Читать книгу: «The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol», страница 6
It was the hour of the day when infants of nine months should be washed and put to bed. The landlady, announcing the fact, held out her arms. Jean clung to his English nurse, who played the fascinating game of pretending to eat his hand. The landlady had not that accomplishment. She was dull and practical.
“Come and be washed,” she said.
“Oh, do let me come, too,” cried the English lady.
“Bien volontiers, mademoiselle,” said the other. “C’est par ici.”
The English lady held Jean out for the paternal good-night. Aristide kissed the child in her arms. The action brought about, for the moment, a curious and sweet intimacy.
“My sister is passionately fond of children,” said the elder lady, in smiling apology.
“And you?”
“I, too. But Anne – my sister – will not let me have a chance when she is by.”
After dinner Aristide went up, as usual, to his room to see that Jean was alive, painless, and asleep. Finding him awake, he sat by his side and, with the earnestness of a nursery-maid, patted him off to slumber. Then he crept out on tiptoe and went downstairs. Outside the hotel he came upon the two sisters sitting on a bench and drinking coffee. The night was fine, the terraces of the neighbouring cafés were filled with people, and all the life of Aix not at the cafés promenaded up and down the wide and pleasant avenue. The ladies smiled. How was the boy? He gave the latest news. Permission to join them at their coffee was graciously given. A waiter brought a chair and he sat down. Conversation drifted from the baby to general topics. The ladies told the simple story of their tour. They had been to Nice and Marseilles, and they were going on the next day to Avignon. They also told their name – Honeywood. He gathered that the elder was Janet, the younger Anne. They lived at Chislehurst when they were in England, and often came up to London to attend the Queen’s Hall concerts and the dramatic performances at His Majesty’s Theatre. As guileless, though as self-reliant, gentlewomen as sequestered England could produce. Aristide, impressionable and responsive, fell at once into the key of their talk. He has told me that their society produced on him the effect of the cool hands of saints against his cheek.
At last the conversation inevitably returned to Jean. The landlady had related the tragic history of the dead mother and the invalid aunt. They deplored the orphaned state of the precious babe. For he was precious, they declared. Miss Anne had taken him to her heart.
“If only you had seen him in his bath, Janet!”
She turned to Aristide. “I’m afraid,” she said, very softly, hesitating a little – “I’m afraid this must be a sad journey for you.”
He made a wry mouth. The sympathy was so sincere, so womanly. That which was generous in him revolted against acceptance.
“Mademoiselle,” said he, “I can play a farce with landladies – it happens to be convenient – in fact, necessary. But with you – no. You are different. Jean is not my child, and who his parents are I’ve not the remotest idea.”
“Not your child?” They looked at him incredulously.
“I will tell you – in confidence,” said he.
Jean’s history was related in all its picturesque details; the horrors of the life of an enfant trouvé luridly depicted. The sisters listened with tears in their foolish eyes. Behind the tears Anne’s grew bright. When he had finished she stretched out her hand impulsively.
“Oh, I call it splendid of you!”
He took the hand and, in his graceful French fashion, touched it with his lips. She flushed, having expected, in her English way, that he would grasp it.
“Your commendation, mademoiselle, is sweet to hear,” said he.
“I hope he will grow up to be a true comfort to you, M. Pujol,” said Miss Janet.
“I can understand a woman doing what you’ve done, but scarcely a man,” said Miss Anne.
“But, dear mademoiselle,” cried Aristide, with a large gesture, “cannot a man have his heart touched, his – his —ses entrailles, enfin– stirred by baby fingers? Why should love of the helpless and the innocent be denied him?”
“Why, indeed?” said Miss Janet.
Miss Anne said, humbly: “I only meant that your devotion to Jean was all the more beautiful, M. Pujol.”
Soon after this they parted, the night air having grown chill. Both ladies shook hands with him warmly.
Anne’s hand lingered the fraction of a second longer in his than Janet’s. She had seen Jean in his bath.
Aristide wandered down the gay avenue into the open road and looked at the stars, reading in their splendour a brilliant destiny for Jean. He felt, in his sensitive way, that the two sweet-souled Englishwomen had deepened and sanctified his love for Jean. When he returned to the hotel he kissed his incongruous room-mate with the gentleness of a woman.
In the morning he went round to the garage. The foreman mechanician advanced to meet him.
“Well?”
“There is nothing to be done, monsieur.”
“What do you mean by ‘nothing to be done’?” asked Aristide.
The other shrugged his sturdy shoulders.
“She is worn out. She needs new carburation, new cylinders, new water-circulation, new lubrication, new valves, new brakes, new ignition, new gears, new bolts, new nuts, new everything. In short, she is not repairable.”
Aristide listened in incredulous amazement. His automobile, his wonderful, beautiful, clashing, dashing automobile unrepairable! It was impossible. But a quarter of an hour’s demonstration by the foreman convinced him. The car was dead. The engine would never whir again. All the petrol in the world would not stimulate her into life. Never again would he sit behind that wheel rejoicing in the insolence of speed. The car, which, in spite of her manifold infirmities, he had fondly imagined to be immortal, had run her last course. Aristide felt faint.
“And there is nothing to be done?”
“Nothing, monsieur. Fifty francs is all that she is worth.”
“At any rate,” said Aristide, “send the basket to the Hôtel de Paris.”
He went out of the garage like a man in a dream. At the door he turned to take a last look at the Pride of his Life. Her stern was towards him, and all he saw of her was the ironical legend, “Cure your Corns.”
At the hotel he found the bench outside occupied chiefly by Jean. One of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while Miss Anne administered the feeding-bottle. Provincial France is the happiest country in the world – in that you can live your intimate, domestic life in public, and nobody heeds.
“I hope you’ve not come to tell Jean to boot and saddle,” said Miss Anne, a smile on her roughly-hewn, comely face.
“Alas!” said Aristide, cheered by the charming spectacle before him. “I don’t know when we can get away. My auto has broken down hopelessly. I ought to go at once to my firm in Marseilles” – he spoke as if he were a partner in the Maison Hiéropath – “but I don’t quite know what to do with Jean.”
“Oh, I’ll look after Jean.”
“But you said you were leaving for Avignon to-day.”
She laughed, holding the feeding-bottle. “The Palace of the Popes has been standing for six centuries, and it will be still standing to-morrow; whereas Jean – ” Here Jean, for some reason known to himself, grinned wet and wide. “Isn’t he the most fascinating thing of the twentieth century?” she cried, logically inconsequential, like most of her sex. “You go to Marseilles, M. Pujol.”
So Aristide took the train to Marseilles – a half-hour’s journey – and in a quarter of the city resembling a fusion of Jarrow, an unfashionable part of St. Louis, and a brimstone-manufacturing suburb of Gehenna, he interviewed the high authorities of the Maison Hiéropath. His cajolery could lead men into diverse lunacies, but it could not induce the hard-bitten manufacturer of quack remedies to provide a brand-new automobile for his personal convenience. The old auto had broken down. The manufacturer shrugged his shoulders. The mystery was that it had lasted as long as it did. He had expected it to explode the first day. The idea had originally been that of the junior partner, a scatter-brained youth whom at times they humoured. Meanwhile, there being no beplacarded and beflagged automobile, there could be no advertisement; therefore they had no further use for M. Pujol’s services.
“Good,” said Aristide, when he reached the evil thoroughfare. “It was a degraded occupation, and I am glad I am out of it. Meanwhile, here is Marseilles before me, and it will be astonishing if I do not find some fresh road to fortune before the day is out.”
Aristide tramped and tramped all day through the streets of Marseilles, but the road he sought he did not find. He returned to Aix in dire perplexity. He was used to finding himself suddenly cut off from the means of livelihood. It was his chronic state of being. His gay resourcefulness had always carried him through. But then there had been only himself to think of. Now there was Jean. For the first time for many years the dragon-fly’s wings grew limp. Jean – what could he do with Jean?
Jean had already gone to sleep when he arrived. All day he had been as good as gold, so Miss Anne declared. For herself, she had spent the happiest day of her life.
“I don’t wonder at your being devoted to him, M. Pujol,” she said. “He has the most loving ways of any baby I ever met.”
“Yes, mademoiselle,” replied Aristide, with an unaccustomed huskiness in his voice, “I am devoted to him. It may seem odd for a man to be wrapped up in a baby of nine months old – but – it’s like that. It’s true. Je l’adore de tout mon cœur, de tout mon être,” he cried, in a sudden gust of passion.
Miss Anne smiled kindly, not dreaming of his perplexity, amused by his Southern warmth. Miss Janet joined them in the hall. They went in to dinner, Aristide sitting at the central table d’hôte, the ladies at a little table by themselves. After dinner they met again outside the hotel, and drank coffee and talked the evening away. He was not as bright a companion as on the night before. His gaiety was forced. He talked about everything else in the world but Jean. The temptation to pour his financial troubles into the sympathetic ears of these two dear women he resisted. They regarded him as on a social equality, as a man of means engaged in some sort of business at Marseilles; they had invited him to bring Jean to see them at Chislehurst when he should happen to be in England again. Pride forbade him to confess himself a homeless, penniless vagabond. The exquisite charm of their frank intimacy would be broken. Besides, what could they do?
They retired early. Aristide again sought the message of the stars; but the sky was clouded over, and soon a fine rain began to fall. A bock at a café brought him neither comfort nor inspiration. He returned to the hotel, and, eluding a gossip-seeking landlady, went up to his room.
What could be done? Neither the sleeping babe nor himself could offer any suggestion. One thing was grimly inevitable. He and Jean must part. To carry him about like an infant prince in an automobile had, after all, been a simple matter; to drag him through Heaven knew what hardships in his makeshift existence was impossible. In his childlike, impulsive fashion he had not thought of the future when he adopted Jean. Aristide always regarded the fortune of the moment as if it would last forever. Past deceptions never affected his incurable optimism. Now Jean and he must part. Aristide felt that the end of the world had come. His pacing to and fro awoke the child, who demanded, in his own way, the soothing rocking of his father’s arms. There he bubbled and “goo’d” till Aristide’s heart nearly broke.
“What can I do with you, mon petit Jean?”
The Enfants Trouvés, after all? He thought of it with a shudder.
The child asleep again, he laid it on its bed, and then sat far into the night thinking barrenly. At last one of his sudden gleams of inspiration illuminated his mind. It was the only way. He took out his watch. It was four o’clock. What had to be done must be done swiftly.
In the travelling-basket, which had been sent from the garage, he placed a pillow, and on to the pillow he transferred with breathless care the sleeping Jean, and wrapped him up snug and warm in bedclothes. Then he folded the tiny day-garments that lay on a chair, collected the little odds and ends belonging to the child, took from his valise the rest of Jean’s little wardrobe, and laid them at the foot of the basket. The most miserable man in France then counted up his money, divided it into two parts, and wrote a hasty letter, which, with the bundle of notes, he enclosed in an envelope.
“My little Jean,” said he, laying the envelope on the child’s breast. “Here is a little more than half my fortune. Half is for yourself and the little more to pay your wretched father’s hotel bill. Good-bye, my little Jean. Je t’aime bien, tu sais– and don’t reproach me.”
About an hour afterwards Miss Anne awoke and listened, and in a moment or two Miss Janet awoke also.
“Janet, do you hear that?”
“It’s a child crying. It’s just outside the door.”
“It sounds like Jean.”
“Nonsense, my dear!”
But Anne switched on the light and went to see for herself; and there, in the tiny anteroom that separated the bedroom from the corridor, she found the basket – a new Pharoah’s daughter before a new little Moses in the bulrushes. In bewilderment she brought the ark into the room, and read the letter addressed to Janet and herself. She burst into tears. All she said was: —
“Oh, Janet, why couldn’t he have told us?”
And then she fell to hugging the child to her bosom.
Meanwhile Aristide Pujol, clad in his goat-skin cap and coat, valise in hand, was plodding through the rain in search of the elusive phantom, Fortune; gloriously certain that he had assured Jean’s future, yet with such a heartache as he had never had in his life before.
V
THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG’S HEAD
Once upon a time Aristide Pujol found himself standing outside his Paris residence, No. 213 bis, Rue Saint Honoré, without a penny in the world. His last sou had gone to Madame Bidoux, who kept a small green grocer’s shop at No. 213 bis and rented a ridiculously small back room for a ridiculously small weekly sum to Aristide whenever he honoured the French capital with his presence. During his absence she forwarded him such letters as might arrive for him; and as this was his only permanent address, and as he let Madame Bidoux know his whereabouts only at vague intervals of time, the transaction of business with Aristide Pujol, “Agent, No. 213 bis, Rue Saint Honoré, Paris,” by correspondence was peculiarly difficult.
He had made Madame Bidoux’s acquaintance in the dim past; and he had made it in his usual direct and electric manner. Happening to walk down the Rue Saint Honoré, he had come upon tragedy. Madame Bidoux, fat, red of face, tearful of eye and strident of voice, held in her arms a little mongrel dog – her own precious possession – which had just been run over in the street, and the two of them filled the air with wailings and vociferation. Aristide uncovered his head, as though he were about to address a duchess, and smiled at her engagingly.
“Madame,” said he, “I perceive that your little dog has a broken leg. As I know all about dogs, I will, with your permission, set the limb, put it into splints and guarantee a perfect cure. Needless to say, I make no charge for my services.”
Snatching the dog from the arms of the fascinated woman, he darted in his dragon-fly fashion into the shop, gave a hundred orders to a stupefied assistant, and – to cut short a story which Aristide told me with great wealth of detail – mended the precious dog and gained Madame Bidoux’s eternal gratitude. For Madame Bidoux the world held no more remarkable man than Aristide Pujol; and for Aristide the world held no more devoted friend than Madame Bidoux. Many a succulent meal, at the widow’s expense – never more enjoyable than in summer time when she set a little iron table and a couple of iron chairs on the pavement outside the shop – had saved him from starvation; and many a gewgaw sent from London or Marseilles or other such remote latitudes filled her heart with pride. Since my acquaintance with Aristide I myself have called on this excellent woman, and I hope I have won her esteem, though I have never had the honour of eating pig’s trotters and chou-croûte with her on the pavement of the Rue Saint Honoré. It is an honour from which, being an unassuming man, I shrink.
Unfortunately Madame Bidoux has nothing further to do with the story I am about to relate, save in one respect: —
There came a day – it was a bleak day in November, when Madame Bidoux’s temporary financial difficulties happened to coincide with Aristide’s. To him, unsuspicious of coincidence, she confided her troubles. He emptied the meagre contents of his purse into her hand.
“Madame Bidoux,” said he with a flourish, and the air of a prince, “why didn’t you tell me before?” and without waiting for her blessing he went out penniless into the street.
Aristide was never happier than when he had not a penny piece in the world. He believed, I fancy, in a dim sort of way, in God and the Virgin and Holy Water and the Pope; but the faith that thrilled him to exaltation was his faith in the inevitable happening of the unexpected. He marched to meet it with the throbbing pulses of a soldier rushing to victory or a saint to martyrdom. He walked up the Rue Saint Honoré, the Rue de la Paix, along the Grands Boulevards, smiling on a world which teemed with unexpectednesses, until he reached a café on the Boulevard des Bonnes Filles de Calvaire. Here he was arrested by Fate, in the form of a battered man in black, who, springing from the solitary frostiness of the terrace, threw his arms about him and kissed him on both cheeks.
“Mais, c’est toi, Pujol!”
“C’est toi, Roulard!”
Roulard dragged Aristide to his frosty table and ordered drinks. Roulard had played the trumpet in the regimental band in which Aristide had played the kettle drum. During their military service they had been inseparables. Since those happy and ear-splitting days they had not met. They looked at each other and laughed and thumped each other’s shoulders.
“Ce vieux Roulard!”
“Ce sacré Pujol.”
“And what are you doing?” asked Aristide, after the first explosions of astonishment and reminiscence.
A cloud overspread the battered man’s features. He had a wife and five children and played in theatre orchestras. At the present time he was trombone in the “Tournée Gulland,” a touring opera company. It was not gay for a sensitive artist like him, and the trombone gave one a thirst which it took half a week’s salary to satisfy. Mais enfin, que veux-tu? It was life, a dog’s life, but life was like that. Aristide, he supposed, was making a fortune. Aristide threw back his head, and laughed at the exquisite humour of the hypothesis, and gaily disclosed his Micawberish situation. Roulard sat for a while thoughtful and silent. Presently a ray of inspiration dispelled the cloud from the features of the battered man.
“Tiens, mon vieux,” said he, “I have an idea.”
It was an idea worthy of Aristide’s consideration. The drum of the Tournée Gulland had been dismissed for drunkenness. The vacancy had not been filled. Various executants who had drummed on approval – this being an out-week of the tour – had driven the chef d’orchestre to the verge of homicidal mania. Why should not Aristide, past master in drumming, find an honourable position in the orchestra of the Tournée Gulland?
Aristide’s eyes sparkled, his fingers itched for the drumsticks, he started to his feet.
“Mon vieux Roulard!” he cried, “you have saved my life. More than that, you have resuscitated an artist. Yes, an artist. Sacré nom de Dieu! Take me to this chef d’orchestre.”
So Roulard, when the hour of rehearsal drew nigh, conducted Aristide to the murky recesses of a dirty little theatre in the Batignolles, where Aristide performed such prodigies of repercussion that he was forthwith engaged to play the drum, the kettle-drum, the triangle, the cymbals, the castagnettes and the tambourine, in the orchestra of the Tournée Gulland at the dazzling salary of thirty francs a week.
To tell how Aristide drummed and cymballed the progress of Les Huguenots, Carmen, La Juive, La Fille de Madame Angot and L’Arlésienne through France would mean the rewriting of a “Capitaine Fracasse.” To hear the creature talk about it makes my mouth as a brick kiln and my flesh as that of a goose. He was the Adonis, the Apollo, the Don Juan, the Irresistible of the Tournée. Fled truculent bass and haughty tenor before him; from diva to moustachioed contralto in the chorus, all the ladies breathlessly watched for the fall of his handkerchief; he was recognized, in fact, as a devil of a fellow. But in spite of these triumphs, the manipulation of the drum, kettle-drum, triangle, cymbals, castagnettes and tambourine, which at first had given him intense and childish delight, at last became invested with a mechanical monotony that almost drove him mad. All day long the thought of the ill-lit corner, on the extreme right of the orchestra, garnished with the accursed instruments of noise to which duty would compel him at eight o’clock in the evening hung over him like a hideous doom. Sweet singers of the female sex were powerless to console. He passed them by, and haughty tenor and swaggering basso again took heart of grace.
“Mais, mon Dieu, c’est le métier!” expostulated Roulard.
“Sale métier!” cried Aristide, who was as much fitted for the merciless routine of a theatre orchestra as a quagga for the shafts of an omnibus. “A beast of a trade! One is no longer a man. One is just an automatic system of fog-signals!”
In this depraved state of mind he arrived at Perpignan, where that befell him which I am about to relate.
Now, Perpignan is the last town of France on the Gulf of Lions, a few miles from the Spanish border. From it you can see the great white monster of Le Canigou, the pride of the Eastern Pyrenees, far, far away, blocking up the valley of the Tet, which flows sluggishly past the little town. The Quai Sadi-Carnot (is there a provincial town in France which has not a something Sadi-Carnot in it?) is on the left bank of the Tet; at one end is the modern Place Arago, at the other Le Castillet, a round, castellated red-brick fortress with curiously long and deep machicolations of the 14th century with some modern additions of Louis XI, who also built the adjoining Porte Notre Dame which gives access to the city. Between the Castillet and the Place Arago, the Quai Sadi-Carnot is the site of the Prefecture, the Grand Hôtel, various villas and other resorts of the aristocracy. Any little street off it will lead you into the seething centre of Perpignan life – the Place de la Loge, which is a great block of old buildings surrounded on its four sides by narrow streets of shops, cafés, private houses, all with balconies and jalousies, all cramped, crumbling, Spanish, picturesque. The oldest of this conglomerate block is a corner building, the Loge de Mer, a thirteenth century palace, the cloth exchange in the glorious days when Perpignan was a seaport and its merchant princes traded with Sultans and Doges and such-like magnificoes of the Mediterranean. But nowadays its glory has departed. Below the great gothic windows spreads the awning of a café, which takes up all the ground floor. Hugging it tight is the Mairie, and hugging that, the Hôtel de Ville. Hither does every soul in the place, at some hour or other of the day, inevitably gravitate. Lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, merchants, lovers, soldiers, market-women, loafers, horses, dogs, wagons, all crowd in a noisy medley the narrow cobble-paved streets around the Loge. Of course there are other streets, tortuous, odorous and cool, intersecting the old town, and there are various open spaces, one of which is the broad market square on one side flanked by the Théâtre Municipal.
From the theatre Aristide Pujol issued one morning after rehearsal, and, leaving his colleagues, including the ever-thirsty Roulard, to refresh themselves at a humble café hard by, went forth in search of distraction. He idled about the Place de la Loge, passed the time of day with a café waiter until the latter, with a disconcerting “Voilà! Voilà!” darted off to attend to a customer, and then strolled through the Porte Notre Dame onto the Quai Sadi-Carnot. There a familiar sound met his ears – the roll of a drum followed by an incantation in a quavering, high-pitched voice. It was the Town Crier, with whom, as with a brother artist, he had picked acquaintance the day before.
They met by the parapet of the Quai, just as Père Bracasse had come to the end of his incantation. The old man, grizzled, tanned and seamed, leant weakly against the parapet.
“How goes it, Père Bracasse?”
“Alas, mon bon Monsieur, it goes from bad to worse,” sighed the old man. “I am at the end of my strength. My voice has gone and the accursed rheumatism in my shoulder gives me atrocious pain whenever I beat the drum.”
“How much more of your round have you to go?” asked Aristide.
“I have only just begun,” said Père Bracasse.
The Southern sun shone from a cloudless sky; a light, keen wind blowing from the distant snow-clad Canigou set the blood tingling. A lunatic idea flashed through Aristide’s mind. He whipped the drum strap over the old man’s head.
“Père Bracasse,” said he, “you are suffering from rheumatism, bronchitis, fever and corns, and you must go home to bed. I will finish your round for you. Listen,” and he beat such a tattoo as Père Bracasse had never accomplished in his life. “Where are your words?”
The old man, too weary to resist and fascinated by Aristide’s laughing eyes, handed him a dirty piece of paper. Aristide read, played a magnificent roll and proclaimed in a clarion voice that a gold bracelet having been lost on Sunday afternoon in the Avenue des Platanes, whoever would deposit it at the Mairie would receive a reward.
“That’s all?” he enquired.
“That’s all,” said Père Bracasse. “I live in the Rue Petite-de-la-Réal, No. 4, and you will bring me back the drum when you have finished.”
Aristide darted off like a dragon-fly in the sunshine, as happy as a child with a new toy. Here he could play the drum to his heart’s content with no score or conductor’s bâton to worry him. He was also the one and only personage in the drama, concentrating on himself the attention of the audience. He pitied poor Roulard, who could never have such an opportunity with his trombone…
The effect of his drumming before the Café de la Loge was electric. Shopkeepers ran out of their shops, housewives craned over their balconies to listen to him. By the time he had threaded the busy strip of the town and emerged on to the Place Arago he had collected an admiring train of urchins. On the Place Arago he halted on the fringe of a crowd surrounding a cheap-jack whose vociferations he drowned in a roll of thunder. He drummed and drummed till he became the centre of the throng. Then he proclaimed the bracelet. He had not enjoyed himself so much since he left Paris.
He was striding away, merry-eyed and happy, followed by his satellites when a prosperous-looking gentleman with a very red face, a prosperous roll of fat above the back of his collar, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole, descending the steps of the great glass-covered café commanding the Place, hurried up and laid his finger on his arm.
“Pardon, my friend,” said he, “what are you doing there?”
“You shall hear, monsieur,” replied Aristide, clutching the drumsticks.
“For the love of Heaven!” cried the other hastily interrupting. “Tell me what are you doing?”
“I am crying the loss of a bracelet, monsieur!”
“But who are you?”
“I am Aristide Pujol, and I play the drum, kettle-drum, triangle, cymbals, castagnettes and tambourine in the orchestra of the Tournée Gulland. And now, in my turn, may I ask to whom I have the honour of speaking?”
“I am the Mayor of Perpignan.”
Aristide raised his hat politely. “I hope to have the pleasure,” said he, “of Monsieur le Maire’s better acquaintance.”
The Mayor, attracted by the rascal’s guileless mockery, laughed.
“You will, my friend, if you go on playing that drum. You are not the Town Crier.”
Aristide explained. Père Bracasse was ill, suffering from rheumatism, bronchitis, fever and corns. He was replacing him. The Mayor retorted that Père Bracasse being a municipal functionary could not transmit his functions except through the Administration. Monsieur Pujol must desist from drumming and crying. Aristide bowed to authority and unstrung his drum.
“But I was enjoying myself so much, Monsieur le Maire. You have spoiled my day,” said he.
The Mayor laughed again. There was an irresistible charm and roguishness about the fellow, with his intelligent oval face, black Vandyke beard and magically luminous eyes.
“I should have thought you had enough of drums in your orchestra.”
“Ah! there I am cramped!” cried Aristide. “I have it in horror, in detestation. Here I am free. I can give vent to all the aspirations of my soul!”
The Mayor mechanically moved from the spot where they had been standing. Aristide, embroidering his theme, mechanically accompanied him; and, such is democratic France, and also such was the magnetic, Ancient Mariner-like power of Aristide – did not I, myself, on my first meeting with him at Aigues-Mortes fall helplessly under the spell – that, in a few moments, the amateur Town Crier and the Mayor were walking together, side by side, along the Quai Sadi-Carnot, engaged in amiable converse. Aristide told the Mayor the story of his life – or such incidents of it as were meet for Mayoral ears – and when they parted – the Mayor to lunch, Aristide to yield up the interdicted drum to Père Bracasse – they shook hands warmly and mutually expressed the wish that they would soon meet again.
They met again; Aristide saw to that. They met again that very afternoon in the café on the Place Arago. When Aristide entered he saw the Mayor seated at a table in the company of another prosperous, red-ribboned gentleman. Aristide saluted politely and addressed the Mayor. The Mayor saluted and presented him to Monsieur Quérin, the President of the Syndicat d’Initiative of the town of Perpignan. Monsieur Quérin saluted and declared himself enchanted at the encounter. Aristide stood gossiping until the Mayor invited him to take a place at the table and consume liquid refreshment. Aristide glowingly accepted the invitation and cast a look of triumph around the café. Not to all mortals is it given to be the boon companion of a Mayor and a President of the Syndicat d’Initiative!
