They were quite alone, the others having gone on into the room set apart for them, where food was spread. Andre–Louis, who was as unlearned in Woman as he was learned in Man, was not to know, upon feeling himself suddenly extraordinarily aware of her femininity, that it was she who in some subtle, imperceptible manner so rendered him.
“What,” she asked him, with demurest innocence, “are these compensations?”
He caught himself upon the brink of the abyss.
“Fifteen livres a month,” said he, abruptly.
A moment she stared at him bewildered. He was very disconcerting. Then she recovered.
“Oh, and bed and board,” said she. “Don’t be leaving that from the reckoning, as you seem to be doing; for your dinner will be going cold. Aren’t you coming?”
“Haven’t you dined?” he cried, and she wondered had she caught a note of eagerness.
“No,” she answered, over her shoulder. “I waited.”
“What for?” quoth his innocence, hopefully.
“I had to change, of course, zany,” she answered, rudely. Having dragged him, as she imagined, to the chopping-block, she could not refrain from chopping. But then he was of those who must be chopping back.
“And you left your manners upstairs with your grand-lady clothes, mademoiselle. I understand.”
A scarlet flame suffused her face. “You are very insolent,” she said, lamely.
“I’ve often been told so. But I don’t believe it.” He thrust open the door for her, and bowing with an air which imposed upon her, although it was merely copied from Fleury of the Comedie Francaise, so often visited in the Louis le Grand days, he waved her in. “After you, ma demoiselle.” For greater emphasis he deliberately broke the word into its two component parts.
“I thank you, monsieur,” she answered, frostily, as near sneering as was possible to so charming a person, and went in, nor addressed him again throughout the meal. Instead, she devoted herself with an unusual and devastating assiduity to the suspiring Leandre, that poor devil who could not successfully play the lover with her on the stage because of his longing to play it in reality.
Andre–Louis ate his herrings and black bread with a good appetite nevertheless. It was poor fare, but then poor fare was the common lot of poor people in that winter of starvation, and since he had cast in his fortunes with a company whose affairs were not flourishing, he must accept the evils of the situation philosophically.
“Have you a name?” Binet asked him once in the course of that repast and during a pause in the conversation.
“It happens that I have,” said he. “I think it is Parvissimus.”
“Parvissimus?” quoth Binet. “Is that a family name?”
“In such a company, where only the leader enjoys the privilege of a family name, the like would be unbecoming its least member. So I take the name that best becomes in me. And I think it is Parvissimus — the very least.”
Binet was amused. It was droll; it showed a ready fancy. Oh, to be sure, they must get to work together on those scenarios.
“I shall prefer it to carpentering,” said Andre–Louis. Nevertheless he had to go back to it that afternoon, and to labour strenuously until four o’clock, when at last the autocratic Binet announced himself satisfied with the preparations, and proceeded, again with the help of Andre–Louis, to prepare the lights, which were supplied partly by tallow candles and partly by lamps burning fish-oil.
At five o’clock that evening the three knocks were sounded, and the curtain rose on “The Heartless Father.”
Among the duties inherited by Andre–Louis from the departed Felicien whom he replaced, was that of doorkeeper. This duty he discharged dressed in a Polichinelle costume, and wearing a pasteboard nose. It was an arrangement mutually agreeable to M. Binet and himself. M. Binet — who had taken the further precaution of retaining Andre–Louis’ own garments — was thereby protected against the risk of his latest recruit absconding with the takings. Andre–Louis, without illusions on the score of Pantaloon’s real object, agreed to it willingly enough, since it protected him from the chance of recognition by any acquaintance who might possibly be in Guichen.
The performance was in every sense unexciting; the audience meagre and unenthusiastic. The benches provided in the front half of the market contained some twenty-seven persons: eleven at twenty sous a head and sixteen at twelve. Behind these stood a rabble of some thirty others at six sous apiece. Thus the gross takings were two louis, ten livres, and two sous. By the time M. Binet had paid for the use of the market, his lights, and the expenses of his company at the inn over Sunday, there was not likely to be very much left towards the wages of his players. It is not surprising, therefore, that M. Binet’s bonhomie should have been a trifle overcast that evening.
“And what do you think of it?” he asked Andre–Louis, as they were walking back to the inn after the performance.
“Possibly it could have been worse; probably it could not,” said he.
In sheer amazement M. Binet checked in his stride, and turned to look at his companion.
“Huh!” said he. “Dieu de Dien! But you are frank.”
“An unpopular form of service among fools, I know.”
“Well, I am not a fool,” said Binet.
“That is why I am frank. I pay you the compliment of assuming intelligence in you, M. Binet.”
“Oh, you do?” quoth M. Binet. “And who the devil are you to assume anything? Your assumptions are presumptuous, sir.” And with that he lapsed into silence and the gloomy business of mentally casting up his accounts.
But at table over supper a half-hour later he revived the topic.
“Our latest recruit, this excellent M. Parvissimus,” he announced, “has the impudence to tell me that possibly our comedy could have been worse, but that probably it could not.” And he blew out his great round cheeks to invite a laugh at the expense of that foolish critic.
“That’s bad,” said the swarthy and sardonic Polichinelle. He was grave as Rhadamanthus pronouncing judgment. “That’s bad. But what is infinitely worse is that the audience had the impudence to be of the same mind.”
“An ignorant pack of clods,” sneered Leandre, with a toss of his handsome head.
“You are wrong,” quoth Harlequin. “You were born for love, my dear, not criticism.”
Leandre — a dull dog, as you will have conceived — looked contemptuously down upon the little man. “And you, what were you born for?” he wondered.
“Nobody knows,” was the candid admission. “Nor yet why. It is the case of many of us, my dear, believe me.”
“But why”— M. Binet took him up, and thus spoilt the beginnings of a very pretty quarrel —“why do you say that Leandre is wrong?”
“To be general, because he is always wrong. To be particular, because I judge the audience of Guichen to be too sophisticated for ‘The Heartless Father.’”
“You would put it more happily,” interposed Andre–Louis — who was the cause of this discussion —“if you said that ‘The Heartless Father’ is too unsophisticated for the audience of Guichen.”
“Why, what’s the difference?” asked Leandre.
“I didn’t imply a difference. I merely suggested that it is a happier way to express the fact.”
“The gentleman is being subtle,” sneered Binet.
“Why happier?”