CHAPTER XXV A DARK DAWN

Before retiring that night Florence and Petite Jeanne sat for a long time in their own small room, discussing the past and future.

They had spent the earlier hours of the evening in Angelo’s studio. There, in frankness and utter sincerity, the little company had discussed its prospects.

No one blamed Petite Jeanne for the part she had played. Being endowed with tender and kindly souls, they one and all felt that under the same conditions they would have acted in an identical manner.

“It is of little consequence,” Angelo had declared magnanimously. “We should never have succeeded under that management. The opera was doomed. And once a failure always a failure in the realm of playland.”
195

“What does it matter?” Dan Baker’s kindly old eyes had lighted with a smile. “You have youth and love and beauty, all of you. How can you ask for more?”

This speech had seemed quite wonderful at the time. But to these girls sitting on their bed, facing facts, the future did not seem rosy. With only two weeks’ room rent paid, with less than ten dollars between them, with no income save Florence’s meager pay, and with bleak old winter close at hand, they could not but dread what lay ahead.

“Jeanne,” Florence said at last, as if to change the subject, “was the gypsy who chased you, on that morning when you fell into Merry’s cellar, among those you saw at the Forest Preserve?”

“No,” the little French girl said thoughtfully. “No, I am sure he was not.”

“Then,” said her companion, “we had better put his Majesty, the little God of Fire, back to rest in his hole in the floor. You may need him yet.”
196

“I am sure we shall.” The little French girl’s tone carried assurance. “That opera is beautiful, very, very beautiful. And what is it the poet says?

“‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’

“And still another:

“‘All that is at all

Lasts forever, past recall.’

“If these things are true, how can our beautiful opera fail to live? Believe me, our time will yet come.

“Yes, yes, we must hide the little Fire God very carefully indeed.”

Three weeks passed. Trying weeks they were to the little French girl; weeks in which her faith and courage were severely tested.

As proof of her faith in the beautiful thing Angelo and Swen had created, she kept up her dancing. Sometimes in Angelo’s studio, sometimes in her own small room, sometimes humming snatches of the score, sometimes with Swen beating the battered piano, she danced tirelessly on. There were times, too, when those hardy souls who went to walk in the park on these bleak days saw a golden haired sprite dancing in the sun. This, too, was Jeanne.
197

But when winter came sweeping down, when on one memorable November day she awoke and found the window ledge piled high with snow and heard the shriek of a wind that, whirling and eddying outside, seemed never to pause, she despaired a little.

“This American winter,” she murmured. “It is terrible.”

And how could it seem otherwise to her? In her beloved France it snowed a little. But the snow was soon gone. No drifts three feet high, no blocked traffic, no terrible thermometer dropping to twenty below. Besides, when winter came in France, the gypsies, “folding their tents like the Arabs,” drifted away toward the south where it was always summer.
198

By drawing the covers up over her head she was able to shut out from her eyes the sight of the drifting snow and from her ears the sound of the shrieking wind. But she could not hide from her alert mind the fact that her money was gone, that the rent was overdue, nor that Florence’s pitiful salary, if such it might be called, sufficed only to supply them with the plainest of food.

In these last days she had gone less seldom to Angelo’s studio. Matters were no better there. And, though for her sake Angelo and his companions kept up a continuous chatter about future successes and good times just around the corner, she knew in her heart that they, too, were discouraged.

“There are the traveling bags,” she told herself now, as she threw back the covers and sat up. “Those three pigskin traveling bags down there in Angelo’s studio. I have fifteen dollars invested in them. Kay King has always said: ‘You may have the money back any time.’

“Perhaps,” she thought soberly, “it is wrong of me to keep them. But to sell them seems like betraying a friend. To cast all those beautiful treasures, bestowed upon my good friend by those who loved him best, before the eyes of curious, grasping and often stupid people, and to say ‘Come, buy these,’ certainly does seem like the betrayal of a friend.
199

“And he was so kind to me!” She closed her eyes and saw it all again. “I was so young. The ship, the sea, all the people were so strange. And America. It, at first, was even worse. But he, big-hearted man that he was, treated me as his own daughter. He made everything seem so simple, so joyous, so much like a lark. How can I? Oh, how can I?” She wrung her slender hands in agony. “How can I permit them to be sold?

“And yet,” she thought more calmly, “it has been more than three weeks since I wrote that letter to his hotel in New York. There has been time for it to reach England and for the reply to come. I have heard nothing. Perhaps he is dead.

“No reply,” she thought again. “There may have been one, and yet I may not have known it.”

This was true. Since she did not wish to carry the heavy bags to her room, she had left them at Angelo’s studio, and in writing the letter had given only that address.
200

“I have not been to the studio for three days. A letter may await me. I shall go to-day. If he reclaims the bags, he will repay me. Perhaps there will be a tiny reward. Then all will be well again. Ah, yes, why despair?”

Thus encouraged, she hopped out of bed, did ten minutes of shadow-dancing and then, having hopped into her clothes, set about the business of making toast and coffee over an electric plate.

“Life,” she murmured as she sipped her coffee, “is after all very, very sweet.”