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CARNIVAL
BY
COMPTON MACKENZIE
AUTHOR OF "THE PASSIONATE ELOPEMENT"
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Published March, 1912_
Printed in the United States of America
TO
MARTIN SECKER
_"Put out the light; and then--put out the light."_
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BIRTH OF COLUMBINE 1
II. FAIRIES AT THE CHRISTENING 8
III. DAWN SHADOWS 18
IV. THE ANCIENT MISCHIEF 30
V. PRETTY APPLES IN EDEN 40
VI. SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR 51
VII. AMBITION WAKES 61
VIII. AMBITION LOOKS IN THE GLASS 71
IX. LIFE, ART, AND LOVE 89
X. DRURY LANE AND COVENT GARDEN 108
XI. THE ORIENT PALACE OF VARIETIES 120
XII. GROWING OLD 131
XIII. THE BALLET OF CUPID 140
XIV. RAIN ON THE ROOF 152
XV. CRAS AMET 153
XVI. LOVE'S HALCYON 165
XVII. COLUMBINE ASLEEP 175
XVIII. SWEET AND TWENTY 176
XIX. THE GIFT OF OPALS 186
XX. FETE GALANTE 199
XXI. EPILOGUE 216
XXII. THE UNFINISHED STATUE 221
XXIII. TWO LETTERS 234
XXIV. JOURNEY'S END 241
XXV. MONOTONE 249
XXVI. IN SCYROS 255
XXVII. QUARTETTE 271
XXVIII. ST. VALENTINE'S EVE 282
XXIX. COLUMBINE AT DAWN 288
XXX. LUGETE, O VENERES 289
XXXI. A DOCUMENT IN MADNESS 298
XXXII. PAGEANTRY OF DEATH 303
XXXIII. LOOSE ENDS 310
XXXIV. MR. Z. TREWHELLA 317
XXXV. MARRIAGE OF COLUMBINE 332
XXXVI. THE TRAGIC LOADING 341
XXXVII. COLUMBINE IN THE DARK 349
XXXVIII. THE ALIEN CORN 350
XXXIX. INTERMEZZO 359
XL. HARVEST HOME 367
XLI. COLUMBINE HAPPY 370
XLII. SHADED SUNLIGHT 371
XLIII. BOW BELLS 377
XLIV. PICKING UP THREADS 382
XLV. LONDON PRIDE 389
XLVI. MAY MORNING 394
XLVII. NIGHTLIGHT TIME 399
XLVIII. CARNI VALE 404
Chapter I: _The Birth of Columbine_
All day long over the gray Islington Street October, casting pearly
mists, had turned the sun to silver and made London a city of meditation
whose tumbled roofs and parapets and glancing spires appeared hushed and
translucent as in a lake's tranquillity.
The traffic, muted by the glory of a fine autumn day, marched, it
seemed, more slowly and to a sound of heavier drums. Like mountain
echoes street cries haunted the burnished air, while a muffin-man,
abroad too early for the season, swung his bell intermittently with a
pastoral sound. Even the milk-cart, heard in the next street, provoked
the imagination of distant armor. The houses seemed to acquire from the
gray and silver web of October enchantment a mysterious immensity. There
was no feeling of stressful humanity even in the myriad sounds that, in
a sheen of beauty, floated about the day. The sun went down behind roofs
and left the sky plumed with rosy feathers. There was a cold gray minute
before dusk came stealing in, richly and profoundly blue: then night
sprang upon the street, and through the darkness an equinoctial wind
swept, moaning.
Along the gutters the brown leaves danced: the tall plane tree at the
end of the street would not be motionless until December should freeze
the black branches in diapery against a somber sky. Along the gutters
the leaves whispered and ran and shivered and leaped, while the gas-jets
flapped in pale lamps.
There was no starshine on the night Jenny Raeburn was born, only a
perpetual sound of leaves dancing and the footsteps of people going
home.
Mrs. Raeburn had not been very conscious of the day's calm beauty. Her
travail had been long: the reward scarcely apprehended. Already two
elder children had closed upon her the gates of youth, and she was
inclined to resent the expense of so much pain for an additional tie.
There was not much to make the great adventure of childbirth endurable.
The transitory amazement of a few relatives was a meager consolation for
the doubts and agonies of nine slow months. But the muslin curtains,
tied back with raffish pink bows, had really worried her most of all.
Something was wrong with them: their dinginess or want of symmetry
annoyed her.
With one of those rare efforts towards imaginative comprehension, which
the sight of pain arouses in dull and stolid men, her husband had
inquired, when he came back from work, whether there was anything he
could do.
"Those curtains," she had murmured.
"Don't you get worrying yourself about curtains," he had replied.
"You've got something better to do than aggravate yourself with
curtains. The curtains is all right."
Wearily she had turned her face to the sad-colored wallpaper. Wearily
she had transferred her discontent to the absence of one of the small
brass knobs at the foot of the bed.
"And that knob. You never remember to get a new one."
"Now it's knobs!" he had exclaimed, wondering at the foolishness of a
woman's mind in the shadows of coming events. "Don't you bother your
head about knobs, either. Try and get a bit of sleep or something, do."
With this exhortation, he had retired from the darkening room, to wander
round the house lighting various jets of gas, turning them down to the
faintest blue glimmer, and hoping all the while that one of his wife's
sisters would not emerge from the country at the rumor of the baby's
arrival, in order to force her advice upon a powerless household.
Edith and Alfred, his two elder children, had been carried off by the
other aunt to her residence in Barnsbury, whence in three weeks they
would be brought back to home and twilight speculations upon the arrival
of a little brother or sister. In parenthesis, he hoped it would not be
twins. They would be so difficult to explain, and the chaps in the shop
would laugh. The midwife came down to boil some milk and make final
arrangements. The presence of this ample lady disturbed him. The gale
rattling the windows of the kitchen did not provide any feeling of
firelight snugness, but rather made his thoughts more restless, was even
so insistent as to carry them on its wings, weak, formless thoughts, to
the end of Hagworth Street, where the bar of the "Masonic Arms" spread a
wider and more cheerful illumination than was to be found in the harried
kitchen of Number Seventeen. So Charlie Raeburn went out to spend time
and money in piloting several friends across the shallows of Mr.
Gladstone's mind.
Upstairs Mrs. Raeburn, left alone, again contemplated the annoying
curtains; though by now they were scarcely visible against the gloom
outside. She dragged herself off the bed and, moving across to the
window, stood there, rubbing the muslin between her fingers. She
remained for a while thus, peering at the backs of the houses opposite
that, small though they really were, loomed with menace in the lonely
dusk. Shadows of women at work, always at work, went to and fro upon the
blinds. They were muffled sounds of children crying, the occasional
splash of emptied pails, and against the last glimmer of sunset the
smoke of chimneys blown furiously outwards. To complete the air of
sadness and desolation, the faded leaf of a dried-up geranium was
lisping against the window-pane. She gave up fingering the muslin
curtains and came back to the middle of the room, wondering vaguely when
the next bout of pain was due and why the "woman" didn't come upstairs
and make her comfortable. There were matches on the toilet-table; so she
lit a candle, whose light gave every piece of ugly furniture a shadow
and made the room ghostly and unfamiliar. Presently she held the light
beside her face and stared at herself in the glass, and thought how
pretty she still looked, and, flushed by the fever, how young.
She experienced a sensation of fading personality. She seemed actually
to be losing herself. Eyes, bright with excitement, glittered back from
the mirror, and suddenly there came upon her overwhelmingly the fear of
death.
And if she died, would anybody pity her, or would she lie forgotten
always after the momentary tribute of white chrysanthemums? Death,
death, she found herself saying over to the tune of a clock ticking in
the passage. But she had no desire to die. Christmas was near, with its
shoplit excursions and mistletoe and merriment. Why should she die? No,
she would fight hard. A girl or a boy? What did it matter? Nothing
mattered. Perhaps a girl would be nicer, and she should be called Rose.
And yet, on second thoughts, when you came to think of it, Rose was a
cold sort of a name, and Rosie was common. Why not call her Jenny? That
was better--with, perhaps, Pearl or Ruby to follow, when its
extravagance would pass unnoticed. A girl should always have two names.
But Jenny was the sweeter. Nevertheless, it would be as well to support
so homely a name with a really lady-like one--something out of the
ordinary.
Why had she married Charlie? All her relatives said she had married
beneath her. Father had been a butcher--a prosperous man--and even he,
in the family tradition, had not been considered good enough for her
mother, who was a chemist's daughter. Yet, she, Florence Unwin, had
married a joiner. Why _had_ she married Charlie? Looking back over the
seven years of their married life, she could not remember a time when
she had loved him as she had dreamed of love in the airy room over the
busy shop, as she had dreamed of love staring through the sunny window
away beyond the Angel, beyond the great London skies. Charlie was so
stupid, so dull; moreover, though not a drunkard, he was fond of
half-pints and smelt of sawdust and furniture polish. Her sisters never
liked, never would like him. She had smirched the great tradition of
respectability. What would her grandfather, the chemist, have said, that
dignified old man in brown velvet coat, treated always with deference,
even by her father, the jolly, handsome butcher? Florence Unwin married
to a joiner--a man unable to afford to keep his house free from the
inevitable lodger who owned the best bedroom--the bedroom that by right
should have been hers. She had disgraced the family and for no high
motive of passion--and once she was young and pretty. And still young,
after all, and still pretty. She was only thirty-three now. Why had she
married at all? But then her sisters did give themselves airs, and the
jolly, handsome butcher had enjoyed too well and too often those drives
to Jack Straw's Castle on fine Sunday afternoons under the rolling
Hampstead clouds, had left little enough when he died, and Charlie came
along, and perhaps even marriage with him had been less intolerable than
existence among the frozen sitting-rooms of her two sisters, drapers
wives though they both were.
And the aunts, those three severe women? She might, perhaps, have lived
with them when the jolly, handsome butcher died, with them in their
house at Clapton, with them eternally dusting innumerable china
ornaments and correcting elusive mats. The invitation had been extended,
but was forbidding as a mourning-card or the melancholy visit of an
insurance agent with his gossip of death. Death? Was she going to die?
It did not matter. The pain was growing more acute. She dragged herself
to the door and called down to the midwife; called two or three times.
There was no answer except from the clock, with its whisper of Death and
Death. Where was the woman? Where was Charlie? She called again. Then
she remembered, through what seemed years of grinding agony, that the
street door was slammed some time ago. Charlie must have gone out. With
the woman? Had he run away with her? Was she, the wife, forever
abandoned? Was there no life in all the world to reach her solitude? The
house was fearfully, unnaturally silent. She reached up to the cold gas
bracket, and the light flared up without adding a ray of cheerfulness to
the creaking passage. Higher still she turned it, until it sang towards
the ceiling, a thin geyser of flame. The chequers upon the oil-cloth
became blurred, as tears of self-pity welled up in her eyes. She was
deserted, and in pain.
Her mind sailed off along morbid channels to the grim populations of
hysteria. She experienced the merely nervous sensation of many black
beetles running at liberty around the empty kitchen. It was a
visualization of tingling nerves, and, fostered by the weakening
influence of labor pains, it extended beyond the mere thought to the
endowment of a mental picture with powerful and malign purpose, so that,
after a moment or two, she came to imagining that between her and the
world outside black beetles were creating an impassable barrier.
Could Charlie and the woman really have run away? She called again and
peered over the flimsy balustrade down to the ground floor. Or was the
woman lying in the kitchen drunk? Lying there, incapable of action,
among the black beetles? She called again:
"Mrs. Nightman! Mrs. Nightman!"
How dry her hands were, how parched her tongue; and her eyes, how they
burned.
Was she actually dying? Was this engulfing silence the beginning of
death? What was death?
And what was that? What were those three tall, black figures, moving
along the narrow passage downstairs? What were they, so solemn and tall
and silent, moving with inexorable steps, higher and higher?
"Mrs. Nightman, Mrs. Nightman!" she shrieked, and stumbled in agony of
body and horror of mind back to the flickering bedroom, back to the
bed.
And then there was light and a murmur of voices, saying: "We have come
to see how you are feeling, Florence," and sitting by her bed she
recognized the three aunts from Clapton, in their bugles and cameos and
glittering bonnets.
There was a man, too, whom she had only just time to realize was the
doctor, not the undertaker, before she was aware that the final effort
of her tortured body was being made without assistance from her own will
or courage.
She waved away the sympathizers. She was glad to see the doctor and Mrs.
Nightman herding them from the room, like gaunt, black sheep; but they
came back again as inquisitive animals will when, after what seemed a
thousand thousand years of pain, she could hear something crying and the
trickle of water and the singing of a kettle.
Perhaps it was Aunt Fanny who said: "It's a dear little girl."
The doctor nodded, and Mrs. Raeburn stirred, and with wide eyes gazed at
her baby.
"It is Jenny, after all," she murmured; then wished for the warmth of a
new-born child against her breast.