Nocturne | Page 4

Frank Swinnerton
or not. She
presently gave a quiet sigh of relief as at length the river was left
behind and the curious nervous tension--no more lasting than she might
have felt at seeing a man balancing upon a high window-sill--was
relaxed. She breathed more deeply, perhaps, for a few instants; and
then, quite naturally, she looked at her reflection in the sliding glass.
That hat, as she could see in the first sure speedless survey, had got the
droops. "See about you!" she said silently and threateningly, jerking her
head. The hat trembled at the motion, and was thereafter ignored.
Stealthily 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,
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