"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.

"Amelie Duprat, Monsieur," she said. "But pour le metier—we must have professional names for the cafes—Pere 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 cafe, 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 Pere 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 Misericorde!"

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 Chambery 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 Pere 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 cafe—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 repertoire, 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.

"Pere Paragot had played the violin for sixty years, but he could not make it sing like that."

"You would not compare Pere 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 Pere Paragot used to say. I make no progress—I am as stupid as a goose."

* * * * *

Two hours afterwards we started for Chambery, 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 Chambery. 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 Chambery 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 Pere 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. Pere 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 Chambery, 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. Fetes." 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 Saute 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 Leontine Bringuet.

"Tiens! where is Pere 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 Pere 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.

"Berzelius 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 a 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 arriere 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 Pere 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. "Pere 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 Pere 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 quete."

"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 Vitae. 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 Berzelius 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 Chambery 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 cafe; 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 "Recits des Temps Merovingiens," a tattered, flyblown copy of which he had bought at Chambery—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 metier. When Pere Paragot was alive it was different. He had his good qualities, Pere 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 Cafe Brasserie Tissot," and then after a pause, turning her head away, she added the fatalistic words she had used before: "If faut passer par la, 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 cafe.

"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 Pere 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 Pere Paragot?"

"You can if you like," she said huskily; and I wondered why on earth she should have turned the colour of cream cheese.



CHAPTER VII

NOT being content with having attached to his person a stray dog and a mongrel boy and rendering himself responsible for their destinies, Paragot must now saddle himself with a young woman. Had she been a beautiful gipsy, holding fascinating allurements in lustrous eyes and pomegranate lips, and witchery in a supple figure, the act would have been a commonplace of human weakness. But in the case of poor Blanquette, squat and coarse, her heavy features only redeemed from ugliness by youth, honesty and clean teeth, the eternal attraction of sex was absent.

From the decorative point of view she was as unlovely as Narcisse or myself. She was dull, unimaginative, ignorant, as far removed from Paragot as Narcisse from a greyhound. Why then, in the name of men and angels, should Paragot have taken her under his protection? My only answer to the question is that he was Paragot. Judge other men by whatever standard you have to hand; it will serve its purpose in a rough and ready manner; but Paragot—unless with me idolatry has obscured reason—Paragot can only be measured by that absolute standard which lies awful and unerring on the knees of the high gods.

Of course he saved the girl from a hideous doom. Thousands of kindly, earnest men have done the same in one way or another. But Paragot's way was different from anyone else's. Its glorious lunacy lifted it above ordinary human methods.

So many of your wildly impulsive people repent them of their generosities as soon as the magnanimous fervour has cooled. The grandeur of Paragot lay in the fact that he never repented. He was fantastic, self-indulgent, wastrel, braggart, what you will; but he had an exaggerated notion of the value of every human soul save his own. The destiny of poor Blanquette was to him of infinitely more importance than that of the wayward genius that was Paragot. The pathos of his point of view had struck me, even as a child, when he discoursed on my prospects.

"I am Paragot, my son," he would say, "a film full of wind and wonder, fantasy and folly, driven like thistledown about the world. I do not count. But you, my little Asticot, have the Great Responsibility before you. It is for you to uplift a corner of the veil of Life and show joy to men and women where they would not have sought it. Work now and gather wisdom, my son, so that when the Great Day comes you may not miss your destiny." And once, he added wistfully—"as I have missed mine."

* * * * *

As Paragot decided that we should not start off then and there into the unknown but remain at the cafe until we had laid our plan of campaign, Blanquette took her valise into the house, and, for the rest of the day, busied herself in the kitchen with the patronne; Paragot drank with the villagers in the cafe; and I, when Thierry and Narcisse had given me all the companionship they had to offer, curled myself up on the mattress spread in a corner of the tiny salle a manger and went to sleep.

The next morning Paragot awakened with an Idea. He would go to Aix-les-Bains which was close by, and would return in the evening. The nature of his errand he would not tell me. Who was I, little grey worm that I was, to question his outgoings and his incomings? The little grey worm would stay with Blanquette and Narcisse and see to it that they did not bite each other. I humbly accepted the rebuke and obeyed the behest. The afternoon found the three of us in a field under a tree; Blanquette embracing her knees, and the dog asleep with his throat across her feet. She was wearing her old cotton dress, and as she had been helping the patronne all the morning, her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows displaying stout, stubby arms. The top button of her bodice was open; she was bare-headed, but her hair, little deeper in shade than her tanned face and neck, was coiled neatly. Had it not been for the hard grip of the day before I should have jealously resented her admission into our vagabond fraternity. As it was, from the height of my sixteen-year-old masculinity I somewhat looked down upon her: not as poor Blanquette, the zither-playing vagrant; but as a girl. Could we, creation's lords, do with a creature of an inferior sex in our wanderings? Could she perform our feats of endurance? I questioned her anxiously.

"Moi?" she laughed, "I am as strong as any man. You will see."

She leaped to her feet and, before I could protest, had picked me off the ground like a kitten and was tossing me in her arms.

"Voila!" she said, depositing me tenderly on the grass; and having collected the dislodged Narcisse she embraced her knees and laughed again. It was a kind honest laugh; a good-natured, big boy's laugh, coming full out of her eyes and shewing her strong white teeth. I lost the sense of insult in admiration of her strength.

"You should have been a boy, Blanquette," said I.

She assented, acknowledging at once her inferiority and thus restoring my self respect.

"You are lucky, you, to be one. In this world the egg is for the men and the shell is for the women."

"Why don't you cut off your hair and put on boy's clothes?" I asked. "Then you would get the egg. No one could tell the difference."

"You don't think I look like a woman? I? Mon Dieu! Where are your eyes?"

She was actually indignant with me who had thought to please her: my first encounter with the bewildering paradox of woman.

"Ah! mais non," she panted. "I may be strong like a man, but grace a Dieu, I don't resemble one. Look."

And she sat bolt upright, her hands at her waist developing her bust to its full extent. She was not jolie, jolie, she explained, but she was as solidly built as another; I was to examine myself and see how like I was to the flattest of boards. Routed I chewed blades of grass in silence until she spoke again.

"Tell me of the patron."

"The patron?" I asked, puzzled.

"Yes—Monsieur—your master."

"You must call him maitre," said I, "not patron." For the patron was any peddling "boss," the leader of a troupe of performing dogs or the miserable landlord of a village inn, Paragot a patron!

"I meant no harm. I have too much respect for him," said Blanquette, humbly.

Again reinstated in my position of superiority I explained the Master to her feminine intelligence.

"He has been to every place in the world and knows everything that is to be known, and speaks every language that is spoken under the sun, and has read every book that ever was written, and I have seen him break a violin over a man's head."

"Tiens!" said Blanquette.

"In the Forum at Rome last winter he had an argument with the most learned professor in Europe who is making the excavations, and proved him to be wrong."

"Tiens!" repeated Blanquette, much impressed, though of Forum or excavations she had no more notion than Narcisse.

"If he wanted to be a king tomorrow, he would only have to go up to a throne and sit upon it."

"But no," said Blanquette. "To be a king one must be a king's son."

"How do you know that he isn't?" I asked with a could-and if-I-would expression of mystery.

"King's sons don't go about the high roads with little gamins like you," replied the practical Blanquette.

"How do you know that I am not a king's son too?" I asked, less with the idea of self-aggrandisement than that of vindication of Paragot.

"Because you yourself said that your mother sold you as my mother sold me to Pere Paragot."

Whereupon it suddenly occurred to me that as far as retentiveness of memory was concerned, Blanquette was not such a fool as in my arrogance I had set her down to be. I was going to retort that his magnificence in purchasing me proved him a personage of high order, but as I quickly reflected that the same argument might apply to the rank of the contemned Pere Paragot, I refrained. A silence ensuing, I uncomfortably resolved to study my master with a view to acquiring his skill in repartee.

"But what does he do, the Master?" enquired Blanquette.

"Do? What do you mean?"

"How does he earn his living?"

"That shows you know nothing about him," I cried triumphantly. "King's sons do not earn their living. They have got it already. Haven't you ever read that in books?"

"I can read and write, but I don't read books," sighed Blanquette. "I am not clever. You will have to teach me."

"This is the book I am reading," said I, taking the "Recits des Temps Merovingiens" from my pocket.

Again Blanquette sighed. "You must be very clever, Asticot."

"Not at all," said I modestly, but I felt that it was nice of Blanquette to realise the intellectual gulf between us. "It is the Master who has taught me all I know." I spoke, God wot, as if my knowledge would have burst through the covers of an Encyclopaedia—"Three years ago I could not speak a word of French. Fancy. And now——"

"You still talk like an Englishman," said Blanquette.

Looking back now on those absurd far-off days, I wonder whether after all I did not learn as much that was vital from Blanquette as from Paragot. Her downright, direct, unimaginative common-sense amounted to genius. At the time I preferred genius in the fantastic form which inflated my bubbles of self-conceit, instead of bursting them; but in after life one has a high appreciation of the burster.

In the moment's mortification, however, I recriminated.

"You make worse mistakes than I do. You say 'j'allons faire,' when you ought to say 'je vais faire' and I heard you talk about une chien."

"That is because I have no education," replied Blanquette, with her grave humility. "I speak like the peasants; not like instructed people—not like the Master, for instance."

"No one could speak like the Master," said I.

There was a long silence. Blanquette hugged her knees and Narcisse snored at her feet, accepting her as vagabond comrade. I lay on my back and forgot Blanquette; and out of the intricacies of myriad leaf and branch against the sky wove pictures of Merovingian women. There where the black branches cut a lozenge of blue was the pale Queen Galeswinthe lying on her bed. Through yon dark cluster of under-leaves one could discern the strangler sent by King Hilperic to murder her. And in that radiant patch silhouetted clear and cold and fierce in loveliness was Fredegonde waiting for the King. She was a glittering sword of a woman whose slayings fascinated me. I much preferred her to the gentler Brunehilde whose form I saw outlined in a soft shadow of green. I tried to find frames in my aerial gallery for Brunehilde's two daughters, Ingonde and Chlodoswinde, especially the latter whose name appealed to my acquired taste for odd nomenclature, and the conscious effort brought me back to the modern world, and the sound of Blanquette's voice.

"Tu sais, Asticot, I can wash the Master's shirts and mend his clothes. I can also make his coffee in the morning."

Her eyes had a far-away look. She was living in the land of day dreams even as I had been.

"I always prepare the Master's breakfast," said I jealously.

"It is the woman's duty."

"I don't care," I retorted.

She unclasped her hands, and coming forward on to her knees and bending over me, brushed a strand of hair from my forehead.

"I will prepare yours too, Asticot," she said gently, "and you will see how nice that will be. Men can't do these things where there is a woman to look after them. It is not proper."

So, flattered in my masculinity, being ranked with Paragot as a "man," I took a sultanesque view of the situation and graciously consented to her proposed ministrations.

* * * * *

Paragot came back triumphant from Aix-les-Bains. Hadn't he told me he had been inspired to go there? The man who played the violin at the open-air Restaurant by the Lac de Bourget had just that day fallen ill. The result, a week's engagement for Blanquette and himself.

"But, my child," said he, "you will have to suffer an inharmonious son of Satan who makes a discordant Hades out of an execrable piano. He had the impudence to tell me that he came from the Conservatoire. He, with as much ear for music as an organ-grinder's monkey! He said to me—Paragot—that I played the violin not too badly! I foresee a hideous doom overhanging that young man, my children. Before the week is out I will throw him into the maw of his soul-devouring piano. Ha! my children, give me to drink, for I am thirsty."

Mindful of my dignity as a man, I glanced at Blanquette, who went into the cafe obediently, while I stayed with my master. It was a sweet moment. Paragot gripped me by the shoulder.

"My son, while Blanquette and I work, which Carlyle says is the noblest function of man, but concerning which I have my own ideas, you cannot live in red-shirted, pomaded and otherwise picturesque and studious laziness. Look," he cried, pointing to a round, flat object wrapped in paper which he had brought with him. "Do you know what that is?"

"That," said I, "is a cake."

"It is a tambourine," said my master.

* * * * *

The next day found us in the garden of the little lake-side restaurant at Aix-les-Bains playing at lunch time. The young man at the piano whom I had expected to see a fiend in human shape was a harmless consumptive fellow who played with the sweet patience of a musical box. He shook hands with me and called me "cher collegue," and before nightfall told me of a disastrous love-story in consequence of which, were it not for his mother, he would drown himself in the lake. He effaced himself before Paragot much as the bellows-blower does before the organist. His politeness to Blanquette would have put to the blush any young man at the Bon Marche or the Louvre. His name was Laripet.

I was ordered to make modest use of my tambourine until sufficient instruction from Paragot should authorise him to let me loose with it; I was merely to add to the picturesqueness of the group on the platform, and at intervals to go the round of the guests collecting money. I liked this, for I could then jingle the tambourine without fear of reproof. You have no idea what an ordeal it is for a boy to have a tambourine which he must not jingle. But the shady charm of the garden compensated for the repression of noisy instincts. After months of tramping in the broiling sun, free and perfect as it was, the easy loafing life seemed sweet. We went little into the gay town itself. For my part I did not like it. Aix-les-Bains consisted of a vast Enchanted Garden set in a valley, great mountains hemming it round. Skirting the Enchanted Garden were shady streets and mysterious palaces, some having gardens of their own of a secondary enchantment, and shops where jewels and perfumes and white ties and flowers and other objects of strange luxury were exhibited in the windows. But these took the humble place of mere accessories to the Enchanted Garden, jealously guarded against Asticot by great high gilded railings and by blue-coated, silver-buttoned functionaries at the gates. Within rose two Wonder Houses gorgeous with dome and pinnacle, bewildering with gold and snow, displaying before the aching sight the long cool stretch of verandahs, and offering the baffling glimpse of vast interiors whence floated the dim sound of music and laughter; and bright, happy beings, in wondrous raiment, wandered in and out unchallenged, unconcerned, as if the Wonder Houses were their birthright.

I, a shabby, penniless little Peri, stood at the gilded gates disconsolate. I didn't like it. The mystery of the unknown beatitude within the Wonder Houses oppressed me to faintness. It was unimaginable. Through the leaves of a tree I could see the pale Queen Galeswinthe; but through those gay enchanting walls I could see nothing. They baulked my soul. When I tried to explain my feelings to Paragot he looked at me in his kind, sad way and shook his head.

"My wonder-headed little Asticot," said he, "within those gewgaw Wonder Houses——" Then he stopped abruptly and waved me away, "No. It's a devilish good thing for you to have something your imagination boggles at. Stick to the Ideal, my son, and hug the Unexplained. The people who have solved the Riddle of the Universe at fifteen are bowled over by the Enigma of their cook at fifty. Plug your life as full as it can hold with fantasy and fairy-tale, and thank God that your soul is baulked by the Mysteries of the Casinos of Aix-les-Bains."

"But what do they do there, Master?" I persisted.

"The men worship strange goddesses and the women run after false gods, and all practice fascinating idolatries."

I did not in the least know what he meant, which was what he intended. When I consulted Blanquette one morning, as she and I alone were sauntering down the long shady avenue which connects the town with the little-port of the lake, she said that people went into the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs, the two Wonder Houses aforesaid, merely to gamble. I pooh-poohed the notion.

"The Master says they are Temples of great strange gods, where people worship."

"Gods! What an idea! Il n'y a que le bon Dieu," quoth Blanquette.

"You have evidently not heard of the gods of Greece and Rome, Jupiter and Apollo and Venus and Bacchus."

"Ah, tiens," said Blanquette. "I have heard Italians swear 'Corpo di Bacco.' That is why?"

"Of course," said I in my grandest manner, "and there are heaps of other gods besides."

"All the same," she objected, "I always thought the Italians were good Catholics."

"So they may be," said I, "but that doesn't prove that there are not beautiful gods and goddesses and idols and shrines in the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs."

As this was unanswerable Blanquette diverted the conversation to the less transcendental topic of the premature baldness of Monsieur Laripet.

* * * * *

If the doings of the bright happy beings were hidden from me while they worshipped in the Casinos, I at least met them at close quarters in the garden of the Restaurant du Lac. In some respects this garden resembled that of the Restaurant du Soleil at Chambery. There was a verandah round the restaurant itself, there were trees in joyous leafage, there were little tables, and there were waiters hurrying to and fro with napkins under their arms. But that was all the resemblance. Our little platform stood against the railings separating the garden from the quay. Behind us shimmered the blue lake, great mountains rising behind; away on the right, embosomed in the green mountainside, flashed the white Chateau de Hautecombe. Always in mid-lake a tiny paddle-steamer churned up a wake of white foam. On the quay itself stood an enchanting little box—a camera obscura—to which I as a fellow artist was given the entree by the proprietor, and in which one could see heavenly pictures of the surrounding landscape; there were also idle cabs with white awnings, and fezzed Turks perspiring under furs and rugs which they hawked for sale. In front of us, within the garden, a joyous crowd of the radiantly raimented laughed over dainty food set on snowy cloths. Here and there a lobster struck a note of colour, or a ray of sunlight striking through the red or gold translucencies of wine in a glass: which distracted my attention from my orchestral duties and caused an absent-minded jingle of my tambourine.

What I loved most was to make my round among the tables and mingle closely with the worshippers. Of the men, clean and correct in their perfectly fitting flannels, sometimes stern, sometimes mocking, sometimes pettishly cross, I was rather shy; but I was quite at my ease with the women, even with those whose many rings and jewels, violent perfumes and daring effects of dress made me instinctively differentiate from their quieter and less bejewelled sisters. Blanquette laughingly called me a "petit polisson" and said that I made soft eyes at them. Perhaps I did. When one is a hundred and fifty it is hard to realise that one's little scarecrow boy's eyes may have touched the hearts of women. But the appeal of the outstretched tambourine was rarely refused.

"Get out of this," the man would say.

"But no. Remain. Il a l'air si drole—what is your name?"

"Je m'appelle Asticot, Madame, a votre service."

This always amused the lady. She would search through an invariably empty purse.

"Give him fifty centimes."

And the man would throw a silver piece into the tambourine.

Once I was in luck. The lady found a ten-franc piece in her purse.

"That is all I have."

"I have no change," growled the man.

"If I give you this," said the lady, "what would you do with it?"

"If Madame would tell me where to get it, I would buy a photograph of Madame," said I, with one of Paragot's "inspirations"; for she was very pretty.

"Voila," she laughed putting the gold into my hand. "Tu me fais la cour, maintenant. Come and see me at the Villa Marcelle and I will give you a photograph gratis."

But Paragot when I repeated the conversation to him called the lady shocking names, and forbade me to go within a mile of the Villa Marcelle. So I did not get the photograph.

The next best thing I loved was to see Blanquette's eyes glitter when I returned to the platform and poured silver and copper into her lap. She uttered strange little exclamations under her breath, and her fingers played caressingly with the coins.

"We gain more here in a day than Pere Paragot did in a week. It is wonderful. N'est-ce pas, Maitre?" she said one morning.

Paragot tuned his violin and looked down on her.

"Money pleases you, Blanquette?"

"Of course."

She counted the takings sou by sou.

"Yet you did not want to accept your just share."

"What you make me take is not just, Master," she said, simply.

Much as she loved money, her sense of justice rebelled against Paragot's division of the takings—a third for Laripet, a third for Blanquette and a third for himself which he generously shared with me. Pere Paragot used to sweep into his pockets every sou and Blanquette had to subsist on whatever he chose to allow for joint expenses. Her new position of independence was a subject for much inward pride, mingled however with a consciousness of her own unworthiness. Monsieur Laripet, yes; she would grant that he was entitled to the same as the Master; but herself—no. Was not the Master the great artist, and she but the clumsy strummer? Was he not also a man, with more requirements than she—tobacco, absinthe, brandy and the like?

"A third is too much," she added.

"If you argue," said he, "I will divide it in halves for Laripet and yourself, and I won't touch a penny."

"That would be idiotic," said Blanquette.

"It would be in keeping with life generally," he answered. "In a comic opera one thing is not more idiotic than another. Yes, Monsieur Laripet, we will give them Funiculi, Funicula. I once drove in coffin nails to that tune in Verona. Now we will set people eating to it in Aix-les-Bains—we, Monsieur Laripet, you and I, who ought to be the petted minions of great capitals! It is a comic opera."

"One has to get bread or one would starve," said Blanquette pursuing her argument. "And to get bread one must have money. If I had all the money you would not eat bread."

"I should eat brioches," laughed Paragot quoting Marie Antoinette.

"You always laugh at me, Master," said Blanquette wistfully.

Paragot drew his bow across the strings.

"There is nothing in this comical universe I don't laugh at, my little Blanquette," said he. "I am like good old Montaigne—I rather laugh than weep, because to laugh is the more dignified."

Laripet struck a chord on the piano. Paragot joined in and played three bars. Then he stopped short. There was not the vestige of a laugh on his face. It was deadly white, and his eyes were those of a man who sees a ghost.

The four bright happy beings, two ladies and two men who had just entered the garden and at whom his stare was directed, took no notice, but followed a bowing maitre d'hotel to a table that had been reserved for them.

I sprang to the platform, on the edge of which I had been squatting at Blanquette's feet.

"Are you ill, Master?"

He started. "Ill? Of course not. Pardon, Monsieur Laripet. Recommencons."

He plunged into the merry tune and fiddled with all his might, as if nothing had happened. But I saw his nostrils quivering and the sweat running down his face into his beard.



CHAPTER VIII

WHEN Funiculi Funicula was over he sat on the wooden chair provided for him and wiped his face. His hands shook. He beckoned me to come near.

"Do I look too grotesque a mountebank Tomfool?" he asked in English.

He was wearing the pearl-buttoned velveteen suit whose magnificence he had enhanced by newly purchased steel-buckled shoes and black stockings, and to a less bigoted worshipper than me I suppose he must have looked a mountebank Tomfool; but I only gaped at his question.

"Do I?" he repeated almost fiercely.

"You look beautiful, Master," said I.

He passed his lean fingers wearily over his eyes. "Pardon, my little Asticot. There are things in Heaven and Earth etc. Myriads of Mysteries. As many in the heart of man as in your Wonder Houses yonder. Get me some brandy. Three petits verres poured into a tumbler."

I went off to the restaurant and obtained the drink. When I returned they were playing the mocking chorus that runs through "Orphee aux Enfers."

The number over, Paragot drained the glass at one gulp. The company broke into unusual applause. Some one shouted "Bis!"

"Get me some more," said he. "Do you know why I chose that tune?"

"No, Master."

"Because twenty devils entered into me and played leapfrog over one another."

"I am very fond of that little tune. It is so gay," said Blanquette, as if she were introducing a fresh topic of conversation.

"I detest it," said my master.

The maitre d'hotel came up and asked that the chorus should be played again as an encore. I fetched Paragot's drink and having set it down beside him on the platform, went round with my tambourine. When I reached the table at which the four new comers were seated I found that they spoke English. They were a young man in a straw hat, a young girl, a forbidding looking man of forty with a beaky nose, and the loveliest lady I have ever seen in my life. She had the complexion of a sea-shell. Her eyes were the blue of glaciers, and they shone cold and steadfast; but her lips were kind. Her black hair under the large white tulle hat had the rare bluish tinge, looking as if cigarette smoke had been blown through it. Small and exquisitely made she sat the princess of my boyish dreams.

"I call it a ripping tune," cried the young girl.

"I hate it more than any other tune in the world," said the lovely lady with a shiver.

Her voice was like a peal of bells or running water or whatever silvery sounding things you will.

"It is very absurd to have such prejudices," said the beaky-nosed man of forty. He spoke like a Frenchman, and like a very disagreeable Frenchman. How dared he address my princess in that tone?

I extended my tambourine.

"Qu'est-ce que vous desirez?" asked the straw-hatted young man in an accent as Britannic as the main deck of the Bellerophon.

"Anything that the ladies will kindly give me, Sir," I replied in our native tongue.

"Hullo! English? What are you knocking about France for?"

I glanced at the lovely lady. She was crumbling bread and not taking the least notice of me. I was piqued.

"My Master thinks it the best way to teach me philosophy, Sir," said I politely. If I had not learned much philosophy from him I had at least learned politeness. The lady looked up with a smile. The young girl exclaimed that either my remark or myself—I forget which—was ripping. I paid little heed to her. I have always disregarded the people of one adjective; they seem poverty-stricken to one who has sunned himself in the wealth of Paragot's epithets.

"Your master is the gentleman in the pearl buttons?" enquired the young man.

"Yes, Sir."

"What's his name?"

"Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot, Sir," said I so proudly that the lovely princess laughed.

"I must look at him," she said turning round in her chair.

I too glanced at the familiar group on the platform: Laripet with his back to us, working his arms and shoulders at the piano; Blanquette seated on the other side, thrumming away at the zither on her lap; Narcisse lolling his tongue in that cynical grin of his; and Paragot fiddling in front, like a fiddler possessed, his clear eyes fixed on the lady in a most uncanny stare.

When she turned again, she shivered once more. She did not look up but went on crumbling bread. It shocked me to notice that the pink of her sea-shell face had gone and that her fingers trembled. Then a wild conjecture danced through my brain and I forgot my tambourine.

"You still here?" laughed the young man. "What are you waiting for?"

I started. "I beg your pardon, Sir," said I moving away. He laughed and called me back.

"Here are two francs to buy a philosophy book."

"And here are five sous not to come and worry us again," said the older man in French. While I was wondering why they tolerated such a disagreeable man in the party my beautiful lady's fingers flew to the gilt chain purse by her side. "And here are five francs because you are English!" she exclaimed; and as she held me for a second with her eyes I saw in them infinite depths of sadness and longing.

When I returned to the platform the piece had just been brought to an end. Paragot poured his second brandy down his throat and sat with his head in his hands. I shed, as usual, my takings into Blanquette's lap. On seeing the five-franc piece her eyes equalled it in size.

"Tiens! Cent sous! who gave it you?"

I explained. The most beautiful lady in the world. Paragot raised his head and looked at me haggardly.

"Why did she give you five francs?"

"Because I was English, she said."

"Did she talk to you?"

"Yes, Master, and I have never heard anyone speak so beautifully."

Paragot made no answer, but began to tune his violin.

During the next interval my quartette left the restaurant. I ran to the gate, and bowed as they passed by.

The young fellow gave me a friendly nod, but the lovely lady swept out cold-eyed, looking neither to right nor left. A large two-horsed cab with a gay awning awaited them on the quay. As my lady entered, her skirt uplifted ever so little disclosed the most delicately shaped, tiny foot that has ever been attached to woman, and then I felt sure.

"Those little feet so adored." The haunting phrase leaped to my brain and I stood staring at the departing carriage athrill with excitement.

It was Joanna—lovelier than I had pictured her in my Lotus Club dreams, more gracious than Ingonde or Chlodoswinde or any of the belles dames du temps jadis whose ballade by Maitre Francois Villon my master had but lately made me learn by heart and whose names were so many "sweet symphonies." It was Joanna, "pure and ravishing as an April dawn"; Joanna beloved of Paragot in those elusive days when I could not picture him, before he smashed his furniture with a crusader's mace and started on his wanderings under the guidance of Henri Quatre. It was Joanna whom he had an agonized desire to see in Madrid and whose silvery English voice he had longed to hear. And I, Asticot, had seen her and had heard her silvery voice. Among boys assuredly I was the most blessed.

But Paragot seemed that day of all men the most miserable, and I more dog-like than Narcisse in my sympathy with his moods, almost lifted up my nose and whined for woe. All my thrill died away. I felt guilty, oddly ashamed of myself. I took a pessimistic view of life. What, thought I, are Joannas sent into the world for, save to play havoc with men's happiness? Maitre Francois Villon was quite right. Samson, Sardanapalus, David, Maitre Francois himself, all came to grief over Joannas. "Bien heureux qui rien n'y a." Happy is he who has nothing to do with 'em.

As soon as we were free Paragot left us, and went off by himself; whereupon I, mimetic as an ape, rejected the humble Blanquette's invitation to take a walk with her, and strolled moodily into the town with Narcisse at my heels. A dog fight or two and a Byronic talk with a little towheaded flower-seller who gave me a dusty bunch of cyclamen—as a porte-bonheur she said prettily—whiled away the time until the people began to drift out of the Wonder Houses to dress for dinner. I lingered at the gates, going from one to the other, in the unavowed hope, little idiot that I was, of seeing Joanna. At last, at the main entrance to the Villa des Fleurs I caught sight of Paragot. He had changed from the velveteens into his vagabond clothes, and was evidently on the same errand as myself. I did not venture near, respecting his desire for solitude, but lounged at the corner of the main street and the road leading down to the Villa, playing with Narcisse and longing for something to happen. You see it is not given every day to an impressionable youngster, his brain stuffed with poetry, pictures, and such like delusive visionary things, to tumble head first into the romance of the actual world. For the moment the romance was at a standstill. I longed for a further chapter. It was a pity, I reflected, that we did not live in Merovingian times. Then Paragot and I could have lain in wait with our horses—everyone had horses in knightly days—and when Joanna came near, we should have killed the beaky-nosed man, and Paragot would have swung her on his saddlebow and we should have galloped away to his castle in the next kingdom, where Paragot, and Joanna and I, with Blanquette to be tirewoman to our princess, would have lived happy ever after. What I expected to get for myself, heaven knows: it did not strike me that perennial contemplation of another's bliss might wear out the stoutest altruism.

Then suddenly out of the door of the Villa came two ladies, one of whom I recognised as Joanna and the other as the young girl of the luncheon party. The facade of the villa stretches across the road and is about a hundred yards from the corner. I saw Paragot stand rigid, and make no sign of recognition as she passed him by, with her head up, like a proud queen. I felt an odd pain at my heart. Why was she so cruel? Her eyes were of the blue of glaciers, but all the rest of her face had seemed tender and kind. I was aware, in a general way, that radiantly attired ladies do not shake hands with ragamuffins in public places, but you must please to remember that I no more considered Paragot a ragamuffin than I thought Blanquette the equal of Joanna. Paragot to me was the peer of kings.

I turned away sorrowing and sauntered up the little street that leads to the Etablissement des Bains. I was disappointed in Joanna and did not want to see her again. She should be punished for her cruelty. I sat down on one of the benches on the Place, and looking at the Mairie clock stolidly thought of supper. They made famous onion soup at the little auberge where we lodged, and Paragot, himself a connoisseur, had pronounced their tripes a la mode de Caen superior to anything that Mrs. Housekeeper had executed for the Lotus Club. Besides I was getting hungry. With youth a full heart rarely compensates an empty stomach, and now even my heart was growing empty.

Presently who should emerge into the Place but the two ladies. I sat on my bench and watched them cross. They were evidently going up the hill to one of the hotels behind the Etablissement. In her white dress and white tulle hat coloured by three great roses, with her beautiful hair and sea-shell face and swaying supple figure, she looked the incarnation of all that was worshipful in woman. I could have knelt and prayed to her. Why was she so cruel to my master? I regarded her with mingled reproach and adoration. But the mixed feeling gave place to one of amazement when I saw her separate from her companion, who continued her way up the hill, and strike straight across the Place in my direction.

She was coming to me.

I rose, took off my ragged hat and twirled it in my fingers, which was the way that Paragot had taught me to be polite in France.

"I want to speak to you," she said quickly. "You are the boy with the tambourine, aren't you?"

"Yes, Mademoiselle."

Paragot had threatened to shoot me if I called any young lady "Miss."

"What is the name of the—the gentleman who played the violin?"

"Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot."

"That is not his real name?"

"No, Mademoiselle," said I.

"What is it?"

"I don't know," said I. "This is a new name; he has only had it a week."

"How long have you known him?"

"A long, long time, Mademoiselle. He adopted me when I was quite small."

"You are not very big now," she said with a smile.

"I am nearly sixteen," said I proudly.

To herself she murmured, "I don't think I can be mistaken."

In a different tone she continued, "You spoke some nonsense about his being your master and teaching you philosophy."

"It wasn't nonsense," I replied stoutly. "He teaches me everything. He teaches me history and Shakespeare and Francois Villon, and painting and Schopenhauer and the tambourine."

Her pretty lips pouted in a little gasp of astonishment as she leaned on her long parasol and looked at me.

"You are the oddest little freak I have come across for a long time."

I smiled happily. She could have called me anything opprobrious in that silvery voice of hers and I should have smiled. Now I come to think of it "smile" is the wrong word. The man smiles, the boy grins. I grinned happily.

"Has your master always played the violin in orchestras like this?"

"Oh, no, Mademoiselle," said I. "Of course not. He only began four days ago."

"What was his employment till then?"

"Why, none," said I.

It seemed absurd for Paragot to have employment like a man behind a shop-counter. I remembered acquaintances of my mother's who were "out of employment" and their unspeakable vileness. Then, echo of Paragot (for what else could I be?), I added: "We just walk about Europe for the sake of my education. My master said I was to learn Life from the Book of the Universe."

The lovely lady sat down.

"I believe you are nothing more nor less than an amazing little parrot. I'm sure you speak exactly like your master."

"Oh, no, Mademoiselle," said I modestly, "I wish I could. There is no one who can talk like him in all the world."

She gave me a long, steady, half-frightened look out of her blue eyes. I know now that I had struck a chord of memory; that I had established beyond question in her mind Paragot's identity with the man who had loved her in days past; that old things sweet and terrifying surged within her heart. Even then, holding their secret, I saw that she had recognised Paragot.

"You must think me a very inquisitive lady," she said, with a forced smile; "but you must forgive me. What you said this morning about your master teaching you philosophy interested me greatly. One thing I should like to know," and she dug at the gravel with the point of her parasol, "and that I hardly like to ask. Is he—are you—very poor?"

"Poor?" It was a totally new idea. "Why, no, Mademoiselle; he has a great bank in London which sends him bank-notes whenever he wants them. I once went with him. He has heaps of money."

The lady rose. "So this going about as a mountebank is only a masquerade," she said, with a touch of scorn.

"He did it to help Blanquette," said I.

"Blanquette?"

"The girl who plays the zither. My master has adopted her too."

"Oh, has he?" said the lady, the blue of her eyes becoming frosty again. I dimly perceived that in mentioning Blanquette I had been indiscreet. In what respect, I know not. I had intended my remark to be a tribute to Paragot's wide-heartedness. She took it as if I had told her of a crime. Women, even the loveliest of dream Joannas, are a mystifying race. "Bien heureux qui rien n'y a."

"Goodbye," she said.

"Goodbye, Mademoiselle."

She must have read mortification in my face, for she turned after a step or two, and said more kindly.

"You're not responsible, anyway." Then she paused, as if hesitating, while I stood hat in hand, as I had done during our conversation.

"I wonder if I can trust you."

She took her purse from the bag hanging at her waist and drew out a gold piece.

"I will give you this if you promise not to tell your Master that you have spoken to me this afternoon."

I shrank back. Remember I had been for three years in the hourly companionship of a man of lofty soul for all his waywardness, and he had modelled me like wax to his liking. The gold piece was tempting. I had never owned a gold piece in my life—and all the frost had melted from Joanna's eyes. But I felt I should be dishonored in taking money.

"I promise without that," I said.

She put the coin back in her purse and held out her delicately gloved hand.

"Promise with this, then," she said.

And then I knew for the first time what an exquisite sensitive thing is a sweet, high-bred lady. Only such a one could have performed that act of grace. She converted me into a besotted little imbecile weltering in bliss. I would have pledged my soul's welfare to execute any phantasmagoric behest she had chosen to ordain.

"I am leaving Aix tomorrow morning—but if you are ever in any trouble—by the way what is your name?"

"Asticot Pradel," said I, reflecting for the first time that though Polydore Pradel had perished and Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot reigned in his stead, my own borrowed or invented name remained unaltered. Augustus Smith lingered in my memory as a vague, mythical creature of no account.

Joanna smiled. "You are a little masquerader too. Well—if you are ever in any trouble, and I can help you—remember the Comtesse de Verneuil, 7 Avenue de Messine, Paris."

This offer of friendship took my breath away. I grinned stupidly at her. I was also puzzled.

"What is the matter?" she laughed.

"The Comtesse de Verneuil?—but you are English," I stammered.

"Yes. But my husband is French. He is the Comte de Verneuil. Remember 7 Avenue de Messine."

She nodded graciously and turned away leaving a stupefied Asticot twirling his hat. Her husband! And I had been calling her Mademoiselle all the time! And I had been weaving fairy tales of our riding off with her to Paragot's castle! She was married. Her husband was the Comte de Verneuil! Worse than that. Her husband was the disagreeable beaky-nosed man who gave me five sous to go away.

A sense of desolation, disaster, disillusionment overwhelmed me. I sat on the bench and burst out crying and Narcisse jumped up and licked my face.



CHAPTER IX

IT was nearly midnight when Paragot returned to our inn on the outskirts of the town. He reeled up to the doorstep where I sat in the moonlight awaiting his return.

"Why aren't you in bed?"

"It was too hot and I couldn't sleep, Master," said I. As a matter of fact I had been dismally failing to compose a poem on Joanna after the style of Maitre Francois Villon. Just as youthful dramatists begin with a five act tragedy, so do youthful poets begin with a double ballade. In order to eke out the slender stock of rhymes to Joanna, I had to drag in Indianna which somehow didn't fit. I remember also that she showered her favours like manna, which was not very original.

Paragot seated himself heavily by my side.

"The moon has a baleful influence, my son," said he in a thick voice. "And you'll come under it if you sit too long beneath its effulgence. That's what has happened to me. It makes one talk unmentionable imbecility."

He just missed concertina-ing the last two words, and looked at me with an air of solemn triumph.

"It isn't the Man in the Moon's fault, my little Asticot," he continued. "I've been having a very interesting conversation with him. He is a most polite fellow. He said if I would go up and join him he would make room for me. It's all a lie, you know, about his having been sent there for gathering sticks on a Sunday. He went of his own accord, because it was the only place where he could be four thousand miles away from any woman. Think of it, little Asticot of my heart. There are lots of lies told about the moon, he says. He looks down on the earth and sees all of us little worms wriggling in and out and over one another and thinking ourselves so important and he cracks his sides with laughing; and your bald-headed idiots with spyglasses take the cracks for mountain ranges and volcanoes. I'm going to live in the moon, away from female feminine women, and if you are good my son, you shall come too."

I explained to him as delicately as I could that I should regard such a change rather as a punishment than as a reward. He broke into a laugh.

"You too—with the milk of the feeding-bottle still wet on your lips? The trail of the petticoat's over us all! What has been putting the sex feminine into your little turnip-head? Have you fallen in love with Blanquette?"

"No, Master," said I. "When I fall in love it will be with a very beautiful lady."

Paragot pointed upwards. "I see another crack in my friend's sides. We all fall in love with beautiful ladies, my poor Asticot, one after the other, plunging into destruction with the comic sheep-headedness of the muttons of Panurge. Another woolly one over? Ho! ho! laughs the man in the moon, and crack go his sides."

The door opened behind us and the proprietor of the auberge appeared on the threshold.

"Give me half a litre of red wine, Monsieur Bonnivard," cried Paragot. "I am the descendant of Maitre Jehan Cotard whose throat was so dry that in this world he was never known to spit."

"Bien, Monsieur," said the patron.

Paragot filled his porcelain pipe and lit it with clumsy fingers, and did not speak till his wine was brought.

"My son, we are leaving Aix the first thing in the morning."

I started up in alarm. We had not finished our engagement at the Restaurant du Lac.

"I care no more for the Restaurant du Lac than for the rest of the idiot universe," he declared.

"But Blanquette—it would break her heart."

"All women's hearts can be mended for twopence."

"And men's?"

"They have to go about with them broken, my son, and the pieces clank and jangle and chink and jingle inside like a crate of broken crockery. We leave Aix tomorrow."

"But Master," I cried, "there is no necessity."

"What do you mean?"

"She is leaving Aix herself tomorrow."

"She!" he shouted, quite sober for the moment. "Who the devil do you mean by 'she'?"

I upbraided myself for a vain idiot. Here was I on the point of breaking my oath sworn on Joanna's hand. I felt ashamed and frightened. He grasped my shoulder roughly.

"Who do you mean by 'she'? Tell me."

"The Lady of the Lake, Master," said I.

He looked at me for a moment keenly, then relaxed his grip and shrugged his shoulders with the ghost of a laugh.

"If you see holes in ladders in this perspicacious fashion you'll have to forsake the paths of art for the higher walks of the Prefecture of Police."

He puffed silently at his pipe for a few moments and then turning his head away asked me in a low voice:

"How can you know that she is leaving tomorrow?"

I lied for the first time to Paragot.

"I overheard her say so while I was waiting with the tambourine."

"Sure?"

"Quite sure."

This seemed to satisfy him, to my great relief. How my poor little oath would have fared under cross examination I don't know. At any rate honour was saved. Paragot laid aside his pipe and looked wistfully into the past over his wine bowl.

"The Lady of the Lake," he murmured. "I have called her many things good and bad in my time, but never that. You are a genius, my little Asticot."

He finished his wine slowly, holding the bowl in both hands. The moon smiled at us in a friendly way, sailing high over the mountains. There entered my head the novel reflection that he was smiling on all men alike, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust. He was smiling just the same on Joanna's beaky-nosed husband.

Her husband! Something caught at my heart. Did Paragot know? I debated anxiously in my mind whether I should impart the disastrous information. If he knew that she was a married woman he would put foolish thoughts out of his head, for it was only in Merovingian and such like romantic epochs that men loved other men's wives. I touched him timidly on the arm.

"Master,—I overheard something else."

"Did you?"

"She is married, and that is her husband."

"Did he take off his hat?"

"No, Master."

"He is a scaly-headed vulture," said Paragot dreamily.

"He only gave me five sous," said I, relieved and yet disappointed at finding that my disclosure produced no agitation.

Paragot fumbled in his pocket. "We will not batten on his charity," said he, and he cast three or four coppers into the silent street. They crashed, rolled and fell over with little chinks. Narcisse who had hitherto been asleep trotted out and sniffed at them. Paragot laughed; then checked himself, and holding up a long-nailed forefinger looked at me with an air of awful solemnity.

"Listen to the wisdom of Paragot. There is not a woman worth a clean man that does not marry a scaly-headed vulture."

He murmured an incoherence or two, and there was then a long silence. Presently his head knocked sharply against the lintel. I roused him.

"Master, it won't be good for us to sit any longer in the moonshine."

He turned a glazed look on me. "Minerva's Owl," said he, "I am quite aware of it."

He rose and lumbered into the inn, and I, having guided him up the narrow staircase to his room, descended to my bunk in a corner of the tiny salon. My sleeping arrangements were always sketchy.

In the morning when I questioned him as to our departure from Aix, he affected not to understand, and told me that I had been dreaming and that the moonshine had affected my brain.

"Consider, my son," said he, "that when I returned last night, I found you fast asleep on the doorstep, and you never woke up till this morning."

From this I gathered that for the second time he had dosed the book of his life to my prying though innocent eyes. I also learned the peculiar difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober.

When our engagement at Aix was at an end, the proprietor of the restaurant desired to renew it, but Paragot declined. The sick violinist whom we had replaced had recovered and Paragot had seen him on the quay looking through the railings with the hungry eyes of a sort of musical Enoch Arden. Blanquette had some little difficulty in preventing him from rushing out there and then and delivering his fiddle into the other's hands. It was necessary to be reasonable, she said.

"Nom de Dieu!" he cried, "if I were reasonable I should be lost. Reason would set me down in Paris with gloves and an umbrella. Reason would implant a sunny smile on my face above the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour. It would marry me to the daughter of one of my confreres at the Academie des Beaux Arts. It would make me procreate my species, cre nom de Dieu! It would make me send you and Asticot and Narcisse to the devil. If I were reasonable I should not be Paragot. The man who lives according to reason has the heart of a sewing-machine."

But out of regard for Blanquette he served his time faithfully at the Restaurant du Lac, and reconciled his conscience with reason by giving the hungry violinist his own share of the takings. It was only when Blanquette suggested the further exploitation of Aix that he showed his Gascon obduracy. If there was one place in the world where the soul sickened and festered it was Aix-les-Bains. Mammon was King thereof and Astarte Queen. He was going to fiddle no more for sons of Belial and daughters of Aholah. He had set out to travel to the Heart of Truth, and the way thither did not lead through the Inner Shrine of Dagon and Astaroth. Blanquette did not in the least know what he was talking about, and I only had a vague glimmer of his meaning. But I see now that his sensitive nature chafed at the false position. Among the simple village folk he was a personality, compelling awe and admiration. Among the idlers of Aix, whom in his loftiness he despised, he was but the fiddling mountebank to whom any greasy wallower in riches could cast a disdainful franc.

So once more we took to the high road, and Paragot threw off the depressing burden of Mammon (Joanna) and became his irresponsible self again.

I have but confused memories of our fantastic journeyings. Stretches of long white road and blazing sun. Laughing valleys and corn fields and white farmsteads among the trees. Now and then a village fete or wedding at which we played to the enthusiasm of the sober vested peasantry. Nights passed in barns, deserted byres, on the floor of cottages and infinitesimal cafes. Hours of idleness by the wayside after the midday meal, when the four of us sat round the fare provided by Blanquette, black bread, cheese, charcuterie and the eternal bottle of thin wine. It was rough, but there was plenty. Paragot saw to that, in spite of Blanquette's economical endeavours. Sometimes he would sleep while she and I chatted in low voices so as not to wake him. She told me of her wanderings with the old man, the hardness of her former life. Often she had cried herself to sleep for hunger, shivering in wet rags the long night through. Now it was all changed: she ate too much and was getting as fat as a pig. Did I not think so? Voila! In her artless way she guided my finger into her waistband and then swelled herself out like the frog in the fable to prove the increase in her girth. She spoke in awestricken whispers of the Master himself. Save that he was utterly kind, impulsive, generous, boastful, and according to her untrained ear a violinist of the first quality, she knew not what manner of man he was. She had enough imagination to feel vaguely that he had dropped from vast spaces into her narrow world. But he was a mystery.

Once, the previous summer, as she was resting by the roadside with the old man, even as we were doing then, an amiable person, she told me, with easel and stool and paint-box, came along and requested their permission to make an oil sketch of them. While he painted he conversed, telling them of Sicily whither he was going and of Paris whence he came. In a dim way she associated him with Paragot. The two had the same trick of voice and manner, and held unusual views as to the value of five francs. But the amiable painter had been a gentleman elegantly dressed, such as she saw in the large towns driving in cabs and consuming drinks in expensive cafes, whereas the Master was attired like a peasant and slept in barns and did everything that the elegantly dressed gentlemen in cafes did not do. At all events she was penetrated with the consciousness of a loftier mind and spirit, and she contented herself even as I did with being his devoted slave.

Often too she spoke of her own ambitions. If she were rich she would have a little house of her own. Perhaps for company she would like someone to stay with her. She would keep it so clean, and would mend all the linen, and do the cooking, and save to go to market, would never leave it from one year's end to the other. A good sleek cat to curl up by the fireside would complete her felicity.

"But Blanquette!" I would cry. "The sun and the stars and the high road and the smell of spring and the fields and the freedom of this life—you would miss them."

"J'aime le menage, moi," she would reply, shaking her head.

Of all persons I have ever met the least imbued with the vagabond instinct was the professional vagabond Blanquette de Veau.

Sometimes, instead of sleeping, Paragot would talk to us from the curious store of his learning, always bent on my education and desirous too of improving the mind of Blanquette. Sometimes it was Blanquette who slept, Narcisse huddled up against her, while Paragot and I read our tattered books, or sketched, or discussed the theme which I had written overnight as my evening task. It was an odd school; but though I could not have passed any examination held by the sons of men, I verily believe I had a wider culture, in the truest sense of the word, than most youths of my age. I craved it, it is true, and I drank from an inexhaustible source; but few men have the power of directing that source so as to supply the soul's need of a boy of sixteen.

Well, well—I suppose Allah Paragot is great and Mahomet Asticot is his prophet.

* * * * *

We wandered and fiddled and zithered and tambourined through France till the chills and rains of autumn rendered our vagabondage less merry. The end of October found us fulfilling a week's engagement at a brasserie on the outskirts of Tours. Two rooms over a stable and a manger in an empty stall below were assigned to us; and every night we crept to our resting places wearied to death by the evening's work.

I have always found performance on a musical instrument exhausting in itself: the tambourine, for instance, calls for considerable physical energy; but when the instrument, tambourine, violin or zither, is practised for several hours in a little stuffy room filled with three or four dozen obviously unwashed humans, reeking with bad tobacco and worse absinthe, and pervaded by the ghosts of inferior meals, it becomes more penitential than the treadmill. A dog's life, said Paragot. Whereat Narcisse sniffed. It was not at all the life for a philosopher's dog, said he.

On the morning of the last day of our engagement, Blanquette entered Paragot's bedchamber as usual, with the bowls of coffee and hunks of coarse bread that formed our early meal. I had risen from my manger and crept into Paragot's room for warmth, and while he slept I sat on the floor by the window reading a book. As for Blanquette she had dressed and eaten long before and had helped the servant of the cafe to sweep and wash the tables and make the coffee for the household. It was not in her peasant's nature to be abed, which, now I come to think of it, must be a characteristic of the artistic temperament. Paragot loved it. He only woke when Blanquette brought him his coffee. Ordinarily he would remonstrate with picturesque oaths at being aroused from his slumbers, and having taken the coffee from her hands, would dismiss her with a laugh. He observed the most rigid propriety in his relations with Blanquette. But this morning he directed her to remain.

"Sit down, my child; I have to speak to you."

As there was no chair or stool in the uncomfortable room—it had lean-to walls and bare dirty boards and contained only the bed and a table—she sat obediently at the foot of the bed next to Narcisse and folded her hands in her lap. Paragot broke his bread into his coffee and fed himself with the sops by means of a battered table-spoon. When he had swallowed two or three mouthfuls he addressed her.

"My good Blanquette, I have been wandering through the world for many years in search of the springs of Life. I do not find them by scraping catgut in the Cafe Brasserie Dubois."

"It would be better to go to Orleans," said Blanquette. "We were at the Cafe de la Couronne there last winter and I danced."

"Not even your dancing at Orleans would help me in my quest," said he.

"I don't understand," murmured Blanquette looking at him helplessly.

"Have the kindness," said he, pointing to the table, "to smash that confounded violin into a thousand pieces."

"Mon Dieu! What is the matter?" cried Blanquette.

"It does not please me."

"I know it is not a good one," said Blanquette. "We will save money until we can buy a better."

"I would execrate it were it a Stradivarius," said he, his mouth full of sop. "Asticot," he called, "don't you loathe your tambourine?"

"Yes, Master," I replied from the floor.

"Do you love playing the zither?"

"But no, Maitre," said Blanquette.

"Why then," said my master, "should we pursue a career which is equally abominable to the three of us? We are not slaves, nom d'un chien!"

"We must work," said Blanquette, "or what would become of us?"

Paragot finished his coffee and bread and handed the bowl to Blanquette who nursed it in her lap, while he settled himself snugly beneath the bedclothes. The autumn rain beat against the dirty little window and the wind howled through chinks and crevices, filling the room with cold damp air. I drew the old blanket which I had brought from my manger-bed closer round my shoulders. Blanquette with her peasant's indifference to change of temperature sat unconcerned in her thin cotton dress.

"But what will become of us?" she repeated.

"I shall continue to exist," said he.

"But I, what shall I do?"

"You can fill my porcelain pipe, and let me think," replied Paragot.

She rose in her calm obedient way and, having carried out his orders, reseated herself at the foot of the bed.

"You are the most patient creature alive," said he, "otherwise you would not be contented to go on playing the zither, which is not a very exhilarating instrument, my little Blanquette. I am not patient, and I am not going to play the violin again for a million years after tonight, and the violin is superior to the zither."

Blanquette regarded him uncomprehending.

"If I were a king I would live in a palace and you should be my housekeeper. But as I am a ragged vagabond too idle to work, I am puzzled as to the disposal of you."

She grew very white and rose to her feet.

"I understand. You are driving me away. If it is your desire I will earn my living alone. Je ne vous serai pas sur le dos."

For all her vulgar asseveration that she would not be on his back, her manner held a dignity which touched him. He held out his hand.

"But I don't drive you away, little idiot," he laughed. "On the contrary. You are like Asticot and Narcisse. You belong to me. But Asticot is going to learn how to become an artist, and Narcisse when he is bored can hunt for fleas. You are a young woman; things must arrange themselves differently. But how? Voila tout!"

"It is very simple," said Blanquette.

"How, simple?"

"Dame! I can work for you and Asticot."

"The devil!" cried Paragot.

"But yes," she went on earnestly. "I know that men are men, and sometimes they do not like to work. It happens very often. Tiens! mon maitre, I am alone, all that is most alone. You are the only friends I have in the world, you and Asticot. You have been kinder to me than any one I have ever met. I put you in my prayers every night. It is a very little thing that I should work for you, if it fatigues you to scrape the fiddle in these holes of cabarets. It is true. True as the bon Dieu. I would tear myself into four pieces for you. Je suis brave fille, and I can work. But no!" she cried, looking deep into his eyes. "You can't refuse. It is not possible."

"Yes, I refuse," said Paragot.

He had turned on his side, face on palm, elbow on pillow, had regarded her sternly as she spoke. I saw that he was very angry.

"For what do you take me, little imbecile? Do you know that you insult me? I to be supported by a woman? Nom de Dieu de Dieu!"

His ire blazed up suddenly. He cursed, scolded, boasted all in a breath. Blanquette looked at him terrified. She could not understand. Great tears rolled down her cheeks.

"But I have made you angry," she wailed.

The scornful spurning of her devotion hurt her less than the sense of having caused his wrath. The primitive savage feminine is not complicated by over-subtlety of feeling. As soon as she could speak she broke into repentant protestation. She had not meant to anger him. She had spoken from her heart. She was so ignorant. She would tear herself into four pieces for him. She was brave fille. She was alone and he was her only friend. He must forgive her.