Michael, Brother of Jerry
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Michael’s wrath was as superlative as was his helplessness. He could only bristle and tear his vocal chords with his rage. But it was a very ancient and boresome experience to Collins. He was even taking advantage of the moment to glance across the arena and size up what the bears were doing.
“Oh, you thoroughbred,” he sneered at Michael, returning his attention to him. “Slack him! Let go!”
The instant his bonds were released, Michael soared at Collins, and Collins, timing and distancing with the accuracy of long years, kicked him under the jaw and whirled him back and down into the sawdust.
“Hold him!” Collins ordered. “Line him out!”
And the two youths, pulling in opposite directions with chain and rope, stretched him into helplessness.
Collins glanced across the ring to the entrance, where two teams of heavy draft-horses were entering, followed by a woman dressed to over-dressedness in the last word of a stylish street-costume.
“I fancy he’s never done any flipping,” Collins remarked, coming back to the problem of Michael for a moment. “Take off your lead, Jimmy, and go over and help Smith. – Johnny, hold him to one side there and mind your legs. Here comes Miss Marie for her first lesson, and that mutt of a husband of hers can’t handle her.”
Michael did not understand the scene that followed, which he witnessed, for the youth led him over to look on at the arranging of the woman and the four horses. Yet, from her conduct, he sensed that she, too, was captive and ill-treated. In truth, she was herself being trained unwillingly to do a trick. She had carried herself bravely right to the moment of the ordeal, but the sight of the four horses, ranged two and two opposing her, with the thing patent that she was to hold in her hands the hooks on the double-trees and form the link that connected the two spans which were to pull in opposite directions – at the sight of this her courage failed her and she shrank back, drooping and cowering, her face buried in her hands.
“No, no, Billikens,” she pleaded to the stout though youthful man who was her husband. “I can’t do it. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense, madam,” Collins interposed. “The trick is absolutely safe. And it’s a good one, a money-maker. Straighten up a moment.” With his hands he began feeling out her shoulders and back under her jacket. “The apparatus is all right.” He ran his hands down her arms. “Now! Drop the hooks.” He shook each arm, and from under each of the fluffy lace cuffs fell out an iron hook fast to a thin cable of steel that evidently ran up her sleeves. “Not that way! Nobody must see. Put them back. Try it again. They must come down hidden in your palms. Like this. See. – That’s it. That’s the idea.”
She controlled herself and strove to obey, though ever and anon she cast appealing glances to Billikens, who stood remote and aloof, his brows wrinkled with displeasure.
Each of the men driving the harnessed spans lifted up the double-trees so that the girl could grasp the hooks. She tried to take hold, but broke down again.
“If anything breaks, my arms will be torn out of me,” she protested.
“On the contrary,” Collins reassured her. “You will lose merely most of your jacket. The worst that can happen will be the exposure of the trick and the laugh on you. But the apparatus isn’t going to break. Let me explain again. The horses do not pull against you. They pull against each other. The audience thinks that they are pulling against you. – Now try once more. Take hold the double-trees, and at the same moment slip down the hooks and connect. – Now!”
He spoke sharply. She shook the hooks down out of her sleeves, but drew back from grasping the double-trees. Collins did not betray his vexation. Instead, he glanced aside to where the kissing pony and the kneeling pony were leaving the ring. But the husband raged at her:
“By God, Julia, if you throw me down this way!”
“Oh, I’ll try, Billikens,” she whimpered. “Honestly, I’ll try. See! I’m not afraid now.”
She extended her hands and clasped the double-trees. With a thin writhe of a smile, Collins investigated the insides of her clenched hands to make sure that the hooks were connected.
“Now brace yourself! Spread your legs. And straighten out.” With his hands he manipulated her arms and shoulders into position. “Remember, you’ve got to meet the first of the strain with your arms straight out. After the strain is on, you couldn’t bend ’em if you wanted to. But if the strain catches them bent, the wire’ll rip the hide off of you. Remember, straight out, extended, so that they form a straight line with each other and with the flat of your back and shoulders. That’s it. Ready now.”
“Oh, wait a minute,” she begged, forsaking the position. “I’ll do it – oh, I will do it, but, Billikens, kiss me first, and then I won’t care if my arms are pulled out.”
The dark youth who held Michael, and others looking on, grinned. Collins dissembled whatever grin might have troubled for expression, and murmured:
“All the time in the world, madam. The point is, the first time must come off right. After that you’ll have the confidence. – Bill, you’d better love her up before she tackles it.”
And Billikens, very angry, very disgusted, very embarrassed, obeyed, putting his arms around his wife and kissing her neither too perfunctorily nor very long. She was a pretty young thing of a woman, perhaps twenty years old, with an exceedingly childish, girlish face and a slender-waisted, generously moulded body of fully a hundred and forty pounds.
The embrace and kiss of her husband put courage into her. She stiffened and steeled herself, and with compressed lips, as he stepped clear of her, muttered, “Ready.”
“Go!” Collins commanded.
The four horses, under the urge of the drivers, pressed lazily into their collars and began pulling.
“Give ’em the whip!” Collins barked, his eyes on the girl and noting that the pull of the apparatus was straight across her.
The lashes fell on the horses’ rumps, and they leaped, and surged, and plunged, with their huge steel-shod hoofs, the size of soup-plates, tearing up the sawdust into smoke.
And Billikens forgot himself. The terribleness of the sight painted the honest anxiety for the woman on his face. And her face was a kaleidoscope. At the first, tense and fearful, it was like that of a Christian martyr meeting the lions, or of a felon falling through the trap. Next, and quickly, came surprise and relief in that there was no hurt. And, finally, her face was proudly happy with a smile of triumph. She even smiled to Billikens her pride at making good her love to him. And Billikens relaxed and looked love and pride back, until, on the spur of the second, Harris Collins broke in:
“This ain’t a smiling act! Get that smile off your face. The audience has got to think you’re carrying the pull. Show that you are. Make your face stiff till it cracks. Show determination, will-power. Show great muscular effort. Spread your legs more. Bring up the muscles through your skirt just as if you was really working. Let ’em pull you this way a bit and that way a bit. Give ’em to. Spread your legs more. Make a noise on your face as if you was being pulled to pieces an’ that all that holds you is will-power. – That’s the idea! That’s the stuff! It’s a winner, Bill! It’s a winner! – Throw the leather into ’em! Make ’m jump! Make ’m get right down and pull the daylights out of each other!”
The whips fell on the horses, and the horses struggled in all their hugeness and might to pull away from the pain of the punishment. It was a spectacle to win approval from any audience. Each horse averaged eighteen hundredweight; thus, to the eye of the onlooker, seven thousand two hundred pounds of straining horse-flesh seemed wrenching and dragging apart the slim-waisted, delicately bodied, hundred-and-forty pound woman in her fancy street costume. It was a sight to make women in circus audiences scream with terror and turn their faces away.
“Slack down!” Collins commanded the drivers.
“The lady wins,” he announced, after the manner of a ringmaster. – “Bill, you’ve got a mint in that turn. – Unhook, madam, unhook!”
Marie obeyed, and, the hooks still dangling from her sleeves, made a short run to Billikens, into whose arms she threw herself, her own arms folding him about the neck as she exclaimed before she kissed him:
“Oh, Billikens, I knew I could do it all the time! I was brave, wasn’t I!”
“A give-away,” Collins’s dry voice broke in on her ecstasy. “Letting all the audience see the hooks. They must go up your sleeves the moment you let go. – Try it again. And another thing. When you finish the turn, no chestiness. No making out how easy it was. Make out it was the very devil. Show yourself weak, just about to collapse from the strain. Give at the knees. Make your shoulders cave in. The ringmaster will half step forward to catch you before you faint. That’s your cue. Beat him to it. Stiffen up and straighten up with an effort of will-power – will-power’s the idea, gameness, and all that, and kiss your hands to the audience and make a weak, pitiful sort of a smile, as though your heart’s been pulled ’most out of you and you’ll have to go to the hospital, but for right then that you’re game an’ smiling and kissing your hands to the audience that’s riping the seats up and loving you. – Get me, madam? You, Bill, get the idea! And see she does it. – Now, ready! Be a bit wistful as you look at the horses. – That’s it! Nobody’d guess you’d palmed the hooks and connected them. – Straight out! – Let her go!”
And again the thirty-six-hundredweight of horses on either side pitted its strength against the similar weight on the other side, and the seeming was that Marie was the link of woman-flesh being torn asunder.
A third and a fourth time the turn was rehearsed, and, between turns, Collins sent a man to his office, for the Del Mar telegram.
“You take her now, Bill,” he told Marie’s husband, as, telegram in hand, he returned to the problem of Michael. “Give her half a dozen tries more. And don’t forget, any time any jay farmer thinks he’s got a span that can pull, bet him on the side your best span can beat him. That means advance advertising and some paper. It’ll be worth it. The ringmaster’ll favour you, and your span can get the first jump. If I was young and footloose, I’d ask nothing better than to go out with your turn.”
Harris Collins, in the pauses gazing down at Michael, read Del Mar’s Seattle telegram:
“Sell my dogs. You know what they can do and what they are worth. Am done with them. Deduct the board and hold the balance until I see you. I have the limit of a dog. Every turn I ever pulled is put in the shade by this one. He’s a ten strike. Wait till you see him.”
Over to one side in the busy arena, Collins contemplated Michael.
“Del Mar was the limit himself,” he told Johnny, who held Michael by the chain. “When he wired me to sell his dogs it meant he had a better turn, and here’s only one dog to show for it, a damned thoroughbred at that. He says it’s the limit. It must be, but in heaven’s name, what is its turn? It’s never done a flip in its life, much less a double flip. What do you think, Johnny? Use your head. Suggest something.”
“Maybe it can count,” Johnny advanced.
“And counting-dogs are a drug on the market. Well, anyway, let’s try.”
And Michael, who knew unerringly how to count, refused to perform.
“If he was a regular dog, he could walk anyway,” was Collins’ next idea. “We’ll try him.”
And Michael went through the humiliating ordeal of being jerked erect on his hind legs by Johnny while Collins with the stick cracked him under the jaw and across the knees. In his wrath, Michael tried to bite the master-god, and was jerked away by the chain. When he strove to retaliate on Johnny, that imperturbable youth, with extended arm, merely lifted him into the air on his chain and strangled him.
“That’s off,” quoth Collins wearily. “If he can’t stand on his hind legs he can’t barrel-jump – you’ve heard about Ruth, Johnny. She was a winner. Jump in and out of nail-kegs, on her hind legs, without ever touching with her front ones. She used to do eight kegs, in one and out into the next. Remember when she was boarded here and rehearsed. She was a gold-mine, but Carson didn’t know how to treat her, and she croaked off with penumonia at Cripple Creek.”
“Wonder if he can spin plates on his nose,” Johnny volunteered.
“Can’t stand up on hind legs,” Collins negatived. “Besides, nothing like the limit in a turn like that. This dog’s got a specially. He ain’t ordinary. He does some unusual thing unusually well, and it’s up to us to locate it. That comes of Harry dying so inconsiderately and leaving this puzzle-box on my hands. I see I just got to devote myself to him. Take him away, Johnny. Number Eighteen for him. Later on we can put him in the single compartments.”
CHAPTER XXVI
Number Eighteen was a big compartment or cage in the dog row, large enough with due comfort for a dozen Irish terriers like Michael. For Harris Collins was scientific. Dogs on vacation, boarding at the Cedarwild Animal School, were given every opportunity to recuperate from the hardships and wear and tear of from six months to a year and more on the road. It was for this reason that the school was so popular a boarding-place for performing animals when the owners were on vacation or out of “time.” Harris Collins kept his animals clean and comfortable and guarded from germ diseases. In short, he renovated them against their next trips out on vaudeville time or circus engagement.
To the left of Michael, in Number Seventeen, were five grotesquely clipped French poodles. Michael could not see them, save when he was being taken out or brought back, but he could smell them and hear them, and, in his loneliness, he even started a feud of snarling bickeringness with Pedro, the biggest of them who acted as clown in their turn. They were aristocrats among performing animals, and Michael’s feud with Pedro was not so much real as play-acted. Had he and Pedro been brought together they would have made friends in no time. But through the slow monotonous drag of the hours they developed a fictitious excitement and interest in mouthing their quarrel which each knew in his heart of hearts was no quarrel at all.
In Number Nineteen, on Michael’s right, was a sad and tragic company. They were mongrels, kept spotlessly and germicidally clean, who were unattached and untrained. They composed a sort of reserve of raw material, to be worked into established troupes when an extra one or a substitute was needed. This meant the hell of the arena where the training went on. Also, in spare moments, Collins, or his assistants, were for ever trying them out with all manner of tricks in the quest of special aptitudes on their parts. Thus, a mongrel semblance to a cooker spaniel of a dog was tried out for several days as a pony-rider who would leap through paper hoops from the pony’s back, and return upon the back again. After several falls and painful injuries, it was rejected for the feat and tried out as a plate-balancer. Failing in this, it was made into a see-saw dog who, for the rest of the turn, filled into the background of a troupe of twenty dogs.
Number Nineteen was a place of perpetual quarrelling and pain. Dogs, hurt in the training, licked their wounds, and moaned, or howled, or were irritable to excess on the slightest provocation. Always, when a new dog entered – and this was a regular happening, for others were continually being taken away to hit the road – the cage was vexed with quarrels and battles, until the new dog, by fighting or by non resistance, had commanded or been taught its proper place.
Michael ignored the denizens of Number Nineteen. They could sniff and snarl belligerently across at him, but he took no notice, reserving his companionship for the play-acted and perennial quarrel with Pedro. Also, Michael was out in the arena more often and far longer hours than any of them.
“Trust Harry not to make a mistake on a dog,” was Collins’s judgment; and constantly he strove to find in Michael what had made Del Mar declare him a ten strike and the limit.
Every indignity, in the attempt to find out, was wreaked upon Michael. They tried him at hurdle-jumping, at walking on forelegs, at pony-riding, at forward flips, and at clowning with other dogs. They tried him at waltzing, all his legs cord-fastened and dragged and jerked and slacked under him. They spiked his collar in some of the attempted tricks to keep him from lurching from side to side or from falling forward or backward. They used the whip and the rattan stick; and twisted his nose. They attempted to make a goal-keeper of him in a football game between two teams of pain-driven and pain-bitten mongrels. And they dragged him up ladders to make him dive into a tank of water.
Even they essayed to make him “loop the loop” – rushing him down an inclined trough at so high speed of his legs, accelerated by the slash of whips on his hindquarters, that, with such initial momentum, had he put his heart and will into it, he could have successfully run up the inside of the loop, and across the inside of the top of it, back-downward, like a fly on the ceiling, and on and down and around and out of the loop. But he refused the will and the heart, and every time, when he was unable at the beginning to leap sideways out of the inclined trough, he fell grievously from the inside of the loop, bruising and injuring himself.
“It isn’t that I expect these things are what Harry had in mind,” Collins would say, for always he was training his assistants; “but that through them I may get a cue to his specially, whatever in God’s name it is, that poor Harry must have known.”
Out of love, at the wish of his love-god, Steward, Michael would have striven to learn these tricks and in most of them would have succeeded. But here at Cedarwild was no love, and his own thoroughbred nature made him stubbornly refuse to do under compulsion what he would gladly have done out of love. As a result, since Collins was no thoroughbred of a man, the clashes between them were for a time frequent and savage. In this fighting Michael quickly learned he had no chance. He was always doomed to defeat. He was beaten by stereotyped formula before he began. Never once could he get his teeth into Collins or Johnny. He was too common-sensed to keep up the battling in which he would surely have broken his heart and his body and gone dumb mad. Instead, he retired into himself, became sullen, undemonstrative, and, though he never cowered in defeat, and though he was always ready to snarl and bristle his hair in advertisement that inside he was himself and unconquered, he no longer burst out in furious anger.
After a time, scarcely ever trying him out on a new trick, the chain and Johnny were dispensed with, and with Collins he spent all Collins’s hours in the arena. He learned, by bitter lessons, that he must follow Collins around; and follow him he did, hating him perpetually and in his own body slowly and subtly poisoning himself by the juices of his glands that did not secrete and flow in quite their normal way because of the pressure put upon them by his hatred.
The effect of this, on his body, was not perceptible. This was because of his splendid constitution and health. Wherefore, since the effect must be produced somewhere, it was his mind, or spirit, or nature, or brain, or processes of consciousness, that received it. He drew more and more within himself, became morose, and brooded much. All of which was spiritually unhealthful. He, who had been so merry-hearted, even merrier-hearted than his brother Jerry, began to grow saturnine, and peevish, and ill-tempered. He no longer experienced impulses to play, to romp around, to run about. His body became as quiet and controlled as his brain. Human convicts, in prisons, attain this quietude. He could stand by the hour, to heel to Collins, uninterested, infinitely bored, while Collins tortured some mongrel creature into the performance of a trick.
And much of this torturing Michael witnessed. There were the greyhounds, the high-jumpers and wide-leapers. They were willing to do their best, but Collins and his assistants achieved the miracle, if miracle it may be called, of making them do better than their best. Their best was natural. Their better than best was unnatural, and it killed some and shortened the lives of all. Rushed to the springboard and the leap, always, after the take-off, in mid-air, they had to encounter an assistant who stood underneath, an extraordinarily long buggy-whip in hand, and lashed them vigorously. This made them leap from the springboard beyond their normal powers, hurting and straining and injuring them in their desperate attempt to escape the whip-lash, to beat the whip-lash in the air and be past ere it could catch their flying flanks and sting them like a scorpion.
“Never will a jumping dog jump his hardest,” Collins told his assistants, “unless he’s made to. That’s your job. That’s the difference between the jumpers I turn out and some of these dub amateur-jumping outfits that fail to make good even on the bush circuits.”
Collins continually taught. A graduate from his school, an assistant who received from him a letter of recommendation, carried a high credential of a sheepskin into the trained-animal world.
“No dog walks naturally on its hind legs, much less on its forelegs,” Collins would say. “Dogs ain’t built that way. They have to be made to, that’s all. That’s the secret of all animal training. They have to. You’ve got to make them. That’s your job. Make them. Anybody who can’t, can’t make good in this factory. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, and get busy.”
Michael saw, without fully appreciating, the use of the spiked saddle on the bucking mule. The mule was fat and good-natured the first day of its appearance in the arena. It had been a pet mule in a family of children until Collins’s keen eyes rested on it; and it had known only love and kindness and much laughter for its foolish mulishness. But Collins’s eyes had read health, vigour, and long life, as well as laughableness of appearance and action in the long-eared hybrid.
Barney Barnato he was renamed that first day in the arena, when, also, he received the surprise of his life. He did not dream of the spike in the saddle, nor, while the saddle was empty, did it press against him. But the moment Samuel Bacon, a negro tumbler, got into the saddle, the spike sank home. He knew about it and was prepared. But Barney, taken by surprise, arched his back in the first buck he had ever made. It was so prodigious a buck that Collins eyes snapped with satisfaction, while Sam landed a dozen feet away in the sawdust.
“Make good like that,” Collins approved, “and when I sell the mule you’ll go along as part of the turn, or I miss my guess. And it will be some turn. There’ll be at least two more like you, who’ll have to be nervy and know how to fall. Get busy. Try him again.”
And Barney entered into the hell of education that later won his purchaser more time than he could deliver over the best vaudeville circuits in Canada and the United States. Day after day Barney took his torture. Not for long did he carry the spiked saddle. Instead, bare-back, he received the negro on his back, and was spiked and set bucking just the same; for the spike was now attached to Sam’s palm by means of leather straps. In the end, Barney became so “touchy” about his back that he almost began bucking if a person as much as looked at it. Certainly, aware of the stab of pain, he started bucking, whirling, and kicking whenever the first signal was given of some one trying to mount him.
At the end of the fourth week, two other tumblers, white youths, being secured, the complete, builded turn was performed for the benefit of a slender, French-looking gentleman, with waxed moustaches. In the end he bought Barney, without haggling, at Collins’s own terms and engaged Sammy and the other two tumblers as well. Collins staged the trick properly, as it would be staged in the theatre, even had ready and set up all the necessary apparatus, and himself acted as ringmaster while the prospective purchaser looked on.
Barney, fat as butter, humorous-looking, was led into the square of cloth-covered steel cables and cloth-covered steel uprights. The halter was removed and he was turned loose. Immediately he became restless, the ears were laid back, and he was a picture of viciousness.