Читать книгу Teresa of Watling Street: A Fantasia on Modern Themes - Arnold Bennett - Страница 5

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A week later—and in the meantime he had been far from idle—Richard Redgrave arrived in Dunstable. It was a warm, sunshiny, sleepy day, such as suited that sleepy town, and showed off its fine old church and fine old houses to perfection. There is no theatre in Dunstable, no concert-hall, and nothing ever excites this staid borough save a Parliamentary election or the biennial visit of Bosco’s Circus.

On the morning of Richard’s arrival Dunstable was certainly excited, and the occasion was Bosco, who, with his horses, camels, elephants, lions, bears, acrobats, riders, trapezists, and pavilions, had encamped in a large field to the south of the town. Along the whole of its length Dunstable, which consists chiefly of houses built on either side of Watling Street for a distance of about a mile and a half, was happily perturbed by the appearance of Bosco’s gigantic, unrivalled, and indescribable circus, which was announced to give two performances, at two-thirty and at seven-thirty of the clock. And, after all, a circus which travels with two hundred horses (chiefly piebald and cream), and with a single tent capable of holding four thousand people, is perhaps worthy to cause excitement.

Richard determined to patronize Mr. Bosco’s entertainment—he thought he might pick up useful information in the crowd—and at two-thirty he paid his shilling and passed up the gorgeous but rickety steps into the pavilion.

A brass band was playing at its full power, but above the noise of the trumpets could be heard the voice of the showman—not Bosco himself, but an individual hired for his big voice—saying, ‘Step up, ladies and gentlemen. Today happens to be the thirtieth anniversary of our first visit to this town, and to celebrate the event we shall present to you exactly the same performance as we had the honour of presenting, by special command, to Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor last year. Step up, step up, and see our great spectacle, the Relief of Mafeking! See the talking horse! See Juana, the most beautiful rider in the world! Step up!

Children half-price to morning performance only.’ The big voice made precisely this speech every day of his life all over England.

The circus was well filled, and the audience enthusiastic. The clowns had an enormous success. As for Richard, he was more interested in Juana, the horsewoman. She was a tall and beautiful girl, apparently of the Spanish type. She rode, in a strictly conventional park riding costume, a superb strawberry-roan mare, which at her command waltzed, circled, caracoled, and did everything except stand on its head. Mare and rider were equally graceful, equally calm and self-contained. It was a charming item in the programme, but somewhat over the heads of the audience, save a few who knew a born rider when they saw one. An elephant was brought in, a young man in Indian costume being perched on its neck. The mare and the elephant went through a number of evolutions together. Finally the mare reared and lodged her forepaws on the elephant’s tremendous flank, and so situated the strange pair made an exit which roused the house from apathy to wild enthusiasm. Juana was vociferously recalled. She re-entered on foot, holding her habit up with one hand, a light whip in the other. Richard could not help being struck by the rather cold, sad, disdainful beauty of the girl’s face. It seemed wrong that the possessor of such a face should have to go through a series of tricks twice daily for the diversion of a rustic audience.

‘That wench is as like Craig’s girl as two peas.’ Richard turned quickly at the remark, which was made by one of two women who sat behind him industriously talking. The other agreed that there was some likeness between ‘Craig’s girl’ and the lovely Juana, but not a very remarkable one.

Richard left his seat, went out of the pavilion, and walked round the outside of it towards the part where the performers entered the ring. Attached to the pavilion by a covered way was a smaller tent, which was evidently used as a sort of green-room by the performers. Richard could see within, and it happened that he saw Juana chatting with a girl who was very much like Juana, though rather less stately. The young man in Indian costume, who had ridden the elephant, was also of the group. Soon the young man went to another corner of the tent, and the two girls began to talk more rapidly and more earnestly. Lastly, they shook hands and kissed, Juana burst into tears, and her companion ran out of the tent. Richard followed her at a safe distance through the maze of minor tents, vans, poles, and loose horses, to the main road. A small, exquisitely-finished motor-car stood by the footpath; the girl jumped on board, pulled a lever, and was off in a northerly direction through Dunstable up Watling Street.

‘Is that the road to Hockliffe?’ he asked a policeman.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It’s Raphael Craig’s daughter, I bet,’ he said to himself, and for some reason or other smiled a satisfied smile. Then he added, half aloud, ‘But who is Juana?’

He went back to see the rest of the performance, and he had scarcely sat down before he had cause to wish that he had remained outside. The famous strawberry-roan mare, formerly ridden by Juana, was making a second appearance as the talking horse, in charge of the young man who had shone before in Indian costume, but who now wore the dress of a riding-master. An attendant was walking along the front benches with a bundle of numbered cards. He offered one to Richard, and Richard thoughtlessly accepted the offer. From that moment the eyes of the entire assemblage were upon him.

‘The gentleman,’ said the young man in charge of the mare, ‘has chosen a card. Now, this wonderful animal will tell you the number of the card, and a lot of other interesting information. I shall put questions to the animal, which will answer “Yes” by nodding its head, and “No” by shaking its head, and will count by stamping its off fore-foot on the ground.’

Richard was disgusted at being thus made the centre of a trick, but there was no help for it.

‘What is the number of the card drawn by the gentleman?’ the young man demanded of the mare.

She stamped her foot ten times on the tan.

‘Number ten,’ said the young man. ‘Is that so, sir?’

It was so. Richard nodded. Loud applause.

‘Is the holder of the card a married man?’

The mare shook her head. Laughter.

‘He is a bachelor?’

The mare lowered her head. More laughter.

‘Will he ever be married?’

The mare lowered her head again. Loud laughter.

‘Soon?’

Again the mare signed an affirmative. Shrieks of laughter.

‘To a pretty girl?’

The mare nodded decisively.

‘Will they be blessed with many children?’

The mare kicked out with her hindlegs, and ran as if horror-struck from the ring, amid roars of rustic delight. This simple trick and joke, practised for years and years with all kinds of horses, had helped as much as anything to make the fortune of Bosco’s circus. It never failed of its effect.

The final ‘turn’ of the show was the Relief of Mafeking. Under cover of the noise and smoke of gunpowder, Richard contrived to make a stealthy exit; he was still blushing. As he departed he caught a last glimpse of Juana, who came into the ring in the character of a Red Cross nurse on the field of battle.

That evening at midnight Richard issued forth from the Old Sugar Loaf Hotel on a motor-car. Bosco’s circus was already leaving the town, and as the straggling procession of animals and vehicles wandered up Watling Street under the summer moon it made a weird and yet attractive spectacle—such a spectacle as can be seen only on the high-roads of England. Its next halting-place was eighteen miles north—a long journey. The cavalcade was a hindrance to Richard, for he particularly desired to have Watling Street between Dunstable and Hockliffe to himself that night. He waited, therefore, until the whole of Bosco had vanished ahead out of sight. The elephants, four in number, brought up the rear of the procession, and they were under control of the young man whose trick with the strawberry-roan mare had put Richard to the blush. There was no sign of the mare nor of Juana.

Watling Street runs through a deep chalk-cutting immediately to the north of Dunstable, and then along an embankment. This region at the foot of the Chiltern Hills is famous for its chalk, which is got from immense broad pits to the west of the high-road. As Richard’s car ran through the cutting—it was electrical, odourless, and almost noiseless—he perceived in front of him the elephant herd standing in the road. A little further on he descried the elephant-keeper, who was engaged in converse with a girl. Leaving his motor-car to take care of itself, Richard climbed transversely up the side of the cutting, and thus approached nearer to the pair. He saw now, in the brilliant white radiance of the moon, that the girl was the same girl who had kissed Juana in the circus tent. She was apparently urging the man to some course of action at which he hesitated. Then the elephant-keeper called aloud to his elephants, and the man and the girl, followed by the elephants, and followed also by Richard, passed through an open gate at the northern end of the cutting, and so crossed a very large uncultivated field. The extremity of the field descended steeply into a huge chalk-pit, perhaps a hundred yards in circumference and sixty feet deep, by means of a rough cart-track. At the end of the cart-track, in the bottom of the pit, was a motorcar. Richard watched the elephant-keeper single out one of the elephants and attach it by ropes to the motor-car. Slowly the ponderous and docile creature dragged the vehicle up the steep cart-track. The girl clapped her hands with joy.

‘If she is Craig’s daughter——’ Richard exclaimed softly, and then stopped.

Silhouetted sharply against the night-sky was the figure of Juana on the strawberry-roan. Mare and rider stood motionless at the top of the cart-track, and Richard, from his place of concealment, could see that Juana was gazing fixedly into the chalk-pit The man with the elephants and the girl with the motor-car had not perceived her, and before they could do so she had ridden off down the field. It was a wonderful apparition, a wonderful scene—the moon, the vast hemisphere of the purple sky, the glittering and immense whiteness of the chalk-pit, the exotic forms of the elephants contrasted with the motor-car, and, lastly, the commanding and statuesque equestrian on the brow. Richard was quite impressed by the mere beauty and strangeness, as well as by the mystery, of it all. What did it mean? Why should Juana, an expert who would certainly receive a generous salary, be riding at one o’clock a.m., seeing that the principal performers, as Richard knew, usually travelled by train from one town to the next? And why should she have followed these other two—the elephant-keeper and the young girl who so remarkably resembled herself? And having followed them and observed their movements, why should she silently depart, without making known her presence? He had been able to examine Juana’s face in the strong moonlight, and again he was moved by its sad, calm, cold dignity. Juana seemed as though, at the age of twenty-five or so—she could not be more—she had suffered all the seventy and seven different sorrows which this world is said to contain, and had emerged from them resolute and still lovely, but with a withered heart. Her face almost frightened Richard.

With infinite deliberation the elephants and the motor-car arrived at the top of the cart-track. The three elephants not engaged in hauling appeared to have formed a prejudice against the motor-car; the fourth, the worker, who had been used to dragging logs of teak in India, accepted his rôle with indifference. He pulled nonchalantly, as if he was pulling a child’s go-cart, thus, happily, leaving the keeper free to control the other beasts. At length the cortège—it had all the solemnity of a funeral pageant—passed safely into the field and out of Richard’s sight towards the highroad. He heard the spit, spit of the petrol-engine of the motor-car, now able to move of itself on the easy gradient, and simultaneously a startling snort and roar from one of the elephants. It occurred to him to hope that the leviathan had not taken it into his gigantic head to wreck the machine. The notion was amusing, and he laughed when he thought how frail a thing a motor-car would prove before the attack of an elephant’s trunk. Then he proceeded duly towards the road, hugging the hedge. Once more he heard the snort and the roar, and then a stern cry of command from the keeper, a little scream from the girl, and an angry squeak from the elephant. The spit, spit of the motor-car at the same moment ceased.

When, after some minutes of scouting, he reached the gate and had a view of the road, he rather expected to see the motor-car lying in fragments in Watling Street, with, possibly, a couple of mangled corpses in the near neighbourhood, and a self-satisfied elephant dominating the picture. But his horrid premonitions were falsified.. The keeper had clearly proved the superiority of man over the brute creation; he was astride the neck of the obstreperous elephant, and the herd were trampling, with their soft, flabby footfalls, down Watling Street, along the sloping embankment, into the deep, broad valley which separates Dunstable from the belt of villages to the north of it. The lady with the motor-car stood quiescent in the road. She had got safely out of her chalk-pit, and was now waiting for the elephants to disappear before proceeding on her journey. Richard hesitated whether to return and examine the chalk-pit or to keep in touch with the lady. What any creature—especially a woman, and a young woman—could be doing with a motor-car in a chalk-pit in the middle of the night passed his wit to conceive. Nor could he imagine how any sane driver of a motor-car could take his car down such a steep slope as that cart-track with the least hope of getting it up again without the assistance of an elephant, or at least a team of horses. She must surely have been urged by the very strongest reasons to descend into the pit. What were those reasons? He wanted badly to examine the chalk-pit at once, but he decided ultimately that it would be better to watch the lady—‘Craig’s girl.’ The chalk-pit would always remain where it was, whereas the lady, undoubtedly an erratic individuality, might be at the other end of the world by breakfast-time. He crept back to his own car, found it unharmed in the deep shadow where he had left it, and mounted.

By this time the elephant herd had accomplished a good quarter of a mile down the gradual declivity of the embankment. ‘Craig’s girl’ started her car and followed gently. It seemed, in the profound silence of the night, that the spit, spit of her engine must be heard for miles and miles around. Richard started his own car, and rolled noiselessly in the traces of his forerunner. The surface of the road was perfect—for the Bedfordshire County Council takes a proper pride in its share of this national thoroughfare—and the vehicles moved with admirable ease, Richard’s being about a couple of hundred yards in the rear. Just at the top of the embankment is a tiny village, appropriately called Chalk Hill, and this village possesses a post pillar-box, a Wesleyan chapel of the size of a cottage, and an inn—the Green Man. As Richard swung past the Green Man a head popped out of one of its windows.

‘Anything wrong?’ asked a man.

‘No,’ said Richard, stopping his car and lowering his voice to a whisper, lest the girl in front should hear and turn round. ‘Go back to bed,’ he added.

‘Go to bed yourself,’ the man said, apparently angry at this injunction. ‘You circus-folk, you’ve got motor-cars now; as if camels and alligators wasn’t enough, you’ve got motorcars a-grunting and a-rattling. Three blessed hours you’ve been a-passing this house, and my wife down with erysipelas.’

Grumbling, the man closed the window. Richard laughed at being identified with the retinue of Bosco’s circus. He felt that it was an honour, for in the eyes of the village these circus-folk move always in an atmosphere of glory and splendour and freedom.

He passed on. The girl in front was gradually overtaking the elephants, which were scattered across the width of the road. Suddenly one of them turned—the one ridden by the keeper—and charged furiously back, followed more slowly by the others. Evidently the sound of the spit, spit of the motor-car had renewed the animal’s anger. Perhaps it thought: ‘I will end this spit, spit once for all.’ Whatever the brute’s thoughts, the keeper could not dissuade it from its intentions, though Richard could see him prodding it behind the ear with a goad. The girl, ‘Craig’s girl,’ perceived the danger which she ran, and, after a moment’s vacillation, began to wheel round, with the object of flying before this terrible elephantine wrath. But that moment’s vacillation was her undoing. Ere she could get the machine headed straight in the opposite direction the elephant was upon her and her car. Richard trembled with apprehension, for the situation was in truth appalling. With a single effort the elephant might easily have pitched both girl and car down the steep side of the embankment, which was protected only by a thin iron rail. Richard stopped his own car and waited. He could do nothing whatever, and he judged that the presence of himself and another car in the dreadful altercation might lead even to further disasters.