[1]I have been charged with the invention of these facetiæ. Here is the Synthetic Protoplasmidea:—“The dream of creating offspring without the concurrence of woman has always haunted the imagination of the human race. The miraculous advances which the chemical synthesis has accomplished in these latter days seem to justify the boldest hopes, but we are still far from the creation of living protoplasm. The experiences of Loeb or of Delage are undoubtedly very confounding. But in order to produce life these scientists were obliged, nevertheless, to have recourse to beings already organized. Thousands of centuries undoubtedly separate us from any possibility of realizing the most magnificent and most disconcerting dream ever engendered in the human brain. In the meantime, as the Torch of Life must be transmitted to the succeeding generations, woman will continue gloriously to fulfil her character of mother.”—“Problems of the Sexes,” Jean Finot; 12s.6d.net; p. 352.Lightly worked up and chattily treated, this theme, as Katie said, drew quiet smiles of appreciation from every cultured audience which Walter addressed.O. O.
[1]I have been charged with the invention of these facetiæ. Here is the Synthetic Protoplasmidea:—“The dream of creating offspring without the concurrence of woman has always haunted the imagination of the human race. The miraculous advances which the chemical synthesis has accomplished in these latter days seem to justify the boldest hopes, but we are still far from the creation of living protoplasm. The experiences of Loeb or of Delage are undoubtedly very confounding. But in order to produce life these scientists were obliged, nevertheless, to have recourse to beings already organized. Thousands of centuries undoubtedly separate us from any possibility of realizing the most magnificent and most disconcerting dream ever engendered in the human brain. In the meantime, as the Torch of Life must be transmitted to the succeeding generations, woman will continue gloriously to fulfil her character of mother.”—“Problems of the Sexes,” Jean Finot; 12s.6d.net; p. 352.Lightly worked up and chattily treated, this theme, as Katie said, drew quiet smiles of appreciation from every cultured audience which Walter addressed.O. O.
[1]I have been charged with the invention of these facetiæ. Here is the Synthetic Protoplasmidea:—
“The dream of creating offspring without the concurrence of woman has always haunted the imagination of the human race. The miraculous advances which the chemical synthesis has accomplished in these latter days seem to justify the boldest hopes, but we are still far from the creation of living protoplasm. The experiences of Loeb or of Delage are undoubtedly very confounding. But in order to produce life these scientists were obliged, nevertheless, to have recourse to beings already organized. Thousands of centuries undoubtedly separate us from any possibility of realizing the most magnificent and most disconcerting dream ever engendered in the human brain. In the meantime, as the Torch of Life must be transmitted to the succeeding generations, woman will continue gloriously to fulfil her character of mother.”—“Problems of the Sexes,” Jean Finot; 12s.6d.net; p. 352.
Lightly worked up and chattily treated, this theme, as Katie said, drew quiet smiles of appreciation from every cultured audience which Walter addressed.
O. O.
Theywere great believers in the Empire, they on the “Novum.” Indeed, they were the only true Imperialists, since they recognized that ideas, and not actions, were by far and away the most potent instruments in the betterment of mankind. Everybody who was anybody knew that, a mere sporadic outbreak here and there (such as the one in Manchuria) notwithstanding, war had been virtually impossible ever since the publication of M. Bloch’s book declaring it to be so. What, they asked,waswar, more than an unfortunate miscalculation on the part of the lamb that happened to lie down with the lion? And what made the miscalculation so unfortunate? Why, surely the possession by the lion of teeth and claws. Draw his teeth and cut his claws, and the two would slumber peacefully together. So with the British lion. He only fought because he had things ready to fight with. Philosophically, his aggressions were not much more than a kind of sportive manifestation of the joy of life, that happened, rather inconsequentially, to take the form of the joy of death. Take away the ships and guns, then, and everything would be all right.
These views on the Real Empire were in no way incompatible with Mr. Wilkinson’s desire to see all TradeUnionists armed. For a war at home, about shorter hours and higher wages, would at any rate be a war between equals in race. It was wars between unequals that had made of the Old Empire so hideous a thing. Amory herself had more than once stated this rather well.
“I call it cowardice,” she had said. “Every fine instinct in us tells us to stick up for the weaker side. It makes my blood boil! Think of those gentle and dusky millions, all being, to put it in a word, bullied—just bullied! We all know the kind of man who goes abroad—the conventional ‘adventurer.’ (I like ‘adventurer!’) He’s just a common bully. He drinks disgustingly, and swears, and kicks people who don’t get out of his way—but he’s always careful to have a revolver in his pocket for fear they should hit him back!... And he makes a tremendous fuss about his white women, but when it comes to their black or brown ones ... well, anyway,Ithink he’s a brute, and we want a better class of man thanthatfor our readers!”
And that was briefly why, at the “Novum,” they tried to reduce armaments at home, and gave at least moral encouragement to the other side whenever there was a dust-up abroad.
But it had been some time ago that Amory had said all this, and her attitude since then had undergone certain changes. One of these changes had been her acquisition of the Romantic Point of View; another had been that suspended state of affairs between herself and Mr. Strong. The first of these curtailed a good deal of the philosophy in which Mr. Strong alwaysseemed anxious to enwrap the subject (in order, as far as Amory could see, to avoid action). It also made a little more of the position of women, white, black or brown, and especially when rolled up in carpets, in Imperial affairs. And the second, that hung-up relation between Edgar Strong and herself, had left her constantly wondering what would have happened had she taken Mr. Strong at his word and fled to Paris with him, and exactly where they stood since she had not done so.
For naturally, things could hardly have been expected to be the same after that. Since Edgar had ceased to come quite so frequently to The Witan, Amory had thought the whole situation carefully over and had come to her conclusion. Perhaps the histories ofles grandes maitressesand the writings of Key had helped her; or, more likely, Key in Sweden (or wherever it was) and herself in England had arrived at the same conclusion by independent paths. That conclusion, stated in three words, was the Genius of Love.
It was perfectly simple. Why had Amory Towers, the painter of that picture (“Barrage”) so enthusiastically acclaimed by the whole of Feminist England, now for so long ceased to paint? What had become of the Genius that had brought that picture into being? It is certain that Genius cannot be stifled. Deny it one opportunity and it will break out somewhere else—in another art, in politics, in leadership in one form or another, or it may be even in crime.
Even so, Amory was conscious, her own Genius had refused to be suppressed. It had found another outletin politics, directed in a recumbent attitude from a sofa.
Yet that had landed her straightway in a dilemma—the dilemma of Edgar and the twins, of Paris on seven francs a day and the comforts Cosimo allowed her, of a deed that was to have put even that of the Wyrons into the shade and a mere settling down to the prospect of seeing Edgar when it pleased him to put in an appearance.
She had not seen this protean property of Genius just at first. That could only have been because she had not examined herself sufficiently. She had been introspective, but not introspective enough.
And lest she should be mistaken in the mighty changes that were going on within herself, at first she had tried the painting again. Her tubes were dry and her brushes hard, but she had got new ones, and one after another she had taken up her old half-finished canvases again. A single glance at them had filled her with astonishment at the leagues of progress, mental and emotional, that she had made since then. She had laughed almost insultingly at those former attempts. That large canvas on the “Triumph of Humane Government” was positively frigid! And Edgar had liked it!... Well, that only showed what a power she now had over Edgar if she only cared to use it. If he had liked that chilly piece of classicism, he would stand dumb before the canvas that every faculty in her was now straining to paint. She began to think that canvas out....
It must be Eastern, of course; nay, it must be TheEast—tremendously voluptuous and so on. She would paint it over the “Triumph.” It should be bathed in a sunrise, rabidly yellow (they had no time for decaying mellowness in those vast and kindling lands to which Amory’s inner eye was turned)—and of course there ought to be a many-breasted what-was-her-name in it, the goddess (rather rank, perhaps, but that was the idea, a smack at effete occidental politeness). And there ought to be a two-breasted figure as well, perhaps with a cord or something in her hand, hauling up the curtain of night, or at any rate showing in some way or other that her superb beauty was actually responsible for the yellow sunrise....
And above all, she must getherselfinto it—the whole of herself—all that tremendous continent that Cosimo had not had, that her children had not had, that her former painting had left unexpressed, that politics had not brought out of her....
The result of that experiment was remarkable. Two days later she had thrown the painting aside again. It was a ghastly failure. But only for a moment did that depress her; the next moment she had seen further. She was a Genius; she knew it—felt it; she was so sure about it that she would never have dreamed of arguing about it; she had such thoughts sometimes.... And Genius could never be suppressed. Very well; the Eastern canvas was a total failure; she admitted it. Ergo, her Genius was for something else than painting.
That was all she had wanted to know.
For what, then? No doubt Edgar Strong, who hadenlightened her about herself before, would be able to enlighten her again now. And if he would not come to see her, she must go and see him. But already she saw the answer shining brightly ahead. She must pant, not paint; live, not limn. Her Genius was, after all, for Love.
True, at the thought of those offices in Charing Cross Road she had an instinctive shrinking. Their shabbiness rather took the shine out of the voluptuousnesses she had tried, and failed, to get upon her canvas. But perhaps there was a fitness in that too. Genius, whether in Art or in Love, is usually poor. If she could be splendid there she could be so anywhere. No doubt heaps and heaps of grand passions had transfigured grimy garrets, and had made of them perfectly ripping backgrounds....
So on an afternoon in mid-January Amory put on her new velvet costume of glaucous sea-holly blue and her new mushroom-white hat, and went down to the “Novum’s” offices in a taxi. It seemed to her that she got there horribly quickly. Her heart was beating rapidly, and already she had partly persuaded herself that if Edgar wasn’t in it might perhaps be just as well, as she had half-promised the twins to have tea with them in the nursery soon, and anyway she could come again next week. Or she might leave Edgar a note to come up to The Witan. There were familiar and supporting influences at The Witan. But here she felt dreadfully defenceless.... She reached her destination. Slowly she passed through the basement-room with the sandwich-boards, ascended the dark stairs, andwalked along the upper corridor that was hung with the specimens of poster-art.
Edgar was in. He was sitting at his roll-top desk, with his feet thrust into the unimaginable litter of papers that covered it. He appeared to be dozing over the “Times,” and had not drunk the cup of tea that stood at his elbow with a sodden biscuit and a couple of lumps of sugar awash in the saucer.—Without turning his head he said “Hallo,” almost as if he expected somebody else. “Did you bring me some cigarettes in?” he added, still not turning. And this was a relief to Amory’s thumping heart. She could begin with a little joke.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t know you wanted any.”
There was no counterfeit about the start Mr. Strong gave. So swiftly did he pluck his feet away from the desk that twenty sheets of paper planed down to the floor, bringing the cup of tea with them in their fall.
But Mr. Strong paid no attention to the breakage and mess. He was on his feet, looking at Amory. He looked, but he had never a word to say. And she stood looking at him—charming in her glaucous blue, the glint of rich red that peeped from under the new white hat, and her slightly frightened smile.
“Haven’t you any?” she said archly.
At that Mr. Strong found his tongue.
“Excuse me just a moment,” he muttered, striding past her and picking up something from his desk as he went. “Sit down, won’t you?” Then he opened the door by which Amory had entered, did something behind it, and returned, closing the door again. “Onlyso that we shan’t be disturbed,” he said. “They go into the other office when they see the notice.—I wasn’t expecting you.”
Nor did he, Amory thought, show any great joy at her appearance. On the contrary, he had fixed a look very like a glare on her. Then he walked to the hearth. A big fire burned there behind a wire guard, and within the iron kerb stood the kettle he had boiled to make tea. He put his elbows on the mantelpiece and turned his back to her. Again it was Mr. Brimby’s sorrowing Oxford attitude. Amory had moved towards his swivel chair and had sat down. Her heart beat a little agitatedly. He remembered!...
He spoke without any beating about the bush,—“Ought you to have done this?” he said over his shoulder.
She fiddled with her gloves.—“To have done what?” she asked nervously.
“To have come here,” came in muffled tones back. It was evident that he was having to hold himself in.
Then suddenly he wheeled round. This time there was no doubt about it—it was a glare, and a resolute one.
But he had not been able to think of any new line. It was the one he had used before. He made it a little more menacing, that was all.
“I’m only flesh and blood—,” he said quickly, his hands ever so slightly clenching and unclenching and his throat apparently swallowing something.
Her heart was beating quickly enough now.—“But—but—,”she stammered,—“if you only mean my coming here—I’ve been here lots of timesbefore——”
He wasted few words on that.
“Not since——” he rapped out. He was surveying her sternly now.
“But—but—,” she faltered again, “—it’s only me, Edgar—Iamconnected with the paper, you know—that is to say my husbandis——”
“That’s true,” he groaned.
“And—and—I should have come before—I’ve been intending to come—but I’ve been sobusy——”
But that also he brushed aside for the little it was worth. “Mustyou compromise yourself like this?” he demanded. “Don’t you see? I’m not made of wood, and I suppose your eyes are open too. Prang may be here at any moment. He’ll see that notice on the door and wait ... and then he’ll see you go out. You oughtn’t to have come,” he continued gloomily. “Why did you, Amory?”
Once more she quailed before the blue mica of his eye. Her words came now a bit at a time. The victory was his.
“Only to—to see—how the paper was going on—and to—to talk things over—,” she said.
“Oh!” He nodded. “Very well.”
He strode forward from the mantelpiece and approached the desk at which she sat.
“I suppose Cosimo wants to know; very well. As a matter of fact I’m rather glad you’ve come. Lookhere——”
He grabbed a newspaper from the desk and thrust it almost roughly into her hands.
“Read that,” he said, stabbing the paper with his finger.
The part in which he stabbed it was so unbrokenly set that it must have struck Katie Deedes as overwhelmingly learned.—“There you are—read that!” he ordered her.
Then, striding back to the mantelpiece, he stood watching her as if he had paid for a seat in a playhouse and had found standing-room only.
Amory supposed that it must be something in that close and grey-looking oblong that was at the bottom of his imperious curtness. She was sure of this when, before she had read half a dozen lines, he cut it with a sharp “Well? I suppose you see what it means to us?”
“Just a moment,” she said bewilderedly; “you always did read quicker than Ican——”
“Quicker!—” he said. “Just run your eye down it. That ought to tell you.”
She did so, and a few capitals caught her eye.
“Do you mean this about the North-West Banks?” she asked diffidently.
“Do I mean——! Well, yes. Rather.”
“I do wish you’d explain it to me. It seems rather hard.”
But he did not approach and point out particular passages. Instead he seemed to know that leaden oblong by heart. He gave a short laugh.
“Hard? It’s hard enough on the depositors outthere!... They’ve been withdrawing again, and of course the Banks have had to realize.”
“Yes, I saw that bit,” said Amory.
“A forced realization,” Mr. Strong continued. “Depreciation in values, of course. And it’s spreading.”
It sounded to Amory rather like smallpox, but, “I suppose that’s the Monsoon?” she hazarded.
“Partly, of course. Not altogether. There’s the rupee too, of course. At present that’s at about one and twopence, but then there are these bi-metallists.... So until we know what’s going to happen, it seems to me we’re bound hand and foot.”
Amory was awed.—“What—what do you think will happen?” she asked.
Edgar gave a shrug.—“Well—when a Bank begins paying out in pennies it’s as well to prepare for the worst, you know.”
“Are—are they doing that?” Amory asked in a whisper. “Really? And is that the bi-metallists’ doing—or is it the Home Government? Do explain it to me so that I can visualize it. You know I always understand things better when I can visualize them. That’s because I’m an artist.—Does it mean that there are long strings of natives, with baskets and things on their heads to put the pennies in, all waiting at the Banks, like people in the theatre-queues?”
“I dare say. I suppose they have to carry the pennies somehow. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you more than’s in the papers.”
Amory’s face assumed an expression of contempt. On the papers she was quite pat.
“The papers! And how much of the truth can we get from the capitalist press, I should like to know! Why, it’s a commonplace among us—one is almost ashamed to say it again—that the ‘Times’ is always wrong! We havenoImperialist papers really; only Jingo ones. Is therenoway of finding out what this—crisis—is really about?”
This was quite an easy one for Mr. Strong. Many times in the past, when pressed thus by his proprietor’s wife for small, but exact, details, he had wished that he had known even as much about them as seemed to be known by that smart young man who had once come to The Witan in a morning coat and had told Edgar Strong that he didn’t know what he was talking about. But he had long since found a way out of these trifling difficulties. Lift the issue high enough, and it is true of most things that one man’s opinion is as good as another’s; and they lifted issues quite toweringly high on the “Novum.” Therefore in self-defence Mr. Strong flapped (so to speak) his wings, gave a struggle, cleared the earth, and was away in the empyrean of the New Imperialism.
“The ‘Times’ always wrong. Yes. We’ve got to stick firmly to that,” he said. “But don’t you see, that very fact makes it in its way quite a useful guide. It’s the next best thing to being always right, like us; we can depend on its being wrong. We’ve only got to contradict it, and then ask ourselves why we do so. There’s usually a reason.... So there is in this—er—crisis.Of course you know their argument—that a lot of these young native doctors and lawyers come over here, and stop long enough to pick up the latest wrinkles in swindling—the civilized improvements so to speak—and then go back and start these wildcat schemes, Banks and so on, and there’s a smash. I think that’s a fair statement of their case.—But what’s ours? Why, simply that what they’re really doing is to give the Home Government a perfectly beautiful opportunity of living up to its own humane professions.... But we know what that means,” he added sadly.
“You mean that it just shows,” said Amory eagerly, “that we aren’t humane at all really? In fact, that England’s a humbug?”
Mr. Strong smiled. He too, in a sense, was paying out in pennies, and so far quite satisfactorily.
“Well ... take this very crisis,” he returned. “Oughtn’t there to be a grant, without a moment’s loss of time, from the Imperial Exchequer? I’m speaking from quite the lowest point of view—the mere point of view of expediency if you like. Very well. Suppose one or two nativesarescoundrels: what about it? Are matters any better because we know that? Don’t the poverty and distress exist just the same? And isn’t that precisely our opportunity, if only we had a statesman capable of seeing it?... Look here: We’ve only got to go to them and say, ‘We are full of pity and help; here are a lot of—er—lakhs; lakhs of rupees; rupee one and twopence: you may have been foolish, but it isn’t for us to cast the first stone; it’s the conditions that are wrong; go and get something to eat,and don’t forget your real friends by and by.’—Isn’t that just the way to bind them to us? By their gratitude, eh? Isn’t getting their gratitude better than blowing them from the muzzles of guns, eh? And isn’t that the real Empire, of which we all dream? Eh?...”
He warmed up to it, while keeping one ear open for anybody who might come along the passage; and when he found himself running down he grabbed the newspaper again. He doubled it back, refolded it, and again thrust it under Amory’s nose.... There! That put it all in a nutshell, he said! The figures spoke for themselves. The Home Government, he said, knew all about it all the time, but of course they came from that hopeless slough of ineptitude that humorists were pleased to call the “governing classes,” and that was why they dragged such red herrings across the path of true progress as—well, as the Suffrage, say.... What! Hadn’t Amory heard that all this agitation for the Suffrage was secretly fomented by the Government itself? Oh, come, she must know that! Why, of course it was! The Government knew dashed well what they were doing, too! It was a moral certainty that there was somebody behind the scenes actually planning half these outrages! Why? Why, simply because it got ’em popular sympathy when a Minister had his windows smashed or a paper of pepper thrown in his face. They were only too glad to have pepper thrown in their faces, because everybody said what a shame it was, and forgot all about what fools they’d been making of themselves, and when a real—er—crisis came, like this one, peoplescarcely noticed it.... But potty little intellects like Brimby’s and Wilkinson’s didn’t see as deep as that. It was only Edgar Strong and Amory who saw as deep as that. That was why they, Edgar and Amory, were where they were—leaders of thought, not subordinates....
“Just look rather carefully at those figures,” he concluded....
Nevertheless, lofty as these flights were, they had a little lost their thrill for Amory. She had heard them so very, very often. She had trembled in the taxi in vain ifthiswas all that her stealthy coming to the “Novum’s” offices meant. Nor had she put on her new sea-holly velvet to be told, however eloquently, that Wilkinson and Brimby were minor lights when compared with Edgar and herself, and that the “Times” was always wrong. Perhaps the figures that Edgar had thrust under her nose as if he had been clapping a muzzle on her meant something to the right person, but they meant nothing to Amory, and she didn’t pretend they did. They were man’s business; woman’s was “visualizing.” The two businesses, when you came to think of it,wereseparate and distinct. Whoever heard of a man wrapping himself up in a carpet and being carried by Nubians into his mistress’s presence? Whoever heard of a man’s face launching as much as an upriver punt, let alone fleets and fleets of full-sized ships? And whoever heard of the compelling beauty of a man’s eyes, as he lay on a sofa with one satiny upper-arm upraised, simply making—making—a woman come and kiss him?... It was ridiculous. Amory saw now.Even Joan of Arc must have put on her armour, not so much because of all the chopping and banging of maces and things (which must have been very noisy), but more with the idea ofinspiring.... Yes, inspiring: that was it. Therewasa difference. Why, even physically women and men were not the same, and mentally they were just as different. For example, Amory herself wouldn’t have liked to blow anybody from the mouth of a gun, but she wasn’t sure sometimes that Edgar wouldn’t positively enjoy it. He had that hard eye, and square head, and capacity for figures....
She wasn’t sure that her heart didn’t go out to him all the more because of that puzzle of noughts and dots and rupees he had thrust into her hands....
And so, as he continued (so to speak) to gain time by paying in pennies, and to keep an ear disengaged for the passage, it came about that Edgar Strong actually overshot himself. The more technical and masculine he became, the more Amory felt that it was fitting and feminine in her not to bother with these things at all, but just to go on inspiring. She still kept her eyes bent over the column of figures, but she was visualizing again. She was visualizing the Channel steamer, and the Latin Quarter, and satiny upper-arms. And the taxi-tremor had returned....
Suddenly she looked softly yet daringly up. She felt that she must be Indian—yet not too Indian.
“And then there’s suttee,” she said in a low voice.
“Eh?” said Strong. He seemed to scent danger. “Abolished,” he said shortly.
But here Amory was actually able to tell EdgarStrong something. She happened to have been reading about suttee in a feminist paper only a day or two before. No doubt Edgar read nothing but figures and grey oblongs.
“Oh, no,” she said softly but with a knowledge of her ground. “That is, I know it’s prohibited, but there was a case only a little while ago. I read it in the ‘Vaward.’ And it was awful, but splendid, too. She was a young widow, and I’m sure she had a lovely face, because she’d such a noble soul.—Don’t you think they often go together?”
But Edgar did not reply. He had walked to a little shelf full of reference books and books for review, and was turning over pages.
“And the whole village was there,” Amory continued, “and she walked to the pyre herself, and said good-bye to all her relatives, andthen——”
Edgar shut his book with a slap.—“Abolished in 1829,” he said. “It’s a criminal offence under the Code.”
Amory smiled tenderly. Abolished!... Dear, fellow, to think that in such matters he should imagine that his offences and Codes could make any difference! Of course the “Vaward” had made a mere Suffrage argument out of the thing, but to Amory it had just showed how cruel and magnificent and voluptuous and grim the East could be when it really tried.... And then all at once Amory thought, not of any particular poem she had ever read, but what a ripping thing it would be to be able to write poetry, and to say all those things that would have been rather silly in prose, andto put heaps of gorgeous images in, like the many-breasted what-was-her-name, and Thingummy—what-did-they-call-him—the god with all those arms. And there would be carpets and things too, and limbs, not plaster ones, but flesh and blood ones, as Edgar said his own were, and—and—and oh, stacks of material! The rhymes might be a bit hard, of course, and perhaps after all it might be better to leave poetry to somebody else, and to concentrate all her energies on inspiring, as Beatrice inspired Dante, and Laura Petrarch, and that other woman Camoens, and Jenny Rossetti, and Vittoria Colonna Michael Angelo. She might even inspire Edgar to write poetry. And she would be careful to keep the verses out of Cosimo’s way....
“Abolished!” she smiled in gay yet mournful mockery, and also with a touch both of reproach and of disdain in her look.... “Oh well, I suppose men think so....”
But at this he rounded just as suddenly on her as he had done when he had told her that she ought not to have come to the office. Perhaps he felt that he was losing ground again. You may be sure that Edgar Strong, actor, had never had to work as hard for his money as he had to work that afternoon.
“Amory!” he called imperiously. “I tell you it won’t do—not at this juncture! I’d just begun to find a kind of drug in my work; I’ve locked myself up here; and now you come and undo it all again with a look! I see we must have this out. Let me think.”
He began to pace the floor.
When he did speak again, his phrases came in detachedjerks. He kept looking sharply up and then digging his chin into his red tie again.
“It was different before,” he said. “It might have been all right before. We were free then—in a way. It was different in every way.... (Mind your dress in that tea).... But we can’t do anything now. Not at present. There’s this crisis. That’s suddenly sprung upon us. There’s got to be somebody at the wheel—the ‘Novum’s’ wheel, I mean. I hate talking about my duty, but you’ve read the ‘Times’ there. The ‘Times’ is always wrong, and if we desert our posts the whole game’s up—U. P. Prang’s no good here. Prang can’t be trusted at a pinch. And Wilkinson’s no better. Neither of ’em any good in an emergency. Weak man at bottom, Wilkinson—the weakness of violence—effeminate, like these, strongword poets. We can’t rely on Wilkinson and Prang. And who is there left? Eh?”
But he did not wait for an answer.
“Starving thousands, and no Imperial Grant.” His voice grew passionate. “Imperial Grant must be pressed for without delay. What’s to happen to the Real Empire if you and I put our private joys first? Eh? Answer me.... There they are, paying in pennies—and us dallying here.... No. Dash it all, no. May be good enough for some of these tame males, but it’s a bit below a man. I won’t—not now. Not at present. It would be selfish. They’ve trusted me, and——,” a shrug. “No. That’s flat. I seemynights being spent over figures and telegrams and all that sort of thing for some time to come.... Don’t thinkI’ve forgotten. I understand perfectly. I suppose that sooner or later itwillhave to be the Continent and so on—but not until this job’s settled. Not till then. Everything else—everything—has got to stand down. You do see, don’t you, Amory? I hope you do.”
As he had talked there had come over Amory a sense of what his love must be if nothing but his relentless sense of duty could frustrate it even for a day. And that was more thrilling than all the rest put together. It lifted their whole relation exactly where she had tried to put it without knowing how to put it there—into the regions of the heroic. Not that Edgar put on any frills about it. On the contrary. He was simple and plain and straight. And how perfectly right he was! Naturally, since the “Times” and its servile following of the capitalist Press would not help, Edgar had to all intents and purposes the whole of India to carry on his shoulders. It was exactly like that jolly thing of Lovelace’s, about somebody not loving somebody so much if he didn’t love Honour more. He did love her so much, and he had as much as said that there would be plenty of time to talk about the Continent later. Besides, his dear, rough, unaffected way of calling this heroic work his “job!” It was just as if one of those knights of old had called slaying dragons and delivering the oppressed his “job!”
Amory was exalted as she had never been exalted. She turned to him where he stood on the hearth, and laved him with a fond and exultant look.
“I see,” she said bravely. “I was wretchedly selfish. But remember, won’t you, when you’re fightingthis great battle against all those odds, and saying all those lovely things to the Indians, and getting their confidence, and just showing all those other people how stupid they are, thatIdidn’t stop you, dear! I know it would be beastly of me to stop you! I shouldn’t be worthy of you.... But I think you ought to appoint a Committee or something, and have the meetings reported in the ‘Novum,’ and I’m sure Cosimo wouldn’t grudge the money. Oh, how I wish I couldhelp!——”
But he did not say, as she had half hoped he would say, that she did help, by inspiring. Instead, he held out his hand. As she took it in both of hers she wondered what she ought to do with it. If it had been his foot, and he had been the old-fashioned sort of knight, she could have fastened a spur on it. Or she might have belted a sword about her waist. But to have filled his fountain-pen, which was his real weapon, would have been rather stupid.... He was leading her, ever so sympathetically, to the door. He opened it, took from it the notice that had kept Mr. Prang away, and stood with her on the landing.
“Good-bye,” she said.
He glanced over his shoulder, and then almost hurt her hands, he gripped them so hard.
“Good-bye,” he said, his eyes looking into hers. “Youdounderstand, don’t you, Amory?”
“Yes, Edgar.”
Even then he seemed loth to part from her. He accompanied her to the top of the stairs.—“You’ll let me know when you’re coming again, won’t, you?” he asked.
“Yes. Good-bye.”
And she tore herself away.
At the first turning of the stairs Amory stood aside to allow a rather untidy young woman to pass. This young woman had a long bare neck that reminded Amory of an artist’s model, and her hands were thrust into the fore-pockets of a brown knitted coat. She was whistling, but she stopped when she saw Amory.
“Do you know whether Mr. Dickinson, the poster artist, is up here?” she asked.
“The next floor, I think,” Amory replied.
“Thanks,” said the girl, and passed up.
“No, not this week,” Dorothy said. “Dot wrote a fortnight ago. This one’s from Mollie. (You remember Mollie, Katie? She came to that funny little place we had on Cheyne Walk once, but of course she was only about twelve then. She’s nearly nineteen now, and so tall! They’ve just gone to Kohat).—Shall I read it, auntie?”
And she read:—
“‘I’m afraid I wrote you a hatefully skimpy letter last time—,’” h’m, we can skip that; here’s where they started: “‘It was the beastliest journey that I ever made. To begin with, we were the eighteenth tonga that day, so we got tired and wretched ponies; we had one pair for fifteen miles and couldn’t get another pair for love or money. We left Murree at two o’clock and got to Pindi at nine. The dust was ghastly. Mercifully Baba slept like a lump in our arms from five till nine, so he was all right. We had from nine till one to wait in Pindi Station, and had dinner, and Baba had a wash and clean-up and a bottle, and we got on board the train and off. Baba’s cot, etc.; and we settled down for the night. Nurse and Baba and Mary and I were in one carriage and Jim next door. I slept beautifullytill one o’clock, and then I woke and stayed awake. The bumping was terrific, and it made me so angry to look down on the others and see them fast asleep! I had an upper berth. Baba slept from eleven-thirty till six-thirty! So we had no trouble at all withhim——
“‘I’m afraid I wrote you a hatefully skimpy letter last time—,’” h’m, we can skip that; here’s where they started: “‘It was the beastliest journey that I ever made. To begin with, we were the eighteenth tonga that day, so we got tired and wretched ponies; we had one pair for fifteen miles and couldn’t get another pair for love or money. We left Murree at two o’clock and got to Pindi at nine. The dust was ghastly. Mercifully Baba slept like a lump in our arms from five till nine, so he was all right. We had from nine till one to wait in Pindi Station, and had dinner, and Baba had a wash and clean-up and a bottle, and we got on board the train and off. Baba’s cot, etc.; and we settled down for the night. Nurse and Baba and Mary and I were in one carriage and Jim next door. I slept beautifullytill one o’clock, and then I woke and stayed awake. The bumping was terrific, and it made me so angry to look down on the others and see them fast asleep! I had an upper berth. Baba slept from eleven-thirty till six-thirty! So we had no trouble at all withhim——
“Well, and so they got to Kohat. (I hope this isn’t boring you, Katie.)”
“‘It was most beautifully cool and fresh, and we had the mess tonga and drove to the bungalow. The flowering shrubs here would delight Auntie Grace. I’ve fallen in love with a bush of hibiscus in the compound, but find it won’t live in water, but droops directly one picks it. The trees are mostly the palmy kind, and so green, and the ranges of hills behind are exactly like the Red Sea ranges. The outside of our bungalow is covered with purple convolvulus, and the verandah goes practically all round it. Jim’s room is just like him—heads he’s shot, study, dressing-room, and workshop, all in one, and it’s quite the fullest room in the house. Beyond that there’s my room, looking out over the SinaiRange——’
“‘It was most beautifully cool and fresh, and we had the mess tonga and drove to the bungalow. The flowering shrubs here would delight Auntie Grace. I’ve fallen in love with a bush of hibiscus in the compound, but find it won’t live in water, but droops directly one picks it. The trees are mostly the palmy kind, and so green, and the ranges of hills behind are exactly like the Red Sea ranges. The outside of our bungalow is covered with purple convolvulus, and the verandah goes practically all round it. Jim’s room is just like him—heads he’s shot, study, dressing-room, and workshop, all in one, and it’s quite the fullest room in the house. Beyond that there’s my room, looking out over the SinaiRange——’
“Then there are the drawing and dining-rooms——”
“‘The curtains are a pale terra-cotta pink over the door and dark green in the bay-windows, with white net in front. The drawing-room is all green. The durrie (that’s the carpet) is green, with a darker border, and the sofa and chairs and mantelpiece-cover andthe screen behind the sofa all green. There’s another bay-window, with far curtains of green and the near ones chintz, an awfully pretty cream spotted net with a green hem let in. That makes three lots, two in the window itself and a third on a pole where the arch comes into the room. Then over the three doors there are chintz curtains, cream, with a big pattern of pink and green and blue, just like Harrods’catalogue——’
“‘The curtains are a pale terra-cotta pink over the door and dark green in the bay-windows, with white net in front. The drawing-room is all green. The durrie (that’s the carpet) is green, with a darker border, and the sofa and chairs and mantelpiece-cover andthe screen behind the sofa all green. There’s another bay-window, with far curtains of green and the near ones chintz, an awfully pretty cream spotted net with a green hem let in. That makes three lots, two in the window itself and a third on a pole where the arch comes into the room. Then over the three doors there are chintz curtains, cream, with a big pattern of pink and green and blue, just like Harrods’catalogue——’
“Can’t youseeit all!—H’m, h’m!... Then on the Sunday morning they got the mess tonga and went out to Dhoda, with butterfly-nets, and Jim went fishing—h’m, h’m—and shesays—
“‘It’s just like the Old Testament; I shouldn’t have been in the least surprised to meet Abraham and Jacob. It’s the flatness of it, and the flocks and herds. There are women with pitchers on their heads, and a man was making scores of bricks with mud and straw—exactly like the pictures of the Children of Israel in “Line upon Line.” And about a hundred horses and mules and donkeys and carts all stopped at midday, because it was so hot, and it was just what I’d always imagined Jacob doing. But inside cantonments it isn’t a bit Biblical, but rather too civilized, etc.’
“‘It’s just like the Old Testament; I shouldn’t have been in the least surprised to meet Abraham and Jacob. It’s the flatness of it, and the flocks and herds. There are women with pitchers on their heads, and a man was making scores of bricks with mud and straw—exactly like the pictures of the Children of Israel in “Line upon Line.” And about a hundred horses and mules and donkeys and carts all stopped at midday, because it was so hot, and it was just what I’d always imagined Jacob doing. But inside cantonments it isn’t a bit Biblical, but rather too civilized, etc.’
(“Isn’t Katie patient, listening to all this, auntie!”)
“‘But you can’t go far afield at Kohat. At Murree you could always get a three or four mile walk round Pindi Point, but here it’s just to the Club and back. We go to the Central Godown and the Fancy Godown to shop. The Central is groceries, and the Fancy toothpowder,Scrubb’s Ammonia, etc. On Saturday they were afraid Captain Horrocks had smallpox, and so we all got vaccinated, but now that we’ve all taken beautifully it seems it isn’t smallpox after all, and we’ve all got swelled arms, but Captain Horrocks is off the sick-list to-morrow. Colonel Wade is smaller than ever. Mrs. Wade is coming out by the “Rewa.” Mrs. Beecher came to tea onSunday——’
“‘But you can’t go far afield at Kohat. At Murree you could always get a three or four mile walk round Pindi Point, but here it’s just to the Club and back. We go to the Central Godown and the Fancy Godown to shop. The Central is groceries, and the Fancy toothpowder,Scrubb’s Ammonia, etc. On Saturday they were afraid Captain Horrocks had smallpox, and so we all got vaccinated, but now that we’ve all taken beautifully it seems it isn’t smallpox after all, and we’ve all got swelled arms, but Captain Horrocks is off the sick-list to-morrow. Colonel Wade is smaller than ever. Mrs. Wade is coming out by the “Rewa.” Mrs. Beecher came to tea onSunday——’
(“Is thatourMrs. Beecher, when Uncle Dick was at Chatham,auntie?”)—
“‘—and I forgot to say that Dot’s parrots stood the journey awfully well, but they’ve got at the loquat trees and destroyed all the young shoots. Jim saw us safely in and is now off on his Indus trip. The 56th are going in March, and the 53rd come instead. I’m sure the new baby’s a little darling; what are you going to callhim?——’
“‘—and I forgot to say that Dot’s parrots stood the journey awfully well, but they’ve got at the loquat trees and destroyed all the young shoots. Jim saw us safely in and is now off on his Indus trip. The 56th are going in March, and the 53rd come instead. I’m sure the new baby’s a little darling; what are you going to callhim?——’
“And so on. Idothink she writes such good letters. Now let’s have yours, Aunt Grace (and that reallywillbe the end, Katie).”
And Lady Tasker’s letters also were “put in.”
It was a Sunday afternoon, at Cromwell Gardens. Stan was away with his film company for the week-end, and Dorothy had got Katie to stay with her during his absence and had proposed a call on Lady Tasker. They had brought the third Bit with them, and he now slept in one of the cots upstairs. Lady Tasker sat with her crochet at the great first-floor window that looked over its balcony out along the Brompton Road. On the left stretched the long and grey and red andniched and statued façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the failing of the western flush was leaving the sky chill and sharp as steel and the wide traffic-polished road almost of the same colour. Inside the lofty room was the still glow of a perfect “toasting-fire,” and Lady Tasker had just asked Katie to be so good as to put more coal on before it sank too low.
Katie Deedes had made no scruple whatever about changing her coat in more senses of the words than one. She had bought a navy-blue costume and a new toque (with a wing in it), and since then had got into the way of expressing her doubts whether Britomart Belchamber’s hockey legs and Dawn of Freedom eye were in the truest sense feminine. Nay, that is altogether to understate the change in Katie. She had now no doubt about these things whatever. As Saul became Paul, so Katie now not only reviled that which she had cast off, but was even prepared, like the Apostle at Antioch, to withstand the older Peters of Imperialism to their faces, did she detect the least sign of temporizing in them. And this treason had involved the final giving-way of every one of her old associates. She was all for guns and grim measures; and while she looked fondly on Boy Scouts in the streets and talked about “the thin end of the wedge of Conscription,” she scowled on the dusky-skinned sojourners within London’s gates, and advocated wholesale deportations.
And in all this Katie Deedes was only returning to her own fold, though her people were not soldiers, but lawyers. For the matter of that, her father’s cousin was a very august personage indeed, for whose comfort,when he travelled, highly-placed railway officials made themselves personally responsible, and whose solemn progress to Assize was snapshotted for the illustrated papers and thrown on five hundred cinema screens. In the past Katie had been privileged to call this kingpost of the Law “Uncle Joe.”...
And then Mr. Strong had got hold of her....
And after Mr. Strong, Mr. Wilkinson....
And according to Mr. Wilkinson, the most ferocious of the hanging-judges had been a beaming humanitarian by comparison with Sir Joseph. Mr. Wilkinson had the whole of Sir Joseph’s career at his fingers’ ends: the So-and-So judgment—this or that flagrant summing up—the other deliberate and wicked misdirection to the jury. Sir Joseph’s heart was black, his law bunkum, and he had only got where he was by self-advertisement and picking the brains of men a hundred times fitter for heaven than himself....
Therefore Katie, hearing this horrible tale, had quailed, and had straightway given away this devil who was the sinister glory of her house. She had agreed that he was a man whom anybody might righteously have shot on sight, and had gathered her Greenaway garments about her whenever she had passed within a mile of Sir Joseph’s door....
But now he was “Uncle Joe” again, and—well, it must have been rather funny. For Katie’s impressionable conscience had given her no rest day or night until she had sought Uncle Joe out and had made a clean breast of it all before him. Katie had fanciedshe had seen something like a twinkle in those sinful old eyes, but (this was when she mentioned the name of the “Novum”) the twinkle had vanished again. Oh, yes, Sir Joseph, had heard of the “Novum.” Didn’t a Mr. Prang write for it?...
And thereupon Katie had given Mr. Prang away too....
But in the end Sir Joseph had forgiven her, and had told her that she had better not be either a revolutionary, nor yet the kind of Conservative that is only a revolutionary turned inside-out, but just a good little girl, and had asked her how she was getting on, and why she hadn’t been to see her Aunt Anne, and whether she would like some tickets for a Needlework Exhibition; and now she was just beginning to forget that he had ever been anything but “Uncle Joe,” who had given her toys at Christmas, and Sunday tickets for the Zoo whenever she had wanted to go there on that particularly crowded day.
Dorothy had had something of this in her mind when she had brought Katie to Cromwell Gardens that Sunday afternoon. From Katie’s new attitude to her own Ludlow project was not so far as it seemed. If she could lead the zealous ’vert to such promising general topics as Boy Scouts, Compulsory Service, and the preparation of boys for the Army (topics that Katie constantly brought forward by denunciation of their opposites), her scheme would certainly not suffer, and might even be advanced.
And, as it happened, no sooner had Dorothy tuckedher last letter back into its envelope than Katie broke out—earnestly, proselytizingly, and very prettily on the stump.
“There you are!” she exclaimed. “That’s allexactlywhat I mean! Why, any one of those letters ought to be enough to convince anybody! Here are all these stupid people at home, ready to believe everything a native tells them, going on as they do, and hardly one of them’s ever set foot out of England in his life! Of course the Indians know exactly whattheywant, but don’t you see, Dorothy—,” very patiently she explained it for fear Dorothy should not see, “—don’t you see that it’s all so much a matter of course to Mollie and those that they can actually write whole letters about window-curtains! Ilovethat about the window-curtains! It’s all such an old story tothem! Theyknow, you see, and haven’t got to be talking about it all the time in order to persuade themselves! There itis!—But these other people don’t know anything at all. They don’t even see what a perfect answer window-curtains are to them! They go on and on and on—youdosee what I mean,Dorothy?——”
“Yes, dear,” said Dorothy, mildly thinking of the great number of people there were in the world who would take no end of trouble to explain things to her. “Go on.”
And Katie continued to urge upon her friend the argument that those know most about a country who know most about it.
Katie had got to the stage of being almost sure that she remembered Mollie’s coming into the studio inCheyne Walk one day, when Lady Tasker, who had not spoken, suddenly looked up from her crochet and said, “Look, Dorothy—that’s the girl I was speaking about—coming along past the Museum there.”
Dorothy rose and walked to the window.—“Where?” she said.
“Passing the policeman now.”
Dorothy gave a sudden exclamation.—“Why,” she exclaimed, “—come here, Katie, quick—it’s Amory Towers!—It is Amory, isn’t it?”
Katie had run to the window, too. The two women stood watching the figure in the mushroom-white hat and the glaucous blue velvet that idled forlornly along the pavement.
“Do you mean Mrs. Pratt?” said Lady Tasker, putting up her glass again. “Are you quite sure?”
Once before in her life, in the days before her marriage, Amory Towers had done the same thing that she was doing now. Then, seeking something, perhaps a refuge from herself, she had walked the streets until she was ready to drop with fatigue, watching faces passing, passing, for ever passing, and slowly gathering from them a hypnotic stupor. Sometimes, for hour after hour, she had seen nothing but eyes—eyes various in shape and colour as the pebbles on a beach, sometimes looking into hers, sometimes looking past her, sometimes tipped with arrow-heads of white as they turned, sometimes only to be seen under their lids as a finger-nail is seen within the finger of a glove. And at other times, weary of her fellow-beings and ceasing to lookany more at them, she had seen nothing but doors and windows, or fan-lights, or the numbers of houses, or window-boxes, or the patterns of railings, or the serried shapes of chimneys against the sky. She had been looking, and yet not looking, for Cosimo Pratt then; she was looking, and yet not looking, for Edgar Strong now. Had she met him she had nothing new to say to him; she only knew that he had taken weak possession of her mind. She was looking for him in South Kensington because he had once told her, when asked suddenly, that he lived in Sydney Street, S. W., and frequently walked to the Indian section of the Imperial Institute in order to penetrate into the real soul of a people through its art; and she was not looking for him, because one day she had remembered that he had said before that he lived in South Kentish Town—which was rather like South Kensington, but not the same—and something deep down within her told her that the other was a lie.
But yet her feet dragged her to the quarter, as to other quarters, and she talked to herself as she walked. She told herself that her husband did not understand her, and that it would be romantic and silencing did she take a lover to her arms; and she could have wept that, of all the flagrant splendours of which she dreamed, London’s grey should remain her only share. And she knew that the attendants of the Imperial Institute had begun to look at her. Once she had spoken to one of them, but when she had thought of asking him whether he knew a Mr. Strong who came there to study Indian Art, her heart had suddenly failed her, and the questionhad stayed unspoken. Nevertheless, she had feared that the man had guessed her thought, and must be taking stock of her face against some contingency (to visualize which passed the heavy time on) that had a Divorce Court in it, and hotel porters and chambermaids who gave evidence, and the Channel boat, and two forsaken children, and grimy raptures in the Latin Quarter, and its hectic cafés at night....
And so she walked, feeling herself special and strange and frightened and half-resolved; and thrice in as many weeks Lady Tasker, sitting with her crochet at her window, had seen her pass, but had not been able to believe that this was the woman, with a husband and children, on whom she had once called at that house with the secretive privet hedge away in Hampstead.
“ItisAmory!” Dorothy exclaimed. “Is she coming here?”
Lady Tasker spoke reflectively.—“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But—will you fetch her in? I should like to see her.”
“If you like, auntie,” said Dorothy, though a little reluctantly.
But Lady Tasker seemed to change her mind. She laid down her crochet and rose.
“No, never mind,” she said. “I’ll fetch her myself.”
And the old lady of seventy passed slowly out of the room, and Katie and Dorothy moved away from the window.
Lady Tasker was back again in five minutes, but noAmory came with her. She walked back to her chair, moved it, and took up her work again.—“Switch the table light on,” she said.
“Was it Amory?” Dorothy ventured to ask after a silence.
“Yes,” Lady Tasker replied.
“And wouldn’t she come in?”
“She said she was hurrying back home.”
That raised a question so plain that Dorothy thought it tactful to make rather a fuss about finding some album or other that should convince Katie that she really had met the Mollie who had written the letter about the window-curtains. Lady Tasker’s needle was dancing rather more quickly than usual. Dorothy found her album, switched on another light, and told Katie to make room for her on her chair.
Amory, dawdling like that, and then, when spoken to, to have the face to say that she was hurrying backhome!——
It was some minutes later that Lady Tasker said off-handedly, “Has she any children besides those twins?”
“Amory?” Dorothy replied, looking up from the album. “No.”
“How old is she?” Lady Tasker asked.
“Thirty-two, isn’t she, Katie?”
“About that.”
“Is she very—athletic?” Lady Tasker next wanted to know.
“Not at all, I should say.”
“I mean she doesn’t go in for marathon races or Channel swimming or anything of that kind?”
“Amory? No,” said Dorothy, puzzled.
“And you’re sure of her age?” the old lady persisted.
“Well—she may only be thirty-one.”
“I don’t mean is she younger. Is sheolderthan that?”
“No—I know by my own age.”
“H’m!” said Lady Tasker; and again her needle danced....
Dorothy was explaining to Katie that Mollie was fair, about her own colour, but of course the hair never came out right in a photograph, when Lady Tasker suddenly began a further series of questions.
“Dorothy——”
“Yes?”
“Did she—develop—early?”
“Who—Amory? I don’t know. Did she, Katie? Of course she was quite the cleverest girl at the McGrath.”
“Ah!... What did she do at the McGrath?”
“Why, painted. You’re awfully mysterious, auntie! It was soon after she left the McGrath that she painted ‘Barrage’—you’ve heard of her feminist picture that made such a stir!”
“Ah, yes. Yes. I didn’t see it, but I did hear about it. I don’t know anything about art.—Had she any affair before she married young Pratt?”
“No. I’m sure of that. I knew her so well.” Dorothy was quite confident on that point, and Katie agreed. Lady Tasker’s questions continued.
And then, suddenly, into this apparently aimless catechismthe word “doctor” came. Dorothy gave a start.
“Aunt Grace!... Do you mean Amory’s ill?” she cried.
Lady Tasker did not look up from her crochet.—“Ill?” she said. “I’ve no reason to suppose so. I didn’t say she was ill. There’s no illness about it.... By the way, I don’t think I’ve asked how Stan is.”
But for the curiously persistent questions, Dorothy might have seized the opportunity to hint that Stan was made for something more nationally useful than getting himself black and blue by stopping runaway horses for the film or running the risk of double pneumonia by being fished out of the sea on a January day—which was the form his bread-winning was taking on that particular week-end. But the Ludlow design was for the moment forgotten. She would have liked to ask her aunt straight out what she really meant, but feared to be rude. So she turned to the album again, and again Katie, turning from turban to staff-cap and from staff-cap to pith helmet, urged thatthosewere the people who really knew what they were talking about—surely Dorothy sawthat!——
Then, in the middle of Dorothy’s bewilderment, once more the questions.... About that painting of her friend’s, Lady Tasker wanted to know: did Mrs. Pratt get any real satisfaction out of it?—Any emotional satisfaction?—Was she entirely wrapped up in it?—Or was it just a sort of hitting at the air?—Did it exhaust her to no purpose, or was it really worth something when it wasdone?——
“If Dorothy doesn’t know, surely you do, Katie.”
Katie coloured a little.—“I liked ‘Barrage’ awfully at the time,” she confessed, “but—,” and she cheered up again, “—Ihateit now.”
“But did her work—what’s the expression?—fill her life?”
Here Dorothy answered for Katie.—“I think she rather liked the fame part of it,” she said slowly.
“Does she paint now?”
“Very little, I think, Lady Tasker.”
“Has her children to look after, I suppose?”
“Well—she has both a nurse and a governess——”
“They’re quite well off, aren’t they? I seem to remember that Pratt came into quite a lot.”
“They seem to spend a great deal.”
“But that’s only a small house of theirs?”
“Oh, yes, they’re rather proud of that. They don’t spend their money selfishly. It goes to the Cause, you see.”
“What Cause?” Lady Tasker asked abruptly.
This was Katie’s cue....
She ceased, and Lady Tasker muttered something. It sounded rather like “H’m! Too much money and not enough to do!” but neither of her companions was near enough to be quite sure.
And thereupon the questions stopped.
But a surmise of their drift had begun to dawn glimmeringly upon Dorothy. She ceased to hear the exposition of Imperialism’s real needs into which Katie presently launched, and fell into a meditation. Andof that meditation this was about the length andbreadth:—
Until the law should allow a man to have more wives than one (if then), of course only one woman in the world could be perfectly happy—the woman who had Stan. That conviction came first, and last, and ran throughout her meditation. And of what Dorothy might compassionately have called secondary happinesses she had hitherto not thought very much. She had merely thanked her stars that she had not married a man like Cosimo, had once or twice rather resented Amory’s well-meant but left-handed kindnesses, and that had been the extent of her concern about the Pratt household. But first Katie, and now her aunt, had set her wondering hard enough about that household now.
What, she asked herself, had the Pratts married on? What discoveries had they made in one another, what resources found within themselves? Apart from their talks and books and meetings and “interests” and that full pack of their theories, whatwastheir marriage? Thrown alone together for an hour, did they fret? Did their yawning cease when the bell rang and a caller was admitted? Did even the same succession of callers become stale and a bore, so that strangers had to be sought to provide a stimulus? And did they call these and half a hundred other forms of mutual boredom by the rather resounding names that blabbing Katie had repeated to her—“wider interests,” “the broad outlook,” “the breaking down of personal insularity,” and the rest?
And for once Dorothy dropped her excusatory attitude towards her friend. She dropped it so completely that by and by she found herself wondering whether Amory would have married Cosimo had he been a poor man. She was aware that, stated in that way, it sounded hideous; nor did she quite mean that perhaps Amory had married Cosimo simply and solely because hehadnot been poor; no doubt Amory had assumed other things to be equal that as a matter of fact had unfortunately proved to be not equal at all; but shediddoubt now whether Amory had not missed that something, that something made of so many things, that caused her own heart suddenly to gush out to the absent Stan. The thought frightened her a little. Had Amory married and had babies—all, as it were, beside the mark?...
Dorothy did not know.
But an obscurer hint still had seemed to lie behind her aunt’s persistent questions. “Was Amory ill?” she herself had asked in alarm when that unexpected word “doctor” had been quietly dropped; and “Ill? I didn’t say she was ill; there’s no illness about it,” Lady Tasker had replied. No illness about what? Apparently about something Lady Tasker saw, or thought she saw, in Amory.... An old lady whose years had earned her the right to sit comfortably in her chair had gone so far as to descend the stairs and go out into the street to have a closer look at a young one: why? Why ask “Is she a Channel swimmer?” and “Is her painting a mere hitting of the air?” Why this insistence on some satisfaction for labour, as ifwithout that satisfaction the labour wreaked on the labourer some sort of revenge? What sort of a revenge? And why on Amory?
Yes, Dorothy would have liked to ask her aunt a good many questions....
She did not know that Lady Tasker could not have answered them. She did not know that the whole world is waiting for precisely those replies. She did not know that the data of a great experiment have not yet begun to be gathered together. She did not know that, while she and Stan would never see the results of that experiment, little Noel and the other Bits, and Corin and Bonniebell might. She only knew that her aunt was a wise and experienced woman, with an appetite for life and all belonging to it that only grew the stronger as her remaining years drew in, and that apparently Lady Tasker found something to question, if not to fear.
“Is she a Channel swimmer? Does she get any emotional satisfaction out of what she does?”
They were oddly precise questions....
Much less odd was that homely summing-up of Lady Tasker’s: “Too much money, and not enough to do.”...
Dorothy had often thought that herself.
Thegate in the privet hedge of The Witan had had little rest all the afternoon. It was a Sunday, the one following that on which Lady Tasker had issued bareheaded from her door, had crossed the road, and had caused Amory to start half out of her skin by suddenly speaking to her. The Wyrons had come in the morning; they had been expressly asked to lunch; but it was known that Dickie Lemesurier was coming in afterwards to discuss an advertisement, and if Dickie came the chances were that Mr. Brimby would not be very long after her. As a matter of fact Dickie and Mr. Brimby had encountered one another outside and had arrived together at a little after three, bringing three young men, friends of Mr. Brimby’s still at Oxford, with them. These young men wore Norfolk jackets, gold-pinned polo-collars, black brogues and turned-up trousers; and apparently they had hesitated to take Cosimo at his word about “spreading themselves about anywhere,” for they stood shoulder to shoulder in the studio, and when one turned to look at a picture or other object on the wall, all did so. Then, not many minutes later, Mr. Wilkinson had entered, in his double-breasted blue reefer, bringing with him a stunted, bow-legged man who did not carry, butlooked as if he ought to have carried, a miner’s lamp; and by half-past four, of The Witan’s habitués, only Mr. Prang and Edgar Strong were lacking. But Edgar was coming. It had been found impossible, or at any rate Amory had decided that it was impossible, to discuss the question of Dickie’s advertisement without him. But he was very late.
When Britomart Belchamber came in simultaneously with the tea and the twins at a little before five, the studio was full. The asbestos log purred softly, and Mr. Brimby’s three Oxford friends, glad perhaps of something to do, walked here and there, each of them with a plate of bread and butter in either hand, not realizing that at The Witan the beautiful Chinese rule of politeness was always observed—“When the stranger is in your melon-patch, be a little inattentive.” Had Dickie Lemesurier and Laura Wyron eaten half the white and brown that was presented to them, they must have been seriously unwell. It was Cosimo, grey-collared and with a claret-coloured velvet waistcoat showing under his slackly-buttoned tweed jacket, who gave the young men the friendly hint, “Everybody helps themselves here, my dear fellows.” Then the Norfolk jackets came together again, and presently their owners turned with one accord to examine the hock and the top-side that hung on the wall over the sofa.
Not so much a blending of voices as an incessant racket of emphatic and independent pronouncements filled the studio. Walter Wyron had fastened upon the man who looked as if he ought to have carried a miner’s lamp, and his forefinger was wagging like agauge-needle as he explained that one of his Lectures had been misrepresented, and that he hadnevertaken up the position that a kind of Saturnalia should be definitely state-established. He admitted, nevertheless, that the question of such an establishment ought to be considered, like any other question, on its merits, and that after that the argument should be followed whithersoever it led.—Dickie Lemesurier, excessively animated, and with the whites showing dancingly all round her pupils, was talking Césanne and Van Gogh to Laura, and declaring that something was “quite the” something or other.—Mr. Brimby’s hand was fondling Bonniebell’s head while he deprecated the high degree of precision of the modern rifle to Mr. Wilkinson. “If only it wasn’t so ruthlessly logical!” he was sighing. “If only it was subject to the slight organic accident, to those beautiful adaptations of give-and-take that make judgment harsh, and teach us that we ought never to condemn!”—Corin, drawn by the word “gun,” was demanding to be told whether that was the gun that had been taken away from him.—And Britomart Belchamber, indifferent alike to the glances of the Oxford men and their trepidation in her presence, stood like a caryatid under a wall-bracket with an ivy-green replica of Bastianini’s Dante upon it.
“No, no, not for a moment, my dear sir!” Walter shouted to the man who looked like (and was) a miner. “That is to ignore the context. I admit I used the less-known Pompeian friezes as a rough illustration of what I meant—but I didnotsuggest that Waring & Gillow’s should put them on the market! What I didsay was that we moderns must work out our damnation on the same lines that the ancients did. Read your Nietzsche, my good fellow, and see whathesays about the practical serviceability of Excess! I contend that a kind of generaloubliance, say for three weeks in the year, to which everybody without exception would have to conform (so that we shouldn’t have the superior person bringing things up against usafterwards)——”
“Ah doan’t see how ye could mak’ fowk——,” the miner began, in an accent that for a moment seemed to blast a hole clean through the racket. But the hole closed up again.
“Ah, at present you don’t,” Walter cried. “The spade-work isn’t done yet. We need more education. But every new and greatidea——”
But here an outburst from Mr. Wilkinson to Mr. Brimby drowned Walter’s voice. Mr. Wilkinson raised his clenched fist, but only for emphasis, and not in order to strike Mr. Brimby.