Chapter XI
The outbreak of war knocked the Petit 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 encumbered 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."
Bakkus laughed, passing his hand over his silvering locks; but Elodie looked very serious. Absent-mindedly she picked up her corsets, and, the weather being sultry, she fanned herself with them.
"You are going to enlist in the Legion?"
"I am an Englishman, and my duty is towards my own country."
"Bingo is an English dog," said Bakkus.
Reaction from gladness made Elodie's heart grow cold, filled it with sudden dread. It was hard. Most of the women of France were losing their men of vile necessity. She, one of the few privileged by law to retain her man, now saw him swept away in the stream. Protest could be of no avail. When the mild Andrew set his mug of a face like that--his long smiling lips merged into each other like two slugs, and his eyes narrowed to little pin points, she knew that neither she nor any woman nor any man nor the bon Dieu Himself could move him from his purpose. She could only smile rather miserably.
"Isn't it a little bit mad, your idea?"
"Mad? Of course he is," said Bakkus. "Much reading in military text-books has made him mad. A considerably less interesting fellow than Andrew, who, after all, has a modicum of brains, one Don Quixote, achieved immortality by proceeding along the same lunatic lines."
Then Elodie flashed out. She understood nothing of the allusion, but she suspected a sneer.
"If I were a man I should fight for France. If Andre thinks it is his duty to fight for England, it may be mad, but it is fine, all the same. Yesterday, in the street, I sang the Marseillaise with the rest. 'Amour sacré de la Patrie.' Eh bien! There are other countries besides France. Do you deny that the amour sacré exists for the Englishman?"
Andrew rose and gravely took Elodie's face in his delicate hands and kissed her.
"I never did you the wrong, my dear, of thinking you would feel otherwise."
"Neither did I, my good Elodie," said Bakkus, hurriedly opportunist. "If I have had one ambition in my life it is to sun myself in the vicarious glamour of a hero."
The corsets rolled off Elodie's lap as she turned swiftly.
"You really think André if he enlists in the English Army will be a hero?"
"Without doubt," replied Bakkus.
"I am glad," said Elodie. "You have such a habit of mocking all the world that when you are talking of serious things one doesn't know what you mean."
So peace was made. In the agitated days that followed she saw that a profound patriotism underlay Bakkus's cynicism, and she relied much on his counsel. Every man that England could put into the field was a soldier fighting for France. She glowed at the patriotic idea. Andrew, to his great gladness, noted that no hint of the cry "What is to become of me?" passed her lips. She counted on his loyalty as he had counted on hers. When he informed her of the arrangement he had made with her lawyer for her support during his absence, all she said was:
"Mon cher, it is far too much! I can live on half. And as for the will--let us not talk of it. It makes me shiver."
Here came out all that was good in Elodie. She took the war and its obligations, as she had taken her professional work. Through all her flabbiness ran the rod of steel. She suffered, looking forward with terror to the unthinkable future. Already one of her friends, Jeanne Duval, comedienne, was a widow ... What would life be without André? She trembled before the illimitable blankness. The habit of him was the habit of her life, like eating and drinking; his direction her guiding principle. Yet she dominated her fears and showed a brave face.
Often a neighbour, meeting her in the quarter, would say:
"You are fortunate, Madame. You will not lose your husband." To the quarter, as indeed to all the world, they were Monsieur and Madame Patou. "He is an Englishman and won't be called up."
She would flash with proud retort:--
"In England men are not called up. They go voluntarily. Monsieur Patou goes to join the English army."
She was not going to make her sacrifice for nothing.
To Bakkus Andrew confided the general charge of Elodie.
"My dear fellow," said the cynic, "isn't it rather overdoing your saintly simplicity? Do you remember the farce 'Occupe-toi d'Amélie?' Do I appeal to you as a squire of deserted dames, grass-widows endowed with plenty? I--a man of such indefinite morals that so long as I have mutton cutlets I don't in the least care who pays for them? Aren't you paying for this very mouthful now?"
"You are welcome," replied Andrew with a grin, "to all the mutton that Elodie will give you."
Elodie's only proclaimed grievance against Bakkus, whom otherwise she vastly admired, was his undisguised passion for free repasts.
When it came to parting, Elodie wept and sobbed. He marvelled at her emotion.
"You love me so much, my little Elodie?"
"Mais tu es ma vie toute entière. Haven't you understood it?"
In that sense--no. He had not understood. They had arranged their lives so much as business partners, friends, fate-linked humans dependent on each other for the daily amenities of a joint existence. He had never suspected; never had cause to suspect, this hidden flood of sentiment. The simple man's heart responded. For such love she must be repaid. In the packed train which sped him towards England he carried with him no small remorse for past indifference.
Now, what next happened to Andrew, is, as I have said before, omitted from his manuscript. Nor has he vouchsafed to me, in conversation, anything but the rudest sketch. All we know is that he enlisted straight into the regular Army, the Grenadier Guards. Millions of Tommies have passed through his earlier experiences. His gymnastic training, his professional habits of accuracy and his serious yet alert mind bore him swiftly through preliminary stages to high efficiency. In November, 1914, he found himself in Flanders. Wounded, a few months afterwards, he was sent home, patched up, sent back again. Late in 1915, a sergeant, he had his first leave, which he spent in Paris.
Elodie received him with open arms. She was impressed by the martial bearing of her ramrod of a man, and she proudly fingered the three stripes on his sleeve and the D.C.M. ribbon on his breast. She took him for walks, she who, in her later supineness, hated to put one foot before the other--by the Grands Boulevards, the Rue Royale, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysées, hanging on his arm, with a recrudescence of the defiant air of the Marseilles gamine. She made valiant efforts to please her hero who had bled in great battles and had returned to fight in great battles again. She had a thousand things to tell him of her life in Paris, to which the man, weary of the mud and blood of war, listened as though they were revelations of Paradise. Yet, she had but existed idly day in and day out, in the eternal wrapper and slippers, with her cage of birds. The little beasts kept her alive--it was true. One was dull in Paris without men. And the women of her acquaintance, mostly professional, were in poverty. They had the same cry, "My dear, lend me ten francs." "My little Elodie, I am on the rocks, my man is killed." "Ma bien aimée, I am starving. You who are at ease, let me come and eat with you"--and so on and so on. Her heart grieved for them; but que veux-tu?--one was not a charitable institution. So it was all very sad and heartrending. To say nothing of her hourly anxiety. If only the sale guerre would cease and they could go on tour again! Ah, those happy days!
"Were they, after all, so very happy?" asked Andrew.
"One was contented, free from care."
"But now?"
"May they not come to tell me at any minute that you are killed?"
"That's true," said Andrew gravely.
"And besides--"
She paused.
"Besides, what?"
"I love you more now," replied Elodie.
Which gave Andrew food for thought, whenever he had time at the front to consider the appetite.
When next he had a short leave it was as a Lieutenant; but Elodie had gone to Marseilles, braving the tedious third-class journey, to attend her mother's funeral. There Madame Figasso having died intestate, she battled with authorities and lawyers and the huissier Boudin who professed heartbreak at her unfilial insistence on claiming her little inheritance. With the energy which she always displayed in the serious things of life she routed them all. She sold the furniture, the dressmaking business, wrested the greasy bag of savings from the hands of a felonious and discomfited Boudin, and returned to Paris with some few thousand francs in her pocket. Horatio Bakkus, meanwhile, had moved into the Saint-Denis flat to take care of the birds. Nobody in France craving the services of a light tenor, he would have starved, had not his detested brother the Archdeacon, a rich man, made him a small allowance. It was a sad day for him when, after a couple of months' snug lying, he had to betake himself to his attic under the roof, where he shivered in the coalless city.
"I die of convention," said he. "Behold, you have a spare room centrally heated. You are virtue itself. I not only occupy the sacred position of your guardian, but am humiliatingly aware of my supreme lack of attraction. And yet--"
"Fich'-moi le camp," laughed Elodie.
And Bakkus took up his old green valise and returned to his eyrie. There should be no scandal in the Faubourg Saint-Denis if Elodie could help it. 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 pass 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 à 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 petit 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 Othello'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 Petit 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 là-bas, mon chéri--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 glass. "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 ça."
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'éducation. 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 coarse, 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 Petit 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 amusement. 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 passed--of fierce fighting and incessant strain, and he covered himself with glory and completed the rainbow row of ribbons on his breast, until Petit 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.