The Mountebank | Page 2

proceed from his French upbringing.
To return to his letter:--
I have cut out the war. Thousands of brainy people will be spending the
next few years of their lives telling you all about it. But I should rather
like to treat it as a blank, a period of penal servitude, a drugged sleep
afflicted with nightmare, a bit of metempsychosis in the middle of
normal life--you know what I mean. The thing that is I is not General
Lackaday. It is Somebody Else. So I have given you, for what it is
worth, the story of Somebody Else. The MS. is in a beast of a muddle
like the earth before the Bon Dieu came in and made His little
arrangements. Do with it what you like. At the present moment I am
between the Devil and the Deep Sea. I am hoping that the latter will be
the solution of my difficulties. (By the way, I'm not contemplating
suicide.) In either case it doesn't matter.... If you are interested in the
doings of a spent meteor, I shall be delighted to write to you from time
to time. As you said, you are the oldest friend I have. You are almost
the only living creature who knows the real identity of Andrew
Lackaday. You have been charming enough to give me not only the
benefit of your experience, riper than mine, of a man of the world, but
also such a very human sympathy that I shall always think of you with
sentiments of affectionate esteem.
Yours sincerely,
ANDREW LACKADAY
Well. There was the letter, curiously composed; half French, half
English in the turning of the phrase. The last sentence was sheer
translation. But it was sincere. I need not say that I sent a cordial reply.
Our correspondence thenceforward became intimate and regular.
In his estimate of his manuscript from a literary point of view the poor

General did not exaggerate. Anything more hopeless as a continuous
narrative I have never read. But it supplied facts, hit off odds and ends
of character, and--what the autobiography seldom does--it gave the
ipsissima verba of conversations written in helter-skelter fashion with
flowing pen, sometimes in excellent French, sometimes in English,
which beginning in the elaborate style of his letter broke down into
queer vernacular; it was charmingly devoid of self-consciousness, so
that the man as he was, and not as he imagined himself to be or would
like others to imagine him, stood ingenuously disclosed.
If the manuscript had been that of a total stranger I could not have
undertaken the task of the Bon Dieu making His little arrangements to
shape the earth out of chaos. An elderly literary dilettante, who is not a
rabid archæologist, has an indolent way of demanding documents clear
and precise. As a matter of fact, it was some months before I felt the
courage to tackle the business. But knowing the man, knowing also
Lady Auriol and having in the meantime made the acquaintance of
Mademoiselle Elodie Figasso and Horatio Bakkus, playing, in fact, a
minor rôle, say, that of Charles, his friend, in the little drama of his life,
I eventually decided to carry out my good friend's wishes. The major
part of my task has been a matter of arrangement, of joining up flats, as
they say in the theatre, of translation, of editing, of winnowing, as far
as my fallible judgment can decide, the chaff from the grain in his
narrative, and of relating facts which have come within the horizon of
my own personal experience.
I begin therefore at the very beginning.
Many a year ago, when the world, myself included, was young, I knew
a circus. This does not mean that I knew it from the wooden benches
outside the ring. I knew it behind the scenes. I was on terms of intimacy
with the most motley crowd it has been my good fortune to meet. It
was a famous French circus of the classical type that has by now, I fear
me, passed away. Its hautè école was its pride, and it demanded for its
première équestrienne the homage due to the great artists of the world.
Bernhardt of the Comédie Francaise--I think she was still there in those
far-off days, Patti of the Opera and Mlle Renée Saint-Maur of the

Cirque Rocambeau were three stars of equal magnitude. The circus
toured through France from year's end to year's end. It pitched its
tent--what else could it do, seeing that municipal ineptitude provided
no building wherein could be run chariot races of six horses abreast?
But the tent, in my youthful eyes, confused by the naphtha glares and
the violent shadows cast on the many tiers of pink faces, loomed as vast
as a Roman amphitheatre. It was