The gravity of her countenance showed that she was wholly absorbed in her work. From time to time her lips would part with the little words hop, hop, designed to warm up her horse, who was apathetically rounding the circle. Then she would seat herself on the saddle for a moment’s rest, her legs hanging, while she indifferently bowed her head in answer to the applause, her bosom, unconfined by her clinging gown, rising and falling with her quickened breath. She seemed completely isolated from all around by her gravity, her indifference. The young girls whom I knew, my sisters’ friends, used to talk, chatter, laugh, play, put their arms around each others’ waists. This one was passive as an idol.
The show ended with a pantomime, every scene of which I remember. When we went back to the house I repeated it as well as I could by mobilising my sister Nicola, and even little Jamie for a minor part, pressing two little schoolfellows into the service, and with this improvised troop I proposed to treat our parents on the festival of one or the other. Our performance was ruthlessly stopped in the very middle without the slightest respect for dramatic art. Grandfather alone was clamorously delighted with it, for which Aunt Deen reproved him. Reflecting upon the incident, I at last recognised that the plot turned upon a hoodwinked husband. The innocent Nicola had been charged with this part, and under my instructions performed it with wonderful success. But I was forbidden to return to the circus.
The little circus queen who had made a single spring from her horse’s back into my imagination was doubtless destined to remain a magnificent and remote memory for me. But grandfather loved the company of artists and unconventional folk. I can see him now at the Café des Navigateurs, taking sides with all the Martinod group against the bourgeois. One day as we were crossing the Market Place he went round the tent to where the waggons were drawn up.
“Where are we going, grandfather?” I murmured, with throbbing heart.
“I want to get a nearer view of these people.”
In fact, he stopped and talked with the men who were smoking their pipes, while the women were preparing the soup or mending clothes. He spoke to them in an unknown tongue, which must have been Italian. This language upon his lips seemed to me simply incomprehensible. He pronounced it almost like the words that we use, only dwelling upon certain syllables and gliding over those that followed. But when those bronzed men spoke their words took on a strange accent, sometimes low and sometimes sharp, like gay music.
Were these clowns or acrobats? The Marinetti brothers were absent. To see them there would have filled me with pride. The only important personage whom I seemed to recognise was the rope dancer, and she was somewhat disconcertingly crowned with grey hair, and was sadly repairing a dirty skirt of puffed gauze. I was not aware that its proper name is tulle.
Timidly my eyes sought the little horsewoman, though I should have preferred not to find her. I had looked too far away; she was at my side, peeling potatoes with a broken knife. Instead of her golden tunic, she was in an ugly striped gown. Her bare feet—that had been shod with gold—were covered with dust. But in this humiliation she seemed to me as beautiful as in her glory, on the pedestal of her large saddle, springing through hoops amid multitudinous applause. My eyes still enlightened by illusion, I found her just as beautiful, and yet my first impulse was to move away, of course from timidity—but also, I confess, because I had got from Aunt Deen, in the matter of gipsies and beggars, her fear of vermin, which she always said, are easily caught.
Let him who can explain these inconsistencies. I found a new and obscure feeling awaking within me, merely from the shame I felt at that recoil, and in my eagerness to be able to forgive myself, I could at once have shared with her even her insects.
I admired the nobility and also the dexterity with which she peeled her potatoes, never making two beginnings, but removing an entire skin with a single operation. She was condescending without impatience to this mean occupation, and I was grateful to her for her humility. As the other day in the ring, during her hippie exercises, she was serious and impassive, absorbed in her work. Yet did she not observe my fixed observation? She deigned to be the first to speak.