The Mountebank | Page 9

her brown
eyes, which was one of her characteristics---the woman, for all her
capable modernity, instinctively on the defensive.
"It's only a fool who apologizes for doing a thing well," said Lackaday.
"He couldn't do it well if he was a fool," Lady Auriol retorted.
"You never know what a fool can do till you try him," said Lackaday.
It was a summer morning. Nearly all the house-party had gone to
church. Lady Auriol, Colonel Lackaday and I, smitten with pagan
revolt, lounged on the shady lawn in front of the red-brick, gabled
manor house. The air was full of the scent of roses from 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.
"Voilà," 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,"