The Mountebank | Page 3

a noble tent, a palace of a tent, the
auditorium being but an inconsiderable section. There was stabling for
fifty horses. There were decent dressing-rooms. There was a
green-room, with a wooden, practicable bar running along one end, and
a wizened, grizzled, old barman behind it who supplied your wants
from the contents of a myriad bottles ranged in perfect order in some
obscure nook beneath the counter. They did things in the great manner
in the Cirque Rocambeau. It visited none but first-class towns which
had open spaces worthy of its magnificence. It despised one or two
night stands. The Cirque Rocambeau had a way of imposing itself upon
a town as an illusory permanent institution, a week being its shortest
and almost contemptuous sojourn. The Cirque Rocambeau maintained
the stateliness of the old world.
Now the Cirque Rocambeau fades out of this story almost as soon as it
enters it. But it affords the coincidence which enables this story to be
written. For if I had not known the Cirque Rocambeau, I should never
have won the confidence of Andrew Lackaday and I should have
remained as ignorant, as you are, at the present moment, of the
vicissitudes of that worthy man's career.
You see, we met as strangers at a country house towards the end of the
war. Chance turned the conversation to France, where he had lived
most of his life, to the France of former days, to my own early
wanderings about that delectable land, to my boastful accounts of my
two or three months' vagabondage with the Cirque Rocambeau. He
jumped as if I had thrown a bomb instead of a name at him. In fact the
bomb would have startled him less.
"The Cirque Rocambeau?"
"Yes."

He looked at me narrowly. "What year was that?"
I told him.
"Lord Almighty," said he, with a gasp. "Lord Almighty!" He stared for
a long time in front of him without speaking. Then to my amazement
he said deliberately: "I remember you! You were a sort of a young
English god in a straw hat and beautiful clothes, and you used to take
me for rides on the clown's pig. The clown was my foster father. And
now I'm commanding a battalion in the British Army. By Gum! It's a
damn funny world!"
Memory flashed back with almost a spasm of joy.
"'By Gum!'" I repeated. "Why, that was what my old friend Ben Flint
used to say twenty times an hour!"
It was a shibboleth proving his story true. And I remembered the weedy,
ugly, precocious infant who was the pride and spoiled darling of that
circus crowd.
Why I, a young gentleman of leisure, fresh from Cambridge, chose to
go round France with a circus, is neither here nor there. For one thing, I
assure you it was not for the bright eyes of Mlle Renée Saint-Maur or
her lesser sister luminaries. Ben Flint, the English clown, classically
styled "Auguste" in the arena, and his performing pig, Billy, somehow
held the secret of my fascination. Ben Flint mystified me. He was a
man of remarkable cultivation; save for a lapse here and there into
North Country idiom, and for a trace now and then of North Country
burr, his English was pure and refined. In ordinary life, too, he spoke
excellent French, although in the ring he had to follow the classical
tradition of the English clown, and pronounce his patter with a
nerve-rasping Britannic accent. He never told me his history. But there
he was, the principal clown, and as perfect a clown as clown could be,
with every bit of his business at his fingers' ends, in a great and
important circus. Like most of his colleagues, he knew the wide world
from Tokio to Christiania; but, unlike the rest of the crowd, whose life
seemed to be bounded by the canvas walls of the circus, and who

differentiated their impressions of Singapore and Moscow mainly in
terms of climate and alcohol, Ben Flint had observed men and things
and had recorded and analysed his experiences, so that, meeting a more
or less educated youth like myself--perhaps a rare bird in the circus
world--standing on the brink of life, thirsting for the knowledge that is
not supplied by lectures at the Universities, he must have felt some
kind of satisfaction in pouring out, for my benefit, the full vintage of
his wisdom.
I see him now, squat, clean-shaven, with merry blue eyes in a mug of a
face, sitting in a deck chair, on a scrap of ragged ground forming the
angle between the row of canvas stables and the great tent, a cob pipe
in his humorous mouth, a thick half litre glass of beer with a handle to
it on the earth