The door opened, and Noel and Jackie stood there with a nurse behind them. Noel walked stoutly in. Jackie, not yet very firm on his pins, bumbled after him like an overladen bee.
III
THE "NOVUM"
Stan was quite right in supposing that the Cosimo Pratts wished to forget all about the Ludlow experiment that had disturbed the Shropshire country-side a year or more before, but he was wrong in the reason he assigned them. They were not in the least ashamed of it. As a stage in their intellectual development, the experiment had been entirely in its place. Especially in Mrs. Pratt's career—as an old student of the McGrath School of Art, a familiar (for a time) with Poverty in cheap studios, the painter of the famous Feminist picture "Barrage," and so forward—had this been true. Cosimo, in "The Life and Work of Miss Amory Towers," a labour to which he devoted himself intermittently, pointed out the naturalness and inevitability of the sequence with real eloquence. Step had led to step, and the omission of any one step would have ruined the whole.
But nobody with work still in them lingers long over the past. They had dropped the task of regenerating rural England, or rather had handed it over to others, only when it had been pointed out to them that capacity so rare as theirs ought to be directed to larger ends. One evening there had put in an appearance at one of the Ludlow meetings—a meeting of the Hurdy-gurdy Octette, which afterwards gave instrumental performances with such success at Letchworth, Bushey and Golder's Green—Mr. Strong, the original founder and present editor of the "Novum Organum," or, as it was usually called, the "Novum." Mr. Strong, as it happened, was the man whom the scatter-brained Stan had met at The Witan, and of whom he had expected that impossibility of any man whomsoever—an admission that he did not know what he was talking about. At that time Mr. Strong had been perambulating the country with a Van, holding meetings and distributing literature; and whatever Mr. Strong's other failings might have been, nobody had ever said of him that he did not recognize a good thing when he saw it. The Cause itself had served as an introduction between him and Cosimo; it had also been a sufficient reason for his inviting himself to Cosimo's house for a couple of days and remaining there for three weeks; and then he had got rid of the Van and had come again. He was a rapturous talker, when there was an end to be gained, and he had expressed himself as strongly of the opinion that, magnificent a field for the sowing of the good seed as the country-side was, there was simply stupendous propaganda to be done in London. He knew (he had gone on) that Mrs. Pratt would forgive him (he had a searching blue eye and an actor's smile) if he appeared for a moment to speak disparagingly of what he might call the mere graces of the Movement, (alluring as these were in Mrs. Pratt's capable and very pretty hands); it was not disparagement really; he only meant that these garlands would burgeon a hundred-fold if the stern and thankless work was got out of the way first. Mr. Strong had a valuable trick of suddenly making those searching blue eyes of his more searching, and of switching off the actor's smile altogether; both of these things had happened as he had gone on to point out that what the Cause was really languishing for was a serious and responsible organ; and then, and only then, when they had got (so to speak) the diapason, there would be time enough for the trills and appoggiaturas of the Hurdy-gurdy Band.
Before the end of Mr. Strong's second visit Cosimo had put up the greater part of the money for the "Novum."
So you see just where the feather-pated Stan was wrong. The Cosimo Pratts were not outfaced from anything; they had merely seen a new and heralding light. They did not so much recede from the Rural Experiment, and discussions of the Suffrage, and eating buns on the floor at assemblies of the Poets' Club, and a hundred and twenty other such things, as become as it were translated. They still shed over these activities the benignity of their approval, but from on high now. Amory could no longer be expected actually to "run" the Suffrage Shop herself—Dickie Lemesurier did that; nor the "Eden" (the new offshoot off the Lettuce Grill)—that she left to Katie Deedes; nor the "Lectures on Love" Agency—that was quite safe in the hands of her friends, Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish. Amory merely shed approval down. She was hors concours. She ... but you really must read Cosimo's book. You will find it all there (or at any rate a good deal of it).
For Amory Pratt, in so far as Cosimo was the proprietor of the "Novum," was the proprietor of the proprietor of a high-class weekly review that was presently going to put the two older parties out of business entirely. She had more than a Programme now; she had a Policy. She had crossed the line into the haute politique. Her At Homes were already taking on the character of the political salon, and between herself and the wives of ministers and ambassadors were differences, in degree perhaps, but not in kind. And that even these differences should become diminished she had taken on, ever since her settling-down at The Witan, slight, but significant, new attitudes and condescensions. She was kinder and more gracious to her sometime equals than before. She gave them encouraging looks, as much as to say that they need not be afraid of her. But it was quite definitely understood that when she took Mr. Strong apart under the copper beech or retired with him into the studio at the back of the house, she must on no account be disturbed.—Mr. Strong, by the way, always dressed in the same Norfolk jacket, red tie and soft felt hat, and his first caution to Cosimo and Amory had been that Brimby, the novelist, was an excellent chap, but not always to be taken very seriously.