Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  That night the Grand Opera House was packed to the doors and the street in front was full of hoarse, over-worked policemen and wailing coachmen. The awning was out over the sidewalk and the steps of the church across the street were banked with row upon row of watching faces. It was known that this was to be the last lecture of Toppan’s before he plunged into the wilderness again, and that the world would not see him for five years. The mayor of the city introduced him in a speech that was too long, and then Toppan stood up and faced the artillery of opera-glasses, and tried not to look into the right-hand proscenium box that held Victoria Boyden and her party.

  He kept the audience spell-bound for an hour, while he forgot his useless notes, forgot his hearers and the circumstances of time and place, forgot about Victoria Boyden and their mean little squabbles and remembered only that he was Toppan, the great explorer, who had led his men through the interior of Thibet, and had lived to tell it to these people now before him. For an hour he made the people too, forget themselves in him and his story, till they felt something of what he had felt on those occasions when Hope was a phantom scattering chaff, when Resolve wore thin under friction of disaster, when the wheels of Life ran very low and men thanked God that they could die. For an hour he led them steadily into the heart of the unknown: the twilight of the unseen. Then he had an inspiration.

  He had worked himself up to a mood wherein he was himself at his very best, when his chosen life-work made all else seem trivial and the desire to do great things was big within him. In this mood he somehow happened to remember Victoria Boyden, which he should not have done because she was not to be thought of in connection with great deeds and high resolves. But just at that moment Toppan felt his strength and knew how great he really was, and how small and belittled she seemed in comparison. She had practiced a small deception upon him, had done him harm and would do him more. He suddenly resolved to break with her at that very moment and place while he was strong and able to do it.

  He did it by cleverly working into his talk a little story whose real meaning no one but Victoria understood. For the audience it was but a bright little bit of folk-lore of upper India. For Victoria, he might as well have struck her across the face. It was cruel; it was even vulgarly cruel, which is brutal, it was vindictive and perhaps cowardly, but the man was smarting under a long continued bitterness and he had at last turned and with closed eyes struck back savagely.

  The exalted mood which had brought this about, was with him during the rest of the evening, was with him when he drove back to his rooms in his coupe with Bushby, and was with him as he flung himself to bed and went to sleep with a deep sigh of relief for that it was now over and done with forever.

  But it left him during the night and he awoke the next morning to a realisation of what he had done and of all he had lost. He began by remembering Victoria as he had first known her, by recalling only what was good in her, and by palliating all that was bad. From this starting point he went on till he was in an agony of grief and remorse and ended by lashing himself into the belief that Victoria had been his inspiration and had given zest and interest to every thing he had done. Now he bitterly regretted that he had thrown her over. He had never in his life before loved her so much. He was unfitted for work during all that day and passed the next night in unavailing lamentations. His morning’s mail brought him face to face with the crisis of his life. It came in the shape of a letter from Victoria Boyden.

  It was a very thick and a very heavy letter and she must have spent most of the previous day in writing it. He was surprised that she should have written him at all after what had passed on that other evening, but he was deeply happy as well because he knew precisely what the letter would be, before he opened it. It would be a petition for his forgiveness and a last attempt to win him back to her again.

  And Toppan knew that she would succeed. He knew that in his present mood he would make any sacrifice for her sake. He foresaw that her appeal would be too strong for him. That was, if he opened and read her letter. Just now the question was, should he do it? If he read that letter he knew that he was lost, his career would stop where it was. To be great he had only to throw it unopened into the fire; yes, but to be great without her, was it worth the while? What would fame and honour and greatness be, without her? He realised that the time had come to choose between her and his career and that it all depended upon the opening of her letter. Two hours later, he flung himself down before his table and took her letter in his hand. His fingers itched for the touch of it. Close to his elbow lay a little copper knife with poison grooves, such as are used by the Hill-tribes in the Kuen-Lun mountains. Toppan kept it for a paper cutter; just now he picked it up. For a long time he remained sitting, holding Victoria’s letter in one hand, the little knife in the other. Then he put the point under the flap of the envelope and slowly cut it open.

  Two weeks later the Kamtchatka Expedition sailed with Bushby in command. Toppan did not go; he was married to Victoria Boyden that Fall.

  Last season I met Toppan at Coronado Beach. The world has about forgotten him now, but he is quite content as he is. He is head clerk in old Mr. Boyden’s insurance office and he plays a capital game of tennis.

  A CAGED LION

  In front of the entrance a “spieler” stood on a starch-box and beat upon a piece of tin with a stick, and we weakly succumbed to his frenzied appeals and went inside. We did this, I am sure, partly to please the “spieler,” who would have been dreadfully disappointed if we had not done so, but partly, too, to please Toppan, who was always interested in the great beasts and liked to watch them.

  It is possible that you may remember Toppan as the man who married Victoria Boyden, and, in so doing, thrust his greatness from him and became a bank clerk instead of an explorer. After he married, he came to be quite ashamed of what he had done in Thibet and Africa and other unknown corners of the earth, and, after a while, very seldom spoke of that part of his life at all; or, when he did, it was only to allude to it as a passing boyish fancy, altogether foolish and silly, like calf-love and early attempts at poetry.

  “I used to think I was going to set the world on fire at one time,” he said once; “I suppose every young fellow has some such ideas. I only made an ass of myself, and I’m glad I’m well out of it. Victoria saved me from that.”

  But this was long afterward. He died hard, and sometimes he would have moments of strength in his weakness, just as before he had given up his career during a moment of weakness in his strength. During the first years after he had given up his career, he thought he was content with the way things had come to be; but it was not so, and now and then the old feeling, the love of the old life, the old ambition, would be stirred into activity again by some sight, or sound, or episode in the conventional life around him. A chance paragraph in a newspaper, a sight of the Arizona deserts of sage and cactus, a momentary panic on a ferry-boat, sometimes even fine music or a great poem would wake the better part of him to the desire of doing great things. At such times the longing grew big and troublous within him to cut loose from it all and get back to those places of the earth where there were neither months nor years, and where the days of the week had no names; where he could feel unknown winds blowing against his face and unnamed mountains rising beneath his feet; where he could see great, sandy, stony stretches of desert with hot, blue shadows, and plains of salt, and thickets of jungle-grass, broken only by the lairs of beasts and the paths the steinbok make when they go down to water.

  The most trifling thing would recall all this to him, just as a couple of notes have recalled to you whole arias and overtures. But with Toppan it was as though one had recalled the arias and the overtures and then was not allowed to sing them.

  We went into the arena and sat down. The ring in the middle was fenced in by a great, circular, iron cage. The tiers of seats rose around this, a band was playing in a box over the entrance, and the whole interior was lighted by an electric globe slung over the middle of
the cage.

  Inside the cage a brown bear — to me less suggestive of a wild animal than of lap-robes and furriers’ signs — was dancing sleepily and allowing himself to be prodded by a person whose celluloid standing-collar showed white at the neck above the green of his Tyrolese costume. The bear was mangy, and his steel muzzle had chafed him, and Toppan said he was corrupted of moth and rust alike, and the audience applauded but feebly when he and his keeper withdrew.

  After this we had a clown-elephant, dressed in a bib and tucker and vast baggy breeches — like those of a particularly big French Turco — who had lunch with his keeper, and rang the bell and drank his wine and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief like a bed-quilt, and pulled the chair from underneath his companion, seeming to be amused at it all with a strange sort of suppressed elephantine mirth.

  And then, after they had both made their bow and gone out, in bounded and tumbled the dogs, barking and grinning all over, jumping up on their stools and benches, wriggling and pushing one another about, giggling and excited like so many kindergarten children on a show-day. I am sure they enjoyed their performance as much as the audience did, for they never had to be told what to do, and seemed only too eager for their turn to come. The best of it all was that they were quite unconscious of the audience and appeared to do their tricks for the sake of the tricks themselves, and not for the applause which followed them. And then, after the usual programme of wicker cylinders, hoops, and balls was over, they all rushed off amid a furious scrattling of paws and filliping of tails and heels.

  While this was going on, we had been hearing from time to time a great sound, half-whine, half-rumbling guttural cough, that came from somewhere behind the exit from the cage. It was repeated at rapidly decreasing intervals, and grew lower in pitch until it ended in a short bass grunt. It sounded cruel and menacing, and when at its full volume the wood of the benches under us thrilled and vibrated.

  There was a little pause in the programme while the arena was cleared and new and much larger and heavier paraphernalia was set about, and a gentleman in a frock coat and a very shiny hat entered and announced “the world’s greatest lion-tamer.” Then he went away and the tamer came in and stood expectantly by the side of the entrance, there was another short wait and the band struck a long minor chord.

  And then they came in, one after the other, with long, crouching, lurching strides, not at all good-humouredly, like the dogs, or the elephant, or even the bear, but with low-hanging heads, surly, watchful, their eyes gleaming with the rage and hate that burned in their hearts and that they dared not vent. Their loose, yellow hides rolled and rippled over the great muscles as they moved, and the breath coming from their hot, half-open, mouths turned to steam as it struck the air.

  A huge, blue-painted see-saw was dragged out to the centre, and the tamer made a sharp sound of command. Slowly, and with twitching tails, two of them obeyed and clambering upon the balancing-board swung up and down, while the music played a see-saw waltz. And all the while their great eyes flamed with the detestation of the thing and their black upper lips curled away from their long fangs in protest of this hourly renewed humiliation and degradation.

  And one of the others, while waiting his turn to be whipped and bullied, sat up on his haunches and faced us and looked far away beyond us over the heads of the audience — over the continent and ocean, as it were — as though he saw something in that quarter that made him forget his present surroundings.

  “You grand old brute,” muttered Toppan; and then he said: “Do you know what you would see if you were to look into his eyes now? You would see Africa, and unnamed mountains, and great stony stretches of desert, with hot blue shadows, and plains of salt, and lairs in the jungle-grass, and lurking places near the paths the steinbok make when they go down to water. But now he’s hampered and caged — is there anything worse than a caged lion? — and kept from the life he loves and was made for” — just here the tamer spoke sharply to him, and his eyes and crest drooped— “and ruled over,” concluded Toppan, “by some one who is not so great as he, who has spoiled what was best in him and has turned his powers to trivial, resultless uses — some one weaker than he, yet stronger. Ah, well, old brute, it was yours once, we will remember that.”

  They wheeled out a clumsy velocipede, built expressly for him, and, while the lash whistled and snapped about him, the conquered king heaved himself upon it and went around and around the ring, while the band played a quick-step, the audience broke into applause, and the tamer smirked and bobbed his well-oiled head. I thought of Samson performing for the Philistines and Thusnelda at the triumph of Germanicus. The great beasts, grand though conquered, seemed to be the only dignified ones in the whole business. I hated the audience who saw their shame from behind iron bars; I hated myself for being one of them; and I hated the smug, sniggering tamer.

  This latter had been drawing out various stools and ladders, and now arranged the lions upon them so they should form a pyramid, with himself on top.

  Then he swung himself up among them, with his heels upon their necks, and, taking hold of the jaws of one, wrenched them apart with a great show of strength, turning his head to the audience so that all should see.

  And just then the electric light above him cackled harshly, guttered, dropped down to a pencil of dull red, then went out, and the place was absolutely dark.

  The band stopped abruptly with a discord, and there was an instant of silence. Then we heard the stools and ladders clattering as the lions leaped down, and straightway four pairs of lambent green spots burned out of the darkness and traveled swiftly about here and there, crossing and recrossing one another like the lights of steamers in a storm. Heretofore, the lions had been sluggish and inert; now they were aroused and alert in an instant, and we could hear the swift pad-pad of their heavy feet as they swung around the arena and the sound of their great bodies rubbing against the bars of the cage as one and the other passed nearer to us.

  I don’t the think the audience at all appreciated the situation at first, for no one moved or seemed excited, and one shrill voice suggested that the band should play “When the electric lights go out.”

  “Keep perfectly quiet, please!” called the tamer out of the darkness, and a certain peculiar ring in his voice was the first intimation of a possible danger.

  But Toppan knew; and as we heard the tamer fumbling for the catch of the gate, which he somehow could not loose in the darkness, he said, with a rising voice: “He wants to get that gate open pretty quick.”

  But for their restless movements the lions were quiet; they uttered no sound, which was a bad sign. Blinking and dazed by the garish blue whiteness of a few moments before, they could see perfectly now where the tamer was blind.

  “Listen,” said Toppan. Near to us, and on the inside of the cage, we could hear a sound as of some slender body being whisked back and forth over the surface of the floor. In an instant I guessed what it was; one of the lions was crouched there, whipping his sides with his tail.

  “When he stops that he’ll spring,” said Toppan, excitedly.

  “Bring a light, Jerry — quick!” came the tamer’s voice.

  People were clambering to their feet by this time, talking loud, and we heard a woman cry out.

  “Please keep as quiet as possible, ladies and gentlemen!” cried the tamer; “it won’t do to excite—”

  From the direction of the voice came the sound of a heavy fall and a crash that shook the iron gratings in their sockets.

  “He’s got him!” shouted Toppan.

  And then what a scene! In that thick darkness every one sprang up, stumbling over the seats and over each other, all shouting and crying out, suddenly stricken with a panic fear of something they could not see. Inside the barred death-trap every lion suddenly gave tongue at once, until the air shook and sang in our ears. We could hear the great cats hurling themselves against the bars, and could see their eyes leaving brassy streaks against the darkness as they leaped.
Two more sprang as the first had done toward that quarter of the cage from which came sounds of stamping and struggling, and then the tamer began to scream.

  I think that so long as I shall live I shall not forget the sound of the tamer’s scream. He did not scream as a woman would have done, from the head, but from the chest, which sounded so much worse that I was sick from it in a second with that sickness that weakens one at the pit of the stomach and along the muscles at the back of the legs. He did not pause for a second. Every breath was a scream, and every scream was alike, and one heard through it all the long snarls of satisfied hate and revenge, muffled by the man’s clothes and the rip, rip of the cruel, blunt claws.

  Hearing it all in the dark, as we did, made it all the more dreadful. I think for a time I must have taken leave of my senses. I was ready to vomit for the sickness that was upon me, and I beat my hands raw upon the iron bars or clasped them over my ears, against the sounds of the dreadful thing that was doing behind them. I remember praying aloud that it might soon be over, so only those screams might be stopped.

  It seemed as though it had gone on for hours, when some men rushed in with a lantern and long, sharp irons. A hundred voices cried: “Here he is, over here!” and they ran around outside the cage and threw the light of the lantern on a place where a heap of grey, gold-laced clothes writhed and twisted beneath three great bulks of fulvous hide and bristling black mane.

  The irons were useless. The three furies dragged their prey out of their reach and crouched over it again and recommenced. No one dared to go into the cage, and still the man lived and struggled and screamed.

  I saw Toppan’s fingers go to his mouth, and through that medley of dreadful noises there issued a sound that, sick as I was, made me shrink anew and close my eyes and teeth and shudder as though some cold slime had been poured through the hollow of my bones where the marrow should be. It was as the noise of the whistling of a fine whiplash, mingled with the whirr of a locust magnified a hundred times, and ended in an abrupt clacking noise thrice repeated.