III
Lola spent the afternoon with Ernest Treadwell. Loyalty to her old friend took her to the public library on her way back to lunch to ask him to fetch her for a little walk in the afternoon. The flash of joy that came into that boy’s eyes at the sight of her rewarded her well and sufficiently. To tell the truth, she would much have preferred to devote the whole of that afternoon to daydreams, but she knew, no one better, the peculiar temperament of young Treadwell and his hungry need of the inspiration which she alone could give him. But just as the boy arrived, a telegram was handed in addressed abruptly to “Breezy, 77 Queen’s Road, Bayswater.” It was opened, naturally enough, by John, who, to the astonishment of half a dozen customers, emitted a howl of rage. Getting up from his chair behind the glass screen, he wobbled into the back parlor where Lola was seated with Ernest, deciding as to whether they should take the motor bus to Wimbleton Common or the train to Windsor. With an air of comic drama, though he did not intend it to be comic, the watchmaker flung the telegram upon the crowded table. The remains of lunch hobnobbed with kodaks, tissue paper, balls of string and empty cardboard boxes. The telegram fell on a pat of butter and to Ernest Treadwell’s imaginative eye it looked like a hand grenade stuck into a blob of clay. To him, somehow, there was always something sinister about a telegram. Was this one going to ruin the brief happiness of his afternoon?
It was from Feo and ran like this. “I shall need you at six o’clock. Sorry. You had better be at Dover Street at five-thirty. Am dining in town.”
Lola read these words over again and again. Windsor was impossible. Even the trip to Wimbleton Common could not be made. But how was this going to affect the Carlton at seven-thirty? She longed above all things once more to get into the clothes and the proper social surroundings of Madame de Brézé, and hear people talking what had become her own language and listen to the music of a good orchestra. She felt that she deserved another adventure with Chalfont. This erratic twist by Lady Feo, whose movements seemed that week-end to resemble those of the woodcock, shattered all these plans. At least,—did they? Not if she knew it.
“Well, there it is,” she said and gave the telegram to Ernest Treadwell, who had been watching her face with the most painful anxiety. “She who must be obeyed. I’m afraid this means that all we can do is to wander about for a couple of hours and that our little jaunt to Windsor must be postponed. And we never went to Hampton Court to see the crocuses, did we? Bad luck.”
But while she was speaking, her brain was hitting all its cylinders and racing ahead. She would go to the Carlton, Lady Feo or no Lady Feo. She would get her dress from Mrs. Rumbold, with her shoes and stockings, and take them to Dover Street. She would have to dress at Dover Street, bribe Ellen to get her a taxicab and slip down at twelve o’clock to let her in to the area door. That must be the plan of action, whatever the risks might be.
She sprang to her feet and flung an arm round her father’s neck,—her disappointed, affectionate father who had looked forward to a merry evening at the local music hall and to one of the old-time Sundays when he could march out in his best clothes and show off Lola to the neighbors. “It’s life, Daddy,” she said. “It can’t be helped. You have your wrist watches. I have Lady Feo. What’s the good of grumbling? Tell Mother when you get the chance. At the moment she is busy and mustn’t be disturbed. Come on, Ernest, let’s go.”
But Ernest had other views, now that the country was impossible. “I’ve got something in my pocket I want to read to you,” he said. “Might we go up to the drawing-room, do you think?”
That was excellent. That made things ever so much easier. She could give Ernest until four o’clock or a little after and then get rid of him, go round to Mrs. Rumbold and get eventually to Dover Street in time to have everything ready for Lady Feo on her arrival.
And so they went upstairs and opened up the aloof room, with its persistent and insular odor of the Sabbath and antimacassars, and drew up chairs to the window. The row of houses opposite, which had been converted into shops, was bathed in the afternoon sun. A florist’s windows alight with flowers looked like a line from Tennyson in the middle of a financial article in a newspaper. Traffic roared in the street below but did not quite succeed in drowning a weather-beaten piano accompanying a throaty baritone singing, “She dwelt amid the untrodden wiys.—And h’oh the differ-rence ter me.”
With a thoughtfulness that seemed to Ernest Treadwell to be exquisite, Lola shut the window so that she might not miss a single word that she was about to hear. Without any preliminaries and with the colossal egotism that is part and parcel of all writing, the young librarian took from his pocket a wad of manuscript, and in a deadly monotone commenced to read his epic. It was in blank verse and ran to about sixteen pages. It retold the old story of Paola and Francesca, not in the manner of Stephen Phillips and not in imitation of Masefield or any of the younger poets, but in the Treadwell way,—jerky, explosive and here and there out of key; but for all that filled with a rough picturesqueness and passion, with a quite extraordinary sense of color and feeling which held Lola breathless from beginning to end. It was this boy’s greatest effort, on which he had been working for innumerable months, burning the midnight oil with the influence of Lola upon him, and his great love which lifted him into ecstasy.—And when he had finished and ventured to look into her face, he saw there something that crowned his head with laurels and filled his heart with tears.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.—Ernie, you’ve done it. It’s beautiful. You are a poet. However far behind them all, you are in the line of great singers.” And she reached out for the manuscript and saw that on the first page, in angular boyish writing, were the words, “To Lola,—of whom I dream.”
Simpkins, Treadwell, Chalfont,—but, oh, where was Fallaray, her hero, the man who needed love?