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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




Two or three mornings later, going by tram into Clermont-Ferrand and
passing by the great cafe on the east side of the Place de Jaude opposite
the statue of Vercingetorix, I ran literally, stumbling over long legs
outstretched from his chair to the public danger, into Andrew Lackaday. It
was only at the instant of disentanglement and mutual apologies that we
were aware of each other. He sprang to his great height and held out-both
his long arms, and grinned happily.

"My dear fellow, what a delight. Fancy seeing you here! Elodie----"

If he had given me time, I should have recognized her before he spoke.
There she was in the flesh--in a great deal of flesh--more even than I had
pictured. She had a coarse, dark face, with the good humour written on it
that loose features and kind soft eyes are able so often to express--and
white teeth rather too much emphasized by carmined lips above which grew
the faint black down of many women of the South. She was dressed quite
tastefully: white felt hat, white skirt, and a silken knitted yellow
_chandail_.

"Elodie--I present Monsieur le Capitaine Hylton, of whom you have heard me
speak so much." To me--"Madame Patou," said he.

"Madame," said I. We shook hands. I professed enchantment.

"I have spoken much about you to Captain Hylton," said Lackaday quickly.

"So it seems," said I, following the good fellow's lead, "as if I were
renewing an old acquaintance."

"But you speak French like a Frenchman," cried Elodie.

"It is my sole claim, Madame," said I, "to your consideration."

She laughed, obviously pleased, and invited me to sit. The waiter came up.
What would I have? I murmured "Amer Picon--Curaçoa," the most delectable
ante-meal beverage left in France now that absinthe is as extinct as the
stuff wherewith the good Vercingetorix used to gladden his captains after
a successful bout with Cæsar. Elodie laughed again and called me a true
Parisian. I made the regulation reply to the compliment. I could see that
we became instant friends.

"_Mais, mon cher ami_," said Lackaday, "you haven't answered my
question. What are you doing here in Clermont-Ferrand?"

"Didn't I write to you?"

"No----"

I hadn't. I had meant to--just as I had meant to write to Auriol Dayne.

I wonder whether, in that Final Court from which I have not heard of any
theologian suggesting the possibility of Appeal, they will bring up against
me all the unanswered letters of my life? If they do, then certainly shall
I be a Condemned Spirit.

I explained airily--just as I have explained to you.

"Coincidences of the heart, Madame," said I.

She turned to Andrew. "He has said that just like Horace."

I realized the compliment. I liked Elodie. Dress her at whatever Rue de
la Paix rag-swindler's that you pleased, you would never metamorphose the
daughter of the people that she was into the lady at ease in all company.
She was a bit _mannièrée_--on her best behaviour. But she had the
Frenchwoman's instinctive knowledge of conduct. She conveyed, very
charmingly, her welcome to me as a friend of Andrew's.

"Horace--that's my friend Bakkus I've told you about," said Lackaday.
"He'll be here to-morrow. I should so much like you to meet him."

"I'm looking forward," said I, "to the opportunity."

We talked on indifferent subjects; and in the meanwhile I observed Lackaday
closely. He seemed tired and careworn. The bush of carroty hair over his
ears had gone a yellowish grey and more lines seamed his ugly and rugged
face. He was neatly enough dressed in grey flannels, but he wore on his
head the latest model of a French straw hat--the French hatter, left to his
own devices, has ever been the maddest of his tribe--a high, coarsely woven
crown surrounded by a quarter inch brim which related him much more nearly
to Petit Patou than to the British General of Brigade. His delicate fingers
nervously played with cigarette or glass stem. He gave me the impression of
a man holding insecurely on to intelligible life.

Mild hunger translating itself into a conception of the brain, I looked at
my watch. I waved a hand to the row of waiting cabs with linen canopies on
the other side of the blazing square.

"Madame," said I, "let me have the pleasure of driving you to Royat and
offering you _déjeuner_."

"My dear chap," said Andrew, "impossible. We play this afternoon. Twice a
day, worse luck. We have all sorts of things to arrange."

Elodie broke in. They had arranged everything already that morning. Their
turn did not arrive till three-forty. There was time for a dozen lunches;
especially since she would go early and see that everything was prepared.
She excused herself to me in the charmingest way possible. Another day
she might perhaps, with my permission, have the pleasure. But to-day she
insisted on Andre lunching with me alone. We must have a thousand things to
say to each other.

"_Tenez_," she smiled, rising. "I leave you. There's not a word to be
said. Monsieur le Capitaine, see that the General eats instead of talking
too much." She beamed. "_Au grand plaisir de vous revoir._"

We stood bare-headed and shook hands and watched her make a gracious exit.
As soon as she crossed the tram-lines, she turned and waved her fingers at
me.

"A charming woman," said I.

Lackaday smiled in his sad babyish way.

"Indeed she is," said he.

We drove into Royat in one of the cool, white canopied victorias.

"You know we are playing in a circus," he said, indicating a huge play bill
on the side of a wall.

"Yes," said I. "_On revient toujours à ses premières amours._"

"It's not that, God knows," he replied soberly. "But we were out for these
two weeks of our tour. One can't pick and choose nowadays. The eccentric
comedian will soon be as dead as his ancestor, the Court Jester. The war
has almost wiped us out. Those music-halls--of the Variety type--that have
not been turned, through lack of artists, into picture palaces, are now
given over to Revue. I have been here at Clermont-Ferrand many times--but
now," he shrugged his shoulders. "I had an engagement--at my ordinary
music-hall terms--offered me at the Cirque Vendramin to fill in the blank
weeks, and I couldn't afford to refuse. That's why, my friend, you see me
now, where you first met me, in a circus."

"And Madame Patou?" said I.

"I'm afraid," he sighed, "it is rather a come down for Elodie."

We reached the hotel and lunched on the terrace, and I did my best, with
the aid of the maître d'hôtel, to carry out the lady's injunctions. As a
matter of fact, she need not have feared that he should miss sustenance
through excessive garrulity. He seemed ill at ease during the meal and I
did most of the talking. It was only after coffee and the last drop of the
last bottle in the hotel--one of the last, alas! in France--of the real
ancient Chartreuse of the Grand Chartreux, that he made some sort of avowal
or explanation. After beating about the bush a bit, he came to the heart of
the matter.

"I thought the whole war was axed out of my life--with everyone I knew in
it or through it. I wrote all that stuff about myself because I couldn't
help it. It enabled me to find my balance, to keep myself sane. I had to
bridge over--connect somehow--the Andrew Lackaday of 1914 with the Andrew
Lackaday of 1919. A couple of months ago, I thought of sending it to you.
You know my beginnings and my dear old father Ben Flint and so forth. You
came bang into the middle of my most intimate life. I knew in what honour
and affection you were held among those whom I--to whom I--am infinitely
devoted. I..." He paused a moment, and tugged hard at his cigar and
regarded me with bent brows and compressed lips of his parade manner. "I am
a man of few friendships. I gave you my unreserved friendship--it may not
be worth much--but there it is." He glared at me as though he were defying
me to mortal combat, and when I tried to get in a timid word he wiped it
out of my mouth with a gesture. "I wanted you to know the whole truth about
me. Once I never thought about myself. I wasn't worth thinking about. But
the war came. And the war ended. And I'm so upside down that I'm bound to
think about myself and clear up myself, in the eyes of the only human being
that could understand--namely you--or go mad. But I never reckoned to see
you again in the flesh. Our lives were apart as the poles. It was in my
head to write to you something to that effect, when I should receive an
answer to my last letter. I never dreamed that you should meet me now, as I
am."

"It never occurred to you that I might value your friendship and take a
little trouble to seek you out?"

"I must confess," said he, "that I did not suspect that anyone, even you,
would have thought it worth while."

I laughed. He was such a delicious simpleton. So long as he could regard
me as someone on the other side of the grave, he could reveal to me the
intimacies of his emotional life; but as soon as he realized his confidant
in the flesh, embarrassment and confusion overwhelmed him. And, ostrich
again, thinking that, once his head was hidden in the sands of Petit
Patouism, he would be invisible to mortal eye, he had persuaded himself
that his friends would concur in his supposed invisibility.

"My dear fellow," I said, "why all this apologia? As to your having ever
told me or written to me about yourself I have kept the closest secrecy.
Not a human soul knows through me the identity of General Lackaday with
Petit Patou. No," I repeated, meeting his eyes under his bent brows, "not a
human being knows even of our first meeting in the Cirque Rocambeau--and as
for Madame Patou, whom you have made me think of always as Elodie--well--my
discretion goes without saying. And as for putting into shape your
reminiscences--I shouldn't dream of letting anyone see my manuscript before
it had passed through your hands. If you like I'll tear the whole thing up
and it will all be buried in that vast oblivion of human affairs of which I
am only too temperamentally capable."

He threw his cigar over the balustrade of the terrace and stretched out his
long legs, his hands in his pockets and grinned.

"No, don't do that. One of these days I might be amused to read it.
Besides, it took me such a devil of a time to write. It was good of you to
keep things to yourself although I laid down no conditions of secrecy. I
might have known it." He stared at the hill-side opposite, with its zigzag
path through the vines marked by the figures of zealous pedestrians, and
then he said suddenly: "If I asked you not to come and see our show you
would set me down as a fantastical coward."

I protested. "How could I, after all you have told me?"

"I want you to come. Not to-day. Things might be in a muddle. One never
knows. But to-morrow. It will do me good."

I promised. We chatted a little longer and then he rose to go. I
accompanied him to the tram, his long lean body overwhelming my somewhat
fleshy insignificance. And while I walked with him I thought: "Why is it
that I can't tell a man who confides to me his inmost secrets, to buy, for
God's sake, another hat?"

The following afternoon, I went to the Cirque Vendramin. I sat in a front
seat. I saw the performance. It was much as I have already described to
you. Except perhaps for his height and ungainliness no one could have
recognized Andrew Lackaday in the painted clown Petit Patou. His
grotesquery of appearance was terrific. From the tip of his red pointed
wig to the bottom of his high heels he must have been eight feet. I should
imagine him to have been out of scale on the music-hall stage. But in
the ring he was perfect. The mastery of his craft, the cleanness of his
jugglery, amazed me. He divested himself of his wig and did a five minutes'
act of lightning impersonation with a trick felt hat, the descendant of the
_Chapeau de Tabarin:_ the ex-Kaiser, Foch, Clemenceau, Lloyd George,
President Wilson--a Boche prisoner, a helmeted Tommy, a Poilu--which was
marvellous, considering the painted Petit Patou face. For all assistance,
Elodie held up a cheap bedroom wall-mirror. He played his one-stringed
fiddle. I admired the technical perfection of the famous cigar-act. I noted
the stupid bewilderment with which he received a typhoon of hoops thrown by
Elodie, and his waggish leer when, clown-wise, he had caught them all. If
the audience packed within the canvas amphitheatre had gone mad in applause
over this exhibition of exquisite skill interlarded with witty patter, I
might have been carried away into enthusiastic appreciation of a great art.
But the audience, as far as applause could be the criterion, missed the
exquisiteness of it, guffawed only at the broadest clowning and applauded
finally just enough to keep up the heart of the management and Les Petit
Patou. I have seen many harrowing things in the course of a complicated
life; but this I reckon was one of the chief among them.

I thought of the scene a year ago, at Mansfield Park. The distinguished
soldier with his rainbow row of ribbons modestly confused by Evadne's
summons to the household on his appointment to the Brigade; the English
setting; the old red gabled Manor house; the green lawn; the bright English
faces of old Sir Julian and his wife, of young Charles the hero worshipper;
the light in Auriol's eyes; the funny little half-ashamed English ceremony;
again the gaunt, grim, yet childishly smiling figure in khaki, the ideal of
the scarred and proven English leader of men....

The scene shimmered before me and then I realized the same man in his
abominable travesty of God's image, bowing before the tepid plaudits of an
alien bourgeoisie in a filthy, smelly canvas circus, and I tell you I felt
the agony that comes when time has dried up within one the fount of tears.




Chapter XIX



Soon afterwards I met Horatio Bakkus. With his white hair, ascetic,
clean-shaved face and deep dark eyes he looked like an Italian
ecclesiastic. One's glance instinctively sought the tonsure. He would come
forward on to the open-air platform beneath the thick foliage of the park
with the detached mien of a hierophant; and there he would sing like an
angel, one of those who quire to the youngest-eyed cherubim so as not to
wake them. When I made him my modest compliment he said:

"Trick, my dear sir. Trick and laziness. I might have had the _bel
canto_, if I had toiled interminably; but, thank God, I've managed to
carry through on self-indulgent sloth."

As he lived at Royat I saw much of him alone, Royat being such a wee place
that if two sojourners venture simultaneously abroad they must of necessity
meet. I found him as Lackaday had described him, a widely read scholar
and an amiable and cynical companion. But in addition to these casual
encounters, I was thrown daily into his society with Lackaday and Elodie.
We arranged always to lunch together, Lackaday, Bakkus and myself taking it
in turns to be hosts at our respective hotels. Now and then Elodie
insisted on breaking the routine and acting as hostess at a restaurant in
Clermont-Ferrand. It was all very pleasant. The only woman to three men,
Elodie preened herself with amusing obviousness and set out to make herself
agreeable. She did it with a Frenchwoman's natural grace. But as soon as
the talk drifted into anything allusive to war or books or art or politics,
she manifested an ignorance abysmal in its profundity. I was amazed that
a woman should have been for years the intimate companion of two men like
Lackaday and Bakkus without picking up some superficial knowledge of the
matters they discussed. And I was interested, even to the pitch of my
amazement, to behold the deference of both men, when her polite and vacant
smile proclaimed her inability to follow the conversation. Invariably one
of them would leave me to the other and turn to Elodie. It was Bakkus more
often who thus broke away. He had the quick impish faculty, one of the
rarest of social gifts, of suddenly arresting a woman's attention by a
phrase, apparently irrelevant, yet to her woman's jumping mind relevant to
the matter under dispute and of carrying it off into a pleasant feminine
sphere. It was impish, and I believe deliberately so, for on such occasions
one could catch the ironic gleam in his eyes. The man's sincere devotion to
both of them was obvious.

"Madame Patou..." I began one day, at lunch--we were talking of the tyranny
of fashion, even in the idyllic lands where ladies are fully dressed in
teeth necklaces and yellow ochre--"Madame Patou..."

She threw up her hands. We were lunching very well--the _petit vin_
of Auvergne is delicious--"_Mais voyons donc_--why all this ceremony
among friends? Here we are, we three, and it is André, Horace, Elodie--and
here we are, we four, and it is Monsieur Bakkus, and Lackaday--never will I
be able to pronounce that word--and Madame Patou and Monsieur le Capitaine
Hylton. Look. To my friends I am Elodie _tout court_--and you?"

It was an embarrassing moment. Andrew's mug of a face was as expressionless
as that of a sphinx. He would no more have dreamed of addressing me by my
Christian name than of hailing Field-Marshal Haig as Douglas. White-haired,
thin-lipped Bakkus smiled sardonically. But there was no help for it.

"My very intimate friends call me Tony," said I.

"To-ny," she echoed. "But it is charming, To-ny. A _votre santé_,
To-ny."

She held put her glass--I was sitting next to her. I clinked mine politely.

"To the health of the charming Elodie."

She was delighted. Made us all clink glasses. Bakkus said, in English:

"To the abolition of Misters, in obedience to the Lady."

"And now," cried Elodie, "what were you going to say about fashions in
necklaces made of dogs' teeth?"

We pursued our frivolous talk. Bakkus said:

"The whole of the Fall of Man arose from Eve pestering Adam for a
russet-brown fig-leaf in spring time."

"It was after the fall that they made themselves aprons," said Lackaday.

"She had her eye on those fig-leaves long before," retorted Bakkus.

We laughed. There was no great provocation to mirth. But we were attuned to
gaiety. My three friends were lunching with me on the terrace of the Royat
Palace Hotel. It is a long, wide terrace, reaching the whole width of the
façade of the building, and doors lead on to it from all the public rooms.
Only half of it, directly accessible from the _salle à manger_ is
given over to restaurant tables. Ours was on the outskirts. I like to be
free, to have plenty of room and air; especially on a broiling August day.
We were in cool shade. A few feet below us stretched a lower terrace, with
grass-plots and flowers and a fountain and gaily awned garden seats and
umbrella-shaded chairs. And there over the parapet the vine-clad hill
quivered in the sunshine against the blue summer sky, and around us were
cheerful folk at lunch forgetful of hearts and blood-pressure in the
warm beauty of the day. Perhaps now and then a stern and elderly French
couple--he stolid, strongly bearded and decorated, she thin and brown,
over-coiffured and over-ringed--with an elderly angular daughter, hard to
marry, regarded us with eyes of disapproval. Elodie in happy mood threw off
restraint, as, in more private and intimate surroundings, she would have
thrown off her corset. But we cared not for the disapproval of the correct
French profiteers....

"If they tried to smile," said Elodie, incidentally, "they would burst and
all the gold would drop out."

Lackaday threw back his head and laughed--the first real, hearty laugh I
had seen him exhibit since I had met him in France. You see the day, the
food, the wine, the silly talk, the dancing wit of Bakkus, the delightful
comradeship, had brought the four of us into a little atmosphere of
joyousness. There was nothing very intellectual about it. In the hideous
realm of pure intellectuality there could not exist even the hardiest ghost
of a smile. Laughter, like love, is an expression of man's vehement revolt
against reason. So Andrew Lackaday threw himself back in his chair and
laughed at Elodie's quip.

But suddenly, as if some blasting hand had smitten him, his laughter
ceased. His jaw dropped for a second and then snapped like a vice. He
was sitting on my left hand, his back to the balustrade, and facing the
dining-room. At the sight of him we all instinctively sobered and bent
forward in questioning astonishment. He recovered himself quickly and tried
to smile as if nothing had happened--but, seeing his eyes had been fixed on
something behind me, I turned round.

And there, calmly walking up the long terrace towards us, was Lady Auriol
Dayne.

I sprang from my chair and strode swiftly to meet her. From a grating sound
behind me I knew that Lackaday had also risen. I stretched out my hand
mechanically and, regardless of manners, I said:

"What the devil are you doing here?"

She withdrew the hand that she too had put forward.

"That's a nice sort of welcome."

"I'm sorry," said I. "Please consider the question put more politely."

"Well, I'm here," she replied, "because it happens to be my good pleasure."

"Then I hope you'll find lots of pleasure, my dear Auriol."

She laughed, standing as cool as you please, very grateful to the eye in
tussore coat and skirt, with open-necked blouse, and some kind of rakish
hat displaying her thick auburn hair in defiance of the fashion which
decreed concealment even of eyebrows with flower-pot head gear. She laughed
easily, mockingly, although she saw plainly the pikestaff of a Lackaday
upright a few yards away from her, in a rigid attitude of parade.

"Anyhow," she said, "I must go and say how d'ye do to the General."

I gave way to her. We walked side by side to the table. She advanced to him
in the most unconcerned manner. Bakkus rose politely.

"My dear General, fancy seeing you here! How delightful."

I have never seen a man's eyes devour a woman with such idiotic
obviousness.

"Lady Auriol," said he, "you are the last person I ever thought of
meeting." He paused for a second. Then, "May I have the pleasure of
introducing--Madame Patou--Lady Auriol Dayne--Mr. Bakkus--"

"Do sit down, please, everybody," said Auriol, after the introductions.
"I feel like a common nuisance. But I came by the night train and went
to sleep and only woke up to find myself just in time for the fag-end of
lunch."

"I am host," said I. "Won't you join us?"

What else was there to do? She glanced at me with smiling inscrutability.

"You're awfully kind, Tony. But I'm disturbing you."

The maitre d'hôtel and waiter with a twist of legerdemain set her place
between myself and Lackaday.

"This is a charming spot, isn't it, Madame Patou?" she remarked.

Elodie, who had regarded her wonderingly as though she had bean a creature
of another world, bowed and smiled.

"We all talk French, my dear Auriol," said I, "because Madame Patou knows
no English."

"Ah!" said Lady Auriol. "I never thought of it." She translated her remark.
"I'm afraid my French is that of the British Army, where I learned most of
it. But if people are kind and patient I can make myself understood."

"Mademoiselle speaks French very well," replied Elodie politely.

"You are very good to say so, Madame."

I caught questioning, challenging glances flashing across the table, each
woman hostilely striving to place the other. You see, we originally sat:
Elodie on my right hand, then Bakkus facing straight down the terrace, then
Lackaday, then myself. It occurred to me at once that, with her knowledge
of my convention-trained habits, she would argue that, at a luncheon party,
either I would not have placed the lady next the man to whom she belonged,
or that she was a perfectly independent guest, belonging, so to speak, to
nobody. But on the latter hypothesis, what was she doing in this galley? I
swear I saw the wrinkle on Lady Auriol's brow betokening the dilemma. She
had known me from childhood's days of lapsed memory. I had always been.
Romantically she knew Lackaday. Horatio Bakkus, with his sacerdotal air and
well-bred speech and manner, evidently belonged to our own social class.
But Madame Patou, who mopped up the sauce on her plate with a bit of bread,
and made broad use of a toothpick, and leaned back and fanned herself
with her napkin and breathed a "_Mon Dieu, qu'ilfait chaud_" and
contributed nothing intelligent to the conversation, she could not accept
as the detached lady invited by me to charm my two male guests. She was
then driven to the former hypothesis. Madame Patou belonged in some way to
the man by whose side she was not seated.

Of course, there was another alternative. I might have been responsible for
the poor lady. But she was as artless as a poor lady could be. Addressing
my two friends it was always André and Horace, and instinctively she used
the familiar "_tu_." Addressing me she had affrightedly forgotten the
pact of Christian names, and it was "Monsieur le Capitaine" and, of course,
the "_vous_" which she had never dreamed of changing. Even so poor a
French scholar as Lady Auriol could not be misled into such absurd paths of
conjecture.

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