Love, Let Me Not Hunger (12 page)

She nudged the empty tub with her forefoot, begging for water. Toby said, “All right, old girl, afterwards. Lets get it over with. If you think it’s hot here, wait till you get inside that tent.” He loosened the chains holding her bound to the stakes driven into the dry, hard ground, hooked the curved spike of the ankus into the strap of the spangled head-harness covering her broad front and cheek pouches, and pulled. She followed him so docilely that he released the hook and left her free to shamble after him. They entered the little enclosure behind the main tent and stood to the right waiting their cue of Indian music from the panatrope. It was the rule of the circus for both men and animals that entering and exiting acts kept to the right and thus avoided entanglement.

The
galop
came to an end, applause rattled within the tent, the curtain was drawn aside, and the Liberty horses came trotting from the arena blowing, and nodding their plumed heads, to be met by the waiting groom. They passed by the elephant without giving the beast so much as a glance. They were conditioned to the sight and smell of her as she was to them. Fred Deeter emerged upon the heels of the last horse, his jodhpurs stained with sweat, followed by Rose, walking unsteadily in her high-heeled shoes in the sawdust. For an instant she found herself face to face with Toby standing at the head of his elephant and she stood stone-still, taken by surprise, as though she had never seen him there before, and remained there gazing at him with a curious catch of her breath as he, in his turn, looked her up and down with hungry eyes and mounting colour to his face.

The girl broke the spell, but in that second of hesitation moved off to her left instead of continuing on, and thus passed on the right side of the elephant.

With a slow, seemingly ponderous movement, the huge beast swayed towards her, yet fast enough to jam her against the side of the tent, and in an instant the small enclosure was vibrating with the potentiality of tragedy and death, for the girl thus pinned was helpless to move and Judy already had a forefoot lifted to stamp her down.

Over the drumming of the hooves of the departing Liberty horses someone shouted. A half-stifled cry burst from Rose. Toby whirled, the ankus held in both hands above his head, and with all his might struck the elephant on the side of her tender ear. The beast squealed and then let out a trumpet blast of surprise and pain, and for an instant forgot her intent. In that moment’s grace, shaking with fright, Rose freed herself. It was Jackdaw Williams who had shouted and he pushed in quickly between the tent and the elephant, seized Rose roughly around the neck and yanked her out of danger.

“You bloody little fool!” Toby yelled after her. “Get out of here! How often have I told you to keep away from Judy!”

He was himself unnerved and shaking, and at the same time sickeningly filled with desire for the girl and rage at her stupidity.

Within the arena Sam Marvel’s keen ear for trouble had picked up the wrong kind of sounds from behind the entry curtain, and so had Mr. Albert who ran in so swiftly that his coattails stood out behind him.

The elephant was trembling, shocked and bewildered by Toby’s attack, her small eyes aflame. The mind of the great beast was a turmoil of habits, memories, hatreds, affections, conditioned reflexes, and primitive emotions of incalculable savagery. An instant before, everything within her had been concentrated upon killing the creature in blue who had once put the affront of fire crackers upon her. Now that person had disappeared; she herself had a sore ear. She was confused but still dangerous.

Mr. Albert produced a soiled pocket handkerchief from some recess in the tail of his frock-coat and dabbed it at the great fan of Judy’s ear, and when it came away crimson-stained shouted at Toby, “What you been doing to her, boy? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know any better?” Then he soothed the elephant: “Ah there, my girl. That’s my poor good little girl. There now, it’s just a scratch. It’s the heat, I imagine.” And to Toby he said again, “Are you crazy, boy?”

Toby said, “Oh shut up, you old fool. Come on, Judy girl.”

Mr. Albert was still dabbing but the bleeding had stopped and he said once more, patting her scaly side, “See there, you’re all right now. Poor old Judy!”

The red went out of the elephant’s eye and was replaced by a tear shed for the self-pity Mr. Albert was always able to induce in her.

Toby said, “Come on, Jude, everything’s all right now.”

Under the gentling of the voices of the two men whom she trusted, Judy’s confidence returned and she ceased to tremble as the Oriental pipes and drums of her entrance music sounded from within. The confusion in her brain died down, the old habits took over and she entered quietly with Toby, stepping gingerly around the ring. Toby took his bow to the entrance applause, but he was conscious that his legs were trembling and his mind was not on the routine that was to follow, but instead upon the memory of the face and body of the girl, and that curious strained moment when they had been caught up in one another and he had felt his manhood so strongly he had thought he would burst.

Sam Marvel strolled over casually to within earshot, trailing his whip, his mocking expression accentuated by his use of the side of his mouth for speaking rapidly. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” Toby replied curtly, and raised his arms to his audience.

Sam Marvel’s rasping voice filled the tent. “Rajah Poona and his wonder elephant, Saba, from the royal stables!” And out of the side of his mouth again, “Come on, then, get on with it!”

Toby commenced their routine. He was aware that the elephant was still miserable and slow to obey, too quick to relinquish a trick or a position, out of time, out of tune, out of sorts, and, for the first time, his heart went out to her for the cruelty of demanding that so huge a beast heave its bulk about in such blistering weather.

Sam Marvel sidled close again and trickled out the words, “What the hell’s the matter?”

Toby said, “It’s the heat. She’s suffering. I’m going to cut three minutes!”

Marvel said, “Okay,” glanced at the stop-watch he wore on his wrist, and moved off towards the panatrope. Toby finished his act, his costume showing dark patches where the sweat had soaked through, and led his elephant from the ring. Another act followed—tumbling acrobats—and in the heavy, sweltering atmosphere their timing was out too, and they flip-flapped and somersaulted through the heavy fetid air as though in a dream. In this manner the first half of the show drew to a close.

C H A P T E R
8

D
uring the intermission Sam Marvel went out through the back of the tent to light one of his inevitable Schimmelpennincks. Almost immediately he became aware of an uneasiness on his lot as well as amongst the spectators who had drifted out from the tent, many of whom stood looking westwards chattering excitably in Spanish.

“Hallo,” Marvel said to himself, and walked to the edge of the tober where he could get a better look. In the far distance a black wall had reared itself well above the horizon. Ragged, sulphurous streamers and mushrooms of cloud here and there boiled upwards from the solid dark bank.

The lightnings that laced this ominous gathering were a bright purple, and the sound of the far-away thunder, which could be heard at long intervals, had a peculiar, metallic note as though sheets of tin or copper were being vibrated. The break in the stagnant and seemingly endless heat wave they had endured seemed to be at hand.

This burning, airless summer heat, characteristic of the vast Spanish plateau of La Mancha, had pursued them down from Madrid on their trek due south through Toledo, Ciudad Real, Manzanares, and Valdepenas, taking its toll of tempers and exhaustion in both men and animals. Yet the houses had been good and the tour up to that point accounted a success financially.

The proprietor shifted the stump of his cigarillo from one side of his mouth to the other, glanced at his watch, and wondered if there would be an evening performance, and for that matter whether they would be able to get through the matinée before the approaching storm burst overhead.

Sam Marvel having come up to circus ownership the long, hard way, beginning with the penny peep show in the itinerant fair, there was not much he did not know about the hazards attendant to a travelling circus. He had been through fights, panics, and blowdowns. And although he was properly insured against death, damage, and disaster, he didn’t like the looks of the thing building up in the west, for it had a kind of monstrous and chilling quality even at this distance to one who thought he had seen and experienced everything.

Had he been in England, Marvel would not have been too intimidated by the approaching storm, beyond trying to calculate its violence and taking his precautions, for there his tent crews were competent to cope with anything short of a hurricane or a tornado, and moreover there was not the problem of the language barrier. Here in Zalano, as at all their other stands down through Spain, he had recruited local labour as he had planned for this streamlined tour. Up to this point the scheme had proved successful, but Marvel was not unaware that in the case of emergency an untrained crew which could not understand and act quickly to instructions shouted in the stress of a crisis might well prove disastrous. He listened to another distant metallic roll of thunder, and the sound appeared to harbour a peculiar malevolence with which he was unfamiliar.

Joe Cotter, the tent boss, came around from behind the main top to stand beside the proprietor. The light had now undergone a subtle change as the sun, still shining from an otherwise cloudless sky, sank perceptibly closer to the edge of the storm. And against the gathering darkness on the horizon, the square white farmhouses dotted over the plain stood out with unusual sharpness. The greens of the olive trees and the grapevines seemed to have deepened. Over the low roofs of the houses the cross atop the tower of the baroque cathedral arising from the plaza in the centre of the town was silhouetted sharply against the sky.

There on the outskirts the streets were unpaved and the eyes of both men took in the deeply rutted, reddish clay. The tober lay at the bottom of an incline, for the town itself was raised slightly upon the mound of all the remains of previous settlements that lay beneath it, and Marvel thought what it would be like if there were a cloud-burst and how it might affect their next stage. Moving a circus in a sea of mud was sheer hell for all concerned.

To his tent boss he said, “What do you think?”

Cotter did not reply immediately but scratched his head as he looked from the tent top where the coloured pennants hung in motionless rags in the still air to the distant darkness of the approaching storm. He was an elderly, grizzled man of powerful physique and great experience. Clad only in trousers and singlet, the muscles of his arms and shoulders stood out like those of a professional strong man. His was the responsibility: lives and safety against pounds, shillings, and pence. Where the big top was concerned, Marvel accepted his decisions as final. Cotters measuring eye was gauging time against forces. But he, too, was in a strange land and might be coming up against unusual conditions. He took a half-consumed cigarette stub from behind his ear, lit it, and said, “It depends.”

One of the Spanish roustabouts appeared from the direction of the horse stalls carrying two empty water buckets.

“Hey,” said Marvel to the man with the buckets, motioning with his head, “how long before that thing there will get here?”

The man looked at him blankly, completely at a loss to understand the words, though noting the indication of Marvel’s head, nodded and said,
“Sí, sí, muy mal!”

“Get Gogo!” Marvel said. He had quite forgotten the accident to the clown earlier in the afternoon, but remembered it when Cotter returned with Gogo, clad in a fresh costume but walking somewhat stiffly. “You all right?” he grunted.

The clown nodded. He had been fortunate in that only the tip of the wire had struck him. The cut was superficial and had been patched up with adhesive tape.

“Ask this chavvie how long before that storm will be overhead. He ought to know something about local conditions,” Marvel directed.

Gogo engaged the Spaniard in fluent conversation, to which the man replied volubly and apparently vehemently on some side of the question.

“He says it will be an hour, maybe an hour and a half,” Gogo interpreted. “He seems to know what he’s talking about. Storms don’t move fast over this kind of country, but when it comes it’ll be a blowser. He says it’s not so much the wind as the lightning.”

“Are you sure?” said Marvel.

Gogo shrugged. “That’s what he says.”

It was shortly after five o’clock. The second half of the show would run for more than an hour. To call off the performance now and send the audience home would mean returning the money.

Marvel said, “I can get you fifteen minutes out of the second half.”

The tent boss did some rapid calculation and made his decision. “I guess at that rate it’ll be safe enough. We’ll have them out before it breaks. Once they’re out, if there’s a blow-down nobody wall get hurt.” He looked towards the massing in the west and added, “Mebbe by the time of the evening show it’ll have passed over.” The panatrope began to blare from within the tent and the audience streamed back inside to their seats.

Marvel pulled his silver whistle on its chain from his pocket, swinging it around his finger as he walked back to the performer’s entrance. Little Janos, the Hungarian dwarf, presenting his trained dogs—Thor and Wodin, the great Danes, and Kiki, his comic fox terrier with the conical white clown’s cap already strapped to his clever little head—were waiting to go on. He was munching on a piece of salami.

Marvel nodded to him and said, “John Orderly! Get on with it!” The phrase was circus parlance for speeding up the show. Every act had prearranged cuts in case of necessity. Marvel picked up his ringmaster’s whip on the way and entered the arena as the spotlights illuminated the ring once more. He blew on his whistle and announced, “Micky the Midget Magyar and his Capering Canine Comics!”