The Mountebank Part 20

Bakkus laughed, pa.s.sing his hand over his silvering locks; but Elodie looked very serious. Absent-mindedly she picked up her corsets, and, the weather being sultry, she fanned herself with them.

"You are going to enlist in the Legion?"

"I am an Englishman, and my duty is towards my own country."

"Bingo is an English dog," said Bakkus.

Reaction from gladness made Elodie's heart grow cold, filled it with sudden dread. It was hard. Most of the women of France were losing their men of vile necessity. She, one of the few privileged by law to retain her man, now saw him swept away in the stream. Protest could be of no avail. When the mild Andrew set his mug of a face like that--his long smiling lips merged into each other like two slugs, and his eyes narrowed to little pin points, she knew that neither she nor any woman nor any man nor the _bon Dieu_ Himself could move him from his purpose. She could only smile rather miserably.

"Isn't it a little bit mad, your idea?"

"Mad? Of course he is," said Bakkus. "Much reading in military text-books has made him mad. A considerably less interesting fellow than Andrew, who, after all, has a modic.u.m of brains, one Don Quixote, achieved immortality by proceeding along the same lunatic lines."

Then Elodie flashed out. She understood nothing of the allusion, but she suspected a sneer.

"If I were a man I should fight for France. If Andre thinks it is his duty to fight for England, it may be mad, but it is fine, all the same.

Yesterday, in the street, I sang the Ma.r.s.eillaise with the rest. _'Amour sacre de la Patrie.' Eh bien!_ There are other countries besides France.

Do you deny that the _amour sacre_ exists for the Englishman?"

Andrew rose and gravely took Elodie's face in his delicate hands and kissed her.

"I never did you the wrong, my dear, of thinking you would feel otherwise."

"Neither did I, my good Elodie," said Bakkus, hurriedly opportunist. "If I have had one ambition in my life it is to sun myself in the vicarious glamour of a hero."

The corsets rolled off Elodie's lap as she turned swiftly.

"You really think Andre if he enlists in the English Army will be a hero?"

"Without doubt," replied Bakkus.

"I am glad," said Elodie. "You have such a habit of mocking all the world that when you are talking of serious things one doesn't know what you mean."

So peace was made. In the agitated days that followed she saw that a profound patriotism underlay Bakkus's cynicism, and she relied much on his counsel. Every man that England could put into the field was a soldier fighting for France. She glowed at the patriotic idea. Andrew, to his great gladness, noted that no hint of the cry "What is to become of me?" pa.s.sed her lips. She counted on his loyalty as he had counted on hers. When he informed her of the arrangement he had made with her lawyer for her support during his absence, all she said was:

_"Mon cher,_ it is far too much! I can live on half. And as for the will--let us not talk of it. It makes me s.h.i.+ver."

Here came out all that was good in Elodie. She took the war and its obligations, as she had taken her professional work. Through all her flabbiness ran the rod of steel. She suffered, looking forward with terror to the unthinkable future. Already one of her friends, Jeanne Duval, comedienne, was a widow ... What would life be without Andre? She trembled before the illimitable blankness. The habit of him was the habit of her life, like eating and drinking; his direction her guiding principle. Yet she dominated her fears and showed a brave face.

Often a neighbour, meeting her in the quarter, would say:

"You are fortunate, Madame. You will not lose your husband." To the quarter, as indeed to all the world, they were Monsieur and Madame Patou.

"He is an Englishman and won't be called up."

She would flash with proud retort:--

"In England men are not called up. They go voluntarily. Monsieur Patou goes to join the English army."

She was not going to make her sacrifice for nothing.

To Bakkus Andrew confided the general charge of Elodie.

"My dear fellow," said the cynic, "isn't it rather overdoing your saintly simplicity? Do you remember the farce 'Occupe-toi d'Amelie?' Do I appeal to you as a squire of deserted dames, gra.s.s-widows endowed with plenty? I--a man of such indefinite morals that so long as I have mutton cutlets I don't in the least care who pays for them? Aren't you paying for this very mouthful now?"

"You are welcome," replied Andrew with a grin, "to all the mutton that Elodie will give you."

Elodie's only proclaimed grievance against Bakkus, whom otherwise she vastly admired, was his undisguised pa.s.sion for free repasts.

When it came to parting, Elodie wept and sobbed. He marvelled at her emotion.

"You love me so much, my little Elodie?"

_"Mais tu es ma vie toute entiere._ Haven't you understood it?"

In that sense--no. He had not understood. They had arranged their lives so much as business partners, friends, fate-linked humans dependent on each other for the daily amenities of a joint existence. He had never suspected; never had cause to suspect, this hidden flood of sentiment. The simple man's heart responded. For such love she must be repaid. In the packed train which sped him towards England he carried with him no small remorse for past indifference.

Now, what next happened to Andrew, is, as I have said before, omitted from his ma.n.u.script. Nor has he vouchsafed to me, in conversation, anything but the rudest sketch. All we know is that he enlisted straight into the regular Army, the Grenadier Guards. Millions of Tommies have pa.s.sed through his earlier experiences. His gymnastic training, his professional habits of accuracy and his serious yet alert mind bore him swiftly through preliminary stages to high efficiency. In November, 1914, he found himself in Flanders. Wounded, a few months afterwards, he was sent home, patched up, sent back again. Late in 1915, a sergeant, he had his first leave, which he spent in Paris.

Elodie received him with open arms. She was impressed by the martial bearing of her ramrod of a man, and she proudly fingered the three stripes on his sleeve and the D.C.M. ribbon on his breast. She took him for walks, she who, in her later supineness, hated to put one foot before the other--by the Grands Boulevards, the Rue Royale, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, hanging on his arm, with a recrudescence of the defiant air of the Ma.r.s.eilles _gamine._ She made valiant efforts to please her hero who had bled in great battles and had returned to fight in great battles again. She had a thousand things to tell him of her life in Paris, to which the man, weary of the mud and blood of war, listened as though they were revelations of Paradise. Yet, she had but existed idly day in and day out, in the eternal wrapper and slippers, with her cage of birds. The little beasts kept her alive--it was true. One was dull in Paris without men. And the women of her acquaintance, mostly professional, were in poverty. They had the same cry, "My dear, lend me ten francs." "My little Elodie, I am on the rocks, my man is killed." _"Ma bien aimee,_ I am starving. You who are at ease, let me come and eat with you"--and so on and so on. Her heart grieved for them; but _que veux-tu?_--one was not a charitable inst.i.tution. So it was all very sad and heartrending. To say nothing of her hourly anxiety. If only the _sale guerre_ would cease and they could go on tour again! Ah, those happy days!

"Were they, after all, so very happy?" asked Andrew.

"One was contented, free from care."

"But now?"

"May they not come to tell me at any minute that you are killed?"

"That's true," said Andrew gravely.

"And besides--"

She paused.

"Besides, what?"

"I love you more now," replied Elodie.

Which gave Andrew food for thought, whenever he had time at the front to consider the appet.i.te.

When next he had a short leave it was as a Lieutenant; but Elodie had gone to Ma.r.s.eilles, braving the tedious third-cla.s.s journey, to attend her mother's funeral. There Madame Figa.s.so having died intestate, she battled with authorities and lawyers and the _huissier_ Boudin who professed heartbreak at her unfilial insistence on claiming her little inheritance.

With the energy which she always displayed in the serious things of life she routed them all. She sold the furniture, the dressmaking business, wrested the greasy bag of savings from the hands of a felonious and discomfited Boudin, and returned to Paris with some few thousand francs in her pocket. Horatio Bakkus, meanwhile, had moved into the Saint-Denis flat to take care of the birds. n.o.body in France craving the services of a light tenor, he would have starved, had not his detested brother the Archdeacon, a rich man, made him a small allowance. It was a sad day for him when, after a couple of months' snug lying, he had to betake himself to his attic under the roof, where he s.h.i.+vered in the coalless city.

"I die of convention," said he. "Behold, you have a spare room centrally heated. You are virtue itself. I not only occupy the sacred position of your guardian, but am humiliatingly aware of my supreme lack of attraction.

And yet--"

_"Fich'-moi le camp,"_ laughed Elodie.

And Bakkus took up his old green valise and returned to his eyrie. There should be no scandal in the Faubourg Saint-Denis if Elodie could help it.