Nights at the Circus Read Online Free Page B

a lady with four arms, all perfect, like a Hindu goddess, hinged on either side of those shoulders of a voluptuous stevedore? Because, truly, that is the real nature of the physiological anomaly in which Miss Fevvers is asking us to suspend disbelief.
    Now, wings without arms is one impossible thing; but wings with arms is the impossible made doubly unlikely – the impossible squared. Yes, sir!
    In his red-plush press box, watching her through his opera-glasses, he thought of dancers he had seen in Bangkok, presenting with their plumed, gilded, mirrored surfaces and angular, hieratic movements, infinitely more persuasive illusions of the airy creation than this over-literal winged barmaid before him. ‘She tries too damn’ hard,’ he scribbled on his pad.
    He thought of the Indian rope trick, the child shinning up the rope in the Calcutta market and then vanishing clean away; only his forlorn cry floated down from the cloudless sky. How the white-robed crowd roared when the magician’s basket started to rock and sway on the ground until the child jumped out of it, all smiles! ‘Mass hysteria and the delusion of crowds . . . a little primitive technology and a big dose of the will to believe.’ In Kathmandu, he saw the fakir on a bed of nails, all complete, soar up until he was level with the painted demons on the eaves of the wooden houses; what, said the old man, heavily bribed, would be the point of the illusion if it looked like an illusion? For, opined the old charlatan to Walser with po-faced solemnity, is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
    Now the pit band ground to a halt and rustled its scores. After a moment’s disharmony comparable to the clearing of a throat, it began to saw away as best it could at – what else – ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’. Oh, the scratch unhandiness of the musicians! the tuneless insensitivity of their playing! Walser sat back with a pleased smile on his lips; the greasy, inescapable whiff of stage magic which pervaded Fevvers’ act manifested itself abundantly in her choice of music.
    She gathered herself together, rose up on tiptoe and gave a mighty shrug, in order to raise her shoulders. Then she brought down her elbows, so that the tips of the pin feathers of each wing met in the air above her headdress. At the first crescendo, she jumped.
    Yes, jumped. Jumped up to catch the dangling trapeze, jumped up some thirty feet in a single, heavy bound, transfixed the while upon the arching white sword of the limelight. The invisible wire that must have hauled her up remained invisible. She caught hold of the trapeze with one hand. Her wings throbbed, pulsed, then whirred, buzzed and at last began to beat steadily on the air they disturbed so much that the pages of Walser’s notebook ruffled over and he temporarily lost his place, had to scramble to find it again, almost displaced his composure but managed to grab tight hold of his scepticism just as it was about to blow over the ledge of the press box.
    First impression: physical ungainliness. Such a lump it seems! But soon, quite soon, an acquired grace asserts itself, probably the result of strenuous exercise. (Check if she trained as a dancer.)
    My, how her bodice strains! You’d think her tits were going to pop right out. What a sensation that would cause; wonder she hasn’t thought of incorporating it in her act. Physical ungainliness in flight caused, perhaps, by absence of tail , the rudder of the flying bird – I wonder why she doesn’t tack a tail on the back of her cache-sexe; it would add verisimilitude and, perhaps, improve the performance.
    What made her remarkable as an aerialiste , however, was the speed – or, rather the lack of it – with which she performed even the climactic triple somersault. When the hack aerialiste , the everyday, wingless variety, performs the triple somersault, he or she travels through the air at a cool sixty miles an hour; Fevvers, however, contrived a