Adam came to a standstill. “Where’s the boss?” The tones were thick and muffled. A feeble smile swept over my face: I discovered I was holding my breath.
A few paces now, the din distanced a little and the glare diminished. Then sounded another voice hoarse and violent, high above my head.
The cage bumped to the ground. And I heard Adam cringingly explain: “I’ve got a bird here for you, mister.”
“A bird,” rang the jeer, “who wants your bloody bird? Be off.”
“Ay, but it won’t be a bloody bird,” gasped Adam cajolingly, “when you’ve seen her pretty feathers.”
At this, apparently, recollection of Adam’s face or voice returned to the showman. He remained silent while with palsied fingers Adam unlatched my bolts and bars. Bent almost double and half-stifled, I sat there in sight, my clothes spread brightly out about me. The cool air swirled in, and for a while my eyes dazzled at the bubbling blaze of a naphtha lamp suspended from the pole of the tent above the crisscross green-bladed grass at my feet. I lifted my head.
There stood Adam, in his black tailcoat rubbing his arm; and there the showman. Still to the tips of my fingers, I sat motionless, gazing up into the hard, high-boned, narrow-browed face with its small restless eyes voraciously taking me in. Fortunately the choked beating of my heart was too small a sound for his ear; and he was the first to withdraw from the encounter.
“My God,” he muttered, and spat into a corner of the canvas booth—with its one dripping lamp, its rough table and chair, and a few oddments of his trade.
“And what, my handsome young lady,” he went on in a low, carneying tone, and fidgeting with his hands, “what might be your little imbroglio?”
In a gush, presence of mind returned to me, and fear passed away. I quietly listened to myself explaining without any concealment precisely what was my little imbroglio. He burst out laughing.
“Stage-struck, eh? There’s a young lady now! Well, who’s to blame ’ee?”
He asked me my age, my name, where I came from, if I could dance, sing, ride; and stared so roundly at me that I seemed to see my garish colours reflected in the metallic grey of his eyes.
All this was on his side of the bargain. Now came mine. I folded tight my hands in my lap, glanced up at the flaming lamp. How much would he pay me?
It was as if a shutter had descended over his face. “Drat me,” said he, “when a young lady comes selling anything, she asks her price.”
So I asked mine—fifteen guineas for four nights’ hire. … To look at that human animal you might have supposed the actual guineas had lodged in his throat. It may be that Shylock’s was a more modest bargain. I cannot say.
At first thought it had seemed to me a monstrous sum, but at that time I was ignorant of what a really fine midget fetched. It was but half my old quarterly allowance, with £2 over for Adam. I should need every penny of it. And I had not come selling my soul without having first decided on its value. The showman fumed and blustered. But I sat close on Chakka’s abandoned stage, perfectly still, making no answer; finding, moreover, in Adam an unexpected stronghold, for the wider gawked his frightened eyes at the showman’s noise and gesticulations, the more resolved I became. With a last dreadful oath, the showman all but kicked a hole in my cage.
“Take me away, Adam,” I cried quaveringly; “we are wasting this gentleman’s time.”
I smiled to myself, in spite of the cold tremors that were shaking me all over; with every nerve and sinew of his corpulent body he was coveting me: and with a curse he at last accepted my terms. I shrugged my shoulders, but still refused to stir a finger until our contract had been written down in black and white. Maybe some tiny lovebird of courage roosts beneath every human skull, maybe my mother’s fine French blood had rilled to the surface. However that may be, there could be no turning back.
He drew out a stump of pencil and a dirty envelope. “That, my fine cock,” he said to Adam, as he wrote, “that’s a woman; and you make no mistake about it. To hell with your fine ladies.”
It remains, if not the most delicate, certainly one of the most substantial compliments I ever earned in my life.
“That’s that,” he pretended to groan, presenting me with his scrawl. “Ask a shark for a stamp, and if ruined I must be—ruined I am.”
I leapt to my feet, shook out my tumbled finery, smiled into his stooping face, and tucked the contract into my bodice. “Thank you, sir,” I said, “and I promise you shan’t be ruined if I can help it.” Whereupon Adam became exceedingly merry, the danger now over.
Such are the facts concerning this little transaction, so far as I can recall them; yet I confess to being a little incredulous. Have I, perhaps, gilded my side of the bargaining? If so, I am sure my showman would be the last person to quarrel with me. I am inclined to think he had taken a fancy to me. Anyhow I had won—what is, perhaps, even better—his respect. And though the pay came late, when it was no longer needed, and though it was the blackest money that ever touched my fingers, it came. And if anybody was the defaulter, it was I.
There was no time to lose. My gipsy woman was sent for from the shooting gallery. I shook hands with her; she shook hands with Adam, who was then told to go about his business and to return to the tent when the circus was over. The three of us, showman, woman, and I, conferred together, and with extreme cordiality agreed what should
