The Mountebank Part 2

"I suppose you think," she said at last with a swift side glance, "that I'm laying down the law about things I'm quite ignorant of."

He said: "Not at all. You're in a position to judge much better than I.

You people outside the wood can see it, in its entirety. We who are in the middle of the horrid thing can't see it for the trees."

It was this little speech so simple, so courteous and yet not lacking a touch of irony, that first made Lady Auriol, in the words which she used when telling me of it afterwards, sit up and take notice.

Bridge, the monomania which tainted Sir Julius Verity-Stewart's courtly soul, pinned Lady Auriol down to the green-covered table for the rest of the evening. But the next day she set herself to satisfy her entirely unreprehensible curiosity concerning Colonel Lackaday.

Lady Auriol, born with even more curiosities than are the ordinary birthright of a daughter of Eve, had spent most of her life in trying to satisfy them. In most cases she had been successful. Here be it said that Lady Auriol was twenty-eight, unmarried, and almost beautiful when she took the trouble to do her hair and array herself in becoming costume. As to maiden's greatest and shyest curiosity, well--as a child of her epoch--she knew so much about the theory of it that it ceased to be a curiosity at all. Besides, love--she had preserved a girl's faith in beauty--was a psychological mystery not to be solved by the cold empirical methods which could be employed in the solution of other problems. I must ask you to bear this in mind when judging Lady Auriol. She had once fancied herself in love with an Italian poet, an Antinous-like young man of impeccable manners, boasting an authentic pedigree which lost itself in the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. None of your vagabond ballad-mongers. A guest when she first met him of the Italian Amba.s.sador. To him, Prince Charming, knight and troubadour, she surrendered. He told her many wonders of fairy things.

He led her into lands where woman's soul is free and dances on b.u.t.tercups.

He made exquisite verses to her auburn hair. But when she learned that these same verses were composed in a flat in Milan which he shared with a naughty little opera singer of no account, she dismissed Prince Charming offhand, and betook herself alone to the middle of Abyssinia to satisfy her curiosity as to the existence there of dulcimer-playing maidens singing of Mount Abora to whom Coleridge in his poem a.s.signs such haunting attributes.

Lady Auriol, in fact, was a great traveller. She had not only gone all over the world--anybody can do that--but she had gone all through the world.

Alone, she had taken her fate in her hands. In comparison with other geographical exploits, her journey through Abyssinia was but a trip to Margate. She had wandered about Turkestan. She had crossed China. She had fooled about Saghalien.... In her schooldays, hearing of the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, she had imagined the Sanjak to be a funny little man in a red cap.

Riper knowledge, after its dull exasperating way, had brought disillusion; but like Mount Abora the name haunted her until she explored it for herself. When she came back, she knew the Sanjak of Novi Bazar like her pocket.

Needless to say that Lady Auriol had thrown all her curiosities, her illusions--they were hydra-headed--her enthusiasms and her splendid vitality into the war. She had organized and directed as Commandant a great hospital in the region of Boulogne. "I'm a woman of business," she told Lackaday and myself, "not a ministering angel with open-worked stockings and a Red Cross of rubies dangling in front of me. Most of the day I sit in a beastly office and work at potatoes and beef and army-forms. I can't nurse, though I daresay I could if I tried; but I hate amateurs. No amateurs in my show, I a.s.sure you. For my job I flatter myself I'm trained.

A woman can't knock about the waste s.p.a.ces of the earth by herself, head a rabble of pack-carrying savages, without gaining some experience in organization. In fact, when I'm not at my own hospital, which now runs on wheels, I'm employed as a sort of organizing expert--any old where they choose to send me. Do you think I'm talking swollen-headedly, Colonel Lackaday?"

She turned suddenly round on him, with a defiant flash of her brown eyes, which was one of her characteristics---the woman, for all her capable modernity, instinctively on the defensive.

"It's only a fool who apologizes for doing a thing well," said Lackaday.

"He couldn't do it well if he was a fool," Lady Auriol retorted.

"You never know what a fool can do till you try him," said Lackaday.

It was a summer morning. Nearly all the house-party had gone to church.

Lady Auriol, Colonel Lackaday and I, smitten with pagan revolt, lounged on the shady lawn in front of the red-brick, gabled manor house. The air was full of the scent of roses from border beds and of the song of thrushes and the busy chitter-chatter of starlings in the old walnut trees of the further garden. It was the restful England which the exiled and the war-weary used so often to conjure up in their dreams.

"You mean a fool can be egged on to do great things and still remain a fool?" asked Lady Auriol lazily.

Lackaday smiled--or grinned--it is all the same--a weaver of fairy nothings could write a delicious thesis on the question; is Lackaday's smile a grin or is his grin a smile? Anyhow, whatever may be the definition of the special ear-to-ear white-teeth-revealing contortion of his visage, it had in it something wistful, irresistible. You will find it in the face of a tickled baby six months old. He touched his row of ribbons.

"_Voila_," said he.

"It's polite to say I don't believe it," she said, regarding him beneath her long lashes. "But, supposing it true for the sake of argument, I should very much like to know what kind of a fool you are."

Lying back in her long cane chair, an incarnation of the summer morning, fresh as the air in her white blouse and skirt, daintily white hosed and shod, her auburn hair faultlessly dressed sweeping from the side parting in two waves, one bold from right to left, the other with coquettish grace, from left to right, the swiftness of her face calmed into lazy contours, the magnificent full physique of her body relaxed as she lay with her silken ankles crossed on the nether chair support, her hands fingering a long necklace of jade, she appealed to me as the most marvellous example I had ever come across of the woman's power of self-transmogrification.

The last time I had seen her was in France, wet through in old short-skirted kit, with badly rolled muddy puttees, muddier heavy boots, a beast of a dripping hat pinned through rain-sodden strands of hair, streaks of mud over her face, ploughing through mud to a British Field Ambulance, yet erect, hawk-eyed, with the air of a General of Division. There s.e.x was wiped out. During our chance meeting, one of the many queer chance meetings of the war, a meeting which lasted five minutes while I accompanied her to her destination, we spoke as man to man. She took a swig out of my brandy flask. She asked me for a cigarette--smoked out, she said. I was in nearly the same predicament, having only, at the moment, for all tobacco, the pipe I was then smoking. "For G.o.d's sake, like a good chap, give me a puff or two," she pleaded. And so we walked on through the rain and mud, she pipe in mouth, her shoulders hunched, her hands, under the scornfully hitched up skirt, deep in her breeches pockets. And now, this summer morning, there she lay, all woman, insidiously, devilishly alluring woman, almost voluptuous in her self-confident abandonment to the fundamental conception of feminine existence.

Lackaday's eyes rested on her admiringly. He did not reply to her remark, until she added in a bantering tone:

"Tell me."

Then he said, with an air of significance: "The most genuine brand you can imagine, I a.s.sure you."

"A motley fool," she suggested idly.

At that moment, Evadne, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the house, who, as she told me soon afterwards, in the idiom of her generation, had given the divine-services a miss, carried me off to see a litter of Sealyham puppies. That inspection over, we reviewed rabbits and fetched a compa.s.s round about the pigsties and crossed the orchard to the chicken's parade, and pa.s.sed on to her own allotment in the kitchen garden, where a few moth-eaten cabbages and a wilting tomato in a planted pot seemed to hang degraded heads at our approach, and, lingering through the rose garden, we eventually emerged on the further side of the lawn.

"I suppose you want to go and join them," she said with a jerk of her bobbed head in the direction of Lady Auriol and Colonel Lackaday.

"Perhaps we ought," said I.

"They don't want us--you can bet your boots," said she.

"How do you know that, young woman of wisdom?"

She sniffed. "Look at 'em."

I looked at 'em; mole-visioned masculine fifty seeing through the eyes of feminine thirteen; and, seeing very distinctly indeed, I said:

"What would you like to do?"

"If you wouldn't mind very much," she replied eagerly, her interest in, or her scorn of, elderly romance instantly vanis.h.i.+ng, "let us go back to the peaches. That's the beauty of Sundays. That silly old a.s.s Jenkins"--Jenkins was the head gardener--"is giving his family a treat, instead of coming down on me. See?"

Evadne linked her arm in mine. Again I saw. She had already eaten two peaches. Who was I to stand in the way of her eating a third or a fourth or a fifth? With the after consequences of her crime against Jenkins, physical and otherwise, I had nothing to do. It was the affair of her parents, her doctor, her Creator. But the sight of the rapturous enjoyment on her face when her white teeth bit into the velvet bloom of the fruit sped one back to one's own youth and procured a delight not the less intense because it was vicarious.

"Come along," said I.

"You're a perfect lamb," said she.

Before the perfect lamb was led to the peach slaughter, he looked again across the lawn. Colonel Lackaday had moved his chair very close to Lady Auriol's wicker lounge, so that facing her, his head was but a couple of feet from hers. They talked not so much animatedly as intimately.

Lackaday's face I could not see, his back being turned to me; I saw Lady Auriol's eyes wide, full of earnest interest, and compa.s.sionate admiration.

I had no idea that her eyes could melt to such softness. It was a revelation. No woman ever looked at a man like that, unless she was an accomplished syren, without some soul-betrayal. I am a _vieux routier_, an old campaigner in this world of men and women. Time was when--but that has nothing to do with this story. At any rate I think I ought to know something about women's eyes.

"Did you ever see anything so idiotic?" asked Evadne, dragging me round.

"I think I did once," said I.

"When was that?"

"Ah!" said I.

"Do tell me, Uncle Tony."

I, who have seen things far more idiotic a thousand times, racked my brain for an answer that would satisfy the child.

"Well, my dear," I began, "your father and mother, when they were engaged----"

She burst out: "But they were young. It isn't the same thing. Aunt Auriol's as old as anything. And Colonel Lackaday's about sixty."

"My dear Evadne," said I. "I happen to know that Colonel Lackaday is thirty-eight."

Thirteen shrugged its slim shoulders. "It's all the same," it said.

We went to the net-covered wall of ripe and beauteous temptation, trampling over Jenkins's beds of I know not what, and ate forbidden fruit. At least Evadne did, until, son of Adam, I fell.