Part 18 (1/2)

VIII

In the servants' sitting room Simpkins was sitting alone, not reading, not smoking; thinking of Lola and of the inn at Wargrave which had become so detestable,-a dead ambition, the ghost of a dream. And when the door opened and Lola let herself in, tear-stained, he sprang to his feet, gazing in amazement. Lola-dressed like a lady-crying.-But she held up her hand, went swiftly across the room and out, upstairs. She was back an hour and a half too soon. There was no need for Ellen to slip down and open the door. The evening had been a dismal failure. It would be a long time before she would play Cinderella again,-although the Prince loved her and had told her so.

But instead of going through the door which led to the servants'

quarters, she stood for a moment in the corridor through which Simpkins had taken her when she had first become an inmate of that house and once more she stayed there against the tapestry with a cold hand on her heart. Simpkins loved her. Treadwell loved her. Chalfont loved her, but oh, where was Fallaray? What a little fool she had been ever to suppose, in her wildest dreams, that Fallaray, Fallaray would see her and stop to speak, set alight by the love in her eyes! What a silly little fool.

A door opened and Fallaray came out,-his shoulders rounded, his Savonarola face pale and lined with sleeplessness. At the sight of the charming little figure in evening dress he drew up. Mrs. Malwood perhaps, or another of Feo's friends. She was entertaining again, of course.

And Lola trembled like a frightened bird, with great tears welling from her eyes.

Fallaray was puzzled. This child did not look like one of Feo's friends,-and why was she crying? He knew the face, he remembered those wide-apart eyes. They had followed him into his work, into his dreams,-de Breze, de Breze,-the Savoy, the Concert.

He held out his hand. ”Madame de Breze,” he said, ”what have they done to you?”

And she shook her head again, trembling violently.

And Fallaray, with the old curious tingle running through his veins, was helpless. If she wouldn't tell him what was the matter, what was he to do? He imagined that some flippancy or some sarcasm had wounded this astonis.h.i.+ng girl and she had fled from the drawing-room and lost her way. But women were unknown to him, utter strangers, and he was called to work. He said, ”My wife's room is there,” stood irresolute for a moment, although his brain was filled with the songs of birds, and bowed and went away.

And when Lola heard the street door close, she moved like a bird shot through the wings, fumbled her way to the pa.s.sage which led to her servant's bedroom and flung herself face downwards upon her bed. What was it in her that did these things to every man,-except Fallaray?

PART VI

I

To Ellingham's entire satisfaction, Feo did not sit out the performance at the Adelphi. She left in the middle of the second act. It was not a piece demanding any sort of concentration. That was not its metier. It was one of those rather pleasant, loosely made things, bordering here and there on burlesque, in which several comedians have been allotted gaps to fill between songs which, repeated again and again, give a large chorus of pretty girls an opportunity of wearing no dress longer than five minutes or lower than the knees. But Feo's mind was wandering. The last twenty-four hours had been filled with disappointment. She agreed with the adage that if you can't make a mistake you can't make anything.

But this last one, which had taken the Macquarie person into her circle of light, proved to her that she was losing not only her sense of perspective but her sense of humor. It rankled; and it continued to rankle all through the jokes and songs and horseplay of the company behind the footlights that Sat.u.r.day night.

Then, too, she found herself becoming more and more disappointed in Ellingham. He had aged. Still just on the right side of forty, he seemed to her to have had all the youth knocked out of him. His resilience had gone-sapped by the War-and with it his danger, which had been so attractive. He was now a quiet, repressed, responsible, dull-yes, dull,-man; in a sort of way the father of a family. When he talked it was about his regiment in India, his officers, his quartermaster sergeant, the health of his men, the ugly look of things in the East.

All this made it seem to Feo that Beetle Ellingham had pulled away from her, left her behind. She was still fooling, while he, once as irresponsible as herself and almost as mad, had found his feet and was standing firmly upon them. Disappointment, disappointment.

”What to do?” she asked, as they got into a taxicab. She rather hoped that he would say ”Nothing. I'll see you home and say good night.”

But he didn't. ”I'll drive you home and talk for an hour, if you can stand such a thing. I'm going to see my old people in Leicesters.h.i.+re to-morrow, and I don't suppose I shall be back in town for a month or two.”

She told him to make it Dover Street, and he did so, and there was silence until the cab drew up at the door of the house in which the man-whom she had for the first time seriously considered as the new Messiah-burnt himself up in the endeavor to find some solution to all the troubles of his country, and, like a squirrel in a cage, ran round and round and round.

Feo let herself in and led the way to what she called her den,-a long, low-ceilinged room, self-consciously decorated in what purported to be a futuristic manner, the effect of which, as though it had been designed by an untrained artist striving to disguise his ignorance behind a chaos of the grotesque, made sanity stagger. And here, full stretch on an octagonal divan, she mounted a cigarette in her long green holder and commenced to inhale hungrily.

Hating the room and all its fake, Ellingham, who more than ever justified the nickname of Beetle which had been given to him at Eton because of his over-hanging black eyebrows, prowled up and down with his hands in his pockets. He, too, was disappointed. It seemed to him that Feo had remained the hoyden, the overgrown, long-legged girl with boy's shoulders and the sort of s.e.x illusiveness which had so greatly attracted him in the old days, and had set him to work to eliminate and replace. But now she was thirty something, and although he hated to use the expression about her of all women, he told himself that she was mutton playing lamb, and a futile lamb at that. Perhaps it was because he had been all the way through the War and had come out with a series of unforgettable pictures stamped upon his brain that he had expected to find some sort of emergement on the part of Feo, who, although she had been spared the blood and muck of Flanders, was the sister of a flying man, the relation of innumerable gallant fellows who had been made the gun fodder of that easily preventable orgy, and the friend of many a young soldier whose bones now lay under the shallow surface of French earth. So far as she was concerned, he could see that the War might never have happened at all. It made him rather sick. Nevertheless he had loved her violently and had never married because of his remembrance of her and he wanted to find out how she stood. He was entirely in the dark. He had not been alone with her once since the end of July, 1914,-a night on the terrace of a house overlooking the Thames at Cookham, when all the world already knew that slaughter was in the air and the wings of the angel of death rustled overhead.

He stopped in front of her, all stretched out among cus.h.i.+ons, her short and pleated frock making her appear to be in a kilt. ”Well, how about it?” he asked.

And she shrugged her shoulders and tossed the ash of her cigarette at a small marble pot. ”I dunno,” she said. ”Pretty badly, one way and another.”

”How's that?”