"You will learn it, my son."
"No one ever speaks it out of Hungary," I contended.
"My son," said he, "the value of a man is often measured by his useless and fantastic attainments."
Then the candle end sputtered out and we were in darkness. Paragot bade me good night, and left me to a mingled sense of burned candle grease and desolation.
He departed the next day. Blanquette and I with a dejected Narcisse at our heels, walked back from the railway station to the hotel, where losing all sense of manly dignity I broke down crying and Blanquette put her arm round my neck and comforted me motherwise.
Two months afterwards Paragot wrote to Blanquette to join him in Paris, and when the flutter of her wet handkerchief from the railway carriage window became no longer visible, then indeed I felt myself to be a stranger in a strange land.
Two years! I can remember even now their endless heartache. The Izelins were kind; Madame Izelin, a refined Hungarian lady, became my staunch friend as well as my instructress in manners; my life teemed with interests, and I worked like a little maniac; but all the time I longed for Paragot. Had it not been for his letters I should have scented my way back to him like a dog, across Europe. Ah those letters of Paragot--I have them still--what a treasury they are of grotesque fantasy and philosophic wisdom! They gave me but little news of his doings. He had settled down in Paris with Blanquette as his housekeeper.
His floridly anathematised ankle kept him hobbling about the streets while his heart was chasing b.u.t.terflies over the fields. He had founded a coenaculum for the cultivation of the Higher Conversation at the Cafe Delphine. He had taken up Persian and was saturating himself with Hafiz and Firdusi. His health was good. Indeed he was a man of iron const.i.tution.
Blanquette now and then supplemented these meagre details of objective life. The master had taken a _bel appartement_. There were curtains to his bed. Food was dear in Paris. They had been to Fontainebleau.
Narcisse had stolen the sausages of the concierge. The Master was always talking of me and of the great future for which I was destined. But when I became famous I was not to forget my little Blanquette. I see the sprawling mis-spelt words now: "_Il ne fot james...o...b..ie ta pet.i.te Blanquette_."
As if I could ever forget her!
I arrived in Paris one evening a day or two earlier than I was expected.
It had been ordained by Paragot that I should break my journey at Berlin, in order to visit that capital, but affection tugged at my heart-strings and compelled me to travel straight through from Buda-Pesth. It was Paragot and Blanquette and Narcisse that I wanted to see and not Berlin.
Yet when I stepped out of the train on to the Paris platform, I was conscious for the first time of development. I was decently attired. I had a bag filled with the garments of respectability. I had money in my pocket, also a packet of cigarettes. A porter took my luggage and enquired in the third person whether Monsieur desired a cab. The temptation was too great for eighteen. I took the cab in a lordly way and drove to No. 11 Rue des Saladiers where Paragot had his "bel appartement." And with the antic.i.p.atory throb of joy at beholding my beloved Master was mingled a thrill of vain-glorious happiness. Asticot in a cab! It was absurd, and yet it seemed to fall within the divine fitness of things.
The cab stopped in a narrow street. I had an impression of tall houses looking fantastically dilapidated in the dim gas-light, of little shops on the ground floor, and of little murky gateways leading to the habitations above. Beside the gateway of No. 11 was a small workman"s drinking shop, sometimes called in Paris a _zinc_ on account of the polished zinc bar which is its princ.i.p.al feature. Untidy, slouching people filled the street.
Directed by the concierge to the _cinquieme a gauche_, I mounted narrow, evil smelling, badly lighted stairs, and rang at the designated door. It opened; Blanquette appeared with a lamp in her hand.
"_Monsieur desire?_"
"_Mais c"est moi, Blanquette._"
In another minute she had ushered me in, set down the lamp and was hugging me in her strong young arms.
"But my little Asticot, I did not know you. You have changed. You are no longer the same. _Tu es tout a fait monsieur!_ How proud the Master will be."
"Where is he?"
Alas, the Master did not expect me to-day and was at the Cafe Delphine.
She would go straightway and tell him. I must be tired and hungry. She would get me something to eat. But who would have thought I should have come back a _monsieur_! How I had grown! I must see the _appartement_.
This was the salon.
I looked around me for the first time. Nothing in it save the rickettiness of a faded rep suite arranged primly around the walls, and a few bookshelves stuffed with tattered volumes suggested Paragot. The round centre table, covered with American cloth, and the polished floor were spotless. Cheap print curtains adorned the windows and a cage containing a canary hung between them. Three or four oleographs--one a portrait of Garibaldi--in gilt frames formed the artistic decoration.
"It was I who chose the pictures," said Blanquette proudly.
She opened a door and disclosed the sleeping chamber of the Master, very bare, but very clean. Another door led into the kitchen--a slip of a place but glistening like the machine room of a man-of-war.
"I have a bedroom upstairs, and there is one also for you which the Master has taken. Come and I will show you."
We mounted to the attics and I was duly installed.
"I would have put some flowers if I had known you were coming," said Blanquette.
We went down again and she prepared food for me, her plain face beaming as she talked. She was entirely happy. No one so perfect as the Master had ever been the head of a household. Of course he was untidy. But such was the nature of men. If he did not make stains on the floor with muddy boots and lumps of meat thrown to Narcisse, and litter the rooms with clothes and tobacco and books, what occupation would there be for a housekeeper? As it was she worked from morning to night. And the result; was it not neat and clean and beautiful? Ah! she was happy not to be playing the zither in _bra.s.series_. All her dreams were realised. She had a _menage_. And she had the Master to serve. Now would she fetch him from the Cafe Delphine.
Half an hour afterwards he strode into the room, followed by Blanquette and Narcisse. He spoke in French and embraced me French fas.h.i.+on. Then he cried out in English and wrung me by the hand. He was almost as excited as Narcisse who leaped and barked frantically.
"It is good to have him back, eh Blanquette?"
"_Oui, Maitre._ He does not know how sad it has been without him."
Blanquette smiled, wept and removed the remains of my supper. Then she set on the table gla.s.ses and a bottle of _tisane_ they had bought on the way home. We drank the sour sweet champagne as if it were liquid gold and clinked gla.s.ses, and with Narcisse all talked and barked together.
It was a glad home-coming.
Paragot had changed very little. The hair on his temple was beginning to turn grey and his sallow cheeks were thinner. But he was the same hairy unkempt creature of prodigious finger nails and disreputable garments, still full of strange oaths and picturesque fancy, and still smoking his pipe with the porcelain bowl.
Presently Blanquette retired to bed and Paragot and I talked far into the night. Before we separated, with a comprehensive wave of the hand he indicated the primly set furniture and polished floor.
"Did you ever behold such exquisite discomfort?"
Poor Blanquette!
CHAPTER XI
HOW far away it all seems; Paris; the Rue des Saladiers: the _atelier_ Janot where the ill.u.s.trious painter called us his children and handed us the sacred torch of his art for us to transmit, could we but keep it aflame, to succeeding generations; the Cafe Delphine, with Madame Boin, fat, pink, urbane, her hair a miracle of perrukery, enthroned behind the counter; my dear Master, Paragot, himself! How far away! It is not good to live to a hundred and fifty. The backward vista down the years is too frighteningly long.
I found Paragot established as the Dictator of the Cafe Delphine. No one seemed to question his position. He ruled there autocratically, having inst.i.tuted sundry ordinances disobedience to which had exile as its penalty. The most generous of creatures, he had nevertheless ordained that as Dictator he should go scot-free. To have declined to pay for his absinthe or _choucroute_ would have closed the Cafe Delphine in a student"s face. He had a prescriptive right to the table under the lee of Madame Boin"s counter, and the peg behind him was sacred to his green hat. To the students he was a mystery. No one knew where he lived, how he subsisted, what he had been. Various rumours filled the _Quartier_.
According to one he was a Russian Nihilist escaped from Siberia.
Another, and one nearer the mark, credited him with being a kind of Rip van Winkle revisiting old student scenes after a twenty years" slumber.
He seemed to pa.s.s his life between the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pont Neuf and the Cafe Delphine. "Paris," he used to say, "it is the Boul"
Mich"!" Although he would turn to the absolute stranger who had been brought as a privilege to his table and say, using the familiar second person singular, "Buy me an evening paper," or addressing the company at large, "Somebody is going to offer me an absinthe," and promptly order it, he was never known to borrow money.
This eccentricity vexed the soul of the _Quartier_, where the chief use of money is to be borrowed. To me the idea of Paragot asking needy youngsters for the loan of five francs was exquisitely ludicrous; I am only setting down the impression of the _Quartier_ regarding him. Not only did he never borrow but sometimes gave whole francs in charity. One evening an unseemly quarrel having arisen between two law-students from Auvergne (the Boeotia of France) and the waiter as to an alleged overcharge of two sous, Paragot arose in wrath, and das.h.i.+ng a louis on the table with a "_Hercule paie-toi_," stalked majestically out of the Cafe. A deputation waited on him next day with the object of refunding the twenty francs. He refused (naturally) to take a penny. It would be a lesson to them, said he, and they meekly accepted the rebuke.
"But what did you study here, before you went to sleep?" an impudent believer in the Rip van Winkle theory once asked him.
"The lost arts of discretion and good manners, _mon pet.i.t_," retorted Paragot, with a flash of his blue eyes which scorched the offender.
The students paid his score willingly, for in his talk they had full value for their money. I found the Cafe Delphine a Lotus Club, with a difference. Instead of being the scullion I was a member, and took my seat with the rest, and, though none suspected it, paid for Paragot"s drinks with Paragot"s money. Our real relations were never divulged. It would affect both our positions, said he. To explain our friends.h.i.+p, it was only necessary to say that we had met at Buda-Pesth where I had been sent to study with the famous Izelin, who was a friend of Paragot"s.