Nights at the Circus (27 page)

She would no longer be an extraordinary woman, no more the Greatest
Aerialiste
in the world but – a freak. Marvellous, indeed, but a marvellous monster, an exemplary being denied the human privilege of flesh and blood, always the object of the observer, never the subject of sympathy, an alien creature forever estranged.

She owes it to herself to remain a woman, he thought. It is her human duty. As a symbolic woman, she has a meaning, as an anomaly, none.

As an anomaly, she would become again, as she once had been, an exhibit in a museum of curiosities. But what would she become, if she continued to be a woman?

Then he saw she was pale under her rouge, as if recovering from real fear, and bundling herself in her feathery cape as if it would warm her. She gave him a thin smile.

‘Nearly came unstuck, eh?’ she said ambiguously.

Lizzie ran to her with half a bottle of brandy from the bar. The Colonel hovered, uttering flattering, sweet words, but Fevvers, subsiding into a ringside seat, shushed him silent as an iron clanking heralded the erection of the enormous cage in which the Princess and her cats performed.

‘My protegee,’ said Fevvers, gulping brandy. ‘
Now
you’ll see something.’

Walser tried to sit down beside her but Lizzie firmly pushed him out of the way so he sat down beside the Colonel instead.

Preoccupied with Mignon’s debut, the Princess had spared no thought for herself, forgotten to so much as pop on a frock, and both her petticoat and chemise could have done with a wash, hem of one stained with excrement of the cages and waist of the other with bloody prints from absent-minded wipings of her hands. But, as for Mignon – what fairy godmother had touched the little street-waif with her wand?

Her flaxen hair was piled up in soft curls and secured with a pink satin rose. A regular ballgown, white as icing, all romantic frills and lace, was cut in a way that showed how well her bruises were healing. She thrust out her meagre bosom as if to let a caged bird within it free.

Only, by the second verse, the Colonel began to rustle a little.

‘Lieder in the tiger-cage!’ he brooded aloud. ‘Thassa real class act, yessir. But mightn’t it be
too
high class? Get my meaning? Wasted on the hoi polloi? Mightn’t –’

‘Shush!’ remonstrated Fevvers sharply.

Walser’s eyes prickled and that vertiginous sensation he by now associated with the presence of the
aerialiste
overwhelmed him, although he knew, this time, the music was as much to blame as she.

A scatter of applause from the little audience, modified by an aggressive silence from Sybil that justified somewhat the Colonel’s apprehensions, for he held great store by his pig’s commercial acumen. No. Not for
this
show. Not
that
song. There was cash to be coined from the singer but not if she and her accompanist persisted in turning the ring into a concert hall. He strove to recall how his great predecessor, Barnum, marketed Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, for the great American public . . . Sign up Mignon, yes; but sign her up with
this
cat act? H’m! Problems.

‘What else,’ he rasped, champing his butt, ‘can you do?’

Mignon, manipulating her romantic skirts with marvellous dexterity, approached the biggest tiger on his pedestal and curtsied. The ladies’ excuse-me!

The tiger’s tail twitched and the tunnels of his nostrils tingled in response to the tasty civet in her perfume. The Princess gave out the preliminary chord. Down he jumped from his perch.

The Princess, out of respect for the city, chose to play the grand waltz from
Onegin. One
, two, three. Mignon waltzed with the tiger.
One
, two, three. The tall beast, a little stiff and grandfatherly, tenderly bent over the debutante, fully six feet tall on his hind legs and, it would seem, somewhat discommoded by the leather gauntlets secured to his forepaws with string lest, in the excitement of the moment, he let out his retracted claws with disastrous consequences to Mignon’s bare shoulders, which had only the appearance of marble.

Round and round they went, Mignon humming along with the tune in an absent-minded, ensorcellating voice, as pleased with herself and the effect she made as any girl at her first ball. But the tiger’s bride was sad to be cut out and, perhaps, even jealous at losing her partner to the pretty girl. Putting back her ears, she began to growl a sulphurous undermusic.

Hand in the tiger’s paw, Mignon ‘styled’ to the crowd, as the Princess taught her, then curtsied to the tiger, to the other dancers, beaming with her customary lack of discrimination for it was all in the day’s work to her, pretending to be dead or dancing with the fearful living.

More applause, far more than hitherto because every single one of the Educated Apes crept in to perch along the upper benches. Few of the non-simian habitués of the Imperial Circus could have behaved with more decorum as they clapped to see their former keeper in her new incarnation. One of them, with the green hair-ribbon, caught Walser’s eye and winked at him. The Ape-Man was, as usual, elsewhere, nailed to some low bar by liquor, no doubt.

This time, Sybil could barely contain her enthusiasm and the Colonel’s doubts vanished. He was quite consoled for the loss of the Charivaris.

‘That beats all, don’t it, Sybil! What nerve, what class! Whatta nattraction! If that little blondie ain’t a wonder! And, as for the brown-skinned gal, why, she’s just the amazing thing! Tell you what,’ he confided to Sybil, ‘what say we
drop
the song; just drop it. Forget it. Drop the song, go straight into the dance.’

Mignon led her partner back to his pedestal and dropped a kiss on his plush forehead before courteously handling him up. But a huge, amber tear dropped out of the tigress’s eye, and then another. The Princess tapped her teeth with her fingernail when she saw those disappointed tears and beckoned impatiently at the observers. Walser felt a nudging at his bad arm and, looking down, saw that Sybil was poking him with her snout.

‘Don’t you see, man,’ interpreted the Colonel, in a julep-haunted whisper, ‘the Princess wants a volunteer. Sybil knows. Sybil can tell. Off ye go, young feller, and do your duty! Do your duty by the Ludic Game and Colonel Kearney’s Circus!’

‘’Ere, Mr Colonel,’ said Fevvers. ‘I say, ain’t that a bit much?’

The Princess beckoned again; Sybil nudged again, this time ferociously.

‘Ain’t you an
Amurrican
?’ implored the Colonel. ‘Where’s your spirit?’

‘But that’s the cat tried to eat me!’ cried Walser, aghast.

‘So you’ve been introduced, already? Fine!’

‘But my arm –’

‘’E’s a wounded soldier, poor sod –’

Walser looked from side to wide, seeking escape but saw, instead, the apparition of the Strong Man, come to gawp at Mignon. A vision of gleaming muscle, the Strong Man saw Walser at the same moment. His biceps rose, as if reflexively. Fevvers covered her eyes with one hand and raised the brandy bottle to her lips with the other.

‘Walser by name I may be, ma’am, but I fear I’m no dancing man,’ apologised Walser to his auburn partner but the lovely creature, with the relief of the reprieved wallflower, laid her head on his injured shoulder with a gentle, reassuring pressure and it was just as well she was in an appeasing mood since there was no time to procure her gloves. She led. She steered Walser round the ring with complete assurance and a wonderfully grave concern.

One
, two, three.
One
, two, three.

Mignon whirled by, flashed the clown a brilliant smile and Walser, supported by the unforged steel of the tigress’s forepaws, thought: there goes Beauty, and the Beast. Then, looking into the tigress’s depthless, jewelled eyes, he saw reflected there the entire alien essence of a world of fur, sinew and grace in which he was the clumsy interloper and, as the tigress steered his bedazzlement once more round the Princess’s white piano, he allowed himself to think as the tigers would have done:

Here comes the Beast, and Beauty!

The breath of the tigress was wonderfully foul because of the putrid remains of breakfast still stuck between her teeth. That was the only thing that jarred.

All the tigers were on their hind legs, now, waltzing as in a magic ballroom in the country where the lemon trees grow.

The bars of the arena went past, first one by one, then, as the tempo quickened, resolving themselves into one single blurred bar, a confinement apprehended but no longer felt, until that single bar itself dissolved and all that remained was the limitless landscape of the music within which, while the dance lasted, they lived in perfect harmony.

This time, the applause was tumultuous and, if the Princess herself joined in, so did every single member of the circus (with the exception of the sulking Charivaris) for, as Walser took his bow, he saw all the stable-boys, roustabouts and grooms, besides elephants and equestrians he could not put a name to, unknown tumblers, jugglers, girls who were shot from guns, and every single clown, all drawn to the amazing spectacle, all succumbed to it. The Colonel sank right down in his seat and kicked his little legs in the air with delight. Fevvers toasted Walser with the empty brandy bottle.

Walser led the tigress back to her pedestal and bowed to her. She knocked him backwards with her rumbling, gratified, evil-smelling purr. Exquisitely formal, the Princess kissed him on both cheeks but Mignon she kissed on the mouth and the two girls clung together for a little longer, only a moment longer, than propriety allowed although, such was the vigour of the ovation, nobody noticed except those to whom it came as no surprise.

Then the Princess snapped shut the piano lid, took up her rifle and gestured imperiously with it. The cats leapt off their pedestals and disappeared down the chute. Abruptly discontinuous, the enchantment was over.

The Colonel was well pleased with the progress of the august he had himself selected, who was now both Human Chicken and tigress’s gigolo. But, later that afternoon, the Strong Man beat Walser to a pulp and only the intervention of the
aerialiste
saved him.

The cuckolder cuckolded wears a double set of horns; the Strong Man’s forehead buckled under the weight. He lurked in the gamy tranquillity of the menagerie, biding his time until Walser passed through the bowels of the building on his way to piss in the courtyard and jumped upon him from behind, knocking him down on the cobbles in front of the elemental indifference of the elephants. Walser’s cockscomb and wig fell off.

The Strong Man knelt on Walser’s back and kneed his kidneys again and again but you would have thought it hurt him more than it hurt Walser because he blubbered like a child. Walser, his right arm useless, could do nothing to defend himself and writhed under the great, grunting succubus until a drench of water descended on them both.

That put the Strong Man’s fire out. He rolled off Walser, bawling and dripping, a sorry sight. This time it was Fevvers who flourished the hosepipe with which the Princess had already rescued Walser once before. She shook out a last few drops in a disturbingly masculine fashion and laid it aside. Mignon looked out of the cat-house at the sound of the commotion. When she saw Samson, the Strong Man, reduced to such pathetic, liquifying misery, her face took on an April hue of sympathetic showers. She had too short a memory to hold a grudge.

Walser, ignored, got up and looked for his head-coverings. Water ran out of his sleeves and down his trouser-legs. Fevvers shooed the ex-combatants towards the Princess’s quarters, although, when the Strong Man saw the tigers perking up and looking inquisitive, he began to bellow again, this time out of fright. He was dressed, as usual, only in his tigerskin loincloth, to which the Princess pointed meaningfully.

‘What she means is, off with that,’ Fevvers said to him. ‘They don’t like the look of it.’

He knuckled his eyes and would not budge so she removed it for him, disclosing for a moment his enormous prick now crouched and shrunken, altogether the ghost of itself, before she wrapped him in a towel and chucked his loincloth to a safe distance. Walser made haste to take off his own trousers before, oh! agonising, oh! delirious notion, she could get her hands on
him.
Soon both were draped in towels and seated on bottles of straw. It was four o’clock and Mignon ran to the freshly opened cookhouse for warming mugs of tea.

Mignon’s balldress hung from a bar on a wooden hanger marked
Hotel de l’Europe.
At home, the cat-tamers looked like a pair of schoolgirls surprised at a game in the dorm. Like the Princess, Mignon didn’t bother to dress up in private, although
her
underthings were brand-new, exquisite batiste and broderie anglaise. A price tag still hung from the petticoat hem.

The Strong Man took a swallow of tea and then his tears burst forth afresh. Fevvers, with impersonal motherliness, took his curly head in her arms and pillowed it on her bosom. Walser was aggrieved, for he was the battered one and nobody paid him any attention except Mignon who, discovering hitherto untapped areas of competence within herself, snatched up a beefsteak and slapped it on his face to quell the beginnings of a monstrous black eye. But hers was not the attention he craved and, the more the Strong Man sobbed and snuggled, the more Walser felt put in the wrong and ill-used.

‘I never laid a finger on her!’ he declared to the Strong Man, only to spark off a fresh storm. The Strong Man mumbled something between Fevvers’ breasts, where only she could hear.

‘He says he loves you,’ she told Mignon. Mignon presented a blank face. Fevvers hastily translated herself. Mignon laughed. The Strong Man wept and mumbled some more.

‘He says he loves you but he’s a coward.’

This time, Mignon did not laugh but kicked at the straw with her bare toe.

Mumble, mumble, mumble.

‘He says he loves you; he’s a coward; and he can’t bear to think of you in the arms of a clown.’