Walking in Pimlico (39 page)

‘That won’t do,’ says the voice, with an edge to it. ‘I want to see Mr Corney Sage now. It is a very grave matter. Are you sure you don’t know where he is?’

I hear my name spoken by a voice I have heard before! It echoes round the yard and then around my head. I strain to hear what else is said, but I am hot as hell and the vomit suddenly races into my mouth at such a pace that I cannot hold it, and I turn my head only just in time to stop the contents of my guts dropping into my lap. It hits the stones with a sound like rain but, as I am thinking it will be heard and bring Bellmaker and the other fellow around, the door opens and a roar of laughter empties into the yard, followed by the pale face of Toddy who blinks two or three times and takes in the state of me.

‘You’ve got to come now. The bird bloke’s nearly done.’

The sounds of squawking and fluttering inside the hall are a sure sign that Signor Papagenyo has once again failed to prevent his pigeons from flying to the roof. It will take some few minutes to recover them, I think, and then Bellmaker will call an interval. I haul myself up on aching legs, with a belly that feels hard and sore, and start to follow Toddy inside. And it is then that I realize that there is someone still there, on the other side of the wall. For their boots rattle upon the stones, and they are walking swiftly towards the gate.

‘Is that you, Corney Sage?’ that someone calls out. ‘Halloa! Hi! Wait! I want to see you!’

But I don’t want to see that someone, for I am scared to know who it is. I cross the yard in two and vault the low gate like an acrobat over the ring fence, and I am once again running down the Row to the light with the familiar sound of footsteps coming after me.

Corney Sage – New Clay

I
n the Market Place the Wakes are blazing, like a regular Bartlemy. Drums banging and trumpets blaring, each show trying to outdo the other with noise and flash. Indeed when the big drum is a-beating and the showman is giving it all at a rant all you can do is
watch
the goings-on, for nothing can be heard above the commotion.

Showmen are not the only ones going hell for leather, for the mild people of New Clay are turned for three days into madmen, every one of them drunk as a besom. I am tripped and jostled as I hurry into the crush, but I do not care, for I have it in my poor head that so long as I am closed about by people, even if they are stupid drunk and do not know me, I shall be safe from the one who is coming after me and is out to do me harm. My fever is very high, but I am certain I see his face coming at me in the crowd, and I am only just out of his reach. So I panic some and start to push and heave, but I am caught up in the crush of bodies all pushing and heaving down the avenues of shows and booths and stalls, and there is nothing for it but to stop trying to get through and let the crowd take me where it will.

Which I do. I shuffle along without knowing or caring where I am going. Certain, it is a strange feeling, but warming also, to be so cradled by my fellow men and women.

The crush ends, and I am once more in front of Colonel Buxton’s Military Show. The platform is full of parading soldiers, uniformed in red and black, and marching all in step backward and forward until, when Buxton bawls a command, they stop smartly and dress. Then come forward some dapper fellows to tumble about and juggle clubs high into the night sky. Buxton is a great bellower, and promises a show within so rare, he says, that we can hardly imagine it, and which has, as its draw, the great one-armed lifting feat by the Mysterious Herculine which I have read about on the bill. Buxton is giving the patter his best greasing. Not only, says he, are these here fine fellows soldiers, they are h-athel-etes also. They are much admired by all the heads of Europe. The Derbaah of Rajerstan, he says, was particularly taken with the Mysterious Herculine and the one-armed lifting display. ‘What does he lift? Skirts?’ comes a voice out of the crowd, and before they are inclined to laugh, Buxton is back in there, quick as a rat. We will never find out, he says, if we do not pay our penny to see the show, which is just about to begin.

Some fellows push past me and on to the platform, where a grim-looking woman, a camp-follower perhaps, takes their pennies and lets them through. There is a buzz around me of people deciding what they will do. Where shall they spend their penny? Here? Or the mummers? Or on gingerbread? And then, above the voices, I hear another.

‘Corney Sage! Corney Sage! Hoi! Wait! Wait there!’

The moment I move, a great wave of cold comes over me, like I have been doused with water, and I pull my little jacket around me and across my throat, to keep out the chill, but it does no good. Where that voice is coming from I cannot tell, and even as I search among the faces, the drum on the Military Show starts up again with a bang! bang! bang! and my head thuds along with it. Then, I think I see him coming, pushing through. I do see him, his hand aloft, and his pale face racing towards me, with an open mouth, black as a
cavern, crying, ‘Hoi! Hoi! Hoi! Corney Sage!’ But, strange, then he seems to shrink and thin away, and I hear Lucy’s voice, and, oh! I see her, in a crowd of young women, turning to wave to me, and smiling me on in that sleepy way she has.

I call out to her, ‘Lucy! I thought you was dead!’ and she laughs and laughs, with the sound getting louder and louder, when her face shifts and changes and it is not Lucy at all, but a woman mad with drink, shouting in my face to go to that other place and pushing me hard.

As I stumble against the steps and lose my legs, the world turns around and someone close by is saying, ‘Look at him! Drunk as a piper! Disgusting!’

But I’m Corney Sage, I say, comedian and champion clog-dancer, sick with the ague. I’m a moderate man, I cry, never over the water-line, but they don’t hear me, and continue to give me a wide berth. Above the noise, I hear someone shouting again, closer now.

‘Corney Sage! Where are you?’

Lucy! It’s Lucy again, and I turn about and search the crowd for her, but her face disappears among the great white moons of faces and lamps, and then comes at me again, out of the dark or the sky or a show-flash. And not Lucy, but her dead face, twisted and terrible, and the noise coming from her mouth now is – not Lucy but Bessie that’s calling me, for
her
voice I couldn’t mistake. I see her! There she is, a-pushing through the crowd, sometimes disappearing but always bobbing up again, waving her hands to me.

‘Bessie, girl!’ I cry. ‘Oh, my eye, it
is
you! You aren’t dead!’

Folks around me laugh and shake their heads. I lean against the steps and wipe my eye and laugh myself, for if Bessie’s here then she can’t be back there, lying in the yard of the Constellation Concert Rooms, Whitechapel, London, with her poor body trampled upon and her head smashed about. And none of this will have
happened. It will not be real, but a tale told me by a pro one night, cosy by the fire. Or in a penny blood that I’ve read or a show seen in a gaff. Or on the front of the
Illustrated Police News
. Or sung about. Or shouted about.

But it won’t be real.

It won’t be real.

Not long now, I think, for Bessie’s here and she’s a good girl and will see me right! I feel warmed by the thought, and I don’t wonder what Bessie is doing in New Clay, and why she has left Whitechapel and should be looking out for me. I am just glad as a fly that I see her sweet face. But I am brought up, coughing hard and have to gasp for breath, for there are pains like knives in my chest. Now that the brandy has worn off, all that is left is the ague, which gnaws at my joints and thunders in my head. My eyes, too, have mist about them, like I am now and then looking through a fog, and as I rub them I knock against a gang of lads outside a booth showing the Giant Girl, where the showman is crying, ‘Hi! Hi! Here she is! Miss Rosie French, the biggest girl in the land!’

And he holds up, in his two hands, a huge pair of lady’s down-belows, which makes the lads roar with laughter and point at them!

‘Ladies and gentlemen, she has already grown out of these, her present undergarment being twice as large! Step right in! Only a penny to see the heaviest girl in the land!’

The lads push and shove each other and lark their way over, knocking off each other’s hats, and jossing, and one shouts to me, ‘Here you are, mester! Come and get an eyeful of this old girl!’

Then, from the middle of the avenue, I see
him
again, charging down upon me but from a long way away. He is sharp though all around me is misty, and racing towards me at a speed too fast to be right. I hear his heels cracking on the stones, and see his breath coming in clouds. I rub my eyes hard. The crowd parts, and no one
seems to notice that this young man is tearing through them, for they just step aside whiles he comes on and on. The shiny black hair and the flash waistcoat are familiar, and I recognize the boots and coat that I saw in her trunk as if they were handed to me piece by piece. On he comes, faster and faster but he makes no gain upon me, though he is running powerful hard, for I see him bare his teeth with the effort of it, and his arms are driving at his sides. And as I stare, his face becomes hers and they melt together under the moon in the Constellation yard. They are the same.

I am roused by a sudden yell from nowhere, and turn around and about and, though I am powerfully struck with fear, force my legs to stumble up the steps of the Military Show though it is like a long march. On the empty platform, I look around and down and hope he and she are lost, but no, there he comes on, cutting through the throng, and growing larger now and closer. In a moment he will be in front of the show, another at the steps and another beside me. I do not know whether fear or fever makes me tremble so, and I reach in my pocket for a wipe with which to dry my head and hands, where my fingers close about a coin. No, not a coin but the token given to me by Colonel Buxton for the delivery of his bills. (To my knowledge, they still lie beneath the boards at the side of the platform in the Vine with the dust and the mice, where I thrust them!) In a moment it is whipped from my hand and I fall through the doors into the show.

The thick heat closes up my nose so perfectly it is as if Bendigo himself had clocked me and I struggle hard to breathe through my mouth, taking in great gulps of hot and smoky air which brings on my coughing again. Little wonder that people try to give me a wide berth, for if I had rung a bell and hung a legend around my neck reading, ‘Avoid this man. He has the plague,’ I could not have done better. Corney Sage, I say to myself as I stumble over feet and benches and apologize to both, you stand to lose the good favour of
your fellow man if you carry on thuswise, and I am much inclined to laugh, and perhaps I do, though only I see the wit.

The show has just begun, and the booth is crowded to the rafters. There are seats up to the roof on three sides but no one sits, all preferring to stand instead to get a better view of the square, which is covered with white sand. The marching display has already begun. There is a side drum giving out a steady rhythm to eight guardsmen who parade, shoulder, dress and march out, and then in comes Colonel Buxton, in his red jacket jingling with medals and gold, holding a sabre above his head which flashes and glitters. It is a fine sight and no mistake, a regular triumph of clever parading, for they are never out of step and always to the mark. The Colonel roars an order and in troop more soldiers ready to show their skills in balancing and tumbling. So much activity and appreciation makes the booth very hot, for the crowd will hurrah every tumble and lift, and give chaff to each other as well as the muscle-grinders in the square, but in a regular, holiday way with no edge. They have left their pals outside and they call to them through canvas and shutters what they can see, and before long another good crowd is paid up and ready to come in. The Colonel hurries things along, for he wants to get to the meat of the show – the Mysterious Herculine and the one-armed lift – and get the next audience in. It is all showman’s guff, and I know it well.

I am close to the front, pressed in on all three sides by hayseeds and tipsy boys and at the front by the square-fence, but though pressed and wanting air, I feel safe. The fever is now coming upon me in waves, and I scarcely know whether the side drum is beating or whether it is in my head, and likewise the figure of Colonel Buxton grows and shrinks before my eyes like a pantomime head, and his voice sings loud in my ears or makes me suppose I have come over deaf. I clutch the rail and hold myself steady, and close my eyes and wish that I was in a cool bed, and that my dear mother
was beside me, to stroke my head. (I believe my mother does visit me in times of trial, for I have seen her twice – once when, only a little child, I was chased by a mad bull and had to hide in a haystack, and once when I fell in the Thames and was swept along in a mess of foul stuff and dead dogs until I was rescued by a waterman with a bill-hook. I had the fever for days after, owing to the quantity of Thames water I had swallowed, but my mother was by my bedside then, holding my hand, and talking to me about God and angels. Or it might have been a charity visitor.) The fellows around me are roaring again as the balancers and stretchers march away and Colonel Buxton, himself down to his underwear, is painting the air red, white and blue with the deeds of the Mysterious Herculine.