Miss Amory

“ The instant the march was over, Frank Amory came trotting up beside us,—a glad, glorious light in his brave young eyes,—sprang from his saddle and to her side. The others he did not appear to see at all. His eyes were for her alone, for her in all their boyish adoration, in all their glowing pride and tenderness. Tearing off his gauntlet, he clasped her hand before a word was said, and she looked shyly, yet steadfastly, down into his transfigured face.
"I shall be down right after stables; mother will come sooner," was all he said. ”

“ Amory was not sure that any other woman than herself would not have been piqued. Any other woman would have expected him either not to look at the thing, or else to say that it was small, or to ask whether the real one was as white, or something foolish like that. But Amory was superior to such things. She lived on higher levels. On these levels such an affront to the pure intellect as a flirtation could not exist. Free Love as a logical and defensible system—yes, perhaps; or a combination so happy of marriage and cohabitation as that of the Wyrons’—yes again ”

“ The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beauty—beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor's voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the beauty of women. ”

“ Amory would have been far less observant than she was had it not occurred to her, as she left Dorothy's flat that day, that she had been hustled out almost unceremoniously. She hoped—she sincerely hoped—that she did not see the reason. To herself, as to any other person not absolutely case-hardened by prejudice, the thing that presented itself to her mind would not have been a reason at all; but these conventional people were so extraordinary, and in nothing more extraordinary than in their regulations for receiving callers of the opposite sex. ”

“ Whoever heard of a man wrapping himself up in a carpet and being carried by Nubians into his mistress’s presence? Whoever heard of a man’s face launching as much as an upriver punt, let alone fleets and fleets of full-sized ships? And whoever heard of the compelling beauty of a man’s eyes, as he lay on a sofa with one satiny upper-arm upraised, simply making—making—a woman come and kiss him?... It was ridiculous. Amory saw now. ”

“ If something of a likeness to Amory herself was to be traced in all these figures, every artist who works in a single room knows how frequently, for lack of pence, he must use himself as a model. It was this picture, of which more later, that enabled Amory to see so clearly the peril that beset Cosimo. ”

“ But whether it was that Amory was in difficulties with her work, or whether her pulse had suddenly bounded at the thought of a party really after her own heart, she threw down her palette.
“Oh no, rather not!” she cried. “I’ll come with you. Just half a minute; I’ll wash my brushes when we come back. How ripping!”
Joyously she snatched down from the hook her porringer hat; her eyes shone as she thrust the enamel-headed pins through it. She had not seen Cosimo for several weeks, the others for months and months, and she was pining, simply pining, for a party that a rational person could enjoy. ”

“ Therefore it was that Amory looked on Corin and Bonniebell as the precious repositories of her own relinquished joys, and heirs to a happier life than she herself had known. She dreamed over them and their future. Laura Wyron was quite right: by the time they had grown up the fogs of cowardice and prejudice and self-seeking would have disappeared for ever. Perhaps even by that time, as in Heaven, there would be no more marrying nor giving in marriage. Things would have adjusted themselves out of the rarer and sweeter and more liberal atmosphere. ”

“ Now when your need of a thing is very great, you are not to be put off by a young man who admits that his wife is at home, but tells you that she has some trifling affair—is in her dressing-gown perhaps, or has not made her hair tidy—that makes your call slightly inconvenient. Therefore Amory, in her need, did what the young man would no doubt have called "an infernally cheeky thing." She repeated her request once more, and then, seeing another refusal coming, waited for no further reply, but pushed past Stan and made direct for Dorothy's bedroom. ”

“ All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between... ”

“ Do you suppose when people die they don't notice any difference, either?"
"What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's going to look in print. Think of Crass—digging for head-lines."
St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl; but there were times—
"Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the absolute."
Amory nodded.
"Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out with the camera, while the light is good." ”

“ They dined and cleared away, and, while Dorothy washed up, Amory replaced the dish of fruit on the table, set out the biscuits and cakes on the Persian Rose plates, and made of all, with the flask of Chianti, another still-life group. Then she disposed the chairs as if by happy accident, and poked the fire. The casement looking over the river became an oblong of dim blue; the fire burnt up, and glowed on the black and sagging old ceiling; and Amory hoped that the people overhead were going to be quiet to-night. ”

“ Dorothy cried appealingly. “I really think you do seem to hit it off together somehow. And as for what people say, you say what you think about people, and they’ve a right to do the same, and anyway you can’t stop them, and you can’t expect to have the world to yourself. Why, I thought you were always talking about ‘equal rights.’”
“I don’t know whether you know that just at present you’re talking about a very precious and beautiful friendship!” said Amory proudly. ”

“ Amory herself would have been the first to confess the weakness that set her wondering how many bedrooms the Shropshire house had, and whether there were rose gardens and fruit trees on the southern walls. Even from thoughts of duty weak mortals must sometimes stoop. Besides, if there was not a village green with a maypole on it, some arrangement would probably have to be made. Amory didn’t think she would want morrice-dancing on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, except, of course, on birthdays and festival days and the days when the tenants paid their rent. ”

“ His experience of far less comfortable sleeping-quarters had persuaded him that in this imperfect world a man is entitled to exactly what he can get.
His eyes, nevertheless, did not seek Amory’s. Instead, roving round the room to see if nothing less would serve (leaving him still with the fathomless look in reserve for emergencies) , they fell on the Benares tray and the casts. And as they remained there he suddenly frowned. Amory’s own eyes followed his; [391] and suddenly she felt again that little creeping thrill. A faint colour and warmth, new and pleasurable, came into her cheeks. ”

“ Their shabbiness rather took the shine out of the voluptuousnesses she had tried, and failed, to get upon her canvas. But perhaps there was a fitness in that too. Genius, whether in Art or in Love, is usually poor. If she could be splendid there she could be so anywhere. No doubt heaps and heaps of grand passions had transfigured grimy garrets, and had made of them perfectly ripping backgrounds....
So on an afternoon in mid-January Amory put on her new velvet costume of glaucous sea-holly blue and her new mushroom-white hat, and went down to the “Novum’s” offices in a taxi. ”

“ We all speak of the world as we find it. This was the world as Amory had found it; and, since the total sum of the world’s wrong and cruelty was admittedly enormous, what more natural than to try to gauge its enormousness by a process of multiplication?
Amory, sternly and deliberately setting her painting aside until she should have come to some really basic conclusion on these points, began to multiply. ”

“ Amory usually replied, “there are lots of girls; why, you couldn’t find a worse wife than me! What good should I be about a house or nursing a [104] baby?”—“True,” Cosimo would then reply,—thoughtfully yet equably: “but you’re unique, you see. You have your art.”—And that, it always seemed to Amory, was the whole point. An ordinary young man would not have had the perception to recognize her art as the crux of the whole matter. ”

“ Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it—later in life he almost completely slew it—but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.
There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... ”

“ When Amory had said this same thing before, Cosimo had laughed, and with beautiful tact had replied that Dorothy would never have married him: but there was something of the still, of the rapt, about Amory that morning that would have made a laugh an offence. Instead, he said, almost reproachfully, “Oh,—Amory!”
“Why don’t you?” she continued dreamily. “I hope it’s not that mere settling down of opinion that is fatal to real vitality of thought. An idée fixe isn’t an idée at all; it’s a Law that in course of time thoughts become petrified. Then they’ve got to be got fluid again. ”

“ Then, with his mouth full of sandwich, the young [224] man kissed Dorothy, who performed the same idiotic gesture on him in return.
Now no really sensitive person likes to see other persons in the act of an embrace, and Amory was exquisitely sensitive. And in this hard world it is the sensitive person who suffers for the dull. Further, even suffering takes a keener edge when you are seen to suffer. Therefore the least that Dorothy and her smart young man could have done, when, turning, they became aware of Amory’s presence, would have been to spare her the gratuitous pain of looking at her. ”

“ Surely it ought to be possible to say that the presence of a person affected you pleasantly, or unpleasantly, without sniggering inferences of a liaison in the one case or of a rupture in the other!
Therefore it was once more just a little irritating that Mr. Strong, instead of telling her what type he did admire, should merely laugh and say, "Well—not Mrs. Tasker." If Amory had a criticism at all to make of Mr. Strong it was this habit of his of negatives, that sometimes almost justified the nickname Mr. Brimby had given him, of "Stone Wall Strong." ”

“ Cosimo gasped.
“Isn’t it?” Amory bore him down, flinging out an adorable arm. “Isn’t it? What is the battle, then, if that isn’t it? What is every woman worth her salt, and a few devoted men, working and suffering and fighting for if it isn’t for that? ”

“ Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.
Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in Philadelphia he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness; a latent strength, a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that she was compelled to face. ”

“ Amory was beside herself with importance and delight. She had not now a mere promise from Croziers’—she was to have a proper contract, and a cheque for a hundred pounds posted to her the very moment the contract was signed. All that day she could not sit still for a minute in one place, and in the afternoon she suddenly started up, crammed her hat on her head, and ran out to the confectioner’s in the King’s Road, where the use of a telephone was to be had for twopence. She must tell Dorothy that she particularly wanted to see her at the studio that afternoon—why, she refused to say. ”

“ They must needs “invite” people and be a little stand-offish about people coming uninvited. They were “At home” and “Not at home” for all the world as if they had been important [364] people. But Amory would have thought herself very stupid to be taken in by all this ceremony. For example, the last time she and Cosimo had been asked to the flat to dinner she knew that they had been “worked off” only because the Taskers had had the pheasants given by somebody, and very likely the fish too. ”