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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




She belonged therefore, in some sort of fashion, to General Lackaday. An
elderly man of the world, with his nerves on edge, has no need of wizardry
to divine the psychology of such a situation.

Mistress of social forms, Lady Auriol, after sweeping Elodie into her net,
caught Horatio Bakkus and through reference to her own hospital experiences
during the war, wrung from him the avowal of his concerts for the wounded
in Paris.

"How splendid of you! By the way, how do you spell your name? It's an
uncommon one."

"With two k's."

"I wonder if you have anything to do with an old friend of my fattier,
Archdeacon Bakkus?"

"My eldest brother."

"No, really? One of my earliest recollections is his buying a prize boar
from my father."

"Just like the dear fellow's prodigality," said Bakkus. "He had a whole
Archdeaconry to his hand for nothing. I've lately spent a couple of months
with him in Westmorland, so I know."

"How small the world is," said Lady Auriol to Lackaday.

"Too small," said he.

"Oh," said Auriol blankly.

"Have you seen our good friends, the Verity-Stewarts lately?"

She had. They were in perfect health. They were wondering what had become
of him.

"And indeed, General," she flashed, "what _has_ become of you?"

"It is not good," said Elodie, in quick anticipation, "that the General
should neglect his English friends."

There sounded the note of proprietorship, audible to anybody. Auriol's eyes
dwelt for a second on Elodie; then she turned to Lackaday.

"Madame Patou is quite right."

Said he, with one of his rare flights into imagery, "I was but a shooting
star across the English firmament."

"Encore une étoile qui file,
File, file et disparait!"

"Oh no, my dear friend," laughed Bakkus. "He can't persuade us, Lady
Auriol, that he is afflicted with the morbidezza of 1830."

"_Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?_" asked Elodie, sharply.

"It was a fashion long ago, my dear, for poets to assume the gaiety of a
funeral. Even Béranger who wrote _Le Roi d'Yvetot_--you know it--"

"Naturally, '_Il était un roi d'Yvetot!_'"--cried Elodie, who had
learned it at school.

"Well--of course. Even Béranger could not escape the malady of
his generation. Do you remember"--his swift glance embraced us
all--"Longfellow's criticism of European poets of that epoch, in his prose
masterpiece, _Hyperion?_ He refers to Salis and Matthisson, but
Lamartine and people of his kidney come in--'Melancholy gentlemen' pardon,
my dear Elodie, if I quote it in English--'Melancholy gentlemen to whom
life was only a dismal swamp, upon whose margin they walked with cambric
handkerchiefs in their hands, sobbing and sighing and making signals to
Death to come and ferry them over the lake.' _Cela veut dire_," he
made a marvellous French paraphrase for Elodie's benefit.

"_Comprends pas_," she shrugged at the boredom of literary allusion.
"I don't see what all that has to do with André. I shall see, Mademoiselle,
that he writes to his friends."

"You will be doing them a great service, Madame," replied Auriol.

There was a stiff silence. If Bakkus had stuck to his intention of driving
the conversation away from embarrassing personal questions, instead of
being polite to Elodie, we should have been spared this freezing moment of
self-consciousness. I asked Auriol whether she had had a pleasant journey,
and we discussed the discomfort of trains. From then to the end of the meal
the conversation halted. It was a relief to rise and fall into groups as we
strolled down the terrace to coffee. I manoeuvred Elodie and Bakkus to the
front leaving Auriol and Lackaday to follow. I sought a table at the far
end, for coffee; but when I turned round, I discovered that the pair had
descended by the mid-way flight of three or four steps to the grass-plotted
and fountained terrace below.

We sat down. Elodie asked:

"Who is that lady?"

I explained as best I could. "She is the daughter of an English nobleman,
whence her title. The way to address her is 'Lady Auriol.' She did lots of
work during the war, work of hospital organization in France, and now she
is still working for France. I have known her since she was three years
old; so she is a very great friend of mine."

Her eyes wandered to the bit of red thatched head and the gleam of the
crown of a white hat just visible over the balustrade.

"She appears also to be a great friend of André."

"The General met many charming ladies during his stay in England," I lied
cheerfully.

"Which means," she said with a toss of her head and an ironical smile,
"that the General behaved like a real--who was it, Horace, who loved
women so much? _Ah oui_--like a real Don Juan." She wagged her plump
forefinger. "Oh no, I know my André."

"I could tell you stories--" said I.

"Which would not be true."

She laughed in a forced way--and her eyes again sought the tops of the
couple promenading in the sunshine. She resumed her catechism.

"How old is she?"

"I don't know exactly."

"But since you have known her since she was three years old?"

"If I began to count years at my time of life," said I, "I should die of
fright."

"She looks about thirty. Wouldn't you say so, Horace? It is droll that she
has not married. Why?"

"Before the war she was a great traveller. She has been by herself all over
the world in all sorts of places among wild tribes and savages. She has
been far too busy to think of marriage."

Elodie looked incredulous. "One has always one's _moments perdus._"

"One doesn't marry in odd moments," said I.

"You and Horace are old bachelors who know nothing at all about it. Tell
me. Is she very rich?"

"None of our old families are very rich nowadays," I replied, rather at
a loss to account, save on the score of feminine curiosity, for this
examination. If it had not been for her mother who left her a small fortune
of a thousand or so a year, Auriol would have been as penniless as her two
married sisters. Her brother, Lord Vintrey, once a wastrel subaltern of
Household Cavalry, and, after a dashing, redeeming war record, now an
expensive Lieutenant-Colonel, ate up all the ready money that Lord
Mountshire could screw out of his estates. With Elodie I could not enter
into these explanations.

"All the same she is passably rich," Elodie persisted. "One does not buy a
costume like that under five hundred francs."

The crimson vested and sashed and tarbooshed Algerian negro brought the
coffee, and poured out the five cups. We sipped. I noticed Elodie's hand
shake.

"If their coffee gets cold, so much the worse."

Bakkus, who had maintained a discreet silence hitherto, remarked:--

"Unless Andrew's head is particularly thick, he'll get a sunstroke in this
blazing sun."

"That's true," cried Elodie and, rising with a great scraping of chair, she
rushed to the balustrade and addressed him shrilly.

"_Mais dis donc André, tu veux attraper un coup de soleil?_"

We heard his voice in reply: "_Nous rentrons_."

A few moments afterwards they mounted from the lower terrace and
came towards us. Lackaday's face was set in one of its tight-lipped
expressionless moods. Lady Auriol's cheek was flushed, and though she
smiled conventional greeting, her eyes were very serious.

"I am sorry to have put into danger the General's health, madame," said she
in her clear and British French. "But when two comrades of the Great War
meet for the first time, one is forgetful."

She gave me a little sign rejecting the offered coffee. Lackaday took his
cup and drank it off at one gulp. He looked at his wrist watch, the only
remaining insignia of the British soldier.

"Time for our tram, Elodie."

"_C'est vrai?_" He held his wrist towards her. "_Oui, mon Dieu!
Miladi--_" She funked the difficult "Lady Auriol."

"_Au revoir, Madame,_" said Auriol shaking hands.

"_Trop honorée,_" said Elodie, somewhat defiantly. "_Au revoir,
Miladi._" She made an awkward little bow. "_Et toi,_" she extended
a careless left hand to Bakkus.

"I will see you to the lift," said I.

We walked down the terrace in silence to the _salon_ door just inside
which was the lift which took one down some four stories to the street.
Two things were obvious: the perturbation of the simple Lackaday and the
jealousy of Elodie.

"_Au revoir, monsieur, et merci,_" she said, with over emphasized
politeness, as we stood at the lift gates.

"Good-bye, old chap," said Lackaday and gripped my hand hard.

As soon as I returned to the end of the terrace, Bakkus rose and took his
leave. Auriol and I were alone. Of course other humans were clustering
round tables all the length of the terrace. But we had our little end
corner to ourselves. I sat down next to her.

"Well?" said I.

She bent forward, and her face was that of the woman whom I had met in the
rain and mud and stark reality of the war.

"Why didn't you tell me?"




Chapter XX



If a glance could destroy, if Lady Auriol had been a Gorgon or a basilisk
or a cockatrice, then had I been a slain Anthony Hylton.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

The far-flung gesture of her arm ending in outspread fingers might have
been that of Elodie.

"Tell you what, my dear?" said I.

"The whole wretched tragedy. I came to you a year ago with my heart in
my hand--the only human creature living who I thought could help me. And
you've let me down like this. It's damnable!"

"An honourable man," said I, nettled, "doesn't betray confidences."

"An honourable man! I like that! I gave you my confidences. Haven't you
betrayed them?"

"Not a bit," said I. "Not the faintest hint of what you have said to me
have I whispered into the ear of man or woman."

She fumed. "If you had, you would be--unmentionable."

"Precisely. And I should have been equally undeserving of mention, if I had
told you of the secret, or double, or ex-war--however you like to describe
it--life of our friend."

"The thing is not on all fours," she said with a snap of her fingers. "You
could have given me the key to the mystery--such as it is. You could have
prevented me from making a fool of myself. You could, Tony. From the very
start."

"At the very start, I knew little more than you did. Nothing save that he
was bred in a circus, where I met him thirty years ago. I knew nothing more
of his history till this April, when he told me he was Petit Patpu of the
music-halls. His confidence has been given me bit by bit. The last time
I saw you I had never heard of Madame Patou. It was you that guessed the
woman in his life. I had no idea whether you were right or wrong."

"Yet you could have given me a hint--the merest hint--without betraying
confidences--as you call it," she mouthed my phrase ironically. "It was not
playing the game."

"I gathered," said I, "that playing the game was what both of you had
decided to do, in view of the obviously implied lady in the background."

"Well?" she challenged.

"If it's a question of playing the game"--I had carried the war into the
enemy's quarters--"may I repeat my original rude question this morning?
What the devil are you doing here?"

She turned on me in a fury. "How dare you insinuate such a thing?"

"You've not come to Royat for the sake of my beautiful eyes."

"I'm under no obligation to tell you why I've come to Royat. Let us say my
liver's out of order."

"Then my dear," said I, "you have come to the wrong place to cure it."

She glanced at me wrathfully, took out a cigarette, waved away with an
unfriendly gesture the briquette I had drawn from my pocket, and struck one
of her own matches. There fell a silence, during which I sat back in my
chair, my arms on the elbow and my fingers' tips joined together, and
assumed an air of philosophic meditation.

Presently she said: "There are times, Tony, when I should like to kill
you."

"I am glad," said I, "to note the resumption of human relations."

"You are always so pragmatically and priggishly correct," she said.

"My dear," said I, "if you want me to sympathize with you in this
impossible situation, I'll do it with all my heart. But don't round on me
for either bringing it about or not preventing it."

"I was anxious to know something about Andrew Lackaday--I don't care
whether you think me a fool or not"--she was still angry and defiant--"I
wrote you pointedly. You did not answer my letter. I wrote again reminding
you of your lack of courtesy. You replied like a pretty fellow in a morning
coat at the Foreign Office and urbanely ignored my point."

She puffed indignantly. The terrace began to be deserted. There was a
gap of half a dozen tables between us and the next group. The flamboyant
Algerian removed the coffee cups. When we were alone again, I reiterated
my explanation. At every stage of my knowledge I was held in the bond of
secrecy. Lackaday's sensitive soul dreaded, more than all the concentrated
high-explosive bombardment of the whole of the late German Army, the
possibility of Lady Auriol knowing him as the second-rate music-hall
artist.

"You are the woman of his dreams," said I. "You're an unapproachable star
in mid ether, or whatever fanciful lover's image you like to credit him
with. The only thing for his salvation was to make a clean cut. Don't you
see?"

"That's all very pretty," said Auriol. "But what about me? A clean cut you
call it? A man cuts a woman in half and goes off to his own life and thinks
he has committed an act of heroic self-sacrifice!"

I put my hand on hers. "My dear child," said I, "if Andrew Lackaday thought
you were eating out your heart for him he would be the most flabbergasted
creature in the world."

She bent her capable eyes on me. "That's a bit dogmatic, isn't it? May I
ask if you have any warrant for what you're saying?"

"In his own handwriting."

I gave a brief account of the manuscript.

"Where is it?" she asked eagerly.

"In my safe in London--I'm sorry----"

In indignation she flashed: "I wouldn't read a word of it."

"Of course not," said I. "Nor would I put it into your hands without
Lackaday's consent. Anyhow, that's my authority and warrant."

She threw the stub of her cigarette across the terrace and went back to the
original cry:

"Oh Tony, if you had only given me some kind of notion!"

"I've tried to prove to you that I couldn't."

"I suppose not," she admitted wearily.

"Men have their standards. Forgive me if I've been unreasonable."

When a woman employs her last weapon, her confession of unreason, and
demands forgiveness, what can a man do but proclaim himself the worm that
he is? We went through a pretty scene of reconciliation.

"And now," said I, "what did Lackaday, in terms of plain fact, tell you
down there?"

She told me. Apparently he had given her a précis of his life's history
amazingly on the lines of a concentrated military despatch.

"Lady Auriol," said he, as soon as they were out of earshot, "you are here
by some extraordinary coincidence. In a few hours you will be bound to hear
all about me which I desired you never to know. It is best that I should
tell you myself, at once."

It was extraordinary what she had learned from him in those few minutes.
He had gone on remorselessly, in his staccato manner, as if addressing a
parade, which I knew so well, putting before her the dry yet vital facts of
his existence.

"I knew there was a woman--wife and children--what does it matter? I told
you," she said. "But--oh God!" She smote her hands together hopelessly,
fist into palm. "I never dreamed of anything like this."

"I am in a position to give you chapter and verse for it all," said I.

"Oh I know," she said, dejectedly, and the vivid flower that was Auriol,
in a mood of dejection, suggested nothing more in the world than a
drought-withered hybiscus--her colour had faded, the sweeping fulness
of her drooped, her twenties caught the threatening facial lines of her
forties--what can I say more? The wilting of a tropical bloom--that was her
attitude--the sap and the life all gone.

"Oh I know. There's nothing vulgar about it. It goes back into the years.
But still ..."

"Yes, yes, my dear," said I, quickly. "I understand."

We were alone now on the terrace. Far away, a waiter hung over the
balustrade, listening to the band playing in the Park below. But for the
noise of the music, all was still on the breathless August air. Presently
she drew her palms over her face.

"I'm dog-tired."

"That abominable night journey," said I, sympathetically.

"I sat on a _strapontin_ in the corridor, all night," she said.

"But, my dear, what madness!" I cried horrified, although in the war she
had performed journeys compared with which this would be the luxury of
travel. "Why didn't you book a _coupé-lit_, even a seat, beforehand?"

She smiled dismally. "I only made up my mind yesterday morning. I got it
into my head that you knew everything there was to be known about Andrew
Lackaday."

"But how did you get it?"

My question was one of amazement. No man had more out-rivalled an oyster in
incommunicativeness.

It appeared that I suffered from the defects of my qualities. I had been
over-diplomatic. My innocence had been too bland for my worldly years. My
evasions had proclaimed me suspect. My criticism of Royat made my fear of a
chance visit from her so obvious. My polite hope that I should see her in
Paris on my way back, rubbed in it. If there had been no bogies about,
and Royat had been the Golgotha of my picture, would not my well-known
selfishness, when I heard she was at a loose end in August Paris, have
summoned her with a "Do for Heaven's sake come and save me from these
selected candidates for burial?" I had done it before, in analogous
circumstances, I at Nauheim, she at Nuremberg. No. It was, on the contrary:
"For Heaven's sake don't come near me. I'll see you in Paris if by
misfortune you happen to be there."

"My dear," said I, "didn't it occur to you that your astuteness might be
overreaching itself and that you might find me here--well--in the not
infrequent position of a bachelor man who desires to withdraw himself from
the scrutiny of his acquaintance?"

She broke into disconcerting laughter.

"You? Tony?"

"Hang it all!" I cried angrily, "I'm not eighty yet!"

However virtuous a man may be, he resents the contemptuous denial to his
claim to be a potential libertine.

She laughed again; then sobered down and spoke soothingly to me. Perhaps
she did me injustice, but such a thing had never entered her mind engaged
as it was with puzzlement over Lackaday. When people are afflicted with
fixed ideas, they grow perhaps telepathic. Otherwise she could not account
for her certainty that I could give her some information. She knew that I
would not write. What was a flying visit--a night's journey to Royat? In
her wander years, she had travelled twelve hours to a place and twelve back
in order to buy a cabbage. Her raid on me was nothing so wonderful.

"So certain was I," she said, "that you were hiding things from me, that
when I saw him this morning at your table, I was scarcely surprised."

"My dear Auriol," said I, when she had finished the psychological sketch of
her flight from Paris, "I think the man who unlearned most about women as
the years went on, was Methuselah."

"A woman only puts two and two together and makes it five. It's as simple
as that."

"No," said I, "the damnable complex mystery of it, to a man's mind, is that
five should be the right answer."

She dismissed the general proposition with a shrug.

"Well, there it is. I was miserable--I've been miserable for months--I was
hung up in Paris. I had this impulse, intuition--call it what you like. I
came--I saw--and I wish to goodness I hadn't!"

"I wasn't so wrong after all, then," I suggested mildly.

She laughed, this time mirthlessly. "I should have taken it for a warning.
Blue Beard's chamber...."

We were silent for a while. The waiters came scurrying down with trays and
cloths and cups to set the little tables for tea. The western sun had burst
below the awning and flooded half the length of the terrace with light
leaving us by the wall just a strip of shade.

I said as gently as I could: "When you two parted in April, I thought you
recognized it as final."

"It would have been, if only I had known," she said.

"Known what?"

She answered me with weary impatience.

"Anything definite. If he had gone to his death I could have borne it. If
he had gone to any existence to which I had a clue, I could have borne it.
But don't you see?" she cried, with a swift return of vitality. "Here was
a man whom any woman would be proud to love--a strong thing of flesh and
blood--disappearing into the mist. I said something heroical to him about
the creatures of the old legends. One talks high-falutin' nonsense at
times. But I didn't realize the truth of it till afterwards. A woman, even
though it hurts her like the devil, prefers to keep a mental grip of a man.
He's there--in Paris, Bombay, Omaha, with his wife and family, doing this,
that and the other. He's still alive. He's still in some kind of human
relation with you. You grind your teeth and say that it's all in the day's
work. You know where you are. But when a man fades out of your life like
a wraith--well--you don't know where you are. It has been maddening--the
ghastly seriousness of it. I've done my best to keep sane. I'm a woman with
a lot of physical energy--I've run it for all it's worth. But this uncanny
business got on my nerves. If the man had not cared for me, I would have
kicked myself into sense. But--oh, it's no use talking about that--it goes
without saying. Besides you know as well as I do. You've already told me.
Well then, you have it. The man I loved, the man who loved me, goes and
disappears, like the shooting star he talked about, into space. I've done
all sorts of fool things to get on his track, just to know. At last I came
to you. But I had no notion of running him down in the flesh. You're sure
of that, Tony, aren't you?"

The Diana in her flashed from candid eyes.

"Naturally," I answered. How could she know that Lackaday was here?
I asked, in order to get to the bottom of this complicated emotional
condition:

"But didn't you ever think of writing--oh, as a friend of course--to
Lackaday, care of War Office, Cox's...?"

She retorted: "I'm not a sloppy school-girl, my friend."

"Quite so," said I. I paused, while the waiter brought tea. "And now that
there's no longer any mystery?"

Her bosom rose with a sigh.

"I mourn my mystery, Tony."

She poured out tea. I passed the uninspiring food that accompanied it. We
conversed in a lower key of tension. At last she said:

"If I don't walk, I'll break something."

A few moments afterwards we were in the street. She drew the breath of one
suffering from exhausted air.

"Let us go up a hill."

Why the ordinary human being should ever desire to walk up hill I have
never been able to discover. For me, the comfortable places. But with Lady
Auriol the craving was symbolical of character. I agreed.

"Choose the least inaccessible," I pleaded.

We mounted the paths through the vines. At the top, we sat down. I wiped
a perspiring brow. She filled her lungs with the air stirred by a faint
breeze.

"Whereabouts is this circus?" she asked suddenly.

I told her, waving a hand in the direction of Clermont-Ferrand.

"How far?"

"About two or three miles."

"I'll go there this evening," she announced calmly.

"What?"

I nearly jumped off the wooden bench.

"My dear Auriol," said I, "my heart's dicky. You oughtn't to spring things
like that on me."

"I don't see where the shock comes in. Why shouldn't I go to a circus if I
want to?"

"It's your wanting to go that astonishes me."

"You're very easily surprised," she remarked. "You ought to take something
for it."

"Possibly," said I. "But why on earth do you want to see the wretched
Lackaday make a fool of himself?"

"If you take it that way," she said icily, "I'm sorry I mentioned it. I
could have gone without your being a whit the wiser."

I lifted my shoulders. "After all, it's entirely your affair. You talked
a while ago about mourning your mystery--which suggested a not altogether
unpoetical frame of mind."

"There s no poetry at all about it," she declared. "That's all gone. We've
come to facts. I'm going to get all the facts. Crucify myself with facts,
if you like. That's the only way to get at Truth."

When a woman of Auriol's worth talks like this, one feels ashamed to
counter her with platitudes of worldly wisdom. She was going to the Cirque
Vendramin. Nothing short of an Act of God could prevent her. I sat helpless
for a few moments. At last, taking advantage of a gleam of common sense, I
said:

"It's all very well for you to try to get to the bedrock of things. But
what about Lackaday?"

"He's not to know."

"He'll have to know," I insisted warmly. "The circus tent is but a small
affair. You'll be there under his nose." I followed the swift change on her
face. "Of course--if you don't care if he sees you..."

She flashed: "You don't suppose I'm capable of such cruelty!"

"Of course not," said I.

She looked over at the twin spires of the cathedral beneath which the town
slumbered in the blue mist of the late afternoon.

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