Love, Let Me Not Hunger

by Paul Gallico

  For a moment, the horseman’s face turned dark with fury and he was left speechless, not so much because of the slur but because the boy had read his mind and beaten him to it with all the impudence and impetuousness of youth. And besides, he was no longer all that sure of himself. He twisted his lips into the semblance of a grin and said, “Okay, bub. A stiff prick ain’t the answer to everything. You’ll find out.” He turned on his heel and walked off to the horse tent.

  Toby continued to the Walterses’ living wagon, put the suitcase inside the door, and came back again to stand in the centre of the enclosure, watching Rose. He knew that Albert would have sense enough not to let her go near Judy who was restlessly stamping her feet and “pounding rice,” which she always did when she had something on her mind. Rose was cuddling Congo. Mr. Albert was still doing his dance of ecstasy. After a little, Rose came walking back alone to where Toby was standing, and thus they faced one another for an instant without speaking. And because of their different emotions, clouding their senses and their vision, neither could see within or read or guess the mind of the other.

  “Why did you come back?” Toby asked.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t help it.” Under his gaze she lowered her eyes and added lamely, “I thought maybe I could be of some help.”

  Toby said, “You’re another mouth to feed. That bastard Marvel didn’t leave us much. Maybe if something happened and he didn’t get back here it might get tough.”

  Rose looked up angrily and cried, “I wouldn’t care.” But then immediately was contrite and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I don’t eat very much. I’m not ever that hungry.” Then she concluded, “I’ll try not to be in the way,” and made to move in the direction of Jackdaw Williams’ van, but stopped as, searching for her suitcase, she saw that it was no longer there.

  “Where’s my bag?” she asked.

  “I took it,” Toby replied.

  She challenged him now with her stubborn chin raised and her green eyes flashing. “Where is it?” she asked.

  “In my wagon,” Toby Walters replied, and threw her challenge back at her insolently, possessively, and overwhelmingly, destroying the small pitiful defiance she had thought to put up. Thus they stared at each other yet another instant, the boy all male, aggressive, demanding, imperiously insisting.

  The fire went out of her eyes and the starch from her spine. Her shoulders drooped, and when she looked up at him it was through narrowed eyelids, and she blinked as though what she saw was too bright and dazzling to be regarded unshaded, and she asked finally, “Kin I have a wash? I’m all dirty.” And she looked down at herself—anything not to be looking into that loved face.

  “Okay,” Toby said and could not keep the shaking and the exultation out of his voice. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Up to that time, from force of habit he had been sleeping in his own narrow bunk on the top shelf of the boys’ side of the wagon. That had been his place as long as he could remember and he had stuck to it. But now they were gone, his quarreling prim-mouthed sisters, the mocking, know-it-all brothers, and the nagging parents. He was boss. He led Rose through to the compartment formerly occupied by his father and mother. They were old-fashioned and had slept together in a built-in bed that took up half the width of the caravan.

  “You can shack in here,” Toby said.

  The girl regarded him curiously. Then submissively she put her suitcase onto the bed.

  “There’s a shower in that closet,” Toby said, “but there won’t be any hot water.”

  “That’s all right,” she replied, and her weariness lay like a mantle over her—dust and fatigue and submission. “I’ll just have a wash and then a bit of a lie down.”

  “I’ll get you something to eat,” Toby said.

  “That would be nice.”

  He went into the galley and lit the stove. There were bread, cheese, and tea, and he prepared to fry up some eggs. He heard the water running and his hands trembled so that he could hardly hold the frying pan and he pictured her standing beneath the shower, soaping her naked body, lifting her arms and with them her breasts.

  How long was there still to wait until the evening, the dark when he could have her? “It,” the thing one did, was to him not for daylight. Night first must fall. Then it was going to happen to him. She was there. She had moved in, accepted without a murmur. A real little tart. Shack up with anyone who’d feed her. God knows who else and how many more besides Williams had had a slice off that piece of cake.

  He had to tell himself this because she was actually so unlike this with her child’s mouth and innocent expression, and he was frightened in case in some way he might be wrong about her. Still the important thing was to know at last, to find out, to take advantage of this miracle of her return long after he had been resigned never to seeing her again, to become a man, cheaply, at no price, upon a body that would neither protest nor demand. He would be avenged for all the endless anguish and nightmares of his cravings that she had put upon him from the day he had first laid eyes upon her.

  When the late summer’s darkness had at last come to Zalano and Janos, Deeter, and Mr. Albert had retired to their quarters, Toby waited trembling in his own compartment, listening through the partition to the sounds Rose was making as she undressed—soft sounds—just her breathing and quiet, unhurried movements. In his mind he stripped the garments from her until the tension of his passion was almost unbearable.

  He restrained himself until he heard the bed creaking as she settled herself and that creaking in itself augmented the pain of his desire, for it was a remembered sound. He had lived with it for years, the creaking of the bed of his parents.

  He undressed himself, fumbling and pulling at his clothes, and then, gently easing the door handle, he went in to her. A street lamp from the road cast a single ray through the window by which he could see the pallor of her face and the shine of an eye. She had the sheet drawn up about her body.

  He got into bed with her and for a moment lay apart, hoping that he would be able to quiet the shaking of his limbs. But they would not still and he could wait no longer. He reached for her.

  She turned to him, meeting him, yielding, seeking the embrace of his arms, pressing herself to him. “Oh, Toby,” she whispered, “I love you.”

  He hardly heard, or if he had, the words meant nothing to him. For with the touch of her body, breasts, and belly, and thighs against him he went almost insane with excitement, clawing, pushing, pulling at her, hustling her into position, entering her, crashing into her like an animal frantic with rut.

  There was no holding back and in an instant he had spent himself in a convulsion that was an agony as well as an ecstasy. There was pain mingled with the deep all-pervading sweetness. Yet it was accompanied almost by conscious thought that entered his head—“I’m doing it—in my father’s bed—it’s happening—”

  He experienced the last faint pulsing echo of the release of his passion, fading beyond recall, leaving him longing for recapture. And then it was over. He was conscious of sweat pouring from his body and that he was digging the nails of the fingers of both hands into the flesh of Rose’s shoulders. Otherwise he was not aware of her. He had not heard her sigh, or murmur, or cry out.

  Toby released her and a moment later freed himself from her body. And so he was a man.

  But all he felt was an odd sense of disappointment, of somehow having been cheated, as though all the yearning and suffering, the wanting to experience it so badly and the holding back for so long had not been worthwhile now that it had happened at last. What had all the fuss been about? He was inclined to blame Rose. That probably was what it was like to do it with a girl like her.

  He looked down at her, and the ray coming in through the window fell upon her head turned sideways on the pillow. Her lips were parted slightly. Her eyes were swimming and far-gazing, like someone who was away, far away, perhaps lost beyond recall. He felt defrauded and didn’t know why, except that s
omething had been missing. He hadn’t got what he had expected.

  And now there was nothing left; no excitement of any kind. He studied her again to see whether she was any different or how she would be now that at last he had done it to her. He could not know that she was still voyaging through the stars. She only looked alien, strange and foreign to him, like someone he did not know or had ever known. He felt no desire to talk to her or even ask her whether she was all right. He did not care. The violent explosion of his passions had left him with a feeling of weakness and lassitude, and the wish only to escape from his all-pervading sense of disappointment.

  He got out of bed and left the compartment. Back in his own, he climbed up on to the shelf of his youth and stretched out his limbs. The being alone felt good.

  Well, he said to himself, that’s that.

  Just before he fell asleep he thought he heard a noise from next door, as though perhaps Rose might be crying. Whatever, if she was or she wasn’t it didn’t concern him. He turned over, stretched once more, and was asleep.

  C H A P T E R

  1 5

  They passed the next day doing the usual things that their new lives demanded of them, and in particular under the circumstances they now found themselves in—Toby with his horses and the elephant, and Rose with a new home. The six days in which Toby had dwelt there alone had seen it left in the condition one might expect of a bachelor youth, and Rose busied herself with cleaning, familiarizing herself with the whereabouts of utensils, and putting things right.

  By nightfall he was avid for her once more, excited by and looking forward to the prospect of again being with her in the bed, and hopeful perhaps of penetrating further into the enigma of this talked-to-death act which so far had eluded him.

  And yet when it was over and he had expended himself, he was no closer to the solution of the mystery, beyond that “it felt good,” and from then on, with the boys, he would be able to put in his oar with the rest of them. Of Rose he knew no more than that she possessed the necessary equipment for mating and was subserviently willing to permit him to use it. He made no connection between “it”—her place—and the warm, yielding, overflowing heart of the girl, her affection and her joy at being able to gratify him, and the exquisite and dominating trait of her innocence.

  Of none of these things was he aware. Had his mind been less dirtied by his family, or had he been older, he might have guessed at this innocence bordering upon the virginal from the fact that she could teach him nothing. The blind was leading the blind. They entered paradise apart. They never touched one another.

  For each night when he had finished with her, Toby arose and went back to the safety and comfort of his own bunk and his own ways. He left her in boredom, but sometimes in anger that there was not more to it, that he never appeared to be coming any closer to the big thing it was supposed to be. And once, as he lay in his bunk, irritated and bewildered, the words of Fred Deeter came floating by on the surface of his stream of consciousness, what the hell did he mean with his “You’ll find out.” Deeter was old and probably rotten at it; he was over sixty. And Jackdaw Williams had been no chicken either. Did that mean that they possessed a secret, some further knowledge to an even greater sensation that he did not? Did it mean that he would have to grow old before he, too, could find it with a girl? Had Deeter known that he, Toby, was a virgin, that Rose would be his first girl, and that in the having of her he would find himself frustrated, baffled, and unfulfilled? Often, when in a gathering of men, Deeter would narrate some amorous experience of his in the past, he would say of the woman involved that he had “loved her up good and plenty.” He supposed that he, Toby, had loved Rose up now.

  Love! Beloved! Make love to! Were these just words or, if not, wherein was contained their secret? And how and when were they to be used? You were supposed to fall in love with a good girl and then marry her. But afterwards what you did was loving her up; you did just what he and Rose were doing. And what about Rose and the curious day residue that sometimes remained in his memory from the night before? A movement, a glance, a damp lock of hair falling over an eye, a softness of skin, or a little cry that he recalled with an emotion almost approaching tenderness and which had then sternly to be denied since they could not belong properly to such a one as Rose. He was confused. If to be young and virile and stand like a stallion was not everything that made a man, then what was?

  He would have given much to have been able to ask Fred Deeter, but he could not have done so for anything. No further word passed between the two upon the subject of their exchange during the ensuing days, but whenever they encountered or worked together, the ex-cowboy regarded him with just the faintest suggestion of mockery about his thin lips and alkali-crinkled eyes, an expression which seemed to say, “Well, bub, now that you’ve got it, how do you like it?”

  The starvation it seemed came upon them almost from one day to another, so that they could hardly remember the dividing line of the time when there had been food for all animals as well as themselves and the moment suddenly when their money had run out, the last wisps of timothy hay had disappeared, the remaining scraps of meat had been devoured and only a few mouldy carrots, half-rotten apples and blackened bananas remained in the bins.

  And as suddenly, their own larders too were empty. Then the police and the authorities from Zalano came and moved them from the tober to a walled derelict finca, situated a half a mile or so out of the town.

  It was neither cruelty nor callousness on the part of the Spaniards which had dictated this shift, but the pandemonium of protest set up by the hungry animals and continuing through the night. The roars of the starving cats as well as the complaints of Judy and the other animals reached well to the centre of the town and disturbed the sleep of the citizens in addition to knocking at the doors of their consciences.

  The five left in charge of the beasts had done what they could when at the end of three weeks Marvel had not returned. They had pooled their meagre resources of personal funds, a small drop in a large bucket, as the food bill for the livestock travelling with the circus ran to some $168 a week for victuals and bedding. Thereafter the men sold their watches and whatever trinkets they had of any value and after that they were done for. There was nothing more to sell since all of the circus property, such as lorries, living wagons, spare canvas, props, etc., had been impounded by the court.

  Appealed to, the authorities in Zalano referred them to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Madrid, but the organisation must have been moribund for there was no reply to the letters despatched to them by Deeter. The truth was that Zalano had troubles of its own. The storm had destroyed crops and its passing had sowed a swath of appalling damage. The town treasury was empty, Red Cross aid insufficient, and the citizens were still dazedly trying to assess the extent of the catastrophe and had little time left for the plight of the circus people now removed out of sight, out of hearing, and hence out of mind. The best that Dr. Perrera had been able to do for them had been to arrange for each of the five to take a meal a day with one of the better off families who had volunteered this hospitality, until such time as the circus proprietor should return or send funds to relieve the situation.

  The walls of the finca were of lime-washed stone, and within, some narrow, red roof-tiling ran around the top on two sides. Inside the enclosure a space of about half an acre was empty of all but weeds, and stones that lay about in the grass, but there was at least some shelter for the horses, as the narrow roofed-in portions furnished cover from sun and rain and would serve as stables as well as providing shade for some of the more sensitive beasts.

  The lorries, caravans, and cages had been driven and towed there by police and some drivers recruited from the town, and when the circus rolling stock had been bestowed around the inside perimeter of the ten-foot walls they climbed aboard the police jeeps and drove off.

  Rose and the men were seized by an all-pervading sense of loneliness and abandonment. At
least on the tober they had been surrounded by human habitation and signs of life. Here the high walls enclosed and oppressed them, and they and their animals suddenly were all living on top of one another. Through the opening of the gates they could see the flat void of the plain, relieved only by the occasional spike of a cypress tree, a distant farm building such as the one they were occupying, and, on the edge of the horizon, the mountains.

  Each fell prey to melancholies peculiar to their circumstances. The tall, sagging wooden gates of the finca remained unlocked; they were free to come and go but there was no place for them to exercise this freedom.

  Toby, Rose, and Mr. Albert had been wanderers over the face of England, used to the bustle of towns and cities and here within the walls were as exiled from all that was familiar as though they had been transported to the moon. Deeter and Janos standing before the gates of their unguarded prison were assailed further by the nostalgias of memory.

  For Janos, the flat country with the distant purple rim of mountains reminded him of his native Puszta, the Hungarian plain, while Deeter was remembering the same endless table-lands located in Wyoming, where as a boy he had mounted his first mustang and where the Rockies form the jagged edge to the rim of the horizon.

  Each day when nothing happened, every passing twenty-four hours without a letter, telegram or word from Sam Marvel increased the tension of their nerves. Each night spent listening to the complaints of the starving beasts, now modulated through weakness to whines and whimpers, slowly augumented the growing burden of horror borne by the five.

  For there was nothing, literally nothing for them to eat. The nearby farmers, their fields ruined by the storm, could not afford to let the horses graze. Neighbours to the finca moved to compassion sometimes contributed a pailful of garbage, hardly fit for pigs, or a half a jug of soured milk, with no conception of what it took to keep going only such a small menagerie as was in their midst. Even had they known that a full-grown lion or tiger consumed between ten and twenty pounds of horseflesh a day, that an elephant could put away a hundred pounds of hay and needed oats and bran besides, that hay for the horses cost some $60 a week and that the other inmates consumed bread by the loaf, milk by the gallon, and fresh vegetables and fruits by the basketful, they could have done nothing about it for they had no such supplies.