But, kind to her old friend as Amory was always ready to be, she did not feel herself called upon to go out of her way to be very nice to her friend's husband. He had no right to expect it after his rudeness to Edgar Strong about the "Novum." For it had been about the "Novum" that Stan had given Strong that talking-to. Much right (Amory thought hotly) he had to talk! Just because he consorted with men who counted their money in rupees and thought nothing of shouldering their darker-skinned brothers off the pavement, he thought he was entitled to put an editor into his place! But the truth, of course, was, that that very familiarity prevented him from really knowing anything about these questions at all. Because an order was established, he had not imagination enough to see how it could have been anything different. His mind (to give it that name) was of the hidebound, official type, and too many limited intelligences of that kind stopped the cause of Imperial progress to-day. Or rather, they tried to stop it, and perhaps thought they were stopping it; but really, little as they suspected it, they were helping more than they knew. A pig-headed administration does unconsciously help when, out of its own excesses, a divine discontent is bred. Mr. Suwarree Prang had been eloquent on that very subject one afternoon not very long ago. A charming man! Amoryhad listened from her hammock, rapt. Mr. Prang did the "Indian Review" for the "Novum," in flowery but earnest prose; and as he actually was Indian, and did not merely hobnob with a few captains and subalterns home on leave, it was to be supposed that he would know rather more of the subject than Mr. Stanhope Tasker!——
And Mr. Stanhope Tasker had had the cheek to tell Mr. Strong that he didn't know what he was talking about!
Amory felt that she could never be sufficiently thankful for the chance that had thrown Mr. Strong in her way. She had always secretly felt that her gifts were being wasted on such minor (but still useful) tasks as the "Eden" Restaurant and the "Love Lectures" Agency. But her personal exaltation over Katie Deedes and the others had caused her no joy. What had given her joy had been the immensely enlarged sphere of her usefulness; that was it, not the odious vanity of leadership, but the calm and responsible envisaging of a task for which not one in ten thousand had the vision and courage and strength. And Edgar Strong had shown her these things. Of course, if he had put them in these words she might have suspected him of trying to flatter her; but as a matter of fact he had not said a single word about it. He had merely allowed her to see for herself. That was his way: to all-but-prove a thing—to take it up to the very threshold of demonstration—and then apparently suddenly to lose interest in it. And that in a way was his weakness as aneditor. Amory, whom three or four wieldings of the blue pencil had sufficed to convince that there was nothing in journalism that an ordinary intelligence could not master in a month, realized this. She herself, it went without saying, always saw at once exactly what Mr. Strong meant; she personally liked those abrupt and smiling stops that left Mr. Strong's meaning as it were hung up in the air; but it was a mistake to suppose that everybody was as clever as she and Mr. Strong. "I's" had to be dotted and "t's" crossed for the multitude. But it was at that point that Mr. Strong always became almost languid.
It was inevitable that the man who had thus revealed to her, after a single glance at her, such splendid and unsuspected capacities within herself, should exercise a powerful fascination over Amory. If he had seen all this in her straight away (as he assured her he had), then he was a man not lightly to be let go. He might be the man to show her even greater things yet. He puzzled her; but he appeared to understand her; and as both of them understood everybody else, she was aware of a challenge in his society that none other of her set afforded her. He could even contradict her and go unsacked. Prudent people, when they sack, want to know what they are sacking, and Amory did not know. Therefore Mr. Strong was quite sure of his job until she should find out.
Another thing that gave Mr. Strong this apparently off-hand hold over her was the confidential manner in which he had warned her not to take Mr.Brimby, the novelist, too seriously. For without the warning Amory, like a good many other people, might have committed precisely that error.... But when Mr. Brimby, taking Amory apart one day, had expressed in her ear a gentle doubt whether Mr. Strong was quite "sound" on certain important questions, Amory had suddenly seen. Mr. Strong had "cut" one of Mr. Brimby's poignantly sorrowful sketches of the East End—seen through Balliol eyes—and Mr. Brimby was resentful. She did not conceal from herself that he might even be a little envious of Mr. Strong's position. He might have been wiser to keep his envy to himself, for, while mere details of routine could hardly expect to get Amory's personal attention, there was one point on which Mr. Strong was quite "sound" enough for Amory—his sense of her own worth and of how that worth had hitherto been wasted. And Mr. Strong had not been ill-natured about Mr. Brimby either. He had merely twinkled and put Amory on her guard. And because he appeared to have been right in this instance, Amory was all the more disposed to believe in his rightness when he gave her a second warning. This was about Wilkinson, the Labour Member. He was awfully fond of dear old Wilkie, he said; he didn't know a man more capable in some things than Wilkie was; but it would be foolish to deny that he had his limitations. He wasn't fluid enough; wanted things too much cut-and-dried; was a little inclined to mistake violence for strength; and of course the whole pointabout the "Novum" was that it was fluid....
"In fact," Mr. Strong concluded, his wary blue eyes ceasing suddenly to hold Amory's brook-brown ones and taking a reflective flight past her head instead, "for a paper like ours—I'm hazarding this, you understand, and keep my right to reconsider it—I'm not sure that a certain amount of fluidity isn't a Law...."
Amory nodded. She thought it excellently put.
Amory sometimes thought, when she took her bird's-eye-view of the numerous activities that found each its voice in its proper place in the columns of the "Novum," that she would have allowed almost any of them to perish for lack of support rather than the Wyron's "Lectures on Love." She admitted this to be a weakness in herself, a sneaking fondness, no more; but there it was—just that one blind spot that mars even the clearest and most piercing vision. And she always smiled when Mr. Strong tried to show this weakness of hers in the light of a merit.
"No, no," she always said, "I don't defend it. Twenty things are more important really, but I can't help it. I suppose it's because we know all about Laura and Walter themselves."
"Perhaps so," Mr. Strong would musingly concede.
Anybody who was anybody knew all about Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron and a certain noble defeat in their lives that was to be accounted as more than a hundred ordinary victories. That almost historic episode had just shown everybodywho was anybody what the world's standards were really worth. Hitherto the Wyrons have been spoken of both as a married couple and as "Walter Wyron" and "Laura Beamish" separately; let the slight ambiguity now be cleared up.
Mrs. Cosimo Pratt became on occasion Miss Amory Towers for reasons that began and ended in her profession as a painter; and everybody who was anybody was as well aware that Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the famous feminist picture "Barrage," was in reality Mrs. Cosimo Pratt, as the great mass of people who were nobody knew that Miss Elizabeth Thompson, the painter of "The Roll Call," was actually Lady Butler. But not so with the Wyrons. Reasons, not of business, nor yet of fame, but of a burning and inextinguishable faith, had led to their noble equivocation. Deeply seated in the hearts both of Walter and of Laura had lain a passionate non-acceptance of the merely parroted formula of the Wedding Service. So searching and fundamental had this been that by the time their various objections had been disposed of little had remained that had seemed worth bothering about; and in one sense they had not bothered about it. True, in another sense they had bothered, and that was precisely where the defeat came in; but that did not dim the splendour of the attempt. To come without further delay to the point, the Wyrons had married, under strong protest, in the ordinary everyday way, Laura submitting to the momentary indignity of a ring; but thereafter they had magnificentlyvindicated the New Movement (in that one aspect of it) by not saying a word about the ceremony of their marriage to anybody—no, not even to the people who were somebody. Then they had flown off to the Latin Quarter.
It had not been in the Latin Quarter, however, that the true character of their revolt had first shown. Perhaps—nobody knows—their relation had not been singular enough there. Perhaps—there were people base enough to whisper this—they had feared the singularity of "letting on." It is easy to do in the Boul' Mich' as the Boul' Mich' does. The real difficulties begin when you try to do in London what London permits only as long as you do it covertly.
And if there had been a certain covertness about their behaviour when, after a month, they had returned, what a venial and pardonable subterfuge, to what a tremendous end! Amory herself, up to then, had not had a larger conception. For while the Wyrons had secretly married simply and solely in order that their offspring should not lie under a stigma, their overt lives had been one impassioned and beautiful protest against any assumption whatever on the part of the world of a right to make rules for the generation that was to follow. No less a gospel than this formed the substance of those Lectures of Walter's; great as the number of the born was, his mission was the protection of a greater number still. The best aspects both of legitimacy and of illegitimacy were to be stereoscoped in the perfect birth. Andhe now had, in quite the strict sense of the word, a following. The same devoted faces followed him from the Lecture at the Putney Baths on the Monday to that at the Caxton Hall on the Thursday, from his ascending the platform at the Hampstead Town Hall on the Tuesday to his addressing of a garden-party from under the copper-beech at The Witan on the Sunday afternoon. And in course of time the faithfulness of the followers was rewarded. They graduated, so to speak, from the seats in the body of the building to the platform itself. There they supported Laura, and gave her a countenance that she no longer needed (for she had earned her right to wear her wedding-ring openly now), and flocked about the lecturer afterwards, not as about a mere man, but rather as seeing in him the physician, the psychologist, the expert, the helper, and the setter of crooked things straight that he was.
As a lecturer—may we say as a prophet?—Walter had a manner original and taking in the extreme. Anybody less sustained by his vision and less upheld by his faith might have been a little tempted to put on "side," but not so Walter. Perhaps his familiarity with the stage—everybody knew his father, Herman Wyron, of the New Greek Theatre—had taught him the value of the large and simple statement of large and simple things; anyhow, he did not so much lecture to his audiences as accompany them, chattily and companionably, through the various windings of his subject. With his hands thrust unaffectedly into the pocketsof his knickers, and a sort of sublimated "Well, here we are again" expression on his face, he allayed his hearers' natural timidity before the magnitude of his mission, and gave them a direct and human confab. on a subject that returned as it were from its cycle of vastness to simple personal experience again. His every sentence seemed to say, "Don't be afraid; it's nothing really; soon you'll be as much at your ease in dealing with these things as I am; just let me tell you an anecdote." No wonder Laura held her long and muscular neck very straight above her hand-embroidered yoke. Everybody understood that unless she adopted some sort of an attitude her proper pride in such a married lover must show, which would have been rather rubbing it in to the rest of her sex. So she booked dates for new lectures almost nonchalantly, and, when the platform was invaded at the end of the Lecture, or Walter stepped down to the level of those below, she was there in person as the final demonstration of how well these things actually would work as soon as Society had decided upon some concerted action.
Corin and Bonniebell, Amory's twins, did not attend Walter's Lectures. It was not deemed advisable to keep them out of bed so late at night. But Miss Britomart Belchamber, the governess, could have passed—had in fact passed—an examination in them. It had been Amory who, so to speak, had set the paper. For it had been at one of the Lectures—the one on "The Future Race: Are We Making Manacles?"—that MissBelchamber had first impressed Amory favourably. Amory had singled her out, first because she wore the guarantee of Prince Eadmond's Collegiate Institution—the leather-belted brown sleeveless djibbah with the garment of fine buff fabric showing beneath it as the fruit of a roasted chestnut shows when the rind splits—and secondly because of her admirable physique. She was splendidly fair, straight as an athlete, and could shut up her long and massive limbs in a wicker chair like a clasp-knife; and for her movements alone it was almost a sin that Walter's father could not secure her for the New Greek Society's revival of "Europa" at the Choragus Theatre. And she was not too quick mentally. That is not to say that she was a fool. What made Amory sure that she was not a fool was that she herself was not instinctively attracted by fools, and it was better that Miss Belchamber should be ductile under the influence of Walter's ideas than that she should have just wit enough to ask those stupid and conventional and so-called "practical" questions that Walter always answered at the close of the evening as patiently as if he had never heard them before. And Miss Belchamber told the twins stories, and danced "Rufty Tufty," with them, and "Catching of Quails," and was really cheap at her rather stiff salary. Cosimo loved to watch her at "Catching of Quails." If the children did not grow up with a love of beauty after that, he said, he gave it up. (The twins, by the way, unconsciously served Amory as another exampleof Dorothy Tasker's unreasonableness. As the mother of Noel and Jackie, Dorothy seemed rather to fancy herself as an experienced woman. But Amory could afford to smile at this pretension. There was a difference in age of a year and more between Noel and Jackie. No doubt Dorothy knew a little, but she, Amory, could have told her a thing or two).
On a Wednesday afternoon about a fortnight after Lady Tasker's visit to The Witan, Amory walked the garden thoughtfully. The weather was growing chilly, the hammock had been taken in, and her feet in the fallen leaves made a melancholy sound. Cosimo had left her half an hour before; certain points had struck him in the course of conversation which he thought ought to be incorporated in the "Life and Work"; and it was a rule at The Witan that nothing must ever be allowed to interfere with the impulse of artistic creation. For the matter of that, Amory herself was creating now, or at any rate was at the last preparatory stage that immediately precedes creation. Presently she would have taken the plunge and would be deep in the new number of the "Novum." For the moment she was thinking of Mr. Strong.
As she tried to clear up exactly what place Mr. Strong had in her thoughts she was struck by the dreadful tendency words and names and definitions have to attach themselves to vulgar and ready-made meanings—a tendency so strong that she had even caught herself more than once jumping to a common conclusion. To take an example,though a rather preposterous one. Had Dorothy, with one of her ridiculous advertisements waiting to be done, confessed to her that instead of setting about it she was thinking of a male person with a pair of alert blue eyes and a curiously mobile and clean-cut mouth (not that it was likely that Dorothy would have had the candour to make such a confession)—well, Amory might have smiled just like anybody else. She was not trying to make herself out any better than others. She was candid about it, however, which they were often not.
Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word for it that had not been vulgarized. She was, of course, exceedingly interested in him, but that was not saying very much. She "liked" him, too, but that again might mean anything. Her difficulty was that she herself was so special; and so on second thoughts she might have been right in giving an interpretation to Dorothy's actions, and Dorothy quite wrong in giving the same interpretation to hers merely because the data were the same.
Nor had Mr. Strong himself been able to help her very much when, a couple of days before, she had put the question to him, earnestly and without hateful false shame.
"Whatisthis relation of ours?" she had asked him, point-blank and fearlessly.
"Eh?" Mr. Strong had replied, a little startled.
"Theremustbe a relation of some sort between every two people who come into contact. I'm just wondering exactly what oursis."
Then Mr. Strong had knitted his brows and had said, presently, "I see.... Have you read 'The Tragic Comedians?'"—Amory had not, and the copy of the book which she had immediately ordered had not come yet. And then she too had knitted her brows. She had caught the trick from him.
"I suppose that what it really comes to is knowingyourself," she had mused; and at that Mr. Strong had given her a quick approving look, almost as if he said that if she put in her thumb in the same place again she might pull out a plum very well worth having.
"And not," Amory had continued, curiously heartened, "anything about the other person at all."
"Good, good," Mr. Strong had applauded under his breath; "have you Edward Carpenter's book in the house, by the way?... Never mind: I'll send you my copy."
He had sent it. It was in Amory's hand now. She had discovered that it had a catching and not easily identifiable smell of its own, of Virginia cigarettes and damp and she knew not what else, all mingled; and somehow the smell seemed quite as much an answer to the question she had asked as anything in the book itself.
Nor, despite Walter's special knowledge of these indications, could she go to the Wyrons for diagnosis and advice. For one thing, there was her own position of high patronage to be considered; for another, splendidly daring as the Wyrons' original protest had been, the Lectures had lately begunto have a little the air of a shop, over the counter of which admittedly valuable specifics were handed, but with a kind of "Andthe next article, please?" suspicion about it. Besides, the Wyrons, having no children, had of necessity to "chic" a little in cases where children formed a complicating element. Besides ... but anyway, Amory wasn't going either to Laura Beamish or to Walter Wyron.
She made a charming picture as she walked slowly the length of the privet hedge and then turned towards the copper beech again. Mr. Strong had said that he liked her in that dress—an aluminium-grey one, very simple and very expensive, worn with a handsome Indian shawl, a gift of Mr. Prang's, the mellow colour of which "led up" to the glowing casque of her hair; and she had smiled when Mr. Strong had added that Britomart Belchamber's rough tabards and the half-gym costume in which she danced "Rufty Tufty" would not have suited her, Amory, at all. Probably they wouldn't—not as a regular thing. Cosimo liked those, especially when the wearer was largish; indeed, it was one of Cosimo's humours to pose as Britomart's admirer. But Amory was small, and never shut her limbs up like a multiple-lever in a basket chair, but drew her skirt down a foot or so below her toes instead whenever she sat down. She fancied, though Mr. Strong had never used the word, that the "Novum's" editor found Miss Belchamber just a little hoydenish.
Amory wished that something would bring Mr. Strong up that afternoon. It was one of the dayson which the editing of the "Novum" could take care of itself, and besides, they would actually be editing it together. For the next number but one—the forthcoming one was already passed—was to be their most important utterance yet. It was to indicate clearly, firmly and once for all, their Indian policy. The threatened failure of the monsoon made the occasion urgent, and Mr. Suwarree Prang himself had explained to Amory only the night before precisely what the monsoon was, and how its failure would provide, from the point of view of those who held that the present wicked regime of administration by the strong hand was at last tottering to its fall, a providential opportunity. It had struck Amory as wondrously romantic and strange that a meteorological condition half-way round the world, in a place she had never seen, should thus change the course of her quiet life in Hampstead; but, properly considered, no one thing in this wonderful world was more wonderful than another. It was Life, and Life, as she remembered to have read somewhere or other, is for the Masters of it. And she was beginning to find that after all these things only required a little confidence. It was as easy to swim in six miles deep of water, like that place in Cosimo's atlas of which the name escaped her for the moment, as it was in six feet. And Mr. Prang had talked to her so long and so vividly about India that she sometimes found it quite difficult to realize that she had never been there.
Still wishing that Mr. Strong would come, sheslowly left the garden and entered the house. In the hall she paused for a moment, and a tender little smile softened her face. She had stopped before the exquisite casts of the foot and the arm. Pensively she took the foot up from the console table, and then, coming to a resolution, she took the arm down from its hook on the wall. After all, beautiful as she had to admit them to be, the studio, and not the hall, was the proper place for them.
With the foot and Edward Carpenter in her left hand, and the plaster arm hugged to her right breast, she walked along the passage and sought the studio.
It was called the studio, and there certainly were canvases and easels and other artists' paraphernalia there, but it was less used for painting than as a room for sitting and smoking and tea and discussion. It was a comfortable apartment. Rugs made islands on the thick cork floor-covering, and among the rugs were saddlebag chairs, a long adjustable chair, and a wide couch covered with faded tapestry. The room was an annex of corrugated iron lined with matchboarding, but electric-light fittings depended from the iron ties overhead, and in place of an ordinary hearth was a sort of stage one, with an imitation log of asbestos, which, when you put a match to it, broke into a licking of blue and yellow gas-jets. The north window occupied the whole of the garden end, and, facing it, was the large cartoon for Amory's unfinished allegorical picture, "The Triumph of HumaneGovernment." High up and just within the door was the bell that answered to the button outside.
Amory was putting down the casts on a Benares tray when the ringing of this bell startled her. But as it rang in the kitchen also, she did not move to answer it. She stood listening, the fingers of one hand to her lips, those of the other still resting on the plaster shoulder. Then she heard a voice, and a moment later there came a tap at the door.
It was Mr. Strong.
He advanced, and did a thing he had not done before—lifted the hand she extended to his lips and then let it drop again. But Amory was not surprised. It was merely a new and natural expression of the homage he had never concealed, and even had Amory been vain enough to suppose that it meant anything more, the briskness of the "Good afternoon" that followed it would have disabused her. "Glad I found you," Mr. Strong said. "I wanted to see you. Cosimo in?"
Her husband was always Cosimo to him, but in speaking to herself he used no name at all. It was as if he hesitated to call her Amory, and refused to call her Mrs. Pratt. Even "Miss Towers" he had only used once, and that was some time ago.
Amory's fingers left the cast, and Mr. Strong walked towards the asbestos log.—"May I?" he said, drawing forth a packet of Virginia cigarettes; and afterwards he put the match with which he lighted one of the cigarettes to the log. Amory drew up a small square footstool, and put her elbows on her knees and her interwoven fingersbeneath her chin. Mr. Strong examined the end of his cigarette, and thrust his chin down into his red tie and his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Then he seemed to plunge into thought.
Suddenly he shot a glance at Amory, and said abruptly, "I suppose you've talked over the Indian policy with Cosimo?"
It was nice and punctilious of him, the way he always dragged Cosimo in, and Amory liked it. She felt sure that the editor of the "Times," calling on the Prime Minister's wife, would not ignore the Prime Minister. But to-day she was a little abstracted—dull—she didn't know exactly what; and so she replied, without moving, "Would you like him here? He's busy with the 'Life'."
"Oh no, don't trouble him then."
There was a pause. Then, "I did talk to him about it. And to Mr. Prang," Amory said.
"Oh. Hm. Quite so," said Mr. Strong, looking at the toes of his brogues.
"Yes. Mr. Prang was here last night," Amory continued, looking at the points of her own slippers.
"Yes."
Again Mr. Strong's chin was sunk into his red tie. He was rising and falling slowly on his toes. His eyes moved ruminatively sideways to the rug at Amory's feet.
"Yes. Yes. I've been wondering——" he said thoughtfully.
"Well?"
"Oh, nothing really. I dare say I'm quite wrong. You see, Prang——"
"What?" Amory asked as he paused again.
There was a twinkle in the eyes that rose to Amory's. Mr. Strong gave a slight shrug.—"Well—Prang!——" he said with humorous deprecation.
Amory was quick.—"Oh!—You don't mean that Mr. Prang isn't sound?"
"Sound? Perfectly, perfectly. And a most capable fellow. Only I've wondered once or twice whether he isn't—you know—just a littletoocapable.... You see, we want to use Prang—not to have Prang usingus."
Amory could not forbear to smile. If that was all that was troubling Mr. Strong she thought she could reassure him.
"I don't think you'd have been afraid of that if you'd been here last night," she replied quietly. "We were talking over England's diabolical misrule, and I never knew Mr. Prang so luminous. It was pathetic—really. Cosimo was talking about that Rawal Pindi case—you know, of that ruffianly young subaltern drawing down the blinds and then beating the native.—'But how do they take it?' I asked Mr. Prang, rather scornfully, you know; and really I was sorry for the poor fellow, having to apologize for his country.—'That's it,' he said sadly—it was really sad.—And he told me, frankly, that sometimes the poor natives pretended they were killed, and sometimes they announce that they're going to die on a certain day, and they reallydodie—they're so mystic and sensitive—it wasmostinteresting.... But what I mean is, that a gentle and submissive people like that—Mr.Prang admits that's their weakness—I mean theycouldn'tuseus! It's our degradation that we aren't gentle and sensitive too. You see what I mean?"
"Oh, quite," Mr. Strong jerked out. "Quite."
"And that's why I call Mr. Prang an idealist. There must be somethinginthe East. At any rate it was splendid moral courage on Prang's part to say, quite openly, that they couldn't do anything without the little handful of us here, but must simply go on suffering and dying."
There fell one of the silences that usually came when Mr. Strong lost interest in a subject. Merely adding, "Oh, I've not a word to say against Prang, but——," he began to rise and fall on his toes again. Then he stepped to the Benares table where the casts were. But he made no criticism of them. He picked the foot up, and put it down again. "I like it," he said, and returned once more to the asbestos hearth. The silence fell again.
Amory, sitting on the footstool with her knees supporting her elbows and her wrists supporting her chin, would have liked to offer Mr. Strong a penny for his thoughts. She had had an odd, warm little sensation when he had picked up that cast of the perfect foot. She supposed he must know that it was her foot, but so widely had his thoughts been ranging that he had merely put it down again with an abstracted "I like it." Amory was not sure that any other woman than herself would not have been piqued. Any other woman would have expected him either not to look at thething, or else to say that it was small, or to ask whether the real one was as white, or something foolish like that. But Amory was superior to such things. She lived on higher levels. On these levels such an affront to the pure intellect as a flirtation could not exist. Free Love as a logical and defensible system—yes, perhaps; or a combination so happy of marriage and cohabitation as that of the Wyrons'—yes again; but anything lower she left to the stupid people who swallowed the conventions whole, including the convention of not being found out.—So she merely wondered about their relation again. Obviously, there must be a relation. And yet his own explanation had been quite insufficient; it had been no explanation at all to ask her whether she had read "The Tragic Comedians" or whether she had Edward Carpenter in the house. No doubt it was flattering to her intelligence to suppose that she could "flash" at his meaning without further words on his part, but it was also a little irritating when the flash didn't come. And, now that she came to think of it, except that he allowed it to be inferred that he found Britomart Belchamber a bit lumpish, she didn't know what he thought, not merely of herself, but of women at all.
And yet there was a passed-through-the-furnace look about him that might have piqued any woman. It was not conceivable that his eyes had softened only over inspired passages in proof, or that the tenderest speeches his lips had shaped had been the "Novum's" rallying-cries to the devoted band of theNew Imperialists. Amory was sure that his memory must be a maze of things, less spacious perhaps, but far more interesting than these. He looked widely now, but must have looked close and intense too. He pronounced upon the Empire, but, for all he was not married, must have probed deep into the palpitating human heart as well.
Amory was just thinking what a gage of intimacy an unembarrassed silence can be when Mr. Strong broke it. He lighted another cigarette at the end of the last, turned, threw the end on the asbestos log, and stood looking at the purring blue and yellow jets. No doubt he was full of the Indian policy again.
But as it happened it was not the Indian policy—"Oh," Mr. Strong said, "I meant to ask you—Who was that fellow who came up here one day?"
This was so vague that when Amory said "What fellow?" Mr. Strong himself saw the vagueness, and laughed.
"Of course: 'How big is a piece of wood?'—I mean the fellow who came to The Witan in a morning-coat?"
This was description enough. Amory's back straightened a little.
"Oh, Stanhope Tasker! Oh, just the husband of a friend of mine. I don't think you've met her. Why?"
Surely, she thought, Mr. Strong was not going to tell her that "Stanhope Tasker was an excellent fellow in his way, but——," as he had said of Mr. Brimby, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Prang!——
"Oh, nothing much. Only that I saw him to-day," Strong replied offhandedly.
"He's often about. He isn't a very busy man, I should say," Amory remarked.
"Saw him in Charing Cross Road as I was coming out of the office," Mr. Strong continued. "I don't think he saw me though."
"After his abominable manners to you that day I should think he'd be ashamed to look you in the face."
For a moment Mr. Strong looked puzzled; then he remembered, and laughed again.
"Oh, I didn't mind that in the least! Rather refreshing in fact. Far more likely he didn't notice me because he had his wife with him. I think you said he was married?"
Amory was just about to say that Mr. Strong gave Stan far more magnanimity than he deserved when a thought arrested her. Dorothy in Charing Cross Road! As far as she was aware Dorothy had not been out of Hampstead for weeks, and even then kept to the less frequented parts of the Heath. It wasn't likely....
Her eyes became thoughtful.
"Oh? That's funny," she said.
"What, that he shouldn't see me? Oh no. They seemed far more interested in electric-light fittings."
Amory's eyes grew more thoughtful still—"Oh!" she said; and added, "Did you think her pretty?"
"Hm—in a way. Very well dressed certainly; they both were. But I don't think these blackSpanish types amuse me much," Mr. Strong replied.
Dorothy a black Spanish type!
"Oh, do tell me what she had on!" said Amory brightly.
She rather thought she knew most of Dorothy's dresses by this time.
A black Spanish type!
The task of description was too much for Mr. Strong, but he did his best with it. Amory was keenly interested. But she pocketed her interest for the present, and said quite banteringly and with an almost arch look, "Oh, I should have thought Mrs. Tasker exactly your type!"
Again the quick motion of Mr. Strong's blue eyes suggested an audible click—"Oh? Why?" he asked.
"Oh, there's no 'why' about it, of course. It's the impression of you I had, that's all. You see, you don't particularly admire Miss Belchamber——"
"Oh, come! I think Miss Belchamber's an exceedingly nice girl, only——"
"Well, Laura Beamish, then. But I forgot; you don't go to Walter's Lectures. But I wonder whether you'd admire Laura?"
"If she's black and Spanish you think I should?" He paused. "Is she?"
"No. Brown and stringy rather, and with eyes that open and shut very quickly.... But I'm very absurd. There's no Law about these things really. Only, you see, I've no idea of the kind of woman youdoadmire?"
She said it smilingly, but that did not mean thatshe was not perfectly candid and natural about it too. Why not be natural about these things? Amory knew people who were natural enough about their preferred foods and clothing and houses; was a woman less than an entrée, or a bungalow, or a summer overcoat? Besides, it was so very much more intrinsically interesting. Walter Wyron had made a whole Lecture on it—Lecture No. II, "Types and Tact," and Walter had barely touched the fringe of the subject. Amory wanted to go a little deeper than that. But she also wanted to get away from those vulgarized words and ready-made conclusions, and to have each case considered on its merits. Surely it ought to be possible to say that the presence of a person affected you pleasantly, or unpleasantly, without sniggering inferences of aliaisonin the one case or of a rupture in the other!
Therefore it was once more just a little irritating that Mr. Strong, instead of telling her what type he did admire, should merely laugh and say, "Well—not Mrs. Tasker." If Amory had a criticism at all to make of Mr. Strong it was this habit of his of negatives, that sometimes almost justified the nickname Mr. Brimby had given him, of "Stone Wall Strong." So she dropped one hand from her chin, allowing it to hang loose over her knee while the other forearm still kept its swan's-neck curve, and said abruptly, "Well—about the Indian Number. Let's get on."
"Ah, yes," said Mr. Strong. "Let's get on."
"What had we decided?"
"Only Prang's article so far."
"But you say you have your doubts about it?"
Mr. Strong hesitated. "Only about its selling-power," he said with a little shrug. "We must sell the paper, you see. It's not paying its way yet."
"Well, I'm sure that's not Mr. Prang's fault," Amory retorted. "He's practically made the export circulation."
"You mean the Bombay circulation? Yes, I suppose he has. I don't deny it."
"You can't deny it. Since Prang began to write for us we've done awfully well in Bombay."
To that too, Mr. Strong assented. Then Amory, after a moment's pause, spoke quietly. She did not like to think of her editor as jealous of his own contributors.
"I know you don't like Mr. Prang," she said, looking fixedly at the asbestos log.
"I!" began Stone Wall Strong. "Why, you know I think he's a first rate fellow, if only——"
This time, however, Amory really did intend to get it out of him. For once she would have one of those hung-up sentences completed.
"If only what?" she said, looking up at him.
"Oh, I don't know—as you said a moment ago, there's no 'why' about these things——"
"But I did give you my impression. You don't give me yours."
"You did, I admit. Yes, I admit you did.... What is it you want to know, then?"
"Only why you seem so doubtful about Mr. Prang."
"Ah!" said Mr. Strong....
Those who knew Edgar Strong the best said that he was a man who, other things being equal, would rather go straight than not. Even when the other things were not quite equal, he still had a mild preference for straightness. But if other people positively insisted that he should deviate from straightness, very well; that was their look-out. He had been a good many things in his time—solicitor's clerk, free-lance journalist, book-pedlar, election-agent's minion, Vanner, poetic vagabond, and always an unerring "spotter" of the literary son of the farming squire the moment he appeared in sight; and the "Novum" was the softest job he had found yet. If the price of his keeping it was that he should look its owner's wife long and earnestly in the eyes, as if in his own there lay immeasurable things, not for him to give but for her to take if she list, so be it; he would sleep none the less well in his rent-free bedroom behind the "Novum's" offices afterwards. His experience of far less comfortable sleeping-quarters had persuaded him that in this imperfect world a man is entitled to exactly what he can get.
His eyes, nevertheless, did not seek Amory's. Instead, roving round the room to see if nothing less would serve (leaving him still with the fathomless look in reserve for emergencies), they fell on the Benares tray and the casts. And as they remained there he suddenly frowned. Amory's own eyes followed his; and suddenly she felt again that little creeping thrill. A faint colour andwarmth, new and pleasurable, came into her cheeks.
Then with a little rush, her discovery came upon her....
Shehadgot something from Mr. Strong at last!
Her head drooped a little away from him, and the hand that had hung laxly over her knee dropped gently to the rug. It was a delicious moment. So all these weeks and weeks Mr. Stronghadcared that that foot, that arm, had been exposed to the gaze of anybody who might have entered the house! He had not said so; he did not say so now; but that was it! More, he had cared so much that it had quite distorted his judgment of Mr. Prang. And all at once Amory remembered something else—a glance Edgar Strong had given her, neither more nor less eloquent than the look he was bending on the casts now, one afternoon when she had lain in the hammock in the garden and Mr. Prang, bending over her, had ventured to examine a locket about her throat....
Sothatwas at the bottom of his reserve!Thatwas the meaning of his "buts"!...
Amory did not move. She wished it might last for hours. Mr. Strong had taken a step towards the casts, but, changing his mind, had turned away again; and she was astonished to find how full of meaning dozens of his past gestures became now that she had the key to them. And she knew that the castswerebeautiful. Brucciani would have bought them like a shot. And she seemed to see Mr. Strong's look, piteous and frowning both at once, if she should sell them to Brucciani, andBrucciani should publish them to hang in a hundred studios....
The silence between them continued.
But speak she must, and it would be better to do so before he did; and by and bye she lifted her head again. But she did not look directly at him.
"It was very foolish," she murmured with beautiful directness and simplicity.
Mr. Strong said nothing.
"But for weeks I've been intending to move them."
Mr. Strong shrugged his shoulders. It was as if he said, "Well better late than never ... but you see,now."
"Yes," breathed Amory, softly, but aloud.
The next moment Mr. Strong was himself again. He returned to his station by the asbestos log.
"Well, there's Prang's article," he said in his business voice. "Am I to have it set up?"
"Perhaps we'd better see what Cosimo says first," Amory replied.
She did not know which was the greater delicacy in Mr. Strong—the exquisite tact of the glance he had given at the casts, or the quiet strength with which he took up the burden of editing the "Novum" again.
A white October mist lay over the Heath, and the smell of burning leaves came in at the pond-room window of Dorothy Tasker's flat. But the smell was lost on Dorothy. All her intelligence was for the moment concentrated in one faculty, the faculty of hearing. She was sure Jackie had swallowed a safety-pin, and she was anxiously listening for the click with which it might come unstuck.
"Shall I send for the doctor, m'm?" said Ruth, who stood holding the doorknob in her aproned hand. She had been called away from her "brights," and there was a mournful relish of Jackie's plight on her face.
"No," said Dorothy.... "Oh, Iknowthere were twelve of them, and now there are only eleven!...Haveyou put one of these things into your mouth, Jackie?"
"He put it up his nose, mumsie, like he did some boot-buttons once," said Noel cheerfully.
"But he couldn't do that....Haveyou swallowed it, Jackie?"
"Mmm," said Jackie resolutely, as who shouldsay that that which his hand (or in this case his mouth) found to do he did with all his might.
"Oh dear!" sighed Dorothy, leaning back in her chair....
She supposed it was the still white weather that weighed on her spirits; she hoped so, for if it was not that it was something worse. Even dreary weather was better than bankruptcy. She had sent her pass-book to the bank to be balanced; until it should come back she refused to look at the pile of tradesmen's books that stood on her writing-desk; and borrowing from her aunt was not borrowing at all, but simply begging, since Aunt Grace regarded the return of such loans as the last of affronts.
And (she sighed again) she had beensowell-off at the time of her marriage! Why, she had had well over a thousand a year from Hallowell and Smith's alone!... But Stan had had a few debts which had had to be settled, and Stan's knowledge of the style in which things ought to be done had been rather a drawback on that trip they had taken to the Riviera, for his ideas of hotels had been a little splendacious, and of dinners to "a few friends" rather daring; and, with one thing and another, the problem of how to satisfy champagne tastes on a beer income had never been really satisfactorily solved by Stan, poor old boy. And he never, never grumbled at home, not even when the cold beef came on three evenings together, which was harder on him than it was on most people. He did what he could toearn, too. It wasn't his fault that the standard of efficiency in the Army was so impracticably high, nor that he had been packed off to try his luck in Canada with the disadvantage of being a remittance-man, nor that, at the age of twenty-seven, when his father had died, he had had to turn to and compete for this job or that with a horde of capable youngsters years his juniors and with fewer hampering decencies. It was his father's fault and Aunt Susan's really, for having sent him to Marlborough and Sandhurst without being able to set him properly on his feet afterwards. Such victims of circumstances, on a rather different level, made husbands who stopped at home and cleaned the knives and took the babies out in the perambulator. In Stan's case the natural result had been to make a young man fit only to join as a ranker or to stand with his back to a mirror in a suspect card-room.
"Shall I take him away, m'm?" Mrs. Mossop asked—("And prepare his winding-sheet," her tone seemed to add).
"Yes, do," Dorothy replied, with a glance at Ruth's blackened hands. "And please make yourself fit to be seen, Ruth. You know you oughtn't to be doing all that on the very day I let Norah out."
She knew that her rebuke had set Ruth up in the melancholy enjoyment of resentment for half a week, but she was past caring. Ruth rose an inch in height at being chidden for the faithful performance of her most disagreeable duties; she turned; and as she bore the Bits away the mightyroar into which Jackie broke diminished in volume down the passage.
Dorothy sighed, that all her troubles should thus crowd on her at once. Her eyes fell again on the tradesmen's books. It hardly seemed worth while to pay them, since they would only come in again next week, as clamourous and urgent as ever. They were thrust through the letterbox like letters; Dorothy knew very well the thud with which they fell on the floor; but she could never help running out into the hall when they came. She had tried the plan of dispensing with books altogether and paying for everything in cash as she got it, but that had merely meant, not one large worry a week, but harassing little ones all the week through.
Oh, why had she squandered, or allowed Stan to squander, those good round sovereigns of Hallowell and Smith's!——
Still—there is measure in everything—she had not sent her pass-book to the bank in order to learn whether she had a balance. That would have been too awful. It was the amount of her margin that she wanted, and feared, to know. For presently there would be the doctor to pay, and so many guineas a week at the Nursing Home, and the flat going on just the same, and poor old Stan pathetically hoping that a casual dinner-table puff in a Marlborough voice would result in fat new ledger-accounts for Fortune and Brooks' and magnificent commissions for himself. If only she could get just a little ahead of her points! Butthe money went out just slightly quicker than it came in. Stan carved it as it were in twopences off the cold beef, the Bits swallowed it in pennorths with their breadcrumbs and gravy, and directly the strain eased for a little, down swooped the rent and set everything back again exactly where it had been three months before.
And the Income Tax people had actually sent Stan a paper, wanting to know all about his income from lands, hereditaments, etc., and warning him that his wife's income must be accounted as part of his own!
But it must not be supposed that Dorothy had allowed things to come to this pass without having had an idea. She had an idea, and one that she thought a very good one. Nevertheless, an idea is one thing, and the execution thereof at the proper time quite another. For example, the proper moment for the execution of this idea of Dorothy's was certainly now, or at any rate at the Christmas Quarter (supposing she herself was up and about again by that time and had found a satisfactory sub-tenant for the flat). But the person against whom her idea was designed—who, by the way, happened to be her unsuspecting and much-loved aunt, Lady Tasker—was a very present difficulty. Dorothy knew for a fact that what would be admirably convenient for herself at Christmas could not possibly be convenient to her aunt until, at the very earliest, next summer. That was the crab—the intervening period of nine months. She knew of no mandragora that would put herself, Stan andher Bits of Impudence gently to sleep, to wake up again to easier times.
Oh, why had she spent those beautiful thick sovereigns of Hallowell and Smiths' so recklessly!—
The mist lay flat over the pond outside, making in one corner of it a horrible scum, from which the swans, seeking their food, lifted blackened necks. There was never a ripple on the pond-room walls to-day. Slowly Dorothy rose. Moping was useless; she must do something. She crossed to her writing-desk and took from one of its drawers a fat file, concertina-ed like her own accordion-pleated skirts; and she sat down and opened it fan-wise on her knee. It was full of newspaper-cuttings, draft "ideas" for advertisements, and similar dreary things. She sighed again as her listless fingers began to draw them out. She had not thought at one time that she would ever come to this. By a remarkable piece of luck and light-heartedness and ingenuity she had started at Hallowell and Smith's at the top of the tree; the brains of underlings had been good enough to cudgel for such scrap-stuff as filled her concertina-file; but that was all changed now. Light come, light go; and since the lapse of her contracts she had been glad not only to devise these ignoble lures for the public, but to draw them also. They formed the pennies-three-farthings that came in while Stan carved the twopences from the joint. She had thought the good times were going to last for ever. They hadn't. She now looked enviously up to those who had been her own subordinates.
With no heart in her task at all, Dorothy set about the drafting of an advertisement.
She was just beginning to forget about swallowed safety-pins, and poor luckless Stan, and guineas for her Nursing Home, and the prospect of presently having seven mouths, big and little, to feed—she was even beginning to cease to hear the clamour of the Bits in the room along the passage—when there came a ring at the bell. Her fair head did not move, but her blue eyes stole abstractedly sideways as Ruth passed the pond-room door. Then a man's voice sounded, and Dorothy dropped her pen....
"Mrs. Tasker," she had heard, with the "a" cut very short and two "s's" in her name....
The next moment Ruth had opened the pond-room door, and, in tones that plainly said "You needn't think that I've forgotten about just now, because I haven't," announced: "Mr. Miller."
Now it was curious that Dorothy had just been thinking about Mr. Miller. Mr. Miller was Hallowells' Publicity Manager, and the time had been when Dorothy had had Mr. Miller completely in her pocket. She had obtained that comfortable contract of hers from Mr. Miller, and if during the latter part of its continuance she had taken her duties somewhat lightly and her pleasures with enormous gusto, she was not sure that Mr. Miller had not done something of the same kind. But the firm, which could excuse itself from a renewal of her own contract, for some reason or other could not get rid of Mr. Miller; and now here was Mr. Miller unexpectedly in Dorothy's flat—seeking her,which is far better for you than when you have to do the seeking. He stood there with his grey Trilby in his hand and his tailor-made deltoids almost filling the aperture of the doorway.
"There, now, if I wasn't right!" said Mr. Miller with great satisfaction, advancing with one hand outstretched. "I fixed it all up with myself coming along that you'd be around the house. I've had no luck all the week, and I said to myself as I got out of the el'vator at Belsize Park, 'It's doo to change.' And here I find you, right on the spot. I hope this is not an introosion. How are you? And how's Mr. Stan?"
He shook hands heartily with Dorothy, and looked round for a place in which to put his hat and stick.
"Why, now, this is comfortable," he went on, drawing up the chair to which Dorothy pointed. "I like your English fires. They may not have all the advantages of steam-heat, but they got a look about 'em—the Home-Idee. And you're looking just about right in health, Mrs. Tasker, if I may say so. You English women have our N'York ladies whipped when it comes to complexion, you have for sure. And how's the family——?"
But here Mr. Miller suddenly stopped and looked at Dorothy again. If the look that came into his eyes had come into those of a young unmarried woman, Dorothy would have fled there and then. He dropped his head for a moment as people do who enter a church; then he raised it again.
"If you'll pardon an old married man and thefather of three little goils," Mr. Miller said, his eyes reverently lifted and his voice suddenly altered, "—but am I right in supposing that ... another little gift from the storks, as my dear old Mamie—that was my dear old negro nurse—used to say?" Then, without waiting for the unrequired answer, he straightened his back and squared his deltoids in a way that would have made any of Holbein's portraits of Henry the Eighth look like that of a slender young man. His voice dropped three whole tones, and again he showed Dorothy the little bald spot on the crown of his head.
"I'm glad. I say I'm glad. I'm vurry glad. I rejoice. And I should like to shake Mr. Stan by the hand. I should like to shake you by the hand too, Mrs. Tasker." Then, when he had done so: "It's the Mother-Idee. The same, old-fashioned Idee, like our own mothers. It makes one feel good. Reverent. I got no use for a young man but what he shows lats of reverence for his mother. The old Anglo-Saxon-Idee—reverence for motherhood.... And when, if an old married man may ask the question——?"
Dorothy laughed and blushed and told him. Mr. Miller, dropping his voice yet another tone, told her in return that he knew of no holier place on oith than the chamber in which the Anglo-Saxon-Idee of veneration for motherhood was renewed and sustained. And then, after he had said once more that he rejoiced, there fell a silence.
Dorothy liked Mr. Miller. Once you got over his remarkable aptitude for sincerities he had anexcellent heart. Nevertheless she could not imagine why he had come. She shuddered as he seemed for a moment to be once more on the point of removing his shoes at the door of the Mosque of Motherhood, but apparently he thought better of it. Squaring his shoulders again, and no doubt greatly fortified by his late exercise, he said, "Well, I always feel more of a man after I felt the throb of a fellow-creature's heart. That's so. And now you'll be wondering what's brought me up here? Well, the fact is, Mrs. Tasker, I'm wurried. I got wurries. You can see the wurry-map on my face. Hallowells' is wurrying me. I ain't going to tell you Hallowells' ain't what it was in its pammy days; it may be, or it may not; mebbe you've heard the talk that's going around?"
"No," said Dorothy.
"Is that so? Well, there is talk going around. There's a whole push of people, knocking us all the time. They ain't of much account themselves, but they knock us. It's a power the inferior mind has. And I say I'm wurried about it."
Dorothy, in spite of her "No," had heard of the "knocking" of Hallowell and Smiths', and her heart gave an excited little jump at the thought that flashed across her mind. Did Hallowells' want her back? The firm had been launched upon London with every resource of publicity; Dorothy herself had been the author of its crowning device; and whereas the motto of older firms had been "Courtesy Costs Nothing," Hallowells' had vastly improved upon this. Courtesy had, asa matter of fact, cost them a good deal; but the rewards of the investment had been magnificent. Mr. Miller had known that if you say to people often enough "See how courteous I am," you are to all intents and purposes courteous. But what Mr. Miller had not known had been the precise point at which it is necessary to begin to build up a strained reputation again. Commercial credit too, like those joints Stan carved, comes in in two-pence-halfpennies but goes out in threepences.... And so the "knocking" had begun. Rumours had got about that Hallowells' was a shop where you were asked, after a few unsuitable articles had been shown to you, whether you didn't intend to buy anything, and where you might wait for ten minutes at a counter while two assistants settled a private difference behind it. Did Mr. Miller want her help in restoring the firm's fair name? Did he intend to offer her another contract? Were there to be more of Hallowells' plump, ringing sovereigns—that she would know better how to take care of this time? It was with difficulty that she kept her composure as Mr. Miller continued:
"There's no denying but what inferior minds have that power," he went sorrowfully on. "They can't build up an enterprise, but they can knock, and they been good and busy. You haven't heard of it? Well, that's good as far as it goes, but they been at it for all that. Now I don't want to knock back at your country, Mrs. Tasker, but it seems to me that's the English character. You're hostile to the noo. The noo gives you cold feet. Yougot a terrific capacity for stopping put. Your King Richard Core de Lion did things in a certain way, and it ain't struck you yet that he's been stiff and straight quite a while. And so when you see something with snap and life to it you start knocking." Mr. Miller spoke almost bitterly. "But I ain't holding you personally responsible, Mrs. Tasker. I reckon you're a wonderful woman. Yours is a reel old family, and if anybody's the right to knock it's you; butyouappreciate the noo.Youlook at it in the light of history.Yougot the sense of world-progress.You'rea sort of Lady Core de Lion to-day. I haven't forgotten the Big Idee you started us off with. And so I come to you, and tell you, straight and fair, we want you."
Dorothy was tingling with excitement; but she took up a piece of sewing—the same piece on which she had bent her modest gaze when she had machinated against her aunt on the afternoon on which Lady Tasker had come on, weary and thirsty, from The Witan. It was a piece she kept for such occasions as these. She stitched demurely, and Mr. Miller went on again:—
"We want you. We want those bright feminine brains of yours, Mrs. Tasker. And your ladies' intooition. We're stuck. We want another Idee like the last. And so we come to the department where we got satisfaction before."
Dorothy spoke slowly. She was glad the pond-room was beautifully furnished—glad, too, that the hours Ruth spent over her "brights" werenot spent in vain. The porcelain gleamed in her cabinets and the silver twinkled on her tables. At any rate she did not look poor.
"This is rather a surprise," she said. "I hardly know what to say. I hadn't thought of taking on another contract."
But here Mr. Miller was prompt enough.
"Well, I don't know that we were thinking of a noo contract exactly. You're a lady with a good many responsibilities now, and ain't got too much time for contracts, I guess. No, it ain't a contract. It's an Idee we want."
Far more quickly than Dorothy's hopes had risen they dropped again at this. "An Idee:" naturally!... Everybody wanted that. She had not had to hawk an idea like the last—so simple, so shapely, so beauty-bright. And she had learned that it is not the ideas, but what follows them, that pays—the flat and uninspired routine that forms the everyday work of a lucrative contract. It is the irony of this gipsy life of living by your wits. You do a stately thing and starve; you follow it up—or somebody else does—with faint and empty echoes of that thing, and you are overfed. An Idea—but not a contract; a picking of her brains, but no permanent help against that tide of tradesman's books that flowed in at the front door.... And Dorothy knew already that for another reason Mr. Miller had sought her out in vain. Ideas arenotrepeated. They visit us, but we cannot fetch them. And as for echoes of that former inspiration of hers, no doubt Mr. Millerhad thought of all those for himself and had rejected them.
"I see," she said slowly....
"Well," said Mr. Miller, his worry-map really piteous, "I wish you could tell me where we've gone wrong. It must be something in the British character we ain't appreciated, but what, well, that gets me. We been Imperialistic. There ain't been one of our Monthly House Dinners but what we've had all the Loyal Toasts, one after the other. There ain't been a Royal Wedding but what we've had a special window-display, and christenings the same, and what else you like. We ain't got gay with the Union Jack nor Rotten Row nor the House of Lords. We've reminded folk it was your own King George who said 'Wake up, England——!'"
But at this point Mr. Miller's doleful recital was cut short by a second ring at the bell. Again Ruth's step was heard in the passage outside, and again Ruth, loftily sulky but omitting no point of her duty, stood with the door-knob in her hand.
"Mrs. Pratt," she announced; and Amory entered.
Seeing Mr. Miller, however, she backed again. Mr. Miller had risen and bowed as if he was giving some invisible person a "back" for leapfrog.
"Oh, I do so beg your pardon!" said Amory hurriedly. "I didn't know you'd anybody here. But—if I could speak to you for just a moment, Dorothy—it won't take a minute——"
"Please excuse me," said Dorothy to Mr. Miller; and she went out.
She was back again in less than three minutes. Her face had an unusual pinkness, but her voice was calm. She did not sit down again. Neither did she extend her hand to Mr. Miller in a too abrupt good-bye. Nevertheless, that worried man bowed again, and looked round for his hat and stick.
"I shall have to think over what you've been saying," Dorothy said. "I've no proposal to make off-hand, you see—and I'm rather afraid that just at present I shan't be able to come and see you——"
There were signs in Mr. Miller's bearing of another access of reverence.
"So I'll write. Or better still, if it's not too much trouble for you to come and see me again——? Perhaps I'd better write first.—But you'll have tea, won't you?"
Mr. Miller put up a refusing hand.—"No, I thank you.—So you'll do your possible, Mrs. Tasker? That's vurry good of you. I'm wurried, and I rely on your sharp feminine brains. As for the honorarium, we shan't quarrel about that. I wish I could have shaken hands with Mr. Stan. There ain't a happier and prouder moment in a man's life than——"
"Good-bye."
And the father of three little goils of his own took his leave.
No sooner had he gone than Dorothy's brows contracted. She took three strides across the roomand rang for Ruth. Never before had she realized the inferiority, as a means of expressing temper, of an electric bell to a hand-rung one or to one of which a yard or two of wire can be ripped from the wall. Only by mere continuance of pressure till Ruth came did she obtain even a little relief. To the high resolve on Ruth's face she paid no attention whatever.
"A parcel will be coming from Mrs. Pratt," she said. "Please see that it goes back at once."
Ruth's head was heroically high. The late Mr. Mossop had had his faults, but he had not kept his finger on electric-bell buttons till she came.
"No doubt there's them as would give better satisfaction, m'm," she said warningly.
But Dorothy rushed on her fate.—"There seems very little satisfaction anywhere to-day," she answered.
"Then I should wish to give the usual notice," said Ruth.
"Very well," said the reckless mistress.... "Ruth!" (Ruth returned). "You forgot what I said about always shutting the door quietly."
This time the door close so quietly behind Ruth that Dorothy heard her outburst into tears on the other side of it.
Second-hand woollies for her Bits!... Of course Amory Pratt had made the proposal with almost effusive considerateness. No doubt the twins, Corin and Bonniebell,hadoutgrown them. Dorothy did not suppose for a moment that they werenotthe best of their kind that money couldbuy; the Pratts seemed to roll in money. And beyond all dispute the wintermightcome any morning now, and the garmentswouldjust fit Jackie. But—her own Bits!... She had had her back to the bedroom window when the offer had been made; she knew that her sudden flush had not showed; and her voice had not changed as she had deliberately told her lie—that she had bought the children's winter outfits only the day before....
"I'm sure you won't have any difficulty in giving them away," she had concluded as she had passed to the bedroom door.
"Far less difficulty than you'll find here," she might have added, but had forborne....
Other children's woollies for her little Jackie!——
What gave sting to the cut was that Jackie sorely needed them; but then it was not like Amory Pratt, Dorothy thought bitterly, to make a graceful gift of an unrequired thing. She must blunder into people's necessities. A gift of a useless Teddy Bear or of a toy that would be broken in a week Dorothy might not have refused; but mere need!—"Oh!" Dorothy exclaimed, twisting in her chair with anger....
What a day! What a life! And what a little thing thus to epitomize the whole hopeless standstill of their circumstances!
And because it was a little thing, it had a power over Dorothy that twenty greater things would not have had. She was about to call the precious and disparaged Jackie when she thought betterof it. Instead, she dropped her face into her hands and melted utterly. What Ruth did in the kitchen she did in the pond-room; and Jackie, who caught the contagion, filled the passage between with an inconsolable howling.
It was into this house of lamentation that Stan entered at half-past four.
"Steady, there!" he called to his younger son; and Jackie's bellow ceased instantaneously.
"Ruth's c'ying, so I c'ied too," he confided solemnly to his father; and the two entered the pond-room together, there to find Dorothy also in tears.
"Hallo, what's this?" said Stan. "Jackie, run and tell Ruth to hurry up with tea.... Head up, Dot—let's have a look at you——"
Perhaps he meant that Dot should have a look at him, for his face shone with an—alas!—not unwonted excitement. Dorothy had seen that shining before. It usually meant that he had been let in on the ground floor of the International Syndicate for the manufacture of pig-spears, or had secured an option on the world's supply of wooden pips for blackberry jam, or an agency for a synthesized champagne. And she never dashed the perennial hopefulness of it. The poor old boy would have been heartbroken had he been allowed to suppose that he was not, in intent at any rate, supporting his wife and children.