The Mountebank Part 29

Presently the call-boy put his head in the doorway. Andrew rose, descended the iron stairs to the wings. Instinctively he went to the waiting table, covered with green velvet and gold, on which lay piled the once familiar properties--the one-stringed fiddle, the pith b.a.l.l.s, the rings, the cigar, the matches, the trick silk hat, the cards, the coins, and the rest of the juggler's apparatus, and methodically checked them. In the visible shaft of brilliantly lit stage he could see the back of the head and the plump shoulders and tournure of a singer rendering in bravura fas.h.i.+on the Jewel Song from "Faust." The stillness whence arose this single flood of sound seemed almost uncanny. The superheated air thickened with hot human breath and tobacco smoke stood stagnant like a miasma in the unventilated wings and back of the stage. The wild beast smell of the lion, although his cage had been hurriedly wheeled out through the scenery door, still persisted and caught the throat, and in the dim white-washed bareness, a few figures, stagehands in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, and vague pale men in hard felt hats tiptoed about like perspiring ghosts. One of the latter approached Andrew. Monsieur Patou need have no fear, he whispered. Everything was arranged--the beautiful ballroom interior--the men who were to set the stage had their orders, also the lime-light operators. Andrew nodded, already having given explicit instructions. The singer vanished from the quivering streak of stage, in order to give her finale close to the footlights. She ceased.

Rapturous applause. She appeared panting, perspiring, beaming in the wings; went on again to bow her acknowledgments, amid hoa.r.s.e cries of "_bis, bis!_" She reappeared, glowing vaporously in her triumph, and spread out her arms before the pallid man in the hard felt hat.

"Well! What did I say? You made difficulties about offering me an engagement. I told you I could make these little birds eat out of my hand.

You hear?"--the clamour would have been perceptible to a deaf mute--"They are mad about me. I go on again."

"_Mais non, madame_. Three songs. That is your contract. The programme is long."

So spake the a.s.sistant manager. But the lady snapped her fingers, heard like a pistol shot amid the uproar, and made a vast gesture with her arms.

"If I am not allowed to have my encore, I tear up my contract."

The a.s.sistant manager released himself from responsibility, yielded to woman's unreason, and the lady, who had arranged the matter with the leader of the orchestra, returned in contemptuous triumph to the stage.

Elodie, meanwhile, had descended and stood by Andrew's side. She wore a very low-cut and short-skirted red evening frock, so tight that she seemed to ooze distressingly from every aperture. A red rose drooped in her thick black hair. Like the lank green-clad Andrew, she betrayed anxiety beneath her heavy make-up. The delay to their turn, prolonging her suspense, caused her to stamp her foot with annoyance.

"The _sale grue!_ and she sings like a duck."

"She pleases the audience," whispered Andrew.

"And ruins our reception. It is the last straw."

"It can't be helped," said Andrew.

The singer gave as her encore a song from "La Traviata." She certainly had the mechanical technique so beloved by French audiences. That of Olympia listened spell-bound to her trills and when she had finished broke once more into enthusiastic cheering, calling and recalling her two or three times. At last the curtain came finally down and she disappeared up the iron staircase.

The interior backcloth and wings provided for Les Pet.i.t Patou were let down, stage hands set the table and properties, Andrew and Elodie anxiously supervising, and when all was clear the curtain went up. Andrew went on alone and grinned familiarly, his old tradition, before the sea of faces. A few faint hand-claps instead of the old expectant laughter welcomed him. A generation had apparently risen that knew not Pet.i.t Patou. His heart sank.

The heat of the footlights s.h.i.+mmered like a furnace and smote him with sudden la.s.situde. He began his tricks. Took his tiny one-stringed broomstick handled fiddle and played it with his hands encased in grotesquely long cotton gloves. Presently, with simulated impatience, he drew off the gloves, threw them, conjurer fas.h.i.+on, vanis.h.i.+ng into the air, and then resumed his violin to find himself impeded now and then by various articles cunningly fixed to his attire, one after another of which he disposed of like the gloves. Finally in his perplexity he made as if to undo his tights (a certain laugh in former days) but thinking better of it, threw fiddle and bow as in disgust across the stage into the wings, where they were caught by the waiting Elodie. The act, once arousing merriment, fell flat. Andrew's heart sank lower. In itself the performance, which he had carried through with skilful cleanness, contained nothing risible; for laughter it depended solely on a personal note of grotesquerie, of exaggerated bewilderment and impatience and of appealingly idiotic self-satisfaction when each impediment was discovered and discarded. Had he lost that personal touch, merely gone through his conjuring with the mechanical precision of a soldier on parade? Heavens, how he hated himself and his aching head and the audience and the lay out of futile properties!

Elodie appeared. The performance must continue. He threw into it all his energy. Elodie gave him her old loyal support. They did their famous cigar trick, developed from the act of Prepimpin. He had elaborated much of the comic business. The new patter, with up-to-date allusions, had resulted from serious conclave with Horatio Bakkus, whose mordant wit supplied many a line that should have convulsed the house. But the house refused to be convulsed. His look of vacant imbecility when one after another of a set of plates with which he juggled, disappeared, being fastened to an elastic contrivance to his back, and his expression of reproach when, turning Elodie round, he discovered her wearing the plates as a sort of basque, which once excited, on no matter what stage, rolling guffaws of mirth, now pa.s.sed by unappreciated.

The final item in the programme was one invented and brought to mechanical perfection just before the war broke out. He insisted on playing his cigar box and broom-handle fiddle in spite of Elodie's remonstrances. There was a pretty squabble. He pulled and she pulled, with the result that both bow and handle, by a tubular device, aided by a ratchet apparatus for the strings, a.s.sumed gigantic proportions. Pet.i.t Patou prevailing, after an almost disastrous fall, perched his great height on chair superimposed on table, and, with his long lean legs and arms, looking like a monstrous and horrible spider, began to work the heavy bow across the long strings. He had rehea.r.s.ed it to perfection. In performance, something happened. His artist's nerve had gone. His fingers fumbled impotently for the stops. His professional experience saved a calamitous situation. With an acrobat's stride he reached the stage, telescoped fiddle and bow to normal proportions, and after a lightning nod to the _chef d'orchestre_, played the Ma.r.s.eillaise. At the end there was half-hearted perfunctory applause. A light hearted section of every audience applauds anything. But mingled with it there came from another section a horrible sibilant sound, the stage death warrant of many an artist's dreams, the modern down-turned thumb of the Roman populace demanding a gladiator's doom.

The curtain fell. Blank silence now from its further side. A man swiftly bundled together the properties and drew them off. A tired looking man in evening dress, with a hideously painted face and long waxed moustaches, stood in the wings amid performing dogs, some free, some in basket cages, and amid the waiting clutter of apparatus that at once was rushed upon the stage. Andrew and Elodie moved clear and at the bottom of the iron staircase he motioned to her to ascend first. She clutched him by the arm and gulped down a sob.

"Mon pauvre vieux!"

He tried to smile. "Want of habit. We'll get it all back soon.

_Voyons_"--he took her fat chin in his hand and turned up her face, on which make-up, perspiration and tears melted into one piteous paste. "This is not the way that battles are won."

On the landing they separated. Andrew entered his sweltering dressing-room and gave himself over to the little dresser who had just turned out the dog-trainer in his shabby evening suit.

"Monsieur had a good reception?"

"Good enough," said Andrew, stretching himself out for the slipping off of his tights.

"Ah," said the intuitive little man in the white jacket. "It is the war.

Audiences are no longer the same. They no longer care for subtlety.

Monsieur heard the singer before his turn? Well. Before the war Olympia wouldn't have listened to her. One didn't pay to hear a bad gramophone.

And, on the other hand, a performance really artistic"--the little man sighed--"it was heart-breaking."

Andrew let him talk; obviously the hisses had mounted from the wings to the dressing-room corridors; the man meant well and kindly. When he had dressed and appeared in his own Lackaday image, he put a twenty-franc note into the dresser's hand with a "Thank you, my friend," and marched out and away into the comparatively fresh air of the sulphurous night. He lit a cigarette and sat down at the corner of a little obscure cafe, commanding a view of the stage-door and waited for Elodie. His nervousness, even his headache, had gone. He felt cold and grim and pa.s.sionless, like a man measuring himself against fate.

When Elodie came out, a while later, he sat her down at the table, and insisted on her drinking a _Grog Americain_ to restore her balance.

But iced rum and water could not medicine an overwrought soul. In her native air, nothing could check her irrepressibility of expression. She had to spend her fury with the audience. In all her life never had she encountered such imbecility--such b.e.s.t.i.a.l stupidity. Like the dresser, she upbraided the war. It had changed everything. It had changed the heart of France. She, Ma.r.s.eillaise of the Ma.r.s.eillais, was ashamed of being of Ma.r.s.eilles. Once the South was warm and generous and responsive. Now it was colder than Paris. She had never imagined that the war could press like a dead hand on the heart of the people of Provence. Now she knew it was true what Bakkus had once said--she had been very angry, but he was right--that through the sunny nature of every child of the Midi swept the _mistral_.

She was not very consecutive or coherent or logical. She sought clamorously for every evil influence, postwar, racial, political, that could account for the frozen failure of the evening's performance. No thought disloyal to Andre hovered on the outskirts of her mind. He perceived it, greatly touched. When she paused in her vehement outburst, he leaned towards her, elbow on table, and his delicate hand at the end of his long bony wrist held up as a signal of arrest:

"The fault is not that of France, or Ma.r.s.eilles, my dear Elodie. Perhaps the war may have something to do with it. But the fault is mine."

She waved away so insane a suggestion. Went into details. How could it be his fault when the night's tricks were as identical with the tricks which used to command applause as two reproductions of the same cinema film? As for the breakdown of the new trick with the elongated violin and bow, she had seen where the mechanism had not worked properly. A joint had stuck; the audience had seen it too; an accident which could happen anywhere; that had nothing to do with the failure of the entertainment. The failure lay in the mental and moral condition of the degraded post-war audience. For all her championing, Andrew shook his head sadly.

"No. Your cinema a.n.a.logy won't hold. The fault's in me, and I'm sorry, my dear."'

He tried to explain. She tried to understand. It was hopeless. He knew that he had lost, and had not yet recovered, that spiritual or magnetic contact with his audience which is the first element in artistic success, be the artistry never so primitive. The audience, he realized full well, had regarded him as a mechanical figure executing mechanical antics which in themselves had no particular claim on absorbing human interest. The eternal appeal, the "held me with his eye" of the Ancient Mariner, was wanting. And the man trained in the school of war saw why.

They walked to their modest hostelry. He had shrunk from the great hotels where the lounges were still full of men in khaki going or coming from overseas--among whom he would surely find acquaintances. But he no longer desired to meet them. He had cut himself clean adrift from the old a.s.sociations. He told me that Bakkus and I were his only correspondents.

Henceforth he would exist solely as Pet.i.t Patou, flinging General Lackaday dead among the dead things of war.... Besides, the great hotels of Ma.r.s.eilles cost the eyes of your head. The good old days of the comfortable car and inexpensive lodging had gone apparently for ever, and he had to fall back on the travel and accommodation of his early struggling days.

Elodie continued the discussion of the disaster. His face wore its wry grin of discomfiture; but he said little. They must go on as they had begun.

Perhaps things would right themselves. He would lose his loathing of his mountebank trade and thus win back the sympathy of his audience.

Before they separated for the night she flung her arm protectingly round him and kissed him.

"They shall applaud you, _mon vieux_, I promise you."

He laughed. Again her faith touched him deeply.

"You have not changed since our first meeting in the Restaurant Garden at Avignon. You are always my mascot, Elodie!"

The menacing thunder broke in the night, and all the next day it rained pitilessly. Two or three morning hours they spent at the music-hall, rehearsing, so that no physical imperfection should mar the evening performance. The giant violin worked with the precision of a Stradivarius.

All that human care could do was done. They drove back to the hotel to lunch. Elodie lounged for the rest of the afternoon in her room, with a couple of love-birds for company--the rest of the aviary in the Saint-Denis flat being under the guardians.h.i.+p of Bakkus; and Andrew, with his cleared dressing-table for a desk, brought up-to-date the autobiographical ma.n.u.script which for the past few months had solaced so many hours of enforced leisure. Then they dined and proceeded to the music-hall, Elodie defiant, with a flush on her cheek, Andrew with his jaw set in a sort of hopeless determination.

The preparations of the preceding evening repeated themselves. The rain had slightly cooled the air, but the smell of drains and humanity and leaky gas-pipes and the mangy lion, still caught at Andrew's throat. The little dresser, while investing him in the hated motley, pointed proudly to the open skylight. He himself had mounted, at great personal peril, to the roof. One was not a Cha.s.seur Alpin for nothing. O yes, he had gone all through the war. He had the military medal, and four chevrons. Had Monsieur Patou seen any service? Like everybody else, said Andrew. It was good to get back to civil life and one's ordinary tasks, said the dresser whom the change in the weather perhaps had rendered more optimistic. Was not Monsieur Patou glad to return to the stage? A man's work, what? The war was for savages and wild beasts--not for human beings. Andrew let him talk on, wondering idly how he had sloughed his soldier's life without a regret. He stood up, once more, in his zany garb, and, looking in the mirror, lost sight of himself for a poignant second while the dressing-room changed into an evil-smelling dug-out, dark save for one guttering candle stuck in a bottle, and in the shadows he saw half a dozen lean, stern faces lit with the eyes of men whom he was sending forth to defy death. And every one of them hung upon his words as though they were a G.o.d's. The transient vision faded, and he became aware again of the grotesque and painted clown gibbering meaninglessly out of the gla.s.s.

He strode down the iron stairs. There was the table of properties waiting in the wings. There came Elodie to join him. There, in the fiercely lighted strip of stage, the back, cut by the wing, of the singer with the voice of the duck, ending the "Jewel Song." Then came the applause, the now undisputed encore, the weary nervous wait.... Such had been his life night after night in unconsidered, undreamed-of monotony--before the war...such would be his life henceforward--changeless, deadly, appalling.

At last, he went on. Through the mysterious psychological influence which one audience has on another, his reception was even more frigid than before. Elodie made her entrance. The house grew restless, inattentive, Andrew flogged his soul until he seemed to sweat his heart's blood. Here and there loud talking and hoa.r.s.e laughter rose above the buzz and rustle of an unappreciative audience. Elodie's breast heaved and her face grew pallid beneath its heavy paint, but her eyes were bright.

"_Allons toujours_," Andrew whispered.

But in the famous cigar act he missed, for the first time since the far off rehearsals after the death of Prepimpin, when the fault was due to Elodie's lack of skill. But now, she threw it fair. It was he who missed. The lighted cigar smote him on the cheek. The impossibility of the occurrence staggered him for a second. But a second on the stage is an appreciable s.p.a.ce of time, sufficient for the audience to pounce on his clumsiness, to burst into a roar of jeering laughter, to take up the cruelty of the hiss.

But before he could do anything Elodie, coa.r.s.e and bulging out of her short red bodice and skirt, her features contorted with anger, was in front of the footlights, defying the house.

"_Laches!_" she cried.

The word which no Frenchman can hear unperturbed cut the clamour like a trumpet call. There was sudden silence.

"Yes. Cowards. You make me ashamed that I am of Ma.r.s.eilles. To you a demobilized hero is nothing. But instead of practising his tricks during the war to amuse you, he has been fighting for his country. And he has earned this." She flashed from her bosom a white-enamelled cross depending from a red ribbon. "_Voila!_ Not _Chevalier_--but _Officier de la Legion d'Honneur!_" With both pudgy arms outstretched she held the audience for the tense moment. "And from simple soldier to General of Brigade. And that is the Pet.i.t Patou whom you insult." She threatened them with the cross. "You insult France!"