PART II
I
Mrs. Malwood was hipped. She had been losing heavily at bridge, her
Pomeranian had been run over in Berkeley Square and taken to the dog's
hospital, her most recent flame had just been married to his colonel's
daughter, and her fourth husband was still alive. Poor little soul, she
had lots to grumble about. So she had come round to be cheered up by Feo
Fallaray who always managed to laugh through deaths and epidemics to
find her friend in the first stages of being dressed for dinner. She had
explained her mental attitude, received a hearty kiss and been told to
lie down and make herself comfortable. There she was, at the moment, in
one of the peculiar frocks which had become almost like the uniform of
Feo's "gang." She was not old, except in experience. In fact, she was
not more than twenty-three. But as she lay on the sofa with her eyes
closed and her lashes like black fans on her cheeks, a little pout on
her pretty mouth and her bobbed head resting upon a brilliant cushion,
she looked, in those clothes of hers, like a school girl whose
headmistress was a woman of an aesthetic turn of mind but with a curious
penchant for athleticism. Underneath her smock of duvetyn, the color of
a ripe horse-chestnut, she wore bloomers and stockings rolled down under
her knees,--as everybody could see. She might have been a rather swagger
girl scout who never scouted, and there was just a touch of masculinity
about her without anything muscular. She was, otherwise, so tiny a thing
that any sort of a man could have taken her up in one hand and held her
above his head. Very different from Lady Feo, whose shoulders were
broad, whose bones were large, who stood five foot ten without her
shoes, who could hand back anything that was given to her and swing a
golf club like a man.
"I've just been dipping into Margot's Diary, Georgie. Topping stuff. I
wish to God she were young again,--one of us. She'd make things hum. I
can't understand why the critics have all thrown so many vitriolic fits
about her book and called her the master egotist. Don't they know the
meaning of words and isn't this an autobiography? Good Lord, if any
woman has a right to be egotistical it's Margot. She did everything well
and to my way of thinking she writes better than all the novelists
alive. She can sum up a character as well in ten lines as all our
verbose young men in ten chapters. In her next book I hope to heaven
she'll get her second wind and put a searchlight into Downing Street.
Her poor old bird utterly lost his tail but the public ought to know to
what depths of trickery and meanness politics can be carried.--You can
make that iron a bit hotter if you like, Lola. Don't be afraid of it."
Lola gave her a glint of smile and laid the iron back on its stand.
During the process of being dressed, Lady Feo reclined in a sort of
barber's chair--not covered with a _peignoir_ or a filmy dressing jacket
but in what is called in America a union suit--a one-piece thing of silk
with no sleeves and cut like rowing shorts. It became her tremendously
well,--cool and calm and perfectly satisfied with herself. She glanced
at Lola, who stood quiet and efficient in a neat frock of black alpaca,
with her golden hair done closely to her small head, and then winked at
Georgie and gave a hitch to her elbow to call attention to the new maid
whom she had already broken in and regarded as the latest actor in her
private theatricals. Her whole life was a sort of play in which she took
the leading part.
There was something in that large and airy bedroom which always did Mrs.
Malwood good. She liked its Spartan simplicity, its white walls, white
furniture, white carpet and the curtains and cushions which were of
delicate water-color tones suggestive of sweet peas. It had once been
wholly black as a background for Lady Feo's dead-white skin. But her
friend had grown out of that, as she grew out of almost everything
sooner or later.
"New, isn't she?" asked Mrs. Malwood without lowering her voice.
"A month old," replied Lady Feo, "and becoming more and more useful
every moment. Aren't you, Lola?"
Lola bowed and smiled and once more put the hot tongs to the thick wiry
hair which eventually would stand out around her mistress's head like
that of some Hawaiian girl.
"Where did you pick her up?" asked Georgie.
"She fell into my lap like a ripe plum. She's a niece of my Breezy, the
housekeeper. You'd never think it, would you? I'm more and more inclined
to believe, as a matter of fact, that she escaped from a china cabinet
from a collection of Dresden pieces."
Mrs. Malwood perched herself upon an elbow and examined Lola
languidly,--who was quite used to this sort of thing, having already
been discussed openly before innumerable people as though she were a
freak.
They little knew how closely Lola was studying them in turn,--their
manner, their accent, their tricks of phrase and for what purpose she
was undergoing this apprenticeship. Out for sensation, they would
certainly have attained a thrilling one could they have seen into the
mind of this discreet and industrious girl who performed her duties with
the deftest fingers and went about like a disembodied spirit.
"Where are you dining?"
"Here," said Lady Feo. "I've got half a dozen of Arthur's friendly
enemies coming. It will be a sort of Cabinet meeting. They're all in a
frightful stew about his attitude on the Irish question. They know that
he and I are not what the papers call 'in sympathy,' so why the dickens
they've invited themselves I don't know,--in the hope, I suppose, of my
being able to work on his feelings and get him to climb down from his
high horse. The little Welshman is the last man to cod himself that his
position is anything but extremely rocky and he knows that he can't
afford to lose the support of a man like Arthur, whose honesty is sworn
to by every Tom, Dick and Harry in the land; this is in the way of a
_dernier ressort_, I suppose. I shall be the only woman present. Pity me
among this set of indecisive second-raters who are all in a dead funk
and utterly unable to cope with the situation, either in Germany,
France, Ireland, India or anywhere else and have messed up the whole
show. If I had Margot's pen, just think what a ripping chapter I could
write in my diary if I kept one, eh, Georgie?" She threw back her head
and laughed.
As far as Fallaray's hard-and-fast stand against reprisals was concerned
she cared nothing. In fact, Ireland was a word with which she was
completely fed up. She had erased it from her dictionary. It meant
nothing to her that British officers were being murdered in their beds
and thrown at the feet of their wives or that the scum of the army had
blacked and tanned their way through a country burning with passion and
completely mad. The evening was just one of a series of stunts to her
out of which she would derive great amusement and be provided with
enough chitchat to give her friends gusts of mirth for weeks.
"I saw Fallaray to-day," said Georgie. "He was walking in the Park. He
only needs a suit of armor to look like Richard Coeur de Lion. Is he
really and honestly sincere, Feo, or is this a political trick to get
the Welshman out of Downing Street? I ask because I don't believe that
any man can have been in the House as long as he has and remain clean."
"Don't you know," said Lady Feo, with only the merest glint of smile,
"that Arthur has been divinely appointed to save civilization from
chaos? Don't you know that?"
"Yes, but I know a good many of the others who have--when any one's
looking. You really can't make me believe in these people, especially
since the War. Such duds, my dear."
"All the same, you can believe in Arthur." She spoke seriously. "He has
no veneer, no dishonesty, no power of escape from his own standards of
life. That's why he and I are like oil and water. We don't speak the
same language. He reminds me always of an Evangelist at a fancy-dress
ball, or Cromwell at a varsity binge. He's a wonderful dull dog, is
Arthur, absolutely out of place in English politics and it's perfectly
ridiculous that he should be married to me. God knows why I did it. His
profile fascinated me, probably, and the way he played tennis. I was
dippy about both those things at the time. I'm awfully sorry for him,
too. He needs a wife,--a nice cowlike creature with no sense of humor
who would lick his boots, put eau de cologne on his high forehead, run
to meet him with a little cry of adoration and spring out of bed to turn
on his bath when he came home in the middle of the night. All Cromwells
do and don't they love the smell of powder!--Good for you, Lola. Don't
you get frightfully fed up with this thick wiry hair of mine?"
Lola smiled and shook her head. It was only when she was alone with her
mistress that she permitted herself to answer questions. But as she
listened and with a burning heart heard her hero discussed and dismissed
and knew, better and more certainly than ever, the things that he
needed, one phrase ran like a recurring motif through her brain,--the
rustle of silk, the rustle of silk.
II
Lola and Miss Breezy were not on speaking terms.
The elderly spinster considered that she had been used and flouted,
treated as though she were in her dotage and had lost her authority to
engage and dismiss the members of the Fallaray menage. She had nursed,
therefore, a feeling of bitter antagonism against Lola during her three
weeks under the same roof. She had not treated her niece to anything in
the nature of an outburst on her return from Queen's Road to take up her
duties. "Dignity, dignity," she repeated again and again and steeled
herself with two other wonderful words that have helped so many similar
women in the great crisis of wounded vanity,--"my position." She had
simply cut her dead. Since then they had, of course, met frequently and
had even been obliged to speak to each other. They did so as though they
were totally unrelated and had never met before.
All this led to a certain amount of comedy below stairs, it being
perfectly well known to every one that Lola was the housekeeper's niece.
What Lola did when Miss Breezy entered the servants' sitting room the
night of her arrival filled the maids with astonishment, resentment and
admiration,--astonishment because of her extraordinary capacity of
holding in her laughter, resentment because she treated Miss Breezy with
the sort of respect which that good lady never got from them, and
admiration because of the innate breeding which seemed to ooze from that
child's finger tips. She had risen to her feet. And ever since she had
continued to do so--a thing, the possibility of which the others had
never conceived--and when spoken to had replied, "Yes, Miss Breezy,"
with a perfectly straight face and not one glint of humor in her eye. It
was wonderful. It was like something in a book,--an old book by a man
who wrote of times that were as dead as mutton. It was gorgeous. It gave
the girls the stitch from laughing. It became one of their standard
jokes. "Up for Miss Breezy," the word went after that and there was a
scramble out of chairs. All this made the elderly spinster angrier than
ever. Not only had she been done by this girl but, my word, the child
was rubbing it in.
It was curious to see the effect that Lola had upon the other servants.
They were all tainted with the Bolshevism that has followed in the wake
of the War. They drew their wages and grumbled, slurred their duties,
ate everything that they could lay their hands on, thought nothing of
destroying the utensils of the kitchen and the various things which they
used in the course of work, went out as often as they could and stayed
out much later than the rules of the house permitted. But under the
subtle influence of this always smiling, always good-tempered girl who
seemed to have come from another planet, ribaldry and coarse jokes and
the rather loose larking with the footmen began gradually to disappear.
Without resentment, because Lola was so companionable and fitted into
her new surroundings like a key into a lock, they toned themselves down
in her presence, and finding her absolutely without "side," hurried to
win her friendship, went into her room at night, singly, to confide in
her,--were not in the least jealous because Albert Simpkins, the butler
and the two footmen competed with one another to grovel at her feet. In
a word, Lola was as great a favorite below stairs as she was above. She
had realized that the ultimate success of her plan depended on her
popularity in the servants' sitting room and in winning these people to
her side had used all her homogeneous sense, even, perhaps, with greater
care and thoughtfulness than she had applied to her task of ingratiating
herself with Lady Feo. She knew very well that if the servants didn't
get on with her she would never be able to stay. They would make it
impossible.
How Madame de Breze would have chuckled had she been able to see her
little imitator sitting on the sofa at night, beneath an oleograph of
Queen Victoria, going through the current _Tatler_ in the midst of a
group of maids, with a butler and two footmen hanging over her shoulders
and a perfect valet dreaming of matrimony sitting astride a chair as
near as he could get. How she would have laughed at her descendant's
small quips and touches of wit and irony as she discussed the people who
were known to her companions by sight and by name and seemed to belong
to a sort of menagerie, separated from them by the iron bars of class
distinction through which they could be seen moving about,--well fed and
well groomed and performing for the public.
It was no trouble to Lola to do all this. She had done it almost all her
life with the gradations of children with whom she had been at
school,--admired by the girls, keeping the boys at arms' length and yet
retaining their friendship. It was perfectly easy. Lady Feo had liked
her instantly and so no effort was necessary. Tactfulness alone was
required,--to be silent when her mistress obviously required silence, to
be merry and bright when her mood was expansive and to anticipate her
wishes whenever in attendance. All Lola's period of make-believe, during
which she had played the celebrated courtesan in her little back
bedroom, had taught her precisely how to conduct herself in her new
surroundings. Had not she herself been in the hands of just such a
lady's maid as she had now become and seen her laugh when she had
laughed, remain quiet when she had demanded quietude? It merely meant
that she had exchanged roles with Lady Feo for a time and was playing
the servant's part instead of that of the leading lady. She reveled in
the whole thing. It gave her constant delight and pleasure. Above all,
she was under the same roof as her hero, of whom she caught a momentary
glimpse from time to time,--from the window as he got into his car, from
the gallery above the hall as he came back from the House of Commons, or
late at night when he passed along the corridor to his lonely rooms,
sometimes tired and with dragging feet, sometimes scornful and
impatient, and once or twice so blazing with anger that it was a wonder
that the things he touched did not burst into flames.
III
The only one of the servants who took the remotest interest in the
arrival of those members of the Cabinet who were to dine with Lady Feo
was Lola. With the butler's connivance she stood inside the hat room in
the hall and peeped through the door. To her there was something not
only indescribably interesting in the sight at close quarters of men of
whom she had read daily for years and who were admired or loathed by her
father and his friends, but something moving, because they had it in
their power to help or hinder the work of Fallaray. She found them to be
a curiously smug and well-fed lot, undistinguished, badly dressed and
not very different from the ordinary run of Queen's Road tradesmen. She
thought that they looked like piano tuners and was astonished and
disappointed.
The most important person, who arrived late and whose face was of course
familiar to her from caricatures, made up for all the rest. He stood in
the full light for a moment while he gave his coat and hat to a
footman,--a soft dump hat and a coat lined with very shiny black satin.
He looked more than ever like a quack doctor, one who was a cross
between a comedian and a revivalist. His uncut hair, very white now,
flopped over the back of his collar in a most uncivilized manner and his
little moustache of the walrus type was quite out of keeping with it. If
he had been clean-shaven he could have passed for a poet, or a dramatist
who desired to advertise the fact, as some of them do who flourished in
the Victorian period. His short plebeian figure, with legs far too small
and apparently too frail to carry his fat little trunk, gave him a
gnome-like appearance, but in his eyes, which were very wonderful, there
was a gleam of humor and resourcefulness which stamped him as a
consummate leader of men, while his forehead denoted imagination and
keen intelligence. It made Lola laugh to see the way in which he tried
to win the callous footman with a cheery word, never losing an
opportunity of making a client, and to watch his rabbit-like way of
going upstairs to the drawing-room.
She was met by Simpkins, who darted quickly and eagerly to her side.
"Look 'ere," he said in a whisper. "You're free for the evening. How
about doing a show with me? I can get you back before Lady Feo'll want
you again. What d'yer say?"
"Yes," said Lola, "I should love it. What shall we see?"
Simpkins was a gallery first nighter and an ardent patron of the drama.
Whatever he recommended, therefore, was sure to be worth seeing. "Well,"
he said, "there's Irene Vanbrugh in a new American play,--'Miss Nell o'
New Orleans.' I couldn't get to see it but I read old man Walkley and I
saw what Punch said. I don't think the play's much, but Irene is
orlright. Nip up and get your things on. Let's go and test it."
Lola nipped. Her little bedroom was in the servants' corridor. She was
lucky that it wasn't, like most servants' bedrooms, in the basement,
cheek by jowl with the coal cellar. She changed quickly, excited at the
prospect of stealing a few hours away from the house in Dover Street.
She had been home twice on her nights off, there to be gazed at in
silent wonder by the little mother who seemed to know her even less than
ever and to be put through an exhaustive cross-examination by her
father, whose mind ran to small details, as was natural in one who wore
a magnifying glass perpetually in his eye. She met Simpkins in the
servants' sitting room,--very spruce in a tail coat and a bowler with
his black tie ingeniously pulled through a gold ring in which there was
a most depressed diamond.
She was received with a chorus of inquiries from the maids. "Hello,
Lola," "On the loose with Simpky?" "This is something new, ain't it?"
"Going to do the shimmy in 'Ammersmith?" and so forth. To all of which
she replied in one sentence. "Mr. Simpkins is taking me to an organ
recital," and won a scream of mirth.
Simpkins was ecstatic. He had made a bet with himself that his appeal
would be refused. Always before Lola had turned him down and he knew
that the frequent pestering of the butler and the two footmen had been
unable to move her to adventure. "We've just time to do it," he said,
put two fingers into his mouth and sent a piercing whistle into the
muggy April evening. A prowling taxi drew up short and quivered, and a
well-shaped head looked round to see from whom this urgent call had
issued. Taking Lola's hand, Simpkins ran her across the street and
opened the door. "The Dooker York's."
"Righto, Sir," said the driver, giving a quick and appreciative glance
at his customer's companion. Exactly three years ago the owner of that
particularly nice voice, straight nose and small moustache had commanded
a battery of the R. F. A. and fired with open sights at the advancing
enemy. With nothing to eat except apples plucked from the orchards
through which he had retired with his ragged and weakening men, he had
fought coolly and cheerily for many days and nights, utterly out of
touch with the main army and eventually, looking like a scarecrow, had
removed his guns from impossible positions and fallen on his face in
Amiens. Thus does a grateful Parliament reward its saviors.
Simpkins slipped his hand through Lola's arm. "I've been looking forward
to this," he said. "You don't know what you've done for me. I'm a
different man since I saw you first."
"I," said Lola quickly, "am precisely the same girl," and very kindly
and definitely gave him back his hand and drew a little farther into her
corner of the cab. But Simpkins wasn't hurt. On the contrary he esteemed
her the more highly for this action. She proved herself so to be
different from the girls with whom he was acquainted and thus lived up
to his preconceived idea of her. "Sorry," he said, "thank you," and
glowed with love.
It was perfectly true that Simpkins was a different man since he had
seen Lola. She had revolutionized his life and his thoughts and
strengthened his ambitions. He was a good fellow, clean-minded, with one
or two ideals to which he had clung faithfully and well through the many
temptations which were provided by his like below stairs. He had
character. He was illiterate but not unintelligent. He had something
that the human sensibility is frequently without,--a soul, and because
of that he had imagination and a sense of worship. He was the sort of
man of whom fanatics are made under a crisis of deep emotion. As a
gentleman's gentleman he regarded himself as having a sort of mission in
life. He must be honest, always ready for his master's call; spruce,
cheerful and discreet. When tempted to make himself acquainted with the
contents of private letters he must never give anything away. He had
held himself in waiting, so to speak, for a great love affair and had
built up in his mind a good and wholesome picture of home and wife and
children. Lola fitted into this picture and dominated it as no other
girl had ever done, and he had fallen actually and metaphorically before
her like a shack before a hurricane. At any time now he could leave
service and branch out for himself, because he had inherited from his
father a sum of money which would enable him to buy a public house
somewhere in the country--preferably on the upper Thames--and let rooms
to nice people,--they would have to be nice people. He was a man in the
middle thirties with plenty of time to add to his good nest egg, bring
up a little family with great care and put his son in a good school with
a view to making him a gentleman,--a dentist perhaps, or a clerk in
Coutts's bank. He could see only Lola as the mother of this boy and the
fact that she had accepted his invitation to go to the theater filled
him with a great hopefulness; he rejoiced in her having disallowed his
familiarity.
To Lola, Simpkins was less than the dust. She had already sized him up
as a rather curious character to be respected and even liked but not, of
course, to be considered as anything but an infrequent escort into the
theater life of London.
She placed him among the Treadwells,--though not so high up in the list
as Ernest. One of these fine days she hoped to be able to lift the
Bayswater poet out of the public library into the public gaze, to do for
him what Madame de Breze had done for Paul Brissac.
They arrived at the theater in good time. With a curious touch of
embarrassment, because he had seen at once that the cab was being driven
by a gentleman, Simpkins handed over half a crown and said, "That's all
right, you can keep the change." He received a crisp and unabashed
"Thank you" and a little bow from the waist down which was a cross
between extreme politeness and ineffable cheek, and before Lola turned
to go into the theater she was given a pucka salute with the hand almost
flat upon the ear. She returned a smile that was like one of those
electric advertisements which flick in and out of the sky in all really
progressive American cities. It nearly knocked the man over and almost
caused him to collide with a policeman.
Simpkins was tempted to buy two seats in the stalls and could have done
so without question in these after-war times when almost the only people
who have enough money for their laundresses are the profiteers. But
tradition prevailed and he took her up to the dress circle,--where
nobody dressed. The people were coming reluctantly into the theater in
the usual manner of Londoners. English people are not ardent theater
goers and have to be dragged in to see a play almost in the same manner
as in the old days of barnstorming, when the manager beat a drum on the
threshold of the tent, the hero and the heroine stood at his elbow and
made pathetic appeals to passers-by, and the villain, lurking in the
background, grimaced at all the girls.
The orchestra had just begun to tune up and the scraping of fiddles sent
a tingle through Lola's veins. It put her in the mood, as it always did,
to forget life, her own personality and the presence of Simpkins, and
place herself into the character of the play's heroine. From an
unexpected pocket Simpkins brought out a small box of chocolates. He was
one of those strange people who, although they have just risen from a
hearty meal, cannot go through an evening at the theater without
munching something. "'Ave one," he said. "They're nice."
"You think of everything," said Lola, and in order not to hurt his
feelings, took one and dropped it under the seat. "There's going to be a
good house," she added.
"Irene always draws 'em in. By Gum, she's given me some good evenings in
her time. She's what I call safe. You can bank on her. She dresses like
a lady, too, and that gets me. Good old Irene." And then he put his face
rather close to Lola's. "Some one said you thought of going on the stage
before you joined us. That's not true, is it?"
"No," said Lola. "Not in the least true. I discussed it with my aunt. In
fact, to be quite honest, I put it to her head like a pistol."
"Oh, I see." Simpkins heaved a sigh of relief. If Lola were to go on the
stage,--and all these young officers buzzing about, treating marriage as
though it were a betting transaction----
"I think," said Lola with naive gravity, "that it's better to play a
leading part in life than to be in the chorus on the stage. Cleverer
acting is required, too, don't you think so?"
A leading part in life? Simpkins was worried. Would she consider the
wife of a man who owned the "Black Bell" at Wargrave to be a leading
part? "You're not ambitious, are yer?" he asked, peering at her
patrician profile.
"Oh," she said, "Oh," and suddenly threw out her hands.
And then the lights went out and the buzz of talking ceased gradually as
though bees were retiring in platoons from a feeding place.
IV
They walked to Trafalgar Square. Lola was still in the old garden of
Miss Nell among the Creoles and the music of the Mardi Gras frolickers.
She had no ears for the expert criticisms of her escort. There were
plenty of unoccupied taxis scouting for fares but Lola pulled up under
the shadow of the National Gallery to watch the big play of life for a
moment or two. From force of a habit which she had not yet conquered,
she looked up at the sky, half expecting to see the great white beams of
searchlights swing and stammer until they focussed upon something that
looked like a silver fish, and then to twinge under the quick reports of
anti-aircraft guns. Twice during the War she had been caught on that
spot during a raid and had stood transfixed to the pavement between
fright and a keen desire to see the show. Memories of those
never-to-be-forgotten incidents, small as they were and of no
consequence in the story of the War--the loss of a few well-fed
noncombatants who made themselves targets for stray shrapnel because
they wouldn't dip like rabbits into funk holes--came back to her then,
as well they might. The War's evidences forced themselves every day upon
the notice even of those who desired to forget,--the processions of
unemployed with their rattling collection boxes among the ugliest of
them all.
Big Ben struck the quarter and Lola returned to earth. "Simpky," she
said, "cab, quick." And he called one and gave the address. And then she
began again to hear what the valet was saying. He had used up Miss Nell
o' New Orleans and had come to Miss Lola of Queen's Road, Bayswater.
"Look 'ere, can't we do this often, you and me? We can always sneak off
when there's a dinner on or Lady Feo's out in the push. It don't cost
much and I've got plenty of money."
"I should like to very much," said Lola. "Once a fortnight, say. You
see, I go home every Wednesday night. I don't think we ought to do it
more often than once a fortnight because, after all, I feel rather
responsible to Auntie and I don't want to set a bad example to the other
girls."
"Well, promise you won't go out with the other men. I let you into the
'ouse first, don't forget that, and that was a sort of omen to me and if
you could bring yourself to look upon me as--well----" He broke off
nervously and ran his hand over his forehead, which was damp with
excitement.
But Lola was not in the least nonplussed. She had had so much practice.
She was an expert in mentally making all sorts and conditions of men her
brothers. She said, "Simpky,"--although the man looked extremely
un-Russian,--"you mustn't spoil me. Also you must remember that Ellen
Glazeby has hopes. She's a friend of mine."
"Oh, my God," said Simpkins, with a touch of melodrama. "If I'd been
engaged to 'er and on the verge of marriage, and then 'ad seen you,--or
even if I'd been married for a couple of years and was 'appy and 'ad
seen you----Religious as I am----"
Lola turned to him with extreme simplicity. "But I'm a good girl,
Simpky," she said.
And he gave a funny throaty sound, like a frog at night with its feet in
water; and one of his hands fluttered out and caught hold of the end of
Lola's piece of fur, and this he pressed to his lips. "Oh, my God," he
said again, words failing.
And so Lola was rather glad when the cab drew up at the house in Dover
Street.
A car arrived at the same time and honked impatiently and imperiously.
Simpkins leapt from the taxi and said, "Pull out of the way, quick." It
did so. And as Lola descended and stood at the top of the area steps,
she saw Fallaray go slowly up to the front door with rounded shoulders,
as though he were Atlas with the weight of the world on his back. He was
followed by a man whose step was light and eager.
V
It was George Lytham.
The editor of a new weekly called _Reconstruction_ which had not as yet
done more than take its place among all those elder brothers on the
bookstalls which were suffering from a combination of hardening of the
arteries and shrinkage of the exchequer, Lytham was a live wire, a man
who could make mistakes, eat his own words, and having gone halfway up
the wrong road, turn around without giving a curse for what other men
would call dignity and retrace his steps at a run. Eton and Balliol, he
had been a wet-bob, had a chest like a prize fighter and a forearm as
hard as a cricket bat. The third son of old Lord Lockinge, he had sat in
the House as member for one of those agricultural constituencies which
are too dull and scattered to attract Radical propagandists and nearly
always plump for Unionism. He had quickly made his mark. _Punch_ drew
him in rowing shorts after his maiden speech and the Northcliff press
made a point of referring to him as Young Lochinvar. But he had chucked
the House in disgust after two years of it, one year of enormous
enthusiasm during which he had worked like a dog and another year of
sickly pessimism and disillusion brought about by contact with a set of
political crows who fluttered over the carcass of
England,--traditionless, illiterate, dishonest, of low minds and low
accents, led by the Old Bad Men who had inherited the right or tricked
their way to the front benches and had all died before the War but were
still living and still clinging to office. He owed allegiance to no
leader and had started _Reconstruction_, backed with the money of the
great mine owners and merchants who should have been members of the
Cabinet, for the purpose of cleaning out the Augean stables. He numbered
among his contributors every political free-thinker in
England,--ex-members of Parliament, ex-war correspondents who spoke with
horror of brass hats, and men who had served in all capacities in the
War and were, for that reason, determined to remove the frightful burden
of taxation caused by the maintenance of a great war machine for the
indulgence of escapades in Mesopotamia and Ireland.
Lytham was young,--not yet thirty-five; unmarried, so that his purpose
was single, his time his own. His paper was his wife and he was out for
blood,--not with a bludgeon, not with a gun, but with an intellect
which, supported by other intellects, alone provided some hope for the
future of England and the Human Family. He had fastened upon Fallaray
and dogged his heels. He regarded him as a brother, was ready to back
him through thick and thin and had come home with him that night to
discuss one or two of the great questions of the moment and to make
plans for quick functioning.
When Fallaray led the way into his den and turned up the lights--all of
them, so that there should be no shadows in the room and no
ghosts--Lytham took his place with his back to the fire, standing in the
frame of black oak like the picture of a crusader who had left his armor
at home; he liked that room for its size and simplicity and tradition,
its books and prints and unashamed early-Victorianism. He was as tall as
Fallaray but not as thin and did not look as though the fires of his
soul had burnt him down to the bone. His hair was brown and crisp and
short, his moustache small, his nose straight and his eyes large and
full of humor and irony. Except for his mouth there was nothing
sensitive in his face and the only sign of restlessness that he
permitted himself to show was in his habit of lighting one cigarette
from the butt of another just finished,--the cheapest stinkers that were
on the market and which had been smoked by the men of the regiment to
which he had been attached from the beginning to the end of the
War,--fags, in other words. His holder was far too long for the comfort
of people who stood too close.
"Now, Fallaray," he said, "let's get down to it."
Fallaray sat on the edge of his desk which he gripped tight with both
his hands. "I'm ready," he answered.
"The point is this. You have come out against reprisals, which means
that you have dared to voice the overwhelming sentiment of the country
at a moment when the Government has plumped for whole hoggism and given
Sinn Fein its finest advertisement. So far so good. But this is only the
beginning. To carry the thing on to its right conclusion, you must not
only resign from the Cabinet but you must lead us to an immediate
settlement of the Irish question. You must organize all that section of
British opinion and American opinion--which counts for so much--and work
for the overthrow of the coalition government. Will you do it?"
"Of course."
"Ah!"
"But wait a second. Here we are marching with France into Germany,
occupying towns for the purpose of wringing out of these whimpering
liars the fruits of victory which they say they cannot pay and which
they may not be able to pay. Already the fires of Bolshevism are
breaking out everywhere as a result. Are we to put the Irish question
before one that is surrounded with the most amazing threads of
difficulty and may lead to the death of Europe? In other words, my dear
Lytham, is murder and arson in one small island of greater importance to
the world at this moment than the possibility of a new and even more
terrible war in Europe, with disease and famine following at its heels?
The men I have served with during the last war say 'no.' They have even
gone so far as to dine here to-night with my wife to try and get her to
move me out of what they call my rut,--to persuade me, because they have
failed to do so, to shelve the Irish question and back up France in her
perfectly righteous demand for reparations. I can't make up my mind
whether I will see this German question through, or swing body and soul
to the Irish question and handicap them in this new crisis. If you've
got anything to say, for God's sake, say it."
For a moment Lytham had nothing to say. It did seem to him, as he stood
there in that quiet room with all its books and with hardly a sound
coming in from the street below, that the troubles of that green and
egotistical island melted away before those which did not affect merely
England and France and Germany, Austria, Russia, Poland, Belgium but
America also. It did seem to him that the murder of a few Britishers, a
handful of loyal Irishmen and the reprisals of the Black and Tans for
cowardly ambushes, brutally carried out, were in the nature of a side
show in a circus of shows, of a small family quarrel in a city of
families who were up against a frightful epidemic,--and he didn't know
what to say.
The two men looked into each other's eyes, searched each other's hearts
and waited, listening, for an inspiration,--from God probably, whose
children had become strangely out of hand.
Thus they stood, silent and without a sign, as others were
standing,--bewildered, embarrassed, groping.
And then the door was flung open.
VI
Feo Fallaray's ideas of evening clothes were curious. Her smock-frock,
or wrapper, or whatever she called the thing, had a shimmer of green
about it. Her stockings were green and she wore round her head a circlet
of the most marvelous pieces of jade. The result was bizarre and made
her look as though she were in fancy dress. She might have been an
English Polaire ready to enter the smarter Bohemian circles of a London
Montmartre. Or, to quote the remark of a woman in the opposite set, "a
pre-Raphaelite flapper."
She drew up short on seeing Lytham. He was no friend of hers. He was far
too normal, far too earnest, and both his hands were on the wheel. But
with all the audacity of which she was past mistress, she gave him one
of her widest smiles. "Oh, it's you," she said. "They told me some one
was with my beloved husband. Well, how's young Lochinvar?"
Lytham bowed profoundly and touched her hand with the tips of his
fingers. "Very well, thank you," he said. How he detested green. If he
had been married and his wife had dared to appear in such a frock, he
would have returned her to her mother for good.
Fallaray rose from the desk on which he was sitting and walked to the
farthest end of the room. There was no one in the world who gave him
such a sense of irritation as this woman did.
"I'm not welcome, I know," said Feo, "but I thought you might like me to
come and tell you what happened to-night, Arthur."
Fallaray turned, but did not look at her. "Thanks so much," he said.
"Yes. You're very kind. I'm afraid you've been pretty badly bored."
She echoed the word, giving it all its dictionary interpretations and
some which are certainly not in any dictionary.
"When I see those people," she said, "I marvel at our ever having got
through the War. Well, the end of it is that I am to ask you to
reconsider your attitude. The argument is that your secession puts them
into the cart just at a moment when they think, rightly or wrongly, that
they are forcing the fear of God into the Sinn Feiners. They can't
imagine that my influence with you is absolutely nil, because they have
the bourgeois idea of marriage and think that because two people are
tied together by Church and law they must of necessity be in full
sympathy. So all I can do is to make my report and add on my own account
that I never saw such a set of petty opportunists in all my career."
Lytham gave her a match for the cigarette that she had put into a black
holder with a narrow band of diamonds. "Did you give them any views of
your own?" he asked.
[Illustration: A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]
"Rather," she said, the light on her hair like moonlight on black water.
"I held forth at length with my back to the fireplace. As a matter of
fact, quite on the spur of the moment, I handed them a very brilliant
idea."
"Yes?" It was a little incredulous.
"Yes, odd as it very obviously seems to you, Lochinvar. I said that I
thought that this was the psychological moment for a nice piece of
theatricality. I said that some one, probably Kipling, should draft a
letter for the King, in which he should set forth the fact that he was
going to withdraw every one of his soldiers and all his officials from
Ireland at once and leave the Irish to run themselves, giving them the
same kind of dominion government that they have in Australia and Canada,
wishing them Godspeed and a happy Easter,--a manly, colloquial letter,
very simple and direct, and ending with a touch of real emotion, the
sort of thing that the King would write on his own, better than any
one."
There was a moment's pause, during which Lytham darted a quick look at
Fallaray. A gleam came into the eyes of both men.
"What did they say to that?" he asked.
"My dear man, what do you suppose they said? Having no imagination and
precious little knowledge of the facts of the case, they dragged in
Ulster and talked about civil war, which I think is absurd, because
already, as Arthur knows perfectly well, Ulster is feeling the pinch of
the boycott and has deserted Carson to a man. They're longing for a
settlement and only anxious to go on making bawbees in the good old
Scotch Presbyterian manner.--They couldn't see, and I don't suppose they
will ever be made to see, this lot, that a letter from the King would
immediately have the effect of withdrawing all the sympathy from the
Irish and reduce them from martyrs to the level of ordinary human
beings. They couldn't see that every Irish grievance would be taken away
in one fell swoop, that the priests would be left without a leg to stand
on and that above all America would be the first to say 'Now show us.'
It would be a frightful blow to Collins and de Valera and also to the
Germans and the Sinn Feiners in the United States, and make all the
world admire the British sense of sportsmanship,--which we have almost
lost by everything that has been done during and since the War by our
people in Ireland.--What do _you_ think of it,--both of you?"
She threw her head back and waited for a scoffing laugh from Lytham and
a look from her husband that would move her to ribaldry. Her long white
neck rose out of her queer gown like a pillar, the pieces of jade in her
hair shimmered oddly and there was the gleam of undergraduate ragging in
her eyes.
Fallaray looked at his wife for the first time. "It was an inspiration,"
he said. "I confess that I have never thought of this solution."
Feo was amazed but bowed ironically. "Very generous, Arthur, very
generous. I couldn't have been married to you all this time without
having acquired a certain amount of intelligence, though, could I?" Even
at such a moment she could not remain serious, although she was
perfectly ready to confess to a considerable flutter of vanity at
Fallaray's favorable comment.
"My God," said George Lytham, "it takes a woman to think of a thing like
this."
"You'll make me swollen-headed in a moment, you two."
Lytham took no further notice of her. He strode over to Fallaray. "Could
this be done? I quite agree with your wife in her interpretation of the
effect of such a letter and of course it could be made the sort of human
document which would electrify the world. I agree, too, that once our
soldiers were withdrawn with all the brass hats from the castle, the
huge majority of reasonable Irishmen would insist on taking hold of
things against the very small minority of Republicans who have merely
used Ireland as a means of feathering their own nests, and be obliged to
prove that they are fit to run their own country without bloody
squabbles, cat-calling, filthy recriminations and all the other things
for which they have earned a historical reputation. But--can it be
done?"
Fallaray paced up and down the room with his hands clasped behind his
back and his great shoulders rounded. Lytham and Lady Feo watched him.
It was a peculiar moment. They both saw in it the test of Fallaray's
imagination and, in a way, humor. They could see that he was looking at
this thing from every possible angle, dissecting it as a chemist would
dissect bad water. At last he gave a groan and stopped and faced them.
"Not with these men," he said. "Not with this political system, not in
these times. Do you imagine for a moment that the present Cabinet holds
a single man big enough, humble enough, patriotic enough to permit even
the King to step on the stage and absorb the limelight? No. Not one.
There is some microbe in the House of Commons, some atrocious cootie
which gets under the skin of its members and poisons them so that they
become the victims of a form of egomania of which they never can be
cured. Then, too, my dear Lytham, we must get it into our heads that the
Irish trouble is like a cancer in the body of the Constitution. We may
hit upon a medicine that seems likely to give temporary relief--the
withdrawal of the troops, the appointment of a new Lord Lieutenant, even
the establishment of a Dominion Government--but we have got to remember
that the hatred of the Irish for the English is fundamental and
permanent. What may seem to us to-day to offer a solution to this
age-old problem becomes futile and unworkable to-morrow. In our efforts
to deal with the question we must not allow ourselves to be influenced
by the quick transitory events that chase each other across the front
pages of the paper. We must, if we can, go to the root of the
malady,--the deep human emotion that burns in the hearts and souls of
the Irish and endeavor to understand. Otherwise we are as children
making foolish marks on shifting sand. What we write to-day is
obliterated to-morrow."
He turned about, walked slowly over to the chair at his desk and dropped
into it heavily, rising again immediately because Feo was standing.
Seeing which, and having an engagement to join Mrs. Malwood and several
others at a private dance club, she made for the door. "Well," she said,
"there it is. I did my best for you."
"An excellent best," said Fallaray. "Thank you again. Are you leaving
us?"
She waved her hand, that long able hand which might have achieved good
things but for that fatal kink in her,--and went.
"Brilliant woman," said Fallaray. It was on the tip of Lytham's tongue
to say "Brilliant what?" but he swallowed the remark.
And presently they heard Feo's high-pitched voice in the street below,
giving an order to her chauffeur.
And they resumed the discussion, coming back always to the point from
which they started. The Old Bad Man, shuffling, juggling, lying to
others as well as themselves, without the sense to realize that
something far worse than the War was coming hourly to a head, blocked
every avenue of escape.
VII
Lytham walked home in the small hours of that morning. He had the luck
to live in the Albany, at the Piccadilly end. The streets, but for a
silent-footed Bobby or two, were deserted. Even the night birds had
given up hope and withdrawn to their various nests.
He wondered once more, as he went along, what on earth had made Fallaray
marry Feo, of all women. It was one of his favorite forms of mental
pastime to try and discover the reason of ninety-nine per cent, of the
marriages which had come under his fairly intimate observation. It
seemed to him, in reviewing the whole body of his friends, not only that
every man had married the wrong woman but that every woman had married
the wrong man.
There was his brother, for instance,--Charlie Lytham, master of
foxhounds and one of the most good-natured creatures to be found on
earth,--hearty, honest, charitable, full of laughter, a superb horseman,
everybody's friend. For some unexplained and astounding reason he hadn't
married one of the nice healthy English girls who rode and golfed and
stumped about the countryside, perfectly content to live out of town for
ten months of the year and enjoy a brief bust in London. He had been
dragged to the altar by a woman who looked like a turkey and gobbled
like one when she spoke, who wore the most impossible clothes with
waggling feathers and rattling beads, spoke in a loud raucous voice and
was as great a form of irritation to every one who came in contact with
her as the siren of a factory. What was the idea?--Poor devil. He had
condemned himself to penal servitude.
Then there was his sister, Helena Lytham, a beautiful decorative person
born to play the queen in pageants and stand about as in a fresco in a
rather thick nightgown which clung decorously to her Leightonian
figure,--respectable but airy. On Lytham's return from Coblenz after the
Armistice she had presented him to a little dapper person who barely
came up to her shoulder, who smoked a perpetual cigar out of the corner
of his mouth, wore a waistcoat with a linoleum pattern, skin-tight
trousers and boots with brown leather uppers. He realized George's idea
of the riding master of a Margate livery stable. And so it went on all
the way through.--And here was Fallaray.
The truth of the thing was that Fallaray had not married Lady Feo. Lady
Feo had married Fallaray. What she had said to Mrs. Malwood was
perfectly true. At eighteen her hobbies were profiles and tennis. At
twenty-four Fallaray's profile was at its best. He looked like a Greek
god, especially when he was playing tennis with a shirt open at the
neck, and she had met him during the year that he had put up that superb
fight against Wilding in the good old days. The fact that he was Arthur
Fallaray, the son of a distinguished father, born and bred for a place
on the front bench, a marked man already because of his speeches in the
Oxford Union, didn't matter. His profile was the finest that she had
seen and his tennis was in the championship class, and so she had
deliberately gone for him, followed him from house party to house party
with the sole intention of acquiring and possessing. At the end of six
weeks she had got him. He had been obliged to kiss her. Her face had
been purposely held in place to receive it. The rest was easy.
Whereupon, she had immediately advertised the engagement broadcast,
brought her relations down upon Fallaray in a swarm, sent paragraphs to
the papers and made it literally impossible for the unfortunate man to
do anything but go through with the damned thing like a
gentleman,--dazed by the turn of events and totally unacquainted with
the galloping creature who had seemed to him to resemble a thoroughbred
but untrained yearling, kicking its heels about in a paddock. It had all
been just a lark to her,--no more serious than collecting postage
stamps, which eventually she could sell or give away. If ever she were
to fall really in love, it would be perfectly simple, she had argued,
either to be divorced or to juggle affairs so that she might divorce
Fallaray. Any man who played tennis as well as he had done could do a
little thing like that for her. The result was well known. A man of high
ideals, Fallaray had gone through with this staggering marriage with
every intention of making it work. Being in love with no other girl, he
had determined to do his utmost to play the game and presently stand
proudly among a little family of Fallarays. But he had found in Feo some
one who had no standards, no sense of right and wrong, give and take; a
girl who was a confirmed anarchist, who cared no more for law and order,
Church and State or the fundamentals of _life_, _tradition_, _honor_,
womanhood than an animal, a beautiful orang-outang, if there is such a
thing, who or which delighted in hanging to branches by its tail and
making weird grimaces at passers-by. The thing had been a tragedy, so
far as Fallaray was concerned, an uncanny and terrible event in his
life, almost in the nature of an incurable illness. The so-called
honeymoon to which he never looked back, had been a nightmare filled
with scoffing laughter, brilliant and amazing remarks, out of which he
had emerged in a state of mental chaos to plunge into work as an
antidote. They had always lived under the same roof because it was
necessary for a man who goes into politics to truckle to that curious
form of hypocrisy which will never be eradicated from the British
system. Her people and his people had demanded this, and his first
constituency had made it a _sine qua non_. Not requiring much money, he
had been and continued to be very generous in his allowance to his wife,
who did not possess a cent of her own. On the contrary, it was
frequently necessary for her to settle her brother's debts and even to
pay her father's bills from time to time. The gallant old Marquis was
without anything so bourgeois as the money sense and couldn't possibly
play bridge under five pounds a thousand. There was also the system with
which he had many times attempted to break the bank at Monte Carlo.
To-day, never interfering with her way of life and living in his own
wing like a bachelor, he knew less of Feo's character than he did when
she had caught him first. What he knew of her friendships and her
peregrinations he got from the newspapers. When it was necessary to dine
at his own table, he treated her as though she were one of his guests,
or rather as though he were one of hers. There was no scandal attaching
to his name, because women played absolutely no part in his life; and
there was no actual scandal attaching to hers. Only notoriety. She had
come to be looked upon by society and by the vast middle class who
discussed society as a beautiful freak, an audacious strange creature
who frittered away her gifts, who was the leader of a set of women of
all ages, married and unmarried, who took an impish delight in flouting
the conventions and believed that they established the proof of unusual
intelligence by a self-conscious display of eccentricity.
VIII
And in the meantime Lola continued to be an apt little pupil. Her quick
ear had already enabled her to pick up the round crisp intonation of
Lady Feo and her friends and at any moment of the day she could now give
an exact imitation of their walk, manner of shaking hands and those
characteristic tricks which made them different from all the women who
had had the ill fortune to come into the world in the small streets.
Up in the servant's bedroom in Dover Street, before a square of mirror,
Lola practised and rehearsed for her eventual debut,--the form of which
was on the knees of the gods. She had entered her term of apprenticeship
quite prepared to serve conscientiously for at least a year,--a long
probation for one so young and eager. Probably she would have continued
to study and listen and watch, with gathering impatience, but for a
sudden hurrying forward of the clock brought about by the gift of a
frock,--rustling with silk. A failure, because the dressmaker, with the
ineffable cheek of these people, had entirely departed from Feo's rigid
requirements, it provided Lola with the key to life. Giving one yell at
the sight of it, Feo was just about to rip it in pieces when she caught
the longing eyes of her maid. Whereupon, with the generosity which is so
easy when it is done with other people's money, she said, "Coming over,"
rolled it into a ball and threw it at Lola. It was, as may be imagined,
a very charming and reasonable garment such as might have been worn by a
perfectly respectable person.
On her way home that night, Lola dropped in to her own little dressmaker
who lived in one of the numerous dismal villas off Queen's Road, for the
purpose of having it altered to fit her. It was miles too large. She had
eventually brought it back to Dover Street and hidden it away behind one
of her day frocks in her only cupboard, and every time that she took a
peep at it, her eyes sparkled and her breath came short and she wondered
when and how she could possibly wear it.
Filled with a great longing to try her wings and fly out of the cage
like the canary of which she had spoken to Ernest Treadwell, there were
moments in her life now when she was consumed with impatience. The poet
of the public library, the illiterate and ecstatic valet, the pompous
butler and the two cockney footmen,--she had grown beyond all these. She
was absolutely sure of herself as an honorary member of the Feo "gang."
She felt that she could hold her own now with the men of their class. If
she were right, her apprenticeship would be over. Fully fledged, she
could proceed with her great scheme. The chance came as chances always
do come, and as usual she took it.
Several days after Lytham's talk with Fallaray--which had left them both
in that state of irresolution which seemed to have infected every
one--Lady Feo went off for the week-end, leaving Lola behind. The party
had been arranged on the spur of the moment and was to take place in a
cottage with a limited number of bedrooms. If Lady Feo had given the
thing a moment's thought, she would have told Lola to take three days
holiday. But this she had forgotten to do. And so there was Lola in
Dover Street with idle hands. The devil finds some mischief still----
At four o'clock that evening Simpkins entered the servants' sitting
room. Lola happened to be alone, surrounded by _Tatlers_, _Punches_ and
_Bystanders_, fretting a little and longing to try her paces. "Good
old," he said, "Mr. Fallaray has got to dine at the Savoy to-night with
his Ma and Auntie from the country. One of them family affairs which,
not coming too frequently, does him good. And you're free. How about
another show, Princess?" He had recently taken to calling her princess.
"There's another American play on which ain't bad, I hear. Let's sample
it. What do you say?"
Mr. Fallaray.--The Savoy----
Without giving the matter an instant's thought, Lola shook her head.
"_Too bad, Simpky,_" she said, "I promised Mother to go home to-night.
She has some friends coming and I am going to help her."
"Oh," said Simpkins, extremely disappointed. "Well, then, I'll take you
'ome and if I'm very good and put on a new tie I may be asked,--I say I
may----" He paused, having dropped what he considered to be a delicate
hint.
This was a most awkward moment. Mr. Fallaray--The Savoy--That new frock.
And here was Simpkins butting in and standing with his head craned
forward as if to meet the invitation halfway. So she said, as cool as a
cucumber, "Mother will be very disappointed not to be able to ask you,
Simpky, because she likes you so much. She enjoyed both times you came
home with me. So did Father. But, you see, our drawing-room is very
small and Mother has asked too many people as it is. Get tickets for
tomorrow night and I shall be very glad to go with you."
There was no guile in Lola's eye and not the smallest hesitation in her
speech. Simpkins bore up bravely. He knew these parties and the way in
which some hostesses allowed their rooms to brim over. And, anyway, it
was much better to have Lola all to himself. He could live for Saturday.
"Righto," he said. "Let me know when you're ready to go and if you feel
like a taxicab----"
"I couldn't think of it," said Lola. "You spend much too much money,
Simpky. You're an absolute profiteer. I shall go by Tube and this time a
friend of mine is fetching me."
"Treadwell?" She nodded and calmly examined a picture of Lopodoski in
one of her latest contortions.
There was a black cloud on Simpkins's face. He had met Ernest at the
Breezys' house. He had seen the way in which this boy gazed at
Lola,--lanky, uncouth, socialistic young cub. He was not jealous, good
Lord, no. That would be absurd. A junior librarian with a salary that
was far less than any plumber got, and him a man of means with the
"Black Bull" at Wargrave on the horizon. All the same, if he heard that
Ernest Treadwell had suddenly been run over by a pantechnicon and
flattened out like a frog----
And that was why he sat down on the sofa a little too close to Lola and
dared to possess himself of her hand. "Princess,--you know 'ow I feel.
You know what you've done to me."
Lola patted his hand and gave it back and rewarded him with a smile
which she considered to be matronly. "Nice Simpky," she said. "Very nice
Simpky," as though he were a rather faulty terrier a little too keen on
the thrown stick. "I must go now," she added and rose. "I have some
sewing to do for Lady Feo."
And as Simpkins watched her go, his whole heart swelled, and something
went to his head that blurred everything for a moment. He would sell his
soul for that girl. For her sake he would even set light to the "Black
Bull" and watch it burn, if that would give her a moment's amusement.
Mr. Fallaray.--The Savoy----
What Lola did in Lady Feo's room was not to sew but to seat herself at
the dressing table, do her hair with the greatest care and practise with
the make-up sticks,--rouge, and the brush of water colors with which she
emphasized her eyebrows. Finally, time having flown, she borrowed a pair
of lace stockings, some shoes and gloves, made her way stealthily along
the servants' corridor to her own room, and packed them, with the new
frock, into a cardboard box. Dressed and hatted for the street, she
carried the magic costume in which she was going to transplant herself
from Cinderella's kitchen to the palace of the Prince and went down to
the servants' sitting room through which it was necessary for her to go
in order to escape.
Miss Breezy was there, issuing, as she would have said, orders to one of
the housemaids. That was lucky. It saved Lola from answering an outburst
of questions. As it was, she gave a little bow to her aunt, said "Good
evening, Miss Breezy," opened the door and nipped up the area steps into
the street. A little involuntary laugh floated behind her like the
petals of a rose. A prowling taxi caught her eye. She nodded and was in
before any one could say Jack Robinson,--if any one now remembers the
name of that mystic early Victorian.
The address she gave was 22 Castleton Terrace, Bayswater.
Mr. Fallaray.--The Savoy!
IX
"My word," said Mrs. Rumbold, getting up from her knees and taking a pin
out of her mouth. "I never see anything like it before. It's my opinion
that you could 'old your own in that frock with any of the best, my
dear. It's so quiet--yet so compelling. The best of taste. If I see you
coming down the steps of the Ritz, I should nudge the person I was with
and say, 'Duke's daughter. French mother probably.'"
"Thank you," said Lola. And that was exactly how she felt. Carried
forward on the current of her impatience, she didn't stop to ask herself
what was the use of going to the Savoy, of all places, alone,--the
danger, the absurdity. "I wonder if you'll be so kind as to fold up my
day dress, put it in the box and string it up. You're sure you'll be up
as late as half-past eleven? If so, it won't take me a moment to change
and I'll leave the evening dress here."
"Oh, that'll be all right," said Mrs. Rumbold. "I shall be up, my dear.
The old man's going to a dinner and will come staggering back later than
that. He'll be a regular Mason to-night, bless him." And she stood back,
looked Lola all over with the greatest admiration and a certain amount
of personal pride. She was a good dressmaker, no doubt about it. An
awful lot of stuff had had to be taken out of that frock. It must have
been made for a woman with the shoulders of a rowing man. It wasn't for
her to ask what the little game was, to inquire why a lady's maid was
going out on the sly, looking like her mistress. She had her living to
make and dressmaking was a precarious livelihood in these times. "Have a
good evening, my dear," she said; "enjoy yourself. Only live once, yer
know." And added inwardly, "And I'll lay you'll manage to do yourself
pretty well,--a lot better than most, with that face and figure and the
style and all. Lord, but how you've come on since I see yer last. All
the zwar-zwar of the reg'ler thing, sweep-me-bob."
The taxi was still waiting at the door, ticking up sixpences, but in
Lola's pocket was a little purse bulging with her savings. She turned at
the door. "Mrs. Rumbold," she said, and it might have been Lady Feo who
was speaking, "you certainly are one in a million."
There was a sudden cry of despair.
"Lord 'a' mercy, what's the trouble?"
Lola had become herself again, a tragic, large-eyed self. "I can't go
like this," she said. "I have no evening cloak." The whole framework of
her adventure flapped like the sides of a tent in a high wind.
"My dear!" cried Mrs. Rumbold. "Well, there's a nice lookout. What in
the world's to be done?"
Fallaray.--The Savoy----
"Wait a second. I've got an idea." The woman with tousled hair made a
dart at a curtain which was stretched across one of the corners of her
workroom. She emerged immediately with something thin and black which
gleamed here and there with silver. "Put that on," she said. "I've just
made it for Mrs. Wimpole in Inverness Terrace. She won't be calling for
it until to-morrer. If you'll promise to bring it back safe----"
All Lola's confidence returned and a smile of triumph came into her
face. "That will do nicely," she said, and placed herself to receive the
borrowed garment. A quick glance in the mirror showed her that if it
wasn't exactly the sort of thing that she would have chosen, it passed.
"You're a brick, Mrs. Rumbold, a perfect brick. I can't tell you how
grateful I am." And she bent forward and touched the withered cheek with
her lips. One of these days she would do something for this hard-working
woman whose eldest boy sat legless in the back parlor,--something which
would relieve the great and persistent strain which followed her from
one plucky day to another.
And then, pausing for a moment on the top of the steps in order to make
sure that there was no one in the street who could recognize
her--Queen's Road was only just round the corner--Lola ran down and put
her hand on the door of the taxi cab.
"The Savoy," she said.