The elephants, a small one and a big one together to show their absurd proportions, came next. The earth shook under them. They waved their trunks hopefully from side to side, and their little brown eyes, which seemed to have no relation to their bodies, peered out like prisoners out of the peep-holes of a monstrous moving prison. When the man next to Robert offered the smallest of them an empty paper-bag it curled its trunk over his head and opened its pointed mouth and let out a piercing squeal of protest which alarmed its tormentor, and caused his neighbours to regard him with nervous disapproval. But the big elephant seemed to exercise a soothing influence over its companion. It waved its trunk negligently as though in contemptuous dismissal of a commonplace incident.
"My dear," it said, "that's all you can expect of such people."
There were men seated on the big elephants' necks, their legs tucked comfortably behind the enormous flapping ears. They looked mysterious and proud in their position. They wore turbans and carried sticks with pointed iron spikes at the head, and when they came to the low entrance of the tent they prodded their huge beasts, which went down on their knees, painfully yet with a kind of sorrowful pride, and blundered through amidst the admiring murmur of the crowd.
"The way they manage them big brutes!" declared the lady with the feathered hat disconsolately. "And there's our George, a proper 'uman being, and can't be got to do a thing—nohow."
The band inside had stopped, beaten in the hard-fought contest with its rival at the far end of the procession, which thereupon broke out into throaty triumphant trumpet blasts and exultant roll of drums. Rufus clutched wildly at Robert's sleeve.
"Oh, my word, just look at her! Oh, my word!"
Robert craned forward, peering round the embonpoint of the man next him. The procession now scarcely moved, and there was a space between the last elephant and the great coal-black horse that followed—a wide, solemn space, that invited you to realize that this was the finest sight you had ever seen in your life. He was indeed a splendid, terrifying creature. As Rufus Cosgrave said loudly, he was not like a human horse at all. One could imagine him having just burst out of hell, still breathing fire and smoke and rolling his eyes in the anguish of his bridled wickedness. In the glare from the tent-door he gleamed darkly, a wild thing of black flames, and those in the front row of the crowd trod nervously on the toes of those behind, edging out of reach of his restless, dancing hoofs. For it seemed impossible that the woman in the saddle should be really his master. And yet she sat upright and unconcerned. In its black, close-fitting habit, her supple body looked a living, vital part of the splendid beast. She was his brain, stronger than his savage instinct, and every threatening move of his great limbs was dictated to him without a sound, almost without a gesture. A touch of a slender, patent-leather boot set him prancing, an imperceptible twist of the wrist and he stood stock still, foam-necked and helpless. It was a proud—an awe-inspiring spectacle. And it was not only her fearless strength. She was fair and beautiful. So Robert saw her. He saw nothing else. He gazed and gazed, heart-stricken. He did not hear Rufus speak to him, or the band which was blaring out a Viennese waltz, an old thing, whistled and danced half to death long since, but which, having perhaps a spark of immortal youth left among the embers, had not lost its power to make the pulses quicken. Indeed it even played a humble part in this great moment in Robert's life. Though he did not hear it, it poured emotion into the heated, dusty air. It painted the tawdry show with richer colours. It was the rider's invisible retinue. At a touch from her heel the horse danced to it, in perfect time, arching his great neck, and rolling his wild eyes.
She was proud, too. Robert saw how she disdained the gaping multitude. She rode with haughtily lifted head and only once her glance, under the white, arrogant lids, dropped for an instant. Was it chance, was it the agonized intensity of his own gaze which drew it to the small boy almost under her horse's hoofs? (For he had held his ground. He was not afraid. Unlike the rest, his trust in her was limitless and unquestioning. And if she chose to ride him down, he would not care, no more than a fanatic worshipper beneath the wheels of a Juggernaut.) Now under her eyes his heart stood still, his knees shook. She did not smile; she did not recognize his naked, shameless adoration. And that too was well. A smile would have lowered her, brought her down from her superb distance. His happiness choked him. She was the embodiment of everything that he had heard pass in the distance from the silent dusks of Acacia Grove—splendour and power, laughter and music, the beat of a secret pulse answering the tread of invisible processions. She came riding out of the mists of his fancy into light, a living reality that he could take hold of, and set up in his empty temple. She was not his mother, nor Francey, nor God, but she was everything that in their vague and different ways these three had been to him before he lost them. She was something to be worshipped, to be died for, if necessary, with joy and pride.
But in a moment it was over. She looked away from him and rode forward, like a monarch into a grandly illuminated castle, amidst the whispered plaudits of her people.
A little girl on a Shetland pony rode at her heels, Robert saw her without wanting to see her. She obtruded herself vulgarly. She was dressed as a page, her painfully thin legs looking like sticks of peppermint in their parti-coloured tights, and either was, or pretended to be, terrified of her minute and tubbily good-natured mount. At its first move forward she fell upon its neck with shrill screams and clung on grotesquely, righting herself at last to make mock faces at the grinning crowd.