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The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




"One of these days," said Andrew, the frown of anger returning to his brow,
"I'll throw you out of the window."

"Provided it is not, as now, on the ground floor, you would be committing
an act of the loftiest altruism."

Andrew returned to his forgotten breakfast, and poured out a cup of tepid
tea.

"What would you suggest--just plain black or red--Mephisto--or stripes?"

He was full of the realization of the Elodesque idea. His brain became
a gushing fount of inspiration. Hundreds of grotesque possibilities of
business, hitherto rendered ineffective by flapping costume, appeared in
fascinating bubbles. He thought and spoke of nothing else.

"Once I denied you the rank of artist," said Bakkus. "I retract. I
apologize. No one but an artist would inflict on another human being such
intolerable boredom."

"But it's your idea, bless you, which I'm carrying out, with all the
gratitude in the world."

"If you want to reap the tortures of the damned," retorted Bakkus, "just
you be a benefactor."

Andrew shrugged his shoulders. That was the way of Horatio Bakkus, perhaps
the first of his fellow-creatures whom he had deliberately set out to
study, for hitherto he had met only simple folk, good men and true or
uncomplicated fools and knaves, and the paradoxical humour of his friend
had been a puzzling novelty demanding comprehension; the first, therefore,
who put him on the track of the observation of the twists of human
character and the knowledge of men. That was the way of Bakkus. An idea was
but a toy which he tired of like a child and impatiently broke to bits.
Only a week before he had come to Andrew:

"My dear fellow, I've got a song. I'm going to write it, set it and sing it
myself. It begins:--

_I crept into the halls of sleep
And watched the dreams go by._

I'll give you the accompaniment in a day or two and we'll try it on the
dog. It's a damned sight too good for them--but no matter."

Andrew was interested. The lines had a little touch of poetry. He refrained
for some time from breaking through the gossamer web of the poet's fancy.
At last, however, as he heard nothing further, he made delicate enquiries.

"Song?" cried Bakkus. "What song? That meaningless bit of moonshine
ineptitude I quoted the other day? I have far more use for my intellect
than degrading it to such criminal prostitution."

Yes, he was beginning to know his Bakkus. His absorption in his new
character was not entirely egotistic. Both his own intelligence and his
professional experience told him that here, as he had worked out-the
business in his mind, was an entirely novel attraction. In his young
enthusiasm he saw hundreds crowding round the pitch on the sands. It was as
much to Bakkus's interest as to his own that the new show should succeed.
And even before he had procured the costume from Covent Garden, Bakkus
professed intolerable boredom. He shrugged his shoulders. Bored or not,
Bakkus should go through with it. So again under the younger man's
leadership Bakkus led the strenuous life of rehearsal.

It took quite a day for their fame to spread. On the second day they
attracted crowds. Money poured in upon them. Little Patou, like a
double-tailed serpent rearing himself upright on his tail tips, appeared
at first a creature remote, of some antediluvian race--until he talked
a familiar, disarming patter with his human, disarming grin. The Great
Patapon, contrary to jealous anticipation, saw himself welcomed as a
contrast and received more than his usual meed of applause. This satisfied,
for the time, his singer's vanity which he professed so greatly to despise.
They entered on a spell of halcyon days.

The brilliant sunny season petered out in hopeless September, raw and
chill. A week had passed without the possibility of an audience. Said
Bakkus:

"Of all the loathsome spots in a noisome universe this is the most
purulent. In order to keep up our rudimentary self-respect we have done
our best to veil our personal identity as images of the Almighty from the
higher promenades of the vulgar. Our sole associates have been the blatant
frequenters of evil smelling bars. We've not exchanged a word with a
creature approaching our intellectual calibre. I am beginning to conceive
for you the bitter hatred that one of a pair of castaways has for the
other; and you must regard me with feelings of equal abhorrence."

"By no means," replied Andrew. "You provide me with occupation, and that
amuses me."

As the occupation for the dismal week had mainly consisted in dragging a
cursing Bakkus away from public-house whisky on damp and detested walks,
and in imperturbably manoeuvring him out of an idle--and potentially
vicious--intrigue with the landlady's pretty and rather silly daughter, his
reply brought a tragic scowl to Bakkus's face.

"There are times when I lie awake, inventing lingering deaths for you. You
occupy yourself too much with my affairs. It's time our partnership in this
degrading mountebankery should cease."

"Until it does, it's going to be efficient," said Andrew. "It's a come down
for both of us to play on the sands and pass the hat round. I hate it as
much as you do, but we've done it honourably and decently--and we'll end up
in the same way."

"We end now," said Bakkus, staring out of their cheap lodging house
sitting-room window at the dismal rain that veiled the row of cheap lodging
houses opposite.

Andrew made a stride across the room, seized his shoulder and twisted him
round.

"What about our bookings next month?"

For their success had brought them an offer of a month certain from a
northern Palladium syndicate, with prospects of an extended tour.

"Dust and ashes," said Bakkus.

"You may be dust," cried Andrew hotly, "but I'm damned if I'm ashes."

Bakkus bit and lighted a cheap cigar and threw himself on the dilapidated
sofa. "No, my dear fellow, if it comes to that, I'm the ashes. Dead! With
never a recrudescent Phoenix to rise up out of them. You're the dust, the
merry sport of the winds of heaven."

"Don't talk foolishness," said Andrew.

"Was there ever a man living who used his breath for any other purpose?"

"Then," said Andrew, "your talk about breaking up the partnership is mere
stupidity."

"It is and it isn't," replied Bakkus. "Although I hate you, I love you.
You'll find the same paradoxical sentimental relationship in most cases
between man and wife. I love you, and I wish you well, my dear boy. I
should like to see you Merry-Andrew yourself to the top of the Merry-Andrew
tree. But for insisting on my accompanying you on that uncomfortable and
strenuous ascent, without very much glory to myself, I frankly detest you."

"That doesn't matter a bit to me," said Andrew. "You've got to carry out
your contract."

Bakkus sighed. "Need I? What's a contract? I say I am willing to perform
vocal and other antics for so many shillings a week. When I come to think
of it, my soul revolts at the sale of itself for so many shillings a week
to perform actions utterly at variance with its aspirations. As a matter of
fact I am tired. Thanks to my brain and your physical cooperation, I have
my pockets full of money. I can afford a holiday. I long for bodily sloth,
for the ragged intellectual companionship that only Paris can give me, for
the resumption of study of the philosophy of the excellent Henri Bergson,
for the absinthe that brings forgetfulness, for the Tanagra figured,
broad-mouthed, snub-nosed shrew that fills every day with potential
memories."

"Oh that's it, is it?" cried Andrew, with a glare in his usually mild
eyes and his ugly jaw set. They had had many passages at arms. Bakkus's
sophistical rhetoric against Andrew's steady common sense; and they had
sharpened Andrew's wit. But never before had they come to a serious
quarrel. Feeling his power he had hitherto exercised it with humorous
effectiveness. But now the situation appeared entirely devoid of humour. He
was coldly and sternly angry.

"That's the beginning and end of the whole thing? It all comes down to a
worthless little Montmartroise? For a little thing of _rien du tout,_
the artist, the philosopher, the English public school man will throw over
his friend, his partner, his signed word, his honour? _Mon Dieu!_ Well
go--I can easily--No, I'll not say what I have in my mind."

Bakkus turned over on his side, facing his adversary, his under arm
outstretched, the cigar in his fingers.

"I love to see youth perspiring--especially with noble rage. It does it
good, discharges the black humours of the body. If I could perspire more
freely I should be singing in Grand Opera."

"You can break your contract and I'll do without you," cried the furious
Andrew.

"I'm not going to break the contract, my young friend," replied Bakkus,
peering at him through lowered eyelids. "When did I say such a thing? We
end the damp and dripping folly of the sands."

"We don't," said Andrew.

"As you will," said Bakkus. "Again I prophesy that you'll be drilling
awkward squads in barrack yards before you've done. It's all you're fit
for."

Andrew smiled or grinned with closed lips. It was his grim smile, many
years afterwards to become familiar to larger bodies of men than awkward
squads. Once more he had won his little victory.

So peace was made. They finished up the miserable fag end of the season
and with modest success carried out their month's contract in the northern
towns. But even Andrew's drastic leadership could not prevail on Bakkus's
indolence to sign an extension. Montmartre called him. An engagement. He
also spoke vaguely of singing lessons. Now that Parisians had returned to
Paris, he could not afford to lose his connections. With cynical frankness
he also confessed his disinclination to be recognized in a music-hall Punch
and Judy show by his brother the Archdeacon.

"Archdeacons," said Andrew--he had a confused idea of their prelatical
status, "don't go to music-halls."

"They do in this country," said Bakkus. "They're everywhere. They infest
the air like microbes. You only have to open your mouth and you get your
lungs filled with them. It's a pestilential country and I've done with it."

"All right," replied Andrew, "I'll run the show on my own."

But the Palladium syndicate, willing to book "The Great Patapon and Little
Patou" for a further term, declined to rebook Little Patou by himself.
He returned to Paris, where he found Bakkus wallowing in absinthe and
philosophic sloth.

"We might have made our fortune in England," said he.

Said Bakkus coolly sipping his absinthe, "I have no desire to make my
fortune. Have you?"

"I should like to make my name and a big position," replied Andrew.

"And I, my young friend? As the fag end of the comet's tail should I have
made my name and a big position? Ah egotist! Egotist! Sublime egotist! The
true artist using human souls as the rungs of his ladder! Well, go your
ways. I have no reproach against you. Now that I'm out of your barrack
square, my heart is overflowing with love for you. You have ever a friend
in Horatio Bakkus. When you fall on evil days and you haven't a sou in your
pocket, come to me--and you'll always find an inspiration."

"I wish you would give me one now," said Andrew, who had spent a fruitless
morning at the Agence Moignon.

"You want a foil, an intelligent creature who will play up to you--a
creature far more intelligent than I am. A dog. Buy a dog. A poodle."

"By Gum!" cried Andrew, "I believe you're right again."

"I'm never wrong," said Bakkus. "Garcon!" He summoned the waiter and waved
his hand towards the little accusing pile of saucers. "Monsieur always pays
for my inspirations."




Chapter VIII



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

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

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

Prépimpin cast an oblique glance at his old master.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You see, he succeeds. If you credited his modesty, you would think that
Prépimpin made Petit Patou. _Quod est absurdum_. But the psychological
fact remains that Andrew Lackaday needed some magnetic contact with another
individuality, animal or human, to exhibit his qualities. There, in
counselling splendid isolation, Elodie Figasso, the little Marseilles
gutter fairy was wrong. She saw, clearly enough, that, subordinated to
others, with no chance of developing his one personality he must fail.
But she did not perceive--and poor child, how could she?--that given the
dominating influence over any combination, even over one poodle dog, he
held the key of success.

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

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

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

Why the great capitals fail to be amused is a perpetual mystery to Andrew
Lackaday. Prépimpin and he give them the newest things they can think of.
After weeks and weeks of patient rehearsal, they bring a new trick to
perfection. It is the _clou_ of their performance for a week's
engagement at the Paris Folies-Bergère. After a conjuring act, he retires.
Comes on again immediately, Petit Patou, apparently seven foot high, in
the green silk tights reaching to the arm-pit waist, a low frill round his
neck, his hair up to a point, a perpetual grin painted on his face. On the
other side enters Prépimpin on hind legs, bearing an immense envelope.
Petit Patou opens it--shows the audience an invitation to a ball.

"Ah! dress me, Prépimpin."

The dog pulls a hidden string and Petit Patou is clad in a bottle green
dress-coat. Prépimpin barks and dances his delight.

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

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

"And a stick."

Prepimpin brings the stick.

"And a cigar."

Prépimpin rushes to a little table at the back of the stage and on his hind
legs offers a box of cigars to his master, who selects one and lights it.
He begins the old juggler's trick of the three objects. The dog sits on his
haunches and watches him. There is patter in which the audience is given
to understand that Prépimpin, who glances from time to time over the
footlights, with a shake of his leonine mane, is bored to death by his
master's idiocy. At last the hat descends on Petit Patou's head, the
crook-handled stick falls on his arm, and he looks about in a dazed way for
the cigar, and then he sees Prépimpin, who has caught it, swaggering off on
his hind legs, the still lighted cigar in his mouth.

"No," writes Lackaday, "it was a failure. Poor Prépimpin and I left Paris
with our tails between our legs. We were to start a tour at Bordeaux.
'_Mon pauvre ami_,' said I, on the journey--Prépimpin never suffered
the indignity of a dog cage--'There is only one thing to be done. It is you
who will be going to the ball and will juggle with the three objects, and
I who will catch the cigar in my mouth.' But it was not to be. At Bordeaux
and all through the tour we had a _succès fou_."

Thus Andrew washed his hands of Paris and London and going where he was
appreciated roved the world in quiet contentment. He was young, rather
scrupulously efficient within his limits, than ambitious, and of modest
wants, sober habits, and of a studious disposition which his friendship
with Horatio Bakkus had both awakened and stimulated. Homeless from birth
he never knew the nostalgia which grips even the most deliberately vagrant
of men. As his ultimate goal he had indeed a vague dream of a home with
wife and children--one of these days in the future, when he had put by
enough money to justify such luxuries. And then there was the wife to find.
In a wife sewing by lamp-light between a red-covered round table and
the fire, a flaxen haired cherub by her side--for so did his ingenuous
inexperience picture domestic happiness--he required the dominating
characteristic of angelic placidity. Perhaps his foster-mother and the
comfort Ben Flint found in her mild and phlegmatic devotion had something
to do with it.

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

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

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

And so--in effect--_Bon soir_.

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

He is not wandering all the time over France, or flashing meteor-like about
Europe. He has periods of repose, enforced and otherwise. But his position
being ensured, he has no anxieties. Paris is his headquarters. He lives
still in his old _hôtel meublé_ in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. But
instead of one furnished room on the fifth floor, he can afford an
apartment, salon, salle à manger, bedrooms, cabinet de toilette, on the
prosperous second, which he retains all the year round. And Petit Patou can
now stride through the waiting crowd in Moignon's antechamber and enter the
sacred office, cigar in mouth, and with a "look here, _mon vieux_,"
put the fear of God into him. Petit Patou and Prépimpin, the idols of the
Provinces, have arrived.

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

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

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

"Yes, who?" scowled the pessimist, now getting grey and more gaunt of blue,
ill-shaven cheek. "To me it is seven æons of Promethean damnation."

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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