It was rather rapid, this intimacy between the odd assorted pair--the high-bred woman of fervid action and the mild and gawky Colonel born in a travelling circus. Holding the key to his early life, and losing myself in conjecture as to his subsequent career until he found himself possessed of the qualities that make a successful soldier, I could not help noticing the little things, unperceived by a generous war society, which pathetically proved that his world and that of Lady Auriol, for all her earth-wide Bohemianism, were star distances apart. Little tiny things that one feels ashamed to record. His swift glance round to assure himself of the particular knife and fork he should use at a given stage of the meal--the surreptitious pushing forward on the plate, of the knife which he had leaned, French fashion, on the edge; his queer distress on entering the drawing-room--his helplessness until the inevitable and unconscious rescue, for he was the honoured guest; the restraint, manifest to me, which he imposed on his speech and gestures. Everyone loved him for his simplicity of manners. In fact they were natural to the man. He might have saved himself a world of worry. But his trained observation had made him aware of the existence of a thousand social solecisms, his sensitive character shrank from their possible committal, and he employed his mimetic genius as an instrument of salvation. And then his English--his drawing-room English--was not spontaneous. It was thought out, phrased, excellent academic English, not the horrible ordinary lingo that we sling at each other across a dinner-table; the English, though without a trace of foreign accent, yet of one who has spent a lifetime in alien lands and has not met his own tongue save on the printed page; of one, therefore, who not being sure of the shade of slang admissible in polite circles, carefully and almost painfully avoids its use altogether.
Yet all through that long weekend--we were pressed to stay till the Wednesday morning--no one, so far as I know, suspected that Colonel Lackaday found himself in an unfamiliar and puzzling environment.
His appointment to the Brigade came on the Tuesday. He showed me the letter, during a morning stroll in the garden.
"Don't tell anybody, please," said he.
"Of course not." I could not repress an ironical glance, thinking of Lady Auriol. "If you would prefer to make the announcement your own way."
He gasped, looking down upon me from his lean height. "My dear fellow--it's the very last thing I want to do. I've told you because I let the thing out a day or two ago--in peculiar circumstances--but it's in confidence."
"Confidence be hanged," said I.
Heaven sent me Evadne--just escaped from morning lessons with her governess, and scuttling across the lawn to visit her Sealyhams. I whistled her to heel. She raced up.
"If you were a soldier what would you do if you were made a General?"
She countered me with the incredulous scorn bred of our familiarity.
"You haven't been made a General?"
"I haven't," I replied serenely. "But Colonel Lackaday has." She looked wide-eyed up into Lackaday's face.
"Is that true?"
I swear he blushed through his red sun-glaze.
"Since Captain Hylton says so----"
She held out her hand with perfect manners and said:
"I'm so glad. My congratulations." Then, before the bewildered Lackaday could reply, she tossed his hand to the winds.
"There'll be champagne for dinner and I'm coming down," she cried and fled like a doe to the house. At the threshold of the drawing-room she turned.
"Does Cousin Auriol know?"
"Nobody knows," I said.
She shouted: "Good egg!" and disappeared.
I turned to the frowning and embarrassed Lackaday.
"Your modesty doesn't appreciate the pleasure that news will give all those dear people. They've shown you in the most single-hearted way that they're your friends, haven't they?"
"They have," he admitted. "But it's very extraordinary. I don't belong to their world. I feel a sort of impostor."
"With this--and all these?"
I flourished the letter which I still held, and with it touched the rainbow on his tunic. His features relaxed into his childish ear-to-ear grin.
"It's all so incomprehensible--here--in this old place--among these English aristocrats--the social position I step into. I don't know whether you can quite follow me."
"As a distinguished soldier," said I, "apart from your charming personal qualities, you command that position."
He screwed up his mobile face. "I can't understand it. It's like a nightmare and a fairy-tale jumbled up together. On the outbreak of war I came to England and joined up. In a few months I had a commission. I don't know..." he spread out his ungainly arm--"I fell into the métier--the business of soldiering. It came easy to me. Except that it absorbed me body and soul, I can't see that I had any particular merit. Whatever I have done, it would have been impossible, in the circumstances, not to do. Out there I'm too busy to think of anything but my day's work. As for these things"--he touched his ribbons--"I put them up because I'm ordered to. A matter of discipline. But away from the Army I feel as though I were made up for a part which I'm expected to play without any notion of the words. I feel just as I would have done five years ago if I had been dressed like this and planted here. To go about now disguised as a General only adds to the feeling."
"If you'll pardon me for saying so," said I, "I think you're super-sensitive. You imagine yourself to be the same man that you were five years ago. You're not. You're a different human being altogether. Men with characters like yours must suffer a sea-change in this universal tempest."
"I hope not," said he, "for what will become of me when it's all over? Everything must come to an end some day--even the war."
I laughed. "Don't you see how you must have changed? Here you are looking regretfully to the end of the war. If it were only bloodless you would like it to go on for ever. Who knows whether you wouldn't eventually wear two batons instead of the baton and sword."
"I'm not an ambitious man, if you mean that," said he, soberly. "Besides this war business is far too serious for a man to think of his own interests. Suppose a fellow schemed and intrigued to get high rank and then proved inefficient--it would mean death to hundreds or thousands of his men. As it is, I assure you I'm not cock-a-whoop about commanding a brigade. I was a jolly sight happier with a platoon."
"At any rate," said I, "other people are cock-a-whoop. Look at them."
The household, turned out like a guard by Evadne, emerged in a body from the house. Sir Julius beamed urbanely. Lady Verity-Stewart almost fell on the great man's neck. Young Charles broke into enthusiastic and profane congratulations. From the point of view of eloquent compliment his speech was disgraceful; but I loved the glisten in the boy's eyes as he gazed on his hero. A light also gleamed in the eyes of Lady Auriol. She shook hands with him in her direct fashion.
"I'm glad. So very very glad." Perhaps I alone--except Lackaday--detected a little tremor in her voice. "Why didn't you want us to know?"
Instinctively I caught Evadne's eye. She winked at me, acknowledging thereby that she had divulged the General's secret. But by what feminine process of divination had she guessed it? Charles came to his chief's rescue.
"The General couldn't go around shouting 'I'm to command a brigade mother, I'm to command a brigade,' could he?"
"He might have stuck on his badges and walked in as if nothing had happened. It would have been such fun to see who would have spotted them first."
Thus Evadne, immediately called to order by Sir Julius. The hero said very little. What in his modesty could the good fellow say? But it was obvious that the sincere and spontaneous tributes pleased him. Sir Julius, after the suppression of Evadne, made him the little tiniest well-bred ghost of an oration. That the gallant soldier under whom his son had the distinguished honour to serve should receive the news of his promotion under his roof was a matter of intense gratification to the whole household.
It was a gracious scene--the little group, on the lawn in shade of the old manor house, so intimate, so kindly, so genuinely emotional, yet so restful in its English restraint, surrounding the long, lank, khaki-clad figure with the ugly face, who, after looking from one to the other of them in a puzzled sort of way, drew himself up and saluted.
"You're very kind," said he, in reply to Sir Julius. "If I have the same loyalty in my brigade as I had in my old regiment," he glanced at Charles, "I shall be a very proud man."
That ended whatever there was of ceremony. Lady Auriol drew me aside.
"Come for a stroll."
"To see the Sealyhams and the rabbits?"
"No, Tony. To talk of our friend. He interests me tremendously."
"I'm glad to hear it," said I.
We entered the rose garden heavy with the full August blooms.
"Well, my dear," said I. "Talk away."
"If you have a bit of sense in you, it would be you who would talk. If you were a bitsimpáticoyou would at once set the key of the conversation."
"All of which implied abuse means that you're dying to know, through the medium of subtle and psychological dialogue, which is entirely beyond my brain power, whether you're not just on the verge of wondering if you're not on the verge of falling in love with Colonel Lackaday."
"You put it with your usual direct brutality----"
"Well," said I. "Are you?"
"Am I what?"
"Dying to know etcetera, etcetera--I am not addicted to vain repetition."
She sighed, tried to pick a black crimson Victor Hugo, pricked her fingers and said "Damn!" With my penknife I cut the stalk and handed her the rose, which she pinned on her blouse.
"I suppose I am," she eventually replied. Then she caught me by the arm. "Look here, Tony, do be a dear. You're old enough to be my ancestor and by all accounts you've had a dreadful past. Do tell me if I'm making an ass of myself. I only did it once," she went on, without giving me time to answer. "You know all about it--Vanucci, the little beast. I needn't put on frills with you. Since then I swore off that sort of thing. I've gone about in maiden meditation and man's breeches, fancy free. I've loved lots of men just as I've loved lots of women--as friends, comrades. I'm level-headed and, I think, level-hearted. I haven't gone about like David in his wrath, saying that all men are liars. They're not. They're just as good as women, if not better. I've no betrayed virgin's grouch against men. But I've made myself too busy to worry about sex. It's no use talking tosh. Sex is the root of the whole sentimental, maudlin----"
"But tremulous and bewildering and nerve-racking and delicious and myriad-adjectived soul-condition," I interrupted, "known generally as love. Ninety-nine point nine repeater per cent of the world's literature has been devoted to its analysis. It's therefore of some importance. It's even the vital principle of the continuity of the human race."
"I'm perfectly aware of it."
"Then why, my dear, resent, as you seem to do, the inevitable reassertion, in your own case, of the vital principle?"
She laughed. "Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop. But that's just it. Is it a gallop or is it a crawl? I tell you, I thought myself immune for many years. But now, these last two or three days I'm beginning to feel a perfect idiot. A few minutes ago if the whole lot of you hadn't been standing round, I think I should have cried. Just for silly gladness. After all there are thousands of Brigadier-Generals."
"To be accurate, not more than a few hundreds."
"Hundreds or thousands, what does it matter?" she cried impatiently. "What's Hecuba to me or I to Hecuba?" Few women have the literary sense of apposite quotation--but no matter. She went on. "What's one Brigadier-General to me or I to one Brigadier-General? And yet--there it is. I'm beginning to fear lest this particular Brigadier-General may mean a lot to me. So I come back to my original question. Am I making an ass of myself?"
"One can't answer that question, my dear Auriol," said I, "without knowing how far your fears, feelings and all the rest of it are reciprocated."
"Suppose I think they are?"
"Then all I can say is: 'God bless you my children.' But," I added, after a pause, "I must warn you that your budding idyll is not passing unnoticed."
She snapped her fingers. "I've lived my private life in public too long to care a hang for that. I'm only concerned about my own course of action. Shall I go on, or shall I pull myself up with a jerk?"
"What would you like to do?"
She walked on for a few yards without replying. I glanced at her and saw that the colour had come into her cheeks, and that her eyes were downcast. At last she said:
"Now that I'm a woman again, I should like to get some happiness out of it. I should like to give happiness, too, full-handed." She flashed up and took my arm and pressed it. "I could do it, Tony."
"I know you could," said I.
After which the conversation became more intimate. Anybody, to look at us, as we walked, arm in arm, round the paths of the rose garden, would have taken us for lovers. Of course she wanted none of my advice. Her frank and generous nature felt the imperious need of expansion. I, to whom she could talk as to a sympathetic wooden idol, happened to be handy. I don't think she could have talked in the same way to a woman, I don't think she would have talked so even to me, who had taken her pick-a-back round about her nursery, if I had not with conviction qualified Lackaday as a gallant gentleman.
Eventually we came down to the practical aspect of a situation, as old as Romance itself. The valorous and gentle knight of hidden lineage and the Earl's daughter. Not daring to aspire, and ignorant of the flame he has kindled in the high-born bosom, he rides away without betraying his passion, leaving the fair owner of the bosom to pine in lonely ignorance.
"At this time of day, it's all such damn nonsense," said Lady Auriol.
I pointed out to her that chivalrous souls still beautified God's earth and that such damn nonsense could not be other than the essence of their being. To this knightly company Colonel Lackaday might well belong. On the other hand, there was she, the same old proud Earl's daughter. For all her modernity, her independence, her democratic sympathies, she remained a great lady. She had little fortune; but she had position and an ancient name. Her father, the impoverished fourteenth Earl of Mountshire, and the thirtieth Baron of something else, refused to sit among the canaille of the present House of Peers. He bred shorthorns and Berkshire pigs, which he disposed of profitably, and grew grapes and melons for Covent Garden, read the lessons in church and wrote letters to theTimesabout the war on which the late Guy Earl of Warwick would have rather prided himself when he took a fancy to make a King.
"The dear old idiot," said Lady Auriol. "He belongs to the time of Nebuchadnezzar."
But, all the same, in spite of her flouting, her birth assured her a social position from which she could be thrown by nothing less than outrageous immorality or a Bolshevist revolution. That Lackaday, to whom the British Peerage, in the ordinary way, was as closed a book as the Talmud, realized her high estate I was perfectly aware. Dear and garrulous Lady Verity-Stewart had given him at dinner the whole family history--she herself was a Dayne--from the time of Henry I. I was sitting on the other side of her and heard and amused myself by scanning the expressionless face of Lackaday who listened as a strayed aviator might listen to the social gossip of the inhabitants of Mars. Anyhow he left the table with the impression that the Earl of Mountshire was the most powerful noble in England and that his hostess and her cousin, Lady Auriol, regarded the Royal Family as upstarts and only visited Buckingham Palace in order to set a good example to the proletariat.
"I'm sure he does," said I, after summarizing Lady Verity-Stewart's monologue.
"The family has been the curse of my life," said Auriol. "If I hadn't anticipated them--or is it it?--by telling them to go to the devil, they would have disowned me long ago. Now they're afraid of me, and I've got the whip hand. A kind of blackmail; so they let me alone."
"But if you made amésalliance, as they call it," said I, "they'd be down upon you like a cartload of bricks." "Bricks?" she retorted, with a laugh. "A cartload of puff-balls. There isn't a real brick in the whole obsolete structure. I could marry a beggar man to-morrow and provided he was a decent sort and didn't get drunk and knock me about and pick his teeth with his fork, I should have them all around me and the beggar man in a week's time, trying to save face. They'd move heaven and earth to make the beggar man acceptable. They know that if they didn't, I'd be capable of going about with him like a raggle-taggle gipsy--and bring awful disgrace on them."
"All that may be true," said I, "but the modest Lackaday doesn't realize it."
"I'll put sense into him," replied Lady Auriol. And that was the end, conclusive or not, of the conversation.
In the afternoon they went off for a broiling walk together. What they found to say to each other, I don't know. Lady Auriol let me no further into her confidence, and my then degree of intimacy with the General did not warrant the betrayal of my pardonable curiosity as to the amount of sense put into him by the independent lady.
Now, from what I have related, it may seem that Lady Auriol had brought up all her storm troops for a frontal attack on the position in which the shy General lay entrenched. This is not the case. There was no question of attack or siege or any military operation whatever on either side. The blessed pair just came together like two drops of quicksilver. Each recognized in the other a generous and somewhat lonely soul; an appreciation of the major experiences of life and, with that, a craving for something bigger even than the war, which would give life its greater meaning. She, born on heights that looked contemptuously down upon a throne, he born almost in a wayside ditch, their intervening lives a mutual mystery, they met--so it seemed to me, then, as I mused on the romantical situation--on some common plane not only of adventurous sympathy but of a humanity simple and sincere. From what I could gather afterwards, they never exchanged a word, during this intercourse, of amorous significance. Nor did they steer the course so dear to modern intellectuals (and so dear too to the antiquated wanderers through the Land of Tenderness) which led them into analytical discussions of their respective sentimental states of being. They talked just concrete war, politics and travel. On their tramps they scarcely talked at all. They kept in step which maintained the rhythm of their responsive souls. She would lay an arresting touch on his arm at the instant in which he pointed his stick at some effect of beauty; and they would both turn and smile at each other, intimately, conscious of harmony.
We left the next morning, Lackaday to take over his brigade in France, I to hang around the War Office for orders to proceed on my further unimportant employment. Lady Auriol and Charles saw us off at the station.
"It's all very well for your new brigade, sir," said the latter when the train was just coming into the station. "They're in luck. But the regiment's in the soup."
He wanted to discuss the matter, but with, elderly tact I drew the young man aside, so that the romantic pair should have a decent leave-taking. But all she said was:
"You'll write and tell me how you get on?"
And he; with a flash in his blue eyes and his two-year-old grin:
"May I really?"
"You may--if a General in the field has time to write to obscure females."
She looked adorable, provoking, with the rich colour rising beneath her olive cheek--I almost fell in love with her myself and I was glad that the ironical Charles had his back to her. An expression of shock overspread Lackaday's ingenuous features. He shot out both hands in protest, and mumbled something incoherent. She took the hands with a happy laugh, as the train lumbered noisily in.
Lackaday was silent and preoccupied during the run to London.
At the terminus we parted. I asked him to dinner at my club. He hesitated for a moment, then declined on the plea of military business. I did not see him or the Verity-Stewarts or Lady Auriol till after the Armistice.
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 passionate 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 hell'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 passed 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 lassitudes?
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 shifted 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 space 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 damn 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 thebeau gestewhich 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 attitude which afforded me both pleasure and amusement. She seemed bent on assuring 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 damn and brushed himself. Then he said:
"Did you ever hear of Les Petit 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 friendship, has ever pressed me to give an account of myself. I'm not ashamed of Les Petit 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 Petit Patou conveys nothing to me."
"I'm the original Petit 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 attitude of one waiting for applause. Then swiftly he disembarrassed himself of the basket and threw the insulted cigar into the fire.
"Do you think that's a dignified way for General Andrew Lackaday, C.B., to make his living--in the green skin tights of Petit Patou?"
We talked far into the night. My sleep was haunted by the nightmare of the six foot four of the stringy, bony emaciation of General Lackaday in green skin tights.
To realize Petit Patou in the British General of Brigade, we must turn to the manuscript mentioned at the beginning of this story.
We meet him, a raw youth, standing, one blazing summer day on the Bridge of Avignon. He insists on this episode, because, says he, the bridge is associated with important events in his life. It was not, needless to remark, the Pont d'Avignon of the gay old song, for the further arch of that was swept away by floods long ago, and it now remains a thing of pathetic uselessness. Three-quarters of the way across the Rhone might you go, and then you would come to abrupt nothingness, just the swirling river far below your arrested feet. It was the new suspension bridge, some three hundred yards further up, sadly inharmonious with the macchiolated battlements of the city and the austere mass, rising above them, of the Palace of the Popes on the one side, and, on the other, the grey antiquity of the castle of Villeneuve brooding like an ancient mother over its aged offspring, the clustering sun-baked town. The joyous generation of the Old Bridge has long since passed away, but to the present generation the New Bridge affords the same wonder and delight. For it entices like the old, from stifling streets to the haunts of Pan. There do you find leafy walks, and dells of shade, and pathways by the great cool river leading to sequestered spots where you may sit and forget the clatter of flagstones and the stuffy apartment above them for which the rent is due; where the air of early June is perfumed by wild thyme and marjoram and the far-flung sweetness of new mown hay, and where the nightingales sing. So, whenever it can, all Avignon turns out, as it has turned out for hundreds of years, on its to and fro adventure across the Bridge of Promise.
It was on a Sunday afternoon when young Lackaday stood there, leaning moodily over the parapet, regarding it not as a bridge of Promise, but as a Bridge of Despair. He had fled from the dressing-room of the little music-hall just outside the city walls, which he shared with three others of the troupe, from its horrible reek of escaping gas and drainage and grease-paint and the hoarded human emanations of years, and had come here instinctively to breathe the pure air that swept down the broad stream. He had come for rest of mind and comfort of soul; but only found himself noisily alone amid an unsympathetic multitude.
He had failed. He had learned it first from the apathy of the audience. He had learned it afterwards from the demeanour and the speech far from apathetic of the manager and leader of the troupe. They were a company of six, Les Merveilleux, five jugglers, plate spinners, eccentric musicians, ventriloquists, and one low comedian. Lackaday was the low comedian, his business to repeat in burlesque most of the performance of his fellow artists. It was his first engagement, outside the Cirque Rocambeau, his first day with the troupe. Everything had gone badly. His enormous lean length put the show out of scale. The troupe, accustomed to the business of a smaller man, whose sudden illness caused the gap which Lackaday came from Paris to fill, resented the change, and gave him little help. They demanded impossibilities. Although they had rehearsed--and the rehearsals had been a sufficient nightmare of suffering--everybody had seemed to devote a ferocious malice to his humiliation. Where the professional juggler is accustomed to catch things at his hip, they threw them at his knees; they appeared to decide that his head should be on the level of his breast. The leading lady, Madame Coinçon, wife of the manager, a compact person of five foot two, roundly declared that she could not play with him, and in his funniest act, dependent on her co-operation, she left him to be helplessly funny by himself. The tradition of the troupe required the comedian to be attired in a loud check suit, green necktie and white felt bowler hat. On the podgy form of Lackaday's predecessor it produced its comic effect. On the lank Lackaday it was characterless. In consequence of all this, he had been nervous, he had missed cues, he had fumbled when he ought to have been clear, and been clear when he ought comically to have fumbled. He had gone about his funny business with the air of a curate marrying his vicar to the object of his hopeless affections.
And Coinçon had devastatingly insulted him. What worm was in the head of Moignon (the Paris music-hall agent) that he should send him such a monstrosity? He wasn't,nom de Dieu, carrying about freaks at a fair. He wanted a comedian and not a giant. No wonder the Cirque Rocambeau had come to grief, if it depended on such canaries as Lackaday. Didn't he know he was there to make the audience laugh?--not to give a representation of Monsieur Mounet-Sully elongated by the rack.
"Hop, man petit," said he at last. "F---- moi le camp," which is a very vulgar way of insisting on a person's immediate retirement. "Here is your week's salary. I gain by the proceeding. The baggage-man will see us through. He has done so before. As for Moignon--"
Although Lackaday regarded Moignon as a sort of god dispensing fame and riches, enthroned on unassailable heights of power, he trembled at the awful destiny that awaited him. He would be cast, like Lucifer from heaven. He would be stripped of authority. Coinçon's invective against him was so terrible that Lackaday pitied him even more than he pitied himself. Yet there was himself to consider. As much use to apply to the fallen Moignon for an engagement as to the Convent of the Daughters of Calvary. He and Moignon and their joint fortunes were sent hurtling down into the abyss.
On the parapet of the Bridge of Despair leant young Lackaday, gazing unseeingly down into the Rhone. His sudden misfortune had been like the stunning blow of a sandbag. His brain still reeled. What had happened was incomprehensible. He knew his business. He could conceive no other. He had been trained to it since infancy. There was not a phase of clown's work with which he was not familiar. He was a passable gymnast, an expert juggler, a trick musician, an accomplished conjurer. All that the Merveilleux troupe act required from him he had been doing successfully for years. Why then the failure? He blamed the check suit, the ill-will of the company, the unreason of Madame Coinçon....
It did not occur to him that he had emerged from an old world into a new. That between the old circus public and the new music-hall public there was almost a generation's change of taste and critical demand. The Cirque Rocambeau had gone round without perceiving that the world had gone round too. It wondered why its triumphant glory had declined; and it could not take steps to adapt itself to the new conditions which it could not appreciate. Everyone grew old and tradition-bound in the Cirque Rocambeau, even the horses, until gradually it perished of senile decay. Andrew Lackaday carrying on the traditions of his foster father, the clown Ben Flint, had remained with it, principal clown, to the very end. Now and then, rare passers through from the outer world, gymnasts down on their luck, glad to take a makeshift engagement while waiting for better things, had counselled him to leave the antiquated concern. But the Cirque Rocambeau had been the whole of his life, childhood, boyhood, young manhood; he was linked to it by the fibres of a generous nature. All those elderly anxious folk were his family. Many of the children, his contemporaries, trained in the circus, had flown heartlessly from the nest, and the elders had fatalistically lamented. Madame Rocambeau, bowed, wizened, of uncanny age, yet forceful and valiant to the last--carrying on for the old husband now lying paralysed in Paris who had inherited the circus from his father misty years ago, would say to the young man, when one of these defections occurred: "And you André, you are not going to leave us? You have a fine position, and if you are dissatisfied, perhaps we can come to an arrangement. You are a child of the circus and I love you like my own flesh and blood. We shall turn the corner yet. All that is necessary is faith--and a little youth." And Andrew, a simple soul, who had been trained in the virtues of honour and loyalty by the brave Ben Flint, would repudiate with indignation the suggestion of any selfish desire to go abroad and seek adventure.
At last, one afternoon, when the tent, a miserable gipsy thing compared with the proud pavilion of the days of the glory of Billy the pig, was pitched on the outskirts of a poor little town, they found Madame Rocambeau dead in the canvas box-office which she had occupied for fifty years, the heartbreaking receipts in front of her, counted out into little piles of bronze and small silver. The end had come. The circus could not be sold as a going concern. It crumbled away. Somebody bought the old horses, Heaven knows for what purpose. Somebody bought the antiquated harness and moth-eaten trappings. Somebody else bought the tents and fittings. But nobody bought the old careworn human beings, riders and gymnasts and stable hands who crept away into the bright free air of France, dazed and lost, like the prisoners released from the Bastille.
It was not so long ago; long enough ago, however, for young Andrew Lackaday to have come perilously near the end of his savings in Paris, before the Almighty Moignon (now curse-withered), but then vast and unctuous, reeking of fat food and diamonds and great cigars, had found him this engagement at Avignon. He had journeyed thither full of the radiant confidence of twenty. He stood on the bridge overwhelmed by the despair whose Tartarean blackness only twenty can experience.
Not a gleam anywhere of hope. His humiliation was absolute. The maniacal Coinçon had not even given him an opportunity of redeeming his failure. He had been paid to go away. The disgusting yet necessary price of his shame rattled in his pockets. To-night the baggage man would play his part--a being once presumably trained, yet sunk so low in incompetence that he was glad to earn his livelihood as baggage man. And he, Andrew Lackaday, was judged more incompetent even than this degraded outcast. Why? How could it be? What was the reason? He dug his nails into his burning temples. The summer sun beat down on him, and set a-glitter the currents in the Rhone. The ceaseless, laughing stream of citizens passed him by. Presently youth's need of action brought him half-unconsciously to an erect position. He glanced dully this way and that, and then slowly moved along the bridge towards the Villeneuve bank. Girls bare-headed, arm-in-arm, looked up at him and laughed, he was so long and lean and comical with his ugly lugubrious face and the little straw hat perched on top of his bushy carroty poll. He did not mind, being used to derision. In happier days he valued it, for the laugh would be accompanied by a nudge and a "Voilà Auguste!" He took it as a tribute. It was fame. Now he was so deeply sunk in his black mood that he scarcely heeded. He walked on to the end of the bridge, and turned down the dusty pathway by the bank.
Suddenly he became aware of sounds of music and revelry, and a few yards further on he came to a broad dell shaded by plane trees and set out as a restaurant garden, with rude tables and benches, filled with good-humoured thirsty folk; on one side a weather-beaten wooden châlet, having the proud title of Restaurant du Rhône, served apparently but to house the supply of drinks which nondescript men and sturdy bare-headed maidens carried incessantly on trays to the waiting tables. On the dusty midway space--the garden boasted no blade of grass--couples danced to the strains of a wheezing hurdy-gurdy played by a white bearded ancient who at the end of each tune refreshed himself with a draught from a chope of beer on the ground by his side, while a tiny anæmic girl went round gathering sous in a shell. When the music stopped you could hear the whir and the click of the bowls in an adjoining dusty and rugged alley and the harsh excited cries of the players. During these intervals the serving people in an absent way would scatter an occasional carafe-full of water on the dancing floor to lay the dust.
Young Lackaday hung hesitatingly on the outskirts under the wooden archway that was at once the entrance and the sign-board. The music had ended. The tables were packed. He felt very thirsty and longed to enter and drink some of the beer which looked so cool in the long glasses surmounted by its half inch of white froth--inviting as sea-foam. Shyness held him. These prosperous, care-free bourgeois, almost indistinguishable one from the other by racial characteristics, and himself a tragic failure in life and physically unique among men, were worlds apart. It had never occurred to him before that he could find himself anywhere in France where the people were not his people. He felt heart-brokenly alien.
Presently the hurdy-gurdy started the ghostly tinkling of theIl Baciowaltz, and the ingenuous couples of Avignon rose and began to dance. The thirst-driven Lackaday plucked up courage, and strode to a deserted wooden table. He ordered beer. It was brought. He sipped luxuriously. One tells one's thirst to be patient, when one has to think of one's sous. He was half-way through when two girls, young and flushed from dancing together, flung themselves down on the opposite bench--the table between.
"We don't disturb you, Monsieur?"
He raised his hat politely. "By no means, Mesdemoiselles."
One of them with a quick gesture took up from the table a forgotten newspaper and began to fan herself and her companion, to the accompaniment of giggling and chatter about the heat. They were very young. They ordered grenadine syrup and eau-de-seltz. Andrew Lackaday stared dismally beyond them, at the dancers. In the happy, perspiring girls in front of him he took no interest, for all their youth and comeliness and obviously frank approachability. He saw nothing but the fury-enflamed face of Coinçon and heard nothing but the rasping voice telling him that it was cheaper to pay him his week's salary than to allow him to appear again. And "f---- moi le camp!" Why hadn't he taken Coinçon by the neck then and there with his long strong fingers and strangled him? Coinçon would have had the chance of a rabbit. He had the strength of a dozen Coinçons--he, trained to perfection, with muscle like dried bull's sinews. He could split an apple between arm and forearm, in the hollow of his elbow. Why shouldn't he go back and break Coinçon's neck? No man alive had the right to tell him tof---- le camp!
"You don't seem very gay," said a laughing voice.
With a start he recovered consciousness of immediate surroundings. Instead of two girls opposite, there was only one. Vaguely he remembered that a man had come up.
"Un tour de valse, Mademoiselle?"
"Je vieux bien."
And one of the girls had gone, leaving her just sipped grenadine syrup and seltzer-water. But it had been like some flitting unreality of a dream.
At his blinking recovery the remaining girl laughed again.
"You look like a somnambulist."
He replied: "I beg pardon, Mademoiselle, but I was absorbed in my reflections."
"Black ones--hein?They have made you little infidelities?"
He frowned. "They? Who do you mean--they?"
"Un joli garçon is not absorbed in his reflections"--she mimicked his tone--"unless there is the finger of apetite femmeto stir them round and darken them."
"Mademoiselle," said he, seriously. "You are quite mistaken. There's not a woman in the world against whom I have the slightest grudge."
He spoke truly. It was a matter of love, and Mme Coinçon's hostility did not count.
"Word of honour," he added looking into the smiling ironical face.
Love had entered very little into his serious scheme of life. He had had his entanglements of course. There was Francine Dumesnil, who had fluttered into the Cirque Rocambeau as a slack wire artist, and after making him vows of undying affection, had eloped a week afterwards with Hans Petersen, the only man left who could stand on the bare back of a horse that was not thick with resin. But the heart of Andrew Lackaday had nothing to do with the heart of Francine Dumesnil. He had agreed with the aged Madame Rocambeau.Sales types, both of them.
"If it had beenchagrin d'amour--sorrow of love, Mademoiselle," said he, "I should not have been so insensible to the presence of two such charming young ladies."
"We are polite, all the same," she remarked approvingly.
She sipped her grenadine. Having nothing further to say he sipped his beer. Presently she said:
"I saw you this afternoon at theboite." He looked at her with a touch of interest. No one would allude to the music-hall as the "box" except a fellow professional engaged there.
"You too?" he asked.
She nodded. She belonged to a troupe of dancing girls. As they were the first number, they got away early. She and her friend had gone for a walk and found this restaurant. It was gay, wasn't it? He said, soberly:
"You were dancing at rehearsal this morning. You've danced at the music-hall this afternoon, you'll be dancing again this evening--why do you dance here?"
"One can only be young once," she replied.
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen. And you?"
"Twenty-two."
She would have given him thirty, she said, he looked so serious. And he, regarding her more narrowly, would have given her fifteen. She was very young, slight, scarcely formed, yet her movements were lithe and complete like those of a young lizard. She had laughing, black eyes and a fresh mouth set in a thin dark face that might one day grow haggard or coarse, according to her physical development, but was now full with the devil's beauty of youth. A common type, one that would not arrest masculine eyes as she passed by. Dozens of the girls there round about might have called her sister. She was dressed with cheap neatness, the soiled white wing of a bird in her black hat being the only touch of bravura. She spoke with the rich accent of the South.
"You are of theMidi?" he said.
Yes. She came from Marseilles. Ingenuously chattering she gave him her family history. In the meanwhile her companions and her partner having finished their dance had retired to a sequestered corner of the restaurant, leaving the pair here to themselves. Lackaday learned that her name was Elodie Figasso. Her father was dead. Her mother was a dressmaker, in which business she, too, had made her apprenticeship. But an elderly man, ahuissier, one of those people who go about with a tricolour-rosetted cocked hat, and steel buttons and canvas trousers and a leather satchel chained to their waist, had lately diverted from Elodie the full tide of maternal affection. As she hated thehuissier, a vulgar man who thought of nothing but the good things that the Veuve Figasso could put into his stomach, and as her besotted mother starved them both in order to fulfil thehuissier'sdemands, and as she derived no compensating joy from her dressmaking, she had found, thanks to a friend, a positron asfigurantein a Marseilles Revue, and,voilà--there she was free, independent, and, since she had talent and application, was now earning her six francs a day.
She finished her grenadine. Then with a swift movement she caught a passing serving maid and slipped into her hand the money for her companion's scarcely tasted drink and her own. Instantly Andrew protested--Mademoiselle must allow him to have the pleasure.
But no--never in life, she had not intruded on his table to have free drinks. As for theconsommationof the feather-headed Margot--from Margot herself would she get reimbursement.
"But yet, Mademoiselle," said he, "you make me ashamed. You must still be thirsty--like myself."
"ça ne vous gênera pas?"
She asked the question with such a little air of serious solicitude that he laughed, for the first time. Would it upset his budget, involve the sacrifice of a tram ride or a packet of tobacco, if he spent a few sous on more syrup for her delectation? And yet the delicacy of her motive appealed to him. Here was a little creature very honest, very much of the people, very proud, very conscientious.
"On the contrary, Mademoiselle," said he, "I shall feel that you do me an honour."
"It is not to be refused," said she politely, and the serving maid was despatched for more beer and syrup.
"I waited to see your turn," she said, after a while.
"Ah!" he sighed.
She glanced at him swiftly. "It does not please you that I should talk about it?"
"Not very much," said he.
"But I found you admirable," she declared. "Much better than thatespèce de poule mouillée--I already forget his name--who played last week. Oh--a wet hen--he was more like a drowned duck. So when I heard a comedian from Paris was coming, I said: 'I must wait' and Margot and I waited in the wings--and we laughed. Oh yes, we laughed."
"It's more than the audience did," said the miserable Andrew.
The audience! Of Avignon! She had never played to such an audience in her her life. They were notorious, these people, all over France. They were so stupid that before they would laugh you had to tell them a thing was funny, and then they were so suspicious that they wouldn't laugh for fear of being deceived.
All of which, of course, is a libel on the hearty folk of Avignon. But Elodie was from Marseilles, which naturally has a poor opinion of the other towns of Provence. She also lied for the comforting of Lackaday.
"They are so unsympathetic," said he, "that I shall not play any more."
She knitted her young brow. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that I play neither to-night nor to-morrow night, nor ever again. To-morrow I return to Paris."
She regarded him awe-stricken. "You throw up an engagement--just like that--because the audience doesn't laugh?" She had heard vague fairy-tales of pampered opera-singers acting with such Olympian independence; but never a music-hall artist on tour. He must be very rich and powerful.
Lackaday read the thought behind the wide-open eyes.
"Not quite like that," he admitted honestly. "It did not altogether depend on myself. You see thepatronfound that the audience didn't laugh and thepatronnefound that my long body spoiled her act--and so--I go to Paris to-morrow."
She rose from the depths of envying wonder to the heights of pity. She flashed indignation at the abominable treatment he had received from the Coinçons. She scorched them with her contempt. What right had thattortoiseof a Madame Coinçon to put on airs? She had seen better juggling in a booth at a fair. Her championship warmed Andrew's heart, and he began to feel less lonely in a dismal and unappreciative world. Longing for further healing of an artist's wounded vanity he said:
"Tell me frankly. You did see something to admire in my performance?"
"Haven't I always said so?Tiens, would you like me to tell you something? All my life I have loved Auguste in a circus. You know Auguste--the clown? Well, you reminded me of Auguste and I laughed."
"Until lately I was Auguste--in the Cirque Rocambeau."
She clapped her hands.
"But I have seen you there--when I was quite little--three--four years ago at Marseilles."
"Four years," said Andrew looking into the dark backward and abysm of time.
"Yes, I remember you well, now. We're old friends."
"I hope you'll allow me to continue the friendship," said Andrew.
They talked after the way of youth. He narrated his uneventful history. She added details to the previous sketch of her own career. The afternoon drew to a close. The restaurant garden emptied; the good folks of Avignon returned dinnerwards across the bridge. They looked for Margot, but Margot had disappeared, presumably with her new acquaintance. Elodie sniffed in a superior manner. If Margot didn't take care, she would be badly caught one of these days. For herself, no, she had too much character. She wouldn't walk about the streets with a young man she had only known for five minutes. She told Andrew so, very seriously, as they strolled over the bridge arm-in-arm.
They parted, arranging to meet at 10 o'clock when she was free from the music-hall, at the Café des Négociants or the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville.
Andrew, shrinking from the table d'hôte in the mangy hotel in a narrow back street where the Merveilleux troupe had their crowded being, dined at a cheap restaurant near the railway station, and filled in the evening with aimless wandering up and and down the thronged Avenue de la Gare. Once he turned off into the quiet moonlit square dominated by the cathedral and the walls and towers of the Palace of the Popes. The austere beauty of it said nothing to him. It did not bring calm to a fevered spirit. On the contrary, it depressed a spirit longing for a little fever, so he went back to the broad, gay Avenue where all Avignon was taking the air. A girl's sympathy had reconciled him with his kind.
She came tripping up to him, almost on the stroke of ten, as he sat at the outside edge of the café terrace, awaiting her. The reconciliation was complete. Like most of the young men there, he too had his maid. They met as if they had known each other for years. She was full of an evil fellow,un gros type, with a roll of fat at the back of his neck and a great diamond ring which flashed in the moonlight, who had waited for her at the stage door and walked by her side, pestering her with his attentions.
"And do you know how I got rid of him? I said: 'Monsieur, I can't walk with you through the streets on account of my comrades. But I swear to you that you will find me at the Café des Négotiants at a quarter past ten.' And so I made my escape. Look," said she excitedly, gripping Andrew's arm, "here he is."
She met the eyes of thegros typewith the roll of fat and the diamond ring, who halted somewhat uncertainly in front of the cafe. Whereupon Andrew rose to his long height of six foot four and, glaring at the offender, put him to the flight of over-elaborated unconcern. Elodie was delighted.
"You could have eaten him up alive,n'est-ce pas, André?"
And Andrew felt the thrill of the successful Squire of Dames. For the rest of the evening, there was no longer any 'Monsieur' or 'Mademoiselle.' It was André and Elodie.
Yes, he would write to her from Paris, telling her of his fortunes. And she too would write. The Agence Moignon would always find him. It is parenthetically to be noted how his afternoon fears of the impermanence of the Agence Moignon had vanished. Time flew pleasantly. She seemed to have set herself, her youth and her femininity, to the task of evoking the wide baby smile on his good-natured though dismal face. It was only on their homeward way, after midnight, that she mentioned the 'boîle.' There had been discussions. Some had said this and some had said that. There had been partisans of the Coinçons and partisans of André. There was subject matter for one of the pretty quarrels dear to music-hall folk. But Elodie summed up the whole matter, with her air of precocious wisdom--a wisdom gained in the streets and sewing-rooms and cafés-concerts of Marseilles.
"What you do is excellent,mon cher; but it isvieux jeu. The circus is not the music-hall. You must be original."
As originality was banned from the circus tradition, he stood still in the narrow, quiet street and gasped.
"Original?"
"You are so long and thin," she said.
"That has always been against me; it was against me to-day."
"But you could make it so droll," she declared. "And there would be no one else like you. But you must be by yourself, not with a troupe like the Merveilleux.Tiens," she caught him by the lapels of his jacket and a passer-by might have surmised a pleading stage in a lovers' discussion, "I have heard there is a little little man in London--oh, so little,et pas du tout joli."
"I know," said Andrew, "but he is a great artist."
"And so are you," she retorted. "But as this little man gets all the profit he can out of his littleness--it wasla grosseLéonie--thebrune, number three, you know--ah, but you haven't seen us--anyhow she has been in London and was telling me about him this evening--all that nature has endowed him with he exaggerates--eh bien!Why couldn't you do the same?"
The street was badly lit with gas; but still he could see the flash in her dark eyes. He drew himself up and laid both his hands on her thin shoulders.
"My little Elodie," said he--and by the dim gaslight she could see the flash of his teeth revealed by his wide smile--"My little Elodie, you have genius. You have given me an idea that may make my fortune. What can I give you in return?"
"If you want to show me that you are not ungrateful, you might kiss me," said Elodie.