 CHAPTER I In the month of June 1919 I received a long letter from Brigadier General Andrew Lackaday together with a bulky manuscript. The letter, addressed from an obscure hotel in Marseille, ran as follows. My dear friend, on the occasion of our last meeting, when I kept you up to an ungodly hour of the morning with the story of my wretched affairs, to which you patiently listened without seeming bored, you were good enough to suggest that I might write a book about myself, not for the sake of vulgar advertisement, but in order to interest, perhaps to encourage, at any rate, to stimulate the thoughts of many of my old comrades who have been placed in the same predicament as myself. Well, I can't do it. You are a professional man of letters, and don't appreciate the extraordinary difficulty a layman has, not only in writing a coherent narrative, but in composing the very sentences which express the things that he wants to convey. Add to this that English is, to me, if not a foreign, at any rate a secondary language. I thought all my life in French, though that to express myself clearly on any except the humdrum affairs of life, is always a conscious effort. Even this little prelude in my best style has taken me nearly two cigarettes to write, so I gave up an impossible task. But I thought to myself that perhaps you might have the time, or the interest, to put into shape a whole mass of raw material which I have slung together, from memory, I have a good one, and from my diary. It may seem odd that a homeless Bohemian like myself should have kept a diary, but I was born methodical. I believe my mastery of army forms gamed me by promotion. Anyhow, you will find in it a pretty complete history of my career up to date. I have cut out of the war. Is there a loosest natural eye of any nationality but English, who, rising from private to Brigadier General, could write 673 sprawling full-scapped pages purporting to contain the story of his life from 1880-something to June 1919? And deliberately omit, as if it were neither here nor there, its four-and-a-half years glorious and astounding episode? I have cut out of the war. On looking through the manuscript I found that he had cut out the war insofar as his military experiences were concerned. In Kharky he showed himself to be as English and John Bull as you please, and how the juices meteororic promotion occurred, and what various splendid services compelled the exhibition on his breast of a rainbow row of ribbons are matters known only to the war-office Andrew Lackaday and his maker. Well, that is perhaps an exaggeration of secrecy. The newspapers have published their official paragraphs. Officers who served under him have given me interesting information, but from the spoken or written word of Andrew Lackaday I have not been able to glean a grain of knowledge. That, I say, is where the intensely English side of him manifested itself. But, on the other hand, the private life that he led during the four-and-a-half years of war, and that which he lived before and after, was revealed with a refreshing gallic lack of reticence which could only proceed from his French upbringing. To return to his letter. I have cut out the war. Thousands of brainy people will be spending the next few years of their lives telling you all about it. But I should rather like to treat it as a blank, a period of penal servitude, a drug to sleep afflicted with nightmare, a bit of metempsychosis in the middle of normal life. You know what I mean. The thing is that I is not General Lackaday, it is somebody else. So I have given you for what it is worth the story of somebody else. The manuscript is in a beast of a muddle, like the earth before the bond you came in and made his little arrangements. Do with it what you like. At the present moment I am between the devil and the deep blue sea. I am hoping that the latter will be the solution of my difficulties. By the way, I am not contemplating suicide. In either case, it does not matter. If you are interested in the doings of a spent meteor, I should be delighted to write to you from time to time. As you said, you are the oldest friend I have. You are almost the only living creature who knows the real identity of Andrew Lackaday. You have been charming enough to give me not only the benefit of your experience, riper than mine, of a man of the world, but also such a very human sympathy that I should always think of you with sentiments of affectionate esteem. You are sincerely Andrew Lackaday. Well, there was the letter, curiously composed, half French, half English in the turning of the phrase. The last sentence was sheer translation, but it was sincere. I did not say that I sent a cordial reply. Our correspondence then forward became intimate and regular. In his estimate of his manuscript, from a literary point of view, the poor general did not exaggerate. Anything more hopeless as a continuous narrative I have never read. But it supplied facts, hit-off odds and ends of character, and, what the autobiography seldom does, it gives the absissima verba of conversations written in helter-skelter fashion with flowing pen, sometimes in excellent French, sometimes in English, which, beginning in the elaborate style of his letter, broke down into queer vernacular. It was charmingly devoid of self-consciousness, said that the man as he was, and not as he imagined himself to be, or would like others to imagine him, stood ingenuously disclosed. If the manuscript had been that of a total stranger, I could not have undertaken the task of the bondure, making it little arrangements to shape the earth out of chaos. An old, re-literary Dilitanti, who is not a rabid archaeologist, has an indolent way of demanding documents clear and precise. As a matter of fact, it was some months before I felt the courage to tackle the business. But knowing the man, knowing also Lady Oriole, and having in the meantime made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle Elodie Figasso and Horatio Bacchus, playing in fact a minor role, say that of Charles, his friend in the little drama of his life, I eventually decided to carry out my good friend's wishes. The major part of my task has been a matter of arrangement, of joining up flats, as they say in the theatre, of translation, of editing, of winnowing, as far as my fattable judgment can decide, the chaff from the grain in his narrative, and of relating facts which have come within the horizon of my own personal experience. I begin, therefore, at the very beginning. Many a year ago, when the world, myself included, was young, I knew a circus. This does not mean that I knew it from the wooden benches outside the ring. I knew it behind the scenes. I was on terms of intimacy with the most motley crowd it has been my good fortune to meet. It was a famous French circus of the classical type that has, by now, I fear me, passed away. Its haute école was its pride, and it demanded for its premier equestrian the homage due to the great artists of the world. Bernhardt of the Comédie Française, I think she was still there in those far-off days, Patty of the Opera, and Mamazelle Urénée Saint-Mure of the Cirque-Rocombe were three stars of equal magnitude. The circus toured through France from year's end to year's end. It pitched its tent, what else could it do, seeing that municipal ineptitude provided no building wherein could be run chariot races of six horses abreast. But the tent, in my youthful eyes, confused by the naps of the glares and the violent shadows cast on the mini-tears of pink faces, loomed as vast as a Roman amphitheatre. It was a noble tent, a palace of a tent, the auditorium being but an inconsiderable section. There was tabling for fifty horses, there were decent dressing rooms, there was a green room, with a wooden, practicable bar running along one end, and a wisened, grizzled old barman behind it who supplied your wants from the contents of a myriad bottles, ranged in perfect order in some obscure nook beneath the counter. They did things in the great manner in the Cirque-Rocombe. It visited none but first-class towns which had open spaces worthy of its magnificence. It despised one or two night stands. The Cirque-Rocombe had a way of imposing itself upon a town, as an illusory permanent institution, a weak being its shortest and almost contemptuous surgeon. The Cirque-Rocombe maintained the stateness of the old world. Now the Cirque-Rocombe fades out of this story almost as soon as it enters it. But it affords the coincidence which enables this story to Britain. For if I had not known the Cirque-Rocombe, I should never have won the confidence of Andrew Lacoday, and I should have remained as ignorant as you are at the present moment of the vicissitudes of that worthy man's career. You see, we met as strangers at a country house towards the end of the war. Chance turned the conversation to France, where he had lived most of his life, to the France of former days, to my own early wanderings about that delectable land, to my boastful accounts of my two or three months of vagabondage with the Cirque-Rocombe. He jumped as if I had thrown a bomb instead of a name at him. In fact, the bomb would have startled him less. The Cirque-Rocombe? Yes. He looked at me narrowly. What year was that? I told him. Lord Almighty! said he with a gasp. Lord Almighty! He stared for a long time in front of him without speaking. Then to my abasement he said deliberately, I remember you. You were a sort of a young English god in a straw hat and beautiful clothes, and you used to take me for rides on the clown's pig. The clown was my foster-father, and now I am commanding a battalion in the British army. By gum, it's a damn funny world! Memory flashed back with almost a spasm of joy. By gum, I repeated. Why, that was what my old friend Ben Flint used to say twenty times an hour. It was a shibboleth proving his story true, and I remembered the weedy, ugly, precocious infant who was the pride and spoiled darling of that circus crowd. Why I, a young gentleman of leisure, fresh from Cambridge, chose to go round France with a circus, is neither here nor there. For one thing, I assure you it was not for the bright eyes of Mamoiselle Grennice-Saint-Moyor or her lesser sister Luminaries. Ben Flint, the English clown, classically starred Auguste in the arena, and his performing pig, Billy, somehow held the secret of my fascination. Ben Flint mystified me. He was a man of remarkable cultivation, say for a lapse here and there into North Country idiom, and for a trace now and then of North Country burr. His English was pure and refined. In ordinary life, too, he spoke excellent French, although in the ring he had to follow the classical addition of the English clown and pronounce his patter with a nerve-rasping Britannic accent. He never told me his history. But there he was, the principal clown, and as perfect a clown as clown could be, with every bit of his business at his fingers' end, in a great and important circus. Like most of his colleagues, he knew the wide world from Tokyo to Christianity, but unlike the rest of the crowd whose life seemed to be bounded by the canvas walls of the circus, and who differentiated their impressions of Singapore and Moscow mainly in terms of climate and alcohol, Ben Flint had observed men and things, and had recorded and analyzed his experiences, so that, meeting a more or less educated youth like myself, perhaps a rare bird in the circus world, standing on the brink of life, thirsting for the knowledge that is not supplied by lectures at the university, he must have felt some kind of satisfaction in pouring out, for my benefit, the full vintage of his wisdom. I see him now, squat, clean-shaven, with merry blue eyes and a mug of a face, sitting in a depture, on a scrap of rugged ground, forming the angle between the row of canvas tables and the great tent, a cob-pipe in his humorous mouth, a thick, half-eated glass of beer with a handle to it on the earth beside him, and I hear his shrewd talk of faraway and mysterious lands. His pretty French wife, who knows no English, charmingly dishevelled, uncorseted, free, in a dubious peignoir trimmed with artificial lace, she, who moulded in mirific tights, see green with reflections of mother of pearl, like Venus and a Diomini, does the tightrope act every afternoon and evening, sits a little way apart, busy with needle and thread, repairing a sorrowy handful of garments which, tonight, will be tense with some portion of her shapely body. Between them sprawls on his side, Billy, the great brown pig whom Ben has trained to stand on his hind legs, to jump through hoops, to die for his country. They don't applaud, they don't appreciate you, Billy, the time would say, choosing his time when applause was scant, share them what you think of them. And then Billy would deliberately turn round and move away from the pig, who deliberately turned round, and moving in a semi-circle, present his turn to the delighted audience. There lies Billy, the pig, the most human pig that ever breathed, adored by Ben Flint, who, not having given the beast one second's pain in all its beatific life, was, in his turn, loved by the pig, as only a few men are loved by a dog. And there, sitting on the pig's powerful withers, his two-smock full of wilted daisies, his little eight-year-old, towel-headed Andrew Lackaday making a daisy-chain, which eventually he twines round the animal's semi-protesting snout. Yes, there is the picture. It is full summer. We have lunched Madame and Ben and Andrew and I at the little cafe restaurant at the nearby straggling end of the town, and other tables, other aristocratic members of the troupe. The humbler have cooked their food in the vague precincts of the circus. We have returned to all that Ben and his wife know as home. It is one o'clock. At two, matinee, an hour of blissful ease. We are in the shade of the great tent, but the air is full of the heavy odour of the dust and the flowers and the herbs of the south, and of the pungent smell of the long row of canvas tables. I call little Andrew. He dismounts from beneath the pig, and, insolent brat, screws an imaginary eyedlass into his eye, which he contrives to keep contorted, and assuming a supercilious expression and a languid manner struts leisurely towards us, with his hands in his pockets, thereby giving what I am forced to admit is an imitation of myself perfect in its burlesque. Ben flint roars with laughter. I clutch the impon, throw him across my knee and pretend to spank him. We struggle lustily till madame cries out, but si s'endrait, you are making monsieur too hot? And Andrew, docile, ceased at once. But, standing in front of me, his back to madame, he noisiously mimicked madame's speech with his lips. So drolly, so exquisitely, the Ben flint's hearty laugh broke out again. Look at the little devil! By gummy has a fortune in him! I learned of the circus as much about Andrew as he knew himself. Perhaps more, for a child of eight has lost all recollection of parents who died before he was two. They were circus folk, English, trapeze artists. Come, they said, from a long tour in Australia where Andy was born, and their first European engagement was in the Cirque-Rocombeau. Their stay was brief, their end tragic. Lackaday Per took to drink, which is the last thing a trapeze artist should do, brain and hand at rehearsal one day lost coordination by the thousands part of a second, and Lackaday Mer, swinging from her feet upwards, missed the anticipated grip, and fell with a thud on the ground, breaking her spine. Whereupon Lackaday Per went out and hanged himself from a cross-beam in an empty pool. Thus, at two years old, Andrew Lackaday started life on his own account. From that day he was alone in the world. Nothing in his parents' modest luggage gave clue to Kith or Ken. Ben Flint, who is a fellow countryman, went through their effects, found not even one letter addressed to him, found no sign of their contact with any human being living or dead. They called themselves professionally the Lackadays. Whether it was their real name or not, no one in the world, which narrowed itself within the limits of the Sir Crocombeau, could possibly tell. But it was the only name that Andrew had, and as good as any other. It was part of his inheritance. There remained to be ninety-five francs in cash, some cheap trinkets, a couple of boxes of fripperies which were sold for a song, a tattered copy of Longfellow's poems, and a brand-new guilt-aged Bible, carefully covered in brown paper, with, for Fanny from Jim, inscribed on the fly-leaf. From which Andrew Lackaday, as soon as his mind grasped such things, deduced that his mother's name was Fanny and his father's James. But Ben Flint assured me that Lackaday called his wife Mara, while she called him Alf, by which names they were familiarly known by their colleagues. So who were Fanny and Jim, if not Andrew's parents, remained a mystery. Meanwhile there was the orphan Andrew Lackaday, rich in his extreme youth and the fortune above specified, and violently asserting his right to live and enjoy. Meanwhile, too, Ben Flint and his wife had lost their pig Bob, Billy's predecessor. Bob had grown old and passed his job, and become afflicted with an obscure poor-sign disease, possibly senile decay, for which there was no remedy but merciful euthanasia. The Flint's mourned him, desolate. They had not the heart to buy another. They were childless, pigless. But behold, there to their hand was Andrew, fatherless, motherless. On an occasion, just out of the funeral for which Ben Flint played, when Madame was mothering the tiny Andrew in her arms, and Ben stood staring, lost in yearning for the lost and beloved pig, she glanced up and said, "'Dear, why should he not replace Bob, C'est petit cochon?' Ben Flint slapped his thigh. "'By gum!' said he, and the thing was done. The responsibility of self-dependence for life and enjoyment was removed from the shoulders of young Andrew Lackaday for many years to come. In the course of time, when the child's état civil, as a resident in France, had to be declared, and this question of nationality became of great importance in after-years, Madame said, "'Since we have adopted him, why not give him our name?' But Ben, with the romanticism of behemia, replied, "'No, his name belongs to him. If he keeps it, he may be able to find out something about his family. He might be the heir to great possessions. I never knows. It's a clue, anyway.' "'Besides,' he added, the sturdy North Countryman asserting itself, "'I'm not giving my name to any man, save the son of my loins. It's a name where I come from that has never been dishonoured for a couple of hundred years.' "'But it is just as you like, Monsieur Dix,' said Madame, who was the placidest thing in France. "'For thirty years I'd forgotten all this, but the by-gum of Colonel Lackaday wiped out the superscription of the Panimpsest of memory, and revealed in startling clearness all these impressions of the past.' "'Of course, we're fond of the kid,' said Ben Flint. "'He's free from vice, and has clever as pained. He's a born acrobat. Might as well try to teach a duck to swim. It comes natural. A remedy, of course. There's nothing he won't be able to do when I'm finished with him. Yet there are some things which lick me eat altogether. He's an ugliest son of a gun. His father and mother, by the way, were a damn good-looking pair. But their hands were the thick-spread muscular hands of the acrobat. Where the deuce did he get his long, thin, delicate fingers from? Already he could pass a coin from back to front. He flicked an illustrative conjurer's hand. At eight years old! To teach him was as easy as falling off a log. Still, that's mechanical. What I want to know is, where did he get his power of mimicry? That artistic sense of expressing personality. Well, my soul is down while near as clever as Billy. Join the talk, which followed the discovery of our former meeting. I reported to Colonel Lackaday these incomiums of years ago. He smiled, wistfully. Most of the dear old fellows' swans were geese. I'm afraid, said he. I was the awkwardest gozzling of them all. They tried for years to teach me the acrobat's business, but he was no good. They might just as well have spent pains on a rheumatic young giraffe. I looked at him, and smiled. The simile was not inapposite. How, I asked myself, could the man into which he had developed ever have become an acrobat? He was the leanest, scraggiest, long thing I have ever seen. Six foot four of stringy sinew and bone with inordinately long legs, around which his cocky slacks flapped as though they hid stilts instead of human limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly. The sleaze of his tunic far above the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have expected to find hands of a talent like Nottyness, to correspond with the sparse rugosity of his person, one found, to one's astonishment, the most delically shaped hands in the world with long, sensitive, nervous fingers, like those of the thousands of artists who have lived and died without being able to express themselves in any artistic medium. In a word, the fingers of the artiste Monquet. I've told you what Ben Flint, shrewd observer, said about his hands as a child of eight. They were the same hands thirty years after. To me, elderly observer of human things, they seemed, as he moved them so gracefully, the only touch of physical grace about him, to confer an air of pathos on the ungainly man, to serve as an index to a soul which otherwise could not be divined. From this lean length of body rose a long, stringy neck carrying a small head surmounted by closely cropped charity thatch. His skin was drawn tight over the framework of his face, as though his maker had been forced to observe the strictest economy in material. His complexion was brick red over a myriad freckles. His features preserved the irregular ugliness of the child I half remembered, but it was redeemed by light blue candid eyes set in a tight net of humorous lines, and by a large mobile mouth, which, though it could shut grimly on occasions, yet when relaxed in a smile disarmed you by its ear-to-ear kindness, and fascinated you by the disclosure of two rows of white teeth perfectly set in the healthy pink streaks of gum. He had the air of a man physically fit inured to hardship. The air, too, in spite of his gentleness, of a man accustomed to command. In the country-house of which we met it had not occurred to me to speculate on his social standing, as human frailty determined that the one should do in the case of so many splendid and gallant officers of the new army. His manners were marked by shy simplicity and quiet reserve. It was a shock to preconceived ideas to find him bred in a circus, even in so magnificent a circus as the Cirque-roquembourg, and brought up by a clown, even by such a superior clown as Ben Flint. At my old friend, I asked, for I had lost knowledge of Ben practically from the time I ended my happy vagabondage. Maximar Mea culpa. He died when I was about sixteen, replied Colonel Lackaday, and his wife a year or so later. And then I queried eager for autobiographical revelations. Then, said he, I was a grown-up man able to fend for myself. That was all I could get out of him without allowing natural curiosity to outrun discretion. He changed the conversation to the war, to the France about which I, a very elderly captain, have I not confessed to early twenties, thirty years before, was travelling most uncomfortably, doing queer odd jobs as a nominal liaison officer on the quartermaster general's staff. His intimacy with the country was amazing. Multiplies Sam Weller's extensive and peculiar knowledge of London by a thousand, and you shall form some idea of Colonel Lackaday's acquaintance with the Inns of Provincial France. He could even trot out the family members of the innkeepers. In this he became animated and amusing. His features assumed an actor's mobility far into their previous military sedateness, and he used his delicate hands in expressive gestures. In parenthesis I may say we had left the weekend party at their bridge, or flirtation, according to age, in the drawing-room, now the pursuits having for us great attraction, in spite of Lady Oriole Dane, of whom more and we have found our way to cooling drinks and excellent cigars in our host's library. It was the first time he had exchanged more than a dozen words, for we had only arrived that Saturday afternoon. But after the amazing mutual recognition, we sat luxuriously chaired excellent friends, and I, for my part, enjoying his society. Ah, said he, Montellymar, I know that hotel, in fact, and the patron, eh? He remember him? Forty stone! The gaunt man sat up in his chair, and by what mesmeric magic it happened, I know not, but before my eyes grew the living image of the gross, shapeless creature who put me to bed in ringing wet sheets. And when you complained, he looked like this, eh? He did look like that, bleary-eyed, drooping mouth, vacant. I recollected that the fat miscreant had the middle of his upper lip curiously sunken into the space of two missing front teeth. The middle of Colonel Lackaday's upper lip was sucked in. And he said, What would you have, Monsieur Sélagueur? The horrible fat man hundreds of miles away from the front with every convenience for drying sheets had said those identical words and of the same greasy grasping tone I gaped to the mimetic miracle. It was then that the memory of the eight-year-old child's travesty of myself flashed through my mind. Pardon me, said I, but haven't you turned this marvellous gift of yours to—well, to practical use? He grinned in his honest, wide-mouthed way, showing his incomparable teeth. Don't you think, said he, I'm the model of a Colonel of the Rifles? He grinned again at the cloud of puzzlement on my face, and rose, holding out his hand. Time for turning in. Would you do me a favour? Don't give me away about the circus. Somehow my esteem for him sank like thermometer mercury plunged into ice. I thought him, with the blazing record of achievement across his chest, a man above such petty solicitude. His mild blue eyes searched my thoughts. I don't care a damn, Captain Hilton, said he, in a tone singularly different from any that he'd used in our pleasant talk. If anybody knows I was born in a stable—a far better man than I once had that privilege— but as it happens that I may go out to command a brigade next week, it would be to the interest of my authority, and therefore to that of the army, if no gossip led to the establishment of my identity. I assure you, sir," I began stiffly. I was only a Captain, he, but for formality or two, as a general. He clapped his hands on my shoulders, and I swear his ugly, smiling face was that of an angel. My dear fellow," said he, so long as you regard me as an honest cuss, nothing matters in the world. I went to bed with the conviction that he was as honest a cuss as I had ever met. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of The Mountabank by William John Locke Our hosts, the Verity Stewards, were pleasant people, old friends of mine, inhabiting a Somerset manor house which had belonged to their family since the days of Charles II. They were proud of their descent, but the alternative to their motto, suggested by the son of the house, Captain Charles Verity Steward, the king can do no wrong, found no favour in the eyes of his parents who had lived remote from their home for a very long time. I had no idea what his parents who had lived remote from the democratic humour of the officers of the new army. It was to this irreverent Calvelier convalescent at home from a machine-gun bullet through his shoulder and hero-worshipper of his colonel that Andrew Lackaday owed his shy appearance at Mansfield Court. He was proud of the boy, a gallant and efficient soldier. Lady Verity Steward had coached her invitation in such cordial terms that a refusal would have been curmudgeonly, and the colonel was heartily tired of spending his hard-won leave horribly alone in London. Perhaps I may seem to be explaining that which needs no explanation. It is not so. In England, Colonel Lackaday found himself in the position of many an officer from the dominions overseas. He had barely an acquaintance. Here the two his leave had been spent in France. But one does not take a holiday in France when the war officer commands attention at White Hall. He was very glad to go to the war-office, suspecting the agreeable issue of his visit. Yet all the same he was a stranger in a strange land, living on the saw-dust and warmed-up soda-water of unutterable boredom. He had spent, so he said, his happiest hours in London at the Holborn Empire. Three evenings had he devoted to its accent, but not soul-enthralling entertainment. In the name of goodness, why, I asked Puzzled, there was a troop of Japanese acrobats, said he. In the course of a raving life one picks up picturesque acquaintances. Hossimuro, the head of them, is a capital fellow. This he told me later, for our friendship begun when he was eight years old, had leaped into sudden renewal, but without any idea of exciting my commiseration. Yet it made me think. That, a prospective brigadier general should find his sole relief from solitude in the fugitive companionship of his Japanese acrobat seemed to me pathetic. Meanwhile there he was at Mansfield Court, lean and unlovely, but, as I divine, lovable in his unaffected simplicity, the very model of a British field officer. At dinner on Saturday evening he had sat between his hostess and Lady Oriole Dane. To the former he had talked to the things she most loved to hear, the manifold virtues of her son. He was falling away from the strict standards of military excellence, of course, but he touched upon them with his wide, charming smile, condoned them with the indulgence of the man prematurely mellowed who has kept his hold on youth, so that Lady Verity Stewart felt herself in full sympathy with Charles' chief and bored the good man considerably with accounts of the boy's earlier escapades. To Lady Oriole, he talked mainly about the war of which she appeared to have more complete information of. I suppose you think, she said at last with a swift side glance, that I'm laying down the law about things I'm quite ignorant of. He said, not at all, you're in a position to judge much better than I. You people outside the wood can see it in its entirety. We who are in the middle of the horrid thing can't see it for the trees. It was this little speech, so simple, so courteous, and yet not lacking a touch of irony the first made Lady Oriole in the words which used when telling me of it afterwards, sit up and take notice. Bridge, the monomania which tainted Sir Julius Verity Stewart's courtly soul, pinned Lady Oriole down to the green-covered table for the rest of the evening. But the next day she set herself to satisfy her entirely unreprehensible curiosity concerning Colonel Lackaday. Lady Oriole, born with even more curiosities than are the ordinary birthright of a daughter of Eve, had spent most of her life in trying to satisfy them. In most cases she had been successful. Hereby it said that Lady Oriole was 28, unmarried, and almost beautiful when she took the trouble to do her hair and array herself in becoming costume. As to Maiden's greatest and shyest curiosity, well, as a child of her epoch she knew so much about the theory of it that it ceased to be a curiosity at all. Besides love, she had preserved a girl's faith in beauty, was a psychological mystery not to be solved by the cold, empirical methods which could be employed in the solution of other problems. I must ask you to bear this in mind when judging Lady Oriole. She had once fancied herself in love with an Italian poet, an Antionist-like young man of impeccable manners, boasting an authentic pedigree which had lost itself in the wolf and remus. None of your vagabond ballad-mongers are guests when she first met him of the Italian ambassador. To him, Prince Charming, Knight and Troubadour, she surrendered. He told her many wonders of fairy things. He led her into lands where woman's soul is free and dances on butter-cups. He made exquisite verses to her auburn hair. But when she learned that these same verses were composed in a flat in Milan and a naughty little opera singer of no account, she dismissed Prince Charming off-hand and betook herself alone to the middle of Apicinia to satisfy her curiosity as to the existence there of Dalsimer playing Maiden's singing of Mount Obora, to whom Coleridge in his poem assigned such haunting attributes. Lady Oriole, in fact, was a great traveller. She had not only gone all over the world, anybody can do that, but she had gone all through the world. Alone she had taken her fate in her hands. In comparison with other geographical exploits her journey through Apicinia was but a trip to Margate. She had wandered about Turkestan. She had crossed China. She had fooled about Sakhalian. In her school days, hanging of the sand-jack of Novi Bazaar, she had imagined the sand-jack to be a funny little man in a red cap. Riper knowledge, after its dull, exasperating way led to this illusion. But like Mount Obora, the name haunted her until she explored it for herself. When she came back she knew the sand-jack of Novi Bazaar like her pocket. Needless to say that Lady Oriole had thrown all her curiosities, her illusions, they were hydro-headed, her enthusiasm and her splendid vitality into the war. I'm a woman of business, she told like a day of myself, not a ministering angel with open-work stockings and a red cross of rubies dangling in front of me. Most of the day I sit in a beastly office and work potatoes and beef and army forms. I can't nurse, though I dare so I could if I tried. But I hate amateurs. No amateurs in my show I assure you. For my job I fatter myself I'm trained. A woman can't knock about the waste-spaces of the earth by herself, had a rabble of pack-carrying savages without gaining some experience in organisation. In fact when I'm not at my own hospital which now runs on wheels I'm employed as a sort of organising expert any old where they choose to send me. Do you think I'm talking swollen-headedly Colonel Lackaday? She turned suddenly round on him with a defiant flash of her brown eyes which was one of her characteristics. The woman for all her capable modernity instinctively on the defensive. It's only a fool who apologises for doing a thing well said Lackaday. He couldn't do it well if he was a fool Lady Oriole retorted. You never know what a fool can do till you try him said Lackaday. It was a summer morning. Nearly all the house-party had gone to church. Lady Oriole, Colonel Lackaday and I smitten with pagan revolt and lounged on the shady lawn in front of the red-brick gabled manor-house. The air was full of the scent of roses from border-beds and of the song of thrushes and the busy chitter-chatter of starlings in the old walnut trees of the further garden. It was the restful England which the exiled the war-weary used so often to conjure up in their dreams. You mean a fool can be egged on to do great things and still remain a fool? asked Lady Oriole lazily. Lackaday smiled, or grinned, is all the same. A weaver of fairy nothings could write a delicious thesis on the question is Lackaday's smile a grin or is his grin a smile? Anyhow, whatever may be the definition of the special ear-to-ear white teeth revealing contortion of his visage it had in it something wistful, irresistible. You will find it in the face of a tickled baby six months old. He touched his row of ribbons. Voila! said he. It's polite to say I don't believe it, she said, regarding it beneath her long lashes. But, supposing it is true for the sake of argument, I very much like to know what kind of a fool you are. Lying back in her long cane chair, an incarnation of the summer morning, fresh as the air in her white blouse and skirt, daintily white hosed and shod, her urban hair fortlessly dressed, sweeping from the side-parting in two waves, one bold from right to left, the other with coquettish grace from left to right, the swiftness of her face calmed into lazy contours, the magnificent full physique of her body relaxed as she lay with her silken ankles crossed on the nether chair support, her hands fingering along necklace of jade. She appealed to me as the most marvellous example I had ever come across of the woman's power of self-transmogrification. The last time I had seen her was in France, wet through an old short-skirted kit, with badly rolled muddy patees, muddier heavy boots, a beast of a dripping hat pinned through rain-sodden strands of hair, streaks of mud over her face, plowing through mud to a British field-ambulance, yet erect hawk-eyed, with the air of a general of division. There sex was wiped out. During our chance meeting, one of the many queer chance meetings of the war, a meeting which lasted five minutes while I accompanied her to her destination, we spoke as man to man. She took a swig out of my brandy flask. She asked me for a cigarette, smoked out, she said. I was in nearly the same predicament, having only at the moment, for all tobacco, the pipe I was then smoking. For God's sake, like a good chap, give me a puff or two," she pleaded. And so we walked on through the marina mud, she pipe in mouth, her shoulders punched, her hands under the scornfully hitched-up skirt deep in her britches' pockets. And now, this summer morning, there she lay, all woman insidiously, dividishly alluring woman, almost voluptuous in her self-confident abandonment to the fundamental conception of feminine existence. Lackaday's eyes rested on her admiringly. He did not reply to her remark until she added in a bantering tone, telling me, then he said with an air of significance, the most genuine brand you can imagine, I assure you, a motley fool, she suggested idly. At that moment, Evadny, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the house who, as she told me soon afterwards in the idiom of her generation, had given the divine services a miss, carried me off to see a letter of selium poppies. That inspection over, we reviewed rabbits and fetched a compass round about the pigsties, and crossed the orchard to the chickens' parade, and passed on to her own allotment in the kitchen garden, where a few moth-eaten cabbages and a wilting tomato in a planted pot seemed to hang degraded heads at our approach, and lingering through the rose garden, we eventually emerged on the further side of the lawn. I suppose you want to go and join them, she said, with a jerk of her bobbed head in the direction of Lady Lacaday. Perhaps we ought, said I. They don't want us, you can bet your boots," said she. How do you know that, young woman of wisdom? She sniffed. Look at them! I looked at them, mull-visioned, masquerade in fifty, seeing through the eyes of feminine thirteen, and seeing very distinctly indeed, I said, What would you like to do? If you wouldn't mind very much, she replied eagerly, her interest in, or her scorn of, elderly romance instantly vanishing, let us go back to the peaches. That's the beauty of Sundays, that silly old-ass Jenkins, Jenkins was the head gardener, is giving his family a treat instead of coming down on me, see? Evaddi linked her arm in mine. Again, I saw, she'd already eaten two peaches. Who was I to stand to the way of her eating a third, or a fourth, or a fifth? With the after-consequences of her crime against Jenkins, physical and otherwise, I had nothing to do. It was the affair of her parents, her doctor, her creator. But the sight of the rapturous enjoyment on her face, when her white teeth bit into the velvet bloom of the fruit, sped one back to one's own youth, and procured a delight, not the less intense, because it was vicarious. Come along, said I. You're a perfect lamb! said she. Before the perfect lamb was led to the peach slaughter, he looked again across the lawn. Colonel Lackaday had moved his chair very close to Lady Oriel's wicker lounge, so that, facing her, his head was but a couple of feet from hers. They talked not so much animatedly, as intimately. Lackaday's face I could not see his back being turned to me. I saw Lady Oriel's eyes wide, full of earnest interest and compassionate admiration. I had no idea that her eyes could melt to such softness. It was a revelation. No woman ever looked at a man like that, unless she was an accomplished siren without some soul-betrayal. I am a view-routier, an old campaigner in the world of men and women. Time is when, but that has nothing to do with the story. At any rate I think I ought to know something about Lady Oriel's eyes. Did you ever see anything so idiotic? I asked Evadny, dragging me round. I think I did once, said I. When was that? Ah, said I. Do tell me, Uncle Tony. I, who had seen things far more idiotic a thousand times, racked my brain for an answer that would satisfy the child. Well, my dear, I began. Your father and mother, when they were engaged, she burst out, and they were young. It isn't the same thing. Aunt Oriel's as old as anything, and Colonel Lackaday's about sixty. My dear Evadny, said I, I happen to know that Colonel Lackaday is thirty-eight. Thirteen shrugged its slim shoulders. It's all the same, it said. We went to the net-covered wall of ripe and beautious temptation, trampling over Jenkins's beds of, I know not what, a net forbidden fruit. At least Evadny did, until, son of Adam, I fell. Do have a bite, it's lovely, and I've left you the blushy side. What could I do? There she stood, fair, slim, bobbed-haired, green-curtled, serious-eyed, carelessly juicy-lipped, holding up the peach. I, to whom all wall fruit is death, bit into the side that blushed. She anxiously watched my expression. Topping, isn't it? Yum-yum, said I. Isn't it? she said, taking back the peach. That's the beauty of childhood. It demands no elaborate expression. Simplicity is its only coinage. A rhapsody on the exquisiteness of the fruit's flavour would have bore Evadny's stiff. Her soul yearned for the establishment of patrinus of other link of appreciation. Yum-yum, said I, and the link was instantly supplied. She threw away peach-stone and sighed. Let's go. Why, I asked. I'm not looking for any more trouble, she replied. We returned to the lawn and Lady Aureole and Colonel Lackaday. Not a hole could be picked in the perfect courtesy of their greeting, but it lacked passionate enthusiasm. Evadny and I sat down and our exceedingly dull conversation was soon interrupted by the advent of the church-goers. Towards lunchtime, Evadny and I, chance-companions, strolled towards the house. What a charming woman, he remarked. Lady Verity Steward, said I with a touch of malice, our hostess was the last woman with whom he had spoken, is a perfect dear. So she is, but I meant Lady Aureole. I've known her since she was that high, I said, spreading out a measuring hand. Her development has been most interesting. A shade of annoyance passed over the Colonel's ugly good-humoured face to treat the radiant creature who had swum into his ken as a subject of psychological observation savoured of profanity. With a smile I added, she's one of the very best. His brow cleared and his teeth gleamed out my tribute. I've met very few English ladies in the course of my life, said he, half apologetically. The other day another officer finding me fully about pal mal insisted on my lunching with him at the Carlton. He had a party. I sat next to a Mrs. Tankerville who I gather as a celebrity. She is, said I. And she said you must really come and have tea with me to-morrow. I've a crowd of most interesting people coming. She did, cried like a day, regarding me with all stricken eyes. A soul must have looked at the witch of Endor. But I didn't go. The witch. Oh, damned dumb! And the dumber I was, the more she taught at me. I'd risen from the Franks, hadn't I? She thought careers like mine such a romance. I just sat and sweated and couldn't eat. She made me feel as if she was going to exhibit me as the fighting skeleton in her freak-museum. If ever I see that woman coming towards me in the street, I'll turn tail and run like hell. I laughed. You mustn't compare Mrs. Tankerville with Lady Aureole Dane. Monsue, I should think not! He cried with a fervent gesture. Lady Aureole Our passage from the terrace across the threshold of the drawing-room cut short a possible rhapsody. Later in the afternoon, in the panelled Elizabethan entrance hall, I came across Lady Aureole in tweed coat and skirt and business-like walking-boots, a felt hat on her head and a stout stick in her hands. Wither away, I asked. Colonel Lackaday and I are off for a tramp over to Glastonbury. Her lips moved ironically. Like to come. God forbid, I cried. Thought she wouldn't, she said, drawing on a wash-leather gauntlet. But when I'm in society, I do try to be polite. My teaching and example for the last twenty years, said I, have not been without effect. You're a master of department, my dear Tony. I was old enough to be her father, but she'd always called me Tony and had no more respect for my grey hairs than her cousin Evadney. Tell me, she said with a swift change of manner, do you know anything about Colonel Lackaday? We met here as strangers, said I, and I can only say that he impresses me as being a very gallant gentleman. Her face beamed. She held out her hand. I'm so glad you think so. She'd answered the clock. A bit late, he's outside. I loathe on punctuality. So long, Tony. She waved and cared as farewell, and straight out. In the evening she gave Sir Julius to understand that for all she cared he could go into a corner and play bridge by himself, thus holding herself free as it appeared to my amused fancy for any pleasanter eventuality. In a few moments Colonel Lackaday was sitting by her side. I drew a chair to a bridge-table and I did look over my hostess's hand. Presently, being dummy, she turned to me with a little motion of her head towards the pair and whispered, those two, aureolanda, don't you think it's rather rapid? My dear Selena, said I, what would you have? C'est la guerre! End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of The Mountain Bank by William John Locke This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers. Chapter 3 It was rather rapid, this intimacy between the older sorted pair, the hybrid woman of fervid action and the mild and gawky Colonel born in a travelling circus. Holding the key to his early life and losing myself in conjecture as to his subsequent career until he found himself possessed of the qualities that made a successful soldier, I could not help noticing the little things unperceived by a generous war-society which pathetically proved that his world and that of Lady Aureol for all her earth-wide bohemianism were star distances apart. Little tiny things that one feels ashamed to record. His swift glance round to ensure himself of the particular knife and forky to use at a given stage of the meal. The surreptitious pushing forward on the plate of the knife which he had leaned French fashion on the edge. His queer distress on entry in the drawing-room. His helplessness until the inevitable and unconscious rescue for he was the honoured guest. The restraint manifest to me which imposed on his speech and gestures. Everyone loved him for his simplicity of manners. In fact, they were natural to the man. He might have saved himself a world of worry, but his trained observation made him aware of the existence of a thousand social solicisms. His sensitive character shrank from their possible committal and he employed his mimetic genius as an instrument of salvation. And then his English, his drawing-room English, was not spontaneous. It was thought out, phrased, excellent academic English, not the horrible ordinary linger that we sling at each other across a dinner-table. The English, though without his trace of foreign accent, yet of one who has spent a lifetime in alien lands and has not met his own tongue save on the pretty page, of one therefore who not being sure of the shade of slang admissible in polite circles carefully and almost painfully avoids its use altogether. Yet, all through that long weekend, we were pressed to stay till the Wednesday morning. No one, so far as I know, suspected that Colonel Lackaday found himself in an unfamiliar and puzzling environment. His appointment to the brigade came on the Tuesday. He showed me the letter during a morning stroll in the garden. Don't tell anybody please, said he. Of course not. I could not repress an ironical glance thinking of Lady Oriole. If you would prefer to make the announcement your own way. He gasped, looking down upon me from his lean height. My dear fellow, it's the very last thing I wanted to do. I've told you because I let the thing out a day or two ago in peculiar circumstances, but it's in confidence. Confidence behind, said I. Heaven sent me if Adney just escaped from morning lessons with her governess and scuttling across the lawn to visit her silly arms. I wished her to heal. She raced up. If you were a soldier, what would you do if you were made a general? She countered me with the incredulous scorn bread of our familiarity. You haven't been made a general. I haven't, I replied serenely. But Colonel Lackaday has. She looked wide-eyed up at Lackaday's face. Is that true? I swear he blushed through his red sun-lays. Since Captain Hilton says so, she held out her hand with perfect manners and said, I'm so glad, my congratulations. Then before the bewildered Lackaday could reply, she tossed his hand to the winds. There be champagne for dinner, and I'm coming down," she cried, and fled like a doe to the house. At the threshold of the drawing-room she turned. Doesn't cousin Oriole know? Nobody knows, I said. She shouted, Good egg! And disappeared. I turned to the frowning and embarrassed Lackaday. Your modesty doesn't appreciate the pleasure that news will give all those dear people. They've shown you the most single-hearted way that they are friends, haven't they? They have, admitted, but it's very extraordinary. I don't belong to their world. I feel a sort of imposter. With this and all these I flourished the letter which I still held, and with it touched the rainbow on his tunic. His features relaxed into his charges ear to ear grin. It's also incomprehensible here in this old place among these English aristocrats, the social position I step into. I don't know whether you can quite follow me. As a distinguished soldier, said I, apart from your charming personal qualities, you command that position. He screwed up his mobile face. I can't understand it. It's like a night-wear and a fairy-tale jumbled up together. On the outbreak of war I came to England and joined up. In a few months I had a commission. I don't know. I fell into the Metier, the business of soldiering. It came easy to me, except that it absorbed my body and soul. I can't see that I had any particular merit. Whatever I have done it would have been impossible in the circumstances not to do. There, I'm too busy to think of anything but my day's work. As for these things, he touched his ribbons. I put them up because I'm ordered to, matter of discipline. In the army I feel as though I were made up for a part which I'm expected to play without any notion of the words. I feel just as I would have done five years ago if I'd been dressed like this and planted here. To go about now disguised as a general only adds to the feeling. If you're pardoning for saying so, said I, I think you're super-sensitive. You imagine yourself to be the same man that you were five years ago. You're not. You're a different human being altogether. Men with characters like yours must suffer a sea-change in this universal tempest. I hope not, said he, for what will become of me when it's all over? Everything must come to an end some day, even the war. I laughed. Don't you see how you must have changed? Here you are looking regretfully to the end of the war. If it were only bloodless you would like it to go on forever. Who knows whether you wouldn't eventually wear two battens and sword. I'm not an ambitious man if you mean that, said he, certainly. Besides, this war business is far too serious for a man to think of his own interests. Suppose a fellow schemed an intrigue to get high rank and then proved inefficient. It would mean death to hundreds or thousands of his men. As it is, I show you I'm not cock-a-hoop about commanding a brigade. I was a jollyside happy with a platoon. At any rate, said I, other people are cock-a-hoop. Look at them. The household, turned out like a guard by Evadny, emerged in a body from the house. Sir Julius beamed urbanely. Lady Vereter Stewart almost fell on the great man's neck. Young Charles broke into enthusiastic and profane congratulations. From the point of view of eloquent compliment his speech was disgraceful. I loved the glisten in the boy's eyes as he gazed on his hero. A light also teemed in the eyes of Lady Oriole. She shook hands with him in her direct fashion. I'm glad. So very, very glad. Perhaps I alone, except like a day, detected a little tremor in her voice. Why, did you want us to know? Instinctively I caught Evadny's eye. She winked at me, acknowledging thereby that she had divulged the general's secret. But why, what feminine process of divination had she guested? Charles came to his chief's rescue. The general couldn't go around shouting, I'm to Commander Brigade, mother, I'm to Commander Brigade, could he? He might have stuck on his badges and walked in as if nothing had happened. It would have been such fun to see who would have spotted them first. Thus Evadny immediately called to order by Sir Julius. The hero said very little what in his modesty could the good fellow say? But it was obvious that the sincere and spontaneous tributes pleased him. Sir Julius, after the suppression of Evadny, made him the little, tiniest, well-bred ghost of a narration. That the gallant soldier under whom his son had this distinguished honour to serve should receive the news of his promotion under his roof was a matter of intense gratification to the whole household. It was a gracious scene the little group on the lawn in shade of the old manor house so intimate, so kindly, so genuinely emotional, yet so restful in its English restraint, surrounding the long, lank, khaki-clad figure with the ugly face, who, after looking for one to the other of them in a puzzled sort of way, drew himself up and saluted. You're very kind," said he in reply to Sir Julius. If I have the same loyalty of my Brigade that I had in my old regiment, he'd answered Charles, I should be a very proud man. That ended whatever there was of ceremony. Lady Oriole drew me aside. Come for a stroll. To see the silly homes of the rabbits no, Tony, to talk of our friend, he interests me tremendously. I'm glad to hear it, said I. We entered the rose garden heavy with the full August blooms. Well, my dear, said I, talk away. If you have a bit of sense in you it would be you who would talk. If you were a bit simpatico you would have once set the key of the conversation. Applied abuse means that you're dying to know through the medium of subtle and psychological dialogue, which is entirely beyond my brainpower, whether you're not just on the vage of wondering if you're not on the verge of falling in love with Colonel Lackaday. You put it with your usual direct brutality. Well, said I, are you? Am I what? Dying to know, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not addicted to vain repetition. She sighed, tried to pick a black crimson Victor Hugo, pricked her finger and said, damn! With my fenn knife I cut the stalk and handed her the rose which she pinned on her blouse. I suppose I am, she eventually replied. Then she caught me by the arm. Look here, Tony, do be a dear. You're old enough to be my ancestor and by all accounts you've had a dreadful past. Do tell me if I'm making an ass of myself. I only did it once, she went on, without giving me time to answer. You know all about it. Vanucci, the little beast. I needn't put on frills with you. Since then I swore off that kind of thing. I've gone about in maiden meditation and man's breeches, francy free. I've loved lots of men just as I've gone on. I've loved lots of men just as I've loved lots of women as friends, comrades. I'm level-headed and I think level-hearted. I haven't gone about like David in his Roth saying that all men are liars. They're not. They're just as good as women, if not better. I've no betrayed virgin's grouch against men. But I've made myself too busy to worry about sex. Ah, it's no use talking, Tosh. Sex is the root of the whole sentimental mordlin. But treminous, bewildering and nerve-wracking and delicious and myriad-adjective soul-condition I interrupted. Known generally as love. Ninety-nine point nine repeater percent of the world's literature has been devoted to its analysis. It's therefore of some importance. It's even the vital principle of the continuity of the human race. I'm perfectly aware of it. Then why, my dear, present, as you seem to do, the inevitable reassertion, in your own case, of the vital principle? She laughed. Chassez le naturel, il revient au gallop. But that's just it. Is it a gallop or is it a crawl? I tell you, I thought myself immune for many years. But now, these last two or three days I'm beginning to feel a perfect idiot. A few minutes ago if the whole lot of you hadn't been standing round I think that I should have cried just for silly gladness. After all, there are thousands of Brigadier Generals. To be accurate, not more than a few hundreds. Hundreds or thousands, what does it matter? She cried impatiently. What's hecuba to me or I to hecuba? Few women have the literary sense of an opposite quotation, but no matter. She went on. What's one Brigadier General to me or I to one Brigadier General? And yet, there it is, I'm beginning to fear less this particular Brigadier General may mean a lot to me. So I come back to my original question. Am I making an ass of myself? One can't answer that question, my dear Oriole, said I, without knowing how far your fears, feelings and all the rest of it are reciprocated. Suppose I think they are. Then all I can say is God bless you, my children. But, I did after a pause, I must warn you that your budding iddle is not passing unnoticed. She snapped her fingers. I lived my private life in public too long to care a hang for that. I'm only concerned about my own course of action. Shall I go on or shall I pull myself up with a jerk? What would you like to do? She walked on for a few yards without replying. I'd lanced at her and saw that her eyes were downcast. At last she said, Now that I'm a woman again, I should like to get some happiness out of it. I should like to give happiness too, full-handed. She flashed up and took my arm and pressed it. I could do it, Tony. I know you could, said I. After which the conversation became more intimate. Anybody to look at us as we walked arm in arm round the paths of the Rose Garden would have taken us for lovers. Of course she wanted none of my advice. Her frank and generous nature felt the imperious need of expansion. I, to whom she could talk as to a sympathetic wooden idol, happened to be handy. I don't think she could have talked in the same way to a woman. I don't think she would have talked so even to me who had taken her picker-back round about her nursery if I had not, with conviction, qualified lackaday as a gallant gentleman. Eventually we came round to the practical aspect of a situation as old as romance itself. The valorous and gentle knight of hidden lineage and the earl's daughter. Not daring to aspire an ignorant of the flame he has kindled in the high-born bosom, he rides away without betraying his passion leaving the fair owner of the bosom to pine in lonely ignorance. At this time of day it's all such damn nonsense, said Lady Aurel. I pointed out to her that chivalrous souls still beautified God's earth and that such damn nonsense could not be other than the essence of their being. To this nightly company Colonel Lackaday might well belong. On the other hand there was she the same old proud earl's daughter. For all her modernity, her independence, her democratic sympathies she remained a great lady. She had little fortune but she had position and an ancient name. Her father the impoverished 14th Earl of Muncher and the 30th Baron of something else refused to sit among the cannae of the present house of Piers. He bred short horns and barked her pinks which he disposed of profitably and grew grapes and melons for cobb and garden. Read the lessons in church and wrote letters to the Times or on which the late guy Earl of Warwick would have rather prided himself when he took a fancy to make a king. The dear old idiot to Lady Oriel he belongs to the time of Nebuchadnezzar but all the same in spite of her flouting. Her birth a shorter, a social position from which she could be thrown by nothing less than outrageous immorality or a Bolshevist revolution. That Lackaday to whom the British peerage in the ordinary way was as close to book as the Talmud realised her higher state I was perfectly aware. Dear and garrulous Lady Verity Steward had given him a dinner the whole family history. She herself was a dain from the time of Henry I. I was sitting on the other side of her and heard and amused myself by scanning the expressionist face of Lackaday who listened as a strayed aviator might listen to the social gossip of the inhabitants of Mars. Anyhow he left the table with the impression that the Earl of Muncher was the most powerful noble in England and that his hostess and her cousin Lady Oriel regarded the royal family as upstarts and only visited Buckingham Palace in order to set a good example to the proletariat. I am sure he does said I after summarising Lady Verity Steward's monologue. The family has been the curse of my life said Oriel if I hadn't anticipated them or is it it by telling them to go to the devil they would have disowned me long ago. Now they're afraid of me and I've got the whip hand the kind of blackmail so they let me alone but if you made a mesalliance as they call it, said I they'd be down upon you like a cartload of bricks Bricks she reported with a laugh cartload of puffballs there isn't a real brick in the whole obsolete structure I could marry a beggar man and provided he was a decent salt and didn't get drunk and not be about and pick his teeth with his fork I should have them all around me and the beggar man in a week's time trying to save face they move heaven and earth to make the beggar man acceptable they know that if they didn't I'd be capable of going about with him like a bagel-tuggled gypsy and bring awful disgrace on them all that may be true said I but the modest lackaday doesn't realise it I'll put sense into him replied Lady Oriole and that was the end, conclusive or not of the conversation in the afternoon they went off for a broiling walk together what they found to say to each other I don't know Lady Oriole let me know further into her confidence and my then degree of intimacy with the general did not warrant the betrayal of my pardonable curiosity as the amount of sense put into him by the independent lady now, from what I have related it may seem that Lady Oriole had brought up all her stormtroops for a frontal attack on the position in which the shy general they entrenched this is not the case there was no question of attack or siege or any military operation whatever on either side the blessed pair just came together like two drops of quicksilver each recognising the other a generous and somewhat lonely soul an appreciation of the major experiences of life and with that a craving for something bigger even than the war which would give life its greater meaning she, born on heights that looked contemptuously down upon a throne he, born almost an away side ditch their intervening lives are mutual mystery they met so it seemed to me then as I am used on the romantical situation on some common plane not only of a venturous sympathy but of a humanity simple and sincere from what I could gather afterwards they never exchanged a word during this intercourse of amorous significance nor did they steer the course so dear to modern intellectuals and so dear to the antiquated wanderers through the land of tenderness which led them into analytical discussions of their respective sentimental states of being they talked just concrete war, politics and travel on their tramps they scarcely talked at all they kept in step which maintained the rhythm of their responsive souls she would lay an arresting touch on his arm at the instant in which he pointed his stick at some effect of beauty and they would both turn and smile at each other intimately, conscious of harmony we left the next morning lackaday to take over his brigade in France I, to hang around the war-office for orders to proceed on my further unimportant employment Lady Oriole and Charles saw us off at the station it's all really well for your new brigade, sir said the latter when the train was just coming to the station there in luck, but the regiment's in the soup he wanted to discuss the matter but with elderly tact I drew the young man aside so that the romantic pair should have a decent leave-taking but all she said was you'll write and tell me how you get on and he with a flash in his blue eyes and his two-year-old grin may I really you may if a general in the field has time to write to obscure females she looked adorable provoking with the rich color rising beneath her olive cheek I almost fell in love with her myself and I was glad that the ironical Charles had his back to her an expression of shock overspread lackaday's ingenuous features he shot out both hands in protest and mumbled something incoherent she took the hands with a happy laugh as the train lumbered noisily in lackaday was silent and preoccupied during the run to London at the terminus we parted I asked him to dinner at my club he hesitated for a moment then declined on the plea of military business I did not see him all the verity stewards all lady-oil till after the armistice end of chapter 3 chapter 4 of The Mountabank by William John Locke this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Simon Evers chapter 4 like ancient Gaul time is nowadays divided into three parts before, during, and after the war the lives of most men are split into these three hard and fast sections and the men who have sojourned in the valley of the shadow of death have emerged for all their phlegm their philosophy, their passionate carelessness and according to their several temperaments not the same as when they entered they have taken human life they have performed deeds of steadfast and reckless heroism unimagined even in the war-like daydreams of their early childhood they have endured want and misery and pain inconceivable they have witnessed scenes of horror one of which, in their former existence would have provided months of shuddering nightmare they have made instant decisions affecting the life or death of their fellows they have conquered fear they have seen the scale of values upon which their civilized life was so carefully based swept away and replaced by another strange and grim to which their minds must rigidly conform they return to the world of rest where humanity is still struggling to maintain the old scale the instinct born of generations of tradition compels a facile re-acceptance they think the blood and mud and the hell's delight of the war are things of the past we take up life where we left it five years ago we come back to plow, lathe, counter, bank, office and we shall carry on as though a sleeping beauty spell had been cast on the world and we were awakening at the kiss of the fairy prince of peace to our suspended tasks are they right or are they wrong in their surmise these millions of men who have passed through the valley of the shadow haunted by their memories tempered by their plunge into the elemental illumined by the self-knowledge gained in the fierce school of war does the captain VC of infantry adored and trusted by his men from whose ranks he rose by reason of latent qualities of initiative, command and inspiration contentedly returned to the selling of women's stockings in his old drapery establishment to the vulgar tyranny of the oily shop-walker to the humiliating restrictions and conditions of the salesman's life return he must perhaps he has but two trades both of which he knows profoundly the selling of hosiery and the waging of war as he can no longer wage war he sells hosiery but does he do it contentedly if his soul through reaction is contented at first would it continue to be so through the long uneventful stocking-selling years will not the war change he has suffered cause nostalgias revolts would it bring into his resumed activities a new purpose or more than the old lassitudes these questions were worrying me as they were worrying most demobilized men although I an elderly man about town had no personal cause for anxiety when one morning my man brought me in the card of Brigadier General Lackaday it was early March I may mention incidentally that I had broken down during the last wild weeks of the war and that an unthinkingly bit-beneficent war-office had flung me into Nice where they had forgotten me until a few days before during my stay in the south I led the lotus life of studious self-indulgence I lived entirely for myself and neglected my correspondence to such a point that folks ceased to write to me as a matter of fact I was a very sick man under the iron rule of doctors and nurses and such like oppressors but except to explain why I had lost touch with everybody that is a matter of insignificant importance the one or two letters I did receive from Lady Oriol did not stimulate my interest in the romance I gathered that she was in continuous relations with General Lackaday who it appeared was in the best of health but when a man of fifty has his heart and lungs and liver and lights all dislocated he may be pardoned for his chilly enthusiasm over the vulgar robustness of a very young Brigadier on this March morning however when I was beginning in sober joyousness to pick up the threads of English social life the announcement of General Lackaday gave me a real thrill of pleasure he came in long, lean, carky-clad red-tabbed with I swear more rainbow lines on his breast and a more pathetically childish grin on his face than ever we greeted each other like old friends long separated and fell immediately into intimate talk exchanging our personal histories of seven months mine differed only in brevity from an old wives tale his had the throb of adventure and the sting of failure in October his Brigade had found immortal glory in heroic death he had obeyed high orders the slaughter was no fault of his but after the disaster if the catch of an important position can be so called he'd been summarily appointed to a home command and now was demobilized demobilized I cried what on earth do you mean it appears that there are more Brigadier generals than there are Brigades I can retire with my honorary rank but if I care to stay on I must do so with the rank and pay of a major I fled up indignant I presumed that he had consigned the war-office to flamboyant perdition in his mild way he had the war-office had looked pained by offering a permanent major commission in the regular army with chance of promotion and penchant he thought it had dealt very handsomely by lackaday it hinted that though he had led his Brigade to victory he might have employed a safer a more Sunday school method oh the hint was of the slightest, the subtlest the most delicate the war-office very pointedly addressed him as general and regarding his row of ribbons implicitly declared him an ingrate but for a certain strenuous of glance to develop in places where bureaucracy would have been very frightened the war-office would have so proclaimed him in explicit speech I would have stayed on as a Brigadier said he but the major's job's impossible I just thought any soldier would have appreciated the position and it was a soldier, a colonel whom I saw but it seems that if you stay long enough in that place you're at the mercy of the little girls who run you round and eventually arrive at their level of intelligence however he grinned under the cigarette it's all over I can call myself General Lackaday till the day of my death but not as soon as it put into my pocket and, odd as it may appear I've got to earn my living well I suppose something will turn up before I had time to question him as to his plans and prospects he shifted the talk to our friends the Verity Stewards he'd stayed with them two or three times once Lady Oriole had again been a fellow guest he met her in London dined at her tiny house in Charles Street, Mayfair a little dinner party, doubtless in his honour and he had called once or twice evidently the romance was in the full idyllic stage I asked, somewhat maliciously what Lady Oriole thought of it he rose to my question like a simple fish she's far more indignant than I am I've had to stop her right into the newspapers and sending the old Earl down to the House of Lords Lady Oriole ought to be able to pull some strings said I there are not any strings going to be pulled for me and this business he rose, stalked about the room it is a modest bachelor St. James Street sitting room and he took up about as much of his space as a daddy long legs under a tumbler and suddenly halted in front of me do you know why? I made a polite gesture of inquiring ignorance because it's a damn sight too sacred I bowed, I understood I confided in my heart to owe many things to Lady Oriole he continued she's a great woman but even to her I couldn't owe my position in the British Army did you tell her so? I did I pictured the scene, knowing my Oriole I could see the pride in her dark eyes and masterful lips his renunciation had in it that of the Beaugest which she secretly adored it put the final stamp on the man upon this little emotional outburst he left, promising to dine with me the next day for a month I saw him frequently once or twice with Lady Oriole he was still in uniform waiting for the final clip of the war of his scissors severing the red tape that still bound him to the army Lady Oriole said to me I think the day he puts off khaki he'll cry he stuck to it till the very last day possible then he appeared gaunt and miserable in an ill-fitting blue-sird suit which in the wind flapped about his lean body he had the pathetic air of a lost child on this occasion Lady Oriole and he were lunching with me she adopted a motherly attitude which afforded me both pleasure and amusement she seemed bent on assuring him that the gaudy vestments of a successful general had nothing in her esteem that, like Semmelay, she felt had that unfortunate lady been given a second chance more at ease with her dubita in the common guise of ordinary man how the remnants had progressed I could not tell nothing of it was perceptible from that talk which was that of mutually understanding friends I hinted a questioner after the meal when she and I were alone for a few moments she shrugged her shoulders and regarded me enigmatically I'm a little more mid-Victorian than I thought I was which means whatever you like it to that is all I had a chance of getting out of her well, the relations between Lackaday and Lady Oriole were no business of mine I had plenty to do and to think about an anxiety over their tender affairs did not rob me of an hour's slumber then came a day when the offer of a humble mission in connection with the peace conference sent me to Paris before starting I had a last interview with Lackaday he dined with me alone in my chambers he looked ill and worried his craggy neck rising far above an evening collar too low for him seemed to betray by its stringy workings the perturbation of his spirit his carroty thatch no longer crisp from the careful military cut he had grown into a kind of untanable touselment the last month or two had aged him he was the last person one of imagined to be a distinguished soldier in the great war we talked pleasantly of indifferent things till the cigars were lit he was always a charming companion possessing a gentle and somewhat plaintive humour and then he began against his habit to speak of himself like thousands of demobilised officers looking around for some opening in civil life as to what particular round hole his square peg could fit he was most vague perhaps a position in one of the far away regions that were to be administered by the League of Nations something in Syria or Germany to Africa look here my dear fellow I said at last I presume I am the very oldest surviving acquaintance you have in the world and you can't accuse me of indiscreet curiosity you must have had some kind of profession before the war of course I had then why not go back to it it was the first time I had ventured to question him on his antecedents for all his gentleness he had a personal dignity which was enhanced by the symbolism of his uniform and forbade impertinent questioning as he kept the shutters pulled down over his pre-war career having in all our intercourse given me no hint of the avocations that had led him to know the ins of France with the accuracy of a Michelin guide it was obvious that he'd done so for his own good and deliberate reasons I had gone into my stupid head that the qualities which had raised him from private to Brigadier General had served him in a commercial pursuit that he had been, at the time of his pilgrimage through the country the agent of some French business-house on my question he stared at his cigar placing it backwards and forwards between his delicate thumb and two fingers with the air of a man hesitating on a decision until the inevitable happened the long ash of the cigar fell over his trousers he rose for the laugh and a dam and brushed himself then he said did you ever hear of Le Petit Patu? no said I, mystified scarcely ever one in this country ever has that's the advantage of obscurity he reflected for a moment then he said I never realised until I went very shyly among them the exquisite delicacy of English gentlefolk not one of you even Lady Oriole who has given me the privilege of her intimate friendship has ever pressed me to give an account of myself I'm not ashamed of Le Petit Patu but it seems so so he snapped his fingers for the word so incongruous my military rank demanded that I should preserve it from ridicule you remember I asked you to say nothing of the circus still said I, the name Petit Patu conveys nothing to me I'm the original Petit Patu when I took a partner we became plural Regardez en instant it was any later that I saw the significance of the instinctive French phrase he rose glanced around him pounced on a little silver matchbox with a wire waste paper-basket and, contorting his mobile face into a hideous grimace of impossibility began to juggle with these two objects and his cigar displaying the fortless technique of the professional after a few throws the cigar flew into his mouth the matchbox fell into the open pocket of his dinner-jacket and the waste-paper-basket descended over his head for a second he stood grinning through the wire cage in the attitude of one waiting for applause then swiftly he disembarrassed himself of the basket and threw the insulted cigar into the fire do you think that's a dignified way for General Andrew Lackaday C.B. to make his living? in the green skin tights of Petit Patu we talked far into the night my sleep was haunted by the nightmare of the six-foot-four of the stringy, bony emaciation of General Lackaday in green skin tights End of Chapter 4