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Mountebank

<h1>Chapter VIII</h1> We behold Petit Patou now definitely launched on his career. Why the execution of Bakkus's (literally) cynical suggestion should have met with instant success, neither he nor Andrew nor Prépimpin, the poodle, nor anyone under heaven had the faintest idea. Perhaps Prépimpin had something to do with it. He was young, excellently trained, and expensive. As to the methods of his training Andrew made no enquiries. Better not. But, brought up in the merciful school of Ben Flint, in which Billy the pig had many successors, both porcine and canine, he had expert knowledge of what kind firmness on the part of the master and sheer love on that of the animal could accomplish. Prépimpin went through his repertoire with the punctilio of the barrack square deprecated by Bakkus. "I buy him," said Andrew. "Viens, mon ami." Prépimpin cast an oblique glance at his old master. "Va-t-en," said the latter. "Allons" said Andrew with a caressing touch on the dog's head. Prépimpin's topaz eyes gazed full into his new lord's. He wagged the tuft at the end of his shaven tail. Andrew knelt down, planted his fingers in the lion shagginess of mane above his ears and said in the French which Prépimpin understood: "We're going to be good friends, eh? You're not going to play me any dirty tricks? You're going to be a good and very faithful colleague?" "You mustn't spoil him," said the vendor, foreseeing, according to his lights, possible future recriminations. Andrew, still kneeling, loosed his hold on the dog, who forthwith put both paws on his shoulder and tried to lick the averted human face. "I've trained animals since I was two years old, Monsieur Berguinan. Please tell me something that I don't know." He rose. "Alors, Prépimpin, we belong to each other. Viens." The dog followed him joyously. The miracle beyond human explanation was accomplished, the love at first sight between man and dog. Now, in the manuscript there is much about Prépimpin. Lackaday, generally so precise, has let himself go over the love and intelligence of this most human of animals. To read him you would think that Prépimpin invented his own stage business and rehearsed Petit Patou. As a record of dog and man sympathy it is of remarkable interest; it has indeed a touch of rare beauty; but as it is a detailed history of Prépimpin rather than an account of a phase in the career of Andrew Lackaday, I must wring my feelings and do no more than make a passing reference to their long and, from my point of view, somewhat monotonous partnership. It sheds, however, a light on the young manhood of this earnest mountebank. It reveals a loneliness ill-becoming his years--a loneliness of soul and heart of which he appears to be unconscious. Again, we have here and there the fleeting shadow of a petticoat. In Stockholm--during these years he went far afield--he fancies himself in love with one Vera Karynska of vague Mid-European nationality, who belongs to a troupe of acrobats. Vera has blue eyes, a deeply sentimental nature, and, alas! an unsympathetic husband who, to Andrew's young disgust depends on her for material support, seeing that every evening he and various other brutes of the tribe form an inverted pyramid with Vera's amazonian shoulders as the apex. He is making up a besotted mind to say, "Fly with me," when the Karinski troupe vanishes Moscow-wards and an inexorable contract drives him to Dantzic. In that ancient town, looking into the faithful and ironical eyes of Prépimpin, he thanks God he did not make a fool of himself. You see, he succeeds. If you credited his modesty, you would think that Prépimpin made Petit Patou. Quod est absurdum. But the psychological fact remains that Andrew Lackaday needed some magnetic contact with another individuality, animal or human, to exhibit his qualities. There, in counselling splendid isolation, Elodie Figasso, the little Marseilles gutter fairy was wrong. She saw, clearly enough, that, subordinated to others, with no chance of developing his one personality he must fail. But she did not perceive--and poor child, how could she?--that given the dominating influence over any combination, even over one poodle dog, he held the key of success. So we see him, the born leader, unconscious of his powers for lack of opportunity, instinctively craving their exercise for his own spiritual and moral evolution, and employing them in the benign mastery of the dog Prépimpin. They were happy years of bourgeois vagabondage. At first he felt the young artist's soreness that, with the exception of rare, sporadic engagements, neither London nor Paris would have him. Once he appeared at the Empire, in Leicester Square, an early turn, and kept on breaking bits of his heart every day, for a week, when the curtain went down in the thin applause that is worse than silence. "Prépimpin felt it," he writes, "even more than I did. He would follow me off, with his head bowed down and his tail-tuft sweeping the floor, so that I could have wept over his humiliation." Why the great capitals fail to be amused is a perpetual mystery to Andrew Lackaday. Prépimpin and he give them the newest things they can think of. After weeks and weeks of patient rehearsal, they bring a new trick to perfection. It is the clou of their performance for a week's engagement at the Paris Folies-Bergère. After a conjuring act, he retires. Comes on again immediately, Petit Patou, apparently seven foot high, in the green silk tights reaching to the arm-pit waist, a low frill round his neck, his hair up to a point, a perpetual grin painted on his face. On the other side enters Prépimpin on hind legs, bearing an immense envelope. Petit Patou opens it--shows the audience an invitation to a ball. "Ah! dress me, Prépimpin." The dog pulls a hidden string and Petit Patou is clad in a bottle green dress-coat. Prépimpin barks and dances his delight. "But nom d'un chien, I can't go to a ball without a hat." Prepimpin bolts to the wings and returns with an opera hat. "And a stick." Prepimpin brings the stick. "And a cigar." Prépimpin rushes to a little table at the back of the stage and on his hind legs offers a box of cigars to his master, who selects one and lights it. He begins the old juggler's trick of the three objects. The dog sits on his haunches and watches him. There is patter in which the audience is given to understand that Prépimpin, who glances from time to time over the footlights, with a shake of his leonine mane, is bored to death by his master's idiocy. At last the hat descends on Petit Patou's head, the crook-handled stick falls on his arm, and he looks about in a dazed way for the cigar, and then he sees Prépimpin, who has caught it, swaggering off on his hind legs, the still lighted cigar in his mouth. "No," writes Lackaday, "it was a failure. Poor Prépimpin and I left Paris with our tails between our legs. We were to start a tour at Bordeaux. 'Mon pauvre ami,' said I, on the journey--Prépimpin never suffered the indignity of a dog cage--'There is only one thing to be done. It is you who will be going to the ball and will juggle with the three objects, and I who will catch the cigar in my mouth.' But it was not to be. At Bordeaux and all through the tour we had a succès fou." Thus Andrew washed his hands of Paris and London and going where he was appreciated roved the world in quiet contentment. He was young, rather scrupulously efficient within his limits, than ambitious, and of modest wants, sober habits, and of a studious disposition which his friendship with Horatio Bakkus had both awakened and stimulated. Homeless from birth he never knew the nostalgia which grips even the most deliberately vagrant of men. As his ultimate goal he had indeed a vague dream of a home with wife and children--one of these days in the future, when he had put by enough money to justify such luxuries. And then there was the wife to find. In a wife sewing by lamp-light between a red-covered round table and the fire, a flaxen haired cherub by her side--for so did his ingenuous inexperience picture domestic happiness--he required the dominating characteristic of angelic placidity. Perhaps his foster-mother and the comfort Ben Flint found in her mild and phlegmatic devotion had something to do with it. In his manuscript he tries to explain--and flounders about in a psychological bog--that his ideal woman and his ideal wife are two totally different conceptions. The woman who could satisfy all his romantic imaginings was the Princesse Lointaine--the Highest Common Factor of the ladies I have already mentioned--Mélisande, Phèdre, Rosalind, Fédora, and Dora Copperfield--it is at this stage that he mentions them by name, having extended his literary horizon. Her he did not see sewing, in ox-eyed serenity, by a round table covered with a red cloth. With Her it was a totally different affair. It was a matter of spring and kisses and a perfect spiritual companionship.... As I have said, he gets into a terrible muddle. Anyhow, between the two conflicting ideals, he does not fall to the ground of vulgar amours. At the risk of tedium I feel bound to insist on this aspect of his life. For in the errant cosmopolitan world in which he, irresponsible and now well salaried bachelor had his being, he was thrown into the free and easy comradeship of hundreds of attractive women, as free and irresponsible as himself. He lived in a sea of temptation. On the other hand, I should be doing as virile a creature as ever walked a great wrong if I presented him to you under the guise of a Joseph Andrews. He had his laughter and his champagne and his kisses on the wing. But it was: "We'll meet again one of these days." "One of these days when our paths cross again." And so--in effect--Bon soir. It is difficult to compress into a page or two the history of several years. But that is what I have to do. He is not wandering all the time over France, or flashing meteor-like about Europe. He has periods of repose, enforced and otherwise. But his position being ensured, he has no anxieties. Paris is his headquarters. He lives still in his old hôtel meublé in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. But instead of one furnished room on the fifth floor, he can afford an apartment, salon, salle à manger, bedrooms, cabinet de toilette, on the prosperous second, which he retains all the year round. And Petit Patou can now stride through the waiting crowd in Moignon's antechamber and enter the sacred office, cigar in mouth, and with a "look here, mon vieux," put the fear of God into him. Petit Patou and Prépimpin, the idols of the Provinces, have arrived. In Paris, when their presences coincide, he continues to consort with Bakkus, whose exquisite little tenor voice still affords him a means of livelihood. In fact Bakkus has had a renewed lease of professional activity. He sings at watering places, at palace hotels; which involves the physical activity which he abhors. "Bound to this Ixion wheel of perpetual motion," says he, "I suffer tortures unimagined even by the High Gods. Compared with it our degrading experience on the sands seven years ago was a blissful idyll." "By Gum!" says Andrew, "seven years ago. Who would have thought it?" "Yes, who?" scowled the pessimist, now getting grey and more gaunt of blue, ill-shaven cheek. "To me it is seven æons of Promethean damnation." "To me it seems only yesterday," says Andrew. "It's because you have no brain," says Bakkus. But they are good friends. Away from Paris they carry on a fairly regular correspondence. Such of Bakkus's letters as Lackaday has kept and as I have read, are literary gems with--always--a perverse and wilful flaw ... like the man's life. <hr /> From Paris, after this particular meeting with Bakkus, Andrew once more goes on tour with Prépimpin. But a Prépimpin grown old, and, though pathetically eager, already past effective work. Nine years of strenuous toil are as much as any dog can stand. Rheumatism twinged the hind legs of Prépimpin. Desire for slumber stupefied his sense of duty. He could no longer catch the lighted cigar and swagger off with it in his mouth, across the stage. "And yet, I'm sure," writes Lackaday, "that every time I cut his business, it nearly broke his heart. And it had come to Prépimpin's business being cut down to an insignificant minimum. I could, of course, have got another dog. But it would have broken his heart altogether. And one doesn't break the hearts of creatures like Prépimpin. I managed to arrange the performance, at last, so that he should think he was doing a devil of a lot...." Then the end came. It was on the Bridge of Avignon, which, if you will remember, Lackaday superstitiously regards as a spot fraught with his destiny. Fate had not taken him to the town since his last disastrous appearance. No one recognized in the Petit Patou of provincial fame the lank failure of many years ago. Besides, this time, he played not at the wretched music-hall without the walls, but at the splendid Palace of Varieties in the Boulevard de la Gare. He was a star--en vedette, and he had a dressing-room to himself. He stayed at the Hôtel d'Europe, the famous hostelry by the great entrance gates. To avoid complication, he went everywhere now as Monsieur Patou. Folks passing by the open courtyard of the hotel where he might be taking the air, pointed him out to one another. "Le voilà--Petit Patou" It was in the middle of his week's engagement--once more in summer time. He lunched, saw to Prépimpin's meal, smoked the cheap cigar of content, and then, crossing the noisy little flagged square, went through the gates, Prépimpin at his heels, and made his way across the dusty road to the bridge. The work-a-day folk, on that week-day 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, an 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 waggon, with its three great white horses and great barrels. Nothing hurried in the hot sunshine. The Rhone, very low, flowed sluggishly. Only now and then did a screeching, dust-whirling 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 Prépimpin who sat by his heels gazing at the roadway, occupied possibly by the same sere reflections. Presently the flea-catching antics of a ragged mongrel in the middle of the roadway disturbed Prépimpin'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--solverat 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. What could they do 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 Hôtel Luxembourg at Nîmes--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're very kind," said Andrew, "but the kindest thing is to leave me alone." He bent down again and took Prépimpin in his arms and strode with him through the group of motorists and the little clamouring 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 Princesse Lointaine. He said in an uncertain voice: "You have given me your very sweet sympathy. You can't do more." She made a little helpless gesture and turned and joined her companions, who went on their way to Nîmes. Andrew carried the bleeding body of Prépimpin, 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 pylon 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 Prépimpin on the ground. He broke down and cried. For seven years the dog's life and his had 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 Prépimpin 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 careworn. 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 for roses; the soiled white gloves with an unmended finger tip. "Madame?" said he. And as he saw it, the woman's face and form became vaguely familiar. He had seen her somewhere. But in the last few years he had seen thousands of women. "You have had a great misfortune, monsieur?" "That is true, madame." She sat on the bench beside him. "Vous pleurez. You must have loved him very much." It was not a stranger 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? Enfin, 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. "Mon Dieu! Elodie!" She smiled sadly. "Ah," said she, "I'm glad you remember." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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