A copy of beowulf, p.20
A Copy of Beowulf, page 20
She looked startled at this. And which startlement did reveal, at least, that she accepted as a possibility that which he had set forth but as a categorical question.
And helplessly the man shook his skin-tight wigged head, with the tiny brown derby on it. Helplessly yes, but partly amusedly. Even admiringly.
“I love you, Melodee,” he said, “because you’re such a little—little wishful-hoper! Yes, ‘wishful-hoper’, that’s the word for you. For back of that very startled look you just gave was a world of wishful hoping. Wishful hoping that even if ’twas all realized—to the extent at most, I mean, of Breck Lindo merely coming in and—and convincing you, say, that he’d treat you all your life as though you’d been born under marital sacrament and all that—well, honey, it’s wishful hoping that, if realized only in the way I outlined, would only fetch you up some day behind the 8-ball of marital discord and hatred. Why, honey, a man like Breck, whose parents were married by bell, book and candle—in a huge cathedral—well, folks like you and I just aren’t in his class, see? We belong to each oth—no,” he broke off, “you can just forget all about that. And by ‘that’, I mean Breck dram—at—i—cally reversing completely all he told you in his wire—and riding—or striding—into the show this afternoon or evening, with the location—the genuine, establishable, confirmable location, that is—of a marriage-register page containing your mammy’s and pappy’s sigs. For the chance of Breck now coming riding, striding, or any other way, into this show today or tonight, with or without any documents or documentary evidence or anything else, is equal to—can you take mathematics, honey?”
“Oh yes, Jules. Yes. I studied math in high school. Exactly how much is the chance—you outline?”
“Exactly zero, honey,” he laughed satisfiedly, “with the rim peeled off!”
CHAPTER XXI
“No Charge, Mister!”
Breck, climbing down off the battered, rickety carryall, drawn by two mules, that had brought him from Custer’s Crossing north of New Madrid, to and through the very fascinating-looking little town itself, and around to the rutty road today forming the “front” of the circus—in front of MacWhorter’s very own big green-and-white checkered trailer, in fact—looked up plaintively, from the ground, at the weatherbeaten, open-throated driver with the tatter-rimmed straw hat.
“Are you sure,” asked Breck, hitching up his purple corduroy trousers by his braided leather belt, “that you won’t accept a dollar—five dollars—anything you name—for fetching me all the way here, to where I want to be?”
“Nary a cent, circus man,” the man in the seat was saying. “That thar free pass you give me for tonight’s show is more’n I d’serve. Jest hope I driv’ these critters fast ’nough to make up fer some o’ the time you lost gittin’ to Custer’s Crossin’. Train ’uz ’bout two hours late, ef it come by just befur I driv past, an’—”
“That’s right,” said Breck. “And nothing vehicular going past there at the time. I feared for a few minutes I’d have to hoof it here.”
“Yo’ wouldn’. Allus somebody comin’ long sooner or later in a veh’cle o’ some so’te.”
“Well, thanks a million for the lift,” said Breck from ground level.
The man on the high seat saluted with two gnarled fingers, clicked to his mules, and drove off in the same direction the carryall had been headed.
And Breck was alone on the sunbaked road with a cheerful sky overhead that, though betokening the hour now to be all of 4:30 in the afternoon, was completely cloudless and promising a perfect night for a showing.
Signs of activity were more or less absent, at least on the outside of the show. Far down the blaze of trailer sides making up the front, a few curious town loafers could be seen congregated around the stout collapsible wooden latticework that tonight, denuded of its now occluding and garishly-painted canvas, and drawn back from the 10-foot gap it was covering, would form the “gate”.
But now a rattling, rolling sound coming from the closed door of the big white-and-green checkered trailer where Breck had asked to be let off showed it was about to open. And open it did! Three quarters way, anyway. Revealing in the opening none other than the owner of the Biggest Little Circus on Earth.
Angus MacWhorter seemed taller than ever, framed in the doorway, or portion thereof, and seemed also like a great black crow, clad as he was in his black ringmaster’s trousers, suspendered by ascetically jet-black braces to his coatless stiff-fronted white shirt. But his great brooding long face, and the high grey-touched sideburns each side, as well as the hair above it, thinning because of his 60 or so years of age, was beaming out instant welcome to the man on the road.
“Hi, Breck!” he called. “I thought I recognized your voice outside. So glad you made it okay. Come in!”
MacWhorter was now standing aside, holding full open, with one giant tree trunk of an arm, the trailer door. Breck crossed the narrow lane of separating turf, and stepped up and in. The gaunt cheerless interior of the trailer, made so because of its few and so ascetic pieces of furniture, and its complete lack of color, seemed to be of the same starkness as usual. For MacWhorter’s bunk, at one end, was neatly made up with its jet-black coverlid. His black crow-like long-tailed ringmaster’s coat hung casually across the back of the single battered all-wood chair, a folding one, his tall silk hat for tonight’s performance perched, by being “dunked” firmly into its overlying folds, atop it, and his great loaded blackthorn cane, which he carried customarily on his occasional long evening walks “under the stars with God”, leaning crazily awry against both. Moreover, MacWhorter’s brass-bound Bible was on a portable table underneath the high small window on the lot side, letting in, however, that window, plenty of light on the Bible’s fine text, and revealing also that MacWhorter had at last bought himself a brand new canvas-back chair to supplant his old one. For the new one stood there, its black wood blacker than black—its black canvas also blacker than black. Shouting its own newness. “Mac’s being a spendthrift,” said Breck to himself. “A new chair for his own trailer!”
“I’ve been doing my daily Bible chapter now,” MacWhorter explained to Breck as he closed the door. Plainly getting Breck’s surprised glance toward the big Bible. “Because pull-out hour for our next stop will be much earlier tonight than usual. I’m so glad you got here okay, Breck. I need you badly—as a driver tonight. Couple of those newly-taken-on chaps jumped the show at Prairie City last night—at show-close hour—they just couldn’t, they said, ‘take it’ to dive into territory ‘worse’ than ‘Darkest Africa’!”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Breck. “They’ll be missing all the fun now. Well, I’m here. Had a good sleep last night. And can drive anything you’ve got—this night.”
“Well sit down, Breck,” MacWhorter now invited. “Yes, over there in my new chair. I—I got it for 69 cents. Isn’t it a beauty? Sit down. And tell me how you came out—on whatever you went away for?”
He took from the single wood chair where perched, hung and stood, respectively, the tall silk hat, the frock coat which gave him that awesome dignity he always presented when he stepped into the ring, and the blackthorn cane. Swinging the chair around to face the table, and taking the garments and cane over to the bunk. Where he dropped them, and came back. The while Breck settled down into MacWhorter’s new 69-cent acquisition. Disposing of his broad-brimmed grey felt hat that had been clear to Europe with him and back, by simply dropping it on the floor. For MacWhorter’s penchant for sweeping out his trailer was so great that no speck of dust ever remained there for over an hour.
MacWhorter meanwhile had swung about the folding wooden chair and settled down in. Facing Breck across the Bible.
And now waited for Breck’s reply to his question.
But Breck, having in front of him the necessity eventually of making some kind of a report to Melodee anent the weird peregrinations he’d just rounded out—as well as an explanation, maybe, of many things!—averted the said report and explanation to his own superior.
“What I can tell you, Chief, can wait. Till we have more time. All that’s important is that I’m here—on time and on date, as I said I would be—via Custer’s Crossing by way of K.C.—the last leg thereof being done behind a pair of mules.”
“That’s as good a report as anybody could want,” said MacWhorter. “I was being too personal anyway in my question. I really only asked to rule out the dread possibility that you might be reporting to say you wouldn’t be going on with the show beyond and after some date, heaven knows what.”
“No, Chief, nothing like that. I’ll be with you till I’ve served my time—my health-time, that is!”
“Well, tell me just this then,” asked MacWhorter. “And I’ll settle—for that! Were you peeved—surprised—knocked into insomnia—or what?—when you got that fool wire, in the night, at the Farmers and Drovers Hotel, from Ferdinand?”
“From Ferdi—you—you don’t mean ‘Ferdinand the Bull’? Only ‘Ferdinand’ I know of. The sidesplitting bull?—played by Murphy the clown and Spellback the rousta—”
“The same,” said MacWhorter, both ruefully and apologetically. “It all came about this way. Murphy asked me late yesterday when you’d be back with the show, and I told him today. I told him you’d be at K.C. for all of last night, at a certain hotel, and would go out in the early morning by the jerkwater that passes north of here. Being a clown—I suppose that was the motive?—he asked me if he and Spellback could wire you a sort of combined welcome-home and joke—and would I give him the name of your hotel.
“He outlined the proposed telegram,” went on MacWhorter, “and since it was just good clean fun, I gave him the name of the hotel you entrusted to me. And—”
“What—did the wire say?” asked Breck. “Or—was it to have said?”
“To have said?” MacWhorter frowned. “Didn’t—you get it? They told me later they actually despatched it up town. With restricted delivery—delivery at night, that is. And—oh, it read, as Murphy dictated it off from his mind’s eye—it read—” And MacWhorter read it off obviously from his own mind’s eye:
SIR AND ESTEEMED FRIEND:
UNLESS YOU ARE BACK WITH THE SHOW BY TOMORROW, I SHALL REFUSE TO FACE THE FEARLESS MATADOR DON SEÑOR KELLY AT NEW MADRID, AND WILL DISGRACE THE ANCIENT CULT OF BULLFIGHTING.
“And ’twas signed,” sighed MacWhorter,
FERDINAND
“You—you didn’t get it?”
“Well, Chief,” said Breck, stroking his chin a bit sheepishly, “I—I didn’t. No. You see, when I registered in at the Farmers and Drovers Hotel before dinner, after the plane trip from Chi, I did so really only to freshen up, shave, change shirts and all, and get into decent shape. And to have a good dinner there in the hotel dining room. And to look at a few of the evening papers and see what on earth was going on in the world. I had no intention of sleeping there all night.”
“Not sleeping there all—why not?”
“Because, Chief,” Breck recounted, though sheepishly, “my whole life’s happiness—my—my very Fate!—depended on getting that 6 A.M. jerkwater out in the morning, and being here—before show-close tonight. I can’t tell you exactly why. Something—something concerning—well—Melodee. And—and Jules DiValo. And—but if I shouldn’t get here—well, Chief, I just didn’t intend to take a-a-a-any chances that some fool room clerk would forget to ring me up at 4 A.M.—or ring the wrong room—or some equally fool bellboy would knock on the wrong door—or fail entirely to do his duty. I—I just couldn’t risk it, Chief! It was too critical a situation—for me. So, by mid-evening, about 8:30 or 9 P.M. I took my bag and myself over to the railroad yards, and found the yard-master. Told him my general predica—”
“—waving a $10 bill in front of his face,” said MacWhorter shrewdly. “I know how you are, Breck.”
“Oh yes,” assented Breck blithely. “Ten dollar bills grease one’s way amazingly, Chief! Yep, I told him I’d like to roll up on the seat of the passenger coach of the combined coach and freight car train that would go out at 6 A.M. toward and to Mustang. Well, the ten did it—and how! The train was even then being lackadaisically made up, a freight car being coupled now and again on one or the other end of a dilapidated passenger coach by a small yards engine. The coach itself was all ready, swept and brushed fit to kill. He lit an oil lantern in its ceiling, told me to make myself comfortable, and to turn out the lantern before I slid off into dreamla——
“Well, I curled up on two drawn-together red-plush seats with a single blanket I carry—oh yes, I’d turned out the overhead light. And must have been in dreamland in 5 minutes. If you only knew, Chief, how much sleep I’ve lost in the last week. Jumping from hither to yon and—yes, I must have been dead to the world in 5 minutes. And do you know what?”
“The coach never left the yards?” nodded MacWhorter.
“Now Chief—you’re being facetious! I’m here—am I not? No, Chief, I practically never came back to consciousness till my nostrils were assailed by the smell of oranges being unpeeled, and the acrid smell of corncob pipes burning Burley tobacco and of vile stogies being smoked, and my ears by the raucous squalls of infants. And believe it or not, we were rolling along ’way out in the country. One grizzled guy sitting across the aisle from where I was laid out, told me we were full 50 miles out of K.C!”
Breck paused.
“So you see,” he said, almost apologetically, “the ribbing wire from Murphy and Spellback, signed ‘Ferdinand’, which reached me—rather, my room—in the night, didn’t really get to me because I was 10 miles away, snoring in a coach—in a railroad yards.”
“Well, well, well!” commented MacWhorter, nodding. “Serves the two right. Losing their money, I mean. For I don’t believe too much in practical jokes. They’re fundamentally dishonest, you know. Well, if you don’t tell ’em you never got it, I won’t say anything.” He abruptly changed the subject.
“Have to travel far—while you were gone?”
“If I told you, Chief,” said Breck simply, “how far I really travelled, you’d call me—no, you wouldn’t. But if I told certain people in the outfit how far I’ve travelled—certain skeptics of ever’thing—like, for instance, Jules DiValo!—they’d call me a pathological liar. So for a while I’ll probably tell nobody where I’ve been and gone to—let alone that Parisian orphan-asylum doorstep-deposited foundling. Since—”
“What—what did I hear you say?” said MacWhorter, pricking up his ears. “Parisian orphan-asylum doorstep-deposited foundling?”
“Oh,” sighed Breck, disgusted and disgruntled, “Jules has a certain clipping about himself showing him to have been—been dropped on a Parisian orphan-asylum doorstep—with a note pinned to him revealing that he was—was born in the dark of the moon, so to speak—yeah, without benefit of clergy!—and asking ’em to name the babe—him!—after the street and asylum-founder, resulting in the name—”
“Arah!” snorted MacWhorter angrily, waving a big hand equally angrily. “Arah!” he repeated. “What—what nonsense! Foundling! Paris! Why—I have some identification papers of his and a passport that he took out only six months ago, apparently to go abroad. Probably as—as ‘The Great American Prestidigitator’! He doesn’t know I have ’em, though, as yet. They were in a brown cloth wallet, which you yourself may have seen in his hands on innumerable occasions. Anyway, he lost the wallet on the lot a couple of days ago—Honest Hank, the present Get-’Em-Here boy, found it, and brought it secretly to me. And I’ve been waiting ever since for DiValo to apply to me for it. Since he knows I’m the Lost-and-Found official of this outfit. But he doesn’t apply—evidently has some fallacious reason to believe he lost it in the town, and is probably writing back there violently—anyway, I have it. I’ve examined the contents carefully of course—had to in order to find out definitely who they belonged to. His picture’s there on the passport, flat face, wax mustaches and all, and smirking as all getout. And—
“However,” MacWhorter tried to reach his real point, “the point I’m trying to get at is that the passport and papers show that DiValo’s real name is Snopczinski—yes, he’s a blond Pole—his name is Czeslaw Snopczinski, though don’t try to spell it!—and he was born in—in Paris?—good gracious no, not in Paris—he was born in Chicago, in back of the stockyards, the 14th of 21 children granted by a somewhat generous Fate to an obviously good Polish woman named Irene Snopczinski—what’s that?—born in the dark of the moon?—heavens, no!—his father is Henrik Snopczinski; and Jules—that is, Czeslaw!—was christened in the Church of St. Ignatius, and—”
At this point, Breck, who had been trying to absorb this melange of c’s, s’s, z’s, and facts, politely exploded.
“The—the hell you say, Chief! I—excuse my Anglo-Saxon, Chief. The deuce you say? Born via proper wedlock, eh?—else he couldn’t have been christened in the Church of St. Igna—born under proper wed—oh boy! Paris foundling! Paris foundling—is good. Paris—”
“Odd,” mused MacWhorter, “that he’d want to claim that. Since he—”
“Not odd, Chief,” offered Breck, “when you know the facts. Czeslaw—Snopczinski, eh? Well I’ll be—but by the way, how is Melodee? No, ne’ mind—I’ll find that out for myself. Where is she now? I mean—any change in her particular trailer or anything—”
