A Crooked Mile Part 18

And after Mr. Strong, Mr. Wilkinson....

And according to Mr. Wilkinson, the most ferocious of the hanging-judges had been a beaming humanitarian by comparison with Sir Joseph. Mr.

Wilkinson had the whole of Sir Joseph's career at his fingers' ends: the So-and-So judgment--this or that flagrant summing up--the other deliberate and wicked misdirection to the jury. Sir Joseph's heart was black, his law bunk.u.m, and he had only got where he was by self-advertis.e.m.e.nt and picking the brains of men a hundred times fitter for heaven than himself....

Therefore Katie, hearing this horrible tale, had quailed, and had straightway given away this devil who was the sinister glory of her house. She had agreed that he was a man whom anybody might righteously have shot on sight, and had gathered her Greenaway garments about her whenever she had pa.s.sed within a mile of Sir Joseph's door....

But now he was "Uncle Joe" again, and--well, it must have been rather funny. For Katie's impressionable conscience had given her no rest day or night until she had sought Uncle Joe out and had made a clean breast of it all before him. Katie had fancied she had seen something like a twinkle in those sinful old eyes, but (this was when she mentioned the name of the "Novum") the twinkle had vanished again. Oh, yes, Sir Joseph had heard of the "Novum." Didn't a Mr. Prang write for it?...

And thereupon Katie had given Mr. Prang away too....

But in the end Sir Joseph had forgiven her, and had told her that she had better not be either a revolutionary, nor yet the kind of Conservative that is only a revolutionary turned inside-out, but just a good little girl, and had asked her how she was getting on, and why she hadn't been to see her Aunt Anne, and whether she would like some tickets for a Needlework Exhibition; and now she was just beginning to forget that he had ever been anything but "Uncle Joe," who had given her toys at Christmas, and Sunday tickets for the Zoo whenever she had wanted to go there on that particularly crowded day.

Dorothy had had something of this in her mind when she had brought Katie to Cromwell Gardens that Sunday afternoon. From Katie's new att.i.tude to her own Ludlow project was not so far as it seemed. If she could lead the zealous 'vert to such promising general topics as Boy Scouts, Compulsory Service, and the preparation of boys for the Army (topics that Katie constantly brought forward by denunciation of their opposites), her scheme would certainly not suffer, and might even be advanced.

And, as it happened, no sooner had Dorothy tucked her last letter back into its envelope than Katie broke out--earnestly, proselytizingly, and very prettily on the stump.

"There you are!" she exclaimed. "That's all _exactly_ what I mean! Why, any one of those letters ought to be enough to convince anybody! Here are all these stupid people at home, ready to believe everything a native tells them, going on as they do, and hardly one of them's ever set foot out of England in his life! Of course the Indians know exactly what _they_ want, but don't you see, Dorothy--," very patiently she explained it for fear Dorothy should not see, "--don't you see that it's all so much a matter of course to Mollie and those that they can actually write whole letters about window-curtains! I _love_ that about the window-curtains! It's all such an old story to _them_! They _know_, you see, and haven't got to be talking about it all the time in order to persuade themselves! There it _is_!--But these other people don't know anything at all. They don't even see what a perfect answer window-curtains are to them! They go on and on and on--you _do_ see what I mean, Dorothy?----"

"Yes, dear," said Dorothy, mildly thinking of the great number of people there were in the world who would take no end of trouble to explain things to her. "Go on."

And Katie continued to urge upon her friend the argument that those know most about a country who know most about it.

Katie had got to the stage of being almost sure that she remembered Mollie's coming into the studio in Cheyne Walk one day, when Lady Tasker, who had not spoken, suddenly looked up from her crochet and said, "Look, Dorothy--that's the girl I was speaking about--coming along past the Museum there."

Dorothy rose and walked to the window.--"Where?" she said.

"Pa.s.sing the policeman now."

Dorothy gave a sudden exclamation.--"Why," she exclaimed, "--come here, Katie, quick--it's Amory Towers!--It is Amory, isn't it?"

Katie had run to the window, too. The two women stood watching the figure in the mushroom-white hat and the glaucous blue velvet that idled forlornly along the pavement.

"Do you mean Mrs. Pratt?" said Lady Tasker, putting up her gla.s.s again.

"Are you quite sure?"

Once before in her life, in the days before her marriage, Amory Towers had done the same thing that she was doing now. Then, seeking something, perhaps a refuge from herself, she had walked the streets until she was ready to drop with fatigue, watching faces pa.s.sing, pa.s.sing, for ever pa.s.sing, and slowly gathering from them a hypnotic stupor. Sometimes, for hour after hour, she had seen 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 arrow-heads of white as they turned, sometimes only to be seen under their lids as a finger-nail is seen within the finger of a glove. And at other times, weary of her fellow-beings and ceasing to look any more at them, she had seen nothing but doors and windows, or fan-lights, or the numbers of houses, or window-boxes, or the patterns of railings, or the serried shapes of chimneys against the sky. She had been looking, and yet not looking, for Cosimo Pratt then; she was looking, and yet not looking, for Edgar Strong now. Had she met him she had nothing new to say to him; she only knew that he had taken weak possession of her mind. She was looking for him in South Kensington because he had once told her, when asked suddenly, that he lived in Sydney Street, S.W., and frequently walked to the Indian section of the Imperial Inst.i.tute in order to penetrate into the real soul of a people through its art; and she was not looking for him, because one day she had remembered that he had said before that he lived in South Kentish Town--which was rather like South Kensington, but not the same--and something deep down within her told her that the other was a lie.

But yet her feet dragged her to the quarter, as to other quarters, and she talked to herself as she walked. She told herself that her husband did not understand her, and that it would be romantic and silencing did she take a lover to her arms; and she could have wept that, of all the flagrant splendours of which she dreamed, London's grey should remain her only share. And she knew that the attendants at the Imperial Inst.i.tute had begun to look at her. Once she had spoken to one of them, but when she had thought of asking him whether he knew a Mr. Strong who came there to study Indian Art, her heart had suddenly failed her, and the question had stayed unspoken. Nevertheless she had feared that the man had guessed her thought, and must be taking stock of her face against some contingency (to visualize which pa.s.sed the heavy time on) that had a Divorce Court in it, and hotel porters and chambermaids who gave evidence, and the Channel boat, and two forsaken children, and grimy raptures in the Latin Quarter, and its hectic cafes at night....

And so she walked, feeling herself special and strange and frightened and half-resolved; and thrice in as many weeks Lady Tasker, sitting with her crochet at her window, had seen her pa.s.s, but had not been able to believe that this was the woman, with a husband and children, on whom she had once called at that house with the secretive privet hedge away in Hampstead.

"It _is_ Amory!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Is she coming here?"

Lady Tasker spoke reflectively.--"I don't know. I don't think so.

But--will you fetch her in? I should like to see her."

"If you like, auntie," said Dorothy, though a little reluctantly.

But Lady Tasker seemed to change her mind. She laid down her crochet and rose.

"No, never mind," she said. "I'll fetch her myself."

And the old lady of seventy pa.s.sed slowly out of the room, and Katie and Dorothy moved away from the window.

Lady Tasker was back again in five minutes, but no Amory came with her.

She walked back to her chair, moved it, and took up her work again.--"Switch the table light on," she said.

"Was it Amory?" Dorothy ventured to ask after a silence.

"Yes," Lady Tasker replied.

"And wouldn't she come in?"

"She said she was hurrying back home."

That raised a question so plain that Dorothy thought it tactful to make rather a fuss about finding some alb.u.m or other that should convince Katie that she really had met the Mollie who had written the letter about the window-curtains. Lady Tasker's needle was dancing rather more quickly than usual. Dorothy found her alb.u.m, switched on another light, and told Katie to make room for her on her chair.

Amory, dawdling like that, and then, when spoken to, to have the face to say that she was hurrying back home!----

It was some minutes later that Lady Tasker said off-handedly, "Has she any children besides those twins?"

"Amory?" Dorothy replied, looking up from the alb.u.m. "No."

"How old is she?" Lady Tasker asked.

"Thirty-two, isn't she, Katie?"

"About that."

"Is she very--athletic?" Lady Tasker next wanted to know.

"Not at all, I should say."

"I mean she doesn't go in for marathon races or Channel swimming or anything of that kind?"

"Amory? No," said Dorothy, puzzled.

"And you're sure of her age?" the old lady persisted.

"Well--she may only be thirty-one."

"I don't mean is she younger. Is she _older_ than that?"

"No--I know by my own age."