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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




"You are of the _Midi?_" he said.

Yes. She came from Marseilles. Ingenuously chattering she gave him her
family history. In the meanwhile her companions and her partner having
finished their dance had retired to a sequestered corner of the restaurant,
leaving the pair here to themselves. Lackaday learned that her name was
Elodie Figasso. Her father was dead. Her mother was a dressmaker, in which
business she, too, had made her apprenticeship. But an elderly man, a
_huissier_, one of those people who go about with a tricolour-rosetted
cocked hat, and steel buttons and canvas trousers and a leather satchel
chained to their waist, had lately diverted from Elodie the full tide of
maternal affection. As she hated the _huissier_, a vulgar man who
thought of nothing but the good things that the Veuve Figasso could put
into his stomach, and as her besotted mother starved them both in order to
fulfil the _huissier's_ demands, and as she derived no compensating
joy from her dressmaking, she had found, thanks to a friend, a positron as
_figurante_ in a Marseilles Revue, and, _voilà_--there she was
free, independent, and, since she had talent and application, was now
earning her six francs a day.

She finished her grenadine. Then with a swift movement she caught a passing
serving maid and slipped into her hand the money for her companion's
scarcely tasted drink and her own. Instantly Andrew protested--Mademoiselle
must allow him to have the pleasure.

But no--never in life, she had not intruded on his table to have free
drinks. As for the _consommation_ of the feather-headed Margot--from
Margot herself would she get reimbursement.

"But yet, Mademoiselle," said he, "you make me ashamed. You must still be
thirsty--like myself."

"_Ça ne vous gênera pas?_"

She asked the question with such a little air of serious solicitude that
he laughed, for the first time. Would it upset his budget, involve the
sacrifice of a tram ride or a packet of tobacco, if he spent a few sous on
more syrup for her delectation? And yet the delicacy of her motive appealed
to him. Here was a little creature very honest, very much of the people,
very proud, very conscientious.

"On the contrary, Mademoiselle," said he, "I shall feel that you do me an
honour."

"It is not to be refused," said she politely, and the serving maid was
despatched for more beer and syrup.

"I waited to see your turn," she said, after a while.

"Ah!" he sighed.

She glanced at him swiftly. "It does not please you that I should talk
about it?"

"Not very much," said he.

"But I found you admirable," she declared. "Much better than that _espèce
de poule mouillée_--I already forget his name--who played last week.
Oh--a wet hen--he was more like a drowned duck. So when I heard a comedian
from Paris was coming, I said: 'I must wait' and Margot and I waited in the
wings--and we laughed. Oh yes, we laughed."

"It's more than the audience did," said the miserable Andrew.

The audience! Of Avignon! She had never played to such an audience in her
her life. They were notorious, these people, all over France. They were so
stupid that before they would laugh you had to tell them a thing was funny,
and then they were so suspicious that they wouldn't laugh for fear of being
deceived.

All of which, of course, is a libel on the hearty folk of Avignon. But
Elodie was from Marseilles, which naturally has a poor opinion of the other
towns of Provence. She also lied for the comforting of Lackaday.

"They are so unsympathetic," said he, "that I shall not play any more."

She knitted her young brow. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I play neither to-night nor to-morrow night, nor ever again.
To-morrow I return to Paris."

She regarded him awe-stricken. "You throw up an engagement--just like
that--because the audience doesn't laugh?"

She had heard vague fairy-tales of pampered opera-singers acting with such
Olympian independence; but never a music-hall artist on tour. He must be
very rich and powerful.

Lackaday read the thought behind the wide-open eyes.

"Not quite like that," he admitted honestly. "It did not altogether depend
on myself. You see the _patron_ found that the audience didn't laugh
and the _patronne_ found that my long body spoiled her act--and so--I
go to Paris to-morrow."

She rose from the depths of envying wonder to the heights of pity. She
flashed indignation at the abominable treatment he had received from
the Coinçons. She scorched them with her contempt. What right had that
_tortoise_ of a Madame Coinçon to put on airs? She had seen better
juggling in a booth at a fair. Her championship warmed Andrew's heart, and
he began to feel less lonely in a dismal and unappreciative world. Longing
for further healing of an artist's wounded vanity he said:

"Tell me frankly. You did see something to admire in my performance?"

"Haven't I always said so? _Tiens_, would you like me to tell
you something? All my life I have loved Auguste in a circus. You know
Auguste--the clown? Well, you reminded me of Auguste and I laughed."

"Until lately I was Auguste--in the Cirque Rocambeau."

She clapped her hands.

"But I have seen you there--when I was quite little--three--four years ago
at Marseilles."

"Four years," said Andrew looking into the dark backward and abysm of time.

"Yes, I remember you well, now. We're old friends."

"I hope you'll allow me to continue the friendship," said Andrew.

They talked after the way of youth. He narrated his uneventful history. She
added details to the previous sketch of her own career. The afternoon
drew to a close. The restaurant garden emptied; the good folks of Avignon
returned dinnerwards across the bridge. They looked for Margot, but Margot
had disappeared, presumably with her new acquaintance. Elodie sniffed in a
superior manner. If Margot didn't take care, she would be badly caught one
of these days. For herself, no, she had too much character. She wouldn't
walk about the streets with a young man she had only known for five
minutes. She told Andrew so, very seriously, as they strolled over the
bridge arm-in-arm.

They parted, arranging to meet at 10 o'clock when she was free from the
music-hall, at the Café des Négociants or the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville.

Andrew, shrinking from the table d'hôte in the mangy hotel in a narrow back
street where the Merveilleux troupe had their crowded being, dined at a
cheap restaurant near the railway station, and filled in the evening with
aimless wandering up and and down the thronged Avenue de la Gare. Once he
turned off into the quiet moonlit square dominated by the cathedral and the
walls and towers of the Palace of the Popes. The austere beauty of it said
nothing to him. It did not bring calm to a fevered spirit. On the contrary,
it depressed a spirit longing for a little fever, so he went back to the
broad, gay Avenue where all Avignon was taking the air. A girl's sympathy
had reconciled him with his kind.

She came tripping up to him, almost on the stroke of ten, as he sat at the
outside edge of the café terrace, awaiting her. The reconciliation was
complete. Like most of the young men there, he too had his maid. They met
as if they had known each other for years. She was full of an evil fellow,
_un gros type_, with a roll of fat at the back of his neck and a great
diamond ring which flashed in the moonlight, who had waited for her at the
stage door and walked by her side, pestering her with his attentions.

"And do you know how I got rid of him? I said: 'Monsieur, I can't walk with
you through the streets on account of my comrades. But I swear to you that
you will find me at the Café des Négotiants at a quarter past ten.' And so
I made my escape. Look," said she excitedly, gripping Andrew's arm, "here
he is."

She met the eyes of the _gros type_ with the roll of fat and the
diamond ring, who halted somewhat uncertainly in front of the cafe.
Whereupon Andrew rose to his long height of six foot four and, glaring at
the offender, put him to the flight of over-elaborated unconcern. Elodie
was delighted.

"You could have eaten him up alive, _n'est-ce pas_, André?"

And Andrew felt the thrill of the successful Squire of Dames. For the rest
of the evening, there was no longer any 'Monsieur' or 'Mademoiselle.' It
was André and Elodie.

Yes, he would write to her from Paris, telling her of his fortunes. And
she too would write. The Agence Moignon would always find him. It is
parenthetically to be noted how his afternoon fears of the impermanence of
the Agence Moignon had vanished. Time flew pleasantly. She seemed to have
set herself, her youth and her femininity, to the task of evoking the wide
baby smile on his good-natured though dismal face. It was only on their
homeward way, after midnight, that she mentioned the '_boîle_.' There
had been discussions. Some had said this and some had said that. There had
been partisans of the Coinçons and partisans of André. There was subject
matter for one of the pretty quarrels dear to music-hall folk. But Elodie
summed up the whole matter, with her air of precocious wisdom--a wisdom
gained in the streets and sewing-rooms and cafés-concerts of Marseilles.

"What you do is excellent, _mon cher_; but it is _vieux jeu_. The
circus is not the music-hall. You must be original."

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

"Original?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter VI



A kiss must mean either very much or very little. There are maidens to whom
it signifies a life's consecration. There are men whose blood it fires with
burning passion. There are couples of different sex who jointly consider
their first kiss a matter of supreme importance, and, the temporary rapture
over, at once begin to discuss the possibilities of parental approbation
and the ways and means of matrimony. A kiss may be the very devil of a
thing leading to two or three dozen honourably born grandchildren, or to
suicide, or to celebate addiction to cats, or to eugenic propaganda, or to
perpetual crape and the boredom of a community, or to the fate of Abelard,
or to the Fall of Troy, or to the proud destiny of a William the Conqueror.
I repeat that it is a ticklish thing to go and meddle with it without due
consideration. And in some cases consideration only increases the fortuity
of its results. Volumes could be written on it.

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

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

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

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

"We will write to each other?"

"It is agreed."

"Alors, au revoir."

"Au revoir, Elodie, et merci."

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

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

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


There now follow some years, in Lackaday's career, of high endeavour
and fierce struggle. He has taken to heart Elodie's suggestion of the
exploitation of his physical idiosyncracy. He seeks for a formula. In the
meanwhile he gains his livelihood as he can. His powers of mimicry stand
him in good stead. In the outlying café-concerts of Paris, unknown to
fashion or the foreigner, he gives imitations of popular idols from Le
Bargy to Polin. But the Ambassadeurs, and the Alcazar d'Eté and the Folies
Marigny and Olympia and such-like stages where fame and fortune are to be
found, will have none of him. Paris, too, gets on his vagabond nerves.
But what is the good of presenting the unsophisticated public of Brest or
Béziers with an imitation of Monsieur le Bargy? As well give them lectures
on Thermodynamics.

Sometimes he escapes from mimicry. He conjures, he juggles, he plays
selections from Carmen and Cavaleria Rusticana on a fiddle made out of
a cigar box and a broom-handle. The Provinces accept him with mild
approbation. He tries Paris, the Paris of Menilmontant and the Outer
Boulevards; but Paris, not being amused, prefers his mimicry. He is alone,
mind you. No more Coinçon combinations. If he is to be insulted, let the
audience do it, or the vulgar theatre management; not his brother artists.
Away from his imitations he tries to make the most of his grotesque figure.
He invents eccentric costumes; his sleeves reach no further than just
below his elbows, his trouser hems flick his calves; he wears, inveterate
tradition of the circus clown, a ridiculously little hard felt hat on the
top of his shock of carroty hair. He paints his nose red and extends his
grin from ear to ear. He racks his brain to invent novelties in manual
dexterity. For hours a day in his modest _chambre garnie_ in the
Faubourg Saint Denis he practises his tricks. On the dissolution of the
Cirque Rocambeau, where as "Auguste" he had been practically anonymous, he
had unimaginatively adopted the professional name of Andrew-André. He is
still Andrew-André. There is not much magic about it on a programme. But,
_que voulez-vous?_ It is as effective as many another.

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

At last he makes a friend--an Englishman, Horatio Bakkus; and this
friendship marks a turning-point in his history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why? Is my English then so villainous?"

He mimicked him perfectly. Horatio Bakkus laughed.

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

"And I yours."

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

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

"Young man----" said he.

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

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

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

"Then, Mr. Lackaday----"

"You can omit the 'Mr.,'" said Andrew, "if you care to do so."

"You're more English than I thought," smiled Horatio Bakkus.

"I'm proud that you should say so," replied Andrew.

"I was about to remark," said Bakkus, "when you interrupted me, that I
wondered why a young Englishman of obviously decent upbringing should be
pursuing this contemptible form of livelihood."

"I beg your pardon," said Andrew, pausing in the act of conveying to his
mouth a morsel of sandwich. He was puzzled; comrades down on their luck had
cursed the profession for a _sale métier_ and had wished they were
road sweepers; but he had never heard it called contemptible. It was a
totally new conception.

Bakkus repeated his words and added: "It is below the dignity of one made
in God's image."

"I am afraid I do not agree with you," replied Andrew, stiffly. "I was born
in the profession and honourably bred in it and I have known no other and
do not wish to know any other."

"You were born an imitator? It seems rather a narrow scheme of life."

"I was born in a circus, and whatever there could be learned in a circus I
was taught. And it was, as you have guessed, a decent upbringing. By Gum,
it was!" he added, with sudden heat.

"And you're proud of it?"

"I don't see that I've got anything else to be proud of," said Andrew.

"And you must be proud of something?"

"If not you had better be dead," said Andrew.

"Ah!" said Bakkus, and went on with his supper.

Andrew, who had hitherto held himself on the defensive against
impertinence, and was disposed to dislike the cynical attitude of his new
acquaintance, felt himself suddenly disarmed by this "Ah!" Perhaps he had
dealt too cruel a blow at the disillusioned owner of the pretty little
tenor voice in which he could not take very much pride. Bakkus broke a
silence by remarking:

"I envy you your young enthusiasm. You don't think it better we were all
dead?"

"I should think not!" cried Andrew.

"You say you know all that a circus can teach you. What does that mean? You
can ride bare back and jump through hoops?"

"I learned to do that--for Clown's business," replied Andrew. "But that's
no good to me now. I am a professional juggler and conjurer and trick
musician. I'm also a bit of a gymnast and sufficient of a contortionist to
do eccentric dancing."

Bakkus took a sip of beer, and regarded him with his mocking eyes.

"And you'd sooner keep on throwing up three balls in the air for the rest
of your natural life than just be comfortably dead? I should like to know
your ideas on the point. What's the good of it all? Supposing you're the
most wonderful expert that ever lived--supposing you could keep up fifty
balls in the air at the same time, and could balance fifty billiard cues,
one on top of another, on your nose--what's the good of it?"

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