A Crooked Mile Part 14

She had not seen Amory since that day when the episode of the winter woollies had made her angry, for, though Amory had called once at the Nursing Home soon after the birth of the third Bit, Dorothy had really not felt equal to the hair-raising tale of the twins all over again, and had sent a message down to her by the nurse. There was this difference between this tragic recital of Amory's and the fervour with which Ruth Mossop always hugged to her breast the thought of the worst that could happen--that Ruth _had_ known brutality, and so might be forgiven for getting "a little of her own back"; but Amory had known one hardish twelvemonths perhaps, a good many years ago and when she had been quite able to bear it, and had since magnified that period of discomfort by a good many diameters. Amory, Dorothy considered, didn't really know she was born. She was unfeignedly sorry for that. Whatever measure of contempt was in her she kept for Cosimo.

For she considered that Cosimo was at the bottom of all the trouble. If Stan, at his most impecunious and happy-go-lucky, could still stalk about the house saying "Dot, I won't have this," or "Look here, Dorothy, that has got to stop," it seemed to her that Cosimo, with never a care on his mind that was not his own manufacture, might several times have prevented Amory from making rather a fool of herself. But it seemed to Dorothy that kind of man was springing up all over the place nowadays.

Mr. Brimby was another of them. Dorothy had read one of Mr. Brimby's books--"_The Source_," and hadn't liked it. She had thought it terribly dismal. In it a pretty and rich young widow, who might almost have been Amory herself, went slumming, and spent a lot of money in starting a sort of Model p.a.w.n Shop, and by and by there came a mysterious falling-off in her income, and she went to see her lawyer about it, and learned, of course, that her source of income was that very slum in which she had stooped to labour so angelically.... Dorothy didn't know very much about p.a.w.nshops, but then she didn't believe that Mr. Brimby did either; and if her interest in them ever should become really keen, she didn't think she should go to Oxford for information about them. And Mr. Brimby himself seemed to feel this "crab," as Stan would have called it, for after "_The Source_" he had written a Preface for a book by a real and genuine tramp.... And it had been Amory who had recommended "_The Source_" to Dorothy. She had said that it just showed, that with vision and thought and heart and no previous experience ("no prejudice"

had been her exact words), there need be none of these dreadful grimy establishments, with their horrible underbred a.s.sistants who refused a poor woman half a crown on her mattress and made a joke about it, but airy and hygienic rooms instead, with rounded corners so that the dust could be swept away in two minutes (leaving a balance of at least twenty-eight minutes in which the sweeper might improve himself), and really courtly-mannered attendants, full of half crowns and pity and Oxford voice, who would give everybody twice as much as they asked for and a tear into the bargain.

And Amory knew just as much about real p.a.w.nshops as did Dorothy and Mr.

Brimby.

For the life of her Dorothy could not make out what all these people were up to.

And--though this was better now that Stan was earning--the thought of the money that was being squandered at The Witan had sometimes made her ready to cry. For at the Nursing Home she had had one other visitor, and this visitor had opened her eyes to the appalling rate at which Cosimo's inheritance must be going. This visitor had been Katie Deedes. Katie too, was an old fellow-student of Dorothy's; it had not taken Dorothy long to see that Katie was full of a grievance; and then it had all come out. There had been some sort of a row. It had been simply and solely because Katie ran a Food Shop. Amory thought that _infra dig_. And just because Katie had given the children a few chestnuts Amory had practically said so.

"_I_ shan't go there again," Katie had said, trying on Dorothy's account to keep down her tears. "_I_ didn't marry a man with lots of money, and turn him round my finger, and make him write my _Life and Works_, and then snub my old friends! And none of the people who go there are really what she thinks they are. _She_ thinks they go to see _her_, but Mr.

Brimby only goes because d.i.c.kie does, and because he wants to sell the 'Novum' something or other, and Mr. Strong of course has to go, and Mr.

Wilkinson goes because he wants Cosimo to stop the 'Novum' and start something else with him as editor, and Laura goes because they get things printed about Walter's Lectures, and I don't know what those Indians are doing there at all, and anyway _I've_ been for the last time! I'm just as good as she is, and I should like to come and see you instead, Dorothy, and of course I won't bring your babies chestnuts if you don't want.... But I'm frightfully selfish; I'm tiring you out....

May an A B C girl come to see you?"

And Katie had since been. There is no social reason why the manager of a Vegetarian Restaurant may not visit the house of a film acrobat.

As it happened, Katie came in that very night when the weary breadwinner was painstakingly explaining to his thoughtful spouse his reasons for doubting whether he would ever have got very rich had he remained one of Fortune and Brooks' well-dressed drummers. Katie had a round face and puzzled but affectionate eyes, and Stan was just beginning to school his own eyes not to rest with too open an interest on her Greenaway frocks and pancake hats. Katie for her part was intensely self-conscious in Stan's presence. She felt that when he wasn't looking at her clothes he was, expressly, _not_-looking at them, and that was worse.... But she couldn't have worn a hobble skirt and an aigrette at the "Eden."... Stan had told Dorothy that when he knew Katie better he intended to get out of her the remaining gruesome and Blue-Beard's-Chamber details which the hoof and the forequarter seemed to him to promise.

"Poor little darlings!" Dorothy exclaimed compa.s.sionately by and by--Katie had been relating some anecdote in which Corin and Bonniebell had played a part. "I _do_ think it's wrong to dress children ridiculously! The other day _I_ saw a little girl--she must have been quite six or seven--and _she'd_ knickers like a little boy, and long golden hair all down her back! What _is_ the good of pretending that girls are boys?"

"Awful rot," Stan remarked with a mighty stretch. "I say, I'm off to bed; I shall be yawning in Miss Deedes' face if I don't. Is there any arnica in the house, Dot?... Good night----"

"Good night," said Katie; and as the door closed behind the master of the house she settled more comfortably in her chair. "Now that he's stopped not-looking at me we can have a good talk," her gesture seemed to say; "how _does_ he expect I can get any other clothes till I've saved the money?"...

They did talk. They talked of the old days at the McGrath, and who'd married who, and who hadn't married who after all, and, in this connection, of Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, whom they had both known.... And it just showed how little glory and fame were really worth in the world. For Dorothy, who had been living in London all this time, had not heard as much as a whisper of that memorable revolt of the Wyrons against the Marriage Service, and, though she did know vaguely that Walter lectured, had not the ghost of an idea of what his lectures were about. She had been too busy minding her own petty and private and selfish affairs. Katie couldn't believe it. She thought Dorothy was joking.

"You've never heard of Walter's Lecture on '_Heads or Tails in the Trying Time_,' nor his '_Address on the Chromosome_'?" she gasped....

"No; do tell me. What is a Chromosome?"

"A Chromosome? Why, it's a--it's a--well, you know when you've a cell--or a nucleus--or a gland or something--but it isn't a gland--it's the--but you _do_ astonish me, Dorothy!"

"But surely you're joking about Walter and Laura?" Dorothy exclaimed in her turn.

"Indeed I'm not! Why, I thought _every_body knew!..."

"(It's all right--he won't come in again). But _why_ did they pretend not to be married?" Dorothy asked in amazement.

"I don't know--I mean I forget for the moment--it seemed perfectly clear the way Walter explained it--you ought to go and hear him----"

"But what difference could being married--I mean not being married--make?"

"Ah!" said Katie, with satisfaction at having found her bearings again.

"Walter's got a whole Lecture on that. It always thrills everybody.

Amory thinks it's almost his best--after the '_Synthetic Protoplasm_'

one, of course--that's admitted by everybody to be quite _the_ best!"[1]

"Proto ... but I thought those were a kind of oats!" said poor Dorothy, utterly bewildered.

"Oats!" cried Katie in a sort of whispered shriek. "Why, it's--it's--but I don't know even how to _begin_ to explain it! Do you mean to say you haven't read about these things?"

"No," murmured Dorothy, abashed.

"Not Monod, nor Ellen Key, nor Sebastien Faure, nor Malom!----"

"N-o." Dorothy felt horribly ashamed of herself.

"But--but--those _lovely_ little boys of yours!----"

She gazed wide-eyed at the disconcerted Dorothy....

It was the humiliating truth: Dorothy had never heard of the existence of a single one of these writers and leaders of thought. She had borne Noel in black ignorance of what they had had to say about the Torch of the Race, and Jackie and the third Bit for all the world as if they had never set pen to paper. Monod had not held her hand, nor Faure been asked for his imprimatur; Key had hymned Love superfluously, and the Synthesists, equally superfluously, its supersession. For a moment she anxiously hoped that it was all right, and then, as Katie went on, the marvel of it all overwhelmed her again.

The dictum that desirable children could be born only _out_ of wedlock!

That stupendous suggestion of Walter's to millionaires who did not know what to do with their money, that, for the improvement of the Race, they should endow with a thousand pounds every poor little come-by-chance that weighed eleven pounds at birth! That other proposal, that twenty years could straightway be added to woman's life and beauty by a mere influencing of her thoughts about the Chromosome--whatever it was!...

Poor uncultured Dorothy did not know whether she was on her head or her heels. She had never dreamed, until Katie told her, that before marrying Stan she ought to have gone to the insect-world, or to the world of molluscs and crustacae, to learn how _they_ maintained the integrity of their own highest type--whether by pulling their wings off after the flight, or devouring their husbands, or--or--or what! She had heard of the moral lessons that can be learned of the ant, but it had not struck her that she and Stan might, by means of a little more study and care, have lifted up the economy of their little flat to the level of the marvellously-organized domesticity you see when you kick over a stone.

But Katie's hesitations and great gaps of confessed ignorance gave her a little more courage. Katie was at pains to explain that all that she herself knew about it all was that these things were what they _said_, and Dorothy must go to Walter and the books for the rest.

"They're all very expensive books, and I may not really have understood them," she said wistfully. "They must be awfully deep and so on if they're so dear--twelve and fifteen and twenty s.h.i.+llings! But I did try so hard, and sometimes it seemed quite reasonable and plain, especially when the print was nice and big.... Close print always seems so frightfully learned.... And I know I've explained it badly; I haven't Walter's gift of putting things. Amory has, of course. When she and Walter have a really good set-to it makes one feel positively _abject_ about one's ignorance. I doubt if Cosimo can always _quite_ follow them, and I'm quite sure Mr. Strong can't--I know he's only hedging when he says, 'Ah, yes, have you read Fabre on the Ant or Maeterlinck on the Bee?'--and I believe he just glances at the review books that come to the 'Novum' instead of really studying them, as Walter and Amory do. And it's very funny about Mr. Strong," she rattled artlessly on. "Sometimes I've thought that it isn't just that Amory doesn't know what they all go to The Witan for, but that everybody else _does_ know. They all seem to want it to themselves. Of course if Mr. Wilkinson wants Cosimo to stop the 'Novum,' and to start something else for him, it's only natural that he and Mr. Strong should be a little jealous of one another; but d.i.c.kie and Mr. Brimby are jealous of the Wyrons, and I suppose I was jealous of d.i.c.kie too--and everybody seems jealous of everybody, and Amory of Cosimo, and Amory's always interfering between Britomart Belchamber and the twins' lessons, and that _can't_ be a very good thing for discipline, but Britomart's like me in being rather stupid, and I wish I'd her screw--she gets nearly twice as much as I do. The only people who don't seem jealous of anybody are those Indians. They're _always_ affable. I suppose it's rather nice for them, so far from their own country, having a house to go to...."

But here Dorothy's humility and self-distrust ended. The moment it came to India, she shared her aunt's deplorable narrow-mindedness and propensity to make a virtue of her intolerance. It seemed to her that it was one thing for the Tims and Tonys, in India, to have to employ a native interpreter (and to be pretty severely rooked by him) when they had their Urdu Higher Proficiency to pa.s.s, but quite another for these same natives to come over here, and to learn our law and language, and our excellent national professions, and our somewhat mitigated ways of living up to them. No, she was not one whit better than her hide-bound old aunt, and she did not intend to have too practical a brotherly love taught at that meditated foundation at the Brear....

She became silent as she thought of that foundation again, and presently Katie rose.

"I suppose I couldn't see him in his cot?" she said wistfully.

Dorothy smiled. Katie meant the youngest Bit.

"Well ... I'm afraid he's in _our_ room, you see ...," she said.

Katie had been thinking of The Witan. She coloured a little.

"Sorry," she murmured; and then she broke out emphatically.

"I _like_ coming to see you, Dorothy. I don't feel so--such a _fool_ when I'm with you.... And do tell me where you got that frock, and how much it was; I _must_ have another one as soon as I can raise the money!

I do wish I could make what Britomart Belchamber makes! Two-twenty a year! Think of that!... But of course Prince Eadmond teachers do come expensive----"

More and more it was coming to seem to Dorothy that the whole thing was terrifically expensive.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] I have been charged with the invention of these facetiae. Here is the Synthetic Protoplasm idea:--