Case with 4 Clowns

by Bruce, Leo

  For me these walks had become small tours of exploration of the district we passed through, and although this was not a very impressive part of Yorkshire, there was a sort of lazy comfort to be obtained from the wide sun-warmed fields and lanes. On this particular day we went a little farther than usual. The surrounding fields were a patch-work of different shades of green, and the tiny footpaths through them stretched their straight lines in a network far away from the tober.

  As we walked in single file along one of these footpaths the drills of pale-green wheat-blades seemed to curve towards us, straighten themselves, and then curve away again behind.

  “It has a sort of hypnotic effect,” I said to Anita, after a few minutes. “The sun flickering through a spile fence does much the same thing.”

  “That reminds me,” I added, when she did not answer, “that you told us your mother was a hypnotist.”

  “Yes, that’s right. You had a theory that she had something to do with Helen stabbing me, didn’t you? Do you still believe that?”

  “Well,” I said awkwardly. “I only thought of it as a possibility, you know. In this sort of business, detection I mean, you have to take every single factor into consideration.”

  “I see,” said Anita, “so you haven’t really made up your mind. Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” I said gratefully. “We can only know things like that for certain when the case is over. If it ever is over,” I added with a sigh.

  “You know,” went on Anita thoughtfully, “you have quite the wrong idea about hypnotism. Most writers have I think. It’s quite a simple thing really—you can hypnotize yourself, if you care to. But I don’t think it would get you anywhere. You see, the sort of hypnotism that my mother dabbles in is quite harmless. She can’t make people do anything. She just sends them into a trance, that’s all. You can get rid of a headache that way sometimes.”

  “Do you mean to say,” I exclaimed, “that it is impossible to make people perform certain actions of which they know nothing when they wake up again?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Anita. “But what I meant was that I had never seen my mother do anything like that.”

  I left the subject there, and when in a little while we turned back towards the tober, the conversation passed easily on to other matters of little interest to anybody else but Anita and myself.

  We emerged, unexpectedly, on a lane which ran behind the tober, sunk lowdown like the bed of a spring stream and hidden from the tober itself by a high brambly hedge. No one seemed to be moving in the field. It was nearly time for the afternoon show, but the only person visible from where we stood was the groom, who was leisurely applying whiting to the mane of one of the ring horses and sissing gently and soothingly. It was the sort of afternoon which, had it been a Sunday in a London suburb, called for the harsh repetitive whirr of a lawn-mower or perhaps the very distant cry of a hawker. The leveling heat seemed to demand only sounds which were familiar; continuous, recurring sounds. Anything else would have been like a knife slashing suddenly through the center of the heavy blanket of the sky.

  And suddenly, inevitably, the disturbing sound came. It was the high-pitched scream of an angry elephant, and then, rushing quickly into the silence behind it, the violent sound of a man swearing. It was the voice of a frightened man, made brave by the loudness of his own voice.

  Without comment of any sort Anita and I scrambled quickly up the bank out of the lane and crawled through the hedge into the tober. One or two people had already appeared on the field and were moving towards the elephant tent, but before any of us could reach it the elephant trumpeted again, and this time the body of a man was hurled through the tent flap and landed limply and heavily on the grass. Anita ran over to him and knelt on the ground.

  “It’s the new elephant man,” she said, as her fingers quickly set about undoing his shirt-collar.

  The man’s face was a gray mud color, and from the corner of his nostril ran a thin dark trickle of blood. He seemed soft and yielding, like a piece of clay; scarcely a man at all. Then, slowly, he opened his eyes and moved his head. He stared at us for a moment with an incredulous, hurt expression, and then slowly, one by one, he began to move his arms and legs, watching them doubtfully.

  “Seems all right,” he said at last.

  “Try and stand,” said Anita, and together we helped him on to his feet. He swayed for a moment, and then, shaking his head with a queer worried movement, he grinned shakily at us, as if to show he was all right.

  By this time most of the others had gathered round and were waiting for some sort of an explanation.

  “What happened?” said Beef, pushing his way through the group, as only a trained policeman can.

  Hesitantly, the man told us. It was quite brief. Apparently, he had been cleaning one of the elephants for the afternoon show, when it had screamed at him. He stepped up close to it to show that he was not to be intimidated, but the animal began to wind its trunk round his body. For a moment he had struggled, striking the elephant with the back of the heavy brush he had in his hand, but the squeeze of the trunk had tightened until he was no longer able to breathe and he lost consciousness before the animal threw him out of the tent.

  I was surprised to find everybody taking the affair quite coldly. It was nothing very new to have a man attacked by an elephant it seemed. Daroga, directly he had heard the man’s story, walked straight into the elephant tent and we could hear his voice talking to the elephant in a low, soothing tone.

  “They do that sometimes,” said Daroga to Beef. “One of the elephants takes it into his head that he doesn’t like one of the men. After that it’s best for the chap to go home if he wants to do it all in one piece.”

  The new hand looked at Daroga and gave a grin. “I never ran away from an elephant yet,” he said, “and I don’t mean to start now. I’ll have him eating out of my hand in a couple of days, you see if I don’t.”

  “As long as he doesn’t eat your hand,” said Daroga. “Still, that’s your business.”

  That seemed to be the opinion of the others, and slowly they drifted away from the tent and went back to their wagons. One or two, however, remained, and Beef and I noticed that they seemed discontented. It was Sid Bolton, the fat clown, who voiced the reason for this.

  “It’s not only his safety that’s concerned in this,” he said. “Those elephants are not safe for anybody if there’s someone about they’ve taken a dislike to.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked. “Does it disturb them, or something?”

  “Well, look at us in the ring. Clem and I have to roll about under the elephants’ feet as part of the clowning—that’s all right when the animals are in their right minds, but I don’t go much on it if they’re nervous.”

  “You see,” joined in Clem Gail, “it makes them restless. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt anybody else on purpose, but when they get like that they might do damage to anybody who was near them. It’s too dangerous to play about with animals that way. If they don’t like someone, then you ought to get rid of him straight away. What an elephant says, goes.”

  They were not the only ones who were feeling uncomfortable about the affair. I noticed one or two of the others discussing the affair in various parts of the field, mostly those artists who appeared in the ring with the elephants at one time or another.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” said Anita. “And that is to go and see Jackson about it. He’s the boss.”

  “He’s also ring-master,” said Clem, “so he won’t like the risk any more than we do.”

  With the usual amount of talk and argument, the artists at last decided to go straight to the proprietor and tell him what they thought. Beef and I watched the little procession lining up before the wagon, while Sid Bolton knocked on the door.

  “You know,” said Beef thoughtfully, “this is a funny do.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you think the new man is purposely annoying the elephant
s for some reason? I should think it was a rather dangerous thing to do.”

  “I didn’t say as I thought anything of the kind,” said Beef. “All I said was as it was a funny do. You always exaggerate everything.”

  We saw Jackson open the door at Sid Bolton’s knock and went across to hear what he had to say about it. There was actually little necessity for this, as his voice was loud enough to be heard almost all over the tober.

  “Well, you know my feelings about the affair,” he said to the crowd gathered at his wagon steps. “I didn’t like it in the first place. But it’s Daroga you want to see about it, not me.”

  “But you can sack the man, can’t you?” said Sid Bolton. “He’s a danger to the show, that’s what he is. Better for all of us if he went. He doesn’t know Fanny Anny about elephants, and he’ll only go and kill himself, and maybe us too, if someone doesn’t tell him to clear off.”

  But Jackson merely shrugged his shoulders at this. “Daroga put the man on,” he said coldly, “so if anyone’s got to sack him you’d better go and persuade Daroga to do it.” And with that he shut his door on the disgruntled and murmuring group.

  It seemed perfectly clear to me who had the whip-hand between these two men, Daroga and the proprietor. Jackson, I felt, would have been only too pleased to sack the new elephant man. But something stopped him from trying. What was it?

  I turned to Beef. “You know,” I said, “I think Daroga’s probably got something on Jackson, and is blackmailing him.”

  “Go on,” said Beef derisively with a broad grin. “You don’t say!”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  April 30th (continued).

  AFTER a few days with the circus, the show in the ring had begun to take on a new significance. Some of the turns seemed more and more brilliant, and some of them seemed just boring. One turn especially I enjoyed was the wire-walking act, and I went into the tent during the evening performance in time to see that only, and then came out again. I left Beef watching the show, and wandered slowly round the tent.

  The evening was warm and lovely. Hardly any moon, but a sort of soft light blurred the edges of the trees and made them seem half-human, standing round the side of the field like parents waiting to collect their children from a party which was going on inside the tent. The lorry which fed electricity to the tents was purring softly, and as I walked slowly by it I noticed Len Waterman seated hunched up on the step with his head in his hands. He did not seem to notice me. I wondered if he were feeling ill, but I was too nervous to approach him and ask if he were all right. His fingers were sunk deeply into his hair, and he sat still, almost without breathing it seemed.

  Anita was on the steps of her wagon, trying to read by the thin yellow light which came over her shoulder, and I stopped to talk to her. From the inside of the wagon came rattling and clattering, as if old Margot were beginning to get the supper ready. Even the fact that neither of the twins had been appearing in the ring now for a week, could not break the circus routine of exceedingly late supper. Like the artists who had been performing, Anita and Helen would not sit down to the last meal of the day until nearly midnight.

  As I approached the wagon steps Anita looked up and smiled at me, and then, closing the book she was reading, she held the back of the cover up to me for me to see the title. It was Case With No Conclusion, the story of Beef’s last case, and I felt childishly flattered. To me, Anita was an unusual sort of person altogether. Most people, on discovering that I wrote detective novels for a living, take up one of two attitudes. Either they think “thrillers” are the perigee of degradation and look at me as though I were something which had slipped out of a hole in the wainscoting, or else they gush at length about writing in general and tell me how they have a cousin who “writes,” and have I ever heard of him. I seldom have, by the way, and it gives me pleasure to say so.

  But the point about Anita was that she did neither of these things, and yet was genuinely interested in me. She had not, perhaps, been delivered up to “middle-class morality,” as Shaw’s dustman would have phrased it.

  “What do you think of it?” I asked.

  “I don’t think you’re quite fair to the Sergeant,” was her comment.

  The circus band had begun to play the “Skaters’ Waltz.”

  “That’s the trapeze act starting,” said Anita.

  The crowd in the tent had become now completely silent. I could imagine the row on row of strained white faces, the unanimous turning of heads, the bright lights reflected in the widely-staring eyes. By now I knew the turns off by heart, and when the first burst of applause came I could visualize Paul and Christophe bowing from the center of the ring after their introduction of the act. Once more the band struck up—slow, soft music, which was the only sound to be heard from the big top.

  “What would happen,” I asked Anita, “if the band played the wrong music?”

  “I don’t know,” she laughed. “We’re all like circus horses really. Some of us have routine acts which we’ve been doing for years. And with the same music. If the music went wrong, you know, I think the act would just crack up. But it’s never happened yet.”

  A fresh burst of applause from the tent made me look up. Sharp brilliant flashes of light came through the small gaps which the wind opened now and again in the canvas. From the dynamo-lorry stretched the two wires which carried the current to the lighting in the tent top. I had often noticed the rough joints and knots in these wires, and even now, in the dark, it seemed only an act of fortune that the current ever reached the lamps.

  There was a prolonged roll on the drums. The finale had started. In perfect silence—there was no band now—the lithe figures of Suzanne and the two Dariennes were swinging slowly on the high trapezes. A gasp, bitten off sharply, as from one gigantic man rather than from a crowd of three hundred people, told us that Suzanne had slipped backwards on her trapeze and was hanging by her feet. The drums again. I seemed to feel the tension in the air as she prepared to hurl herself across the ring to where Paul was already swinging gently with his arms ready to catch her. My mind seemed to time it so that with my eyes shut I could see the somersaulting figure pass through the steady white light in the center. And then, as Paul’s arms would be stretching out to catch her hands, instead of the usual mass sigh of relief, came the piercing scream of one woman.

  But before the sound had ended, the tent seemed to quiver with excited shouts and cries from the audience. Anita and I leaped to our feet, and as we did so I noticed that the guide-bulb over the lorry had gone out.

  “The lights must have fused,” Anita managed to say, as we ran toward the tent entrance.

  Inside the tent we could see nothing. Some of the crowd were attempting to find the exit, and their angry, frightened voices, gave us no clue to what had happened. I could hear Jackson’s voice rising powerfully above the clamor:

  “Keep perfectly calm, ladies and gentlemen. Keep in your seats. A small technical hitch …”

  At first the crowd seemed to take no notice, but his voice went on and on in the darkness, and it must have seemed to the frightened people, the only thing to which they could cling.

  “Those of you who have left your seats, please remain exactly where you are. The lights will be repaired in a few minutes. No one will be hurt so long as they keep still.”

  The people in the tent seemed to have obeyed Jackson’s commands, for the noise subsided to a low but steady murmur. Some genius in the bandstand began to play “Daisy, Daisy,” as a solo on his saxophone, and by the second bar everyone was singing.

  “Good God,” I said to Anita, “have they no imagination at all? Why, at this moment Suzanne may be lying on the ground with her …”

  The dim red flickers of matches struck here and there in the crowd only served to illuminate the staring faces of those who struck them. But at that moment the lights came suddenly on. My eyes immediately sought the trapeze. At one end sat the two Dariennes, staring into the crowd below; and the other, e
mpty, swung with sickening slowness, with the white sweat-handkerchief dangling from one corner. The scene below was in unutterable confusion. The ring was half-filled with standing and seated members of the audience.

  As Anita and I rushed forward I glanced upward and saw the still figure of Suzanne lying in the net. Paul and Christophe were descending as fast as they could, and in a few moments they were lifting Suzanne out of the net and handing her carefully down to Jackson and Clem Gail, who stood ready at the side of the ring. Christophe sprang out of the net and bent over the still form when they placed her on the ground. “Suzanne,” he almost shouted at her, “speak to me.”

  He raised his head and looked swiftly round the circle of faces. His jaw muscles were set, and his eyes looked hard and rock-like, almost unseeing. Then suddenly he seemed to shrivel, and pitching forward on to the pale figure in his arms, he pressed his face against her breast. His slow rhythmical sobbing increased, until it had become almost animal-like in its intensity. His fingers twitched, nervously pulling at the spangles on Suzanne’s costume.

  The thin querulous face of a woman in the crowd poked suddenly between Jackson and myself. “Why doesn’t someone get a doctor for the poor thing?” she said shrilly. I became conscious of the people around us.

  “Where’s Beef?” I said.

  Almost as if I had called him up from some smoky depth, a stir in the crowd proclaimed the appearance of the Sergeant.

  “Here, what’s all this?” his disembodied voice was saying. And the round anxious face of my old friend appeared over the heads of the crowd.

  I felt a sense of relief when Beef bent down briskly and shook the hysterical Christophe by the shoulders.

  “Come on, young fellow,” he said kindly, “that sort of thing won’t get you nowhere. Pull yourself together.” And after lifting the boy bodily away, he expertly raised Suzanne in his arms and walked with her to the entrance of the tent. The crowd stood back in silence and made way for us as we followed Beef to Suzanne’s wagon.