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I rose to greet him, and invited him to my table. "I would join you with pleasure," said he, "but I am thinking of paying my respects to Lady Auriol." When I told him that he would not find her, he sat down. We could keep an eye on the hotel entrance, I remarked. "Our lunch with Bakkus is off," said I. "Yes. I'm sorry. I rang him up early this morning. Elodie isn't quite herself to-day."
The Casino having been burned down in 1918, the concerts took place under the bandstand in the park. After dinner we found places, among the multitude, on the Casino Cafe Terrace overlooking the bandstand, and listened to Bakkus sing. I explained Bakkus, more or less, to Auriol.
General Lackaday was the best of fellows -so simple, so sincere such a damned fine soldier such a gentle, kindly creature so scurvily treated by a disgraceful War Office just the husband for Auriol etcetera, etcetera in strophe and antistrophe of eulogy. All this was by way of beginning. Then came the point of the conclave.
"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.
They had the drawing-room to themselves to no one, the order had gone forth, was her ladyship at home that drawing-room of Lady Auriol which Lackaday regarded as the most exquisite room in the world. It had comfort of soft chairs and bright fire and the smell of tea and cigarettes; but it also had the style, to him so precious, with which his fancy invested her.
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!
Our passage from the terrace across the threshold of the drawing-room cut short a possible rhapsody. Later in the afternoon, in the panelled Elizabethan entrance hall, I came across Lady Auriol in tweed coat and skirt and business-like walking boots, a felt hat on her head and a stout stick in her hands. "Whither away?" I asked. "Colonel Lackaday and I are off for a tramp, over to Glastonbury."
Presently, being dummy, she turned to me, with a little motion of her head towards the pair and whispered: "Those two Auriol and don't you think it's rather rapid?" "My dear Selina," said I. "What would you have? 'C'est la guerre." It was rather rapid, this intimacy between the odd assorted pair the high-bred woman of fervid action and the mild and gawky Colonel born in a travelling circus.
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?
If you had convinced me that the whole basis of my projected action was illusory, I should have found means to cancel the arrangements. But remember what you said. "There can't by any possibility be anything between Lady Auriol Dayne and Petit Patou." "Damn the fellow," I muttered. "Now he's calmly shifting the responsibility on to me."
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