The Rustle of Silk
And finally Chalfont said, "I see. Well, I wish you luck, little Lola,
and I congratulate you on loving like that. Oddly enough, we both love
like that. I wish to God----"
And as Lola moved away she put her hand through his arm as a sister
might have done, which was better than nothing; and they walked back
along that avenue of broken men, that street of weary feet, up
Northumberland Avenue and back into the lights and the whirl. "I think
I'll leave you now," said Lola. "There's a cold hand on my heart. I want
to be alone."
And so, without a word, Chalfont hailed a passing taxi, opened the door,
handed Lola in, and stood back, very erect, very simple, with his cork
arm most uncomic. And before the cab started he flung up his left hand
to the peak of his cap, not as though saluting a company of boy scouts
or a queen, but the woman he loved, the woman he would always love, the
woman for whom he would wait on the other side of the Bridge.
And all the way to Dover Street Lola wept.
VIII
In the servants' sitting room Simpkins was sitting alone, not reading,
not smoking; thinking of Lola and of the inn at Wargrave which had
become so detestable,--a dead ambition, the ghost of a dream. And when
the door opened and Lola let herself in, tear-stained, he sprang to his
feet, gazing in amazement. Lola--dressed like a lady--crying.--But she
held up her hand, went swiftly across the room and out, upstairs. She
was back an hour and a half too soon. There was no need for Ellen to
slip down and open the door. The evening had been a dismal failure. It
would be a long time before she would play Cinderella again,--although
the Prince loved her and had told her so.
But instead of going through the door which led to the servants'
quarters, she stood for a moment in the corridor through which Simpkins
had taken her when she had first become an inmate of that house and once
more she stayed there against the tapestry with a cold hand on her
heart. Simpkins loved her. Treadwell loved her. Chalfont loved her, but
oh, where was Fallaray? What a little fool she had been ever to suppose,
in her wildest dreams, that Fallaray, Fallaray would see her and stop to
speak, set alight by the love in her eyes! What a silly little fool.
A door opened and Fallaray came out,--his shoulders rounded, his
Savonarola face pale and lined with sleeplessness. At the sight of the
charming little figure in evening dress he drew up. Mrs. Malwood
perhaps, or another of Feo's friends. She was entertaining again, of
course.
And Lola trembled like a frightened bird, with great tears welling from
her eyes.
Fallaray was puzzled. This child did not look like one of Feo's
friends,--and why was she crying? He knew the face, he remembered those
wide-apart eyes. They had followed him into his work, into his
dreams,--de Breze, de Breze,--the Savoy, the Concert.
He held out his hand. "Madame de Breze," he said, "what have they done
to you?"
And she shook her head again, trembling violently.
And Fallaray, with the old curious tingle running through his veins, was
helpless. If she wouldn't tell him what was the matter, what was he to
do? He imagined that some flippancy or some sarcasm had wounded this
astonishing girl and she had fled from the drawing-room and lost her
way. But women were unknown to him, utter strangers, and he was called
to work. He said, "My wife's room is there," stood irresolute for a
moment, although his brain was filled with the songs of birds, and bowed
and went away.
And when Lola heard the street door close, she moved like a bird shot
through the wings, fumbled her way to the passage which led to her
servant's bedroom and flung herself face downwards upon her bed. What
was it in her that did these things to every man,--except Fallaray?
PART VI
I
To Ellingham's entire satisfaction, Feo did not sit out the performance
at the Adelphi. She left in the middle of the second act. It was not a
piece demanding any sort of concentration. That was not its metier. It
was one of those rather pleasant, loosely made things, bordering here
and there on burlesque, in which several comedians have been allotted
gaps to fill between songs which, repeated again and again, give a large
chorus of pretty girls an opportunity of wearing no dress longer than
five minutes or lower than the knees. But Feo's mind was wandering. The
last twenty-four hours had been filled with disappointment. She agreed
with the adage that if you can't make a mistake you can't make anything.
But this last one, which had taken the Macquarie person into her circle
of light, proved to her that she was losing not only her sense of
perspective but her sense of humor. It rankled; and it continued to
rankle all through the jokes and songs and horseplay of the company
behind the footlights that Saturday night.
Then, too, she found herself becoming more and more disappointed in
Ellingham. He had aged. Still just on the right side of forty, he seemed
to her to have had all the youth knocked out of him. His resilience had
gone--sapped by the War--and with it his danger, which had been so
attractive. He was now a quiet, repressed, responsible, dull--yes,
dull,--man; in a sort of way the father of a family. When he talked it
was about his regiment in India, his officers, his quartermaster
sergeant, the health of his men, the ugly look of things in the East.
All this made it seem to Feo that Beetle Ellingham had pulled away from
her, left her behind. She was still fooling, while he, once as
irresponsible as herself and almost as mad, had found his feet and was
standing firmly upon them. Disappointment, disappointment.
"What to do?" she asked, as they got into a taxicab. She rather hoped
that he would say "Nothing. I'll see you home and say good night."
But he didn't. "I'll drive you home and talk for an hour, if you can
stand such a thing. I'm going to see my old people in Leicestershire
to-morrow, and I don't suppose I shall be back in town for a month or
two."
She told him to make it Dover Street, and he did so, and there was
silence until the cab drew up at the door of the house in which the
man--whom she had for the first time seriously considered as the new
Messiah--burnt himself up in the endeavor to find some solution to all
the troubles of his country, and, like a squirrel in a cage, ran round
and round and round.
Feo let herself in and led the way to what she called her den,--a long,
low-ceilinged room, self-consciously decorated in what purported to be a
futuristic manner, the effect of which, as though it had been designed
by an untrained artist striving to disguise his ignorance behind a chaos
of the grotesque, made sanity stagger. And here, full stretch on an
octagonal divan, she mounted a cigarette in her long green holder and
commenced to inhale hungrily.
Hating the room and all its fake, Ellingham, who more than ever
justified the nickname of Beetle which had been given to him at Eton
because of his over-hanging black eyebrows, prowled up and down with his
hands in his pockets. He, too, was disappointed. It seemed to him that
Feo had remained the hoyden, the overgrown, long-legged girl with boy's
shoulders and the sort of sex illusiveness which had so greatly
attracted him in the old days, and had set him to work to eliminate and
replace. But now she was thirty something, and although he hated to use
the expression about her of all women, he told himself that she was
mutton playing lamb, and a futile lamb at that. Perhaps it was because
he had been all the way through the War and had come out with a series
of unforgettable pictures stamped upon his brain that he had expected to
find some sort of emergement on the part of Feo, who, although she had
been spared the blood and muck of Flanders, was the sister of a flying
man, the relation of innumerable gallant fellows who had been made the
gun fodder of that easily preventable orgy, and the friend of many a
young soldier whose bones now lay under the shallow surface of French
earth. So far as she was concerned, he could see that the War might
never have happened at all. It made him rather sick. Nevertheless he had
loved her violently and had never married because of his remembrance of
her and he wanted to find out how she stood. He was entirely in the
dark. He had not been alone with her once since the end of July,
1914,--a night on the terrace of a house overlooking the Thames at
Cookham, when all the world already knew that slaughter was in the air
and the wings of the angel of death rustled overhead.
He stopped in front of her, all stretched out among cushions, her short
and pleated frock making her appear to be in a kilt. "Well, how about
it?" he asked.
And she shrugged her shoulders and tossed the ash of her cigarette at a
small marble pot. "I dunno," she said. "Pretty badly, one way and
another."
"How's that?"
"Oh, I dunno," she said again. "One gets nowhere and does really nothing
and spends one's life looking for something that never turns up,--the
glamour of the impossible. Disappointment, disappointment."
"H'm," said Beetle. "Is there no chance of your getting on better with
Fallaray? He seems to be the only live creature in politics, the one
honest man." He had never imagined that he would ever have put that
question to her.
"That's true," said Feo. "He is. I have nothing but admiration for
Edmund,--except dislike. Profiles and tennis are no longer my hobbies
and there is no more hope of our getting on, as you call it, than of my
becoming an earnest worker among the slums. Once Feo, always Feo,
y'know. That's the sentence I labor under, Beetle. As a rule, I'm
perfectly satisfied and have no grumbles. I rot about and play the giddy
ox, wear absurd clothes, do my best to give a jar to what remains of
British smugdom and put in a good-enough time. You mustn't judge me as
you find me to-night. I have the megrims. Ghosts are walking and I'm out
of form. To put it truthfully, I'm rather ashamed of myself. I've become
a little too careless. I must relearn the art of drawing the line.
That's all. But, for the Lord's sake, don't let me depress _you_,--that
is, if I have any longer the power of doing so."
She hadn't, he found, and it hurt. In the old days he would have said so
and in a sort of way got even with her for turning him down and marrying
Fallaray. He would have taken a certain amount of joy in hitting her as
hard as he could. But he had altered. He was not the old Beetle, the
violent, hot-tempered, rather cruel individualist. Men had died at his
side,--officers and Tommies. And so his days of hurting women were over.
He was rather a gentle Beetle now. Curious how things shaped themselves.
And so he prowled up and down with his hands in his pockets,
inarticulate, out of touch,--like a doctor in a lunatic asylum, or an
Oxford man revisiting the scenes of his giddy youth in his very old age.
And Feo continued to smoke,--smarting. Not because she cared for Beetle
or had ever given him a thought. But because everything was edgeways,
like a picture puzzle that had fallen in a heap. She would have given a
great deal to have had this man take his hands out of his pockets and
stop prowling and become the old violent Beetle once again. She would
have liked to have heard him curse Fallaray and accuse her of being a
rotter. She would have liked to have seen the old hot look in his eyes
and been compelled to laugh him off, using her old flippant words.
Anything,--anything but the thing that was.
But even as he prowled--up round the wispy table and down in front of
that damn-fool altar, or whatever it was--he became more and more the
ancient friend, distantly related, who had little to talk about and