He stopped, and began to walk up and down the studio.
Amory was suddenly pale. She had not thought of this. She had thought that perhaps Mr. Strong might give a cry, rush across the studio, and take her in his arms; but of this cold and almost passionless prevision of details she had not dreamed. And yet that was magnificent too. Edgar wasted no time in dalliance when there was planning to be done. There would be time enough for softer delights when the whole of the Latin Quarter lay spread out before them in indolent magnificence of bloom. He was terrifying and superb. Such a man not manage Mr. Prang! Why, here he was, ready to bear her off that very night at a word!
Paris—Montmartre—the Quartier!
It was Romance with a vengeance!
Then at a thought she grew paler still. The children! What about Corin and Bonniebell? It didn’t matter so much about Cosimo; it would serve him right; but what about the twins? Were they also to be included in the seven francs a day? And wouldn’tit matter how they dressed either in the Quarter? Or, did Edgar propose that they should be left behind in Cosimo’s keeping, with Britomart Belchamber for a stepmother?
Edgar had reached the door again now. He was not hurrying her, but there was a look on his face that seemed to say that all she needed was a hat and a rug for the steamer.
Such a very different thing from a carpet to roll roundher——
She had risen unsteadily from the sofa. She crossed the floor and stood before Edgar, looking earnestly up into his blue eyes. She moistened her lips.
“What’s happened——” she began in a whisper....
He interrupted her only to make the slightest of forbidding gestures with his hand; her own hands had moved, as if she would have put them on his shoulders. And she saw that he was quite right. At the touch of her his control would certainly have broken down. She went on, appealingly and almost voicelessly.
“What’s happened—had to happen, hadn’t it?” she whispered. “Youfelt it sweeping us away too—didn’t you?... But need we say any more about it to-night?... I want to think, Edgar. We must both think. There’s—there’s a lot to think about—and talk over. We mustn’t be too rash. Itwouldbe rash, wouldn’t it? Look at me,Edgar——”
“Oh—I must go——,” he said with an impatience that he had not to assume.
“But look at me,” she begged. “I shan’t sleep awink to-night. I shall think about it all night. It will be lovely—but torturing—dear!—But you’ll sleep, I expect....” She pouted this last.
“I’m going away,” he announced abruptly.
“Oh!” she cried, startled.... “But you’ll come in to-morrow?”
“I shall go away for a few days. Perhaps longer.”
“But—but—we haven’t settled about thepaper!——”
He was grim.—“You don’t suppose I can think about the papernow, do you?”
“No, no—of course not—but itmustbe done to-day, Edgar! Or to-morrow at the very latest!... Can’t wetryto put this on one side, just for an hour?”
He shook his head before the impossibility....
And that was how it came about that the Indian policy of the “Novum” was left in the hands of Mr. Suwarree Prang.
Amoryhad been at a great deal of trouble to gather all the opinions she could get about the education of her twins, Corin and Bonniebell; but it was not true, as an unkind visitor who had been once only to The Witan had said, that they were everybody’s children. Just because Amory had taken Katie Deedes’ advice and had had their hair chopped off short at the nape like a Boutet de Monvel drawing—and had not disdained to accept the spelling-books which Dickie Lemesurier had given them (books in which the difficult abstraction of the letter “A” was visualized for their young eyes as “Little Brown Brother,” “B” as “Tabby Cat,” and so on)—and had listened to Mr. Brimby when he had said what a good thing it would be to devote an hour on Friday afternoons to the study of Altruism and Camaraderie—and, in a word, had not been too proud and egotistical to make use of a good suggestion wherever she found it—because she had done these things, it did not at all follow that she had shirked her duties. If she did not influence them directly, having other things to do, she influenced thosewho did influence them, which came to the same thing. She influenced the Wyrons, for example, and nobody could say that the Wyrons had not made a particularly careful study of children. They had, and Walter had founded at least two Lectures directly on the twins and their education.
But the Wyrons, who had submitted to the indignity of marriage for the sake of the race, laboured and lectured under an obvious disadvantage; they had no children of their own. And so Amory had to fill up the gaps in their experience for herself. Still, it was wonderful how frequently the Wyron’s excogitations and the things Amory had found out for herself coincided. They were in absolute accord, for example, about the promise of the immediate future and the hope that lay in the generation to come. The Past was dead and damned; the Present at best was an ignoble compromise; but the Morrow was to be bright and shining.
“Walter and I,” Laura sometimes said sadly, “aren’t anything to brag about. There is much of the base in us. Our lives aren’t what they should be. We’re in the grip of inherited instincts too. We strive for the best, but the worst’s sometimes too much for us. It’s like Moses seeing the Promised Land from afar. We’re just in the position of Moses. But these youngAarons——”
Amory thought that very modest and dignified of poor old Laura. She frequently thought of her as ‘poor old Laura,’ but of course she didn’t mean her actual age, which was only two years more than Amory’s own. And that was very good, if a little sad,about Moses. The Wyrons did look forth over a Canaan they weren’t very likely ever to tread.
Lately—that is to say since that secret and tremendous moment between herself and Edgar Strong in the studio—Amory had fallen into the habit of musing long over the sight of the twins at lessons, at play, or at that more enlightened combination that makes lessons play and play lessons. Sometimes Mr. Brimby, the novelist, had come up to her as she had mused and had asked her what she was thinking about.
“Your little Pigeon Pair, eh?” he had said. “Ah, the sweetness; ah, lucky mother! Grey books have to be the children of some of us; ah, me; yours is a pleasanter path!”
Then he would fondle the little round topiary trees of their heads. Amory was almost as sorry for Mr. Brimby as she was for Laura. His books sold only moderately well, and she had more than once thought she would like the “Novum” to serialize one of them—the one with the little boy rather like Corin and the little girl rather like Bonniebell in it—if Mr. Brimby didn’t want too much money for it.
Edgar Strong, on the other hand, never fondled the children, and Amory’s heart told her why. How could he be expected to do anything but hate those poor innocents who had come between him and his desire? He must have realized that only the twins had frustrated that flight to Paris. Of course he was polite about it; he said that he was not very fond of children at all; but Amory was not deceived. She was, in a way, flattered that he did not fondle them. It wassuch an eloquent abstention. But it would have been more eloquent still had he come to the Witan and not-fondled them oftener.
Therefore it was that Amory looked on Corin and Bonniebell as the precious repositories of her own relinquished joys, and heirs to a happier life than she herself had known. She dreamed over them and their future. Laura Wyron was quite right: by the time they had grown up the fogs of cowardice and prejudice and self-seeking would have disappeared for ever. Perhaps even by that time, as in Heaven, there would be no more marrying nor giving in marriage. Things would have adjusted themselves out of the rarer and sweeter and more liberal atmosphere. Corin, grown to be twenty, would one day meet with some mite who was still in her cradle or not yet born, and the two would look at one another with amazement and delight, and the Ideal Love would be born in their eyes, and Corin would recite a few of those brave and pure and unashamed things out of “Leaves of Grass” to her, and—well, and there they would be.... And Bonniebell, too, would do the same, on a Spring morning very likely, simply clad, cool and without immodest blushes—yes, she too would see somebody, and she would say, gladly and simply, “I am here” (for there would be no reason, then, why she should wait for the youth to speak first), and—well, and there they would be too. And it would be Exogamy, or whatever the word was that Walter used. Either would go forth from the family on the appointed day—or perhaps only Corin would go, and Bonniebell remain behind—butanyway, one, if not both of them would go forth, and rove the morning-flushed hills, alone and free and singing and on the look-out for somebody, and they would look just like pictures of young Greeks, and nobody would laugh, as they did at the poor lady who walked in Greek robes down the Strand....
And Amory herself? Alas! She would be left with the tribe. She would be old then—say fifty-something on the eleventh of October. And Edgar would be old too. They would have to recognize thattheiryouth had been spent in the night-time of ignorance and suspicion.Theywould only be able to think of those spirited young things quoting “Leaves of Grass” to one another and wondering what had happened to them....
No wonder Amory was sometimes pensive....
Mr. Wilkinson, the Labour Member, had been to all intents and purposes asked not to fondle the twins. He was a tall spare man with a great bush of pepper-and-salt hair, a Yorkshire accent, and an eye that hardly rested on any single object long enough to get more than a fleeting visual impression of it. He wrote on the first and third weeks of the month the “Novum’s” column of “Military Notes,” and on the alternate weeks filled the same column with officially inspired “Trade Union Echoes.” Between these two activities of Mr. Wilkinson’s there was a connexion. He, in common with everybody else at the Witan, was loud in decrying the jobberies and vested interests of Departments, with the War Office placed foremost in the shock of his wrath. But the Trade Unions wereanother matter, and never a billet-creating measure came before Parliament but he strove vehemently to have its wheels cogged in with those of the existing Trade Union machine. That is to say, that while in theory he was for democratic competitive examination, in practice he found something to be said for jobbery, could the fitting Trade Unionist but be found. He was, moreover, a firebrand by temperament, and this is where the connexion between the “Military Matters” and the “Echoes” appears. Trade Unionists he declared, ought to learn to shoot. The other side, with their cant about “Law and Order,” never hesitated to call out the regular troops; therefore, until the Army itself should have been won over by means of the leaflets that were disseminated for the purpose, they ought in the event of a strike to be prepared to throw up barricades, to shoot from cellar-windows, and to throw down chimney-stacks from the house-tops. Capitalist-employed troops would not destroy more property than they need; in a crooked-streeted town the advantage of long-range fire would be gone; and Mr. Wilkinson was prepared to demonstrate that a town defended on his lines could hold out, in the event of Industrial War pushed to an extreme, until it was starved into surrender.—These arguments, by the way, had impressed Mr. Prang profoundly.
Now (to come back to the twins) on Corin’s fourth birthday Mr. Wilkinson, moved by these considerations, had given him a wooden gun, and in doing so had committed a double error in Amory’s eyes. His first mistakehad been to suppose that even if, under the present lamentable (but nevertheless existing) conditions of militarism, Corin should ever become a soldier at all, he would be the uncommissioned bearer of a gun and not the commissioned bearer of a sword. And his second mistake had been like unto it, namely, to think that, in the case of a proletariat uprising say in Cardiff or York, Corin would not similarly have held some post of weight and responsibility on the other side. Corin shoot up through the street-trap of a coal-hole or pot somebody from behind a chimney-stack!... But Amory admitted that it must be difficult for Mr. Wilkinson to shake off the effects of his upbringing. That upbringing had been very different from, say, Mr. Brimby’s. Mr. Brimby had been at Oxford, and in nobly stooping to help the oppressed brought as it were a fragrant whiff of graciousness and culture with him. Mr. Wilkinson was a nobody. He came from the stratum of need, and, when it came to fondling the twins, must not think himself a Brimby.... Therefore, Amory had had to ask him to take the gun back (a deprivation which had provoked a mighty outcry from Corin), and to give him, if he must give him something, a Nature book instead.
Katie Deedes and Dickie Lemesurier were both permitted to fondle the twins, though in somewhat different measure. This difference of measure did not mean that either Katie or Dickie suffered from a chronic cold that the twins might have contracted. Here againthe case was almost as complicated as the case of Mr. Wilkinson. Cases had a way of being complicated at The Witan. It wasthis:—
Both of these ladies, as Amory had assured Mr. Brimby, were “quite all right.” She meant socially. No such difference was to be found between them in this respect as that which yawned between Mr. Brimby and Mr. Wilkinson. Indeed as far as Dickie was concerned, Amory had given a little apologetic laugh at the idea of her having to place and appraise a Lemesurier of Bath at all. The two girls had equally to work for their living, and—but perhaps it was here that the difference came in. There are jobs and jobs. It was a question of tone. Dickie, running the Suffrage Book Shop, enjoyed something of the glamour of Letters; but Katie, as manageress of the Eden Restaurant, was, after all, only a caterer. It was not Amory’s fault that Romance had pronounced arbitrarily and a little harshly on the relative dignity of these occupations. She could not help it that books are books and superior, while baked beans are only baked beans, necessary, but not to be talked about. If Dickie had, by her calling, a shade more consideration than was strictly her due, while Katie, by hers, was slightly shorn of something to which she would otherwise have been entitled, well, it was not Amory who had arranged it so.
But between books and baked beans the twins did not hesitate for an instant. They saw from no point of view but their unromantic own.
Dickie, overhauling the remainder stock at the SuffrageShop, was able to bring them a book from time to time; but Katie, whose days were spent in a really interesting place full of things to eat, brought them sweetened Proteids, and cold roasted chestnuts, and sugared Filbertine, and sometimes a pot of the Eden Non-Neurotic Honey for tea. And because the flesh was stronger in them than Amory thought it ought to be (at any rate until the day should come when they must leave the tribe with a copy of “Leaves of Grass” in their hands), they adored Katie and thought very much less of Dickie.
Now this belly-guided preference was a thing to be checked in them; and one day Amory had asked Katie (quite nicely and gently) whether she would mindnotbringing the children things that spoiled their appetites, not to speak of their tempers when they clamoured for these comestibles at times when they were not to be had. Then, one afternoon in the nursery, Amory actually had to repeat her request. Half an hour later, when the children had been brought down into the studio for their after-tea hour, she learned that Katie had left the house. It was Corin himself who informed her of this.
“Auntie Katie was crying,” he said. “About the vertisements,” he added.
“Ad-vertisements, dear,” Amory corrected him. “Sayad-vertisements, not vertisements.”
“Ad-vertisements,” said Corin sulkily. “But—” and he cheered up again,”—shewas, mother.”
“Nonsense,” said Amory. “And you’re not to say ‘Auntie’ to Katie. It isn’t true. Your Auntie isyour father’s or your mother’s sister, and we haven’t any.... And now you’ve played enough. Say good-night, both of you, and take Auntie Dickie’s book, and ask Miss Belchamber to read you the story of the Robin and her Darling Eggs, and then you must have your baths and go to bed.”
“I want the tale about Robin Hood, that Mr. Strong once told me,” Corin demurred.
“No, you must have the one about the dear Dickie Bird, who had a wing shot off by a cruel man one day, and had to hide her head under the other one, so that when her Darling Eggs were hatched out the poor little birds were all born with crooked necks—you remember what I told you about the fortress in a horrible War, when the poor mothers were all so frightened that all the little boys and girls were born lame—it’s the samething—”
“Were there guns, that went bang?” Corin demanded. He had forgotten that the story contained this really interesting detail.
“Yes.”
“Great big ones?” Corin’s eyes were wide open.
“Very big. It was very cruel and anti-social.”
But Corin’s momentary interest waned again.—“I want Robin Hood,” he said sullenly.
“Now you’re being naughty, and I shall have to send you to bed without any nice reading at all.”
“I want Robin Hood.” The tone was ominous....
“And I want some chestnuts,” Bonniebell chimed in, her face also puckering....
And so Amory, who had threatened to send them bookless to bed, must keep her word. It is very wrong to tell falsehoods to children. She dismissed them, and they went draggingly out, their Boutet de Monvel hair and fringedépongecostumes giving them the appearance of two luckless pawns that had been pushed off the board in some game of chess they did not understand.
Amory thought it very foolish of Katie to take on in this way. She might have known that her advertisements had not been refused without good reason. Amory had fully intended to explain all about it to Katie, but she really had had so many things to do. Nor ought it to have needed explaining. Surely Katie could have seen for herself that Dickie’s Bookshop List, with its names of Finot and Forel and Mill and the rest, was a distinction and an embellishment to the paper, while her own Filbertines and Protolaxatives were a positive disfigurement. The proper place for these was, not in the columns of the “Novum,” but in the “Please take One” box at the Eden’s door.... But if Katie intended to sulk and cry about it, well, so much the worse.... (To jump forward a little: Katie did elect to sulk. Or rather, she did worse. She was so ill-advised as to go behind Amory’s back and to speak to Cosimo himself about the advertisements. With that Katie’s goose—or perhaps one should say her Anserine—was cooked. Amory did not allow that kind of thing. She certainly did not intend to explain anything after that. It was plain as a pikestaff that Katie was jealous of Dickie. Amorywas bitterly disappointed in Katie. Of course she would not forbid her the house; she was still free to come to The Witan whenever she liked; but—somehow Katie only came once more. She found herself treated so very, very kindly.... So she gulped down a sob, fondled the twins once more, and left.)
Miss Britomart Belchamber saw enough of the twins not to wish to fondle them very much. Amory was not yet absolutely sure that she fondled Cosimo instead, but she was welcome to do so if she could find any satisfaction in it. Cosimo fondled the twins to a foolish extreme. Mr. Prang could never get near enough to them to fondle them. Both Corin and Bonniebell displayed a most powerful interest in Mr. Prang, and would have stood stock-still gazing at him for an hour had they been permitted; but the moment he approached them they fled bellowing.
And in addition to these various fondlings there were casual fondlings from time to time whenever the more favoured of the “Novum’s” contributors were asked to tea.
But the Wyrons remained, so to speak, theex-officiofondlers, and perhaps childless Laura felt a real need to fondle at her heart. It was she who first asked Amory whether she hadn’t noticed that, while Mr. Brimby and Dickie frequently fondled the twins separately, more frequently still they did so together.
“No!” Amory exclaimed. “I hadn’t noticed!”
“Walter thinks they would be a perfect pair,” Laura mused....
Stansaw very little in the scheme that Dorothy darkly meditated against her aunt. He seldom saw much in Dorothy’s schemes. Perhaps she did not make quite enough fuss about them, but went on so quietly maturing them that her income seemed to be merely something that happened in some not fully explained but quite natural order of events. Stan thought it rather a lucky chance that the money usually had come in when it was wanted, that was all.
But of his own job he had quite a different conception.Thattook thought. This appeared plainly now that he was able to dismiss his own past failures with a light and almost derisive laugh.
“I don’t know whatever made me think there was anything in them,” he said complacently one night within about ten days of Christmas. He had put on his slippers and his pipe, and was drowsily stretching himself after a particularly hard “comic film” day, in the course of which he had been required to fall through a number of ceilings, bringing the furniture with him in his downward flight. He had come home, had had a shampoo and a hot bath, and the last traces of the bags of flour and the sacks of soot had disappeared.
“I don’t think now they’d ever have come to very much.”
“Hush a moment,” said Dorothy, listening, her needle arrested half-way through the heel of one of his socks.... “All right. I thought I heard him—Yes?”
She could face young girls now. The third Bit had turned out to be yet another boy.
“I mean,” Stan burbled comfortably, “there wouldn’t have been the money in them I thought there would. Now take those salmon-flies, Dot. Of course I can tie ’em in a way. But what I mean is, it’s a limited market. Not like the boot-trade, I mean, or soap, or films. Everybody wears boots and sees films. There’s more scope, more demand. But everybody doesn’t carry a salmon-rod. Comparatively few people do. And the same with big-game shooting. Or deer-stalking. Everybody can’t afford ’em.”
“No, dear,” said Dorothy, her eyes downcast.
“Then there was Fortune and Brooks,” Stan continued with a great air of discovery. “Isee their game now. You see it, too, don’t you?—They just wanted orders. New accounts. That’s what they wanted. If I could have put ’em on to a chap who’d have spent say five hundred a year on Chutney and things—well, what I mean is, where would they be without customers like that?”
“Nowhere, dear,” said the dutiful Dorothy.
“Exactly. Nowhere. That’s what I was leading up to. They wouldn’t be anywhere. They justwanted to be put on to these things. And it’s just struck me howIshould have looked going out to dinner somewhere, strange house very likely, and I’d said to somebody I’d perhaps met for the first time, ‘Don’t think much of these salted almonds; our hostess ought to try the F. and B. Brand, a Hundred Gold Medals, and see that the blessed coupon isn’t broken.’—Eh? See what I mean?”
“I was never very keen on the idea,” Dorothy admitted gravely.
“No, and I’m blessed if I see why I was, now,” Stan conceded cheerfully....
She loved this change in him which a real job with real money had brought about. Poor old darling, she thought, it must have been pretty rotten for him before, borrowing half-crowns from her in the morning, which he would spend with an affected indifference on drinks and cab fares in the evening. And heshouldspeak with a new authority if he wished. Not for worlds would she have smiled at His Impudence’s new air of being master in his own house. Heshouldbe a Sultan if he liked—provided he didn’t want more than one wife.
Moreover, his bringing in of money had been a relief so great that even yet she had hardly got out of the habit of reckoning on her own earnings only. It had taken her weeks to realize that now the twopences came in just a little more quickly than they went out, and that she could actually afford herself the luxury of keeping Mr. Miller waiting for his Idea, or even ofnot giving it to him at all. She really had no Idea to give him. She was entirely wrapped up now in her plot against Lady Tasker.
That plot, summarized from several conversations with Stan, was asfollows:—
“You see, there’s the Brear, with all that land, Aunt Grace’s very own. The Cromwell Gardens lease is up in June, and it’s all very well for auntie to say she doesn’t hate London, but she does. She spends half a rent, with one and another of them, in travelling backwards and forwards, and she’s getting old, too.—Then there’s us. We can’t go on living here, and the Tonys will be home just as Tim’s leave’s up, and they’re sure to leave their Bits behind. Very well. Now the Tims and the Tonys can’t afford to pay much, but they can afford something, and I think they ought to pay. They’re sure to want those boys to go into the Army, and they’dhaveto pay for that anyway.—So there ought to be a properly-managed Hostel sort of place, paying its way, and a fund accumulating, and Aunt Gracie at the head of it, poor old dear, but somebody to do the work for her.—I don’t see why we shouldn’t clear out that old billiard-table that nobody ever uses, and throw that and the gun-room into one, and make that the schoolroom, and have a proper person down—a sort of private preparatory school for Sandhurst and Woolwich, and the money put by to help with the fees afterwards. It would be much easier if we all clubbed together. And I should jolly well make Aunt Eliza give us at least a thousand pounds—selfish old thing.”
“Frightful rows there’d be,” Stan usually commented,thinking less of Dorothy’s plan than of his own last trick-tumble. “Like putting brothers into the same regiment; always a mistake. And we’re all rather good at rows you know.”
“Well, they’re ourownrows anyway. We keep ’em to ourselves. And wedoall mean pretty much the same thing when all’s said. I’m going to work it all out anyway, and then tackle Aunt Grace....Ishall manage it, of course.”
She did not add that her Lennards and Taskers and Woodgates would sink their private squabbles precisely in proportion as the outside attacks on their common belief rendered a closing-up of the ranks necessary. But shehadbeen to The Witan and had kept her eyes open there, and knew that there were plenty of other Witans about. If stupid Parliament, with its votes and what not, couldn’t think of anything to do about it, that was no reason why she should not do something, and make stingy old Aunt Eliza pay for the training of her Bits into the bargain.
She had not seen Amory since that day when the episode of the winter woollies had made her angry, for, though Amory had called once at the Nursing Home soon after the birth of the third Bit, Dorothy had really not felt equal to the hair-raising tale of the twins all over again, and had sent a message down to her by the nurse. There was this difference between this tragic recital of Amory’s and the fervour with which Ruth Mossop always hugged to her breast the thought of the worst that could happen—that Ruthhadknown brutality, and so might be forgiven for getting “a littleof her own back”; but Amory had known one hardish twelvemonths perhaps, a good many years ago and when she had been quite able to bear it, and had since magnified that period of discomfort by a good many diameters. Amory, Dorothy considered, didn’t really know she was born. She was unfeignedly sorry for that. Whatever measure of contempt was in her she kept for Cosimo.
For she considered that Cosimo was at the bottom of all the trouble. If Stan, at his most impecunious and happy-go-lucky, could still stalk about the house saying “Dot, I won’t have this,” or “Look here, Dorothy, that has got to stop,” it seemed to her that Cosimo, with never a care on his mind that was not his own manufacture, might several times have prevented Amory from making rather a fool of herself. But it seemed to Dorothy that kind of man was springing up all over the place nowadays. Mr. Brimby was another of them. Dorothy had read one of Mr. Brimby’s books—“The Source,” and hadn’t liked it. She had thought it terribly dismal. In it a pretty and rich young widow, who might almost have been Amory herself, went slumming, and spent a lot of money in starting a sort of Model Pawn Shop, and by and by there came a mysterious falling-off in her income, and she went to see her lawyer about it, and learned, of course, that her source of income was that very slum in which she had stooped to labour so angelically.... Dorothy didn’t know very much about pawnshops, but then she didn’t believe that Mr. Brimby did either; and if her interest in them ever should become really keen, shedidn’t think she should go to Oxford for information about them. And Mr. Brimby himself seemed to feel this “crab,” as Stan would have called it, for after “The Source” he had written a Preface for a book by a real and genuine tramp.... And it had been Amory who had recommended “The Source” to Dorothy. She had said that it just showed, that with vision and thought and heart and no previous experience (“no prejudice” had been her exact words), there need be none of these dreadful grimy establishments, with their horrible underbred assistants who refused a poor woman half a crown on her mattress and made a joke about it, but airy and hygienic rooms instead, with rounded corners so that the dust could be swept away in two minutes (leaving a balance of at least twenty-eight minutes in which the sweeper might improve himself), and really courtly-mannered attendants, full of half crowns and pity and Oxford voice, who would give everybody twice as much as they asked for and a tear into the bargain.
And Amory knew just as much about real pawnshops as did Dorothy and Mr. Brimby.
For the life of her Dorothy could not make out what all these people were up to.
And—though this was better now that Stan was earning—the thought of the money that was being squandered at The Witan had sometimes made her ready to cry. For at the Nursing Home she had had one other visitor, and this visitor had opened her eyes to the appalling rate at which Cosimo’s inheritance must be going. This visitor had been Katie Deedes.Katie too, was an old fellow-student of Dorothy’s; it had not taken Dorothy long to see that Katie was full of a grievance; and then it had all come out. There had been some sort of a row. It had been simply and solely because Katie ran a Food Shop. Amory thought thatinfra dig. And just because Katie had given the children a few chestnuts Amory had practically said so.
“Ishan’t go there again,” Katie had said, trying on Dorothy’s account to keep down her tears. “Ididn’t marry a man with lots of money, and turn him round my finger, and make him write myLife and Works, and then snub my old friends! And none of the people who go there are really what she thinks they are.Shethinks they go to seeher, but Mr. Brimby only goes because Dickie does, and because he wants to sell the “Novum” something or other, and Mr. Strong of course has to go, and Mr. Wilkinson goes because he wants Cosimo to stop the “Novum” and start something else with him as editor, and Laura goes because they get things printed about Walter’s Lectures, and I don’t know what those Indians are doing there at all, and anywayI’vebeen for the last time! I’m just as good as she is, and I should like to come and see you instead, Dorothy, and of course I won’t bring your babies chestnuts if you don’t want.... But I’m frightfully selfish; I’m tiring you out.... May an A B C girl come to see you?”
And Katie had since been. There is no social reason why the manager of a Vegetarian Restaurant may not visit the house of a film acrobat.
As it happened, Katie came in that very night whenthe weary breadwinner was painstakingly explaining to his thoughtful spouse his reasons for doubting whether he would ever have got very rich had he remained one of Fortune and Brooks’ well-dressed drummers. Katie had a round face and puzzled but affectionate eyes, and Stan was just beginning to school his own eyes not to rest with too open an interest on her Greenaway frocks and pancake hats. Katie for her part was intensely self-conscious in Stan’s presence. She felt that when he wasn’t looking at her clothes he was, expressly,not-looking at them, and that was worse.... But she couldn’t have worn a hobble skirt and an aigrette at the “Eden.”... Stan had told Dorothy that when he knew Katie better he intended to get out of her the remaining gruesome and Blue-Beard’s-Chamber details which the hoof and the forequarter seemed to him to promise.
“Poor little darlings!” Dorothy exclaimed compassionately by and by—Katie had been relating some anecdote in which Corin and Bonniebell had played a part. “Idothink it’s wrong to dress children ridiculously! The other dayIsaw a little girl—she must have been quite six or seven—andshe’dknickers like a little boy, and long golden hair all down her back! Whatisthe good of pretending that girls are boys?”
“Awful rot,” Stan remarked with a mighty stretch. “I say, I’m off to bed; I shall be yawning in Miss Deedes’ face if I don’t. Is there any arnica in the house, Dot?... Goodnight——”
“Good night,” said Katie; and as the door closed behind the master of the house she settled more comfortablyin her chair. “Now that he’s stopped not-looking at me we can have a good talk,” her gesture seemed to say; “howdoeshe expect I can get any other clothes till I’ve saved the money?”...
They did talk. They talked of the old days at the McGrath, and who’d married who, and who hadn’t married who after all, and, in this connection, of Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, whom they had both known.... And it just showed how little glory and fame were really worth in the world. For Dorothy, who had been living in London all this time, had not heard as much as a whisper of that memorable revolt of the Wyrons against the Marriage Service, and, though she did know vaguely that Walter lectured, had not the ghost of an idea of what his lectures were about. She had been too busy minding her own petty and private and selfish affairs. Katie couldn’t believe it. She thought Dorothy was joking.
“You’ve never heard of Walter’s Lecture on ‘Heads or Tails in the Trying Time,’ nor his ‘Address on the Chromosome’?” she gasped....
“No; do tell me. What is a Chromosome?”
“A Chromosome? Why, it’s a—it’s a—well, you know when you’ve a cell—or a nucleus—or a gland or something—but it isn’t a gland—it’s the—but youdoastonish me, Dorothy!”
“But surely you’re joking about Walter and Laura?” Dorothy exclaimed in her turn.
“Indeed I’m not! Why, I thoughteverybody knew!...”
“(It’s all right—he won’t come in again). Butwhydid they pretend not to be married?” Dorothy asked in amazement.
“I don’t know—I mean I forget for the moment—it seemed perfectly clear the way Walter explained it—you ought to go and hearhim——”
“But what difference could being married—I mean not being married—make?”
“Ah!” said Katie, with satisfaction at having found her bearings again. “Walter’s got a whole Lecture on that. It always thrills everybody. Amory thinks it’s almost his best—after the ‘Synthetic Protoplasm’ one, of course—that’s admitted by everybody to be quitethebest!“[1]
“Proto ... but I thought those were a kind of oats!” said poor Dorothy, utterly bewildered.
“Oats!” cried Katie in a sort of whispered shriek. “Why, it’s—it’s—but I don’t know even how tobeginto explain it! Do you mean to say you haven’t read about these things?”
“No,” murmured Dorothy, abashed.
“Not Monod, nor Ellen Key, nor Sebastian Faure, norMalom!——”
“N-o.” Dorothy felt horribly ashamed of herself.
“But—but—thoselovelylittle boys ofyours!——”
She gazed wide-eyed at the disconcerted Dorothy....
It was the humiliating truth: Dorothy had never heard of the existence of a single one of these writers and leaders of thought. She had borne Noel in black ignorance of what they had had to say about the Torch of the Race, and Jackie and the third Bit for all the world as if they had never set pen to paper. Monod had not held her hand, nor Faure been asked for his imprimatur; Key had hymned Love superfluously, and the Synthesists, equally superfluously, its supersession. For a moment she anxiously hoped that it was all right, and then, as Katie went on, the marvel of it all overwhelmed her again.
The dictum that desirable children could be born onlyoutof wedlock! That stupendous suggestion of Walter’s to millionaires who did not know what to do with their money, that, for the improvement of the Race, they should endow with a thousand pounds every poor little come-by-chance that weighed eleven pounds at birth! That other proposal, that twentyyears could straightway be added to woman’s life and beauty by a mere influencing of her thoughts about the Chromosome—whatever it was!... Poor uncultured Dorothy did not know whether she was on her head or her heels. She had never dreamed, until Katie told her, that before marrying Stan she ought to have gone to the insect-world, or to the world of molluscs and crustacæ, to learn howtheymaintained the integrity of their own highest type—whether by pulling their wings off after the flight, or devouring their husbands, or—or—or what! She had heard of the moral lessons that can be learned of the ant, but it had not struck her that she and Stan might, by means of a little more study and care, have lifted up the economy of their little flat to the level of the marvellously-organized domesticity you see when you kick over a stone.
But Katie’s hesitations and great gaps of confessed ignorance gave her a little more courage. Katie was at pains to explain that all that she herself knew about it all was that these things were what theysaid, and Dorothy must go to Walter and the books for the rest.
“They’re all very expensive books, and I may not really have understood them,” she said wistfully. “They must be awfully deep and so on if they’re so dear—twelve and fifteen and twenty shillings! But I did try so hard, and sometimes it seemed quite reasonable and plain, especially when the print was nice and big.... Close print always seems so frightfully learned.... And I know I’ve explained it badly; I haven’t Walter’s gift of putting things. Amory has,of course. When she and Walter have a really good set-to it makes one feel positivelyabjectabout one’s ignorance. I doubt if Cosimo can alwaysquitefollow them, and I’m quite sure Mr. Strong can’t—I know he’s only hedging when he says, ‘Ah, yes, have you read Fabre on the Ant or Maeterlinck on the Bee?’—and I believe he just glances at the review books that come to the “Novum” instead of really studying them, as Walter and Amory do. And it’s very funny about Mr. Strong,” she rattled artlessly on. “Sometimes I’ve thought that it isn’t just that Amory doesn’t know what they all go to The Witan for, but that everybody elsedoesknow. They all seem to want it to themselves. Of course if Mr. Wilkinson wants Cosimo to stop the “Novum,” and to start something else for him, it’s only natural that he and Mr. Strong should be a little jealous of one another; but Dickie and Mr. Brimby are jealous of the Wyrons, and I suppose I was jealous of Dickie too—and everybody seems jealous of everybody, and Amory of Cosimo, and Amory’s always interfering between Britomart Belchamber and the twins’ lessons, and thatcan’tbe a very good thing for discipline, but Britomart’s like me in being rather stupid, and I wish I’d her screw—she gets nearly twice as much as I do. The only people who don’t seem jealous of anybody are those Indians. They’realwaysaffable. I suppose it’s rather nice for them, so far from their own country, having a house to go to....”
But here Dorothy’s humility and self-distrust ended. The moment it came to India, she shared her aunt’s deplorablenarrow-mindedness and propensity to make a virtue of her intolerance. It seemed to her that it was one thing for the Tims and Tonys, in India, to have to employ a native interpreter (and to be pretty severely rooked by him) when they had their Urdu Higher Proficiency to pass, but quite another for these same natives to come over here, and to learn our law and language, and our excellent national professions, and our somewhat mitigated ways of living up to them. No, she was not one whit better than her hide-bound old aunt, and she did not intend to have too practical a brotherly love taught at that meditated foundation at the Brear....
She became silent as she thought of that foundation again, and presently Katie rose.
“I suppose I couldn’t see him in his cot?” she said wistfully.
Dorothy smiled. Katie meant the youngest Bit.
“Well ... I’m afraid he’s inourroom, you see...,” she said.
Katie had been thinking of The Witan. She coloured a little.
“Sorry,” she murmured; and then she broke out emphatically.
“Ilikecoming to see you, Dorothy. I don’t feel so—such afoolwhen I’m with you.... And do tell me where you got that frock, and how much it was; Imusthave another one as soon as I can raise the money! I do wish I could make what Britomart Belchamber makes! Two-twenty a year! Think of that!...But of course Prince Eadmond teachers do comeexpensive——”
More and more it was coming to seem to Dorothy that the whole thing was terrifically expensive.