"Did I come in by the door?"
"Yes."
"Who brought me?"
"The doctor."
"Did he ring the bell?"
"Yes."
"Did father know I was coming?"
"Yes."
"Was I a present from father?"
"Yes."
"Would you like that gentleman to give you a present?"
"What do you mean?"
"Would you like him to give you a li"l" girl like me?"
"Not at all; and you stop asking questions, Mrs. Chatter."
Her mother was suddenly aware of Jenny"s cross-examinations, which she had been answering mechanically with thoughts far away with a florid man in a jingling hansom cab. Jenny was conscious of her dreaming and knew in her sly baby heart that her mother was in a weak mood. But it was too good to last long enough for Jenny to find out all she wanted to know.
"Why don"t you send father away and have that gentleman as a lodger?"
"I told you once; don"t keep on."
"But why don"t you?"
"Because I don"t want to."
In bed that night Jenny lay awake and tried to understand the conversation in the parlor. At present her intelligence could only grasp effect. a.n.a.lysis had not yet entered her mind.
She saw, in pictures on the ceiling, her mother and the rich strange gentleman. She saw her father watching. She saw them all three as primitive folks see tragedies, dimly aware of great events, but powerless to extract any logical sequence. Lying awake, she planned pleasant surprises, planned to bring back Mr. Timpany and banish her father. It was like the dreams of Christmas time, when one lay awake and thought of presents. She remembered how pleased her mother had professed herself by the gift of a thimble achieved on Jenny"s side by a great parsimony in sweets. The gentleman had offered a cosy house. At once she visualized it with lights in every window and the delicious smell that is wafted up from the gratings of bakers" shops. But what was a Ralli cart? Something to do with riding? And Jenny was to come, too, and share in all this. He had said so distinctly. If he gave mother a house, why should he not give her a doll"s house such as Edie boasted of in the house of a friend, such as Edie had promised to show her some day. She began to feel a budding resentment against her mother for saying "No" to all these delights, a resentment comparable with her emotions not so long ago when her mother refused to let her go for a ride on an omnibus with Mr. Vergoe.
Good things came along very seldom, and when they did come, grown-up people always spoiled them. Life, as Jenny lay awake, seemed made up of small repressions. Life was a series of hopes held out and baffled desires, of unjust disappointments and aspirations unreasonably neglected. She lay there, a mite in flowing time, sensible only of having no free will.
Why couldn"t she grow up all of a sudden and do as she liked? But then grown-up people, whom she always regarded as entirely at liberty, did not seem to be able to do as they liked. Her mother had said, "No, thank you," to a cosy house, just as she was taught to say, "No, thank you,"
to old gentlemen who offered her pennies to turn somersaults over railings--surely a harmless way of getting money. But her mother had not wanted to say "No, thank you." That Jenny recognized as a fact, although, if she had been asked why, she would have had nothing approaching a reason.
"I will do as I like," Jenny vowed to herself. "I will, I will. I won"t be told." Here she bit the sheet in rage at her powerlessness. Desire for action was stirring strongly in her now. "Why can"t I grow up all at once? Why must I be a little girl? Why can"t I be like a kitten?"
Kittens had become cats within Jenny"s experience.
"I will be disobedient. I will be disobedient. I won"t be stopped."
Suddenly a curious sensation seized her of not being there at all. She bit the bedclothes again. Then she sat up in bed and looked at her petticoats hanging over the chair. She was there, after all, and she fell asleep with wilful ambitions dancing lightly through the gay simplicities of her child"s brain, and, as she lay there with tightly closed, determined lips, her mother with shaded candle looked down at her and wondered whether, after all, she and Jenny would not have been better off under the rich-voiced, cigar-haunted protection of Mr.
Timpany.
And then Mrs. Raeburn went to bed and fell asleep to the snoring of Charlie, just as truly unsatisfied as most of the women in this world.
Only Charlie was all right. He had spent a royal evening in bragging to a circle of pipe-armed friends of his firmness and virility at a moment of conjugal stress.
And outside the cold January stars were reflected in the puddles of Hagworth Street.
Chapter VI: _Shepherd"s Calendar_
It was unlikely that Jenny"s dancing could always be kept a secret. The day came at last when her mother, in pa.s.sing the playground of the school, looked over the railings and saw her daughter"s legs above a semicircle of applauding children. Mrs. Raeburn was more than shocked: she was profoundly alarmed. The visit of the aunts rose up before her like a ghost from the heart of forgotten years. They had faded into a gradual and secure insignificance, only momentarily displaced by the death of Aunt f.a.n.n.y. But the other two lived on in Carminia House like skeletons of an outraged morality.
Something must be done about this dancing craze. Something must be done to check the first signs of a prophecy fulfilled. She thought of Barnsbury; but Mrs. Purkiss had now two pasty-faced boys of her own, and was no longer willing to act as deputy-mother to the children of her sister. Something must certainly be done about Jenny"s wilfulness.
"How dare you go making such an exhibition of yourself?" she demanded, when Jenny came home. "How dare you, you naughty girl?"
Jenny made no reply but an obstinate frown.
"You dare sulk and I"ll give you a good whipping."
The teacher was written to; was warned of Jenny"s wild inclinations. The teacher, a fish-like woman in a plaid skirt, remonstrated with her pupil.
"Nice little girls," she a.s.serted "don"t kick their legs up in the air."
The cla.s.s was forbidden to encourage the dancer; a mountain was made of a molehill; Jenny was raised to the giddy pinnacle of heroism. She wore about her the blazing glories of a martyr; she began to be conscious of possessing an exceptional personality, for there had never been such a fuss over any other girl"s misdemeanor. She began to feel more acutely the injustice of grown-up repression. She tried defiance and danced again in the playground, but learned that humanity"s prime characteristic is cowardice; perceived, with Aristotle, that man is a political animal, a hunter in packs. She thought the school would support her justifiable rebellion, but, alas, the school deserted her.
Heroine she might be in corner conferences. Heroine she might be in linked promenades; but when her feelings were crystallized in action, the other girls thought of themselves. They applauded her intentions, but shrank from the prominence of the visible result. Jenny abandoned society. The germ of cynicism was planted in her soul. She came to despise her fellows. In scarlet cloak she traveled solitary to school, and hated everybody.
The immediate and obvious result of this self-imposed isolation was her heightened importance in the eyes of boys. One by one they approached her with offers of escort, with tribute from sticky pockets. Little by little she became attached to their top-spinning, marble-flicking journeys to and from school; gradually she was admitted to the more intimate fellowship of outlawry. She found that, in a.s.sociation with boys, she could prosecute her quarrel with the world. With them she wandered far afield from Hagworth Street; with them she tripped along on many a marauding expedition. For them she acted as decoy, as scout against policemen. With them she rang the bells of half a street at a run. With them she broke the windows of empty houses; climbed ladders and explored roofs and manipulated halfpennies stuck with wax to the paving-stones. She was queen of the robbers" camp on a tin-sprinkled waste of building-land. She acquired a fine contempt of girls, and wished more than ever she had been fortunate enough to be born a boy.
Even Alfie condescended not merely to take notice of her, but also sometimes to make use of her activity. She looked back with wonder to the time when she had regarded her brother with a shrinking distaste. He became her standard of behavior. She saw his point of view when n.o.body else could, as on the occasion when he asked Edie if she dared him to hit her on the head with the bar of iron he was swinging, and when Edie, having in duty bound dared, found herself with a large cut on the forehead. Alfie, finding other boys admired it, encouraged her dancing; and they used to flock round the organs while Jenny learned step-dancing from big, rough girls who were always to be found in the middle of the music.
One day, however, Mrs. Raeburn and Mrs. Purkiss, coming back together from a spring hat foray, walked right into one of Jenny"s performances.
Mrs. Raeburn might have endured the shame of it alone, but the company of her sister upset her power of dealing with an awkward situation. If in the past she had been inclined to compare Percy and Claude, her pasty-faced nephews, unfavorably with her own children, on the present occasion their mother drained the cup of revenge to the dregs.
With Jenny between them, the two sisters walked back to Hagworth Street.
"It isn"t as if it was just showing her legs," said Mrs. Purkiss.
"That"s bad enough, but I happened to notice she had a hole in her stocking....
"And those great, common girls she was hollering with. Wherever on earth can she have picked up with them? Some of Charlie"s friends, I suppose....
"It seems funny that Alfie shouldn"t have more shame than go letting his sister make such a sight of herself, but there, I suppose Alfie takes after his father....
"All I"m thankful for is that Bill wasn"t with us, he being a man as anything like that upsets for a week. He never did have what you might call a good liver, and anything unpleasant turns his bile all the wrong way. Only last week, when Miss Knibbs, our first a.s.sistant, sent an outsize in combinations to a customer who"s _very_ particular about any remark being pa.s.sed about her stoutness, Bill was sick half of the night....