Helia made a sign and looked to the trapezes oscillating. Suddenly, to a joyous strain, she leaped forward. The orchestra seemed to uphold her in her flight. Nothing could be more graceful than the pose of her skirt, which fluttered from her ankles like a pair of wings. Then Helia leaped to the second trapeze just as the two bars almost touched. Her hand grasped the steel tube with a sudden effort, which her art concealed. Then, letting go, she continued her dizzy balancing and leaped to the third trapeze, as calm as Fortune on her Wheel. She had crossed the entire space of the circus at a single flight and fallen upright on the other platform just as a wingless Victory finds rest on the pediment of a temple.
“Hurrah! Brava! brava!”
Helia cast a look of triumph on the crowd.
“What an artiste!” the duke murmured. Could this really be she who but a moment ago was talking like any comrade—this prodigy who was holding the hall enthralled, and bringing in a crush to the door all the stable crowd and artistes, gentlemen in evening dress, and the whole tumult of clowns?
Sœurette looked at her “big sister” in wonder and delight, while her lips seemed to murmur a prayer. Cemetery entered the ring again to proclaim the distress of man and his unrealizable desires. He jumped up to the rope, climbed a yard or two, and fell back flat on the ground. Poum! Come on! the goddess seemed to say to him. He tried again, but from the height of his Olympus the leader of the orchestra thundered him down with a stroke of the bass-drum, and he fell again—poum!—remaining on his back with his four limbs wriggling in the air. Then he dragged himself away, broken and bruised, with halting leg and rubbing his shoulder, while above him Helia appeared as an apparition, a shining form rid of the heaviness of the flesh.
At the Circus
Her art astonished the public. There was no perceptible effort,—Jarret lâchés, high leaps, whirls,—there was nothing of all that. She gave the sensation of the “something never seen before.” Merely by the way in which she touched her trapeze with the point of her bare feet, one felt that she was free from rules—inventive, a genius. It was youth and beauty, scorn of danger, and courage holding spellbound the crowd below her.
Her artistic intelligence profited even by obstacles. Thus Helia disdained the net; but the law imposed it. She found a means of making it serve her own purposes.