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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




The singer was ending her encore from "La Traviata" when he went down the
iron stairs. Elodie met him punctually, for they had agreed to avoid the
dreary wait. As soon as the stage was set and the curtain up, he went on
and was greeted by a round of applause. Somehow the word had been passed
round the populace that formed the Olympia clientèle. Thenceforward the
performance went without a hitch, to the attentive gratification of the
audience. There was no uproarious demonstration; but they laughed in the
right places and acclaimed satisfactorily his finale on the giant violin.
They gave him a call, to which he responded, leading Elodie by the hand.

For himself, he hardly knew whether to feel relief or contempt, but Elodie,
blindly stumbling through the cages of the performing dogs in the wings,
almost broke down.

"Now all goes well. Confess I was right."

He turned at the bottom of the stairs.

"Yes. I confess. You did what was right to make it go well."

She scanned his face to read his meaning. Of late he had grown so
remote and difficult to understand. He put his arm round her kindly and
smiled--and near by his smile, painted to the upper tip of each ear, was
grotesquely horrible.

"Why yes, little goose. Now everything will go on wheels."

"That is true?" she asked anxiously.

"I swear it," said he.

When they reached the hotel, she swiftly discarded the walking clothes and
slipped on her wrapper in which only was she the real Elodie, and went to
his room and sat on the little narrow bed.

"_Mon ami_," said she, "I have something to tell you. I would not
speak this afternoon because it was necessary that nothing should disturb
your performance."

Andrew lit a pipe and sat down in the straight-backed arm-chair.

"What's the matter?"

"I had to wait an hour at the dentist's. Why those people say one o'clock
when they mean two, except to make you think they are so busy that they do
you a favour to look inside your mouth, and can charge you whatever they
like--thirty francs, the monster charged me--you ought to go and tell him
it was a robbery--"

"My dear," he interrupted, thus cutting out the predicate of her rhetorical
sentence, "you surely couldn't have thought a dentist's fee of thirty
francs would have put me off my work?"

She threw up her arms. "Mon Dieu! Men are stupid! No. Listen. I had to
wait an hour. I had to distract myself--well--you know the supplement to
_L'Illustration_ that has appeared every week during the war--the
pages of photographs of the heroes of France. I found them all collected
in a portfolio on the table. Ah! Some living, but mostly dead. It was
heart-breaking. And do you know what I found? I found this. I stole it."

She drew from her pocket peignoir a crumpled page covered with vignette
photographs of soldiers, a legend underneath each one, and handed it to
Andrew, her thumb indicating a particular portrait.

"There! Look!"

And Andrew looked and beheld the photograph of a handsome, vast
mustachioed, rake-helly officer of Zouaves, labelled as Captain Raoul
Marescaux, who had died gloriously for France on the twenty-sixth of March,
1917.

For a second or two he groped for some association with a far distant past.

"But don't you see?" cried Elodie. "It is my husband. He has been dead for
over two years."




Chapter XVII



The real discussion between them of the change that the death of Raoul
Marescaux might bring about in their relations, did not take place till
the next day. Each felt it as a sudden shock which, as in two chemicals
hitherto mingling in placid fluidity, might cause crystallization. Up to
this point, the errant husband, vanishing years before across the seas in
company with a little modiste of the Place de la Madeleine, had been but a
shadow, less a human being than a legal technicality which stood in way of
their marriage.

Occasionally during the war each had contemplated the possibility of the
husband being killed. A mere fleeting speculation. As Elodie had received
no official news of his death--which is astonishing in view of the French
Republic's accuracy in tracing the _état civil_ of even her obscurest
citizens--she presumed that he was still alive somewhere in the Shadow Land
in which exist monks and Papuans and swell-mobsmen and other members of the
human race with whom she had no concern. And Andrew had been far too busy
to give the fellow whose name he had all but forgotten, more than a passing
thought. But now, there he was, dead, officially reported, with picture and
description and distinction and place and date all complete. The shadow had
melted into the definite Eternity of Shadows.

Andrew rose early, dressed, and, according to his athletic custom, took his
swinging hour's walk through the streets still fresh with the lingering
coolness of the night, and then, after breakfast, entered Elodie's room.
But she was still fast asleep. She seldom rose till near midday. It was
only after lunch, a preoccupied meal, that they found the opportunity for
discussion, in the little stuffy courtyard of the hotel, set round with
dusty tubs of aloes and screened with a trellis of discontented vine. They
sat on a rustic bench by a door and then coffee was served on a blistered
iron table once painted yellow. There were many flies which disturbed the
slumbers of an old mongrel Newfoundland sprawling on the cobbles.

And there he put to her the proposition which he had formulated during the
night.

"My dear," said he, "I have something very important to say to you. You
will listen--eh? You won't interrupt?"

Coffee-cup in hand, she glanced at him swiftly before she sipped.

"As you will."

"Yesterday," said he, "I met a comrade of the war, a Colonel of Australian
artillery. I lunched with him, as you know."

"_Bien_," said Elodie.

"I had a long talk with him. He made certain propositions."

He repeated his conversation with Arbuthnot, described at second hand the
Solomon Islands, the beauties of reef and palm, the delights of a new,
free life and laid before her the guarantee of a competence and the
possibilities of a fortune. As he talked, Elodie's dark face grew sullen
and her eyes hardened. When he paused, she said:

"You are master of your affairs. If you wish to go, you are free. I have no
right to say anything."

"You don't allow me to finish," said he, smiling patiently. "I would not go
there without you."

"_Moi?_" She shifted round on her seat with Southern excitability and
pointed her finger at her bosom. "I go to the other end of the world and
live among savages and Australians who don't talk French--and I who know
no word of English or any other savage tongue? No, my friend. Ask anything
else of me--I give it freely, as I have given it all these years. But not
that."

"You would go with me as my wife, Elodie. We will get married."

"_Pouf!_" said Elodie, contemptuously.

Without any knowledge of the terminal values so precious to women, Andrew
felt a vague apprehension lest he had begun at the wrong end.

"Surely," said he, by way of reparation. "The death of your husband makes a
great difference. Now there is nothing to prevent our marriage."

"There is everything to prevent it," she replied. "You no longer love me."

"The same affection exists," said he, "that has always been between us."

"Then we go on leading the life that we always have led."

"I don't think it very satisfactory," said Andrew.

"I do, if it pleases us to remain together, we remain. If we want to say
'Good-bye' we are free to do so."

He noticed that she wrung her hands nervously together.

"You don't wish to say 'good-bye,' Elodie?" he asked gently.

"Oh, no. It is only not to put ourselves into the impossibility of saying
it."

"While you live, my dear," he replied, "I could never say it to you."

"If you went away to the Antipodes, you would have to say good-bye, my dear
André, for I could not accompany you--never in life. I have heard of these
countries. They may be good for men, but for women--no. Unless one is
archimillionaire, one has no servants. The woman has to keep the house and
wash the floor and cook the meals. And that--you know well--I can't do. It
may be selfish and a little unworthy but _mon Dieu!_--I have always
been frank--that's how I am. And except on tour abroad where we have lived
in hotels where everybody spoke French I have never lived out of France.
That is what I was always saying to myself when you were seeking an
occupation. 'What will happen to me if he does get a foreign appointment?'
I was afraid, oh, terribly afraid. But I said nothing to you. I loved you
too much. But now it is necessary for me to tell you what I have in my
heart. You are free to go to what wild island you like--that is why it
would be absurd for us to marry--but it would be all finished between us."

"That couldn't be," said Andrew. "What would become of you?"

She averted her head and said abruptly, "Don't think of it."

"But I must think of it. During the war----"

"During the war, it was different. _A la guerre comme à la guerre._
We knew it could not last for ever. You loved me. It was natural for me to
accept the support of _mon homme_, like all other women. But now, if
you leave me--no. _N-i-n-i, nini, c'est fini._"

So all Andrew's beautiful dreams faded into mist. He rose and crossed
the little cobbled courtyard and looked out for a while into the shabby
by-street in which the hotel was situated. That Elodie should accompany him
was the only feasible way, from the pecuniary point of view, of carrying
out the vague scheme.

It would be a life, at first, of some roughness and privation. Arbuthnot
had laid the financial side quite clearly before him. He could not expect
to land on the Solomon Islands without capital (and even a borrowed
capital) and expect an income of a thousand pounds a year to drop into his
mouth. If Elodie, although refusing to accompany him, would accept his
allowance, that allowance, would, of arithmetical necessity, be far, far
less than she had enjoyed during the war. Besides, although he was bound
tentatively to suggest it, he knew the odd pride, the rod of steel through
her nature, which he had come up against, to his own great advantage,
time after time during their partnership, and he would have been the most
astonished man in the world had she answered otherwise.

Yes, the dream of coco-nuts and pearls had melted. She was right. Even had
she consented, she would have been a ghastly failure in pioneer Colonial
life. Their existence would have been mildewed and moth-eaten with misery.
She knew herself and her limitations. To go and leave her to starve or earn
a precarious livelihood with her birds, on this post-war music-hall stage
avid for novelty of sensation, were an act as dastardly as that of the late
Raoul Mares-caux who planted her there on the platform of the Gare St.
Lazare while he was on his ways overseas with the modiste of the Place de
la Madeleine.

He turned to find her dabbing her eyes with a couple of square inches of
chiffon which, in spite of its exiguity, had smeared the powder on her
face. He sat down beside her, with his patient smile, and took her hand and
patted it.

"Come, come, my little Elodie. I am not going to leave you. It was only an
idea. If it had attracted you, well and good. But as it doesn't, let us say
no more about it."

"I don't want to hinder you in your life, André," she said brokenly. "_Ça
me donne beaucoup de peine_. But you see, don't you, that I couldn't do
it?"

He soothed her as best he could. Les Petit Patou would invent new business,
of a comicality that would once more make their fortunes. That being so,
why should they not be married?

She looked at him searchingly. "You desire it as much as that?"

"I desire earnestly," said he, "to do what is right."

"Are you sure that it doesn't come from the respectability of an English
General?"

"I don't know how it comes," he replied, hiding the sting of the shrewd
thrust with a laugh, "but it's there, all the same."

"Well, I'll think of it," said Elodie, "but give me time. _Ne m'embête
pas._"

He promised not to worry her. "But tell me," he said, after a few moments'
perplexity, "why were you so agitated all yesterday after you had seen that
photograph?"

Elodie let her hand fall on her lap and regarded him with pitying
astonishment. "_Mon Dieu!_ What do you expect a woman to be when she
learns that her husband, whom she thinks alive, has been killed two years
ago?"

Andrew gave it up.

On the morning of the sailing of the Osway from Marseilles, he called on
Arbuthnot at the Hôtel de Noailles, and told him of his decision.

"I'm sorry," said Arbuthnot, "as sorry as I can be. But in case you care to
change your mind, here's my card."

"And here's mine," said Andrew, and he handed him his card thus inscribed

MONSIEUR PATOU
(_Combinaison des Petit Patou_)
3 rue Falda
Faubourg Saint-Denis
Paris

Arbuthnot looked from the card to Andrew and from Andrew to the card, in
some perplexity.

"Why," said he, "I've seen your bills about the town. You're playing here!
Why the deuce didn't you let me know?"

"I gave a better performance at Bourdon Wood," said Andrew.

Now hereabouts, I ought to say, the famous manuscript ends. Indeed, this
late Marseilles part of it was very hurried and sketchy. The main object
which he had in view--or rather which, in the first inception of the idea,
I had suggested he should have in view--namely, "to interest, perhaps
encourage, at any rate to stimulate the thoughts of many of my old comrades
who have been placed in the same predicament as myself" (as he says in the
letter which accompanied the manuscript) he had abandoned as hopeless. He
had merely jotted things down helter-skelter, diary fashion. I have had to
supplement these notes from his letters and from the confidential talks
which we had, not very long after he had left Marseilles.

From these letters and these talks also, it appears that the tour booked by
Moignon did not prove the disastrous failure prognosticated by the first
two nights at Marseilles. Nowhere did he meet a prewar enthusiasm; but, on
the other hand, nowhere did he encounter the hostility of the Marseilles
audience. At Lyons, owing to certain broad effects, which he knew of old to
be acceptable to that unique, hard-headed, full-bellied, tradition-bound
bourgeoisie, he had an encouraging success. He felt the old power return to
him--the power of playing on the audience as on a musical instrument.
But at Saint-Etienne--a town of operatives--the performance went
disappointingly flat. Before a dull or discontented audience he stood
helpless. No, the old magnetic power had gone.

However, he had recovered the faculty of making his livelihood somehow or
other as Petit Patou, which, he began desperately to feel, was all that
mattered. His soul revolted, but his will prevailed. Elodie accompanied him
in serene content, more flaccid and slatternly than ever in her hotel room,
keenly efficient on the stage.

Now it happened that, a while later, during a visit to some friends in
Shropshire who have nothing to do with this story, I broke down in health.
I have told you before, that liaison work during the war had put out of
action the elderly crock that is Anthony Hylton. Doctors drew undertakers'
faces between the tubes of their stethoscopes as they jabbed about my
heart, and raised their eyebrows over my blood pressure.

Just at this time I had a letter from Lackaday. Incidentally he mentioned
that he was appearing in August at Clermont-Ferrand and that Horatio Bakkus
(who, in his new prosperity, could afford to choose times and seasons) had
arranged to accept a synchronous engagement at the Casino of Royat.

So while my medical advisers were wringing their hands over the practical
inaccessibility and the lack of amenity of Nauheim, whither they had
despatched me unwilling in dreary summers before the war, and while they
were suggesting even more depressing health resorts in the British Isles,
it occurred to me to ask them whether Royat-les-Bains did not contain
broken-down heart repairing works of the first order. They brightened up.

"The place of all places,' said they.

"Write me a chit to a doctor there," said I, "and I'm off at once."

I did not care much about my heart. It has always been playing me tricks
from the day I fell in love with my elder sister's French governess. But
I did care about seeing my friend Lackaday in his reincarnation as Petit
Patou, and I was most curious to make the acquaintance of Elodie and
Horatio Bakkus.

Soon afterwards, therefore, behold me on my way to Clermont-Ferrand, of
which manufacturing town Royat is a suburb.




Chapter XVIII



Without desiring to interfere with the sale of guide-books, I may say that
Clermont-Ferrand is a great big town, the principal city of Auvergne, and
devotes itself to turning out all sorts of things from its factories such
as Michelin and Berguignan tyres, and all sorts of young lawyers, doctors
and schoolmasters from its university. It proudly claims Blaise Pascal as
its distinguished son. It has gardens and broad walks and terraces along
the old ramparts, whence one can see the round-backed pride (with its
little pip on the top) of the encircling mountain range, the Puy de Dôme;
and it also has a wilderness of smelly, narrow little streets with fine
old seventeenth-century mansions hidden in mouldering court-yards behind
dilapidated portes cochères; it has a beautiful romanesque Church in a
hollow, and, on an eminence, an uninteresting restored cathedral whose twin
spires dominate the town for miles around. By way of a main entrance, it
has a great open square, the Place de Jaude, the clanging ganglion of its
tramway system, about which are situated the municipal theatre and the
chief cafés, and from which radiate the main arteries of the city. On the
entrance side rises a vast mass of sculpture surmounted by a statue of
Vercingetorix, the hero of those parts, the gentleman over whose name we
have all broken our teeth when learning to construe Cæsar "_De Bello
Gallico_." Passing him by for the first time, I should have liked to
shake hands with him for old times' sake, to show my lack of ill feeling.

Now that you all know about Clermont-Ferrand, as the ancient writers say, I
will tell you about Royat. You take a tram from Vercingetorix and after
a straight mile you are landed at the foot of a cup of the aforesaid
encircling mountains, and, looking around, when the tram refuses to go
any further owing to lack of rails, you perceive that you are in
Royat-les-Bains. It consists, on the ground floor, as it were, of a white
Etablissement des Bains surrounded by a little park, which is fringed on
the further side by an open-air concert platform and a theatre, of a few
rows of shops, and a couple of cafés. You could play catch with a cricket
ball across it. The hotels are perched around on the slopes of the hills,
so that you may enter stately portals among the shops, but shall be whirled
upwards in a lift to the main floor, whence you look down on the green and
tidy miniature place.

From my room in the Royat Palace Hotel I had a view across the Park, beyond
which I could see the black crowds pouring out of the Clermont-Ferrand
trams. The reason for this frenzied going and coming of human beings
between Clermont-Ferrand and Royat, I could never understand. I believe
tram-riding is a hideous vice. Just connect up by tramlines a place no one
ever wants to go to with another no one ever wants to go from, and in a
week you will have the inhabitants of those respective Sleepy Hollows
running to and fro with the strenuous aimlessness of ants. Progressive
politicians will talk to you of the wonders of transport. Well, transport
or madness, what does it matter? I mean what does it matter to the course
of this narrative?

I had a pleasant room, I say, with a good view blocked above the tram
terminus by a vine-clad mountain. I called on a learned gentleman who knew
all about hearts and blood pressures, he prescribed baths and unpleasant
waters, and my cure began. All this by way of preamble to the statement
that I had comfortably settled down in Royat a week before Les Petit Patou
were billed to appear in Clermont-Ferrand. Having nothing in the world to
do save attend to my internal organs, I spent much time in the old town,
which I had not visited for many years, match-hunting (with indifferent
success) being at first my main practical pursuit. Then a natural curiosity
leading me to enquire the whereabouts of the chief music-halls and vacant
ignorance manifesting itself on the faces of the policemen and waiters
whom I interrogated, I abandoned matches for the chase of music-halls.
Eventually I became aware that I was pursuing a phantom. There were no
music-halls. All had been perverted into picture palaces. I read Lackaday's
letter again. There it was as clear as print.

"So we proceed on our pilgrimage; we are booked for Clermont-Ferrand for
the third week in August. I hate it--because I hate it. But I'm looking
forward to it because my now prosperous friend Bakkus has arranged to sing
during my stay there, at the Casino of Royat."

And sure enough the next day, they stuck up bills by the park gates
announcing the coming of the celebrated tenor, Monsieur Horatio Bakkus.

It was only later that the great flaming poster of a circus--The
Cirque Vendramin--which had pitched its tent for a fortnight past at
Clermont-Ferrand, caught my eye. There it was, amid announcements of all
sorts of clowns and trapezists and Japanese acrobats:

"Special engagement of the world famed eccentrics, Les Petit Patou."

If I uttered profane words, I am sure the Recording Angel followed an
immortal precedent.

In order to spy out the land, I went then and there to the afternoon
performance. The circus was pitched in a disgruntled field somewhere near
the dismally remote railway station. The tent was crowded with the good
inhabitants of Clermont-Ferrand who, since they could not buy sugar or
matches or coal for cooking, must spend their money somewhere. I scarcely
had entered a circus since the good old days of the Cirque Rocambeau.
And what a difference! They had a few uninspiring horses and riders for
convention sake. But the _haute école_ had vanished. Not even a rouged
and painted ghost of Mademoiselle Renée Saint-Maur remained. It was a
ragged, old-fashioned acrobatic entertainment, with the mildewed humour of
antiquated clowns. But they had a star turn--a juggler of the school of
Cinquevallis--an amazing fellow. And then I remembered having seen the name
on the last week's bill, printed in the great eighteen inch letters which
were now devoted to Les Petit Patou.

Next week Lackaday would be the star turn. But still...

I went back to Royat feeling miserable. I was not elated by finding a
letter from Lady Auriol which had been forwarded from my St. James's Street
chambers. She was in Paris organising something in connection with the
devastated districts. She reproached me for not having answered a letter
written a month ago, written at her ancestral home where she had been
summoned to her father's gouty chair side. I might, she said, have had the
politeness to send a line of condolence.... Well, I might: but whether to
her or to Lord Mountshire, whose gout was famous in the early nineties, I
did not know. Yes, I ought to have answered her letter. But then, you see,
I am a villainous correspondent: I was running about, and doctors were
worrying me: and I could not have answered without lying about Andrew
Lackaday who, leaving her without news of himself, had apparently vanished
from her ken. She had asked me all sorts of pointed questions about
Lackaday which I, having by that time read his manuscript, found very
embarrassing to answer. Of course I intended to write. One always does,
in such cases. There was nothing for it now but to make immediate and
honourable amends.

I explained my lack of courtesy, as best I could, bewailed her father's
gout and her dreary ministrations on that afflicted nobleman, regretted
incidentally her lack of news of the gallant General and spread myself over
my own sufferings and my boredom in a little hole of a place, where no one
was to be seen under the age of seventy-three--drew, I flattered myself,
rather a smart picture of the useless and gasping ancients flocking
pathetically to the futile _Fons Juventutis_ (and what business
had they to be alive anyhow during this world food shortage?) and then,
commending her devotion to the distressed and homeless, expressed the warm
hope that I should meet her in Paris on my way back to England.

It was the letter of a friend and a man of the world. It put me into a
better humour with myself. I dined well on the broad terrace of the hotel,
smoked a cigar in defiance of doctor's orders, and after an instructive
gastronomical discussion with a comfortable old Bordeaux merchant with whom
I had picked acquaintance, went to bed in a selfishly contented frame of
mind.

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