“You’ve hit it,” replied the Dublin sage; “that’s the very idea.”
“Why, blawst it, me man,” shrieked Reggie, “don’t you know there’s a Friend-in-Need Society in Colombo? What do you fawncy we contribute to it for? Now if you chaps don’t stop disgracing all the—”
“What’s the bloody row?” growled a voice in the darkness.
Our employer loomed up out of the night.
“Oh! That’ll be all right,” he asserted, in a soothing voice, when the controversy had been explained to him; “The tints is all up. T’night I’ll give these byes their uniforems, an’ whinever the show is goin’ on an’ the niggers can see thim, they’ll wear thim.”
“Uniforms!” cried the Englishmen. “That’s different, ye knoaw.”
“Of course,” continued Reggie, lighting a cigarette, “it will be all right with uniforms. When a man weahs a uniform, the natives think he is doing something they cawn’t do, ye knoaw, and he keeps his cawste. Oah, yes, that’ll do very nicely, Mr. Manager. We’ll be off, then,” and the pair tripped away into the night.
“Fitzgerald’s Circus” was an Australian enterprise. Its personnel, from Fritz himself to the trick poodle, hailed from the little continent. In competition with the circuses of our own land this one-ring affair would have attracted small attention; but its annual circuit of Oriental cities, from Hong Kong to Bombay, was on virgin soil where the most stereotyped “act” was greeted with bursts of enthusiasm.
To us, surfeited and sophisticated beings from an unmarveling world, the sights of interest were in the amphitheater of benches rather than in the ring. The burners lighted, we dashed off to don our uniforms. These were light blue in color and richly trimmed with gold braid—things of glory above which even the bald crown of Askins and the straw-tinted thatch of the Swede inspired a deep Singhalese reverence. The designers of the garments, however, having in mind durability rather than the comfort of scores of annual wearers, had forced upon us a costume appropriate to the upper ranges of the Himalayas.
Our first uniformed duties were those of ushers, and between the appearance of the frightened vanguard of the audience and the first fanfare of the audacious “orchestra,” life moved with a vim. The hordes that swarmed in upon us before the barker had concluded his first appeal comprised every caste of Singhalese society. Weighty problems unknown to the most experienced circus man of the western world crowded themselves upon us, demanding instantaneous solution. A delegation of priests in cheese-cloth robes raised their shrill voices in protest because the space allotted them gave no room for their betel-nut boxes. Half-breeds shouted strenuous objections to being seated with natives. Merchants refused to enter the same section with shopkeepers. Shopkeepers were chary of pollution at the touch of scribes. Scribes cried out hoarsely at contact with laborers. Skilled workmen screamed in frenzy at every attempt to make place among them for mere coolies.