Love of Seven Dolls (4 page)

Had she had her suitcase in her possession, Mouche would have turned and fled. But it was locked now in the luggage boot and she had a woman’s inability to part with her possessions no matter how wretched they might be. And besides, where was she to go? Not the river any more, at the bottom of which writhed eels and crayfish as Carrot Top had warned her.

Half-blinded with tears, Mouche turned away and obeyed him.

She heard the scraping and thudding on the roof as Golo fastened the dismantled puppet booth to the rack and then tied the trunk on behind.

Capitaine Coq got into the front seat, pulled his stocking cap over his eyes and went to sleep. The car, guided by Golo, moved off, crossing the bridge and turning north at the Port Neuilly, sought the high road to Rheims.

Huddled in the back seat, Mouche dried her tears and nibbled on the bread and sausage. She managed to derive comfort from the fact that safe in the trunk behind her, tarpaulined against inclement weather, were all the little creatures who had seemed to like her. And she remembered that even Capitaine Coq had spoken of them in the third person as though their lives were their own.

Just before she fell asleep, she felt the trunk scrape against the rear of the car and she smiled, thinking of Poil du Carot, bowed beneath his managerial worries, the hypocritical but lovable fox, the unhappy giant, the sulky golden-haired girl, the pompous but friendly penguin, the gossipy concierge who at bottom was a woman who could be trusted, and the kind and touching mender of broken toys. Surely she would be meeting them all again . . .

T
HE REAL NAME OF THE MAN WHO
billed himself as Capitaine Coq was Michel Peyrot, and he was bred out of the gutters of Paris, the same which in an earlier age had spawned Villon.

His had been a life without softness or pity. He had never known his father. When he was six his mother, who earned her living on the street, was murdered. Michel was taken by a carnival family. His foster-mother, a worn-out soubrette, augmented her income by obliging clients behind the tent after the performance; his foster father was a fire-eater in the freak show and was rarely sober.

When Michel was twelve, the fire-eater engaged in a duel with a rival from another fair, but being drunk, miscalculated the amount of petrol he could store in his cheeks to blow out from his mouth in flames. Swallowing some which became ignited simultaneously he died horribly of internal combustion. His wife, already undermined with disease, did not survive him long, and at thirteen Michel was again alone in the world.

By the time he was fifteen, he was a little savage practised in all of the cruel arts and swindles of the street fairs and cheap carnivals. Now at thirty-five he was handsome in a rakish way, with wiry, reddish hair, wide-spaced grey eyes in a pale face and a virile crooked nose wrinkled still further by a blow that had flattened it during a brief experiment with pugilism and which, with a sensuous mouth, gave him something of the look of a satyr.

Throughout his life no one had ever been kind to him, or gentle, and he paid back the world in like. Wholly cynical, he had no regard or respect for man, woman, child or God. Not at any time he could remember in this thirty-five years of existence had he ever loved anything or anyone. He looked upon women as conveniences that his appetite demanded, and after he had used them, abandoned them or treated them badly. Why he had picked up the thin, wretched bit of flotsam known as Mouche he could not have told. Indeed, he would have insisted that it was not he at all who had added her to his queer family, but the members of that group themselves, Carrot Top, Monsieur Reynardo, Mme. Muscat and Monsieur Nicholas, who had made the decision.

For in spite of the fact that it was he who sat behind the one-way curtain in the booth, animated them and supplied their seven voices, the puppets frequently acted strangely and determinedly as individuals over whom he had no control. Michel never had bothered to reflect greatly over this phenomenon but had simply accepted it as something that was so and which, far from interfering with the kind of life he was accustomed to living, brought him a curious kind of satisfaction.

Growing up with the people of the carnival acts, Michel had learned juggling, sword-swallowing and leaping on the trampolin, but it was in ventriloquism that he became the most proficient.

The lives of the puppets had begun when Michel Peyrot was a prisoner of the Germans during the war, and in their camps had a kind of post-graduate course in all that was base in the human nature.

In this evil period of an evil life he first carved and clad the seven puppets, brought them to life for the entertainment of his fellow prisoners and made the discovery that more and more they refused to speak the obscenities and vulgarities that make soldiers laugh, but instead were becoming individuals with lives of their own.

During those times that he sat hidden in the puppet booth, Michel Peyrot was not, but the seven were. Golo, the derelict Senegalese, understood this paradox perfectly. To him it was simply the primitive jungle magic by which his spirit was enabled to leave the body and enter into other objects which then became imbued with his life. But there was yet another manifestation of which Michel Peyrot was unaware, and that was that under the scheme of creation it was not possible for a man to be wholly wicked and live a life entirely devoted to evil.

If Carrot Top, Gigi and Ali the giant were restoring to him the childhood of which he had been robbed, or Reynardo, Dr. Duclos, Mme. Muscat and Monsieur Nicholas the means by which he could escape from himself, Michel was not consciously aware of it. Often he was cynically amused at the things done and the sentiments expressed by bis creations, for they were completely foreign to him.

Yet the habit of the puppet booth grew and when the war ended and he returned to France, Michel Peyrot became Capitaine Coq, and with Golo, whom he had found starving in the prison camp, as slave, orchestra and factotum took to the road.

The last night of the fair outside the Port Neuilly in Paris, it had been the experienced and cynical eye of Capitaine Coq that had instantly detected the despairing shoulder slope and the blind, suicide walk of the unhappy girl with the straw valise, but it had been
Poil du Carot,
the puppet with the red hair and pointed ears who had saved her, for Coq would not have given a fig for a whole troupe of despairing girls marching single file into the Seine. He had looked upon women and death and dead women unmoved. But it amused him to let Carrot Top and the others deal with the girl as they wished.

Nevertheless, once the strange little play had begun and the seven had proceeded independently with their work of capturing her, Coq’s sharp showman’s instincts had been quick to recognise the value of this trusting child speaking seriously and with complete belief across the booth to the inhabitants thereof. Whoever or whatever she was, she was possessed of that indefinable something that bridges the gap separating audience and performer and touches the heart of the beholder. He had noted her effect upon the hardened crowd of pitchmen, labourers and fellow rascals who had gathered about his booth. If the girl could be taught to work thus spontaneously with his family, standing out in front of the counter, she might become a definite business asset. If not, he could always kick her out or abandon her.

But there was one more quality which had attracted him in her, as he had peered through the scrim of the blind curtain and seen her pinched shoulders, hollow cheeks, dark unhappy eyes and snow-white, blue-veined temples beneath the short-cut black hair, or rather which had exasperated him and roused all of the bitterness and hatred of which he had so great a supply. This was her innocence and essential purity. Capitaine Coq was the mortal enemy of innocence. It was the one trait in human beings, man or woman, boy or girl, that he could not bear. He would, if he could, have corrupted the whole world.

In the back of the car, Mouche had slept the sleep of mental and physical exhaustion. When she awoke, it was morning, and she was alone. All of the panic of the night before returned overwhelmingly and she sprang from the machine looking about her fearfully. But the bright sunlight and the surroundings helped to dissipate some of her fears. The dilapidated vehicle was parked in a tangled area behind booths and concessions of yet another fair. In the background she saw the twin towers of the damaged cathedral of Rheims.

There was a water pump nearby and she went to it and washed her face, the cold water helping to clear her head. When she ventured through the tangle of guy wires and stays supporting a nearby tent, she heard suddenly a voice with a familiar rasp, “Hola, Mouche!”

She edged through to the street on which the fair fronted. It was Mr. Reynardo. The booth that she had seen only by torch flare the night before was standing once more. It looked shabby in the morning light. But there was no disputing that Mr. Reynardo was a fine figure of an impudent red fox.

He whistled at her, opened his jaws and asked, “Wash your face, baby?”

“Of course,” Mouche replied and then asked pointedly, “Did you?”

“No, but don’t tell anyone. I think I got away with it.” He whipped below and was replaced by Carrot Top who held a one hundred franc note in his two hands. He said:

“Oh hello, Mouche. Sleep all right?”

“Oh yes, thank you. I think so.” The most delicious relief pervaded her. Here they were again, her little friends of the night before. How natural it seemed to be standing there talking to them.

Carrot Top piped, “Go get yourself some bread and cheese for your breakfast,” and handed her the note. “There’s an
Epicerie
just down the street. I’ve still got a lot to do to get the show ready. And bring back the change.”

As she turned to go, somebody behind her went “Psssssst!” She looked around and saw Mr. Reynardo in a corner of the booth motioning to her with his head. She went to him and he stretched his snout up to her ear and whispered hoarsely, “There needn’t
be
any change.”

Mouche asked, “What do you mean, Mr. Reynardo?”

The fox contrived a wicked leer. “Call me Rey. Shhh . . . Everybody knows prices are up. Say breakfast cost more and keep the difference. But remember, it was my idea. Fifty-fifty, kid . . .”

Mouche shook her head as earnestly as though she were reproving a child. “But Rey . . . Really! That isn’t honest.”

“Ha, ha!” yipped the fox. “Maybe not, but it’s the only way you’ll get any money out of this outfit. Don’t say I didn’t tip you.”

When Mouche returned from her breakfast and with thirty francs left over, Carrot Top and Gigi the ingenue were holding the stage. The leprechaun was trying to comb her hair, the angle of his head giving a worried and concentrated expression to his face. A half-dozen people were standing about watching.

Carrot Top looked up. “Oh, back again, Mouche? Had your breakfast?”

Mouche replied politely, “Yes, thank you. And here’s your change.”

Carrot Top nodded absently, took the money, disappeared beneath the counter with it and reappeared almost immediately saying, “I’m trying to do Gigi’s hair. It’s full of mares’ nests.”

Gigi whined sulkily, “It is not. He’s hurting me.”

“Birds’ nests, you mean,” Mouche corrected. “Here, let me help. Girls know how to do that ever so much better.”

Carrot Top looked severe. “Men make the best hair-dressers . . .” he announced, but surrendered the comb to Mouche who applied herself gently to reducing the snarls in Gigi’s golden wig.

Gigi commanded, “I want braids. I’m tired of all that hair in my eyes. Braid my hair, Mouche.”

“Certainly, Gigi,” Mouche acquiesced. “And then we’ll wind it about your ears in two buns, Bretonne fashion.”

Unselfconsciously as though there were no one else watching, she set about combing and separating the hair into strands and then began to weave the braids, singing as she did so, an ancient Breton hair-braiding song that for centuries mothers had sung to their little daughters to keep them quiet during the ceremony. It went:

“First,

One and three

then

Three and two

then

Two and one,

NOW—

One and two

and

Three and one

and

Two and one . . .”

It had a simple, repetitive, hypnotic melody and Golo appearing from behind the booth with his guitar, fingered the strings softly for a moment and picked it up. Doctor Duclos appeared with some sheet music which he read earnestly through the pince-nez affixed to his beak and contributed basso “poom-pooms.” Gigi beat time with her hands. In no time there was a fascinated and enchanted crowd, ten deep, gathered about the booth.

When the hair was braided and bunned, Gigi and Dr. Duclos went away and Carrot Top taking the empty stage explained the plot of their play. He is in love with Gigi, but the girl is being compelled by her greedy mother, Mme. Muscat, to marry wealthy windy old Dr. Duclos. Carrot Top’s friend Reynardo sends the giant Alifanfaron to abduct Gigi, but being likewise in the employ of Dr. Duclos, the double-crossing fox arranges for the giant to steal Mme. Muscat while he makes love to Gigi instead.