Read Ebook: Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage by Onions Oliver

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ave 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 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.

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?"

"Then who did you suppose they'd been talking about?" she asked, staring.

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.

"Oh, Amory!" Cosimo reproached her; but he fidgeted uneasily. Perhaps he had suddenly remembered Pattie Wynn-Jenkins.

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 Antin?us. 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.

"Can't!--It must!"

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 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.

"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.

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 , that the hills and the towers 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 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.

"I see; like winnings," said Mr. Wellcome. "Well, and Cos here's been touching too from all I hear." He winked slowly.

But Mr. Wellcome only guffawed.

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.

"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 , 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....

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 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 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.

"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.

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