A DARK DAWN
Before retiring that night Florence and Petite Jeanne sat for a long
time in their own small room, discussing the past and future.
They had spent the earlier hours of the evening in Angelo’s studio.
There, in frankness and utter sincerity, the little company had
discussed its prospects.
No one blamed Petite Jeanne for the part she had played. Being endowed
with tender and kindly souls, they one and all felt that under the same
conditions they would have acted in an identical manner.
“It is of little consequence,” Angelo had declared magnanimously. “We
should never have succeeded under that management. The opera was doomed.
And once a failure always a failure in the realm of playland.”
“What does it matter?” Dan Baker’s kindly old eyes had lighted with a
smile. “You have youth and love and beauty, all of you. How can you ask
for more?”
This speech had seemed quite wonderful at the time. But to these girls
sitting on their bed, facing facts, the future did not seem rosy. With
only two weeks’ room rent paid, with less than ten dollars between them,
with no income save Florence’s meager pay, and with bleak old winter
close at hand, they could not but dread what lay ahead.
“Jeanne,” Florence said at last, as if to change the subject, “was the
gypsy who chased you, on that morning when you fell into Merry’s cellar,
among those you saw at the Forest Preserve?”
“No,” the little French girl said thoughtfully. “No, I am sure he was
not.”
“Then,” said her companion, “we had better put his Majesty, the little
God of Fire, back to rest in his hole in the floor. You may need him
yet.”
“I am sure we shall.” The little French girl’s tone carried assurance.
“That opera is beautiful, very, very beautiful. And what is it the poet
says?
“‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’
“And still another:
“‘All that is at all
Lasts forever, past recall.’
“If these things are true, how can our beautiful opera fail to live?
Believe me, our time will yet come.
“Yes, yes, we must hide the little Fire God very carefully indeed.”
Three weeks passed. Trying weeks they were to the little French girl;
weeks in which her faith and courage were severely tested.
As proof of her faith in the beautiful thing Angelo and Swen had
created, she kept up her dancing. Sometimes in Angelo’s studio,
sometimes in her own small room, sometimes humming snatches of the
score, sometimes with Swen beating the battered piano, she danced
tirelessly on. There were times, too, when those hardy souls who went to
walk in the park on these bleak days saw a golden haired sprite dancing
in the sun. This, too, was Jeanne.
But when winter came sweeping down, when on one memorable November day
she awoke and found the window ledge piled high with snow and heard the
shriek of a wind that, whirling and eddying outside, seemed never to
pause, she despaired a little.
“This American winter,” she murmured. “It is terrible.”
And how could it seem otherwise to her? In her beloved France it snowed
a little. But the snow was soon gone. No drifts three feet high, no
blocked traffic, no terrible thermometer dropping to twenty below.
Besides, when winter came in France, the gypsies, “folding their tents
like the Arabs,” drifted away toward the south where it was always
summer.
By drawing the covers up over her head she was able to shut out from her
eyes the sight of the drifting snow and from her ears the sound of the
shrieking wind. But she could not hide from her alert mind the fact that
her money was gone, that the rent was overdue, nor that Florence’s
pitiful salary, if such it might be called, sufficed only to supply them
with the plainest of food.
In these last days she had gone less seldom to Angelo’s studio. Matters
were no better there. And, though for her sake Angelo and his companions
kept up a continuous chatter about future successes and good times just
around the corner, she knew in her heart that they, too, were
discouraged.
“There are the traveling bags,” she told herself now, as she threw back
the covers and sat up. “Those three pigskin traveling bags down there in
Angelo’s studio. I have fifteen dollars invested in them. Kay King has
always said: ‘You may have the money back any time.’
“Perhaps,” she thought soberly, “it is wrong of me to keep them. But to
sell them seems like betraying a friend. To cast all those beautiful
treasures, bestowed upon my good friend by those who loved him best,
before the eyes of curious, grasping and often stupid people, and to say
‘Come, buy these,’ certainly does seem like the betrayal of a friend.
“And he was so kind to me!” She closed her eyes and saw it all again. “I
was so young. The ship, the sea, all the people were so strange. And
America. It, at first, was even worse. But he, big-hearted man that he
was, treated me as his own daughter. He made everything seem so simple,
so joyous, so much like a lark. How can I? Oh, how can I?” She wrung her
slender hands in agony. “How can I permit them to be sold?
“And yet,” she thought more calmly, “it has been more than three weeks
since I wrote that letter to his hotel in New York. There has been time
for it to reach England and for the reply to come. I have heard nothing.
Perhaps he is dead.
“No reply,” she thought again. “There may have been one, and yet I may
not have known it.”
This was true. Since she did not wish to carry the heavy bags to her
room, she had left them at Angelo’s studio, and in writing the letter
had given only that address.
“I have not been to the studio for three days. A letter may await me. I
shall go to-day. If he reclaims the bags, he will repay me. Perhaps
there will be a tiny reward. Then all will be well again. Ah, yes, why
despair?”
Thus encouraged, she hopped out of bed, did ten minutes of
shadow-dancing and then, having hopped into her clothes, set about the
business of making toast and coffee over an electric plate.
“Life,” she murmured as she sipped her coffee, “is after all very, very
sweet.”