Soon afterwards I met Horatio Bakkus. With his white hair, ascetic,
clean-shaved face and deep dark eyes he looked like an Italian
ecclesiastic. One's glance instinctively sought the tonsure. He would come
forward on to the open-air platform beneath the thick foliage of the park
with the detached mien of a hierophant; and there he would sing like an
angel, one of those who quire to the youngest-eyed cherubim so as not to
wake them. When I made him my modest compliment he said:
"Trick, my dear sir. Trick and laziness. I might have had the _bel
canto_, if I had toiled interminably; but, thank God, I've managed to
carry through on self-indulgent sloth."
As he lived at Royat I saw much of him alone, Royat being such a wee place
that if two sojourners venture simultaneously abroad they must of necessity
meet. I found him as Lackaday had described him, a widely read scholar
and an amiable and cynical companion. But in addition to these casual
encounters, I was thrown daily into his society with Lackaday and Elodie.
We arranged always to lunch together, Lackaday, Bakkus and myself taking it
in turns to be hosts at our respective hotels. Now and then Elodie
insisted on breaking the routine and acting as hostess at a restaurant in
Clermont-Ferrand. It was all very pleasant. The only woman to three men,
Elodie preened herself with amusing obviousness and set out to make herself
agreeable. She did it with a Frenchwoman's natural grace. But as soon as
the talk drifted into anything allusive to war or books or art or politics,
she manifested an ignorance abysmal in its profundity. I was amazed that
a woman should have been for years the intimate companion of two men like
Lackaday and Bakkus without picking up some superficial knowledge of the
matters they discussed. And I was interested, even to the pitch of my
amazement, to behold the deference of both men, when her polite and vacant
smile proclaimed her inability to follow the conversation. Invariably one
of them would leave me to the other and turn to Elodie. It was Bakkus more
often who thus broke away. He had the quick impish faculty, one of the
rarest of social gifts, of suddenly arresting a woman's attention by a
phrase, apparently irrelevant, yet to her woman's jumping mind relevant to
the matter under dispute and of carrying it off into a pleasant feminine
sphere. It was impish, and I believe deliberately so, for on such occasions
one could catch the ironic gleam in his eyes. The man's sincere devotion to
both of them was obvious.
"Madame Patou..." I began one day, at lunch--we were talking of the tyranny
of fashion, even in the idyllic lands where ladies are fully dressed in
teeth necklaces and yellow ochre--"Madame Patou..."
She threw up her hands. We were lunching very well--the _petit vin_
of Auvergne is delicious--"_Mais voyons donc_--why all this ceremony
among friends? Here we are, we three, and it is André, Horace, Elodie--and
here we are, we four, and it is Monsieur Bakkus, and Lackaday--never will I
be able to pronounce that word--and Madame Patou and Monsieur le Capitaine
Hylton. Look. To my friends I am Elodie _tout court_--and you?"
It was an embarrassing moment. Andrew's mug of a face was as expressionless
as that of a sphinx. He would no more have dreamed of addressing me by my
Christian name than of hailing Field-Marshal Haig as Douglas. White-haired,
thin-lipped Bakkus smiled sardonically. But there was no help for it.
"My very intimate friends call me Tony," said I.
"To-ny," she echoed. "But it is charming, To-ny. A _votre santé_,
To-ny."
She held put her glass--I was sitting next to her. I clinked mine politely.
"To the health of the charming Elodie."
She was delighted. Made us all clink glasses. Bakkus said, in English:
"To the abolition of Misters, in obedience to the Lady."
"And now," cried Elodie, "what were you going to say about fashions in
necklaces made of dogs' teeth?"
We pursued our frivolous talk. Bakkus said:
"The whole of the Fall of Man arose from Eve pestering Adam for a
russet-brown fig-leaf in spring time."
"It was after the fall that they made themselves aprons," said Lackaday.
"She had her eye on those fig-leaves long before," retorted Bakkus.
We laughed. There was no great provocation to mirth. But we were attuned to
gaiety. My three friends were lunching with me on the terrace of the Royat
Palace Hotel. It is a long, wide terrace, reaching the whole width of the
façade of the building, and doors lead on to it from all the public rooms.
Only half of it, directly accessible from the _salle à manger_ is
given over to restaurant tables. Ours was on the outskirts. I like to be
free, to have plenty of room and air; especially on a broiling August day.
We were in cool shade. A few feet below us stretched a lower terrace, with
grass-plots and flowers and a fountain and gaily awned garden seats and
umbrella-shaded chairs. And there over the parapet the vine-clad hill
quivered in the sunshine against the blue summer sky, and around us were
cheerful folk at lunch forgetful of hearts and blood-pressure in the
warm beauty of the day. Perhaps now and then a stern and elderly French
couple--he stolid, strongly bearded and decorated, she thin and brown,
over-coiffured and over-ringed--with an elderly angular daughter, hard to
marry, regarded us with eyes of disapproval. Elodie in happy mood threw off
restraint, as, in more private and intimate surroundings, she would have
thrown off her corset. But we cared not for the disapproval of the correct
French profiteers....
"If they tried to smile," said Elodie, incidentally, "they would burst and
all the gold would drop out."
Lackaday threw back his head and laughed--the first real, hearty laugh I
had seen him exhibit since I had met him in France. You see the day, the
food, the wine, the silly talk, the dancing wit of Bakkus, the delightful
comradeship, had brought the four of us into a little atmosphere of
joyousness. There was nothing very intellectual about it. In the hideous
realm of pure intellectuality there could not exist even the hardiest ghost
of a smile. Laughter, like love, is an expression of man's vehement revolt
against reason. So Andrew Lackaday threw himself back in his chair and
laughed at Elodie's quip.
But suddenly, as if some blasting hand had smitten him, his laughter
ceased. His jaw dropped for a second and then snapped like a vice. He
was sitting on my left hand, his back to the balustrade, and facing the
dining-room. At the sight of him we all instinctively sobered and bent
forward in questioning astonishment. He recovered himself quickly and tried
to smile as if nothing had happened--but, seeing his eyes had been fixed on
something behind me, I turned round.
And there, calmly walking up the long terrace towards us, was Lady Auriol
Dayne.
I sprang from my chair and strode swiftly to meet her. From a grating sound
behind me I knew that Lackaday had also risen. I stretched out my hand
mechanically and, regardless of manners, I said:
"What the devil are you doing here?"
She withdrew the hand that she too had put forward.
"That's a nice sort of welcome."
"I'm sorry," said I. "Please consider the question put more politely."
"Well, I'm here," she replied, "because it happens to be my good pleasure."
"Then I hope you'll find lots of pleasure, my dear Auriol."
She laughed, standing as cool as you please, very grateful to the eye in
tussore coat and skirt, with open-necked blouse, and some kind of rakish
hat displaying her thick auburn hair in defiance of the fashion which
decreed concealment even of eyebrows with flower-pot head gear. She laughed
easily, mockingly, although she saw plainly the pikestaff of a Lackaday
upright a few yards away from her, in a rigid attitude of parade.
"Anyhow," she said, "I must go and say how d'ye do to the General."
I gave way to her. We walked side by side to the table. She advanced to him
in the most unconcerned manner. Bakkus rose politely.
"My dear General, fancy seeing you here! How delightful."
I have never seen a man's eyes devour a woman with such idiotic
obviousness.
"Lady Auriol," said he, "you are the last person I ever thought of
meeting." He paused for a second. Then, "May I have the pleasure of
introducing--Madame Patou--Lady Auriol Dayne--Mr. Bakkus--"
"Do sit down, please, everybody," said Auriol, after the introductions.
"I feel like a common nuisance. But I came by the night train and went
to sleep and only woke up to find myself just in time for the fag-end of
lunch."
"I am host," said I. "Won't you join us?"
What else was there to do? She glanced at me with smiling inscrutability.
"You're awfully kind, Tony. But I'm disturbing you."
The maitre d'hôtel and waiter with a twist of legerdemain set her place
between myself and Lackaday.
"This is a charming spot, isn't it, Madame Patou?" she remarked.
Elodie, who had regarded her wonderingly as though she had bean a creature
of another world, bowed and smiled.
"We all talk French, my dear Auriol," said I, "because Madame Patou knows
no English."
"Ah!" said Lady Auriol. "I never thought of it." She translated her remark.
"I'm afraid my French is that of the British Army, where I learned most of
it. But if people are kind and patient I can make myself understood."
"Mademoiselle speaks French very well," replied Elodie politely.
"You are very good to say so, Madame."
I caught questioning, challenging glances flashing across the table, each
woman hostilely striving to place the other. You see, we originally sat:
Elodie on my right hand, then Bakkus facing straight down the terrace, then
Lackaday, then myself. It occurred to me at once that, with her knowledge
of my convention-trained habits, she would argue that, at a luncheon party,
either I would not have placed the lady next the man to whom she belonged,
or that she was a perfectly independent guest, belonging, so to speak, to
nobody. But on the latter hypothesis, what was she doing in this galley? I
swear I saw the wrinkle on Lady Auriol's brow betokening the dilemma. She
had known me from childhood's days of lapsed memory. I had always been.
Romantically she knew Lackaday. Horatio Bakkus, with his sacerdotal air and
well-bred speech and manner, evidently belonged to our own social class.
But Madame Patou, who mopped up the sauce on her plate with a bit of bread,
and made broad use of a toothpick, and leaned back and fanned herself
with her napkin and breathed a "_Mon Dieu, qu'ilfait chaud_" and
contributed nothing intelligent to the conversation, she could not accept
as the detached lady invited by me to charm my two male guests. She was
then driven to the former hypothesis. Madame Patou belonged in some way to
the man by whose side she was not seated.
Of course, there was another alternative. I might have been responsible for
the poor lady. But she was as artless as a poor lady could be. Addressing
my two friends it was always André and Horace, and instinctively she used
the familiar "_tu_." Addressing me she had affrightedly forgotten the
pact of Christian names, and it was "Monsieur le Capitaine" and, of course,
the "_vous_" which she had never dreamed of changing. Even so poor a
French scholar as Lady Auriol could not be misled into such absurd paths of
conjecture.
She belonged therefore, in some sort of fashion, to General Lackaday. An
elderly man of the world, with his nerves on edge, has no need of wizardry
to divine the psychology of such a situation.
Mistress of social forms, Lady Auriol, after sweeping Elodie into her net,
caught Horatio Bakkus and through reference to her own hospital experiences
during the war, wrung from him the avowal of his concerts for the wounded
in Paris.
"How splendid of you! By the way, how do you spell your name? It's an
uncommon one."
"With two k's."
"I wonder if you have anything to do with an old friend of my fattier,
Archdeacon Bakkus?"
"My eldest brother."
"No, really? One of my earliest recollections is his buying a prize boar
from my father."
"Just like the dear fellow's prodigality," said Bakkus. "He had a whole
Archdeaconry to his hand for nothing. I've lately spent a couple of months
with him in Westmorland, so I know."
"How small the world is," said Lady Auriol to Lackaday.
"Too small," said he.
"Oh," said Auriol blankly.
"Have you seen our good friends, the Verity-Stewarts lately?"
She had. They were in perfect health. They were wondering what had become
of him.
"And indeed, General," she flashed, "what _has_ become of you?"
"It is not good," said Elodie, in quick anticipation, "that the General
should neglect his English friends."
There sounded the note of proprietorship, audible to anybody. Auriol's eyes
dwelt for a second on Elodie; then she turned to Lackaday.
"Madame Patou is quite right."
Said he, with one of his rare flights into imagery, "I was but a shooting
star across the English firmament."
"Encore une étoile qui file,
File, file et disparait!"
"Oh no, my dear friend," laughed Bakkus. "He can't persuade us, Lady
Auriol, that he is afflicted with the morbidezza of 1830."
"_Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?_" asked Elodie, sharply.
"It was a fashion long ago, my dear, for poets to assume the gaiety of a
funeral. Even Béranger who wrote _Le Roi d'Yvetot_--you know it--"
"Naturally, '_Il était un roi d'Yvetot!_'"--cried Elodie, who had
learned it at school.
"Well--of course. Even Béranger could not escape the malady of
his generation. Do you remember"--his swift glance embraced us
all--"Longfellow's criticism of European poets of that epoch, in his prose
masterpiece, _Hyperion?_ He refers to Salis and Matthisson, but
Lamartine and people of his kidney come in--'Melancholy gentlemen' pardon,
my dear Elodie, if I quote it in English--'Melancholy gentlemen to whom
life was only a dismal swamp, upon whose margin they walked with cambric
handkerchiefs in their hands, sobbing and sighing and making signals to
Death to come and ferry them over the lake.' _Cela veut dire_," he
made a marvellous French paraphrase for Elodie's benefit.
"_Comprends pas_," she shrugged at the boredom of literary allusion.
"I don't see what all that has to do with André. I shall see, Mademoiselle,
that he writes to his friends."
"You will be doing them a great service, Madame," replied Auriol.
There was a stiff silence. If Bakkus had stuck to his intention of driving
the conversation away from embarrassing personal questions, instead of
being polite to Elodie, we should have been spared this freezing moment of
self-consciousness. I asked Auriol whether she had had a pleasant journey,
and we discussed the discomfort of trains. From then to the end of the meal
the conversation halted. It was a relief to rise and fall into groups as we
strolled down the terrace to coffee. I manoeuvred Elodie and Bakkus to the
front leaving Auriol and Lackaday to follow. I sought a table at the far
end, for coffee; but when I turned round, I discovered that the pair had
descended by the mid-way flight of three or four steps to the grass-plotted
and fountained terrace below.
We sat down. Elodie asked:
"Who is that lady?"
I explained as best I could. "She is the daughter of an English nobleman,
whence her title. The way to address her is 'Lady Auriol.' She did lots of
work during the war, work of hospital organization in France, and now she
is still working for France. I have known her since she was three years
old; so she is a very great friend of mine."
Her eyes wandered to the bit of red thatched head and the gleam of the
crown of a white hat just visible over the balustrade.
"She appears also to be a great friend of André."
"The General met many charming ladies during his stay in England," I lied
cheerfully.
"Which means," she said with a toss of her head and an ironical smile,
"that the General behaved like a real--who was it, Horace, who loved
women so much? _Ah oui_--like a real Don Juan." She wagged her plump
forefinger. "Oh no, I know my André."
"I could tell you stories--" said I.
"Which would not be true."
She laughed in a forced way--and her eyes again sought the tops of the
couple promenading in the sunshine. She resumed her catechism.
"How old is she?"
"I don't know exactly."
"But since you have known her since she was three years old?"
"If I began to count years at my time of life," said I, "I should die of
fright."
"She looks about thirty. Wouldn't you say so, Horace? It is droll that she
has not married. Why?"
"Before the war she was a great traveller. She has been by herself all over
the world in all sorts of places among wild tribes and savages. She has
been far too busy to think of marriage."
Elodie looked incredulous. "One has always one's _moments perdus._"
"One doesn't marry in odd moments," said I.
"You and Horace are old bachelors who know nothing at all about it. Tell
me. Is she very rich?"
"None of our old families are very rich nowadays," I replied, rather at
a loss to account, save on the score of feminine curiosity, for this
examination. If it had not been for her mother who left her a small fortune
of a thousand or so a year, Auriol would have been as penniless as her two
married sisters. Her brother, Lord Vintrey, once a wastrel subaltern of
Household Cavalry, and, after a dashing, redeeming war record, now an
expensive Lieutenant-Colonel, ate up all the ready money that Lord
Mountshire could screw out of his estates. With Elodie I could not enter
into these explanations.
"All the same she is passably rich," Elodie persisted. "One does not buy a
costume like that under five hundred francs."
The crimson vested and sashed and tarbooshed Algerian negro brought the
coffee, and poured out the five cups. We sipped. I noticed Elodie's hand
shake.
"If their coffee gets cold, so much the worse."
Bakkus, who had maintained a discreet silence hitherto, remarked:--
"Unless Andrew's head is particularly thick, he'll get a sunstroke in this
blazing sun."
"That's true," cried Elodie and, rising with a great scraping of chair, she
rushed to the balustrade and addressed him shrilly.
"_Mais dis donc André, tu veux attraper un coup de soleil?_"
We heard his voice in reply: "_Nous rentrons_."
A few moments afterwards they mounted from the lower terrace and
came towards us. Lackaday's face was set in one of its tight-lipped
expressionless moods. Lady Auriol's cheek was flushed, and though she
smiled conventional greeting, her eyes were very serious.
"I am sorry to have put into danger the General's health, madame," said she
in her clear and British French. "But when two comrades of the Great War
meet for the first time, one is forgetful."
She gave me a little sign rejecting the offered coffee. Lackaday took his
cup and drank it off at one gulp. He looked at his wrist watch, the only
remaining insignia of the British soldier.
"Time for our tram, Elodie."
"_C'est vrai?_" He held his wrist towards her. "_Oui, mon Dieu!
Miladi--_" She funked the difficult "Lady Auriol."
"_Au revoir, Madame,_" said Auriol shaking hands.
"_Trop honorée,_" said Elodie, somewhat defiantly. "_Au revoir,
Miladi._" She made an awkward little bow. "_Et toi,_" she extended
a careless left hand to Bakkus.
"I will see you to the lift," said I.
We walked down the terrace in silence to the _salon_ door just inside
which was the lift which took one down some four stories to the street.
Two things were obvious: the perturbation of the simple Lackaday and the
jealousy of Elodie.
"_Au revoir, monsieur, et merci,_" she said, with over emphasized
politeness, as we stood at the lift gates.
"Good-bye, old chap," said Lackaday and gripped my hand hard.
As soon as I returned to the end of the terrace, Bakkus rose and took his
leave. Auriol and I were alone. Of course other humans were clustering
round tables all the length of the terrace. But we had our little end
corner to ourselves. I sat down next to her.
"Well?" said I.
She bent forward, and her face was that of the woman whom I had met in the
rain and mud and stark reality of the war.
"Why didn't you tell me?"