VI
The room at the back of the house in which Lola had been installed since she had been old enough to sleep alone had been her parents’ bedroom and was larger than the one to which they had retired. While Breezy had argued that he damned well didn’t intend to turn out for that kid, Mrs. Breezy had moved the furniture. The best room only was good enough for Lola. The window gave a sordid view of back yards filled with packing cases, washing, empty bottles and one or two anæmic laburnum trees which for a few days once a year burst into a sort of golden smile and then became sullen again,—observation posts for the most corrupt of animals, the London cat. It was in this room that Mrs. Breezy, trespassing sometimes, stood for a few moments lost in amazement, feeling more than ever the changeling sense that she did her best to forget.
With the money that she had saved up—birthday money, Christmas money and a small allowance made to her by her father—Lola had bought a rank imitation of an old four-poster bed made probably in Birmingham. Over it she had hung a canopy of chintz with a tapestry pattern on a black background, copied from an illustration in the life of Du Barry. From time to time pillows with lace covers had been added to the luxurious pile, a little footstool placed at the side of the bed and—the latest acquisition—an eiderdown now lent an air of swollen pomp to the whole thing, which, to the puzzled and concerned mother, was immoral. Hers was one of those still existing minds which read immorality into all attempts to break away from her own strict set of conventions, especially when it was in the direction of beautifying a bed, to her, of course, an unmentionable thing. In America, without doubt, she would be a cherished and respected member of the Board of Motion Picture Censors, as well as—having a cellar—a militant prohibitionist.
For the rest, the room possessed a sofa which was an English cousin to an Italian day bed and curtains of china silk in which there was a faint tinge of pink. A small table on which there was a collection of dainty things for writing, mementos of many Christmases and several lines of shelves crammed with books gave the room something of the appearance of a boudoir, and this was added to by half a dozen cheap French prints framed in gold which looked rather well against a wall paper of tiny bouquets tied up with blue ribbon. Lola’s collection of books had frequently sent John Breezy into gusts of mirth. There was nothing among them that he could read. Very few of them were in English and those were of French history. The rest were the lives and memoirs of famous courtesans, including those of the Madame de Brézé, to whom the watchmaker always referred with a mixture of pride and levity,—but not when his wife was in hearing. A bulky French dictionary, old and dog-eared, stood in solitude upon the writing table.
It was to this room that Lola withdrew as often as possible to cut herself off from every suggestion of Queen’s Road, Bayswater, and the shop below, and to forget her daily journeys to and from the Polytechnic where she was supposed to be taking a commercial course in bookkeeping and shorthand with a view either to going into an office or becoming a teacher in one of the many small schools which endeavored to keep their heads up in and about that portion of London.
The game of make-believe, which the dramatist who followed Lola from Hyde Park corner that afternoon had watched her play, had been carried on in this bed-sitting room ever since she had fallen under the spell of the de Brézé memoirs. It was here, especially on Sunday mornings, that this young thing let her imagination have full play while her father and mother, dressed in their Sabbath best, attended the Methodist Church near-by. Then, playing the part of her celebrated ancestress, she put on a little lace cap and a peignoir over her nightgown and sat up in bed to receive the imaginary friends, admirers and sycophants who came to her with the latest gossip, with rare and beautiful gifts and with the flattery of their kind, which, while it pleased her very much, failed to turn her head, because, after all, she had inherited much of her mother’s shrewdness. With her door locked, her nose powdered and her lips the color of a cherry, Lola conducted, for her own amusement, a brilliant series of monologues which, if given on the stage in a setting a little more elaborate, would have set all London laughing.
The girl’s mimicry of the people whom she brought to life from the pages of those French books was perfectly delightful. She brought her master to life. With a keen sense of characterization she built him up—unconsciously assisted by Aunt Hannah—into as close a resemblance to Fallaray as she could,—a tired, world-worn man, starving for love and adoration, weighed down by the problems of a civilization in chaos, distrait and sometimes almost brusque, but always chivalrous and kind, who came to her for refreshment and inspiration and left her with a lighter tread and renewed optimism. Ancient dames whose days were over came to her with envy in their hearts and the hope of charity in their withered souls to tell her of their triumphs and the scandals of their time. But the character upon whom she concentrated all her humor and sarcasm was the friend of her master, an unscrupulous person who loved her and never could resist the opportunity of pressing his suit in flowery but passionate terms and with an accent which, elaborately Parisian, was reproduced from that of the French journalist who had taught Lola his language in a class that she had attended for several years. These word fencings had begun, of course, as a child would naturally have begun them, with the stilted sentences and high-flown remarks which she had lifted from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They had become more and more sophisticated as the years had passed and were now full of subtleties and insinuations against which, egging the man on, Lola defended herself with what she took to be great wit and cleverness.
If her little mother had ever gone so far as to put her ear to the keyhole of that bedroom, she would have listened to something which would probably have sent her to a doctor to consult him as to her daughter’s mental condition. She would have heard, for instance, the well-modulated voice of that practised lovemaker and the laughing high-pitched replies of a girl not unpleased with his attentions but adamant to his pleadings and perfectly sure of herself. It is true that Mrs. Breezy would not have understood one word that was spoken because it was all in French, but the mere act of conducting long conversations with imaginary characters as a hobby would have struck deep at her sense of the fitness of things, especially as Sunday was the day chosen for such a game. The Methodist mind is strangely inelastic.
What would have been said to all this by a disciple of Freud it is easy to conceive. He would have read into it the existence of a complex proving a suppressed desire which must have landed Lola in a lunatic asylum. Common sense and a rudimentary knowledge of heredity might, however, have given to the mother and the psychoanalyst the key to all this. The fact was that Lola threw back to her French ancestress who, like herself, was the daughter of humble, honest people, and the glamor of the de Brézé memoirs had not only caught and colored her imagination, which was her strongest trait, but had shown her how to exploit the gift of sex appeal in a way that would make her essential to a man who had it in him to become a great political figure, the only way in which she, like the de Brézé, could be placed in a golden cage with all the luxuries, share in the secrets of government, meet the men who counted, bask in the reflected glory of power, and give in return so whole-hearted a love, devotion, encouragement and refreshment that her “master” would go out to the affairs of his country grateful and humanized. She could not, of course, ever hope to achieve this ambition by marriage. No such man would marry the daughter of a watchmaker. It was that the spirit of this woman lived again in the Breezys’ little daughter; that in her there had been revived the same desire to force a place for herself in a world to which she had not been born, and that she had been endowed with the same feminine qualities that were necessary to such a scheme. In the knowledge of this and pinning her faith to a similar cause—the word was hers—Lola Breezy had gone through those curious years of double life more and more determined to perform this kind of courtesanship, believing that she had inherited the voice with which to sing the little songs of a canary in the secret cage of no less a man than one of proved ability and idealism, who was within an ace of premiership, and—so that her vanity might be satisfied in the proof of her own ability to help him—against whom was pitted all that was mean, ignorant, jealous and reactionary in a bad political system.
What more natural, therefore, than that the man who fulfilled all these requirements and whom she would give her life to serve was Fallaray. He had been brought home to her every Thursday evening by her aunt for ten years. She had read in the papers every word that he had spoken; had followed his course of action through all the years of the War which he had done his best to prevent; had watched his lonely struggle to substantiate a League of Nations free from blood lust and territorial greed; had seen him pelted with lies and calumny when he had cried out that Germany must be allowed to live if Europe were to live; and that very day had stood trembling in front of the billboard which announced that he would not stand for the bloody and disastrous reprisals in Ireland that were backed by the Prime Minister. He was the one honest man, the one idealist in English politics; the one great humanitarian who possessed that strength and fairness of mind which permitted him to see both sides of a question; to belong to a party without being a slave to its shibboleths; to commit the sudden volt-faces so impossible to brass hats and to the Junkers of all nationality; the one man in the House of Commons who didn’t give a damn for limelight, self-aggrandizement, titles, graft and all the rest of the things which have been brought into that low and unclean business by men who would sell the country for a drink. And above all he was unhappy with his wife.
The housekeeper aunt had built up for this girl a hero who fitted exactly into the niche in her heart and ambitions. All the stories and backstairs gossip about him had excited her desire to become a second Madame de Brézé in his life and bring the rustle of silk to this Eveless man. Never once did there enter into her game of make-believe or her dreams of achievement the idea of becoming Fallaray’s wife, even if, at any time, he should be free to marry again. She had too keen a sense of psychology for that. She saw the need to Fallaray, as to other such men in his position, of a secret romance,—stolen meetings, brief escapes, entrancing interludes, and the desire—the paradox of asceticism—for feminine charms. She had read the story of Parnell and understood it; of Nelson and sympathized with it. She knew the history of other men of absorbing patriotism and great intellect who had kept their optimism and their humanity because of a woman’s tenderness and flattery, and whenever she looked at the picture of Fallaray, in whom she recognized a modern Quixote tilting at windmills, she saw that he stood in urgent need of a woman who could do for him what Madame de Brézé had done for that minister of Louis XIV. During all her intelligent years, therefore, she had conducted herself in the hope, vague and futile as it seemed, of some day being discovered to Fallaray, and in her heart there had grown up a love and a hero worship so strong and so passionate that it could never be transferred to any other man.
The reason, then, why Lola had turned the whole force of her concentration upon entering the house in Dover Street as lady’s maid becomes clear. Here, suddenly, was her chance. Once in this house, in attendance upon Lady Feo, it would be possible for her not only to learn the manners and the language of the only women who were known to Fallaray, but eventually, with luck and strategy, to exercise her gift, as she called it, upon Fallaray himself. What did she care whether, as her aunt had said, she went down a peg in the social scale by becoming a lady’s maid? She would willingly become a crossing sweeper or a beggar girl.
If it were true that Fallaray never went into the side of the house that was occupied by his wife, then she would eventually, when she felt that her apprenticeship had been served, slip into the other side. Like all women she had cunning and like very few courage. Opportunity comes to those who make it and she was ready and eager to undergo any humiliation to try herself, so to speak, on Fallaray. Ernest Treadwell loved her and would, she knew, die for her willingly. There was the hero stuff in him. Other boys, too numerous to mention, would go through fire and water for her kisses. Life was punctuated with turned heads, sudden flashes of eye and everyday attempts to win her favor. Once in that house in Dover Street——