CHAPTER VI
The summer waned and the autumn began and then a great shock came to Toni—two great shocks, in fact. First Paul Verney, who, next to Jacques, was Toni’s best friend, was sent away to boarding-school. Toni felt a horrible sense of loss and emptiness. In losing Paul, he seemed to lose a protector as well as a friend. He had not been so much afraid of other people when Paul was about, but now he was more afraid of them than ever. And then, Toni, being a strong, robust fellow for his age, it was forced upon Madame Marcel that, as he would not go to school, he must learn a trade.
Madame Marcel was ambitious for Toni and shed many tears over his determination not to make a walking encyclopedia of himself if he could help it. What was the use of his learning to work, anyhow? When he married Denise, as he fully intended to do, they could live over Mademoiselle Duval’s shop and eat cakes and tarts for dinner and candies for breakfast and supper. There was the bench under the acacia tree close by Mademoiselle Duval’s shop, and Toni expected to spend his adult life sitting on that bench, in the summer time, with Denise and eating cakes, and in the winter time sitting in his mother’s warm kitchen licking candy kettles.
It was a very grave matter to select a trade for Toni. Madame Marcel had aspirations for him which were not shared, however, by anybody else; for all the persons with whom she talked concerning Toni’s future were quite brutal, so his poor mother thought, and recommended putting the boy to doing hard work for which his strong little legs and arms and back well fitted him. But Madame Marcel secretly yearned to see her Toni a gentleman, though at the same time she had not the courage to advance this proposition in any way. So she thought as a compromise between a trade and a profession she would make Toni a musician—a violinist, in short.
When this was broached to Toni, he objected to it, as he did to every suggestion that he should do anything except amuse himself, talk with Jacques and hang around the horses at the cavalry barracks. His mother, however, for once showed some determination, and Toni, finding that he absolutely had to learn to work, begged and prayed that he might be allowed to work about the one livery stable in the town of Bienville. Toni really did not think he would mind feeding and currying horses, he loved them so much—almost as much as Jacques and Paul Verney—and, like Jacques, they were interested listeners—more interested than most of the people he knew. Madame Marcel would by no means consent to this, and urged on Toni the advantage of playing first violin in the orchestra of the theater, like Hermann, the yellow-haired Swiss, who was first violinist at the Bienville theater.
“Do you call that work,” asked Toni indignantly, as if he were already a captain of industry—“sitting there and fiddling for amusement? Why, mama, that isn’t work at all—it’s just amusement.”
“Then why do you object to it?” asked Madame Marcel helplessly.
“Because it is not work,” replied Toni boldly. “When I work, I want to work—currying horses or something.”
“But have you no ambition?” cried poor Madame Marcel. “Do you want to be a mere hostler?”