IITHE CIRCUS
MY attention was distracted from these election concerns by the circus which had been set up in the Market Place. Its immense white tent, at last secured in place by solid pegs, bore above the entrance curtain, in letters of gold against a blue background, the inscriptionMarinetti’s Circus. A drummer plied his drumsticks at short intervals to attract the attention of the public, and from time to time the portière was raised and a princess in a spangled robe and rose-coloured stockings emerged like an apparition. I used to pass that way on my return from school, merely to hear that unceasing drum and to see that lady, who was sometimes old and sometimes very young. How I longed to get inside the tent! I indulged my desire for this forbidden paradise by lingering as long as possible and then speeding away at my best pace, so as not to be late at home.
Once I made the circuit of the tent and got “behind the scenes.” The waggon-houses were drawn up side by side at the back. Thick smoke was pouring from their slender chimneys—as if from green wood, and from the odour some witch’s broth must have been in course of preparation. Several raw-boned horses were wandering at liberty, as if they hadnot the strength to go far, under the indulgent watch of dogs whose indolence reassured me. A parroquet was fluttering from roof to roof. On the steps of one waggon a woman was sitting clothed in rags which unblushingly revealed her amber skin, combing her hair in the sun; the black mass which she drew forward cast a shadow over all her face, hiding it from me, though it alone interested me. A bronzed old fellow was smoking his pipe with a majesty like that of the old shepherd in his russet mantle, walking before his sheep with even pace toward the mountain. Some half-naked children, brown and curly-headed, crawling among the waggons, were hustling one another, exchanging thumps, when suddenly a door opened and out bounced a termagant, holding a stewpan in her left hand and with her right restoring peace by means of a few sound slaps.
This spectacle in no way cooled my curiosity. Has the wrong side of a theatre ever cooled the interest of amateurs or the zeal of actors? What was not my delight then when grandfather, returning from a walk, proposed to take me inside. I imagine he was going in on his own account and was far from suspecting my longings.
We entered. The orchestra, composed of a cornopean, two small flutes and a clavier which some one struck with two rulers—I was unfamiliar with the dulcimer—were making such a clatter as quite to drown out the faithful and monotonous drum outside. Little by little we grew usedto it and through all the noise I soon became aware of a sort of call, at once indescribably sad, sweet and authoritative, and so insistent that no one could resist it. In later years the Hungarian dances gave me a better understanding of the longing which I then felt. The sound brought before me unknown, far distant lands, and all the pleasures of vague pain. I longed to extend my arms to hasten the future. It was, as it were, a new apprehension of the still more vague sensation which Aunt Deen’s cradle song had awakened in me:
Si Dieu favoriseMa noble entrepriseJ’irai-z-à VeniseCouler d’heureux jours.
Si Dieu favoriseMa noble entrepriseJ’irai-z-à VeniseCouler d’heureux jours.
Si Dieu favoriseMa noble entrepriseJ’irai-z-à VeniseCouler d’heureux jours.
Si Dieu favorise
Ma noble entreprise
J’irai-z-à Venise
Couler d’heureux jours.
And I dimly realised that The House would never fulfil my dream. We didn’t hear such music there.
Powdered clowns in parti-coloured red and yellow costumes and little pointed caps played tricks upon one another which excited the laughter of the crowd and disgusted me. I had not come to witness buffoonery, but had expected, without quite knowing what, a noble and moving spectacle. Happily a tight-rope dancer restored my serenity, for it was with difficulty that she preserved her equilibrium, seeming likely at any moment to fall to the ground.
But the sensational number was the flying trapeze of the two Marinetti brothers. More than one celebrated acrobat has doubtless begun his career in a travelling circus. The two Marinetti brothers later becamecelebrated; one was killed in London by a fall; the other is to-day one of the first mimics of the world. At that time they were very young fellows, hardly older than I. One might have thought that they were simply amusing themselves, with no thought of the spectators. They played into each other’s hands with touching solicitude and arranged by a slight signal for the execution of their joint turns—I had almost said their duet, for there was so much rhythm in the supple movements of their two bodies that they really seemed to sing. During their whole glorious or tragic career, did they ever do anything more daring than those flights from one trapeze to another, without the security of the net, always laid in wait for by death, for which they seemed to care no more than a sparrowhawk for a knife?
The stifled cry of a woman in the audience awoke me to the danger to which I had been as indifferent as they, but of which I became suddenly aware. I was full of admiration and envy of them, soaring thus through the air. I could conceive of nothing more heroic, and my notion of courage underwent a change. Until now, through the epic stories father had told me, I had imagined it as always serving a cause. Hector was defending his city against the Greeks and Roland his faith against the Saracens. But was it not finer to juggle thus with oneself, for no reason, for one’s own pleasure?—for the public had ceased to count.In that ill-lighted circus, to the sound of that strange, exciting orchestra, I came to feel the charm of the danger that serves no purpose.
But clowns, rope dancer and even the Marinetti brothers were eclipsed in my imagination as by enchantment, when into the ring there dashed a little horsewoman standing erect upon a black horse whose saddle was large and flat like a table. I had been looking down during the interval, that is why I noticed the horse, for otherwise I should surely have seen only the rider. She wore a robe of gold. If the lamps had emitted less smoke and more light it is probable that that frayed dress would not have given me such a vision of luxury. The girl’s arms were bare and her hair unbound. Alone among all those tawny performers she was fair like the heroines of all my ballads. Merely by her leap into the ring she gave me what no woman had ever given me before, not even she whom I had met with grandfather and whom I had called the lady of the pavilion before I named her Helen;—not the sense of beauty—to that I had already attained; but the fear of approaching her and not keeping her. Yet I search my memory in vain for her features—I can not find them. I must have seen her often, and now I wonder if I ever looked at her, if I ever really dared to look at her. I think she had golden eyes—the golden tint of a virgin in a stained glass window through which the sun is shining. How old was she? Sixteenor seventeen—not older, and perhaps not so old. The fruits of her country do not need many months for ripening. She appeared taller than she was, by reason of her slenderness. It would be unjust to call her thin; slight, yes, but her slight form was full and muscular, and I wondered at the nascent roundness of her bosom. She was leaping through hoops that were held before her, and at each spring I trembled lest the horse should get away or she should miss the large saddle. It made me happy to tremble for her. Reassured by her skill I began to watch the movement of her hair, which each time she bounded rose and fell in cadence upon her shoulders. If a lock fell over her face she would throw it back with a gesture of annoyance.
The gravity of her countenance showed that she was wholly absorbed in her work. From time to time her lips would part with the little words hop, hop, designed to warm up her horse, who was apathetically rounding the circle. Then she would seat herself on the saddle for a moment’s rest, her legs hanging, while she indifferently bowed her head in answer to the applause, her bosom, unconfined by her clinging gown, rising and falling with her quickened breath. She seemed completely isolated from all around by her gravity, her indifference. The young girls whom I knew, my sisters’ friends, used to talk, chatter, laugh,play, put their arms around each others’ waists. This one was passive as an idol.
The show ended with a pantomime, every scene of which I remember. When we went back to the house I repeated it as well as I could by mobilising my sister Nicola, and even little Jamie for a minor part, pressing two little schoolfellows into the service, and with this improvised troop I proposed to treat our parents on the festival of one or the other. Our performance was ruthlessly stopped in the very middle without the slightest respect for dramatic art. Grandfather alone was clamorously delighted with it, for which Aunt Deen reproved him. Reflecting upon the incident, I at last recognised that the plot turned upon a hoodwinked husband. The innocent Nicola had been charged with this part, and under my instructions performed it with wonderful success. But I was forbidden to return to the circus.
The little circus queen who had made a single spring from her horse’s back into my imagination was doubtless destined to remain a magnificent and remote memory for me. But grandfather loved the company of artists and unconventional folk. I can see him now at the Café des Navigateurs, taking sides with all the Martinod group against the bourgeois. One day as we were crossing the Market Place he went round the tent to where the waggons were drawn up.
“Where are we going, grandfather?” I murmured, with throbbing heart.
“I want to get a nearer view of these people.”
In fact, he stopped and talked with the men who were smoking their pipes, while the women were preparing the soup or mending clothes. He spoke to them in an unknown tongue, which must have been Italian. This language upon his lips seemed to me simply incomprehensible. He pronounced it almost like the words that we use, only dwelling upon certain syllables and gliding over those that followed. But when those bronzed men spoke their words took on a strange accent, sometimes low and sometimes sharp, like gay music.
Were these clowns or acrobats? The Marinetti brothers were absent. To see them there would have filled me with pride. The only important personage whom I seemed to recognise was the rope dancer, and she was somewhat disconcertingly crowned with grey hair, and was sadly repairing a dirty skirt of puffed gauze. I was not aware that its proper name istulle.
Timidly my eyes sought the little horsewoman, though I should have preferred not to find her. I had looked too far away; she was at my side, peeling potatoes with a broken knife. Instead of her golden tunic, she was in an ugly striped gown. Her bare feet—that had been shod with gold—were covered with dust. But in this humiliation she seemed to me as beautiful as in her glory, on the pedestal of herlarge saddle, springing through hoops amid multitudinous applause. My eyes still enlightened by illusion, I found her just as beautiful, and yet my first impulse was to move away, of course from timidity—but also, I confess, because I had got from Aunt Deen, in the matter of gipsies and beggars, her fear of vermin, which she always said, are easily caught.
Let him who can explain these inconsistencies. I found a new and obscure feeling awaking within me, merely from the shame I felt at that recoil, and in my eagerness to be able to forgive myself, I could at once have shared with her even her insects.
I admired the nobility and also the dexterity with which she peeled her potatoes, never making two beginnings, but removing an entire skin with a single operation. She was condescending without impatience to this mean occupation, and I was grateful to her for her humility. As the other day in the ring, during her hippie exercises, she was serious and impassive, absorbed in her work. Yet did she not observe my fixed observation? She deigned to be the first to speak.
“Peeling is slow work,” she observed.
“Yes, indeed,” I replied, at the very summit of happiness; “peeling is slow work.”
I should have liked to help her. I ought to have helped her, but I dared not. A pharisaic scruple withheld me. Though my zeal might carry me even to the vermin which you catch without knowing it, I had notthe courage to endure the obloquy of peeling potatoes in the public square, before all thoseroulottes.
Our mutual confidences went no further. Suddenly a guttural voice called,
“Nazzarena!”
She left her vegetables and went away without saying good-bye. I was greatly moved; at least I knew her name. I rushed back to the house at a gallop, leaving behind me grandfather, waving his arms and crying,
“Halloa! Wait!”
It was impossible for me not to run. Wings had sprouted from my shoulders, and during my wild race my whole being was surging, like our music box when the spring was released. I rushed into the garden, bumping against Tem Bossette, who had not stepped aside quickly enough, and who shouted,
“What’s the matter with you, Master Francis?”
I replied laughing, but without checking my speed:
“Why, nothing at all. Nothing is the matter with me.”
I leaped over the cannas, flew to the orchard like a run-away chicken, and threw myself, breathless, against a young apple tree. The trees were in blossom—it was springtime. The branches trembled at the shock, and a shower of rosy petals rained down upon me.
I was far from suspecting that I was also gathering the blossom of love, the love that does not ripen.
At school the Marinetti circus had become the object of all our interest and conversation. In the playground, between two games of prison-bars, the big boys discussed sometimes the flying trapeze, which had dazzled the lovers of sport, and sometimes the little horsewoman, preferred by the clan of philosophers. I would catch fragments of their remarks as I passed, and I was burning to arouse the envy of my elders with the superiority which I had achieved over them. Thus torn between my secret and my vanity, it was the latter which won out, and one day, with feigned modesty, I admitted that I had spoken to her. My object was at once attained and even exceeded: they all crowded around me, congratulating me, plying me with questions. I was forced to embroider the truth a little, in order to satisfy their curiosity.
“You are a lucky fellow,” said Fernand de Montraut, whose jealousy I divined.
Fernand de Montraut was the ornament of the rhetoric division and at the same time the lowest in the class. He passed for the most elegant fellow in school because of his cravats, and every one bowed to his superior experience in all matters of sentiment, for he boasted the friendship of several girls. Unfortunately, he added,
“Then you are in love?”
Not knowing until that moment what it was to be in love, I at once learned its meaning from his question, and gave myself up to the melancholy which I deemed the proper thing.
Grandfather having struck up an acquaintance with the circus folk, whom he supplied with tobacco, I found myself again in Nazzarena’s presence. The desire to give her something tortured me, the more so because Fernand de Montraut, an acknowledged judge, had assured me that one always gave presents to ladies. The only embarrassment was the choice of gift. Now I had in a drawer a collection of cornelian marbles which I treasured as if they had been jewels. There were spotted red ones, and black ones with white circles. Nothing that I possessed was more precious to me. For a moment I hesitated at so great a sacrifice, and thought of at least keeping back that flame-coloured agate that the light shone through and which was my favourite. But it was clear to me that if I kept back that one my offering would be worthless. In a moment of resignation rather than of enthusiasm I gathered up the whole lot and ran to my new friend, awkwardly presenting them to her without a word of explanation. She seemed somewhat surprised, but accepted them without hesitation.
“Zat’s pretty,” she said, “you ’z cute.”
She used familiar words, which I had always heard without noticing their sound, and it seemed as if she had transformed them into another language, all flowers and music. I was emboldened to speak to her inreply, urged on perhaps by a notion of justice: having sacrificed my marbles I had a right to some compensation.
“I know your name,” I said with some emphasis. “Your name is Nazzarena.”
She was greatly delighted at the extent of my knowledge.
“Aha! he knows my name. But it isn’t Nazzarena, it’s Nazzaré-na. Say it!”
I must needs learn her accent. After which she asked,
“What’s your name?”
“Francis.”
“Like the saint of Assisi. And where are you from?”
“Why, from here, of course.”
How should I be from anywhere else? One lives in his own town and his own house. Perhaps she perceived her blunder, for she asked no more questions and it was I who bashfully resumed the conversation, not without timidity.
“Where are you from?”
“I don’t know.”
What a curious answer! One always knows where one is from. Well!
“Then you have no house of your own?”
“That’s our house.”
She pointed to one of the waggons, the front of which was painted green. I could not mistake her expression of scorn. She suddenlyturned away and gazed at the great buildings of cut stone which surrounded the market place on all four sides; my town is ancient and rugged, and its houses were built to last for centuries. Perhaps she was estimating the security of a stationary life, but I was picturing to myself the joys of a nomad existence when I went on:
“It must be very amusing.”
“What must?”
“To keep changing your locality.”
I used the wordlocalitypurposely, to give her a high idea of me.
“That depends,” she said. “There are places where the receipts are bad. One time we made only seven francs and a half.”
Details of that sort were of no interest, but I went on to confess to an unbounded admiration for this mode of life. At this declaration she opened her eyes wide, doubtless amazed that one could envy her when one lived in one of those great buildings, capable of enduring all sorts of bad weather.
“All the same you wouldn’t come with us.” The mere suggestion seemed to please her, but she at once put it away as an absurdity.
“Besides you can’t know much. But you’z cute.”
Again that expression which seemed offensive to my self-love. I could not remain silent under so unworthy an estimate, and I retorted proudly,
“I can ride horse-back.”
I had sometimes been hoisted upon our farmer’s blind mare, and had even experienced a disquietude akin to fear when long shivers ran through her body. My friend appeared enchanted and promised to lend me her black steed.
How does the grown-up heart differ from that of childhood? I had not the least idea of going with her. She did not suppose I was going. I had not the slightest equestrian ability. She had no authority over her horse; without mutual agreement each was conniving at luring the other on. It was a delicious foretaste of the falsehoods which lurk beneath all lovers’ conversations.
Just then, as we both sat silent, a fearful and torturing memory came to me. One phrase—just a short phrase from the book of ballads which I had read and reread during my convalescence, until they seemed to form part of the very atmosphere of my existence, suddenly detached itself from the rest—I heard it within myself as if another than myself had uttered it. It was a line in the legend of The Lord of Burleigh. The Lord of Burleigh is speaking to a peasant girl, who is the prettiest and most modest girl in the village, and what he says is,
There is no one in the world whom I love like thee.
To be sure, I should never in the world have spoken those words aloud; I should even have closed my lips tight to make sure of not uttering them. But I felt them as living things, and they thrilled through me.Now I discovered their prodigious meaning. How could one say such words to some one who was not of one’s family, and whom one hardly knew?No one in the world! What about father—and mother? I dimly perceived the sacrilegious power of love, and while I was leaning over that abyss, Nazzarena, usually so grave, was laughing and showing her teeth.
One of the bronzed men of the troop passed, and stopped before us, scrutinising us. Then suddenly he knocked our two heads together, uttering in his jargon a word or two that I did not understand.
The touch of her cheek burned me, and violently pulling myself free I felt myself reddening to the very roots of my hair. She only laughed the more.
“What did he say?” I stammered, tossed between anger and a totally new emotion.
“Oh, nothing,” said she. “That you were my little lover.”
“I!” I protested. “What an idea!”
I could not consent that it should be possible. The love that one expressed must lose all importance. And what next? That way everything would be over. Surely, for love to be love one must keep it to oneself and it must hurt....