The Belovéd Vagabond by William J Locke (lightweight ebook reader .TXT) 📕

sous to dogs. It is my nature. Now I know why I was sent into the world. It was to play the fiddle up and down the sunny land of France. My little Asticot, why haven't we thought of it before? You shall learn to play the trumpet, Asticot, and Narcisse shall walk on his hind legs and collect the money. It will be magnificent!"

"Are you serious, Monsieur?" asked Blanquette, trembling.

"Serious? Over an inspiration that came straight from the bon Dieu? But yes, I am serious. Et toi?" he added sharply using for the first time the familiar pronoun, "are you afraid I will beat you like Père Paragot?"

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

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 café 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 café; 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 à 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.

"Voilà!" 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 grâce à 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 maître," 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 Père 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 Père 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 "Récits des Temps Mérovingiens" 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 Encyclopædia--"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