Chapter IX: _Life, Art and Love_

Eileen Vaughan was, of course, perfectly familiar to Jenny, but the two other girls who were to be her companions for several weeks had to be much observed during the first half-hour of the journey north.

Madame Aldavini was in a first-class compartment, as she wanted to be alone in order to work out on innumerable sheets of paper the arrangement of a new ballet. So the Aldavini Quartette shared between them the four corners of a third-class compartment. Jenny felt important to the world, when she read on the slip pasted to the window: "Reserved for Aldavini's Quartette, Euston to Glasgow." It was written in looking-glass writing, to be sure, but that only made the slow deciphering of it the more delightful.

However, it was read clearly at last, and Jenny turned round once more to look at her companions. Immediately opposite was Valerie Duval--a French girl with black fountains of hair, with full red lips and a complexion that darkened from ivory to warm Southern roses when the blood coursed to her cheeks. Her eyes glowed under heavy brown lids as she talked very sweetly in a contralto French accent. Soon she took Jenny on her knees and said:

"You will tell me all your secrets--yes?"

To which Jenny scoffingly answered:

"Secrets? I'm not one for secrets."

"But you will confide to me all your _passions_, your loves,--yes?"

"Love?" said Jenny, looking round over her shoulder at Valerie. "Love's silly."

Valerie smiled.

The other new friend was Winnie Ambrose--raspberries and cream and flaxen hair and dimpled chin and upper lip curling and a snub nose. She was one of those girls who never suggest the presence of stays, who always wear white blouses of crepe de chine, cut low round a plump neck. They have bangles strung on their arms, and each one possesses a locket containing the inadequate portrait of an inadequate young man. But Winnie was _very_ nice, always ready for a joke.

The train swept them on northwards. Once, as it slowed to make a sharp curve, Jenny looked out of the window and saw the great express, like a line of dominoes with its black and white carriages. There was not much to look at, however, as they cleft the gray December airs, as they roared through echoing stations into tunnels and out again into the dreary light. They ate lunch, and Jenny drank Bass out of a bottle and spluttered and made queer faces and wrinkled up her gay, deep eyes in laughter unquenchable. They swept on through Lancashire with its chimneys and furnaces and barren heaps of refuse. They swung clear of these huddled populations and, through the gathering twilight, cut a way across the rolling dales of Cumberland. Jenny thought what horrible places they were, these sweeping moorland wastes with gray cottages no bigger than sheep, with switchback stone walls whence the crows flew as the train surged by. She was glad to be in the powdered, scented, untidy compartment in warmth and light. The child grew tired and, leaning her head on Valerie's breast, went to sleep; she was drowsily glad when Valerie kissed her, murmuring in a whisper melodious as the splash of the Saone against the warm piers of her native Lyons:

"Comme elle est gentille, la gosse."

Pillowed thus, Jenny spent the last hours of the journey with the dark crossing of the border, waking in the raw station air, waking to bundles being pulled down and papers gathered together and porters peering in through the door. Madame Aldavini said before she left them:

"To-morrow, girls, eleven o'clock at the theater."

And all the girls said, "Yes, Madame," and packed themselves into a cab with velvet cushions of faded peacock-blue and a smell of damp straps. There they sat with bundles heaped on their knees, and were jolted through the cold Glasgow streets. It was Saturday night, and all the curbstones were occupied by rocking drunkards, except in one wide street very golden and beautiful, from which they turned off to climb laboriously up the cobbles of a steep hill and pull up at last before a tall house in a tall, dark, quiet road.

They walked up the stairs and rang the bell. The big door swung open, to Jenny's great surprise, apparently without human agency. They stood in the well of a great winding stone staircase, while a husky voice called from somewhere high above them to come up.

They had a large sitting-room, too full of hangings and overburdened with photographs of rigid groups; but the fire was blazing up the chimney and the lamp was throwing a warm and comfortable halo on the ceiling. Jenny peeped out of the window and could see the black roofs of Glasgow in the starlight. They had tea when they arrived, with porridge, which Jenny disliked extremely, and oatcakes which made her cough; and after tea they unpacked. It was settled that Jenny should sleep with Valerie. The bedroom was cosy with slanting bits of ceiling flung anywhere, like a box of toy bricks put carelessly away. The bed, to Jenny's enormous diversion, was buried in a deep alcove.

"Whoever heard?" she asked.

"We'll be all to ourselves," said Valerie in her deep voice; and Jenny felt a thrill at the idea of lying snug in the alcove with Valerie's warm arm about her.

The sitting-room looked a very different place when the four girls had scattered over it their various belongings, when they had flung all the antimacassars into the corner in a cold white heap, when they had stuck a fan-shaped line of photographs round the mirror over the mantelpiece--photographs of fluffy-haired girls in gay dancing attitudes, usually inscribed "Yours sincerely Lottie, or Amy, or Madge, or Violet."

When she had pulled off most of the blobs on the valance of the mantelpiece and examined all the photographs, Jenny sat down on the white rabbit-skin rug with her back to the high iron fender and looked at her companions--at Winnie sprawling over a shining leather arm-chair, twisting one of the buttons that starred its round back, while she read "Will He Remember?"; at Eileen, writing home to Camberwell; at Valerie, as deep in a horse-hair sofa as the shape of it allowed, smoking a cigarette. She thought, while she sat there in the warmth and quiet, how jolly it was to be quit of the eternal sameness of Hagworth Street. She almost felt that Islington no longer existed, as if up here in this Glasgow flat she were in a new world.

"This is nice," she said. "Give us a cigarette, Val, there's a duck."

Bedtime came not at any fixed boring moment, but suddenly, with all the rapture of an inspiration. Bedtime came with Valerie taking, it seemed, hours to undress as she wandered round the room in a maze of white lace and pink ribbons. Jenny lay buried in the deep feather bed, watching her shadow on the crooked ceiling, following with drowsy glances the shadowy combing of what, in reflection, seemed an absolute waterfall of hair.

Then suddenly Valerie blew out the candlelight.

"Oo-er!" cried Jenny. "We aren't going to sleep in the dark?"

"Of course we are, kiddie," said Valerie; and somehow darkness did not matter when Jenny could sail off into sleep clasping Valerie's soft hot hand.

Gray morning came with the stillness of Sunday in Glasgow, with raindrops pattering against the window in gusts of wind, with Mrs. McMeikan and breakfast on a tray.

"This is grand, isn't it?" said Jenny, and "Oo-er!" she cried, as she upset the teapot all over the bed.

Then the bell had to be rung.

"Whoever heard of a bell-rope in such a place?" said Jenny, and pulled it so hard that it broke. Then, of course, there was loud laughter, and when Mrs. McMeikan came in again Jenny buried herself in the bedclothes and Valerie had to explain what had happened.

"Eh, the wild wee lassie," said the landlady, and the high spirits of the child, hidden by the patchwork quilt in the deep alcove, won the old Scotswoman's heart, so that whatever mischief Jenny conceived and executed under her roof was forgiven because she was a "bonnie wean, and awfu' sma', she was thenkin', to be sent awa' oot tae airn her ain living."

There was a rehearsal on Sunday because Madame Aldavini had to go back on Sunday night to London. The four girls walked along the gray Glasgow streets in the sound of the many footsteps of pious Presbyterian worshipers, until they arrived at the stage door of the Court Theater. Jenny asked, "Any letters for me?" in imitation of Valerie and Winnie.

"Any letters for Raeburn--for Pearl, I should say?"

Of course there was not so much as a postcard, but Jenny felt the prouder for asking.

The rehearsal of "Jack and the Beanstalk" went off with the usual air of incompleteness that characterizes the rehearsal of a pantomime. Jenny found that the Aldavini Quartette were to be Jumping Beans; and Winnie and Jenny and Valerie and Eileen jumped with a will and danced until they shook the boards of the Court Theater's stage. Madame Aldavini went back to London, having left many strict injunctions with the three older girls never to let Jenny out of their keeping. But Jenny was not ambitious to avoid their vigilance. It was necessary, indeed, occasionally, to slap Eileen's face and teach her, but Winnie and Valerie were darlings. Jenny had no desire to talk to men, and if lanky youths with large tie-pins saluted her by the stage door, she passed on with her nose as high as a church tower. And when, lured on by Jenny's long brown legs and high-brown boots and trim blue sailor dress, they ventured to remove the paper from their cuffs and follow in long-nosed, fishy-eyed pursuit, Jenny would catch hold of Valerie's hand and swing along in front of them as serenely cold as the Huntress Moon sailing over the heads of Boeotian swineherds.

Those were jolly days in Glasgow, sweet secluded days of virginal pastimes and young enjoyment. They danced at night in their green dresses and scarlet bean-blossom caps. They were encored by the shrewd Glasgow audience, who recognized the beauty and freshness and spirit of the four Jumping Beans. They walked through the gray Glasgow weather down Sauchiehall Street and stared at the gay shopwindows. They walked through wind-swept Kelvin Grove. They laughed at nothing, and gossiped about nothing, and ate large teas and smoked cigarettes and lolled in arm-chairs and read absurd stories and listened to Mrs. McMeikan's anecdotes with hardly concealed mirth. Nor did Mrs. McMeikan care a jot how much they laughed at her, "sae bonny was their laughter."

Everybody in the pantomime was very kind and very pleasant to Jenny. Everybody gave her chocolates and ribbons and photographs signed "Yours sincerely Lottie, or Amy, or Madge, or Violet." Everybody wanted her to be as happy and jolly as possible. She was a great favorite with the gallery boys, who whistled very loudly whenever she came on. She was contented and merry. She did not feel that Winnie or Valerie or even Eileen was trying to keep her down. She knew they were loyal and was fond of them, but not so fond of them as they of her. Eileen, however, thought she should be snubbed now and then.

Jenny was at a critical age when she went to Glasgow. It was the time of fluttering virgin dreams, of quickening pulses and heartbeats unaccountable. If Jenny had been at a high school, it would have been the age of girlish adorations for mistresses. She might have depended on the sanctifying touch of some older woman with sympathy. She might have adopted the cloistral view of human intercourse, that light-hearted world of little intimate jokes and sentimental readings and pretty jealousies for the small advantage of sitting next some reverend mother or calm and gentle sister.

However, it is not to be supposed that the transition from childhood to womanhood was altogether unmarked. There were bound to be moments of indestructible languor when she was content to be adored herself. Had she met Abelard, Abelard could have made her an Heloise. They existed truly enough, the passionate fevers and deep ardors of adolescence. They flowed up in momentary caresses and died as soon in profound shynesses. Now was the time to feed the sensuous imagination with poetry and lull the frightened soul with music. She should have been taken to enchanted lands.

But there was nothing.

Here was a child worthy of a Naiad's maternity, if grace of limb counted immortally, and when for the first time she was given the world to look at, her finite vision and infinite aspirations were never set in relation to each other. She was given a telescope, and nobody had taken off the shutter. Her soul was a singing bird in a cage. Freedom was the only ideal. She might have been moved by Catholicism, but nobody gave it to her. It may be idle to speculate on the effect of incense-haunted chapels, of blazing windows and the dim accoutrements of Mass. Perhaps, after all, they would merely have struck her comically. Perhaps she was a true product of London generations, yet maybe her Cockney wit would have glittered more wonderfully in a richer setting--haply in Lacedaemon, with sea-green tunic blown to the outline of slim beauty by each wind coming southward from Thessaly.

Anyway, it was impossible to think of her enticed by the ready-made gallantries of raw-boned Sawnies by the stage door of the Court Theater. Her temperament found greater satisfaction in Valerie's more beautifully expressed adoration. The latter may not have roused her to encounter life, may not have supplied a purpose, a hope or a determination, but at least it kept her contented in the shy season of maidenhood. It helped to steer her course between incidental viciousness and eventful passion. She went back to Hagworth Street with no red thorns of impure associations to fester and gather. The days went by very quickly without any great adventures except the dance on the occasion of the pantomime's last night. Jenny was not invited to this entertainment. She was supposed to be too young, and her mouth went dry with disappointment and a lump of unshed tears came into her throat, and it almost seemed as if her heart must stop.

"I ought to go; oh, it is a shame; I ought to go."

Jenny went up of her own accord to the stage-manager himself and said:

"Please, Mr. Courtenay-Champion, why aren't I asked to the dance?"

"Good Lord!" said Mr. Courtenay-Champion. "A kid like you? No, my dear, you're too young. It goes on too late. After the show, some hours."

But Jenny sobbed and cried, and was so clearly heart-broken by the idea of being left out that Mr. Courtenay-Champion changed his mind and told her she could come. She was instantly transfigured as by dazzling sunlight after days of mist. It was to be a splendid dance, with jellies and claret-cup, and Jenny went with Valerie to buy the widest pink sash that ever was known, and tied it in the largest pink bow that ever was seen. She danced every single dance and even waltzed twice with the great comedian, Jimmy James, and, what is more, told him he couldn't dance, to his great delight, which seems to show that Mr. James had a sense of humor in addition to being a great comedian.

It really was a splendid evening, and perhaps the most splendid part of it was lying in bed with Valerie and talking over with her all the partners and taking them off with such excited demonstration of their methods that the bed became all untucked and had to be made over again before they could finally settle themselves down to sleep.

In February Jenny was back again in Hagworth Street, with memories of "Jack and the Beanstalk" fading slowly like the colors of a sunset. She had enjoyed her personal success in Glasgow, but already success was beginning to prove itself an empty prize--a rainbow bubble easily burst. The reason is obvious. Jenny had never been taught to concentrate her mind. She had no power of retrospective analysis. The applause endured a little while in her meditations, but gradually died away in the occupations of the present. She could not secure it as the basis of a wider success on the next occasion. She began to ask: "What's the good of anything?" Within a few weeks of the resumption of ordinary life, the Glasgow theater had become like a piece of cake that one eats unconsciously, then turns to find and discovers not. She was no farther forward on the road to independence. She became oppressed by the dead weight of futurity.

At home, too, there was a very real repression, which she grew to hate more and more deeply on each occasion of its exercise. A breath of maternal interference and she would fly into a temper--a scowling, chair-tilting, door-slamming rage. She would fling herself out of the house with threats never to return. One day when she was reproached with staying out longer than she was allowed, she rushed out again and disappeared. Her mother, in despair, went off to invoke the aid of Madame Aldavini, who wisely guessed that Jenny would be found with Valerie Duval. There she was, indeed, in Valerie's rooms in Soho, not at all penitent for her misbehavior, but sufficiently frightened by Madame's threat of expulsion to come back home without argument.

Freedom was still Jenny's religion. She was much about with boys, but still merely for the life and entertainment of their company, for no sentimental adventures. It would have been wiser to let her alone, but nobody with whom she was brought into contact could realize the sexlessness of the child. The truest safeguard of a girl's virtue is familiarity with the aggregated follies of masculine adolescence.

Jenny fought her way desperately into her seventeenth year, winning freedom in jots. She liked most of anything to go to Collin's Music-hall with a noisy gang of attendant boys, not one of whom was as much a separate realized entity to her as even an individual sheep is to a shepherd. Alfie came home in the summer before her seventeenth birthday and abetted cordially her declarations of independence. May, too, was implicated in every plot for the subversion of parental authority.

Mrs. Raeburn worried terribly about her daughter's future. She ascribed her hoyden behavior to the influence of the stage.

"We don't want your theatrical manners here," she would say.

"Well, who put me on the stage?" Jenny would retort.

In the Christmastide after Alfie came home Jenny went to Dublin in a second Aldavini Quartette, and enjoyed herself more than ever. She had now none of the desire for seclusion that marked her Glasgow period, no contempt of man in the abstract, and was soon good friends with a certain number of young officers whom she regarded much as she regarded the boys of Islington.

One of them, Terence O'Meagh, of the Royal Leinster Fusiliers, made her his own special property; he was a charming good-looking, conceited young Irishman, as susceptible to women as most of his nation, and endowing the practice of love with as little humor as most Celts. He used to wait at the stage door and drive her back to her lodgings in his own jaunting car. He used to give her small trinkets so innocently devoid of beauty as almost to attract by their artlessness. He was a very young officer who had borne the blushing honors of a scarlet tunic for a very short while, so that, in addition to the Irishman's naive assumption of universal popularity, he suffered from the sentiment that a soldier's red coat appeals to every woman.

Jenny, with her splendid Cockney irreverence, thought little of Mr. O'Meagh, less of his red coat, but a very great deal of the balmy February drives past the vivid green meadows of Liffey.

"You know," Terence would say, leaning gracefully over the division of the car, "you know, Jenny, our regiment--the 127th of the Line, as we call ours--was absolutely cut to pieces at Drieufontein; and at Riviersdorp they held the position against two thousand Boers."

"Who cares?" said Jenny.

"You might take a little interest in it."

"Well," said Jenny, "how can I?"

"But you might be interested because, after all, it is my regiment, and I'm awfully fond of you, little girl."

"Don't be soppy," Jenny advised him.

"You're so cursedly matter-of-fact."

"Eh?"

"So--oh, well, damn it, Jenny, you don't seem to care whether I'm with you or not."

"Why should I?"

"Any other girl would be fond of me."

"Ah--any other girl would."

"Then why aren't you?"

"Oh, you'll pass in a crowd."

"Dash it, I'm frightfully in love with you," vowed Terence.

"What's the good of spoiling a fine day by being silly?"

"Damn it, nobody else but me would stick your rudeness."

And Terence would sulk, and Jenny would hum, and the jaunting car would go jaunting on.

On the last night of the pantomime Mr. O'Meagh called for her as usual, and, as they drove off, said:

"Look here, Miss Jenny, you're coming back to my rooms with me to-night."

"Am I?" said Jenny. "That's news."

"By Jove, you are!"

"No fear."

"You shall!"

Terence caught hold of her hand.

"Let me go," Jenny said.

"I'm damned if I will. Look here, you know, you can't make a fool of an Irishman."

"That's quite right," Jenny agreed.

"When an Irishman says he'll have a thing, he'll have it."

"Well, you won't have Jenny Pearl."

"Look here, I've been jolly good to you. I gave you----"

"What?" interrupted Jenny in dangerous tones. "Look!"

She unbuckled a wrist-watch and flung it into the road.

"There's your watch, anyway. Going to get down and pick it up?"

Terence whipped up the horse.

"You little devil, you shall come with me."

Jenny caught hold of the reins.

"Shut up!" said O'Meagh. "Shut up! Don't you know better than that?"

"Well, stop," said Jenny.

The subaltern, in order to avoid a scene, stopped.

"Look here," Jenny told him. "You think yourself a lad, I know, and you think girls can't say 'no' to you; but I can, see? You and your little cottages for two! Not much!" and Jenny slipped down from the car and vanished.

"Men," she said to Winnie Ambrose, the only one left of the Glasgow Quartette. "Men! I think men are awful. I do. Really. Conceited! Oh, no; it's only a rumor."

It had been arranged by Madame Aldavini that Jenny, on her return from Dublin, should join the ballet of the opera at Covent Garden. Unfortunately her first appearance in London had to be postponed for a year owing to the fact of there being no vacancy. Jenny was disheartened. It was useless for Madame Aldavini to assure her that the extra year's practice would greatly benefit her dancing. Jenny felt she had been practicing since the world was made. She continued to practice because there was nothing else to do, but time had quenched the fire of inspiration. She was tired of hearing that one day she might, with diligence and application, become a Prima Ballerina. She knew she was a natural dancer, but Terpischore having endowed her with grace and lightness and twinkling feet, left the spirit that could ripen these gifts to some other divinity. She had, it is true, escaped the doom of an infant prodigy, but it might have been better to blossom as a prodigy than to lie fallow when the warmth and glory of the footlights were burning without her.

Meanwhile Hagworth Street had not changed much in seventeen years. The tall plane-tree at the end was taller. The London County Council, not considering it possessed any capacity for decoration, had neglected to lop off its head, and, as there was no other tree in sight, did not think it worth the trouble of clipping to an urban pattern. Year by year it shed its bark and, purged of London vileness, broke in May fresh and green and beautiful. In October more leaves pattered down, more leaves raced along the gutters than on the night of Jenny's birth. The gas-jets burned more steadily in a mantle of incandescent light. This method of illumination prevailed indoors as well as outside, shedding arid and sickly gleams over the front-parlor of Number Seventeen, shining, livid and garish, in the narrow hall. The knob was still missing from the bedstead, and for seventeen years Charlie had promised to get a new one. Charlie himself had changed very slightly. He still worked for the same firm in Kentish Town. He still frequented the "Masonic Arms." He cared less for red neckties and seemed smaller than of old. Yet he could drink more. If his hair was thinner, his eyebrows, on the other hand, were more bushy, because he blew off his old ones in the course of an illustrated lecture on the management of gas-stoves. For the constant fingering of his ragged moustache, he substituted a pensive manipulation of his exceptional eyebrows.

Mr. Vergoe was dead, and most of his property adorned his granddaughter's room in Cranbourne Street. She was still a second-line girl in the _Corps de Ballet_ of the Orient Palace of Varieties. Jenny, however, possessed the picture of the famous dead Columbine. It hung above the bed she shared with May, beside a memorial card of the donor set in a shining black Oxford frame. The room itself grew smaller every year. Jenny could not imagine that once to Edie and herself it had been illimitable. Nowadays it seemed to be all mahogany wardrobe, and semicircular marble-topped washstand and toilet-table and iron bedstead. On the door were many skirts and petticoats. On the walls were shrivelled fans with pockets that held curl-papers mostly. There was also a clouded photograph of Alfie, Edie, Jenny and May, of which the most conspicuous feature was the starched frills of Jenny, those historic frills that once, free of petticoats, had seemed a talisman to masculinity. The toilet-table was inhabited by a collection of articles that presented the most sudden and amazing contrasts. Next to a comb that might easily have been rescued from a dustbin was a brush backed with silver repousse. Beside seven broken pairs of nail-scissors was a scent-bottle with golden stopper. Jenny's nightgown was daintily ribboned and laced, and looked queerly out of place on the pock-marked quilt.

Mrs. Purkiss still visited her sister, but Jenny was not allowed to associate with Percy or Claude, both more pasty-faced than ever, because Percy was going to be a missionary and Claude was suspected of premature dissipation, having been discovered kissing the servant in the bathroom.

Mrs. Raeburn, in the jubilee of her age, was still a handsome woman, and was admired even by Jenny for her smartness. She still worried about the future of her children. She was more than ever conscious of her husband's inferiority and laughed over most of the facts of her life. May's back, however, and Jenny's perpetual riotousness caused her many misgivings. But Alfie was doing well, and Edie seemed happy, making dresses over at Brixton. There had been no recurrence of Mr. Timpany, and she now viewed that episode much as she would have regarded a trifling piece of domestic negligence. As for the Miss Horners, their visit had long faded absolutely from her mind. It would have taken a very great emotional crisis to inspire such another speech as she made to them seventeen years ago. Charlie still snored beside her, as he had snored in sequel to seven or eight thousand nightly undressings. She still saw to the washing, added up the accounts, bought a new dress in the spring and a new bonnet in the autumn. She still meant to read the paper this week, but never had time, and every night she hoped that all would go smooth. This habit of hope was to her what the candle-lit chapter of a Bible with flower-stained pages or counterpane prayers or dreams of greatness are to minds differently constituted. Her life was by no means drab, for she went often to the theater, and occasionally to the saloon bar of a discreet public-house, where, in an atmosphere of whisky and Morocco leather, she would sometimes listen to Mrs. Purkiss's doubts of Jenny's behavior, but more often tell diverting tales of Charlie.

Such was Hagworth Street, when, on a cold Sunday in the front of May, Edie came over from Brixton. She looked pale and anxious as she sat for a while in the kitchen twisting black kid gloves round her fingers.

"How's Brixton, Edie?" asked her mother.

"Grand."

"You've not been up to see us for a long time."

"No-o-o," agreed the eldest daughter.

"Busy?"

"Not so very. Only you never know when you will be. I'll go upstairs and take my things off. Come with us Jenny," she said, turning to her sister.

"There's a cheek. Whatever next?"

"Oh, you are hateful! Come on up."

Jenny, with every appearance of unwillingness, followed Edie upstairs, and flung herself down on the bed they had once shared.

"Don't be all night," she protested, as she watched Edie staring aimlessly at herself in the glass.

"Jenny," said the latter suddenly, "I done it."

"Done what?"

"Myself, I suppose."

"What d'ye mean?"

"You know," said Edie.

"Oh, yes, I know, that's why I'm asking."

"You remember that fellow I was going about with?"

"Bert Harding?"

"Yes, Bert."

"You're never going to marry him, Edie?"

"I got to--if I can."

Jenny sat up on the bed.

"You don't mean----"

"That's right," said Edie.

"Whatever made you?"

"I am a fool," said Edie helplessly.

"Whatever will Alfie say?" Jenny wondered.

"What's it got to do with Alfie?"

"I don't know, only he's very particular. But this Bert of yours, I suppose he will marry you?"

"He says so. He says nothing wouldn't stop him."

"Are you mad to marry him?"

"I must."

"But you don't want to?"

"I wouldn't--not if I hadn't got to. I wouldn't marry anybody for a bit."

"I wouldn't anyhow," said Jenny decidedly.

"Don't talk silly. I've got to."

"Oh, I do think it's a shame. A pretty girl like you, Edie. Men! Can he keep you?--comfortable and all that?"

"He's got enough, and he expects to make a bit more soon, and then there's my dressmaking."

"Men!" declared Jenny. "No men for me. I wouldn't trust any man."

"Don't say nothing to mother about it."

"As if I should."

The two sisters went downstairs.

"I'll bring him over soon," said Edie.

"And I'll properly tell him off," said Jenny.

A month went by, and Mr. Albert Harding had many important engagements. Another month went by and Edie began to fret.

Jenny went over to Brixton to see her sister.

"Looks as if this marriage was only a rumor," she said.

"He hasn't got the time, not for a week or two."

"What?" exclaimed Jenny.

"He's going to take me to the Canterbury to-morrow. He's all right, Jenny. Only he's busy. He is, really."

Jenny, jolting homewards in the omnibus that night, wondered what ought to be done. Although she felt to the full the pity of a nice girl like Edie being driven into a hasty marriage, no alternative presented itself clearly. She thought with quickening heart, so terrible was the fancy, how she would act in Edie's place. She would run away out of the world's eyes, out of London.

Yet Edie did not seem to mind so much.

The malignity of men enraged her. The selfishness and grossness sickened her. Boys were different; but men, with their conceit and lies, were beasts. They should never make a fool of her. Never. Never. Then she wondered if her mother had been compelled to marry. On no other basis could her father be explained. Men were all alike.

Bert Harding, greasy, dark-eyed, like a dirty foreigner. He was nice-looking, after a fashion, yes, but even more conceited than most men. And Edie had _got_ to marry him.

Alfie was on the doorstep when she reached home.

"You?" she said.

"Come over for the night. Got some business in Islington to-morrow morning."

"Alfie, you know Bert Harding?"

"Yes."

"You've got to make him marry Edie."

"I'll smash his face in if he don't."

"They'll be at the Canterbury to-morrow night."

It was a poor fight in the opinion of the Westminster Bridge Road. Bert was overmatched. He was perfectly willing to marry Edie at once, as it happened, but Jenny enjoyed seeing one of his dark eyes closed up by her brother. Alfie, having done his duty, never spoke to Bert or Edie again.

"However could she have been so mad," said Mrs. Raeburn. "Soft! Soft! That's you," she went on, turning on her husband.

"Oh, of course it's me. Everything's me," said Charlie.

"Yes, it is you. You can't say no to a glass of beer and Edie can't say no to a man."

"What would you have done, mother," asked Jenny, "if Edie's Bert had gone away and left her?"

"She'd never have come inside my house again--not ever again."

"You're funny."

"Funny?" said Mrs. Raeburn. "You try and be funny, and see what happens."

"Who cares?" said Jenny. "It wouldn't trouble me. I'm sick of this dog's island. But men. Whatever next? Don't you imagine I'll let any man---- Not much."

"Don't you be too sure, Mrs. Clever," said the mother.

"But I am. I'm positive. Love! There's nothing in it."

"Hark at her," jeered Charlie.

Jenny lay awake in a fury that night. One after another, man in his various types passed across the screen of her mind. She saw them all. The crimson-jointed, fishy-eyed Glasgow youths winked at her once more. The complacent subalterns of Dublin dangled their presents and waited to be given her thanks and kisses. Old men, from the recess of childish memories, rose up again and leered at her. Her own father, small and weak and contemptible, pottered across the line of her mental vision. Bert Harding was there, his black boot-button eyes glittering. And to that her sister had surrendered herself, to be pawed and mauled about and boasted of. Ugh! Suddenly in the middle of her disgust Jenny thought she heard a sound under the bed.

"Oo--er, May!" she called out. "May!"

"Whatever is it, you noisy thing?"

"Oo--er, there's a man under the bed! Oh, May, wake up, else we shall all be murdered!"

"Who cares?" said May. "Go to sleep."

And just then the Raeburns' big cat, tired of his mouse-hole, came out from underneath the bed and walked slowly across the room.