CHAPTER VII

CARACAL’S NARROW ESCAPE

“À bas Caracal!”

“Vive Vieillecloche!”

Phil, who was reading a newspaper as he passed along, looked up with astonishment.

He was in front of the entrance of a music-hall. On a strip of cotton cloth he read, in huge letters, “PUNCH d’INDIGNATION!” The name of Vieillecloche was displayed everywhere, mingled with the flags which covered a good half of the theatrical posters of acrobats, jugglers, and clowns.

“The flag covers the goods!” Phil said, as he saw this assemblage of patriotism and fakery. “Vieillecloche is at his old tricks; what a humbug!”

Phil stopped. Confused imprecations against impostors and grafters came to his ears between the bang! bang! of the door, pushed one way or the other by the public and clanging back into its place.

Bang! “Vive Vieillecloche!”

Bang! “À bas!” Bang! “Traitors! Sold out!” Bang! “À bas Caracal!” Bang! bang!

“Hello!” said Phil. “‘À bas Caracal’? What does that mean? I must go in.”

He entered.

Bang! It was the door slamming after Phil. He had now a right to the indignation and to the punch.

To tell the truth, there was little indignation in the hall, but a great deal of drinking and still more laughter. The public was made up of the idlers of the quarter, who had come to be amused. There were stable-boys and grooms in their great wooden shoes. The hall was infected with the smell of rum and tobacco. The voices, which but now had reached Phil’s ear in broken cries, rolled uninterruptedly. There was a continuous torrent of _à bas!_ and _vive!_ mingled with coarse wit and the clink of glasses. On the stage, mastering the tumult, Vieillecloche was speaking.

“Vive Vieillecloche!”

“Hear! hear!”

Bang!

The flights of oratory were lost amid the noise.

“Only yesterday,” Vieillecloche was saying, as he raised his voice, “not satisfied with attacking the majesty of universal suffrage, forgetful of the famous night of the 13th of March, foreigners feared not to brave the lion-people in its den! They banded together to despoil us of our dead—to soil the majesty of the tomb where our great ancestors—” Bang! said the door, cutting the discourse, “—ancestors sleep their eternal sleep! Do you not hear, O people, beneath the earth Richard the Lion-hearted roaring with wrath and shame? And to think there are French pens that treat us as visionaries—us who point out such attacks—and that pretend that we are wanting in courtesy by accusing our passing guests of an imaginary crime! This vile pen, citizens, I deliver it up to your indignant scorn. It is Caracal!”

“À bas Caracal!”

“Oho! I understand,” Phil said to himself. “Caracal has taken up the defense of the foreigners, as he promised Miss Rowrer the other day.”

“Eh bien!” Vieillecloche went on, “it shall not be said that Caracal has appealed in vain to our courtesy when he asks us to cease our political campaign against such foreigners, among whom there are ladies and even a young girl. We shall speak no more of Richard the Lion-hearted! All that is a blunder, a visionary’s dream, a groundless accusation. So be it! They ask for definite facts and not for vague accusations. Here is a definite fact! I accuse, formally, an American of stealing our ideas and stifling under the power of his cursed gold the outburst of a young genius, the hope of our glorious national art. They come to pillage even in their calm retreats, and to deprive of their labor the sons of the soil—_les autochtones!_—hum!—_les autochtones!_” (The word intoxicated Vieillecloche and he sent it bounding like a rubber ball.) “Yes, citizens! He has signed his work with a false name, he has picked the lock of our national museums, and, like a cuckoo, he has deposited in the bosom of glory the egg which he has not laid! And you suffer that, O people? Do you not feel the blush of shame mounting to your cheek? Take your clubs, Parisians—” and so he went on and on.

Vieillecloche in his haranguing embroidered his theme with violent gestures which sent the skirts of his coat flying around his thin body.

Phil was not sorry to have come. The inventions of this crank amused him, most of all when the orator, rising to higher flights, brought out personal facts so as “to enter into the domain of practical things.” Vieillecloche calmed down. The storm-tossed skirts of his coat fell. He was no longer the roaring tribune of the people: he was the statesman, speaking calmly and coolly. He held one hand between the buttons of his waistcoat, and the other behind his back, like Napoleon. To begin with, according to him, these facts would never have taken place if they had only listened to him.

A quarter of an hour of counsels followed, in which there were insurrections and barricades, blood and glory, and _à bas!_ and _vive!_

“But if the sword remains in the scabbard,” Vieillecloche concluded, “let the people, at least, console despoiled genius with their songs; let the old Gaulish gaiety inflict its avenging laugh on the robber of its glory!”

As Vieillecloche retired amid ironic applause, a long-haired poet came out on the platform and a hurdy-gurdy ground out despairingly such an air as goats dance to. Phil looked at the furious grinder and gave a cry of astonishment: “Poufaille!”

“What is Poufaille doing here? And why does he look so furious?” Phil asked himself, as he saw the sculptor’s wrathful head leaning over the hurdy-gurdy whose crank he turned with rage.

Bing! bing!

“After all,” thought Phil, “there is nothing strange in Poufaille being here. Artists belong to all sorts of provincial and Parisian societies, as if they were really children of the soil, so as to get orders. He might as well grind out a tune at an indignation meeting as Suzanne do the Muse of the South at the Pig’s-Rump Dinner.”

Phil also knew that the “Poets of the Landes” or the “Broom-flower” were only too happy to make themselves heard by a Parisian public, and would not miss an occasion for avenging genius despoiled by cowards, and for declaiming in its honor to the accompaniment of a hurdy-gurdy or bagpipes.

So it was a very simple thing that Poufaille should have offered his services. Meanwhile Vieillecloche had sat down after many a handshake with the notabilities of the committee. It was now the turn of the poet.

The singer on the platform gesticulated to his Norman patois, more monotonous than the fall of rain, while the air of the hurdy-gurdy, piercing and thrilling, filled the hall like a continued wailing from a herd of kids.

“Enough!” cried the public; “be done, _fouchtri!_”

“To the door!”

“Enough! enough!”

“Silence, François!”

“Ta bouche, bébé!”

“Stow it! I say! _pétrusquin!_”

It was the _Parigot_ wit replying to the wit of the provinces. The people had indeed arisen, but not as Vieillecloche would have wished. Instead of tearing up the paving-stones in honor of misunderstood Genius, and casting out the robbers of Glory, they were content to finish the punch and laugh in the face of the poet who bored them with his doggerel.

Besides, all these questions of signatures to pictures, of museum locks picked, and of Richard the Lion-hearted interested nobody.

But the banging of the door now began covering the bing! bing! of the tune. The public was going out in a mass. Vieillecloche tried to keep them by new flights of oratory which had no echo. Phil foresaw that the fierce tribune of the people would soon be making his prophetic gestures and proclaiming the eternal glory of the _autochtones_ alone with his hurdy-gurdy, like St. Anthony with his pig. So Phil went away, followed to the very street by the exasperated grinding of the crank.

“What madness!” Phil said to himself. “Poufaille is certainly earning his money. He puts as much heat into it as if some one had stolen his own share of glory.” Poufaille a despoiled young genius! Phil, at the very idea, could not refrain from laughter.

“I must wait for him here,” he thought; “I shall see him when he comes out.”

He walked back and forth, but Poufaille did not come out. Still, Phil lost nothing by waiting. A final bang of the door made him turn his head and—what did he see but, arm in arm and laughing and talking together as gay as school-boys, Vieillecloche with Caracal!

“Well, I never! That’s too much!” Phil said, as he followed them with his eyes, trying to gather from their gestures the meaning of their conversation.

Vieillecloche lifted his hands, as if to show that they were empty. Caracal spoke low to him. Vieillecloche nodded approvingly.

“Those fine fellows must be preparing some stroke of business,” Phil said to himself, strongly interested. “Who knows if I do not play a part in it? It may be my turn—and Miss Ethel will no longer hear of Richard the Lion-hearted. The attacks will now fall on Caracal. Bravo! But perhaps Miss Ethel will not be displeased to learn of the friendship between Caracal and Vieillecloche. One might have supposed they would not be quite so thick! I don’t understand it,” was Phil’s conclusion. Moreover, he was accustomed never to take seriously what Caracal said or did.

“Besides,” Phil added, “Poufaille must know what is going on. I have not seen him come out, but he will tell me to-night.” So he determined to dine at Mère Michel’s, where he would have a chance of seeing Poufaille.

For a long time he had not met the _copains_—they had almost become strangers to him. The talk about art and the masterpieces traced with a burnt match on grimy tables no longer interested him. He felt himself out of place in the environment, but he wished to see Poufaille that very evening. To begin with, he would have the pleasure of offering his services to the poor devil, who could not be very rich, to judge from the sale at the Hôtel Drouot a few days before. Phil would find some delicate means of being useful to him. Who knows if he would ever see him again? It would be like a farewell to his own past. So Phil went to Mère Michel’s.

His past mounted up to his brain. It seemed to rise up whole and entire before him when, near the Boulevard, in a narrow street, he saw the painted canvas and fixtures deposited at the stage entrance of a circus. The damp courtyard, the frayed walls, the store-rooms of stage-properties, the theater’s insides—all that was a little of his own past.

It was himself, again, whom he elbowed in the Boulevard beside the Café des Artistes, where women with red tresses topped with feathers were drinking from little glasses with ill-shaven messieurs, showing each other photographs and programs, and signing engagements with fingers stiff with rings. Phil could hear their technical slang: _Chiqué-dèche—purée-j’te fais une bleue en cinq secs!_ “Garçon, two absinthes, and get a move on you, _bougre d’andouille_!”

Strolling artists offered to do his portrait for two sous. A bohemian imitated an _ocarina_ by swelling out his cheeks. A contortionist spread his little carpet and dislocated himself on the sidewalk.

“Do you like my trade?” he said to Phil, who stood looking at him. “If you do, I’ll hire you!”

“What a world it is, all the same! And to think that once I loved it all,” Phil thought, as he turned away.

Farther on there was a restaurant still celebrated for the reason that, long ago, my Lord l’Arsouille had supped there with Cora Pearl. As Phil passed in front of it, he saw the staircase decorated with green palms, and he thought he recognized Helia going up,—it was her hat and cloak,—and, lifting his eyes, Phil saw, at the window above, the profile of the Duke of Morgania. Phil lowered his head and went his way pensively, leaving behind him the restaurant full of fragrance and lights, wherein the beautiful butterflies of the night were coming to burn their wings.

To escape from these mournful visions, Phil called up the remembrance of Ethel. The remainder of his way he traversed without noticing the distance. He had already passed the Seine and gone under the vault of the Institut, following a quiet old street. A moment later he was at Mère Michel’s. A volley of enthusiastic cries welcomed him. Phil asked himself if he were not the plaything of a dream.

“Vive Phil! Hurrah for Phil! Bravo, Phil! A _ban_ for Phil!”

“_Pan! pan! pan! pan! pan!_”

“It must be my tall hat,” thought Phil, and he took it off with a quick movement. The welcome doubled its noise.

“Vive Phil!”

“Hurrah!”

“Am I dreaming?” Phil asked himself, “or are these men crazy?” They were all crowding round him, patting him on the back and shaking his hand.

“Old Phil!”

“Good old Phil!”

“My best compliments, old comrade!”

“Compliments for what? Whose compliments?” Phil asked in a daze.

“But for your picture, of course!”

“What picture?”

“Your picture in the Luxembourg. Haven’t you read the papers?”

You could have “knocked Phil over with a feather.” They were telling him he had a picture in the Luxembourg, and he was the only one not to know it! Surely they must be amusing themselves with him—they must have got up a practical joke. So he went away, ill disposed for a _rigolade_ after the events of the day.

He had not gone ten steps when he stumbled on Poufaille; but it was Poufaille cold and sinister, a Northern Poufaille as it were, closer buttoned up than Vieillecloche in his rôle as statesman.

“How goes it?” Phil said cordially, holding out his hand.

Poufaille did not budge.

“What’s the matter?” said Phil. “You’re giving me the cold shoulder! Is everybody losing his head? You won’t take my hand, good old Poufaille!”

“I am no longer your good old Poufaille!”

“But what have I done?” Phil asked.

“What have you done?” Poufaille burst out, unable to restrain himself longer. “I’ll tell you what you’ve done. You’ve stolen my share of glory—you sign pictures which were painted by me! I’ve seen my cows in the Luxembourg, signed by your name—the picture into which I put my whole soul!”

If lightning had fallen at Phil’s feet he would have been less surprised. So he was the robber cuckoo and Poufaille was the young genius! Now he understood the meaning of the “Punch d’Indignation.”

“That’s what you’ve done to me!” Poufaille cried, quite beside himself. “You would hinder me from flying with my own wings. I had something here” (and Poufaille gave himself a tremendous blow on the forehead), “I had something here—and you robbed me of it!”

“Your cows—” Phil began in distress, “it was a joke I wanted to play on Caracal. I bought the picture and signed it—that is true. But was it yours? I didn’t know it.”

“You didn’t know it! Doesn’t one know the mark of the lion?”

“My good Poufaille, let me explain it to you—let me—” Phil all but stammered; (it was not easy to tell Poufaille that his picture had been used as a scarecrow)—“let me explain it to you.”

“We’ll have the explanation in public,” Poufaille shouted.

“Only let me tell you, my dear Poufaille—”

But Poufaille would listen to nothing. He only knew that he was perishing of hunger while another was stealing his glory. In his rage fragments of the speech came back to him in chance words: “_Les autochtones!_—young genius—you have deposited in the bosom of glory an _autochtone’s_ egg—do you understand?—an _autochtone’s_ egg!”

“Poufaille,” Phil said gravely, “if I have done you wrong, I swear it was not done wilfully. How much do you think your cows are worth? I’ll give you whatever you ask.”

“Money!” Poufaille answered indignantly. “You dare offer me money to purchase my silence!”

“Listen to me, I beseech you!”

“No! I am going to tell them all about it inside there!” and Poufaille, terrible and furious, entered Mère Michel’s.

It was now Phil’s turn to be angry—not against the poor simpleton Poufaille, but Caracal should pay for this! “What will Miss Rowrer think of me with this story of a forged signature?” Phil said to himself.

The idea that his name figured on a picture in the collection of daubs which form the foreign hall of the Luxembourg Museum—and that just when he dreamed he was sure of fame! At the very thought he clenched his fists with fury. So Caracal had bewitched the Fine Arts Commission into accepting such a horror!—or perhaps they were willing to discredit American art by presenting to the public a wretched work bought for a few sous in a junk-shop! And now he, Phil, was to suffer shipwreck from the ridiculousness of it, while Ethel would laugh! What could be Caracal’s aim? With a flash it came to him that the abominable critic wished to make him grotesque and odious at the same time.

“Ah, Caracal,” Phil said to himself, “you are mistaken this time. You shall pay for all this!”

A sudden idea came to him: “What if I should go and punch his head!”

He knew he should find Caracal at home at that hour. It was the day before the feuilleton, impertinent and familiar, which he was in the habit of signing “A Parisian,” or the _chronique scandaleuse_ of courts by an “Old Diplomat,” alternating with art criticisms signed “Caracal.” A cab happened to be passing. Phil hailed it, called out the address to the driver, and—_en route_! What streets he took, through what quarters, Phil did not know. He knew only that the critic was going to have a bad quarter of an hour. He must have from him a frank explanation, without dodging or subterfuge. This time there would be no duel carried on by winking the eye and shrugging the shoulder. Phil stiffened his arm as the cab stopped short. He jumped to the ground and with three steps reached the concierge’s lodge.

“M. Caracal, if you please?”

“Seventh floor, last door—on the court!”

Phil ran quickly up the stairs. A thick carpet deadened his steps, and he could hear, behind the doors, the sound of pianos or the laughter of children. He imagined to himself the pleasant homes with their lamps surrounded by a circle of golden heads.

“Good, simple, good people!” Phil thought. “Perhaps it is from you that Caracal takes his studies for ‘The House of Glass’—wolf in the sheepfold that he is!”

The thought increased his anger. He went up and up. At last he was going to see that apartment of Caracal’s which no one ever entered. No doubt it would be insolent in its luxury and have a big valet in the anteroom and invaluable pictures which this grafter of the press must have extorted for his collection of art works, of which he was always talking in his articles.

Seventh floor, last door! It must be there. Phil had reached it. There was no bell! Phil knocked, but there was no reply. The key had been forgotten in the door, and he entered. On a table a small lamp shed its light over papers and books. There were other books on the ground and on chairs—perhaps the encyclopedia from which Caracal drew his weekly erudition. In the half-obscurity, farther back, Phil saw a brass bedstead like a child’s couch. Beside it, on a chest of drawers, there were garments carefully folded and a hat protected from the dust by a newspaper. On the floor were shoes beside a blacking-brush. On the chimneypiece there was a photograph in which an old lady held the hand of an old gentleman. Everything in the room was neatly ordered and touching in its simplicity.

“I must have mistaken the floor,” Phil said to himself. “This is not the apartment of an arbiter of society elegance.”

He was on the point of retreating when, on a sofa near him in the shadow, some one moved, and he seemed to hear a sob. Phil started back and the figure on the sofa came into full light. It was Caracal asleep. There was an expression of sadness on his face and tears were on his cheeks—the cheeks which Phil had always seen smirking with a convulsive sneer.

Caracal, when he came home, must have thrown himself on the sofa worn out with his day’s work. The calm which had come over his features showed that he had dropped off to sleep in some sad and gentle dream. Phil, in spite of himself, looked up to the chimneypiece where the old lady and the old gentleman seemed watching over their child—yes, yes, Phil was sure of it now, from the sadness on the face of Caracal. He must have gone back to his childhood; perhaps, in his dreams, he heard the beloved voices which had long since become silent. A sob from Caracal made Phil tremble again—a dull, deep sob like the sigh of a dying man. One would have said that his whole life was rising up before him—his heart’s bitterness, humiliations undergone and illusions fled, the success of others and regrets for his own ill-doing.

Phil felt his anger fade away. He divined all the wretchedness of his life, so full of meanness and bluff. Asleep, the poor creature, overcome by his distress, seemed sacred to him. He went out without noise.

“Old Caracal,” he murmured, “I’ll leave you to your dream—that shall be your punishment.”