The Mountebank Part 36

The scene shimmered before me and then I realized the same man in his abominable travesty of G.o.d's image, bowing before the tepid plaudits of an alien bourgeoisie in a filthy, smelly canvas circus, and I tell you I felt the agony that comes when time has dried up within one the fount of tears.

Chapter XIX

Soon afterwards I met Horatio Bakkus. With his white hair, ascetic, clean-shaved face and deep dark eyes he looked like an Italian ecclesiastic. One's glance instinctively sought the tonsure. He would come forward on to the open-air platform beneath the thick foliage of the park with the detached mien of a hierophant; and there he would sing like an angel, one of those who quire to the youngest-eyed cherubim so as not to wake them. When I made him my modest compliment he said:

"Trick, my dear sir. Trick and laziness. I might have had the _bel canto_, if I had toiled interminably; but, thank G.o.d, I've managed to carry through on self-indulgent sloth."

As he lived at Royat I saw much of him alone, Royat being such a wee place that if two sojourners venture simultaneously abroad they must of necessity meet. I found him as Lackaday had described him, a widely read scholar and an amiable and cynical companion. But in addition to these casual encounters, I was thrown daily into his society with Lackaday and Elodie.

We arranged always to lunch together, Lackaday, Bakkus and myself taking it in turns to be hosts at our respective hotels. Now and then Elodie insisted on breaking the routine and acting as hostess at a restaurant in Clermont-Ferrand. It was all very pleasant. The only woman to three men, Elodie preened herself with amusing obviousness and set out to make herself agreeable. She did it with a Frenchwoman's natural grace. But as soon as the talk drifted into anything allusive to war or books or art or politics, she manifested an ignorance abysmal in its profundity. I was amazed that a woman should have been for years the intimate companion of two men like Lackaday and Bakkus without picking up some superficial knowledge of the matters they discussed. And I was interested, even to the pitch of my amazement, to behold the deference of both men, when her polite and vacant smile proclaimed her inability to follow the conversation. Invariably one of them would leave me to the other and turn to Elodie. It was Bakkus more often who thus broke away. He had the quick impish faculty, one of the rarest of social gifts, of suddenly arresting a woman's attention by a phrase, apparently irrelevant, yet to her woman's jumping mind relevant to the matter under dispute and of carrying it off into a pleasant feminine sphere. It was impish, and I believe deliberately so, for on such occasions one could catch the ironic gleam in his eyes. The man's sincere devotion to both of them was obvious.

"Madame Patou..." I began one day, at lunch--we were talking of the tyranny of fashion, even in the idyllic lands where ladies are fully dressed in teeth necklaces and yellow ochre--"Madame Patou..."

She threw up her hands. We were lunching very well--the _pet.i.t vin_ of Auvergne is delicious--"_Mais voyons donc_--why all this ceremony among friends? Here we are, we three, and it is Andre, Horace, Elodie--and here we are, we four, and it is Monsieur Bakkus, and Lackaday--never will I be able to p.r.o.nounce that word--and Madame Patou and Monsieur le Capitaine Hylton. Look. To my friends I am Elodie _tout court_--and you?"

It was an embarra.s.sing moment. Andrew's mug of a face was as expressionless as that of a sphinx. He would no more have dreamed of addressing me by my Christian name than of hailing Field-Marshal Haig as Douglas. White-haired, thin-lipped Bakkus smiled sardonically. But there was no help for it.

"My very intimate friends call me Tony," said I.

"To-ny," she echoed. "But it is charming, To-ny. A _votre sante_, To-ny."

She held put her gla.s.s--I was sitting next to her. I clinked mine politely.

"To the health of the charming Elodie."

She was delighted. Made us all clink gla.s.ses. Bakkus said, in English:

"To the abolition of Misters, in obedience to the Lady."

"And now," cried Elodie, "what were you going to say about fashions in necklaces made of dogs' teeth?"

We pursued our frivolous talk. Bakkus said:

"The whole of the Fall of Man arose from Eve pestering Adam for a russet-brown fig-leaf in spring time."

"It was after the fall that they made themselves ap.r.o.ns," said Lackaday.

"She had her eye on those fig-leaves long before," retorted Bakkus.

We laughed. There was no great provocation to mirth. But we were attuned to gaiety. My three friends were lunching with me on the terrace of the Royat Palace Hotel. It is a long, wide terrace, reaching the whole width of the facade of the building, and doors lead on to it from all the public rooms.

Only half of it, directly accessible from the _salle a manger_ is given over to restaurant tables. Ours was on the outskirts. I like to be free, to have plenty of room and air; especially on a broiling August day.

We were in cool shade. A few feet below us stretched a lower terrace, with gra.s.s-plots and flowers and a fountain and gaily awned garden seats and umbrella-shaded chairs. And there over the parapet the vine-clad hill quivered in the sunshine against the blue summer sky, and around us were cheerful folk at lunch forgetful of hearts and blood-pressure in the warm beauty of the day. Perhaps now and then a stern and elderly French couple--he stolid, strongly bearded and decorated, she thin and brown, over-coiffured and over-ringed--with an elderly angular daughter, hard to marry, regarded us with eyes of disapproval. Elodie in happy mood threw off restraint, as, in more private and intimate surroundings, she would have thrown off her corset. But we cared not for the disapproval of the correct French profiteers....

"If they tried to smile," said Elodie, incidentally, "they would burst and all the gold would drop out."

Lackaday threw back his head and laughed--the first real, hearty laugh I had seen him exhibit since I had met him in France. You see the day, the food, the wine, the silly talk, the dancing wit of Bakkus, the delightful comradeship, had brought the four of us into a little atmosphere of joyousness. There was nothing very intellectual about it. In the hideous realm of pure intellectuality there could not exist even the hardiest ghost of a smile. Laughter, like love, is an expression of man's vehement revolt against reason. So Andrew Lackaday threw himself back in his chair and laughed at Elodie's quip.

But suddenly, as if some blasting hand had smitten him, his laughter ceased. His jaw dropped for a second and then snapped like a vice. He was sitting on my left hand, his back to the bal.u.s.trade, and facing the dining-room. At the sight of him we all instinctively sobered and bent forward in questioning astonishment. He recovered himself quickly and tried to smile as if nothing had happened--but, seeing his eyes had been fixed on something behind me, I turned round.

And there, calmly walking up the long terrace towards us, was Lady Auriol Dayne.

I sprang from my chair and strode swiftly to meet her. From a grating sound behind me I knew that Lackaday had also risen. I stretched out my hand mechanically and, regardless of manners, I said:

"What the devil are you doing here?"

She withdrew the hand that she too had put forward.

"That's a nice sort of welcome."

"I'm sorry," said I. "Please consider the question put more politely."

"Well, I'm here," she replied, "because it happens to be my good pleasure."

"Then I hope you'll find lots of pleasure, my dear Auriol."

She laughed, standing as cool as you please, very grateful to the eye in tussore coat and skirt, with open-necked blouse, and some kind of rakish hat displaying her thick auburn hair in defiance of the fashion which decreed concealment even of eyebrows with flower-pot head gear. She laughed easily, mockingly, although she saw plainly the pikestaff of a Lackaday upright a few yards away from her, in a rigid att.i.tude of parade.

"Anyhow," she said, "I must go and say how d'ye do to the General."

I gave way to her. We walked side by side to the table. She advanced to him in the most unconcerned manner. Bakkus rose politely.

"My dear General, fancy seeing you here! How delightful."

I have never seen a man's eyes devour a woman with such idiotic obviousness.

"Lady Auriol," said he, "you are the last person I ever thought of meeting." He paused for a second. Then, "May I have the pleasure of introducing--Madame Patou--Lady Auriol Dayne--Mr. Bakkus--"

"Do sit down, please, everybody," said Auriol, after the introductions.

"I feel like a common nuisance. But I came by the night train and went to sleep and only woke up to find myself just in time for the f.a.g-end of lunch."

"I am host," said I. "Won't you join us?"

What else was there to do? She glanced at me with smiling inscrutability.

"You're awfully kind, Tony. But I'm disturbing you."

The maitre d'hotel and waiter with a twist of legerdemain set her place between myself and Lackaday.

"This is a charming spot, isn't it, Madame Patou?" she remarked.

Elodie, who had regarded her wonderingly as though she had bean a creature of another world, bowed and smiled.

"We all talk French, my dear Auriol," said I, "because Madame Patou knows no English."