Lizzies Tiger -2

百度搜索 American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 天涯 或 American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.

    She did mind that and shook an obdurate head; she did not like her fathers hard, dry, imperative kisses, and ehem only for the sake of power. Sometimes Emma touched her cheek lightly with unparted lips. Lizzie would allow no more. The man sighed when she shook her head, took her h<cite></cite>and away from the crotch, softly folded it up on its fingers and gave her hand ceremoniously back to her.

    &quot;Gratuity,&quot; he said, felt in his pocket and nipped her a heraightened up and walked away. Lizzie put the  in her pinafore pocket and, after a moments thought, stumped off after the funny man along the still, secret edges of the field, curious as to what he might do .

    But now surprises were going on all round her in the bushes, mewings, squeaks, rustlings, although the funny man paid no attention to them, not even when a stately fat woman rose up under his feet, huge as a moon and stark but for her stays, but for black cotton stogs held up by garters with silk rosettes on them, but for a majestic hat of black leghorn with feathers. The woman addressed the drunken man angrily, in a language with a good many ks in it, but he ploughed on indifferently and Lizzie scuttled unseen after, casting an inquisitive backward glance. She had never seen a womans naked breasts since she could remember, and this pair of melons jiggled entrangly as the fat woman shook her fist in the wake of the funny man before she parted her thighs with a wet smad sank down on her knees again in the grass in whiething unseen moaned.

    Then a person scarcely as tall as Lizzie herself, dressed up like a little drummer-boy, somersaulted -- head over heels -- directly across their paths, muttering to himself as he did so. Lizzie had just the time to see that, although he was small, he was not shaped quite right, for his head seemed to have been pressed into his shoulders with some violence, but then he was gone.

    Dont think any of this frightened her. She was not the kind of child that frightens easily.

    Then they were at the back of a tent, not the big, striped tent, but another, smaller tent, where the funny man fumbled with the flap much as he had fumbled with his trousers. A bright mauve, ammoniac reek pulsed out from this tent; it was lit up inside like a ese lantern and glowed. At last he mao unfasten a inside. He did not so much as attempt to close up after him; he seemed to be in as great a hurry as the tumbling dwarf, so she slipped through too, but as soon as she was inside, she lost him, because there were so many other people there.

    Feet of ers had worn all the grass from the ground and it had been replaced by sawdust, which soon stuck all over the mudpie Lizzie had bee. The tent was lined with cages on wheels, but she could not see high enough to see what was ihem, yet, mixed with the everyday chatter around her, she heard strange cries that did not e from human throats, so she knew she was on the right track.

    She saw what could be seen: a young couple, arm in arm, he whispering in her ear, she giggling; a group of three grinning, gaping youths, poking sticks within the bars; a family that went down in steps of size, a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl, down to a baby of ierminate sex in the womans arms. There were many more present, but these were the people she took at of.

    The gagging stench was worse than a summer privy and a savage hullabaloo went on all the time, a r as if the sea had teeth.

    She eeled her ast skirts and trousers and scratched, bare legs of summer boys until she was standing beside the biggest brother of the staircase family at the front of the crowd, but still she could not see the tiger, even if she stood on tiptoe, she saw only wheels and the red and gold base of the cage, whereon was depicted a woman without any clothes, much like the one in the grass outside only without the hat and stogs, and some foliage, with a gilded moon and stars. The brother of the staircase family was much older than she, perhaps twelve, and clearly of the lower class, but  and respectable-looking, although the entire family possessed that pale, peculiar look characteristic of the mill operatives. The brother looked down and saw a small child in a filthy pinafore peering and straining upwards.

    &quot; Veux-tu voir le grand chat, ma petite?&quot;

    Lizzie did not uand what he said, but she knew what he was saying and nodded assent. Mother looked over the<dfn></dfn> head of the good baby in the lace bo as her son heaved Lizzie up in his arms food look.

    &quot;Les poux. . .&quot; she warned, but her son paid her no heed.

    &quot;Voilà, ma petite!&quot;

    The tiger walked up and down, up and down; it walked up and down like Satan walking about the world and it burned. It burned shtly, she was scorched. Its tail, thick as her fathers forearm, twitched bad forth at the tip. The quick, loping stride of the caged tiger; its eyes like yellow s of a fn currency; its round, i, toy-like ears; the stiff whiskers stig out with an artificial look; the red mouth from which the bright noise came. It walked up and down on straw strewn with bloody bones.

    The tiger kept its head down; questing hither and thither though i of what might not be told. All its motion was slung from the marvellous hau held so high you could have rolled a marble down its back, if it would have let you, and the marble would have run down an oblique ail it rolled over the domed forehead on to the floor. In its hihe tense muscles keened and sang. It was a miracle of dynamic suspension. It reached one end of the cage in a few paces and whirled around upon itself in one liquid motion; nothing could be quicker or more beautiful than its walk. It was all raw, vivid, exasperated nerves. Upon its pelt it bore the imprint of the bars behind which it lived.

    The young lad who kept hold of her g tight as she lunged forward towards the beast, but he could not stop her clutg the bars of the cage with her little fingers aried but he could not dislodge them. The tiger stopped in its track halfway through its mysterious patrol and looked at her<var></var>. Her pale-blue Calvinist eyes of New England entered with a shock the flat, mineral eyes of the tiger.

    It seemed to Lizzie that they exged this card for an eime, the tiger and herself.

    Then something strange happehe svelte beast fell to his knees. It was as if it had been subdued by the presence of this child, as if this little child of all the children in the world, might lead it towards a peaceable kingdom where it need  meat. But only &quot;as if&quot;. All we could see was, it k. A crackle of shock ran through the tent; the tiger was ag out of character.

    Its mind remained, however, a law unto itself. We did not know what it was thinking. How could we?

    It stopped r. Instead it started to emit a rattling purr. Time somersaulted. Space dimio the field of attractive force between the child and the tiger. All that existed in the whole world now were Lizzie and the tiger.

    Then, oh! then. . . it came towards her, as if she were winding it to her on an invisible string by the exercise of pure will. I ot tell you how much she loved the tiger, nor how wonderful she thought it was. It was the power of her love that forced it to e to her, on its knees, like a pe. It dragged its pale belly across the dirty straw towards the bars where the little soft creature hung by its hooked fingers. Behind it followed the serpentih of its ceaselessly twitg tail.

    There was a wrinkle in its nose and it buzzed and rumbled and they ook their eyes off one ahough her had the least idea what the other meant.

    The boy holding Lizzie got scared and pummelled her little fists, but she would not let go a grip as tight and senseless as that of the newborn.

    Crack! The spell broke.

    The world bounded into the ring.

    A lash cracked round the tigers ivorous head, and a glorious her into the cage brandishing in the hand that did not hold the whip a three-legged stool. He wore fawn breeches, black boots, a bright red jacket frogged with gold, a tall hat. A dervish, he; he beed, crouched, pointed with the whip, menaced with the stool, leaped and twirled in a brilliant ballet of mimic ferocity, the dance of the Taming of the Tiger, to whom the tamer gave no ce to fight at all.

    The great cat unpeeled its eyes off Lizzies in a trice, rose up on its hind legs aed at the whip like our puss Ginger feints at a piece of paper dangled from a string. It batted at the tamer with its enormous paws, but the whip tio fuse, irritate and torment it and, what with the shouting, the suddeed baying of the crowd, the dreadful fusion of the signs surrounding it, habitual , a lifetimes training, the tiger whimpered, laid back its ears and scampered away from the whirling man to an obscure er of the stage, there to cower, while its flanks heaved, the picture of humiliation.

    Lizzie let go of the bars and g, mudstains and all, to her young protector for fort. She was shaken to the roots by the attack of the trainer upoiger and her four-year-old roots were very he surface.

    The tamer gave his whip a final, ptuous ripple around his adversarys whispers that made it sink its huge head on the floor. Then he placed one booted foot oigers skull and cleared his throat for speech. He was a hero. He was a tiger himself, but even more so, because he was a man.

    &quot;Ladies alemen, boys and girls, this inparable tiger known as the Sce of Bengal, and brought alive-oh to Boston from its native ju three short months before this present time, now, at my imperious and, offers you a perfect imitation of docility and obedience. But do not let the brute deceive you. Brute it was, and brute it remains. Not for nothing did it receive the soubriquet of Sce for, in its native habitat, it thought nothing of ing a dozen brown-skinned heathen for its breakfast and following up with a couple of dozen more for dinner!&quot;

    A pleasing shudder tihrough the crowd.

    &quot;This tiger,&quot; and the beast whickered ingratiatingly when he , &quot;is the veritable ination of blood lust and fury; in a single instant, it  turn from furry quiesto three hundred pounds, yes, three hundred pounds of death-dealing fury.

    &quot;The tiger is the cats revenge.&quot;

    Oh, Miss Ginger, Miss Ginger Cuddles, who sat mewing soriously oepost as Lizzie passed by; who would have thought you seethed with such rese!

    The mans voice dropped to a fidential whisper and Lizzie, although she was in such a state, suerves, reised this was the same man as the one she had met behind the cider stall, although now he exhibited such erect mastery, not a single person ient would have thought he had been drinking.

    &quot;What is the nature of the boween us, between the Beast and Ma me tell you. It is fear. Fear! Nothing but fear. Do you know how insomnia is the plague of the tamer of cats? How all night long, every night, we pace our quarters, impossible to close our eyes for brooding on what day, what hour, what moment the fatal beast will choose to strike?

    &quot;Dont think I ot bleed, or that they have not wounded me. Under my clothes, my body is a palimpsest of scars, scar upon scar. I heal only to be once more broken open. No skin of mihat is not scar tissue. And I am always afraid, always; all the time in the ring, in the cage, now, this moment -- this very moment, boys and girls, ladies alemen, you see before you a man in the grip of mortal fear.

    &quot;Here and now I am in terror of my life.

    &quot;At this moment I am in this cage within a perfect death trap.&quot;

    Theatrical pause.

    &quot;But,&quot; and here he khe tigers h his whipstock, so that it howled with pain and affront, &quot;but. . .&quot;  and Lizzie saw the secret frog he kept within his trousers shift a little, &quot;. . . but Im not half so scared of the big brute as it is of me!&quot;

    He showed his red maw in a laugh.

    &quot;For I bring to bear upon its killer instinct a rational mans knowledge of the power of fear. The whip, the stool, are instruments of bluff with which I create his fear in my arena. In my cage, among my cats, I have established a hierarchy of fear and among my cats you might well say I am top dog, because I know that all the time they want to kill me, that is their project, that is their iion. . . but as for them, they just dont know what I might do . No, sir!&quot;

    As if ented by the notion, he laughed out loud again, but by now the tiger, perhaps insed by the ued blow on the nose, rumbled out a clear and introvertible message of disaffe and, with a quick jerk of its sculptured head, flung the mans foot away so that, caught off-balance, he half toppled over. And theiger was no longer a thing of stillness, of hard edges and clear outlines, but a whizz of blad red, maw and es, in the air. On him.

    The crowd immediately bayed.

    But the tamer, with enormous presenind, seeing as how he was drunk, and, in the circumstances, with almost uny physical agility, bounced backwards on his boot-heels and thrust the tool he carried in his left hand into the fierce tigers jaws, leaving the tiger w, gnawing, destroying the harmless thing, as a ragged black boy quickly unlatched the cage door and out the tamer leaped, unscathed, amidst hurrahs.

    Lizzies stunned little face was now mottled all over with a curious reddish-purple, with the heat of the tent, with passion, with the sudden access of enlighte.

    To see the rest of the stupendous cat act, the audience would have had to buy aicket for the Big Top, besides the ticket for the menagerie, for which it had already paid, so, relut on the whole to do that, in spite o<cite></cite>f the promise of s and dang ladies, it soon got bored with watg the tiger splintering the wooden stool, and drifted off.

    &quot;Eh bien, ma petite,&quot; said her boy-o her in a sweet, singsong, ing voice. &quot;Tu as vu la bête! La bête du cauchemar!&quot;

    The baby in the lace bo had slept peacefully through all this, but now began to stir and mumble. Its mother nudged her husband with her elbow.

    &quot;On va, Papa?&quot;

    The ing, smiling bht his bright pink lips down on Lizzies forehea<tt></tt>d for a farewell kiss. She could not bear that; she struggled furiously and shouted to be put down. With that, her cover broke and she burst out of her disguise of dirt and silence; half the remaining gawpers ient had kin been bleakly buried by her father, the rest owed him money. She was the most famous daughter in all Fall River.

    &quot;Well, if it aint Andrew Bordens little girl! What are they ucks doing with little Lizzie Borden?&quot;

百度搜索 American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 天涯 或 American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.