 CHAPTER V To realise Pettipa II in the British general of Brigade, we must turn to the manuscript mentioned at the beginning of this story. We meet him, a raw youth standing, one blazing summer day on the bridge of Avignon. He insists on this episode because, says he, the bridge is associated with important events in his life. It was not, needless to remark, the Pond Avignon of the Gay Old Song, for the further arch of that was swept away by floods long ago, and it now remains a thing of pathetic uselessness. Three quarters of the way across the road might you go, and then you would come to abrupt nothingness, just the swirling river far below your arrested feet. It was the new suspension bridge, some three hundred yards further up, sadly inharmonious, with immaculate battlements of the city, and the austere mass rising above them of the palace of the popes on the one side, and on the other the grey antiquity of the castle of Villeneuve, brooding like an ancient mother over its aged offspring, the clustering sun-baked town. The joyous generation of the old bridge has long since passed away, but to the present generation the new bridge affords the same wonder and delight, for it entices like the old, from stifling streets to the haunts of Pan. There do you find leafy walks and dels of shade, and pathways by the great cool river, leading to sequestered spots, where you may sit and forget the clatter of flagstones and the stuffy apartment above them for which the rent is due, where the air of early June is perfumed by wild thyme and marjoram, and the far-flung sweetness of new-mown hay, and where the nightingales sing. There whenever it can all Avignon turns out, as it has turned out for hundreds of years, on its to-and-fro adventure across the bridge of promise. It was on a Sunday afternoon, when young lacquerdays stood there, leaning moodily over the parapet, regarding it not as a bridge of promise, but as a bridge of despair. He had fled from the dressing-room of the little music hall just outside the city walls, which he shared with three others of the troupe, from its horrible reek of escaping gas and drainage and grease-paint, and the thaworted human emanations of years, and had come here instinctively to breathe the pure air that swept down the broad stream. He had come for rest of mind and comfort of soul, but only find himself noisily alone amid an unsympathetic multitude. He had failed. He learned it first from the apathy of the audience. He learned it afterwards from the demeanor and the speech far from apathetic of the manager and leader of the troupe. There were a company of six, Les Mœurs-Veurs, five jugglers, plate-spinners, eccentric musicians, ventriloquists, and one low-comedian. Lacadé was the low-comedian, his business to repeat in burlesque most of the performance of his fellow-artists. It was his first engagement, outside the Sœur Caroccombeau, his first day with the troupe. Everything had gone badly. His enormous lean length put the shell out of scale. The troupe, accustomed to the business of a smaller man, whose sudden illness caused the gap which Lacadé came from Paris to Phil, resented the change, and gave him little help. They demanded impossibilities. Although they had rehearsed, and the rehearsals had been a sufficient nightmare of suffering, everybody had seemed to devote a ferocious mannice to his humiliation. Where the professional juggler is accustomed to catch things at his hip, they threw them at his knees. They appeared to decide that his head should be on the level of his breast. The leading lady, Madame Croissant, wife of the manager, a compact person of five-foot-two, rounded it loud that she could not play with him. And in his funniest act, dependent on her co-operation, she left him to be helplessly funny by himself. The tradition of the troupe required the comedian to be attired in a loud Czech suit, green neck tie, and white felt bowler hat. On the podgy form of Lacadé's predecessor, it produced its comic effect. On the lank Lacadé, it was characterless. In consequence of all this, he'd been nervous, he'd missed cues, he'd fumbled when he ought to have been clear, and been clear when he ought comically to have fumbled. He'd gone about his funny business with the air of a curate marrying his vicar to the object of his hopeless affections. And Croissant had devastatingly insulted him. What worm was in the head of Moynion, the parish musical agent, that he should send him such a monstrosity? He wasn't, non-the-dual, caring about freaks at a fair. He wanted a comedian, and not a giant. No one of the Sacrocombe would come to grief if it depended on such canaries as Lacadé. Didn't he know he was there to make the audience laugh? Not to give a representation of Monsieur Mounais-Soulet elongated by the rack? Oh, mon petit, said he at last, fait moi la compe. Which is a very valgaway of insisting on a person's immediate retirement. Here is your week's salary, I gain, by the proceeding the barricage man will see us through. He has done so before. As for Moynion? Although Lacadé regarded Moynion as a sort of god dispensing fame and riches enthroned on unassailable heights of power, he trembled at the awful destiny that awaited him. He would be cast, like Lucifer, from heaven. He would be stripped of authority. Qu'Oissons's invective against him was so terrible that Lacadé pitted him even more than he pitted himself. If there was himself to consider. As much used to apply to the fallen Moynion for an engagement at the convent of the Daughters of Calvary. He and Moynion and their joint fortunes were sent hurtling down into the abyss. On the parapet of the British despair lent young Lacadé gazing unseeingly down into the Rhone. His sudden misfortune had been like the stunning blow of a sandbag. His brain still reeled. What had happened was incomprehensible. He knew his business. He could conceive no other. He'd been trained to do it since infancy. There was not a phase of Clown's work with which he was not familiar. He was a possible gymnast, an expert juggler, a trick-musician, an accomplished conjurer. All that the Merveilleau troupe'd act required from him, he had been doing successfully for years. Why then the failure? He blamed the chequesuits, the ill-will of the company, the unreason of Madame Qu'Oissons. It did not occur to him that he'd emerged from an old world into a new. That between the old circus-public and the new musical-public there was almost a generation's change of taste and critical demand. The Cirque-rocombeau had gone round without perceiving that the world had gone round too. It wondered why its triumphant glory had declined, and it could not take steps to adapt itself to the new conditions which it could not appreciate. Every one grew old and tradition-bound in the Cirque-rocombeau, in the horses, until gradually it perished of senile decay. Andrew Lackaday, carrying on the traditions of his foster-father, the clown Ben Flint, had remained with it, principal clown, to the very end. Now and then, rare passes through from the outer world, gymnasts down on their luck, clad to take a makeshift engagement while waiting for better things, had counseled him to leave the antiquated concern. But the Cirque-rocombeau had been the whole of his life, childhood, boyhood, young manhood. He was linked to it by the fibres of a generous nature. All those elderly, anxious folk were his family. Many of the children, his contemporaries, trained in the Cirque-rocombeau had flown heartlessly from the nest, and the elders had fatalistically lamented. Madame Rockambour, bowed, wisened, of uncanny age, yet forceful and valiant to the last, carrying on for the old husband, now lying paralysed in Paris, who had married the circus from his father misty years ago, would say to the young man, when one of these defections occurred, And you, André, you are not going to leave us? You have a fine position, and if you are dissatisfied, perhaps we can come to an arrangement. You are a child of the circus, and I love you like my own flesh and blood. We shall turn the corner yet, all that is necessary is faith, and a little youth. And Andrew, a simple soul, who had been trained in the virtues of honour and loyalty by the brave Ben Flint, would repudiate with indignation the suggestion of any selfish desire to go abroad and seek adventure. At last, one afternoon, when the tent, a miserable gypsy thing, compared with the proud pavilion of the days of the glory of Billy the Pig, was pinched on the outskirts of a poor little town, they found Madame Rockambour dead in the canvas box office, which she had occupied for fifty years. The heartbreaking receipts in front of her counted out into little piles of bronze and small silver. The end had come. The circus could not be sold as a going concern. It crumbled away. Somebody bought the old horses, heaven knows for what purpose. Somebody bought the antiquated harness and moth-eaten trappings. Somebody else bought the tents and fittings. But nobody bought the old, care-worn human beings, riders and gymnasts and stable-hands, who crept away into the bright, free air of France, dazed and lost, like the prisoners released from the Bastille. It was not so long ago. Long enough ago, however, for young Andrew Lackaday to have come perilously near the end of his savings in Paris, before the almighty Moignot, now curse-withered, but then vast and endless, reeking of fat food and diamonds and great cigars, had found him this engagement at Avignon. He had journeyed thither full of the radiant confidence of twenty. He stood on the bridge, overwhelmed by the despair whose tarterium blackness only twenty can experience. Not at Leam anywhere of hope. His humiliation was absolute. The Monarchal Croissant had not even given him an opportunity of redeeming his failure. He had been paid to go away. It is gusting, yet necessary a price of his shame rattled in his pockets. Tonight the baggage-man would play his part, a being once presumably trained, yet sunk so low in incompetence that he was glad to earn his livelihood as baggage-man. And he, Andrew Lackaday, was judged more incompetent even than this degraded outcast. Why? How could it be? What was the reason? He dug his nails into his burning temples. The summer sun beat down on him and set at litter the currents in the Rhone. The ceaseless, laughing stream of citizens passed him by. Presently, youth's need of action brought him half unconsciously to an erect position. He glanced duly this way and that, and then slowly moved along the bridge towards the villa of Blank. Girls, bare-headed, arm in arm, looked up at him and laughed. He was so long and lean and comical with his ugly lugubrious face and the little straw hat perched on top of his bushy, carot-y pole, mind being used to derision. In happier days he valued it, for the laugh would be accompanied by a nudge on a voila august. He took it as a tribute. It was fame. Now he was so deeply sunk in his black mood that he scarcely heeded. He walked on to the end of the bridge and turned down the dusty pathway by the bank. Suddenly he became aware of sounds of music and revelry, and a few yards further on he came to a broad dell shaded by plain trees and set out as a restaurant garden, with rude tables and benches filled with good-humoured, thirsty folk. On one side a weather-beaten wooden chalet, having the proud title of restaurant du Rhône, served apparently but to house the supply of drinks which nondescript men and sturdy bare-haired maidens carried incessantly on trays to the waiting tables. On the dusty midway-space, the garden boasted no blade of grass, couples danced to the strains of a wheezing hurdy-gurdy played by a white-bearded ancient, who at the end of each tune refreshed himself with a draught from a choke of beer on the ground by his side, while a tiny, anemic girl went round gathering Sue in a shell. When the music stopped you could hear the whir and the click of the bowls in an adjoining dusty and reggae'd alley and the harsh, excited cries of the players. Between these intervals the serving people, in an absent way, would scatter an occasional carafe full of water on the dancing floor to lay the dust. Young lackaday hung hesitatingly on the outskirts under the wooden archway was at once the entrance and the signboard. The music had ended, the tables were packed. He felt very thirsty and longed to enter and drink some of the beer which looked so cool in the long glasses, surmounted by a half-inch of white froth, inviting as seafoam. Shiness held him. These prosperous, carefree bourgeois, almost indistinguishable one from the other by racial characteristics, and himself a tragic failure in life and physically unique among men, were worlds apart. It had never occurred to him before that he could find himself anywhere in France where the people were not his people. He felt heartbrokenly alien. Suddenly the herdy-girdies started the ghostly tinkling of the ill-baccio waltz, and the ingenious couples of Avignon rose and began to dance. The thirst-driven lackaday plucked up courage and strode to a deserted wooden table. He ordered beer. It was brought. He sipped luxuriously. One tells one's thirst to be patient when one has to think of one's sue. He was half way through when two girls, young and flushed from dancing together, flung themselves down on the opposite bench, the table between. We don't disturb you, monsieur? He raised his hat politely. By no means made him as well. One of them, with a quick gesture, took up from the table a forgotten newspaper, and began to fan herself and her companion to the accompaniment of giggling and chatter about the heat. They were very young. They ordered grenadine syrup and odysilts. Andrew Dacaday stared dismally beyond them at the dancers. Even the happy, perspiring girls in front of him, he took no interest for all their youth and comeliness, and obviously Frank's approachability. He saw nothing but the fury-inflamed face of Quanson, and heard nothing but the rasping voice telling him that it was cheaper to pay him his weak salary than to allow him to appear again. Au revoir, Molochamp! Why hadn't he taken Quanson by the neck then and there with his long, strong fingers, and strangled him? Quanson would have had the chance of a rabbit. He had the strength of a dozen Quanson. He trained to perfection with muscle-like, dried bull sinews. He could split an apple between arm and forearm in the hollow of his elbow. Why shouldn't he go back and break Quanson's neck? No man alive had the right to turn him to Fullerkamp. You don't seem very gay, said a laughing voice. With the start he recovered consciousness of immediate surroundings. Instead of two girls opposite, there was only one. Vaguely, he remembered that a man had come up. Tour de Vez, Mamazelle! Je vivis bien! And one of the girls had gone, leaving her just sipping grenadine-silippe and seltzer-water. But it had been like some flitting unreality of a dream. At his blinking recovery the remaining girl laughed again. You look like a sonambulist! He replied, I beg pardon, Mamazelle, but I was absorbed in my reflections. Black Quanson, they have made you little infidelities? He frowned. They? Who do you mean? They? Jolies-Gançois is not absorbed in his reflections. She mimicked his tone, unless there is the finger of a petit femme to stir them round and darken them. Mamazelle, said he seriously, you are quite mistaken. There's not a woman in the world against whom I have the slightest grudge. It was a matter of love, and Madame Quanson's hostility did not count. Word of honour, he added, looking into the smiling, ironical face. Love had entered very little into his serious scheme of life. He'd had his entanglements, of course. There was Francine Dumesnil, who had fluttered into the sec rocombeau as a slack-wire artist, and, after making him vows of undying affection, had eloped a week afterwards with Hans Peterson, the only man left who could stand on the bareback of a horse that was not thick with resin. But the heart of Andrew Lackaday had nothing to do with the heart of Francine Dumesnil. He had agreed with the agent Madame Rocombeau. Saltip, both of them. If it had been Chagrin D'Amour, sorrow of love, Mamazelle, said he, I should not have been so insensible to the presence of two such charming young ladies. We are polite, all the same, she remarked approvingly. She sipped her grenadine. Having nothing further to say, he sipped his beer. Presently she said, I saw you this afternoon at the Poitre. He looked at her with a touch of interest. No one would allude to the music hall as the box except a fellow professional engaged there. You, too, he asked. She nodded. She belonged to a troupe of dancing girls. As they were the first number, they got away early. She and her friend had gone for a walk and found this restaurant. It was gay, wasn't it? He said soberly, You were dancing at rehearsal this morning. You've danced at the music hall this afternoon. You'll be dancing again this evening. Why do you dance here? I can only be young once, she replied. How old are you? Seventeen. And you? Twenty-two. She would have given him thirty. She said he looked so serious. And he, regarding her more narrowly, would have given her fifteen. She was very young, slight, scarcely formed, yet her movements were lithe and complete like those of a young lizard. She had laughing black eyes and a fresh mouth set in a thin, dark face that by one day grew haggard or coarse according to her physical development, but was now full with the devil's beauty of youth. A common type, one that would not arrest masculine eyes as she passed by. Dozens of the girls here round about might have called her sister. She was dressed with cheap neatness, the soiled white wing of a bird in her black hat being the only touch of bravura. She spoke with the richer accent of the south. You are of the midi? He said. Yes, she came from Marseille. In generously 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. An elderly man, a huissier, one of those people who go about with the trickleur-resetted 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 verve Figasso could put into his stomach, and as her besotted mother starved them both in order to fulfill the huissier's demands, and as she had derived no compensating joy from her dressmaking, she had found, thanks to her friend, a position as figurant in a Marseille review. And voilà! There she was, free, independent, and since she had tant 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, Marseille 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 Margo, from Margo herself would she get reimbursement. But yet, mademoiselle, said he, you make me ashamed. You must still be thirsty, like myself. S'en avoue-je ne d'aie pas? She asked the question with such a little air of serious seditude 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 or more syrup for her délectation? 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 should feel that you do me an honour. It is not to be refused, said she politely, and the serving-maid was dispatched 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 find you admirable, she declared, much better than a spester pool mouillier, 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 never played to such an audience in her life. There were no tourists, 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 if a fear of being deceived. All of which, of course, is a libel on the hearty folk of Avignon. But Elodie was from Marseille, which naturally had a poor opinion of the other towns of Provence. She also lied for the comforting of Lacquereday. 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 tonight, nor tomorrow night, nor ever again. Tomorrow I return to Paris. She regarded him all 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 musical artist on tour. He must be very rich and powerful. Lacquereday 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 patron found that my long body spoiled her act, and so I go to Paris tomorrow. 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 croissant. She scorned them with her to contempt. What right had that tortoise of Madame Croissant to put on hers? She had seen better jugging in a boo that a fair. Her championship warmed Andrew's heart, and he began to feel less lonely in a dismal and unappreciative world. Longing for further he leave 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-roquembeau. She clapped her hands. But I have seen you there, when I was quite little, three, four years ago, at Marseille. 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 restuarial garden emptied. The good folks of Avignon returned to dinner-wards 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 would 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 ten o'clock when she was free from the music hall, at the Café des Dengueux-Sions, or the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville. Andrew, shrinking from the table-dote to the main gie-hotel in a narrow back-street, where the Moveo troupe had their crowded being, dined at a cheap restaurant near the railway-station, and filled in the evening with aimless wandering up and down the Fronde Avenue de la Gare. Once he turned off into the quite moondid square dominated by the cathedral and the walls and towers of the Palace of the Popes. The austere beauty fit said nothing to him. He did not bring calm to a fevered spirit. On the contrary, he 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 on the outside edge of the Café Thérèse, awaiting her. The reconciliation was complete. Like most of the young men there, he too had his maid. They met as if they'd known each other for years. She was full of an evil fellow, en grosse type, with a roll of fat at the back of his neck and a great diamond ring which flashed to the moonlight, who had waited for her at the stage door and walked by her side pestering her with his attentions. "'And you know how I got rid of him?' I said, "'Monsieur, I can't walk with you through the streets on a cut of my corn-moods. But I swear to you that you will find me at the Café des Négations 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 grosse type with a roll of fat at the diamond ring, who halted somewhat uncertainly in front of the Café, whereupon Andrew rose to his long height of six feet 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 Mamoiselle. It was André and Elodie. Yes, he would write to her from Paris, telling her of his fortunes, and she too would write. The augeant's moignant would always find him. It is parenthetically to be noted how his afternoon fears of the impermanence of the augeant's moignant 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 meanted the boile. There had been discussions. Some had said this, and some had said that. There had been partisans of the croissant and partisans of André. There was subject matter for one of the pretty quarrels dear to musical folk. But Elodie summed up the whole matter with her air of precocious wisdom. Her wisdom gained in the streets and sewing-rooms and cafe-concerts of Marseille. What you do is excellent, Montchère, but it is vieux-jeux. The circus is not the musical. You must be original." As originality was banned from the circus tradition, he stood still on 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 drôle,' she declared, and there would be no one else like you. But you must be by yourself, not with a troupe like the Merville. Tiens!' She caught him by the lapels of his jacket, and a passer-by might have surmised a pleading stage in a lover's discussion. I have heard there is a little man in London, or so little, a pâté-tou-jeu-lis.' "'I know,' said Andrew, but he is a great artist. "'And so are you,' she retorted. "'But as this little man gets all the profits he can out of his little dis. It was a gross Lyonnais. 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. Hey, Pierre! 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 wanted 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 sexes 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 celebrate addiction to cats, or to eugenic propaganda, or to perpetual crepe 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 our half-fulfilled womanhood that he suffered no temptations of an easy conquest. The kiss therefore evoked no baser range of emotion. As he said was whirling with an artist's sudden conception, and, Markew, an artist's conception need no more be a case of pathogenesis than that of the physical woman. It had no room for the higher and subtler amoromantical 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 round one of her obit-addictor 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 hostel where possibly a shade more poverty-stricken in the flag paved by street, a trifle, stela-smelling, than his own, and there put out a friendly hand of dismissal. We will write to each other? It is agreed. Allo, au revoir. Au revoir, Elodie. E messie. And that was the end of it. And we went back to Paris by the first train in the morning, and Elodie continued to dance in Evingior. 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 affected 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. As 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 my means that tainted Elie Nott as so many of her sisters of song and dance. And she had forgotten him. He shrugged philosophic shoulders. After all, why should she trouble her so further with so dull a dog? Manlike, he did not realise the difficulties that were set to even sagacious-headed a 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 cafe 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 immodestly show themselves at cafes alone, or when you have to stand up in a post-office, and then there is the paper and envelope difficulty, with a furious person behind you who wanted to send a telegram. Elodie's invariable habit, when she corresponded on the back of a picture-postcard with her mother, when in fact you have before you the unprecedented task of writing a letter, picture-postcards being out of the question, and a letter whose flawedness 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 Lacaday, we will now proceed. The fact remains that they faded pleasantly, and even regrettelessly, from each other's lives. The now follows some years in Lacaday's career of high endeavour and fierce struggle. He had taken to heart Elodie's suggestion of the exploitation of his physical idiosyncrasy. He seeks for a formula. In the meanwhile he gains his livelihood as he can. His powers of memocrys 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 Labagy to Polar. But the ambassadeur, and the Arcazardette, and the Folie Marinee 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 Bezier with an imitation of M. Labagy? As well give them lectures on thermodynamics. Sometimes he escapes from memocry. He conjures, he juggles. He plays selectrums from Carmen and Cavallarria 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 Menilmonton and the Outer Boulevard. But Paris, not being amused, prefers his memocry. He is alone, mind you, no more croissant combinations. If he is to be incited, let the audience do it, all the vulgar theatrical 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, in veteran tradition of the Circus Clown, a ridiculous little hard-felt hat on the top of his shock of charity 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 moddish chambre-ganie, in the faux-barc sondanie, he practices his tricks. On the dissolution of the Cirque-Roccombeau, whereas Auguste he had been practically anonymous, he had unimaginably adopted the professional name of Andrew André. He is still Andrew André. There's not up-magic about it on a program, but, c'est que vous levez, it is as effective as many another. During this period we see him as 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 Mount-a-Banque 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 that was common to Milly Sond and Phaedra and Rosalind and Phaedora, and the child-wife of David Commerfield. It is, as I've indicated, the ladies who bit him boursoir. Sometimes he mourns for a day or two, more often he laughs, welcoming regained freedom. None touches his heart. Of men he has acquainted his implenty, with whom he lives on terms of good comradeship, but he has scarcely an intimate. At last he makes a friend, an Englishman, a ratio Bacchus. And this friendship marks a turning point in his history. They met at a cafe-concert in Montmartre, which, like many of its kind, had an ephemeral existence, the nearest, instantly, to the real Paris to which Andrew Lackaday had attained. It tried to appeal to a catholicity of tastes, to outdo its rivals in scabrousness. Did not Ferrandolle and Lisette Blondie make their names there? And at the same time to offer to the pure-minded an innocent entertainment. To the latter, both Lackaday with his imitations, and Horatio Bacchus with his sentimental balance contributed. Somehow the mixture failed to please. The one part scared the virtuous, and the other, the debauched, yawned. La boîte blanche perished of inannition. But during its continuance, Lackaday and Bacchus 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 Roupigal, and, striking off, reached the Grand Boulevard. The brasserie totell 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. And 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 Bacchus 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 Bacchus, with stuck-in vindictiveness. It turned him into an idle, sentimental, hypocritical, and disloot 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 paralyzing 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, some 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 admit the Mr., said Andrew, if you care to do so. You're more English than I thought, smiled Horatio Backus. I'm proud that you should say so, replied Andrew. I was about to remark, said Backus, when you interrupted me, but 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, wrenched down on their luck, and cursed the profession for a salmitie, and a wish to they were road-sweepers, but he had never heard it called contemptible, a totally new conception. Backus repeated his words and added, It is below the dignity of one made in God's image. I'm afraid I do not agree with you, replied Andrew stiffly. I was born in the profession and honourably bred in it, and I've known no other and do not wish to know any other. You were born an imitator. 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. 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'd better be dead, said Andrew. Ah! said Backus, 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. Backus 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 could ride bareback and jump through hoops. I learned to do that for Clown's business, replied Andrew. Well, 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. Backus took a sip of beer and regarded him with his mocking eyes. And you two to keep on throwing up three balls in the air for the rest of your natural life, and 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 billion cues, one on top of another on your nose. What's the good of it? Andrew rubbed his head. Such problems had never occurred to him. Old Ben Frillin'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 shopper-harion with his question. What's the good of it? I suppose I'm an artist in my way, he replied, modestly. Artist? Backus 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 Michelangelo and Dante and Beethoven were the curses of humanity, much better dead. But anyhow, they were artists. Even I, with my tin-pot voice-singing Annie Laurie and the sands of Dee, and such like Clap-Trap, Lump in the throat of the de Grocer and his wife, I'm an artist. But you, my dear fellow, with your fifty billion 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, no, no. But what would be the good of it when you had done it and they had seen it? Sure 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 billion cues on the end of your nose. Andrew reflected for a long time, his oboe on the cafe table, his hand covering his eyes. There must surely be some fantasy 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. At on-day I'm the same 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 billion cues give 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. Backers 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've never thought of it. But you must, my dear Lacade. You have no idea how it stimulates your intellect. Your own vague ideas and sends you away with the comforting conviction of what a damn fool the other fellow is. It's the cheapest recreation of 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 cafe 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 idol and cynical tenor, Andrew learned many things. Now, parenthetically, certain facts in the previous career of Andrew Lacade 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 in him a sturdy Lancashire fear of God and duty toward his neighbour and a duty toward himself, and had given him the golden rule above mentioned. Ben had also seen to his elementary education so that the regime de patissie passait had no difficulties for him. Our racine and bossouet were not empty names, seeing that he'd 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 Britain's, 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 valsounds, Ben Flint had the genius to compel their rejection. My father, writes like a day, for as such he always regarded Ben Flint, was the most remarkable man I've 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. 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 ineradical 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, had been disposed to wonder why he did not empty it to broaden the intellectual and aesthetic horizon of his adopted son. But on thinking over the matter, how could he? He'd 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 then found his being, there was no one to replace the mellow old English clown, who travelled round with Stern 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 picked up in aimless and desultory reading. In Horatio Bacchus, therefore, Andrew met for the first time a human being interested in the intellectual aspect of life, one who advanced our greatest propositions just for the joy of supporting them and of refuting counterarguments. 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 Bacchus that he discovered the Venus of Milo and Marcus Heridas and Lord Jean Races. From the last he derived the most immediate benefit. If you've never been to a race meeting, said Bacchus, you've missed one of the elementary opportunities of a liberal education. Nowhere else can you have such a chance of studying human imbecility, navery, 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 Bacchus, love to realize myself for what I really am, an imbecile, a nave, and a useless craver of money for which I've not had the indignity of working. It gives me to feel that for all my heritage of culture I am nothing more or less than one of the rebel rout. I've backed horses ever since I was a boy, and in my time I've had a purely light in pawning my underwear in order to do so. It seems to be the height of folly, said sober Andrew. Bacchus 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 perlay ground. So Andrew assented. Humbly, on foot, mingling with the Paris crowd. Bacchus wore a sun-stained brown and white-checked 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 tragedyan to that of the book-maker's tout rejected of honest book-making 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 carotid thatch of his hair. For them no tickets for stands and lawn or enclosure. The far-off, gale-addressed crowd in these exclusive demean shimmered before Andrew's vision as remote to 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-gaity, which stultified Bacchus' bleak description, and Andrew's great height over-topping the crowd afforded him a fair view of the course. Steeped in horse-law and confidently prophetic. To the admiration of Andrew, he ran through the entries for each race, analysing their histories, summarising 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 Paris Mutuelle, and, betting his modest five-frank piece on each of the first two events, found Bacchus 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 L.O.D. My friend, said Bacchus, now is the time to make a bold bid for a sure fortune. There is a horse called Gaufrado, which is quoted in the sacred inner-rin of those that know, at eight to one. I have information from this bore rabble that he will win, and that he will come out at about fifteen to one. 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 am going to back L.O.D., said Andrew. Bacchus stared at him. L.O.D., 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 Palimutuel. Bacchus paid his five Louis for his graffado 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 L.O.D., 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 Bacchus, witheringly. Let us see the race, said Andrew. They paid a frank a piece for a stand on a bench, and watched as much of the race as they could see. And Bacchus forgot to share his glasses with Andrew, who caught, now and then, an uncomprehending sight of coloured dots on movie objects, and gaped in equally uncomprehensible bewilderment when the racing streak flashed home up the street. A strange cry, not of gladness, but of wonder, burst from the great crowd. Andrew turned to Bacchus, 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 could you have given me the tip? He must have known something. No one could play such a game without knowing, which 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, realising 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. The thin crowd run their booth of the peri-mutuel, mainly composed of place-winners, and when the placards of the old's went up, Bacchus 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, replied Andrew, 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 Bacchus, 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, L.O.D. brought him luck. This time, in the shape of a hundred and three Louis, a guldy sum, when one has to live from hand to mouth, came, at the end of their engagement, at la boîte blanche, when they lost even that precarious method of existence. 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 rehabedited Des Moignons and his confrères, the other agents, declared, in terms varying from apologetic stupor to frank brutality, unique entertainment. But what shall I do? asked the anxious André. Great Monsieur, we shall soon well arrange it, said Moignons. Huh? pantomime the other agents, with shrugged shoulders and helplessly outspreader hands. And it happened to that Bacchus, the sweet barrel-monger, found himself on the same rocks of unemployment. I have, said he, one evening, when the stranded pair were sitting outside a holly little liquor retreat with a zinc bar in the faubourg sondigny. The luxury of consommation at sixty centime on the Grand Bolivar 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 et longchamps? They are put away, said Andrew. Thank God! said Bacchus. Andrew detected a lack of altruism in the pious note of praise. He did not love Bacchus to such a pitch of brotherly affection as would warrant his relieving him of responsibility for self-support. He had already fed Bacchus for three days. They are put away, he repeated. Bring them out of darkness into the light of day, said Bacchus. What are talents in a napkin? You are a capitalist. I am a man with ideas. May I order another of this Mothrake's bowel-gripping absente 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 Pyrrho? On the stage, masked balls, yes. But real Pyrrho 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 Zank brought out the Absente. Bacchus 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. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of The Mount-a-Bank by William John Locke This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Simon Evers. Chapter 7 It was a successful combination. Bacchus 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 Bacchus as his dull witted foil. A complete little performance, the patter and business artistically thought out and perfectly rehearsed. They wore the conventional puro costume with white faces and black skull caps. Bacchus, familiar with English customers, 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 Houndred 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 Bacchus once, when returning homeward he 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 wanted to be, replied Andrew, hugging the bag tight under his long arm. You're bourgeois to your fingertips. Your ideal of happiness is a meek female and a parlor, 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 Bacchus. 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 jibes, Bacchus instinctively submitted. Bacchus might provide ideas, but it was the lank and youthful Andrew who sought of that rigid execution. You've no more soul than a Prussian drill, Sergeant, Bacchus 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 Bacchus 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 Bacchus, 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 Mayor, L.O.D., which remarked concerning her namesake. Andrew, quick in his dignity, had made a curt answer. Ironical Bacchus began to hum the old nursery song. Suddenly he stopped. By George, I have it, the name that will epautee the English bourgeois, Ron Ron Ron and Petit Patapon, Arby Ron Ron Ron, and you'll be dear little Patapon. English Caesar public, however, when he came to think of it, had never heard of the Shepardess 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 Eredy's wise counsel, stuck to the Petit. His French instinct guiding him, he rejected Patapon. Bacchus 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 bore 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 Petit for the straits to which he was reduced, although he winces at his precarious Mount of Bancury, and his sensitive and respectable soul revolts are going round with a mendicant's hat and thanking old women and children for pennies, as in order to correlate certain inferences and coincidences in his career. Eredy 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 circus rock and ball 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 Bacchus 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. Bacchus looked at the cold, grey water, it was a cloudy morning, took counsel with himself, and, sitting on the sand, 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, bearing to derisive eyes like the skin-covered fossil of a prehistoric monster of a man, clotted like ruddy seaweed over his staring ugly face, Bacchus forgot his ways and rolled on his back convulsed with vulgar but inextinguishable laughter. My God! his impolite hilarity! You're the funniest thing on 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 them laughing before you even begin a bit of business. Why, the devil did you take advantage of your physical peculiarities. Look, I don't get cross. This is what I mean. He pulled out a pencil, and putting aside plates and dishes, began to sketch on the tablecloth with his superficial artistic facility. And he 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-council. 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 Bacchus had finished and leaned back to admire his work, Andrew drew a deeper 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, 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 pat the feet of the tights and wear high heels that would give me another couple of inches. He cried excitedly. By come! said he, touching back as his shoulder, a rare act of demonstrative niffs. What a thing it is to have imagination! Ah! said Bacchus! What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, a moving, how express and aborable! 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. Bacchus 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. 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 will 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, Mithisto or stripes? He was full of the realisation of the Elodesque idea. His brain became a gushing fount of inspiration. Hundreds of grotesque possibilities of business hitherto rendered ineffective by a flapping costume appeared in fascinating bubbles. He thought and spoke of nothing else. Once I denied you the rank of artist, said Bacchus. I retract. I apologise. 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 torches of the dam, reported Bacchus, just you be a benefactor. Andrew shrugged his shoulders. That was the way of Horatio Bacchus, perhaps the first of his fellow-creatures whom he had deliberately set out to study. For hitherto he met only simple folk, good men and true, or uncomplicated fools and naves, 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 observations of the twists of human character and the knowledge of men. That was the way of Bacchus. An idea was but a toy which he touted 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 damn 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 poets fancy. At last, however, as he heard nothing further, he made a delicate inquiries. "'Thong!' cried Bacchus. "'What song?' That meaningless bit of moonshide 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 Bacchus. His absorption in his new character was not entirely egotistic. Both his own intelligence and his professional experience told him that here, as he 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 Bacchus' interest as to his own that the new show should succeed. And even before he had procured the costume from Covent Garden, Bacchus professed intolerable boredom. He shrugged his shoulders. Bored or not, Bacchus could go through with it. So again, under the younger man's leadership, Bacchus 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 patoo, like a double-tailed serpent rearing himself upright on his tail-tips, appeared at first a creature remote of some anti-Diluvian race, until he talked a familiar, disarming patter with his human, disarming grin. The great patapour, contrary to jealous anticipation, and received more than his usual mead 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 summery season peated out in hopeless September, raw and chill. A week had passed without the possibility of an audience. Said Bacchus, Of all the loathsome spots in a noisome universe, this is the most poignant. 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 valga. Our soul associated to be the blatant frequenters of evil-smelling bars. Do not exchange 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 bribe me with occupation, and that amuses me. As the occupation for the dismal week amending consisted in dragging a cursing Bacchus away from public-house whiskey on damp and detested walks, and in imperturbably maneuvering him out of an idle and potentially vicious intrigue with the landlady's pretty and rather silly daughter, his reply brought us tragic scowl to Bacchus' face. The 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 mountain-bank reach 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 around. 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 Bacchus, staring out of the 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 an offer of a month certain from a northern Palladium syndicate, with prospects of an extended tour. Dust and ashes, said Bacchus. You may be dust, cried Andrew hotly, but I'm damned if I'm ashes. Bacchus 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 recredescent 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 isn't, it isn't, replied Bacchus. 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 assent, 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. Back aside. 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, myself revolts of 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 tarred. Thanks to my brain and your physical co-operation, 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 could give me. For the resumption of study of the philosophy of the action on Lee Berkson, for the absent that brings forgetfulness, for the Tanagara-figured, broad-mouthed, snub-dosed 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, many passages at arms, back as his fascistical rhetoric against Andrew's steady common sense, and then sharpened Andrew's wit. But never before have 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 humor. He was coldly and sternly angry at the end of the whole thing. It all comes down to a worth a little moment through us. For a little thing of re-en-de-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. Backers turned over on his side, facing his adversary, his underarm outstretched, the cigar in his fingers. I love to see youth perspiring, especially with noble rage. He 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 Backers, 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 Backers, we'll be drilling awkward squads in barric yards before you're done. It's all you're fit for. Andrew smiled, or grinned, with closed lips. It was his grim smile. Many years afterwards he'd become familiar to larger bodies of men than awkward squads. Once more he'd 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 to the northern towns. But even Andrew's drastic leadership could not prevail on Backers' 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-duty show by his brother, the Archdeacon. Archdeacons, said Andrew, he had a confused idea of the prolactical status. Don't go to music halls. They do in this country, said Backers. 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 pester-dental 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 Patapont and Little Patou for a further term, declined to re-book Little Patou by himself. He returned to Paris, where he found Backers wallowing in absent and philosophic sloth. We might have made our fortune in England, said he. Said Backers, coolly sipping his absent. 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 tale should I have made my name and a big position? Ah, egotist, egotist, sublime egotist! The true artist using human souls of 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 Backers? When you fall on evil days and you haven't a suit in your pocket, come to me. And you'll always find an inspiration. Who had spent a fruitless morning at the Argeant's Mognon. 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 come, cried Andrew. I believe you're right again. I'm never wrong, said Backers. He summoned the waiter and waved his hand towards the little accusing pile of sources. Monsieur always pays for my inspirations. End of Chapter 7 We behold Petit Patu now definitely launched on his career. Why the execution of Backers' literally cynical suggestion should have met with instant success, neither he, nor Andrew, nor Prépimpin, the poodle, nor any one 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 inquiries. Better not. But, brought up in the merciful school of Ben Flint, in which Billy the Pig had many successes, both poor sign and canine, he had expert knowledge of what kind of 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 Backers. I buy him, said Andrew. Viens, mon ami. Prépimpin cast an oblique glance at his old master. Va t'en, c'est de la terre. And on, said Andrew, with a caressing touch on the dog's head. Prépimpin's topaz eyes gazed full into his new lords. He wagged the tough at the end of his chave and tail. Andrew, knelt down, planted his fingers in the larn shagginess of Maine 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, for seeing according to his light's 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 Bergunat. Please tell me something that I don't know. He rose. Allois, 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's 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 Mountabank. It reveals a loneliness ill-becoming his ears. A loneliness of soul and heart at 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 Viera Karolinska, a vague mid-European nationality who belongs to a troop of acrobats. Viera 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 Viera's Amazonian shoulders as the apex. He is making up a besotted mind to say, fly with me, when the Karolinska troop vanishes Moscow Woods, and an inexorable contract drives him to Dansik. 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, he would think that Prépimpin made Petipatou. Cordes d'Absurdum. But the psychological fact remains that Andrew Lackaday needed some magnetic contact with another individuality, animal or human, to exhibit his qualities. There, encountering splendid isolation, Elodie Fegasso, the little Marseille 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 sauness, 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 to the thinner plaws 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-tuffs 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 Lacade. 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 clue of their performance for a week's engagement of the Paris Folie-Bergère. After a conjuring act he retires, comes on again immediately. Petit-Petu, apparently seven foot high, in the green silk tights reaching to the armpit waste, 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 high legs bearing an immense envelope. Petit-Petu opens it, shows the audience an invitation to a ball. Ah, the rest me, Prépimpin! The dog pulls a hidden string, and Petit-Petu is clad in a bottle-green dress-coat. Prépimpin barks and dances his delight. But nom du chien, I can't go to a ball without a hat! Prépimpin bolts to the wings and returns with an opera hat. And a stick! Prépimpin 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 Patra in which the audience is given to understand that Prépimpin, who glances from time to time over the foot-lights with a shake of his leonine mane, is bored to death by his master's idiocy. At last the hat descends on Petit-Petu's hat, 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, right like a day, it was a failure. Poor Prépimpin and I left Paris with our tails between our legs. We were to start a tour at Bordeaux. M'en 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 who 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 success-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 Bakas are 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 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 in the far, a flaxen-head cherubbed by her side, for so did his ingenious inexperienced 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 princess Lointain, the highest common factor of the ladies I've already mentioned, Melisande, Phaedra, Rosalind, Fedora, 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 oxide 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've 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 shall be doing as Virala Treacher has 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, bourgeois. It is difficult to compress into a page or two the history of several years, but that is what I have to do. He's 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 insured, he has no anxieties. Paris is his headquarters. He lives still in his old Hotel Meubles in the Faux-Burks-en-Denis. But, instead of one furnished room on the fifth floor, he can afford an apartment, salon, salamanger, bedrooms, cabinets to toilette, on the prosperous second, which he retains all the year round. And Petit Patou can now strive through the waiting crowd in Moyen's anti-chamber and enter the sacred office, cigar in mouth, and with a, look here, Montville, put the fear of God into him. Petit Patou and Pré-Papa, the idols of the provinces, have arrived. In Paris, when their presences coincide, he continues to consort with Bacchus, whose exquisite little tenor voice still affords him a means of livelihood. In fact, Bacchus has had a renewed lease of professional activity. He sings at watering-places, at Paris Hotels, which involves the physical activity which he abhors. Bound to this xtian wheel of perpetual motion, says he, I suffer tortures unimagined even by the high gods. Compared with it, our degrading existence on the sand seven years ago was a blissful ittle. Py-Gum, said 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 eons of Promethean damnation. To me it seems only yesterday, said Andrew. It's because you have no brain, says Bacchus. But they are good friends. Away from Paris they carry on a fairly regular correspondence. Such of Bacchus's letters as Lacoday has kept, and as I have read, are literally gems, with always a perverse and willful flaw, like the man's life. From Paris, after this particular meeting with Bacchus, Andrew once more goes on tour with Pre-Pimpin. But a Pre-Pimpin groan old, and though pathetically eager, already past effective work. Nine years of strenuous toil are as much as any dog can stand. Rheumatism twinge to the hind legs of Pre-Pimpin. 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. Yet I am sure, like Lacoday, that every time I cut his business it nearly broke his heart. And it has come to Pre-Pimpin'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 Pre-Pimpin. I managed to arrange the performance at last so that you would 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, Lacoday 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-Battu of provincial fame the lank of 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 of the Boulevard de Lagarre. He was a star, or vedette, and he had a dressing-room to himself. He stayed at the Hotel d'Europe, the famous hostel area by the Great Entrance gates. To avoid complication he went everywhere now, as Monsieur Pattu. Folks passing by the open courtyard of the hotel, where he might be taking the air, pointed him out to one another. It was in the middle of his week's engagement, once more in summertime. He lunched, sought a prepimpar's meal, smoked the cheap cigar of content, and then, crossing the noisy little flagged square, went through the gates, prepimpar at his heels, and made his way across the dusty road to the bridge. The workaday folk, on that weekday afternoon, had all returned to their hives in the town, and the pathways of the bridge contained but few pedestrians. In the roadway, too, there was but lazy life, and occasional omnibus. The queer old diligence of Provence, with its great covered hood, in the midst of which sat the driver amid a cluster of peasants, hidden like the queen bee by the swarm. A bullock cart bringing hay into the city, a tradesman's cart, a lumbering wine-wagon with its three great white horses and great barrels. Nothing hurried in the hot sunshine. The road, very low, flowed sluggishly. Only now and then did a screeching, dust-wirling projectile of a motor-car hurl itself across this bridge of drowsy leisure. Andrew leaned over the parapet, finding rest in a mild melancholy. His thoughts chiefly occupied with the decay of prepimpar, who sat by his heels, gazing at the roadway, occupied possibly by the same seer reflections. Presently the flea-catching antics of a ragged mongrel in the middle of the roadway disturbed prepimpar's sense of the afternoon's decorum. He rose and with stiff dignity stalked towards him. He stood nose to nose with the mongrel, his tufted tail in straight defiance up in the air. Then suddenly there was a rush and a roar and a yell of voices and the scrunch of swiftly applied brakes. Andrew turned round and saw a great touring car filled with men and women, and the men were jumping out, and he saw a mongrel dog racing away for dear life. And then at last he saw a black mass stretched upon the ground. With horror in his heart he rushed and threw himself down by the dog's body. He was dead. He had solved the problem. Solver at Ambulando. Andrew heard English voices around him. He raised a ghastly face. You brutes, you have killed my dog! He scarcely heard the explanations, the apologies. The dog, seeing the car far off, had cleared himself. Then without warning he had flung himself suicidally in the path of the car, or could they have done now by way of amends. The leader of the little company of tourists, a clean-shaven, florid man, obviously well-bred and greatly distressed, drew a card from his pocket-book. I am staying a couple of days at the hotel Luxembourg at Neems. I know that nothing can pay for a dog one loves, but— Oh, no, no, no, said Andrew, waving aside the card. Can we take the dog anywhere for you? You are very kind, said Andrew, but the kindest thing is to leave me alone. He bent down again, and took Pripyapar in his arms, and strobe with him through the group of motorists and the little clamoring crowd that had gathered round. One of the former, a girl in a blue motor-veil, ran after him and touched his arm. Her eyes were full of tears. It breaks my heart to see you like that. Oh, can't I do anything for you? Andrew looked at her. Through all his stunning grief, he had a dim vision of the process lontain. He said in an uncertain voice, You have given me your very sweet sympathy. You can't do more. She made of a little helpless gesture, and turned and joined her companions, who went on their way to Neem. Andrew carried the bleeding body of Pripyapar, and there was that in his face which forbade the idle to trail indiscreetly about his path. He strode on, staring ahead, and did not notice a woman by the pilot of the bridge, who, as he passed, gave a bewildered gasp, and after a few undecided moments, followed him at a distance. He went, carrying the dog, up the dirty river bank outside the walls, where there was comparative solitude, and sat down on a stone seat, and laid Pripyapar on the ground. He broke down, and cried. For seven years the dog's life and his have been inextricably interwoven. Not only had they shared bed and board as many a good man and dog have done, but they had shared the serious affairs of life, its triumphs, its disillusions. And Pripyapar was all that he had to love in the wide world. "'Pardon, monsieur?' said a voice. He looked up and saw the woman who had followed him. She was dark of the loose build of the woman predisposed to stoutness who had grown thin, and she had kind eyes in which pain seemed to hold in check the promise of laughter, and only an animal wistfulness lingered. Her lips were pinched, and her face was thin and care-worn. And yet she was young, obviously under thirty. Her movements retained all the lissomeness of youth. Although dressed more or less according to the fashion of the year, she looked poor. Yet there was not so much of threadbare poverty in her attire as lack of interest, or pathetic incongruity. The coat and skirt too heavy for the sultry day. The cheap straw hat trimmed with uncared four roses. The soiled white gloves with an unmended fingertip. "'Madame?' said he. And as he saw it, the woman's face and form became vaguely familiar. He'd seen her somewhere. But in the last few years he'd seen thousands of women. "'You have had a great misfortune, monsieur.' "'That is true, madame.' She sat on the bench beside him. "'Vous pluré. You must have loved him very much.' He was not as strange as speaking to him. Otherwise he would have risen, and, as politely as anguished nerves allowed, would have told her to go to the devil. She made no intrusion on his grief. Her voice fell with familiar comfort on his ear. He was vaguely conscious of her right to offer sympathy. He regarded her grateful but perplexed. "'You don't recognize me? Or far why should you?' She shrugged her shoulders. "'We only met for a few hours, many years ago, here in Avignon. But we were good friends.' Then Andrew drew a deep breath and turned swiftly round on the bench and shot out both his hands. "'Montier! Elodie!' She smiled sadly. "'Ah!' she said. I'm glad you remember.' End of Chapter 8