Carnival.
by Compton Mackenzie.
Chapter I: _The Birth of Columbine_
All day long over the gray Islington Street October, casting pearly mists, had turned the sun to silver and made London a city of meditation whose tumbled roofs and parapets and glancing spires appeared hushed and translucent as in a lake"s tranquillity.
The traffic, muted by the glory of a fine autumn day, marched, it seemed, more slowly and to a sound of heavier drums. Like mountain echoes street cries haunted the burnished air, while a m.u.f.fin-man, abroad too early for the season, swung his bell intermittently with a pastoral sound. Even the milk-cart, heard in the next street, provoked the imagination of distant armor. The houses seemed to acquire from the gray and silver web of October enchantment a mysterious immensity. There was no feeling of stressful humanity even in the myriad sounds that, in a sheen of beauty, floated about the day. The sun went down behind roofs and left the sky plumed with rosy feathers. There was a cold gray minute before dusk came stealing in, richly and profoundly blue: then night sprang upon the street, and through the darkness an equinoctial wind swept, moaning.
Along the gutters the brown leaves danced: the tall plane tree at the end of the street would not be motionless until December should freeze the black branches in diapery against a somber sky. Along the gutters the leaves whispered and ran and shivered and leaped, while the gas-jets flapped in pale lamps.
There was no starshine on the night Jenny Raeburn was born, only a perpetual sound of leaves dancing and the footsteps of people going home.
Mrs. Raeburn had not been very conscious of the day"s calm beauty. Her travail had been long: the reward scarcely apprehended. Already two elder children had closed upon her the gates of youth, and she was inclined to resent the expense of so much pain for an additional tie.
There was not much to make the great adventure of childbirth endurable.
The transitory amazement of a few relatives was a meager consolation for the doubts and agonies of nine slow months. But the muslin curtains, tied back with raffish pink bows, had really worried her most of all.
Something was wrong with them: their dinginess or want of symmetry annoyed her.
With one of those rare efforts towards imaginative comprehension, which the sight of pain arouses in dull and stolid men, her husband had inquired, when he came back from work, whether there was anything he could do.
"Those curtains," she had murmured.
"Don"t you get worrying yourself about curtains," he had replied.
"You"ve got something better to do than aggravate yourself with curtains. The curtains is all right."
Wearily she had turned her face to the sad-colored wallpaper. Wearily she had transferred her discontent to the absence of one of the small bra.s.s k.n.o.bs at the foot of the bed.
"And that k.n.o.b. You never remember to get a new one."
"Now it"s k.n.o.bs!" he had exclaimed, wondering at the foolishness of a woman"s mind in the shadows of coming events. "Don"t you bother your head about k.n.o.bs, either. Try and get a bit of sleep or something, do."
With this exhortation, he had retired from the darkening room, to wander round the house lighting various jets of gas, turning them down to the faintest blue glimmer, and hoping all the while that one of his wife"s sisters would not emerge from the country at the rumor of the baby"s arrival, in order to force her advice upon a powerless household.
Edith and Alfred, his two elder children, had been carried off by the other aunt to her residence in Barnsbury, whence in three weeks they would be brought back to home and twilight speculations upon the arrival of a little brother or sister. In parenthesis, he hoped it would not be twins. They would be so difficult to explain, and the chaps in the shop would laugh. The midwife came down to boil some milk and make final arrangements. The presence of this ample lady disturbed him. The gale rattling the windows of the kitchen did not provide any feeling of firelight snugness, but rather made his thoughts more restless, was even so insistent as to carry them on its wings, weak, formless thoughts, to the end of Hagworth Street, where the bar of the "Masonic Arms" spread a wider and more cheerful illumination than was to be found in the harried kitchen of Number Seventeen. So Charlie Raeburn went out to spend time and money in piloting several friends across the shallows of Mr.
Gladstone"s mind.
Upstairs Mrs. Raeburn, left alone, again contemplated the annoying curtains; though by now they were scarcely visible against the gloom outside. She dragged herself off the bed and, moving across to the window, stood there, rubbing the muslin between her fingers. She remained for a while thus, peering at the backs of the houses opposite that, small though they really were, loomed with menace in the lonely dusk. Shadows of women at work, always at work, went to and fro upon the blinds. They were m.u.f.fled sounds of children crying, the occasional splash of emptied pails, and against the last glimmer of sunset the smoke of chimneys blown furiously outwards. To complete the air of sadness and desolation, the faded leaf of a dried-up geranium was lisping against the window-pane. She gave up fingering the muslin curtains and came back to the middle of the room, wondering vaguely when the next bout of pain was due and why the "woman" didn"t come upstairs and make her comfortable. There were matches on the toilet-table; so she lit a candle, whose light gave every piece of ugly furniture a shadow and made the room ghostly and unfamiliar. Presently she held the light beside her face and stared at herself in the gla.s.s, and thought how pretty she still looked, and, flushed by the fever, how young.
She experienced a sensation of fading personality. She seemed actually to be losing herself. Eyes, bright with excitement, glittered back from the mirror, and suddenly there came upon her overwhelmingly the fear of death.
And if she died, would anybody pity her, or would she lie forgotten always after the momentary tribute of white chrysanthemums? Death, death, she found herself saying over to the tune of a clock ticking in the pa.s.sage. But she had no desire to die. Christmas was near, with its shoplit excursions and mistletoe and merriment. Why should she die? No, she would fight hard. A girl or a boy? What did it matter? Nothing mattered. Perhaps a girl would be nicer, and she should be called Rose.
And yet, on second thoughts, when you came to think of it, Rose was a cold sort of a name, and Rosie was common. Why not call her Jenny? That was better--with, perhaps, Pearl or Ruby to follow, when its extravagance would pa.s.s unnoticed. A girl should always have two names.
But Jenny was the sweeter. Nevertheless, it would be as well to support so homely a name with a really lady-like one--something out of the ordinary.
Why had she married Charlie? All her relatives said she had married beneath her. Father had been a butcher--a prosperous man--and even he, in the family tradition, had not been considered good enough for her mother, who was a chemist"s daughter. Yet, she, Florence Unwin, had married a joiner. Why _had_ she married Charlie? Looking back over the seven years of their married life, she could not remember a time when she had loved him as she had dreamed of love in the airy room over the busy shop, as she had dreamed of love staring through the sunny window away beyond the Angel, beyond the great London skies. Charlie was so stupid, so dull; moreover, though not a drunkard, he was fond of half-pints and smelt of sawdust and furniture polish. Her sisters never liked, never would like him. She had smirched the great tradition of respectability. What would her grandfather, the chemist, have said, that dignified old man in brown velvet coat, treated always with deference, even by her father, the jolly, handsome butcher? Florence Unwin married to a joiner--a man unable to afford to keep his house free from the inevitable lodger who owned the best bedroom--the bedroom that by right should have been hers. She had disgraced the family and for no high motive of pa.s.sion--and once she was young and pretty. And still young, after all, and still pretty. She was only thirty-three now. Why had she married at all? But then her sisters did give themselves airs, and the jolly, handsome butcher had enjoyed too well and too often those drives to Jack Straw"s Castle on fine Sunday afternoons under the rolling Hampstead clouds, had left little enough when he died, and Charlie came along, and perhaps even marriage with him had been less intolerable than existence among the frozen sitting-rooms of her two sisters, drapers wives though they both were.
And the aunts, those three severe women? She might, perhaps, have lived with them when the jolly, handsome butcher died, with them in their house at Clapton, with them eternally dusting innumerable china ornaments and correcting elusive mats. The invitation had been extended, but was forbidding as a mourning-card or the melancholy visit of an insurance agent with his gossip of death. Death? Was she going to die?
It did not matter. The pain was growing more acute. She dragged herself to the door and called down to the midwife; called two or three times.
There was no answer except from the clock, with its whisper of Death and Death. Where was the woman? Where was Charlie? She called again. Then she remembered, through what seemed years of grinding agony, that the street door was slammed some time ago. Charlie must have gone out. With the woman? Had he run away with her? Was she, the wife, forever abandoned? Was there no life in all the world to reach her solitude? The house was fearfully, unnaturally silent. She reached up to the cold gas bracket, and the light flared up without adding a ray of cheerfulness to the creaking pa.s.sage. Higher still she turned it, until it sang towards the ceiling, a thin geyser of flame. The chequers upon the oil-cloth became blurred, as tears of self-pity welled up in her eyes. She was deserted, and in pain.
Her mind sailed off along morbid channels to the grim populations of hysteria. She experienced the merely nervous sensation of many black beetles running at liberty around the empty kitchen. It was a visualization of tingling nerves, and, fostered by the weakening influence of labor pains, it extended beyond the mere thought to the endowment of a mental picture with powerful and malign purpose, so that, after a moment or two, she came to imagining that between her and the world outside black beetles were creating an impa.s.sable barrier.
Could Charlie and the woman really have run away? She called again and peered over the flimsy bal.u.s.trade down to the ground floor. Or was the woman lying in the kitchen drunk? Lying there, incapable of action, among the black beetles? She called again:
"Mrs. Nightman! Mrs. Nightman!"
How dry her hands were, how parched her tongue; and her eyes, how they burned.
Was she actually dying? Was this engulfing silence the beginning of death? What was death?
And what was that? What were those three tall, black figures, moving along the narrow pa.s.sage downstairs? What were they, so solemn and tall and silent, moving with inexorable steps, higher and higher?
"Mrs. Nightman, Mrs. Nightman!" she shrieked, and stumbled in agony of body and horror of mind back to the flickering bedroom, back to the bed.
And then there was light and a murmur of voices, saying: "We have come to see how you are feeling, Florence," and sitting by her bed she recognized the three aunts from Clapton, in their bugles and cameos and glittering bonnets.
There was a man, too, whom she had only just time to realize was the doctor, not the undertaker, before she was aware that the final effort of her tortured body was being made without a.s.sistance from her own will or courage.
She waved away the sympathizers. She was glad to see the doctor and Mrs.
Nightman herding them from the room, like gaunt, black sheep; but they came back again as inquisitive animals will when, after what seemed a thousand thousand years of pain, she could hear something crying and the trickle of water and the singing of a kettle.
Perhaps it was Aunt f.a.n.n.y who said: "It"s a dear little girl."
The doctor nodded, and Mrs. Raeburn stirred, and with wide eyes gazed at her baby.
"It is Jenny, after all," she murmured; then wished for the warmth of a new-born child against her breast.
Chapter II: _Fairies at the Christening_
A fortnight after the birth of Jenny, her three great-aunts, black and stately as ever, paid a second visit to the mother.
"And how is Florrie?" inquired Aunt Alice.
"Going on fine," said Florrie.
"And what is the baby to be called?" asked Aunt f.a.n.n.y.
"Jenny, and perhaps Pearl as well."
"Jenny?"