It was always the same with Uncle Toby. He always sucked in an anxious breath while the lion-tamers cowed the tawny, snarling big cats. When the wire-walker who pretended to be drunk climbed up the pylon to the high wire and, reeling and stumbling, seemed about to fall, he half-rose with sweat on his face. The little girls laughed at their silly uncle. Did he not realize that it was all an act? Didn’t he know that in a circus such things were done every day, year in and year out? Silly uncle, nice uncle! Simple-minded uncle!
The children could not be expected to know that he went to the circus, as he went to musical reviews, half hoping that something unexpected might happen.
The Equestrienne might fall off the great white horse. The leopard that watched, crouching, lashing its tail, might spring and rend. There was one chance in a million that the intoxicated-looking man on the high wire might just for that once really be drunk, and fall; and oh, the soft wicked thud of the body in the sawdust!
There was the Woman who hung by the chin on the edge of a sabre; and there were the Flying Foxes, three men and a girl. One of them always pretended, on the high trapeze, to miss his cue. There was a moment of frightful tension. Say, just say, that he had been up a little too late the night before and for one split second lost confidence? The Murderer knew how easily, in a split second, a man can lose confidence. Or say that the girl, who fascinated and terrified the whole world with her triple somersaults, under-estimated or over-estimated her take-off by the merest mote of time, so that the big man missed? He could see the madly clutching fingers grasping nothing; hear the screams of the spectators. … The big man swung himself back to his platform, but before he reached it the girl was bouncing on the sawdust, while everyone stood up, stretched taut with horror.
Meanwhile, to the left and the right of him, his nieces squealed with delight.
Then there were the side-shows. There were midgets, bearded ladies, living skeletons, ‘The Ugliest Woman in the World’, and the ‘Limbless Wonder’. This last-named freak had a beautiful head, and an indeterminate torso without arms or legs. She painted in water-colour, holding the brush between her teeth. He could watch her for hours.
Also he liked the Midgets that lived in dolls’ houses — men and women of mature age; the biggest was no taller than a four-year-old child. How nice to be with such people, the strongest of whom he could pick up with one hand!
After these exhibitions, there were always things to do. One spieler invited him to ‘smash up the happy home’. At the end of a brightly-lit blind-alley stood a representation of a peaceful kitchen — a table set with plates, cups, and dishes; and a dresser full of plates and cups and saucers. You bought the right to smash everything — seven balls cost a shilling. You took careful aim and threw. A teacup flew to fragments; a dinner plate dropped to shards. Crash! — and a soup plate tinkled down. Respectable husbands of wives and fathers of families slapped down their shillings and hurled their wooden balls at ‘The Happy Home’.
And the Shooting Galleries, too, had clay figures of men and animals which, when hit with a little lead bullet, burst asunder like Judas Iscariot. Or there was a tired-looking little old man in a high silk hat. You could see him in his entirety, but he was protected up to the crown of his head by a wire fence. Only the hat was vulnerable and you knocked that off — with wooden balls again. The nieces shrieked with glee and congratulated their uncle on his skill.
There was a softer side to this idealist; he loved to amuse the children.
Above everything — the crack of little rifles, the spank of wooden balls against skittles, the smash of broken crockery, and the twang of the wire fence that guarded the man in the silk hat — there was the gay scream of the calliope and the shrieks of the young ladies coming out of the ‘Haunted House’. Here, passing down dark passages made comically horrible by dancing skeletons and uncertain floors, you arrived at a chute. It let you down with a rush. Scores of young men jostled one another at the bottom of the chute. As the girls slid down, kicking and shrieking, the watchful spectators could rely upon a glimpse of underwear, and sometimes that which it was supposed to conceal.
Having taken his nieces home, he generally went back to the fun fair alone.
46
Asta, as I write, is being talked into militancy on the side of August Lang Fowler, who claims to have recorded the thin, high, agonized cry of cut flowers.
Only Catchy goes regularly to the Bar Bacchus nowadays — and about her there clings, always, an atmosphere of guilt, of maudlin grief, stale liquor, and decay that makes you long for a good high wind to blow her and her kind from the face of the earth, the fly-blown face of the exhausted earth.
THE END