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Mountebank

<h1>Chapter XII</h1> That was the devil of it. He had met Lady Auriol Dayne. He had found in that frank and capable young woman--or thought he had found, which comes to the same thing--the Princesse Lointaine of his dreams. If she differed from that nebulous and characterless paragon, were less ethereal, more human nature's daily food, so much the better. She possessed that which he had yearned for--quality. She had style--like the prose of Theophile Gautier, the Venus of Milo, the Petit Trainon. She suggested Diana, who more than all goddesses displayed this gift of distinction; yet was she not too Diana-ish to be unapproachable. On the contrary, she blew about him as free as the wind.... That, in a muddle-headed way, was his impression of her: a subtle mingling of nature and artistry. On every side of her he beheld perfection. Physically, she was as elemental as the primitive woman superbly developed by daily conditions of hardship and danger; spiritually, as elemental as the elves and fairies; and over her mind played the wisdom of the world. Thus, in trying to account for her to himself, did the honest Lackaday flounder from trope to metaphor. "To love her," he quotes from Steele, "is a liberal education." The last time he met her in England, was after my departure for Paris. You will remember that just before then he had confided to me his identity as Petit Patou and had kept me up half the night. It was a dismal April afternoon, rain and mud outside, a hopeless negation of the spring. They had the drawing-room to themselves--to no one, the order had gone forth, was her ladyship at home--that drawing-room of Lady Auriol which Lackaday regarded as the most exquisite room in the world. It had comfort of soft chairs and bright fire and the smell of tea and cigarettes; but it also had the style, to him so precious, with which his fancy invested her. The note of the room was red lacquer partly inherited, partly collected, the hangings of a harmonious tone, and the only pictures on the distempered walls the colour-prints of the late eighteenth century. It had the glow of smiling austerity, the unseizable, paradoxical quality of herself. An old Sèvres tea-service rested on a Georgian silver tray, which gleamed in the firelight. Wherever he looked, he beheld perfection. And pouring out the tea stood the divinity, a splendid contrast to the shrine, yet again paradoxically harmonious; full-bosomed, warm and olive, wearing blue serge coat and skirt, her blouse open at her smooth throat, her cheeks flushed with walking through the rain, her eyes kind. For a while, like a Knight in the Venusberg, he gave himself up to the delight of her. Then suddenly he pulled himself together, and, putting down his teacup, he said what he had come to say:-- "This is the last time that I shall ever see you." She started. "What on earth do you mean? Are you going off to the other end of the world?" "I'm going back to France." "When?" "To-morrow morning." She twisted round in her chair, her elbow on the arm and her chin in her hand and looked at him. "That's sudden, isn't it?" He smiled rather sadly. "When once you've made up your mind, it's best to act, instead of hanging on." "You're sure there's no hope in this country?" "I know I'm as useful as a professional wine-taster will soon be in the United States." They laughed, resumed the discussion of many previous meetings. Had he tried this, that or the other opening? He had tried everything. No one wanted him. "So," said he, "I'm making a clean cut and returning to France." "I'm sorry." She sighed. "Very sorry. You know I am. I hoped you would remain in England and find some occupation worthy of you--but, after all--France isn't Central China. We shall still be next-door neighbours. The Channel can be easily crossed by one of us. You used the word 'ever,' you know," she added with an air of challenge. "I did." "Why?" "That would take a lot of telling," said Andrew grimly. "We've got hours, if you choose, in front of us." "It's not a question of time," said he. "Then, my good Andrew, what are you talking about?" "Only that I must return to the place I came from, my dear friend. Let it rest at that." She lit a cigarette. "Rather fatalistic, isn't it?" "Four years of fighting make one so." "You speak," said she, after a little reflection occasioning knitting of the brows, "you speak like the Mysterious Unknown of the old legends--the being sent from Hell or Heaven or any other old place to the earth to accomplish a mission. You know what I mean. He lives the life of the world into which he is thrown and finds it very much to his liking. But when the mission is fulfilled--the Powers that sent him say: 'Your time is up. Return whence you came.' And the poor Make-believe of a human has got to vanish." "You surely aren't jesting?" he asked. "No," she said. "God forbid! I've too deep a regard for you. Besides, I believe the parable is applicable. Otherwise how can I understand your 'for ever'?" "I'm glad you understand without my blundering into an explanation," he replied. "It's something, as you say. Only the legendary fellow goes back to cool his heels--or the reverse--in Shadow Land, whereas I'll still continue to inhabit the comfortable earth. I'm as Earth-bound as can be." He paused for a moment, and continued:-- "Fate or what you will dragged me from obscurity into the limelight of the war to play my little part. It's over. I've nothing more to do on the stage. Fate rings down the curtain. I must go back into obscurity. La commedia è finita." "It's more like a tragedy," said she. Andrew made a gesture with his delicate hands. "A comedy's not a farce. Let us stick to the comedy." "Less heroically--let us play the game," she suggested. "If you like to put it that way." She regarded him searchingly out of frank eyes; her face had grown pale. "If you gave me the key to your material Shadow Land, it would not be playing the game?" "You are right, my dear," said he. "It wouldn't." "I thought as much," said Lady Auriol. He rose, mechanically adjusted his jacket, which always went awry on his gaunt frame. "I want to say something," he declared abruptly. "You're the only lady--highly-bred woman--with whom I've been on terms of friendship in my life. It has been an experience far more wonderful than you can possibly realize. I'll keep it as an imperishable memory"--he spoke bolt upright as though he were addressing troops on parade before a battle--"it's right that you should know I'm not ungrateful for all you have done for me. I've only one ambition left--that you should remember me as a soldier--and--in my own way--a gentleman." "A very gallant gentleman," she said with quivering lips. He held out his hand, took hers, kissed it French fashion. "Good-bye and God bless you," said he, and marched out of the room. She stood for a while, with her hand on her heart--suffering a pain that was almost physical. Then she rushed to the door and cried in a loud voice over the balustrade of the landing: "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 God! 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 friendship--even her affectionate friendship--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 mass of civilians, did he recognize what a mighty personage he then was--a cock of the walk, saluted, "sired," treated with deference. None of the old-fashioned pit-of-the-theatre scrum for passport 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-class 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 passed him by, recognized him after a second, saluted and paused undecided. A few months ago, Andrew would have returned his salute with brass-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 scrap, 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 passed. 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 passed 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 shell-holes. German shells.... 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, flushing 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 André, it is good to have you back. O mon petit homme--how I have been longing for this moment. Now the war is finished, you will not leave me again ever. Et te voilà Général. 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 Général?" 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 passed 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 gods of peace have arrived, my little Elodie," said he with a touch of bitterness, "and the little half-gods 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 spaciousness 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 antimacassars 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 antimacassar 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 Damn!" And Elodie then bursting in, with a proud "Isn't it pretty, ton petit chez-toi!" What could he do but smile, and assure 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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