The Rustle of Silk
them that he could read. Very few of them were in English and those were
of French history. The rest were the lives and memoirs of famous
courtesans, including those of the Madame de Breze, to whom the
watchmaker always referred with a mixture of pride and levity,--but not
when his wife was in hearing. A bulky French dictionary, old and
dog-eared, stood in solitude upon the writing table.
It was to this room that Lola withdrew as often as possible to cut
herself off from every suggestion of Queen's Road, Bayswater, and the
shop below, and to forget her daily journeys to and from the Polytechnic
where she was supposed to be taking a commercial course in bookkeeping
and shorthand with a view either to going into an office or becoming a
teacher in one of the many small schools which endeavored to keep their
heads up in and about that portion of London.
The game of make-believe, which the dramatist who followed Lola from
Hyde Park corner that afternoon had watched her play, had been carried
on in this bed-sitting room ever since she had fallen under the spell of
the de Breze memoirs. It was here, especially on Sunday mornings, that
this young thing let her imagination have full play while her father and
mother, dressed in their Sabbath best, attended the Methodist Church
near-by. Then, playing the part of her celebrated ancestress, she put on
a little lace cap and a _peignoir_ over her nightgown and sat up in bed
to receive the imaginary friends, admirers and sycophants who came to
her with the latest gossip, with rare and beautiful gifts and with the
flattery of their kind, which, while it pleased her very much, failed to
turn her head, because, after all, she had inherited much of her
mother's shrewdness. With her door locked, her nose powdered and her
lips the color of a cherry, Lola conducted, for her own amusement, a
brilliant series of monologues which, if given on the stage in a setting
a little more elaborate, would have set all London laughing.
The girl's mimicry of the people whom she brought to life from the pages
of those French books was perfectly delightful. She brought her master
to life. With a keen sense of characterization she built him
up--unconsciously assisted by Aunt Hannah--into as close a resemblance
to Fallaray as she could,--a tired, world-worn man, starving for love
and adoration, weighed down by the problems of a civilization in chaos,
distrait and sometimes almost brusque, but always chivalrous and kind,
who came to her for refreshment and inspiration and left her with a
lighter tread and renewed optimism. Ancient dames whose days were over
came to her with envy in their hearts and the hope of charity in their
withered souls to tell her of their triumphs and the scandals of their
time. But the character upon whom she concentrated all her humor and
sarcasm was the friend of her master, an unscrupulous person who loved
her and never could resist the opportunity of pressing his suit in
flowery but passionate terms and with an accent which, elaborately
Parisian, was reproduced from that of the French journalist who had
taught Lola his language in a class that she had attended for several
years. These word fencings had begun, of course, as a child would
naturally have begun them, with the stilted sentences and high-flown
remarks which she had lifted from Grimm's Fairy Tales. They had become
more and more sophisticated as the years had passed and were now full of
subtleties and insinuations against which, egging the man on, Lola
defended herself with what she took to be great wit and cleverness.
If her little mother had ever gone so far as to put her ear to the
keyhole of that bedroom, she would have listened to something which
would probably have sent her to a doctor to consult him as to her
daughter's mental condition. She would have heard, for instance, the
well-modulated voice of that practised lovemaker and the laughing
high-pitched replies of a girl not unpleased with his attentions but
adamant to his pleadings and perfectly sure of herself. It is true that
Mrs. Breezy would not have understood one word that was spoken because
it was all in French, but the mere act of conducting long conversations
with imaginary characters as a hobby would have struck deep at her sense
of the fitness of things, especially as Sunday was the day chosen for
such a game. The Methodist mind is strangely inelastic.
What would have been said to all this by a disciple of Freud it is easy
to conceive. He would have read into it the existence of a complex
proving a suppressed desire which must have landed Lola in a lunatic
asylum. Common sense and a rudimentary knowledge of heredity might,
however, have given to the mother and the psychoanalyst the key to all
this. The fact was that Lola threw back to her French ancestress who,
like herself, was the daughter of humble, honest people, and the glamor
of the de Breze memoirs had not only caught and colored her imagination,
which was her strongest trait, but had shown her how to exploit the gift
of sex appeal in a way that would make her essential to a man who had it
in him to become a great political figure, the only way in which she,
like the de Breze, could be placed in a golden cage with all the
luxuries, share in the secrets of government, meet the men who counted,
bask in the reflected glory of power, and give in return so
whole-hearted a love, devotion, encouragement and refreshment that her
"master" would go out to the affairs of his country grateful and
humanized. She could not, of course, ever hope to achieve this ambition
by marriage. No such man would marry the daughter of a watchmaker. It
was that the spirit of this woman lived again in the Breezys' little
daughter; that in her there had been revived the same desire to force a
place for herself in a world to which she had not been born, and that
she had been endowed with the same feminine qualities that were
necessary to such a scheme. In the knowledge of this and pinning her
faith to a similar cause--the word was hers--Lola Breezy had gone
through those curious years of double life more and more determined to
perform this kind of courtesanship, believing that she had inherited the
voice with which to sing the little songs of a canary in the secret cage
of no less a man than one of proved ability and idealism, who was within
an ace of premiership, and--so that her vanity might be satisfied in the
proof of her own ability to help him--against whom was pitted all that
was mean, ignorant, jealous and reactionary in a bad political system.
What more natural, therefore, than that the man who fulfilled all these
requirements and whom she would give her life to serve was Fallaray. He
had been brought home to her every Thursday evening by her aunt for ten
years. She had read in the papers every word that he had spoken; had
followed his course of action through all the years of the War which he
had done his best to prevent; had watched his lonely struggle to
substantiate a League of Nations free from blood lust and territorial
greed; had seen him pelted with lies and calumny when he had cried out
that Germany must be allowed to live if Europe were to live; and that
very day had stood trembling in front of the billboard which announced
that he would not stand for the bloody and disastrous reprisals in
Ireland that were backed by the Prime Minister. He was the one honest
man, the one idealist in English politics; the one great humanitarian
who possessed that strength and fairness of mind which permitted him to
see both sides of a question; to belong to a party without being a slave
to its shibboleths; to commit the sudden volt-faces so impossible to
brass hats and to the Junkers of all nationality; the one man in the
House of Commons who didn't give a damn for limelight,
self-aggrandizement, titles, graft and all the rest of the things which
have been brought into that low and unclean business by men who would
sell the country for a drink. And above all he was unhappy with his
wife.
The housekeeper aunt had built up for this girl a hero who fitted
exactly into the niche in her heart and ambitions. All the stories and
backstairs gossip about him had excited her desire to become a second
Madame de Breze in his life and bring the rustle of silk to this Eveless
man. Never once did there enter into her game of make-believe or her
dreams of achievement the idea of becoming Fallaray's wife, even if, at
any time, he should be free to marry again. She had too keen a sense of
psychology for that. She saw the need to Fallaray, as to other such men
in his position, of a secret romance,--stolen meetings, brief escapes,
entrancing interludes, and the desire--the paradox of asceticism--for
feminine charms. She had read the story of Parnell and understood it; of
Nelson and sympathized with it. She knew the history of other men of
absorbing patriotism and great intellect who had kept their optimism and
their humanity because of a woman's tenderness and flattery, and
whenever she looked at the picture of Fallaray, in whom she recognized a
modern Quixote tilting at windmills, she saw that he stood in urgent
need of a woman who could do for him what Madame de Breze had done for
that minister of Louis XIV. During all her intelligent years, therefore,
she had conducted herself in the hope, vague and futile as it seemed, of
some day being discovered to Fallaray, and in her heart there had grown
up a love and a hero worship so strong and so passionate that it could
never be transferred to any other man.
The reason, then, why Lola had turned the whole force of her
concentration upon entering the house in Dover Street as lady's maid
becomes clear. Here, suddenly, was her chance. Once in this house, in
attendance upon Lady Feo, it would be possible for her not only to learn
the manners and the language of the only women who were known to
Fallaray, but eventually, with luck and strategy, to exercise her gift,
as she called it, upon Fallaray himself. What did she care whether, as
her aunt had said, she went down a peg in the social scale by becoming a
lady's maid? She would willingly become a crossing sweeper or a beggar
girl.
If it were true that Fallaray never went into the side of the house that
was occupied by his wife, then she would eventually, when she felt that
her apprenticeship had been served, slip into the other side. Like all
women she had cunning and like very few courage. Opportunity comes to
those who make it and she was ready and eager to undergo any humiliation
to try herself, so to speak, on Fallaray. Ernest Treadwell loved her and
would, she knew, die for her willingly. There was the hero stuff in him.
Other boys, too numerous to mention, would go through fire and water for
her kisses. Life was punctuated with turned heads, sudden flashes of eye
and everyday attempts to win her favor. Once in that house in Dover
Street----
VII
Saturday came. Ernest Treadwell arrived early, his face shining with
Windsor soap. He had bought a spring tie at Hope Brothers, the name and
the season going well with his mood. It was a ghastly affair,--yellow
with blobs of red. It was indeed much more suited to Mr. Prouty, the
butcher. It illustrated something at which he frequently looked,--animal
blood on a sawdust floor. But Ernest Treadwell was one of those men who
could always be persuaded into wearing anything that was offered to him.
He was a dreamer, the stuff that poets are made of, impractical,
embarrassed. He went about with his young and incoherent brain seething
with the tail end of big thoughts. If he had not been watched by a fond
mother, he would probably have left the house with his trousers around
his neck and his legs thrust through the sleeves of his coat. He walked