The Mountebank Part 21

But a few days later--

"_Ah, je m'ennuie, je m'ennuie_," she cried in an accent of boredom.

Then Bakkus elaborated a Machiavellian idea. Why shouldn't she work? At what? Why, hadn't she a troupe of trained birds? Madame Patou was not the first comer in the variety world. She could get engagements in the provinces. How did she know that the war would not last longer than Andrew's savings?

"_Mon Dieu_, it is true," she said.

Forthwith she went to the agent Moignon. After a few weeks she started on the road with her aviary, and Bakkus once more left his eyrie to take charge of the flat in the Faubourg St. Denis.

It came to pa.s.s that the next time Andrew and Elodie met in their Paris house, he wore a Major's crown and the ribbons of the Distinguished Service Order, the Military Cross and the Legion of Honour. From his letters she had grasped but little of his career and growing distinction; but the sight of him drove her mad with pride. If she had loved to parade the Paris streets with him as a Sergeant, now she could scarcely bear to exist with him otherwise than in public places. Not only an officer, but almost a Colonel. And decorated--he, an English officer, with the Legion of Honour!

The British decorations she scarcely understood--but they made a fine display. The salutes from uniformed men of every nation almost turned her head. The little restaurant round the corner, where they had eaten for so many years, suddenly appeared to her an inappropriate setting for his exalted rank. She railed against its meanness.

"Let us eat then," laughed Andrew, who had not given the matter a thought, "on the Place de la Madeleine."

But if the Restaurant Mangin in the Faubourg Saint-Denis was too lowly, the Restaurant Weber frightened her by its extravagance. She hit upon the middle course of engaging a cook for the wonderful fortnight of his leave and busying herself with collaborating in the preparation of succulent meals.

"My dear child," said Andrew, sitting at his own table in the tiny and seldom-used _salle a manger_ for the first time since their early disastrous experience of housekeeping, "why in the world haven't we had this cosiness before?"

He seemed to have entered a new world of sacred domesticity. The outward material sign of the inward grace drew him nearer to her than all protestations of affection.

"Why have you waited all these years?" he asked.

Elodie, expansive, rejoicing in the success of the well-cooked dinner, reproached herself generously. It was all her fault. Before the war she had been ignorant, idle. But the war had taught her many things. Above all it had taught her to value her _pet.i.t homme_.

"Because you now see him in his true colours," observed Bakkus, who took for granted a seat at the table as the payment for his guardianship. "The drill sergeant I always talked to you about."

"Sergeant!" Elodie flung up her head in disdain. "He is _Commandant_.

And see to it that you are not wanting in respect."

"From which outburst of conjugal ferocity, my dear fellow," said Bakkus, "you can gauge the conscientiousness of my guidance of Elodie during your absence."

Andrew grinned happily. He was full of faith in both of them--loving woman, loyal friend.

"It is true," said he, "that I have found my vocation."

"What are you going to do when the war is over and Oth.e.l.lo's occupation is gone?"

"I don't think the war will ever be over," he laughed. "It's no good looking ahead. For the present one has to regard soldiering as a permanent pursuit."

"I thought so," said Bakkus. "He'll cry when it's over and he can't move his pretty soldiers about."

"That is true?" asked Elodie, in the tone of one possessed of insight.

Andrew shrugged his shoulders, a French trick out of harmony with his British uniform.

"Perhaps," said he with a sigh.

"I too," said Elodie, "will be sorry when you become _Pet.i.t Patou_ again."

He touched her cheek caressingly with the back of his hand, and smiled.

Strange how the war had brought her the gift of understanding. Never had he felt so close to her.

"All the same," added Elodie, "it is very dangerous _la-bas, mon cheri_--and I don't want you to get killed."

"All the glory and none of the death," said Bakkus. "Conducted on those principles, warfare would be ideal employment for the young. But you would be going back to the Middle Ages, when, if a knight were killed, he was vastly surprised and annoyed. Personally I hate the war. It prevents me from earning a living, and insults me with the sense of my age, physical decay and incapacity. I haven't a good word to say for it."

"If you only went among the wounded in the Paris hospitals," replied Andrew, with some asperity, "and sang to them--"

"My good fool," said Bakkus, "I've been doing that for about four or five hours a day since the war began, till I've no voice left."

"Didn't you know?" cried Elodie. "Horace has never worked so hard in his life. And for nothing. In his way he is a hero like you."

"Why the devil didn't you tell me?" cried Andrew.

Bakkus flung a hand. "If you hadn't to dress the part what should I have known of your rank and orders? Would you go about saying 'I'm a dam fine fellow'?"

"I'm sorry," said Andrew, filling his guest's gla.s.s. "I ought to have taken it for granted."

"We give entertainments together," said Elodie. "He sings and I take the birds. Ah! the poilus. They are like children. When Riquiqui takes off Paulette's cap they twist themselves up with laughing. _Il faut voir ca."_

This was all news to Andrew, and it delighted him beyond measure. He could take away now to the trenches the picture of Elodie as ministering angel surrounded by her birds--an exquisite, romantic, soul-satisfying picture.

"But why," he asked again, "didn't you tell me?"

_"Ah, tu sais_--letters--I am not very good at letters. _Fante d'education._ I want so much to tell you what I feel that I forget to tell you what I do."

Bakkus smiled sardonically as he sipped his liqueur brandy. She had given her bird performance on only two occasions. She had exaggerated it into the gracious habit of months or years. Just like a woman! Anyhow, the disillusionment of Andrew was none of his business. The dear old chap was eating lotus in his Fool's Paradise, thinking it genuine pre-war lotus and not war _ersatz._ It would be a crime to disabuse him.

For Andrew the days of leave sped quickly. Not a domestic cloud darkened his relations with Elodie. Through indolent and careless living she had grown gross and coa.r.s.e, too unshapely and unseemly for her age. When the news of his speedy arrival in Paris reached her, she caught sight of herself in her mirror and with a sudden pang realized her lack of attraction. In a fever she corseted herself, creamed her face, set a coiffeur to work his will on her hair. But what retrieval of lost comeliness could be effected in a day or two? The utmost thing of practical value she could do was to buy a new, gay dressing-gown and a pair of high-heeled slippers. And Andrew, conscious of waning beauty, overlooked it in the light of her new and unsuspected coquetry. Where once the slattern lolled about the little salon, now moved an attractively garbed and tidy woman. Instead of the sloven, he found a housewife who made up in zeal for lack of experience. The patriotic soldier's mate replaced the indifferent and oft-times querulous partner of Les Pet.i.t Patou. It is true that, when, in answer to the question, "A battle--what is that like?" he tried to interest her in a scientific exposition, she would interrupt him, a love-bird on her finger and its beak at her lips, with: "Look, isn't he sweet?" thereby throwing him out of gear; it is true that she yawned and frankly confessed her boredom, as she had done for many years when the talk of Andrew and Bakkus went beyond her intellectual horizon; but--_que voulez-vous?_--even a great war cannot, in a few months, supply the deficiencies of thirty uneducated years. The heart, the generous instinct--these were the things that the war had awakened in Elodie--and these were the things that mattered and made him so gracious a homecoming.

And she had grasped the inner truth of the war. She had accepted it in the grand manner, like a daughter of France.

So at least it seemed to Andrew. The depth of her feelings he did not try to gauge. Into the part in her demonstrativeness played by vanity or by momentary reaction from the dread of losing him, her means of support, it never entered his head to enquire. That she should sun herself in reflected splendour for the benefit of the quarter and of such friends as she had, and that she should punctiliously exact from them the respect due to his military rank, afforded him gentle amus.e.m.e.nt. He knew that, as soon as his back was turned, she would relapse into slipshod ways. But her efforts delighted him, proved her love and her loyalty. For the third time he parted from her to go off to the wars, more impressed than ever by the sense of his inappreciation of her virtues. He wrote her a long letter of self-upbraiding for the past, and the contrast between the slimy dug-out where he was writing by the light of one guttering candle, and the cosy salon he had just quitted being productive of nostalgia, he expressed himself, for once in his life, in the terms of an ardent lover.

Elodie, who found his handwriting difficult to read at the best of times, and undecipherable in hard pencil on thin paper, handed the letter over to the faithful Bakkus, who read it aloud with a running commentary of ironic humour. This Andrew did not know till long afterwards.

In a few weeks he got the command of his battalion.

Bakkus wrote:--

"How you'll be able to put up with us now I know not. Elodie can scarcely put up with herself. She gives orders in writing to tradesmen now and subscribes herself 'Madame La Colonelle Patou.' She has turned down a bird engagement offered by Moignon, as beneath her present dignity. You had better come home as soon as you can."

Andrew laughed and threw the letter away. He had far more serious things to attend to than Elodie's pretty foibles. And when you are commanding a crack regiment in a famous division in the line you no more think of leave than of running away from the enemy. Months pa.s.sed--of fierce fighting and incessant strain, and he covered himself with glory and completed the rainbow row of ribbons on his breast, until Pet.i.t Patou and Elodie and Bakkus and the apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Denis became things of a far-off dream.

And before he saw Elodie again, he had met Lady Auriol Dayne.

Chapter XII