The Rustle of Silk
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.
"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