“Honestly. What has? Come on…tell a fellow.”
“I can’t tell you just now. That’s my cue. And I can’t see you after the show. I’m busy. I’ve got to get into the town and do something. Listen—I’ll see you after tonight’s show. Dodo’s giving a party. Are you going?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m not. Sneak out of it round about midnight. I’ll meet you at the back of the tigers’ cage. I’ll tell you something that’ll make you sit up. I’ll tell you this now, though. Keep that girl of yours away from Joe Carey. He’s not a very suitable companion for a nice girl like Loretta.”
“I know it,” said Lorimer.
The band blared out, hanging grimly to a triumphal chord. The plush curtains parted, and Miss St. Clair’s Educated Ponies trooped through and were led away for a wash-down and a meal. Miss St. Clair appeared, said: “Hullo, darling!” to Anton, disappeared again, took a number of bows to the accompaniment of some rather half-hearted applause, appeared again, said: “Lovely house—just listen to the dears!” disappeared again, took a few more bows to applause that was now only a ripple, came back through the curtains, debated for a moment about taking a third call, decided against it and went off to her dressing-tent for a cup of tea.
The band struck up Anton’s music. On the other side of their platform, the door of the tigers’ cage was opened, and the cubs roused and sent down the tunnel into the ring. The two older animals followed after a brief argument. Peter was left alone in a corner of the cage. The two attendants responsible for getting the animals into the ring armed themselves with sticks, and prodded Peter viciously in the behind. Anton, flinging off his dressing-gown, ran round to see what was holding up his act.
“Don’t do that, you damned fools! Leave the beast alone—he’ll go in all right if you leave him.”
“Yes—but when?”
“Well, stop punching him like that. It’s all right for you. I’ve got to go into the ring with him, after you’ve made him mad.”
The tiger gave a lusty roar and slouched off down the tunnel.
“He’s losing his nerve,” said one of the attendants, who would no more have thought of appearing unarmed in the ring with the smallest of the cubs than have contemplated climbing Mount Everest on roller-skates. “Losing his nerve, that’s what he’s doing.”
Anton parted the curtains and ran to the side of the ring. The house was filled mainly with children, who rose and cheered wildly. This was the kind of thing they were after; for, having been let out early from their schools in order to attend the opening performance of the circus, they had very little use for Miss St. Clair and her Educated Ponies. The less education the better. The tigers and the elephants and the comic little clown were what they were after. They had studied the posters of Anton’s act each day since Mr. Johnston and his advance staff arrived in the town and plastered them on all the hoardings…they had studied them, and weaved highly imaginative tales around the gentleman and the things he did to his seven tigers. He held the biggest one up in his arms, high above his head, and made the others jump over it. That was what he did: there was a picture of him doing it on the hoarding beside the station. They had not yet reached the age of realizing that circus posters, like the advertisements of patent medicines, are a little too freely studded with superlatives to be taken literally. They cheered and yelled, and suddenly subsided and waited in silence.
Anton opened the door of the huge cage which had been erected right round the ring—to the great annoyance of Miss St. Clair. Miss St. Clair made out that it spoiled her act and put the idea into her ponies’ heads that they were dangerous animals. He banged the door shut, locking it behind his back. The tigers turned round to face him on hearing the door clang to, and the four cubs went meekly into the positions for their first trick without even waiting for a word from Anton.
He was unarmed, without even a whip: that was one of the great features of his act. The first few tricks were schedule stuff and went through smoothly, though Peter was plainly in no mood to be played with on this sultry afternoon. The high-jump apparatus was placed in position in the middle of the ring, and the rope hoop set on top of it. The tigers were back in their positions round the edge of the ring; the cubs had gone off to sleep. Anton, with his eyes fixed on Peter, walked backwards to the bars of the cage and took from one of the attendants outside the torch which was to set the rope hoop alight. Peter gave a lusty snarl on catching sight of the flame, and ran quickly round to the far side of the ring. Anton lit the hoop, which was soaked in petroleum and burned up quickly. He roused the cubs and sent them one at a time through the hoop without any great difficulty. The children got off their seats again and roared their approval. The two older beasts took a good deal more trouble before they could be persuaded to leap through the hoop. He got them at last and they retired, grumbling, on to their boxes. Anton walked up to Peter.
Peter was damned if he was going to go through any hoop of fire to please any animal trainer, however brilliant and well-paid. It was hot enough this afternoon without hoops of fire; he’d been rubbed up the wrong way by those attendants shoving him out of the cage; in any case, it was beneath his dignity to show himself cowed by a mere man in front of a house of yelling children. Peter sat very still on his box, his jaws wide open, but no sound coming from his powerful throat. Anton came up to within a yard of him, calling him by name. Peter looked down on him with a pair of bright green eyes. Anton took another step forward. A huge forepaw flashed out within inches of his face; he leapt back into the middle of the ring. The children sat tense, leaning forward on the edges of their seats. Anton walked slowly up to the tiger again.
“Peter!…come down, Peter!…Peter—here, Peter…”
The tiger roared and slouched off his box down on to the sawdust. Anton felt better—he had the upper hand now. He started to manoeuvre the beast round to the other side of the ring. Peter went, meekly at first, and then suddenly turned to face his trainer and made one lightning dash into the centre of the ring. Anton jumped aside and ran backwards to the bars of the cage.
“Whip!” he said.
He knew that, with Peter in his present frame of mind, it was merely inviting trouble to try and finish the act without a whip. The attendant passed it through the bars to him with a muttered, “Stick it, lad!” Anton grasped the whip without taking his eyes off Peter.
The two older beasts decided to come off their boxes and join in whatever fun happened to be going. It was the one thing Anton had hoped would not happen. He could deal with Peter alone all right; Peter, in his present mood, plus two other none-too-genial tigers at his back, was a different kettle of fish altogether. He cracked his whip; the two tigers went slowly back to their positions. Peter stood his ground in the middle of the ring, his neck stretched out and his jaws wide apart. The whip cracked again. The tiger went slowly round to the side of the ring from which he started his run up to the hoop of fire.
“Now, Peter…jump!”
The tiger jumped—at Anton.
A woman in the dearer seats—one of the few people at the matinée who had paid the necessary amount of money to be given a piece of carpet instead of a plain board to sit on—screamed shrilly. The attendant standing below the band platform had his finger taut on the trigger of his revolver. Anton was all right, though. He had the tiger back in position again, and the long cord of the whip cracked smartly against the beast’s hind-quarters. It was the first time that he had used the whip on any of his tigers for months.
“Now, Peter…up!”
The beast began its run. Just before it jumped, Anton stepped back into the middle of the ring, satisfied that he had got what he wanted. Peter, catching sight of the movement, side-tracked as if to spring at him, caught sight of the whip in Anton’s hand, and jumped. Instead of clearing the hoop perfectly, he grazed the rim of the rope with his body. The burning rope scorched his skin, and the ani
mal gave a roar of genuine bad temper. In the same moment as his landing after the jump, he turned on Anton for the third time. Anton backed towards the door of the cage leading out into the tunnel, and cracked his whip twice in quick succession.
“Open the door!”
The two attendants pulled back the latches and the door to the tunnel shot open. Peter, turning round at the noise, saw the open door and ran out of the ring and up through the tunnel. The other beasts followed him, all except the baby cub, who was by this time sound asleep and had to be pushed out of the ring. The door shut, and another clang, a few seconds later, told Anton that the second door, at the other end of the tunnel, had also been shut and that his seven Bengal tigers were back in their cage.
He took his applause, ran out of the ring, and came back for several vigorous calls. He pushed aside the plush curtains and took his dressing-gown from an attendant.
“Bit frisky today, sir, aren’t they?” said the attendant.
“Yes. It’s this heat,” said Anton, and realized that his whole body was trembling. He ran off to change his clothes. He had an appointment to make—an appointment with the local superintendent of police.
The attendant who had handed him his dressing-gown crossed over to where a grotesquely dressed clown was standing, waiting to go on while the cage was being taken down. The clown had his face completely whitened, save for two enormous eyebrows of black, fully an inch in thickness. He wore a tiny bowler-hat, and a harlequinade costume of red and yellow silk. He carried a heavy book under his arm.
“Those cats’ll get Anton one of these days,” said the attendant.
The clown patted his wig into position and gave the man his book to hold while he was playing the fool in the ring.
“Yes,” said Dodo, “they’ll get him all right. Perhaps it would save a lot of trouble if they did.”
Chapter Five
In a weak moment Mr. Minto had invited his brother and sister and sister’s fiancé to dinner at the Station Hotel, and afterwards to the evening performance of the circus. Claire had said that she was quite sure that Mr. Minto, after spending an evening in the company of her Ronald, would realize the other side of the young man’s character, and would see how wrong his brother had been in summing him up.
Mr. Minto, as early as the soup course, was forced to the conclusion that Claire’s young man had not been fitted out with a character at all, let alone a character with more than one side. He was shy and ill-at-ease and with no conversational powers at all; and Mr. Minto did not hold with the way he gripped his knife and fork in mid-air while masticating each mouthful. He tried his best to persuade young Mr. Briggs to open out: he asked him about business, and pumped him for details of the vacuum-cleaner industry, only to receive the information that it “wasn’t a bad life”. Mr. Minto asked him if he liked circuses; young Mr. Briggs replied that they weren’t bad. Mr. Minto asked him if he was enjoying his dinner; young Mr. Briggs said that it, too, wasn’t bad. A queer young man, Mr. Minto decided, and fell to brooding moodily on this thing called Love.
Honestly, you could never tell what Love would be up to next. Here it had got hold of Claire Minto, a sensible and normal female if ever there was one, and reduced her to a state of jelly-like devotion for this pale and rather mannerless youth. Claire, of all people: a girl who enjoyed life to the full, who was intelligent and appreciated intelligence in others…what on earth had made her fall for a vacuum-cleaning youth like Ronald Briggs? Mr. Minto had no idea, and sighed mournfully as the relics of his fish were taken away and the entrée put before him.
“Was that a sigh, darling?” asked Claire. “Or just your asthma?”
“It was a sigh,” said Mr. Minto. “‘I sip no sup, and I crave no crumb, and I sigh for the love of a ladye.’’’
“That’s poetry, isn’t it?” said Mr. Briggs.
“Do you mean you want an affair?” asked Claire. “Or are you just quoting from Gilbert and Sullivan?”
“I was quoting.”
“Well, you might at least be accurate. You’re sipping your sup pretty well—pour me out another glass, Robert—and you seem to be craving your crumbs all right. Who’s the ladye in question?”
“You,” said Mr. Minto.
“Well, you can’t have me. Ronnie got me with his strong, he-manly personality. Didn’t you, darling?”
Young Mr. Briggs gave a little giggle and continued to pick at his entrée.
“He swept me off my feet—just as though I were a speck of dust and he was demonstrating one of his vacuums.”
“I wasn’t wanting you,” said Mr. Minto. “I was sighing for you, but I wasn’t wanting you. As a matter of fact, I was just wondering how you would settle down to married life. You’re making a terrible mistake, you know, young man. She’s an awful woman.”
The husband-to-be made a series of clucking noises with his teeth, intended, presumably, to convey the impression that Claire wasn’t an awful woman at all, that Mr. Minto really shouldn’t say such things about his own sister, but that of course he must have his little joke.
“No, but I mean it,” said Mr. Minto, pouring out more champagne. “Do you remember, Robert, the time she stood up in the middle of one of your sermons and shouted out ‘Bosh!’?”
The priest, who had been concentrating on his dinner up to now, dropped his knife and fork with a clatter and went pink at the thought of the incident.
“I don’t see anything wrong in that,” said Claire. “It was both. Utter bosh. By the way, have we got to go to this circus?”
“There’s nothing else to do in this town. There isn’t a theatre and all the films I see advertised were in London round about the time of the first Wembley Exhibition. So we’re going to the circus.”
“Ronnie and I thought of spending a quiet night, planning things.”
“If you think I’m going to waste a whole evening watching you two canoodling on a sofa with sappy expressions on your stupid faces, planning the colour of your spare-bedroom curtains—if you think that, you’re very much mistaken,” said Mr. Minto. “No, we’re going to the circus, and after that we’re going to Dodo’s party.”
“Who, might I ask, is Dodo?” said the priest.
“Dodo is the leading clown in the circus. A very intelligent little man. He’s staying in this hotel, and we had a most interesting talk at breakfast this morning. About porridge. He’s giving a party, and we’re all invited. Beer and bangers.”
“Bangers?” said Robert, suspecting that they had something to do with the Fifth of November.
“Beer and bangers and lots of Camembert.”
“Gorgeous!” said Claire. “I shall eat until I burst, and rumble the whole night.”
“If you burst first, you won’t rumble,” said Mr. Minto, whose police training had made him a stickler for accuracy in such matters. “And if you are going to burst, do so at the circus and not here. They’d charge it as extra on my bill—it’s that kind of an hotel. What do you say to the circus and supper idea, Mr. Briggs?”
“Not bad,” said Mr. Briggs.
The party broke up and prepared to leave for the circus. In the hotel foyer, Claire drew Mr. Minto aside and whispered to him.
“What do you think of him?” she asked. “Ronnie, I mean.”
“Not bad,” said Mr. Minto.
The circus was a huge success. Mr. Minto had by this time befriended almost all the artists staying in the hotel, and he was able to tell the other members of his party the inner history of each act. The priest spent the evening staring open-mouthed at the goings-on in the ring, and raising his eyebrows higher and higher as Mr. Minto took the gilt off each turn’s gingerbread by revealing that the artists concerned suffered from rheumatism, spent their spare time knitting socks, or were secret drinkers when not actually doing their stuff in the show.
The clown, Dodo, recognized them
on his first appearance, and introduced one or two personal allusions which were greatly appreciated by Mr. Minto, but which left the rest of the audience rather cold. Mr. Minto’s brother, being a priest, thought them a trifle outspoken, but did not say so. Lorimer, perched high in the very roof of the tent and waiting for Loretta to get into position for the beginning of their act, waved down to Mr. Minto, and Mr. Minto waved back with his bowler-hat. His stock at once soared in the eyes of the surrounding audience, and one discerning youth of about six years left his parents in the half-crown seats and clambered up to sit beside Mr. Minto, who was obviously the man to settle one or two knotty points which his father and mother had been unable to answer.
“My name’s Bobby,” said the youth.
“So is that funny-looking gentleman’s,” said Mr. Minto, pointing to his brother. “But we’re not allowed to call him Bobby, because he wears his collar that way round. We have to call him Robert. Father Robert at that.”
The youth, after thinking this out for a moment or two, got down to business. Was it true that Anton caught all his tigers when they were baby tigers and taught them to do their tricks then? Mr. Minto was not sure, but thought it highly probable. Was it true that Anton’s tigers had all their claws and teeth taken out, and really weren’t a bit f’rocious? Oh no, said Mr. Minto, shocked at such an improper idea; Anton’s tigers were the most f’rocious tigers in the whole world, and it was very, very brave of Anton to go in beside them and make them do all those clever tricks. Would he (Mr. Minto) go in a cage beside seven tigers? No, not unless it was absolutely necessary. Would he do it for a million pounds? No, certainly not for a million pounds. Would he do it for a billion pounds? No, Mr. Minto didn’t think he would do it even for a billion pounds. Would he for a billion billion pounds? Mr. Minto, realizing that this sort of thing might go on for some time, said that he wouldn’t do it for any amount of money.
Death of Anton Page 5
