You see, he succeeds. If you credited his modesty, you would think that Prépimpin made Petit Patou. Quod est absurdum. But the psychological fact remains that Andrew Lackaday needed some magnetic contact with another individuality, animal or human, to exhibit his qualities. There, in counselling splendid isolation, Elodie Figasso, the little Marseilles gutter fairy was wrong. She saw, clearly enough, that, subordinated to others, with no chance of developing his one personality he must fail. But she did not perceive--and poor child, how could she?--that given the dominating influence over any combination, even over one poodle dog, he held the key of success.
So we see him, the born leader, unconscious of his powers for lack of opportunity, instinctively craving their exercise for his own spiritual and moral evolution, and employing them in the benign mastery of the dog Prépimpin.
They were happy years of bourgeois vagabondage. At first he felt the young artist's soreness that, with the exception of rare, sporadic engagements, neither London nor Paris would have him. Once he appeared at the Empire, in Leicester Square, an early turn, and kept on breaking bits of his heart every day, for a week, when the curtain went down in the thin applause that is worse than silence.
"Prépimpin felt it," he writes, "even more than I did. He would follow me off, with his head bowed down and his tail-tuft sweeping the floor, so that I could have wept over his humiliation."
Why the great capitals fail to be amused is a perpetual mystery to Andrew Lackaday. Prépimpin and he give them the newest things they can think of. After weeks and weeks of patient rehearsal, they bring a new trick to perfection. It is the clou of their performance for a week's engagement at the Paris Folies-Bergère. After a conjuring act, he retires. Comes on again immediately, Petit Patou, apparently seven foot high, in the green silk tights reaching to the arm-pit waist, a low frill round his neck, his hair up to a point, a perpetual grin painted on his face. On the other side enters Prépimpin on hind legs, bearing an immense envelope. Petit Patou opens it--shows the audience an invitation to a ball.
"Ah! dress me, Prépimpin."
The dog pulls a hidden string and Petit Patou is clad in a bottle green dress-coat. Prépimpin barks and dances his delight.
"But nom d'un chien, I can't go to a ball without a hat."
Prepimpin bolts to the wings and returns with an opera hat.
"And a stick."