Like Ancient Gaul, time is nowadays divided into three parts, before,
during and after the war. The lives of most men are split into these three
hard and fast sections. And the men who have sojourned in the Valley of the
Shadow of Death have emerged, for all their phlegm, their philosophy, their
passionate carelessness and according to their several temperaments, not
the same as when they entered. They have taken human life, they have
performed deeds of steadfast and reckless heroism unimagined even in the
war-like daydreams of their early childhood. They have endured want and
misery and pain inconceivable. They have witnessed scenes of horror one of
which, in their former existence, would have provided months of shuddering
nightmare. They have made instant decisions affecting the life or death of
their fellows. They have conquered fear. They have seen the scale of values
upon which their civilized life was so carefully based swept away and
replaced by another strange and grim to which their minds must rigidly
conform. They return to the world of rest where humanity is still
struggling to maintain the old scale. The instinct born of generations of
tradition compels a facile reacceptance. They think: "The blood and mud and
the hell's delight of the war are things of the past. We take up life where
we left it five years ago; we come back to plough, lathe, counter, bank,
office, and we shall carry on as though a Sleeping Beauty spell had been
cast on the world and we were awakening, at the kiss of the Fairy Prince of
peace, to our suspended tasks."
Are they right or are they wrong in their surmise, these millions of
men, who have passed through the Valley of the Shadow, haunted by their
memories, tempered by their plunge into the elemental, illumined by the
self-knowledge gained in the fierce school of war?
Does the Captain V.C. of Infantry, adored and trusted by his men, from
whose ranks he rose by reason of latent qualities of initiative command and
inspiration, contentedly return to the selling of women's stockings in his
old drapery establishment, to the vulgar tyranny of the oily shopwalker, to
the humiliating restrictions and conditions of the salesman's life? Return
he must--perhaps. He has but two trades, both of which he knows profoundly;
the selling of hosiery and the waging of war. As he can no longer wage
war, he sells hosiery. But does he do it contentedly? If his soul, through
reaction, is contented at first, will it continue to be so through the long
uneventful stocking-selling years? Will not the war change he has suffered
cause nostalgias, revolts? Will it bring into his resumed activities a new
purpose or more than the old lassitudes?
These questions were worrying me, as they were worrying most demobilized
men, although I, an elderly man about town, had no personal cause
for anxiety, when, one morning, my man brought me in the card of
Brigadier-General Lackaday. It was early March. I may mention incidentally
that I had broken down during the last wild weeks of the war, and that an
unthinkingly beneficent War Office had flung me into Nice where they had
forgotten me until a few days before.
During my stay in the South I led the lotus life of studious
self-indulgence. I lived entirely for myself and neglected my
correspondence to such a point that folks ceased to write to me. As a
matter of fact I was a very sick man, under the iron rule of doctors and
nurses and such like oppressors; but, except to explain why I had lost
touch with everybody, that is a matter of insignificant importance. The one
or two letters I did receive from Lady Auriol did not stimulate my interest
in The Romance. I gathered that she was in continuous relations with
General Lackaday, who, it appeared, was in the best of health. But when a
man of fifty has his heart and lungs and liver and lights all dislocated he
may be pardoned for his chilly enthusiasm over the vulgar robustness of a
very young Brigadier.
On this March morning, however, when I was beginning, in sober joyousness,
to pick up the threads of English social life, the announcement of General
Lackaday gave me a real thrill of pleasure.
He came in, long, lean, khaki clad, red-tabbed, with, I swear, more rainbow
lines on his breast, and a more pathetically childish grin on his face
than ever. We greeted each other like old friends long separated, and fell
immediately into intimate talk, exchanging our personal histories of seven
months. Mine differed only in brevity from an old wife's tale. His had the
throb of adventure and the sting of failure. In October his brigade had
found immortal glory in heroic death. He had obeyed high orders. The
slaughter was no fault of his. But after the disaster--if the capture of an
important position can be so called--he had been summarily appointed to a
Home Command, and now was demobilized.
"Demobilized?" I cried, "what on earth do you mean?"
"It appears that there are more Brigadier-Generals in the dissolving Army,"
said he, "than there are brigades. I can retire with my honorary rank, but
if I care to stay on, I must do so with the rank and pay of a Major."
I flared up indignant. I presumed that he had consigned the War Office to
flamboyant perdition. In his mild way he had. The War Office had looked
pained. By offering a permanent Major's commission in the Regular Army,
with chance of promotion and pension, it thought it had dealt very
handsomely by Lackaday. It hinted that though he had led his brigade to
victory, he might have employed a safer, a more Sunday school method. Oh!
the hint was of the slightest, the subtlest, the most delicate. The War
Office very pointedly addressed him as General, and, regarding his row of
ribbons, implicitly declared him an ingrate. But for a certain stoniness
of glance developed in places where Bureaucracy would have been very
frightened, the War Office would have so proclaimed him in explicit speech.
"I would have stayed on as a Brigadier," said he. "But the Major's job's
impossible. I should have thought any soldier would have appreciated the
position--and it was a soldier, a colonel whom I saw--but it seems that if
you stay long enough in that place you're at the mercy of the little
girls who run you round, and eventually you arrive at their level of
intelligence. However," he grinned and lit a cigarette, "it's all over. I
can call myself General Lackaday till the day of my death, but not a sou
does it put into my pocket. And, odd as it may appear, I've got to earn my
living. Well, I suppose something will turn up."
Before I had time to question him as to his plans and prospects, he shifted
the talk to our friends, the Verity-Stewarts. He had stayed with them two
or three times. Once Lady Auriol had again been a fellow guest. He had met
her in London, dined at her tiny house in Charles Street, Mayfair--a little
dinner party, doubtless in his honour--and he had called once or twice.
Evidently the Romance was in the full idyllic stage. I asked somewhat
maliciously what Lady Auriol thought of it. He rose to my question like a
simple fish.
"She's far more indignant than I am, I've had to stop her writing to the
newspapers and sending the old Earl down to the House of Lords."
"Lady Auriol ought to be able to pull some strings," said I.
"There are not any strings going to be pulled for me in this business,"
said Lackaday. He rose, stalked about the room--it is a modest bachelor St.
James's Street sitting-room, and he took up about as much of its space as
a daddy-long-legs under a tumbler--and suddenly halted in front of me. "Do
you know why?"
I made a polite gesture of enquiring ignorance.
"Because it's a damn sight too sacred."
I bowed. I understood.
"I can find it in my heart to owe many things to Lady Auriol," he
continued. "She's a great woman. But even to her I couldn't owe my position
in the British Army."
"Did you tell her so?"
"I did."
I pictured the scene, knowing my Auriol. I could see the pride in her dark
eyes and masterful lips. His renunciation had in it that of the _beau
geste_ which she secretly adored. It put the final stamp on the man.
Upon this little emotional outburst he left, promising to dine with me the
next day. For a month I saw him frequently, once or twice with Lady Auriol.
He was still in uniform, waiting for the final clip of the War Office
scissors severing the red tape that still bound him to the Army.
Lady Auriol said to me: "I think the day he puts off khaki he'll cry."
He stuck to it till the very last day possible. Then he appeared, gaunt and
miserable, in an ill-fitting blue serge suit which, in the wind, flapped
about his lean body. He had the pathetic air of a lost child. On this
occasion--Lady Auriol and he were lunching with me--she adopted a motherly
attitude which afforded me both pleasure and amusement. She seemed bent
on assuring him that the gaudy vestments of a successful General went for
nothing in her esteem; that, like Semele, she felt (had that unfortunate
lady been given a second chance) more at ease with her Jupiter in the
common guise of ordinary man.
How the Romance had progressed I could not tell. Nothing of it was
perceptible from their talk, which was that of mutually understanding
friends. I hinted a question after the meal, when she and I were alone for
a few moments. She shrugged her shoulders, and regarded me enigmatically.
"I'm a little more mid-Victorian than I thought I was."
"Which means?"
"Whatever you like it to."
And that is all I had a chance of getting out of her. Well, the relations
between Lackaday and Lady Auriol were no business of mine. I had plenty to
do and to think about, and anxiety over their tender affairs did not rob me
of an hour's slumber.
Then came a day when the offer of a humble mission in connection with the
Peace Conference sent me to Paris. Before starting I had a last interview
with Lackaday. He dined with me alone in my chambers.
He looked ill and worried. His scraggy neck rising far above an evening
collar too low for him seemed to betray by its stringy workings the
perturbation of his spirit. His carroty thatch no longer crisp from the
careful military cut had grown into a kind of untamable towslement. The
last month or two had aged him. He was the last person one would have
imagined to be a distinguished soldier in the Great War.
We talked pleasantly of indifferent things till the cigars were lit--he was
always a charming companion, possessing a gentle and somewhat plaintive
humour--and then he began, against his habit, to speak of himself. Like
thousands of demobilized officers he was looking around for some opening in
civil life. As to what particular round hole his square peg could fit he
was most vague. Perhaps a position in one of the far-away regions that were
to be administered by the League of Nations. Something in Syria or German
East Africa.
"Look here, my dear fellow," I said at last, "I presume I'm the very oldest
surviving acquaintance you have in the world. And you can't accuse me of
indiscreet curiosity. But surely you must have had some kind of profession
before the war."
"Of course I had."
"Then why not go back to it?"
It was the first time I had ventured to question him on his antecedents.
For all his gentleness, he had a personal dignity which was enhanced by the
symbolism of his uniform and forbade impertinent questioning. As he had
kept the shutters pulled down over his pre-war career, having in all our
intercourse given me no hint of the avocations that had led him to know the
Inns of France with the accuracy of a Michelin guide, it was obvious that
he had done so for his own good and deliberate reasons. I had got it into
my stupid head that the qualities which had raised him from private to
Brigadier-General had served him in a commercial pursuit; that he had been,
at the time of his pilgrimage through the country, the agent of some French
business house.
On my question he stared at his cigar, twisting it backwards and forwards
between his delicate thumb and two fingers, with the air of a man
hesitating on a decision, until the inevitable happened; the long ash of
the cigar fell over his trousers. He rose with a laugh and a damn and
brushed himself. Then he said:
"Did you ever hear of Les Petit Patou?"
"No," said I, mystified.
"Scarcely anyone in this country ever has. That's the advantage of
obscurity." He reflected for a moment then he said: "I never realized,
until I went very shyly among them, the exquisite delicacy of English
gentlefolk. Not one of you, not even Lady Auriol who has given me the
privilege of her intimate friendship, has ever pressed me to give an
account of myself. I'm not ashamed of Les Petit Patou. But it seems
so--so----" he snapped his fingers for the word--"so incongruous. My
military rank demanded that I should preserve it from ridicule--you'll
remember I asked you to say nothing of the circus."
"Still," said I, "the name Petit Patou conveys nothing to me."
"I'm the original Petit Patou. When I took a partner we became plural.
_Regardez un instant._"
It was only later that I saw the significance of the instinctive French
phrase.
He rose, glanced around him, pounced on a little silver match-box and
an empty wire waste-paper basket, and contorting his mobile face into a
hideous grimace of imbecility, began to juggle with these two objects and
his cigar, displaying the faultless technique of the professional. After
a few throws, the cigar flew into his mouth, the matchbox fell into the
opened pocket of his dinner jacket and the waste-paper basket descended
over his head. For a second he stood grinning through the wire cage, in
the attitude of one waiting for applause. Then swiftly he disembarrassed
himself of the basket and threw the insulted cigar into the fire.
"Do you think that's a dignified way for General Andrew Lackaday, C.B., to
make his living--in the green skin tights of Petit Patou?"
We talked far into the night. My sleep was haunted by the nightmare of the
six foot four of the stringy, bony emaciation of General Lackaday in green
skin tights.