Love, Let Me Not Hunger (16 page)

Cotter was aware that both men and materials were being subjected to strains and stresses which neither flesh and blood, wood, cast iron, or cotton fibre had been intended to withstand. He was certain that unless the tornado slacked off his equipment would not survive, and he was as concerned with seeing to it that his men would not be injured when the crash came as with trying to evade it.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, as anti-violent as the violence that had been raging, the wind and hail abruptly came to an end as the cold front passed. Inside the tent the workers were left stunned by its sudden cessation, breathless, close to exhaustion, unable to credit the fact that they were no longer called upon to haul and strain at ropes with blistered palms and aching backs. Within the space of an instant, the tent had left off its plunging and rearing and become as docile as a child, and they looked at one another in dazed bewilderment, holding the ends of ropes unexpectedly slackened in their hand. Only Joe Cotter was still as wary and mistrustful as a prize fighter who has knocked his opponent down but is waiting to see in what kind of shape he will arise before conceding himself the winner. Was this the end of the blow, or merely the pause before a stronger onslaught?

They waited, counting the seconds, but there was not so much as a stir to the top or sidewalls. “Okay,” said Cotter, “take a breather,” and started to walk to the entrance of the big top when the first of the two lightning bolts struck.

C H A P T E R
1 1

I
t hit the right-hand king pole, splitting it down the middle; and simultaneously, with the frightful thunder crack that signalled the strike, a curl of flame appeared at the base of the pole as well as at the top around the edge of the canvas. The two small fires, if caught in time, might have been extinguished, had not an instant later a second bolt, in the form of a fireball, ripped down through the tent and exploded at the base of a pile of the wooden seating planks and their supports.

Instantaneously, the tinder dry wood with a crackling roar burst into yellow flowers of flame, which simultaneously spread upwards, devouring the canvas walls of the tent.

“Out! Out! Git out! Git out!” Cotter shouted. He had been inside the enclosure at the moment of the two strikes and was half stunned by his nearness to them and the impact of the detonation hammering down from the sky. Yet he recovered sufficiently to shove and harry the figures of the shocked and dizzied men remaining within the tent, pushing them, beating upon their backs, at the same time keeping up his half-hysterical cry of “Git out! Git out! Git out from under, you bloody fools! She’s going up!”

By the time they were all outside the racing flames had circled the enclosure and the heat of the burning benches was driving them back. Still Cotter kept his head, shouting, “Git those beast wagons out of there! Come on, lend a hand!” And between them they hustled the big cages containing the wildly excited cats out of range of the flames.

The fire brought out all of the members of the circus to stand huddled together, the blaze lighting up the horror on their faces.

The passing of the wind and hail had swept away the panic that had so badly rattled Sam Marvel and enabled him to get a grip on himself, when the frames of his broken windows were filled with a bright orange glare that lit up the whole of the interior of the living wagon.

He shouted, “Christ-all-bloody-mighty!” and ran. His momentary cowardice had passed, for the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling him was greater than his fear of the storm, which was still firing its electrical discharges and unending artillery salvoes overhead, as though from then on this was the way the world was to be and must be endured.

He burst from the wagon, a bandy-legged little figure still in his ringmaster’s dinner jacket and bowler, like one going to a party. He came at once upon Cotter and the group that had moved and manhandled the beast wagons to a place of safety.

Tufts of burning canvas now began to detach themselves from the main tent and float down to the ground. Both Cotter and Sam Marvel immediately became aware of this new danger and shouted at the members of the company, “Don’t stand there, you bloody fools! Move your wagons! Get them off the tober! Wet down the horse tent!”

Fred Deeter and the grooms and horsemen, as well as two of the Walters boys, who had come out from the horse stalls at the first burst of flame and the cries of the tent boss, now went back to try to blindfold the more hysterical of the horses within and loop them to leaders, attaching four at a time so that they could be led forth in case the fire spread.

Toby and the acrobat Joe Purvey of the Birdsalos scrambled up on to the top of the horse tent, and the taut surface enabled them to take gigantic leaps as though they were on the trampoline or spacemen on the moon, and bat to the ground pieces of burning canvas before they could ignite the enclosure. Others ran to fetch buckets of water to wet down the side nearest the blaze.

The main tent was an inferno. Fed by the furnace of the crackling seats below, the flames shot into the sky. Burning ropes writhed through the air like incandescent snakes; and the roaring of the blaze drowned out the shouts of the performers running about to save their possessions and drag the cages of the animals to safety. Even had there been a sufficient supply of water at hand—one tap to which endless trips had to be made supplied the whole circus—the forming of a bucket brigade to fight the blaze would have been as useless as to try to put out a burning city with a child’s toy.

The fire was a beautiful and fearful thing as it crawled up the masts of the poles whose stays had not yet been consumed, and roared from the white heat of the furnace at the bottom through pale yellow to deep orange flames; awe-inspiring and eerie too. For there was something missing from this blaze. Fire called for fire sounds, the clanging of bells, the wailing of sirens, the thumping and pumping of apparatus, the tearing slosh of water.

There were none.

No bells of alarm rang from the centre of the palm-lined Plaza de los Reyes Católicos; no wagons rumbled through the streets. Zalano had no fire-fighting equipment. The town was built of blocks of fieldstone and roofed with uninflammable tile. A bucket brigade of neighbours was enough to put out the occasional oil-stove or kitchen fat fire.

From the nearest house on the far side of the road opposite the tober, roughly garbed men, women in black shawls, and children in pinafores appeared and stood gazing white-faced at the flaming tent. But no one came from the town. Zalano, too, was being shelled by lightning which was striking belfries and houses, knocking stones off chimneys and cornices, while the hail had left hardly a pane of glass intact. In addition, the people were too horror-stricken and involved in this catastrophe bombarding them from the heavens. The fire lighting up the sky to the south was none of their concern.

Joe Cotter, standing so near to the burning structure that the heat seared his lips and turned his face a lobster red, was close to being out of his mind with rage at being cheated of the victory he had thought he had won, and grief at the loss.

“Water! Water!” he shouted. “Jesus Saviour, where’s your bloody water?” He beat his fists against his skull, tears flowed from his eyes, and he continued to curse.

Sam Marvel came as close to finding sympathy for another human being as the gigantic ego of his small stature was capable of, and he put his hand on the shoulder of his foreman. “Take it easy, Joe,” he said. And then on behalf of himself, added once more, “Christ Almighty! She’s gone!”

Gone indeed was the tour, the season, and his grandiose attempt to beat the telly. There would be no profit that summer. True, the insurance companies would reimburse him for the loss of the tent and its gear and any further damage he might suffer through the storm, but there was no hope of continuing or playing out the schedule. His active mind was already assessing all the other consequences of the catastrophe—the logistics of freighting the animals and horses to a sea-port to get them back to England; the expense connected with transporting the troupe home in like manner; the necessity for finding them new jobs elsewhere—now that the season was advanced almost an impossibility—or paying them the amount of their contracts while they loafed out the summer. Endless trouble and endless headaches awaited him.

“Rain!” groaned Joe Cotter. “Where’s the bloody rain?”

Marvel’s thin lips parted in a curiously mirthless grin as he looked up from the contorted features of his tent boss into the splitting sky, and knew that this was what was the matter. It was the rain that was missing from his furious and demoniacal electrical storm, and which made every new fork of lightning so horrifying, lanced from the murky vault that appeared to have become a gigantic cyclotron of disintegrating atoms. It was this rainlessness, Marvel realised, that made it so appallingly venomous. In the sudden onslaught of the hail, they had all forgotten that here was a thunderstorm without rain; rain that would fall coolly upon parched skin; rain that could put out fires; rain that above all
belonged
to the thunderstorms of the past that one had known and could endure. Rain might still salvage something from this fearful fountain of fire mounting to the sky.

Touched by madness for a moment, Joe Cotter raised both his fists and shook them at the heavens. “Rain!” he bawled. “Christ, can’t you give us some bleeding rain?”

The rains fell then.

They poured down from the splitting blackness above, not in droplets or slanting needles, wind-blown gusts or a steady downpour, but in solid, breath-taking, drowning sheets.

The two ancient enemies, water and fire, met and before the astonished eyes of Sam Marvel, Joe Cotter, and the helpless tentmen and circus people watching, drenched, it was fire that triumphed. So hot was the blaze at the centre, so greedy the flames licking up the spars and racing up the canvas sides to envelop the roof in billowing tongues shooting a hundred feet into the air, that the deluge had no effect upon them whatsoever except to achieve a hissing of steam at the edges.

The downpour might as well have been petrol as water for all the help it was against the white-hot incandescence. So fierce was the internal heat that it dried the wetted portions and then burned them to a smouldering mass. It was an amazing sight to see the rain illuminated and descending in what seemed to be solid shafts, as though water was being poured out of a celestial bucket, and the flames and smoke shooting through them.

But the triumph of the fire was short-lived. The last ropes had been consumed; the flaming poles were no longer capable of support; and with one final, catastrophic crash the entire structure collapsed inwards, sending up a volcano of sparks in a last mocking gesture against the cloudburst.

The danger of the blaze reaching the horse tent or inflammable lorries, trailers, caravans, with their petrol supplies and equipment, or destroying the valuable menagerie, was now over for all these were thoroughly soaked, and the members of the circus company, dazed and stunned by the virulence and duration of the storm and its destructive powers, now gathered themselves to deal with the menace of the cloudburst. With Sam Marvel in the lead, they ran once again for their wagons.

By the light of the embers smouldering where the big tent had been, and the flaring lightning flashes, they fought a desperate and losing battle in and about their living quarters to keep the water from completing the job of havoc that had been initiated by the wind and hail.

There was no keeping out that kind of inundation from such loosely built structures, which had been subjected to deterioration over long miles of bumpy roads. Every crack or weakness in joist or join became an opening through which the water now streamed, seemingly in rivers, getting into closets and lockers, ruining clothes, costumes, food supplies. The rain beat in through the shattered windows, seeped under doorways, creating lakes on the floor and soaking to the skin anyone who tried to battle with it from without. It seemed almost as though the omnipresent water had pre-empted the space occupied by the very air needed to breathe, and left the struggling humans gasping and afraid to open their mouths lest it invade them too, and fill their lungs.

Only Judy rejoiced. The torrent cascading down upon her dry, sore hide was bliss. She had been aching for cool water, inside and out, and here it was. She had climbed to her feet and from a pool gathering around her she slaked her inner thirst and now stood waving her trunk, blinking her wet eyelids and wriggling her fat behind into the rain storm with pleasure like a gleeful puppy.

Mr. Albert, emerging from beneath the elephant, patted her soaked sides and, lifting one flap of an ear, shouted into it, “You stay here, old girl! You’ll be all right now!”

He splashed across the lot, which now was ankle-deep in water and mud, to the horse tent.

Here was a shambles of men working in the dark with nervous animals amidst floating straw, ordure, sodden plumes, and trappings; yet, strange to say, the horses were calmed rather than further excited by the water drumming down on the roof and entering through every crevice. Rain was a more accustomed phenomenon, and after the long days and nights of fetid heat they, too, appreciated the soaking they were getting.

At the far end of the horse tent, Harry Walters had joined the three boys in securing his rosin-backs and the two Arabs.

The big ring horses were stolid in temperament and the boys had them well under control, but the Arabs were more nervous and kept trying to rear. Harry Walters yanked them down roughly by their bridles and swore at them. He was not a man who treated his animals badly, but the storm and the succession of catastrophes had rattled him.

Toby said, “Here, let me loosen this, Dad. They’ll be all right in a minute.”

Walters said, “Shut up and get out! I don’t need you to tell me how to handle horses. Get over to the wagon and give the women a hand.”

Toby went out into the downpour. It seemed to have grown lighter, though there was no cessation in either the quality or the quantity of the rain teeming down. But the intervals between the crackling lightning flashes and the answering cannon fire of thunder seemed to have increased slightly, as though the centre of its attack was no longer directly over the heart of Zalano. At the end of the tober, beyond the now disorganised collection of wagons, the embers of the fire still glowed and hissed in a wide circle. The ground itself on which he stood was under water, and what had been once earth so hard baked that it was almost impossible to intrude an iron stake into its skin, was now soft mud into which his heels sank.