The Rustle of Silk
looking at a horizon which no longer contained the outline of his dream
upon the banks of the Thames. He got up as Lola entered,--done for, but
in the spirit of a protector, a Cromwellian spirit. "Where 'ad you bin
last night?" he asked, "in them clothes?" He had not slept for thinking
of it. His Lola, dressed like a lady, coming in with a tear-stained
face, late at night, alone, from a devouring world. All his early chapel
stuff had been revived at the sight. Disappointment had stirred it up.
Another cross-examination! Wasn't the world large enough for so small a
little figure to escape notice?
"Dear old Simpky," she said, with that wide-eyed candor of hers, "I'm in
such a hurry. With any luck I shall just be able to catch the bus that
will take me home to lunch."
But Simpkins put his back against the door. "No," he said. "Not like
that. Even if I've lost yer, I love yer, and it's my job to see you
don't come to no 'arm. You've got to tell me what you're doing."
There was something in the man's eyes and in the whiteness of his face
that warned Lola immediately of the need to be careful. Her mother had
said that Simpkins was a good man with something of ecstasy in his
nature, and she guessed intuitively that the latter might take the form
eventually, in his ignorance and his love, of a dangerous watchfulness.
So she was very patient and quiet and commonplace, remembering a similar
scene which had taken place with Treadwell outside Mrs. Rumbold's
battered house.
"I went to a concert with a married friend of mine. Lady Feo gave me the
frock. It's very kind of you to worry, Simpky. And now, please----"
And after a moment's hesitation Simpkins opened the door and with a
curious dignity gave the girl her freedom. He loved her and believed in
her. She was Lola and she was good, and but for some catastrophic
accident she might be engaged to be married to him.
But Lola didn't go immediately. She turned round and put her hand on the
valet's arm. "What are you going to do?" she asked, affectionately
concerned.
"There isn't anything for me to do," he said, "now."
"Come home with me."
But he shook his head. "I couldn't," he said. "Your father is a friend
of mine and might slap me on the back and tell me to go on 'oping--and
there isn't any--_is_ there?"
And she said, "No, Simpky dear. I'm sorry to say there isn't. But you
can't sit here looking at the carpet with the sun shining and so much to
see. Why not come on the bus as far as Queen's Road and then go for a
walk. It would do you good."
And he said, "Nothing can do me good."
And she could see that he had begun to revel in his pain, and nurse it,
and elevate it to a great tragedy. And for the first time she recognized
in this man a menace to her scheme. He loved her too well and she had
made him a fanatic.
This scheme of hers, so like one of the Grimm's fairy tales in which the
woodcutter's daughter dared to love the prince,--was it to get all over
the town? Miss Breezy had a friend in Scotland Yard, a detective. Lady
Feo was on the watch, and here was Simpkins turned into a protector. And
all the while Prince Fallaray lived in the same house and did nothing
more than just remember her name, thinking that she was a friend of the
woman who called herself his wife.
Never mind; the sun was shining, tears had dried, courage had returned,
frocks and shoes and stockings had come and the impossible was one of
the things that nearly always happened.
An hour later the door of the watchmaker's shop opened in answer to her
knock. There stood the fat man with his beaming smile of welcome and
surprise, and out of the little parlor came an enticing aroma of roast
lamb and mint sauce.
V
That evening, controlling her excitement and anxious to make her people
happy, Lola went to the family chapel with them,--the watchmaker in a
gargantuan tail coat, a pair of pepper and salt trousers, and a bowler
hat in which he might have been mistaken for the mayor of
Caudebac-sur-Seine or a deputy representing one of the smaller
manufacturing towns of France. Beside him his little wife stood bluntly
for England. Everything that she wore told the story not only of her
birth and tradition but of that of several grandmothers. There must have
been at that moment hundreds of thousands of just such women, dressed in
a precisely similar manner, on their way to answer the summons of a bell
which was not very optimistic,--the Church having fallen rather low in
popular favor. It had so many rivals and some of them were, it must be
confessed, more in the mood of the times.
It was a sight worth seeing to watch these Breezys ambling up Queen's
Road, proudly, with their little girl. And it was because Lola knew that
she was conferring a great treat upon her parents that she submitted
herself to an hour and a half of something worse to her than boredom.
Only a little while ago she had looked forward to the evening service on
Sundays and had been gently moved by the hymns, by the reading from the
Scripture and even by the illiterate impromptus of the minister; and she
had found, in moments that were dull, the usual feminine pleasure in
casting surreptitious glances about the small, plain unbeautiful
building to see what Mrs. This wore or Mrs. That. But now she found
herself going through it all like a fish out of water. As Ellingham had
outgrown Lady Feo, so had she outgrown that flat, uninspired, and rather
cruel service, in which the name of God was always mentioned as a
monster of vengeance, without love and without forgiveness, and with a
suspicious eye to the keyhole of every house. With a sort of shame she
found herself finding fault with the rhymes of the hymns, which every
now and then were dreadful, and were, oh, so badly sung; and when a
smug-faced, uneducated man came forward, shut his eyes, placed himself
in an attitude of elaborate piety and let himself go with terrible
unction, treating God and death and life and joy and humanity as though
they were butter, or worse still, margarine, goose flesh broke out upon
her and a curious self-consciousness as though she were intruding upon a
scene at which she had no right to be present. Away and away back,
church had not been like this to her. Out of a dream she seemed to hear
the deep reverberation of a great organ, the high sweet voices of unseen
boys and the soft murmur of an old scholar retelling the simple story of
Christ's pathetic struggle, and of God's mercy.--Oh, the commonplace,
the misinterpretation, the hypocrisy, the ignorance. No wonder the
busses were filled, she thought, the commons crowded on the outskirts of
the city. To her there was more religion in one shaft of evening sun
than in all those chapels put together.
It was with thankfulness and relief that Lola went back with her parents
to the street and turned into Queen's Road again, which wore a Sunday
expression. Gone for a brief time were the itinerant musicians, the
innumerable perambulators, the ogling flappers with their cheap silk
stockings and misshapen legs, the retired colonels eking out a grumbling
living on infinitesimal pensions.
"Let's take a little walk," said Mrs. Breezy. "It's nice now. The
Gardens look more like the country in the twilight."
"Of course," said Breezy, "walk. Best exercise in the world. Oils a man
up." But all the same he didn't intend to go far. Athleticism was a pose
with him. He had grown so fat sitting on that backless chair behind the
glass screen, looking into the works of sick watches like a poor man's
doctor who treated a long line of ailing people. If it wasn't the
mainspring, then it was over-winding. Very simple.
But Lola steered them away from Kensington Gardens because soldiers were
there under canvas, and Chalfont was in command of the London district,
and it might happen easily that all of a sudden that purring car would
draw up at the curb and her name be called by the man with the cork arm.
"Let's go the other way," she said, "for a change. I love to look at all
the houses that are just the same and wonder what the people are like
who live in them, and whether they're just the same."
It was her evening. She was no longer the little girl to be told to do
this or that and taken here and there with or against her will. She had
broken out of all that, rather strangely and quietly and suddenly; and
in a sort of way her parents had become her children. It always happens.
It is one of the privileges of parenthood eventually to obey. It is the
subtle tribute paid by them to a son or daughter of whom they are proud,
who is part of them and who has come through all the vicissitudes of
childhood and adolescence under their care and guidance. It is one of
the nicer forms of egotism.
And so these three little people, the Breezys, went into the labyrinths
of villadom, up one street and down another. Some of the houses were
smarter than the rest, with little trees in tubs, and Virginia creepers
twined about their pillars, and perhaps a fat Cupid, weather-stained,
standing in a little square of cat-fought garden, or with two small
lions eying each other from opposite sides of the doorway with bitter
antagonism. But the waning light of a glorious day still clung to the
sky, in which an evening star had opened its eye, and even Bayswater,
that valley of similitude, wore beauty of a sort. And all the way along,
up and down and across, the high-sounding names of the various terraces
ringing with sarcasm, they went together, these three little people, one
far from little outwardly, in great affection. To Lola there was
something unreal, almost uncanny about the whole thing. She had grown
out of all these streets, all this commonplace, that entire world. She
felt like some one who hears a very old tune played in a theater and
looks down with surprise and a little thread of pain from a seat in a
box,--a tune which seemed to take her back, away and away to far distant
days, and stir dim memories.--Only last night she had been sitting in
the Carlton with Chalfont as Madame de Breze, and next Friday, if all
went well----
With a sudden thrill of intense excitement and longing, she then and
there made up her mind that some day it would be her privilege and joy
to lift those two estimable people out of Queen's Road and place them,
not too old for enjoyment, among spreading trees and sloping lawns and
all the color of an English garden,--away from watches and silver
wedding presents, kodaks and ugly vases, from need of work, from clash
of traffic and the inevitable voices of throaty baritones. Ah, that was
what she wanted to do, so much, and if possible before it was too late.
Time has an ugly way of slipping off the calendar.
And when, presently, they returned to the shop and let themselves in, it
was Lola, with a curious emotion, because she might never see them again
as she was that night, who got the supper, who placed them, arguing, in
the stuffy drawing-room, and made many journeys up and down the narrow
staircase to the kitchen. "Please," she said. "Please. This is my
evening. Even a lady's maid can lay a supper if she tries hard enough."
And they did as they were told, reluctantly, but delighted,--and a
little surprised. It was something of a change. And before the evening
was over Treadwell came, wearing a flapping tie, the mark of the poet,
and a suit of reach-me-downs egregiously cut but with something in his
face that lived it down,--love. Poor boy, he had a long way to go alone.
When at last, having said good night, Lola went upstairs to the room in
which she had played that little game of hers so often and sat in the
dark as quiet as a mouse, holding her breath, not one, no, not a single
one of all her old friends came in to see her,--not the ancient marquis