Love of Seven Dolls (11 page)

Monsieur Nicholas spoke again. “Think, Mouche. Whose hand was it you just took to you so lovingly when it was Carrot Top or Mr. Reynardo or Alifanfaron, and held it close to your breast and bestowed the mercy of tears upon it?”

Mouche suppressed a cry of terror. “The hand that struck me across the mouth . . .” she gasped and her own fingers went to her lips as though in memory of that pain . . .

“Yet you loved it, Mouche. And those hands loved and caressed you——”

Mouche felt her senses beginning to swim but now it was she who asked the question. “But who are you then, Monsieur Nicholas? Who are you all?”

Monsieur Nicholas seemed to grow in stature, to fill the booth with his voice and presence as he replied: “A man is many things, Mouche. He may wish like Carrot Top to be a poet and soar to the stars and yet be earthbound and overgrown, ugly and stupid like Alifanfaron. In him will be the seeds of jealousy, greed and the insatiable appetite for admiration and pleasure of chicken-brained arrogant Gigi. Part of him will be a pompous bore like Dr. Duclos and another the counterpart of Madame Muscat, gossip, busybody, tattletale and sage. And where there is a philosopher there can also be the sly, double-dealing sanctimonious hypocrite, thief and self-forgiving scoundrel like Mr. Reynardo.”

And Monsieur Nicholas continued: “The nature of man is a never-ending mystery, Mouche. There we are, Mouche, seven of us you have grown to love. And each of us has given you what there was of his or her heart. I think I even heard the wicked Reynardo offer to lay down his life for you—or his skin. He was trying to convey to you a message from Him who animates us all . . .”

“No, no . . . No more!” Mouche pleaded. “Stop. I cannot bear it . . .”

“Evil cannot live without good . . .” Monsieur Nicholas said in a voice that was suddenly unlike his own. “All of us would rather die than go on without you . . .”

“Who is it? Who is speaking?” Mouche cried. And then on a powerful impulse, hardly knowing what she was doing, she reached across the booth to the curtain through which she could be seen but could not see and with one motion stripped away the veil that for so long had separated her from the wretched, unhappy man hiding there.

He sat there immovable as a statue, gaunt, hollow-eyed, bitter, hard, uncompromising, yet dying of love for her.

The man in black with the red hair in whose dead face only the eyes still lived was revealed with his right hand held high, his fingers inside the glove that was Monsieur Nicholas. In his left was crumpled in a convulsive grip the limp puppet of Monsieur Reynardo. It was as though he were the balancing scale between good and evil, and evil and good. Hatred and love, despair and hope played across his features, illuminating them at times like lightning playing behind storm clouds with an unearthly beauty, Satan before the fall.

And to Mouche who passed in that moment over the last threshold from child to womanhood, there came as a vision of blinding clarity and understanding of a man who had tried to be and live a life of evil, who to mock God and man had perpetrated a monstrous joke by creating his puppets like man, in His image and filling them with love and kindness.

And in the awful struggle within him that confronted her she read his punishment. He who loved only wickedness and corruption had been corrupted by the good in his own creations. The seven dolls of his real nature had become his master and he their victim. He could live only through them and behind the curtain of his booth.

And in one last blinding flash, Mouche knew the catalyst that could save him. It was herself. But he could not ask for her love. He would not and could not ask. In that flash she thought for an instant upon the story of Beauty and the Beast which had always touched her oddly as a child and knew that here was the living Beast, who must die of the struggle if she did not take pity on him.

Yet it was not pity but love that made Mouche reach her arms towards him across the counter of the puppet booth where they had duelled daily for the past year and cry: “Michel—Michel! Come to me!”

No time seemed to have passed, yet he was out of the booth and they were clinging desperately to one another. Trembling, holding him, Mouche whispered: “Michel . . . Michel. I love you. I do love you, no matter who or what you are. I cannot help myself. It is you I love, you that I have always loved.”

It was she who held him secure, his red head, as stiff and bristly as that of Mr. Reynardo, sheltered in the hollow of her neck and shoulder where so often his hand, unrecognised, had leaned. And the desperation of his clinging was the greater as he murmured her name again and again: “Mouche . . . Mouche . . . Mouche . . .” and hid his face from hers.

“Michel . . . I love you. I will never leave you.”

Then it was finally that Mouche felt the trickling of something warm over the hand that held the ugly, beautiful, evil, but now transfigured head, to her and knew that they were the tears of a man who never in his life had yielded to them before and who, emerging from the long nightmare, would be made forever whole by love.

And thus they remained on that darkened empty stage for a long while as Michel Peyrot, alias Capitaine Coq, surrendered his person and his soul to what had been so fiercely hateful and unbearable to him, the cloister of an innocent and loving woman and the receiving and cherishing of love.

Nor did they stir even when an old negro with a white patch over one eye shuffled across the echoing stage and looking down over the counter of the booth into the darkness of the mysterious quarters below chuckled.

“Oh ho; Little Boss! You, Carrot Top! Mr. Reynardo! Dr. Duclos, Ali, Madame Muscat! Where are you all? You better come up here and learn the news. Miss Mouche is not going to leave us. She is going to stay with us for ever.”