The Mountebank Part 12

"If you will bear with me for a minute or two, until the sugar's melted, I'll tell you all about it."

Chapter VII

It was a successful combination. Bakkus sang his ballads and an occasional humorous song of the moment to Andrew's accompaniment on mandolin or one-stringed violin, and Andrew conjured and juggled comically, using Bakkus as his dull-witted foil. A complete little performance, the patter and business artistically thought out and perfectly rehea.r.s.ed. They wore the conventional Pierrot costume with whited faces and black skull caps.

Bakkus, familiar with English customs, had undertaken to attend to the business side of their establishment on the sands of the great West Coast resort, Andrew providing the capital out of his famous hundred louis. But it came almost imperceptibly to pa.s.s that Andrew made all the arrangements, drove the bargains and kept an accurate account of their varying finances.

"You'll never be a soldier of fortune, my dear fellow," said Bakkus once, when, returning homewards, he had wished to dip his hand into the leather bag containing the day's takings in order to supply himself lavishly with comforting liquid.

"It's the very last thing I want to be," replied Andrew, hugging the bag tight under his long arm.

"You're bourgeois to your finger-tips, your ideal of happiness is a meek female in a parlour and half a dozen food-sodden brats."

Andrew hunched his shoulders good-naturedly at the taunt. A home, and wife and offspring seemed rather desirable of attainment.

"You've lots of money in your pocket to pay for a drink," said he. "It's mere perversity that makes you want to touch the takings. We haven't counted them."

"Perversity is the only thing that makes this rotten life worth living,"

retorted Bakkus.

It was his perversity, thus exemplified, which compelled Andrew to const.i.tute himself the business manager of the firm. He had a sedate, inexorable way with him, a grotesque dignity, to which, for all his gibes, Bakkus instinctively submitted. Bakkus might provide ideas, but it was the lank and youthful Andrew who saw to their rigid execution.

"You've no more soul than a Prussian drill sergeant," Bakkus would say.

"And you've no more notion of business than a Swiss Admiral," Andrew would reply.

"Who invented this elegant and disgustingly humiliating entertainment?"

Andrew would laugh and give him all the credit. But when Bakkus, in the morning, clamouring against insane punctuality, and demanding another hour's sloth, refused to leave his bed, he came up against an incomprehensible force, and, entirely against his will, found himself on the stroke of eleven ready to begin the performance on the sands. Sometimes he felt an almost irresistible desire to kick Andrew, so mild and gentle, with his eternal idiotic grin; but he knew in his heart that Andrew was not one of the idiots whom people kicked with impunity. He lashed him, instead, with his tongue, which Andrew, within limits, did not mind a bit. To Bakkus, however, Andrew owed the conception of their adventure. He also owed to him the name of the combination, and also the name which was to be professionally his for the rest of his stage career.

It all proceeded from the miraculous winning of the mare Elodie. Bakkus had made some indiscreet remark concerning her namesake. Andrew, quick in his dignity, had made a curt answer. Ironical Bakkus began to hum the old nursery song:

_Il etait une bergere Et ron, ron, ron, pet.i.t patapon_.

Suddenly he stopped.

"By George! I have it! The names that will _epater_ the English bourgeois. Ron-ron-ron and Pet.i.t Patapon. I'll be Ron-ron-ron and you'll be dear little Patapon."

As the English seaside public, however, when he came to think of it, have never heard of the shepherdess who guarded her muttons and still less of the refrain which ill.u.s.trated her history, he realized that the names as they stood would be ineffective. Ron-ron and Patapon therefore would they be. But Andrew, remembering Elodie's wise counsel, stuck to the "pet.i.t."

His French instinct guiding him, he rejected Patapon. Bakkus found Ron-ron an unmeaning appellation. At last they settled it. They printed it out in capital letters.

THE GREAT PATAPON AND LITTLE PATOU

So it came to pa.s.s that a board thus inscribed in front of their simple installation on the sands advertised their presence.

Now, Lackaday in his ma.n.u.script relates this English episode, not so much as an appeal to pity for the straits to which he was reduced, although he winces at its precarious mountebankery, and his sensitive and respectable soul revolts at going round with the mendicant's hat and thanking old women and children for pennies, as in order to correlate certain influences and coincidences in his career. Elodie seems to haunt him. So he narrates what seems to be another trivial incident.

Andrew was a l.u.s.ty swimmer. In the old circus summer days Ben Flint had seen to that. Whenever the Cirque Rocambeau pitched its tent by sea or lake, Ben Flint threw young Andrew into the water. So now every morning, before the world was awake, did Andrew go down to the sea. Once, a week after their arrival, did he, by some magnetic power, drag the protesting Bakkus from his bed and march him down, from the modest lodgings in a by-street, to the sea front and the bathing-machines. Magnetic force may bring a man to the water, but it can't make him go in. Bakkus looked at the cold grey water--it was a cloudy morning--took counsel with himself and, sitting on the sands, refused to budge from the lesser misery of the windy sh.o.r.e. He smoked the pipe of disquiet on an empty stomach for the half-hour during which Andrew expended unnecessary effort in progressing through many miles in an element alien to man. In the cold and sickly wretchedness of a cutting wind, he cursed Andrew with erudite elaboration. But when Andrew eventually landed, his dripping bathing-suit clinging close to his gigantic and bony figure, appearing to derisive eyes like the skin covered fossil of a prehistoric monster of a man, his bushy hair clotted, like ruddy seaweed, over his staring, ugly face, Bakkus forgot his woes and rolled on his back convulsed with vulgar but inextinguishable laughter.

"My G.o.d!" he cried later, when summoned by an angry Andrew to explain his impolite hilarity. "You're the funniest thing on the earth. Why hide the light of your frame under a bushel of clothing? My dear boy, I'm talking sense"--this was at a hitherto unfriendly breakfast-table--"You've got an extraordinary physique. If I laughed, like a rude beast, for which I apologize, the public would laugh. There's money in it. Skin tights and your hair made use of, why--you've got 'em laughing before you even begin a bit of business. Why the devil don't you take advantage of your physical peculiarities? Look here, don't get cross. This is what I mean."

He pulled out a pencil and, pus.h.i.+ng aside plates and dishes, began to sketch on the table-cloth with his superficial artistic facility. Andrew watched him, the frown of anger giving way to the knitted brow of interest.

As the drawing reached completion, he thought again of Elodie and her sage counsel. Was this her mental conception which he had been striving for years to realize? He did not find the ideal incongruous with his lingering sense of romance. He could take a humorous view of anything but his profession. That was sacred. Everything did he devote to it, from his soul to his skinny legs and arms. So that, when Bakkus had finished, and leaned back to admire his work, Andrew drew a deep breath, and his eyes shone as if he had received an inspiration from on High. He saw himself as in an apotheosis.

There he was, self-exaggeratingly true to life, inordinately high, inordinately thin, clad in tights that reached to a waistband beneath his armpits giving him miraculous length of leg, a low-cut collar accentuating his length of neck, his hair twisted up on end to a fine point.

"And I could pad the feet of the tights and wear high heels that would give me another couple of inches," he cried excitedly. "By Gum!" said he, clutching Bakkus's shoulder, a rare act of demonstrativeness, "what a thing it is to have imagination."

"Ah!" said Bakkus, "what a piece of work is man! How n.o.ble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a G.o.d! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!"

"What the devil do you mean?" asked Andrew.

Bakkus waved a hand towards the drawing.

"If only I had your application," said he, "I should make a great name as an ill.u.s.trator of Hamlet."

"One of these days," said Andrew, the frown of anger returning to his brow, "I'll throw you out of the window."

"Provided it is not, as now, on the ground floor, you would be committing an act of the loftiest altruism."

Andrew returned to his forgotten breakfast, and poured out a cup of tepid tea.

"What would you suggest--just plain black or red--Mephisto--or stripes?"

He was full of the realization of the Elodesque idea. His brain became a gus.h.i.+ng fount of inspiration. Hundreds of grotesque possibilities of business, hitherto rendered ineffective by flapping costume, appeared in fascinating bubbles. He thought and spoke of nothing else.

"Once I denied you the rank of artist," said Bakkus. "I retract. I apologize. No one but an artist would inflict on another human being such intolerable boredom."

"But it's your idea, bless you, which I'm carrying out, with all the grat.i.tude in the world."

"If you want to reap the tortures of the d.a.m.ned," retorted Bakkus, "just you be a benefactor."

Andrew shrugged his shoulders. That was the way of Horatio Bakkus, perhaps the first of his fellow-creatures whom he had deliberately set out to study, for hitherto he had met only simple folk, good men and true or uncomplicated fools and knaves, and the paradoxical humour of his friend had been a puzzling novelty demanding comprehension; the first, therefore, who put him on the track of the observation of the twists of human character and the knowledge of men. That was the way of Bakkus. An idea was but a toy which he tired of like a child and impatiently broke to bits.

Only a week before he had come to Andrew:

"My dear fellow, I've got a song. I'm going to write it, set it and sing it myself. It begins:--

_I crept into the halls of sleep And watched the dreams go by._

I'll give you the accompaniment in a day or two and we'll try it on the dog. It's a d.a.m.ned sight too good for them--but no matter."

Andrew was interested. The lines had a little touch of poetry. He refrained for some time from breaking through the gossamer web of the poet's fancy.

At last, however, as he heard nothing further, he made delicate enquiries.