The Mountebank | Page 5

"For Fanny from Jim" inscribed on the flyleaf. From which Andrew
Lackaday, as soon as his mind could grasp such things, deduced that
his mother's name was Fanny, and his father's James. But Ben Flint
assured me that Lackaday called his wife Myra, while she called him
Alf, by which names they were familiarly known by their colleagues.
So who were Fanny and Jim, if not Andrew's parents, remained a
mystery.
Meanwhile there was the orphan Andrew Lackaday rich in his extreme
youth and the fortune above specified, and violently asserting his right
to live and enjoy. Meanwhile, too, Ben Flint and his wife had lost their
pig Bob, Billy's predecessor. Bob had grown old and past his job and
become afflicted with an obscure porcine disease, possibly senile decay,
for which there was no remedy but merciful euthanasia. The Flints
mourned him, desolate. They had not the heart to buy another. They
were childless, pigless. But behold! There, to their hand was Andrew,
fatherless, motherless. On an occasion, just after the funeral, for which
Ben Flint paid, when Madame was mothering the tiny Andrew in her
arms, and Ben stood staring, lost in yearning for the lost and beloved

pig, she glanced up and said:
"Tiens, why should he not replace Bob, ce petit cochon?"
Ben Flint slapped his thigh.
"By Gum!" said he, and the thing was done. The responsibility of self
dependence for life and enjoyment was removed from the shoulders of
young Andrew Lackaday for many years to come.
In the course of time, when the child's état civil, as a resident in France,
had to be declared, and this question of nationality became of great
importance in after years--Madame said:
"Since we have adopted him, why not give him our name?"
But Ben, with the romanticism of Bohemia, replied:
"No. His name belongs to him. If he keeps it, he may be able to find out
something about his family. He might be the heir to great possessions.
One never knows. It's a clue anyway. Besides," he added, the sturdy
North countryman asserting itself, "I'm not giving my name to any man
save the son of my loins. It's a name where I come from that has never
been dishonoured for a couple of hundred years."
"But it is just as you like, mon chéri," said Madame, who was the
placidest thing in France.
* * * * *
For thirty years I had forgotten all this; but the "By Gum!" of Colonel
Lackaday wiped out the superscription over the palimpsest of memory
and revealed in startling clearness all these impressions of the past.
"Of course we're fond of the kid," said Ben Flint. "He's free from vice
and as clever as paint. He's a born acrobat. Might as well try to teach a
duck to swim. It comes natural. Heredity of course. There's nothing he
won't be able to do when I'm finished with him. Yet there are some
things which lick me altogether. He's an ugly son of a gun. His father

and mother, by the way, were a damn good-looking pair. But their
hands were the thick spread muscular hands of the acrobat. Where the
deuce did he get his long, thin delicate fingers from? Already he can
pass a coin from back to front----" he flicked an illustrative conjuror's
hand--"at eight years old. To teach him was as easy as falling off a log.
Still, that's mechanical. What I want to know is, where did he get his
power of mimicry? That artistic sense of expressing personality? 'Pon
my soul, he's damn well nearly as clever as Billy."
During the talk which followed the discovery of our former meeting, I
reported to Colonel Lackaday these encomiums of years ago. He smiled
wistfully.
"Most of the dear old fellow's swans were geese, I'm afraid," said he.
"And I was the awkwardest gosling of them all. They tried for years to
teach me the acrobat's business; but it was no good. They might just as
well have spent their pains on a rheumatic young giraffe."
I looked at him and smiled. The simile was not inapposite. How, I
asked myself, could the man into which he had developed, ever have
become an acrobat? He was the leanest, scraggiest long thing I have
ever seen. Six foot four of stringy sinew and bone, with inordinately
long legs, around which his khaki slacks flapped, as though they hid
stilts instead of human limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly, the
sleeves of his tunic far above the bony wrist, as though his tailor in
cutting the garment had repudiated as fantastic the evidence of his
measurements. Yet, when one might have expected to find hands of a
talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the sparse rugosity of his