Carnival Part 56

Madge Wilson's disloyalty effected for Jenny what nothing else had done.

It made the blood course fast, the heart beat: it kindled her eyes again. That night in bed, she thought of falseness and treachery and cried herself to sleep.

Chapter XXVI: _In Scyros_

The outburst against feminine treachery had an effect upon Jenny's state of mind beyond the mere evoking of tears. These were followed by a general agitation of her point of view necessitating an outlet for her revived susceptibleness to emotion. A less sincere heart would have been caught on the rebound; but she and men were still mutually unattractive.

The consequence of this renewed activity of spirit, in the aspect of its immediate cause, was paradoxical enough; for when Jenny thought she would try the pretensions of suffragism, no clear process of reasoning helped her to such a resolve, no formulated hostility to man. Whatever logic existed in the decision was fortuitous; nor did she at all perceive any absence of logic in throwing in her lot with treacherous woman.

Lilli Vergoe was proud of such a catechumen, and made haste to introduce her to the tall house in Mecklenburg Square, whose elm-shadowed rooms displayed the sober glories of the Women's Political, Social and Economic League. Something about the house reminded Jenny of her first visit to Madame Aldavini's School; but she found Miss Bailey less alarming than the dancing mistress as, rising from ma.s.ses of letters and scarlet gladioli, she welcomed the candidate. Miss Bailey, the president of the League, was a tall, handsome woman, very unlike Jenny's conception of a suffragette. She had a regular profile, a thin, high-bridged nose, and clearly cut, determined lips. Her complexion was pale, her hair very brown and rich. Best of all Jenny liked her slim hands and the voice which, though marred by a slight huskiness due to public speaking, was full of quality and resonance. She was one of those women who, carrying in their presence a fine tranquillity at once kindly and ascetic, imbue the onlooker with their long and perceptive experience of humanity. She was in no sense homely or motherly; indeed, she wore about her the remoteness of the great. Yet whatever in her general appearance seemed of marble was vivified by clear hazel eyes into the reality of womanhood.

"And so you're going to join our club?" inquired Miss Bailey.

Jenny, although she had intended this first visit to be merely empirical, felt bound to commit herself to the affirmative.

"You'll soon know all about our objects."

"Oh, I've told her a lot already, Miss Bailey," declared Lilli with the eagerness of the trusted school-girl.

"That's right," said Miss Bailey, smiling. "Come along then, and I will enroll you, Miss----"

"Pearl," murmured Jenny, feeling as if her name had somehow slipped down and escaped sideways through her neck. Then with an effort clearing her throat, she added, "Jenny Pearl," blus.h.i.+ng furiously at the confession of ident.i.ty.

"Your address?"

"Better say 17 Hagworth Street, Islington. Only I'm not living there just now. Now I'm living 43 Stacpole Terrace, Camden Town."

"Have you a profession?"

"I'm on the stage."

"What a splendid profession, too--for a woman. Don't you think so?"

Jenny stared at this commendation of a state of life she had always imagined was distasteful to people like Miss Bailey.

"I don't know much about splendid, but I suppose it's all right," she agreed at last.

"Indeed it is. Are you at the Orient also?"

"Yes, you know, in the ballet," said Jenny very quickly, so that the president might not think she was trying to push herself unduly.

"I don't believe there's anything that gives more pleasure than good dancing. Dancing ought to be the expression of life's joy," said the older woman, gazing at the pigeon-holes full of docketed files, at the bookshelves stuffed with dry volumes of Ethics and Politics and Economics, as if half regretting she, too, was not in the Orient Ballet.

"Dancing is the oldest art," she continued. "I like to think they danced the spring in long before calendars were made. Your subscription is half a crown a year."

Jenny produced the coin from her bag; and it said much for Miss Bailey's personality that the new member to adorn the action did not wink over her shoulder at Lilli.

"Thank you. Here's the badge. It's copied from an old Athenian medal.

This is Pallas Athene, the G.o.ddess of Wisdom."

"She isn't much to look at, is she?" commented Jenny.

"My dear child, that's the owl."

Jenny turned the medal over and contemplated the armed head. Then she put it carefully away in her purse, wondering if the badge would bring her luck.

"Now, I shall let Lilli show you round the club rooms, for I'm very busy this afternoon," said Miss Bailey in gentle dismissal.

The two girls left the study and set out to explore the rest of the house. Over the mantlepiece of the princ.i.p.al room Jenny saw Mona Lisa and drew back so quickly that she trod on Lilli's foot.

"I'm not going in there," she said.

"Why not? It's a nice room."

"I'm not going in. I don't want to," she repeated, without any explanation of her whim.

"All right. Let's go downstairs. We can have tea."

It was a fine afternoon towards the end of July, so the tea-room was empty. Jenny looked cautiously at all the pictures but none of them conjured up the past. There was a large photograph of the beautiful sad head of Jeanne d'Arc, but Jenny did not bother to read that it came originally from the church of St. Maurice in Orleans. There was a number of somewhat dreary engravings of famous pioneers of feminism like Mary Wolstonecraft, whose faces, she thought, would look better turned round to the wall. Below these hung several statistical maps showing the density of population in various London slums, with black splodges for criminal districts. Most of the furniture was of green fumed oak fretted with hearts, and the crockery that lived dustily on a shelf following the line of the frieze came from Hanley disguised in Flemish or Breton patterns, whose studied irregularity of design and roughness of workmans.h.i.+p was symbolic of much. In order, apparently, to accentuate the flimsiness of the green fumed oak, there were several mid-Victorian settees that, having faded in back rooms of Wimpole Street and Portman Square, were now exposed round the sides of their new abode in a succession of hillocks. On the wall by the door hung a framed tariff, on which poached eggs in every permutation of number and combination of additional delicacies figured most prominently. Here and there on tables not occupied with green teacups were scattered pamphlets, journals, and the literary propaganda of the feminine movement. The general atmosphere of the room was permeated by an odor of damp toast and the stale fumes of asthma cigarettes.

"What an unnatural smell," murmured Jenny.

"It's those asthma cigarettes," Lilli explained. "One of the members has got it very bad."

Jenny was glad to escape very soon after tea, and told her friend a second visit to Mecklenburg Square was not to be done.

"I used to think they was nice houses when I pa.s.sed by the other side in that green 'bus going to Covent Garden, but I think they're _very_ stuffy, and what wall-paper! More like blotting-paper."

However, one Sat.u.r.day evening in August, as Jenny was leaving the theater, Lilli begged her to come and hear Miss Ragstead speak on the general aims of the movement, with particular attention to a proposed demonstration on the occasion of the re-opening of Parliament.

"When's the old crow going to speak?" Jenny inquired.

"To-morrow evening."

"On a Sunday?"

"Yes."

So, because there was nothing else to do and because nowadays Sunday was a long grim moping, a procession of pretty hours irrevocable, Jenny promised to accompany her friend.

It was a wet evening, and Bloomsbury seemed the wettest place in London as the two girls turned into the spa.r.s.e lamplight of Mecklenburg Square and hurried along under the dank, fast-fading planes and elms. Inside the house, however, there was an air of energetic jollity owing to the arrival of several girl students from Oxford and Cambridge, who stumped in and out of the rooms, greeting each other with tales of Swiss mountains and comparisons of industry. In their strong, low-heeled boots they stumped about consumed by holiday suns.h.i.+ne and the acquisition of facts. With friendly smiles and fresh complexions, they talked enthusiastically to several young men, whose Adam's apples raced up and down their long necks, giving them the appearance of chickens swallowing maize very quickly.

"Talk about funny turns," whispered Jenny.

"They're all very clever," Miss Vergoe apologized, as she steered her intolerant friend past the group.

"Yes, I should say they ought to be clever, too. They _look_ as though they were pecking each other's brains out."