I dashed a bucket of water over my horse’s legs. “You’d better look out for your elephant; those drunken Bretons are irritating him,” I said. “Mahouts are born, not made.”
Speed turned; the elephant was squealing and thrusting out a prehensile trunk among the people. There would be trouble if any fool gave him tobacco.
“Hi!” cried Speed, “tobah! Let the mem-log alone! Ai! he’s snatched a coiffe! Drop it, Djebe! C’hast buhan! Don’t be afraid, mesdames; the elephant is not ugly! Chomit oll en ho trankilite!”
The elephant appeared to understand the mixture of Hindu, French, and Breton—or perhaps it was the sight of the steel ankus that Speed flourished in his quality of mahout. The crowd pressed forward again, reassured by the “Chomit oll en ho trankilite!”
Speed swallowed the last crumb of his sandwich, wiped his hands on his handkerchief, and shoved them into his shabby pockets; the ankus dangled from his wrist.
We were in seedy circumstances; an endless chain of bad luck had followed us from Chartres—bad weather, torrents of rain, flooded roads, damaging delays on 161 railways already overcrowded with troops and war material, and, above all, we encountered everywhere that ominous apathy which burdened the whole land, even those provinces most remote from the seat of war. The blockade of Paris had paralyzed France.
The fortune that Byram had made in the previous year was already gone; we no longer travelled by rail; we no longer slept at inns; we could barely pay for the food for our animals.
As for the employés, the list had been cut down below the margin of safety, yet for a month no salaries had been paid.
As I stood there in the public square of Quimperlé, passing the cooling sponge over my horse’s nose, old Byram came out of the hotel on the corner, edged his way through the stolid crowd that surrounded us gaunt mountebanks, and shuffled up to me.
“I guess we ain’t goin’ to push through to-night, Scarlett,” he observed, wiping his sweating forehead on the sleeve of his linen duster.