Tardon me, sir. Are you Mr Prospero?’
The old man started and peered at me over his shoulder. Behind him, in the gloom of the doorway, one of the pale girls, the singer, was sitting on a chair, silent now, pulling a daisy asunder with her long glittering nails.
‘Eh?’ the old man grunted. He had plump pink lips and small bright blue eyes, a hooked nose. I remember his boots, worn thin and wrinkled like black paper.
‘Are you-?’
‘I am not,’ he answered cheerfully. Tuck off now.’
The pale girl spoke briefly in a low voice. He looked up at her, frowned, and turned to me again.
‘Why, I believe you're right, my dear,’ he murmured. ‘Well well.’ He struggled up from his sprawling position, but did not rise, and leaned forward to scrutinise my face, my clothes, and craned his neck and peered at the pack on my back. ‘A travelling man, I perceive. Tell me, boy, what is your name?’
‘Gabriel, sir.’
‘Gabriel Sir?’
‘No sir, Godkin. Gabriel Godkin.’
He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
‘Godkin, eh? Well now, that's a fine name to have, a fine old name. And tell me this now, Gabriel Godkin, who sent you here?’ I did not answer. ‘And you come from where?’ Again, no answer. My silence seemed to satisfy him. He sat and beamed at me with his plump hands resting on his knees. Behind him the girl stirred and sighed. Her face was wide at the eyes, white, curiously boneless. She was not pretty, I would not say pretty, but striking, certainly, with those eyes, the straw-coloured hair, that trancelike calm. The old boy chuckled softly and glanced up at her.
‘He wants to see Prospero, did you hear? Did you hear that?’ He turned to me once again, shaking his head, still beaming. ‘Nobody sees Prospero. Why, I don't recall that I ever saw him myself! How about that now. You don't say much, do you, Gabriel Godkin? Still, there are worse faults, worse faults.’ He slapped his knees and stood up, hoisted up his trousers, tugged at his tight waistcoat. In spite of his bulk and the untidiness it entailed he possessed a certain elegance. We shook hands solemnly.
‘I am Silas,’ he said. ‘Come along with me now.’
I followed him down the line of caravans to the largest of them, painted black, and there, with another smile, in silence, he led me up the steps. They were all in there, perched on stools, reclining on the narrow bunks, standing idly about, the youth with the hot eyes, the fat woman, golden children, all. There was a great silence, and a smell of boiled tea. At my back the pale girl entered quietly. She went and stood by her twin, who was her double except for Ker ravenblack hair. No one said a word, but they all smiled, a symphony of strange smiles around me. Silas rubbed his hands.
‘Well here we are,’ he said. ‘Allow me to present-this is Angel, and Mario there, young Justin and Juliette.’ The painted children bowed and tittered. ‘And the baba under the table, little Sophie. Come out and say howdedoo, baba. Shy, are you? This is Magnus, and Sybil here, and last, but ah! the very best, my darling girls, Ada, Ida.’ He laid a hand on my shoulder and took a deep breath. ‘Children, this is Gabriel Godkin.’
I was confused. The names all slipped away from the faces, into a jumble. The tall slender woman with flame-red hair and agate eyes, Sybil it was, turned her face from the window and looked at me briefly, coldly. Still no one spoke, but some smiled. I felt excitement and unease. It seemed to me that I was being made to undergo a test, or play in a game the rules of which I did not know. Silas put his hands in his pockets and chuckled again, and all at once I recognised the nature of the bond between them. Laughter! O wicked, mind you, and vicious perhaps, but laughter for all that. And now I laughed too, but, like theirs, my laughter made no sound, no sound at all.
23
SILAS TOOK ME next on a tour of his collapsible kingdom. Now strictly speaking it was not a circus at all, but a kind of travelling theatre. Here was no big top strung with a filigree of tightropes and gleaming trapeze bars, but a long rectangular tent with benches and a stage, the latter an awkward hinged affair which took a workparty of four an hour to dismantle. The canvas roof above us, cooking slowly in the sun, gave off a smell of sweat and glue. I felt obscurely betrayed. There were worse disappointments in store. Out behind the tent we found the wild beasts promised by the poster, a melancholy tubercular grey monkey in a birdcage, and a motheaten tiger lying motionless behind bamboo bars on a trailer. The monkey bared his yellow teeth and turned contemptuously away from us, displaying his skinned purplish backside. I peered into the tiger's glassy yellow eye and ventured to enquire if it was alive. Silas laughed.
‘Stuffed!’ he cried, greatly tickled. ‘Yet very lifelike, would you not say? Fearsome. Ha!’ He clasped his hands on the shelf of his big belly and beamed at me, not without fondness, amused by my chagrin. ‘It is real, you know, Gabriel. They find it quite convincing.’
They were the folk who paid to look upon these wonders. There was both mockery and reverence in the way he spoke the word. People believed the shoddy dreams he sold them! The fact filled him with awe.
‘You see, my boy, they pay to gape at our stuffed friend here, to make faces at Albert the monkey, to watch us capering about the stage, they pay, mark you, and their pennies work like magic wands, transforming all they buy.’
We sat down side by side on the shaft of the trailer. He took from his waistcoat pocket a short black pipe and stuck it between his teeth, folded his arms and gazed at the blue hills away behind the town. I watched him suspiciously, with the uneasy feeling that he was making fun of me. He was an odd old man. I liked him. The sun, still low, was in our faces, and now I saw a figure approach out of a mist of light, skimming down the path by the caravans, a tiny figure on a threewheeled cycle. At first I thought it must be Prospero, and I stared at Silas. He said nothing. The little man pulled up before us and put one sharp shoe to the ground. He had a big square head and enormous hands. His black eyebrows and his hair were as smooth as fur. He wore a neat grey suit tightly buttoned. A red scarf was knotted at his throat. He was less than four feet tall.
‘Well well,’ said Silas, by way of greeting. ‘There you are.’
The little man stepped down from his cycle, tugged the wrinkles out of his jacket deftly with finger and thumb, and gravely bowed.
‘Silas, my friend, how are you? And…?’
‘This is Gabriel.’
He shook my hand.
‘The name is Rainbird,’ he said loftily, as though presenting to me something of inestimable value. We made room for him on the shaft and he settled himself daintily between us, clasping his mighty hands in his lap. Silas looked at him over his pipe and asked,
‘Well, any news?’
Rainbird squirmed, feigning a delicious horror.
‘What a day, O! what a day. Would you believe it, I was knocked off my bike. Just look at my things.’ There were a few faint mudstains on his jacket and his shoes were damp. ‘A child it was, a little girl, no higher than that. I could have slapped her face, I really could. And what's so funny, may I ask?’ Silas was chuckling. He turned his laughter into a cough and waved his hands apologetically. Rainbird sniffed. ‘I see nothing funny, I'm sure.’