The Mountebank Part 6

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 pa.s.sionate 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 h.e.l.l'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 pa.s.sed 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 la.s.situdes?

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 s.h.i.+fted 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 s.p.a.ce 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 d.a.m.n 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 att.i.tude which afforded me both pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt. She seemed bent on a.s.suring 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 d.a.m.n and brushed himself. Then he said:

"Did you ever hear of Les Pet.i.t 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 friends.h.i.+p, has ever pressed me to give an account of myself. I'm not ashamed of Les Pet.i.t 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 Pet.i.t Patou conveys nothing to me."

"I'm the original Pet.i.t 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 att.i.tude of one waiting for applause. Then swiftly he disembarra.s.sed himself of the basket and threw the insulted cigar into the fire.