The unventilated dressing-room of the Olympia Music-Hall in Marseilles
reeked of grease paint, stale human exhalations, the acrid odour, creeping
up the iron stairs, of a mangy performing lion, and all manner of
unmentionable things. The month of June is not the ideal month to visit
Marseilles, even if one is free to pass the evening at a café table on
the Cannebière, and there is a breeze coming in from over the sea; but in
copper-skied thundery weather, the sirocco conditions of more southerly
latitudes, especially when one is cooped up in a confined and airless
space, Marseilles in June can be a gasping inferno. Andrew, in spite of
hard physical training, was wet through. His little white-jacketed dresser,
says he, perspired audibly. There was not so much air in the dressing-room
as tangible swelter.
He sat by the wooden table, in front of a cracked and steaming mirror, the
contents of his make-up box laid out before him, and (save for one private
dress rehearsal carried out in surroundings of greater coolness and
comfort) transformed himself, for the first time, from General Lackaday
into the mountebank clown, Petit Patou. The electric lights that should
have illuminated the mirror were not working--he had found, to his
discomfort, that manifold things in post-war France refused to work--and
two candles fainting into hopeless curves took their place. Anxiously over
a wet skin he painted the transfiguring lines, from lip corner to ear, from
nostril to eye, from eye to brow, once the mechanical hand-twist of a few
moments--now the painfully concentrated effort of all his faculties.
He finished at last. The swart and perspiring dresser dried his limbs, held
out the green silk high-heeled tights which reached to his armpits. Then
the grotesque short-sleeved jacket. Then the blazing crimson wig rising to
the point of its extravagant foot height. He felt confined within a red-hot
torture-skin, a Nessus garment specially adapted to the use of discarded
Brigadier-Generals. He sat on the straight-backed chair and looked round
the nine foot square flyblown room, with its peeling paper and its
strained, sooty skylight, which all the efforts of himself and the
dresser had failed to open. It was Mademoiselle Chose, the latter at
last remembered, an imperious lady with a horror of draughts and the ear
(and--who knows?--perhaps the heart of the management) who had ordered it,
in the winter, to be nailed down from the outside. As proof, the broken
cords.
"Tell the manager that if it is not unnailed tomorrow, I shall smash a hole
in it," said Andrew.
It did not matter now. In a few moments he would be summoned from the
suffocating den, and then, his turn over, he would dress quickly and emerge
into the open air. Meanwhile, however, he gasped in the heat and the heavy
odour of the place; his head ached with an intolerable pain round his
temples and at the back of his eyeballs; and acute nervousness gripped his
vitals.
Presently the call-boy put his head in the doorway. Andrew rose, descended
the iron stairs to the wings. Instinctively he went to the waiting table,
covered with green velvet and gold, on which lay piled the once familiar
properties--the one-stringed fiddle, the pith balls, the rings, the cigar,
the matches, the trick silk hat, the cards, the coins, and the rest of the
juggler's apparatus, and methodically checked them. In the visible shaft
of brilliantly lit stage he could see the back of the head and the plump
shoulders and tournure of a singer rendering in bravura fashion the Jewel
Song from "Faust." The stillness whence arose this single flood of sound
seemed almost uncanny. The superheated air thickened with hot human breath
and tobacco smoke stood stagnant like a miasma in the unventilated wings
and back of the stage. The wild beast smell of the lion, although his cage
had been hurriedly wheeled out through the scenery door, still persisted
and caught the throat, and in the dim white-washed bareness, a few figures,
stagehands in shirt-sleeves, and vague pale men in hard felt hats tiptoed
about like perspiring ghosts. One of the latter approached Andrew. Monsieur
Patou need have no fear, he whispered. Everything was arranged--the
beautiful ballroom interior--the men who were to set the stage had their
orders, also the lime-light operators. Andrew nodded, already having given
explicit instructions. The singer vanished from the quivering streak of
stage, in order to give her finale close to the footlights. She ceased.
Rapturous applause. She appeared panting, perspiring, beaming in the wings;
went on again to bow her acknowledgments, amid hoarse cries of "_bis,
bis!_" She reappeared, glowing vaporously in her triumph, and spread out
her arms before the pallid man in the hard felt hat.
"Well! What did I say? You made difficulties about offering me an
engagement. I told you I could make these little birds eat out of my hand.
You hear?"--the clamour would have been perceptible to a deaf mute--"They
are mad about me. I go on again."
"_Mais non, madame_. Three songs. That is your contract. The programme
is long."
So spake the assistant manager. But the lady snapped her fingers, heard
like a pistol shot amid the uproar, and made a vast gesture with her arms.
"If I am not allowed to have my encore, I tear up my contract."
The assistant manager released himself from responsibility, yielded to
woman's unreason, and the lady, who had arranged the matter with the leader
of the orchestra, returned in contemptuous triumph to the stage.
Elodie, meanwhile, had descended and stood by Andrew's side. She wore a
very low-cut and short-skirted red evening frock, so tight that she seemed
to ooze distressingly from every aperture. A red rose drooped in her thick
black hair. Like the lank green-clad Andrew, she betrayed anxiety beneath
her heavy make-up. The delay to their turn, prolonging her suspense, caused
her to stamp her foot with annoyance.
"The _sale grue!_ and she sings like a duck."
"She pleases the audience," whispered Andrew.
"And ruins our reception. It is the last straw."
"It can't be helped," said Andrew.
The singer gave as her encore a song from "La Traviata." She certainly had
the mechanical technique so beloved by French audiences. That of Olympia
listened spell-bound to her trills and when she had finished broke once
more into enthusiastic cheering, calling and recalling her two or three
times. At last the curtain came finally down and she disappeared up the
iron staircase.
The interior backcloth and wings provided for Les Petit Patou were let
down, stage hands set the table and properties, Andrew and Elodie anxiously
supervising, and when all was clear the curtain went up. Andrew went on
alone and grinned familiarly, his old tradition, before the sea of faces. A
few faint hand-claps instead of the old expectant laughter welcomed him. A
generation had apparently risen that knew not Petit Patou. His heart sank.
The heat of the footlights shimmered like a furnace and smote him with
sudden lassitude. He began his tricks. Took his tiny one-stringed
broomstick handled fiddle and played it with his hands encased in
grotesquely long cotton gloves. Presently, with simulated impatience, he
drew off the gloves, threw them, conjurer fashion, vanishing into the air,
and then resumed his violin to find himself impeded now and then by various
articles cunningly fixed to his attire, one after another of which he
disposed of like the gloves. Finally in his perplexity he made as if to
undo his tights (a certain laugh in former days) but thinking better of it,
threw fiddle and bow as in disgust across the stage into the wings, where
they were caught by the waiting Elodie. The act, once arousing merriment,
fell flat. Andrew's heart sank lower. In itself the performance, which he
had carried through with skilful cleanness, contained nothing risible;
for laughter it depended solely on a personal note of grotesquerie,
of exaggerated bewilderment and impatience and of appealingly idiotic
self-satisfaction when each impediment was discovered and discarded. Had
he lost that personal touch, merely gone through his conjuring with the
mechanical precision of a soldier on parade? Heavens, how he hated himself
and his aching head and the audience and the lay out of futile properties!
Elodie appeared. The performance must continue. He threw into it all his
energy. Elodie gave him her old loyal support. They did their famous cigar
trick, developed from the act of Prépimpin. He had elaborated much of the
comic business. The new patter, with up-to-date allusions, had resulted
from serious conclave with Horatio Bakkus, whose mordant wit supplied many
a line that should have convulsed the house. But the house refused to be
convulsed. His look of vacant imbecility when one after another of a set
of plates with which he juggled, disappeared, being fastened to an elastic
contrivance to his back, and his expression of reproach when, turning
Elodie round, he discovered her wearing the plates as a sort of basque,
which once excited, on no matter what stage, rolling guffaws of mirth, now
passed by unappreciated.
The final item in the programme was one invented and brought to mechanical
perfection just before the war broke out. He insisted on playing his cigar
box and broom-handle fiddle in spite of Elodie's remonstrances. There was
a pretty squabble. He pulled and she pulled, with the result that both
bow and handle, by a tubular device, aided by a ratchet apparatus for the
strings, assumed gigantic proportions. Petit Patou prevailing, after an
almost disastrous fall, perched his great height on chair superimposed on
table, and, with his long lean legs and arms, looking like a monstrous and
horrible spider, began to work the heavy bow across the long strings. He
had rehearsed it to perfection. In performance, something happened. His
artist's nerve had gone. His fingers fumbled impotently for the stops. His
professional experience saved a calamitous situation. With an acrobat's
stride he reached the stage, telescoped fiddle and bow to normal
proportions, and after a lightning nod to the _chef d'orchestre_,
played the Marseillaise. At the end there was half-hearted perfunctory
applause. A light hearted section of every audience applauds anything. But
mingled with it there came from another section a horrible sibilant sound,
the stage death warrant of many an artist's dreams, the modern down-turned
thumb of the Roman populace demanding a gladiator's doom.
The curtain fell. Blank silence now from its further side. A man swiftly
bundled together the properties and drew them off. A tired looking man in
evening dress, with a hideously painted face and long waxed moustaches,
stood in the wings amid performing dogs, some free, some in basket cages,
and amid the waiting clutter of apparatus that at once was rushed upon
the stage. Andrew and Elodie moved clear and at the bottom of the iron
staircase he motioned to her to ascend first. She clutched him by the arm
and gulped down a sob.
"Mon pauvre vieux!"
He tried to smile. "Want of habit. We'll get it all back soon.
_Voyons_"--he took her fat chin in his hand and turned up her face, on
which make-up, perspiration and tears melted into one piteous paste. "This
is not the way that battles are won."
On the landing they separated. Andrew entered his sweltering dressing-room
and gave himself over to the little dresser who had just turned out the
dog-trainer in his shabby evening suit.
"Monsieur had a good reception?"
"Good enough," said Andrew, stretching himself out for the slipping off of
his tights.
"Ah," said the intuitive little man in the white jacket. "It is the war.
Audiences are no longer the same. They no longer care for subtlety.
Monsieur heard the singer before his turn? Well. Before the war Olympia
wouldn't have listened to her. One didn't pay to hear a bad gramophone.
And, on the other hand, a performance really artistic"--the little man
sighed--"it was heart-breaking."
Andrew let him talk; obviously the hisses had mounted from the wings to the
dressing-room corridors; the man meant well and kindly. When he had dressed
and appeared in his own Lackaday image, he put a twenty-franc note into the
dresser's hand with a "Thank you, my friend," and marched out and away into
the comparatively fresh air of the sulphurous night. He lit a cigarette and
sat down at the corner of a little obscure café, commanding a view of the
stage-door and waited for Elodie. His nervousness, even his headache, had
gone. He felt cold and grim and passionless, like a man measuring himself
against fate.
When Elodie came out, a while later, he sat her down at the table, and
insisted on her drinking a _Grog Américain_ to restore her balance.
But iced rum and water could not medicine an overwrought soul. In her
native air, nothing could check her irrepressibility of expression. She
had to spend her fury with the audience. In all her life never had she
encountered such imbecility--such bestial stupidity. Like the dresser, she
upbraided the war. It had changed everything. It had changed the heart
of France. She, Marseillaise of the Marseillais, was ashamed of being of
Marseilles. Once the South was warm and generous and responsive. Now it was
colder than Paris. She had never imagined that the war could press like a
dead hand on the heart of the people of Provence. Now she knew it was true
what Bakkus had once said--she had been very angry, but he was
right--that through the sunny nature of every child of the Midi swept the
_mistral_.
She was not very consecutive or coherent or logical. She sought clamorously
for every evil influence, postwar, racial, political, that could account
for the frozen failure of the evening's performance. No thought disloyal
to André hovered on the outskirts of her mind. He perceived it, greatly
touched. When she paused in her vehement outburst, he leaned towards her,
elbow on table, and his delicate hand at the end of his long bony wrist
held up as a signal of arrest:
"The fault is not that of France, or Marseilles, my dear Elodie. Perhaps
the war may have something to do with it. But the fault is mine."
She waved away so insane a suggestion. Went into details. How could it be
his fault when the night's tricks were as identical with the tricks which
used to command applause as two reproductions of the same cinema film? As
for the breakdown of the new trick with the elongated violin and bow, she
had seen where the mechanism had not worked properly. A joint had stuck;
the audience had seen it too; an accident which could happen anywhere; that
had nothing to do with the failure of the entertainment. The failure lay in
the mental and moral condition of the degraded post-war audience. For all
her championing, Andrew shook his head sadly.
"No. Your cinema analogy won't hold. The fault's in me, and I'm sorry, my
dear."'
He tried to explain. She tried to understand. It was hopeless. He knew that
he had lost, and had not yet recovered, that spiritual or magnetic contact
with his audience which is the first element in artistic success, be the
artistry never so primitive. The audience, he realized full well, had
regarded him as a mechanical figure executing mechanical antics which in
themselves had no particular claim on absorbing human interest. The eternal
appeal, the "held me with his eye" of the Ancient Mariner, was wanting. And
the man trained in the school of war saw why.
They walked to their modest hostelry. He had shrunk from the great hotels
where the lounges were still full of men in khaki going or coming from
overseas--among whom he would surely find acquaintances. But he no longer
desired to meet them. He had cut himself clean adrift from the old
associations. He told me that Bakkus and I were his only correspondents.
Henceforth he would exist solely as Petit Patou, flinging General Lackaday
dead among the dead things of war.... Besides, the great hotels of
Marseilles cost the eyes of your head. The good old days of the comfortable
car and inexpensive lodging had gone apparently for ever, and he had to
fall back on the travel and accommodation of his early struggling days.
Elodie continued the discussion of the disaster. His face wore its wry grin
of discomfiture; but he said little. They must go on as they had begun.
Perhaps things would right themselves. He would lose his loathing of his
mountebank trade and thus win back the sympathy of his audience.
Before they separated for the night she flung her arm protectingly round
him and kissed him.
"They shall applaud you, _mon vieux_, I promise you."
He laughed. Again her faith touched him deeply.
"You have not changed since our first meeting in the Restaurant Garden at
Avignon. You are always my mascot, Elodie!"
The menacing thunder broke in the night, and all the next day it rained
pitilessly. Two or three morning hours they spent at the music-hall,
rehearsing, so that no physical imperfection should mar the evening
performance. The giant violin worked with the precision of a Stradivarius.
All that human care could do was done. They drove back to the hotel to
lunch. Elodie lounged for the rest of the afternoon in her room, with a
couple of love-birds for company--the rest of the aviary in the Saint-Denis
flat being under the guardianship of Bakkus; and Andrew, with his cleared
dressing-table for a desk, brought up-to-date the autobiographical
manuscript which for the past few months had solaced so many hours of
enforced leisure. Then they dined and proceeded to the music-hall, Elodie
defiant, with a flush on her cheek, Andrew with his jaw set in a sort of
hopeless determination.
The preparations of the preceding evening repeated themselves. The rain had
slightly cooled the air, but the smell of drains and humanity and leaky
gas-pipes and the mangy lion, still caught at Andrew's throat. The little
dresser, while investing him in the hated motley, pointed proudly to the
open skylight. He himself had mounted, at great personal peril, to the
roof. One was not a Chasseur Alpin for nothing. O yes, he had gone all
through the war. He had the military medal, and four chevrons. Had Monsieur
Patou seen any service? Like everybody else, said Andrew. It was good to
get back to civil life and one's ordinary tasks, said the dresser whom
the change in the weather perhaps had rendered more optimistic. Was not
Monsieur Patou glad to return to the stage? A man's work, what? The war was
for savages and wild beasts--not for human beings. Andrew let him talk on,
wondering idly how he had sloughed his soldier's life without a regret. He
stood up, once more, in his zany garb, and, looking in the mirror, lost
sight of himself for a poignant second while the dressing-room changed into
an evil-smelling dug-out, dark save for one guttering candle stuck in a
bottle, and in the shadows he saw half a dozen lean, stern faces lit with
the eyes of men whom he was sending forth to defy death. And every one of
them hung upon his words as though they were a god's. The transient vision
faded, and he became aware again of the grotesque and painted clown
gibbering meaninglessly out of the glass.
He strode down the iron stairs. There was the table of properties waiting
in the wings. There came Elodie to join him. There, in the fiercely lighted
strip of stage, the back, cut by the wing, of the singer with the voice
of the duck, ending the "Jewel Song." Then came the applause, the now
undisputed encore, the weary nervous wait.... Such had been his life night
after night in unconsidered, undreamed-of monotony--before the war...such
would be his life henceforward--changeless, deadly, appalling.
At last, he went on. Through the mysterious psychological influence which
one audience has on another, his reception was even more frigid than
before. Elodie made her entrance. The house grew restless, inattentive,
Andrew flogged his soul until he seemed to sweat his heart's blood. Here
and there loud talking and hoarse laughter rose above the buzz and rustle
of an unappreciative audience. Elodie's breast heaved and her face grew
pallid beneath its heavy paint, but her eyes were bright.
"_Allons toujours_," Andrew whispered.
But in the famous cigar act he missed, for the first time since the far off
rehearsals after the death of Prépimpin, when the fault was due to Elodie's
lack of skill. But now, she threw it fair. It was he who missed. The
lighted cigar smote him on the cheek. The impossibility of the occurrence
staggered him for a second. But a second on the stage is an appreciable
space of time, sufficient for the audience to pounce on his clumsiness, to
burst into a roar of jeering laughter, to take up the cruelty of the hiss.
But before he could do anything Elodie, coarse and bulging out of her short
red bodice and skirt, her features contorted with anger, was in front of
the footlights, defying the house.
"_Lâches!_" she cried.
The word which no Frenchman can hear unperturbed cut the clamour like a
trumpet call. There was sudden silence.
"Yes. Cowards. You make me ashamed that I am of Marseilles. To you a
demobilized hero is nothing. But instead of practising his tricks during
the war to amuse you, he has been fighting for his country. And he has
earned this." She flashed from her bosom a white-enamelled cross depending
from a red ribbon. "_Voilà!_ Not _Chevalier_--but _Officier de
la Légion d'Honneur!_" With both pudgy arms outstretched she held the
audience for the tense moment. "And from simple soldier to General of
Brigade. And that is the Petit Patou whom you insult." She threatened them
with the cross. "You insult France!"
Reaction followed swift on her lightning speech. The French audience,
sensitive to the dramatic and the patriotic, burst into tumultuous
acclamation. Elodie smiled at them triumphantly and turned to Andrew, who
stood at the back of the stage, petrified, his chin in the air, at the full
stretch of his inordinate height, his eyes gleaming, his long thin lips
tightened so that they broke the painted grin, his hands on his hips.
Now if Elodie had carried out the plan developed during the night she could
then and there have died happily. Exulting in her success, she tripped up
the stage to Andrew, the clasp of the decoration between finger and thumb,
hoping to pin it on his breast. The applause dropped, the house hovering
for an instant on the verge of anti-climax. But Andrew, with a flash of
rage and hatred, waved her away, and strode down to the footlights, tearing
off his grotesque wig and revealing his shock of carroty hair. His soul was
sick with horror. Only the swift silence made him realize that he was bound
to address the audience.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said he, "I thank you for your generosity to me as
a soldier. But I am here to try to merit your approbation as an artist. For
what has just happened I must ask you to pardon a woman's heart."
He remaned for a while glaring at them. Then, when the applause came to an
end, he bowed, half ironically and gave a quick, imperious order, at which
the curtain was rung down amid an uproar of excitement. He strode into the
wings followed by Elodie starry-eyed, and stood panting. The curtain rose
as if automatically. The manager thrust him towards the stage.
"They want you," he cried.
"They can go to the devil," said Andrew.
Regardless of the clamour, he stalked with Elodie to the foot of the iron
stairs. On their way they passed the waxed moustachioed trainer of the
performing dogs.
"A good _coup de théâtre_, Madame," he remarked jealously.
Andrew glowered down on him.
"You say, Monsieur----?"
But the dog trainer meeting the eyes burning in the painttd face, thought
it best to say nothing, and Andrew mounted the stairs. Elodie followed
him into his dressing-room palpitating with excitement and perplexity and
clutching both his arms looked wildly into his face.
"You are not pleased with me?"
For a moment or two he regarded her with stupid hostility; then, getting a
grip on himself, he saw things from her point of view and realized her wit
and her courage and her devotion. It was no fault of hers that she had no
notion of his abhorrence of the scene.
He smiled.
"It is only you who could have dared," he said.
"I told you last night they should applaud you."
"And last night I told you you are always my mascot."
"If it only weren't true that you love me no longer," said Elodie.
The dresser entered. Elodie slipped out. Andrew made a step, after her to
the threshold.
"What the devil did she mean by that?" said he, after the manner of men.