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The Mountebank

by William John Locke · English · Gutenberg #8430 · 552,773 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Mountebank

Author: William John Locke


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8430]
                Most recently updated: February 13, 2015

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOUNTEBANK ***




Produced by Curtis A. Weyant and The Online Distributed
Proofreading Team











The Mountebank

by

William J. Locke




Chapter I



In the month of June, 1919, I received a long letter from Brigadier-General
Andrew Lackaday together with a bulky manuscript.

The letter, addressed from an obscure hotel in Marseilles, ran as
follows:--

MY DEAR FRIEND,

On the occasion of our last meeting when I kept you up to an ungodly hour
of the morning with the story of my wretched affairs to which you patiently
listened without seeming bored, you were good enough to suggest that I
might write a book about myself, not for the sake of vulgar advertisement,
but in order to interest, perhaps to encourage, at any rate to stimulate
the thoughts of many of my old comrades who have been placed in the same
predicament as myself. Well, I can't do it. You're a professional man of
letters and don't appreciate the extraordinary difficulty a layman has, not
only in writing a coherent narrative, but in composing the very sentences
which express the things that he wants to convey. Add to this that English
is to me, if not a foreign, at any rate, a secondary language--I have
thought all my life in French, so that to express myself clearly on any
except the humdrum affairs of life is always a conscious effort. Even this
little prelude, in my best style, has taken me nearly two cigarettes to
write; so I gave up an impossible task.

But I thought to myself that perhaps you might have the time or the
interest to put into shape a whole mass of raw material which I have slung
together--from memory (I have a good one), and from my diary. It may seem
odd that a homeless Bohemian like myself should have kept a diary; but
I was born methodical. I believe my mastery of Army Forms gained me my
promotion! Anyhow you will find in it a pretty complete history of my
career up to date. "I have cut out the war----"

Is there a _lusus naturæ_ of any nationality but English, who
rising from Private to Brigadier-General, could write six hundred and
seventy-three sprawling foolscap pages purporting to contain the story
of his life from eighteen-eighty something to June nineteen hundred and
nineteen and deliberately omit, as if it were neither here nor there, its
four and a half years' glorious and astounding episode?

"_I have cut out the war!_"

On looking through the MS. I found that he had cut out the war, in so far
as his military experiences were concerned. In khaki he showed himself to
be as English and John Bull as you please; and how the deuce his meteoric
promotion occurred and what various splendid services compelled the
exhibition on his breast of a rainbow row of ribbons, are matters known
only to the War Office, Andrew Lackaday and his Maker. Well--that is
perhaps an exaggeration of secrecy. The newspapers have published
their official paragraphs. Officers who served under him have given me
interesting information. But from the spoken or written word of Andrew
Lackaday I have not been able to glean a grain of knowledge. That, I say,
is where the intensely English side of him manifested itself. But, on the
other hand, the private life that he led during the four and a half years
of war, and that which he lived before and after, was revealed with a
refreshing Gallic lack of reticence which could only proceed from his
French upbringing.

To return to his letter:--

I have cut out the war. Thousands of brainy people will be spending the
next few years of their lives telling you all about it. But I should rather
like to treat it as a blank, a period of penal servitude, a drugged sleep
afflicted with nightmare, a bit of metempsychosis in the middle of normal
life--you know what I mean. The thing that is _I_ is not General
Lackaday. It is Somebody Else. So I have given you, for what it is worth,
the story of Somebody Else. The MS. is in a beast of a muddle like the
earth before the Bon Dieu came in and made His little arrangements. Do with
it what you like. At the present moment I am between the Devil and the Deep
Sea. I am hoping that the latter will be the solution of my difficulties.
(By the way, I'm not contemplating suicide.) In either case it doesn't
matter.... If you are interested in the doings of a spent meteor, I shall
be delighted to write to you from time to time. As you said, you are the
oldest friend I have. You are almost the only living creature who knows the
real identity of Andrew Lackaday. You have been charming enough to give me
not only the benefit of your experience, riper than mine, of a man of the
world, but also such a very human sympathy that I shall always think of you
with sentiments of affectionate esteem.

Yours sincerely,

ANDREW LACKADAY

Well. There was the letter, curiously composed; half French, half English
in the turning of the phrase. The last sentence was sheer translation.
But it was sincere. I need not say that I sent a cordial reply. Our
correspondence thenceforward became intimate and regular.

In his estimate of his manuscript from a literary point of view the
poor General did not exaggerate. Anything more hopeless as a continuous
narrative I have never read. But it supplied facts, hit off odds and
ends of character, and--what the autobiography seldom does--it gave the
_ipsissima verba_ of conversations written in helter-skelter fashion
with flowing pen, sometimes in excellent French, sometimes in English,
which beginning in the elaborate style of his letter broke down into queer
vernacular; it was charmingly devoid of self-consciousness, so that the man
as he was, and not as he imagined himself to be or would like others to
imagine him, stood ingenuously disclosed.

If the manuscript had been that of a total stranger I could not have
undertaken the task of the Bon Dieu making His little arrangements to shape
the earth out of chaos. An elderly literary dilettante, who is not a rabid
archæologist, has an indolent way of demanding documents clear and precise.
As a matter of fact, it was some months before I felt the courage to tackle
the business. But knowing the man, knowing also Lady Auriol and having
in the meantime made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle Elodie Figasso and
Horatio Bakkus, playing, in fact, a minor rôle, say, that of Charles, his
friend, in the little drama of his life, I eventually decided to carry out
my good friend's wishes. The major part of my task has been a matter
of arrangement, of joining up flats, as they say in the theatre, of
translation, of editing, of winnowing, as far as my fallible judgment can
decide, the chaff from the grain in his narrative, and of relating facts
which have come within the horizon of my own personal experience.

I begin therefore at the very beginning.

Many a year ago, when the world, myself included, was young, I knew a
circus. This does not mean that I knew it from the wooden benches outside
the ring. I knew it behind the scenes. I was on terms of intimacy with the
most motley crowd it has been my good fortune to meet. It was a famous
French circus of the classical type that has by now, I fear me, passed
away. Its _hautè école_ was its pride, and it demanded for its
_première équestrienne_ the homage due to the great artists of the
world. Bernhardt of the Comédie Francaise--I think she was still there in
those far-off days, Patti of the Opera and Mlle Renée Saint-Maur of the
Cirque Rocambeau were three stars of equal magnitude. The circus toured
through France from year's end to year's end. It pitched its tent--what
else could it do, seeing that municipal ineptitude provided no building
wherein could be run chariot races of six horses abreast? But the tent, in
my youthful eyes, confused by the naphtha glares and the violent
shadows cast on the many tiers of pink faces, loomed as vast as a Roman
amphitheatre. It was a noble tent, a palace of a tent, the auditorium being
but an inconsiderable section. There was stabling for fifty horses.
There were decent dressing-rooms. There was a green-room, with a wooden,
practicable bar running along one end, and a wizened, grizzled, old barman
behind it who supplied your wants from the contents of a myriad bottles
ranged in perfect order in some obscure nook beneath the counter. They did
things in the great manner in the Cirque Rocambeau. It visited none but
first-class towns which had open spaces worthy of its magnificence. It
despised one or two night stands. The Cirque Rocambeau had a way of
imposing itself upon a town as an illusory permanent institution, a week
being its shortest and almost contemptuous sojourn. The Cirque Rocambeau
maintained the stateliness of the old world.

Now the Cirque Rocambeau fades out of this story almost as soon as it
enters it. But it affords the coincidence which enables this story to be
written. For if I had not known the Cirque Rocambeau, I should never
have won the confidence of Andrew Lackaday and I should have remained as
ignorant, as you are, at the present moment, of the vicissitudes of that
worthy man's career.

You see, we met as strangers at a country house towards the end of the war.
Chance turned the conversation to France, where he had lived most of his
life, to the France of former days, to my own early wanderings about
that delectable land, to my boastful accounts of my two or three months'
vagabondage with the Cirque Rocambeau. He jumped as if I had thrown a bomb
instead of a name at him. In fact the bomb would have startled him less.

"The Cirque Rocambeau?"

"Yes."

He looked at me narrowly. "What year was that?"

I told him.

"Lord Almighty," said he, with a gasp. "Lord Almighty!" He stared for a
long time in front of him without speaking. Then to my amazement he said
deliberately: "I remember you! You were a sort of a young English god in a
straw hat and beautiful clothes, and you used to take me for rides on the
clown's pig. The clown was my foster father. And now I'm commanding a
battalion in the British Army. By Gum! It's a damn funny world!"

Memory flashed back with almost a spasm of joy.

"'By Gum!'" I repeated. "Why, that was what my old friend Ben Flint used to
say twenty times an hour!"

It was a shibboleth proving his story true. And I remembered the weedy,
ugly, precocious infant who was the pride and spoiled darling of that
circus crowd.

Why I, a young gentleman of leisure, fresh from Cambridge, chose to go
round France with a circus, is neither here nor there. For one thing, I
assure you it was not for the bright eyes of Mlle Renée Saint-Maur or her
lesser sister luminaries. Ben Flint, the English clown, classically styled
"Auguste" in the arena, and his performing pig, Billy, somehow held
the secret of my fascination. Ben Flint mystified me. He was a man of
remarkable cultivation; save for a lapse here and there into North Country
idiom, and for a trace now and then of North Country burr, his English
was pure and refined. In ordinary life, too, he spoke excellent French,
although in the ring he had to follow the classical tradition of the
English clown, and pronounce his patter with a nerve-rasping Britannic
accent. He never told me his history. But there he was, the principal
clown, and as perfect a clown as clown could be, with every bit of his
business at his fingers' ends, in a great and important circus. Like most
of his colleagues, he knew the wide world from Tokio to Christiania; but,
unlike the rest of the crowd, whose life seemed to be bounded by the canvas
walls of the circus, and who differentiated their impressions of Singapore
and Moscow mainly in terms of climate and alcohol, Ben Flint had observed
men and things and had recorded and analysed his experiences, so that,
meeting a more or less educated youth like myself--perhaps a rare bird
in the circus world--standing on the brink of life, thirsting for the
knowledge that is not supplied by lectures at the Universities, he must
have felt some kind of satisfaction in pouring out, for my benefit, the
full vintage of his wisdom.

I see him now, squat, clean-shaven, with merry blue eyes in a mug of a
face, sitting in a deck chair, on a scrap of ragged ground forming the
angle between the row of canvas stables and the great tent, a cob pipe in
his humorous mouth, a thick half litre glass of beer with a handle to it on
the earth beside him, and I hear his shrewd talk of far-away and
mysterious lands. His pretty French wife, who knows no English, charmingly
dishevelled, uncorseted, free, in a dubious _peignoir_ trimmed
with artificial lace--she who moulded in mirific tights, sea-green with
reflections of mother-of-pearl, like Venus Anadyomene, does the tight rope
act every afternoon and evening--sits a little way apart, busy with needle
and thread repairing a sorry handful of garments which to-night will be
tense with some portion of her shapely body. Between them sprawls on his
side Billy, the great brown pig whom Ben has trained to stand on his hind
legs, to jump through hoops, to die for his country....

"They don't applaud. They don't appreciate you, Billy," the clown would
say, choosing his time when applause was scant. "Show them what you think
of them."

And then Billy would deliberately turn round and, moving in a semicircle,
present his stern to the delighted audience....

There lies Billy, the pig, the most human pig that ever breathed, adored
by Ben Flint, who, not having given the beast one second's pain in all its
beatific life, was, in his turn, loved by the pig as only a few men are
loved by a dog--and there, sitting on the pig's powerful withers, his blue
smock full of wilted daisies, is little eight-year-old tow-headed Andrew
Lackaday making a daisy chain, which eventually he twines round the
animal's semi-protesting snout.

Yes. There is the picture. It is full summer. We have lunched, Madame
and Ben and Andrew and I, at the little café restaurant at the near-by
straggling end of the town. At other tables, other aristocratic members of
the troupe. The humbler have cooked their food in the vague precincts of
the circus. We have returned to all that Ben and his wife know as home. It
is one o'clock. At two, matinee. An hour of blissful ease. We are in the
shade of the great tent; but the air is full of the heavy odour of the dust
and the flowers and the herbs of the South, and of the pungent smell of the
long row of canvas stables.

I call little Andrew. He dismounts from Billy the pig, and, insolent brat,
screws an imaginary eyeglass into his eye, which he contrives to keep
contorted, and assuming a supercilious expression and a languid manner,
struts leisurely towards us, with his hands in his pockets, thereby
giving what I am forced to admit is an imitation of myself perfect in its
burlesque. Ben Flint roars with laughter. I clutch the imp and throw him
across knee and pretend to spank him. We struggle lustily till Madame cries
out:

"But cease, André. You are making Monsieur too hot."

And Andrew, docile, ceased at once; but standing in front of me, his back
to Madame, he noiselessly mimicked Madame's speech with his lips, so
drolly, so exquisitely, that Ben Flint's hearty laugh broke out again.

"Just look at the little devil! By Gum! He has a fortune in him."

I learned in the circus as much about Andrew as he knew himself. Perhaps
more; for a child of eight has lost all recollection of parents who died
before he was two. They were circus folk, English, trapeze artists, come,
they said, from a long tour in Australia, where Andrew was born, and their
first European engagement was in the Cirque Rocambeau. Their stay was
brief; their end tragic. Lackaday _Père_ took to drink, which is the
last thing a trapeze artist should do. Brain and hand at rehearsal one
day lost co-ordination by the thousandth part of a second and Lackaday
_Mère_, swinging from her feet upwards, missed the anticipated grip,
and fell with a thud on the ground, breaking her spine. Whereupon Lackaday
_Père_ went out and hanged himself from a cross-beam in an empty
stable.

Thus, at two years old, Andrew Lackaday started life on his own account.
From that day, he was alone in the world. Nothing in his parents' modest
luggage gave clue to kith or kin. Ben Flint who, as a fellow-countryman,
went through their effects, found not even one letter addressed to them,
found no sign of their contact with any human being living or dead. They
called themselves professionally "The Lackadays." Whether it was their real
name or not, no one in the world which narrowed itself within the limits of
the Cirque Rocambeau, could possibly tell. But it was the only name that
Andrew had, and as good as any other. It was part of his inheritance, the
remainder being ninety-five francs in cash, some cheap trinkets, a couple
of boxes of fripperies which were sold for a song, a tattered copy of
Longfellow's Poems, and a brand new gilt-edged Bible, carefully covered in
brown paper, with "For Fanny from Jim" inscribed on the flyleaf. From which
Andrew Lackaday, as soon as his mind could grasp such things, deduced that
his mother's name was Fanny, and his father's James. But Ben Flint assured
me that Lackaday called his wife Myra, while she called him Alf, by which
names they were familiarly known by their colleagues. So who were Fanny and
Jim, if not Andrew's parents, remained a mystery.

Meanwhile there was the orphan Andrew Lackaday rich in his extreme youth
and the fortune above specified, and violently asserting his right to live
and enjoy. Meanwhile, too, Ben Flint and his wife had lost their pig
Bob, Billy's predecessor. Bob had grown old and past his job and become
afflicted with an obscure porcine disease, possibly senile decay, for
which there was no remedy but merciful euthanasia. The Flints mourned him,
desolate. They had not the heart to buy another. They were childless,
pigless. But behold! There, to their hand was Andrew, fatherless,
motherless. On an occasion, just after the funeral, for which Ben Flint
paid, when Madame was mothering the tiny Andrew in her arms, and Ben stood
staring, lost in yearning for the lost and beloved pig, she glanced up and
said:

"_Tiens_, why should he not replace Bob, _ce petit cochon?_"

Ben Flint slapped his thigh.

"By Gum!" said he, and the thing was done. The responsibility of self
dependence for life and enjoyment was removed from the shoulders of young
Andrew Lackaday for many years to come.

In the course of time, when the child's _état civil_, as a resident
in France, had to be declared, and this question of nationality became of
great importance in after years--Madame said:

"Since we have adopted him, why not give him our name?"

But Ben, with the romanticism of Bohemia, replied:

"No. His name belongs to him. If he keeps it, he may be able to find out
something about his family. He might be the heir to great possessions.
One never knows. It's a clue anyway. Besides," he added, the sturdy North
countryman asserting itself, "I'm not giving my name to any man save
the son of my loins. It's a name where I come from that has never been
dishonoured for a couple of hundred years."

"But it is just as you like, _mon chéri_," said Madame, who was the
placidest thing in France.

       *       *       *       *       *

For thirty years I had forgotten all this; but the "By Gum!" of Colonel
Lackaday wiped out the superscription over the palimpsest of memory and
revealed in startling clearness all these impressions of the past.

"Of course we're fond of the kid," said Ben Flint. "He's free from vice and
as clever as paint. He's a born acrobat. Might as well try to teach a duck
to swim. It comes natural. Heredity of course. There's nothing he won't be
able to do when I'm finished with him. Yet there are some things which lick
me altogether. He's an ugly son of a gun. His father and mother, by the
way, were a damn good-looking pair. But their hands were the thick spread
muscular hands of the acrobat. Where the deuce did he get his long, thin
delicate fingers from? Already he can pass a coin from back to front----"
he flicked an illustrative conjuror's hand--"at eight years old. To teach
him was as easy as falling off a log. Still, that's mechanical. What I want
to know is, where did he get his power of mimicry? That artistic sense of
expressing personality? 'Pon my soul, he's damn well nearly as clever as
Billy."

During the talk which followed the discovery of our former meeting, I
reported to Colonel Lackaday these encomiums of years ago. He smiled
wistfully.

"Most of the dear old fellow's swans were geese, I'm afraid," said he. "And
I was the awkwardest gosling of them all. They tried for years to teach me
the acrobat's business; but it was no good. They might just as well have
spent their pains on a rheumatic young giraffe."

I looked at him and smiled. The simile was not inapposite. How, I asked
myself, could the man into which he had developed, ever have become an
acrobat? He was the leanest, scraggiest long thing I have ever seen. Six
foot four of stringy sinew and bone, with inordinately long legs, around
which his khaki slacks flapped, as though they hid stilts instead of human
limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly, the sleeves of his tunic far above
the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated
as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have
expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the
sparse rugosity of his person, one found to one's astonishment the most
delicately shaped hands in the world, with long, sensitive, nervous
fingers, like those of the thousands of artists who have lived and died
without being able to express themselves in any artistic medium. In a word,
the fingers of the artiste manqué. I have told you what Ben Flint, shrewd
observer, said about his hands, as a child of eight. They were the same
hands thirty years after. To me, elderly observer of human things, they
seemed, as he moved them so gracefully--the only touch of physical grace
about him--to confer an air of pathos on the ungainly man, to serve as an
index to a soul which otherwise could not be divined.

From this lean length of body rose a long stringy neck carrying a small
head surmounted by closely cropped carotty thatch. His skin was drawn tight
over the framework of his face, as though his Maker had been forced to
observe the strictest economy in material. His complexion was brick red
over a myriad freckles. His features preserved the irregular ugliness of
the child I half remembered, but it was redeemed by light blue candid eyes
set in a tight net of humorous lines, and by a large, mobile mouth, which,
though it could shut grimly on occasions, yet, when relaxed in a smile,
disarmed you by its ear-to-ear kindliness, and fascinated you by the
disclosure of two rows of white teeth perfectly set in the healthy pink
streaks of gum. He had the air of a man physically fit, inured to hardship;
the air, too, in spite of his gentleness, of a man accustomed to command.
In the country house at which we met it had not occurred to me to speculate
on his social standing, as human frailty determined that one should do in
the case of so many splendid and gallant officers of the New Army. His
manners were marked by shy simplicity and quiet reserve. It was a shock to
preconceived ideas to find him bred in a circus, even in so magnificent a
circus as the Cirque Rocambeau, and brought up by a clown, even by such a
superior clown as Ben Flint,

"And my old friend?" I asked. For I had lost knowledge of Ben practically
from the time I ended my happy vagabondage. _Maxima mea culpa_.

"He died when I was about sixteen," replied Colonel Lackaday, "and his wife
a year or so later."

"And then?" I queried, eager for autobiographical revelations.

"Then," said he, "I was a grown up man, able to fend for myself."

That was all I could get out of him, without allowing natural curiosity to
outrun discretion. He changed the conversation to the war, to the France
about which I, a very elderly Captain--have I not confessed to early
twenties thirty years before?--was travelling most uncomfortably, doing
queer odd jobs as a nominal liaison officer on the Quartermaster-General's
staff. His intimacy with the country was amazing. Multiply Sam Weller's
extensive and peculiar knowledge of London by a thousand, and you shall
form some idea of Colonel Lackaday's acquaintance with the inns of
provincial France. He could even trot out the family skeletons of the
innkeepers. In this he became animated and amusing. His features assumed an
actor's mobility foreign to their previous military sedateness, and he used
his delicate hands in expressive gestures. In parenthesis I may say we had
left the week-end party at their bridge or flirtation (according to age) in
the drawing-room, neither pursuits having for us great attraction, in spite
of Lady Auriol Dayne, of whom more hereafter, and we had found our way to
cooling drinks and excellent cigars in our host's library. It was the first
time we had exchanged more than a dozen words, for we had only arrived
that Saturday afternoon. But after the amazing mutual recognition, we sat
luxuriously chaired, excellent friends, and I, for my part, enjoying his
society.

"Ah!" said he, "Montélimar. I know that hotel. _Infect_. And the
_patron_, eh? You remember him. Forty stone. Phoo!"

The gaunt man sat up in his chair and by what mesmeric magic it happened I
know not, but before my eyes grew the living image of the gross, shapeless
creature who had put me to bed in wringing wet sheets.

"And when you complained, he looked like this--eh?"

He did look like that. Bleary-eyed, drooping-mouthed, vacant. I recollected
that the fat miscreant had the middle of his upper lip curiously sunken
into the space of two missing front teeth. The middle of Colonel Lackaday's
upper lip was sucked in.

"And he said: 'What would you have, Monsieur? _C'est la guerre?_'"

The horrible fat man, hundreds of miles away from the front, with every
convenience for drying sheets, had said those identical words. And in the
same greasy, gasping tone.

I gaped at the mimetic miracle. It was then that the memory of the
eight-year-old child's travesty of myself flashed through my mind.

"Pardon me," said I, "but haven't you turned this marvellous gift of yours
to--well to practical use?"

He grinned in his honest, wide-mouthed way, showing his incomparable teeth.

"Don't you think," said he, "I'm the model of a Colonel of the Rifles?"

He grinned again at the cloud of puzzlement on my face, and rose holding
out his hand.

"Time for turning in. Will you do me a favour? Don't give me away about the
circus."

Somehow my esteem for him sank like thermometer mercury plunged into ice. I
had thought him, with the blazing record of achievement across his chest, a
man above such petty solicitude. His mild blue eyes searched my thoughts.

"I don't care a damn, Captain Hylton," said he, in a tone singularly
different from any that he had used in our pleasant talk--"if anybody knows
I was born in a stable. A far better man than I once had that privilege.
But as it happens that I am going out to command a brigade next week, it
would be to the interest of my authority and therefore to that of the army,
if no gossip led to the establishment of my identity."

"I assure you, sir----" I began stiffly--I was only a Captain, he, but for
a formality or two, a Brigadier-General.

He clapped his hands on my shoulders--and I swear his ugly, smiling face
was that of an angel.

"My dear fellow," said he, "so long as you regard me as an honest cuss,
nothing matters in the world."

I went to bed with the conviction that he was as honest a cuss as I had
ever met.




Chapter II



Our hosts, the Verity-Stewarts, were pleasant people, old friends of mine,
inhabiting a Somerset manor-house which had belonged to their family since
the days of Charles the Second. They were proud of their descent; the
Stewart being hyphenated to the first name by a genealogically enthusiastic
Verity of a hundred years ago; but the alternative to their motto suggested
by the son of the house, Captain Charles Verity-Stewart, "The King can do
no wrong," found no favour in the eyes of his parents, who had lived remote
from the democratic humour of the officers of the New Army.

It was to this irreverent Cavalier, convalescent at home from a machine-gun
bullet through his shoulder, and hero-worshipper of his Colonel, that
Andrew Lackaday owed his shy appearance at Mansfield Court. He was proud of
the boy, a gallant and efficient soldier; Lady Verity-Stewart had couched
her invitation in such cordial terms that a refusal would have been
curmudgeonly; and the Colonel was heartily tired of spending his hard-won
leave horribly alone in London.

Perhaps I may seem to be explaining that which needs no explanation. It is
not so. In England Colonel Lackaday found himself in the position of many
an officer from the Dominions overseas. He had barely an acquaintance.
Hitherto his leave had been spent in France. But one does not take a
holiday in France when the War Officer commands attention at Whitehall. He
was very glad to go to the War Office, suspecting the agreeable issue of
his visit. Yet all the same he was a stranger in a strange land, living
on the sawdust and warmed-up soda-water of unutterable boredom. He had
spent--so he said--his happiest hours in London, at the Holborn Empire.
Three evenings had he devoted to its excellent but not soul-enthralling
entertainment.

"In the name of goodness, why?" I asked puzzled.

"There was a troupe of Japanese acrobats," said he. "In the course of a
roving life one picks up picturesque acquaintances. Hosimura, the head of
them, is a capital fellow."

This he told me later, for our friendship, begun when he was eight years
old, had leaped into sudden renewal; but without any idea of exciting my
commiseration. Yet it made me think.

That a prospective Brigadier-General should find his sole relief from
solitude in the fugitive companionship of a Japanese acrobat seemed to me
pathetic.

Meanwhile there he was at Mansfield Court, lean and unlovely, but, as I
divined, lovable in his unaffected simplicity, the very model of a British
field-officer. At dinner on Saturday evening, he had sat between his
hostess and Lady Auriol Dayne. To the former he had talked of the things
she most loved to hear, the manifold virtues of her son. There were
fallings away from the strict standards of military excellence, of course;
but he touched upon them with his wide, charming smile, condoned them with
the indulgence of the man prematurely mellowed who has kept his hold on
youth, so that Lady Verity-Stewart felt herself in full sympathy with
Charles's chief, and bored the good man considerably with accounts of the
boy's earlier escapades. To Lady Auriol he talked mainly about the war, of
which she appeared to have more complete information than he himself.

"I suppose you think," she said at last with a swift side glance, "that I'm
laying down the law about things I'm quite ignorant of."

He said: "Not at all. You're in a position to judge much better than I.
You people outside the wood can see it, in its entirety. We who are in the
middle of the horrid thing can't see it for the trees."

It was this little speech so simple, so courteous and yet not lacking a
touch of irony, that first made Lady Auriol, in the words which she used
when telling me of it afterwards, sit up and take notice.

Bridge, the monomania which tainted Sir Julius Verity-Stewart's courtly
soul, pinned Lady Auriol down to the green-covered table for the rest of
the evening. But the next day she set herself to satisfy her entirely
unreprehensible curiosity concerning Colonel Lackaday.

Lady Auriol, born with even more curiosities than are the ordinary
birthright of a daughter of Eve, had spent most of her life in trying to
satisfy them. In most cases she had been successful. Here be it said that
Lady Auriol was twenty-eight, unmarried, and almost beautiful when she took
the trouble to do her hair and array herself in becoming costume. As to
maiden's greatest and shyest curiosity, well--as a child of her epoch--she
knew so much about the theory of it that it ceased to be a curiosity at
all. Besides, love--she had preserved a girl's faith in beauty--was a
psychological mystery not to be solved by the cold empirical methods which
could be employed in the solution of other problems. I must ask you to bear
this in mind when judging Lady Auriol. She had once fancied herself in love
with an Italian poet, an Antinous-like young man of impeccable manners,
boasting an authentic pedigree which lost itself in the wolf that suckled
Romulus and Remus. None of your vagabond ballad-mongers. A guest when she
first met him of the Italian Ambassador. To him, Prince Charming, knight
and troubadour, she surrendered. He told her many wonders of fairy things.
He led her into lands where woman's soul is free and dances on buttercups.
He made exquisite verses to her auburn hair. But when she learned that
these same verses were composed in a flat in Milan which he shared with a
naughty little opera singer of no account, she dismissed Prince Charming
offhand, and betook herself alone to the middle of Abyssinia to satisfy her
curiosity as to the existence there of dulcimer-playing maidens singing of
Mount Abora to whom Coleridge in his poem assigns such haunting attributes.

Lady Auriol, in fact, was a great traveller. She had not only gone all over
the world--anybody can do that--but she had gone all through the world.
Alone, she had taken her fate in her hands. In comparison with other
geographical exploits, her journey through Abyssinia was but a trip to
Margate. She had wandered about Turkestan. She had crossed China. She had
fooled about Saghalien.... In her schooldays, hearing of the Sanjak of Novi
Bazar, she had imagined the Sanjak to be a funny little man in a red cap.
Riper knowledge, after its dull exasperating way, had brought disillusion;
but like Mount Abora the name haunted her until she explored it for
herself. When she came back, she knew the Sanjak of Novi Bazar like her
pocket.

Needless to say that Lady Auriol had thrown all her curiosities, her
illusions--they were hydra-headed--her enthusiasms and her splendid
vitality into the war. She had organized and directed as Commandant a great
hospital in the region of Boulogne. "I'm a woman of business," she told
Lackaday and myself, "not a ministering angel with open-worked stockings
and a Red Cross of rubies dangling in front of me. Most of the day I sit
in a beastly office and work at potatoes and beef and army-forms. I can't
nurse, though I daresay I could if I tried; but I hate amateurs. No
amateurs in my show, I assure you. For my job I flatter myself I'm trained.
A woman can't knock about the waste spaces of the earth by herself, head
a rabble of pack-carrying savages, without gaining some experience in
organization. In fact, when I'm not at my own hospital, which now runs on
wheels, I'm employed as a sort of organizing expert--any old where they
choose to send me. Do you think I'm talking swollen-headedly, Colonel
Lackaday?"

She turned suddenly round on him, with a defiant flash of her brown eyes,
which was one of her characteristics---the woman, for all her capable
modernity, instinctively on the defensive.

"It's only a fool who apologizes for doing a thing well," said Lackaday.

"He couldn't do it well if he was a fool," Lady Auriol retorted.

"You never know what a fool can do till you try him," said Lackaday.

It was a summer morning. Nearly all the house-party had gone to church.
Lady Auriol, Colonel Lackaday and I, smitten with pagan revolt, lounged on
the shady lawn in front of the red-brick, gabled manor house. The air was
full of the scent of roses from border beds and of the song of thrushes
and the busy chitter-chatter of starlings in the old walnut trees of
the further garden. It was the restful England which the exiled and the
war-weary used so often to conjure up in their dreams.

"You mean a fool can be egged on to do great things and still remain a
fool?" asked Lady Auriol lazily.

Lackaday smiled--or grinned--it is all the same--a weaver of fairy nothings
could write a delicious thesis on the question; is Lackaday's smile a grin
or is his grin a smile? Anyhow, whatever may be the definition of the
special ear-to-ear white-teeth-revealing contortion of his visage, it had
in it something wistful, irresistible. You will find it in the face of a
tickled baby six months old. He touched his row of ribbons.

"_Voilà_," said he.

"It's polite to say I don't believe it," she said, regarding him beneath
her long lashes. "But, supposing it true for the sake of argument, I should
very much like to know what kind of a fool you are."

Lying back in her long cane chair, an incarnation of the summer morning,
fresh as the air in her white blouse and skirt, daintily white hosed and
shod, her auburn hair faultlessly dressed sweeping from the side parting in
two waves, one bold from right to left, the other with coquettish grace,
from left to right, the swiftness of her face calmed into lazy contours,
the magnificent full physique of her body relaxed as she lay with her
silken ankles crossed on the nether chair support, her hands fingering a
long necklace of jade, she appealed to me as the most marvellous example I
had ever come across of the woman's power of self-transmogrification.

The last time I had seen her was in France, wet through in old
short-skirted kit, with badly rolled muddy puttees, muddier heavy boots, a
beast of a dripping hat pinned through rain-sodden strands of hair, streaks
of mud over her face, ploughing through mud to a British Field Ambulance,
yet erect, hawk-eyed, with the air of a General of Division. There sex was
wiped out. During our chance meeting, one of the many queer chance meetings
of the war, a meeting which lasted five minutes while I accompanied her to
her destination, we spoke as man to man. She took a swig out of my brandy
flask. She asked me for a cigarette--smoked out, she said. I was in nearly
the same predicament, having only, at the moment, for all tobacco, the pipe
I was then smoking. "For God's sake, like a good chap, give me a puff or
two," she pleaded. And so we walked on through the rain and mud, she pipe
in mouth, her shoulders hunched, her hands, under the scornfully hitched up
skirt, deep in her breeches pockets. And now, this summer morning, there
she lay, all woman, insidiously, devilishly alluring woman, almost
voluptuous in her self-confident abandonment to the fundamental conception
of feminine existence.

Lackaday's eyes rested on her admiringly. He did not reply to her remark,
until she added in a bantering tone:

"Tell me."

Then he said, with an air of significance: "The most genuine brand you can
imagine, I assure you."

"A motley fool," she suggested idly.

At that moment, Evadne, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the house, who,
as she told me soon afterwards, in the idiom of her generation, had given
the divine-services a miss, carried me off to see a litter of Sealyham
puppies. That inspection over, we reviewed rabbits and fetched a compass
round about the pigsties and crossed the orchard to the chicken's parade,
and passed on to her own allotment in the kitchen garden, where a few
moth-eaten cabbages and a wilting tomato in a planted pot seemed to hang
degraded heads at our approach, and, lingering through the rose garden, we
eventually emerged on the further side of the lawn.

"I suppose you want to go and join them," she said with a jerk of her
bobbed head in the direction of Lady Auriol and Colonel Lackaday.

"Perhaps we ought," said I.

"They don't want us--you can bet your boots," said she.

"How do you know that, young woman of wisdom?"

She sniffed. "Look at 'em."

I looked at 'em; mole-visioned masculine fifty seeing through the eyes of
feminine thirteen; and, seeing very distinctly indeed, I said:

"What would you like to do?"

"If you wouldn't mind very much," she replied eagerly, her interest in, or
her scorn of, elderly romance instantly vanishing, "let us go back to the
peaches. That's the beauty of Sundays. That silly old ass Jenkins"--Jenkins
was the head gardener--"is giving his family a treat, instead of coming
down on me. See?"

Evadne linked her arm in mine. Again I saw. She had already eaten two
peaches. Who was I to stand in the way of her eating a third or a fourth or
a fifth? With the after consequences of her crime against Jenkins, physical
and otherwise, I had nothing to do. It was the affair of her parents, her
doctor, her Creator. But the sight of the rapturous enjoyment on her face
when her white teeth bit into the velvet bloom of the fruit sped one back
to one's own youth and procured a delight not the less intense because it
was vicarious.

"Come along," said I.

"You're a perfect lamb," said she.

Before the perfect lamb was led to the peach slaughter, he looked again
across the lawn. Colonel Lackaday had moved his chair very close to Lady
Auriol's wicker lounge, so that facing her, his head was but a couple
of feet from hers. They talked not so much animatedly as intimately.
Lackaday's face I could not see, his back being turned to me; I saw Lady
Auriol's eyes wide, full of earnest interest, and compassionate admiration.
I had no idea that her eyes could melt to such softness. It was a
revelation. No woman ever looked at a man like that, unless she was
an accomplished syren, without some soul-betrayal. I am a _vieux
routier_, an old campaigner in this world of men and women. Time was
when--but that has nothing to do with this story. At any rate I think I
ought to know something about women's eyes.

"Did you ever see anything so idiotic?" asked Evadne, dragging me round.

"I think I did once," said I.

"When was that?"

"Ah!" said I.

"Do tell me, Uncle Tony."

I, who have seen things far more idiotic a thousand times, racked my brain
for an answer that would satisfy the child.

"Well, my dear," I began, "your father and mother, when they were
engaged----"

She burst out: "But they were young. It isn't the same thing. Aunt Auriol's
as old as anything. And Colonel Lackaday's about sixty."

"My dear Evadne," said I. "I happen to know that Colonel Lackaday is
thirty-eight."

Thirteen shrugged its slim shoulders. "It's all the same," it said.

We went to the net-covered wall of ripe and beauteous temptation, trampling
over Jenkins's beds of I know not what, and ate forbidden fruit. At least
Evadne did, until, son of Adam, I fell.

"Do have a bite. It's lovely. And I've left you the blushy side."

What could I do? There she stood, fair, slim, bobbed-haired, green-kirtled,
serious-eyed, carelessly juicy-lipped, holding up the peach. I, to whom all
wall-fruit is death, bit into the side that blushed. She anxiously watched
my expression.

"Topping, isn't it?"

"Yum, yum," said I.

"Isn't it?" she said, taking back the peach.

That's the beauty of childhood. It demands no elaborate expression.
Simplicity is its only coinage. A rhapsody on the exquisiteness of the
fruit's flavour would have bored Evadne stiff. Her soul yearned for the
establishment between us of a link of appreciation. "Yum, yum," said I, and
the link was instantly supplied.

She threw away a peach stone and sighed.

"Let's go."

"Why?" I asked.

"I'm not looking for any more trouble," she replied.

We returned to the lawn and Lady Auriol and Colonel Lackaday. Not a hole
could be picked in the perfect courtesy of their greeting; but it lacked
passionate enthusiasm. Evadne and I sat down, and our exceedingly dull
conversation was soon interrupted by the advent of the church goers.

Towards lunch time Lackaday and I, chance companions, strolled towards the
house.

"What a charming woman," he remarked.

"Lady Verity-Stewart," said I, with a touch of malice--our hostess was the
last woman with whom he had spoken--"is a perfect dear."

"So she is, but I meant Lady Auriol."

"I've known her since she was that high," I said spreading out a measuring
hand. "Her development has been most interesting."

A shade of annoyance passed over the Colonel's ugly good-humoured face.
To treat the radiant creature who had swum into his ken as a subject for
psychological observation savoured of profanity. With a smile I added:

"She's one of the very best."

His brow cleared and his teeth gleamed out my tribute.

"I've met very few English ladies in the course of my life," said he half
apologetically. "The other day, a brother officer finding me fooling about
Pall Mall insisted on my lunching with him at the Carlton. He had a party.
I sat next to a Mrs. Tankerville, who I gather is a celebrity."

"She is," said I. "And she said, 'You must really come and have tea with me
to-morrow. I've a crowd of most interesting people coming.'"

"She did," cried Lackaday, regarding me with awestricken eyes, as Saul must
have looked at the Witch of Endor. "But I didn't go. I couldn't talk to
her. I was as dumb as a fish. Oh, damned dumb! And the dumber I was the
more she talked at me. I had risen from the ranks, hadn't I? She thought
careers like mine such a romance. I just sat and sweated and couldn't eat.
She made me feel as if she was going to exhibit me as the fighting skeleton
in her freak museum. If ever I see that woman coming towards me in the
street, I'll turn tail and run like hell."

I laughed. "You mustn't compare Mrs. Tankerville with Lady Auriol Dayne."

"_Mon Dieu!_ I should think not!" he cried with a fervent gesture.
"Lady Auriol----"

Our passage from the terrace across the threshold of the drawing-room cut
short a possible rhapsody.

Later in the afternoon, in the panelled Elizabethan entrance hall, I came
across Lady Auriol in tweed coat and skirt and business-like walking boots,
a felt hat on her head and a stout stick in her hands.

"Whither away?" I asked.

"Colonel Lackaday and I are off for a tramp, over to Glastonbury." Her lips
moved ironically. "Like to come?"

"God forbid!" I cried.

"Thought you wouldn't," she said, drawing on a wash-leather gauntlet, "but
when I'm in Society, I do try to be polite."

"My teaching and example for the last twenty years," said I, "have not been
without effect."

"You're a master of deportment, my dear Tony." I was old enough to be her
father, but she had always called me Tony, and had no more respect for my
grey hairs than her cousin Evadne. "Tell me," she said, with a swift change
of manner, "do you know anything about Colonel Lackaday?"

"We met here as strangers," said I, "and I can only say that he impresses
me as being a very gallant gentleman."

Her face beamed. She held out her hand. "I'm so glad you think so." She
glanced at the clock.

"Good Lord! I'm a minute late. He's outside. I loathe unpunctuality. So
long, Tony."

She waved a careless farewell and strode out.

In the evening she gave Sir Julius to understand that, for aught she cared,
he could go into a corner and play Bridge by himself, thus holding herself
free, as it appeared to my amused fancy, for any pleasanter eventuality. In
a few moments Colonel Lackaday was sitting by her side. I drew a chair to
a bridge-table, and idly looked over my hostess's hand. Presently, being
dummy, she turned to me, with a little motion of her head towards the pair
and whispered:

"Those two--Auriol and ---- don't you think it's rather rapid?"

"My dear Selina," said I. "What would you have? '_C'est la guerre_.'"




Chapter III



It was rather rapid, this intimacy between the odd assorted pair--the
high-bred woman of fervid action and the mild and gawky Colonel born in a
travelling circus. Holding the key to his early life, and losing myself in
conjecture as to his subsequent career until he found himself possessed of
the qualities that make a successful soldier, I could not help noticing the
little things, unperceived by a generous war society, which pathetically
proved that his world and that of Lady Auriol, for all her earth-wide
Bohemianism, were star distances apart. Little tiny things that one
feels ashamed to record. His swift glance round to assure himself of the
particular knife and fork he should use at a given stage of the meal--the
surreptitious pushing forward on the plate, of the knife which he had
leaned, French fashion, on the edge; his queer distress on entering the
drawing-room--his helplessness until the inevitable and unconscious rescue,
for he was the honoured guest; the restraint, manifest to me, which he
imposed on his speech and gestures. Everyone loved him for his simplicity
of manners. In fact they were natural to the man. He might have saved
himself a world of worry. But his trained observation had made him aware
of the existence of a thousand social solecisms, his sensitive character
shrank from their possible committal, and he employed his mimetic genius
as an instrument of salvation. And then his English--his drawing-room
English--was not spontaneous. It was thought out, phrased, excellent
academic English, not the horrible ordinary lingo that we sling at each
other across a dinner-table; the English, though without a trace of foreign
accent, yet of one who has spent a lifetime in alien lands and has not met
his own tongue save on the printed page; of one, therefore, who not being
sure of the shade of slang admissible in polite circles, carefully and
almost painfully avoids its use altogether.

Yet all through that long weekend--we were pressed to stay till the
Wednesday morning--no one, so far as I know, suspected that Colonel
Lackaday found himself in an unfamiliar and puzzling environment.

His appointment to the Brigade came on the Tuesday. He showed me the
letter, during a morning stroll in the garden.

"Don't tell anybody, please," said he.

"Of course not." I could not repress an ironical glance, thinking of Lady
Auriol. "If you would prefer to make the announcement your own way."

He gasped, looking down upon me from his lean height. "My dear fellow--it's
the very last thing I want to do. I've told you because I let the thing out
a day or two ago--in peculiar circumstances--but it's in confidence."

"Confidence be hanged," said I.

Heaven sent me Evadne--just escaped from morning lessons with her
governess, and scuttling across the lawn to visit her Sealyhams. I whistled
her to heel. She raced up.

"If you were a soldier what would you do if you were made a General?"

She countered me with the incredulous scorn bred of our familiarity.

"You haven't been made a General?"

"I haven't," I replied serenely. "But Colonel Lackaday has."

She looked wide-eyed up into Lackaday's face.

"Is that true?"

I swear he blushed through his red sun-glaze.

"Since Captain Hylton says so----"

She held out her hand with perfect manners and said:

"I'm so glad. My congratulations." Then, before the bewildered Lackaday
could reply, she tossed his hand to the winds.

"There'll be champagne for dinner and I'm coming down," she cried and fled
like a doe to the house. At the threshold of the drawing-room she turned.

"Does Cousin Auriol know?"

"Nobody knows," I said.

She shouted: "Good egg!" and disappeared.

I turned to the frowning and embarrassed Lackaday.

"Your modesty doesn't appreciate the pleasure that news will give all those
dear people. They've shown you in the most single-hearted way that they're
your friends, haven't they?"

"They have," he admitted. "But it's very extraordinary. I don't belong to
their world. I feel a sort of impostor."

"With this--and all these?"

I flourished the letter which I still held, and with it touched the rainbow
on his tunic. His features relaxed into his childish ear-to-ear grin.

"It's all so incomprehensible--here--in this old place--among these English
aristocrats--the social position I step into. I don't know whether you can
quite follow me."

"As a distinguished soldier," said I, "apart from your charming personal
qualities, you command that position."

He screwed up his mobile face. "I can't understand it. It's like a
nightmare and a fairy-tale jumbled up together. On the outbreak of war I
came to England and joined up. In a few months I had a commission. I don't
know..." he spread out his ungainly arm--"I fell into the métier--the
business of soldiering. It came easy to me. Except that it absorbed me body
and soul, I can't see that I had any particular merit. Whatever I have
done, it would have been impossible, in the circumstances, not to do. Out
there I'm too busy to think of anything but my day's work. As for these
things"--he touched his ribbons--"I put them up because I'm ordered to. A
matter of discipline. But away from the Army I feel as though I were made
up for a part which I'm expected to play without any notion of the words.
I feel just as I would have done five years ago if I had been dressed like
this and planted here. To go about now disguised as a General only adds to
the feeling."

"If you'll pardon me for saying so," said I, "I think you're
super-sensitive. You imagine yourself to be the same man that you were five
years ago. You're not. You're a different human being altogether. Men with
characters like yours must suffer a sea-change in this universal tempest."

"I hope not," said he, "for what will become of me when it's all over?
Everything must come to an end some day--even the war."

I laughed. "Don't you see how you must have changed? Here you are looking
regretfully to the end of the war. If it were only bloodless you would like
it to go on for ever. Who knows whether you wouldn't eventually wear two
batons instead of the baton and sword."

"I'm not an ambitious man, if you mean that," said he, soberly. "Besides
this war business is far too serious for a man to think of his own
interests. Suppose a fellow schemed and intrigued to get high rank and then
proved inefficient--it would mean death to hundreds or thousands of his
men. As it is, I assure you I'm not cock-a-whoop about commanding a
brigade. I was a jolly sight happier with a platoon."

"At any rate," said I, "other people are cock-a-whoop. Look at them."

The household, turned out like a guard by Evadne, emerged in a body from
the house. Sir Julius beamed urbanely. Lady Verity-Stewart almost fell on
the great man's neck. Young Charles broke into enthusiastic and profane
congratulations. From the point of view of eloquent compliment his speech
was disgraceful; but I loved the glisten in the boy's eyes as he gazed on
his hero. A light also gleamed in the eyes of Lady Auriol. She shook hands
with him in her direct fashion.

"I'm glad. So very very glad." Perhaps I alone--except Lackaday--detected a
little tremor in her voice. "Why didn't you want us to know?"

Instinctively I caught Evadne's eye. She winked at me, acknowledging
thereby that she had divulged the General's secret. But by what feminine
process of divination had she guessed it? Charles came to his chief's
rescue.

"The General couldn't go around shouting 'I'm to command a brigade mother,
I'm to command a brigade,' could he?"

"He might have stuck on his badges and walked in as if nothing had
happened. It would have been such fun to see who would have spotted them
first."

Thus Evadne, immediately called to order by Sir Julius. The hero said very
little. What in his modesty could the good fellow say? But it was obvious
that the sincere and spontaneous tributes pleased him. Sir Julius, after
the suppression of Evadne, made him the little tiniest well-bred ghost
of an oration. That the gallant soldier under whom his son had the
distinguished honour to serve should receive the news of his promotion
under his roof was a matter of intense gratification to the whole
household.

It was a gracious scene--the little group, on the lawn in shade of the old
manor house, so intimate, so kindly, so genuinely emotional, yet so restful
in its English restraint, surrounding the long, lank, khaki-clad figure
with the ugly face, who, after looking from one to the other of them in a
puzzled sort of way, drew himself up and saluted.

"You're very kind," said he, in reply to Sir Julius. "If I have the same
loyalty in my brigade as I had in my old regiment," he glanced at Charles,
"I shall be a very proud man."

That ended whatever there was of ceremony. Lady Auriol drew me aside.

"Come for a stroll."

"To see the Sealyhams and the rabbits?"

"No, Tony. To talk of our friend. He interests me tremendously."

"I'm glad to hear it," said I.

We entered the rose garden heavy with the full August blooms.

"Well, my dear," said I. "Talk away."

"If you have a bit of sense in you, it would be you who would talk. If
you were a bit _simpático_ you would at once set the key of the
conversation."

"All of which implied abuse means that you're dying to know, through the
medium of subtle and psychological dialogue, which is entirely beyond my
brain power, whether you're not just on the verge of wondering if you're
not on the verge of falling in love with Colonel Lackaday."

"You put it with your usual direct brutality----"

"Well," said I. "Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"Dying to know etcetera, etcetera--I am not addicted to vain repetition."

She sighed, tried to pick a black crimson Victor Hugo, pricked her fingers
and said "Damn!" With my penknife I cut the stalk and handed her the rose,
which she pinned on her blouse.

"I suppose I am," she eventually replied. Then she caught me by the arm.
"Look here, Tony, do be a dear. You're old enough to be my ancestor and by
all accounts you've had a dreadful past. Do tell me if I'm making an ass of
myself. I only did it once," she went on, without giving me time to answer.
"You know all about it--Vanucci, the little beast. I needn't put on frills
with you. Since then I swore off that sort of thing. I've gone about in
maiden meditation and man's breeches, fancy free. I've loved lots of men
just as I've loved lots of women--as friends, comrades. I'm level-headed
and, I think, level-hearted. I haven't gone about like David in his wrath,
saying that all men are liars. They're not. They're just as good as women,
if not better. I've no betrayed virgin's grouch against men. But I've made
myself too busy to worry about sex. It's no use talking tosh. Sex is the
root of the whole sentimental, maudlin----"

"But tremulous and bewildering and nerve-racking and delicious and
myriad-adjectived soul-condition," I interrupted, "known generally as love.
Ninety-nine point nine repeater per cent of the world's literature has been
devoted to its analysis. It's therefore of some importance. It's even the
vital principle of the continuity of the human race."

"I'm perfectly aware of it."

"Then why, my dear, resent, as you seem to do, the inevitable reassertion,
in your own case, of the vital principle?"

She laughed. "_Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop_. But that's
just it. Is it a gallop or is it a crawl? I tell you, I thought myself
immune for many years. But now, these last two or three days I'm beginning
to feel a perfect idiot. A few minutes ago if the whole lot of you hadn't
been standing round, I think I should have cried. Just for silly gladness.
After all there are thousands of Brigadier-Generals."

"To be accurate, not more than a few hundreds."

"Hundreds or thousands, what does it matter?" she cried impatiently.
"What's Hecuba to me or I to Hecuba?" Few women have the literary sense
of apposite quotation--but no matter. She went on. "What's one
Brigadier-General to me or I to one Brigadier-General? And yet--there it
is. I'm beginning to fear lest this particular Brigadier-General may mean
a lot to me. So I come back to my original question. Am I making an ass of
myself?"

"One can't answer that question, my dear Auriol," said I, "without knowing
how far your fears, feelings and all the rest of it are reciprocated."

"Suppose I think they are?"

"Then all I can say is: 'God bless you my children.' But," I added, after a
pause, "I must warn you that your budding idyll is not passing unnoticed."

She snapped her fingers. "I've lived my private life in public too long to
care a hang for that. I'm only concerned about my own course of action.
Shall I go on, or shall I pull myself up with a jerk?"

"What would you like to do?"

She walked on for a few yards without replying. I glanced at her and saw
that the colour had come into her cheeks, and that her eyes were downcast.
At last she said:

"Now that I'm a woman again, I should like to get some happiness out of it.
I should like to give happiness, too, full-handed." She flashed up and took
my arm and pressed it. "I could do it, Tony."

"I know you could," said I.

After which the conversation became more intimate. Anybody, to look at us,
as we walked, arm in arm, round the paths of the rose garden, would have
taken us for lovers. Of course she wanted none of my advice. Her frank and
generous nature felt the imperious need of expansion. I, to whom she could
talk as to a sympathetic wooden idol, happened to be handy. I don't think
she could have talked in the same way to a woman, I don't think she would
have talked so even to me, who had taken her pick-a-back round about her
nursery, if I had not with conviction qualified Lackaday as a gallant
gentleman.

Eventually we came down to the practical aspect of a situation, as old as
Romance itself. The valorous and gentle knight of hidden lineage and the
Earl's daughter. Not daring to aspire, and ignorant of the flame he has
kindled in the high-born bosom, he rides away without betraying his
passion, leaving the fair owner of the bosom to pine in lonely ignorance.

"At this time of day, it's all such damn nonsense," said Lady Auriol.

I pointed out to her that chivalrous souls still beautified God's earth and
that such damn nonsense could not be other than the essence of their being.
To this knightly company Colonel Lackaday might well belong. On the other
hand, there was she, the same old proud Earl's daughter. For all her
modernity, her independence, her democratic sympathies, she remained a
great lady. She had little fortune; but she had position and an ancient
name. Her father, the impoverished fourteenth Earl of Mountshire, and the
thirtieth Baron of something else, refused to sit among the canaille of the
present House of Peers. He bred shorthorns and Berkshire pigs, which he
disposed of profitably, and grew grapes and melons for Covent Garden, read
the lessons in church and wrote letters to the _Times_ about the war
on which the late Guy Earl of Warwick would have rather prided himself when
he took a fancy to make a King.

"The dear old idiot," said Lady Auriol. "He belongs to the time of
Nebuchadnezzar."

But, all the same, in spite of her flouting, her birth assured her a social
position from which she could be thrown by nothing less than outrageous
immorality or a Bolshevist revolution. That Lackaday, to whom the British
Peerage, in the ordinary way, was as closed a book as the Talmud,
realized her high estate I was perfectly aware. Dear and garrulous Lady
Verity-Stewart had given him at dinner the whole family history--she
herself was a Dayne--from the time of Henry I. I was sitting on the other
side of her and heard and amused myself by scanning the expressionless face
of Lackaday who listened as a strayed aviator might listen to the social
gossip of the inhabitants of Mars. Anyhow he left the table with the
impression that the Earl of Mountshire was the most powerful noble in
England and that his hostess and her cousin, Lady Auriol, regarded the
Royal Family as upstarts and only visited Buckingham Palace in order to set
a good example to the proletariat.

"I'm sure he does," said I, after summarizing Lady Verity-Stewart's
monologue.

"The family has been the curse of my life," said Auriol. "If I hadn't
anticipated them--or is it it?--by telling them to go to the devil, they
would have disowned me long ago. Now they're afraid of me, and I've got the
whip hand. A kind of blackmail; so they let me alone."

"But if you made a _mésalliance_, as they call it," said I, "they'd be
down upon you like a cartload of bricks."

"Bricks?" she retorted, with a laugh. "A cartload of puff-balls. There
isn't a real brick in the whole obsolete structure. I could marry a beggar
man to-morrow and provided he was a decent sort and didn't get drunk and
knock me about and pick his teeth with his fork, I should have them all
around me and the beggar man in a week's time, trying to save face. They'd
move heaven and earth to make the beggar man acceptable. They know that if
they didn't, I'd be capable of going about with him like a raggle-taggle
gipsy--and bring awful disgrace on them."

"All that may be true," said I, "but the modest Lackaday doesn't realize
it."

"I'll put sense into him," replied Lady Auriol. And that was the end,
conclusive or not, of the conversation.

In the afternoon they went off for a broiling walk together. What they
found to say to each other, I don't know. Lady Auriol let me no further
into her confidence, and my then degree of intimacy with the General did
not warrant the betrayal of my pardonable curiosity as to the amount of
sense put into him by the independent lady.

Now, from what I have related, it may seem that Lady Auriol had brought up
all her storm troops for a frontal attack on the position in which the shy
General lay entrenched. This is not the case. There was no question of
attack or siege or any military operation whatever on either side. The
blessed pair just came together like two drops of quicksilver. Each
recognized in the other a generous and somewhat lonely soul; an
appreciation of the major experiences of life and, with that, a craving
for something bigger even than the war, which would give life its greater
meaning. She, born on heights that looked contemptuously down upon a
throne, he born almost in a wayside ditch, their intervening lives a mutual
mystery, they met--so it seemed to me, then, as I mused on the romantical
situation--on some common plane not only of adventurous sympathy but of
a humanity simple and sincere. From what I could gather afterwards, they
never exchanged a word, during this intercourse, of amorous significance.
Nor did they steer the course so dear to modern intellectuals (and so dear
too to the antiquated wanderers through the Land of Tenderness) which led
them into analytical discussions of their respective sentimental states of
being. They talked just concrete war, politics and travel. On their tramps
they scarcely talked at all. They kept in step which maintained the rhythm
of their responsive souls. She would lay an arresting touch on his arm at
the instant in which he pointed his stick at some effect of beauty; and
they would both turn and smile at each other, intimately, conscious of
harmony.

We left the next morning, Lackaday to take over his brigade in France, I to
hang around the War Office for orders to proceed on my further unimportant
employment. Lady Auriol and Charles saw us off at the station.

"It's all very well for your new brigade, sir," said the latter when
the train was just coming into the station. "They're in luck. But the
regiment's in the soup."

He wanted to discuss the matter, but with, elderly tact I drew the young
man aside, so that the romantic pair should have a decent leave-taking. But
all she said was:

"You'll write and tell me how you get on?"

And he; with a flash in his blue eyes and his two-year-old grin:

"May I really?"

"You may--if a General in the field has time to write to obscure females."

She looked adorable, provoking, with the rich colour rising beneath her
olive cheek--I almost fell in love with her myself and I was glad that the
ironical Charles had his back to her. An expression of shock overspread
Lackaday's ingenuous features. He shot out both hands in protest, and
mumbled something incoherent. She took the hands with a happy laugh, as the
train lumbered noisily in.

Lackaday was silent and preoccupied during the run to London.

At the terminus we parted. I asked him to dinner at my club. He hesitated
for a moment, then declined on the plea of military business. I did not see
him or the Verity-Stewarts or Lady Auriol till after the Armistice.




Chapter IV



Like Ancient Gaul, time is nowadays divided into three parts, before,
during and after the war. The lives of most men are split into these three
hard and fast sections. And the men who have sojourned in the Valley of the
Shadow of Death have emerged, for all their phlegm, their philosophy, their
passionate carelessness and according to their several temperaments, not
the same as when they entered. They have taken human life, they have
performed deeds of steadfast and reckless heroism unimagined even in the
war-like daydreams of their early childhood. They have endured want and
misery and pain inconceivable. They have witnessed scenes of horror one of
which, in their former existence, would have provided months of shuddering
nightmare. They have made instant decisions affecting the life or death of
their fellows. They have conquered fear. They have seen the scale of values
upon which their civilized life was so carefully based swept away and
replaced by another strange and grim to which their minds must rigidly
conform. They return to the world of rest where humanity is still
struggling to maintain the old scale. The instinct born of generations of
tradition compels a facile reacceptance. They think: "The blood and mud and
the hell's delight of the war are things of the past. We take up life where
we left it five years ago; we come back to plough, lathe, counter, bank,
office, and we shall carry on as though a Sleeping Beauty spell had been
cast on the world and we were awakening, at the kiss of the Fairy Prince of
peace, to our suspended tasks."

Are they right or are they wrong in their surmise, these millions of
men, who have passed through the Valley of the Shadow, haunted by their
memories, tempered by their plunge into the elemental, illumined by the
self-knowledge gained in the fierce school of war?

Does the Captain V.C. of Infantry, adored and trusted by his men, from
whose ranks he rose by reason of latent qualities of initiative command and
inspiration, contentedly return to the selling of women's stockings in his
old drapery establishment, to the vulgar tyranny of the oily shopwalker, to
the humiliating restrictions and conditions of the salesman's life? Return
he must--perhaps. He has but two trades, both of which he knows profoundly;
the selling of hosiery and the waging of war. As he can no longer wage
war, he sells hosiery. But does he do it contentedly? If his soul, through
reaction, is contented at first, will it continue to be so through the long
uneventful stocking-selling years? Will not the war change he has suffered
cause nostalgias, revolts? Will it bring into his resumed activities a new
purpose or more than the old lassitudes?

These questions were worrying me, as they were worrying most demobilized
men, although I, an elderly man about town, had no personal cause
for anxiety, when, one morning, my man brought me in the card of
Brigadier-General Lackaday. It was early March. I may mention incidentally
that I had broken down during the last wild weeks of the war, and that an
unthinkingly beneficent War Office had flung me into Nice where they had
forgotten me until a few days before.

During my stay in the South I led the lotus life of studious
self-indulgence. I lived entirely for myself and neglected my
correspondence to such a point that folks ceased to write to me. As a
matter of fact I was a very sick man, under the iron rule of doctors and
nurses and such like oppressors; but, except to explain why I had lost
touch with everybody, that is a matter of insignificant importance. The one
or two letters I did receive from Lady Auriol did not stimulate my interest
in The Romance. I gathered that she was in continuous relations with
General Lackaday, who, it appeared, was in the best of health. But when a
man of fifty has his heart and lungs and liver and lights all dislocated he
may be pardoned for his chilly enthusiasm over the vulgar robustness of a
very young Brigadier.

On this March morning, however, when I was beginning, in sober joyousness,
to pick up the threads of English social life, the announcement of General
Lackaday gave me a real thrill of pleasure.

He came in, long, lean, khaki clad, red-tabbed, with, I swear, more rainbow
lines on his breast, and a more pathetically childish grin on his face
than ever. We greeted each other like old friends long separated, and fell
immediately into intimate talk, exchanging our personal histories of seven
months. Mine differed only in brevity from an old wife's tale. His had the
throb of adventure and the sting of failure. In October his brigade had
found immortal glory in heroic death. He had obeyed high orders. The
slaughter was no fault of his. But after the disaster--if the capture of an
important position can be so called--he had been summarily appointed to a
Home Command, and now was demobilized.

"Demobilized?" I cried, "what on earth do you mean?"

"It appears that there are more Brigadier-Generals in the dissolving Army,"
said he, "than there are brigades. I can retire with my honorary rank, but
if I care to stay on, I must do so with the rank and pay of a Major."

I flared up indignant. I presumed that he had consigned the War Office to
flamboyant perdition. In his mild way he had. The War Office had looked
pained. By offering a permanent Major's commission in the Regular Army,
with chance of promotion and pension, it thought it had dealt very
handsomely by Lackaday. It hinted that though he had led his brigade to
victory, he might have employed a safer, a more Sunday school method. Oh!
the hint was of the slightest, the subtlest, the most delicate. The War
Office very pointedly addressed him as General, and, regarding his row of
ribbons, implicitly declared him an ingrate. But for a certain stoniness
of glance developed in places where Bureaucracy would have been very
frightened, the War Office would have so proclaimed him in explicit speech.

"I would have stayed on as a Brigadier," said he. "But the Major's job's
impossible. I should have thought any soldier would have appreciated the
position--and it was a soldier, a colonel whom I saw--but it seems that if
you stay long enough in that place you're at the mercy of the little
girls who run you round, and eventually you arrive at their level of
intelligence. However," he grinned and lit a cigarette, "it's all over. I
can call myself General Lackaday till the day of my death, but not a sou
does it put into my pocket. And, odd as it may appear, I've got to earn my
living. Well, I suppose something will turn up."

Before I had time to question him as to his plans and prospects, he shifted
the talk to our friends, the Verity-Stewarts. He had stayed with them two
or three times. Once Lady Auriol had again been a fellow guest. He had met
her in London, dined at her tiny house in Charles Street, Mayfair--a little
dinner party, doubtless in his honour--and he had called once or twice.
Evidently the Romance was in the full idyllic stage. I asked somewhat
maliciously what Lady Auriol thought of it. He rose to my question like a
simple fish.

"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.

"You are of the _Midi?_" he said.

Yes. She came from Marseilles. Ingenuously chattering she gave him her
family history. In the meanwhile her companions and her partner having
finished their dance had retired to a sequestered corner of the restaurant,
leaving the pair here to themselves. Lackaday learned that her name was
Elodie Figasso. Her father was dead. Her mother was a dressmaker, in which
business she, too, had made her apprenticeship. But an elderly man, a
_huissier_, one of those people who go about with a tricolour-rosetted
cocked hat, and steel buttons and canvas trousers and a leather satchel
chained to their waist, had lately diverted from Elodie the full tide of
maternal affection. As she hated the _huissier_, a vulgar man who
thought of nothing but the good things that the Veuve Figasso could put
into his stomach, and as her besotted mother starved them both in order to
fulfil the _huissier's_ demands, and as she derived no compensating
joy from her dressmaking, she had found, thanks to a friend, a positron as
_figurante_ in a Marseilles Revue, and, _voilà_--there she was
free, independent, and, since she had talent and application, was now
earning her six francs a day.

She finished her grenadine. Then with a swift movement she caught a passing
serving maid and slipped into her hand the money for her companion's
scarcely tasted drink and her own. Instantly Andrew protested--Mademoiselle
must allow him to have the pleasure.

But no--never in life, she had not intruded on his table to have free
drinks. As for the _consommation_ of the feather-headed Margot--from
Margot herself would she get reimbursement.

"But yet, Mademoiselle," said he, "you make me ashamed. You must still be
thirsty--like myself."

"_Ça ne vous gênera pas?_"

She asked the question with such a little air of serious solicitude that
he laughed, for the first time. Would it upset his budget, involve the
sacrifice of a tram ride or a packet of tobacco, if he spent a few sous on
more syrup for her delectation? And yet the delicacy of her motive appealed
to him. Here was a little creature very honest, very much of the people,
very proud, very conscientious.

"On the contrary, Mademoiselle," said he, "I shall feel that you do me an
honour."

"It is not to be refused," said she politely, and the serving maid was
despatched for more beer and syrup.

"I waited to see your turn," she said, after a while.

"Ah!" he sighed.

She glanced at him swiftly. "It does not please you that I should talk
about it?"

"Not very much," said he.

"But I found you admirable," she declared. "Much better than that _espèce
de poule mouillée_--I already forget his name--who played last week.
Oh--a wet hen--he was more like a drowned duck. So when I heard a comedian
from Paris was coming, I said: 'I must wait' and Margot and I waited in the
wings--and we laughed. Oh yes, we laughed."

"It's more than the audience did," said the miserable Andrew.

The audience! Of Avignon! She had never played to such an audience in her
her life. They were notorious, these people, all over France. They were so
stupid that before they would laugh you had to tell them a thing was funny,
and then they were so suspicious that they wouldn't laugh for fear of being
deceived.

All of which, of course, is a libel on the hearty folk of Avignon. But
Elodie was from Marseilles, which naturally has a poor opinion of the other
towns of Provence. She also lied for the comforting of Lackaday.

"They are so unsympathetic," said he, "that I shall not play any more."

She knitted her young brow. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I play neither to-night nor to-morrow night, nor ever again.
To-morrow I return to Paris."

She regarded him awe-stricken. "You throw up an engagement--just like
that--because the audience doesn't laugh?"

She had heard vague fairy-tales of pampered opera-singers acting with such
Olympian independence; but never a music-hall artist on tour. He must be
very rich and powerful.

Lackaday read the thought behind the wide-open eyes.

"Not quite like that," he admitted honestly. "It did not altogether depend
on myself. You see the _patron_ found that the audience didn't laugh
and the _patronne_ found that my long body spoiled her act--and so--I
go to Paris to-morrow."

She rose from the depths of envying wonder to the heights of pity. She
flashed indignation at the abominable treatment he had received from
the Coinçons. She scorched them with her contempt. What right had that
_tortoise_ of a Madame Coinçon to put on airs? She had seen better
juggling in a booth at a fair. Her championship warmed Andrew's heart, and
he began to feel less lonely in a dismal and unappreciative world. Longing
for further healing of an artist's wounded vanity he said:

"Tell me frankly. You did see something to admire in my performance?"

"Haven't I always said so? _Tiens_, would you like me to tell
you something? All my life I have loved Auguste in a circus. You know
Auguste--the clown? Well, you reminded me of Auguste and I laughed."

"Until lately I was Auguste--in the Cirque Rocambeau."

She clapped her hands.

"But I have seen you there--when I was quite little--three--four years ago
at Marseilles."

"Four years," said Andrew looking into the dark backward and abysm of time.

"Yes, I remember you well, now. We're old friends."

"I hope you'll allow me to continue the friendship," said Andrew.

They talked after the way of youth. He narrated his uneventful history. She
added details to the previous sketch of her own career. The afternoon
drew to a close. The restaurant garden emptied; the good folks of Avignon
returned dinnerwards across the bridge. They looked for Margot, but Margot
had disappeared, presumably with her new acquaintance. Elodie sniffed in a
superior manner. If Margot didn't take care, she would be badly caught one
of these days. For herself, no, she had too much character. She wouldn't
walk about the streets with a young man she had only known for five
minutes. She told Andrew so, very seriously, as they strolled over the
bridge arm-in-arm.

They parted, arranging to meet at 10 o'clock when she was free from the
music-hall, at the Café des Négociants or the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville.

Andrew, shrinking from the table d'hôte in the mangy hotel in a narrow back
street where the Merveilleux troupe had their crowded being, dined at a
cheap restaurant near the railway station, and filled in the evening with
aimless wandering up and and down the thronged Avenue de la Gare. Once he
turned off into the quiet moonlit square dominated by the cathedral and the
walls and towers of the Palace of the Popes. The austere beauty of it said
nothing to him. It did not bring calm to a fevered spirit. On the contrary,
it depressed a spirit longing for a little fever, so he went back to the
broad, gay Avenue where all Avignon was taking the air. A girl's sympathy
had reconciled him with his kind.

She came tripping up to him, almost on the stroke of ten, as he sat at the
outside edge of the café terrace, awaiting her. The reconciliation was
complete. Like most of the young men there, he too had his maid. They met
as if they had known each other for years. She was full of an evil fellow,
_un gros type_, with a roll of fat at the back of his neck and a great
diamond ring which flashed in the moonlight, who had waited for her at the
stage door and walked by her side, pestering her with his attentions.

"And do you know how I got rid of him? I said: 'Monsieur, I can't walk with
you through the streets on account of my comrades. But I swear to you that
you will find me at the Café des Négotiants at a quarter past ten.' And so
I made my escape. Look," said she excitedly, gripping Andrew's arm, "here
he is."

She met the eyes of the _gros type_ with the roll of fat and the
diamond ring, who halted somewhat uncertainly in front of the cafe.
Whereupon Andrew rose to his long height of six foot four and, glaring at
the offender, put him to the flight of over-elaborated unconcern. Elodie
was delighted.

"You could have eaten him up alive, _n'est-ce pas_, André?"

And Andrew felt the thrill of the successful Squire of Dames. For the rest
of the evening, there was no longer any 'Monsieur' or 'Mademoiselle.' It
was André and Elodie.

Yes, he would write to her from Paris, telling her of his fortunes. And
she too would write. The Agence Moignon would always find him. It is
parenthetically to be noted how his afternoon fears of the impermanence of
the Agence Moignon had vanished. Time flew pleasantly. She seemed to have
set herself, her youth and her femininity, to the task of evoking the wide
baby smile on his good-natured though dismal face. It was only on their
homeward way, after midnight, that she mentioned the '_boîle_.' There
had been discussions. Some had said this and some had said that. There had
been partisans of the Coinçons and partisans of André. There was subject
matter for one of the pretty quarrels dear to music-hall folk. But Elodie
summed up the whole matter, with her air of precocious wisdom--a wisdom
gained in the streets and sewing-rooms and cafés-concerts of Marseilles.

"What you do is excellent, _mon cher_; but it is _vieux jeu_. The
circus is not the music-hall. You must be original."

As originality was banned from the circus tradition, he stood still in the
narrow, quiet street and gasped.

"Original?"

"You are so long and thin," she said.

"That has always been against me; it was against me to-day."

"But you could make it so droll," she declared. "And there would be no one
else like you. But you must be by yourself, not with a troupe like the
Merveilleux. _Tiens_," she caught him by the lapels of his jacket and
a passer-by might have surmised a pleading stage in a lovers' discussion,
"I have heard there is a little little man in London--oh, so little, _et
pas du tout joli_."

"I know," said Andrew, "but he is a great artist."

"And so are you," she retorted. "But as this little man gets all the
profit he can out of his littleness--it was _la grosse_ Léonie--the
_brune_, number three, you know--ah, but you haven't seen us--anyhow
she has been in London and was telling me about him this evening--all that
nature has endowed him with he exaggerates--_eh bien!_ Why couldn't
you do the same?"

The street was badly lit with gas; but still he could see the flash in
her dark eyes. He drew himself up and laid both his hands on her thin
shoulders.

"My little Elodie," said he--and by the dim gaslight she could see the
flash of his teeth revealed by his wide smile--"My little Elodie, you have
genius. You have given me an idea that may make my fortune. What can I give
you in return?"

"If you want to show me that you are not ungrateful, you might kiss me,"
said Elodie.




Chapter VI



A kiss must mean either very much or very little. There are maidens to whom
it signifies a life's consecration. There are men whose blood it fires with
burning passion. There are couples of different sex who jointly consider
their first kiss a matter of supreme importance, and, the temporary rapture
over, at once begin to discuss the possibilities of parental approbation
and the ways and means of matrimony. A kiss may be the very devil of a
thing leading to two or three dozen honourably born grandchildren, or to
suicide, or to celebate addiction to cats, or to eugenic propaganda, or to
perpetual crape and the boredom of a community, or to the fate of Abelard,
or to the Fall of Troy, or to the proud destiny of a William the Conqueror.
I repeat that it is a ticklish thing to go and meddle with it without due
consideration. And in some cases consideration only increases the fortuity
of its results. Volumes could be written on it.

If you think that the kiss exchanged between Andrew and Elodie had any
such immediate sentimental or tragical or heroical consequences you
are mistaken. Andrew responded with all the grace in the world to the
invitation. It was a pleasant and refreshing act. He was grateful for her
companionship, her sympathy, and her inspired counsel. She carried off her
frank comradeship with such an air of virginal innocence, and at the same
time with such unconscious exposure of her half fulfilled womanhood, that
he suffered no temptations of an easy conquest. The kiss therefore evoked
no baser range of emotion. As his head was whirling with an artist's sudden
conception--and, mark you, an artist's conception need no more be a case
of parthenogenesis than that of the physical woman--it had no room for the
higher and subtler and more romantical idealizations of the owner of the
kissed lips. You may put him down for an insensible young egoist. Put him
down for what you will. His embrace was but gratefully fraternal.

As for Elodie, if it were not dangerous--she had the street child's
instinct--what did a kiss or two matter? If one paid all that attention to
a kiss one's life would be a complicated drama of a hundred threads.

"A kiss is nothing"--so ran one of her _obiter dicta_ recorded
somewhere in the manuscript--"unless you feel it in your toes. Then look
out."

Evidently this kiss Elodie did not feel in her toes, for she walked along
carelessly beside him to the door of her hotel, a hostelry possibly a shade
more poverty-stricken in a flag paved by-street, a trifle staler-smelling
than his own, and there put out a friendly hand of dismissal.

"We will write to each other?"

"It is agreed."

"Alors, au revoir."

"Au revoir, Elodie, et merci."

And that was the end of it. Andrew went back to Paris by the first train in
the morning, and Elodie continued to dance in Avignon.

If they had maintained, as they vaguely promised, an intimate
correspondence, it might have developed, according to the laws of the
interchange of sentiment between two young and candid souls, into a
reciprocal expression of the fervid state which the kiss failed to produce.
A couple of months of it, and the pair, yearning for each other, would have
effected by hook or crook, a delirious meeting, and young Romance would
have had its triumphant way. But to the gods it seemed otherwise. Andrew
wrote, as in grateful duty bound. He wrote again. If she had replied,
he would have written a third time; but as there are few things more
discouraging than a one-sided correspondence, he held his hand. He felt a
touch of disappointment. She was such a warm, friendly little creature,
with a sagacious little head on her--by no means the _tête de linotte_
of so many of her sisters of song and dance. And she had forgotten him. He
shrugged philosophic shoulders. After all, why should she trouble herself
further with so dull a dog? Man-like he did not realize the difficulties
that beset even a sagacious-headed daughter of song and dance in the matter
of literary composition, and the temptation to postpone from day to day the
grappling with them, until the original impulse has spent itself through
sheer procrastination. It is all very well to say that a letter is an easy
thing to write, when letter-writing is a daily habit and you have writing
materials and table all comfortably to hand. But when, like Elodie, you
would have to go into a shop and buy a bottle of ink and a pen and paper
and envelopes and take them up to a tiny hotel bedroom shared with an
untidy, space-usurping colleague, or when you would have to sit at a café
table and write under the eyes of a not the least little bit discreet
companion--for even the emancipated daughters of song and dance cannot, in
modesty, show themselves at cafés alone; or when you have to stand up in a
post office--and then there is the paper and envelope difficulty--with a
furious person behind you who wants to send a telegram--Elodie's invariable
habit when she corresponded, on the back of a picture post card, with
her mother; when, in fact, you have before you the unprecedented task of
writing a letter--picture post cards being out of the question--and a
letter whose flawlessness of expression is prescribed by your vanity, or
better by your nice little self-esteem, and you are confronted by such
conditions as are above catalogued, human frailty may be pardoned for
giving it up in despair.

With this apologia for Elodie's unresponsiveness, conscientiously recorded
later by Andrew Lackaday, we will now proceed. The fact remains that they
faded pleasantly and even regretlessly from each other's lives.


There now follow some years, in Lackaday's career, of high endeavour
and fierce struggle. He has taken to heart Elodie's suggestion of the
exploitation of his physical idiosyncracy. He seeks for a formula. In the
meanwhile he gains his livelihood as he can. His powers of mimicry stand
him in good stead. In the outlying café-concerts of Paris, unknown to
fashion or the foreigner, he gives imitations of popular idols from Le
Bargy to Polin. But the Ambassadeurs, and the Alcazar d'Eté and the Folies
Marigny and Olympia and such-like stages where fame and fortune are to be
found, will have none of him. Paris, too, gets on his vagabond nerves.
But what is the good of presenting the unsophisticated public of Brest or
Béziers with an imitation of Monsieur le Bargy? As well give them lectures
on Thermodynamics.

Sometimes he escapes from mimicry. He conjures, he juggles, he plays
selections from Carmen and Cavaleria Rusticana on a fiddle made out of
a cigar box and a broom-handle. The Provinces accept him with mild
approbation. He tries Paris, the Paris of Menilmontant and the Outer
Boulevards; but Paris, not being amused, prefers his mimicry. He is alone,
mind you. No more Coinçon combinations. If he is to be insulted, let the
audience do it, or the vulgar theatre management; not his brother artists.
Away from his imitations he tries to make the most of his grotesque figure.
He invents eccentric costumes; his sleeves reach no further than just
below his elbows, his trouser hems flick his calves; he wears, inveterate
tradition of the circus clown, a ridiculously little hard felt hat on the
top of his shock of carroty hair. He paints his nose red and extends his
grin from ear to ear. He racks his brain to invent novelties in manual
dexterity. For hours a day in his modest _chambre garnie_ in the
Faubourg Saint Denis he practises his tricks. On the dissolution of the
Cirque Rocambeau, where as "Auguste" he had been practically anonymous, he
had unimaginatively adopted the professional name of Andrew-André. He is
still Andrew-André. There is not much magic about it on a programme. But,
_que voulez-vous?_ It is as effective as many another.

During this period we see him a serious youth, absorbed in his profession,
striving towards success, not for the sake of its rewards in luxurious
living, but for the stamp that it gives to efficiency. The famous
mountebank of Notre Dame did not juggle with greater fervour. Here and
there a woman crosses his path, lingers a little and goes her way. Not
that he is insensible to female charms, for he upbraids himself for
over-susceptibility. But it seems that from the atavistic source whence
he inherited his beautiful hands, there survived in him an instinct which
craved in woman the indefinable quality that he could never meet, the
quality which was common to Melisande and Phèdre and Rosalind and Fédora
and the child-wife of David Copperfield. It is, as I have indicated, the
ladies who bid him _bonsoir_. Sometimes he mourns for a day or two,
more often he laughs, welcoming regained freedom. None touches his heart.
Of men, he has acquaintances in plenty, with whom he lives on terms of good
comradeship; but he has scarcely an intimate.

At last he makes a friend--an Englishman, Horatio Bakkus; and this
friendship marks a turning-point in his history.

They met at a café-concert in Montmartre, which, like many of its kind, had
an ephemeral existence--the nearest, incidentally, to the real Paris to
which Andrew Lackaday had attained. It tried to appeal to a catholicity of
tastes; to outdo its rivals inscabrousness--did not Farandol and Lizette
Blandy make their names there?--and at the same time to offer to the
purer-minded an innocent entertainment. To the latter both Lackaday,
with his imitations, and Horatio Bakkus, with his sentimental ballads,
contributed. Somehow the mixture failed to please. The one part scared
the virtuous, at the other the deboshed yawned. _La Boîte Blanche_
perished of inanition. But during its continuance, Lackaday and Bakkus had
a month's profitable engagement.

They bumped into each other, on their first night, at the stage-door. Each
politely gave way to the other. They walked on together and turned down the
Rue Pigalle and, striking off, reached the Grands Boulevards. The Brasserie
Tourtel enticed them. They entered and sat down to a modest supper,
sandwiches and brown beer.

"I wish," said Andrew, "you would do me the pleasure to speak English with
me."

"Why?" cried the other. "Is my French so villainous?"

"By no means," said Andrew, "but I am an Englishman."

"Then how the devil do you manage to talk both languages like a Frenchman?"

"Why? Is my English then so villainous?"

He mimicked him perfectly. Horatio Bakkus laughed.

"Young man," said he, "I wish I had your gift."

"And I yours."

"It's the rottenest gift a man can be born with," cried Bakkus with
startling vindictiveness. "It turns him into an idle, sentimental,
hypocritical and dissolute hound. If I hadn't been cursed young with a
voice like a Cherub, I should possibly be on the same affable terms with
the Almighty as my brother, the Archdeacon, or profitably paralysing the
intellects of the young like my brother, the preparatory schoolmaster."

He was a lean and rusty man of forty, with long black hair brushed back
over his forehead, and cadaverous cheeks and long upper lip which all the
shaving in the world could not redeem for the blue shade of the strong
black beard which at midnight showed almost black. But for his black,
mocking eyes, he might have been taken for the seedy provincial tragedian
of the old school.

"Young man----" said he.

"My name," said Andrew, "is Lackaday."

"And you don't like people to be familiar and take liberties."

Andrew met the ironical glance. "That is so," said he quietly.

"Then, Mr. Lackaday----"

"You can omit the 'Mr.,'" said Andrew, "if you care to do so."

"You're more English than I thought," smiled Horatio Bakkus.

"I'm proud that you should say so," replied Andrew.

"I was about to remark," said Bakkus, "when you interrupted me, that I
wondered why a young Englishman of obviously decent upbringing should be
pursuing this contemptible form of livelihood."

"I beg your pardon," said Andrew, pausing in the act of conveying to his
mouth a morsel of sandwich. He was puzzled; comrades down on their luck had
cursed the profession for a _sale métier_ and had wished they were
road sweepers; but he had never heard it called contemptible. It was a
totally new conception.

Bakkus repeated his words and added: "It is below the dignity of one made
in God's image."

"I am afraid I do not agree with you," replied Andrew, stiffly. "I was born
in the profession and honourably bred in it and I have known no other and
do not wish to know any other."

"You were born an imitator? It seems rather a narrow scheme of life."

"I was born in a circus, and whatever there could be learned in a circus I
was taught. And it was, as you have guessed, a decent upbringing. By Gum,
it was!" he added, with sudden heat.

"And you're proud of it?"

"I don't see that I've got anything else to be proud of," said Andrew.

"And you must be proud of something?"

"If not you had better be dead," said Andrew.

"Ah!" said Bakkus, and went on with his supper.

Andrew, who had hitherto held himself on the defensive against
impertinence, and was disposed to dislike the cynical attitude of his new
acquaintance, felt himself suddenly disarmed by this "Ah!" Perhaps he had
dealt too cruel a blow at the disillusioned owner of the pretty little
tenor voice in which he could not take very much pride. Bakkus broke a
silence by remarking:

"I envy you your young enthusiasm. You don't think it better we were all
dead?"

"I should think not!" cried Andrew.

"You say you know all that a circus can teach you. What does that mean? You
can ride bare back and jump through hoops?"

"I learned to do that--for Clown's business," replied Andrew. "But that's
no good to me now. I am a professional juggler and conjurer and trick
musician. I'm also a bit of a gymnast and sufficient of a contortionist to
do eccentric dancing."

Bakkus took a sip of beer, and regarded him with his mocking eyes.

"And you'd sooner keep on throwing up three balls in the air for the rest
of your natural life than just be comfortably dead? I should like to know
your ideas on the point. What's the good of it all? Supposing you're the
most wonderful expert that ever lived--supposing you could keep up fifty
balls in the air at the same time, and could balance fifty billiard cues,
one on top of another, on your nose--what's the good of it?"

Andrew rubbed his head. Such problems had never occurred to him. Old Ben
Flint's philosophy pounded into him, at times literally with a solid and
well-deserved paternal cuff, could be summed up in the eternal dictum:
"That which thou hast to do, do it with all thy might." It was the
beginning and end of his rule of life. He looked not, nor thought of
looking, further. And now came this Schopenhaurian with his question.
"What's the good of it?"

"I suppose I'm an artist, in my way," he replied, modestly.

"Artist?" Bakkus laughed derisively. "Pardon me, but you don't know what
the word means. An artist interprets nature in concrete terms of emotion,
in words, in colour, in sound, in stone--I don't say that he deserves to
live. I could prove to you, if I had time, that Michael Angelo and Dante
and Beethoven were the curses of humanity. Much better dead. But, anyhow,
they were artists. Even I with my tinpot voice singing 'Annie Laurie' and
'The Sands of Dee' and such-like clap-trap which brings a lump in the
throat of the grocer and his wife, am an artist. But you, my dear
fellow--with your fifty billiard cues on top of your nose? There's a devil
of a lot of skill about it of course--but nothing artistic. It means
nothing."

"Yet if I could perform the feat," said Andrew, "thousands and thousands of
people would come to see me; more likely a million."

"No doubt. But what would be the good of it, when you had done it and they
had seen it? Sheer waste of half your lifetime and a million hours on the
part of the public, which is over forty thousand days, which is over a
hundred years. Fancy a century of the world's energy wasted in seeing you
balance billiard cues on the end of your nose!"

Andrew reflected for a long time, his elbow on the cafe table, his hand
covering his eyes. There must surely be some fallacy in this remorseless
argument which reduced his life's work to almost criminal futility. At last
light reached him. He held out his other hand and raised his head.

"_Attendez_. I must say in French what has come into my mind. Surely
I am an artist according to your definition. I interpret nature, the
marvellous human mechanism in terms of emotion--the emotion of wonder. The
balance of fifty billiard cues gives the million people the same catch at
the throat as the song or the picture, and they lose themselves for an hour
in a new revelation of the possibilities of existence, and so I save the
world a hundred years of the sorrow and care of life."

Bakkus looked at him approvingly. "Good," said he. "Very good. Thank God,
I've at last come across a man with a brain that isn't atrophied for want
of use. I love talking for talking's sake--good talk--don't you?"

"I cannot say that I do," replied Andrew honestly, "I have never thought of
it.'

"But you must, my dear Lackaday. You have no idea how it stimulates your
intellect. It crystallizes your own vague ideas and sends you away with the
comforting conviction of what a damned fool the other fellow is. It's the
cheapest recreation in the world--when you can get it. And it doesn't
matter whether you're in purple and fine linen or in rags or in the greasy
dress-suit of a café-concert singer." He beckoned the waiter. "Shall we
go?"

They parted outside and went their respective ways. The next night they
again supped together, and the night after that, until it became a habit.
In his long talks with the idle and cynical tenor, Andrew learned many
things.

Now, parenthetically, certain facts in the previous career of Andrew
Lackaday have to be noted.

Madame Flint had brought him up nominally in the Roman Catholic Faith,
which owing to his peripatetic existence was a very nebulous affair without
much real meaning; and Ben Flint, taking more pains, had reared him in
a sturdy Lancashire Fear of God and Duty towards his Neighbour and Duty
towards himself, and had given him the Golden Rule above mentioned. Ben had
also seen to his elementary education, so that the _régime du participe
passé_ had no difficulties for him, and Racine and Bossuet were not
empty names, seeing that he had learned by heart extracts from the writings
of these immortals in his school primer. That they conveyed little to him
but a sense of paralysing boredom is neither here nor there. And Ben Flint,
most worthy and pertinacious of Britons, for the fourteen impressionable
years during which he was the arbiter of young Andrew's destiny, never for
an hour allowed him to forget that he was an Englishman. That Andrew should
talk French, his stepmother tongue, to all the outside world was a matter
of necessity. But if he addressed a word of French to him, Ben Flint, there
was the devil to pay. And if he picked up from the English stable hands
vulgarisms and debased vowel sounds, Ben Flint had the genius to compel
their rejection.

"My father," writes Lackaday--for as such he always regarded Ben
Flint--"was the most remarkable man I have ever known. That he loved me
with his whole nature I never doubted and I worshipped the ground on which
he trod. But he was remorseless in his enforcement of obedience. Looking
back, I am lost in wonder at his achievement."

Still, even Ben Flint could not do everything. The eternal precepts of
morality, the colloquial practice of English speech, the ineradicable
principles of English birth and patriotism, the elementary though thorough
French education, the intensive physical training in all phases of circus
life, took every hour that Ben Flint could spare from his strenuous
professional career as a vagabond circus clown. I who knew Ben Flint, and
drank of his wisdom gained in many lands, have been disposed to wonder why
he did not empty it to broaden the intellectual and æsthetic horizon of his
adopted son. But on thinking over the matter--how could he? He had spent
all his time in filling up the boy with essentials. Just at that time when
Andrew might have profited by the strong, rough intellectuality that had
so greatly attracted me as a young man, Ben Flint died. In the realm of
gymnasts, jugglers, circus-riders, dancers in which Andrew had thence found
his being, there was no one to replace the mellow old English clown, who
travelled around with Sterne and Montaigne and Shakespeare and Bunyan and
the Bible, as the only books of his permanent library. Such knowledge as
he possessed of the myriad activities of the great world outside his
professional circle he had picked up in aimless and desultory reading.

In Horatio Bakkus, therefore, Andrew met for the first time a human being
interested in the intellectual aspect of life; one who advanced outrageous
propositions just for the joy of supporting them and of refuting
counter-arguments; one, in fact, who, to his initial amazement,
could juggle with ideas as he juggled with concrete objects. In this
companionship he found an unknown stimulus. He would bid his friend adieu
and go away, his brain catching feverishly at elusive theories and new
conceptions. Sometimes he went off thrilled with a sense of intellectual
triumph. He had beaten his adversary. He had maintained his simple moral
faith against ingenious sophistry. He realized himself as a thinking being,
impelled by a new force to furnish himself with satisfying reasons for
conduct. It was through Horatio Bakkus that he discovered The Venus of Milo
and Marcus Aurelius and Longchamps races....

From the last he derived the most immediate benefit.

"If you've never been to a race-meeting," said Bakkus, "you've missed one
of the elementary opportunities of a liberal education. Nowhere else can
you have such a chance of studying human imbecility, knavery and greed. You
can also glut your eyes with the spectacle of useless men, expensive women,
and astounded, sensitive animals."

"I prefer," replied Andrew, with his wide grin, "to keep my faith in
mankind and horses."

"And I," said Bakkus, "love to realize myself for what I really am, an
imbecile, a knave, and a useless craver of money for which I've not had the
indignity of working. It soothes me to feel that for all my heritage of
culture I am nothing more or less than one of the rabble-rout. I've backed
horses ever since I was a boy and in my time I've had a pure delight in
pawning my underwear in order to do so."

"It seems to be the height of folly," said sober Andrew.

Bakkus regarded him with his melancholy mocking eyes.

"To paraphrase a remark of yours on the occasion of our first meeting--if a
man is not a fool in something he were better dead. At any rate let me show
you this fool's playground."

So Andrew assented. They went to Longchamps, humbly, on foot, mingling with
the Paris crowd. Bakkus wore a sun-stained brown and white check suit and
an old grey bowler hat and carried a pair of racing-glasses slung across
his shoulders, all of which transformed his aspect from that, in evening
dress, of the broken old tragedian to that of the bookmaker's tout rejected
of honest bookmaking men. As for Andrew, he made no change in his ordinary
modest ill-fitting tweeds, of which the sleeves were never long enough; and
his long red neck mounted high above the white of his collar and his straw
hat was, as usual, clamped on the carroty thatch of his hair. For them no
tickets for stands, lawn or enclosure. The far off gaily dressed crowd in
these exclusive demesnes shimmered before Andrew's vision as remote as some
radiant planetary choir. The stir on the field, however, excited him. The
sun shone through a clear air on this late meeting of the season, investing
it with an air of innocent holiday gaiety which stultified Bakkus's bleak
description. And Andrew's great height overtopping the crowd afforded him a
fair view of the course.

Bakkus came steeped in horse-lore and confidently prophetic. To the
admiration of Andrew he ran through the entries for each race, analysing
their histories, summarizing their form, and picking out dead certainties
with an esoteric knowledge derived from dark and mysterious sources. Andrew
followed him to the booths of the _Pari Mutuel_, and betting his
modest five franc piece, on each of the first two events, found Bakkus
infallible. But on looking down the list of entries for the great race of
the day he was startled to find a name which he had only once met with
before and which he had all but forgotten. It was "Elodie."

"My friend," said Bakkus, "now is the time to make a bold bid for a sure
fortune. There is a horse called Goffredo who is quoted in the sacred inner
ring of those that know at 8 to 1. I have information withheld from this
boor rabble, that he will win, and that he will come out at about 15 to 1.
I shall therefore invest my five louis in the certain hope of seventy-five
beautiful golden coins clinking into my hand. Come thou and do likewise."

"I'm going to back Elodie," said Andrew.

Bakkus stared at him. "Elodie--that ambulatory assemblage of cat's meat!
Why she has never been placed in a race in her life. Look at her." He
pulled Andrew as near the railings as they could get and soon picked her
out of the eight or nine cantering down the straight--a sleek, mild,
contented bay whose ambling gentleness was greeted with a murmur of
derision. "Did you ever see such a cow?"

"I like the look of her," said Andrew.

"Why--in the name of----"

"She looks as if she would be kind to children," replied Andrew.

They rushed quickly to the _Pari Mutuel_. Bakkus paid his five louis
for his Goffredo ticket. He turned to seek Andrew, but Andrew had gone. In
a moment or two they met among the scurrying swarm about the booths.

"What have you done?"

"I've put a louis on Elodie," said Andrew.

"The next time I want to give you a happy day I'll take you to the Young
Men's Christian Association," said Bakkus witheringly.

"Let us see the race," said Andrew.

They paid a franc apiece for a stand on a bench and watched as much of the
race as they could see. And Bakkus forgot to share his glasses with Andrew,
who caught now and then an uncomprehending sight of coloured dots on moving
objects and gaped in equally uncomprehensible bewilderment when the racing
streak flashed home up the straight. A strange cry, not of gladness but
of wonder, burst from the great crowd. Andrew turned to Bakkus, who, with
glasses lowered, was looking at him with hollow eyes from which the mockery
had fled.

"What's the matter?" asked Andrew.

"The matter? Your running nightmare has won. Why the devil couldn't you
have given me the tip? You must have known something. No one could play
such a game without knowing. It's damned unfriendly."

"Believe me, I had no tip," Andrew protested. "I never heard of the beast
before."

"Then why the blazes did you pick her out?"

"Ah!" said Andrew. Then realizing that his philosophical and paradoxical
friend was in sordid earnest he said mildly:

"There was a girl of that name who once brought me good luck."

The gambler, alive to superstitious intuitions, repented immediately of his
anger.

"That's worth all the tips in the world. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I don't wear my heart upon my sleeve," replied Andrew.

So peace was made. They joined the thin crowd round their booth of the
_Pari Mutuel_, mainly composed of place winners, and when the placards
of the odds went up, Bakkus gripped his companion's arm.

"My God! A hundred and three to one. Why didn't you plank on your last
penny."

"I'm very well content with two thousand francs," said Andrew. "It's
something against a rainy day."

They reached the _guichet_ and Andrew drew his money.

"Suppose the impossible animal hadn't won--you would have been rather
sick."

"No," Andrew replied, after a moment's thought. "I should have regarded my
louis as a tribute to the memory of one who did me a great service."

"I believe," said Bakkus, "that if I could only turn sentimentalist, I
should make my fortune."

"Let us go and find a drink," said Andrew.


For the second time Elodie brought him luck. This time in the shape of a
hundred and three louis, a goodly sum when one has to live from hand to
mouth. And the time came, at the end of their engagement at _La Boîte
Blanche_, when they lost even that precarious method of existence.
For the first time in his life Andrew spent a month in vain search for
employment. Dead season Paris had more variety artists than it knew what to
do with. The provinces, so the rehabilitated Moignon and his confrères, the
other agents, declared, in terms varying from apologetic stupor to frank
brutality, had no use for Andrew-André and his unique entertainment.

"But what shall I do?" asked the anxious André.

"Wait, _mon cher_, we shall soon well arrange it," said Moignon.

"?" pantomimed the other agents, with shrugged shoulders and helplessly
outspread hands.

And it happened too that Bakkus, the sweet ballad-monger, found himself on
the same rocks of unemployment.

"I have," said he, one evening, when the stranded pair were sitting
outside a horrid little liquor retreat with a zinc bar in the Faubourg
Saint-Denis--the luxury of _consommations_ at sixty centimes on the
Grands Boulevards had faded from their dreams--"I have, my dear friend,
just enough to carry me on for a fortnight."

"And I too," said Andrew.

"But your hundred louis at Longchamps?"

"They're put away," said Andrew.

"Thank God," said Bakkus.

Andrew detected a lack of altruism in the pious note of praise. He did not
love Bakkus to such a pitch of brotherly affection as would warrant his
relieving him of responsibility for self support. He had already fed Bakkus
for three days.

"They're put away," he repeated.

"Bring them out of darkness into the light of day," said Bakkus. "What are
talents in a napkin? You are a capitalist--I am a man with ideas. May I
order another of this _mastroquet's_ bowel-gripping absinthes in order
to expound a scheme? Thank you, my dear Lackaday. _Oui, encore une_.
Tell me have you ever been to England?"

"No," said Lackaday.

"Have you ever heard of Pierrots?"

"On the stage--masked balls--yes."

"But real Pierrots who make money?"

"In England? What do you mean?"

"There is in England a blatant, vulgar, unimaginative, hideous institution
known as the Seaside."

"Well?" said Andrew.

The dingy proprietor of the "Zingue" brought out the absinthe. Bakkus
arranged the perforated spoon, carrying its lump of sugar over the glass
and began to drop the water from the decanter.

"If you will bear with me for a minute or two, until the sugar's melted,
I'll tell you all about it."




Chapter VII



It was a successful combination. Bakkus sang his ballads and an occasional
humorous song of the moment to Andrew's accompaniment on mandolin or
one-stringed violin, and Andrew conjured and juggled comically, using
Bakkus as his dull-witted foil. A complete little performance, the patter
and business artistically thought out and perfectly rehearsed. They wore
the conventional Pierrot costume with whited faces and black skull caps.

Bakkus, familiar with English customs, had undertaken to attend to the
business side of their establishment on the sands of the great West Coast
resort, Andrew providing the capital out of his famous hundred louis. But
it came almost imperceptibly to pass that Andrew made all the arrangements,
drove the bargains and kept an accurate account of their varying finances.

"You'll never be a soldier of fortune, my dear fellow," said Bakkus once,
when, returning homewards, he had wished to dip his hand into the leather
bag containing the day's takings in order to supply himself lavishly with
comforting liquid.

"It's the very last thing I want to be," replied Andrew, hugging the bag
tight under his long arm.

"You're bourgeois to your finger-tips, your ideal of happiness is a meek
female in a parlour and half a dozen food-sodden brats."

Andrew hunched his shoulders good-naturedly at the taunt. A home, and wife
and offspring seemed rather desirable of attainment.

"You've lots of money in your pocket to pay for a drink," said he. "It's
mere perversity that makes you want to touch the takings. We haven't
counted them."

"Perversity is the only thing that makes this rotten life worth living,"
retorted Bakkus.

It was his perversity, thus exemplified, which compelled Andrew to
constitute himself the business manager of the firm. He had a sedate,
inexorable way with him, a grotesque dignity, to which, for all his gibes,
Bakkus instinctively submitted. Bakkus might provide ideas, but it was the
lank and youthful Andrew who saw to their rigid execution.

"You've no more soul than a Prussian drill sergeant," Bakkus would say.

"And you've no more notion of business than a Swiss Admiral," Andrew would
reply.

"Who invented this elegant and disgustingly humiliating entertainment?"

Andrew would laugh and give him all the credit. But when Bakkus, in the
morning, clamouring against insane punctuality, and demanding another
hour's sloth, refused to leave his bed, he came up against an
incomprehensible force, and, entirely against his will, found himself on
the stroke of eleven ready to begin the performance on the sands. Sometimes
he felt an almost irresistible desire to kick Andrew, so mild and gentle,
with his eternal idiotic grin; but he knew in his heart that Andrew was not
one of the idiots whom people kicked with impunity. He lashed him, instead,
with his tongue, which Andrew, within limits, did not mind a bit. To
Bakkus, however, Andrew owed the conception of their adventure. He also
owed to him the name of the combination, and also the name which was to be
professionally his for the rest of his stage career.

It all proceeded from the miraculous winning of the mare Elodie. Bakkus had
made some indiscreet remark concerning her namesake. Andrew, quick in his
dignity, had made a curt answer. Ironical Bakkus began to hum the old
nursery song:

  _Il était une bergère
  Et ron, ron, ron, petit patapon_.

Suddenly he stopped.

"By George! I have it! The names that will _épater_ the English
bourgeois. Ron-ron-ron and Petit Patapon. I'll be Ron-ron-ron and you'll be
dear little Patapon."

As the English seaside public, however, when he came to think of it, have
never heard of the shepherdess who guarded her muttons and still less of
the refrain which illustrated her history, he realized that the names as
they stood would be ineffective. Ron-ron and Patapon therefore would they
be. But Andrew, remembering Elodie's wise counsel, stuck to the "petit."
His French instinct guiding him, he rejected Patapon. Bakkus found Ron-ron
an unmeaning appellation. At last they settled it. They printed it out in
capital letters.

THE GREAT PATAPON AND LITTLE PATOU

So it came to pass that a board thus inscribed in front of their simple
installation on the sands advertised their presence.

Now, Lackaday in his manuscript relates this English episode, not so much
as an appeal to pity for the straits to which he was reduced, although he
winces at its precarious mountebankery, and his sensitive and respectable
soul revolts at going round with the mendicant's hat and thanking old women
and children for pennies, as in order to correlate certain influences and
coincidences in his career. Elodie seems to haunt him. So he narrates what
seems to be another trivial incident.

Andrew was a lusty swimmer. In the old circus summer days Ben Flint had
seen to that. Whenever the Cirque Rocambeau pitched its tent by sea or
lake, Ben Flint threw young Andrew into the water. So now every morning,
before the world was awake, did Andrew go down to the sea. Once, a week
after their arrival, did he, by some magnetic power, drag the protesting
Bakkus from his bed and march him down, from the modest lodgings in a
by-street, to the sea front and the bathing-machines. Magnetic force may
bring a man to the water, but it can't make him go in. Bakkus looked at the
cold grey water--it was a cloudy morning--took counsel with himself and,
sitting on the sands, refused to budge from the lesser misery of the windy
shore. He smoked the pipe of disquiet on an empty stomach for the half-hour
during which Andrew expended unnecessary effort in progressing through many
miles in an element alien to man. In the cold and sickly wretchedness of a
cutting wind, he cursed Andrew with erudite elaboration. But when Andrew
eventually landed, his dripping bathing-suit clinging close to his gigantic
and bony figure, appearing to derisive eyes like the skin covered fossil of
a prehistoric monster of a man, his bushy hair clotted, like ruddy seaweed,
over his staring, ugly face, Bakkus forgot his woes and rolled on his back
convulsed with vulgar but inextinguishable laughter.

"My God!" he cried later, when summoned by an angry Andrew to explain his
impolite hilarity. "You're the funniest thing on the earth. Why hide the
light of your frame under a bushel of clothing? My dear boy, I'm talking
sense"--this was at a hitherto unfriendly breakfast-table--"You've got
an extraordinary physique. If I laughed, like a rude beast, for which I
apologize, the public would laugh. There's money in it. Skin tights and
your hair made use of, why--you've got 'em laughing before you even begin
a bit of business. Why the devil don't you take advantage of your physical
peculiarities? Look here, don't get cross. This is what I mean."

He pulled out a pencil and, pushing aside plates and dishes, began to
sketch on the table-cloth with his superficial artistic facility. Andrew
watched him, the frown of anger giving way to the knitted brow of interest.
As the drawing reached completion, he thought again of Elodie and her sage
counsel. Was this her mental conception which he had been striving for
years to realize? He did not find the ideal incongruous with his lingering
sense of romance. He could take a humorous view of anything but his
profession. That was sacred. Everything did he devote to it, from his soul
to his skinny legs and arms. So that, when Bakkus had finished, and leaned
back to admire his work, Andrew drew a deep breath, and his eyes shone as
if he had received an inspiration from on High. He saw himself as in an
apotheosis.

There he was, self-exaggeratingly true to life, inordinately high,
inordinately thin, clad in tights that reached to a waistband beneath his
armpits giving him miraculous length of leg, a low-cut collar accentuating
his length of neck, his hair twisted up on end to a fine point.

"And I could pad the feet of the tights and wear high heels that would
give me another couple of inches," he cried excitedly. "By Gum!" said he,
clutching Bakkus's shoulder, a rare act of demonstrativeness, "what a thing
it is to have imagination."

"Ah!" said Bakkus, "what a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How
infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in
action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals!"

"What the devil do you mean?" asked Andrew.

Bakkus waved a hand towards the drawing.

"If only I had your application," said he, "I should make a great name as
an illustrator of Hamlet."

"One of these days," said Andrew, the frown of anger returning to his brow,
"I'll throw you out of the window."

"Provided it is not, as now, on the ground floor, you would be committing
an act of the loftiest altruism."

Andrew returned to his forgotten breakfast, and poured out a cup of tepid
tea.

"What would you suggest--just plain black or red--Mephisto--or stripes?"

He was full of the realization of the Elodesque idea. His brain became
a gushing fount of inspiration. Hundreds of grotesque possibilities of
business, hitherto rendered ineffective by flapping costume, appeared in
fascinating bubbles. He thought and spoke of nothing else.

"Once I denied you the rank of artist," said Bakkus. "I retract. I
apologize. No one but an artist would inflict on another human being such
intolerable boredom."

"But it's your idea, bless you, which I'm carrying out, with all the
gratitude in the world."

"If you want to reap the tortures of the damned," retorted Bakkus, "just
you be a benefactor."

Andrew shrugged his shoulders. That was the way of Horatio Bakkus, perhaps
the first of his fellow-creatures whom he had deliberately set out to
study, for hitherto he had met only simple folk, good men and true or
uncomplicated fools and knaves, and the paradoxical humour of his friend
had been a puzzling novelty demanding comprehension; the first, therefore,
who put him on the track of the observation of the twists of human
character and the knowledge of men. That was the way of Bakkus. An idea was
but a toy which he tired of like a child and impatiently broke to bits.
Only a week before he had come to Andrew:

"My dear fellow, I've got a song. I'm going to write it, set it and sing it
myself. It begins:--

  _I crept into the halls of sleep
  And watched the dreams go by._

I'll give you the accompaniment in a day or two and we'll try it on the
dog. It's a damned sight too good for them--but no matter."

Andrew was interested. The lines had a little touch of poetry. He refrained
for some time from breaking through the gossamer web of the poet's fancy.
At last, however, as he heard nothing further, he made delicate enquiries.

"Song?" cried Bakkus. "What song? That meaningless bit of moonshine
ineptitude I quoted the other day? I have far more use for my intellect
than degrading it to such criminal prostitution."

Yes, he was beginning to know his Bakkus. His absorption in his new
character was not entirely egotistic. Both his own intelligence and his
professional experience told him that here, as he had worked out-the
business in his mind, was an entirely novel attraction. In his young
enthusiasm he saw hundreds crowding round the pitch on the sands. It was as
much to Bakkus's interest as to his own that the new show should succeed.
And even before he had procured the costume from Covent Garden, Bakkus
professed intolerable boredom. He shrugged his shoulders. Bored or not,
Bakkus should go through with it. So again under the younger man's
leadership Bakkus led the strenuous life of rehearsal.

It took quite a day for their fame to spread. On the second day they
attracted crowds. Money poured in upon them. Little Patou, like a
double-tailed serpent rearing himself upright on his tail tips, appeared
at first a creature remote, of some antediluvian race--until he talked
a familiar, disarming patter with his human, disarming grin. The Great
Patapon, contrary to jealous anticipation, saw himself welcomed as a
contrast and received more than his usual meed of applause. This satisfied,
for the time, his singer's vanity which he professed so greatly to despise.
They entered on a spell of halcyon days.

The brilliant sunny season petered out in hopeless September, raw and
chill. A week had passed without the possibility of an audience. Said
Bakkus:

"Of all the loathsome spots in a noisome universe this is the most
purulent. In order to keep up our rudimentary self-respect we have done
our best to veil our personal identity as images of the Almighty from the
higher promenades of the vulgar. Our sole associates have been the blatant
frequenters of evil smelling bars. We've not exchanged a word with a
creature approaching our intellectual calibre. I am beginning to conceive
for you the bitter hatred that one of a pair of castaways has for the
other; and you must regard me with feelings of equal abhorrence."

"By no means," replied Andrew. "You provide me with occupation, and that
amuses me."

As the occupation for the dismal week had mainly consisted in dragging a
cursing Bakkus away from public-house whisky on damp and detested walks,
and in imperturbably manoeuvring him out of an idle--and potentially
vicious--intrigue with the landlady's pretty and rather silly daughter, his
reply brought a tragic scowl to Bakkus's face.

"There are times when I lie awake, inventing lingering deaths for you. You
occupy yourself too much with my affairs. It's time our partnership in this
degrading mountebankery should cease."

"Until it does, it's going to be efficient," said Andrew. "It's a come down
for both of us to play on the sands and pass the hat round. I hate it as
much as you do, but we've done it honourably and decently--and we'll end up
in the same way."

"We end now," said Bakkus, staring out of their cheap lodging house
sitting-room window at the dismal rain that veiled the row of cheap lodging
houses opposite.

Andrew made a stride across the room, seized his shoulder and twisted him
round.

"What about our bookings next month?"

For their success had brought them an offer of a month certain from a
northern Palladium syndicate, with prospects of an extended tour.

"Dust and ashes," said Bakkus.

"You may be dust," cried Andrew hotly, "but I'm damned if I'm ashes."

Bakkus bit and lighted a cheap cigar and threw himself on the dilapidated
sofa. "No, my dear fellow, if it comes to that, I'm the ashes. Dead! With
never a recrudescent Phoenix to rise up out of them. You're the dust, the
merry sport of the winds of heaven."

"Don't talk foolishness," said Andrew.

"Was there ever a man living who used his breath for any other purpose?"

"Then," said Andrew, "your talk about breaking up the partnership is mere
stupidity."

"It is and it isn't," replied Bakkus. "Although I hate you, I love you.
You'll find the same paradoxical sentimental relationship in most cases
between man and wife. I love you, and I wish you well, my dear boy. I
should like to see you Merry-Andrew yourself to the top of the Merry-Andrew
tree. But for insisting on my accompanying you on that uncomfortable and
strenuous ascent, without very much glory to myself, I frankly detest you."

"That doesn't matter a bit to me," said Andrew. "You've got to carry out
your contract."

Bakkus sighed. "Need I? What's a contract? I say I am willing to perform
vocal and other antics for so many shillings a week. When I come to think
of it, my soul revolts at the sale of itself for so many shillings a week
to perform actions utterly at variance with its aspirations. As a matter of
fact I am tired. Thanks to my brain and your physical cooperation, I have
my pockets full of money. I can afford a holiday. I long for bodily sloth,
for the ragged intellectual companionship that only Paris can give me, for
the resumption of study of the philosophy of the excellent Henri Bergson,
for the absinthe that brings forgetfulness, for the Tanagra figured,
broad-mouthed, snub-nosed shrew that fills every day with potential
memories."

"Oh that's it, is it?" cried Andrew, with a glare in his usually mild
eyes and his ugly jaw set. They had had many passages at arms. Bakkus's
sophistical rhetoric against Andrew's steady common sense; and they had
sharpened Andrew's wit. But never before had they come to a serious
quarrel. Feeling his power he had hitherto exercised it with humorous
effectiveness. But now the situation appeared entirely devoid of humour. He
was coldly and sternly angry.

"That's the beginning and end of the whole thing? It all comes down to a
worthless little Montmartroise? For a little thing of _rien du tout,_
the artist, the philosopher, the English public school man will throw over
his friend, his partner, his signed word, his honour? _Mon Dieu!_ Well
go--I can easily--No, I'll not say what I have in my mind."

Bakkus turned over on his side, facing his adversary, his under arm
outstretched, the cigar in his fingers.

"I love to see youth perspiring--especially with noble rage. It does it
good, discharges the black humours of the body. If I could perspire more
freely I should be singing in Grand Opera."

"You can break your contract and I'll do without you," cried the furious
Andrew.

"I'm not going to break the contract, my young friend," replied Bakkus,
peering at him through lowered eyelids. "When did I say such a thing? We
end the damp and dripping folly of the sands."

"We don't," said Andrew.

"As you will," said Bakkus. "Again I prophesy that you'll be drilling
awkward squads in barrack yards before you've done. It's all you're fit
for."

Andrew smiled or grinned with closed lips. It was his grim smile, many
years afterwards to become familiar to larger bodies of men than awkward
squads. Once more he had won his little victory.

So peace was made. They finished up the miserable fag end of the season
and with modest success carried out their month's contract in the northern
towns. But even Andrew's drastic leadership could not prevail on Bakkus's
indolence to sign an extension. Montmartre called him. An engagement. He
also spoke vaguely of singing lessons. Now that Parisians had returned to
Paris, he could not afford to lose his connections. With cynical frankness
he also confessed his disinclination to be recognized in a music-hall Punch
and Judy show by his brother the Archdeacon.

"Archdeacons," said Andrew--he had a confused idea of their prelatical
status, "don't go to music-halls."

"They do in this country," said Bakkus. "They're everywhere. They infest
the air like microbes. You only have to open your mouth and you get your
lungs filled with them. It's a pestilential country and I've done with it."

"All right," replied Andrew, "I'll run the show on my own."

But the Palladium syndicate, willing to book "The Great Patapon and Little
Patou" for a further term, declined to rebook Little Patou by himself.
He returned to Paris, where he found Bakkus wallowing in absinthe and
philosophic sloth.

"We might have made our fortune in England," said he.

Said Bakkus coolly sipping his absinthe, "I have no desire to make my
fortune. Have you?"

"I should like to make my name and a big position," replied Andrew.

"And I, my young friend? As the fag end of the comet's tail should I have
made my name and a big position? Ah egotist! Egotist! Sublime egotist! The
true artist using human souls as the rungs of his ladder! Well, go your
ways. I have no reproach against you. Now that I'm out of your barrack
square, my heart is overflowing with love for you. You have ever a friend
in Horatio Bakkus. When you fall on evil days and you haven't a sou in your
pocket, come to me--and you'll always find an inspiration."

"I wish you would give me one now," said Andrew, who had spent a fruitless
morning at the Agence Moignon.

"You want a foil, an intelligent creature who will play up to you--a
creature far more intelligent than I am. A dog. Buy a dog. A poodle."

"By Gum!" cried Andrew, "I believe you're right again."

"I'm never wrong," said Bakkus. "Garcon!" He summoned the waiter and waved
his hand towards the little accusing pile of saucers. "Monsieur always pays
for my inspirations."




Chapter VIII



We behold Petit Patou now definitely launched on his career. Why the
execution of Bakkus's (literally) cynical suggestion should have met with
instant success, neither he nor Andrew nor Prépimpin, the poodle, nor
anyone under heaven had the faintest idea. Perhaps Prépimpin had something
to do with it. He was young, excellently trained, and expensive. As to the
methods of his training Andrew made no enquiries. Better not. But, brought
up in the merciful school of Ben Flint, in which Billy the pig had many
successors, both porcine and canine, he had expert knowledge of what kind
firmness on the part of the master and sheer love on that of the animal
could accomplish.

Prépimpin went through his repertoire with the punctilio of the barrack
square deprecated by Bakkus.

"I buy him," said Andrew. "_Viens, mon ami_."

Prépimpin cast an oblique glance at his old master.

"_Va-t-en_," said the latter.

"_Allons_" said Andrew with a caressing touch on the dog's head.

Prépimpin's topaz eyes gazed full into his new lord's. He wagged the tuft
at the end of his shaven tail. Andrew knelt down, planted his fingers in
the lion shagginess of mane above his ears and said in the French which
Prépimpin understood:

"We're going to be good friends, eh? You're not going to play me any dirty
tricks? You're going to be a good and very faithful colleague?"

"You mustn't spoil him," said the vendor, foreseeing, according to his
lights, possible future recriminations.

Andrew, still kneeling, loosed his hold on the dog, who forthwith put both
paws on his shoulder and tried to lick the averted human face.

"I've trained animals since I was two years old, Monsieur Berguinan. Please
tell me something that I don't know." He rose. "_Alors_, Prépimpin, we
belong to each other. _Viens_."

The dog followed him joyously. The miracle beyond human explanation was
accomplished, the love at first sight between man and dog.

Now, in the manuscript there is much about Prépimpin. Lackaday, generally
so precise, has let himself go over the love and intelligence of this most
human of animals. To read him you would think that Prépimpin invented his
own stage business and rehearsed Petit Patou. As a record of dog and man
sympathy it is of remarkable interest; it has indeed a touch of rare
beauty; but as it is a detailed history of Prépimpin rather than an account
of a phase in the career of Andrew Lackaday, I must wring my feelings and
do no more than make a passing reference to their long and, from my point
of view, somewhat monotonous partnership. It sheds, however, a light on
the young manhood of this earnest mountebank. It reveals a loneliness
ill-becoming his years--a loneliness of soul and heart of which he appears
to be unconscious. Again, we have here and there the fleeting shadow of a
petticoat. In Stockholm--during these years he went far afield--he fancies
himself in love with one Vera Karynska of vague Mid-European nationality,
who belongs to a troupe of acrobats. Vera has blue eyes, a deeply
sentimental nature, and, alas! an unsympathetic husband who, to Andrew's
young disgust depends on her for material support, seeing that every
evening he and various other brutes of the tribe form an inverted pyramid
with Vera's amazonian shoulders as the apex. He is making up a besotted
mind to say, "Fly with me," when the Karinski troupe vanishes Moscow-wards
and an inexorable contract drives him to Dantzic. In that ancient town,
looking into the faithful and ironical eyes of Prépimpin, he thanks God he
did not make a fool of himself.

You see, he succeeds. If you credited his modesty, you would think that
Prépimpin made Petit Patou. _Quod est absurdum_. But the psychological
fact remains that Andrew Lackaday needed some magnetic contact with another
individuality, animal or human, to exhibit his qualities. There, in
counselling splendid isolation, Elodie Figasso, the little Marseilles
gutter fairy was wrong. She saw, clearly enough, that, subordinated to
others, with no chance of developing his one personality he must fail.
But she did not perceive--and poor child, how could she?--that given the
dominating influence over any combination, even over one poodle dog, he
held the key of success.

So we see him, the born leader, unconscious of his powers for lack of
opportunity, instinctively craving their exercise for his own spiritual
and moral evolution, and employing them in the benign mastery of the dog
Prépimpin.

They were happy years of bourgeois vagabondage. At first he felt the young
artist's soreness that, with the exception of rare, sporadic engagements,
neither London nor Paris would have him. Once he appeared at the Empire,
in Leicester Square, an early turn, and kept on breaking bits of his heart
every day, for a week, when the curtain went down in the thin applause that
is worse than silence.

"Prépimpin felt it," he writes, "even more than I did. He would follow me
off, with his head bowed down and his tail-tuft sweeping the floor, so that
I could have wept over his humiliation."

Why the great capitals fail to be amused is a perpetual mystery to Andrew
Lackaday. Prépimpin and he give them the newest things they can think of.
After weeks and weeks of patient rehearsal, they bring a new trick to
perfection. It is the _clou_ of their performance for a week's
engagement at the Paris Folies-Bergère. After a conjuring act, he retires.
Comes on again immediately, Petit Patou, apparently seven foot high, in
the green silk tights reaching to the arm-pit waist, a low frill round his
neck, his hair up to a point, a perpetual grin painted on his face. On the
other side enters Prépimpin on hind legs, bearing an immense envelope.
Petit Patou opens it--shows the audience an invitation to a ball.

"Ah! dress me, Prépimpin."

The dog pulls a hidden string and Petit Patou is clad in a bottle green
dress-coat. Prépimpin barks and dances his delight.

"But _nom d'un chien_, I can't go to a ball without a hat."

Prepimpin bolts to the wings and returns with an opera hat.

"And a stick."

Prepimpin brings the stick.

"And a cigar."

Prépimpin rushes to a little table at the back of the stage and on his hind
legs offers a box of cigars to his master, who selects one and lights it.
He begins the old juggler's trick of the three objects. The dog sits on his
haunches and watches him. There is patter in which the audience is given
to understand that Prépimpin, who glances from time to time over the
footlights, with a shake of his leonine mane, is bored to death by his
master's idiocy. At last the hat descends on Petit Patou's head, the
crook-handled stick falls on his arm, and he looks about in a dazed way for
the cigar, and then he sees Prépimpin, who has caught it, swaggering off on
his hind legs, the still lighted cigar in his mouth.

"No," writes Lackaday, "it was a failure. Poor Prépimpin and I left Paris
with our tails between our legs. We were to start a tour at Bordeaux.
'_Mon pauvre ami_,' said I, on the journey--Prépimpin never suffered
the indignity of a dog cage--'There is only one thing to be done. It is you
who will be going to the ball and will juggle with the three objects, and
I who will catch the cigar in my mouth.' But it was not to be. At Bordeaux
and all through the tour we had a _succès fou_."

Thus Andrew washed his hands of Paris and London and going where he was
appreciated roved the world in quiet contentment. He was young, rather
scrupulously efficient within his limits, than ambitious, and of modest
wants, sober habits, and of a studious disposition which his friendship
with Horatio Bakkus had both awakened and stimulated. Homeless from birth
he never knew the nostalgia which grips even the most deliberately vagrant
of men. As his ultimate goal he had indeed a vague dream of a home with
wife and children--one of these days in the future, when he had put by
enough money to justify such luxuries. And then there was the wife to find.
In a wife sewing by lamp-light between a red-covered round table and
the fire, a flaxen haired cherub by her side--for so did his ingenuous
inexperience picture domestic happiness--he required the dominating
characteristic of angelic placidity. Perhaps his foster-mother and the
comfort Ben Flint found in her mild and phlegmatic devotion had something
to do with it.

In his manuscript he tries to explain--and flounders about in a
psychological bog--that his ideal woman and his ideal wife are two totally
different conceptions. The woman who could satisfy all his romantic
imaginings was the Princesse Lointaine--the Highest Common Factor of the
ladies I have already mentioned--Mélisande, Phèdre, Rosalind, Fédora, and
Dora Copperfield--it is at this stage that he mentions them by name, having
extended his literary horizon. Her he did not see sewing, in ox-eyed
serenity, by a round table covered with a red cloth. With Her it was a
totally different affair. It was a matter of spring and kisses and a
perfect spiritual companionship.... As I have said, he gets into a terrible
muddle. Anyhow, between the two conflicting ideals, he does not fall to the
ground of vulgar amours. At the risk of tedium I feel bound to insist on
this aspect of his life. For in the errant cosmopolitan world in which he,
irresponsible and now well salaried bachelor had his being, he was thrown
into the free and easy comradeship of hundreds of attractive women, as free
and irresponsible as himself. He lived in a sea of temptation. On the other
hand, I should be doing as virile a creature as ever walked a great wrong
if I presented him to you under the guise of a Joseph Andrews. He had his
laughter and his champagne and his kisses on the wing. But it was:

"We'll meet again one of these days."

"One of these days when our paths cross again."

And so--in effect--_Bon soir_.

It is difficult to compress into a page or two the history of several
years. But that is what I have to do.

He is not wandering all the time over France, or flashing meteor-like about
Europe. He has periods of repose, enforced and otherwise. But his position
being ensured, he has no anxieties. Paris is his headquarters. He lives
still in his old _hôtel meublé_ in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. But
instead of one furnished room on the fifth floor, he can afford an
apartment, salon, salle à manger, bedrooms, cabinet de toilette, on the
prosperous second, which he retains all the year round. And Petit Patou can
now stride through the waiting crowd in Moignon's antechamber and enter the
sacred office, cigar in mouth, and with a "look here, _mon vieux_,"
put the fear of God into him. Petit Patou and Prépimpin, the idols of the
Provinces, have arrived.

In Paris, when their presences coincide, he continues to consort with
Bakkus, whose exquisite little tenor voice still affords him a means
of livelihood. In fact Bakkus has had a renewed lease of professional
activity. He sings at watering places, at palace hotels; which involves the
physical activity which he abhors.

"Bound to this Ixion wheel of perpetual motion," says he, "I suffer
tortures unimagined even by the High Gods. Compared with it our degrading
experience on the sands seven years ago was a blissful idyll."

"By Gum!" says Andrew, "seven years ago. Who would have thought it?"

"Yes, who?" scowled the pessimist, now getting grey and more gaunt of blue,
ill-shaven cheek. "To me it is seven æons of Promethean damnation."

"To me it seems only yesterday," says Andrew.

"It's because you have no brain," says Bakkus.

But they are good friends. Away from Paris they carry on a fairly regular
correspondence. Such of Bakkus's letters as Lackaday has kept and as I have
read, are literary gems with--always--a perverse and wilful flaw ... like
the man's life.

       *       *       *       *       *

From Paris, after this particular meeting with Bakkus, Andrew once more
goes on tour with Prépimpin. But a Prépimpin grown old, and, though
pathetically eager, already past effective work. Nine years of strenuous
toil are as much as any dog can stand. Rheumatism twinged the hind legs
of Prépimpin. Desire for slumber stupefied his sense of duty. He could no
longer catch the lighted cigar and swagger off with it in his mouth, across
the stage.

"And yet, I'm sure," writes Lackaday, "that every time I cut his business,
it nearly broke his heart. And it had come to Prépimpin's business being
cut down to an insignificant minimum. I could, of course, have got another
dog. But it would have broken his heart altogether. And one doesn't
break the hearts of creatures like Prépimpin. I managed to arrange the
performance, at last, so that he should think he was doing a devil of a
lot...."

Then the end came. It was on the Bridge of Avignon, which, if you will
remember, Lackaday superstitiously regards as a spot fraught with his
destiny.

Fate had not taken him to the town since his last disastrous appearance. No
one recognized in the Petit Patou of provincial fame the lank failure
of many years ago. Besides, this time, he played not at the wretched
music-hall without the walls, but at the splendid Palace of Varieties in
the Boulevard de la Gare. He was a star--_en vedette_, and he had
a dressing-room to himself. He stayed at the Hôtel d'Europe, the famous
hostelry by the great entrance gates. To avoid complication, he went
everywhere now as Monsieur Patou. Folks passing by the open courtyard of
the hotel where he might be taking the air, pointed him out to one another.
"_Le voilà--Petit Patou_"

It was in the middle of his week's engagement--once more in summer time. He
lunched, saw to Prépimpin's meal, smoked the cheap cigar of content, and
then, crossing the noisy little flagged square, went through the gates,
Prépimpin at his heels, and made his way across the dusty road to the
bridge. The work-a-day folk, on that week-day afternoon, had all returned
to their hives in the town, and the pathways of the bridge contained but
few pedestrians.

In the roadway, too, there was but lazy life, an occasional omnibus, the
queer old diligence of Provence with its great covered hood in the midst of
which sat the driver amid a cluster of peasants, hidden like the queen bee
by the swarm, a bullock cart bringing hay into the city, a tradesman's
cart, a lumbering wine waggon, with its three great white horses and great
barrels. Nothing hurried in the hot sunshine. The Rhone, very low, flowed
sluggishly. Only now and then did a screeching, dust-whirling projectile of
a motor-car hurl itself across this bridge of drowsy leisure.

Andrew leaned over the parapet, finding rest in a mild melancholy, his
thoughts chiefly occupied with the decay of Prépimpin who sat by his heels
gazing at the roadway, occupied possibly by the same sere reflections.
Presently the flea-catching antics of a ragged mongrel in the middle of the
roadway disturbed Prépimpin's sense of the afternoon's decorum. He rose
and with stiff dignity stalked towards him. He stood nose to nose with the
mongrel, his tufted tail in straight defiance up in the air.

Then suddenly there was a rush and a roar and a yell of voices--and the
scrunch of swiftly applied brakes. Andrew turned round and saw a great
touring car filled with men and women--and the men were jumping out. And
he saw a mongrel dog racing away for dear life. And then at last he saw a
black mass stretched upon the ground. With horror in his heart he rushed
and threw himself down by the dog's body. He was dead. He had solved the
problem--_solverat ambulando_. Andrew heard English voices around him;
he raised a ghastly face.

"You brutes, you have killed my dog."

He scarcely heard the explanations, the apologies. The dog seeing the car
far off, had cleared himself. Then without warning he had flung himself
suicidally in the path of the car. What could they do now by way of amends?
The leader of the little company of tourists, a clean-shaven, florid
man, obviously well bred and greatly distressed, drew a card from his
pocket-book.

"I am staying a couple of days at the Hôtel Luxembourg at Nîmes--I know
that nothing can pay for a dog one loves--but--"

"Oh, no, no, no," said Andrew waving aside the card.

"Can we take the dog anywhere for you?"

"You're very kind," said Andrew, "but the kindest thing is to leave me
alone."

He bent down again and took Prépimpin in his arms and strode with him
through the group of motorists and the little clamouring crowd that had
gathered round. One of the former, a girl in a blue motor veil, ran after
him and touched his arm. Her eyes were full of tears.

"It breaks my heart to see you like that. Oh can't I do anything for you?"

Andrew looked at her. Through all his stunning grief he had a dim vision of
the Princesse Lointaine. He said in an uncertain voice:

"You have given me your very sweet sympathy. You can't do more."

She made a little helpless gesture and turned and joined her companions,
who went on their way to Nîmes. Andrew carried the bleeding body of
Prépimpin, and there was that in his face which forbade the idle to trail
indiscreetly about his path. He strode on, staring ahead, and did not
notice a woman by the pylon of the bridge who, as he passed, gave a
bewildered gasp, and after a few undecided moments, followed him at a
distance. He went, carrying the dog, up the dirty river bank outside the
walls, where there was comparative solitude, and sat down on a stone seat,
and laid Prépimpin on the ground. He broke down and cried. For seven years
the dog's life and his had been inextricably interwoven. Not only had they
shared bed and board as many a good man and dog have done, but they had
shared the serious affairs of life, its triumphs, its disillusions. And
Prépimpin was all that he had to love in the wide world.

"_Pardon, monsieur_," said a voice.

He looked up and saw the woman who had followed him. She was dark, of the
loose build of the woman predisposed to stoutness who had grown thin, and
she had kind eyes in which pain seemed to hold in check the promise of
laughter and only an animal wistfulness lingered. Her lips were pinched
and her face was thin and careworn. And yet she was young--obviously under
thirty. Her movements retained all the lissomeness of youth. Although
dressed more or less according to the fashion of the year, she looked poor.
Yet there was not so much of threadbare poverty in her attire, as lack of
interest--or pathetic incongruity; the coat and skirt too heavy for the
sultry day; the cheap straw hat trimmed with uncared for roses; the soiled
white gloves with an unmended finger tip.

"Madame?" said he.

And as he saw it, the woman's face and form became vaguely familiar. He
had seen her somewhere. But in the last few years he had seen thousands of
women.

"You have had a great misfortune, monsieur?"

"That is true, madame."

She sat on the bench beside him.

"_Vous pleurez_. You must have loved him very much."

It was not a stranger speaking to him. Otherwise, he would have risen and,
as politely as anguished nerves allowed, would have told her to go to the
devil. She made no intrusion on his grief. Her voice fell with familiar
comfort on his ear. He was vaguely conscious of her right to offer
sympathy. He regarded her, grateful but perplexed.

"You don't recognize me? _Enfin_, why should you?" She shrugged
her shoulders. "We only met for a few hours many years ago--here in
Avignon--but we were good friends."

Then Andrew drew a deep breath and turned swiftly round on the bench and
shot out both his hands.

"_Mon Dieu!_ Elodie!"

She smiled sadly.

"Ah," said she, "I'm glad you remember."




Chapter IX



They sat awhile and talked of the tragedy, the dead Prépimpin, at once a
link and a barrier between them, lying at their feet. Her ready sympathy
brought her near; but while the dog lay there, mangled and bloody, he could
think of nothing else. It was Elodie who suggested immediate and decent
burial. Why should he not go to the hotel for a workman and a spade?

He smiled. "You always seem to come to my help in time of trouble. But
while I am absent, what will happen to him?"

"I will guard him, my friend," said Elodie.

He marched off. In a few minutes he came back accompanied by one of the
hotel baggage porters. The grave, on the waste land by the Rhone, was
quickly dug, and Prépimpin covered over for ever with the kindly earth. As
soon as the body was hidden, Andrew turned away, the tears in his eyes.

"And now," said he, "let us sit somewhere else and you shall tell me about
yourself. I have been selfish."

The tale she had to tell was very old and very sad. She did not begin
it, however, until, drawing off her old gloves, for coolness' sake, she
disclosed a wedding ring on her finger. His eye caught it at once.

"Why, you are married."

"Yes," she said, "I am married."

"You don't speak in the tone of a happy woman."

She shrugged hopeless shoulders. "A woman isn't happy with a _goujat_
for a husband."

Now a _goujat_ is a word for which scoundrel, and miscreant, are but
weak translations. It denotes lowest depths of infamy.

Andrew frowned terribly. "He ill-treats you?"

"He did. But that is past. Fortunately I am alone. He has deserted me."

"Children?"

"Thank God, no," replied Elodie.

And then it all came out in the unrestrained torrent of the south. She had
been an honest girl, in spite of a thousand temptations. When André met
her, she was as pure as any young girl in a convent. It wasn't that she was
ignorant. Oh no. The girl who had gone through the workrooms of Marseilles
and the music-halls of France and could retain virginal innocence would
be either a Blessed Saint or an idiot. It was knowledge that had kept her
straight; knowledge and pride. She was not for sale. _Grand Dieu_, no!
And love? If a man's love fell short of the desire for marriage, well, it
didn't amount to a row of pins. Besides, even where there could be a love
quite true without the possibility of marriage, she had seen enough of the
world to know the unhappinesses that could happen to women. No. André must
not think she was cold or prudish. She had set out to be merely reasonable.
To André the girl's apology for preserving her chastity seemed perfectly
natural. In her world it was somewhat of an eccentric feat.

"_Et puis, enfin._" And then, at last, came the conquering male, a
singer in a light opera touring company in the chorus of which she was
engaged. He was young, handsome--played secondary parts; one of the great
ones, in fact, in her limited theatrical hierarchy. He fell in love with
her. She, flattered, responded. Of course, he suggested setting up house
together, then and there. But she had her aforesaid little principles.
His infatuation, however, was such that he consented to run the terrific
gauntlet of French matrimonial procedure. Why people in France go to the
nerve-racking trouble of getting married Heaven only knows. Camels can
gallop much more easily through needles' eyes. Anybody can be born in
France, anybody can die; against these phenomena the form-multiplying and
ream-writing _Ad-min-is-tra-tion_ is powerless. But when you come to
the intermediate business of world population, then bureaucracy steps in
and plays the very devil. Elodie and Raoul Marescaux desired to be married.
In England they would have got a special license, or gone to a registry
office, and the thing would have been over. But in France, Monsieur and
Madame Marescaux, and Madame Figasso, and the _huissier_ Boudin, who
insisted on coming forward although he was not legally united to Madame,
and lawyers representing each family, were set all agog, and there
were meetings and quarrels, and delays--Elodie had not a cent to her
dowry--which of course was the stumbling-block--with the final result that
nothing was done which might not have been done at once, namely, that the
pair were doubly married--once by Monsieur le Maire and then by Monsieur le
Curé.

For a few months she was happy. Then the handsome Raoul became enamoured of
a fresh face. Then Elodie fell ill, oh, so ill, they thought she was going
to die. And during her illness and slow recovery Raoul became enamoured
of every fresh face he saw. A procession. If it had been one, said Elodie
philosophically, she could perhaps have arranged matters. But they had been
endless. And what little beauty she had her illness had taken away, so
her only weapon was gone; and Raoul jeered at her and openly flaunted his
infidelities in her presence. When she used beyond a certain point the
ready tongue with which Providence had endowed her, she was soundly beaten.
"_Le goujat!_" cried Andrew. Ah! It was a life of hell. But they had
kept nominally together, in the same companies, she singing in the chorus,
he playing his second rôles. And then there came a day when he obtained
an engagement in the Opera at Buenos Ayres. She was to accompany him. Her
berth was booked, her luggage packed. He said to her, "I have to go away
for a day or two on business. Meet me at the boat train for Havre on
Wednesday." She went to the Gare St. Lazare on Wednesday to find that the
boat train had gone on Tuesday. _Un sale tour_--eh? Did ever anyone
hear of such a dirty trick? And later she learned that her berth was
occupied by a little modiste of the Place de la Madeleine with whom he had
run away.

That was two years ago. Since then she had not heard of him; and she wished
never to hear of him again.

"And you have been supporting yourself all the time, on the stage?"

"Yes, I have lived. But it has been hard. My illness affected my voice. No
one wants me very much. But still"--she smiled wanly--"I can manage. And
now, you. I saw you yesterday at the Palace. They know me there and give me
my _entrée_. You have had a _beau succès_. You are famous. I am
so glad."

Modestly he depreciated the fame, but acknowledged the success which was
due to her encouragement. He told her of the racehorse Elodie and his lucky
inspiration. For the first time she laughed and clapped her hands.

"Oh, I am flattered! Yes, and greatly touched. Now I know that you have
remembered me. But if the horse had lost wouldn't you have pested against
me? Say?"

Andrew replied soberly: "I could not possibly have lost. I knew it would
win, just as I know that five minutes hence the sun will continue to shine.
I had faith in your star, Elodie."

"My star--it's not worth very much, my star."

"It has been to me," said Andrew.

They talked on. By dint of questioning she learned most of his not
over-eventful history. He told her of Horatio Bakkus, and of the season
on the sands, when first he realized her original idea of exploiting his
figure; of Prépimpin in his prime and their wanderings about Europe. And
now alas! there was no longer a Prépimpin.

"But how will you give the performance this evening without him?" she
asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. He had not given a thought to that yet. It was
the loss of his friend that wrung his heart.

"You are so gentle and sympathetic. Why is it that no woman has loved you?"

"Perhaps because I've not found a woman I could love," said he.

She did not pursue the subject, but sighed and looked somewhat drearily in
front of her. It was then that he became aware of the cruel treatment that
the years had inflicted on her youth. He knew that she was under thirty,
yet she looked older. The colour had gone from her olive skin, leaving it
sallow; her cheeks were drawn; haggard lines appeared beneath her eyes;
her cheekbones and chin were prominent. It struck him that she might be
fighting a hard battle against poverty. She looked underfed. He asked her.

"Have you an engagement here in Avignon?"

She shook her head. No, she was resting.

"How long have you been out?"

She couldn't tell. Many weeks. And prospects for the immediate future? The
Tournée Tardieu was coming next Monday to Avignon. She knew the manager.
Possibly he would give her a short engagement.

"And if he doesn't?"

"I will arrange," said Elodie with a show of bravery.

Andrew frowned again, and his mild blue eyes narrowed keenly. He stretched
out his arm and put his delicate fingers on her hand.

"You have given me your help and sympathy. Do you refuse mine? Why does
your pride forbid you to tell me that you are in great distress?"

"What would be the good?" she replied with averted face. "How could you
help me? Money? Oh no. I would sooner fling myself in the river."

"You're talking foolishness," said he. "You know that you are in debt for
your little room, and that the _propriétaire_ won't let you stay much
longer. You know that you have not sufficient food. You know that you have
had nothing to-day but a bit of bread and a cup of coffee, if you have had
that. Confess!"

The corners of her mouth worked pathetically. In spite of heroic effort, a
sob came into her throat and tears into her eyes. Then she broke down and
wept wretchedly.

Yes, it was true. She had but a few sous in the world. No other clothes but
those she wore. Oh, she was ashamed, ashamed that he should guess. If she
had not been weak, he would have gone away and never have known. And so on,
and so forth. The situation was plain as day to Andrew. Elodie, if not his
guardian angel, at any rate his mascot, was down and out. While she was
crying, he slipped, unperceived, a hundred-franc note into the side pocket
of her jacket. At all events she should have a roof over her head and food
to eat for the next few days, until he could devise some plan for her
future welfare. Her future welfare! For all his generous impulses, it gave
him cause for cold thought. How the deuce could a wandering, even though
successful, young mountebank assure the future of a forlorn and untalented
young woman?

"_Voyons, chère amie_," said he comfortingly, "all is not yet lost. If
the theatre does not give you a livelihood, we might try something else. I
have my little savings. I could easily lend you enough to buy a _petit
commerce_, a little business. You could repay me, bit by bit, at your
convenience. _Tiens!_ Didn't you tell me you were apprenticed to a
dressmaker?"

But Elodie was hopeless. All that she had learned as a child she had
forgotten. She was fit for nothing but posturing on the stage. If André
could get her a good engagement, that was all the aid she would accept.

Andrew looked at his watch. The afternoon had sped with magical rapidity.
He reflected that not only must he dine, but he must think over and
rehearse the evening's performance with Prépimpin's part cut out. He dared
not improvise before the public. He rose with the apologetic explanation--

"My little Elodie," said he, as they walked along the battlemented city
walls towards the great gate, "have courage. Come to the Palace to-night. I
will arrange that you shall have a loge. You only have to ask for it. And
after my turn, you shall meet me, as long ago, at the Café des Négociants,
and we shall sup together and talk of your affairs."

She meekly consented. And when they parted at the entrance to the Hôtel
d'Europe, he said:

"If I do not ask you to dine, it is because I have to think and work. You
understand? But in your pocket you will find _de quoi bien dîner. Au
revoir, chère amie_."

He put out his hand. She held it, while her eyes, tragically large and
dark, searched his with painful intensity.

"Tell me," she said, "is it better that I should come and see you to-night
or that I should throw myself over the bridge into the Rhone?"

"If you meet me to-night," said Andrew, "you will still be alive, which,
after all, is a very good thing."

"_Je viendrai,_" said Elodie.

"The devil!" said Andrew, entering the courtyard of the hotel, and wiping a
perspiring brow, "here am I faced with a pretty responsibility!"

Experience enabled him to give a satisfactory performance; and his manager
prepared his path by announcing the unhappy end of Prépimpin and craving
the indulgence of the audience. But Andrew passed a heartbroken hour at the
music-hall. In his dressing-room were neatly stored the dog's wardrobe and
properties--the gay ribbons, the harness, the little yellow silk hat which
he wore with such a swaggering air, the little basket carried over his
front paw into which he would sweep various objects when his master's back
was turned, the drinking dish labelled "Dog" ... He suffered almost a human
bereavement. And then, the audience, for this night, was kind. But, as
conscientious artist, he was sensitively aware of makeshift. A great
element of his success lay in the fact that he had trained the dog to
appear the more clever of the two, to score off his pretended clumsiness
and to complete his tricks. For years he had left uncultivated the art of
being funny by himself. Without Prépimpin he felt lost, like a man in a
sculling race with only one oar. He took off his make-up and dressed,
a very much worried man. Of course he could obtain another trained dog
without much difficulty, and the special training would not take long;
but he would have to love the animal in order to establish that perfect
partnership which was essential to his performance. And how could he love
any other dog than Prépimpin? He felt that he would hate the well-meaning
but pretentious hound. He went out filled with anxieties and repugnances.

Elodie was waiting for him by the stage door. She said:

"You got out of the difficulty marvellously."

"But it was nothing like the performance you saw yesterday."

"_Ah non_" she replied frankly.

"_Voilà_," said he, dejectedly.

They walked, almost in silence, along the Avenue de la Gare, thronged,
as it was at the time of their first meeting, with the good citizens
of Avignon, taking the air of the sultry summer evening. She told him
afterwards that she felt absurdly small and insignificant trotting by the
side of his gaunt height, a feeling which she had not experienced years
before when their relative positions were reversed. But now she regarded
him as a kind of stricken god; and womanlike she was conscious of haggard
face and shrunken bosom, whereas before, she had stepped beside him proud
of the ripe fulness of her youth.

Whither the commonplace adventure was leading them neither knew. For his
part pity compelled superstitious sentiment to the payment, in some vague
manner, of a long-standing obligation. She had also given him very rare
sympathy that afternoon, and he was grateful. But things ended there, in a
sort of blind alley.

For her part, she let herself go with the current of destiny into which, by
strange hazard, she had drifted. She had the humility which is the fiercest
form of pride. Although she clung desperately to him, as to the spar that
alone could save her from drowning, although the feminine within her was
drawn to his kind and simple manliness, and although her heart was touched
by his grief at the loss of the dog, yet never for a moment did she count
upon the ordinary romantic _dénouement_ of such a situation. The
idea came involuntarily into her mind. Into the mind of what woman of her
upbringing would not the idea come? But she banished it savagely. Who was
she, waste rag of a woman, to attract a man? And even had she retained the
vivid beauty and plenitude of her maidenhood, it would have been just the
same. Elodie Figasso had never sold herself. No. All that side of things
was out of the question. She wished, however, that he was less of an
enigmatic, though kindly, sphinx.

Over their modest supper of sandwiches and Côtes du Rhône wine, in an
inside corner of the Café des Négociants--it was all the café could
offer, and besides she swore to a plentiful dinner--they discussed their
respective forlorn positions. Adroitly she tacked away from her own
concerns towards his particular dilemma. If he shrank from training another
dog and yet distrusted a solo performance, what was he going to do? Take a
partner like his friend--she forgot the name--yes, Bakkus, on whom perhaps
he couldn't rely, and who naturally would demand half his salary?

"Never again," Andrew declared, feeling better after a draught of old
Hermitage. "The only thing I can think of is to engage a competent
assistant."

Then Elodie's swift brain conceived a daring idea.

"You would have to train the assistant."

"Of course. But," he added in a dismal tone, "most of the assistants I
have seen are abysmally stupid. They are dummies. They give nothing of
themselves, for the performer to act up to."

"In fact," said Elodie, trying hard to steady her voice, "you want someone
entirely in sympathy with you, who can

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