Читать книгу Gray youth - Oliver Onions - Страница 13

There was nobody like Cosimo for beginning at the beginning. “What,” he asked, extending a magnificent arm, bare (and black) to the very shoulder, “is the use of doing the floor when you’re going to fetch all sorts of cobwebs down from the walls and ceiling, and haven’t as much as got the chimney swept? It’s simply doing work twice over. No; let that plumber chap finish the sink-pipe first, then, when the things we’ve bought come, I’ll have the men give them a thorough sweeping in the cart and Mrs. ’Ill or Jellies can wash them with ammonia and water downstairs, so that everything’ll come in perfectly clean. Jellies, did you get lots of old newspapers? All right, I don’t want ’em yet, they’re to cover the floor when I distemper the walls. Put ’em out on the landing there.—Now give me that brush, Mrs. ’Ill——”

He took a long brush from Mrs. ’Ill and began at the corner of the ceiling beyond the fireplace.

Dorothy had taken away her black-and-white desk and her other belongings some days before; now the table, the chairs, Amory’s easel and a whole clutter of other things filled the landing and staircase outside. The plumber worked crouched half under the sink; but the chimney-sweep who had promised to come that morning at eight had not yet put in an appearance. The floor was an inch deep in dust and cobwebs and débris, and Cosimo’s broom fetched down fresh showers moment by moment. He wore an old deer-stalker cap, to keep them out of his tendrilled hair. Amory, too, wore an old dust-bonnet of Mrs. ’Ill’s and her oldest painting pinafore. Cosimo gave her loud warnings to stand out of the way as each fall came down. Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies grimaced and spat the dust out of their mouths as they swept the walls.

For a whole week Cosimo had been past telling helpful and enthusiastic. He had not gone out when Amory had called on him that morning; he had been still in bed; but, hearing her knock and knowing her step, he had called, “That you, Amory? Oh, do come in!” So Amory had sat on the edge of Cosimo’s bed, and Cosimo had bounded upward into a sitting posture as Amory had told him her great news. “No, by Jove, really, though!” he had shouted joyously. “You’ve got the money? I say, Amory, that’s perfectly glorious! Tell me quickly what you’re going to do!”

And they had taken a header into plans, both talking at once.

Cosimo had done the whole of the shopping; Amory had merely stood by and nodded and admired. “Leave it all to me,” he had said repeatedly; “you have your own special work that nobody but you can do: I can just about manage this. … Now, have you a bed? And a bath? And what about somewhere for your clothes? Tell me everything you’ve got, and then we shall know where we are.”

So Cosimo had chosen Amory’s narrow bed for her, going down into the basement for a slightly out-of-date pattern, much cheaper and probably better made; and since Amory must have a bath, Cosimo had advised her to get one of those oval ones with a lid that served as a travelling trunk as well; they were a little dearer, but much cheaper than buying the bath and the trunk separately. Then he had known where a second-hand chest of drawers was going for next to nothing, also a bowl and basin. And, cleverest of all, he had given orders that these things were to be sent, not at once, but on dates when, he calculated, the place would be just ready for their reception. Amory had ticked off these purchases on a slip of paper, as also she had those of turpentine and paraffin, boiled oil and soap and firewood and tins of distemper. She had read aloud from the list: “Soap, scrubbing-brushes, blacklead, condensed milk——” and Cosimo, laying his hand on each article as she named it, had replied with “Right—right——” It had been great fun.

It was lucky, too, that Jellies was out of work; that gave them somebody to help when Mrs. ’Ill was at the Creek (“or buying winkles for the hens,” Amory laughed). And the pair of them were almost as funny as a pantomime about Amory and Cosimo. They waited quite half a minute between knocking at the door and entering the room where the friends were, and if one of them went out again both of them did. It caused Amory the greatest amusement; they were as funny as Dorothy, when she had run in that afternoon thinking Amory wanted to tell her, not about Croziers’ and the pictures, but about—Cosimo! Really, these one-ideaed people were killing! It never occurred to them that it was just possible that their narrow, illiberal views were not shared by everybody! There was her aunt, for example: Aunt Jerry was the most comical, mid-Victorian survival imaginable. She had stated flatly, not two nights ago, that if she wasn’t married in a church, by two clergymen, with a bouquet and bells and “The Voice that Breathed o’er Eden,” she should not consider herself married at all! Bouquets and bells, at this time of day! … Amory (she thanked goodness) intended never to marry. Hers and Cosimo’s was a much more rational relation. They had argued it out anthropologically from Primitive Culture and The Golden Bough.

The plumber under the sink had a gas-jet and a soldering-iron, and he was raising a smell of warm lead and flux. He, too, seemed to have jumped to the same ludicrous conclusion as Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies. There was an intelligence about his back view, as if that aspect of him said, “I see—I’m minding my business—nearly finished—three’s none—‘nuff said.” And when, as Cosimo swept, Amory approached the plumber and asked him whether the smell of cabbage-water would now cease, he turned round almost with a start.

“Beg pardon, Miss? … Oh, that! Don’t you worry your ’ead about that. A S-pipe’ll do it if anything will, and I’ll explain it to the master afore I go.”

The master! … Amory and Cosimo had to go out on to the landing in order to laugh. Otherwise they would have stifled.

Then, at nearly midday, the sweep arrived, and to the smells of dust and hot lead was added that of the soot that rustled down the chimney. Amory and Cosimo, unable to eat in the room itself and too begrimed to lunch at the little restaurant along the Embankment, sat with their glasses of milk and paper bag of sandwiches on the dark stairs.

Amory always devoutly hoped that when Cosimo married he would marry some nice girl whose friend she could be. At present he was as poor as a church mouse, but would not be so when his uncle died; and Cosimo was not the kind of man money would spoil. If he had not known the value of money he would not have been able to do Amory’s shopping for her so admirably; and if anything at all could still further have uplifted their beautiful friendship, it would have been that Cosimo should by and by be buying chests of drawers and washbowls for some girl of whom Amory could really approve. Girl after girl—Katie Deedes, Dickie Lemesurier, and others—Amory had suggested them all at one time and another as more or less eligible partners for her “pal”; but Cosimo had only laughed. He supposed he would marry some time or other, he had said, though why he must (now he came to think of it) he didn’t quite know. Indeed, he thought he probably wouldn’t, after all. “You see,” he explained frankly, “it would have to be somebody so awfully like you, and there isn’t anybody else so wonderful.”—“What rubbish, Cosimo!” 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 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. He would have wanted to hold her hand or to put his arm about her, and so would have ruined all.

And Cosimo sometimes, but of course only as a joke, spoke of her art with a sort of humorous resentment, as a man who is allowed much but is still excluded from one favour might speak of the rival in whose preference he after all concurs. Amory thought that a perfecting touch. Seriousness must be unassailable before such gracious, humorous little liberties can be taken with it.

As they drank their milk and ate their sandwiches that day they laughed together over Aunt Jerry’s old-fashioned courtship. Cosimo asked to be told again what Aunt Jerry proposed to wear at her wedding. He had already been told several times, but he had the power, so rare among men, of visualizing a dress from a verbal description, and could carry the precise shade of a ribbon “in his eye” for matching purposes better than Amory herself. …

“Doesn’t it sound like the year of the Great Exhibition!” he chuckled when Amory had told him.

“The dress?” Amory laughed. “The dress is nothing; it’s the whole thing that’s like the year of the Great Exhibition! Why, when I asked auntie an ordinary, simple question—whether she thought there would be any babies—she blushed as if she really believed the storks brought them, and implored me not to dream of saying anything of the sort to George! Who to, I should like to know, if not to George? Such absurd false shame! … And this to-day, my dear, if you please, with Forel’s book to be had at any French bookseller’s, and Altruism and Camaraderie taught at even ordinary schools, and everything thrown open to sensible discussion just as you and I discuss these things! It’s too funny!”

“There’s only one word for it really—‘prurient,’ ” Cosimo opined.

“Oh, but that’s taking it too seriously; I prefer the funny side of it. Babies! Is she expecting butterflies, I wonder? … I did my best for her; I tried to explain what a chromosome was; but it was no good. You’ve never seen Aunt Jerry; I must have you meet her; she’s so like the lady who went to see Anthony and Cleopatra and said it was very unlike the homelife of the dear late Queen!”

Cosimo was silent for a moment; then his voice came authoritatively out of the darkness. Cosimo was not much of a painter, but he really had views that were often quite well worth hearing.

“You see, Amory, it’s the swing of the pendulum. Action and re-action. Perfectly simple. Take wearing stays, for example. What woman to-day would think of wearing the stays they used to wear? Half the women we know wear none at all, and the other half only these ribbon corsets. And it’s just the same with their views on marriage. They make such mysteries about it, and what’s the result? Why, in trying to make it impossibly beautiful they miss the real beauty that’s there all the time, the beauty of the physical process. We have to rediscover that to-day. And we’ve got a whole lot of abolishing to do before we can begin. Sorry to have to abolish your aunt, but really, as you say, Amory, we haven’t time to-day to waste on people who marry and expect to have butterflies.”

Sometimes Amory wondered whether these daring and illuminating talks with Cosimo were altogether a good thing for her art. They sometimes seemed to enlarge her ideas too much. It was difficult, with a common brush and an ordinary canvas and a paint-box like anybody else’s, to express the true philosophical meaning of the heart of things as Cosimo sometimes set that meaning forth; or rather, she could explain what she meant, but could not always make it explain itself. She expressed this doubt to Cosimo now, and found him quite extraordinarily full of help.

“I know,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s hard, but it’s what you’ve got to do, Amory. It’s your job. Fundamental brainwork, as Rossetti said. The old traditions are epuisées—worn out; in making the new one you must say to yourself, ‘Is this that I am doing merely a repetition, or does it belong to the age that has—well, say, wireless telegraphy?’ I don’t mean that you’ve got to muddle yourself, of course; that’s the other danger: like Scylla and Charybdis; there are always two dangers, underdoing and overdoing; it’s a Law. What I mean is that your art must be the thing. See what I mean? Break fresh ground. Do something new. Say to yourself ‘I’m going to do something new.’ That’s what the Pre-Raphaelites did, and look at Ford Madox Brown! As I say, it’s the swing of the pendulum; action and re——(Hallo, here’s Mrs. ’Ill—listen to her cough). … What a dreadful cold you have, Mrs. ’Ill!”

And they chuckled for a quarter of an hour over Mrs. ’Ill’s comical confusion.

That afternoon they had one of their jolliest chats about Heredity. Amory wished she had Galton by her so that she could show Cosimo what she really meant, but Galton, in that topsy-turvy, was not to be laid hands on. Cosimo rested on his broom from time to time to listen, fastened his coffee-brown eyes earnestly on her face, and said that she ought to paint a picture, not necessarily to be called “Heredity,” but to have something of Galton’s meaning and spirit about it. “Express him in a different medium, if you understand me,” he said. … Then he finished his walls, and they washed their begrimed hands and faces together over a bucket and went out to tea. Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies were left to sweep up and to make all ready for Cosimo to distemper the walls and stain the floor to-morrow. They dined, talking ever the more rapidly and brightly as the hours wore on; and Amory went as reluctantly back to Glenerne that night as if she had been going from a glorious liberty to a prison.

Here, however, a piece of bad news awaited her. After dinner Uncle George drew her aside and handed her a paragraph he had cut from a newspaper. Amory read it, and then looked inquiringly up at Mr. Massey. Except that it contained a name with which she was somehow remotely familiar, it conveyed nothing to her. Not many things in newspapers did convey much to Amory. She thought them dull, and wished they had a Cosimo at the head of them to fill them with the really interesting things about the New Movement and criticism and art.

Nor did the scholastic bookseller himself appear to know the full purport of the paragraph. It announced baldly and briefly that a trustee had absconded with certain funds, and Mr. Massey feared that those funds might include the capital sum that hitherto had yielded the thirteen pounds a quarter Amory had had from her godmother. The man might, of course (Mr. Massey said), be—something or other—“extradited” she thought the word was; but, on the other hand, he might not. Even if he were to be extradited, Mr. Massey feared that such delinquents commonly bolted, not with the money, but after the money was spent. So he would not advise Amory to build too much on the recovery of the money. … And Amory discovered something new and rather unexpected in her prospective uncle, namely, that while it was “a pleasure to assist” (as he had softly hissed) a young woman who had shown herself as capable as Amory had of assisting herself, he did not think it necessary to keep hold of her hand once she was set on her feet. She had a hundred pounds in actual cash, on account of a sum that might be very large indeed; and he himself would have thought himself lucky had he been possessed of half that capital at her age. … This mid-Victorian, heavy-father view of Mr. Massey’s, that young people should be kept a little short in the very years of their capacity for enjoyment, could, of course, have been demolished in a minute by any modern and rational and hard-up young man: it was manifestly absurd that people should have money only when they were past their pleasures: but it would have taken more than Cosimo to knock it out of Mr. Massey’s head for all that.

Amory went to bed moodily that night, first trying to tell herself, and then trying not to tell herself, that her income was in all probability now reduced by a half.

She had begun, too, to be a little alarmed at the rate at which her hundred pounds of actual capital was diminishing. Excellently and cheaply as Cosimo had bought, she simply could not tell herself where nearly thirty pounds had gone. There had been her bed, her bath, her chest of drawers, her washstand, her this, that, and the other; and there had been “sundries.” She had had the conception of sundries that they were quite small things, in paper packets and tins, that cost a few pence; it came rather as a shock to her that kettles and frying-pans and cups and saucers and scrubbing-brushes were sundries too. And tablecloths and blankets and sheets and pillow-cases seemed to be very considerable sundries indeed. Still—thirty pounds! She would have thought that thirty pounds would have furnished the Glenerne kitchens twice over. And at tea that afternoon, Cosimo had spoken of a carved wood frame he had seen in Marylebone High Street that it would be positively criminal not to buy for another three! …

Well, living would be cheaper at Cheyne Walk; that would be one thing. Tea and bread-and-butter and a chop or steak once a day would be quite enough for her; and when all these things were bought they were bought, and would not be to buy again. She had another shrinking as she remembered that, now that all her work had gone to Croziers’, she had hardly a canvas or stretcher in the place, and that half her paint-tubes were mere flat metal ribbons with a screw-cap on the end, and that she badly wanted a complete set of new brushes. She tried to tell herself that five pounds would refit her, but she knew in her heart that ten or twelve would hardly be too much; artists’ colourmen have their sundries too. …

And now she must reckon a whole pound a week as good as gone. …

But the press-cuttings from the provincial papers were still coming in, and her courage revived as she remembered Mr. Hamilton Dix’s newest article on her and her work. He was coming to interview her. The market for her twenty-eight canvases was already being prepared. Mr. Dix would hardly be doing all that unless it was intended that her show should come on in the autumn. …

She went to sleep, once more resolved that when, presently, she should come into her kingdom, no poor artist, provided he were really deserving, should ask her help in vain.

Two days later she had cast her money cares almost entirely to the winds. Naturally it was not to be supposed that she could come into a hundred pounds and not buy herself at least one frock; as a matter of fact she had bought two. She hoped she had not offended Dorothy about them. It was one of the advantages of Dorothy’s occupation that she was frequently offered clothes, not merely at cost price, but at truly absurd reductions. But then (Amory had thought) they were such clothes—inartistic and irrational in the extreme, conventional Paris and Viennese models, some of them actually resembling those excruciating drawings of Dorothy’s, and hats that (to put it bluntly) Amory would not have been found dead in. Dorothy had offered to get her a number of these, and had said that it was a chance to be jumped at! … Why, even Cosimo, a man, had laughed and said, “Dear old Dot—she means awfully well, doesn’t she?” … And Cosimo had chosen the two frocks Amory actually had bought. One of them was terra-cotta, the other green; both were exquisitely smocked at yoke and hips, and any of the Pre-Raphaelites (Cosimo said) would have gone half wild with delight over the drawing of the myriad intricate folds. He had made a suggestion or two in the shop itself, and when the things had been, delivered at the studio, Cosimo had not rested until he had seen Amory put them on. Amory had looked round the room; the curtain that was to enclose her new bed was not up yet, but she thanked goodness she was not one of your shrinking prudes. … “I don’t suppose a girl’s arms will shock you, will they?” she had asked, smiling. … So she had tried, first the terra-cotta, then the green. “Oh, I say, you do look stunning!” Cosimo had flattered her, lifting his fine dark eyes as she had turned this way and that; “but you ought to have a Portia cap, you know——” And that was only another instance of the way their minds jumped together; for Amory, without saying anything to Cosimo, had already got two of the Portia caps, one for each frock. … Then she had got back into the old frock again, and they had discussed the preparation of the studio once more.

As Cosimo said, they had really got most of the work done. The furniture would not arrive until the morrow, but the walls were already distempered a light green colour, almost white, and the ceiling was done, and the floor was a wide frame glassy with boiled oil and paraffin and polish, only awaiting the square of Japanese matting in the centre. The shining brown border was not yet quite dry, and Cosimo had very cleverly built up a sort of gang-plank across it to the door. To see Jellies, herself of a yielding figure, crossing this yielding plank, was very funny indeed. The framing in passe-partout of the photographs of old masters went down as sundries; Amory, with Myers on Human Personality tucked under her arm, had spent half the day in setting the photographs each in the one and only place for it; and now, until the bed and chest of drawers and things should come, she and Cosimo were sitting cross-legged in the middle of the unstained part of the floor. A yard of casement-cloth was between them, which Cosimo deftly ripped up with a pair of scissors. He had brought his own little work-basket. He was as handy with a needle as a sailor. And as he measured the casement-cloth he talked.

“Steady a moment—you’ve got hold of the wrong end; that’s the end, where I’ve basted it. If I were you I should buttonhole the eyelets. … Look out, you’re giving me a finished pair to cut … and I say, Amory, you want a fresh binding on that skirt—you’ll be catching your heel and coming down; I’ll put a stitch in it for you as soon as I’ve finished this. … I say you’re quiet; a penny for your thoughts!”

Amory, as a matter of fact, had been once more hoping that Cosimo would by and by find some really nice girl to marry. In his case the wrong one would be dreadfully wrong; he had the woman’s point of view so perfectly. That, in a sense, was why he was so exquisitely right in not wanting to marry Amory herself—supposing, that was, that Amory had not definitely decided never to marry at all. They knew one another too well; were too much alike, too beautifully “pals”; somehow they seemed almost to come within the prohibited degrees. … Still, if Amory couldn’t marry Cosimo, she could keep, as it were, an eye on him. It would be dreadful if he fell into the hands of some jealous creature or other, worthy neither of him nor of Amory herself. Amory had long thought that it would be rather nice to be “Aunt Amory” to a number of eugenically-selected and rationally-clothed boys and girls, who were not told lies about where they came from, and had moral courage enough, when they were afraid, to say that they were afraid; but she wasn’t going to be “come over” by their mother, and permitted as a favour to see Cosimo once in a while, and to be put off with a “Not at Home” when she and Cosimo wished to discuss her art. … So, when Cosimo said, “A penny for your thoughts,” Amory was silent for a moment, and then, lifting her pretty brook-brown eyes over the yard of casement-cloth that united their hands, she smiled pensively and said:

“I was wondering, Cosimo, why—why you don’t marry Dorothy.”

Cosimo dropped his end of the casement-cloth and reached for a needle with black thread in it. He leaned forward.

“Here, let me stitch that binding while I think of it. … What’s that? Marry Dorothy? … Why, you don’t suppose Dorothy would have me, do you? Because I don’t.”

Of course, Cosimo was far too well-bred to say that he wouldn’t have Dorothy. Still, she guessed what he meant. Dorothy (he seemed to say) was a perfect dear, but not in that way. Nevertheless, Amory, who sat in the light and could see herself ever so tiny in Cosimo’s black-coffee-coloured eyes, looked a little doubtful, and said, “Are you quite sure of that?”

“Perfectly sure,” Cosimo repeated, with the same beautiful tact. “Don’t suppose she’d look at me if there wasn’t another man in London. Besides, if I wanted to be absurd, I might ask you why you don’t marry Walter!”

Amory straightened her back and the pretty bluebell-stalk of her neck. She gave a rich little laugh.

“Oh, just at present I’m having enough of marriage to last me for some time to come. … Cosimo,” she added, in impressive tones, “Aunt Jerry’s—awful!”

“How, awful? (Just pull the edge round a bit, will you?”)

“Ugh! … But you don’t know her: I’ll take you round and introduce you: then you’ll see for yourself. What about next Wednesday? or no, I’d better have them here. … Really it seems to me to amount to a public gloating? Their engagement was announced in the ‘Times,’ and ever since they’ve had nothing but advertisements—advertisements for wedding-cakes, dresses, veils, flowers, furniture, houses, and I don’t know what not. The most private things—you wouldn’t believe! It’s as if every tradesman in London was looking at them as those shopmen looked at us when we bought the bed! But the moment I ask a perfectly plain question, oh, the outraged modesty! … And what do you think her latest is? She hopes that if there are any children at all they’ll be boys! Boys! Think of it!”

“Ah, the Feminist Movement was bound to tell,” said Cosimo. “If we’re doing nothing else, we’re driving the reactionaries into the opposite camp and making them declare themselves.”

“You think it’s that?”

“Think, my dear! I’m quite sure. We’re driving them to their last defence. They know that woman’s man’s equal really, and that’s why they’re afraid. Why, look at your own case. You needn’t go further than that. What’s the good of theorizing when one knows? Take the chromosome. If woman’s got one and man hasn’t, then she has something he hasn’t, and is actually his superior. You’ve a chromosome and I haven’t, and look at us. … Yes, that’s why the stick-in-the-muds nowadays all want boys. The female disability’s going to be removed. You’re removing it in your work; the advance-guard are removing it by having girls. It’s all right as long as we know who’s for us and who’s against us. I don’t blame your aunt for a single moment. I’m sorry for her, but that’s a different thing.”

“Dorothy says she’d rather have boys, too,” Amory mused.

“Of course she would; so would Jellies; and making allowances for accidentals, Dot and Jellies are intellectually on a par, you know.”

(“Here’s a piece that wants a stitch too.) But oh, Cosimo, isn’t that going rather too far? Dorothy—and Jellies——!”

“Not far enough,” Cosimo averred stoutly. “The cases are exactly on all-fours. We know what Dorothy is, but we don’t know what Jellies might not have been if she’d had the chance. You aren’t allowing for Environment, you see. …”

And only the arrival of the bed, the bath and the chest of drawers cut short (three-quarters of an hour later) the most illuminating talk about Environment that Amory and Cosimo had ever had.

By seven o’clock that evening the studio was practically ready for Amory to come into it. It certainly looked exceedingly comfortable. A fire had been lighted, more for the sake of decorative effect than from any need of one, and the smell of the excellent little dinner Cosimo had cooked filled the room with a delightfully homelike smell. Potatoes roasted in their jackets in the ashes, liver-and-bacon keeping warm on the two hot plates inside the fender, a pancake ready for pouring into the pan, cheese, fruit, coffee in a little lustre jug only needing the hot water to be poured upon it, and half a bottle of “Veuve Dodo” (an Australian burgundy) from the wineshop in the King’s Road—Cosimo had seen to all. Mrs. ’Ill herself, coming in to give a last look round, had found nothing wanting.

“Well, nobody can say as ’ow you won’t be snug—can they, Florence?” Mrs. ’Ill said, leaving it delicately in doubt whether she meant the pronoun to be taken as in the plural. “A prettier little ’ome, all things considered, I never see. I always says as it isn’t riches as makes contentment; and you ’aven’t far to go for your potatoes anyway, which is just downstairs, also apples and oranges. And eggs I can always supply, though my experience is as artists puts too much trust in eggs, which hasn’t the nourishment of meat when all’s said, and not cheaper when you take your ’ealth into consideration, as all of us must, young or old and married or not. Nor winkles, though I’m fond of ’em myself, but not to rely on. Bring the bucket, Florence, and I ’ope you’ve taken notice, so you can tell ’Orris when ’e comes out next week. … Oh, thank you, sir; I don’t deny it would be acceptable, the smell of turps being that drying—and wishing you good night and sweet dreams. …”

And Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies curtsied elaborately and left them.

“She almost said the Creek wasn’t five minutes away!” Cosimo laughed when they had gone. “And that idea was a great success of yours, to put the slippers I’d been whitewashing inside the fender. Jellies’s eyes nearly fell into them when she saw them! Aren’t people funny! … Well, let’s have the first meal in the new place. …”

He put a pinch of salt into the coffee-jug and reached for the liver-and-bacon.

As they ate and toasted the new studio, in the Veuve Dodo, they discussed the house-warming that, of course, Amory must give. Including the carved wood frame, the two frocks, and more sundries, Amory’s installation had cost her in all forty-three pounds. A fresh supply of materials for her work would bring the sum up to forty-eight or more—call it forty-eight, and to all intents and purposes forty-eight was fifty. A party by all means; one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. They talked of it. Laura would bring her guitar again, and—who was that new friend of Walter’s, the one with the glasses, who seemed to know Nietzsche by heart? … They would get Walter to bring him. And Katie and Dickie, of course, and Phyllis Hardy, and Amory supposed they’d have to ask Dorothy. They could pull the bed from behind its curtain to sit on; and now, thank goodness, there were plates and glasses enough to go round! Amory’s eyes rested on them where they stood in overlapping rows on the rack that Cosimo had put up where the little bookshelf had been. They shone brightly, and the cups twinkled on the new brass hooks below them; and there were tea and coffee in the tins, and milk in a jug, and butter in a little dish, and everything looked so spick-and-span that Amory had half a mind to paint it all. The flat wide kettle Cosimo had bought would boil on the oil-stove in twelve minutes. The bath was under the bed. Cosimo had marked the spare bed and table linen that was neatly folded in the chest of drawers. A curtain drew across the row of pegs on which Amory’s clothes hung, and the reflections of the candle-flames in the polished floor-borders made simply ripping shimmers of colour. Amory was quite cross that she must return to Glenerne that night; it was such a long way for poor Cosimo to see her home. Well, she would be nearer to him soon—practically just round the corner. Then they would be able to see quite a lot of each other.

After supper Cosimo washed up, and then they drew up two chairs to the fire; and Amory turned back her new terra-cotta skirt so as not to scorch it, and they talked and ate apples. They talked of poor Herbertson’s show (he had died), and Mr. Dix’s articles, and Amory’s own work; and it was long before Amory yawned sleepily. Then she rose. Return to Glenerne she must. She begged Cosimo, who had had a hard day, to let her go alone; but Cosimo would not hear of it. Then, as Cosimo was putting out the lamp, they both laughed together. The absent-minded fellow had actually been on the point of setting out with her to Shepherd’s Bush in the slippers in which he had white-washed, leaving his boots by the side of her bed.