The Clown
Yesterday a familiar face flitted by me on the street. It was pale and had a tired expression, but the features were sharp and strongly marked.
I did not recall his name. I was sure I had seen him sometime, perhaps a long while ago, but I could not remember when or under what circumstances. His face had aroused my interest without my being able to explain why, and I dug all sorts of old recollections out of the junk-room of my memory in order to identify him, but in vain.
In the evening I was at the theatre. There to my surprise I found him again on the stage in a minor role. He was but little disguised; I recognized him at once and looked for his name on the program. I found it, but it was unknown to me. I followed his acting with tense interest. He took the part of a miserably stupid and ridiculous servant, whom everybody made fun of. The role was as wretched as the piece, and he played it mechanically and conventionally; but in certain intonations his voice assumed a sharp and bitter character which did not belong to the part.
They reechoed in my ear, those tones, till late into the night, as I went back and forth in my room. And with their help I at last succeeded in digging up the recollection with which they belonged. I discovered that we had been schoolmates, but he was many years younger than I; when I was in the highest class, he was in one of the lowest.
When I was in the top class of the school, I was one day standing at the window toward the end of a lunch recess. Recesses at the school were an especial abomination of mine; I could never find anything to do. I knew that I did not know my lesson, and I could not set myself to going over it. The slight vexation I felt about the coming lesson always faded before a greater: a vexation about life, a gnawing premonition that the days to follow would be as empty and meaningless as those which had passed.
So I was walking back and forth with my hands in my jacket pockets, now and then stopping at the window, which was open. As I stood there, my attention was caught by a peculiar occurrence which was taking place down in the yard just below the window. A little boy in one of the lowest classes, a lad of ten or eleven, lay stretched on his back, surrounded by a crowd of other boys in a ring. Their faces, most of them at any rate, had the expression of evil curiosity which children and uncultured people do not know how to conceal. A little broad-shouldered fellow with high cheekbones, who gave the impression of being very strong for his age, stood in the ring with a whip in his hand.
“You are my slave,” he said to the boy on the ground, “aren’t you? Say: ‘I am your slave!’ ”
“I am your slave,” answered the child without hesitating; which indicated that this was not the first time he had said it.
“Get up,” ordered the other.
The boy got up.
“Imitate B., the way he looks when he comes into class!”
B. was a teacher who went on crutches. The boy went a couple of steps outside the ring, which opened to give him space; then he came back on the improvised stage and executed as he did so the movements of a man walking on crutches. He did his part very well; the illusion was complete, and the onlookers applauded, but the little actor stood there with a serious expression. He had a pallid little face and black clothes; perhaps he had just lost his father or mother.
“Laugh!” ordered the other with a light flick of the whip which he had in his hand.
The boy tried to obey, but it did not come easily. The laugh sounded forced at the start, but it was not long before he succeeded in laughing himself into a genuine, quite natural guffaw, and with that he turned toward his “master,” as if it was at him that he laughed. But the latter already desired to have his slave show off new accomplishments.
“Say: ‘My farsher is a damned scoundrel!’ ”
The boy looked around the circle with a helpless glance. When he saw that no one gave a semblance of wanting to help him, and that, on the contrary, all stood in eager expectation of something really amusing, he said as low as he dared:
“My farsher is a damned scoundrel.”
That drew unbounded applause.
“Laugh—Cry!”
The child began to simulate weeping, but with that he now came into the mood he was ordered to imagine. The weeping stuck in his throat, and he shed actual tears.
“Let him be!” said an older boy in the circle, “he’s crying in earnest.”
And with that the school bell rang.
Some days afterwards he ran past me on the way from school. I noticed that his jacket was ripped open in the back.
“Wait a bit!” I said to him, “your jacket has split open in the back.”
“No,” he said, “it hasn’t split open,
