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 o