There now follow some years, in Lackaday's career, of high endeavour and fierce struggle. He has taken to heart Elodie's suggestion of the exploitation of his physical idiosyncracy. He seeks for a formula. In the meanwhile he gains his livelihood as he can. His powers of mimicry stand him in good stead. In the outlying café-concerts of Paris, unknown to fashion or the foreigner, he gives imitations of popular idols from Le Bargy to Polin. But the Ambassadeurs, and the Alcazar d'Eté and the Folies Marigny and Olympia and such-like stages where fame and fortune are to be found, will have none of him. Paris, too, gets on his vagabond nerves. But what is the good of presenting the unsophisticated public of Brest or Béziers with an imitation of Monsieur le Bargy? As well give them lectures on Thermodynamics.
Sometimes he escapes from mimicry. He conjures, he juggles, he plays selections from Carmen and Cavaleria Rusticana on a fiddle made out of a cigar box and a broom-handle. The Provinces accept him with mild approbation. He tries Paris, the Paris of Menilmontant and the Outer Boulevards; but Paris, not being amused, prefers his mimicry. He is alone, mind you. No more Coinçon combinations. If he is to be insulted, let the audience do it, or the vulgar theatre management; not his brother artists. Away from his imitations he tries to make the most of his grotesque figure. He invents eccentric costumes; his sleeves reach no further than just below his elbows, his trouser hems flick his calves; he wears, inveterate tradition of the circus clown, a ridiculously little hard felt hat on the top of his shock of carroty hair. He paints his nose red and extends his grin from ear to ear. He racks his brain to invent novelties in manual dexterity. For hours a day in his modest chambre garnie in the Faubourg Saint Denis he practises his tricks. On the dissolution of the Cirque Rocambeau, where as "Auguste" he had been practically anonymous, he had unimaginatively adopted the professional name of Andrew-André. He is still Andrew-André. There is not much magic about it on a programme. But, que voulez-vous? It is as effective as many another.
During this period we see him a serious youth, absorbed in his profession, striving towards success, not for the sake of its rewards in luxurious living, but for the stamp that it gives to efficiency. The famous mountebank of Notre Dame did not juggle with greater fervour. Here and there a woman crosses his path, lingers a little and goes her way. Not that he is insensible to female charms, for he upbraids himself for over-susceptibility. But it seems that from the atavistic source whence he inherited his beautiful hands, there survived in him an instinct which craved in woman the indefinable quality that he could never meet, the quality which was common to Melisande and Phèdre and Rosalind and Fédora and the child-wife of David Copperfield. It is, as I have indicated, the ladies who bid him bonsoir. Sometimes he mourns for a day or two, more often he laughs, welcoming regained freedom. None touches his heart. Of men, he has acquaintances in plenty, with whom he lives on terms of good comradeship; but he has scarcely an intimate.
At last he makes a friend--an Englishman, Horatio Bakkus; and this friendship marks a turning-point in his history.
They met at a café-concert in Montmartre, which, like many of its kind, had an ephemeral existence--the nearest, incidentally, to the real Paris to which Andrew Lackaday had attained. It tried to appeal to a catholicity of tastes; to outdo its rivals inscabrousness--did not Farandol and Lizette Blandy make their names there?--and at the same time to offer to the purer-minded an innocent entertainment. To the latter both Lackaday, with his imitations, and Horatio Bakkus, with his sentimental ballads, contributed. Somehow the mixture failed to please. The one part scared the virtuous, at the other the deboshed yawned. La Boîte Blanche perished of inanition. But during its continuance, Lackaday and Bakkus had a month's profitable engagement.
They bumped into each other, on their first night, at the stage-door. Each politely gave way to the other. They walked on together and turned down the Rue Pigalle and, striking off, reached the Grands Boulevards. The Brasserie Tourtel enticed them. They entered and sat down to a modest supper, sandwiches and brown beer.
"I wish," said Andrew, "you would do me the pleasure to speak English with me."
"Why?" cried the other. "Is my French so villainous?"
"By no means," said Andrew, "but I am an Englishman."
"Then how the devil do you manage to talk both languages like a Frenchman?"