by Paul Gallico
The two older boys, Jacko and Ted, had managed secretly from time to time to escape from the sexual prohibitions which had been laid upon them, though they still paid lip service to them in the presence of their mother.
They had come to terms with what was left of their normal sexual needs by taking on any glamour-struck town girl whenever the opportunity offered itself. There were plenty of dark places behind the tober in the shadows of the wagons and lorries where the garish lights of the circus front did not penetrate. And since they would be away to the next town an hour or two later there were no complications or consequences to be considered. The fact that they left a number of pregnancies behind them during the course of a summer’s trouping they could not know, and if they had known they would not have cared.
For Toby Walters the coming of Jackdaw and Rose became a torment. From the moment he first laid eyes upon her, the slender figure in the blue cloth coat, fox-coloured hair beneath the beret, reflective eyes, and the child’s mouth of innocence, knowing that this disarming appearance was but the outer covering of one who must be a veritable Jezebel of lewdness and iniquity, he had wanted her for himself.
Twenty-one years of age, he had been saddled by his family with virginity through fear. Subconsciously Toby had leavened the unwholesomeness of their restrictions with a measure of poetry and concocted an adolescent world in which girls were good or bad, men decent or rotters. A good girl kept herself pure for the man she was going to marry, a good man did the same for the girl who would become the mother of his children.
Undermining these illusions was his natural virility, which spent itself in night dreams that frightened and worried him. Often by day he was assailed by shaming desires and further harried by the vivid earthy nature of the circus where humans and animals as well were thrown together in cramped, close quarters. This brought him close to the fetishism of undergarments, thighs, odours, the bodies-in-tights of girls and performers all around him and from time to time at night those sounds emanating from the thin partition which divided the quarters of Pa and Ma Walters in the big living wagon from those which he and his brothers and sisters occupied.
It was the patent availability of Rose which tortured Toby. She was there and there was no escape from the implications of her presence in the clown wagon. No subterfuge was put up as to her relationship with Jackdaw Williams. They were living together which meant that at night—any night, every night—it was happening. The dirty old man was using her, enjoying her, finding himself able whenever he wished to do so to relieve those wire-taut tensions, swellings, and cravings which likewise possessed Toby, repressed and forbidden.
Until the coming of Rose these desires had been mere flickering of heat lightning upon the horizon, an apprehension kept and controlled. There were girls all about him in the show, attractive ones indeed, members of other acts, but they were dangerous unless one was prepared to marry them in the sense that if one fooled around, one could get them “into trouble” and oneself embroiled with their families. And there were married women, and some of them ever so often acted pretty randy towards him, as the phrase went. But here the stern code of life in a small, tightly knit circus community was even more forbidding. One did not fool around with another man’s wife.
It was Rose who turned these harmless, distant flickerings of youthful electricity into potential violence of a full-fledged storm. For what about a man’s tart, his whore, his strumpet, and all the other words used by his family to apply to Rose. Neither virgin nor wife, she must be a willing partner in lust. By her presence there she signalized that she was being had and therefore could be had. Toby wanted her for himself, to do to her what Jackaw was doing; to feel what Jackdaw was feeling upon her person; to embrace, to thrust, to smother her with violence—
As a human being, a person, a woman, a neighbour he had not so much as the faintest conception of who or what she was, or what she was like, or what she might feel or think. For he had let her be coloured by association with the hard, slovenly man with whom she lived and for whose filthy quarters and dirty way of living Toby had always experienced contempt. That she should be sharing the bed of such a man inspired disgust and yet to his horror he found that this in no wise diminished the intensity of his desire for her.
He strove to work it off in the rehearsal ring, throwing himself the more earnestly and forcefully into his art and thus increasing the jealousy of his family who saw him pushing himself farther towards a stardom which they did not wish to acknowledge.
For whereas Harry, Jacko, and Ted Walters and the two girls performed all of the classic tricks of voltige and bareback riding, which included Jacko’s difficult back somersault from one horse in motion to another, these were done under tensions and timing of their own making. They prepared carefully for the stunts, gaining balance and assurance as the big horses cantered about the ring, with the canny assistance of Ma Walters who kept the beasts at just the right pace and had them at the proper spot at the important moment.
But Toby, as the Auguste of the troupe, had no such moments of visual preparation. Every one of his somersaults, slips, falls, and bits of eccentric riding appeared to take place haphazardly and spontaneously, calling for the utmost muscular control and co-ordination. In the middle of his family’s act, he would suddenly arise from a seat in the audience wearing battered top hat and tails, a drooping moustache concealing his youth and red painted nose advertising his condition. He would first attract attention to himself by shouting, while weaving drunkenly; then his shouts would become intelligible; he would insist that he could do all those tricks himself. Pa Walters would invite him to come into the ring and try. The knowing ones in the audience would look at one another and say, “It’s all a part of the act.” The naïve and the innocent would tremble for what was going to happen to the poor drunk.
Toby was a better rider than he was a clown, but it was his riding perfection which made his clowning so perfect and hysterically funny, so that fall after fall would send each roar of laughter to a higher hysterical pitch, until when at last he performed his incredible trick of somersaulting from one horse over another to a third, the audience burst into a spontaneous ovation. Pa Walters and the boys took it upon themselves to see that the size of Toby’s head was kept down.
There was further solace for the boy in his new job presenting Judy the performing elephant. They had been circus-lot friends for a long time and through his childhood Toby had always felt an affection for the beast and would pause to feed her titbits. Now this emotion grew into something stronger. For there were both tenderness and a capacity to love within Toby of which he was wholly unaware. He had not even so much as tapped the components of the word, the things of which it was made up such as compassion, longing, hatred, sweetness, selflessness, respect, and liking. He “loved” his family because it had been dinned into him that one did. He “loved” his favourite horse or his pet dog as a matter of course. He loved Judy first because of youthful vanity; she reflected his own skill, power, and command over her, but soon he grew to love her as well—just because. She was, with all her strength and bulk, so helpless, so dependent, and plaintively endearing. And she showed that she cared for him.
Toby had been fortunate in his relationship with Judy, for she had accepted him immediately and without protest as her trainer. She liked him and therefore she obeyed him. She might just as well not have done so, and then there would have been trouble and Toby might have had to beat her.
For while cruelty played no part in the training of such a beast, this did not mean that there must not exist between animal and man a clear understanding as to who was boss. In such a tight community as a circus, working and travelling on a strict schedule, firm obedience had to be imposed upon an animal of such strength and tonnage that if its destructive powers were unleashed the most desperate and far-reaching carnage could result. During the time the elephant was in the ring, it was unfettered and separated from the audience by no more than a foot-high ledge
, and hence had to be under the complete control of the human in charge.
Toby, born and bred to the circus, was a realist in these matters, like all the show people, who, though they might love their animals, permitted no false sentimentality or anthropomorphism to endanger their lives or those of the members of the audience to whom they played. Toby was immensely relieved when Judy accepted him and chose to carry out his commands. For he had sat at the feet of many of the great professionals and listened to their lore and remembered the words of a trainer known as Elephant Al:
“Elephants don’t like working any more than people, or standing on their hind legs or doing tricks nature never built ’em for. You got to remember that no matter how tame they appear to be, they’re wild animals with all of the wild animal’s fears, instincts, panics, hates, irritations, and lazinesses. When it comes to a showdown, one or the other of you has got to win, and it had better be you if you want to go on working with elephants.”
Toby had once witnessed one such showdown between Elephant Al and a six-ton tusker named Mabel, a fight to the finish between a puny man with only his iron-tipped elephant stick or ankus, and an enraged beast attempting to kill with tusks, trunk, feet, and cunning. It had been horrible, but the man had triumphed, and afterwards Toby, who was then only twelve, had gone off to a dark patch at the far end of the tober and been sick.
Elephant Al had been taken away himself to hospital with three broken ribs, a crushed instep, and an arm lacerated from shoulder to elbow—yet two days later he showed Mabel in the ring. For a long time Toby could not erase from his memory the globules of red upon the grey hide, the whimperings in the giant throat, the misery in the little eyes and the dreadful ignominy at the end with the noble and majestic beast yielding to man, its trunk raised like a single arm in total capitulation. That night Toby had wept for grandeur debased and brought low, and did not know that his tears were shed because of love.
He hoped that Judy would never disobey, that there would never be a showdown with her, that he would never have to fight and beat and hurt her. His youthful confidence was such that he could put it out of his mind, and his very fearlessness with his charge impressed her even more to do his bidding. Yet always, gnawing at the back of Toby’s mind, was the gen he had had on Judy. She had once killed a woman, or at least so they said. One never knew then when and where this hatred might break out, and he wondered, if ever it did, whether he could control her. He hoped so. In the meantime he played it safe. She showed no signs of being aware of women during her performance in the ring, and afterwards he saw that she was staked out and roped off so that visitors were well out of reach.
C H A P T E R
5
On one of her earliest exploratory wanderings through this new, unfamiliar, and exciting world, Rose poked into the great, peak-roofed barn that stood apart from the main building housing the training ring. One of the large double doors was slightly ajar and from within came a concert of weird unmusical sounds: grunts, coughs, squeaks, shrieks, chitterings, barks, and whines.
She slipped inside and was struck almost as by a physical force with a new smell, one she had never encountered before. It was sharp, pungent, and ammoniac, compounded of urine and all the effluvia and admixture of scent glands of various kinds and species of animals, odours which were like a language between themselves, and which when borne on the winds of distant plains or forests advertised their presence and made them known to one another.
The enclosure was hot and stuffy from the many oil heaters burning in it to raise the temperature from the bitter February sharpness without to a cosy and comfortable fug. A row of cages mounted on long circus wagons extended the full length of the barn and around to one half of the end, for the bulk of Sam Marvel’s zoo had already been disposed of by lease, contract, or sale, and these remaining were the ones that would accompany the circus on its forthcoming invasion of the Continent.
Rose’s eyes had first to accustom themselves to the meagre light. Only half a dozen electric bulbs were burning, and very little filtered in through the windows let into the roof and the sides, for as usual the damp, thick, yellowish winter fog prevailed. Besides which, the harsh, ammoniac smell stung her eyeballs. She was aware only of vague shapes and forms within the cages, some motionless as if dead, others pacing with a kind of gliding movement; but then as she became more accustomed to this new and strange environment her attention became focused upon one cage at the end of the barn and the only human being within sight.
This was an old man with white hair and drooping white moustache. He was clad in khaki-coloured overalls and jacket which was unbuttoned to reveal the singlet beneath and the white hairs on the scrawny chest. He was seated on a stool reading a newspaper through steel-rimmed spectacles which he had set on the end of his nose. But the astonishing feature about him was that his left arm was inserted through the bars of the cage. As Rose approached closer, she saw that the beast lying on its side in the enclosure was a tiger and that the old man, while he was reading his newspaper, was massaging its shoulder blade with regular and soothing strokes of his knotty but muscular hand.
The tiger, whose state of bliss as the result of the stroking was penetrated by the sound of footsteps and the arrival of another presence, raised its head from the floor of the cage to see. For a moment, he stared at her with great, amber, interested eyes that seemed to burn with a flame of their own beyond the reflection of the artificial lighting. A rose-coloured tongue emerged to curl for an instant around the triangle of his nose. His mouth then opened in a cavernous yawn, accompanied by a kind of moaning grumble, revealing the yellow ivory of his fangs, and thereafter, with a thud that shook the cage, he let his head fall back once more to the floor to continue his enjoyment.
Rose gasped, “Oh! Ain’t he beautiful!” It was the first time ever that she had seen a tiger.
The old man put his paper down on to the dirt floor of the barn and pushed his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose, but did not leave off his attentions to the shoulder of the beast. After having inspected Rose, he said, “You’re new, ain’t you?” And then added, “Yup, ain’t he? Ain’t he an old fellow?” This last was said half to the tiger and half to Rose.
The girl watched, fascinated, the slow, gentle, rhythmical movements of the old man’s hand on the glossy orange and black marked fur, and saw the muscles rippling beneath in response to the movement of the fingers.
“Oh,” she queried, “could I do that?”
The old man looked dubiously from the tiger to Rose and back to the tiger again and replied, “Well, I wouldn’t just yet. Not until he knows you. He don’t know you, see. He knows me.”
“What’s his name?”
“Rajah.”
“Rajah! What does it mean?”
“Well, a kind of king or emperor-like in India.”
“India? Is that where he comes from?”
“That’s right, miss.” He left off stroking the tiger now for a moment, withdrawing his arm from the cage. Rajah, with a sudden movement and a switch of his tail, rolled over on his back with his paws in the air and wriggled his body twice, emitting a low, melodious groan.
“Ah!” cried Rose. “I want to squeeze him!”
“I do,” said the old man. “Sometimes when nobody is around and I go in to clean his cage. He lets me. I go over and take his big old head in my arms and give him a proper squeeze. He’s a funny old cat. Tigers don’t like people touching ’em, but he don’t seem to mind about me.”
This was indeed true and no one appeared to know why. It was simply a part of the astonishing phenomenon of Mr. Albert, the beast man.
It had happened some time ago just before the old man turned seventy after a life which, from every point of view, had to be accounted as a total failure. Working around the Marvel Circus where extra hands were needed to hammer tent stakes or fetch and carry, he had quite by accident discovered a most amazing affinity to wild animals.
Passing by one of t
he cages on the way to bring something or other for the tent boss, he had paused to admire one of the lionesses in the big mixed-cat act presented by Major Fritz Hoffmann, the German dompteur. Her name was Zara and she was a lovely-looking specimen, lithe, sleek, well groomed. He stood there for an instant, captivated by her beauty and smiling at her, when to his surprise he saw that she was smiling right back at him. Or at least that is how it appeared, for her great mouth was open, her tongue lolling to one side, and she seemed to be grinning from ear to ear.
“Well!” Mr. Albert had said. “Well, old girl.” And his voice was so cheerful and chuckly that the lioness responded by wriggling her whole body with a kind of unconscious joy and batted her two paws on the floor of the cage. Then she gave a low cat purr and thrust her head forward.
“Well,” Mr. Albert had said again. “Well, you silly old thing!” and fearlessly rubbed her between the ears and then under the chin, and Zara quite turned herself inside out with love. She evidently regarded Mr. Albert as some superior kind of lion and behaved most kittenishly and ridiculously, prostrating herself before him, rolling over, her throat vibrating with delight.
Mr. Albert did not look like a lion at all. His grey, thinning hair was plastered down one side of his head. He had a drooping moustache which he had first acquired as an infantryman of a Kentish regiment in the First World War and never thereafter relinquished, and with this went a pair of washed-out blue eyes which still managed to retain some innocence, and a weak chin. What he did have was an engaging smile and a vast, empty heart yearning for something or someone to belong to.
The love affair of Zara, the lioness, and Albert Griggs was mutual. He was enthralled and enchanted with this wild creature who cared for him and returned her affection besottedly. He would spend all of his free time in front of her cage with his arm through the bars scratching her belly or pulling her ears, and the skin of his wrists was rubbed raw from the love licks of her rasping tongue.
