The animals were all wrecks, and the troupers all looked stupid and cruel, and none of them seemed to be any good at anything. It was cold out and hot in, and there was a nightsweat crossfire from the laboring generators and the Alaskan drafts through the ragged canvas and the slow-moving gusts of beast-warmed gas . . . Gwyn's countenance, on arrival (Richard noted), was obviously geared up for a whole evening of childlike wonder; but he soon forgot about that and fell in with all the flat smiles and crinkled lips and the earnest concern with animals' rights and animals' germs.
"Who's funding these clowns?" asked the publicity boy, rhetorically.
But there were no clowns.
Cringing off-white dogs were being urged with many menaces to attempt bedraggled diagonal leaps through hand-held hoops as Richard identified Professor Stanwyck Mills, standing near the spread of crates and trunks where the performers stored their juggling batons, their sequined capes, their bolts of damp finery. He was talking and being talked to by Gwyn Barry; Gwyn had his head cocked at a sympathetic angle, and was frowning and nodding as if assenting (on TV) to a proposition both beautiful and true. And there in the ring, after his stunts with the dogs, the matador, arms raised, had gone into his tense-buttocked appeal for recognition and praise.
There followed a collective high-pitched groan-almost a hoot-as a putrescent little elephant waddled out into the glare. Was this an elderly dwarf elephant, or just an afflicted infant elephant, already rotting at the age of one? Its well-intentioned wanderings and blunderings were somehow meant to be combined with the fierce determination of a piebald pony, running in its tight circle with a kind of traumatized invariance, apparently prepared to keep doing that forever while the
elephant plodded helplessly about, so anxious to please, black rheum
thrown off from its eyes like sweat, its damp-damaged hide lightly coated with the kind of hair that sprouts out near a healing wound, gingery and brittle, like the weft of baklava. Dressed in overalls, theelephant could have passed for a London builder: cheerful, not very dishonest, complete with beer-paunch and bony coccyx-prominent on its fleshless, winded rump.
Richard saw his chance. "Professor Mills?" he said, and introduced himself at length. "I wonder if you were ever sent a copy of our review of the reprint of Jurisprudential? I brought a copy along. Hoped you might be here. An interesting review, as well as a favorable one."
"Why thank you," he said. "I'll look forward to that."
The reviews, thought Richard, had definitely been a good idea. Americans couldn't know-couldn't possibly imagine-just how little The Little Magazine really was.
"I'm particularly interested in your ideas on penal reform," Richard went on. "I like what I might call your humanely utilitarian slant. In a field so full of humbug. As you say, the question is: 'Does it work?' "
They talked on, or Richard did. Mills had an air of troubled and shaky preoccupation. Glancing at the animals, the runts and curs and strays bobbing round the ring, Richard was struck by Mills's inches: for an Irish-American he seemed fabulously tall. So maybe this tremulous fatigue was what the tall ended up with, after a lifetime of lugging that sack of height. Round his neck he wore a light surgical brace like an aerodynamic yoke.
"It's amazing how hidebound we are in England. Still the old ideas. Deterrence. Sequestration. There's a lot of talk but no will to bring about change. Even our most liberal public figures say one thing and …" Richard appeared to hesitate, as if considering the etiquette or equity of simply seizing on the nearest example. "Well. Take Gwyn Barry. Thoroughly liberal in all his pronouncements. But deep down …"
"You surprise me. In his writing he seems-irreproachably liberal on such matters."
"Gwyn? Oh, you've no idea the kind of things he'll say in private. He actually favors a return to more public forms of punishment."
As Mills leaned backward on his plinth Richard went through the formality of telling himself not to get carried away.
"With paying spectators. Retributive and exemplary. But with a vengeance. So to speak. Stocks and pillories. Ceremonial scourgings. Ducking-stools. Tarring and feathering. Impalements and flayings. You see, he thinks the mob has had a poor deal in recent years. Public ston-ings, even lynchings-"
He was interrupted, not by the professor, but by the publishing and bookselling community and its fresh consensus of exhausted forbearance: a pair of midget camels or lumpy llamas were now trotting anx-iously about, to so little purpose that the ringmaster was now giving them the taste of his lash. A modest instrument-a black cord on a black stick. Nothing like the deafening bullwhips that Richard had in mind. He said,
"You're an Irishman, Professor. You must have followed that case- the bomb in the shopping center. Here's what Gwyn said. He said: round up all known IRA members and shackle them to the gates of the Tower of London. With a big sign, with pictures, saying what they did and inviting the public to go ahead and vent their anger. And then, after a couple of months of that, when their arms and their legs and their 'cocks' have been ripped off (do excuse me), string them up for the ravens. Oh yes. That's friend Barry for you."
Richard might have said more; but now a steel-hooped tunnel was being hastily and noisily pounded together, leading through the crowd toward a square cage in the ring. There was talk of a tiger . . . The two men found themselves pushed together in the press, Richard taking care to shield the professor, who seemed fearful for the upholstery supporting his neck. They stood side by side, enjoying what Richard felt to be a just and wordless solidarity. Earlier that winter (the case was still sub judice), Mills had Christmased with his wife at their holiday home on Lake Tahoe; forcing entry on Christmas Eve, a crew of nomad joy-raiders had then subjected the Millses to a two-hundred-hour ordeal of abuse, battery, bondage and arson. The professor was of course aware that a personal experience, however dire, should carry only statistical weight in the settlement of one's intellectual positions. But he was doing a lot of rethinking, which he was going to have to do a lot of anyway, because the many scores of texts he had studied and annotated in preparation for his next book (a lifetime effort provisionally entitled The Lenient Hand) had been mockingly torched by the intruders, along with the rest of his work station and, it seemed, everything else he had ever cared about. His wife, Marietta, still in deep therapy, hadn't uttered a word since New Year's Day.
The tiger was coming. Richard dumped Stanwyck and managed to dispatch another tray of drinks before sidling his way ringside. Along its tube of bars the tiger moved silently in the hush, with almost inorganic smoothness, like the contents of a hypodermic responding to the pressure of the surgeon's thumb. Richard looked up suddenly: Gwyn was