A Crooked Mile Part 13

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.

d.i.c.kie, overhauling the remainder stock at the Suffrage Shop, 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-Neuritic 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 Gra.s.s" in their hands), they adored Katie and thought very much less of d.i.c.kie.

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 mind _not_ bringing the children things that spoiled their appet.i.tes, 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 vertis.e.m.e.nts," he added.

"_Ad_-vertis.e.m.e.nts, dear," Amory corrected him. "Say _ad_-vertis.e.m.e.nts, not vertis.e.m.e.nts."

"_Ad_-vertis.e.m.e.nts," said Corin sulkily. "But--" and he cheered up again, "--she _was_, mother."

"Nonsense," said Amory. "And you're not to say 'Auntie' to Katie. It isn't true. Your Auntie is your 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 d.i.c.kie'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 d.i.c.kie 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 same thing--"

"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 fringed _eponge_ costumes giving them the appearance of two luckless p.a.w.ns 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 d.i.c.kie'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 advertis.e.m.e.nts. 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 d.i.c.kie. Amory was 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, the _ex-officio_ fondlers, 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 d.i.c.kie 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....

II

THE 'VERT

Stan saw 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. _That_ took 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 deerstalking. 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. "_I_ see 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 just wanted to be put on to these things. And it's just struck me how _I_ should 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 he _should_ speak 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. He _should_ be 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 of not 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 as follows:--

"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'd _have_ to pay for that anyway.--So there ought to be a properly-managed Hostel sort of place, paying its way, and a fund acc.u.mulating, 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 n.o.body 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 our _own_ rows anyway. We keep 'em to ourselves. And we _do_ all mean pretty much the same thing when all's said. I'm going to work it all out anyway, and then tackle Aunt Grace.... _I_ shall 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 she _had_ been 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.