A Crooked Mile Part 4

"It ruins the whole effect! It's _unspeakably_ vulgar! After that glowing, that impa.s.sioned Foreword--_this_! Hardly a month ago that lovely apostrophe to Truth Naked--that beautiful image of her stark and innocent on our banners but with a forest of bright bayonets bristling about her--and now _this_! It's revolting!"

But Mr. Strong had himself written that impa.s.sioned Foreword, and knew all about it. Again he had given his proprietor's wife that quietly humouring look.

"Do you mean that the 'Novum's' going to refuse advertis.e.m.e.nts?"

"I mean that I blue-pencilled that one myself."

"And what about the others--the 'Eden' and the Suffrage Shop and Wyron's Lectures?"

"They're different. They _are_ the Cause. You said yourself that the 'Novum' was going to be a sort of generalissimo, and these the brigades or whatever they're called. They are, at any rate, doing the Work. Is _that_ doing any Work, I should like to know?"

Mr. Strong had refrained from flippancy.--"I see what you mean," he had replied equably. "At the same time, if you're going to refuse advertis.e.m.e.nts the thing's going to cost a good deal more money."

"Well?" Amory had replied, as who might say, "Has money been refused you yet?"

Strong had given a compliant shrug--"All right. That means I censor the advertis.e.m.e.nts, I suppose. New industry. Very well. The 'Eden' and Wyron's Lectures and Week-end Cottages and the Plato Press only, then.

I'll strike out that '_Platinum: False Teeth Bought_.' But I warn you it will cost more."

"Never mind that."

And so the incident had ended.

But perhaps Mrs. Pratt's sensitiveness of eye was not the only cause of the rejection of that offending advertis.e.m.e.nt. Another reason might have lain in her present relation with her sometime fellow-student of the McGrath School of Art, Dorothy Tasker. For that relation had suffered a change since the days when the two girls had shared a shabby day-studio in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At that time, now five years ago, Amory Towers had been thrust by circ.u.mstances into a position of ign.o.ble envy of her friend. She had been poor, and Dorothy's people (or so she had supposed) very, very wealthy. True, poor Dorothy, without as much as a single spark of talent, had nevertheless buckled to, and, in various devious ways, had contrived to suck a parasitic living out of the wholesome body of real art; none the less, Amory had conceived her friend to be of the number of those who play at hardship and independence with a fully spread table at home for them to return to when they are tired of the game. But the case was entirely changed now. Amory frankly admitted that she had been mistaken in one thing, namely, that if those people of Dorothy's had more money, they had also more claims upon it, and so were relatively poor. Amory herself was now very comfortably off indeed. By that virtue and good management which the envious call luck, she had now money, Cosimo's money, to devote to the regeneration of the world.

Dorothy, married to the good-tempered and shiftless Stan, sometimes did not know which way to turn for the overdue quarter's rent.

Now among her other ways of making ends meet Dorothy had for some years done rather well out of precisely that kind of work which Amory refused to allow the "Novum" to touch--advertis.e.m.e.nts. She had wormed herself into the services of this firm and that as an advertis.e.m.e.nt-adviser. But her contracts had begun in course of time to lapse, one or two fluky successes had not been followed up, and two children had further tightened things. Nor had Stan been of very much help. Amory despised Stan. She thought him, not a man, but a mere mouth to be fed. Real men, like Cosimo, always had money, and Amory was quite sure that, even if Cosimo had not inherited a fortune from his uncle, he would still have contrived to make himself the possessor of money in some other way.

Therefore Amory was even kinder to Dorothy than she was to d.i.c.kie Lemesurier of the Suffrage Shop, to Katie Deedes of the "Eden," and to Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, who ran the "Lectures on Love." But somehow--it was a little difficult to say exactly how, but there it undoubtedly was--Dorothy did not accept her kindnesses in quite the proper spirit. One or two she had even rejected--gently, Amory was bound to admit, but still a rejection. For example, there had been that little rebuff (to call it by its worst name for a moment) about the governess.

Amory had, in Miss Britomart Belchamber, the most highly-qualified governess for Corin and Bonniebell that money and careful search had been able to obtain; Dorothy lived less than a quarter of an hour's walk away; it would have been just as easy for Britomart to teach four children as to teach two; but Dorothy had twisted and turned and had finally said that she had decided that she couldn't put Amory to the trouble. And again, when the twins had had their party, Amory would positively have _liked_ Noel and Jackie to come and dance "Twickenham Ferry" in those spare costumes and to join in those songs from the Book of Caroline Ditties; but again an excuse had been made. And half a dozen similar things had driven Amory to the conclusion, sadly against her will, that the Taskers were taking up that ridiculous, if not actually hostile att.i.tude, of the poor who hug their pride. It was not nice between old friends. Amory could say with a clear conscience that she had not refused Dorothy's help in the days when the boot had been on the other leg. She was not resentful, but really it did look very much like putting on airs.

But of course that stupid Stanhope Tasker was at the bottom of it all.

Amory did not so much mind his not having liked her from the first; she would have been sorry to let a trifle like that ruffle her equanimity; but it was evident that he did not in the least realize his position.

She was quite sure, in the first place, that he couldn't afford (or rather Dorothy couldn't afford) to pay eighty pounds for that flat, plus another twenty for the little office they had annexed and used as a nursery. And in the next place he dressed absurdly above his position.

Cosimo dressed for hygiene and comfort, in cellular things and things made of non-irritant vegetable fibre; but those absurdly modish jackets and morning-coats of Stan's had, unless Amory was very much mistaken, to be bought at the expense of real necessaries. And so with their hospitality. In that too, they tried to cut a dash and came very near to making themselves ridiculous. Amory didn't want to interfere; she couldn't plan and be wise for everybody; she had her own affairs to attend to; but she was quite sure that the Taskers would have done better to regulate their hospitality as hospitality was regulated at The Witan--that was, to make no special preparation, but to have the door always open to their friends. But no; the Taskers must make a splash.

They must needs "invite" people and be a little stand-offish about people coming uninvited. They were "At home" and "Not at home" for all the world as if they had been important people. But Amory would have thought herself very stupid to be taken in by all this ceremony. For example, the last time she and Cosimo had been asked to the flat to dinner she knew that they had been "worked off" only because the Taskers had had the pheasants given by somebody, and very likely the fish too.

And it would have been just like Stan Tasker's insolence had he asked them because he _knew_ that the Pratts did not eat poor beasties that should have been allowed to live because of their lovely plumes, nor the pretty speckled creatures that had done no harm to the destroyer who had taken them with a hook out of their pretty stream.

But, kind to her old friend as Amory was always ready to be, she did not feel herself called upon to go out of her way to be very nice to her friend's husband. He had no right to expect it after his rudeness to Edgar Strong about the "Novum." For it had been about the "Novum" that Stan had given Strong that talking-to. Much right (Amory thought hotly) he had to talk! Just because he consorted with men who counted their money in rupees and thought nothing of shouldering their darker-skinned brothers off the pavement, he thought he was ent.i.tled to put an editor into his place! But the truth, of course, was, that that very familiarity prevented him from really knowing anything about these questions at all. Because an order was established, he had not imagination enough to see how it could have been anything different. His mind (to give it that name) was of the hidebound, official type, and too many limited intelligences of that kind stopped the cause of Imperial progress to-day. Or rather, they tried to stop it, and perhaps thought they were stopping it; but really, little as they suspected it, they were helping more than they knew. A pig-headed administration does unconsciously help when, out of its own excesses, a divine discontent is bred. Mr. Suwarree Prang had been eloquent on that very subject one afternoon not very long ago. A charming man! Amory had listened from her hammock, rapt. Mr. Prang did the "Indian Review" for the "Novum," in flowery but earnest prose; and as he actually was Indian, and did not merely hobn.o.b with a few captains and subalterns home on leave, it was to be supposed that he would know rather more of the subject than Mr.

Stanhope Tasker!----

And Mr. Stanhope Tasker had had the cheek to tell Mr. Strong that he didn't know what he was talking about!

Amory felt that she could never be sufficiently thankful for the chance that had thrown Mr. Strong in her way. She had always secretly felt that her gifts were being wasted on such minor (but still useful) tasks as the "Eden" Restaurant and the "Love Lectures" Agency. But her personal exaltation over Katie Deedes and the others had caused her no joy. What had given her joy had been the immensely enlarged sphere of her usefulness; that was it, not the odious vanity of leadership, but the calm and responsible envisaging of a task for which not one in ten thousand had the vision and courage and strength. And Edgar Strong had shown her these things. Of course, if he had put them in these words she might have suspected him of trying to flatter her; but as a matter of fact he had not said a single word about it. He had merely allowed her to see for herself. That was his way: to all-but-prove a thing--to take it up to the very threshold of demonstration--and then apparently suddenly to lose interest in it. And that in a way was his weakness as an editor. Amory, whom three or four wieldings of the blue pencil had sufficed to convince that there was nothing in journalism that an ordinary intelligence could not master in a month, realized this. She herself, it went without saying, always saw at once exactly what Mr.

Strong meant; she personally liked those abrupt and smiling stops that left Mr. Strong's meaning as it were hung up in the air; but it was a mistake to suppose that everybody was as clever as she and Mr. Strong.

"I's" had to be dotted and "t's" crossed for the mult.i.tude. But it was at that point that Mr. Strong always became almost languid.

It was inevitable that the man who had thus revealed to her, after a single glance at her, such splendid and unsuspected capacities within herself, should exercise a powerful fascination over Amory. If he had seen all this in her straight away (as he a.s.sured her he had), then he was a man not lightly to be let go. He might be the man to show her even greater things yet. He puzzled her; but he appeared to understand her; and as both of them understood everybody else, she was aware of a challenge in his society that none other of her set afforded her. He could even contradict her and go unsacked. Prudent people, when they sack, want to know what they are sacking, and Amory did not know.

Therefore Mr. Strong was quite sure of his job until she should find out.

Another thing that gave Mr. Strong this apparently off-hand hold over her was the confidential manner in which he had warned her not to take Mr. Brimby, the novelist, too seriously. For without the warning Amory, like a good many other people, might have committed precisely that error.... But when Mr. Brimby, taking Amory apart one day, had expressed in her ear a gentle doubt whether Mr. Strong was quite "sound" on certain important questions, Amory had suddenly seen. Mr. Strong had "cut" one of Mr. Brimby's poignantly sorrowful sketches of the East End--seen through Balliol eyes--and Mr. Brimby was resentful. She did not conceal from herself that he might even be a little envious of Mr.

Strong's position. He might have been wiser to keep his envy to himself, for, while mere details of routine could hardly expect to get Amory's personal attention, there was one point on which Mr. Strong was quite "sound" enough for Amory--his sense of her own worth and of how that worth had hitherto been wasted. And Mr. Strong had not been ill-natured about Mr. Brimby either. He had merely twinkled and put Amory on her guard. And because he appeared to have been right in this instance, Amory was all the more disposed to believe in his rightness when he gave her a second warning. This was about Wilkinson, the Labour Member. He was awfully fond of dear old Wilkie, he said; he didn't know a man more capable in some things than Wilkie was; but it would be foolish to deny that he had his limitations. He wasn't fluid enough; wanted things too much cut-and-dried; was a little inclined to mistake violence for strength; and of course the whole point about the "Novum" was that it was fluid....

"In fact," Mr. Strong concluded, his wary blue eyes ceasing suddenly to hold Amory's brook-brown ones and taking a reflective flight past her head instead, "for a paper like ours--I'm hazarding this, you understand, and keep my right to reconsider it--I'm not sure that a certain amount of fluidity isn't a Law...."

Amory nodded. She thought it excellently put.

IV

THE STONE WALL

Amory sometimes thought, when she took her bird's-eye-view of the numerous activities that found each its voice in its proper place in the columns of the "Novum," that she would have allowed almost any of them to perish for lack of support rather than the Wyron's "Lectures on Love." She admitted this to be a weakness in herself, a sneaking fondness, no more; but there it was--just that one blind spot that mars even the clearest and most piercing vision. And she always smiled when Mr. Strong tried to show this weakness of hers in the light of a merit.

"No, no," she always said, "I don't defend it. Twenty things are more important really, but I can't help it. I suppose it's because we know all about Laura and Walter themselves."

"Perhaps so," Mr. Strong would musingly concede.

Anybody who was anybody knew all about Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron and a certain n.o.ble defeat in their lives that was to be accounted as more than a hundred ordinary victories. That almost historic episode had just shown everybody who was anybody what the world's standards were really worth. Hitherto the Wyrons have been spoken of both as a married couple and as "Walter Wyron" and "Laura Beamish" separately; let the slight ambiguity now be cleared up.

Mrs. Cosimo Pratt became on occasion Miss Amory Towers for reasons that began and ended in her profession as a painter; and everybody who was anybody was as well aware that Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the famous feminist picture "Barrage," was in reality Mrs. Cosimo Pratt, as the great ma.s.s of people who were n.o.body knew that Miss Elizabeth Thompson, the painter of "The Roll Call," was actually Lady Butler. But not so with the Wyrons. Reasons, not of business, nor yet of fame, but of a burning and inextinguishable faith, had led to their n.o.ble equivocation. Deeply seated in the hearts both of Walter and of Laura had lain a pa.s.sionate non-acceptance of the merely parroted formula of the Wedding Service. So searching and fundamental had this been that by the time their various objections had been disposed of little had remained that had seemed worth bothering about; and in one sense they had not bothered about it. True, in another sense they had bothered, and that was precisely where the defeat came in; but that did not dim the splendour of the attempt. To come without further delay to the point, the Wyrons had married, under strong protest, in the ordinary everyday way, Laura submitting to the momentary indignity of a ring; but thereafter they had magnificently vindicated the New Movement (in that one aspect of it) by not saying a word about the ceremony of their marriage to anybody--no, not even to the people who were somebody. Then they had flown off to the Latin Quarter.

It had not been in the Latin Quarter, however, that the true character of their revolt had first shown. Perhaps--n.o.body knows--their relation had not been singular enough there. Perhaps--there were people base enough to whisper this--they had feared the singularity of "letting on."

It is easy to do in the Boul' Mich' as the Boul' Mich' does. The real difficulties begin when you try to do in London what London permits only as long as you do it covertly.

And if there had been a certain covertness about their behaviour when, after a month, they had returned, what a venial and pardonable subterfuge, to what a tremendous end! Amory herself, up to then, had not had a larger conception. For while the Wyrons had secretly married simply and solely in order that their offspring should not lie under a stigma, their overt lives had been one impa.s.sioned and beautiful protest against any a.s.sumption whatever on the part of the world of a right to make rules for the generation that was to follow. No less a gospel than this formed the substance of those Lectures of Walter's; great as the number of the born was, his mission was the protection of a greater number still. The best aspects both of legitimacy and of illegitimacy were to be stereoscoped in the perfect birth. And he now had, in quite the strict sense of the word, a following. The same devoted faces followed him from the Lecture at the Putney Baths on the Monday to that at the Caxton Hall on the Thursday, from his ascending the platform at the Hampstead Town Hall on the Tuesday to his addressing of a garden-party from under the copper-beech at The Witan on the Sunday afternoon. And in course of time the faithfulness of the followers was rewarded. They graduated, so to speak, from the seats in the body of the building to the platform itself. There they supported Laura, and gave her a countenance that she no longer needed (for she had earned her right to wear her wedding-ring openly now), and flocked about the lecturer afterwards, not as about a mere man, but rather as seeing in him the physician, the psychologist, the expert, the helper, and the setter of crooked things straight that he was.

As a lecturer--may we say as a prophet?--Walter had a manner original and taking in the extreme. Anybody less sustained by his vision and less upheld by his faith might have been a little tempted to put on "side,"

but not so Walter. Perhaps his familiarity with the stage--everybody knew his father, Herman Wyron, of the New Greek Theatre--had taught him the value of the large and simple statement of large and simple things; anyhow, he did not so much lecture to his audiences as accompany them, chattily and companionably, through the various windings of his subject.

With his hands thrust unaffectedly into the pockets of his knickers, and a sort of sublimated "Well, here we are again" expression on his face, he allayed his hearers' natural timidity before the magnitude of his mission, and gave them a direct and human confab. on a subject that returned as it were from its cycle of vastness to simple personal experience again. His every sentence seemed to say, "Don't be afraid; it's nothing really; soon you'll be as much at your ease in dealing with these things as I am; just let me tell you an anecdote." No wonder Laura held her long and muscular neck very straight above her hand-embroidered yoke. Everybody understood that unless she adopted some sort of an att.i.tude her proper pride in such a married lover must show, which would have been rather rubbing it in to the rest of her s.e.x. So she booked dates for new lectures almost nonchalantly, and, when the platform was invaded at the end of the Lecture, or Walter stepped down to the level of those below, she was there in person as the final demonstration of how well these things actually would work as soon as Society had decided upon some concerted action.

Corin and Bonniebell, Amory's twins, did not attend Walter's Lectures.

It was not deemed advisable to keep them out of bed so late at night.

But Miss Britomart Belchamber, the governess, could have pa.s.sed--had in fact pa.s.sed--an examination in them. It had been Amory who, so to speak, had set the paper. For it had been at one of the Lectures--the one on "_The Future Race: Are We Making Manacles?_"--that Miss Belchamber had first impressed Amory favourably. Amory had singled her out, first because she wore the guarantee of Prince Eadmond's Collegiate Inst.i.tution--the leather-belted brown sleeveless djibbah with the garment of fine buff fabric showing beneath it as the fruit of a roasted chestnut shows when the rind splits--and secondly because of her admirable physique. She was splendidly fair, straight as an athlete, and could shut up her long and ma.s.sive limbs in a wicker chair like a clasp-knife; and for her movements alone it was almost a sin that Walter's father could not secure her for the New Greek Society's revival of "Europa" at the Choragus Theatre. And she was not too quick mentally.

That is not to say that she was a fool. What made Amory sure that she was not a fool was that she herself was not instinctively attracted by fools, and it was better that Miss Belchamber should be ductile under the influence of Walter's ideas than that she should have just wit enough to ask those stupid and conventional and so-called "practical"

questions that Walter always answered at the close of the evening as patiently as if he had never heard them before. And Miss Belchamber told the twins stories, and danced "Rufty Tufty," with them, and "Catching of Quails," and was really cheap at her rather stiff salary. Cosimo loved to watch her at "Catching of Quails." If the children did not grow up with a love of beauty after that, he said, he gave it up. (The twins, by the way, unconsciously served Amory as another example of Dorothy Tasker's unreasonableness. As the mother of Noel and Jackie, Dorothy seemed rather to fancy herself as an experienced woman. But Amory could afford to smile at this pretension. There was a difference in age of a year and more between Noel and Jackie. No doubt Dorothy knew a little, but she, Amory, could have told her a thing or two).

On a Wednesday afternoon about a fortnight after Lady Tasker's visit to The Witan, Amory walked the garden thoughtfully. The weather was growing chilly, the hammock had been taken in, and her feet in the fallen leaves made a melancholy sound. Cosimo had left her half an hour before; certain points had struck him in the course of conversation which he thought ought to be incorporated in the "_Life and Work_"; and it was a rule at The Witan that nothing must ever be allowed to interfere with the impulse of artistic creation. For the matter of that, Amory herself was creating now, or at any rate was at the last preparatory stage that immediately precedes creation. Presently she would have taken the plunge and would be deep in the new number of the "Novum." For the moment she was thinking of Mr. Strong.

As she tried to clear up exactly what place Mr. Strong had in her thoughts she was struck by the dreadful tendency words and names and definitions have to attach themselves to vulgar and ready-made meanings--a tendency so strong that she had even caught herself more than once jumping to a common conclusion. To take an example, though a rather preposterous one. Had Dorothy, with one of her ridiculous advertis.e.m.e.nts waiting to be done, confessed to her that instead of setting about it she was thinking of a male person with a pair of alert blue eyes and a curiously mobile and clean-cut mouth (not that it was likely that Dorothy would have had the candour to make such a confession)--well, Amory might have smiled just like anybody else. She was not trying to make herself out any better than others. She was candid about it, however, which they were often not.

Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word for it that had not been vulgarized. She was, of course, exceedingly interested in him, but that was not saying very much. She "liked" him, too, but that again might mean anything. Her difficulty was that she herself was so special; and so on second thoughts she might have been right in giving an interpretation to Dorothy's actions, and Dorothy quite wrong in giving the same interpretation to hers merely because the data were the same.

Nor had Mr. Strong himself been able to help her very much when, a couple of days before, she had put the question to him, earnestly and without hateful false shame.

"What _is_ this relation of ours?" she had asked him, point-blank and fearlessly.