I sprang for the door, but stopped suddenly as a thought struck me.
“But say,” I wailed, “we’re aground! The clothes—!”
“Stretch a leg and get tiffin!” cried the ring-master. “Walhalla’s rags are all here.”
That evening, before the show began, I worked feverishly with Faust. We practiced jokes, tumbles, tripping each other up, pretending we were knocked down, and so on, while the manager tried to give us more time by holding back the audience. When the natives finally stormed the tent and forced their way inside, I scurried away to the dressing-tent to put on my clown’s outfit and have my face painted.
We had to leave out some of the acts until the next day gave more time for practice; but the natives didn’t seem to notice it, and the Europeans didn’t care, so I got through the performance with nothing worse happening to me than one rather bad fall that was a little too real.
We gave two performances a day because the natives enjoyed our act. But one day, while back in the dressing-tent where I scraped dried paint off one side of my face, while my fellow clown daubed fresh colors on the other, while I was jumping out of one foolish costume into another more idiotic, turning the place topsy-turvy in a mad scramble to find my dunce-cap and a lost slap-stick, I began to lose my love for the clown’s life.
And when I went to bed on my row of chairs that night, I found myself wishing that the time would soon come when I could earn my living in some other way.
One long week I wore the cap and bells on the cricket-field of Colombo. Then the day dawned when our tent was quickly taken down and bundled into the hold of a ship by naked stevedores. On the forward deck the moth-eaten tiger peered through the bars of his cage at the jungle behind the city and rubbed a watery eye; at the rail an unpainted Faust stared gloomily down at the water. But we four wanderers shed no tears as we stood at the far end of the break-water and watched the circus carried off until it sank below the sky-line. As we straggled back at dusk to join the homeless wanderers under the palms of Gordon Gardens, I caught myself feeling now and then in the band of my trousers for the money I had sewed there.
CHAPTER XVII
THREE WANDERERS IN INDIA
The merry circus days had left me so great a fortune that I decided to sail to the peninsula of India at once. Marten, of Tacoma, offered to go with me, and I agreed; for the ex-pearl-fisher could speak the Hindu language freely and he knew the country well.