The Rustle of Silk Part 5

They were all tainted with the Bolshevism that has followed in the wake of the War. They drew their wages and grumbled, slurred their duties, ate everything that they could lay their hands on, thought nothing of destroying the utensils of the kitchen and the various things which they used in the course of work, went out as often as they could and stayed out much later than the rules of the house permitted. But under the subtle influence of this always smiling, always good-tempered girl who seemed to have come from another planet, ribaldry and coa.r.s.e jokes and the rather loose larking with the footmen began gradually to disappear.

Without resentment, because Lola was so companionable and fitted into her new surroundings like a key into a lock, they toned themselves down in her presence, and finding her absolutely without "side," hurried to win her friendship, went into her room at night, singly, to confide in her,-were not in the least jealous because Albert Simpkins, the butler and the two footmen competed with one another to grovel at her feet. In a word, Lola was as great a favorite below stairs as she was above. She had realized that the ultimate success of her plan depended on her popularity in the servants' sitting room and in winning these people to her side had used all her h.o.m.ogeneous sense, even, perhaps, with greater care and thoughtfulness than she had applied to her task of ingratiating herself with Lady Feo. She knew very well that if the servants didn't get on with her she would never be able to stay. They would make it impossible.

How Madame de Breze would have chuckled had she been able to see her little imitator sitting on the sofa at night, beneath an oleograph of Queen Victoria, going through the current _Tatler_ in the midst of a group of maids, with a butler and two footmen hanging over her shoulders and a perfect valet dreaming of matrimony sitting astride a chair as near as he could get. How she would have laughed at her descendant's small quips and touches of wit and irony as she discussed the people who were known to her companions by sight and by name and seemed to belong to a sort of menagerie, separated from them by the iron bars of cla.s.s distinction through which they could be seen moving about,-well fed and well groomed and performing for the public.

It was no trouble to Lola to do all this. She had done it almost all her life with the gradations of children with whom she had been at school,-admired by the girls, keeping the boys at arms' length and yet retaining their friendship. It was perfectly easy. Lady Feo had liked her instantly and so no effort was necessary. Tactfulness alone was required,-to be silent when her mistress obviously required silence, to be merry and bright when her mood was expansive and to antic.i.p.ate her wishes whenever in attendance. All Lola's period of make-believe, during which she had played the celebrated courtesan in her little back bedroom, had taught her precisely how to conduct herself in her new surroundings. Had not she herself been in the hands of just such a lady's maid as she had now become and seen her laugh when she had laughed, remain quiet when she had demanded quietude? It merely meant that she had exchanged roles with Lady Feo for a time and was playing the servant's part instead of that of the leading lady. She reveled in the whole thing. It gave her constant delight and pleasure. Above all, she was under the same roof as her hero, of whom she caught a momentary glimpse from time to time,-from the window as he got into his car, from the gallery above the hall as he came back from the House of Commons, or late at night when he pa.s.sed along the corridor to his lonely rooms, sometimes tired and with dragging feet, sometimes scornful and impatient, and once or twice so blazing with anger that it was a wonder that the things he touched did not burst into flames.

III

The only one of the servants who took the remotest interest in the arrival of those members of the Cabinet who were to dine with Lady Feo was Lola. With the butler's connivance she stood inside the hat room in the hall and peeped through the door. To her there was something not only indescribably interesting in the sight at close quarters of men of whom she had read daily for years and who were admired or loathed by her father and his friends, but something moving, because they had it in their power to help or hinder the work of Fallaray. She found them to be a curiously smug and well-fed lot, undistinguished, badly dressed and not very different from the ordinary run of Queen's Road tradesmen. She thought that they looked like piano tuners and was astonished and disappointed.

The most important person, who arrived late and whose face was of course familiar to her from caricatures, made up for all the rest. He stood in the full light for a moment while he gave his coat and hat to a footman,-a soft dump hat and a coat lined with very shiny black satin.

He looked more than ever like a quack doctor, one who was a cross between a comedian and a revivalist. His uncut hair, very white now, flopped over the back of his collar in a most uncivilized manner and his little moustache of the walrus type was quite out of keeping with it. If he had been clean-shaven he could have pa.s.sed for a poet, or a dramatist who desired to advertise the fact, as some of them do who flourished in the Victorian period. His short plebeian figure, with legs far too small and apparently too frail to carry his fat little trunk, gave him a gnome-like appearance, but in his eyes, which were very wonderful, there was a gleam of humor and resourcefulness which stamped him as a consummate leader of men, while his forehead denoted imagination and keen intelligence. It made Lola laugh to see the way in which he tried to win the callous footman with a cheery word, never losing an opportunity of making a client, and to watch his rabbit-like way of going upstairs to the drawing-room.

She was met by Simpkins, who darted quickly and eagerly to her side.

"Look 'ere," he said in a whisper. "You're free for the evening. How about doing a show with me? I can get you back before Lady Feo'll want you again. What d'yer say?"

"Yes," said Lola, "I should love it. What shall we see?"

Simpkins was a gallery first nighter and an ardent patron of the drama.

Whatever he recommended, therefore, was sure to be worth seeing. "Well,"

he said, "there's Irene Vanbrugh in a new American play,-'Miss Nell o'

New Orleans.' I couldn't get to see it but I read old man Walkley and I saw what Punch said. I don't think the play's much, but Irene is orlright. Nip up and get your things on. Let's go and test it."

Lola nipped. Her little bedroom was in the servants' corridor. She was lucky that it wasn't, like most servants' bedrooms, in the bas.e.m.e.nt, cheek by jowl with the coal cellar. She changed quickly, excited at the prospect of stealing a few hours away from the house in Dover Street.

She had been home twice on her nights off, there to be gazed at in silent wonder by the little mother who seemed to know her even less than ever and to be put through an exhaustive cross-examination by her father, whose mind ran to small details, as was natural in one who wore a magnifying gla.s.s perpetually in his eye. She met Simpkins in the servants' sitting room,-very spruce in a tail coat and a bowler with his black tie ingeniously pulled through a gold ring in which there was a most depressed diamond.

She was received with a chorus of inquiries from the maids. "h.e.l.lo, Lola," "On the loose with Simpky?" "This is something new, ain't it?"

"Going to do the shimmy in 'Ammersmith?" and so forth. To all of which she replied in one sentence. "Mr. Simpkins is taking me to an organ recital," and won a scream of mirth.

Simpkins was ecstatic. He had made a bet with himself that his appeal would be refused. Always before Lola had turned him down and he knew that the frequent pestering of the butler and the two footmen had been unable to move her to adventure. "We've just time to do it," he said, put two fingers into his mouth and sent a piercing whistle into the muggy April evening. A prowling taxi drew up short and quivered, and a well-shaped head looked round to see from whom this urgent call had issued. Taking Lola's hand, Simpkins ran her across the street and opened the door. "The Dooker York's."

"Righto, Sir," said the driver, giving a quick and appreciative glance at his customer's companion. Exactly three years ago the owner of that particularly nice voice, straight nose and small moustache had commanded a battery of the R. F. A. and fired with open sights at the advancing enemy. With nothing to eat except apples plucked from the orchards through which he had retired with his ragged and weakening men, he had fought coolly and cheerily for many days and nights, utterly out of touch with the main army and eventually, looking like a scarecrow, had removed his guns from impossible positions and fallen on his face in Amiens. Thus does a grateful Parliament reward its saviors.

Simpkins slipped his hand through Lola's arm. "I've been looking forward to this," he said. "You don't know what you've done for me. I'm a different man since I saw you first."

"I," said Lola quickly, "am precisely the same girl," and very kindly and definitely gave him back his hand and drew a little farther into her corner of the cab. But Simpkins wasn't hurt. On the contrary he esteemed her the more highly for this action. She proved herself so to be different from the girls with whom he was acquainted and thus lived up to his preconceived idea of her. "Sorry," he said, "thank you," and glowed with love.

It was perfectly true that Simpkins was a different man since he had seen Lola. She had revolutionized his life and his thoughts and strengthened his ambitions. He was a good fellow, clean-minded, with one or two ideals to which he had clung faithfully and well through the many temptations which were provided by his like below stairs. He had character. He was illiterate but not unintelligent. He had something that the human sensibility is frequently without,-a soul, and because of that he had imagination and a sense of worship. He was the sort of man of whom fanatics are made under a crisis of deep emotion. As a gentleman's gentleman he regarded himself as having a sort of mission in life. He must be honest, always ready for his master's call; spruce, cheerful and discreet. When tempted to make himself acquainted with the contents of private letters he must never give anything away. He had held himself in waiting, so to speak, for a great love affair and had built up in his mind a good and wholesome picture of home and wife and children. Lola fitted into this picture and dominated it as no other girl had ever done, and he had fallen actually and metaphorically before her like a shack before a hurricane. At any time now he could leave service and branch out for himself, because he had inherited from his father a sum of money which would enable him to buy a public house somewhere in the country-preferably on the upper Thames-and let rooms to nice people,-they would have to be nice people. He was a man in the middle thirties with plenty of time to add to his good nest egg, bring up a little family with great care and put his son in a good school with a view to making him a gentleman,-a dentist perhaps, or a clerk in Coutts's bank. He could see only Lola as the mother of this boy and the fact that she had accepted his invitation to go to the theater filled him with a great hopefulness; he rejoiced in her having disallowed his familiarity.

To Lola, Simpkins was less than the dust. She had already sized him up as a rather curious character to be respected and even liked but not, of course, to be considered as anything but an infrequent escort into the theater life of London.

She placed him among the Treadwells,-though not so high up in the list as Ernest. One of these fine days she hoped to be able to lift the Bayswater poet out of the public library into the public gaze, to do for him what Madame de Breze had done for Paul Brissac.

They arrived at the theater in good time. With a curious touch of embarra.s.sment, because he had seen at once that the cab was being driven by a gentleman, Simpkins handed over half a crown and said, "That's all right, you can keep the change." He received a crisp and unabashed "Thank you" and a little bow from the waist down which was a cross between extreme politeness and ineffable cheek, and before Lola turned to go into the theater she was given a pucka salute with the hand almost flat upon the ear. She returned a smile that was like one of those electric advertis.e.m.e.nts which flick in and out of the sky in all really progressive American cities. It nearly knocked the man over and almost caused him to collide with a policeman.

Simpkins was tempted to buy two seats in the stalls and could have done so without question in these after-war times when almost the only people who have enough money for their laundresses are the profiteers. But tradition prevailed and he took her up to the dress circle,-where n.o.body dressed. The people were coming reluctantly into the theater in the usual manner of Londoners. English people are not ardent theater goers and have to be dragged in to see a play almost in the same manner as in the old days of barnstorming, when the manager beat a drum on the threshold of the tent, the hero and the heroine stood at his elbow and made pathetic appeals to pa.s.sers-by, and the villain, lurking in the background, grimaced at all the girls.

The orchestra had just begun to tune up and the sc.r.a.ping of fiddles sent a tingle through Lola's veins. It put her in the mood, as it always did, to forget life, her own personality and the presence of Simpkins, and place herself into the character of the play's heroine. From an unexpected pocket Simpkins brought out a small box of chocolates. He was one of those strange people who, although they have just risen from a hearty meal, cannot go through an evening at the theater without munching something. "'Ave one," he said. "They're nice."

"You think of everything," said Lola, and in order not to hurt his feelings, took one and dropped it under the seat. "There's going to be a good house," she added.

"Irene always draws 'em in. By Gum, she's given me some good evenings in her time. She's what I call safe. You can bank on her. She dresses like a lady, too, and that gets me. Good old Irene." And then he put his face rather close to Lola's. "Some one said you thought of going on the stage before you joined us. That's not true, is it?"

"No," said Lola. "Not in the least true. I discussed it with my aunt. In fact, to be quite honest, I put it to her head like a pistol."

"Oh, I see." Simpkins heaved a sigh of relief. If Lola were to go on the stage,-and all these young officers buzzing about, treating marriage as though it were a betting transaction--

"I think," said Lola with nave gravity, "that it's better to play a leading part in life than to be in the chorus on the stage. Cleverer acting is required, too, don't you think so?"

A leading part in life? Simpkins was worried. Would she consider the wife of a man who owned the "Black Bell" at Wargrave to be a leading part? "You're not ambitious, are yer?" he asked, peering at her patrician profile.

"Oh," she said, "Oh," and suddenly threw out her hands.

And then the lights went out and the buzz of talking ceased gradually as though bees were retiring in platoons from a feeding place.

IV

They walked to Trafalgar Square. Lola was still in the old garden of Miss Nell among the Creoles and the music of the Mardi Gras frolickers.

She had no ears for the expert criticisms of her escort. There were plenty of unoccupied taxis scouting for fares but Lola pulled up under the shadow of the National Gallery to watch the big play of life for a moment or two. From force of a habit which she had not yet conquered, she looked up at the sky, half expecting to see the great white beams of searchlights swing and stammer until they focussed upon something that looked like a silver fish, and then to twinge under the quick reports of anti-aircraft guns. Twice during the War she had been caught on that spot during a raid and had stood transfixed to the pavement between fright and a keen desire to see the show. Memories of those never-to-be-forgotten incidents, small as they were and of no consequence in the story of the War-the loss of a few well-fed noncombatants who made themselves targets for stray shrapnel because they wouldn't dip like rabbits into funk holes-came back to her then, as well they might. The War's evidences forced themselves every day upon the notice even of those who desired to forget,-the processions of unemployed with their rattling collection boxes among the ugliest of them all.

Big Ben struck the quarter and Lola returned to earth. "Simpky," she said, "cab, quick." And he called one and gave the address. And then she began again to hear what the valet was saying. He had used up Miss Nell o' New Orleans and had come to Miss Lola of Queen's Road, Bayswater.

"Look 'ere, can't we do this often, you and me? We can always sneak off when there's a dinner on or Lady Feo's out in the push. It don't cost much and I've got plenty of money."

"I should like to very much," said Lola. "Once a fortnight, say. You see, I go home every Wednesday night. I don't think we ought to do it more often than once a fortnight because, after all, I feel rather responsible to Auntie and I don't want to set a bad example to the other girls."

"Well, promise you won't go out with the other men. I let you into the 'ouse first, don't forget that, and that was a sort of omen to me and if you could bring yourself to look upon me as-well--" He broke off nervously and ran his hand over his forehead, which was damp with excitement.

But Lola was not in the least nonplussed. She had had so much practice.

She was an expert in mentally making all sorts and conditions of men her brothers. She said, "Simpky,"-although the man looked extremely un-Russian,-"you mustn't spoil me. Also you must remember that Ellen Glazeby has hopes. She's a friend of mine."

"Oh, my G.o.d," said Simpkins, with a touch of melodrama. "If I'd been engaged to 'er and on the verge of marriage, and then 'ad seen you,-or even if I'd been married for a couple of years and was 'appy and 'ad seen you--Religious as I am--"

Lola turned to him with extreme simplicity. "But I'm a good girl, Simpky," she said.

And he gave a funny throaty sound, like a frog at night with its feet in water; and one of his hands fluttered out and caught hold of the end of Lola's piece of fur, and this he pressed to his lips. "Oh, my G.o.d," he said again, words failing.

And so Lola was rather glad when the cab drew up at the house in Dover Street.

A car arrived at the same time and honked impatiently and imperiously.

Simpkins leapt from the taxi and said, "Pull out of the way, quick." It did so. And as Lola descended and stood at the top of the area steps, she saw Fallaray go slowly up to the front door with rounded shoulders, as though he were Atlas with the weight of the world on his back. He was followed by a man whose step was light and eager.