The showman, leering avariciously at me out of his shifty eyes, led us on towards the huge ballooning tent, its pennon fluttering darkly against the stars. I believe if in that spirituous moment he had muttered, “Fly with me, fairest!” all cares forgotten, I’d have been gone. He held his peace.
The brass band within wrenched and blared into the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Chafing, pawing, snorting, my steed, with its rider, paused in the entry. Then with a last smirk of encouragement from the gipsy woman, the rein was loosed, I bowed my head, and the next moment, as if in a floating vat of light, I found myself cantering well-nigh soundlessly round the ring, its circumference thronged tier above tier in the smoke-laden air with ghost-white rings of faces.
I smiled fixedly, tossing my fingers. A piebald clown came wambling in to meet me, struck his hand on his foolish heart, and fell flat in the tan. Love at first sight. Over his prostrate body we ambled, the ill-tempered little beast naggling at its bit, and doing his utmost to unseat me. The music ceased. The cloud of witnesses loured. Come Night, come Nero, I didn’t care! Edging the furious little creature into the centre of the ring, I mastered him, wheeled him, in a series of obeisances—North, South, East, West. A hurricane—such as even Mr. Bowater can never have outridden—a hurricane of applause burst bounds and all but swept me out of the saddle. “Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye!” sang cornet and trombone. With a toss, I swept my plaits starwards, brandished my whip at the faces, and galloped out into the night.
My début was over. I confess it—the very memory of it carries me away even now. And even now I would maintain that it was at least a little more successful than that other less professional début which poor Mr. Crimble and Lady Pollacke had left unacclaimed in Beechwood High Street.
XLVII
My showman, his hard face sleek with sweat, insisted on counting out three huge platelike crown pieces into my lap—for a douceur. I brushed them off on to the ground. “Only to clinch the bargain,” he said. His teeth grinned at me as if he would gladly have swallowed me whole.
“Pick up the money,” said I coldly, determined once and for all to keep him in his place. “It’s early days yet.” But when my back was turned, covetous Adam took charge of it.
While we trudged along homeward—for in the deserted night the cage was unnecessary, until I was too tired to go further—I listened to the coins clanking softly together in Adam’s pocket. It was an intoxicating lullaby. But such are the revulsions of success, for hours and hours that night I lay sleepless. Once I got up and put my hand in where the crowns were, to assure myself I was awake. But the dream which visited me—between the watches of remorse—I shall keep to myself.
With next day’s sun, the Signorina had become the talk of the countryside, and Adam’s vacant face must have stood him in good stead. She had been such “a draw,” he told me, that the showman had decided to stay two more nights on the same pitch: which was fortunate for us both. Especially as on the third afternoon heavy rain fell, converting the green field into a morass. With evening the clouds lifted, and a fulling moon glazed the puddles, and dimmed the glowworm lamps. Impulse is a capricious master. I did my best, for even when intuition fails my sex, there’s obstinacy to fall back upon; but all that I had formerly achieved with ease had to be forced out of me that night with endless effort. The Oracle was unwilling. When a genteel yet foxy looking man, with whiskers and a high stiff collar under his chin, sneakishly invited me to tell his fortune, and I replied that “Prudent chickens roost high,” the thrust was a little too deft. My audience was amused, but nobody laughed.
He seemed to be well known, and the green look he cast me proved that the truth is not always palatable or discreet. Unseduced by the lumps of sugar which I had pilfered for him, my peevish mount jibbed and bucked and all but flung the Princess of Andalusia into the sodden ring. He succeeded in giving a painful wrench to her wrist, which doubled the applause.
A strange thing happened to me, too, that night. When for the second or third time the crowd was flocking in to view me, my eyes chanced to fall on a figure standing in the clouded light a little apart. He was dressed in a high-peaked hat and a long and seemingly brown cassock-like garment, with buttoned tunic and silver-buckled leather belt. Spurs were on his boots, a light whip in his hand. Aloof, his head a little bowed down, his face in profile, he stood there, framed in the opening, dusky, level-featured, deep-eyed—a Stranger.
What in me rushed as if on wings into his silent company? A passionate longing beyond words burned in me. I seemed to be carried away into a boundless wilderness—stunted trees, salt in the air, a low, enormous stretch of night sky, space; and this man, master of soul and solitude.
He never heeded me; raised not an eyelid to glance into my tent. If he had, what then? I was a nothing. When next, after the press of people, I looked, he was gone; I saw him no more. Yet the girlish remembrance remains, consoling this superannuated heart like a goblet of flowers in that secret chamber of the mind we call the imagination.
The fall from that giddy moment into this practical world was abrupt. Sulky, tired with
