The Mountebank Part 14

We behold Pet.i.t Patou now definitely launched on his career. Why the execution of Bakkus's (literally) cynical suggestion should have met with instant success, neither he nor Andrew nor Prepimpin, the poodle, nor anyone under heaven had the faintest idea. Perhaps Prepimpin had something to do with it. He was young, excellently trained, and expensive. As to the methods of his training Andrew made no enquiries. Better not. But, brought up in the merciful school of Ben Flint, in which Billy the pig had many successors, both porcine and canine, he had expert knowledge of what kind firmness on the part of the master and sheer love on that of the animal could accomplish.

Prepimpin went through his repertoire with the punctilio of the barrack square deprecated by Bakkus.

"I buy him," said Andrew. "_Viens, mon ami_."

Prepimpin cast an oblique glance at his old master.

"_Va-t-en_," said the latter.

"_Allons_" said Andrew with a caressing touch on the dog's head.

Prepimpin's topaz eyes gazed full into his new lord's. He wagged the tuft at the end of his shaven tail. Andrew knelt down, planted his fingers in the lion s.h.a.gginess of mane above his ears and said in the French which Prepimpin understood:

"We're going to be good friends, eh? You're not going to play me any dirty tricks? You're going to be a good and very faithful colleague?"

"You mustn't spoil him," said the vendor, foreseeing, according to his lights, possible future recriminations.

Andrew, still kneeling, loosed his hold on the dog, who forthwith put both paws on his shoulder and tried to lick the averted human face.

"I've trained animals since I was two years old, Monsieur Berguinan. Please tell me something that I don't know." He rose. "_Alors_, Prepimpin, we belong to each other. _Viens_."

The dog followed him joyously. The miracle beyond human explanation was accomplished, the love at first sight between man and dog.

Now, in the ma.n.u.script there is much about Prepimpin. Lackaday, generally so precise, has let himself go over the love and intelligence of this most human of animals. To read him you would think that Prepimpin invented his own stage business and rehea.r.s.ed Pet.i.t Patou. As a record of dog and man sympathy it is of remarkable interest; it has indeed a touch of rare beauty; but as it is a detailed history of Prepimpin rather than an account of a phase in the career of Andrew Lackaday, I must wring my feelings and do no more than make a pa.s.sing reference to their long and, from my point of view, somewhat monotonous partners.h.i.+p. It sheds, however, a light on the young manhood of this earnest mountebank. It reveals a loneliness ill-becoming his years--a loneliness of soul and heart of which he appears to be unconscious. Again, we have here and there the fleeting shadow of a petticoat. In Stockholm--during these years he went far afield--he fancies himself in love with one Vera Karynska of vague Mid-European nationality, who belongs to a troupe of acrobats. Vera has blue eyes, a deeply sentimental nature, and, alas! an unsympathetic husband who, to Andrew's young disgust depends on her for material support, seeing that every evening he and various other brutes of the tribe form an inverted pyramid with Vera's amazonian shoulders as the apex. He is making up a besotted mind to say, "Fly with me," when the Karinski troupe vanishes Moscow-wards and an inexorable contract drives him to Dantzic. In that ancient town, looking into the faithful and ironical eyes of Prepimpin, he thanks G.o.d he did not make a fool of himself.

You see, he succeeds. If you credited his modesty, you would think that Prepimpin made Pet.i.t Patou. _Quod est absurdum_. But the psychological fact remains that Andrew Lackaday needed some magnetic contact with another individuality, animal or human, to exhibit his qualities. There, in counselling splendid isolation, Elodie Figa.s.so, the little Ma.r.s.eilles gutter fairy was wrong. She saw, clearly enough, that, subordinated to others, with no chance of developing his one personality he must fail.

But she did not perceive--and poor child, how could she?--that given the dominating influence over any combination, even over one poodle dog, he held the key of success.

So we see him, the born leader, unconscious of his powers for lack of opportunity, instinctively craving their exercise for his own spiritual and moral evolution, and employing them in the benign mastery of the dog Prepimpin.

They were happy years of bourgeois vagabondage. At first he felt the young artist's soreness that, with the exception of rare, sporadic engagements, neither London nor Paris would have him. Once he appeared at the Empire, in Leicester Square, an early turn, and kept on breaking bits of his heart every day, for a week, when the curtain went down in the thin applause that is worse than silence.

"Prepimpin felt it," he writes, "even more than I did. He would follow me off, with his head bowed down and his tail-tuft sweeping the floor, so that I could have wept over his humiliation."

Why the great capitals fail to be amused is a perpetual mystery to Andrew Lackaday. Prepimpin and he give them the newest things they can think of.

After weeks and weeks of patient rehearsal, they bring a new trick to perfection. It is the _clou_ of their performance for a week's engagement at the Paris Folies-Bergere. After a conjuring act, he retires.

Comes on again immediately, Pet.i.t Patou, apparently seven foot high, in the green silk tights reaching to the arm-pit waist, a low frill round his neck, his hair up to a point, a perpetual grin painted on his face. On the other side enters Prepimpin on hind legs, bearing an immense envelope.

Pet.i.t Patou opens it--shows the audience an invitation to a ball.

"Ah! dress me, Prepimpin."

The dog pulls a hidden string and Pet.i.t Patou is clad in a bottle green dress-coat. Prepimpin barks and dances his delight.

"But _nom d'un chien_, I can't go to a ball without a hat."

Prepimpin bolts to the wings and returns with an opera hat.

"And a stick."

Prepimpin brings the stick.

"And a cigar."

Prepimpin rushes to a little table at the back of the stage and on his hind legs offers a box of cigars to his master, who selects one and lights it.

He begins the old juggler's trick of the three objects. The dog sits on his haunches and watches him. There is patter in which the audience is given to understand that Prepimpin, who glances from time to time over the footlights, with a shake of his leonine mane, is bored to death by his master's idiocy. At last the hat descends on Pet.i.t Patou's head, the crook-handled stick falls on his arm, and he looks about in a dazed way for the cigar, and then he sees Prepimpin, who has caught it, swaggering off on his hind legs, the still lighted cigar in his mouth.

"No," writes Lackaday, "it was a failure. Poor Prepimpin and I left Paris with our tails between our legs. We were to start a tour at Bordeaux.

'_Mon pauvre ami_,' said I, on the journey--Prepimpin never suffered the indignity of a dog cage--'There is only one thing to be done. It is you who will be going to the ball and will juggle with the three objects, and I who will catch the cigar in my mouth.' But it was not to be. At Bordeaux and all through the tour we had a _succes fou_."

Thus Andrew washed his hands of Paris and London and going where he was appreciated roved the world in quiet contentment. He was young, rather scrupulously efficient within his limits, than ambitious, and of modest wants, sober habits, and of a studious disposition which his friends.h.i.+p with Horatio Bakkus had both awakened and stimulated. Homeless from birth he never knew the nostalgia which grips even the most deliberately vagrant of men. As his ultimate goal he had indeed a vague dream of a home with wife and children--one of these days in the future, when he had put by enough money to justify such luxuries. And then there was the wife to find.

In a wife sewing by lamp-light between a red-covered round table and the fire, a flaxen haired cherub by her side--for so did his ingenuous inexperience picture domestic happiness--he required the dominating characteristic of angelic placidity. Perhaps his foster-mother and the comfort Ben Flint found in her mild and phlegmatic devotion had something to do with it.

In his ma.n.u.script he tries to explain--and flounders about in a psychological bog--that his ideal woman and his ideal wife are two totally different conceptions. The woman who could satisfy all his romantic imaginings was the Princesse Lointaine--the Highest Common Factor of the ladies I have already mentioned--Melisande, Phedre, Rosalind, Fedora, and Dora Copperfield--it is at this stage that he mentions them by name, having extended his literary horizon. Her he did not see sewing, in ox-eyed serenity, by a round table covered with a red cloth. With Her it was a totally different affair. It was a matter of spring and kisses and a perfect spiritual companions.h.i.+p.... As I have said, he gets into a terrible muddle. Anyhow, between the two conflicting ideals, he does not fall to the ground of vulgar amours. At the risk of tedium I feel bound to insist on this aspect of his life. For in the errant cosmopolitan world in which he, irresponsible and now well salaried bachelor had his being, he was thrown into the free and easy comrades.h.i.+p of hundreds of attractive women, as free and irresponsible as himself. He lived in a sea of temptation. On the other hand, I should be doing as virile a creature as ever walked a great wrong if I presented him to you under the guise of a Joseph Andrews. He had his laughter and his champagne and his kisses on the wing. But it was:

"We'll meet again one of these days."

"One of these days when our paths cross again."

And so--in effect--_Bon soir_.

It is difficult to compress into a page or two the history of several years. But that is what I have to do.

He is not wandering all the time over France, or flas.h.i.+ng meteor-like about Europe. He has periods of repose, enforced and otherwise. But his position being ensured, he has no anxieties. Paris is his headquarters. He lives still in his old _hotel meuble_ in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. But instead of one furnished room on the fifth floor, he can afford an apartment, salon, salle a manger, bedrooms, cabinet de toilette, on the prosperous second, which he retains all the year round. And Pet.i.t Patou can now stride through the waiting crowd in Moignon's antechamber and enter the sacred office, cigar in mouth, and with a "look here, _mon vieux_,"

put the fear of G.o.d into him. Pet.i.t Patou and Prepimpin, the idols of the Provinces, have arrived.

In Paris, when their presences coincide, he continues to consort with Bakkus, whose exquisite little tenor voice still affords him a means of livelihood. In fact Bakkus has had a renewed lease of professional activity. He sings at watering places, at palace hotels; which involves the physical activity which he abhors.

"Bound to this Ixion wheel of perpetual motion," says he, "I suffer tortures unimagined even by the High G.o.ds. Compared with it our degrading experience on the sands seven years ago was a blissful idyll."

"By Gum!" says Andrew, "seven years ago. Who would have thought it?"

"Yes, who?" scowled the pessimist, now getting grey and more gaunt of blue, ill-shaven cheek. "To me it is seven aeons of Promethean d.a.m.nation."

"To me it seems only yesterday," says Andrew.

"It's because you have no brain," says Bakkus.

But they are good friends. Away from Paris they carry on a fairly regular correspondence. Such of Bakkus's letters as Lackaday has kept and as I have read, are literary gems with--always--a perverse and wilful flaw ... like the man's life.

From Paris, after this particular meeting with Bakkus, Andrew once more goes on tour with Prepimpin. But a Prepimpin grown old, and, though pathetically eager, already past effective work. Nine years of strenuous toil are as much as any dog can stand. Rheumatism twinged the hind legs of Prepimpin. Desire for slumber stupefied his sense of duty. He could no longer catch the lighted cigar and swagger off with it in his mouth, across the stage.

"And yet, I'm sure," writes Lackaday, "that every time I cut his business, it nearly broke his heart. And it had come to Prepimpin's business being cut down to an insignificant minimum. I could, of course, have got another dog. But it would have broken his heart altogether. And one doesn't break the hearts of creatures like Prepimpin. I managed to arrange the performance, at last, so that he should think he was doing a devil of a lot...."

Then the end came. It was on the Bridge of Avignon, which, if you will remember, Lackaday superst.i.tiously regards as a spot fraught with his destiny.

Fate had not taken him to the town since his last disastrous appearance. No one recognized in the Pet.i.t Patou of provincial fame the lank failure of many years ago. Besides, this time, he played not at the wretched music-hall without the walls, but at the splendid Palace of Varieties in the Boulevard de la Gare. He was a star--_en vedette_, and he had a dressing-room to himself. He stayed at the Hotel d'Europe, the famous hostelry by the great entrance gates. To avoid complication, he went everywhere now as Monsieur Patou. Folks pa.s.sing by the open courtyard of the hotel where he might be taking the air, pointed him out to one another.

"_Le voila--Pet.i.t Patou_"