Nights at the Circus (33 page)

He bit down upon his doubts as upon an aching tooth and refused to believe his eyes.

These days, the tigers watched the Princess in the same way their little cousins who live amongst us watch a bird in a tree too high to climb. The Princess petitioned the Colonel, via the medium of Mignon, who now spoke for her and was roughly translated by Fevvers, to let her commandeer the ‘wagon salon’, and the Colonel, after much cigar mastication, permitted her to do so on the advice of Sybil, who thought a change of scene would distract them all. None of the conductors dared enter the ‘wagon salon’ thereafter but the tigers appreciated their new quarters in their own way. They ripped open the pale brocade with which the armchairs were upholstered, made nests of the stuffing and cuffed at their reflections in the mirrors that took up their stripes and multiplied them while Mignon leant against the Princess’s shoulder and they tried out a whole new repertoire to suit the organ, sentimental parlour songs, Bach chorales, the Methodist hymn-book, anything that might calm the tigers’ spirits. But the Princess knew the cats no longer trusted her and, worst of all, nor did she trust them. She was consumed with guilt and despair because she had used her gun.

The Colonel did not like to hear the parlour organ since, when he thought of the corpse of the tigress, the fatal last night at Petersburg came back to him in a fugue of failure. Indeed, his constant excitement had something febrile and desperate about it, for the apes had left him in the lurch, his master clown had somersaulted out of the ring into the madhouse – the Princess’s loss wasn’t the half of it. And, in his heart, although his head hotly denied it, he knew the elephants grew each day more feeble. It was a singularly depleted Grand Circus he would present before the God Emperor of Japan unless he could acquire, on the way, a performing bear or two, perhaps. Siberia could afford no other kind of recruit.

He knew full well that those who play the Ludic Game sometimes win but sometimes . . . lose. (Oh, those humiliating headlines in
Variety
!) His heart missed a beat when Mignon sang: ‘Oh, sacred head, sore wounded’, and he imagined his own scrubby pate buffeted by fortune.

Outside the ‘wagon salon’, the Strong Man stood with folded arms. He was the watchdog.

If Samson’s heart still knocked in his chest like a bird in a box when he saw the frail shape of Mignon, he’d learned to subdue himself sufficiently to fetch and carry humbly for the girls, to muck out for them, assist them with all the tasks to which his muscles condemned him.

Unrequited love was performing a peculiar alchemy within the Strong Man and yet the object of his love was changing its nature. Stark lust for lost Mignon slowly resolved itself, out of sheer propinquity, into an awed veneration for these beings who seemed, as a pair, to transcend their individualities. He knew he could not love the one without the other as he could not love the singer without her song, and must love both without touching either, so, by degrees, he grew less physical. He’d taken to wearing clothes, a visible sign of his changing sense of himself, had bought himself a stout, belted Russian shirt and in it looked already less of a hulk. He nourished his sensibility, which was still at the stripling stage, by standing guard over them.

He let the Colonel pass with a curt nod.

The Colonel counted his blessings over fish soup in the dining car: thank God! he retained exclusive use of the Cockney Venus!

The mellow pink shade of the table lamp soothed the hysterical brilliance of the rouge with which she had concealed the traces of her fit of tears. Although a corset was too much to contemplate, tonight, she had made a token effort to dress up to first-class standards, put on a tea-gown of cream lace and pinned up her hair so that you did not notice her dark parting, but the tea-gown, cut to drape over her bosom, was unbecoming, giving her a middle-aged, thickening look, and her pinned-up curls were drooping, already. The ‘lucky’ violets bravely pinned on her shoulder were unconvincing imitations, cheap, tatty things, a child’s birthday present, perhaps.

The waiter watched with fascination as the Colonel tied a napkin round Sybil’s neck.

‘Pigs eat everything a man eats,’ he informed the table. ‘That’s why a man tastes same as a pig. That’s why cannibals called roasted
homo sapiens
“long pig”, yessir! Omnivores, see; mixed feedin’! Gives us both that gamey taste.’

As if the notion of cannibalism refreshed his appetite, he attacked a veal cutlet with gusto, although, by its texture, the cutlet had been cooked in the station buffet at Irkutsk several days before, loaded on the train and reheated in a gravy far too bright a brown for authenticity.

As for me, I slipped the nasty thing on my own plate across to Sybil, who speedily despatched it just as the Colonel said she would. I’d a great affection for the clever little pig, I must say, and she looked well on travel, far better than I did. Her ruff was as pristine as the day we left Petersburg, more so; who did the Colonel get to goffer it for him? The girl who looked after the samovar? The steward? And she shone with the oilings the Colonel was never too far gone in his cups to give her and I thought, I could do with a massage meself, if it was young Jack-me-lad give it to me.

Here he, comes.

What
is
it this young man reminds me of? A piece of music composed for one instrument and played on another. An oil sketch for a great canvas. Oh, yes; he’s unfinished, just as Lizzie says, but all the same – his sun-burned bones! His sun-bleached hair! Underneath his make-up, that face like a beloved face known long ago, and lost, and now returned, although I never knew him before, although he is a stranger, still that face which I have always loved before I ever saw it so that to see him is to remember, although I do not know who it is I then remember, except it might be the vague, imaginary face of desire.

Absentmindedly she bit into a chunk of bread that had the colour and texture of devil’s food cake. As the Colonel took Sybil on his lap to make hospitable room for Walser, the young man felt the hungry eyes upon him and it seemed to him her teeth closed on his flesh with the most voluptuous lack of harm.

All she had done was to define the necessary innocence of the adventurer and to take advantage of it.

Spoon chinked upon soup-plate; knife ground against cutlet; the fringed pink lamps swayed this way and that, reflected in the dark windows as if they might be blooms upon the branches of the enfilades of trees through which they now were passing; the waiters rolled suavely to and fro as if on invisible wheels with dishes lined along their arms; from the invisible kitchen came the clatter of pans. There was a macedonia of fruit for dessert.

Then, just as the Princess and Mignon arrived in the restaurant car in bloody aprons, Samson dogging their footsteps, on the way to the kitchen to collect the tigers’ dinners, there came a thunderous boom. And, as if at the command of the biggest drum-roll in the entire history of the circus, the dining-car rose up in the air.

For a split second, everything levitated – lamps, tables, tablecloths. The waiters rose, and the plates rose from their arms. Sybil was lifted up, as was the chunk of canned pineapple on which her jaws were just about to close. The feet of the dark girl and the fair girl in the doorway were propelled upwards from the rising floor. Then, before shock or consternation could cross their faces, the whole lot fell down again and, with a rending crash, flew apart in a multitude of fragments.

The train immediately ceased to be a train and turned into so many splinters of wood, so much twisted metal, so many screams and cries, while the forest on either side of the devastated track burst aflame, ignited by the burning logs cast far and wide from the fire-box of the now demolished engine.

The giantess found herself trapped under the collapsed table at which she’d been engaged in picking pale maraschino cherries from her macedonia and spooning them into the dish of the pet pig. Her first emotions were surprise and indignation. Nearby in the dark, her foster-mother expostulated eloquently in her native dialect but none of Lizzie’s tricks could get them out of
this
hole. Only the strength of the muscles Fevvers now stretched to their fullest extent would shift the wreckage and let them and their bruises scramble out into the open air which in itself was hazardous, filled with flame and flying debris. The wind, now risen to a gale, scorched them.

I have broken my right wing. As the first shock passes, I feel the pain. It hurts. Hurts as much as a clean fracture in the forearm. But no more. A lot to be thankful for. I can still keep the use of my right arm, even though the wing is broken. God, it hurts. Could be worse. Keep a stiff upper lip, girl; keep on telling yourself how it could be worse!

Indeed, it seems all we in the restaurant car were fortunate. Here’s Mignon surfaced! Having sustained a black eye from the blow of a flying brandy bottle but otherwise unhurt, she’s dragging the Princess out from under a cascade of crockery and silverware that has cut and scratched and concussed her. Lizzie gives a quick check, no bones broken, but she can’t wake up the Princess, who has passed out . . . As for the Colonel, it must be
he
who’s made of india-rubber, not I, for here he comes bouncing out of the rubble with his pig safe in the bosom of his jacket. Did Sybil foresee
this
fix, for all her talent as a seer? Did she, hell! Her ruff is a casualty, though; flat as a pancake. The Colonel strips her off, from now on this little pig will go naked.

Of my young man, no sign.

Then, amongst the ruins of the ‘wagon salon’, I beheld a great wonder. For the tigers were all gone into the mirrors. How to describe it. The ‘wagon salon’ lay on its side, ripped open like the wrappings of a Christmas toy by an impatient child, and, of those lovely creatures, not a trace of blood or sinew, nothing. Only pile upon pile of broken shards of mirror, that segmented the blazing night around us in a thousand jagged dissociations so you might think, if you had time or patience to fit them back together, then, suddenly, all would be as it had been before, the forest, the plain, the twin tracks of the railway lines bearing forwards towards the infinity of the horizon the pretty little carriages and the puffing train which now seemed to me to have been a kind of gauntlet flung down in the face of Nature – a grand gesture of defiance which Nature had picked up, then tossed disdainfully back upon the heaving earth, shattering it into fragments.

And, as for the tigers, as if Nature disapproved of them for their unnatural dancing, they had frozen into their own reflections and been shattered, too, when the mirrors broke. As if that burning energy you glimpsed between the bars of their pelts had convulsed in a great response to the energy released in fire around us and, in exploding, they scattered their appearances upon that glass in which they had been breeding sterile reduplications. On one broken fragment of mirror, a paw with the claws out; on another, a snarl. When I picked up a section of flank, the glass burned my fingers and I dropped it.

Mignon was cuddling the Princess in her arms. Now and then, tiger-fashion herself, she licked the forehead next to her shoulder. But what shall the tamer do when the beasts are gone? Or Orpheus without his lute, for that matter? For I could not guess where her own piano might have got to and the parlour organ from the ‘wagon salon’ lay higgledy piggledy in bits on the melting snow, a random collection of pipes as if there had been a cataclysm in a plumber’s.

It was a frosty night yet the snow melted in the heat. Up above, you never saw such stars.

And of my clown, no trace.

But the rest of Clown Alley began to heave and bubble up from the smithereens of the hard class, wiping the rubble out of its eyes. Accustomed as they were to catastrophe, it was no more to them than any other incendiary vehicle, I dare say, and their dogs shook themselves and ran around and snapped and whined and got under everybody’s feet and still I couldn’t find him.

Retain the use of my hands as I may, I’m in some discomfort. Imagine you’ve got an extra arm, hinged on at the back, and it’s dangling down, it’s broken.

I got down on my knees in the dining-car, excavating a cache of veal cutlets that had broken out of the ice-box and were littering up a place where my bewildered eyes thought they’d glimpsed a movement, and the conductors and the engineers and every single one of the waiters, all in one piece more or less, or so it seemed, came to jostle me and impede my search as they quested for the train’s supply of vodka, but, of the young fellow who was
my
quest, not so much as a great toe or a little finger I could keep in a locket as a souvenir.

Then a soft, moist, questing thing attacked me in the back of the neck, causing me to jump. It was, for God’s sake, the tip of the trunk of an elephant.

For, poor things, it turns out this very moment should be the fated moment, the moment of destiny, when indeed their chains all parted and they were free! Yet free for what? They achieve their longed-for liberty at just the moment when it won’t do them any good!

They’d smashed their way easily out of the remains of their confinement and, formed up in a line good as gold, some passed bits of wreckage along to one another while others filled their trunks with melted snow and squirted upon the fires in an attempt to put them out. All this as though they’d never heard tell of pneumonia. The jumbos were a lesson to us all and, had we the chance to join them in their sterling work, no doubt we’d have left the wreck neat as a new pin by morning but we were forced to leave them to it because, while I was digging away for some relic of the young American, all we survivors of Colonel Kearney’s circus were kidnapped, every one.

Liz said it was as though our abductors materialised out of a copse of birches, like guardian spirits of the woods – a band of rough-looking coves in sheepskins, armed to their teeth. Evidently they lacked ponies or draught beasts for one or two of these men were dragging odd contraptions behind them – long poles of larchwood with leather strips criss-crossing them, the kind of cart you might invent if you hadn’t thought of the wheel. They’d come as if prepared to ferry away the injured, although only the Princess lies in need of a stretcher. They barked out a few orders of which my friends understood not one word, being reluctant linguists, but the language of the gun is picked up very quickly and our captors soon nudged them into a column with their rifle butts.