Nocturne. Frank Swinnerton
Jenny went back to her own reflection in the window, catching the clearly-chiselled profile of her face, bereft in the dark mirror of all its colour. She could see her nose and chin quite white, and her lips as part of the general colourless gloom. A little white brooch at her neck stood boldly out; and that was all that could be seen with any clearness, as the light was not directly overhead. Her eyes were quite lost, apparently, in deep shadows. Yet she could not resist the delight of continuing narrowly to examine herself. The face she saw was hardly recognisable as her own; but it was bewitchingly pale, a study in black and white, the kind of face which, in a man, would at once have drawn her attention and stimulated her curiosity. She had longed to be pale, but the pallor she was achieving by millinery work in a stuffy room was not the marble whiteness which she had desired. Only in the sliding window could she see her face ideally transfigured. There it had the brooding dimness of strange poetic romance. You couldn’t know about that girl, she thought. You’d want to know about her. You’d wonder all the time about her, as though she had a secret. … The reflection became curiously distorted. Jenny was smiling to herself.
As soon as the tramcar had passed the bridge, lighted windows above the shops broke the magic mirror and gave Jenny a new interest, until, as they went onward, a shopping district, ablaze with colour, crowded with loitering people, and alive with din, turned all thoughts from herself into one absorbed contemplation of what was beneath her eyes. So absorbed was she, indeed, that the conductor had to prod her shoulder with his two fingers before he could recover her ticket and exchange it for another. “ ‘Arf asleep, some people!” he grumbled, shoving aside the projecting arms and elbows which prevented his free passage between the seats. “Feyuss please!” Jenny shrugged her shoulder, which seemed as though it had been irritated at the conductor’s touch. It felt quite bruised. “Silly old fool!” she thought, with a brusque glance. Then she went silently back to the contemplation of all the life that gathered upon the muddy and glistening pavements below.
ii
In a few minutes they were past the shops and once again in darkness, grinding along, pitching from end to end, the driver’s bell clanging every minute to warn carts and people off the tramlines. Once, with an awful thunderous grating of the brakes, the car was pulled up, and everybody tried to see what had provoked the sense of accident. There was a little shouting, and Jenny, staring hard into the roadway, thought she could see as its cause a small girl pushing a perambulator loaded with bundles of washing. Her first impulse was pity—“Poor little thing”; but the words were hardly in her mind before they were chased away by a faint indignation at the child for getting in the tram’s way. Everybody ought to look where they were going. Ev-ry bo-dy ought to look where they were go-ing, said the pitching tramcar. Ev-ry bo-dy. … Oh, sickening! Jenny looked at her neighbour’s paper—her refuge. “Striking speech,” she read. Whose? What did it matter? Talk, talk. … Why didn’t they do something? What were they to do? The tram pitched to the refrain of a comic song: “Actions speak louder than words!” That kid who was wheeling the perambulator full of washing. … Jenny’s attention drifted away like the speech of one who yawns, and she looked again at her reflection. The girl in the sliding glass wouldn’t say much. She’d think the more. She’d say, when Sir Herbert pressed for his answer, “My thoughts are my own, Sir Herbert Mainwaring.” What was it the girl in One of the Best said? “You may command an army of soldiers; but you cannot still the beating of a woman’s heart!” Silly fool, she was. Jenny had felt the tears in her eyes, burning, and her throat very dry, when the words had been spoken in the play; but Jenny at the theatre and Jenny here and now were different persons. Different? Why, there were fifty Jennys. But the shrewd, romantic, honest, true Jenny was behind them all, not stupid, not sentimental, bold as a lion, destructively experienced in hardship and endurance, very quick indeed to single out and wither humbug that was within her range of knowledge, but innocent as a child before any other sort of humbug whatsoever. That was why she could now sneer at the stage-heroine, and could play with the mysterious beauties of her own reflection; but it was why she could also be led into quick indignation by something read in a newspaper.
Tum-ty tum-ty tum-ty tum, said the tram. There were some more shops. There were straggling shops and full-blazing rows of shops. There were stalls along the side of the road, women dancing to an organ outside a public-house. Shops, shops, houses, houses, houses … light, darkness. … Jenny gathered her skirt. This was where she got down. One glance at the tragic lady of the mirror, one glance at the rising smoke that went to join the general cloud; and she was upon the iron-shod stairs of the car and into the greasy roadway. Then darkness, as she turned along beside a big building into the side streets among rows and rows of the small houses of Kennington Park.
iii
It was painfully dark in these side streets. The lamps drew beams such a short distance that they were as useless as the hidden stars. Only down each street one saw mild spots starting out of the gloom, fascinating in their regularity, like shining beads set at prepared intervals in a body of jet. The houses were all in darkness, because evening meals were laid in the kitchens: the front rooms were all kept for Sunday use, excepting when the Emeralds and Edwins and Geralds and Dorises were practising upon their mothers’ pianos. Then you could hear a din! But not now. Now all was as quiet as night, and even doors were not slammed. Jenny crossed the street and turned a corner. On the corner itself was a small chandler’s shop, with “Magnificent Tea, per 2/- lb.”; “Excellent Tea, per ⅛d. lb”; “Good Tea, per ¼d. lb.” advertised in great bills upon its windows above a huge collection of unlikely goods gathered together like a happy family in its tarnished abode. Jenny passed the dully-lighted shop, and turned in at her own gate. In a moment she was inside the house, sniffing at the warm odour-laden air within doors. Her mouth drew down at the corners. Stew to-night! An amused gleam, lost upon the dowdy passage, fled across her bright eyes. Emmy wouldn’t have thanked her for that! Emmy—sick to death herself of the smell of cooking—would have slammed down the pot in despairing rage.
In the kitchen a table was laid; and Emmy stretched her head back to peer from the scullery, where she was busy at the gas stove. She did not say a word. Jenny also was speechless; and went as if without thinking to the kitchen cupboard. The table was only half-laid as usual; but that fact did not make her action the more palatable to Emmy. Emmy, who was older than Jenny by a mysterious period—diminished by herself, but kept at its normal term of three years by Jenny, except in moments of some heat, when it grew for purposes of retort—was also less effective in many ways, such as in appearance and in adroitness; and Jenny comprised in herself, as it were, the good looks of the family. Emmy was the housekeeper, who looked after Pa Blanchard; Jenny was the roving blade who augmented Pa’s pension by her own fluctuating wages. That was another slight barrier between the sisters. Nevertheless, Emmy was quite generous enough, and was long-suffering, so that her resentment took the general form of silences and secret broodings upon their different fortunes. There was a great deal to be said about this difference, and the saying grew more and more remote from explicit utterance as thought of it ground into Emmy’s mind through long hours and days and weeks of solitude. Pa could not hear anything besides the banging of pots, and he was too used to sudden noises to take any notice of such a thing; but the pots themselves, occasionally dented in savage dashes against each other or against the taps, might have heard vicious apostrophes if they had listened intently to Emmy’s ejaculations. As it was, with the endurance of pots, they mutely bore their scars and waited dumbly for superannuation. And every bruise stood to Emmy when she renewed acquaintance with it as mark of yet another grievance against Jenny. For Jenny enjoyed the liberties of this life while Emmy stayed at home. Jenny sported while Emmy was engaged upon the hideous routine of kitchen affairs, and upon the nursing of a comparatively helpless old man who could do hardly anything at all for himself.
Pa was in his bedroom—the back room on the ground-floor, chosen because he could not walk up the stairs, but must have as little trouble in self-conveyance as possible—staggeringly making his toilet for the meal to come, sitting patiently in front of his dressing-table by the light of a solitary candle. He would appear in due course, when he was fetched. He had been a strong man, a runner and cricketer in his youth, and rather obstreperously disposed; but that time was past, and his strength for such pursuits was as dead as the wife who had suffered because of its vagaries. He could no longer disappear on the Saturdays,