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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




"She's far more indignant than I am, I've had to stop her writing to the
newspapers and sending the old Earl down to the House of Lords."

"Lady Auriol ought to be able to pull some strings," said I.

"There are not any strings going to be pulled for me in this business,"
said Lackaday. He rose, stalked about the room--it is a modest bachelor St.
James's Street sitting-room, and he took up about as much of its space as
a daddy-long-legs under a tumbler--and suddenly halted in front of me. "Do
you know why?"

I made a polite gesture of enquiring ignorance.

"Because it's a damn sight too sacred."

I bowed. I understood.

"I can find it in my heart to owe many things to Lady Auriol," he
continued. "She's a great woman. But even to her I couldn't owe my position
in the British Army."

"Did you tell her so?"

"I did."

I pictured the scene, knowing my Auriol. I could see the pride in her dark
eyes and masterful lips. His renunciation had in it that of the _beau
geste_ which she secretly adored. It put the final stamp on the man.

Upon this little emotional outburst he left, promising to dine with me the
next day. For a month I saw him frequently, once or twice with Lady Auriol.
He was still in uniform, waiting for the final clip of the War Office
scissors severing the red tape that still bound him to the Army.

Lady Auriol said to me: "I think the day he puts off khaki he'll cry."

He stuck to it till the very last day possible. Then he appeared, gaunt and
miserable, in an ill-fitting blue serge suit which, in the wind, flapped
about his lean body. He had the pathetic air of a lost child. On this
occasion--Lady Auriol and he were lunching with me--she adopted a motherly
attitude which afforded me both pleasure and amusement. She seemed bent
on assuring him that the gaudy vestments of a successful General went for
nothing in her esteem; that, like Semele, she felt (had that unfortunate
lady been given a second chance) more at ease with her Jupiter in the
common guise of ordinary man.

How the Romance had progressed I could not tell. Nothing of it was
perceptible from their talk, which was that of mutually understanding
friends. I hinted a question after the meal, when she and I were alone for
a few moments. She shrugged her shoulders, and regarded me enigmatically.

"I'm a little more mid-Victorian than I thought I was."

"Which means?"

"Whatever you like it to."

And that is all I had a chance of getting out of her. Well, the relations
between Lackaday and Lady Auriol were no business of mine. I had plenty to
do and to think about, and anxiety over their tender affairs did not rob me
of an hour's slumber.

Then came a day when the offer of a humble mission in connection with the
Peace Conference sent me to Paris. Before starting I had a last interview
with Lackaday. He dined with me alone in my chambers.

He looked ill and worried. His scraggy neck rising far above an evening
collar too low for him seemed to betray by its stringy workings the
perturbation of his spirit. His carroty thatch no longer crisp from the
careful military cut had grown into a kind of untamable towslement. The
last month or two had aged him. He was the last person one would have
imagined to be a distinguished soldier in the Great War.

We talked pleasantly of indifferent things till the cigars were lit--he was
always a charming companion, possessing a gentle and somewhat plaintive
humour--and then he began, against his habit, to speak of himself. Like
thousands of demobilized officers he was looking around for some opening in
civil life. As to what particular round hole his square peg could fit he
was most vague. Perhaps a position in one of the far-away regions that were
to be administered by the League of Nations. Something in Syria or German
East Africa.

"Look here, my dear fellow," I said at last, "I presume I'm the very oldest
surviving acquaintance you have in the world. And you can't accuse me of
indiscreet curiosity. But surely you must have had some kind of profession
before the war."

"Of course I had."

"Then why not go back to it?"

It was the first time I had ventured to question him on his antecedents.
For all his gentleness, he had a personal dignity which was enhanced by the
symbolism of his uniform and forbade impertinent questioning. As he had
kept the shutters pulled down over his pre-war career, having in all our
intercourse given me no hint of the avocations that had led him to know the
Inns of France with the accuracy of a Michelin guide, it was obvious that
he had done so for his own good and deliberate reasons. I had got it into
my stupid head that the qualities which had raised him from private to
Brigadier-General had served him in a commercial pursuit; that he had been,
at the time of his pilgrimage through the country, the agent of some French
business house.

On my question he stared at his cigar, twisting it backwards and forwards
between his delicate thumb and two fingers, with the air of a man
hesitating on a decision, until the inevitable happened; the long ash of
the cigar fell over his trousers. He rose with a laugh and a damn and
brushed himself. Then he said:

"Did you ever hear of Les Petit Patou?"

"No," said I, mystified.

"Scarcely anyone in this country ever has. That's the advantage of
obscurity." He reflected for a moment then he said: "I never realized,
until I went very shyly among them, the exquisite delicacy of English
gentlefolk. Not one of you, not even Lady Auriol who has given me the
privilege of her intimate friendship, has ever pressed me to give an
account of myself. I'm not ashamed of Les Petit Patou. But it seems
so--so----" he snapped his fingers for the word--"so incongruous. My
military rank demanded that I should preserve it from ridicule--you'll
remember I asked you to say nothing of the circus."

"Still," said I, "the name Petit Patou conveys nothing to me."

"I'm the original Petit Patou. When I took a partner we became plural.
_Regardez un instant._"

It was only later that I saw the significance of the instinctive French
phrase.

He rose, glanced around him, pounced on a little silver match-box and
an empty wire waste-paper basket, and contorting his mobile face into a
hideous grimace of imbecility, began to juggle with these two objects and
his cigar, displaying the faultless technique of the professional. After
a few throws, the cigar flew into his mouth, the matchbox fell into the
opened pocket of his dinner jacket and the waste-paper basket descended
over his head. For a second he stood grinning through the wire cage, in
the attitude of one waiting for applause. Then swiftly he disembarrassed
himself of the basket and threw the insulted cigar into the fire.

"Do you think that's a dignified way for General Andrew Lackaday, C.B., to
make his living--in the green skin tights of Petit Patou?"

We talked far into the night. My sleep was haunted by the nightmare of the
six foot four of the stringy, bony emaciation of General Lackaday in green
skin tights.




Chapter V



To realize Petit Patou in the British General of Brigade, we must turn to
the manuscript mentioned at the beginning of this story.

We meet him, a raw youth, standing, one blazing summer day on the Bridge
of Avignon. He insists on this episode, because, says he, the bridge is
associated with important events in his life. It was not, needless to
remark, the Pont d'Avignon of the gay old song, for the further arch of
that was swept away by floods long ago, and it now remains a thing of
pathetic uselessness. Three-quarters of the way across the Rhone might you
go, and then you would come to abrupt nothingness, just the swirling river
far below your arrested feet. It was the new suspension bridge, some
three hundred yards further up, sadly inharmonious with the macchiolated
battlements of the city and the austere mass, rising above them, of the
Palace of the Popes on the one side, and, on the other, the grey antiquity
of the castle of Villeneuve brooding like an ancient mother over its aged
offspring, the clustering sun-baked town. The joyous generation of the Old
Bridge has long since passed away, but to the present generation the New
Bridge affords the same wonder and delight. For it entices like the old,
from stifling streets to the haunts of Pan. There do you find leafy walks,
and dells of shade, and pathways by the great cool river leading to
sequestered spots where you may sit and forget the clatter of flagstones
and the stuffy apartment above them for which the rent is due; where the
air of early June is perfumed by wild thyme and marjoram and the far-flung
sweetness of new mown hay, and where the nightingales sing. So, whenever it
can, all Avignon turns out, as it has turned out for hundreds of years, on
its to and fro adventure across the Bridge of Promise.

It was on a Sunday afternoon when young Lackaday stood there, leaning
moodily over the parapet, regarding it not as a bridge of Promise, but as
a Bridge of Despair. He had fled from the dressing-room of the little
music-hall just outside the city walls, which he shared with three others
of the troupe, from its horrible reek of escaping gas and drainage and
grease-paint and the hoarded human emanations of years, and had come here
instinctively to breathe the pure air that swept down the broad stream.
He had come for rest of mind and comfort of soul; but only found himself
noisily alone amid an unsympathetic multitude.

He had failed. He had learned it first from the apathy of the audience.
He had learned it afterwards from the demeanour and the speech far from
apathetic of the manager and leader of the troupe. They were a company of
six, Les Merveilleux, five jugglers, plate spinners, eccentric musicians,
ventriloquists, and one low comedian. Lackaday was the low comedian, his
business to repeat in burlesque most of the performance of his fellow
artists. It was his first engagement, outside the Cirque Rocambeau, his
first day with the troupe. Everything had gone badly. His enormous lean
length put the show out of scale. The troupe, accustomed to the business of
a smaller man, whose sudden illness caused the gap which Lackaday came from
Paris to fill, resented the change, and gave him little help. They demanded
impossibilities. Although they had rehearsed--and the rehearsals had been
a sufficient nightmare of suffering--everybody had seemed to devote a
ferocious malice to his humiliation. Where the professional juggler is
accustomed to catch things at his hip, they threw them at his knees; they
appeared to decide that his head should be on the level of his breast. The
leading lady, Madame Coinçon, wife of the manager, a compact person of five
foot two, roundly declared that she could not play with him, and in his
funniest act, dependent on her co-operation, she left him to be helplessly
funny by himself. The tradition of the troupe required the comedian to be
attired in a loud check suit, green necktie and white felt bowler hat. On
the podgy form of Lackaday's predecessor it produced its comic effect. On
the lank Lackaday it was characterless. In consequence of all this, he had
been nervous, he had missed cues, he had fumbled when he ought to have been
clear, and been clear when he ought comically to have fumbled. He had gone
about his funny business with the air of a curate marrying his vicar to the
object of his hopeless affections.

And Coinçon had devastatingly insulted him. What worm was in the head
of Moignon (the Paris music-hall agent) that he should send him such a
monstrosity? He wasn't, _nom de Dieu_, carrying about freaks at a
fair. He wanted a comedian and not a giant. No wonder the Cirque Rocambeau
had come to grief, if it depended on such canaries as Lackaday. Didn't he
know he was there to make the audience laugh?--not to give a representation
of Monsieur Mounet-Sully elongated by the rack.

"_Hop, man petit_," said he at last. "_F---- moi le camp_," which
is a very vulgar way of insisting on a person's immediate retirement. "Here
is your week's salary. I gain by the proceeding. The baggage-man will see
us through. He has done so before. As for Moignon--"

Although Lackaday regarded Moignon as a sort of god dispensing fame and
riches, enthroned on unassailable heights of power, he trembled at the
awful destiny that awaited him. He would be cast, like Lucifer from heaven.
He would be stripped of authority. Coinçon's invective against him was so
terrible that Lackaday pitied him even more than he pitied himself. Yet
there was himself to consider. As much use to apply to the fallen Moignon
for an engagement as to the Convent of the Daughters of Calvary. He and
Moignon and their joint fortunes were sent hurtling down into the abyss.

On the parapet of the Bridge of Despair leant young Lackaday, gazing
unseeingly down into the Rhone. His sudden misfortune had been like the
stunning blow of a sandbag. His brain still reeled. What had happened was
incomprehensible. He knew his business. He could conceive no other. He had
been trained to it since infancy. There was not a phase of clown's work
with which he was not familiar. He was a passable gymnast, an expert
juggler, a trick musician, an accomplished conjurer. All that the
Merveilleux troupe act required from him he had been doing successfully for
years. Why then the failure? He blamed the check suit, the ill-will of the
company, the unreason of Madame Coinçon....

It did not occur to him that he had emerged from an old world into a new.
That between the old circus public and the new music-hall public there
was almost a generation's change of taste and critical demand. The Cirque
Rocambeau had gone round without perceiving that the world had gone round
too. It wondered why its triumphant glory had declined; and it could
not take steps to adapt itself to the new conditions which it could not
appreciate. Everyone grew old and tradition-bound in the Cirque Rocambeau,
even the horses, until gradually it perished of senile decay. Andrew
Lackaday carrying on the traditions of his foster father, the clown Ben
Flint, had remained with it, principal clown, to the very end. Now and
then, rare passers through from the outer world, gymnasts down on their
luck, glad to take a makeshift engagement while waiting for better things,
had counselled him to leave the antiquated concern. But the Cirque
Rocambeau had been the whole of his life, childhood, boyhood, young
manhood; he was linked to it by the fibres of a generous nature. All
those elderly anxious folk were his family. Many of the children, his
contemporaries, trained in the circus, had flown heartlessly from the
nest, and the elders had fatalistically lamented. Madame Rocambeau, bowed,
wizened, of uncanny age, yet forceful and valiant to the last--carrying
on for the old husband now lying paralysed in Paris who had inherited the
circus from his father misty years ago, would say to the young man, when
one of these defections occurred: "And you André, you are not going to
leave us? You have a fine position, and if you are dissatisfied, perhaps we
can come to an arrangement. You are a child of the circus and I love you
like my own flesh and blood. We shall turn the corner yet. All that is
necessary is faith--and a little youth." And Andrew, a simple soul, who had
been trained in the virtues of honour and loyalty by the brave Ben Flint,
would repudiate with indignation the suggestion of any selfish desire to go
abroad and seek adventure.

At last, one afternoon, when the tent, a miserable gipsy thing compared
with the proud pavilion of the days of the glory of Billy the pig, was
pitched on the outskirts of a poor little town, they found Madame Rocambeau
dead in the canvas box-office which she had occupied for fifty years, the
heartbreaking receipts in front of her, counted out into little piles of
bronze and small silver. The end had come. The circus could not be sold as
a going concern. It crumbled away. Somebody bought the old horses, Heaven
knows for what purpose. Somebody bought the antiquated harness and
moth-eaten trappings. Somebody else bought the tents and fittings. But
nobody bought the old careworn human beings, riders and gymnasts and stable
hands who crept away into the bright free air of France, dazed and lost,
like the prisoners released from the Bastille.

It was not so long ago; long enough ago, however, for young Andrew Lackaday
to have come perilously near the end of his savings in Paris, before the
Almighty Moignon (now curse-withered), but then vast and unctuous, reeking
of fat food and diamonds and great cigars, had found him this engagement at
Avignon. He had journeyed thither full of the radiant confidence of twenty.
He stood on the bridge overwhelmed by the despair whose Tartarean blackness
only twenty can experience.

Not a gleam anywhere of hope. His humiliation was absolute. The maniacal
Coinçon had not even given him an opportunity of redeeming his failure. He
had been paid to go away. The disgusting yet necessary price of his shame
rattled in his pockets. To-night the baggage man would play his part--a
being once presumably trained, yet sunk so low in incompetence that he was
glad to earn his livelihood as baggage man. And he, Andrew Lackaday, was
judged more incompetent even than this degraded outcast. Why? How could it
be? What was the reason? He dug his nails into his burning temples.

The summer sun beat down on him, and set a-glitter the currents in the
Rhone. The ceaseless, laughing stream of citizens passed him by. Presently
youth's need of action brought him half-unconsciously to an erect position.
He glanced dully this way and that, and then slowly moved along the bridge
towards the Villeneuve bank. Girls bare-headed, arm-in-arm, looked up
at him and laughed, he was so long and lean and comical with his ugly
lugubrious face and the little straw hat perched on top of his bushy
carroty poll. He did not mind, being used to derision. In happier days he
valued it, for the laugh would be accompanied by a nudge and a "_Voilà
Auguste!_" He took it as a tribute. It was fame. Now he was so deeply
sunk in his black mood that he scarcely heeded. He walked on to the end of
the bridge, and turned down the dusty pathway by the bank.

Suddenly he became aware of sounds of music and revelry, and a few yards
further on he came to a broad dell shaded by plane trees and set out as a
restaurant garden, with rude tables and benches, filled with good-humoured
thirsty folk; on one side a weather-beaten wooden châlet, having the proud
title of Restaurant du Rhône, served apparently but to house the supply
of drinks which nondescript men and sturdy bare-headed maidens carried
incessantly on trays to the waiting tables. On the dusty midway space--the
garden boasted no blade of grass--couples danced to the strains of a
wheezing hurdy-gurdy played by a white bearded ancient who at the end of
each tune refreshed himself with a draught from a chope of beer on the
ground by his side, while a tiny anæmic girl went round gathering sous in a
shell. When the music stopped you could hear the whir and the click of the
bowls in an adjoining dusty and rugged alley and the harsh excited cries
of the players. During these intervals the serving people in an absent way
would scatter an occasional carafe-full of water on the dancing floor to
lay the dust.

Young Lackaday hung hesitatingly on the outskirts under the wooden archway
that was at once the entrance and the sign-board. The music had ended. The
tables were packed. He felt very thirsty and longed to enter and drink some
of the beer which looked so cool in the long glasses surmounted by its
half inch of white froth--inviting as sea-foam. Shyness held him. These
prosperous, care-free bourgeois, almost indistinguishable one from the
other by racial characteristics, and himself a tragic failure in life and
physically unique among men, were worlds apart. It had never occurred to
him before that he could find himself anywhere in France where the people
were not his people. He felt heart-brokenly alien.

Presently the hurdy-gurdy started the ghostly tinkling of the _Il
Bacio_ waltz, and the ingenuous couples of Avignon rose and began to
dance. The thirst-driven Lackaday plucked up courage, and strode to
a deserted wooden table. He ordered beer. It was brought. He sipped
luxuriously. One tells one's thirst to be patient, when one has to think of
one's sous. He was half-way through when two girls, young and flushed from
dancing together, flung themselves down on the opposite bench--the table
between.

"We don't disturb you, Monsieur?"

He raised his hat politely. "By no means, Mesdemoiselles."

One of them with a quick gesture took up from the table a forgotten
newspaper and began to fan herself and her companion, to the accompaniment
of giggling and chatter about the heat. They were very young. They ordered
grenadine syrup and eau-de-seltz. Andrew Lackaday stared dismally beyond
them, at the dancers. In the happy, perspiring girls in front of him he
took no interest, for all their youth and comeliness and obviously frank
approachability. He saw nothing but the fury-enflamed face of Coinçon and
heard nothing but the rasping voice telling him that it was cheaper to pay
him his week's salary than to allow him to appear again. And "_f---- moi
le camp!_" Why hadn't he taken Coinçon by the neck then and there with
his long strong fingers and strangled him? Coinçon would have had the
chance of a rabbit. He had the strength of a dozen Coinçons--he, trained to
perfection, with muscle like dried bull's sinews. He could split an apple
between arm and forearm, in the hollow of his elbow. Why shouldn't he go
back and break Coinçon's neck? No man alive had the right to tell him to
_f---- le camp!_

"You don't seem very gay," said a laughing voice.

With a start he recovered consciousness of immediate surroundings. Instead
of two girls opposite, there was only one. Vaguely he remembered that a man
had come up.

"_Un tour de valse, Mademoiselle?_"

"_Je vieux bien_."

And one of the girls had gone, leaving her just sipped grenadine syrup and
seltzer-water. But it had been like some flitting unreality of a dream.

At his blinking recovery the remaining girl laughed again.

"You look like a somnambulist."

He replied: "I beg pardon, Mademoiselle, but I was absorbed in my
reflections."

"Black ones--_hein?_ They have made you little infidelities?"

He frowned. "They? Who do you mean--they?"

"_Un joli garçon is not absorbed in his reflections_"--she mimicked
his tone--"unless there is the finger of a _petite femme_ to stir them
round and darken them."

"Mademoiselle," said he, seriously. "You are quite mistaken. There's not a
woman in the world against whom I have the slightest grudge."

He spoke truly. It was a matter of love, and Mme Coinçon's hostility did
not count.

"Word of honour," he added looking into the smiling ironical face.

Love had entered very little into his serious scheme of life. He had had
his entanglements of course. There was Francine Dumesnil, who had fluttered
into the Cirque Rocambeau as a slack wire artist, and after making him vows
of undying affection, had eloped a week afterwards with Hans Petersen, the
only man left who could stand on the bare back of a horse that was not
thick with resin. But the heart of Andrew Lackaday had nothing to do
with the heart of Francine Dumesnil. He had agreed with the aged Madame
Rocambeau. _Sales types_, both of them.

"If it had been _chagrin d'amour_--sorrow of love, Mademoiselle,"
said he, "I should not have been so insensible to the presence of two such
charming young ladies."

"We are polite, all the same," she remarked approvingly.

She sipped her grenadine. Having nothing further to say he sipped his beer.
Presently she said:

"I saw you this afternoon at the _boite_." He looked at her with a
touch of interest. No one would allude to the music-hall as the "box"
except a fellow professional engaged there.

"You too?" he asked.

She nodded. She belonged to a troupe of dancing girls. As they were the
first number, they got away early. She and her friend had gone for a walk
and found this restaurant. It was gay, wasn't it? He said, soberly:

"You were dancing at rehearsal this morning. You've danced at the
music-hall this afternoon, you'll be dancing again this evening--why do you
dance here?"

"One can only be young once," she replied.

"How old are you?"

"Seventeen. And you?"

"Twenty-two."

She would have given him thirty, she said, he looked so serious. And he,
regarding her more narrowly, would have given her fifteen. She was very
young, slight, scarcely formed, yet her movements were lithe and complete
like those of a young lizard. She had laughing, black eyes and a fresh
mouth set in a thin dark face that might one day grow haggard or coarse,
according to her physical development, but was now full with the devil's
beauty of youth. A common type, one that would not arrest masculine eyes as
she passed by. Dozens of the girls there round about might have called her
sister. She was dressed with cheap neatness, the soiled white wing of a
bird in her black hat being the only touch of bravura. She spoke with the
rich accent of the South.

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