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The Belovéd Vagabond

by William John Locke · English · Gutenberg #28489 · 500,714 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Belovéd Vagabond

Author: William John Locke


        
Release date: April 4, 2009 [eBook #28489]
                Most recently updated: January 4, 2021

Language: English

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Produced by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, Emmy and the
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THE BELOVÉD VAGABOND




THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM J. LOCKE

          IDOLS
          SEPTIMUS
          DERELICTS
          THE USURPER
          WHERE LOVE IS
          THE WHITE DOVE
          SIMON THE JESTER
          A STUDY IN SHADOWS
          THE BELOVÉD VAGABOND
          AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA
          THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
          THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE




The Belovéd Vagabond

By William J. Locke

Author of

"Septimus," "Idols," Etc.

[Illustration]

          A. L. BURT COMPANY
          Publishers         New York




          Copyright, 1905

          BY JOHN LANE
          Copyright, 1900

          BY JOHN LANE COMPANY


          SET UP, ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY
          THE PUBLISHERS PRINTING CO., NEW YORK




THE BELOVÉD VAGABOND




CHAPTER I


THIS is not a story about myself. Like Canning's organ-grinder I have
none to tell. It is the story of Paragot, the belovéd vagabond--please
pronounce his name French-fashion--and if I obtrude myself on your
notice it is because I was so much involved in the medley of farce and
tragedy which made up some years of his life, that I don't know how to
tell the story otherwise. To Paragot I owe everything. He is at once my
benefactor, my venerated master, my beloved friend, my creator. Clay in
his hands, he moulded me according to his caprice, and inspired me with
the breath of life. My existence is drenched with the colour of Paragot.
I lay claim to no personality of my own, and any _obiter dicta_ that may
fall from my pen in the course of the ensuing narrative are but
reflections of Paragot's philosophy. Men have spoken evil of him. He
snapped his fingers at calumny, but I winced, never having reached the
calm altitudes of scorn wherein his soul has its habitation. I burned to
defend him, and I burn now; and that is why I propose to write his
_apologia_, his justification.

Why he singled me out for adoption from among the unwashed urchins of
London I never could conjecture. Once I asked him.

"Because," said he, "you were ugly, dirty, ricketty, under-sized,
underfed and wholly uninteresting. Also because your mother was the very
worst washer-woman that ever breathed gin into a shirt-front."

I did not resent these charges, direct and implied, against my mother.
She did launder villainously, and she did drink gin, and of the nine
uncared-for gutter-snipes she brought into the world, I think I was the
most unkempt and neglected. I know that Sunday-school books tell you to
love your mother; but if the only maternal caresses you could remember
were administered by means of a wet pair of woollen drawers or the edge
of a hot flat-iron, you would find filial piety a virtue somewhat
abstract. Verily do earwigs care more for their progeny than did my
mother. She sold me body and soul to Paragot for half-a-crown.

It fell out thus.

One morning, laden with his--technically speaking--clean linen, I
knocked at the door of Paragot's chambers. He called them chambers, for
he was nothing if not grandiloquent, but really they consisted in an
attic in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, above the curious club over
which he presided. I knocked, then, at the door. A sonorous voice bade
me enter. Paragot lay in bed, smoking a huge pipe with a porcelain bowl
and reading a book. The fact of one individual having a room all to
himself impressed me so greatly with a sense of luxury, refinement and
power, that I neglected to observe its pitifulness and squalor. Nor of
Paragot's personal appearance was I critical. He had long black hair,
and a long black beard, and long black finger-nails. The last were so
long and commanding that I thought ashamedly of my own bitten
fingertips, and vowed that when I too became a great man, able to smoke
a porcelain pipe of mornings in my own room, my nails should equal his
in splendour.

"I have brought the washing, Sir," I announced, "and, please, Sir,
mother says I'm not to let you have it unless you settle up for the last
three weeks."

I had a transient vision of swarthy, hairy legs, as Paragot leaped out
of bed. He stood over me, man of all the luxuries that he was, in his
nightshirt. Fancy having a shirt for the day and a shirt for the night!

"Do you mean that you will dispute possession of it with me, _vi et
armis_?"

"Yes, Sir," said I, confused.

He laughed, clapped me on the shoulder, called me David, Jack the
Giant-Killer, and bade me deliver the washing-book. I fumbled in the
pocket of my torn jacket and handed him a greasy, dog's-eared mass of
paper. As soon as his eyes fell on it, I realised my mistake, and
produced the washing book from the other pocket.

"I've given you the wrong one, Sir," said I, reaching for the treasure I
had surrendered.

But he threw himself on his bed and dived his legs beneath the clothes.

"Wonderful!" he cried. "He is four foot nothing, he looks like a yard of
pack-thread, he would fight me for an ill-washed shirt and a pair of
holes with bits of sock round them, and he reads 'Paradise Lost'!"

He made a gesture of throwing the disreputable epic at my head, and I
curved my arm in an attitude only too familiarly defensive.

"I found it in a bundle of washing, Sir," I cried apologetically.

At home reading was the unforgivable sin. Had my mother discovered me
poring over the half intelligible but wholly fascinating story of Adam
and Eve and the Devil, she would have beaten me with the first implement
to her hand. I had a moment's terror lest the possession of a work of
literature should be so horrible a crime that even Paragot would
chastise me.

To my consternation he thrust the tattered thing--it was an antiquated
sixpenny edition--under my nose and commanded me to read.

"'Of Man's first disobedience'--Go on. If you can read it intelligently
I'll pay your mother. If you can't I'll write to her politely to say
that I resent having my washing sent home by persons of no education."

I began in great fear, but having, I suppose, an instinctive
appreciation of letters, I mouthed the rolling lines not too brokenly.

"What's a Heavenly Muse?" asked Paragot, as soon as I paused. I had not
the faintest idea.

"Do you think it's a Paradisiacal back yard where they keep the Horse of
the Apocalypse?"

I caught a twinkle in the blue eyes which he bent fiercely upon me.

"If you please, Sir," said I, "I think it is the Bird of Paradise."

Then we both laughed; and Paragot bidding me sit on the wreck of a
cane-bottomed chair, gave me my first lesson in Greek Mythology. He
talked for nearly an hour, and I, ragged urchin of the London streets,
my wits sharpened by hunger and ill-usage, sat spell-bound on my
comfortless perch, while he unfolded the tale of Gods and Goddesses, and
unveiled Olympus before my enraptured vision.

"Boy," said he suddenly, "can you cook a herring?"

I came down to earth with a bang. Stunned I stared at him. I distinctly
remember wondering where I was.

"Can you cook a herring?" he shouted.

"Yes, Sir," I cried, jumping to my feet.

"Then cook two--one for you and one for me. You'll find them somewhere
about the room, also tea and bread and butter and a gas-stove, and when
all is ready let me know."

He settled himself comfortably in bed and went on reading his book. It
was Hegel's Philosophy of History. I tried to read it afterwards and
found that it passed my understanding.

In a confused dream of gods and herrings, I set about my task. Heaven
only knows how I managed to succeed. In my childish imagination Jupiter
was clothed in the hirsute majesty of Paragot.

And I was to breakfast with him!

The herrings and a half-smoked pipe shared a plate on the top of the
ricketty chest of drawers. I had to blow the ash off the fish. A paper
of tea and a loaf of bread I found in a higgledy-piggledy mixture of
clothes, books and papers. My godlike friend had carelessly put his
hair-brush into the butter. The condition of the sole cooking utensil
warred even against my sense of the fitness of gridirons, and I cleansed
it with his towel.

Since then I have breakfasted in the houses of the wealthy, I have
lunched at the Café Anglais, I have dined at the Savoy but never have I
eaten, never till they give me a welcoming banquet in the Elysian fields,
shall I eat so ambrosial a meal as that first herring with Paragot.

When I had set it on the little deal table, he deigned to remember my
existence, and closing his book, rose, donned a pair of trousers and sat
down. He gave me my first lesson in table-manners.

"Boy," said he, "if you wish to adorn the high social spheres for which
you are destined, you must learn the value of convention. Bread and
cheese-straws and asparagus and the leaves of an artichoke are eaten
with the fingers; but not herrings or sweetbreads or ice cream. As
regards the last you are doubtless in the habit of extracting it from a
disappointing wine-glass with your tongue. This in _notre monde_ is
regarded as bad form. '_Notre Monde_' is French, a language which you
will have to learn. Its great use is in talking to English people when
you don't want them to understand what you say. They pretend they do,
for they are too vain to admit their ignorance. The wise man profits by
the vanity of his fellow-creatures. If I were not wise after this
manner, should I be here eating herrings in Tavistock Street, Covent
Garden?"

I was too full of food and adoration to reply. I gazed at him dumbly
worshipping and choked over a cup of tea. When I recovered he questioned
me as to my home life, my schooling, my ideas of a future state and my
notions of a career in this world. The height of my then ambition was to
keep a fried-fish shop. The restaurateur with whom my good mother dealt
used to sit for hours in his doorway in Drury Lane reading a book, and I
considered this a most dignified and scholarly avocation. When I made
this naïve avowal to Paragot, he looked at me with a queer pity in his
eyes, and muttered an exclamation in a foreign tongue. I have never met
anyone so full of strange oaths as Paragot. As to my religious
convictions, they were chiefly limited to a terrifying conception of the
hell to which my mother daily consigned me. In devils, fires, chains and
pitchforks its establishment was as complete as any _inferno_ depicted
by Orcagna. I used to wake up of nights in a cold sweat through dreaming
of it.

"My son," said Paragot, "the most eminent divines of the Church of
England will tell you that a material hell with consuming flames is an
exploded fallacy. I can tell you the same without being an eminent
divine. The wicked carry their own hell about with them during
life--here, somewhere between the gullet and the pit of the stomach, and
it prevents their enjoyment of herrings which smell vilely of gas."

"There ain't no devils, then?" I asked.

"_Sacré mille diables_, No!" he shouted. "Haven't I been exhausting
myself with telling you so?"

I said little, but to this day I remember the thrilling sense of
deliverance from a horror which had gone far to crush the little
childish joy allowed me by circumstance. There was no fiery hell, no
red-hot pincers, no eternal frizzling and sizzling of the flesh, like
unto that of the fish in Mr. Samuel's fish-shop. Paragot had transformed
me by a word into a happy young pagan. My eyes swam as I swallowed my
last bit of bread and butter.

"What is your name?" asked Paragot.

"Augustus, Sir."

"Augustus, what?"

"Smith," I murmured. "Same as mother's."

"I was forgetting," said he. "Now if there is one name I dislike more
than Smith it is Augustus. I have been thinking of a very nice name for
you. It is Asticot. It expresses you better than Augustus Smith."

"It is a very good name, Sir," said I politely.

I learned soon after that it is a French word meaning the little grey
worms which fishermen call "gentles," and that it was not such a
complimentary appellation as I had imagined; but Asticot I became, and
Asticot I remained for many a year.

"Wash up the things, my little Asticot," said he, "and afterwards we
will discuss future arrangements."

According to his directions I took the tray down to a kind of scullery
on the floor below. The wet plates and cups I dried on a greasy rag
which I found lying on the sink; and this seemed to me a refinement of
luxurious living; for at home, when we did wash plates, we merely held
them under the tap till the remains of food ran off, and we never
thought of drying them. When I returned to the bedroom Paragot was
dressed for the day. His long lean wrists and hands protruded far
through the sleeves of an old brown jacket. He wore a grey flannel shirt
and an old bit of black ribbon done up in a bow by way of a tie; his
slouch hat, once black, was now green with age, and his boots were
innocent of blacking. But my eyes were dazzled by a heavy gold watch
chain across his waistcoat and I thought him the most glorious of
betailored beings.

"My little Asticot," said he, "would you like to forsake your gentle
mother's wash-tub and your dreams of a fried-fish shop and enter my
service? I, the heir of all the ages, am driven by Destiny to running
The Lotus Club downstairs. We call it 'Lotus' because we eat tripe to
banish memory. The members meet together in order to eat tripe, drink
beer and hear me talk. You can eat tripe and hear me talk too, and that
will improve both your mind and your body. While Cherubino, the waiter,
teaches you how to be a scullion, I will instruct you in philosophy. The
sofa in the Club will make an excellent bed for you, and your wages will
be eighteen pence a week."

He thrust his hands in his trouser pockets, and rattling his money
looked at me with an enquiring air. I returned his gaze for a while,
lost in a delirious wonder. I tried to speak. Something stuck in my
throat. I broke into a blubber and dried my eyes with my knuckles.

It was an intoxicated little Asticot that trotted by his side to my
mother's residence. There over gin-and-water the bargain was struck. My
mother pocketed half-a-crown and with shaky unaccustomed fingers signed
her name across a penny-stamp at the foot of a document which Paragot
had drawn up. I believe each of them was convinced that they had
executed a legal deed. My mother after inspecting me critically for a
moment wiped my nose with the piece of sacking that served as her apron
and handed me over to Paragot, who marched away with his purchase as
proud as if I had been a piece of second-hand furniture picked up cheap.

I may as well remark here that Paragot was not his real name; neither
was Josiah Henkendyke by which he was then known to me. He had a
harmless mania for names, and I have known him use half a dozen. But
that of Paragot which he assumed later as his final alias is the one
with which he is most associated in my mind, and to avoid confusion I
must call him that from the start. Indeed, looking backward down the
years, I wonder how he could ever have been anything else than Paragot.
That Phoebus Apollo could once have borne the name of John Jones is
unimaginable.

"Boy," said he, as we retraced our steps to Tavistock Street, "you are
my thing, my chattel, my _famulus_. No slave of old belonged more
completely to a free-born citizen. You will address me as 'master'!"

"Yes, Sir," said I.

"Master!" he shouted. "_Master_ or _maître_ or _maestro_ or _magister_
according to the language you are speaking. Now do you understand?"

"Yes, Master," said I.

He nodded approval. At the corner of a by-street he stopped short and
held me at arm's length.

"You are a horrible object, my little Asticot," said he. "I must clothe
you in a manner befitting the Lotus Club."

He ran me into a slop-dealer's and fitted me out in sundry garments in
which, although they were several sizes too large for me, I felt myself
clad like Solomon in all his glory. Then we went home. On the way up to
his room he paused at the scullery. A dishevelled woman was tidying up.

"Mrs. Housekeeper," said he, "allow me to present you our new scullion
pupil. Kindly instruct him in his duties, feed him and wash his head.
Also please remember that he answers to the name of Asticot."

He swung on his heel and went downstairs humming a tune. I remained with
Mrs. Housekeeper who carried out his instructions zealously. I can feel
the soreness on my scalp to this day.

Thus it fell out that I quitted the maternal roof and entered the
service of Paragot. I never saw my mother again, as she died soon
afterwards; and as my brood of brothers and sisters vanished down the
diverse gutters of London, I found myself with Paragot for all my
family; and now that I have arrived at an age when a man can look back
dispassionately on his past, it is my pride that I can lay my hand on my
heart and avow him to be the best family that boy ever had.




CHAPTER II


THE Lotus Club was the oddest society I have met. The premises
consisted of one long dingy room with two dingy windows: the
furniture of a long table covered with dirty American cloth, a
multitude of wooden chairs, an old sofa, two dilapidated dinner-waggons,
and a frame against the wall from which, by means of clips, churchwarden
pipes depended stem downwards; and by each clip was a label bearing a
name. On the table stood an enormous jar of tobacco. A number of
ill-washed glasses decorated the dinner-waggons. There was not a curtain,
not a blind,  not a picture. The further end of the room away from the
door contained a huge fireplace, and on the wooden mantelpiece ticked
a three-and-sixpenny clock.

During the daytime it was an abode of abominable desolation. No one came
near it until nine o'clock in the evening, when one or two members
straggled in, took down their long pipes and called for whisky or beer,
the only alcoholic beverages the club provided. These were kept in great
barrels in the scullery, presided over by Mrs. Housekeeper until it was
time to prepare the supper, when Cherubino and I helped ourselves. At
eleven the cloth was laid. From then till half past members came in
considerable numbers. At half past supper was served. A steaming dish of
tripe furnished the head of the table in front of Paragot, and a cut of
cold beef the foot.

There were generally from fifteen to thirty present; men of all classes:
Journalists, actors, lawyers, out-at-elbows nondescripts. I have seen
one of Her Majesty's Judges and a prizefighter exchanging views across
the table. A few attended regularly; but the majority seemed to be
always new-comers. They supped, talked, smoked, and drank whisky until
two or three o'clock in the morning and appeared to enjoy themselves
prodigiously. I noticed that on departing they wrung Paragot fervently
by the hand and thanked him for their delightful evening. I remembered
his telling me that they came to hear him talk. He did talk: sometimes
so compellingly that I would stand stock-still rapt in reverential
ecstasy: once to the point of letting the potatoes I was handing round
roll off the dish on to the floor. I never was so rapt again; for
Cherubino picking up the potatoes and following my frightened exit,
broke them over my head on the landing, by way of chastisement. The best
barbers do not use hot mealy potatoes for the hair.

When the last guest had departed, Paragot mounted to his attic, Mrs.
Housekeeper and Cherubino went their several ways--each went several
ways, I think, for they had unchecked command during the evening over
the whisky and beer barrels--and I, dragging a bundle of bedclothes from
beneath the sofa, went to bed amid the fumes of tripe, gas, tobacco,
alcohol and humanity, and slept the sleep of perfect happiness.

In the morning, at about eleven, I rose and prepared breakfast for
Paragot and myself, which we ate together in his room. For a couple of
hours he instructed me in what he was pleased to call the humanities.
Then he sent me out into the street for air and exercise, with
instructions to walk to Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's
Cathedral, Whiteley's--he always had a fresh objective for me--and to
bring him back my views thereon and an account of what I had noticed on
the way. When I came home I delivered myself into the hands of Mrs.
Housekeeper and turned scullion again. The plates, glasses, knives and
forks of the previous evening's orgy were washed and cleaned, the room
swept and aired, and a meal cooked for Mrs. Housekeeper and myself which
we ate at a corner of the long table. Paragot himself dined out.

On Sunday evenings the Club was shut, and as Mrs. Housekeeper did not
make her appearance on the Sabbath, the remains of Saturday night's
supper stayed on the table till Monday afternoon. Imagine remains of
tripe thirty six hours old!

I mention this, not because it is of any great interest, but because it
exhibits a certain side of Paragot's character. In those early days I
was not critical. I lived in a maze of delight. Paragot was the Wonder
of the Earth, my bedroom a palace chamber, and the abominable Sunday
night smell pervaded my senses like the perfumes of all the Arabies.

"My son," said Paragot one morning, in the middle of a French
lesson--from the first he was bent on my learning the language--"My son,
I wonder whether you are going to turn out a young Caliban, and after I
have shewn you the True Divinity of Things, return to your dam's god
Setebos?"

He regarded me earnestly with his light blue eyes which looked so odd in
his swarthy black-bearded face.

"Is there any hope for the race of Sycorax?"

As we had read "The Tempest" the day before, I understood the
allusions.

"I would sooner be Ariel, Master," said I, by way of showing off my
learning.

"He was an ungrateful beggar too," said Paragot. He went on talking, but
I heard him not; for my childish mind quickly associated him with
Prospero, and I wondered where lay his magic staff with which he could
split pines and liberate tricksy spirits, and whether he had a beautiful
daughter hidden in some bower of Tavistock Street, and whether the
cadaverous Cherubino might not be a metamorphosed Ferdinand. He appeared
the embodiment of all wisdom and power, and yet he had the air of one
cheated of his kingdom. He seemed also to be of reverential age. As a
matter of fact he was not yet forty.

My attention was recalled by his rising and walking about the room.

"I am making this experiment on your vile body, my little Asticot," said
he, "to prove my Theory of Education. You have had, so far as it goes,
what is called an excellent Board School Training. You can read and
write and multiply sixty-four by thirty-seven in your head, and you can
repeat the Kings of England. If you had been fortunate and gone to a
Public school they would have stuffed your brain full of Greek verbs and
damned facts about triangles. But of the meaning of life, the value of
life, the art of life, you would never have had a glimmering perception.
I am going to educate you, my little Asticot, through the imagination.
The intellect can look after itself. We will go now to the National
Gallery."

He caught up his hat and threw me my cap, and we went out. He had a
sudden, breathless way of doing things. I am sure thirty seconds had
not elapsed between the idea of the National Gallery entering his head
and our finding ourselves on the stairs.

We went to the National Gallery. I came away with a reeling
undistinguishable mass of form and colour before my eyes. I felt sick.
Only one single picture stood out clear. Paragot talked Italian art to
my uncomprehending ears all the way home.

"Now," said he, when he had settled himself comfortably in his old
wicker-work chair again, "which of the pictures did you like best?"

Why that particular picture (save that it is the supreme art of a
supreme genius) should have alone fixed itself on my mind, I do not
know. It has been one of the psychological puzzles of my life.

"A man's head, master," said I; "I can't describe it, but I think I
could draw it."

"Draw it?" he echoed incredulously.

"Yes, Master."

He pulled a stump of pencil from his pocket and threw it to me. I felt
luminously certain I could draw the head. A curious exaltation filled me
as I sat at a corner of the table before a flattened-out piece of paper
that had wrapped up tea. Paragot stood over me, as I drew.

"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_" cried he. "It is Gian Bellini's Doge
Loredano. But what made you remember that picture, and how in the name
of Board schools could you manage to draw it?"

He walked swiftly up and down the room.

"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"

"I used to draw horses and men on my slate at school," said I modestly.

Paragot filled his porcelain pipe and walked about strangely excited.
Suddenly he stopped.

"My little Asticot," said he, "you had better go down and help Mrs.
Housekeeper to wash up the dirty plates and dishes, for your soul's
sake."

What my soul had to do with greasy crockery I could not in the least
fathom; but the next morning Paragot gave me a drawing lesson. It would
be false modesty for me to say that I did not show talent, since the
making of pictures is the means whereby I earn my living at the present
moment. The gift once discovered, I exercised it in and out of season.

"My son," said Paragot, when I showed him a sketch of Mrs. Housekeeper
as she lay on the scullery floor one Saturday night, unable to go any
one of her several ways, "I am afraid you are an artist. Do you know
what an artist is?"

I didn't. He pronounced the word in tones of such deep melancholy that I
felt it must denote something particularly depraved.

"It is the man who has the power of doing up his soul in whitey-brown
paper parcels and selling them at three halfpence apiece."

This was at breakfast one morning while he was chipping an egg. Only two
eggs furnished forth our repast, and I was already deep in mine. He
scooped off the top of the shell, regarded it for a second and then rose
with the egg and went to the window.

"Since you have wings you had better fly," said he, and he threw it into
the street.

"My little Asticot," he added, resuming his seat. "I myself was once an
artist: now I am a philosopher: it is much better."

He cheerfully attacked his bread and butter. Whether it was a sense of
his goodness or my own greediness that prompted me I know not, but I
pushed my half eaten egg across to him and begged him to finish it. He
looked queerly at me for a moment.

"I accept it," said he, "in the spirit in which it is offered."

The great man solemnly ate my egg, and pride so filled my heart that I
could scarcely swallow. A smaller man than Paragot would have refused.

From what I gathered from conversations overheard whilst I was serving
members with tripe and alcohol, it appeared that my revered master was a
mysterious personage. About eight months before, he had entered the then
unprosperous Club for the first time as a guest of the founder and
proprietor, an old actor who was growing infirm. He talked vehemently.
The next night he took the presidential chair which he since occupied,
to the Club's greater glory. But whence he came, who and what he was, no
one seemed to know. One fat man whose air of portentous wisdom (and
insatiable appetite) caused me much annoyance, proclaimed him a Russian
Nihilist and asked me whether there were any bombs in his bedroom.
Another man declared that he had seen him leading a bear in the streets
of Warsaw. His manner offended me.

"Have you ever been to Warsaw, Mr. Ulysses?" asked the fat man. Mr.
Ulysses was the traditional title of the head of the Lotus Club.

"This gentleman says he saw you leading a bear there, Master," I piped,
wrathfully, in my shrill treble.

There was the sudden silence of consternation. All, some five and
twenty, laid down their knives and forks and looked at Paragot, who rose
from his seat. Throwing out his right hand he declaimed:

  [Greek: "Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polutropon, os mala polla
           plagchthê, epei Troiês Ieron ptoliethron epersen
           pollôn d' anthrôpôn iden astea, kai noon egnô.]

"Does anyone know what that is?"

A young fellow at the end of the table said it was the opening lines of
the Odyssey.

"You are right, sir," said Paragot, threading his fingers through his
long black hair. "They tell of my predecessor in office, the first
President of this Club, who was a man of many wanderings and many
sufferings and had seen many cities and knew the hearts of men. I,
gentlemen, have had my Odyssey, and I have been to Warsaw, and," with a
rapier flash of a glance at the gentleman who had accused him of leading
bears, "I know the miserable hearts of men." He rapped on the table with
his hammer. "Asticot, come here," he shouted.

I obeyed trembling.

"If ever you lift up your voice again in this assembly, I will have you
boiled and served up with onion sauce, second-hand tripe that you are,
and you shall be eaten underdone. Now go."

I felt shrivelled to the size of a pea. Beneath Paragot's grotesqueness
ran an unprecedented severity. I was conscious of the accusing glare of
every eye. In my blind bolt to the door I had the good fortune to run
headlong into a tray of drinks which Cherubino was carrying.

The disaster saved the situation. Laughter rang out loud and the talk
became general. The interlude was forgotten; but the man who said he had
seen my master leading bears in Warsaw vanished from the Club for ever
after.

The next morning when I entered Paragot's room to wake him I found him
reading in bed. He looked up from his book.

"My little Asticot," said he, "leading bears is better than calumny, but
indiscretion is worse than both."

And that is all I heard of the matter. I never lifted up my voice in the
Club again.

There was a curious black case on the top of a cupboard in his room
which for some time aroused my curiosity. It was like no box I had seen
before. But one afternoon Paragot took it down and extracted therefrom a
violin which after tuning he began to play. Now although fond of music I
have never been able to learn any instrument save the tambourine--my
highest success otherwise has been to finger out "God save the Queen"
and "We won't go home till morning" on the ocarina--and to this day a
person able to play the piano or the fiddle seems possessed of an
uncanny gift; but in that remote period of my fresh rescue from the
gutter, an executant appeared something superhuman. I stared at him with
stupid open mouth. He played what I afterwards learned was one of
Brahms's Hungarian dances. His lank figure and long hair worked in
unison with the music which filled the room with a wild tumult of
movement. I had not heard anything like it in my life. It set every
nerve of me dancing. I suppose Paragot found his interest in me because
I was such an impressionable youngster. When, at the abrupt finale, he
asked me what I thought of it, I could scarce stammer a word.

He gave me one of his queer kind looks while he tuned a string.

"I still wonder, my son, whether it would not be better for your soul
that you should go on scullioning to the end of time."

"Why, Master?" I asked.

"_Sacré mille diables_," he cried, "do you think I am going to give you
a reason for everything? You'll learn fast enough."

He laughed and went on playing, and, as I listened, the more godlike he
grew.

"The streets of Paris," said he, returning the fiddle to its case, "are
strewn with the wrecked souls of artists."

"And not London?"

"My little Asticot," he replied, "I am a Frenchman, and it is our
fondest illusion that no art can possibly exist out of Paris."

I discovered later that he was the son of a Gascon father and an Irish
mother, which accounted for his being absolutely bilingual and, indeed,
for many oddities of temperament. But now he proclaimed himself a
Frenchman, and for a time I was oppressed with a sense of
disappointment.

At the Board School I had bolted enough indigestible historical facts to
know that the English had always beaten the French, and I had drawn the
natural conclusion that the French were a vastly inferior race of
beings. It was, I verily believe, the first step in my spiritual
education to realise that the god of my idolatry suffered no diminution
of grandeur by reason of his nationality. Indeed he gained accession,
for after this he talked often to me of France in his magniloquent way,
until I began secretly to be ashamed of being English. This had one
advantage, in that I set myself with redoubled vigour to learn his
language.

So extraordinary was the veneration I had for the man who had
transplanted me from the kicks and soapsuds of my former life into this
bewildering land of Greek gods and Ariels and pictures and music; for
the man who spoke many unknown tongues, wore a gold watch chain, had
been to Warsaw and every city mentioned in my school geography, and
presided like a king over an assembly of those whom as a gutter urchin I
had been wont to designate "toffs"; for the beneficent being who had
provided me, Gus Smith alias Asticot, with a nightshirt, condescended to
eat half my egg and to allow me to supervise his bedchamber and maintain
it in an orderly state of disintegration, hair-brushes from butter and
tobacco-ash from fish; for the man who, God knows, was the first of
human creatures to awaken the emotion of love within my child's
breast--so extraordinary was the veneration I had for him, that although
I started out on this narrative by saying it was Paragot's story and not
my own I proposed to tell, I hope to be pardoned for a brief egotistical
excursion.

Like the gentleman in Chaucer, Paragot had over "his beddes hedde" a
shelf of books to which, careless creature that he was, he did not dream
of denying me access. In that attic in Tavistock Street I read Smollett
and Byron and somehow spelt through "Nana." I also found there the _De
Imitatione Christi_, which I read with much the same enjoyment as I did
the others. You must not think this priggish of me. The impressionable
child of starved imagination will read anything that is printed. In my
mother's house I used to purloin the squares of newspaper in which the
fried fish from Mr. Samuel's had been wrapped, and surreptitiously read
them. Why not Saint Thomas à Kempis?

I have in my possession now a filthy piece of paper, dropping to bits,
on which is copied, in my round Board School boy handwriting, the
eleventh chapter of the _De Imitatione_.

It runs:

"_My Son, thou hast still many things to learn, which thou hast not well
learned yet._"

"_What are they, Lord_?"

"_To place thy desire altogether in subjection to my good pleasure and
not to be a lover of thyself, but an earnest seeker of my will. Thy
desires often excite and urge thee forward: but consider with thyself
whether thou art not more moved for thine own objects than for my
honour. If it is myself that thou seekest thou shalt be well content
with whatsoever I shall ordain; but if any pursuit of thine own lieth
hidden within thee, behold it is this which hindreth and weigheth thee
down._

"_Beware, therefore, lest thou strive too earnestly after some desire
which thou hast conceived, without taking counsel of me: lest haply it
repent thee afterwards, and that displease thee which before pleased,
and for which thou didst long as for a great good. For not every
affection which seemeth good is to be forthwith followed: neither is
every opposite affection to be immediately avoided. Sometimes it is
expedient to use restraint even in good desires and wishes, lest through
importunity thou fall into distraction of mind, lest through want of
discipline thou become a stumbling-block to others, or lest by the
resistance of others thou be suddenly disturbed and brought to
confusion._

"_Sometimes indeed it is needful to use violence, and manfully to strive
against the sensual appetite, and not to consider what the flesh may or
not will; but rather to strive after this, that it may become subject,
however unwillingly, to the spirit. And for so long it ought to be
chastised and compelled to undergo slavery, even until it be ready for
all things; and learn to be contented with little, to be delighted with
things simple, and never to murmur at any inconvenience._"

Let no one be shocked. It was one of the great acts of devotion of my
life. I copied this out as a boy, not because it counselled me in my
duty towards God, but because it summed up my whole duty to Paragot.
Paragot was "Me." I saw the relation between Paragot and myself in every
line. Had not I often fallen into distraction of mind over my drawing
and books when I ought to have been helping Mrs. Housekeeper downstairs?
Was it not want of discipline that made me a stumbling-block that
memorable night in the Club? Ought I not to be content with everything
Paragot should ordain? And was it not my duty to murmur at no
inconvenience?

Years afterwards I showed this paper to Paragot. He wept. Alas! I had
not well chosen my opportunity.

I remember, the night after I copied the chapter, Cherubino and I helped
Paragot up the stairs and put him to bed. It was the first time I had
seen him the worse for liquor. But when one has been accustomed to see
one's mother and all her adult acquaintances dead drunk, the spectacle
of a god slightly overcome with wine is neither here nor there.




CHAPTER III


THERE was one merit (if merit it was) of my mother's establishment. No
skeletons lurked in cupboards. They flaunted their grimness all over the
place. Such letters as she received trailed about the kitchen, for all
who chose to read, until they were caught up to cleanse a frying-pan. As
she possessed no private papers their sanctity was never inculcated; and
I could have rummaged, had I so desired, in every drawer or box in the
house without fear of correction. When I took up my abode with Paragot,
he laid no embargo on any of his belongings. The attic, except for
sleeping purposes, was as much mine as his, and it did not occur to me
that anything it contained could not be at my disposal.

This must be my apologia for reading, in all innocence, but with much
enjoyment, some documents of a private nature which I discovered one
day, about a year after I had entered Paragot's service, stuffed by way
of keeping them together in an old woollen stocking. They have been put
into my possession now for the purpose of writing this narrative, so my
original offence having been purged, I need offer no apology for
referring to them. There was no sort of order in the bundle of
documents; you might as well look for the quality of humour in a
dromedary, or of mercy in a pianist, as that of method in Paragot. I
managed however to disentangle two main sets, one a series of love
letters and the other disconnected notes of travel. In both was I
mightily interested.

The love-letters, some of which were written in English and some in
French, were addressed to a beautiful lady named Joanna. I knew she was
beautiful because Paragot himself said so. "_Pure et ravissante comme
une aube d'avril_," "My dear dream of English loveliness," "the fair
flower of my life" and remarks such as these were proof positive. The
odd part of it was that they seemed not to have been posted. He wrote:
"not till my arms are again around you will your beloved eyes behold
these outpourings of my heart." The paper heading bore the word "Paris."
Allusions to a great artistic project on which he was working baffled my
young and ignorant curiosity. "I have Love, Youth, Genius, Beauty on my
side," he wrote, "and I shall conquer. We shall be irresistible. Fame
will attend my genius, homage your Beauty; we shall walk on roses and
dwell in the Palaces of the Earth." My heart thrilled when I read these
lines. _I knew_ that Paragot was a great man. Here, again, was proof. I
did not reflect that this vision splendid of earth's palaces had faded
into the twilight of the Tavistock Street garret. Thank heaven we have
had years of remembered life before we learned to reason.

I had many pictures of my hero in those strange letter days, so remote
to my childish mind. He crosses the Channel in December, just to skulk
for one dark night against the railings of the London Square where she
dwelt, in the hope of seeing her shadow on the blind. For some reason
which I could not comprehend, the lovers were forbidden to meet. It
rains, he sees nothing, but he returns to Paris with contentment in his
heart and a terrible cold in his head. But, "I have seen the doorstep,"
he writes, "_qu'effleurent tous les jours ces petits pieds si adorés_."

I hate your modern manner of wooing. A few weeks ago a young woman in
need of my elderly counsel showed me a letter from her betrothed. He had
been educated at Oxford University and possessed a motor-car, and yet he
addressed her as "old girl" and alluded to "the regular beanfeast" they
would have when they were married; and the damsel not only found nothing
wanting in the missive, but treasured it as if it had been an
impapyrated kiss. "_Joie de mon âme_," wrote Paragot, "I have seen the
doorstep which your little feet so adored touch lightly every day." I
like that better. But this is the opinion of the Asticot of a hundred
and fifty. The Asticot of fourteen could not contrast: for him sufficed
the Absolute of the romance of Paragot's love-making. Yet I did have a
standard of comparison--Ferdinand, whom till then I had regarded as the
Prince of Lovers. But he paled into the most prosaic young man before
the newly illuminated Paragot, and as for Miranda I sent her packing
from her throne in my heart and Joanna reigned in her stead. Little
idiot that I was, I set to dreaming of Joanna. You may not like the
name, but to me it held and still holds unspeakable music.

The other papers, as I have said, were records of travel, and I
instinctively recognized that they referred to subsequent Joanna-less
days. They were written on the backs of bills in outlandish languages,
leaves torn from greasy note-books, waste stuff exhaling exotic odours,
and odds and scraps of paper indescribable. In after years in Paris I
besought Paragot, almost on my knees, to write an account of the years
of vagabondage to which these papers refer. It would make, I told him, a
_picaresque_ romance compared with which that of Gil Bias de Santillane
were the tale of wanderings round a village pump. Such, said I, is given
to few men to produce. But Paragot only smiled, and sipped his absinthe.
It was against his principles, he said. The world would be a gentler
habitat if there had never been written or graven record of a human
action, and he refused to pander to the obscene curiosity of the
multitude as to the thoughts and doings of an entire stranger. Besides,
literary composition was beset with too many difficulties. One's method
of expression had always to be in evening dress which he abhorred, and
he could not abide the violet ink and pin-pointed pens supplied in cafés
and places where one writes. So the world has lost a new Odyssey.

The notes formed reading as disconnected as a dictionary. They were so
abrupt. Incidents were noted which stimulated my young imagination like
stinging-nettles; and then nothing more.

"As soon as Hedwige had taught me German, she grew sick and tired of me;
and when she wanted to marry an under-officer of cavalry with moustaches
reaching to the top of his _Pikelhaube_, who tried to run me through the
body when he saw such a scarecrow walking out with her, I left Cassel."

And that was all I learned with regard to Cassel, Hedwige, (save from
two other notes) or his learning the German tongue.

The following note is the only one he thought worth while to make of a
journey through Russia.

"Novotorshakaya is a beastly hole (_un trou infect_). The bugs are the
most companionable creatures in it, and they are the cleanest."

"At Prague," he scribbles on a sheet of paper stained with coffee-cup
rings, "I made the acquaintance of a polite burglar, who introduced me
to his lady wife, and to other courteous criminals, their spouses and
families. My slight knowledge of Czech, which I had by this time
acquired, enabled me to take vast pleasure in their society. Granted
their sociological premises, based on Proudhon, they are too logical.
The lack of imaginative power to break away from convention, _their
convention_, is a serious defect in their character. They take their
gospel of _tuum est meum_ too seriously. I do not inordinately
sympathise with people who get themselves hanged for a principle. And
that is what my friend Mysdrizin did. An old lady of Prague, obstinate
as the old sometimes are, on whom he called professionally, disputed his
theories; whereupon, instead of smiling with the indulgence of one who
knows the art of living, and letting her have her own way, he convinced
her with a life-preserver. His widow, like her predecessor of Ephesus,
desiring speedy consolation, I fled the city. My Epicureanism and her
iron-bound individualism would have clashed. I had played the Battle of
Prague _à quatre mains_ sufficiently in my tender childhood. I had no
wild yearning to recommence."

Here is another:

"Verona----"

There is no date. None of these jottings bear a date, and when I last
saw Paragot he had not the patience to arrange these far off memories.
Verona! To me the word recalls immemorable associations--vistas of
narrow old streets redolent of the Renaissance, echoing still with brawl
and clash of arms, and haunted by the general stock in trade of the
artist's historical fancy. But did Verona appeal to Paragot's romantic
sense? Not a bit of it.

"At Verona," runs the jotting, "I lodged with the cheeriest little
undertaker in the world, who had a capital low-class practice. His wife,
four children, and whoever happened to be the lodger, were all pressed
into the merry service. We sang _Funiculi funiculà_ as we drove in the
nails. When I make coffins again I shall sing that refrain. It has an
unisonal value that is positively captivating. Had it not been that a
diet of spaghetti and anæmic wine, a _tord-boyau_ (intestine-twister) of
unparalleled virulence undermined my constitution, and that the four
children, whose bedroom I shared, all took whooping-cough at once and
thus robbed me of sleep, I might have been coffin-making to the tune of
_Funiculi, Funiculà_ to the present day."

Here and there were jottings of figures. I know now they refer to
Paragot's tiny patrimony on which he--and I, in after years--subsisted.
It was so small that no wonder he worked now and then for a living wage.

I also see now, as of course I could not be expected to see then, that
Paragot, being a creature of extremes, would either have the highest or
the lowest. In these travel-sketches, as he cannot go to Grand Hotels, I
find him avoiding like lazar-houses the commercial or family hostelries
where he will foregather with the half-educated, the half-bred, the
half-souled; the offence of them is too rank for his spirit. The
pretending simian class, aping the vices of the rich and instinct with
the vices of the low, and frank in neither, moves the man's furious
scorn. He will have realities at any cost. All said and done, the bugs
of Novortovshakaya did not masquerade as hummingbirds, nor merry
Giuseppi Sacconi of Verona as a critic of Girolami dai Libri.

"I don't mind," he writes on a loose sheet, apropos of nothing, "the
frank dunghill outside a German peasant's kitchen window. It is a matter
of family pride. The higher it can be piled the greater his
consideration. But what I loathe and abominate is the dungheap hidden
beneath Hedwige's draper papa's parlour floor."

When I came to this in my wrongful search through Paragot's papers, I
felt greatly relieved. I thought Hedwige had seduced him from his
allegiance to Joanna, and that he was sorry she had married the sergeant
with moustaches reaching to his _Pikelhaube_, though what part of his
person his _Pikelhaube_ was, I could not for the life of me imagine. I
pictured Hedwige as a gigantic awe-compelling lady. The name somehow
conveyed the idea to me. It was peculiarly comforting to learn that she
was a horrid girl whose papa had a draper's shop over a dunghill. I no
longer bothered my head concerning her, for soon I came across a
reference to Joanna.

"I was lounging one day in the Puerta del Sol, that swarming central
parallelogram of Madrid, and musing on the possibilities of progress in
a nation which contents itself with ox-transport in the heart of its
capital, when a carriage drove past me in which I can almost still swear
I saw Joanna. It entered the Calle de San Hieronimo. I started in racing
pursuit and fell into the arms of a green-gloved soldier. To avoid
arrest as a madman or a murderer, for no sane man runs in Spain, I
leaped into a fiacre and gave such chase as tomorrow's victim of the
bull-ring would allow. We came up with the carriage on the Prado, just
in time to see the skirts of a lady vanish through the door of a house.
I dismissed my cab and waited. I waited two solid hours. That attracted
no attention. Everyone waits in Spain. To stand interminably at a
street corner is to take out a patent of respectability. But my
confounded heart beat wildly. I had an _agonized desire_ to see her
again. I addressed the liveried coachman in my best Spanish, taking off
my hat and bowing low.

"'Señor, will you have the great goodness to tell me who is that lady?'

"'Señor,' he replied with equal urbanity, 'it is not correct for
coachmen to give rapscallions information as to their employers.'

"'When your Señora bids the rapscallion sit beside her in the carriage
and orders you to drive, you will regret your insolence,' said I.

"I turned a haughty back on him; but I felt his lackey's eye fixed
disapprovingly on my rags.

"'I will hear the sound,' said I to myself, 'of her silvery English
voice, or I will die.'

"Then the door opened, and the beautiful lady entered the carriage; _and
it was not Joanna_.

"The gods were without bowels of compassion for me that day."

Another scrap contains the following:

"Thus have I come to the end of a five years' vagabondage. I started out
as a Pilgrim to the Inner Shrine of Truth which I have sought from St.
Petersburg to Lisbon, from Taormina to Christiania. I have lived in a
spiritual shadowland, dreaming elusive dreams, my better part stayed by
the fitful vision of things unseen. Such an exquisite wild-goose-chase
has never man undertaken before or since the dear Knight of La Mancha.
And now I come to think of it, I don't know what the deuce I have been
after, save that instead of pursuing I have all the time been running
away.

"In my next quest I must not proclaim my Dulcinea too loudly. When
Hedwige's little sister came to me with a doll into which Hedwige had
savagely run hatpins so that the stuffing came out, I consoled the
weeping infant with a new doll and the assurance that Hedwige was the
spitefullest cat as yet evolved from a feline sex. I had no notion at
the time of the reason for Hedwige's viciousness. But now I fancy she
must have acted according to mediæval superstition and used the doll as
Joanna's hated effigy. I remember that the next time I saw her I
criticised her straight Teutonic fringe and fanfaronaded on the
captivating frizziness of Joanna's hair. The wonder is that Hedwige did
not run hatpins into _me_. The murderer's widow of Prague was built of
sterner stuff; she cared not a hempen strand for Joanna, a pale
consumptive doxy, according to her picturing, who had jilted me for an
eminent swell-mobsman in London."

I spent many happy hours over these scraps, building up the fantastic
fairy tale of Paragot's antecedents, and should have gone on reading
them for an indefinite time had not Paragot one day discovered me. It
was then that I learned the sacrosanctity of private papers.

"I thought, my little Asticot," said he, bending his blue eyes on me, "I
thought you were a gentleman."

Only Paragot could have had so crazy a thought. I could not be a
gentleman, I reflected, till I had a gold watch-chain. However Paragot
expected me to be one without the seal and token of outward adornments,
and I promised faithfully to mould myself according to his
expectations.

"How much of this nightmare farrago have you read?"

"I know it all by heart, Master," said I.

He took off his old hat and threw it on the bed, and ran his fingers
through his hair perplexedly.

"My son," said he at last, "if you were just a common boy I should make
you go on your bended knees and lift up your hand and swear that you
would not reveal to a living soul the mysteries which these papers
contain, and then I should send you to dwell for ever among the
tripe-plates. But I see before me a gentleman, a scholar and an artist
and I will not submit him to such an indignity."

He put his hand on my head and looked at me in kind irony.

"I will never tell no one, Master," I promised.

"Anyone," he corrected.

"Anyone, Master," I repeated meekly.

"You will wipe it all out of your memory."

I was habitually truthful with Paragot, because he never gave me cause
to lie.

"I can't, Master," said I, thinking of my dreams of Joanna.

The seriousness of my tone amused him.

"What has made such an indelible impression on your mind?"

"I can't forget----" I blurted out, moved both by reluctance to yield
over my dreams of Joanna and by a desire to show off my familiarity with
French, "I can't forget about _ces petits pieds si adorés_."

The smile died from his face, which assumed a queer, scared expression.
He went to the window and stood there so long, that I, in my turn grew
scared. I realised dimly what I had done, and I could have bitten my
tongue out. I drew near him.

"Master," said I timidly.

He did not seem to hear; presently he picked up his hat from the bed and
walked out without taking any notice of me.

We did not refer to the papers again until long afterwards, and though
they lay unguarded as before in the old stocking, never till this
present day have I set my eyes on them.




CHAPTER IV


ONE May morning a year after my surprising of Paragot's secret, I awoke
later than usual, the three-and-sixpenny clock on the mantelpiece
marking eleven, and huddling on my clothes in alarm I left the foul
smelling Club room, and ran upstairs to arouse my master.

To my astonishment he was not alone. A stout florid man, wearing a white
waistcoat which bellied out like the sail of a racing yacht, a frock
coat and general resplendency of garb, stood planted in the middle of
the room, while Paragot still in nightshirt but trousered, sat swinging
his leg on a corner of the deal table. I noticed the fiddle which
Paragot had evidently been playing before his visitor's arrival, lying
on the disordered bed.

"Who the devil is this?" cried the fat man angrily.

"This is Mr. Asticot, my private secretary, who cooks my herrings and
attends to my correspondence. Usually he cooks two, but if you will join
us at breakfast Mr. Hogson----"

"Pogson," bawled the fat man.

"I beg your pardon," said my master sweetly. "If you will join us at
breakfast he will cook three."

"Damn your breakfast," said Mr. Pogson.

"Only two then, Asticot. This gentleman has already breakfasted. You
will forgive us for not treating you as a stranger."

Mr. Pogson, who was in a rage, thumped the table with his hand.

"I'll give you to understand Mr. Henkendyke, that I am the proprietor of
this club. I have bought it with my money, and I'm not going to see it
go to eternal glory as it's doing under your management. I'm not like
that old ass Ballantyne. I'm a business man and I'm going to run this
club for a profit, and if you continue to be manager you'll jolly well
have to turn over a new leaf."

"My good friend," said my master, rising and thrusting his hands in his
pockets, "you have told me that about ten times; it is getting
monotonous."

"The way this place is run," continued Mr. Pogson, unheeding, "is
scandalous. Not a blessed account kept. No check on provisions or drink.
Every night your servants are drunk."

"As owls," said Paragot.

"And what the dickens do you do?"

"I give the Lotus Club the prestige of my presidency. I accept a salary
and this presidential residence as my remuneration. You do not expect a
man like me to keep ledgers and check butcher's bills like a
twopennyhalfpenny clerk in the City. It is you, my dear Mr. Pogson, who
have curious ideas of club management. You should put this sort of thing
into the hands of some arithmetical hireling. I--" he waved his long
fingers tipped with their long nails, magnificently--"am the
picturesque, the intellectual, the spiritual guide of the club."

"You are a ---- fraud," cried Mr. Pogson, using so dreadful an adjective
that I dropped the gridiron. Paragot had trained me to a distaste of
foul language. "You are a drunken incompetent thief."

Paragot took his guest's glossy silk hat and gold mounted cane from the
table and put them into his hands. He pointed to the door.

"Get out--quickly," said he.

He turned on his heel and sitting on the bed began to play the fiddle.
Mr. Pogson instead of getting out stood in front of him quivering like
an infuriated jelly, and informed him that it was his blooming club and
his blooming room, that he would choose the moment of exit most
convenient to his own blooming self; also that Paragot's speedy exit was
a matter for his decision. In a dancing fury he heaped abuse on Paragot
who played "The Last Rose of Summer," with rather more tremolo than
usual. Even I saw that he was dangerous. Mr. Pogson did not heed.
Suddenly Paragot sprang to his feet towering over the fat man and swung
his fiddle on high like Thor's hammer. With a splitting crash it came
down on Mr. Pogson's head. Then Paragot gripped him and running with him
to the door, shot him down the stairs.

"That, my little Asticot," said he, "is the present proprietor of the
Lotus Club, and this is the late manager."

I ran to the door for the purpose of locking it. Paragot smiled.

"He will not come back. When he has mended what Fluellen calls his
'ploody coxcomb,' he will take out a summons against me for assault."

He threw himself on the bed, while I, in trembling bewilderment,
prepared the breakfast. Presently he broke into a loud laugh.

"The fool! The mammonite fool, Asticot! Does he think that Mr.
Ulysses-es are picked up by the hundred among the smug young men of the
Polytechnic who add up figures, and keep books by double entry? Do you
know what double entry is?"

"No, Master," said I from my squatting seat on the floor by the gas
stove.

"Thank the gods for your ignorance. It is a nescience whereby human
aspirations are cribbed within ruled lines and made to balance on the
opposite side. Would you like to see me obey Mr. Mammon's behest and
crib my aspirations within ruled lines?"

"No, Master," said I.

"The gods have given you understanding," said he, "which is better than
book-keeping by double entry."

At the time I thought my master's attitude magnificent and I despised
Mr. Pogson from the bottom of my heart. But since then I have wondered
how the deuce the Lotus Club survived a month of Paragot's management.
In after years when I questioned him, he said airily that he left all
financial questions to Ballantyne, the old actor proprietor, who had
grown infirm, and that he was president and not manager. Yet to my
certain knowledge he paid wages to Mrs. Housekeeper, Cherubino and
myself, and as for tradesmen's bills they were strewn about Paragot's
bedchamber like the autumn leaves of Vallombrosa, in greater numbers
than the articles of his attire. On the other hand, I have no
recollection of moneys coming in. There must have been some loose
unbusinesslike arrangement between Ballantyne and himself which most
justifiably shocked the business instincts of Mr. Pogson. There I
sympathise with the latter. But I must admit that he showed a want of
tact in dealing with Paragot.

My master was in gay spirits during breakfast. When he had finished, he
declared the meal to be the most enjoyable he had eaten in Tavistock
Street. My insensate conceit regarded the statement as a tribute to my
culinary skill and I glowed with pride. I informed him that my herring
cookery was nothing to what I could do with sprats.

"My little Asticot," said he, filling his porcelain pipe, "I have to
offer you my joint congratulation and commiseration. I congratulate you
on your being no longer a scullion. I commiserate with you on the loss
of your salary of eighteen pence a week. Your sensitive spirit would
revolt against taking service under anyone of Mr. Mammon's myrmidons,
and even if it didn't, I am sure he would not employ you. Like Caliban
no longer will you 'scrape trencher nor wash dish'--at least in the
Lotus Club--for from this hour I dismiss you from its service."

He smoked silently in his wicker chair, giving me time to realise the
sudden change in my fortunes. Then only did I understand. I saw myself
for a desolate moment, cast motherless, rudderless on the wide world
where art and scholarship met with contumely and undergrown youth was
buffeted and despised. My gorgeous dreams were at an end. The blighting
commonplace overspread my soul.

"What would you like to do, my little Asticot?" he asked.

I pulled myself together and looked at him heroically.

"I could be a butcher's boy."

The corners of my mouth twitched. It was a shuddersome avocation, and
the prospect of the companionship of other butcher boys who could not
draw, did not know French, and had never heard of Joanna filled me with
a horrible sense of doom.

Suddenly Paragot leaped up in his wild way to his feet and clapped me so
heartily on the shoulder that I staggered.

"My son," cried he, "I have an inspiration. It is spring, and the
hedgerows are greener than the pavement, and the high roads of Europe
are wider than Tavistock Street. We will seek them to-day, Asticot _de
mon coeur_; I'll be Don Quixote and you'll be my Sancho, and we'll go
again in quest of adventures." He laughed aloud, and shook me like a
little rat. "_Cela te tape dans l'oeil, mon petit Asticot?_"

Without waiting for me to reply, he rushed to the ricketty washstand,
poured out water from the broken ewer, and after washing, began to dress
in feverish haste, talking all the time. Used as I was to his suddenness
my wits could not move fast enough to follow him.

"Then I needn't be a butcher's boy?" I said at last.

He paused in the act of drawing on a boot.

"Butcher's boy? Do you want to be a butcher's boy?"

"No, Master," said I fervently.

"Then what are you talking of?" He had evidently not heard my answer to
his question. "I am going to educate you in the High School of the
Earth, the University of the Universe, and to-morrow you shall see a cow
and a dandelion. And before then you will be disastrously seasick."

"The sea!" I cried in delirious amazement. "We are going on the sea?
Where are we going?"

"To France, _petit imbécile_," he cried. "Why are you not getting ready
to go there?"

I might have answered that I had no personal preparations to make; but
feeling rebuked for idleness while he was so busy, I began to clear away
the breakfast things. He stopped me.

"_Nom de Dieu_, we are not going to travel with cups and saucers!"

He dragged from the top of the cupboard an incredibly dirty carpet bag
of huge dimensions and decayed antiquity, and bade me pack therein our
belongings. The process was not a lengthy one; we had so few. When we
had little more than half filled the bag with articles of attire and the
toilette stuffed in pell-mell, we looked around for ballast.

"The books, Master," said I.

"We will take the immortal works of Maître François Rabelais, and the
dirty little edition of 'David Copperfield.' The remainder of the
library we will sell in Holywell Street."

"And the violin?"

He picked up the maimed instrument and, after looking at it critically,
threw it into a corner.

"For Pogson," said he.

When we had tied up the books with a piece of stout string
providentially lying at the bottom of the cupboard, our preparations
were complete. Paragot donned his cap and a storm-stained Inverness
cape, grasped the carpet bag and looked round the room.

"_En route_," said he, and I followed with the books. We gained the
street and left the Lotus Club behind us for ever.

What Mrs. Housekeeper said, what Cherubino said, what the members said
when they found no Mr. Ulysses presiding at the supper table that
evening, what Mr. Pogson said when he learned that his assailant had
shaken the dust of the Lotus Club from off his feet and strolled into
the wide world without giving him the opportunity of serving a summons
for assault, I have never been able to discover. Nor have I learned who
succeeded Paragot as president and occupied the palatial chamber of all
the harmonies that was Paragot's squalid attic. When, in after years, I
returned to London the Lotus Club had passed from human memory, and at
the present day a perky set of office premises stands on its site. The
morality of Paragot's precipitate exodus I am not in a position to
discuss. From his point of view the fact of having disliked the new
proprietor from their first interview, and broken a fiddle over his
head, rendered his position as president untenable. Paragot walked out.

After having sold the books for a few shillings in Holywell Street, we
marched up Fleet Street into the City, and entered a stupendous,
unimagined building which Paragot informed me was his bank. Elegant
gentlemen behind the counter shovelled gold to and fro with the same
casual indifference as I had seen grocers' assistants shovel tea. One of
them, a gorgeous fellow wearing a white piqué tie and a horse-shoe pin,
paid such deference to Paragot that I went out prodigiously impressed by
my master's importance. I was convinced that he owned the establishment,
and during the next quarter of an hour I could not speak to him for awe.

It was about two o'clock when we reached Victoria Station. There Paragot
discovered, for the first time, that there was not a train till nine in
the evening. It had not occurred to him that trains did not start for
Paris at quarter of an hour intervals during the day.

"My son," said he, "now is the time to make practical use of our
philosophy. Instead of heaping vain maledictions on the Railway Company,
let us deposit our luggage in the cloak room and take a walk on the
Thames Embankment."

We walked thither and sat on a vacant bench beside the Cleopatra's
Needle. It was a warm May afternoon. My young mind and body fired by the
excitements of the day found rest in the sunny idleness. It was
delicious to be here, instead of washing up plates and dishes with Mrs.
Housekeeper. Paragot took off his old slouch hat, stretched himself
easefully and sighed.

"I am anxious to get to Paris to consult Henri Quatre."

"Who is Henri Quatre, Master?" I asked.

"Henri Quatre is on the Pont Neuf. That is a French saying which means
that Queen Anne is dead. He was a great King of France and his statue on
horseback is in the middle of a great bridge across the Seine called the
Pont Neuf. He is a great friend of mine. I will tell you a story. Once
upon a time there lived in Paris a magnificent young man who thought
himself a genius. He _was_ a genius, my little Asticot. A genius is a
man who writes immortal books, paints immortal pictures, rears immortal
buildings and commits immortal follies. Don't be a genius, my son, it
isn't good for anybody. Well, this young man was clad in purple and fine
linen and fared sumptuously every day. He also had valuable furniture.
One evening something happened to annoy him."

Paragot paused.

"What annoyed him?" I asked.

"A flaw in what he had conceived to be the scheme of the universe,"
replied my master. "It annoys many people. The young man being annoyed,
cast the fruits of his genius into the fire, tore up his purple and fine
linen and smashed his furniture with a Crusader's mace which happened to
be hanging by way of an ornament on the wall. It's made of steel with a
knob full of spikes, and weighs about nine pounds. I know nothing like
it for destroying a Louis Quinze table, or for knocking the works out of
a clock. If you're good, my son, you shall have one when you grow up."

I looked gratefully at him. Not content with his kindness to me then, he
would be my benefactor still when I reached manhood.

"The young man then packed a valise full of necessaries and went out
into the street. It was a rainy November evening. He walked along the
quays through the lamp-lit drizzle till he came to the statue of Henri
Quatre. The Pont Neuf was alive with traffic and the swiftly passing
lights of vehicles threw conflicting gleams over the wet statue. The
gas-lamps flickered in the wind." Paragot flickered his long fingers
dramatically, to illustrate the gas-lamps. "On all sides rose vague
masses of building--the Louvre away beyond the bridge, the frowning mass
of the Conciergerie--the towering turrets of Notre Dame--swelling like
billows against the sky. Pale reflections came from the river. Do you
see the picture, my little Asticot? And the young man clutched the
railings that surround the plinth of the statue, and caught sight of the
face of Henri Quatre, and Henri Quatre looked at him so kindly that he
said: '_Mon bon roi_, you are of the South like myself: I am leaving
Paris to go into the wide world, but I don't know where in the wide
world to go to.' _And the King nodded his head and pointed to the Gare
de Lyon._ And the young man took off his hat and said, '_Mon bon roi_, I
thank you!' He went to the Gare de Lyon and found a train just starting
for Italy. So he went to Italy. I have a great respect for Henri
Quatre."

"And what happened to him then, Master?" I asked, after a breathless
pause.

"He became a vagabond philosopher," replied Paragot, refilling his
porcelain pipe.

No argument has ever been able to convince Paragot that the statue did
not nod its head and point the way to Italy. For some years I myself
believed it; but at last it became obvious that the flashing gleams of
light over the wet statue had made him the victim of a trick of the
eyes. I think the only serious offence I ever gave Paragot was when I
presented to him this solution of the mystery.

Varied discourse and a meal in a Strand eating-house filled up the hours
till nine o'clock. And then I started for Wonderland with Paragot.

       *       *       *       *       *

We stayed in Paris but two days. When I asked my master why our sojourn
was not longer, he said something about the "bitter-sweet" of it, which
I could not understand. I have only two clear memories of Paris. He took
me to see Henri Quatre, and explained how the statue nodded and how the
hand which held the reins lifted and pointed to the Gare de Lyon. What
more conclusive proof of his veracity need I have than actual
confrontation with Henri Quatre? The other scene fixed on my mind is a
narrow dark street with tall houses on either side; an awning outside a
humble café; a little table beneath it at which Paragot and myself were
seated. I sipped luxuriously a celestial liquor which I have since
learned was grenadine syrup and water; in front of Paragot was a curious
opalescent milky fluid of which he drank great quantities during those
two days and ever afterwards.

"The time has come," said he, rolling his eyes at me with an awful
solemnity and speaking in a thick voice, "the time has come to talk of
affairs. First let me impress on you that Henkendyke is an appellation
offensive to French ears. Henceforward my name is Pradel--Polydore
Pradel. And as it is necessary for you to have an _état civil_, I hereby
adopt you as my son. Your name is therefore Asticot Pradel. I hope you
like it. You have never known what it is to have a father. Now the
possession of a father is a privilege to which every human being has a
right. I, Polydore Pradel, confer on you that privilege. My son--"

He raised his glass, clinked it against mine and pledged me.

"Henceforward," said Paragot, "what is good enough for me will I hope
not be good enough for you, and what is too bad for me shall never be
your portion. I swear it by the devil that dwells in this entrancing but
execrated form of alcohol."

He finished his drink and called for another. As soon as the absinthe
had curdled with the dropping water, he filled up the glass and drank it
off. Then he sat for a long time in bemused silence, while I, perched on
my chair, reflected on his great goodness and wondered how I should help
him up the darksome stairs of our hotel without the aid of Cherubino.

The next day we started on our pilgrimage. Why we went in one direction
more than another, why we went to one place rather than to another,
neither he nor I could tell. I never questioned. Sometimes we wandered
for days on foot, sleeping in village inns or farm-houses--occasionally
under a hedge when the nights were warm. Sometimes we spent two or three
days in an old world town, and Paragot would show me cathedrals and
churches and lecture me on the history of the place, and set me to
sketch bits of the picturesque that took his fancy. In the cool,
exquisite cloister of the Chateau of Jacques Coeur at Bourges I
learned more of the history of Charles VII than any English boy of my
generation. In the Chateau of Blois, the salamanders of François
Premier, the statue of Diane de Poictiers, the poison cabinet of
Catherine de Medici, the dungeons of the Cardinal de Lorraine, became
living testimonies of the past under Paragot's imaginative teaching. He
had set his heart on educating me; suddenly as the original impulse had
seized him, yet it lasted strong and became the object of his disordered
and otherwise aimless life. Books we always had in plenty. Tattered
classics are cheap enough in France, and what mattered it if pages were
missing? When done with we threw them away. We might have been tracked
through the country, like the hares in a paper chase, by the trail of
literature we left behind us.

In spite of his unmethodical temperament Paragot made one fixed rule for
my habits. In towns and larger villages, I went to bed at nine o'clock.
What he did with himself by way of amusement in the evenings I never
knew. Nor did it occur to me to conjecture. Healthily tired after a
happy day I was only too glad to crawl to whatever queer resting place
chance provided, and to sleep the sound sleep of boyhood. To be for ever
moving amid a fairyland of novelty, to have no care for the morrow, to
have no tasks save those that were a delight, to be under the protecting
guidance of a godlike being whose very reproofs were couched in terms of
humorous kindness, to eat strange unexpected things, to fraternise in a
new tongue, which daily grew more familiar, with any urchin on the
high-road or city byway, to pass wondering days among country sights
and country sounds--to be in short the perfect vagabond, could boy dream
of a more glorious life?

Now and again a whimsy seized my master and he declared that we must
work and earn our daily bread by the sweat of our brows. At a farm near
Chartres we hired ourselves out to an elderly couple, Monsieur and
Madame Dubosc, and spent toilsome but healthy days carting manure.
Although Paragot wrought miracles with his pitchfork, I don't think
Monsieur Dubosc took him seriously. Peasant shrewdness penetrated to the
gentleman beneath Paragot's blouse, and peasant ignorance attributed to
him the riches which he did not possess. They became great friends,
however, and before we left he succeeded in establishing himself as a
kind of oracle by curing a pig of some mysterious disease by means of a
remedy which he said he had learned in Dalmatia. Old Madame Dubosc shed
tears when we left La Haye.

Sometimes Paragot grew tired of tramping, and we travelled by rail, in
the wooden third class compartments of omnibus trains that stopped at
every station. Now and then pure chance took us to any particular town.
It was at Nancy that Paragot went to the ticket office and said with the
utmost politeness:--

"Monsieur, will you have the kindness to give me a ticket?"

"To what destination?" asked the clerk peering through his pigeon hole.

"_Parbleu_," said Paragot, "to any destination you like provided it is
not too expensive."

The clerk called him a _farceur_ and would have nothing to do with him,
but Paragot protested.

"Pardon, Monsieur, I have but one wish, to get away from Nancy. I have
seen the Episcopal Palace on the Place Stanislas, the Cathedral, and I
have viewed but I have not read the seventy-five thousand volumes in the
University Library. You know the places one gets to from Nancy, which I
do not. I am a stranger, in your hands. If you could suggest to me a
town about 100 kilometres distant----"

"There is Longwy," said the haughty official.

"Then have the kindness to give me two third class tickets to Longwy,"
said Paragot.

And to Longwy we went. Paragot contemplated the lack of interest in the
smug little town.

"To hold out Longwy as a goal to the enthusiastic Pilgrim to the Shrine
of Truth," said he, "could only enter the timber-built mind of a French
railway official."

The record of our wanderings would mark the stages of my own
development, but would be of little count as a history of Paragot. We
tramped and trained south through Italy and spent the winter in Rome.
Then it entered his head to obtain employment for both of us, as workman
and boy, on the excavations of the Forum. We lived in the slums with our
brother excavators, and were completely happy. So happy that though we
wandered the next year over France and part of Germany the winter again
found us working in Rome. In the following Spring we set our faces
northward, and in July Destiny overtook us in Savoy.




CHAPTER V


IT was the late afternoon of a sweltering July day. The near hills
slumbered in the sunshine. Far away beyond them grey peaks of Alpine
spurs, patched with snow, rose in faint outline against the sky. The
valley lay in rich idleness, green and gold and fruitful, yielding
itself with a maternal largeness to the white fifteenth century château
on the hillside. A long white road stretched away to the left following
the convolutions of the valley, until it became a thread; on the right
it turned sharply by a clump of trees which marked a farm. In the middle
of it all, in the grateful shadow cast by a wayside café, sat Paragot
and myself, watching with thirsty eyes the buxom but slatternly
_patronne_ pour out beer from a bottle. A dirty, long-haired mongrel
terrier lapped water from an earthenware bowl, at the foot of the wooden
table at which we sat. This was Narcisse, a recent member of our
vagabond family, whom my master had casually adopted some weeks before
and had christened according to some _lucus a non lucendo_ principle of
his own. I think he was the least beautiful dog I have ever met; but I
loved him dearly.

Paragot drained his tumbler, handed it back to be refilled, drained it
again and cleared his throat with the contentment of a man whose thirst
has been slaked.

"Now one can spit," he exclaimed heartily.

"That is always a comfort to a man," remarked the _patronne_.

"It is the potentiality that is the comfort. Have you apartments for the
night, Madame?"

"They are for _des messieurs_--for gentlemen," said the patronne
diffidently.

Narcisse having also finished his draught stretched himself out on the
ground, his chin on his fore paws, and glanced furtively upwards at the
disparaging lady.

"_Tron de l'air!_" cried Paragot, "are we not gentlemen?"

"_Tiens_, you are of the Midi," cried the woman, recognising the
expletive--for no one born north of Avignon says "_Tron de l'air_"--"I
too am from Marseilles. My husband was a Savoyard. That is why I am
here."

"I am a gentleman of Gascony," said my master, "and this is my son
Asticot."

"It is a droll name," said the _patronne_.

"We are commercial travellers on our rounds with samples of philosophy."

"It is a droll trade," said the _patronne_.

We were greasy and dirty, sunburnt to the colour of Egyptian felaheen
and dressed in the peasant's blue blouse. Creatures more unlike
professors of philosophy could not be conceived. But the _patronne_
seemed to be impressed--as who was not?--by Paragot.

"The rooms will be three francs, Monsieur," she said after a calculating
pause.

"I engage them," said my master. "Asticot, aid Madame to take our
luggage up to our bedchambers." I grasped my bundle and handed Paragot's
dilapidated canvas gripsack to the _patronne_. He arrested her.

"One moment, Madame. As you see, my portmanteau contains a shirt, a
pair of socks, a comb and a toothbrush. Also a copy of the works of the
divine vagrant Maître François Villon, which I will take out at once. He
was a thief and a reprobate and got nearer hanged than any man who ever
lived, and he is the dearest friend I have."

"You have droll friends," remarked the _patronne_ continuing her litany.

"And to think that he died four hundred years ago," sighed my master.
"Isn't it strange, Madame, that all the bravest men and most beautiful
women are those that are dead?"

The landlady laughed. "You talk like a true Gascon, Monsieur. In this
country people are so silent that one loses the use of one's tongue."

I departed with her to see after domestic arrangements and when I
returned I found Paragot smoking his porcelain pipe, and talking to a
dusty child in charge of a goat. Having, at that period, a soul above
dusty children in charge of goats. I sprawled on the ground beside
Narcisse, and being tired by the day's tramp fell into a doze. The good
earth, when you have a casing of it already on clothes and person, is a
comfortable couch; but I think you must be in your teens to enjoy it.

I awoke to the sound of Paragot's voice talking to Narcisse. The goat
child had slipped away. An ox cart laden with hay lumbered past. The
mellowness of late afternoon lay over the land. The shadow cast by the
little white café had deepened gradually far beyond the table. From
within the house came the faint clatter of footsteps and cooking
utensils. Paragot was still smoking. Narcisse sat on his haunches, his
ill shaped head to one side and his ears cocked. After making a vicious
dig at a flea, he yawned and trotted about after the manner of his kind
in search of adventure. Paragot summoned him back.

"My good Narcisse, every spot on the earth has its essential quality
which the wise man or dog knows how to enjoy in its entirety. In great
cities where life is pulsating around you, you are alert for the
unexpected. The underlying principle of a world's backwater like this is
restful stagnation. Here you must wallow in the uneventful. In vain you
sniff around in quest of the exciting, mistaking like your fellow in the
fable the shadow for the substance. The substance here is rest. Here
nothing ever happens."

"Pardon, Monsieur," said a voice close upon us. "Is it very far to
Chambéry?"

"It does not matter," said a second voice following hard on the first,
"for I can go no further."

I jumped to my feet and my master started round in his chair. The first
speaker was a girl, the second an old man. She had merely the comeliness
of tanned and hair-bleached peasant youth; he was wizened, lined,
browned and bent. A cotton umbrella shaded the girl's bare head and she
carried in her hand a cane valise covered with grey canvas. The old man
was burdened with two ancient shabby cases, one evidently containing a
violin and the other some queerly shaped musical instrument. Both the
new comers were wayworn and dirty, and my master seeing suffering on the
old man's face rose and courteously offered him a chair.

"Sit down and rest," said he, "and Mademoiselle, you are thinking of
going to Chambéry? But it is nearly a day's journey on foot."

"We have to play at a wedding tomorrow, Monsieur," said the girl
piteously. "It was arranged two months ago, and we must get there in
some manner."

"There is a railway station not far off," said I.

"Alas! we have only ten sous in the world, which is not enough to pay
for our tickets," she answered. "Imagine, Monsieur, I had a piece of
twenty francs in my pocket this morning, and I went to the station to
get a ticket, for I had counted on going by railway, as my grandfather
is so ill, and when I came to pay, I found I had lost my louis. How, the
_bon Dieu_ only knows. It is desolating, Monsieur; we had to walk so as
to keep our engagement at Chambéry. If we miss it, _nous sommes dans la
purée pour tout de bon_."

To be in the _purée_ is to be in a very bad mess indeed. The prospect of
abject pennilessness filled the damsel's eyes with woe.

"You earn your living by playing at weddings for folks to dance?" asked
my master.

"Yes, Monsieur. My grandfather plays the violin and I the zither--we
also go to fairs. In the winter we play at cafés in large towns. Life is
hard, Monsieur, is it not?"

She closed her umbrella and laid it on the valise. The old man sat by
the table, his head resting on his hands, saying nothing.

"When I think of my good louis that is gone!" she added tragically.

The only feature making for charm in a coarse homely face was a set of
white even teeth. I found her singularly unattractive. A tear rolled
down her cheek and its course was that of a rill in a dusty plain.

"Suppose I lend you the money for the railway tickets?" said my master
kindly.

"O Monsieur," she cried, "I should thank you from the depths of my
heart. _Grandpère_," she turned to the old man who, ashen faced, was
staring in front of him, "Monsieur will lend us enough money to get to
Chambéry."

"I can go no further," he murmured.

Then his eyelids quivered, his body moved spasmodically, and he swayed
sideways off the chair on to the ground.

We rushed to aid him. The girl put his head on her lap. My master bade
me run into the café for brandy. When I returned the old man was dead.

Narcisse sat placidly by, with his tongue out, eyeing his master
ironically.

"You are the man," his glance implied, "who said that nothing happens
here."

I have known many dogs in my life, but never so mocking and cynical a
dog as Narcisse.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was nearly midnight before my master and I sat down again outside the
café. The intervening hours had been spent in journeying to and from the
nearest village, and obtaining the necessary services of doctor and
curé. My master was smoking his porcelain pipe, as usual, but strangely
silent. A faint circle of light came from the open ground-floor window
of the café. The white road gleamed dimly, and beyond the hushed valley
the hills loomed vague against a black, starlit sky. In the lighted room
a few peasants from neighbouring farms drank their sour white wine and
discussed the death in low voices. In other circumstances my master
would have joined them under pretext of getting nearer the Heart of
Life, and would have told them amazing tales of Ekaterinoslav or
Valladolid till they reeled home drunk with wine and wonder. And I
should have been abed. But to-night Paragot seemed to prefer the silent
company of Narcisse and myself.

"What do you think of it all, Asticot?" he asked at length.

"Of what, master?"

"Death."

"It frightens me," was all I could answer.

"What I resent about it," said my master reflectively, "is that one is
not able to have any personal concern in the most interesting event in
one's career. If you could even follow your own funeral and have a
chance of weeping for yourself! You are never so important as when you
are a corpse--and you miss it all. I have a good mind not to die. It is
either the silliest or the wisest action of one's life; I wonder which."

Presently the girl came down the passage of the café, stood for a moment
in the doorway, and seeing Paragot advanced to the table.

"You are very kind, Monsieur," she said, "and for what you have done I
thank you from my heart."

"It was very little," said my master. "Asticot, why do you not give
Mademoiselle your chair? Your manners are worse than those of Narcisse.
Mademoiselle, do me the pleasure of being seated."

She sat down, her feet apart, peasant fashion, her hands in her lap.

"If I had not lost the twenty francs he would not have died," she said
dejectedly.

"He would have died if you had brought him here in a carriage. He had
aneurism of the heart, the doctor says. He might have died any moment
the last ten years. How old was he?"

"Seventy, eighty, ninety--how should I know?"

"But he was your grandfather."

"Ah, no, indeed, Monsieur," she replied in a more animated manner. "He
was not a relative. My mother was poor and she sold me to him three
years ago."

"Why that is like me, Master!" I cried, vastly interested.

"My son," said he in English, "that is one of the things that must be
forgotten. And then, Mademoiselle?" he asked in French.

"Then he taught me to play the zither and to dance. I am sorry he is
dead. _Dame, oui, par exemple!_ But I do not weep for him as for a
grandfather. Oh, no!"

"And your mother?"

"She died last year. So I am all alone."

He asked her what she thought of doing for her livelihood. She shrugged
her shoulders with the resignation of her class.

"I can always earn my living. There are brasseries, cafés-concerts in
all the towns--I am fairly well known. They will give me an engagement.
_Il faut passer par là comme les autres._"

"You must go through it like the others?" repeated my master. "But you
are very young, my poor child."

"I am eighteen, Monsieur, I know I shall not make a fortune. I am not
pretty enough even when I paint, and my figure is heavy. That is what
Père Paragot used to complain of."

"What was his name?" asked my master, pricking up his ears.

"Berzélius Paragot--and he took the name of Nibbidard, which means 'no
luck'--so he loved to call himself Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot."

"Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot," mouthed my master joyously. "I would give
anything for a name like that!"

"It is yours if you like to take it," she said quite seriously. "No one
will want it any more."

"Little Asticot of my heart," said he, "what do you think of it?"

It struck me as a most aristocratically romantic appellation. I was used
to his aliases by this time. He had long ceased to call himself
"Pradel," and what was our surname for the moment I am now unable to
recollect.

"You look like 'Paragot,' Master," said I, and, in an inexplicable way,
he did--as I have before remarked. He called me a psychometrical genius
and enquired the name of the young lady.

"Amélie Duprat, Monsieur," she said. "But _pour le métier_--we must have
professional names for the cafés--Père Paragot called me 'Blanquette de
Veau.'"

"Delicious!" cried he.

"So everyone calls me Blanquette," she explained gravely. There was a
silence. Paragot--he really assumed the name from this moment--refilled
his pipe. The belated peasants, having finished their wine, clattered
out of the café, and took off their hats as they passed us.

"Life is very hard, is it not, Messieurs?" remarked Blanquette. It
seemed to be her favourite philosophic proposition. She sighed. "If Père
Paragot had only lived to play at the wedding tomorrow!"

"What then?"

"I should have had ten francs."

"Ah!" said my master.

"First I lose my louis, and now I lose my ten francs! ah! _Sainte Vierge
de Miséricorde!_"

It was heart-rending. Sometimes they received more than the stipulated
fee at these village weddings. They passed the hat round. If the guests
were mellow with good wine, which makes folks generous, they often
earned double the amount. And they always had as much as they liked to
eat, and could take away scraps in a handkerchief.

"And good wholesome nourishment, Monsieur. Once it was half a goose."

And now there was nothing, nothing. Blanquette did not believe in the
_bon Dieu_ any longer. She buried her face in her arms and wept. Paragot
smoked helplessly for a few moments. I, unused to women's tears, felt
the desolation of the race of Blanquette de Veau overspread me. But that
I considered it to be beneath my dignity as a man, I should have wept
too.

Suddenly Paragot brought his fist down on the table and started to his
feet. Blanquette lifted a scared wet face, dimly seen in the half light.

"_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" cried he, "If you hold so much to your ten francs
and half a goose, I myself will come with you to Chambéry tomorrow and
fiddle at the wedding."

"You, Monsieur?" she gasped.

"Yes, I. Why not? Do you think I can't scrape catgut as well as Père
Paragot?"

He walked to and fro declaring his musical powers in his boastful way.
If he chose he could rip out the hearts of a dead Municipal Council
with a violin, and could set a hospital for paralytics a-dancing. He
would have fiddled the children of Hamelin away from the Pied Piper.
Didn't Blanquette believe him?

"But yes, Monsieur," she said fervently.

"Ask Asticot."

My faith in him was absolute. To my mind he had even understated his
abilities. The experience of the disillusioning years has since caused
me to modify my opinions; but Paragot's boastfulness has not lessened
him in my eyes. And this leads to a curious reflection. When a Gascon
boasts, you love him for it; when a Prussian does it, your toes tingle
to kick him to Berlin. His very whimsical braggadocio made Paragot
adorable, and I am at a loss to think what he would have been without
it.

"Of course," said he, "if you are proud, if you don't want to be seen in
the company of a scarecrow like me, there is nothing more to be said."

Blanquette humbly repudiated the charge of pride. Her soul was set on
her ten francs and she didn't care how she got them. She accepted
Monsieur's generous offer out of a full heart.

"That's sense," said my master. "We shall rehearse at daybreak."




CHAPTER VI


DAWN found us all in a field some distance from the café--Paragot,
Blanquette, Narcisse, the zither, the fiddle and I, and while the two
musicians rehearsed the jingly waltzes and polkas that made up the old
man's répertoire, I tried to explain the situation to Narcisse who sat
with his ears cocked wondering what the deuce all the noise was about.

"Ah, Monsieur," said Blanquette, during a pause, "you play like a great
artist."

"Didn't I tell you so?" he cried triumphantly.

"You must have studied much."

"Prodigiously," said he.

"Père Paragot had played the violin for sixty years, but he could not
make it sing like that."

"You would not compare Père Paragot with my master?" I exclaimed by way
of rebuke.

Blanquette acquiesced humbly.

"When one hears Monsieur, one has the devil in one's body."

"Listen to this," said the delighted Paragot jumping on to his feet and
tucking the fiddle beneath his chin.

And there in the pure dawn with nothing but God's sky and green fields
around us, he played Gounod's "Ave Maria," putting into his execution
all his imaginative fervour, and accentuating the tremolo passages in a
vibrating ecstasy which to Blanquette's uncultured soul was the very
passion of music. I have since learned that the greatest violinists do
not overemphasise the tremolo.

"Ah Dieu! it is beautiful," she murmured.

"Isn't it?" cried Paragot. "And it touches your heart, my little
Blanquette, eh? We are all artists together."

"I, Monsieur?"

She laughed and ran her hands over the zither strings.

"I ought to be at work in the fields. So Père Paragot used to say. I
make no progress--I am as stupid as a goose."

       *       *       *       *       *

Two hours afterwards we started for Chambéry, as odd a procession as
ever gave food for a high-road's gaiety. From the old grey valise
carried the previous day by Blanquette she had produced much property
finery. A black velveteen jacket resplendent with pearl-buttons,
velveteen knee-breeches tied with ribbons at the knees, and a rakish
Alpine hat with a feather adorned my master's person. His own
disreputable heavy boots and a pair of grey worsted stockings may not
have formed a fastidious finish to the costume; but in my eyes he looked
magnificent. Towards the transfiguration of Blanquette a Pandora box
could not have effected more. She was attired in a short skirt, a white
_fichu_ moderately fresh, a kind of Italian head-dress and scarlet
stockings. Enormous gilt ear-rings swung from her ears; a cable of blue
beads encircled her neck; her lips were dyed pomegranate, her eyes
darkened and her cheeks touched with rouge. A pair of substantial gilt
shoes slung over her shoulders clinked their heels together as she
walked. Narcisse barked his ecstatic admiration around this beauteous
creature, and had I been a dog I should have barked mine too. My dignity
as a man only allowed me to cast sidelong glances at her and hope that
she would soon put on the gilt shoes. As for my master, on beholding
her, he doffed his hat and saluted her with a fantastic compliment,
whereat the girl blushed brick-red and turned her head away.

"Motley's the only wear, my son," he cried gaily. "In this cap and
bells, I see life under a different aspect. Never has it appeared to me
sweeter and more irresponsible. Don't you feel it? But I forgot. You
haven't any motley. I apologise for my want of tact. Blanquette," he
added in French, "why haven't you found a costume for Asticot?"

Blanquette replied in her matter-of-fact way that she hadn't any. They
walked on together, and I dropped behind suddenly realising my
pariahdom. I wondered whether these magnificent beings would be ashamed
of my company when we arrived at Chambéry. I pictured myself sitting
lonesome with Narcisse in the market-place while they revelled in their
splendour, and the self-pity of the child overcame me.

"Master," said I dismally, "what shall Narcisse and I do while you are
at the wedding?"

He wheeled round and regarded me, and I knew by the light in his eyes
that an inspiration was taking shape behind them.

"I'll buy you a red shirt and pomade your hair, and you shall be one of
us, my son, and go round with the hat."

I exulted obviously.

"Now the dog will feel out of it," said he, perplexed. "I will consult
Blanquette. Do you think we could shave Narcisse and make him think he's
a poodle?"

"That would be impossible, Monsieur," replied Blanquette gravely.

As Narcisse was enjoying himself to his heart's content, darting from
side to side of the road and sniffing for the smells his soul delighted
in, I did not concern myself about his feelings.

For Paragot's suggestion which I knew was ironically directed against
myself, I did not care. So long as I was to be with my companions and of
them, irony did not matter. I caught the twinkle in his eye and laughed.
He was as joyous as Narcisse. The gladness of the July morning danced in
his veins. He pulled the violin and bow out of the old baize bag and
fiddled as we walked. It must have been an amazing procession.

       *       *       *       *       *

And the old man whose clothes and functions we had assumed lay cold and
stiff in the little lonely room with candles at his head and his feet.
During our railway journey to Chambéry Blanquette told us in her artless
way what she knew of his history. In the flesh he had been a crabbed and
crotchety ancient addicted to drink. He had passed some years of his
middle life in prison for petty thefts. In his youth--Blanquette's mind
could not grasp the idea of Père Paragot having once been young--he must
have been an astonishing blackguard. He had been wont to beat
Blanquette, until one day realising her young strength she held him firm
in her grip and threatened to throw him into a pond if he persisted in
his attempted chastisement. Since then he had respected her person, but
to the day of his death he had cursed her for anserine stupidity. An
unlovely, loveless and unloved old man. Why should Blanquette have wept
over him? She had not the Parisian's highly strung temperament and
capacity for facile emotion. She was peasant to the core, slow to
rejoice, and slow to grieve, and she had the peasant's remorseless
logic in envisaging the elemental facts of existence. Père Paragot was
wicked. He was dead. _Tant mieux._

       *       *       *       *       *

Blanquette had not the divine sense of humour which rainbows the tears
of the world. That was my dear master's possession. But at the obvious
she could laugh like any child of unsophistication. In the long shaded
avenue of Chambéry, with its crowded market-stalls on either
side--stalls where you saw displayed for sale rolls of calico and boots
and gauffrettes and rusty locks and melons and rosaries and flyblown
books--Paragot bought me my red shirt (which--_mirabile dictu!_--had
tasselled cords to tie the collar) and pomade for my hair. He also
purchased a yard of blue chiffon which he tied in an artistic bow round
Narcisse's neck, whereat Blanquette laughed heartily; and when Narcisse
bolted beneath a flower-stall and growling dispossessed himself of the
adornment, and set to with tooth and claw to rend it into fragments, she
threw herself on a bench convulsed with mirth. As Paragot had spent
fifty centimes on the chiffon I thought this hilarity exceedingly
ill-natured; but when another and a larger dog came up to see what
Narcisse was doing and in half a minute was whirling about with Narcisse
in a death grapple, and Blanquette sprang forward, separated the two
dogs at some risk and took our bleeding mongrel to her bosom, consoling
him with womanly words of pity, I saw there was something tender in
Blanquette which mitigated my resentment.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Restaurant du Soleil, where the marriage feast was held, was an
earwiggy hostelry on the outskirts of the town, sheltered from the
prying roadway by a screen of green lattice and a series of _tonnelles_,
the dusty arbours, each furnished with table and chairs, beloved of
French revellers. Above the entrance gate stretched the semi-circular
sign-board bearing in addition to the name, the legend "Jardin. Noces.
Fêtes." Within, a few lime-trees closely planted threw deep shadow over
the grassless garden; shrubs and flowers wilted in a neglected bed.

Usually the forlorn demesne was supervised by a mangy waiter brooding
over mangy tables and by a mangier cat who kept a furtive eye on the
placarded list of each day's _plat du jour_ and wondered when her turn
would come for Thursday's _Sauté de lapin_. But tables, cat and waiter
cast manginess aside when _we_(the pride of that day still remains and
makes me italicise the word) came down to play at the wedding of Adolphe
Querlat and Léontine Bringuet.

"_Tiens!_ where is Père Paragot?" asked fat Madame Bringuet--perspiring
in unaccustomed corset and black bombazine.

"Alas! he is no longer, Madame," explained Blanquette. "He had a seizure
yesterday. He fell off his chair, and we picked him up stone dead."

"_Tiens, tiens_, but it is sad."

"But no. It does not matter. This gentleman will make you dance much
better than Père Paragot," and she whispered encomiums into Madame's
ear.

"Enchanted, Monsieur. And your name?"

My master swept a courtly bow with his feathered hat--no one ever bowed
so magnificently as he.

"Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot, _cadet_, at your service."

"You must be hungry, Monsieur Paragot--and Mademoiselle and this little
monsieur," said Madame Bringuet hospitably. "We are at table in the
_salle à manger_. You will join us."

We entered the long narrow room and sat down to the banquet. Heavens!
what a feast! There were omelettes and geese and eels and duck and tripe
and onion soup and sausages and succulences inconceivable. Accustomed to
the Spartan fare of vagabondage I plunged into the dishes head foremost
like a hungry puppy. Should I eat such a meal as that to-day it would be
my death. Hey for the light heart and elastic stomach of youth! Some
fifty persons, the _ban and arrière ban_ of the relations of the young
couple, guzzled in a wedged and weltering mass. Wizened grandfathers and
stolid large-eyed children ate and panted in the suffocating heat, and
gorged again. Not till half way through the repast did tongues begin to
wag freely. At last the tisane of champagne--syrupy paradise to my
uncultivated palate--was handed round and the toasts were drunk. The
bride's garter was secured amid boisterous shouts and innuendos, and
then we left the stifling room and entered the garden, the elders to
smoke and drink and gossip at the little tables beneath the verandah,
the younger folk to dance on the uneven gravel. Young as I was, I felt
grateful that no physical exercise was required of me for some hours to
come. Even Narcisse and the cat (which followed him) waddled heavily to
the verandah where we were to play.

The signal to start was soon given. Paragot tucked his violin under his
chin, tuned up, waved one, two, three with his bow; Blanquette struck a
cord on her zither and the dance began. At first all was desperately
correct. The men in their ill-fitting broadcloth and white ties and
enormous wedding favours, the women in their tight and decent finery,
gyrated with solemn circumspection. But by degrees the music and the
good Savoy wines and the abominable cognac flushed faces and set heads
a-swimming. The sweltering heat caused a gradual discarding of garments.
Arms took a closer grip of waists. Loud laughter and free jests replaced
formal conversation; steps were performed of Southern fantasy; the dust
rose in clouds; throats were choked though countenances streamed; the
consumption of wine was Rabelaisian. And all through the orgy Paragot
fiddled with strenuous light-heartedness, and Blanquette thrummed her
zither with the awful earnestness of a woman on whose efforts ten francs
and perhaps half a goose depended. But it was Paragot who made the
people dance. To me, sitting in red shirt and pomaded hair at his feet,
it seemed as if he were a magician. He threw his bow across the strings
and compelled them to do his bidding. He was the great, the omnipotent
personage of the feast. I sunned myself in his glory.

Indeed, he had the incommunicable gift of setting his soul a-dancing as
he played, of putting the devil into the feet of those who danced. The
wedding party were enraptured. If he had consumed all the bumpers he was
offered, he would have been as drunk as a fiddler at an Irish wake.
During a much needed interval in the dancing he advanced to the edge of
the verandah and as a solo played Stephen Heller's "Tarantella," which
crowned his triumph. With his unkempt beard and swarthy face and
ridiculous pearl-buttoned velveteens, there was an air of rakish
picturesqueness about Paragot, and he retained, what indeed he never
quite lost, a certain aristocracy of demeanour. Wild cries of "_Bis!_"
saluted him when he stopped. Men clapped each other on the shoulder
uttering clumsy oaths, women smiled at him largely. Madame Bringuet,
reeking in her tight gown, held up to him a brimming glass of champagne;
the bride threw him a rose. He kissed the flower, put it in his
button-hole and after bowing low drank to her health. I recalled my
childish ambition to keep a fried fish shop and despised it heartily. If
I only could play the violin like Paragot, thought I, and win the
plaudits of the multitude, what greater glory could the earth hold? The
practical Blanquette woke me from my dreams. Now was the moment, said
she, to go round with the hat. I swung myself down from the verandah,
the traditional shell (in lieu of a hat) in my hand, and went my round.
Money was poured into it. Time after time I emptied it into my bulging
pockets. When I returned to the verandah, Blanquette's eyes distended
strangely. She glanced at Paragot, who smiled at her in an absent
manner. For the moment the artist in him was predominant. He was the
centre of his little world, and its adulation was as breath to his
nostrils.

This is what I, the mature man, know to be the case. To me, then, he was
but the King receiving tribute from his subjects. When Paragot with a
flourish of his bow responded to the encore, I found my hand slip into
Blanquette's and there it remained in a tight grip till flushed and
triumphant he again acknowledged the applause. Nothing was said between
Blanquette and myself, but she became my sworn sister from that moment.
And Narcisse sat at our feet looking down on the crowd, his tongue
lolling out mockingly and a satiric leer on his face.

"My children," said Paragot, on our return journey in the close,
ill-lighted, wooden-seated third-class compartment, "we have had a
glorious day. One of those sun-kissed, snow-capped peaks that rise here
and there in the monotonous range of life. It fills the soul with poetry
and makes one talk in metaphor. In such moments as these we are all
metaphors, my son. We are illuminated expressions of the divine standing
for the commonplace things of yesterday and tomorrow. We have
accomplished what millions and millions are striving and struggling and
failing to do at this very hour. We have achieved _success_! We have
left on human souls the impress of our mastery! We are also all of us
dog-tired and, I perceive, disinclined to listen to transcendental
conversation."

"I'm not tired, master," I declared as stoutly as the effort of keeping
open two leaden eyelids would allow.

"And you?" he asked turning to Blanquette by his side--I occupied the
opposite corner.

She confessed. A very little. But she had listened to all Monsieur had
said, and if he continued to talk she would not think of going to sleep.
Whereupon she closed her eyes, and when I opened mine I saw that her
head had slipped along the smooth wooden back of the carriage and rested
on Paragot's shoulder. Through sheer kindliness and pity he had put his
arm around her so as to settle her comfortably as she slept. I envied
her.

When she awoke at the first stoppage of the train, she started away from
him with a little gasp.

"O Monsieur! I did not know. You should have told me."

"I am only Père Paragot," said he. "You must often have had your head
against this mountebank jacket of mine."

She misunderstood him. Her eyes flashed.

"It is the first time in my life--I swear it." She held up her two
forefingers crossed and kissed them. "Père Paragot! _ah non!_ neither he
nor another. I am an honest girl, though you may not think so."

"My good Blanquette," said he kindly, taking her scarred coarse hand in
his, "you are as honest a girl as ever breathed, and if Père Paragot
didn't let you put your sleepy little head on his shoulder he must have
been a stonier hearted old curmudgeon than you have given one to
believe."

So he soothed her and explained, while our two fellow passengers, a
wizened old peasant and his wife, regarded them stolidly.

"_Mon Dieu_, it is hot," said Blanquette. "Don't you think so, Asticot?
I wish I had a fan."

"I will make you one out of the paper the fowl is wrapped in," said
Paragot.

Not half a goose, but a cold fowl minus half a wing had been our
supplementary guerdon. Decently enveloped in a sheet of newspaper it lay
on her lap. When he had divested it of its covering, which he proceeded
to twist into a fan, it still lay on her lap, looking astonishingly
naked.

At the next station the old peasant and his wife got out and we had the
compartment to ourselves. Blanquette produced from her pocket a
handkerchief knotted over an enormous lump.

"These are the takings, Monsieur. It looks small; but they changed the
coppers into silver at the restaurant for me."

"It's a fortune," laughed my master.

"It is much," she replied gravely, and undoing the knot she offered him
with both hands the glittering treasure. "I hope you will be a little
generous, Monsieur--I know it was you who gained the _quête_."

"My good child!" cried he, interrupting her and pushing back her hands,
"what lunacy are you uttering? Do you imagine that I go about fiddling
for pence at village weddings?"

"But Monsieur--"

"But little imbecile, I did it to help you, to enable you to get your
ten francs and half a goose. Asticot too. Haven't you been enchanted all
day to be of service to Mademoiselle? Do you want to be paid for wearing
a red shirt with a tasselled collar and pommade in your hair? Aren't we
going about the world like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rescuing damsels
in distress? Isn't that the lodestar of our wanderings?"

"Yes, master," said I.

Blanquette looked open-mouthed from him to me, from me to him, scarce
able to grasp such magnanimity. To the peasant, money is a commodity to
be struggled for, fought for, grasped, prized; to be doled out like the
drops of a priceless Elixir Vitæ. Paragot had the aristocratic, artistic
scorn of it; and I, as I have said before, was the pale reflexion of
Paragot.

"It is yours," I explained, as might a great prince's chamberlain, "the
master gained it for you."

The tears came into her eyes. The corners of her lips went down. Paragot
turned half round in his seat and put his hands on her shoulders.

"If you spill tears on the fowl you will make it too salt, and I shall
throw it out of the window."

       *       *       *       *       *

Paragot paid the modest funeral expenses of the worn-out fiddler. Asked
why he did not leave the matter in the hands of the communal
authorities he replied that he could not take a man's name without
paying for it. Such an appellation as Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot was
worth a deal coffin and a mass or two. This fine sense of integrity was
above Blanquette's comprehension. She thought the funeral was a waste of
money.

"It should go to benefit the living and not the dead," she argued.

"Wait till you are dead yourself," he replied, "and see how you would
like to be robbed of your name. There are many things for you to learn,
my child."

"_Il n'y a pas beaucoup_--not many," she said with a sigh. "We who are
poor and live on the high-roads learn very quickly. If you are hungry
and have two sous you can buy bread. If you only have two sous and you
throw them to a dog who doesn't need them, you have nothing to buy bread
with, and you starve. And it is not so easy to gain two sous."

Paragot sucked reflectively at his porcelain pipe.

"Asticot," said he, "the _argumentum ad ventrem_ is irrefutable."

"Now I must go and make my _malle_" she said. "I return to Chambéry to
try to earn my two sous."

"Won't you stay here over the night? You must be very tired."

"One must work for one's living, Monsieur," she said moving away.

It was afternoon. We had trudged the three dusty miles back from the
tiny churchyard where we had left the old man's unlamented grave, and
Paragot, as usual, was washing his throat with beer. It must be noted,
not to his glorification, that about this time a chronic dryness began
to be the main characteristic of Paragot's throat, and the only
humectant that seemed to be of no avail was water.

The sun still blazed and the hush of the July afternoon lay over the
valley. Paragot watched the thickset form of Blanquette disappear into
the café; he poured out another bottle of beer and addressed Narcisse
who was blinking idly up at him.

"If she had a pair of decent stays, my dog, or no stays at all, she
might have something of a figure. What do you think? On the whole--no."

Narcisse stood on his hind legs, his forepaws on his master's arm, and
uttered little plaintive whines. Paragot patted him on the head.

As I was engaged a yard or two away, elbows on knees, in what Paragot
was pleased to call my studies--Thierry's "Récits des Temps
Mérovingiens," a tattered, flyblown copy of which he had bought at
Chambéry--he was careful not to interrupt me; he talked to the dog.
Paragot had to talk to something. If he were alone he would have talked
to his shadow; in his coffin he would have apostrophised the worms.

"Yes, my dog," said he, after a draught of beer. "We have passed through
more than we wotted of these two days. We have held a human being by the
hand and have faced with her the eternal verities. Now she is going to
earn her two sous in the whirlpool, and the whirlpool will suck her
down, and as she has not claims to beauty, Narcisse, of any kind
whatsoever, either of face or figure, hers will be a shuddersome career
and end. Say you are sorry for poor Blanquette de Veau."

Narcisse sniffed at the table, but finding it bare of everything but
beer, in which he took no interest, dropped on his four legs and curled
himself up in dudgeon.

"You damned cynical sensualist," cried my master. "I have wasted the
breath of my sentiment upon you." And he called out for the landlady and
more beer.

Presently Blanquette emerged laden with zither case and fiddle and
little grey valise and the pearl-buttoned suit which was slung over one
arm.

"Monsieur," she said, putting down her impedimenta, "the _patronne_ has
told me that you have paid for my lodging and my nourishment. I am very
grateful, Monsieur. And if you will accept this costume it will be a way
of repaying your kindness."

Paragot rose, took the suit and laid it on his chair.

"I accept it loyally," said he, with a bow, as if Blanquette had been a
duchess.

"_Adieu, Monsieur, et merci_," she said holding out her hand.

Paragot stuck both his hands in his trousers pockets.

"My good child," said he, "you are bound straight for the most cheerless
hell that was ever inhabited by unamusing devils."

Blanquette shrugged her shoulders and spoke in her dull fatalistic way.

"_Que voulez-vous?_ I know it is not gay. But it is in the _métier_.
When Père Paragot was alive it was different. He had his good qualities,
Père Paragot. He was like a watch-dog. If any man came near me he was
fierce. I did not amuse myself, it is true, but I remained an honest
girl. Now it is changed. I am alone. I go into a brasserie to play and
dance. I can get an engagement at the Café Brasserie Tissot," and then
after a pause, turning her head away, she added the fatalistic words
she had used before: "_If faut passer par là, comme les autres_."

"I forbid you!" cried my master, striding up and down in front of her
and ejaculating horrible oaths. He invoked the sacred name of pigs and
of all kinds of other things. My attention had long since been diverted
from the learned Monsieur Thierry, and I wondered what she had to pass
through like the others. It must be something dreadful, or my master
would not be raving so profanely. I learned in after years. Of all
mutilated lives there are few more ghastly than those of the _fille de
brasserie_ in a small French provincial town. And here was Blanquette
about to abandon herself to it with stolid, hopeless resignation. There
was no question of vicious instinct. What semblance of glamour the life
presented did not attract her in the least. A sweated alien faces
rabbit-pulling in the East End with more pleasurable anticipation.

"I am not going to allow you to take an engagement in a brasserie!"
shouted my master. "Do you hear? I forbid you!"

"But Monsieur----" began Blanquette piteously.

Then Paragot had one of his sudden inspirations. He crashed his fist on
the little table so that the glass and bottles leaped and Narcisse
darted for shelter into the café.

"_Tron de l'air!_" he cried. "I have it. It is an illumination.
Asticot--here! Leave your book. I shall be Paragot in character as well
as name. We shall fiddle with Blanquette as we fiddled yesterday--and I
shall be a watch-dog like Père Paragot and keep her an honest girl.
We'll make it a firm, Paragot and Company, and there will always be two
sous for bread and two to throw to a dog. I like throwing sous to dogs.
It is my nature. Now I know why I was sent into the world. It was to
play the fiddle up and down the sunny land of France. My little Asticot,
why haven't we thought of it before? You shall learn to play the
trumpet, Asticot, and Narcisse shall walk on his hind legs and collect
the money. It will be magnificent!"

"Are you serious, Monsieur?" asked Blanquette, trembling.

"Serious? Over an inspiration that came straight from the _bon Dieu_?
But yes, I am serious. _Et toi?_" he added sharply using for the first
time the familiar pronoun, "are you afraid I will beat you like Père
Paragot?"

"You can if you like," she said huskily; and I wondered why on earth she
should have turned the colour of cream cheese.




CHAPTER VII


NOT being content with having attached to his person a stray dog and a
mongrel boy and rendering himself responsible for their destinies,
Paragot must now saddle himself with a young woman. Had she been a
beautiful gipsy, holding fascinating allurements in lustrous eyes and
pomegranate lips, and witchery in a supple figure, the act would have
been a commonplace of human weakness. But in the case of poor
Blanquette, squat and coarse, her heavy features only redeemed from
ugliness by youth, honesty and clean teeth, the eternal attraction of
sex was absent.

From the decorative point of view she was as unlovely as Narcisse or
myself. She was dull, unimaginative, ignorant, as far removed from
Paragot as Narcisse from a greyhound. Why then, in the name of men and
angels, should Paragot have taken her under his protection? My only
answer to the question is that he was Paragot. Judge other men by
whatever standard you have to hand; it will serve its purpose in a rough
and ready manner; but Paragot--unless with me idolatry has obscured
reason--Paragot can only be measured by that absolute standard which
lies awful and unerring on the knees of the high gods.

Of course he saved the girl from a hideous doom. Thousands of kindly,
earnest men have done the same in one way or another. But Paragot's way
was different from anyone else's. Its glorious lunacy lifted it above
ordinary human methods.

So many of your wildly impulsive people repent them of their
generosities as soon as the magnanimous fervour has cooled. The grandeur
of Paragot lay in the fact that he never repented. He was fantastic,
self-indulgent, wastrel, braggart, what you will; but he had an
exaggerated notion of the value of every human soul save his own. The
destiny of poor Blanquette was to him of infinitely more importance than
that of the wayward genius that was Paragot. The pathos of his point of
view had struck me, even as a child, when he discoursed on my prospects.

"I am Paragot, my son," he would say, "a film full of wind and wonder,
fantasy and folly, driven like thistledown about the world. I do not
count. But you, my little Asticot, have the Great Responsibility before
you. It is for you to uplift a corner of the veil of Life and show joy
to men and women where they would not have sought it. Work now and
gather wisdom, my son, so that when the Great Day comes you may not miss
your destiny." And once, he added wistfully--"as I have missed mine."

       *       *       *       *       *

As Paragot decided that we should not start off then and there into the
unknown but remain at the café until we had laid our plan of campaign,
Blanquette took her valise into the house, and, for the rest of the day,
busied herself in the kitchen with the _patronne_; Paragot drank with
the villagers in the café; and I, when Thierry and Narcisse had given me
all the companionship they had to offer, curled myself up on the
mattress spread in a corner of the tiny _salle à manger_ and went to
sleep.

The next morning Paragot awakened with an Idea. He would go to
Aix-les-Bains which was close by, and would return in the evening. The
nature of his errand he would not tell me. Who was I, little grey worm
that I was, to question his outgoings and his incomings? The little grey
worm would stay with Blanquette and Narcisse and see to it that they did
not bite each other. I humbly accepted the rebuke and obeyed the behest.
The afternoon found the three of us in a field under a tree; Blanquette
embracing her knees, and the dog asleep with his throat across her feet.
She was wearing her old cotton dress, and as she had been helping the
_patronne_ all the morning, her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows
displaying stout, stubby arms. The top button of her bodice was open;
she was bare-headed, but her hair, little deeper in shade than her
tanned face and neck, was coiled neatly. Had it not been for the hard
grip of the day before I should have jealously resented her admission
into our vagabond fraternity. As it was, from the height of my
sixteen-year-old masculinity I somewhat looked down upon her: not as
poor Blanquette, the zither-playing vagrant; but as a girl. Could we,
creation's lords, do with a creature of an inferior sex in our
wanderings? Could she perform our feats of endurance? I questioned her
anxiously.

"_Moi?_" she laughed, "I am as strong as any man. You will see."

She leaped to her feet and, before I could protest, had picked me off
the ground like a kitten and was tossing me in her arms.

"_Voilà!_" she said, depositing me tenderly on the grass; and having
collected the dislodged Narcisse she embraced her knees and laughed
again. It was a kind honest laugh; a good-natured, big boy's laugh,
coming full out of her eyes and shewing her strong white teeth. I lost
the sense of insult in admiration of her strength.

"You should have been a boy, Blanquette," said I.

She assented, acknowledging at once her inferiority and thus restoring
my self respect.

"You are lucky, you, to be one. In this world the egg is for the men and
the shell is for the women."

"Why don't you cut off your hair and put on boy's clothes?" I asked.
"Then you would get the egg. No one could tell the difference."

"You don't think I look like a woman? I? _Mon Dieu!_ Where are your
eyes?"

She was actually indignant with me who had thought to please her: my
first encounter with the bewildering paradox of woman.

"_Ah! mais non_," she panted. "I may be strong like a man, but _grâce à
Dieu_, I don't resemble one. Look."

And she sat bolt upright, her hands at her waist developing her bust to
its full extent. She was not _jolie, jolie_, she explained, but she was
as solidly built as another; I was to examine myself and see how like I
was to the flattest of boards. Routed I chewed blades of grass in
silence until she spoke again.

"Tell me of the _patron_."

"The _patron_?" I asked, puzzled.

"Yes--Monsieur--your master."

"You must call him _maître_," said I, "not _patron_." For the _patron_
was any peddling "boss," the leader of a troupe of performing dogs or
the miserable landlord of a village inn, Paragot a _patron_!

"I meant no harm. I have too much respect for him," said Blanquette,
humbly.

Again reinstated in my position of superiority I explained the Master to
her feminine intelligence.

"He has been to every place in the world and knows everything that is to
be known, and speaks every language that is spoken under the sun, and
has read every book that ever was written, and I have seen him break a
violin over a man's head."

"_Tiens!_" said Blanquette.

"In the Forum at Rome last winter he had an argument with the most
learned professor in Europe who is making the excavations, and proved
him to be wrong."

"_Tiens!_" repeated Blanquette, much impressed, though of Forum or
excavations she had no more notion than Narcisse.

"If he wanted to be a king tomorrow, he would only have to go up to a
throne and sit upon it."

"But no," said Blanquette. "To be a king one must be a king's son."

"How do you know that he isn't?" I asked with a could-and if-I-would
expression of mystery.

"King's sons don't go about the high roads with little _gamins_ like
you," replied the practical Blanquette.

"How do you know that I am not a king's son too?" I asked, less with the
idea of self-aggrandisement than that of vindication of Paragot.

"Because you yourself said that your mother sold you as my mother sold
me to Père Paragot."

Whereupon it suddenly occurred to me that as far as retentiveness of
memory was concerned, Blanquette was not such a fool as in my arrogance
I had set her down to be. I was going to retort that his magnificence
in purchasing me proved him a personage of high order, but as I quickly
reflected that the same argument might apply to the rank of the
contemned Père Paragot, I refrained. A silence ensuing, I uncomfortably
resolved to study my master with a view to acquiring his skill in
repartee.

"But what does he do, the Master?" enquired Blanquette.

"Do? What do you mean?"

"How does he earn his living?"

"That shows you know nothing about him," I cried triumphantly. "King's
sons do not earn their living. They have got it already. Haven't you
ever read that in books?"

"I can read and write, but I don't read books," sighed Blanquette. "I am
not clever. You will have to teach me."

"This is the book I am reading," said I, taking the "Récits des Temps
Mérovingiens" from my pocket.

Again Blanquette sighed. "You must be very clever, Asticot."

"Not at all," said I modestly, but I felt that it was nice of Blanquette
to realise the intellectual gulf between us. "It is the Master who has
taught me all I know." I spoke, God wot, as if my knowledge would have
burst through the covers of an Encyclopædia--"Three years ago I could
not speak a word of French. Fancy. And now----"

"You still talk like an Englishman," said Blanquette.

Looking back now on those absurd far-off days, I wonder whether after
all I did not learn as much that was vital from Blanquette as from
Paragot. Her downright, direct, unimaginative common-sense amounted to
genius. At the time I preferred genius in the fantastic form which
inflated my bubbles of self-conceit, instead of bursting them; but in
after life one has a high appreciation of the burster.

In the moment's mortification, however, I recriminated.

"You make worse mistakes than I do. You say '_j'allons faire_,' when you
ought to say '_je vais faire_' and I heard you talk about _une chien_."

"That is because I have no education," replied Blanquette, with her
grave humility. "I speak like the peasants; not like instructed
people--not like the Master, for instance."

"No one could speak like the Master," said I.

There was a long silence. Blanquette hugged her knees and Narcisse
snored at her feet, accepting her as vagabond comrade. I lay on my back
and forgot Blanquette; and out of the intricacies of myriad leaf and
branch against the sky wove pictures of Merovingian women. There where
the black branches cut a lozenge of blue was the pale Queen Galeswinthe
lying on her bed. Through yon dark cluster of under-leaves one could
discern the strangler sent by King Hilperic to murder her. And in that
radiant patch silhouetted clear and cold and fierce in loveliness was
Frédégonde waiting for the King. She was a glittering sword of a woman
whose slayings fascinated me. I much preferred her to the gentler
Brunehilde whose form I saw outlined in a soft shadow of green. I tried
to find frames in my aerial gallery for Brunehilde's two daughters,
Ingonde and Chlodoswinde, especially the latter whose name appealed to
my acquired taste for odd nomenclature, and the conscious effort brought
me back to the modern world, and the sound of Blanquette's voice.

"_Tu sais_, Asticot, I can wash the Master's shirts and mend his
clothes. I can also make his coffee in the morning."

Her eyes had a far-away look. She was living in the land of day dreams
even as I had been.

"I always prepare the Master's breakfast," said I jealously.

"It is the woman's duty."

"I don't care," I retorted.

She unclasped her hands, and coming forward on to her knees and bending
over me, brushed a strand of hair from my forehead.

"I will prepare yours too, Asticot," she said gently, "and you will see
how nice that will be. Men can't do these things where there is a woman
to look after them. It is not proper."

So, flattered in my masculinity, being ranked with Paragot as a "man," I
took a sultanesque view of the situation and graciously consented to her
proposed ministrations.

       *       *       *       *       *

Paragot came back triumphant from Aix-les-Bains. Hadn't he told me he
had been inspired to go there? The man who played the violin at the
open-air Restaurant by the Lac de Bourget had just that day fallen ill.
The result, a week's engagement for Blanquette and himself.

"But, my child," said he, "you will have to suffer an inharmonious son
of Satan who makes a discordant Hades out of an execrable piano. He had
the impudence to tell me that he came from the Conservatoire. He, with
as much ear for music as an organ-grinder's monkey! He said to
me--Paragot--that I played the violin not too badly! I foresee a hideous
doom overhanging that young man, my children. Before the week is out I
will throw him into the maw of his soul-devouring piano. Ha! my
children, give me to drink, for I am thirsty."

Mindful of my dignity as a man, I glanced at Blanquette, who went into
the café obediently, while I stayed with my master. It was a sweet
moment. Paragot gripped me by the shoulder.

"My son, while Blanquette and I work, which Carlyle says is the noblest
function of man, but concerning which I have my own ideas, you cannot
live in red-shirted, pomaded and otherwise picturesque and studious
laziness. Look," he cried, pointing to a round, flat object wrapped in
paper which he had brought with him. "Do you know what that is?"

"That," said I, "is a cake."

"It is a tambourine," said my master.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next day found us in the garden of the little lake-side restaurant
at Aix-les-Bains playing at lunch time. The young man at the piano whom
I had expected to see a fiend in human shape was a harmless consumptive
fellow who played with the sweet patience of a musical box. He shook
hands with me and called me "_cher collègue_," and before nightfall told
me of a disastrous love-story in consequence of which, were it not for
his mother, he would drown himself in the lake. He effaced himself
before Paragot much as the bellows-blower does before the organist. His
politeness to Blanquette would have put to the blush any young man at
the Bon Marché or the Louvre. His name was Laripet.

I was ordered to make modest use of my tambourine until sufficient
instruction from Paragot should authorise him to let me loose with it; I
was merely to add to the picturesqueness of the group on the platform,
and at intervals to go the round of the guests collecting money. I liked
this, for I could then jingle the tambourine without fear of reproof.
You have no idea what an ordeal it is for a boy to have a tambourine
which he must not jingle. But the shady charm of the garden compensated
for the repression of noisy instincts. After months of tramping in the
broiling sun, free and perfect as it was, the easy loafing life seemed
sweet. We went little into the gay town itself. For my part I did not
like it. Aix-les-Bains consisted of a vast Enchanted Garden set in a
valley, great mountains hemming it round. Skirting the Enchanted Garden
were shady streets and mysterious palaces, some having gardens of their
own of a secondary enchantment, and shops where jewels and perfumes and
white ties and flowers and other objects of strange luxury were
exhibited in the windows. But these took the humble place of mere
accessories to the Enchanted Garden, jealously guarded against Asticot
by great high gilded railings and by blue-coated, silver-buttoned
functionaries at the gates. Within rose two Wonder Houses gorgeous with
dome and pinnacle, bewildering with gold and snow, displaying before the
aching sight the long cool stretch of verandahs, and offering the
baffling glimpse of vast interiors whence floated the dim sound of music
and laughter; and bright, happy beings, in wondrous raiment, wandered in
and out unchallenged, unconcerned, as if the Wonder Houses were their
birthright.

I, a shabby, penniless little Peri, stood at the gilded gates
disconsolate. I didn't like it. The mystery of the unknown beatitude
within the Wonder Houses oppressed me to faintness. _It was
unimaginable._ Through the leaves of a tree I could see the pale Queen
Galeswinthe; but through those gay enchanting walls I could see nothing.
They baulked my soul. When I tried to explain my feelings to Paragot he
looked at me in his kind, sad way and shook his head.

"My wonder-headed little Asticot," said he, "within those gewgaw Wonder
Houses----" Then he stopped abruptly and waved me away, "No. It's a
devilish good thing for you to have something your imagination boggles
at. Stick to the Ideal, my son, and hug the Unexplained. The people who
have solved the Riddle of the Universe at fifteen are bowled over by the
Enigma of their cook at fifty. Plug your life as full as it can hold
with fantasy and fairy-tale, and thank God that your soul is baulked by
the Mysteries of the Casinos of Aix-les-Bains."

"But what do they do there, Master?" I persisted.

"The men worship strange goddesses and the women run after false gods,
and all practice fascinating idolatries."

I did not in the least know what he meant, which was what he intended.
When I consulted Blanquette one morning, as she and I alone were
sauntering down the long shady avenue which connects the town with the
little-port of the lake, she said that people went into the Cercle and
the Villa des Fleurs, the two Wonder Houses aforesaid, merely to gamble.
I pooh-poohed the notion.

"The Master says they are Temples of great strange gods, where people
worship."

"Gods! What an idea! _Il n'y a que le bon Dieu_," quoth Blanquette.

"You have evidently not heard of the gods of Greece and Rome, Jupiter
and Apollo and Venus and Bacchus."

"_Ah, tiens_," said Blanquette. "I have heard Italians swear 'Corpo di
Bacco.' That is why?"

"Of course," said I in my grandest manner, "and there are heaps of other
gods besides."

"All the same," she objected, "I always thought the Italians were good
Catholics."

"So they may be," said I, "but that doesn't prove that there are not
beautiful gods and goddesses and idols and shrines in the Cercle and the
Villa des Fleurs."

As this was unanswerable Blanquette diverted the conversation to the
less transcendental topic of the premature baldness of Monsieur Laripet.

       *       *       *       *       *

If the doings of the bright happy beings were hidden from me while they
worshipped in the Casinos, I at least met them at close quarters in the
garden of the Restaurant du Lac. In some respects this garden resembled
that of the Restaurant du Soleil at Chambéry. There was a verandah round
the restaurant itself, there were trees in joyous leafage, there were
little tables, and there were waiters hurrying to and fro with napkins
under their arms. But that was all the resemblance. Our little platform
stood against the railings separating the garden from the quay. Behind
us shimmered the blue lake, great mountains rising behind; away on the
right, embosomed in the green mountainside, flashed the white Château de
Hautecombe. Always in mid-lake a tiny paddle-steamer churned up a wake
of white foam. On the quay itself stood an enchanting little box--a
_camera obscura_--to which I as a fellow artist was given the _entrée_
by the proprietor, and in which one could see heavenly pictures of the
surrounding landscape; there were also idle cabs with white awnings, and
fezzed Turks perspiring under furs and rugs which they hawked for sale.
In front of us, within the garden, a joyous crowd of the radiantly
raimented laughed over dainty food set on snowy cloths. Here and there a
lobster struck a note of colour, or a ray of sunlight striking through
the red or gold translucencies of wine in a glass: which distracted my
attention from my orchestral duties and caused an absent-minded jingle
of my tambourine.

What I loved most was to make my round among the tables and mingle
closely with the worshippers. Of the men, clean and correct in their
perfectly fitting flannels, sometimes stern, sometimes mocking,
sometimes pettishly cross, I was rather shy; but I was quite at my ease
with the women, even with those whose many rings and jewels, violent
perfumes and daring effects of dress made me instinctively differentiate
from their quieter and less bejewelled sisters. Blanquette laughingly
called me a "_petit polisson_" and said that I made soft eyes at them.
Perhaps I did. When one is a hundred and fifty it is hard to realise
that one's little scarecrow boy's eyes may have touched the hearts of
women. But the appeal of the outstretched tambourine was rarely refused.

"Get out of this," the man would say.

"But no. Remain. _Il a l'air si drôle_--what is your name?"

"_Je m'appelle Asticot, Madame, à votre service._"

This always amused the lady. She would search through an invariably
empty purse.

"Give him fifty centimes."

And the man would throw a silver piece into the tambourine.

Once I was in luck. The lady found a ten-franc piece in her purse.

"That is all I have."

"I have no change," growled the man.

"If I give you this," said the lady, "what would you do with it?"

"If Madame would tell me where to get it, I would buy a photograph of
Madame," said I, with one of Paragot's "inspirations"; for she was very
pretty.

"_Voilà_," she laughed putting the gold into my hand. "_Tu me fais la
cour, maintenant._ Come and see me at the Villa Marcelle and I will give
you a photograph gratis."

But Paragot when I repeated the conversation to him called the lady
shocking names, and forbade me to go within a mile of the Villa
Marcelle. So I did not get the photograph.

The next best thing I loved was to see Blanquette's eyes glitter when I
returned to the platform and poured silver and copper into her lap. She
uttered strange little exclamations under her breath, and her fingers
played caressingly with the coins.

"We gain more here in a day than Père Paragot did in a week. It is
wonderful. _N'est-ce pas, Maître?_" she said one morning.

Paragot tuned his violin and looked down on her.

"Money pleases you, Blanquette?"

"Of course."

She counted the takings sou by sou.

"Yet you did not want to accept your just share."

"What you make me take is not just, Master," she said, simply.

Much as she loved money, her sense of justice rebelled against Paragot's
division of the takings--a third for Laripet, a third for Blanquette and
a third for himself which he generously shared with me. Père Paragot
used to sweep into his pockets every sou and Blanquette had to subsist
on whatever he chose to allow for joint expenses. Her new position of
independence was a subject for much inward pride, mingled however with a
consciousness of her own unworthiness. Monsieur Laripet, yes; she would
grant that he was entitled to the same as the Master; but herself--no.
Was not the Master the great artist, and she but the clumsy strummer?
Was he not also a man, with more requirements than she--tobacco,
absinthe, brandy and the like?

"A third is too much," she added.

"If you argue," said he, "I will divide it in halves for Laripet and
yourself, and I won't touch a penny."

"That would be idiotic," said Blanquette.

"It would be in keeping with life generally," he answered. "In a comic
opera one thing is not more idiotic than another. Yes, Monsieur Laripet,
we will give them _Funiculi, Funiculà_. I once drove in coffin nails to
that tune in Verona. Now we will set people eating to it in
Aix-les-Bains--we, Monsieur Laripet, you and I, who ought to be the
petted minions of great capitals! It is a comic opera."

"One has to get bread or one would starve," said Blanquette pursuing her
argument. "And to get bread one must have money. If I had all the money
you would not eat bread."

"I should eat _brioches_," laughed Paragot quoting Marie Antoinette.

"You always laugh at me, Master," said Blanquette wistfully.

Paragot drew his bow across the strings.

"There is nothing in this comical universe I don't laugh at, my little
Blanquette," said he. "I am like good old Montaigne--I rather laugh than
weep, because to laugh is the more dignified."

Laripet struck a chord on the piano. Paragot joined in and played three
bars. Then he stopped short. There was not the vestige of a laugh on his
face. It was deadly white, and his eyes were those of a man who sees a
ghost.

The four bright happy beings, two ladies and two men who had just
entered the garden and at whom his stare was directed, took no notice,
but followed a bowing maître d'hôtel to a table that had been reserved
for them.

I sprang to the platform, on the edge of which I had been squatting at
Blanquette's feet.

"Are you ill, Master?"

He started. "Ill? Of course not. Pardon, Monsieur Laripet.
_Recommençons._"

He plunged into the merry tune and fiddled with all his might, as if
nothing had happened. But I saw his nostrils quivering and the sweat
running down his face into his beard.




CHAPTER VIII


WHEN _Funiculi Funiculà_ was over he sat on the wooden chair provided
for him and wiped his face. His hands shook. He beckoned me to come
near.

"Do I look too grotesque a mountebank Tomfool?" he asked in English.

He was wearing the pearl-buttoned velveteen suit whose magnificence he
had enhanced by newly purchased steel-buckled shoes and black stockings,
and to a less bigoted worshipper than me I suppose he must have looked a
mountebank Tomfool; but I only gaped at his question.

"Do I?" he repeated almost fiercely.

"You look beautiful, Master," said I.

He passed his lean fingers wearily over his eyes. "Pardon, my little
Asticot. There are things in Heaven and Earth etc. Myriads of Mysteries.
As many in the heart of man as in your Wonder Houses yonder. Get me some
brandy. Three _petits verres_ poured into a tumbler."

I went off to the restaurant and obtained the drink. When I returned
they were playing the mocking chorus that runs through "Orphée aux
Enfers."

The number over, Paragot drained the glass at one gulp. The company
broke into unusual applause. Some one shouted "_Bis!_"

"Get me some more," said he. "Do you know why I chose that tune?"

"No, Master."

"Because twenty devils entered into me and played leapfrog over one
another."

"I am very fond of that little tune. It is so gay," said Blanquette, as
if she were introducing a fresh topic of conversation.

"I detest it," said my master.

The maître d'hôtel came up and asked that the chorus should be played
again as an encore. I fetched Paragot's drink and having set it down
beside him on the platform, went round with my tambourine. When I
reached the table at which the four new comers were seated I found that
they spoke English. They were a young man in a straw hat, a young girl,
a forbidding looking man of forty with a beaky nose, and the loveliest
lady I have ever seen in my life. She had the complexion of a sea-shell.
Her eyes were the blue of glaciers, and they shone cold and steadfast;
but her lips were kind. Her black hair under the large white tulle hat
had the rare bluish tinge, looking as if cigarette smoke had been blown
through it. Small and exquisitely made she sat the princess of my boyish
dreams.

"I call it a ripping tune," cried the young girl.

"I hate it more than any other tune in the world," said the lovely lady
with a shiver.

Her voice was like a peal of bells or running water or whatever silvery
sounding things you will.

"It is very absurd to have such prejudices," said the beaky-nosed man of
forty. He spoke like a Frenchman, and like a very disagreeable
Frenchman. How dared he address my princess in that tone?

I extended my tambourine.

"_Qu'est-ce que vous désirez?_" asked the straw-hatted young man in an
accent as Britannic as the main deck of the Bellerophon.

"Anything that the ladies will kindly give me, Sir," I replied in our
native tongue.

"Hullo! English? What are you knocking about France for?"

I glanced at the lovely lady. She was crumbling bread and not taking the
least notice of me. I was piqued.

"My Master thinks it the best way to teach me philosophy, Sir," said I
politely. If I had not learned much philosophy from him I had at least
learned politeness. The lady looked up with a smile. The young girl
exclaimed that either my remark or myself--I forget which--was ripping.
I paid little heed to her. I have always disregarded the people of one
adjective; they seem poverty-stricken to one who has sunned himself in
the wealth of Paragot's epithets.

"Your master is the gentleman in the pearl buttons?" enquired the young
man.

"Yes, Sir."

"What's his name?"

"Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot, Sir," said I so proudly that the lovely
princess laughed.

"I must look at him," she said turning round in her chair.

I too glanced at the familiar group on the platform: Laripet with his
back to us, working his arms and shoulders at the piano; Blanquette
seated on the other side, thrumming away at the zither on her lap;
Narcisse lolling his tongue in that cynical grin of his; and Paragot
fiddling in front, like a fiddler possessed, his clear eyes fixed on the
lady in a most uncanny stare.

When she turned again, she shivered once more. She did not look up but
went on crumbling bread. It shocked me to notice that the pink of her
sea-shell face had gone and that her fingers trembled. Then a wild
conjecture danced through my brain and I forgot my tambourine.

"You still here?" laughed the young man. "What are you waiting for?"

I started. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said I moving away. He laughed and
called me back.

"Here are two francs to buy a philosophy book."

"And here are five sous not to come and worry us again," said the older
man in French. While I was wondering why they tolerated such a
disagreeable man in the party my beautiful lady's fingers flew to the
gilt chain purse by her side. "And here are five francs because you are
English!" she exclaimed; and as she held me for a second with her eyes I
saw in them infinite depths of sadness and longing.

When I returned to the platform the piece had just been brought to an
end. Paragot poured his second brandy down his throat and sat with his
head in his hands. I shed, as usual, my takings into Blanquette's lap.
On seeing the five-franc piece her eyes equalled it in size.

"_Tiens! Cent sous!_ who gave it you?"

I explained. The most beautiful lady in the world. Paragot raised his
head and looked at me haggardly.

"Why did she give you five francs?"

"Because I was English, she said."

"Did she talk to you?"

"Yes, Master, and I have never heard anyone speak so beautifully."

Paragot made no answer, but began to tune his violin.

During the next interval my quartette left the restaurant. I ran to the
gate, and bowed as they passed by.

The young fellow gave me a friendly nod, but the lovely lady swept out
cold-eyed, looking neither to right nor left. A large two-horsed cab
with a gay awning awaited them on the quay. As my lady entered, her
skirt uplifted ever so little disclosed the most delicately shaped, tiny
foot that has ever been attached to woman, and then I felt sure.

"Those little feet so adored." The haunting phrase leaped to my brain
and I stood staring at the departing carriage athrill with excitement.

It was Joanna--lovelier than I had pictured her in my Lotus Club dreams,
more gracious than Ingonde or Chlodoswinde or any of the _belles dames
du temps jadis_ whose ballade by Maître François Villon my master had
but lately made me learn by heart and whose names were so many "sweet
symphonies." It was Joanna, "pure and ravishing as an April dawn";
Joanna beloved of Paragot in those elusive days when I could not picture
him, before he smashed his furniture with a crusader's mace and started
on his wanderings under the guidance of Henri Quatre. It was Joanna whom
he had an agonized desire to see in Madrid and whose silvery English
voice he had longed to hear. And I, Asticot, had seen her and had heard
her silvery voice. Among boys assuredly I was the most blessed.

But Paragot seemed that day of all men the most miserable, and I more
dog-like than Narcisse in my sympathy with his moods, almost lifted up
my nose and whined for woe. All my thrill died away. I felt guilty,
oddly ashamed of myself. I took a pessimistic view of life. What,
thought I, are Joannas sent into the world for, save to play havoc with
men's happiness? Maître François Villon was quite right. Samson,
Sardanapalus, David, Maître François himself, all came to grief over
Joannas. "_Bien heureux qui rien n'y a._" Happy is he who has nothing to
do with 'em.

As soon as we were free Paragot left us, and went off by himself;
whereupon I, mimetic as an ape, rejected the humble Blanquette's
invitation to take a walk with her, and strolled moodily into the town
with Narcisse at my heels. A dog fight or two and a Byronic talk with a
little towheaded flower-seller who gave me a dusty bunch of cyclamen--as
a _porte-bonheur_ she said prettily--whiled away the time until the
people began to drift out of the Wonder Houses to dress for dinner. I
lingered at the gates, going from one to the other, in the unavowed
hope, little idiot that I was, of seeing Joanna. At last, at the main
entrance to the Villa des Fleurs I caught sight of Paragot. He had
changed from the velveteens into his vagabond clothes, and was evidently
on the same errand as myself. I did not venture near, respecting his
desire for solitude, but lounged at the corner of the main street and
the road leading down to the Villa, playing with Narcisse and longing
for something to happen. You see it is not given every day to an
impressionable youngster, his brain stuffed with poetry, pictures, and
such like delusive visionary things, to tumble head first into the
romance of the actual world. For the moment the romance was at a
standstill. I longed for a further chapter. It was a pity, I reflected,
that we did not live in Merovingian times. Then Paragot and I could have
lain in wait with our horses--everyone had horses in knightly days--and
when Joanna came near, we should have killed the beaky-nosed man, and
Paragot would have swung her on his saddlebow and we should have
galloped away to his castle in the next kingdom, where Paragot, and
Joanna and I, with Blanquette to be tirewoman to our princess, would
have lived happy ever after. What I expected to get for myself, heaven
knows: it did not strike me that perennial contemplation of another's
bliss might wear out the stoutest altruism.

Then suddenly out of the door of the Villa came two ladies, one of whom
I recognised as Joanna and the other as the young girl of the luncheon
party. The façade of the villa stretches across the road and is about a
hundred yards from the corner. I saw Paragot stand rigid, and make no
sign of recognition as she passed him by, with her head up, like a proud
queen. I felt an odd pain at my heart. Why was she so cruel? Her eyes
were of the blue of glaciers, but all the rest of her face had seemed
tender and kind. I was aware, in a general way, that radiantly attired
ladies do not shake hands with ragamuffins in public places, but you
must please to remember that I no more considered Paragot a ragamuffin
than I thought Blanquette the equal of Joanna. Paragot to me was the
peer of kings.

I turned away sorrowing and sauntered up the little street that leads to
the Etablissement des Bains. I was disappointed in Joanna and did not
want to see her again. She should be punished for her cruelty. I sat
down on one of the benches on the Place, and looking at the Mairie clock
stolidly thought of supper. They made famous onion soup at the little
auberge where we lodged, and Paragot, himself a connoisseur, had
pronounced their _tripes à la mode de Caen_ superior to anything that
Mrs. Housekeeper had executed for the Lotus Club. Besides I was getting
hungry. With youth a full heart rarely compensates an empty stomach, and
now even my heart was growing empty.

Presently who should emerge into the Place but the two ladies. I sat on
my bench and watched them cross. They were evidently going up the hill
to one of the hotels behind the Etablissement. In her white dress and
white tulle hat coloured by three great roses, with her beautiful hair
and sea-shell face and swaying supple figure, she looked the incarnation
of all that was worshipful in woman. I could have knelt and prayed to
her. Why was she so cruel to my master? I regarded her with mingled
reproach and adoration. But the mixed feeling gave place to one of
amazement when I saw her separate from her companion, who continued her
way up the hill, and strike straight across the Place in my direction.

_She was coming to me._

I rose, took off my ragged hat and twirled it in my fingers, which was
the way that Paragot had taught me to be polite in France.

"I want to speak to you," she said quickly. "You are the boy with the
tambourine, aren't you?"

"Yes, Mademoiselle."

Paragot had threatened to shoot me if I called any young lady "Miss."

"What is the name of the--the gentleman who played the violin?"

"Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot."

"That is not his real name?"

"No, Mademoiselle," said I.

"What is it?"

"I don't know," said I. "This is a new name; he has only had it a week."

"How long have you known him?"

"A long, long time, Mademoiselle. He adopted me when I was quite small."

"You are not very big now," she said with a smile.

"I am nearly sixteen," said I proudly.

To herself she murmured, "I don't think I can be mistaken."

In a different tone she continued, "You spoke some nonsense about his
being your master and teaching you philosophy."

"It wasn't nonsense," I replied stoutly. "He teaches me everything. He
teaches me history and Shakespeare and François Villon, and painting and
Schopenhauer and the tambourine."

Her pretty lips pouted in a little gasp of astonishment as she leaned on
her long parasol and looked at me.

"You are the oddest little freak I have come across for a long time."

I smiled happily. She could have called me anything opprobrious in that
silvery voice of hers and I should have smiled. Now I come to think of
it "smile" is the wrong word. The man smiles, the boy grins. I grinned
happily.

"Has your master always played the violin in orchestras like this?"

"Oh, no, Mademoiselle," said I. "Of course not. He only began four days
ago."

"What was his employment till then?"

"Why, none," said I.

It seemed absurd for Paragot to have employment like a man behind a
shop-counter. I remembered acquaintances of my mother's who were "out of
employment" and their unspeakable vileness. Then, echo of Paragot (for
what else could I be?), I added: "We just walk about Europe for the sake
of my education. My master said I was to learn Life from the Book of the
Universe."

The lovely lady sat down.

"I believe you are nothing more nor less than an amazing little parrot.
I'm sure you speak exactly like your master."

"Oh, no, Mademoiselle," said I modestly, "I wish I could. There is no
one who can talk like him in all the world."

She gave me a long, steady, half-frightened look out of her blue eyes. I
know now that I had struck a chord of memory; that I had established
beyond question in her mind Paragot's identity with the man who had
loved her in days past; that old things sweet and terrifying surged
within her heart. Even then, holding their secret, I saw that she had
recognised Paragot.

"You must think me a very inquisitive lady," she said, with a forced
smile; "but you must forgive me. What you said this morning about your
master teaching you philosophy interested me greatly. One thing I should
like to know," and she dug at the gravel with the point of her parasol,
"and that I hardly like to ask. Is he--are you--very poor?"

"Poor?" It was a totally new idea. "Why, no, Mademoiselle; he has a
great bank in London which sends him bank-notes whenever he wants them.
I once went with him. He has heaps of money."

The lady rose. "So this going about as a mountebank is only a
masquerade," she said, with a touch of scorn.

"He did it to help Blanquette," said I.

"Blanquette?"

"The girl who plays the zither. My master has adopted her too."

"Oh, has he?" said the lady, the blue of her eyes becoming frosty again.
I dimly perceived that in mentioning Blanquette I had been indiscreet.
In what respect, I know not. I had intended my remark to be a tribute to
Paragot's wide-heartedness. She took it as if I had told her of a crime.
Women, even the loveliest of dream Joannas, are a mystifying race.
"_Bien heureux qui rien n'y a._"

"Goodbye," she said.

"Goodbye, Mademoiselle."

She must have read mortification in my face, for she turned after a step
or two, and said more kindly.

"You're not responsible, anyway." Then she paused, as if hesitating,
while I stood hat in hand, as I had done during our conversation.

"I wonder if I can trust you."

She took her purse from the bag hanging at her waist and drew out a gold
piece.

"I will give you this if you promise not to tell your Master that you
have spoken to me this afternoon."

I shrank back. Remember I had been for three years in the hourly
companionship of a man of lofty soul for all his waywardness, and he had
modelled me like wax to his liking. The gold piece was tempting. I had
never owned a gold piece in my life--and all the frost had melted from
Joanna's eyes. But I felt I should be dishonored in taking money.

"I promise without that," I said.

She put the coin back in her purse and held out her delicately gloved
hand.

"Promise with this, then," she said.

And then I knew for the first time what an exquisite sensitive thing is
a sweet, high-bred lady. Only such a one could have performed that act
of grace. She converted me into a besotted little imbecile weltering in
bliss. I would have pledged my soul's welfare to execute any
phantasmagoric behest she had chosen to ordain.

"I am leaving Aix tomorrow morning--but if you are ever in any
trouble--by the way what is your name?"

"Asticot Pradel," said I, reflecting for the first time that though
Polydore Pradel had perished and Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot reigned in
his stead, my own borrowed or invented name remained unaltered. Augustus
Smith lingered in my memory as a vague, mythical creature of no account.

Joanna smiled. "You are a little masquerader too. Well--if you are ever
in any trouble, and I can help you--remember the Comtesse de Verneuil, 7
Avenue de Messine, Paris."

This offer of friendship took my breath away. I grinned stupidly at her.
I was also puzzled.

"What is the matter?" she laughed.

"The Comtesse de Verneuil?--but you are English," I stammered.

"Yes. But my husband is French. He is the Comte de Verneuil. Remember 7
Avenue de Messine."

She nodded graciously and turned away leaving a stupefied Asticot
twirling his hat. Her husband! And I had been calling her Mademoiselle
all the time! And I had been weaving fairy tales of our riding off with
her to Paragot's castle! She was married. Her husband was the Comte de
Verneuil! Worse than that. Her husband was the disagreeable beaky-nosed
man who gave me five sous to go away.

A sense of desolation, disaster, disillusionment overwhelmed me. I sat
on the bench and burst out crying and Narcisse jumped up and licked my
face.




CHAPTER IX


IT was nearly midnight when Paragot returned to our inn on the outskirts
of the town. He reeled up to the doorstep where I sat in the moonlight
awaiting his return.

"Why aren't you in bed?"

"It was too hot and I couldn't sleep, Master," said I. As a matter of
fact I had been dismally failing to compose a poem on Joanna after the
style of Maître François Villon. Just as youthful dramatists begin with
a five act tragedy, so do youthful poets begin with a double ballade. In
order to eke out the slender stock of rhymes to Joanna, I had to drag in
Indianna which somehow didn't fit. I remember also that she showered her
favours like manna, which was not very original.

Paragot seated himself heavily by my side.

"The moon has a baleful influence, my son," said he in a thick voice.
"And you'll come under it if you sit too long beneath its effulgence.
That's what has happened to me. It makes one talk unmentionable
imbecility."

He just missed concertina-ing the last two words, and looked at me with
an air of solemn triumph.

"It isn't the Man in the Moon's fault, my little Asticot," he continued.
"I've been having a very interesting conversation with him. He is a most
polite fellow. He said if I would go up and join him he would make room
for me. It's all a lie, you know, about his having been sent there for
gathering sticks on a Sunday. He went of his own accord, because it was
the only place where he could be four thousand miles away from any
woman. Think of it, little Asticot of my heart. There are lots of lies
told about the moon, he says. He looks down on the earth and sees all of
us little worms wriggling in and out and over one another and thinking
ourselves so important and he cracks his sides with laughing; and your
bald-headed idiots with spyglasses take the cracks for mountain ranges
and volcanoes. I'm going to live in the moon, away from female feminine
women, and if you are good my son, you shall come too."

I explained to him as delicately as I could that I should regard such a
change rather as a punishment than as a reward. He broke into a laugh.

"You too--with the milk of the feeding-bottle still wet on your lips?
The trail of the petticoat's over us all! What has been putting the sex
feminine into your little turnip-head? Have you fallen in love with
Blanquette?"

"No, Master," said I. "When I fall in love it will be with a very
beautiful lady."

Paragot pointed upwards. "I see another crack in my friend's sides. We
all fall in love with beautiful ladies, my poor Asticot, one after the
other, plunging into destruction with the comic sheep-headedness of the
muttons of Panurge. Another woolly one over? Ho! ho! laughs the man in
the moon, and crack go his sides."

The door opened behind us and the proprietor of the auberge appeared on
the threshold.

"Give me half a litre of red wine, Monsieur Bonnivard," cried Paragot.
"I am the descendant of Maître Jehan Cotard whose throat was so dry that
in this world he was never known to spit."

"Bien, Monsieur," said the _patron_.

Paragot filled his porcelain pipe and lit it with clumsy fingers, and
did not speak till his wine was brought.

"My son, we are leaving Aix the first thing in the morning."

I started up in alarm. We had not finished our engagement at the
Restaurant du Lac.

"I care no more for the Restaurant du Lac than for the rest of the idiot
universe," he declared.

"But Blanquette--it would break her heart."

"All women's hearts can be mended for twopence."

"And men's?"

"They have to go about with them broken, my son, and the pieces clank
and jangle and chink and jingle inside like a crate of broken crockery.
We leave Aix tomorrow."

"But Master," I cried, "there is no necessity."

"What do you mean?"

"She is leaving Aix herself tomorrow."

"She!" he shouted, quite sober for the moment. "Who the devil do you
mean by 'she'?"

I upbraided myself for a vain idiot. Here was I on the point of breaking
my oath sworn on Joanna's hand. I felt ashamed and frightened. He
grasped my shoulder roughly.

"Who do you mean by 'she'? Tell me."

"The Lady of the Lake, Master," said I.

He looked at me for a moment keenly, then relaxed his grip and shrugged
his shoulders with the ghost of a laugh.

"If you see holes in ladders in this perspicacious fashion you'll have
to forsake the paths of art for the higher walks of the Prefecture of
Police."

He puffed silently at his pipe for a few moments and then turning his
head away asked me in a low voice:

"How can you know that she is leaving tomorrow?"

I lied for the first time to Paragot.

"I overheard her say so while I was waiting with the tambourine."

"Sure?"

"Quite sure."

This seemed to satisfy him, to my great relief. How my poor little oath
would have fared under cross examination I don't know. At any rate
honour was saved. Paragot laid aside his pipe and looked wistfully into
the past over his wine bowl.

"The Lady of the Lake," he murmured. "I have called her many things good
and bad in my time, but never that. You are a genius, my little
Asticot."

He finished his wine slowly, holding the bowl in both hands. The moon
smiled at us in a friendly way, sailing high over the mountains. There
entered my head the novel reflection that he was smiling on all men
alike, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust. He was smiling
just the same on Joanna's beaky-nosed husband.

Her husband! Something caught at my heart. Did Paragot know? I debated
anxiously in my mind whether I should impart the disastrous information.
If he knew that she was a married woman he would put foolish thoughts
out of his head, for it was only in Merovingian and such like romantic
epochs that men loved other men's wives. I touched him timidly on the
arm.

"Master,--I overheard something else."

"Did you?"

"She is married, and that is her husband."

"Did he take off his hat?"

"No, Master."

"He is a scaly-headed vulture," said Paragot dreamily.

"He only gave me five sous," said I, relieved and yet disappointed at
finding that my disclosure produced no agitation.

Paragot fumbled in his pocket. "We will not batten on his charity," said
he, and he cast three or four coppers into the silent street. They
crashed, rolled and fell over with little chinks. Narcisse who had
hitherto been asleep trotted out and sniffed at them. Paragot laughed;
then checked himself, and holding up a long-nailed forefinger looked at
me with an air of awful solemnity.

"Listen to the wisdom of Paragot. There is not a woman worth a clean man
that does not marry a scaly-headed vulture."

He murmured an incoherence or two, and there was then a long silence.
Presently his head knocked sharply against the lintel. I roused him.

"Master, it won't be good for us to sit any longer in the moonshine."

He turned a glazed look on me. "Minerva's Owl," said he, "I am quite
aware of it."

He rose and lumbered into the inn, and I, having guided him up the
narrow staircase to his room, descended to my bunk in a corner of the
tiny salon. My sleeping arrangements were always sketchy.

In the morning when I questioned him as to our departure from Aix, he
affected not to understand, and told me that I had been dreaming and
that the moonshine had affected my brain.

"Consider, my son," said he, "that when I returned last night, I found
you fast asleep on the doorstep, and you never woke up till this
morning."

From this I gathered that for the second time he had dosed the book of
his life to my prying though innocent eyes. I also learned the peculiar
difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober.

When our engagement at Aix was at an end, the proprietor of the
restaurant desired to renew it, but Paragot declined. The sick violinist
whom we had replaced had recovered and Paragot had seen him on the quay
looking through the railings with the hungry eyes of a sort of musical
Enoch Arden. Blanquette had some little difficulty in preventing him
from rushing out there and then and delivering his fiddle into the
other's hands. It was necessary to be reasonable, she said.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" he cried, "if I were reasonable I should be lost.
Reason would set me down in Paris with gloves and an umbrella. Reason
would implant a sunny smile on my face above the red ribbon of the
Legion of Honour. It would marry me to the daughter of one of my
_confrères_ at the Académie des Beaux Arts. It would make me procreate
my species, _cré nom de Dieu_! It would make me send you and Asticot and
Narcisse to the devil. If I were reasonable I should not be Paragot. The
man who lives according to reason has the heart of a sewing-machine."

But out of regard for Blanquette he served his time faithfully at the
Restaurant du Lac, and reconciled his conscience with reason by giving
the hungry violinist his own share of the takings. It was only when
Blanquette suggested the further exploitation of Aix that he showed his
Gascon obduracy. If there was one place in the world where the soul
sickened and festered it was Aix-les-Bains. Mammon was King thereof and
Astarte Queen. He was going to fiddle no more for sons of Belial and
daughters of Aholah. He had set out to travel to the Heart of Truth, and
the way thither did not lead through the Inner Shrine of Dagon and
Astaroth. Blanquette did not in the least know what he was talking
about, and I only had a vague glimmer of his meaning. But I see now that
his sensitive nature chafed at the false position. Among the simple
village folk he was a personality, compelling awe and admiration. Among
the idlers of Aix, whom in his loftiness he despised, he was but the
fiddling mountebank to whom any greasy wallower in riches could cast a
disdainful franc.

So once more we took to the high road, and Paragot threw off the
depressing burden of Mammon (Joanna) and became his irresponsible self
again.

I have but confused memories of our fantastic journeyings. Stretches of
long white road and blazing sun. Laughing valleys and corn fields and
white farmsteads among the trees. Now and then a village fête or wedding
at which we played to the enthusiasm of the sober vested peasantry.
Nights passed in barns, deserted byres, on the floor of cottages and
infinitesimal cafés. Hours of idleness by the wayside after the midday
meal, when the four of us sat round the fare provided by Blanquette,
black bread, cheese, charcuterie and the eternal bottle of thin wine. It
was rough, but there was plenty. Paragot saw to that, in spite of
Blanquette's economical endeavours. Sometimes he would sleep while she
and I chatted in low voices so as not to wake him. She told me of her
wanderings with the old man, the hardness of her former life. Often she
had cried herself to sleep for hunger, shivering in wet rags the long
night through. Now it was all changed: she ate too much and was getting
as fat as a pig. Did I not think so? _Voilà!_ In her artless way she
guided my finger into her waistband and then swelled herself out like
the frog in the fable to prove the increase in her girth. She spoke in
awestricken whispers of the Master himself. Save that he was utterly
kind, impulsive, generous, boastful, and according to her untrained ear
a violinist of the first quality, she knew not what manner of man he
was. She had enough imagination to feel vaguely that he had dropped from
vast spaces into her narrow world. But he was a mystery.

Once, the previous summer, as she was resting by the roadside with the
old man, even as we were doing then, an amiable person, she told me,
with easel and stool and paint-box, came along and requested their
permission to make an oil sketch of them. While he painted he conversed,
telling them of Sicily whither he was going and of Paris whence he came.
In a dim way she associated him with Paragot. The two had the same trick
of voice and manner, and held unusual views as to the value of five
francs. But the amiable painter had been a gentleman elegantly dressed,
such as she saw in the large towns driving in cabs and consuming drinks
in expensive cafés, whereas the Master was attired like a peasant and
slept in barns and did everything that the elegantly dressed gentlemen
in cafés did not do. At all events she was penetrated with the
consciousness of a loftier mind and spirit, and she contented herself
even as I did with being his devoted slave.

Often too she spoke of her own ambitions. If she were rich she would
have a little house of her own. Perhaps for company she would like
someone to stay with her. She would keep it so clean, and would mend all
the linen, and do the cooking, and save to go to market, would never
leave it from one year's end to the other. A good sleek cat to curl up
by the fireside would complete her felicity.

"But Blanquette!" I would cry. "The sun and the stars and the high road
and the smell of spring and the fields and the freedom of this life--you
would miss them."

"_J'aime le ménage, moi_," she would reply, shaking her head.

Of all persons I have ever met the least imbued with the vagabond
instinct was the professional vagabond Blanquette de Veau.

Sometimes, instead of sleeping, Paragot would talk to us from the
curious store of his learning, always bent on my education and desirous
too of improving the mind of Blanquette. Sometimes it was Blanquette who
slept, Narcisse huddled up against her, while Paragot and I read our
tattered books, or sketched, or discussed the theme which I had written
overnight as my evening task. It was an odd school; but though I could
not have passed any examination held by the sons of men, I verily
believe I had a wider culture, in the truest sense of the word, than
most youths of my age. I craved it, it is true, and I drank from an
inexhaustible source; but few men have the power of directing that
source so as to supply the soul's need of a boy of sixteen.

Well, well--I suppose Allah Paragot is great and Mahomet Asticot is his
prophet.

       *       *       *       *       *

We wandered and fiddled and zithered and tambourined through France
till the chills and rains of autumn rendered our vagabondage less merry.
The end of October found us fulfilling a week's engagement at a
brasserie on the outskirts of Tours. Two rooms over a stable and a
manger in an empty stall below were assigned to us; and every night we
crept to our resting places wearied to death by the evening's work.

I have always found performance on a musical instrument exhausting in
itself: the tambourine, for instance, calls for considerable physical
energy; but when the instrument, tambourine, violin or zither, is
practised for several hours in a little stuffy room filled with three or
four dozen obviously unwashed humans, reeking with bad tobacco and worse
absinthe, and pervaded by the ghosts of inferior meals, it becomes more
penitential than the treadmill. A dog's life, said Paragot. Whereat
Narcisse sniffed. It was not at all the life for a philosopher's dog,
said he.

On the morning of the last day of our engagement, Blanquette entered
Paragot's bedchamber as usual, with the bowls of coffee and hunks of
coarse bread that formed our early meal. I had risen from my manger and
crept into Paragot's room for warmth, and while he slept I sat on the
floor by the window reading a book. As for Blanquette she had dressed
and eaten long before and had helped the servant of the café to sweep
and wash the tables and make the coffee for the household. It was not in
her peasant's nature to be abed, which, now I come to think of it, must
be a characteristic of the artistic temperament. Paragot loved it. He
only woke when Blanquette brought him his coffee. Ordinarily he would
remonstrate with picturesque oaths at being aroused from his slumbers,
and having taken the coffee from her hands, would dismiss her with a
laugh. He observed the most rigid propriety in his relations with
Blanquette. But this morning he directed her to remain.

"Sit down, my child; I have to speak to you."

As there was no chair or stool in the uncomfortable room--it had lean-to
walls and bare dirty boards and contained only the bed and a table--she
sat obediently at the foot of the bed next to Narcisse and folded her
hands in her lap. Paragot broke his bread into his coffee and fed
himself with the sops by means of a battered table-spoon. When he had
swallowed two or three mouthfuls he addressed her.

"My good Blanquette, I have been wandering through the world for many
years in search of the springs of Life. I do not find them by scraping
catgut in the Café Brasserie Dubois."

"It would be better to go to Orléans," said Blanquette. "We were at the
Café de la Couronne there last winter and I danced."

"Not even your dancing at Orléans would help me in my quest," said he.

"I don't understand," murmured Blanquette looking at him helplessly.

"Have the kindness," said he, pointing to the table, "to smash that
confounded violin into a thousand pieces."

"_Mon Dieu!_ What is the matter?" cried Blanquette.

"It does not please me."

"I know it is not a good one," said Blanquette. "We will save money
until we can buy a better."

"I would execrate it were it a Stradivarius," said he, his mouth full of
sop. "Asticot," he called, "don't you loathe your tambourine?"

"Yes, Master," I replied from the floor.

"Do you love playing the zither?"

"But no, Maître," said Blanquette.

"Why then," said my master, "should we pursue a career which is equally
abominable to the three of us? We are not slaves, _nom d'un chien_!"

"We must work," said Blanquette, "or what would become of us?"

Paragot finished his coffee and bread and handed the bowl to Blanquette
who nursed it in her lap, while he settled himself snugly beneath the
bedclothes. The autumn rain beat against the dirty little window and the
wind howled through chinks and crevices, filling the room with cold damp
air. I drew the old blanket which I had brought from my manger-bed
closer round my shoulders. Blanquette with her peasant's indifference to
change of temperature sat unconcerned in her thin cotton dress.

"But what will become of us?" she repeated.

"I shall continue to exist," said he.

"But I, what shall I do?"

"You can fill my porcelain pipe, and let me think," replied Paragot.

She rose in her calm obedient way and, having carried out his orders,
reseated herself at the foot of the bed.

"You are the most patient creature alive," said he, "otherwise you would
not be contented to go on playing the zither, which is not a very
exhilarating instrument, my little Blanquette. I am not patient, and I
am not going to play the violin again for a million years after tonight,
and the violin is superior to the zither."

Blanquette regarded him uncomprehending.

"If I were a king I would live in a palace and you should be my
housekeeper. But as I am a ragged vagabond too idle to work, I am
puzzled as to the disposal of you."

She grew very white and rose to her feet.

"I understand. You are driving me away. If it is your desire I will earn
my living alone. _Je ne vous serai pas sur le dos._"

For all her vulgar asseveration that she would not be on his back, her
manner held a dignity which touched him. He held out his hand.

"But I don't drive you away, little idiot," he laughed. "On the
contrary. You are like Asticot and Narcisse. You belong to me. But
Asticot is going to learn how to become an artist, and Narcisse when he
is bored can hunt for fleas. You are a young woman; things must arrange
themselves differently. But how? _Voilà tout!_"

"It is very simple," said Blanquette.

"How, simple?"

"_Dame!_ I can work for you and Asticot."

"The devil!" cried Paragot.

"But yes," she went on earnestly. "I know that men are men, and
sometimes they do not like to work. It happens very often. _Tiens! mon
maître_, I am alone, all that is most alone. You are the only friends I
have in the world, you and Asticot. You have been kinder to me than any
one I have ever met. I put you in my prayers every night. It is a very
little thing that I should work for you, if it fatigues you to scrape
the fiddle in these holes of cabarets. It is true. True as the _bon
Dieu_. I would tear myself into four pieces for you. _Je suis brave
fille_, and I can work. But no!" she cried, looking deep into his eyes.
"You can't refuse. It is not possible."

"Yes, I refuse," said Paragot.

He had turned on his side, face on palm, elbow on pillow, had regarded
her sternly as she spoke. I saw that he was very angry.

"For what do you take me, little imbecile? Do you know that you insult
me? I to be supported by a woman? _Nom de Dieu de Dieu!_"

His ire blazed up suddenly. He cursed, scolded, boasted all in a breath.
Blanquette looked at him terrified. She could not understand. Great
tears rolled down her cheeks.

"But I have made you angry," she wailed.

The scornful spurning of her devotion hurt her less than the sense of
having caused his wrath. The primitive savage feminine is not
complicated by over-subtlety of feeling. As soon as she could speak she
broke into repentant protestation. She had not meant to anger him. She
had spoken from her heart. She was so ignorant. She would tear herself
into four pieces for him. She was _brave fille_. She was alone and he
was her only friend. He must forgive her.

I, feeling monstrously tearful, jumped to my feet.

"Yes, Master, forgive her."

He burst out laughing. "Oh what three beautiful fools we are! Blanquette
to think of supporting two hulking men, I to be angry, and Asticot to
plead tragically as if I were a tyrant about to cut off her head. My
little Blanquette, you have touched my heart, and who touches the heart
of Paragot can eat Paragot's legs and liver if he is hungry and drink
his blood if he is thirsty. I will remember it all my life, and if you
will bring me my déjeuner I will stay in bed till this afternoon."

"Then I am not to leave you?" she asked, somewhat bewildered.

"Good heavens no!" he cried. "Because I am sick of fiddling do you
suppose I am going to send you adrift? We shall settle down for the
winter. Some capital. Which one would you like, Asticot?"

"Buda-Pesth," said I at random.

"Very well," said Paragot, "the day after tomorrow we start for
Buda-Pesth. Now let me go to sleep."

We took exactly two months getting to Buda-Pesth. The only incident of
our journey which I clearly remember is a week's sojourn at the farm of
La Haye near Chartres where we had carted manure, and where we renewed
our acquaintance with Monsieur and Madame Dubosc.




CHAPTER X


IN Buda-Pesth three things happened.

First, Paragot slipped in the street and broke his ankle bone, so that
he lay seven weeks in hospital, during which time Blanquette and I and
Narcisse lived like sparrows on the housetops, dazed by the
incomprehensibilities of the strange city.

Secondly, Paragot's aunt, his mother's sister, died intestate leaving a
small sum of money which he inherited as her nearest surviving relative.

Thirdly, Paragot fell into the arms of Theodor Izelin the painter, an
old friend of Paris student days.

The consequences of the first accident, though not immediate, were
lasting. Paragot walked for ever afterwards with a slight limp, and his
tramps along the high-roads of Europe had to be abandoned.

The consequence of the second was that Paragot went to London. Some
legal formality, the establishment of identity or what not, necessitated
his presence. I daresay he could have arranged matters through consuls
and lawyers and such-like folk, but Paragot who was childishly simple in
business matters obeyed the summons to London without question.

As a consequence of the third I became an inmate of the house of Theodor
Izelin.

It was all very bewildering.

It was arranged that during Paragot's absence in England I should board
with Izelin, Blanquette with Izelin's elderly model, a lady of
unimpeachable respectability and a rough and ready acquaintance with the
French language, and that Narcisse should alternate between the two
establishments. Paragot's business concluded, he would return to
Buda-Pesth, collect us and go whither the wind might drift him. I was
provided with a respectable outfit and with detailed instructions as to
correct behaviour in a lady's house. Theodor Izelin's wife was a
charming woman.

Everything was arranged; but who could reckon on Paragot?

On the night before his departure--indeed it must have been two or three
in the morning--Paragot burst into my little attic bedroom, candle in
hand, and before I had time to rub my startled eyes, sat down on the bed
and began to speak.

"My son," said he, "I have had an inspiration!"

Who but Paragot would have awakened a boy at two or three in the morning
to announce an inspiration? And who but Paragot would alter the course
of human lives on the flash of an impulse?

"It came," he cried, "while I was supping with Izelin. I told him. I
worked it all out. He agreed. So it is settled."

"What, Master?" I asked, sitting up. His slouch felt hat and his swarthy
bearded face, his glittering eyes and the candle on his knees gave him
the air of an excited Guy Fawkes.

"Your career, my son. The money I am going to collect in London shall be
devoted to your education. You shall learn to paint, infant Raphael and
Izelin shall teach you. And you shall learn the manners of a gentleman,
and Madame Izelin shall teach you. And you shall learn what it is to
have a heart, and if you care a hang for Paragot two years' separation
shall teach you."

"Two years!" I cried aghast. "But master I can't live two years here
without you!"

"We find we can live without a devil of a lot of things when we have to,
my son. When I smashed my furniture with the crusader's mace I thought I
could not live anywhere without--something. But here I am as alive as a
dragon-fly."

He went on talking. It was for my good. His broken ankle bone had
compelled him to resign his peripatetic tutorship in the University of
the Universe. In a narrower Academy he would be but a poor instructor.
If he had taught me to speak the truth and despise lies and shams, and
to love pictures and music and cathedrals and books and trees and all
beautiful things, _nom de Dieu!_ he had accomplished his mission. It was
time for other influences. When an inspiration such as tonight's came to
him he took it as a command from a Higher Power (I am convinced that he
believed it), against which he was powerless.

"Providence ordains that you stay here with the Izelins. Afterwards you
shall go to Janot's studio in Paris. In the meantime you can attend
classes in the humanities at Buda-Pesth."

"I can't understand the beastly language!" I grumbled.

"You will learn it, my son."

"No one ever speaks it out of Hungary," I contended.

"My son," said he, "the value of a man is often measured by his useless
and fantastic attainments."

Then the candle end sputtered out and we were in darkness. Paragot bade
me good night, and left me to a mingled sense of burned candle grease
and desolation.

He departed the next day. Blanquette and I with a dejected Narcisse at
our heels, walked back from the railway station to the hotel, where
losing all sense of manly dignity I broke down crying and Blanquette put
her arm round my neck and comforted me motherwise.

Two months afterwards Paragot wrote to Blanquette to join him in Paris,
and when the flutter of her wet handkerchief from the railway carriage
window became no longer visible, then indeed I felt myself to be a
stranger in a strange land.

       *       *       *       *       *

Two years! I can remember even now their endless heartache. The Izelins
were kind; Madame Izelin, a refined Hungarian lady, became my staunch
friend as well as my instructress in manners; my life teemed with
interests, and I worked like a little maniac; but all the time I longed
for Paragot. Had it not been for his letters I should have scented my
way back to him like a dog, across Europe. Ah those letters of
Paragot--I have them still--what a treasury they are of grotesque
fantasy and philosophic wisdom! They gave me but little news of his
doings. He had settled down in Paris with Blanquette as his housekeeper.
His floridly anathematised ankle kept him hobbling about the streets
while his heart was chasing butterflies over the fields. He had founded
a coenaculum for the cultivation of the Higher Conversation at the Café
Delphine. He had taken up Persian and was saturating himself with Hafiz
and Firdusi. His health was good. Indeed he was a man of iron
constitution.

Blanquette now and then supplemented these meagre details of objective
life. The master had taken a _bel appartement_. There were curtains to
his bed. Food was dear in Paris. They had been to Fontainebleau.
Narcisse had stolen the sausages of the concierge. The Master was always
talking of me and of the great future for which I was destined. But when
I became famous I was not to forget my little Blanquette. I see the
sprawling mis-spelt words now: "_Il ne fot jamés oublié ta petite
Blanquette_."

As if I could ever forget her!

I arrived in Paris one evening a day or two earlier than I was expected.
It had been ordained by Paragot that I should break my journey at
Berlin, in order to visit that capital, but affection tugged at my
heart-strings and compelled me to travel straight through from
Buda-Pesth. It was Paragot and Blanquette and Narcisse that I wanted to
see and not Berlin.

Yet when I stepped out of the train on to the Paris platform, I was
conscious for the first time of development. I was decently attired. I
had a bag filled with the garments of respectability. I had money in my
pocket, also a packet of cigarettes. A porter took my luggage and
enquired in the third person whether Monsieur desired a cab. The
temptation was too great for eighteen. I took the cab in a lordly way
and drove to No. 11 Rue des Saladiers where Paragot had his "bel
appartement." And with the anticipatory throb of joy at beholding my
beloved Master was mingled a thrill of vain-glorious happiness. Asticot
in a cab! It was absurd, and yet it seemed to fall within the divine
fitness of things.

The cab stopped in a narrow street. I had an impression of tall houses
looking fantastically dilapidated in the dim gas-light, of little shops
on the ground floor, and of little murky gateways leading to the
habitations above. Beside the gateway of No. 11 was a small workman's
drinking shop, sometimes called in Paris a _zinc_ on account of the
polished zinc bar which is its principal feature. Untidy, slouching
people filled the street.

Directed by the concierge to the _cinquième à gauche_, I mounted narrow,
evil smelling, badly lighted stairs, and rang at the designated door. It
opened; Blanquette appeared with a lamp in her hand.

"_Monsieur désire?_"

"_Mais c'est moi, Blanquette._"

In another minute she had ushered me in, set down the lamp and was
hugging me in her strong young arms.

"But my little Asticot, I did not know you. You have changed. You are no
longer the same. _Tu es tout à fait monsieur!_ How proud the Master will
be."

"Where is he?"

Alas, the Master did not expect me to-day and was at the Café Delphine.
She would go straightway and tell him. I must be tired and hungry. She
would get me something to eat. But who would have thought I should have
come back a _monsieur_! How I had grown! I must see the _appartement_.
This was the salon.

I looked around me for the first time. Nothing in it save the
rickettiness of a faded rep suite arranged primly around the walls, and
a few bookshelves stuffed with tattered volumes suggested Paragot. The
round centre table, covered with American cloth, and the polished floor
were spotless. Cheap print curtains adorned the windows and a cage
containing a canary hung between them. Three or four oleographs--one a
portrait of Garibaldi--in gilt frames formed the artistic decoration.

"It was I who chose the pictures," said Blanquette proudly.

She opened a door and disclosed the sleeping chamber of the Master, very
bare, but very clean. Another door led into the kitchen--a slip of a
place but glistening like the machine room of a man-of-war.

"I have a bedroom upstairs, and there is one also for you which the
Master has taken. Come and I will show you."

We mounted to the attics and I was duly installed.

"I would have put some flowers if I had known you were coming," said
Blanquette.

We went down again and she prepared food for me, her plain face beaming
as she talked. She was entirely happy. No one so perfect as the Master
had ever been the head of a household. Of course he was untidy. But such
was the nature of men. If he did not make stains on the floor with muddy
boots and lumps of meat thrown to Narcisse, and litter the rooms with
clothes and tobacco and books, what occupation would there be for a
housekeeper? As it was she worked from morning to night. And the result;
was it not neat and clean and beautiful? Ah! she was happy not to be
playing the zither in _brasseries_. All her dreams were realised. She
had a _ménage_. And she had the Master to serve. Now would she fetch him
from the Café Delphine.

       *       *       *       *       *

Half an hour afterwards he strode into the room, followed by Blanquette
and Narcisse. He spoke in French and embraced me French fashion. Then he
cried out in English and wrung me by the hand. He was almost as excited
as Narcisse who leaped and barked frantically.

"It is good to have him back, eh Blanquette?"

"_Oui, Maître._ He does not know how sad it has been without him."

Blanquette smiled, wept and removed the remains of my supper. Then she
set on the table glasses and a bottle of _tisane_ they had bought on the
way home. We drank the sour sweet champagne as if it were liquid gold
and clinked glasses, and with Narcisse all talked and barked together.
It was a glad home-coming.

Paragot had changed very little. The hair on his temple was beginning to
turn grey and his sallow cheeks were thinner. But he was the same hairy
unkempt creature of prodigious finger nails and disreputable garments,
still full of strange oaths and picturesque fancy, and still smoking his
pipe with the porcelain bowl.

Presently Blanquette retired to bed and Paragot and I talked far into
the night. Before we separated, with a comprehensive wave of the hand he
indicated the primly set furniture and polished floor.

"Did you ever behold such exquisite discomfort?"

Poor Blanquette!




CHAPTER XI


HOW far away it all seems; Paris; the Rue des Saladiers: the _atelier_
Janot where the illustrious painter called us his children and handed us
the sacred torch of his art for us to transmit, could we but keep it
aflame, to succeeding generations; the Café Delphine, with Madame Boin,
fat, pink, urbane, her hair a miracle of perrukery, enthroned behind the
counter; my dear Master, Paragot, himself! How far away! It is not good
to live to a hundred and fifty. The backward vista down the years is too
frighteningly long.

I found Paragot established as the Dictator of the Café Delphine. No one
seemed to question his position. He ruled there autocratically, having
instituted sundry ordinances disobedience to which had exile as its
penalty. The most generous of creatures, he had nevertheless ordained
that as Dictator he should go scot-free. To have declined to pay for his
absinthe or _choucroute_ would have closed the Café Delphine in a
student's face. He had a prescriptive right to the table under the lee
of Madame Boin'

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