On Mr. Vergoe's recommendation, Madame Aldavini granted an interview to
Mrs. Raeburn and her daughter, and the old clown was to accompany them
on the difficult occasion.
It was a warm April day when they set out, with a sky like the matrix of
turquoise. The jagged purple clouds were so high that all felt the
outside of an omnibus was the only place on such a day. Mrs. Raeburn and
Jenny sat in front, and Mr. Vergoe sat immediately behind them, pointing
out every object of interest on the route. At least, he pointed out
everything until they reached Sadlers Wells Theater, after which
reminiscences of Sadlers Wells occupied the rest of the journey. They
swung along Rosebery Avenue and into Theobald's Road and pulled up at
last by Southampton Row. Then they walked through a maze of narrow
streets to Madame Aldavini's school, in Great Queen Street. No longer
can it be found; whatever ghosts of dead _coryphees_ haunt the portals
must spend a draughty purgatory in the very middle of Kingsway.
It was a tall, gray Georgian house, with flat windows and narrow sills
and a suitable cornice of dancing Loves and Graces over the door, which
had a large brass plate engraved with "School of Dancing," and more
bells beside it than Jenny had ever seen beside one door in her life.
She thought what games could be played with Great Queen Street and its
inhabitants, if it were in Islington and all the houses had as many
bells. Mr. Vergoe pressed a button labeled "Aldavini," and presently
they were walking along a dark, dusty passage into a little paneled room
with a large desk and pictures of dancers in every imaginable kind of
costume. At the desk sat Madame Aldavini herself in a dress of tawny
satin. Jenny thought she looked like an organ-woman, with her dark,
wrinkled face and glittering black eyes.
"And how is Mr. Vergoe?" she inquired.
"How are _you_, Madame?" he replied, with great deference.
"I am very well, thank you."
Mrs. Raeburn was presented and dropped her umbrella in embarrassment,
making Jenny feel very much ashamed of her mother and wish she were
alone with Mr. Vergoe. Then she was introduced herself, and as Madame
Aldavini fixed her with a piercing eye, Jenny felt so shy that she was
only able to murmur incoherent politeness to the floor.
The dancing-mistress got up from her desk and looked critically at the
proposed pupil.
"You think the child will make a dancer?" she said, turning sharply to
Mrs. Raeburn.
"Oh, well, really I--well, she's always jigging about, if that's
anything to go by."
Madame Aldavini gave a contemptuous sniff.
"I think she will make a very good dancer," Mr. Vergoe put in.
"You've seen her?"
"Many times," he said. "In fact, this visit is due to me--in a manner of
speaking."
"Come, we'll see what she can do," said the mistress, and led the way
out of the little room along a glass-covered arcade into the
dancing-room.
The latter was probably a Georgian ballroom with fine proportions and
Italian ceiling. A portion of it was curtained off for the pupils to
change into practice dress, and all the way round the walls was a rail
for toe-dancing. At the far end was a dais with a big arm-chair and a
piano, over which hung a large oil painting of some bygone ballet at the
Theatre de l'Opera in Paris, and also an engraving of Taglioni signed
affectionately by that great Prima Ballerina Assoluta.
Madame Aldavini rang a bell, and presently Miss Carron, her pianist and
assistant teacher, came in. Miss Carron was a Frenchwoman, who had lived
so long in London that she spoke English better than French, except in
moments of great anger, when her native tongue returned to her with an
added force of expression from such long periods of quiescence.
"What tune do you like, miss?" inquired Madame. "What is her name?
Jenny? _Si_, I have no Jenny at present."
But the would-be dancer had no tune by name.
"Play the what's it called from what's its name," suggested Mr. Vergoe,
to help matters along.
"_Hein?_" said Miss Carron sharply.
"The--you know--the--the--well, anyway, it goes like this," and he
hummed the opening bars of the Intermezzo from "Cavalleria."
"Ah!" said Miss Carron. "But that's no tune to dance to. You want
something to show off the twiddly-bits."
"Play the Intermezzo," commanded Madame Aldavini.
Miss Carron began, but Jenny could only wriggle in a shamefaced way, and
was too shy to start.
"You great stupid," said her mother.
"One, two, three, off," said Mr. Vergoe.
"You are frightened, yes? Timid? Come, I shall not eat you," declared
Madame.
At last the novice produced a few steps.
"Enough," said Madame. "I take her. She will come once a week for the
first year, twice a week for the second year, three times a week the
third year and every day--how old is she?"
"Ten."
"Every day when she is thirteen."
The further details of Jenny's apprenticeship were settled in the
little paneled room, while Jenny listened to wonderful instructions
about stockings and shoes and skirts. When it was all over the three
visitors walked out of the gray house, where Jenny was to spend so many
hours of childhood, into Great Queen Street and an April shower
sprinkling the pavement with large preliminary drops. Mr. Vergoe
insisted on standing tea at a shop in Holborn for the luck of the
adventure. Jenny's first chocolate _eclair_ probably made a more abiding
impression on her mind than the first meeting with Madame Aldavini.
So Jenny became a dancer and went, under her mother's escort, to Great
Queen Street once a week for a year.
The pupils of Madame Aldavini all wore pink tarlatan skirts, black
stockings clocked with pink, and black jerseys with a large pink A
worked on the front. There were about twenty girls in Jenny's class, who
all had lockers and pegs of their own in the anteroom curtained off by
black velvet draperies. Fat theatrical managers with diamond rings and
buttonholes sometimes used to sit beside Madame and watch the pupils.
She sat on the dais, whence her glittering black eyes and keen face
could follow the dancers everywhere. Jenny used to think the mistress
was like a black note of the piano come to life. There was something so
clean and polished and clear-cut about Madame. Her eyes, she used to
think, were like black currants. Madame's feet in black satin shoes were
restless all the while beneath her petticoats; but she never let them
appear, so that the children should have no assistance beyond the long
pole with which she used to mark the beat on the floor and sometimes on
the shoulders of a refractory dancer.
Two years rolled by, and Jenny was able to go alone now. She was
considered one of Madame Aldavini's best pupils, and several managers
wanted her for fairy parts, but Mrs. Raeburn always refused, and Madame
Aldavini, because she thought that Jenny might be spoilt by too
premature a first appearance, did not try persuasion.
As might have been expected, the instant that Jenny had her own way and
was fairly set on the road to the gratification of her wishes, she
began to be lazy. She was so far a natural dancer that nearly every step
came very easily to her. This facility was fatal, for unless she learned
at once, she would not take the trouble to learn at all. Madame used to
write home to Hagworth Street complaints of her indolence, and Mrs.
Raeburn used to threaten to take her away from the school. Then for a
very short time Jenny would work really hard.
At thirteen she went every day to the dancing school, and at thirteen
Jenny had deliciously slim legs and a figure as lithe as a hazel wand.
Her almond eyes were of some fantastic shade of sapphire-blue with deep
gray twilights in them and sea-green laughters. They were extraordinary
eyes whose under-lids always closed first. Her curls never won back the
silver they lost in the country; but her complexion had the bloom and
delicate texture of a La France rose, although in summer her straight
little nose was freckled like a bird's egg. Her hands were long and
white; her lips very crimson and translucent, but the under-lip
protruded slightly, and bad temper gave it a vicious look. Her teeth
were small, white, and glossy as a cat's. She cast a powerful
enchantment over all the other girls, so that when, from tomboy
loiterings and mischievous escorts, she arrived late for class, they
would all run round for her with shoes and petticoats and stockings,
like little slaves. Laughingly, she would let them wait upon her and
wonder very seldom why she was the only girl so highly favored. She had
a sharp tongue and no patience for the giggles and enlaced arms of
girlhood. She had no whispered secrets to communicate. She never put out
a finger to help her companions, although sometimes she would prompt the
next girl through a difficult step. She was entirely indifferent to
their adoration. As if the blood of queens ran in her veins, she
accepted homage naturally. Perhaps it was some boyish quality of
debonair assurance in Jenny that made the rest of them disinclined to
find any fault in her. She seemed as though she ought to be spoilt, and
if, like most spoilt children, she was unpleasant at home, she was very
charming abroad. Her main idea of amusement was to be "off with the
boys," by whom she was treated as an equal. There was no sentiment about
her, and an attempted kiss would have provoked spitfire rage. There was
something of Atalanta about her, and in Hellas Artemis would have
claimed her, running by the thyme-scented borders of Calydon.
Madame Aldavini, with some disapproval, watched her progress. She was
not satisfied with her pupil and determined to bring her down to the
hard facts of the future. Jenny was called up for a solo lesson. These
solo lessons, when Madame used to show the steps by making her fingers
dance on her knees, were dreaded by everybody.
"Come along now," she said, and hummed an old ballet melody, tapping her
fingers the while.
Jenny started off well enough, but lost herself presently in trying to
follow those quick fingers.
"Again, foolish one," cried the mistress. "Again, I say. Well can you do
it, if you like."
"I can't," declared Jenny sulkily. "It's too difficult."
Madame Aldavini seized her long pole and brandished it fiercely.
"Again, self-willed baby, again."
Jenny, with half a screwed-up eye on the pole, made a second attempt;
the pole promptly swung round and caught her on the right shoulder. She
began to cry and stamp.
"I can't do it; I can't do it."
"You will do it. You shall do it."
Once more Jenny started, and this time succeeded so well that it was
only at the very end of the new step that Madame angrily pushed the pole
between her pretty ankles, rattling it from side to side to show her
contempt for Jenny's obstinacy.
"For it is obstinacy," she declared. "It is not stupidity. Bah! well can
you do it, if you like."
So Madame conquered in the end with her long pole and her sharp tongue,
and Jenny learned the new and difficult step.
"Listen to me," said the former. "Do you not wish to become a Prima
Ballerina?"
"Yes," murmured Jenny, the sooner to be out of Madame's reach, and back
with the boys in Islington.
"You have not the banal smile of the _danseuse_ who takes her strength
from her teeth. You have not the fat forearm or dreadful wrist of those
idiots who take their strength from them, and, thanks to me, you might
even become a Prima Ballerina Assoluta."
The words of an old comic song about a girl called Di who hailed from
Utah and became a Prima Ballerina Assoluta returned, with its jingling
tune, to Jenny's head, while Madame was talking.
"Whistle not while I talk, inattentive one," cried her mistress, banging
the pole down with a thump.
"Have you dreams of success, of bouquets and sables and your own
carriage? Look around you, lazy one. Look at the great Taglioni whom
emperors and kings applauded. Yet you, miserable child, you can only now
make one 'cut.' Why do you come here unless you have ambition to
succeed, to be _maitresse_ of your art, to sweep through the stage door
with silk dresses? Do I choose you from the others to dance to me,
unless I wish your fortune--eh? If, after this, you work not, I finish
with you. I let you go your own pig-headed way."
Jenny did work for a while, and even persevered and practiced so
diligently as to be able to do a double cut and a fairly high beat,
sweeping all the cups and saucers off the kitchen table as she did so.
But when she had achieved this accomplishment, how much nearer was she
to a public appearance, a triumphant success? What was the use of
practicing difficult steps for the eyes of Ruby? What was the use of
holding on to the handle of the kitchen door and putting one leg
straight up till her toes twinkled over the top of it? Ruby only said,
"You unnatural thing," or drew her breath in through ridged teeth in
horrified amazement. What was the good of slaving all day? It was better
to enjoy one's self by standing on the step of young Willie Hopkins' new
bicycle and floating round Highbury Barn with curls and petticoats
flying, and peals of wild laughter. It was much more pleasant to shock
old ladies by puffing the smoke of cigarettes before them, or to play
Follow my Leader over the corrugated-iron roof of an omnibus depot.
Sometimes she took to playing truant for wind-blown afternoons by
Highgate Ponds in the company of boys, and always made the same excuse
to Madame of being wanted at home, until Madame grew suspicious and
wrote to Mrs. Raeburn.
Her mother asked why Jenny had not gone to her dancing-lesson, and where
she had been.
"I _was_ there," vowed Jenny. "Madame can't have noticed me."
So Mrs. Raeburn wrote and explained the mistake, and Jenny managed with
great anxiety to obtain possession of the letter, ostensibly in order to
post it, but really in order to tear it to a hundred pieces round the
corner.
She was naturally a truthful child, but the long restraint of childhood
had to be mitigated somehow, and lying to those in authority was no
sacrifice of her egotism, the basis of all essential truthfulness. With
her contemporaries she was always proudly, indeed painfully, frank.
This waiting to grow up was unendurable. Everybody else was emancipated
except herself. Ruby went away to be married--a source of much
speculation to Jenny, who could not understand anybody desiring to live
in a state of such corporeal intimacy with Ruby.
"I'm positive he don't know she snores," said Jenny to her mother.
"Well, what's it got to do with you?"
What, indeed, had anything to do with her? It was shocking how utterly
unimportant she was to Hagworth Street.
Edie had gone away to learn dressmaking, and Alfie had vanished into
some Midland town to learn something else, and occupying his room there
was another lodger whom she liked. Then one day he came into the kitchen
in a queer brown suit and said he was "off to the Front."
"Gone for a soldier?" said her father, when he heard of it. "Good Lord!
some people don't know when they're well off, and that's a fact."
There was nobody to inflame Jenny with the burning splendors of
patriotism. It became merely a matter of clothes, like everything else.
She gathered it was the correct thing to wear khaki ties, sometimes with
scarlet for the soldiers or blue for the sailors. It was also not
outrageous to wear a Union Jack waistcoat. But any conception of a small
nation fighting inch by inch for their sun-parched country, of a great
nation sacrificing even its sense of humor to consolidate an empire and
avenge a disgrace, was entirely outside her imaginative experience.
What had it got to do with her?
There was nobody to implant ideals of citizenship or try to show her
relation to the rest of mankind. Her education at the board school was
mechanical; the mistresses were like mental coffee-grinders, who, having
absorbed a certain number of hard facts roasted by somebody else,
distributed them in a more easily assimilated form. They tried to give
children the primary technique of knowledge, but without any suggestions
as to the manner of application. She had enough common sense to grasp
the ultimate value of drearily reiterated practice steps in dancing. She
perceived that they were laying the foundation of something better. It
was only her own impatience which nullified some of the practical
results of much academic instruction. But of her intellectual education
the foundations were not visible at all. The teachers were building on
sand a house which would topple over as soon as she was released from
attendance at school. Jenny was a sufferer from the period of transition
through which educational theories were passing, and might have been
better off under the old system of picturesque misapprehensions of
truth, or even with no deliberate education at all. It is important to
understand the stark emptiness of Jenny's mind now and for a long while
afterwards. Life was a dragging, weary affair unless she was being
amused. There had been no mental adventures since, flashing and
glorious, the idea of dancing came furiously through the night as she
lay awake thinking of the pantomime. The fault was not hers. She was the
victim of sterile imaginations. Her soul was bleak and cold as the life
of man in the days before Prometheus stole fire from heaven.
If it had not been for May, Jenny would have been even less satisfactory
than she was. But May, with her bird-like gayety--not obstreperous like
a blackbird's, but sweet and inconspicuous as the song of a goldfinch
dipping through the air above apple-orchards--May, with her easy
acceptance of physical deformity, shamed her out of mere idle
discontent. Jenny would talk to her of the dancing-school till May knew
every girl's peculiarity.
"She's funny, my sister. She's a caution, is young May. Poor kid, a
shame about her back."
They quarreled, of course, over trifles, but May was the only person to
whom Jenny would behave as if she were sorry for anything she had done
or said. She never admitted her penitence in word to anybody on earth.
It was a pleasure to Mrs. Raeburn, this fondness of Jenny for May, and
once in a rare moment of confidence, she told the elder child that she
depended on her to look after May when she herself was gone.
"With her poor little back she won't ever be able to earn her
living--not properly, and when you're on the stage and getting good
money, you mustn't leave May out in the cold."
Here was something vital, a tangible appeal, not a sentiment broadly
expressed without obvious application like the culminating line of a
hymn. Here was a reason, and Jenny clung fast to it as a drowning
seafarer will clutch at samphire, unconscious of anything save greenery
and blessed land. People were not accustomed to give Jenny reasons. When
she had one, usually self-evolved, she held fast to it, nor cared a jot
about its possible insecurity. Reasons were infrequent bits of greenery
to one battered by a monotonous and empty ocean; for Jenny's mind was
indeed sea-water with the flotsam of wrecked information, with wonderful
hues evanescent, with the sparkle and ripple of momentary joys, with the
perpetual booming of discontent, sterile and unharvested.
One breezy June day, much the same sort of day as that when Jenny danced
under the plane-tree, Madame Aldavini told her she could give her a
place as one of the quartette of dancers in a Glasgow pantomime.
"But, listen," said Madame, "what they want is acrobatic dancing. If you
join this quartette, it does not mean you give up dancing--ballet-dancing,
you understand; you will come back to me when the pantomime is over
until you are able to join the Ballet at Covent Garden. You will not
degrade your talent by sprawling over shoulders, by handsprings and
splits and the tricks which an English audience likes. You understand?"
Jenny did not really understand anything beyond the glorious fact that
in December she would be away from Hagworth Street and free at last to
do just as she liked.
Mrs. Raeburn, when she heard of the proposal, declined to entertain its
possibility. It was useless for Jenny to sulk and slam doors, and demand
furiously why she had been allowed to learn dancing if she was not to be
allowed ever to make a public appearance.
"Time enough for that in the future," said her mother. "There'll always
be plenty of theaters."
Jenny became desperate. Her dreams of a glorious freedom were fading.
That night she took to bed with her a knife.
"What are you doing with that knife?" said May.
"I'm going to kill myself," said Jenny.
Pale as a witch, she sat on the edge of the bed. White was her face as
a countenance seen in a looking-glass at dawn. Her lips were closed; her
eyes burned.
May shrieked.
"Mother--dad--come quick: Jenny's going to kill herself with the
carving-knife."
Mrs. Raeburn rushed into the room and saw the child with the blade
against her throat. She snatched away the knife.
"Whatever was you going to do?"
"I want to go to Glasgow," said Jenny; "and I'll kill myself if I
don't."
"I'll give you 'kill yourself,'" cried Mrs. Raeburn, slapping her
daughter's cheeks so that a crimson mark burned on its dead paleness.
"Well, I will," said Jenny.
"We'll see about it," said Mrs. Raeburn. Jenny knew she had won; and
deserved victory, for she had meant what she said. Her mother was
greatly perplexed. Who would look after Jenny?
Madame Aldavini explained that there would be three other girls, that
they would all live together, that she herself would see them all
established, as she had to go north herself to give the final touches to
the ballet which she was producing; that no harm would come to Jenny;
that she would really be more strictly looked after than she was at
home.
"That's quite impossible," said Mrs. Raeburn.
Madame smiled sardonically.
"However," Mrs. Raeburn went on, "I suppose she's got to make a start
some time. So let her go."
Now followed an interlude from toe-dancing--an interlude which Jenny
enjoyed, although once she nearly strained herself doing the "strides."
But acrobatic dancing came very easily to her, and progress was much
more easily discernible than in the long and tiresome education for the
ballet.
Of the other three girls who were to make up the Aldavini Quartette,
only one was still at the school. She was a plump girl called Eileen
Vaughan, three years older than Jenny, prim and, in the latter's
opinion, "very stuck up." Jenny hoped that the other two would be more
fun than Eileen. Eileen was a pig, although she liked her name.
Great problems arose in Hagworth Street out of Jenny's embarkation upon
the ship of life. So long as she had been merely a pupil of Madame
Aldavini's, family opposition to her choice of a profession had
slumbered; but with the prospect of her speedy debut, it broke out again
very fiercely.
Old Miss Horner had died soon after her letter of protest against the
dancing notion, and Miss Mary was left alone in Carminia House--in
isolated survival, a pathetic more than a severe figure. However, she
ventured to pay a visit to her niece in order to present a final
remonstrance, but she lacked the power of her two elder sisters. What
they commanded, she besought. What they declared, she hinted. Mrs.
Raeburn felt quite sorry for the poor old thing, as she nodded on about
salvation and temptation and the wages of sin. Old Miss Horner used to
be able to wing her platitudes with the flame of God's wrath, but Miss
Mary let them appear as the leaden things they really were. She made no
impression but that of her own loneliness, went back to Carminia House
after declining a slice of cherry cake, and died shortly afterwards, to
the great comfort of the Primitive Methodists of Sion Chapel, who gained
velvet cushions for the pews in consequence, and became less primitive
than ever.
Mrs. Raeburn could not help speculating for an hour or two upon the
course of Jenny's life if she had accepted her aunts' offer, but went to
sleep at the end of it thinking, anyway, it would be all the same a
hundred years hence.
Mrs. Purkiss came and registered a vow never to come again if Jenny
really went; but she had registered so many vows in her sister's hearing
that Mrs. Raeburn had come to regard them with something of that
familiarity which must ultimately dull the surprise of a Commissioner
for Oaths, and treated them as a matter of course.
Uncle James Threadgale, with face as pale and square as ever, but with
hair slightly damper and thinner, suggested that Jenny should come down
to Galton for a bit and think it over. This offer being pleasantly
declined, he gave her a roll of blue serge and asked a blessing on the
undertaking.
Charlie, having found that he was easily able to keep all knowledge of
his daughter's lapse into publicity from his fellow-workmen at the shop
in Kentish Town, decided to celebrate her imminent departure to the
boreal pole (Glasgow soon achieved a glacial topography in Hagworth
Street), by giving a grand supper-party.
"We'll have old Vergoe and Madame Neverseenher"--his witty periphrasis
for Aldavini--"and a brother of mine you've none of you never seen
either, a rare comic, or he used to be, though where he is now, well,
that wants knowing."
"What's the good of saying he's to come to supper, then?" inquired Mrs.
Raeburn.
"Only if he's about," explained Charlie. "If he's about, I'd like Jenny
here to meet him, because he was always a big hand at club concerts
twenty years ago, before he went to Africa. Arthur his name _was_."
"Oh, for goodness sake, stop your talking," said Mrs. Raeburn.
"And you can't ask Madame," announced Jenny, who was horrified by the
contemplation of a meeting between her father and the dancing-mistress.
"_And_ why not? _And_ why not? Will anybody here kindly tell me why
not?"
"Because you can't," said Jenny decidedly.
"Of course not. The child's quite right," Mrs. Raeburn corroborated.
"Well, of course, you all know better than the old man. But I daresay
she'd like to talk about Paris with your poor old dad."
However, notwithstanding the elision of all Mr. Raeburn's proposed
guests from the list of invitations, the supper did happen, and the
master of the house derived some consolation from being allowed to
preside at the head of his own table, if not sufficiently far removed
from his wife to enjoy himself absolutely. Mr. Vergoe, getting a very
old man now, came with Miss Lilli Vergoe, still a second-line girl at
the Orient Theater of Varieties, and Edie arrived from Brixton, where
she was learning to make dresses. Eileen Vaughan came, at Mrs. Raeburn's
instigation and much to Jenny's disgust, and Mr. Smithers, the new
lodger, a curly-headed young draper's assistant, tripped down from his
room upstairs. May, of course, was present, and Alfie sent a picture
postcard from Northampton, showing the after-effects of a party. This
was put upon the mantelpiece and greatly diverted the company. Mrs.
Purkiss was invited, and pasty-faced Percy and Claude and Mr. Purkiss
were also invited, but Mrs. Purkiss signalized her disapproval by taking
no notice of the invitation, thereby throwing Mrs. Raeburn into a
regular flutter of uncertainty. Nevertheless, she turned up ten minutes
late with both her offspring, to everybody's great disappointment and
Mrs. Raeburn's great anxiety, when she saw with what a will her nephews
settled down to the tinned tongue.
The supper passed off splendidly, and nearly everything was eaten and
praised. Mrs. Purkiss talked graciously to Mr. Smithers about the
prospects of haberdashery and the principles of window-dressing and,
somewhat tactlessly, about the advantage of cash registers. Charlie gave
a wonderfully humorous description of his first crossing of the English
Channel. Percy and Claude ate enormously, and Percy was sick, to his
uncle's immense entertainment and profound satisfaction, as it gave him
an excuse to tell the whole story of the Channel crossing over again,
ending up with: "It's all right, Perce. Cheer up, sonny, Dover's in
sight."
Eileen ate self-consciously and gazed with considerable respectfulness
at Miss Lilli Vergoe, who related pleasantly her many triumphs over the
snares and duplicity of the new stage manager at the Orient. Mr. Vergoe
chatted amiably with everybody in turn and made a great feature of
helping the stewed tripe. May went into fits of laughter at everything
and everybody, and Jenny discussed with Edie what style of dress should
be made from the roll of blue serge presented to her by Uncle James.
After supper everybody settled down to make the evening a complete
success.
Mr. Vergoe sang "Champagne Charlie" and "In Her Hair She Wore a White
Camelia," and Mr. Raeburn joined in the chorus of the former with a note
of personal satisfaction, while Mrs. Raeburn always said:
"Champagne Charlie _is_ his name,
Half a pint of porter _is_ his game."
Neither Miss Vergoe nor Miss Vaughan would oblige with a dance, to the
great disappointment of Mr. Smithers, who had hoped for a solution of
many sartorial puzzles from such close proximity to two actresses.
Jenny, however, was set on the table when the plates had been cleared
away, and danced a breakdown to the great embarrassment of Mrs. Purkiss,
who feared for pasty-faced Percy and Claude's sense of the shocking.
Percy recited Casabianca, and Claude, though he did not recite himself,
prompted his brother in so many of the lines that it became, to all
purposes, a duet. Edie giggled in a corner with Mr. Smithers, and told
the latter once or twice that he was a sauce-box and no mistake. Mr.
Smithers himself sang "Queen of My Heart," in a mildly pleasant tenor
voice, and, being encored, sang "Maid of Athens," and told Miss Vergoe,
in confidence, that several persons had passed the remark that he was
very like Lord Byron. To which Miss Vergoe, with great want of
appreciation, replied, "Who cares?" and sent Mr. Smithers headlong back
to the readier admiration of Edie.
It was a very delightful evening, indeed, whose most delightful moment,
perhaps, was Mrs. Purkiss's retirement with Percy and Claude, leaving
the rest of the party to settle themselves round the kitchen fire, roast
chestnuts, eat oranges and apples, smoke, and drink the various drinks
that became their ages and tastes.
"And what's Jenny going to call herself on the stage?" asked Mr. Vergoe.
"What _does_ the man mean?" said Mrs. Raeburn.
"Well, she must have a stage name. Raeburn is too long."
"It's no longer than Vergoe," argued Mrs. Raeburn, looking at Lilli.
"Oh, but she already had a stage name--so to speak," explained the old
man proudly. "What's Jenny's second name?"
"Pearl," said Mrs. Raeburn.
"Oh, mother, you needn't go telling everybody."
"There you are," said Charlie, who had waited for this moment fourteen
years. "There you are; I told you she wouldn't thank you for it when you
would give it her. Pearl! Whoever heard? Tut-tut!"
"Why shouldn't she call herself Jenny Pearl--Miss Jenny Pearl?" said Mr.
Vergoe. "If it isn't a good Christian name, it's a very showy stage
name, as it were--or wait a bit--what about Jenny Vere? There was a
queen or something called Jennivere--no now, I come to think of it, that
was Guinevere."
"I can't think whatever on earth she wants to call herself anything
different from what she is," persisted the mother.
"Well, I don't know either, but it's done. Even Lilli here, she spells
her first name differently--L-i-double l-i, and Miss Vaughan here, I'll
bet Vaughan ain't her own name--in a manner of speaking."
"Yes it is," said Miss Vaughan, pursing up her mouth so that it looked
like a red flannel button.
But Mr. Vergoe was right--Miss Eileen Vaughan in Camberwell was Nellie
Jaggs. Jenny soon found that out when they lived together, and wrote a
postcard to Mr. Vergoe to tell him so.
"But why must she be Jenny Pearl?" asked Mrs. Raeburn. "Although, mind,
I don't say it isn't a very good name," she added, remembering it was
her own conjunction.
"It's done," Mr. Vergoe insisted. "More flowery--I suppose--so to
speak."
So Jenny Raeburn became Jenny Pearl, and her health was drunk and her
success wished.
A few weeks afterward she stood on Euston platform, with a queer
feeling, half-way between sickness and breathlessness, and was met by
Madame Aldavini with Eileen and two older girls, and bundled into a
reserved compartment. Very soon she was waving a handkerchief to her
mother and May, already scarcely visible in the murk of a London fog.
Life had begun.