"I cannot say that I do," replied Andrew honestly, "I have never thought of it.'
"But you must, my dear Lackaday. You have no idea how it stimulates your intellect. It crystallizes your own vague ideas and sends you away with the comforting conviction of what a damned fool the other fellow is. It's the cheapest recreation in the world--when you can get it. And it doesn't matter whether you're in purple and fine linen or in rags or in the greasy dress-suit of a café-concert singer." He beckoned the waiter. "Shall we go?"
They parted outside and went their respective ways. The next night they again supped together, and the night after that, until it became a habit. In his long talks with the idle and cynical tenor, Andrew learned many things.
Now, parenthetically, certain facts in the previous career of Andrew Lackaday have to be noted.
Madame Flint had brought him up nominally in the Roman Catholic Faith, which owing to his peripatetic existence was a very nebulous affair without much real meaning; and Ben Flint, taking more pains, had reared him in a sturdy Lancashire Fear of God and Duty towards his Neighbour and Duty towards himself, and had given him the Golden Rule above mentioned. Ben had also seen to his elementary education, so that the régime du participe passé had no difficulties for him, and Racine and Bossuet were not empty names, seeing that he had learned by heart extracts from the writings of these immortals in his school primer. That they conveyed little to him but a sense of paralysing boredom is neither here nor there. And Ben Flint, most worthy and pertinacious of Britons, for the fourteen impressionable years during which he was the arbiter of young Andrew's destiny, never for an hour allowed him to forget that he was an Englishman. That Andrew should talk French, his stepmother tongue, to all the outside world was a matter of necessity. But if he addressed a word of French to him, Ben Flint, there was the devil to pay. And if he picked up from the English stable hands vulgarisms and debased vowel sounds, Ben Flint had the genius to compel their rejection.
"My father," writes Lackaday--for as such he always regarded Ben Flint--"was the most remarkable man I have ever known. That he loved me with his whole nature I never doubted and I worshipped the ground on which he trod. But he was remorseless in his enforcement of obedience. Looking back, I am lost in wonder at his achievement."
Still, even Ben Flint could not do everything. The eternal precepts of morality, the colloquial practice of English speech, the ineradicable principles of English birth and patriotism, the elementary though thorough French education, the intensive physical training in all phases of circus life, took every hour that Ben Flint could spare from his strenuous professional career as a vagabond circus clown. I who knew Ben Flint, and drank of his wisdom gained in many lands, have been disposed to wonder why he did not empty it to broaden the intellectual and æsthetic horizon of his adopted son. But on thinking over the matter--how could he? He had spent all his time in filling up the boy with essentials. Just at that time when Andrew might have profited by the strong, rough intellectuality that had so greatly attracted me as a young man, Ben Flint died. In the realm of gymnasts, jugglers, circus-riders, dancers in which Andrew had thence found his being, there was no one to replace the mellow old English clown, who travelled around with Sterne and Montaigne and Shakespeare and Bunyan and the Bible, as the only books of his permanent library. Such knowledge as he possessed of the myriad activities of the great world outside his professional circle he had picked up in aimless and desultory reading.
In Horatio Bakkus, therefore, Andrew met for the first time a human being interested in the intellectual aspect of life; one who advanced outrageous propositions just for the joy of supporting them and of refuting counter-arguments; one, in fact, who, to his initial amazement, could juggle with ideas as he juggled with concrete objects. In this companionship he found an unknown stimulus. He would bid his friend adieu and go away, his brain catching feverishly at elusive theories and new conceptions. Sometimes he went off thrilled with a sense of intellectual triumph. He had beaten his adversary. He had maintained his simple moral faith against ingenious sophistry. He realized himself as a thinking being, impelled by a new force to furnish himself with satisfying reasons for conduct. It was through Horatio Bakkus that he discovered The Venus of Milo and Marcus Aurelius and Longchamps races....
From the last he derived the most immediate benefit.
"If you've never been to a race-meeting," said Bakkus, "you've missed one of the elementary opportunities of a liberal education. Nowhere else can you have such a chance of studying human imbecility, knavery and greed. You can also glut your eyes with the spectacle of useless men, expensive women, and astounded, sensitive animals."