Love, Let Me Not Hunger Read Free Page B

costume as Buffalo Slim, as well as his trick horse, Marlene Dietrich, a palomino whose responses were almost human.
    Marvel summoned Jackdaw Williams and the clowns, Bill Semple, Tom Drury, and Janos, the dwarf, and laid down the law on their turns. There was to be no more slacking and horsing around. Gogo and Panache were to present their musical entree and work out at least two or three new entrees in which all of them would take part.
    “A lot of stuff with water,” Marvel ordered. “Kids like to see you get doused or fall on your arse in water. Or maybe one of them cars that busts up.” This was as far as Sam Marvel’s originality took him. He added, “And what’s more, all of you lend a hand setting up and pulling down. You, Drury! I understand you can spickety Spanish? Okay, you’re the interpreter.”
    Janos, the dwarf clown, parked a half-eaten sandwich and pulled himself up by his finger tips to look over the edge of the desk at the circus proprietor. “What about my doks?” he asked.
    “What about your dogs?”
    “I do my oct with them?”
    “Okay, okay. You can do your act. Second half. Micky the Midget Magyar and his Capering Canine Comics. But you bloody well feed ’em yourself.”
    Janos released his hold from the desk and came down from his tiptoes, a satisfied smirk on his broad features.
    “Hokay, hokay, I feed ’em.” For in spite of his malformation he was as vain as any of his fellow performers. Indeed in this environment his abnormality was covered up. Everyone in a circus is special—everyone shows himself—everyone in some manner changes his appearance. Under clown-white Janos became a member of a unique community and no longer stood out as grotesque, pitiful, and excluded. For affection he turned to the three dogs he had trained to do a comedy act with him and from whom he was inseparable. Two were hulking, lazy great Danes who got laughs by refusing to do anything he asked them to and superciliously turning their heads away at every command. The third was a small, lively, intelligent fox terrier who could turn back flips and walk balanced on his forefeet. With Janos his dogs came first. His second concern was his stomach.
    Janos was a Hungarian with a Hungarian’s gusto for food. He ate voraciously and seemingly interminably since he was rarely seen when he was not chewing at something. Food in some way must have been a compensation to him. Most of his money he spent upon delicacies for himself and would often be seen in his corner of the clown wagon treating himself to a tin of pâté or smoked salmon.
    Sam Marvel had a look at the chewed end of his Schimmelpenninck and then said to Jackdaw, “You do your specialty number with that lousy bird, but you come back in the last half billed as Marvo the Juggler. Why the hell don’t you stick to juggling or doing that musical act of yours? You’re a much better juggler than you are a joey.”
    Jackdaw Williams, who was a big, powerful man with a bulbous nose and weary, heavy-lidded eyes which drooped at the corners like those of a bloodhound, said amiably, “Why don’t you mind your own bloody business, Sam? Say what you want and cut out the lectures.”
    One of his specialties was to appear as a living scarecrow with Raffles, his jackdaw, perched on his shoulder. He had trained the bird to fly into various sections of the audience where it would filch eyeglasses, programmes, bags of sweets, women’s purses, or anything that was loose and bring them to him. When the bird had collected sufficient articles Williams would hold up each one and ask the owner to stand and identify it, and the jackdaw would then fly back with it, with Williams sometimes deliberately muddling articles, such as returning a woman’s hat to a man, which provided the laughs.
    But Williams, who was of the circus from generations back, was also a skilled juggler in the old tradition and a competent acrobat. As well, he could perform on a dozen or so musical