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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




"Why, yes. If you will consent to a month of very hard work. You would
have to learn a little elementary juggling. You would have to give me
instantaneous replies in act and speech. But if you would give yourself up
to me I could teach you."

"But, _mon pauvre André_," she said, with an astonished air, "this is
the last thing I ever dreamed of. I am so ignorant. I should put you to
shame."

"Oh no, you wouldn't," said he, confidently. "I know my business. Wait.
_Les affaires sont les affaires_. I should have to give you a little
contract. Let us see. For the remainder of my tour--ten weeks--ten francs a
day with hotel _en pension_ and railway fares."

To Elodie, independent waif in theatre-land, this was wealth beyond her
dreams. She stretched both hands across the table.

"Do you mean that? It is true? And, if I please you, you will keep me
always?"

"Why not?" said Andrew. "And, if you show talent, we may come to a better
arrangement for the next tour."

"And if I show no talent at all?"

He made a deprecating gesture and grinned in his charming way. But Elodie's
intuition taught her that there was the stern purpose of a man behind the
grin. She had imposed her helplessness on him this once. But if she failed
him she would not have, professionally, a second chance.

"I insist on your having talent," said Andrew.

The walk home to her dingy lodgings repeated itself. She felt very humble
yet triumphant. More than ever did she regard him as a god who had raised
her, by a touch, from despair and starvation to hope and plenty, and in her
revulsion of gratitude she could have taken both his hands and passionately
kissed them. And yet she was proudly conscious of something within her,
unconquerably feminine, which had touched his godship and wrought the
miracle.

They halted in the narrow, squalid street, before the dark entry of the
house where she lodged. Andrew eyed the poverty-stricken hole in disgust.
Obviously she had touched the depths.

"To-morrow you must move," said he. "I shall arrange a room for you at the
hotel. We shall have much business to discuss. Can you be there at ten
o'clock?"

"Whatever you say shall be done," she replied humbly.

He put out his hand.

"Good-night, Elodie. Have courage and all will be well."

She murmured some thanks with a sob in her voice and, turning swiftly,
disappeared up the evil-smelling stone stairs. The idea of kissing her did
not occur to him until he found himself alone and remembered the pretty
idyll of their leave-taking long ago. He laughed, none too gaily. Between
boy and girl and man and woman there was a vast difference.




Chapter X



That was the beginning of the combination known a little while afterwards
as _Les Petit Patou_. Elodie, receptive, imitative, histrionic, showed
herself from the start an apt pupil. To natural talent she added the
desire, born of infinite gratitude, to please her benefactor. She possessed
the rare faculty of perfect surrender. Andrew marvelled. Had he hypnotized
her she could not have more completely executed his will. And yet she was
no automaton. She was artist enough to divine when her personality should
be effaced and when it should count. She spoke her patter with intelligent
point. She learned, thanks to Andrew's professional patience, and her own
vehement will, a few elementary juggling tricks. Andrew repeated the famous
Prépimpin cigar-act. Open-mouthed, Elodie followed his manipulations. When
he threw away the cigar it seemed to enter her mouth quite naturally,
against her will. She removed it with an expression of disgust and hurled
it at Andrew, who caught it between his lips, smoked it for a second or two
and grinned his thanks. With a polite gesture he threw it, as the audience
thought, back to her; but by a sleight-of-hand trick the cigar vanished and
she caught, to her delighted astonishment, a pearl necklace, which, as she
clasped it round her neck, vanished likewise. After which he overwhelmed
her with disappearing jewels. At once it became a popular item in their
entertainment.

In the course of a few months he swore she was worth a hundred Prépimpins.
He could teach her anything. By the end of the year he evolved the
grotesque performance that made Les Petit Patou famous in provincial
France, brought them for a season to Paris at the Cirque Médrano, to London
(for a week) at the Hippodrome, to the principal cities of Italy, and
doubled and trebled the salary which he enjoyed as Petit Patou all alone
with the dog.

Meanwhile it is important to note a very swift physical change in Elodie.
When a young woman, born to plumpness, is reduced by misery to skin and
bone, a short term of succulent nourishment and absence of worry, will
suffice to restore her to a natural condition. She had no beauty, save that
of her dark and luminous eyes and splendid teeth. Her features were coarse
and irregular. Her uncared for skin gave signs of future puffiness. But
still--after two or three happy months, she more or less regained the
common attractiveness and the audacious self-confidence of the Marseilles
_gamine_ who had asked him to kiss her long ago.

Thus, imperceptibly, she became less an assistant than a partner, less a
paid servant on the stage than a helpmeet in his daily life. Looking at
the traditions of their environment and at the enforced intimacy of their
vagabondage, one sees the inevitability of this linking of their fortunes.
That there was any furious love about the affair I have very grave doubts.
Andrew in his secret soul still hankered after the Far-away Princess, and
Elodie had spent most of her passionate illusions on the unspeakable
Raoul. But they had a very fair basis of mutual affection to build upon.
Philosophers will tell you that such is the basis of most happy marriages.
You can believe them or not, as you please. I am in no position to
dogmatise.... At any rate Les Petit Patou started off happily. If Elodie
was not the perfect housewife, you must remember her upbringing and her
devil-may-care kind of theatrical existence. Andrew knew that hers were
not the habits of the Far-away One, who like himself would be a tidy soul,
bringing into commonplace tidiness an exquisitely harmonious sense of
order; but the Far-away One was a mythical being endowed with qualities
which it would be absurd to look for in Elodie. Besides, their year
being mainly spent in hotels, she had little opportunity of cultivating
housewifely qualities. If she neglected the nice conduct of his underlinen
after the first few months of their partnership, he could not find it in
his heart to blame her. Professional work was tiring. Her own clothes
needed her attention. But still, the transient comfort had been very
agreeable.... In Paris, too, at first she had played at house-keeping in
the apartment of the Faubourg Saint-Denis. But Elodie did not understand
the _bonne_, and the _bonne_ refused to understand Elodie in the
matter of catering, and they emphasized their mutual misunderstanding with
the unrestrained speech of children of the people. Once or twice Andrew
went hungry. In his sober and dignified way he drew Elodie's attention to
his unusual condition. It led to their first quarrel. After that they ate,
very comfortably, at a little restaurant round the corner.

It was not the home life of which Andrew had dreamed--not even the
reincarnation of Madame Flint sitting by the round table darning socks by
the light of the shaded lamp. Elodie loathed domestic ideals.

"_Mon vieux_," she would declare, "I had enough sewing in my young
days. My idea of happiness would be a world without needles and thread."

He noted in her, too, a curious want of house-pride. Dust gave her no great
concern. She rather loved a litter of periodicals, chiffons, broken packets
of cigarettes, tobacco and half-eaten fruit on the tables. A picture askew
never attracted her attention. To remain in the house, dressed in her
out-of-door clothes, seemed to her vain extravagance and discomfort. A
wrapper and slippers, the more soiled and shapeless the better, were the
only indoor wear. Andrew deplored her lack of literary interest. She would
read the feuilletons of the _Petit Journal_ and the _Matin_ in a
desultory fashion; but she could not concentrate her mind on the continuous
perusal of a novel. She spent hours over a pack of greasy cards, telling
her fortune by intricate methods. The same with music; though in this case
she had a love for it in the open air when a band was playing, and was
possessed of a natural ear, and could read easy pieces and accompaniments
at sight with some facility. But she would never try to learn anything
difficult; would never do more than strum a popular air or two until swift
boredom paralysed her nerves.

Yet, for all her domestic slatternness, the moment she emerged from private
into professional life, her phlegmatic indolence was transformed into quick
energy. No rehearsal wearied her. Into every performance she concentrated
the whole of her being. If it were a question of mastering a grotesque
accompaniment to a new air on Andrew's one-string fiddle, she would slave
for hours until it was perfect. She kept her stage costume in scrupulous
repair. Her make-up box was a model of tidiness. She would be late for
lunch, late for dinner, late for any social engagement, but never once was
she late for a professional appointment. On the stage her loyalty to Andrew
never wavered. No man could have a more ideal co-worker. She never lost her
head, demanded a more prominent position, or grudged him the lion's share
of the applause. In her praiseworthy lack of theatrical vanity, writes
Lackaday, by way of encomium, she was unique among women. A pearl of great
price.

Also, when they walked abroad, she dressed with neatness. Her hair, a
stringy bush at home, appeared a miracle of coiffure. Lips and eyes
received punctilious attention. The perfection of her high-heeled shoes was
a matter of grave concern. Whatever may have been underneath, the outside
of her toilette received anxious care. She thought much of externals.
Andrew came within her purview. She did her best to remodel his outer man
more in accordance with his prosperity; but what woman can have sartorial
success with the man who is the tailor's despair?

Lackaday is pathetically insistent on her manifold virtues. She retains
all through the years her street-child's swift intelligence. She has
_flair_. She predicts instinctively the tastes of varying audiences.
She has a vivid imagination curiously controlled by the most prosaic common
sense. He rarely errs in taking her advice.... To her further credit
balance, she is more saving than extravagant. Bits of jewellery please her,
but she does not crave inordinate adornment. When he buys a touring-car for
the greater comfort of their vagrant life, she is appalled by the cost and
upbraids him with more than a touch of shrewishness. Her tastes do not rise
with her position. She would sooner have a _chou-croûte garnie_ than
a fore-quarter of Paris lamb or a duck _à la presse_. She could never
understand why Andrew should pay four or five francs for a bottle of wine,
when they could buy a good black or grey for three sous a litre. On tour
gaieties were things unthought of. But during periods of rest, in Paris,
she cared little for excitement. With an income relieving her from the
necessity of work, she would have been content to lounge slipshod about the
house till the day of her death.

Once Andrew, having to entertain, for politic reasons, the director of
a Paris music-hall, took her to the Café de Paris. The guest, in a
millionaire way, had suggested that resort of half-hungry wealth. Modest
Andrew had never entered such a place in his life; nor, naturally, had
Elodie. Knowing, however, that one went there in full dress, he disinterred
a dress-suit which he had bought three years before in order to attend
the funeral of a distinguished brother artist, and sent Elodie with a
thousand-franc note to array herself in an adequate manner, at the Galeries
La Fayette. Elodie's economical soul shrank in horror from the expenditure,
at one fell swoop, of a thousand francs. She bought God knows what for less
than half the money.

Proud of her finery, secretly exulting also that she had a matter of twenty
pounds or so put away in her private stocking, she flaunted down the
crowded restaurant, followed by the little fat director, only remarkable
for a diamond flash-light in his shirt-front, and by Andrew, inordinately
long and gawky, in his ill-fitting, short-sleeved evening suit, his ready
made white tie already wandering in grievance towards a sympathetic ear.
Women in dreams of diaphanous and exiguous raiment stared derisively at
the trio as they passed their tables. Elodie stared back at them. Now,
Lackaday, honest soul, had, not the remotest notion of what was wrong with
her attire. In his eyes she was dressed like a queen. She wore, says he, a
beautiful emerald green dress, and a devil of a hat with a lot of dark blue
feathers in it. But, as she was surrendering her cloak to the white-capped
lady of the vestiare, there came from a merry adjoining table the clear-cut
remark of a young woman, all bare arms, back and bosom, but otherwise
impeccably vestured:

"They oughtn't to allow it, in a place like this--_des grues des
Batignolles_."

Unsuccessful ladies of easy virtue from Whitechapel, perhaps, is the
nearest rendering of the phrase.

Elodie had quick ears. She also had the quick temper and tongue of
Marseilles. She hung behind the two men, who proceeded to their table
unconscious of drama.

"In these places," she spat, "they pay naked women like you to come to
attract men. You fear the competition of the modest, _ma fille_."

The indiscreet young woman had no retort. She flushed crimson over neck and
shoulders, while Elodie, triumphant, swept away. But the ensuing dinner
was not an exhilarating meal. She burned with the insult, dilated upon it,
repeated over and over again her repartee, offered her costume to the frank
criticism of Andrew and their guest. Did she look like a _grue?_
Did her toilette in any way suggest the Batignolles? In vain did the fat
director proclaim her ravishing. Andrew, at first indignant, assured her
that the insulter had been properly set down. If it had been a man, he
would have lifted the puppy from his chair and beaten him before the whole
restaurant. But a woman! She had met her match in Elodie. In vain he
confirmed the director's opinion. Elodie could not eat. Food stuck in her
throat; she could only talk interminably of the outrage. The little fat
director made his escape as soon as he had eaten the last mouthful of
dinner.

"_Eh bien_," said Elodie, as they were driving home to the Faubourg
Saint-Denis, "and is it all fixed up, the Paris contract?"

"My dear," replied Andrew gently, "you gave us little chance to discuss
it."

"I prevented you?" cried Elodie. "I? _Bon Dieu!_ Oh no. It is too
much. You first take me to a place where I am insulted, and then reproach
me for being an obstacle between you and your professional success. No
doubt the naked woman would be a better partner for you. She could wheedle
and coax that little horror of a manager. I, who am an honest woman, am a
drag on you--"

And so on, with a whirling unreason, with which Andrew had grown familiar.
But the episode of the Café de Paris marks the beginning and the end of
Elodie's acquaintance with the smart world. She hates it with a fierce
jealousy, knowing that it is a sphere beyond her ken. Herein lay a
fundamental principle of her character. The courtesan, with her easy
adaptability to the glittering environment which she craves, and Elodie,
essentially child of the people, proud, and virtuous according to her
lights, were worlds apart. A bit of a socialist, Elodie, she stuck fiercely
to her class. People she was. People she would remain. A daw of the people,
she had tried to peacock it among the gentry. She had been detected in her
borrowed plumes. At the stupid reference to her supposed morals she snapped
her fingers. It was idiotic. It was the detection of the plumage that
rankled in her soul. From that moment she hated society and every woman in
it with an elaborate ostentation. The very next day she sold the emerald
green dress and the devil of a hat and, with a certain grim satisfaction,
stuffed the proceeds into the stocking of economy. In spite of the
disastrous dinner, Andrew obtained the Paris engagement. He was not,
however, greatly surprised--so far had his education advanced--when Elodie
claimed the credit.

"At that dinner--what did you do? You sat silent as the obelisk in the
Place de la Concorde. It was I who made all the conversation. Monsieur
Wolff was very enchanted."

Andrew grinned.

"I don't know what I should do without you, Elodie," said he.

Now, in sketching the life of Andrew Lackaday and Elodie, I again labour
under the difficulty of having to compress into a few impressionistic
strokes the history of years. The task is in one way made easier, in
that these years of work and wandering scarcely show the development of
anything. What was true at the end of the first year of their partnership
seems to be true at the end of the second, third, fourth and fifth. After a
time when their grotesque performance was a fixed and settled thing, there
was little need for the invention of novelty or for rehearsal. Week after
week, month after month, year after year, they reproduced their almost
stereotyped entertainment. Here and there, according to the idiosyncrasy
of the audience, they introduced some variety. But the very variations, in
course of time, became stereotyped. Too violent a change proved disastrous.
The public demanded the particular antics with which the name of Les
Petit Patou was identified. Thus life was reduced to terms of beautiful
simplicity.

Yet, perhaps, after all, their sentimental relations did undergo an
imperceptible development, as subtle as that which led in the first place
to their union. This union had its original promptings in a not unromantic
chain of circumstances. Of vulgarity or sordidness it had nothing. Had
Elodie been free it would never have entered Andrew's head not to marry
her, and she would have married him offhand. Lackaday insists on our
remembering this vital fact. Sincere affection drew them together. Then the
first couple of years or so were devoted to mutual discoveries. There was
no question on either part of erring after strange fancies. Elodie carried
her air of propriety in the happy-go-lucky music-hall world almost to the
point of the absurd. As for Andrew, he had ever shown himself the most
lagging Lothario of his profession. Indeed, for a period during which she
suffered an exaggeration of her own sentiments, she upbraided him for not
being the perfect lover of her half-forgotten dreams....

"Why don't you love me any longer, André?"

"But I love you, surely. That goes without saying."

"Then why do you go on reading, reading all the time instead of telling me
so?"

She would be lying on a couch, dressed in her soiled wrapper and old
bedroom slippers, occupied with nothing but boredom, while Andrew devoted
himself to the unguided pursuit of knowledge, the precious pleasure of
his life. He would put the book face downwards on his knee and pucker his
brows.

"_Mon Dieu, ma chérie_, what do you want me to say?"

"That you love me."

"I've just said it."

"Say it again."

"_Je l'aime bien. Voilà!_"

"And that's all?"

"Of course it's all. What remains to be said?"

The honest fellow was mystified. He could not keep on repeating the formula
for the two or three hours of their repose. It would be the monotonous
reiteration of the idiot. And he could no more have knelt by her side and
poured out his adoration in the terms, let us say, of Chastelard, than he
could have lectured her on Hittite inscriptions. What did she want?

She sighed. He cared for his old book much more than for her.

"My dear," said he, "if you would only read a bit you would find it a great
comfort and delight."

You see, at this rather critical period, each had their grievance--Elodie
only, of course, as far as their private lives were concerned. Elodie,
somewhat romantically inclined, wanted she knew not what. Perhaps a
recrudescence of the fine frenzy of the early days of her marriage with
Raoul. Sober Andrew craved some kind of intellectual companionship. If
Elodie grudged him the joy of books and he yielded to her resentment, he
was a lost mountebank. And the very devil of it was that, just at this
time, he had discovered the most fascinating branch of literature
imaginable. Creasy's _Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World_, picked
up in a cheap edition, had put him on the track. He procured Kinglake's
_Crimea_. He was now deep in the study of Napier's _Peninsular
War_. He studied it, pencil in hand and notebook by his side, filled
with diagrams and contours of country and little parallelograms all askew
denoting Army Corps or divisions. Of course, he did not expect Elodie to
interest herself in military history, but he deplored her unconcealed
hatred of his devotion to a darling pursuit. Why could not she find
pleasure in some intelligent occupation? To spend one's leisure in untidy
sloth did not consort with the dignity of a human being. Why didn't she do
this or that? She rejected all suggestions. Retorted: Why couldn't he spend
a few hours in relaxation like everybody else? If only he would go and play
billiards at the café. That he should amuse himself outside among men was
only natural. Sitting at home, in her company, over a book, got on her
nerves.

Horatio Bakkus encouraged her maliciously. In Paris he made the flat in the
Faubourg Saint-Denis his habitual resting-place, and ate his meals in their
company at the café round the corner.

"If there is one thing, my dear Elodie, more futile than fighting battles,
it is reading about them," he declared at one of their symposia.

"_Voilà!_ You hear what Horace says! An educated man who knows what he
is talking about."

"It's a kind of disease, like chess or the study of the Railway Guide. And
when he prefers it to the conversation of a beautiful and talented woman,
it's worse than a disease, it's a crime. My dear fellow," he cried with an
ironical gleam in his dark eyes, "you're blind to the treasure the gods
have given you. Any ass can write a text-book, but the art of conversation
is a gift bestowed by Heaven upon the very few."

Elodie, preening herself, asked:

"Is it true that I have that gift?"

"You have the flow of words. You have wit. You talk like a running brook.
You talk like no book that ever was written. I would sooner, my dear,
listen to the ripple of your speech than read all the manuals of military
science the world has produced."

Andrew saw her flattered to fluttering point.

"Don't you know that he is the greatest _blagueur_ an existence?" he
asked.

But Elodie had fallen under the spell of Bakkus. like him she loved talk,
although her education allowed her only the lightest kind. She loved its
give-and-take, its opportunities for the flash of wit or jest. Bakkus could
talk about an old boot. She too. He could analyse sentiment in his mordant
way. She could analyse it in her own unsophisticated fashion. Now Andrew,
though death on facts and serious argument, remained dumb and bewildered
in a passage-at-arms about apparently nothing at all; and while Bakkus and
Elodie enjoyed themselves prodigiously, he gaped at them, wondering what
the deuce they found to laugh at. He was for ever warning Elodie not to put
a too literal interpretation on Bakkus's sayings.

The singer had gone grey, and that touch of venerability gave him an air
of greater distinction, as a broken down tragedian, than he possessed when
Andrew had first met him ten years or so before. Elodie could bandy jests
with him, but when he spoke with authority she listened overawed.

"My dear André," she replied to his remark. "I am not a fool. I know when
Horace is talking nonsense and when he means what he says."

"And I maintain," said Bakkus, "that this most adorable woman is being
sacrificed on the altar of Cæsar's Commentaries and the latest French
handbook on scientific slaughter."

"I think," said Andrew, who had imprudently sketched his course of reading
to the cynic, "that _The Art of War_ by Colonel Foch is the most
masterly thing ever written on the subject of warfare."

"But who is going to war, these days, my good fellow?"

"They're at it now," said Andrew.

"The Balkans--Turkey--Bulgaria? Barbarians. What's that got to do with
civilized England and France?"

"What about Germany?"

"Germany's never going to sacrifice her commercial position by going to
war. Among great powers war is a lunatic anachronism."

"Oh, _mon Dieu_," cried Elodie, "now you're talking politics."

Bakkus took her hand which held a fork on which was prodded a gherkin--they
were at lunch--and raised it to his lips.

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