A Crooked Mile

by Oliver Onions

THE PIGEON PAIR

Amory had been at a great deal of trouble to gather all the opinions she could get about the education of her twins, Corin and Bonniebell; but it was not true, as an unkind visitor who had been once only to The Witan had said, that they were everybody's children. Just because Amory had taken Katie Deedes' advice and had had their hair chopped off short at the nape like a Boutet de Monvel drawing—and had not disdained to accept the spelling-books which Dickie Lemesurier had given them (books in which the difficult abstraction of the letter "A" was visualized for their young eyes as "Little Brown Brother," "B" as "Tabby Cat," and so on)—and had listened to Mr. Brimby when he had said what a good thing it would be to devote an hour on Friday afternoons to the study of Altruism and Camaraderie—and, in a word, had not been too proud and egotistical to make use of a good suggestion wherever she found it—because she had done these things, it did not at all follow that she had shirked her duties. If she did not influence them directly, having other things to do, she influenced those who did influence them, which came to the same thing. She influenced the Wyrons, for example, and nobody could say that the Wyrons had not made a particularly careful study of children. They had, and Walter had founded at least two Lectures directly on the twins and their education.

But the Wyrons, who had submitted to the indignity of marriage for the sake of the race, laboured and lectured under an obvious disadvantage; they had no children of their own. And so Amory had to fill up the gaps in their experience for herself. Still, it was wonderful how frequently the Wyrons' excogitations and the things Amory had found out for herself coincided. They were in absolute accord, for example, about the promise of the immediate future and the hope that lay in the generation to come. The Past was dead and damned; the Present at best was an ignoble compromise; but the Morrow was to be bright and shining.

"Walter and I," Laura sometimes said sadly, "aren't anything to brag about. There is much of the base in us. Our lives aren't what they should be. We're in the grip of inherited instincts too. We strive for the best, but the worst's sometimes too much for us. It's like Moses seeing the Promised Land from afar. We're just in the position of Moses. But these young Aarons——"

Amory thought that very modest and dignified of poor old Laura. She frequently thought of her as 'poor old Laura,' but of course she didn't mean her actual age, which was only two years more than Amory's own. And that was very good, if a little sad, about Moses. The Wyrons did look forth over a Canaan they weren't very likely ever to tread.

Lately—that is to say since that secret and tremendous moment between herself and Edgar Strong in the studio—Amory had fallen into the habit of musing long over the sight of the twins at lessons, at play, or at that more enlightened combination that makes lessons play and play lessons. Sometimes Mr. Brimby, the novelist, had come up to her as she had mused and had asked her what she was thinking about.

"Your little Pigeon Pair, eh?" he had said. "Ah, the sweetness; ah, lucky mother! Grey books have to be the children of some of us; ah, me; yours is a pleasanter path!"

Then he would fondle the little round topiary trees of their heads. Amory was almost as sorry for Mr. Brimby as she was for Laura. His books sold only moderately well, and she had more than once thought she would like the "Novum" to serialize one of them—the one with the little boy rather like Corin and the little girl rather like Bonniebell in it—if Mr. Brimby didn't want too much money for it.

Edgar Strong, on the other hand, never fondled the children, and Amory's heart told her why. How could he be expected to do anything but hate those poor innocents who had come between him and his desire? He must have realized that only the twins had frustrated that flight to Paris. Of course he was polite about it; he said that he was not very fond of children at all; but Amory was not deceived. She was, in a way, flattered that he did not fondle them. It was such an eloquent abstention. But it would have been more eloquent still had he come to The Witan and not-fondled them oftener.

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. Corin, grown to be twenty, would one day meet with some mite who was still in her cradle or not yet born, and the two would look at one another with amazement and delight, and the Ideal Love would be born in their eyes, and Corin would recite a few of those brave and pure and unashamed things out of "Leaves of Grass" to her, and—well, and there they would be.... And Bonniebell, too, would do the same, on a Spring morning very likely, simply clad, cool and without immodest blushes—yes, she too would see somebody, and she would say, gladly and simply, "I am here" (for there would be no reason, then, why she should wait for the youth to speak first), and—well, and there they would be too. And it would be Exogamy, or whatever the word was that Walter used. Either would go forth from the family on the appointed day—or perhaps only Corin would go, and Bonniebell remain behind—but anyway, one, if not both of them would go forth, and rove the morning-flushed hills, alone and free and singing and on the look-out for somebody, and they would look just like pictures of young Greeks, and nobody would laugh, as they did at the poor lady who walked in Greek robes down the Strand....