Nights at the Circus (39 page)

‘What’ll they do with the boy babies? Feed ’em to the polar bears? To the
female
polar bears?’ demanded Liz, who was in truculent mood and clearly thought herself back in Whitechapel at a meeting of the Godwin and Wollstonecraft Debating Society. I hushed her up. Mention of the patent ice-bucket piqued my curiosity.

‘I asked them where they got it from,’ said the Escapee. ‘And they told me, from the dining-room of a wrecked train on the Great Siberian Railway.’

The Colonel broke down when he heard about the elephants, how these women saw the lifeless bodies lying around the track like so many overturned pantechnicons, and only forestalled tears by blowing his nose forcefully again and again on a succession of the small silk American flags of which he kept a seemingly inexhaustible supply upon his person. But I pressed the Escapee for news of human survivors and – bless me! – it turned out the woman found a
blond foreigner
tucked up among some tablecloths with not a scratch on him but left him behind when they saw a rescue party on the way and, by the time the Escapee met them, were already regretting having abandoned such a fine repository of semen. I was overcome with emotion when I heard all this. I forgot myself so far as to cry out:

‘My young man will come and save us!’

‘Hold hard, you sentimental booby, sounds like he’s in no fit state to save himself,’ said Lizzie. ‘I like the sound of the rescue party better!’

But it turns out the Escapee is primarily on the run from the rescue party, which would ‘rescue’ him right back to the penal colony. And the outlaws, too, had best shift themselves sharpish or they’ll have a lot to answer for when the fire, ambulance and police arrive.

The Colonel is as pleased as punch, however. I can see he is already plotting the tall headlines in all the newspapers – just wait until he gets to a telegraph! He reckons this catastrophe will end up making a mint for him, one way or another. His optimism is of the remorseless kind, that can’t see the cloud for the silver lining, and his sudden burst of renewed high spirits – he lets out a series of American Indian war-whoops and commences to jig – his exuberance brings me down to earth for, whatever happens next, we’re at this moment stuck in the outback in a snowdrift amongst a crowd of trigger-happy brigands far gone in liquor and armed to the teeth, whom we needs must persuade, for their own good, to leave us behind and run away.

‘Now, lads,’ says Lizzie to the clowns. ‘The time has come to shake off your lethargy. You must put on such a show for our hosts as will wake ’em up so they’ll listen to reason. Make ’em smile, make ’em laugh – then we can talk to them. Bring them back to life, my lads.’ Perhaps hers was an unfortunate choice of words, recalling as it did their old routine of the Clown’s Funeral, which they would never undertake again. They were leery of the idea at first because, with Buffo gone and all their gear, only got left the rags they stood up in, and the fiddle, the tambourine, the triangle, no more, they couldn’t see their way to doing their best, although their card tricks went down so well with the fire-boy.

‘Think of it,’ pleads Lizzie, ‘as a requiem for Buffo.’

At that, they all exchange a look, a strange, dark, sad look that, had it been sound, would have reverberated round and round amongst them like the notes of a solemn organ in a great cathedral. When the last echoes of that look, that unspoken message, that mute avowal of some intent unknown to us, died away, old Grok picks up his triangle, gives it a kick, and Grik removes the little fiddle from his hat. I won’t say they give me much joy when they start up the Dead March from
Saul
; I get that goose-walking-over-my-grave feeling that tells me something is up, but it’s a start. One red-headed fellow, after a bit, picks up a log of wood and hits a dwarf with it. The fire-boy is convulsed with mirth. I unbar the door and out they troop.

The outlaws had summoned up enough spirit to light a fire in the middle of the camp and were all sitting round on tree stumps in the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker. A light snow falling, snow settled on their heads. The clowns had lost their leader so it took a little while for them to work out what to do. One performed a cartwheel in a desultory manner until another tripped him over and then, for these were simple folk, the outlaw chief’s cheeks crumpled under the flicker of a smile. That seemed to give the clowns heart, or some more complex motivation, for they all snapped to and, Grik and Grok striking a more rhythmic note, they all began to dance.

But what was the tune they played? Damned if I can put a name to it; eldritch music from a witches’ sabbath. And, as for their dancing – was ‘dance’ the right word for it? Nothing about that dance to cheer the heart. God, I thought, we’re
fools
; did you ever, yourself, Fevvers, laugh at a clown, not even if it were ever so? Didn’t the clowns always summon to your mind disintegration, disaster, chaos?

This dance was the dance of death, and they danced it for George Buffins, that they might be as him. They danced it for the wretched of the earth, that they might witness their own wretchedness. They danced the dance of the outcasts for the outcasts who watched them, amid the louring trees, with a blizzard coming on. And, one by one, the outcast outlaws raised their heads to watch and all indeed broke out in laughter but it was a laughter without joy. It was the bitter laugh one gives when one sees there is no triumph over fate. When we saw those cheerless arabesques as of the damned, and heard that laughter of those trapped in the circles of hell, Liz and I held hands, for comfort.

They danced the night into the clearing, and the outlaws welcomed it with cheers. They danced the perturbed spirit of their master, who came with a great wind and blew cold as death into the marrow of the bones. They danced the whirling apart of everything, the end of love, the end of hope; they danced tomorrows into yesterdays; they danced the exhaustion of the implacable present; they danced the deadly dance of the
past
perfect which fixes everything fast so it can’t move again; they danced the dance of Old Adam who destroys the world because we believe he lives forever.

The outlaws entered into the spirit of the thing with a will. With ‘huzzahs’ and ‘bravos’, all sprang up and flung themselves into the wild gavotte, firing off their guns. The snow hurled wet, white sheets in our faces, and the wind took up the ghastly music of the old clowns and amplified it fit to drive you crazy. Then the snow blinded us and Samson picked us up one by one and slung us back in that shed and leaned up hard against the door, forcing it closed against the tempest with his mighty shoulders.

Though bullets crashed into the walls and the wind came whistling through the knotholes and picked up burning embers from the fire, hurling them about until we thought we might burn to death in the middle of the snow and ice, the shed held firm. It rocked this way and that way and it seemed at any moment the roof might be snatched away, but this little group of us who, however incoherently, placed our faiths in reason, were not exposed to the worst of the storm. The Escapee, however, faced with this insurrection of militant pessimism, turned pale and wan and murmured to himself comforting phrases of Kropotkin, etc., as others might, in such straits, recite the rosary.

When the storm passed, as pass it did, at last, the freshly fallen snow made all as new and put the camp fire out. Here, there was a shred of scarlet satin and, there, Grik’s little violin with the strings broken but, of the tents, shacks, muskets and cuirasses of the outlaws, the clowns and the clowns themselves, not one sight, as if all together had been blown off the face of the earth.

But one poor dog is left behind. The whirlwind must have dropped him off, poor thing. A little mongrel pup with a pom-pom on his tail, running round in circles, whining.

And I hope that outlaw chief was blown clear back to his own village, to find the plough waiting for his hand, the swollen udders of the cow anticipating his fingers, the brown hen clucking for him to collect neglected eggs, and all as it had been – the dear home of nostalgia enriched by absence. But, where the clowns had got to, I do not know. Gone to join George Buffins in the great madhouse in the sky, no doubt.

Lizzie offers no apology for having unwittingly precipitated this denouement. She shrugs; observes: ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish’; strips off and puts on a set of the bearskins which she’s stitched into coats and trousers for us all. With her moustache and brown face and the shako she’s made herself to keep her ears warm, she looks like a little bear, herself.

‘Shanks’s pony,’ she says. ‘Let’s be off.’

Although the battered shed still stands, none of us survivors have any inclination to stay in that ill-omened place. We shall set boldly forth and rescue ourselves. We don the products of Lizzie’s improvised tailoring to keep us warm en route and strike off in what the Escapee thinks is the direction of the railway track. After some thought, he consents to come with us as guide; the Colonel had made extravagant promises about American passports and this young man has the face of one who will believe the beautiful promise of the Statue of Liberty.

The others are amazed at what has come to pass but all that Liz and I know is, the clowns made an invocation to chaos and chaos, always immanent in human affairs, came in on cue. But the Escapee remains most troubled in his mind over the occurrence and tries to engage me in debate on its significance.

‘Look, love,’ I says to him, eventually, because I’m not in the mood for literary criticism. ‘If I hadn’t bust a wing in the train-wreck, I could
fly
us all to Vladivostok in two shakes, so I’m not the right one to ask questions of when it comes to what is real and what is not, because, like the duck-billed platypus, half the people who clap eyes on me don’t believe what they see and the other half thinks they’re seeing things.’

That shut him up.

I’m glad to see the Colonel takes the loss of the clowns in his stride, no doubt rehearsing in his mind the interviews he’ll give the press: ‘Clowns blown away in blizzard! Eye-witness account of famous circus proprietor.’ But some of us are less resilient. Mignon clings tight to the Princess’s hand but the Princess’s eyes are vacant.

‘If we don’t get that girl to a keyboard, soon, it will go the worse for her,’ I says to Liz.

Samson wraps her in furs and carries her, Mignon trotting behind. And so we leave the outlaw camp, or what remains of it, and the last little clown dog comes with us, not wanting to be left by himself. And, what makes me sad, I find, upon the wind-blown snow, a little way on, just the one feather, the purple feather the fire-boy stole from me, that must have fallen from his jacket as the wind swept him off.

And so our journeyings commenced again, as if they were second nature. Young as I am, it’s been a picaresque life; will there be no end to it? Is my fate to be a female Quixote, with Liz my Sancho Panza? If so, what of the young American? Will he turn out to be the beautiful illusion, the Dulcinea of that sentimentality for which Liz upbraids me, telling me it’s but the obverse to my enthusiasm for hard cash?

Trudge on, trudge on, girl, and let events dictate themselves.

But, although we trudged long and far, we stayed in the forest, seemed to get no nearer to the railway track than when we’d started out, and the Escapee adopts a worried look. Has he taken a wrong turning, out here, where there
are
no turnings? Or, rather, in this trackless waste, at any single point one stands at an imaginary crossroads, at the confluence of all directions, none of which might be the right direction. And on we go, for fear of freezing to the spot if we stand still.

Then the trees thin out and stop and the Escapee is mightily discomforted, for we’ve come to the bank of a wide, frozen river, which he hadn’t taken into account at all. But, on the other side of the river, there is a little house of that most unsuitable, frilled and goffered kind the Russians elect to build out here and the Escapee guesses, by its loneliness, it is the home of an exile such as he was, who will give us a welcome. So we slip and slide across the river, with little spectral eddies and scurries of wind-blown snow starting up around us like agents of foul weather, and walk up to the front door nice as you please, as if making a formal call in Belgravia, London.

Nailed to the wall beside the door is a shingle on which, in the Cyrillic script, is the inscription: ‘Conservatoire of Transbaikalia’. And then a name, with a string of letters after. But this shingle is so stained with moss and age the name is indecipherable; the shingle looks as though it has been uselessly advertising for pupils for some decades.

The Escapee knocked at the door. No reply. No light shone inside, no smoke came out the chimney. He knocked once more and then we pushed the door open to find the stink of humanity inside, certainly, but, in the first room we came to, no other sign of it. The building itself was built of pine, the only flooring being a deep layer of fishbones that shone like ivory and told us that the tenant of this dolorous place ate mostly fish from the river.

In the next room, a stove, with the cold remains of fire in it, and an unlit lamp. The Colonel dipped his finger in the lamp, discovered it was filled with fish oil and at once applied for a dose in order to give a polish to Sybil, whose skin was losing its gloss and suppleness without her daily going-over, so she was looking more and more like a wallet. Liz let him dab a bit on one of his little flags. He squatted down at once, rubbing away as if she were not a pig but Aladdin’s lamp. What an aroma – pooh!

I should say the place was furnished – roughly, even exiguously, with a few chairs and a table whose red plush covers, mildewed though they were, hinted touchingly at former pretensions. On the wall, a daguerrotype of a young man standing between a potted palm and a grand piano. And, what’s more, a print, as it might have been antique, of a boy in a perruque that Liz swore was Mozart. So whoever lived here, or what
had
lived here, but, by the smell, might recently have dropped off his perch, had been of a musical bent. I immediately drew the Princess’s attention to these relics but they were not sufficient, by themselves, to cheer her up.