“Skirts must be short when people are doing real work,” Feather said. “And then of course one’s shoes and stockings require attention. I’m not always sure I like leggings however smart they are. Still I often wear them—as a sort of example.”
“Of what?” inquired Coombe who was present
“Oh, well—of what women are willing to do for their country—in time of war. Wearing unbecoming things—and doing without proper food. These food restrictions are enough to cause a revolution.”
She was specially bitter against the food restrictions. If there was one thing men back from the Front—particularly officers—were entitled to, it was unlimited food. The Government ought to attend to it. When a man came back and you invited him to dinner, a nice patriotic thing it was to restrict the number of courses and actually deny him savouries and entrées because they are called luxuries. Who should have luxuries if not the men who were defending England?
“Of course the Tommies don’t need them,” she leniently added. “They never had them and never will. But men who are officers in smart regiments are starving for them. I consider that my best War Work is giving as many dinner parties as possible, and paying as little attention to food restrictions as I can manage by using my wits.”
For some time—in certain quarters even from early days—there had been flowing through many places a current of talk about America. What was she going to do? Was she going to do anything at all? Would it be possible for her hugeness, her power, her wealth to remain inert in a world crisis? Would she be content tacitly to admit the truth of old accusations of commerciality by securing as her part in the superhuman conflict the simple and unadorned making of money through the dire necessities of the world? There was bitterness, there were sneers, there were vague hopes and scathing injustices born of torment and racking dread. Some few were patiently just, because they knew something of the country and its political and social workings and were by chance of those whose points of view included the powers and significances of things not readily to be seen upon the surface of events.
“If there were dollars to be made out of it, of course America would rush in,” was Feather’s decision. “Americans never do anything unless they can make dollars. I never saw a dollar myself, but I believe they are made of green paper. It would be very exciting if they did rush in. They would bring so much money and they spend it as if it were water. Of course they haven’t any proper army, so they’d have to build one up out of all sorts of people.”
“Which was what we were obliged to do ourselves, by the way,” Coombe threw in as a contribution.
“But they will probably have stockbrokers and Wall Street men for officers. Then some of them might give one ‘tips’ about how to make millions in ‘corners.’ I don’t know what corners are but they make enormities out of them. Starling!” with a hilarious tinkle of a laugh, “you know that appallingly gorgeous house of Cherry Cheston’s in Palace Garden—did she ever tell you that it was the result of a ‘tip’ a queer Chicago man managed for her? He liked her. He used to call her ‘Cherry Ripe’ when they were alone. He was big and red and half boyish—sentimental and half blustering. Cherry was ripe, you know, and he liked the ripe style. I should like to have a Chicago stockbroker of my own. I wish the Americans would come in!”
The Dowager Duchess of Darte and Lord Coombe had been of those who had begun their talk of this in the early days.
“Personally I believe they will come in,” Coombe had always said. And on different occasions he had added reasons which, combined, formulated themselves into the following arguments. “We don’t really know much of the Americans though they have been buying and selling and marrying us for some time. Our insular trick of feeling superior has held us mentally aloof from half the globe. But presumably the United States was from the first, in itself, an ideal, pure and simple. It was. It is asinine to pooh-pooh it. A good deal is said about that sort of thing in their histories and speeches. They keep it before each other and it has had the effect of suggesting ideals on all sides. Which has resulted in laying a sort of foundation of men who believe in the ideals and would fight for them. They are good fighters and, when the sincere ones begin, they will plant their flag where the insincere and mere politicians will be forced to stand by it to save their faces. A few louder brays from Berlin, a few more threats of hoofs trampling on the Star Spangled Banner and the fuse will be fired. An American fuse might turn out an amazing thing—because the ideals do exist and ideals are inflammable.”
This had been in the early days spoken of.
Chapter 36
Harrowby and the rest did not carry on their War Work in the slice of a house. It was of an order requiring a more serious atmosphere. Feather saw even the Starling less and less.
“Since the Dowager took her up she’s far too grand for the likes of us,” she said.
So to speak, Feather blew about from one place to another. She had never found life so exciting and excitement had become more vitally necessary to her existence as the years had passed. She still looked extraordinarily youthful and if her face was at times rather marvellous in its white and red, and her lips daring in their pomegranate scarlet, the fine grain of her skin aided her effects and she was dazzlingly in the fashion. She had never worn such enchanting clothes and never had seemed to possess so many.
“I twist my rags together myself,” she used to laugh. “That’s my gift. Hélène says I have genius. I don’t mean that I sit and sew. I have a little slave woman who does that by the day. She admires me and will do anything that I tell her. Things are so delightfully scant and short now that you can cut two or three frocks out of one of your old petticoats—and mine were never very old.”
There was probably a modicum of truth in this—the fact remained that the garments which were more scant and shorter than those of any other feathery person were also more numerous and exquisite. Her patriotic entertainment of soldiers who required her special order of support and recreation was fast and furious. She danced with them at cabarets; she danced as a nymph for patriotic entertainments, with snow-white bare feet and legs and a swathing of Spring woodland green tulle and leaves and primroses. She was such a success that important personages smiled on her and asked her to appear under undreamed of auspices. Secretly triumphant though she was, she never so far lost her head as to do anything which would bore her or cause her to appear at less than an alluring advantage. When she could invent a particularly unique and inspiring shred of a garment to startle the public with, she danced for some noble object and intoxicated herself with the dazzle of light and applause. She found herself strung to her highest pitch of excitement by the air raids, which in the midst of their terrors had the singular effect of exciting many people and filling them with an insane recklessness. Those so excited somehow seemed to feel themselves immune. Feather chattered about “Zepps” as if bombs could only wreak their vengeance upon coast towns and the lower orders.
When Lord Coombe definitely refused to allow her to fit up the roof of the slice of a house as a sort of luxurious Royal Box from which she and her friends might watch the spectacle, she found among her circle acquaintances who shared her thrills and had prepared places for themselves. Sometimes she was even rather indecently exhilarated by her sense of high adventure. The fact was that the excitement of the seething world about her had overstrung her trivial being and turned her light head until it whirled too fast.
“It may seem horrid to say so and I’m not horrid—but I like the war. You know what I mean. London never was so thrilling—with things happening every minute—and all sorts of silly solemn fads swept away so that one can do as one likes. And interesting heroic men coming and going in swarms and being so grateful for kindness and entertainment. One is really doing good all the time—and being adored for it. I own I like being adored myself—and of course one likes doing good. I never was so happy in my life.”
“I used to be rather a coward, I suppose,” she chattered
gaily on another occasion. “I was horribly afraid of things. I believe the War and living among soldiers has had an effect on me and made me braver. The Zepps don’t frighten me at all—at least they excite me so that they make me forget to be frightened. I don’t know what they do to me exactly. The whole thing gets into my head and makes me want to rush about and see everything. I wouldn’t go into a cellar for worlds. I want to see!”
She saw Lord Coombe but infrequently at this time, the truth being that her exhilaration and her War Work fatigued him, apart from which his hours were filled. He also objected to a certain raffishness which in an extremely mixed crowd of patriots rather too obviously “swept away silly old fads” and left the truly advanced to do as they liked. What they liked he did not and was wholly undisturbed by the circumstances of being considered a rigid old fossil. Feather herself had no need of him. An athletic and particularly well favoured young actor who shared her thrills of elation seemed to permeate the atmosphere about her. He and Feather together at times achieved the effect, between raids, of waiting impatiently for a performance and feeling themselves ill treated by the long delays between the acts.
“Are we growing callous, or are we losing our wits through living at such high temperature?” the Duchess asked. “There’s a delirium in the air. Among those who are not shuddering in cellars there are some who seem possessed by a sort of light insanity, half defiance, half excited curiosity. People say exultantly, ‘I had a perfectly splendid view of the last Zepp!’ A mother whose daughter was paying her a visit said to her, ‘ I wish you could have seen the Zepps while you were here. It is such an experience.’”
“They have not been able to bring about the wholesale disaster Germany hoped for and when nothing serious happens there is a relieved feeling that the things are futile after all,” said Coombe. “When the results are tragic they must be hushed up as far as is possible to prevent panic.”
Dowie faithfully sent him her private bulletin. Her first fears of peril had died away, but her sense of mystification had increased and was more deeply touched with awe. She opened certain windows every night and felt that she was living in the world of supernatural things. Robin’s eyes sometimes gave her a ghost of a shock when she came upon her sitting alone with her work in her idle hands. But supported by the testimony of such realities as breakfasts, long untiring walks and unvarying blooming healthfulness, she thanked God hourly.
“Doctor Benton says plain that he has never had such a beautiful case and one that promised so well,” she wrote. “He says she’s as strong as a young doe bounding about on the heather. What he holds is that it’s natural she should be. He is a clever gentleman with some wonderful comforting new ideas about things, my lord. And he tells me I need not look forward with dread as perhaps I had been doing.”
Robin herself wrote to Coombe—letters whose tender-hearted comprehension of what he was doing always held the desire to surround him with the soothing quiet he had so felt when he was with her. What he discovered was that she had been born of the elect,—the women who know what to say, what to let others say and what to beautifully leave unsaid. Her unconscious genius was quite exquisite.
Now and then he made the night journey to Darreuch Castle and each time she met him with her frank childlike kiss he was more amazed and uplifted by her aspect. Their quiet talks together were wonderful things to remember. She had done much fine and dainty work which she showed him with unaffected sweetness. She told him stories of Dowie and Mademoiselle and how they had taught her to sew and embroider. Once she told him the story of her first meeting with Donal—but she passed over the tragedy of their first parting.
“It was too sad,” she said.
He noticed that she never spoke of sad and dark hours. He was convinced that she purposely avoided them and he was profoundly glad.
“I know,” she said once, “ that you do not want me to talk to you about the War.”
“Thank you for knowing it,” he answered. “I come here on a pilgrimage to a shrine where peace is. Darreuch is my shrine.”
“It is mine, too,” was her low response.
“Yes, I think it is,” his look at her was deep. Suddenly but gently he laid his hand on her shoulder.
“I beg you,” he said fervently, “I beg you never to allow yourself to think of it. Blot the accursed thing out of the Universe while—you are here. For you there must be no war.”
“How kind his face looked,” was Robin’s thought as he hesitated a second and then went on:
“I know very little of such—sacrosanct things as mothers and children, but lately I have had fancies of a place for them where there are only smiles and happiness and beauty—as a beginning.”
It was she who now put her hand on his arm. “Little Darreuch is like that—and you gave it to me,” she said.
Chapter 37
Lord Coombe was ushered into the little drawing-room by an extremely immature young footman who—doubtless as a consequence of his immaturity—appeared upon the scene too suddenly. The War left one only servants who were idiots or barely out of Board Schools, Feather said. And in fact it was something suggesting “a scene” upon which Coombe was announced. The athletic and personable young actor—entitled upon programmes Owen Delamore—was striding to and fro talking excitedly. There was theatrical emotion in the air and Feather, delicately flushed and elate, was listening with an air half frightened, half pleased. The immaturity of the footman immediately took fright and the youth turning at once produced the fatal effect of fleeing precipitately.
Mr. Owen Delamore suddenly ceased speaking and would doubtless have flushed vividly if he had not already been so high of colour as to preclude the possibility of his flushing at all. The scene, which was plainly one of emotion, being intruded upon in its midst left him transfixed on his expression of anguish, pleading and reproachful protest—all thrilling and confusing things.
The very serenity of Lord Coombe’s apparently unobserving entrance was perhaps a shock as well as a relief. It took even Feather two or three seconds to break into her bell of a laugh as she shook hands with her visitor.
“Mr. Delamore is going over his big scene in the new play,” she explained with apt swiftness of resource. “It’s very good, but it excites him dreadfully. I’ve been told that great actors don’t let themselves get excited at all, so he ought not to do it, ought he, Lord Coombe?”
Coombe was transcendently well behaved.
“I am a yawning abyss of ignorance in such matters, but I cannot agree with the people who say that emotion can be expressed without feeling.” He himself expressed exteriorly merely intelligent consideration of the idea. “That however may be solely the opinion of one benighted.”
It was so well done that the young athlete, in the relief of relaxed nerves, was almost hysterically inclined to believe in Feather’s adroit statement and to feel that he really had been acting. He was at least able to pull himself together, to become less flushed and to sit down with some approach to an air of being lightly amused at himself.
“Well it is proved that I am not a great actor,” he achieved. “I can’t come anywhere near doing it. I don’t believe Irving ever did—or Coquelin. But perhaps it is one of my recommendations that I don’t aspire to be great. At any rate people only ask to be amused and helped out just now. It will be a long time before they want anything else, it’s my opinion.”
They conversed amiably together for nearly a quarter of an hour before Mr. Owen Delamore went on his way murmuring polite regrets concerning impending rehearsals, his secret gratitude expressing itself in special courtesy to Lord Coombe.
As he was leaving the room, Feather called to him airily:
“If you hear any more of the Zepps—just dash in and tell me!—Don’t lose a minute! Just dash!”
When the front door was heard to close upon him, Coombe remarked casually:
“I will ask you to put an immediate stop to that sort of thing.”
He observed
that Feather fluttered—though she had lightly moved to a table as if to rearrange a flower in a group.
“Put a stop to letting Mr. Delamore go over his scene here?”
“Put a stop to Mr. Delamore, if you please.”
It was at this moment more than ever true that her light being was overstrung and that her light head whirled too fast. This one particular also overstrung young man had shared all her amusements with her and had ended by pleasing her immensely—perhaps to the verge of inspiring a touch of fevered sentiment she had previously never known. She told herself that it was the War when she thought of it. She had however not been clever enough to realise that she was a little losing her head in a way which might not be to her advantage. For the moment she lost it completely. She almost whirled around as she came to Coombe.
“I won’t,” she exclaimed. “I won’t!”
It was a sort of shock to him. She had never done anything like it before. It struck him that he had never before seen her look as she looked at the moment. She was a shade too dazzlingly made up—she had crossed the line on one side of which lies the art which is perfect. Even her dress had a suggestion of wartime lack of restraint in its style and colours.
It was of a strange green and a very long scarf of an intensely vivid violet spangled with silver paillettes was swathed around her bare shoulders and floated from her arms. One of the signs of her excitement was that she kept twisting its ends without knowing that she was touching it. He noted that she wore a big purple amethyst ring—the amethyst too big. Her very voice was less fine in its inflections and as he swiftly took in these points Coombe recognised that they were the actual result of the slight tone of raffishness he had observed as denoting the character of her increasingly mixed circle.