CHAPTER VIII
The damp, river-scented earth slipped under his feet. The blare of a steam clarion, and the bang of a steam-driven drum, sounded, and the naphtha lamps of the merry-go-round and the circus gleamed through the fog. The infernal noise jigged on his brain-pan as if every flying crotchet and quaver stamped like the hoof of a little devil in the surface of his brain. The smell of the lamps was in his nostrils, and with it odours of tar and stables and orange-peel.
Six-and-thirty hours had gone by since he had turned his back on Blackfriars Bridge. It was more than fifty hours since he had tasted food, and he had spent two days and a night in the open in fog and rain. He had been hungry, but the pangs of hunger had passed, and he was conscious of little but a cold nausea. He drew towards the light and the music mechanically. In front of him, illuminated by flaring lamps (which sparkled, he thought, as an apple of Sodom might have done when newly cut), was a placard fixed in an iron frame, with clamps which pierced the turf. ‘One night only in Reading,’ said the placard. Until then he had not known his whereabouts.
There was no more custom for the merry-go-round, and its noisy organ ceased to play. He could hear the band within the circus now, the dull thud of hoofs on sawdusted earth, and the crack of a whip. A mirthless voice, with an intention of mirth in it, said, ‘Look out! Catch her! She’ll tumble!’ A laugh spouted up from the spectators within, and was half smothered by the canvas of the show. Not far from him was a slit in the canvas wall, with a pale yellow spirit of light in it. A man came into the gleam.
‘Now, where,’ the man asked, in a voice of anger, ‘is that boy?
The voice of some invisible person responded in an alternation between a hoarse bass and a shrill falsetto:
‘Perchance he wanders with the paling moon, where Delos’ tower awaits the lagging dawn, which fronts not yet her summit, or perchance——’
‘Oh, go to ‘ell!’ said the voice that had first spoken. ‘Where is that boy?’
‘You might,’ began the invisible person, in a cracked soprano, and concluded in a tone three octaves lower, ‘have let me finish.’
‘Let you finish!’ said the other. ‘Would you finish? Can you finish? He stood comically silhouetted—a balloon propped by two monstrous sausages and topped by a football. ‘Billy,’ he said, in a grave voice, after a minute’s pause, ‘where is that boy? Miriam can’t do three turns. If Pauer isn’t here in five minutes, the fat’s in the fire.’