The guards cried: “Chut!--Keep quiet!”--But too late.
* * * * *
A door had opened, and the examining magistrate himself appeared on the
sill.
Skull-cap of velvet, grizzled whiskers, mouth thin and evil, the eye
scrutinizing, distrustful, but not profound, it was just the type of
an examining magistrate, one of those men who thinks he has a criminal
before him always, like those doctors of the insane who see maniacs
everywhere. That one in particular had a certain way of looking at you,
so annoying, and so insulting, that you felt guilty without having done
anything. With one glance of the eye he terrified all the lobby: “What
does all this noise mean?--Try to do your duty a little better,” he
said, addressing the guards. Then he closed his door with a sharp click.
* * * * *
The municipal guard taken to task, red, mortified, looked around a
moment for some one upon whom to lay the blame. But the little girl
said nothing more, Pignou sat quiet on his bench--All at once he
perceived me, and as I was at the door of the hall, almost in the
lobby, he took me by the arm and jerked me around brutally.
“What are you doing there, you?”
BOUM-BOUM
BY ARSÈNE ARNAUD CLARETIE
[Illustration]
_Jules Claretie, as he is known in the literary world, was
born at Limoges in 1840, and was educated at Paris, where in
1860 he adopted journalism for a living; contributed a great
variety of papers to the journals, under his own name and under
the various pseudonyms of Olivier de Salin, Candide, Perdican,
etc. In 1885 he became administrator of the Comédie Française,
and in 1888 Member of the French Academy. He was Anatole
France’s predecessor as editor of “Le Temps.”_
_Claretie has written a great number of works, a “History
of the Revolution 1870-1871,” belles-lettres, biographies,
criticism, etc. Among his novels may be mentioned the first,
“Une Drôlesse,” published in 1862; “Les Muscadins,” “Monsieur
le Ministre” which the author dramatized, and “L’Accusateur,”
1897._
[Illustration]
BOUM-BOUM
BY JULES CLARETIE
Translated by Mary Stuart Symonds.
Copyright, 1891, by The Current Literature Publishing Company.
The child was lying stretched out in his little, white bed, and his
eyes, grown large through fever, looked straight before him, always
with the strange fixity of the sick who already perceive what the
living do not see.
The mother at the foot of the bed, torn by suffering and wringing her
hands to keep herself from crying, anxiously followed the progress
of the disease on the poor, emaciated face of the little being. The
father, an honest workman, kept back the tears which burned his eyelids.
The day broke clear and mild, a beautiful morning in June, and lighted
up the narrow room in the street of the Abessess where little François,
the child of Jacques and Madeleine Legrand, lay dying. He was seven
years old and was very fair, very rosy, and so lively. Not three weeks
ago he was gay as a sparrow; but a fever had seized him and they had
brought him home one evening from the public school with his head heavy
and his hands very hot. From that time he had been here in this bed and
sometimes in his delirium when he looked at his little well-blackened
shoes, which his mother had carefully placed in a corner on a board, he
said:
“You can throw them away now, little François’ shoes! Little François
will not put them on any more! Little François will not go to school
any more--never, never!”
Then the father cried out and said: “Wilt thou be still!” And the
mother, very pale, buried her blond head in his pillow so that little
François could not hear her weep.
This night the child had not been delirious; but for the two days
past the doctor had been uneasy over an odd sort of prostration which
resembled abandon, it was as if at seven years the sick one already
felt the weariness of life. He was tired, silent, sad, and tossed his
little head about on the bolster. He had no longer a smile on his poor,
thin lips, and with haggard eyes he sought, seeing they knew not what,
something there beyond, very far off--
In Heaven! Perhaps! thought Madeleine, trembling.
When they wished him to take some medicine, some sirup, or a little
soup, he refused. He refused everything.
“Dost thou wish anything, François?”
“No, I wish nothing!”
“We must draw him out of this,” the doctor said. “This torpor frightens
me!--you are the father and the mother, you know your child well--Seek
for something to reanimate this little body, recall to earth this
spirit which runs after the clouds!”
Then he went away.
“Seek!”
Yes, without doubt they knew him well, their François, these worthy
people! They knew how it amused him, the little one, to plunder the
hedges on Sunday and to come back to Paris on his father’s shoulders
laden with hawthorne--Jacques Legrand had bought some images, some
gilded soldiers, and some Chinese shadows for François; he cut them
out, put them on the child’s bed and made them dance before the
bewildered eyes of the little one, and with a desire to weep himself he
tried to make him laugh.
“Dost thou see, it is the broken bridge--Tire tire tire!--And that is
a general!--Thou rememberest we saw one, a general, once, in the Bois
de Boulogne?--If thou takest thy medicine well I will buy thee a real
one with a cloth tunic and gold epaulets--Dost thou wish for him, the
general, say?”
“No,” replied the child, with the dry voice which fever gives.
“Dost thou wish a pistol, some marbles--a crossbow?”
“No,” repeated the little voice, clearly and almost cruelly.
And to all that they said to him, to all the jumping-jacks, to all the
balloons that they promised him, the little voice--while the parents
looked at each other in despair--responded:
“No.”--“No.”--“No!”
“But what dost thou wish, my François?” asked the mother. “Let us
see, there is certainly something thou wouldst like to have--Tell it,
tell it to me! to me!--thy mother!” And she laid her cheek on the
pillow of the sick boy and whispered this softly in his ear as if
it were a secret. Then the child, with an odd accent, straightening
himself up in his bed and stretching out his hand eagerly toward some
invisible thing, replied suddenly in an ardent tone, at the same time
supplicating and imperative:
“I want Boum-Boum!”
Boum-Boum.
Poor Madeleine threw a frightened look toward her husband. What did the
little one say? Was it the delirium, the frightful delirium, which had
come back again?
Boum-Boum!
She did not know what that meant, and she was afraid of these singular
words which the child repeated with a sickly persistence as if, not
having dared until now to formulate his dream, he grasped the present
time with invincible obstinacy:
“Yes, Boum-Boum! Boum-Boum! I want Boum-Boum!”
The mother had seized Jacques’s hand and spoke very low, as if demented.
“What does that mean, Jacques? He is lost!”
But the father had on his rough, working man’s face a smile almost
happy, but astonished too, the smile of a condemned man who foresees a
possibility of liberty.
Boum-Boum! He remembered well the morning of Easter Monday when
he had taken François to the circus. He had still in his ears the
child’s outbursts of joy, the happy laugh of the amused boy, when the
clown, the beautiful clown, all spangled with gold and with a great
gilded butterfly sparkling, many-colored, on the back of his black
costume, skipped across the track, gave the trip to a rider or held
himself motionless and stiff on the sand, his head down and his feet
in the air. Or again he tossed up to the chandelier some soft, felt
hats which he caught adroitly on his head, where they formed, one by
one, a pyramid; and at each jest, like a refrain brightening up his
intelligent and droll face, he uttered the same cry, repeated the same
word, accompanied now and then by a burst from the orchestra: Boum-Boum!
Boum-Boum! and each time that it rang out, Boum-Boum, the audience
burst out into hurrahs and the little one joined in with his hearty,
little laugh. Boum-Boum! It was this Boum-Boum, it was the clown of the
circus, it was this favorite of a large part of the city that little
François wished to see and to have and whom he could not have and could
not see since he was lying here without strength in his white bed.
In the evening Jacques Legrand brought the child a jointed clown, all
stitched with spangles, which he had bought in a passageway and which
was very expensive. It was the price of four of his working days! But
he would have given twenty, thirty, he would have given the price of a
year’s labor to bring back a smile to the pale lips of the sick child.
The child looked at the plaything a moment as it glistened on the white
cover of the bed, then said, sadly:
“It is not Boum-Boum!--I want to see Boum-Boum!”
Ah! if Jacques could have wrapped him up in his blankets, could have
carried him to the circus, could have shown him the clown dancing under
the lighted chandelier and have said to him, Look! He did better,
Jacques, he went to the circus, demanded the address of the clown, and
timidly, his legs shaking with fear, he climbed, one by one, the steps
which led to the apartment of the artist, at Montmartre. It was very
bold this that Jacques was going to do! But after all the comedians go
to sing and recite their monologues in drawing-rooms, at the houses of
the great lords. Perhaps the clown--oh! if he only would--would consent
to come and say good-day to François. No matter, how would they receive
him, Jacques Legrand, here at Boum-Boum’s house?
He was no longer Boum-Boum! He was Monsieur Moreno, and, in the
artistic dwelling, the books, the engravings, the elegance was like a
choice decoration around the charming man who received Jacques in his
office like that of a doctor.
Jacques looked, but did not recognize the clown, and turned and twisted
his felt hat between his fingers. The other waited. Then the father
excused himself. “It was astonishing what he came there to ask, it
could not be--pardon, excuse--But in short, it was concerning the
little one--A nice little one, monsieur. And so intelligent! Always the
first at school, except in arithmetic, which he did not understand--A
dreamer, this little one, do you see! Yes, a dreamer. And the
proof--wait--the proof--”
Jacques now hesitated, stammered; but he gathered up his courage and
said bruskly:
“The proof is that he wishes to see you, that he thinks only of you,
and that you are there before him like a star which he would like to
have, and that he looks--”
When he had finished the father was deadly pale and he had great drops
on his forehead. He dared not look at the clown who remained with
his eyes fixed on the workman. And what was he going to say, this
Boum-Boum? Was he going to dismiss him, take him for a fool and put him
out the door?
“You live?” asked Boum-Boum.
“Oh! very near! Street of the Abessess!”
“Come!” said the other. “Your boy wants to see Boum-Boum? Ah, well, he
is going to see Boum-Boum.”
* * * * *
When the door opened and showed the clown, Jacques Legrand cried out
joyfully to his son:
“François, be happy, child! See, here he is, Boum-Boum!”
A look of great joy came over the child’s face. He raised himself on
his mother’s arm and turned his head toward the two men who approached,
questioning, for a moment, who it was by the side of his father; this
gentleman in an overcoat, whose good, pleasant face he did not know.
When they said to him: “It is Boum-Boum!” he slowly fell back on the
pillow and remained there, his eyes fixed, his beautiful large, blue
eyes, which looked beyond the walls of the little room, and were always
seeking the spangles and the butterfly of Boum-Boum, like a lover who
pursues his dream.
“No,” replied the child with a voice which was no longer dry, but full
of despair, “no, it is not Boum-Boum.”
The clown, standing near the little bed, threw upon the child an
earnest look, very grave, but of an inexpressible sweetness.
He shook his head, looked at the anxious father, the grief-stricken
mother, and said, smiling, “He is right, this is not Boum-Boum!” and
then he went out.
“I can not see him, I will never see Boum-Boum any more!” repeated the
child, whose little voice spoke to the angels. “Boum-Boum is perhaps
there, there, where little François will soon go.”
And suddenly--it was only a half-hour since the clown had
disappeared--the door opened quickly, and in his black, spangled
clothes, his yellow cap on his head, the gilded butterfly on his breast
and on his back, with a smile as big as the mouth of a money-box and
a powdered face, Boum-Boum, the true Boum-Boum, the Boum-Boum of the
circus, the Boum-Boum of the popular neighborhood, the Boum-Boum of
little François--Boum-Boum appeared.
Lying on his little white bed the child clapped his thin, little hands,
laughing, crying, happy, saved, with a joy of life in his eyes, and
cried “Bravo!” with his seven-year gaiety, which all at once kindled
up like a match:
“Boum-Boum! It is he, it is he, this time! Here is Boum-Boum! Long live
Boum-Boum! Good-day, Boum-Boum.”
And when the doctor came back, he found, seated by little François’s
bedside, a clown with a pale face, who made the little one laugh again
and again, and who said to the child while he was stirring a piece of
sugar into a cup of medicine:
“Thou knowest, if thou dost not drink, little François, Boum-Boum will
not come back any more.”
So the child drank.
“Is it not good?”
“Very good!--thanks, Boum-Boum!”
“Doctor,” said the clown to the doctor, “do not be jealous--It seems to
me that my grimaces will do him as much good as your prescriptions!”
The father and the mother wept, but this time from joy.
Until little François was on his feet again a carriage stopped every
day before the dwelling of a workman in the street of the Abessess, at
Montmartre, and a man got out with a gay powdered face, enveloped in an
overcoat with the collar turned back, and underneath it one could see a
clown’s costume.
“What do I owe you, monsieur?” said Jacques, at last, to the
master-clown when the child took his first walk, “for now I owe you
something!”
The clown stretched out his two soft, Herculean hands to the parents.
“A shake of the hand!” said he.
Then placing two great kisses on the once more rosy cheeks of the child:
“And (laughing) permission to put on my visiting-card:
“BOUM-BOUM
_Acrobatic Doctor and Physician in ordinary to little
François!_”