Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 20
WHATEVER his purpose in joining the show, Little Dog gave him no bother, and except when he happened to see him Tom almost forgot him.
The wandering care-free life suited him. In a drawer under his berth in the train he kept his everyday apparel, and the professional trunk he had bought was carried in the baggage car, and at each stop taken to the lot. He had no material worries. In the morning he got coffee and whatever else he chose at the "privilege" counter on the train, and at ten or so he sauntered to the grounds.
There he was at liberty to sit on his heels in the sun and shoot craps, or exchange reminiscences with the other cowboys. The show ground would be humming with activity. Water wagons were moving about, and pails of water carried hither and thither; sprinkling carts were settling the dust in the arena if it was dry, and men with spades and rakes were leveling it. In the great tents where the horses were kept a thick bedding of straw had been thrown down; from the elephants came the usual howls, squeals and trumpetings; in the cook tent already the great copper cauldrons were boiling, and the steam tables were connected, and set up.
At half after eleven, or at twelve on parade days, he sat down at a long table covered with a blue barred cloth, in company with dozens of other such tables similarly covered, and ate a substantial hot meal. When the meal was over he would take a toothpick from the glass holder in the center of the table, and with it jauntily stuck in his mouth would wander out. Later on he would wander into the dressing tent, past a row of laundresses asking for washing to do, and maybe he would gather up his soiled socks and shirts and body linen and pass them out. Then he would strip and bathe.
All about him would be men similarly occupied. The flat-topped trunks sat in rows, and beside each trunk was a folding chair and two pails of cold water. As the lids of the trunks were raised they showed a make-up box and a mirror, and into the lids were fastened divers toilet articles, and sometimes a photograph or two.
Tom's, however, merely contained a sign he had picked up somewhere. "Keep Out. This means you."
The tent would be full of nude men, bathing. The odor of smoke, soap and moist earth would fill it. Tom, scrubbing vigorously, would take a new pride in his big clean body, so lithe, so answerable to every call he made upon it.
He had almost forgotten Kay; he never thought of Clare at all. The show was a world of its own. It drew into a city, unloaded, played a day or two, and moved on.
"Where are we now, anyhow? Ithaca?"
"Syracuse, isn't it? Hey, boy, what town's this?"
He was handsomer than ever. His lean face tanned, his jaw clean cut and determined. He moved with lithe easy motions; he had worked hard at his roping, and now when seven horses abreast came thundering past him and the big loop lay ready, he would shove back his big hat and almost casually throw his rope. Bull-dogging or roping, or on some leaping, twisting demon twice a day risking his neck to make holiday for the crowd, he was a fine figure of a man. And he knew it.
The show was essentially moral. The family tradition held; troupes of riders were family groups, father, mother, sons and daughters. In the married cars women sat in the mornings doing their mending, sewing on buttons, even washing and ironing. Almost always, in the train or outside the women's dressing tent, little lines were stretched and women in slop shoes and wrapped in kimonos would duck out from underneath the tent and pin up in the sun the family washing, socks and stockings side by side, and even small undergarments which at first reminded him uncomfortably of those Clare had showed him.
He was not without sentimental episodes, however. If the married women let him severely alone, the girls found him rather a thrilling figure. They watched him and waylaid him.
"Let's see the new hat, Tom. Where'd you get it?"
"Sent to Texas for it. It's sure a good hat."
"Sit down, can't you? You're always going somewhere."
"I'm a busy man," he would say. "This show would be nowhere, if I didn't run around and tell 'em how to do things."
Perhaps he would sit down, and for a half hour or so there would be dalliances of a half-jocular type.
"Let's see that ring. Who gave you that?"
"I bought it. What d'you think? Some fellow gave it to me?"
He would hold her hand, under pretext of examining the ring.
"Nice little hand. Doesn't seem right it should be doing work, somehow. You ought to get a husband and let him work for you."
"If you get a husband in this business you've gotta work too. They aren't carrying any dead wood."
But before long he would tire of her and move on, his hunger for feminine society temporarily appeased. He was no saint; he let women alone because they no longer interested him, but he still swore and sometimes swaggered, and he was still a fighting wildcat on occasion.
Once, indeed, he lost a portion of a front tooth in an encounter. He spent a hundred dollars to have it filled out with gold, and was excessively proud of it.
"If I die and don't leave any money," he told the little Cossack, "you pull this—see?—and bury me with it."
"Very nice," said the Cossack, not understanding. Tom threw back his head and roared with laughter.
"You're a cold-blooded little devil, aren't you? For all your circus lady!"
Again, coming on Little Dog one day just afterwards, he stopped the Indian.
"You try any tricks on me now, and see what happens!"
"What happen?" said Little Dog, glowering.
"I'll bite you with this." Tom told him, grinning cheerfully. "It's better than you deserve, but it's a magic tooth. Your medicine man's no good then. You'll turn into a dentist and go around in a white coat."
Just how much Little Dog understood is problematical.
But Tom was very popular with the show people, and later on with the Colonel himself. That was after the day when Rosie, one of the elephants, was frightened during the parade and started to run. She was under a railroad bridge at the time, and a deadly monster of steel and iron came roaring over her head. She bellowed hysterically, lifted her great trunk, stuck out her absurd little tail, hurled her huge bulk out of line and started.
Tom, taller than the rest, saw her, and putting spurs to his horse, raced the flying gray behemoth down the crowded street. But an elephant on the run can move very fast. When his rope settled and drew taut it was Rosie's tail that was in the noose. It brought her up short, and as the noose tightened she sat down suddenly, loudly wailing.
The Colonel was very pleased over that.
"Uses his head," he said. "Got a head and uses it. He's a good boy."
He sent for Tom that day and handed him fifty dollars.
That was his life, until one day he wakened to find himself in the city where he had come to find Kay. He scowled when he heard it. The place held nothing but bitterness for him. The thought that he was there to amuse it, to make holiday for it, was gall and wormwood to him. His head was very high when he rode out with the parade, his eyes hard under the brim of his hat.
"Say, mister, are you a real cowboy?"
"Sure am, son."
But there was no smile, no flash of teeth—one of them partly gold!—from his tanned young face.
Kay, fitting her wedding slippers in town, heard the approaching parade and stepped out to the pavement. She had no suspicion that Tom was in town. Or that already, riding up the street, he was on his way to her, more picturesque than ever, more romantic; that he was coming heralded by a steam calliope, excruciatingly shrill and off tone, and by a brass band on a great gold and red wagon; and led by great heavy-stepping elephants, splay-footed camels, and Indians in war bonnets, buckskin clothes and beaded moccasins.
Other traffic had stopped. The pavements were crowded, and there was desultory cheering up and down the street. She was still unsuspicious. The parade moved on, brilliant and exotic; Arabs, Indians, a colored minstrel troupe, a group of Cossacks, in astrakhan hats and queer long blouses, tightly belted at the waist. One of the Cossacks, small and young, seemed to pick her out of the crowd and saluted her with his whip.
But she hardly saw him; her eyes were strained back to where the cowboys, the aristocrats of the performance, were riding along, relaxed in their saddles. On they came, the sun shining on their bright shirts and colored neckerchiefs, on their spurs and chaps and coiled ropes. Under the broad high-crowned hats their faces were thin, young, and brown. They swayed to the motion of their horses, the reins in one gloved hand, the other resting negligently on hip or thigh. And as they passed, like the little Cossack they picked out pretty girls and smiled at them.
One, in the lead, was on a tall bay horse. Every now and again he tightened his rein and lightly spurred the animal, and it reared above the crowd. The man on its back sat at his ease, smiling half scornfully at the crowd. He seemed to say: "Tie that, you bunch of pikers!"
Suddenly she heard herself calling:
"Tom! Tom McNair!"
He heard her. She knew that. She could see his eyes searching the crowd. But she could not call again. Too many eyes were on her, interested and curious. And after that first start of his he did not look around. Instead, with a half-mocking smile on his face, he dug his spurs into his horse, and the animal reared again.
It was like a gesture of defiance.
She went back into the shop and asked for a drink of water, and when they had brought it to her they stood around her. They seemed to think she looked ill. Maybe she was. She felt very queer. But she was thinking quite clearly, at that.
But she was determined to see him. She had no intention of communicating with him. What was the use? She would see him once more, and then she would go away and live her life as it was pre-determined. Perhaps he had forgotten her anyhow. All those pretty girls, riding high-school thoroughbreds in the parade—perhaps he was in love with one of them. He was vain as well as proud. The very way he had made his horse rear in the street, that was vanity.
But she would see him once more.
She called up the house and made some excuse or other, and later she took a taxicab and went out to the show grounds. Her head was throbbing and her hands icy cold. By the time the performance began the grand-stand was crowded, but she saw nothing of the crowd, and but little of what went on in the arena. All she saw was Tom McNair, winning the plaudits of the vast audience by his recklessness and accepting them with a mocking smile. If he suspected her presence there he gave no indication of it; he swept the reserved seats with a casual glance now and then, but that was all.
He had come into his own. In that dusty enclosure he was a king, and these people assembled to do him homage.
She had no idea that he was being unusually reckless that afternoon, or that Arizona was bursting with rage under his gaudy shirt.
"Look at that crazy fool! He'll break his neck or the horse's, and I don't give a damn which."
She saw him only as the apotheosis of all that she had remembered, the sublimation of her dreams
She slipped out before the end of the performance, and drearily went home, to find Mr. Trowbridge in the lower hall, heavily and beamingly jovial. She forced a smile for him, and he caught her by the shoulders and turned her to the light.
"Ah!" he cried. "Now that is what I call a happy bride's face! Look at that color! Look at those eyes!"
She went obediently upstairs with him to look at the gifts: more silver, some carved jade, a Heppelwhite sofa, a dower chest, very old. When it was opened it still smelled faintly of open wood fires and lavender. And Herbert was there, with an anxious pucker on his forehead and the notebook in his hand.
"Hello, darling." He kissed her abstractedly. "Look here, you know more about these things than I do. What's that tea service worth? Approximately, of course."
"It seems so calculating, Herbert."
"Not at all. There's a lot of value here, and it needs protection."
Mr. Trowbridge was roaming about, his hands behind his back, his head on one side.
"Now that's a pretty thing. What's it for?"
She stood beside him. Herbert had moved on. "Enamel and gold clock, $200. Antique Sheffield table urn, $100. Chest flat silver, $3000."
"Help an old man, Kay. What shall we send you?"
"Please, why send anything? We have more now than we can ever use."
He must not send anything. Nobody must send anything more. She wasn't going through with it. It would be a sin. A sin against Herbert and a sin against herself. To live with one man and love another was immoral.
"But of course I'll send you something. Don't you suppose I want to put at least a feather in the love nest?"
Love nest! Oh, God, if he would only go away; if they would only all go and give her time to think.
"What do you think these consoles are worth, Kay? Are they genuine or reproductions?"
"Father says they are genuine. Why don't you ask him?"
She got to her room at last and out onto the little balcony. But there were men just underneath, putting up a marquee on the lawn. Although it was late they were still working. They were putting down the floor, carefully pushing the boards home and then nailing them. It was like her father to want a floor in a marquee. In a day or two people would be sitting there, eating and drinking champagne. Her health and Herbert's. "A very long life together, and a happy one." A long life!
Suddenly she knew what she was going to do. She was going to Tom McNair, if he wanted her. She turned back into her room and closed and locked the door.