IV
THE TRIBUNAL OF CONSCIENCE
Uncle Charlie took six blue tickets from his pocket and set them on the dining-room mantel. His ownership of a newspaper was the explanation for this liberality of supply to those who could put the two things together.
"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 fast enough. She hurried to the kitchen. She had heard of the circus from Bob the house-boy, who had a circus bill!
Bills, as a rule, are small affairs measurable in inches; bits of paper which reduce Aunt Cordelia to figurings with a lead pencil, short replies, and low spirits.
But a circus bill, pink and pictorial, is measurable in feet. As Bob spread his on the kitchen table yesterday and again this morning, it fell either side well on the way to the floor. Its wonders, inexplicable where he, spelling out the text, forebore to explain, or explicable where he did if one knew no better than he, were measurable only by the limits of the mind to take them in. If Emmy Lou, who started to school last fall three weeks late owing to a popular prejudice against whooping-cough, had caught up as Aunt Cordelia easily assumed she would, or "caught on," in the words of Uncle Charlie, she might have been spelling out some of the wonders of the circus bill for herself.
Bob's finger had paused beneath a lady in myriad billowing skirts poised mid-air between a horse and a hoop such as Emmy Lou spent hours trying to trundle on the sidewalk. "She's jumpin' th'ough the hoop, but thet ain'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 in with the soup, borrowed the bill and hurried back with it to the dining-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 his trunk."
"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 zebra as well?" regretfully. "Even the lemonade?"
"Lemonade?"
"Pink. And peanuts." Uncle Charlie motioned to Bob to put his soup down and have done with it, as it were. "Also Nella, The Child Equestrienne in 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 and turning to his soup. "But of course if there is room for doubt about it——"
The very next day Emmy Lou came hurrying home from Sunday school. She had the Dawkins, Sarah, the conscientious elder sister, Maud, and Albert Eddie, for company as far as the grocery at the corner. Since Aunt Cordelia had learned they were English, apparent explanation for those who understood, they had been persuaded to go to St. Simeon's Sunday school too.
Sunday school was to have a—Emmy Lou in her Sunday dress and her Sunday hat, hurrying on from the corner by herself, tried to straighten this out before reaching home and reporting it. What was it Sunday school was to have? In Uncle Charlie's study—a small back room, somewhat battered and dingy but, as he claimed in its defense, his own—was a picture of a stout little man propelled in a wheelbarrow by some other men.
Emmy Lou had discovered that Uncle Charlie loved the little man and prized the picture. When she asked who he was and where he was going in the 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 Aunt Cordelia to start to church, straightened out the matter. Mr. Pickwick was going to a picnic. It then followed that Emmy Lou, in general a brief person, had such a store of information about the picnic she was moved to share it with Uncle Charlie. This common interest about the circus and their recurring conversations about it were drawing them together, anyhow. Her data about the picnic on the whole was menacing in its 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 the swings 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 picnic without a basket! Emmy Lou had endeavored to find out what sort of a basket and Sarah had cut her short with the brief reply, "A picnic basket."
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've been meaning to speak about it myself. I find the circus is here for the one day only and that the day for St. Simeon's picnic."
Emmy Lou received this as applying to the Dawkins only. The information her inquiries had enabled her to get together led her personally to disparage picnics.
"Albert Eddie says Sarah made him wash dishes at the last picnic he went to. And she makes him carry baskets. That if he'd wash dishes for 'em at the circus and carry water, they'd let him in."
"Sarah, Maud, Albert Eddie, you, me, and one ticket to spare; such was my idea," said Uncle Charlie, he and Aunt Cordelia preparing to start. "The only thing we've ever given the Dawkins up to date is the whooping-cough. Picnic or circus, duty or pleasure, we'll have to put it to 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 will prefer 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 to be. We respect each other's honesty and go our own ways. I am going to leave the tickets where I put them yesterday. I planned to take her and the Dawkins to the circus. You and she can fight it out." He proceeded through the open doorway to the stone steps.
"In that case," from Aunt Cordelia as she followed him, "since you seem to put me in the wrong, I leave it to her own conscience. She is seven years old, a big girl going to school and Sunday school, and ought to know 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 kindly features.
Somewhere beyond the neighborhood where Emmy Lou lived with Aunt Cordelia and Uncle Charlie, was the roundhouse and the yards of a railroad. Or so Aunt Cordelia explained. The roundhouse bell, rung every hour by the watchman on his rounds, made far-off melancholy tolling through the night.
The sins at seven, the chubby, endeavoring Emmy Lou's sins, her cloak on the coat-closet floor instead of the closet peg, mucilage on Aunt Katie's rug where a paper outspread before pasting began would have saved it—sins such as these have no prod to reminder more poignant than this melancholy tolling of the roundhouse bell in the night.
"It is an uneasy conscience," Aunt Cordelia invariably claimed when Emmy Lou, waking, came begging for permission to get in her bed. "If your conscience was all that it should be, you'd be asleep."
Yet did Aunt Cordelia, as a rule, leave those matters to Emmy Lou's conscience which she thought she did? Did Emmy Lou three out of four Sundays find herself remaining at church rather than on her road home because she herself wanted to stay? Or taking off her new dress on reaching home because she wanted to get into the older one?
Or, rather, did she find her baffled if unsuspecting self, coerced and bewildered, doing these and other things in the name of choice when the doing was not through choice at all?
Aunt Cordelia was going to leave the decision between the circus and the picnic to Emmy Lou, too, because she said she was. Nor did Aunt Cordelia, 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 Aunt Louise the very next morning, "and arrange with her to look after Emmy Lou at the picnic. We'll use the small hamper for her basket. She can take enough for herself and them. Bob can take her and it around to the church corner where the chartered street cars are to be waiting, and put her in Sarah's charge there. I can't see, Katie, why you oppose a cake with 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 the picnic; or light on the purpose of the baskets.
Uncle Charlie arriving for dinner outmatched it, however, by another appeal. "I saw a new circus bill on the fence of the vacant lot as I came by. A yellow bill."
Emmy Lou hurried right down there from the dinner-table. Nella, the Child Equestrienne, was kissing her hand right to Emmy Lou from her horse's back. And the elephant, abandoning his customary dark business of putting little children in his trunk, with unexpected geniality was sitting on a stool before a table drinking tea.
And the next day Bob outmatched this. He had been to the grocery to see about 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 seen about 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 could identify as a Flying Dutchman, perhaps because she was hazy as to what a Dutchman was. But Zephine, swinging by her teeth, was just leaping into space.
"I think I will let her wear her sprigged muslin," said Aunt Cordelia at supper 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," from Aunt Cordelia sharply.
"She has decided then?"
"She certainly ought to have decided. There never should have been any doubt. 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, with this sense of frustration and bewilderment was she swallowing at tears?
"I certainly feel I may say Emmy Lou has decided," repeated Aunt Cordelia. "I'm sure, Katie, tarts are just the thing."
"I'll never believe it," said Uncle Charlie, emphatically, nor was he referring 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 we hear the circus rumbling by in the night. Our street is the one they usually take from the railroad yards to the circus-grounds. I put six tickets 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 your tickets and the circus."
"They are not my tickets. They are going to stay right here. I merely was to go with Emmy Lou on one of them. They are her tickets to do with as she wants and to take whom she pleases."
Though the circus did go by in the night, according to report next morning, Emmy Lou failed to hear it. Nor did the melancholy of the tolling bell disturb her. Aunt Cordelia said this was because she was going to her Sunday school picnic as she should, and had a quiet conscience.
"I come roun' by the circus as I come to work," Bob said in the pantry where Aunt Cordelia and he packed the basket with Emmy Lou for spectator. "Gittin' them wagons with the lookin'-glass sides ready for the perade. Thet ol' elephant come swinging erlong like he owned the y'earth. Mr. Charlie gimme a ticket las' night to go."
Which reminded Emmy Lou. Even though she was going to the picnic, there was comfort in the thought those tickets yet on the mantelpiece were hers. 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 this dress 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 those given you.
"You haven't a thing to do but stay with Maud and Albert Eddie, and mind Sarah," said Aunt Cordelia as she put Emmy Lou's hat on her head and its elastic under her chin, "except, of course, to look after your basket. There is pink icing on the little cakes and a good tablecloth that I don't want anything to happen to under the beaten biscuits at the bottom. 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 the Dawkins with the rest of St. Simeon's Sunday school were put aboard the excursion 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 get off the car Albert Eddie shall carry it."
Emmy Lou had a seat between Albert Eddie and Maud. Beyond Albert Eddie were three little boys in knickerbockers, blouses, and straw hats, as gloomy 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 it with 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 little boy as their car came in sight of the beflagged tent city. "I'll betcher they're gettin' ready for the parade right now!"
Four glittering, turbaned beings appeared around a tent, each leading a plumed and caparisoned horse to a place before a gilded and high-throned edifice. "Didn't I tell you they were?" bitterly. A band crashed.
The heads of St. Simeon's Sunday school, regardless of danger, craned out as one. The more venturesome left their seats.
St. Simeon's chartered cars rolled inexorably by. Heads came in. The venturesome 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 the car 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 cars was similarly staggering under the weight of a basket.
Sarah and Maud, with Emmy Lou led by either hand between them, followed Albert Eddie with their own. After which, St. Simeon's, having brought all baskets to a common center beneath a tree in the neighborhood of the ice-water barrel, went off and left them.
"I'm going with a little girl who asked me," Maud told Sarah. "We won't go 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 fire so we can put the coffee on," said Sarah. "When you come back from that you can take the bucket and bring us the ice-water from the barrel for the lemonade."
Sarah's glance came next to Emmy Lou, no mixer in the world of Sunday school at best, as Sarah before this had observed. Sarah frowned perturbedly. Some are picnickers by intuition, for example Maud and the little girl gone off together; others come to it through endeavor. It was seven-year-old Emmy Lou's first picnic, and she in her sprigged muslin stood looking to Sarah.
Sarah was a manager, but having yet to manage for Emmy Lou her frown was perturbed. Then her face cleared. She fetched a flat if a trifle over-mossy stone and put it down on the outskirts of the baskets grouped beneath 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," she told Emmy Lou and was gone.
There is virtue in coming to a picnic. Aunt Cordelia plainly gave one to understand so.
"Why don't you go play with the others, little girl?" asked a lady who was tying on a gingham apron as she hurried by. "Go over to the swings and see-saws."
But Emmy Lou, no picnicker by intuition, nor as yet by any other mode of arrival, was grateful that she had to stay with the baskets, and, had the lady paused long enough for a reply, could say so.
Was there virtue in coming to the picnic for Albert Eddie too? Emmy Lou on her stone under the tree guarding baskets saw him come back with his load of firewood. She saw him next carrying the bucket of water from the barrel.
And here some ladies approaching the baskets beside Emmy Lou beneath the tree, and casting appraising eyes over the outlay, began to help themselves to the same! To this basket, and that basket, and carry them away! One even approached and laid hands on Emmy Lou's own! It took courage to speak, but she found it.
"It's mine," from Emmy Lou.
"And just the very nicest looking one I have seen," said the lady heartily after raising the lid and probing into the contents. "Anyone would be glad to say it was hers," and went off with it! St. Simeon's with a commendable sense of fellowship made a common feast from its picnic 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 pink icing, her tarts, her ham and tongue, her chicken and biscuits and tablecloth borne off from her with a coolness astounding and appalling.
Virtue is hers who dully endures a picnic. Emmy Lou, coming out of her stun and daze and seeing some little boys approaching, the ice-water barrel being a general Mecca, swallowed hard that, did they notice her, they might not see how near she was to crying. Three little boys in knickerbockers, blouses, and straw hats they were, still with their common 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 have trumpeted just then?"
For Emmy Lou's hand some time since had brought forth for comfort from her pocket the blue tickets which were her own. That hand closed on them at the question now. She'd just seen her basket go!
"Are they circus tickets? Sure? Lemme see them? Aw, what you scared of, lettin' me see 'em in my hand?"
Emmy Lou did not know just what. The ways of a picnic and those attending were new to her, but what she had learned discouraged confidence. Her hand and the tickets in it went behind her.
"Where'd she get 'em?" the boy asked now of Albert Eddie, arriving with his 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 got there.
Emmy Lou knew Albert Eddie, had known him for a long time as time is measured at seven years. He looked after her on the way to and from Sunday school even though he did it at Sarah's bidding, whereas Maud forgot her. Moreover, he had not wanted to come to the picnic, and, bond firmly established between them, neither had she. She surrendered her tickets into his hands to be inspected. She even credentialed them. The others had doubted them! "They're mine. My Uncle Charlie said so. To take 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 she pleased with! This plump little girl with the elastic of her hat under her 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, alone excluded.
"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 her stone 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 carried the 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 but one gloriously afloat on seas of dire and reckless abandon.
"We'll take you to the circus, these boys and me, and let you see everything, if you want us to," with a diablerie of cunning so appalling and so convicting in its readiness he knew he must falter if he stopped to consider it.
"'Tain't as if we hadn't been before, every one of us," from Logan, with that 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 went to visit my grandmother."
"I been twice to one show," from Logan, eclipsing them all. "One day with one uncle, and the next day with another!"
And Emmy Lou never had been at all! The tickets, most cunning play of all, had been put back in her own hand.
"Old clown he threw his hat up, turned a handspring, and come up and caught it on his head," from Wharton. "We'll show you the clown."
"—rode one horse standing and driving five and kissed her hand every time she came by—" Logan, forgetting his cue and his cunning, was saying 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 and Logan.
Emmy Lou moved on her stone.
"—rolls in a big keg, that elephant does, and turns it up and sits down on 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 take charge of them. She put her hand in Albert Eddie's. "I didn't want to come 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 safer territory of road beside the track they were mindful of her.
"I'll take her by one hand," said Logan to Albert Eddie, "and you keep hold of her by the other hand, because she knows you."
Whatever that hot, dusty, shadeless, that appalling stretch of country road meant to Emmy Lou, she never afterward referred to it. But then there were reasons making silence more natural on her part.
Yet she saw the circus! Emmy Lou saw the circus! Come what might, she had 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 canvas walls, to whom the tickets were handed, eyed them, four unattended little boys taking marked care of one little girl in their midst—since he 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 circling sweep and reach of seats and faces, with four little boys guarding one little girl in their midst, wandering along looking for places!
Oh, blare of brass, Oh, fanfare of trumpets, Oh, triumphant entry of all hitherto 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 pities him and is sorry for him, her heart goes out to him instead! And she trembles for Nella as her horse urged by the snapping, menacing whip sweeps by faster and even faster—and she cries out when at the crash of the kettle-drums, Zephine leaps——
"But I didn't see the elephant like I did the lions and the camel and the tiger," she tells Logan and Albert Eddie and the others. Nor had she. The elephant had gone to take his place in the triumphal entry when Emmy Lou and her four cicerones, in their progress through the animal tent before the program, reached his roped-in inclosure.
And so they made their way back to him through the surging crowd as they went out, four solicitous little boys conducting Emmy Lou. Made their way as near as might be, then pushed her through the row of spectators in front of them to the rope.
"He picks little children up and puts them in his trunk," she was saying as one fascinated by the very awfulness of that she dwelt on, as they squeezed her through.
Why should that monstrous bulk of elephant have trumpeted just then—as Emmy Lou emerged at the rope—have flung his trunk out in all the lordly condescension of a mighty one willing to stoop, in the accustomed quest of peanuts?
Aunt Louise, returning from a futile trip to the church corner to meet Emmy Lou, had just explained that the picnic had not returned, being delayed, so rumor said, by the search for five missing children, when Bob 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 agitation anew.
"Good work," from Uncle Charlie, just arrived himself. "Who was with her?"
"Some li'l boys, she says. She warn't with nobody when I come on her runnin' f'om thet elephunt toward me without knowin' it, an' screamin'."
Emmy Lou's agitation broke into speech mingled with tears. "He picks little children up and puts them in his trunk. And he tried to pick up me!"
Along in the night Emmy Lou awaking found that she wanted a drink. These warm June nights the water bottle and tumbler sat on the sill of the open window in Aunt Cordelia's room, which meant that Emmy Lou must get out of bed and patter in there to them.
Reaching the window—was Emmy Lou in her nightgown and her bare feet really there and awake or in her bed in reality and direly dreaming?
Was it so or not so, this looming, swinging, menacing bulk, palpably after her again, approaching adown the silent, dusky street?
Seven years old and a little, little girl, Emmy Lou fled to Aunt Cordelia's bedside and tugged at her arm to get her awake.
Aunt Cordelia, taking her into her bed, soothed her, her hand massaging up and down back, shoulders, little thighs, comfortingly enough, even the while she scolds. She takes it without question that Emmy Lou has been dreaming.
"It is what comes of being a naughty little girl again. We never sleep well 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 window with its broad sill was the circus elephant making his way to the railroad yard and his traveling car, the yard where the roundhouse bell even now made melancholy tolling in the night.