The Rustle of Silk
of obstreperous white stuff that was unmastered by a brush. And as if
all this were not enough, there was a small cascade under the middle of
the lower lip kept just long enough to bend up and bite in moments of
deep calculation. There may have been hairs upon his conscience too,
judging by his exquisite lack of memory.
His was, nevertheless, a very old title and a long line of buried
Marquises had all done something, good and bad, to place the name of
Amesbury in the pages of history. Rip Van Winkle, as most people called
the present noble Lord, had done good and bad things too, like the rest
of us,--good because his heart was kind, and bad from force of
circumstances. If he had inherited a fine fortune with his father's
shoes instead of bricks and mortar mortgaged from cellar to ceiling, his
might have been a different story and not one unfortunately linked up
with several rather shady transactions. At fifty-five, however, life
found him still abounding in optimism on the nice allowance granted to
him by Fallaray, and always on the lookout, like all Micawbers, for
something to turn up.
He had driven the large brake to the station to meet Feo and her party
who were on their way down for the week-end. His temporary exile at
Chilton Park, brought about by a universal disinclination to honor his
checks, had been a little dull. He was delighted at the prospect of
seeing people again, especially Mrs. Malwood. He was fond of Angoras and
liked to hear them purr. So with a rather seedy square felt hat over one
eye and a loose overcoat of Irish homespun over his riding kit, he
clambered down from the high box, saw that the groom was at the horses'
heads and strolled into the station to talk over the impending strike of
the Triple Alliance with the station master,--the parlor Bolshevist of
Princes Risborough. An express swooped through the station as he stood
on the platform and made a parachute of his overcoat. The London train
was not due for fifteen minutes.
Tapping on the door of Mr. Sparrow's room, he entered to find that
worthy exulting over the morning paper, his pale, tubercular face
flushed with excitement. The headlines announced that "England faces
revolution. Mines flood as miners steal coal and await with confidence
the entire support of allied unions. Great Britain on the edge of a
precipice."
"All wrong," said Rip Van Winkle quietly. "Panicky misinterpretation of
the situation, Sparrow,--much as you desire the opposite."
The station master whipped round, his fish-like eyes strangely magnified
by the strong glasses in his spectacles. "What makes yer say that, m'
Lord?" he asked, even at that moment flattered at the presence of a
Marquis in his office. "Labor has England by the throat."
"England has Labor by the seat of the pants, you should say, Sparrow.
Take my word for it, the strike is not only doomed to eventual failure,
however the fluctuations go, but the Labor movement will grow less and
less terrorist in its methods from this day onwards."
Mr. Sparrow threw back his head and laughed loudly,--showing an
incomplete collection of very disastrous teeth. "Well, there won't be a
damned train running by this time Monday," he said.
"I'll bet you a thousand oak apples to one there will," replied Lord
Amesbury, "and I'll tell you why. Every sane and law-abiding Englishman,
from the small clerk to the most doddering duke, has begun to organize
and this mighty revolution of yours is already as dead as mutton."
"Oh, is that so?" Mr. Sparrow laughed again.
"That is so. You see, Sparrow, you Labor gentlemen, talking
paradoxically, have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, not merely
in this country but all over the world. You have been the bullies of the
school and for a considerable number of years you have made our
politicians stiff with fright. They have licked your boots and given way
to you whenever you demanded higher wages. They pampered and petted you
all through the War, from which you emerged with swollen heads and far
too many pianos. When history turns its cold eye upon you, you will be
summed up as a set of pretty dirty blackguards who did less to win the
War than all the dud shells piled into a heap. You slacked, grumbled,
threatened and held up governments for wages out of all proportion to
your work. You proved the possession of criminal as well as unpatriotic
instincts and you finally showed yourselves up in your true light when
you deserted the mines and took the pumpers away. There isn't any word
in any dictionary to define the sort of indignation which that dastardly
and wanton action has caused. The result of it has been to put the first
big nail in the coffin of Labor unions. You have been discovered as men
with a yellow streak. Governments now see, what they have never been
able to recognize before, that labor does not form the most important
section of the three sections of society, the other two being capital
and the purchasing power. You have made clear to them, Master Sparrow,
that labor and capital are at the mercy of the third element,--the great
middle class, the people who buy from capital, pay your wages and who
can at any moment, by not buying, reduce both capital and labor to
nothingness. The new strike, the epoch-making strike, is of this middle
class, and they haven't struck against you but against strikes. At last
the worm has turned and I venture to prophesy, foolish as it is, that
after a series of damaging and expensive kicks, labor will descend to
its proper place, with a just share in profits that will enable it to
get a little joy out of life, freed from the tyrannical hand of unions,
and with more spare time than is at present enjoyed by the members of
the middle class who will continue to take the rough with the smooth,
without squealing, as heretofore. In fact, I look upon this strike of
miners as one of the best things that has ever happened in history and
nothing gives me greater joy and greater satisfaction than to watch, as
I shall do from to-day onwards, the gradual diminishing of the excessive
size of the labor head.--How are your potatoes coming along?"
Without waiting for an answer, the tall old man turned quietly and left
the room; while the parlor Bolshevist, stuffed with the pamphlets of
Hyndman and Marks, Lenin and Trotsky, gave a vicious kick to the leg of
the table and eyed the receding figure with venom.
The train was late and so Rip Van Winkle killed time by studying the
contents of the bookstall, looking with a sort of incredulity at the
stuff on which the public is fed,--illiterate fiction with glaring
covers and cheap weeklies filled with egregious gossip and suggestive
drawings. The extra fifteen minutes of waiting was passed very
pleasantly by his Lordship because many of his old friends from the
village came up to him and talked. The chemist, who had driven down
personally to collect his monthly box of drugs from London, was very
affable. So also was the blacksmith who had known Lord Amesbury for many
years and treated him with _bonhomie_. They talked racing with great
earnestness. The postman, the gardener from the house of the war
profiteer, and the village policeman, all of them very good friends of
the man upon whom they looked as representing the good old days, livened
things up. With the real democracy that belongs solely to the
aristocrat, Rip Van Winkle knew all about the ailments of their wives,
the prospects of their children, the number of their hens and pigs and
their different forms of religious worship, which he duly respected,
whether they were Little Baptists, Big Baptists or Middle-sized
Baptists, Minor Methodists or Major Methodists, Independent Churchmen or
Dependent Churchmen, Roman Catholics or Anglicans whose Catholicism is
interpreted intelligently. The village consisted perhaps of twenty-five
hundred souls, but they all had their different cures, and there were as
many churches and chapels in and off the High Street as there were
public houses. It had always seemed to Feo's father that honest beer is
infinitely preferable to the various sorts of religion which were to be
obtained in those other public houses in their various bottles, all
labeled differently, and he hoped that the prohibition which had been
the means of developing among the people of the United States so many
drinks far more injurious than those in which alcohol prevailed would
never be forced by graft and hypocrisy, self-seeking and salary-making
upon the tight little island,--not always so tight as prohibitionists
supposed.
Lady Feo bounded out of the train, followed by Mrs. Malwood and their
two new friends recently picked up,--Feo's latest fancy, Gordon
Macquarie, a glossy young man who backed musical plays in order that he
might dally with the pretty members of his choruses, and Mrs. Malwood's
most recent time-killer whose name was Dowth,--David Dowth, the Welsh
mine owner, who had just succeeded to his father's property and had
invaded London to see life. Cambridge was still upon the latter's face
and very obviously upon his waistcoat. He was a green youth who would
learn about women from Mrs. Malwood. They were both new to Rip Van
Winkle and for that reason all the more interesting. Lola, carrying a
jewel case, emerged from a compartment at the back of the train with
Mrs. Malwood's maid, similarly burdened, and it was at Lola that Lord
Amesbury threw his most appreciative glance.
"French," he said to himself. "The reincarnation of those pretty little
people made immortal by Fragonard."
Feo threw her arms round her father's neck and kissed him on those
places of his cheeks which were clear of undergrowth. "Good old Rip,"
she said. "Always on the spot. Been bored, old boy?"
Lord Amesbury laughed. "To be perfectly frank, yes," he said. "I have
missed my race meetings and my bridge at Boodles, but I have been
studying the awakening of spring and the psychology of bird life, all
very delightful. Also I have been watching the daily changes among the
trees in the beech forest. Amazingly dramatic, my dear. But it's good to
see you again and I hope your two friends are gamblers. Possibly I can
make a bit out of them."
He patted her on the shoulder and looked her up and down with admiration
not unmixed with astonishment. Among the many riddles which he had never
been able to solve he placed the fact that he of all men was Feo's
father. What extraordinary twist had nature performed in making his only
daughter a girl instead of a boy? Standing there in her short skirt and
manly looking golf shoes with lopping tongues, her beautiful square
shoulders lightly covered with a coarsely knitted sweater of chestnut
brown and a sort of Tyrolean hat drawn down over her ears, she looked
like a young officer in the First Life Guards masquerading in women's
clothes.
II
When Lord Amesbury mounted the box with Feo at his side and turned out
of the station yard into the long road which led to the old village of
Princes Risborough, the first thing that caught Lola's eyes was the
white cross cut by the Romans in the chalk of the hill, on the top of
which sat Chilton Park. Again and again she had stood in front of
photographs of this very view. They hung in Miss Breezy's room, neatly
framed. Many times Miss Breezy herself had explained to Lola the meaning
of that cross, so far as its historical significance went, and Lola had
been duly impressed. The Romans,--how long ago they must have lived. But
to her, more and more as her love and adoration grew, that white cross
stood as a mark for the place to which Fallaray went from time to time
for peace, to listen to the wind among the beech trees, to watch the
sheep on the distant hills, to wander among the gardens of his old house