Friendship Village Part 28

"I could do some o' my embroidery," she observed, "but it's quite expensive stuff, an' I don't know whether it would sell rill well here in Friendship. I'd be 'most afraid to risk. An' I don't do enough cookin', myself, to what-you-might-say know how, any more."

"Same with my sewing," observed Mis' Doctor Helman; "I put it all out now. I don't know as I could sew up a seam. That's the trouble, hiring everything done so."

Those who did not hire everything done preserved a respectful silence.

And Doctor June looked up in the elm trees.

"The Lord," he said, "spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. The Lord said unto Moses, 'What is that in thine hand?' Moses had, you remember, nothing but a rod in his hand. But it was enough to let the people know that G.o.d had been with him--that the Lord had appeared unto him. Suppose the glory of the Lord, here in the garden, should ask us now, as it does ask, 'What is that in thine hand?' What have we got?"

There was silence again, and we looked at one another doubtfully.

"Land, Doctor!" said Libbie Liberty then, "I been tryin' for two years to earn a new parlour carpet, an' I ain't had nothin' in my hand to earn with. So I keep on sayin' I _like_ an old Brussels carpet--they're so easy to sweep."

"My!" said Abigail Arnold, "I declare, I'd be real put to it to try to make extry money. 'Bout the only thing the Lord seems to 'a' put in my hand is time. I've got oodles o' that, layin' 'round loose."

Mis' Photographer Sturgis was in the big garden chair, wrapped in a shawl, her feet on an inverted flower-pot.

"I'm tryin' to think," she said, looking sidewise at the ground. "I donno's I know how I could earn a cent, convenient. It ain't real easy for women to earn. I think mebbe the Lord meant the men to be the Moseses."

Mis' Amanda Toplady's voice rolled out, deep and comfortable, like a complaisant giant's.

"Well said!" she remarked. "I'm drove to death all day. If anybody's to ask me what I got in my hand, I declare I guess I'd say, rill reverent: Dear Lord, I've got my hands full, an' that's about all I have got."

So we went on, saying much or little as was our nature, but we were all agreed that we were virtually helpless--for Calliope was out of town that week, and not present to shame us.

"What's in my hands?" said grim Miss Liddy Ember, finally, in her thin falsetto. "Well, I ain't got any rill, what-you-might-call hands. I just got kind o' cat's paws for my three meals a day an' my rent."

Then, by her sister's side, Ellen Ember stood up. We had hardly noticed her, sitting there quietly playing with some of the doctor's flowers.

But now we saw that she had hurriedly twisted her splendid hair about her head, and by this we understood that she was herself again. We had seen her come to herself like this on the street, and then she would go hurrying home, the tears running down her face in shame for her unbound hair and her singing and dancing. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were shining as she rose now, and she looked appealingly pretty, one hand, palm outward, half hiding her trembling mouth. By her soft eyes, too, we knew that she was herself again.

"You all know," she began, and dare not trust herself. "You all know ..." she said once more, and we understood what she would say.

"What can I do?" she cried to us. "What is there I can do? I ain't got anything but my craziness! Oh, it seems like I _ain't_ much, an' so I'd ought to _do_ all the more."

To soothe her, we took our woman's way of all talking at once. And then Doctor June called out cheerily that he felt the way Ellen did, that he wasn't a real Moses, for what had he--Doctor June--in his hand, and didn't we all know there was no money in pills? And then he told us how the Reverend Arthur Bliss was to be in town again on Wednesday of the next week, and would we not all think the matter over quietly, and meet with them on that evening, for cakes and tea?

"As many of you as can," he said, "come with a plan to earn a dollar, and tell how you mean to do it. Ellen, you and I'll preside at the meeting, and hear what the rest say, and keep real still ourselves, like proper officers."

But Ellen Ember would not be comforted. She stood with that one hand, palm outward, pressed against her lips, looking at us with big, br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes.

"I ain't got nothin' but my craziness, you know," she said over. And then, as she was going through the gateway, she turned to Doctor June.

"Why, Wednesday's the first night o' the Carnival!" she cried. "You set the dollar meetin' on the first night o' the Carnival!"

"My stars!" cried Doctor June, gravely. "And I might have been selling pills on the grounds!"

All Friendship Village loves a Carnival. Once the word meant to me a Florentine _fiesta_ day, with a feast of colour, and of many little fine things, "real, like laughter." Now when I say "carnival" I mean the painted eruption by night from the market square of some town like Friendship, when lines broaden and waver grotesquely, when the mirth is in great silhouettes and Colour goes unmasked.

I always make my way to such a place, for it holds for me the wonder of the untoward; as will a strolling Italian plodding past my house at night with his big, silent bear; or the spectacle of the huge, faded red ice-wagon, with powerful horses and rattling chains and tongs, and giants in blue denim atop the crystal; or the strange, copper world that dissolves in the fluid of certain sunsets. And that Wednesday night, a week later, on my way to the "dollar meeting" at Doctor June's, I turned toward the Friendship Carnival with some vestige of my youth clinging to the hem of things.

I gave my attention to them all: The pop-corn wagon, an aristocratic affair that looked like a hea.r.s.e; the little painted canaries and love-birds, so out of place and patient that I thought they must have souls to form as well as we; the sad little live monkey, incessantly dodging white b.a.l.l.s thrown at him by certain immortals (who, when they hit him, got pipes); and the giant who flung "Look! Look! Look! Look!"

through a megaphone, while a good little dog toiled up a ladder and then stood at the ladder's top in a silence that was all nice reticence and dignity. Also, the huge Saxon fellow who, at the portal of the Arabian Court of Art and Regular Cafe Restaurant, sang a love-song through a megaphone--"Tenderly, dearest, I breathe thy sweet name," he hallooed, with his free hand beckoning the crowd to the Court of Art.

And then I saw the Lyric Dance Arcade and Indian Palace of Asiatic Mystery. And I found myself close to the platform, listening to the cry of a man in gilt knickerbockers.

"Ladies! Gentlemen! All!" he summoned. "Never in the history of the show business has there been anything resemblin' this. Come here--here--here--here! See Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, who is about to begin one of her most sublimely sensational dances. See her, see her, you may never again see her! Graceful, glittering, genteel. Graceful, glittering, gen-te-e-e-l. I am telling you about Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, in her ancient Asiatic dance, the most up-to-date little act in the entire show business to-day. Here she is, waiting for you--you--you. Everybody that's got the dime!"

Until he ceased, I had hardly noticed Zorah herself, standing in the canvas portico. The woman had, I then observed, a kind of appealing prettiness and a genuineness of pose. She was looking out on the crowd with the usual manner of simulated shyness, but to the shyness was given conviction by an uplifted hand, palm outward, hiding her mouth. I noted her small, stained face, her splendid unbound hair--and then a certain resemblance caught at my heart. And I saw that she was wearing a skirt made of a man's plaid shawl, and about her shoulders was a rosy, old-fashioned nubia. Her face and throat were stained, and so were her thin little arms--but I knew her.

The performance, as the man had said, was about to begin, and already he was giving Zorah her signal to go within. Somehow I bought a ticket and hurried into the tent. The seats were sparingly occupied, and I saw, as I would have guessed, no one whom I knew in the eager, stamping little audience. In their midst I lost the slim figure that had preceded me, until she mounted the platform and swept before the footlights a stately courtesy.

And there, in the smoky little tent, Ellen Ember began to dance, with her quite surprising grace--as Pierrette might have danced in Carnival.

It was the charming, faery measure which she had danced for me in Miss Liddy's dining-room; and as she had sung to me then, so now, in a sweet piping voice, she sang her incongruous little song:--

O Day of wind and laughter, A G.o.ddess born are you, Whose eyes are in the morning Blue--blue!

The slumbrous noon your body is, Your feet are the shadow's flight, But the immortal soul of you Is Night.

It seemed to me that I sat for hours in that hot little place, cut off from the world, watching. Again and again, to the bra.s.s blare of some hoiden tune, she set the words of the lyric that "she liked the feel of," and she danced on and on. And when at last the music shattered off, and she ceased, and ran behind a screening canvas, somehow I made my way forward through the crowd that was clapping hands and calling her back, and I gained the place where she stood.

When I asked her to come with me, she nodded and smiled, with unseeing eyes, and a.s.sented quite simply, and then suddenly sat down before the lifted tent flap.

"But I must wait for my money," she said. "That's what I came for--my money. They thought I'd never earn my dollar, but I have."

At this I understood. And now I marvel how I talked at all to the man in gilt knickerbockers who arrived and haggled over the whole matter.

Zorah, he explained, the sure-enough Zorah, had took down sick in the last place they made, an' they'd had to leave her behind. An' when he told about it down town that morning, this little piece here had up an'

offered. Somethin' had to be done--he left it to me if they didn't. He felt his duty to the amus.e.m.e.nt park public, him. So he had closed with her for a dollar for three fifteen-minute turns--he give two shillings a turn, on the usual, but she'd hung out stout for the even money. An'

she'd danced her three, odd but satisfactory. You could hand 'em queer things in the show business, if you only dressed the part. Yes, sure, here was the dollar. Be on hand to-morrow night? No? Sufferin' snakes, but was we goin' to leave him shipwrecked?

Finally I got her away, and skirted the market-place with her dancing at my side, shaking her silver dollar in her shut palms and singing:--

"Busy, busy, busy all the day. An' then I earned my dollar, my dollar--they never thought I'd earn my dollar ..."

I remember, as we struck into the unlighted block where Miss Liddy's house stood, that I was struggling hard for my own serenity, so that for a moment I did not observe that Ellen stopped beside me. But I knew that she fell silent, and when I turned I saw her there on the dark walk hurriedly twisting her splendid hair about her head. And by that and by her silence I understood that she was suddenly herself, and of her own mind, as we say.

On this, "Ellen!" said I quickly, "how fine of you to have earned your Orphans' Home dollar so soon. But you have beaten us all!"

She had contrived to fasten her hair, and I saw her touching tentatively the folds of her strange dress. And so I made her know what she had done, as gently as I might, and with all praise I stilled her dismay and shame. And last I led her, as I was determined that I would do, past Miss Liddy's dark little house and on to the home of Doctor June.

I think that I would not have dared take Ellen, just as she was, in her plaid skirt and her rosy nubia, into that black and brown henrietta-cloth a.s.sembly, if I had remembered that there was to be a stranger present. But this, in the events of the hour, I had quite forgotten. I remembered as I entered the room and came face to face with the Reverend Arthur Bliss, talking of the figures for the fiscal year.

"--and the deficit," he was saying, "ought to be made up by us who are so well equipped to do it. With Paul, let us fight the good fight--of every day. This is to-day's fight. Now let us talk over our various weapons."

Doctor June looked thoughtfully at his young guest, and in the older face was a brooding tenderness, like the tenderness of the father who longs to hold the child in quiet, in his arms.

"Yes," said Doctor June, "'fighting' is one name for it. I am tempted to say that 'drudgery' is another name. Errantry, ministry, service, or whatever. It all comes to the same thing: 'What is that in thine hand?'

Well, now, who of us is first?"

"I think," said I then, "that Ellen Ember is first."