The Mountebank Part 9

As originality was banned from the circus tradition, he stood still in the narrow, quiet street and gasped.

"Original?"

"You are so long and thin," she said.

"That has always been against me; it was against me to-day."

"But you could make it so droll," she declared. "And there would be no one else like you. But you must be by yourself, not with a troupe like the Merveilleux. _Tiens_," she caught him by the lapels of his jacket and a pa.s.ser-by might have surmised a pleading stage in a lovers' discussion, "I have heard there is a little little man in London--oh, so little, _et pas du tout joli_."

"I know," said Andrew, "but he is a great artist."

"And so are you," she retorted. "But as this little man gets all the profit he can out of his littleness--it was _la grosse_ Leonie--the _brune_, number three, you know--ah, but you haven't seen us--anyhow she has been in London and was telling me about him this evening--all that nature has endowed him with he exaggerates--_eh bien!_ Why couldn't you do the same?"

The street was badly lit with gas; but still he could see the flash in her dark eyes. He drew himself up and laid both his hands on her thin shoulders.

"My little Elodie," said he--and by the dim gaslight she could see the flash of his teeth revealed by his wide smile--"My little Elodie, you have genius. You have given me an idea that may make my fortune. What can I give you in return?"

"If you want to show me that you are not ungrateful, you might kiss me,"

said Elodie.

Chapter VI

A kiss must mean either very much or very little. There are maidens to whom it signifies a life's consecration. There are men whose blood it fires with burning pa.s.sion. There are couples of different s.e.x who jointly consider their first kiss a matter of supreme importance, and, the temporary rapture over, at once begin to discuss the possibilities of parental approbation and the ways and means of matrimony. A kiss may be the very devil of a thing leading to two or three dozen honourably born grandchildren, or to suicide, or to celebate addiction to cats, or to eugenic propaganda, or to perpetual c.r.a.pe and the boredom of a community, or to the fate of Abelard, or to the Fall of Troy, or to the proud destiny of a William the Conqueror.

I repeat that it is a ticklish thing to go and meddle with it without due consideration. And in some cases consideration only increases the fortuity of its results. Volumes could be written on it.

If you think that the kiss exchanged between Andrew and Elodie had any such immediate sentimental or tragical or heroical consequences you are mistaken. Andrew responded with all the grace in the world to the invitation. It was a pleasant and refres.h.i.+ng act. He was grateful for her companions.h.i.+p, her sympathy, and her inspired counsel. She carried off her frank comrades.h.i.+p with such an air of virginal innocence, and at the same time with such unconscious exposure of her half fulfilled womanhood, that he suffered no temptations of an easy conquest. The kiss therefore evoked no baser range of emotion. As his head was whirling with an artist's sudden conception--and, mark you, an artist's conception need no more be a case of parthenogenesis than that of the physical woman--it had no room for the higher and subtler and more romantical idealizations of the owner of the kissed lips. You may put him down for an insensible young egoist. Put him down for what you will. His embrace was but gratefully fraternal.

As for Elodie, if it were not dangerous--she had the street child's instinct--what did a kiss or two matter? If one paid all that attention to a kiss one's life would be a complicated drama of a hundred threads.

"A kiss is nothing"--so ran one of her _obiter dicta_ recorded somewhere in the ma.n.u.script--"unless you feel it in your toes. Then look out."

Evidently this kiss Elodie did not feel in her toes, for she walked along carelessly beside him to the door of her hotel, a hostelry possibly a shade more poverty-stricken in a flag paved by-street, a trifle staler-smelling than his own, and there put out a friendly hand of dismissal.

"We will write to each other?"

"It is agreed."

"Alors, au revoir."

"Au revoir, Elodie, et merci."

And that was the end of it. Andrew went back to Paris by the first train in the morning, and Elodie continued to dance in Avignon.

If they had maintained, as they vaguely promised, an intimate correspondence, it might have developed, according to the laws of the interchange of sentiment between two young and candid souls, into a reciprocal expression of the fervid state which the kiss failed to produce.

A couple of months of it, and the pair, yearning for each other, would have effected by hook or crook, a delirious meeting, and young Romance would have had its triumphant way. But to the G.o.ds it seemed otherwise. Andrew wrote, as in grateful duty bound. He wrote again. If she had replied, he would have written a third time; but as there are few things more discouraging than a one-sided correspondence, he held his hand. He felt a touch of disappointment. She was such a warm, friendly little creature, with a sagacious little head on her--by no means the _tete de linotte_ of so many of her sisters of song and dance. And she had forgotten him. He shrugged philosophic shoulders. After all, why should she trouble herself further with so dull a dog? Man-like he did not realize the difficulties that beset even a sagacious-headed daughter of song and dance in the matter of literary composition, and the temptation to postpone from day to day the grappling with them, until the original impulse has spent itself through sheer procrastination. It is all very well to say that a letter is an easy thing to write, when letter-writing is a daily habit and you have writing materials and table all comfortably to hand. But when, like Elodie, you would have to go into a shop and buy a bottle of ink and a pen and paper and envelopes and take them up to a tiny hotel bedroom shared with an untidy, s.p.a.ce-usurping colleague, or when you would have to sit at a cafe table and write under the eyes of a not the least little bit discreet companion--for even the emanc.i.p.ated daughters of song and dance cannot, in modesty, show themselves at cafes alone; or when you have to stand up in a post office--and then there is the paper and envelope difficulty--with a furious person behind you who wants to send a telegram--Elodie's invariable habit when she corresponded, on the back of a picture post card, with her mother; when, in fact, you have before you the unprecedented task of writing a letter--picture post cards being out of the question--and a letter whose flawlessness of expression is prescribed by your vanity, or better by your nice little self-esteem, and you are confronted by such conditions as are above catalogued, human frailty may be pardoned for giving it up in despair.

With this apologia for Elodie's unresponsiveness, conscientiously recorded later by Andrew Lackaday, we will now proceed. The fact remains that they faded pleasantly and even regretlessly from each other's lives.

There now follow some years, in Lackaday's career, of high endeavour and fierce struggle. He has taken to heart Elodie's suggestion of the exploitation of his physical idiosyncracy. He seeks for a formula. In the meanwhile he gains his livelihood as he can. His powers of mimicry stand him in good stead. In the outlying cafe-concerts of Paris, unknown to fas.h.i.+on or the foreigner, he gives imitations of popular idols from Le Bargy to Polin. But the Amba.s.sadeurs, and the Alcazar d'Ete and the Folies Marigny and Olympia and such-like stages where fame and fortune are to be found, will have none of him. Paris, too, gets on his vagabond nerves.

But what is the good of presenting the unsophisticated public of Brest or Beziers with an imitation of Monsieur le Bargy? As well give them lectures on Thermodynamics.

Sometimes he escapes from mimicry. He conjures, he juggles, he plays selections from Carmen and Cavaleria Rusticana on a fiddle made out of a cigar box and a broom-handle. The Provinces accept him with mild approbation. He tries Paris, the Paris of Menilmontant and the Outer Boulevards; but Paris, not being amused, prefers his mimicry. He is alone, mind you. No more Coincon combinations. If he is to be insulted, let the audience do it, or the vulgar theatre management; not his brother artists.

Away from his imitations he tries to make the most of his grotesque figure.

He invents eccentric costumes; his sleeves reach no further than just below his elbows, his trouser hems flick his calves; he wears, inveterate tradition of the circus clown, a ridiculously little hard felt hat on the top of his shock of carroty hair. He paints his nose red and extends his grin from ear to ear. He racks his brain to invent novelties in manual dexterity. For hours a day in his modest _chambre garnie_ in the Faubourg Saint Denis he practises his tricks. On the dissolution of the Cirque Rocambeau, where as "Auguste" he had been practically anonymous, he had unimaginatively adopted the professional name of Andrew-Andre. He is still Andrew-Andre. There is not much magic about it on a programme. But, _que voulez-vous?_ It is as effective as many another.

During this period we see him a serious youth, absorbed in his profession, striving towards success, not for the sake of its rewards in luxurious living, but for the stamp that it gives to efficiency. The famous mountebank of Notre Dame did not juggle with greater fervour. Here and there a woman crosses his path, lingers a little and goes her way. Not that he is insensible to female charms, for he upbraids himself for over-susceptibility. But it seems that from the atavistic source whence he inherited his beautiful hands, there survived in him an instinct which craved in woman the indefinable quality that he could never meet, the quality which was common to Melisande and Phedre and Rosalind and Fedora and the child-wife of David Copperfield. It is, as I have indicated, the ladies who bid him _bonsoir_. Sometimes he mourns for a day or two, more often he laughs, welcoming regained freedom. None touches his heart.

Of men, he has acquaintances in plenty, with whom he lives on terms of good comrades.h.i.+p; but he has scarcely an intimate.

At last he makes a friend--an Englishman, Horatio Bakkus; and this friends.h.i.+p marks a turning-point in his history.

They met at a cafe-concert in Montmartre, which, like many of its kind, had an ephemeral existence--the nearest, incidentally, to the real Paris to which Andrew Lackaday had attained. It tried to appeal to a catholicity of tastes; to outdo its rivals inscabrousness--did not Farandol and Lizette Blandy make their names there?--and at the same time to offer to the purer-minded an innocent entertainment. To the latter both Lackaday, with his imitations, and Horatio Bakkus, with his sentimental ballads, contributed. Somehow the mixture failed to please. The one part scared the virtuous, at the other the deboshed yawned. _La Boite Blanche_ perished of inanition. But during its continuance, Lackaday and Bakkus had a month's profitable engagement.

They b.u.mped into each other, on their first night, at the stage-door. Each politely gave way to the other. They walked on together and turned down the Rue Pigalle and, striking off, reached the Grands Boulevards. The Bra.s.serie Tourtel enticed them. They entered and sat down to a modest supper, sandwiches and brown beer.

"I wish," said Andrew, "you would do me the pleasure to speak English with me."

"Why?" cried the other. "Is my French so villainous?"

"By no means," said Andrew, "but I am an Englishman."

"Then how the devil do you manage to talk both languages like a Frenchman?"

"Why? Is my English then so villainous?"

He mimicked him perfectly. Horatio Bakkus laughed.

"Young man," said he, "I wish I had your gift."

"And I yours."

"It's the rottenest gift a man can be born with," cried Bakkus with startling vindictiveness. "It turns him into an idle, sentimental, hypocritical and dissolute hound. If I hadn't been cursed young with a voice like a Cherub, I should possibly be on the same affable terms with the Almighty as my brother, the Archdeacon, or profitably paralysing the intellects of the young like my brother, the preparatory schoolmaster."

He was a lean and rusty man of forty, with long black hair brushed back over his forehead, and cadaverous cheeks and long upper lip which all the shaving in the world could not redeem for the blue shade of the strong black beard which at midnight showed almost black. But for his black, mocking eyes, he might have been taken for the seedy provincial tragedian of the old school.

"Young man----" said he.

"My name," said Andrew, "is Lackaday."

"And you don't like people to be familiar and take liberties."

Andrew met the ironical glance. "That is so," said he quietly.