The Vagabond [antikvár]

Part One ONE Ten thirty . . . Once again I'm ready too soon. My friend Brague, who helped me when I first began miming, often raices me to task for this in that salty language of his: 'You poor boob of an amateur! You've always got ants in your pants. If we listened to you we'd be putting on our make-up base at half past seven in the middle of bolting the hors-d'ouvre ! ' After three years of music-hall and theatre I'm still the same: always ready too soon. Ten thirty-five . . . I'd better open that book lying on the make-up shelf, even though I've read it over and over again, or the copy of Paris-Sport the dresser was marking just now with my eyebrow pencil; otherwise I'll find myself all alone, face to face with that painted mentor who gazes at me from the other side of the looking-glass, with deep-set eyes under lids smeared with purplish grease-paint. Her cheek-bones are as brightly coloured as garden phlox and her blackish-red lips gleam as though they were varnished. She gazes at me for a long time and I know she is going to speak to me. She is going to say: 'Is that you there? All alone, there in that cage where idle, impatient, imprisoned hands have scored the white walls with interlaced initials and embellished them with crude, indecent shapes? On those plaster walls reddened nails, like yours, have unconsciously inscribed the appeal of the , forsaken. Behind you a feminine hand has carved 'Marie', and the name ends in a passionate mounting flourish, like a cry to heaven. Is it you there, all alone under that ceiling booming and vibrating beneath the feet of the dancers, like the floor 5