Nocturne | Page 7

had endured much. Her eyes, also, were hard;
although if she cried one saw her face soften remarkably into the
semblance of that of a little girl. From an involuntary defiance her
expression changed to something really pathetic. One could not help
loving her then, not with the free give and take of happy affection, but
with a shamed hope that nobody could read the conflict of sympathy
and contempt which made one's love frigid and self-conscious. Jenny
rarely cried: her cheeks reddened and her eyes grew full of tears; but

she did not cry. Her tongue was too ready and her brain too quick for
that. Also, she kept her temper from flooding over into the
self-abandonment of angry weeping and vituperation. Perhaps it was
that she had too much pride--or that in general she saw life with too
much self-complacency, or that she was not in the habit of yielding to
disappointment. It may have been that Jenny belonged to that class of
persons who are called, self-sufficient. She plunged through a crisis
with her own zest, meeting attack with counter-attack, keeping her head,
surveying with the instinctive irreverence and self-protective wariness
of the London urchin the possibilities and swaying fortunes of the fight.
Emmy, so much slower, so much less self-reliant, had no refuge but in
scolding that grew shriller and more shrill until it ended in violent
weeping, a withdrawal from the field entirely abject. She was not a
born fighter. She was harder on the surface, but weaker in powers
below the surface. Her long solitudes had made her build up grievances,
and devastating thoughts, had given her a thousand bitter things to fling
into the conflict; but they had not strengthened her character, and she
could not stand the strain of prolonged argument. Sooner or later she
would abandon everything, exhausted, and beaten into impotence. She
could bear more, endure more, than Jenny; she could bear much, so that
the story of her life might be read as one long scene of endurance of
things which Jenny would have struggled madly to overcome or to
escape. But having borne for so long, she could fight only like a cat,
her head as it were turned aside, her fur upon end, stealthily moving
paw by paw, always keeping her front to the foe, but seeking for
escape--until the pride perilously supporting her temper gave way and
she dissolved into incoherence and quivering sobs.
It might have been said roughly that Jenny more closely resembled her
father, whose temperament in her care-free, happy-go-lucky way she
understood very well (better than Emmy did), and that while she
carried into her affairs a necessarily more delicate refinement than his
she had still the dare-devil spirit that Pa's friends had so much admired.
She had more humour than Emmy--more power to laugh, to be
detached, to be indifferent. Emmy had no such power. She could laugh;
but she could only laugh seriously, or at obviously funny things.
Otherwise, she felt everything too much. As Jenny would have said,
she "couldn't take a joke." It made her angry, or puzzled, to be laughed

at. Jenny laughed back, and tried to score a point in return, not always
scrupulously. Emmy put a check on her tongue. She was sometimes
virtuously silent. Jenny rarely put a check on her tongue. She
sometimes let it say perfectly outrageous things, and was surprised at
the consequences. For her it was enough that she had not meant to hurt.
She sometimes hurt very much. She frequently hurt Emmy to the quick,
darting in one of her sure careless stabs that shattered Emmy's
self-control. So while they loved each other, Jenny also despised Emmy,
while Emmy in return hated and was jealous of Jenny, even to the point
of actively wishing in moments of furtive and shamefaced savageness
to harm her. That was the outward difference between the sisters in
time of stress. Of their inner, truer, selves it would be more rash to
speak, for in times of peace Jenny had innumerable insights and
emotions that would be forever unknown to the elder girl. The sense of
rivalry, however, was acute: it coloured every moment of their
domestic life, unwinking and incessant. When Emmy came from the
scullery into the kitchen bearing her precious dish of stew, and when
Jenny, standing up, was measured against her, this rivalry could have
been seen by any skilled observer. It rayed and forked about them as
lightning might have done about two adjacent trees. Emmy put down
her dish.
"Fetch Pa, will you!" she said briefly. One could see who gave orders
in the kitchen.
iv
Jenny found her father in his bedroom, sitting before the dressing-table
upon which a tall candle stood in an equally tall candlestick. He was