The supper at the Trocadero only marked the first of many such evenings
spent in the company of Irene and the two brothers. However much one
side of Jenny's character might despise Jack Danby, to another side he
was strangely soothing. When she was beside Maurice, every moment used
to be haunted by its own ghost, bitter-sweet with the dread of finality.
Danby's effect was that of a sedative drug whose action, however
grateful at the time, is loathed in retrospect, until deprivation renews
desire. Jenny found herself longing to sit near him and was fretful in
his absence because, not being in love with him, he did not occupy her
meditations pleasantly. He was worth nothing to her without the sense of
contact. He was a bad habit: under certain conditions of opportunity in
association he might become a vice.
Evolution, in providence for the perpetuation of the species, has kept
woman some thousands of years nearer to animals than man. Hence their
inexplicableness to the majority of the opposite sex. Men have built up
a convention of fastidious woman to flatter their own sexual rivalry.
Woman is relinquished as a riddle when she fails to conform to masculine
standards of behavior. Man is accustomed to protest that certain
debased--or rather highly specialized--types of his own sex are
unreasonably attractive. He generally fails to perceive that when a
woman cannot find a man who is able to stimulate her imagination, she
often looks for another who will gratify her senses.
Maurice was never the lover corresponding most nearly with an ideal of
greensick maiden dreams. Jenny's sensibility had not been stultified by
these emotional ills, so that when he crossed her horizon, she loved him
sanely without prejudice. She made him sovereign of her destiny because
he seemed to her fit for power. He completely satisfied her imagination;
and, having made a woman of her, he left a libertine to reap what he had
sown.
Jack Danby possessed the sly patience of an accomplished rake. He never
alarmed Jenny with suggestions of escort, with importunity of embraces.
His was the stealthy wooing of inactivity and smoldering eyes. He would
let slip no occasion for interpreting life to the disadvantage of
virtue; he was always sensually insistent. He and his brother, offspring
of a lady's maid and an old demirep, owed to their inheritance of a
scabrous library the foundations of material prosperity. They owed also
their corrupt breed which, through some paradox of healing, might be
valuable to women in the mood for oblivion whom the ordinary anaesthetics
of memory had failed.
One Saturday night early in January, Arthur suggested that the two girls
should come to tea and spend the evening at the flat in Victoria. Irene
looked at Jenny, and Jenny nodded her approval of the plan.
Greycoat Gardens lay between the Army and Navy Stores and Vincent
Square. The windows at the back looked out over the playground of an
old-fashioned charity school, and the roof made a wave in that sea of
roofs visible from the studio window in Grosvenor Road. But that was ten
months ago.
When Jenny and Irene reached the Gardens, the mud-splashed January
darkness had already fallen; but for some reason the entrance-hall of
the block containing the Danbys' flat was not yet lighted up. It seemed
cavernous and chill; the stone stairs were repellent and the whole air
full of hollow warnings. Half-way up, a watery exhalation filtered
through the frosted glass of a flat's front door in a cold effulgence
which added eerily to the lifelessness of all the other doors. The
Danbys lived at the very top, and it took all Irene's powers of
persuasion to induce Jenny to complete the ascent. At last, however,
they gained their destination and immediately on the shrilling of an
electric bell walked through a narrow hall misty with the fumes of
Egyptian cigarettes. The sitting-room looked cosy with its deep crimson
paper and fireglow and big arm-chairs heaped with downy cushions. Yet
the atmosphere had the sickly oppression of an opiate, and it did not
take Jenny long to pull back the purple velvet curtains and throw open
the window to the raw winter night.
"It's like being in a bottle of port in this room. Phew! I shall have a
most shocking headache soon," she prophesied.
"Won't you leave your coats and things in my room?" said Jack Danby.
"That's not such a dusty idea. Come on, young Ireen."
The two girls followed their host to his room which was hung with rose
du Barri draperies prodigally braided with gold.
"What a glorious room," cried Jenny.
"You think so?" asked its owner.
"Rather."
The evening passed away without any development of the situation. The
girls looked at books and pictures according to the custom of first
visits, and drank Green Chartreuse after the supper which they had
helped to lay. They also smoked many fat Egyptian cigarettes during an
evening of heavy silences, broken by the crunch of subsiding coal and
occasional cries that floated in from neighboring slums across the
stillness of a wet Sunday night.
As Jenny paused on the step of the taxi that was to drive them home,
Jack Danby held her hand very tightly.
"You'll come again?" he asked.
"Of course."
After this first visit Jenny and Irene spent almost every afternoon at
the flat in Greycoat Gardens. Jenny liked the sensation of Jack Danby
brushing against her, of the sudden twitches he would give her hands,
nor did she resent an unexpected kiss with which he once burnt her neck
as she leaned over the table looking at a portfolio of Lancret's
engravings.
Arthur Danby went back to Paris in advance of his brother, and Jenny
fell into the habit of visiting the flat alone. Jack still never
startled her with sudden importunities, never suggested the existence of
another point of view beside her own. He seemed perfectly content to
watch her enjoyment of his luxury and heavy comfort.
One Sunday afternoon in the middle of February--St. Valentine's Eve, to
be precise--when the snowdrops drift in myriads across the London parks,
Jenny went to pay her farewell visit. Jack Danby was leaving England on
the next day to rejoin his brother in Paris. Before she came away from
Stacpole Terrace, Jenny had arranged for Irene to pick her up in the
course of the evening, so that they could go back together. For some
reason she was very particular in exacting a strict promise from Irene
not to fail her.
"What a fuss about nothing," grumbled her friend.
"Oh, well, Ireen, I don't like coming back alone on a Sunday
night. I hate Sunday, and you know it."
Jenny, buried in a big arm-chair, dozed away the afternoon as usual and
after tea sat staring into the fire, while Danby from the hearthrug
assiduously stroked the slim white hand that drooped listlessly over an
arm of the chair. A steady drench of rain had set in with the dusk, and,
being close under the roof, they could hear the gurgle and hiss of the
flooded gutters. Neither of them made a move to turn on the electric
light or stir the lowering fire to flame. Danby even denied himself
three or four cigarettes so that the magnetic current of sensuousness
should not be interrupted. Inch by inch he drew closer to Jenny, sliding
noiselessly over the thick fur of the rug. He was now near enough to
kiss slowly her bare forearm and separately each supple finger. Jenny
leaned back unconscious of him, though remotely pleased by his kisses,
in her dull hell of memory where repressed inclinations smoldered like
the fire on which her eyes were fixed. What a fool she had been for the
sake of a silly powerlessness to take the plunge. It was bound to be
taken in the end--with someone. But Maurice was a rotter, and would he
after all have been worthy of the ultimate sacrifice? Would he not have
tired and put her under an even more severe humiliation? Toys were good
enough for Maurice. It was ridiculous to make life a burden for the sake
of one man. Twenty-two next October. How quickly the years were flying.
So, in a maze of speculation, regret and resolution, Jenny lay back in
the deep arm-chair while Jack Danby drugged her with kisses. She drew
her arm away at last, feeling hungry in a vague way.
"What's the time?" she asked, yawning.
"It must be after nine."
"Good lord, and we haven't had supper yet."
"Are we going to wait for Irene?" he inquired.
"Not for supper. She is late. I won't half tell her off."
Danby had risen from the hearth-rug and turned on the light. Jenny was
poking the fire vigorously.
"I've got _pate de foie gras"_ he informed her.
"Ugh, what horrible-looking stuff," she said.
"Don't you like it?"
"I never tried it."
"Try now," Danby urged.
"No, thanks, it looks like bad butter."
The rain increased in volume as the evening wore on. Still Irene did not
come. It struck eleven o'clock, and Jenny said she could wait no longer.
"I'll get a cab," said Danby.
"No; don't leave me here all alone," cried Jenny.
"Why should you go home at all to-night?" Danby breathed in a parched
whisper.
Jenny pressed her face against the jet-black window-pane and suddenly
away beyond Westminster there was a low bourdon of thunder.
"Stay with me," pleaded Danby; "it's such a night for love."
"Who cares?" murmured Jenny. "I've only myself to think about."
"What did you say?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"But you will stay?"
She nodded.