"One has to keep showing passports all the time in order that the police may be sure that they have not discovered a deserter. In the street car, the other afternoon, I had to explain that I was a Spaniard to some girls who were wondering why I was not at the front. . . . One of them, as soon as she learned my nationality, asked me with great simplicity why I did not offer myself as a volunteer. . . . Now they have invented a word for the stay-at-homes, calling them Les Embusques, the hidden ones. . . . I am sick and tired of the ironical looks shot at me wherever I go; it makes me wild to be taken for an Embusque."
A flash of heroism was galvanizing the impressionable Bohemian. Now that everybody was going to the war, he was wishing to do the same thing. He was not afraid of death; the only thing that was disturbing him was the military service, the uniform, the mechanical obedience to bugle-call, the blind subservience to the chiefs.
Fighting was not offering any difficulties for him but his nature capriciously resented everything in the form of discipline. The foreign groups in Paris were trying to organize each its own legion of volunteers and he, too, was planning his--a battalion of Spaniards and South Americans, reserving naturally the presidency of the organizing committee for himself, and later the command of the body.
He had inserted notices in the papers, making the studio in the rue de la Pompe the recruiting office. In ten days, two volunteers had presented themselves; a clerk, shivering in midsummer, who stipulated that he should be an officer because he was wearing a suitable jacket, and a Spanish tavern-keeper who at the very outset had wished to rob Argensola of his command on the futile pretext that he was a soldier in his youth while the Bohemian was only an artist. Twenty Spanish battalions were attempted with the same result in different parts of Paris. Each enthusiast wished to be commander of the others, with the individual haughtiness and aversion to discipline so characteristic of the race. Finally the future generalissimos, decided to enlist as simple volunteers . . . but in a French regiment.
"I am waiting to see what the Garibaldis do," said Argensola modestly. "Perhaps I may go with them."
This glorious name made military service conceivable to him. But then he vacillated; he would certainly have to obey somebody in this body of volunteers, and he did not believe in an obedience that was not preceded by long discussions. . . . What next!
"Life has changed in a fortnight," he continued. "It seems as if we were living in another planet; our former achievements are not appreciated. Others, most obscure and poor, those who formerly had the least consideration, are now promoted to the first ranks. The refined man of complex spirituality has disappeared for who knows how many years! . . . Now the simple-minded man climbs triumphantly to the top, because, though his ideas are limited, they are sure and he knows how to obey. We are no longer the style."
Desnoyers assented. It was so; they were no longer fashionable.
None knew that better than he, for he who was once the sensation of the day, was now passing as a stranger among the very people who a few months before had raved over him.
"Your reign is over," laughed Argensola. "The fact that you are a handsome fellow doesn't help you one bit nowadays. In a uniform and with a cross on my breast, I could soon get the best of you in a rival love affair. In times of peace, the officers only set the girls of the provinces to dreaming; but now that we are at war, there has awakened in every woman the ancestral enthusiasm that her remote grandmothers used to feel for the strong and aggressive beast. . . . The high-born dames who a few months ago were complicating their desires with psychological subtleties, are now admiring the military man with the same simplicity that the maid has for the common soldier. Before a uniform, they feel the humble and servile enthusiasm of the female of the lower animals before the crests, foretops and gay plumes of the fighting males. Look out, master! . . . We shall have to follow the new course of events or resign ourselves to everlasting obscurity. The tango is dead."
And Desnoyers agreed that truly they were two beings on the other side of the river of life which at one bound had changed its course.
There was no longer any place in the new existence for that poor painter of souls, nor for that hero of a frivolous life who, from five to seven every afternoon, had attained the triumphs most envied by mankind.
