The Mountebank | Page 9

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.
"Voil��," 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 sex 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 God'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 assure 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 compass round about the pigsties and crossed the orchard to the chicken's parade, and passed 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 vanishing, "let us go back to the peaches. That's the beauty of Sundays. That silly old ass 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