If a glance could destroy, if Lady Auriol had been a Gorgon or a basilisk or a cockatrice, then had I been a slain Anthony Hylton.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
The far-flung gesture of her arm ending in outspread fingers might have been that of Elodie.
"Tell you what, my dear?" said I.
"The whole wretched tragedy. I came to you a year ago with my heart in my hand--the only human creature living who I thought could help me. And you've let me down like this. It's damnable!"
"An honourable man," said I, nettled, "doesn't betray confidences."
"An honourable man! I like that! I gave you my confidences. Haven't you betrayed them?"
"Not a bit," said I. "Not the faintest hint of what you have said to me have I whispered into the ear of man or woman."
She fumed. "If you had, you would be--unmentionable."
"Precisely. And I should have been equally undeserving of mention, if I had told you of the secret, or double, or ex-war--however you like to describe it--life of our friend."
"The thing is not on all fours," she said with a snap of her fingers. "You could have given me the key to the mystery--such as it is. You could have prevented me from making a fool of myself. You could, Tony. From the very start."
"At the very start, I knew little more than you did. Nothing save that he was bred in a circus, where I met him thirty years ago. I knew nothing more of his history till this April, when he told me he was Petit Patpu of the music-halls. His confidence has been given me bit by bit. The last time I saw you I had never heard of Madame Patou. It was you that guessed the woman in his life. I had no idea whether you were right or wrong."
"Yet you could have given me a hint--the merest hint--without betraying confidences--as you call it," she mouthed my phrase ironically. "It was not playing the game."
"I gathered," said I, "that playing the game was what both of you had decided to do, in view of the obviously implied lady in the background."
"Well?" she challenged.
"If it's a question of playing the game"--I had carried the war into the enemy's quarters--"may I repeat my original rude question this morning? What the devil are you doing here?"
She turned on me in a fury. "How dare you insinuate such a thing?"
"You've not come to Royat for the sake of my beautiful eyes."
"I'm under no obligation to tell you why I've come to Royat. Let us say my liver's out of order."
"Then my dear," said I, "you have come to the wrong place to cure it."
She glanced at me wrathfully, took out a cigarette, waved away with an unfriendly gesture the briquette I had drawn from my pocket, and struck one of her own matches. There fell a silence, during which I sat back in my chair, my arms on the elbow and my fingers' tips joined together, and assumed an air of philosophic meditation.
Presently she said: "There are times, Tony, when I should like to kill you."
"I am glad," said I, "to note the resumption of human relations."
"You are always so pragmatically and priggishly correct," she said.
"My dear," said I, "if you want me to sympathize with you in this impossible situation, I'll do it with all my heart. But don't round on me for either bringing it about or not preventing it."
"I was anxious to know something about Andrew Lackaday--I don't care whether you think me a fool or not"--she was still angry and defiant--"I wrote you pointedly. You did not answer my letter. I wrote again reminding you of your lack of courtesy. You replied like a pretty fellow in a morning coat at the Foreign Office and urbanely ignored my point."
She puffed indignantly. The terrace began to be deserted. There was a gap of half a dozen tables between us and the next group. The flamboyant Algerian removed the coffee cups. When we were alone again, I reiterated my explanation. At every stage of my knowledge I was held in the bond of secrecy. Lackaday's sensitive soul dreaded, more than all the concentrated high-explosive bombardment of the whole of the late German Army, the possibility of Lady Auriol knowing him as the second-rate music-hall artist.
"You are the woman of his dreams," said I. "You're an unapproachable star in mid ether, or whatever fanciful lover's image you like to credit him with. The only thing for his salvation was to make a clean cut. Don't you see?"
"That's all very pretty," said Auriol. "But what about me? A clean cut you call it? A man cuts a woman in half and goes off to his own life and thinks he has committed an act of heroic self-sacrifice!"
I put my hand on hers. "My dear child," said I, "if Andrew Lackaday thought you were eating out your heart for him he would be the most flabbergasted creature in the world."
She bent her capable eyes on me. "That's a bit dogmatic, isn't it? May I ask if you have any warrant for what you're saying?"
"In his own handwriting."
I gave a brief account of the manuscript.
"Where is it?" she asked eagerly.
"In my safe in London--I'm sorry----"
In indignation she flashed: "I wouldn't read a word of it."
"Of course not," said I. "Nor would I put it into your hands without Lackaday's consent. Anyhow, that's my authority and warrant."
She threw the stub of her cigarette across the terrace and went back to the original cry:
"Oh Tony, if you had only given me some kind of notion!" "I've tried to prove to you that I couldn't."
"I suppose not," she admitted wearily.
"Men have their standards. Forgive me if I've been unreasonable."
When a woman employs her last weapon, her confession of unreason, and demands forgiveness, what can a man do but proclaim himself the worm that he is? We went through a pretty scene of reconciliation.
"And now," said I, "what did Lackaday, in terms of plain fact, tell you down there?"
She told me. Apparently he had given her a précis of his life's history amazingly on the lines of a concentrated military despatch.
"Lady Auriol," said he, as soon as they were out of earshot, "you are here by some extraordinary coincidence. In a few hours you will be bound to hear all about me which I desired you never to know. It is best that I should tell you myself, at once."
It was extraordinary what she had learned from him in those few minutes. He had gone on remorselessly, in his staccato manner, as if addressing a parade, which I knew so well, putting before her the dry yet vital facts of his existence.
"I knew there was a woman--wife and children--what does it matter? I told you," she said. "But--oh God!" She smote her hands together hopelessly, fist into palm. "I never dreamed of anything like this."
"I am in a position to give you chapter and verse for it all," said I.
"Oh I know," she said, dejectedly, and the vivid flower that was Auriol, in a mood of dejection, suggested nothing more in the world than a drought-withered hybiscus--her colour had faded, the sweeping fulness of her drooped, her twenties caught the threatening facial lines of her forties--what can I say more? The wilting of a tropical bloom--that was her attitude--the sap and the life all gone.
"Oh I know. There's nothing vulgar about it. It goes back into the years. But still ..."
"Yes, yes, my dear," said I, quickly. "I understand."
We were alone now on the terrace. Far away, a waiter hung over the balustrade, listening to the band playing in the Park below. But for the noise of the music, all was still on the breathless August air. Presently she drew her palms over her face.
"I'm dog-tired."
"That abominable night journey," said I, sympathetically.
"I sat on astrapontinin the corridor, all night," she said.
"But, my dear, what madness!" I cried horrified, although in the war she had performed journeys compared with which this would be the luxury of travel. "Why didn't you book acoupé-lit, even a seat, beforehand?"
She smiled dismally. "I only made up my mind yesterday morning. I got it into my head that you knew everything there was to be known about Andrew Lackaday."
"But how did you get it?"
My question was one of amazement. No man had more out-rivalled an oyster in incommunicativeness.
It appeared that I suffered from the defects of my qualities. I had been over-diplomatic. My innocence had been too bland for my worldly years. My evasions had proclaimed me suspect. My criticism of Royat made my fear of a chance visit from her so obvious. My polite hope that I should see her in Paris on my way back, rubbed in it. If there had been no bogies about, and Royat had been the Golgotha of my picture, would not my well-known selfishness, when I heard she was at a loose end in August Paris, have summoned her with a "Do for Heaven's sake come and save me from these selected candidates for burial?" I had done it before, in analogous circumstances, I at Nauheim, she at Nuremberg. No. It was, on the contrary: "For Heaven's sake don't come near me. I'll see you in Paris if by misfortune you happen to be there."
"My dear," said I, "didn't it occur to you that your astuteness might be overreaching itself and that you might find me here--well--in the not infrequent position of a bachelor man who desires to withdraw himself from the scrutiny of his acquaintance?"
She broke into disconcerting laughter.
"You? Tony?"
"Hang it all!" I cried angrily, "I'm not eighty yet!"
However virtuous a man may be, he resents the contemptuous denial to his claim to be a potential libertine.
She laughed again; then sobered down and spoke soothingly to me. Perhaps she did me injustice, but such a thing had never entered her mind engaged as it was with puzzlement over Lackaday. When people are afflicted with fixed ideas, they grow perhaps telepathic. Otherwise she could not account for her certainty that I could give her some information. She knew that I would not write. What was a flying visit--a night's journey to Royat? In her wander years, she had travelled twelve hours to a place and twelve back in order to buy a cabbage. Her raid on me was nothing so wonderful.
"So certain was I," she said, "that you were hiding things from me, that when I saw him this morning at your table, I was scarcely surprised."
"My dear Auriol," said I, when she had finished the psychological sketch of her flight from Paris, "I think the man who unlearned most about women as the years went on, was Methuselah."
"A woman only puts two and two together and makes it five. It's as simple as that."
"No," said I, "the damnable complex mystery of it, to a man's mind, is that five should be the right answer."
She dismissed the general proposition with a shrug.
"Well, there it is. I was miserable--I've been miserable for months--I was hung up in Paris. I had this impulse, intuition--call it what you like. I came--I saw--and I wish to goodness I hadn't!"
"I wasn't so wrong after all, then," I suggested mildly.
She laughed, this time mirthlessly. "I should have taken it for a warning. Blue Beard's chamber...."
We were silent for a while. The waiters came scurrying down with trays and cloths and cups to set the little tables for tea. The western sun had burst below the awning and flooded half the length of the terrace with light leaving us by the wall just a strip of shade.
I said as gently as I could: "When you two parted in April, I thought you recognized it as final."
"It would have been, if only I had known," she said.
"Known what?"
She answered me with weary impatience.
"Anything definite. If he had gone to his death I could have borne it. If he had gone to any existence to which I had a clue, I could have borne it. But don't you see?" she cried, with a swift return of vitality. "Here was a man whom any woman would be proud to love--a strong thing of flesh and blood--disappearing into the mist. I said something heroical to him about the creatures of the old legends. One talks high-falutin' nonsense at times. But I didn't realize the truth of it till afterwards. A woman, even though it hurts her like the devil, prefers to keep a mental grip of a man. He's there--in Paris, Bombay, Omaha, with his wife and family, doing this, that and the other. He's still alive. He's still in some kind of human relation with you. You grind your teeth and say that it's all in the day's work. You know where you are. But when a man fades out of your life like a wraith--well--you don't know where you are. It has been maddening--the ghastly seriousness of it. I've done my best to keep sane. I'm a woman with a lot of physical energy--I've run it for all it's worth. But this uncanny business got on my nerves. If the man had not cared for me, I would have kicked myself into sense. But--oh, it's no use talking about that--it goes without saying. Besides you know as well as I do. You've already told me. Well then, you have it. The man I loved, the man who loved me, goes and disappears, like the shooting star he talked about, into space. I've done all sorts of fool things to get on his track, just to know. At last I came to you. But I had no notion of running him down in the flesh. You're sure of that, Tony, aren't you?"
The Diana in her flashed from candid eyes.
"Naturally," I answered. How could she know that Lackaday was here? I asked, in order to get to the bottom of this complicated emotional condition:
"But didn't you ever think of writing--oh, as a friend of course--to Lackaday, care of War Office, Cox's...?"
She retorted: "I'm not a sloppy school-girl, my friend."
"Quite so," said I. I paused, while the waiter brought tea. "And now that there's no longer any mystery?"
Her bosom rose with a sigh.
"I mourn my mystery, Tony."
She poured out tea. I passed the uninspiring food that accompanied it. We conversed in a lower key of tension. At last she said:
"If I don't walk, I'll break something."
A few moments afterwards we were in the street. She drew the breath of one suffering from exhausted air.
"Let us go up a hill."
Why the ordinary human being should ever desire to walk up hill I have never been able to discover. For me, the comfortable places. But with Lady Auriol the craving was symbolical of character. I agreed.
"Choose the least inaccessible," I pleaded.
We mounted the paths through the vines. At the top, we sat down. I wiped a perspiring brow. She filled her lungs with the air stirred by a faint breeze.
"Whereabouts is this circus?" she asked suddenly.
I told her, waving a hand in the direction of Clermont-Ferrand.
"How far?"
"About two or three miles."
"I'll go there this evening," she announced calmly.
"What?"
I nearly jumped off the wooden bench.
"My dear Auriol," said I, "my heart's dicky. You oughtn't to spring things like that on me."
"I don't see where the shock comes in. Why shouldn't I go to a circus if I want to?"
"It's your wanting to go that astonishes me."
"You're very easily surprised," she remarked. "You ought to take something for it."
"Possibly," said I. "But why on earth do you want to see the wretched Lackaday make a fool of himself?"
"If you take it that way," she said icily, "I'm sorry I mentioned it. I could have gone without your being a whit the wiser."
I lifted my shoulders. "After all, it's entirely your affair. You talked a while ago about mourning your mystery--which suggested a not altogether unpoetical frame of mind."
"There s no poetry at all about it," she declared. "That's all gone. We've come to facts. I'm going to get all the facts. Crucify myself with facts, if you like. That's the only way to get at Truth."
When a woman of Auriol's worth talks like this, one feels ashamed to counter her with platitudes of worldly wisdom. She was going to the Cirque Vendramin. Nothing short of an Act of God could prevent her. I sat helpless for a few moments. At last, taking advantage of a gleam of common sense, I said:
"It's all very well for you to try to get to the bedrock of things. But what about Lackaday?"
"He's not to know."
"He'll have to know," I insisted warmly. "The circus tent is but a small affair. You'll be there under his nose." I followed the swift change on her face. "Of course--if you don't care if he sees you..."
She flashed: "You don't suppose I'm capable of such cruelty!"
"Of course not," said I.
She looked over at the twin spires of the cathedral beneath which the town slumbered in the blue mist of the late afternoon.
"Thanks, Tony," she said presently. "I didn't think of it. I should naturally have gone to the best seats, which would have been fatal. But I've been in many circuses. There's always the top row at the back, next the canvas...."
"My dear good child," I cried, "you couldn't go up there among the lowest rabble of Clermont-Ferrand!"
She glanced at me in pity and sighed indulgently.
"You talk as if you had been born a hundred years ago, and had never heard of--still less gone through--the late war. What the----" she paused, then thrust her face into mine, so that when she spoke I felt her breath on my cheek, "What theHelldo you think I care about the rabble of Clermont-Ferrand?"
That she would walk undismayed into a den of hyenas or Bolsheviks or Temperance Reformers or any other benighted savages I was perfectly aware. That she would be perfectly able to fend for herself I have no doubt. But still, among the uneducated dregs of the sugar-less, match-less, tobacco-less populace of a French provincial town who attributed most of their misfortunes to the grasping astuteness of England, we were not peculiarly beloved.
This I explained to her, while she continued to smile pityingly. It was all the more incentive to adventure. If I had assured her that she would be torn limb from limb, like an inconvincible aristocrat flaunting abroad during the early days of the French Revolution, she would have grown enthusiastic. Finally, in desperation because, in my own way, I was fond of Auriol, I put down a masculine and protecting foot.
"You're not going there without me, anyhow," said I.
"I've been waiting for that polite offer for the last half hour," she replied.
What I said, I said to myself--to the midmost self of my inmost being. I am not going to tell you what it was. This isn't the secret history of my life.
A cloud came up over the shoulder of the hills. We descended to the miniature valley of Royat.
"It's going to rain," I said.
"Let it," said Auriol unconcerned.
Then began as dreary an evening as I ever have spent.
We dined, long before anybody else, in a tempest of rain which sent down the thermometer Heaven knows how many degrees. Half-way through dinner we were washed from the terrace into the empty dining-room. There was thunder and lightningad libitum.
"A night like this--it's absurd," said I.
"The absurder the better," she replied. "You stay at home, Tony dear. You're a valetudinarian. I'll look after myself."
But this could not be done. I have my obstinacies as mulish as other people's.
"If you go, I go."
"As you have, according to your pampered habit, bought a car from now till midnight, I don't see how we can fail to keep dry and warm."
I had no argument left. Of course, I hate to swallow an early and rapid dinner. One did such things in the war, gladly dislocating an elderly digestion in the service of one's country. In peace time one demands a compensating leisure. But this would be comprehensible only to a well-trained married woman. My misery would have been outside Auriol's ken. I meekly said nothing. The world of young women knows nothing of its greatest martyrs.
When it starts thundering and lightening in Royat, it goes on for hours. The surrounding mountains play an interminable game of which the thunderbolt is the football. They make an infernal noise about it, and the denser the deluge the more they exult.
Amid the futile flashes and silly thunderings--no man who has been under an intensive bombardment can have any respect left for the pitiful foolery of a thunderstorm--and a drenching downpour of rain (which is solid business on the part of Nature) we scuttled from the hired car to the pay-desk of the circus. We were disguised in caps and burberrys, and Lady Auriol had procured a black veil from some shop in Royat. We paid our fifty centimes and entered the vast emptiness of the tent. We were far too early, finding only half a dozen predecessors. We climbed to the remotest Alpine height of benches. The wet, cold canvas radiated rheumatism into our backs. A steady drip from the super-saturated tent above us descended on our heads and down our necks. Auriol buttoned the collar of her burberry and smiled through her veil.
"It's like old times."
"Old times be anythinged," said I, vainly trying to find comfort on six inches of rough boarding.
"It's awfully good of you to come, Tony," she said after a while. "You can't think what a help it is to have you with me."
"If you think to mollify me with honeyed words," said I, "you have struck the wrong animal."
It is well to show a woman, now and then, that you are not entirely her dupe.
She laid her hand on mine. "I mean it, dear. Really. Do you suppose I'm having an evening out?"
We continued the intimate sparring bout for a while longer. Then we lapsed into silence and watched the place gradually fill with the populace of Clermont-Ferrand. The three top tiers soon became crowded. The rest were but thinly peopled. But there was a sufficient multitude of garlic-eating, unwashed humanity, to say nothing of the natural circus smell, to fill unaccustomed nostrils with violent sensations. A private soldier is a gallant fellow, and ordinarily you feel a comfortable sense of security in his neighbourhood; but when he is wet through and steaming, the fastidious would prefer the chance of perils. And there were many steaming warriors around us.
There we sat, at any rate, wedged in a mass as vague and cohesive as chocolate creams running into one another. I had beside me a fat, damp lady whose wet umbrella dripped into my shoes. Lady Auriol was flanked by a lean, collarless man in a cloth-cap who made sarcastic remarks to soldier friends on the tier below on the capitalist occupiers of the three-franc seats. The dreadful circus band began to blare. The sudden and otherwise unheralded entrance of a lady on a white horse followed by the ring master made us realize that the performance had begun. The show ran its course. The clowns went through their antiquated antics to the delight of the simple folk by whom we were surrounded. A child did a slack wire act, waving a Japanese umbrella over her head. Some acrobats played about on horizontal bars. We both sat forward on our narrow bench, elbows on knees and face in hands, saying nothing, practically seeing nothing, aware only of a far off, deep down, infernal pit in which was being played the Orcagnesque prelude to a bizarre tragedy. I, who had gone through the programme before, yet suffered the spell of Auriol's suspense. Long before she had thrown aside the useless veil. In these dim altitudes no one could be recognized from the ring. Her knuckles were bent into her cheeks and her eyes were staring down into that pit of despair. We had no programme; I had not retained in my head the sequence of turns. Now it was all confused. The pervasive clowns alone seemed to give what was happening below a grotesque coherence.
Suddenly the ring was empty for a second. Then with exaggerated strides marched in a lean high-heeled monster in green silk tights reaching to his armpits, topped with a scarlet wig ending in a foot high point. He wore white cotton gloves dropping an inch from the finger tips, and he carried a fiddle apparently made out of a cigar box and a broom handle. His face painted red and white was made up into an idiot grin. He opened his mouth at the audience, who applauded mildly.
Lady Auriol still sat in her bemused attitude of suspense. I watched her perplexedly for a second or two, and then I saw she had not recognized him. I said:
"That's Lackaday."
She gasped. Sat bolt upright, and uttered an "Oh-h!" a horrible little moan, not quite human, almost that of a wounded animal, and her face was stricken into tense ugliness. Her hand, stretched out instinctively, found mine and held it in an iron grip. She said in a quavering voice:
"I wish I hadn't come."
"I wish I could get you out," said I.
She shook her head.
"No, no. It would be giving myself away. I must see it through."
She drew a deep breath, relinquished my hand, turned to me with an attempt at a smile.
"I'm all right now. Don't worry."
She sat like a statue during the performance. It was quite a different performance from the one I had seen a few days before. It seemed to fail not only in the magnetic contact between artist and audience, but in technical perfection. And Elodie, whom I had admired as a vital element in this combination, so alive, so smiling, so reponsive, appeared a merely mechanical figure, an exactly regulated automaton.
My heart sank into my shoes, already chilled with the drippings of my fat neighbour's umbrella. If Lackaday had burst out on Lady Auriol as the triumphant, exquisite artist, there might, in spite of the unheroic travesty of a man in which he was invested, have been some cause for pride in extraordinary, crowd-compelling achievement. The touch of genius is a miraculous solvent. But here was something second-rate, third-rate, half-hearted--though I, who knew, saw that the man was sweating blood to exceed his limitations. Here was merely an undistinguished turn in a travelling circus which folk like Lady Auriol Dayne only visited in idle moods of good-humoured derision.
He went through it not quite to the bitter end, for I noted that he cut out the finale of the elongated violin. There was perfunctory applause, a perfunctory call. After he had made his bow, hand in hand with Elodie, he retired in careless silence and was nearly knocked down by the reappearing lady on the broad white horse.
"Let us go," said Auriol.
We threaded our way down the break-neck tiers of seats and eventually emerged into the open air. Our hired car was waiting. The full moon shone down in a clear sky in the amiable way that the moon has--as though she said with an intimate smile--"My dear fellow--clouds? Rain? I never heard of such a thing. You must be suffering from some delusion. I've been shining on you like this for centuries." I made a casual reference to the beauty of the night.
"It ought to be still raining," said Lady Auriol.
We drove back to Royat in silence. I racked my brains for something to say, but everything that occurred to me seemed the flattest of uncomforting commonplaces.
Well, it was her affair entirely. If she had given me some opening I might have responded sympathetically. But there she sat by my side in the car, rigid and dank. For all that I could gather from her attitude, some iron had entered into her soul. She was a dead woman.
The car stopped at the hotel door. We entered. A few yards down the hall the lift waited. We went up together. I shall never forget the look on her face. I shall always associate it with the picture of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. The lift stopped at my floor. Her room was higher.
I bade her good night.
She wrung my hand. "Good night, Tony, and my very grateful thanks."
I slipped out and watched her whisked, an inscrutable mystery, upwards.
The first sign of commotion in the morning was a note from Bakkus, whose turn it was to act as luncheon host. Our friends at Clermont-Ferrand, said he, had cried off. They had also asked him to go over and see them. Would I be so kind as to regard this as adies nonin the rota of our pleasant gatherings?
I dressed and bought some flowers, which I sent up to Lady Auriol with a polite message. The chasseur returned saying that Miladi had gone out about half an hour before.
"You don't mean that she has left the hotel with her luggage?"
The boy smiled reassurance. She had only gone for a walk. I breathed freely. It would have been just like her to go off by the first train.
I suffered my treatment, drank my glasses of horrible water and again enquired at the hotel for Lady Auriol. She had not yet returned. Having nothing to do, I took myMoniteur du Puy de Dôme, which I had not read, to the café which commands a view of the park gates and the general going and coming of Royat. Presently, from the tram terminus I saw advancing the familiar gaunt figure of Lackaday. I was glad, I scarcely knew why, to note that he wore a grey soft felt instead of the awful straw hat. I rose to greet him, and invited him to my table.
"I would join you with pleasure," said he, "but I am thinking of paying my respects to Lady Auriol."
When I told him that he would not find her, he sat down. We could keep an eye on the hotel entrance, I remarked.
"Our lunch with Bakkus is off," said I.
"Yes. I'm sorry. I rang him up early this morning. Elodie isn't quite herself to-day."
"The thunder last night, perhaps."
He nodded. "Women have nerves."
That something had happened was obvious. I remembered last night's half-hearted performance.
"By the way," said I, "Bakkus mentioned in his note that he was going over to Clermont-Ferrand to see you."
"Yes," said Lackaday, "I left him there. He has marvellous tact and influence when he chooses to exert them. A man thrown away on the trivialities of life. He was born to be a Cardinal. I'm so glad you have taken to him."
I murmured mild eulogy of Bakkus. We spoke idly of his beautiful voice. Conversation languished, Lackaday's eyes being turned to the entrance of the hotel some fifty yards away up the sloping street.
"I'm anxious not to miss Lady Auriol," he said at last. "It will be my only chance of seeing her. We're off to-morrow."
"To-morrow?"
"Our engagement ends to-night. We're due at Vichy next week."
I had not realized the flight of the pleasant days. But yet--I was puzzled. Yesterday there had been no talk of departure. I mentioned my surprise.
"I have ended the engagement of my own accord," said he. "The management had engaged another star turn for to-day--overlapping mine. A breach of contract which gave me the excuse for terminating it. I don't often stand on the vain dignity of the so-called artist, but this time I've been glad to do so."
"The atmosphere of the circus is scarcely congenial," said I.
"That's it. I'm too big for my boots, or my head's too big for my hat. And the management are not sorry to save a few days' salary."
"But during these few days----?"
"We wait at Vichy."
He spoke woodenly, his lined face set hard.
"I shall miss you tremendously, my dear fellow," said I.
"I shall miss your company even more," said he.
"We won't, at any rate, say good-bye to-day," I ventured. "There are cars to be hired, and Vichy from the car point of view is close by."
"You, my dear Hylton, I shall be delighted to see."
The emphasis on the pronoun would have rendered his meaning clear to even a more obtuse man than myself. No Lady Auriols flaunting over to Vichy.
"May I ask when you came to this decision?" I enquired. "Bakkus's note suggested only a postponement of our meeting."
"Last night," said he. "That's one reason why I sent for Bakkus."
"I see," said I. But I did not tell him what I saw. It looked as though the gallant fellow were simply running away.
Soon afterwards, to my great relief, there came Lady Auriol swinging along on the other side of the pavement. The café, you must know, forms a corner. To the left, the park and the tram terminus; to the right, the street leading to the post office and then dwindling away vaguely up the hill. It was along this street that Lady Auriol came, short-skirted, flushed with exercise, rather dusty and dishevelled. I stood and waved an arresting hand. She hesitated for a second and then crossed the road and met us outside the café. I offered a seat at our table within. She declined with a gesture. We all stood for a while and then went diagonally over to the park entrance.
"I've been such a walk," she declared. "Miles and miles--through beautiful country and picturesque villages. You ought to explore. It's worth it."
"I know the district of old," said Lackaday.
"I'm tremendously struck with the beauty of the women of Auvergne."
"They're the pure type of old Gaul," said Lackaday.
She put up a hand to straying hair. "I'm falling to pieces. I have but two desires in the world--a cold bath and food. Perhaps I shall see you later."
He stood unflinching, like a soldier condemned for crime. I wondered at her indifference. He said:
"Unfortunately I can't have that pleasure. My engagements take up the rest of the day, and tomorrow I leave Clermont-Ferrand. I shan't have another opportunity of seeing you."
Their eyes met and his, calm yet full of pain, dominated. She thrust her hand through my arm.
"Very well then, let us get into the shade."
We entered the park, found an empty bench beneath the trees and sat down, Auriol between us. She said:
"Do you mean at Royat or in the world in general?"
"Perhaps the latter."
She laughed queerly. "As chance has thrown us together here, it will possibly do the same somewhere else."
"My sphere isn't yours," said he. "If it hadn't been for the accident of Hylton being here, we should not have met now."
"Captain Hylton had nothing to do with it," she said warmly. "I had no notion that you were at Clermont-Ferrand."
"I'm quite aware of that, Lady Auriol."
She flushed, vexed at having said a foolish thing.
"And Captain Hylton had no notion that I was coming."
"Perfectly," said Lackaday.
"Well?" she said after a pause.
"I came over to Royat, this morning," said Lackaday, "to call on you and bid you good-bye."
"Why?" she asked in a low voice.
"It appeared to be ordinary courtesy."
"Was there anything particular you wanted to say to me?"
"Perhaps to supplement just the little I could tell you yesterday afternoon."
"Captain Hylton supplemented it after you left. Oh, he was very discreet. But there were a few odds and ends that needed straightening out. If you had been frank with me from the beginning, there would have been no need of it. As it was, I had to clear everything up. If I had known exactly. I should not have gone to the circus last night."
His eyelids fluttered like those of a man who has received a bullet through him, and his mouth set grimly.
"You might have spared me that," said he. He bent forward. "Hylton, why did you let her do it?"
"I might just as well have tried to stop the thunder," said I, seeing no reason why this young woman should not bear the blame for her folly.
"A circus is a comfortless place of entertainment," he said, in the familiar, even voice. "I wish it had been a proper theatre. What did you think of the performance?"
She straightened herself upright, turned and looked at him; then looked away in front of her: a sharp breath or two caused a little convulsive heave of her bosom; to my astonishment I saw great tears run down her cheeks on to her hands tightly clasped on her lap. As soon as she realized it, she dashed her hands roughly over her eyes. Lackaday ventured the tip of his finger on her sleeve.
"It's a sorry show, isn't it? I'm not very proud of myself. But perhaps you understand now why I left you in ignorance."
"Yet you told Anthony. Why not me?"
I was about to rise, this being surely a matter for them to battle out between themselves, but I at once felt her powerful grip on my arm. Whether she was afraid of herself or of Lackaday, I did not know. Anyway, I seemed to represent to her some kind of human dummy which could be used, at need, as a sentimental buffer.
"I presume," she continued, "I was quite as intimate a friend as Anthony?"
"Quite," said he. "But Hylton's a man and you're a woman. There can be no comparison. You are on different planes of sentiment. For instance, Hylton, loyal friend as he is, has not to my knowledge done me the honour of shedding tears over Petit Patou."
I felt horribly out of place on the bench in this public leafy park, beside these two warring lovers. But it was most humanly interesting. Lackaday seemed to be reinvested with the dignity of the man as I had first met him, a year ago.
"Anthony--" I could not help feeling that her repeated change of her term of reference to me, from the formal Captain Hylton to my Christian name, sprang from an instinctive desire to put herself on more intimate terms with Lackaday--"Anthony," she said in her defiant way, "would have cried, if he could."
Lackaday's features relaxed into his childlike smile.
"Ah," said he, "'The little more and how much it is. The little less and how far away.'"
She was silent. Although the situation was painful, I could not help feeling the ironical satisfaction that she was getting the worst of the encounter. I was glad, because I thought she had treated him cruelly. The unprecedented tears, however, were signs of grace. Yet the devil in her suggested ariposte.
"I hope Madame Patou is quite well."
Lackaday's smile faded into the mask.
"Last night's thunderstorm upset her a little--but otherwise--yes--she is quite well."
He rose. Lady Auriol cried:
"You're not going already?"
His ear caught a new tone, for he smiled again.
"I must get back to Clermont-Ferrand. Goodbye, Hylton."
We shook hands.
"Good-bye, old chap," said I. "We'll meet soon."
Auriol rose and turned on me an ignoring back. As I did not seem to exist any longer, I faded shadow-like away to the park gate, where I hung about until Auriol should join me.
As to what happened between them then, I must rely on her own report, which, as you shall learn, she gave me later.
They stood for a while after I had gone. Then he held out his hand.
"Good-bye, Lady Auriol," said he.
"No," she said. "There are things which we really ought to say to each other. You do believe I wish I had never come?"
"I can quite understand," said he, stiffly.
"It hurts," she said.
"Why should it matter so much?" he asked.
"I don't know--but it does."
He drew himself up and his face grew stern.
"I don't cease to be an honourable man because of my profession; or to be worthy of respect because I am loyal to sacred obligations."
"You put me in the wrong," she said. "And I deserve it. But it all hurts. It hurts dreadfully. Can't you see? The awful pity of it? You of all men to be condemned to a fife like this. And you suffer too. It all hurts."
"Remember," said he, "it was the life to which I was bred."
She felt hopeless. "It's my own fault for coming," she said. "I should have left things as they were when we parted in April. There was beauty--you made it quite clear that our parting was final. You couldn't have acted otherwise. Forgive me for all I've said. I pride myself on being a practical woman; but--for that reason perhaps--I'm unused to grappling with emotional situations. If I've been unkind, it's because I've been stabbing myself and forgetting I'm stabbing you at the same time."
He walked a pace or two further with her. For the first time he seemed to recognize what he, Andrew Lackaday, had meant to her.
"I'm sorry," he said gravely. "I never dreamed that it was a matter of such concern to you. If I had, I shouldn't have left you in any doubt. To me you were the everything that man can conceive in woman. I wanted to remain in your memory as the man the war had made me. Vanity or pride, I don't know. We all have our failings. I worshipped you as thePrincesse Loinlaine. I never told you that I am a man who has learned to keep himself under control. Perhaps under too much control. I shouldn't tell you now, if----"
"You don't suppose I'm a fool," she interrupted. "I knew. And the Verity-Stewarts knew. And even my little cousin Evadne knew."
They still strolled along the path under the trees. He said after a while:
"I'm afraid I have made things very difficult for you."
She was pierced with remorse. "Oh, how like you! Any other man would have put it the other way round and accused me of making things difficult for him. And he would have been right. For I did come here to get news of you from Anthony Hylton. He was so discreet that I felt that he could tell me something. And I came and found you and have made things difficult for you."
He said in his sober way: "Perhaps it is for the best that we have met and had this talk. We ought to have had it months ago, but--" he turned his face wistfully on her--"we couldn't, because I didn't know. Anyhow, it's all over."
"Yes," she sighed. "It's all over. We're up against the stone wall of practical life."
"Quite so," said he. "I am Petit Patou, the mountebank; my partner is Madame Patou, whom I have known since I was a boy of twenty, to whom I am bound by indissoluble ties of mutual fidelity, loyalty and gratitude; and you are the Lady Auriol Dayne. We live, as I said before, in different spheres."
"That's quite true," she said. "We have had our queer romance. It won't hurt us. It will sweeten our lives. But, as you say, it's over. It has to be over."
"There's no way out," said he. "It's doubly locked. Good-bye."
He bent and kissed her hand. To the casual French valetudinarians sitting and strolling in the park, it was nothing but a social formality. But to Auriol the touch of his lips meant the final parting of their lives, the consecrated burial of their love.
She lingered for a few moments watching his long, straight back disappear round the corner of the path, and then turned and joined me by the park gate. On our way to the hotel the only thing she said was:
"I don't seem to have much chance, do I, Tony?"
It was after lunch, while we sat, as the day before, at the end of the terrace, that she told me of what had taken place between Lackaday and herself, while I had been hanging about the gate. I must confess to pressing her confidence. Since I was lugged, even as a sort ofraisonneur, into their little drama, I may be pardoned for some curiosity as to development. I did not seem, however, to get much further. They had parted for ever, last April, in a not unpoetic atmosphere. They had parted for ever now in circumstances devoid of poetry. The only bit of dramatic progress was the mutual avowal, apparently dragged out of them. It was almost an anticlimax. And then dead stop. I put these points before her. She agreed dismally. Bitterly reproached herself for giving way in Paris to womanish folly; also for deliberately bringing about the morning's explanation.
"You were cruel--which is utterly unlike you," I said, judicially.
"That horrible green, white and red thing haunted me all night--and that fat woman bursting out of her clothes. I felt shrivelled up. If only I had left things as they were!" She harped always on that note. "I thought I could walk myself out of my morbid frame of mind. Oh yes--you're quite right--morbid--unlike me. I walked miles and miles. I made up my mind to return to Paris by the night train. I should never see him again. The whole thing was dead. Killed. Washed out. I had got back some sense when I ran into the two of you. It seemed so ghastly to go on talking in that cold, dry way. I longed to goad him into some sort of expression of himself--to find the man again. That's why I told him about going to the circus last night."
She went on in this strain. Presently she said: "I could shed tears of blood over him. Don't think I'm filled merely with selfish disgust. As I told him--the pity of it--all that he must have suffered--for he has suffered, hasn't he?"
"He has gone through Hell," said I.
She was silent for a few moments. Then she said: "What's the good of going round and round in a circle? You either understand or you don't."
By way of consolation I mendaciously assured her that I understood. I don't think I understand now. I doubt whether she understood herself. Her emotions were literally going round and round in a circle, a hideous merry-go-round with fixed staring features, to be passed and repassed in the eternal gyration. Horror of Petit Patou. Her love for Lackaday. Madame Patou. Hatred of Lacka-day. Scorching self-contempt for seeking him out. Petit Patou and Madame Patou. Lackaday crucified. Infinite pity for Lackaday. General Lackaday. Old dreams. The lost illusion. The tomb of love. Horror of Petit Patou--and soda capo, endlessly round and round.
At least, this figure gave me the only clue to her frame of mind. If she went on gyrating in this way indefinitely, she must go mad. No human consciousness could stand it. For sanity she must stop at some point. The only rational halting-place was at the Tomb. If I knew my Auriol, she would drop a flower and a tear on it, and then would start on a bee-line for Central Tartary, or whatever expanse of the world's surface offered a satisfactory field for her energies.
She swallowed the stone-cold, half-remaining coffee in her cup and rose and stretched herself, arms and back and bust, like a magnificent animal, the dark green, silken knitted jumper that she wore revealing all her great and careless curves, and drew a long breath and smiled at me.
"I've not slept for two nights and I've walked twelve miles this morning. I'll turn in till dinner." She yawned. "Poor old Tony," she laughed. "You can have it at a Christian hour this evening."
"The one bright gleam in a hopeless day," said I.
She laughed again, blew me a kiss and went her way to necessary repose.
I remained on the terrace a while longer, in order to finish a long corona-corona, forbidden by my doctors. But I reflected that as the showman makes up on the swings what he loses on the roundabouts, so I made up on the filthy water what I lost on the cigars. How I provided myself with excellent corona-coronas in Royat, under the Paris price, I presume, of ten francs apiece, wild reporters will never drag out of me. I mused, therefore, over the last smokable half-inch, and at last, discarding it reluctantly, I sought well-earned slumber in my room. But I could not sleep. All this imbroglio kept me awake. Also the infernal band began to play. I had not thought--indeed, I had had no time to think of the note from Bakkus which I had received the first thing in the morning, and of Lackaday's confirmation of the summons to the ailing Elodie. Women, said he, had nerves. The thunder, of course. But, thought I, with elderly sagacity, was it all thunder?
As far as I could gather, from Lackaday's confessions he had never given Elodie cause for jealousy from the time they had become Les Petit Patou. Her rout of the suggestive Ernestine proved her belief in his insensibility to woman's attractions during the war. She had never heard of Lady Auriol. Lady Auriol, therefore, must have bounded like a tiger into the placid compound of her life. Reason enough for acrise des nerfs. Even I, who had nothing to do with it, found my equilibrium disturbed.
Lady Auriol and I dined together. She declared herself rested and in her right and prosaic mind.
"I have no desire to lose your company," said I, "so I hope there's no more talk of an unbookedstrapontinon the midnight train."
"No need," she replied. "He's leaving Clermont-Ferrand tomorrow. I'll keep to my original programme and enjoy fresh air until a wire summons me back to Paris. That's to say if you can do with me."
"If you keep on looking as alluring as you are this evening," said I, "perhaps I mayn't be able to do without you."
"I wonder why I've never been able to fall in love with a man of your type, Tony," she remarked in her frank, detached way. "You--by which I mean hundreds of men like you, much younger, of course--you are of my world, you understand the half-said thing, your conduct during the war has been irreproachable, you've got a heart beneath a cynical exterior, you've got brains, you're as clean as a new pin, you're an agreeable companion, you can turn a compliment in a way that even a savage like me can appreciate, and yet----"
"And yet," I interrupted, "when you're presented with a whole paper, row on row, of new pins, you're left cold because choice is impossible." I smiled sadly and sipped my wine. "Now I know what I am, one of a row of nice, clean, English-made pins."
"It's you that are being rude to yourself, not I," she laughed. "But you are of a type typical, and in your heart you're very proud of it. You wouldn't be different from what you are for anything in the world."
"I would give a good deal," said I, "to be different from what I am--but--from the ideal of myself--no."
She was quite right. Although I may not have sound convictions, thank Heaven I've sacred prejudices. They have kept me more or less straight in my unimaginative British fashion during a respectable lifetime. So far am I from being a Pharisee, that I exclaim: "Thank God I am as other decent fellows are."
We circled pleasantly round the point until she returned to her original proposition--her wonder that she had never been able to fall in love with a man of my type.
"It's very simple," said I. "You distrust us. You know that if you suddenly said to one of us, 'Let us go to Greenland and wear bearskins and eat blubber'; or, 'Let us fit up the drawing-room with incubators for East-end babies doomed otherwise to die,' he would vehemently object. And there would be rows and the married life of cat and dog."
She said: "Am I really as bad as that, Tony?"
"You are," said I.
She shook her head. "No," she replied, after a pause. "In the depths of myself I'm as conventional as you are. That's why I said I was puzzled to know why I had never fallen in love with any one of you. I had my deep reasons, my dear Tony, for saying it. I'm bound to my type and my order. God knows I've seen enough and know enough to be free. But I'm not. Last night showed me that I'm not."
"And that's final, my dear?" said I.
She helped herself to salad with an air of bravura. She helped herself, to my surprise, to a prodigious amount of salad.
"As final as death," she replied.
There had been billed about the place a Grand Concert du Soir in the Casino de Royat. The celebrated tenor, M. Horatio Bakkus. The Casino having been burned down in 1918, the concerts took place under the bandstand in the park.
After dinner we found places, among the multitude, on the Casino Cafe Terrace overlooking the bandstand, and listened to Bakkus sing. I explained Bakkus, more or less, to Auriol. Although she could not accept Lackaday as Petit Patou, she seemed to accept Bakkus, without question, as a professional singer. The concert over, he joined us at our little japanned iron table, and acknowledged her well-merited compliments--I tell you, he sang like a minor Canon in an angelic choir--with, well, with the well-bred air of a minor Canon in an angelic choir. With easy grace he dismissed himself and talked knowledgeably and informatively of the antiquities and the beauties of Auvergne. To most English folk it was an undiscovered country. We must steal a car and visit Orcival. Hadn't I heard of it? France's gem of Romanesque churches? And the Château--ages old---with itscharmille--the towering maze-like walks of trees kept clipped in scrupulous formality by an old gardener during the war--thecharmilledesigned by no less a genius than Le Nôtre, who planned the wonders of Versailles and the exquisite miniature of the garden of Nîmes? To-morrow must we go.
This white-haired, luminous-eyed ascetic--he drank but an orangeade through post-war straws--had kept us spellbound with his talk. I glanced at Auriol and read compliance in her eye.
"Will you accompany us ignorant people and act as cicerone?"
"With all the pleasure in life," said Bakkus.
"What time shall we start?"
"Would ten be too early?"
"Lady Auriol and I are old campaigners."
"I call for you at ten. It is agreed?"
We made the compact. I lifted my glass. He sputtered response through the post-war straws resting in the remains of his orangeade. He rose to go, pleading much correspondence before going to bed. We rose too. He accompanied us to the entrance to our hotel. At the lift, he said:
"Can you give me a minute?"
"As many as you like," said I, for it was still early.
We sped Lady Auriol upwards to her repose, and walked out through the hall into the soft August moonlight.
"May I tread," said he, "on the most delicate of grounds?"
"It all depends," said I, "on how delicately you do it."
He made a courteous movement of his hand and smiled. "I'll do my best. I take it that you're very fully admitted into Andrew Lackaday's confidence."
"To a great extent," I admitted.
"And--forgive me if I am impertinent--you have also that of the lady whom we have just left?"
"Really, my dear Bakkus----" I began.
"It is indeed a matter of some importance," he interposed quickly. "It concerns Madame Patou--Elodie. Rightly or wrongly, she received a certain impression from your charming luncheon party of yesterday. Andrew, as you are aware, is not the man with whom a woman can easily make a scene. There was no scene. A hint. With that rat-trap air of finality with which I am, for my many failings, much more familiar than yourself, he said: 'We will cancel our engagement and go to Vichy.' This morning, as I wrote, I was called to Clermont-Ferrand. Madame Patou, you understand, has the temperament of the South. Its generosity is apt to step across the boundaries of exaggeration. In my capacity of friend of the family, I had a long interview with her. You have doubtless seen many such on the stage. I must say that Andrew, to whom the whole affair appeared exceedingly distasteful, had announced his intention of obeying the rules of common good manners and leaving his farewell card on Lady Auriol. Towards the end of our talk it entered the head of Madame Patou that she would do the same. I pointed out the anomaly of the interval between the two visits. But the head of a Marseillaise is an obstinate one. She dressed, put on her best hat--there is much that is symbolical in a woman's best hat, as doubtless a man of the world like yourself has observed--and took the tram with me to Royat. We alighted at the further entrance to the park, and came plump upon a leave-taking between Lackaday and Lady Auriol. You know there is a turn--some masking shrubs--we couldn't help seeing through them. She was for rushing forward. I restrained her. A second afterwards, Andrew ran into us. For me, at any rate, it was a most unhappy situation. If he had fallen into a rage, like ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and accused us of spying, I should have known how to reply. But that's where you can never get hold of Andrew Lackaday. He scorns such things. He said in his ramrod fashion: 'It's good of you to come to meet me, Elodie. I was kept longer than I anticipated.' He stopped the Clermont-Ferrand tram, nodded to me, and, with his hand under Elodie's elbow, helped her in."
"May I ask why you tell me all this?" I asked.
"Certainly," said he, and his dark eyes glittered in the moonlight. "I give the information for what it may be worth to you as a friend, perhaps as adviser, of both parties."
"You are assuming, Mr. Bakkus," I answered rather stiffly, "that Madame Patou's unfortunate impressions are in some way justified."
It was a most unpleasant conversation. I very much resented discussing Lady Auriol with Horatio Bakkus.
"Not at all," said he. "But Fate has thrown you and me into analogous positions--we are both elderly men--me as between Lackaday and Madame Patou, you as between Lady Auriol and Lackaday."
"But, damn it all, man," I cried angrily, "what have I just been saying? How dare you assume there's anything between them save the ordinary friendship of a distinguished soldier and an English lady?"
"If you can only assure me that there is nothing but that ordinary friendship, you will take a weight off my mind and relieve me of a great responsibility."
"I can absolutely assure you," I cried hotly, "that by no remote possibility can there be anything else between Lady Auriol Dayne and Petit Patou."
He thrust out both his hands and fervently grasped the one I instinctively put forward.
"Thank you, thank you, my dear Hylton. That's exactly what I wanted to know.Au revoir. I think we said ten o'clock."
He marched away briskly. With his white hair gleaming between his little black felt hat cocked at an angle and the collar of his flapping old-fashioned opera-cloak, he looked like some weird bird of the night.
I entered the hotel feeling the hot and cold of the man who has said a damnable thing. Through the action of what kinky cell of the brain I had called the dear gallant fellow "Petit Patou," instead of "Lackaday," I was unable to conjecture.
I hated myself. I could have kicked myself. I wallowed in the unreason of a man vainly seeking to justify himself. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to see Horatio Bakkus again. I went to bed loathing the idea of our appointment.