CHAPTER IV
THE PARADE
Breakfast over, active preparations are on for the parade. Well-fed horses and ponies in shining harness and waving plumes take their places before glittering vehicles; the sound of music is heard from bands perched hazardously high; clowns, charioteers, jockeys, Roman riders join the line; camels and elephants, some bearing a weight of feminine beauty in Oriental costume, make appearance, and a picturesque cavalcade nearly a mile long is in motion.
One of the managers leads the line down to town and back. He has already been over the course once, noting its conditions with caution born of long experience. Sometimes his foresight bids him change the route. A corner is too sharp for the forty-horse team, a hill may be dangerously steep, a bridge too low or unsafe, the road too rough, or perhaps the advance man did not appreciate that at a certain point the parade would “double” on itself.
Behind him a drum corps blows and beats, and then Jeanne d’Arc, in polished armor, with clanking curtains of chain mail. The flush of tan is beginning to tint ears and cheeks under her helmet and her two mounted knights are very happy and proud. She is a young woman who was adopted by a wealthy aunt in Pittsburg, who sent her to Europe to keep her from entering circus life. Her sudden return, romantic marriage with a tattooed man, enlistment as a jockey rider in Cedar Rapids, Ia., and rapid rise to the front ranks of equestriennes is a matter circus folk never tire of discussing.
Through densely crowded streets the procession measures its gaudy passage, a handsome lovelorn young acrobat yearning for the return to the tent, where an eighteen-year-old girl somersault rider eagerly awaits him; the stepmother behind, who doesn’t approve of their devotion; a uniformed marshal, whose thoughts are for his wife, seriously ill in a Philadelphia hospital; a brother who fears for his sister; a bicycle rider at the performance, now high on the back of an elephant whose temper has been bad for several days; Sultan, a majestic lion, viewing it all calmly from the top of a high cage; bands playing, horses prancing, wagons rumbling, calliope screaming, clowns frollicking—truly a fantastic panorama. And sometimes ahead, then behind, again on the side, a tramp bicyclist, darting up steps and down, scaling fences, into stores and houses, often one wheel off the ground, seldom on both, but never dismounting.
By the side of the band wagons and behind the shrieking calliope a cloud of boys keeps tireless pace, reeling off mile after mile, but gorged with happiness. Street cars make time with the procession, jammed with passengers and scores hanging to platforms, paying no fares but this eloquent testimony to the passing show. The tigers and lions look bored, and the hyena yawns with accumulated ennui. Behind, the gorgeously caparisoned riders, men and women in tights and spangles and breastplates of shining gold and steel; behind, the richly-decked camels with riders from the great desert and the elephants swaying to and fro with monotonous tread, and near the end of the gaudy line, the fairy outfit of Santa Claus, the old woman of nursery fame, Bluebeard in decapitation attitude and the other tableau wagons of burnished gold and flaming red.
The clowns are very much in evidence. Behind all manner of steeds, from the camel treading like a dusty spectre with his cushioned feet, to the proud pony, and from the four-horse teams to the decrepit agricultural equine; on foot and on elephant and on bicycle; in costume weird and wonderful, they are an amusement-affording part of the cortege. Boys flock by their sides, and their ready wit is equal to all exigencies. Well has the press agent written:
Clowns on four legs,
Clowns on two,