“You frightened me so,” she said. “Don’t, please, do that again.”
“Well, I will not.” I patted her shoulder, surprised and a little touched. “One certainly has no right to take risks in a position like mine—with a little gossip dependent on me.”
She lifted her face, with a tiny stamp of her foot.
“I tell you,” she said, “that if you were to fall, I should jump after you.”
I looked at her a moment without answering; then I said, with a note of huskiness in my voice which I could not quite control, “Allons, donc, Fifine! Then it is certain I must not fall. Come; I am going to show you a Provençal bull-fight. That is what the excitement is all about.”
We found an unoccupied embrasure, through which we could command the scene below. Right under the walls, on the strip of land which divided them from the water, they had erected a frail barrier enclosing a goodish space of ground; and within this area was enacting the game which above all others these southerners love. And a game it is, no more, and a manly game, calling for courage and dexterity, and without any suggestion of the brutality which characterises the baser business. They drive in a bull—commonly one of those, small and black, which are especially raised for these ferrades, or fêtes—having a rosette pinned between his horns; and the man who can succeed in snatching this token wins the prize. That is all; but it affords fair enough exercise for pluck and agility. Any one who likes may take part in the sport: you will see some twenty or thirty engaged in it as a rule: and the bull himself is often the most rompish member of the party. Of course he means business, but it is very seldom that he gets the chance for a literal stroke of it. Still, it is that off-chance which constitutes the excitement; and, if he is a good bull, he affords one a plenitude. The drawback to the thing, as an entertainment, is the lack of colour, owing to the reason aforesaid. These cuadrillas might, so far as their clothes go, be just a body of ordinary young bank holiday-makers, roystering in Battersea-Park. And perhaps it is on that account that, after a bull or two—the bouts as a rule last only a few minutes—the novelty of the thing stales and one has had enough of it.
Fifine was greatly excited at first, and in terror lest the beast in one of his rushes should “get home.” “They can never go on misleading him,” she said. “He will turn suddenly on a side-skip like that, and have the man on his horns. O, Dieu merci! Did you see?”
“Rest happy, m’amie,” said I. “The bull will never do as you fear. And for what reason, do you think. Why, because he charges with his eyes shut.”
“His eyes shut?”
“Ah, yes! That is the players’ safety. If it were a cow, now, it would be different. She would leave her tale of victims behind her, no question; because she would keep her eyes open. A woman’s weapons are not strength but vision. She sees very clearly what she is after, and the best way to get it.”