A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




She lingered for a few moments watching his long, straight back disappear
round the corner of the path, and then turned and joined me by the park
gate. On our way to the hotel the only thing she said was:

"I don't seem to have much chance, do I, Tony?"

It was after lunch, while we sat, as the day before, at the end of the
terrace, that she told me of what had taken place between Lackaday and
herself, while I had been hanging about the gate. I must confess
to pressing her confidence. Since I was lugged, even as a sort of
_raisonneur_, into their little drama, I may be pardoned for some
curiosity as to development. I did not seem, however, to get much further.
They had parted for ever, last April, in a not unpoetic atmosphere. They
had parted for ever now in circumstances devoid of poetry. The only bit of
dramatic progress was the mutual avowal, apparently dragged out of them.
It was almost an anticlimax. And then dead stop. I put these points before
her. She agreed dismally. Bitterly reproached herself for giving way in
Paris to womanish folly; also for deliberately bringing about the morning's
explanation.

"You were cruel--which is utterly unlike you," I said, judicially.

"That horrible green, white and red thing haunted me all night--and that
fat woman bursting out of her clothes. I felt shrivelled up. If only I had
left things as they were!" She harped always on that note. "I thought I
could walk myself out of my morbid frame of mind. Oh yes--you're quite
right--morbid--unlike me. I walked miles and miles. I made up my mind to
return to Paris by the night train. I should never see him again. The whole
thing was dead. Killed. Washed out. I had got back some sense when I ran
into the two of you. It seemed so ghastly to go on talking in that cold,
dry way. I longed to goad him into some sort of expression of himself--to
find the man again. That's why I told him about going to the circus last
night."

She went on in this strain. Presently she said: "I could shed tears of
blood over him. Don't think I'm filled merely with selfish disgust. As
I told him--the pity of it--all that he must have suffered--for he has
suffered, hasn't he?"

"He has gone through Hell," said I.

She was silent for a few moments. Then she said: "What's the good of going
round and round in a circle? You either understand or you don't."

By way of consolation I mendaciously assured her that I understood. I
don't think I understand now. I doubt whether she understood herself.
Her emotions were literally going round and round in a circle, a hideous
merry-go-round with fixed staring features, to be passed and repassed in
the eternal gyration. Horror of Petit Patou. Her love for Lackaday. Madame
Patou. Hatred of Lacka-day. Scorching self-contempt for seeking him out.
Petit Patou and Madame Patou. Lackaday crucified. Infinite pity for
Lackaday. General Lackaday. Old dreams. The lost illusion. The tomb of
love. Horror of Petit Patou--and so _da capo_, endlessly round and
round.

At least, this figure gave me the only clue to her frame of mind. If she
went on gyrating in this way indefinitely, she must go mad. No human
consciousness could stand it. For sanity she must stop at some point. The
only rational halting-place was at the Tomb. If I knew my Auriol, she would
drop a flower and a tear on it, and then would start on a bee-line for
Central Tartary, or whatever expanse of the world's surface offered a
satisfactory field for her energies.

She swallowed the stone-cold, half-remaining coffee in her cup and rose and
stretched herself, arms and back and bust, like a magnificent animal, the
dark green, silken knitted jumper that she wore revealing all her great and
careless curves, and drew a long breath and smiled at me.

"I've not slept for two nights and I've walked twelve miles this morning.
I'll turn in till dinner." She yawned. "Poor old Tony," she laughed. "You
can have it at a Christian hour this evening."

"The one bright gleam in a hopeless day," said I.

She laughed again, blew me a kiss and went her way to necessary repose.

I remained on the terrace a while longer, in order to finish a long
corona-corona, forbidden by my doctors. But I reflected that as the showman
makes up on the swings what he loses on the roundabouts, so I made up on
the filthy water what I lost on the cigars. How I provided myself with
excellent corona-coronas in Royat, under the Paris price, I presume, of
ten francs apiece, wild reporters will never drag out of me. I mused,
therefore, over the last smokable half-inch, and at last, discarding it
reluctantly, I sought well-earned slumber in my room. But I could not
sleep. All this imbroglio kept me awake. Also the infernal band began to
play. I had not thought--indeed, I had had no time to think of the note
from Bakkus which I had received the first thing in the morning, and of
Lackaday's confirmation of the summons to the ailing Elodie. Women, said
he, had nerves. The thunder, of course. But, thought I, with elderly
sagacity, was it all thunder?

As far as I could gather, from Lackaday's confessions he had never given
Elodie cause for jealousy from the time they had become Les Petit Patou.
Her rout of the suggestive Ernestine proved her belief in his insensibility
to woman's attractions during the war. She had never heard of Lady Auriol.
Lady Auriol, therefore, must have bounded like a tiger into the placid
compound of her life. Reason enough for a _crise des nerfs_. Even I,
who had nothing to do with it, found my equilibrium disturbed.

Lady Auriol and I dined together. She declared herself rested and in her
right and prosaic mind.

"I have no desire to lose your company," said I, "so I hope there's no more
talk of an unbooked _strapontin_ on the midnight train."

"No need," she replied. "He's leaving Clermont-Ferrand tomorrow. I'll keep
to my original programme and enjoy fresh air until a wire summons me back
to Paris. That's to say if you can do with me."

"If you keep on looking as alluring as you are this evening," said I,
"perhaps I mayn't be able to do without you."

"I wonder why I've never been able to fall in love with a man of your type,
Tony," she remarked in her frank, detached way. "You--by which I mean
hundreds of men like you, much younger, of course--you are of my world,
you understand the half-said thing, your conduct during the war has been
irreproachable, you've got a heart beneath a cynical exterior, you've got
brains, you're as clean as a new pin, you're an agreeable companion, you
can turn a compliment in a way that even a savage like me can appreciate,
and yet----"

"And yet," I interrupted, "when you're presented with a whole paper, row on
row, of new pins, you're left cold because choice is impossible." I smiled
sadly and sipped my wine. "Now I know what I am, one of a row of nice,
clean, English-made pins."

"It's you that are being rude to yourself, not I," she laughed. "But you
are of a type typical, and in your heart you're very proud of it. You
wouldn't be different from what you are for anything in the world."

"I would give a good deal," said I, "to be different from what I
am--but--from the ideal of myself--no."

She was quite right. Although I may not have sound convictions, thank
Heaven I've sacred prejudices. They have kept me more or less straight in
my unimaginative British fashion during a respectable lifetime. So far am
I from being a Pharisee, that I exclaim: "Thank God I am as other decent
fellows are."

We circled pleasantly round the point until she returned to her original
proposition--her wonder that she had never been able to fall in love with a
man of my type.

"It's very simple," said I. "You distrust us. You know that if you suddenly
said to one of us, 'Let us go to Greenland and wear bearskins and eat
blubber'; or, 'Let us fit up the drawing-room with incubators for East-end
babies doomed otherwise to die,' he would vehemently object. And there
would be rows and the married life of cat and dog."

She said: "Am I really as bad as that, Tony?"

"You are," said I.

She shook her head. "No," she replied, after a pause. "In the depths of
myself I'm as conventional as you are. That's why I said I was puzzled to
know why I had never fallen in love with any one of you. I had my deep
reasons, my dear Tony, for saying it. I'm bound to my type and my order.
God knows I've seen enough and know enough to be free. But I'm not. Last
night showed me that I'm not."

"And that's final, my dear?" said I.

She helped herself to salad with an air of bravura. She helped herself, to
my surprise, to a prodigious amount of salad.

"As final as death," she replied.

* * * * *

There had been billed about the place a Grand Concert du Soir in the Casino
de Royat. The celebrated tenor, M. Horatio Bakkus. The Casino having been
burned down in 1918, the concerts took place under the bandstand in the
park.

After dinner we found places, among the multitude, on the Casino Cafe
Terrace overlooking the bandstand, and listened to Bakkus sing. I explained
Bakkus, more or less, to Auriol. Although she could not accept Lackaday
as Petit Patou, she seemed to accept Bakkus, without question, as a
professional singer. The concert over, he joined us at our little japanned
iron table, and acknowledged her well-merited compliments--I tell you, he
sang like a minor Canon in an angelic choir--with, well, with the well-bred
air of a minor Canon in an angelic choir. With easy grace he dismissed
himself and talked knowledgeably and informatively of the antiquities and
the beauties of Auvergne. To most English folk it was an undiscovered
country. We must steal a car and visit Orcival. Hadn't I heard of it?
France's gem of Romanesque churches? And the Château--ages old---with its
_charmille_--the towering maze-like walks of trees kept clipped
in scrupulous formality by an old gardener during the war--the
_charmille_ designed by no less a genius than Le Nôtre, who planned
the wonders of Versailles and the exquisite miniature of the garden of
Nîmes? To-morrow must we go.

This white-haired, luminous-eyed ascetic--he drank but an orangeade through
post-war straws--had kept us spellbound with his talk. I glanced at Auriol
and read compliance in her eye.

"Will you accompany us ignorant people and act as cicerone?"

"With all the pleasure in life," said Bakkus.

"What time shall we start?"

"Would ten be too early?"

"Lady Auriol and I are old campaigners."

"I call for you at ten. It is agreed?"

We made the compact. I lifted my glass. He sputtered response through the
post-war straws resting in the remains of his orangeade. He rose to
go, pleading much correspondence before going to bed. We rose too. He
accompanied us to the entrance to our hotel. At the lift, he said:

"Can you give me a minute?"

"As many as you like," said I, for it was still early.

We sped Lady Auriol upwards to her repose, and walked out through the hall
into the soft August moonlight.

"May I tread," said he, "on the most delicate of grounds?"

"It all depends," said I, "on how delicately you do it."

He made a courteous movement of his hand and smiled. "I'll do my best. I
take it that you're very fully admitted into Andrew Lackaday's confidence."

"To a great extent," I admitted.

"And--forgive me if I am impertinent--you have also that of the lady whom
we have just left?"

"Really, my dear Bakkus----" I began.

"It is indeed a matter of some importance," he interposed quickly. "It
concerns Madame Patou--Elodie. Rightly or wrongly, she received a certain
impression from your charming luncheon party of yesterday. Andrew, as you
are aware, is not the man with whom a woman can easily make a scene. There
was no scene. A hint. With that rat-trap air of finality with which I am,
for my many failings, much more familiar than yourself, he said: 'We will
cancel our engagement and go to Vichy.' This morning, as I wrote, I
was called to Clermont-Ferrand. Madame Patou, you understand, has the
temperament of the South. Its generosity is apt to step across the
boundaries of exaggeration. In my capacity of friend of the family, I had a
long interview with her. You have doubtless seen many such on the stage.
I must say that Andrew, to whom the whole affair appeared exceedingly
distasteful, had announced his intention of obeying the rules of common
good manners and leaving his farewell card on Lady Auriol. Towards the end
of our talk it entered the head of Madame Patou that she would do the same.
I pointed out the anomaly of the interval between the two visits. But the
head of a Marseillaise is an obstinate one. She dressed, put on her best
hat--there is much that is symbolical in a woman's best hat, as doubtless a
man of the world like yourself has observed--and took the tram with me to
Royat. We alighted at the further entrance to the park, and came plump
upon a leave-taking between Lackaday and Lady Auriol. You know there is a
turn--some masking shrubs--we couldn't help seeing through them. She was
for rushing forward. I restrained her. A second afterwards, Andrew ran into
us. For me, at any rate, it was a most unhappy situation. If he had fallen
into a rage, like ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and accused us of
spying, I should have known how to reply. But that's where you can never
get hold of Andrew Lackaday. He scorns such things. He said in his ramrod
fashion: 'It's good of you to come to meet me, Elodie. I was kept longer
than I anticipated.' He stopped the Clermont-Ferrand tram, nodded to me,
and, with his hand under Elodie's elbow, helped her in."

"May I ask why you tell me all this?" I asked.

"Certainly," said he, and his dark eyes glittered in the moonlight. "I give
the information for what it may be worth to you as a friend, perhaps as
adviser, of both parties."

"You are assuming, Mr. Bakkus," I answered rather stiffly, "that Madame
Patou's unfortunate impressions are in some way justified."

It was a most unpleasant conversation. I very much resented discussing Lady
Auriol with Horatio Bakkus.

"Not at all," said he. "But Fate has thrown you and me into analogous
positions--we are both elderly men--me as between Lackaday and Madame
Patou, you as between Lady Auriol and Lackaday."

"But, damn it all, man," I cried angrily, "what have I just been saying?
How dare you assume there's anything between them save the ordinary
friendship of a distinguished soldier and an English lady?"

"If you can only assure me that there is nothing but that ordinary
friendship, you will take a weight off my mind and relieve me of a great
responsibility."

"I can absolutely assure you," I cried hotly, "that by no remote
possibility can there be anything else between Lady Auriol Dayne and Petit
Patou."

He thrust out both his hands and fervently grasped the one I instinctively
put forward.

"Thank you, thank you, my dear Hylton. That's exactly what I wanted to
know. _Au revoir_. I think we said ten o'clock."

He marched away briskly. With his white hair gleaming between his
little black felt hat cocked at an angle and the collar of his flapping
old-fashioned opera-cloak, he looked like some weird bird of the night.

I entered the hotel feeling the hot and cold of the man who has said a
damnable thing. Through the action of what kinky cell of the brain I had
called the dear gallant fellow "Petit Patou," instead of "Lackaday," I was
unable to conjecture.

I hated myself. I could have kicked myself. I wallowed in the unreason of a
man vainly seeking to justify himself. The last thing in the world I wanted
to do was to see Horatio Bakkus again. I went to bed loathing the idea of
our appointment.




Chapter XXII



Lady Auriol, myself and the car met punctually at the hotel door at ten
o'clock. There was also a _chasseur_ with Lady Auriol's dust-coat
and binoculars, and a _concierge_ with advice. We waited for Bakkus.
Auriol, suddenly bethinking herself of plain chocolate, to the consumption
of which she was addicted on the grounds of its hunger-satisfying
qualities, although I guaranteed her a hearty midday meal on the occasion
of the present adventure, we went down the street to the _Marquise de
Sévigné_ shop and bought some. This took time, because she lingered over
several varieties devastating to the appetite. I paid gladly. If we all
had the same ideas as to the employment of a happy day, it would be a dull
world. We went back to the car. Still no Bakkus. We waited again. I railed
at the artistic temperament. Pure, sheer bone idleness, said I.

"But what can he be doing?" asked Auriol.

I, who had received through Lackaday many lights on Bakkus's character, was
at no loss to reply.

"Doing? Why, snoring. He'll awake at midday, stroll round here and expect
to find us smiling on the pavement. We give him five more minutes."

At the end of the five minutes I sent the _concierge_ off for a
guide-book; much more accurate, I declared, than Bakkus was likely to be,
and at half-past ten by my watch we started. Although I railed at the sloth
of Bakkus, I rejoiced in his absence. My over-night impression had not been
dissipated by slumber.

"I'm not sorry," said I, as we drove along. "Our friend is rather too much
of a professed conversationalist."

"You also have a comfortable seat which possibly you would have had to give
up to your guest," said Auriol.

"How you know me, my dear," said I, and we rolled along very happily.

I think it was one of the pleasantest days I have ever passed in the course
of a carefully spent life. Auriol was at her best. She had thrown off the
harried woman of affairs. She had put a nice little tombstone over the
grave of her romance, thus apparently reducing to beautiful simplicity her
previous complicated frame of mind. For aught I could have guessed, not a
cloud had ever dimmed the Diana serenity of her soul. If I said that
she laid herself out to be the most charming of companions, I should be
accusing her of self-consciousness. Rather, let me declare her to have been
so instinctively. Vanity apart, I stood for something tangible in her
life. She could not remember the time when I had not been her firm friend.
Between my first offering of chocolates and my last over a quarter of a
century had lapsed. As far as a young woman can know a middle-aged man, she
knew me outside in. If she came to me for my sympathy, she knew that she
had the right. If she twitted me on my foibles, she knew that I granted her
the privilege, with affectionate indulgence.

Now, perhaps you may wonder why I, not yet decrepit, did not glide ever so
imperceptibly in love with Lady Auriol, who was no longer a dew-besprinkled
bud of a girl and therefore beyond the pale of my sentimental inclinations.
Well, just as she had avowed that she could not fall in love with a man of
my type, so was it impossible for me to fall in love with a woman of hers.
Perhaps some dark-eyed devil may yet lure me to destruction, or some mild,
fair-haired, comfortable widow may entice me to domesticity. But the joy
and delight of my attitude towards Auriol was its placid and benignant
avuncularity. We were the best and frankest friends in the world.

And the day was an August hazy dream of a day. We wound along the mountain
roads, first under overhanging greenery and then, almost suddenly, remote,
in blue ether. We hung on precipices overlooking the rock-filled valleys of
old volcanic desolation. Basaltic cliffs rose up from their bed of yellow
cornfields, bare and stark, yet, in the noontide shimmer, hesitating in
their eternal defiance of God and man. We ascended to vast tablelands of
infinite scrub and yellow broom, and the stern peaks of the Puy de Dôme
mountains, a while ago seen like giants, appeared like rolling hillocks;
but here and there a little white streak showed that the snow still
lingered and would linger on until the frosts of autumn bound it in chains
to await the universal winding-sheet of winter. Climate varied with the
varying altitude of the route. Here, on a last patch of mountain ground,
were a man or two and a woman or two and odd children, reaping and binding;
there, after a few minutes' ascent, on another sloping patch, a solitary
peasant ploughed with his team of oxen. Everywhere on the declivitous
waysides, tow-haired, blue-eyed children guarded herds of goats, as their
forbears had done in the days of Vercingetorix, the Gaul. Nowhere, save in
the dimly seen remotenesses of the valleys, where vestiges of red-roofed
villages emerged through the fertile summer green, was there sign of
habitation. Whence came they, these patient humans, wresting their life
from these lonely spots of volcanic wildernesses?

Now and then, on a lower hump of mountain, appeared the ruined tower of
a stronghold fierce and dominating long ago. There the lord had all the
rights of the _seigneur_, as far as his eye could reach. He had
men-at-arms in plenty, and could ride down to the valley and could
provision himself with what corn and meat he chose, and could return and
hold high revel. But when the winter came, how cold must he have been, for
all the wood with its stifling smoke that he burned in his crude stone
hall. And Madame the Countess, his wife, and her train of highborn young
women--imagine the cracking chilblains on the hands of the whole fair
community.

"Does the guide-book say that?" asked Auriol, on my development of this
pleasant thesis.

"Is a guide-book human?"

"It doesn't unweave rainbows. As a _cicerone_ you're impossible. I
regret Horatio Bakkus."

Still, in spite of my prosaic vision, we progressed on an enjoyable
pilgrimage. I am not giving you an itinerary. I merely mention features of
a day's whirl which memory has recaptured. We lunched in that little oasis
of expensive civilization, Mont Dore. Incidentally we visited Orcival, with
its Romanesque church and château, the objective of our expedition, and
found it much as Bakkus's glowing eloquence had described. From elderly
ladies at stalls under the lee of the church we bought picture post cards.
We wandered through the deeply shaded walks of the _charmille_, as
trimly kept as the maze of Hampton Court and three times the height. We did
all sorts of other things. We stopped at wild mountain gorges alive with
the rustle of water and aglow with wild-flowers. We went on foot through
one-streeted, tumble-down villages and passed the time of day with the
kindly inhabitants. And the August sun shone all the time.

We reached Royat at about six o'clock and went straight up to our rooms.
On my table some letters awaited me; but instead of finding among them
the apology from Bakkus which I had expected, I came across a telephone
memorandum asking me to ring up Monsieur Patou at the Hôtel Moderne, Vichy,
as soon as I returned.

After glancing through my correspondence, I descended to the bureau and
there found Auriol in talk with the _concierge_. She broke off and
waved a telegram at me.

"The end of my lotus-eating. The arrangements are put through and I'm no
longer hung up. So"--she made a little grimace--"it's the midnight train to
Paris."

"Surely to-morrow will do," I protested.

"To-morrow never does," she retorted.

"As you will," said I, knowing argument was hopeless.

Meanwhile the _concierge_ was 'allo'-ing lustily into the telephone.

"I ought to have stuck to head-quarters," she said, moving away into the
lounge. "It's the first time I've ever mixed up business and--other things.
Anyhow," she smiled, "I've had an adorable day. I'll remember it in Arras."

"Arras?"

"Roundabout." She waved vaguely. "I'll know my exact address to-morrow."

"Please let me have it."

"What's the good unless you promise to write to me?"

"I swear," said I.

"Pardon, Miladi," called the _concierge_, receiver in hand. "The
_gare de Clermont-Ferrand_ says there is no _place salon-lit_ or
_coupé-lit_ free in the train to-night. But there is _one place de
milieu_, _premiere_, not yet taken."

"Reserve it then and tell them you're sending a _chasseur_ at once
with the money." She turned to me. "My luck's in."

"Luck!" I cried. "To get a middle seat in a crowded carriage, for an
all-night journey, with the windows shut?"

She laughed. "Why is it, my dear Tony, you always seem to pretend there has
never been anything like a war?"

She went upstairs to cleanse herself and pack. I remained master of the
telephone. In the course of time I got on to the Hôtel Moderne, Vichy.
Eventually I recognized Lackaday's voice. The preliminaries of fence over,
he said:

"I wonder whether it would be trespassing too far on your friendship to ask
you to pay your promised visit to Vichy to-morrow?"

The formality of his English, which one forgot when talking to him face to
face, was oddly accentuated by the impersonal tones of the telephone.

"I'll motor over with pleasure," said I. The prospect pleased me. It was
only sixty kilometres. I was wondering what the deuce I should do with
myself all alone.

"You're sure it wouldn't be inconvenient? You have no other engagement?"

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.