The Mountebank Part 11

Bakkus stared at him. "Elodie--that ambulatory a.s.semblage of cat's meat!

Why she has never been placed in a race in her life. Look at her." He pulled Andrew as near the railings as they could get and soon picked her out of the eight or nine cantering down the straight--a sleek, mild, contented bay whose ambling gentleness was greeted with a murmur of derision. "Did you ever see such a cow?"

"I like the look of her," said Andrew.

"Why--in the name of----"

"She looks as if she would be kind to children," replied Andrew.

They rushed quickly to the _Pari Mutuel_. Bakkus paid his five louis for his Goffredo ticket. He turned to seek Andrew, but Andrew had gone. In a moment or two they met among the scurrying swarm about the booths.

"What have you done?"

"I've put a louis on Elodie," said Andrew.

"The next time I want to give you a happy day I'll take you to the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation," said Bakkus witheringly.

"Let us see the race," said Andrew.

They paid a franc apiece for a stand on a bench and watched as much of the race as they could see. And Bakkus forgot to share his gla.s.ses with Andrew, who caught now and then an uncomprehending sight of coloured dots on moving objects and gaped in equally uncomprehensible bewilderment when the racing streak flashed home up the straight. A strange cry, not of gladness but of wonder, burst from the great crowd. Andrew turned to Bakkus, who, with gla.s.ses lowered, was looking at him with hollow eyes from which the mockery had fled.

"What's the matter?" asked Andrew.

"The matter? Your running nightmare has won. Why the devil couldn't you have given me the tip? You must have known something. No one could play such a game without knowing. It's d.a.m.ned unfriendly."

"Believe me, I had no tip," Andrew protested. "I never heard of the beast before."

"Then why the blazes did you pick her out?"

"Ah!" said Andrew. Then realizing that his philosophical and paradoxical friend was in sordid earnest he said mildly:

"There was a girl of that name who once brought me good luck."

The gambler, alive to superst.i.tious intuitions, repented immediately of his anger.

"That's worth all the tips in the world. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I don't wear my heart upon my sleeve," replied Andrew.

So peace was made. They joined the thin crowd round their booth of the _Pari Mutuel_, mainly composed of place winners, and when the placards of the odds went up, Bakkus gripped his companion's arm.

"My G.o.d! A hundred and three to one. Why didn't you plank on your last penny."

"I'm very well content with two thousand francs," said Andrew. "It's something against a rainy day."

They reached the _guichet_ and Andrew drew his money.

"Suppose the impossible animal hadn't won--you would have been rather sick."

"No," Andrew replied, after a moment's thought. "I should have regarded my louis as a tribute to the memory of one who did me a great service."

"I believe," said Bakkus, "that if I could only turn sentimentalist, I should make my fortune."

"Let us go and find a drink," said Andrew.

For the second time Elodie brought him luck. This time in the shape of a hundred and three louis, a goodly sum when one has to live from hand to mouth. And the time came, at the end of their engagement at _La Boite Blanche_, when they lost even that precarious method of existence.

For the first time in his life Andrew spent a month in vain search for employment. Dead season Paris had more variety artists than it knew what to do with. The provinces, so the rehabilitated Moignon and his confreres, the other agents, declared, in terms varying from apologetic stupor to frank brutality, had no use for Andrew-Andre and his unique entertainment.

"But what shall I do?" asked the anxious Andre.

"Wait, _mon cher_, we shall soon well arrange it," said Moignon.

"?" pantomimed the other agents, with shrugged shoulders and helplessly outspread hands.

And it happened too that Bakkus, the sweet ballad-monger, found himself on the same rocks of unemployment.

"I have," said he, one evening, when the stranded pair were sitting outside a horrid little liquor retreat with a zinc bar in the Faubourg Saint-Denis--the luxury of _consommations_ at sixty centimes on the Grands Boulevards had faded from their dreams--"I have, my dear friend, just enough to carry me on for a fortnight."

"And I too," said Andrew.

"But your hundred louis at Longchamps?"

"They're put away," said Andrew.

"Thank G.o.d," said Bakkus.

Andrew detected a lack of altruism in the pious note of praise. He did not love Bakkus to such a pitch of brotherly affection as would warrant his relieving him of responsibility for self support. He had already fed Bakkus for three days.

"They're put away," he repeated.

"Bring them out of darkness into the light of day," said Bakkus. "What are talents in a napkin? You are a capitalist--I am a man with ideas. May I order another of this _mastroquet's_ bowel-gripping absinthes in order to expound a scheme? Thank you, my dear Lackaday. _Oui, encore une_.

Tell me have you ever been to England?"

"No," said Lackaday.

"Have you ever heard of Pierrots?"

"On the stage--masked b.a.l.l.s--yes."

"But real Pierrots who make money?"

"In England? What do you mean?"

"There is in England a blatant, vulgar, unimaginative, hideous inst.i.tution known as the Seaside."

"Well?" said Andrew.

The dingy proprietor of the "Zingue" brought out the absinthe. Bakkus arranged the perforated spoon, carrying its lump of sugar over the gla.s.s and began to drop the water from the decanter.