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The Mountebank

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Andrew grinned happily. He was full of faith in both of them--loving woman,
loyal friend.

"It is true," said he, "that I have found my vocation."

"What are you going to do when the war is over and Othello's occupation is
gone?"

"I don't think the war will ever be over," he laughed. "It's no good
looking ahead. For the present one has to regard soldiering as a permanent
pursuit."

"I thought so," said Bakkus. "He'll cry when it's over and he can't move
his pretty soldiers about."

"That is true?" asked Elodie, in the tone of one possessed of insight.

Andrew shrugged his shoulders, a French trick out of harmony with his
British uniform.

"Perhaps," said he with a sigh.

"I too," said Elodie, "will be sorry when you become _Petit Patou_
again."

He touched her cheek caressingly with the back of his hand, and smiled.
Strange how the war had brought her the gift of understanding. Never had he
felt so close to her.

"All the same," added Elodie, "it is very dangerous _là-bas, mon
chéri_--and I don't want you to get killed."

"All the glory and none of the death," said Bakkus. "Conducted on those
principles, warfare would be ideal employment for the young. But you would
be going back to the Middle Ages, when, if a knight were killed, he was
vastly surprised and annoyed. Personally I hate the war. It prevents me
from earning a living, and insults me with the sense of my age, physical
decay and incapacity. I haven't a good word to say for it."

"If you only went among the wounded in the Paris hospitals," replied
Andrew, with some asperity, "and sang to them--"

"My good fool," said Bakkus, "I've been doing that for about four or five
hours a day since the war began, till I've no voice left."

"Didn't you know?" cried Elodie. "Horace has never worked so hard in his
life. And for nothing. In his way he is a hero like you."

"Why the devil didn't you tell me?" cried Andrew.

Bakkus flung a hand. "If you hadn't to dress the part what should I have
known of your rank and orders? Would you go about saying 'I'm a dam fine
fellow'?"

"I'm sorry," said Andrew, filling his guest's glass. "I ought to have taken
it for granted."

"We give entertainments together," said Elodie. "He sings and I take the
birds. Ah! the poilus. They are like children. When Riquiqui takes off
Paulette's cap they twist themselves up with laughing. _Il faut voir
ça."_

This was all news to Andrew, and it delighted him beyond measure. He could
take away now to the trenches the picture of Elodie as ministering angel
surrounded by her birds--an exquisite, romantic, soul-satisfying picture.

"But why," he asked again, "didn't you tell me?"

_"Ah, tu sais_--letters--I am not very good at letters. _Fante
d'éducation._ I want so much to tell you what I feel that I forget to
tell you what I do."

Bakkus smiled sardonically as he sipped his liqueur brandy. She had given
her bird performance on only two occasions. She had exaggerated it into
the gracious habit of months or years. Just like a woman! Anyhow, the
disillusionment of Andrew was none of his business. The dear old chap was
eating lotus in his Fool's Paradise, thinking it genuine pre-war lotus and
not war _ersatz._ It would be a crime to disabuse him.

For Andrew the days of leave sped quickly. Not a domestic cloud darkened
his relations with Elodie. Through indolent and careless living she had
grown gross and coarse, too unshapely and unseemly for her age. When the
news of his speedy arrival in Paris reached her, she caught sight of
herself in her mirror and with a sudden pang realized her lack of
attraction. In a fever she corseted herself, creamed her face, set
a coiffeur to work his will on her hair. But what retrieval of lost
comeliness could be effected in a day or two? The utmost thing of practical
value she could do was to buy a new, gay dressing-gown and a pair of
high-heeled slippers. And Andrew, conscious of waning beauty, overlooked it
in the light of her new and unsuspected coquetry. Where once the slattern
lolled about the little salon, now moved an attractively garbed and tidy
woman. Instead of the sloven, he found a housewife who made up in zeal for
lack of experience. The patriotic soldier's mate replaced the indifferent
and oft-times querulous partner of Les Petit Patou. It is true that, when,
in answer to the question, "A battle--what is that like?" he tried to
interest her in a scientific exposition, she would interrupt him, a
love-bird on her finger and its beak at her lips, with: "Look, isn't he
sweet?" thereby throwing him out of gear; it is true that she yawned and
frankly confessed her boredom, as she had done for many years when the talk
of Andrew and Bakkus went beyond her intellectual horizon; but--_que
voulez-vous?_--even a great war cannot, in a few months, supply
the deficiencies of thirty uneducated years. The heart, the generous
instinct--these were the things that the war had awakened in Elodie--and
these were the things that mattered and made him so gracious a homecoming.
And she had grasped the inner truth of the war. She had accepted it in the
grand manner, like a daughter of France.

So at least it seemed to Andrew. The depth of her feelings he did not try
to gauge. Into the part in her demonstrativeness played by vanity or by
momentary reaction from the dread of losing him, her means of support, it
never entered his head to enquire. That she should sun herself in reflected
splendour for the benefit of the quarter and of such friends as she had,
and that she should punctiliously exact from them the respect due to his
military rank, afforded him gentle amusement. He knew that, as soon as his
back was turned, she would relapse into slipshod ways. But her efforts
delighted him, proved her love and her loyalty. For the third time he
parted from her to go off to the wars, more impressed than ever by the
sense of his inappreciation of her virtues. He wrote her a long letter of
self-upbraiding for the past, and the contrast between the slimy dug-out
where he was writing by the light of one guttering candle, and the cosy
salon he had just quitted being productive of nostalgia, he expressed
himself, for once in his life, in the terms of an ardent lover.

Elodie, who found his handwriting difficult to read at the best of times,
and undecipherable in hard pencil on thin paper, handed the letter over to
the faithful Bakkus, who read it aloud with a running commentary of ironic
humour. This Andrew did not know till long afterwards.

In a few weeks he got the command of his battalion.

Bakkus wrote:--

"How you'll be able to put up with us now I know not. Elodie can scarcely
put up with herself. She gives orders in writing to tradesmen now and
subscribes herself 'Madame La Colonelle Patou.' She has turned down a bird
engagement offered by Moignon, as beneath her present dignity. You had
better come home as soon as you can."

Andrew laughed and threw the letter away. He had far more serious things to
attend to than Elodie's pretty foibles. And when you are commanding a crack
regiment in a famous division in the line you no more think of leave than
of running away from the enemy. Months passed--of fierce fighting and
incessant strain, and he covered himself with glory and completed the
rainbow row of ribbons on his breast, until Petit Patou and Elodie and
Bakkus and the apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Denis became things of a
far-off dream.

And before he saw Elodie again, he had met Lady Auriol Dayne.




Chapter XII



That was the devil of it. He had met Lady Auriol Dayne. He had found in
that frank and capable young woman--or thought he had found, which comes to
the same thing--the Princesse Lointaine of his dreams. If she differed from
that nebulous and characterless paragon, were less ethereal, more human
nature's daily food, so much the better. She possessed that which he had
yearned for--_quality._ She had style--like the prose of Theophile
Gautier, the Venus of Milo, the Petit Trainon. She suggested Diana, who
more than all goddesses displayed this gift of distinction; yet was she not
too Diana-ish to be unapproachable. On the contrary, she blew about him as
free as the wind.... That, in a muddle-headed way, was his impression of
her: a subtle mingling of nature and artistry. On every side of her he
beheld perfection. Physically, she was as elemental as the primitive woman
superbly developed by daily conditions of hardship and danger; spiritually,
as elemental as the elves and fairies; and over her mind played the wisdom
of the world.

Thus, in trying to account for her to himself, did the honest Lackaday
flounder from trope to metaphor. "To love her," he quotes from Steele, "is
a liberal education."

The last time he met her in England, was after my departure for Paris. You
will remember that just before then he had confided to me his identity
as Petit Patou and had kept me up half the night. It was a dismal April
afternoon, rain and mud outside, a hopeless negation of the spring. They
had the drawing-room to themselves--to no one, the order had gone forth,
was her ladyship at home--that drawing-room of Lady Auriol which Lackaday
regarded as the most exquisite room in the world. It had comfort of soft
chairs and bright fire and the smell of tea and cigarettes; but it also had
the style, to him so precious, with which his fancy invested her. The
note of the room was red lacquer partly inherited, partly collected, the
hangings of a harmonious tone, and the only pictures on the distempered
walls the colour-prints of the late eighteenth century. It had the glow of
smiling austerity, the unseizable, paradoxical quality of herself. An old
Sèvres tea-service rested on a Georgian silver tray, which gleamed in the
firelight. Wherever he looked, he beheld perfection. And pouring out the
tea stood the divinity, a splendid contrast to the shrine, yet again
paradoxically harmonious; full-bosomed, warm and olive, wearing blue serge
coat and skirt, her blouse open at her smooth throat, her cheeks flushed
with walking through the rain, her eyes kind.

For a while, like a Knight in the Venusberg, he gave himself up to the
delight of her. Then suddenly he pulled himself together, and, putting down
his teacup, he said what he had come to say:--

"This is the last time that I shall ever see you."

She started.

"What on earth do you mean? Are you going off to the other end of the
world?"

"I'm going back to France."

"When?"

"To-morrow morning."

She twisted round in her chair, her elbow on the arm and her chin in her
hand and looked at him.

"That's sudden, isn't it?"

He smiled rather sadly. "When once you've made up your mind, it's best to
act, instead of hanging on."

"You're sure there's no hope in this country?"

"I know I'm as useful as a professional wine-taster will soon be in the
United States."

They laughed, resumed the discussion of many previous meetings. Had he
tried this, that or the other opening? He had tried everything. No one
wanted him.

"So," said he, "I'm making a clean cut and returning to France."

"I'm sorry." She sighed. "Very sorry. You know I am. I hoped you would
remain in England and find some occupation worthy of you--but, after
all--France isn't Central China. We shall still be next-door neighbours.
The Channel can be easily crossed by one of us. You used the word 'ever,'
you know," she added with an air of challenge,

"I did."

"Why?"

"That would take a lot of telling," said Andrew grimly.

"We've got hours, if you choose, in front of us."

"It's not a question of time," said he.

"Then, my good Andrew, what are you talking about?"

"Only that I must return to the place I came from, my dear friend. Let it
rest at that."

She lit a cigarette. "Rather fatalistic, isn't it?"

"Four years of fighting make one so."

"You speak," said she, after a little reflection occasioning knitting of
the brows, "you speak like the Mysterious Unknown of the old legends--the
being sent from Hell or Heaven or any other old place to the earth to
accomplish a mission. You know what I mean. He lives the life of the world
into which he is thrown and finds it very much to his liking. But when
the mission is fulfilled--the Powers that sent him say: 'Your time is up.
Return whence you came.' And the poor Make-believe of a human has got to
vanish."

"You surely aren't jesting?" he asked.

"No," she said. "God forbid! I've too deep a regard for you. Besides, I
believe the parable is applicable. Otherwise how can I understand your 'for
ever'?"

"I'm glad you understand without my blundering into an explanation," he
replied. "It's something, as you say. Only the legendary fellow goes back
to cool his heels--or the reverse--in Shadow Land, whereas I'll still
continue to inhabit the comfortable earth. I'm as Earth-bound as can be."

He paused for a moment, and continued:--

"Fate or what you will dragged me from obscurity into the limelight of
the war to play my little part. It's over. I've nothing more to do on the
stage. Fate rings down the curtain. I must go back into obscurity. _La
commedia è finita_."

"It's more like a tragedy," said she.

Andrew made a gesture with his delicate hands.

"A comedy's not a farce. Let us stick to the comedy."

"Less heroically--let us play the game," she suggested.

"If you like to put it that way."

She regarded him searchingly out of frank eyes; her face had grown pale.

"If you gave me the key to your material Shadow Land, it would not be
playing the game?"

"You are right, my dear," said he. "It wouldn't."

"I thought as much," said Lady Auriol.

He rose, mechanically adjusted his jacket, which always went awry on his
gaunt frame. "I want to say something," he declared abruptly. "You're the
only lady--highly-bred woman--with whom I've been on terms of friendship in
my life. It has been an experience far more wonderful than you can possibly
realize. I'll keep it as an imperishable memory"--he spoke bolt upright as
though he were addressing troops on parade before a battle--"it's right
that you should know I'm not ungrateful for all you have done for me. I've
only one ambition left--that you should remember me as a soldier--and--in
my own way--a gentleman."

"A very gallant gentleman," she said with quivering lips.

He held out his hand, took hers, kissed it French fashion.

"Good-bye and God bless you," said he, and marched out of the room.

She stood for a while, with her hand on her heart--suffering a pain that
was almost physical. Then she rushed to the door and cried in a loud voice
over the balustrade of the landing:

"Andrew, come back."

But the slam of the front door drowned her call. She returned to the
drawing-room and threw up the window. Andrew was already far away, tearing
down the rainswept street.

Now, if Andrew had heard the cry, he would have heard that in it which no
man can hear unmoved. He would have leaped up the stairs and there would
have been as pretty a little scene of mutual avowals as you could wish for.
Auriol knew it. She has frankly told me so. Not until this last interview
was she certain of his love. But then, although he said nothing, any fool
of a woman could have seen it as clear as daylight. And she had been
planted there like a stuck pig all the time--her _ipsissima verba_ (O
Diana distinction of lover's fancy!) and when common sense came to her aid,
she just missed him by the fraction of a second.... Yet, after all, my
modern Diana--or Andrew's, if you prefer it--had her own modern mode
of telling an elderly outsider about her love affairs--the mode of the
subaltern from whom is dragged the story of his Victoria Cross. Andrew
Lackaday's quaintly formulated idealizations had their foundations in fact.
This is by the way. What happened next was Lady Auriol's recovery of real
common sense when she withdrew her head and her rained-upon hat from the
window and drew down the sash. She flew to her bedroom, stamped about with
clenched fists until she had dried up at their source the un-Auriol like
tears that threatened to burst forth. Her fury at her weakness spent, she
felt better and strangled the temptation to write him then and there a
summons to return that evening for a full explanation. My God! Hadn't they
had their explanation? If he could in honour have said, "I am a free live
man as you are a free live woman, and I love you as you love me"--wouldn't
he have said it? He was the last man in the world to make a mystery about
nothing. Into the mystery she was too proud to enquire. Enough for her to
know in her heart that he was a gallant gentleman. She should have stopped
at her parable....

Meanwhile she let Andrew return to France unaware of the tumult he had
raised. That he had won her interest, her respect, her friendship--even her
affectionate friendship--he was perfectly aware. But that his divinity was
just foolishly and humanly in love with him he had no notion. He consoled
himself with reflections on her impeccability, her wondrous intuition, her
Far-away Princess-like delicacy. Who but she could have summed up in a
parable the whole dismal situation?

Well, the poor Make-believe had to vanish.

The last time he travelled to Boulogne it was in a military train. He had
a batman who looked after his luggage. He wore a baton and sword on his
shoulder-straps. Only now, a civilian in a packed mass of civilians, did he
recognize what a mighty personage he then was--a cock of the walk,
saluted, "sired," treated with deference. None of the old-fashioned
pit-of-the-theatre scrum for passport inspection, on the smoking-room deck.
And there, on the quay, were staff officers and R.T.O.'s awaiting him with
a great car--no worry about Customs or luggage or anything--everything done
for him by eager young men without his bidding--and he had thought nothing
of it. Indeed, if there had been a hitch in the machinery which conveyed
him to his brigade, he would have made it hot for the defaulter. And
now--with a third share in a porter he struggled through the Customs in the
midst of the perspiring civilian crowd, and, emerging on to the platform,
found a comfortless middle seat in an old German first-class carriage
built for four. There were still many men in uniform, English, French and
American, doing Heaven knows what about the busy station. But none took
notice of him, and he lounged disconsolately by the carriage door waiting
for the train to start. He scarcely knew which of his experiences, then or
now, was an illusion.

In spite of the civilian horde, women, young girls, mufti-clad men, the
station still preserved a military aspect. A company of blue-clad poilus
sat some way off, in the middle of their packs, eating a scratch meal. Here
and there were bunches of British Tommies, with a sergeant and a desultory
officer, obviously under discipline. It seemed impossible that the war
should be ended--that he, General Lackaday, should have finished with it
for ever.

At last, a young subaltern passed him by, recognized him after a second,
saluted and paused undecided. A few months ago, Andrew would have returned
his salute with brass-hatted majesty, but now he smiled his broad
ear-to-ear smile, thrust out his long arm and gripped the young man's hand.
It was Smithson, one of his brigade staff--a youth of mediocre efficiency,
on whom, as the youth remembered, he was wont most austerely to frown. But
all this Andrew forgot.

"My dear boy," he cried. "How glad I am to see you."

It was as if a survivor from a real world had appeared before him in a land
of dreams. He questioned him animatedly on his doings. The boy responded
wonderingly. At last:--

"When are you going to be demobilized?"

The subaltern smiled. "I hope never, sir. I'm a regular."

"Lucky devil," said Andrew. "Oh, you lucky devil! I'd give anything to
change places with you."

"I'm on, sir," laughed Smithson. "I'm all for being a Brigadier-General."

"Not on the retired list--out of the service," said Andrew.

The train began to move. Andrew jumped hastily into his compartment and,
leaning out of the window before the stout Frenchman, waved a hand to the
insignificant young man in the King's uniform. With all his soul he
envied him the privilege of wearing it. He cursed his stiff-neckedness
in declining the Major's commission offered by the War Office. A line of
Tennyson reminiscent of the days when Bakkus had guided his reading came
into his head. Something about a man's own angry pride being cap and bells
for a fool. He tried to find repose against the edge of the sharp double
curve that divided the carriage side into two portions. The trivial
discomfort irritated him. The German compartment might be a symbol of
victory, but it was also a symbol of the end of the war, the end of the
only intense life full of meaning which he had ever known.

As the train went on, he caught sight from the window of immense stores of
war--German waggons with their military destinations still marked in chalk,
painted guns of all calibres, drums of barbed wire, higgledy-piggledy
truck-loads of scrap, all sorts of flotsam and jetsam of the great
conflict. All useless, done with, never to be thought of again, so the
world hoped, in the millennium that was to be brought about by the League
of Nations. Yet it seemed impossible. In wayside camps, at railway
stations, he saw troops of the three great countries. Now and then
train-loads of them passed. It was impossible that the mighty hosts they
represented should soon melt away into the dull flood of civil life. The
war had been such a mighty, such a gallant thing. Of course the genius of
mankind must now be bent to the reconstruction of a shattered world. He
knew that. He knew that regret at the ending of the universal slaughter
would be the sentiment of a homicidal lunatic. Yet deep down in his heart
there was some such regret, a gnawing nostalgia.

After Amiens they passed by the battle-fields. A young American officer
sitting by the eastern window pointed them out to him. He explained to
Andrew what places had been British gun emplacements, pointed to the white
chalk lines that had been British trenches. Told him what a trench looked
like. Andrew listened grimly. The youth had pointed out of window again.
Did he know what those were? Those were shell-holes. German shells....
Presently the conductor came through to examine tickets. Andrew drew from
his pocket his worn campaigning note-case and accidently dropped a letter.
The young American politely picked it up, but the typewritten address on
the War Office envelope caught his eye. "Brigadier-General Lackaday, C.B."
He handed it to Andrew, flushing scarlet.

"Is that your name, sir?"

"It is," said Andrew.

"Then I reckon, sir, I've been making a fool of myself."

"Every man," said Andrew, with his disarming smile, "is bound to do that
once in his life. It's best to get it over as soon as possible. That's the
way one learns. Especially in the army."

But the young man's talk had rubbed in his complete civiliandom.

As the train neared Paris, his heart sank lower and lower. The old pre-war
life claimed him mercilessly, and he was frozen with a dread which he had
never felt on the fire-step in the cold dawn awaiting the lagging hour of
zero. On the entrance to the Gare du Nord he went into the corridor and
looked through the window. He saw Elodie afar off. Elodie, in a hat over
her eyes, a fur round her neck, her skirt cut nearly up to her knees
showing fat, white-stockinged calves. She had put on much flesh. The great
train stopped and vomited forth its horde of scurrying humans.

Elodie caught sight of him and rushed and threw herself into his arms, and
embraced him rapturously.

"Oh, my André, it is good to have you back. _O mon petit homme_--how
I have been longing for this moment. Now the war is finished, you will not
leave me again ever. _Et te voilà Général_. You must be proud, eh? But
your uniform? I who had made certain I should see you in uniform."

He smiled at her characteristic pounce on externals.

"I no longer belong to the Army, my little Elodie," he replied, walking
with her, his porter in front, to the barrier.

"_Mais tu es toujours Général?_" she asked anxiously.

"I keep the rank," said Andrew.

"And the uniform? You can wear it? You will put it on sometimes to please
me?"

They drove home through twilight Paris, her arm passed through his, while
she chattered gaily. Was it not good to smell Paris again after London with
its fogs and ugliness and raw beefsteaks? To-night she would give him such
a dinner as he had never eaten in England--and not for two years. Did he
realize that it was two years since he had seen her?

"_Mon Dieu_," said he, "so it is."

"And you are pleased to have me again?"

"Can you doubt it?" he smiled.

"Ah, one never knows. What can't a man do in two years? Especially when he
becomes a high personage, a great General full of honours and decorations."

"The gods of peace have arrived, my little Elodie," said he with a touch of
bitterness, "and the little half-gods of war are eclipsed. If we go to a
restaurant there's no reason why the waiter with his napkin under his arm
shouldn't be an ex-colonel of Zouaves. All the glory of the war has ended,
my dear. A breath. Phew! Out goes the candle."

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