In the month of June, 1919, I received a long letter from Brigadier-General
Andrew Lackaday together with a bulky manuscript.
The letter, addressed from an obscure hotel in Marseilles, ran as
follows:--
MY DEAR FRIEND,
On the occasion of our last meeting when I kept you up to an ungodly hour
of the morning with the story of my wretched affairs to which you patiently
listened without seeming bored, you were good enough to suggest that I
might write a book about myself, not for the sake of vulgar advertisement,
but in order to interest, perhaps to encourage, at any rate to stimulate
the thoughts of many of my old comrades who have been placed in the same
predicament as myself. Well, I can't do it. You're a professional man of
letters and don't appreciate the extraordinary difficulty a layman has, not
only in writing a coherent narrative, but in composing the very sentences
which express the things that he wants to convey. Add to this that English
is to me, if not a foreign, at any rate, a secondary language--I have
thought all my life in French, so that to express myself clearly on any
except the humdrum affairs of life is always a conscious effort. Even this
little prelude, in my best style, has taken me nearly two cigarettes to
write; so I gave up an impossible task.
But I thought to myself that perhaps you might have the time or the
interest to put into shape a whole mass of raw material which I have slung
together--from memory (I have a good one), and from my diary. It may seem
odd that a homeless Bohemian like myself should have kept a diary; but
I was born methodical. I believe my mastery of Army Forms gained me my
promotion! Anyhow you will find in it a pretty complete history of my
career up to date. "I have cut out the war----"
Is there a _lusus naturæ_ of any nationality but English, who
rising from Private to Brigadier-General, could write six hundred and
seventy-three sprawling foolscap pages purporting to contain the story
of his life from eighteen-eighty something to June nineteen hundred and
nineteen and deliberately omit, as if it were neither here nor there, its
four and a half years' glorious and astounding episode?
"_I have cut out the war!_"
On looking through the MS. I found that he had cut out the war, in so far
as his military experiences were concerned. In khaki he showed himself to
be as English and John Bull as you please; and how the deuce his meteoric
promotion occurred and what various splendid services compelled the
exhibition on his breast of a rainbow row of ribbons, are matters known
only to the War Office, Andrew Lackaday and his Maker. Well--that is
perhaps an exaggeration of secrecy. The newspapers have published
their official paragraphs. Officers who served under him have given me
interesting information. But from the spoken or written word of Andrew
Lackaday I have not been able to glean a grain of knowledge. That, I say,
is where the intensely English side of him manifested itself. But, on the
other hand, the private life that he led during the four and a half years
of war, and that which he lived before and after, was revealed with a
refreshing Gallic lack of reticence which could only proceed from his
French upbringing.
To return to his letter:--
I have cut out the war. Thousands of brainy people will be spending the
next few years of their lives telling you all about it. But I should rather
like to treat it as a blank, a period of penal servitude, a drugged sleep
afflicted with nightmare, a bit of metempsychosis in the middle of normal
life--you know what I mean. The thing that is _I_ is not General
Lackaday. It is Somebody Else. So I have given you, for what it is worth,
the story of Somebody Else. The MS. is in a beast of a muddle like the
earth before the Bon Dieu came in and made His little arrangements. Do with
it what you like. At the present moment I am between the Devil and the Deep
Sea. I am hoping that the latter will be the solution of my difficulties.
(By the way, I'm not contemplating suicide.) In either case it doesn't
matter.... If you are interested in the doings of a spent meteor, I shall
be delighted to write to you from time to time. As you said, you are the
oldest friend I have. You are almost the only living creature who knows the
real identity of Andrew Lackaday. You have been charming enough to give me
not only the benefit of your experience, riper than mine, of a man of the
world, but also such a very human sympathy that I shall always think of you
with sentiments of affectionate esteem.
Yours sincerely,
ANDREW LACKADAY
Well. There was the letter, curiously composed; half French, half English
in the turning of the phrase. The last sentence was sheer translation.
But it was sincere. I need not say that I sent a cordial reply. Our
correspondence thenceforward became intimate and regular.
In his estimate of his manuscript from a literary point of view the
poor General did not exaggerate. Anything more hopeless as a continuous
narrative I have never read. But it supplied facts, hit off odds and
ends of character, and--what the autobiography seldom does--it gave the
_ipsissima verba_ of conversations written in helter-skelter fashion
with flowing pen, sometimes in excellent French, sometimes in English,
which beginning in the elaborate style of his letter broke down into queer
vernacular; it was charmingly devoid of self-consciousness, so that the man
as he was, and not as he imagined himself to be or would like others to
imagine him, stood ingenuously disclosed.
If the manuscript had been that of a total stranger I could not have
undertaken the task of the Bon Dieu making His little arrangements to shape
the earth out of chaos. An elderly literary dilettante, who is not a rabid
archæologist, has an indolent way of demanding documents clear and precise.
As a matter of fact, it was some months before I felt the courage to tackle
the business. But knowing the man, knowing also Lady Auriol and having
in the meantime made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle Elodie Figasso and
Horatio Bakkus, playing, in fact, a minor rôle, say, that of Charles, his
friend, in the little drama of his life, I eventually decided to carry out
my good friend's wishes. The major part of my task has been a matter
of arrangement, of joining up flats, as they say in the theatre, of
translation, of editing, of winnowing, as far as my fallible judgment can
decide, the chaff from the grain in his narrative, and of relating facts
which have come within the horizon of my own personal experience.
I begin therefore at the very beginning.
Many a year ago, when the world, myself included, was young, I knew a
circus. This does not mean that I knew it from the wooden benches outside
the ring. I knew it behind the scenes. I was on terms of intimacy with the
most motley crowd it has been my good fortune to meet. It was a famous
French circus of the classical type that has by now, I fear me, passed
away. Its _hautè école_ was its pride, and it demanded for its
_première équestrienne_ the homage due to the great artists of the
world. Bernhardt of the Comédie Francaise--I think she was still there in
those far-off days, Patti of the Opera and Mlle Renée Saint-Maur of the
Cirque Rocambeau were three stars of equal magnitude. The circus toured
through France from year's end to year's end. It pitched its tent--what
else could it do, seeing that municipal ineptitude provided no building
wherein could be run chariot races of six horses abreast? But the tent, in
my youthful eyes, confused by the naphtha glares and the violent
shadows cast on the many tiers of pink faces, loomed as vast as a Roman
amphitheatre. It was a noble tent, a palace of a tent, the auditorium being
but an inconsiderable section. There was stabling for fifty horses.
There were decent dressing-rooms. There was a green-room, with a wooden,
practicable bar running along one end, and a wizened, grizzled, old barman
behind it who supplied your wants from the contents of a myriad bottles
ranged in perfect order in some obscure nook beneath the counter. They did
things in the great manner in the Cirque Rocambeau. It visited none but
first-class towns which had open spaces worthy of its magnificence. It
despised one or two night stands. The Cirque Rocambeau had a way of
imposing itself upon a town as an illusory permanent institution, a week
being its shortest and almost contemptuous sojourn. The Cirque Rocambeau
maintained the stateliness of the old world.
Now the Cirque Rocambeau fades out of this story almost as soon as it
enters it. But it affords the coincidence which enables this story to be
written. For if I had not known the Cirque Rocambeau, I should never
have won the confidence of Andrew Lackaday and I should have remained as
ignorant, as you are, at the present moment, of the vicissitudes of that
worthy man's career.
You see, we met as strangers at a country house towards the end of the war.
Chance turned the conversation to France, where he had lived most of his
life, to the France of former days, to my own early wanderings about
that delectable land, to my boastful accounts of my two or three months'
vagabondage with the Cirque Rocambeau. He jumped as if I had thrown a bomb
instead of a name at him. In fact the bomb would have startled him less.
"The Cirque Rocambeau?"
"Yes."
He looked at me narrowly. "What year was that?"
I told him.
"Lord Almighty," said he, with a gasp. "Lord Almighty!" He stared for a
long time in front of him without speaking. Then to my amazement he said
deliberately: "I remember you! You were a sort of a young English god in a
straw hat and beautiful clothes, and you used to take me for rides on the
clown's pig. The clown was my foster father. And now I'm commanding a
battalion in the British Army. By Gum! It's a damn funny world!"
Memory flashed back with almost a spasm of joy.
"'By Gum!'" I repeated. "Why, that was what my old friend Ben Flint used to
say twenty times an hour!"
It was a shibboleth proving his story true. And I remembered the weedy,
ugly, precocious infant who was the pride and spoiled darling of that
circus crowd.
Why I, a young gentleman of leisure, fresh from Cambridge, chose to go
round France with a circus, is neither here nor there. For one thing, I
assure you it was not for the bright eyes of Mlle Renée Saint-Maur or her
lesser sister luminaries. Ben Flint, the English clown, classically styled
"Auguste" in the arena, and his performing pig, Billy, somehow held
the secret of my fascination. Ben Flint mystified me. He was a man of
remarkable cultivation; save for a lapse here and there into North Country
idiom, and for a trace now and then of North Country burr, his English
was pure and refined. In ordinary life, too, he spoke excellent French,
although in the ring he had to follow the classical tradition of the
English clown, and pronounce his patter with a nerve-rasping Britannic
accent. He never told me his history. But there he was, the principal
clown, and as perfect a clown as clown could be, with every bit of his
business at his fingers' ends, in a great and important circus. Like most
of his colleagues, he knew the wide world from Tokio to Christiania; but,
unlike the rest of the crowd, whose life seemed to be bounded by the canvas
walls of the circus, and who differentiated their impressions of Singapore
and Moscow mainly in terms of climate and alcohol, Ben Flint had observed
men and things and had recorded and analysed his experiences, so that,
meeting a more or less educated youth like myself--perhaps a rare bird
in the circus world--standing on the brink of life, thirsting for the
knowledge that is not supplied by lectures at the Universities, he must
have felt some kind of satisfaction in pouring out, for my benefit, the
full vintage of his wisdom.
I see him now, squat, clean-shaven, with merry blue eyes in a mug of a
face, sitting in a deck chair, on a scrap of ragged ground forming the
angle between the row of canvas stables and the great tent, a cob pipe in
his humorous mouth, a thick half litre glass of beer with a handle to it on
the earth beside him, and I hear his shrewd talk of far-away and
mysterious lands. His pretty French wife, who knows no English, charmingly
dishevelled, uncorseted, free, in a dubious _peignoir_ trimmed
with artificial lace--she who moulded in mirific tights, sea-green with
reflections of mother-of-pearl, like Venus Anadyomene, does the tight rope
act every afternoon and evening--sits a little way apart, busy with needle
and thread repairing a sorry handful of garments which to-night will be
tense with some portion of her shapely body. Between them sprawls on his
side Billy, the great brown pig whom Ben has trained to stand on his hind
legs, to jump through hoops, to die for his country....
"They don't applaud. They don't appreciate you, Billy," the clown would
say, choosing his time when applause was scant. "Show them what you think
of them."
And then Billy would deliberately turn round and, moving in a semicircle,
present his stern to the delighted audience....
There lies Billy, the pig, the most human pig that ever breathed, adored
by Ben Flint, who, not having given the beast one second's pain in all its
beatific life, was, in his turn, loved by the pig as only a few men are
loved by a dog--and there, sitting on the pig's powerful withers, his blue
smock full of wilted daisies, is little eight-year-old tow-headed Andrew
Lackaday making a daisy chain, which eventually he twines round the
animal's semi-protesting snout.
Yes. There is the picture. It is full summer. We have lunched, Madame
and Ben and Andrew and I, at the little café restaurant at the near-by
straggling end of the town. At other tables, other aristocratic members of
the troupe. The humbler have cooked their food in the vague precincts of
the circus. We have returned to all that Ben and his wife know as home. It
is one o'clock. At two, matinee. An hour of blissful ease. We are in the
shade of the great tent; but the air is full of the heavy odour of the dust
and the flowers and the herbs of the South, and of the pungent smell of the
long row of canvas stables.
I call little Andrew. He dismounts from Billy the pig, and, insolent brat,
screws an imaginary eyeglass into his eye, which he contrives to keep
contorted, and assuming a supercilious expression and a languid manner,
struts leisurely towards us, with his hands in his pockets, thereby
giving what I am forced to admit is an imitation of myself perfect in its
burlesque. Ben Flint roars with laughter. I clutch the imp and throw him
across knee and pretend to spank him. We struggle lustily till Madame cries
out:
"But cease, André. You are making Monsieur too hot."
And Andrew, docile, ceased at once; but standing in front of me, his back
to Madame, he noiselessly mimicked Madame's speech with his lips, so
drolly, so exquisitely, that Ben Flint's hearty laugh broke out again.
"Just look at the little devil! By Gum! He has a fortune in him."
I learned in the circus as much about Andrew as he knew himself. Perhaps
more; for a child of eight has lost all recollection of parents who died
before he was two. They were circus folk, English, trapeze artists, come,
they said, from a long tour in Australia, where Andrew was born, and their
first European engagement was in the Cirque Rocambeau. Their stay was
brief; their end tragic. Lackaday _Père_ took to drink, which is the
last thing a trapeze artist should do. Brain and hand at rehearsal one
day lost co-ordination by the thousandth part of a second and Lackaday
_Mère_, swinging from her feet upwards, missed the anticipated grip,
and fell with a thud on the ground, breaking her spine. Whereupon Lackaday
_Père_ went out and hanged himself from a cross-beam in an empty
stable.
Thus, at two years old, Andrew Lackaday started life on his own account.
From that day, he was alone in the world. Nothing in his parents' modest
luggage gave clue to kith or kin. Ben Flint who, as a fellow-countryman,
went through their effects, found not even one letter addressed to them,
found no sign of their contact with any human being living or dead. They
called themselves professionally "The Lackadays." Whether it was their real
name or not, no one in the world which narrowed itself within the limits of
the Cirque Rocambeau, could possibly tell. But it was the only name that
Andrew had, and as good as any other. It was part of his inheritance, the
remainder being ninety-five francs in cash, some cheap trinkets, a couple
of boxes of fripperies which were sold for a song, a tattered copy of
Longfellow's Poems, and a brand new gilt-edged Bible, carefully covered in
brown paper, with "For Fanny from Jim" inscribed on the flyleaf. From which
Andrew Lackaday, as soon as his mind could grasp such things, deduced that
his mother's name was Fanny, and his father's James. But Ben Flint assured
me that Lackaday called his wife Myra, while she called him Alf, by which
names they were familiarly known by their colleagues. So who were Fanny and
Jim, if not Andrew's parents, remained a mystery.
Meanwhile there was the orphan Andrew Lackaday rich in his extreme youth
and the fortune above specified, and violently asserting his right to live
and enjoy. Meanwhile, too, Ben Flint and his wife had lost their pig
Bob, Billy's predecessor. Bob had grown old and past his job and become
afflicted with an obscure porcine disease, possibly senile decay, for
which there was no remedy but merciful euthanasia. The Flints mourned him,
desolate. They had not the heart to buy another. They were childless,
pigless. But behold! There, to their hand was Andrew, fatherless,
motherless. On an occasion, just after the funeral, for which Ben Flint
paid, when Madame was mothering the tiny Andrew in her arms, and Ben stood
staring, lost in yearning for the lost and beloved pig, she glanced up and
said:
"_Tiens_, why should he not replace Bob, _ce petit cochon?_"
Ben Flint slapped his thigh.
"By Gum!" said he, and the thing was done. The responsibility of self
dependence for life and enjoyment was removed from the shoulders of young
Andrew Lackaday for many years to come.
In the course of time, when the child's _état civil_, as a resident
in France, had to be declared, and this question of nationality became of
great importance in after years--Madame said:
"Since we have adopted him, why not give him our name?"
But Ben, with the romanticism of Bohemia, replied:
"No. His name belongs to him. If he keeps it, he may be able to find out
something about his family. He might be the heir to great possessions.
One never knows. It's a clue anyway. Besides," he added, the sturdy North
countryman asserting itself, "I'm not giving my name to any man save
the son of my loins. It's a name where I come from that has never been
dishonoured for a couple of hundred years."
"But it is just as you like, _mon chéri_," said Madame, who was the
placidest thing in France.
* * * * *
For thirty years I had forgotten all this; but the "By Gum!" of Colonel
Lackaday wiped out the superscription over the palimpsest of memory and
revealed in startling clearness all these impressions of the past.
"Of course we're fond of the kid," said Ben Flint. "He's free from vice and
as clever as paint. He's a born acrobat. Might as well try to teach a duck
to swim. It comes natural. Heredity of course. There's nothing he won't be
able to do when I'm finished with him. Yet there are some things which lick
me altogether. He's an ugly son of a gun. His father and mother, by the
way, were a damn good-looking pair. But their hands were the thick spread
muscular hands of the acrobat. Where the deuce did he get his long, thin
delicate fingers from? Already he can pass a coin from back to front----"
he flicked an illustrative conjuror's hand--"at eight years old. To teach
him was as easy as falling off a log. Still, that's mechanical. What I want
to know is, where did he get his power of mimicry? That artistic sense of
expressing personality? 'Pon my soul, he's damn well nearly as clever as
Billy."
During the talk which followed the discovery of our former meeting, I
reported to Colonel Lackaday these encomiums of years ago. He smiled
wistfully.
"Most of the dear old fellow's swans were geese, I'm afraid," said he. "And
I was the awkwardest gosling of them all. They tried for years to teach me
the acrobat's business; but it was no good. They might just as well have
spent their pains on a rheumatic young giraffe."
I looked at him and smiled. The simile was not inapposite. How, I asked
myself, could the man into which he had developed, ever have become an
acrobat? He was the leanest, scraggiest long thing I have ever seen. Six
foot four of stringy sinew and bone, with inordinately long legs, around
which his khaki slacks flapped, as though they hid stilts instead of human
limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly, the sleeves of his tunic far above
the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated
as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have
expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the
sparse rugosity of his person, one found to one's astonishment the most
delicately shaped hands in the world, with long, sensitive, nervous
fingers, like those of the thousands of artists who have lived and died
without being able to express themselves in any artistic medium. In a word,
the fingers of the artiste manqué. I have told you what Ben Flint, shrewd
observer, said about his hands, as a child of eight. They were the same
hands thirty years after. To me, elderly observer of human things, they
seemed, as he moved them so gracefully--the only touch of physical grace
about him--to confer an air of pathos on the ungainly man, to serve as an
index to a soul which otherwise could not be divined.
From this lean length of body rose a long stringy neck carrying a small
head surmounted by closely cropped carotty thatch. His skin was drawn tight
over the framework of his face, as though his Maker had been forced to
observe the strictest economy in material. His complexion was brick red
over a myriad freckles. His features preserved the irregular ugliness of
the child I half remembered, but it was redeemed by light blue candid eyes
set in a tight net of humorous lines, and by a large, mobile mouth, which,
though it could shut grimly on occasions, yet, when relaxed in a smile,
disarmed you by its ear-to-ear kindliness, and fascinated you by the
disclosure of two rows of white teeth perfectly set in the healthy pink
streaks of gum. He had the air of a man physically fit, inured to hardship;
the air, too, in spite of his gentleness, of a man accustomed to command.
In the country house at which we met it had not occurred to me to speculate
on his social standing, as human frailty determined that one should do in
the case of so many splendid and gallant officers of the New Army. His
manners were marked by shy simplicity and quiet reserve. It was a shock to
preconceived ideas to find him bred in a circus, even in so magnificent a
circus as the Cirque Rocambeau, and brought up by a clown, even by such a
superior clown as Ben Flint,
"And my old friend?" I asked. For I had lost knowledge of Ben practically
from the time I ended my happy vagabondage. _Maxima mea culpa_.
"He died when I was about sixteen," replied Colonel Lackaday, "and his wife
a year or so later."
"And then?" I queried, eager for autobiographical revelations.
"Then," said he, "I was a grown up man, able to fend for myself."
That was all I could get out of him, without allowing natural curiosity to
outrun discretion. He changed the conversation to the war, to the France
about which I, a very elderly Captain--have I not confessed to early
twenties thirty years before?--was travelling most uncomfortably, doing
queer odd jobs as a nominal liaison officer on the Quartermaster-General's
staff. His intimacy with the country was amazing. Multiply Sam Weller's
extensive and peculiar knowledge of London by a thousand, and you shall
form some idea of Colonel Lackaday's acquaintance with the inns of
provincial France. He could even trot out the family skeletons of the
innkeepers. In this he became animated and amusing. His features assumed an
actor's mobility foreign to their previous military sedateness, and he used
his delicate hands in expressive gestures. In parenthesis I may say we had
left the week-end party at their bridge or flirtation (according to age) in
the drawing-room, neither pursuits having for us great attraction, in spite
of Lady Auriol Dayne, of whom more hereafter, and we had found our way to
cooling drinks and excellent cigars in our host's library. It was the first
time we had exchanged more than a dozen words, for we had only arrived
that Saturday afternoon. But after the amazing mutual recognition, we sat
luxuriously chaired, excellent friends, and I, for my part, enjoying his
society.
"Ah!" said he, "Montélimar. I know that hotel. _Infect_. And the
_patron_, eh? You remember him. Forty stone. Phoo!"
The gaunt man sat up in his chair and by what mesmeric magic it happened I
know not, but before my eyes grew the living image of the gross, shapeless
creature who had put me to bed in wringing wet sheets.
"And when you complained, he looked like this--eh?"
He did look like that. Bleary-eyed, drooping-mouthed, vacant. I recollected
that the fat miscreant had the middle of his upper lip curiously sunken
into the space of two missing front teeth. The middle of Colonel Lackaday's
upper lip was sucked in.
"And he said: 'What would you have, Monsieur? _C'est la guerre?_'"
The horrible fat man, hundreds of miles away from the front, with every
convenience for drying sheets, had said those identical words. And in the
same greasy, gasping tone.
I gaped at the mimetic miracle. It was then that the memory of the
eight-year-old child's travesty of myself flashed through my mind.
"Pardon me," said I, "but haven't you turned this marvellous gift of yours
to--well to practical use?"
He grinned in his honest, wide-mouthed way, showing his incomparable teeth.
"Don't you think," said he, "I'm the model of a Colonel of the Rifles?"
He grinned again at the cloud of puzzlement on my face, and rose holding
out his hand.
"Time for turning in. Will you do me a favour? Don't give me away about the
circus."
Somehow my esteem for him sank like thermometer mercury plunged into ice. I
had thought him, with the blazing record of achievement across his chest, a
man above such petty solicitude. His mild blue eyes searched my thoughts.
"I don't care a damn, Captain Hylton," said he, in a tone singularly
different from any that he had used in our pleasant talk--"if anybody knows
I was born in a stable. A far better man than I once had that privilege.
But as it happens that I am going out to command a brigade next week, it
would be to the interest of my authority and therefore to that of the army,
if no gossip led to the establishment of my identity."
"I assure you, sir----" I began stiffly--I was only a Captain, he, but for
a formality or two, a Brigadier-General.
He clapped his hands on my shoulders--and I swear his ugly, smiling face
was that of an angel.
"My dear fellow," said he, "so long as you regard me as an honest cuss,
nothing matters in the world."
I went to bed with the conviction that he was as honest a cuss as I had
ever met.