Chapter X: _Drury Lane and Covent Garden_

To compensate Jenny for her disappointment over Covent Garden, Madame Aldavini secured a place for her in the Drury Lane pantomime. She was no longer to be the most attractive member of an attractive quartette, but one of innumerable girls who changed several times during the evening into amazingly complicated dresses, designed not to display individual figures, but to achieve broad effects of color and ingenuity.

Straight lines were esteemed above dancing, straight lines of Frenchmen or Spaniards in the Procession of Nations, straight lines of Lowestoft or Dresden in the Procession of Porcelain, straight lines of Tortoise-shell Butterflies or Crimson-underwing Moths in the Procession of Insects. Jenny's gay deep eyes were obscured by tricolor flags or the spout of a teapot or the disproportionate antennae of a butterfly. There was no individual grace of movement in swinging down the stage in the middle of a long line of undistinguished girls. If the audience applauded, they applauded a shaft of vivid color, no more enthusiastically than they would have clapped an elaborate arrangement of limelight. Everything was sacrificed to the cleverness of a merely inventive mind. More than ever Jenny felt the waste of academic instruction in her art. She had been learning to dance for so many years, and there she was beside girls who could neither dance nor move, girls who had large features and showy legs and so much cubic space for spangles.

But if her personality did not carry over the footlights and reach the mighty audience of Drury Lane, behind the scenes it gradually detached itself from the huge crowd of girls. Great comedians with great salaries condescended to find out her name. Great principal boys with great expanses of chest nodded at her over furs. Dainty principal girls with dainty tiers of petticoats smiled and said good evening in their mincing, genteel, principal girl voices. Even the stage doorkeeper never asked her name more than once. Everybody knew Jenny Pearl, except the public. So many people told her she was sure to get on that she began to be ambitious again, and used to go, without being pressed, to Madame Aldavini's for practice. The latter was delighted and prophesied a career--a career that should date from her engagement (a real engagement this time) at Covent Garden in the spring.

Jenny's popularity at the theater made her more impatient than ever of home. She bore less and less easily her mother's attempts to steer her course.

"You'll come to grief," Mrs. Raeburn warned her.

"I don't think so."

"A nice mess Edie made of things."

"I'm not Edie. I'm not so soft."

"Why you can't meet some nice young chap, and settle down comfortable with a home of your own, I can't think."

"Like Edie, I suppose, and have a pack of kids. One after another. One after another. And a husband like Bert, so shocking jealous he can't see her look at another man without going on like a mad thing. Not this little girl."

Jenny never told her mother that half the attraction of boys' society nowadays lay in the delight of making fools of them. If she had told her Mrs. Raeburn might not have understood. Jenny was angry that her mother should suspect her of being fast. She was sure of her own remoteness from passionate temptation. She gloried in her security. She could not imagine herself in love, and laughed heartily at girls who did. She was engaged to sixteen boys in one year, to not one of whom was vouchsafed the light privilege of touching her cheeks. They presented her with cheap jewelry, which she never returned on the decease of affection, and scarcely wore during its short existence. It was put away in a cigar-box in a tangled heap of little petrified hearts.

Mrs. Raeburn, however, who beheld in these despised youths a menace to her daughter's character, was never tired of dinning into her ears the tale of Edith's disaster. The more she scolded, the more she held a watch in her hand when Jenny came back from the theater, the more annoying was Jenny, the longer did she delay her evening home-comings.

The fact that Bert and Edie had settled down into commonplace married life did not make her regard more kindly the circumstance-impelled conjunction. She reproduced in her mental view of the result something of her mother's emotion immediately before her own birth. Long ago Mrs. Raeburn had settled down into an unsatisfied contentment; long ago she had renounced extravagance of hope or thought, merely keeping a hold on laughter; but Jenny felt vaguely the waste of life, the waste of love, the waste of happiness which such a marriage as Edie's suggested. She could not have formulated her impressions. She had never been taught to co-ordinate ideas. Her mind was a garden planted with rare shrubs whose labels had been destroyed by a careless gardener, whose individual existence was lost in a maze of rank weeds. Could the Fates have given her a rich revenge for the waste of her intelligence, Jenny should have broken the heart of some prominent member of the London School Board, should have broken his heart and wrecked his soul, herself meanwhile blown on by fortunate gales to Elysium.

May was often told of her sister's crusade, of the slain suitors too slow to race with Atalanta.

"Men _are_ fools," Jenny proclaimed.

"Did you see Fred to-night?"

"Yes; he saw me home."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing much. I told him not to talk because he got on my nerves, and I wanted to think about my new costume for the spring."

"Didn't he mind?"

"I can't help his troubles. He asked if he might kiss me."

"What did you say?"

"I told him after the next turning, and every time we come to the next turning I told him the next, till we got to our gate. I said good night, and he said, 'What about my kiss?' I said, 'There's a cheek; you don't want much'; and he said, 'I give you a brooch last week, Jenny'; and I said, 'There's your brooch,' and I threw it down."

"What did he do?"

"He couldn't do much. I trod on it and ran in."

"Somebody'll shoot you one day," prophesied May.

"Who cares? Besides, they haven't got no pluck. Men are walking cigarettes, that's what men are."

Drury Lane pantomime came to an end.

"And a good job," said Jenny, "for it isn't a pantomime at all; it's more of a Lord Mayor's show."

Jenny now had to rehearse hard for the ballet at Covent Garden, but there was still plenty of time in the lengthening spring dusks with their silver stars and luminous horizons, to fool plenty of men. There was a quarrelsome interlude with Alfie on this account. The latter had rashly presented one of his own friends for Jenny's sport. The friend had spent most of his income on chocolates and pit-stalls, and at one swoop a whole week's salary on a garnet bracelet.

"Look here," said Alfie, "don't you get playing your tricks on any of my friends, because I won't have it."

"Hark at him. Hark at Alfred Proud. As if your friends were better than anyone else's."

"Well, I'm not going to have fellows say my sister's hot stuff."

"Who did?"

"Never mind who did. Somebody said it."

"Arthur?"

Arthur was the melancholy Romeo introduced by Alfie.

"Somebody said you was to Arthur."

"And what did he do?"

"He was quite disgusted. He walked away."

"Didn't he have a fight over it?"

"No. He said he would have done, only you treated him so off-hand."

"Well, he needn't come whistling outside for me no more."

"You're not going to chuck him?"

"Chuck him? I never had him. He worried me to go out with him. I didn't want to go."

"You'll get a bullet in your chest one of these days. You'll get shot."

"Not by one of your massive friends."

"Why not?"

"Why, there isn't hardly one of 'em as would have the pluck to hold a pistol, and not one as would have the money to buy one."

"Well, don't say I never told you."

"You and your friends' pistols!"

With the pride and insolence of maiden youth, Jenny took the London streets. Through the transient April rains she came from Islington to Covent Garden every day. From King's Cross she rode on the green omnibus that jogged by the budding elms of Brunswick Square. Down Guilford Street she rode and watched its frail inhabitants coming home with their parcels of ribbons and laces. Through Great Queen Street into Long Acre she came, sitting along on the front seat of the green omnibus more like a rosy lily now than a La France rose--down Long Acre till she came to Bow Street, through which she would run to the theater past the groups of porters who nodded and smiled at her, for they soon recognized the swift one running through the April rains.

Italian opera appealed to Jenny most. She did not care greatly for "Tannhaeuser," thinking the Venusberg ballet very poor and Venus herself a sight. Teutonic extravagance affected her with a slight sense of discomfort as of being placed too near trombones. Her training as a dancer had begotten a feeling of meticulous form which the expansive harmonies of Wagner disconcerted. Jenny did not enjoy suffering a sea-change. Novelty and strangeness were to her merely peculiar. Strauss would have bored her, not as Brahms might have bored her to somnolence, but as an irritating personality bores one to rudeness or sudden flight. To speculate how far it might have been advisable to hang her intelligence with Gothic tapestries is not worth while. Probably the imposition of decorated barbarism on her lucid and sensitive enjoyment of Verdi would have obscured the small windows of her soul with gloomy arras. Notwithstanding her education at the board school, she had a view, and it was better she should preserve an instinct for a sanity that was sometimes pathos rather than, in the acquirement of an epileptic appreciation, she should lose what was, after all, a classical feeling in her sensuous love of obvious beauty.

The sugar-plums of Italian opera melted innocently in her mouth, leaving behind them nothing but a memory of sweetness, as one steps from a garden of shaded bird-song with a thought of music. Wagner was more intoxicating, but bequeathed no limpid exultation to the heart of the wearied listener. Moreover, she had a very real sense of being a square peg in a round hole when she and the other minions of Venus tripped round the frequent rocks of Venusberg. It was as if a confectioner had stuck a shepherdess of pink icing on the top of a plum-pudding. Jenny felt, in her own words, that it was all unnatural. There was nothing of Walpurgis in their stereotyped allurement. It was Bobbing Joan in Canterbury Close. The violins might wail through the darkened opera house, but an obese Tannhaeuser caught by the wiles of an adipose Venus during the inexpressive seductions of an Italian ballet was silly; the poses to be sustained were fatiguing and ineffective. More fatiguing still was Jenny's almost unendurable waiting as page while the competitors sang to Elizabeth. There were four pages in purple velvet tunics. Jenny looked her part, but the other three looked like Victoria plums. The one scene in German opera that she really enjoyed was the Valkyries' ride, when she and a few selected girls were strapped high up to the enchanted horses and rocked exhaustingly through the terrific clamor.

But these excursions into Gothic steeps among the distraught populations of the north were not the main feature of the opera season. They were a _tour de force_ of rocks in a dulcet enclosure. Over Covent Garden hung the magic of an easy and opulent decoration. It sparkled from the tiaras in the grand circle. It flashed from the tie-pins of the basses, from the rings of the tenors. It breathed on the oceanic bosoms of the contraltos. It trembled round the pleated hips of the sopranos. Everything was fat--a pasha's comfortable dream.

Jenny, being little and svelte, was distressed by the prevalent sumptuousness. A fine figure began to seem a fine ambition.

"My dear child, you are thin," some gracious prima donna would murmur richly just before she tripped on to the stage to play consumptive Mimi.

Jenny could not see that she was advancing to fame at Covent Garden. Nor was she, indeed, but Madame Aldavini tried to console her by insisting upon the valuable experience and pointing out the products of success that surrounded her. Covent Garden was only a stepping-stone, Madame reminded her.

Here she was at seventeen without a chance to display her accomplishments. It was more acting than dancing at Covent Garden. Jenny, too, was always chosen for such voiceless parts as were important. Some of these she did not like. In Rigoletto, for instance, Previtale, the great singer, expressed a wish that she should play the girl in the sack whom he was to fondle. Jenny did not like being fondled. Other girls would have loved the conspicuous attractions of Previtale, but Jenny thought his breath was awful, as indeed it was.

Her principal friend at Covent Garden was a girl called Irene, or rather spelled Irene, for she was always called Ireen. Irene Dale was a mixture of the odd and the ordinary in her appearance. At first glance she seemed the commonplace type produced in hundreds by English _coulisses_. Perhaps the expression of her face in repose first suggested a possibility of distinction. The intensely blue eyes in that circumstance had a strange, listless ardor, as if she were dreaming of fiery moments fled long ago. The blue eyes were enhanced by hair, richly brown as drifted leaves under the sunlight. Her mouth was prettiest when she was being pleasantly teased. Her nose came to an end, and then began again. Her chin was deeply cleft and her complexion full of real roses. In the company of Jenny, Irene gave an impression of slowness; not that Jenny, except when late for rehearsal, ever seemed in a hurry, but with her there was always the suggestion of a tremulous agility. Irene had been at Madame Aldavini's school, where she and Jenny in their childhood had wasted a considerable amount of time in romping, but, since they never happened to go on tour together, they never achieved a girlish friendship until at Covent Garden they found themselves dressing next to each other.

Jenny tried to inspire Irene with the hostility to men felt by herself. But Irene, although she enjoyed the lark, had a respect for men at the bottom of it all, and would not always support Jenny in the latter's freely expressed contempt. While she was at Covent Garden, Irene met a young man, unhealthily tall, who made much of her and gave her expensive rings, and for a fancy of his own took her to a fashionable milliner's and dressed her in short skirts. Jenny had heard something of Irene's Danby and was greatly annoyed by the latter's unsympathetic influence.

"Your Danby," she would protest. "Whatever can you see in him? Long idiot!"

"My Danby's a gentleman," said Irene.

"Well, I think he looks terrible. Why, he wears his teeth outside."

Then Jenny, meeting Irene and her Danby in Leicester Square, beheld her friend in the childish costume.

"Oh, sight!" she called out.

"You are rude," said Irene.

"You're a very rude little girl," said Danby; "but will you come and have a drink with us?"

"No, thanks," said Jenny, and passed on coldly. That evening she attacked Irene in the dressing-room.

"To let a man make such a shocking sight of you!"

"He likes to see me in short skirts."

"Whatever for? And those boots!"

"He wants me to marry him," declared Irene.

"Marry you? That's only a rumor, young Irene. I've properly rumbled your Danby. Marry you! I don't think."

"He is when he comes back from Paris, and he said you were a very bad example for me."

"Crushed!" said Jenny in mock humility. Then she went on, "Yes, you and your Parises. Any old way, you can tell Tin Ribs from me I should be ashamed to make a girl I was fond of look such a terrible sight."

"His brother said he'd like to be introduced to you."

"Yes; I daresay. Tin Ribs the Second, I suppose. No, thanks, not this little girl."

London deepened into summer, and the golden people coming out of Covent Garden seemed scattered with star dust from the prodigal June stars, while the high moon made of Jenny a moonbeam as, in white pique, she sat in the front of the green omnibus going home.

These were happy days at Covent Garden, and when the season ended Jenny was sorry. She did not enjoy Yarmouth with its swarming sands and goat-carriages and dust and fleas and switchback flung down on the barren coast like a monstrous skeleton. She was glad to come back to London in the effulgence of a fine September; glad to rehearse again for the autumn opera season, and pleased, when that was over, to return to Drury Lane for the Christmas pantomime.

After her second spring season of opera was over she and Irene discussed the future. Danby had retired to Paris on his business. His rings sparkled unseen in the safe of a Camden Town pawnbroker, although the whisky and soda which they served to buy had long ceased to sparkle for Mrs. Dale. Irene said she was tired of being in three months and out three months.

"I think we ought to go to the Orient, Jenny."

"I don't care where we go," said Jenny.

"Well, let's."

"All right. I'll meet you Camden Town station to-morrow. Don't you be late."

"No fear."

"Oh, no, Mrs. Punctual, you're never late!" scoffed Jenny.

"Well, I won't be to-morrow."

On the following morning Jenny dressed herself up to impress the ballet-master of the Orient, and arrived in good time at Camden Town station. Irene was nowhere in sight. Jenny waited half an hour. People began to stare at the sprays of lilac in her large round hat. Really, they were looking at the blue facets of her eyes and her delicate, frowning eyebrows. But Jenny, feeling herself a-blush, thought it was the lilac, thought her placket was undone, thought there was a hole in her stocking, became thoroughly hot and self-conscious.

She waited another blushful quarter of an hour. Then, thinking that Irene must surely have mistaken the meeting-place, she called at the shop in Kentish Town where her father worked and asked him if he'd seen Irene.

"Irene Dale?" said Charlie.

"Yes, you know."

"Haven't you seen her?"

"No."

"Why, she was in here asking for you. She's been waiting outside Kentish Town Station."

"That's Mrs. Brains all over. Ta-ta!"

Jenny dashed off to Kentish Town, where she caught Irene on the verge of departure. Most of the way to the Orient they argued which was right.

When they reached the famous theater of varieties, Irene said she was afraid to go in.

"Who cares?" said Jenny. "If they don't want us, they won't eat us, any way."

Monsieur Corontin, the Maitre de Ballet, interviewed them in his little room that was hidden away at the end of one of the innumerable passages. He looked at Jenny curiously.

"Dance, please, miss."

Jenny danced as well as she could in the diminutive room.

"Now, please, miss," he said to Irene, who also danced.

"You are engaged," said Mr. Corontin.

"Both?" asked Jenny.

"Both of you."

They lost themselves several times in the course of their descent.

"What an unnatural place," said Jenny. "Gee! How many more stairs? I suppose we're ballet girls now."

At home that evening Charlie remonstrated with his daughter for intruding upon him at Kentish Town.

"Don't come asking me for your flash friends," he said. "Why, the men wondered who you were."

"Didn't they know I was your daughter?"

"I tried to pretend you wasn't, but one of 'em heard you calling me dad."

"What did he say?"

"What did he say? He said, 'Charlie, is your daughter a---- princess?'"

"Well, you ought to have been very proud," said Jenny.

"Proud, with all the men in the shop laughing at me? Why, they'll think I've no business to be working."

"Oh!"

"And don't you never recognize me in the street," went on Charlie.

"Why ever not?"

"Well, look at you; look at your hat. People, I know, wonders whatever on earth you are."

"Oh, my own father's ashamed of me now; and what about you? Beer and bed's all you think about."

Jenny thought she would go and see Lilli Vergoe, in Cranbourne Street, and tell her of the engagement.

Lilli sat with her feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a cigarette.

"I've joined the ballet," said Jenny.

"Where?"

"At the Orient."

"You won't like it."

"Who cares? I sha'n't stay if I don't."

"Yes, you will. You'll stay. Everybody stays in the Orient. I've stayed there twelve years, and I'm still a second-line girl. You'll stay twelve years and, if you don't get fat, you'll still be a second-line boy."

"What about if I get married?"

"You'll still stay."

"You'll give me a headache, you and your staying. I intend to enjoy myself. You're worse than a wet week, you are."

Jenny was standing by the window looking down into Cranbourne Street baking in the July heat.

"Isn't it shocking hot?" said Lilli.

"I think summer's simply lovely," Jenny answered.