THE RUSTLE OF SILK
BY
COSMO HAMILTON
Author of _Scandal_, Etc.
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Made in the United States of America
Copyright, 1922,
By Cosmo Hamilton.
All rights reserved
Published April, 1922
Reprinted April, 1922 (twice)
Reprinted June, 1922
Reprinted July, 1922
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
- PART I
- PART II
- PART III
- PART IV
- PART V
- PART VI
- PART VII
- PART VIII
PART I
I
The man had followed her from Marble Arch,--not a mackerel-eyed old man,
sensual and without respect, but one who responded to emotions as an
artist and was still young and still interested. He had seen her descend
from a motor omnibus, had caught his breath at her disturbing
femininity, had watched her pass like a sunbeam on the garden side of
the road, and in the spirit of a man who sees the materialization of the
very essence of woman, turned and followed.
All the way along, under branches of trees that were newly peppered with
early green, he watched her and saw other men's heads turn as she
passed,--on busses, in taxicabs, in cars and in the infrequent
horse-drawn carriage that was like a Chaucerian noun dropped into the
pages of a modern book. He saw men stop as he had stopped and catch
their breath and then pursue their way reluctantly. He noticed that
women, especially passee, tired women, paid her tribute by a flash of
smile or a sudden brightness of the eye. There was no conscious effort
to attract in the girl's manner, nothing bizarre or even smart in her
clothing. Her young figure, the perfection of form, was plainly dressed.
She wore the clothes of a student of the lower middle class, of the
small shopkeeping class, and probably either made them herself or bought
them off the peg. There was no startling beauty in her face or anything
wonderful in her eyes, and certainly nothing of challenge, of
coquetry,--nothing but the sublime unself-consciousness of a child. And
yet there was so definite and disordering a sense of sex about her that
she passed through a very procession of tribute.
The man was a dramatist whose business was to play upon the emotions of
sex, and to watch this child and the stir she made seemed to him to
refute once more the ludicrous attempts of would-be reformers to remold
humanity and prohibit the greatest of the urges of nature, and made him
laugh. He wondered all the way along not who she was, because that
didn't matter, but what she would do and become,--this girl with her
wide-apart eyes, oval face and full red lips, with the nose of a
patrician and the sensitive nostrils of a horse,--if she would quickly
marry in her own class and drift from early motherhood into a
discontented drabness, or burst the bonds and be transferred from her
probable back yard into a great conservatory.
He marveled at her astonishing detachment and was amused to discover
that she was playing at some sort of game all by herself. From time to
time, as she danced along, she assumed suddenly a dignified and gracious
personality, walking slowly, with a high chin, bowing to imaginary
acquaintances and looking through the railings of Kensington Gardens
with an air of proprietorship. Then she as quickly returned to her own
obviously normal self and hurried a little, conscious of approaching
dusk. Finally, with the cunning of city breeding, she nicked across the
road, and he saw her stop outside the tube station at Bayswater,
arrested by the bill of an evening paper,--"Fallaray against reprisals.
New crisis in the Irish Question. Notable defection from Lloyd-George
forces."
He watched the girl stand in front of these glaring words and read them
over and over with extraordinary interest. Standing at her elbow, he
heard her heave a quick excited sigh. He imagined that she must be Irish
and watched her enter the station, linger about the bookstall and fasten
eagerly upon a magazine,--so eagerly that he slipped again to her elbow
and looked to see why. On the cover of this fiction monthly was the
photograph of the man whose name was set forth on the poster,--the Right
Hon. Arthur Napier Fallaray, Home Secretary. He knew the face well. It
was one of the few arresting faces in public life; one in which there
was something medieval, something also of Savonarola, Manning, and, in
the eyes, of Christ,--a clean-shaven face, thin and hawk-like, with a
hatchet jaw line, a sad and sensitive mouth and thick brown hair that
went into one or two deep kinks. It might have been the face of a
hunchback or one who had been inflicted from babyhood with paralysis,
obliged to stand aloof from the rush and tear of other children. Only
the head was shown on the cover, not the body that stood six foot one,
the broad shoulders and the long arms suggestive of the latent strength
of a wrestler.
The flush that suffused the girl's face surprised the watcher and piqued
his curiosity. Fallaray, the ascetic, the married bachelor who lived in
one wing of his house while Lady Feodorowna entertained the resuscitated
Souls in the other,--and this young girl of the lower middle class,
worshiping at his shrine! He would have followed her for the rest of the
afternoon with no other purpose than to study her moods and watch her
stir the passers-by like the whir of an aeroplane or the sudden scent of
lilac. But the arrival of a train swept a crowd between them and he lost
her. He took a ticket to see if she were on one or other of the
platforms, returned to the street and searched up and down. She had
gone. Before he left, another bill was posted upon the board of the
_Evening Standard_. "Fallaray sees Prime Minister. May resign from
cabinet. Uneasiness in Downing Street," and as he walked away, no longer
interested in the psychology of crowds, but with his imagination all
eager and alight, the playwright in him had grasped at the germ of a
dramatic experiment.--Take the man Fallaray, a true and sensitive
patriot, working for no rewards; humanitarian, scholar, untouched by
romance, deaf to the rustle of silk--and that girl, woman to the tips of
her ears, Eve in every movement of her body----
II
"Lola's late," said Mrs. Breezy. "She ought to have been home half an
hour ago."
Without taking from his eye the magnifying glass through which he was
peering into the entrails of a watch, John Breezy gave a fat man's
chuckle. "Don't you worry about Lola. She's the original good girl and
has more friends among strangers than the pigeons in Kensington Gardens.
She's all right, old dear."
But Mrs. Breezy never gave more than one ear to her husband. She was not
satisfied. She left her place behind the glistening counter of the
little jewelry shop in Queen's Road, Bayswater, and went out into the
street to see if she could see anything of her ewe lamb,--the one child
of her busy and thrifty married life. On a rain-washed board above her
head was painted "John Breezy, Watchmaker and Jeweler, Founded in 1760
by Armand de Breze." The name had been Bowdlerized as a concession to
the careless English ear.
On the curb a legless man was seated in a sort of perambulator with
double wheels, playing a concertina and accompanying another man with no
arms and a glass eye who sang with a gorgeous cockney accent, "Come
hout, Come hout, the Spring is 'ere." A few yards farther down a girl
with the remains of prettiness was playing the violin at the side of an
elderly woman with the smile of professional supplication who held a
small tin cup. The incessant crowd which passed up and down Queen's Road
paid little attention either to these stray dogs or to those who
occupied other competitive positions in this street of constant noises.
Flappers with very short skirts and every known specimen of leg added to
the tragic-comedy of a thoroughfare in which provincialism and
sophistication were like oil and water. Here was drawn the outside line
of polite pretence. The tide of _hoi polloi_ washed up to it and over.
Ex-governors of Indian provinces, utterly unrecognized, ex-officers and
men of gallant British regiments, mostly out of employment, nurse girls
with children, and women of semi-society who lived in those dull barrack
houses of Inverness Terrace, where cats squabbled and tradesmen's boys
fought, passed the anxious mother.
Not a day went by that she did not hear from Lola of one or perhaps a
series of attempts, in the street, in the Tube, in busses and in the
Park, to win her into conversation. The horror stirred by these accounts
in the heart of the little woman, to say nothing of the terror, seemed
oddly exaggerated to the daughter, who, with her eyes large and gleaming
with fun, described the manner in which she left her unrestrained
admirers flat and inarticulate. There was nothing vain in this
acceptance of male admiration, the mother knew. It was something of
which the child had been aware ever since she could remember; had
accepted without regret; had hitherto put to no use; but which, deep
down in her soul, was recognized as the all-powerful asset of a woman,
not to be bought with money, achieved by art or simulated by acting.
Not in so many words had this "gift," as Lola called it, been
interpreted and discussed by Mrs. Breezy. On the contrary, she tried to
ignore and hide it away as a dangerous thing which she would have been
ashamed to possess. In the full flower of her own youth there had been
nothing in herself, she thanked God, to lift her out of the great ruck
of women except, as Breezy had discovered, a shrewd head, a tactful
tongue and the infinite capacity for taking pains. And she was ashamed
of it in Lola. It gave her incessant and painful uneasiness and fright
and made her feel, in sleepless hours and while in church, that she had
done some wicked thing before her marriage that must be punished. With
unusual fairness she accepted all the blame but never had had the
courage to tell the truth, either to herself or her husband, as to her
true feelings towards this uncanny child, as she sometimes inwardly
called her. Had she done so, she must have confessed that Lola was the
only human being with whom she had come into touch that remained a total
stranger; she must have owned to having been divided from her child
almost always by a sort of wall, a division of class over which it was
increasingly impossible to cross.
There were times, indeed, when the little woman had gone down to the
overcrowded parlor behind the shop so consumed with the idea that she
had brought into the world the offspring of another woman that she had
sat down cold and puzzled and with an aching heart. It had seemed to her
then, as now, that something queer and eerie had happened. At the back
of her mind there had been and was still a sort of superstition that
Lola was a changeling, that the fairies or the devil or some imp of
mischief had taken her own baby away at the moment of her birth and
replaced it with an exquisite little creature stolen from the house of
an aristocrat. How else could she account for the tiny wrists, small
delicate hands, those wide blue eyes, those sensitive nostrils and above
all that extraordinary capacity for passing with superb unconsciousness
and yet with supreme sophistication through everyday crowds.
There was nothing of John in this girl, of that fat Tomcat-like man,
with no more brain than was necessary to peer into watches and repair
jewelry, to look with half an eye at current events and grow into
increasing content on the same small patch of earth. Neither was there
anything of herself, nothing so vulgar as shrewdness, nothing so
commonplace as tact and nothing so legitimate as taking pains. Either