"'It was most beautifully cool and fresh, and we had the mess

tonga and drove to the bungalow. The flowering shrubs here would

delight Auntie Grace. I've fallen in love with a bush of hibiscus

in the compound, but find it won't live in water, but droops

directly one picks it. The trees are mostly the palmy kind, and

so green, and the ranges of hills behind are exactly like the Red

Sea ranges. The outside of our bungalow is covered with purple

convolvulus, and the verandah goes practically all round it.

Jim's room is just like him--heads he's shot, study,

dressing-room, and workshop, all in one, and it's quite the

fullest room in the house. Beyond that there's my room, looking

out over the Sinai Range----'

"Then there are the drawing and dining-rooms----"

"'The curtains are a pale terra-cotta pink over the door and dark

green in the bay-windows, with white net in front. The

drawing-room is all green. The durrie (that's the carpet) is

green, with a darker border, and the sofa and chairs and

mantelpiece-cover and the screen behind the sofa all green.

There's another bay-window, with far curtains of green and the

near ones chintz, an awfully pretty cream spotted net with a

green hem let in. That makes three lots, two in the window itself

and a third on a pole where the arch comes into the room. Then

over the three doors there are chintz curtains, cream, with a big

pattern of pink and green and blue, just like Harrods'

catalogue----'

"Can't you _see_ it all!--H'm, h'm!... Then on the Sunday morning they

got the mess tonga and went out to Dhoda, with butterfly-nets, and Jim

went fishing--h'm, h'm--and she says--

"'It's just like the Old Testament; I shouldn't have been in the

least surprised to meet Abraham and Jacob. It's the flatness of

it, and the flocks and herds. There are women with pitchers on

their heads, and a man was making scores of bricks with mud and

straw--exactly like the pictures of the Children of Israel in

"_Line upon Line_." And about a hundred horses and mules and

donkeys and carts all stopped at midday, because it was so hot,

and it was just what I'd always imagined Jacob doing. But inside

cantonments it isn't a bit Biblical, but rather too civilized,

etc.'

("Isn't Katie patient, listening to all this, auntie!")

"'But you can't go far afield at Kohat. At Murree you could

always get a three or four mile walk round Pindi Point, but here

it's just to the Club and back. We go to the Central Godown and

the Fancy Godown to shop. The Central is groceries, and the Fancy

tooth-powder, Scrubb's Ammonia, etc. On Saturday they were afraid

Captain Horrocks had smallpox, and so we all got vaccinated, but

now that we've all taken beautifully it seems it isn't smallpox

after all, and we've all got swelled arms, but Captain Horrocks

is off the sick-list to-morrow. Colonel Wade is smaller than

ever. Mrs. Wade is coming out by the "Rewa." Mrs. Beecher came to

tea on Sunday----'

("Is that _our_ Mrs. Beecher, when Uncle Dick was at Chatham,

auntie?")--

"'--and I forgot to say that Dot's parrots stood the journey

awfully well, but they've got at the loquat trees and destroyed

all the young shoots. Jim saw us safely in and is now off on his

Indus trip. The 56th are going in March, and the 53rd come

instead. I'm sure the new baby's a little darling; what are you

going to call him?----'

"And so on. I _do_ think she writes such good letters. Now let's have

yours, Aunt Grace (and that really _will_ be the end, Katie)."

And Lady Tasker's letters also were "put in."

* * * * *

It was a Sunday afternoon, at Cromwell Gardens. Stan was away with his

film company for the week-end, and Dorothy had got Katie to stay with

her during his absence and had proposed a call on Lady Tasker. They had

brought the third Bit with them, and he now slept in one of the cots

upstairs. Lady Tasker sat with her crochet at the great first-floor

window that looked over its balcony out along the Brompton Road. On the

left stretched the long and grey and red and niched and statued facade

of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the failing of the western flush

was leaving the sky chill and sharp as steel and the wide

traffic-polished road almost of the same colour. Inside the lofty room

was the still glow of a perfect "toasting fire," and Lady Tasker had

just asked Katie to be so good as to put more coal on before it sank too

low.

Katie Deedes had made no scruple whatever about changing her coat in

more senses of the words than one. She had bought a navy-blue costume

and a new toque (with a wing in it), and since then had got into the way

of expressing her doubts whether Britomart Belchamber's hockey legs and

Dawn of Freedom eye were in the truest sense feminine. Nay, that is

altogether to understate the change in Katie. She had now no doubt about

these things whatever. As Saul became Paul, so Katie now not only

reviled that which she had cast off, but was even prepared, like the

Apostle at Antioch, to withstand the older Peters of Imperialism to

their faces, did she detect the least sign of temporizing in them. And

this treason had involved the final giving-way of every one of her old

associates. She was all for guns and grim measures; and while she looked

fondly on Boy Scouts in the streets, and talked about "the thin end of

the wedge of Conscription," she scowled on the dusky-skinned sojourners

within London's gates, and advocated wholesale deportations.

And in all this Katie Deedes was only returning to her own fold, though

her people were not soldiers, but lawyers. For the matter of that, her

father's cousin was a very august personage indeed, for whose comfort,

when he travelled, highly-placed railway officials made themselves

personally responsible, and whose solemn progress to Assize was

snapshotted for the illustrated papers and thrown on five hundred cinema

screens. In the past Katie had been privileged to call this kingpost of

the Law "Uncle Joe."...

And then Mr. Strong had got hold of her....

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

And according to Mr. Wilkinson, the most ferocious of the hanging-judges

had been a beaming humanitarian by comparison with Sir Joseph. Mr.

Wilkinson had the whole of Sir Joseph's career at his fingers' ends: the

So-and-So judgment--this or that flagrant summing up--the other

deliberate and wicked misdirection to the jury. Sir Joseph's heart was

black, his law bunkum, and he had only got where he was by

self-advertisement and picking the brains of men a hundred times fitter

for heaven than himself....

Therefore Katie, hearing this horrible tale, had quailed, and had

straightway given away this devil who was the sinister glory of her

house. She had agreed that he was a man whom anybody might righteously

have shot on sight, and had gathered her Greenaway garments about her

whenever she had passed within a mile of Sir Joseph's door....

But now he was "Uncle Joe" again, and--well, it must have been rather

funny. For Katie's impressionable conscience had given her no rest day

or night until she had sought Uncle Joe out and had made a clean breast

of it all before him. Katie had fancied she had seen something like a

twinkle in those sinful old eyes, but (this was when she mentioned the

name of the "Novum") the twinkle had vanished again. Oh, yes, Sir Joseph

had heard of the "Novum." Didn't a Mr. Prang write for it?...

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

But in the end Sir Joseph had forgiven her, and had told her that she

had better not be either a revolutionary, nor yet the kind of

Conservative that is only a revolutionary turned inside-out, but just a

good little girl, and had asked her how she was getting on, and why she

hadn't been to see her Aunt Anne, and whether she would like some

tickets for a Needlework Exhibition; and now she was just beginning to

forget that he had ever been anything but "Uncle Joe," who had given her

toys at Christmas, and Sunday tickets for the Zoo whenever she had

wanted to go there on that particularly crowded day.

Dorothy had had something of this in her mind when she had brought Katie

to Cromwell Gardens that Sunday afternoon. From Katie's new attitude to

her own Ludlow project was not so far as it seemed. If she could lead

the zealous 'vert to such promising general topics as Boy Scouts,

Compulsory Service, and the preparation of boys for the Army (topics

that Katie constantly brought forward by denunciation of their

opposites), her scheme would certainly not suffer, and might even be

advanced.

And, as it happened, no sooner had Dorothy tucked her last letter back

into its envelope than Katie broke out--earnestly, proselytizingly, and

very prettily on the stump.

"There you are!" she exclaimed. "That's all _exactly_ what I mean! Why,

any one of those letters ought to be enough to convince anybody! Here

are all these stupid people at home, ready to believe everything a

native tells them, going on as they do, and hardly one of them's ever

set foot out of England in his life! Of course the Indians know exactly

what _they_ want, but don't you see, Dorothy--," very patiently she

explained it for fear Dorothy should not see, "--don't you see that it's

all so much a matter of course to Mollie and those that they can

actually write whole letters about window-curtains! I _love_ that about

the window-curtains! It's all such an old story to _them_! They _know_,

you see, and haven't got to be talking about it all the time in order to

persuade themselves! There it _is_!--But these other people don't know

anything at all. They don't even see what a perfect answer

window-curtains are to them! They go on and on and on--you _do_ see what

I mean, Dorothy?----"

"Yes, dear," said Dorothy, mildly thinking of the great number of people

there were in the world who would take no end of trouble to explain

things to her. "Go on."

And Katie continued to urge upon her friend the argument that those know

most about a country who know most about it.

Katie had got to the stage of being almost sure that she remembered

Mollie's coming into the studio in Cheyne Walk one day, when Lady

Tasker, who had not spoken, suddenly looked up from her crochet and

said, "Look, Dorothy--that's the girl I was speaking about--coming along

past the Museum there."

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

"Passing the policeman now."

Dorothy gave a sudden exclamation.--"Why," she exclaimed, "--come here,

Katie, quick--it's Amory Towers!--It is Amory, isn't it?"

Katie had run to the window, too. The two women stood watching the

figure in the mushroom-white hat and the glaucous blue velvet that idled

forlornly along the pavement.

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

"Are you quite sure?"

* * * * *

Once before in her life, in the days before her marriage, Amory Towers

had done the same thing that she was doing now. Then, seeking something,

perhaps a refuge from herself, she had walked the streets until she was

ready to drop with fatigue, watching faces passing, passing, for ever

passing, and slowly gathering from them a hypnotic stupor. Sometimes,

for hour after hour, she had seen nothing but eyes--eyes various in

shape and colour as the pebbles on a beach, sometimes looking into hers,

sometimes looking past her, sometimes tipped with arrow-heads of white

as they turned, sometimes only to be seen under their lids as a

finger-nail is seen within the finger of a glove. And at other times,

weary of her fellow-beings and ceasing to look any more at them, she had

seen nothing but doors and windows, or fan-lights, or the numbers of

houses, or window-boxes, or the patterns of railings, or the serried

shapes of chimneys against the sky. She had been looking, and yet not

looking, for Cosimo Pratt then; she was looking, and yet not looking,

for Edgar Strong now. Had she met him she had nothing new to say to him;

she only knew that he had taken weak possession of her mind. She was

looking for him in South Kensington because he had once told her, when

asked suddenly, that he lived in Sydney Street, S.W., and frequently

walked to the Indian section of the Imperial Institute in order to

penetrate into the real soul of a people through its art; and she was

not looking for him, because one day she had remembered that he had said

before that he lived in South Kentish Town--which was rather like South

Kensington, but not the same--and something deep down within her told

her that the other was a lie.

But yet her feet dragged her to the quarter, as to other quarters, and

she talked to herself as she walked. She told herself that her husband

did not understand her, and that it would be romantic and silencing did

she take a lover to her arms; and she could have wept that, of all the

flagrant splendours of which she dreamed, London's grey should remain

her only share. And she knew that the attendants at the Imperial

Institute had begun to look at her. Once she had spoken to one of them,

but when she had thought of asking him whether he knew a Mr. Strong who

came there to study Indian Art, her heart had suddenly failed her, and

the question had stayed unspoken. Nevertheless she had feared that the

man had guessed her thought, and must be taking stock of her face

against some contingency (to visualize which passed the heavy time on)

that had a Divorce Court in it, and hotel porters and chambermaids who

gave evidence, and the Channel boat, and two forsaken children, and

grimy raptures in the Latin Quarter, and its hectic cafes at night....

And so she walked, feeling herself special and strange and frightened

and half-resolved; and thrice in as many weeks Lady Tasker, sitting with

her crochet at her window, had seen her pass, but had not been able to

believe that this was the woman, with a husband and children, on whom

she had once called at that house with the secretive privet hedge away

in Hampstead.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

rose.

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

And the old lady of seventy passed slowly out of the room, and Katie and

Dorothy moved away from the window.

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

She walked back to her chair, moved it, and took up her work

again.--"Switch the table light on," she said.

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

"Yes," Lady Tasker replied.

"And wouldn't she come in?"

"She said she was hurrying back home."

That raised a question so plain that Dorothy thought it tactful to make

rather a fuss about finding some album or other that should convince

Katie that she really had met the Mollie who had written the letter

about the window-curtains. Lady Tasker's needle was dancing rather more

quickly than usual. Dorothy found her album, switched on another light,

and told Katie to make room for her on her chair.

Amory, dawdling like that, and then, when spoken to, to have the face to

say that she was hurrying back home!----

It was some minutes later that Lady Tasker said off-handedly, "Has she

any children besides those twins?"

"Amory?" Dorothy replied, looking up from the album. "No."

"How old is she?" Lady Tasker asked.

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

"About that."

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

"Not at all, I should say."

"I mean she doesn't go in for marathon races or Channel swimming or

anything of that kind?"

"Amory? No," said Dorothy, puzzled.

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

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

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

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

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

Dorothy was explaining to Katie that Mollie was fair, about her own

colour, but of course the hair never came out right in a photograph,

when Lady Tasker suddenly began a further series of questions.

"Dorothy----"

"Yes?"

"Did she--develop--early?"

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

cleverest girl at the McGrath."

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

"Why, painted. You're awfully mysterious, auntie! It was soon after she

left the McGrath that she painted 'Barrage'--you've heard of her

feminist picture that made such a stir!"

"Ah, yes. Yes. I didn't see it, but I did hear about it. I don't know

anything about art.--Had she any affair before she married young Pratt?"

"No. I'm sure of that. I knew her so well." Dorothy was quite confident

on that point, and Katie agreed. Lady Tasker's questions continued.

And then, suddenly, into this apparently aimless catechism the word

"doctor" came. Dorothy gave a start.

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

Lady Tasker did not look up from her crochet.--"Ill?" she said. "I've no

reason to suppose so. I didn't say she was ill. There's no illness about

it.... By the way, I don't think I've asked how Stan is."

But for the curiously persistent questions, Dorothy might have seized

the opportunity to hint that Stan was made for something more nationally

useful than getting himself black and blue by stopping runaway horses

for the film or running the risk of double pneumonia by being fished out

of the sea on a January day--which was the form his bread-winning was

taking on that particular week-end. But the Ludlow design was for the

moment forgotten. She would have liked to ask her aunt straight out what

she really meant, but feared to be rude. So she turned to the album

again, and again Katie, turning from turban to staff-cap and from

staff-cap to pith helmet, urged that _those_ were the people who really

knew what they were talking about--surely Dorothy saw _that_!----

Then, in the middle of Dorothy's bewilderment, once more the

questions.... About that painting of her friend's, Lady Tasker wanted to

know: did Mrs. Pratt get any real satisfaction out of it?--Any emotional

satisfaction?--Was she entirely wrapped up in it?--Or was it just a sort

of hitting at the air?--Did it exhaust her to no purpose, or was it

really worth something when it was done?----

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

Katie coloured a little.--"I liked 'Barrage' awfully at the time," she

confessed, "but--," and she cheered up again, "--I _hate_ it now."

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

Here Dorothy answered for Katie.--"I think she rather liked the fame

part of it," she said slowly.

"Does she paint now?"

"Very little, I think, Lady Tasker."

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

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

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

into quite a lot."

"They seem to spend a great deal."

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

"Oh, yes, they're rather proud of that. They don't spend their money

selfishly. It goes to the Cause, you see."

"What Cause?" Lady Tasker asked abruptly.

This was Katie's cue....

She ceased, and Lady Tasker muttered something. It sounded rather like

"H'm! Too much money and not enough to do!" but neither of her

companions was near enough to be quite sure.

And thereupon the questions stopped.

But a surmise of their drift had begun to dawn glimmeringly upon

Dorothy. She ceased to hear the exposition of Imperialism's real needs

into which Katie presently launched, and fell into a meditation. And of

that meditation this was about the length and breadth:--

Until the law should allow a man to have more wives than one (if then),

of course only one woman in the world could be perfectly happy--the

woman who had Stan. That conviction came first, and last, and ran

throughout her meditation. And of what Dorothy might compassionately

have called secondary happinesses she had hitherto not thought very

much. She had merely thanked her stars that she had not married a man

like Cosimo, had once or twice rather resented Amory's well-meant but

left-handed kindnesses, and that had been the extent of her concern

about the Pratt household. But first Katie, and now her aunt, had set

her wondering hard enough about that household now.

What, she asked herself, had the Pratts married on? What discoveries had

they made in one another, what resources found within themselves? Apart

from their talks and books and meetings and "interests" and that full

pack of their theories, what was their marriage? Thrown alone together

for an hour, did they fret? Did their yawning cease when the bell rang

and a caller was admitted? Did even the same succession of callers

become stale and a bore, so that strangers had to be sought to provide a

stimulus? And did they call these and half a hundred other forms of

mutual boredom by the rather resounding names that blabbing Katie had

repeated to her--"wider interests," "the broad outlook," "the breaking

down of personal insularity," and the rest?

And for once Dorothy dropped her excusatory attitude towards her friend.

She dropped it so completely that by and by she found herself wondering

whether Amory would have married Cosimo had he been a poor man. She was

aware that, stated in that way, it sounded hideous; nor did she quite

mean that perhaps Amory had married Cosimo simply and solely because he

had _not_ been poor; no doubt Amory had assumed other things to be equal

that as a matter of fact had unfortunately proved to be not equal at

all; but she _did_ doubt now whether Amory had not missed that

something, that something made of so many things, that caused her own

heart suddenly to gush out to the absent Stan. The thought frightened

her a little. Had Amory married and had babies--all, as it were, beside

the mark?...

Dorothy did not know.

But an obscurer hint still had seemed to lie behind her aunt's

persistent questions. "Was Amory ill?" she herself had asked in alarm

when that unexpected word "doctor" had been quietly dropped; and "Ill? I

didn't say she was ill; there's no illness about it," Lady Tasker had

replied. No illness about what? Apparently about something Lady Tasker

saw, or thought she saw, in Amory.... An old lady whose years had

earned her the right to sit comfortably in her chair had gone so far as

to descend the stairs and go out into the street to have a closer look

at a young one: why? Why ask "Is she a Channel swimmer?" and "Is her

painting a mere hitting of the air?" Why this insistence on some

satisfaction for labour, as if without that satisfaction the labour

wreaked on the labourer some sort of revenge? What sort of a revenge?

And why on Amory?

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

She did not know that Lady Tasker could not have answered them. She did

not know that the whole world is waiting for precisely those replies.

She did not know that the data of a great experiment have not yet begun

to be gathered together. She did not know that, while she and Stan would

never see the results of that experiment, little Noel and the other

Bits, and Corin and Bonniebell might. She only knew that her aunt was a

wise and experienced woman, with an appetite for life and all belonging

to it that only grew the stronger as her remaining years drew in, and

that apparently Lady Tasker found something to question, if not to fear.

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

of what she does?"

They were oddly precise questions....

Much less odd was that homely summing-up of Lady Tasker's: "Too much

money, and not enough to do."...

Dorothy had often thought that herself.

V

"HOUSE FULL"

The gate in the privet hedge of The Witan had had little rest all the

afternoon. It was a Sunday, the one following that on which Lady Tasker

had issued bareheaded from her door, had crossed the road, and had

caused Amory to start half out of her skin by suddenly speaking to her.

The Wyrons had come in the morning; they had been expressly asked to

lunch; but it was known that Dickie Lemesurier was coming in afterwards

to discuss an advertisement, and if Dickie came the chances were that

Mr. Brimby would not be very long after her. As a matter of fact Dickie

and Mr. Brimby had encountered one another outside and had arrived

together at a little after three, bringing three young men, friends of

Mr. Brimby's still at Oxford, with them. These young men wore Norfolk

jackets, gold-pinned polo-collars, black brogues and turned-up trousers;

and apparently they had hesitated to take Cosimo at his word about

"spreading themselves about anywhere," for they stood shoulder to

shoulder in the studio, and when one turned to look at a picture or

other object on the wall, all did so. Then, not many minutes later, Mr.

Wilkinson had entered, in his double-breasted blue reefer, bringing with

him a stunted, bowlegged man who did not carry, but looked as if he

ought to have carried, a miner's lamp; and by half-past four, of The

Witan's habitues, only Mr. Prang and Edgar Strong were lacking. But

Edgar was coming. It had been found impossible, or at any rate Amory had

decided that it was impossible, to discuss the question of Dickie's

advertisement without him. But he was very late.

When Britomart Belchamber came in simultaneously with the tea and the

twins at a little before five, the studio was full. The asbestos log

purred softly, and Mr. Brimby's three Oxford friends, glad perhaps of

something to do, walked here and there, each of them with a plate of

bread and butter in either hand, not realizing that at The Witan the

beautiful Chinese rule of politeness was always observed--"When the

stranger is in your melon-patch, be a little inattentive." Had Dickie

Lemesurier and Laura Wyron eaten half the white and brown that was

presented to them, they must have been seriously unwell. It was Cosimo,

grey-collared and with a claret-coloured velvet waistcoat showing under

his slackly-buttoned tweed jacket, who gave the young men the friendly

hint, "Everybody helps themselves here, my dear fellows." Then the

Norfolk jackets came together again, and presently their owners turned

with one accord to examine the hock and the top-side that hung on the

wall over the sofa.

Not so much a blending of voices as an incessant racket of emphatic and

independent pronouncements filled the studio. Walter Wyron had fastened

upon the man who looked as if he ought to have carried a miner's lamp,

and his forefinger was wagging like a gauge-needle as he explained that

one of his Lectures had been misrepresented, and that he had _never_

taken up the position that a kind of Saturnalia should be definitely

state-established. He admitted, nevertheless, that the question of such

an establishment ought to be considered, like any other question, on its

merits, and that after that the argument should be followed

whithersoever it led.--Dickie Lemesurier, excessively animated, and with

the whites showing dancingly all round her pupils, was talking Cesanne

and Van Gogh to Laura, and declaring that something was "quite the"

something or other.--Mr. Brimby's hand was fondling Bonniebell's head

while he deprecated the high degree of precision of the modern rifle to

Mr. Wilkinson. "If only it wasn't so ruthlessly logical!" he was

sighing. "If only it was subject to the slight organic accident, to

those beautiful adaptations of give-and-take that make judgment harsh,

and teach us that we ought never to condemn!"--Corin, drawn by the word

"gun," was demanding to be told whether that was the gun that had been

taken away from him.--And Britomart Belchamber, indifferent alike to the

glances of the Oxford men and their trepidation in her presence, stood

like a caryatid under a wall-bracket with an ivy-green replica of

Bastianini's Dante upon it.

"No, no, not for a moment, my dear sir!" Walter shouted to the man who

looked like (and was) a miner. "That is to ignore the context. I admit I

used the less-known Pompeian friezes as a rough illustration of what I

meant--but I did _not_ suggest that Waring & Gillow's should put them on

the market! What I did say was that we moderns must work out our

damnation on the same lines that the ancients did. Read your Nietzsche,

my good fellow, and see what _he_ says about the practical

serviceability of Excess! I contend that a kind of general _oubliance_,

say for three weeks in the year, to which everybody without exception

would have to conform (so that we shouldn't have the superior person

bringing things up against us afterwards)----"

"Ah doan't see how ye could mak' fowk----," the miner began, in an

accent that for a moment seemed to blast a hole clean through the

racket. But the hole closed up again.

"Ah, at present you don't," Walter cried. "The spade-work isn't done

yet. We need more education. But every new and great idea----"

But here an outburst from Mr. Wilkinson to Mr. Brimby drowned Walter's

voice. Mr. Wilkinson raised his clenched fist, but only for emphasis,

and not in order to strike Mr. Brimby.

"Stuff and nonsense! There you go, Brimby, trimming again! We've heard

all that: 'A great deal to be said on both sides,'"--(Mr. Wilkinson all

but mimicked Mr. Brimby). "There isn't--not if you're going to do

anything! There's only one side. You've got to shoot or be shot. I'm a

shooter. Give me five hundred real men and plenty of barricade

stuff----"

"Oh, oh, oh, my dear friend!" Mr. Brimby protested. "Why, if your

principles were universally applied----"

"Who said anything about applying 'em universally? Hang your universal

applications! I'm talking about the Industrial Revolution. I'll tell you

what's the matter with you, Brimby: you don't like the sight of blood.

I'm not blaming you. Some men are like that. But it's in every page of

your writing. You've got a bloodless style. I don't mind admitting that

I liked some of your earlier work, while there still seemed a chance of

your making up your mind some day----"

But here Mr. Wilkinson in his turn was drowned, this time by an

incredulous laugh from Cosimo, who had joined Dickie and Laura.

"Van Gogh says _that_?" his voice mounted high. "Really? You're sure he

wasn't joking? Ha ha ha ha!... But it's rather pathetic really. One

would think Amory'd never painted 'Barrage,' nor the 'White Slave,' nor

that--," he pointed to the unfinished canvas of "The Triumph of Humane

Government" on the wall. "By Jove, I must make an Appendix of that!...

Here--Walter!--Have you told him, Dickie?--Walter!----"

But Walter was now at deadly grips with the man who had forgotten his

miner's lamp.

"I tell you I never used Saturnalia in that sense at all!----"

But the miner stood his ground.

"Happen ye didn't, but I'll ask ye one question: Have ye ever been to

Blackpool of a August Bank Holiday?----"

"My good man, you talk as if I proposed to do something with the stroke

of a pen, to-morrow, before the world's ready for it----"

"Have ye ever been to Blackpool of a Bank Holiday?"

"What on earth has Blackpool to do with it?----"

"Well, we'll say Owdham Wakes week at t' Isle o' Man--Douglas----"

"Pooh! You've got hold of the wrong idea altogether! Do you know what

Saturnalia _means_?----"

"I know there's a man on Douglas Head, at twelve o'clock i' t' day, wi'

t' sun shining, going round wi' a stick an' prodding 'em up an' telling

'em to break away----"

"I shouldn't have thought anybody could have been so _incredibly_ slow

to grasp an idea--!" cried Walter, his hands aloft.

"Have--you--ever--been--to--Blackpool--when--t' Wakes--is on?"

Then Cosimo called again--

"Walter! I say! Come here!... Dickie's just told me something that makes

the '_Life and Work_' _rather_ necessary, I think!----"

And Walter turned his back on the miner and joined his wife and Dickie

and Cosimo.

Anybody who wasn't anybody might have supposed the noise to be a series

of wrangles, but of course it wasn't so at all really. Issues far too

weighty hung in the balance. It is all very well for people whose

mental range is limited by _matinees_ and Brooklands and the newest car

to talk in pleasant and unimpassioned voices, but what was going to

happen to Art unless Cosimo hurled himself and the '_Life and Work_'

against this heretic Van Gogh, and what was to become of England if

Walter allowed a pig-headed man who could say nothing but "Blackpool

Pier, Blackpool Pier," to shout him down, and what would happen to

Civilization if Mr. Wilkinson did not, figuratively speaking, take hold

of the dilettante Brimby and shake him as a terrier shakes a rat? No:

there would be time enough for empty politenesses when the battle was

won.

In the meantime, a mere nobody might have thought they were merely

excessively rude to one another.

Then began fresh combinations and permutations of the talk. Mr.

Wilkinson, whose square-cut pilot jacket somehow added to the truculence

of his appearance, planted himself firmly for conversation before Dickie

Lemesurier; the miner, whose head at a little distance appeared bald,

but on a closer view was seen to be covered with football-cropped and

plush-like bristles, nudged Cosimo's hip, to attract his attention: and

Walter Wyron sprang forward with a welcoming "Hallo, Raffinger!" as the

door opened and two young McGrath students were added to the crowd. For

a minute no one voice preponderated in the racket; it was--

"Hallo, Raff! Thought you weren't coming!"

"I want a gun!" (This from Corin.)

"My dear Corin" (this from Bonniebell), "Miss Belchamber's told you over

and over again guns are anti-social----"

"Anybody smoking? Well, I know they don't mind----"

"But, Miss Lemesurier, where a speaker reaches only a hundred or two,

the written word----"

"Ah, but the personal, magnetic thrill----" (This was in Dickie's rather

deep voice.)

Then Walter, to somebody else, not the miner--

"I should have thought _anybody_ would have known that when I said

Saturnalia I meant----"

"Where's Amory?"

"Sweet, in those little tunics!----"

"A subsidy from the State, of course----"

Then the miner, but not to Walter--

"I' t' daylight, proddin' 'em up wi' a stick--to say nowt o' Port

Skillian bathin'-place of a fine Sunda'----"

"That hoary old lie, that Socialism means sharing----"

"Oh, at any artists' colourman's----"

"No; it will probably be published privately----"

"Van Gogh----"

"Oh, you're _entirely_ wrong!----"

And then, in the middle of a sudden and mysterious lull, the man who had

come without his safety-lamp was heard addressing Cosimo again:--

"Well, what about t' new paaper? Owt settled yet?... Nay, ye needn't

look; Wilkinson telled me; it's all right; nowt 'at's said 'll go beyond

these fower walls. Wilkinson's gotten a rare list together, names an'

right, I can tell ye! But t' way I look at it is this----"

Cosimo looked blank.

"But, my dear--I'm afraid I didn't catch your name----," he said.

"Crabtree--Eli Crabtree. This is t' point I want to mak', mister. Ye

see, I can't put things grammar; but there's lots about 'at can; so I

thowt we'd get a sec'etary, an' I'd sit an' smoke whol' my thowts come,

and then I'd tell him t' tale. Ye see, ye want to go slap into t' middle

o' t' lives o' t' people. Now comin' up o' t' tram-top I bethowt me of a

champion series: '_Back to Back Houses I've Known_.' I'll bet a crahn

that wi' somb'dy to put it grammar for me----"

"My dear Crabtree, I'm afraid, don't you know, that there's been some

mistake----"

And at this point, everybody becoming conscious at the same moment that

they were listening, a fresh wave of sound flowed over the assembly; and

presently Mr. Wilkinson was seen to take Cosimo aside and to be making

the gestures of a man who is explaining some ridiculous mistake.

Then once more:--

"I beg your pardon--I thought you were Mrs. Pratt----"

"Put grammar--straight to fowk's hearts--sinks and slopstones an' all t'

lot----"

"No, Balliol----"

"But listen, Pratt, the way the mistake arose----"

"Ellen Key, of course----"

"The 'Times!'--As if the 'Times' wasn't _always_ wrong!----"

"There's a raucousness about her paint----"

"The Caxton Hall, at eight--do come!----"

"But we authors are so afraid of sentiment nowadays!----"

"Bombay, I think--or else Hyderabad----"

"Oh, he talks like a fool!----"

"Raff! Come here and recite '_The King is Duller_'----"

"But Love _is_ Law!----"

"Suspend our judgments until we've heard the other side----"

"Only water--but they couldn't break her spirit--she was out again in

three days----"

And again there came an unexpected lull.

This time it was broken by, perhaps not the loudest, but certainly the

most travelling voice yet--the voice of the caryatid beneath the bracket

with the bust upon it. Miss Belchamber was dressed in a sleeveless

surcoat chess-boarded with large black and white squares; the skirt

beneath it was of dark blue linen; and there were beards of leather on

her large brown brogues. One of the young Oxford men, greatly daring,

had approached her and asked her a question. She turned slowly; she gave

the young man the equal-soul-to-equal-soul look; and then the apparatus

of perfect voice-production was set in motion. Easily and powerfully the

air came from her magnificent chest, up the splendid six-inch main of

her throat, rang upon the hard anterior portion of her palate, and was

cut, as it were, to its proper length and shaped into perfect

enunciation by her red tongue and beautiful white teeth.

"What?" she said.

The undergraduate fell a little back.

"Only--I only asked if you'd been to many theatres lately."

"Not any."

"Oh!... I--I suppose you know everybody here?"

"Yes."

"Do point them out to me!"

"That's Walter Wyron. That's Mrs. Wyron. That's Miss Lemesurier. I don't

know who the little man is. That's Mr. Wilkinson. My name's Belchamber."

"Oh--I say--I mean, thanks awfully. We've heard of them all, of course,"

the unhappy young man faltered.

"What?"

"All distinguished names, I mean."

"Of course."

"Rather!----"

And again everybody listened, became conscious of the fact, and broke

out anew.

But where all this time was Amory?

Demonstrably, exactly where she ought to have been--in her bedroom. She

was too dispirited to be accessible to the rational talk of others; she

did not feel that she had energy enough to be a source of illumination

herself; surely, then, merely because a lot of people, invited and

uninvited, chose to come to The Witan, she need not put herself out to

go and look after them. They might call themselves her "guests" if they

liked; Amory didn't care what form of words they employed; the

underlying reality remained--that she was intensely bored, and too

fundamentally polite to bore others by going down. Perhaps she would go

down when Edgar came. She had left word that she was to be informed of

his arrival. But he was very late.

Nevertheless, she knew that he would come. Lately she had grown a little

more perspicacious about that. It had dawned on her that, everything

else apart, she had some sort of hold on him through the "Novum," and

there had been a trace of command in her summons that he was pretty sure

not to disregard. No doubt he would try to get away again almost

directly, but she had arranged about that. She intended to keep him to

supper. Also the Wyrons. And Britomart Belchamber too would be there.

And of course Cosimo.

She moved restlessly between her narrow bed and the window, now

polishing her nails, now glancing at her hair in the glass. From the

window she could see over the privet hedge and down the road, but there

was no sign of Edgar yet. She looked at herself again in the glass,

without favour, and then sat down on the edge of her bed again.

Her meeting with Lady Tasker the week before had greatly unsettled her.

Very stupidly, she had quite forgotten that Lady Tasker lived in

Cromwell Gardens. She would have thought nothing at all of the meeting

had Lady Tasker had a hat on her head and gloves on her hands; she would

have set that down as an ordinary street-encounter; but Dorothy's aunt

had evidently seen her from some window, perhaps not for the first time,

and, if not for the first, very likely for the third or fourth or fifth.

In a word, Amory felt that she had been caught.

And, as she had been thinking of Edgar Strong at the moment when the old

lady's voice had startled her so, it was not beyond the bounds of

possibility that her start had seemed remarkable. Lady Tasker was so

very sharp.

At all events, even Edgar was not going to have everything all his own

way.

For she was sure now that she had the hold of the "Novum" on him, and

that that hold was not altogether the single-minded devotion to his duty

he had made it out to be on that day when she had last gone to the

office. Not that she thought too unkindly of him on that account. The

labourer, even in the field of Imperial Politics, is still worthy of his

hire, and poor Edgar, like the rest of the world, had to make the best

compromise he could between what he would have liked to do and what

circumstances actually permitted him to do. Of course he would be

anxious to keep his job. If he didn't keep it a worse man would get it,

and India would be no better off, but probably worse. She sighed that

all work should be subject to compromises of this kind. Edgar, in a

word, was no longer a hero to her, but, by his very weakness, something

a little nearer and dearer still.

But for all that she had not hesitated to use her "pull" in order to get

him to The Witan that day.

She saw him as she advanced to the glass again. He was nearly a quarter

of a mile down the road. She found a little secret delight in watching

his approach when he was unconscious of her watching. His figure was

still very small, and she indulged herself with a fancy, closing her

eyes for a moment in order to do so. Suppose he had been, not

approaching, but going away--then when she opened her eyes again he

would look smaller still.... She opened them, and experienced a little

thrill at seeing him nearer and plainer. She could distinguish the red

spot of his tie. Now he turned his head to look at some people who

passed. Now he stepped off the pavement to make room for somebody. Now

he was on the pavement again--now hidden by a tree--now once more

disclosed, and quite near----

She straightened herself, gave a last look into the glass, and

descended.

She met him in the hall. They shook hands, but did not speak. There was

no need for him to ask whether anybody had come; the babble of noise

could be plainly heard through the closed studio door. They walked along

the passage, descended the two steps into the garden, and reached the

studio.

Strong opened the door, and--

"_Ha, ha, ha!_ I shall tell them that at the Nursery!----"

"No--just living together----"

"Corin!--Corin!----"

"The eighteenth, at the Little Theatre----"

Then the voice of Mr. Crabtree vociferating to his friend Mr.

Wilkinson.

"I thowt ye telled me 'at Pratt knew all about it----"

"One day in the High, just opposite Queens----"

"Not know the '_Internationale_'!--Debout, les damnes de la terre----!"

Next, sonorously, Miss Belchamber.

"Yes, I dance 'Rufty Tufty' and 'Catching of Quails'----"

"But my good chap, don't you see that the Referendum----"

"Oh, throw it down anywhere--on the hearth----"

"Really, the bosh he talks----"

"The Minority Report----"

"Corin!----"

"Plato----"

"Prang----"

Then, before anybody had had time to notice the entry of Amory and Edgar

Strong, an extraordinary, not to say a regrettable thing occurred.

Mr. Eli Crabtree had spent the last twenty minutes in going deliberately

from one person to another, often thrusting himself unceremoniously

between two people already engaged in conversation, and in subjecting

them to questionings that had become less and less reticent the further

he had passed round the room. And it appeared that this collier who had

forgotten his Davy had yet another lamp with him--the lamp of his own

narrow intelligence and inalienable, if worthless, experience. By the

help of that darkness within him that he mistook for light, he

had added inference to inference and conclusion to conclusion.

Cosimo--Wilkinson--Walter Wyron--Brimby--the Balliol men--the young

students of the McGrath--he had missed not one of them; but none knew

the portent of his tour of the studio until he had reached the hearth

again. Then he was seen to be standing with his hands behind him, as if

calmly summing them up.

"By--Gow!" he said half to himself, his football-cropped head moving

this way and that and his eyes blinking rapidly as he sought somebody to

address.

Then, all in a moment, he ceased his attempt to single out one more than

another, and was addressing them in the lump, for all the world as if he

had been allowed the entree of the house, not as a high and memorable

privilege and in order that he might learn something he had never

suspected before, but as if, finding himself there, _he_ might as well

tell _them_ a thing or two while he was about it. And though his

astonishment at what he had seen might well have rendered him dumb, his

good temper did not for an instant forsake him.

"By--Gow!" he said again. "But this _is_ a menagerie, an' reight!"

The instantaneous dead silence and turn of every head might have

disconcerted a prophet, but they made not the slightest impression on

Mr. Crabtree.

"It _is_ a menagerie!" he continued superbly. "Ding, if onnybody'd told

me I wadn't ha' believed 'em!--Let's see how monny of ye there is----"

And calmly he began to count them.

"Fowerteen--fifteen--sixteen countin' them two 'at's just come in an'

leavin' out t' barns. Sixteen of ye, grown men an' women, an' not a

single one of ye knows ye're born! Nay, it's cappin'!--Him wi' his

Salmagundys or whativver he calls 'em, an' niver been on Douglas

Head!--T' maister here, 'at doesn't know what a back-to-back is, I'se

warrant!--An' yon chap--," Mr. Crabtree's forefinger was straight as a

pistol between Mr. Brimby's eyes, "--'at says there's a deeal to be said

o' both sides an'll be having his pocket'ankercher out in a minute!--An'

these young men thro' t' Collidge!--Nay, if it doesn't beat all! I ne'er

thowt to live to see t' day!----"

And he made a T-t-t-ing with his tongue on his palate, while his sharp

little eyes looked on them all with amusement and pity.

Out of the silence of consternation that had fallen on the studio Walter

Wyron was the first to come. He nudged Cosimo, as if to warn him not to

spoil everything, and then, with his hands deep in the pockets of his

knickers and an anticipatory relish on his face, said "I say, old

chap--make us a speech, won't you?"

But if Walter thought to take a rise out of Mr. Crabtree he was quite,

quite mistaken. With good-natured truculence the collier turned on him

also.

"A speech?" he said. "Well, I wasn't at t' back o' t' door when t'

speechifyin'-powers was given out; it wadn't be t' first time I'd made a

speech, nut by a mugfull. Mony's t' time they've put Eeali Crabtree o'

t' table i' t' 'Arabian Horse' at Aberford an' called on him for a

speech. I'd sooner mak' a speech nor have a quart o' ale teamed down my

collar, an' that's all t' choice there is when t' lads begins to get

lively!... I don't suppose onny o' ye's ever been i' t' 'Arabian Horse'?

Ye owt to come, of a oppenin'-time of a Sunda' morning. Ye'd see a bit

o' life. Happen ye might ha' to get at t' back o' t' door--if they

started slinging pints about, that is--but it's all love, and ye've got

to do summat wi' it when ye can't sup onny more. I should like to have

him 'at talks about t' Paraphernalia there; it 'ld oppen his eyes a bit!

An' him 'at wor reciting about t' King an' all--t' little bastard i' t'

corner there----"

At this word, used in so familiar and cheerful a sense, Laura Wyron

stiffened and turned her back; but Walter still hoped for his "rise."

"Go on," he said; "give us some more, old chap."

The child of nature needed no urging.

"Ay, as much as ivver ye like," he said accommodatingly. "But I wish I'd

browt my voice jewjewbes. Ay, I willn't be t' only one 'at isn't

talking! T' rest on ye talks--ding, it's like a lamb's tail, waggin' all

day and nowt done at neet--so we mud as weel all be friendly-like! Talk!

Ay, let's have a talk! Here ye all are, all wi' your fine voices an'

fine clothes, an' ivvery one o' ye wi' t' conveeanience i' t' house, I

don't doubt, an' I'll bet a gallon there isn't one o' ye's ivver done a

hands-turn i' your lives! Nay, ye're waur nor my Aunt Kate! Come down to

Aberford an' I'll show ye summat! Come--it's a invitaation--I'll see it

doesn't cost ye nowt! T' lads is all working, all but t' youngest, an'

we're nooan wi'out! No, we're nooan wi'out at our house! I'll interdewce

ye to t' missis, an' ye can help her to peel t' potates, an' ye can go

down i' t' cage if ye like! Come, an' I'll kill a pig, just for love.

Come of a Sunda' dinner-time, when t' beef's hot. Wilkinson knows what I

mean; he knows t' life; he reckons not to when he's wi' his fine

friends, but Wilkie's had to lie i' bed while his shirt was being mended

afore to-day!... Nay, the hengments!" He broke into a jovial laugh. "Ye

know nowt about it, an' ye nivver will! These 'ere young pistills fro'

t' Collidge--what are they maalakin' at? It doesn't tak' five thousand

pound a year to learn a lad not to write a mucky word on a wall!" (Here

Dickie Lemesurier turned her back on the speaker).... "They want to get

back to their Collidges. T' gap's ower wide. They'll get lost o' t'

road. Same as him 'at wrote t' book about t' pop-shop----," again Mr.

Crabtree's forefinger was levelled between Mr. Brimby's eyes. "Brimbyin'

about, an' they don't know a black puddin' from a Penny Duck! Has he

ivver had to creep up again t' chimley-wall to keep himself warm i' bed,

or to pull t' kitchen blinds down while he washed himself of a Saturda'

afternooin? But ye can all come an' see if ye like. We've had to tew for

it, but we're nooan wi'out now. An' I'll show ye a bit o' sport too. We

all have we'r whippets, an' we can clock t' pigeons in, an'

see what sort of a bat these young maisters can mak' at

knurr-an'-spell--eighteen-and-a-half score my youngest lad does! Ay, we

enjoy we'rsens! An' there's quoits an' all. Eighteen yards is my

distance if onnybody wants to laake for a beast's-heart supper!

Come--ding it, t' lot o' ye come! We can sleep fower o' ye, wed 'uns,

heads to tails, if ye don't mind all being i' t' little cham'er----"

But by this time Mr. Crabtree was having to struggle to keep his

audience. Mr. Brimby too had turned away, and Mr. Wilkinson, and even

Miss Belchamber had spoken several words of her own accord to the young

Balliol boy. The tide of sound began to rise again, so that once more

Mr. Crabtree's voice was only one among many. Then Walter started

forward with an "Ah, Amory!" and "Hallo, Strong!" Mr. Raffinger of the

McGrath exclaimed....

"Perseverance Row, fower doors from t' 'Arabian Horse'----," Mr.

Crabtree bawled hospitably through the hubbub....

"Oh, you _must_ see it--the New Greek Society, on the seventeenth----"

"But I say--what _is_ 'Catching of Quails,' Miss Belchamber----?"

"Mr. Wilkinson brought him, I think----"

"Fellow of All Souls, wasn't he?----"

Then that genial Aberford man again:

"I tell ye t' gap's ower wide, young man--ye'll get lost o' t' road----"

"No, the children take her name----"

"Got a match, old fellow?----"

"Rot, my dear chap!----"

"But what _is_ condonation if that isn't?----"

"Oh, the ordinary brainless Army type----"

"I read it in the German----"

"They gained time by paying in pennies----"

"In Pere Lachaise----"

"Well, we can talk about it at suppertime----"

"But with cheaper Divorce----"

"One an' all--whenivver ye like--Eeali Crabtree, Perseverance Row,

Aberford, fower doors from t' 'Arabian Horse'----"

"Nietzsche----"

"Finot----"

"Weininger----"

"Wadham----"

"Aberford----"

"Rufty Tufty----"

VI

THE SOUL STORM

"I--say!----"

"_Wasn't_ he priceless!----"

"You got his address, Cosimo? I _must_ cultivate him!----"

"Pure delight!----"

"You had come in, hadn't you, Amory?----"

"He _shot_ Brimby!----"

"To all intents and purposes--with his finger----"

"Can you do his accent, Walter?----"

"I will in a week, or perish----"

"His bath in the kitchen!----"

"T' wed 'uns can sleep i' t' little chamber----"

"No--he didn't sound the 'b' in 'chamber,' and there were at least three

'a's' in it----"

"'T' little chaaam'er'----"

"No, you haven't quite got it----"

"Give me a little time----"

The party had dwindled to six--Cosimo and Amory, the Wyrons, and

Britomart Belchamber and Mr. Strong. They were still in the studio, but

they were only waiting for the supper-gong to ring. Cigarette ends were

thickly strewn about the asbestos log. The bandying of short ecstatic

phrases had been between Walter and his wife, with Cosimo a little less

rapturously intervening; the subject of them was, of course, Mr.

Crabtree. To his general harangue Mr. Crabtree had added, before

leaving, more particular words of advice, making a second tour of the

studio for the purpose; and he had distinguished Walter above all the

rest by inviting him, not merely to the house four doors from the

"Arabian Horse," but to spend a warm afternoon with him on Douglas Head

also.

But the Wyrons had these raptures pretty much to themselves. Perhaps

Cosimo was thinking of Mr. Wilkinson, of some new paper of which he had

never heard, and of the assumption that he, apparently, was to find the

money for it. Miss Belchamber was rarely rapturous, so that her silence

was nothing out of the way. Edgar Strong could be rapturous when he

chose, but he evidently didn't choose now. And Amory had far too much on

her mind.

Her original idea in asking the Wyrons to stay to supper had been that

they, as acknowledged experts in the subject that perplexed her, would

be the proper people to keep the ring while the four persons immediately

concerned talked the whole situation quietly and reasonably and

thoroughly out. But she was rather inclined now to think again before

submitting her case to them. It would be so much better, if the case

must be submitted to anybody, that Cosimo should do it. Then she herself

would be able to shape her course in the light of anything that might

turn up. Nothing, she had to admit, had turned up yet, and Amory was not

sure that in that very fact there did not lie a sufficient cause for

resentment. Had Cosimo pleaded a passion for Britomart Belchamber he

would have had Passion's excuse. Lacking Passion, it could only be

concluded that he was bored with Amory herself.

And that amounted to an insult....

The booming of the gong, however, cut short her brooding. They passed to

the dining-room. Britomart and Walter sat with their backs to the tall

black dresser with the willow pattern stretching up almost to the

ceiling; Laura and Edgar took the German chairs that had their backs to

the copper-hooded fireplace; and Cosimo and Amory occupied either end of

the highly-polished clothless table. This absence of cloth, by the way,

gave a church-like appearance to the flames of the candles in the

spidery brass sticks that had each of them a ring at the top to lift it

up by; the preponderance of black oak and dull black frames on the walls

further added to the effect of gloom; and the putting down of the little

green pipkins of soup and the moving of the green-handled knives and

round-bowled spoons made little knockings from time to time.

Again Walter and Laura, with not too much help from Cosimo, sustained

the weight of the conversation; and it was not until Amory asked a

question in a tone from which rapture was markedly absent that they

sponged, as it were, the priceless memory of Mr. Crabtree from their

minds. Amory's question had been about Walter's new Lecture, still in

course of preparation, on "_Post-Dated Passion_"; and Walter cursorily

ran over its heads for the general benefit.

"I admit I got the idea from Balzac," he said between mouthfuls

(whenever they came to The Witan the Wyrons supped almost as heartily as

did Edgar Strong himself). "'Comment l'amour revient aux vieillards,'

you know. But of course that hasn't any earthly interest for anybody.

'Aux vieilles' it ought to be. Then--well, then you've simply got 'em."

"Why not 'vieillards?'" Amory asked, not very genially.

"I say, Cosimo, I'll have another cutlet if I may.--Why not

'vieillards?' Quite obvious. Men aren't the interest. I've tried men,

and you can ask Laura how the bookings went.--But 'vieilles' and I've

got 'em. Really, Amory, you're getting quite dull if you don't see that!

I'll explain. You see, I've already got the younger ones, like Brit

here--shove the claret along, Brit--but the others, of forty or fifty

say, well, they've all had their affairs--or if they haven't better

still--and it's merely a question of touching the right chord. Regrets,

time they've lost, fatal words 'Too late' and so on--it's simply _made_

for me! Touch the chord and they do the rest for themselves. They

probably won't hear half of it for sobbing.--Of course I shall probably

have to modify my style a bit--not quite so--what shall I say----"

"Jaunty," his wife suggested, "--in the best sense, I mean----"

"Hm--that's not quite the word--but never mind. It's a great field.

Certainly women, not men, are the draw."

Amory made a rather petulant objection, and the argument lasted some

minutes. In the end Walter triumphantly gained his first point, that

women and not men were the "draw" in the box-office sense, and also his

second one, namely, that not the Britomarts, but the older women, who

would put their hearts into his hands and pay him for exploiting their

helplessness and ache and tenderness and regret, and never suspect that

they were being practised upon, were "simply made for him...."

"What do you think of my title?" he asked.

And the title was discussed.

Amory was beginning to find Walter just a little grasping. She wished

that after all she had not asked the Wyrons to stay to supper. Formerly

she had thought that marriage-escapade of theirs big and heroic (that

too, by the way, had been in the Latin Quarter, and probably on seven

francs a day); but now she was less sure about that. Quite apart from

the inapplicability of the Wyrons' experience to her own case, she now

wondered whether theirs had in fact been experience at all. Now that she

came to think of it, they had taken no risks. They _had_ been married,

and in the last event could always turn round on their critics and

silence them with that fact....

Nor was she quite so ready now to lay even the souls of Britomart and

Cosimo on the dissecting-table for the sake of seeing Walter exercise

his professional skill upon them. This was not so much that she wanted

to spare Cosimo and Britomart as that she did not want to give Walter a

gratification. She was inclined to think that if Walter couldn't be a

little more careful about contradicting her he might find his

advertisement omitted from the "Novum" one week, as Katie Deedes' had

been omitted, and where would he be then? The way in which he had just

said that she was "getting quite dull" had been next door to a

rudeness....

But she had to admit that she felt dull. Edgar, who sat next to her, did

not speak, and Cosimo, who faced her, was apparently still brooding on

people who planned the spending of his money without thinking it

necessary to consult him first. She was tired of the whole of the

circumstances of her life. Paris on seven francs a day could hardly be

much worse. Nor, if she could but shake off her lethargy, need that sum

be fixed as low as seven francs. For she had lately remembered an

arrangement made between herself and Cosimo before she had ever

consented to become engaged to him. It was a long time since either of

them had spoken of this arrangement--so long that Cosimo would have been

almost within his rights had he maintained that the circumstances had so

altered as to make it no longer binding; but there it was, or had been,

and it had never been expressly revoked. It was the arrangement by which

they had set apart a fund to insure themselves, either or both of them,

against any evils that might arise from incompatibility. Amory had no

idea how the matter now stood. She didn't suppose for a moment that

Cosimo had actually set a sum by each week or month; but, hard and fast

or loose and fluid, he must have made, or be still ready to make, some

provision. It was an inherent part of the contract that a solemn

affirmation, with reason shown (spiritual, not mere legal reason) by

either one or the other, should constitute a sufficient claim on this

fund.

Therefore Paris need not necessarily be the worst penury.

But, for all her new inclination to leave the Wyrons out of it, she

still thought it a prudent idea to carry the fight (not that there would

be any fight--that was only a low way of expressing the high

reasonableness that always prevailed at The Witan) to Cosimo and

Britomart, rather than to have it centre about Edgar and herself.

Walter's eyes were mainly on the box-office nowadays. The original

virtue of that fine protest of theirs was--there was no use in denying

it--gone. He spread his Lectures frankly now as a net. Well, that was

only one net more among the many nets of which she was becoming

conscious. Edgar too, poor boy, was compelled to regard even the "Novum"

as in some manner a net. Mr. Brimby, Amory more than guessed, had nets

to spread. Mr. Wilkinson, in his own way, was out for a catch; and

Dickie fished at the Suffrage Shop; and Katie had fished at the Eden;

and the only one who didn't fish was Mr. Prang, who wrote his articles

about India for nothing, just to be practising his English.

And all these nets were spread for somebody's money--a good deal of it

Cosimo's. It had been the same, though perhaps not quite so bad, at

Ludlow. That experiment on the country-side had been alarmingly costly.

And all this did not include the dozens and dozens of nets of narrower

mesh. The "Novum" might gulp down money by the hundred, but the lesser

things were hardly less formidable in the sum of them--subscriptions,

contributions, gifts, loans, investments, shares in the Eden and the

Book Shop, mortgages, second mortgages, subsidies, sums to "tide over,"

backings, guarantees, losses cut, more good money sent to bring back the

bad, fresh means of spending devised by somebody or other almost every

day. It had begun to weary even Amory. The people who came to The Witan

became rather curiously better-dressed the longer their visiting

continued; but the things they professed to hold dear appeared very

little further advanced. All that first brightness and promise had gone.

Amory's interest had gone. She wanted to escape from it all, and to go

away with Edgar appeared once more to be the readiest way out.

But, though she might now wish to keep Walter Wyron out of it all, that

did not necessarily mean that Walter would be kept out. This

_ex-officio_ specialist on the (preferably female) heart, this

professional rectifier of unfortunate marriages, had not done a number

of years' platform-work without having discovered the peculiar beauties

of the _argumentum ad hominem_, and it was one of his practices to

enforce his arguments with "Take the case of Brit here"--or "Let's get

down to the concrete: suppose Amory--" And these descents to the

particular had always a curiously accusatory effect. Walter,

interrupting Amory's meditation, broke into one of them now.

"But my dear chap,"--this was to Cosimo,"--I can't imagine what's come

over all of you to-night! First Amory, now you! You're usually quicker

than this! Let's take a case.--Brit here----"

One sterno-mastoid majestically turned the caryatid's head. Again Miss

Belchamber's grand thorax worked as if somebody had put a penny into the

slot.

"What?" she said.

"Quiet, Brit; I'm only using you as an illustration.--Suppose Brit here

was to develop a passion for somebody--Cosimo, say; yes, Cosimo'll do

capitally; awfully good instance of the cant that's commonly talked

about 'treachery' and 'under his own roof' and all the rest of it--as if

a roof wasn't a roof and it hadn't got to be under somebody's--unless

they went out on the Heath!--Well, suppose it was to happen to Cosimo

and Brit; what then? We're civilized, I hope. We're a little above the

animals, I venture to think. Amory wouldn't fly at Brit's eyes, and

Brit's father wouldn't come round with a razor to cut Cosimo's throat.

In fact----"

"My fa-ther al-ways uses a safety-razor," said Miss Belchamber with a

reminiscent air.

"Don't interrupt, Brit.--I was going to say that the world's got past

all that. Nor Brit wouldn't fly at Amory, nor Cosimo kick the old josser

out of the house--though we should be much more ready to condone that

part of it if they did--if it was only to get quits with the past a

bit----"

"My fa-ther's forty-five," Miss Belchamber announced, as the interesting

result of an interesting mental process of computation. "Next June," she

added.

"More interruptions from the back of the hall.--In fact, I'm not sure

that _wouldn't_ be entirely defensible--Brit going for Amory and Cosimo

kicking the old dodderer out, I mean. That's the justification of the

_crime passionel_. It's the Will to Live. And by Live I mean Love. It's

the old saying, that kissing lips have no conscience. Or Jove laughs at

lovers' oaths. Quite right. It's the New Greek Spirit. But for all that

we're modern and rational about these things. If Strong here wanted to

take Laura from me I should simply say, 'All you've got to do, my dear

chap, is to table your reasons, and if they're stronger than mine you

take her.' See?"

At that Edgar Strong, like Britomart, looked up. He spoke for the first

time.--"What's that you're saying?" he asked.

"I don't suppose you'd want her, but suppose you did...."

Mr. Strong dropped his eyes to his plate again.--"Ah, yes," he said.

"Ellen Key's got something about that." And he relapsed into silence

again.

It sounded to Amory idiotic. Walter was so evidently "trying" it on them

in order to see how it would go down with an audience afterwards. She

wouldn't have scratched Britomart's eyes out for Cosimo,--but she

coloured a little, and bit her lip, at the thought that somebody might

want to come between herself and Edgar.... But perhaps that was what

Walter meant--real affinities, as distinct from the ordinary vapid

assumptions about marriages being made in Heaven. If so, she agreed with

him--not that she was much fonder of him on that account. She wished he

would keep his personalities for Cosimo and Britomart, and leave herself

and Edgar alone.--Walter went on.

"And then, when you've got your New Greek Certificate, so to speak, it's

plainly the duty of everybody else, not to put obstacles in your way and

to threaten you with razors and cutting off supplies, but to sink their

personal feelings and to do everything they can to help you. And without

snivelling either. I shouldn't snivel, I hope, if anybody took Laura,

and she wouldn't if anybody took me----"

Here Laura interposed softly.--"I don't want any one to take you, dear,"

she said.

Walter turned sharply.

"Eh?... Now you've put me off my argument.... What was I saying?...

Haven't I told you you must _never_ do that, Laura?... No, it's quite

gone.... You see ..."

Laura murmured that she was very sorry....

"No, it's gone," said Walter, almost cheerfully, as if not sorry that

for once the worth of what he had been about to say should be measured

by the sense of loss. "So since Laura wishes it I'll shut up."

He passed up his plate for a second helping of trifle.

By this time Amory was perhaps rather glad that she had had the Wyrons

after all. That about people not putting obstacles in the way was quite

neat. "A plain duty," he had said. She hoped Cosimo'd heard that, and

would remember it when she raised the subject of the fund. And so far

was she herself from putting obstacles in _his_ way that, although she

could have sent Britomart Belchamber packing with her wages at any

moment, she had not done so. That, as Walter had said, would only have

been another way of flying at her eyes.... Besides, Amory had been far

too deeply occupied to formulate definitely her charges against Cosimo

and Britomart. For all she knew it might have gone much, much further

than she had thought. Sometimes, when Amory took breakfast in her own

room, she did not see Cosimo until the evening, and Britomart too had

heaps of time on her hands when she had finished with Corin and

Bonniebell. Cosimo must not tell her that the "_Life and Work_" occupied

him during every minute of his time....

Then, presently, she was sorry again that the Wyrons had been asked, for

Walter had suddenly remembered the thread of his discourse, and, in

continuing it, had been almost rude to Laura. She wondered whether he

would have turned with a half angry "Why, what's the matter?" had Laura

cried. Perhaps it was really a good thing the Wyrons hadn't any

children, for this kind of thing would certainly have been a bad example

for them. She herself was never rude to Cosimo before Corin and

Bonniebell. She was always markedly polite. There were excuses to be

made for Passion, but none for rudeness.

By this time Edgar Strong had finished his last piece of cheese and was

wiping his lips with his napkin. Then he looked at his watch, and for

the second time during the course of the meal spoke.

"Look here, Cosimo, I've got to be off presently, and we haven't

settled about those advertisements yet. And there's something else I

want to say to you too. Could we hurry coffee up? Where do we have it?

In the studio, I suppose? Or do the others go into the studio and you

and Walter and I have ours here?"

"We might as well all go into the studio," said Cosimo, rising; and they

left the sombre room and sought the studio, all except Miss Belchamber,

who went upstairs.

The sight of the innumerable cigarette-ends about the asbestos log

reminded Walter of Mr. Crabtree again; and for a minute or two--that is

to say during the time that Walter, taking her aside, told her of the

quiet but penetrating side-light Mr. Crabtree had innocently shed on Mr.

Wilkinson's scheme for some new paper or other that Cosimo was to

finance--Amory was once more glad that the Wyrons had come. But the next

moment, as Walter loitered away and Laura came and sat softly down

beside her, she was sorry again. Laura was gently crying. That struck

Amory as stupid. As if she hadn't enough great troubles of her own,

without burdening herself with the Wyrons' trivial ones!

So, as she had nothing really helpful to say to Laura, she left her, and

sat down on the footstool she had occupied on the day when Edgar Strong

had said that he liked the casts and had asked her whether she had read

something or other--she forgot what.

Edgar was talking in low tones to Cosimo, and Amory thought she heard

the name of Mr. Prang. Then Cosimo, who always thought more Imperially

with a map before him, got out the large atlas, and the two of them bent

over it together. Walter joined them, and, after an interlude that

appeared to be about the Lectures' advertisement, Walter strolled away

again and joined Laura. Amory heard an "Eh?" and a moment later the word

"touchy," and Walter went off to the window with his hands in the

pockets of his knickers, whistling. Edgar took not the least notice of

Amory's eyes intently fixed upon him. He continued to talk to Cosimo.

Walter, who was examining a Japanese print, called over his shoulder,

"This a new one, Amory? What is it--Utamaro?" Then he walked up to where

Laura sat again. He was speaking in an undertone to her: "Rubbish ...

take on like that ... better clear off then"; and a moment later, seeing

Edgar Strong buttoning up his coat, he called out, "Wait a minute,

Strong--we're going down too--get your hat, Laura----"

Five minutes later Cosimo Pratt and his wife were alone.

It was the first time they had been so for nearly a fortnight. Indeed,

for weeks the departure of the last visitor had been the signal for

their own good-night, Cosimo going his way, she hers. There had never

been anything even remotely approaching a "scene" to account for this.

It had merely happened so.

Therefore, finding himself alone with his wife in the studio again,

Cosimo yawned and stretched his arms above his head.

"Ah-h-h!... You going to bed?"

As he would hardly be likely to take himself off before she had answered

his question, Amory did not reply at once. She sat down on the footstool

and stretched her hands out to the asbestos log. Then, after a minute,

and without looking up, she broke one of their tacitly accepted rules by

asking a direct question.

"What were you and Edgar Strong discussing?" she asked.

He yawned again.--"Oh, the Bookshop advertisement--and advertisements

generally. It begins to look as if we should have to be less exclusive

about these things. Strong tells me that it's unheard-of for a paper to

refuse any advertisement it can get."

"I mean when you got out the atlas."

"Oh--India, of course. The Indian policy. Strong isn't altogether

satisfied about Prang. He seems to think he might get us into trouble."

"How? Why?" Amory said, her eyes reflectively on the purring gas-jets.

"Can't make out. Some fancy of his. The policy hasn't changed, and Prang

hasn't changed. I wonder whether Wilkinson's right when he says Strong's

put his hand to the plough but is now ... _ah!_ That reminds

me!--Were you here when that preposterous fellow--what's his

name--Crabtree--rather let the cat out of the bag about Wilkinson?"

"You mean about another paper? No. But Walter said something about it."

"Yes, by Jove! He seems to have it all cut-and-dried! Crabtree seems to

think I knew all about it. Of course I did know that Wilkinson had a

scheme, but I'd no idea he was jumping ahead at that rate. I don't want

two papers. One's getting rather serious."

Still without looking at her husband, Amory said, "How, serious?"

"Why, the expense. I'm not sure that we didn't take the wrong line about

the advertisements. Anyway, something will have to be done. Thirty

pounds a week is getting too stiff. I'm seriously thinking of selling

out from the Eden and the Bookshop. Do you know that with one thing and

another we're down more than three thousand pounds this year?"

Amory was surprised; but she realized instinctively that that was not

the moment to show her surprise. Were she to show it, the moment would

not be opportune for the raising of the subject of the fund, and she

wanted to raise that subject. And she wanted to raise it in connexion

with Cosimo and Britomart Belchamber. She continued to gaze at the log.

The servants, she thought, might have taken the opportunity of dinner to

sweep up the litter of cigarette-ends that surrounded it; and then she

had a momentary fancy. It was, that the domestic relations that existed

between herself and Cosimo were a thing that, like that mechanical

substitute for a more generous fire, could be turned off and on as it

were by the mere touching of a tap. She wondered what made her think of

that....

Cosimo had taken out his penknife and was scraping his nails, moodily

running over items of disbursement as he scraped; and then the silence

fell between them again.

It was Amory who broke it, and in doing so she turned her head for the

first time. She gave her husband a look that meant that, though he might

talk about expenses, she also had a subject.

"Walter was excessively stupid to-night," she said abruptly.

He said "Oh?" and went on scraping.

"At the best he's never a model of tact, but I thought he rather

overstepped the mark at dinner."

Again he said "Oh?" and added, "What about?"

"His manners. His ideas are all right, I suppose, but I'm getting rather

tired of his platform-tricks."

"His habit of illustration and so on?"

"And his want of tact generally. In fact I'm not sure it isn't more than

that. In a strange house it would have been simply a _faux pas_, but he

knows us well enough, and the arrangement between us. He might at any

rate wait till he's called in."

Cosimo started on another nail.--"What arrangement?" he said.

Again Amory gave him that look that might have told him that, though he

might think that only a lot of money had gone, she knew that something

far more vital had gone with it.

"Do you mean that you didn't hear what he was saying about you and

Britomart Belchamber?"

"Yes, I heard that, of course. Of course I heard it."

"Well?"

"Well!"

And this time their eyes met in a long look....

Cosimo had only himself to thank for what happened to him then. After

all, you cannot watch a superb piece of female mechanism playing

"Catching of Quails," and openly admire the way in which it can shut up

like a clasp-knife and fold itself upon itself like a multiple lever,

and pretend to be half in love with it lest sharp eyes should see that

you are actually half in love with it, and take it for walks, and

discuss Walter's Lectures with it, and tell it frequently how different

things might have been had you been ten years younger, and warn it to be

a good girl because of dangerous young men, and stroke its hair, and

tell it what beautiful eyes it has, and kiss its hand from time to time,

and walk with your arm protectingly about its waist, and so on and so

forth, day after day--you cannot, after all, do these things and be

entirely unflurried when your ever-so-slightly tiresome wife reminds you

that, be it only by way of illustration, a young expert in such matters

has coupled your name with that of the passive object of your

philanderings. Nor can you reasonably be surprised when that wife gives

you a long look, that doesn't reproach you for anything except for your

stupidity or hypocrisy if you pretend not to understand, and then

resumes her meditative gazing into a patent asbestos fire. Appearances

_are_ for the moment against you. You can_not_ help for one moment

seeing it as it must have appeared all the time to somebody else. Of

course you know that you are in the right really, and the other person

entirely wrong, and that with a little reasonableness on that other

person's part you could make this perfectly clear; but you _are_ rather

trapped, you know it, and the state of mind in which you find yourself

is called by people who aren't anybody in particular "flurry."

Which is perhaps rather a long way of saying that Cosimo was suddenly

and entirely disconcerted.

And his flurry included a certain crossness and impatience with Amory.

She was--could be--only pretending. She knew perfectly well that there

was nothing really. The least exercise of her imagination must have told

her that to press Britomart Belchamber's hand, for example, was the most

innocent of creature-comforts. Why, he had pressed it with Amory herself

there; he had said, jokingly, and Amory had heard him, that it was a

desirable hand to press, and he had pressed it. And so with Britomart's

dancing of "Rufty Tufty." Amory, who, like Cosimo, had had an artist's

training, ought to be the last person to deny that any eye so trained

did not see a hundred beauties where eyes uneducated saw one only. And

that of course meant chaste beauties. Such admiration was an exercise in

analysis, not in amorousness.... No, it was far more likely that Amory

was getting at him. She was smiling, a melancholy and indifferent little

smile, at the asbestos log. She had no right to smile like that. It made

him feel beastly. It made him so that he didn't know what to say....

But she continued to smile, and when Cosimo did at last speak he hated

himself for stammering.

"But--but--but--oh, come, Amory, this _is_ absurd! You're--you're tired!

Me and Britomart! Oh, c-c-come!----"

And then it occurred to him that this was a ridiculous answer, and that

the proper answer to have made would have been simply to laugh. He did

laugh.

"Ha, ha, ha! By Jove, for the moment you almost took me in! You really

did get a rise out of me that time! Congratulations.--And I admit it is

rather cool of Walter to pounce on the first name that occurs to him and

make use of it in that way. Deuced cool when you come to think of it. It

seems to me----"

But again that quite calm and unreproaching look silenced him. There was

a loftiness and serenity about it that reminded him of the Amory of four

or five years before. And she spoke almost with a note of wonder at him

in her tone.

"My dear Cosimo," she said very patiently, "what is the matter? You look

at me as if I had accused you of something. Nothing was further from my

thoughts. I suppose, when you examine it, it's a matter for

congratulation, not accusation at all. As Walter said, I don't want to

fly at anybody's eyes. We foresaw this, and provided for it, you know."

At this cool taking for granted of a preposterous thing Cosimo's stammer

became a splutter.--"But--but--but--," he broke out: but Amory held up

her hand.

"I raise no objection. I've no right to. What earthly right have I, when

I concurred before ever we were married?"

"Concurred!... My dear girl, concurred in what? Really this is the most

ridiculous situation I was ever in!"

Amory raised her brows.--"Oh?... I don't see anything ridiculous about

it. It received my sanction when Britomart stopped in the house, and I

haven't changed my mind. As I say, we foresaw it, and provided for it."

"'It!'" Cosimo could only pipe--one little note, high and thin as that

of a piccolo. Amory continued.

"I'm not asking a single question about it. I'm not even curious. I

didn't become your property when we married, and you're not mine. Our

souls are our own, both of us. I think we were very wise to foresee it

quite at the beginning.--And don't think I'm jealous. Perfectly truly, I

wish you every happiness. Britomart's a very pretty girl, and nobody can

say she's always making a display of her cleverness, like some of them.

I respect your privacy, and want you to do the best you can with your

life."

The piccolo note changed to that of a bassoon.--"Amory--listen to me."

"No. I'd _very_ much rather not hear anything about it. As Walter said,

Life _is_ Love, and I only mentioned this at all to-night because there

is one quite small practical detail that doesn't seem to me entirely

satisfactory."

She understood Cosimo to ask what that was.

"This: You ought to be fair to her. I know you'll forgive my mentioning

anything so vulgar, but it is--about money. She can't be expected to

think of such things herself just now,"--there were whole honeymoons in

the reasonable little nod Amory gave,"--and so _I_ mention it. It's my

place to do so. For us all just to dip our hands into a common purse

doesn't seem to me very satisfactory. She's rights too that I shouldn't

dream of disputing. And don't think I'm assuming more than there

actually is. I only mean that I don't see why, in certain events, you

shouldn't, et cetera; that's all I mean. You see?... But I admit that

for everybody's sake I should like things put on a proper footing

without loss of time."

Cosimo had begun to wander up and down among the saddlebag chairs. His

slender fingers rested aimlessly on the backs of them from time to time.

Amory thought that he was about to try the remaining notes within the

compass of his voice, but instead he suddenly straightened himself. He

appeared to have come to a resolution. He strode towards the door.

"Where are you going?" Amory asked.

"I'm going to fetch Britomart," he replied shortly. "This is

preposterous."

But again he hesitated, as perhaps Amory surmised he might. His offer,

if it meant anything, ought to have meant that his conscience was so

clear that Amory might catechize Britomart to her heart's content; but

there _had_ been those hair-strokings and hand-pattings, and--and--and

Britomart, as Amory had said, was "not always making a display of her

cleverness." She might, indeed, let fall something even more

disconcerting than the rest--

Cosimo was trying a bluff--

In a word, between fetching Britomart and not fetching her, Amory had

her husband by the short hairs.

She mused.--"Just a moment," she said.

And then she rose from the footstool, put one hand on the edge of the

mantelpiece, and with the other drew up her skirt an inch or two and

stretched out her slipper to the log.

"It really isn't necessary to fetch Britomart," she said after a moment,

looking up. "Fetch her if you prefer it, of course, but first I want to

say something else--something quite different."

That it was something quite different seemed to be a deep relief to

Cosimo. He returned from the door again.

"What's that?" he said.

"It's different," Amory said slowly, "but related. Let me think a moment

how to put it.... You were speaking a few minutes ago of selling out

from the Eden and the Suffrage Shop. If I understand you, things aren't

going altogether well."

"They aren't," said Cosimo, almost grimly.

"And then," Amory continued, "there's Mr. Prang. Neither you nor Strong

seem very satisfied about him."

"It's Strong who isn't satisfied. I've no complaints to make about

Prang."

"Well, I've been thinking about that too, and I've had an idea. I'm not

sure that after all Strong mayn't be right. I admit Prang states a case

as well as it could be stated; the question is whether it's quite the

case we _want_ stated. His case is ours to a large extent, but perhaps

not altogether. And as matters stand we're in his hands about India,

simply because he knows more about it than we do. You see what I mean?"

"Not quite," said Cosimo.

"No? Well, let me tell you what I've been thinking...."

Those people who are nobodys, and have not had the enormous advantage of

being taken by the hand by the somebodys, are under a misconception

about daring and original ideas. The ideas seem original and daring to

them because the processes behind them are hidden. The inferior mind

does not realize of itself that every sudden and miraculous blooming is

already an old story to somebody.

But Cosimo occupied a sort of intermediary position between the sources

of inspiration and the flat levels of popular understanding. Remember,

he was in certain ways one of the public; but at the same time he was

the author of the "_Life and Work_." He took his Amory, so to speak,

nascent. Therefore, when she gave utterance to a splendour, he credited

himself with just that measure of participation in it that causes us

humbler ones, when we see the airman's spiral, to fancy our own hands

upon the controls, or, when we read a great book, to sun ourselves in

the flattering delusion that we do not merely read, but, in some

mysterious sense, participate in the writing of it also.

And so the words which Amory spoke now--words which would have caused

you or me to give a gasp of admiration--affected him less

extraordinarily.

"Why don't you go to India and see for yourself?" she said.

Nevertheless, Cosimo was not altogether unaffected. Even to his

accustomed ear it was rather stupendous, and, if he hadn't been again

uneasily wondering whether he dared risk having Britomart down when

Amory should return to the former subject again, might have been more

stupendous still. He resumed his walk along the saddlebag chairs, and,

when at last he did speak, did not mar a high occasion with too much

vulgar demonstrativeness.

"That's an idea," he said simply.

"You see, Mr. Chamberlain went to South Africa," Amory replied, as

simply.

"Yes," said Cosimo thoughtfully.... "It's certainly an idea."

"And you know how people have been getting at the 'Novum' lately, and

even suggesting that Prang was merely a pen-name for Wilkinson himself."

"Yes, yes."

"Well, if you went, for six months, say, or even three, nobody'd be able

to say after that that you didn't know all about it."

"No," Cosimo replied.

"The stupid people go. Why not the people with eyes and minds?"

"Exactly," said Cosimo, resuming his walk.

Then, as if he had been a mere you or a simple me, the beauty of the

idea did begin to work a little in him. He walked for a space longer,

and then, turning, said almost with joy, "I say, Amory--would you

_like_ to go?"

But Amory did not look up from the slippered foot she had again begun to

warm.--"Oh, I shouldn't go," she said absently.

"You mean me to go by myself?" said Cosimo, the joy vanishing again.

Then it was that Amory returned to the temporarily relinquished subject

again.

"Well ...," she said, with a return of the quiet and wan but brave

smile, "... I've nothing to do with that. I shouldn't set detectives to

watch you. I was speaking for the moment purely from the point of view

of the 'Novum's' policy.--But I see what you mean."

But Cosimo didn't mean that at all. He interposed eagerly, anxiously.

"You _do_ jump to conclusions!"--he began.

"My _dear_ Cosimo," she put up her hand, "I'm doing nothing of the kind.

As I said, the other isn't my affair. Oh, I do wish you'd believe that I

was perfectly calm about it! As Emerson said, soul ought to speak to

soul from the top of Olympus or something, and, except that I want you

to be happy, it's a matter of indifference to me who you go with. Do try

to see that, Cosimo. Let's try to behave like civilized beings. We

agreed long ago that sex was only a matter of accident. Don't let's make

it so hatefully pivotal. After all, what practical difference would it

make?"

But this was too much for Cosimo. He must have Britomart down and take

his chance, that was all. At the worst, he did not see how Amory could

be so unreasonable that a hand-pat or a hair-stroke or two could not be

put before her in the proper light.

Unfortunately, the trouble was, not that she made a fuss, but that she

made so little fuss....

Again he moved towards the door.

But Miss Belchamber herself, as it happened, saved him the trouble of

fetching her. Their hands were at the door at the same moment, his

inside, hers outside. She entered. She was wrapped in the large

black-and-gold Chinese dressing-gown Cosimo had given her for a

Christmas present, and there were pantofles on her bare feet, and her

hair hung down her back in two enormous yellow plaits. She was eating a

large piece of cake.

"I've left the hot water tap running," she announced. "I hadn't gone to

bed. Does anybody else want a bath? I like lots of hot baths. I came

down for a piece of cake."

She crossed to the sofa, crammed the last piece of cake into her mouth,

dusted the crumbs from her fingers, tucked the dressing-gown close under

her, and with her fingers began softly to perform the motions of

_petrissage_ upon herself in the region of the _erectors spinae_. As she

did so she again spoke, placidly and syllabically.

"I made a mistake," she said. "Father's forty-six. Next June. And I

shall go to Walter's new Lecture. He's in the guard's van. I mean the

van-guard. And Prince Ead-mond's is in the van-guard too. Especially

Miss Miles. She says the Saturn-alia is a time of great

li-cen-tiousness and dancing. Are they going to start it soon?"

Cosimo was nervous again. He cleared his throat.--"Britomart--," he

began; but Miss Belchamber went on.

"I hope they are. Walter says it would be a very good thing. I shall

dance 'Rufty Tufty.' And 'The Black Nag.' I love 'The Black Nag.' That's

why I'm having a hot bath. Hot baths open the pores, or sweat-ducts.

Then you close them again with a cold sponge. I always close them again

with a cold sponge."

Cosimo cleared his throat again and had another try.--"Listen,

Britomart--we were talking about you----"

Miss Belchamber looked complacently at her crossed Parian-marble ankles.

Then she raised one of them, and her fingers explored the common tendon

of the soleus and gastrocnemius.

"The soleus," she said, "acts when the knee-joint is flexed. In 'Rufty

Tufty' it acts. Both of them, of course. And the manage-ment of the

breath is very im-portant. It would be a very good thing if every-body

opened their windows and took a hun-dred deep breaths before the

Saturn-alia begins. I shall, and I shall make Corin and Bonniebell. Or

won't they be able to go if it's very late? If it's after their bedtime

I could bring them away early and then go back. I am so looking forward

to it."

Cosimo made a third attempt.--"Britomart--", he said gravely.

"What?" said Miss Belchamber.

"I want to tell you about a rather important discussion we've been

having----"

"Then shall I go and turn the tap off? The water will run cold. Then the

sweat-ducts would have to be closed before they are opened, and that's

wrong."

But this time Amory had moved towards the door. Cosimo, and not she, had

wanted Miss Belchamber down, and now that he had got her he might amuse

her. She thought he looked extremely foolish, but that was his look-out;

she was going to bed. It seemed an entirely satisfactory moment in which

to do so. She had managed better than she had hoped. The question of the

fund had been satisfactorily raised, and it was obvious that the "Novum"

would gain by having somebody on the spot, somebody perhaps less biassed

than Mr. Prang, to advise upon its Indian policy. At the door she turned

her nasturtium-coloured head.

"You might think over what I've been saying," she said. "We can talk of

it again in a day or two. Especially my second suggestion, that about

the 'Novum.' That seems to me very well worth considering. Good night."

And she passed out, leaving Cosimo plucking his lip irresolutely, and

Miss Britomart Belchamber deeply interested in the common tendon of the

other soleus and gastrocnemius.

Part III

I

LITMUS

It was on an afternoon in May, and the window of Dorothy's flat

overlooking the pond was wide open. Ruffles of wind chased one another

from moment to moment across the water, and the swans, guarding their

cygnets, policed the farther bank, where dogs ran barking. The two elder

Bits played in the narrow strip of garden below; again the frieze of the

room was a soft net of rippling light; and the brightness of the sun--or

so Ruth Mossop declared--had put the fire out.

Ruth was alone in the flat. As she passed between the pond-room and the

kitchen, re-lighting the fire, "sweeping in," and preparing tea, she

sang cheerfully to herself "_A few more years shall roll, a few more

sorrows come_." Ruth considered that the sorrows would probably come by

means of the youngest Bit. He ought (she said) to have been a little

girl. Then, in after years, he might have been a bit of comfort to his

mother. Boys, in Ruth's experience, were rarely that.

As she put the cakes for tea into the oven of the stove there came a

milk-call from below. Ruth leaned out of the lift-window, and there

ensued a conversation with the white-jacketed milk-boy.

"Saw your guv'nor last night," the boy grinned.

"Where's that cream I ordered, and that quart of nursery milk? You can't

mind your business for thinking of picture palaces."

"Keep your 'air on; coming up now.--I say, they put 'is 'ead under a

steam-'ammer. I said it was a dummy, but Gwen said it wasn't. _Was_ it

'im?"

"You mind your own interference, young man, and leave others to mind

theirs; you ought to have something better to do with your threepences

than collecting cigarette cards and taking girls to the pictures."

"It was in '_Bullseye Bill: A Drarmer of Love an' 'Ate_'--'Scoundrel,

'ow dare you speak those words to a pure wife an' mother on the very

threshold of the 'Ouse of----'"

"That's enough, young man--we don't want language Taken in Vain

here--and you can tell 'em at your place we're leaving soon."

"But _was_ that 'im in the long whiskers at the end, when the powder

magazine blew up?"

But Ruth, taking her cans, shut down the window and returned to the

kitchen.

"'Then O, my Lord, prepare----'" she crooned as she gave a peep into the

oven and then clanged the door to again, "'My soul for that blest

day----'"

They were leaving soon. Already the sub-letting of the flat was in an

agent's hands, and soon Stan would be braving the perils of his career

no longer. Dorothy had unfolded her idea to her aunt, and Lady Tasker

had raised no objection, provided Dorothy could raise the money by

bringing Aunt Eliza into line.

"It's as good as Maypoles and Village Players anyway," she had said,

"and I'm getting too old to run about as I have done.--By the way, is it

true that Cosimo Pratt's gone to India?"

Dorothy had replied that it was true.

"Hm! What for? To dance round another Maypole?"

"I don't know, auntie. I've seen very little of them."

"Has she gone?"

"No."

"No more babies yet, I suppose?"

"No."

"Well ... you'd better see your Aunt Eliza. She's got all the money

that's left.--But I don't see how you're going to get any very much out

of Tony and Tim."

"Oh, I'll see they don't impose on me as they've been imposing on

you!... So I may move that billiard-table, and alter the gun-room?"

"Yes, if you pay for it."

"Thanks--you are a dear!..."

By what arts Dorothy had contrived to lay Aunt Eliza under contribution

doesn't matter very much here. Among themselves the Lennards and Taskers

might quarrel, but they presented an unbroken front to the world--and

Dorothy, for Aunt Eliza's special benefit, managed to make the world in

some degree a party to her project. That is to say, that a paragraph

had appeared in certain newspapers, announcing that an experiment of

considerable interest, etc., the expenses of which were already

guaranteed, and so forth, was about to be tried in the County of

Shropshire, where "The Brear," the residence of the late Sir Noel

Tasker, was already in course of alteration. And so on, in Dorothy's

opinion, neither too much nor too little for her design.... It had been

a public committance of the family, and it had worked the oracle with

Aunt Eliza. Rather than have a public squabble about it, she had come in

with her thousand, the work was now well advanced, and the venerable

sinner who had recited the poems printed by Cosimo Pratt's Village Press

was in charge of the job. Dorothy, hurriedly weaning the youngest Bit,

had run down to Ludlow for the express purpose of announcing to him that

it was a job, and not an aesthetic jollification.

Moreover, at that time she had half a hundred other matters to attend

to; for Stan, escaping from powder-magazines as the last inch of fuse

sputtered, and fervently hoping that the man had made no mistake about

the length of stroke of the Nasmyth hammer under which he put his

devoted head, could give her little help. Besides her own approaching

_demenagement_, she had much of the care of that of her aunt. As Stan's

earnings were barely sufficient for the current expenses of the

household, she still had to turn to odds and ends of her old

advertisement work. She had--Quis custodiet?--the nurse to look after,

and the tradesmen, and letters, and callers, and Ruth. In short, a

simple inversion of her aunt's dictum about the Pratts--"Too much money

and not enough to do"--would have fitted Dorothy's case to a nicety.

Therefore, as another burden more or less would make little difference

to one already so burdened, Dorothy had added still further to her

cares. Ever since that day when Lady Tasker had come bareheaded out of

her house and had spoken to Amory Pratt outside the Victoria and Albert

Museum, Dorothy had had her sometime friend constantly on her mind. She

had spoken of her to her aunt, who had again shown herself deplorably

illiberal and incisive.

"I don't pretend to understand the modern young woman," she had remarked

carelessly. "Half of 'em seem to upset their bodies with too much study,

and the other half to play hockey till they're little better than fools.

I suppose it's all right, and that somebody knows what they're about....

I often wonder what they'd have done, though, if it hadn't been for

Sappho and Madame Curie.... By the way," she had gone irrelevantly on

without a break, "does she _want_ any more children besides those

twins?"...

Nevertheless, Dorothy had had Amory so much on her mind that twice since

Cosimo's departure for India she had been up to The Witan in search of

her. After all, if anybody was to blame for anything it was Cosimo. But

on neither occasion had Amory been at home. Dorothy had left messages,

to which she had received no reply; and so she had gone a third

time--had gone, as it happened, on that very afternoon when Ruth sang

"A few more years shall roll" as she made the hot cakes for tea. This

time she had persuaded Katie Deedes to come with her--for Katie had left

the Eden, was out of a job, and for the time being had afternoon hours

to spare.

But again they had failed to find Amory, and Dorothy and Katie took a

turn round the Heath before returning to the flat for tea. As they

walked along the hawthorn hedge that runs towards Parliament Hill and

South Hill Park they talked. Kites were flying on the Hill; the Highgate

Woods and the white spire showed like a pale pastel in the Spring

sunshine; and from the prows of a score of prams growing babies leaned

out like the figureheads of ships.

"That's where Billie was born," said Dorothy, nodding towards the backs

of the houses that make the loop of South Hill Park.

Katie only said "Oh?" She too had caught the uneasiness about Amory. And

what Katie thought was very soon communicated.

"You see, Dot," she broke suddenly out, "you've no idea of what a--what

a funny lot they are really.... No, I haven't told you--I haven't told

you _half_! It's everything they do. Why, the nurse practised for months

and months at a school where they washed a celluloid baby--I'm not

joking--she did--a life-sized one--they did it in class, and dressed it,

and put it to sleep--as if _that_ would be any good at all with a real

one!... And really--I'm not prudish, as you know, Dot--but the way they

used to sit about, in a dressing-gown or a nightgown or anything--I

don't mean when there was a _big_ crowd there, of course, but just a few

of them--Walter, and Mr. Brimby, and Edgar Strong--and all of them going

quite red in the face with puremindedness! At any rate, I never did

think _that_ was quite the thing!"

She spoke with great satisfaction of the point of the New Law she had

not broken. It seemed to make up for those she had.

"And those casts and paintings and things about--it's all right being an

artist, of course, but if I ever got married, _I_ shouldn't like casts

and paintings of me about for everybody to see like that!----"

"Oh, just look at that hawthorn!" Dorothy interrupted.

"Yes, lovely.--And Walter talking about Dionysus, and what Lycurgus

thought would be a very good way of preventing jealousy, and a lot more

about Greeks and Romans and Patagonians and Esquimaux! Do you know, Dot,

I don't believe they know anything at all about it--not _really_ know, I

mean! I don't see how they can! One man might know a little bit about a

part of it, and another man a little bit about another part--and that

would be rather a lot, seeing how long ago it all is--but Walter knows

it _all_! At any rate nobody can contradict him. But what does it matter

to us to-day, Dorothy? What _does_ it matter?... Of course I don't mean

they're wicked. But--but--in some ways I can't help thinking it would be

better to _be_ wicked as long as you didn't say anything about it----!"

"Oh, I don't think they're wicked," said Dorothy placidly. But the 'vert

went eagerly on.

"That's just it!" she expounded. "Walter says 'wicked's' only a relative

term. If you face the truth boldly, all the time, lots of things

wouldn't be wicked at all, he says. And I believe he's really awfully

devoted to Laura--in his way--though he does talk about these things

with Britomart Belchamber sitting there in her nightgown. But it's

always the _same bit_ of truth they face boldly. They never think of

going in for astronomy--or crystal-what-is-it--crystallography--or

something chilly--and face that boldly----"

Dorothy laughed.--"You absurd girl!"

"--but no. It's always whether people wear clothes because they're

modest or whether they're modest because they wear clothes, or something

like that.--And Walter begins it--and then Laura chimes in, and then

Cosimo, and then Amory, and then Dickie--and when they've said it all on

Monday they say it again on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and every day--and I

don't know what they've decided even yet----"

"Well, here we are," Dorothy said as she reached her own door. "Let's

have some tea.... Mr. Miller hasn't been in yet, has he, Ruth?"

"No, m'm."

"Well, we'll have tea now, and you can make some fresh when he comes.

And keep some cakes hot."

Mr. Miller's visit that afternoon had to do with a care so trifling that

Dorothy merely took it in her stride. She had not found--she knew that

she would never find--the "Idee" that Mr. Miller wanted; but if no

Idees except real ones were ever called Idees we should be in a very bad

way in this world. She knew that there is always a middling chance that

if you state a pseudo-Idee solemnly enough, and trick it out with

circumstance enough, and set people talking enough about it, it will

prove just as serviceable as the genuine article; and she was equally

familiar, as we have seen, with that beautiful and compensating Law by

which quick and original minds are refused money when they are producing

of their best but overwhelmed with it when their brains have become as

dry as baked sponges. She had given Mr. Miller quite good Idees in the

past; she had no objection to being paid over again for them now; and if

they really had been new ones they would have been of no use to Mr.

Miller for at least ten years to come. That is why the art of

advertisement is so comparatively advanced. Any other art would have

taken twenty years.

Therefore, as she remembered the exceeding flimsiness of the one poor

Idee she had, she had resolved that Mr. Miller's eyes should be diverted

as much as possible from the central lack, and kept to the bright

irrelevancies with which she would adorn it. The Idee was that of the

Litmus Layette ... but here we may as well skip a few of Katie's artless

betrayals of her former friends, and come to the moment when Mr. Miller,

with his Edward the Sixth shoulders, appeared, bowed, was introduced to

Katie, bowed again, sat down, and was regaled with hot cakes and

conversation. He had risen and bowed again, by the way, when Dorothy,

for certain reasons of policy, had mentioned Katie's relationship to the

great Sir Joseph Deedes, and Katie had told of a stand-up fight she had

had with her uncle's Marshal about admittance to his lordship's private

room.

"Well, now, that's something I've learned to-day," Mr. Miller

magnanimously admitted, sitting down again. "So your English Judges have

Marshals! I was under the impression that that was a military title,

like Marshal Macmann and Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. Well now.... And

how might Judge Deedes' Marshal be dressed, Miss Deedes?"

"Not 'Judge' Deedes," said Katie smiling. "That's a County Court Judge."

And she explained. Mr. Miller opened his eyes wide.

"Is that so-o-o? Well now, if that isn't interesting! That's noos. He's

a Honourable with a 'u' in it, and a Sir, and you call him his Lordship,

and he's Mister Justice Deedes! Ain't that English!... Now let me see if

I'm on the track of it. 'Your Worship'--that's a Magistrate. 'Your

Honour'--that's the other sort of Judge. And 'My Lord'--that's Miss

Deedes' uncle. And an English Judge has a Marshal.... Do you recollect

our Marshals, Mrs. Stan?----"

Building (as it now appeared) even better than he knew, Mr. Miller had,

in the past, granted the rank of Marshal to Messrs. Hallowell and

Smiths' shopwalkers.

Dorothy's reason for thus flagrantly introducing Sir Joseph's name was

this:--

Katie had left the Eden, and she herself was presently off to Ludlow.

Thus there was the possible reversion of a job of sorts going a-begging.

Katie might as well have it as anybody else. Dorothy had strictly

enjoined upon her impulsive friend that on no account was she to

contradict or disclaim anything she, Dorothy, might choose to say on her

behalf to Mr. Miller; and she intended that the credit, such as it was,

of the last Idee she even intended to propose to Mr. Miller--the Litmus

Layette--should be Katie's start. Once started she would have to look

after herself.

So when Mr. Miller passed from the subject of Hallowell and Smiths'

Marshals to that of his long-hoped-for Idee, Dorothy was ready for him.

Avoiding the weak spot, she enlarged on the tradition--very different

from a mere superstition--that, in Layettes, blue stood always for a boy

and pink for a girl.

"You see," she said, "this is England when all's said, and we're

_fright_fully conservative. Don't condemn it just because it wouldn't go

in New York.... You've heard of the Willyhams, of course?" she broke off

suddenly to ask.

"I cann't say I have, Mrs. Stan. But I'm sitting here. Tell me. They're

a Fam'ly, I presoom?"

"Yes. Upshire's their title. Now that title's descended in the female

line ever since Charles the First. Ever since then the Willyham Layettes

have been pink as a matter of course. And now, not a month ago, there

was a boy, and they had to rush off and get blue at the very last

moment.... Let me see, your children are little girls, aren't they?" she

again interrupted herself to say.

"Three little goils, Mrs. Stan, with black-and-white check frocks and

large black bows in their hair."