Kavanagh, who looked after the birds, was, a little fortunately
for him, kicked in the stomach by a mule and had to be left at an
infirmary. Pompoon, who seemed to understand birds, took charge of the
parakeets, love birds, and other highly coloured fowl, including the
quetzal with green mossy head, pink breast, and flowing tails, and the
primrose-breasted toucans with bills like a butcher’s cleaver.
The show was always moving on and moving on. Putting it up and taking
it down was a more entertaining affair than the exhibition itself.
With Jimmy Fascota in charge, and the young man of the frock coat in
an ecstasy of labour, half-clothed husky men swarmed up the rigged
frameworks, dismantling poles, planks, floors, ropes, roofs, staging,
tearing at bolts and bars, walking at dizzying altitudes on narrow
boards, swearing at their mates, staggering under vast burdens,
sweating till they looked like seals, packing and disposing incredibly
of it all, furling the flags, rolling up the filthy awnings, then Right
O! for a market town twenty miles away.
In the autumn the show would be due at a great gala town in the
north, the supreme opportunity of the year, and by that time Mr.
Woolf expected to have a startling headline about a new tiger act
and the intrepid tamer. But somehow Pedersen could make no progress
at all with this. Week after week went by, and the longer he left
that initial entry into the cage of the tiger, notwithstanding
the comforting support of firearms and hot irons, the more remote
appeared the possibility of its capitulation. The tiger’s hatred
did not manifest itself in roars and gnashing of teeth, but by its
rigid implacable pose and a slight flexion of its protruded claws. It
seemed as if endowed with an imagination of blood-lust, Pedersen being
the deepest conceivable excitation of this. Week after week went by
and the show people became aware that Pedersen, their Pedersen, the
unrivalled, the dauntless tamer, had met his match. They were proud of
the beast. Some said it was Yak’s bald crown that the tiger disliked,
but Marie swore it was his moustache, a really remarkable piece of
hirsute furniture, that he would not have parted with for a pound of
gold—so he said. But whatever it was—crown, moustache, or the whole
conglomerate Pedersen—the tiger remarkably loathed it and displayed
his loathing, while the unfortunate tamer had no more success with
it than he had ever had with Marie the Cossack, though there was at
least a good humour in her treatment of him which was horribly absent
from the attitude of the beast. For a long time Pedersen blamed the
hunchback for it all. He tried to elicit from him by gesticulations
in front of the cage the secret of the creature’s enmity, but the
barriers to their intercourse were too great to be overcome, and to
all Pedersen’s illustrative frenzies Pompoon would only shake his sad
head and roll his great eyes until the Dane would cuff him away with
a curse of disgust and turn to find the eyes of the tiger, the dusky,
smooth-skinned tiger with bitter bars of ebony, fixed upon him with
tenfold malignity. How he longed in his raging impotence to transfix
the thing with a sharp spear through the cage’s gilded bars, or to
bore a hole into its vitals with a red-hot iron! All the traditional
treatment in such cases, combined first with starvation and then
with rich feeding, proved unavailing. Pedersen always had the front
flap of the cage left down at night so that he might, as he thought,
establish some kind of working arrangement between them by the force of
propinquity. He tried to sleep on a bench just outside the cage, but
the horror of the beast so penetrated him that he had to turn his back
upon it. Even then the intense enmity pierced the back of his brain
and forced him to seek a bench elsewhere out of range of the tiger’s
vision.
Meanwhile, the derision of Marie was not concealed—it was even
blatant—and to the old contest of love between herself and the Dane
was now added a new contest of personal courage, for it had come to
be assumed, in some undeclarable fashion, that if Yak Pedersen could
not tame that tiger, then Marie the Cossack would. As this situation
crystallized daily the passion of Pedersen changed to jealousy and
hatred. He began to regard the smiling Marie in much the same way as
the tiger regarded him.
“The hell-devil! May some lightning scorch her like a toasted fish!”
But in a short while this mood was displaced by one of anxiety; he
became even abject. Then, strangely enough, Marie’s feelings underwent
some modification. She was proud of the chance to subdue and defeat
him, but it might be at a great price—too great a price for her.
Addressing herself in turn to the dim understanding of Pompoon she had
come to perceive that he believed the tiger to be not merely quite
untamable, but full of mysterious dangers. She could not triumph
over the Dane unless she ran the risk he feared to run. The risk was
colossal then, and with her realization of this some pity for Yak began
to exercise itself in her; after all, were they not in the same boat?
But the more she sympathized the more she jeered. The thing had to be
done somehow.
Meanwhile Barnabe Woolf wants that headline for the big autumn show,
and a failure will mean a nasty interview with that gentleman. It
may end by Barnabe kicking Yak Pedersen out of his wild beast show.
Not that Mr. Woolf is so gross as to suggest that. He senses the
difficulty, although his manager in his pride will not confess to any.
Mr. Woolf declares that his tiger is a new tiger; Yak must watch out
for him, be careful. He talks as if it were just a question of giving
the cage a coat of whitewash. He never hints at contingencies; but
still, there is his new untamed tiger, and there is Mr. Yak Pedersen,
his wild beast tamer—at present.
III
One day the menagerie did not open. It had finished an engagement, and
Jimmy Fascota had gone off to another town to arrange the new pitch.
The show folk made holiday about the camp, or flocked into the town for
marketing or carousals. Mrs. Fascota was alone in her caravan, clothed
in her jauntiest attire. She was preparing to go into the town when
Pedersen suddenly came silently in and sat down.
“Marie,” he said, after a few moments, “I give up that tiger. To me he
has given a spell. It is like a mesmerize.” He dropped his hands upon
his knees in complete humiliation. Marie did not speak, so he asked:
“What you think?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and put her brown arms akimbo. She was a
grand figure so, in a cloak of black satin and a huge hat trimmed with
crimson feathers.
“If _you_ can’t trust him,” she said, “who can?”
“It is myself I am not to trust. Shameful! But that tiger will do me,
yes, so I will not conquer him. It’s bad, very, very bad, is it not so?
Shameful, but I will not do it!” he declared excitedly.
“What’s Barnabe say?”
“I do not care, Mr. Woolf can think what he can think! Damn Woolf! But
for what I do think of my own self.... Ah!” He paused for a moment,
dejected beyond speech. “Yes, miserable it is, in my own heart very
shameful, Marie. And what you think of me, yes, that too!”
There was a note in his voice that almost confounded her—why, the
man was going to cry! In a moment she was all melting compassion and
bravado.
“You leave the devil to me, Yak. What’s come over you, man? God love
us, I’ll tiger him!”
But the Dane had gone as far as he could go. He could admit his defeat,
but he could not welcome her all too ready amplification of it.
“Na, na, you are good for him, Marie, but you beware. He is not a
tiger; he is beyond everything, foul—he has got a foul heart and a
thousand demons in it. I would not bear to see you touch him; no, no, I
would not bear it!”
“Wait till I come back this afternoon—you wait!” cried Marie, lifting
her clenched fist. “So help me, I’ll tiger him, you’ll see!”
Pedersen suddenly awoke to her amazing attraction. He seized her in his
arms. “Na, na, Marie! God above! I will not have it.”
“Aw, shut up!” she commanded, impatiently, and pushing him from her
she sprang down the steps and proceeded to the town alone.
She did not return in the afternoon; she did not return in the evening;
she was not there when the camp closed up for the night. Sophy, alone,
was quite unconcerned. Pompoon sat outside the caravan, while the
flame of the last lamp was perishing weakly above his head. He now
wore a coat of shag-coloured velvet. He was old and looked very wise,
often shaking his head, not wearily, but as if in doubt. The flute lay
glittering upon his knees and he was wiping his lips with a green silk
handkerchief when barefoot Sophy in her red petticoat crept behind him,
unhooked the lamp, and left him in darkness. Then he departed to an old
tent the Fascotas had found for him.
When the mother returned the camp was asleep in its darkness and she
was very drunk. Yak Pedersen had got her. He carried her into the
arena, and bolted and barred the door.
IV
Marie Fascota awoke next morning in broad daylight; through chinks and
rents in the canvas roof of the arena the brightness was beautiful
to behold. She could hear a few early risers bawling outside, while
all around her the caged beasts and birds were squeaking, whistling,
growling, and snarling. She was lying beside the Dane on a great bundle
of straw. He was already awake when she became aware of him, watching
her with amused eyes.
“Yak Pedersen! Was I drunk?” Marie asked dazedly in low husky tones,
sitting up. “What’s this, Yak Pedersen? Was I drunk? Have I been here
all night?”
He lay with his hands behind his head, smiling in the dissolute
ugliness of his abrupt yellow skull so incongruously bald, his
moustache so profuse, his nostrils and ears teeming with hairs.
“Can’t you speak?” cried the wretched woman. “What game do you call
this? Where’s my Sophy, and my Jimmy—is he back?”
Again he did not answer; he stretched out a hand to caress her.
Unguarded as he was, Marie smashed down both her fists full upon his
face. He lunged back blindly at her and they both struggled to their
feet, his fingers clawing in her thick strands of hair as she struck
at him in frenzy. Down rolled the mass and he seized it; it was her
weakness, and she screamed. Marie was a rare woman—a match for most
men—but the capture of her hair gave her utterly into his powerful
hands. Uttering a torrent of filthy oaths, Pedersen pulled the yelling
woman backwards to him and grasping her neck with both hands gave a
murderous wrench and flung her to the ground. As she fell Marie’s hand
clutched a small cage of fortune-telling birds. She hurled this at the
man, but it missed him; the cage burst against a pillar and the birds
scattered in the air.
“Marie! Marie!” shouted Yak, “listen! listen!”
Remorsefully he flung himself before the raging woman who swept at him
with an axe, her hair streaming, her eyes blazing with the fire of a
thousand angers.
“Drunk, was I!” she screamed at him. “That’s how ye got me, Yak
Pedersen? Drunk, was I!”
He warded the blow with his arm, but the shock and pain of it was so
great that his own rage burst out again, and leaping at the woman he
struck her a horrible blow across the eyes. She sunk to her knees and
huddled there without a sound, holding her hands to her bleeding face,
her loose hair covering it like a net. At the pitiful sight the Dane’s
grief conquered him again, and bending over her imploringly he said:
“Marie, my love, Marie! Listen! It is not true! Swear me to God, good
woman, it is not true, it is not possible! Swear me to God!” he raged
distractedly. “Swear me to God!” Suddenly he stopped and gasped. They
were in front of the tiger’s cage, and Pedersen was as if transfixed by
that fearful gaze. The beast stood with hatred concentrated in every
bristling hair upon its hide, and in its eyes a malignity that was
almost incandescent. Still as a stone, Marie observed this, and began
to creep away from the Dane, stealthily, stealthily. On a sudden, with
incredible agility, she sprang up the steps of the tiger’s cage, tore
the pin from the catch, flung open the door, and, yelling in madness,
leapt in. As she did so, the cage emptied. In one moment she saw
Pedersen grovelling on his knees, stupid, and the next....
All the hidden beasts, stirred by instinctive knowledge of the tragedy,
roared and raged. Marie’s eyes and mind were opened to its horror. She
plugged her fingers into her ears; screamed; but her voice was a mere
wafer of sound in that pandemonium. She heard vast crashes of someone
smashing in the small door of the arena, and then swooned upon the
floor of the cage.
The bolts were torn from their sockets at last, the slip door swung
back, and in the opening appeared Pompoon, alone, old Pompoon, with a
flaming lamp and an iron spear. As he stepped forward into the gloom
he saw the tiger, dragging something in its mouth, leap back into its
cage.
_Mordecai and Cocking_
Two men sat one afternoon beside a spinney of beeches near the top
of a wild bare down. Old shepherd Mordecai was admonishing a younger
countryman, Eustace Cocking, now out of work, who held beside him in
leash a brindled whippet dog, sharp featured and lean, its neck clipped
in a broad leather collar. The day was radiant, the very air had bloom;
bright day is never so bright as upon these lonely downs, and the grim
face of storm never so tragic elsewhere. From the beeches other downs
ranged in every direction, nothing but downs in beautiful abandoned
masses. In a valley below the men a thousand sheep were grazing; they
looked no more than a handful of white beach randomly scattered.
“The thing’s forbidden, Eustace; it always has and always will be, I
say, and thereby ’tis wrong.”
“Well, if ever I doos anything wrong I allus feel glad of it next
morning.”
“’Tis against law, Eustace, and to be against law is the downfall of
mankind. What I mean to say—I’m a national man.”
“The law! Foo! That’s made by them as don’t care for my needs, and
don’t understand my rights. Is it fair to let them control your mind as
haven’t got a grip of their own? I worked for yon farmer a matter of
fourteen years, hard, I tell you, I let my back sweat....”
The dog at his side was restless; he cuffed it impatiently: “and twice
a week my wife she had to go to farmhouse; twice a week; doing up
their washing and their muck—‘Lie down!’” he interjected sternly to
the querulous dog—“two days in every seven. Then the missus says to
my wife, ‘I shall want you to come four days a week in future, Mrs.
Cocking; the house is too much of a burden for me.’ My wife says: ‘I
can’t come no oftener, ma’am; I’d not have time to look after my own
place, my husband, and the six children, ma’am.’ Then missus flew into
a passion. ‘Oh, so you won’t come, eh!’
“‘I’d come if I could, ma’am,’ my wife says, ‘and gladly, but it ain’t
possible, you see.’
“‘Oh, very well!’ says the missus. And that was the end of that, but
come Saturday, when the boss pays me: ‘Cocking,’ he says, ‘I shan’t
want you no more arter next week.’ No explanation, mind you, and I
never asked for none. I know’d what ’twas for, but I don’t give a dam.
What meanness, Mordecai! Of course I don’t give a dam whether I goes or
whether I stops; you know my meaning—I’d much rather stop; my home’s
where I be known; but I don’t give a dam. ’Tain’t the job I minds so
much as to let him have that power to spite me so at a moment after
fourteen years because of his wife’s temper. ’Tis not decent. ’Tis
under-grading a man.’”
There was no comment from the shepherd. Eustace continued: “If that’s
your law, Mordecai, I don’t want it. I ignores it.”
“And that you can’t do,” retorted the old man. “God A’mighty can look
after the law.”
“If He be willing to take the disgrace of it, Mordecai Stavely, let
Him.”
The men were silent for a long time, until the younger cheerfully
asked: “How be poor old Harry Mixen?”
“Just alive.”
Eustace leaned back, munching a strig of grass reflectively and looking
at the sky: “Don’t seem no sign of rain, however?”
“No.”
The old man who said “No” hung his melancholy head, and pondered; he
surveyed his boots, which were of harsh hard leather with deep soles.
He then said: “We ought to thank God we had such mild weather at the
back end of the year. If you remember, it came a beautiful autumn and
a softish winter. Things are growing now; I’ve seen oats as high as my
knee; the clover’s lodged in places. It will be all good if we escape
the east winds—hot days and frosty nights.”
The downs, huge and bare, stretched in every direction, green and grey,
gentle and steep, their vast confusion enlightened by a small hanger
of beech or pine, a pond, or more often a derelict barn; for among
the downs there are barns and garners ever empty, gone into disuse
and abandoned. They are built of flint and red brick, with a roof of
tiles. The rafters often bear an eighteenth-century date. Elsewhere in
this emptiness even a bush will have a name, and an old stone becomes
a track mark. Upon the soft tufts and among the triumphant furze live
a few despised birds, chats and finches and that blithe screamer the
lark, but above all, like veins upon the down’s broad breast, you may
perceive the run-way of the hare.
“Why can’t a man live like a hare?” broke out the younger man. “I’d not
mind being shot at a time and again. It lives a free life, anyway, not
like a working man with a devil on two legs always cracking him on.”
“Because,” said Mordecai, “a hare is a vegetarian creature, what’s
called a rubinant, chewing the cud and dividing not the hoof. And,” he
added significantly, “there be dogs.”
“It takes a mazin’ good dog to catch ever a hare on its own ground.
Most hares could chase any dog ever born, believe you me, if they liked
to try at that.”
“There be traps and wires!”
“Well, we’ve no call to rejoice, with the traps set for a man, and the
wires a choking him.”
At that moment two mating hares were roaming together on the upland
just below the men. The doe, a small fawn creature, crouched coyly
before the other, a large nut-brown hare with dark ears. Soon she
darted away, sweeping before him in a great circle, or twisting and
turning as easily as a snake. She seemed to fly the faster, but when
his muscular pride was aroused he swooped up to her shoulder, and,
as if in loving derision, leaped over her from side to side as she
ran. She stopped as sharply as a shot upon its target and faced him,
quizzing him gently with her nose. As they sat thus the dark-eared
one perceived not far off a squatting figure; it was another hare, a
tawny buck, eyeing their dalliance. The doe commenced to munch the
herbage; the nut-brown one hobbled off to confront this wretched, rash,
intruding fool. When they met both rose upon their haunches, clawing
and scraping and patting at each other with as little vigour as mild
children put into their quarrels—a rigmarole of slapping hands. But,
notwithstanding the delicacy of the treatment, the interloper, a meek
enough fellow, succumbed, and the conqueror loped back to his nibbling
mistress.
Yet, whenever they rested from their wooing flights, the tawny
interloper was still to be seen near by. Hapless mourning seemed
to involve his hunched figure; he had the aspect of a deferential,
grovelling man; but the lover saw only his provocative, envious eye—he
swept down upon him. Standing up again, he slammed and basted him with
puny velvet blows until he had salved his indignation, satisfied his
connubial pride, or perhaps merely some strange fading instinct—for it
seemed but a mock combat, a ritual to which they conformed.
Away the happy hare would prance to his mate, but as often as he came
round near that shameless spy he would pounce upon him and beat him to
the full, like a Turk or like a Russian. But though he could beat him
and disgrace him, he could neither daunt nor injure him. The vanquished
miscreant would remain watching their wooing with the eye of envy—or
perhaps of scorn—and hoping for a miracle to happen.
And a miracle did happen. Cocking, unseen, near the beeches released
his dog. The doe shot away over the curve of the hill and was gone.
She did not merely gallop, she seemed to pass into ideal flight,
the shadow of wind itself. Her fawn body, with half-cocked ears and
unperceivable convulsion of the leaping haunches, soared across the
land with the steady swiftness of a gull. The interloping hare, in a
blast of speed, followed hard upon her traces. But Cocking’s hound
had found at last the hare of its dreams, a nut-brown, dark-eared,
devil-guided, eluding creature, that fled over the turf of the hill
as lightly as a cloud. The long leaping dog swept in its track with a
stare of passion, following in great curves the flying thing that grew
into one great throb of fear all in the grand sunlight on the grand bit
of a hill. The lark stayed its little flood of joy and screamed with
notes of pity at the protracted flight; and bloodless indeed were they
who could view it unmoved, nor feel how sweet a thing is death if you
be hound, how fell a thing it is if you be hare. Too long, O delaying
death, for this little heart of wax; and too long, O delaying victory,
for that pursuer with the mouth of flame. Suddenly the hound faltered,
staggered a pace or two, then sunk to the grass, its lips dribbling
blood. When Cocking reached him the dog was dead. He picked the body up.
“It’s against me, like everything else,” he muttered.
But a voice was calling “Oi! Oi!” He turned to confront a figure
rapidly and menacingly approaching.
“I shall want you, Eustace Cocking,” cried the gamekeeper, “to come
and give an account o’ yourself.”
_The Man from Kilsheelan_
If you knew the Man from Kilsheelan it was no use saying you did not
believe in fairies and secret powers; believe it or no, but believe
it you should; there he was. It is true he was in an asylum for the
insane, but he was a man with age upon him so he didn’t mind; and
besides, better men than himself have been in such places, or they
ought to be, and if there is justice in the world they will be.
“A cousin of mine,” he said to old Tom Tool one night, “is come from
Ameriky. A rich person.”
He lay in the bed next him, but Tom Tool didn’t answer so he went on
again: “In a ship,” he said.
“I hear you,” answered Tom Tool.
“I see his mother with her bosom open once, and it stuffed with
diamonds, bags full.”
Tom Tool kept quiet.
“If,” said the Man from Kilsheelan, “if I’d the trusty comrade I’d make
a break from this and go seek him.”
“Was he asking you to do that?”
“How could he an’ all and he in a ship?”
“Was he writing fine letters to you then?”
“How could he, under the Lord? Would he give them to a savage bird or a
herring to bring to me so?”
“How did he let on to you?”
“He did not let on,” said the Man from Kilsheelan.
Tom Tool lay long silent in the darkness; he had a mistrust of the
Man, knowing him to have a forgetful mind; everything slipped through
it like rain through the nest of a pigeon. But at last he asked him:
“Where is he now?”
“He’ll be at Ballygoveen.”
“You to know that and you with no word from him?”
“O, I know it, I know; and if I’d a trusty comrade I’d walk out of this
and to him I would go. Bags of diamonds!”
Then he went to sleep, sudden; but the next night he was at Tom Tool
again: “If I’d a trusty comrade,” said he; and all that and a lot more.
“’Tis not convenient to me now,” said Tom Tool, “but to-morrow night I
might go wid you.”
The next night was a wild night, and a dark night, and he would not
go to make a break from the asylum, he said: “Fifty miles of journey,
and I with no heart for great walking feats! It is not convenient, but
to-morrow night I might go wid you.”
The night after that he said: “Ah, whisht wid your diamonds and all!
Why would you go from the place that is snug and warm into a world that
is like a wall for cold dark, and but the thread of a coat to divide
you from its mighty clasp, and only one thing blacker under the heaven
of God and that’s the road you walk on, and only one thing more shy
than your heart and that’s your two feet worn to a tissue tramping in
dung and ditches....”
“If I’d a trusty comrade,” said the Man from Kilsheelan, “I’d go seek
my rich cousin.”
“ ... stars gaping at you a few spans away, and the things that have
life in them, but cannot see or speak, begin to breathe and bend. If
ever your hair stood up it is then it would be, though you’ve no more
than would thatch a thimble, God help you.”
“Bags of gold he has,” continued the Man, “and his pockets stuffed with
the tobacca.”
“Tobacca!”
“They were large pockets and well stuffed.”
“Do you say, now!”
“And the gold! large bags and rich bags.”
“Well, I might do it to-morrow.”