The Aspirations of Jean Servien | Page 8

carved in meerschaum. Just think,
the other day he came and told mother his wife was making him
atrocious scenes."
Madame Ewans put in her head at the half-open door:
"Come along," she said, and they set out. No sooner were they in the
street than a man, who was smoking, greeted Madame with a friendly

wave of his gloved hand. She muttered between her teeth:
"Shall we never be done with them?"
The man began in a guttural voice:
"I was just going to your place, my dear, to offer you a box of Turkish
cigarettes. But I see you are taking a boarding-school out for a walk--a
regular boarding-school, 'pon my word! You take pupils, eh? I
congratulate you. Make men of 'em, my dear, make men of 'em."
Madame Ewans frowned and replied with a curl of the lips:
"I am with my son and one of my son's friends."
The gentleman threw a careless look at one of the lads--Jean Servien as
it happened.
"Capital, capital!" he exclaimed. "Is that one your son?"
"Not he, indeed!" she cried hotly.
Jean felt he was looked down upon, and as she laid her hand on her
son's shoulder with a proud gesture, he could not help noticing his
schoolfellow's easy air and elegant costume, at the same time casting a
glance of disgust at his own jacket, which had been cut down for him
by his aunt out of an overcoat of his father's.
"Shall we be honoured by your presence to-night at the Bouffes?" asked
the gentleman.
"No!" replied Madame Ewans, and pushed the two children forward
with the tip of her sunshade.
Stepping out gaily, they soon arrive under the chestnuts of the Tuileries,
cross the bridge, then down the river-bank, over the shaky gangway,
and so on to the steamer pontoon.
Now they are aboard the boat, which exhales a strong, healthy smell of

tar under the hot sun. The long grey walls of the embankments slip by,
to be succeeded presently by wooded slopes.
Saint-Cloud! The moment the ropes are made fast, Madame Ewans
springs on to the landing-stage and makes straight for the shrilling of
the clarinettes and thunder of the big drums, steering her little charges
through the press with the handle of her sunshade.
Jean was mightily surprised when Madame Ewans made him "try his
luck" in a lottery. He had before now gone with his aunt to sundry
suburban fairs, but she had always dissuaded him so peremptorily from
spending anything that he was firmly persuaded revolving-tables and
shooting-galleries were amusements only permitted to a class of people
to which he did not belong. Madame Ewans showed the greatest
interest in her son's success, urging him to give the handle a good
vigorous turn.
She was very superstitious about luck, "invoking" the big prizes,
clapping her hands in ecstasy whenever Edgar won a halfpenny
egg-cup, falling into the depths of despair at every bad shot. Perhaps
she saw an omen in his failure; perhaps she was just blindly eager to
have her darling succeed. After he had lost two or three times, she
pulled the boy away and gave the wooden disk such a violent push
round as set its cargo of crockery-ware and glass rattling, and
proceeded to play on her own account--once, twice, twenty times, thirty
times, with frantic eagerness. Then followed quite a business about
exchanging the small prizes for one big one, as is commonly done.
Finally, she decided for a set of beer jugs and glasses, half of which she
gave to each of the two friends to carry.
But this was only a beginning. She halted the children before every
stall. She made them play for macaroons at rouge et noir. She had them
try their skill at every sort of shooting-game, with crossbows loaded
with little clay pellets, with pistols and carbines, old-fashioned
weapons with caps and leaden bullets, at all sorts of distances, and at
all kinds of targets--plaster images, revolving pipes, dolls, balls
bobbing up and down on top of a jet of water.

Never in his life had Jean Servien been so busy or done so many
different things in so short a space of time.
His eyes dazzled with uncouth shapes and startling colours, his throat
parched with dust, elbowed, crushed, mauled, hustled by the crowd, he
was intoxicated with this debauch of diversions.
He watched Madame Ewans for ever opening her little purse of Russia
leather, and a new power was revealed to him. Nor was this all. There
was the Dutch top to be set twirling, the wooden horses of the
merry-go-round to be mounted; they had to dash down the great chute
and take a turn in the Venetian gondolas, to be weighed in the machine
and touch the