A Crooked Mile Part 10

Before they had seen her, she left the path, struck across the gra.s.s behind them, and turned her face homewards. She was far, far too proud to look back. Certainly it was his duty to have let her know. Never mind. Since he hadn't....

Yet the tingling persisted, coming and going in quite pleasurable little shocks. Then all at once she found herself wondering how far Cosimo and Britomart had gone, or would go. Not that it was any business of hers.

She was not her husband's keeper. It would be futile to try to keep somebody who evidently didn't want to be kept. It would also take away the curious subtle pleasure of that thrill.

She was not conscious that she quickened the steps that took her to the studio, where by this time Edgar Strong probably awaited her.

Most decidedly Cosimo ought to have given her warning----

As for Britomart Belchamber--sly creature--no doubt she had persuaded him to slink away like that----

Well, there would be time enough to deal with her by and bye----

Amory reached The Witan again.

As she entered the hall a maid was coming out of the dining-room. Amory called her.

"Has Mr. Strong been in?"

"He's in the studio, m'm," the maid replied.

"Are the children with Miss Belchamber?"

"No, m'm. They're with nurse, m'm."

"Is Miss Belchamber in her room?"

"No, m'm. She's gone out."

"How long ago?"

"About an hour, m'm."

"Is Mr. Pratt in?"

"I think so, m'm. I'll go and inquire."

"Never mind. I'm going upstairs."

Ah! Then they had gone out separately, by pre-arrangement! More slyness!

And this was Cosimo's "pretence" at being Miss Belchamber's devoted admirer! Of course, if there had been any pretence at all about it, it would have had to be that he was not her admirer. Very well; they would see about that, too, later!----

She went quickly to her own room, changed her blouse for a tea-gown, and then, with that tingling at her heart suddenly warm and crisp again, descended to the studio.

It was high time (she told herself) that the "Novum's" Indian policy was definitely settled. Mr. Strong also said so, the moment he had shaken hands with her and said "Good afternoon." But Mr. Strong spoke bustlingly, as if the more haste he made the more quickly the job would be over.

"Now these are the lines we have to choose from," he said....

And he enumerated a variety of articles they had in hand, including Mr.

Prang's.

"Then there's this," he said....

He told Amory about a crisis in the Bombay cotton trade, and of a scare in the papers that very morning about heavy withdrawals of native capital from the North Western Banks....

"But I think the best thing of all would be for me to write an article myself," he said, "and to back it up with a number of Notes. What I really want cleared up is our precise objective. I want to know what that's to be."

"We'll have tea in first, and then we shall be undisturbed," said Amory.

"Better wait for Cosimo, hadn't we?"

"He's out," said Amory, pa.s.sing to the bell.

She sat down on the corner of the sofa, and watched the maid bring in tea. Mr. Strong, who had placed himself on the footstool and was making soughing noises by expelling the air from his locked hands, appeared to be brooding over his forthcoming number. But that quick little tingle of half an hour before had had a curious after-affect on Amory. How it had come about she did not know, but the fact remained that she was not, now, so very sure that even the "Novum" was quite as great a thing as she had supposed it to be. Or rather, if the "Novum" itself was no less great, she had, quite newly, if dimly, foreseen herself in a more majestic role than that of a mere technical _directrice_.

Politics? Yes, it undoubtedly was the Great Game. Strong men fancied themselves somewhat at it, and conceited themselves, after the fashion of men, that it was they who wrought this marvel or that. But was it?

Had there not been women so much stronger than they that, doing apparently nothing, their nothings had been more potent than all the rest? She began to give her fancy play. For example, there was that about a face launching a thousand ships. That was an old story, of course; if a face could launch a thousand ships so many centuries ago, there was practically no limit to its powers with the British Navy at its present magnificent pitch of numerical efficiency. But that by the way. It was the idea that had seized Amory. Say a face--Helen's, she thought it was--had launched a thousand, or even five hundred ships; where was the point? Why, surely that that old Greek Lord High Admiral, whoever he was--(Amory must look him up; chapter and verse would be so very silencing if she ever had occasion to put all this into words)--surely he had thought, as all men thought, that he was obeying no behest but his own. The chances were that he had hardly wasted a thought on Helen's face as a factor in the launching....

Yet Helen's face had been the real launching force, or rather the brain behind Helen's face ... but Amory admitted that she was not quite sure of her ground there. Perhaps she was mixing Helen up with somebody else.

At any rate, if she was wrong about Helen she was not wrong about Catherine of Russia. Nor about Cleopatra. Nor about the Pompadour. These had all had brains, far superior to the brains of their men, which they had used through the medium of their beauty. She knew this because she had been reading about them quite recently, and could put her finger on the very page; she had a wonderful memory for the places in books in which pa.s.sages occurred.... So there were Catherine the Second, and Cleopatra, and the Pompadour, even if she had been wrong about Helen.

That was a curious omission of Homer's, by the way--or was it Virgil?--the omission of all reference to the brain behind. Perhaps it had seemed so obvious that he took it for granted. But barring that, the notion of a face launching the ships was very fine. It was the Romantic Point of View. Hitherto Amory had pa.s.sed over the Romantic Point of View rather lightly, but now she rather thought there was a good deal in it.

At any rate that about the face of a woman being the real launching-force of a whole lot of ships--well, it was an exaggeration, of course, and in a sense only a poetic way of putting it--but it was quite a ripping idea.

So if a ship could be launched, apparently, not by a mere material knocking away of the thingummy, but by the timeless beauty of a face, an Indian policy ought not to present more difficulties. At all events it was worth trying. Perhaps "trying" was not exactly the word. These things happened or they didn't happen. But anybody not entirely stupid would know what Amory meant.

The maid lighted the little lamp under the water-vessel that kept the m.u.f.fins hot and then withdrew. Amory turned languidly to Mr. Strong.

"Would you mind pouring out the tea? I'm so lazy," she said.

She had put her feet up on the sofa, and her hands were clasped behind her head. The att.i.tude allowed the wide-sleeved tea-gown into which she had changed to fall away from her upper arm, showing her satiny triceps.

The studio was warm; it might be well to open the window a little; and Amory, from her sofa, gave the order. It seemed to her that she had not given orders enough from sofas. She had been doing too much of the work herself instead of lying at her ease and stilly willing it to be done.

She knew better now. It was much better to take a leaf out of the book of _les grandes maitresses_. She recognized that she ought to have done that long ago.

So Mr. Strong brought her tea, and then returned to his footstool again, where he ate enormous mouthfuls of m.u.f.fin, spreading anchovy-paste over them, and drank great gulps of tea. He fairly made a meal of it. But Amory ate little, and allowed her tea to get cold. The cast which Stan had coa.r.s.ely called "the fore-quarter" had been hung up on the wall at the sofa's end, and her eyes were musingly upon it. The trotter lay out of sight behind her.

"Well, about that thing of Prang's," said Mr. Strong when he could eat no more. "Hadn't we better be settling about it?"

"Don't shout across the room," said Amory languidly, and perhaps a little pettishly. She was wondering what was the matter with her hand that Mr. Strong had not kissed it when he had said good afternoon. He had kissed it on a former occasion.

"Head bad?" said Mr. Strong.

"No, my head's all right, but there's no reason we should edit the 'Novum' from the housetops."

"Was I raising my voice? Sorry."

Mr. Strong rose from his footstool and took up a station between the tea-table and the asbestos log.

Amory was getting rather tired of hearing about that thing of Prang's.

She did not see why Mr. Strong should shuffle about it in the way he did. The article had been twice "modified," that was to say more or less altered, and Amory could hardly be expected to go on reading it in its various forms for ever. What did Mr. Strong want? If he whittled much more at Mr. Prang's clear statement of a point of view of which the single virtue was its admitted extremeness, he would be reducing the "Novum" to the level of mere Liberalism, and they had long ago decided that, of the Conservative who opposed and the Liberal who killed by insidious kindnesses, the former was to be preferred as a foe. Besides, there was an alluring glow about Mr. Prang's way of writing. No doubt that was part and parcel of the glamour of the East. The Eastern style, like the Eastern blood, had more sun in it. Keats had put that awfully well, in the pa.s.sage about "parched Abyssinia" and "old Tartary the Fierce," and so had that modern man, who had spoken of Asia as lying stretched out "in indolent magnificence of bloom." Yes, there was a funny witchery about Asia. In all sorts of ways they "went it" in Asia.