“Obscurantism,” Cosimo suggested, but rather diffidently. Even he had never seen Amory so astonishingly into her stride before. He could have listened to her all day; he did listen to her half the day.
“That’s the very word!” Amory praised him. “Signifying darkness, where it’s pretending to shed light all the time! If exploded ideas like those can be put into the Prayer Book, it seems to me that a Divorce Service ought to go into the Prayer Book too, instead of having to go to a court of law for it! And look, I ask you, at the position of woman in divorce to-day!” (Amory drove ahead as if it had been a question of Aunt Jerry’s divorce already.) “Suppose she gets her decree: there’s an odium attaches to her just the same whether it’s her fault or not!Icall it the fault of Abraham and Sarah, and their stupid old Service! Laws that are too harsh areboundto be broken! It’s a duty to break them, so that we can get them altered. What we want is a rational tie, voluntarily entered into, and sweep all these archaic old penalties aside! Not that it’s any business of mine; thank goodnessIshan’t marry....”
None the less, out of a noble love of abstract justiceand a hatred of wrong merely because it was wrong, Amory found it intolerable.
Then there was the minor apparatus. From the point of view of Eugenics, Amory would have thought that the worst possible preparation for the perfect race of the future was all this over-eating of indigestible things, and over-drinking of things that were, medically speaking, poisons. “Healths” indeed! Pretty name for them!... And all these buffooneries of throwing rice and confetti, and flinging an old shoe after the “happy” (ahem!) pair. For the wedding presents, Amory conceded, there was something to be said. The present economic conditions made it difficult for the really splendid young people to get married at all, and so it was right that they should be in a sense subsidized by those who had wrested (principally by callousness) more out of the competitive struggle than they (of a more sensitive make) had managed to wrest for themselves. Indeed, Amory’s only complaint against the custom of giving presents was that it did not go far enough. What really ought to be done was that the State should pick its best specimens, on the principles laid down by Galton and others, and pension them off for one understood purpose, putting them in the midst of beautiful surroundings ... a sort of Endowment of Motherhood idea, but on a scale of the first magnitude, and not by mere doles, ... and, of course, with everything possible done to ensure the birth of girls.... Science would soon be able to do that at the rate at which it was advancing....
“I say, Amory, you are wonderful!” Cosimo breathed, rapt....
Amory said, “Silly old Cosimo!” But she herself could not help thinking that her lips had rather been touched with the coal.
At Glenerne, nothing but the approaching wedding was talked about. Unhappily, however, the talk was all about those very accidentals that had the least to do with the propagation of a healthy and rational race. True, a knowing eye rested once in a while on the whatnot that contained the photographs of Miss Addams’s “grandchildren,” and a smile was hidden behind a hand or turned hurriedly into a cough; but for the rest the race was left to look after itself just as if Galton had never been born, and a Eugenic Congress had never been held. Very little whist or dancing went on in the large double drawing-room upstairs. Everybody flocked downstairs again into the dining-room, where the tablecloth and cruets were not now left for the next repast, as usual, but removed to make room for Aunt Jerry’s heaps and heaps of linen. Miss Crebbin and Miss Swan marked; Miss Addams and Mrs. Deschamps folded and set all into orderly heaps; and M. Criqui and Mr. Edmondson wrapped the heaps in brown paper and wrote on each package a description of its contents. Mr. Massey was frequently taken by the shoulders by Mrs. Deschamps and turned out of the room, as being only in the way. He either retired to his bedroom and wrote cheques, or else, in the company of other smokers, sat on the garden roller in the little back greenhouse and lighted and threw away again Cubeb cigarettes.
Mr. Edmondson’s case was generally commiserated. He had not been quite himself since Amory’s departure. He had held rather moping discussions, on such subjects as the progress of illustrated journalism and the decay of respect in the attitude of the young towards the old, with Mr. Rainbow and stout Mr. Waddey, the timber-merchant; and he had more than once dropped a dark hint that he might soon be leaving Glenerne—young musical society becomes a little trying when you yourself are the young and musical society. And he took it rather hardly that he would not be able to be present at the wedding-breakfast, but must rise at five-thirty, clean his boots, make his cup of tea over his spirit-kettle, and lunch in the ticket-office as usual. Mrs. Deschamps told M. Criqui that she thought Mr. Edmondson had had more than apenchantfor Amory; M. Criqui, who was in the Lyons silk trade, and had given Aunt Jerry a beautiful dress-length, had raised his brows and said “Si?” M. Criqui’s politeness never forsook him. It was as if he asked Mrs. Deschamps where Mr. Edmondson’s eyes could have been to have had apenchantfor anybody when Mrs. Deschamps herself was there, to be admired almost whether her victim wished it or not.
But if Mr. Edmondson must be absent, a pretty full gathering of the others was to be present. Mr. Waddey, the timber-merchant, had put off the buying of a Gloucestershire wood for the purpose; Mr. Rainbow had put a red line round the date on the hanging calendar in his bedroom; and Mr. Geake and Mr. Sandys had promised to run in, the one from the Estate Office in Goldhawk Road, the other from the BranchBank. Miss Crebbin, away in the city, was in Mr. Edmondson’s case, but Miss Swan was turning her class over to the study of art for the afternoon (a subject in which one of the monitors could be trusted to take them), and Miss Tickell would close her milliner’s shop from ten to four. As for five or six of the other ladies, their time was their own. There had been much discussion as to whether the olive-skinned Indians should be invited; finally, they too had been included. Two of them lunched daily at Glenerne. They could hardly be asked to move from their accustomed chairs and wooden napkin-rings; and then there was the solidarity of the Empire to consider. All three had been asked, and were coming. Mr. Massey’s brother and his wife were to be the only outsiders, for Mr. and Mrs. Wellcome and the infant Master Wellcome could hardly be called outsiders. Or if there was another outsider at all it would be Mr. Cosimo Pratt, and he (Glenerne had been given vaguely to understand) might not be an outsider very long. Really the most outside of all was Amory herself. It was true she had lived in the house, but in the body only, not in the spirit, if press-cuttings meant anything. She had stooped on the wing from a brighter air. Her art was not the same kind of art as that to which Miss Swan had turned over her Board School class for the afternoon. It brought in cheques for ninety-five pounds.
The wedding was fixed for a Tuesday, and by the Monday night the Glenerne hall was almost impassable with trunks and bags and cases—the trunks and bagsfor the going away (to the Lake District), the cases containing nobody knew what until Mr. Massey and Miss Geraldine, who had gone to the Vicarage, should return. Two of them, however, were surmised to contain Mr. Wellcome’s contribution to the morrow’s breakfast, and it was a “wheeze” of the men to attitudinize in mock ecstasies before them and to make luscious noises as of drinking. Another case, a yard square but not very high, was so heavy that the porter had hardly been able to carry it in; and if one might judge from certain conspiratorial whispers, one or two of the borders guessed what that case also contained. Mrs. Deschamps had almost wept over Mr. Massey’s special licence; Mr. Waddey, who was a widower, had remarked that it was strange, when you came to think of it, the meaning there might be in a bit of paper you could easily crumple up and throw into the fire. Mr. Edmondson, too, asked to be allowed to look at the licence. Later he was heard going about saying that it was strange, when you really considered it, how much bits of paper, that you could easily tear up into little pieces, stood for sometimes. “A railway ticket’s nothing in itself,” he said, by way of illustration of what he meant, “but just you try to travel without one....”
The wedding-day dawned. Mr. Massey and his brother (a red-faced, silent man who wore policeman’s boots and seemed uncomfortable in his collar) had gone off arm in arm somewhere; and Amory and Mr. Massey’s brother’s wife were helping Aunt Jerry to dress. Mrs. Deschamps had lent her bedroom for the displayof the wedding-presents. The heavy box in the hall had been opened, and had been found to contain, by stupid mistake, a second wedding-cake, all snow and silver, which Mr. Geake and Mr. Sandys had carried into the dining-room and set before the bride’s place. You had to look twice at lavender bonnets and white veils and black coats and light gloves before you were quite sure who the wearers were; and the string of cabs outside, with nosegays in the lamps, stretched away to the end of the road and round the corner. And Glenerne that morning was a school for waiters indeed, for six extra ones had come from Bunters’, and, with their heads held high, looked as it were through their dropped lids at Glenerne’s own Germans and Belgians and the little red-fezzed Omar K.
Then a loud “Hi, Squeegee—Lueegee—Guliulimo! Them things come?” was heard in the hall. Mr. Wellcome, with Mrs. Wellcome bearing a torrent of lace in which the youngest Master Wellcome slept, had arrived. “Brought her after all, you see, Nellie!” Mr. Wellcome cried triumphantly to Mrs. Deschamps, whom he met at the foot of the stairs; and then he spoke behind his hand: “Lucky ... always want one like that at a wedding!”... “Notagain!” Mrs. Deschamps whispered back, half shocked, half as if such a man was indeed a creature to be dreaded. “Eh? Why not?” Mr. Wellcome blustered. “We don’t adopt ’em atourhouse! Not while we have our health! Now, time we were off; where’s this daughter o’ minepro tem?”
The arrival of the Wellcomes was all they had beenwaiting for. They set off, the line of cabs drawing up at the gate, stopping, starting, stopping again, until the last had driven off with a couple of urchins sitting on the back of it.
Amory and Cosimo heard every word of that preposterous Service from the front pew. The quick glances that passed between them from time to time only emphasized their rock-like gravity between whiles. And after all, there is such a thing as tolerance. If this Sacrament was really the crumbling institution the pure beam of reason showed it to be, so much the less abolition there would be for Amory and Cosimo to do. You teach a lesson to those who do not respect your convictions when you deal gently with their manifest prejudices, and the fewer who shared the joke the more humour there would be for themselves. So Amory merely noted that her aunt made no bones about the word “obey,” and wondered, as man and wife knelt, where Uncle George’s brother, who was best man, got those extraordinary boots.
But she had promised Cosimo that the real humour should come afterwards, when the wedding-party returned to Glenerne; and her promise was richly fulfilled. There were heads at every window in the street, and they could hardly get in at the gate for the press of watchers about it. And when they had got in and mounted the front steps and passed along the hall, they could hardly get into the dining-room for the crowd of waiters, Bunters’ and Glenerne’s, who, making an international matter of it, covertly elbowed and shouldered one another and muttered words of contemptunder their breath and exchanged malevolent glances. But when they had got in, and had found each his or her name written by Mrs. Deschamps on the half-sheets of notepaper with the silver-lettered Glenerne heading, it was worth coming miles to see and participate in. Regular boarders eyed the table, with its dishes glazed and its dishes garnished, its dishes frilled and crimped and made strange with icing and aspic and cochineal, very much as a man who knew a buttercup and a daisy when he saw them might peep, intimidated, into a house of rare and exotic orchids. These fantastic growths of the same kingdom as the dandelion and the dog-rose? These gemmed and enamelled comestibles food also, like Miss Addams’s thin soups and strips of watery fish and semi-transparent slices of Argentine beef and New Zealand lamb?... Each resolved to let his neighbour tackle them first and to see what implement he did so with. For, while fingers might have been made before forks, they were no fewer in number than the bright plated objects of cutlery (including something that seemed to start as a pair of sugar-tongs and to end as a sort of cigar-cutter) that extended for quite six inches on either side of each plate. It might be going too far to say that one must necessarily be born to these things; nevertheless a fellow did feel a bit taken aback when he was confronted with them straight away.
(To anticipate a little: Nobody knew who it was who first discovered that here they had a tower of strength in Mr. Wellcome. But it was presently seen that Mr. Wellcome knew all about fish-knives and finger-bowls, and made nothing of them. Therefore all youhad to do was to watch Mr. Wellcome. Then, no idea being so good but that it is capable of improvement, it was discovered that you were quite safe if you watched Mr. Sandys, who watched Mr. Rainbow, who watched Mr. Wellcome. Soon eachplatwas being attacked with grace and confidence at its proper remove from the fountainhead of good form, the movement passing down the table very much as the cabs had drawn up one by one at the door.)
To ask who occupied Mr. Wellcome’s Chair were to ask who occupies the Throne at a Coronation. Mr. Wellcome Himself occupied it. Mrs. George Massey sat on his right hand, George Massey on his left. This arrangement was duplicated at the other end of the long table, where Miss Addams sat between Cosimo and Amory. These constellations of primary and hardly secondary brilliance were united, along either side of the table, by the lesser stars; and, just as a hole appears in the Southern Heavens, so the three Indian students made a sort of Coal Sack among the whiter faces on Miss Addams’s right hand. Amory thought it far better that she and Cosimo should not be sitting actually together. Apart, they would have all the more notes to compare afterwards.
Cosimo was gathering these already. As once he had taken the broom from the crossing-sweeper, so now he was talking across the corner of the table to Mrs. Wellcome. He was talking about the only person who breakfasted without taking his cue of deportment from anybody—the child; he got, as he said afterwards, “simply priceless things.” Amory, across the othercorner, was engaged in a series of lively rallies with Mr. Rainbow. Mr. Rainbow always expanded when Mr. Wellcome came to Glenerne. If he became a little deflated again when Mr. Wellcome had turned his back, nobody thought the less of him on that account. To be able to play up to Mr. Wellcome at all was an achievement beyond the power of most.
Not that Mr. Wellcome Himself showed himself immediately at the top of his form; he husbanded his resources better than that. He had almost reunited the two hostile camps of waiters and set them to make common cause against himself when he had asked which of them knew the top from the bottom of a bottle of G. H. Mumm, and, taking a napkin and a cutter, had shown them how to unwire one and to pour its contents out; and when all the glasses had been filled, and Mr. Wellcome had risen at the head of the table, dark against the bow-window with its indiarubber-plants in the mustard-yellow faience vases, those who rapped with the ends of their knives on the table and called “Order, order!” felt that it would be some minutes yet before he was thoroughly “warm.”
And yet he started at a more humorous level than anybody else could have attained. In the first place (he said) he must apologize for speaking at all. It was all Mrs. W.’s fault. As everybody knew, he was not allowed to get a word in edgeways at home (smiles)—led a dog’s life, in fact (more smiles)—indeed, as he had said to his old friend Charlie Cutbush only the other day, Charlie Cutbush, who used to travel for Dwu Mawr Whisky and now kept “The SilentWoman” in the Borough, “Charlie,” he had said, “you ought to get that sign o’ yours altered—it ought to be a man with his head cut off, not a woman!” (A little more laughter, and a gallant remark from Cosimo to the speaker’s wife that at any rate Mr. Wellcome looked well on it). But to get on (Mr. Wellcome continued). As they all knew, there was a good deal of giving in connexion with weddings. In his own time at Glenerne it had always been a bit of a puzzle where Miss Addams put ’em all to sleep; but they all knew now where Mrs. Deschamps slept, and a pretty little room it was, and its occupant lots of time before her yet (quite a sudden outburst of mirth at this, and confusion and a cry of “Wretch!” from Mrs. Deschamps). Tut-tut!—What Mr. Wellcome meant to say, if they’d be quiet a bit and not jump down his throat like that, was that they’d all been into Mrs. Deschamps’ room to see the wedding-presents. (Laughter.) Now Mr. Wellcome wasn’t going to say they weren’t, one and all, very handsome wedding-presents, especially Miss Addams’s oak-and-silver biscuit-box and the embroidered quilt given by Mrs. Deschamps herself (but Mr. Wellcome would have a word to say to his old friend George Massey, about the comparative inefficacy of embroidered quilts when your feet were really cold, by and by.) (More laughter.) But what Mr. Wellcomewasgoing to say, and he’d say it twice if anybody didn’t hear it the first time, was that he’d been giving something away that morning that he hoped and trusted his old friend George would find worth more than all the rest put together—a bonny bride. (Loud applause, and aninstant recognition of their error on the part of those who had thought that a humorist couldn’t on occasion be serious too.) Mr. Wellcome repeated: a bonnie bride. Mr. Wellcome didn’t mean that they didn’t all joke about these things sometimes. He did himself, and so would George Massey be doing by and by. But hedidsay this about marriage, and he spoke as a man who had been married more years than he cared to remember: that there was nothing like it. (Cries of “Hear, hear!” from married and unmarried alike, and a noisy drumming of knives and hands on the table.) And while Mr. Wellcome was about it he was going to say something else. There seemed to be people about who thought themselves very wise nowadays. They wanted this changed and that changed; Mr. Wellcome didn’t know what they did want, and he didn’t think they themselves did either; sometimes it seemed to him that they just wanted something different—good or bad, but different. In fact he, Mr. Wellcome, called ’em grousers and grizzlers—a pack o’ frosty-faces. Now nobody expected the world to stand still. No doubt there was lots of things could be improved on. There was off-licences, for instance. Likewise Clubs. But (here Mr. Wellcome shook a fat forefinger warningly and impressively) Marriage wasn’t one of ’em. If an Englishman’s house was his castle, Marriage was what Mr. Wellcome might call the front-door key of it! (Applause far more loud and sustained than any mere humorous sally could have called forth.) Now he kept his front-door key on the bunch. (A “Go on with you!” from Mrs. Wellcome.) If the law allowed himtwo or three wives (and he had only to look round that table to wish ... but that was neither here nor there, and no doubt if he could he’d soon be wishing he hadn’t—much laughter)—what he was going to say was that if he had twenty wives he’d keep ’em all on the bunch too.... “But instead o’ that one of ’em keeps me on a bit of string,” said Mr. Wellcome, dropping his voice so comically and despondingly that the whole table roared with laughter....
“And now,” said Mr. Wellcome, beginning to pat his pockets in search of something, “let’s cut the cackle and come to the horses.... Where is the dashed thing? Ah, here it is!...”
And, as if his gift of champagne had not been enough, from the bottom of his breeches-pocket he drew forth a gold wrist-watch, ordered Aunt Jerry to hold out her hand, and snapped the chain about her wrist.
It was, too, a “coming to the horses” in a sense quite other than the figurative one in which Mr. Wellcome used the expression. They were real horses to which he came. What else (Mr. Wellcome wanted to know) could be expected of him when Toreador had come in at twelve to one yesterday, and all the money on the favourite, and the bookies’ pockets simply spilling gold and notes?... Nay, Mr. Wellcome described the scene. He set himself in an attitude, and his voice dropped to a hush. “I don’t know how ever Sammy did it!” he confided to them. “He seemed to pick her together, then ...hoooosh!—Short head, and a hundred-and-twenty o’ the best for W.W.!... ‘Who giveyouthe office?’ Dick Marks says to me when I goes totouch; ‘if it hadn’t been for you, Old Knowall, it’ld ha’ been grand slam;youknow a bit,youdo’ ... So now, ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Wellcome concluded, raising his glass, “in asking you all to drink the health of Mr. and Mrs. George Massey, I’ll do so in the words of the poet:
What is there in the vale of LifeHalf so delightful as a wife,When friendship, love and peace combineTo stamp the marriage-bond divine?...
What is there in the vale of LifeHalf so delightful as a wife,When friendship, love and peace combineTo stamp the marriage-bond divine?...
What is there in the vale of LifeHalf so delightful as a wife,When friendship, love and peace combineTo stamp the marriage-bond divine?...
I ask you to join me, ladies and gentlemen....”
Then was begun the writing of a page unparalleled for brightness in the annals of Glenerne. Health after health was drunk, and it was Mr. Rainbow who proposed that of the youngest bachelor present—the infant Wellcome. Yesterday, he said, had been a fine day for Toreador’s race, but no finer than to-day was for another race—the Human Race!... Such a roar as went up! Nobody had supposed Rainbow had it in him. Aunt Jerry blushed; Mrs. Deschamps, who was sipping champagne at the time, had to have her back slapped by M. Criqui, and did not recover for several minutes; Cosimo’s laugh rivalled that of Mr. Wellcome himself. And then Mr. Rainbow rounded on Cosimo likewise.... For nothing succeeds like success, and Mr. Rainbow, having scored once, immediately scored again. If little birds were to be believed, he said, giving the discreetest of glances at Cosimo and Amory, they might be having another jollification before long. He mentioned no names. He would merely say that one of them was not unknown tofame, fame of what he might call an artistic sort; and all he would say, in the words of a song that used to be sung when he was a good many years younger, was, “That’s the time to do it—while you’re young!”
Then Mr. Rainbow made his best hit of all—he sat down in the perfect moment of his triumph.
“The cake, the cake!” everybody shouted; and one of Bunters’ waiters handed Aunt Jerry a knife.
Then there were fresh shrieks of merriment, for when Aunt Jerry tried to cut that formidable cake it was discovered to be of solid plaster-of-Paris—a white grindstone tricked out with silver-paper cupids and spurious sugar-work.
“Beats Mrs. Deschamps and the Kissing Bee hollow!” roared the authors of the imposture.
And so the real cake had to be brought and cut.
They rose from the table and ascended to the drawing-room, and there the merriment became more furious still. For Mr. Wellcome’s eyes fell on the whatnot with the photographs of Miss Addams’s “grandchildren,” and the seed of an idea sprang into being in his mind. It grew; it blossomed; it spread into the Rose of Eugenics itself. Mr. Wellcome approached Amory and Cosimo. He was perhaps just slightly drunk. His fingers moved lovingly on Cosimo’s biceps, and passed to his pectoral muscles: his other hand was out, almost as if he would have done the same to Amory: and then he gave them, so to speak, their certificate of physical fitness. Noisily he bade Cosimo kiss Amory there and then.
“Be a man ... kiss her, damme!” he cried, a forciblehand on each; and Amory dropped her lids....
But Cosimo, who was there to see others make exhibitions of themselves but not to make one of himself, hung reluctantly back. But the irresistible Wellcome dragged them both forward again. There was no help for it, and so, knocking his head against Amory’s, he gave her a stage kiss only, which, of course, in this tale of Two Kisses, does not count.
“That’s the style!” cried Mr. Wellcome heartily, deceived by appearances. “Hoooosh!... Short head!—Hi, Bonzoline ... what’s your name ... Lorenzo! Hurry up with them liqueurs, and then go downstairs, and feel in the right-hand pocket of my overcoat, and you’ll find a bundle of toothpicks—and hi!—see whether my Missis has changed the boy yet ... I want to show ’em his legs, tell her.... Talk about ‘legs’!... But you’ll see....”
They had seemed to be merry up to then; but all agreed afterwards that only with the bringing up of the coffee and liqueurs and toothpicks did what might be called therealmerriment begin.
At six o’clock that evening Amory and Cosimo took tea in the studio in Cheyne Walk and compared notes of the events of the day. Cosimo was ecstatic. He had not believed such things existed. Amory’s utterances, too, were as breathless and explosive as his own, but seemed somehow to lack ring. A close observer might have supposed her to be acting a brightness. Then for the twentieth time Cosimo guffawed.
“But you lost your bet, Amory—hedidn’tsay, ‘May all your troubles be little ones!’”
“But he showed us the baby’s legs.”
“I admit he did that. That was rather beyond rubies.”
“And he handed the toothpicks round.”
“So he did. I shall keep mine—die in defence of it. And you’ll find that horse’s name written on my heart. A horse-race at a wedding!—Oh, oh, I’m not complaining! It was all you promised, and more!”
“I thought perhaps you were disappointed,” Amory remarked.
“Good heavens, no! I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds! (But, of course, your aunt was charming.)...Isn’tMr. Massey fond of the police sergeant!”
“Sickly sentiment, I call it,” said Amory abruptly.
“Oh no, not if you take it as part of the general show,” Cosimo explained. “Damon and Pythias, I suppose; not having a brother, can’t say. But the thing can’t be taken to bits. It was a perfect whole. I wonder what thereisabout a perfect whole that makes it far more than the sum of the parts?”
“Eh?... Oh yes, it is more,” said Amory.
“More?... Rather! Why, take it in art....”
“Don’t talk about art to-night, Cosimo, please,” she said. “You always give me so much to think of when you talk about art.”
“Tired?” said Cosimo solicitously, bending over the back of her chair.
“A little.”
Amory could not have told why she was tired. She only knew that, to-night somehow, Cosimo did not seem as intuitive as he usually was.
Amorywas not the only one who was grumbling at the weather. Even Mrs. ’Ill, who was usually of an imperturbable temper, complained. The clothes that she hadn’t had out, no, not half an hour, had been drying that lovely it was a treat to see ’em; and of course in running out quick to take ’em in she must go and drop an armful—her most partickler gent’s shirts too—and what with the babies and the hens carrying the dirt in and out and one thing and another, it really was enough to try anybody. Cheyne Walk! Rainy Walk morelike——
Indeed, it must have rained an inch or more during the morning. It overflowed so from the roof-gutter overhead that as Amory stood by the casement window she might as well have been looking through a Bridal Veil Waterfall. Not that there was anything to look at beyond it. The park had gone; the Jelly Factory was blotted out; the Suspension Bridge was vignetted into nothing half-way across the river. Gurglings came from underneath the sink in the corner. Whether it was the rain or not, the smell of cabbage-water had returned.
Amory was sure it was raining harder in Cheyne Walk than it was anywhere else; harder than it could possibly be in Oxford Street, for example. And she had wanted, yet not wanted, to go to Oxford Street that morning. She had wanted to go because she wanted money; she had not wanted to go because the only means she knew of getting it was to borrow from Dorothy. Cosimo was away; his uncle had died a week before; Cosimo could not possibly be disturbed. And she had seen Mr. Hamilton Dix, and—thank you! It would be some time before she troubled Mr. Hamilton Dix again!...
Overfed animal!...
October, and still no Show. More, Mr. Hamilton Dix hardly took the trouble now to promise one immediately. But Mr. Dix need not think that Amory didn’t now see perfectly clearly the trick that had been practised upon her. She knew now why he had come so hurriedly to her that morning and dazzled her with his offer of a hundred pounds. Angiers’, a far better firm than Croziers’, had wanted her; that was why. Croziers’ had bought her merely in order that Angiers’ should not have her. “Dishonest,” Amory called it, and she had told Hamilton Dix so to his face. And his reply had been to take her hand and try to pat it.
Wasn’t it dishonest? she had cried hotly to herself any time this past month. If it wasn’t, she would be glad if somebody would tell her what honesty was! And Mr. Dix in his most odious and soothing voice, had said that she really mustn’t talk like that. “Dishonest?” he had repeated. Why, Miss Towers talkedas if Croziers’ had anything to gain by deliberately suppressing her work! Nothing (he had assured her) was further from the truth. Croziers’ were in the hands of circumstances, too, the circumstances that made one time ripe for a particular exhibition and another not.... Messrs. Angier? Mr. Dix knew nothing about Messrs. Angier and their arrangements. Theymightbe all right; Mr. Dixhadheard it said that Messrs. Angier were rather in the habit of promising more than they performed, but that was only a rumour, and Mr. Dix wouldn’t give it currency. But he could assure Miss Towers that such “options” as that which Messrs. Crozier had obtained on her work were matters of everyday business.... Come now: would she tell him, as her friend, exactly what the trouble was? Was it money? If so, there was perhaps a chance that Messrs. Crozier might be willing to take over a certain quantity of her more recent work on the same terms as before....
Another “option,” in fact....
Then, successively had come the stages when Mr. Dix had told her that in his opinion she was injudicious to change her style so frequently as she did (“Versatility’s all very well, but it puzzles your public,” he had said, as if it had not been precisely the ground of Amory’s complaint that Croziers’ were seeing to it that she hadnopublic at all)—when he had told her, that, if she really thought Angiers’ could do better for her, Croziers’ might be willing to release her from her obligation on repayment of the sum advanced plus a trifle for the accommodation—and when he hadceased to say anything at all. A pretty “option!”—Amory supposed that other man had called it an “option” when he had run away with her godmother’s fifty-two pounds a year.
And of course this was exactly why she didn’t want to ask Dorothy for money. For Dorothy would be able to say—perhaps to say it as if she was crowing over her a little—that she had warned her about that contract. Not that Dorothy had warned her one bit, really. Dorothy had not known any more than herself that her Show would be put off and put off and put off; and if the Show hadnotbeen put off, all would have been well. But Dorothy was so—peculiar. Her ways were peculiar. Shehadways, in fact, not principles. Amory didn’t want to be severe on Dorothy, but some of the things she did seemed positivelyunprincipled. Not to go any further, there was Dorothy’s undignified way of regarding her own sex. She seemed to concur in that view of it that made it merely the plaything of the other sex. Of course (to be quite fair) it wasn’t to be supposed for a moment that Dorothy would have let Mr. Hamilton Dix kiss her, as he had wanted to kiss Amory. Amory was sure she wouldn’t. But for all that there would have been—something—not a kiss—not even a “leading on” perhaps—Amory couldn’t have said what it would have been—but there would have beensomething.... Put coarsely, it was a sort of exaggerated sex-consciousness in Dorothy—that and lack of principle. Amory ought to know that exaggerated sex-consciousness by this time. Glenerne had been full of it. The world seemed to be full of it. It seemed anodious domination; Amory could not understand it at all. Why, Cosimo did not want to kiss her....
Because, of course, that sham gesture at her aunt’s wedding had not been a kiss.
Cosimo quite understood that she was wedded to her art.
Amory could not conceive where the money had gone. Less than six months ago she had had nearly sixty pounds, not counting her regular pound a week; now she had a few shillings only, and quite a number of small debts. She supposed it was because she was not really familiar with the prices of things. Yes, it must be that, for she remembered how surprised she had been at the cost of the little studio-warming she had given when she had first come into this hateful little room. She had not provided anything at all out of the way. There had been a rather nice Greek wine Walter Wyron had told her about, not to be bought in very small quantities, but of course they had not drunk the whole of it that night—indeed, it had lasted for weeks. And there had been cold sausages and salads from a German charcuterie, in glass, not in tins—it was not true economy to run the risk of ptomaine poisoning. And there had also been a few boxes of figs and candied fruits—she admitted those had been rather dear. And so on. Nor, if the party had been a great success, would she have minded a little extra expenditure just for once; but, somehow, it had not been a success. Laura Beamish had had a cold and had not been able to sing; Dickie Lemesurier had wired at the last minute that she was not able to come; Cosimo had done his best,but Dorothy had turned up in an evening frock and had said she could not possibly stay more than an hour; and Walter’s friend, who could quote Nietzsche, had proved to be domineering and had done nothing but wrangle with Walter the whole of the evening. In fact, the party had fallen miserably flat.
But that, after all, was only one evening, and if Amory had been a little extravagant that time, she had more than made up (or so she should have thought) since. Eggs, sardines (in tins), cold boiled ham (at half a crown a pound), bread, butter, and lots of nice hot tea—it was not possible to live much more cheaply than that. At first Mrs. ’Ill cooked her an occasional joint in her own oven at the Creek, but joints are not cheap when you throw a large portion of them away from sheer weariness of the sight of them. She had spent rather a lot on canvases, nothing on clothes. And twice she had been away with Katie Deedes for weekends. Oh yes, and there had been one other party, a river-party just before everybody went away for the summer, which had been Amory’s, all but the railway-fares and the claret and lemonade. That had been quite a success.
Except for these things Amory had not the vaguest idea where the money had gone.
She only wanted to borrow until the Christmas quarter; indeed, it was not so much an advance on her allowance as an anticipation of the Christmas present she was sure to receive from her uncle and aunt. Then she would be straight again, and would know how to spend more wisely for the future. And Dorothycould well afford it, if one might judge of her fortune from her unhygienic but expensive dresses. If only the rain would stop she would go to Dorothy at once. She knew that Dorothy’s position had improved, and, if the world chose to regard its art as a parasitic thing, the artist could hardly be blamed if he spoiled the Philistine whenever he had the opportunity. In one sense she would actually be doing Dorothy a favour. A loan would put Dorothy into the honourable position of being a patron. Many a Philistine name lives on the formal page of an immortal work that otherwise would have been forgotten.
Amory continued to watch the flounces of water that spilled from the eaves and to listen to the runnings and gurglings of the West London drainage system.
But all at once a merry “Cooee!” came from below; a flapping as of shaken garments sounded in the entry; and a step and a call of “Amory!” were heard on the stairs. It was the voice of Dorothy herself. The door flew inwards, and Dorothy Lennard stood there, a pair of blue eyes and the tip of a nose visible, the rest of her a shimmer of some greenish-yellow material, thin as goldbeaters’ skin and trickling rivulets of water. She shook herself on the landing in a haze of water-dust, like a dog that comes out of a pond, and thencried—
“Quick, Amory, and certify me—you shall take ’em off yourself and feel—Mr. Miller said Sloane Street, but it was so near I thought I’d come in—how are you?—No, I’ll unbutton them, then your hands will be quite dry tofeel——”
She took from her head a sort of poke that fitted like a bathing-cap, allowed the long garment to rustle in a small close heap to the floor, and cried, “There! Now feel me!”
She seized Amory’s wrist and patted herself with Amory’s palm.
“That damp isn’t the rain come through,” she went on. “Quite the other way; that’s my warmth that did that, they’re as impervious as that! And of course they’re rather dear. But it’s a perfect day for it! There’ll be a column of floods and rainfall in all the papers to-morrow, and we’re setting all the telephones on the jump now getting the space next to it. You do certify me? I said to Mr. Miller, ‘Whatisthe good of sticking a piece of the stuff under a tap in the window? Whatdoesit convey to anybody? They only think there’s some fake somewhere (advertisers have faked so much, you see), and besides, it’s been done.’ So I said, ‘Why not let somebody go out in this rain in ’em? If they’ll stand this they’ll stand anything. Then get some known person to certify that at such-and-such a time yesterday (the wettest day for eighteen years) so-and-so arrived as dry as a bone at such-and-such a place, having walked in Ararat Extra Light and Japhet Boots’—but you must feel my stockings too.”
She sat down in one of Amory’s basket-chairs, began to unlace her boots, and presently thrust out for Amory’s examination, one after the other, her grey silk-stockinged soles.
“So they’re mine,” Dorothy cried jubilantly, “and if you’ll give me your signature I’ll get you a set, notto speak of the advertisement for you—can’t do without that nowadays—‘I, the undersigned, Amory Towers’—if they’ve never heard of you they daren’t say so when they see that.... Those Cosimo’s slippers? I’ll put ’em on.... I say, you have let your fire down! No, I’ll set it going—you fill the kettle—Ihaveenjoyed my walk!”
She began to potter about the black fire, gabbling without stopping as she did so.
Amory was almost disinterestedly glad to see Dorothy; on such a day she would have been glad to see anybody. For inside the studio was more desolate than the streets without. No longer did that room over the greengrocer’s shop shimmer and twinkle as on the day when she and Cosimo had sat down to their first little supper there. Half the plates that had overlapped so prettily, half the cup that had dangled from the bright hook, were broken; the sink was full of articles awaiting that dreaded washing-up; and in the cupboard forgotten condensed milk tins and brick-like half-loaves turned yellow and green. Amory had cut off Mrs. ’Ill’s daily visit; she now came on Saturdays only, and Cosimo had not been there to give her a hand. By the time Dorothy had drawn up the fire, and, going for the tea-things, had found plates with sardine-tails on their edges and cups with graduations of brown about their rims, she might have been pardoned had she thought tea hardly worth troubling about; but she merely bustled cheerfully about, scraping things into a bucket, clearing the table, sweeping the hearth. All the time shechatted about the Ararat Extra Light and the photograph of her that would appear in the papers on the morrow. Amory had been shocked to hear that Dorothy had actually consented to this.
“Why not?” Dorothy had demanded. “It won’t have my name on, and by the time the machine men have finished with it, it won’t be either like me or anybody else! My dear, you’re as bad as Aunt Emmie. Hang my family! Would any ofthembuy me a pair of Japhet Boots? My dear, Ihaveto dress myself well:Ican’t afford to go about in rags! You don’t suppose I buy my clothes, do you? Why, you couldn’t get these stockings for thirty shillings! I don’t mean that I get photographed for every stitch I have on, but I have to get things one way or another!”
Amory sighed to be the possessor of a relentless intellect. It was a heavy burden. Far, far happier were they, the simpler ones, whose nature it was to laugh lazily and good-humouredly while others shouldered the responsibility of the world. They did not even know that in order that they might dance somebody else must weep. Dorothy had condemned herself. All sorts of people could put forward that plea of hers, “I have to get things one way and another.” Amory wanted to know what Dorothygavethe world in return. She, Amory, gave her art; but Dorothy would surely hardly claim that those fashion-drawings of hers could not quite well be got along without. Therefore it was even a little sorrowfully that Amory asked Dorothy how she was getting along at the studio.
“Pleasedon’t tread on my new Ararat!” Dorothy cried in fright. “Sorry; my fault for leaving it there.... The studio? Oh, I’m under Miss Benson, of course; it would be a shame to turn her out of a job, and Miss Umpleby would come next anyway; so I just potter along. As a matter of fact, I’m only in the studio about half my time; it’s much more fun downstairs, talking over ideas with Mr. Miller. You wouldn’t suppose, would you, Amory,” she said suddenly, both earnestly and excitedly, “that as I stand here now, filling this teapot, I’ve got an idea worth—I don’t know how much, but certainly Doubledays’ would give me a thousand for it, if Hallowells’ won’t take it, and I should want a pretty stiff contract even then?”
With her hair all rumpled by the Ararat cap and her feet in Cosimo’s old slippers she certainly did not look worth a thousand.
“Sorry I can’t tell you what it is,” she went on, setting down the teapot, thumbing a hard half-loaf and selecting a softer one. “I haven’t told Mr. Miller yet. We have to choose our time for these things; wait for the ripe moment. Wait till Hallowells’ get their last storey up and the roof on, then we’ll see. Mr. Miller thinks I’m just a person who makes a useful suggestion now and then, and I let him think so; but wait a bit. Something better than Benny’s place forme!”——
“But—but—I don’t understand. Is this fashion-drawing?” Amory asked.
“Oh, dear no!” Dorothy replied, drawing up a chair to the table. “Let it stand a minute first—stir it with a spoon.... I don’t mean fashion-drawing now. Yousee, Hallowells’ are going to wake London up. Mr. Miller’s pretty good at his job—waking London up—in other words, advertising, and I’m only a fashion-artist a long as there’s nothing better going. It will probably come off next Spring—depends how they get on with the building; and I’ll buy a picture from you then, Amory.”
Amory had smiled. Oh, advertisement! She had thought that Dorothy could hardly mean that she was going to make all this money out of fashion-drawing! Advertisements—those funny things that Aunt Jerry was getting! Amory smiled again.
For Aunt Jerry had lately been showing her more of them—advertisements now, not of caterers and wedding-cake makers, job-masters, and house-agents and furnishers, such as she had had at the time of her wedding, but of quite other things. Amory had thought she had never seen anything so funny—and nauseating—funny and nauseating both at once. Really, the things were an outrage! She supposed that somebody—Mr. Miller perhaps—read the top left-hand corner of the front page of theTimesandMorning Postday by day, carefully counted the weeks, felt (as it were) Aunt Jerry’s pulse, asked her how she was feeling each morning, penetrated into her hidden thoughts, anticipated her desires, and then sent the things along—descriptions of layettes and perambulators, of cribs and pens and patent bottles, of foods and clothes and schemes for insurance. “Baby will Soon be Cutting his Teeth,” Mr. Miller, or whoever it was, began, whispering (so to speak) confidentially behind his hand; or “Of course if you WANTyour Wee One to have Wind!”... That, Amory thought, was the funny aspect; the nauseating one came when you remembered that, properly diffused by this same means, really valuable information about Eugenics and the Chromosome might have been given to the world. That, if Aunt Jerry and Mr. Massey must have children, would have been, not immediately perhaps, but ultimately far more to the purpose. But Amory supposed it would be a waste of time to look for ultimate purposes to Dorothy. Possibly she not only devised the advertisements, but drew the layette too.
But Amory had not forgotten that she wanted Dorothy to lend her ten pounds. The minutes were passing, and no doubt Dorothy would soon be putting on the Ararat again, and going back to Oxford Street and Mr. Miller. Amory turned over this and that “opening”; none of them seemed very promising. Dorothy was already lacing up the Japhet Boots; she was going to make her advertisement a “cinch” by walking back also in the downpour. But suddenly Amory remembered her pride. There was no need for abjectness. Therefore it was with a certain offhandedness that, as Dorothy rose and stamped one Japhet boot after the other, she suddenly said, “Oh, I say, Dorothy, will you lend me ten pounds?”
It is astonishing how rich everybody else appears when we ourselves are poor. For a moment Dorothy’s eyes opened widely, then she broke into a humorous grimace.
“My dear!... Where from, I wonder?” Then she added, “Really? I mean, you really want it?”
“Yes,” said Amory shortly. She wondered whether Dorothy thought she would ask for it if she didn’t want it.
“I haven’t ten pounds in the world,” said Dorothy. Then she considered for a moment. “If it’s really urgent—I mean if you reallymusthave it—I might—I never have yet, but Imightbe able to get it——” She paused.
There seemed to Amory a certain lack of delicacy in the pause. It was as if she gave Amory an opportunity of saying what she wanted the money for. Amory was sure that some day, when those poor and deserving artists should come to her, she would neither ask questions nor break off into pauses that came to the same thing. She did not deny Dorothy’s right to refuse; she did deny her any other right. If Dorothy’s fashion-drawing or advertisements or whatever it was could not provide ten pounds, then absolutely the only thing that could be said for these absurdities disappeared.
“You see, I should have to borrow it myself——” Dorothy said hesitatingly, and Amory merely hoisted her shapely shoulders.
Then, however, it seemed to strike even Dorothy that she was not behaving very well. Suddenly she said, “All right, I will borrow it; will to-morrow do?”
“I should be awfully obliged,” said Amory, helping Dorothy on with the Ararat Coat.
But Dorothy relapsed from the right attitude again immediately. Without stopping to think that the Ararat sleeve was wet and Amory dry, she suddenly passed her arm about her. She held her close, making herhorridly wet, and began to say a number of the so-called sympathetic things that, when they are not impertinences, are banalities.
“Iamsorry, dear,” she said. “I see how it is; of course you aren’t cut out for this sort of life. I saw that the moment I came in. Now, look here, what you ought to do would be to give Mrs. ’Ill a sum every week, and to tell her that she’s got to do you, all in, for that. Not too much, either;youcan’t buy, but she can. That’s the way I do. I saw how you’d been living when I washed up; eggs and sardines and pressed beef; and you’re really run down. You ought never to have signed that contract, but I’ll tell you what you perhaps can do about that. Tell Croziers’ that you won’t go to another dealer, but that youmusthave leave to sell things privately, and that you’ll pay them commission just as ifthey’dsold them. If they won’t—well, just you sell without their permission, and let ’em sue you if they like. They won’t sue you. They can’t afford it. I’m seeing business men every day, remember, and I’m sure that’s what Mr. Miller would say. And if my thing comes off I’ll buy a picture from you next Spring. Will you promise to do that, Amory?”
Even Amory saw the sense of it, but that did not alter the fact that to all intents and purposes Dorothy was lending her money on the condition that she did as she was told with it. Notexactlythat, of course, but rather indelicately like it. And she had all but told Amory that her place was disgracefully dirty and herself underfed. Amory wasn’t sure that Dorothy wasn’t simply one mass of pose. She could come here andspeak her mind plainly enough, could talk in quite a grasping spirit of the money she intended to get; but Amory could imagine her with Mr. Miller—anything but plain; sly, wheedling, not helping in the emancipation of her sex at all, but actually doing all she could to rivet their chains the faster upon them; neither forgetting, nor allowing Mr. Miller to forget, that she was rather a personable young woman. Amory called it the next thing to—well, she wouldn’t say what. She would be kind, merely say that they were in opposite camps, and let it go at that.
Therefore she was not giving Dorothy one for herself, but was merely showing herself staunch to a high ideal, when she said, effusively, but still with dignity, “Oh, thank you so very, very much ... if youcouldpossibly get me the money.... Perhaps I haven’t managed very well, but as you say, I’ve other things to think of; and about what you say about Croziers’, I hardlythink——”
But Dorothy cut bluntly in. “Rubbish! They’ve just taken advantage of your ignorance and inexperience. I should tell ’em they could make kite-tails of their silly old contract! Look here, shallIsee Mr. Dix for you?”
Amory hesitated. She did not want to see Mr. Dix again herself, firstly because she felt that an artist ought to be spared these sordid matters, and secondly because she always wanted to wash herself when Mr. Dix had covered her with those galantined eyes. But Dorothy was not an artist, and apparently didn’t mind a glutinous look more or less. To the coarser naturethe coarser task. One didn’t chop firewood with a razor....
“What’d be the good?” she sighed. “I signed the thing.”
“Leave that to me,” said Dorothy briskly. “I’ll talk to Mr. Dix for you. At least I’ll get permission for you to sell things privately, and then you can reckon the ten pounds off the price of the picture I’ll buy—for my scheme’s bound to come off! So we’ll call that a bet. And now I must fly. Do try my plan with Mrs. ’Ill. When’s Cosimo coming back? Yes, I saw about his uncle. Good-bye, dear.... And oh, dear, now I’m forgetting the very thing I came for! You will sign that advertisement, won’t you?”
“What advertisement?” Amory asked. She had forgotten all about the Ararat Coat. But now she remembered.... “Oh, that waterproof thing! Oh, you don’t want me to sign that!”
Dorothy turned quickly. “Oh, Amory, don’t be so silly!” she broke out. “Of course it doesn’t matter a button to us whether you sign it or not, but I thought you might as well. Nobody need sign it for that matter, but we have our space, and it’s a pity to waste this rain. And I really could get you the complete outfit, boots and all. As well as getting your name before the public. But don’t if you don’t want.”
Amory lifted her shallow (but penetrating) eyes.
“Well, dear—if it werereallynecessary—especially after all your kindness—but as you say it isn’t—if you wouldn’t very much mind—I think my signature looks better on mypictures——”
“All right. It doesn’t matter,” said Dorothy. “I’ll let you know how I go on with Mr.Dix——”
And she was gone, once more to put the Ararat and the Japhet Boots to the test of the heaviest rainfall for eighteen years.
No sooner was her back turned than Amory, flinging aside the curtain on its little rail, lay down on her unmade bed. She had the promise of her ten pounds, but it had cost its price. It had cost it in forbearance. Still, that was no more than all the poets and seers and souls dedicated to art had had to suffer before her, and she, like them, had kept her ideal unsullied.
But she was disappointed in Dorothy.
Moreand more as she thought it over, Amory was glad that she was not going to see Mr. Hamilton Dix again. Excepting always Cosimo, who was different, she had begun to have a poor opinion of men. And as this opinion was based, not on her reading of Association books, nor on anything Laura Beamish or Katie Deedes had told her, but on her own unshakable and inalienable experience, it is perhaps worth a moment’s examination.
By no means, then, did she now think men the efficient, capable creatures they appeared to consider themselves to be. Amory knew men; she knew two of them, no fewer. One of these two men had inveigled her into an all-but-fraudulent contract; the other, definitely fraudulently, had absconded with the funds that had provided Amory Towers with an income of a pound a week, and was not very likely ever to be heard of again. We all speak of the world as we find it. This was the world as Amory had found it; and, since the total sum of the world’s wrong and cruelty was admittedly enormous, what more natural than to try to gauge its enormousness by a process of multiplication?
Amory, sternly and deliberately setting her painting aside until she should have come to some really basic conclusion on these points, began to multiply.
And the day on which she did so was an evil day for those impostors—men. How should it not be an evil day for them? For men, who had had the world’s affairs entirely in their hands in the past, still had them almost entirely in their hands to-day; and what had they made of things? Plainly, the best system they had been able to devise was a system in which it was possible for trustees to abscond with funds entrusted to them by godmothers. And not only that. Forgetting that a real man, Blake (unhappily now dead), had said that the sight of a robin in a cage set all heaven in a rage—totally ignoring that spiritual aspect of the matter—men, when asked for redress, callously weighed the cost of prosecution and the chances of securing a conviction, shrugged their shoulders, and (in Amory’s case) apparently proposed to do nothing at all. Men, in a word, actually approved (though they pretended not to) of the organized robbery of poor girls.
Next, whether they liked it or not, men must shoulder the responsibility for a state of things that permitted iniquitous contracts to be fluttered in the face of necessitous people, and that (in effect) ground the face of the poor because he (or in the present instance she) was poor. Males, as males, could not escape the onus of Mr. Hamilton Dix. Amory might have been more merciful had they made any attempt to do so, but they did not. They spoke of such things as everyday matters of business. They said that no humanly devisable system could be perfect, and told her, with their hypocritical “niceness,” that the whole fabric of society could hardly be pulled down merely because a self-seeking individualhere and there crept in and took advantage. But Amory knew that it was not a question of individuals. It was the underlying spiritual principle that was the whole point. That was radically wrong. Even men saw this, a few men, and called themselves Radicals, which was really a Latin word, meaning that they affected to go to the radix or root of the matter; but Amory knew where the root of the matter really lay. It lay in this artificial sex-distinction and in that frightfully laughable masculine theory of the “natural dominance of the male.”
But this was only a part of it, and not the finer part. It was in the finer part that the whole evil came to a head. How (to put the thing in a nutshell) did men (with the honourable exception of Cosimo and one or two others) treat art (namely, Amory’s art)? There you had it!
Here Amory was on her own ground, and could speak once more from that astonishingly useful thing, experience. How had the world, under male dominance, treated her art?... Well, Amory would be fair, even generous. There actually had been a period of a few months, a sort of lucid interval, when Mr. Hamilton Dix’s articles really had given the impression that Mr. Dix knew what he was talking about. They had been written about the time Amory had signed her contract, and had been copied by provincial papers. But oh! the downfall after that. The adulation Dix had lately been spilling over that Harris girl, who (as Amory could demonstrate, absolutely and up to the hilt) had simply stolen Amory’s own subjects and carried one or two ofAmory’s own tricks of handling to simply screaming absurdities! More than once Amory had wondered whether Miss Harris let Mr. Dix kiss her.... And when Amory had pointed out the theft to Mr. Dix, and had said that in her poor opinion an action for infringement of copyright might lie (or if it mightn’t, then it ought to), had Mr. Dix done anything but ogle her and insult her with his sticky smile? Not he. He had merely asked her whether she wished to make her demonstration before a jury of matrons!... No doubt he had thought that smart, but even a fool may sometimes tell the truth by accident and unawares. A jury of matrons—that was to say an appeal to a court that did not condone embezzlement and smile at thievish contracts—was exactly whatwasneeded. But had men, during all the centuries in which they had ruled, ever founded such a court? Were they ever likely to do so until they were absolutely driven to it? Not they! And it was probably too late now. The women had seen through them, knew their real nature. At last they had seen the thing to be the sex-war it really had been all along. Amory could have named, offhand, quite a dozen of her old companions of the McGrath who had put the whole question far more clearly than the so-called statesmen. And even among men themselves there was the clear-eyed Otto Weiniger—that notable exception.
For what had Weiniger said, if the dull world would but take the wool out of its ears and listen? Why, what but that the classification by sexes was nothing but the roughest of approximations after all? Because thechromosome didn’t actuallyshow, illogical folk had got into the habit of saying “This is a man” and “That is a woman,” largely by force of hearing it repeated time after time. But what of the masculine qualities in woman, the feminine qualities in man? What about Cosimo’s exquisite perceptions, Amory’s own strong art? Oh no; this rough guesswork really would not do for a generation that at last, in spite of bandages and blinkers, had begun to see the light! Amory knew—by herself and Cosimo, to go no further—that the sexesdidintermerge and graduate. The best women to-day had brains that pierced ruthlessly through shams (which was what brains were primarily for); and the best men were Feminist in their sympathies. No doubt it would take a little time for this truth to force its way into the Glenernes of the land. No doubt Mrs. Deschamps would continue to flirt with M. Criqui, and the unspeakable Mr. Wellcome to boast that he was wholly (not partly) the father of his own offspring and his placid wife entirely (and without qualification) their mother. But nobody on the look-out for signs of the true progress turned their eyes Glenernewards. Glenerne had never heard of the chromosome. Ten to one it would have thought it was a mechanical piano-player. That was why Amory had left Glenerne.
And how had the world treated its Weiniger—its Nietzsche—its Strindberg? “Mad as hatters,” it said, merely because they had shot themselves, or died in the madhouses to which it had driven them!
Yes (Amory thought), if that was the best the men could do, it was time the women took hold!
Hungrily, hungrily she wished Cosimo was back, so that they might discuss these things together!
But Cosimo not only remained away; he did not even write very frequently. He appeared to wait until he had received three letters from Amory, and then to “answer” them together, obviously with the letters before him. Amory understood that business in connection with his uncle’s estate detained him; he was in Shropshire: and a phrase about “running up to town presently” had read as if, even when he should come, he would go back to Shropshire again. But he had not given up his studio near the Vestry Hall; Amory knew that because he had sent her the key of it and had asked her to forward his letters; and Amory went there daily. Once she had even tried to work there, but without much success. She had hardly expected it would answer. She had only tried it because she had come to hate her own place so.
Indeed, there had been days when she had approached her easel as reluctantly as if the instrument had been a guillotine with a basket behind it to receive her severed head; and there had been other days when to contemplate the daub on the canvas had almost made her wish it had been one. For she now found her own work execrable. And yet she could not summon the courage to take a knife and scrape it out. Each afternoon she hoped it would appear better in the morning, but it never did. It seemed as if Croziers’ carrier, in fetching away those twenty-eight pictures, had taken away also whatever talent had gone to their painting. On one canvas only that she had produced since then could shebear to look, and that was neither study, sketch, nor picture. It showed the group, all red with firelight, that had sat about her hearth when Laura Beamish, with the coloured ribbons of her guitar falling about her, had sung “The Trees they do Grow High.”
She knew that the reasons for this wretched falling off lay close at hand. In the first place, she badly needed a change. Next, she was making far, far greater attempts than when she had been content to state (as it were with a “Something like this—you know—and this—you’ve seen these things”), the results of her Saturday night wanderings in the streets and of her Sunday mornings in Petticoat Lane or where the Salvation Army gathered to sing. She told herself that she had acquired knowledge more quickly than she had been able to assimilate it. Next, the lean years were always followed by the fat, the fat by the lean: it was a Law.... But she had gleams of hope too. Broadly considered, discontent was no bad sign. Only fatuity could regard its work with unvarying complacence. Despondency might not be in itself a guarantee of genius, but genius and despondency were no strangers. Her work was in a stage of transition. She was in mental and spiritual labour, and a new style would emerge. To the old one she refused to return.... And so on. The more she groped the more she read, and the more she read the more she groped. They are lucky who are merely required to love the highest when they see it: let us sorrow for those who are condemned, not only to love, but also to attempt to realize, the highest when they do not see it.
And let us sorrow especially for the artist who has no choice but to sacrifice, to the vast and thunderous things he cannot do, the frail and small and comfortable things that he can.
Amory’s refuge from herself at that time was to walk the streets until she was ready to drop with fatigue. North, south, east, and west she went, numbing herself with mechanical movement, exhausting herself with speculations that even for herself had no interest. Faces passing, passing, for ever passing, seemed to lend her a stupor; they seemed, not individuals, but aspects of one general, horrible human phenomenon. Sometimes, in this multiple beast of a crowd, her heart palpitated as the heart of a bird palpitates before a spinning, fascinating snare. Sometimes for an hour at a time she would see 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 arrowheads of white as they turned, sometimes only to be seen under their lowered lids as a finger-nail is to be seen under the finger of a glove. She wondered how many of them, like her own, were seeing nothing but eyes too. She wondered on what pillows they closed, within what walls, behind what doors and windows, with what other eyes sealed by their sides.... And at other times she saw nothing but doors and windows. As if she had been paid to keep a catalogue of these things, she counted and classified the fanlights of Lincoln’s Inn and the Bloomsbury Squares, the high-railinged balconies of the tenements behind Victoria Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, the numbers on Soho doors,the window-boxes of Mayfair. Then there would take her the fancy that everybody she saw knew everybody else, as the bees of a hive may be supposed to know one another, and that she alone was an intruder and unknown. And for a time she rather liked that. It gave her a sense of specialness. But presently it began to frighten her a little. The specialness turned to an intolerable loneliness. Her elbows touched theirs, but they were remoter from her than the stars. If she could have stopped one of them and asked it what name it bore it would have been rather a relief; to know even a name would have been something; it would have helped in that frightening blankness, and she would have been quite willing to tell her own name in return. But she knew nothing about them—nothing, nothing. Even their sex (if Weiniger was to be believed) was a matter of presumption. Of course some had beards and some had not, but that was a shallow, superficial view. No doubt with the advance of knowledge (she fancied Galton had said something of the sort) beards might be bred on every face, or bred out of existence entirely. Amory hoped the latter. Mr. Jowett, at the McGrath (she remembered), had once lifted his moustache to show her the growth and construction of the ornament, and it had not struck her as a pretty sight; and she could not have endured Cosimo with a beard. It would have been a contradiction of all she found most sympathetic in Cosimo. That nice, friendly other girl Amory was ready to choose for Cosimo should certainly not be a girl who would allow Cosimo to grow a beard....
Amory went into Cosimo’s studio one night, after a long walk through Wandsworth, past Clapham Common, and back through the Old Town to the bus at Victoria, in order to see whether there were any letters for him. There were none, and she sat down on the edge of his bed, where she had sat that morning when she had come to tell Cosimo that she was moving into Cheyne Walk at once. Cosimo’s studio was on the ground floor, at the back of a block. Amory had not lighted the gas. Somewhere away across a yard somebody was going to bed with a blind up, and the distant incandescent shed a raw ugly light. It shone through a narrow side-window of Cosimo’s studio, making quite a bright patch on the floor at the foot of his bed. Amory watched it dully, trying to summon up force to get up and go home.