Читать книгу Carnival - Compton Mackenzie - Страница 9

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IT was unlikely that Jenny's dancing could always be kept a secret. The day came at last when her mother, in passing 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 Fanny. 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 asserted "don't kick their legs up in the air."

The class 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 association 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 nobody 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 assistant, sent an outsize in combinations to a customer who's very particular about any remark being passed about her stoutness, Bill was sick half of the night....

"I can't think why you don't send her away to Carrie's. The country would do her good, and Carrie's got no children of her own. I'd like to have her myself, only I'm afraid she'd be such a bad example to Percy and Claude."

Mrs. Raeburn was silent. Vulnerable through Jenny's lapse from modesty, she had no sting for her nephews.

Finally it was settled that Jenny should spend a year with Mrs. Threadgale at Galton. It was laid on the shoulders of Hampshire to curb her naughtiness. It remained to be seen how far country sights and sounds would civilize her rudeness.

Having made up her mind to banish the child, Mrs. Raeburn began at once to regret the decision. With all her disobedience, Jenny was still the favorite. "She was such a character," in her mother's words; and her gay, dark eyes and silvery curls would be missed from Hagworth Street. But the day of departure came along. A four-wheeler threw a shadow on the door. There were kisses and handkerchiefs and last injunctions and all the paraphernalia of separation. Jenny was bundled in. Mrs. Raeburn followed.

"Now mind, Ruby," cried the latter from the window, "don't you let May get putting nothing in her mouth, and see Mr. Raeburn has his tea comfortable, and, Alfie, you dare misbehave while I'm away. Good-bye, all."

At last the train drew up at Galton along a gray gravel platform that smelt fresh and flowery after the railway carriage. There was lilac in bloom and red hawthorn, and a pile of tin trunks, and when the train had puffed on, Jenny could hear birdsong everywhere.

While the two sisters embraced, the little girl surveyed her new aunt. She was more like her mother than Aunt Mabel. Nicer altogether than Aunt Mabel, though she disliked the flavor of veil that was mingled with the kisses of welcome.

"They'll wheel the luggage along on a barrow," said Aunt Caroline. "It's not far where we live."

They turned into the wide country street with its amber sunlight and sound of footsteps, and very soon arrived before the shop of James Threadgale, Draper and Haberdasher. Jenny hoped they would go in through the shop itself, but Mrs. Threadgale opened a door at the side and took them upstairs to a big airy parlor that seemed to Jenny's first glance all sunbeams and lace. Having been afforded a glimpse of Paradise, they were taken downstairs again into the back parlor, which would have been very dull had it not looked out on to a green garden sloping down to a small stream.

Uncle James, with pale, square face and quiet voice, came in from the shop to greet them. Jenny thought he talked funny with his broad Hampshire vowels. Ethel, the maid, came in, too, with her peach-bloom cheeks and creamy neck and dewy crimson mouth. Jenny compared her with "our Rube," greatly to our Rube's disadvantage.

Mrs. Raeburn stayed a week, and Jenny said good-bye without any feeling of home-sickness. She liked her new uncle and aunt. There were no pasty-faced cousins, and Ethel was very nice. She was not sent to the National School. Such a course would have been derogatory to Mr. and Mrs. Threadgale's social position. So she went to a funny old school at the top of the town kept by an old lady called Miss Wilberforce—a dear old lady with white caps and pale blue ribbons and a big pair of tortoise-shell spectacles. The school was a little gray house with three gables and diamond lattices and a door studded with great nails over which was an inscription that said, "Mrs. Wilberforce's School, 1828."

In the class-room on one side was heard a perpetual humming of bees among the wallflowers in the front garden, and through the windows on the far side, which looked away over the open country, floated the distant tinkle of sheep-bells. All along one side hung rows of cloaks and hats, and all over the other walls hung pictures of sheep and cows and dogs and angels and turnips and wheat and barley and Negroes and Red Indians: there were also bunches of dried grasses and glass cases full of butterflies and birds' eggs and fossils, and along the window-sills were pots of geraniums. On her desk Miss Wilberforce had an enormous cane, which she never used, and a bowl of bluebells or wild flowers of the season and a big ink-horn and quill pens and books and papers which fluttered about the room on a windy day. There was a dunce's stool with a fool's-cap beside it, and a blackboard full of the simplest little addition sums. All the children's desks were chipped and carved and inked with the initials of bygone scholars, and all the forms were slippery with the fidgetings of innumerable little girls. About the air of the warm, murmurous schoolroom hung the traditions of a dead system of education.

Jenny learned to darn and sew; to recite Cowper's "Winter Walk" after Miss Wilberforce, who was never called "teacher," but always "ma'am"; to deliver trite observations upon the nature of common animals, such as "The dog is a sagacious beast," "The sheep is the friend of man," and to acquire a slight acquaintance with uncommon animals such as the quagga, the yak, and the ichneumon, because they won through their initials an undeserved prominence in the alphabet. She learned that Roman Catholics worshiped images and, incidentally, the toe of the Pope, and wondered vaguely if the latter were a dancer. She was told homely tales about Samuel and Elijah. She was given a glazed Bible which smelt of oil-cloth, and advised to read it every morning and every evening without any selection of suitable passages. She learned a hymn called "Now the day is over," which always produced an emotion of exquisite melancholy. She was awarded a diminutive plot of ground and given a penny packet of nasturtium seeds to sow, but, being told by another girl that they were good to eat, she ate them instead, and her garden was a failure.

There were delightful half-holiday rambles over the countryside, when she, still in her scarlet serge, and half a dozen girls and boys danced along the lanes picking flowers and playing games with chanted refrains like "Green Gravel" and "Queen of Barbary." She made friends with farmers' lads, and learned to climb trees and call poultry and find ducks' eggs. Hay-making time came on, when she was allowed to ride on the great swinging loads right into the setting sun, it seemed. She used to lie on her back, lulled by the sounds of eventide, and watch the midges glinting on the air of a golden world.

She slept in a funny little flowery room next to her uncle and aunt, and she used to lie awake in the slow summer twilights sniffing in the delicious odor of pinks in full bloom below her window. Sometimes she would lean out of the window and weave fancies round the bubbling stream beyond the grass till the moon came up from behind a hop-garden and threw tree-shadows all over the room. Below her sill she could pick great crimson roses that looked like bunches of black velvet in the moonlight, and in the morning she used to suck the honey from the sweet, starry flowers of the jasmine that flung its green fountains over the kitchen porch.

Summer went on; the hay was cut, and in the swimming July heat she used to play in the meadows till her face grew freckled as the inside of a cowslip. Now was the time when she could wear foxglove blooms on every finger. Now was the time to watch the rabbits scampering by the wood's edge in the warm dusk. The corn turned golden, and there were expeditions for wild raspberries. The corn was cut, and blackberry time arrived, bringing her mother, who was pleased to see how well Jenny looked and went back to Hagworth Street with a great bunch of fat purple dahlias.

In October there was nutting—best of all the new delights, perhaps—when she wandered through the hazel coppices and shook the smooth boughs until the ripe nuts pattered down on the damp, woodland earth. Nutting was no roadside adventure. She really penetrated into the heart of the woods and with her companions would peep out half-affrighted by the lips of the October leaves along the glades, half-afraid of the giant beeches with their bare gray branches twisted to the likeness of faces and figures. She and her playmates would peep out from the hazel coppice and dart across the mossy way out of the keeper's eye, and lose themselves in the dense covert and point with breathless whisper to a squirrel or scurrying dormouse. Home again in the silvery mists or moaning winds, home again with bags of nuts slung across shoulders, to await the long winter evenings and fireside pleasures.

Jenny was allowed to celebrate her ninth birthday by a glorious tea-party in the kitchen, when little girls in clean pinafores and little boys in clean collars stumped along the flagged passage and sat down to tea and munched buns and presented Jenny with dolls' tea-services and pop-guns and Michaelmas daisies with stalks warm from the tight clasp of warm hands.

She grew to love her Aunt Carrie and Uncle James with the quiet voice and thin, damp hair.

Winter went by to the ticking of clocks and patter of rain. But there was snow after Christmas and uproarious snow-balling and slides in Galton High Street. There was always a fine crackling fire in the kitchen, and a sleek tabby cat, and copper kettles singing on the hob. There was Ethel's love affair with the grocer's assistant to talk and giggle over amid the tinkle and clatter of washing up the tea-things.

And then in March Mrs. Threadgale caught cold and died quite suddenly; and Jenny put some white violets on her grave and wore a black dress and went home to Islington.

The effect of this wonderful visit was not much more permanent than the surprise of a new picture-book. Galton had meant not so much a succession of revelations as a volley of sensations. She was sad at leaving the country; she missed the affection of her uncle and aunt. She missed the easy sway she had wielded over everybody at Galton. But she had very little experience to carry back to Hagworth Street. One would like to say she carried the memory of that childish wondertime right through her restless life, but, actually, she never remembered much about it. It very soon became merely a vague interval between two long similarities of existence, like a break in a row of houses that does not admit one to anything more than an added space of sky. She never communed with elves, or, like young Blake, saw God's forehead pressed against the window-pane. Jenny was no mystic of nature, and the roar of humanity would always move her more than the singing of waves and forest leaves.

Her great hold upon life was the desire of dancing. This she had fostered on many a level stretch of sward, with daisy chains hung all about her. She had danced with damson-stained mouth like a young Bacchante. She had danced while her companions made arches and hoops of slender willow-stems. She had danced the moon up and the sun down; and once, when the summer dusk was like wine cooled by woodland airs, when a nightingale throbbed in every roadside tree and glow-worms spangled the grass, she had taken a spray of eglantine and led an inspired band of childish revelers down into the twinkling lamplight of Galton.

Yet this wonderful year became a date in her chronicle chiefly because age or sunlight or wind tarnished her silver curls to that uncertain tint which is, unjustly to mice, always called mouse-colored; so that her arrival at Number Seventeen was greeted by a chorus of disapproval.

"Good gracious!" cried Mrs. Raeburn, when she saw her. "Will you only look at her hair?"

"What's gone with it?" asked Jenny.

"Why, what a terrible color. No color at all, you might say. I feel quite disgusted."

"Perhaps she won't be quite such a Miss Vain now," Ruby put in.

Jenny was discouraged. The London spring was trying after Galton, and one day, a month or two after she came back, she felt horribly ill, and her face was flushed.

"The child's ill," said Mrs. Raeburn.

"Ill? Nonsense!" argued Charlie. "Why, look at her color. Ill? Whoever heard? Never saw no one look better in my life. Look how bright her eyes is."

"You ignorant man!" said his wife, and sent for the doctor.

The doctor said it was scarlet fever, and Jenny was taken away in blankets to the hospital. She felt afraid at first in the long, quiet ward with all the rows of nurses and palms and thin beds from which heads suddenly popped up.

"Do you think you'll go to heaven when you die?" the charge-nurse whispered to Jenny as she tucked her in.

"I don't care where I go," said Jenny; "as long as there isn't no castor-oil."

As she lay waiting to get better and watched the lilac buds breaking into flower outside the big windows, she could not help wishing she were in Galton again, although in a way she liked the peace and regularity of hospital life. It amused her to have breakfast at half-past five and lunch at nine. The latter she laughed at all the time she was in the hospital. Her convalescence was an exceptionally long one, but she had two jolly weeks before she left, when she could run about and help to carry the meals to the other patients. She danced once or twice then for the benefit of the ward and was glad that everybody clapped her so loudly. She cried when she left in August to go home to her family.