A Crooked Mile Part 32

Amory walked quickly down the East Heath. As she walked she could not help wondering what there had been to make such a fuss about. Indeed she had been making quite a bugbear of the thing she was now doing quite easily. What, after all, would it matter? Would a single one of the people she pa.s.sed so hurriedly think her case in the least degree special? Had they not, each one of them, their own private and probably very similar affairs? Was there one of them of whom it could be said with certainty that he or she was not, at that very moment, bound on the same errand? She looked at the women. There was nothing to betray them, but it was quite as likely as not. Nor could they tell by looking at her. For that matter, the most resolute would hide it the most. And a person's life was his own. n.o.body would give him another one when he had starved and denied the one he had. There might not be another one. Some people said that there was, and some that there wasn't. Meetings were held about that too, but so far they hadn't seemed to advance matters very much....

Nor was it the urge of pa.s.sion that was now driving her forward at such a rate. She could not help thinking that she had been rather silly in her dreams about carpets and Nubians and those things. If Edgar was pa.s.sionate, very well--she would deny him nothing; but in that case she would feel ever so slightly superior to Edgar. She rather wished that that was not so; she hoped that after all it might not be so; on the whole she would have preferred to be a little his inferior. She had not been inferior to Cosimo. They, she and Cosimo, had talked a good deal about equality, of course, but, after all, equality was a balance too nice for the present stressful stage of the struggle between man and woman; a theoretical equality if you liked, but in practice the thing became a slight temporary feminine preponderance, which would, no doubt, settle down in time. Virtually she had been Cosimo's master. She did not want to be Edgar's. Rather than be that he might--her tired sensibilities gave a brief flutter--he might even be a little cruel to her if he wished....

A Tottenham Court Road bus was just starting from the bottom of Pond Street. She ran to catch it. It moved forward again, with Amory sitting inside it, between a man in a white m.u.f.fler and opera-hat and a flower-woman returning home with her empty baskets.

Many, many times Amory Pratt, abusing her fancy, had rehea.r.s.ed the scene to which she was now so smoothly and rapidly approaching; but she rehea.r.s.ed nothing now. It would suffice for her just to appear before Edgar; no words would be necessary; he would instantly understand. Of course (she reflected) he might have left the office when she got there; it was even reasonably probable that he would have left; it was not a press-night; twenty to one he would have left. But her thoughts went forward again exactly as if she had not just told herself this.... He would be there. She would go up to him and stand before him. As likely as not not a word would pa.s.s between them. She felt that she had used too many words in her life. She and her set had discussed subjects simply out of existence. Often, by the time they had finished talking, not one of them had known what they had been talking about. It had been sheer dissipation. Men, she had heard, took drinks like that, and by and by were unable to stand, and then made hideous exhibitions of themselves. n.o.body could say exactly at what point they, the men, became incapable, nor the point at which the others, Amory and her set, became word-sodden; in the one case the police (she had heard) made them walk a chalk-line; but there was no chalk-line for the others. Their paths were crooked as scribble....

But she was going straight at last--as straight as a pair of tram-lines could take her--and so far was she from wis.h.i.+ng that the tram would go more slowly, that she would have hastened it had she been able.

The "Mother s.h.i.+pton"--the Cobden Statue--Hampstead Road--the "Adam and Eve." At this last stopping-place she descended, crossed the road, and boarded a bus. She remembered that once before, when she had visited the office in a taxi, the cab had seemed to go at a terrifying speed; now the bus seemed to crawl. A fear took her that every stop might cause her to miss him by just a minute. She tapped with her foot. She looked almost angrily at those who got in or out. That flower-woman: why couldn't she have got out at the proper stopping-place, instead of upsetting everything with her baskets hardly a hundred yards further on?... Off again; she hoped to goodness that was the last delay. She had been stupid not to take a taxi after all.

She descended opposite the "Horse Shoe," not three minutes' walk from the "Novum's" offices. Then again she called herself stupid for not having sat where she was, since the bus would go straight past the door.

But she could be there as soon as the bus if she walked quickly.----

The bus overtook her and beat her by twenty yards.

The bookseller's shutters were down, and in the window of the electric-fittings shop could be dimly seen a ventilating fan, a desk-lamp, and a switchboard or two. Amory turned in under the arch that led to the yard behind. Her eyes had gone up to the third floor almost before she had issued from the narrow alley----

Ah!... So she was not too late. There was a light.

Through the ground-floor cavern in which the sandwich-boards were stacked she had for the first time to slacken her pace; the floor was uneven, and the place was crowded with dim shadows. A man smoking a pipe over an evening paper turned as she entered, but, seeing her make straight for the stairs, he did not ask her her business. The winding wooden staircase was black as a flue. On the first landing she paused for a moment; the man with the pipe had, after all, challenged her, "Who is it you want, Miss?" he called from below.... But he did not follow her. A vague light from the landing window showed her the second flight of wedge-shaped wooden steps. She mounted them, and gained the corridor hung with the specimens of the poster-artist's work. Ahead along the pa.s.sage a narrow shaft of light crossed the floor. She gave one more look behind, for fear the man below had, after all, followed her; she was determined, but that did not mean that she necessarily wished to be seen....

Her life was her own, to do what she liked with. n.o.body would give her another one....

And Edgar might be cruel if he wished....

For one instant longer she hesitated. Then she pushed softly at the door from which the beam of light came.

The quietness of her approach was wasted after all. There was n.o.body in the office. The floor was untidy with scattered leaves of paper, and Edgar had carelessly left every drawer of his desk open; but that only meant that he could not be very far away. Probably he was in the waiting-room. She approached the door of it.

But, as she did so, some slight unfamiliarity about the place struck her. The first room of the three, or waiting-room, she knew, from having once or twice pushed at the first door of the pa.s.sage and having had to pa.s.s through that ante-room. Of the third room she knew nothing save that it was used as a sort of general lumber-room. But the rooms seemed somehow to have got changed about. It was from this third room, and not from the waiting-room, that a bright light came, and the smell of charred paper. The door was partly open. Amory advanced to it.

As she did so somebody spoke.

For so slight a cause, the start that Amory gave was rather heartrending. She stopped dead. Her face had turned so chalky a white that the freckles upon it, which ordinarily scarcely showed, looked almost unwholesome.

In her mind she had given Edgar Strong leave to be cruel to her, but not with this cruelty. The cruelty we choose is always another cruelty.

Once a man, who miraculously survived a flogging, said that by comparison with the anguish of the second stroke that of the first was almost a sweetness; and after the third, and fourth, men, they say, have laughed. It happened so to Amory. The voices she heard were not loud; so much the worse, when a few ordinary, grunted, half expressions could so pierce her.

"----months ago, but I wasn't ready. I stayed on here for n.o.body's convenience but my own, I can tell you." It was Edgar who said this.

Then a woman's voice--

"I don't think this waistcoat's worth taking; I've patched and patched it----"

"Oh, chuck it under the bed. And I say--we've had nothing to eat. Make the cocoa, will you?"

"Just a minute till I finish this bag.--What'll Pratt say when he comes back?"

"As I shan't be here to hear him, it's hardly worth while guessing."

"Will Wilkinson take it over?"

"The 'Novum'?... I don't think there'll be any more 'Novum.' I suppose these London Indians will be holding a meeting. I don't like 'em, but let's be fair to them: most of 'em are all right. They've got to dissociate themselves from this Collins business somehow. But I expect some lunatic will go and move an amendment.... Well, it won't matter to us. We shall be well down the Channel by that time."

Then the girl gave a low laugh.--"I _do_ think you might buy me a trousseau, Ned--the way it's turned out----"

The man's voice grunted.

"I thought that would be the next. Give you something and you all want something else immediately.... Can't afford it, my dear. I've only pulled between three and four hundred out of this show, living here, paying myself s.p.a.ce-rates and all the lot; and we shall want all that."

Again the low voice--very soft and low.

"But you'll be a little sorry to leave here, won't you--m'mmm?----"

(This was the second stroke, by comparison with which the first had been sweet.)

Strong spoke brusquely.--"Look here, old girl--we've heaps of things to do to-night--lots of time before us--don't let's have any nonsense----"

"No-o-o?"----

Amory, besides hearing, might have seen; but she did not. Something had brought into her head her own words to Walter Wyron of an hour or two before, when Walter had picked up the cable announcing Cosimo's return: "Put that down, Walter; it's mine." This other, that was taking place in that inner room, was theirs. It would have been perfectly easy to strike them dumb by appearing, just for one moment, in the doorway of this--lumber-room; but she preferred not to do it. If she had, she felt that it would have been the remains of a woman they would have seen.

There is not much catch in striking anybody dumb when the process involves their seeing--that. Much better to steal out quietly....

Noiselessly she turned her back to the half-open door. She tiptoed out into the corridor again. For a dozen yards she continued to tiptoe--in order to spare them; and then she found herself at the head of the steep stairs. She descended. She had not made a single sound. Down below the man was still reading the paper, and again he looked round. At another time Amory might have questioned him; but again she did not. There was nothing to learn. She knew.

It was the first thing she had ever really known.

Bowed with the strangeness of knowledge, she walked slowly out into Charing Cross Road.

IV

GREY YOUTH

She continued to walk slowly; the slowness was as remarkable as her haste had been. She had intended, had she missed Edgar, to go to an hotel; but home was hotel enough, hotel home. Home--home to a house without privacy--home to children of whom she was not much more than technically the mother--home to an asbestos log and to the absence of a husband that was at least as desirable as his presence: nothing else remained.

For her lack seemed total--so total as hardly to be a lack. She desired no one thing, and a desire for everything is an abuse of the term "desire." So she walked slowly, stopping now and then to look at a flagstone as if it had been a remarkable object. And as she walked she wondered how she had come to be as she was.

She could not see where her life had gone wrong. She did not remember any one point at which she had taken a false and crucial step. For example, she did not think this grey and harmonious totality of despondency had come of her marrying Cosimo. They were neither outstandingly suited nor unsuited to one another, and a thousand marriages precisely similar were made every day and turned out well enough. No; it could not be that she had expected too much of marriage.

She had not courted disappointment that way.... (But stay: had the trouble come of her not expecting largely enough? Of her not having a.s.sumed enough? Of her not having said to Life, "Such and such I intend to have, and you shall provide it?" Would she have fared better then?)... And if Cosimo had brought her no wonder, neither had her babes. People were in the habit of saying astonis.h.i.+ng things about the miracle of the babe at the breast, but Amory could only say that she had never experienced these things. She had wondered that she should not, when so many others apparently did, but the fact remained, that bearing had been an anguish and nursing an inconvenience. And so at the twins she had stopped.

Would it have been better had she not stopped? Would she have been happier with many children? Without children at all? Or unmarried? Or ought her painting to have been husband, home and children to her?...

It was a little late in the day to ask these questions now----

And yet there had been no reason for asking them earlier----