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with admiration, she replied: “I know you’d be quite capable of it.”
At these words, the fair young woman and the athletic young man
burst out laughing, looking at us. Ida grew angry and muttered to me:
“They are laughing at us… Why don’t you tell them how rude they
are?” But at that moment a bell rang and everyone got up. The first
part of the show was over.
Outside the big tent we could see the other two standing in
front of the bear’s cage. I went straight up to the man and said in a
firm voice: “Tell me… were you laughing at us?”
He turned slightly and answered without hesitation: “No, we
were laughing at a frog pretending to be an ox.”
“The frog, I suppose, being me?”
“If the cap fits, wear it.”
The woman started to laugh, and Ida, hissing like a viper, broke
in: “There is nothing to laugh at… instead of laughing, you’d better
stop rubbing yourself up against my husband… I suppose you think I
didn’t see you…”
I was astonished, because I hadn’t noticed it. The fair woman
answered indignantly: “My dear girl, you are crazy, why do you think
I should worry about a poor fish like your husband?”
And now, in turn, the man came up to me and said
threateningly: “That’s enough… get along with you… better for you
if you do.”
“Who says so?” I cried in exasperation, raising myself on tiptoe
to be on a level with him.
The scene that followed I shall remember as long as I live. He
made no reply to my remark, but, all of a sudden, took me under the
arms and lifted me up in the air like a feather and suddenly dumped
me down on the back of the elephant which was standing just behind
us in a straw-covered space. What happened then, I don’t know,
because I fainted, and when I came round I found myself at the First
Aid post, with Ida sitting beside me holding my hand. Later we went
home without seeing the second part of the show.
Next day I said to Ida: “That woman was perfectly right: I’m
just a poor fish and nothing more.”
But Ida, taking me by the arm and gazing at me, said: “You
were magnificent! He was frightened, and that was why he put you on
to the elephant… And then, riding along on the elephant, you looked
really splendid… It was a pity you fell off.”

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