The Mountebank Part 19

"And I maintain," said Bakkus, "that this most adorable woman is being sacrificed on the altar of Caesar's Commentaries and the latest French handbook on scientific slaughter."

"I think," said Andrew, who had imprudently sketched his course of reading to the cynic, "that _The Art of War_ by Colonel Foch is the most masterly thing ever written on the subject of warfare."

"But who is going to war, these days, my good fellow?"

"They're at it now," said Andrew.

"The Balkans--Turkey--Bulgaria? Barbarians. What's that got to do with civilized England and France?"

"What about Germany?"

"Germany's never going to sacrifice her commercial position by going to war. Among great powers war is a lunatic anachronism."

"Oh, _mon Dieu_," cried Elodie, "now you're talking politics."

Bakkus took her hand which held a fork on which was prodded a gherkin--they were at lunch--and raised it to his lips.

"_Pardon, chere madame_. It was this maniac of an Andre. He is mad or worse. Years ago I told him he ought to be a sergeant in a barrack square."

"Just so!" cried Elodie. "Look at him now. Here he is as soft as two pennyworth of b.u.t.ter. But in the theatre, if things do not go quite as he wants them--oh la la! It is Right turn--Quick march! Brr! And I who speak have to do just the same as the others."

"I know," said Bakkus. "A Prussian without bowels. Ah, my poor Elodie! My heart bleeds for you."

"Where do you keep it--that organ?" asked Andrew.

"He keeps it," retorted Elodie, "where you haven't got it. Horace understands me. You don't. Horace and I are going to talk. You smoke your cigar and think of battles and don't interfere."

It was said laughingly, so that Andrew had no cause for protest; but beneath the remark ran a streak of significance. She resented the serious tone at which Andrew had led the conversation. He and his military studies and his war of the future! They bored her to extinction. She glanced at him obliquely. A young man of thirty, he behaved himself like the senior of this youthful, flashing, elderly man who had the gift of laughter and could pluck out for her all that she had of spontaneity in life.

This conversation was typical of many which filled Elodie's head with an illusion of the brilliant genius of Horatio Bakkus. In spite of her peevishness she had a wholesome respect for Andrew--for his honesty, his singleness of purpose, his gentle masterfulness. But, all the same, their common detection of the drill-sergeant in his nature formed a sympathetic bond between Bakkus and herself. In the back of her mind, she set Andrew down as a dull dog. For all his poring over books, Bakkus could defeat him any day in argument. The agreeable villain's mastery of phrase fascinated her. And what he didn't know about the subtle delicacies of women's temperament was not worth knowing. She could tell him any thing and count on sympathy; whereas Andrew knew less about women than about his poodle dog.

There was, I say, this mid-period of their union when they grew almost estranged. Andrew, in spite of his loyalty, began to regret. He remembered the young girl who had rushed to him so tearfully as he was bending over the body of Prepimpin--the flashing vision of the women of another world.

In such a one would he find the divine companionship. She would stand with him, their souls melting together in awe before the majesty of Chartres, in worship before the dreaming spires of Rheims, in joy before the smiling beauty of Azay-le-Rideau. They would find a world of things to say of the rugged fairyland of Auvergne or the swooning loveliness of the Cote d'Azur.

They would hear each other's heart beating as they viewed great pictures, their pulses would throb together as they listened to great opera. He would lie at her feet as she read the poets that she loved. She would also take an affectionate interest in military strategy. She would be different, oh, so different from Elodie. To Elodie, save for the comfort of inns, the accommodation of dressing-rooms and the appreciation of audiences, one town was exactly the same as another. She found amus.e.m.e.nt in sitting at a cafe with a gla.s.s of syrup and water in front of her, and listening to a band; otherwise she had no aesthetic sense. She used terms regarding cathedrals and pictures for which boredom is the mildly polite euphemism. A busy street gay with shop windows attracted her far more than any grandeur of natural scenery. She loved displays of cheap millinery and underwear.

Andrew could not imagine the Other One requiring his responsive ecstasy over a fifteen-franc purple hat with a green feather, or a pile of silk stockings at four francs fifty a pair ... The Other One, in a moment of delicious weakness, might stand enraptured before a dream of old lace or exquisite tissue or what not, and it would be his joy to take her by the hand, enter the shop and say "It is yours." But Elodie had no such moments.

Her economical habits gave him no chance of divine extravagance. Even when he took her in to buy the fifteen-franc hat, she put him to shame by trying to bargain.

So they lost touch with each other until a bird or two brought them together again. Figuratively it is the history of most unions. In theirs, the birds were corporeal. It was at Montpellier. An old man had a turn with a set of performing birds, canaries, perroquets, love-birds, beauregards.

Elodie came across him rehearsing on the stage. She watched the rehearsal fascinated. Then she approached the cages.

_"Faites attention, Madame,"_ cried the old man in alarm. "You will scare them. They know no one but me."

_"Mais non, mais non,"_ said Elodie. _"Voyons, ca me connait."_

She spoke from idle braggadocio. But when she put her hands on the cages, the birds came to her. They hopped about her fearlessly. She fished in her pockets for chocolate--her only extravagant vice--and bird after bird pecked at the sweet from her mouth. The old man said:

"Truly the birds know you, Madame. It is a gift. No one can tell whence it comes--and it comes to very few. There are also human beings for whom snakes have a natural affinity."

Elodie shuddered. "Snakes! I prefer birds. Ah, _le pet.i.t amour. Viens donc!_"

She had them all about her, on head and shoulders and arms, all unafraid, all content; then all fluttering with their clipped wings, about her lips, except a grey parrot who rubbed his beak against her ear.

Andrew, emerging suddenly from the wings, stood wonder-stricken.

"But you are a bird-woman," said he. "I have heard of such, but never seen one."

From that moment, the town-bred, town-compelled woman who had thought of bird-life only in terms of sparrows, set about to test her unsuspected powers. And what the old man and Andrew had said was true.... They wandered to the Peyrou, the beautiful Louis XIV terraced head of the great aqueduct, and sat in the garden--she alone, Andrew some yards apart--and once a few crumbs attracted a bird, it would hop nearer and nearer, and if she was very still it would light on her finger and eat out of the palm of her hand, and if she were very gentle, she could stroke the wild thing's head and plumage.

A new and wonderful interest came into her life. To find birds, Elodie, who by this time hated walking from hotel to music-hall, so had her indolence grown accustomed to the luxurious car, tramped for miles through the woods accompanied by Andrew almost as excited as herself at the new discovery.

And he bought her books on birds, from which she could learn their names, their distinguishing colours and marks, their habits and their cries.

It must be remarked that the enthusiastic search for knowledge, involving, as it did, much physical exertion, lasted only a summer. But it sufficed to re-establish friendly relations between the drifting pair. She found an interest in life apart from the professional routine. During the autumn and winter she devoted herself to the training of birds, and Andrew gave her the benefit of his life's experience in the science. They travelled about with an aviary. And while Andrew, now unreproached, frowned, pencil in hand and notebook by his side, over the strategics of the Franco-Prussian War, Elodie, always in her slatternly wrapper, spent enraptured hours in putting her feathered troupe through their pretty tricks or in playing with them foolishly as one plays with a dog.

Thus their midway mutual grievances imperceptibly vanished. The positive was eliminated from their relations. They had been beginning to hate each other. Hatred ceased. Perhaps Elodie dreamed now and then of the Perfect Lover. Andrew had ever at the back of his soul the Far-away Princess, the Other One, the Being who would enable him to formulate a mode of nebulous existence and spiritual chaos, and then to live the wondrous life recalled by the magical formula. I must insist on this, so that you can recognize that the young and successful mountebank, although dead set on the perfection of his mountebankery, and, in serious fact, never dreaming of a work-a-day existence outside the walls of a Variety Theatre yet had the tentacles of his being spread gropingly, blindly, octopus-like, to the major potentialities of life. Even when looking back upon himself, as he does in the crude ma.n.u.script, he cannot account for these unconscious, or subconscious, feelings. He has no idea of the cause of the fascination wrought on him by military technicalities. It might have been chess, it might have been conchology, it might have been heraldry. Hobbies are more or less unaccountable. In view of his later career it seems to me that he found in the unalluring textbooks of Clausewitz and Foch and those bound in red covers for the use of the staff of the British Army, some expressions of a man's work--which was absent from the sphere into which fate had set him clad in green silk tights. The subject was instinct with the commanding brain. If his lot had been cast in the theatre proper, instead of in the music-hall, he might have become a great manager. However, all that is by the way. The important thing, for the time we are dealing with, is his relations with Elodie for the remainder half of their union before the war.

These, I have said, ceased to be positive. They accepted their united life as they accepted the rain and the sunshine and the long motor journeys from town to town. Spiritually they went each their respective ways, unmolested by the other. But they each formed an integral part of the other's existence. They were bound by the indissoluble ties of habit. And as Elodie, now that she had got her birds to amuse her, made no demands on Andrew, and as Andrew, who had schooled his tidy soul to toleration of her slovenliness, made no demands on Elodie, they were about as happy as any pair in France.

When she pa.s.sed thirty, her face coa.r.s.ened and her uncared-for figure began to spread.

And then the war broke out.

Chapter XI

The outbreak of war knocked the Pet.i.t Patou variety combination silly, as it knocked many thousands of other combinations in France. One day it was a going concern worth a pretty sum of money; the next day it was gone.

They happened to be in Paris, putting in a fortnight's rest after an exhausting four months on the road, and waiting for the beginning of a beautiful tour booked for Aix-les-Bains, for the race-weeks at Dieppe and Deauville, for Biarritz--the cream of August and September resorts of the wealthy.... Then, in a dazzling flash, mobilization. No more actors, no more stage hands, no more croupiers, no more punters, no more theatre-goers. No more anything but all sorts and conditions of men getting into uniform and all sorts and conditions of women trying to smile but weeping inward blood. Contracts, such as Andrew's, were blown away like thistledown.

Peremptory authorities required Andrew's papers. They had done so years before when he reached the age of military service. But now, as then, they proved Andrew indisputably to be a British subject--he had to thank Ben Flint for that--and the authorities went their growling way.

"What luck!" cried Elodie, when she heard the result of the perquisition.

"Otherwise you would have been taken and sent off to this _sale guerre._"

"I'm not so sure," replied Andrew, with a grim set of his ugly jaw, "that I'm not going off to the _sale guerre,_ without being sent."

"But it is idiotic, what you say!" cried Elodie, in consternation. "What do you think, Horace?"

Bakkus threw a pair of Elodie's corsets which enc.u.mbered the other end of the sofa on which he was lounging on to the floor and put up his feet and sucked at his cigar, one of Andrew's best--the box, by the way, Elodie, who kept the key of a treasure cupboard, seldom brought out except for Bakkus--and said:

"Andrew isn't a very intellectual being. He bases his actions on formulas.

Such people in times of stress even forget the process of thought that led to the establishment of the formulas. They shrink into a kind of trained animal. Andrew here is just like a little dog ready to do his tricks. Some voice which he can't resist will soon say, 'Bingo, die for your country.'

And our good friend, without changing a muscle of his ugly face, will stretch himself out dead on the floor."

"Truth," said Andrew, with a hard glint in his eyes, "does sometimes issue from the lips of a fool."