IV
THE TRIBUNAL OF CONSCIENCE
UNCLE CHARLIE took six blue tickets from his pocket and set them on thedining-room mantel. His ownership of a newspaper was the explanation forthis liberality of supply to those who could put the two thingstogether.
"I wonder," said he, "if anybody in this room ever heard of the circus?"
Emmy Lou could not get down from her place at the dinner-table fastenough. She hurried to the kitchen. She had heard of the circus from Bobthe house-boy, who had a circus bill!
Bills, as a rule, are small affairs measurable in inches; bits of paperwhich reduce Aunt Cordelia to figurings with a lead pencil, shortreplies, and low spirits.
But a circus bill, pink and pictorial, is measurable in feet. As Bobspread his on the kitchen table yesterday and again this morning, itfell either side well on the way to the floor. Its wonders, inexplicablewhere he, spelling out the text, forebore to explain, or explicablewhere he did if one knew no better than he, were measurable only by thelimits of the mind to take them in. If Emmy Lou, who started to schoollast fall three weeks late owing to a popular prejudice againstwhooping-cough, had caught up as Aunt Cordelia easily assumed she would,or "caught on," in the words of Uncle Charlie, she might have beenspelling out some of the wonders of the circus bill for herself.
Bob's finger had paused beneath a lady in myriad billowing skirts poisedmid-air between a horse and a hoop such as Emmy Lou spent hours tryingto trundle on the sidewalk. "She's jumpin' th'ough the hoop, but thetain't nothin'. Heah in the other picture she's jumpin' th'ough six."
Emmy Lou, hurrying to the kitchen now and finding Bob about to start inwith the soup, borrowed the bill and hurried back with it to thedining-room and Uncle Charlie's side.
"This one's an elephant," she explained, her finger, even as Bob's,beneath the picture. "He picks little children up and puts them in histrunk."
"I see you know, though some do call it his howdah," said Uncle Charlie."And no doubt about the lions and the tigers, the giraffe and the zebraas well?" regretfully. "Even the lemonade?"
"Lemonade?"
"Pink. And peanuts." Uncle Charlie motioned to Bob to put his soup downand have done with it, as it were. "Also Nella, The Child Equestriennein Her Triumphal Entry--here she is. And Zephine, the Wingless Wonder,in Her Flight Through the Air----"
"Am I going to the circus?" from Emmy Lou.
"That's what I hoped," from Uncle Charlie, handing back the bill andturning to his soup. "But of course if there is room for doubt aboutit----"
The very next day Emmy Lou came hurrying home from Sunday school. Shehad the Dawkins, Sarah, the conscientious elder sister, Maud, and AlbertEddie, for company as far as the grocery at the corner. Since AuntCordelia had learned they were English, apparent explanation for thosewho understood, they had been persuaded to go to St. Simeon's Sundayschool too.
Sunday school was to have a--Emmy Lou in her Sunday dress and her Sundayhat, hurrying on from the corner by herself, tried to straighten thisout before reaching home and reporting it. What was it Sunday school wasto have? In Uncle Charlie's study--a small back room, somewhat batteredand dingy but, as he claimed in its defense, his own--was a picture of astout little man propelled in a wheelbarrow by some other men.
Emmy Lou had discovered that Uncle Charlie loved the little man andprized the picture. When she asked who he was and where he was going inthe wheelbarrow, Uncle Charlie said it was _Mr. Pickwick_ going to a_picnic_. Or, and here was the trouble, was it _Mr. Picnic_ going to a_pickwick_? It depended on this what Sunday school was to have.
Uncle Charlie, hat and cane in hand, waiting in the hall for AuntCordelia to start to church, straightened out the matter. _Mr. Pickwick_was going to a _picnic_. It then followed that Emmy Lou, in general abrief person, had such a store of information about the picnic she wasmoved to share it with Uncle Charlie. This common interest about thecircus and their recurring conversations about it were drawing themtogether, anyhow. Her data about the picnic on the whole was menacing inits character. As, for example:
It was to be in Mr. Denby's grove. He charged too much for it, but St.Simeon's could not do any better. If you went too far away from theswings and the benches the mamma of some little pigs would chase you.
Further. You cannot go to St. Simeon's picnic, or, indeed, to any picnicwithout a basket! Emmy Lou had endeavored to find out what sort of abasket and Sarah had cut her short with the brief reply, "A picnicbasket."
And, finally, "Albert Eddie wishes he'd never started to St. Simeon's.Sarah says he has to go to the picnic and he wants to go to the circus!"
Aunt Cordelia arriving in full church array caught this last. "I'vebeen meaning to speak about it myself. I find the circus is here for theone day only and that the day for St. Simeon's picnic."
Emmy Lou received this as applying to the Dawkins only. The informationher inquiries had enabled her to get together led her personally todisparage picnics.
"Albert Eddie says Sarah made him wash dishes at the last picnic he wentto. And she makes him carry baskets. That if he'd wash dishes for 'em atthe circus and carry water, they'd let him in."
"Sarah, Maud, Albert Eddie, you, me, and one ticket to spare; such wasmy idea," said Uncle Charlie, he and Aunt Cordelia preparing to start."The only thing we've ever given the Dawkins up to date is thewhooping-cough. Picnic or circus, duty or pleasure, we'll have to put itto them which they want it to be."
Aunt Cordelia, even at the risk of being late to church, stopped short.She didn't see the matter in any such fashion at all! "Emmy Lou willprefer to go to her own Sunday school picnic too, I hope," decidedly."How you distract and bother the child, Charlie!"
"I bother Emmy Lou? She and I are as near good friends as people get tobe. We respect each other's honesty and go our own ways. I am going toleave the tickets where I put them yesterday. I planned to take her andthe Dawkins to the circus. You and she can fight it out." He proceededthrough the open doorway to the stone steps.
"In that case," from Aunt Cordelia as she followed him, "since you seemto put me in the wrong, I leave it to her own conscience. She is sevenyears old, a big girl going to school and Sunday school, and ought toknow right from wrong." And the two were gone.
Conscience! Familiar shibboleth to the seventh age of little girls!Stern front behind which Aunt Cordelia these days hides her kindlyfeatures.
Somewhere beyond the neighborhood where Emmy Lou lived with AuntCordelia and Uncle Charlie, was the roundhouse and the yards of arailroad. Or so Aunt Cordelia explained. The roundhouse bell, rung everyhour by the watchman on his rounds, made far-off melancholy tollingthrough the night.
The sins at seven, the chubby, endeavoring Emmy Lou's sins, her cloak onthe coat-closet floor instead of the closet peg, mucilage on AuntKatie's rug where a paper outspread before pasting began would havesaved it--sins such as these have no prod to reminder more poignant thanthis melancholy tolling of the roundhouse bell in the night.
"It is an uneasy conscience," Aunt Cordelia invariably claimed when EmmyLou, waking, came begging for permission to get in her bed. "If yourconscience was all that it should be, you'd be asleep."
Yet did Aunt Cordelia, as a rule, leave those matters to Emmy Lou'sconscience which she thought she did? Did Emmy Lou three out of fourSundays find herself remaining at church rather than on her road homebecause she herself wanted to stay? Or taking off her new dress onreaching home because she wanted to get into the older one?
Or, rather, did she find her baffled if unsuspecting self, coerced andbewildered, doing these and other things in the name of choice when thedoing was not through choice at all?
Aunt Cordelia was going to leave the decision between the circus and thepicnic to Emmy Lou, too, because she said she was. Nor did AuntCordelia, honest soul, or Emmy Lou, unquestioning and trusting one,dream but that she did.
"I'll see Sarah Dawkins," said Aunt Cordelia to Aunt Katie and AuntLouise the very next morning, "and arrange with her to look after EmmyL
ou at the picnic. We'll use the small hamper for her basket. She cantake enough for herself and them. Bob can take her and it around to thechurch corner where the chartered street cars are to be waiting, and puther in Sarah's charge there. I can't see, Katie, why you oppose a cakewith custard filling for the basket."
"It's messy," said Aunt Katie, "both to take and to eat."
"But if she likes it best?" from Aunt Cordelia.
It was the first thing come to Emmy Lou's hearing lending appeal to thepicnic; or light on the purpose of the baskets.
Uncle Charlie arriving for dinner outmatched it, however, by anotherappeal. "I saw a new circus bill on the fence of the vacant lot as Icame by. A yellow bill."
Emmy Lou hurried right down there from the dinner-table. Nella, theChild Equestrienne, was kissing her hand right to Emmy Lou from herhorse's back. And the elephant, abandoning his customary dark businessof putting little children in his trunk, with unexpected geniality wassitting on a stool before a table drinking tea.
And the next day Bob outmatched this. He had been to the grocery to seeabout chickens for the picnic to which Emmy Lou ought to want to go.
"There's a Flyin' Dutchman on the outside, an' side-shows too. I seenabout it on a bill the other side of the grocery. A green bill."
Emmy Lou hurried down there. She didn't see anything that she couldidentify as a Flying Dutchman, perhaps because she was hazy as to what aDutchman was. But Zephine, swinging by her _teeth_, was just leapinginto space.
"I think I will let her wear her sprigged muslin," said Aunt Cordelia atsupper that night. "A good many grown persons go in the afternoon."
"Their excuse being to take the children----" from Uncle Charlie easily.
"I am not talking of the circus, Charlie, and you know I am not," fromAunt Cordelia sharply.
"She has decided then?"
"She certainly ought to have decided. There never should have been anydoubt. I'll put in some little tarts, Katie; all children like tarts."
Had Emmy Lou decided? She heard it assumed that she had. Why, then, withthis sense of frustration and bewilderment was she swallowing at tears?
"I certainly feel I may say Emmy Lou has decided," repeated AuntCordelia. "I'm sure, Katie, tarts are just the thing."
"I'll never believe it," said Uncle Charlie, emphatically, nor was hereferring to the tarts.
Did he refuse to be party to any such idea?
"I would not be surprised," said he to Emmy Lou the next evening, "if wehear the circus rumbling by in the night. Our street is the one theyusually take from the railroad yards to the circus-grounds. I put sixtickets on the mantelpiece where at the most we will need only five.Suppose I take one and see what I can do with it?"
"Emmy Lou has no idea but of going to her own Sunday school picnic,"said Aunt Cordelia. "I wish, Charlie, you would be still about yourtickets and the circus."
"They are not my tickets. They are going to stay right here. I merelywas to go with Emmy Lou on one of them. They are her tickets to do withas she wants and to take whom she pleases."
Though the circus did go by in the night, according to report nextmorning, Emmy Lou failed to hear it. Nor did the melancholy of thetolling bell disturb her. Aunt Cordelia said this was because she wasgoing to her Sunday school picnic as she should, and had a quietconscience.
"I come roun' by the circus as I come to work," Bob said in the pantrywhere Aunt Cordelia and he packed the basket with Emmy Lou forspectator. "Gittin' them wagons with the lookin'-glass sides ready forthe perade. Thet ol' elephant come swinging erlong like he owned they'earth. Mr. Charlie gimme a ticket las' night to go."
Which reminded Emmy Lou. Even though she was going to the picnic, therewas comfort in the thought those tickets yet on the mantelpiece werehers. She went into the dining-room and pushed a chair to the hearth.The sprigged muslin she was to wear had a pocket, and later when thisdress was put on the tickets which were her own were in the pocket.
If one never has been to a picnic the only premises to go on are thosegiven you.
"You haven't a thing to do but stay with Maud and Albert Eddie, and mindSarah," said Aunt Cordelia as she put Emmy Lou's hat on her head and itselastic under her chin, "except, of course, to look after your basket.There is pink icing on the little cakes and a good tablecloth that Idon't want anything to happen to under the beaten biscuits at thebottom. There is ham and there's tongue and there's chicken."
"I have to look after the basket," Emmy Lou told Sarah as she and theDawkins with the rest of St. Simeon's Sunday school were put aboard theexcursion cars.
"Of course you do," said Sarah approvingly. "We all do. It's right here.And," with the heartiness of one distributing largesse in privileges,the meanwhile settling her three charges in their places, "when we getoff the car Albert Eddie shall carry it."
Emmy Lou had a seat between Albert Eddie and Maud. Beyond Albert Eddiewere three little boys in knickerbockers, blouses, and straw hats, asgloomy in face as he.
"Not only _let_ him carry water for the elephant but gave him _a ticket_for doing it," the nearest one was saying to the other three. "Had itwith him when he got back. I saw it myself. He lemme take it in my hand.A _blue_ ticket."
"Right past the circus grounds, tents and all," from the second littleboy as their car came in sight of the beflagged tent city. "I'll betcherthey're gettin' ready for the parade right now!"
Four glittering, turbaned beings appeared around a tent, each leading aplumed and caparisoned horse to a place before a gilded andhigh-throned edifice. "Didn't I tell you they were?" bitterly. A bandcrashed.
The heads of St. Simeon's Sunday school, regardless of danger, cranedout as one. The more venturesome left their seats.
St. Simeon's chartered cars rolled inexorably by. Heads came in. Theventuresome returned to their places.
"What is there to a picnic anyhow?" from the third little boy. "Nothin'at all but what you eat."
Albert Eddie staggered under the weight of the basket when in time thecar stopped on the track along the dusty road outside Mr. Denby's grove.But then one out of every two persons descending from the several carswas similarly staggering under the weight of a basket.
Sarah and Maud, with Emmy Lou led by either hand between them, followedAlbert Eddie with their own. After which, St. Simeon's, having broughtall baskets to a common center beneath a tree in the neighborhood of theice-water barrel, went off and left them.
"I'm going with a little girl who asked me," Maud told Sarah. "We won'tgo too far or the mother of the little pigs will chase us."
"Albert Eddie, I told the ladies that you would get the wood for a fireso we can put the coffee on," said Sarah. "When you come back from thatyou can take the bucket and bring us the ice-water from the barrel forthe lemonade."
Sarah's glance came next to Emmy Lou, no mixer in the world of Sundayschool at best, as Sarah before this had observed. Sarah frownedperturbedly. Some are picnickers by intuition, for example Maud and thelittle girl gone off together; others come to it through endeavor. Itwas seven-year-old Emmy Lou's first picnic, and she in her spriggedmuslin stood looking to Sarah.
Sarah was a manager, but having yet to manage for Emmy Lou her frown wasperturbed. Then her face cleared. She fetched a flat if a trifleover-mossy stone and put it down on the outskirts of the baskets groupedbeneath the sheltering tree, and near the ice-water barrel. "There, now!You can sit down here and look after the baskets till I get back," shetold Emmy Lou and was gone.
There is virtue in coming to a picnic. Aunt Cordelia plainly gave one tounderstand so.
"Why don't you go play with the others, little girl?" asked a lady whowas tying on a gingham apron as she hurried by. "Go over to the swingsand see-saws."
But Emmy Lou, no picnicker by intuition, nor as yet by any other mode ofarrival, was grateful that she had to stay with the baskets, and, hadthe lady paused long enough for a reply, could say so.
Was there virtue in coming to the picnic for Albert Eddie too? Emmy Louon
her stone under the tree guarding baskets saw him come back with hisload of firewood. She saw him next carrying the bucket of water from thebarrel.
And here some ladies approaching the baskets beside Emmy Lou beneath thetree, and casting appraising eyes over the outlay, began to helpthemselves to the same! To this basket, and that basket, and carry themaway! One even approached and laid hands on Emmy Lou's own! It tookcourage to speak, but she found it.
"It's mine," from Emmy Lou.
"And just the very nicest looking one I have seen," said the ladyheartily after raising the lid and probing into the contents. "Anyonewould be glad to say it was hers," and went off with it! St. Simeon'swith a commendable sense of fellowship made a common feast from itspicnic baskets at long tables for all, but Emmy Lou did not know this.She only saw her cake with the custard filling, her cakes with the pinkicing, her tarts, her ham and tongue, her chicken and biscuits andtablecloth borne off from her with a coolness astounding and appalling.
Virtue is hers who dully endures a picnic. Emmy Lou, coming out of herstun and daze and seeing some little boys approaching, the ice-waterbarrel being a general Mecca, swallowed hard that, did they notice her,they might not see how near she was to crying. Three little boys inknickerbockers, blouses, and straw hats they were, still with theircommon air of being more than justifiably aggrieved.
They noticed her and at the abrupt halt of one, all stopped.
"We saw her on the car," he said. "_What's she got?_"
"Why should that monstrous bulk of elephant havetrumpeted just then?"]
For Emmy Lou's hand some time since had brought forth for comfortfrom her pocket the blue tickets which were her own. That hand closed onthem at the question now. She'd just seen her basket go!
"_Are_ they circus tickets? Sure? Lemme see them? Aw, what you scaredof, lettin' me see 'em in my hand?"
Emmy Lou did not know just what. The ways of a picnic and thoseattending were new to her, but what she had learned discouragedconfidence. Her hand and the tickets in it went behind her.
"Where'd she get 'em?" the boy asked now of Albert Eddie, arriving withhis bucket for more water.
He set the bucket down by the barrel and joined the group.
"Do you s'pose they are really hers?" was the query put to him as he gotthere.
Emmy Lou knew Albert Eddie, had known him for a long time as time ismeasured at seven years. He looked after her on the way to and fromSunday school even though he did it at Sarah's bidding, whereas Maudforgot her. Moreover, he had not wanted to come to the picnic, and, bondfirmly established between them, neither had she. She surrendered hertickets into his hands to be inspected. She even credentialed them. Theothers had doubted them! "They're mine. My Uncle Charlie said so. Totake anybody I wanted to take if I hadn't had to come here!"
Her tickets! Five by actual count and actual touch! To do what shepleased with! This plump little girl with the elastic of her hat underher chin, sitting alone at the picnic on a stone!
The conversation in the group became choric and to some extent Delphic,Emmy Lou, with her eyes on the tickets in Albert Eddie's hands, aloneexcluded.
"Aw, we could!"
"Follow the track!"
"Could she do it?"
"'Tain't so far she couldn't if we start now."
Four little boys, nearing nine, Albert Eddie, Logan, John, and Wharton,made Machiavellian through longing, turned to this little girl on herstone and made court to her as they knew how.
"Aw, you ask her! You know her!" from Logan to Albert Eddie.
Albert Eddie cleared his throat. He'd carried the basket. He'd carriedthe wood. He'd carried the water. He was bitter to desperate lengths,indeed, and in the rebound no good and obedient little boy at all butone gloriously afloat on seas of dire and reckless abandon.
"We'll take you to the circus, these boys and me, and let you seeeverything, if you want us to," with a _diablerie_ of cunning soappalling and so convicting in its readiness he knew he must falter ifhe stopped to consider it.
"'Tain't as if we hadn't been before, every one of us," from Logan, withthat yet greater cunning of the practiced and the artist, indifference;"but we wouldn't mind taking you."
"I been twice," from Wharton mightily.
"I been once, last year," from Albert Eddie.
"I been twice in _one_ year," from John, "here at home and when I wentto visit my grandmother."
"I been twice to one show," from Logan, eclipsing them all. "One daywith one uncle, and the next day with another!"
And Emmy Lou never had been at all! The tickets, most cunning play ofall, had been put back in her own hand.
"Old clown he threw his hat up, turned a handspring, and come up andcaught it on his head," from Wharton. "We'll show you the clown."
"--rode one horse standing and driving five and kissed her hand everytime she came by--" Logan, forgetting his cue and his cunning, wassaying to Albert Eddie and John.
"--picks out the letters, that dog does, and spells his own name--"John, forgetting his cue and his cunning, was saying to Albert Eddie andLogan.
Emmy Lou moved on her stone.
"--rolls in a big keg, that elephant does, and turns it up and sits downon it. We'll show you the elephant too," Wharton, faithful to his cue,was saying to her.
Emmy Lou stood up. She handed the tickets to whoever might be to takecharge of them. She put her hand in Albert Eddie's. "I didn't want tocome to the picnic and not go to the circus," she said.
They were grateful and solicitous little boys. They hurried her unduly,perhaps, in getting her out of the grounds, but once upon the saferterritory of road beside the track they were mindful of her.
"I'll take her by one hand," said Logan to Albert Eddie, "and you keephold of her by the other hand, because she knows you."
Whatever that hot, dusty, shadeless, that appalling stretch of countryroad meant to Emmy Lou, she never afterward referred to it. But thenthere were reasons making silence more natural on her part.
Yet she saw the circus! Emmy Lou saw the circus! Come what might, shehad that!
What that they arrived at the circus entrance dinnerless, dust-laden,and, but for a stop along the way at a pump and trough, thirsty!
What that the man sitting at the mouth of the passage between canvaswalls, to whom the tickets were handed, eyed them, four unattendedlittle boys taking marked care of one little girl in their midst--sincehe let them by and in!
Sawdust, orange-peel, flaring gas jets, camel, lions, big pussy-tiger,Oh, glorious and unmatchable blend of circus aroma! Oh, vast circlingsweep and reach of seats and faces, with four little boys guarding onelittle girl in their midst, wandering along looking for places!
Oh, blare of brass, Oh, fanfare of trumpets, Oh, triumphant entry of allhitherto but dimly sensed and hauntingly visioned, color, pageant,rhythm, triumph, glory, heretofore lost as they came, but now palpable,tangible, and existent!
Oh, pitiful, a bit terrifying, white-faced clown! The butt, the mock,the bear-all! Emmy Lou does not laugh at the clown! Because she pitieshim and is sorry for him, her heart goes out to him instead! And shetrembles for Nella as her horse urged by the snapping, menacing whipsweeps by faster and even faster--and she cries out when at the crash ofthe kettle-drums, Zephine leaps----
"But I didn't see the elephant like I did the lions and the camel andthe tiger," she tells Logan and Albert Eddie and the others. Nor hadshe. The elephant had gone to take his place in the triumphal entry whenEmmy Lou and her four cicerones, in their progress through the animaltent before the program, reached his roped-in inclosure.
And so they made their way back to him through the surging crowd as theywent out, four solicitous little boys conducting Emmy Lou. Made theirway as near as might be, then pushed her through the row of spectatorsin front of them to the rope.
"He picks little children up and puts them in his trunk," she was sayingas one fascinated by the very awfulness of that she dwelt on, as theysqueezed her through.
W
hy should that monstrous bulk of elephant have trumpeted just then--asEmmy Lou emerged at the rope--have flung his trunk out in all the lordlycondescension of a mighty one willing to stoop, in the accustomed questof peanuts?
* * * * *
Aunt Louise, returning from a futile trip to the church corner to meetEmmy Lou, had just explained that the picnic had not returned, beingdelayed, so rumor said, by the search for five missing children, whenBob walked in bringing a dust-laden Emmy Lou.
"Came on her at the circus?" from Aunt Cordelia incredulously.
"In the animal tent roun' there whar thet elephunt is," Bob diagrammed.
Emmy Lou's face, bearing marks of recent agitation, showed agitationanew.
"Good work," from Uncle Charlie, just arrived himself. "Who was withher?"
"Some li'l boys, she says. She warn't with nobody when I come on herrunnin' f'om thet elephunt toward me without knowin' it, an'screamin'."
Emmy Lou's agitation broke into speech mingled with tears. "He pickslittle children up and puts them in his trunk. And he tried to pick upme!"
* * * * *
Along in the night Emmy Lou awaking found that she wanted a drink. Thesewarm June nights the water bottle and tumbler sat on the sill of theopen window in Aunt Cordelia's room, which meant that Emmy Lou must getout of bed and patter in there to them.
Reaching the window--was Emmy Lou in her nightgown and her bare feetreally there and awake or in her bed in reality and direly dreaming?
Was it so or not so, this looming, swinging, menacing bulk, palpablyafter her again, approaching adown the silent, dusky street?
Seven years old and a little, little girl, Emmy Lou fled to AuntCordelia's bedside and tugged at her arm to get her awake.
Aunt Cordelia, taking her into her bed, soothed her, her hand massagingup and down back, shoulders, little thighs, comfortingly enough, eventhe while she scolds. She takes it without question that Emmy Lou hasbeen dreaming.
"It is what comes of being a naughty little girl again. We never sleepwell when our conscience is uneasy."
Emmy Lou lay close. Conscience! Aunt Cordelia said so!
Nor did Aunt Cordelia dream, nor Emmy Lou suspect, that the monstrous,looming shape padding along the silent street beyond the open windowwith its broad sill was the circus elephant making his way to therailroad yard and his traveling car, the yard where the roundhouse belleven now made melancholy tolling in the night.