Love, Let Me Not Hunger (13 page)

As usual, Janos made his entrance on his stomach as the two great Danes on their leads pulled him along the ground, while the fox terrier barked and leaped over his prostrate form. A ripple of laughter went through the audience.

And yet it was no longer the same as it had been before the intermission. To the fearfully oppressive heat was now added the tension of the menace from the oncoming storm. The air within the big tent had become supercharged, as though the malignant purple voltage of electricity cooking up on the horizon had sent on waves in advance to sizzle and crackle in the heavy atmosphere. Not only the audience but the performers, animal and human, were affected by the change.

The former were inclined to laugh more quickly, nervously and loudly, and sometimes on a pitch rising close to hysteria. Upon the artistes exhibiting their routines secured by years of practise, the tensions had the effect of making them more than usually conscious of the dangers connected with their acts and the bodily movements necessary to bring them off. Although word had passed swiftly through the ranks of the show people that the matinée would be concluded before the storm was expected overhead, it was nevertheless a menace. The mere fact of the slow inevitability of its progress towards them altered their metabolism and put them on edge.

An all-pervading nervousness filled the arena, collecting like the charge in some gigantic gas pocket on the ground and needing only a spark to set it off. Minute by minute the uneasiness and apprehension increased. And yet when the explosion finally came it occurred in a totally unexpected area and was not at all like anything those connected with the circus feared or anticipated.

C H A P T E R
9

O
f all persons, the detonator was Mr. Albert, for now with the duties of property master and general ring manager that had been imposed upon him in addition to his job as beast man, he was overworked and overtaxed. An old man, the heat was affecting him even more than many of the others, and the hurry and rush of the last half of the show, along with the cuts that were being made to speed it up, were confusing him.

At best, Mr. Albert was barely tolerated by the circus artistes since he was classified as a josser—someone on the show but neither circus born nor part of an act.

Mr. Albert’s fearful eagerness to please did nothing to ameliorate the contempt with which he was regarded and if anything aggravated it. Sometimes in his anxiousness to keep up with things he got beneath their feet, interfered with their timing, or ruined a bow, and then they would tear a strip or two off him behind the curtain after their exit. This would put him into a panic of apologies, for he was always terrified of losing his job.

However, there was no time for him to linger or brood over such scoldings for there was always something else to be lugged into the ring, and he would be off in the curious kind of gallop he had evolved which took away some of the strain of running in sawdust or sand.

Oddly enough, his absurd uniform of frock coat and bowler hat stood him in good stead as he darted about the ring during the show, carrying objects seemingly far too heavy for him, hauling trapezes aloft, or straining to put the proper degree of tautness into the trampoline, for one was never quite sure from his get-up whether he was a performer or an attendant, an Auguste, an acrobat, or what. Thus, the spectators soon got used to him and thereafter forgot him, so that although he was there all of the time he likewise was not.

On this particular day he got even more on the nerves of the artistes with his fumbling and bumbling attempts to be in two places at one time, and keeping up with the cuts in the programme instigated by the repeated mutterings of “John Orderly! John Orderly!” from the ringmaster.

The astonishing thing that befell Mr. Albert that afternoon about the middle of the last half of the show, took place to the obbligato of the brassy grumbling and rumbling of thunder which occasionally overtopped the rowdy cacophony of the panatrope which Marvel had turned up to its loudest to drown out the reverberations. The exhortations of Marvel to speed it up had put Mr. Albert into an absolute frenzy of activity.

In the ring at the time were the Risley acrobats, the two fat but powerful members of the Yoshiwara-Fu Tong troupe who lay on their backs in cradles and juggled and tossed objects about with their feet, including their own children, who flew like gaily coloured shuttlecocks through the air.

But already set up on the other side of the ring were the trampoline and the trapeze bars above to be used by the Birdsalos—Bill Munger, his pretty wife, Betty, and Joe Purvey, their clown partner—in their comedy acrobatic act. Waiting at the rear for their ladder entree were the four clowns and Augustes—Gogo, Panache, Jackdaw Williams, and little Janos.

This was a knockabout piece of clowning, a kind of delirium of sloshing with buckets of water, mostly directed at the midget clown which sometimes came close almost to drowning him, sending him off dripping, choking, coughing, and spluttering. The pails of water had to be standing by for this act so that there would be no interruption in the flow of liquid or fun. The trampoline was being tested by Bill Munger, who gave a dissatisfied shake of his head and turned the screw, bringing the canvas stretcher to a still further degree of tautness. The Risley act was in full swing, and Mr. Albert was in the process of running in the last of the dozen or so pails of water to be used by the clowns.

As he passed by Jackdaw Williams, waiting bulbous-nosed and blubber-lipped in his tattered tramps costume, the bird perched upon Williams’ shoulder suddenly gave vent to an ear-splitting scream and the Auguste, for no reason that he could remember afterwards, stuck out his foot.

It so happened that the Risley performers were just between tricks, rearranging cradles and setting up their props for the next one, so that the attention of the audience momentarily was not centred upon them. And the sudden loud scream of the jackdaw transfixed them and caused every eye to turn in the direction of the entry curtain from which Mr. Albert, bearing two buckets, tripped, stumbling, captive of his own momentum, unable to stop and came staggering into the centre of the ring to go sprawling on his face, one bucket beneath him, the other emptying its contents over his head.

A roar of surprised laughter greeted him. Then the little old man in the long-tailed coat
was
a clown after all! They had suspected it, they hadn’t been sure, they thought he
might
be, and now there he was stretched out on his belly, his spectacles knocked awry, sawdust all over his chest and filling one sleeve, and a great splash of wet on the back of his black frock coat. He was the funniest sight any of them had ever seen.

The laughter ran around the tent, waxing in intensity and the loudest shout issued from the tiny mouth of the great, obese, painted woman sitting in her solitary state in the front row of the ringside seats.

The clowns were what they were, not only because it was their profession, hereditary or acquired, but because they were creative men with a sense of the ridiculous and the grotesque. They were always improvising and ad-libbing in their acts, teasing, tricking, or surprising one another; this opportunity was simply too good to be missed, and with loud clownish cries of, “Hoi, hoi, hoi!” all four ran into the ring bearing buckets of water.

They fell upon Mr. Albert, sitting him up, brushing him off with great solicitousness, whereupon little Janos, shouting with glee, emptied another pail of water over his head. It ran down his face and neck and collar and shirt front, giving rise to one great unified scream of laughter from the audience.

They stood him up on his feet and immediately knocked his legs out from under him, so that he sprawled upon his behind, his face bewildered and foolish, and again the little dwarf, a curious kind of frenzy raging beneath the painted smile on his mouth and gleaming through the plus marks of his eyes, emptied another bucket over him. He was getting some of his own back. The fat Marquesa was leaning forward upon the rim of the ring itself, shaking, rippling, and billowing with laughter.

So far it had been a kind of half-innocent impromptu of perverted humour, but thereafter a kind of illogical and malicious hysteria took over and all the mad fury and absurdity of impossible cruelties practised upon a helpless victim soon turned into a comic nightmare, against a background of gales of uncontrolled, maniacal laughter.

The two Japanese were in their cradles when Gogo and Panache picked up the drenched figure of Mr. Albert between them and hurled him on to the feet of the nearest one. In a moment the figure of the old man was whirling just as had their wooden barrels, coat-tails flying and water spraying from him. Then his body arched through the air to land on the feet of the second spinner who rotated him, flipped him, turned him around, upside down, this way and that, before kicking him to fly like a lunatic swallow in the direction of the clowns, who caught him and themselves went to the ground with the force of his landing. And now all were doused with buckets from the wildly excited dwarf who was shouting, “Hoi, hoi, hoi!” at the top of his lungs through it all.

The madness waxed instead of waned, and so did the roars, the shouts, the shrieks, the yells, the gales, and the gusts of laughter that swept through and rocked the audience.

Mr. Albert was up, he was down; he was rolling in the sawdust, sneezing and coughing with water in his nose, eyes, and ears. Other performers, drawn from their quarters by the extraordinary volume of sound coming from the big top, crowded the entry space and themselves were swept into paroxysms of amusement. Sam Marvel stood at the side of the ring out of range of the splashing water, motionless and watching the proceedings as though hypnotised. There was no laughter in him; the expression of mild mockery never left his bloodless lips and he was immoblized, fascinated by the spectacle, and taking a kind of cruel, illogical satisfaction out of what was happening to the old man, who with his humiliation was releasing them all from the tensions which had been building up.

But the most astonishing sight was the fat Marquesa, now almost out of control with mirth. The white skin of her face had suffused to a beet red. She was almost choking with laughter, her little eyes half closed, her bodice close to bursting, and she pounded the rim of the ring with closed fists in an ecstasy of enjoyment.

Somehow the three Birdsalos then got into the act with their trampoline. Mr. Albert was flung to them like a football and bounced from the canvas into the air so that for one moment he hung like a sodden, dripping doll from the bars of the apparatus above, and the next was jouncing and bouncing and turning over in the air, his arms and legs waving in a kind of grotesque despair, which sent the audience into newer, longer, and even higher-pitched transports.

In the end he was returned to his four tormentors in mid-ring to fall down once more, groggy, bewildered, benumbed, soaked, to endure the baptism of the last two buckets at the hands of the now insanely screaming Janos.

Mr. Albert tried to rise to his feet but his legs would no longer support him and he fell again with his face in the sawdust, to renewed hurricanes of laughter, so comical a figure that the Marquesa could no longer hold her water and was forced to wet her seat through her voluminous and billowing clothing.

Joe Cotter, the tent boss, pushed his way through the performers who had crowded just inside the entrance curtain, went up to Sam Marvel and said something into his ear. The proprietor nodded and quickly blew a number of blasts which eventually pierced the pandemonium of whoops, guffaws, chuckles, and shrieks still raging, and penetrated to the four clowns and their victim. Old habits and circus routine took over again and the four picked up Mr. Albert, each by an arm and a leg, and ran him out of the arena, accompanied by a deafening volume of applause and shouts of
“Bravo!”
and
“Olé!”
As they passed the section where the Marquesa was still shaking uncontrollably with mirth, she rose and, leaning forward, blew a series of kisses in the direction of the group.

With their disappearance through the curtain some kind of normality and order was restored to the show. The Birdsalos went into their act; the gusts of laughter blew themselves out, though never quite did the buzz and hum of excitement resulting from those strange minutes leave the audience.

During the trampoline act, Marvel nipped outside with the tent boss, and even the cold lizard’s blood in his veins was chilled by the ominous change in the world he had known a few hours before.

The black mass had swallowed the sun and a third of the sky, and the white buildings of the town were bathed in an eerie light. The campanile of the church tower was now illuminated by the purple electrical discharges erupting from the boiling clouds. And deeper within the approaching storm and towards the all but blotted-out horizon, blinding bolts of lightning were striking the earth; and the rumble of strange-sounding thunder like no other the two men had ever heard, though muted still by distance, was continuous.

Marvel said, “Christ Almighty!”

Cotter nodded. “I want to get ’em out of there.”

Marvel glanced at his watch again. “How much longer?” he asked, looking at the sky.

“Ten or fifteen minutes, I’d say. She’s been comin’ faster than I thought she would.”

“Can we finish? We got ten minutes to go. If we send ’em home without seeing the last number they’ll talk.”

“O.K.,” said Cotter, “but you were running over. What the hell was that? A new act?”

Marvel said, “You can search me,” and cocked another eye towards the sky. The Birdsalos emerged dripping. From within the tent came the shouts of the clowns doing a run-around to cover the setting up of the cage for the animal act. In the lowering gloom, men bared to the waist marched by with sections of the steel tunnel through which the big cats would enter the arena. Others were carrying pieces of the cage itself.

“O.K.,” Marvel said, and went back into the tent.