The Mountebank Part 35

"I have spoken much about you to Captain Hylton," said Lackaday quickly.

"So it seems," said I, following the good fellow's lead, "as if I were renewing an old acquaintance."

"But you speak French like a Frenchman," cried Elodie.

"It is my sole claim, Madame," said I, "to your consideration."

She laughed, obviously pleased, and invited me to sit. The waiter came up.

What would I have? I murmured "Amer Picon--Curacoa," the most delectable ante-meal beverage left in France now that absinthe is as extinct as the stuff wherewith the good Vercingetorix used to gladden his captains after a successful bout with Caesar. Elodie laughed again and called me a true Parisian. I made the regulation reply to the compliment. I could see that we became instant friends.

"_Mais, mon cher ami_," said Lackaday, "you haven't answered my question. What are you doing here in Clermont-Ferrand?"

"Didn't I write to you?"

"No----"

I hadn't. I had meant to--just as I had meant to write to Auriol Dayne.

I wonder whether, in that Final Court from which I have not heard of any theologian suggesting the possibility of Appeal, they will bring up against me all the unanswered letters of my life? If they do, then certainly shall I be a Condemned Spirit.

I explained airily--just as I have explained to you.

"Coincidences of the heart, Madame," said I.

She turned to Andrew. "He has said that just like Horace."

I realized the compliment. I liked Elodie. Dress her at whatever Rue de la Paix rag-swindler's that you pleased, you would never metamorphose the daughter of the people that she was into the lady at ease in all company.

She was a bit _mannieree_--on her best behaviour. But she had the Frenchwoman's instinctive knowledge of conduct. She conveyed, very charmingly, her welcome to me as a friend of Andrew's.

"Horace--that's my friend Bakkus I've told you about," said Lackaday.

"He'll be here to-morrow. I should so much like you to meet him."

"I'm looking forward," said I, "to the opportunity."

We talked on indifferent subjects; and in the meanwhile I observed Lackaday closely. He seemed tired and careworn. The bush of carroty hair over his ears had gone a yellowish grey and more lines seamed his ugly and rugged face. He was neatly enough dressed in grey flannels, but he wore on his head the latest model of a French straw hat--the French hatter, left to his own devices, has ever been the maddest of his tribe--a high, coa.r.s.ely woven crown surrounded by a quarter inch brim which related him much more nearly to Pet.i.t Patou than to the British General of Brigade. His delicate fingers nervously played with cigarette or gla.s.s stem. He gave me the impression of a man holding insecurely on to intelligible life.

Mild hunger translating itself into a conception of the brain, I looked at my watch. I waved a hand to the row of waiting cabs with linen canopies on the other side of the blazing square.

"Madame," said I, "let me have the pleasure of driving you to Royat and offering you _dejeuner_."

"My dear chap," said Andrew, "impossible. We play this afternoon. Twice a day, worse luck. We have all sorts of things to arrange."

Elodie broke in. They had arranged everything already that morning. Their turn did not arrive till three-forty. There was time for a dozen lunches; especially since she would go early and see that everything was prepared.

She excused herself to me in the charmingest way possible. Another day she might perhaps, with my permission, have the pleasure. But to-day she insisted on Andre lunching with me alone. We must have a thousand things to say to each other.

"_Tenez_," she smiled, rising. "I leave you. There's not a word to be said. Monsieur le Capitaine, see that the General eats instead of talking too much." She beamed. "_Au grand plaisir de vous revoir._"

We stood bare-headed and shook hands and watched her make a gracious exit.

As soon as she crossed the tram-lines, she turned and waved her fingers at me.

"A charming woman," said I.

Lackaday smiled in his sad babyish way.

"Indeed she is," said he.

We drove into Royat in one of the cool, white canopied victorias.

"You know we are playing in a circus," he said, indicating a huge play bill on the side of a wall.

"Yes," said I. "_On revient toujours a ses premieres amours._"

"It's not that, G.o.d knows," he replied soberly. "But we were out for these two weeks of our tour. One can't pick and choose nowadays. The eccentric comedian will soon be as dead as his ancestor, the Court Jester. The war has almost wiped us out. Those music-halls--of the Variety type--that have not been turned, through lack of artists, into picture palaces, are now given over to Revue. I have been here at Clermont-Ferrand many times--but now," he shrugged his shoulders. "I had an engagement--at my ordinary music-hall terms--offered me at the Cirque Vendramin to fill in the blank weeks, and I couldn't afford to refuse. That's why, my friend, you see me now, where you first met me, in a circus."

"And Madame Patou?" said I.

"I'm afraid," he sighed, "it is rather a come down for Elodie."

We reached the hotel and lunched on the terrace, and I did my best, with the aid of the maitre d'hotel, to carry out the lady's injunctions. As a matter of fact, she need not have feared that he should miss sustenance through excessive garrulity. He seemed ill at ease during the meal and I did most of the talking. It was only after coffee and the last drop of the last bottle in the hotel--one of the last, alas! in France--of the real ancient Chartreuse of the Grand Chartreux, that he made some sort of avowal or explanation. After beating about the bush a bit, he came to the heart of the matter.

"I thought the whole war was axed out of my life--with everyone I knew in it or through it. I wrote all that stuff about myself because I couldn't help it. It enabled me to find my balance, to keep myself sane. I had to bridge over--connect somehow--the Andrew Lackaday of 1914 with the Andrew Lackaday of 1919. A couple of months ago, I thought of sending it to you.

You know my beginnings and my dear old father Ben Flint and so forth. You came bang into the middle of my most intimate life. I knew in what honour and affection you were held among those whom I--to whom I--am infinitely devoted. I..." He paused a moment, and tugged hard at his cigar and regarded me with bent brows and compressed lips of his parade manner. "I am a man of few friends.h.i.+ps. I gave you my unreserved friends.h.i.+p--it may not be worth much--but there it is." He glared at me as though he were defying me to mortal combat, and when I tried to get in a timid word he wiped it out of my mouth with a gesture. "I wanted you to know the whole truth about me. Once I never thought about myself. I wasn't worth thinking about. But the war came. And the war ended. And I'm so upside down that I'm bound to think about myself and clear up myself, in the eyes of the only human being that could understand--namely you--or go mad. But I never reckoned to see you again in the flesh. Our lives were apart as the poles. It was in my head to write to you something to that effect, when I should receive an answer to my last letter. I never dreamed that you should meet me now, as I am."

"It never occurred to you that I might value your friends.h.i.+p and take a little trouble to seek you out?"

"I must confess," said he, "that I did not suspect that anyone, even you, would have thought it worth while."

I laughed. He was such a delicious simpleton. So long as he could regard me as someone on the other side of the grave, he could reveal to me the intimacies of his emotional life; but as soon as he realized his confidant in the flesh, embarra.s.sment and confusion overwhelmed him. And, ostrich again, thinking that, once his head was hidden in the sands of Pet.i.t Patouism, he would be invisible to mortal eye, he had persuaded himself that his friends would concur in his supposed invisibility.

"My dear fellow," I said, "why all this apologia? As to your having ever told me or written to me about yourself I have kept the closest secrecy.

Not a human soul knows through me the ident.i.ty of General Lackaday with Pet.i.t Patou. No," I repeated, meeting his eyes under his bent brows, "not a human being knows even of our first meeting in the Cirque Rocambeau--and as for Madame Patou, whom you have made me think of always as Elodie--well--my discretion goes without saying. And as for putting into shape your reminiscences--I shouldn't dream of letting anyone see my ma.n.u.script before it had pa.s.sed through your hands. If you like I'll tear the whole thing up and it will all be buried in that vast oblivion of human affairs of which I am only too temperamentally capable."

He threw his cigar over the bal.u.s.trade of the terrace and stretched out his long legs, his hands in his pockets and grinned.

"No, don't do that. One of these days I might be amused to read it.

Besides, it took me such a devil of a time to write. It was good of you to keep things to yourself although I laid down no conditions of secrecy. I might have known it." He stared at the hill-side opposite, with its zigzag path through the vines marked by the figures of zealous pedestrians, and then he said suddenly: "If I asked you not to come and see our show you would set me down as a fantastical coward."

I protested. "How could I, after all you have told me?"

"I want you to come. Not to-day. Things might be in a muddle. One never knows. But to-morrow. It will do me good."

I promised. We chatted a little longer and then he rose to go. I accompanied him to the tram, his long lean body overwhelming my somewhat fleshy insignificance. And while I walked with him I thought: "Why is it that I can't tell a man who confides to me his inmost secrets, to buy, for G.o.d's sake, another hat?"

The following afternoon, I went to the Cirque Vendramin. I sat in a front seat. I saw the performance. It was much as I have already described to you. Except perhaps for his height and ungainliness no one could have recognized Andrew Lackaday in the painted clown Pet.i.t Patou. His grotesquery of appearance was terrific. From the tip of his red pointed wig to the bottom of his high heels he must have been eight feet. I should imagine him to have been out of scale on the music-hall stage. But in the ring he was perfect. The mastery of his craft, the cleanness of his jugglery, amazed me. He divested himself of his wig and did a five minutes'

act of lightning impersonation with a trick felt hat, the descendant of the _Chapeau de Tabarin:_ the ex-Kaiser, Foch, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, President Wilson--a Boche prisoner, a helmeted Tommy, a Poilu--which was marvellous, considering the painted Pet.i.t Patou face. For all a.s.sistance, Elodie held up a cheap bedroom wall-mirror. He played his one-stringed fiddle. I admired the technical perfection of the famous cigar-act. I noted the stupid bewilderment with which he received a typhoon of hoops thrown by Elodie, and his waggish leer when, clown-wise, he had caught them all. If the audience packed within the canvas amphitheatre had gone mad in applause over this exhibition of exquisite skill interlarded with witty patter, I might have been carried away into enthusiastic appreciation of a great art.

But the audience, as far as applause could be the criterion, missed the exquisiteness of it, guffawed only at the broadest clowning and applauded finally just enough to keep up the heart of the management and Les Pet.i.t Patou. I have seen many harrowing things in the course of a complicated life; but this I reckon was one of the chief among them.

I thought of the scene a year ago, at Mansfield Park. The distinguished soldier with his rainbow row of ribbons modestly confused by Evadne's summons to the household on his appointment to the Brigade; the English setting; the old red gabled Manor house; the green lawn; the bright English faces of old Sir Julian and his wife, of young Charles the hero wors.h.i.+pper; the light in Auriol's eyes; the funny little half-ashamed English ceremony; again the gaunt, grim, yet childishly smiling figure in khaki, the ideal of the scarred and proven English leader of men....