V
It was a lukewarm night, without wind and without moon, starless. Excited at having got in her request, which she knew from a close study of her aunt’s character was bound to be refused and after a process of flattery eventually conceded, Lola waved her hand to the Preedys and graciously consented to give a few minutes to Ernest Treadwell. The butcher and his wife, after a lifetime of intimacy with animals, had both taken on a marked resemblance to sheep. They walked away in the direction of their large and prosperous corner shop with wide-apart legs and short quick steps, as though expecting to be rounded up by a bored but conscientious dog. As she leaned against the private door of her father’s shop, with the light of the lamp-post on hair that was the color of buttercups, she did look French. If Miss Breezy were to take the trouble to read a well-known book of memoirs published during the reign of Louis XIV, it would dawn upon her that the little Lola of Queen’s Road, Bayswater, daughter of the cockney watchmaker and Ellen who came from a flat market garden in Middlesex, threw back to a certain Madame de Brézé, the famous courtesan. Whether her respect for her brother would become less or grow greater for this discovery it is not easy to say. Probably, being a snob, it would increase.
“Don’t stand there without a hat, Lola dear. You may catch cold.”
“Mother always says that,” said Lola, “even in the middle of the summer, but she won’t call again for ten minutes, so let’s steal a little chat.” She put her hand on Treadwell’s shoulder with a butterfly touch and held him rooted and grateful. He had the pale skin that goes with red hair as well as the pale eyes, but as he looked at this girl of whom he dreamed by day and night, they flared as they had flared when he had seen her first as a little girl with her hair in a queue at the other end of a classroom. He stood with his foot on the step and his hands clasped together, inarticulate. Behind his utter commonplaceness there was the soul of Romeo, the passion of self-sacrifice that goes with great lovers. He had been too young for gun fodder in the war but he had served in spirit for Lola’s sake and had performed a useful job in the capacity of a boy scout messenger in the War Office. His bony knees and awkward body had been the joke of many a ribald subaltern, mud-stained from the trenches.
“What are you doing on Saturday afternoon?” asked Lola. “Shall we walk to Hampton Court and see the crocuses? They’re all up now like little soldiers in a pantomime.”
“I’ll call for you at two o’clock,” answered the boy, thrilling as though he had been decorated. “We’ll have tea there and come back on top of a bus. I suppose your mother wouldn’t let me take you to the theater? There’s a great piece at the Hammersmith,—Henry Ainley. He’s fine.”
Lola laughed softly. “Mother’s a dear,” she said. “She lets me do everything I want to do after I’ve told her that I’m simply going to do it. Besides, she likes you.”
“Do you like me, Lola?” The question came before the boy could be seized with his usual timidity. It was followed by a rush of blood to the head.
The girl’s answer proved her possession of great kindness and an amazing lack of coquetry. “You are one of my oldest friends, Ernest,” she replied, thereby giving the boy something to hope for but absolutely nothing to grasp. He had never dared to go so far as this before and like all the other boys who hung round Lola had never been able, by any of his crude efforts, to get her to flirt. Friend was the only word that any of them could apply to her. And yet even the least precocious of these boys was convinced of the fact that she was not innocent of her power.
“I love the spring,—just smell it in the air,” said Lola, going off at a tangent, “but I shall never live in the country—I mean all the time. I shall go there and see things grow and get all the scent and the whispers and the music of the stars and then rush back to town. Do you believe in reincarnation, Ernest? I do. I was a canary once and lived in a cage, a big golden cage, full of seeds and water and little bells that jingled. It stood on the table in a room filled with tapestry and lovely old furniture. Servants in livery gave me a saucer for a bath and refilled my seed pans.—I feel like a canary now sometimes. I like to fly out, perfectly tame, and with no cats about, sing a little and imagine that I am perfectly free, and then flick back, stand on a perch and do my best singing to the noise of traffic.” And she laughed again and added, “What rot we talk when we’re young, don’t we? I must go.”
“No, not yet. Please not yet.” And the boy put his hands out to touch her and was afraid. He would gladly have died then and there in that street just to be allowed to kiss her lips.
“It’s late. I must go, Ernest. I have to get up so awfully early. I hate getting up early. I would like breakfast in bed and a nice maid to bring me my letters and the papers. Besides, I don’t want to worry Mother. She has all the worries of the shop. Good night and don’t be late on Saturday.” She held out her hand.
The boy seized it and held it tight, his brain reeling, and his blood on fire. He stood for an instant unable to give expression to the romance that she stirred in him, with his mouth open and his rather faulty teeth showing, and his big awkward nose very white. And when she had gone and the door of her castle was closed, the poor knight, who had none of the effrontery of the troubadour, paced up and down for an hour in front of the shop, saying half aloud all the things from Shakespeare which alone seemed fit for the ears of that princess,—princess of Queen’s Road, Bayswater!