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 lur
ked 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.’
It was the Princess who burst out laughing, this time, while Mignon shook her head: ‘No! Never a clown!’
The Strong Man brightened up at that, and managed to get his tea down.
The word ‘iron’ was crudely inscribed on the knuckles of his right hand, and ‘steel’ on his left: the tattoos had a miserably self-inflicted look, as if carved with a penknife then filled in with ink during a deprived, self-mutilatory childhood. All of his bulk was muscle and simplicity, there was no flesh nor flab nor wit on him. He had a good, snub nose and, as he left off snivelling, his face once again took on its habitual expression of baffled innocence, of perpetual wonder at the ways of the world.
The Strong Man was naive and knew no tricks. During the gaps between the acts, while the cage or the trapeze went up, as the clowns mugged, Samson would strut round the ring holding a horse above his head.
Yes; he was very strong, and, as he knew deep down, a spiritual weakling. But, and this is what he did not know about himself, he was a great sentimentalist, so that, all the time he was poking the Ape-Man’s woman, he never thought much about her, except that she was easy, but, as soon as she went off with the clown – or so he thought – and took a bath, had her hair done, put on a pretty dress, turned into a star, his heart turned over like a pancake whenever he thought how he’d get his huge tool in her no more. But don’t think great loves haven’t sprung from less likely sources than that in the history of the world. If, when the Strong Man watched the tiger waltz Mignon out of his reach for ever, he thought his heart was breaking, sentimental he might have been but break it did. Out of the fracture, sensibility might poke a moist, new-born head.
As all sat inconclusively around the cat-house, came a dragging, bumping sound; the Professor entered, backwards, through the open door to the courtyard, pulling the insensible Ape-Man along by his feet. The Professor was making heavy weather of it, panting, blowing and wheezing, clearly painfully conscious of the indignity of his task. The Ape-Man’s head thudded against the cobbles at each tug the Professor gave his boots but the smile on his insensible features did not lift.
‘Mein husband!’ said Mignon.
‘Here, Samson, me old duck, you go and give that poor hairy fellow a hand before he has a heart attack,’ said Fevvers. The Strong Man rose obediently, tucking the ends of his towel round his waist. He carted the Ape-Man off to his bunk, the Professor trotting along beside him chattering to himself with annoyance.
Fevvers dropped some remark in German that made Mignon smile, another in French that made the Princess smile, too, but they did not smile at Fevvers, they smiled at one another and one white hand and one brown one reached out and clasped together.
‘That’s that, then.’ At last she addressed Walser. ‘You cop hold of your duds and come along with me, me old China. Leave the love-birds together.’
Love-birds, was it? Of course it was!
Hand in hand, the girls now went back into the cage, where the tigers slept the afternoon away, for the Princess was teaching Mignon more lieder. So she would not sing in the ring; well and good. So much the better, in fact! They would cherish in loving privacy the music that was their language, in which they’d found the way to one another.
When the Strong Man came running back from the apes, he, love locked out, shook the bars that kept him from his beloved but the musical lovers did not hear, so wrapt were they.
Left alone, the Professor went through the pockets of the Ape-Man. He withdrew his flat wallet, found what he was looking for – Monsieur Lamarck’s contract with the Colonel – read it through and tore it up. He pierced the unconscious Ape-Man with a regard of pure simian contempt. He seized the Ape-Man’s greatcoat from the foot of his bunk in order to pass unnoticed in the crowd and sped off.
In the courtyard he discovered Walser sluicing his face for the second time that day, getting rid of blood and muddied make-up. The Professor caught his bad arm, making him jump and, after a tetchy display of contrition, drew Walser with him into the alley; although Walser, wearing only a towel, protested fiercely, he made it apparent he wished the clown to hail a cab for him.
Since the Colonel proposed to entertain his star to dinner that night, a date of which he nourished great hopes, he returned to his hotel early, in order to treat his blue jowls to a shave. In his rolled shirtsleeves, humming ‘Casey Jones’ to himself around his
clenched cigar, he was attacking his cheeks with a cut-throat razor in the bathroom of his suite when the Professor, in too much of a hurry to fuss with the front desk, shinned up a drain-pipe and knocked peremptorily at the frosted glass window. The Colonel, after a few exclamations of Kentuckian astonishment, let the Professor in and ushered him to the drawing-room, to wait while he wiped the suds from his cheeks. When he returned, the Professor was seated at the writing desk, penning rapidly on hotel notepaper.
‘Nature did not give me vocal cords but left the brain out of Monsieur Lamarck. He is a hopeless drunk with no business sense. I therefore propose to take over all the business management of the “Educated Apes” and demand the salary and expenses formerly payable to Monsieur Lamarck now be paid to me.’
‘Well, here’s a do, Sybil.’ Colonel Kearney addressed his pig. ‘The madmen take over the lunatic asylum.’
Undeterred, the chimp jotted down the sum he considered appropriate for the services of himself and his colleagues, which caused the Colonel’s eyebrows to rise when he saw it and offer the Professor a friendly glass, hardly the most tactful hospitality, in the circumstances, which the Professor angrily refused. Uncorking a fresh bottle of bourbon with his teeth, the Colonel stroked a chin still stiff with soap and observed amusedly:
‘Aw, shoot, Professor! If there ain’t a man in the ring with you, people’ll think you’re just a bunch of high-school kids in monkey suits!’
The Professor uttered an indescribable noise that did not need vocal cords to express its meaning.
‘I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, Professor! Well, sir, you know what I always say – let us consult the oracle.’
With a grunt, Sybil launched herself to the carpet as he spilled out the alphabet cards.
‘“Cheap at the price”,’ pondered the Colonel. ‘Well, I hate to disagree with you, Sybil, but this gentleman certainly strikes a mighty hard bargain. Are you convinced he’s irreplaceable? You are? I’ll be darned . . .’