The Mountebank Part 23

"Andrew, come back."

But the slam of the front door drowned her call. She returned to the drawing-room and threw up the window. Andrew was already far away, tearing down the rainswept street.

Now, if Andrew had heard the cry, he would have heard that in it which no man can hear unmoved. He would have leaped up the stairs and there would have been as pretty a little scene of mutual avowals as you could wish for.

Auriol knew it. She has frankly told me so. Not until this last interview was she certain of his love. But then, although he said nothing, any fool of a woman could have seen it as clear as daylight. And she had been planted there like a stuck pig all the time--her _ipsissima verba_ (O Diana distinction of lover's fancy!) and when common sense came to her aid, she just missed him by the fraction of a second.... Yet, after all, my modern Diana--or Andrew's, if you prefer it--had her own modern mode of telling an elderly outsider about her love affairs--the mode of the subaltern from whom is dragged the story of his Victoria Cross. Andrew Lackaday's quaintly formulated idealizations had their foundations in fact.

This is by the way. What happened next was Lady Auriol's recovery of real common sense when she withdrew her head and her rained-upon hat from the window and drew down the sash. She flew to her bedroom, stamped about with clenched fists until she had dried up at their source the un-Auriol like tears that threatened to burst forth. Her fury at her weakness spent, she felt better and strangled the temptation to write him then and there a summons to return that evening for a full explanation. My G.o.d! Hadn't they had their explanation? If he could in honour have said, "I am a free live man as you are a free live woman, and I love you as you love me"--wouldn't he have said it? He was the last man in the world to make a mystery about nothing. Into the mystery she was too proud to enquire. Enough for her to know in her heart that he was a gallant gentleman. She should have stopped at her parable....

Meanwhile she let Andrew return to France unaware of the tumult he had raised. That he had won her interest, her respect, her friends.h.i.+p--even her affectionate friends.h.i.+p--he was perfectly aware. But that his divinity was just foolishly and humanly in love with him he had no notion. He consoled himself with reflections on her impeccability, her wondrous intuition, her Far-away Princess-like delicacy. Who but she could have summed up in a parable the whole dismal situation?

Well, the poor Make-believe had to vanish.

The last time he travelled to Boulogne it was in a military train. He had a batman who looked after his luggage. He wore a baton and sword on his shoulder-straps. Only now, a civilian in a packed ma.s.s of civilians, did he recognize what a mighty personage he then was--a c.o.c.k of the walk, saluted, "sired," treated with deference. None of the old-fas.h.i.+oned pit-of-the-theatre scrum for pa.s.sport inspection, on the smoking-room deck.

And there, on the quay, were staff officers and R.T.O.'s awaiting him with a great car--no worry about Customs or luggage or anything--everything done for him by eager young men without his bidding--and he had thought nothing of it. Indeed, if there had been a hitch in the machinery which conveyed him to his brigade, he would have made it hot for the defaulter. And now--with a third share in a porter he struggled through the Customs in the midst of the perspiring civilian crowd, and, emerging on to the platform, found a comfortless middle seat in an old German first-cla.s.s carriage built for four. There were still many men in uniform, English, French and American, doing Heaven knows what about the busy station. But none took notice of him, and he lounged disconsolately by the carriage door waiting for the train to start. He scarcely knew which of his experiences, then or now, was an illusion.

In spite of the civilian horde, women, young girls, mufti-clad men, the station still preserved a military aspect. A company of blue-clad poilus sat some way off, in the middle of their packs, eating a scratch meal. Here and there were bunches of British Tommies, with a sergeant and a desultory officer, obviously under discipline. It seemed impossible that the war should be ended--that he, General Lackaday, should have finished with it for ever.

At last, a young subaltern pa.s.sed him by, recognized him after a second, saluted and paused undecided. A few months ago, Andrew would have returned his salute with bra.s.s-hatted majesty, but now he smiled his broad ear-to-ear smile, thrust out his long arm and gripped the young man's hand.

It was Smithson, one of his brigade staff--a youth of mediocre efficiency, on whom, as the youth remembered, he was wont most austerely to frown. But all this Andrew forgot.

"My dear boy," he cried. "How glad I am to see you."

It was as if a survivor from a real world had appeared before him in a land of dreams. He questioned him animatedly on his doings. The boy responded wonderingly. At last:--

"When are you going to be demobilized?"

The subaltern smiled. "I hope never, sir. I'm a regular."

"Lucky devil," said Andrew. "Oh, you lucky devil! I'd give anything to change places with you."

"I'm on, sir," laughed Smithson. "I'm all for being a Brigadier-General."

"Not on the retired list--out of the service," said Andrew.

The train began to move. Andrew jumped hastily into his compartment and, leaning out of the window before the stout Frenchman, waved a hand to the insignificant young man in the King's uniform. With all his soul he envied him the privilege of wearing it. He cursed his stiff-neckedness in declining the Major's commission offered by the War Office. A line of Tennyson reminiscent of the days when Bakkus had guided his reading came into his head. Something about a man's own angry pride being cap and bells for a fool. He tried to find repose against the edge of the sharp double curve that divided the carriage side into two portions. The trivial discomfort irritated him. The German compartment might be a symbol of victory, but it was also a symbol of the end of the war, the end of the only intense life full of meaning which he had ever known.

As the train went on, he caught sight from the window of immense stores of war--German waggons with their military destinations still marked in chalk, painted guns of all calibres, drums of barbed wire, higgledy-piggledy truck-loads of sc.r.a.p, all sorts of flotsam and jetsam of the great conflict. All useless, done with, never to be thought of again, so the world hoped, in the millennium that was to be brought about by the League of Nations. Yet it seemed impossible. In wayside camps, at railway stations, he saw troops of the three great countries. Now and then train-loads of them pa.s.sed. It was impossible that the mighty hosts they represented should soon melt away into the dull flood of civil life. The war had been such a mighty, such a gallant thing. Of course the genius of mankind must now be bent to the reconstruction of a shattered world. He knew that. He knew that regret at the ending of the universal slaughter would be the sentiment of a homicidal lunatic. Yet deep down in his heart there was some such regret, a gnawing nostalgia.

After Amiens they pa.s.sed by the battle-fields. A young American officer sitting by the eastern window pointed them out to him. He explained to Andrew what places had been British gun emplacements, pointed to the white chalk lines that had been British trenches. Told him what a trench looked like. Andrew listened grimly. The youth had pointed out of window again.

Did he know what those were? Those were sh.e.l.l-holes. German sh.e.l.ls....

Presently the conductor came through to examine tickets. Andrew drew from his pocket his worn campaigning note-case and accidently dropped a letter.

The young American politely picked it up, but the typewritten address on the War Office envelope caught his eye. "Brigadier-General Lackaday, C.B."

He handed it to Andrew, flus.h.i.+ng scarlet.

"Is that your name, sir?"

"It is," said Andrew.

"Then I reckon, sir, I've been making a fool of myself."

"Every man," said Andrew, with his disarming smile, "is bound to do that once in his life. It's best to get it over as soon as possible. That's the way one learns. Especially in the army."

But the young man's talk had rubbed in his complete civiliandom.

As the train neared Paris, his heart sank lower and lower. The old pre-war life claimed him mercilessly, and he was frozen with a dread which he had never felt on the fire-step in the cold dawn awaiting the lagging hour of zero. On the entrance to the Gare du Nord he went into the corridor and looked through the window. He saw Elodie afar off. Elodie, in a hat over her eyes, a fur round her neck, her skirt cut nearly up to her knees showing fat, white-stockinged calves. She had put on much flesh. The great train stopped and vomited forth its horde of scurrying humans.

Elodie caught sight of him and rushed and threw herself into his arms, and embraced him rapturously.

"Oh, my Andre, it is good to have you back. _O mon pet.i.t homme_--how I have been longing for this moment. Now the war is finished, you will not leave me again ever. _Et te voila General_. You must be proud, eh? But your uniform? I who had made certain I should see you in uniform."

He smiled at her characteristic pounce on externals.

"I no longer belong to the Army, my little Elodie," he replied, walking with her, his porter in front, to the barrier.

"_Mais tu es toujours General?_" she asked anxiously.

"I keep the rank," said Andrew.

"And the uniform? You can wear it? You will put it on sometimes to please me?"

They drove home through twilight Paris, her arm pa.s.sed through his, while she chattered gaily. Was it not good to smell Paris again after London with its fogs and ugliness and raw beefsteaks? To-night she would give him such a dinner as he had never eaten in England--and not for two years. Did he realize that it was two years since he had seen her?

"_Mon Dieu_," said he, "so it is."

"And you are pleased to have me again?"

"Can you doubt it?" he smiled.

"Ah, one never knows. What can't a man do in two years? Especially when he becomes a high personage, a great General full of honours and decorations."

"The G.o.ds of peace have arrived, my little Elodie," said he with a touch of bitterness, "and the little half-G.o.ds of war are eclipsed. If we go to a restaurant there's no reason why the waiter with his napkin under his arm shouldn't be an ex-colonel of Zouaves. All the glory of the war has ended, my dear. A breath. Phew! Out goes the candle."

But Elodie would have none of this pessimistic philosophy.

"You are a General to the end of your days."

They mounted to the flat in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. To Andrew, accustomed of late months to the greater s.p.a.ciousness of English homes, it seemed small and confined and close. It smelt of birds--several cages of which occupied a side of the salon. Instinctively he threw open a window.

Instinctively also: "The _courant d'air!_" cried Elodie.

"Just for a minute," said Andrew--and added diplomatically, "I want to see what changes there are in the street."

"It's always the same," said Elodie. "I will go and see about dinner."

So till she returned he kept the window open and looked about the room. It was neat as a new pin, redded-up against his arrival. His books had been taken from their cases and dusted; the wild displacement of volumes that should have gone in series betrayed the hand of the zealous though inexpert librarian. The old curtains had been cleaned, the antimaca.s.sars over the backs of chairs and sofa had been freshly washed, the floor polished. Not a greasy novel or a straggling garment defiled the spotlessness of the room, which, but for the row of birds and the books, looked as if it subserved no human purpose. A crazy whatnot, imitation lacquer and bamboo, the only piece of decorative furniture, was stacked with photographs of variety artists, male and female, in all kinds of stage costumes, with sprawling signatures across, the collection of years of touring,--all scrupulously dusted and accurately set out. The few cheap prints in maple frames that adorned the walls (always askew, he remembered) had been adjusted to the horizontal. On the chenille-covered table in the middle of the room stood a vase with artificial flowers. The straight-backed chairs upholstered in yellow and brown silk stood close sentry under the prints, in their antimaca.s.sar uniforms. Two yellow and brown arm-chairs guarded the white faience stove. The sofa against the wall frowned sternly at the whatnot on the opposite side. Andrew's orderly soul felt aghast at this mathematical tidiness. Even the old slovenly chaos was better. At least it expressed something human. And then the picture of that other room, so exquisite, so impregnated with the Far-away Princess spirit of its creator, rose up before him, and he sighed and rubbed his fingers through his red stubbly hair, and made a whimsical grimace, and said, "Oh d.a.m.n!" And Elodie then bursting in, with a proud "Isn't it pretty, _ton pet.i.t chez-toi!_"

What could he do but smile, and a.s.sure her that no soldier home from the wars could have a more beautifully regulated home?

"And you have looked enough at the street?"

Andrew shut the window.