The Rustle of Silk.

by Cosmo Hamilton.

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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed,-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 pa.s.see, 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 cla.s.s, of the small shopkeeping cla.s.s, 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 s.e.x about her that she pa.s.sed through a very procession of tribute.

The man was a dramatist whose business was to play upon the emotions of s.e.x, 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sers-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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s eye who sang with a gorgeous c.o.c.kney 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 pa.s.sed up and down Queen's Road paid little attention either to these stray dogs or to those who occupied other compet.i.tive 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, pa.s.sed 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 a.s.set 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 G.o.d, 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 cla.s.s 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 superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sing 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 sh.e.l.ls 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, hobn.o.bbing 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 pa.s.sionate 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 manuverings. "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 ap.r.o.n. 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 G.o.d 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sion that it threw a hot dart at her spinsterhood and left her rattled and confused.

IV