Hoops

[Scene: The big tent-stable of a travelling circus. On the ground near the entrance GENTLEMAN JOHN, stableman and general odd-job man, lies smoking beside MERRY ANDREW, the clown. GENTLEMAN JOHN is a little hunched man with a sensitive face and dreamy eyes. MERRY ANDREW, who is resting between the afternoon and evening performances, with his clown's hat lying beside him, wears a crimson wig, and a baggy suit of orange-coloured cotton, patterned with purple cats. His face is chalked dead-white, and painted with a set grin, so that it is impossible to see what manner of man he is. In the back-ground are camels and elephants feeding, dimly visible in the steamy dusk of the tent.]

Gentleman John:

And then consider camels: only think

Of camels long enough, and you'ld go mad -

With all their humps and lumps; their knobbly knees,

Splay feet, and straddle legs; their sagging necks,

Flat flanks, and scraggy tails, and monstrous teeth.

I've not forgotten the first fiend I met:

'Twas in a lane in Smyrna, just a ditch

Between the shuttered houses, and so narrow

The brute's bulk blocked the road; the huge green stack

Of dewy fodder that it slouched beneath

Brushing the yellow walls on either hand,

And shutting out the strip of burning blue:

And I'd to face that vicious bobbing head

With evil eyes, slack lips, and nightmare teeth,

And duck beneath the snaky, squirming neck,

Pranked with its silly string of bright blue beads,

That seemed to wriggle every way at once,

As though it were a hydra. Allah's beard!

But I was scared, and nearly turned and ran:

I felt that muzzle take me by the scruff,

And heard those murderous teeth crunching my spine,

Before I stooped - though I dodged safely under.

I've always been afraid of ugliness.

I'm such a toad myself, I hate all toads;

And the camel is the ugliest toad of all,

To my mind; and it's just my devil's luck

I've come to this - to be a camel's lackey,

To fetch and carry for original sin,

For sure enough, the camel's old evil incarnate.

Blue beads and amulets to ward off evil!

No eye's more evil than a camel's eye.

The elephant is quite a comely brute,

Compared with Satan camel, - trunk and all,

His floppy ears, and his inconsequent tail.

He's stolid, but at least a gentleman.

It doesn't hurt my pride to valet him,

And bring his shaving-water. He's a lord.

Only the bluest blood that has come down

Through generations from the mastodon

Could carry off that tail with dignity,

That tail and trunk. He cannot look absurd,

For all the monkey tricks you put him through,

Your paper hoops and popguns. He just makes

His masters look ridiculous, when his pomp's

Butchered to make a bumpkin's holiday.

He's dignity itself, and proper pride,

That stands serenely in a circus-world

Of mountebanks and monkeys. He has weight

Behind him: 'ons of primeval power

Have shaped that pillared bulk; and he stands sure,

Solid, substantial on the world's foundations.

And he has form, form that's too big a thing

To be called beauty. Once, long since, I thought

To be a poet, and shape words, and mould

A poem like an elephant, huge, sublime,

To front oblivion; and because I failed,

And all my rhymes were gawky, shambling camels,

Or else obscene, blue-buttocked apes, I'm doomed

To lackey it for things such as I've made,

Till one of them crunches my backbone with his teeth,

Or knocks my wind out with a forthright kick

Clean in the midriff, crumpling up in death

The hunched and stunted body that was me -

John, the apostle of the Perfect Form!

Jerusalem! I'm talking like a book -

As you would say: and a bad book at that,

A maundering, kiss-mammy book - The Hunch-back's End

Or The Camel-Keeper's Reward - would be its title.

I froth and bubble like a new-broached cask.

No wonder you look glum, for all your grin.

What makes you mope? You've naught to growse about.

You've got no hump. Your body's brave and straight -

So shapely even that you can afford

To trick it in fantastic shapelessness,

Knowing that there's a clean-limbed man beneath

Preposterous pantaloons and purple cats.

I would have been a poet, if I could:

But better than shaping poems 'twould have been

To have had a comely body and clean limbs

Obedient to my bidding.

Merry Andrew:

I missed a hoop

This afternoon.

Gentleman John:

You missed a hoop? You mean ...

Merry Andrew:

That I am done, used up, scrapped, on the shelf,

Out of the running - only that, no more.

Gentleman John:

Well, I've been missing hoops my whole life long;

Though, when I come to think of it, perhaps

There's little consolation to be chewed

From crumbs that I can offer.

Merry Andrew:

I've not missed

A hoop since I was six. I'm forty-two.

This is the first time that my body's failed me:

But 'twill not be the last. And ...

Gentleman John:

Such is life!

You're going to say. You see I've got it pat,

Your jaded wheeze. Lord, what a wit I'ld make

If I'd a set grin painted on my face.

And such is life, I'ld say a hundred times,

And each time set the world aroar afresh

At my original humour. Missed a hoop!

Why, man alive, you've naught to grumble at.

I've boggled every hoop since I was six.

I'm fifty-five; and I've run round a ring

Would make this potty circus seem a pinhole.

I wasn't born to sawdust. I'd the world

For circus ...

Merry Andrew:

It's no time for crowing now.

I know a gentleman, and take on trust

The silver spoon and all. My teeth were cut

Upon a horseshoe: and I wasn't born

To purple and fine linen - but to sawdust,

To sawdust, as you say - brought up on sawdust.

I've had to make my daily bread of sawdust:

Ay, and my children's, - children's, that's the rub,

As Shakespeare says ...

Gentleman John:

Ah, there you go again!

What a rare wit to set the ring aroar -

As Shakespeare says! Crowing? A gentleman?

Man, didn't you say you'd never missed a hoop?

It's only gentlemen who miss no hoops,

Clean livers, easy lords of life who take

Each obstacle at a leap, who never fail.

You are the gentleman.

Merry Andrew:

Now don't you try

Being funny at my expense; or you'll soon find

I'm not quite done for yet - not quite snuffed out.

There's still a spark of life. You may have words:

But I've a fist will be a match for them.

Words slaver feebly from a broken jaw.

I've always lived straight, as a man must do

In my profession, if he'ld keep in fettle:

But I'm no gentleman, for I fail to see

There's any sport in baiting a poor man

Because he's losing grip at forty-two,

And sees his livelihood slipping from his grasp -

Ay, and his children's bread.

Gentleman John:

Why, man alive,

Who's baiting you? This winded, broken cur,

That limps through life, to bait a bull like you!

You don't want pity, man! The beaten bull,

Even when the dogs are tearing at his gullet,

Turns no eye up for pity. I myself,

Crippled and hunched and twisted as I am,

Would make a brave fend to stand up to you

Until you swallowed your words, if you should slobber

Your pity over me. A bull! Nay, man,

You're nothing but a bear with a sore head.

A bee has stung you - you who've lived on honey.

Sawdust, forsooth! You've had the sweet of life:

You've munched the honeycomb till -

Merry Andrew:

Ay! talk's cheap.

But you've no children. You don't understand.

Gentleman John:

I have no children: I don't understand!

Merry Andrew:

It's children make the difference.

Gentleman John:

Man alive -

Alive and kicking, though you're shamming dead -

You've hit the truth at last. It's that, just that,

Makes all the difference. If you hadn't children,

I'ld find it in my heart to pity you,

Granted you'ld let me. I don't understand!

I've seen you stripped. I've seen your children stripped.

You've never seen me naked; but you can guess

The misstitched, gnarled, and crooked thing I am.

Now, do you understand? I may have words.

But you, man, do you never burn with pride

That you've begotten those six limber bodies,

Firm flesh, and supple sinew, and lithe limb -

Six nimble lads, each like young Absalom,

With red blood running lively in his veins,

Bone of your bone, your very flesh and blood?

It's you don't understand. God, what I'ld give

This moment to be you, just as you are,

Preposterous pantaloons, and purple cats,

And painted leer, and crimson curls, and all -

To be you now, with only one missed hoop,

If I'd six clean-limbed children of my loins,

Born of the ecstasy of life within me,

To keep it quick and valiant in the ring

When I ... but I ... Man, man, you've missed a hoop;

But they'll take every hoop like blooded colts:

And 'twill be you in them that leaps through life,

And in their children, and their children's children.

God! doesn't it make you hold your breath to think

There'll always be an Andrew in the ring,

The very spit and image of you stripped,

While life's old circus lasts? And I ... at least

There is no twisted thing of my begetting

To keep my shame alive: and that's the most

That I've to pride myself upon. But, God,

I'm proud, ay, proud as Lucifer, of that.

Think what it means, with all the urge and sting,

When such a lust of life runs in the veins.

You, with your six sons, and your one missed hoop,

Put that thought in your pipe and smoke it. Well,

And how d'you like the flavour? Something bitter?

And burns the tongue a trifle? That's the brand

That I must smoke while I've the breath to puff.

(Pause.)

I've always worshipped the body, all my life -

The body, quick with the perfect health which is beauty,

Lively, lissom, alert, and taking its way

Through the world with the easy gait of the early gods.

The only moments I've lived my life to the full

And that live again in remembrance unfaded are those

When I've seen life compact in some perfect body,

The living God made manifest in man:

A diver in the Mediterranean, resting,

With sleeked black hair, and glistening salt-tanned skin,

Gripping the quivering gunwale with tense hands,

His torso lifted out of the peacock sea,

Like Neptune, carved in amber, come to life:

A stark Egyptian on the Nile's edge poised

Like a bronze Osiris against the lush, rank green:

A fisherman dancing reels, on New Year's Eve,

In a hall of shadowy rafters and flickering lights,

At St Abbs on the Berwickshire coast, to the skirl of the pipes,

The lift of the wave in his heels, the sea in his veins:

A Cherokee Indian, as though he were one with his horse,

His coppery shoulders agleam, his feathers aflame

With the last of the sun, descending a gulch in Alaska;

A brawny Cleveland puddler, stripped to the loins,

On the cauldron's brink, stirring the molten iron

In the white-hot glow, a man of white-hot metal:

A Cornish ploughboy driving an easy share

Through the grey, light soil of a headland, against a sea

Of sapphire, gay in his new white corduroys,

Blue-eyed, dark-haired, and whistling a careless tune:

Jack Johnson, stripped for the ring, in his swarthy pride

Of sleek and rippling muscle ...

Merry Andrew:

Jack's the boy!

Ay, he's the proper figure of a man.

But he'll grow fat and flabby and scant of breath.

He'll miss his hoop some day.

Gentleman John:

But what are words

To shape the joy of form? The Greeks did best

To cut in marble or to cast in bronze

Their ecstasy of living. I remember

A marvellous Hermes that I saw in Athens,

Fished from the very bottom of the deep

Where he had lain two thousand years or more,

Wrecked with a galleyful of Roman pirates,

Among the white bones of his plunderers

Whose flesh had fed the fishes as they sank -

Serene in cold, imperishable beauty,

Biding his time, till he should rise again,

Exultant from the wave, for all men's worship,

The morning-spring of life, the youth of the world,

Shaped in sea-coloured bronze for everlasting.

Ay, the Greeks knew: but men have forgotten now.

Not easily do we meet beauty walking

The world to-day in all the body's pride.

That's why I'm here - a stable-boy to camels -

For in the circus-ring there's more delight

Of seemly bodies, goodly in sheer health,

Bodies trained and tuned to the perfect pitch,

Eager, blithe, debonair, from head to heel

Aglow and alive in every pulse, than elsewhere

In this machine-ridden land of grimy, glum

Round-shouldered, coughing mechanics. Once I lived

In London, in a slum called Paradise,

Sickened to see the greasy pavements crawling

With puny flabby babies, thick as maggots.

Poor brats! I'ld soon go mad if I'd to live

In London, with its stunted men and women

But little better to look on than myself.

Yet, there's an island where the men keep fit -

St Kilda's, a stark fastness of high crag:

They must keep fit or famish: their main food

The Solan goose; and it's a chancy job

To swing down a sheer face of slippery granite

And drop a noose over the sentinel bird

Ere he can squawk to rouse the sleeping flock.

They must keep fit - their bodies taut and trim -

To have the nerve: and they're like tempered steel,

Suppled and fined. But even they've grown slacker

Through traffic with the mainland, in these days.

A hundred years ago, the custom held

That none should take a wife till he had stood,

His left heel on the dizziest point of crag,

His right leg and both arms stretched in mid air,

Above the sea: three hundred feet to drop

To death, if he should fail - a Spartan test.

But any man who could have failed, would scarce

Have earned his livelihood or his children's bread

On that bleak rock.

Merry Andrew (drowsily):

Ay, children - that's it, children!

Gentleman John:

St Kilda's children had a chance, at least,

With none begotten idly of weakling fathers.

A Spartan test for fatherhood! Should they miss

Their hoop, 'twas death, and childless. You have still

Six lives to take unending hoops for you,

And you yourself are not done yet ...

Merry Andrew (more drowsily):

Not yet.

And there's much comfort in the thought of children.

They're bonnie boys enough; and should do well,

If I can but keep going a little while,

A little longer till ...

Gentleman John:

Six strapping sons!

And I have naught but camels.

(Pause.)

Yet, I've seen

A vision in this stable that puts to shame

Each ecstasy of mortal flesh and blood

That's been my eyes' delight. I never breathed

A word of it to man or woman yet:

I couldn't whisper it now to you, if you looked

Like any human thing this side of death.

'Twas on the night I stumbled on the circus.

I'd wandered all day, lost among the fells,

Over snow-smothered hills, through blinding blizzard,

Whipped by a wind that seemed to strip and skin me,

Till I was one numb ache of sodden ice.

Quite done, and drunk with cold, I'ld soon have dropped

Dead in a ditch; when suddenly a lantern

Dazzled my eyes. I smelt a queer warm smell;

And felt a hot puff in my face; and blundered

Out of the flurry of snow and raking wind

Dizzily into a glowing Arabian night

Of elephants and camels having supper.

I thought that I'd gone mad, stark, staring mad;

But I was much too sleepy to mind just then -

Dropped dead asleep upon a truss of hay;

And lay, a log, till - well, I cannot tell

How long I lay unconscious. I but know

I slept, and wakened, and that 'twas no dream.

I heard a rustle in the hay beside me,

And opening sleepy eyes, scarce marvelling,

I saw her, standing naked in the lamplight,

Beneath the huge tent's cavernous canopy,

Against the throng of elephants and camels

That champed unwondering in the golden dusk,

Moon-white Diana, mettled Artemis -

Her body, quick and tense as her own bowstring,

Her spirit, an arrow barbed and strung for flight -

White snowflakes melting on her night-black hair,

And on her glistening breasts and supple thighs:

Her red lips parted, her keen eyes alive

With fierce, far-ranging hungers of the chase

Over the hills of morn - The lantern guttered

And I was left alone in the outer darkness

Among the champing elephants and camels.

And I'll be a camel-keeper to the end:

Though never again my eyes...

(Pause.)

So you can sleep,

You Merry Andrew, for all you missed your hoop.

It's just as well, perhaps. Now I can hold

My secret to the end. Ah, here they come!

[Six lads, between the ages of three and twelve, clad in pink tights covered with silver spangles, tumble into the tent.]

The Eldest Boy:

Daddy, the bell's rung, and -

Gentleman John:

He's snoozing sound.

(to the youngest boy)

You just creep quietly, and take tight hold

Of the crimson curls, and tug, and you will hear

The purple pussies all caterwaul at once.