‘He’s a captain, apparently. I think I noticed him in the group last night. Tall and good-looking, with a moustache.’
‘Shall you go?’ he asked, masking his feelings with an expressionless tone.
‘How can I, with the show on, and the move to Tours tonight?’
‘But the captain?’ he persisted. ‘And with a moustache.’
The cold irony of his manner pierced her self-esteem. She rarely coloured, but now a faint flush showed under her bluish-white skin.
‘What do you think I am? I know these garrison towns and what you can get in them. Not for me, thanks.’
He was silent. Although he despised himself for it, and vainly tried to combat it, from time to time jealousy would surge over him in an overpowering wave. The mere thought that she might go out alone with this strange officer caused him excruciating pain. However, she had flatly stated that she would ignore the invitation, so telling himself to be reasonable, he forced a conciliatory smile.
‘Let’s go down to the river.’ When they quarrelled it was always he who made the first advances.
He paid the bill and they went down to the water’s edge. The sun, unusually warm for the time of year, had broken through and, blinding upwards from the stream in glittering shafts, enveloped them in a bath of light. He loved the sunshine – water and sun were the twin gods he could have worshipped. And while she lit a Caporal and, with shut eyes, relaxed in a posture of ease beneath a shady willow, he sat in the open brightness and began to sketch her. Already he had made scores of drawings wherein was reflected not only his intensity of feeling for her, but also the complex interplay of anguish, desire, and at times near hatred which composed it.
He was not blind to those qualities of selfishness, cruelty and vanity which in another person would have aroused his contempt. He knew that – she merely tolerated him – perhaps because her Gallic mind lingered upon the possibilities of the grande propriété, but mainly, he felt sure, because his unconcealed desire flattered her, gave her that sense of power which her nature best enjoyed. She brought him more pain than happiness. Yet he could not help himself. He longed for her with a physical need which, since she would not satisfy it, increased from day to day.
Presently, glancing up from his sketch-book, he saw that she was asleep. An involuntary sigh, nervous and irritable, broke from him. Leaving his drawing-block and crayons, he went further down the bank, then, on an impulse, threw off his clothes and plunged into the river. He knew from their previous excursions that she did not care to bathe – she had a feline dislike for cold water – but to him the shock of these spring-fed streams was an invigorating delight.
‘When he returned she was standing up, shaking the dried grass from her short bushy hair.
‘You are a fine one to go off.’
‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Still early.’ He came close and put his arm around her waist. ‘We have another hour.’
‘Oh, leave me.’ She leaned back and pushed her hands against his chest. ‘You’re wet.’
‘But Emmy…’
‘No, no. We mustn’t be late. You don’t want to lose your job, It is so agreeable and convenient for you, is it not?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he answered in a strained voice. As she had already started towards the inn her followed.
Her unusual concern for his welfare puzzled him. Nor was this dispelled by her sprightly manner as they rode back to Angers. In a high voice she sang snatches of the latest music-hall air:
Les jolis soirs dans les jardins de l’Alhambra
Où donc sont les belles
Que l’amour appelle?
Et le rendezvous, de l’amour très fou.
And, following her habit when she was gay, she left the local
inhabitants gaping by a display of trick riding in their swift passage
through the riverside villages.
It was not yet three o’clock when they reached the circus and
few people were on the ground. He changed and put up his easel. All the afternoon he worked absently, moodily, the line between his brows gradually deepened. Although he struggled against the thought that she had cut short their expedition in order to keep the assignation at La Terrasse, it grew within him. Dusk brought no alleviation, during supper he spoke scarcely a word to Jo-jo and the Croc.
At last, he got up abruptly and made his way to the other end of the field to Emmy’s caravan. Madame Armande was seated on the steps with a bucket between her fat knees, washing stockings. At one time she had been part of a trapeze act but a bad fall had broken her hip, and she had walked with a limp ever since. Now, at fifty, heavy and shapeless, with dropsical legs and a double chin, she was known as the gossip of the company. Jo-jo, who expectorated at the mention of her name, swore that during the winter lay-off she managed an establishment of doubtful reputation in the port of Le Havre.
‘Good evening.’ Stephen tried to make his voice calm. ‘ Is Emmy in?’
Madame Armande considered him sideways, with her small eyes.
‘But Abbé, you understand very well that she sees no one before the show.’
‘It’s only for a moment.’
She shook her head, encased in a spotted handkerchief.
‘I would not dare disturb her.’
‘Then…’ He hesitated, anxious to believe her. ‘She’s resting?’
Madame threw up her hands.
‘What else! Nom de Dieu, do you make me a liar?’
Was her indignation real or affected? He wanted to go into the the van, but her bulk, and the bucket, blocked the way. He must not make himself completely ridiculous. He forced himself to make a few conventional remarks, then turned away in the darkness.
The crowds flocked in, the show began, roars of laughter and applause filled the big tent. She was late in coming on. Was this mere accident? He could not be certain. He tried to reassure himself. Yet when she finally appeared it seemed to his overstrung fancy that her performance was more dashing, more showily vivacious than usual. Prolonged shouts of ‘Bravo’ from the front tribune followed her as she made her exit.
Afterwards, in the bustle and confusion of lifting stakes, he could not see her. Dismally he joined Jo-jo and the Croc and began the task of dismantling the stands. Working heedlessly, he cut his hand on an iron hook. He did not care. A cold wind had risen and whipped across the ground. The generator was cut off, the electric lights died. All around, by the red light of flares, amidst shouts and imprecations, men toiled like demons, uprooting stanchions, hauling on ropes, struggling with the great bights of flapping canvas. As always happened in this first hour of transit, the animals were upset, gave out in every key, from their mobile cages, weird howls of protest. The traction engines, pounding and snorting, with whirling flywheels, added to the tumult. To Stephen it seemed that the scene came straight from Dole’s drawings of the Inferno and that he too was suffering the tortures of the damned.
Chapter Nine
From Angers the Cirque Peroz moved to Tours, then to Blois, then on to Bourges and Nevers. The weather kept fine, business flourished, old Peroz wore his hat at a jaunty angle. After a three-day stay at Dijon they swung due south into the Côte d’Or, making one-night stands in the old stone-walled towns, approached by gateways, strung out between sloping vineyards, along the valley of the Ouche.
Stephen had at first been viewed by the company with reserve. But the weekly ‘ take’ from his portraiture was satisfactory, and since a fixed percentage of this sum went into the tronc, in which all the performers would share when it was distributed at Nice, he was considered to be pulling his weight. Beyond that, his agreeable manners and quiet disposition soon put him on friendly terms with most of the troupe.
They were a human lot. Fernand the lion-tamer, who strode into the circular iron cage fearless as a hussar in his blue-and-silver uniform, with a sleeve dramatically slashed to ribbons, was the most timorous of men,
who suffered acutely from nervous dyspepsia and was coddled on a milk diet by his devoted wife. The lions themselves were harmless as cows, for the most part extremely aged, the males castrated; they roared only because they wanted their supper, and all the business of surrounding the cage with attendants bearing red-hot irons was sheer hocus-pocus.
‘We have not had an accident in twenty years,’ Peroz would remark complacently as he sent out advance notices to the local paper of the next town on the circuit.
NARROW ESCAPE AT THE CIRQUE PEROZ
LIONESS RUNS AMUCK
Fernand Severely Mauled
Max and Montz, both dwarfs, were the two principal clowns, a pair internationally celebrated, whose feature act was known as ‘The Elopement’, a sketch in which Max, garbed in grotesquely outmoded finery, played the part of the elderly bride. The routine, carried out with an antique Panhard motor-car that broke down, refused to start, and finally fell apart, was uproariously comic. Max, with his puckish grin, left the audience helpless from sidesplitting laughter. Yet out of the arena he manifested a melancholy more profound than Hamlet’s, confided to Stephen, sadly, a frustrated lifelong passion for the violin.
With such inconsistencies before him, Stephen was less surprised to discover that the Japanese juggler was a devout Christian Scientist, that Nina d’Amora, who rode bareback, was allergic to horses and in consequence endured a chronic asthma, while Philippe, who every night took spectacular risks on the high trapeze, spent most of his spare time knitting socks.
Because he was teamed with them, Stephen saw more of Jo-jo and the Croc than any of the others. Jean Baptiste, beneath his apparent apathy, was a sensitive and intelligent man – Stephen made several striking studies of him standing on his platform facing the gaping crowd. He had been well educated at the lycée in Rouen, had passed on to a position with good prospects in an excellent firm, La Nationale. Then this incurable affliction had struck at him, turning him gradually from a normal being to a gruesome freak, breaking up his marriage, causing him to lose his position, sending him to one clinic after another – a hopeless progress – and bringing him in final desperation to a sideshow in the Cirque Peroz.
But it was for Jo-jo that Stephen entertained a particular regard. The ex-jockey was a thorough rogue who stole at every opportunity, cheated his way across the countryside and, whenever he had the chance, drank himself into such a state of stupor that he lay all night on the bare ground, ‘ sleeping it off’. Yet in his duplicity there was an oddly human quality which bore out his boast that never in his life had he let down a friend. Often in the evening, after seeing Emmy, when Stephen came in to the converted camion where he bunked with the other two, he caught Jo-jo’s gaze fixed peculiarly upon him – less in sympathy, an emotion of which Jo-jo was incapable, than with a sort of cynical understanding, mixed faintly with derision.
‘Been out with your girl?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Had a good time?’
Stephen did not answer.
Upon several occasions the ex-jockey had appeared to wish to press the point, but instead, shrugging, he had turned to Jean Baptiste and started a discussion with him which he made deliberately gross.
‘What is your opinion of women, Croc?’
‘I regard them with tolerant contempt.’
‘You speak like a husband.’
‘Yes … I have been married. My wife now operates a passage á niveau at Croiset on the Chemins de Fer du Nord. It is my fondest hope that one day the Paris express, travelling at ninety kilometres an hour, will strike her in a vulnerable part.’
‘For myself, though I have never married, I like women. But only to sleep with. Every other way they are a worse nuisance than the clap.’
‘But one achieves that by sleeping with women.’
‘Not my women. I never choose tarts. Only good honest country wives I meet in the market who are seeking some slight variety.’
‘Ah! Variety! That is a true word – to which I owe much of my later successes.’
‘You! Scaly one!’
‘But, certainly. I have made many conquests amongst my intimates through curiosity. Women bored with the marriage bed will do anything for novelty. I have read that a murderer about to be guillotined can have his pick of scores of women.’
‘Sacré bleu! Though you merit it you are not going to lose your ugly head.’
‘No. But I have equal attraction. Reflecting on the power of the crocodile’s tail, women believe me endowed with formidable phallic powers.’
‘But you disappoint them, farceur.’
‘Only once, Jo-jo. There was a stout one, a spinster, unattached, who for months followed me around in the hope that our repeated congress would produce an alligator. Unhappily the child was normal.’
A burst of profane laughter filled the caravan but Stephen did not join in it. He knew that the dialogue was directed at him, less from any malicious intent than as a remedy administered to the victim of a persistent fever. Yet his malady had now progressed so far it seemed incurable, intensified by Emmy’s moods and inconsistencies. Sometimes she treated him well, seated on the steps of her caravan, flattered by his attentions, full of her own importance, laughing at him, kicking her bare toes in the sun.
And while she was not lavish with her favours, when they strolled together in the darkness sometimes she permitted him to kiss her, before she quickly drew away. In vain he told himself that in a nature so lacking in depth he would never arouse an answering passion. He hung about her like a wasp around a nectarine, but without once penetrating the soft flesh of the fruit.
One wet afternoon when they had quitted the pleasant district of the Saône for the barren territory of the Pays de Dombres, they pulled into the small and scattered community of Moulin-les-Drages. Their destination had been St Etienne, but the main traction engine had broken down en route, holding up a long line of coupled waggons, and since the repair would take at least twenty-four hours, this enforced halt became necessary. Peroz, much upset at missing an important date, decided after considerable debate to give a show, or the greater part of it, in Les Drages, and so cut some of his loss.
But having begun with misfortune, the day went from bad to worse. No advance bills had been posted; the town, on investigation, proved to be mean and poverty-stricken, its sole industry a decayed brickworks. And the rain steadily increased. When evening came not more than a hundred people were assembled in the dripping tent.
True to the Peroz tradition, most of the artistes went through with their performance in good style, then got back to the big stove in the dressing-room. Emmy, however, was less fortunate. Twice during her preliminary evolutions her wheel skidded, spilling her on to the damp flooring. The first fall raised a laugh from the boorish audience, the second evoked a definite jeer followed by catcalls. As a result, she cut the main part of her act and rode from the ring with her head in the air.
When Stephen saw her afterwards outside the tent she was still pale with mortification. He knew better than to speak, but instead moved off with her along the road towards the common, about a half a kilometre distant, where the caravans were parked. To make matters worse, they had not proceeded far when a heavy shower broke, forcing them to run for shelter to a barn that stood in an adjoining open field of stubble.
When his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, Stephen looked around, observing that the place was filled with straw. He abroke the silence.
‘At least it’s dry here.’ He added: ‘I’m glad you didn’t go down tonight. That crowd didn’t deserve it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well.’ He coloured slightly. ‘They seemed rather an unsympathetic lot.’
‘I didn’t notice it. I always hold my audience.’
‘Then why didn’t you go down?’
‘Because the chute was sopping wet. Don’t you realise that it’s suicidal in the rain?’ In a spasm of temper, her eyes sparked at him. ‘Who are you to stand t
here and criticise? Don’t you know the risks I take every night, while you sit safe on your backside, scratching on a sheet of paper, with no more guts than a louse? I go down or don’t go down exactly as I choose. And I won’t break my neck for any little half-baked curé!’
He stared at her for a moment, as pale now as she, then, infuriated, he caught her suddenly round the waist.
‘Don’t speak to me like that.’
‘Let me go.’
‘Not till you apologise.’
‘Fiche-toi le camp.’
The next instant they were struggling together. Blind with anger, recollecting all the slights and insults she had heaped on him, he determined to subdue her physically, and locking both arms about her like a wrestler he tried to bring her to the ground. But she fought like a wildcat, twisting and turning in the soft straw, threshing against him with her elbows. She was stronger than he had believed, with short, powerful muscles and a feline suppleness. He began to breathe heavily, to feel the pressure of her body bearing him down. Straining every nerve, he resisted. They swayed to and fro indecisively until, crooking her leg behind his, with a quick jerk she threw him heavily.
‘There,’ she gasped. ‘Let that be a lesson to you.’
He got up slowly. It was less dark than before, through the skylight of the barn the moon was visible behind racing clouds. With an effort, still trying to catch his breath, he made himself look at her, saw, with confused surprise, that she had not risen, but was leaning back amongst the straw, her dress still disarranged from the struggle, watching him through narrowed eyes with an odd, speculative expression, aroused, yet vaguely derisive. On her face, usually of a cold pallor, there was a tinge of colour, on her pale lips a curious, faintly shrewish smile. For a moment she sustained his gaze, then, placing both arms behind her head in an attitude less of enticement than expectation, she made an impatient movement.
‘Well, stupid … what are you waiting for?’
The invitation he had sought so long was unmistakable, yet it was so blatant, so devoid of the faintest semblance of affection, he did not stir. Frozen and repelled, he stared at her, then spun round and, without a word, walked away. She could not believe it. Her expression altered. Affronted and enraged, she jumped to her feet.