II “Barrage”
The sale of “Barrage” to the Manumission League was definitely concluded within the week. Amory thought it a distinct smack in the eye for Mr. Hamilton Dix. Mr. Dix, in hoodwinking her, and all but fraudulently getting her to accept Croziers’ miserable hundred pounds, had no doubt thought he was doing a smart stroke of business; but he was likely to squirm now, and to wish he had not given her permission to sell privately what work she could. True, Amory admitted that in a sense she had been indebted to Dorothy Lennard for this release—but only in a sense. It was a thing anybody would have thought of, and things anybody might think of were very lightly and happily hit off in that perfect phrase of Nietzsche’s, “the vulgarity of the lucky find.” In any case, Amory and nobody else had actually painted “Barrage.” So if Dorothy liked to go about boasting that she herself had procured the sale to the League—not that Amory knew for a fact that she had done or was doing this—well, it would be a little beneath Amory’s dignity to contradict her. Some people cannot bear to hear of the success of others. Amory thanked goodness that she was not like that.
The transaction put her into possession of no less a sum than two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds, and for a single picture—at last that was something like! She had always known it would come, and come it had. Again, as she had done after the Crozier agreement, she counted the time “Barrage” had taken to paint; again she saw those other pictures she intended to paint—the Education picture, the State Motherhood picture, the terrible indictment of all non-members of the Manumission League that the White Slave canvas was to set forth; and again she saw herself rich. “Barrage” had left her limp and a rag, but that was past. It paid in cash to soar. Throes meant thousands. She laughed at her immediate two hundred, and straightway set about the spending of it.
And first of all she discovered that no system of physical exercises yet invented can compare for one moment with silk stockings for giving an erect carriage to the female head. She bought a couple of dozen pairs, taking Cosimo with her to choose the colours. She bought scarves, too, Indian and Japanese, and the most exquisitely embroidered peasant smocks, and a kind of goose-girl costume for the evenings, to go with which Cosimo, as a joke, made her buy a pair of sabots also. She put on the costume in the studio in Cheyne Walk, and her tiny feet were bare inside the sabots, and her hair was done in two glorious plaits, and she had a Breton cap on the top of it. For the studio itself she bought nothing new; that, she said, was to be kept severely for work—she had already begun a cartoon for the White Slave picture, and Cosimo had posed for the angelic and accusing figure that symbolized Manumission and the League. The only new piece of furniture that she did buy was a hanging cupboard so tall that it would hardly go under the blackened and sagging ceiling. She filled it with the new velvets and silks and put the stockings and shawls and the dyed leather belts with the enamelled clasps in the drawers beneath; and then one Sunday she bore off Cosimo to Oasthouse View again, on the Mall, Chiswick. He was to see Aunt Jerry’s baby.
This time they did not go to lunch; they arrived at about tea-time instead. But if by going later Amory had expected to avoid Mrs. Deschamps and Miss Crebbin and her young man, she was disappointed. And not only that; as it happened, she and Cosimo walked straight into a party so large that its talk and laughter could be heard twenty yards before they reached the wrought-iron gate. Indeed, at the gate Amory hesitated for a moment and exchanged a quick glance with Cosimo; one voice had risen above all the rest; it was the voice of Mr. Wellcome. “Shall we hurry past?” Amory’s glance seemed to say; but Cosimo hoisted himself out of a rather quiet mood and replied, “Oh, we’ll go in—rather!” Perhaps he still lived in hopes of hearing Mr. Wellcome say “May all your troubles be little ones.”
It would have been laughable, if at the same time it had not been so terribly socially deplorable, to see the ridiculous fuss they made of that baby of Aunt Jerry’s. These people did not seem to have as much as a glimmer of the true significance of childhood—not to speak of its rights. They did not seem to realize that every false impression it acquired now would have to be corrected, painfully and with labour and tears, in the long years to come. It did not seem to occur to them, for example, that it was in the last degree important that, from the very beginning, its eyes should rest on none but beautiful and sage-green objects; instead they let it see Mr. Wellcome. They seemed to be totally ignorant of the fact that, already, beauty born of murmuring sound should be passing into its mite of a face; they prodded it, and guffawed in its tender ears, and said “Boh!” and “Diddums!” And was it conducive to a proper modesty and earnestness of purpose in later years that the child should be told already that it was precious and a gem, and that its mother could eat it, and (when it expressed its just resentment by a cry, so that its father had to take it into his arms and to sing to it), that the hills and the towers (the oasthouses presumably) that it could see from the window all belonged to it? That was a lie. They did not, and never would. Amory hoped that by the time it grew up there would be no such thing as private ownership of hills and oasthouses. But there they were, all of them, poisoning its vague young mind, and really not thinking of it at all, but of their own stupid cachinnations and witticisms. No wonder it cried.
And Mr. Wellcome was positively devastating in his humour. Mrs. Deschamps had her small fingers on his mouth even as Amory and Cosimo entered, trying to prevent the utterance of some dreadful facetiousness or other; pretty Miss Crebbin was blushing at it yet; but Mr. Wellcome tore Mrs. Deschamps’ hand away as he saw the newcomers, and cried, “Well, all I can say is hooray for the little difference—here’s Cos and Am—is all right behind, George?—Here, Cos, come and be getting your hand in——”
And he snatched the baby and forced it into Cosimo’s arms.
Truth to tell, Cosimo held the infant quite as well as Amory did. When, in the course of the shocking display of promiscuity, it arrived at Amory, she stood with it much as a hatstand stands with the hat that is hung upon it. But she thanked goodness that she knew a little more than to say “Diddums” to it. It was a little boy; Amory was rather sorry for that; nevertheless she bent an earnest gaze upon it, as if, male as it was, she still sealed it as more or less vowed to the Cause. Mr. Wellcome was entirely wrong when he cried that he’d take short odds he could guess what she was thinking of. Mr. Wellcome could never have guessed. Mr. Wellcome was for the propagation of Tuberculosis and the direct encouragement of the Social Evil. In fact, Amory was not at all sure that men like Mr. Wellcome were not the real Antichrist.
Then the babe was borne away by a nurse, and, while George Massey, mingling his hissings with those of the silver kettle over Aunt Jerry’s spirit-lamp, passed round cups of tea, the conversation came round to Amory herself and “Barrage.” Mr. Wellcome had failed to catch the figure for which the picture had been sold.
“How much did you say?” he demanded again over his cup.
Amory glanced at Cosimo.
“Two hundred pounds,” said Cosimo with a negligent air.
Mr. Wellcome’s respect for the Cause evidently went up. “Come, that’s not so dusty,” he approved. “Have you been raking it in at this rate ever since you left Glenerne, Miss Am?” he asked, fixing her with his eye and tapping her on the knee. He was a friendly man.
Amory replied graciously that she had, more or less; it was not easy to fix a rate; sometimes she would be quite a long time without making very much, and then——
“I see; like winnings,” said Mr. Wellcome. “Well, and Cos here’s been touching too from all I hear.” He winked slowly.
“Mis-ter Wellcome!” Mrs. Deschamps interposed, shocked.
But Mr. Wellcome only guffawed.
“Well, it makes the mare to go—eh, George? No doin’ your duty as a citizen without it, George, what? I always say, every time I have a good win, ‘Now for the duty as a citizen!’ Not that horses ain’t precarious, like art; but getting married’s like learning to swim—when you’re neck and crop in for it you find a way out all right. Well, I don’t care, among friends, where it is, Glenerne or where you like—I know where there’s a bottle or two of G. H. Mumm left, and the Spanish brandy’s got no force, I give you my word! It’s betwixt Miss Crebbin and somebody—Miss Crebbin’s favourite for the moment, but betting alters——”
And the opening of an oyster is not larger nor more watery than the next wink Mr. Wellcome gave.
“Aren’t you going to stay and see him in his bath, Amory?” Aunt Jerry asked wistfully when, at a little after five, Amory and Cosimo rose to go.
“I’m afraid not,” Amory replied, drawing on her new gloves. “Cosimo and I have to go and see Europa at the New Greek Society; it’s the first performance in England.”
“The theatre—on Sunday!” Aunt Jerry exclaimed softly.
And Amory and Cosimo left. If they had stayed there would have been nothing to beat Aunt Jerry’s consternation at the idea of going to a theatre on Sunday.
Hitherto it had not struck Amory that the Manumission League, in paying her two hundred pounds for “Barrage,” had paid a very good price indeed for a canvas by an artist who, save for a few columns about her by Mr. Hamilton Dix (who was not to a column or so about anybody on whom Croziers’ wandering eyes might rest), was unknown. Nor had it occurred to her that the League might want to see its money back again. Dorothy Lennard might entertain such suspicions, but then Dorothy was of a suspicious nature, always thinking somebody might be getting the better of her, and naturally crediting other people with intentions no better than her own. “I don’t like sales outright,” Dorothy had said.... And Amory, too, began to wonder whether righteousness also may not have its mammon when she first heard, at the Lettuce Grill, of the purpose to which it was intended to put her picture. It was only a rumour; indeed, Amory had it from a source no more official than Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish; but Walter’s father was the mainstay of the New Greek Society, and things that he said had a way of being authentic, and Amory began to wonder whether she ought not to have had a royalty, or a percentage, or whatever Dorothy had called it after all. The rumour was to the effect that, merely as a means of sowing the good seed, “Barrage” was to be exhibited, not in an ordinary gallery with a hundred other pictures, but by itself, with drapery round it, set back in a sort of proscenium, with lights at the top and bottom, and a muffled harmonium playing sacred music in the next room, and a faint odour of Ruban de Bruges burning, and other appurtenances of reverence and solemnity. That converts might be made, the whole of the League’s resources were to be concentrated on the enterprise, and the admission was to be a shilling. If the picture drew neophytes and shillings enough in London it was to be taken to the Provinces.
There are twenty shillings in a pound, and in two hundred pounds four thousand shillings. When four thousand shillings had been taken, “Barrage,” omitting other expenses, would have paid for itself.
Now the League had many times four thousand members in London alone....
A royalty of, say, a penny in the shilling would have worked out at more than four pounds per thousand....
The League was going to do the thing very thoroughly, and a special “Barrage” Committee was to be formed....
Two hundred pounds was well enough as far as it went, but there was going to be increment beyond that, earned really by Amory....
She felt a sharp stab of regret that she had let “Barrage” go for so little.
But the regret did not last long. She remembered in time that she was bringing herself down to Dorothy’s level. The full reward she might not get, but all the renown would be hers, and, though she was no Dorothy, she was yet not so ignorant of business but that she knew that in other ways her market was now as good as made. And compared with the kudos that would be hers, even the foregone royalty fell away into the background. “Foregone,” she told herself, was the world; for the effect was the same as if she had had the royalty and had magnanimously handed it back again to the Cause. To all intents and purposes, she was subscribing to the Cause’s funds (say) a thousand guineas. Her name would not appear with that figure after it in any list, but it is well to do good by stealth, and the name would ring resoundingly enough in other ways. “Amory Towers, you know, the painter of ‘Barrage’”—“‘Barrage,’ Miss Towers’ great work”—“That feminist picture that everybody’s going to see, ‘Barrage,’ by Amory Towers”... yes, there would be lots of that. And in the Movement itself she would be a person of consideration and authority. She would have a voice in its councils. “Has Miss Towers given her opinion yet?” the leaders would ask one another on this point or that; and there were the other propagandist pictures yet to come. In the meantime it was a little odd that Amory was not asked to join the “Barrage” Committee. But perhaps that was as well too. Anybody can serve on a Committee, but it takes a somebody to paint a “Barrage.” To inferior minds inferior work. It was better after all that there should be a little mystery about Amory and that she should be shut off from the common gaze as it were by a veil. More than her own exclusion she resented the inclusion of the name of Mr. Hamilton Dix. For Mr. Dix had been called in. Mr. Dix, whose articles on Hallowells’ advertisements had brought him very much to the fore, had evidently been deemed by the Committee to be the very man to act as Art Director for “Barrage” also. And as that man of parts, who had no interest in Croziers’, still never abandoned an attitude of benevolence towards Croziers’ and such artists as they elected to “take up,” Amory’s twenty-odd older pictures also seemed in a fair way for being fetched up out of Croziers’ cellars. One thing brings another. Amory had known it would come, and it had come, or was coming. And it was coming without her having receded from the highest that was in her by as much as a single inch. That (as Cosimo said) was what was so wonderful. In an age of polluted altars she had kept her single taper burning pure and bright.
To anticipate a little: those contingent results of the enormous publicity that was presently given to “Barrage” came duly to pass. Croziers’ sold all but two of those old Saturday-night street-markets of hers at prices that varied from ten to thirty pounds apiece. Their numerous charges and commissions struck Amory as merely capacious; for all that, she received a series of cheques that totted up in all to more than four hundred pounds; and in several articles he wrote on the astonishing combination of human sympathy and pure idealism that distinguished the work of Miss Towers from the work of all other living artists, Mr. Hamilton Dix fairly let himself go. This was when “Barrage” left London for Manchester, Liverpool, and the North, to draw its thousands of visitors per week and to be chosen as a popular and attractive text, though with various applications, by half the Nonconformist ministers in the land; and one of the curious little after-effects of the enterprise was to show how entirely right Mr. Miller was when he said that the mere advertising “stunt” was over, and that advertising, to be effective to-day, must attach itself to something higher than itself. He would have attached a drapery business to the Royal Standard; but the feminist picture did even better. The “Barrage” turnstiles took their toll of shillings that were really the sinews of a Holy War.
Nothing, in Cosimo’s opinion, could have been more simple and unaffected and fine than the way in which Amory still stuck to the shabby little studio in Cheyne Walk. More than once he protested, but she lifted her eyes to him and asked him, Was it not enough? The roof kept out the rain; the door kept out intruders; and she could open the diamond-latticed window and look at the stars whenever she liked. She liked the solitude, she said; out of just such a solitude the strength must be gathered that is to be put to the service of the multitude. She did sometimes sigh for the country; she was not sure that soon she might not take a trip away somewhere, a longish one, quite alone; she had always promised herself such a trip, to Italy, but the loved servitude of her career had never permitted her to get farther than Paris; but now there was nothing to keep her in England. She might even go and live permanently abroad, working for the Cause from wherever it might be. But wherever she went, Cosimo must not suppose she would ever forget him. She would write to him quite frequently. And he must write to her.
The first time Amory allowed Cosimo this peep at her plans his face became blank with dismay. They were sitting together on a bench in the little Embankment garden where the Carlyle statue is. It was an evening early in April, approaching dusk, and on another bench, twenty yards away, a dim huddle under the trees had caused Amory’s lips to curl into a smile; it had reminded her of that horrible hypnotizing evening when she had walked on Clapham Common and had returned to pass a night of starts and tremors, lying dressed on Cosimo’s bed. She could afford to smile now, though she did so a little disdainfully. Things had improved since then—rather! Cosimo, though he had always been splendid, had been somehow a little off-handed at odd times; not exactly casual, but as if, while esteeming her very highly indeed, his esteem had none the less fallen just a little short of her true deserts; but that, too, was being quickly altered now. And she would like to see Rome too. Quite inferior people had seen Rome, and Amory owed it to herself and to her art not to be crowed over by anybody. She told Cosimo so.
“Yes,” he said dejectedly; “I thought that would be the next. You’re rising, Amory. You’ll remember us poor grovellers sometimes, though, won’t you?” Amory’s tone of reproach almost passed reproach; it was as if she had received a twinge of pain.
“I don’t think I’ve deserved that of you, Cosimo,” she could not forbear saying.
But Cosimo persisted sadly.
“I beg your pardon, dear, but it is so. You might remember a little longer than most others, because you’re finer and truer than they are, but time and distance do make a difference, and it’s no good saying they don’t. I know.”
Amory wondered whether Cosimo knew the difference time and distance made because of Pattie Wynn-Jenkins, but she only shook her head on its white hyacinth-stalk of a neck.
“I don’t forget my friends, Cosimo,” she said quietly.
“I’m not accusing you, Amory. But,” he continued mournfully, “there are brilliant circles in Rome, and I know exactly how you’d take your place there, and it would be quite right and proper in one sense, and nobody would be gladder than I. But I should be buried in that beastly hole Shropshire all the time, boring myself to tears with cows and grass and pheasants and a lot of stupid yokels——”
Gently Amory tried to show him how ungrateful he was.
“Oh, Cosimo, how can you speak so of the country that gave the world ‘The Shropshire Lad’! I should always have beautiful thoughts of you—as my Shropshire Lad—and it isn’t as if there wasn’t a noble work to do in the country too. There’s the Housing Problem, and an iniquitous Land System, and sanitary dwellings for the agricultural labourer——”
She went on, but Cosimo refused to see it. It was as if her “Barrage” would be carried in triumph through the streets of Rome as Cimabue’s “Madonna” was carried through those of Florence, while he would be tapping the barometer each morning, and then taking a walk with no other company than that of his dog, and returning to his solitary lunch, and going to sleep in the afternoon, and wishing to goodness he’d never seen his beastly estate. And so strongly did he now feel how little he had to offer Amory that he did not offer it, but sighed instead, and said that he supposed he’d be driven to marry some wench from the nearest dairy in order not to die of sheer weariness within six months. Amory mused.
“About that, Cosimo,” she said slowly at last. “You know what I’ve always wanted for you. I’ve always wanted you to marry some nice girl I could make a friend of. At one time I thought Dorothy might have done, but I see now that I was wrong. But you’d be better not marrying at all than marrying somebody who wouldn’t enter into your ideas. Can’t you live for duty alone, Cosimo, as I can?”
“You’ve more to sustain you,” he replied dully.
“All duties are alike precious,” said Amory firmly. “Yours is a more even temperament. I grant I rise a little sometimes, but for every rise there’s a despair, Cosimo, and I often think almost anybody is happier than I. Besides, you’d have the richest of my thought in my letters. You remember that fine passage in Ruskin—I think it’s in the Crown of Wild Olive—about the spoken word often being hasty and inaccurate, but the written one being choice and considered; I forget exactly how it goes. But you’d have that, Cosimo.”
“Oh, that——” Cosimo sighed.
His eyes had rested on the grey huddle on the bench twenty yards away. The huddle had moved, and a dim face had appeared. It was the face of Mrs. ’Ill’s daughter, Jellies, and Amory had seen it too. It seemed to brighten her. She gave a gay little laugh.
“There you are,” she said; “when you say you’d marry a dairymaid, do you mean—that?” She made a little movement of her head. “If you do, Cosimo, by all means marry one. When things come to that pitch I don’t see that anything matters very much. Marry a dairymaid, by all means, if that’s what you mean by marriage. But”—her laughter suddenly ceased—“don’t forget, Cosimo, that there is another side to it. You’d perhaps get all that some men seem to require, and perhaps you are that kind of man, but I shouldn’t have thought it. I should have planned something very different for you.... And think what you’d forego. No Societies for the study of those lovely Folk-Songs. No revival of Morrice Dancing. No bringing back the peasantry to those beautiful and rational old smock costumes. No bringing up of the standard of rustic morals to the level of that of the chaste animals. No education of the people up to an enlightened system of Land Tenure. No jolly Socialist Vans, no Pamphlets, nothing fine. Only the extortions of Landlordism and the old hateful Three—Rent, Interest, and Profits.... I’m not saying that to do all this is your work, Cosimo. I’m only pointing out that it’s somebody’s work. I don’t know Shropshire; perhaps Shropshire isn’t ripe for it; but it’s being done elsewhere. It attracts me. But of course that is no reason why it should attract you. I only mean that I should have said it was worth examining.”
Cosimo sat in the falling dusk, thrilled. What a daring and constructive brain!... And still some fools said women had no capacity for affairs! What (he wondered) would they have said could they have heard Amory as she was now—not argumentative, urging nothing, pleading nothing, with nothing to gain, quite detached and disinterested, merely anxious that, as she saw her own work before her, so others should see theirs? He rather thought they would have been silenced!...
And now there was no expressing how much Cosimo wanted her. Alone and of himself he could never have thought of these things, but with Amory by his side!... He seemed to see that Shropshire estate as it might be made. The bright parts of his vision seemed to gather as it were about a Maypole; the Maypole was in the middle; Cosimo knew the very spot for it. And the place really needed a Village Hall, on a contributory basis. In wet weather they could have the Folk-Songs and the Morrice Dancing there, and in fine weather on the green. There might be Vans and Pamphlets too; they might even set up a Village Press. And with these as a beginning the rest would come in time; but he could do nothing without Amory. He must have her. He knew it would not be easy, but he fancied—he was not sure, but he fancied—that there had been suppressed emotion in the tone in which she had called him her Shropshire Lad. Again he glanced at Jellies, whose face had disappeared again. The huddle, as far as he could see in the gloom, was quite motionless. Often and often with Amory he had laughed at this slow and elementary and adhesive love-making of the lower orders; it had always seemed so funny; and of course it was funny still with people of that class; Cosimo was not running away from that. Still, Cosimo had once taken a crossing-sweeper’s broom and had swept for half an hour for him, and Amory was temptingly pretty as she sat by his side in the dusk....
Between his dream of a Model Village, of which he was proud, and something else for which he felt a little apologetic, Cosimo did not quite know where he was; but he knew that he wanted Amory. A soft “Ow!” came from the huddle on the other bench; it rather put Cosimo off for a moment or two; but all was silent again, and he took heart. He altered his position, and ran his arm along the back of the bench.
“Do you really think, Amory——” he began huskily.
“Eh?” said Amory. Apparently he had startled her. She had been quite lost in abstraction.
“Do you think that’s the choice—for me?”
“The choice?... Oh, I see! You mean what I was saying. Well, Cosimo, what do you think yourself?”
Cosimo spoke spiritlessly.
“I don’t know. Sometimes it doesn’t seem worth while my thinking when you’re here. I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t think,” Amory answered slowly, “that in cases like this one person has really the right to settle things for another. As you know, I hate the word Conscience; I prefer the expression Personal Will; but that’s what it seems to me to be.”
“But in so many things my will’s yours, Amory. You see deeper than I. You’re constructive. You’re one of the world’s Makers of Things. I should be a very good lieutenant or something, but I’m quite without the creative gift. Won’t you help me to do all those beautiful things, Amory?”
But evidently Amory didn’t understand him. She replied, with quick eagerness—
“Gladly—oh, so gladly! You know you have only to ask, Cosimo, now or at any time.”
Cosimo tried again.
“I—I don’t mean that exactly,” he stammered. “That’s splendid, that part in the Crown of Wild Olive, I know, but—but—I mean something else, Amory—dear——”
His hand had slipped from the back of the bench; softly it lay on Amory’s shoulder. He could hardly believe that it had lain there many times before, it lay so differently softly now. And yet Amory did not seem to recognize the difference in the softness, nor did she appear conscious that he had called her “dear” in a tone he had never used before. She put her finger-tips lightly on his knee. “Wait a bit,” she said. “I have it on the tip of my tongue—it’s not the Crown of Wild Olive; it’s Sesame and Lilies—you know—that passage about gossiping with housemaids and stableboys when you might be conversing with kings and queens—I shall remember it in a moment——”
For one fleeting instant it did strike Cosimo that if he had not taken down Amory’s hair for her and called her “dear” in the past he might have had more resources at his disposal now—at any rate in the sense that Amory would have apprehended him more quickly; and yet that, too, had its little furtive compensation. His hand could remain where it was....
Amory continued to try to recollect the passage from Sesame and Lilies.
But suddenly she too gave, not a common “Ow!” but a quite sudden start into perception. She moved a little, but the hand on her shoulder did not. With quiet firmness she put her own hand upon it, but her slight effort to draw it away met with resistance. She had seen. She made as if to rise.
“Isn’t it getting late?” she said, looking away over the river.
“Amory—don’t go—you know what I mean——” Cosimo pleaded throatily. “It’s—it’s what I said the other day—you know——”
“Let’s be going, Cosimo,” said Amory. “I really don’t know what you mean by the other day.”
“After you’d seen Dorothy—and I wanted you to marry me—do marry me, dear——”
Somehow his hold of her suddenly loosened, and Amory was on her feet. From the bench twenty yards away two faces watched them through the gloom. Amory looked sorrowfully at Cosimo. She was not angry. She did not pretend that she did not understand.
“Cosimo,” she said, and her voice was low, “I don’t see how you can expect things to be the same after this.”
Cosimo sat helplessly, as if still to sit might be construed as an invitation for her also to resume her place.
“I—I don’t want them to be the same, dear——” he begged almost abjectly.
“And you mustn’t call me dear—not in this new way,” Amory commanded, softly, but with decision. “I do see what you mean—now. And I admit it makes matters clearer—too clear, perhaps. In that way our friendship may have been a disadvantage. It’s committed us to a certain course, and we must either keep to that course or else undo things. I think you’ll admit that’s a Law. I——”
“Oh, undo them!” Cosimo cried ardently, catching, as he sat, at her hands.
But Amory drew the hands away and glanced towards Alf and Jellies. Her low voice thrilled, as it were, with the first tones of a tragic scene.
“Cosimo—no, I say. Not now. Not here. Perhaps never, and not anywhere. I’m almost sure it would be better not. I’m quite sure. It’s not like that time the other day. I’d seen Dorothy then, you see, and she’d said that horrid thing. Mere pride made us go on as we had been doing in the face of the whole world. It was noble of you to offer it then—noble in a way, but quite impossible; and that’s all past. Now our paths seem to lie in different directions, and we must follow them; it’s a L—it’s our duty. In the sense you mean, the sense of doing a sacred work, I was actually more your wife during that long and beautiful friendship than I can be now that you say you love me——”
“Oh, I do love you!” Cosimo groaned, hearing these words of doom. “I do love you, Amory!”
“Then I bid you love your duty more,” Amory replied, with sweet mournfulness, placing her finger-tips ever so lightly for one moment on his shoulder, as it were an accolade. “Go, my Shropshire Lad, and do it. And I will try to do mine. Let that unite us, and let nothing gross and of the earth”—from the next bench came a resounding smack of two mouths placed together—“let nothing of the earth come near. So you will be my Cosimo, and I your Amory. Isn’t that the higher and the better way?”
“Oh, but, Amory, it’s so hard! You know you’ve often said yourself that the physical relation has its proper place! How—how would the world go on without it?”
“The world, Cosimo, goes on by the progress of ideas. Ideas can be in a sense our children, yours and mine. And these are born of no contact but the contact of the mingling spirits. I will write to you quite frequently—after a time, when I have forgotten a little; I will write such letters as you’d never, never receive from anybody else! And perhaps, after a number of years, we could meet again. When it was safer. I couldn’t meet you until it was safe, and I must leave you now. Don’t come with me, dear friend. I am not really going away; only the mortal part of me; everything else is yours, Cosimo. Good night——”
“Amory! Amory!”
“Don’t make it harder, dearest thought—you are thought of my thought——”
Cosimo sat still.
“Must that be all, Amory?”
“Is it so little? Oh, you don’t know! Have you forgotten what I told you about the Antinöus? You are all that to me!”
“Then——” Cosimo supplicated, his arms outstretched; but Amory turned away her head.
“Ah no! You mean I kissed the Antinöus. But I daren’t kiss you, my Shropshire Lad; I might fail utterly. And it would be no good your trying to kiss me; you’d hold my corporeal part for a moment, but think of all you’d lose! Would it be worth while, Cosimo?” She smiled, benign as a star, down on him. “Would it?”
How could he say Yes? How, on the other hand, could he say No? He was between the highest she had ever taught him, and that common, blissful lethargy of the huddle on the neighbouring seat. Thus two Principles run through that multicoloured pattern of the world’s web. It is a Law. Cosimo saw that it was a Law. He also saw that it was a hard one.
Suddenly he did the most sensible thing he could have done. He rose.
“Well, I’ll walk along with you as far as your place,” he said wearily. “I suppose I may do that?”
“Yes,” said Amory. She would not have had the heart to refuse him so little. They walked in silence, and stopped before the greengrocer’s entry.
“Mayn’t I come up?” Cosimo asked.
“No.”
“Oh, Amory! You can’t mean never again?”
“Never again, I think, Cosimo. I’m going up to think, and to gather my things together. I shall leave to-morrow or the day after.”
An “Oh!” broke from Cosimo’s lips. So might a prisoner failingly exclaim who, having known that he must die at sunrise, should be ordered forth from his cell before the stars had begun to pale.
“Good night—and good-bye,” said Amory, smiling bravely as she held out her little hand.
“Oh!... Not like this! Amory, I can’t bear it!”
“It must be borne. I see now that this had to come. I don’t say you may not see me just once more.”
Even at that Cosimo caught eagerly. “When? To-morrow?”
“No, not to-morrow; I shall be packing. Nor the day after; I shall be busy with the ‘Barrage’ Committee. I’ll write to you, Cosimo.”
“Write!”
“Do you get many letters such as I should write to you?” she asked gently. “I’ll write, Cosimo; perhaps you may see me once or twice more.”
“Oh,” Cosimo groaned, “however shall I get through the time!”
The years they had spent together now seemed as nothing compared with these last eternal days before the new order, whatever it was to be, should begin.