Inside the cage a brown bear—to me less suggestive of a wild animal than of lap-robes and furriers' signs—was dancing sleepily and allowing himself to be prodded by a person whose celluloid standing-collar showed white at the neck above the green of his Tyrolese costume. The bear was mangy, and his steel muzzle had chafed him, and Toppan said he was corrupted of moth and rust alike, and the audience applauded but feebly when he and his keeper withdrew.
After this we had a clown-elephant, dressed in a bib and tucker and vast baggy breeches—like those of a particularly big French Turco—who had lunch with his keeper, and rang the bell and drank his wine and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief like a bed-quilt, and pulled the chair from underneath his companion, seeming to be amused at it all with a strange sort of suppressed elephantine mirth.
And then, after they had both made their bow and gone out, in bounded and tumbled the dogs, barking and grinning all over, jumping up on their stools and benches, wriggling and pushing one another about, giggling and excited like so many kindergarten children on a show-day. I am sure they enjoyed their performance as much as the audience did, for they never had to be told what to do, and seemed only too eager for their turn to come. The best of it all was that they were quite unconscious of the audience and appeared to do their tricks for the sake of the tricks themselves, and not for the applause which followed them. And then, after the usual programme of wicker cylinders, hoops, and balls was over, they all rushed off amid a furious scrattling of paws and filliping of tails and heels.
While this was going on, we had been hearing from time to time a great sound, half-whine, half-rumbling guttural cough, that came from somewhere behind the exit from the cage. It was repeated at rapidly decreasing intervals, and grew lower in pitch until it ended in a short bass grunt. It sounded cruel and menacing, and when at its full volume the wood of the benches under us thrilled and vibrated.
There was a little pause in the programme while the arena was cleared and new and much larger and heavier paraphernalia was set about, and a gentleman in a frock coat and a very shiny hat entered and announced "the world's greatest lion-tamer." Then he went away and the tamer came in and stood expectantly by the side of the entrance, there was another short wait and the band struck a long minor chord.
And then they came in, one after the other, with long, crouching, lurching strides, not at all good-humouredly, like the dogs, or the elephant, or even the bear, but with low-hanging heads, surly, watchful, their eyes gleaming with the rage and hate that burned in their hearts and that they dared not vent. Their loose, yellow hides rolled and rippled over the great muscles as they moved, and the breath coming from their hot, half-open, mouths turned to steam as it struck the air.
A huge, blue-painted see-saw was dragged out to the centre, and the tamer made a sharp sound of command. Slowly, and with twitching tails, two of them obeyed and clambering upon the balancing-board swung up and down, while the music played a see-saw waltz. And all the while their great eyes flamed with the detestation of the thing and their black upper lips curled away from their long fangs in protest of this hourly renewed humiliation and degradation.
And one of the others, while waiting his turn to be whipped and bullied, sat up on his haunches and faced us and looked far away beyond us over the heads of the audience—over the continent and ocean, as it were—as though he saw something in that quarter that made him forget his present surroundings.
"You grand old brute," muttered Toppan; and then he said: "Do you know what you would see if you were to look into his eyes now? You would see Africa, and unnamed mountains, and great stony stretches of desert, with hot blue shadows, and plains of salt, and lairs in the jungle-grass, and lurking places near the paths the steinbok make when they go down to water. But now he's hampered and caged—is there anything worse than a caged lion?—and kept from the life he loves and was made for"—just here the tamer spoke sharply to him, and his eyes and crest drooped—"and ruled over," concluded Toppan, "by some one who is not so great as he, who has spoiled what was best in him and has turned his powers to trivial, resultless uses—some one weaker than he, yet stronger. Ah, well, old brute, it was yours once, we will remember that."
They wheeled out a clumsy velocipede, built expressly for him, and, while the lash whistled and snapped about him, the conquered king heaved himself upon it and went around and around the ring, while the band played a quick-step, the audience broke into applause, and the tamer smirked and bobbed his well-oiled head. I thought of Samson performing for the Philistines and Thusnelda at the triumph of Germanicus. The great beasts, grand though conquered, seemed to be the only dignified ones in the whole business. I hated the audience who saw their shame from behind iron bars; I hated myself for being one of them; and I hated the smug, sniggering tamer.