Bildungsromans; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Scotland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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