Part III
I The League
Other grounds of complaint against the Manumission League you might have, but you could never, never say that they minced matters. As they themselves declared, they could not afford to. Woman had been told for so long that she was a creature of impulse and caprice, not to be depended on for a judgment uninfluenced by personal considerations, that the eagle itself was not clearer-eyed than it now behoved her to show herself to be. Therefore the League’s members were rigorously rational. They saw opposing principles in stark and irreconcilable conflict. You agreed with the League and all its ways, or you did not; you subscribed to its funds, which were considerable, or you identified yourself with the White Slave Traffic. You were for Manumission or Immorality. It was because woman had not seen so piercingly and ruthlessly in the past that she had got the name of an illogical and non-political animal; the League had changed all that. True, a weaker member did now and then hint in private that the League demanded more than it expected to get, so that the basis of a bargain might be established, but these admissions were looked upon with disfavour as a drag of darkness and the past. All or nothing: and he or she who was not for the League was against it.
It was for this reason that the barb that Dorothy had planted in Amory’s breast so galled her that there would have been no getting rid of it without cutting out a portion of her heart also. She, on a point of sex, no different from anybody else! It was monstrous. Why, who in such matters was spotless if Amory was not? Who, unstayed by an exalted and pure ideal, could have behaved as Amory had behaved? Oh, these worser meanings, and the glee with which a world, base itself, seized upon them! Amory would have given anything to know the name of the person who had been talking about her; not that she hated any person, but oh, she hated, with a hatred that set a red spot glowing in either cheek, a slanderous tongue! She and Cosimo, her dear, brave old pal! Forked tongues had been at work on a relation so heavenly-pure as theirs!... Well, at any rate Cosimo must know. She would have felt a traitor to her chum had she kept this from him. “The world draws its own conclusions!” Cosimo must be told that without loss of time. It would be in the highest degree unjust to Cosimo to allow him to remain for another hour in a position so damnably false!
And Amory had been told this by a blue-eyed fashion-artist, whose wiles had no doubt corrupted a young man who, for all Amory knew, might have been one of Hallowells’ shop-walkers!
With the red spots still burning in her cheeks, she sought Cosimo that very afternoon.
Until March Cosimo still had his studio, but he no longer lived there. He had taken a bedroom and sitting-room in Margaretta Terrace, the short right-angled street off Oakley Street that runs into Oakley Crescent. Amory gave her soft treble knock at his door at a little before five o’clock. The knock had been arranged between them. The landlady in the basement was deaf, and if, after waiting for a minute, Cosimo did not descend, Amory always went away again.
Cosimo was at home, and even as he opened the door he was aware of Amory’s perturbation. He followed her upstairs to his sitting-room on the first floor, and the moment he had closed the door asked her what was the matter. She pulled out her enamel-headed hatpins and threw the hat into an arm-chair; but when she turned she was a little calmer.
“The matter? How the matter?” she said. “I’m dying for some tea. Have you got some? I’ve been to see Dorothy, but I suppose it was a bit early for tea when I left.”
Cosimo had tea; he made it for himself in his room. As he lighted his spirit-lamp and filled the little kettle from the jug in the next room Amory listlessly tossed over the magazines on his little round table; but there was nothing new in them. She had grown suddenly dejected. There seemed to be nothing new in the world. She was as tired of Cosimo’s little furnished sitting-room as she was of his studio in the King’s Road or of her own studio in Cheyne Walk. She was tired of her work; she was tired of her friends—especially when they spread gross reports about her; for the moment she was even tired of “Barrage” and the League. And she was not sure that she was not tired of herself. Although Cosimo was back in town, she was plunged again into the mood in which she had wandered the streets during his absence, looking into eyes strange and various as the pebbles on a shore and thinking that the solitude would have been less frightening had she known as much as the names of their enigmatical possessors. She wanted a change; “Barrage” had taken more out of her even than she had supposed; she was petulant with herself. She was also exceedingly sorry for anybody of brilliant gifts on whom the world presses so harshly as to make that person petulant with herself. Self-contempt is ever the artist’s blackest despair.
“Well,” said Cosimo cheerfully, taking cakes from a square biscuit-tin which he had produced from a cupboard, “and what had Dorothy to say for herself?”
Amory did not hesitate. Though Dorothy could not keep her tongue from repeating a slander and then running away from it by refusing the slanderer’s name, Amory respected herself a little too much to give Dorothy or anybody whomsoever away. So she lay back on one of Cosimo’s sofa-cushions and put her cheek on the sofa-end.
“Oh, quite a lot,” she answered dully. “She seemed to be enjoying herself. She asked after you.”
“Really, awfully kind of her. She’s still at the Juperies, of course?”
“Oh yes, still there.”
“I say, you look fagged out. But tea won’t be a minute. No, don’t get up to help; all’s ready when the water boils.... Nothing wrong, is there?” he asked, as Amory sank wearily back on the cushion again.
“Oh, give me some tea first.”
“Then there is?” said Cosimo quickly, catching at the last word. “Not about ‘Barrage,’ I hope? They haven’t cried off, have they?”
“No, it’s nothing about ‘Barrage.’”
“Then what... but I’m worrying you, poor dear. I’ll give you some tea and you can tell me then.”
And, the water boiling, he made the tea and carried Amory a cup where she lay. He packed a cushion in the small of her back and made her put her feet up; then, sitting down on a little square hassock by her side, he patted her hand.
“No, don’t talk just yet,” he murmured. “Will you have a phenacetin? Well, perhaps the tea will set you right. Close your eyes and I’ll try to take it away.”
And, rising from the hassock, he drew a chair to the sofa-end, sat behind Amory, and began gently to draw his fingers over her closed lids and back towards the roots of her hair,—“Don’t talk—give yourself quite up to it,” he murmured....
Amory, relaxing totally, did so.
Sympathetic in all things as Cosimo was, in nothing was he so sympathetic as in his touch of an aching head. Softly as a woman, he changed from stroking Amory’s lids, and began lightly to draw his sensitive tips along the angle of her jaw and up the sides of her bluebell-stalk of a neck. And he knew when she felt better, for he whispered “Sssh—I can feel it passing into my fingers and wrists—keep your eyes closed——” and continued to stroke. Amory could not have borne to let anybody else touch her so; it was only because of their intellectual affinity that she could bear Cosimo’s long fingers upon her lids and cheek and neck. Mr. Hamilton Dix she must certainly have struck; and as she lay back, with Cosimo’s silky tips passing over her face, she remembered, apropos of nothing, the only other male contact she had ever experienced—a brutal kiss, snatched years ago under the dark portico of the McGrath, with a knocking together of crania, and a smell of tobacco, and a horrible stiff little moustache.... She could not have endured even Cosimo with a moustache....
And Dorothy talked about the world and its “conclusions!”
By and by her fingers softly touched Cosimo’s, in token that she felt better. Slowly she opened her eyes again.
“Ah!” she said.... “Thanks, dear. I don’t know why I should come all over like that.”
“By Jove, you had got it,” said Cosimo, stroking his hands and wringing, as it were, the numbness from them. “I feel it all up my forearms.”
“So now you’ve got it.”
“Oh, it’s rather pleasant; only like your foot going to sleep. It’s going already. Now have some more tea and you’ll be quite all right. I expect you’ve had too much on your mind, that’s what’s been the matter with you.”
“I have, rather. And I’ve been upset to-day, too.”
“I knew you had. What was it?”
“It was something Dorothy told me. Perhaps I’ll tell you in a few minutes, but I don’t in the least want to. Yes, I will have some more tea, please. Cosimo——”
She spoke so shortly that Cosimo started and almost dropped the teacup. There was that in her tone which suggested that, though she had only that moment resolved that what she had to tell him might be told by and by, it was torn from her now by something stronger than herself. Cosimo had turned.
“What? Good gracious, how you startled me.”
“I want you to tell me something, Cosimo.”
“What?” said Cosimo. The golden eyes were glittering on his. Evidently Amory was fighting hard to keep in check some powerful emotion.
“I want you to tell me this, and truthfully, please, and without any false modesty: Do I strike you as the kind of girl decent people might wish not to know?”
Cosimo was thunderstruck. He could only look at her incredulously. Was something worse than a headache the matter with her?
“Do you strike me——” he repeated.
“Yes,” she interrupted. “Am I a—peculiar—sort of person?”
“Peculiar——?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you why I ask in a minute. I want to know how I strike you first. You wouldn’t call me an immodest girl, would you?”
Still Cosimo was all at sea.
“Do you mean—I mean, has somebody been shocked because—well, because you have brave and enlightened views?”
“I don’t mean anything about my views. I mean about myself. To put it brutally, would you think that anybody had the right to say I led—a horrid life?”
Cosimo had been standing gaping, with the cup in his hand. This time he did drop the cup. He gasped.
“Do I understand——”
“Answer my question,” Amory commanded. “Do I give people that impression?”
“You——!” was all that Cosimo could say.
“Do I give you that impression?”
“Amory——!”
But she put up her hand peremptorily and continued.
“So that if anybody does think that, you’d say it was just the vileness of their own minds?” (Amory herself could not help noticing that somehow it sounded worse when put in this way than it had when Dorothy had talked about “conclusions.”)
“My dear girl——!”
“Mere unconventionality apart, you wouldn’t say that?”
“Wouldn’t... why, anybody who’d say that must be mad!”
Amory straightened her back and nodded. “Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know,” she said. “I was a little afraid to trust my own judgment, that’s all. Thank you.”
But apparently it was not all that Cosimo wanted to know. Of course such a subject was always interesting quite apart from its personal application; many times he and Amory had discussed that kind of thing in the abstract by the half-day together; but now that was not all. His face was quite grimly set. Slowly he drew up a chair to where Amory sat, bolt upright and robed in her consciousness of rectitude, on the sofa.
“This,” he said slowly, “is interesting. May I hear a little more about it, please?”
Amory had more than half expected him to take that attitude. Since Cosimo had had his hair cut he was still to be counted as “one of them,” one of the enlightened ones; but, like Samson, he had lost perhaps a little of his strength in the process of shearing. He still saw the light, but sometimes it dazzled him a little—that was another reason why he needed an unflinching pair of eyes always by his side. Now his grimness was almost the ordinary conventional thing. The male behaved like that in most novels and in all theatres. Taken properly in hand, Cosimo would not be very difficult to manage.
“Need we go into it?” said Amory quietly. There was withering disdain of her traducers in the single glance she shot at him.
“I think we’ve got to,” Cosimo replied, with the same slightly histrionic quietness. “I really think we’d better, don’t you know.”
“As regards myself, I don’t consider it worth it,” Amory replied proudly.
“I know you don’t,” the still strong man pursued doggedly. “That’s because you’re so high-minded and scornful and wonderful. You’re so high above it all that really it’s difficult for you to understand. But I think I’ll make this my business, if you don’t mind. Please tell me.”
“Don’t you think that by touching pitch you’d only be defiling yourself?”
“It isn’t a question of me. It’s you. I really think you’d better tell me.”
“But what could you do?”
“Leave that to me. If it’s a man who’s been talking——” Cosimo left the sentence significantly unfinished. “Is it a man?”
“I don’t know. Dorothy wouldn’t tell me.”
Cosimo half rose. “Oh, she wouldn’t, wouldn’t she? Perhaps she’ll tell me, though! Will she have left that place of hers if I take a cab?”
Amory put up her hand rather quickly.
“Oh, Cosimo, do treat it with the contempt it deserves! You’d get nothing out of Dorothy. You know how obstinate she can be.”
“Well, tell me what she said; then I’ll consider whether I’ll go or not.”
“No, Cosimo, I’d rather not.”
“But you must!”
At that Amory once more broke passionately out. She hit at the sofa cushion with her tiny white fist.
“Oh, it’s—I know I’ve not deserved it! That ought to be enough for me, and I do try to look at it in that light, but I’m not always so high-minded as you think, Cosimo, and it does hurt when they spring a thing like that on you without warning! And the way she did it!... Listen. I didn’t mean to tell you, but she seems to have been talking me over, and there does come a point when the truth has to be told! I went up when she was having her lunch; she was having it with somebody or other, I forget his name; and—Cosimo—but I’m sure I needn’t tell you——”
“Not——?” The golden eyes and the black-coffee brown ones were crossed as it were like swords for a moment, as if either had started into an attitude of defence against some monstrous meaning—the meaning that, Dorothy had said, was always between them.
“Yes,” Amory sighed as if in disgust.
Cosimo stared, frowning.
“You do mean kissing, don’t you?”
“If you must have the horrid word.”
“And it was after that that she said——?”
“Yes. Rather unbelievable, isn’t it?... And that,” Amory broke out anew, “is what made me so angry. In a room where the workmen might come at any moment, too! And then to talk about me!... Listen, Cosimo, I’m going to make a confession. I know it isn’t necessary with you, but I want to make it. I want you to know exactly how much and how little I have to reproach myself with; then you’ll see. An awful man did once kiss me, at a dance at the McGrath—and once I did give a kiss—I’ll tell you——”
Cosimo made a little protesting movement.
“Oh, Amory, do you think you need defend yourself to me——?”
“But I want to tell you. It wasn’t to a man—it was to a beautiful object—the Antinöus in the Louvre. I dare say it was foolish, but I thought it so beautiful, and anybody with any understanding at all would have regarded it as—don’t think me silly—as a sort of dedication—to my art—and I have been faithful to my ideal ever since——”
Cosimo’s eyes were moist with emotion. The beautiful gesture! What a ripping touch that would be if anybody ever wrote the life of the painter of “Barrage!”... “Oh!” he breathed reverentially. “You are superb, Amory.”
“And of course I’m not counting that stupid thing at my aunt’s wedding——”
“That——,” said Cosimo, straightway dismissing it.
“And that’s all—absolutely all,” said Amory, softly and bitterly. “To all intents and purposes I’ve never been kissed.... So don’t you think, Cosimo, that from her at any rate I might have been spared this?”
She lifted the shallow opals of her eyes.
Suddenly Cosimo ceased to be the still strong man. He became the hero, dreadful in his anger.
“It’s unbelievable—cruel!” he cried. “And I’m going to see about it! You wait here—I’m going now—I’m going to get to the bottom of this—you stay here till I come back.”
He was half-way across the room, reaching for his hat.
But Amory called him. “Cosimo——!”
“We’ll talk about it when I get back!” Cosimo muttered, grim once more. Talking would do any time. This was the hour for action.
“But—Cosimo—wait! You can’t go to her! She’d think I’d been telling you things—she doesn’t understand these moments when the truth simply must be told! Come here and be reasonable. She’d only round on you; I know her! If I can take it calmly I think you might. I’m not angry now. I’m going to take simply no notice. ‘Let Gryll be Gryll and have his hoggish mind’—you know—it’s in the Faerie Queene. That’s what I think about it.... So you don’t mind, do you, Cosimo?”
Something in this, he did not know what, arrested Cosimo, but Amory gave him no time to think. She continued—
“We should show ourselves quite unworthy of the faith we profess to take the least bit of notice, either of us. It’s merely the old prejudice about the Subjection persisting. Why should the woman be compromised, as they call it, and not the man? They’re equally guilty or equally innocent, one would have thought? But that’s not our business really; our business is to strike and suffer, and strike and suffer, and to go on striking and suffering until not a tongue in the whole wide world dare say those hateful words again, ‘One Law for the Man and Another for the Woman!’”
“But——” Cosimo gasped.
“Isn’t it?” Amory bore him down, flinging out an adorable arm. “Isn’t it? What is the battle, then, if that isn’t it? What is every woman worth her salt, and a few devoted men, working and suffering and fighting for if it isn’t for that? They’re fighting against Wrong, Cosimo, and Vivisection, and Tuberculosis, and Man-made Laws, and the White Slave Traffic——”
But Cosimo was white. He had heard all this before, but something he had not heard before had evidently seized on him now. Again he tried to speak, but again Amory went triumphantly on.
“And with that noble task before us, what does it matter what scurrilous tongues say? Let them say! We defy the world! The world!” (She gave a contemptuous laugh). “Why, the world will be drawing its ‘conclusions’ (I believe that’s the expression) at this very moment. A young man and a young woman, discussing ideals together——,” she became brightly mocking, “—dreadful! Two beings of the opposite sex merely discussing great Social Problems—ha ha! Heavens, if they only knew! I really believe, Cosimo, that of all the times we’ve been together, if once—just once—the roof could have been lifted off and we could have been seen, perfectly innocently occupied, the world would have had such a shock to its conceit and ignorance that the Dawn would begin to-morrow! I really think that——”
But here Cosimo found his tongue. “Amory,” he gasped, “do you mean that they’ve been talking about—you and me?”
Amory laughed. “Why, you stupid old Cosimo, who else?”
“Do you mean—you and me?”
At that Amory’s laugh ceased. She stared. “You?... Cosimo, did you—tell me—did you think I had a scandalous relation with anybody else?”
“No—no, no—but——”
“Then who did you suppose they’d been talking about?” she asked, staring.
“I—I—I didn’t know——”
“Do you mind?” This was said slowly, as if Amory struggled with a new idea.
“No—of course not—I mean, I think you’re magnificent—but it—it didn’t occur to me—just at first——”
Amory smiled cynically. “Oh, I’ve not had any scandalous relation with anybody except you!”
“Er—er—ha—have some more tea,” said Cosimo quaveringly, putting out his hand to the cold teapot.
There was a moment’s silence.
“Perhaps you don’t believe me either?” said Amory presently, her head suddenly thrown back. “Perhaps you thought I’d found another friend while you were away?”
“Oh, Amory!” Cosimo reproached her; but he fidgeted uneasily. Perhaps he had suddenly remembered Pattie Wynn-Jenkins.
“Because—because——” Amory’s voice quavered now, “because if you did, Cosimo, it wasn’t true—it wasn’t—I trusted you as I thought you trusted me——”
She showed signs of breaking down. That was infinitely pathetic. Is it not pathetic, when one who is prepared to defy the whole world provided she is allowed her single beautiful friendship, finds that friendship too yielding under the strain? Cosimo thought so, and put out his hand rather aimlessly.
But Amory drew her own hand back. The pathetic weakness passed. Wearily she laughed now.
“Oh no, better not, Cosimo. There are perfectly innocent things that we can’t allow ourselves. It’s hard, isn’t it? but you see what the world is. It’s probably damned us already; we’re probably damned at this moment for being together here; but as long as we give it no reason it only recoils on its own head. I’m perfectly willing to accept the situation. I accepted it in a sense when I did that foolish thing with the Antinöus. I thought then that I was just vowing myself to my art, but I see now that it was a far greater thing. It really meant that I chose all the large and beautiful and abstract things—a sort of life of toil—and put off these other things once for all. I didn’t know; I might not have had the courage if I’d known; but there’s no going back. Once I said our friendship must end, Cosimo, but that’s over too. They’d talk just the same if we ended it now. So let them talk. It’s bitter, but if I can bear it you ought to be able to. After all, there is that petty sense in which I lose more than you do.”
Cosimo had been staring hard at her. Again he had a merely conventional look. This time it was that of a man who, occupied with important and practical things, indulgently allows a woman to talk while he arrives at his conclusion. Presently he seemed to have come to the conclusion. His face was set.
“Well,” he said, rousing himself, “that leaves only one thing to be done.”
“Precisely,” said Amory, with a little shrug.
“You must marry me,” said Cosimo.
Amory fell back into the sofa-corner and for a moment looked at him as if she did not believe she could have heard aright. Then she smiled. She shook her head slowly.
Poor, foolish Cosimo! Was that all he saw? Well she must teach him....
“Don’t you see, Cosimo,” she said, as patiently as if she had been instructing a child, “that that’s the one thing that can’t be done?”
“Can’t!—It must!”
“Really, Cosimo——”
“But it’s as plain as it can be——”
“But you don’t, you don’t see, dear,” Amory replied, still smiling. “That would be to be false to everything. It would be an admission. Think how all those people who have been so hideously wrong would instantly be sure they’d been perfectly right all the time! Why, it might just as well have been so!... No, Cosimo, that would be mere weakness—yielding to pressure, and an acknowledgment of that very opinion we hate so. We can’t be on both sides at once, Cosimo. Either we’ve been right or we’ve been wrong, and I know which I think we’ve been. Don’t you see yet, dear, what it meant when I kissed the Antinöus? It meant that I removed myself away from all that!... Really, Cosimo, I think you are almost dull enough sometimes to marry!”
“But—but—lots of the League people are married——” said Cosimo, bewildered.
“Ah, but they aren’t you and me, Cosimo! They haven’t our perfect friendship. Besides, I’m rather proud, you know. I don’t think I could ever accept a man who merely thought he was under an obligation to marry me. You never asked me before, and you were quite right, just as you’re quite wrong in this. If you really want an answer, it’s—No. And if you want to know whether you’ve got to behave one bit differently because of this—well, that’s No too. I admit I was angry, but now that I’ve talked it over I find it really rather amusing. It’s quite funny, in fact, coming from Dorothy, after you know what. There are Dorothy’s ideas, and there are mine, and I do sometimes think that if Dorothy thinks a thing right that’s almost enough in itself to make it wrong for me. I hope you see now, Cosimo?”
Cosimo may not have seen, but he was at any rate silenced. A new fear had seized on him now. Hitherto he had taken this question of “compromising” very much at Amory’s valuation, without overmuch thought about it on his own account; but now—now that he had had his hair cut—that irrational conventional point of view refused to be altogether banished. Though it came late and should have come earlier, perhaps he ought to consider her a little more; indeed, things being so hatefully as they seemed to be, it might be better if, for some time to come at any rate, they were less together than they had been in the past. The thought afflicted him with a melancholy sense of loneliness and hopelessness; he felt a little as a man feels after a weakening attack of influenza. Something he had grown to need he must now be more or less deprived of.... But again, as he mumbled something of this kind, Amory came out shining and magnificent. Not go on precisely as before? Why (she exclaimed) that would be the next worst thing to marrying! If any difference was to be made at all, they must be seen even more constantly together than before! Just as the League sometimes overstated things in order that those things should “carry,” so even by a slight parade of intimacy they must enter their protest. To weaken now would never, never do! Surely Cosimo saw that?
So they dined that night at the Lettuce Grill, in St. Martins Lane, and Amory had never been more trenchant and brilliant, more bright and tender and free and brave. And after dinner they joined a larger party at one of the long tables, and Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish dropped in, and everybody was absolutely at his and her best, and it was almost like a larger and more responsible McGrath over again, and the Dawn, if emotion and enthusiasm and resolve counted for anything at all, was hastened that night by several years. And before the party broke up Amory definitely clinched the sale of “Barrage”.... And Cosimo was pensive and abstracted now. He saw, not only how right Amory was in everything she said and did, but how temerarious he himself had been when, that afternoon, he had said, almost as if he had been making a sacrifice, that a being so daring and dashing and gloriously winged must of course marry him. There was no of course about it. It would be she, not he, who would be making the sacrifice. He would be lucky to get her. Laura Beamish, whispering to him that Amory, drinking to the Dawn in the Lettuce Grill’s Unfermented Grape-fruit Moselle, was stunningly pretty, told Cosimo nothing that he could not now see for himself.
Yes, Cosimo Pratt saw at last that he had come near making a precious ass of himself when he had taken her acceptance of him so entirely for granted. He did not suppose for a moment that a girl so frank and free and brave could (to put it grossly) be holding out for her price; nevertheless her price could be no light one. And because it was not a light one, Cosimo was now full of eagerness to pay it.