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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




"_Pardon, chère madame_. It was this maniac of an André. He is mad or
worse. Years ago I told him he ought to be a sergeant in a barrack square."

"Just so!" cried Elodie. "Look at him now. Here he is as soft as two
pennyworth of butter. But in the theatre, if things do not go quite as he
wants them--oh la la! It is Right turn--Quick march! Brr! And I who speak
have to do just the same as the others."

"I know," said Bakkus. "A Prussian without bowels. Ah, my poor Elodie! My
heart bleeds for you."

"Where do you keep it--that organ?" asked Andrew.

"He keeps it," retorted Elodie, "where you haven't got it. Horace
understands me. You don't. Horace and I are going to talk. You smoke your
cigar and think of battles and don't interfere."

It was said laughingly, so that Andrew had no cause for protest; but
beneath the remark ran a streak of significance. She resented the serious
tone at which Andrew had led the conversation. He and his military studies
and his war of the future! They bored her to extinction. She glanced at him
obliquely. A young man of thirty, he behaved himself like the senior of
this youthful, flashing, elderly man who had the gift of laughter and could
pluck out for her all that she had of spontaneity in life.

This conversation was typical of many which filled Elodie's head with
an illusion of the brilliant genius of Horatio Bakkus. In spite of her
peevishness she had a wholesome respect for Andrew--for his honesty, his
singleness of purpose, his gentle masterfulness. But, all the same, their
common detection of the drill-sergeant in his nature formed a sympathetic
bond between Bakkus and herself. In the back of her mind, she set Andrew
down as a dull dog. For all his poring over books, Bakkus could defeat him
any day in argument. The agreeable villain's mastery of phrase fascinated
her. And what he didn't know about the subtle delicacies of women's
temperament was not worth knowing. She could tell him any thing and count
on sympathy; whereas Andrew knew less about women than about his poodle
dog.

There was, I say, this mid-period of their union when they grew almost
estranged. Andrew, in spite of his loyalty, began to regret. He remembered
the young girl who had rushed to him so tearfully as he was bending over
the body of Prépimpin--the flashing vision of the women of another world.
In such a one would he find the divine companionship. She would stand with
him, their souls melting together in awe before the majesty of Chartres,
in worship before the dreaming spires of Rheims, in joy before the smiling
beauty of Azay-le-Rideau. They would find a world of things to say of the
rugged fairyland of Auvergne or the swooning loveliness of the Côte d'Azur.
They would hear each other's heart beating as they viewed great pictures,
their pulses would throb together as they listened to great opera. He would
lie at her feet as she read the poets that she loved. She would also take
an affectionate interest in military strategy. She would be different, oh,
so different from Elodie. To Elodie, save for the comfort of inns, the
accommodation of dressing-rooms and the appreciation of audiences, one town
was exactly the same as another. She found amusement in sitting at a café
with a glass of syrup and water in front of her, and listening to a band;
otherwise she had no æsthetic sense. She used terms regarding cathedrals
and pictures for which boredom is the mildly polite euphemism. A busy
street gay with shop windows attracted her far more than any grandeur of
natural scenery. She loved displays of cheap millinery and underwear.
Andrew could not imagine the Other One requiring his responsive ecstasy
over a fifteen-franc purple hat with a green feather, or a pile of silk
stockings at four francs fifty a pair ... The Other One, in a moment of
delicious weakness, might stand enraptured before a dream of old lace or
exquisite tissue or what not, and it would be his joy to take her by the
hand, enter the shop and say "It is yours." But Elodie had no such moments.
Her economical habits gave him no chance of divine extravagance. Even when
he took her in to buy the fifteen-franc hat, she put him to shame by trying
to bargain.

So they lost touch with each other until a bird or two brought them
together again. Figuratively it is the history of most unions. In theirs,
the birds were corporeal. It was at Montpellier. An old man had a turn with
a set of performing birds, canaries, perroquets, love-birds, beauregards.
Elodie came across him rehearsing on the stage. She watched the rehearsal
fascinated. Then she approached the cages.

_"Faites attention, Madame,"_ cried the old man in alarm. "You will
scare them. They know no one but me."

_"Mais non, mais non,"_ said Elodie. _"Voyons, ça me connaît."_

She spoke from idle braggadocio. But when she put her hands on the cages,
the birds came to her. They hopped about her fearlessly. She fished in
her pockets for chocolate--her only extravagant vice--and bird after bird
pecked at the sweet from her mouth. The old man said:

"Truly the birds know you, Madame. It is a gift. No one can tell whence
it comes--and it comes to very few. There are also human beings for whom
snakes have a natural affinity."

Elodie shuddered. "Snakes! I prefer birds. Ah, _le petit amour. Viens
donc!_"

She had them all about her, on head and shoulders and arms, all unafraid,
all content; then all fluttering with their clipped wings, about her lips,
except a grey parrot who rubbed his beak against her ear.

Andrew, emerging suddenly from the wings, stood wonder-stricken.

"But you are a bird-woman," said he. "I have heard of such, but never seen
one."

From that moment, the town-bred, town-compelled woman who had thought of
bird-life only in terms of sparrows, set about to test her unsuspected
powers. And what the old man and Andrew had said was true.... They wandered
to the Peyrou, the beautiful Louis XIV terraced head of the great aqueduct,
and sat in the garden--she alone, Andrew some yards apart--and once a few
crumbs attracted a bird, it would hop nearer and nearer, and if she was
very still it would light on her finger and eat out of the palm of her
hand, and if she were very gentle, she could stroke the wild thing's head
and plumage.

A new and wonderful interest came into her life. To find birds, Elodie, who
by this time hated walking from hotel to music-hall, so had her indolence
grown accustomed to the luxurious car, tramped for miles through the woods
accompanied by Andrew almost as excited as herself at the new discovery.
And he bought her books on birds, from which she could learn their names,
their distinguishing colours and marks, their habits and their cries.

It must be remarked that the enthusiastic search for knowledge, involving,
as it did, much physical exertion, lasted only a summer. But it sufficed
to re-establish friendly relations between the drifting pair. She found an
interest in life apart from the professional routine. During the autumn and
winter she devoted herself to the training of birds, and Andrew gave her
the benefit of his life's experience in the science. They travelled about
with an aviary. And while Andrew, now unreproached, frowned, pencil in hand
and notebook by his side, over the strategics of the Franco-Prussian War,
Elodie, always in her slatternly wrapper, spent enraptured hours in putting
her feathered troupe through their pretty tricks or in playing with them
foolishly as one plays with a dog.

Thus their midway mutual grievances imperceptibly vanished. The positive
was eliminated from their relations. They had been beginning to hate each
other. Hatred ceased. Perhaps Elodie dreamed now and then of the Perfect
Lover. Andrew had ever at the back of his soul the Far-away Princess, the
Other One, the Being who would enable him to formulate a mode of nebulous
existence and spiritual chaos, and then to live the wondrous life recalled
by the magical formula. I must insist on this, so that you can recognize
that the young and successful mountebank, although dead set on the
perfection of his mountebankery, and, in serious fact, never dreaming of
a work-a-day existence outside the walls of a Variety Theatre yet had the
tentacles of his being spread gropingly, blindly, octopus-like, to the
major potentialities of life. Even when looking back upon himself, as he
does in the crude manuscript, he cannot account for these unconscious, or
subconscious, feelings. He has no idea of the cause of the fascination
wrought on him by military technicalities. It might have been chess, it
might have been conchology, it might have been heraldry. Hobbies are more
or less unaccountable. In view of his later career it seems to me that he
found in the unalluring textbooks of Clausewitz and Foch and those bound in
red covers for the use of the staff of the British Army, some expressions
of a man's work--which was absent from the sphere into which fate had set
him clad in green silk tights. The subject was instinct with the commanding
brain. If his lot had been cast in the theatre proper, instead of in the
music-hall, he might have become a great manager. However, all that is by
the way. The important thing, for the time we are dealing with, is his
relations with Elodie for the remainder half of their union before the war.
These, I have said, ceased to be positive. They accepted their united life
as they accepted the rain and the sunshine and the long motor journeys from
town to town. Spiritually they went each their respective ways, unmolested
by the other. But they each formed an integral part of the other's
existence. They were bound by the indissoluble ties of habit. And as
Elodie, now that she had got her birds to amuse her, made no demands on
Andrew, and as Andrew, who had schooled his tidy soul to toleration of her
slovenliness, made no demands on Elodie, they were about as happy as any
pair in France.

When she passed thirty, her face coarsened and her uncared-for figure began
to spread.

And then the war broke out.




Chapter XI



The outbreak of war knocked the Petit Patou variety combination silly, as
it knocked many thousands of other combinations in France. One day it was a
going concern worth a pretty sum of money; the next day it was gone.

They happened to be in Paris, putting in a fortnight's rest after an
exhausting four months on the road, and waiting for the beginning of a
beautiful tour booked for Aix-les-Bains, for the race-weeks at Dieppe and
Deauville, for Biarritz--the cream of August and September resorts of the
wealthy.... Then, in a dazzling flash, mobilization. No more actors,
no more stage hands, no more croupiers, no more punters, no more
theatre-goers. No more anything but all sorts and conditions of men getting
into uniform and all sorts and conditions of women trying to smile but
weeping inward blood. Contracts, such as Andrew's, were blown away like
thistledown.

Peremptory authorities required Andrew's papers. They had done so years
before when he reached the age of military service. But now, as then, they
proved Andrew indisputably to be a British subject--he had to thank Ben
Flint for that--and the authorities went their growling way.

"What luck!" cried Elodie, when she heard the result of the perquisition.
"Otherwise you would have been taken and sent off to this _sale
guerre._"

"I'm not so sure," replied Andrew, with a grim set of his ugly jaw, "that
I'm not going off to the _sale guerre,_ without being sent."

"But it is idiotic, what you say!" cried Elodie, in consternation. "What do
you think, Horace?"

Bakkus threw a pair of Elodie's corsets which encumbered the other end of
the sofa on which he was lounging on to the floor and put up his feet and
sucked at his cigar, one of Andrew's best--the box, by the way, Elodie,
who kept the key of a treasure cupboard, seldom brought out except for
Bakkus--and said:

"Andrew isn't a very intellectual being. He bases his actions on formulas.
Such people in times of stress even forget the process of thought that led
to the establishment of the formulas. They shrink into a kind of trained
animal. Andrew here is just like a little dog ready to do his tricks. Some
voice which he can't resist will soon say, 'Bingo, die for your country.'
And our good friend, without changing a muscle of his ugly face, will
stretch himself out dead on the floor."

"Truth," said Andrew, with a hard glint in his eyes, "does sometimes issue
from the lips of a fool."

Bakkus laughed, passing his hand over his silvering locks; but Elodie
looked very serious. Absent-mindedly she picked up her corsets, and, the
weather being sultry, she fanned herself with them.

"You are going to enlist in the Legion?"

"I am an Englishman, and my duty is towards my own country."

"Bingo is an English dog," said Bakkus.

Reaction from gladness made Elodie's heart grow cold, filled it with sudden
dread. It was hard. Most of the women of France were losing their men of
vile necessity. She, one of the few privileged by law to retain her man,
now saw him swept away in the stream. Protest could be of no avail. When
the mild Andrew set his mug of a face like that--his long smiling lips
merged into each other like two slugs, and his eyes narrowed to little pin
points, she knew that neither she nor any woman nor any man nor the _bon
Dieu_ Himself could move him from his purpose. She could only smile
rather miserably.

"Isn't it a little bit mad, your idea?"

"Mad? Of course he is," said Bakkus. "Much reading in military text-books
has made him mad. A considerably less interesting fellow than Andrew, who,
after all, has a modicum of brains, one Don Quixote, achieved immortality
by proceeding along the same lunatic lines."

Then Elodie flashed out. She understood nothing of the allusion, but she
suspected a sneer.

"If I were a man I should fight for France. If Andre thinks it is his
duty to fight for England, it may be mad, but it is fine, all the same.
Yesterday, in the street, I sang the Marseillaise with the rest. _'Amour
sacré de la Patrie.' Eh bien!_ There are other countries besides France.
Do you deny that the _amour sacré_ exists for the Englishman?"

Andrew rose and gravely took Elodie's face in his delicate hands and kissed
her.

"I never did you the wrong, my dear, of thinking you would feel otherwise."

"Neither did I, my good Elodie," said Bakkus, hurriedly opportunist. "If
I have had one ambition in my life it is to sun myself in the vicarious
glamour of a hero."

The corsets rolled off Elodie's lap as she turned swiftly.

"You really think André if he enlists in the English Army will be a hero?"

"Without doubt," replied Bakkus.

"I am glad," said Elodie. "You have such a habit of mocking all the world
that when you are talking of serious things one doesn't know what you
mean."

So peace was made. In the agitated days that followed she saw that a
profound patriotism underlay Bakkus's cynicism, and she relied much on his
counsel. Every man that England could put into the field was a soldier
fighting for France. She glowed at the patriotic idea. Andrew, to his great
gladness, noted that no hint of the cry "What is to become of me?" passed
her lips. She counted on his loyalty as he had counted on hers. When he
informed her of the arrangement he had made with her lawyer for her support
during his absence, all she said was:

_"Mon cher,_ it is far too much! I can live on half. And as for the
will--let us not talk of it. It makes me shiver."

Here came out all that was good in Elodie. She took the war and its
obligations, as she had taken her professional work. Through all her
flabbiness ran the rod of steel. She suffered, looking forward with terror
to the unthinkable future. Already one of her friends, Jeanne Duval,
comedienne, was a widow ... What would life be without André? She trembled
before the illimitable blankness. The habit of him was the habit of her
life, like eating and drinking; his direction her guiding principle. Yet
she dominated her fears and showed a brave face.

Often a neighbour, meeting her in the quarter, would say:

"You are fortunate, Madame. You will not lose your husband." To the
quarter, as indeed to all the world, they were Monsieur and Madame Patou.
"He is an Englishman and won't be called up."

She would flash with proud retort:--

"In England men are not called up. They go voluntarily. Monsieur Patou goes
to join the English army."

She was not going to make her sacrifice for nothing.

To Bakkus Andrew confided the general charge of Elodie.

"My dear fellow," said the cynic, "isn't it rather overdoing your saintly
simplicity? Do you remember the farce 'Occupe-toi d'Amélie?' Do I appeal to
you as a squire of deserted dames, grass-widows endowed with plenty? I--a
man of such indefinite morals that so long as I have mutton cutlets I
don't in the least care who pays for them? Aren't you paying for this very
mouthful now?"

"You are welcome," replied Andrew with a grin, "to all the mutton that
Elodie will give you."

Elodie's only proclaimed grievance against Bakkus, whom otherwise she
vastly admired, was his undisguised passion for free repasts.

When it came to parting, Elodie wept and sobbed. He marvelled at her
emotion.

"You love me so much, my little Elodie?"

_"Mais tu es ma vie toute entière._ Haven't you understood it?"

In that sense--no. He had not understood. They had arranged their lives so
much as business partners, friends, fate-linked humans dependent on each
other for the daily amenities of a joint existence. He had never suspected;
never had cause to suspect, this hidden flood of sentiment. The simple
man's heart responded. For such love she must be repaid. In the packed
train which sped him towards England he carried with him no small remorse
for past indifference.

Now, what next happened to Andrew, is, as I have said before, omitted from
his manuscript. Nor has he vouchsafed to me, in conversation, anything
but the rudest sketch. All we know is that he enlisted straight into the
regular Army, the Grenadier Guards. Millions of Tommies have passed through
his earlier experiences. His gymnastic training, his professional habits
of accuracy and his serious yet alert mind bore him swiftly through
preliminary stages to high efficiency. In November, 1914, he found himself
in Flanders. Wounded, a few months afterwards, he was sent home, patched
up, sent back again. Late in 1915, a sergeant, he had his first leave,
which he spent in Paris.

Elodie received him with open arms. She was impressed by the martial
bearing of her ramrod of a man, and she proudly fingered the three stripes
on his sleeve and the D.C.M. ribbon on his breast. She took him for
walks, she who, in her later supineness, hated to put one foot before the
other--by the Grands Boulevards, the Rue Royale, the Place de la Concorde,
the Champs Elysées, hanging on his arm, with a recrudescence of the defiant
air of the Marseilles _gamine._ She made valiant efforts to please
her hero who had bled in great battles and had returned to fight in great
battles again. She had a thousand things to tell him of her life in Paris,
to which the man, weary of the mud and blood of war, listened as though
they were revelations of Paradise. Yet, she had but existed idly day in and
day out, in the eternal wrapper and slippers, with her cage of birds. The
little beasts kept her alive--it was true. One was dull in Paris without
men. And the women of her acquaintance, mostly professional, were in
poverty. They had the same cry, "My dear, lend me ten francs." "My little
Elodie, I am on the rocks, my man is killed." _"Ma bien aimée,_ I am
starving. You who are at ease, let me come and eat with you"--and so on and
so on. Her heart grieved for them; but _que veux-tu?_--one was not a
charitable institution. So it was all very sad and heartrending. To say
nothing of her hourly anxiety. If only the _sale guerre_ would cease
and they could go on tour again! Ah, those happy days!

"Were they, after all, so very happy?" asked Andrew.

"One was contented, free from care."

"But now?"

"May they not come to tell me at any minute that you are killed?"

"That's true," said Andrew gravely.

"And besides--"

She paused.

"Besides, what?"

"I love you more now," replied Elodie.

Which gave Andrew food for thought, whenever he had time at the front to
consider the appetite.

When next he had a short leave it was as a Lieutenant; but Elodie had gone
to Marseilles, braving the tedious third-class journey, to attend her
mother's funeral. There Madame Figasso having died intestate, she battled
with authorities and lawyers and the _huissier_ Boudin who professed
heartbreak at her unfilial insistence on claiming her little inheritance.
With the energy which she always displayed in the serious things of life
she routed them all. She sold the furniture, the dressmaking business,
wrested the greasy bag of savings from the hands of a felonious and
discomfited Boudin, and returned to Paris with some few thousand francs in
her pocket. Horatio Bakkus, meanwhile, had moved into the Saint-Denis flat
to take care of the birds. Nobody in France craving the services of a light
tenor, he would have starved, had not his detested brother the Archdeacon,
a rich man, made him a small allowance. It was a sad day for him when,
after a couple of months' snug lying, he had to betake himself to his attic
under the roof, where he shivered in the coalless city.

"I die of convention," said he. "Behold, you have a spare room centrally
heated. You are virtue itself. I not only occupy the sacred position of
your guardian, but am humiliatingly aware of my supreme lack of attraction.
And yet--"

_"Fich'-moi le camp,"_ laughed Elodie.

And Bakkus took up his old green valise and returned to his eyrie. There
should be no scandal in the Faubourg Saint-Denis if Elodie could help it.
But a few days later--

"_Ah, je m'ennuie, je m'ennuie_," she cried in an accent of boredom.

Then Bakkus elaborated a Machiavellian idea. Why shouldn't she work? At
what? Why, hadn't she a troupe of trained birds? Madame Patou was not
the first comer in the variety world. She could get engagements in the
provinces. How did she know that the war would not last longer than
Andrew's savings?

"_Mon Dieu_, it is true," she said.

Forthwith she went to the agent Moignon. After a few weeks she started
on the road with her aviary, and Bakkus once more left his eyrie to take
charge of the flat in the Faubourg St. Denis.

It came to pass that the next time Andrew and Elodie met in their Paris
house, he wore a Major's crown and the ribbons of the Distinguished Service
Order, the Military Cross and the Legion of Honour. From his letters she
had grasped but little of his career and growing distinction; but the sight
of him drove her mad with pride. If she had loved to parade the Paris
streets with him as a Sergeant, now she could scarcely bear to exist with
him otherwise than in public places. Not only an officer, but almost a
Colonel. And decorated--he, an English officer, with the Legion of Honour!
The British decorations she scarcely understood--but they made a fine
display. The salutes from uniformed men of every nation almost turned her
head. The little restaurant round the corner, where they had eaten for
so many years, suddenly appeared to her an inappropriate setting for his
exalted rank. She railed against its meanness.

"Let us eat then," laughed Andrew, who had not given the matter a thought,
"on the Place de la Madeleine."

But if the Restaurant Mangin in the Faubourg Saint-Denis was too lowly,
the Restaurant Weber frightened her by its extravagance. She hit upon the
middle course of engaging a cook for the wonderful fortnight of his leave
and busying herself with collaborating in the preparation of succulent
meals.

"My dear child," said Andrew, sitting at his own table in the tiny and
seldom-used _salle à manger_ for the first time since their early
disastrous experience of housekeeping, "why in the world haven't we had
this cosiness before?"

He seemed to have entered a new world of sacred domesticity. The outward
material sign of the inward grace drew him nearer to her than all
protestations of affection.

"Why have you waited all these years?" he asked.

Elodie, expansive, rejoicing in the success of the well-cooked dinner,
reproached herself generously. It was all her fault. Before the war she had
been ignorant, idle. But the war had taught her many things. Above all it
had taught her to value her _petit homme_.

"Because you now see him in his true colours," observed Bakkus, who took
for granted a seat at the table as the payment for his guardianship. "The
drill sergeant I always talked to you about."

"Sergeant!" Elodie flung up her head in disdain. "He is _Commandant_.
And see to it that you are not wanting in respect."

"From which outburst of conjugal ferocity, my dear fellow," said Bakkus,
"you can gauge the conscientiousness of my guidance of Elodie during your
absence."

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