"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 moons.h.i.+ne."

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 moons.h.i.+ne 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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, s.h.i.+vering 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 s.p.a.ces 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 a.s.sociated 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 pa.s.sed 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 bra.s.serie on the outskirts of Tours. Two rooms over a stable and a manger in an empty stall below were a.s.signed 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 coa.r.s.e 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 sc.r.a.ping catgut in the Cafe Bra.s.serie 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 c.h.i.n.ks 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.