He paused in the act of drawing on a boot.
"Butcher's boy? Do you want to be a butcher's boy?"
"No, Master," said I fervently.
"Then what are you talking of?" He had evidently not heard my answer to his question. "I am going to educate you in the High School of the Earth, the University of the Universe, and to-morrow you shall see a cow and a dandelion. And before then you will be disastrously seasick."
"The sea!" I cried in delirious amazement. "We are going on the sea? Where are we going?"
"To France, petit imbécile," he cried. "Why are you not getting ready to go there?"
I might have answered that I had no personal preparations to make; but feeling rebuked for idleness while he was so busy, I began to clear away the breakfast things. He stopped me.
"Nom de Dieu, we are not going to travel with cups and saucers!"
He dragged from the top of the cupboard an incredibly dirty carpet bag of huge dimensions and decayed antiquity, and bade me pack therein our belongings. The process was not a lengthy one; we had so few. When we had little more than half filled the bag with articles of attire and the toilette stuffed in pell-mell, we looked around for ballast.
"The books, Master," said I.
"We will take the immortal works of Maître François Rabelais, and the dirty little edition of 'David Copperfield.' The remainder of the library we will sell in Holywell Street."
"And the violin?"
He picked up the maimed instrument and, after looking at it critically, threw it into a corner.
"For Pogson," said he.
When we had tied up the books with a piece of stout string providentially lying at the bottom of the cupboard, our preparations were complete. Paragot donned his cap and a storm-stained Inverness cape, grasped the carpet bag and looked round the room.
"En route," said he, and I followed with the books. We gained the street and left the Lotus Club behind us for ever.
What Mrs. Housekeeper said, what Cherubino said, what the members said when they found no Mr. Ulysses presiding at the supper table that evening, what Mr. Pogson said when he learned that his assailant had shaken the dust of the Lotus Club from off his feet and strolled into the wide world without giving him the opportunity of serving a summons for assault, I have never been able to discover. Nor have I learned who succeeded Paragot as president and occupied the palatial chamber of all the harmonies that was Paragot's squalid attic. When, in after years, I returned to London the Lotus Club had passed from human memory, and at the present day a perky set of office premises stands on its site. The morality of Paragot's precipitate exodus I am not in a position to discuss. From his point of view the fact of having disliked the new proprietor from their first interview, and broken a fiddle over his head, rendered his position as president untenable. Paragot walked out.
After having sold the books for a few shillings in Holywell Street, we marched up Fleet Street into the City, and entered a stupendous, unimagined building which Paragot informed me was his bank. Elegant gentlemen behind the counter shovelled gold to and fro with the same casual indifference as I had seen grocers' assistants shovel tea. One of them, a gorgeous fellow wearing a white piqué tie and a horse-shoe pin, paid such deference to Paragot that I went out prodigiously impressed by my master's importance. I was convinced that he owned the establishment, and during the next quarter of an hour I could not speak to him for awe.
It was about two o'clock when we reached Victoria Station. There Paragot discovered, for the first time, that there was not a train till nine in the evening. It had not occurred to him that trains did not start for Paris at quarter of an hour intervals during the day.
"My son," said he, "now is the time to make practical use of our philosophy. Instead of heaping vain maledictions on the Railway Company, let us deposit our luggage in the cloak room and take a walk on the Thames Embankment."
We walked thither and sat on a vacant bench beside the Cleopatra's Needle. It was a warm May afternoon. My young mind and body fired by the excitements of the day found rest in the sunny idleness. It was delicious to be here, instead of washing up plates and dishes with Mrs. Housekeeper. Paragot took off his old slouch hat, stretched himself easefully and sighed.
"I am anxious to get to Paris to consult Henri Quatre."
"Who is Henri Quatre, Master?" I asked.
"Henri Quatre is on the Pont Neuf. That is a French saying which means that Queen Anne is dead. He was a great King of France and his statue on horseback is in the middle of a great bridge across the Seine called the Pont Neuf. He is a great friend of mine. I will tell you a story. Once upon a time there lived in Paris a magnificent young man who thought himself a genius. He was a genius, my little Asticot. A genius is a man who writes immortal books, paints immortal pictures, rears immortal buildings and commits immortal follies. Don't be a genius, my son, it isn't good for anybody. Well, this young man was clad in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. He also had valuable furniture. One evening something happened to annoy him."
Paragot paused.
"What annoyed him?" I asked.
"A flaw in what he had conceived to be the scheme of the universe," replied my master. "It annoys many people. The young man being annoyed, cast the fruits of his genius into the fire, tore up his purple and fine linen and smashed his furniture with a Crusader's mace which happened to be hanging by way of an ornament on the wall. It's made of steel with a knob full of spikes, and weighs about nine pounds. I know nothing like it for destroying a Louis Quinze table, or for knocking the works out of a clock. If you're good, my son, you shall have one when you grow up."
I looked gratefully at him. Not content with his kindness to me then, he would be my benefactor still when I reached manhood.
"The young man then packed a valise full of necessaries and went out into the street. It was a rainy November evening. He walked along the quays through the lamp-lit drizzle till he came to the statue of Henri Quatre. The Pont Neuf was alive with traffic and the swiftly passing lights of vehicles threw conflicting gleams over the wet statue. The gas-lamps flickered in the wind." Paragot flickered his long fingers dramatically, to illustrate the gas-lamps. "On all sides rose vague masses of building—the Louvre away beyond the bridge, the frowning mass of the Conciergerie—the towering turrets of Notre Dame—swelling like billows against the sky. Pale reflections came from the river. Do you see the picture, my little Asticot? And the young man clutched the railings that surround the plinth of the statue, and caught sight of the face of Henri Quatre, and Henri Quatre looked at him so kindly that he said: 'Mon bon roi, you are of the South like myself: I am leaving Paris to go into the wide world, but I don't know where in the wide world to go to.' And the King nodded his head and pointed to the Gare de Lyon. And the young man took off his hat and said, 'Mon bon roi, I thank you!' He went to the Gare de Lyon and found a train just starting for Italy. So he went to Italy. I have a great respect for Henri Quatre."
"And what happened to him then, Master?" I asked, after a breathless pause.
"He became a vagabond philosopher," replied Paragot, refilling his porcelain pipe.
No argument has ever been able to convince Paragot that the statue did not nod its head and point the way to Italy. For some years I myself believed it; but at last it became obvious that the flashing gleams of light over the wet statue had made him the victim of a trick of the eyes. I think the only serious offence I ever gave Paragot was when I presented to him this solution of the mystery.
Varied discourse and a meal in a Strand eating-house filled up the hours till nine o'clock. And then I started for Wonderland with Paragot.
We stayed in Paris but two days. When I asked my master why our sojourn was not longer, he said something about the "bitter-sweet" of it, which I could not understand. I have only two clear memories of Paris. He took me to see Henri Quatre, and explained how the statue nodded and how the hand which held the reins lifted and pointed to the Gare de Lyon. What more conclusive proof of his veracity need I have than actual confrontation with Henri Quatre? The other scene fixed on my mind is a narrow dark street with tall houses on either side; an awning outside a humble café; a little table beneath it at which Paragot and myself were seated. I sipped luxuriously a celestial liquor which I have since learned was grenadine syrup and water; in front of Paragot was a curious opalescent milky fluid of which he drank great quantities during those two days and ever afterwards.
"The time has come," said he, rolling his eyes at me with an awful solemnity and speaking in a thick voice, "the time has come to talk of affairs. First let me impress on you that Henkendyke is an appellation offensive to French ears. Henceforward my name is Pradel—Polydore Pradel. And as it is necessary for you to have an état civil, I hereby adopt you as my son. Your name is therefore Asticot Pradel. I hope you like it. You have never known what it is to have a father. Now the possession of a father is a privilege to which every human being has a right. I, Polydore Pradel, confer on you that privilege. My son—"
He raised his glass, clinked it against mine and pledged me.
"Henceforward," said Paragot, "what is good enough for me will I hope not be good enough for you, and what is too bad for me shall never be your portion. I swear it by the devil that dwells in this entrancing but execrated form of alcohol."
He finished his drink and called for another. As soon as the absinthe had curdled with the dropping water, he filled up the glass and drank it off. Then he sat for a long time in bemused silence, while I, perched on my chair, reflected on his great goodness and wondered how I should help him up the darksome stairs of our hotel without the aid of Cherubino.
The next day we started on our pilgrimage. Why we went in one direction more than another, why we went to one place rather than to another, neither he nor I could tell. I never questioned. Sometimes we wandered for days on foot, sleeping in village inns or farm-houses—occasionally under a hedge when the nights were warm. Sometimes we spent two or three days in an old world town, and Paragot would show me cathedrals and churches and lecture me on the history of the place, and set me to sketch bits of the picturesque that took his fancy. In the cool, exquisite cloister of the Chateau of Jacques Cœur at Bourges I learned more of the history of Charles VII than any English boy of my generation. In the Chateau of Blois, the salamanders of François Premier, the statue of Diane de Poictiers, the poison cabinet of Catherine de Medici, the dungeons of the Cardinal de Lorraine, became living testimonies of the past under Paragot's imaginative teaching. He had set his heart on educating me; suddenly as the original impulse had seized him, yet it lasted strong and became the object of his disordered and otherwise aimless life. Books we always had in plenty. Tattered classics are cheap enough in France, and what mattered it if pages were missing? When done with we threw them away. We might have been tracked through the country, like the hares in a paper chase, by the trail of literature we left behind us.
In spite of his unmethodical temperament Paragot made one fixed rule for my habits. In towns and larger villages, I went to bed at nine o'clock. What he did with himself by way of amusement in the evenings I never knew. Nor did it occur to me to conjecture. Healthily tired after a happy day I was only too glad to crawl to whatever queer resting place chance provided, and to sleep the sound sleep of boyhood. To be for ever moving amid a fairyland of novelty, to have no care for the morrow, to have no tasks save those that were a delight, to be under the protecting guidance of a godlike being whose very reproofs were couched in terms of humorous kindness, to eat strange unexpected things, to fraternise in a new tongue, which daily grew more familiar, with any urchin on the high-road or city byway, to pass wondering days among country sights and country sounds—to be in short the perfect vagabond, could boy dream of a more glorious life?
Now and again a whimsy seized my master and he declared that we must work and earn our daily bread by the sweat of our brows. At a farm near Chartres we hired ourselves out to an elderly couple, Monsieur and Madame Dubosc, and spent toilsome but healthy days carting manure. Although Paragot wrought miracles with his pitchfork, I don't think Monsieur Dubosc took him seriously. Peasant shrewdness penetrated to the gentleman beneath Paragot's blouse, and peasant ignorance attributed to him the riches which he did not possess. They became great friends, however, and before we left he succeeded in establishing himself as a kind of oracle by curing a pig of some mysterious disease by means of a remedy which he said he had learned in Dalmatia. Old Madame Dubosc shed tears when we left La Haye.
Sometimes Paragot grew tired of tramping, and we travelled by rail, in the wooden third class compartments of omnibus trains that stopped at every station. Now and then pure chance took us to any particular town. It was at Nancy that Paragot went to the ticket office and said with the utmost politeness:—
"Monsieur, will you have the kindness to give me a ticket?"
"To what destination?" asked the clerk peering through his pigeon hole.
"Parbleu," said Paragot, "to any destination you like provided it is not too expensive."
The clerk called him a farceur and would have nothing to do with him, but Paragot protested.
"Pardon, Monsieur, I have but one wish, to get away from Nancy. I have seen the Episcopal Palace on the Place Stanislas, the Cathedral, and I have viewed but I have not read the seventy-five thousand volumes in the University Library. You know the places one gets to from Nancy, which I do not. I am a stranger, in your hands. If you could suggest to me a town about 100 kilometres distant——"
"There is Longwy," said the haughty official.
"Then have the kindness to give me two third class tickets to Longwy," said Paragot.
And to Longwy we went. Paragot contemplated the lack of interest in the smug little town.
"To hold out Longwy as a goal to the enthusiastic Pilgrim to the Shrine of Truth," said he, "could only enter the timber-built mind of a French railway official."
The record of our wanderings would mark the stages of my own development, but would be of little count as a history of Paragot. We tramped and trained south through Italy and spent the winter in Rome. Then it entered his head to obtain employment for both of us, as workman and boy, on the excavations of the Forum. We lived in the slums with our brother excavators, and were completely happy. So happy that though we wandered the next year over France and part of Germany the winter again found us working in Rome. In the following Spring we set our faces northward, and in July Destiny overtook us in Savoy.
CHAPTER V
It was the late afternoon of a sweltering July day. The near hills slumbered in the sunshine. Far away beyond them grey peaks of Alpine spurs, patched with snow, rose in faint outline against the sky. The valley lay in rich idleness, green and gold and fruitful, yielding itself with a maternal largeness to the white fifteenth century château on the hillside. A long white road stretched away to the left following the convolutions of the valley, until it became a thread; on the right it turned sharply by a clump of trees which marked a farm. In the middle of it all, in the grateful shadow cast by a wayside café, sat Paragot and myself, watching with thirsty eyes the buxom but slatternly patronne pour out beer from a bottle. A dirty, long-haired mongrel terrier lapped water from an earthenware bowl, at the foot of the wooden table at which we sat. This was Narcisse, a recent member of our vagabond family, whom my master had casually adopted some weeks before and had christened according to some lucus a non lucendo principle of his own. I think he was the least beautiful dog I have ever met; but I loved him dearly.
Paragot drained his tumbler, handed it back to be refilled, drained it again and cleared his throat with the contentment of a man whose thirst has been slaked.
"Now one can spit," he exclaimed heartily.
"That is always a comfort to a man," remarked the patronne.
"It is the potentiality that is the comfort. Have you apartments for the night, Madame?"
"They are for des messieurs—for gentlemen," said the patronne diffidently.
Narcisse having also finished his draught stretched himself out on the ground, his chin on his fore paws, and glanced furtively upwards at the disparaging lady.
"Tron de l'air!" cried Paragot, "are we not gentlemen?"
"Tiens, you are of the Midi," cried the woman, recognising the expletive—for no one born north of Avignon says "Tron de l'air"—"I too am from Marseilles. My husband was a Savoyard. That is why I am here."
"I am a gentleman of Gascony," said my master, "and this is my son Asticot."
"It is a droll name," said the patronne.
"We are commercial travellers on our rounds with samples of philosophy."
"It is a droll trade," said the patronne.
We were greasy and dirty, sunburnt to the colour of Egyptian felaheen and dressed in the peasant's blue blouse. Creatures more unlike professors of philosophy could not be conceived. But the patronne seemed to be impressed—as who was not?—by Paragot.
"The rooms will be three francs, Monsieur," she said after a calculating pause.
"I engage them," said my master. "Asticot, aid Madame to take our luggage up to our bedchambers." I grasped my bundle and handed Paragot's dilapidated canvas gripsack to the patronne. He arrested her.
"One moment, Madame. As you see, my portmanteau contains a shirt, a pair of socks, a comb and a toothbrush. Also a copy of the works of the divine vagrant Maître François Villon, which I will take out at once. He was a thief and a reprobate and got nearer hanged than any man who ever lived, and he is the dearest friend I have."
"You have droll friends," remarked the patronne continuing her litany.
"And to think that he died four hundred years ago," sighed my master. "Isn't it strange, Madame, that all the bravest men and most beautiful women are those that are dead?"
The landlady laughed. "You talk like a true Gascon, Monsieur. In this country people are so silent that one loses the use of one's tongue."
I departed with her to see after domestic arrangements and when I returned I found Paragot smoking his porcelain pipe, and talking to a dusty child in charge of a goat. Having, at that period, a soul above dusty children in charge of goats. I sprawled on the ground beside Narcisse, and being tired by the day's tramp fell into a doze. The good earth, when you have a casing of it already on clothes and person, is a comfortable couch; but I think you must be in your teens to enjoy it.
I awoke to the sound of Paragot's voice talking to Narcisse. The goat child had slipped away. An ox cart laden with hay lumbered past. The mellowness of late afternoon lay over the land. The shadow cast by the little white café had deepened gradually far beyond the table. From within the house came the faint clatter of footsteps and cooking utensils. Paragot was still smoking. Narcisse sat on his haunches, his ill shaped head to one side and his ears cocked. After making a vicious dig at a flea, he yawned and trotted about after the manner of his kind in search of adventure. Paragot summoned him back.
"My good Narcisse, every spot on the earth has its essential quality which the wise man or dog knows how to enjoy in its entirety. In great cities where life is pulsating around you, you are alert for the unexpected. The underlying principle of a world's backwater like this is restful stagnation. Here you must wallow in the uneventful. In vain you sniff around in quest of the exciting, mistaking like your fellow in the fable the shadow for the substance. The substance here is rest. Here nothing ever happens."
"Pardon, Monsieur," said a voice close upon us. "Is it very far to Chambéry?"
"It does not matter," said a second voice following hard on the first, "for I can go no further."
I jumped to my feet and my master started round in his chair. The first speaker was a girl, the second an old man. She had merely the comeliness of tanned and hair-bleached peasant youth; he was wizened, lined, browned and bent. A cotton umbrella shaded the girl's bare head and she carried in her hand a cane valise covered with grey canvas. The old man was burdened with two ancient shabby cases, one evidently containing a violin and the other some queerly shaped musical instrument. Both the new comers were wayworn and dirty, and my master seeing suffering on the old man's face rose and courteously offered him a chair.
"Sit down and rest," said he, "and Mademoiselle, you are thinking of going to Chambéry? But it is nearly a day's journey on foot."
"We have to play at a wedding tomorrow, Monsieur," said the girl piteously. "It was arranged two months ago, and we must get there in some manner."
"There is a railway station not far off," said I.
"Alas! we have only ten sous in the world, which is not enough to pay for our tickets," she answered. "Imagine, Monsieur, I had a piece of twenty francs in my pocket this morning, and I went to the station to get a ticket, for I had counted on going by railway, as my grandfather is so ill, and when I came to pay, I found I had lost my louis. How, the bon Dieu only knows. It is desolating, Monsieur; we had to walk so as to keep our engagement at Chambéry. If we miss it, nous sommes dans la purée pour tout de bon."
To be in the purée is to be in a very bad mess indeed. The prospect of abject pennilessness filled the damsel's eyes with woe.
"You earn your living by playing at weddings for folks to dance?" asked my master.
"Yes, Monsieur. My grandfather plays the violin and I the zither—we also go to fairs. In the winter we play at cafés in large towns. Life is hard, Monsieur, is it not?"
She closed her umbrella and laid it on the valise. The old man sat by the table, his head resting on his hands, saying nothing.
"When I think of my good louis that is gone!" she added tragically.
The only feature making for charm in a coarse homely face was a set of white even teeth. I found her singularly unattractive. A tear rolled down her cheek and its course was that of a rill in a dusty plain.
"Suppose I lend you the money for the railway tickets?" said my master kindly.
"O Monsieur," she cried, "I should thank you from the depths of my heart. Grandpère," she turned to the old man who, ashen faced, was staring in front of him, "Monsieur will lend us enough money to get to Chambéry."
"I can go no further," he murmured.
Then his eyelids quivered, his body moved spasmodically, and he swayed sideways off the chair on to the ground.
We rushed to aid him. The girl put his head on her lap. My master bade me run into the café for brandy. When I returned the old man was dead.
Narcisse sat placidly by, with his tongue out, eyeing his master ironically.
"You are the man," his glance implied, "who said that nothing happens here."
I have known many dogs in my life, but never so mocking and cynical a dog as Narcisse.
It was nearly midnight before my master and I sat down again outside the café. The intervening hours had been spent in journeying to and from the nearest village, and obtaining the necessary services of doctor and curé. My master was smoking his porcelain pipe, as usual, but strangely silent. A faint circle of light came from the open ground-floor window of the café. The white road gleamed dimly, and beyond the hushed valley the hills loomed vague against a black, starlit sky. In the lighted room a few peasants from neighbouring farms drank their sour white wine and discussed the death in low voices. In other circumstances my master would have joined them under pretext of getting nearer the Heart of Life, and would have told them amazing tales of Ekaterinoslav or Valladolid till they reeled home drunk with wine and wonder. And I should have been abed. But to-night Paragot seemed to prefer the silent company of Narcisse and myself.
"What do you think of it all, Asticot?" he asked at length.
"Of what, master?"
"Death."
"It frightens me," was all I could answer.
"What I resent about it," said my master reflectively, "is that one is not able to have any personal concern in the most interesting event in one's career. If you could even follow your own funeral and have a chance of weeping for yourself! You are never so important as when you are a corpse—and you miss it all. I have a good mind not to die. It is either the silliest or the wisest action of one's life; I wonder which."
Presently the girl came down the passage of the café, stood for a moment in the doorway, and seeing Paragot advanced to the table.
"You are very kind, Monsieur," she said, "and for what you have done I thank you from my heart."
"It was very little," said my master. "Asticot, why do you not give Mademoiselle your chair? Your manners are worse than those of Narcisse. Mademoiselle, do me the pleasure of being seated."
She sat down, her feet apart, peasant fashion, her hands in her lap.
"If I had not lost the twenty francs he would not have died," she said dejectedly.
"He would have died if you had brought him here in a carriage. He had aneurism of the heart, the doctor says. He might have died any moment the last ten years. How old was he?"
"Seventy, eighty, ninety—how should I know?"
"But he was your grandfather."
"Ah, no, indeed, Monsieur," she replied in a more animated manner. "He was not a relative. My mother was poor and she sold me to him three years ago."
"Why that is like me, Master!" I cried, vastly interested.
"My son," said he in English, "that is one of the things that must be forgotten. And then, Mademoiselle?" he asked in French.
"Then he taught me to play the zither and to dance. I am sorry he is dead. Dame, oui, par exemple! But I do not weep for him as for a grandfather. Oh, no!"
"And your mother?"
"She died last year. So I am all alone."
He asked her what she thought of doing for her livelihood. She shrugged her shoulders with the resignation of her class.
"I can always earn my living. There are brasseries, cafés-concerts in all the towns—I am fairly well known. They will give me an engagement. Il faut passer par là comme les autres."
"You must go through it like the others?" repeated my master. "But you are very young, my poor child."
"I am eighteen, Monsieur, I know I shall not make a fortune. I am not pretty enough even when I paint, and my figure is heavy. That is what Père Paragot used to complain of."
"What was his name?" asked my master, pricking up his ears.
"Berzélius Paragot—and he took the name of Nibbidard, which means 'no luck'—so he loved to call himself Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot."
"Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot," mouthed my master joyously. "I would give anything for a name like that!"
"It is yours if you like to take it," she said quite seriously. "No one will want it any more."
"Little Asticot of my heart," said he, "what do you think of it?"
It struck me as a most aristocratically romantic appellation. I was used to his aliases by this time. He had long ceased to call himself "Pradel," and what was our surname for the moment I am now unable to recollect.
"You look like 'Paragot,' Master," said I, and, in an inexplicable way, he did—as I have before remarked. He called me a psychometrical genius and enquired the name of the young lady.
"Amélie Duprat, Monsieur," she said. "But pour le métier—we must have professional names for the cafés—Père Paragot called me 'Blanquette de Veau.'"
"Delicious!" cried he.
"So everyone calls me Blanquette," she explained gravely. There was a silence. Paragot—he really assumed the name from this moment—refilled his pipe. The belated peasants, having finished their wine, clattered out of the café, and took off their hats as they passed us.
"Life is very hard, is it not, Messieurs?" remarked Blanquette. It seemed to be her favourite philosophic proposition. She sighed. "If Père Paragot had only lived to play at the wedding tomorrow!"
"What then?"
"I should have had ten francs."
"Ah!" said my master.
"First I lose my louis, and now I lose my ten francs! ah! Sainte Vierge de Miséricorde!"
It was heart-rending. Sometimes they received more than the stipulated fee at these village weddings. They passed the hat round. If the guests were mellow with good wine, which makes folks generous, they often earned double the amount. And they always had as much as they liked to eat, and could take away scraps in a handkerchief.
"And good wholesome nourishment, Monsieur. Once it was half a goose."
And now there was nothing, nothing. Blanquette did not believe in the bon Dieu any longer. She buried her face in her arms and wept. Paragot smoked helplessly for a few moments. I, unused to women's tears, felt the desolation of the race of Blanquette de Veau overspread me. But that I considered it to be beneath my dignity as a man, I should have wept too.
Suddenly Paragot brought his fist down on the table and started to his feet. Blanquette lifted a scared wet face, dimly seen in the half light.
"Tonnerre de Dieu!" cried he, "If you hold so much to your ten francs and half a goose, I myself will come with you to Chambéry tomorrow and fiddle at the wedding."
"You, Monsieur?" she gasped.
"Yes, I. Why not? Do you think I can't scrape catgut as well as Père Paragot?"
He walked to and fro declaring his musical powers in his boastful way. If he chose he could rip out the hearts of a dead Municipal Council with a violin, and could set a hospital for paralytics a-dancing. He would have fiddled the children of Hamelin away from the Pied Piper. Didn't Blanquette believe him?
"But yes, Monsieur," she said fervently.
"Ask Asticot."
My faith in him was absolute. To my mind he had even understated his abilities. The experience of the disillusioning years has since caused me to modify my opinions; but Paragot's boastfulness has not lessened him in my eyes. And this leads to a curious reflection. When a Gascon boasts, you love him for it; when a Prussian does it, your toes tingle to kick him to Berlin. His very whimsical braggadocio made Paragot adorable, and I am at a loss to think what he would have been without it.
"Of course," said he, "if you are proud, if you don't want to be seen in the company of a scarecrow like me, there is nothing more to be said."
Blanquette humbly repudiated the charge of pride. Her soul was set on her ten francs and she didn't care how she got them. She accepted Monsieur's generous offer out of a full heart.
"That's sense," said my master. "We shall rehearse at daybreak."
CHAPTER VI
Dawn found us all in a field some distance from the café—Paragot, Blanquette, Narcisse, the zither, the fiddle and I, and while the two musicians rehearsed the jingly waltzes and polkas that made up the old man's répertoire, I tried to explain the situation to Narcisse who sat with his ears cocked wondering what the deuce all the noise was about.
"Ah, Monsieur," said Blanquette, during a pause, "you play like a great artist."
"Didn't I tell you so?" he cried triumphantly.
"You must have studied much."
"Prodigiously," said he.
"Père Paragot had played the violin for sixty years, but he could not make it sing like that."
"You would not compare Père Paragot with my master?" I exclaimed by way of rebuke.
Blanquette acquiesced humbly.
"When one hears Monsieur, one has the devil in one's body."
"Listen to this," said the delighted Paragot jumping on to his feet and tucking the fiddle beneath his chin.
And there in the pure dawn with nothing but God's sky and green fields around us, he played Gounod's "Ave Maria," putting into his execution all his imaginative fervour, and accentuating the tremolo passages in a vibrating ecstasy which to Blanquette's uncultured soul was the very passion of music. I have since learned that the greatest violinists do not overemphasise the tremolo.
"Ah Dieu! it is beautiful," she murmured.
"Isn't it?" cried Paragot. "And it touches your heart, my little Blanquette, eh? We are all artists together."
"I, Monsieur?"
She laughed and ran her hands over the zither strings.
"I ought to be at work in the fields. So Père Paragot used to say. I make no progress—I am as stupid as a goose."
Two hours afterwards we started for Chambéry, as odd a procession as ever gave food for a high-road's gaiety. From the old grey valise carried the previous day by Blanquette she had produced much property finery. A black velveteen jacket resplendent with pearl-buttons, velveteen knee-breeches tied with ribbons at the knees, and a rakish Alpine hat with a feather adorned my master's person. His own disreputable heavy boots and a pair of grey worsted stockings may not have formed a fastidious finish to the costume; but in my eyes he looked magnificent. Towards the transfiguration of Blanquette a Pandora box could not have effected more. She was attired in a short skirt, a white fichu moderately fresh, a kind of Italian head-dress and scarlet stockings. Enormous gilt ear-rings swung from her ears; a cable of blue beads encircled her neck; her lips were dyed pomegranate, her eyes darkened and her cheeks touched with rouge. A pair of substantial gilt shoes slung over her shoulders clinked their heels together as she walked. Narcisse barked his ecstatic admiration around this beauteous creature, and had I been a dog I should have barked mine too. My dignity as a man only allowed me to cast sidelong glances at her and hope that she would soon put on the gilt shoes. As for my master, on beholding her, he doffed his hat and saluted her with a fantastic compliment, whereat the girl blushed brick-red and turned her head away.
"Motley's the only wear, my son," he cried gaily. "In this cap and bells, I see life under a different aspect. Never has it appeared to me sweeter and more irresponsible. Don't you feel it? But I forgot. You haven't any motley. I apologise for my want of tact. Blanquette," he added in French, "why haven't you found a costume for Asticot?"
Blanquette replied in her matter-of-fact way that she hadn't any. They walked on together, and I dropped behind suddenly realising my pariahdom. I wondered whether these magnificent beings would be ashamed of my company when we arrived at Chambéry. I pictured myself sitting lonesome with Narcisse in the market-place while they revelled in their splendour, and the self-pity of the child overcame me.
"Master," said I dismally, "what shall Narcisse and I do while you are at the wedding?"
He wheeled round and regarded me, and I knew by the light in his eyes that an inspiration was taking shape behind them.
"I'll buy you a red shirt and pomade your hair, and you shall be one of us, my son, and go round with the hat."
I exulted obviously.
"Now the dog will feel out of it," said he, perplexed. "I will consult Blanquette. Do you think we could shave Narcisse and make him think he's a poodle?"
"That would be impossible, Monsieur," replied Blanquette gravely.
As Narcisse was enjoying himself to his heart's content, darting from side to side of the road and sniffing for the smells his soul delighted in, I did not concern myself about his feelings.
For Paragot's suggestion which I knew was ironically directed against myself, I did not care. So long as I was to be with my companions and of them, irony did not matter. I caught the twinkle in his eye and laughed. He was as joyous as Narcisse. The gladness of the July morning danced in his veins. He pulled the violin and bow out of the old baize bag and fiddled as we walked. It must have been an amazing procession.
And the old man whose clothes and functions we had assumed lay cold and stiff in the little lonely room with candles at his head and his feet. During our railway journey to Chambéry Blanquette told us in her artless way what she knew of his history. In the flesh he had been a crabbed and crotchety ancient addicted to drink. He had passed some years of his middle life in prison for petty thefts. In his youth—Blanquette's mind could not grasp the idea of Père Paragot having once been young—he must have been an astonishing blackguard. He had been wont to beat Blanquette, until one day realising her young strength she held him firm in her grip and threatened to throw him into a pond if he persisted in his attempted chastisement. Since then he had respected her person, but to the day of his death he had cursed her for anserine stupidity. An unlovely, loveless and unloved old man. Why should Blanquette have wept over him? She had not the Parisian's highly strung temperament and capacity for facile emotion. She was peasant to the core, slow to rejoice, and slow to grieve, and she had the peasant's remorseless logic in envisaging the elemental facts of existence. Père Paragot was wicked. He was dead. Tant mieux.
Blanquette had not the divine sense of humour which rainbows the tears of the world. That was my dear master's possession. But at the obvious she could laugh like any child of unsophistication. In the long shaded avenue of Chambéry, with its crowded market-stalls on either side—stalls where you saw displayed for sale rolls of calico and boots and gauffrettes and rusty locks and melons and rosaries and flyblown books—Paragot bought me my red shirt (which—mirabile dictu!—had tasselled cords to tie the collar) and pomade for my hair. He also purchased a yard of blue chiffon which he tied in an artistic bow round Narcisse's neck, whereat Blanquette laughed heartily; and when Narcisse bolted beneath a flower-stall and growling dispossessed himself of the adornment, and set to with tooth and claw to rend it into fragments, she threw herself on a bench convulsed with mirth. As Paragot had spent fifty centimes on the chiffon I thought this hilarity exceedingly ill-natured; but when another and a larger dog came up to see what Narcisse was doing and in half a minute was whirling about with Narcisse in a death grapple, and Blanquette sprang forward, separated the two dogs at some risk and took our bleeding mongrel to her bosom, consoling him with womanly words of pity, I saw there was something tender in Blanquette which mitigated my resentment.
The Restaurant du Soleil, where the marriage feast was held, was an earwiggy hostelry on the outskirts of the town, sheltered from the prying roadway by a screen of green lattice and a series of tonnelles, the dusty arbours, each furnished with table and chairs, beloved of French revellers. Above the entrance gate stretched the semi-circular sign-board bearing in addition to the name, the legend "Jardin. Noces. Fêtes." Within, a few lime-trees closely planted threw deep shadow over the grassless garden; shrubs and flowers wilted in a neglected bed.
Usually the forlorn demesne was supervised by a mangy waiter brooding over mangy tables and by a mangier cat who kept a furtive eye on the placarded list of each day's plat du jour and wondered when her turn would come for Thursday's Sauté de lapin. But tables, cat and waiter cast manginess aside when we(the pride of that day still remains and makes me italicise the word) came down to play at the wedding of Adolphe Querlat and Léontine Bringuet.
"Tiens! where is Père Paragot?" asked fat Madame Bringuet—perspiring in unaccustomed corset and black bombazine.
"Alas! he is no longer, Madame," explained Blanquette. "He had a seizure yesterday. He fell off his chair, and we picked him up stone dead."
"Tiens, tiens, but it is sad."
"But no. It does not matter. This gentleman will make you dance much better than Père Paragot," and she whispered encomiums into Madame's ear.
"Enchanted, Monsieur. And your name?"
My master swept a courtly bow with his feathered hat—no one ever bowed so magnificently as he.
"Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot, cadet, at your service."
"You must be hungry, Monsieur Paragot—and Mademoiselle and this little monsieur," said Madame Bringuet hospitably. "We are at table in the salle à manger. You will join us."
We entered the long narrow room and sat down to the banquet. Heavens! what a feast! There were omelettes and geese and eels and duck and tripe and onion soup and sausages and succulences inconceivable. Accustomed to the Spartan fare of vagabondage I plunged into the dishes head foremost like a hungry puppy. Should I eat such a meal as that to-day it would be my death. Hey for the light heart and elastic stomach of youth! Some fifty persons, the ban and arrière ban of the relations of the young couple, guzzled in a wedged and weltering mass. Wizened grandfathers and stolid large-eyed children ate and panted in the suffocating heat, and gorged again. Not till half way through the repast did tongues begin to wag freely. At last the tisane of champagne—syrupy paradise to my uncultivated palate—was handed round and the toasts were drunk. The bride's garter was secured amid boisterous shouts and innuendos, and then we left the stifling room and entered the garden, the elders to smoke and drink and gossip at the little tables beneath the verandah, the younger folk to dance on the uneven gravel. Young as I was, I felt grateful that no physical exercise was required of me for some hours to come. Even Narcisse and the cat (which followed him) waddled heavily to the verandah where we were to play.
The signal to start was soon given. Paragot tucked his violin under his chin, tuned up, waved one, two, three with his bow; Blanquette struck a cord on her zither and the dance began. At first all was desperately correct. The men in their ill-fitting broadcloth and white ties and enormous wedding favours, the women in their tight and decent finery, gyrated with solemn circumspection. But by degrees the music and the good Savoy wines and the abominable cognac flushed faces and set heads a-swimming. The sweltering heat caused a gradual discarding of garments. Arms took a closer grip of waists. Loud laughter and free jests replaced formal conversation; steps were performed of Southern fantasy; the dust rose in clouds; throats were choked though countenances streamed; the consumption of wine was Rabelaisian. And all through the orgy Paragot fiddled with strenuous light-heartedness, and Blanquette thrummed her zither with the awful earnestness of a woman on whose efforts ten francs and perhaps half a goose depended. But it was Paragot who made the people dance. To me, sitting in red shirt and pomaded hair at his feet, it seemed as if he were a magician. He threw his bow across the strings and compelled them to do his bidding. He was the great, the omnipotent personage of the feast. I sunned myself in his glory.
Indeed, he had the incommunicable gift of setting his soul a-dancing as he played, of putting the devil into the feet of those who danced. The wedding party were enraptured. If he had consumed all the bumpers he was offered, he would have been as drunk as a fiddler at an Irish wake. During a much needed interval in the dancing he advanced to the edge of the verandah and as a solo played Stephen Heller's "Tarantella," which crowned his triumph. With his unkempt beard and swarthy face and ridiculous pearl-buttoned velveteens, there was an air of rakish picturesqueness about Paragot, and he retained, what indeed he never quite lost, a certain aristocracy of demeanour. Wild cries of "Bis!" saluted him when he stopped. Men clapped each other on the shoulder uttering clumsy oaths, women smiled at him largely. Madame Bringuet, reeking in her tight gown, held up to him a brimming glass of champagne; the bride threw him a rose. He kissed the flower, put it in his button-hole and after bowing low drank to her health. I recalled my childish ambition to keep a fried fish shop and despised it heartily. If I only could play the violin like Paragot, thought I, and win the plaudits of the multitude, what greater glory could the earth hold? The practical Blanquette woke me from my dreams. Now was the moment, said she, to go round with the hat. I swung myself down from the verandah, the traditional shell (in lieu of a hat) in my hand, and went my round. Money was poured into it. Time after time I emptied it into my bulging pockets. When I returned to the verandah, Blanquette's eyes distended strangely. She glanced at Paragot, who smiled at her in an absent manner. For the moment the artist in him was predominant. He was the centre of his little world, and its adulation was as breath to his nostrils.
This is what I, the mature man, know to be the case. To me, then, he was but the King receiving tribute from his subjects. When Paragot with a flourish of his bow responded to the encore, I found my hand slip into Blanquette's and there it remained in a tight grip till flushed and triumphant he again acknowledged the applause. Nothing was said between Blanquette and myself, but she became my sworn sister from that moment. And Narcisse sat at our feet looking down on the crowd, his tongue lolling out mockingly and a satiric leer on his face.
"My children," said Paragot, on our return journey in the close, ill-lighted, wooden-seated third-class compartment, "we have had a glorious day. One of those sun-kissed, snow-capped peaks that rise here and there in the monotonous range of life. It fills the soul with poetry and makes one talk in metaphor. In such moments as these we are all metaphors, my son. We are illuminated expressions of the divine standing for the commonplace things of yesterday and tomorrow. We have accomplished what millions and millions are striving and struggling and failing to do at this very hour. We have achieved success! We have left on human souls the impress of our mastery! We are also all of us dog-tired and, I perceive, disinclined to listen to transcendental conversation."
"I'm not tired, master," I declared as stoutly as the effort of keeping open two leaden eyelids would allow.
"And you?" he asked turning to Blanquette by his side—I occupied the opposite corner.
She confessed. A very little. But she had listened to all Monsieur had said, and if he continued to talk she would not think of going to sleep. Whereupon she closed her eyes, and when I opened mine I saw that her head had slipped along the smooth wooden back of the carriage and rested on Paragot's shoulder. Through sheer kindliness and pity he had put his arm around her so as to settle her comfortably as she slept. I envied her.
When she awoke at the first stoppage of the train, she started away from him with a little gasp.
"O Monsieur! I did not know. You should have told me."
"I am only Père Paragot," said he. "You must often have had your head against this mountebank jacket of mine."
She misunderstood him. Her eyes flashed.
"It is the first time in my life—I swear it." She held up her two forefingers crossed and kissed them. "Père Paragot! ah non! neither he nor another. I am an honest girl, though you may not think so."
"My good Blanquette," said he kindly, taking her scarred coarse hand in his, "you are as honest a girl as ever breathed, and if Père Paragot didn't let you put your sleepy little head on his shoulder he must have been a stonier hearted old curmudgeon than you have given one to believe."
So he soothed her and explained, while our two fellow passengers, a wizened old peasant and his wife, regarded them stolidly.
"Mon Dieu, it is hot," said Blanquette. "Don't you think so, Asticot? I wish I had a fan."
"I will make you one out of the paper the fowl is wrapped in," said Paragot.
Not half a goose, but a cold fowl minus half a wing had been our supplementary guerdon. Decently enveloped in a sheet of newspaper it lay on her lap. When he had divested it of its covering, which he proceeded to twist into a fan, it still lay on her lap, looking astonishingly naked.
At the next station the old peasant and his wife got out and we had the compartment to ourselves. Blanquette produced from her pocket a handkerchief knotted over an enormous lump.
"These are the takings, Monsieur. It looks small; but they changed the coppers into silver at the restaurant for me."
"It's a fortune," laughed my master.
"It is much," she replied gravely, and undoing the knot she offered him with both hands the glittering treasure. "I hope you will be a little generous, Monsieur—I know it was you who gained the quête."
"My good child!" cried he, interrupting her and pushing back her hands, "what lunacy are you uttering? Do you imagine that I go about fiddling for pence at village weddings?"
"But Monsieur—"
"But little imbecile, I did it to help you, to enable you to get your ten francs and half a goose. Asticot too. Haven't you been enchanted all day to be of service to Mademoiselle? Do you want to be paid for wearing a red shirt with a tasselled collar and pommade in your hair? Aren't we going about the world like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rescuing damsels in distress? Isn't that the lodestar of our wanderings?"
"Yes, master," said I.
Blanquette looked open-mouthed from him to me, from me to him, scarce able to grasp such magnanimity. To the peasant, money is a commodity to be struggled for, fought for, grasped, prized; to be doled out like the drops of a priceless Elixir Vitæ. Paragot had the aristocratic, artistic scorn of it; and I, as I have said before, was the pale reflexion of Paragot.
"It is yours," I explained, as might a great prince's chamberlain, "the master gained it for you."
The tears came into her eyes. The corners of her lips went down. Paragot turned half round in his seat and put his hands on her shoulders.
"If you spill tears on the fowl you will make it too salt, and I shall throw it out of the window."
Paragot paid the modest funeral expenses of the worn-out fiddler. Asked why he did not leave the matter in the hands of the communal authorities he replied that he could not take a man's name without paying for it. Such an appellation as Berzélius Nibbidard Paragot was worth a deal coffin and a mass or two. This fine sense of integrity was above Blanquette's comprehension. She thought the funeral was a waste of money.
"It should go to benefit the living and not the dead," she argued.
"Wait till you are dead yourself," he replied, "and see how you would like to be robbed of your name. There are many things for you to learn, my child."
"Il n'y a pas beaucoup—not many," she said with a sigh. "We who are poor and live on the high-roads learn very quickly. If you are hungry and have two sous you can buy bread. If you only have two sous and you throw them to a dog who doesn't need them, you have nothing to buy bread with, and you starve. And it is not so easy to gain two sous."
Paragot sucked reflectively at his porcelain pipe.
"Asticot," said he, "the argumentum ad ventrem is irrefutable."
"Now I must go and make my malle" she said. "I return to Chambéry to try to earn my two sous."
"Won't you stay here over the night? You must be very tired."
"One must work for one's living, Monsieur," she said moving away.
It was afternoon. We had trudged the three dusty miles back from the tiny churchyard where we had left the old man's unlamented grave, and Paragot, as usual, was washing his throat with beer. It must be noted, not to his glorification, that about this time a chronic dryness began to be the main characteristic of Paragot's throat, and the only humectant that seemed to be of no avail was water.
The sun still blazed and the hush of the July afternoon lay over the valley. Paragot watched the thickset form of Blanquette disappear into the café; he poured out another bottle of beer and addressed Narcisse who was blinking idly up at him.
"If she had a pair of decent stays, my dog, or no stays at all, she might have something of a figure. What do you think? On the whole—no."
Narcisse stood on his hind legs, his forepaws on his master's arm, and uttered little plaintive whines. Paragot patted him on the head.
As I was engaged a yard or two away, elbows on knees, in what Paragot was pleased to call my studies—Thierry's "Récits des Temps Mérovingiens," a tattered, flyblown copy of which he had bought at Chambéry—he was careful not to interrupt me; he talked to the dog. Paragot had to talk to something. If he were alone he would have talked to his shadow; in his coffin he would have apostrophised the worms.
"Yes, my dog," said he, after a draught of beer. "We have passed through more than we wotted of these two days. We have held a human being by the hand and have faced with her the eternal verities. Now she is going to earn her two sous in the whirlpool, and the whirlpool will suck her down, and as she has not claims to beauty, Narcisse, of any kind whatsoever, either of face or figure, hers will be a shuddersome career and end. Say you are sorry for poor Blanquette de Veau."
Narcisse sniffed at the table, but finding it bare of everything but beer, in which he took no interest, dropped on his four legs and curled himself up in dudgeon.
"You damned cynical sensualist," cried my master. "I have wasted the breath of my sentiment upon you." And he called out for the landlady and more beer.
Presently Blanquette emerged laden with zither case and fiddle and little grey valise and the pearl-buttoned suit which was slung over one arm.
"Monsieur," she said, putting down her impedimenta, "the patronne has told me that you have paid for my lodging and my nourishment. I am very grateful, Monsieur. And if you will accept this costume it will be a way of repaying your kindness."
Paragot rose, took the suit and laid it on his chair.
"I accept it loyally," said he, with a bow, as if Blanquette had been a duchess.
"Adieu, Monsieur, et merci," she said holding out her hand.
Paragot stuck both his hands in his trousers pockets.
"My good child," said he, "you are bound straight for the most cheerless hell that was ever inhabited by unamusing devils."
Blanquette shrugged her shoulders and spoke in her dull fatalistic way.
"Que voulez-vous? I know it is not gay. But it is in the métier. When Père Paragot was alive it was different. He had his good qualities, Père Paragot. He was like a watch-dog. If any man came near me he was fierce. I did not amuse myself, it is true, but I remained an honest girl. Now it is changed. I am alone. I go into a brasserie to play and dance. I can get an engagement at the Café Brasserie Tissot," and then after a pause, turning her head away, she added the fatalistic words she had used before: "If faut passer par là, comme les autres."
"I forbid you!" cried my master, striding up and down in front of her and ejaculating horrible oaths. He invoked the sacred name of pigs and of all kinds of other things. My attention had long since been diverted from the learned Monsieur Thierry, and I wondered what she had to pass through like the others. It must be something dreadful, or my master would not be raving so profanely. I learned in after years. Of all mutilated lives there are few more ghastly than those of the fille de brasserie in a small French provincial town. And here was Blanquette about to abandon herself to it with stolid, hopeless resignation. There was no question of vicious instinct. What semblance of glamour the life presented did not attract her in the least. A sweated alien faces rabbit-pulling in the East End with more pleasurable anticipation.
"I am not going to allow you to take an engagement in a brasserie!" shouted my master. "Do you hear? I forbid you!"
"But Monsieur——" began Blanquette piteously.
Then Paragot had one of his sudden inspirations. He crashed his fist on the little table so that the glass and bottles leaped and Narcisse darted for shelter into the café.
"Tron de l'air!" he cried. "I have it. It is an illumination. Asticot—here! Leave your book. I shall be Paragot in character as well as name. We shall fiddle with Blanquette as we fiddled yesterday—and I shall be a watch-dog like Père Paragot and keep her an honest girl. We'll make it a firm, Paragot and Company, and there will always be two sous for bread and two to throw to a dog. I like throwing sous to dogs. It is my nature. Now I know why I was sent into the world. It was to play the fiddle up and down the sunny land of France. My little Asticot, why haven't we thought of it before? You shall learn to play the trumpet, Asticot, and Narcisse shall walk on his hind legs and collect the money. It will be magnificent!"
"Are you serious, Monsieur?" asked Blanquette, trembling.
"Serious? Over an inspiration that came straight from the bon Dieu? But yes, I am serious. Et toi?" he added sharply using for the first time the familiar pronoun, "are you afraid I will beat you like Père Paragot?"
"You can if you like," she said huskily; and I wondered why on earth she should have turned the colour of cream cheese.