To compensate Jenny for her disappointment over Covent Garden, Madame
Aldavini secured a place for her in the Drury Lane pantomime. She was no
longer to be the most attractive member of an attractive quartette, but
one of innumerable girls who changed several times during the evening
into amazingly complicated dresses, designed not to display individual
figures, but to achieve broad effects of color and ingenuity.
Straight lines were esteemed above dancing, straight lines of Frenchmen
or Spaniards in the Procession of Nations, straight lines of Lowestoft
or Dresden in the Procession of Porcelain, straight lines of
Tortoise-shell Butterflies or Crimson-underwing Moths in the Procession
of Insects. Jenny's gay deep eyes were obscured by tricolor flags or the
spout of a teapot or the disproportionate antennae of a butterfly. There
was no individual grace of movement in swinging down the stage in the
middle of a long line of undistinguished girls. If the audience
applauded, they applauded a shaft of vivid color, no more
enthusiastically than they would have clapped an elaborate arrangement
of limelight. Everything was sacrificed to the cleverness of a merely
inventive mind. More than ever Jenny felt the waste of academic
instruction in her art. She had been learning to dance for so many
years, and there she was beside girls who could neither dance nor move,
girls who had large features and showy legs and so much cubic space for
spangles.
But if her personality did not carry over the footlights and reach the
mighty audience of Drury Lane, behind the scenes it gradually detached
itself from the huge crowd of girls. Great comedians with great salaries
condescended to find out her name. Great principal boys with great
expanses of chest nodded at her over furs. Dainty principal girls with
dainty tiers of petticoats smiled and said good evening in their
mincing, genteel, principal girl voices. Even the stage doorkeeper never
asked her name more than once. Everybody knew Jenny Pearl, except the
public. So many people told her she was sure to get on that she began to
be ambitious again, and used to go, without being pressed, to Madame
Aldavini's for practice. The latter was delighted and prophesied a
career--a career that should date from her engagement (a real engagement
this time) at Covent Garden in the spring.
Jenny's popularity at the theater made her more impatient than ever of
home. She bore less and less easily her mother's attempts to steer her
course.
"You'll come to grief," Mrs. Raeburn warned her.
"I don't think so."
"A nice mess Edie made of things."
"I'm not Edie. I'm not so soft."
"Why you can't meet some nice young chap, and settle down comfortable
with a home of your own, I can't think."
"Like Edie, I suppose, and have a pack of kids. One after another. One
after another. And a husband like Bert, so shocking jealous he can't see
her look at another man without going on like a mad thing. Not this
little girl."
Jenny never told her mother that half the attraction of boys' society
nowadays lay in the delight of making fools of them. If she had told her
Mrs. Raeburn might not have understood. Jenny was angry that her mother
should suspect her of being fast. She was sure of her own remoteness
from passionate temptation. She gloried in her security. She could not
imagine herself in love, and laughed heartily at girls who did. She was
engaged to sixteen boys in one year, to not one of whom was vouchsafed
the light privilege of touching her cheeks. They presented her with
cheap jewelry, which she never returned on the decease of affection, and
scarcely wore during its short existence. It was put away in a cigar-box
in a tangled heap of little petrified hearts.
Mrs. Raeburn, however, who beheld in these despised youths a menace to
her daughter's character, was never tired of dinning into her ears the
tale of Edith's disaster. The more she scolded, the more she held a
watch in her hand when Jenny came back from the theater, the more
annoying was Jenny, the longer did she delay her evening home-comings.
The fact that Bert and Edie had settled down into commonplace married
life did not make her regard more kindly the circumstance-impelled
conjunction. She reproduced in her mental view of the result something
of her mother's emotion immediately before her own birth. Long ago Mrs.
Raeburn had settled down into an unsatisfied contentment; long ago she
had renounced extravagance of hope or thought, merely keeping a hold on
laughter; but Jenny felt vaguely the waste of life, the waste of love,
the waste of happiness which such a marriage as Edie's suggested. She
could not have formulated her impressions. She had never been taught to
co-ordinate ideas. Her mind was a garden planted with rare shrubs whose
labels had been destroyed by a careless gardener, whose individual
existence was lost in a maze of rank weeds. Could the Fates have given
her a rich revenge for the waste of her intelligence, Jenny should have
broken the heart of some prominent member of the London School Board,
should have broken his heart and wrecked his soul, herself meanwhile
blown on by fortunate gales to Elysium.
May was often told of her sister's crusade, of the slain suitors too
slow to race with Atalanta.
"Men _are_ fools," Jenny proclaimed.
"Did you see Fred to-night?"
"Yes; he saw me home."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing much. I told him not to talk because he got on my nerves, and I
wanted to think about my new costume for the spring."
"Didn't he mind?"
"I can't help his troubles. He asked if he might kiss me."
"What did you say?"
"I told him after the next turning, and every time we come to the next
turning I told him the next, till we got to our gate. I said good night,
and he said, 'What about my kiss?' I said, 'There's a cheek; you don't
want much'; and he said, 'I give you a brooch last week, Jenny'; and I
said, 'There's your brooch,' and I threw it down."
"What did he do?"
"He couldn't do much. I trod on it and ran in."
"Somebody'll shoot you one day," prophesied May.
"Who cares? Besides, they haven't got no pluck. Men are walking
cigarettes, that's what men are."
Drury Lane pantomime came to an end.
"And a good job," said Jenny, "for it isn't a pantomime at all; it's
more of a Lord Mayor's show."
Jenny now had to rehearse hard for the ballet at Covent Garden, but
there was still plenty of time in the lengthening spring dusks with
their silver stars and luminous horizons, to fool plenty of men. There
was a quarrelsome interlude with Alfie on this account. The latter had
rashly presented one of his own friends for Jenny's sport. The friend
had spent most of his income on chocolates and pit-stalls, and at one
swoop a whole week's salary on a garnet bracelet.
"Look here," said Alfie, "don't you get playing your tricks on any of my
friends, because I won't have it."
"Hark at him. Hark at Alfred Proud. As if your friends were better than
anyone else's."
"Well, I'm not going to have fellows say my sister's hot stuff."
"Who did?"
"Never mind who did. Somebody said it."
"Arthur?"
Arthur was the melancholy Romeo introduced by Alfie.
"Somebody said you was to Arthur."
"And what did he do?"
"He was quite disgusted. He walked away."
"Didn't he have a fight over it?"
"No. He said he would have done, only you treated him so off-hand."
"Well, he needn't come whistling outside for me no more."
"You're not going to chuck him?"
"Chuck him? I never had him. He worried me to go out with him. I didn't
want to go."
"You'll get a bullet in your chest one of these days. You'll get shot."
"Not by one of your massive friends."
"Why not?"
"Why, there isn't hardly one of 'em as would have the pluck to hold a
pistol, and not one as would have the money to buy one."
"Well, don't say I never told you."
"You and your friends' pistols!"
With the pride and insolence of maiden youth, Jenny took the London
streets. Through the transient April rains she came from Islington to
Covent Garden every day. From King's Cross she rode on the green omnibus
that jogged by the budding elms of Brunswick Square. Down Guilford
Street she rode and watched its frail inhabitants coming home with their
parcels of ribbons and laces. Through Great Queen Street into Long Acre
she came, sitting along on the front seat of the green omnibus more like
a rosy lily now than a La France rose--down Long Acre till she came to
Bow Street, through which she would run to the theater past the groups
of porters who nodded and smiled at her, for they soon recognized the
swift one running through the April rains.
Italian opera appealed to Jenny most. She did not care greatly for
"Tannhaeuser," thinking the Venusberg ballet very poor and Venus herself
a sight. Teutonic extravagance affected her with a slight sense of
discomfort as of being placed too near trombones. Her training as a
dancer had begotten a feeling of meticulous form which the expansive
harmonies of Wagner disconcerted. Jenny did not enjoy suffering a
sea-change. Novelty and strangeness were to her merely peculiar. Strauss
would have bored her, not as Brahms might have bored her to somnolence,
but as an irritating personality bores one to rudeness or sudden flight.
To speculate how far it might have been advisable to hang her
intelligence with Gothic tapestries is not worth while. Probably the
imposition of decorated barbarism on her lucid and sensitive enjoyment
of Verdi would have obscured the small windows of her soul with gloomy
arras. Notwithstanding her education at the board school, she had a
view, and it was better she should preserve an instinct for a sanity
that was sometimes pathos rather than, in the acquirement of an
epileptic appreciation, she should lose what was, after all, a classical
feeling in her sensuous love of obvious beauty.
The sugar-plums of Italian opera melted innocently in her mouth, leaving
behind them nothing but a memory of sweetness, as one steps from a
garden of shaded bird-song with a thought of music. Wagner was more
intoxicating, but bequeathed no limpid exultation to the heart of the
wearied listener. Moreover, she had a very real sense of being a square
peg in a round hole when she and the other minions of Venus tripped
round the frequent rocks of Venusberg. It was as if a confectioner had
stuck a shepherdess of pink icing on the top of a plum-pudding. Jenny
felt, in her own words, that it was all unnatural. There was nothing of
Walpurgis in their stereotyped allurement. It was Bobbing Joan in
Canterbury Close. The violins might wail through the darkened opera
house, but an obese Tannhaeuser caught by the wiles of an adipose Venus
during the inexpressive seductions of an Italian ballet was silly; the
poses to be sustained were fatiguing and ineffective. More fatiguing
still was Jenny's almost unendurable waiting as page while the
competitors sang to Elizabeth. There were four pages in purple velvet
tunics. Jenny looked her part, but the other three looked like Victoria
plums. The one scene in German opera that she really enjoyed was the
Valkyries' ride, when she and a few selected girls were strapped high up
to the enchanted horses and rocked exhaustingly through the terrific
clamor.
But these excursions into Gothic steeps among the distraught populations
of the north were not the main feature of the opera season. They were a
_tour de force_ of rocks in a dulcet enclosure. Over Covent Garden hung
the magic of an easy and opulent decoration. It sparkled from the tiaras
in the grand circle. It flashed from the tie-pins of the basses, from
the rings of the tenors. It breathed on the oceanic bosoms of the
contraltos. It trembled round the pleated hips of the sopranos.
Everything was fat--a pasha's comfortable dream.
Jenny, being little and svelte, was distressed by the prevalent
sumptuousness. A fine figure began to seem a fine ambition.
"My dear child, you are thin," some gracious prima donna would murmur
richly just before she tripped on to the stage to play consumptive Mimi.
Jenny could not see that she was advancing to fame at Covent Garden. Nor
was she, indeed, but Madame Aldavini tried to console her by insisting
upon the valuable experience and pointing out the products of success
that surrounded her. Covent Garden was only a stepping-stone, Madame
reminded her.
Here she was at seventeen without a chance to display her
accomplishments. It was more acting than dancing at Covent Garden.
Jenny, too, was always chosen for such voiceless parts as were
important. Some of these she did not like. In Rigoletto, for instance,
Previtale, the great singer, expressed a wish that she should play the
girl in the sack whom he was to fondle. Jenny did not like being
fondled. Other girls would have loved the conspicuous attractions of
Previtale, but Jenny thought his breath was awful, as indeed it was.
Her principal friend at Covent Garden was a girl called Irene, or rather
spelled Irene, for she was always called Ireen. Irene Dale was a mixture
of the odd and the ordinary in her appearance. At first glance she
seemed the commonplace type produced in hundreds by English _coulisses_.
Perhaps the expression of her face in repose first suggested a
possibility of distinction. The intensely blue eyes in that circumstance
had a strange, listless ardor, as if she were dreaming of fiery moments
fled long ago. The blue eyes were enhanced by hair, richly brown as
drifted leaves under the sunlight. Her mouth was prettiest when she was
being pleasantly teased. Her nose came to an end, and then began again.
Her chin was deeply cleft and her complexion full of real roses. In the
company of Jenny, Irene gave an impression of slowness; not that Jenny,
except when late for rehearsal, ever seemed in a hurry, but with her
there was always the suggestion of a tremulous agility. Irene had been
at Madame Aldavini's school, where she and Jenny in their childhood had
wasted a considerable amount of time in romping, but, since they never
happened to go on tour together, they never achieved a girlish
friendship until at Covent Garden they found themselves dressing next to
each other.
Jenny tried to inspire Irene with the hostility to men felt by herself.
But Irene, although she enjoyed the lark, had a respect for men at the
bottom of it all, and would not always support Jenny in the latter's
freely expressed contempt. While she was at Covent Garden, Irene met a
young man, unhealthily tall, who made much of her and gave her expensive
rings, and for a fancy of his own took her to a fashionable milliner's
and dressed her in short skirts. Jenny had heard something of Irene's
Danby and was greatly annoyed by the latter's unsympathetic influence.
"Your Danby," she would protest. "Whatever can you see in him? Long
idiot!"
"My Danby's a gentleman," said Irene.
"Well, I think he looks terrible. Why, he wears his teeth outside."
Then Jenny, meeting Irene and her Danby in Leicester Square, beheld her
friend in the childish costume.
"Oh, sight!" she called out.
"You are rude," said Irene.
"You're a very rude little girl," said Danby; "but will you come and
have a drink with us?"
"No, thanks," said Jenny, and passed on coldly. That evening she
attacked Irene in the dressing-room.
"To let a man make such a shocking sight of you!"
"He likes to see me in short skirts."
"Whatever for? And those boots!"
"He wants me to marry him," declared Irene.
"Marry you? That's only a rumor, young Irene. I've properly rumbled your
Danby. Marry you! I don't think."
"He is when he comes back from Paris, and he said you were a very bad
example for me."
"Crushed!" said Jenny in mock humility. Then she went on, "Yes, you and
your Parises. Any old way, you can tell Tin Ribs from me I should be
ashamed to make a girl I was fond of look such a terrible sight."
"His brother said he'd like to be introduced to you."
"Yes; I daresay. Tin Ribs the Second, I suppose. No, thanks, not this
little girl."
London deepened into summer, and the golden people coming out of Covent
Garden seemed scattered with star dust from the prodigal June stars,
while the high moon made of Jenny a moonbeam as, in white pique, she sat
in the front of the green omnibus going home.
These were happy days at Covent Garden, and when the season ended Jenny
was sorry. She did not enjoy Yarmouth with its swarming sands and
goat-carriages and dust and fleas and switchback flung down on the
barren coast like a monstrous skeleton. She was glad to come back to
London in the effulgence of a fine September; glad to rehearse again
for the autumn opera season, and pleased, when that was over, to return
to Drury Lane for the Christmas pantomime.
After her second spring season of opera was over she and Irene discussed
the future. Danby had retired to Paris on his business. His rings
sparkled unseen in the safe of a Camden Town pawnbroker, although the
whisky and soda which they served to buy had long ceased to sparkle for
Mrs. Dale. Irene said she was tired of being in three months and out
three months.
"I think we ought to go to the Orient, Jenny."
"I don't care where we go," said Jenny.
"Well, let's."
"All right. I'll meet you Camden Town station to-morrow. Don't you be
late."
"No fear."
"Oh, no, Mrs. Punctual, you're never late!" scoffed Jenny.
"Well, I won't be to-morrow."
On the following morning Jenny dressed herself up to impress the
ballet-master of the Orient, and arrived in good time at Camden Town
station. Irene was nowhere in sight. Jenny waited half an hour. People
began to stare at the sprays of lilac in her large round hat. Really,
they were looking at the blue facets of her eyes and her delicate,
frowning eyebrows. But Jenny, feeling herself a-blush, thought it was
the lilac, thought her placket was undone, thought there was a hole in
her stocking, became thoroughly hot and self-conscious.
She waited another blushful quarter of an hour. Then, thinking that
Irene must surely have mistaken the meeting-place, she called at the
shop in Kentish Town where her father worked and asked him if he'd seen
Irene.
"Irene Dale?" said Charlie.
"Yes, you know."
"Haven't you seen her?"
"No."
"Why, she was in here asking for you. She's been waiting outside Kentish
Town Station."
"That's Mrs. Brains all over. Ta-ta!"
Jenny dashed off to Kentish Town, where she caught Irene on the verge of
departure. Most of the way to the Orient they argued which was right.
When they reached the famous theater of varieties, Irene said she was
afraid to go in.
"Who cares?" said Jenny. "If they don't want us, they won't eat us, any
way."
Monsieur Corontin, the Maitre de Ballet, interviewed them in his little
room that was hidden away at the end of one of the innumerable passages.
He looked at Jenny curiously.
"Dance, please, miss."
Jenny danced as well as she could in the diminutive room.
"Now, please, miss," he said to Irene, who also danced.
"You are engaged," said Mr. Corontin.
"Both?" asked Jenny.
"Both of you."
They lost themselves several times in the course of their descent.
"What an unnatural place," said Jenny. "Gee! How many more stairs? I
suppose we're ballet girls now."
At home that evening Charlie remonstrated with his daughter for
intruding upon him at Kentish Town.
"Don't come asking me for your flash friends," he said. "Why, the men
wondered who you were."
"Didn't they know I was your daughter?"
"I tried to pretend you wasn't, but one of 'em heard you calling me
dad."
"What did he say?"
"What did he say? He said, 'Charlie, is your daughter a---- princess?'"
"Well, you ought to have been very proud," said Jenny.
"Proud, with all the men in the shop laughing at me? Why, they'll think
I've no business to be working."
"Oh!"
"And don't you never recognize me in the street," went on Charlie.
"Why ever not?"
"Well, look at you; look at your hat. People, I know, wonders whatever
on earth you are."
"Oh, my own father's ashamed of me now; and what about you? Beer and
bed's all you think about."
Jenny thought she would go and see Lilli Vergoe, in Cranbourne Street,
and tell her of the engagement.
Lilli sat with her feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a cigarette.
"I've joined the ballet," said Jenny.
"Where?"
"At the Orient."
"You won't like it."
"Who cares? I sha'n't stay if I don't."
"Yes, you will. You'll stay. Everybody stays in the Orient. I've stayed
there twelve years, and I'm still a second-line girl. You'll stay twelve
years and, if you don't get fat, you'll still be a second-line boy."
"What about if I get married?"
"You'll still stay."
"You'll give me a headache, you and your staying. I intend to enjoy
myself. You're worse than a wet week, you are."
Jenny was standing by the window looking down into Cranbourne Street
baking in the July heat.
"Isn't it shocking hot?" said Lilli.
"I think summer's simply lovely," Jenny answered.