Part 14 (1/2)
We behold Pet.i.t Patou now definitely launched on his career. Why the execution of Bakkus's (literally) cynical suggestion should have met with instant success, neither he nor Andrew nor Prepimpin, the poodle, nor anyone under heaven had the faintest idea. Perhaps Prepimpin had something to do with it. He was young, excellently trained, and expensive. As to the methods of his training Andrew made no enquiries. Better not. But, brought up in the merciful school of Ben Flint, in which Billy the pig had many successors, both porcine and canine, he had expert knowledge of what kind firmness on the part of the master and sheer love on that of the animal could accomplish.
Prepimpin went through his repertoire with the punctilio of the barrack square deprecated by Bakkus.
”I buy him,” said Andrew. ”_Viens, mon ami_.”
Prepimpin cast an oblique glance at his old master.
”_Va-t-en_,” said the latter.
”_Allons_” said Andrew with a caressing touch on the dog's head.
Prepimpin's topaz eyes gazed full into his new lord's. He wagged the tuft at the end of his shaven tail. Andrew knelt down, planted his fingers in the lion s.h.a.gginess of mane above his ears and said in the French which Prepimpin understood:
”We're going to be good friends, eh? You're not going to play me any dirty tricks? You're going to be a good and very faithful colleague?”
”You mustn't spoil him,” said the vendor, foreseeing, according to his lights, possible future recriminations.
Andrew, still kneeling, loosed his hold on the dog, who forthwith put both paws on his shoulder and tried to lick the averted human face.
”I've trained animals since I was two years old, Monsieur Berguinan. Please tell me something that I don't know.” He rose. ”_Alors_, Prepimpin, we belong to each other. _Viens_.”
The dog followed him joyously. The miracle beyond human explanation was accomplished, the love at first sight between man and dog.
Now, in the ma.n.u.script there is much about Prepimpin. Lackaday, generally so precise, has let himself go over the love and intelligence of this most human of animals. To read him you would think that Prepimpin invented his own stage business and rehea.r.s.ed Pet.i.t Patou. As a record of dog and man sympathy it is of remarkable interest; it has indeed a touch of rare beauty; but as it is a detailed history of Prepimpin rather than an account of a phase in the career of Andrew Lackaday, I must wring my feelings and do no more than make a pa.s.sing reference to their long and, from my point of view, somewhat monotonous partners.h.i.+p. It sheds, however, a light on the young manhood of this earnest mountebank. It reveals a loneliness ill-becoming his years--a loneliness of soul and heart of which he appears to be unconscious. Again, we have here and there the fleeting shadow of a petticoat. In Stockholm--during these years he went far afield--he fancies himself in love with one Vera Karynska of vague Mid-European nationality, who belongs to a troupe of acrobats. Vera has blue eyes, a deeply sentimental nature, and, alas! an unsympathetic husband who, to Andrew's young disgust depends on her for material support, seeing that every evening he and various other brutes of the tribe form an inverted pyramid with Vera's amazonian shoulders as the apex. He is making up a besotted mind to say, ”Fly with me,” when the Karinski troupe vanishes Moscow-wards and an inexorable contract drives him to Dantzic. In that ancient town, looking into the faithful and ironical eyes of Prepimpin, he thanks G.o.d he did not make a fool of himself.
You see, he succeeds. If you credited his modesty, you would think that Prepimpin made Pet.i.t Patou. _Quod est absurdum_. But the psychological fact remains that Andrew Lackaday needed some magnetic contact with another individuality, animal or human, to exhibit his qualities. There, in counselling splendid isolation, Elodie Figa.s.so, the little Ma.r.s.eilles gutter fairy was wrong. She saw, clearly enough, that, subordinated to others, with no chance of developing his one personality he must fail.
But she did not perceive--and poor child, how could she?--that given the dominating influence over any combination, even over one poodle dog, he held the key of success.
So we see him, the born leader, unconscious of his powers for lack of opportunity, instinctively craving their exercise for his own spiritual and moral evolution, and employing them in the benign mastery of the dog Prepimpin.
They were happy years of bourgeois vagabondage. At first he felt the young artist's soreness that, with the exception of rare, sporadic engagements, neither London nor Paris would have him. Once he appeared at the Empire, in Leicester Square, an early turn, and kept on breaking bits of his heart every day, for a week, when the curtain went down in the thin applause that is worse than silence.
”Prepimpin felt it,” he writes, ”even more than I did. He would follow me off, with his head bowed down and his tail-tuft sweeping the floor, so that I could have wept over his humiliation.”
Why the great capitals fail to be amused is a perpetual mystery to Andrew Lackaday. Prepimpin and he give them the newest things they can think of.
After weeks and weeks of patient rehearsal, they bring a new trick to perfection. It is the _clou_ of their performance for a week's engagement at the Paris Folies-Bergere. After a conjuring act, he retires.
Comes on again immediately, Pet.i.t Patou, apparently seven foot high, in the green silk tights reaching to the arm-pit waist, a low frill round his neck, his hair up to a point, a perpetual grin painted on his face. On the other side enters Prepimpin on hind legs, bearing an immense envelope.
Pet.i.t Patou opens it--shows the audience an invitation to a ball.
”Ah! dress me, Prepimpin.”
The dog pulls a hidden string and Pet.i.t Patou is clad in a bottle green dress-coat. Prepimpin barks and dances his delight.
”But _nom d'un chien_, I can't go to a ball without a hat.”
Prepimpin bolts to the wings and returns with an opera hat.
”And a stick.”
Prepimpin brings the stick.