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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




Andrew rubbed his head. Such problems had never occurred to him. Old Ben
Flint's philosophy pounded into him, at times literally with a solid and
well-deserved paternal cuff, could be summed up in the eternal dictum:
"That which thou hast to do, do it with all thy might." It was the
beginning and end of his rule of life. He looked not, nor thought of
looking, further. And now came this Schopenhaurian with his question.
"What's the good of it?"

"I suppose I'm an artist, in my way," he replied, modestly.

"Artist?" Bakkus laughed derisively. "Pardon me, but you don't know what
the word means. An artist interprets nature in concrete terms of emotion,
in words, in colour, in sound, in stone--I don't say that he deserves to
live. I could prove to you, if I had time, that Michael Angelo and Dante
and Beethoven were the curses of humanity. Much better dead. But, anyhow,
they were artists. Even I with my tinpot voice singing 'Annie Laurie' and
'The Sands of Dee' and such-like clap-trap which brings a lump in the
throat of the grocer and his wife, am an artist. But you, my dear
fellow--with your fifty billiard cues on top of your nose? There's a devil
of a lot of skill about it of course--but nothing artistic. It means
nothing."

"Yet if I could perform the feat," said Andrew, "thousands and thousands of
people would come to see me; more likely a million."

"No doubt. But what would be the good of it, when you had done it and they
had seen it? Sheer waste of half your lifetime and a million hours on the
part of the public, which is over forty thousand days, which is over a
hundred years. Fancy a century of the world's energy wasted in seeing you
balance billiard cues on the end of your nose!"

Andrew reflected for a long time, his elbow on the cafe table, his hand
covering his eyes. There must surely be some fallacy in this remorseless
argument which reduced his life's work to almost criminal futility. At last
light reached him. He held out his other hand and raised his head.

"_Attendez_. I must say in French what has come into my mind. Surely
I am an artist according to your definition. I interpret nature, the
marvellous human mechanism in terms of emotion--the emotion of wonder. The
balance of fifty billiard cues gives the million people the same catch at
the throat as the song or the picture, and they lose themselves for an hour
in a new revelation of the possibilities of existence, and so I save the
world a hundred years of the sorrow and care of life."

Bakkus looked at him approvingly. "Good," said he. "Very good. Thank God,
I've at last come across a man with a brain that isn't atrophied for want
of use. I love talking for talking's sake--good talk--don't you?"

"I cannot say that I do," replied Andrew honestly, "I have never thought of
it.'

"But you must, my dear Lackaday. You have no idea how it stimulates your
intellect. It crystallizes your own vague ideas and sends you away with the
comforting conviction of what a damned fool the other fellow is. It's the
cheapest recreation in the world--when you can get it. And it doesn't
matter whether you're in purple and fine linen or in rags or in the greasy
dress-suit of a café-concert singer." He beckoned the waiter. "Shall we
go?"

They parted outside and went their respective ways. The next night they
again supped together, and the night after that, until it became a habit.
In his long talks with the idle and cynical tenor, Andrew learned many
things.

Now, parenthetically, certain facts in the previous career of Andrew
Lackaday have to be noted.

Madame Flint had brought him up nominally in the Roman Catholic Faith,
which owing to his peripatetic existence was a very nebulous affair without
much real meaning; and Ben Flint, taking more pains, had reared him in
a sturdy Lancashire Fear of God and Duty towards his Neighbour and Duty
towards himself, and had given him the Golden Rule above mentioned. Ben had
also seen to his elementary education, so that the _régime du participe
passé_ had no difficulties for him, and Racine and Bossuet were not
empty names, seeing that he had learned by heart extracts from the writings
of these immortals in his school primer. That they conveyed little to him
but a sense of paralysing boredom is neither here nor there. And Ben Flint,
most worthy and pertinacious of Britons, for the fourteen impressionable
years during which he was the arbiter of young Andrew's destiny, never for
an hour allowed him to forget that he was an Englishman. That Andrew should
talk French, his stepmother tongue, to all the outside world was a matter
of necessity. But if he addressed a word of French to him, Ben Flint, there
was the devil to pay. And if he picked up from the English stable hands
vulgarisms and debased vowel sounds, Ben Flint had the genius to compel
their rejection.

"My father," writes Lackaday--for as such he always regarded Ben
Flint--"was the most remarkable man I have ever known. That he loved me
with his whole nature I never doubted and I worshipped the ground on which
he trod. But he was remorseless in his enforcement of obedience. Looking
back, I am lost in wonder at his achievement."

Still, even Ben Flint could not do everything. The eternal precepts of
morality, the colloquial practice of English speech, the ineradicable
principles of English birth and patriotism, the elementary though thorough
French education, the intensive physical training in all phases of circus
life, took every hour that Ben Flint could spare from his strenuous
professional career as a vagabond circus clown. I who knew Ben Flint, and
drank of his wisdom gained in many lands, have been disposed to wonder why
he did not empty it to broaden the intellectual and æsthetic horizon of his
adopted son. But on thinking over the matter--how could he? He had spent
all his time in filling up the boy with essentials. Just at that time when
Andrew might have profited by the strong, rough intellectuality that had
so greatly attracted me as a young man, Ben Flint died. In the realm of
gymnasts, jugglers, circus-riders, dancers in which Andrew had thence found
his being, there was no one to replace the mellow old English clown, who
travelled around with Sterne and Montaigne and Shakespeare and Bunyan and
the Bible, as the only books of his permanent library. Such knowledge as
he possessed of the myriad activities of the great world outside his
professional circle he had picked up in aimless and desultory reading.

In Horatio Bakkus, therefore, Andrew met for the first time a human being
interested in the intellectual aspect of life; one who advanced outrageous
propositions just for the joy of supporting them and of refuting
counter-arguments; one, in fact, who, to his initial amazement,
could juggle with ideas as he juggled with concrete objects. In this
companionship he found an unknown stimulus. He would bid his friend adieu
and go away, his brain catching feverishly at elusive theories and new
conceptions. Sometimes he went off thrilled with a sense of intellectual
triumph. He had beaten his adversary. He had maintained his simple moral
faith against ingenious sophistry. He realized himself as a thinking being,
impelled by a new force to furnish himself with satisfying reasons for
conduct. It was through Horatio Bakkus that he discovered The Venus of Milo
and Marcus Aurelius and Longchamps races....

From the last he derived the most immediate benefit.

"If you've never been to a race-meeting," said Bakkus, "you've missed one
of the elementary opportunities of a liberal education. Nowhere else can
you have such a chance of studying human imbecility, knavery and greed. You
can also glut your eyes with the spectacle of useless men, expensive women,
and astounded, sensitive animals."

"I prefer," replied Andrew, with his wide grin, "to keep my faith in
mankind and horses."

"And I," said Bakkus, "love to realize myself for what I really am, an
imbecile, a knave, and a useless craver of money for which I've not had the
indignity of working. It soothes me to feel that for all my heritage of
culture I am nothing more or less than one of the rabble-rout. I've backed
horses ever since I was a boy and in my time I've had a pure delight in
pawning my underwear in order to do so."

"It seems to be the height of folly," said sober Andrew.

Bakkus regarded him with his melancholy mocking eyes.

"To paraphrase a remark of yours on the occasion of our first meeting--if a
man is not a fool in something he were better dead. At any rate let me show
you this fool's playground."

So Andrew assented. They went to Longchamps, humbly, on foot, mingling with
the Paris crowd. Bakkus wore a sun-stained brown and white check suit and
an old grey bowler hat and carried a pair of racing-glasses slung across
his shoulders, all of which transformed his aspect from that, in evening
dress, of the broken old tragedian to that of the bookmaker's tout rejected
of honest bookmaking men. As for Andrew, he made no change in his ordinary
modest ill-fitting tweeds, of which the sleeves were never long enough; and
his long red neck mounted high above the white of his collar and his straw
hat was, as usual, clamped on the carroty thatch of his hair. For them no
tickets for stands, lawn or enclosure. The far off gaily dressed crowd in
these exclusive demesnes shimmered before Andrew's vision as remote as some
radiant planetary choir. The stir on the field, however, excited him. The
sun shone through a clear air on this late meeting of the season, investing
it with an air of innocent holiday gaiety which stultified Bakkus's bleak
description. And Andrew's great height overtopping the crowd afforded him a
fair view of the course.

Bakkus came steeped in horse-lore and confidently prophetic. To the
admiration of Andrew he ran through the entries for each race, analysing
their histories, summarizing their form, and picking out dead certainties
with an esoteric knowledge derived from dark and mysterious sources. Andrew
followed him to the booths of the _Pari Mutuel_, and betting his
modest five franc piece, on each of the first two events, found Bakkus
infallible. But on looking down the list of entries for the great race of
the day he was startled to find a name which he had only once met with
before and which he had all but forgotten. It was "Elodie."

"My friend," said Bakkus, "now is the time to make a bold bid for a sure
fortune. There is a horse called Goffredo who is quoted in the sacred inner
ring of those that know at 8 to 1. I have information withheld from this
boor rabble, that he will win, and that he will come out at about 15 to 1.
I shall therefore invest my five louis in the certain hope of seventy-five
beautiful golden coins clinking into my hand. Come thou and do likewise."

"I'm going to back Elodie," said Andrew.

Bakkus stared at him. "Elodie--that ambulatory assemblage of cat's meat!
Why she has never been placed in a race in her life. Look at her." He
pulled Andrew as near the railings as they could get and soon picked her
out of the eight or nine cantering down the straight--a sleek, mild,
contented bay whose ambling gentleness was greeted with a murmur of
derision. "Did you ever see such a cow?"

"I like the look of her," said Andrew.

"Why--in the name of----"

"She looks as if she would be kind to children," replied Andrew.

They rushed quickly to the _Pari Mutuel_. Bakkus paid his five louis
for his Goffredo ticket. He turned to seek Andrew, but Andrew had gone. In
a moment or two they met among the scurrying swarm about the booths.

"What have you done?"

"I've put a louis on Elodie," said Andrew.

"The next time I want to give you a happy day I'll take you to the Young
Men's Christian Association," said Bakkus witheringly.

"Let us see the race," said Andrew.

They paid a franc apiece for a stand on a bench and watched as much of the
race as they could see. And Bakkus forgot to share his glasses with Andrew,
who caught now and then an uncomprehending sight of coloured dots on moving
objects and gaped in equally uncomprehensible bewilderment when the racing
streak flashed home up the straight. A strange cry, not of gladness but
of wonder, burst from the great crowd. Andrew turned to Bakkus, who, with
glasses lowered, was looking at him with hollow eyes from which the mockery
had fled.

"What's the matter?" asked Andrew.

"The matter? Your running nightmare has won. Why the devil couldn't you
have given me the tip? You must have known something. No one could play
such a game without knowing. It's damned unfriendly."

"Believe me, I had no tip," Andrew protested. "I never heard of the beast
before."

"Then why the blazes did you pick her out?"

"Ah!" said Andrew. Then realizing that his philosophical and paradoxical
friend was in sordid earnest he said mildly:

"There was a girl of that name who once brought me good luck."

The gambler, alive to superstitious intuitions, repented immediately of his
anger.

"That's worth all the tips in the world. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I don't wear my heart upon my sleeve," replied Andrew.

So peace was made. They joined the thin crowd round their booth of the
_Pari Mutuel_, mainly composed of place winners, and when the placards
of the odds went up, Bakkus gripped his companion's arm.

"My God! A hundred and three to one. Why didn't you plank on your last
penny."

"I'm very well content with two thousand francs," said Andrew. "It's
something against a rainy day."

They reached the _guichet_ and Andrew drew his money.

"Suppose the impossible animal hadn't won--you would have been rather
sick."

"No," Andrew replied, after a moment's thought. "I should have regarded my
louis as a tribute to the memory of one who did me a great service."

"I believe," said Bakkus, "that if I could only turn sentimentalist, I
should make my fortune."

"Let us go and find a drink," said Andrew.


For the second time Elodie brought him luck. This time in the shape of a
hundred and three louis, a goodly sum when one has to live from hand to
mouth. And the time came, at the end of their engagement at _La Boîte
Blanche_, when they lost even that precarious method of existence.
For the first time in his life Andrew spent a month in vain search for
employment. Dead season Paris had more variety artists than it knew what to
do with. The provinces, so the rehabilitated Moignon and his confrères, the
other agents, declared, in terms varying from apologetic stupor to frank
brutality, had no use for Andrew-André and his unique entertainment.

"But what shall I do?" asked the anxious André.

"Wait, _mon cher_, we shall soon well arrange it," said Moignon.

"?" pantomimed the other agents, with shrugged shoulders and helplessly
outspread hands.

And it happened too that Bakkus, the sweet ballad-monger, found himself on
the same rocks of unemployment.

"I have," said he, one evening, when the stranded pair were sitting
outside a horrid little liquor retreat with a zinc bar in the Faubourg
Saint-Denis--the luxury of _consommations_ at sixty centimes on the
Grands Boulevards had faded from their dreams--"I have, my dear friend,
just enough to carry me on for a fortnight."

"And I too," said Andrew.

"But your hundred louis at Longchamps?"

"They're put away," said Andrew.

"Thank God," said Bakkus.

Andrew detected a lack of altruism in the pious note of praise. He did not
love Bakkus to such a pitch of brotherly affection as would warrant his
relieving him of responsibility for self support. He had already fed Bakkus
for three days.

"They're put away," he repeated.

"Bring them out of darkness into the light of day," said Bakkus. "What are
talents in a napkin? You are a capitalist--I am a man with ideas. May I
order another of this _mastroquet's_ bowel-gripping absinthes in order
to expound a scheme? Thank you, my dear Lackaday. _Oui, encore une_.
Tell me have you ever been to England?"

"No," said Lackaday.

"Have you ever heard of Pierrots?"

"On the stage--masked balls--yes."

"But real Pierrots who make money?"

"In England? What do you mean?"

"There is in England a blatant, vulgar, unimaginative, hideous institution
known as the Seaside."

"Well?" said Andrew.

The dingy proprietor of the "Zingue" brought out the absinthe. Bakkus
arranged the perforated spoon, carrying its lump of sugar over the glass
and began to drop the water from the decanter.

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




Chapter VII



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who invented this elegant and disgustingly humiliating entertainment?"

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

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

_Il était une bergère
Et ron, ron, ron, petit patapon_.

Suddenly he stopped.

"By George! I have it! The names that will _épater_ the English
bourgeois. Ron-ron-ron and Petit Patapon. I'll be Ron-ron-ron and you'll be
dear little Patapon."

As the English seaside public, however, when he came to think of it, have
never heard of the shepherdess who guarded her muttons and still less of
the refrain which illustrated her history, he realized that the names as
they stood would be ineffective. Ron-ron and Patapon therefore would they
be. But Andrew, remembering Elodie's wise counsel, stuck to the "petit."
His French instinct guiding him, he rejected Patapon. Bakkus found Ron-ron
an unmeaning appellation. At last they settled it. They printed it out in
capital letters.

THE GREAT PATAPON AND LITTLE PATOU

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

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

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

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

He pulled out a pencil and, pushing aside plates and dishes, began to
sketch on the table-cloth with his superficial artistic facility. Andrew
watched him, the frown of anger giving way to the knitted brow of interest.
As the drawing reached completion, he thought again of Elodie and her sage
counsel. Was this her mental conception which he had been striving for
years to realize? He did not find the ideal incongruous with his lingering
sense of romance. He could take a humorous view of anything but his
profession. That was sacred. Everything did he devote to it, from his soul
to his skinny legs and arms. So that, when Bakkus had finished, and leaned
back to admire his work, Andrew drew a deep breath, and his eyes shone as
if he had received an inspiration from on High. He saw himself as in an
apotheosis.

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

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

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

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

Bakkus waved a hand towards the drawing.

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

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