The real discussion between them of the change that the death of Raoul
Marescaux might bring about in their relations, did not take place till
the next day. Each felt it as a sudden shock which, as in two chemicals
hitherto mingling in placid fluidity, might cause crystallization. Up to
this point, the errant husband, vanishing years before across the seas in
company with a little modiste of the Place de la Madeleine, had been but a
shadow, less a human being than a legal technicality which stood in way of
their marriage.
Occasionally during the war each had contemplated the possibility of the
husband being killed. A mere fleeting speculation. As Elodie had received
no official news of his death--which is astonishing in view of the French
Republic's accuracy in tracing the _état civil_ of even her obscurest
citizens--she presumed that he was still alive somewhere in the Shadow Land
in which exist monks and Papuans and swell-mobsmen and other members of the
human race with whom she had no concern. And Andrew had been far too busy
to give the fellow whose name he had all but forgotten, more than a passing
thought. But now, there he was, dead, officially reported, with picture and
description and distinction and place and date all complete. The shadow had
melted into the definite Eternity of Shadows.
Andrew rose early, dressed, and, according to his athletic custom, took his
swinging hour's walk through the streets still fresh with the lingering
coolness of the night, and then, after breakfast, entered Elodie's room.
But she was still fast asleep. She seldom rose till near midday. It was
only after lunch, a preoccupied meal, that they found the opportunity for
discussion, in the little stuffy courtyard of the hotel, set round with
dusty tubs of aloes and screened with a trellis of discontented vine. They
sat on a rustic bench by a door and then coffee was served on a blistered
iron table once painted yellow. There were many flies which disturbed the
slumbers of an old mongrel Newfoundland sprawling on the cobbles.
And there he put to her the proposition which he had formulated during the
night.
"My dear," said he, "I have something very important to say to you. You
will listen--eh? You won't interrupt?"
Coffee-cup in hand, she glanced at him swiftly before she sipped.
"As you will."
"Yesterday," said he, "I met a comrade of the war, a Colonel of Australian
artillery. I lunched with him, as you know."
"_Bien_," said Elodie.
"I had a long talk with him. He made certain propositions."
He repeated his conversation with Arbuthnot, described at second hand the
Solomon Islands, the beauties of reef and palm, the delights of a new,
free life and laid before her the guarantee of a competence and the
possibilities of a fortune. As he talked, Elodie's dark face grew sullen
and her eyes hardened. When he paused, she said:
"You are master of your affairs. If you wish to go, you are free. I have no
right to say anything."
"You don't allow me to finish," said he, smiling patiently. "I would not go
there without you."
"_Moi?_" She shifted round on her seat with Southern excitability and
pointed her finger at her bosom. "I go to the other end of the world and
live among savages and Australians who don't talk French--and I who know
no word of English or any other savage tongue? No, my friend. Ask anything
else of me--I give it freely, as I have given it all these years. But not
that."
"You would go with me as my wife, Elodie. We will get married."
"_Pouf!_" said Elodie, contemptuously.
Without any knowledge of the terminal values so precious to women, Andrew
felt a vague apprehension lest he had begun at the wrong end.
"Surely," said he, by way of reparation. "The death of your husband makes a
great difference. Now there is nothing to prevent our marriage."
"There is everything to prevent it," she replied. "You no longer love me."
"The same affection exists," said he, "that has always been between us."
"Then we go on leading the life that we always have led."
"I don't think it very satisfactory," said Andrew.
"I do, if it pleases us to remain together, we remain. If we want to say
'Good-bye' we are free to do so."
He noticed that she wrung her hands nervously together.
"You don't wish to say 'good-bye,' Elodie?" he asked gently.
"Oh, no. It is only not to put ourselves into the impossibility of saying
it."
"While you live, my dear," he replied, "I could never say it to you."
"If you went away to the Antipodes, you would have to say good-bye, my dear
André, for I could not accompany you--never in life. I have heard of these
countries. They may be good for men, but for women--no. Unless one is
archimillionaire, one has no servants. The woman has to keep the house and
wash the floor and cook the meals. And that--you know well--I can't do. It
may be selfish and a little unworthy but _mon Dieu!_--I have always
been frank--that's how I am. And except on tour abroad where we have lived
in hotels where everybody spoke French I have never lived out of France.
That is what I was always saying to myself when you were seeking an
occupation. 'What will happen to me if he does get a foreign appointment?'
I was afraid, oh, terribly afraid. But I said nothing to you. I loved you
too much. But now it is necessary for me to tell you what I have in my
heart. You are free to go to what wild island you like--that is why it
would be absurd for us to marry--but it would be all finished between us."
"That couldn't be," said Andrew. "What would become of you?"
She averted her head and said abruptly, "Don't think of it."
"But I must think of it. During the war----"
"During the war, it was different. _A la guerre comme à la guerre._
We knew it could not last for ever. You loved me. It was natural for me to
accept the support of _mon homme_, like all other women. But now, if
you leave me--no. _N-i-n-i, nini, c'est fini._"
So all Andrew's beautiful dreams faded into mist. He rose and crossed
the little cobbled courtyard and looked out for a while into the shabby
by-street in which the hotel was situated. That Elodie should accompany him
was the only feasible way, from the pecuniary point of view, of carrying
out the vague scheme.
It would be a life, at first, of some roughness and privation. Arbuthnot
had laid the financial side quite clearly before him. He could not expect
to land on the Solomon Islands without capital (and even a borrowed
capital) and expect an income of a thousand pounds a year to drop into his
mouth. If Elodie, although refusing to accompany him, would accept his
allowance, that allowance, would, of arithmetical necessity, be far, far
less than she had enjoyed during the war. Besides, although he was bound
tentatively to suggest it, he knew the odd pride, the rod of steel through
her nature, which he had come up against, to his own great advantage,
time after time during their partnership, and he would have been the most
astonished man in the world had she answered otherwise.
Yes, the dream of coco-nuts and pearls had melted. She was right. Even had
she consented, she would have been a ghastly failure in pioneer Colonial
life. Their existence would have been mildewed and moth-eaten with misery.
She knew herself and her limitations. To go and leave her to starve or earn
a precarious livelihood with her birds, on this post-war music-hall stage
avid for novelty of sensation, were an act as dastardly as that of the late
Raoul Mares-caux who planted her there on the platform of the Gare St.
Lazare while he was on his ways overseas with the modiste of the Place de
la Madeleine.
He turned to find her dabbing her eyes with a couple of square inches of
chiffon which, in spite of its exiguity, had smeared the powder on her
face. He sat down beside her, with his patient smile, and took her hand and
patted it.
"Come, come, my little Elodie. I am not going to leave you. It was only an
idea. If it had attracted you, well and good. But as it doesn't, let us say
no more about it."
"I don't want to hinder you in your life, André," she said brokenly. "_Ça
me donne beaucoup de peine_. But you see, don't you, that I couldn't do
it?"
He soothed her as best he could. Les Petit Patou would invent new business,
of a comicality that would once more make their fortunes. That being so,
why should they not be married?
She looked at him searchingly. "You desire it as much as that?"
"I desire earnestly," said he, "to do what is right."
"Are you sure that it doesn't come from the respectability of an English
General?"
"I don't know how it comes," he replied, hiding the sting of the shrewd
thrust with a laugh, "but it's there, all the same."
"Well, I'll think of it," said Elodie, "but give me time. _Ne m'embête
pas._"
He promised not to worry her. "But tell me," he said, after a few moments'
perplexity, "why were you so agitated all yesterday after you had seen that
photograph?"
Elodie let her hand fall on her lap and regarded him with pitying
astonishment. "_Mon Dieu!_ What do you expect a woman to be when she
learns that her husband, whom she thinks alive, has been killed two years
ago?"
Andrew gave it up.
On the morning of the sailing of the Osway from Marseilles, he called on
Arbuthnot at the Hôtel de Noailles, and told him of his decision.
"I'm sorry," said Arbuthnot, "as sorry as I can be. But in case you care to
change your mind, here's my card."
"And here's mine," said Andrew, and he handed him his card thus inscribed
MONSIEUR PATOU
(_Combinaison des Petit Patou_)
3 rue Falda
Faubourg Saint-Denis
Paris
Arbuthnot looked from the card to Andrew and from Andrew to the card, in
some perplexity.
"Why," said he, "I've seen your bills about the town. You're playing here!
Why the deuce didn't you let me know?"
"I gave a better performance at Bourdon Wood," said Andrew.
Now hereabouts, I ought to say, the famous manuscript ends. Indeed, this
late Marseilles part of it was very hurried and sketchy. The main object
which he had in view--or rather which, in the first inception of the idea,
I had suggested he should have in view--namely, "to interest, perhaps
encourage, at any rate to stimulate the thoughts of many of my old comrades
who have been placed in the same predicament as myself" (as he says in the
letter which accompanied the manuscript) he had abandoned as hopeless. He
had merely jotted things down helter-skelter, diary fashion. I have had to
supplement these notes from his letters and from the confidential talks
which we had, not very long after he had left Marseilles.
From these letters and these talks also, it appears that the tour booked by
Moignon did not prove the disastrous failure prognosticated by the first
two nights at Marseilles. Nowhere did he meet a prewar enthusiasm; but, on
the other hand, nowhere did he encounter the hostility of the Marseilles
audience. At Lyons, owing to certain broad effects, which he knew of old to
be acceptable to that unique, hard-headed, full-bellied, tradition-bound
bourgeoisie, he had an encouraging success. He felt the old power return to
him--the power of playing on the audience as on a musical instrument.
But at Saint-Etienne--a town of operatives--the performance went
disappointingly flat. Before a dull or discontented audience he stood
helpless. No, the old magnetic power had gone.
However, he had recovered the faculty of making his livelihood somehow or
other as Petit Patou, which, he began desperately to feel, was all that
mattered. His soul revolted, but his will prevailed. Elodie accompanied him
in serene content, more flaccid and slatternly than ever in her hotel room,
keenly efficient on the stage.
Now it happened that, a while later, during a visit to some friends in
Shropshire who have nothing to do with this story, I broke down in health.
I have told you before, that liaison work during the war had put out of
action the elderly crock that is Anthony Hylton. Doctors drew undertakers'
faces between the tubes of their stethoscopes as they jabbed about my
heart, and raised their eyebrows over my blood pressure.
Just at this time I had a letter from Lackaday. Incidentally he mentioned
that he was appearing in August at Clermont-Ferrand and that Horatio Bakkus
(who, in his new prosperity, could afford to choose times and seasons) had
arranged to accept a synchronous engagement at the Casino of Royat.
So while my medical advisers were wringing their hands over the practical
inaccessibility and the lack of amenity of Nauheim, whither they had
despatched me unwilling in dreary summers before the war, and while they
were suggesting even more depressing health resorts in the British Isles,
it occurred to me to ask them whether Royat-les-Bains did not contain
broken-down heart repairing works of the first order. They brightened up.
"The place of all places,' said they.
"Write me a chit to a doctor there," said I, "and I'm off at once."
I did not care much about my heart. It has always been playing me tricks
from the day I fell in love with my elder sister's French governess. But
I did care about seeing my friend Lackaday in his reincarnation as Petit
Patou, and I was most curious to make the acquaintance of Elodie and
Horatio Bakkus.
Soon afterwards, therefore, behold me on my way to Clermont-Ferrand, of
which manufacturing town Royat is a suburb.