The Rustle of Silk

by Cosmo Hamilton

I

Sir Peter Chalfont’s cork arm had become one of the institutions of the town. Long ago the grimness had gone out of everybody’s laughter at the tricks he played with it,—presenting it with the palm the wrong way, making it squeak suddenly and wagging it about from the wrist as a greeting to his friends. Every one had grown accustomed to his frequent changes of gloves and his habit of appearing at dinner with those dreadful stiff fingers in white buckskin. He had indeed trained the thing to perform as though it were an animal and he could do almost anything with it except tie a dress tie. That was beyond him.

At quarter to eight on the evening of Lola’s first dip into life, he turned away from the telephone and presented himself to the man who had been his batman during the last year of the War. He had had three since the miracle of the Marne. He was rather bored because he had just been told by the girl who had promised to dine with him that she didn’t feel like eating and he knew that meant that some one else had cropped up who was more amusing than himself. He had a great mind to give the Savoy a wide berth and walk round to Boodles and have dinner with the Pall Mall Gazette. But on second thoughts the idea of accompanying his cold salmon and cucumber with the accumulating mass of depressing evidence of the world’s unrest, as set forth in the evening paper, appalled him. Charles was trying to edge his way back into Hungary. The Russian Reds were emptying their poison all over the map. English miners had gone out on strike and with a callousness altogether criminal had left the pumps unmanned. Viviani had landed in the United States to endeavor to prove to the new President that if he did not jerk the Senate out of Main Street he would inevitably sentence Europe to death. And Lloyd George, even to the amazement of those who knew him best, was continuing his game of poker with Lenin and Trotsky.

It couldn’t be done. And so, his tie duly tied by the clumsy-fingered man who had received lessons from a shop in the Burlington Arcade, the gallant Peter left his rooms in Park Place and stood on the curb in St. James’s Street. Should he walk or drive? Should he try to raise a friend equally at a loose end, or carry on alone? How he missed his dear old father, who, until the day of his peaceful death, was always ready to join him in a cheery dinner at the Marlborough or the Orleans or at one of the hotels where he could see the pretty girls. After all, dining at the Savoy was not such a lonely proceeding as it seemed. Among the profiteers and the new rich there might be a familiar face. And there was at any rate an orchestra. With a dump hat at an angle of forty-five and a light overcoat over his dinner jacket, he was a mark for all the prowling cabs which found business worse than usual. Two or three of them knew this tall wiry man and had served in his Division. One of the youngest of the Brigadier Generals in the British Army, he had worn his brass hat as though it were the cap of a man with one pip; they loved him for that and any day and any night would cheerfully have followed him to hell. Many of them had called him “Beauty Chalfont,” which had made him uncomfortable. It was better than “Bloody” Chalfont or “Butcher” Chalfont,—adjectives that had been rather too freely applied to some of his brother Brigadiers. So far as the majority of passers-by were concerned, this man to whom willing hands had gone up in salute and who had turned out to be a born soldier was, like so many demobilized officers all over the country, of no account, a nobody, his name and his services forgotten.

The pre-war cheeriness which had belonged to the Savoy was absent now. Chorus ladies and Guards officers, baby-faced foreign office clerks and members of the Bachelors, famous artists and dramatists and the ubiquitous creatures who put together the musical potpourris of the town, beautiful ladies of doubtful reputation and highly respectable ones without quite so much beauty no longer jostled the traveling Americans, tennis-playing Greeks and Indian rajahs in the foyer. Chalfont marched in to find the place filled with wrongly dressed men with plebeian legs and strange women who seemed to have been dug out of the residential end of factory cities. Their pearls and diamonds were almost enough to stir Bolshevism in the souls of curates.

Shedding his coat and hat and taking a ticket from a flunkey, on whose chest there was a line of ribbons, he looked across the long vista of intervening space to the dining room. The band was playing “Avalon” and a buzz of conversation went up in the tobacco smoke. What was the name of that cheery little soul who had dined with him in March, 1914? March, 1914. He had been a happy-go-lucky Captain in the 21st Lancers in those days, drawing a generous allowance from the old man and squeezing every ounce of fun out of life. The years between had brought him up against the sort of realities that he did not care to think about when left without companionship and occupation. Two younger brothers dead and nearly all his pals.—Just as he was about to go down the stairs and be conducted to one of the small tables in the draught he saw a girl in a black cloak with touches of silver on it standing alone, large-eyed, her butter-colored hair gleaming in the light, and caught his breath. “Jumping Joseph,” he said to himself, “look at that,” and was rooted to the floor.

It was Lola, as scared as a child in the middle of traffic, a rabbit among a pack of hounds, asking herself, cold and hot by turns, what she had done—oh, what—by coming to that place with no one to look after her, wishing and wishing that the floor would open up and let her into a tunnel which would lead her out to the back room of the nerve-wrung dressmaker. Every passing man who looked her up and down and every woman who turned her head over her shoulder added stone after stone to the pile of her folly, so childish, so laughable, so stupendous. How could she have been such a fool,—the canary so far away from the safety of its cage.

Chalfont looked again. “She’s been let down by somebody,” he thought. “What sort of blighter is it who wouldn’t break his neck to be on the steps to meet such a—perfectly——All these cursed eyes, greedily signaling. What’s to be done?”

And as he stood there, turning it all over, his chivalry stirred, Lola came slowly out of her panic. If only Mrs. Rumbold had asked her with whom she was going, if only she had had, somewhere in all the world, one sophisticated friend to tell her that such a step as this was false and might be fatal. The way out was to stand for one more moment and look as though her escort were late, or had been obliged to go to the telephone, and then face the fact that in her utter and appalling ignorance she had made a mistake, slip away, drive back to that dismal Terrace and change into her Cinderella clothes. Ecstasy approaching madness must have made her suppose that all she had to do was to sail in to this hotel in Lady Feo’s frock and all the rest would follow,—that looking, as well as feeling “a lady” now and loving like a woman, something would go out from her soul—a little call—and Fallaray would rise and come to her. Mr. Fallaray. The Savoy. They were far, far out of her reach. Her heart was in her borrowed shoes. And then she became aware of Chalfont, met his eyes and saw in them sympathy and concern and understanding. And what was more, she knew this man. Yes, she did. He was no stranger; she had seen him often,—that very day. It was a rescue! A friendly smile curled up her lips.

Chalfont maintained his balance. Training told. He gave it fifty seconds—fifty extraordinary seconds—during which he asked himself, “Is she—or not?” Deciding not by a unanimous vote, he went across to her and bowed. “I’m awfully afraid that something must have happened. Can I be of use to you?”

“I’m longing for asparagus,” said Lola in the manner of an old friend.

“That’s perfectly simple,” said Chalfont, blinking just once. “I’m alone, you’re alone, and asparagus ought to be good just now.”

“Suppose we go in then,” said Lola, buying the hotel, her blood dancing, her eyes all free from fright. She was perfectly happy in the presence of this man because she recognized in him immediately a modern version of the Chevalier who had so frequently brought her bonbons to her room at Versailles which overlooked the back yard of Queen’s Road, Bayswater.

“My name’s Chalfont, Peter Chalfont.” A rigid conventionality sat on his shoulders.

“I know,” she said, and added without a moment’s hesitation, “I am Madame de Brézé.” And then she knew how she knew. How useful was the Tatler. Before the War, during the War, after the War, the eyes of this man had stared at her from its pages in the same spirit of protection. That very afternoon she had paused at his photograph taken in hunting kit, sitting on his horse beside the Prince of Wales, underneath which was printed, “Sir Peter Chalfont, Bart. V. C. Late Brigadier General,”—and somewhere among that crowd was Fallaray.