Chapter X: The Children of the Big Tops

Every woman says it sooner or later, that is, every woman who goes to a circus. High upon the close-packed tiers of seats she sits, watching the white, sleek ring horses or “rosinbacks”—resin never is pronounced correctly under the white tops—the flash of the riding acts, the swaying grace of the “casting numbers”, the “perch” and “traps” and other aerial performances, as the general ensemble of air-acrobatics swings into action; listening to the characteristic lilt and high-corneted blare of the circus band, enjoying herself immensely until—the music changes.

The aerialists swing to their tapes and descend to the hippodrome tracks, there to don their clogs and robes and lose themselves in the vast expanse of the circus tent as they return to the dressing rooms. A wild hullaballoo comes from the “pad room”, where the performers await their entrance into the main tent. A shrieking, siren note sounds from the compressed air calliope, augmenting the band. Then, tumbling and shouting, the clowns come forth, and one of them is trundling a baby carriage, with a two-year-old child within, his chubby face smeared with clown-white, and perhaps, squeezed tight in his arms, a baby lion! Then it is that the remark is sure to come:

“Oh, that poor little baby!”

Whereupon the woman leans toward her companion. Together they decide that it must be terrible to be a circus baby, to be forced into a wandering, uncouth sort of gypsy life; a homeless existence where there are coarse men, shouting, hurrying laborers, the sting of unkind elements, and no chance whatever for the enlightenment of culture, or for an opportunity to gain from life what it should hold for every youngster.

It sounds very true. The surprising part, however, is that it is not true in any particular, and could the baby in the carriage—the one who clasps tight at the soft, furry ball that some day will be a ferocious, caged, black-maned Nubian—could that youngster reply, it would be to the effect that the sympathy is being wasted, and that he has a chance in life for all that it can hold, an opportunity for everything that one could desire, far above the ordinary child born in the ordinary American home!

Impossible? Not at all. The circus is a definite thing; a world apart, it is true, but nevertheless, a world which revolves upon a well-oiled axle, which brooks neither tempest nor disaster, which knows no obstacle to defeat it from its purpose of traveling on, day after day, a fairyland, mysterious in its coming, mysterious in the fleeting lights and hurrying, shadowy forms of its departure, yet a well-conceived, steadily balanced affair in which the baby plays as great a part as the adult; for the baby of to-day is the circus man or woman of to-morrow, and the circus succeeds through the generations of those who have learned its intricacies from childhood.

So, if you are a circus goer—and who isn’t?—don’t pity the baby or the youngster of the circus world. And above all, don’t think of the child as a poor little thing in the midst of ruffianism and neglect.

Buffalo Bill is dead now. But during his life, what would you, as a child, have given to have been trundled on his lap each afternoon, there to listen wide-eyed, while the white-haired old plainsman told just how he slew Yellowhand in the famous duel of the Battle of the Warbonnet, and to hear from him, the man who helped to build it, the story of the conquering of the great, free West? Few indeed were the children about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show who did not have their daily story hour in which the great scout himself regaled them. Those visits were in themselves an education. But wait; the story of the circus child is one that must start at the beginning.

The mother? There is the child insured through the very life she leads, for the circus woman is nothing if not moral, and thrifty and sturdy. Her life is not an easy one, it is true, as concerns the physical; it is the busy, hurrying existence of one who must be ever ready for the call of the bugle, who must meet the elements as they come and smile in spite of fatigue, of cold or rain or blazing sun. But it is her life; she is inured to it, and she wants nothing else. As to the moral side: she has neither the time nor the inclination to be anything but moral. From the time that the long trains glide into town in the early morning until the last torch is extinguished, and the tired “pull-up” teams at last have been taken to the stock cars at night, her day is one constant succession of activity. Morning brings the parade, afternoon the matinée, night still another performance. And no circus train lingers after the main tent flutters to the ground; there is no time for the “wild party”, for the “town johnny” or the “joy ride”, even though the inclination should tend that way, which it doesn’t. Always, too, there lurks ahead the specter of winter, grim, cold, forbidding winter, when the bands no longer will blare; when the steel-throated calliope will stand deserted and desolate in the winter quarters yards; when the sleek, bulky draft stock will become rough-coated and clumsily kittenish as it wanders the ranch or farm where it is pastured; when the land of the tent is forgotten in the minds of the ordinary person; but when the attention of the performer must be more keenly bent than ever upon the days when the sun will shine and the pennants flutter atop the mastheads of the center poles. For though the circus stops, the performer never ceases. If she is an acrobat, there must be daily practice in order that muscles remain supple. If she is a rider, the obligation is even greater; for the ring horse or “rosinback” is something that must not be neglected. The rider who sways and somersaults before the thronged tents of the summer is merely reaping the benefits of a winter of hard, arduous work. Not only is the ring horse of a type especially adapted to bareback riding, a horse without nerves, without skittishness and with highly developed sense of rhythm and well-timed locomotion, but it also is the result of constant care and of constant exercise and training. The rider must not neglect him, winter or summer!

If she is a trainer of animals, her duties are equally strenuous in the winter months. Each day is the steel arena erected in the big animal house. Snow and cold may lay without; blustery, gripping winds may sweep and swirl, but within the warmth of the menagerie house there is the circus of the summer as concerns the animals and their trainer.

So it goes all the way through the list of the circus woman’s activities. Energy, sturdiness and courage are her lot, just as it also must be the lot of the man who is her husband. The trainer of lions cannot drink; his eye must be ever keen when the beasts are snarling on their pedestals. The “caster” of the high, double-trapeze acts, who swings and sways at the roofs of the tents during the summer months, cannot get out of condition, either mentally or physically. The nets which stretch beneath are not the protection they seem. A fall at the wrong angle means a broken leg or arm,—or worse, a broken back or neck. Perfect continuity of life is the price demanded of the circus man or woman, and it is only natural that this should be transmitted to the circus child.

As it is with the moral fiber, so is it with health. It is only a matter of from six to eight weeks from the time that the circus mother leaves the ring until she is back again with her child. Health is hers and health is her baby’s; the long-drawn-out illness so often attendant upon childbirth is absent with the circus woman. Rugged health and a constitution endowed with vast reserves of physical and mental strength are the bulwarks of her crisis, and they rarely fail.

And so it’s a wonderful day in the circus when the new baby is brought on. About the pad room, the other women of the show have been sewing for weeks, for the new baby is not a personal, solitary thing, as it so often is in other walks of life. It is a circus baby; it belongs to the tented world and all those in it, to a world devoted, a world that is segregated to a certain degree, a wandering world without the constant ties of home, and a world in which love and softness of heart are predominant features. Instead of one nurse, there are dozens. Instead of a baby who cries unattended while its mother is performing before the thousands of the big circus tent, there are constantly outstretched arms. It is “their” baby, theirs to comfort and to make happy, theirs to coddle and pamper, theirs to dream for, and hope for and work for. Nor does this feeling include only the performers; it spreads to the “roughnecks”, who become grinning, tongue-halted men in the presence of the new visitor; to the menagerie, where the animal men steal the baby leopard while its mother sleeps, that the human baby may have a “kitten” with which to play. It goes even to the “juice joints” or concession stands; the child of the circus never wants for dainties! The clowns romp for it, grimacing and doing tricks far beyond their fun-making capacities of the ring, for this is a labor of love. The horse attendants bring forth the prettiest pony, and it belongs to the baby, as far as usage is concerned. The natural longing for home ties, which, strangely enough, is stronger in the circus person than in the ordinary run of mortals, centers in the child. It has an entire community working for its happiness and its future. Often you’ve seen a baby in the ring with the clowns. You’ve thought of it as a part of the performance, something which must be repeated twice a day, whether there are clouds and storm, or sun and blistering weather. But you have been wrong. The clowns are merely romping with their playmate, that is all; the adult wanderers are merely making life more pleasant for a little fellow who has just come into the circus world. What matters it if that romp occurs in the comparative seclusion of the pad room or before thousands of persons?

So, the first few years are traversed. Then comes the time of education. It is here that much sympathy is directed toward the circus child, and much sympathy wasted. For the youngster of the “white tops”, the “heir to the ballyhoo” as it often is called, has more opportunities for education, more chance to learn the necessary things of life, more openings to become conversant in youth with things that many persons obtain only at college than nine out of ten of American children! But perhaps that needs proof.

Remember first that the circus season ends generally in October and does not begin again until April. That leaves six months for the usual city schooling, for most circus performers spend their winters in the municipality where the show is stored until spring. Therefore, the child is deprived of only three months’ study a year, and this is more than recompensed by the opportunities for learning which abound about it.

For instance, does the usual child at six, or seven, begin a study of applied psychology? Hardly. The circus child does, and for the reason that the whole circus business is built upon psychology. The circus man knows what an ordinary person will do under nearly every possible condition, because his life has been devoted to the study of humanity. Crowd spirit—not mob spirit, understand, but crowd spirit—is ever before him. He sees every walk and class of life represented in the throngs which daily pass through the main gates. He knows the vagaries of the human mind as represented in the reserved seats as apart from that of the “blues” or general admission seats. He knows wherein the ordinary citizen of a lumbering district, for instance, differs from that of the person who lives in a mining or agricultural section of the country. He early learns the fundamental rules which govern the actions of humans, and all these things are brought as naturally to the attention of the circus child as a love for fairy tales.

A study of natural history is his from the beginning, for there is always the animal man to lead him about the menagerie, and to tell him everything there is to know about the beasts who are imprisoned there. He is taught by men who know, by those who spend their lives in companionship with the animals. He learns the relationship of the lion, the tiger, the leopard, the jaguar and cougar of the feline family and comes to know them as more than mere animals. He knows the difference between an African elephant and an Asiatic, so that he can tell them by sight. He learns that all monkeys do not belong to the antecedents of the human family, and the reason why the chimpanzee and the Koolakamba are more closely related to man than, for instance, the marmoset or the rhesus. Books, it is true, on the subject, are missing. But the best students do not study volumes; they investigate the things themselves.

He becomes a weather prophet through the days that he spends with the boss canvas man, studying the sky and learning the reasons for the sudden rush of orders and the “guying out” gangs which hurry from rope to rope about the big tent, tightening the hempen braces of the spreading canvas to withstand a “blow” or the soggy deluge of rain.

He knows machinery,—for the circus is a world of it. The gasoline engine and all that it contains become familiar to him through the ever-present questions that are readily answered. For isn’t he a circus child? The man on the big tractor explains to him the mysteries of the automobile. The calliope player takes him along on parade and tells him the story of steam, to the accompaniment of the screaming notes of the howling, screeching “horse piano.” So it is with the patent stake drivers, the “spool wagons” which raise and lower the tent, the heavy, sturdy equipment of the wagons and railroad stock,—he comes to know it all, because he is reared in a place where it is a part of his life.

He learns of music from the bandmaster,—and let it be known that among the circus “wind-jammers” there are as many students of classical music as there are in the orchestras of the theater and the concert hall. In the preliminary “concerts” which precede the main performance, half or more of the numbers are of the classical nature, as may be gleaned from the following programme, taken at random from a circus programme. And lest there be doubt, the year was 1915, and the circus Ringling Brothers:

1. Atlantis (The Lost Continent) Suite in four parts—Sefranek.
Atlantis is a continent mentioned in Plato’s history, and extended
across the Atlantic Ocean approximately from Europe to Yucatan.
This continent, it is believed, was the home of a great race which
conquered and civilized the world. The Azores Islands are considered
to be the tops of the lofty mountains and are all that now remain of
the great country. No. 1, Nocturne and Morning Hymn of Praise. No. 2,
A Court Function. No. 3, “I Love Thee” (The Prince and Aana). No. 4,
The Destruction of Atlantis.

2. Southern Memories—Medley Overture—Hecker.

3. Selection—From Samson et Dalila—Saint-Saëns.

4. Star and Crescent March—Richards.

5. Suite—The Last Days of Pompeii—Sousa.

A. In the House of Burbo and Stratonice.
B. Nydia.
C. The Destruction of Pompeii and Nydia’s Death.

6. Selection—From Madame Butterfly—Puccini.

7. The Hall of Fame—Selection of Favorite Melodies—Sefranek.
Containing Keler Bela’s “Racoczy”, Verdi’s “Celeste Aida”, Fucik’s
“Entry of the Gladiators”, Rubenstein’s “Melody in F”, Grieg’s “Peer
Gynt”, Dvorák’s “Humoresque” and the finale from Liszt’s First
Hungarian Rhapsody.

Sounds queer, doesn’t it, this sort of music in a circus? Yet, if you will remember, that is the type which is always played in the “concert” before the main show. Naturally, once the rush of the performance has begun, conditions change. There is the blare and hurry of the swift, staccato-timed popular air, or the sway of the waltz during the aerial numbers. But before the show, the “concert” must have its classics, classics which change from day to day, for the bandmaster tires of hearing the same thing over and over. The other type of music and its repetition is necessary, of course, for the performance, for the music forms the cues of the circus; the show changes with the changes of the band, and even the trainmaster, at the cars, a half mile away, busy with the struggle of loading the show for the night, can tell the exact status of the performance by the strains which float to him from the circus band. But the preliminary music is different; there the programme can be varied, and it is only natural that the circus child, hearing from the cradle up a nightly variation which takes in the work of every celebrated composer, should receive an education in music far beyond the reach of ninety per cent. of America’s children. More, for he receives it in a way that brings no effort. It is no work for him to learn that Tschaikowsky was the composer of “1812”, or that Offenbach wrote “Orpheus.” It comes to him by the simple method of day-to-day assimilation.

History he does not gain from books. True, he may know little of the wrangles of Europe and the precepts of Confucius, but he knows his America! The afternoon, that time of rest between the matinée and the night show, is the circus man and circus woman’s time for roaming. It is a rest period, and then, the insatiable curiosity of the circus becomes rampant. The townspeople are curious about the circus folk and forget that the feeling is mutual. For the circus people are also curious about the city which they, for a day, are visiting. It is only natural that the circus child knows the story of Barbara Frietchie from seeing the tablet which is placed on the bridge adjacent to where her house once stood. He sees the monument to George Washington’s mother in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and the old home where once she lived. He stands beside the monument to those who fell in the Real Rebellion in Canada and learns the story of that bubble-dream of empire. He hears the story of the Battle of Gettysburg when the circus plays the town and the circus folk troop out, after the matinée, to go over the battlefield. He sees George Washington’s tomb, because the circus people hurry for the interurban car which takes them to Mount Vernon when the show plays Washington. And as he sees he learns—by actual contact!

Nearly twenty thousand miles a year he travels, at a time when curiosity is at its best, and when the one compelling word “why” is constantly on his lips. He knows every railroad and the kind of country it traverses. He knows every city, for he wanders it. He knows the quiet beauty of New York State, the tumbled wonders of the Rockies, the vast expanses of desert leading to the Salton Sea and thence to California; the beautiful reaches of the Saskatchewan, far to the north; the broad, serene beauty of the Mississippi, for the circus must ever seek new territory, new fields, and the circus child goes along! And how many children make a tourist trip of twenty thousand miles a year?

But the roughness of it all, the uncouthness, the hurrying, swearing laborers! The gambling and the graft of the side shows, the short-changers in the “connection”, the constant form of Temptation ever beckoning! So? Let it be known that the gambling, the graft and the thievery of the modern circus are largely fables. Time was, it is true, when those things existed. To-day, the number of shows which permit anything of the sort, and they are the smallest of the small, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Quite the opposite; the circus of to-day employs from one to five detectives, to say nothing of the manager, whose eye is ever alert. Once I managed a show, for a brief space of time. I saw a woman looking rather queerly at her change. She made no protest; she merely believed she had made a mistake. But the instinct was there; somebody was “shorting.” That night, the show was minus one ticket seller. He had paid for his fifty-cent pilfering by losing his job, his “hold-back” of some twenty-dollars in pay, and his transportation home at the end of the season. Swift and stern punishment, it is true, for a petty offense. But he had violated an inexorable rule.

The roughness, the coarseness? Let a man stand some day beside a group of unshaven “ruffians” of the circus as they drive a stake into the ground with the rhythmic swing of their great, sixteen-pound sledges. Let him make some insulting remark about the pretty little girl in tights who is hurrying to take her place in parade. No, on reconsideration, don’t try the experiment, for the circus is primitive in one way. It knows only one answer to an insult,—force! The roughness and the coarseness are not so predominant as one might think.

The elements cannot be governed, it is true. In the circus world, one must fight the cold drizzle of autumnal rain, the blazing sun of July and August, the “northers” of the south with their sleet and freezing rain, the blatter and fierceness of the tempest as it sweeps upon the bellowing, swaying canvas, the crash of the circus wreck as the hurrying train strikes an open switch; but those are things which build character, not destroy it; which bring a strength instead of weakness, sturdiness instead of pliability, courage instead of the yellow streak. Nor is this all.

Those three months of books of which the child has been deprived during the winter months have not been forgotten. Everybody doesn’t go in parade. Always there is some one who is willing to tutor the circus child, to the extent that when autumn comes again, that child is able to make its advancement in grade at the public school it attends. As for the other end of the teaching, it is not at all an unusual thing to hear childish voices singing in the dressing tent on Sunday morning; a Sunday-school of the circus is in progress.

So much for the mental development and the physical well-being. As for the future, the circus child usually knows or cares about only one, and that is the life of his father and mother. If they are riders, then his ambition is to be a rider also. If they are aerialists, he too is drawn toward the flying trapeze or the swinging ladder. Long before most children begin to think about the time when life must be of their own making, rehearsals begin, with the mother and father as tutors and the child as the pupil. Step by step the game is learned, whether it is in the treasury wagon as an executive, or within the ring curbs as an equestrian or equestrienne. Circus families exist from generation to generation; there is a certain honor in the family name, a certain pride in making each generation more famous, more daring, more worthy than the one that went before. The light of pride really begins to show in the eyes of the circus mother and father when they see their son or their daughter displaying more agility than they, more adaptability for the part they play under canvas, more hope of being a stellar attraction than they have formed. Their reward comes in knowing that they have given to their child the health, the stability and the training which will make it greater than they. The child’s reward comes in the upheld honor of the family name and the monetary benefit that results from a “feature act.”

In this, some fail. It is inevitable. But the number of failures in the circus world is diminutive compared to that in the world outside. The training, the constant thought of the future, the hardy life is against anything but success. This applies even to marriage, for the circus man seldom seeks beyond his sphere for a wife; the circus girl looks to the land of the “white tops” for the man who is to be her husband, and divorces are few.

A blank future,—that of the circus act? Some time when you’re in New York, you’ll inevitably drift to a great theater where a “riding clown” is the greatest attraction. His income is nearly that of the President. Meet him and you will find a quiet, modest, well-educated young man, married, proud of his wife and baby, who some day will be greater than he, unconscious apparently of the fact that he, of the circus, is the drawing power which pulls thousands of dollars into the box office every day. Meet his mother, and you will find a quaint, twinkling-eyed, humorous English woman whose fondest memories are of the days back “home” when she and her husband and the children had their own show—and gave most of the performance. She will tell you that she was a circus baby and that her son was a circus baby, and that they are proud of it. Go into their home, and you will find it one of happiness, of children clamoring for the mother not to work herself to death for them, and the mother protesting that all the children do is entertain her. They form the Hanneford Family, and “Poodles”, the star, is the son. They are typical of the circus, and they are still of the circus, for each summer finds them under the great, dun-colored stretches of the “big top”, far happier there than in any comfortable, convenient theater. Their story is simply the story that has been told here,—the story of nearly every circus group, with the exception, of course, that every one cannot be a star.

And even should the child of the circus desire to leave the “white tops” and go into some form of business in the outer world, the basic structure is there to permit it. More, there is a certain amount of knowledge about the fundamental things which is present in the circus boy or girl of fifteen that does not come to the usual young man or woman until twenty or twenty-two. In the first place, there is the absolutely essential one of knowing one’s neighbor, of being able to discern the various phases of human nature as they present themselves. The psychological quality of circus life, which is apparent from the moment that one stops to look at the waving banners of the side show, until the rattling, clattering excitement of the chariot race has announced the finish of the main show, has fitted the child far before the usual time for the job of “figuring out the other fellow.” The moral restraint imposed by the hard work of the circus lot has builded a good foundation of honesty of purpose and tenacity. The travel, and the necessary broadening influences which go with it, play to the advantage of the seeker of fortune in a new world.

But she was pretty. She was young. She had been a circus baby, and her mother had been a circus baby before her. Her name was synonymous with a long line of riders, dating back to the time when Old Dan Rice was the drawing power of thousands to his little one-ring circus, and when Barnum was making money by telling the people the truth about the fact that they liked to be fooled. A motion-picture company had made her an offer,—at a far greater salary than she ever could expect beneath the pennants of the circus.

He was a rider also. But he was something more. The growth of mechanical power about the circus had interested him. He had tinkered with machinery. Then he had patented a number of useful inventions with the result that he too was being sought from without.

They had talked it all over in the shadow of the big top, just at that time of evening when the circus lot holds the greatest power for those who know it, between twilight and dusk, when the old calliope is tooting down at the car line, when “Shanty”, as the chandelier man of every circus is known, is sending the first of the gleaming light clusters up the sides of the center poles, when the first of the shadowy bulk of the throng of the night is beginning to make its way circuswards. Then they had gone to the manager, two circus babies who had grown to manhood and womanhood in the shadow of the big top, and who now stood at the threshold of a new life.

“We wanted to tell you first,” they said. “We’re going to be married.”

The manager grinned; he had guessed it long before.

“Fine,” he answered. “I’ll spread the word; we’ll have a little blow-out in the cook house with a special menu and everything like that. But—what are you going to do then?”

“Then?” They appeared surprised.

“Yes. How about these offers? Are you going to—”

“Oh, those!” They laughed at a matter long laid to rest. “We’re going to stay with the circus!”