I
PENCE
Amory was not the only one who was grumbling at the weather. Even
Mrs. 'Ill, who was usually of an imperturbable temper, complained.
The clothes that she hadn't had out, no, not half an hour, had been
drying that lovely it was a treat to see 'em; and of course in running
out quick to take 'em in she must go and drop an armful--her most
partickler gent's shirts too--and what with the babies and the hens
carrying the dirt in and out and one thing and another, it really was
enough to try anybody. Cheyne Walk! Rainy Walk more like----
Indeed, it must have rained an inch or more during the morning. It
overflowed so from the roof-gutter overhead that as Amory stood by the
casement window she might as well have been looking through a Bridal
Veil Waterfall. Not that there was anything to look at beyond it. The
park had gone; the Jelly Factory was blotted out; the Suspension Bridge
was vignetted into nothing half-way across the river. Gurglings came
from underneath the sink in the corner. Whether it was the rain or not,
the smell of cabbage-water had returned.
Amory was sure it was raining harder in Cheyne Walk than it was
anywhere else; harder than it could possibly be in Oxford Street, for
example. And she had wanted, yet not wanted, to go to Oxford Street
that morning. She had wanted to go because she wanted money; she had
not wanted to go because the only means she knew of getting it was to
borrow from Dorothy. Cosimo was away; his uncle had died a week before;
Cosimo could not possibly be disturbed. And she had seen Mr. Hamilton
Dix, and--thank you! It would be some time before she troubled Mr.
Hamilton Dix again!...
Overfed animal!...
October, and still no Show. More, Mr. Hamilton Dix hardly took the
trouble now to promise one immediately. But Mr. Dix need not think
that Amory didn't now see perfectly clearly the trick that had been
practised upon her. She knew now why he had come so hurriedly to her
that morning and dazzled her with his offer of a hundred pounds.
Angiers', a far better firm than Croziers', had wanted her; that was
why. Croziers' had bought her merely in order that Angiers' should not
have her. "Dishonest," Amory called it, and she had told Hamilton Dix
so to his face. And his reply had been to take her hand and try to pat
it.
Wasn't it dishonest? she had cried hotly to herself any time this past
month. If it wasn't, she would be glad if somebody would tell her
what honesty was! And Mr. Dix in his most odious and soothing voice,
had said that she really mustn't talk like that. "Dishonest?" he had
repeated. Why, Miss Towers talked as if Croziers' had anything to
gain by deliberately suppressing her work! Nothing (he had assured
her) was further from the truth. Croziers' were in the hands of
circumstances, too, the circumstances that made one time ripe for a
particular exhibition and another not.... Messrs. Angier? Mr. Dix knew
nothing about Messrs. Angier and their arrangements. They _might_ be
all right; Mr. Dix _had_ heard it said that Messrs. Angier were rather
in the habit of promising more than they performed, but that was only a
rumour, and Mr. Dix wouldn't give it currency. But he could assure Miss
Towers that such "options" as that which Messrs. Crozier had obtained
on her work were matters of everyday business.... Come now: would she
tell him, as her friend, exactly what the trouble was? Was it money? If
so, there was perhaps a chance that Messrs. Crozier might be willing to
take over a certain quantity of her more recent work on the same terms
as before....
Another "option," in fact....
Then, successively had come the stages when Mr. Dix had told her that
in his opinion she was injudicious to change her style so frequently
as she did ("Versatility's all very well, but it puzzles your public,"
he had said, as if it had not been precisely the ground of Amory's
complaint that Croziers' were seeing to it that she had _no_ public
at all)--when he had told her, that, if she really thought Angiers'
could do better for her, Croziers' might be willing to release her from
her obligation on repayment of the sum advanced plus a trifle for the
accommodation--and when he had ceased to say anything at all. A pretty
"option!"--Amory supposed that other man had called it an "option" when
he had run away with her godmother's fifty-two pounds a year.
And of course this was exactly why she didn't want to ask Dorothy for
money. For Dorothy would be able to say--perhaps to say it as if she
was crowing over her a little--that she had warned her about that
contract. Not that Dorothy had warned her one bit, really. Dorothy had
not known any more than herself that her Show would be put off and put
off and put off; and if the Show had _not_ been put off, all would
have been well. But Dorothy was so--peculiar. Her ways were peculiar.
She _had_ ways, in fact, not principles. Amory didn't want to be
severe on Dorothy, but some of the things she did seemed positively
_un_principled. Not to go any further, there was Dorothy's undignified
way of regarding her own sex. She seemed to concur in that view of
it that made it merely the plaything of the other sex. Of course (to
be quite fair) it wasn't to be supposed for a moment that Dorothy
would have let Mr. Hamilton Dix kiss her, as he had wanted to kiss
Amory. Amory was sure she wouldn't. But for all that there would have
been--something--not a kiss--not even a "leading on" perhaps--Amory
couldn't have said what it would have been--but there would have
been _something_.... Put coarsely, it was a sort of exaggerated
sex-consciousness in Dorothy--that and lack of principle. Amory ought
to know that exaggerated sex-consciousness by this time. Glenerne had
been full of it. The world seemed to be full of it. It seemed an
odious domination; Amory could not understand it at all. Why, Cosimo
did not want to kiss her....
Because, of course, that sham gesture at her aunt's wedding had not
been a kiss.
Cosimo quite understood that she was wedded to her art.
Amory could not conceive where the money had gone. Less than six months
ago she had had nearly sixty pounds, not counting her regular pound a
week; now she had a few shillings only, and quite a number of small
debts. She supposed it was because she was not really familiar with
the prices of things. Yes, it must be that, for she remembered how
surprised she had been at the cost of the little studio-warming she had
given when she had first come into this hateful little room. She had
not provided anything at all out of the way. There had been a rather
nice Greek wine Walter Wyron had told her about, not to be bought in
very small quantities, but of course they had not drunk the whole of
it that night--indeed, it had lasted for weeks. And there had been
cold sausages and salads from a German charcuterie, in glass, not in
tins--it was not true economy to run the risk of ptomaine poisoning.
And there had also been a few boxes of figs and candied fruits--she
admitted those had been rather dear. And so on. Nor, if the party had
been a great success, would she have minded a little extra expenditure
just for once; but, somehow, it had not been a success. Laura Beamish
had had a cold and had not been able to sing; Dickie Lemesurier had
wired at the last minute that she was not able to come; Cosimo had done
his best, but Dorothy had turned up in an evening frock and had said
she could not possibly stay more than an hour; and Walter's friend,
who could quote Nietzsche, had proved to be domineering and had done
nothing but wrangle with Walter the whole of the evening. In fact, the
party had fallen miserably flat.
But that, after all, was only one evening, and if Amory had been a
little extravagant that time, she had more than made up (or so she
should have thought) since. Eggs, sardines (in tins), cold boiled ham
(at half a crown a pound), bread, butter, and lots of nice hot tea--it
was not possible to live much more cheaply than that. At first Mrs.
'Ill cooked her an occasional joint in her own oven at the Creek, but
joints are not cheap when you throw a large portion of them away from
sheer weariness of the sight of them. She had spent rather a lot on
canvases, nothing on clothes. And twice she had been away with Katie
Deedes for weekends. Oh yes, and there had been one other party, a
river-party just before everybody went away for the summer, which had
been Amory's, all but the railway-fares and the claret and lemonade.
That had been quite a success.
Except for these things Amory had not the vaguest idea where the money
had gone.
She only wanted to borrow until the Christmas quarter; indeed, it was
not so much an advance on her allowance as an anticipation of the
Christmas present she was sure to receive from her uncle and aunt. Then
she would be straight again, and would know how to spend more wisely
for the future. And Dorothy could well afford it, if one might judge
of her fortune from her unhygienic but expensive dresses. If only
the rain would stop she would go to Dorothy at once. She knew that
Dorothy's position had improved, and, if the world chose to regard
its art as a parasitic thing, the artist could hardly be blamed if he
spoiled the Philistine whenever he had the opportunity. In one sense
she would actually be doing Dorothy a favour. A loan would put Dorothy
into the honourable position of being a patron. Many a Philistine name
lives on the formal page of an immortal work that otherwise would have
been forgotten.
Amory continued to watch the flounces of water that spilled from the
eaves and to listen to the runnings and gurglings of the West London
drainage system.
But all at once a merry "_Cooee!_" came from below; a flapping as of
shaken garments sounded in the entry; and a step and a call of "Amory!"
were heard on the stairs. It was the voice of Dorothy herself. The
door flew inwards, and Dorothy Lennard stood there, a pair of blue
eyes and the tip of a nose visible, the rest of her a shimmer of some
greenish-yellow material, thin as goldbeaters' skin and trickling
rivulets of water. She shook herself on the landing in a haze of
water-dust, like a dog that comes out of a pond, and then cried--
"Quick, Amory, and certify me--you shall take 'em off yourself and
feel--Mr. Miller said Sloane Street, but it was so near I thought I'd
come in--how are you?--No, I'll unbutton them, then your hands will be
quite dry to feel----"
She took from her head a sort of poke that fitted like a bathing-cap,
allowed the long garment to rustle in a small close heap to the floor,
and cried, "There! Now feel me!"
She seized Amory's wrist and patted herself with Amory's palm.
"That damp isn't the rain come through," she went on. "Quite the other
way; that's my warmth that did that, they're as impervious as that! And
of course they're rather dear. But it's a perfect day for it! There'll
be a column of floods and rainfall in all the papers to-morrow, and
we're setting all the telephones on the jump now getting the space next
to it. You do certify me? I said to Mr. Miller, 'What _is_ the good of
sticking a piece of the stuff under a tap in the window? What _does_
it convey to anybody? They only think there's some fake somewhere
(advertisers have faked so much, you see), and besides, it's been
done.' So I said, 'Why not let somebody go out in this rain in 'em? If
they'll stand this they'll stand anything. Then get some known person
to certify that at such-and-such a time yesterday (the wettest day for
eighteen years) so-and-so arrived as dry as a bone at such-and-such a
place, having walked in Ararat Extra Light and Japhet Boots'--but you
must feel my stockings too."
She sat down in one of Amory's basket-chairs, began to unlace her
boots, and presently thrust out for Amory's examination, one after the
other, her grey silk-stockinged soles.
"So they're mine," Dorothy cried jubilantly, "and if you'll give me
your signature I'll get you a set, not to speak of the advertisement
for you--can't do without that nowadays--'I, the undersigned, Amory
Towers'--if they've never heard of you they daren't say so when they
see that.... Those Cosimo's slippers? I'll put 'em on.... I say, you
have let your fire down! No, I'll set it going--you fill the kettle--I
_have_ enjoyed my walk!"
She began to potter about the black fire, gabbling without stopping as
she did so.
Amory was almost disinterestedly glad to see Dorothy; on such a day
she would have been glad to see anybody. For inside the studio was
more desolate than the streets without. No longer did that room over
the greengrocer's shop shimmer and twinkle as on the day when she and
Cosimo had sat down to their first little supper there. Half the plates
that had overlapped so prettily, half the cup that had dangled from
the bright hook, were broken; the sink was full of articles awaiting
that dreaded washing-up; and in the cupboard forgotten condensed milk
tins and brick-like half-loaves turned yellow and green. Amory had
cut off Mrs. 'Ill's daily visit; she now came on Saturdays only, and
Cosimo had not been there to give her a hand. By the time Dorothy had
drawn up the fire, and, going for the tea-things, had found plates
with sardine-tails on their edges and cups with graduations of brown
about their rims, she might have been pardoned had she thought tea
hardly worth troubling about; but she merely bustled cheerfully about,
scraping things into a bucket, clearing the table, sweeping the
hearth. All the time she chatted about the Ararat Extra Light and the
photograph of her that would appear in the papers on the morrow. Amory
had been shocked to hear that Dorothy had actually consented to this.
"Why not?" Dorothy had demanded. "It won't have my name on, and by the
time the machine men have finished with it, it won't be either like me
or anybody else! My dear, you're as bad as Aunt Emmie. Hang my family!
Would any of _them_ buy me a pair of Japhet Boots? My dear, I _have_
to dress myself well: _I_ can't afford to go about in rags! You don't
suppose I buy my clothes, do you? Why, you couldn't get these stockings
for thirty shillings! I don't mean that I get photographed for every
stitch I have on, but I have to get things one way or another!"
Amory sighed to be the possessor of a relentless intellect. It was
a heavy burden. Far, far happier were they, the simpler ones, whose
nature it was to laugh lazily and good-humouredly while others
shouldered the responsibility of the world. They did not even know that
in order that they might dance somebody else must weep. Dorothy had
condemned herself. All sorts of people could put forward that plea of
hers, "I have to get things one way and another." Amory wanted to know
what Dorothy _gave_ the world in return. She, Amory, gave her art; but
Dorothy would surely hardly claim that those fashion-drawings of hers
could not quite well be got along without. Therefore it was even a
little sorrowfully that Amory asked Dorothy how she was getting along
at the studio.
"_Please_ don't tread on my new Ararat!" Dorothy cried in fright.
"Sorry; my fault for leaving it there.... The studio? Oh, I'm under
Miss Benson, of course; it would be a shame to turn her out of a job,
and Miss Umpleby would come next anyway; so I just potter along. As a
matter of fact, I'm only in the studio about half my time; it's much
more fun downstairs, talking over ideas with Mr. Miller. You wouldn't
suppose, would you, Amory," she said suddenly, both earnestly and
excitedly, "that as I stand here now, filling this teapot, I've got an
idea worth--I don't know how much, but certainly Doubledays' would give
me a thousand for it, if Hallowells' won't take it, and I should want a
pretty stiff contract even then?"
With her hair all rumpled by the Ararat cap and her feet in Cosimo's
old slippers she certainly did not look worth a thousand.
"Sorry I can't tell you what it is," she went on, setting down the
teapot, thumbing a hard half-loaf and selecting a softer one. "I
haven't told Mr. Miller yet. We have to choose our time for these
things; wait for the ripe moment. Wait till Hallowells' get their last
storey up and the roof on, then we'll see. Mr. Miller thinks I'm just a
person who makes a useful suggestion now and then, and I let him think
so; but wait a bit. Something better than Benny's place for me!"----
"But--but--I don't understand. Is this fashion-drawing?" Amory asked.
"Oh, dear no!" Dorothy replied, drawing up a chair to the table.
"Let it stand a minute first--stir it with a spoon.... I don't mean
fashion-drawing now. You see, Hallowells' are going to wake London up.
Mr. Miller's pretty good at his job--waking London up--in other words,
advertising, and I'm only a fashion-artist a long as there's nothing
better going. It will probably come off next Spring--depends how they
get on with the building; and I'll buy a picture from you then, Amory."
Amory had smiled. Oh, advertisement! She had thought that Dorothy
could hardly mean that she was going to make all this money out of
fashion-drawing! Advertisements--those funny things that Aunt Jerry was
getting! Amory smiled again.
For Aunt Jerry had lately been showing her more of them--advertisements
now, not of caterers and wedding-cake makers, job-masters, and
house-agents and furnishers, such as she had had at the time of
her wedding, but of quite other things. Amory had thought she had
never seen anything so funny--and nauseating--funny and nauseating
both at once. Really, the things were an outrage! She supposed that
somebody--Mr. Miller perhaps--read the top left-hand corner of the
front page of the _Times_ and _Morning Post_ day by day, carefully
counted the weeks, felt (as it were) Aunt Jerry's pulse, asked her how
she was feeling each morning, penetrated into her hidden thoughts,
anticipated her desires, and then sent the things along--descriptions
of layettes and perambulators, of cribs and pens and patent bottles,
of foods and clothes and schemes for insurance. "_Baby will Soon be
Cutting his Teeth_," Mr. Miller, or whoever it was, began, whispering
(so to speak) confidentially behind his hand; or "_Of course if you
WANT your Wee One to have Wind!_"... That, Amory thought, was the
funny aspect; the nauseating one came when you remembered that,
properly diffused by this same means, really valuable information about
Eugenics and the Chromosome might have been given to the world. That,
if Aunt Jerry and Mr. Massey must have children, would have been, not
immediately perhaps, but ultimately far more to the purpose. But Amory
supposed it would be a waste of time to look for ultimate purposes to
Dorothy. Possibly she not only devised the advertisements, but drew the
layette too.
But Amory had not forgotten that she wanted Dorothy to lend her ten
pounds. The minutes were passing, and no doubt Dorothy would soon be
putting on the Ararat again, and going back to Oxford Street and Mr.
Miller. Amory turned over this and that "opening"; none of them seemed
very promising. Dorothy was already lacing up the Japhet Boots; she was
going to make her advertisement a "cinch" by walking back also in the
downpour. But suddenly Amory remembered her pride. There was no need
for abjectness. Therefore it was with a certain offhandedness that, as
Dorothy rose and stamped one Japhet boot after the other, she suddenly
said, "Oh, I say, Dorothy, will you lend me ten pounds?"
It is astonishing how rich everybody else appears when we ourselves are
poor. For a moment Dorothy's eyes opened widely, then she broke into a
humorous grimace.
"My dear!... Where from, I wonder?" Then she added, "Really? I mean,
you really want it?"
"Yes," said Amory shortly. She wondered whether Dorothy thought she
would ask for it if she didn't want it.
"I haven't ten pounds in the world," said Dorothy. Then she considered
for a moment. "If it's really urgent--I mean if you really _must_ have
it--I might--I never have yet, but I _might_ be able to get it----" She
paused.
There seemed to Amory a certain lack of delicacy in the pause. It was
as if she gave Amory an opportunity of saying what she wanted the
money for. Amory was sure that some day, when those poor and deserving
artists should come to her, she would neither ask questions nor break
off into pauses that came to the same thing. She did not deny Dorothy's
right to refuse; she did deny her any other right. If Dorothy's
fashion-drawing or advertisements or whatever it was could not provide
ten pounds, then absolutely the only thing that could be said for these
absurdities disappeared.
"You see, I should have to borrow it myself----" Dorothy said
hesitatingly, and Amory merely hoisted her shapely shoulders.
Then, however, it seemed to strike even Dorothy that she was not
behaving very well. Suddenly she said, "All right, I will borrow it;
will to-morrow do?"
"I should be awfully obliged," said Amory, helping Dorothy on with the
Ararat Coat.
But Dorothy relapsed from the right attitude again immediately. Without
stopping to think that the Ararat sleeve was wet and Amory dry, she
suddenly passed her arm about her. She held her close, making her
horridly wet, and began to say a number of the so-called sympathetic
things that, when they are not impertinences, are banalities.
"I _am_ sorry, dear," she said. "I see how it is; of course you aren't
cut out for this sort of life. I saw that the moment I came in. Now,
look here, what you ought to do would be to give Mrs. 'Ill a sum every
week, and to tell her that she's got to do you, all in, for that. Not
too much, either; _you_ can't buy, but she can. That's the way I do.
I saw how you'd been living when I washed up; eggs and sardines and
pressed beef; and you're really run down. You ought never to have
signed that contract, but I'll tell you what you perhaps can do about
that. Tell Croziers' that you won't go to another dealer, but that you
_must_ have leave to sell things privately, and that you'll pay them
commission just as if _they'd_ sold them. If they won't--well, just
you sell without their permission, and let 'em sue you if they like.
They won't sue you. They can't afford it. I'm seeing business men every
day, remember, and I'm sure that's what Mr. Miller would say. And if
my thing comes off I'll buy a picture from you next Spring. Will you
promise to do that, Amory?"
Even Amory saw the sense of it, but that did not alter the fact that to
all intents and purposes Dorothy was lending her money on the condition
that she did as she was told with it. Not _exactly_ that, of course,
but rather indelicately like it. And she had all but told Amory that
her place was disgracefully dirty and herself underfed. Amory wasn't
sure that Dorothy wasn't simply one mass of pose. She could come here
and speak her mind plainly enough, could talk in quite a grasping
spirit of the money she intended to get; but Amory could imagine her
with Mr. Miller--anything but plain; sly, wheedling, not helping in
the emancipation of her sex at all, but actually doing all she could
to rivet their chains the faster upon them; neither forgetting, nor
allowing Mr. Miller to forget, that she was rather a personable young
woman. Amory called it the next thing to--well, she wouldn't say what.
She would be kind, merely say that they were in opposite camps, and let
it go at that.
Therefore she was not giving Dorothy one for herself, but was merely
showing herself staunch to a high ideal, when she said, effusively,
but still with dignity, "Oh, thank you so very, very much ... if you
_could_ possibly get me the money.... Perhaps I haven't managed very
well, but as you say, I've other things to think of; and about what you
say about Croziers', I hardly think----"
But Dorothy cut bluntly in. "Rubbish! They've just taken advantage of
your ignorance and inexperience. I should tell 'em they could make
kite-tails of their silly old contract! Look here, shall _I_ see Mr.
Dix for you?"
Amory hesitated. She did not want to see Mr. Dix again herself, firstly
because she felt that an artist ought to be spared these sordid
matters, and secondly because she always wanted to wash herself when
Mr. Dix had covered her with those galantined eyes. But Dorothy was not
an artist, and apparently didn't mind a glutinous look more or less. To
the coarser nature the coarser task. One didn't chop firewood with a
razor....
"What'd be the good?" she sighed. "I signed the thing."
"Leave that to me," said Dorothy briskly. "I'll talk to Mr. Dix for
you. At least I'll get permission for you to sell things privately,
and then you can reckon the ten pounds off the price of the picture
I'll buy--for my scheme's bound to come off! So we'll call that a
bet. And now I must fly. Do try my plan with Mrs. 'Ill. When's Cosimo
coming back? Yes, I saw about his uncle. Good-bye, dear.... And oh,
dear, now I'm forgetting the very thing I came for! You will sign that
advertisement, won't you?"
"What advertisement?" Amory asked. She had forgotten all about the
Ararat Coat. But now she remembered.... "Oh, that waterproof thing! Oh,
you don't want me to sign that!"
Dorothy turned quickly. "Oh, Amory, don't be so silly!" she broke out.
"Of course it doesn't matter a button to us whether you sign it or not,
but I thought you might as well. Nobody need sign it for that matter,
but we have our space, and it's a pity to waste this rain. And I really
could get you the complete outfit, boots and all. As well as getting
your name before the public. But don't if you don't want."
Amory lifted her shallow (but penetrating) eyes.
"Well, dear--if it were _really_ necessary--especially after all your
kindness--but as you say it isn't--if you wouldn't very much mind--I
think my signature looks better on my pictures----"
"All right. It doesn't matter," said Dorothy. "I'll let you know how I
go on with Mr. Dix----"
And she was gone, once more to put the Ararat and the Japhet Boots to
the test of the heaviest rainfall for eighteen years.
No sooner was her back turned than Amory, flinging aside the curtain on
its little rail, lay down on her unmade bed. She had the promise of her
ten pounds, but it had cost its price. It had cost it in forbearance.
Still, that was no more than all the poets and seers and souls
dedicated to art had had to suffer before her, and she, like them, had
kept her ideal unsullied.
But she was disappointed in Dorothy.
II
A DAMSEL ERRANT
More and more as she thought it over, Amory was glad that she was not
going to see Mr. Hamilton Dix again. Excepting always Cosimo, who was
different, she had begun to have a poor opinion of men. And as this
opinion was based, not on her reading of Association books, nor on
anything Laura Beamish or Katie Deedes had told her, but on her own
unshakable and inalienable experience, it is perhaps worth a moment's
examination.
By no means, then, did she now think men the efficient, capable
creatures they appeared to consider themselves to be. Amory knew men;
she knew two of them, no fewer. One of these two men had inveigled
her into an all-but-fraudulent contract; the other, definitely
fraudulently, had absconded with the funds that had provided Amory
Towers with an income of a pound a week, and was not very likely ever
to be heard of again. We all speak of the world as we find it. This
was the world as Amory had found it; and, since the total sum of the
world's wrong and cruelty was admittedly enormous, what more natural
than to try to gauge its enormousness by a process of multiplication?
Amory, sternly and deliberately setting her painting aside until she
should have come to some really basic conclusion on these points, began
to multiply.
And the day on which she did so was an evil day for those
impostors--men. How should it not be an evil day for them? For men,
who had had the world's affairs entirely in their hands in the past,
still had them almost entirely in their hands to-day; and what had they
made of things? Plainly, the best system they had been able to devise
was a system in which it was possible for trustees to abscond with
funds entrusted to them by godmothers. And not only that. Forgetting
that a real man, Blake (unhappily now dead), had said that the sight
of a robin in a cage set all heaven in a rage--totally ignoring
that spiritual aspect of the matter--men, when asked for redress,
callously weighed the cost of prosecution and the chances of securing a
conviction, shrugged their shoulders, and (in Amory's case) apparently
proposed to do nothing at all. Men, in a word, actually approved
(though they pretended not to) of the organized robbery of poor girls.
Next, whether they liked it or not, men must shoulder the
responsibility for a state of things that permitted iniquitous
contracts to be fluttered in the face of necessitous people, and that
(in effect) ground the face of the poor because he (or in the present
instance she) was poor. Males, as males, could not escape the onus of
Mr. Hamilton Dix. Amory might have been more merciful had they made
any attempt to do so, but they did not. They spoke of such things as
everyday matters of business. They said that no humanly devisable
system could be perfect, and told her, with their hypocritical
"niceness," that the whole fabric of society could hardly be pulled
down merely because a self-seeking individual here and there crept
in and took advantage. But Amory knew that it was not a question of
individuals. It was the underlying spiritual principle that was the
whole point. That was radically wrong. Even men saw this, a few men,
and called themselves Radicals, which was really a Latin word, meaning
that they affected to go to the radix or root of the matter; but Amory
knew where the root of the matter really lay. It lay in this artificial
sex-distinction and in that frightfully laughable masculine theory of
the "natural dominance of the male."
But this was only a part of it, and not the finer part. It was in the
finer part that the whole evil came to a head. How (to put the thing in
a nutshell) did men (with the honourable exception of Cosimo and one or
two others) treat art (namely, Amory's art)? There you had it!
Here Amory was on her own ground, and could speak once more from that
astonishingly useful thing, experience. How had the world, under
male dominance, treated her art?... Well, Amory would be fair, even
generous. There actually had been a period of a few months, a sort
of lucid interval, when Mr. Hamilton Dix's articles really had given
the impression that Mr. Dix knew what he was talking about. They had
been written about the time Amory had signed her contract, and had
been copied by provincial papers. But oh! the downfall after that. The
adulation Dix had lately been spilling over that Harris girl, who (as
Amory could demonstrate, absolutely and up to the hilt) had simply
stolen Amory's own subjects and carried one or two of Amory's own
tricks of handling to simply screaming absurdities! More than once
Amory had wondered whether Miss Harris let Mr. Dix kiss her.... And
when Amory had pointed out the theft to Mr. Dix, and had said that
in her poor opinion an action for infringement of copyright might
lie (or if it mightn't, then it ought to), had Mr. Dix done anything
but ogle her and insult her with his sticky smile? Not he. He had
merely asked her whether she wished to make her demonstration before
a jury of matrons!... No doubt he had thought that smart, but even a
fool may sometimes tell the truth by accident and unawares. A jury of
matrons--that was to say an appeal to a court that did not condone
embezzlement and smile at thievish contracts--was exactly what _was_
needed. But had men, during all the centuries in which they had ruled,
ever founded such a court? Were they ever likely to do so until they
were absolutely driven to it? Not they! And it was probably too late
now. The women had seen through them, knew their real nature. At last
they had seen the thing to be the sex-war it really had been all along.
Amory could have named, offhand, quite a dozen of her old companions
of the McGrath who had put the whole question far more clearly than
the so-called statesmen. And even among men themselves there was the
clear-eyed Otto Weiniger--that notable exception.
For what had Weiniger said, if the dull world would but take the wool
out of its ears and listen? Why, what but that the classification by
sexes was nothing but the roughest of approximations after all? Because
the chromosome didn't actually _show_, illogical folk had got into
the habit of saying "This is a man" and "That is a woman," largely by
force of hearing it repeated time after time. But what of the masculine
qualities in woman, the feminine qualities in man? What about Cosimo's
exquisite perceptions, Amory's own strong art? Oh no; this rough
guesswork really would not do for a generation that at last, in spite
of bandages and blinkers, had begun to see the light! Amory knew--by
herself and Cosimo, to go no further--that the sexes _did_ intermerge
and graduate. The best women to-day had brains that pierced ruthlessly
through shams (which was what brains were primarily for); and the best
men were Feminist in their sympathies. No doubt it would take a little
time for this truth to force its way into the Glenernes of the land. No
doubt Mrs. Deschamps would continue to flirt with M. Criqui, and the
unspeakable Mr. Wellcome to boast that he was wholly (not partly) the
father of his own offspring and his placid wife entirely (and without
qualification) their mother. But nobody on the look-out for signs of
the true progress turned their eyes Glenernewards. Glenerne had never
heard of the chromosome. Ten to one it would have thought it was a
mechanical piano-player. That was why Amory had left Glenerne.
And how had the world treated its Weiniger--its Nietzsche--its
Strindberg? "Mad as hatters," it said, merely because they had shot
themselves, or died in the madhouses to which it had driven them!
Yes (Amory thought), if that was the best the men could do, it was time
the women took hold!
Hungrily, hungrily she wished Cosimo was back, so that they might
discuss these things together!
But Cosimo not only remained away; he did not even write very
frequently. He appeared to wait until he had received three letters
from Amory, and then to "answer" them together, obviously with the
letters before him. Amory understood that business in connection with
his uncle's estate detained him; he was in Shropshire: and a phrase
about "running up to town presently" had read as if, even when he
should come, he would go back to Shropshire again. But he had not given
up his studio near the Vestry Hall; Amory knew that because he had sent
her the key of it and had asked her to forward his letters; and Amory
went there daily. Once she had even tried to work there, but without
much success. She had hardly expected it would answer. She had only
tried it because she had come to hate her own place so.
Indeed, there had been days when she had approached her easel as
reluctantly as if the instrument had been a guillotine with a basket
behind it to receive her severed head; and there had been other days
when to contemplate the daub on the canvas had almost made her wish
it had been one. For she now found her own work execrable. And yet
she could not summon the courage to take a knife and scrape it out.
Each afternoon she hoped it would appear better in the morning, but it
never did. It seemed as if Croziers' carrier, in fetching away those
twenty-eight pictures, had taken away also whatever talent had gone
to their painting. On one canvas only that she had produced since
then could she bear to look, and that was neither study, sketch, nor
picture. It showed the group, all red with firelight, that had sat
about her hearth when Laura Beamish, with the coloured ribbons of her
guitar falling about her, had sung "The Trees they do Grow High."
She knew that the reasons for this wretched falling off lay close
at hand. In the first place, she badly needed a change. Next, she
was making far, far greater attempts than when she had been content
to state (as it were with a "Something like this--you know--and
this--you've seen these things"), the results of her Saturday night
wanderings in the streets and of her Sunday mornings in Petticoat Lane
or where the Salvation Army gathered to sing. She told herself that
she had acquired knowledge more quickly than she had been able to
assimilate it. Next, the lean years were always followed by the fat,
the fat by the lean: it was a Law.... But she had gleams of hope too.
Broadly considered, discontent was no bad sign. Only fatuity could
regard its work with unvarying complacence. Despondency might not be
in itself a guarantee of genius, but genius and despondency were no
strangers. Her work was in a stage of transition. She was in mental
and spiritual labour, and a new style would emerge. To the old one
she refused to return.... And so on. The more she groped the more she
read, and the more she read the more she groped. They are lucky who are
merely required to love the highest when they see it: let us sorrow
for those who are condemned, not only to love, but also to attempt to
realize, the highest when they do not see it.
And let us sorrow especially for the artist who has no choice but to
sacrifice, to the vast and thunderous things he cannot do, the frail
and small and comfortable things that he can.
Amory's refuge from herself at that time was to walk the streets until
she was ready to drop with fatigue. North, south, east, and west she
went, numbing herself with mechanical movement, exhausting herself with
speculations that even for herself had no interest. Faces passing,
passing, for ever passing, seemed to lend her a stupor; they seemed,
not individuals, but aspects of one general, horrible human phenomenon.
Sometimes, in this multiple beast of a crowd, her heart palpitated as
the heart of a bird palpitates before a spinning, fascinating snare.
Sometimes for an hour at a time she would see 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
arrowheads of white as they turned, sometimes only to be seen under
their lowered lids as a finger-nail is to be seen under the finger
of a glove. She wondered how many of them, like her own, were seeing
nothing but eyes too. She wondered on what pillows they closed, within
what walls, behind what doors and windows, with what other eyes sealed
by their sides.... And at other times she saw nothing but doors and
windows. As if she had been paid to keep a catalogue of these things,
she counted and classified the fanlights of Lincoln's Inn and the
Bloomsbury Squares, the high-railinged balconies of the tenements
behind Victoria Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, the numbers on Soho
doors, the window-boxes of Mayfair. Then there would take her the
fancy that everybody she saw knew everybody else, as the bees of a
hive may be supposed to know one another, and that she alone was an
intruder and unknown. And for a time she rather liked that. It gave
her a sense of specialness. But presently it began to frighten her
a little. The specialness turned to an intolerable loneliness. Her
elbows touched theirs, but they were remoter from her than the stars.
If she could have stopped one of them and asked it what name it bore
it would have been rather a relief; to know even a name would have
been something; it would have helped in that frightening blankness,
and she would have been quite willing to tell her own name in return.
But she knew nothing about them--nothing, nothing. Even their sex (if
Weiniger was to be believed) was a matter of presumption. Of course
some had beards and some had not, but that was a shallow, superficial
view. No doubt with the advance of knowledge (she fancied Galton had
said something of the sort) beards might be bred on every face, or bred
out of existence entirely. Amory hoped the latter. Mr. Jowett, at the
McGrath (she remembered), had once lifted his moustache to show her the
growth and construction of the ornament, and it had not struck her as
a pretty sight; and she could not have endured Cosimo with a beard. It
would have been a contradiction of all she found most sympathetic in
Cosimo. That nice, friendly other girl Amory was ready to choose for
Cosimo should certainly not be a girl who would allow Cosimo to grow a
beard....
Amory went into Cosimo's studio one night, after a long walk through
Wandsworth, past Clapham Common, and back through the Old Town to the
bus at Victoria, in order to see whether there were any letters for
him. There were none, and she sat down on the edge of his bed, where
she had sat that morning when she had come to tell Cosimo that she was
moving into Cheyne Walk at once. Cosimo's studio was on the ground
floor, at the back of a block. Amory had not lighted the gas. Somewhere
away across a yard somebody was going to bed with a blind up, and the
distant incandescent shed a raw ugly light. It shone through a narrow
side-window of Cosimo's studio, making quite a bright patch on the
floor at the foot of his bed. Amory watched it dully, trying to summon
up force to get up and go home.
Aching as she was for Cosimo's return, she was still a little
displeased with him. To be sure, he told her, in those rather
perfunctory letters, how horribly he missed her, but somehow she did
not feel that his sense of loss was quite as great as her own. She
resented his staying so long away. It hardly rose to her conception
of their past beautiful friendship. Of course his uncle was dead, but
his uncle would still be dead if Cosimo stayed away another couple of
months, making four in all, and Amory still waiting and waiting....
Well, he mustn't think that she was going to ask him to come back,
though he never returned at all. She would continue to forward his
letters, adding a patient little note of her own once in a while.
Indeed, had it not been that Cosimo understood her art, she would
hardly have done as much as that for him....
Then, still sitting on the edge of Cosimo's deserted bed, she
remembered the richly comical interpretation that Dorothy and the
plumber, the chimney-sweep and Glenerne, had put upon Cosimo's
wellnigh perfect understanding of her art. And that recollection led
to another--that of the "stage-kiss" Cosimo had given her when Mr.
Wellcome had thrust them into one another's arms. She remembered that
she had been--she hardly knew how to put it--say a little disappointed
in Cosimo about that. Hitherto she had not asked herself the reason of
this, but she thought she saw it now. Cosimo, for once, had not done
the proper thing at all. The proper way to fool those inquisitive,
stupid people to the top of their bent would have been to give her a
_real_ kiss, not a mock one. As likely as not that clumsy caress had
seemed the shyness of a real lover. No; the proper way to throw dust in
their eyes would have been to take her face deliberately between his
hands, turn it up, and plant the ridiculous emblem fairly and squarely
on her mouth. _Then_, when they had found themselves alone again, they
could have laughed together at Glenerne and its folly. Cosimo had not
played the game.
And she felt the slight disappointment in him that night especially,
for, reaching North Side an hour or two before, she had suddenly left
the pavement and struck across the Common towards the "Plough." It
was a coldish night, and not, from the point of view of the phenomena
she had passed on the Common, to be compared with any warm evening in
the Spring; nevertheless she had seen enough to give an exquisitely
ironical point to this obsession of bodily contacts that seemed to
engage the world. Simply, they had been kissing everywhere, and Cosimo
certainly ought to have been there to exchange with her humorous
Olympian comments on the screaming absurdity of it all. Perhaps--Amory
was not sure--but perhaps, merely as part of the general joke--as a
sort of recognition of their surroundings--a sort of politeness (if
you cared to put it in that way)--as a doing in Rome as Rome does, and
on Clapham Common as Clapham Common does, Amory might have let him
kiss her too.... And then they would have come back here or to Cheyne
Walk, to laugh together as he cleared supper away and she braided
her inordinate hair. To taste the full savour of folly you yourself
must have been a fool too--just once. Perhaps--Amory was not quite
certain--it was a Law....
But Cosimo had not been a fool even once....
But Amory was almost too fagged out even for resentment. She could
only weakly wish, as she rested her aching back on Cosimo's bed, that
even with his few imperfections he was there. For one thing, twice
that very night she had been frightened on the Common by the approach
of men. Hating herself for doing anything so unmasculine, she had
clutched her skirts and almost made a run for it. To the turning heads
of women in the streets, who apparently found something amusing in
her demonstratively serviceable Portia hat and her obviously sensible
square-toed, flat-heeled shoes, she had long been accustomed; but such
alarms as she had felt when Mr. Jowett had turned up his moustache
to show the growth of it were only the beginning of her instinctive
shrinkings from the rough physique of men. They were not Antinöuses
on Clapham Common. She preferred masculinity sublimated, so to
speak--purified by the processes of art. Anything else--a caress of
Cosimo's, for example--would have owed its bearableness largely to the
philosophic or ironic meaning behind.
She continued to wish that Cosimo was there. Then they would have
talked quite a lot about those things.
She had not noticed that the glaring incandescent across the yard had
been extinguished and that the studio was now pitch-dark. She wished
that before he had left Cosimo had not removed the linen cases from his
pillows; the striped ticking tickled her cheek. But she was too tired
to move. Some time ago a clock had struck a quarter-past something;
a quarter-past eleven she supposed; she decided that when it struck
half-past she would get up. That would not be for five minutes yet. She
closed her eyes.
She did not immediately realize what it was that caused her to open
them again when she did. She only knew that some sound had caused her
alarm, and that, a moment later, she was sitting up with a fluttering
heart on Cosimo's bed. She would have called out, but suddenly, at a
repetition of the sound, she dared not. Nor dared she move. She put her
hand to her breast. Her tiny face had gone white.
Somebody was fumbling softly at the door.
Never in her life had Amory fainted, but she wellnigh did so now. She
knew that there were other men in this block of studios; had she been
observed to come in and not seen to depart again? It was possible,
and burglars also were possible. Instantaneously it had flashed into
her mind that the latch was an ordinary one and that it had closed of
itself behind her--she remembered to have heard its click--otherwise
she would have been defenceless. Terror seized her. It was not her own
restraint that prevented her from giving a shrill scream. She had no
voice with which to scream....
Then suddenly whoever was at the door was heard to depart again. As the
sound of steps died away Amory fell back on Cosimo's bed.
And as she dared not go out, there was nothing for her to do but to
remain where she was.
She simply dared not go out now.
So she lay, hardly closing her eyes once, until the side window became
a leaden oblong. Then, slowly and laggardly, Cosimo's chest of drawers,
his washstand, his little bureau, and his row of boots crept into dim
shape out of the shadows. The sheet over his arm-chair ceased to be
a grey crouching figure, the easel with the duster over it to be a
criminal hanging in chains. Soon the milk-carts would be coming round,
and the postman----
But she would not wait to see whether any letters came for him----
Cold and stiff, at last she rose. Her feet were leaden, and she neither
knew nor cared what anybody might think who saw her coming out into
the street at that hour of the morning. She groped for the latch of
the front door, and closed the door behind her. Ten minutes later she
reached her own studio, dead-beat.
But there, too, somebody--the same somebody--awaited her. She had cast
herself wearily into the low window-seat and was watching the sullen
day-break over the river, when from behind the curtain that enscreened
her bed there came a creak and a heavy sigh. For all her fatigue she
sprang up as a skip-jack springs up when its piece of cobbler's wax
yields. It _could_ only be one person.
She ran across the room and flung the curtain aside.
At the same moment Cosimo opened his eyes.
"Urro!" he grunted.
Then he sat sluggishly up.
"Hullo! It's you. Wherever have you been?" he muttered.
"However did you get in here?" Amory demanded almost sharply.
"Put my hand through that stupid old door and slipped the latch, of
course. You ought to get that door seen to, Amory; anybody could get
in. But where on earth have you been all night? I came for my key,
and then went to my place to see if you were there--went twice, in
fact--but I thought you'd be coming in, so I waited and went to sleep.
What time is it? By jove, it's cold."
Cosimo had lain down dressed on her bed, but his hair--this was the
first thing Amory noticed about him--was less disarranged than it might
have been. It no longer clung about his head in tendrils. He had had
it cut quite short. But Amory did not comment upon the change. She had
come to a sudden resolution. She did not intend to tell Cosimo that she
had spent the night lying on his bed. So when presently he asked her
again where she had been she assumed a brightness that, haggard as it
was, was still a feat when her exhaustion was considered. She laughed.
"Oh, I've been out looking for subjects. I've found one--a
ripper--Covent Garden Market. But oh, I'm _so_ tired!"
"But surely you haven't been there all night, my dear girl?" Cosimo
expostulated.
"There and other places. Why not?... Do be an angel and light the fire,
Cosimo."
And as Cosimo rose, stretched himself, and took off his coat, she
stole a covert look at his cut hair again. It seemed to her to be not
impossible that that might be an index of other changes also.
III
"BUSINESS AS USUAL"
Valuable as were the qualities that had placed Dorothy's friend, Mr.
Miller, high in the estimation of Hallowells', they entailed one defect
that was more valuable than all of them put together. Resolution, hard
work, and singleness of purpose had given him an enviable position in
the most humorous job of the age; but these would have availed him
comparatively little had there not been in that part of him where his
sense of humour should have resided, a void that approached as near to
a vacuum as nature permits. It was to that void that Mr. Miller really
owed his success.
For you simply cannot do these things with your tongue in your cheek.
Had Mr. Miller not been able to make, with perfect belief in them,
statements that anybody else would have had to laugh in the middle of,
he would not have been the Man of Ideas he was. In the ordinary run
of his business smart young men came to Mr. Miller with notions and
devices for this and that; he bought them, paid for them at the current
rates, merely because he had to have them; but they were not what he
really wanted. What he really wanted let him explain for himself.
The moment you were shown into his room you were aware that you were
in the presence of no funny man. Suppose you had the good fortune not
to be "turned down" at once as a mere "smartie," Mr. Miller would take
trouble with you. He would frankly admit that he and his fellows had
only themselves to thank for the disrepute into which their craft had
fallen; and bold would have been the advertising freebooter or mere
space-broker who had held up his head before Mr. Miller's righteous
anger.
"We've overdone it," he would sorrowfully admit. "We want noo
blood--noo blood, noo idees, and belief in the reel dignity of our
work. If you've got them, sit right down and let's have a look at them;
if you haven't, you're a busy man and so am I, and I keep my door plain
inside and pretty in the passage where it looks best from. Now show."
Let us assume that you showed and that Mr. Miller found you worth still
more trouble. He might then address you as follows:--
"Too smart. Smartness took the full count the fall before last; we're
pushing these funny stunts underground where they belong. And that
other idee--too noisy. Shouting don't go any more to-day. N. G.---- Now
you're an Englishman, and cann't be expected to see these things in
their reel perspective; but you've assets right here in this country
without these vodeville acts. It ain't my business to put you wise,
but I'll tell you this: neither noise nor smartness is good enough for
Hallowell and Smiths'. Look out o' that window. You see that edifice.
That edifice isn't going up to be run like the one next door to it.
It's a noo edifice, and it's going to be run on noo methods. You think
your methods are noo. You think again. You think quite a lot. Then
when it's hit you good and hard, ring me up and I'll make another date
with you. You got the right look, and there might be business done
between you and I yet. The door closes itself. If you hear a hiss that
ain't me, but the piston. I hope you found the elevator-man courteous
in his manner. You did? That's one of the things there's going to be
at Hallowells'--etiquette. But unobtroosive. Not sticking out a foot
on each side. You didn't observe it sticking out, did you? So. Good
morning."
Mr. Miller had looked up in an etymological dictionary the meaning
of the word "gospel," and had found that it meant "good tidings";
and that, he said, was exactly what advertisement meant too. He had
looked up other words also--Valour, Hero, Dignity, Gentleman--and he
was for restoring their dimmed lustre. And since he saw things in
their true perspective, he saw also the only way in which that could
be done. To cut the cackle and come (like Mr. Wellcome) to the horses,
he proposed to do it by a putting of the founts of honour to purposes
of irrigation. Commerce had vulgarized itself; dignity must therefore
be restored to it from where dignity was to be had in quantities
sufficient if necessary to throw at the birds--from above. One day Mr.
Miller, passing a more than usually ingenious advertisement in a shop
window, had stated his point of view in twenty words. "Look at that!"
he had exclaimed to his companion. "Now I say the man who invented
that was a live wire. He connects. You feel the man. But what does the
British public know about him? If he'd rescued a comrade under fire
he'd have got your V.C. for it, and everybody'd have known all there
was to him; but you stop a hundred people on this sidewalk and ask 'em
his name, and if a single one of 'em can tell you then the drinks are
on me!"
It is true that Mr. Miller did not say that he wanted the Cross
bestowed (as it were) For Value instead of For Valour, but that was
the direction in which his thoughts strayed. Before his perspective
had become quite so clear he had tried to get permission for the Royal
Standard to float over Hallowells' new premises (the Union Jack having
become common trade property, and so of no more value to one emporium
than to another); and though he had failed, it was still better to have
failed in such an attempt than to have succeeded in the funny stunts
that had been pushed underground the fall before last. It remained an
ideal for commerce to lift up its eyes to.
In the business sense, though in none other, Mr. Miller had paid a
good deal of court to Dorothy Lennard--or perhaps less at first to
Dorothy than to Lady Tasker's niece. Nominally Dorothy was still "third
hand" in the fashion studio; but Miss Benson had been wise enough to
leave her free to do pretty much as she liked (without that freedom
the studio would never have got Hallowells' catalogue, nor have become
what to all intents and purposes it now was--one of Hallowells'
departments), and Dorothy's intimacy with Mr. Miller had ripened
quickly after the famous buying of Glenister's picture, "Sir Walter and
the Cloak," at the Academy more than a year before. Dorothy had gone
round the Exhibition with Mr. Miller, and had seen him stop long before
the picture and presently return to it.
"Now that's what I call a picture, Miss Lennard," he had said at
last. "A reel thoughtful bit of art. I don't care whether you call it
pre-Raphaelite or whatever you call it--you as a lady-artist can put it
all over me there--but speaking as a plain man of business I say that
picture just appeals to me. It calls me. I feel it. It's got meaning.
There's your Raleigh, look. And there's your Queen Bess. And I ask
you to observe the chivalrous spirit of it. That's the reel old-world
English courtesy. That's the thing that hasn't got to be let die.
Hallowells' has got to pitch its key up to that. It's got to be as if
there was a puddle in front of the Grand Entrance every day, and every
lady-shopper was a Queen, and Hallowells' was"--Mr. Miller had made a
low, sweeping gesture with both his arms--"spreading its Cloak. That's
the deportment I want for our Hosts. Where do they keep the Sales
Department here?"
And, that an object-lesson should be ever before his Departmental
Hosts' eyes, Mr. Miller had bought the picture.
How Hallowells' had contrived, during the past two years, with an army
of painters and gilders, carpenters and shopfitters, plasterers and
electricians and inspectors and engineers swarming all over the place,
that business should be "carried on as usual during rebuilding" was
nothing short of a modern miracle; but so it had been. And the gradual
rising of the visible edifice had been accompanied, course by course
and tier by tier, by bright palatial uprearings in Mr. Miller's busy
brain. If the weather should hold for another month, all was expected
to be ready for the Grand Inauguration in the spring; and even if the
weather did not hold, the impression had somehow got about that the
weather must be a mightier power even than had been supposed to be able
to postpone an event of such magnitude.... But all this is ancient
history now. London knows its Hallowells' and the wonders that the
man who held its Portfolio of Publicity (for surely he was entitled
to a seat in the Cabinet of the World's Commerce) called forth. It
has accepted the Hallowell touch. It knows that its shopwalkers rank
as Marshals and its head-salesmen as Hosts. It knows that the employé
who would win his spurs at Hallowells' must fast and keep his vigil
before the picture of Sir Walter and the Cloak. The funny stunt _has_
taken the full count. Mr. Miller _has_ corrected the perspective of
things.... Therefore pass we on to how Dorothy Lennard had now and then
a voice in certain of the tertiary wonders of the organization and how
into the vast complexity she had contrived to drag the name of Mr.
Hamilton Dix.
Mr. Dix had come into the concern over the pictorial advertising. Of
Dorothy as an ex-student of the McGrath Mr. Miller had presently come
to think almost as much as he did of Dorothy the niece of Lady Tasker;
and he had taken her word about Mr. Dix. "Couldn't your posters and
things be made somehow a bit more--important?" Dorothy had suggested
one day. "Tell me how," Mr. Miller had instantly replied--"tell us
how; you've grasped the idee! You don't suppose we could enlist the
patronage of our president of the Royal Academy, do you?" (Mr. Miller
had lately begun to speak of "our" Royal Standard and "our" House of
Peers.) Thereupon Dorothy had given a light, rapid sketch of Sir Edward
Pointer, not so much disdaining as debarred by his official position
from superintending Hallowells' pictorial advertising; and she had
suggested Mr. Hamilton Dix instead. "Is he a live wire?" Mr. Miller
had demanded. "No push about him, I mean, no noise, not always forcing
himself forward, but the reel solid dignity? If he ain't excloosive and
hard to get, he's no good to us! He ain't a 'Sir,' is he?"
"No."
"Nor an 'Honourable,' with a 'u' in it?"
"No, he's just plain Mr. Dix."
"And what place does he take among our critics of art? Is he a one-cent
paper man or two cents? I ain't calling your friend down at all, Miss
Lennard, but we can't afford any but what he's the very top-tip-top."
"I think he'd do really well."
"Then let him name his figure and buy him in.... And now tell me what's
the difficulty about Mr. Stanhope Tasker."
For a moment Dorothy's composure was a little shaken. She smiled and
blushed both at once. Mr. Stanhope Tasker was her second cousin, and
Mr. Miller's next words explained how Lady Tasker's nephew had come to
be at Hallowells'.
"I hope he ain't afraid he won't be able to hold the job down. Between
you and I, Miss Lennard, it don't matter a rusty nail whether he do
or he don't. He's here to _look_ good; if he does that he fills the
bill from A to Zee. Why, walking up our Bond Street only this morning
brought it home to me good and hard. 'Here they are,' says I, 'ten of
'em in as many minutes, the reel high-grade goods, with centuries of
blue blood in the very way they wear their pantaloons--Sir Walters
from 'way back, all with their names spelt one way and pronounced
another--the genu-i-ne all-wool article; but can I get 'em? I cann't.
And that's what Mr. Stan is, if I might call him that without
familiarity. Now just you tell me, Miss Lennard, what's the bother?"
Again Dorothy had bitten her lip, grown pink, and laughed. "Leave him
to me. I'll keep him for you if I can."
"But great snakes (pardon me) what _do_ these gentlemen want? They fix
their own honorarium (has that got a 'u' in it?)--a captain in our army
don't get as much by a half--we don't ask 'em to get shot--they don't
handle goods--they just stand around--it would cipher out at a dollar a
smile and a few 'This way pleases'--_and_ the rank of marshal."
"But you just said that if they weren't hard to get they were no good
to you."
"Hard--hard's the word! That's a fact! But we got to have 'em. Selling
ladies' goods has got to be made just as noble as killing their
husbands and sweethearts on a field of battle. It _is_ as noble. In
a properly organized community there ought to be a Distinguished
Salesmanship Order just as there's a Distinguished Service Order for
our military classes. And Mr. Stan's only asked to graduate for the
Distinguished Smiling Order, if I may take the liberty of saying so."
"Well, perhaps he'll do better after the Inauguration."
"You think that?" Mr. Miller had questioned eagerly. "You think he'll
be all right on the night, so to say? Well now, if I thought that it
would be a weight off my mind. I hope you'll assist me, Miss Lennard.
And thank you very much for your assistance about Mr. Dix. It's a fact
that if these people were easy to get everybody'd be getting 'em.
Pardon me, after you----"
And they had parted, but not before Dorothy had wondered whether Mr.
Miller's intelligent look, when he had asked her to help him in the
difficulty with Mr. Stan, had meant anything.
If you had asked Dorothy Lennard how it was that her Cousin Stanhope
had come to find himself at Hallowell and Smiths', she would probably
have answered you only half candidly. You would have had to guess (as
the chances were that Mr. Miller had guessed) the rest. Poor Stan, she
would have told you, so far frankly, was a perfect darling, but he had
no brains. Successively he had been ploughed for the army, had tried
six months in the city, had spent a year in Canada, three months in
a motor works, two months more in hawking from club to club a really
brilliant idea for a weekly comic paper, and finally, when at the end
of every natural asset he possessed, saving only his good looks, had
come upon a piece of Mr. Miller's own publicity--a column article in
an evening paper on "The Disappearance of the Slur of Trade." Stan had
been much impressed by the new field thus thrown open. Chancing to meet
Dorothy at about that time, for the first time since they had been
children, he had spoken of the new opening, and Dorothy had offered
there and then to introduce him to the writer of the article. From
the first moment Stanhope had shown a willingness to be introduced to
anybody whomsoever by Dorothy; and perhaps Mr. Miller had less hope
than Dorothy supposed that Mr. Stan now hung about the premises for
any reason at all except that Dorothy was to be seen there.... It was
a case of love among the ruins, or whatever the upset may be called
that is the result, not of demolition, but of rebuilding; and now, when
the two were not meeting one another in halls full of trestles and
plasterers' buckets or on passages down which they had to retreat as
counters and glass screens and heavy fittings came along, Dorothy, in
Miss Benson's absence, was fighting with Miss Umpleby for possession
of the telephone, and talking with the bewildered marshal through a
hundred and fifty yards of party-wall and fireproof floor, ceilings and
lift-wells and cornices and plate-glass.... Unless an aunt or somebody
died, Dorothy supposed that when they got married she would have to
keep him.
Having decided that Mr. Miller's solemn articles on the "Art of the
Poster" and the "Academy of the Hoardings" might as well be written by
Mr. Hamilton Dix as by anybody else, Dorothy Lennard was not such a
fool as to receive that handy critic in the fashion studio on the upper
floor. Instead she asked Mr. Miller when he would be out, and borrowed
his office--his fourth office since the building had been in progress,
and, though not yet his permanent one, still an oasis of upholstery
and quietness in a waste of concrete and ladders and new paint and
half-hung walls. She also ordered cut flowers, whisky and soda, and
tea. She had not forgotten her promise to Amory, that she would, if it
was possible, obtain some mitigation of the Crozier contract.
Mr. Dix, for his part, accustomed to shedding the lustre of his name
at ordinary space rates, was prepared to be as lustrous as anybody
liked when money was flowing as it flowed about the new Hallowells'.
He knocked at the door that was plain inside but ornamental without
at four o'clock of a Friday afternoon early in January, and Dorothy
had all in readiness for him. Before showing Mr. Dix the proofs of the
posters on which for many months past Hallowells' had been spending
money like water (they were bound together at the top edge and set,
like a huge book of wallpaper patterns, on a special easel so as to
be conveniently turned over), she gave him an outline of the general
scheme and the part it was hoped he would consent to play in it;
and from the outset Mr. Dix liked this young woman's attitude. For
Croziers' he was not much more than a pen; at Hallowells', if the
bashful and deferential manner in which he found himself received
meant anything, he would be a Berenson or a Cavalcaselle at the very
least, and really well paid for it at that. She was a comely young
woman, too, and appeared to know what she was talking about.... Ah!
She had been at the McGrath! (Dorothy had negligently dropped the name
of Toulouse-Lautrec.) That explained it! Mr. Dix had thought she spoke
with some inside knowledge! A good school, the McGrath. Mr. Dix knew
Professor Jowett quite well: a capable master, very, but shockingly
given over to a habit of cynicism, especially about the poor critics.
By the way, had Miss Lennard ever known a Miss Towers there?...
Dorothy had only mentioned the McGrath in order to give Mr. Dix an
opportunity of mentioning Miss Towers; but Miss Towers could wait a
bit. It would be better to get Mr. Dix to commit himself to magnanimous
generalities before coming to a specific case. Therefore as she gave
him tea she told him how lucky Hallowells' thought themselves to be
able to get his services. When (she said) Mr. Miller had first asked
her whether she thought he would be approachable about mere posters
she had shaken her head; but now that she had seen him (Dorothy slowly
lifted her great blue eyes) she was glad she had asked him. Wasn't it
odd, how afraid you were of the pretentious and mediocre people, and
not at all of the really big men? (At this point Mr. Dix had begun
really to bask.) But of course nothing but the best was good enough for
Hallowells'. Not (she went on) that they pretended for a moment to be
anything but tradespeople, with no views on art at all; but they _did_
believe this, that while an inferior writer might _seem_ to be just
as good, only one thing really paid the best, and that was--the best.
That was why they had sent for Mr. Dix. They wanted the incorruptible
man. As for what Mr. Dix would see fit to do now that they had got him,
that rested entirely with Mr. Dix. It was not for Hallowells' to say
what they wanted, but for Mr. Dix to give them what he thought best for
them. And as for the posters themselves....
"But suppose we look at them," said Dorothy.
They looked at the posters, and Dorothy gave Mr. Dix a whisky and soda
and a cigar. And at that point the curtain went down, so to speak, on
the first act. Mr. Dix declined for the moment to commit himself; with
an hour or two in which to think the matter over he might (he said)
be able to come to a conclusion. He understood that time pressed; it
was half-past five now. Could--_could_ Miss Lennard possibly dine with
him at eight o'clock? He might perhaps say at once that he thought the
subject a fascinating one. As Miss Lennard had so truly said, only the
mediocre mind thought these things beneath its dignity; in fact---- But
if Miss Lennard would give him the pleasure, they could talk about that
later. She would? That was charming of her. He would be round with a
taxi, then, at twenty minutes to eight.
For the second time the scene was set in the Trocadero Grill. Mr. Dix
pointed out that the decoration, garish in detail, nevertheless took
its place in the _ensemble_; and Dorothy's eyes widened, and she said
that she hoped he would say that, in those very words, in one of his
articles--she had thought that very thing so many times herself, but
had lacked the knowledge to express it: she supposed that was where the
genius came in. Didn't Mr. Dix think (she wanted to know) that genius
_was_ just that--the power of expressing what everybody had thought
in terms they had never thought of? Given genius as a text, he is a
poor critic who cannot talk for an hour without a break; and, as Mr.
Dix slowly consumed liqueur brandy as he talked, Dorothy became very
beautiful to him. He became tender, not to say mushy. He vowed that
the sentimental point of view was something to be proud, not ashamed,
of. He spoke of the struggles of poor artists, of the temptations that
beset poor critics when they were asked to sell the truth for gold; and
Dorothy said that it must be awful, but that it would be a comfort to
her thenceforward, whenever she heard such dreadful tales, to know that
one man at least understood. Was the Miss Towers of whom he had spoken
one of those unfortunate ones? She had heard (she said) of a _Mr._
Towers, a painter, but that could not be the same....
"The same--the very same!" Mr. Dix laughed, while the curls shook on
his head; and he told the story of his early mistake....
"And she has actually signed a contract with these hard-hearted
dealers, whoever they are, and can't sell her own work?" Dorothy sighed
meltingly. "Poor thing! And can nothing be done to help her?"
"What a large soft heart you have, Miss Lennard!" murmured Mr. Dix,
squegeeing her, so to speak, with his gelatinous eyes; they really
might have been of the same substance as printing-machine rollers.
"Poor child!" Dorothy sighed compassionately. "Really, I feel like
going round and seeing these horrible people myself! They couldn't eat
me, could they?"
Mr. Dix looked as if he could have eaten Miss Lennard, without sugar.
"Poor dear! But, I'm sure they couldn't resist _you_, Mr. Dix--not if
you said the beautiful things to them you've been saying to me----"
If they could, they could have done more than Mr. Dix could Dorothy.
"_Do_ help the poor child!" Dorothy pleaded. "Half the trouble in the
world seems to me to come of goodness and power being in the wrong
hands, Mr. Dix."...
Again she lifted the large baby eyes....
"I'm sure you will...."
* * * * *
And the worst feature about the whole immoral transaction was that she
did not ask, but conferred a favour--the favour of showing Mr. Hamilton
Dix what a sympathetic, chivalrous, and large-hearted person Mr.
Hamilton Dix could be.
IV
"IL FAUT QU' UNE PORTE--"
Now that Cosimo was back in town again for the second time (he
had stayed a week the first time, and had then departed again for
Christmas, coming back the first week in the New Year) his manner
puzzled Amory a little. Sometimes he seemed changed, sometimes (barring
the hair) exactly as before. Sometimes he told Amory all about his
business, and sometimes seemed more than ordinarily interested in
hers--almost as if he had her a little on his mind and would have liked
to be rid of some responsibility. Then, hardly more than three weeks
after the previous cutting, he got his hair cut again. It was cooler
so, he said--this on a distinctly raw January day.
The cutting altered his appearance surprisingly. Amory thought the
change very much for the worse. The tendrilled clusters had "massed" so
beautifully before; she had sometimes given them a light touch or two
with her fingers, taking an æsthetic delight in the way they "came."
He had reminded her a little of the Antinöus. But now he reminded her
of nothing save of a young human animal of the opposite sex. He wore
starched white collars too, and went about in a hat.... On the other
hand, he mended Amory's door so that it was no longer possible to
intrude a hand and to slip the latch. It wasn't the thing, he said.
What did it matter? Amory asked; but Cosimo only replied that he didn't
like the idea at all.
The door, however, gave way again; and this time Cosimo made a thorough
job of it, taking it from its hinges and laying it on the floor while
he screwed a stout batten on the back that remedied its warping once
for all. This was late on a Saturday evening; in order to bring the
bent door flush with the batten Amory had to sit down on one end of
it; and the lamp stood on the floor between them as Cosimo, kneeling,
screwed. The lamp was not so near, however, as to be a source of danger
if Amory (as she had so often done before) took down her hair. She did
take it down. Cosimo, the top of his cropped head turned to Amory,
continued to screw.
"There!" he said at last. "I think that'll make you safe, Amory."
"Thanks most awfully, Cosimo," Amory replied quietly.
"I've intended to do that ever since that night you were out at Covent
Garden," Cosimo continued. "If I could have got in, anybody else could,
of course. Anyway, you're all right now. You can get up."
"Thanks," said Amory again.... "I'm sure I don't know what I'm safe
from," she added. "Jellies' young man might burgle me, I suppose; but
he's 'in' again."
"No! Really?" said Cosimo, so eagerly that Amory wondered whether he
was glad to change the subject. "I _say_! What is it this time?"
"Oh, they found no fewer than ten bicycles in his place, all bright
green, newly enamelled. And he isn't a cycle dealer. I suppose they
drew conclusions."
"By Jove!" Cosimo exclaimed. "When was that?"...
Amory was quite sure that that too was part of the change in Cosimo. He
wanted to be on a topic that was--like the mended door--"safe." He had
risen on his knees and straightened his back; Amory had thought he was
about to rise altogether; but she herself did not move, and he sat down
again, cross-legged, on the other end of the door. He asked further
questions about Jellies, Orris, and the ten bicycles. Amory, shaking
back her thick, raw-gold mane, answered him quite freely; and then
Cosimo returned to the subject of the door again.
"It ought to have new hinges too, really," he grunted, "but I suppose
it's too late to get them to-night. Look how rusty that one is."
Amory leaned forward, and together they inspected the hinge. Then she
gave a little laugh. It was almost a reckless little laugh.
"Oh, it will do," she said lightly. "I shouldn't bother about it. Leave
it till to-morrow. You can just prop it up for to-night."
"Prop it up!" repeated Cosimo. "Oh no. Wouldn't do at all."
Then, all at once, apparently, Amory saw. She laughed again.
"Oh!... Good gracious, Cosimo, how ridiculous you are! Why, I
thought you were joking at first! As if anybody but you ever came up
here nowadays--and even you only once in awhile!" Then, with another
reckless little laugh, she added, "Why, what difference could a door
make?"
"A good deal, or else why have 'em?" Cosimo retorted. He did not seem
comfortable.
"Quite so: why?" Amory replied. "What a strange idea! Really, I never
knew you confuse Accidentals and Essentials so before! Why, if a
person's made up his mind to do a thing, how will a door stop it? And
if it won't, why a door? You know as well as I do that these things
happen _within ourselves_. Besides, I thought we'd arrived at our
conclusions."
"Of course, so we have," said Cosimo apologetically. "I know we've got
quite down to fundamentals. Still, there's no actual _harm_ in having a
hinge."
Amory shook her head slowly. The lamp on the floor shone tiny in either
brook-brown eye. Somehow Cosimo felt as uncomfortable as a guilty dog
under those eyes.