I’m showing off.
"Light horses!. Bridle horses and remounts!. Mizzen horses! Parade horses!.. Equal to all occasions!.. They won’t be able to teach me anything in China about horses, horsemanship, its ceremonies, its gear, its problems! I’ve got it in my bones, I’ve fallen off horses thousands of times!”
"Young man! I appoint you Master of the Horse! Gonfalon of my caravan! Ah! we haven’t finished!.. There’s a God for barbarians! Your folly has most definitely thrown you into the heart of fortune! Into my arms, young man! into my arms! ” He stood back a bit to contemplate me more leisurely… "Your head is covered!”
I didn’t have a hat.
"Covered! Covered with Destiny! Perfectly! There! the aura! there! I see it!.. What a fine surprise! Stop moving! ”
He saw it on me! He described it to me in the air! a little circle around my head!
"What a destiny!. What a symbol!. Oh! you can’t understand! Obviously! Opaque! Opaque but radiant!”
Ah, I disappoint him again! Ah, it made him lose all patience to see such fine gifts lost, wasted on such a silly head!..
"Splendidly endowed! That’s a fact!”
He insisted. He saw it all!.. I kept amazing him!.
I cut it short.. time to get started!
"Well? So it’s definite, Monsieur? Agreed? Decided? What day! What time!”
I was impatient. that was enough monkey-business! down to action! off to life, death! with my halo or not!
"Oh! how nervous you are, young man! Easy does it! It’ll come!.. Keep your head! Sh! Stop where you are! It seems to me someone’s listening to us that we’re being spied upon all around!.. There are paid traitors everywhere! ”
"Paid by who?”
"Child! Child!”
He was taking pity on me.
"Are you aware that things happen of which you haven’t the slightest suspicion?”
"Oh! I believe you all right!.. Oh! I believe you! ”
He signals to me to keep still.
We were caught in the crowd again.. the whole mob from the consulates.. squashed against the railings. the raging throng around us.. the waiting for visas!.. holding their ground, shoved into one another!. They were trying to find some possible idiom, the better to scream at one another in their delirium, their rage at being kneaded, torn apart.. But it was no go!. They came from too far away in the universe! from countries too strange, too distant.. They didn’t have a shit in common… a good shitty insult, nice and drippy, fat, enormous, reeking. They were quibbling, jabbering, shriveled up, gasping and struggling!. They weren’t getting anywhere! All the same the two of us there were approaching the door saying nothing.. borne up by the surge!.. our turn was really going to come.. maybe we’d get knocked around a few more times..
"I wonder what your name is?”
The question occurs to him all of a sudden.
"Ferdinand! you may call me by my first name!”
"Well, Ferdinand, my friend, we’ll come back another time! ”
"But we’re getting inside, Monsieur! We’ll lose our turn!” "Lose it? Lose it? Listen to him! A fine story!.. You young scapegrace, do you have any idea what the visa may cost? our visa?”
"How do I know!”
The lunatic!
"Madrapore via Kiev? Taranrog? Kaboul? Mongolia?”
"Not at all!”
"Twenty-seven pounds! At least! Do you have that sum?” "No, Monsieur!”
"Neither do I!”
Ah! it all collapses! About face!
We work our way out of the crowd! With a lot of trouble! What a disappointment!
Oh! but it doesn’t bother him at all!.. not the least bit put out!
“Young man, we’ve made contact! Ah! making contact! that’s the main thing! ”
He goes into ecstasies.
"In touch with the Waves, Ferdinand! the approach! the approach! It’s the approach that counts!. Don’t you feel right here the exhalations summoning from Tibet? A kind of caress? starting at the consulate railing?.. from behind all these people?… They’re emanating, I assure you! They’re emanating! Turn away from that side!”
He makes me pivot about… he pivots, too.. I didn’t feel a thing!..
"You’re opaque!.. still opaque!.. You’ll get over it!”
He sighs.. Still and all I do disappoint him a little.
"Can’t be helped! Can’t be helped!.. let’s leave! we’ll come back in a better frame of mind! I’ll initiate you a little, later on! Come over here!.. off to the side!.. so that you know where we are!.. so that I can explain to you!.. You don’t know anything!.. You must!”
We got away from the crowd, we were going toward Tottenham… He was mincing along in his fake Chinese costume. He opens his umbrella, he closes it a couple of minutes later.
"The sidereal shower!” he points out.. "It was time! Exactly thirty-seven minutes after sunset! ”
At Selfridge’s there was the row of shopwindows.. he turned around rather often.. not very well-behaved in the street.. little glances at young women..
"Nice child!.. Nice child!.. Smile of the earth! And of the sky!.. If only I were your age!”
Kidding around all of a sudden.
He admitted being fifty-seven… He was older than that.. his hair ink-black, and he wore it long like an artist.. but keen-eyed and confident.. His beautiful robe cramped him! he hopped along! it was a nuisance in the gutter… he had to tuqk it up! We went down Oxford and Shaftesbury. all along the shopwindows… He chattering about one thing and another… I didn’t understand it all… I felt like getting rid of him, he was annoying me with his rigmarole… People were turning around to stare at us.. But I held on all the same.. Maybe there was a small chance that his leaving for Chira wasn’t all hokum!.. that he might take me along!.. that it might happen!
My heart was in my mouth at the big crossings.. Because of the newsboys.. They were still hawking the same "special,” the morning’s.. the "Tragedy” in Greenwich!.. They were behind the times!.. I’d done better since that! hell!.. They were four days behind!.. they were so excited about the "Greenwich Tragedy” that they’d stopped talking about the war.. Boy, that was some mess! It was all rolling around in my head.. Finally it started rolling too fast! All I could understand was the headache.. More than I needed, and well! I just stopped bothering about my anxiety..
Old Foxy kept on talking!.. He was attracting attention in the crowd!.. Nobody asked to see his papers.. That was the amazing thing!.. The kids, the tarts, the soldier-boys ran after him, pulled at him, played tricks on him!.. They came touching his dragon, pinching his robe, his behind. He defended himself with his umbrella, jokingly, he wasn’t annoyed.. We’d taken quite a stroll… all of Regent, all Totten.. almost the whole theatre district.. Finally, it was inevitable, we got caught among the hustlers!.. First Nini in front of the Twist whose beat was between Wardour and Marble Arch.. She sees me.. she winks at me. Peg-leg Berthe, who worked the theatres, spots me in front of the Daisy..
"Ah! ” she starts razzing. "Are you in the circus?.. Hurray for Punch and Judy! Ferdine!.. Hey! Ferdine!”
I don’t answer.
She tags after us.. and clop! clop! her peg-leg!.. I didn’t want to answer!.. she yells at me…
"Hey! stinker!.. stinker! ”
A lunatic.
It was starting to create a scene.
"Where are you taking him?” she shouts..
She’s hysterical.
I hurry along, I quicken my pace, we turn into a bystreet.. we give her the slip… He wasn’t bothered by such trifles.. He was probably used to being pestered like that, like some freak. He kept right on smiling. Besides his getup, he misbehaved in public.. ogling young girls, as I’ve said. He was insolent, almost provocative, he talked too loudly.