“Hope that yellow pussy’ll get your changes a bit smarter to-night,” said Jewell. “Did I tell you the little perisher’s been after me? Yep.... Fancy thinking I’d take him on! Fresh little greaser! Mauled me about, too. I pretty quick dropped it across him, you bet.”
“Good,” said Johnnie. “I’ll pull his yeller face to bits if he comes round you while I’m about. Tell him from me he’d best stop trifling with suicide. Better ring through, p’r’aps, and tell him to follow our marks on the score. Here—Fred—ring the band, will you, and tell him Diabolo and Angela want him to watch out for their cues, ’cos he mucked ’em last night. Tell him we change to Number Five directly I’m up the rope.”
They drew back to the wings as the serio-comic girl kicked a clumsy and valedictory leg over the footlights and fell against the entrance curtain. They heard their symphony being blared by the brass, and then, with that self-sufficient, mincing gait traditional to the acrobat, they tripped on.
It was a poor house—a Tuesday night house—thin and cold. They did not go well; and while Diabolo was doing the greater share of the stunts, Jewell stood against the back-cloth, with arms behind her in the part of the attendant sprite. From there she was looking into the bleak, blank face of Cheng Brander, and she thought that a baboon might wag a baton with as much intelligence. His attitude in the chair was always the same: negligent, scornful. He saw nothing from his Olympian detachment, looked at none of the turns, smiled at none of their quips, but leant back in his chair at a comfortable angle, his elbow resting on the arm, his wrist directing the beat of the baton, his glance fixed either on the score or wandering to the roof.
Following a brilliant display of jugglery with Indian clubs, Johnnie bowed and danced himself up-stage, whence, by a pulley-rope, he was hauled to the flies. Jewell mouthed at the stage manager in the wings. The stage manager spoke through the telephone, and Cheng Brander, bending to the receiver, listened:
“Number Five,” said the voice to Cheng Brander.
“Number Nine,” said Cheng Brander to his men.
“One! Two! Three!” cried the voice of Johnnie from the flies. The audience could just perceive his head, as he swung by the legs from the upper trapeze.
“Number Nine,” Cheng Brander had said, and the band blared, not The Bridal Chorus, but Stars and Stripes. Johnnie was swinging in rhythm to a melody with which he was so familiar that he was expecting it before a bar was to be heard. He was anticipating the beat of The Bridal Chorus, and the muscles of his legs had, of their own accord, slacked their hold on the bar in readiness for the exact moment of release, when his ears told him of a mistake. Something was wrong somewhere—something—something.... In a fraction of a second he realised that the beat of the music was not the beat to which his nerves were keyed. In a fraction of a second he tried to recover, to check the incipient fall. But his nerves, thrown out of gear by this unexpected rhythm at such a moment, failed to respond. The trapeze swung forward. His hands clutched air. His legs went limp. He came down on his head. One heard a muffled blow as of something cracking.
A short, sharp gasp came from the house. Cheng bent forward and peered across the lights. The curtain fell, and the house rose, sick and disquieted. As it fell, the woman rushed down-stage, and bent with fond hands and inarticulate cries over the body of her boy.