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NOCTURNE
By FRANK SWINNERTON
1917
TO MARTIN SECKER
THIS "NOCTURNE"
INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS
"'But do I see afore me, him as I ever sported with in his times of
happy infancy? And may I--_may_ I?'
"This May I, meant might he shake hands?"
--DICKENS, _Great Expectations_.
I do not know why I should be so overpoweringly reminded of the
immortal, if at times impossible, Uncle Pumblechook, when I sit down to
write a short preface to Mr. Swinnerton's _Nocturne_. Jests come at
times out of the backwoods of a writer's mind. It is part of the
literary quality that behind the writer there is a sub-writer, making a
commentary. This is a comment against which I may reasonably
expostulate, but which nevertheless I am indisposed to ignore.
The task of introducing a dissimilar writer to a new public has its own
peculiar difficulties for the elder hand. I suppose logically a writer
should have good words only for his own imitators. For surely he has
chosen what he considers to be the best ways. What justification has he
for praising attitudes he has never adopted and commending methods of
treatment from which he has abstained? The reader naturally receives his
commendations with suspicion. Is this man, he asks, stricken with
penitence in the flower of his middle-age? Has he but just discovered
how good are the results that the other game, the game he has never
played, can give? Or has he been disconcerted by the criticism of the
Young? The Fear of the Young is the beginning of his wisdom. Is he
taking this alien-spirited work by the hand simply to say defensively
and vainly: "I assure you, indeed, I am _not_ an old fogy; I _quite_
understand it." (There it is, I fancy, that the Pumblechook quotation
creeps in.) To all of which suspicions, enquiries and objections, I will
quote, tritely but conclusively: "In my Father's house are many
Mansions," or in the words of Mr. Kipling:
"There are five and forty ways
Of composing tribal lays
And every blessed one of them is right."
Indeed now that I come to think it over, I have never in all my life
read a writer of closely kindred method to my own that I have greatly
admired; the confessed imitators give me all the discomfort without the
relieving admission of caricature; the parallel instances I have always
wanted to rewrite; while, on the other hand, for many totally dissimilar
workers I have had quite involuntary admirations. It isn't merely that I
don't so clearly see how they are doing it, though that may certainly be
a help; it is far more a matter of taste. As a writer I belong to one
school and as a reader to another--as a man may like to make optical
instruments and collect old china. Swift, Sterne, Jane Austen, Thackeray
and the Dickens of _Bleak House_ were the idols of my youthful
imitation, but the contemporaries of my early praises were Joseph
Conrad, W.H. Hudson, and Stephen Crane, all utterly remote from that
English tradition. With such recent admirations of mine as James Joyce,
Mr. Swinnerton, Rebecca West, the earlier works of Mary Austen or Thomas
Burke, I have as little kindred as a tunny has with a cuttlefish. We
move in the same medium and that is about all we have in common.
This much may sound egotistical, and the impatient reader may ask when I
am coming to Mr. Swinnerton, to which the only possible answer is that I
am coming to Mr. Swinnerton as fast as I can and that all this leads as
straightly as possible to a definition of Mr. Swinnerton's position. The
science of criticism is still crude in its classification, there are a
multitude of different things being done that are all lumped together
heavily as novels, they are novels as distinguished from romances, so
long as they are dealing with something understood to be real. All that
they have in common beyond that is that they agree in exhibiting a sort
of story continuum. But some of us are trying to use that story
continuum to present ideas in action, others to produce powerful
excitements of this sort or that, as Burke and Mary Austen do, while
others again concentrate upon the giving of life as it is, seen only
more intensely. Personally I have no use at all for life as it is,
except as raw material. It bores me to look at things unless there is
also the idea of doing something with them. I should find a holiday,
doing nothing amidst beautiful scenery, not a holiday, but a torture.
The contemplative ecstacy of the saints would be hell to me. In the--I
forget exactly how many--books I have written, it is always about life
being altered I write, or about people developing schemes for altering
life. And I have never once "presented" life. My apparently most
objective books are criticisms and incitements to change. Such a writer
as Mr. Swinnerton, on the contrary, sees life and renders it with a
steadiness and detachment and patience quite foreign to my disposition.
He has no underlying motive. He sees and tells. His aim is the
attainment of that beauty which comes with exquisite presentation. Seen
through his art, life is seen as one sees things through a crystal lens,
more intensely, more completed, and with less turbidity. There the
business begins and ends for him. He does not want you or any one to do
anything.
Mr. Swinnerton is not alone among recent writers in this clear, detached
objectivity. We have in England a writer, Miss Dorothy Richardson, who
has probably carried impressionism in fiction to its furthest limit. I
do not know whether she will ever make large captures of the general
reader, but she is certainly a very interesting figure for the critic
and the amateur of fiction. In _Pointed Roofs_ and _Honeycomb_, for
example, her story is a series of dabs of intense superficial
impression; her heroine is not a mentality, but a mirror. She goes about
over her facts like those insects that run over water sustained by
surface tension. Her percepts never become concepts. Writing as I do at
the extremest distance possible from such work, I confess I find it
altogether too much--or shall I say altogether too little?--for me. But
Mr. Swinnerton, like Mr. James Joyce, does not repudiate the depths for
the sake of the surface. His people are not splashes of appearance, but
living minds. Jenny and Emmy in this book are realities inside and out;
they are imaginative creatures so complete that one can think with ease
of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf is one of
the most perfect Cockneys--a type so easy to caricature and so hard to
get true--in fiction. If there exists a better writing of vulgar
lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly
full of the craving for happiness than this that we have here in the
chapter called _After the Theatre_, I do not know of it. Only a
novelist who has had his troubles can understand fully what a dance
among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope
performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false note, one
fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay brutality; a
hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally,
with the soul left out, we've loads of such "strong stuff" and it is
nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into
sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse
of "better things" in Alf or Emmy that would at one stroke have
converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf
and Emmy is that at no point does a "nature's gentleman" or a "nature's
lady" show through and demand our refined sympathy. It is only by
comparison with this supreme conversation that the affair of Keith and
Jenny seems to fall short of perfection. But that also is at last
perfected, I think, by Jenny's final, "Keith.... Oh, Keith!..."
Above these four figures again looms the majestic invention of "Pa."
Every reader can appreciate the truth and humour of Pa, but I doubt if
any one without technical experience can realise how the atmosphere is
made and completed and rounded off by Pa's beer, Pa's needs, and Pa's
accident, how he binds the bundle and makes the whole thing one, and
what an enviable triumph his achievement is.
But the book is before the reader and I will not enlarge upon its merits
further. Mr. Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before
this one, but none of them compare with it in quality. His earlier books
were strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have
something of the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the
artistic completeness and intense vision of _Nocturne_. He has also made
two admirable and very shrewd and thorough studies of the work and lives
of Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. Like these two, he has had
great experience of illness. He is a young man of so slender a health,
so frequently ill, that even for the most sedentary purposes of this
war, his country will not take him. It was in connection with his
Gissing volume, for which I possessed some material he needed, that I
first made his acquaintance. He has had something of Gissing's
restricted and grey experiences, but he has nothing of Gissing's almost
perverse gloom and despondency. Indeed he is as gay a companion as he is
fragile. He is a twinkling addition to any Christmas party, and the
twinkle is here in the style. And having sported with him "in his times
of happy infancy," I add an intimate and personal satisfaction to my
pleasant task of saluting this fine work that ends a brilliant
apprenticeship and ranks Swinnerton as Master. This is a book that will
not die. It is perfect, authentic, and alive. Whether a large and
immediate popularity will fall to it I cannot say, but certainly the
discriminating will find it and keep it and keep it alive. If Mr.
Swinnerton were never to write another word I think he might count on
this much of his work living, as much of the work of Mary Austen, W.H.
Hudson, and Stephen Crane will live, when many of the more portentous
reputations of to-day may have served their purpose in the world and
become no more than fading names.
DECEMBER, 1917
CONTENTS
PART ONE: EVENING
CHAPTER
I. SIX O'CLOCK
II. THE TREAT
III. ROWS
IV. THE WISH
PART TWO: NIGHT
V. THE ADVENTURE
VI. THE YACHT
VII. MORTALS
VIII. PENALTIES
IX. WHAT FOLLOWED
X. CINDERELLA
PART THREE: MORNING
XI. AFTER THE THEATRE
XII. CONSEQUENCES
PART ONE
EVENING
CHAPTER I: SIX O'CLOCK
i
Six o'clock was striking. The darkness by Westminster Bridge was
intense; and as the tramcar turned the corner from the Embankment Jenny
craned to look at the thickly running water below. The glistening of
reflected lights which spotted the surface of the Thames gave its rapid
current an air of such mysterious and especially sinister power that she
was for an instant aware of almost uncontrollable terror. She could feel
her heart beating, yet she could not withdraw her gaze. It was nothing:
no danger threatened Jenny but the danger of uneventful life; and her
sense of sudden yielding to unknown force was the merest fancy, to be
quickly forgotten when the occasion had passed. None the less, for that
instant her dread was breathless. It was the fear of one who walks in a
wood, at an inexplicable rustle. The darkness and the sense of moving
water continued to fascinate her, and she slightly shuddered, not at a
thought, but at the sensation of the moment. At last she closed her
eyes, still, however, to see mirrored as in some visual memory the
picture she was trying to ignore. In a faint panic, hardly conscious to
her fear, she stared at her neighbour's newspaper, spelling out the
headings to some of the paragraphs, until the need of such protection
was past.
As the car proceeded over the bridge, grinding its way through the still
rolling echoes of the striking hour, it seemed part of an endless
succession of such cars, all alike crowded with homeward-bound
passengers, and all, to the curious mind, resembling ships that pass
very slowly at night from safe harbourage to the unfathomable elements
of the open sea. It was such a cold still night that the sliding windows
of the car were almost closed, and the atmosphere of the covered upper
deck was heavy with tobacco smoke. It was so dark that one could not see
beyond the fringes of the lamplight upon the bridge. The moon was in its
last quarter, and would not rise for several hours; and while the
glitter of the city lay behind, and the sky was greyed with light from
below, the surrounding blackness spread creeping fingers of night in
every shadow.
The man sitting beside Jenny continued to puff steadfastly at his pipe,
lost in the news, holding mechanically in his further hand the return
ticket which would presently be snatched by the hurrying tram-conductor.
He was a shabby middle-aged clerk with a thin beard, and so he had not
the least interest for Jenny, whose eye was caught by other beauties
than those of assiduous labour. She had not even to look at him to be
quite sure that he did not matter to her. Almost, Jenny did not care
whether he had glanced sideways at herself or not. She presently gave a
quiet sigh of relief as at length the river was left behind and the
curious nervous tension--no more lasting than she might have felt at
seeing a man balancing upon a high window-sill--was relaxed. She
breathed more deeply, perhaps, for a few instants; and then, quite
naturally, she looked at her reflection in the sliding glass. That hat,
as she could see in the first sure speedless survey, had got the droops.
"See about you!" she said silently and threateningly, jerking her head.
The hat trembled at the motion, and was thereafter ignored. Stealthily
Jenny went back to her own reflection in the window, catching the
clearly-chiselled profile of her face, bereft in the dark mirror of all
its colour. She could see her nose and chin quite white, and her lips as
part of the general colourless gloom. A little white brooch at her neck
stood boldly out; and that was all that could be seen with any
clearness, as the light was not directly overhead. Her eyes were quite
lost, apparently, in deep shadows. Yet she could not resist the delight
of continuing narrowly to examine herself. The face she saw was hardly
recognisable as her own; but it was bewitchingly pale, a study in black
and white, the kind of face which, in a man, would at once have drawn
her attention and stimulated her curiosity. She had longed to be pale,
but the pallor she was achieving by millinery work in a stuffy room was
not the marble whiteness which she had desired. Only in the sliding
window could she see her face ideally transfigured. There it had the
brooding dimness of strange poetic romance. You couldn't know about that
girl, she thought. You'd want to know about her. You'd wonder all the
time about her, as though she had a secret.... The reflection became
curiously distorted. Jenny was smiling to herself.
As soon as the tramcar had passed the bridge, lighted windows above the
shops broke the magic mirror and gave Jenny a new interest, until, as
they went onward, a shopping district, ablaze with colour, crowded with
loitering people, and alive with din, turned all thoughts from herself
into one absorbed contemplation of what was beneath her eyes. So
absorbed was she, indeed, that the conductor had to prod her shoulder
with his two fingers before he could recover her ticket and exchange it
for another. "'Arf asleep, some people!" he grumbled, shoving aside the
projecting arms and elbows which prevented his free passage between the
seats. "Feyuss please!" Jenny shrugged her shoulder, which seemed as
though it had been irritated at the conductor's touch. It felt quite
bruised. "Silly old fool!" she thought, with a brusque glance. Then she
went silently back to the contemplation of all the life that gathered
upon the muddy and glistening pavements below.
ii
In a few minutes they were past the shops and once again in darkness,
grinding along, pitching from end to end, the driver's bell clanging
every minute to warn carts and people off the tramlines. Once, with an
awful thunderous grating of the brakes, the car was pulled up, and
everybody tried to see what had provoked the sense of accident. There
was a little shouting, and Jenny, staring hard into the roadway, thought
she could see as its cause a small girl pushing a perambulator loaded
with bundles of washing. Her first impulse was pity--"Poor little
thing"; but the words were hardly in her mind before they were chased
away by a faint indignation at the child for getting in the tram's way.
Everybody ought to look where they were going. Ev-ry bo-dy ought to look
where they were go-ing, said the pitching tramcar. Ev-ry bo-dy.... Oh,
sickening! Jenny looked at her neighbour's paper--her refuge. "Striking
speech," she read. Whose? What did it matter? Talk, talk.... Why didn't
they do something? What were they to do? The tram pitched to the refrain
of a comic song: "Actions speak louder than words!" That kid who was
wheeling the perambulator full of washing.... Jenny's attention drifted
away like the speech of one who yawns, and she looked again at her
reflection. The girl in the sliding glass wouldn't say much. She'd think
the more. She'd say, when Sir Herbert pressed for his answer, "My
thoughts are my own, Sir Herbert Mainwaring." What was it the girl in
_One of the Best_ said? "You may command an army of soldiers; but you
cannot still the beating of a woman's heart!" Silly fool, she was. Jenny
had felt the tears in her eyes, burning, and her throat very dry, when
the words had been spoken in the play; but Jenny at the theatre and
Jenny here and now were different persons. Different? Why, there were
fifty Jennys. But the shrewd, romantic, honest, true Jenny was behind
them all, not stupid, not sentimental, bold as a lion, destructively
experienced in hardship and endurance, very quick indeed to single out
and wither humbug that was within her range of knowledge, but innocent
as a child before any other sort of humbug whatsoever. That was why she
could now sneer at the stage-heroine, and could play with the mysterious
beauties of her own reflection; but it was why she could also be led
into quick indignation by something read in a newspaper.
Tum-ty tum-ty tum-ty tum, said the tram. There were some more shops.
There were straggling shops and full-blazing rows of shops. There were
stalls along the side of the road, women dancing to an organ outside a
public-house. Shops, shops, houses, houses, houses ... light,
darkness.... Jenny gathered her skirt. This was where she got down. One
glance at the tragic lady of the mirror, one glance at the rising smoke
that went to join the general cloud; and she was upon the iron-shod
stairs of the car and into the greasy roadway. Then darkness, as she
turned along beside a big building into the side streets among rows and
rows of the small houses of Kennington Park.
iii
It was painfully dark in these side streets. The lamps drew beams such a
short distance that they were as useless as the hidden stars. Only down
each street one saw mild spots starting out of the gloom, fascinating in
their regularity, like shining beads set at prepared intervals in a body
of jet. The houses were all in darkness, because evening meals were laid
in the kitchens: the front rooms were all kept for Sunday use, excepting
when the Emeralds and Edwins and Geralds and Dorises were practising
upon their mothers' pianos. Then you could hear a din! But not now. Now
all was as quiet as night, and even doors were not slammed. Jenny
crossed the street and turned a corner. On the corner itself was a small
chandler's shop, with "Magnificent Tea, per 2/- lb."; "Excellent Tea, per
1/8d. lb"; "Good Tea, per 1/4d. lb." advertised in great bills upon its
windows above a huge collection of unlikely goods gathered together like
a happy family in its tarnished abode. Jenny passed the dully-lighted
shop, and turned in at her own gate. In a moment she was inside the
house, sniffing at the warm odour-laden air within doors. Her mouth drew
down at the corners. Stew to-night! An amused gleam, lost upon the dowdy
passage, fled across her bright eyes. Emmy wouldn't have thanked her for
that! Emmy--sick to death herself of the smell of cooking--would have
slammed down the pot in despairing rage.
In the kitchen a table was laid; and Emmy stretched her head back to
peer from the scullery, where she was busy at the gas stove. She did not
say a word. Jenny also was speechless; and went as if without thinking
to the kitchen cupboard. The table was only half-laid as usual; but that
fact did not make her action the more palatable to Emmy. Emmy, who was
older than Jenny by a mysterious period--diminished by herself, but kept
at its normal term of three years by Jenny, except in moments of some
heat, when it grew for purposes of retort,--was also less effective in
many ways, such as in appearance and in adroitness; and Jenny comprised
in herself, as it were, the good looks of the family. Emmy was the
housekeeper, who looked after Pa Blanchard; Jenny was the roving blade
who augmented Pa's pension by her own fluctuating wages. That was
another slight barrier between the sisters. Nevertheless, Emmy was quite
generous enough, and was long-suffering, so that her resentment took the
general form of silences and secret broodings upon their different
fortunes. There was a great deal to be said about this difference, and
the saying grew more and more remote from explicit utterance as thought
of it ground into Emmy's mind through long hours and days and weeks of
solitude. Pa could not hear anything besides the banging of pots, and he
was too used to sudden noises to take any notice of such a thing; but
the pots themselves, occasionally dented in savage dashes against each
other or against the taps, might have heard vicious apostrophes if they
had listened intently to Emmy's ejaculations. As it was, with the
endurance of pots, they mutely bore their scars and waited dumbly for
superannuation. And every bruise stood to Emmy when she renewed
acquaintance with it as mark of yet another grievance against Jenny. For
Jenny enjoyed the liberties of this life while Emmy stayed at home.
Jenny sported while Emmy was engaged upon the hideous routine of kitchen
affairs, and upon the nursing of a comparatively helpless old man who
could do hardly anything at all for himself.
Pa was in his bedroom,--the back room on the ground-floor, chosen
because he could not walk up the stairs, but must have as little trouble
in self-conveyance as possible,--staggeringly making his toilet for the
meal to come, sitting patiently in front of his dressing-table by the
light of a solitary candle. He would appear in due course, when he was
fetched. He had been a strong man, a runner and cricketer in his youth,
and rather obstreperously disposed; but that time was past, and his
strength for such pursuits was as dead as the wife who had suffered
because of its vagaries. He could no longer disappear on the Saturdays,
as he had been used to do in the old days. His chair in the kitchen, the
horse-hair sofa in the sitting-room, the bed in the bedroom, were the
only changes he now had from one day's end to another. Emmy and Jenny,
pledges of a real but not very delicate affection, were all that
remained to call up the sorrowful thoughts of his old love, and those
old times of virility, when Pa and his strength and his rough
boisterousness had been the delight of perhaps a dozen regular
companions. He sometimes looked at the two girls with a passionless
scrutiny, as though he were trying to remember something buried in
ancient neglect; and his eyes would thereafter, perhaps at the mere
sense of helplessness, fill slowly with tears, until Emmy, smothering
her own rough sympathy, would dab Pa's eyes with a harsh handkerchief
and would rebuke him for his decay. Those were hard moments in the
Blanchard home, for the two girls had grown almost manlike in abhorrence
of tears, and with this masculine distaste had arisen a corresponding
feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion which they could not share.
It was as though Pa had become something like an old and beloved dog,
unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet claiming by his very dumbness
something that they could only give by means of pats and half-bullying
kindness. At such times it was Jenny who left her place at the table and
popped a morsel of food into Pa's mouth; but it was Emmy who best
understood the bitterness of his soul. It was Emmy, therefore, who would
snap at her sister and bid her get on with her own food; while Pa
Blanchard made trembling scrapes with his knife and fork until the mood
passed. But then it was Emmy who was most with Pa; it was Emmy who hated
him in the middle of her love because he stood to her as the living
symbol of her daily inescapable servitude in this household. Jenny
could never have felt that she would like to kill Pa. Emmy sometimes
felt that. She at times, when he had been provoking or obtuse, so shook
with hysterical anger, born of the inevitable days in his society and in
the kitchen, that she could have thrown at him the battered pot which
she carried, or could have pushed him passionately against the
mantelpiece in her fierce hatred of his helplessness and his occasional
perverse stupidity. He was rarely stupid with Jenny, but giggled at her
teasing.
Jenny was taller than Emmy by several inches. She was tall and thin and
dark, with an air of something like impudent bravado that made her
expression sometimes a little wicked. Her nose was long and straight,
almost sharp-pointed; her face too thin to be a perfect oval. Her eyes
were wide open, and so full of power to show feeling that they seemed
constantly alive with changing and mocking lights and shadows. If she
had been stouter the excellent shape of her body, now almost too thick
in the waist, would have been emphasised. Happiness and comfort, a
decrease in physical as in mental restlessness, would have made her more
than ordinarily beautiful. As it was she drew the eye at once, as though
she challenged a conflict of will: and her movements were so swift and
eager, so little clumsy or jerking, that Jenny had a carriage to
command admiration. The resemblance between the sisters was ordinarily
not noticeable. It would have needed a photograph--because photographs,
besides flattening the features, also in some manner "compose" and
distinguish them--to reveal the likenesses in shape, in shadow, even in
outline, which were momentarily obscured by the natural differences of
colouring and expression. Emmy was less dark, more temperamentally
unadventurous, stouter, and possessed of more colour. She was
twenty-eight or possibly twenty-nine, and her mouth was rather too hard
for pleasantness. It was not peevish, but the lips were set as though
she had endured much. Her eyes, also, were hard; although if she cried
one saw her face soften remarkably into the semblance of that of a
little girl. From an involuntary defiance her expression changed to
something really pathetic. One could not help loving her then, not with
the free give and take of happy affection, but with a shamed hope that
nobody could read the conflict of sympathy and contempt which made one's
love frigid and self-conscious. Jenny rarely cried: her cheeks reddened
and her eyes grew full of tears; but she did not cry. Her tongue was too
ready and her brain too quick for that. Also, she kept her temper from
flooding over into the self-abandonment of angry weeping and
vituperation. Perhaps it was that she had too much pride--or that in
general she saw life with too much self-complacency, or that she was not
in the habit of yielding to disappointment. It may have been that Jenny
belonged to that class of persons who are called, self-sufficient. She
plunged through a crisis with her own zest, meeting attack with
counter-attack, keeping her head, surveying with the instinctive
irreverence and self-protective wariness of the London urchin the
possibilities and swaying fortunes of the fight. Emmy, so much slower,
so much less self-reliant, had no refuge but in scolding that grew
shriller and more shrill until it ended in violent weeping, a withdrawal
from the field entirely abject. She was not a born fighter. She was
harder on the surface, but weaker in powers below the surface. Her long
solitudes had made her build up grievances, and devastating thoughts,
had given her a thousand bitter things to fling into the conflict; but
they had not strengthened her character, and she could not stand the
strain of prolonged argument. Sooner or later she would abandon
everything, exhausted, and beaten into impotence. She could bear more,
endure more, than Jenny; she could bear much, so that the story of her
life might be read as one long scene of endurance of things which Jenny
would have struggled madly to overcome or to escape. But having borne
for so long, she could fight only like a cat, her head as it were
turned aside, her fur upon end, stealthily moving paw by paw, always
keeping her front to the foe, but seeking for escape--until the pride
perilously supporting her temper gave way and she dissolved into
incoherence and quivering sobs.
It might have been said roughly that Jenny more closely resembled her
father, whose temperament in her care-free, happy-go-lucky way she
understood very well (better than Emmy did), and that while she carried
into her affairs a necessarily more delicate refinement than his she had
still the dare-devil spirit that Pa's friends had so much admired. She
had more humour than Emmy--more power to laugh, to be detached, to be
indifferent. Emmy had no such power. She could laugh; but she could only
laugh seriously, or at obviously funny things. Otherwise, she felt
everything too much. As Jenny would have said, she "couldn't take a
joke." It made her angry, or puzzled, to be laughed at. Jenny laughed
back, and tried to score a point in return, not always scrupulously.
Emmy put a check on her tongue. She was sometimes virtuously silent.
Jenny rarely put a check on her tongue. She sometimes let it say
perfectly outrageous things, and was surprised at the consequences. For
her it was enough that she had not meant to hurt. She sometimes hurt
very much. She frequently hurt Emmy to the quick, darting in one of her
sure careless stabs that shattered Emmy's self-control. So while they
loved each other, Jenny also despised Emmy, while Emmy in return hated
and was jealous of Jenny, even to the point of actively wishing in
moments of furtive and shamefaced savageness to harm her. That was the
outward difference between the sisters in time of stress. Of their
inner, truer, selves it would be more rash to speak, for in times of
peace Jenny had innumerable insights and emotions that would be forever
unknown to the elder girl. The sense of rivalry, however, was acute: it
coloured every moment of their domestic life, unwinking and incessant.
When Emmy came from the scullery into the kitchen bearing her precious
dish of stew, and when Jenny, standing up, was measured against her,
this rivalry could have been seen by any skilled observer. It rayed and
forked about them as lightning might have done about two adjacent trees.
Emmy put down her dish.
"Fetch Pa, will you!" she said briefly. One could see who gave orders in
the kitchen.
iv
Jenny found her father in his bedroom, sitting before the dressing-table
upon which a tall candle stood in an equally tall candlestick. He was
looking intently at his reflection in the looking-glass, as one who
encounters and examines a stranger. In the glass his face looked red and
ugly, and the tossed grey hair and heavy beard were made to appear
startlingly unkempt. His mouth was open, and his eyes shaded by lowered
lids. In a rather trembling voice he addressed Jenny upon her entrance.
"Is supper ready?" he asked. "I heard you come in."
"Yes, Pa," said Jenny. "Aren't you going to brush your hair? Got a fancy
for it like that, have you? My! What a man! With his shirt unbuttoned
and his tie out. Come here! Let's have a look at you!" Although her
words were unkind, her tone was not, and as she rectified his omissions
and put her arm round him Jenny gave her father a light hug. "All right,
are you? Been a good boy?"
"Yes ... a good boy...." he feebly and waveringly responded. "What's the
noos to-night, Jenny?"
Jenny considered. It made her frown, so concentrated was her effort to
remember.
"Well, somebody's made a speech," she volunteered. "They can all do
that, can't they! And somebody's paid five hundred pounds transfer for
Jack Sutherdon ... is it Barnsley or Burnley?... And--oh, a fire at
Southwark.... Just the usual sort of news, Pa. No murders...."
"Ah, they don't have the murders they used to have," grumbled the old
man.
"That's the police, Pa." Jenny wanted to reassure him.
"I don't know how it is," he trembled, stiffening his body and rising
from the chair.
"Perhaps they hush 'em up!" That was a shock to him. He could not move
until the notion had sunk into his head. "Or perhaps people are more
careful.... Don't get leaving themselves about like they used to."
Pa Blanchard had no suggestion. Such perilous ideas, so frequently
started by Jenny for his mystification, joggled together in his brain
and made there the subject of a thousand ruminations. They tantalised
Pa's slowly revolving thoughts, and kept these moving through long hours
of silence. Such notions preserved his interest in the world, and his
senile belief in Magic, as nothing else could have done.
Together, their pace suited to his step, the two moved slowly to the
door. It took a long time to make the short journey, though Jenny
supported her father on the one side and he used a stick in his right
hand. In the passage he waited while she blew out his candle; and then
they went forward to the meal. At the approach Pa's eyes opened wider,
and luminously glowed.
"Is there dumplings?" he quivered, seeming to tremble with excitement.
"One for you, Pa!" cried Emmy from the kitchen. Pa gave a small chuckle
of joy. His progress was accelerated. They reached the table, and Emmy
took his right arm for the descent into a substantial chair. Upon Pa's
plate glistened a fair dumpling, a glorious mountain of paste amid the
wreckage of meat and gravy. "And now, perhaps," Emmy went on, smoothing
back from her forehead a little streamer of hair, "you'll close the
door, Jenny...."
It was closed with a bang that made Pa jump and Emmy look savagely up.
"Sorry!" cried Jenny. "How's that dumpling, Pa?" She sat recklessly at
the table.
v
To look at the three of them sitting there munching away was a sight not
altogether pleasing. Pa's veins stood out from his forehead, and the two
girls devoted themselves to the food as if they needed it. There was
none of the airy talk that goes on in the houses of the rich while maids
or menservants come respectfully to right or left of the diners with
decanters or dishes. Here the food was the thing, and there was no
speech. Sometimes Pa's eyes rolled, sometimes Emmy glanced up with
unconscious malevolence at Jenny, sometimes Jenny almost winked at the
lithograph portrait of Edward the Seventh (as Prince of Wales) which
hung over the mantelpiece above the one-and-tenpenny-ha'penny clock that
ticked away so busily there. Something had happened long ago to Edward
the Seventh, and he had a stain across his Field Marshal's uniform.
Something had happened also to the clock, which lay upon its side, as if
kicking in a death agony. Something had happened to almost everything in
the kitchen. Even the plates on the dresser, and the cups and saucers
that hung or stood upon the shelves, bore the noble scars of service.
Every time Emmy turned her glance upon a damaged plate, as sharp as a
stalactite, she had the thought: "Jenny's doing." Every time she looked
at the convulsive clock Emmy said to herself: "That was Miss Jenny's
cleverness when she chucked the cosy at Alf." And when Emmy said in this
reflective silence of animosity the name "Alf" she drew a deep breath
and looked straight up at Jenny with inscrutable eyes of pain.
vi
The stew being finished, Emmy collected the plates, and retired once
again to the scullery. Now did Jenny show afresh that curiosity whose
first flush had been so ill-satisfied by the meat course. When, however,
Emmy reappeared with that most domestic of sweets, a bread pudding,
Jenny's face fell once more; for of all dishes she most abominated bread
pudding. Under her breath she adversely commented.
"Oh lor!" she whispered. "Stew and b.p. What a life!"
Emmy, not hearing, but second sighted on such matters, shot a malevolent
glance from her place. In an awful voice, intended to be a trifle arch,
she addressed her father.
"Bready butter pudding, Pa?" she inquired. The old man whinnied with
delight, and Emmy was appeased. She had one satisfied client, at any
rate. She cut into the pudding with a knife, producing wedges with a
dexterous hand.
"Hey ho!" observed Jenny to herself, tastelessly beginning the work of
laborious demolition.
"Jenny thinks it's common. She ought to have the job of getting the
meals!" cried Emmy, bitterly, obliquely attacking her sister by talking
at her. "Something to talk about then!" she sneered with chagrin, up in
arms at a criticism.
"Well, the truth is," drawled Jenny.... "If you want it ... I don't like
bread pudding." Somehow she had never said that before, in all the
years; but it seemed to her that bread pudding was like ashes in the
mouth. It was like duty, or funerals, or ... stew.
"The stuff's _got_ to be finished up!" flared Emmy defiantly, with a
sense of being adjudged inferior because she had dutifully habituated
herself to the appreciation of bread pudding. "You might think of that!
What else am I to do?"
"That's just it, old girl. Just why I don't like it. I just _hate_ to
feel I'm finishing it up. Same with stew. I know it's been something
else first. It's not _fresh_. Same old thing, week in, week out.
Finishing up the scraps!"
"Proud stomach!" A quick flush came into Emmy's cheeks; and tears
started to her eyes.
"Perhaps it is. Oh, but Em! Don't you feel like that
yourself.... Sometimes? O-o-h!..." She drawled the word wearily. "Oh
for a bit more money! Then we could give stew to the cat's-meat man
and bread to old Thompson's chickens. And then we could have nice things
to eat. Nice birds and pastry ... and trifle, and ices, and wine.... Not
all this muck!"
"Muck!" cried Emmy, her lips seeming to thicken. "When I'm so
hot.... And sick of it all! _You_ go out; you do just exactly what you
like.... And then you come home and...." She began to gulp. "What about
me?"
"Well, it's just as bad for both of us!" Jenny did not think so really;
but she said it. She thought Emmy had the bread and butter pudding
nature, and that she did not greatly care what she ate as long as it was
not too fattening. Jenny thought of Emmy as born for housework and
cooking--of stew and bread puddings. For herself she had dreamed a
nobler destiny, a destiny of romance, of delicious unknown things,
romantic and indescribably exciting. She was to have the adventures,
because she needed them. Emmy didn't need them. It was all very well for
Emmy to say "What about me!" It was no business of hers what happened to
Emmy. They were different. Still, she repeated more confidently because
there had been no immediate retort:
"Well, it's just as bad for both of us! _Just_ as bad!"
"'Tisn't! You're out all day--doing what you like!"
"Oh!" Jenny's eyes opened with theatrical wideness at such a perversion
of the facts. "Doing what I like! The millinery!"
"You are! You don't have to do all the scraping to make things go round,
like I have to. No, you don't! Here have I ... been in this ... place,
slaving! Hour after hour! I wish _you'd_ try and manage better. I bet
you'd be thankful to finish up the scraps some way--any old way! I'd
like to see _you_ do what I do!"
Momentarily Jenny's picture of Emmy's nature (drawn accommodatingly by
herself in order that her own might be differentiated and exalted by
any comparison) was shattered. Emmy's vehemence had thus the temporary
effect of creating a fresh reality out of a common idealisation of
circumstance. The legend would re-form later, perhaps, and would
continue so to re-form as persuasion flowed back upon Jenny's egotism,
until it crystallised hard and became unchallengeable; but at any rate
for this instant Jenny had had a glimmer of insight into that tamer
discontent and rebelliousness that encroached like a canker upon Emmy's
originally sweet nature. The shock of impact with unpleasant conviction
made Jenny hasten to dissemble her real belief in Emmy's born
inferiority. Her note was changed from one of complaint into one of
persuasive entreaty.
"It's not that. It's not that. Not at all. But wouldn't you like a
change from stew and bread pudding yourself? Sometimes, I mean. You
_seem_ to like it all right." At that ill-considered suggestion, made
with unintentional savageness, Jenny so worked upon herself that her own
colour rose high. Her temper became suddenly unmanageable. "You talk
about me being out!" she breathlessly exclaimed. "When do I go out?
When! Tell me!"
"O-o-h! I _like_ that! What about going to the pictures with Alf
Rylett?" Emmy's hands were, jerking upon the table in her anger. "You're
always out with him!"
"Me? Well I never! I'm not. When--"
They were interrupted unexpectedly by a feeble and jubilant voice.
"More bready butter pudding!" said Pa Blanchard, tipping his plate to
show that he had finished.
"Yes, Pa!" For the moment Emmy was distracted from her feud. In a
mechanical way, as mothers sometimes, deep in conversation, attend to
their children's needs, she put another wedge of pudding upon the plate.
"Well, I say you _are_," she resumed in the same strained voice. "And
tell me when _I_ go out! I go out shopping. That's all. But for that,
I'm in the house day and night. You don't care tuppence about Alf--you
wouldn't, not if he was walking the soles off his boots to come to you.
You never think about him. He's like dirt, to you. Yet you go out with
him time after time...." Her lips as she broke off were pursed into a
trembling unhappy pout, sure forerunner of tears. Her voice was weak
with feeling. The memory of lonely evenings surged into her mind,
evenings when Jenny was out with Alf, while she, the drudge, stayed at
home with Pa, until she was desperate with the sense of unutterable
wrong. "Time after time, you go."
"Sorry, I'm sure!" flung back Jenny, fairly in the fray, too quick not
to read the plain message of Emmy's tone and expression, too cruel to
relinquish the sudden advantage. "I never guessed you wanted him. I
wouldn't have done it for worlds. You never _said_, you know!"
Satirically, she concluded, with a studiously careful accent, which she
used when she wanted to indicate scorn or innuendo, "I'm sorry. I ought
to have asked if I might!" Then, with a dash into grimmer satire: "Why
doesn't he ask you to go with him? Funny his asking me, isn't it?"
Emmy grew violently crimson. Her voice had a roughness in it. She was
mortally wounded.
"Anybody'd know you were a lady!" she said warmly.
"They're welcome!" retorted Jenny. Her eyes flashed, glittering in the
paltry gaslight. "He's never ... Emmy, I didn't know you were such a
silly little fool. Fancy going on like that ... about a man like him. At
your age!"
Vehement glances flashed between them. All Emmy's jealousy was in her
face, clear as day. Jenny drew a sharp breath. Then, obstinately, she
closed her lips, looking for a moment like the girl in the sliding
window, inscrutable. Emmy, also recovering herself, spoke again, trying
to steady her voice.
"It's not what you think. But I can't bear to see you ... playing about
with him. It's not fair. He thinks you mean it. You don't!"
"Course I don't. I don't mean anything. A fellow like that!" Jenny
laughed a little, woundingly.
"What's the matter with him?" Savagely, Emmy betrayed herself again. She
was trembling from head to foot, her mind blundering hither and thither
for help against a quicker-witted foe. "It's only _you_ he's not good
enough for," she said passionately. "What's the matter with him?"
Jenny considered, her pale face now deadly white, all the heat gone from
her cheeks, though the hard glitter remained in her eyes, cruelly
indicating the hunger within her bosom.
"Oh, he's all right in his way," she drawlingly admitted. "He's clean.
That's in his favour. But he's quiet ... he's got no devil in him. Sort
of man who tells you what he likes for breakfast. I only go with
him ... well, you know why, as well as I do. He's all right enough, as
far as he goes. But he's never on for a bit of fun. That's it: he's got
no devil in him. I don't like that kind. Prefer the other sort."
During this speech Emmy had kept back bitter interruptions by an
unparalleled effort. It had seemed as though her fury had flickered,
blazing and dying away as thought and feeling struggled together for
mastery. At the end of it, however, and at Jenny's declared preference
for men of devil, Emmy's face hardened.
"You be careful, my girl," she prophesied with a warning glance of
anger. "If that's the kind you're after. Take care you're not left!"
"Oh, I can take care," Jenny said, with cold nonchalance. "Trust me!"
vii
Later, when they were both in the chilly scullery, washing up the supper
dishes, they were again constrained. Somehow when they were alone
together they could not quarrel: it needed the presence of Pa Blanchard
to stimulate them to retort. In his rambling silences they found the
spur for their unkind eloquence, and too often Pa was used as a
stalking-horse for their angers. He could hardly hear, and could not
follow the talk; but by directing a remark to him, so that it cannoned
off at the other, each obtained satisfaction for the rivalry that
endured from day to day between them. Their hungry hearts, all the
latent bitternesses in their natures, yearning for expression, found it
in his presence. But alone, whatever their angers, they were generally
silent. It may have been that their love was strong, or that their
courage failed, or that the energy required for conflict was not
aroused. That they deeply loved one another was sure; there was rivalry,
jealousy, irritation between them, but it did not affect their love.
The jealousy was a part of their general discontent--a jealousy that
would grow more intense as each remained frustrate and unhappy. Neither
understood the forces at work within herself; each saw these perversely
illustrated in the other's faults. In each case the cause of unhappiness
was unsatisfied love, unsatisfied craving for love. It was more acute in
Emmy's case, because she was older and because the love she needed was
under her eyes being wasted upon Jenny--if it were love, and not that
mixture of admiration and desire with self-esteem that goes to make the
common formula to which the name of love is generally attached. Jenny
could not be jealous of Emmy as Emmy was jealous of Jenny. She had no
cause; Emmy was not her rival. Jenny's rival was life itself, as will be
shown hereafter: she had her own pain.
It was thus only natural that the two girls, having pushed Pa's chair to
the side of the kitchen fire, and having loaded and set light to Pa's
pipe, should work together in silence for a few minutes, clearing the
table and washing the supper dishes. They were distant, both aggrieved;
Emmy with labouring breath and a sense of bitter animosity, Jenny with
the curled lip of one triumphant who does not need her triumph and would
abandon it at the first move of forgiveness. They could not speak. The
work was done, and Emmy was rinsing the washing basin, before Jenny
could bring herself to say awkwardly what she had in her mind.
"Em," she began. "I didn't know you ... you know." A silence. Emmy
continued to swirl the water round with the small washing-mop, her face
averted. Jenny's lip stiffened. She made another attempt, to be the
last, restraining her irritation with a great effort. "If you like I
won't ... I won't go out with him any more."
"Oh, you needn't worry," Emmy doggedly said, with her teeth almost
clenched. "I'm not worrying about it." She tried then to keep silent;
but the words were forced from her wounded heart. With uncontrollable
sarcasm she said: "It's very good of you, I'm sure!"
"Em!" It was coaxing. Jenny went nearer. Still there was no reply.
"Em ... don't be a silly cat. If he'd only ask _you_ to go once or twice.
He'd always want to. You needn't worry about me being ... See, I like
somebody else--another fellow. He's on a ship. Nowhere near here. I only
go with Alf because ... well, after all, he's a man; and they're scarce.
Suppose I leave off going with him...."
Both knew she had nothing but kind intention, as in fact the betrayal of
her own secret proved; but as Jenny could not keep out of her voice the
slightest tinge of complacent pity, so Emmy could not accept anything
so intolerable as pity.
"Thanks," she said in perfunctory refusal; "but you can do what you
like. Just what you like." She was implacable. She was drying the basin,
her face hidden. "I'm not going to take your leavings." At that her
voice quivered and had again that thread of roughness in it which had
been there earlier. "Not likely!"
"Well, I can't help it, can I!" cried Jenny, out of patience. "If he
likes me best. If he _won't_ come to you. I mean, if I say I won't go
out with him--will that put him on to you or send him off altogether?
Em, do be sensible. Really, I never knew. Never dreamt of it. I've never
wanted him. It's not as though he'd whistled and I'd gone trotting after
him. Em! You get so ratty about--"
"Superior!" cried Emmy, gaspingly. "Look down on me!" She was for an
instant hysterical, speaking loudly and weepingly. Then she was close
against Jenny; and they were holding each other tightly, while Emmy's
dreadful quiet sobs shook both of them to the heart. And Jenny, above
her sister's shoulder, could see through the window the darkness that
lay without; and her eyes grew tender at an unbidden thought, which made
her try to force herself to see through the darkness, as though she were
sending a speechless message to the unknown. Then, feeling Emmy still
sobbing in her arms, she looked down, laying her face against her
sister's face. A little contemptuous smile appeared in her eyes, and her
brow furrowed. Well, Emmy could cry. _She_ couldn't. She didn't want to
cry. She wanted to go out in the darkness that so pleasantly enwrapped
the earth, back to the stir and glitter of life somewhere beyond.
Abruptly Jenny sighed. Her vision had been far different from this
scene. It had carried her over land and sea right into an unexplored
realm where there was wild laughter and noise, where hearts broke
tragically and women in the hour of ruin turned triumphant eyes to the
glory of life, and where blinding streaming lights and scintillating
colours made everything seem different, made it seem romantic,
rapturous, indescribable. From that vision back to the cupboard-like
house in Kennington Park, and stodgy Alf Rylett, and supper of stew and
bread and butter pudding, and Pa, and this little sobbing figure in her
arms, was an incongruous flight. It made Jenny's mouth twist in a smile
so painful that it was almost a grimace.
"Oh lor!" she said again, under her breath, as she had said it earlier.
"_What_ a life!"