Part 27 (1/2)

All through the delicious intercourse, Elodie had hung at the bottom of his heart, a dead-weight, maybe, but one which he could not in honour or common humanity cut off. For Elodie's sake he had held himself in stern restraint, had uttered no word that might be interpreted as that of a lover. As far as Lady Auriol Dayne knew, as far as anyone on this earth knew, his feelings towards her were nothing more than those of a devoted and grateful friend.

So does the well-intentioned ostrich, you may say, bury its head and imagine itself invisible. But the ostrich is desperately sincere--and so was Andrew.

Presently he turned.

”If that woman says such vulgarities again, she must go at once.”

”I shall see that she has no opportunity,” said Elodie.

For a time Andrew sought in France that which he had failed to find in England; but with even less chance of success. The gates to employment in England had been crowded with demobilized officers. Only the fortunate, the young content with modest beginnings, those with money enough to start new avocations, had pushed through. These had been adventurers like himself.

The others had returned to the office or counting-house or broad acres from which they had sprung. In France he found no employment at all; the gates round which the demobilized wistfully gathered, led no whither. As at the War Office, so at military head-quarters in Paris. Bra.s.s-hatted friends wrung him warmly by the hand, condoled with his lot, and genially gave him to understand that he stood not a dog's chance of getting in anywhere.

Why hadn't he worried the people at home for a foreign billet? There were plenty going, but as to their nature they confessed vagueness. He had put in for several, said he, but had always been turned down. The friends shook their heads. In Paris nothing doing. Andrew walked away sadly. Perhaps a spirit proof against rebuffs, a thick-skinned persistence, might have eventually prevailed in London to set him on some career in the social reconstruction of the world. His record stood, and needed only unblus.h.i.+ng flaunting before the eyes of Authority for it to be recognized. But Andrew Lackaday, proud and sensitive, was a poor seeker after favour. All his promotion and his honour had come unsought. He had hated the braggadocio of the rainbow row of ribbons on his khaki tunic, which Army discipline alone forced him to wear. It was Elodie, too, who had fixed into his b.u.t.tonholes the little red rosette of the Officer of the Legion. That at least he could do for her.... Success, such as it was, before the war, he had attained he knew not how. The big drum of the showman had ever been an engine of abhorrence. Others had put him on the track of things, Elodie, Bakkus....

He had sternly suppressed vulgarity in posters. He had never intrigued like most of his craft for press advertis.e.m.e.nt. Over and over again had Bakkus said:

”Raise a thousand or two and give it to me or Moignon to play with and we'll boom you into all the capitals of the earth. There's a fortune in you.”

But Andrew, to whom publicity was the essence of his calling, would have none of it. He did his work and conducted his life in his own way, earnest and efficient.

In the war, of course, he found his real vocation. But he pa.s.sed out of the war as unknown to the general public as any elderly Tommy in a Labour battalion. Never a photograph of him had appeared in the ill.u.s.trated papers. The head of a great Government department, to whom Lady Auriol had mentioned his name, had never heard of it. And when she suggested that the State should hasten to secure the services of such men, he had replied easily:

”Men of his distinction are as thick as blackberries. That's how we won the war.”

Unknown to Lackaday she had tried to see what influence she could command.

Socially, as the rather wild-headed daughter of an impoverished and obscure Earl, she could do but little. She too was a poor intriguer. She could only demand with blatant vividness. Once on a flying visit to Lord Mounts.h.i.+re, she tried to interest him in the man whom, to her indignation, he persisted in styling her protege. He still, she urged, had friends in high places, even in the dreadful Government at which he railed.

”Never heard of the man,” he growled. ”Lackaday--Lackaday--” he shook his white head. ”Who was his father?”

She confessed that she didn't know. He was alone in the world. He had sprung from Nowhere. The old Earl refused to take any interest in him. Such fellows always fell on their feet. Besides, he had tried to put in a word for young Ponsonby--and had got snubbed for his pains. He wasn't going to interfere any more.

She learned that the appointment of a soldier would be made to a vacant colonial governors.h.i.+p. A certain general's recommendation would carry weight. She pa.s.sed the information on to Andrew. This she could do without offending his pride.

”Very sorry, my dear fellow,” said the General. ”You're the very man for the job. But you know what these Colonial office people are. They will have an old regular.”

As a matter of fact they appointed another Brigadier who had started the war with a new Yeomanry commission, a member of a well-known family with a wife who had seen to it that neither his light nor hers should be hidden under a bushel.

In the frantic scramble for place, the inexperienced in the methods of the scrum were as much left out in the cold as a timid old maid at what Americans call a bargain counter. He stood lost behind the throng and his only adviser Lady Auriol stood by his side in similar n.o.ble bewilderment.

On his appointment to a Brigade, Bakkus had written:

”I'm almost tempted to make your fortune in spite of yourself. What a sensation! What headlines! 'Famous Variety Artist becomes a General.'

Companion pictures in the _Daily Mail_, Pet.i.t Patou and Brigadier- General Lackaday. Everybody who had heard of Pet.i.t Patou would be mad to hear of General Lackaday, and all who had heard of soldier Andrew would be crazy to know about Pet.i.t Patou. You'd wake up in the morning like Byron and find yourself famous. You'd be the darling hero of the British Empire. But you always were a wooden-headed idiot....”

To which Andrew had replied in raging fury, to the vast entertainment of Horatio Bakkus.

All of this to show that, notwithstanding his supreme qualities of personal courage, command and military intuition, Andrew Lackaday as a would-be soldier of fortune proved a complete failure. For him, as he presented himself, the tired world, in its nebulous schemes of reconstruction, had no place.

Every day, when he got home, Elodie would ask:

”_Eh bien?_ Have you found anything?”