The Passing Bells

by Phillip Rock

  “Rilke, did you say?” The voice fitted the man, deep and growling like a storm at sea. “Any relation to Paul Rilke of Chicago?”

  “My uncle, sir,” Martin said, tensing, expecting a vise squeeze. The big, brown hand was surprisingly gentle.

  “One of my good friends. Saw him two years ago, come to think of it. Right in this room. How is he?”

  “Fine, sir . . . just fine.”

  The brown hand slipped away and joined its mate in a lockfingered grip across a waistcoat broad as a sail. A hawser of gold chain dangled in a loop from the pockets.

  “Then you’d be Hanna Rilke Greville’s nephew as well. Yes. I can see the resemblance.”

  Martin could detect a likeness to Jacob now. It was in the mouth. The same slash of lips. Nothing else was the same, only that. Jacob’s eyes were large and luminous, his father’s tiny, like black beads almost lost in a great meaty, sunburned face.

  Jacob leaned across the table and placed the tightly rolled sheaf of articles in front of the press lord.

  “Young Rilke here took a Cook’s tour of jolly old England and came back with some very amusing observations of about a thousand words each. I’d like you to read them.”

  Lord Crewe merely glanced at them. “If you say they’re good, Jacob, give them to Blakely.”

  Jacob scooped up the articles and shoved the roll under his arm like a baton. “Right. My idea is to run a short column every day by Rilke . . . his unjaundiced view of the London social and sporting scene. Use a nom de plume . . . Yankee Cousin, or something on that order. He’s staying with the Grevilles, which gives him an inside look at society high jinks. . . . Thus the nom de plume, Rilke. Can’t have you being accused of biting the hand that feeds you, can we?”

  “He can feed himself,” Lord Crewe rumbled. “We’ve never been accused of underpaying our correspondents.”

  A harassed-looking young man darted up to the table with handfuls of paper torn from the Teletype machines.

  “Berlin and St. Petersburg reports, sir.”

  Lord Crewe snatched them from the man’s hand and read through them rapidly. His face was expressionless, the carved figurehead on a ship’s prow. When he was through with them, he tossed them casually aside.

  “I’ll have a few memorandums to shoot down. Ask Miss Fisher to come over.”

  “Yes, sir,” the young man said, hurrying away.

  Lord Crewe looked at his son with a faint smile. “All your fears are proving groundless. Serenity reigns. The world is used to Hapsburgs getting themselves murdered. The new heir apparent is well thought of. Not a ripple in the European pond.”

  “Still waters run deep,” Jacob said. “I do believe.”

  Lord Crewe settled back in his chair. “Get on with your work, Jacob. And have the decency to telephone your mother once in a while.”

  They returned to the bedlam below.

  “Well, Rilke,” Jacob said, “how does it feel to be writing for the most powerful newspaper in the world?”

  “Pretty good . . . but I can’t stay with the Grevilles. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “You’ll have a hard time finding suitable lodgings, old boy. This is the height of the season and London’s bursting at the seams. Tell you what, I have more rooms than I know what to do with . . . a big old flat in Soho above the finest Hungarian restaurant this side of the Danube. And I know you’ll like the digs, Rilke. Every chorus girl in London has a key to the place.”

  By leaning out of the garret window and craning her head to see around a chimney, Ivy Thaxton had a fine view of Mayfair. True, a bit lopsided, more roofs than streets to be seen, but, still, it was London and she was there.

  Dear Mum and Da and my own dearest sisters Mary and Cissy and brothers Ned and Tom and our own dear baby Albert Edward. I am penning this to you all in London town. Oh, it is the grandest place you ever did see.

  Just below the window there was a flat, secluded spot near the base of the tall chimney that had probably been used during the building of the house to stack slates for the roofers. It was an easy matter to climb out the window with notebook and pencil and to sit with her back against the chimney. The roof was a wonder that she would have loved to explore, a vast place of triangular slate hills running in all directions, with narrow valleys in between to catch the rain. In the winter, those valleys would be rushing torrents of black water tumbling to the drains. Rising amid the sharp ridges was a forest of chimneys and vents, some of them emitting clouds of steam or black smoke like thin volcanoes. Her happiest moments of the long day were the few minutes she could sneak in total aloneness by popping out the window with the sureness and silence of a cat.

  The sun was hot, and she turned her face to it for a moment and closed her eyes. The sun was thought to be death to a woman’s beauty—she had read that somewhere—but Norfolk girls loved the sun because there was so little of it to be seen in the watery, misty fens.

  The letter had been started days before, but she had so little time to complete it. Velda Jessup had thrown a fit of some kind shortly after they arrived in London, falling to the floor and frothing at the mouth. She had been carried out of the house on a stretcher, her body rigid as a broomstick. Her inopportune departure had created a crisis, as Miss Alexandra was left without a lady’s maid at the hour of her greatest need for one. Mrs. Broome, who ran the Park Lane house with the same calm sureness with which she ran Abingdon Pryory, had given the job to Ivy.

  “It’s a big step up the ladder, my girl.”

  It was also hard work. Alexandra was in a perpetual fever of activity, her days and nights spent at parties, balls, fetes, luncheons, garden-party teas, dinners, dances, riding in Rotten Row, attending fashion shows, concerts, and plays. Each activity required a new costume, from shoes to hat, and she could never make up her mind about just which dress she wanted to wear. She would try on a dozen before settling for one that halfway pleased her. And talk! The girl never ceased. A constant stream of chatter about this boy and that boy, and should she marry a barrister or should she give her hand and heart to a dashing hussar who was the youngest son of a duke? And gossip, gossip, gossip, as Ivy struggled to turn up a hem or sew on a button. Lady Jane Blake, it was rumored, was seen at the Cafe Royal with a devastatingly handsome Russian ballet dancer, while Lord Blake, surely the ugliest little man in London, was away in Dublin. And had Ivy heard the hilarious bon mot that George Bernard Shaw had uttered to Granville-Barker in the foyer of the Lyceum?

  Ivy smiled in the blessed sun-filled tranquillity of the rooftop, lulled by the muted rumble of traffic and the cooing of a pigeon preening itself on a chimney pot. George Bernard Shaw indeed! How could she have possibly heard what the man had said. And who was Granville-Barker? She truly liked Miss Alexandra, but she was a flibbertigibbet if there ever was one.

  Dear Mum and Da and my own dearest sisters . . .

  The words seemed to wriggle across the page in the heat. She licked the point of her pencil and placed it against the notebook, but she couldn’t get her thoughts together.

  I am penning this to you all in London town. Oh, it is the grandest place you ever did see.

  That was true enough—what she had seen of it on a few shopping trips with Miss Alexandra and one afternoon off, which she had spent sitting in Hyde Park watching the rowers on the Serpentine. Ross had offered to take her to the pictures, but she had overheard one of the parlormaids telling another maid what Ross liked to do in the dark of the picture palace.

  “Put his hand clear up me knickers,” the girl had said, tittering. Tittering! Ivy glared up at the pigeon. If any man did a thing like that to her, she’d make him titter, right out the other side of his mouth. She began to write in a slow, precise hand:

  I have been given a much more enjoyable and responsible job here, quite a rung up for your Ivy . . .

  Was it? She stared thoughtfully into space. What was she? A lady’s maid. Ironing and sewing and smoothing, folding things into drawers and hanging things
in closets all day and half the night, too. Miss Alexandra never put so much as a stocking in its proper place, but then one didn’t keep a dog and expect to do the barking.

  How cheeky the pigeon was, strutting back and forth as though it owned the house beneath its tiny feet. The true London spirit all right. She had noticed that in the park, the London air, everyone strutting along the paths, rich and poor alike, cocky as lords. She had sat on a bench in her plain brown dress, one hand pressed to the crown of her straw sailor hat to keep it from spinning away across the pond in the wind. Three girls had come along the path, sharing a bag of sweets between them, nice-looking girls, her age or perhaps a bit older. Well dressed. Nice linen skirts, white shirtwaists. They had sat for a moment on the bench, talking and laughing, and then one of them had drawn a silver watch on a silver chain from a small pocket in her shirt and had glanced at it and said: “Oh, my, we’d best get back to the office or Mr. Parrot will be ever so upset.”

  The other two girls had laughed merrily, and one of them had replied, cheeky as can be: “Well, you know what Mr. Parrot can do!”

  Then they had walked on, not hurrying one bit, down the path toward Stanhope Gate and on into the great city to work in an office somewhere—and surely no later than six in the evening. Typing, she supposed. They hadn’t taught typing at school. Hadn’t taught much of anything, if it came to that. How to do sums, read, and spell. The library in Norwich had been her real school. The books of Dickens, Thackeray, Galsworthy, Austen, and, oh, all the building contained, but nothing of any practical use.

  . . . quite a rung up for your Ivy, and Mrs. Broome said that I’d be making an extra shilling a week from now on.

  It was too much of an effort to write. Her heart wasn’t in it and she couldn’t keep her thoughts from wandering all over the landscape. It was almost with relief that she heard the sound of Mrs. Broome’s voice calling for her.

  “Ivy? Jane, where is Ivy Thaxton?”

  The girl was sure to tell. She shared the garret room with four girls. Sneaks all.

  “Out the window, Mrs. Broome. I told her. I said, ‘Ivy,’ I said . . .”

  Ivy sighed and closed the notebook. Looking up, she saw Mrs. Broome’s incredulous face in the garret window.

  “Ivy Thaxton! You come up from there this instant before you fall to your death!”

  “It’s impossible to fall, Mrs. Broome.”

  “Perhaps. It is also impossible to permit one of his lordship’s staff to scamper across the rooftops like a common chimney sweep! Come up! Come up at once!”

  She returned to the small stuffy garret, climbing in the window with the same agility with which she had climbed out of it. She brushed dust from her skirt while Mrs. Broome stared coldly at her and the other girl in the room pressed a hand to her mouth to keep from laughing.

  “Honestly, Ivy,” Mrs. Broome said, “you are incorrigible. Never let me see you out there again.”

  “No, Mrs. Broome . . . you won’t.”

  The housekeeper appeared dubious. “Well, we shall see what we shall see. At least I won’t have to concern myself with your extraordinary behavior for the next few days. Miss Alexandra has been invited to Arundel. You will go with her, of course. So hurry along and begin packing. Your mistress will choose her dresses, but you can get started on the underthings and accessories.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Broome.”

  “Take an extra dress for yourself and plenty of clean aprons and caps.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Broome.”

  “And don’t look so penitent, girl. You’re not fooling me one bit. Sitting on a roof indeed!”

  They would be leaving first thing in the morning, the eight-thirty train from Victoria. Miss Alexandra was more bubbly and talkative than usual as she agonized over her selection of clothing. The occasion was a three-day house party at the Duke of Avon’s ancient, beautiful, but restored (all the modern conveniences) castle. She had gone to school with the duke’s daughter, and all the most eligible bachelors in England, perhaps in the entire empire, had been invited.

  “Oh, Lord, I can’t possibly be seen in this rag!”

  By eleven o’clock that night, the clothes had been selected and carefully packed away. Supper had been brought up on a tray—sandwiches and tea. Ivy barely had two bites of a ham sandwich, being too busy smoothing dresses and skirts.

  “Should I take the taffeta? Do you like the yellow silk from Worth’s?”

  A hem or two needed a few stitches, a button or so was gone and had to be replaced. At last all of the work was done, the cream-colored leather trunks with the Greville coat of arms embossed upon them in gold leaf closed and ready for the footmen to take downstairs in the morning. A three-day house party! Ivy shuddered to think what would have been involved if her mistress had decided to take a world cruise.

  “Good night, Ivy. Be up bright and early in the morning.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  She walked wearily down the corridor and then up the curved staircase to the third floor, where a narrow stairway led to the garret rooms. As she passed one of the doors that faced the landing, it opened and Martin Rilke stepped out. He was wearing a bathrobe and was holding a toothbrush and a tube of Pepsodent.

  “Ivy . . . Thaxton?” he asked, smiling.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, staring blankly at him.

  “Don’t you remember me?”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir. Mr. Rilke from Chicago.”

  “Right! Stockyards and railroads.” She was looking at him curiously, and he suddenly felt at a loss for words. He wanted to say that he’d been hoping to run into her again, that she was just about the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, but he knew that would only confuse and embarrass her. In England, gentlemen didn’t speak to maids that way. Maybe they didn’t do it in America, either. But then he’d never grown up around maids.

  “Well,” he said helplessly. “How do you like being up here in London? Do you miss the country?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you come from here? I mean, are you a Londoner?”

  “No, sir. I come from Illingsham, near Norwich.”

  He hadn’t been to either place on the tour. He was starting to feel silly standing in the hall in his robe, holding toothbrush and paste. He couldn’t think of another thing to say to her.

  “Are you going back to America soon?” she asked.

  “No,” he said quickly, glad that she had broken the impasse. “I’ve got a job on the Daily Post. I’ll be in England for another couple of months, but I’ll be leaving here tomorrow . . . moving in with a friend in Soho.”

  “That should be nice. I’m going down to Arundel tomorrow with Miss Alexandra.”

  “That should be nice, too.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, looking away from him and starting off down the hall toward the garret stairs. “Good night, sir.”

  Two of the girls in the room snored—loudly. Great fleshy lumps of girls, both Scots, strong as horses. They worked in the kitchen and their hands were beet red from being in water so much. They labored like navvies, and she didn’t have the heart to wake them and tell them to turn over on their sides. The other two girls were Irish, parlormaids, sisters from Belfast. God’s wrath couldn’t have wakened them.

  Ivy sat up in her narrow bed and then got out of it to stand by the window. She could see the dark shapes of a dozen pigeons on the chimney, huddled against the tall pots. There was hardly any sound of traffic. The city was asleep—or holding its breath on the brink of July.

  Dear Mum and Da and my own dearest sisters Mary and Cissy and brothers Ned and Tom and our own dear baby Albert Edward. I am penning this to you in my thoughts on a hot night in London town. Tomorrow I go to Arundel to stay at the castle of a duke. I have met a very nice young American who is from Chicago, in the state of Illinois, on Lake Michigan as Tom will understand because we both know the atlas better than we know the streets of Illingsham. He is quite taken by me, I think, but bashful and shy and he knows his pl
ace. He wouldn’t dare say, Ivy, may I go walking with you tomorrow? Or, Ivy, may I take you to the pictures on Saturday? After all, he is really nothing but an American boy with shabby suitcases and pajamas that are a bit thin in the knees. Tomorrow I go to Arundel to the castle of a duke. The plumbing, I believe, is sound. Every eligible bachelor in the world will be there, and I will startle them with my inexhaustible supply of starched aprons and crisp caps.

  “Damn,” she said softly, staring out across the shadowed roof, the sleeping city. “Damn . . . damn . . . damn.”

  7

  Charles Greville emerged from the cool foyer of the Carlton Club and waited patiently in the afternoon heat for the doorman to signal a taxi. To anyone passing by he looked elegant, cool, and detached—attributes that one would expect of any man leaving the Carlton. Inside, he was seething. He had just left his father, and absolutely nothing had been resolved. They had had lunch together: Scotch grouse and a superb bottle of hock followed by fruit, cheese, and a hundred-year-old brandy. His father had waited for the brandy before toasting his birthday.

  “To the twenty-third of July. The date of my son’s birth. May it always be a day of sunshine.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “Drink up, my boy. A true Napoleon.”

  His father had been in a good mood. The season was beginning to wind down, more and more people were moving out of London, back to their country estates. He could decently do the same. Abingdon Pryory would be back in full swing by Bank Holiday.

  “I tell you, Charles, I miss the horses, damned if I don’t. Banks will have ’em in shape to suit Banks, but I like ’em a good deal leaner. I’ll have to run the fat off them. And speaking of horses, my lad, why don’t you come with me in September and ride in the Tetbury? Be like old times.”

  “Perhaps I’ll do that, Father.”