Madame Gilbert's Cannibal

Madame Gilbert's war service ended when Austria fell out. She had been in Italy busied with those obscure intrigues for the confounding of an enemy which are excused, and dignified, as patriotic propaganda. She is satisfied that on the Italian Front she, and those who worked with her, really won the war.

The war satisfactorily won, Madame Gilbert sped home to revel in the first holiday which she had known since August, 1914. She always seems to travel with fewer restrictions and at greater speed than any except Prime Ministers and commanding Generals. In Italy she is an Italian and in France a Frenchwoman--a dazzling Italian and a very winning Frenchwoman. The police of both countries make smooth her path with their humble bodies upon which Madame is graciously pleased to trample. "I never trouble much about passports or credentials," says she, "though I carry them just as I do my .25 automatic pistol; in practice I find that I need draw my papers as rarely as I draw my gun. Most of the police and officials who have seen me once know me when I come again, and rush to my assistance." She is never grateful for service. I do not believe she knows the sentiment of gratitude. A poor man renders her aid in defiance of regulations, and maybe at the risk of his neck; she smiles upon him, and the debt is instantly discharged. He is dismissed until perchance Madame may again have occasion for his devotion. Then she reveals the royal accomplishment of never forgetting a face. Imagine a harassed, weary chef du train, before whose official unseeing eyes travellers flit like figures on a cinema screen, imagine such a one addressed by name and rank by the most beautiful and gracious of mortal women, by a woman who remembers all those little family confidences which he had poured into her sympathetic ears some twelve months before, by a woman who enquires sweetly after his good wife--using her pet name--laments that the brave son--also accurately named--is still missing beyond those impenetrable Boche lines. Will not the chef du train, cooed over thus and softly patted as one pats butter, break every French rule the most iron-bound to speed Madame upon her way? Of course he will. In war time, as in peace time, that is the royal manner of Madame Gilbert. She does not travel; she makes a progress.

Madame came home after the armistice with Austria, and, being discharged of liability to the propagandist headquarters, found herself a free and idle woman. The first time for more than four years.

She had a little money from her late husband (the real one), and had been lavishly paid for her services during the war. War prices in London seemed quite moderate to her after the extortions of France and Italy. She re-occupied her old rooms near Shaftesbury Avenue--and incidentally made homeless a pair of exiled Belgians--and fed after the fashion that she loved in the restaurants of Soho. Madame enjoyed her food. She always scoffed at Beauty Specialists. "Look at me," she would say. "Look closely at my skin, at my hair, at my teeth if you like. What you see is God's gift improved by exact care for my health. I do physical exercises for twenty minutes every night and morning. I plunge all over into cold water whenever I can get together enough to cover me, and I eat and drink whatever I like. I shall go on living for just as long as I am beautiful and healthy. When I have to think of my digestion or of the colour of my skin, I shall say Good-bye and go West in a dream of morphia." Superficially, Madame is a Roman Catholic; at heart she is a Greek Pagan.

It was at La Grande Patisserie Belge that Madame stumbled across the lawyer who was fated to introduce her to the Cannibal of whom she told me in Whitehall.

It was a melancholy afternoon in January, peace had not brought plenty--especially of coal--and Madame was fortifying herself against the damp chills of London by long draughts of the hottest coffee and the sweetest and stickiest confectionery which even she could relish. About six feet distant, on what one may describe as her port quarter, sat a middle-aged Englishman whose bagging clothes showed that war rations had dealt sorely with his once ample person. Madame, who without turning her head examined him in critical detail, judged that his loss in weight was three stone. He had the clean, shaven face and alert aspect of a lawyer or doctor. In fancied security a little to the left and rear of Madame Gilbert the stranger stared openly at her cheek and ear and the coils of bright copper hair. Madame knew that he was watching her, and rather liked the scrutiny. She had recognized him at once, and would have been slightly humiliated if he had failed to be interested in her. It is true that she had met him but once before in her life, and that some four years since, but as Madame had condescended to recollect him--I have said that her memory for faces was royal--a failure on his part to remember her would have been an offence unpardonable.

Madame continued to munch sweet stuff, and the man, his tea completed, rose, paid his bill, and then passed slowly in front of her. He needed encouragement before he would speak. So Madame gave it, a quick look and a smile of invitation. He bowed.

"Have I not the honour to meet again the Signora Guilberti?" said he.

"The Signora Guilberti," assented Madame, "or Madame Guilbert, or Madame Gilbert, as rendered by the rough English tongue. I have stooped to anglicise my name," she went on, "though I hate the clipped English version." She indicated a chair, and the lawyer--he was a lawyer--sat down.

"Is it possible that Madame honours me with remembrance?"

"Let me place you," said she, happy in the display of her accomplishments, "and don't seek to guide my memory. It was in the Spring of 1915, at a reception in the garden of Devonshire House. You were in attendance upon Her Majesty the Queen-Mother of Portugal. There were present representatives of the Italian Red Cross, for Italy, the land of my late husband, had ranged herself with the Allies. You are a lawyer of the haute noblesse. Your clients are peers and princes, of old princes in exile and of new peers in possession. I recall you most distinctly, though at that time, my poor friend, you were not a little portly, and now you are a man shrunken."

"And my name?" he asked, flattered that a beautiful woman should recall him so distinctly.

"It is a strange name--Gatepath. An old English name redolent of the soil. Roger Gatepath. Your firm bears no prefix of initials and no suffix of company. You call yourselves Gatepaths. Just Gatepaths, as though your status were territorial."

He crowed with pleasure. By an exercise in memory, Madame Gilbert had tied him to her chariot wheels.

"Right!" cried he. "Right in every particular. You are the most wonderful of women. For two minutes I spoke with you, and that was nearly four years ago. I was one of a large party, an insignificant lawyer lost in a dazzling company of titles. Yet you have remembered."

Madame left the sense of flattery to soak in. She did not spoil the impression that she had made by explaining that she would have remembered a lackey with just the same accuracy.

"And you, Madame?" he asked. "Have you been all these years doing war work with the Italian Red Cross? The years have passed and left no mark upon your face and figure. I, who comfortably filled out my clothes, am shrunken, yet time and sorrow have spared you."

"Nevertheless, I have been pretty hard at work," said Madame briskly. "I was present at that party ostensibly as an official of the Italian Red Cross. In fact I was there to see that no harm befell the Royal Personages who were in my charge. While we moved about those pleasant grounds, chatting and sipping tea, I was watching, watching. And my hand was never far from the butt of the Webley automatic which, slung from my waist, was hidden in a bag of silk."

"Heavens!" he cried out. "You are...."

"Hush," interposed Madame. "A lawyer and a Gatepath should be more discreet. The war is over, and I can tell you now that I fought every minute of it in the Secret Service, the Civil branch. I was the head woman, the bright particular star, in Dawson's Secret Corps."

"Is it discreet to tell me this?" he asked, countering her reproof of a moment earlier.

She smiled rather wickedly. "Are you not a lawyer and a Gatepath? And can one not tell anything to a lawyer and a Gatepath? Besides, I have sent in my resignation, and am now a free woman. It has been a good time, a very good time. I have fought devils and mastered devils in England and France and Italy for four long years, and now I would rest. You say that time and sorrow have spared me. Yet I have known both time and sorrow. Have I not lost...."

He broke into a babble of apologies. "I did not know.... I did not realise...."

She waved a hand, and he fell silent. "I do not wear the trappings of woe, for though I am eternally widowed, I glory in my loss. It was in the rearguard at Caporetto, when all less gallant souls had fled, that my Guilberti fell."

Of course from that moment Gatepath was her slave. She had flattered him and humbugged him as she flattered and humbugged all of us. Madame had no designs against Gatepath, yet she could not forbear to triumph over him. "One never knows," she said, "when one may need a devoted friend, and need him badly. I always look forward."

Two or three weeks later Madame found a letter at her club signed "Gatepaths." It was the club in Dover Street with those steep steps down which the members tumble helplessly in frosty weather. Madame calls it "The Club of Falling Women."

It appears that Gatepath, hunting for an adviser of ripe wisdom, had sought out the Chief of Dawson and lately of Madame, and laid bare his pressing troubles. The Chief is one of those rare men to whom all his friends, and they are as the stars in number, go seeking counsel in their crimes and follies. Nothing shocks him, nothing surprises him. And from the depths of his wise, humorous, sympathetic mind, he will almost always draw waters of comfort. Suppose, for example, one had slain a man and urgently sought to dispose of the corpse--a not uncommon problem in crowded cities--to whom could one more profitably turn than to the Chief of His Majesty's Detective Service? Or if, in a passing fit of absence of mind, one had wedded three wives, and the junior in rank began to suspect the existence of one or more seniors; do we not all suffer from lapses of memory? One does not put these problems before the Chief as one's own--there is a decent convention in these matters--but, of course, he knows. To know all is to pardon all, and there is very little that the Chief does not know about you or me.

The family solicitor of peers and princes poured into the Chief's ear the fantastic cause of his present distresses. He delivered himself of the story in all seriousness, for it was dreadfully serious to him. Never in all his experience, and in that of his century-old firm, had anything so dreadfully serious occurred. The Chief controlled himself until the end was reached, and then exploded in a yell of laughter.