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 sex 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 celebate addiction to cats, or to eugenic propaganda, or to
perpetual crape 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 her half fulfilled womanhood, that
he suffered no temptations of an easy conquest. The kiss therefore evoked
no baser range of emotion. As his head was whirling with an artist's sudden
conception--and, mark you, an artist's conception need no more be a case
of parthenogenesis than that of the physical woman--it had no room for the
higher and subtler and more romantical 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 ran one of her _obiter dicta_ 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 hostelry possibly a shade
more poverty-stricken in a flag paved by-street, a trifle staler-smelling
than his own, and there put out a friendly hand of dismissal.
"We will write to each other?"
"It is agreed."
"Alors, au revoir."
"Au revoir, Elodie, et merci."
And that was the end of it. Andrew went back to Paris by the first train in
the morning, and Elodie continued to dance in Avignon.
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
effected 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. If 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 no means the _tête de linotte_
of so many of her sisters of song and dance. And she had forgotten him. He
shrugged philosophic shoulders. After all, why should she trouble herself
further with so dull a dog? Man-like he did not realize the difficulties
that beset even a sagacious-headed 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 café
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, in
modesty, show themselves at cafés 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 wants to send a telegram--Elodie's invariable
habit when she corresponded, on the back of a picture post card, with
her mother; when, in fact, you have before you the unprecedented task of
writing a letter--picture post cards being out of the question--and a
letter whose flawlessness 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 Lackaday, we will now proceed. The fact remains that they
faded pleasantly and even regretlessly from each other's lives.
There now follow some years, in Lackaday's career, of high endeavour
and fierce struggle. He has taken to heart Elodie's suggestion of the
exploitation of his physical idiosyncracy. He seeks for a formula. In the
meanwhile he gains his livelihood as he can. His powers of mimicry 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 Le
Bargy to Polin. But the Ambassadeurs, and the Alcazar d'Eté and the Folies
Marigny 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
Béziers with an imitation of Monsieur le Bargy? As well give them lectures
on Thermodynamics.
Sometimes he escapes from mimicry. He conjures, he juggles, he plays
selections from Carmen and Cavaleria 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 Menilmontant and the Outer
Boulevards; but Paris, not being amused, prefers his mimicry. He is alone,
mind you. No more Coinçon combinations. If he is to be insulted, let the
audience do it, or the vulgar theatre 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, inveterate
tradition of the circus clown, a ridiculously little hard felt hat on the
top of his shock of carroty 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 modest _chambre garnie_ in the
Faubourg Saint Denis he practises his tricks. On the dissolution of the
Cirque Rocambeau, where as "Auguste" he had been practically anonymous, he
had unimaginatively adopted the professional name of Andrew-André. He is
still Andrew-André. There is not much magic about it on a programme. But,
_que voulez-vous?_ It is as effective as many another.
During this period we see him a 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
mountebank 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 which was common to Melisande and Phèdre and Rosalind and Fédora
and the child-wife of David Copperfield. It is, as I have indicated, the
ladies who bid him _bonsoir_. Sometimes he mourns for a day or two,
more often he laughs, welcoming regained freedom. None touches his heart.
Of men, he has acquaintances in plenty, with whom he lives on terms of good
comradeship; but he has scarcely an intimate.
At last he makes a friend--an Englishman, Horatio Bakkus; and this
friendship marks a turning-point in his history.
They met at a café-concert in Montmartre, which, like many of its kind, had
an ephemeral existence--the nearest, incidentally, to the real Paris to
which Andrew Lackaday had attained. It tried to appeal to a catholicity of
tastes; to outdo its rivals inscabrousness--did not Farandol and Lizette
Blandy make their names there?--and at the same time to offer to the
purer-minded an innocent entertainment. To the latter both Lackaday,
with his imitations, and Horatio Bakkus, with his sentimental ballads,
contributed. Somehow the mixture failed to please. The one part scared
the virtuous, at the other the deboshed yawned. _La Boîte Blanche_
perished of inanition. But during its continuance, Lackaday and Bakkus 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
Rue Pigalle and, striking off, reached the Grands Boulevards. The Brasserie
Tourtel 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."
"Then 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 Bakkus 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 Bakkus with
startling vindictiveness. "It turns him into an idle, sentimental,
hypocritical and dissolute 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 paralysing 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, and cadaverous cheeks and 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 omit the 'Mr.,'" said Andrew, "if you care to do so."
"You're more English than I thought," smiled Horatio Bakkus.
"I'm proud that you should say so," replied Andrew.
"I was about to remark," said Bakkus, "when you interrupted me, that 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; comrades down on their luck had
cursed the profession for a _sale métier_ and had wished they were
road sweepers; but he had never heard it called contemptible. It was a
totally new conception.
Bakkus repeated his words and added: "It is below the dignity of one made
in God's image."
"I am afraid I do not agree with you," replied Andrew, stiffly. "I was born
in the profession and honourably bred in it and I have known no other and
do not wish to know any other."
"You were born an imitator? It 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. And 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 had better be dead," said Andrew.
"Ah!" said Bakkus, 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. Bakkus 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
can ride bare back and jump through hoops?"
"I learned to do that--for Clown's business," replied Andrew. "But 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."
Bakkus took a sip of beer, and regarded him with his mocking eyes.
"And you'd sooner keep on throwing up three balls in the air for the rest
of your natural life than 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 billiard 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
Flint'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 Schopenhaurian with his question.
"What's the good of it?"
"I suppose I'm an artist, in my way," he replied, modestly.
"Artist?" Bakkus 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 Michael Angelo and Dante
and Beethoven were the curses of humanity. Much better dead. But, anyhow,
they were artists. Even I with my tinpot voice singing 'Annie Laurie' and
'The Sands of Dee' and such-like clap-trap which brings a lump in the
throat of the grocer and his wife, am an artist. But you, my dear
fellow--with your fifty billiard 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 doubt. But what would be the good of it, when you had done it and they
had seen it? Sheer 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 billiard cues on the end of your nose!"
Andrew reflected for a long time, his elbow on the cafe table, his hand
covering his eyes. There must surely be some fallacy 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.
"_Attendez_. I must say in 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 billiard cues gives 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."
Bakkus 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 have never thought of
it.'
"But you must, my dear Lackaday. You have no idea how it stimulates your
intellect. It crystallizes your own vague ideas and sends you away with the
comforting conviction of what a damned fool the other fellow is. It's the
cheapest recreation in 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 café-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 idle and cynical tenor, Andrew learned many
things.
Now, parenthetically, certain facts in the previous career of Andrew
Lackaday 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 him in
a sturdy Lancashire Fear of God and Duty towards his Neighbour and Duty
towards himself, and had given him the Golden Rule above mentioned. Ben had
also seen to his elementary education, so that the _régime du participe
passé_ had no difficulties for him, and Racine and Bossuet were not
empty names, seeing that he had 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 Britons, 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 vowel sounds, Ben Flint had the genius to compel
their rejection.
"My father," writes Lackaday--for as such he always regarded Ben
Flint--"was the most remarkable man I have 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. Looking
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 ineradicable
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, have been disposed to wonder why
he did not empty it to broaden the intellectual and æsthetic horizon of his
adopted son. But on thinking over the matter--how could he? He had 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 thence found
his being, there was no one to replace the mellow old English clown, who
travelled around with Sterne 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 had picked up in aimless and desultory reading.
In Horatio Bakkus, therefore, Andrew met for the first time a human being
interested in the intellectual aspect of life; one who advanced outrageous
propositions just for the joy of supporting them and of refuting
counter-arguments; 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 Bakkus that he discovered The Venus of Milo
and Marcus Aurelius and Longchamps races....
From the last he derived the most immediate benefit.
"If you've never been to a race-meeting," said Bakkus, "you've missed one
of the elementary opportunities of a liberal education. Nowhere else can
you have such a chance of studying human imbecility, knavery 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 Bakkus, "love to realize myself for what I really am, an
imbecile, a knave, and a useless craver of money for which I've not had the
indignity of working. It soothes me to feel that for all my heritage of
culture I am nothing more or less than one of the rabble-rout. I've backed
horses ever since I was a boy and in my time I've had a pure delight in
pawning my underwear in order to do so."
"It seems to be the height of folly," said sober Andrew.
Bakkus 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 playground."
So Andrew assented. They went to Longchamps, humbly, on foot, mingling with
the Paris crowd. Bakkus wore a sun-stained brown and white check 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 tragedian to that of the bookmaker's tout rejected
of honest bookmaking 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 carroty thatch of his hair. For them no
tickets for stands, lawn or enclosure. The far off gaily dressed crowd in
these exclusive demesnes shimmered before Andrew's vision as remote as 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 gaiety which stultified Bakkus's bleak
description. And Andrew's great height overtopping the crowd afforded him a
fair view of the course.
Bakkus came steeped in horse-lore and confidently prophetic. To the
admiration of Andrew he ran through the entries for each race, analysing
their histories, summarizing 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 _Pari Mutuel_, and betting his
modest five franc piece, on each of the first two events, found Bakkus
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 "Elodie."
"My friend," said Bakkus, "now is the time to make a bold bid for a sure
fortune. There is a horse called Goffredo who is quoted in the sacred inner
ring of those that know at 8 to 1. I have information withheld from this
boor rabble, that he will win, and that he will come out at about 15 to 1.
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'm going to back Elodie," said Andrew.
Bakkus stared at him. "Elodie--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 _Pari Mutuel_. Bakkus paid his five louis
for his Goffredo 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 Elodie," 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 Bakkus witheringly.
"Let us see the race," said Andrew.
They paid a franc apiece for a stand on a bench and watched as much of the
race as they could see. And Bakkus forgot to share his glasses with Andrew,
who caught now and then an uncomprehending sight of coloured dots on moving
objects and gaped in equally uncomprehensible bewilderment when the racing
streak flashed home up the straight. A strange cry, not of gladness but
of wonder, burst from the great crowd. Andrew turned to Bakkus, 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 couldn't you
have given me the tip? You must have known something. No one could play
such a game without knowing. It's 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 realizing 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. They joined the thin crowd round their booth of the
_Pari Mutuel_, mainly composed of place winners, and when the placards
of the odds went up, Bakkus 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," Andrew replied, 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 Bakkus, "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 Elodie brought him luck. This time in the shape of a
hundred and three louis, a goodly sum when one has to live from hand to
mouth. And the time came, at the end of their engagement at _La Boîte
Blanche_, when they lost even that precarious method of existence.
For the first 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 rehabilitated Moignon and his confrères, the
other agents, declared, in terms varying from apologetic stupor to frank
brutality, had no use for Andrew-André and his unique entertainment.
"But what shall I do?" asked the anxious André.
"Wait, _mon cher_, we shall soon well arrange it," said Moignon.
"?" pantomimed the other agents, with shrugged shoulders and helplessly
outspread hands.
And it happened too that Bakkus, the sweet ballad-monger, found himself on
the same rocks of unemployment.
"I have," said he, one evening, when the stranded pair were sitting
outside a horrid little liquor retreat with a zinc bar in the Faubourg
Saint-Denis--the luxury of _consommations_ at sixty centimes on the
Grands Boulevards 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 at Longchamps?"
"They're put away," said Andrew.
"Thank God," said Bakkus.
Andrew detected a lack of altruism in the pious note of praise. He did not
love Bakkus to such a pitch of brotherly affection as would warrant his
relieving him of responsibility for self support. He had already fed Bakkus
for three days.
"They're put away," he repeated.
"Bring them out of darkness into the light of day," said Bakkus. "What are
talents in a napkin? You are a capitalist--I am a man with ideas. May I
order another of this _mastroquet's_ bowel-gripping absinthes 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 Pierrots?"
"On the stage--masked balls--yes."
"But real Pierrots 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 "Zingue" brought out the absinthe. Bakkus
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."