 CHAPTER XIII. Through one of the little ironies of fate, my mission at the peace conference ended a day or two after Andrew's arrival in Paris, so that when he called at my hotel I had already returned to London. A brief note from him a day or two later informed me of his visit and his great regret at missing me. Of his plans he said nothing. He gave his address, Kerov Cox's Bank. You will remark that this was late April, and I did not receive his famous manuscript till June. Of his private history I knew nothing save his beginnings in the Cirque-Rocombeau and his identity with a professional Monterbank known as Pettipateau. Soon afterwards I spent a weekend with the Verity Stewards. Before I could have a private word with Lady Orill, whom I found as my fellow guest, Evadney, as soon as she had finished her impatient there not in substantial tea, hurried me out into the garden. There were two litters of celium. Lady Verity Steward protested mildly. Uncle Antony doesn't want to see puppies. It's the only thing he's interested in and the only thing he knows anything about, cried Evadney, and he's the only one that's able to pick out the duds. Come on! So I went, crossing the lawn, she took my arm. But all as sick as dogs, she remarked confidentially. Indeed, why? We asked, noted the modern child, not papa or mama, as a well-conducted little girl of the Victorian epoch would have said, but we, ego et parentes. We asked, replied Evadney, General Lacaday down, and crossing our letter came one from Paris telling us he had left England for good. Isn't it rotten? The General's a very good fellow, said I, but I didn't know he was a flame of yours. Oh, you stupid!" cried Evadney, with a protesting tug at my arm. It's nothing to do with me. It's Aunt Oriole. Oh, said I. She shook her fair bobbed head, as if you didn't know. I'm not so senile, said I, as not to grasp your insinuation, my dear, but I fail to see what business it is of ours. It's a family affair. Oh, I forgot you're not real family, only adopted. I felt humiliated. Anyhow, you're as near as doesn't matter. I brightened up again. I've heard them talk it over, when they thought I wasn't listening. Father and mother and Charles. They're all potty over General Lacaday, and so's Aunt Oriole. I told you they'd clicked ages ago. Clicked? Yes, don't you know English? To my sorrow I do. They'd clicked, and Father and Mother and Charles and Aunt Oriole are all potty. And so am I. She declared for he's a dear, and they also ate time for Aunt Oriole to settle down, so they wanted to get him here and fix him. Charles says he's a shy bird. But I interrupted your talking of the family. Your Aunt Oriole has a father, Lord Muncher. Oh, he's an old ass, said Evadney. He's a peer of the realm, said I, rebukingly, though I cordially agreed with her. He'd often fit to be General Lacaday's ancient butler, she retorted. Is that your own? Now it's Charles's, but I can repeat it if I like. And all this goes to prove, said I. Well, don't you see you are dense? The news that the General has gone to France is not them all silly. Aunt Oriole's looking rotten. Charles says she's off her feed. You should have seen her last night at dinner, when they were talking about him. Again, my dear Evadney, said I, opening the gate of the kitchen garden for her to pass through. This is none of my business. She took my arm again. It doesn't matter. But, oh, darling Uncle Tony, couldn't we fix it up? Fix up what, I asked aghast. The wedding, replied this amazing young person, looking up at me so that I had only a vision of earnest grey eyes and a foreshortened snub nose and chin. He's only shy. You could bring him up to the scratch at once. She went on in a whirl of words at which I preserved but a confused memory. Of course it was her own idea. She had heard her mother hint that Antony Hilton might be a useful man to have about. But all the same, she had her plan. Why shouldn't I go off to Paris and bring him back? I gasped. I fought for air. But Evadney hurried me on, talking all the time. She was dying for a wedding. She'd never seen one in her life. She would be a bridesmaid. She described her costume. And she'd set her heart on a wedding present, the best of the bunch of celium puppies. Why, certainly they were all hers. Tit and Tat, from whom the rather extensive kennels had originally sprung, were her own private property. They'd be given to her when she was six years old. Tat had died. But, Tit, I knew Tit. Did I not? No one could spend an hour in Mansfield Court without making the acquaintance of the ancient thing on the hearth-rug, with the shape of a woolly lamb and the eye of a hawk, and the smile of a court jester. Besides, I'd known him since he was a puppy. I, Mokipal, had been the donor of Tit and Tat. I reminded her. I was a stupid. And if she didn't know. But I was to confirm her right to dispose of the pups. I confirmed it solemnly. So we hastened to the stable-yard and inspected the kennels, where the two mothers lay with their slithery tail-wagging broods. We discussed the points of each little piece, and eventually decided on the one which would be Evadney's wedding present to General Lackaday and Lady Oriole Dane. Thanks ever so much, darling, said Evadney. You're so helpful. I returned to the drawing-room, fairly well primed, with the family preoccupations, so that when Lady Verity Stewart carried me off to her own little den on the pretext of showing me some new Bristol glass, and so Julius came smoking casually in her wake, I knew what to expect. They led me up to the subject, of course, very diplomatically, not rushing at it brutally like Evadney, but nothing that the child said did they admit, with the natural exception of the bridesmaid's dress and the wedding present. And they added little more. They were greatly concerned, dear elderly folk, about Oriole. She and General Lackaday had been handed love for months. He evidently more than admired her. Oriole, said Sir Julius, in her don't-care-a-dam-for-anybody sort of way, made no pretence of disguising her sentiments. Any fool could see she was in love with a man, and they had effeced themselves together all over the place. Other women could do it with impunity. If they didn't have an infatuated man in turn at a restaurant they'd be stared at. People would ask whether they would qualify for a nunnery. But Oriole was different. Aphrodite could do what she chose, and no one worried. But an indiscretion of Artemis said tongues wagging. It was high time for something definite to happen. And now the only thing definite was Lackaday's final exodus from the scene, and Oriole's inclination to go off and bury herself in some savage land. Lady Verity stewart thought Borneo. They were puzzled. General Lackaday was the best of fellows, so simple, so sincere, such a damn fine soldier, such a gently, kindly creature, so scurverly treated by a disgraceful war-office, just the husband for Oriole, et cetera, et cetera, and straffy and antistraffy of eulogy. All this was by way of beginning. Then came the point of the concave. It was obvious that General Lackaday couldn't have trifled with Oriole's affections and thrown her off. I smiled at the conception of the Lankan earnest Lackaday in the part of Don Juan. Besides, they added sagely, Oriole had been known to make short work of Philanderas. It could only be a question of some misunderstanding that might easily be arranged by an intelligent person in the confidence of both parties. That, it appeared, was where I came in. I, as if Adne had said, was a useful man to have about. No, my dear Adne, said the juniors. Can't you do something? All that use was I to do. But first I asked, what does Oriole say about it? They hadn't broached the subject. They were afraid. I knew what Oriole was. As likely as not, she would tell them to go to the devil for their impertinence. And she wouldn't be far wrong, said I. Well, of course it seems meddlesome, said Sir Julius, tugging at his white mustache. But we're fond of Oriole. I'd be much more of a father to her than that damned old-ass muncher. If Adne again, though for once in her life she had exercised restraint. And I hate to see her unhappy. She's a woman who ought to marry Hage et al. and bring fine children into the world. And her twenties won't last forever, to put it mildly. And here she's in love with a fine fellow who's in love with her or will eat my hat. Well, don't you see what I mean? Oh, yes, I saw perfectly. To sue them, I promised to play the high-class Pandoras to the rest of my ability. At any rate, Lady Oriole, having taken me into her confidence months ago, couldn't very well tell me to go to the devil. And if she did, couldn't maintain the mandate with much show of outraged dignity. I did not meet her till dinner. She came down on a sort of low-cut red and bronze frock without any sleeves. I've never seen so much of her before. And what I saw was exceedingly beautiful. A magnificent creature, with muscular, shapely arms and deep bosom and back, like a Greek statue, become dark and warm. Her orb and hair crowned her strong, pleasant face. As far as appearances went, I could trace no sign of the love-lord Maiden. Only from her talk did I diagnose a more than customary unrest. The war was over. Hostables were closed. Her occupation, like Lackadays, was gone. England was no place for her. It was divided into two social kingdoms separated by a vast gulf, one jazzing and feasting, and otherwise Sodom and Gomorraising its life away, and the other growling, envious sinister, with a Bolshevik devil in its heart. What could a woman with brains and energy do? The society life at the moment made her sick, a dance to perdition. The middle classes were dancing, too, in ape-like imitation, while the tradesmen class were clinging for dear life onto their short skirts, with legs dangling in the gulf. On the other side, seething masses howling worship of the goddess of unreason. Across the gulf, one would metaphorically be torn to pieces, remain, no outlet for energy but playing the wild Cassandra. Her pessimism was tartarian. General Lackaday, the last time I saw him, agreed with me that the war was a damp site better than this. It was the first time she had mentioned him. Lady Verity Stewart and I exchanged glances. She went on, not a monologue. We all made our comments, protests, and whatnot. But in the theatre phrase we merely fed her instinctive feeling for the personal note. On ordinary occasions, very assartly aware of such tactics, she seemed now to ignore them. She rose to every fly. Public life for women? Parliament? The next election would result in a labour government. Women would stand no chance. Labour guided on conjoining the woman's vote, but it would have no truck with women as legislators. If there was one social class which had the profoundest contempt for women as an intelligent being, it was the labouring population. For heaven's sake, remember, I am only giving you Lady Aurel's views, as expressed over the dinner table. What mine are, I won't say. Anyhow, they don't amount to a row of pins. Lady Aurel continued her Jeremiah. I suppose she did stand for Parliament and got him for a safe conservative constituency. What would happen? She would be swept into the muddiest and most self-destroying game on God's earth. No, my dear friends, no. No politics for her. Well, what then, we asked. Didn't you say something about—what was it, dear? Borneo? Asked Lady Virity Stuart. I don't care where it is, Aunt Selina, Great Lady Aurel, anywhere out of this melting pot of civilisation. But you can't get anywhere. There aren't any ships to take you, and there's nowhere worth going to. The whole of this miserable little earth has been exploited. Tibet has its lonely spots. And it's polyandrous, so a woman ought to have a good time. She laughed. Thanks for the hint, but I'm not taking any. Seriously, however, as you all seem to take such an interest in me, what is a woman like me to do in this welter? Oh, give me the good old war again. Lady Virity Stuart lifted horrified hands, so Julius rebuked her unhumorously. Lady Aurel laughed again, and the Jeremiah'd peated out. She's got it rather badly, Charles murmured to me when the ladies had left the dining-room. But I was not going to discuss Lady Aurel with Charles. I grunted and sipped my port, and told a gratified host that I recognised the Eighty-One Coban. So Julius and Lady Virity Stuart went to bed early after the sacramental game of bridge. Charles, obeying orders, followed soon afterwards. Lady Aurel and I had the field to ourselves. Well, said she. Well, said I. You don't suppose these subtle diplomatists have left us alone to discuss Bolshevism or infant welfare. There was the ironical gleam in her eyes and twisted her lips that had attracted me since her childhood. I've always liked intelligent women. Have they been badgering you? Good Lord, no. But a female baby and a pink sash would see what they're driving at. Haven't they been discussing me and Andrew Lackaday? They have, said I, and their perfect steers. They've built up a fairy-tale around you, and have taken long leases in it, and are terribly anxious that the estate shall be put into liquidation. That's rather neat, she said. I thought so myself, said I. Stretched in an armchair, she looked for some minutes into the glow of the wood of fire. Then she turned her head quickly. You haven't given me away? My good girl, I protested. What do you take me for? She laughed. That's all right. I opened out to you last year about Andrew. You remember? You were very sympathetic. I was in an unholy sort of fog about myself then. I'm in clear weather now. I know my own mind. He's the only man in the world for me. I suppose I've made it obvious. Hence the solicitude of these pet lambs. And your appointment as investigator. Well, my dear Tony, what did they want to know? They're straining their dear simple ears to catch the strain of wedding bells, and they can't do it. So they're worried. While you can tell them not to worry any longer, there aren't going to be any wedding bells. They've made sentimental idiots of themselves. General Lackaday and I aren't marrying, folks. The question hasn't arisen. We're good intimate friends, nothing more. He's no more in love with me than I am with him. Savvy? I savied. But that's for the pet lambs, said I. What for me? I've already told you. And that's the end of it. As far as you were concerned, yes. As you will, I said. I put a log on the fire and took up a book. All this was none of my business, as I'd explained to Evadney. I'm sorry you're not interested in my conversation. She remarked after a while. You gave me to understand that it was over, as far as I was concerned. Never mind. I wanted to tell you something. I laid down my book and lit a cigar. Go ahead, said I. It was then that she told me if I last interviewed with Lackaday. Remember, I had not yet read his version. It's all pretty hopeless, she concluded. For myself, I knew nothing of the reasons that made him adopt the attitude of the mysterious unknown, except his sensitiveness on the point of his profession. He would rather die than appear before her imagination in the green silk tights of Petipatou. I asked tentatively whether he had spoken much of his civilian life. Very little, except of his knowledge of Europe. He has travelled a great deal. But of his occupation, family, and the rest, I know nothing. Oh, yes, he did once say that his father or mother died when he was a baby, and that he had no kith or kin in the world. If he fought fit to tell me more, he would have done so. I, of course, asked no questions. But all the same, said I, you're dying to know the word of the enigma. She laughs cornfully. I know it's my friend. The deuce you do, said I, thinking of Petipatou and wondering how she guessed. What is it? A woman, of course. Did he tell you? I asked, startled, if that shed a new light on the matter. No! she boomed the word at me. What on earth do you suppose was the meaning of our talk about playing the game? Well, my dear, said I, if it comes to that, do you not think it was playing the game for him, a married man, with possibly a string of children, to come down here and make love to you? She flared up. He never made love to me. You've no right to say such a thing. If there was any love-making, it was I that made it. Ninety percent of the love-making in the world is the work of women, and you know it, although you pretend to be shocked, and I'm not ashamed of myself in the least. As soon as I set my eyes on him, I said, that's the man I want, and I soon saw that I could give him what he'd never had before, and I kept him to me so that I could give it to him. And I gloried in it. I don't care whether he has ten wives or twenty children. I'm telling you because— She started up and looked to be full in the face. Upon my word I don't know why, except that you're a comfortable sort of creature, and if you know everything, you'll be able to deal with the pet lambs. She rose, held out her hand. You must be bored stiff. On the contrary, said I, I'm vastly interested, and honoured, my dear Oriole. But tell me, as all this sad, mad, glad affair seems to have come to a sudden stop, what did you propose to do? I don't know, she replied with a half laugh. What I feel like doing is to set out for hell by the most adventurous route. She laughed again, shook hands. Good night, Tony. And she passed out through the door I held open for her. I finished my cigar before the fire. It was the most unsatisfactory romance I had come across in a not inexperienced career. Was it the green silk tights, or the possible woman in the background, that restrained the gallant general? Suppose it was only the former. Would my lady Oriole gib at them? She was a young woman with a majestic scorn for externals. In her unexpectedest, you might cry, Motley's the only where, and raise him even higher in his Mounted Bankic path. I was sorry for both of them. They were two such out-of-the-way human beings, so vivid, so real. They seemed to have a pre-ordained right to each other. He, dry, stern, simple stick of a man, needed the flame-like quality that ran through her physical magnificence. She, pierced beneath the glamour of his soldierly achievements, found in him the primitive virility she could fear combined with the spiritual helplessness to which she could come in her full womanly and maternal aid. To her he was as a rock, but a living rock, vitalised by a myriad veins of sensitiveness. To him, well, I knew my Oriole, and could not quite understand what Oriole in love could be to any man. Oriole, out of love, and in her right mind, had always been good enough for me. So I mused for a considerable time. Then, becoming conscious of the flatness, staleness, and unprofitableness of it all, as far as my elderly selfishness was concerned, I threw my extinct cigar end into the fire, and, thanking God that I had come to an age when all this storm and fuss over a creature of the opposite sex was a thing of the past, and yet, with an unregenerate pang of regret for manifold what might have beens, I put out the lights and went to bed. The next day I succeeded by hook or by crook in guiding the pet lions, if added included, in the way they should go. I reported progress to Lady Oriole. Good dog, she said. I returned to London on Monday morning. When next I heard of her, she was, unthankful to say, not on the adventurous path to the brimstone objective of her predilection, but was fooling about all by herself in a five-ton yacht, somewhere around the outer hebrides in the fountest of weather. In the days of my youth I was the victim of a hopeless passion and meditated suicide. A seafaring friend of mine suggested my accompanying him on his cargo-steamer from the Port of London to Bordeaux. It was blazing summer, but I was appallingly seasick all the way, and when I set foot on land I was cleansed of all human emotion, save that of utter thankfulness that I existed as an entity with an unqueasy stomach. I was cured for good and all. But a five-ton yacht of the outer hebrides in blicked tempests—no, it was too heroic—even my dear old friend Burton, for all his wit and imagination had never desvised such a remedium amorous, such a remedy for love melancholy. And then came June, and with it the manuscript on all the flood of information about the Argeant's Mognon and Bacchus and Pétipoteux and Prépimpas and Eurydée, and various other things that I have yet to set down. End of Chapter 13. Chapter 14. While Lady Oriole Dane was rocking about the outer hebrides, we find Andrew Lackaday in Paris, confronted with the grim necessity of earning a livelihood. His pre-war savings had amounted to no fortune, and in spite of Edady's economy and occasional earnings with her birds, they were well nigh spent. The dearness of everything. Edady wrung her hands. Where once you had change out of a franc, nigh you had none out of a five franc note. He could still carry on comfortably for a year, but that would be the end of it. When he propounded the financial situation, Edady did not understand. "'I must work,' said he. "'But generals don't work,' she protested incredulously. Even the war had developed little of the Marseilles-Gameen's conceptions of life. A general, she knew no grades, and what his brigadier ranking second only to a field-martial, was a general. He commanded an army. A military demigod invested with a glamour and glory, which, ipse facto of its own essence, provided him with ample wealth. And, once a general, always a general. The mere fact of no longer being employed in the command of armies did not matter. The rank remained, and with the rank the golden stream to maintain it. According to popular legend, the Oriental ascetic who concentrates his gaze on the centre of his body and his thoughts on the syllable om arrives at a peculiar mental condition. So the magic word on which she had so long meditated had its hypnotic effect on Ellady. And when he impatiently explained, "'They give you nothing at all for being a general?' she almost screamed. "'Nothing at all,' said Andrew. "'Then what's the good of being a general?' "'None that I can see,' he replied with his grim smile. Ellady's illusions fell clattering round about her ears. Not her illusions as to generals, but her illusions as to Andrew and British military prestige. It was a strange army that no longer acknowledged its high commanders, a strange country that could scrap them. Were British generals real, like French generals, Lyotte, Amanori and Foch, before he became Marachal?' She was bitterly disappointed. She had lived for nearly a year in Andrew's glory. Now there seemed to be no shine in it whatever. He wore no uniform. He received no pay. He was a mere civilian. He had to work for his living like any demobilised poilot who returned to his counter or his conductor's step on the tramway. And he made such a flourishing among all her acquaintances over so marie le general. She went off by herself and wept. The cook whom she had engaged, coming to lay the cloth in the tiny dining-room, found her sobbing with her arms on the table. "'What was the matter with, madame?' "'Ah, ma pauvre Ernestine, je suis bien malheureuse!' Ernestine could think of any one cause for a lady's unhappiness. Had Monsieur le general then been making her infidelities? All allowances should be made for the war. On every side she'd heard tales of the effects of such long separations. But on the other hand she had heard of many reconciliations. Apply a little goodwill, that was all. Monsieur le general was a man, comptu le monde. She was certain that the object of his warrior fancy was not worth madame, and he would quickly realise the fact. She had any to make much of him and give him everything he liked to eat. As soon as the stream of words ceased, Elodie vehemently denounced the disgusting state of her mind. She must have a foul character to think of such things. She baited her haughtily to mind her own business. "'Why, then?' asked the outraged Ernestine, de madame, declare, she was miserable. To invite sympathy and the rent rejected did not argue a fine character on the part of madame. Also, when a woman sits down and weeps like a car, mon Dieu, there must be a reason. Perhaps if Monsieur was not a fault, then. "'I order you to be silent,' stormed Elodie, interrupting the intolerable suggestion. "'My reasons you couldn't possibly understand. Get on with your work and set the table.' She made a dignified exit, and returned to the sonneau where Andrew was writing. "'Are these sevens since the war the insolence of them?' "'What have they been doing now?' he asked sympathetically. She would not say. Why worry him with such vulgarities?' "'But the housekeeper's life these days was not an easy one.' "'Tiens!' she cried with a swift resolve. "'I'll tell you all. What you said about yourself, a general onion name, rejected and cast on the world without money, made me very unhappy. I didn't want you to see me cry. So I went into the Salamange.' And then a dramatic reproduction of the scene, the insolence of the woman, Andrew rose and drew out his pocketbook. She sugarred once. What's her wages?' But Elodie looked at her aghast. "'What? Dismiss, Ernestine. He must be mad. Ernestine, a treasure-drop from heaven. Didn't he know that servants did not grow like the leaves on the trees in the Champs-Elysées? And cooks, they were worth their weight in gold. In the army he could say to an orderly, fichement le camp, because there were plenty of others. But in civil life, no.' She forbade him to interfere in domestic arrangements, the nice condom of which she had proved herself perfectly capable of determining. And then, in her queer, twisted logic, she said, clutching the lapels of his coat and looking up into his face. "'And it's not through what she said. You have never made me infidelities?' He passed his delicate hand over his forehead, and smiled somewhat wearily. "'You may be sure, my dear. I have been faithful to you.' She glanced away from him, somewhat abashed. Now and then his big simplicity frightened her. She became dimly aware that the report of the cook's chatter had offended the never-comprehended delicacies of his soul. She murmured, "'Je te demande bien pardon, André?' "'There's no reason for that, my dear,' said he. She went over to her birds. André resumed his writing. But after a minute or two his pen hung idle in his hand. Yes, he'd spoken truly. He had been faithful to her, in that he had fled from divine temptation. For her sake he had put the other woman and the glory that she signified out of his life. All through the delicious intercourse, and a dude hung at the bottom of his heart, a dead weight, maybe, but one which he could not in honour or common humanity cut off. For Edity's sake he had held himself in stern restraint. I doubted no word that might be interpreted as that of a lover. As far as Lady Oriole Day knew, as far as any one on this earth knew, his feelings towards her were nothing more than those of a devoted and grateful friend. So does the well-intentioned ostrich, you may say, bury its head and imagine itself invisible. But the ostrich is desperately sincere. And so was Andrew. Presently he turned. If that woman says such vulgarities again, she must go at once. I shall see that she has no opportunity," said Edity. For a time Andrew sought in France that which he had failed to find in England, but with even less chance of success. The gates to employment in England had been crowded with demobilised officers. Only the fortunate, the young, content with modest beginnings, those with money enough to start new applications, had pushed through. These had been adventurous like himself. The others had returned to the office or counting house or broad acres from which they had sprung. In France he found no employment at all. The gates round which the demobilised, wistfully gathered, led no wither. As at the war-office so military had caught us in Paris. Brass had his friends rung him warmly by the hand, condoled with his lot, and genuinely gave him to understand that he stood not a dog's chance of getting in anywhere. Why hadn't he worried the people at home for a foreign billet? There were plenty going, but as to their nature they confessed vagueness. He had put him for several, said he, but had always been turned down. The friends shook their heads. In Paris nothing doing. Andrew walked away sadly. Perhaps a spirit proof against rebuffs of thick-skinned persistence might have eventually prevailed in London to set him on some career in social reconstruction of the world. His record stood, and he did only unblushing flaunting before the eyes of authority for it to be recognised. But Andrew Lackaday, proud and sensitive, was a poor seeker after favour. All his promotion and his honour had come unsought. He had hated the braggadocio of the rainbow row of ribbons on his carquetunic, which army discipline alone forced him to wear. It was Elodie, too, who had fixed into his button-holes the little red rosette of the officer of the Legion. That at least he could do for her. Success, such as it was before the war, he detained he knew not how. The big drum of the showman had ever been the anedgen of hot porrants. Others had put him on the track of things. Elodie, Bacchus. He'd sternly suppressed vulgarity in posters. He'd never intrigued, like most of his craft, for oppressive advertisement. Over and over again, had Bacchus said, Raise a thousand or two and give it to me or Moynihan to play with, and we'll boom you into all the capitals of the earth. There's a fortune in you. But Andrew, to whom publicity was the essence of his calling, would have none of it. He did his work and conducted his life in his own way, earnest and efficient. In the war, of course, he found his real vocation. But he passed out of the war as unknown to the general public as any elderly tommy in a labour battalion. Never a photograph of him had appeared in the illustrated papers. The head of a great government department, to whom Lady Oriole had mentioned his name, had never heard of it. And when she suggested that the state should hasten to secure the services of such men, he'd replied easily, Men of his distinction are as thick as blackberries. That's how we won the war. Unknown to lackaday, she tried to see what influence she could command. Socially, as the rather wild-headed daughter of an impoverished and obscure earl, she could do but little. She too was a poor intriguer. She could only demand with blatant vividness. Once, on a flying visit to Lord Mancher, she tried to interest him in the man, whom to her indignation he persisted in styling her protégé. He still, she urged, had friends in high places, even in the dreadful government at which he railed. Never heard of the man, he growled. Lackaday? Lackaday? He shook his white head. Who is his father? She confessed that she didn't know. He was alone in the world. He had sprung from nowhere. The old earl refused to take any interest in him. Such fellows always fell on their feet. Besides, he tried to put in a word for young Ponsonby, and had got snubbed for his pain. He wasn't going to interfere any more. She learned that the appointment of a soldier would be made to a vacant colonial governorship. A certain general's recommendation would carry weight. She passed the information on to Andrew. This she could do without offending his pride. Very sorry, my dear fellow, said the general. You're the very man for the job. But you know what these colonial office people are. They will have an old regular. As a matter of fact, they appointed another brigadier who had started the war with a new Yeomanry commission, a member of a well-known family, with a wife who'd seen to it that neither his light nor hers should be hidden under a bushel. In the frantic scramble for place, the inexperienced in the methods of the scrum were as much left out in the cold as a timid old maid of what Americans call a bargain counter. He stood lost behind the throng, and his only advisor, Lady Oriole, stood by his side in similar noble bewilderment. On his appointment to a brigade, Bacchus had written, I'm always tempted to make your fortune in spite of yourself. What a sensation! What headlines! Famous for art, he artist becomes a general. Companion pitches in the Daily Mail, Petit Patu, and Brigadier General Lackaday. Everybody who has heard of Petit Patu would be mad to hear of General Lackaday, and all who had heard of soldier Andrew would be crazy to know about Petit Patu. He'd wake up in the morning like baron and find yourself famous. He'd be the darling hero of the British Empire. But you always were a wooden-headed idiot. To which Andrew had replied in raging fury to the vast entertainment of Horatio Bacchus. All of this is to show that, notwithstanding his supreme qualities of personal courage, command and military intuition, Andrew Lackaday, as a would-be soldier of fortune, proved a complete failure. For him, as he presented himself, the tired world in its nebulous schemes of reconstruction, had no place. Every day, when he got home, Edaday would ask, Ebya, have you found anything? And he would say, gaunt and worried, but smiling. Not yet. As the days passed, her voice grew sharper, until it seemed to carry the reproach of the wife of the labourer out of work. But she never pressed him further. She knew his moods and his queer silences and the inevitability of forcing his confidence. In spite of her disappointment and disillusion, some of the glamour still invested him. A man of mystery, inspiring a certain awe, he frightened her a little. A no-man's land, unknown, terrifying, on which she dared not venture a foot, lay between them. He was the kind and courteous ghost of the sergeant and the major with whom she had made high festivals during the war. At last, one afternoon, he cast the bomb calmly at her feet. I've just been to see Moignan, said he. Ebya? He says there would be no difficulty. She turned on him her coarse, puzzled face. No difficulty in what? In going back to the stage. She sank upon her yellow and brown striped sofa by the wall and regarded him open-mouthed. To Dee? I must do like all other demobilised men. Return to my trade. Elodie nearly fainted. For months the prospect had hung over them like a doom. Ever since the brigade which he commanded in England had dissolved through demobilisation, and he, left in the air, had applied disastrously to the war-office for further employment. He'd seen others, almost his equal in rank, swept relentlessly back to their old uninspiring avocations. A bayard of a kernel of a glorious battalion of a famous regiment, a fellow with decorations barred two or three times over, was now cooped up in his solicitor's office in Lothbury, E.C., breaking his heart over the petty foggery of convences. A garland boy, adjutant at twenty-two in the company of which he was captain, a V.C., and God knows what else besides, was back again in the close atmosphere of the junior department of a public school. One of his old seconds in command was resuming his awful frock-coated walk down the arse of a suburban drapery-store. The flabby, soulless octopus of civil life reached out its tentacles and dragged all these heroic creatures into its maw of oblivion. Then another, a distinguished actor and a more distinguished soldier, a man with a legendary record of fearlessness, had sloughed his armour and returned to the theatre. That thought he was his own case. But no, the actor took up the high place of historic fame which he had abandoned. He was the exponent of a great art. The dual supremacy brought the public to his feet. His appearance was the triumph both of the artist and the soldier. No. He lackaday held no such position. He recalled his first talk with Bacchus in which he had insisted that his mountain-banking was an art, and with his hard-ganged knowledge of life rejected the sophistry. To hold an audience spellbound by the interpretation of great human emotion was a different matter from making a zany of oneself and, upside down, playing a one-string fiddle behind one's head, an uttering degraded sound through painted gritting lips in order to appeal to the inane sense of humour of the grocer and his wife. No, there was all the difference in the world. The comparison filled him less with consolation than with despair. The actor, mocking the octopus below, had calmly stepped from one rock pinnacle to another. He himself, Andrew Lackaday, in the depths, felt the irresistible grip of the horror twining round his middle. Put him in the midst of a seething mass of soldiery he could command, straighten out chaos into mechanical perfection of order, guide willing men unquestioned into the jaws of hell. Put him on the stage of a musical, and he could keep six plates in the air at a time. Outside these two spheres he could, as far as the world would try him, do nothing. He had to live. He was young, under forty. The sap of life still ran rich in his veins. And not only must he live, but the woman bound to him by a hundred ties, the woman woven by an almost superstitious weft into his early career. The woman whose impeccable loyalty as professional partner had enabled him to make his tiny fortune. The woman whose faithful affection had persisted through the long years of the wars enforced to neglect. The woman, who without his support, unthinkable idea, would perish from inner niche, he knew her, and her dear must live, in the comfort and freedom from anxiety to which the years of unquestioning dependence had accustomed her. Cap and Bells again there was no other way out. After all it perhaps was the best and most honest. Even he had found a semi-military or administrative career abroad what would become of energy. Not in a material sense, of course. The same provision would be made for her welfare as during the last five years. But the abnormal state of war had made normal their separation. In altered circumstances would she not have the right to cry out against his absence? Would she not be justified in the eyes of every right-thinking man? Yet the very conditions of such an appointment would prevent her accompanying him. The problem had appeared insoluble. Desperately he had put off the solution till the crisis should come. But he had felt unhappy shrinking from the possibility of base action. The thought of Eleady had often paralyzed his energy in seeking work. Now, however, he could face the world with a clear conscience. He cut himself a drift from Lady Oriole and her world. Fate linked him forever to Eleady. All that remained was to hide his honours and his name under the cloak of Petit Patou. It took him some time to convince Eleady of the necessity of returning to the old life. She repeated her cry that generals do not perform on the musical stage. The decision outraged her sense of the fitness of things. She yielded as to an irresistible and unreasoning force. And I, then, must I tour with you as before? She asked in dismay, for she was conscious of increased coarseness of body and sluggishness of habit. He frowned. It is true I might find another assistant. But she quickly interrupted the implied reproach. She could not fail him in her duty. No, no, I will go. But you will have to teach me all over again. I only ask for information. We'll begin rehearsals then as soon as possible, he replied with a smile. A few days afterwards, backers, who had been absent from Paris, entered the salon with his usual unceremoniousness and beheld an odd spectacle. The prim chairs had been piled on the couch by the wall, the table pushed into a corner, and on the vacant space, Eleady, in her old dancers' practicing kit, bodice and knickerbockers, once loose but now skin tight to grotesqueness, and Andrew, in undervests and old grey flannels, were perspiringly engaged with pith-balls in the elementary art of the juggler. Eleady, on beholding him, clutched a bursting corsage with both hands, uttered a little squeak, and bolted like an overfed rabbit. Backers laughed out loud. What the devil! Is this the relaxation of the great or the aberrations of the asylum? My dear old chap, I'm so glad you've come back. Sit down. He shifted the table which blocked the way to the two arm-chairs by the stove. Eleady and I are getting into training for the next campaign. He mopped his forehead, wiped his hands, and, with the old acrobat instinct, jerked the handkerchief across the room. You're looking very well, said he. I'm splendid, said Backers. The sinker indeed had a curiously prosperous and distinguished appearance, due not only to a new brown suit and clean linen and well-fitted boots, but also to a sleekness of face and person which suggested comfortable living. His hair, now quite white, brushed back over the forehead, was neatly trimmed. His shallow cheeks had lost their gaunt hollows. His dark eyes, though preserving their ironical glitter, had lost the hungalit gleam of woofishness. Have you signed a caruso-contract for Covent Garden? laughed Andrew. I've done better. At Covent Garden you've got to work like the devil for your money. I've made a contract with my family. No work at all. Agreement? Just to bury the hatchet. Theophilus, that's the Archdeacon, performed the funeral service. He has had a stroke, poor chap. They sent for me. Eleady told me, said Andrew. He's been very good to me during the war. Otherwise I should have been reduced to picking up cigarens with a pointed stick on the boulevard. The damn precarious livelihood, too, considering the shortage of tobacco in this benighted country. He took it into his venerable head that he was going to die and is hard to see me. Voltaire remorse on his deathbed, you know. I fell to follow, said the literal Andrew. All his life he had lived an unbeliever in me. Now your military intelligence grasps it. My brother Ronald, the runner of the Pony Indian, head-flattening system of education, and his wife, especially his wife, the daughter of a lay brother of a bishop who's got a baron at sea for making an enormous fortune out of the war, wouldn't have me at any price. But Theophilus must have muttered some incantation which frightened them, so they surrendered. Poor old Theophilus and I had a touching meeting. He's about as lonely a thing as you could wish to meet. He married an American heiress who died about eight years ago, and he's as rich as creases. We're bosom friends now. As for Mrs. Ronald, I sang her songs of Arabic, including Guno's Aave Maria, with lots of tremolo, and convinced her that I'm a saintly personage. It's my proud boasts that on my account, Ronald and herself, never spoke for three days. I spent a month in the wilds of Westworldland with them, and as soon as Theophilus got on the mend, he's already performing semi-arched archonical functions, I put my hands over my eyes and fled. My God, what a crowd! Give me a drink! I've got four weeks of rears to make up! Andrew went into the Salamorge, and returned with brandy, siphon, and glasses. Help him back, as he asks. And now what are you going to do? Nothing, my dear friend. Absolutely nothing. I wallow in the ill-gotten matrimonial gains of Theophilus and Ronald. My wallow modestly, it is true. The richest strutter of mar I leave to hogs, with whom I'm out of sympathy. You'll never observe that I'm a man of nice discrimination. I choose my hogs. It is the art of life. Well, here's to you, said Andrew, lifting up his glass. And to you! Backers emptied his glass at a draught, breathed a sigh of infinite content, and held it out to be refilled. And now that I've told you the story of my life, what about you? What's the meaning of this? He waved a hand, this reversion to type. You behold, Petipatou ready-vivous, said Andrew. Backers regarded him in astonishment. But my dear fellow-generals can't do things like that! That's the cry of Elodie. She's a woman with whom I'm in perfect sympathy, said Backers. Elodie entered, cooler, lest she shoveled, in her eternal wrapper. She rushed up to Backers, rung both his hands, overjoyed to see him. He must pardon her flight, but, really, she was in a costume, and not even till she took it off did she know that it was split, of mon dur, right across. With a sweep of the hand, she frankly indicated the locality of the disaster. She laughed. Well, it was good that he had arrived at last. He would be able to put some scents into André. He, a general, to go back to the stage. It was crazy. He would give André advice, good counsel. That was what he needed. How André could win battles when he was so helpless in other things, she could not understand. She seized him by the shoulders, and smiled into his face. Mais toi, qui est-ce que les gens disent quelque chose? To say anything, my dear Elodie, while you are speaking, remarked Backers, is beyond the power of mortal man. But now that you are silent, I will say this. It is time for déjeuner. I'm intoxicated with the sense of pecuniary plenitude. I invite you both to eat with me on the boulevard, where we can discuss these high battles. But it is you that are crazy, quite elodie, gasping at the unprecedented proposal, which in itself shook, like an earthquake, her intimately constructed conception of Caratia Backers. And on the boulevard, too. Her soul rose up in alarm. You are wanting in your wits? I can't eat anywhere, even at a restaurant of the second class, under a hundred francs for three persons. Backers, with an air in Louis says, implied that one, two, or three hundred francs were as dirt in his fingers. But Elodie would have none of it. She would be ashamed to put so much money in her stomach. I have, said she, for us two, eggs au beurre noir à la blanquette de veau. And what is enough for two is enough for three. And you must stay and eat with us, as always. I wonder, said Backers, whether Andrew realizes what a pearl you are. So he stayed to lunch, and repeated the story of his good fortune, to which Elodie listened enraptured, as to a tale of hidden treasure of which he was the hero. But never a word could he find a criticism of Andrew's determination. The quips and causticities that a couple of years ago would have flowed from his thin ironical lips, were arrested, unformulated, at the back of his brain. He became aware not so much of a change as of a swift development of the stern aside of Andrew's character. Of himself, he could talk sardonically enough, he could twit Elodie with her foibles in his old way. But of Andrew, with his weather-wheat and mug of a face marked with new deep lines of thought and pain, sitting there, courteous and simple, yet preoccupied, strangely aloof, easy cynic, vulcurously afraid. And when Elodie taxed him with pucillanimity, he glanced at Andrew. He has made up his mind, he replied. Some people's minds are made of sand and water. Others have stuff composed of builder's weird materials that harden into concrete. Others again have arned bars run through the mass-reinforced concrete. That's Andrew. It's a beast of a mind to deal with, as we have often found, my dear. But what would you have? The animal is built that way. You flatter me, Grind Andrew, but I don't see what the necessity of earning bread and butter has to do with a reinforced concrete mind. It's such an undignified way of earning it, protested Elodie. I think, said Bacchus, it will take as much courage for our poor friend to re-become Petty Patu as it took for him to become General Lackaday. Andrew's face suddenly glowed, and he shot out his long arm with his bony wrists many inches from his cuff, and put his delicate hand on Bacchus' shoulder. My dear fellow, why can't you always talk like that? I'm going to, replied Bacchus, pausing the act of lighting one of Elodie's special reserve of pre-war cigars. Don't you realize I'm just transplanted from a forcing bed of high Anglican platitude? But Elodie shrugged her fat shoulders in some petulance. You men always stick together," she said. End of Chapter 14. The unventilated dressing-room of the Olympia Music Hall in Marseille wreaked of grease-paint, stale human exhalations, the acrid odour creeping up the iron stairs of a mangy performing larn, and all manner of unmentionable things. The month of June is not the ideal month to visit Marseille, even if one is free to pass the evening at a cafe table on the Cannebier, and there is a breeze coming in from the over the sea. But in copper-skied, thundery weather the Sirocco conditions are more southerly latitudes, especially when one is cooped up in a confined and airless space. Marseille in June can be a gasping inferno. Andrew, in spite of hard physical training, was wet through. His little white-jacketed dresser says he, perspired audibly. There was not so much air in the dressing-room as tangible swelter. He sat by the wooden table, in front of a cracked and steaming mirror, the contents of his make-up-box laid out before him, and, say for one private dress-rehearsal, carried out in surroundings of greater coolness and comfort, transformed himself, for the first time, from General Lackaday into the Mount-a-Bac Clown, Petit Patu. The electric lights that should have illuminated the mirror were not working. He had found, to his discomfort, that manifold things in post-war France refused to work, and two candles fainting into hopeless curves took their place. Anxiously, over a wet skin, he painted the transfiguring lines, from lip-corner to ear, from nostril to eye, from eye to brow, once the mechanical hand-twist of a few moments, now the painfully concentrated effort of all his faculties. He finished at last. The swat and perspiring dresser dried his limbs, held out the green silk-high-heeled tights which reached to his armpits, then the grotesque short-sleeved jacket, then the blazing crimson wig rising to the point of its extravagant foot-height. He felt confined within a red-hot torture-skin, a nessus garment specially adapted to the use of discarded burger-deer generals. He sat on the straight-backed chair and looked round the nine-foot square fly-blown room, with its peeling paper and its strained sooty skylight, which all the efforts of himself and the dresser had failed to open. It was Mademoiselle Shores, the latter at last remembered, an imperious lady with a horror of drafts and the ear, and who knows, perhaps the heart of the management, who had ordered it in the winter to be nailed down from the outside, as proof the broken cords. "'Tell the manager that if it is not unnailed to-morrow, I shall smash a hole in it,' said Andrew. It did not matter now. In a few moments he would be summoned from the suffocating den, and then, his turn over, he would dress quickly and emerge into the open air. Meanwhile, however, he gasped in the heat and the heavy odour of the place. His head ached with an intolerable pain round his temples and at the back of his eyeballs, and acute nervousness gripped his vitals. Presently the call-boy put his head in the doorway. Andrew Rose descended the iron stairs to the wings. Instinctively he went to the waiting-table, covered with green, velvet and gold, on which lay piled the one's familiar properties—the one-string fiddle, the pith-balls, the rings, the cigar, the matches, the trick-silk hat, the cards, the coins, and the rest of the juggler's apparatus, and methodically checked them. In the visible shaft of brilliantly lit stage he could see the back of the head and the plump shoulders and tournure of a singer rendering in bravura fashion the dual-song from Faust. The stillness whence a rose, this single flood of sound, seemed almost uncanny. The super-heated air thickened with hot human breath, and tobacco-smokes stood stagnant like a miasma in the unventilated wings and back of the stage. The wild beast smell of the lawn, although his cage had been hurriedly wheeled out through the scenery-door, still persisted and caught the throat. And in the dim white-washed bareness a few figures, stage-hands, and shirt-sleeves, and vague pale men in hard-felt hats, tip-toed about like perspiring ghosts. One of the latter approached Andrew. "'Much apatou need have no fear,' he whispered. Everything was arranged—the beautiful ballroom interior, the men who were to set the stage had their orders, also the limelight operators.' Andrew nodded, already having given explicit instructions. The singer vanished from the quivering streak of stage in order to give her finale close to the foot-lights. She ceased, rapturous applause. She appeared panting, perspiring, beaming in the wings, went on again to bow her acknowledgments amid horse-cries of bis bis. She reappeared, glowing vaporously in her triumph, and spread out her arms before the padded man in the hard-felt hat. "'Well, what did I say? You made difficulties about offering me an engagement? I told you I could make these little birds eat out of my hand? You hear?' A clamour would have been perceptible to a deaf mute. "'They are mad about me. I go on again.' "'Mais non, madame. Three songs. That is your contract. The programme is long.' So spoke the assistant manager. But the lady snapped her fingers, heard like a pistol shot amid the uproar, and made a vast gesture with her arms. "'If I am not allowed to have my encore, I tear up my contract.' The assistant manager released himself from responsibility, yielded to women's unreason, and the lady, who had arranged the matter with the leader of the orchestra, returned in contemptuous triumph to the stage. Elodie, meanwhile, had descended and stood by Andrew's side. She wore a very low-cut and short-skirted red evening frock, so tight that she seemed to ooze distressingly from every aperture. A red rose drooped in her thick black hair. Like the lank green-clad Andrew, she betrayed anxiety beneath her heavy makeup. The delay to their turn, prolonging her suspense, caused her to stamp her foot with annoyance. "'The salgru,' and she sings like a duck. "'She pleases the audience,' whispered Andrew, and ruins our reception. It is the last straw.' "'It can't be helped,' said Andrew.' The singer gave a song from La Traviata. She certainly had the mechanical techniques so beloved by French audiences. That of Olympia listened spellbound to her trills, and when she finished, broke once more into enthusiastic cheering, calling and recalling her two or three times. At last the curtain came finally down, and she disappeared up the arned staircase. The interior back-doth and wings, provided for La Petit-Petoux, were let down. Stagehands set the table and properties. Andrew and Elodie anxiously supervising. And when all was clear, the curtain went up. Andrew went on alone and grin familiarly his old tradition before the sea of faces. A few faint hand-laps instead of the old expectant laughter welcomed him. A generation had apparently risen that knew not Petit-Petoux. His heart sank. The heat of the foot-light shimmoured like a furnace, and smote him with sudden lassitude. He began his tricks, took his tiny one-stringed broomstick-handled fiddle, and played it with his hands encased in grotesquely longed cotton loves. Presently, with simulated impatience, he drew off the loves through them, conjure a fashion, vanishing into the air, and then resumed his violin to find himself impeded now and then by various articles cunningly fixed to his attire, one after another of which he disposed of like the loves. Finally, in his perplexity, he made as if to undo his tights—a certain laugh in former days—but, thinking better of it, threw fiddle and bow as in disgust across the stage into the wings, where they were caught by the waiting Elodie. The act, once a rising merriment, fell flat. Andrew's heart sank lower. In itself the performance which he carried through with skilful cleanliness contained nothing risable. For laughter it depended solely on a personal note of grotesquery, of exaggerated bewilderment and impatience, and of appealingly idiotic self-satisfaction when each impediment was discovered and discarded. Had he lost that personal touch, merely gone through his conjuring with the mechanical precision of a soldier on parade? Heavens, how he hated himself and his aching head, and the audience, and the layout of futile properties! Elodie appeared. The performance must continue. He threw into it all his energy. Elodie gave him her old loyal support. They did their famous cigar-trick, developed from the act of Pré-Papa. He had elaborated much of the comic business. The new pattern, with up-to-date illusions, had resulted from serious conclave with the ratio-backers, whose mordant wit supplied many a line that should have convulsed the house. But the house refused to be convulsed. His look of vexed and ink facility, when one after another of a set of plates with which he juggled, disappeared, being fastened to an elastic trim-frivance to his back, and his expression of reproach, when turning Elodie round, he discovered her wearing the plates as a sort of basque, which once excited, on no matter what stage, rolling guffaws of mirth. Now, passed by, unappreciated. The final item in the programme was one invented and brought to mechanical perfection just before the war broke out. He insisted on playing his cigar-box and broom-handle fiddle in spite of Elodie's remonstrances. There was a pretty squabble. He pooled, and she pooled, with the result that both bow and handle, by a tubular device, aided by a ratchet apparatus for the strings, assumed gigantic proportions. Pettipatou prevailing, after an almost disastrous fall, perched his great height on chair superimposed on table, and with his long, lean legs and arms, looking like a monstrous and horrible spider, began to work the heavy bow across the long strings. He had rehearsed it to perfection. In performance, something happened. His artist's nerve had gone. His fingers fumbled impotently for the stops. His professional experience saved a calamitous situation. With an acrobat's stride, he reached the stage, teleskept fiddle and bow to normal proportions, and after a lightning nod to the chef D'Orchestre, played the Marseillais. At the end there was half-hearted, perfunctory applause. A light-hearted section of every audience applauded anything. But mingled with it, there came from another section a horrible, sibilant sound, the stage death-warrent of many an artist's dreams, the modern downturned thumb of the Roman populist demanding a gladiator's doom. The curtain fell. Blank silence now from its further side. A man swiftly bundled together the properties and drew them off. A tired-looking man in evening dress with a hiddishly painted face and long waxed moustaches stood in the wings amid performing dogs, some free, some in basket cages, and amid the waiting clutter of apparatus that at once was rushed upon the stage. Andrew and Elodie moved clear, and at the bottom of the arnstair case he motioned to her to ascend first. She clutched him by the arm and gulped down a sob. One poor little review. He tried to smile. What a habit! We'll get it all back soon. Voyant, he took her fat chin in his hand and turned up her face, on which makeup, perspiration, and tears melted into one piteous paste. This is not the way that battles are won. On the landing they separated. Andrew entered his sweltering dressing-room and gave himself over to the little dresser who just turned out the dog-trainer in his shabby evening suit. Monsieur had a good reception? Good enough, said Andrew, stretching himself out for the slipping off of his tights. Ah! said the intuited little man in the white jacket. It is the war. Audiences are no longer the same. They no longer care for subtlety. Monsieur heard the singer before his turn? Well, before the war Olympia wouldn't have listened to her. One didn't pay to hear a bad gramophone. On the other hand, a performance really artistic. The little man sighed. It was heart-breaking. Andrew let him talk. Obviously the hisses had mounted from the wings to the dressing-room corridors. The man meant well and kindly. When he had dressed and appeared in his own lackaday image, he put a twenty-franc-noked to the dresser's hand with a thank-you, my friend, and marched out and away into the comparatively fresh air of the sulfurous night. He lit a cigarette and sat down at the corner of a little obscure café, commanding a view of the stage-door, and waited for Elodie. His nervousness, even his headache, had gone. He felt cold and grim and passionous, like a man measuring himself against fate. When Elodie came out a while later, he sat her down at the table and insisted on her drinking a groc American to restore her balance. But iced rum and water could not medicine an overraught soul. In her native air nothing could check her irrepressibility of expression. She had to spend her fury with the audience. In all her life, never had she encountered such imbecileity, such bestial stupidity. Like the dresser, she upgraded the war. It had changed everything. It had changed the heart of France. She, Marseillais of the Marseillais, was ashamed of being of Marseille. Once the South was warm and generous and responsive. Now it was colder than Paris. She had never imagined that the war could press like a dead hand on the heart of the people of Provence. Now she knew it was true what Bacchus had once said. She had been very angry, but he was right. The through the sunny nature of every child of the midi swept the mistral. She was not very consecutive or coherent or logical. She sought clamorously for every evil influence, post-war, racial, political, that could account for the frozen failure of the evening's performance. No thought disloyal to André Hoverd on the outskirts of her mind. He perceived it greatly touched. When she paused in her vehement outburst, he leaned towards her, elbow on table, and his delicate hand at the end of his long bony wrist held up as a signal of arrest. The fault is not out of France or Marseille, my dear Elodie. Perhaps the war may have something to do with it. But the fault is mine. She waved away so insane a suggestion. Went into details how could it be his fault when the night's tricks were as identical with the tricks which used to command applause as two reproductions of the same cinema film? As for the breakdown of the new trick with the elongated violin and bow, she had seen where the mechanism had not worked properly. A joint had stuck. The audience had seen it too. An accident which could happen anywhere. That had nothing to do with the failure of the entertainment. The failure lay in the mental and moral condition of the degraded post-war audience. For all her championing, André shook his head sadly. No, your cinema analogy won't hold. The fault's in me. And I'm sorry, my dear. He tried to explain. She tried to understand. It was hopeless. He knew that he had lost and had not yet recovered that spiritual or magnetic contact with his audience which is the first element in artistic success, be the artistry never so primitive. The audience, he realized full well, had regarded him as a mechanical figure executing mechanical antics which in themselves had no particular claim on absorbing human interest. The eternal appeal, the held me with his eye of the ancient mariner, was wanting, and the man trained in the school of war saw why. They walked to their modest hostery. He had shrunk from the great hotels where the lounges were still full of men in khaki going or coming from overseas, among whom he would surely find acquaintances. But he no longer desired to meet them. He cut himself clean adrift from the old associations. He told me that Bacchus and I were his only correspondence. Henceforth he would exist solely as Petit Patu, flinging General Lackaday dead among the dead things of war. Besides, the great hotels of Borset cost the eyes of your head. The good old days of the comfortable car and inexpensive lodging had gone apparently forever, and he had to fall back on the travel accommodation of his early struggling days. Elodie continued to the discussion of the disaster. His face wore its rye grin of discomforture. But he said little. They must go on as they had begun. Perhaps things would write themselves. He would lose his loathing of his Mountabank trade, and thus win back the sympathy of his audience. Before they separated for the night, she flung her arm protectively round him and kissed him. They shall applaud you, Montvue. I promise you." He laughed. Again her faith touched him deeply. You have not changed since our first meeting on the Restral Garden at Avignon. You are always my mascot, Elodie. The menacing thunder broke in the night, and the next day it rained pitilessly. Two or three morning hours they spent at the music hall, rehearsing, so that no physical imperfection should mar the evening performance. The giant violin worked with the precision of Australia's. All that human care could do was done. They drove back to the hotel to lunch. Elodie lounged for the rest of the afternoon in her room with a couple of lovebirds for company, the rest of the aviary in the Sondigny flat being under the guardianship of Bakker's. An Andrew, with his clear dressing table for a desk, brought up to date the autobiographical manuscript, which for the past few months had solidified so many hours of enforced leisure. Then they dined and proceeded to the music hall, Elodie defiant with a flush on her cheek, Andrew with his jaw set in a sort of hopeless determination. The preparations of the preceding evening repeated themselves. The rain had slightly cooled the air, but the smell of drains and humanity and leaky gas-pipes and the main gilan still caught at Andrew's throat. The little dresser, while investing him in the hated motley, pointed proudly to the open skylight, he himself had mounted a great personal peril to the roof. Almost not a chasseur-alban for nothing. Oh, yes, he had gone all through the wall. He had the military medal and four chevrons. Had Monsieur Patou seen any service? Like everybody else, said Andrew. It was good to get back to civil life among one's ordinary tasks, said the dresser, whom the change in the weather perhaps had rendered more optimistic. Was not Monsieur Patou glad to return to the stage? A man's work, what? The war was for savages and wild beasts, not for human beings. Andrew let him talk on, wondering idly how he had stuffed his soldier's life without a regret. He stood up once more in his zany garb, and, looking in the mirror, lost sight of himself for a poignant second, while the dressing-room changed into an evil-smelling dugout, dark, save for one guttering candle stuck in a bottle, and in the shadows he saw half a dozen lean, stern faces, lit with the eyes of men whom he was sending forth to defy death. And every one of them hung upon his words as though they were gods. The transient vision faded, and he became aware again of the grotesque painted clown gibbering meaninglessly out of the glass. He strode down the iron stairs. There was the table of properties waiting in the wings. There came Elodie to join him. There, in the fiercely lighted strip of stage, the back cut by the wing of the singer with the voice of the duck, ending the duel song. Then came the applause, the now undisputed encore, the weary, nervous wait. Such had been his life night after night in unconsidered, undreamed of monotony before the war. Such would be his life henceforward, changeless, deadly, appalling. At last he went on. Through the mysterious psychological influence which one audience has on another, his reception was even more frigid than before. Elodie made her entrance. The house grew restless, inattentive, and who flocked his soul until he seemed to sweat his heart's blood. Here and there, loud talking, and hoarse laughter rose above the buzz and rustle of an unappreciative audience. Elodie's breasts heaved, and her face grew pallid beneath its heaviest paint, but her eyes were bright. Allons-tu-tu, Henry whispered. But in the famous cigar act he missed for the first time since the far-off rehearsals off the death of Pré-Papa when the fault was due to Elodie's lack of skill. But now she threw it fair. It was he who missed. The lighted cigar smote him on the cheek. The impossibility of the occurrence staggered him for a second. But a second on the stage is an appreciable space of time sufficient for the audience to pounce on his clumsiness, to burst into a roar of jeering laughter, to take up the cruelty of the hiss. But before he could do anything, Elodie, coarse and bulging out of her short red bodice and skirt, her features contorted with anger, was in front of the footlights defying the house. Lush, she cried. The word which no Frenchman can hear, unperturbed, cut the clamour like a trumpet-core. There was sudden silence. Yes, cowards, you make me ashamed that I am of Marseille. To you a demobilised hero is nothing. But instead of practicing his tricks during the war to amuse you, he has been fighting for his country, and he has earned this. She flashed from her bosom a white enameled cross, depending from a red rumour. Voila, not Chevalier, but officier de la légion d'honneur. With both pudgy arms outstretched, she held the audience for the tense moment. And from simple soldier to general obligate, and that is the petit patout whom you insult. She threatened them with the cross. You insult France! Reaction followed swift on her lightning-speech. The French audience, sensitive to the dramatic and the patriotic, burst into tumultuous acclamation. Eredy smiled at them triumphantly, and turned to Andrew, who stood at the back of the stage, petrified, his chin in the air, at the full stretch of his inordinate height, his eyes gleaming, his long, thin lips tightened so that they broke the painted grin, his hands on his hips. Now if Eredy had carried out the plan developed during the night, she could then and there have died happily. Exalting in her success she tripped up the stage to Andrew, the clasp of the decoration between finger and thumb, hoping to pin it on his breast. The applause dropped, the house hovering for an instant on the verge of anti-climax. But Andrew, with a flash of rage and hatred, waved her away and strode down to the footlights, tearing off his grotesque wig and revealing his shock of carity hair. His soul was sick with horror. Only the swift silence made him realize that he was bound to address the audience. Ladies and gentlemen, said he, I thank you for your generosity to me as a soldier, but I am here to try to merit your application as an artist. For what has just happened, I must ask you to pardon a woman's heart. He remained for a while glaring at them. Then, when the applause came to an end, he bowed, half ironically, and gave a quick, imperious order, at which the curtain was wrung down amid an uproar of excitement. He strode into the wings followed by Eredy's starry eye, and stood, panting. The curtain rose as if automatically. The manager thrust him towards the stage. They want you, he cried. They could go to the devil, said Andrew. Regardless of the clamour, he stalked with Eredy to the foot of the iron stairs. On their way they passed the wax mustachioed trainer of the performing dogs. A good coup d'etatre madame, he remarked jealously. Andrew glowered down on him. You say, monsieur? But the dog trainer, meeting the eyes burning in the painted face, thought it best to say nothing, and Andrew mounted the stairs. Eredy followed him into his dressing-room, palpitating with excitement and perplexity, and clutching both his arms, looked wildly into his face. You are not pleased with me? For a moment or two he regarded her with stupid hostility. Then, getting a grip on himself, he saw things from her point of view, and realised her wit and her courage and her devotion. It was no fault of hers that she had no notion of his abhorrence of the scene. He smiled. It is only you who could have dared, he said. I told you last night they should applaud you. And last night I told you you are always my mascot. If it only weren't true that you'd love me no longer, said Eredy. The dresser entered. Eredy slipped out. Andrew made a step after her to the threshold. What the devil she mean by that, said he, after the manner of men. End of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 of The Mountabank by William John Locke This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers Chapter 16 She did not repeat the approach. Nor did Andrew put to her the question which he had asked himself. The amicable acidity unruffled by quarrel, which marked their relations, was far too precious to be disturbed by an unnecessary plumbing of emotional depths. As far as he could grapple with psychological complexities, there had been nothing between them through all the years of the divine passion. She had come to him disillusioned and weary. He had come to her with a queer superstitious gratitude for help in the past, and a full recognition of present sympathy and service. As the French say, they made together un bon ménage. Save her for a few half hysterical days during the war, and in that incomprehensible pre-war period at the end of which the birds came to her rescue, there had been little talk of love and dreams of delight, and the rest of the vaporous paradise of the mutually infatuated. He could not manifest, nor did she demand, a lover's ardour. It had all been as comfortable and satisfactory as you please. And now, at the most irrelevant moment, according to his masculine mind, came this cry of the heart. But was it of the heart? Did it not rather proceed from childish disappointment at his lack of enthusiastic praise of her splendid exploit? As I say, he judged it prudent to leave the problem unsold. Of the exploit itself, needless to remark, she talked interminably. Generous and kind-hearted, he agreed with her arguments. Of the humiliation she had wrought for him, he allowed her to have no notion. He shivered all night at the degradation of his proudest honour. It had been gained, not as one of a batch of crosses handed over to the British military authorities for distribution, but on the field. He had come, with a handful of men, to the relief of a sorely pressed village held by the French. Somehow he had rallied the composite force, wiped out two or three nests of machine-guns, and driven out to the Germans. As officer-in-command, he consolidated the village, so that when the French came up, he'd handed it over to them as a victor. A French general had pinned the cross on his breast on a day of wind and rain, and bursting shell, on a vast plain of unutterable devastation. The upholding of it, before the mob of Marseille, had been a profanation. In these moments of anguished amazement he had suffered as he had never suffered in his life before, and he had been helpless. Before he realised what was being done, L.O.D. in her tempestuous swiftness had done it. It was only when she came to fix the cross on his breast that his soul sprang to irresistible revolt. He could have taken her by the throat and wrung it and flung her away dead. Thus they were infinite leagues asunder. She met what about it to wearily indulge in forgiveness when she had fully expected to reap the golden mead of heroism. The next morning she went about silent, perplexed, unhappy. By her stroke of genius she had secured for him a real success. If he had allowed her to crown the dramatic situation by pinning on the cross, his triumph had been such as the stage had never seen. Why didn't you let me do it? she asked him. To complete a work of art, said he, is always a mistake. You must leave something to the imagination. But I did right. Tell me I did right. Denial would have been a dagger thrust through a loyal heart. You acted, my dear, said he, like a noble woman. And she was aware of a shell which she could not pierce. From their first intimate days she had always felt him aloof from her. As a soldier during the war she had found him the counterpart of the millions of men who had heroically fought. As an officer of high rank, as a general, she had stood in her attitude towards him in uneducated awe. As a general demobilized and a reincarnation of Petit Patu, he had inspired her with a familiarity bred not of contempt, that was absurd, but of disillusion. And now, to her primitive intelligence, he loomed again as an incomprehensible being actuated by a model network of motives of which she had no conception. He escaped early from the little hotel, and wandered along the keys encumbered with mountains of goods awaiting transport, mighty crates of foodstuffs, bales of hay, barrels of wine from Algiers. Troops and sailors of all nations mingled with the dock-employees who tried to restore order out of chaos. Calm goods-trains whistled idly by the side of the ships or on sidings. The engine-drivers lounging high above the crowd in Olympian indifference. The broken-down organization had nothing to do with them. Here, in the din and the clatter and the dust, and the smell of tar and other seafaring things reeking shawwards under the blazing sun, Andrew could hide himself from the reputable population of the town. In the confusion of a strange world he could think. His life's unmeaningness overwhelmed him. He moved under the burden of its irony. In that she had hurled insulting defiance on her vast, rough audience, Elodie had done a valiant thing. She had done it for love of him. His failure to respond had evoked her reproach. But the very act for which she claimed due reward was a stab to the heart of any lingering love. And yet he must go on. There was no way out. He'd faced facts ever since the days of Ben Flint, and Elodie was a fact, the principal fact in his life. Curious that she should have faded into comparative insignificance during the war, especially during the last two years of it when he had not seen her. She seemed to have undergone a vehement resurrection. A shadow of the war had developed into the insistent flesh and blood of peace. He wandered far over the Quay, where the ancient Algiers' boat was on the point of departure. Crammed with red tabooched troops, Suaves, Colonials, swore the Turcos and Sparges, grinning blacks with faces like polished boots, all exultant in the approaching demobilization. The grey-blue mass listened with medals. The blacks were eating, with the contented menament of children at a Sunday school treat. Andrew smiled at many memories. Black troops were seemed almost to be eating. As he stood watching, porters and packed-laden blue-helmeted poilous jostled him, until he found a small oasis of quiet near the boughs. Here a hamp was clapped on his shoulder, and a voice said, Surely you're lackaday! He turned and beheld the clean-cut, bronzed face of a man in civilian dress. As often happened, what he had sought to avoid in the streaming streets of the town he'd found in the wilderness and acquaintance. It was one Arbuthnot, an Australian Colonel of artillery, who, through the chances of war, had rendered his battalion great service, a keen, sparely-built man made of leather and whip-cord, with the Australian's shrewd blue eyes. They exchanged the common places of greeting. Demobilized, said Andrew, thank heaven. You seem glad. Could Lord Archer think so? Aren't you glad it's all over? I don't quite know, said Andrew, smiling wistfully. Well, I am, declared Arbuthnot. It was a beastly mess that had to be cleared up, and now it's done as far as my little responsibility is concerned. I'm delighted. I want to get back to my wife and family and lead the life of a human being. War's a dog's life. It has nothing to recommend it. It's as stupid and senseless as a typhoon. He laughed. What are you doing here? Andrew waved a hand, putting in time. So am I, till my boat sails. I thought before I left I'd look at a merrier end of France. Oh, God, they're a happy crowd. He pointed to the packed mass on board the ancient tub of the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique. You share their feelings, said Andrew. Arbuthnot glanced at him keenly. I heard they made you a brigadier, yes? And you've chucked it? I'm a civilian, even as you are, said Andrew. Arbuthnot pushed back his hat and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. For goodness' sake, let us get out of this and sit down somewhere and have a talk. He moved away, Andrew following, and hailed a broken-down cab, a Victoria, which had just deposited to Passenger by the steamer's side. To the canna beer, said he, and they drove off. If you have anything to do, please tell me. But I don't know any in this furnace of a town. You're a godsend. A while afterwards they were seated beneath the awning of a crowded cafe on the canna beer. Ceaseless thousands of the globe's population passed by, from the bare-headed, impudent work-girls of Marseille, as like each other and the childe-lady as peas in a pod, to the daintly costume maiden, from the feathered, flashing queen of the streets to the creping, combered figure of the French war widow, from the abject shuffler clad in flapping rags and frowsy beard, to the stout merchant dressed English fashion in grey flannels and straw hat, with two rolls of comfortable fat above his silk collar, from the stray British or American private, perspiring in khaki, to splendid officers, French, Italian, Romanian, Serbian, Czechoslovak, be meddled like the advertisements of patent foods, from the middle-aged, leaden pipe-laden Marseille plumber in his blue smock, to the blue uniform Senegalese private, staring with his childish grin at the multitudinous hurrying sights of an unfamiliar crowd. Backwards and forwards they passed in two thick, unending streams, and the road-way clashed with trams following each other up and down at fraction of a second intervals, and with the congestion of wagons, carts, cabs, automobiles, waiting patiently on the pleasure of these relentless, strident symbols of democracy. In his troubled mood Andrew found Arbuthnot also a godsend. It was good to talk once more with a man of his own calibre about the things that have once so intensely mattered. He lost his shyness and forgot for a time his anxieties. The rushing life before him had in its way a soothing charm to one resting, as it were, on the quiet bank. It was good too to talk English, or listen to it, for much of the talking was done by his companion. Arbuthnot was full of the big, beloved life that lay before him, of the wife and children whom he had not seen for four years, of his home near Sydney, of the Solomon Islands where he spent the few healthy months of the year growing coconuts for coppera and developing a pearl fishery. A glorious, free existence, said he, and real men to work with. Every able-bodied white in the Solomon Islands had joined up some 160 of them. How many would be going back, alas, he did not yet know. They had been distributed amongst so many units of the Australian forces. But he was looking forward to seeing some of the old, hard-bitten faces in those aisles of enchantment. I thought, said Andrew, that it rained all the year round on the Solomon Islands, that they were so depressing, in fact, that the natives et each other to keep up their spirits. Arbuthnot protested vehemently. It was the loveliest climate in the world during the time that white folks stay there. Of course, there was a rainy season, but then everybody went back to Australia. As for cannibals, he laughed. If you're at a loose end, said he, come out with me and ever look round. We'll clear the war out of your system. Andrew held a cigarette between the tips of his fingers and looked at the curling smoke. The picture of the reefs and serfs and white sands and palm trees of those far-off islands rose, fascinating before his eyes. And then he remembered that he once a father and a mother and a birthplace. Curiously enough, he said, I am Australian-born. He scarcely ever realised the fact. Hold them all raisin', said Arbuthnot heartily. Come with me on the Osway. Captain's a pal of mine. He'll fix up a bung for you somewhere. He offered boneless hospitality. Andrew grew more wistful. He thanked Arbuthnot, but I'm a poor man, said he, and have to earn my living at my old job. And what's that? I'm a musical artist, said Andrew. You? Good Lord! I thought you'd been a soldier all your life, one of the old contemptibles. I listed as a private of the Grenadier guards, smiled Andrew. I'm going to be a general in a brass hat, and hang it back on the state. Somehow it doesn't fit. Do you like it? Andrew went to the intimate question of the frank and direct Australian. Last night's scenes swept across his vision, hateful and humiliating. I have no choice, said he. As before, on the key, Arbuthnot looked at him keenly. I don't think you do like it. I've met hundreds of fellows who feel just the same as you. I'm different, as I told you, but I can understand the other part of you. Perhaps I should kick if I had to go back to a pokey office instead of a free open-air life. After all, we're creatures of circumstance. He paused to light a cigar. Andrew made no reply, and the conversational topic died a natural death. They talked of other things. Went back to Arras, the Somme, St. Quentin. Presently, Arbuthnot, pulling out his watch, suggested lunch. Andrew rose, pleading an engagement, his daily engagement with Elodie at the stuffy little hotel Diolodot. But the other begged him for God's sake not to desert him in this lonely multitude. He would not be the act of a Christian and a comrade. Andrew was tempted, feeling the charm and breeziness of the Australian, like a breath of the free air of Flanders and Piccadilly. He went indoors to the telephone. Elodie, eventually found, responded. Of course her poor André must have his little pleasure. He deserved it, Mondeau. It was Jean-Tille of him to consult her. And it had fallen out quite well, for she herself could not eat. The stopping had dislodged itself from one of her teeth, which was driving her mad with pain, and she was going to a dentist at one o'clock. He commiserated with her on her misadventure. Elodie went into realistic details of the wreck of the gold-stopping on the plainly stuffing of a chocolate. Then an anguished, n'a ma coupé par ma mouselle. But ma mouselle of the exchange cut ruthlessly, and André returned to Arbuthnot. I'm at your service, said he. Arbuthnot put himself into Lackaday's hands, the best place, the best food. It was not often he had the honour of entertaining a British general unawares. André protested. The other insisted. The general was his guest. Where should they go? Some were characteristic. He was sick of the food at grand hotels. It was the same all the world over. Stockholm, Tokyo, Scarborough, Melbourne, Marseille. Marseille has nothing to boast of in the way of cookery, said André, save its bouillobaisse. Now, what's that, cried Arbuthnot? I've sort of heard of it. My dear fellow, said André, with his ear-to-ear grin, to live in Marseille and be innocent of bouillobaisse is like having gone through the war without tasting bully-beeth. He was for dragging him to the little restaurant up a side street in the heart of the town, which is the truest shrine of bouillobaisse. But Arbuthnot had heard vaguely of another place, celebrated for the dish, where one could fill one's lungs as well as one's stomach. The reserve. That's it, taxi, cried Arbuthnot. So they drove out and sat in the cool gallery of the reserve, by a window-table, and looked on the blue Mediterranean, and the wondrous dish was set before them and parsley-served by the maitre d'hôtel. Rascasse, Lube de Mer, Bostelle, Languste. A studied helping of each in a super-plate. Then the sodden toast from the terrine, and the ladles of clear, rich, yellow liquid, flavoured with saffron and with an artist's inspiration of garlic. The essence of the dozen kinds of fish that had yielded up their being to the making of the bouillobaisse. The perfect serving of it is a ceremonial in the grand manner. Arbuthnot, regarding his swimming-plate, looked embarrassed. Knife, fork, and spoon, turned Andrew. There for a while in silence. Then Arbuthnot said, Do you remember that wonderful chapter in Meredith's Aguist when Sir Willoughby Patern offers the second bottle of the Patern port to Dr Middleton, Clara's father? And the old fellow says, I have got a girl to give? Well, I feel like that. This is the most wonderful eating that humanity has ever devised. I'm not a glutton. In a word, I should have sampled this before. I'm just an uncivilised man from the bush, overwhelmed by a new sensation. I'm your debtor-general to all eternity, and you're genius in recommending this wine. He filled Andrew's glass with Cid's honours, asked his pimenty. He's worthy of the man who saw us out at Bordenwood. By the way, he added after a pause. What really happened afterwards? I knew you got through. But we poor devils of gunners, we do our job, and away we go to loose off hell at another section, and we never get a clear knowledge of the results. I'll tell you in a minute, said Andrew, emptying the salt cellars, and running a trench making fingers through the salt, and disposing pepper pots, knives, and spoons, and supplementing these material objects with lead pencil lines on the tablecloth. All vestiges of the Booyah base having been cleared away. You see, here were the German lines, here were their machine guns. A mild little odd, said I must not, tapping a remote corner, was somewhere over here. They worked out the taking of Bordenwood. A medallion de Ville Perigoudin, a supreme position of toast, foie gras, veal, and truffles, interrupted operations. They concluded them more languidly before the cheese. The mild mellow asti softened their hearts, said it at the end of the exquisite meal, in the mingled aroma of coffee, a cigarette, and the haunting saltiness of the sea. They spoke, with Andrew's eternal reserve, like brothers. My dear fellow, said I bough not, the more I talk to you, the more impossible it is seen that you should settle down to your pre-war job. Why don't you chuck it and come out with me on a business footing? I have no capital, said Andrew. They don't need much, but a few thousands. He might have said a few millions for all Andrew's power to command such a sum. The other continued his fairytale of the islands. They were going to boom one of these near days, fortune lay to the hand of the man who came in first. The neighbour was cheap, the world was shrieking for copper, the transport difficulty was soon adjusted self, and then a dazzling reward. It was quite possible, he suggested with some delicacy, to find financial aid, and in the meantime to do management work on a salary, so as to keep himself going. The qualities which made him a general would just those which out there would come on success. And, Australian-born as he was, he could claim a welcome among his own people. I can guarantee you are living anyhow, said the enthusiast. Think it over, and let me know before the Oswey siles. It was a great temptation. If he were a free man, he would have cast off the garb of Petit Patoufa ever, and gone to seek fortune in a new world where he could unashamedly use his own name and military rank among men who did men's work and thought all the better of a man for doing the same. And also he became conscious of a longing to leave France for a season. France was passing through a post-war stage of disgruntlement and suspicion, drawing tight around her feet her tricolored skirts so that they should not be touched by the passing foreigner. France was bleeding from her wounds, weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. The Englishman in Andrews stood hurt and helpless before this morbid convulsive nationalism. Like a woman in certain emotional states, she were better left alone for a while, till she recovered and smiled her benevolent graciousness again. Yet, if he remained Petit Patoufa, he must stay in France, the land of his professional adoption. From appearing on the English stage, he shrank with morbid sensitiveness. There was America where he was unknown. Already Moynion was in touch on his behalf with powerful American agencies. Just before he left Paris, Moynion had said, they are nibbling for the winter. But it was all vague. France alone appeared solid, in spite of the disasters of those first two nights. I wish to God, he cried suddenly after a long silence, I wish to God I could cut everything and come with you. What prevents you? said Abarthnot. I have ties, said he. Abarthnot met with the grim look on his face which forbade further questioning. Ah, said he. Still, he had him with a laugh. I'm at the hotel de Noy, till Friday, that is to say. He explained that he was going the next day to Monte Carlo, which he had never seen, to spend a night or two, but we were returning good time for the sailing of the Oswey and the hearing of General Lacaday's final decision. On their drive back to Marseille, Abarthnot, during a pause at their talk, said, What I can't understand is this. If you're on the musical stage, what would you see doing in Marseille? I'm here on business with my partner, Andrew replied curtly. If it weren't for that, a business engagement, I'd ask you to spend the evening with me, he added. What are you going to do? I went to the theatre last night. What else is there? They have an excellent review of the El Dorado. Go there. I will, said Abarthnot. Andrew breathed freely, relieved from the dread, lest this genial and unsuspecting brother-in-arms should wander into Olympia and behold, what? What kind of a performance? What kind of a reception? All apart from beholding him in his green silk tights and painted face. They parted to the Hotel de Noy. The Australians shook him warmly by the hand. This has been one of the great days of my life, said he with his frank smile. The day when I return and you tell me you're coming with me will be a groiler. Andrew walked away in a glow. He was a man of proved worth, proved to the furnace in which they had met, straight at his eyes, sincere to his soul, who'd claimed him as a leader of the great brotherhood, who, with a generosity acceptable under the unwritten law of that brotherhood's free masonry, had opened his way to freedom and a man's lie. Whether he could follow the way or not was another matter. The fact of the generous opening remained. A heartening thing for all time. You may perhaps remember that in the introductory letter which accompanied the manuscript and is quoted at the beginning of this record of the doings of Andrew Lackaday, he remarks, At the present moment I am between the devil and the deep sea. I'm hoping that the latter will be the solution of my difficulties. This was written in his hotel room as soon as he returned. Elodie unnerved by an over-driven dentist's torture, lay resting in her bedroom with closed windows and drawn shutters. He was between the devil of petty patuism and the deep sea, beyond which lay the fortunate aisles where men were men and coconuts were gold, and where the sweat could roll down your leather skin, undefiled with grease-paint. When he finished writing, he dined with a curiously preoccupied, though pain-relieved, Elodie. He attributed her unusual mood either to anxiety as to their reception to Olympia after the previous night's performance, or to realisation of the significance of her indiscretion. She had little, drank less, and scarcely spoke at all. They reached the music hall. Andrew changed into his tights. The little dresser retailed the gossip of the place. Elodie had undoubtedly caused a sensation. The dresser loudly claimed Madame's action as a bogest. In these days of advertisement one can't afford to be so Maurice Montréal, said he, and I, for example, who committed the stupidity of asking whether you had served in the war. Tonight we are going to see something quite different. Andrew laughed. Haunted by the great seas and the Solomon Islands and the palm trees, he found himself scarcely interested in his reception. The audience could talk and cough and hiss as much as they liked. He practically told them to go to the devil last night. He was quite ready, if need be, to do it again. He was buoyed up by a sublime indifference. The singer was ending her encore from La Traviata when he went down the island stairs. Elodie met him punctually, for they had agreed to avoid the dreary wait. As soon as the stage was set and the curtain up, he went on and was greeted by a round of applause. Somehow the word had been passed round the populace that formed the Olympic clientele. Thenceforward the performance went without a hitch to the attentive gratification of the audience. There was no uproarious demonstration, but they laughed at the right places and had claimed satisfactorily his finale on the Grigiant violin. They gave him a call to which he responded, leading Elodie by the hand. For himself he hardly knew whether to feel relief or contempt, but Elodie, blindly stumbling through the cages of the performing dogs and the wings, almost broke down. Now all goes well. Confess I was right. He turned at the bottom of the stairs. He hissed, as I confess, you did what was right to make it go well. She scanned his face to read his meaning. Of late he grown so remote and difficult to understand. He put his arm round her kindly and smiled, and nearby his smile, painted to the upper tip of each ear, was grotesquely horrible. Why, yes, little goose, now everything will go on wheels. That is true, she asked anxiously. I swear it, said he. When they reached the hotel, she swiftly discarded the walking clothes and slipped on her wrapper, in which only was she the real Elodie, and went to his room and sat on the little narrow bed. When I me, said she, I have something to tell you. I would not speak this afternoon because it was necessary that nothing should disturb your performance. Andrew lit a pipe and sat down in the straight-backed arm chair. What's the matter? I had to wait an hour at the dentist. Why, these people say one o'clock when they mean two, except to make you think they are so busy that they do you a favour to look inside your mouth and could charge you whatever they like. Thirty Franks, the monster charged me, you ought to go and tell him it was a robbery! My dear, he interrupted, thus cutting out the predicate of her rhetorical sentence. You surely couldn't have thought a dentist free of thirty Franks would have put me off my work. She threw up her arms. My dear, men are stupid! No, listen, I had to wait an hour, I had to distract myself. Well, you know the supplement to L'Oestration that has appeared every week during the war, the pages of photographs of the heroes of France? I found them, all collected in a portfolio on the table. Ah, some living, but mostly dead, it was heart-breaking. And you know what I found? I found this. I stole it. She drew from her pocket-pennoir a crumpled page covered with venect photographs of soldiers, a legend underneath each one, and handed it to Andrew, her thumb indicating a particular portrait. There, look! And Andrew looked, and beheld the photograph of a handsome, vast, mustachioed, rake-helly officer of Zouave, labelled as Captain Ryle Moroscoe, who died gloriously for France on the 26th of March, 1917. For a second or two he griped for some association with a far distant past. But don't you see, cried Elodie, it is my husband. He has been dead for over two years. End of Chapter 16