The Mountebank Part 28

"What the devil----? Is this the relaxation of the great or the aberrations of the asylum?"

Andrew grinned and shook hands. "My dear old chap. I'm so glad you've come back. Sit down." He shifted the table which blocked the way to the two arm-chairs by the stove. "Elodie and I are getting into training for the next campaign." He mopped his forehead, wiped his hands and, with the old acrobat instinct, jerked the handkerchief across the room. "You're looking very well," said he.

"I'm splendid," said Bakkus.

The singer indeed had a curiously prosperous and distinguished appearance, due not only to a new brown suit and clean linen and well-fitting boots, but also to a sleekness of face and person which suggested comfortable living. His hair, now quite white, brushed back over the forehead, was neatly trimmed. His sallow cheeks had lost their gaunt hollows, his dark eyes, though preserving their ironical glitter, had lost the hunger-lit gleam of wolfishness.

"Have you signed a Caruso contract for Covent Garden?" laughed Andrew.

"I've done better. At Covent Garden you've got to work like the devil for your money. I've made a contract with my family--no work at all. Agreement--just to bury the hatchet. Theophilus--that's the Archdeacon--performed the Funeral Service. He has had a stroke, poor chap.

They sent for me."

"Elodie told me," said Andrew.

"He has been very good to me during the war. Otherwise I should have been reduced to picking up cigar ends with a pointed stick on the Boulevards--and a d.a.m.n precarious livelihood too, considering the shortage of tobacco in this benighted country. He took it into his venerable head that he was going to die and desired to see me. Voltaire remorse on his death-bed, you know."

"I fail to follow," said the literal Andrew.

"All his life he had lived an unbeliever in ME. Now your military intelligence grasps it. My brother Ronald, the runner of the p.a.w.nee Indian, head-flattening system of education, and his wife, especially his wife, the daughter of a lay brother of a bishop who has got a baronetcy for making an enormous fortune out of the war, wouldn't have me at any price. But Theophilus must have muttered some incantation which frightened them, so they surrendered. Poor old Theophilus and I had a touching meeting. He's about as lonely a thing as you could wish to meet. He married an American heiress, who died about eight years ago, and he's as rich as Croesus. We're bosom friends now. As for Mrs. Ronald I sang her songs of Araby including Gounod's 'Ave Maria' with lots of tremolo and convinced her that I'm a saintly personage. It's my proud boast that, on my account, Ronald and herself never spoke for three days. I spent a month in the wilds of Westmorland with them, and as soon as Theophilus got on the mend--he's already performing semi-Archidiaconal functions--I put my hands over my eyes and fled. My G.o.d, what a crowd! Give me a drink. I've got four weeks'

arrears to make up."

Andrew went into the _salle a manger_ and returned with brandy, syphon and gla.s.ses. Helping Bakkus he asked:

"And now, what are you going to do?"

"Nothing, my friend, absolutely nothing. I wallow in the ill-gotten matrimonial gains of Theophilus and Ronald. I wallow modestly, it is true.

The richer strata of mire I leave to hogs with whom I'm out of sympathy.

You'll have observed that I'm a man of nice discrimination. I choose my hogs. It is the Art of Life."

"Well, here's to you," said Andrew, lifting up his gla.s.s.

"And to you."

Bakkus emptied his gla.s.s at a draught, breathed a sigh of infinite content and held it out to be refilled.

"And now that I've told you the story of my life, what about you? What's the meaning of this--" he waved a hand--"this reversion to type?"

"You behold Pet.i.t Patou redivivus," said Andrew.

Bakkus regarded him in astonishment.

"But, my dear fellow, Generals can't do things like that."

"That's the cry of Elodie."

"She's a woman with whom I'm in perfect sympathy," said Bakkus.

Elodie entered, cooler, less dishevelled, in her eternal wrapper. She rushed up to Bakkus and wrung both his hands, overjoyed to see him. He must pardon her flight, but really--she was in a costume--and not even till she took it off did she know that it was split--Oh, _mon Dieu!_ Right across. With a sweep of the hand she frankly indicated the locality of the disaster. She laughed. Well, it was good that he had arrived at last. He would be able to put some sense into Andre. He a General, to go back to the stage. It was crazy! He would give Andre advice, good counsel, that was what he needed! How Andre could win battles when he was so helpless in other things, she could not understand. She seized him by the shoulders and smiled into his face.

"_Mais toi qui es si intelligent, dis quelque chose_."

"To say anything, my dear Elodie, while you are speaking," remarked Bakkus, "is beyond the power of mortal man. But now that you are silent I will say this. It is time for _dejeuner_. I am intoxicated with the sense of pecuniary plenitude, I invite you both to eat with me on the Boulevards where we can discuss these high matters."

"But it is you that are crazy," cried Elodie, gasping at the unprecedented proposal which in itself shook, like an earthquake, her intimately constructed conception of Horatio Bakkus. And on the Boulevards, too!

Her soul rose up in alarm. "You are wanting in your wits. One can't eat anywhere--even at a restaurant of the second cla.s.s--under a hundred francs for three persons."

Bakkus, with an air Louis Seize, implied that one, two or three hundred francs were as dirt in his fingers. But Elodie would have none of it. She would be ashamed to put so much money in her stomach.

"I have," said she, "for us two, eggs _au beurre noir_ and a _blanquette de veau_, and what is enough for two is enough for three.

And you must stay and eat with us as always."

"I wonder," said Bakkus, "whether Andrew realizes what a pearl you are."

So he stayed to lunch and repeated the story of his good fortune, to which Elodie listened enraptured as to a tale of hidden treasure of which he was the hero, but never a word could he find in criticism of Andrew's determination. The quips and causticities that a couple of years ago would have flowed from his thin, ironical lips, were arrested unformulated at the back of his brain. He became aware, not so much of a change as of a swift development of the sterner side of Andrew's character. Of himself he could talk sardonically enough. He could twit Elodie with her foibles in his old way. But of Andrew with his weather-beaten mug of a face marked with new, deep lines of thought and pain, sitting there courteous and simple, yet preoccupied, strangely aloof, the easy cynic felt curiously afraid. And when Elodie taxed him with pusillanimity he glanced at Andrew.

"He has made up his mind," he replied. "Some people's minds are made up of sand and water. Others of stuff composed of builders' weird materials that harden into concrete. Others again have iron bars run through the ma.s.s--reinforced concrete. That's Andrew. It's a beast of a mind to deal with, as we have often found, my dear. But what would you have? The animal is built that way."

"You flatter me," grinned Andrew, "but I don't see what the necessity of earning bread and b.u.t.ter has to do with a reinforced-concrete mind."

"It's such an undignified way of earning it," protested Elodie.

"I think," said Bakkus, "it will take as much courage for our poor friend to re-become Pet.i.t Patou, as it took for him to become General Lackaday."

Andrew's face suddenly glowed and he shot out his long arm with his bony wrists many inches from his cuff and put his delicate hand on Bakkus's shoulder.

"My dear fellow, why can't you always talk like that?"

"I'm going to," replied Bakkus, pausing in the act of lighting one of Elodie's special reserve of pre-war cigars. "Don't you realize I'm just transplanted from a forcing bed of High Anglican plat.i.tude?"

But Elodie shrugged her fat shoulders in some petulance.

"You men always stick together," she said.

Chapter XV

The unventilated dressing-room of the Olympia Music-Hall in Ma.r.s.eilles reeked of grease paint, stale human exhalations, the acrid odour, creeping up the iron stairs, of a mangy performing lion, and all manner of unmentionable things. The month of June is not the ideal month to visit Ma.r.s.eilles, even if one is free to pa.s.s the evening at a cafe table on the Cannebiere, and there is a breeze coming in from over the sea; but in copper-skied thundery weather, the sirocco conditions of more southerly lat.i.tudes, especially when one is cooped up in a confined and airless s.p.a.ce, Ma.r.s.eilles in June can be a gasping inferno. Andrew, in spite of hard physical training, was wet through. His little white-jacketed dresser, says he, perspired audibly. There was not so much air in the dressing-room as tangible swelter.

He sat by the wooden table, in front of a cracked and steaming mirror, the contents of his make-up box laid out before him, and (save for one private dress rehearsal carried out in surroundings of greater coolness and comfort) transformed himself, for the first time, from General Lackaday into the mountebank clown, Pet.i.t Patou. The electric lights that should have illuminated the mirror were not working--he had found, to his discomfort, that manifold things in post-war France refused to work--and two candles fainting into hopeless curves took their place. Anxiously over a wet skin he painted the transfiguring lines, from lip corner to ear, from nostril to eye, from eye to brow, once the mechanical hand-twist of a few moments--now the painfully concentrated effort of all his faculties.

He finished at last. The swart and perspiring dresser dried his limbs, held out the green silk high-heeled tights which reached to his armpits. Then the grotesque short-sleeved jacket. Then the blazing crimson wig rising to the point of its extravagant foot height. He felt confined within a red-hot torture-skin, a Nessus garment specially adapted to the use of discarded Brigadier-Generals. He sat on the straight-backed chair and looked round the nine foot square flyblown room, with its peeling paper and its strained, sooty skylight, which all the efforts of himself and the dresser had failed to open. It was Mademoiselle Chose, the latter at last remembered, an imperious lady with a horror of draughts and the ear (and--who knows?--perhaps the heart of the management) who had ordered it, in the winter, to be nailed down from the outside. As proof, the broken cords.

"Tell the manager that if it is not unnailed tomorrow, I shall smash a hole in it," said Andrew.

It did not matter now. In a few moments he would be summoned from the suffocating den, and then, his turn over, he would dress quickly and emerge into the open air. Meanwhile, however, he gasped in the heat and the heavy odour of the place; his head ached with an intolerable pain round his temples and at the back of his eyeb.a.l.l.s; and acute nervousness gripped his vitals.