For all that Jenny was so contemptuous of her aunt's opinion at the time
of its expression, when she came to weigh its truth she found it
somewhat disturbing. Was an abscess, indeed, the sole cause of her
mother's madness and death? And could Aunt Mabel have any justification
for so cruelly hinting at a less obvious cause? Jenny herself possessed
a disconcerting clarity of intuition which she inherited from her
mother, who might have divined the progress of the Danby incident and
brooded over it too profoundly in the absence of her daughter. Indeed,
she might have been actually goaded into sheer madness by a terrible
consciousness of that rainy St. Valentine's night; for it was strange
that her sanity should fly forever on the very next morning. It was
horrid to think that all night long her mother, kept awake by pain,
might have been conscious of her actions. Yet the doctor had so
confidently blamed the abscess for everything. Moreover, in the asylum
her mother had seemed just as much distressed by the thought of May's
back as anything else. Sensitiveness to her mother's feelings had led
Jenny into wrecking her own happiness with Maurice, and even Fortune
could scarcely be so fierce as to drive her mother mad on account of the
pitiful corollary to that ruined love. Yet it might be so, and if it
were, what remorse would burden her mind everlastingly. And now it was
too late for explanations. Jenny, having felt all through her mother's
life an inability to confide in her completely, now when she was dead
developed an intense desire to pour out her soul, to acquaint her with
every detail of experience and even to ascertain if her own passionate
adventures had been foreshadowed in her mother's life.
Meanwhile, with all these potential horrors of culpable actions, there
was the practical side of the future to consider. In a week the lodgers
would return, and a servant must be found at once to help May. She
herself would do as much as possible, but most of her energy was sapped
by the theater. She wished her father had the smallest conception of
management. The death of his wife, however, seemed to have destroyed
what small equipment of resolution he possessed, and the "Masonic Arms"
received him more openly, more frequently than ever.
Jenny debated the notion of leaving the Orient and applying all her mind
to keeping house; but it was too late for her temperament to inure
itself to domesticity without the spur of something sharper than mere
pecuniary advantage. Perhaps it would be better to give up the house in
Hagworth Street and take a smaller one, where, on the joint earnings of
herself and her father, he and the two sisters could live in tolerable
comfort. Perhaps she might even accept the risk of setting up house with
May alone. But thirty shillings a week was not a large sum for two
girls, one of whom must be well dressed and able to hold her own in
company where dress counted for a good deal. The more she thought of it,
the more impossible did it seem to give up the theater. Those few days
of absence proved how intimately her existence was wrapped up in the
certainty of an evening's employment. As the time had drawn on for going
down to the Orient, she had become very restless in the quiet of home.
However much she might scoff at it, there was wonderful comfort in the
assurance of a cheerful evening of dressing-room gossip. Besides, there
was always the chance of an interesting stranger in front or of suddenly
being called upon to play a noticeable part, though that pleasure grew
more and more insipid all the time. There was, however, still a certain
agreeable reflection in the consciousness of looking pretty and knowing
that a few eyes every night remarked her face and figure. And even if
all these consolations of theatrical existence failed, there was a very
great satisfaction in making up and leaving, as it were, one's own
discontented body behind.
For a time everything went on as usual and nobody put forward any
definite proposal involving a change either of residence or mode of
life. Jenny began to think she was doomed to settle down into perpetual
dullness and never again to be launched desperately on a passionate
adventure. She was beginning to be aware how easy it was for a woman to
belie the temperament of her youth with a common-place maturity. By the
end of the summer their father had already advanced so far on the road
to moral and financial disintegration as to make it evident to Jenny and
May that they must fend for themselves. One lodger, an old clerk in a
Moorgate firm of solicitors, had already left, and the other, a
Cornishman working in a dairy, would soon be carrying the result of his
commercial experience back to his native land. Neither of the girls
liked the prospect of new lodgers and were nervous of affording shelter
to possible thieves or murderers. Nor did May in particular enjoy the
supervision of the servant or wrestling with the slabs of unbaked dough
which heralded her culinary essays. So at last she and Jenny decided the
house was altogether too large and that they must give notice to quit.
"And aren't I to give no opinion on the subject of my own house?" asked
their father indignantly.
"You?" cried Jenny; "why should you? You don't do nothing but drink
everything away. Why should we slave ourselves to the death keeping
you?"
"There's daughters!" Charlie apostrophized. "Yes, daughters is all very
nice when they're small, but when they grow up, they're worse than
wives. It comes of being women, I suppose." And Charlie, as if
sympathizing with his earliest ancestor, sighed for Eden. "Look here, I
don't want to take my hook from this house."
"All right, stay on, then, stupid," May advised; "only Jenny and I are
going to clear off."
"Stay on by yourself," Jenny continued in support of her sister, "and a
fine house it'll be in a year's time. No one able to get in for empty
bottles and people all around thinking you've opened a shooting-gallery,
I should say."
"Now don't go on," said Charlie, "because I want to have a lay down, so
you can just settle as you like."
It was Sunday afternoon and no problems of future arrangements were
serious enough to interrupt a lifelong habit.
"It's no good talking to him," said Jenny scornfully; "what we've got to
do is give notice sharp. I hate this house now," she added, savagely
appraising the walls.
So it was settled that after so many years the Raeburns should leave
Hagworth Street. Charlie made no more attempts to contest the decision,
and acquiesced almost cheerfully when he suddenly reflected that
public-houses were always handy wherever anyone went. "Though, for all
that," he added, "I shall miss the old 'Arms.'"
"Fancy," said Jenny, "who'd have thought it?"
On the following Sunday afternoon Mr. Corin, the remaining lodger, came
down to interview his hostesses.
"I hear you're leaving then, Miss Raeburn," he said. "How's that?"
"It's too hard work for my sister," Jenny answered very politely. "And
besides, she don't care for it, and nor don't I."
"Well, I'm going home along myself in November month, I believe, or I
should have been sorry to leave you. What I come down to ask about was
whether you'd let a bedroom to a friend of mine who's coming up from
Cornwall on some law business in connection with some evidence over a
right of way or something. A proper old mix up, I believe it is. But I
don't suppose they'll keep him more than a week, and he could use my
sitting-room."
Jenny looked at May.
"Yes, of course, let him come," said the housewife. "But when will it
be?"
"October month, I believe," said Mr. Corin. "That's when the witnesses
are called for."
Everything seemed to happen in October, Jenny thought. In October she
would be twenty-two. How time was flying, flying with age creeping on
fast. In the dreariness of life's prospect, even the arrival of Mr.
Corin's friend acquired the importance of an expected event, and, though
neither of the sisters broke through custom so far as to discuss him
beforehand, the coming of Mr. Corin's friend served as a landmark in the
calendar like Whitsuntide or Easter. Meanwhile, Mr. Raeburn, as if aware
of the little time left in which the "Masonic Arms" could be enjoyed,
drank more and more as the weeks jogged by.
Summer gales marked the approach of autumn, and in the gusty twilights
that were perceptibly earlier every day, Jenny began to realize how
everything of the past was falling to pieces. There was an epidemic of
matrimony at the theater, which included in the number of its victims
Maudie Chapman and Elsie Crauford. Of her other companions Lilli Vergoe
had left the ballet and taken up paid secretarial work for some
misanthropic society, while the relations between Irene and herself had
been as grimly frigid ever since the quarrel. New girls seemed to occupy
old places very conspicuously, and all the stability of existence was
shaken by change. Only the Orient itself remained immutably vast and
austere, voracious of young life, sternly intolerant of fading beauty,
antique and unscrupulous.
Jenny was becoming conscious of the wire from which she was suspended
for the world's gaze, jigged hither and thither and sometimes allowed to
fall with a flop when fate desired a new toy. The ennui of life was
overwhelming. A gigantic futility clouded her point of view, making
effort, enjoyment, sorrow, disappointment, success equally unimportant.
She was not induced by that single experience of St. Valentine's night
to prosecute her curiosity. This may have been because passion full-fed
was a disillusionment, or it may have been that the shock of her
mother's madness appeared to her as a tangible retribution. Everything
was dead. Her dancing, like her life, had become automatic, and even her
clothes lasted twice as long as in the old days.
"I can't make out what's happened to everybody," she said to May. "No
fellows ever seem to come round the stage door now. All the girls have
either got married or booked up that way. Nobody ever wants to have
larks like we used to have. You never hardly hear anybody laugh in the
dressing-room now. I met someone the other day who knew me two years ago
and they said I'd gone as thin as a threepenny-bit."
Jenny meditated upon the achievement of her life up to date and wrote it
down a failure. Where was that Prima Ballerina Assoluta who with
pitter-pat of silver shoes had danced like a will-o'-the-wisp before her
imagination long ago? Where was that Prima Ballerina with double-fronted
house at Ealing or Wimbledon, and meek, adoring husband? Where, indeed,
were all elfin promises of fame and fairy hopes of youth? They had fled,
those rainbow-winged deceivers, together with short frocks
accordion-pleated and childhood's tumbled hair. Where was that love so
violent and invincible that even time would flee in dismay before its
progress? Where, too, was the laughter that once had seemed illimitable
and immortal? Now there was nothing so gay as to keep even laughter
constant to Jenny's world. For her there was no joy in lovely
transcience. She knew by heart no Horatian ode which, declaiming against
time, could shatter the cruelty of impermanence. Without an edifice of
love or religion or art or philosophy, there seemed no refuge from
decay.
When the body finds existence a mock, the mind falls back upon its
intellectual defences. But Jenny had neither equipment, commissariat or
strategic position. She was a dim figure on the arras of civilization,
faintly mobile in the stressful winds of life. She was a complex
decorative achievement and should have been cherished as such. Therefore
at school she was told that William the Conqueror came to the throne in
1066, that a bay is a large gulf, a promontory a small cape. She had
been a plaything for the turgid experiments by parrots in education on
simple facts, facts so sublimely simple that her mind recorded them no
more than would the Venus of Milo sit down on a bench before a pupil
teacher. When she was still a child, plastic and wonderful, she gave her
dancing and beauty to a country whose inhabitants are just as content to
watch two dogs fight or a horse die in the street. When ambition
withered before indifference, she set out to express herself in love.
Her early failures should not have been fatal, would not have been if
she had possessed any power of mental recuperation. But even if William
the Conqueror had won his battle at Clacton, the bare knowledge of it
would not have been very useful to Jenny. Yet she might have been useful
in her beauty, could some educationalist have perceived in her youth
that God as well as Velasquez can create a thing of beauty. She lived,
however, in a period of enthusiastic waste, and now brooded over the
realization that nothing in life seemed to recompense one for living,
however merrily, however splendidly, the adventure began.
Such was Jenny's mood when, just after her twenty-second birthday, Mr.
Corin announced that his friend, Mr. Z. Trewhella, would arrive in three
days' time.