The Snake-Oil Dickens Man. Ross Gilfillan

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СКАЧАТЬ the crowd was taking up their tickets and talking up P.T. Barnum, Mr D’Orleans said to me, ‘I have quite taken a shine to you, Billy. You’ll help us pave the way for the circus, won’t you? I need someone I can count on.’

      ‘Oh, I sure will!’ I exclaimed.

      ‘I’m glad. You can show us a place we can erect the tents and pavilions? And put up signs advertising the coming?’

      I could, for sure.

      ‘And maybe you could also help us with the tickets. Mr Wilkes?’

      Wilkes, who had been exchanging a quiet word with Merriweather, gave D’Orleans his ear.

      ‘I had just been thinking of how matters might be expedited if we were to sell the tickets in advance of the show, as we have sometimes done before. It’s really not too troublesome and it would save much time later.’

      ‘Well, I suppose we could …’

      ‘Good, then I shall arrange with Mr Merriweather how we may proceed with sales of the tickets on the morrow.’

      I basked in the glow of his attention and had it not been for my mother’s recalcitrance, I should surely have followed the dream that was born then, of slipping away with this circus and never seeing Merriweather nor the Particular again. Here was I, Billy Talbot, who had never been anything and had never looked like amounting to anything, called to assist the most famous showman on earth. What with all the excitement, the merriment and the two glasses of beer I’d just had, I couldn’t help voicing the question that was on the minds of everyone present.

      ‘Are you Mr Barnum?’ I asked and there was a perceptible hush.

      No one could have been surprised at my question, only at my presumption in asking it. In his velveteen suit and silver watch chain, with his chest thrown out and his head back, he had the poise and the stature we would have expected of a legend. But he only laughed loudly and said, ‘Barnum indeed!’

      The hotelier laughed with his favoured guest and clapped him on the back. ‘Barnum indeed!’ he echoed.

      I was thinking I never had enjoyed a night at the Particular so much. It was an occasion I should remember for ever, I was sure of that. Our guests seemed to think I was capital company and even Merriweather was casting me approving looks. Mr D’Orleans excused himself – he was tired and would have a long day of it tomorrow. He left Wilkes to tell us of how they had to build great water tanks to hold the rhinoceroses, which they called rhinonosceri, on account of there being so many of them and of how he’d questioned his own wisdom in calling his shooting gallery the ‘John Wilkes’s Booth’. I was ready to be entertained but Merriweather was looking about for someone to be confidential with and could find only me.

      ‘Now this is more like it,’ he said, rubbing his palms.

      ‘Ain’t it, though?’ I said, glowing with pleasure. ‘I did right, didn’t I?’ I think by then I actually believed I had been instrumental in bringing Barnum to town, when all I had really done was to gallop on ahead, waving an arm and hollering ‘Barnum’s a-coming, Barnum’s a-coming!’

      He too left the room shortly after and I gorged myself on tales of far-off lands, of adventures beyond the scope of my imagination and I congratulated myself that such wonderful people would actually stoop to take an interest in my poor self. Maybe the world wasn’t what I had taken it for, after all.

      Then Merriweather reappeared in advance of something pink and shimmering. But for the drink inside me, I would have been more shocked. Even so, the vision of my mother, the drab, stained and work-worn hermit of the wash-house, transformed by a quality taffeta dress, with her hair washed and combed and piled up upon her head and cheeks modestly rouged and powdered, sent a tremor through my frame. She was suddenly beautiful. I tried to say something to her but either the words never escaped my lips or she didn’t hear me.

      The rouge on her cheeks seemed of a stronger colour as she stopped by my chair. Wilkes said, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Billy,’ and got up and took her hand and together they walked down the saloon and I cannot tell you how I felt when she hoisted the hem of her dress and mounted the stairs.

Chapter Three

      I

      I WAS NOT feeling special bright when I awoke, on account of having discovered a hitherto-unsuspected fondness for whisky. In the period between my mother’s ghastly ascension to Wilkes’s room and my own unsteady flight to my eyrie in the eves I made my first acquaintance with hard liquor. I tried to rise but encountered a problem. How and when I was overcome by the villain who had trussed me up tightly and who even now was perhaps returning to finish me off, I did not know but tied fast I was.

      That I had put up a fight before being overpowered by the gang there could be no doubt. The room was much changed. The chair on which I was used to hang my clothes was upturned, as was the rough bookcase, whose contents lay spread and damaged about the attic floor. The crudely-executed portrait of the man in the bearskin coat, by Elijah’s brother, was newly cracked and hanging askew upon the wall.

      Then I noticed my left boot, which circumstantially must have been the instrument of the damage; it lay immediately below and it came to me that its brother had escaped at speed through the window, the culmination of a mortal struggle between he and me, over the right to stay in possession of my foot. Satisfied with that, it was the work of a minute to realise that I was bound by no conventional bonds but that I had, in the throes of troubled sleep, only wound myself up in my bedsheets. And could have wound myself tight as a halter as I recalled how my mother had brought humiliation upon my head with the stranger from out of town.

      I could remember that much more clearly than I had any wish to. What was more opaque was the interval that followed, in which I believe I had gratefully accepted a glass of whisky from Irving, or Merriweather, or any one of the gentlemen then in high spirits in the Particular’s saloon. I had affected to pass off the incident lightly as if it were the custom or that I cared nothing that my mother had behaved as she had. With Wilkes and D’Orleans turned in, Merriweather and myself had become of augmented interest, being the only party present with any extra knowledge of P.T. Barnum and his imminent arrival in our town. Merriweather talked up the circus in a manner I believed might be worthy of Barnum himself and then became intimate with Mr Curry, who had recently been famously successful with a silver-mining speculation.

      The faces about my table were still fired up with Barnum fever and plied me with whisky and hung upon my every word as I employed the little I knew to paint a gaudy picture of the amazing entertainment they had in store. I used the strongest colours to depict a scene in which elephants were as common as horses and giraffes left no one’s bedroom a place of certain privacy.

      Why yes, I said, matter of fact, it was I who had persuaded the strangers that this was the perfect place for Barnum. I had charge of many of the necessary arrangements and it was in my power to ensure that the top folk were given the proper seats and maybe introduced personally to Phineas himself. Another whisky? Mighty kind. My mother? Not mine, sir. Mine had been an industrious wife and religious mother, raised on a small holding in the distant Shenandoah Valley, whose husband had been killed upholding the Union cause and who had herself died, cruelly, resisting a fate far worse than death, at the merciless hands of the Confederate army. Had a halter been handy on that next morning, I am sure I would have availed myself of the perfect peace it seemed to offer.

      But such is the indefatigable nature of the human spirit that not my mother’s iniquity, nor СКАЧАТЬ