A Crooked Mile Part 19

"H'm!" said Lady Tasker; and again her needle danced....

Dorothy was explaining to Katie that Mollie was fair, about her own colour, but of course the hair never came out right in a photograph, when Lady Tasker suddenly began a further series of questions.

"Dorothy----"

"Yes?"

"Did she--develop--early?"

"Who--Amory? I don't know. Did she, Katie? Of course she was quite the cleverest girl at the McGrath."

"Ah!... What did she do at the McGrath?"

"Why, painted. You're awfully mysterious, auntie! It was soon after she left the McGrath that she painted 'Barrage'--you've heard of her feminist picture that made such a stir!"

"Ah, yes. Yes. I didn't see it, but I did hear about it. I don't know anything about art.--Had she any affair before she married young Pratt?"

"No. I'm sure of that. I knew her so well." Dorothy was quite confident on that point, and Katie agreed. Lady Tasker's questions continued.

And then, suddenly, into this apparently aimless catechism the word "doctor" came. Dorothy gave a start.

"Aunt Grace!... Do you mean Amory's ill?" she cried.

Lady Tasker did not look up from her crochet.--"Ill?" she said. "I've no reason to suppose so. I didn't say she was ill. There's no illness about it.... By the way, I don't think I've asked how Stan is."

But for the curiously persistent questions, Dorothy might have seized the opportunity to hint that Stan was made for something more nationally useful than getting himself black and blue by stopping runaway horses for the film or running the risk of double pneumonia by being fished out of the sea on a January day--which was the form his bread-winning was taking on that particular week-end. But the Ludlow design was for the moment forgotten. She would have liked to ask her aunt straight out what she really meant, but feared to be rude. So she turned to the alb.u.m again, and again Katie, turning from turban to staff-cap and from staff-cap to pith helmet, urged that _those_ were the people who really knew what they were talking about--surely Dorothy saw _that_!----

Then, in the middle of Dorothy's bewilderment, once more the questions.... About that painting of her friend's, Lady Tasker wanted to know: did Mrs. Pratt get any real satisfaction out of it?--Any emotional satisfaction?--Was she entirely wrapped up in it?--Or was it just a sort of hitting at the air?--Did it exhaust her to no purpose, or was it really worth something when it was done?----

"If Dorothy doesn't know, surely you do, Katie."

Katie coloured a little.--"I liked 'Barrage' awfully at the time," she confessed, "but--," and she cheered up again, "--I _hate_ it now."

"But did her work--what's the expression?--fill her life?"

Here Dorothy answered for Katie.--"I think she rather liked the fame part of it," she said slowly.

"Does she paint now?"

"Very little, I think, Lady Tasker."

"Has her children to look after, I suppose?"

"Well--she has both a nurse and a governess----"

"They're quite well off, aren't they? I seem to remember that Pratt came into quite a lot."

"They seem to spend a great deal."

"But that's only a small house of theirs?"

"Oh, yes, they're rather proud of that. They don't spend their money selfishly. It goes to the Cause, you see."

"What Cause?" Lady Tasker asked abruptly.

This was Katie's cue....

She ceased, and Lady Tasker muttered something. It sounded rather like "H'm! Too much money and not enough to do!" but neither of her companions was near enough to be quite sure.

And thereupon the questions stopped.

But a surmise of their drift had begun to dawn glimmeringly upon Dorothy. She ceased to hear the exposition of Imperialism's real needs into which Katie presently launched, and fell into a meditation. And of that meditation this was about the length and breadth:--

Until the law should allow a man to have more wives than one (if then), of course only one woman in the world could be perfectly happy--the woman who had Stan. That conviction came first, and last, and ran throughout her meditation. And of what Dorothy might compa.s.sionately have called secondary happinesses she had hitherto not thought very much. She had merely thanked her stars that she had not married a man like Cosimo, had once or twice rather resented Amory's well-meant but left-handed kindnesses, and that had been the extent of her concern about the Pratt household. But first Katie, and now her aunt, had set her wondering hard enough about that household now.

What, she asked herself, had the Pratts married on? What discoveries had they made in one another, what resources found within themselves? Apart from their talks and books and meetings and "interests" and that full pack of their theories, what was their marriage? Thrown alone together for an hour, did they fret? Did their yawning cease when the bell rang and a caller was admitted? Did even the same succession of callers become stale and a bore, so that strangers had to be sought to provide a stimulus? And did they call these and half a hundred other forms of mutual boredom by the rather resounding names that blabbing Katie had repeated to her--"wider interests," "the broad outlook," "the breaking down of personal insularity," and the rest?

And for once Dorothy dropped her excusatory att.i.tude towards her friend.

She dropped it so completely that by and by she found herself wondering whether Amory would have married Cosimo had he been a poor man. She was aware that, stated in that way, it sounded hideous; nor did she quite mean that perhaps Amory had married Cosimo simply and solely because he had _not_ been poor; no doubt Amory had a.s.sumed other things to be equal that as a matter of fact had unfortunately proved to be not equal at all; but she _did_ doubt now whether Amory had not missed that something, that something made of so many things, that caused her own heart suddenly to gush out to the absent Stan. The thought frightened her a little. Had Amory married and had babies--all, as it were, beside the mark?...

Dorothy did not know.

But an obscurer hint still had seemed to lie behind her aunt's persistent questions. "Was Amory ill?" she herself had asked in alarm when that unexpected word "doctor" had been quietly dropped; and "Ill? I didn't say she was ill; there's no illness about it," Lady Tasker had replied. No illness about what? Apparently about something Lady Tasker saw, or thought she saw, in Amory.... An old lady whose years had earned her the right to sit comfortably in her chair had gone so far as to descend the stairs and go out into the street to have a closer look at a young one: why? Why ask "Is she a Channel swimmer?" and "Is her painting a mere hitting of the air?" Why this insistence on some satisfaction for labour, as if without that satisfaction the labour wreaked on the labourer some sort of revenge? What sort of a revenge?

And why on Amory?

Yes, Dorothy would have liked to ask her aunt a good many questions....

She did not know that Lady Tasker could not have answered them. She did not know that the whole world is waiting for precisely those replies.

She did not know that the data of a great experiment have not yet begun to be gathered together. She did not know that, while she and Stan would never see the results of that experiment, little Noel and the other Bits, and Corin and Bonniebell might. She only knew that her aunt was a wise and experienced woman, with an appet.i.te for life and all belonging to it that only grew the stronger as her remaining years drew in, and that apparently Lady Tasker found something to question, if not to fear.

"Is she a Channel swimmer? Does she get any emotional satisfaction out of what she does?"

They were oddly precise questions....

Much less odd was that homely summing-up of Lady Tasker's: "Too much money, and not enough to do."...

Dorothy had often thought that herself.

V

"HOUSE FULL"

The gate in the privet hedge of The Witan had had little rest all the afternoon. It was a Sunday, the one following that on which Lady Tasker had issued bareheaded from her door, had crossed the road, and had caused Amory to start half out of her skin by suddenly speaking to her.

The Wyrons had come in the morning; they had been expressly asked to lunch; but it was known that d.i.c.kie Lemesurier was coming in afterwards to discuss an advertis.e.m.e.nt, and if d.i.c.kie came the chances were that Mr. Brimby would not be very long after her. As a matter of fact d.i.c.kie and Mr. Brimby had encountered one another outside and had arrived together at a little after three, bringing three young men, friends of Mr. Brimby's still at Oxford, with them. These young men wore Norfolk jackets, gold-pinned polo-collars, black brogues and turned-up trousers; and apparently they had hesitated to take Cosimo at his word about "spreading themselves about anywhere," for they stood shoulder to shoulder in the studio, and when one turned to look at a picture or other object on the wall, all did so. Then, not many minutes later, Mr.

Wilkinson had entered, in his double-breasted blue reefer, bringing with him a stunted, bowlegged man who did not carry, but looked as if he ought to have carried, a miner's lamp; and by half-past four, of The Witan's habitues, only Mr. Prang and Edgar Strong were lacking. But Edgar was coming. It had been found impossible, or at any rate Amory had decided that it was impossible, to discuss the question of d.i.c.kie's advertis.e.m.e.nt without him. But he was very late.