Case with 4 Clowns (15 page)

I noticed the Darienne brothers sitting together in their usual way, alone in a corner, and went over to talk to them. Somehow or other, the conversation worked itself back to how their act had started.

“But, of course,” said Christophe, “that was before we had Suzanne with us.”

The elder brother merely grunted at this.

“She has made all the difference to our act,” Christophe went on. “Now it's the top of the show. Before Suzanne came we had to do turns on the bars and rings and so on. We couldn't do very much on the trapeze. We knew the old tricks all right, but it needs a woman, and an expert like Suzanne, to make an act really go.”

“I don't know,” said Paul slowly, looking down at the table as though he felt uncomfortable, “we had good times then. Our act is better, I suppose. But we were happier then.”

I thought I detected a note of resentment in Paul's voice as he said this. Christophe was looking straight at his brother, with a question in his eyes, but Paul refused to look up.

“What was Suzanne doing before she joined up with you?” I asked in an attempt to fill in the gap which Paul had made. Christophe turned to me again.

“But you must have heard of her,” he said. I shook my head. “Oh, but she was famous,” he went on.
“The
Suzanne. She had been with all the really big circuses. She was marvelous in those days. She is not so good now as she was then. But you must see her.”

At this point a disturbance in the street outside saved me from answering, and in a few seconds the hunchback tent hand ran into the bar.

“Here,” he said, holding up his long arms to the crowd in the bar and obtaining immediate silence. “Have any of you seen what's up the road?”

“What've you found, Tug?” asked Ginger. “A mermaid?”

The hunchback waved the facetiousness aside with the two words: “Bogli's Circus.”

“What, in this village?”

“Where are they?”

“The dirty skunks.”

Comment came fast from every occupant of the bar, so that it seemed as if the queerly named Bogli's Circus had committed some unmentionable crime against them.

“No, not here,” replied Tug. “But they're playing tonight just down the road. A village about two miles out. And they're sticking their posters on top of our fly-spots. I just passed a couple as I came down.”

In less than ten seconds the bar was empty except for Beef and myself, and there was a sound of shouting and footsteps in the street.

“What's bitten them?” I asked Beef. But he shook his head.

“Better follow them and see,” was his suggestion, and we made our way out into the street in time to see the tail-end of the procession retreating round the corner.

But we did not have far to go. A few yards round the corner we came on them again, gathered in a group around a gatepost on which was displayed a brilliant blue poster advertising the performance that night of Bogli's Circus in the next village. The orange edging underneath showed where the fly for Jacobi's Circus was. Pete Daroga was slowly and ceremoniously peeling the new one off, and swearing to himself as he did so.

Two of the hands were immediately dispatched to tell Jackson of the occurrence and to get some new fly-bills and a pot of paste.

“There's some work for some of us before the afternoon performance,” said Daroga grimly.

Beef nudged Kurt, who was spitting on his hands and rolling up his sleeves. “What's it all about?” the Sergeant asked.

Kurt looked pityingly at us. “They put their posters on top of ours,” he said simply, “so we go round and put ours on top of theirs.”

“But why all this fuss about it?” I asked. “Why make all this trouble?”

Kurt grinned broadly and spat on his hands once more. “No trouble at all,” he said cheerfully.

April 28th (continued).

I
N A
few minutes the tent hands had returned from the circus loaded with pasting-pots and fly-bills. The group immediately divided into two, with six in each group, who agreed to take half of the village each, and set off. Beef and I were in the group which consisted of Len Waterman, who seemed to have sprung up from nowhere at the mention of trouble, the two Darienne brothers, Sid Bolton, the fat clown, Kurt the lion-trainer, and Ginger.

Sid Bolton was without doubt the most useful person we could have if we did happen to run into trouble—and from the grin on Kurt's face and the way he kept rubbing his hands together, I suspected that it was very likely we should. Sid's fists were the size of a respectable ham, and despite his size there was nothing sluggish about him.

The little cortège walked in “open formation” down the street, Ginger leading with the paste-pot and the fly-bills, and Beef and I bringing up a rather doubtful rear. Actually, Beef seemed to be enjoying the situation.

“Haven't had a decent scrap since I was set on by those poachers,” he told me. “They don't like you to be mixed up in a barney when you're in the Force.”

I hoped, privately, that he would have no opportunity of making up for that omission now. But I refrained from saying this aloud for fear of damping his enthusiasm. Had I not been so closely involved in this business, I might have been able to appreciate the buccaneering spirit which animated these people. As it was, the possibility of being caught up in a “bundle” of some sort, made me overwhelmingly aware of my own shortcomings as a fighter, and I was only able to
see the more ludicrous side of the affair. I had even got so far as to envisage the possible headlines which might greet such an escapade. “Famous Author of Detective Fiction Arrested in Street Battle.” Well, perhaps not famous, but in any case it would be most embarrassing.

But my rumination was cut short by Ginger, who had found one of the hated blue posters. With a true sense of drama he sploshed paste over the offending advertisements and covered it with one of the orange bills he was carrying. We then walked on in search of more. But after this had been done some six or seven times the whole affair began to appear rather futile. No one appeared to defend the blue fly-bills, no one offered to battle with us over the right to use this or that gatepost, and apart from a stray child, a postman, and a road-sweeper, there was nobody to see our triumph. The little group walked on in silence.

At the far side of the village we were met by the other group, and it seemed there was nothing else to do now but to return to the tober. All the available sites in the village had been reclaimed without opposition. Bogli's Circus had been vanquished without bloodshed, but it had been a barren triumph.

“Here, wait a minute,” said Kurt suddenly, as they were beginning to move off. “Where does that road go to?”

His pointing finger indicated a narrow stony road, which led out of the village down into the shallow valley about a mile and a half away. The road ran straight for about half a mile, and then dipped suddenly and disappeared. But a close group of trees and houses in the distance showed where it led to.

“That's the village they're playing at,” said Len Waterman.

“And there's one of their bills,” concluded Ginger.

A little over half-way up the road there was the unmistakable blue splodge which represented Bogli's fly-bill.
Without any further words the whole crowd turned and started eagerly up the road.

But we had not gone more than a hundred yards towards our objective when a group of men appeared suddenly in the distance at the far end of the road. When they saw us they stopped, and formed together as if discussing something. Kurt, who had been walking in front held up his hand, and the two groups stood facing each other over a stretch of more than a quarter of a mile of road. The blue poster was roughly half-way between us. Kurt, who seemed to have taken complete charge of the affair, signaled us to move forward with him, but as we began to walk again, the opposing group did the same. We quickened our pace, until in a few minutes both groups were running at full speed towards each other. It was like running towards a mirror. Every move we made was repeated by the men at the other end of the road. In numbers we were about equal. The road was otherwise deserted, and there was little possibility of interference. I grabbed Beef by the sleeve, but he shook me impatiently off.

“Let them fight it out between themselves,” I gasped. “It's not our fight anyway.”

But Beef was not to be deterred. The whole thing was utterly fantastic; like a scene out of a film. But I found it impossible to feel enthusiastic at taking part in a bad Western. Actually, none of them were concerned with the question of a blue or an orange poster, and there was little or no actual enmity in the whoop Ginger gave at that moment, as he pitched his paste-pot high in the air over our advancing opponents. The white paste sprayed out like a catherine-wheel, and the crowd ducked quickly, but did not stop their pace for it. The leader was a huge red-faced man wearing a béret on the back of his head. A smear of paste from his eyebrow to his mouth only increased his set, determined expression.

Like something in a nightmare, the two groups came together with an explosion of sound, and I found myself close behind Beef and in the center of a whirlpool of fists. Almost paralyzed, I watched the battle around me. “Tiny” Bolton was disdaining the blows which fell on his face and body, and seemed only concerned with his rhythmical delivery of hammer-like blows on the tops of the heads surrounding him. Beef, I was surprised to see, had already cleared a space around him with a series of scythe-like sweeps, and was grunting gently to himself as he prepared for the next comers. So far, no damage had been done and everybody drew back a little, on guard after the first rush.

At this point, for a short time, I entered the fight. A lanky individual, with sandy hair and protruding teeth, singled me out as a possible opponent and came towards me. There was no help for it now, I must fight. In my mind there seems little doubt that, had the fight continued fairly, I should most certainly have won. This is not said in any sense as a boast or to ameliorate the eventual result. But, nevertheless, it was obvious to me that he was an easy proposition. He had no science to speak of and came at me with his chin stuck out, ready to be hit. Unfortunately, at this moment, Beef got in my way. He had just taken on a new assailant and his peculiar windmill technique took little notice of obstacles. In any case, he drew his arm back a little carelessly and caught me under the chin with his elbow. I recovered some minutes later, to find myself lying at the side of the road in a very dusty condition, and decided under the circumstances to remain there.

The fight, however, continued for some time. From its subsequent figuring in all circus conversations, I gathered that it was an extremely good one. But not being an expert on such matters, and being no doubt a little prejudiced by my
own early exclusion from it, it struck me as being nothing more nor less than a vulgar brawl.

Sitting fairly safely at some distance on a little heap of stones, I watched the progress. It soon became obvious that the adherents of Bogli's Circus were having the worst time, and that certainly Sergeant Beef had little need of my help. I therefore exercised my rights as an author and ruminated on the more literary side of the affair. It struck me that it was not unlike the street brawls of the retainers of the houses of the Montagues and the Capulets in “Romeo and Juliet.” In both cases the actual fighters had little to gain by the contact, except the possibility of shed blood and bruised flesh. Some years ago a Russian production of this play had shown the two sides fraternizing before and after the conflict, and I saw now that there was something to be said for that theory. These present fighters did not dislike each other by any means. They had more in common than any of them had with the people of the surrounding villages. But both sides wanted a fight, and here it was.

One exception to this appeared to be Sid Bolton. Unlike the others, he was treating this fight as something more than a game. I watched his face from where I sat and was surprised by the ferocity and hate which was in his expression. He seemed to be always in the most active place, taking on two and sometimes more opponents at a time. I wondered if this could be explained in any way. Obviously, he had no more personal antagonism to the people he was fighting than had the rest of the men from Jacobi's Circus. Why then this viciousness? Suddenly, I remembered what he had told me in the wagon. He had once been the “fat boy” of fairgrounds and circuses, and as he had said this I had seemed to notice a faint bitterness in his voice. My memory of such exhibitions told me that the “fat boy's” tent was usually filled with giggling and chuckling people, who seemed to think that
humanity was the last thing they were expected to see in the lad on show. That laughter must have rankled in Sid's mind. I could imagine him hating all the human race for the laughs he received from some senseless members of it. Could that be the reason for this unexpected violence on his part? I was inclined to think it was.

But the fight, as a fight, had begun to wane a little. Beef was surrounded by the prostrate forms of three opponents, who were either unconscious, or shamming, in order to avoid getting up to face the Sergeant's fists again. Half of the enemy had already begun to retreat the way they had come. And it probably would have fizzled out at that, had not Len Waterman and Christophe Darienne picked on the same man as a prospective partner.

“All right, Len,” said Christophe calmly, “he's mine.”

Len's small sturdy form seemed to bristle at that, and he attempted to elbow Christophe out of the way. But the French lad refused to be hustled.

“It would be you,” shouted Len Waterman suddenly. “Always sneaking in on me.”

Their opponent dropped his hands in bewilderment at this misdirection of energy, and stood watching the two men glaring at each other. Christophe was calm and assured, Len was excited and angry. Then Christophe reached his clenched hand out and tapped Len lightly, almost friendlily, on the shoulder, and in a moment the two men were fighting.