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Updated: May 10, 2025
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'hotel and waiter with a twist of legerdemain set her place between myself and Lackaday.
It was to this irreverent Cavalier, convalescent at home from a machine-gun bullet through his shoulder, and hero-worshipper of his Colonel, that Andrew Lackaday owed his shy appearance at Mansfield Court.
They were a company of six, Les Merveilleux, five jugglers, plate spinners, eccentric musicians, ventriloquists, and one low comedian. Lackaday was the low comedian, his business to repeat in burlesque most of the performance of his fellow artists. It was his first engagement, outside the Cirque Rocambeau, his first day with the troupe. Everything had gone badly.
We alighted at the further entrance to the park, and came plump upon a leave-taking between Lackaday and Lady Auriol. You know there is a turn some masking shrubs we couldn't help seeing through them. She was for rushing forward. I restrained her. A second afterwards, Andrew ran into us. For me, at any rate, it was a most unhappy situation.
I pride myself on being a practical woman; but for that reason perhaps I'm unused to grappling with emotional situations. If I've been unkind, it's because I've been stabbing myself and forgetting I'm stabbing you at the same time." He walked a pace or two further with her. For the first time he seemed to recognize what he, Andrew Lackaday, had meant to her. "I'm sorry," he said gravely.
Although Lackaday regarded Moignon as a sort of god dispensing fame and riches, enthroned on unassailable heights of power, he trembled at the awful destiny that awaited him. He would be cast, like Lucifer from heaven. He would be stripped of authority. Coincon's invective against him was so terrible that Lackaday pitied him even more than he pitied himself. Yet there was himself to consider.
His enormous lean length put the show out of scale. The troupe, accustomed to the business of a smaller man, whose sudden illness caused the gap which Lackaday came from Paris to fill, resented the change, and gave him little help. They demanded impossibilities.
On every side of her he beheld perfection. Physically, she was as elemental as the primitive woman superbly developed by daily conditions of hardship and danger; spiritually, as elemental as the elves and fairies; and over her mind played the wisdom of the world. Thus, in trying to account for her to himself, did the honest Lackaday flounder from trope to metaphor.
Yet all through that long weekend we were pressed to stay till the Wednesday morning no one, so far as I know, suspected that Colonel Lackaday found himself in an unfamiliar and puzzling environment. His appointment to the Brigade came on the Tuesday. He showed me the letter, during a morning stroll in the garden. "Don't tell anybody, please," said he. "Of course not."
Not a human soul knows through me the identity of General Lackaday with Petit Patou. No," I repeated, meeting his eyes under his bent brows, "not a human being knows even of our first meeting in the Cirque Rocambeau and as for Madame Patou, whom you have made me think of always as Elodie well my discretion goes without saying.
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