"The time has come," said he, rolling his eyes at me with an awful solemnity and speaking in a thick voice, "the time has come to talk of affairs. First let me impress on you that Henkend.y.k.e is an appellation offensive to French ears. Henceforward my name is Pradel--Polydore Pradel. And as it is necessary for you to have an _etat civil_, I hereby adopt you as my son. Your name is therefore Asticot Pradel. I hope you like it. You have never known what it is to have a father. Now the possession of a father is a privilege to which every human being has a right. I, Polydore Pradel, confer on you that privilege. My son--"
He raised his gla.s.s, clinked it against mine and pledged me.
"Henceforward," said Paragot, "what is good enough for me will I hope not be good enough for you, and what is too bad for me shall never be your portion. I swear it by the devil that dwells in this entrancing but execrated form of alcohol."
He finished his drink and called for another. As soon as the absinthe had curdled with the dropping water, he filled up the gla.s.s and drank it off. Then he sat for a long time in bemused silence, while I, perched on my chair, reflected on his great goodness and wondered how I should help him up the darksome stairs of our hotel without the aid of Cherubino.
The next day we started on our pilgrimage. Why we went in one direction more than another, why we went to one place rather than to another, neither he nor I could tell. I never questioned. Sometimes we wandered for days on foot, sleeping in village inns or farm-houses--occasionally under a hedge when the nights were warm. Sometimes we spent two or three days in an old world town, and Paragot would show me cathedrals and churches and lecture me on the history of the place, and set me to sketch bits of the picturesque that took his fancy. In the cool, exquisite cloister of the Chateau of Jacques Coeur at Bourges I learned more of the history of Charles VII than any English boy of my generation. In the Chateau of Blois, the salamanders of Francois Premier, the statue of Diane de Poictiers, the poison cabinet of Catherine de Medici, the dungeons of the Cardinal de Lorraine, became living testimonies of the past under Paragot"s imaginative teaching. He had set his heart on educating me; suddenly as the original impulse had seized him, yet it lasted strong and became the object of his disordered and otherwise aimless life. Books we always had in plenty. Tattered cla.s.sics are cheap enough in France, and what mattered it if pages were missing? When done with we threw them away. We might have been tracked through the country, like the hares in a paper chase, by the trail of literature we left behind us.
In spite of his unmethodical temperament Paragot made one fixed rule for my habits. In towns and larger villages, I went to bed at nine o"clock.
What he did with himself by way of amus.e.m.e.nt in the evenings I never knew. Nor did it occur to me to conjecture. Healthily tired after a happy day I was only too glad to crawl to whatever queer resting place chance provided, and to sleep the sound sleep of boyhood. To be for ever moving amid a fairyland of novelty, to have no care for the morrow, to have no tasks save those that were a delight, to be under the protecting guidance of a G.o.dlike being whose very reproofs were couched in terms of humorous kindness, to eat strange unexpected things, to fraternise in a new tongue, which daily grew more familiar, with any urchin on the high-road or city byway, to pa.s.s wondering days among country sights and country sounds--to be in short the perfect vagabond, could boy dream of a more glorious life?
Now and again a whimsy seized my master and he declared that we must work and earn our daily bread by the sweat of our brows. At a farm near Chartres we hired ourselves out to an elderly couple, Monsieur and Madame Dubosc, and spent toilsome but healthy days carting manure.
Although Paragot wrought miracles with his pitchfork, I don"t think Monsieur Dubosc took him seriously. Peasant shrewdness penetrated to the gentleman beneath Paragot"s blouse, and peasant ignorance attributed to him the riches which he did not possess. They became great friends, however, and before we left he succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng himself as a kind of oracle by curing a pig of some mysterious disease by means of a remedy which he said he had learned in Dalmatia. Old Madame Dubosc shed tears when we left La Haye.
Sometimes Paragot grew tired of tramping, and we travelled by rail, in the wooden third cla.s.s compartments of omnibus trains that stopped at every station. Now and then pure chance took us to any particular town.
It was at Nancy that Paragot went to the ticket office and said with the utmost politeness:--
"Monsieur, will you have the kindness to give me a ticket?"
"To what destination?" asked the clerk peering through his pigeon hole.
"_Parbleu_," said Paragot, "to any destination you like provided it is not too expensive."
The clerk called him a _farceur_ and would have nothing to do with him, but Paragot protested.
"Pardon, Monsieur, I have but one wish, to get away from Nancy. I have seen the Episcopal Palace on the Place Stanislas, the Cathedral, and I have viewed but I have not read the seventy-five thousand volumes in the University Library. You know the places one gets to from Nancy, which I do not. I am a stranger, in your hands. If you could suggest to me a town about 100 kilometres distant----"
"There is Longwy," said the haughty official.
"Then have the kindness to give me two third cla.s.s tickets to Longwy,"
said Paragot.
And to Longwy we went. Paragot contemplated the lack of interest in the smug little town.
"To hold out Longwy as a goal to the enthusiastic Pilgrim to the Shrine of Truth," said he, "could only enter the timber-built mind of a French railway official."
The record of our wanderings would mark the stages of my own development, but would be of little count as a history of Paragot. We tramped and trained south through Italy and spent the winter in Rome.
Then it entered his head to obtain employment for both of us, as workman and boy, on the excavations of the Forum. We lived in the slums with our brother excavators, and were completely happy. So happy that though we wandered the next year over France and part of Germany the winter again found us working in Rome. In the following Spring we set our faces northward, and in July Destiny overtook us in Savoy.
CHAPTER V
IT was the late afternoon of a sweltering July day. The near hills slumbered in the suns.h.i.+ne. Far away beyond them grey peaks of Alpine spurs, patched with snow, rose in faint outline against the sky. The valley lay in rich idleness, green and gold and fruitful, yielding itself with a maternal largeness to the white fifteenth century chateau on the hillside. A long white road stretched away to the left following the convolutions of the valley, until it became a thread; on the right it turned sharply by a clump of trees which marked a farm. In the middle of it all, in the grateful shadow cast by a wayside cafe, sat Paragot and myself, watching with thirsty eyes the buxom but slatternly _patronne_ pour out beer from a bottle. A dirty, long-haired mongrel terrier lapped water from an earthenware bowl, at the foot of the wooden table at which we sat. This was Narcisse, a recent member of our vagabond family, whom my master had casually adopted some weeks before and had christened according to some _lucus a non lucendo_ principle of his own. I think he was the least beautiful dog I have ever met; but I loved him dearly.
Paragot drained his tumbler, handed it back to be refilled, drained it again and cleared his throat with the contentment of a man whose thirst has been slaked.
"Now one can spit," he exclaimed heartily.
"That is always a comfort to a man," remarked the _patronne_.
"It is the potentiality that is the comfort. Have you apartments for the night, Madame?"
"They are for _des messieurs_--for gentlemen," said the patronne diffidently.
Narcisse having also finished his draught stretched himself out on the ground, his chin on his fore paws, and glanced furtively upwards at the disparaging lady.
"_Tron de l"air!_" cried Paragot, "are we not gentlemen?"
"_Tiens_, you are of the Midi," cried the woman, recognising the expletive--for no one born north of Avignon says "_Tron de l"air_"--"I too am from Ma.r.s.eilles. My husband was a Savoyard. That is why I am here."
"I am a gentleman of Gascony," said my master, "and this is my son Asticot."
"It is a droll name," said the _patronne_.
"We are commercial travellers on our rounds with samples of philosophy."
"It is a droll trade," said the _patronne_.
We were greasy and dirty, sunburnt to the colour of Egyptian felaheen and dressed in the peasant"s blue blouse. Creatures more unlike professors of philosophy could not be conceived. But the _patronne_ seemed to be impressed--as who was not?--by Paragot.
"The rooms will be three francs, Monsieur," she said after a calculating pause.
"I engage them," said my master. "Asticot, aid Madame to take our luggage up to our bedchambers." I grasped my bundle and handed Paragot"s dilapidated canvas gripsack to the _patronne_. He arrested her.
"One moment, Madame. As you see, my portmanteau contains a s.h.i.+rt, a pair of socks, a comb and a toothbrush. Also a copy of the works of the divine vagrant Maitre Francois Villon, which I will take out at once. He was a thief and a reprobate and got nearer hanged than any man who ever lived, and he is the dearest friend I have."
"You have droll friends," remarked the _patronne_ continuing her litany.
"And to think that he died four hundred years ago," sighed my master.
"Isn"t it strange, Madame, that all the bravest men and most beautiful women are those that are dead?"
The landlady laughed. "You talk like a true Gascon, Monsieur. In this country people are so silent that one loses the use of one"s tongue."
I departed with her to see after domestic arrangements and when I returned I found Paragot smoking his porcelain pipe, and talking to a dusty child in charge of a goat. Having, at that period, a soul above dusty children in charge of goats. I sprawled on the ground beside Narcisse, and being tired by the day"s tramp fell into a doze. The good earth, when you have a casing of it already on clothes and person, is a comfortable couch; but I think you must be in your teens to enjoy it.
I awoke to the sound of Paragot"s voice talking to Narcisse. The goat child had slipped away. An ox cart laden with hay lumbered past. The mellowness of late afternoon lay over the land. The shadow cast by the little white cafe had deepened gradually far beyond the table. From within the house came the faint clatter of footsteps and cooking utensils. Paragot was still smoking. Narcisse sat on his haunches, his ill shaped head to one side and his ears c.o.c.ked. After making a vicious dig at a flea, he yawned and trotted about after the manner of his kind in search of adventure. Paragot summoned him back.
"My good Narcisse, every spot on the earth has its essential quality which the wise man or dog knows how to enjoy in its entirety. In great cities where life is pulsating around you, you are alert for the unexpected. The underlying principle of a world"s backwater like this is restful stagnation. Here you must wallow in the uneventful. In vain you sniff around in quest of the exciting, mistaking like your fellow in the fable the shadow for the substance. The substance here is rest. Here nothing ever happens."
"Pardon, Monsieur," said a voice close upon us. "Is it very far to Chambery?"
"It does not matter," said a second voice following hard on the first, "for I can go no further."
I jumped to my feet and my master started round in his chair. The first speaker was a girl, the second an old man. She had merely the comeliness of tanned and hair-bleached peasant youth; he was wizened, lined, browned and bent. A cotton umbrella shaded the girl"s bare head and she carried in her hand a cane valise covered with grey canvas. The old man was burdened with two ancient shabby cases, one evidently containing a violin and the other some queerly shaped musical instrument. Both the new comers were wayworn and dirty, and my master seeing suffering on the old man"s face rose and courteously offered him a chair.