Eva Ibbotson

Dubrov paused to light a cigar and threw a quick glance at Harriet. Even with her eyelashes she listens, he thought—and went on to speak of the “Arabian Nights” lifestyle of the audience for whom they would dance. “There is a woman who has her carriage horses washed down in champagne,” he said, “and a man who sends back his shirts to London to be laundered,”—and here Madame smiled, for as she had expected a small frown mark had appeared between Harriet’s eyebrows. Harriet did not think it necessary to wash carriage horses in champagne or to send one’s laundry five thousand miles to be washed.

Dubrov now was nearing the end of his discourse. Lightly, almost dismissively, he touched on the triumph, the innumerable curtain calls which would follow their performances of the old ballets blancs, chosen particularly to appeal to those exiled from their own culture; then with a last flourish he brought the Company back to England, laden with jewels and silverware, with ocelot and jaguar skins—to loud acclaim and an almost certain engagement at the Alhambra, Leicester Square.

“You may go now,” said Madame when Dubrov had been thanked, and as the girls slipped out Phyllis could be heard saying, “I wouldn’t fancy going out there, would you? Not with all those creepy-crawlies!”

“And the Indians having a gobble at you, I shouldn’t wonder,” added Lily.

But when Harriet prepared to follow her companions, Madame barred her way. “You will remain behind, Harriet,” she commanded. And as Harriet turned and waited by the door, her hands respectfully folded, she went on, “Monsieur Dubrov came here to recruit dancers for the tour he has just described to you. He has seen your work and would be willing to offer you a contract.”

“Your lack of experience would of course be a disadvantage,” interposed Dubrov quickly. “Your salary would naturally be less than that of a fully-trained dancer.”

It was this haggling, this evidence that she was not simply dreaming, that effected the extraordinary change they now saw in the girl.

“You are offering me a job?” she said slowly. “You would take me?”

“There is no need to sound so surprised,” snapped Madame. “Any pupil in my advanced class has reached a professional standard entirely adequate for the corps de ballet of a South American touring company.”

Harriet continued to stand perfectly still by the door of the room. She had brought up her folded hands to her face as women do in prayer, and her eyes had widened, lightened—shot now with those flecks of amber and gold which had seemed to vanish after her mother’s death.

“I shall not be allowed to go,” she said, addressing Dubrov in her soft, carefully modulated voice. “There is no possible way that I can get permission; and I am only eighteen so that if I run away, I shall be pursued and retrieved and that will make trouble for others. But I shall never forget that you wanted me. Never, as long as I live, shall I forget that.”

And then this primly reared girl with her stiff academic background came forward and took Dubrov’s hand and kissed it.

Then she gave Madame her réverénce and would have left the room, but Dubrov seized her arm and said, “Wait! Take this… there may after all be a miracle.” And as she took the card with his address, he added, “You will find me there or at the Century Theater until April the 25th. If you can reach me before then, I will take you.”

“Thank you,” said Harriet; then she curtseyed once more and was gone.

Edward Finch-Dutton was dissecting the efferent nervous system of a large and somewhat pickled dogfish. The deeply dead elasmobranch lay in a large dish with a waxed bottom, pins spearing the flaps of its rough and spotted skin. The familiar smell of formalin which permeated the laboratory beat its way not unpleasantly into Edward’s capacious and somewhat equine nostrils. He had already sliced away the roof of the cranium and now, firmly and competently—his large freckled hands doing his bidding perfectly—he snipped away at the irrelevant flotsam of muscle, skin and connective tissue to reveal, with calm assurance, the creature’s brain.

“The prosencephalon,” he pronounced, pointing with his seeker at the smooth globular mass, and the first-year students surrounding him in the Cambridge zoology laboratory nodded intelligently.

“The olfactory lobes,” continued Edward, “the thalamencephalon. And note, please, the pineal gland.”

The students noted it, for with Dr. Finch-Dutton’s dissections the pineal gland could be noted, which was not always so with lesser demonstrators. Eagerly they peered and scribbled in their notebooks, for their own specimens awaited them, set out on the long benches of the lab.