第44章 CIRCUS DAY(9)

They pretended that the tent was too big for the clown to be heard, but I take notice it wasn't too big for the fellow to get up and declaim "The puffawmance ees not yait hawf ovah. The jaintlemanly agents will now pawss around the ring with tickets faw the concert."I used to hate that man. When he said the performance was not yet half over, he lied like a dog, consarn his picture! There were only a few more acts to come. He knew it and we knew it. We wanted the show to go on and on, and always to be just as exciting as at the very first, and it wouldn't! We had got to the point where we couldn't be interested in anything any more. We were as little ones unable to prop their eyelids open and yet quarreling with bed.

We were surfeited, but not satisfied. We sat there and pouted because there wasn't any more, and yet we couldn't but yawn at the act before us. We were mad at ourselves, and mad at everybody else.

We clambered down the rattling bedslats seats, sour and sullen. We didn't want to look at the animals; we didn't want to do this, and we didn't want to do that. We whined and snarled, and wriggled and shook ourselves with temper, and we got a good hard slap, side of the head, right before everybody, and then we yelled as if we were being killed alive.

"Now, mister, if I ever take you any place again, you'll know it.

I'd be ashamed of myself if I was you. Hush up! Hush up, I tell you. Now you mark. You're never going to the show again. Do you hear me? Never! I mean it. You're never going again."But at eventide there was light. After supper, after a little rest and a good deal of food, while chopping the kindling for morning (it's wonderful how useful employ tends to induce a cheerful view of life) out of her dazzling treasure-heap of jewels, Memory took up, one after another, a glowing recollection and viewed it with delight. The evening performance, the one all lighted up with bunches and bunches of lights, was a-preparing, and in the gentle breeze the far-off music waved as it had been a flag. A harsh and rumbling noise as of heavy timbers falling tore through the tissue of sweet sounds. The horses in the barn next door screamed in their stalls to hear it. Ages and ages ago, on distant wind-swept plains their ancestors had hearkened to that hunting-cry, and summoned up their valor and their speed. It still thrilled in the blood of these patient slaves of man, though countless generations of them had never even so much as seen a lion.

"And is that all the difference, pa, that the lion roars at night and the ostrich in the daytime?"Out on the back porch in the deepening dusk we sat, with eyes relaxed and dreaming, and watched the stars that powdered the dark sky. Before our inward vision passed in review the day of splendor and renown. We sighed, at last, but it was the happy sigh of him who has full dined. Ambition was digesting. In our turn, when we grew up, we, too, were to do the deeds of high emprise. We were to be somebody.

(I never heard of anybody sitting up to see the show depart. And yet it seems to me that would be the best time to run off with it.)The next day we visited the lots. It was no dream. See the litter that mussed up the place.

We were all there. None had heard the man that runs the show say genially: "Yes, I think we can arrange to take you with us." Here was the ring; here the tent-pole holes, and here a scrap of paper torn from a hoop the bareback rider leaped through . . . . Oh, now I know what I was going to tell you that the clown said. The comicalest thing!

He picked up one of these hoops and began to sniffle.

So the ring-master asked him what he was crying about.

"I - I -was thinking of my mother. Smf! My good old mother!"So the ring-master asked him what made him think of his mother.

"This." And he held up the paper-covered hoop.

The ring-master couldn't see how that put the clown in mind of his mother. He was awful dumb, that man.

"It looks just like the pancakes she used to make for us."Well, sir, we just hollered and laughed at that. And after we had quieted down a little, the ringmaster says: "As big as that?""Bigger," says the clown. "Why, she used to make 'em so big we used 'em for bedclothes.""Indeed" (Just like that. He took it all in, just as if it was so.)"Oh, my, yes! I mind one time I was sleeping with my little brother, and I waked up just as cold - Brr! But I was cold!""But how could that be, sir? You just now said you had pancakes for bedclothes.""Yes, but my little brother got hungry in the night, and et up all the cover."Laugh? Why, they screamed. Me? I thought I'd just about go up.

But the ring master never cracked a smile. He didn't see the joke at all.

Good-by, old clown, friend of our childhood, goodby, good-by forever! And you, our other friend, the street parade, must you go, too? And you, the gorgeous show-bills, must you tread the path toward the sundown? Good-by! Good-by! In that dreary land where you are going, the Kingdom of the Ausgespielt, it may comfort you to recollect the young hearts you have made happy in the days that were, but never more can be again.