Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage

Dorothy stuck it on. If Stan got his game of polo once in a while he must have just as good ponies as anybody else’s...

And so, you know, in the beginning of the June of that year the famous Wedding Week opened. You do not need to dig deep into your newspaper files in order to read all about it and to remember how, for brilliance and festivity and renown, for crowds and mirth and family gatherings and thundering good business, it by far outdistanced any mere Shopping Week that had ever been held in this island realm. It caught on instantaneously. London talked of nothing else. From eleven o’clock to four daily, Oxford Street was blocked. Folk stood up to watch from the standing buses; streams of traffic were diverted into the side streets; it took you half an hour to walk on foot from Oxford Circus to Tottenham Court Road, and high across the street, all pale blue and silver and white, Hallowell’s swinging banner, “OUR WEDDING WEEK,” flapped and fluttered in the spring wind. And the evening papers reserved special columns for the daily doings. Press-photographers snapped; descriptive reporting soared; ponderously playful editorials gave the Wedding Week their imprimatur; comedians made it the theme of their choicest “gags.” The Daily Speculum rose to a million a day on the strength of its photographs of bridal-parties alone. There were rumours of a Manchester Wedding Week. One couple journeyed all the way from Stornoway to be married by Special Licence and to breakfast at Hallowells’; another couple came from the Potteries. In both these cases Hallowells’ handsomely paid for the railway-tickets also. Newly-made husbands and wives were interviewed as they signed the large Bridal Book; they bore testimony that the champagne was excellent, the wedding-cakes not made of plaster of Paris, and that there were absolutely no gratuities whatever. Hallowells’ defiantly invited investigation on these points. They issued a public challenge to anybody who could prove that they were not doing all they had undertaken to do. Especially they drove it home that any genuine bride or bridegroom or member of their party might drink just as much champagne as ever he or she wished. Doubts, they said, had been cast upon their bona fides, and they considered that they owed it to themselves to set themselves right with the public. And surely you could not blame them.

And inside the great domed Central Hall was the sight of a lifetime. The large twenty-four-hours’ clock was embowered with cherubs’ heads so that it almost resembled the picture by Reynolds, and quivers and darts and nuptial torches, big and little, were arranged in trophies everywhere. A real sculptor had been commissioned to model the figure of Hymen that stood in the middle of the hall, and at or in among the fifty tables the wedding-parties sat or moved. Ordinarily the parties were limited to a dozen; special notice had to be given of larger parties; but the mirth those dozens made!... Party succeeded party while the chairs were yet warm; as one party ate its fruit those who waited for the vacated chairs stood so close behind them that they also might almost have bitten of the same banana or apple or pear. The room that is now the world-famed Juperies was the reception-room; there those who did not breakfast joined their friends who did; and the Umbrella Department was turned into a smoking-room for the men. And in they came, party after party, to Hallowells’ to breakfast. Cheers went up from those whom Hallowells’ carriages passed in the streets. An amber-yellow, the same yellow in which their parcels are now done up, was Hallowells’ chosen colour; flowers of that colour filled the carriage lamps, rosettes of that colour were tied to the drivers’ whips. The souvenirs and favours were tied with ribbons of that colour, and confetti of that colour (unless not desired) was thrown at the parties that descended from Hallowells’ vestibule to Oxford Street; this confetti thinned gradually out on the pavements for a quarter of a mile either way, east and west. And every bride and bridegroom who breakfasted was made to enter the great Floral Bell, and to take, from the shelves that lined the structure, the parcel of souvenirs for the party. Two Cupids kept the flap-doors of the Bell. They shot harmless darts at Hallowells’ guests. Sometimes these darts had serpentins of coloured paper (amber yellow) attached to them; sometimes they had whistles. These last, as they flew through the air, made a noise like swallows.

And the parties themselves!... Arthur and Miss Umpleby were among the first to breakfast and then, to the strains of the Wedding March from the string band, to take their souvenirs from the Bell; but on the following day Mr. Nolan, of the Satteens, took Miss Feather, of the Fancies Counters, to have and to hold, and the whole of those two Departments took tea in relays in the room where Sir Walter spread the Cloak, and Mr. Miller himself presided at the tea, and gave Mr. Nolan an advance of salary, and the reporters, too, joined in the applause that greeted the announcement. Mr. Miller would have given his ears to have dared to suggest to Dorothy that she and Mr. Stanhope, Lady Tasker’s nephew and niece, should eat their cake and enter the Bell along with the others; but though he guessed an understanding to exist, he knew no more than that, and in the end funked it. Moreover, to his chagrin, he was losing Mr. Stanhope. His swellest Marshal of all had handed in his paper. In vain had Mr. Miller offered to confer on him the title of Field-Marshal; Stan had told him that he really didn’t feel up to the job, and had refused to reconsider his decision. But that drop of mortification was as nothing in the buckets and buckets of good business the Wedding Week was doing. If Stan was leaving, there was still Sir Walter, and a daily drilling of Marshals for an hour before that inspiring picture might be expected to work wonders. They had really performed very creditably at the Nolan-Feather wedding-tea, and a touch here and there of the easy negligence Dorothy had used when she had introduced him to Lady Tasker in the simple words, “Mr. Miller,” should presently give their deportment its consummation and crown.

Thus, from a hundred churches, east and west and south and north, the newly joined couples came to Hallowells’ to make merry with their friends. They came from Fulham and Wimbledon, from Kilburn and Epping, from Finchley and Streatham and Woolwich and Denmark Hill; and the hinges of the Bell wore loose with much work, and parcels’ delivery vans took the cakes away in great loads each evening, and the strains of the Wedding Marches never ceased, and enough champagne was opened to have converted the great silver-and-white Central Hall into a swimming-bath. And besides the wedding parties, sightseers came also. One of these came daily, occupying a chair under the garlanded and cherubimed twenty-four-hours’ clock. His eyes were agog; sometimes, as one in a dream, he half rose from his chair, grasped the hand of some passing bride or bridegroom, murmured something unintelligible, and sat down again, once more watching in a sort of stupid ecstasy. He was Mr. Wellcome.... And Walter Wyron came with Laura Beamish, and they clutched one another, and, both speaking at once, said that Amory and Cosimo must on no account miss this, and Walter sent Cosimo a postcard that very night. Amory and Cosimo came on the morrow, but missed Walter and Laura in the crush, and retired to a sort of recess on the second floor, past which the lift-well ascended. There, sitting down on a narrow padded bench without a back, they talked. Cosimo had all but won Amory. Only a few points remained on which it was necessary that their understanding should be quite clear.

“You see, Cosimo,” Amory explained earnestly, while the noisy parties went up and down in the lift, “in one sense two rational beings have hardly the right to marry at all as long as the Divorce Laws are in their present chaotic condition. Even a Judicial Separation places a quite unjust stigma on the woman, and the Restitution Decree has become a mere formal step to Divorce itself. There’s absolutely no Equality in the contract. As Equity it’s a farce from beginning to end. I’m not sure that the wisest thing to do wouldn’t be to wait until the Law is altered. I want that one-sided plea of cruelty done away with, or else made the same for both. It’s anomalous—it belongs to the Stone Age.”

“I quite agree,” said Cosimo slowly. “But we have our private arrangement about that. It’s quite understood that if it isn’t a success we each go our own way. You’re to be as free as I am, Amory. I’ve no right to choose your friends for you, male or female. If things come to the worst, I fancy I’m not altogether without a sense of fairness and rationalness and philosophy. So our eyes are quite open.”

Amory mused. “It’s a risk for all that,” she murmured. “There may be all sorts of things about both of us that neither of us knows. In a sense, we’re complete strangers.”

“Then,” Cosimo urged, “let us be brave and take it. There’s very little doubt that they’ll reform those ridiculous laws before long. They’re bound to. With the spread of Democracy cheaper Divorce is inevitable; and when it becomes quite common much of the stigma you speak of will disappear. Look here: I’ve an idea!... Why shouldn’t we start a sort of private Insurance against not getting on together—put away a sum each year for the contingency, so that the expenses of Divorce would be met out of a fund? We could arrange some means of drawing on it, too, in case we decided to live apart. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”

“Ye-es,” said Amory slowly. “Ye-es. It’s certainly a Law, I should say, that the only real way of keeping people together is to leave them perfectly free to separate whenever they like. The day of force, whether physical or legal, is over. That’s what makes all that downstairs so exquisitely funny. They think that the way to bind yourself is to tie yourself fast! So of course it’s our duty to dissociate ourselves as far as ever we can from all that.... Isn’t it nearly time ’Orris and Jellies were here?”...

“Oh, they aren’t due for half an hour yet. Now about Incompatibility, Amory——”

And their love-making went on.

The remark about ’Orris and Jellies had to do with their dissociation from the semi-communal feasting that was going on in the Central Hall. It had been Amory’s idea that this dissociation would be more complete if ’Orris and Jellies also feasted with the rest of the world, and the joke had been cheap at the cost of the qualifying purchase at Hallowells’ of Jellies’ wedding-veil. So ’Orris, Jellies, Mrs. ’Ill, a woman who lent a hand at the Creek sometimes, together with one or two friends, had been told off to a table midway between Hymen and the Bell. Amory and Cosimo intended to watch from the gallery. They still regarded the world and its happenings much as they might have regarded a stereoscope, to be taken up for a few minutes when they found themselves in the humour for it, and put down again when it no longer amused them; and if Dorothy did not like the presence of this particular party at Hallowells’, that could only be because Dorothy was a snob.

So Amory and Cosimo, presently descending by the lift again, watched Jellies’ nuptial party from the balcony, and went on to discuss their own affairs again. They would be married—unless even yet they amicably agreed that it would be best that they should not marry—at a Registry Office; and if they did happen to feel hungry afterwards (certainly not unless) they would go to the Lettuce Grill. The noise that came up from the vast oval below was no doubt a mere reaction from the false religiosity in the church an hour or so before, and champagne certainly heated the blood. Amory drank nothing at meals, Cosimo only barley-water. Jellies’ husband, as they could see from where they leaned over the rail, was already a little drunk on champagne; there was no doubt whatever that he would presently be quite drunk on beer. And these were the people to whom England looked for a eugenically begotten race! Black eyes were in front of Jellies, and intervals of returning to her mother when ’Orris happened to be “in,” and a shamefully large family, and work at the Jelly Factory as before, and very little prospect indeed of ever having either the money or the initiative to obtain a Divorce. It made Amory sad....

And as she stood, with Cosimo by her side, looking down on the laughing, moving crowd below, she thought of a picture that should move the best women and men of her land as even “Barrage” had not moved them. It was this:—

She would take a large canvas, and would rough out upon it that very oval down on which she now looked. And she would fill it with figures, even as it was filled with figures now. But they should not be giggling, guffawing, gesticulating figures such as these, uttering the inanities about lifelong happiness that they themselves knew to be untrue, and filling and refilling their glasses with the blood-heating champagne. No. They should be the enlightened men and women of To-morrow; rational, responsible, of a nobler-moulded flesh and a more ardent spirit; they should average about nine heads high. And their eyes should be centred, not on their own selfish and private parties, but on the figure in the centre of the room that she would put where that absurd Hymen now stood. This figure should be symbolic, colossal, twenty-five heads high. It should represent the Earthly Authority of the marriage-contract. Its feet should be set upon broken figures, each one of which should typify some marriage-form of the past—hedge-priests, broomstick-weddings, handfastings, morganatic unions, savage rites (from Primitive Culture), ecclesiastical rites, even the Registry Office; and the fragments of such pagan emblems as hearts and torches and Cupids and bells should appear all about it. And in her right hand the figure should bear, as it were, a crystal with a flame in it, which should be Marriage, and in her left another crystal with a flame in it, no less perfect, no less honourable, which should be Divorce. And these she should offer to the Children of the Morrow together, both at the same time. Either should be the warranty of the other, as the olive-branch justifies the sword, the sword maintains the olive-branch. So should that figure be set up. And benignly brooding over all, exactly where she and Cosimo now stood, should be two larger and vaguer shapes, rather difficult to do, but probably to be achieved by scraping and scumbling and pumice. These should symbolize the Divine Sanction. Soft and reassuring rays should shoot from their angelic eyes and rest upon the Earthly figure below; this should turn up its glad gaze to receive the rays. In one sense, it was true, Amory did not approve of this paraphernalia of angel-shapes, but merely as emblems they might prove serviceable. They were prejudices that must be accepted pro tem. Though she dreamed of To-morrow, she must paint her picture in terms of To-day.

Rapidly and earnestly she began to describe the picture to Cosimo....

“Oh! By Jove, Amory——” he breathed, wellnigh breathless before the daring of her genius.

“And those two wonderful shapes, just here, exactly where we are.”...

“Looking down and comprehending everything——”

“Oh—like you, Amory!”

“Like you, too, Cosimo—for, if you don’t actually paint the picture, you help in other ways——”

“Shall I, Amory,” he breathed—“shall I always be there to help in those other ways?”

Her eyelids fluttered and dropped.

“You do understand me as nobody else does.”...

“I do—I do—I’m sure I do——”

“And you understand, too, that there’s always that other kiss—the kiss of the Antinöus——”

“It shall be our picture, Amory—all three of us,” he said, with ardour.

“I hope we’re not acting in haste, Cosimo.”

“I’m quite sure we’re not. Oh, let it be soon, Amory!”

He had put his hand on her arm, but she drew a little away.

“Don’t touch me just yet, Cosimo, please,” she asked him.

“No—I beg your pardon,” he said humbly. “I know that in a sense you aren’t here—you’re creating. By Jove, it is wonderful!”

He would have felt unworthy of her had he wanted to kiss her just then.

And, down below them, Jellies and her party rose, and a Marshal made a signal, and the conductor gave a couple of taps with his baton, and the bored musicians reached for their instruments, and their eyes rested sullenly on the tip of the poised stick....

“Hooray—let ’er go!” ’Orris roared huskily....

And once more the Wedding March broke forth.

END OF BOOK ONE

ENTR’ ACTE

“No? Well, one of your old students seemed to be making quite a stir in it not so long ago—that girl who painted ‘Barrage’—what’s her name—Miss Towers, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Amory Towers. A small red-haired girl. I fancy I pointed her out to you once. She was married a year or so ago; married another of our students. Pratt, his name was.”

“Then she’s in the world now, at any rate.”

“Think so? I very much doubt it. Of course she is, in one sense; I can’t deny that; but this is what I mean: There’s too much paper in their lives. They read too much. Draw too much. Especially reading. Lord, the books they get hold of! Weeks and months together I’ve heard ’em: Myers says this, and Galton says that, and Tolstoi says the other; and they make up a sort of world out of all that, and think it’s the real one, or is soon going to be, and they live in it, and go on living in it, and never get out of it. I hope I’ve heard the last of Myers and Galton and Tolstoi.”

“But—my good chap!”

Jowett glared. “Well?”

“Well!”

“You mean these are the great men? Well, I’m not a great man myself, so what does it matter to me? And what does it matter to those infants? Oh, it’s all in the old Greek tag: ‘A great book is a great evil.’... You’re laughing; look here: I’ll tell you the kind of thing that used to happen half a dozen times a day. I used to set these boys and girls to draw a simple object—simple, but more than they could do, for all that, or ever would be able to do; it all depends on how much you see in a simple object. And I’d even show ’em how to do it—for there are one or two simple things I really know and can do myself. Well, presently I’d look up, and there would be sweet seventeen, giving me a pitying sort of smile. I’d ask her what she was smiling at, and then she’d coo, ‘Oh, but Degas didn’t draw like that!’—or Beardsley, or the newest man from Montmartre (but the chances were it was somebody rather corrupt). ‘But you don’t happen to be his pupil just at this moment,’ I’d say.... Anyhow, the point is, that an adorable young female person, or a decent young fellow for that matter, with no more use for an idea than I have for Moses’ Rod, would throw one of these names at my head as soon as look at me. And the bigger the duffer the bigger the name: get that well into your head: that was unvarying. They used to think it was a joke when I asked them, whether they could make an omelette—of course, I really meant make a baby’s shirt and contrive to get a baby inside it, but I couldn’t exactly say that, so I used to say ‘omelette’ very slowly and distinctly, and look hard at ’em.... A baby? If I had said it, another piece of paper would have come in. They wouldn’t have been able to get a baby until they’d seen what Strindberg or Nietzsche or somebody had to say about it first! And even if they did manage it, then there’d be more paper—systematics—newest methods of this and that and the other—lectures on proteids before they dared to feed it—paper, paper, paper—I know—I’ve had twenty-three years of it——”

His friend twinkled. “Has the little red-haired girl any family yet?” he asked.

“I don’t know; but”—something like a twinkle flickered for a moment under Jowett’s shaggy brows also—“perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps Pratt knows at least one little bit about Life by this time. One of the girls there used to sing some song or other, I remember—something about—

and I shouldn’t be surprised—I don’t know, of course, but at a guess——”

“Oh?... You mean she’ll be likely to be jealous?”

“Well, I fancy she’ll have him safe under her pretty little thumb. I suppose there’s nothing new about the whole thing really—same old twig, same old lime, same old bird. But a vast deal more paper—I still stick to that.”

Jowett’s friend twinkled again. “I know what’s the matter with you and me,” he chuckled. “We’re both on the wrong side of five-and-forty. That’s all that’s the matter with us.”

Jowett had been muttering within his shaggy moustache some extempore Litany or other; his friend caught the words, “From all young women who talk paper with their hair down—From all young men who think the New Woman isn’t just the same as the Old one—And from all day-nurseries for the children of the well-to-do middle classes——” He stopped short.

“Think so?” he said. “You think that’s it? Perhaps you’re right.... Well, it’s not my habit, but suppose—if it was only for the sake of the name——”

He indicated an establishment with large hanging lamps——

And they entered the Adam and Eve.

BOOK TWO
A VERY MODERN MARRIAGE

PART I

I
THE WITAN

Only from the policeman outside Highgate Station did she learn that she must either take the Tube back again to Camden Town or else walk across the Heath.

Now Lady Tasker was seventy, and, with the exception of the Zoo, a place she visited from time to time with troops of turbulent great-nephews, the whole of North London was a sort of Camden Town to her, that is to say, she had no objection to its existence so long as it wasn’t troublesome. It was half-past three when she said as much to the Highgate policeman, who up to that time had been an ordinary easy-going Conservative; by five-and-twenty minutes to four she had made of him a fuming Radical. He was saying something about South Square and Merton Lane. Lady Tasker addressed the bracing Highgate air in one of those expressionless and semi-ventriloquial asides that, especially in a mixed company, always made her ladyship very well worth sitting next to.

“Merton Lane! Does the man suppose that conveys anything to me?... I want to know how to get to Hampstead, not the names of the objects of interest on the way!”

The newly-made Radical told her that there might be a taxi on the rank, and turned away to cuff the ears of an urchin who was tampering with an automatic machine. It was a wonder that Lady Tasker’s glare, focussed through the gold-rimmed glass on a point between his shoulder-blades, did not burn a hole in his tunic.

Taxis at eightpence a mile, indeed, with the house at Ludlow already full of those children of Churchill’s, and three of Tony’s little girls eating their way through the larder in Cromwell Gardens, and young Tommy, Emily’s boy, who had just “pulled” his captaincy, arriving at Southampton in the “Seringapatam” on Saturday with another batch for her to take under her wing! Did people suppose she was made of money?...

The policeman’s tunic was just beginning to scorch when Lady Tasker, dropping the glass, turned away and set out for Hampstead on foot.

She might very well have been excused had she omitted to return Mrs. Cosimo Pratt’s call. Indeed she had vowed that very morning that nothing should drag her up to Hampstead that day. But for twenty times that Lady Tasker said “I will not,” nineteen she repented and went, taking out the small change of her magnanimity when she got there. And after all, she would be killing two birds with one stone, for her niece Dorothy also lived somewhere in this northern Great Karroo, and unless she got these things over before the “Seringapatam” dropped anchor on Saturday there was no knowing when next she would have an hour to call her own. As she turned (after a brush with a second policeman, who summed her up quite wrongly on the strength of her antiquated pelisse and trailing old Victorian hat) down Merton Lane to the ponds, she told herself again that she was a foolish old woman to have come at all.

For the Cosimo Pratts were not bosom friends of hers. True, they had been, until six months ago, her neighbours at Ludlow, and for that matter she had known young Cosimo’s people for the greater part of her life: but she had not forgotten the hearty blackguarding the young couple had got, any time this last two years, from the rest of the country-side. Small wonder. What else did they expect, after the way in which they had made farm-labour too big for its jacket and beaters hardly to be had for love or money? Not that Lady Tasker herself had seen very much of their antics. Great-nieces and nephews had kept her too busy for that, and she was moreover wise enough not to believe all she heard. And even were it true, that, she now told herself, had been in the country. They would have to behave differently now that they had let the Shropshire house and had come to live in town. They could hardly dance barefoot round a maypole in Hampstead, or stage-manage the yearly Hiring-Fair for the sake of the “Daily Speculum” photographer (as they had done in Ludlow), or group themselves picturesquely about the feet of the oldest inhabitant while that shocking old reprobate with the splendid head recited (at five shillings an hour) the stories of old, unhappy, far-off things he had learned by heart from the booklets they had printed at the Village Press. No: in London they would almost certainly have to do as other people did, and Shropshire, after its three years of social and artistic awakening, would no doubt forget all about the æsthetic revival and would sink back into a well-earned rest.

It was a Thursday afternoon in September, warm for the time of the year, and a half-day closing for the shops. Had Lady Tasker remembered the half-holiday she certainly would not have come. She hated crowds, and, if you would believe her, had no illusions whatever about the sanctity of our common nature and the brotherhood of man. She would tell you roundly that there was far too much aimless good-nature in the world, and that every sob wasted over a sinner was something taken away from the man who, if he was a sinner too, had at least the decency to keep up appearances. And so much for brotherhood. Great-nephewship, of course, was another matter. Somebody had to look after all those youngsters, and if her sister Eliza, the one at Spurrs, went into a tantrum about every bud that was picked in the gardens and every chair-leg that was an inch out of its place in the house, so much the worse for Lady Tasker, who must walk because she had something else to do with her money than to waste it on taxis.

She had been told by her niece Dorothy to look out for a clump of tall willows and an ivied chimney; that was where the Pratts lived; but Dorothy had spoken of the approach from the Hampstead side, not from Highgate way. Lady Tasker got lost. She was almost dropping for want of a cup of tea, and the Heath seemed all willows, and all the wrong ones. No policeman, Radical or Conservative, was to be seen. Walking across an apparently empty space, well away (as she thought) from a horde of shouting boys, the old lady suddenly found herself enveloped in a game of football. This completed her exhaustion. Near by, one of Messrs. Libertys’ carts was ascending a steep road at a slow walk; somehow or other Lady Tasker managed to get her hand on the tail of it; and the car gave her a tow. She was seventy after all.

As it happened, that was her first piece of luck in a luckless afternoon. The cart drew off to the left; Lady Tasker trailed after it; and suddenly it stopped before a high privet hedge with a closed green door in the middle of it. Lady Tasker did not look for the ivied chimney. On the door was painted in white letters “The Witan.” She was where she wanted to be.

Ordinarily Lady Tasker would have approved of the height of the privet hedge, which was seven or eight feet; that was a nice, reassuring, anti-social height for a hedge; but as it was she could not even put up her hand to the bell. The carter rang it for the pair of them. Over the hedge came the low murmur of voices and the clink of cups and saucers, and then the door was opened. It was opened by the mistress of the house. No doubt Mrs. Pratt had expected the cart, had heard its drawing up, and had not waited for a maid to come. Her eyes sought the carman, who had stepped aside. She spoke with some asperity.

“It’s Libertys’, isn’t it?” she said. “Well, I’ve a very good mind to make you take it back. It was promised for yesterday.”

“Can’t say, I’m sure, m’m.”

“It’s always the same. Every time I——”

Then she saw her visitor, and gave a little start.

“Why, it’s Lady Tasker! How delightful! Do come in! And do just excuse me—I shan’t be a minute.... Why didn’t this come yesterday? It was promised faithfully——”

She stepped outside to scold the carman, leaving Lady Tasker standing just within the green door.

The altercation was plainly audible:

“Very sorry, m’m. You see——”

“I will see, if it occurs again——”

“The orders is taken as they come, m’m——”

“They said the first delivery——”

“We wasn’t loaded till one o’clock——”

“That’s none of my business——”

“Very sorry, m’m——”

“Well, the next time it occurs——”

And so forth.

Now in reading what happened the next moment you must remember that Lady Tasker was very, very tired. Had she been less tired she might have wondered why one of the two maids she saw crossing to the tea-table under the copper beech had not been allowed to take in Mrs. Cosimo Pratt’s parcel. And she would certainly have thought it extraordinary that she should be left standing alone while Mrs. Cosimo Pratt scolded the carrier, and wanted to know why the parcel had not been brought yesterday. But, tired as she was, her eyes had already rested on something that had momentarily galvanized even the weariness out of her. It was this:—

Seven or eight people sat in basket-chairs or stood talking; and, under the copper beech, as if Mrs. Pratt had just slid out of it, a hammock of coloured string still moved, slung from the beech to a sycamore beyond. Lady Tasker saw these things at once; she did not at once see what it was that stood just beyond the hammock.

Then it moved, and Lady Tasker raised her glass.

No doubt you have seen the cover of Mr. Wells’s “Invisible Man.” It will be remembered that all that can be seen of that afflicted person is his clothes; and all that Lady Tasker at first saw of the Invisible Man by the copper beech was his clothes. These were of light yellow tussore, with a white double collar and a small red tie, sharp-edged white cuffs and highly polished brown boots. At collar and cuffs the man ended.

And yet he did not end, for the lenses of a pair of spectacles made lurking lights in the shadow of the beech, a few inches above the white collar.

The phantom wore no hat.

Then Lady Tasker, suddenly pale, dropped her glass. Between the collar and the spectacles a white gash of teeth had appeared. The Invisible Man had smiled, and at the same moment there had shown round the bole of the beech a second smoky shape, this one without teeth, but with white and mobile eyes instead.

Lady Tasker was in the presence of two Hindoos.

Now all her life, and long before her life for that matter, Lady Tasker had been accustomed ... but no: that is not the way to put it. The following table will save many words:—

PORTION OF TREE OF THE LENNARDS AND TASKERS
(Comments by Lady Tasker)

You see how it was, and had to be. Not only was Lady Tasker insular, arrogant, and of opinion that Saint Paul made the mistake of his life when he set out to preach the Gospel to all nations, but she made a virtue of her narrowness and defect. Show her a finger-nail with a purple half-moon, and you no longer saw a charming if acid-tongued old English lady, who cut timber in order to pay for governesses for those grand-children of Emily’s and sent, under guise of birthday gifts, useful little cheques to the descendants of her brother-in-law the groom. Babu or Brahmin, all were the same to her. No defence is offered of an attitude so indefensible. Such people do still exist. Let us sigh for their narrowness of mind, and pass on.

The smile of the first Hindoo was for Mrs. Pratt, who had got her row with the carman over and had reappeared behind Lady Tasker and closed the door of The Witan again. Her face, pretty and finished as a miniature, and the great chestnut-red helm of her hair, showed over the slant of the box in her arms. “Do excuse me, just one moment!” she said, smiling at Lady Tasker as she passed; and she ran off into the house, her mistletoe-berry white robe with its stencilling of grey-green whipping about her heels as she did so. And fortunately, as she ran in at the door, Cosimo Pratt came out of the French window, saw Lady Tasker, and strode to her. He broke into rapid and hearty speech.

“You here! How delightful!—Amory!—I didn’t hear you come! So kind of you!—Amory, where are you?—How are you? Do let me get you some tea!—Amory!——”

Lady Tasker spoke faintly.—“I should like,” she said, “to go into the house.”

“Rather! Hang on to my arm.—Amory! Where is that girl?—Sure you won’t have tea outside? I can find you a nice shady place under the beech——”

Lady Tasker closed her eyes.—“Please take me in.”

“Tube headache? I hate the beastly thing. I thought you were in Ludlow. Charming of you——”

And he led Lady Tasker into the house.

This was a low building of stucco, with slatted window-shuts which, like the sashes of the slightly bowed French window and of the two windows beyond, were newly painted green. This painting seemed rather to emphasize than to mitigate a certain dogseared look the place had, not amounting to dilapidation, but enough to make it probable that Cosimo Pratt had taken it on a repairing lease. The copper beech, the high privet hedge and the willows beyond it, shut out both light and air. The fan-lighted door had two electric bell buttons, with little brass plates. The upper plate read, “Mr. Cosimo Pratt”; the lower one “Miss Amory Towers (Studio).”

But Lady Tasker noticed none of these things. In the hall she sank into the first chair she came to. “Tea, please,” she said faintly; and Cosimo dashed out to get it. He returned, and began to murmur something sympathetic, but Lady Tasker made a little movement with her hand. She didn’t want him to “send Amory.” She only wanted to rest her tired legs and to collect her dispersed thoughts.

An eight-foot hedge, not to shut the populace out, but to shut Indians in! And she, Lady Tasker, had been kept standing while some parcel or other had been taken into the house—standing, and watching a still-moving hammock with a smiling Invisible Man bending over it! Was this England, or a Durbar?... And even yet her hostess didn’t come to ask her if she felt better!... Not that Lady Tasker was greatly surprised at that. She knew that Mrs. Pratt was quite capable of reasoning that the greatest respect is shown to a tired old lady when no fuss is made about her tiredness. The Pratts were like that—full of delicacies so subtle that plain folk never noticed them, but jumped instead to the conclusion that they were bad-mannered. And it would not in the least surprise Lady Tasker if, presently, Mrs. Pratt allowed her to leave without a word about her indisposition. Of course: Lady Tasker had a little forgotten the Pratts at Ludlow. That would be it: “Good-bye—and do come again!” She could see Mrs. Pratt’s pretty brook-brown eyes did anybody (say a Japanese or an Ethiopian) point out this so-called omission to her. She could see the surprise in them. She could hear her earnest voice: “Say these things!... Why, does she suppose I was glad then?”...

Yes, Lady Tasker had a little forgotten her Pratts.

It was an odd little hall in which she sat. It appeared to be an approach to the studio of which the electric bell gave notice, for it was continued by a narrower passage that led to a garden at the back; and either the studio “properties” were gradually thrusting the hatstand and hall table out of the fan-lighted front door, or else these latter ordinary and necessary objects were fighting as it were for admission. Thus, the chair on which Lady Tasker sat was of oak, but it had a Faust-like look; beyond it stood a glass-fronted cupboard of bric-à-brac, with a trophy of Abyssinian armour hanging over it; and the whole of the wall facing Lady Tasker was hung with a tapestry which, if it had been the only one of its kind in existence, would no doubt have been very valuable. And two other objects not commonly to be seen in ordinary halls were there. One of these stood on the narrow gilt console table next to Lady Tasker’s cup of tea. It was a plaster cast, taken from the life, of a female foot. The other hung on the wall above it. This also was a plaster cast, of the whole of a female arm and shoulder, ending with a portion of the side of the neck and the entire breast—of its kind an exquisite specimen. Many artists make or buy such things, but Brucciani has nothing half so beautiful.

It was as Lady Tasker finished her tea that her gaze fell on the two casts. Half negligently she raised her glass and inspected, first the foot, and then the other piece. It is probable that her first remark, uttered in a casual undertone to the air about her, was prompted by mere association of ideas; it was “Hm! I wonder if Mrs. Pratt nursed those twins herself!” Any other reflection that might have followed it was cut short by a sudden darkening of the doorway by which she had entered. Mrs. Pratt stood there. Lady Tasker had been wrong. She had come to ask if she felt better. She did ask her, gathering up long swathes of some newly unpacked white material she carried over her arm as she did so.

“Sorry you were done up,” she remarked. “Won’t you have some more tea?”

Already Lady Tasker was rising.—“No more, thank you.—I was just looking at these. What are they?” She indicated the casts.

The gesture that Mrs. Pratt gave she could probably no more have helped giving than an eye can help winking when it is threatened with a blow. Within one mistletoe-white sleeve an arm moved ever so slightly; very likely a foot also moved within a curiously-toed Saxon-looking white slipper; and she gave a confused and conscious and apologetic little laugh.

“Oh, those silly things!” she said deprecatingly. “I really must move them. But the studio is so full.... Do you know, it’s a most horrid feeling having them done—first the cold plaster poured on, and then, when they take it off again—the mould—you know——”

Lady Tasker plainly did not understand. Perhaps she did not yet even apprehend.—“But—but—,” she said, “they’re from a statue, aren’t they?”

Again Mrs. Pratt gave the pleased bashful little laugh. It was almost as if she said it was very good of Lady Tasker to say so.

“No, they’re from life,” she said. “As a matter of fact they’re me, but I really must move them; they aren’t so remarkable as all that.... Oh, you’re not going, are you?——”

For Lady Tasker had given a jump, and a movement as sudden and sprightly as if she had only that moment got freshly out of her bed. Nervously she put out her hand, while her hostess looked politely disappointed.

“Oh, and I was hoping you’d come and join us in the garden! We’ve Brimby there, the novelist, you know—and Wilkinson, the young Member—and Mr. Strong, of the ‘Novum’—and I should so much like to introduce Mr. Suwarree Prang to you——”

“Oh, thank you so much—,” sprang as effusively from Lady Tasker’s lips as if she had been a schoolgirl allowed for the first time to come down to dinner, “—it’s so good of you, but really I half hoped you’d be out when I called—I only meant to leave cards—I’m going on to see my niece, and really haven’t a moment——”

“Oh, I’m sure Dorothy’d excuse you for once!——,” Mrs. Pratt pressed her.

“Oh, she wouldn’t—I’m quite sure she wouldn’t—she’d never forgive me if she knew I’d been so near and hadn’t called,” said Lady Tasker feverishly.... “How do I get to Dorothy’s from here?”

“Oh, Mr. Wilkinson will take you, or Mr. Prang; but are you sure you won’t stay?”

Lady Tasker was so far from staying that she was already out of the hall and walking quickly towards the green door in the eight-foot hedge. “Thank you, thank you so much,” she was murmuring hurriedly. “I don’t see your husband anywhere about—never mind—so good of you—good-bye——”

“Come again soon, won’t you?”

“Yes, yes—oh, yes!... No, no, please don’t!” (Mrs. Pratt had made a half-turn towards the hammock and the copper beech). “Straight across the Heath you said, didn’t you? I shall find it quite easily! Don’t come any further—good-bye——”

And, touching Mrs. Cosimo Pratt’s extended fingers as timorously as she might have touched those of the cast itself, she fairly broke into a run. The door of The Witan closed behind her.

II
THE POND-ROOM

But for all that Lady Tasker was too old. Invisible Men in the garden (or, if not actually invisible, at any rate as hard to be seen against the leaves of the copper beech as a new penny would have been)—and in the hall those extraordinary replicas! In the hall—the very forefront of the house! It was to be presumed that Mrs. Pratt’s foreign friends, who were permitted to lean over her hammock, would not be denied. The Witan itself, and, for all Lady Tasker knew, the rest of Mrs. Pratt might be reduplicated in plaster in the dining-room, the drawing-room, and elsewhere....

Had she not said it herself, Lady Tasker would never have believed it....

What a—what a—what an extraordinary thing!——

Lady Tasker had fled from The Witan still under the influence of that access of effusive schoolgirlishness in which she had told Mrs. Pratt that she really must go; nor did she grow up again all at once. But little by little, as she walked, she began to resume the burden of her years. She became eighteen, twenty-five, thirty again. By the time she reached the lower pond Arthur had just got that billet in the India Office, and her brother Dick, of the Department of Woods and Forests, had married Ada Polperro, daughter of old Polperro of Delhi fame, and her sister Emily had got engaged to Tony Woodgate, of the Piffers. (But those casts!)... Then as she took the path between the ponds she remembered the children at Ludlow, the three little girls at Cromwell Gardens, and the arrival on Saturday of the “Seringapatam.” (But those natives!)... The thought of the children settled it. Her curious lapse into juvenescence was over. By the time she rang Dorothy’s bell she was the same Lady Tasker who changed the political opinions of policemen and deprecated the wanderings of Saint Paul.

Dorothy’s flat was as different as it could well be from that other house which (Lady Tasker had already decided) had something odd and furtive about it—stagnant yet busy, segregated yet too wide open. The flat had one really brilliant room. This room did not merely overlook the pond in front of it; it seemed actually to have asked the pond to come inside. A large triple window occupied the whole of one end of it; this window faced west; and not only did the September sun shine brightly in, but the inverted sun in the water shone in also, doubling (yet also halving) all shadows, illumining the ceiling, and setting the cream walls a-ripple with the dancing of the wavelets outside. Sprightly chintzes looked as if they also might begin to dance at any moment; the china in Dorothy’s cupboards surprised the eye that had not expected this altered light; and presently, to complete the complexity, the shadow of the sycamore in the little garden below would move round, so that you would hardly be able to tell whether the ceaseless creeping on the cream walls was glitter of ripples, pattern of leaves, or both.

Dorothy sat in her accordion-pleats by the window, surrounded by letters. And pray do not think it mere coincidence in this story that her letters were Indian letters. Some interests that the home-amateur takes up as he might take up poker-work or the diversion of jig-saw hold a large part of the hearts and lives of others, and so Dorothy, as she did more or less every week, had been reading her cousin Churchill’s letter, and that of her little niece and namesake Dot, up in Murree, and Eva Woodgate’s, who had sent her a parcel from Kohat, and others. She rose slowly as her aunt was announced, and put her finger on the bell as she passed.

“How are you, auntie?” she said, kissing Lady Tasker on both cheeks. “Give me your things. Somehow I thought you might come to-day, but I’d almost given you up. Do look what Eva’s sent me! Really, with her own to look after, I don’t know how she finds the time! Aren’t they sweet!——”

And she held them up.

Now Lady Tasker knew perfectly well the meaning of her niece’s accordion-pleating; but she was seventy and worldly-wise again now. Therefore as she looked at the things she remarked off-handedly, “But they’re far too small.”

“Too small!” Dorothy exclaimed. “Of course they aren’t. Why, Noel was only nine, and that’s pretty big, and Jackie only just over eight-and-a-half, though he put on weight while you watched him. They’re just right.”

Lady Tasker reached for a chair. “But they are for Jackie, aren’t they?”

Dorothy’s blue eyes were as big as the plates in her cupboards.—“Jackie! Good gracious, auntie!——”

“Eh?” said Lady Tasker, sitting down. “Not Jackie? Dear me. How stupid of me. Of course, I did hear, but I’ve so many other things to think of, and nobody’d suppose, to look at you——”

Dorothy ran to her aunt and gave her a kiss and a hug, a loud kiss and a hug like two.

“You dear old thing!—Really, I’d begun to hate all the horrid kind people who asked me how I felt to-day and whether I shouldn’t be glad when it was over! What business is it of theirs? I nearly made Stan sack Ruth last week, she looked so, and I positively refuse to have a young girl anywhere near me!... But wasn’t it sweet of Eva? I’ll give you some tea and then read you her letter. Indian or China?”

“China,” Lady Tasker remarked.

“China, Ruth, and I’ll have some more too. I don’t know whether His Impudence is coming in or not; he’s gadding off somewhere, I expect.... But you weren’t only pretending just now, were you, auntie?——”

She put the plug of the spirit-kettle into the wall.

“Well, how are the Bits?” Lady Tasker asked....

(Perhaps “His Impudence” and “The Bits” require explanation. Both expressions Dorothy had from her “maid,” Ruth Mossop. “Maid” is thus written because Ruth was a young widow, who, after a series of disciplinary knockings-about by the late Mr. Mossop, was not over-troubled with maternal anxiety for the four children he had left her with. When asked by Dorothy whether she would prefer to be called Mrs. Mossop or Ruth, Mrs. Mossop had chosen the latter name, giving as her reason that it had been like Mr. Mossop’s impudence to ask her to accept the other name at all; and very many other memories also, brooded on and gloomily loved, including the four children, had been bits of Mr. Mossop’s impudence. Stan had adopted the phrase, finding in it chuckles of his own; and so His Impudence he had become, and Noel and Jackie the fruits thereof.)

Dorothy put her fair head on one side, as if she considered the absent Bits critically and dispassionately, and really thought that on the whole she might venture to approve of them.

“Ra-ther little dears; but oh, Heaven, how are we going to manage with a third!”

Her aunt dissociated herself from the problem with a shrug.—“Well—if Stan will persist in thinking that his dressing-room is merely a room for him to dress in——”

“So I tell him,” Dorothy murmured, with great meekness. “But—but flats aren’t made for children. We did manage to seize the estate agent’s little office for a nursery when all the flats were let, but when Stan brings a man home we have to sleep him in the dressing-room as it is—,” (Lady Tasker shook her head, but the words “Wrong man” were hardly audible), “—and a house will mean stair-carpets, and hall furniture, and I don’t know what else. Besides, Stan hasn’t time to look for one——”

“No?” said Lady Tasker drily.

“He really hasn’t, poor boy,” Dorothy protested. “And he’s after something really good this time—Fortune and Brooks, the what-d’-you-call-’ems, in Pall Mall——”

“What about them?”

“Well, Stan’s been told that they pay awfully good commissions, for introductions, new accounts you know; Stan dines out, say, and makes himself nice to somebody with whole stacks of money, and mentions Fortune & Brooks’s chutney and pickled peaches and things, and—and——”

“I know,” remarked Lady Tasker, with not much more expression than if she had been a talking-doll and somebody had pulled the string that worked the speaking apparatus. She did know these dazzling schemes of her smart and helpless nephew’s—his club secretaryships, his projects for journals that should combine the various desirable features of the “Field” and “Country Life” and the “Sporting Times” and “Punch,” his pony deals, and his other innumerable attempts to make of his saunters down Bond Street to St. James’s and back viâ the Junior Carlton and Regent Street a source of income. Perhaps she knew, too, that Dorothy knew of her knowledge, for she went on, “Well, well—let’s hope there’s more in it than there was in the fishing-flies—now tell me what Eva’s got fresh.”

“Oh, yes!” cried Dorothy, plunging her hand into her letters. “Eva sent the things, but here’s Dot’s first—look at the darling’s writing!——”

And from a sheet of paper with a regimental heading Dorothy began to read: