by Bruce, Leo
“Are you hurt?” asked Beef.
“That blasted feeder will be when I get hold of him,” shouted Kurt by way of an answer, and before we could say anything he had gone at a run out of the tent.
“This ought to be interesting,” said Beef in an almost ghoulish voice.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well,” explained Beef, “the animals’ feeder, Ansell, is supposed to be here ready whenever Kurt goes in with the lions, in case there’s an accident. Apparently he scarpa’d just after Kurt had started.”
“Scarpa’d?” I asked.
“Yes, cleared off, skipped it. Circus palari,” said Beef.
“Palari?” I asked.
“Oh, skip it,” said Beef. “Let’s go and see the fun.”
But there was no need to go very far, because at that minute we heard the voices of the two men raised in argument just outside the opening of the tent. Beef motioned me to keep still, and we stood just inside listening to them. The argument appeared to have passed the initial stages already, for the two voices, peculiarly different, were not discussing lions at all, but generalities. Peter Ansell’s suave educated voice was saying:
“My dear George, it is surprising that you can’t handle a couple of baby lions. You can’t even handle women.”
“What do you mean by that?” shouted Kurt.
“I should have thought it was obvious,” continued Ansell, who seemed to be enjoying himself. “Take Miss Jackson for example. Do you know where she is at this moment?”
“You leave Corinne out of this,” shouted Kurt, “it’s got nothing to do with the argument.”
“Nevertheless, you don’t know where she is,” gibed Ansell, and it struck me that he was covering his own negligence by hitting Kurt on the raw, instead of justifying his absence from the ring.
“All right then, Mr. Clever Ansell,” said Kurt, “and where is she?”
“As a matter of fact, she’s gone into Hull with a certain Mr. Herbert Torrant. He called for her in his car about ten minutes ago, and asked me to tell her father that she would not be back until just before the afternoon show.”
At this point, however, the two men began to walk away from the tent and Beef and I could hear no more.
“That Miss Corinne,” Beef commented, “isn’t half a one. Leads them all up the garden path she does.”
“But there’s nothing serious in that,” I answered sharply. “Nothing in any case which would lead to a murder.”
“You haven’t seen half of it yet,” chuckled Beef.
CHAPTER XIII
April 28th (continued).
THERE was no doubt about Kurt being in a rage. After a brief, but obvious, argument with his feeder, Ansell, he turned abruptly and walked across to his cabin. As he slammed the door behind him Beef said: “There you are. I told you.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “But you said something about Ansell. Are you sure of that?”
“Well, I don’t know about sure,” said Beef. “Let’s go over and see him now. Soon find out.”
We could see Ansell moving towards the zoo and we quickly followed him. By the time we reached him he was beginning to unload the horse-meat which had arrived that day at the station. He seemed quite pleased when Beef offered that we should help him.
“Didn’t know this came in your job,” I said casually, as we transferred the meat from the station lorry to the circus meat wagon.
“Bit of everything,” said Ansell shortly. “Kurt looks after the supply part, works out the quantity and so on, but the actual work on it is part of my job.” He threw a huge section of a carcass into the wagon with a distasteful expression. It looked as though it might have been almost any part of the horse’s anatomy, hewn off with very blunt axes. The fat was a deep yellow, and the rest a dull red. It looked stale and unappetizing, even from the lion’s point of view.
I realized that Ansell was not in one of his talkative moods, and that if we wanted to get anything out of him about his attitude to Corinne Jackson, we should have to wait until he had mellowed a little to our company. This was a mood in which I had not seen him before. He was abrupt in his movements, and only answered our questions in short sentences. And even these had an acid quality which had been absent from his speech at our previous interview.
“Having a good season so far?” said Beef. It was more of a statement than a question.
“There’s always plenty of mugs,” said Ansell.
After a slight pause Beef tried again. “You don’t get on too well with Kurt?” he asked.
“I’d like to see anyone who could get on with that half-baked moron!” said Ansell bitterly.
But it seemed that this little release of feelings had placed him back in something of his normal cynical good-humor.
“You know,” he said suddenly, “I’ve stuck this job for nearly a year. Apart from the time I spent in prison that’s the longest I’ve ever been able to hold one down.”
“And why’s that?” asked Beef. “Does that mean you’re thinking of staying in the circus business for good?”
“Good Lord, I hope not,” answered Ansell.
“Then why do you stay?” I asked.
Peter Ansell seemed not to want to answer my question, or at least not to answer it directly, because after a pause he said:
“Well, it’s not exactly the job which keeps me here. You see, sometimes as one roves around one meets a person who seems different, more interesting, than the rest of the world. Not very often, I admit, but when one does meet such a person it becomes quite sufficient reason for sticking a bit. Humanity, as a whole, rather bores me. People are such hypocrites. I don’t mind a good all-round hypocrite; what I dislike is the person who thinks he’s being honest and is simply deceiving himself. And in my opinion most people spend their lives doing just that. In the circus, strangely enough, that sort of person is rarer than any other place. They’re cut off from all that nasty suburban littleness I suppose, and are more selfish in an obvious way instead of that pseudo-Christian pretense of concern for their fellow men which characterizes the majority of mankind.”
“And this person,” demanded Beef eagerly. “Who is it?”
“Corinne Jackson,” answered Ansell.
“Then you’re in love with her?” insisted Beef.
Ansell’s mouth twisted a little bitterly. “Of course,” he said, “you would put that construction on it. Brought up in an atmosphere of sickly sentiment, of Christmas decorations and popular songs, it’s only natural that any interest whatever which a man takes in a woman is something to do with ‘love.’ Well, you may be right. Perhaps I’m running away from it, and it’s I who am the hypocrite. But, so far as I know, I’m not in love with Corinne Jackson. To tell you the truth, I don’t see how anybody could be, unless they were absolutely blind to her defects. No, I like her because she’s honest with herself, although she manages to fool everybody else. She knows just what she wants and some day, some way, she’s going to get it. Why shouldn’t I give it to her? I don’t want to stay in this perishing circus any more than she does. That’s why I bear no resentment against the rather stupid George. If she married him there would be nothing for her but a long life in the circus; no possibility of escape.”
Beef looked rather puzzled, and not a little hurt at the animal-feeder’s tone. “I don’t know what fancy names you put to it,” he said bluntly, “but it still sounds like love to me.”
“My dear Sergeant,” laughed Ansell, “you have a habit of wanting to put labels on things. Put it away in its little box and everything’s all right. Well, if you want to, you can call it love. I suppose it’s as good a name as any. But, personally, I feel there’s more to it than that. Of course, I’m not trying to kid you that the whole thing is purely platonic. But, believe me, these labels have a nasty habit of never quite answering their purpose.”
When I heard Ansell talk like that, I realized in what particular sense he was déclassé. He had gone beyond reticence. If he had
ever, as he had said, been at a public school, it was many years since its influence had died in him. A man who could stand there and discuss his petty emotional reactions was not what I understood by an educated man. I had never heard anyone so frank, and I wondered whether that frankness in itself was an elaborate façade.
“Anyway, the point is,” Beef said to me afterwards, as we were walking slowly down to the local pub, “that whether he’s in love with her or not, he wants to marry her and take her away from the circus. All right then. That’s all we wanted to know. He can have as many fancy ideas as he likes about why he’s going to do it, it still means the same to me.”
On the whole, perhaps, I agreed with him. There is always something a little bogus in the man who delights in denying the obvious and universal emotions in order to replace them by vaguer and less sure definitions. But despite this, I felt a little sorry for Ansell. It was obvious that what he lacked was any anchorage; anything firm to turn to. He was alone in the world, and though it may be sentimental to feel for this particular type of orphan, I could not help attempting to give Beef some idea of my sympathy for him.
“Oh, he’s all right,” said Beef. “Wouldn’t be happy unless he had something queer going on in that head of his. I’ve met chaps like that before. Make a profession of being a misfit, most of them.”
The subject, apparently, did not interest Beef very much, for after a slight pause he went on: “What does strike me, though, is that Kurt. He’s got a temper on him all right. The way he turned on Ansell when he had that trouble with the cubs. It just shows you. Wouldn’t do no harm to keep a close eye on him.”
The pub was now in sight and Beef quickened his pace noticeably. “One of the beauties of being with a circus,” he said with a grin, “is the way you can get into pubs at all hours. Something I missed a bit since the days I used to be in the Force, that is.”
“How do they get away with it?” I asked.
“Well, no landlord likes to turn his back on the amount of custom that a circus brings. What’s a few by-laws, anyway? And then, the village policeman probably understands.”
And with this he turned quickly through the door marked public bar. The bar was filled with circus people, and Beef was immediately grabbed on his entry to play a game of darts with three of the tent hands. Ginger was rubbing his hands in obvious anticipation, while Beef was elucidating a somewhat technical question on the value of feathered darts as opposed to those with paper flights.
I noticed the Darienne brothers sitting together in their usual way, alone in a corner, and went over to talk to them. Somehow or other, the conversation worked itself back to how their act had started.
“But, of course,” said Christophe, “that was before we had Suzanne with us.”
The elder brother merely grunted at this.
“She has made all the difference to our act,” Christophe went on. “Now it’s the top of the show. Before Suzanne came we had to do turns on the bars and rings and so on. We couldn’t do very much on the trapeze. We knew the old tricks all right, but it needs a woman, and an expert like Suzanne, to make an act really go.”
“I don’t know,” said Paul slowly, looking down at the table as though he felt uncomfortable, “we had good times then. Our act is better, I suppose. But we were happier then.”
I thought I detected a note of resentment in Paul’s voice as he said this. Christophe was looking straight at his brother, with a question in his eyes, but Paul refused to look up.
“What was Suzanne doing before she joined up with you?” I asked in an attempt to fill in the gap which Paul had made. Christophe turned to me again.
“But you must have heard of her,” he said. I shook my head. “Oh, but she was famous,” he went on. “The Suzanne. She had been with all the really big circuses. She was marvelous in those days. She is not so good now as she was then. But you must see her.”
At this point a disturbance in the street outside saved me from answering, and in a few seconds the hunchback tent hand ran into the bar.
“Here,” he said, holding up his long arms to the crowd in the bar and obtaining immediate silence. “Have any of you seen what’s up the road?”
“What’ve you found, Tug?” asked Ginger. “A mermaid?”
The hunchback waved the facetiousness aside with the two words: “Bogli’s Circus.”
“What, in this village?”
“Where are they?”
“The dirty skunks.”
Comment came fast from every occupant of the bar, so that it seemed as if the queerly named Bogli’s Circus had committed some unmentionable crime against them.
“No, not here,” replied Tug. “But they’re playing tonight just down the road. A village about two miles out. And they’re sticking their posters on top of our fly-spots. I just passed a couple as I came down.”
In less than ten seconds the bar was empty except for Beef and myself, and there was a sound of shouting and footsteps in the street.
“What’s bitten them?” I asked Beef. But he shook his head.
“Better follow them and see,” was his suggestion, and we made our way out into the street in time to see the tail-end of the procession retreating round the corner.
But we did not have far to go. A few yards round the corner we came on them again, gathered in a group around a gatepost on which was displayed a brilliant blue poster advertising the performance that night of Bogli’s Circus in the next village. The orange edging underneath showed where the fly for Jacobi’s Circus was. Pete Daroga was slowly and ceremoniously peeling the new one off, and swearing to himself as he did so.
Two of the hands were immediately dispatched to tell Jackson of the occurrence and to get some new fly-bills and a pot of paste.
“There’s some work for some of us before the afternoon performance,” said Daroga grimly.
Beef nudged Kurt, who was spitting on his hands and rolling up his sleeves. “What’s it all about?” the Sergeant asked.
Kurt looked pityingly at us. “They put their posters on top of ours,” he said simply, “so we go round and put ours on top of theirs.”
“But why all this fuss about it?” I asked. “Why make all this trouble?”
Kurt grinned broadly and spat on his hands once more. “No trouble at all,” he said cheerfully.
CHAPTER XIV
April 28th (continued).
IN A few minutes the tent hands had returned from the circus loaded with pasting-pots and fly-bills. The group immediately divided into two, with six in each group, who agreed to take half of the village each, and set off. Beef and I were in the group which consisted of Len Waterman, who seemed to have sprung up from nowhere at the mention of trouble, the two Darienne brothers, Sid Bolton, the fat clown, Kurt the lion-trainer, and Ginger.
Sid Bolton was without doubt the most useful person we could have if we did happen to run into trouble—and from the grin on Kurt’s face and the way he kept rubbing his hands together, I suspected that it was very likely we should. Sid’s fists were the size of a respectable ham, and despite his size there was nothing sluggish about him.
The little cortège walked in “open formation” down the street, Ginger leading with the paste-pot and the fly-bills, and Beef and I bringing up a rather doubtful rear. Actually, Beef seemed to be enjoying the situation.
“Haven’t had a decent scrap since I was set on by those poachers,” he told me. “They don’t like you to be mixed up in a barney when you’re in the Force.”
I hoped, privately, that he would have no opportunity of making up for that omission now. But I refrained from saying this aloud for fear of damping his enthusiasm. Had I not been so closely involved in this business, I might have been able to appreciate the buccaneering spirit which animated these people. As it was, the possibility of being caught up in a “bundle” of some sort, made me overwhelmingly aware of my own shortcomings as a fighter, and I was only able to see the more ludicrous side of the affair. I had even got so fa
r as to envisage the possible headlines which might greet such an escapade. “Famous Author of Detective Fiction Arrested in Street Battle.” Well, perhaps not famous, but in any case it would be most embarrassing.
But my rumination was cut short by Ginger, who had found one of the hated blue posters. With a true sense of drama he sploshed paste over the offending advertisements and covered it with one of the orange bills he was carrying. We then walked on in search of more. But after this had been done some six or seven times the whole affair began to appear rather futile. No one appeared to defend the blue fly-bills, no one offered to battle with us over the right to use this or that gatepost, and apart from a stray child, a postman, and a road-sweeper, there was nobody to see our triumph. The little group walked on in silence.
At the far side of the village we were met by the other group, and it seemed there was nothing else to do now but to return to the tober. All the available sites in the village had been reclaimed without opposition. Bogli’s Circus had been vanquished without bloodshed, but it had been a barren triumph.
“Here, wait a minute,” said Kurt suddenly, as they were beginning to move off. “Where does that road go to?”
His pointing finger indicated a narrow stony road, which led out of the village down into the shallow valley about a mile and a half away. The road ran straight for about half a mile, and then dipped suddenly and disappeared. But a close group of trees and houses in the distance showed where it led to.
“That’s the village they’re playing at,” said Len Waterman.
“And there’s one of their bills,” concluded Ginger.
