Part 34 (1/2)

”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'embete 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, he called on Arbuthnot at the Hotel 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 Pet.i.t 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 ma.n.u.script ends. Indeed, this late Ma.r.s.eilles 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 ma.n.u.script) he had abandoned as hopeless. He had merely jotted things down helter-skelter, diary fas.h.i.+on. 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 Ma.r.s.eilles.

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 Ma.r.s.eilles. Nowhere did he meet a prewar enthusiasm; but, on the other hand, nowhere did he encounter the hostility of the Ma.r.s.eilles 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 Pet.i.t 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 Shrops.h.i.+re 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.”