HOTEL DE PARIS, SEVILLA, SPAIN.
April 17.
My dear and lovely one,
I've not had time to write before. I meant to send you a letter
from the train, but I left all my notepaper and pencils in the
station restaurant at a place called Miranda, and went to sleep
instead.
I find that my uncle has left me more than I expected--five
thousand pounds, in fact. So I want to buy you a delightful little
house somewhere quite close to London. You could have a maid and
you could go on dancing if you liked. Only I do want you to say
"yes" at once. I want you to write by return and tell me you're
going to give up all doubts and worries and scruples. Will you, my
precious?
I've got another splendid plan. I want you to come and join me in
Spain in about a week. I shall be able to meet you in Paris,
because I am going to escort my aunt so far on the way home. Fuz
will look out your trains. You must come. He can arrange to give
you any money you want. We need not stay away very long--about a
month. Sevilla is perfect. The weather is divine. Get yourself some
cool frocks. We'll sit in the Alcazar garden all day. It's full of
lemon trees and fountains. In the evening we'll sit on a balcony
and smoke and listen to guitars.
My darling, I do so adore you. Please, please, come out to Spain
and give up not knowing your own mind. I miss you tremendously. I
feel this beautiful city is wasted without you. I'm sure if you
determined not to bother about anything but love, you'd never
regret it. You wouldn't really. Dearest, sweetest Jenny, do come.
I'm longing for my treasure. It's wonderfully romantic sitting here
in the patio of the hotel--a sort of indoor garden--and thinking so
hard of my gay and sweet one away in London. Darling, I'm sending
you kisses thick as stars, all the way from Spain. All my heart,
Your lover,
Maurice.
Jenny was lying in bed when she received this letter. The unfamiliar
stamp and crackling paper suited somehow the bedroom at Stacpole Terrace
to which she was not yet accustomed. Such a letter containing such a
request would have seemed very much out of place in the little room she
shared at home with May. But here, so dismal was the prospect of life,
she felt inclined to abandon everything and join her lover.
The Dales were a slovenly family. Mr. Dale himself was a nebulous
creature whom rumor had endowed with a pension. It never specified for
what services nor even stated the amount in plain figures; and a more
widely extended belief that the household was maintained by the Orient
management through Winnie and Irene Dale's dancing, supplanted the more
dignified tradition. Mr. Dale was generally comatose on a flock-exuding
chair-bed in what was known as "dad's room." There in the dust,
surrounded by a fortification of dented hatboxes, he perused old Sunday
newspapers whose mildewed leaves were destroyed biennially like
Canterbury Bells. Mrs. Dale was a beady-eyed, round woman with a passion
for bonnets, capes, soliloquies and gin. Her appearance and her manners
were equally unpleasant. She possessed a batch of grievances of which
the one most often aired was her missing of the _Clacton Belle_ one
Sunday morning four years ago. Jenny disliked her more completely than
anybody in the world, regarding her merely as something too large and
too approximately human to extirpate. Winnie Dale, the smoothed-out
replica of her mother, was equally obnoxious. She had long lost all the
comeliness which still distinguished Irene, and possessed an irritating
habit of apostrophizing her affection for a fishmonger--some prosperous
libertine who occasionally cast an eye, glazed like one of his own cods,
at Jenny herself. Ethel, the third sister, was still in short frocks
because her intelligence had not kept pace with her age.
"The poor little thing talks like a child," Mrs. Dale would explain. "So
I dresses her like a child. It's less noticeable."
"_Which_ is silly," Jenny used to comment. "Because she's as tall as a
house and _everybody_ turns round to look after her."
Jenny would scarcely have tolerated this family for a week, if she had
been brought at all closely or frequently in contact with them; but so
much of the day was spent with Maurice and all the evening at the
theater that Stacpole Terrace implied little beyond breakfast in bed and
bed itself. Sometimes, indeed, when she went home to tea at Hagworth
Street and saw the brightness of the glass and shimmer of clean
crockery, she was on the verge of sinking her pride in a practical
reconciliation. Nine weeks passed, however, making it more difficult
every day to admit herself in the wrong; although, during the absence of
Maurice, it became a great temptation. Therefore, when this letter
arrived from Spain, inviting her to widen the breach with her family,
she was half inclined to play with the idea of absolute severance.
Flight, swift and sudden, appealed to her until the difficulty of making
arrangements began to obscure other considerations. The thought of
packing, of catching trains and steamers, of not knowing exactly what
frocks to buy, oppressed her; then a fear took hold of her fancy lest,
something happening to Maurice, she might find herself alone in a
foreign city; and at the end of it all there was her childhood in a
vista of time, her childhood with the presence of her mother brooding
over it, her mother dearly loved whatever old-fashioned notions she
preserved of obedience and strictness of behavior. It would be mean to
outrage, as she knew she would, her mother's pride, and to hand her over
to the criticisms of a mob of relatives. It would be mean to desert May,
who even now might be crying on a solitary pillow. But when she went
downstairs dressed and saw the Dale family in morning deshabille,
uncorseted, flabby and heavy-eyed, crouching over the parlor fire, and
when she thought of Maurice and the empty studio, Jenny's resolution was
shaken and she was inclined to renounce every duty, face every
difficulty and leave her world behind.
"You do look a sulky thing," said Irene. "Coming to sit round the fire?"
"No, thanks," said Jenny. "I haven't got the time."
"Your young chap's away, isn't he?" asked Winnie.
"What's it got to do with you where he is?"
Jenny was in a turmoil of nervous indecision, and felt that whatever
else she did, she must be quit of Stacpole Terrace for that day at
least. She debated the notion of going home, of telling her mother
everything; but the imagination of such an exposure of her most intimate
thoughts dried her up. It would be like taking off her clothes in front
of a crowd of people. Then she thought of going home without reference
to the past; but she was prevented by the expectation of her mother's
readiness to believe the worst, and the inevitably stricter supervision
to which her submission would render her liable. In the end, she
compromised with her inclination by deciding to visit Edie and find out
what sort of sturdy rogue her nephew was by now.
Edie lived at Camberwell in a small house covered with Virginia creeper
not yet in leaf, still a brownish red mat which depressed Jenny as she
rattled the flap of the letterbox and called her sister's name through
the aperture. Presently Edie opened the door.
"Why, if it isn't Jenny. Well I never, you are a stranger."
Edie was shorter than Jenny and more round. Yet for all her plumpness
she looked worn, and her slanting eyes, never so bright as Jenny's, were
ringed with purple cavities.
"How are you, Edie, all this long time?"
"Oh, I'm grand; how's yourself?"
"I'm all right."
The two sisters were sitting in the parlor, which smelt unused, although
it was covered with lengths of material and brown-paper patterns. By the
window was a dressmaker's bust, mournfully buxom. Jenny compared it with
the lay figure in the studio and smiled, thinking how funny they would
look together.
"I wish Bert was in," said Edie. "But he's away on business."
Just then a sound of tears was audible, and the mother had to run out of
the room.
"The children gets a nuisance," she said, as she came back comforting
Eunice, a little girl of two.
"Isn't she growing up a little love?" said Jenny. "Oh, I do think she's
pretty. What glorious eyes she's got."
"They're like her father's, people say; but young Norman, he's the
walking life-like of you, Jenny."
"Where is the rogue?" his aunt inquired.
"Where's Norman, Eunice?"
"Out in the garding, digging gwaves," said Eunice in a fat voice.
Jenny had a sudden longing to have a child of her own and live in a
little house quite close to London.
"Why, I don't believe you've ever seen Baby," said Edie.
"Of course I have, but not for some months."
They went upstairs to look at Baby, who was lying asleep in his cot.
Jenny felt oppressed by the smallness of the bedroom and the many
enlargements of Bert's likeness in youth which dwarfed every other
ornament. They recurred everywhere in extravagantly gilt frames; and the
original photograph was on the chest of drawers opposite one of Edie
wearing a fringe and balloon sleeves.
"There's another coming in five months," said Edie.
"Go on. How many more?"
"I don't know--plenty yet, I expect."
The magic of home that for a few moments had enchanted the little house
was dispelled. Moreover, at tea Norman smeared his face with jam, and
snatched, and kicked his mother because she slapped his wrist.
"Why do you let him behave so bad?" asked Jenny, unconscious that she
was already emulating her own hated Aunt Mabel.
"I don't, only he's such a handful; and his dad spoils him. Besides,
anything for a bit of peace and quiet. Bert never thinks what a worry
children is, and as if I hadn't got enough to look after, he brought
back a dog last week."
"Why don't you tell him off?"
"Oh, it's easier to humor him. You'll find that out quick enough when
you're married yourself."
"Me married? I don't think."
On the way to the theater that evening Jenny almost made up her mind to
join Maurice, and would probably have been constant to her resolve, had
it not been for one of those trivial incidents which more often than
great events change the whole course of a life.
Because she did not like the idea of sitting in meditation opposite a
row of inquisitive faces, she took a seat outside the tramcar that came
swaying and clanging down the Camberwell New Road. It was twilight by
now, and, as the tramcar swung round into Kennington Gate, there was a
wide view of the sky full of purple cloudbanks, islands in a pale blue
luminous sea where the lights of ships could easily be conjured from the
uncertain stars contending with the afterglow of an April sunset. Jenny
sat on the back seat and watched along the Kennington Road the
incandescent gas suffuse room after room with a sickly phosphorescence
in which the inhabitants seemed to swim like fish in an aquarium. All
the rooms thus illuminated looked alike. All the windows had a fretwork
of lace curtains; all the tables were covered with black and red
checkered cloths on which was superimposed half a white cloth covered
with the remains of tea; all the flower vases wore crimped paper
petticoats; all the people inside the cheerless rooms looked tired.
Jenny pulled out the foreign letter and read of sunlight and love. She
began to dream of kisses amid surroundings something like the principal
scene of an Orient ballet, and, as London became more and more
intolerably dreary, over her senses stole the odor of a cigar that
carried her mind racing back to the past. Somewhere long ago her mother,
wanting to go away with someone, had stayed behind; and for the first
time Jenny comprehended mistily that now forgotten renunciation. She
fell to thinking of her mother tenderly, began to be oblivious of
interference, to remember only her merry tales and laughter and
kindness. The strength which long ago enabled Mrs. Raeburn to refuse the
nice little house and the Ralli car seemed to find a renewed power of
expression in her daughter. At present, Jenny thought, kisses in Spain
must still be dreams. That night, in the cheerless parlor of the Dales,
she wrote in watery ink to Maurice that she could not meet him in Paris.
43 STACPOLE TERRACE, CAMDEN TOWN.
Friday.
My darling Maurice,
I can't come to Spain--I can't leave my mother like that--I should
feel a sneak--hurry up and come home because I miss you very much
all the time--It's no use to wish I could come--But I will tell you
about it when you come home--I wish you was here now. With heaps of
love from your darling Jenny.
Irene sends her love and hopes you're having a good time.