The Mountebank

by William John Locke

Chapter XX

If a glance could destroy, if Lady Auriol had been a Gorgon or a basilisk or a cockatrice, then had I been a slain Anthony Hylton.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

The far-flung gesture of her arm ending in outspread fingers might have been that of Elodie.

"Tell you what, my dear?" said I.

"The whole wretched tragedy. I came to you a year ago with my heart in my hand--the only human creature living who I thought could help me. And you've let me down like this. It's damnable!"

"An honourable man," said I, nettled, "doesn't betray confidences."

"An honourable man! I like that! I gave you my confidences. Haven't you betrayed them?"

"Not a bit," said I. "Not the faintest hint of what you have said to me have I whispered into the ear of man or woman."

She fumed. "If you had, you would be--unmentionable."

"Precisely. And I should have been equally undeserving of mention, if I had told you of the secret, or double, or ex-war--however you like to describe it--life of our friend."

"The thing is not on all fours," she said with a snap of her fingers. "You could have given me the key to the mystery--such as it is. You could have prevented me from making a fool of myself. You could, Tony. From the very start."

"At the very start, I knew little more than you did. Nothing save that he was bred in a circus, where I met him thirty years ago. I knew nothing more of his history till this April, when he told me he was Petit Patpu of the music-halls. His confidence has been given me bit by bit. The last time I saw you I had never heard of Madame Patou. It was you that guessed the woman in his life. I had no idea whether you were right or wrong."

"Yet you could have given me a hint--the merest hint--without betraying confidences--as you call it," she mouthed my phrase ironically. "It was not playing the game."

"I gathered," said I, "that playing the game was what both of you had decided to do, in view of the obviously implied lady in the background."

"Well?" she challenged.

"If it's a question of playing the game"--I had carried the war into the enemy's quarters--"may I repeat my original rude question this morning? What the devil are you doing here?"

She turned on me in a fury. "How dare you insinuate such a thing?"

"You've not come to Royat for the sake of my beautiful eyes."

"I'm under no obligation to tell you why I've come to Royat. Let us say my liver's out of order."

"Then my dear," said I, "you have come to the wrong place to cure it."

She glanced at me wrathfully, took out a cigarette, waved away with an unfriendly gesture the briquette I had drawn from my pocket, and struck one of her own matches. There fell a silence, during which I sat back in my chair, my arms on the elbow and my fingers' tips joined together, and assumed an air of philosophic meditation.

Presently she said: "There are times, Tony, when I should like to kill you."

"I am glad," said I, "to note the resumption of human relations."

"You are always so pragmatically and priggishly correct," she said.

"My dear," said I, "if you want me to sympathize with you in this impossible situation, I'll do it with all my heart. But don't round on me for either bringing it about or not preventing it."

"I was anxious to know something about Andrew Lackaday--I don't care whether you think me a fool or not"--she was still angry and defiant--"I wrote you pointedly. You did not answer my letter. I wrote again reminding you of your lack of courtesy. You replied like a pretty fellow in a morning coat at the Foreign Office and urbanely ignored my point."

She puffed indignantly. The terrace began to be deserted. There was a gap of half a dozen tables between us and the next group. The flamboyant Algerian removed the coffee cups. When we were alone again, I reiterated my explanation. At every stage of my knowledge I was held in the bond of secrecy. Lackaday's sensitive soul dreaded, more than all the concentrated high-explosive bombardment of the whole of the late German Army, the possibility of Lady Auriol knowing him as the second-rate music-hall artist.

"You are the woman of his dreams," said I. "You're an unapproachable star in mid ether, or whatever fanciful lover's image you like to credit him with. The only thing for his salvation was to make a clean cut. Don't you see?"

"That's all very pretty," said Auriol. "But what about me? A clean cut you call it? A man cuts a woman in half and goes off to his own life and thinks he has committed an act of heroic self-sacrifice!"

I put my hand on hers. "My dear child," said I, "if Andrew Lackaday thought you were eating out your heart for him he would be the most flabbergasted creature in the world."

She bent her capable eyes on me. "That's a bit dogmatic, isn't it? May I ask if you have any warrant for what you're saying?"

"In his own handwriting."

I gave a brief account of the manuscript.

"Where is it?" she asked eagerly.

"In my safe in London--I'm sorry----"

In indignation she flashed: "I wouldn't read a word of it."

"Of course not," said I. "Nor would I put it into your hands without Lackaday's consent. Anyhow, that's my authority and warrant."

She threw the stub of her cigarette across the terrace and went back to the original cry:

"Oh Tony, if you had only given me some kind of notion!" "I've tried to prove to you that I couldn't."

"I suppose not," she admitted wearily.

"Men have their standards. Forgive me if I've been unreasonable."

When a woman employs her last weapon, her confession of unreason, and demands forgiveness, what can a man do but proclaim himself the worm that he is? We went through a pretty scene of reconciliation.

"And now," said I, "what did Lackaday, in terms of plain fact, tell you down there?"

She told me. Apparently he had given her a précis of his life's history amazingly on the lines of a concentrated military despatch.

"Lady Auriol," said he, as soon as they were out of earshot, "you are here by some extraordinary coincidence. In a few hours you will be bound to hear all about me which I desired you never to know. It is best that I should tell you myself, at once."

It was extraordinary what she had learned from him in those few minutes. He had gone on remorselessly, in his staccato manner, as if addressing a parade, which I knew so well, putting before her the dry yet vital facts of his existence.

"I knew there was a woman--wife and children--what does it matter? I told you," she said. "But--oh God!" She smote her hands together hopelessly, fist into palm. "I never dreamed of anything like this."

"I am in a position to give you chapter and verse for it all," said I.

"Oh I know," she said, dejectedly, and the vivid flower that was Auriol, in a mood of dejection, suggested nothing more in the world than a drought-withered hybiscus--her colour had faded, the sweeping fulness of her drooped, her twenties caught the threatening facial lines of her forties--what can I say more? The wilting of a tropical bloom--that was her attitude--the sap and the life all gone.

"Oh I know. There's nothing vulgar about it. It goes back into the years. But still ..."

"Yes, yes, my dear," said I, quickly. "I understand."

We were alone now on the terrace. Far away, a waiter hung over the balustrade, listening to the band playing in the Park below. But for the noise of the music, all was still on the breathless August air. Presently she drew her palms over her face.

"I'm dog-tired."

"That abominable night journey," said I, sympathetically.

"I sat on a strapontin in the corridor, all night," she said.

"But, my dear, what madness!" I cried horrified, although in the war she had performed journeys compared with which this would be the luxury of travel. "Why didn't you book a coupé-lit, even a seat, beforehand?"

She smiled dismally. "I only made up my mind yesterday morning. I got it into my head that you knew everything there was to be known about Andrew Lackaday."

"But how did you get it?"

My question was one of amazement. No man had more out-rivalled an oyster in incommunicativeness.

It appeared that I suffered from the defects of my qualities. I had been over-diplomatic. My innocence had been too bland for my worldly years. My evasions had proclaimed me suspect. My criticism of Royat made my fear of a chance visit from her so obvious. My polite hope that I should see her in Paris on my way back, rubbed in it. If there had been no bogies about, and Royat had been the Golgotha of my picture, would not my well-known selfishness, when I heard she was at a loose end in August Paris, have summoned her with a "Do for Heaven's sake come and save me from these selected candidates for burial?" I had done it before, in analogous circumstances, I at Nauheim, she at Nuremberg. No. It was, on the contrary: "For Heaven's sake don't come near me. I'll see you in Paris if by misfortune you happen to be there."

"My dear," said I, "didn't it occur to you that your astuteness might be overreaching itself and that you might find me here--well--in the not infrequent position of a bachelor man who desires to withdraw himself from the scrutiny of his acquaintance?"

She broke into disconcerting laughter.

"You? Tony?"

"Hang it all!" I cried angrily, "I'm not eighty yet!"

However virtuous a man may be, he resents the contemptuous denial to his claim to be a potential libertine.

She laughed again; then sobered down and spoke soothingly to me. Perhaps she did me injustice, but such a thing had never entered her mind engaged as it was with puzzlement over Lackaday. When people are afflicted with fixed ideas, they grow perhaps telepathic. Otherwise she could not account for her certainty that I could give her some information. She knew that I would not write. What was a flying visit--a night's journey to Royat? In her wander years, she had travelled twelve hours to a place and twelve back in order to buy a cabbage. Her raid on me was nothing so wonderful.

"So certain was I," she said, "that you were hiding things from me, that when I saw him this morning at your table, I was scarcely surprised."

"My dear Auriol," said I, when she had finished the psychological sketch of her flight from Paris, "I think the man who unlearned most about women as the years went on, was Methuselah."

"A woman only puts two and two together and makes it five. It's as simple as that."

"No," said I, "the damnable complex mystery of it, to a man's mind, is that five should be the right answer."

She dismissed the general proposition with a shrug.

"Well, there it is. I was miserable--I've been miserable for months--I was hung up in Paris. I had this impulse, intuition--call it what you like. I came--I saw--and I wish to goodness I hadn't!"

"I wasn't so wrong after all, then," I suggested mildly.

She laughed, this time mirthlessly. "I should have taken it for a warning. Blue Beard's chamber...."

We were silent for a while. The waiters came scurrying down with trays and cloths and cups to set the little tables for tea. The western sun had burst below the awning and flooded half the length of the terrace with light leaving us by the wall just a strip of shade.

I said as gently as I could: "When you two parted in April, I thought you recognized it as final."

"It would have been, if only I had known," she said.

"Known what?"

She answered me with weary impatience.

"Anything definite. If he had gone to his death I could have borne it. If he had gone to any existence to which I had a clue, I could have borne it. But don't you see?" she cried, with a swift return of vitality. "Here was a man whom any woman would be proud to love--a strong thing of flesh and blood--disappearing into the mist. I said something heroical to him about the creatures of the old legends. One talks high-falutin' nonsense at times. But I didn't realize the truth of it till afterwards. A woman, even though it hurts her like the devil, prefers to keep a mental grip of a man. He's there--in Paris, Bombay, Omaha, with his wife and family, doing this, that and the other. He's still alive. He's still in some kind of human relation with you. You grind your teeth and say that it's all in the day's work. You know where you are. But when a man fades out of your life like a wraith--well--you don't know where you are. It has been maddening--the ghastly seriousness of it. I've done my best to keep sane. I'm a woman with a lot of physical energy--I've run it for all it's worth. But this uncanny business got on my nerves. If the man had not cared for me, I would have kicked myself into sense. But--oh, it's no use talking about that--it goes without saying. Besides you know as well as I do. You've already told me. Well then, you have it. The man I loved, the man who loved me, goes and disappears, like the shooting star he talked about, into space. I've done all sorts of fool things to get on his track, just to know. At last I came to you. But I had no notion of running him down in the flesh. You're sure of that, Tony, aren't you?"

The Diana in her flashed from candid eyes.

"Naturally," I answered. How could she know that Lackaday was here? I asked, in order to get to the bottom of this complicated emotional condition:

"But didn't you ever think of writing--oh, as a friend of course--to Lackaday, care of War Office, Cox's...?"

She retorted: "I'm not a sloppy school-girl, my friend."

"Quite so," said I. I paused, while the waiter brought tea. "And now that there's no longer any mystery?"

Her bosom rose with a sigh.

"I mourn my mystery, Tony."

She poured out tea. I passed the uninspiring food that accompanied it. We conversed in a lower key of tension. At last she said:

"If I don't walk, I'll break something."

A few moments afterwards we were in the street. She drew the breath of one suffering from exhausted air.

"Let us go up a hill."

Why the ordinary human being should ever desire to walk up hill I have never been able to discover. For me, the comfortable places. But with Lady Auriol the craving was symbolical of character. I agreed.

"Choose the least inaccessible," I pleaded.

We mounted the paths through the vines. At the top, we sat down. I wiped a perspiring brow. She filled her lungs with the air stirred by a faint breeze.

"Whereabouts is this circus?" she asked suddenly.

I told her, waving a hand in the direction of Clermont-Ferrand.

"How far?"

"About two or three miles."

"I'll go there this evening," she announced calmly.

"What?"

I nearly jumped off the wooden bench.

"My dear Auriol," said I, "my heart's dicky. You oughtn't to spring things like that on me."

"I don't see where the shock comes in. Why shouldn't I go to a circus if I want to?"

"It's your wanting to go that astonishes me."

"You're very easily surprised," she remarked. "You ought to take something for it."

"Possibly," said I. "But why on earth do you want to see the wretched Lackaday make a fool of himself?"

"If you take it that way," she said icily, "I'm sorry I mentioned it. I could have gone without your being a whit the wiser."

I lifted my shoulders. "After all, it's entirely your affair. You talked a while ago about mourning your mystery--which suggested a not altogether unpoetical frame of mind."

"There s no poetry at all about it," she declared. "That's all gone. We've come to facts. I'm going to get all the facts. Crucify myself with facts, if you like. That's the only way to get at Truth."

When a woman of Auriol's worth talks like this, one feels ashamed to counter her with platitudes of worldly wisdom. She was going to the Cirque Vendramin. Nothing short of an Act of God could prevent her. I sat helpless for a few moments. At last, taking advantage of a gleam of common sense, I said:

"It's all very well for you to try to get to the bedrock of things. But what about Lackaday?"

"He's not to know."

"He'll have to know," I insisted warmly. "The circus tent is but a small affair. You'll be there under his nose." I followed the swift change on her face. "Of course--if you don't care if he sees you..."

She flashed: "You don't suppose I'm capable of such cruelty!"

"Of course not," said I.

She looked over at the twin spires of the cathedral beneath which the town slumbered in the blue mist of the late afternoon.

"Thanks, Tony," she said presently. "I didn't think of it. I should naturally have gone to the best seats, which would have been fatal. But I've been in many circuses. There's always the top row at the back, next the canvas...."

"My dear good child," I cried, "you couldn't go up there among the lowest rabble of Clermont-Ferrand!"

She glanced at me in pity and sighed indulgently.

"You talk as if you had been born a hundred years ago, and had never heard of--still less gone through--the late war. What the----" she paused, then thrust her face into mine, so that when she spoke I felt her breath on my cheek, "What the Hell do you think I care about the rabble of Clermont-Ferrand?"

That she would walk undismayed into a den of hyenas or Bolsheviks or Temperance Reformers or any other benighted savages I was perfectly aware. That she would be perfectly able to fend for herself I have no doubt. But still, among the uneducated dregs of the sugar-less, match-less, tobacco-less populace of a French provincial town who attributed most of their misfortunes to the grasping astuteness of England, we were not peculiarly beloved.

This I explained to her, while she continued to smile pityingly. It was all the more incentive to adventure. If I had assured her that she would be torn limb from limb, like an inconvincible aristocrat flaunting abroad during the early days of the French Revolution, she would have grown enthusiastic. Finally, in desperation because, in my own way, I was fond of Auriol, I put down a masculine and protecting foot.

"You're not going there without me, anyhow," said I.

"I've been waiting for that polite offer for the last half hour," she replied.

What I said, I said to myself--to the midmost self of my inmost being. I am not going to tell you what it was. This isn't the secret history of my life.

A cloud came up over the shoulder of the hills. We descended to the miniature valley of Royat.

"It's going to rain," I said.

"Let it," said Auriol unconcerned.

Then began as dreary an evening as I ever have spent.

We dined, long before anybody else, in a tempest of rain which sent down the thermometer Heaven knows how many degrees. Half-way through dinner we were washed from the terrace into the empty dining-room. There was thunder and lightning ad libitum.

"A night like this--it's absurd," said I.

"The absurder the better," she replied. "You stay at home, Tony dear. You're a valetudinarian. I'll look after myself."

But this could not be done. I have my obstinacies as mulish as other people's.

"If you go, I go."

"As you have, according to your pampered habit, bought a car from now till midnight, I don't see how we can fail to keep dry and warm."

I had no argument left. Of course, I hate to swallow an early and rapid dinner. One did such things in the war, gladly dislocating an elderly digestion in the service of one's country. In peace time one demands a compensating leisure. But this would be comprehensible only to a well-trained married woman. My misery would have been outside Auriol's ken. I meekly said nothing. The world of young women knows nothing of its greatest martyrs.

When it starts thundering and lightening in Royat, it goes on for hours. The surrounding mountains play an interminable game of which the thunderbolt is the football. They make an infernal noise about it, and the denser the deluge the more they exult.

Amid the futile flashes and silly thunderings--no man who has been under an intensive bombardment can have any respect left for the pitiful foolery of a thunderstorm--and a drenching downpour of rain (which is solid business on the part of Nature) we scuttled from the hired car to the pay-desk of the circus. We were disguised in caps and burberrys, and Lady Auriol had procured a black veil from some shop in Royat. We paid our fifty centimes and entered the vast emptiness of the tent. We were far too early, finding only half a dozen predecessors. We climbed to the remotest Alpine height of benches. The wet, cold canvas radiated rheumatism into our backs. A steady drip from the super-saturated tent above us descended on our heads and down our necks. Auriol buttoned the collar of her burberry and smiled through her veil.

"It's like old times."

"Old times be anythinged," said I, vainly trying to find comfort on six inches of rough boarding.

"It's awfully good of you to come, Tony," she said after a while. "You can't think what a help it is to have you with me."

"If you think to mollify me with honeyed words," said I, "you have struck the wrong animal."

It is well to show a woman, now and then, that you are not entirely her dupe.

She laid her hand on mine. "I mean it, dear. Really. Do you suppose I'm having an evening out?"

We continued the intimate sparring bout for a while longer. Then we lapsed into silence and watched the place gradually fill with the populace of Clermont-Ferrand. The three top tiers soon became crowded. The rest were but thinly peopled. But there was a sufficient multitude of garlic-eating, unwashed humanity, to say nothing of the natural circus smell, to fill unaccustomed nostrils with violent sensations. A private soldier is a gallant fellow, and ordinarily you feel a comfortable sense of security in his neighbourhood; but when he is wet through and steaming, the fastidious would prefer the chance of perils. And there were many steaming warriors around us.

There we sat, at any rate, wedged in a mass as vague and cohesive as chocolate creams running into one another. I had beside me a fat, damp lady whose wet umbrella dripped into my shoes. Lady Auriol was flanked by a lean, collarless man in a cloth-cap who made sarcastic remarks to soldier friends on the tier below on the capitalist occupiers of the three-franc seats. The dreadful circus band began to blare. The sudden and otherwise unheralded entrance of a lady on a white horse followed by the ring master made us realize that the performance had begun. The show ran its course. The clowns went through their antiquated antics to the delight of the simple folk by whom we were surrounded. A child did a slack wire act, waving a Japanese umbrella over her head. Some acrobats played about on horizontal bars. We both sat forward on our narrow bench, elbows on knees and face in hands, saying nothing, practically seeing nothing, aware only of a far off, deep down, infernal pit in which was being played the Orcagnesque prelude to a bizarre tragedy. I, who had gone through the programme before, yet suffered the spell of Auriol's suspense. Long before she had thrown aside the useless veil. In these dim altitudes no one could be recognized from the ring. Her knuckles were bent into her cheeks and her eyes were staring down into that pit of despair. We had no programme; I had not retained in my head the sequence of turns. Now it was all confused. The pervasive clowns alone seemed to give what was happening below a grotesque coherence.

Suddenly the ring was empty for a second. Then with exaggerated strides marched in a lean high-heeled monster in green silk tights reaching to his armpits, topped with a scarlet wig ending in a foot high point. He wore white cotton gloves dropping an inch from the finger tips, and he carried a fiddle apparently made out of a cigar box and a broom handle. His face painted red and white was made up into an idiot grin. He opened his mouth at the audience, who applauded mildly.

Lady Auriol still sat in her bemused attitude of suspense. I watched her perplexedly for a second or two, and then I saw she had not recognized him. I said:

"That's Lackaday."

She gasped. Sat bolt upright, and uttered an "Oh-h!" a horrible little moan, not quite human, almost that of a wounded animal, and her face was stricken into tense ugliness. Her hand, stretched out instinctively, found mine and held it in an iron grip. She said in a quavering voice:

"I wish I hadn't come."

"I wish I could get you out," said I.

She shook her head.

"No, no. It would be giving myself away. I must see it through."

She drew a deep breath, relinquished my hand, turned to me with an attempt at a smile.

"I'm all right now. Don't worry."

She sat like a statue during the performance. It was quite a different performance from the one I had seen a few days before. It seemed to fail not only in the magnetic contact between artist and audience, but in technical perfection. And Elodie, whom I had admired as a vital element in this combination, so alive, so smiling, so reponsive, appeared a merely mechanical figure, an exactly regulated automaton.

My heart sank into my shoes, already chilled with the drippings of my fat neighbour's umbrella. If Lackaday had burst out on Lady Auriol as the triumphant, exquisite artist, there might, in spite of the unheroic travesty of a man in which he was invested, have been some cause for pride in extraordinary, crowd-compelling achievement. The touch of genius is a miraculous solvent. But here was something second-rate, third-rate, half-hearted--though I, who knew, saw that the man was sweating blood to exceed his limitations. Here was merely an undistinguished turn in a travelling circus which folk like Lady Auriol Dayne only visited in idle moods of good-humoured derision.

He went through it not quite to the bitter end, for I noted that he cut out the finale of the elongated violin. There was perfunctory applause, a perfunctory call. After he had made his bow, hand in hand with Elodie, he retired in careless silence and was nearly knocked down by the reappearing lady on the broad white horse.

"Let us go," said Auriol.

We threaded our way down the break-neck tiers of seats and eventually emerged into the open air. Our hired car was waiting. The full moon shone down in a clear sky in the amiable way that the moon has--as though she said with an intimate smile--"My dear fellow--clouds? Rain? I never heard of such a thing. You must be suffering from some delusion. I've been shining on you like this for centuries." I made a casual reference to the beauty of the night.

"It ought to be still raining," said Lady Auriol.

We drove back to Royat in silence. I racked my brains for something to say, but everything that occurred to me seemed the flattest of uncomforting commonplaces.

Well, it was her affair entirely. If she had given me some opening I might have responded sympathetically. But there she sat by my side in the car, rigid and dank. For all that I could gather from her attitude, some iron had entered into her soul. She was a dead woman.

The car stopped at the hotel door. We entered. A few yards down the hall the lift waited. We went up together. I shall never forget the look on her face. I shall always associate it with the picture of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. The lift stopped at my floor. Her room was higher.

I bade her good night.

She wrung my hand. "Good night, Tony, and my very grateful thanks."

I slipped out and watched her whisked, an inscrutable mystery, upwards.