CHAPTER IV.

CONTRARIES FRATERNIZE IN HATE.

Success is hateful, especially to those whom it overthrows.  It is rare that the eaten adore the eaters.

The Laughing Man had decidedly made a hit.  The mountebanks around were indignant.  A theatrical success is a syphon—­it pumps in the crowd and creates emptiness all round.  The shop opposite is done for.  The increased receipts of the Green Box caused a corresponding decrease in the receipts of the surrounding shows.  Those entertainments, popular up to that time, suddenly collapsed.  It was like a low-water mark, showing inversely, but in perfect concordance, the rise here, the fall there.  Theatres experience the effect of tides:  they rise in one only on condition of falling in another.  The swarming foreigners who exhibited their talents and their trumpetings on the neighbouring platforms, seeing themselves ruined by the Laughing Man, were despairing, yet dazzled.  All the grimacers, all the clowns, all the merry-andrews envied Gwynplaine.  How happy he must be with the snout of a wild beast!  The buffoon mothers and dancers on the tight-rope, with pretty children, looked at them in anger, and pointing out Gwynplaine, would say, “What a pity you have not a face like that!” Some beat their babes savagely for being pretty.  More than one, had she known the secret, would have fashioned her son’s face in the Gwynplaine style.  The head of an angel, which brings no money in, is not as good as that of a lucrative devil.  One day the mother of a little child who was a marvel of beauty, and who acted a cupid, exclaimed,—­

“Our children are failures!  They only succeeded with Gwynplaine.”  And shaking her fist at her son, she added, “If I only knew your father, wouldn’t he catch it!”

Gwynplaine was the goose with the golden eggs!  What a marvellous phenomenon!  There was an uproar through all the caravans.  The mountebanks, enthusiastic and exasperated, looked at Gwynplaine and gnashed their teeth.  Admiring anger is called envy.  Then it howls!  They tried to disturb “Chaos Vanquished;” made a cabal, hissed, scolded, shouted!  This was an excuse for Ursus to make out-of-door harangues to the populace, and for his friend Tom-Jim-Jack to use his fists to re-establish order.  His pugilistic marks of friendship brought him still more under the notice and regard of Ursus and Gwynplaine.  At a distance, however, for the group in the Green Box sufficed to themselves, and held aloof from the rest of the world, and because Tom-Jim-Jack, this leader of the mob, seemed a sort of supreme bully, without a tie, without a friend; a smasher of windows, a manager of men, now here, now gone, hail-fellow-well-met with every one, companion of none.

This raging envy against Gwynplaine did not give in for a few friendly hits from Tom-Jim-Jack.  The outcries having miscarried, the mountebanks of Tarrinzeau Field fell back on a petition.  They addressed to the authorities.  This is the usual course.  Against an unpleasant success we first try to stir up the crowd and then we petition the magistrate.