Part 9 (1/2)
As originality was banned from the circus tradition, he stood still in the narrow, quiet street and gasped.
”Original?”
”You are so long and thin,” she said.
”That has always been against me; it was against me to-day.”
”But you could make it so droll,” she declared. ”And there would be no one else like you. But you must be by yourself, not with a troupe like the Merveilleux. _Tiens_,” she caught him by the lapels of his jacket and a pa.s.ser-by might have surmised a pleading stage in a lovers' discussion, ”I have heard there is a little little man in London--oh, so little, _et pas du tout joli_.”
”I know,” said Andrew, ”but he is a great artist.”
”And so are you,” she retorted. ”But as this little man gets all the profit he can out of his littleness--it was _la grosse_ Leonie--the _brune_, number three, you know--ah, but you haven't seen us--anyhow she has been in London and was telling me about him this evening--all that nature has endowed him with he exaggerates--_eh bien!_ Why couldn't you do the same?”
The street was badly lit with gas; but still he could see the flash in her dark eyes. He drew himself up and laid both his hands on her thin shoulders.
”My little Elodie,” said he--and by the dim gaslight she could see the flash of his teeth revealed by his wide smile--”My little Elodie, you have genius. You have given me an idea that may make my fortune. What can I give you in return?”
”If you want to show me that you are not ungrateful, you might kiss me,”
said Elodie.
Chapter VI
A kiss must mean either very much or very little. There are maidens to whom it signifies a life's consecration. There are men whose blood it fires with burning pa.s.sion. There are couples of different s.e.x who jointly consider their first kiss a matter of supreme importance, and, the temporary rapture over, at once begin to discuss the possibilities of parental approbation and the ways and means of matrimony. A kiss may be the very devil of a thing leading to two or three dozen honourably born grandchildren, or to suicide, or to celebate addiction to cats, or to eugenic propaganda, or to perpetual c.r.a.pe and the boredom of a community, or to the fate of Abelard, or to the Fall of Troy, or to the proud destiny of a William the Conqueror.
I repeat that it is a ticklish thing to go and meddle with it without due consideration. And in some cases consideration only increases the fortuity of its results. Volumes could be written on it.
If you think that the kiss exchanged between Andrew and Elodie had any such immediate sentimental or tragical or heroical consequences you are mistaken. Andrew responded with all the grace in the world to the invitation. It was a pleasant and refres.h.i.+ng act. He was grateful for her companions.h.i.+p, her sympathy, and her inspired counsel. She carried off her frank comrades.h.i.+p with such an air of virginal innocence, and at the same time with such unconscious exposure of her half fulfilled womanhood, that he suffered no temptations of an easy conquest. The kiss therefore evoked no baser range of emotion. As his head was whirling with an artist's sudden conception--and, mark you, an artist's conception need no more be a case of parthenogenesis than that of the physical woman--it had no room for the higher and subtler and more romantical idealizations of the owner of the kissed lips. You may put him down for an insensible young egoist. Put him down for what you will. His embrace was but gratefully fraternal.
As for Elodie, if it were not dangerous--she had the street child's instinct--what did a kiss or two matter? If one paid all that attention to a kiss one's life would be a complicated drama of a hundred threads.
”A kiss is nothing”--so ran one of her _obiter dicta_ recorded somewhere in the ma.n.u.script--”unless you feel it in your toes. Then look out.”
Evidently this kiss Elodie did not feel in her toes, for she walked along carelessly beside him to the door of her hotel, a hostelry possibly a shade more poverty-stricken in a flag paved by-street, a trifle staler-smelling than his own, and there put out a friendly hand of dismissal.
”We will write to each other?”
”It is agreed.”
”Alors, au revoir.”
”Au revoir, Elodie, et merci.”
And that was the end of it. Andrew went back to Paris by the first train in the morning, and Elodie continued to dance in Avignon.
If they had maintained, as they vaguely promised, an intimate correspondence, it might have developed, according to the laws of the interchange of sentiment between two young and candid souls, into a reciprocal expression of the fervid state which the kiss failed to produce.
A couple of months of it, and the pair, yearning for each other, would have effected by hook or crook, a delirious meeting, and young Romance would have had its triumphant way. But to the G.o.ds it seemed otherwise. Andrew wrote, as in grateful duty bound. He wrote again. If she had replied, he would have written a third time; but as there are few things more discouraging than a one-sided correspondence, he held his hand. He felt a touch of disappointment. She was such a warm, friendly little creature, with a sagacious little head on her--by no means the _tete de linotte_ of so many of her sisters of song and dance. And she had forgotten him. He shrugged philosophic shoulders. After all, why should she trouble herself further with so dull a dog? Man-like he did not realize the difficulties that beset even a sagacious-headed daughter of song and dance in the matter of literary composition, and the temptation to postpone from day to day the grappling with them, until the original impulse has spent itself through sheer procrastination. It is all very well to say that a letter is an easy thing to write, when letter-writing is a daily habit and you have writing materials and table all comfortably to hand. But when, like Elodie, you would have to go into a shop and buy a bottle of ink and a pen and paper and envelopes and take them up to a tiny hotel bedroom shared with an untidy, s.p.a.ce-usurping colleague, or when you would have to sit at a cafe table and write under the eyes of a not the least little bit discreet companion--for even the emanc.i.p.ated daughters of song and dance cannot, in modesty, show themselves at cafes alone; or when you have to stand up in a post office--and then there is the paper and envelope difficulty--with a furious person behind you who wants to send a telegram--Elodie's invariable habit when she corresponded, on the back of a picture post card, with her mother; when, in fact, you have before you the unprecedented task of writing a letter--picture post cards being out of the question--and a letter whose flawlessness of expression is prescribed by your vanity, or better by your nice little self-esteem, and you are confronted by such conditions as are above catalogued, human frailty may be pardoned for giving it up in despair.
With this apologia for Elodie's unresponsiveness, conscientiously recorded later by Andrew Lackaday, we will now proceed. The fact remains that they faded pleasantly and even regretlessly from each other's lives.