Stand by london callin.., p.2
Stand By -- London Calling!, page 2
ANGUS M. MACWHORTER
PROPRIETOR, GREATEST
LITTLE-CIRCUS ON EARTH.
And it was right here that a knock came on the door of the trailer. The lotside door, that is, set almost midwise in the trailer’s side, and facing a similar door set in the opposite wall. It was a very businesslike knock, for it repeated itself twice in succession.
And Angus MacWhorter frowningly stroked his chin. Knowing well that this door, indicatable plainly from “the gate”, some distance off, and at which right now a gatekeeper was being held in attendance, was the only door which at this hour of night could be found by anyone. Specially—people from a far distance. He hurriedly stuffed away in his breast pocket the two telegrams. Whipped out his great silver turnip. Made some quick mental calculations. Put it away. Remembering the time-scheme of these various wires was such that—
“That—that must be the representatives themselves,” he nodded. “For they are supposed to be—pretty close by. And they’re—they’re undoubtedly following up my wire. Maybe—maybe have the money in their possession. All $3000—of it! Maybe—maybe will even tell me who in heaven’s name is paying a small fortune for a hanged stuffed fish. And why. Yes, why?”
He turned briskly toward the door on which the so-businesslike knock had come.
“Come in!” he called eagerly. “Come in!”
CHAPTER II
A Princess There Was!
The trailer door opened.
But did not, in its so doing, reveal any group of assembled men, either with legalistic looking sideburns or without, or carrying either lawbooks or moneybags! Neither did it even reveal what conceivably it could have: a pack of New Orleans gangsters—with drawn guns in hands!
For, disclosed against a background consisting of a momentary flash of the “lot”, with trailers lined up, across a murky looking dark area, their gilt and crimson paint invisible in the dark, but lights glowing cheerfully from all, was a girl. A girl whose petite body proceeded to more or less blot out the background as it rose slightly in process of ascending the two topmost steps of the short flight leading upward to the trailer door, and ever more and more obscured most of the opening. Once in, moreover, she immediately closed the door behind her.
She was about twenty-three, years of age, and was clad in a most curious—perhaps in some ways scant, too!—costume suggesting a herald of some sort—perhaps a medieval herald-girl, even—did one judge by the hartshorn trumpet that hung about her waist by a heavy-linked gold-like chain. It was a costume, no less, which, in the Greatest Little-Circus on Earth, not long ago called the MacWhorter Mammoth Motorized Shows, was known as the “Good-night girl” costume. And which, in addition to being also “the Royal Princess” in the opening ensemble or “Grand Splash” was what its wearer was. Good-night girl! Sheer invention of MacWhorter. A natural beauty of any type, wearing any pretty and striking costume, perhaps a bit scant, perhaps not, to light up the show at exit hour, with youth, beauty, even sex. To be, no less, the point of last “look-back” by the departing audience. To stand, in short, smilingly, on small raised platform at the side of the exit as the people pressed, flooded out, saying ever “Good night, folks—good night! Do come and see the show again next year, won’t you?” And which always sent them, one and all, away smiling. For this girl held within herself all that a good-night girl must have. Youth. Beauty. Sex appeal. Softness. Radiance.
Her costume consisted, in the main, of a long gold and blue bodice-like affair, with jet black cape hanging in back of her, and skin-tight black silk encasements for her lower limbs, which were themselves beautifully moulded—perfect. The bodice-like affair itself hung, by black silk shoulder-straps, over bare white shoulders, leaving entirely free her slender ivory-white arms—hung to well below her hips, where it ended in odd pointed triangles. The blue in the bodice-like garment matched exactly the blue of the eyes in her winsome oval face, as did the gold of it match her hair in its eighteenth-century high-do with double roll at the top and its low hung curls each side. The lips, encrimsoned so little if at all, were pensive, sweet. The open black cape that hung entirely in back of her had an upraised stiff collar flange, also entirely in black, to show the whiteness and slenderness of her neck. Her odd black slippers, with scarlet buckles, were curled fancifully upward at the toes, and with the gold-link held trumpet at her waist, marked her definitely as an historic character.
To those who looked for sex, she was sex in all degrees. For those who, of small towns, wanted to confront modesty, she was covered completely from above her bosom down. For those who looked for beauty, she was the sheerest, purest Anglo-Saxon type thereof. For those who looked only for youth, she was youth, in years and demeanour. And for those who looked only for costuming—she was the Herald, as per the trumpet. But in all that she was, she was completely minus the hardness of the usual circus performer.
She spoke, inside the door, but without coming forward. “Would you be able to grant me a few moments, Mr. MacWhorter?”
“Of course, Erlys—of course!” said the circus proprietor. “I’m always happy to see the Royal Princess—of the Grand Splash. Whether in her Princess costume, or in her later good-night and come-again-folks costume! Here—sit over here across from me, won’t you?”
With his two long arms he swung the diorama and attached dry battery down off the tiny table to the floor, one side. And coming erect again, beckoned to the small folding chair across the table whose back was hardly more than tabletop high.
The girl had come troubledly across the scant bit of space intervening between table and trailer door, and was now dropping down into the folding chair. She looked exceedingly distressed. Resting her eyes unseeingly on MacWhorter’s silk hat. Which made him suddenly come to himself.
“No, my dear—it’s not glued to my head. As so many folk think it is! Fact is, it’s off my head now!” He had whisked off his silk hat, stood it temporarily upmost on the floor. Smiled. “Yes, I keep it on my head, chiefly, because I regard myself—as the best hatrack for it!”
She did not even smile at his explanation of his inseparableness from his famous topper. Showing she was troubled, indeed.
“Well,” he helped out, “what can I do for, my Royal Princess? You so seldom, or never, come with complaints, that I just don’t—”
His gaze fell momentarily on the diorama, now on the floor off from them both. “So seldom or never that—listen!—you—you haven’t—ah—been brought under any kind of pressure, have you, from any—er—persons on the outside—to try to possess—ah—to filch—or—or to destroy, maybe—anything—belonging to the show?”
“Oh no, Mr. MacWhorter!” she hastened to assure him. “What on earth in the show could—” Her voice showed her hopeless inability to grasp this.
Convinced of the sheer wildness of his own suggestions, he hastened to get off the subject.
“I’ve a message for you, by the way, from your brother. Or did my faithful and trusty young driver, Pell Barneyfield, himself get the message to his sister, Erlys Jarnvay—odd to think of you two both being actually Pell Chalcraft and Erlys Chalcraft, but having different names through adoption—well, did he get the message to you before he loped off at four P.M. today—for Cleveland?”
“I got it—yes—or is it the one—you have for me? That he’d write me—on the train?”
“That’s right. That’s it.” MacWhorter frowned. “Though on the Pullman train that will take him from Chicago to Cleveland—not the awful series of jerkwaters and sit-up-all-night affairs he’ll have to take to get from here to Chicago first. Yes,” he nodded, “he’ll write you then exactly why he loped off in such a hurry—my, but he went fast!—when he went!—five minutes after I gave him indefinite leave of absence, he was off on that single daily jerkwater to where he could catch another like it, going straight further north, and—but all right. You have your message. Now what is it you want to see me about so bad that you come in before even taking off your good-night-girl costume? It must be awfully important?”
Whatever she wanted to say, however, she seemed afraid to. For the question she now asked seemed purely formal; she didn’t, indeed, seem to have a real interest in the answer to her own question.
“Is it true, Mr. MacWhorter, that after trying out the new name—Biggest Little-Circus on Earth—you’re going back again—to the old MacWhorter’s Mammoth Motorized Shows?”
“It is indeed!” he said firmly. “And that I should ever even have been persuaded to make a change—by the particular man who advised me—is one of the mysteries, even to me. For it’s done us harm, along the route where our people have known us from ’way back when, our old name was like—like the format of a newspaper. People resent a change in their newspaper. They resent the change here, and—no, Erlys, my dear, I’m taking on an expert sign-painter up ahead who can double in brass—and several other things than that, as well—and he’s going to steadily work now on repainting and relettering everything back to the good old ‘MacWhorter’s M.M.S.’.” He sighed with relief. Smiled wryly. “But you know you just asked that question to sidestep out of saying something you hesitated to say. For we were talking about—well, I was talking about Pell’s weird flying off into space today for Cleveland. Pell—who sure did me the greatest favour of all time.”
“What?” she asked, almost interestedly.
“Getting you into the show!” he laughed. “Lucky for me, all right, that Pell always knew he’d had a sister, at least in the beginning, in that orphan asylum where he originally came from. Rather, that Mr. Jason Barneyfield, who took him out of it when he was fifteen, and thence to Wisconsin, had been informed as to all that. For when we got near that town in Mississippi where the asylum is—and Pell rented himself a horse and saddle and rode over to it with blood in his eye—and compelled them to set forth the old records, birth-certificates and all, showing the existence of a sweet little girl-sister named Erlys, with a cruel burn on her right hip—”
The girl was nodding almost automatically, at his mention of that single blemish which, when she had first come to the show, and had tentatively donned for him the more revealing costume called Autumn, had made him decide, for her goodnight-girl costume, the one of the Herald. And he drove on.
“—showing, those old asylum records, the existence of a little girl-sister named Erlys, and adopted years before by folks named Janway who took her up to Iowa—
“Well maybe,” MacWhorter amended carefully, “I should put it instead that later, when we were within fifty miles of an airfield, so that he could fly up to Des Moines—and found you—he knew you were the Princess I’d been looking for for quite a long while, to ride in the Grand Splash—and the ‘good-night girl’, to make my crowds come back next year. And brought you back here. And here you are, now ten weeks. And that’s the huge favour Pell did me!”
The girl was pensively silent.
“Well that,” she said painedly, “is where I’ve got to make things pretty hard. Mr. MacWhorter, you didn’t have me sign a contract when I came on here—”
“Oh, I figured that your brother being here, under contract, was enough to hold—”—He smiled. “I don’t like contracts, really.”
“Nor I. But Mr. MacWhorter, I’m going to leave the show in—in well, eleven days from now. June 13th, to be exact.”
“Oh—no?” he said. Disappointment written on his face. “June—13th? Why, that’s at the town called Foleysburg.” He sighed heavily. “We-ell, that’s certainly a place one can leave all right. And get back to civilization. For a single miserable jerkwater train, six miles west of the show, reaches further train systems. Is, in fact, the last point out for a long ways. In fact, that’s why Golden-Tongue—or Steve Octigan—the absolutely best spieler in the business, made his contract to end that day—so as to be able to do the Freak Show at Riverview Park, Chicago. Strange!”
“What do you mean, Mr. MacWhorter? Strange?”
“Why—I mean that the unlucky 13th is the date for—for everything. Steve’s divorce becomes final that day—five o’clock, isn’t it, as the judge ironically wrote into the papers?—becomes final from that girl Freda he married—” He shook his head. “If ever a man was entitled to divorce a girl, he certainly was. For—but it’s final, that day. Five P.M.! And his contract is up, with that night’s performance. So he can go to Chicago and do the freak show. And you—you’re leaving the same night—”
He stopped. Almost aghast.
“Oh!” he said. “Don’t tell me—don’t tell me—”
“Yes,” the girl replied gravely, unsmilingly. “You have it right. I am going to marry Steve Octigan—Golden-Tongue. And that’s why I’m leaving the 13th. Because only, that night, can he and I get married—legally. And only can I go with him to Chicago—at that point. And—well now you have it, Mr. MacWhorter.”
He was helplessly silent.
“I—I can’t stop you,” he said unhappily, “from marrying one of the best platform-men in the country. A man who can always get work, as long as there are shows. And who really shouldn’t be in this outfit—except that he likes to travel a bit, between show engagements.” He sighed. “We-ell, you’ll be able to live like a lady, with him. Only—now you won’t be offended?”
“No.”
“You don’t love Steve. Oh, he loves you. Lord, yes! His eyes follow you—even in the Grand Splash—but you don’t love him, Erlys.”
She made no defence to this.
“But intend to marry him—just the same?”
She nodded.
He made a gesture with his great hands.
“You can leave, my dear,” he said. “If you feel you must. For one of the little circus-riders can pinch-hit till Hootens Falls. Where some kind of a model-congress, or convention, or something, scheduled to be held there, will provide girls. Oh, I can get somebody. Who’ll have a yen for travel. No—no harm. But I just hate to see you go—does Pell know?”
“Very, very much!”
“Does he approve—oh it’s none of his business, of course. Skip it. Well, I wish it were anybody—but Golden-Tongue. For that golden tongue of his can sell a customer on looking at a watermelon as—as a modernistic squash. And—may have—but that’s it: you don’t love him. Oh, I’ve watched you. Around him. You admire him. As a self-made chap, and all that. Who has a talent of sorts—and who’s self-developed. But you don’t love him. I’ve seen too much of the real thing in my show career—to be in the least fooled. I’m an old man, and—why,” he pleaded, “why is a girl like you, Erlys—who has great ideals—oh yes, you have—ideals about marriage and everything—why is a girl like you marrying Steve Octigan who—”
Her face was the strangest, at that second, of any face he had ever viewed. Especially when she replied:
“To cure myself, for good and all, of an unholy love—a love in this very show—a love so unholy that even God turns his face away when He contemplates it!”
CHAPTER III
The Load on a Girl’s Heart
MacWhorter raised helpless hands.
“Oh—my!” he said. “Oh—my!” He dropped his hands, for they felt suddenly like ten-ton weights. “Oh—my. Unholy—love? This—this is—beyond me. The people in my show—all are all right. So I thought—Oh!—listen, I dare not ask who or what this unho—why do you think Steve—”
“My mother,” the girl replied quickly; “rather, my dear foster-mother, Elvira Janway, told me always, as a little girl, that if ever I evolved in myself an unholy love, there was no answer to it, or for it—but to marry a good man who loved me—to form a family, and ties—that children would come—and the unholy love would die—in the face of the holy one.”
MacWhorter made helpless gestures in air—almost waving this time his giant hands.
“She—she obviously meant love—for a married man. That would be all that a woman like her could compre—it isn’t some married man in the—”
“Heavens, no. I wouldn’t even allow myself to fall in love with a married man.”
“Unholy love!” MacWhorter said. “This is—the darndest thing I’ve ever encountered—in all my days. I’ve seen all kinds of people in my outfit—had all kinds of situations—but never, never have I encountered, in the show, any love that wasn’t right—much less hear of a girl running off with a man because of an unholy love.”
The girl sighed. Said nothing. Looked even forlorn, desperate.
“I wish your mother were alive,” he said fiercely, “to advise you—on this case.”
“I wish she were just alive. My foster-mother, that is. She was the kindest and dearest woman on earth. To take a little girl out of an asylum—”
“Seems,” said MacWhorter, “she might have taken the little boy out, too, for—”
“No, she—she didn’t have resources enough for anything like that. It meant that Pell, in the boy’s section, had to stay on and on—”
“For about nine years longer, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Till a Wisconsin farmer—”
“—who could well use a husky boy—”
“—named Barneyfield took him out. But like me, he thinks today that Jason Barneyfield is—rather, was—the best man on earth.”
“You two are lucky orphans,” said the man. “I’d like to have known the English Chalcrafts who bore you both. And died of a disease that today wouldn’t be even serious—with penicillin, and streptomycin, and—”
