Nights at the Circus (37 page)

Nevertheless, I persuaded the fire-boy to split a log so Liz can make splints for my broken wing, binding the splints with strips she tore off our underlinen, and then I felt easier. But we couldn’t conceal what we were up to from the fire-boy and his eyes went big as cart-wheels when he saw what I’d got to show. God, he stared. And, would you believe, he crossed himself.

The Princess woke up at last and broke that life-long silence of hers with a vengeance but to no purpose, since she babbled away hysterically and her words made no sense. Even Mignon could not console her for it was plain to see the Princess knew Othello’s occupation was gone. She kept her hands stuck out straight in front of her as if they no longer belonged to her, as if, henceforward, she would have no use for them
as
hands. Her poor fingers were stiff as chapel hat-pegs already.

She made such a hullabaloo, lamenting, presumably, the passing of her keyboard and her tigers, that the clowns grew restive and were all for getting the fire-boy to open the door and shove her out in the snow but Lizzie found a pack of cards in her handbag and they settled down, resentfully but quietly, while the Princess’s passion wore itself out until she lay still in Mignon’s arms, racked only by exhausted sobs.

Liz hugged me and kissed me and, no matter what state she might have been in under her surface calm, she was fast asleep under the stinking bearskins in two shakes but my nerves were so ravaged by the shocking tragedy we had undergone I could not close my eyes although at last the clowns slept, cards and glasses in their hands, the Colonel slept, Mignon and the Princess both drifted into sleep.

The silence of the forest was interrupted only by the howling of the wolves, a sound that chills to the bone by virtue of its distance from humanity, and told me only how lonely I was and how the night around us contained nothing to assuage the infinite melancholy of these empty spaces.

There I lay, my face buried in my arms, and then I heard the softest step on the earthen floor, and then a touch, the smallest, tenderest touch you might imagine, on my back. Quickly as I sprang up, I didn’t catch him at it but now the fire-boy crouched cross-legged by the hearth, again, with, in his hand, a purple feather.

I had no heart to reprimand him.

My movement disturbed the Colonel; he rolled on his back and soon was snoring away in concert with his pig. Perhaps their duet lullabied me for slept I must have, although my young man was burned to a crisp, because the next thing I remember is the unbolting of the door.

Turns out the leader of the outlaws wants to see me all by myself and they’ve come to take me to his hut. They set me at a rough trestle in front of a goodish breakfast of sour milk, black bread and tea. Sleep had refreshed me, and I thought: while there’s life, there’s hope. So, in spite of my sorrow, I dipped my bread into the buttermilk and got a little something down. Meanwhile, he tugged his moustaches, which depended in two thin plaits from his upper lip to his Adam’s apple, and subjected me to a piercing scrutiny from his close-set but not inherently malevolent eyes.

I must have cut a farcical figure, guyed up in what remained of that lace tea-gown, which never suited me even when new, bought it from Swan and Edgar’s for the joke. Minus a petticoat. Plus a blanket around me, toga-fashion. His manners, however, had all the stately courtesy of the poor; he never asked me once to show my feathers, though you could tell he wanted, ever so, but knew it would be rude.

‘Now you are in Transbaikalia, where the rivers freeze solid to the bottom and trap the fish like flies in amber,’ he announced. You know I have knack with foreign languages, pick ’em up like fleas, and though his Russian was not that of Petersburg, I could follow it well enough and pitch in my own three ha’pence, too.

‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ I said.

‘Welcome to the brotherhood of free men.’

‘Brotherhood’, is it? I’m not a man, nor your brother, either! His fraternal greetings don’t go down half so well as his victuals and I give him a sneer, of which he takes no notice, but surges on:

‘We are neither prisoners, nor exiles, nor settlers, madame, though our ranks, on occasion, have been swelled by all three conditions of men; we exist outside a law that shows us no pity and we demonstrate by our lives and deeds, how the wild life in the woods can bring liberty, equality and fraternity to those who pay the price of homelessness, danger and death. Swords are our only sisters, now: our wives are those rifles with whom faithfully each night we share our mattresses and jealously never let out of our sight. We go towards our deaths as joyously as we would towards a marriage.’

Don’t think I’m unsympathetic to the spirit of his peroration, although the letter wants attending to here and there, to my mind. ‘Swords for sisters, rifles for wives’, indeed! What kind of intercourse is that? And anyone with any sense would go towards their
marriage
as if towards the noose, rather than the other way around. This fellow mixes his metaphors the way a toper does his drinks and, I dare say, gets just as tipsy on them. Furthermore, it seems to me his speech would sound well set to music, scored for brass and timpani, and a male voice chorus wouldn’t come amiss, at points. Nevertheless, although he’s kidnapped us, at this moment, I’m more for him than against him.

‘Only catastrophe,’ he goes on, ‘can lead a man to this remote territory.’

But ain’t I living proof that women don’t come here of their own accord, either? To cover up my irritation, I ask him for another glass of tea. With this request, he courteously complies, amidst a clank and bang of armaments, for, besides the rifle propped against the trestle in easy reach of his hand, he’d a pair of pistols at his belt and his peasant caftan was criss-crossed by bandoliers. He’d a wide-bladed sword of a somewhat Turkish design to complete the ensemble. It was the outfit of a conspicuously untamed man, well set-off by the extraordinary ferocity of his moustaches. If this get-up smacked a bit of the comic-opera bandit, it must have been because they copied his get-up, not he theirs, and there was nothing of the wooden prop about his gun, although it looked old enough to have seen service in the Crimea.

‘Each man of us, even including the first fire-boy, is here in flight from a law which would extract punishment from us for the vengeance we took upon those minor officials, army officers, landlords and such like petty tyrants, who forcibly dishonoured the sisters, wives and sweethearts of flesh and blood we all once had, who are now left far behind us.’

So that’s where women come into the libretto! Absent friends!

‘What do you mean, “dishonour”?’ I says, hooking with distaste a dead fly out of my tea but, too cold for flies here, as it turns out, it’s nothing but a tea-leaf, to my relief. I probe him further on the ‘dishonour’ question.

‘Wherein does a woman’s honour reside, old chap? In her vagina or in her spirit?’

Which pithy quibble wouldn’t sound badly set to music, either. Nevertheless, it troubled him, although it might have been I spoke a dirty word that momentarily stemmed his flow. He sucked in his moustache braids and chewed them vehemently, unused to having his opinions questioned.

‘I do think, myself,’ I added, ‘that a girl should shoot her own rapists.’

And I gave his rifle such a proprietorial glance that, if he’d anything of that nature in the back of his mind, then he’d got another think coming.

‘It was my lads,’ he said, evidently not wanting to debate the point with me, ‘that blew up the railway track.’

‘Well done!’ I says ironically. ‘Smart move! Dynamite a circus train! What kind of strategy is that?’

And then, oh! then, great, innocent, big-hearted stupid that he was, his eyes spilled over with fat tears and he cast aside the trestle, knocking over the remains of my scarcely finished breakfast in his enthusiasm, so he could fall on his knees before me and go into his big aria.

‘Remarkable lady from beyond the mountains and the distant sea! It is well known that the Tsar, the Little Father of All the Russians, would, if he but knew of it, never permit that honest peasants such as we should be driven from the plough to live like beasts far away from home outside the law because we did no more than he himself would do if dishonour threatened the Little Mother or his precious girls.

‘The last time we robbed the railhead at R., we took away the newspapers to see whether they carried any stories about us and there we read how you, the famous
aerialiste
, the winged wonder, the Britannic angel, the intimate of the English royal family –’

Curse the Colonel and his publicity stunts!

‘– would pass through Transbaikalia on your way to the Great Ocean, where you will cross to the Land of the Dragonfly to hobnob with another Emperor. We blew up the track, dear lady, solely in order to take you hostage so that we can beg with you, plead with you, plead on my knees beating my forehead on the ground before you –’ suiting his actions to his words ‘– to intercede with your mother-in-law-to-be, the Queen of England.’

Whatever has the Colonel been up to now? What fresh lies has he been spreading? I’ll pay him back for this!

‘To intercede with the great Queen Victoria, the well-beloved baboushka who sits on the throne of England and with her royal bellows keeps alight the charcoal under the bubbling samovar of the Empire on which the sun never sets. I beg you, gracious and amazing creature, to intercede with this Queen Empress to ask her granddaughter’s husband, the Tsar – see! it is a family matter! – to ask the Tsar to forgive us all, so that we might return free men to our native villages, take up the plough we left lying in the fields, milk the cows that have long been lowing untended with swollen udders since we were forced to leave, to harvest the corn we left uncut.

‘For the Tsar is the friend of simple truth and doesn’t know the half of what his officials get up to on the side.’

I could have laughed, if I wasn’t near tears, myself, by that time, at the pitiful simplicity of the man, at his truly appalling greatness of heart, that he believed, in his misfortune, there was some higher authority which was infallible and must always know and love the truth when it saw it, as in
Fidelio
, by Beethoven; nobility of spirit hand in hand with absence of analysis, that’s what’s always buggered up the working class. Though I tried to stop the brigand chief, he covered the hem of my tea-gown with wet kisses.

‘Wonderful lady, you shall – you must! write to her a letter, a letter to Queen Victoria, and we will take it to a train and the train will chug away with it far, very, very far, even so far as unto the city of London. And there, one foggy morning, a liveried butler will bear our letter, with its invisible cargo of hope and faith of honest men, even unto the Queen Empress as she sits tapping away with her golden egg-spoon at her breakfast egg in its golden egg-cup, propped up on the pillows in her bed in Buckingham Palace. When she sees your well-known and beloved writing on the envelope, how gladly she’ll cry out: “A letter! A letter from my dear almost daughter-inlaw!” And then –’

By now my knees were sopping wet with tears and kisses and I could bear it no longer.

‘Oh, my old duck, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers! I’m never engaged to the Prince of Wales! Hasn’t he got a perfectly good wife of his own, already! I’m not even
intimate
with him, love, and such an intimacy he’d offer the likes of me wouldn’t go down well with the Widow of Windsor at all, at all! What idle folly is this, that you fancy these great ones care a single jot about the injustice you suffer? Don’t the great ones themselves weave the giant web of injustice that circumscribes the globe?’

First, he didn’t believe me; then, when my arguments convinced him, he broke out in a furious tempest of rage, grief and despair, well-nigh Wagnerian in its intensity, berating the world, the newspapers, the duplicity of princes and his own gullibility and I must say I heartily sympathised with him but then he took to breaking every single object in his tent, even kicked the trestle and the chairs apart, such was the fury of his disappointment. All the other bandits rushed in but could do nothing to curb his excesses, so I said: ‘Send for Samson,’ and good old Samson the Strong Man got him in a half-nelson and hit him over the head and in the ensuing hush we adjourned to our hut, which, such is the human heart’s capacity for fixing on whatever security offers itself even in the most extreme circumstances, already feels like ‘home’.

‘Bastards,’ said Liz when I told her all and she did not mean the bandits. Even the Colonel looked abashed, as well he might, although he would take no responsibility for our plight, muttering it was a case of ‘caveat emptor’ and fools should take responsibility for themselves.

But – what will the brigand chief do with us, when he wakes up? Will he vent his rage upon ourselves? No use commandeering his weapons, since all the bandits are armed to the teeth and have their muzzles trained upon us. We’re in a pretty pickle, I must say.

The Princess is pacing up and down, bereft, her useless hands outstretched, looking ghastly as Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene, Mignon one step behind to make sure she does no harm to herself, but the clowns have perked up sufficiently to entertain the fire-boy with a few simple card-tricks, episode of the poodle either forgotten or forgiven, but I foresee storms ahead when they run out of cigarettes. The Colonel, possibly from unacknowledged guilt, now overcomes his resistance to vodka to such an extent he is soon well away and sings songs of Old Kentucky over and over to himself in a high baritone. So all those still willing and able to form a council of war settle down together on that wooden platform and they are: yours truly; Lizzie; and – the Strong Man.

I am aware that strange changes are going on in Samson’s frontal lobes. His eyes that used to be so brightly vacant are darkening and growing more introspective hour by hour and though the time is not yet ripe for him to leap into discourse, I begin to have great hopes of him in that department, should we all live so long. If he does not partake in our discussion, he follows with a lively comprehension and, as we are, is torn between genuine compassion for the deceived outlaws and concern as to our own predicament.