A Crooked Mile

by Oliver Onions

But where else to go, if not to The Witan? To Laura's? To Dickie's? That would be the same thing as going home: little enough change from spinal anaesthesia in that! They could not help. Of all her old associates, there was hardly one but might—that was to say if anything extraordinary ever happened to them, like suddenly getting to know something—there was hardly one of them but might experience precisely this same hopeless perfection of wrongness, and fail to discover any one point at which it had all begun. It was rather to be hoped (Amory thought) that they never would get to know anything. They were happier as they were, in a self-contained and harmonious ignorance. Knowledge attained too late was rather dreadful; people ought to begin to get it fairly early or not at all. They ought to begin at about the age of Corin and Bonniebell....

A month ago the last person she would have gone to with a trouble would have been Dorothy Tasker. They had not a single view in common. Moreover, it would have been humiliating. But now that actually became, in a curious, reflex sort of way, a reason for going. She did not know that she actually wished to be humiliated; she did not think about it; but she had been looking at herself, and at people exactly like herself, for a long, long, long time, and, when you have looked at yourself too much you can sometimes actually find out something new about yourself by looking for a change at somebody else as little like you as can possibly be found. Amory had tried a good many things, but she had never tried this. It might be worth trying. She hesitated for one moment longer. This was when she feared that Dorothy might offer her, not the change from numbness to pain, but a sympathy and consolation that, something deep down within her told her, would not help her.... A little more quickly, but not much, she walked up Maiden Road. She turned into Fleet Road, and reached the tram-terminus below Hampstead Heath Station. Thence to Dorothy's was a bare five minutes. What she should say when she got to Dorothy's she did not trouble to think.

And at first it looked as if she would not be allowed to say anything at all to her, for when she rang the bell of the hall-floor flat Stan himself opened the door, looked at her with no great favour, and told her that Dorothy was not to be seen. From that Amory gathered that Dorothy was at least within.

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. Why she should have supposed that Dorothy would be in her bedroom she could not have told. She might equally well have been in the dining-room, or in the pond-room. But along the passage to the bedroom Amory walked, while Stan stared in stupefaction after her.

Dorothy was there. She had not gone to bed, but, early as it was, appeared to have been preparing to do so. Amory knew that because, though in Britomart Belchamber's case a dressing-gown and plaited hair might merely have meant that she wanted to listen to Walter Wyron's talk in looseness and comfort, or else that a plaster cast was to be taken, they certainly did not mean that in Dorothy's. And she supposed that differences of that kind were more or less what she had come to see.

Dorothy was gazing into the fire before which the youngest Bit had had his bath. Close to her own chair was drawn the chair that had evidently been lately occupied by Stan. The infant Bit's cot was in a corner of the room. At first Dorothy did not look up from the fire. Probably she supposed the person who was looking at her from the doorway to be Stan.

But as that person neither spoke nor advanced, she turned her head. The next moment a curious little sound had come from her lips. You see, in the first place, she had expected nobody less, and in the second place, she wholeheartedly shared many of her worldly old aunt's prejudices, among which was the monstrous one that established a connexion between recently-bibbed politicians in this country and revolver shots in another. And there was no doubt whatever that her presentable but brainless young husband had fostered this fallacious conviction. He might even have gone so far as to say that Amory herself was not altogether unresponsible....

And that, too, in a sense, was what Amory had come for.

The eyes of the two women met, Amory's at the door, Dorothy's startled ones looking over her shoulder; blue ones and shallow brook-brown ones; and then Dorothy half rose.

But whatever the first expression of her face had been, it hardly lasted for a quarter of an instant. Alarm instantly took its place. She had begun to get up as a person gets up who would ask another person what he is doing there. Now it was as if, though she did not yet know what it was, there was something to be done, something practical and with the hands, without a moment's delay.