Prepimpin brings the stick.
"And a cigar."
Prépimpin rushes to a little table at the back of the stage and on his hind legs offers a box of cigars to his master, who selects one and lights it. He begins the old juggler's trick of the three objects. The dog sits on his haunches and watches him. There is patter in which the audience is given to understand that Prépimpin, who glances from time to time over the footlights, with a shake of his leonine mane, is bored to death by his master's idiocy. At last the hat descends on Petit Patou's head, the crook-handled stick falls on his arm, and he looks about in a dazed way for the cigar, and then he sees Prépimpin, who has caught it, swaggering off on his hind legs, the still lighted cigar in his mouth.
"No," writes Lackaday, "it was a failure. Poor Prépimpin and I left Paris with our tails between our legs. We were to start a tour at Bordeaux. 'Mon pauvre ami,' said I, on the journey--Prépimpin never suffered the indignity of a dog cage--'There is only one thing to be done. It is you who will be going to the ball and will juggle with the three objects, and I who will catch the cigar in my mouth.' But it was not to be. At Bordeaux and all through the tour we had a succès fou."
Thus Andrew washed his hands of Paris and London and going where he was appreciated roved the world in quiet contentment. He was young, rather scrupulously efficient within his limits, than ambitious, and of modest wants, sober habits, and of a studious disposition which his friendship with Horatio Bakkus had both awakened and stimulated. Homeless from birth he never knew the nostalgia which grips even the most deliberately vagrant of men. As his ultimate goal he had indeed a vague dream of a home with wife and children--one of these days in the future, when he had put by enough money to justify such luxuries. And then there was the wife to find. In a wife sewing by lamp-light between a red-covered round table and the fire, a flaxen haired cherub by her side--for so did his ingenuous inexperience picture domestic happiness--he required the dominating characteristic of angelic placidity. Perhaps his foster-mother and the comfort Ben Flint found in her mild and phlegmatic devotion had something to do with it.
In his manuscript he tries to explain--and flounders about in a psychological bog--that his ideal woman and his ideal wife are two totally different conceptions. The woman who could satisfy all his romantic imaginings was the Princesse Lointaine--the Highest Common Factor of the ladies I have already mentioned--Mélisande, Phèdre, Rosalind, Fédora, and Dora Copperfield--it is at this stage that he mentions them by name, having extended his literary horizon. Her he did not see sewing, in ox-eyed serenity, by a round table covered with a red cloth. With Her it was a totally different affair. It was a matter of spring and kisses and a perfect spiritual companionship.... As I have said, he gets into a terrible muddle. Anyhow, between the two conflicting ideals, he does not fall to the ground of vulgar amours. At the risk of tedium I feel bound to insist on this aspect of his life. For in the errant cosmopolitan world in which he, irresponsible and now well salaried bachelor had his being, he was thrown into the free and easy comradeship of hundreds of attractive women, as free and irresponsible as himself. He lived in a sea of temptation. On the other hand, I should be doing as virile a creature as ever walked a great wrong if I presented him to you under the guise of a Joseph Andrews. He had his laughter and his champagne and his kisses on the wing. But it was:
"We'll meet again one of these days."
"One of these days when our paths cross again."
And so--in effect--Bon soir.
It is difficult to compress into a page or two the history of several years. But that is what I have to do.