The Rustle of Silk
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.
PART III
I
Sir Peter Chalfont's cork arm had become one of the institutions of the
town. Long ago the grimness had gone out of everybody's laughter at the
tricks he played with it,--presenting it with the palm the wrong way,
making it squeak suddenly and wagging it about from the wrist as a
greeting to his friends. Every one had grown accustomed to his frequent
changes of gloves and his habit of appearing at dinner with those
dreadful stiff fingers in white buckskin. He had indeed trained the
thing to perform as though it were an animal and he could do almost
anything with it except tie a dress tie. That was beyond him.
At quarter to eight on the evening of Lola's first dip into life, he
turned away from the telephone and presented himself to the man who had
been his batman during the last year of the War. He had had three since
the miracle of the Marne. He was rather bored because he had just been
told by the girl who had promised to dine with him that she didn't feel
like eating and he knew that meant that some one else had cropped up who
was more amusing than himself. He had a great mind to give the Savoy a
wide berth and walk round to Boodles and have dinner with the _Pall Mall
Gazette_. But on second thoughts the idea of accompanying his cold
salmon and cucumber with the accumulating mass of depressing evidence of
the world's unrest, as set forth in the evening paper, appalled him.
Charles was trying to edge his way back into Hungary. The Russian Reds
were emptying their poison all over the map. English miners had gone out
on strike and with a callousness altogether criminal had left the pumps
unmanned. Viviani had landed in the United States to endeavor to prove
to the new President that if he did not jerk the Senate out of Main
Street he would inevitably sentence Europe to death. And Lloyd George,
even to the amazement of those who knew him best, was continuing his
game of poker with Lenin and Trotsky.
It couldn't be done. And so, his tie duly tied by the clumsy-fingered
man who had received lessons from a shop in the Burlington Arcade, the
gallant Peter left his rooms in Park Place and stood on the curb in St.
James's Street. Should he walk or drive? Should he try to raise a friend
equally at a loose end, or carry on alone? How he missed his dear old
father, who, until the day of his peaceful death, was always ready to
join him in a cheery dinner at the Marlborough or the Orleans or at one
of the hotels where he could see the pretty girls. After all, dining at
the Savoy was not such a lonely proceeding as it seemed. Among the
profiteers and the new rich there might be a familiar face. And there
was at any rate an orchestra. With a dump hat at an angle of forty-five
and a light overcoat over his dinner jacket, he was a mark for all the
prowling cabs which found business worse than usual. Two or three of
them knew this tall wiry man and had served in his Division. One of the
youngest of the Brigadier Generals in the British Army, he had worn his
brass hat as though it were the cap of a man with one pip; they loved
him for that and any day and any night would cheerfully have followed
him to hell. Many of them had called him "Beauty Chalfont," which had
made him uncomfortable. It was better than "Bloody" Chalfont or
"Butcher" Chalfont,--adjectives that had been rather too freely applied
to some of his brother Brigadiers. So far as the majority of passers-by
were concerned, this man to whom willing hands had gone up in salute and
who had turned out to be a born soldier was, like so many demobilized
officers all over the country, of no account, a nobody, his name and his
services forgotten.
The pre-war cheeriness which had belonged to the Savoy was absent now.
Chorus ladies and Guards officers, baby-faced foreign office clerks and
members of the Bachelors, famous artists and dramatists and the
ubiquitous creatures who put together the musical potpourris of the
town, beautiful ladies of doubtful reputation and highly respectable
ones without quite so much beauty no longer jostled the traveling
Americans, tennis-playing Greeks and Indian rajahs in the foyer.
Chalfont marched in to find the place filled with wrongly dressed men
with plebeian legs and strange women who seemed to have been dug out of
the residential end of factory cities. Their pearls and diamonds were
almost enough to stir Bolshevism in the souls of curates.
Shedding his coat and hat and taking a ticket from a flunkey, on whose
chest there was a line of ribbons, he looked across the long vista of
intervening space to the dining room. The band was playing "Avalon" and
a buzz of conversation went up in the tobacco smoke. What was the name
of that cheery little soul who had dined with him in March, 1914? March,
1914. He had been a happy-go-lucky Captain in the 21st Lancers in those
days, drawing a generous allowance from the old man and squeezing every
ounce of fun out of life. The years between had brought him up against
the sort of realities that he did not care to think about when left
without companionship and occupation. Two younger brothers dead and
nearly all his pals.--Just as he was about to go down the stairs and be
conducted to one of the small tables in the draught he saw a girl in a
black cloak with touches of silver on it standing alone, large-eyed, her
butter-colored hair gleaming in the light, and caught his breath.
"Jumping Joseph," he said to himself, "look at that," and was rooted to
the floor.
It was Lola, as scared as a child in the middle of traffic, a rabbit
among a pack of hounds, asking herself, cold and hot by turns, what she
had done--oh, what--by coming to that place with no one to look after
her, wishing and wishing that the floor would open up and let her into a
tunnel which would lead her out to the back room of the nerve-wrung
dressmaker. Every passing man who looked her up and down and every woman
who turned her head over her shoulder added stone after stone to the
pile of her folly, so childish, so laughable, so stupendous. How could
she have been such a fool,--the canary so far away from the safety of
its cage.
Chalfont looked again. "She's been let down by somebody," he thought.
"What sort of blighter is it who wouldn't break his neck to be on the
steps to meet such a--perfectly----All these cursed eyes, greedily
signaling. What's to be done?"
And as he stood there, turning it all over, his chivalry stirred, Lola
came slowly out of her panic. If only Mrs. Rumbold had asked her with