But Amory drew her own hand back. The patheticweakness passed. Wearily she laughed now.
“Oh no, better not, Cosimo. There are perfectly innocent things that we can’t allow ourselves. It’s hard, isn’t it? but you see what the world is. It’s probably damned us already; we’re probably damned at this moment for being together here; but as long as we give it no reason it only recoils on its own head. I’m perfectly willing to accept the situation. I accepted it in a sense when I did that foolish thing with the Antinöus. I thought then that I was just vowing myself to my art, but I see now that it was a far greater thing. It really meant that I chose all the large and beautiful and abstract things—a sort of life of toil—and put off these other things once for all. I didn’t know; I might not have had the courage if I’d known; but there’s no going back. Once I said our friendship must end, Cosimo, but that’s over too. They’d talk just the same if we ended it now. So let them talk. It’s bitter, but if I can bear it you ought to be able to. After all, there is that petty sense in which I lose more than you do.”
Cosimo had been staring hard at her. Again he had a merely conventional look. This time it was that of a man who, occupied with important and practical things, indulgently allows a woman to talk while he arrives at his conclusion. Presently he seemed to have come to the conclusion. His face was set.
“Well,” he said, rousing himself, “that leaves only one thing to be done.”
“Precisely,” said Amory, with a little shrug.
“You must marry me,” said Cosimo.
Amory fell back into the sofa-corner and for a moment looked at him as if she did not believe she could have heard aright. Then she smiled. She shook her head slowly.
Poor, foolish Cosimo! Wasthatall he saw? Well she must teach him....
“Don’t you see, Cosimo,” she said, as patiently as if she had been instructing a child, “that that’s the one thing thatcan’tbe done?”
“Can’t!—It must!”
“Really, Cosimo——”
“But it’s as plain as it can be——”
“But you don’t, you don’t see, dear,” Amory replied, still smiling. “That would be to be false to everything. It would be an admission. Think how all those people who have been so hideously wrong would instantly be sure they’d been perfectly right all the time! Why, it might just as well have been so!... No, Cosimo, that would be mere weakness—yielding to pressure, and an acknowledgment of that very opinion we hate so. We can’t be on both sides at once, Cosimo. Either we’ve been right or we’ve been wrong, and I know whichIthink we’ve been. Don’t you seeyet, dear, what it meant when I kissed the Antinöus? It meant that I removed myselfawayfrom all that!... Really, Cosimo, I think you are almost dull enough sometimes to marry!”
“But—but—lots of the League peoplearemarried——” said Cosimo, bewildered.
“Ah, but they aren’t you and me, Cosimo! They haven’t our perfect friendship. Besides, I’mratherproud, you know. I don’t think I could ever accept a man who merely thought he was under an obligation to marry me. You never asked me before, and you were quite right, just as you’re quite wrong in this. If you really want an answer, it’s—No. And if you want to know whether you’ve got to behave one bit differently because of this—well, that’s No too. I admit I was angry, but now that I’ve talked it over I find it really rather amusing. It’s quite funny, in fact, coming from Dorothy, after you know what. There are Dorothy’s ideas, and there are mine, and I do sometimes think that if Dorothy thinks a thing right that’s almost enough in itself to make it wrong for me. I hope you seenow, Cosimo?”
Cosimo may not have seen, but he was at any rate silenced. A new fear had seized on him now. Hitherto he had taken this question of “compromising” very much at Amory’s valuation, without overmuch thought about it on his own account; but now—now that he had had his hair cut—that irrational conventional point of view refused to be altogether banished. Though it came late and should have come earlier, perhaps he ought to consider her a little more; indeed, things being so hatefully as they seemed to be, it might be better if, for some time to come at any rate, they were less together than they had been in the past. The thought afflicted him with a melancholy sense of loneliness and hopelessness; he felt a little as a man feels after a weakening attack of influenza. Something he had grown to need he must now be more or less deprived of.... But again, as he mumbled somethingof this kind, Amory came out shining and magnificent. Not go on precisely as before? Why (she exclaimed) that would be the next worst thing to marrying! If any difference was to be made at all, they must be seen evenmoreconstantly together than before! Just as the League sometimes overstated things in order that those things should “carry,” so even by a slight parade of intimacy they must enter their protest. To weaken now would never, never do! Surely Cosimo sawthat?
So they dined that night at the Lettuce Grill, inSt.Martins Lane, and Amory had never been more trenchant and brilliant, more bright and tender and free and brave. And after dinner they joined a larger party at one of the long tables, and Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish dropped in, and everybody was absolutely at his and her best, and it was almost like a larger and more responsible McGrath over again, and the Dawn, if emotion and enthusiasm and resolve counted for anything at all, was hastened that night by several years. And before the party broke up Amory definitely clinched the sale of “Barrage”.... And Cosimo was pensive and abstracted now. He saw, not only how right Amory was in everything she said and did, but how temerarious he himself had been when, that afternoon, he had said, almost as if he had been making a sacrifice, that a being so daring and dashing and gloriously winged must of course marry him. There was no of course about it. It would be she, not he, who would be making the sacrifice. He would be lucky to get her. Laura Beamish, whispering to him that Amory, drinking to the Dawn in the Lettuce Grill’sUnfermented Grape-fruit Moselle, was stunningly pretty, told Cosimo nothing that he could not now see for himself.
Yes, Cosimo Pratt saw at last that he had come near making a precious ass of himself when he had taken her acceptance of him so entirely for granted. He did not suppose for a moment that a girl so frank and free and brave could (to put it grossly) be holding out for her price; nevertheless her price could be no light one. And because it was not a light one, Cosimo was now full of eagerness to pay it.
Thesale of “Barrage” to the Manumission League was definitely concluded within the week. Amory thought it a distinct smack in the eye for Mr. Hamilton Dix. Mr. Dix, in hoodwinking her, and all but fraudulently getting her to accept Croziers’ miserable hundred pounds, had no doubt thought he was doing a smart stroke of business; but he was likely to squirm now, and to wish he had not given her permission to sell privately what work she could. True, Amory admitted that in a sense she had been indebted to Dorothy Lennard for this release—but only in a sense. It was a thing anybody would have thought of, and things anybody might think of were very lightly and happily hit off in that perfect phrase of Nietzsche’s, “the vulgarity of the lucky find.” In any case, Amory and nobody else had actually painted “Barrage.” So if Dorothy liked to go about boasting that she herself had procured the sale to the League—not that Amory knew for a fact that she had done or was doing this—well, it would be a little beneath Amory’s dignity to contradict her. Some people cannot bear to hear of the success of others. Amory thanked goodness that she was not like that.
The transaction put her into possession of no less asum than two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds, and for a single picture—at last that was something like! She had always known it would come, and come it had. Again, as she had done after the Crozier agreement, she counted the time “Barrage” had taken to paint; again she saw those other pictures she intended to paint—the Education picture, the State Motherhood picture, the terrible indictment of all non-members of the Manumission League that the White Slave canvas was to set forth; and again she saw herself rich. “Barrage” had left her limp and a rag, but that was past. It paid in cash to soar. Throes meant thousands. She laughed at her immediate two hundred, and straightway set about the spending of it.
And first of all she discovered that no system of physical exercises yet invented can compare for one moment with silk stockings for giving an erect carriage to the female head. She bought a couple of dozen pairs, taking Cosimo with her to choose the colours. She bought scarves, too, Indian and Japanese, and the most exquisitely embroidered peasant smocks, and a kind of goose-girl costume for the evenings, to go with which Cosimo, as a joke, made her buy a pair of sabots also. She put on the costume in the studio in Cheyne Walk, and her tiny feet were bare inside the sabots, and her hair was done in two glorious plaits, and she had a Breton cap on the top of it. For the studio itself she bought nothing new; that, she said, was to be kept severely for work—she had already begun a cartoon for the White Slave picture, and Cosimo had posed for the angelic and accusing figure that symbolized Manumissionand the League. The only new piece of furniture that she did buy was a hanging cupboard so tall that it would hardly go under the blackened and sagging ceiling. She filled it with the new velvets and silks and put the stockings and shawls and the dyed leather belts with the enamelled clasps in the drawers beneath; and then one Sunday she bore off Cosimo to Oasthouse View again, on the Mall, Chiswick. He was to see Aunt Jerry’s baby.
This time they did not go to lunch; they arrived at about tea-time instead. But if by going later Amory had expected to avoid Mrs. Deschamps and Miss Crebbin andheryoung man, she was disappointed. And not only that; as it happened, she and Cosimo walked straight into a party so large that its talk and laughter could be heard twenty yards before they reached the wrought-iron gate. Indeed, at the gate Amory hesitated for a moment and exchanged a quick glance with Cosimo; one voice had risen above all the rest; it was the voice of Mr. Wellcome. “Shall we hurry past?” Amory’s glance seemed to say; but Cosimo hoisted himself out of a rather quiet mood and replied, “Oh, we’ll go in—rather!” Perhaps he still lived in hopes of hearing Mr. Wellcome say “May all your troubles be little ones.”
It would have been laughable, if at the same time it had not been so terribly socially deplorable, to see the ridiculous fuss they made of that baby of Aunt Jerry’s. These people did not seem to have as much as a glimmer of the true significance of childhood—not to speak of its rights. They did not seem to realize that everyfalse impression it acquired now would have to be corrected, painfully and with labour and tears, in the long years to come. It did not seem to occur to them, for example, that it was in the last degree important that, from the very beginning, its eyes should rest on none but beautiful and sage-green objects; instead they let it see Mr. Wellcome. They seemed to be totally ignorant of the fact that, already, beauty born of murmuring sound should be passing into its mite of a face; they prodded it, and guffawed in its tender ears, and said “Boh!” and “Diddums!” And was it conducive to a proper modesty and earnestness of purpose in later years that the child should be told already that it was precious and a gem, and that its mother could eat it, and (when it expressed its just resentment by a cry, so that its father had to take it into his arms and to sing to it), that the hills and the towers (the oasthouses presumably) that it could see from the window all belonged to it? That was a lie. They did not, and never would. Amory hoped that by the time it grew up there would be no such thing as private ownership of hills and oasthouses. But there they were, all of them, poisoning its vague young mind, and really not thinking of it at all, but of their own stupid cachinnations and witticisms. No wonder it cried.
And Mr. Wellcome was positively devastating in his humour. Mrs. Deschamps had her small fingers on his mouth even as Amory and Cosimo entered, trying to prevent the utterance of some dreadful facetiousness or other; pretty Miss Crebbin was blushing at it yet; but Mr. Wellcome tore Mrs. Deschamps’ hand away ashe saw the newcomers, and cried, “Well, all I can say is hooray for the little difference—here’s Cos and Am—is all right behind, George?—Here, Cos, come and be getting your handin——”
And he snatched the baby and forced it into Cosimo’s arms.
Truth to tell, Cosimo held the infant quite as well as Amory did. When, in the course of the shocking display of promiscuity, it arrived at Amory, she stood with it much as a hatstand stands with the hat that is hung upon it. But she thanked goodness that she knew a little more than to say “Diddums” to it. It was a little boy; Amory was rather sorry for that; nevertheless she bent an earnest gaze upon it, as if, male as it was, she still sealed it as more or less vowed to the Cause. Mr. Wellcome was entirely wrong when he cried that he’d take short odds he could guess what she was thinking of. Mr. Wellcome could never have guessed. Mr. Wellcome was for the propagation of Tuberculosis and the direct encouragement of the Social Evil. In fact, Amory was not at all sure that men like Mr. Wellcome were not the real Antichrist.
Then the babe was borne away by a nurse, and, while George Massey, mingling his hissings with those of the silver kettle over Aunt Jerry’s spirit-lamp, passed round cups of tea, the conversation came round to Amory herself and “Barrage.” Mr. Wellcome had failed to catch the figure for which the picture had been sold.
“How much did you say?” he demanded again over his cup.
Amory glanced at Cosimo.
“Two hundred pounds,” said Cosimo with a negligent air.
Mr. Wellcome’s respect for the Cause evidently went up. “Come, that’s not so dusty,” he approved. “Have you been raking it in at this rate ever since you left Glenerne, Miss Am?” he asked, fixing her with his eye and tapping her on the knee. He was a friendly man.
Amory replied graciously that she had, more or less; it was not easy to fix a rate; sometimes she would be quite a long time without making very much, andthen——
“I see; like winnings,” said Mr. Wellcome. “Well, and Cos here’s been touching too from all I hear.” He winked slowly.
“Mis-ter Wellcome!” Mrs. Deschamps interposed, shocked.
But Mr. Wellcome only guffawed.
“Well, it makes the mare to go—eh, George? No doin’ your duty as a citizen without it, George, what? I always say, every time I have a good win, ‘Nowfor the duty as a citizen!’ Not that horses ain’t precarious, like art; but getting married’s like learning to swim—when you’re neck and crop in for it you find a way out all right. Well, I don’t care, among friends, where it is, Glenerne or where you like—I know where there’s a bottle or two of G. H. Mumm left, and the Spanish brandy’s got no force, I give youmyword! It’s betwixt Miss Crebbin and somebody—Miss Crebbin’s favourite for the moment, but bettingalters——”
And the opening of an oyster is not larger nor more watery than the next wink Mr. Wellcome gave.
“Aren’t you going to stay and see him in his bath, Amory?” Aunt Jerry asked wistfully when, at a little after five, Amory and Cosimo rose to go.
“I’m afraid not,” Amory replied, drawing on her new gloves. “Cosimo and I have to go and seeEuropaat the New Greek Society; it’s the first performance in England.”
“The theatre—on Sunday!” Aunt Jerry exclaimed softly.
And Amory and Cosimo left. If they had stayed there would have been nothing to beat Aunt Jerry’s consternation at the idea of going to a theatre on Sunday.
Hitherto it had not struck Amory that the Manumission League, in paying her two hundred pounds for “Barrage,” had paid a very good price indeed for a canvas by an artist who, save for a few columns about her by Mr. Hamilton Dix (who was not to a column or so about anybody on whom Croziers’ wandering eyes might rest), was unknown. Nor had it occurred to her that the League might want to see its money back again. Dorothy Lennard might entertain such suspicions, but then Dorothy was of a suspicious nature, always thinking somebody might be getting the better of her, and naturally crediting other people with intentions no better than her own. “I don’t like sales outright,” Dorothy had said.... And Amory, too, began to wonder whether righteousness also may not have its mammonwhen she first heard, at the Lettuce Grill, of the purpose to which it was intended to put her picture. It was only a rumour; indeed, Amory had it from a source no more official than Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish; but Walter’s father was the mainstay of the New Greek Society, and things that he said had a way of being authentic, and Amory began to wonder whether she ought not to have had a royalty, or a percentage, or whatever Dorothy had called it after all. The rumour was to the effect that, merely as a means of sowing the good seed, “Barrage” was to be exhibited, not in an ordinary gallery with a hundred other pictures, but by itself, with drapery round it, set back in a sort of proscenium, with lights at the top and bottom, and a muffled harmonium playing sacred music in the next room, and a faint odour of Ruban de Bruges burning, and other appurtenances of reverence and solemnity. That converts might be made, the whole of the League’s resources were to be concentrated on the enterprise, and the admission was to be a shilling. If the picture drew neophytes and shillings enough in London it was to be taken to the Provinces.
There are twenty shillings in a pound, and in two hundred pounds four thousand shillings. When four thousand shillings had been taken, “Barrage,” omitting other expenses, would have paid for itself.
Now the League had many times four thousand members in London alone....
A royalty of, say, a penny in the shilling would have worked out at more than four pounds per thousand....
The League was going to do the thingverythoroughly,and a special “Barrage” Committee was to be formed....
Two hundred pounds was well enough as far as it went, but there was going to be increment beyond that, earned really by Amory....
She felt a sharp stab of regret that she had let “Barrage” go for so little.
But the regret did not last long. She remembered in time that she was bringing herself down to Dorothy’s level. The full reward she might not get, but all the renown would be hers, and, though she was no Dorothy, she was yet not so ignorant of business but that she knew that in other ways her market was now as good as made. And compared with the kudos that would be hers, even the foregone royalty fell away into the background. “Foregone,” she told herself, was the world; for the effect was the same as if she had had the royalty and had magnanimously handed it back again to the Cause. To all intents and purposes, she was subscribing to the Cause’s funds (say) a thousand guineas. Her name would not appear with that figure after it in any list, but it is well to do good by stealth, and the name would ring resoundingly enough in other ways. “Amory Towers, you know, the painter of ‘Barrage’”—“‘Barrage,’ Miss Towers’ great work”—“That feminist picture that everybody’s going to see, ‘Barrage,’ by Amory Towers” ... yes, there would be lots of that. And in the Movement itself she would be a person of consideration and authority. She would have a voice in its councils. “Has Miss Towers given her opinion yet?” the leaders would ask one anotheron this point or that; and there were the other propagandist pictures yet to come. In the meantime it was a little odd that Amory was not asked to join the “Barrage” Committee. But perhaps that was as well too. Anybody can serve on a Committee, but it takes a somebody to paint a “Barrage.” To inferior minds inferior work. It was better after all that there should be a little mystery about Amory and that she should be shut off from the common gaze as it were by a veil. More than her own exclusion she resented the inclusion of the name of Mr. Hamilton Dix. For Mr. Dix had been called in. Mr. Dix, whose articles on Hallowells’ advertisements had brought him very much to the fore, had evidently been deemed by the Committee to be the very man to act as Art Director for “Barrage” also. And as that man of parts, who had no interest in Croziers’, still never abandoned an attitude of benevolence towards Croziers’ and such artists as they elected to “take up,” Amory’s twenty-odd older pictures also seemed in a fair way for being fetched up out of Croziers’ cellars. One thing brings another. Amory had known it would come, and it had come, or was coming. And it was coming without her having receded from the highest that was in her by as much as a single inch. That (as Cosimo said) was what was so wonderful. In an age of polluted altars she had kept her single taper burning pure and bright.
To anticipate a little: those contingent results of the enormous publicity that was presently given to “Barrage” came duly to pass. Croziers’ sold all but two of those old Saturday-night street-markets of hers atprices that varied from ten to thirty pounds apiece. Their numerous charges and commissions struck Amory as merely capacious; for all that, she received a series of cheques that totted up in all to more than four hundred pounds; and in several articles he wrote on the astonishing combination of human sympathy and pure idealism that distinguished the work of Miss Towers from the work of all other living artists, Mr. Hamilton Dix fairly let himself go. This was when “Barrage” left London for Manchester, Liverpool, and the North, to draw its thousands of visitors per week and to be chosen as a popular and attractive text, though with various applications, by half the Nonconformist ministers in the land; and one of the curious little after-effects of the enterprise was to show how entirely right Mr. Miller was when he said that the mere advertising “stunt” was over, and that advertising, to be effective to-day, must attach itself to something higher than itself. He would have attached a drapery business to the Royal Standard; but the feminist picture did even better. The “Barrage” turnstiles took their toll of shillings that were really the sinews of a Holy War.
Nothing, in Cosimo’s opinion, could have been more simple and unaffected and fine than the way in which Amory still stuck to the shabby little studio in Cheyne Walk. More than once he protested, but she lifted her eyes to him and asked him, Was it not enough? The roof kept out the rain; the door kept out intruders; and she could open the diamond-latticed window and look at the stars whenever she liked. She liked the solitude, she said; out of just such a solitude the strength mustbe gathered that is to be put to the service of the multitude. She did sometimes sigh for the country; she was not sure that soon she might not take a trip away somewhere, a longish one, quite alone; she had always promised herself such a trip, to Italy, but the loved servitude of her career had never permitted her to get farther than Paris; but now there was nothing to keep her in England. She might even go and live permanently abroad, working for the Cause from wherever it might be. But wherever she went, Cosimo must not suppose she would ever forget him. She would write to him quite frequently. And he must write to her.
The first time Amory allowed Cosimo this peep at her plans his face became blank with dismay. They were sitting together on a bench in the little Embankment garden where the Carlyle statue is. It was an evening early in April, approaching dusk, and on another bench, twenty yards away, a dim huddle under the trees had caused Amory’s lips to curl into a smile; it had reminded her of that horrible hypnotizing evening when she had walked on Clapham Common and had returned to pass a night of starts and tremors, lying dressed on Cosimo’s bed. She could afford to smile now, though she did so a little disdainfully. Things had improved since then—rather! Cosimo, though he had always been splendid, had been somehow a little off-handed at odd times; not exactly casual, but as if, while esteeming her very highly indeed, his esteem had none the less fallen just a little short of her true deserts; but that, too, was being quickly altered now. And shewouldlike to see Rome too. Quite inferior people had seen Rome, and Amory owed it to herself and to her art not to be crowed over by anybody. She told Cosimo so.
“Yes,” he said dejectedly; “I thought that would be the next. You’re rising, Amory. You’ll remember us poor grovellers sometimes, though, won’t you?” Amory’s tone of reproach almost passed reproach; it was as if she had received a twinge of pain.
“I don’t think I’ve deserved that of you, Cosimo,” she could not forbear saying.
But Cosimo persisted sadly.
“I beg your pardon, dear, but it is so. You might remember a little longer than most others, because you’re finer and truer than they are, but time and distance do make a difference, and it’s no good saying they don’t. I know.”
Amory wondered whether Cosimo knew the difference time and distance made because of Pattie Wynn-Jenkins, but she only shook her head on its white hyacinth-stalk of a neck.
“I don’t forget my friends, Cosimo,” she said quietly.
“I’m not accusing you, Amory. But,” he continued mournfully, “there are brilliant circles in Rome, and I know exactly how you’d take your place there, and it would be quite right and proper in one sense, and nobody would be gladder than I. But I should be buried in that beastly hole Shropshire all the time, boring myself to tears with cows and grass and pheasants and a lot of stupidyokels——”
Gently Amory tried to show him how ungrateful he was.
“Oh, Cosimo, how can you speak so of the country that gave the world ‘The Shropshire Lad’! I should always have beautiful thoughts of you—as my Shropshire Lad—and it isn’t as if there wasn’t a noble work to do in the country too. There’s the Housing Problem, and an iniquitous Land System, and sanitary dwellings for the agriculturallabourer——”
She went on, but Cosimo refused to see it. It was as if her “Barrage” would be carried in triumph through the streets of Rome as Cimabue’s “Madonna” was carried through those of Florence, while he would be tapping the barometer each morning, and then taking a walk with no other company than that of his dog, and returning to his solitary lunch, and going to sleep in the afternoon, and wishing to goodness he’d never seen his beastly estate. And so strongly did he now feel how little he had to offer Amory that he did not offer it, but sighed instead, and said that he supposed he’d be driven to marry some wench from the nearest dairy in order not to die of sheer weariness within six months. Amory mused.
“About that, Cosimo,” she said slowly at last. “You know what I’ve always wanted for you. I’ve always wanted you to marry some nice girl I could make a friend of. At one time I thought Dorothy might have done, but I see now that I was wrong. But you’d be better not marrying at all than marrying somebody who wouldn’t enter into your ideas. Can’t you live for duty alone, Cosimo, as I can?”
“You’ve more to sustain you,” he replied dully.
“All duties are alike precious,” said Amory firmly. “Yours is a more even temperament. I grant I rise a little sometimes, but for every rise there’s a despair, Cosimo, and I often think almost anybody is happier than I. Besides, you’d have the richest of my thought in my letters. You remember that fine passage in Ruskin—I think it’s in theCrown of Wild Olive—about the spoken word often being hasty and inaccurate, but the written one being choice and considered; I forget exactly how it goes. But you’d have that, Cosimo.”
“Oh, that——” Cosimo sighed.
His eyes had rested on the grey huddle on the bench twenty yards away. The huddle had moved, and a dim face had appeared. It was the face of Mrs. ’Ill’s daughter, Jellies, and Amory had seen it too. It seemed to brighten her. She gave a gay little laugh.
“There you are,” she said; “when you say you’d marry a dairymaid, do you mean—that?” She made a little movement of her head. “If you do, Cosimo, by all means marry one. When things come tothatpitch I don’t see that anything matters very much. Marry a dairymaid, by all means, ifthat’swhat you mean by marriage. But”—her laughter suddenly ceased—“don’t forget, Cosimo, that there is another side to it. You’d perhaps get all that some men seem to require, and perhaps you are that kind of man, but I shouldn’t have thought it. I should have planned something very different for you.... And think what you’d forego. No Societies for the study of those lovely Folk-Songs. No revival of Morrice Dancing. Nobringing back the peasantry to those beautiful and rational old smock costumes. No bringing up of the standard of rustic morals to the level of that of the chaste animals. No education of the people up to an enlightened system of Land Tenure. No jolly Socialist Vans, no Pamphlets, nothing fine. Only the extortions of Landlordism and the old hateful Three—Rent, Interest, and Profits.... I’m not saying that to do all this is your work, Cosimo. I’m only pointing out that it’ssomebody’swork. I don’t know Shropshire; perhaps Shropshire isn’t ripe for it; but it’s being done elsewhere. It attracts me. But of course that is no reason why it should attract you. I only mean that I should have said it was worth examining.”
Cosimo sat in the falling dusk, thrilled. What a daring and constructive brain!... And still some fools said women had no capacity for affairs! What (he wondered) would they have said could they have heard Amory as she was now—not argumentative, urging nothing, pleading nothing, with nothing to gain, quite detached and disinterested, merely anxious that, as she saw her own work before her, so others should see theirs? He rather thought they would have been silenced!...
And now there was no expressing how much Cosimo wanted her. Alone and of himself he could never have thought of these things, but with Amory by his side!... He seemed to see that Shropshire estate as it might be made. The bright parts of his vision seemed to gather as it were about a Maypole; the Maypole was in the middle; Cosimo knew the very spot for it. Andthe place really needed a Village Hall, on a contributory basis. In wet weather they could have the Folk-Songs and the Morrice Dancing there, and in fine weather on the green. There might be Vans and Pamphlets too; they might even set up a Village Press. And with these as a beginning the rest would come in time; but he could do nothing without Amory. He must have her. He knew it would not be easy, but he fancied—he was not sure, but he fancied—that there had been suppressed emotion in the tone in which she had called him her Shropshire Lad. Again he glanced at Jellies, whose face had disappeared again. The huddle, as far as he could see in the gloom, was quite motionless. Often and often with Amory he had laughed at this slow and elementary and adhesive love-making of the lower orders; it had always seemed so funny; and of course it was funny still with people of that class; Cosimo was not running away from that. Still, Cosimo had once taken a crossing-sweeper’s broom and had swept for half an hour for him, and Amorywastemptingly pretty as she sat by his side in the dusk....
Between his dream of a Model Village, of which he was proud, and something else for which he felt a little apologetic, Cosimo did not quite know where he was; but he knew that he wanted Amory. A soft “Ow!” came from the huddle on the other bench; it rather put Cosimo off for a moment or two; but all was silent again, and he took heart. He altered his position, and ran his arm along the back of the bench.
“Do you really think, Amory——” he began huskily.
“Eh?” said Amory. Apparently he had startled her. She had been quite lost in abstraction.
“Do you think that’s the choice—for me?”
“The choice?... Oh, I see! You mean what I was saying. Well, Cosimo, what do you think yourself?”
Cosimo spoke spiritlessly.
“I don’t know. Sometimes it doesn’t seem worth while my thinking when you’re here. I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t think,” Amory answered slowly, “that in cases like this one person has really the right to settle things for another. As you know, I hate the word Conscience; I prefer the expression Personal Will; but that’s what it seems to me to be.”
“But in so many things my will’s yours, Amory. You see deeper than I. You’re constructive. You’re one of the world’s Makers of Things. I should be a very good lieutenant or something, but I’m quite without the creative gift. Won’t you help me to do all those beautiful things, Amory?”
But evidently Amory didn’t understand him. She replied, with quickeagerness—
“Gladly—oh, so gladly! You know you have only to ask, Cosimo, now or at any time.”
Cosimo tried again.
“I—I don’t mean that exactly,” he stammered. “That’s splendid, that part in theCrown of Wild Olive, I know, but—but—I mean something else, Amory—dear——”
His hand had slipped from the back of the bench; softly it lay on Amory’s shoulder. He could hardly believe that it had lain there many times before, it lay so differently softly now. And yet Amory did not seem to recognize the difference in the softness, nor did she appear conscious that he had called her “dear” in a tone he had never used before. She put her finger-tips lightly on his knee. “Wait a bit,” she said. “I have it on the tip of my tongue—it’s not theCrown of Wild Olive; it’sSesame and Lilies—you know—that passage about gossiping with housemaids and stableboys when you might be conversing with kings and queens—I shall remember it in amoment——”
For one fleeting instant it did strike Cosimo that if he had not taken down Amory’s hair for her and called her “dear” in the past he might have had more resources at his disposal now—at any rate in the sense that Amory would have apprehended him more quickly; and yet that, too, had its little furtive compensation. His hand could remain where it was....
Amory continued to try to recollect the passage fromSesame and Lilies.
But suddenly she too gave, not a common “Ow!” but a quite sudden start into perception. She moved a little, but the hand on her shoulder did not. With quiet firmness she put her own hand upon it, but her slight effort to draw it away met with resistance. She had seen. She made as if to rise.
“Isn’t it getting late?” she said, looking away over the river.
“Amory—don’t go—you know what I mean——”Cosimo pleaded throatily. “It’s—it’s what I said the other day—youknow——”
“Let’s be going, Cosimo,” said Amory. “I really don’t know what you mean by the other day.”
“After you’d seen Dorothy—and I wanted you to marry me—do marry me,dear——”
Somehow his hold of her suddenly loosened, and Amory was on her feet. From the bench twenty yards away two faces watched them through the gloom. Amory looked sorrowfully at Cosimo. She was not angry. She did not pretend that she did not understand.
“Cosimo,” she said, and her voice was low, “I don’t see how you can expect things to be the same after this.”
Cosimo sat helplessly, as if still to sit might be construed as an invitation for her also to resume her place.
“I—I don’t want them to be the same, dear——” he begged almost abjectly.
“And you mustn’t call me dear—not in this new way,” Amory commanded, softly, but with decision. “I do see what you mean—now. And I admit it makes matters clearer—too clear, perhaps. In that way our friendship may have been a disadvantage. It’s committed us to a certain course, and we must either keep to that course or else undo things. I think you’ll admit that’s a Law.I——”
“Oh, undo them!” Cosimo cried ardently, catching, as he sat, at her hands.
But Amory drew the hands away and glanced towardsAlf and Jellies. Her low voice thrilled, as it were, with the first tones of a tragic scene.
“Cosimo—no, I say. Not now. Not here. Perhaps never, and not anywhere. I’m almost sure it would be better not. I’m quite sure. It’s not like that time the other day. I’d seen Dorothy then, you see, and she’d said that horrid thing. Mere pride made us go on as we had been doing in the face of the whole world. It was noble of you to offer it then—noble in a way, but quite impossible; and that’s all past. Now our paths seem to lie in different directions, and we must follow them; it’s a L—it’s our duty. In the sense you mean, the sense of doing a sacred work, I was actually more your wife during that long and beautiful friendship than I can be now that you say you loveme——”
“Oh, I do love you!” Cosimo groaned, hearing these words of doom. “I do love you, Amory!”
“Then I bid you love your duty more,” Amory replied, with sweet mournfulness, placing her finger-tips ever so lightly for one moment on his shoulder, as it were an accolade. “Go, my Shropshire Lad, and do it. And I will try to do mine. Let that unite us, and let nothing gross and of the earth”—from the next bench came a resounding smack of two mouths placed together—“let nothing of the earth come near. So you will be my Cosimo, and I your Amory. Isn’t that the higher and the better way?”
“Oh, but, Amory, it’s so hard! You know you’ve often said yourself that the physical relation has itsproper place! How—how would the world go on without it?”
“The world, Cosimo, goes on by the progress of ideas. Ideas can be in a sense our children, yours and mine. And these are born of no contact but the contact of the mingling spirits. I will write to you quite frequently—after a time, when I have forgotten a little; I will write such letters as you’d never, never receive from anybody else! And perhaps, after a number of years, we could meet again. When it was safer. I couldn’t meet you until it was safe, and I must leave you now. Don’t come with me, dear friend. I am not really going away; only the mortal part of me; everything else is yours, Cosimo. Goodnight——”
“Amory! Amory!”
“Don’t make it harder, dearest thought—youarethought of mythought——”
Cosimo sat still.
“Must that be all, Amory?”
“Is it so little? Oh, you don’t know! Have you forgotten what I told you about the Antinöus? You are allthatto me!”
“Then——” Cosimo supplicated, his arms outstretched; but Amory turned away her head.
“Ah no! You mean I kissed the Antinöus. But I daren’t kiss you, my Shropshire Lad; I might fail utterly. And it would be no good your trying to kiss me; you’d hold my corporeal part for a moment, but think of all you’d lose! Would it be worth while, Cosimo?” She smiled, benign as a star, down on him. “Would it?”
How could he say Yes? How, on the other hand, could he say No? He was between the highest she had ever taught him, and that common, blissful lethargy of the huddle on the neighbouring seat. Thus two Principles run through that multicoloured pattern of the world’s web. It is a Law. Cosimo saw that it was a Law. He also saw that it was a hard one.
Suddenly he did the most sensible thing he could have done. He rose.
“Well, I’ll walk along with you as far as your place,” he said wearily. “I suppose I may do that?”
“Yes,” said Amory. She would not have had the heart to refuse him so little. They walked in silence, and stopped before the greengrocer’s entry.
“Mayn’t I come up?” Cosimo asked.
“No.”
“Oh, Amory! You can’t mean never again?”
“Never again, I think, Cosimo. I’m going up to think, and to gather my things together. I shall leave to-morrow or the day after.”
An “Oh!” broke from Cosimo’s lips. So might a prisoner failingly exclaim who, having known that he must die at sunrise, should be ordered forth from his cell before the stars had begun to pale.
“Good night—and good-bye,” said Amory, smiling bravely as she held out her little hand.
“Oh!... Not like this! Amory, I can’t bear it!”
“It must be borne. I see now that this had to come. I don’t say you may not see me just once more.”
Even at that Cosimo caught eagerly. “When? To-morrow?”
“No, not to-morrow; I shall be packing. Nor the day after; I shall be busy with the ‘Barrage’ Committee. I’ll write to you, Cosimo.”
“Write!”
“Do you get many letters such as I should write to you?” she asked gently. “I’ll write, Cosimo; perhaps you may see me once or twice more.”
“Oh,” Cosimo groaned, “however shall I get through the time!”
The years they had spent together now seemed as nothing compared with these last eternal days before the new order, whatever it was to be, should begin.
Itis not impossible, though it is in the last degree unlikely, that you may have lived in England in those days of Amory Towers’ rise to fame without having heard of the furore created by “Barrage,” and of its triumphant tour through the country, drawing shillings wherever it went; but you certainly did not live in London that spring without having another and not dissimilar event hammered home on you morning, noon, and night—the astounding series of social functions with which Hallowells’ immortalized its Inauguration. “Not dissimilar,” one says, and that is the truth, if not the very obvious truth. For both successes were due to the same cause—high, victorious advertisement. It made no difference that the two glories were different glories—that Mr. Miller knew the dignity due to millinery, and the “Barrage” Committee, ably assisted by Mr. Hamilton Dix, had the secret of making art boom. And perhaps the hidden causes that slowly make history decreed that both successes should come to pass at pretty much the same time. You put pressure upon an object, but that object also puts pressure upon you. Mr. Miller recognized the need of commerce for ideals, and the leaders of the Manumission League recognized the need ideals had of business organization. The onewould elevate business into a Faith, the others make their Faith into an effective and shilling-producing business. It is a Law. It was also one of the Laws that Amory did not see.
For Amory forgot the slight and constant bitterness of having sold “Barrage” outright in the renown that was now hers. Virtually, by an omission so ludicrously accidental that even Dorothy Lennard had noticed it (so, in these miserable mercenary matters, has the small mind the advantage over the great one), she was pouring streams of gold into the League’s war-chest. She solaced herself with that thought—but she intended to see that matters were placed on a very different footing next time. She did not know that there could be no next time. She did not know that though her signature might now be clamoured for by the advertisers of Brain Foods and Hair Washes, Dentifrices and the makers of Portia Caps, the public does not rise to the same fly twice. There was to be no successor to “Barrage.” She might paint—she did paint—all those other fiery-cross canvases, the White Slave canvas, the Tuberculosis canvas, the State Motherhood canvas, and the rest, but she remained Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the famous feminist picture, “Barrage.” And presently there grew up a cult of her finer but unrecognized masterpieces. Cosimo began it later, when he set about the writing of theLife and Work of Amory Towers. It became a test of your knowledge and discrimination. Your lip, if you were really one of the elect, curled a little at the mention of “Barrage”; not (you were expected, if you were a superior person, to say)that “Barrage” was not all very well in its way; popular and so forth; but—did your hearer know the “Tuberculosis” canvas?Thatwas the true Towers. So it was in this pluperfect esteem that Amory by and by came to bask, with Cosimo as her showman.
Benighted Dorothy Lennard, on the other hand, fluked intoherwretched success by sheer luck. She had never an ideal to her name, never realized that the best possession to which she could lay claim was a certain knack, a certain low business cunning. And it was only to be expected that this should pay her, in mere despicable cash, twenty times as well as Amory’s purerawenhad paid. Amory was not in the least envious. Poor Dorothy would need it all, and more. However rich she became, she could never become a prophet; she might become a millionaire, but she could never qualify for the martyr’s crown. Amory hoped her money might make her happy. But she did not see how it could.
But to this fluke of Dorothy’s:—
When, long, long before, Dorothy Lennard had told Amory Towers that she had an idea that alone had made her wealthy as she stood, she had spoken with a superb confidence. Amory had looked for something of national, nay, more, of feminist value; but later she had begun to think that Dorothy had been merely giving utterance to an idle boast; some people, seeing others achieving something, must needs boast, merely to keep up appearances. Since that day Dorothy had kept her own counsel. She had kept her project even from Mr. Miller, without whom she had known she could donothing; she had kept it from Miss Benson, and Miss Umpleby, and for long enough, from her cousin Stanhope. But presently she had had to tell Stan. He shared her sandwiches, and must share her ignoble scheming also.
It appeared that Mr. Miller and Hallowells’ were to provide the money for them to marry on. Theymustmarry, they told one another twenty times a week—simply must. It was stupid, Stan said, not marrying; what on earth was therenotto get married about? He didn’t believe in that off-and-on sort of business, as if they didn’t know their own minds.... Butoughtsecond cousins to marry? Dorothy had urged (scuffling disgustingly for the biggest bite of the sandwich); wasn’t it said to be a bad thing? Weren’t all these Eugenist people always saying what a bad thing it was? Miss Towers saidso—
“Was that Miss Towers, that red-haired little thing you were in such a paddy with that day?”
“What day?”
“The day she caught us—doing this.”
“(There, I’m glad you pricked yourself!)... Yes, that was Miss Towers.”
“Seemed to creep up rather quietly, didn’t she?”
“Stan! Of course she didn’t!”
“Oh, all right. I wondered where you picked her up, that’s all.... And does she say second cousins oughtn’t to marry?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps she doesn’t. She says so many things.”
“Well, you can tell her from me that I don’t knowanything about ‘ought,’ but I want to, and I’m jolly well going to. And look here, Dot, I won’t have you wearing pins—just look what you’ve done to my hand.”
“Didit tratch its hand!”...
Then, of course, the question of prospects had arisen, and Dorothy had had to tell Stanhope Tasker what was in her mind.
“All right, if you think there’s anything in it,” Stan had agreed when Dorothy had unfolded her plan. “I don’t quite see it, though.”
“Idiot!” Dorothy had chuckled, taking a butt at him with her face as if they had been two of the chaste animals at play. “You just wait and see if Mr. Miller doesn’t see it, though!”
“Hope he does, that’s all,” Stan had grunted over the glass of ginger-beer. “Then we’ll clear out of this. I’ve got my eye on a job as secretary to a polo club. Just suit me. And I might get a game sometimes.”
Before Dorothy had allowed Mr. Miller either to “see it” or to know anything whatever about it, however, she had first taken good care of the receptivity of Mr. Miller’s mind. At that time the Inauguration had occupied him day and night; ideas for cheap stunts had come to him plenty as blackberries; but no idea had occurred to him that combined the flashy and ephemeral attractions of these with that real dignity of which the Throne, the Royal Standard, and the Established Church stood as the outward and visible symbols. And Dorothy had let him fume and fret. The longer he fumed and fretted the higher her price was likely to rise. And presently, by the time Mr. Millerhad fumed and fretted himself into a state of nerves lest, after all his vaunting Hallowell & Smith’s Inauguration might turn out to be just like any other Inauguration, the price was likely to be very high indeed.
Moreover, Dorothy had seen Mr. Miller’s somewhat unscrupulous ways with the originators of other ideas. Mr. Miller was painfully subject to a weakness which might have been constitutional to himself or merely part of the general keenness of his job. This weakness was that he had sometimes been known to help himself to an idea, and to deny its real author as much as an acknowledgment. It was in vain that those authors screened themselves with elaborate and formal contracts drawn up in black and white. The law, by the one master-phrase that there is no copyright in idea, indemnified Mr. Miller. Dorothy knew that if she also did not want to be robbed, she must make herself more secure than any black and white could make her. Now there is only one way of doing this. It is by means of the free and flexible understanding of which agreements and contracts are but the rather clumsy letter. She had seen that, touch by touch, she must so prepare Mr. Miller’s attitude thatanysuggestion of hers would be more likely to appear valuable than not. That had meant such present sacrifices as the leaving of really quite passable “stunts” to others. Dorothy could not afford to suggest ordinary things. An imaginary red carpet, so to speak, was to be laid down before she approached Mr. Miller with a suggestion. And Mr. Miller would think the more highly of it in proportion as he paid highly for it.
So she had carefully “nursed” Mr. Miller, had used her charms when the use of charms would serve a turn and had been businesslike and off when the charm of her sex would have been out of place, had dined and supped with Mr. Miller, had left Mr. Miller alone for a week, had one day dropped a hint that Doubledays’ manager was a friend of her people (expressing quite a liking for Doubledays’ manager personally), and so on and so forth, until Mr. Miller thought her not only one of the brightest young women that had ever happened, but one with whom it was a pleasure to be seen in the well-dressed assemblies his British heart loved. And, of course, here Dorothy’s connexions helped too. Lady Tasker crossed over at the Ritz one evening and sat talking with Dorothy for a full ten minutes, with Mr. Miller standing all the time and bowing whenever he got a chance; and his bow when Lady Tasker left was the bow of Sir Walter with the cloak. Thereafter he kept glancing across in the direction of Lady Tasker’s party as if he wondered whether it would be permissible to take wine with Lady Tasker across the width of the room; and he spoke to Dorothy asfollows:—
“Now that’s the reel thing; I say this is an Experience, Miss Lennard. The way you introdooced me: ‘Mr. Miller—,’ no more than thaaat, but with a manner, so to say: ‘Mr. Miller—,’ and then went on conversing about intimate things just as if you’d been at home or in her ladyship’s private suite of rooms at this ho-tel ... that’s the Note! Now if we could secure Lady Tasker for our Inauguration—not to be on voo, but just to be there—that would be worth dallars,guineas, I mean, both to us and to her ladyship.... And is she Mr. Stan’s aunt, if I may use the word, too? Well, now! I have to thank you for a real experience, Miss Lennard. ‘Mr. Miller’—just like that—I might have been anybody way up! Some of our Misters make some of our Sirs look poor, if I may use the expression—cheap skates—‘bum’s’ the word they use in America—nooveau. I’m vurry glad to have had the pleasure of Lady Tasker’s acquaintance. Now indicate to me who the rest of the partyare——”
And when, a week later, Mr. Miller, bowing to Lady Tasker at the theatre, received a bow in return, he certainly felt, if he was not actually, many “dallars” better off. Perhaps actually he was, too. Perhaps his Idea had received confirmation and support, so that he was enabled to go forward with fresh energy and enthusiasm. We must get our inspiration from somewhere, and these things are very difficult to explain.
It may be supposed that this and a few similar things did Dorothy no harm at all; and of course she lied grossly, at any rate by implication, when she introduced the name of Doubledays’. Not that Doubledays’, too, were not straining every nerve. They and everybody else knew of the coming Inauguration that was already as completely planned as—say, “Hamlet” without the Prince. Perhaps Dorothy did actually say something to them; perhaps she gave Mr. Miller an account that she thought quite good enough for Mr. Miller; not all of us can take our truth nascent and unsullied from the Fountainhead of all Truth. Mr. Miller at any rate thought shemight possibly be dickering with Doubledays’, and that was the practical matter. An introduction to Lady Tasker at the Ritz was no good to him if Doubledays’ also was going to be introduced to Lady Tasker at the Ritz, and these and other things were Dorothy’s to give or to withhold.... You see how it was. You see how time-serving and unprincipled and altogether immoral it was. Amory would not have touched it with the end of a long pole. Had Stan written the “Life and Work of Miss Dorothy Lennard” he would probably have written the most deplorable record of our whole deplorable age.
Apart from these things, however, there was the intrinsic beauty of the idea itself. That went straight to the heart of every woman, and of nearly every man also. And it touched every single being of the future, too. To Mr. Wellcome it peculiarly belonged, and Jellies and the Eugenist might have shaken hands upon it. Actuarially its basis was as sound as it could be. Dorothy went carefully into this. The cost for the whole week would be nothing to Hallowells’, and its return would be incalculable. Without it, those shining palatial premises would be as a setting that begged, prayed, implored for its jewel. If Mr. Miller didn’t take it, Doubledays’—might. You don’t bargain for these things; you show them, and name your price. If you are robbed, it is your own fault before the fact; only the people are robbed who deserve to be robbed. Dorothy didn’t guarantee a gem of such water every spring; nevertheless she intended to ask for fifteen hundred pounds a year for a number ofyears on the strength of it—this time (for contracts have their dull uses) to be clinched by a formal contract. She was not a fashion artist now; she had barely passed her Sealskin; she was a Publicity Adviser, and what she did not know about wheedling and scheming and other gross misuses of her sex was not worth knowing. And she did not care one rap for Emancipation and the Cause. She thought the Cause a very useful thing, merely because it collected all the cranks together, so that you might know where to find them if you happened to want them and how to avoid them when you did not; and, applying her publicity training to the extraordinary success “Barrage” was by this time having, she had no difficulty whatever in seeing to what that success was really due. Given the occasion and the organization, anybody else’s picture would have done quite as well as Amory’s. Amory was merely lucky to have hit on the idea at the right moment, and foolish if she thought the idea and the moment were likely ever to jump so happily together again. And if Amory didn’t know this, the odds were that Mr. Dix did.
This idea of Dorothy’s, then (not to beat any longer about the bush), was that of the famous Wedding Week that has now passed into history. “Shopping Weeks” had been tried before, but they had struck Dorothy as “some of our Sirs” had struck Mr. Miller by comparison with the unadorned simplicity of some Misters—as “poor,” “nooveau,” and (to use the American expression) “bum.” And yet they had paid. If those, then, had paid, such an idea asDorothy’s was likely to pay at least as well. It seemed to her that all that these highly-paid Captains of Commerce lacked was inventiveness. They could be trusted with the details, but they had no largeness of conception. They niggled where they should have drawn with a free hand: Dorothy knew that she had ideas enough to keep a dozen of them going.
Hallowell & Smith’s, then, were going to provide, for a week, and up to the capacity of their largest hall, free weddings. Subject to certain conditions, that varied from the purchase of a veil to the opening of a monthly account—and even these were imposed only to stem the rush that was confidently anticipated—Hallowells’ would supply carriages, the breakfast, flowers, cake, music, wine, silver-paper boxes, awnings, liveries, crimson carpets, souvenirs and what not, entirely without charge, deduction, obligation, or any catch about it whatever. Between the pronouncing of the Benediction at the Church and your stepping on to the footboard of the train that was to take you away, you simply put yourself into Hallowells’ hands. Indeed, it was not Hallowells’ fault that they were not able to do even more for you. Certainly it was not Mr. Miller’s fault. For Mr. Miller simply could not see why, if in Scotland a wedding might be celebrated in an ordinary drawing-room, in England it might not take place in an up-to-date Store. He took advice, both legal and ecclesiastical; he approached both the Church and the Registry Office; and the only result was that he found something more inaccessible even than he had found the Royal Standard to be.Hallowells’, dedicated though it was (subject to the Shops’ Hours Acts) to that practical form of Faith which the Apostle James offered to show by his works, still remained, in the hidebound sense that is the only one accepted of dogma, an unconsecrated building. Mr. Miller felt this as an injustice. It seemed to him that the Church could not after all be very sure of its own position. If, as it preached, it was the duty of the strong to help the weak, surely it was equally the duty of an Establishment that had dignity enough and to spare to bestow a little of that dignity where there was need of it. Not to do so was a stultification of reel enterprise, and a refusal to give live and go-ahead brains (his brains and Dorothy’s) their proper reward. He would have met the Church more than half-way; would have dressed his marshal-celebrant in any way they had wished; cloth-of-gold if they liked; no expense should have been spared: but the authorities of the Chapel Royal andSt.George’s, Hanover Square, stuck to their cobwebby old monopoly, and in a business sense Mr. Miller was forced to the conclusion that the Church was “bum.”
But while the Sacrament itself lay beyond his power, its appurtenances provided an opportunity more glorious than Publicity had dreamed of yet. Never was a Publicity-secret more jealously guarded. Day and night a picket kept the door of the room in the Clerkenwell factory where the gigantic papier-maché Old Shoe was being made; and the white-and-silver hymeneal torches, both the large ones for the trophies and the small ones for table-decoration andthe holding of flowers, were allotted to separate firms. All “roughs” given out to printers were red-labelled, like poison-bottles, “Destroy at Once”; and the deliveries of Menus, Souvenirs, Wedding-cake Boxes and so on were sealed with private seals. The theatrical costumiers who supplied the wings and wreaths for the Cupids were given for secrecy’s sake, an address in Scotland from which the consignments were brought back by private van by road; and for long enough the Executive of the Wedding Week was divided about the building of an organ in the place. Mr. Miller rather wanted an organ: it would be, he thought, rather a scorching come-back on the Church; but his stunt-advisers persuaded him otherwise, and a string-band carried the day. And before it was absolutely too late for Doubledays’ or any other firm to have queered the whole thing and to have got ahead of Hallowell’s, Dorothy got her contract. The office of Consultant to Hallowell’s for five years was signed, sealed and delivered unto her. Thereafter she might stick to the job or allow it to lapse, as she pleased; in the meantime, not counting contingent benefits that were sure to come, it would start her and Stan very comfortably together.
And so, with London at its fairest and fullest, and the flower-barrows in the Circuses ablaze with tulips and narcissi and gladioli and escholtzsias, and Bond Street blocked with cars and taxis, and the Park on Sunday mornings for all the world as if rivers of confetti and black patches flowed slowly back and forth, all was made in readiness at Hallowell’s. And so wellhad the secret been kept that it was only when Miss Umpleby happened one day to go into the room where the Bell was being unpacked that anybody in the place (outside the Executive) had the faintest notion of what was going on. But the Bell gave it away to Miss Umpleby. Mr. Miller had got the idea of the Bell from that foreign land, America. It was twelve feet high and composed entirely of artificial flowers; and while it had originally been intended that each bridal pair should hew its way out of it with a silver axe, bringing the souvenirs for its particular party out with it, that idea had been abandoned as impracticable, and the Bell opened with two flaps like a roc’s egg at a pantomime instead. Miss Umpleby was an intelligent young woman; she had read of the device before in the newspapers; and she flew to Dorothy.
“What are they up to in there, Lennie?” she demanded. “Mr. Miller isn’t going to be married, is he?”
Nobody would have known from Dorothy’s face that she guessed that the secret had leaked out.
“Mr. Miller get married? Mr. Miller is married. What are you talking about?” she asked.
“That thing in the room at the end of the corridor there. I peeped in.”
“Then you’d no business to peep,” Dorothy replied; and she denied all knowledge of what was toward.
But presently she was sorry she had done so. Miss Umpleby, being under no obligation of secrecy, told the girls of the fashion studio what she had seen.Dorothy entered the studio as they were discussing it that same afternoon, and the hail of questions that greeted her almost blew her out of the room again.
“Here’s Lennie—she knows!”
“Is it going to be like that New York one that was in the papers, Lennie?”
“And who is it?”
“It isn’t you, Lennie, is it?”
They paused for breath, and then went on.
“And there’s stacks and stacks of mock-orange inboxes——”
“And lots of lace-paper——”
“And they’re doing the Central Hall downstairs all in white and silver.”
“Dotell us!” they implored.
But it was only some days later, when there was no longer any danger of betrayal, that Dorothy told Miss Umpleby, as a great secret. Miss Umpleby clutched at Dorothy’s arm.
“Really?” she cried excitedly. “Do you mean there’ll be champagne, and flowers, and a cake, all for nothing?”
“Well, you give Hallowells’ an order, and they’ll do as many as there’s room for.”
“Oh!... How much is the order?”
“What, do you mean that you’d——?”
“Me and Arthur? Rather! I don’t suppose we shall be married this side of the next eclipse if we don’t do something of the sort! I’m not proud, as long as they don’t mix the husbands up; I’ve had to watch Arthur, I can tell you, ever since he got his new SansSouci hat!... But really, Lennie, do you think you could get us a ticket or whatever it is?”
“If youreallymean it——”
“OfcourseI mean it. Oh, I say, you are a brick! What a lark!”
And so Miss Umpleby, who otherwise would have had to wait for another year, put her name down for that public wedding-breakfast.
And so a word was dropped here and a word was dropped there, and the business spies stole back and forth piecing gathered rumours together, and, some days before the announcements appeared in the papers, Doubledays’ and the rest of them knew that they were done. No counter-device they could have prepared in the time would have compared for one single instant with that clean-cut and beauty-bright idea of Dorothy’s. So some of them touched hidden springs that caused letters on over-advertised business to appear in the papers, but most of them took their defeat magnanimously, merely sending out fresh spies to try to discover “whose notion Miller had stolen that time” and to try to secure the services of that ingenious brain for themselves. Oh, Dorothy would have had no difficulty whatever in selling herself two or three times over! In fact she did so, at varying figures, though of course not to Hallowell’s trade competitors. It is quite simple. When you are more anxious to sell your brains than somebody else is to buy them, then your price is a low one; but when people come running to you with their money in their hands, that is the time to stick it on....