The Rustle of Silk
And there both men remained, gazing,--Fallaray with a smile of
possession, of infinite pride and pleasure; Lytham with an expression of
profound amazement and quick understanding.
"So it's a woman," he thought. And as he continued to look, another
picture of that girl came back into his mind. He had seen her before. He
had turned as she had passed him somewhere and caught his breath. He
remembered to have said to himself as she had walked away, "Eve, come to
life! Some poor devil of an Adam will go to hell for her."--The
Carlton--Chalfont--the foyer with its little cases of glittering jewels,
the long strip of carpet leading to the stairs of the dining room--the
palms--the orchestra. It all came back.--Well, this might be a form of
madness in a man of Fallaray's age and womanless life, but, thank God,
it was one with which he could deal. It was physical, not mental, as he
had feared. Fallaray might very well play Adam without going into hell.
"Can't you combine the two," he said. "Politics and that girl? It's been
done before. It's being done every day. The one is helped by the other."
But Fallaray shook his head. "I am not going to do it," he said. "I have
had a surfeit of one and nothing of the other. Take it from me finally,
George,--I am out of the political game. I think I should have been out
of it in any case, because I came here acknowledging failure, fed up,
nauseated. I am not the man to juggle with intrigues, to say one thing
to placate the capitalists to-day and another to fool labor to-morrow.
It isn't my way and I shall not be missed. On the contrary, my
resignation will be accepted with eagerness. I am going to begin all
over again, free, perfectly firm in my belief that there are better men
to do my job. I was a bull in a china shop, and it will remain a china
shop, whether it's run by one party or another. It's the system. Nothing
can alter it. I couldn't, you and your party won't be able to. It's gone
too far. It's a cancer. It will kill the country. And so I'm out. I
consider that I have earned the right to love and make a home. Row off
from my Eden, my dear fellow, and leave me in peace. I am not going to
be rescued."
"We'll see about that," thought Lytham. "This is not Fallaray who
speaks. It's the man of forty suddenly hit by passion. I'll fight that
girl to the last gasp. We must have this man, we _must_."
He turned away, deeply disappointed at the queer tangent at which his
chief had gone off, bitterly annoyed to find that here was a fight
within a fight at a time when unity was vital. He was himself a
perfectly normal creature who regarded the rustle of silk as one of the
necessities, like golf and tobacco, but to sacrifice a career or let
down a cause for the sake of a woman was to him an act of unimaginable
weakness and folly. If only Fallaray had been younger or older, or,
better still, had been contentedly married to Feo! Cursed bad luck that
he had been caught at forty.--But, struck with an idea in which he could
see immediate possibilities, he stopped on his way to the door and went
back to Fallaray. To work it out in his usual energetic way he must use
strategy and appear to accept his friend's decision as irreparable. "All
right," he said. "You know best. I'll argue no more. But as there's no
need now for me to dash back to town, mayn't I linger with you in
Arcadia for a couple of hours?"
Fallaray was delighted. Lola was to dine at Lady Cheyne's, and he would
be alone. It would be very jolly to have George to dinner, especially as
he saw the futility of argument and recognized an ultimatum. "Stay and
have some food," he said. "I've much to tell you. But will you let me
leave you for ten minutes?"
That was precisely what young Lochinvar intended to do before he drove
away,--speak to that woman.
He watched Fallaray join Lola at the fountain, give her his hand and
wander off among the rose trees, wearing what he called the fatuous
smile of the middle-aged man in love. And then, so that he might obtain
a point or two for future use, he rang the bell for Elmer. The butler
and he had known each other for years. He would answer a few nonchalant
questions without reserve. "Good afternoon, Elmer," he said, when the
old man came in.
"Good afternoon to you, Sir." He might have been an actor who in palmy
days had played Hamlet at Bristol.
"I'm staying to an early dinner with Mr. Fallaray. A whiskey and soda
would go down rather well in the meantime."
"Certainly, Sir."
"Oh, and Elmer."
"Sir?" His turn and the respectful familiar angle of his head were only
possible to actors of the good old school.
"The name of the charming lady who has so kindly helped to brighten up
Mr. Fallaray's week-end."
"Madame de Breze, Sir."
"Oh, yes, of course." He had never heard it before. Married then, or a
widow. French. 'Um. "And she is staying with----"
"Lady Cheyne, Sir."
"Oh, yes,--that house----"
"A stone's throw from the gate in the wall, Sir. You can see the roof
from this window."
"Thanks very much, Elmer. How's your son getting on now?"
"Very well indeed, Sir, thank you, owing to your kindness."
"A very good fellow,--a first-rate soldier. One of our best junior
officers. Not too much soda, then."
"No, Sir." He left the room like an elderly sun-beam.
"Good!" said George Lytham. "Get off early, hang about by the gate,
intercept this young woman on her way back to Fallaray and see what her
game is. That's the idea."
And he sat down, lit a cigarette and picked up a copy of Hood that lay
open on the table. His eyes fell on some marked lines.
"Peace and rest at length have come,
All the day's long toil is past,
And each heart is whispering Home,
Home at last."
And he thought of Feo whom he had seen several nights running with
Arrowsmith and before that, for a series of years, with Dick, Tom and
Harry. Never with Fallaray.
"Poor devil," he thought. "He's been too long without it. It won't be
easy to rescue him now."
VIII
And at the gate in the wall Fallaray held Lola close in his arms and
kissed her, again and again.
"My little Lola," he said softly, "how wonderful you are,--how wonderful
all this is. You had been in the air all round me for weeks. I used to
see your eyes among the stars looking down at me when I left the House.
I used to wake at night and feel them upon me all warm about my heart.
Lots of times, like the wings of a bird, they flashed between me and my
work. And the tingle of your hand that never left me ran through my
veins like fire. I could have stopped dead that night at the Savoy and
followed you away. And when I found you weeping in the corridor in Dover
Street I was confused and bewildered because then I was old and I was
fighting against you for the cause. De Breze, de Breze,--the name used
to come to me, suddenly, like the forerunner of rain to a dried-up
plant. And at last I got away and came down here, as I know now, to
throw off my useless years and go back, past all the milestones on a
long road, and wait for you. And then you heard my cry and opened the
gate and walked among those stone figures of my life and gave me back my
youth."
"With love and adoration and long-deferred hope," she said and crept
closer to his heart. "I love you. I love you. I've always loved you. And
if I'd never found you, I should have waited for you on the other side
of the Bridge,--loving you still."
"My dear--who am I to deserve this?"
"You are Fallaray. Who else?"
And he laughed at that and held up her face and kissed her lips and
said, "No. I'm no longer Fallaray, that husk of a man, emptying his
energy on the ribs of chaos. I'm Edmund the boy, transformed to
adolescence. I'm Any Man in love."
And again she went closer, feeling the far-off shudder of thunder, with
a new-born fear of opening the gate in the wall. "Who was that man who
came to see you?"
"Young Lochinvar,--Lytham. He's interested in politics."
"What did he want to see you about?"
"Nothing." And he brushed away the lingering recollection with his hand.
"No. Tell me. I want to know."
"I forget." And he laughed and kissed her once again.
"But in any case you have to go back to-morrow?"
He shook his head and ran his fingers over her hair.
"But you said you'd have to,--that night."
"Did I? I forget." And he put his hand over her heart and held it there.
And again there came that thunder shudder, and she eyed the gate with
fear. "Did he want you to go back to-night? Tell me; I've _got_ to
know." And she drew away a little--a very little--in order to force her
point.
But he drew her back and kissed her eyes. "Don't look like that," he
said. "What's it matter? Let him want. I'm not going back. I'm never
going back. If George Lytham were multiplied by a hundred thousand and
they all landed on my island with grappling irons, I'd laugh them back
to sea. They shan't have me. I've given them all I had. I've found my
youth and I'll enjoy it, here, anywhere, with you." He stretched out and
opened the gate. "And now, I must let you go, my sweet. But don't be
longer than you can help. Get dinner over quickly and come back to me
again. Wear that silver frock and I'll wait for you on the terrace, as I
did before. I want to be surprised again as you shimmer among those cold
stones." He let her go.
And she went through the gate and stood irresolute, as the shudder came
again. With a little cry she turned and flung her arms round his neck as
though she were saying, "Good-by."
And yet there was only a cloud as big as a man's hand in that clear sky.
IX
No one, it might be thought, could hear to think at the narrow table in
Lady Cheyne's house. Those natural, childlike creatures who, if they had
ever learned the artificialities forget them, talked, argued, sang and
screamed each other down all at the same time. They could not really be
musicians if they didn't.
Zalouhou, whose only preparations for dinner consisted in bushing out
his tie and hair, sat at his hostess' left; Willy Pouff, in an evening
suit borrowed from a waiter friend who had gone to a hospital with a
poisoned hand, on her right. Lola, at the end of the table, sat between
Valdemar Varvascho and Max Wachevsky, who had remembered, oddly enough,
to wash their faces, though Varvascho's beard had grown darkly during
the day. Both the women had changed and made up for artificial light.
The result of Anna Stezzel's hour was remarkable, as well, perhaps, as
somewhat disconcerting. A voluptuous person, with hair as black as a wet
starling, she had plastered her face with a thick coating of white stuff
on which her lips resembled blood stains in the snow. Her beaded evening
gown saved the company from panic merely by an accident and disclosed
also the whole wide expanse of a rather yellow back. Regina Spatz was
built on Zuluesque lines, too, but more by luck than judgment a white
blouse tempered her amazing ampleness. She had used henna on her hair so
that it might have been fungus in a tropic sea and sat in a perpetual
blush of indiscriminate rouge. Salo Impf was wedged against her side and
looked like a Hudson River tugboat under the lee of the _Aquitania_.
Like all fat women, Lady Cheyne was devoted to eating and had long since
decided to let herself go. "One can only live once," she said, in
self-defense; "and how does one know that there'll be peas and potatoes
in the next world." The dinner, to the loudly expressed satisfaction of
the musicians, was substantial and excellent. Each course was received
with a volley of welcome, expressed in several languages. The hard
exercise of singing, playing, gesticulating, praising and breathing
deeply gave these children of the exuberant Muse the best of appetites.
It was a shattering meal.