PART I

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[Illustration: Betty Compson and Conway Tearle]

THE RUSTLE OF SILK

BY

COSMO HAMILTON

Author of _Scandal_, Etc.

GROSSET & DUNLAP

Made in the United States of America

Copyright, 1922,

By Cosmo Hamilton.

All rights reserved

Published April, 1922

Reprinted April, 1922 (twice)

Reprinted June, 1922

Reprinted July, 1922

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

- PART I

- PART II

- PART III

- PART IV

- PART V

- PART VI

- PART VII

- PART VIII

PART I

I

The man had followed her from Marble Arch,--not a mackerel-eyed old man,

sensual and without respect, but one who responded to emotions as an

artist and was still young and still interested. He had seen her descend

from a motor omnibus, had caught his breath at her disturbing

femininity, had watched her pass like a sunbeam on the garden side of

the road, and in the spirit of a man who sees the materialization of the

very essence of woman, turned and followed.

All the way along, under branches of trees that were newly peppered with

early green, he watched her and saw other men's heads turn as she

passed,--on busses, in taxicabs, in cars and in the infrequent

horse-drawn carriage that was like a Chaucerian noun dropped into the

pages of a modern book. He saw men stop as he had stopped and catch

their breath and then pursue their way reluctantly. He noticed that

women, especially passee, tired women, paid her tribute by a flash of

smile or a sudden brightness of the eye. There was no conscious effort

to attract in the girl's manner, nothing bizarre or even smart in her

clothing. Her young figure, the perfection of form, was plainly dressed.

She wore the clothes of a student of the lower middle class, of the

small shopkeeping class, and probably either made them herself or bought

them off the peg. There was no startling beauty in her face or anything

wonderful in her eyes, and certainly nothing of challenge, of

coquetry,--nothing but the sublime unself-consciousness of a child. And

yet there was so definite and disordering a sense of sex about her that

she passed through a very procession of tribute.

The man was a dramatist whose business was to play upon the emotions of

sex, and to watch this child and the stir she made seemed to him to

refute once more the ludicrous attempts of would-be reformers to remold

humanity and prohibit the greatest of the urges of nature, and made him

laugh. He wondered all the way along not who she was, because that

didn't matter, but what she would do and become,--this girl with her

wide-apart eyes, oval face and full red lips, with the nose of a

patrician and the sensitive nostrils of a horse,--if she would quickly

marry in her own class and drift from early motherhood into a

discontented drabness, or burst the bonds and be transferred from her

probable back yard into a great conservatory.

He marveled at her astonishing detachment and was amused to discover

that she was playing at some sort of game all by herself. From time to

time, as she danced along, she assumed suddenly a dignified and gracious

personality, walking slowly, with a high chin, bowing to imaginary

acquaintances and looking through the railings of Kensington Gardens

with an air of proprietorship. Then she as quickly returned to her own

obviously normal self and hurried a little, conscious of approaching

dusk. Finally, with the cunning of city breeding, she nicked across the

road, and he saw her stop outside the tube station at Bayswater,

arrested by the bill of an evening paper,--"Fallaray against reprisals.

New crisis in the Irish Question. Notable defection from Lloyd-George

forces."

He watched the girl stand in front of these glaring words and read them

over and over with extraordinary interest. Standing at her elbow, he

heard her heave a quick excited sigh. He imagined that she must be Irish

and watched her enter the station, linger about the bookstall and fasten

eagerly upon a magazine,--so eagerly that he slipped again to her elbow

and looked to see why. On the cover of this fiction monthly was the

photograph of the man whose name was set forth on the poster,--the Right

Hon. Arthur Napier Fallaray, Home Secretary. He knew the face well. It

was one of the few arresting faces in public life; one in which there

was something medieval, something also of Savonarola, Manning, and, in

the eyes, of Christ,--a clean-shaven face, thin and hawk-like, with a

hatchet jaw line, a sad and sensitive mouth and thick brown hair that

went into one or two deep kinks. It might have been the face of a

hunchback or one who had been inflicted from babyhood with paralysis,

obliged to stand aloof from the rush and tear of other children. Only

the head was shown on the cover, not the body that stood six foot one,

the broad shoulders and the long arms suggestive of the latent strength

of a wrestler.

The flush that suffused the girl's face surprised the watcher and piqued

his curiosity. Fallaray, the ascetic, the married bachelor who lived in

one wing of his house while Lady Feodorowna entertained the resuscitated

Souls in the other,--and this young girl of the lower middle class,

worshiping at his shrine! He would have followed her for the rest of the

afternoon with no other purpose than to study her moods and watch her

stir the passers-by like the whir of an aeroplane or the sudden scent of

lilac. But the arrival of a train swept a crowd between them and he lost

her. He took a ticket to see if she were on one or other of the

platforms, returned to the street and searched up and down. She had

gone. Before he left, another bill was posted upon the board of the

_Evening Standard_. "Fallaray sees Prime Minister. May resign from

cabinet. Uneasiness in Downing Street," and as he walked away, no longer

interested in the psychology of crowds, but with his imagination all

eager and alight, the playwright in him had grasped at the germ of a

dramatic experiment.--Take the man Fallaray, a true and sensitive

patriot, working for no rewards; humanitarian, scholar, untouched by

romance, deaf to the rustle of silk--and that girl, woman to the tips of

her ears, Eve in every movement of her body----

II

"Lola's late," said Mrs. Breezy. "She ought to have been home half an

hour ago."

Without taking from his eye the magnifying glass through which he was

peering into the entrails of a watch, John Breezy gave a fat man's

chuckle. "Don't you worry about Lola. She's the original good girl and

has more friends among strangers than the pigeons in Kensington Gardens.

She's all right, old dear."

But Mrs. Breezy never gave more than one ear to her husband. She was not

satisfied. She left her place behind the glistening counter of the

little jewelry shop in Queen's Road, Bayswater, and went out into the

street to see if she could see anything of her ewe lamb,--the one child

of her busy and thrifty married life. On a rain-washed board above her

head was painted "John Breezy, Watchmaker and Jeweler, Founded in 1760

by Armand de Breze." The name had been Bowdlerized as a concession to

the careless English ear.

On the curb a legless man was seated in a sort of perambulator with

double wheels, playing a concertina and accompanying another man with no

arms and a glass eye who sang with a gorgeous cockney accent, "Come

hout, Come hout, the Spring is 'ere." A few yards farther down a girl

with the remains of prettiness was playing the violin at the side of an

elderly woman with the smile of professional supplication who held a

small tin cup. The incessant crowd which passed up and down Queen's Road

paid little attention either to these stray dogs or to those who

occupied other competitive positions in this street of constant noises.

Flappers with very short skirts and every known specimen of leg added to

the tragic-comedy of a thoroughfare in which provincialism and

sophistication were like oil and water. Here was drawn the outside line

of polite pretence. The tide of _hoi polloi_ washed up to it and over.

Ex-governors of Indian provinces, utterly unrecognized, ex-officers and

men of gallant British regiments, mostly out of employment, nurse girls

with children, and women of semi-society who lived in those dull barrack

houses of Inverness Terrace, where cats squabbled and tradesmen's boys

fought, passed the anxious mother.

Not a day went by that she did not hear from Lola of one or perhaps a

series of attempts, in the street, in the Tube, in busses and in the

Park, to win her into conversation. The horror stirred by these accounts

in the heart of the little woman, to say nothing of the terror, seemed

oddly exaggerated to the daughter, who, with her eyes large and gleaming

with fun, described the manner in which she left her unrestrained

admirers flat and inarticulate. There was nothing vain in this

acceptance of male admiration, the mother knew. It was something of

which the child had been aware ever since she could remember; had

accepted without regret; had hitherto put to no use; but which, deep

down in her soul, was recognized as the all-powerful asset of a woman,

not to be bought with money, achieved by art or simulated by acting.

Not in so many words had this "gift," as Lola called it, been

interpreted and discussed by Mrs. Breezy. On the contrary, she tried to

ignore and hide it away as a dangerous thing which she would have been

ashamed to possess. In the full flower of her own youth there had been

nothing in herself, she thanked God, to lift her out of the great ruck

of women except, as Breezy had discovered, a shrewd head, a tactful

tongue and the infinite capacity for taking pains. And she was ashamed

of it in Lola. It gave her incessant and painful uneasiness and fright

and made her feel, in sleepless hours and while in church, that she had

done some wicked thing before her marriage that must be punished. With

unusual fairness she accepted all the blame but never had had the

courage to tell the truth, either to herself or her husband, as to her

true feelings towards this uncanny child, as she sometimes inwardly

called her. Had she done so, she must have confessed that Lola was the

only human being with whom she had come into touch that remained a total

stranger; she must have owned to having been divided from her child

almost always by a sort of wall, a division of class over which it was

increasingly impossible to cross.

There were times, indeed, when the little woman had gone down to the

overcrowded parlor behind the shop so consumed with the idea that she

had brought into the world the offspring of another woman that she had

sat down cold and puzzled and with an aching heart. It had seemed to her

then, as now, that something queer and eerie had happened. At the back

of her mind there had been and was still a sort of superstition that

Lola was a changeling, that the fairies or the devil or some imp of

mischief had taken her own baby away at the moment of her birth and

replaced it with an exquisite little creature stolen from the house of

an aristocrat. How else could she account for the tiny wrists, small

delicate hands, those wide blue eyes, those sensitive nostrils and above

all that extraordinary capacity for passing with superb unconsciousness

and yet with supreme sophistication through everyday crowds.

There was nothing of John in this girl, of that fat Tomcat-like man,

with no more brain than was necessary to peer into watches and repair

jewelry, to look with half an eye at current events and grow into

increasing content on the same small patch of earth. Neither was there

anything of herself, nothing so vulgar as shrewdness, nothing so

commonplace as tact and nothing so legitimate as taking pains. Either

she did things on the spur of an impulse, by inspiration, or she dropped

them, like the shells of nuts.

In spite of this uncanny idea, Mrs. Breezy loved her little girl,

adopted though she seemed to be, and constant anxiety ran through her

heart like a thread behind a needle. If any man had spoken to _her_ on

the street, she would have screamed or called a policeman. She certainly

would have been immediately covered with goose flesh. Beyond that, if

she had ever discovered that she had been born with the power to stir

the feelings of men at first sight, as music stirs the emotions of an

audience or wind the surface of water, she would have been tempted to

have turned Catholic and taken the veil.

Not an evening went by, therefore, that did not find Mrs. Breezy on the

step of the shop in Queen's Road, Bayswater, looking anxiously up and

down for the appearance of Lola among the heterogeneous crowd which

infested that street. Always she expected to see at her side a man,

perhaps _the_ man who would take her child away. She had her worries,

poor little woman, more perhaps than most mothers.

That evening, the light reluctant to leave the sky, Spring's hand upon

the city trees, Lola did bring some one home,--a woman.

III

Miss Breezy, sister of John, made a point of spending every Thursday

evening at the neat and gleaming shop in Queen's Road. It was her night

off. Sometimes she turned up with tickets for the theater given to her

by the great lady to whom she acted as housekeeper, sometimes to a

concert and once or twice during the season for the opera. If there were

only two tickets, it was always Lola who enjoyed the other. Mr. and Mrs.

Breezy were contented to hear the child's account of what they gladly

missed on her behalf. Frequently they got more from the girl's

description than they would have received had they used the tickets

themselves.

It was this woman who unconsciously had made Fallaray the hero of Lola's

dreams. She had brought all the latest gossip from the Fallaray house in

which she had served since that strange wedding ten years before, when

the son of the Minister for Education, himself in the House of Commons,

had gone in a sort of trance to St. Margaret's, Westminster, and come

out of it surprised to find himself married to the eldest daughter of

the Marquis of Amesbury,--the brilliant, beautiful, harum-scarum member

of a pre-war set that had given England many rude shocks, stepped over

all the conventions of an already careless age and done "stunts" which

sent a thrill of horror and amazement all through the body of the old

British Lion; a set whose cynicism, egotism, perversion, hobnobbing with

political enemies, manufacture of erotic poetry and ribald jests had

spread like an epidemic.

Miss Breezy, whose Christian name was Hannah, as well it might be,

entered in great excitement. "Have you seen the paper?" she asked,

giving her sister-in-law peck to the watchmaker's wife. "Mr. Fallaray's

declared himself against reprisals. He's condemned the methods of the

Black and Tans. They yelled at him in the House this afternoon and

called him Sinn Feiner. Just think of that! If any other man had done

it, I mean any other Minister, Lloyd George could have afforded to

smile. But Mr. Fallaray! It may kill the coalition government, and then

what will happen?"

All this was given out in the shop itself, luckily empty of customers.

"Woo," said John. "Good gracious me," said Mrs. Breezy. "Just as I

expected," said Lola, and she entered the parlor and threw her books

into a corner and perched herself on the table, swinging her legs.

"'Just as you expected?' What do you know about it all, pray?" Miss

Breezy regarded the girl with the irritation that goes with those who

forget that little pitchers have ears. She also forgot that the question

of Ireland, of little real importance among all the world's troubles,

was being forced into daily and even hourly notice by brutal murders and

by equally brutal reprisals and that England was, at that moment, racked

from end to end with passionate resentment and anger with which even

children were tainted.

And Lola laughed,--that ripple of laughter which had made so many men

stand rooted to their shoes after having had the temerity to speak to

her on the spur of the moment, or after many manoeuverings. "What I know

of Mr. Fallaray," she said, "you've taught me. I read the papers for the

rest." And she heaved an enormous sigh and seemed to leave her body and

fly out like a homing pigeon.

"Don't say anything more until I come back," cried Mrs. Breezy, rapping

her energetic heels on the floor on the way out to close the shop.

Beamingly important, the bearer of back-stairs gossip, Miss Breezy

removed her coat,--one of those curious garments which seem to be made

especially for elderly spinsters and are worn by them proudly as a

uniform and with the certain knowledge that everybody can see that they

have gone through life in single blessedness, dependent neither for

happiness nor livelihood on a mere man.

John Breezy, who had lost all suggestion of his French ancestry and

spoke English with the ripest Bayswater, removed his apron. He liked, it

is true, to remember his Huguenot grandfather and from time to time

indulged in Latin gestures, but when he ventured into a few words of

French his accent was atrocious. "Mong Doo," he said, therefore, and

shrugged his fat shoulders almost up to his ears. He had no sympathy

with the Irish. He considered that they were screaming fanatics,

handicapped by a form of diseased egotism and colossal ignorance which

could not be dealt with in any reasonable manner. He belonged to the

school of thought, led by the _Morning Post_, which would dearly like to

put an enormous charge of T. N. T. under the whole island and blow it

sky high. "Of course you buck a good deal about your Fallaray," he said

to his sister, "that's natural. You take his money and you live on his

food. But I think he's a weakling. He's only making things more

difficult. I wish to God I was in the House of Commons. I'd show 'em

what to do to Ireland."

There was a burst of laughter from Lola who jumped off the table and

threw her arms around her father's neck. "How wonderful you are, Daddy,"

she said. "A regular old John Bull!"

Returning before anything further could be said, Mrs. Breezy shut the

parlor door and made herself extremely comfortable to hear the latest

from behind the scenes. It was very wonderful to possess a sister-in-law

who regularly, once a week, came into that dull backwater with the sort

of thing that never got into the papers and who was able to bandy great

names about without turning a hair. "Now, then, Hannah, let's have it

all from the beginning and please, John, don't interrupt." She would

have liked to have added, "Please, Lola," too, but knew better.

Then it was that Miss Breezy settled henwise among the cushions on the

sofa and let herself go. It was a good thing for her that her family was

unacquainted with any of those unscrupulous illiterates who wrote the

chit-chat in the _Daily Mirror_.

"It was last night that I knew about all this," she said. "I went in to

see Lady Feo about engaging a new personal maid. Her great friend was

there,--Mrs. Malwood, who was Lady Glayburgh in the first year of the

War, Lady Pytchley in the second, Mrs. Graham Macoover in the third,

married Mr. Aubrey Malwood in the fourth and still has him on her hands.

I was kept waiting while they finished their talk. Mrs. Malwood had to

hurry home because she was taking part in the theatricals at the

Eastminsters. I heard Lady Feo say that Mr. Fallaray had decided to

throw his bomb in the House this afternoon. She was frightfully excited.

She said she didn't give a damn about the Irish question--and I wish she

didn't speak like that--but that it would be great fun to have a general

election to brighten things up and give her a chance to win some money.

I don't know how Lady Feo knew that her husband had decided to take this

step, because they never meet and I don't believe he ever tells her

anything that he has on his mind. I shouldn't be surprised if she got it

from Mr. Fallaray's secretary. I've seen them whispering in corners

lately and once she starts her tricks on any man, good-by loyalty. My

word, but she's a wonderful woman. A perfect devil but very kind to me.

I've no grumbles. If we do have a general election, and I hope to

goodness we don't, there's only one man to be Prime Minister, and that's

Mr. Fallaray. But there's no chance of it. All the Prime Minister's

newspapers are against him, and all his jackals, and he has more enemies

than any man in the Cabinet, and not a soul to back him up. Office means

too much to them all and they're all in terror of being defeated in the

country. He's the loneliest man in the whole of London and one of the

greatest. That's what I say. I've been with the family ten years and

there are things I like about Lady Feo, for all her rottenness. But I

know this. If she'd been a good wife to that man and had given him a

home to come back to and the love that he needs and two or three

children to romp with even for half an hour a day, there'd be a very

much better chance for England in this mess than there is at present."

Stopping for breath, she looked up and caught the eyes of the girl whose

face had flushed at the sight of the picture on the cover of the

magazine. They were filled with something that startled her, something

in which there was so great a passion that it threw a hot dart at her

spinsterhood and left her rattled and confused.

IV

Miss Breezy was to receive another shock that evening.

It happened that several neighbors came in unexpectedly and stayed to

play cards. It was necessary, therefore, to adjourn from the cosy little

parlor behind the shop and go up to the drawing-room on the second

floor,--a stiff uncomfortable room used only on Sundays and when the

family definitely entertained. It smelt of furniture polish, cake and

antimacassars. Lola had no patience with cards and helped her mother to

make coffee and sandwiches. Miss Breezy, who clung to certain old

shibboleths with the pathetic persistence of a limpet, regarded a pack

of cards as the instrument of the devil. Besides, she resented the

intrusion of every one who put her out of the limelight. Her weekly orgy

of talk emptied the cistern of her brain.

She suspected something out of the way when Lola suddenly jumped on the

sofa like an Angora kitten, snuggled up and began to purr at her side,

saying how nice it was to see her, how terribly they would miss her

visits, and how well-informed she was. The little head pressed against

her bosom was not uncomforting to the childless woman. The warm arm

clasped about her shoulder flattered her vanity. But this display of

affection was unusual. It drew from her a rather shrewd question. "Well,

my dear, and what do you want to get out of me? I know you. This is

cupboard love."

She won a gleam of teeth and a twinkle of congratulation from those

wide-apart eyes. "How clever you are, Auntie. But it isn't cupboard

love, at least not quite. I want to consult you about my future because

you're so sensible and wise."

"Your future.--Your future is to get married and have babies. That was

marked out for you before you began to talk. I never saw such a

collection of dolls in a little girl's room in all my life. A born

mother, my dear, that's what you are. I hope to goodness you have the

luck to find the right sort of man in your own walk of life."

Lola shook her head and snuggled a little closer, putting her lips to

the spinster's ear. "There's plenty of time for that," she said. "And,

anyway, the right man for me won't be in my own walk of life, as you

call it."

"What! Why not?"

"Because I want to better myself, as you once said that every girl

should do. I haven't forgotten. I remember everything that _you_ say,

Auntie."

"Oh, you do, do you? Well, go on with it." What a pretty thing she was

with her fine skin and red lips and disconcerting nostrils. Clever as a

monkey, too, my word. Amazing that Ellen should be her mother!

"And so I want to get away from Queen's Road, if I can. I want to take a

peep, just a peep for a little while into another world and learn how to

talk and think and hold myself. Other girls like me have become ladies

when they had the chance. I can't, I _know_ I can't, become a teacher as

Mother says I must. You know that, too, when you think about me. I

should teach the children everything they ought not to know, for one

thing, you know I should, and throw it all up in a week. I overheard you

say that to Mother the very last time you were here."

"My dear, your ears are too long. But you're right all the same. I can't

see _you_ in a school for the shabby genteel." A warm fierce kiss was

pressed suddenly to her lips. "But what can I do to help you out? I

don't know."

"But I do, Auntie. You're trying to find a personal maid for Lady Feo.

Engage me. I may work up to become a housekeeper like you some day even.

Who knows?"

So that was it.--Good heavens!

Miss Breezy unfolded herself from the girl's embrace and sat with her

back as stiff as a ramrod. "I couldn't think of such a thing," she said.

"You don't belong to the class that ladies' maids come from, nor does

your mother. A funny way to better yourself, that, I must say. Don't

mention it again, please." She got up and shook herself as though to

cast away both the girl's spell and her absurd request. Her

sister-in-law, after a long day's work, was impatient for bed and

yawning in a way which she hoped would convey a hint to her husband's

friends. She had already wound up the clock on the mantelpiece with

extreme deliberation. "I think my cab must be here," said Miss Breezy

loudly, in order to help her. "I ordered him to fetch me. Don't trouble

to come down but do take the trouble to find out what's the matter with

Lola. She's been reading too many novels or seeing too many moving

pictures. I don't know which it is."

To Mrs. Breezy's entire satisfaction, her sister-in-law's departure

broke up the party. There was always a new day to face and she needed

her eight hours' rest. Mr. Preedy, the butcher whose inflated body bore

a ludicrous resemblance to a punch ball and who smelt strongly of meat

fat, his hard-bosomed spouse and Ernest Treadwell, the young man from

the library who would have sold his soul for Lola, followed her down the

narrow staircase. But it was Lola who got the last word. She stood on

the step of the cab and put a soft hand against Miss Breezy's cheek. "Do

this for me, Auntie," she wheedled. "Please, please. If you don't----"

"Well?"

"There are other great ladies and very few ladies' maids, and if I go to

one of them, how will you be able to keep your eye on me,--and you ought

to keep your eye on me, you know."

"Well!" said Miss Breezy to herself, as the cab rattled home. "Did you

ever? What an extraordinary child! Nothing of John about her and just as

little of Ellen. Where does she get these strange things from?" It was

not until she arrived finally at Dover Street that she added two words

to her attempted diagnosis which came in the nature of an inspiration.

"_She's French!_"

V

It was a lukewarm night, without wind and without moon, starless.

Excited at having got in her request, which she knew from a close study

of her aunt's character was bound to be refused and after a process of

flattery eventually conceded, Lola waved her hand to the Preedys and

graciously consented to give a few minutes to Ernest Treadwell. The

butcher and his wife, after a lifetime of intimacy with animals, had

both taken on a marked resemblance to sheep. They walked away in the

direction of their large and prosperous corner shop with wide-apart legs

and short quick steps, as though expecting to be rounded up by a bored

but conscientious dog. As she leaned against the private door of her

father's shop, with the light of the lamp-post on hair that was the

color of buttercups, she did look French. If Miss Breezy were to take

the trouble to read a well-known book of memoirs published during the

reign of Louis XIV, it would dawn upon her that the little Lola of

Queen's Road, Bayswater, daughter of the cockney watchmaker and Ellen

who came from a flat market garden in Middlesex, threw back to a certain

Madame de Breze, the famous courtesan. Whether her respect for her

brother would become less or grow greater for this discovery it is not

easy to say. Probably, being a snob, it would increase.

"Don't stand there without a hat, Lola dear. You may catch cold."

"Mother always says that," said Lola, "even in the middle of the summer,

but she won't call again for ten minutes, so let's steal a little chat."

She put her hand on Treadwell's shoulder with a butterfly touch and held

him rooted and grateful. He had the pale skin that goes with red hair as

well as the pale eyes, but as he looked at this girl of whom he dreamed

by day and night, they flared as they had flared when he had seen her

first as a little girl with her hair in a queue at the other end of a

classroom. He stood with his foot on the step and his hands clasped

together, inarticulate. Behind his utter commonplaceness there was the

soul of Romeo, the passion of self-sacrifice that goes with great

lovers. He had been too young for gun fodder in the war but he had

served in spirit for Lola's sake and had performed a useful job in the

capacity of a boy scout messenger in the War Office. His bony knees and

awkward body had been the joke of many a ribald subaltern, mud-stained

from the trenches.

"What are you doing on Saturday afternoon?" asked Lola. "Shall we walk

to Hampton Court and see the crocuses? They're all up now like little

soldiers in a pantomime."

"I'll call for you at two o'clock," answered the boy, thrilling as

though he had been decorated. "We'll have tea there and come back on top

of a bus. I suppose your mother wouldn't let me take you to the theater?

There's a great piece at the Hammersmith,--Henry Ainley. He's fine."

Lola laughed softly. "Mother's a dear," she said. "She lets me do

everything I want to do after I've told her that I'm simply going to do

it. Besides, she likes you."

"Do _you_ like me, Lola?" The question came before the boy could be

seized with his usual timidity. It was followed by a rush of blood to

the head.

The girl's answer proved her possession of great kindness and an amazing

lack of coquetry. "You are one of my oldest friends, Ernest," she

replied, thereby giving the boy something to hope for but absolutely

nothing to grasp. He had never dared to go so far as this before and

like all the other boys who hung round Lola had never been able, by any

of his crude efforts, to get her to flirt. Friend was the only word that

any of them could apply to her. And yet even the least precocious of

these boys was convinced of the fact that she was not innocent of her

power.

"I love the spring,--just smell it in the air," said Lola, going off at

a tangent, "but I shall never live in the country--I mean all the time.

I shall go there and see things grow and get all the scent and the

whispers and the music of the stars and then rush back to town. Do you

believe in reincarnation, Ernest? I do. I was a canary once and lived in

a cage, a big golden cage, full of seeds and water and little bells that

jingled. It stood on the table in a room filled with tapestry and lovely

old furniture. Servants in livery gave me a saucer for a bath and

refilled my seed pans.--I feel like a canary now sometimes. I like to

fly out, perfectly tame, and with no cats about, sing a little and

imagine that I am perfectly free, and then flick back, stand on a perch

and do my best singing to the noise of traffic." And she laughed again

and added, "What rot we talk when we're young, don't we? I must go."

"No, not yet. Please not yet." And the boy put his hands out to touch

her and was afraid. He would gladly have died then and there in that

street just to be allowed to kiss her lips.

"It's late. I must go, Ernest. I have to get up so awfully early. I hate

getting up early. I would like breakfast in bed and a nice maid to bring

me my letters and the papers. Besides, I don't want to worry Mother. She

has all the worries of the shop. Good night and don't be late on

Saturday." She held out her hand.

The boy seized it and held it tight, his brain reeling, and his blood on

fire. He stood for an instant unable to give expression to the romance

that she stirred in him, with his mouth open and his rather faulty teeth

showing, and his big awkward nose very white. And when she had gone and

the door of her castle was closed, the poor knight, who had none of the

effrontery of the troubadour, paced up and down for an hour in front of

the shop, saying half aloud all the things from Shakespeare which alone

seemed fit for the ears of that princess,--princess of Queen's Road,

Bayswater!

VI

The room at the back of the house in which Lola had been installed since

she had been old enough to sleep alone had been her parents' bedroom and

was larger than the one to which they had retired. While Breezy had

argued that he damned well didn't intend to turn out for that kid, Mrs.

Breezy had moved the furniture. The best room only was good enough for

Lola. The window gave a sordid view of back yards filled with packing

cases, washing, empty bottles and one or two anaemic laburnum trees

which for a few days once a year burst into a sort of golden smile and

then became sullen again,--observation posts for the most corrupt of

animals, the London cat. It was in this room that Mrs. Breezy,

trespassing sometimes, stood for a few moments lost in amazement,

feeling more than ever the changeling sense that she did her best to

forget.

With the money that she had saved up--birthday money, Christmas money

and a small allowance made to her by her father--Lola had bought a rank

imitation of an old four-poster bed made probably in Birmingham. Over it

she had hung a canopy of chintz with a tapestry pattern on a black

background, copied from an illustration in the life of Du Barry. From

time to time pillows with lace covers had been added to the luxurious

pile, a little footstool placed at the side of the bed and--the latest

acquisition--an eiderdown now lent an air of swollen pomp to the whole

thing, which, to the puzzled and concerned mother, was immoral. Hers was

one of those still existing minds which read immorality into all

attempts to break away from her own strict set of conventions,

especially when it was in the direction of beautifying a bed, to her, of

course, an unmentionable thing. In America, without doubt, she would be

a cherished and respected member of the Board of Motion Picture Censors,

as well as--having a cellar--a militant prohibitionist.

For the rest, the room possessed a sofa which was an English cousin to

an Italian day bed and curtains of china silk in which there was a faint

tinge of pink. A small table on which there was a collection of dainty

things for writing, mementos of many Christmases and several lines of

shelves crammed with books gave the room something of the appearance of

a boudoir, and this was added to by half a dozen cheap French prints

framed in gold which looked rather well against a wall paper of tiny

bouquets tied up with blue ribbon. Lola's collection of books had

frequently sent John Breezy into gusts of mirth. There was nothing among

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

up and down the street for half an hour with his cap on the back of his

head and a tuft of hair sticking out in front of it,--an earnest,

ungainly, intelligent, heroic person who might one day become a second

Wells and write a Joan and Peter about the children of Joan and Peter.

Saturday was a good day for the Breezys and much of Friday night had

been spent cleaning and rearranging the cheap and alluring

silverware--birthday presents, wedding presents, lovers' presents--which

invariably filled the windows. Twice Lola had looked down and watched

her young friend as he marched up and down beneath, with an ecstatic

smile on his face. It was after her second look that she made up her

mind to desert the crocuses in Hampton Court and make that boy escort

her to Dover Street. Acting under a sudden inspiration she determined to

go and see her aunt. She knew perfectly well that Miss Breezy had had

time to think over the point which had been suggested to her and was by

now probably quite ready to accept it. That was the woman's character.

She began by saying no to everything and ended, of course, by saying yes

to most of them, and the more emphatic she was in the beginning the more

easily she caved in finally. After all, she was very fond of her niece

and would welcome the opportunity of having the girl's company at night

and during the hours when Lady Feo was out. Lola knew all that and her

entrance into Dover Street had become an obsession, a fixed idea, and if

her aunt should develop a hitherto undemonstrated stiff back,--well then

her hand must be forced, that's all, either by hook or by crook. Dressed

as simply as usual but wearing her Sunday hat, Lola passed through the

shop, dropped a kiss on her father's head, twiddled her fingers at her

mother, who was "getting off" a perfectly hideous vase stuck into a

filigree silver support and must not, therefore, be interrupted in her

diplomatic flow of persuasion. She was met at the door by Ernest

Treadwell, who sheepishly removed his cap. He would have given ten years

of his life to have been able to doff it in the manner of Sir Walter

Raleigh and utter a string of highly polished phrases suitable to that

epoch-making occasion. Instead of which he said, "'Ello," and dropped

his "h" at her feet.

Queen's Road wore its usual Saturday afternoon appearance and its narrow

pavement was filled with people shopping for Sunday,--the tide of

semi-society clashing with that of mere respectability. "Hampton

Court'll look great to-day," said Ernest, who felt that with the

assistance of the crocuses he might be able to stammer a few words of

love and admiration.

Lola glanced up at the clear sky and the April sun which was in a very

kindly mood. "I'm sure it will," she said, "but I'm afraid I've got a

disappointment for Ernie. I want you to be a dear and take me to see my

aunt in Dover Street. It's--it's awfully important."

The boy's eyes flicked and a curious whiteness settled about his nose.

But he played the knight. "Whatever you say, Lola," he said, and forced

himself to smile. Poor boy, it was a sad blow. He had gone to bed the

night before, dreaming of this little adventure. It would have been the

first time that he had ever spent an afternoon and evening alone with

the girl who occupied the throne of his heart.

Lola knew this. She could see the whole story behind the boy's smile. So

she took his arm to compensate him,--knowing how well it would. "There

are crocuses in Kensington Garden," she said. "We'll have a look at

those as we pass."

Every head that turned and every eye that flared made Ernest Treadwell

swell with pride as well as resentment. A policeman held up the traffic

for Lola at the top of the road and one of the keepers of the Gardens,

an old soldier, saluted her as she went through the gates. She rewarded

these attentions with what she called her best de Breze smile. Some day

other and vastly more important men should gladly show her deference.

They followed the broad path which led to Marble Arch, raising their

voices in order to overcome the incessant roar of traffic in the

Bayswater Road. Lola did most of the talking that afternoon and it was

all inspirational, to fire the boy into greater ambition and effort. She

had read some of his poetry,--strange stuff that showed the influence of

Masefield, crude and half-baked but not untouched with imagery. She

believed in Ernest Treadwell and took a very real delight in his

improvement. But for her encouragement it might have been some years

before he broke out of hobble-de-hoydom and the semi-vicious ineptitude

that goes with it. He was very happy as he went along with the warm hand

on his arm. His vanity glowed under her friendship, as she intended that

it should.

The old Gardens were green and fresh, gay with new leaves and daffodils.

Only the presence of smashed men made it look different from the good

days before the War. Would all those children who played under the eyes

of mothers and nurses be laid presently in sacrifice upon the altars of

the old Bad Men of politics who had done nothing to avert the recent

cataclysm?

Lola was excited and on her mettle. She was nearing the crossroads. On

the one that she had marked out stood Fallaray,--the merest speck.

Success with Aunt Hannah meant the first rung of her ladder. Oxford

Street was like a once smart woman who had become _declasse_. It seemed

to be competing with High Street, Putney. There was something

pathetically blatant in the shop window arrangements, a strained effort

to catch what little money was left to the public after the struggle to

make both ends meet and pay the overwhelming taxation. The two young

people were unconscious of the change. Lola babbled incessantly. Among

other things she said, "I suppose you're a socialist, aren't you,

Ernest? You've never discussed it with me, but I think you must be

because you write poetry, and somehow all poets seem to be socialists. I

suppose it's because poetry's so badly paid."

"I dunno about that. I've never tried to sell my stuff. I'm against

everything and everybody, if that's what you mean. But I don't know

whether it's true to call it Socialism. There's a new word for it which

suits me,--intelligensia. I don't think that's the way to pronounce it

but it's near enough. It's in all the weekly papers now and stands for

anarchy with hair oil on the bombs. Why do you ask me?"

Lola still had her hand on his arm. "Well, I'm afraid I'm going to give

you a shock soon. I'm going to be a servant."

"Good God," said Ernest. His grandfather had been a valet, his father a

piano tuner, he himself had risen to the heights of assistant librarian

in a public library, and if his ambition to become a Labor member ever

was realized he might very easily wind up as a peer. His children would

then belong to the new aristocracy with Lola as Lady Treadwell. He

gasped under the blow. "What will your mother say?"

"I'm afraid Mother will hang her head in shame until she gets my angle

of it. Luckily I can always point to Aunt. She's a housekeeper, you see,

and after all that's only a sort of upper servant, isn't it?"

"But,--what's the idea?"

This was not a question to which Lola had any intention of giving an

answer. It was a perfectly private affair. She went off at one of her

inevitable tangents so useful in order to dodge issues. She pointed to

an enormous Rolls-Royce which stood outside Selfridge's. On the panel

was painted a coat of arms as big as a soup tureen. She held Ernest back

to watch the peculiar people who descended from it,--the man small and

fat, with bandy legs and a great moustache waxed into points; the woman

bulbous and wobbly, cluttered up with diamonds, made pathetic by a skirt

that was almost up to her knees. What an excellent thing the War had

been for them.

"New rich," said Lola. "I saw them the other day coming out of a house

at the top of Park Lane which Father told me used to belong to a Duke.

Good Lord, why shouldn't I be a servant without causing a crack in the

constitution of the country?"

Fundamentally snobbish as all socialists are, the boy shook his head.

"You should lead, not serve," he said, quoting from one of his masters.

And that was all he could manage. Lola,--a servant! They turned into

Bond Street in which all the suburban ladies who were not enjoying the

matinees were gluing their noses to the shop windows. Ernest Treadwell

was unfamiliar with this part of London. He preferred the democratic

Strand when he could get away from his duties. He felt more and more

sheepish and self-conscious as Lola drew up instinctively at every shop

in which corsets were displayed and diaphanous underwear spread out. The

silk stockings on extremely well-shaped wooden legs she admired

extremely and desired above all things. The bootmakers' shops also came

in for her close attention. The little French shoes with high vamps and

stubby noses drew exclamations of delight and envy. Several spots on the

window of Aspray's bore the impression of her nose before she could tear

herself away. A set of dressing-table things made of gold and

tortoiseshell made her eyes widen and her lips part. Ernest Treadwell

would willingly have sacrificed all his half-baked socialism to be able

to buy any one of those things for Lola.

Finally they came to Dover Street, that oasis in the heart of Mayfair

where even yet certain houses remain untouched by the hand of trade. The

Fallaray house was on the sunny side, where it stood gloomily with

frowning windows and an uninviting door. It was the oldest house in the

street and wore its octogenarian appearance without camouflage. It had

belonged originally to the Throgmorton family upon whom Fate had laid a

hoodoo. The last of the line was glad to sell it to Fallaray's

grandfather, the cotton man. What he would have said if he could have

returned to his old haunts, opened his door with his latch key and

walked in to find Lady Feo and her gang God only knows.

It was well known to Lola. Many times she had walked up and down Dover

Street in order to gaze at the windows behind which she thought that

Fallaray might be sitting, and several times she had been into her

aunt's rooms which overlooked the narrow yards of Bond Street.

"Wait for me here, Ernest," she said. "I don't think I shall be very

long. If I'm more than half an hour, give me up and we'll have another

afternoon later on."

She waved her hand, went down the area steps and rang the bell. Ernest

Treadwell, to whom the house had taken on a sinister appearance, sloped

off with rounded shoulders and a tight mouth. They might have been in

Hampton Court looking at the crocuses.--Lola,--a servant. Good God!

VIII

Albert Simpkins opened the door.

It wasn't his job to open doors, because he was a valet. But it so

happened that he was the only person in the servants' quarters who was

not either dressing, lying down after a heavy lunch or out to enjoy an

hour's fresh air.

"Miss Breezy, please," said Lola.

Simpkins gasped. If he had been passing through the hall and a footman

had opened the front door to this girl he would have slipped into a dark

corner to watch her enter, believing that she had come to visit Lady

Feo. He knew a thoroughbred when he saw one. That she should have come

to the area of all places seemed to him to be irregular, not in

conformity with the rules of social rectitude which were his religion.

All the same he thrilled, and like every other man who caught sight of

Lola and stood near enough to catch the indefinable scent of her hair,

stumbled over his words.

Lola repeated her remark and gave him a vivid friendly smile. If she

carried her point with her aunt presently, this man would certainly be

useful. "If you will please come in," said Simpkins, "I'll go and see if

Miss Breezy's upstairs. What name shall I say?"

"Lola Breezy."

"Miss Lola Breezy. Thank you." He paused for a moment to bask, and then

with a little bow in which he acknowledged her irresistible and

astonishing effect, disappeared,--valet stamped upon his respectability

like a Cunard label on a suit case.

Lola chuckled and remained standing in the middle of what was used by

the servants as a sitting room. How easy it was, with her gift, to

shatter men's few senses. She knew the place well,--its pictures of

Queen Victoria and of famous race horses cut from illustrated papers

cheaply framed and its snapshots of the gardens of Chilton Park,

Whitecross, Bucks. Discarded books of all sorts were piled up on various

tables. _The Spectator_ and _The New Statesman_, Massingham's peevish

weekly, _Punch_, _The Sketch_ and _The Tatler_, _Eve_ and the

_Bystander_, which had come downstairs from the higher regions, were

scattered here and there. They had been read and commented upon first by

the butler and then downwards through all the gradations of servants to

the girl who played galley slave to the cook. Lola wondered how long it

would be before she also would be spending her spare time in that room,

hobnobbing with the various members of the family below stairs. A few

days, perhaps, not more,--now that she had fastened on this plan.

Simpkins returned almost immediately. "If you will follow me," he said,

and gave her an alluring smile which disclosed a row of teeth that were

peculiarly English. He led the way along a narrow passage up the back

staircase and out upon a wide and imposing corridor, hung with Flemish

tapestry and old portraits, which appealed to Lola's sense of the

decorative and sent her head up with a tilt of proprietorship. This was

her atmosphere. This was the corridor along which her imaginary

sycophants had passed so often to her room in Queen's Road, Bayswater.

"We're not supposed to go through here," said Simpkins, eager to talk,

"except on duty. But it's a short cut to the housekeeper's quarters and

there's no one in to catch us. You look well against that hanging," he

added. "Like a picture in the Academy,"--which to him was the Temple of

Art.

A door opened and there were heavy footsteps.

"Look out. The governor." He seized Lola's arm and in a panic drew her

into the shadow of a large armoire.

Her heart jumped into her mouth!--It was her hero in the flesh, the man

at whose feet she had worshipped,--within a few inches of her, walking

slowly, with his hands behind his back, his mouth compressed and a sort

of hit-me-why-don't-you in his eye. Still with Simpkins's hand upon her

arm she slipped out,--not to be seen, not with any thought of herself,

but to watch Fallaray stride along the corridor; and get the wonder of a

first look.

A door banged and he was gone.

"A pretty near thing," said Simpkins. "It always happens like that. I

don't suppose he would have noticed us. Mostly he sees nothing but his

thoughts,--looks inwards, I mean. But rules is rules. He lives in that

wing of the 'ouse,--has a library and a bedroom there and another room

fitted up as a gym where he goes through exercises to keep hisself fit.

Give 'im enough in the House to keep 'im fit, you'd think, wouldn't yer?

A wonderful man.--Come on, Miss, nick through here." He opened a door,

ran lightly up a short flight of stairs and came back again into the

servant's passage. "'Ere you are," he said and smiled brilliantly,

putting in, as he thought, good work. This girl----! "I'll be glad to

see you 'ome," he added anxiously.

Lola said, "Thank you, but I have some one waiting for me," and entered.

IX

"Well!" said Miss Breezy.

"I hope so," said Lola, kissing the ear that was presented to her.

"I'm just rearranging my things. Her Ladyship's just given me some new

pictures. They used to be in the morning room, but she got sick of them

and handed 'em over to me. I'm going to hang them up." She might have

added that nearly everything that the room contained had been given to

her by Lady Feo with a similar generosity but her sense of humor was not

very keen or else her sense of loyalty was. At any rate, there she stood

in the middle of a nice airy room with something around her head to keep

the dust out of her hair, wearing a pair of gloves, a stepladder near at

hand.

There were six fair-sized canvases in gold frames,--seascapes; bold,

excellent work, with the wind blowing over them and spray coming out

that made the lips all salty. They made you hear the mewing of sea

gulls.

"Lady Feo bought them to help a young artist. He was killed in the War.

She hates the sea, it makes her sick, and doesn't want to be reminded of

anything sad. I don't wonder, and anyway, they'll look very nice here.

Do you like them?"

Lola had sized them up in a glance. She too would have turned them out.

They seemed to her rough and draughty. "Yes," she said, "they're very

good, aren't they?" She mounted the ladder and held out her hands. She

had come to ask a favor. She might as well make herself popular at once.

"Hand them up, Auntie, and I'll hang them for you."

"Oh, well now, that's very nice. I get giddy on a ladder. You came just

at the right moment. Can you manage it? It's very heavy. The first time

I've ever seen you making yourself useful, my dear."

This enabled Lola to get in her first point. "Mother never allows me to

be useful," she said, "and really doesn't understand the sort of thing

that I can do best." She stretched up, hung the cord over a brass

bracket and straightened it.

"Well, you can certainly do this job! Go on and do the rest while you're

at it. I was looking forward to a very tiring afternoon. I didn't want

to have any of the maids to help me. They resent being asked to do

anything that is outside their regular duty."

And so Lola proceeded, hating to get her hands dirty and not very keen

on indulging in athletics, but with a determination made doubly firm by

the fleeting sight of Fallaray.

Miss Breezy was in an equable mood that afternoon,--less pompous than

usual, less consumed with the importance of being the controlling brain

in the management of the Fallaray "establishment," as she called it in

the stilted language of the auctioneer. She became almost human as she

watched Lola perform the task which would have put her to a considerable

amount of physical inconvenience. When one is relieved of anything in

the nature of work, equability is the cheapest form of gratitude.

The room was a particularly nice one, large, with a low ceiling and two

windows which overlooked Dover Street. It didn't in the least indicate

the character of the housekeeper because not a single thing in it was

her own except a few books. Everything else had been given to her by

Lady Feo, and like the pictures, had been discarded from one or other of

the rooms below. The Sheraton sofa had come from the drawing-room. A

Dowager Duchess had sat on it one evening after dinner and let herself

go on the question of the Feo gang. It had been thrown out the following

morning. The armoire of ripe oak, made up of old French altarpieces--an

exquisite thing worth its weight in gold--had suffered a similar fate.

Rappe the ubiquitous photographer had taken a picture of Lady Feo

leaning against one of its doors. It turned out badly. In fact, the

angel on the other door looked precisely as though it were growing on

Lady Feo's nose. It might have been good art but it was bad

salesmanship. Away went the armoire. The story of all the other things

was the same so that the room had begun to assume the appearance of the

den of a dealer in old furniture. There were even a couple of old

masters on the walls,--a Reynolds and a Lely, portraits of the members

of Lady Feo's family whose faces she objected to and whose admonishing

eyes she couldn't bear to have upon her when she came down to luncheon

feeling a little chippy after a night out. These also were priceless. It

had become indeed one of the nicest rooms in the house. Every day it

added something to Miss Breezy's increasing air of dignity and

beatitude.

Lola did not fail to admire the way in which her aunt had arranged her

wonderful presents and used all her arts of flattery before she came

round to the reason of her visit. This she did as soon as Miss Breezy

had prepared tea with something of the ceremony of the Japanese and

arranged herself to be entertained by the child for whose temperament

she had found some excuse by labelling it French. Going cunningly to

work, she began by saying, "What do you think? You remember Mother's

friends, the Proutys, who were playing cards the other night?"

"Indeed I do," replied Miss Breezy. "Whenever I meet those people it

takes me some time to get over the unpleasant smell of meat fat. What

about them?"

"Cissie, the daughter, has gone into the chorus of the Gaiety, and is

very happy there. She's going to be in the second row at first, but

she's bound to be noticed, she says, because she has to pose as a statue

in the second act covered all over with white stuff."

"Nothing else?"

"No, but it will take an hour to put on every night. And before the end

of the run she'll probably be married at St. Margaret's to an officer in

the Guards, she says. She told me that she couldn't hope to become a

lady in any other way. I was wondering what you would say if I did the

same thing?"

Miss Breezy almost dropped her cup as Lola knew that she would. "You

don't mean to say you've come to tell me that you've got _that_ fearful

scheme in the back of your head, you alarming child? A chorus girl?"

Lola laughed. "You know _my_ way of improving myself: to serve an

apprenticeship as a lady's maid, a respectable way,--the way in which

you're going to help me now that you've thought it all over."

The answer came like the rapping of a machine gun. "I've not thought it

over and what's more, I'm not going to begin to think it over. I told

you so."

Without turning a hair Lola handed a plate of cakes. "But you wouldn't

like me to follow Cissie's example, would you,--and that's the

alternative." Poor dear old Aunt! What was the use of pretending to be

firm. All the trumps were against her.

But for once Lola miscalculated her hand and the woman. "If you must

make a fool of yourself," said Miss Breezy, "you must. I'm not your

mother and luckily you can't break my heart. I told you the other night

and I tell you again that I do not intend to be a party to your lowering

yourself by becoming a servant and there's an end of it." And she waved

her disengaged hand.

It was almost a minute before Lola recovered her breath. She sat back,

then, and put her head on one side. "In that case," she said in a

perfectly even voice, "I must try to get used to the other idea. I think

I might look rather well in tights and Cissie tells me that if I were to

join her at the Gaiety I should be put into a number in which five other

girls will come on in underclothes in a bedroom scene. Of course I

should keep my own name and before long you'd see my photograph in the

_Tatler_ as 'the latest recruit to the footlights,--the

great-great-granddaughter of the famous Madame de Breze.' I should tell

the first reporter that, of course, to make it interesting."

Miss Breezy rocked to and fro, gripping her cup. How often had she

shuddered at the sight of scantily dressed precocious girls sitting in

alarming attitudes on the shiny paper of the _Tatler_. To think of Lola

in underclothes, debasing a highly respectable name! Nevertheless, "I am

not to be bullied," she said, wobbling like a turkey. "I have always

given way to you before, Lola, but in this case my mind is made up.

Can't you understand how awkward it would be to have you in the house on

a level with servants who have to be kept in order by me? It would

undermine my authority." That was the point, and it was a good one. And

then her starchiness left her under the horror of the alternative. "As

for that other thing,--well, you couldn't go a better way to kill your

poor mother and surely you don't want to do that?"

"Of course I don't, Auntie."

"There's no call for you to think about any way of earning a living,

Lola. Your parents don't want to get rid of you, Heaven knows, and even

in these bad times they can get along very nicely and keep you too. You

know that."

Lola had never dreamed of this adamantine attitude. Her aunt had been so

easy to manage before. What was she to do?

Thinking that she was winning, Miss Breezy went at it again. "Come, now.

Be a good child and forget both these schemes. Go on with your classes

and it won't be long before a suitable person will turn up and ask you

to marry him. Your type marries young. Now, will you promise me to think

no more about it all?"

But this was Lola's only chance to enter the first stage of her crusade.

She would fight for it to the last gasp. "The chorus, yes," she said.

"As for the other thing, no, Auntie. If you won't help me I must get the

paper in the morning and search through the advertisements. I'm sure to

come across some one who wants a lady's maid and after all, it won't

very much matter who it is. You see, I want to earn my living, and I

have made up my mind to do it in this way. There's good pay, a beautiful

house to live in, no early trains to catch, no bad weather to go

through, holidays in the country and with any luck foreign travel. I

can't understand why many more girls like me don't go in for this sort

of life. I only thought, of course, it would be so nice to be under your

eye and guidance. Mother would much prefer it to be that way, I'm sure."

But even this practical argument had no effect except to rouse the good

lady's dander. "You are a very nagging girl," she cried. "I can see

perfectly well what you're driving at but you won't undermine my

decision, I can tell you that. I will not have you in this house and

that's final."

Lola was beaten. To her astonishment and chagrin she found that her nail

was not to be hammered in. There was steel in the old lady's

composition, after all. But there was steel in her own and she quickly

decided to leave things as they stood and think out another line of

attack before the following Thursday. And then, remembering Ernest

Treadwell, who was living up to his name from one end of the street to

the other and back, she rose to tear herself away with an air of great

patience and affection. Just as she was about to bend down and touch the

usual ear with her lips, the door suddenly swung open and a woman with

bobbed hair, wearing a red velvet tam-o'-shanter and a curious one-piece

garment of brown velvet which disclosed a pair of very admirable legs,

stood smiling in the doorway. Her face was as white as the petals of a

white rose. Her large violet eyes had lashes as black as her eyebrows

and her wanton mouth showed a set of teeth as white and strong as a

negro's. "Oh, hello, Breezy," she cried out, her voice round and

ringing. "Excuse my barging in like this. I want to know what you've

done about the table decorations for to-morrow night."

Miss Breezy rose hurriedly to her feet, and Lola, although she had never

seen this woman before, followed her example, sensing the fact that here

was the famous Lady Feo.

"I sent Mr. Biddle round to Lee and Higgins in Bond Street, my lady. You

need have no anxiety about it."

"That's all right but I've altered my mind. I don't want flowers. I've

bought a set of caricatures and I'm going to put one in front of every

place. If it's too late to cancel the order, telephone to Lee and

Higgins and tell them to send the flowers to any old hospital that

occurs to them." Lady Feo had spotted Lola immediately and during all

this time had never taken her eyes away from the girl's face and figure,

which she looked over with frank and unabashed curiosity and admiration.

With characteristic effrontery she made her examination as thorough as

she would have done if she had been sizing up a horse with a view to

purchase. "Attractive little person," she said to herself. "As dainty as

a piece of Sevres. What the devil's she doing here?" Making conversation

with a view to discover who Lola was, she added aloud, "I see you've

hung the pictures, Breezy.--Breezy and seascapes; they go well together,

don't they?" And she laughed at the little joke,--a gay and boyish

laugh.

With her heart thumping and a ray of hope in front of her, Lola marked

her appreciation of the joke with her most delighted smile.

And Miss Breezy indulged in a diplomatic titter.

"Isn't it a little remiss of you, Breezy, not to introduce me to your

friend?"

"Oh, I beg your ladyship's pardon, I'm sure. This is my niece Lola." She

wished the child in the middle of next week and dreaded the result of

this most unfortunate interruption.

Lady Feo stretched out her hand,--a long-fingered able hand, born for

the violin. "How do you do," she said, as though to an equal. "How is it

that I haven't seen you before? Breezy and I are such old friends. I

call her Breezy in that rather abrupt manner--forgive me, won't

you?--because I'm both rude and affectionate. I hope I didn't cut in on

a family consultation?"

Lola braced herself. Here was her opportunity indeed! "Oh, no, my lady.

It _was_ a sort of consultation, because I came to talk to Aunt about my

future. It's time I earned my own living and as she doesn't want me to

go on the stage, she's going to be kind enough to help me in another

way." She got all this in a little breathlessly, with charming naivete.

"What way?" asked Lady Feo bluntly. "I should think you'd make a great

success on the stage."

Lola took no notice of her aunt's angry and frantic signs. She stood

demure and modest under the searching gaze of Lady Feo and with a sense

of extreme triumph took the jump. "The way I most wanted to begin," she

said, "was to be your ladyship's maid. That's my great ambition."

"And for the love of heaven, why not? Breezy, why the deuce haven't you

told me about this girl? I would like to have her about me. She's

decorative. I wouldn't mind being touched by her and I'm sure she'd look

after my things. Look how neat she is. She might have come out of a

bandbox."

Miss Breezy bit her lip. She was bitterly annoyed. She was unaware of

the expression but she felt that Lola had double-crossed her,--as indeed

she had. "Well, my lady," she said, "to tell you the truth, I didn't

think that you would care to have two people of the same family in your

house. It always leads to trouble."

"Oh, rot," said Lady Feo, "I loathe those old shibboleths. They're so

silly." She turned to Lola. "Look here, do you really mean to say that

you'd rather be a lady's maid than kick your heels about in the chorus?"

"If you please, my lady," said Lola.

"Well, I think you'll miss a lot of fun, but as far as I'm concerned,

you're an absolute Godsend. The girl I've had for two years is going to

be married. Of course, I can't stop that, as much as I shall miss her.

The earth needs repeopling, so I must let her go. The question has been

where to get another. With all the unemployment no one seems very keen

on doing anything but work in factories. I'd love to have you. Come by

all means. Breezy, engage her. I hope we shall rub along very nicely

together."

As much to hide the gleam in her eyes from her aunt as to show deference

to her new mistress, Lola bowed. "I thank you, my lady," she said.

"Fine," said Lady Feo, "fine. That's great. Saves me a world of trouble.

Pretty lucky thing that I looked in here, wasn't it?" She went to the

door and turned. "When can you come, Lola?"

"To-morrow.--To-night."

"To-night. I will let Emily off at once. She'll be glad enough. I'll

send you home in the car. You can pack your things and get back in time

to brush my hair. I suppose you know something about your job?"

Miss Breezy broke in hurriedly. Even now perhaps it might not be too

late to beat this girl at her own game. "That's it, my lady," she said,

tumbling over her words. "She doesn't know anything about it. I'm afraid

I ought to say----"

"Oh, well, Breezy, that's nothing new. They none of 'em know anything.

I'll teach her. I don't want a sham expert with her nose in the air. All

I need is a girl with quick fingers, nippy on her feet, good to look at,

who will laugh at my jokes. You promise to do that, Lola?"

A most delicious smile curled all about Lola's mouth. "I promise, my

lady," she said.

Lady Feo nodded at her. "She'll make a sensation," she thought. "How

jealous they'll all be.--Righto, then. Seven o'clock. Don't be late. So

long." And off she went, slamming the door behind her.

"You little devil," said Miss Breezy, her dignity in great slabs at her

feet.

But Lola had won. And the amazing part of it was that the door of the

house in Dover Street had been opened to her by Fallaray's wife.