A PLEASANT ENTERTAINMENT.
"I have here," said the Showman, "the most interesting entertainment to be witnessed on earth! Walk up! walk up, and judge for yourselves!" And with that he beat the drum and blew shrilly on the pipes.
The music travelled to the ears of his audience with a difference: or so it seemed to them, as they stood before the booth. Some heard in it, through the discordant hubbub of the fair, the rattle of vehicles and the tramp of feet in the busy thoroughfares of a great city; for others, it was the whistling of birds in the hedgerows; and to some, like the restless pulsations of the sea. To each, according to his memories and his mood. But the music of the Showman was a single tune for all.
"Walk up! walk up!" bawled the grey-coated Showman, blowing at the pipes and pounding on the drum.
"Darned if I wouldn't go in, if I had the brass!" quoth a lean, unshaven, shabby-looking man, who stood in front of the booth with his hands in his pockets.
"I'll stand treat, if you like!" cried a sunken-eyed young woman, whose cheap and much-bedraggled finery matched aptly enough with her wan and haggard countenance. It was the impulse of a moment, but she was the puppet of impulse and danced on the wires at the slightest touch of chance.
"Right you are!" cried the man.
And they mounted the steps together.
"It's like going up to the altar, isn't it?" giggled the woman to her companion.
"More like going up to the gallows," growled the man.
The Showman rattled the coins as he pocketed them, and flinging aside the canvas admitted them to the booth.
The interior was enveloped in a dim obscurity; hardly deep enough to be counted as darkness, but oppressive enough to slow the pulses of both. There was, however, at one end of the booth a large disc projected on the obscurity: a pale, empty, weirdly-lighted circle, which they stared at dumbly, with wonder in their eyes.
"Is this some darned fool's joke?" growled the man.
"Hush!" said the woman, "the entertainment has commenced."
And, true enough, the disc at which they had been staring had already a stirring, as of life, across its surface.
They were aware of a couple of enthralling faces fronting them side by side on the disc.
One was a woman's face, exquisitely beautiful, with soft blue eyes, full of the most charming gaiety, and with lips as sweetly winsome as a child's: the other was a man's face, proud and handsome, the mouth set firmly, the eyes full of thought.
"Such a face I had dreamed of as my own," sighed the woman.
"So I had imagined I might have been," mused the man.
And then the scenes on the disc began to wax and dwindle rapidly; like the momentary clinging, and as rapid vanishing, of breath across a mirror of polished steel.
There was a vague fluttering and interchange of images; an elusive, intangible influx of suggestions, and an equally dreamy efflux of the same.
A young girl growing into beautiful womanhood, well-dressed, shapely, sought eagerly in marriage, admired by the opposite sex, and envied by her own. Then a woman in the prime of her powers of enjoyment—with her charms undiminished and her wishes ripened—wedded, and successfully shaping her life: a woman blessed greatly, and very happy.
And side by side with these dream-fancies, or imaginings, went those of a young man facing the world gallantly; surmounting every obstacle easily, and conquering hearts as if by a spell. There was success for him in every scene on which he entered: he was proud and admired, and very haughty, and very rich.
Presently, as if through some dexterous sleight of hand, the pictures of his wooing blended waveringly and dimly with the pictures which emerged for the bedraggled woman who stood beside the loafer in front of the disc.
In the church, when the wedding-march was being played, and in the vignettes of domestic happiness that ensued, the faces and scenes mysteriously coalesced.
For the two spectators, who watched the shifting pictures breathlessly, there were no longer four figures in the scene, but only two.
"Some such future I had imagined for myself," the man muttered.
And the woman mused amazedly: "These were day-dreams of my own."
The disc became obscured, as if their eyes were blurred mistily.
The woman gulped down something: and the man clenched his teeth.
There was a sudden exquisite clarity in the pictures. They were looking at a cluster of white-washed cottages, with tall thatched roofs and with great stone chimneys: a lonely little hamlet drowsing in the sun. White-winged ducks were quacking in the roadway, a grey-coated donkey was grazing beside a hedge, and the threadlets of smoke, that mounted lazily above the roofs, rose up into a sky of the most exquisite purity, spacious, high, and cloudlessly blue. And again there was only one scene for them both.
"My God, that is where I was born!" groaned the man.
"That's my mother's cottage!" sobbed the woman, and wept aloud.
Then came rural scenes of almost every character, with a lad and a girl moving flittingly through them—laughing and kissing in the lanes among the brambles, drifting together everywhere, sweethearting through it all.
"Are you Nelly King, then?" asked the man, hoarsely.
"And you . . . you are Stephen Laity, are you not?"
"If we could both die here and now!" cried the man.
Then the pictures for a while grew blurred and confused, till presently they shewed the gas-lighted streets of London. . . .
"My God, I will see no more!" cried the girl. And she shudderingly held her hand before her eyes.
"Nor I, either!" cried the man, with an oath.
"However much you close your eyes," said the Showman, "you will cancel nothing of the pictures on the screen."
But they had turned and fled even while he was speaking.
"Even in the fair the pictures will pursue you!" said the stern-visaged Showman, following them with his eyes.
THE MAN WHO DESIRED TO BE
A TREE.
The sunshine streamed across the lush-grassed meadows, and beat fiercely down on the huge-limbed elms whose myriad leaves kept fluttering ceaselessly. In the dense green covert, formed by the multitude of interlacing branches, several wee brown songsters had built their nests, and they kept flitting to and fro and trilling joyously as the light breeze stirred the innumerable leaves.
The air was warm, and soft, and pleasant. The deep green arcades were cool and moist, full of the drowsy flutter that rippled through the branches, and full also of the deliciously delicate fragrance from the budding sprays and fresh green foliage. May was in the woodlands, shy and winsome; she had not yet shaken herself free from her day-dreams, and the wonder of her young hopes lingered about her still.
At the foot of a tree, reclining against its roots, lay a lean-visaged student, very shabbily dressed and with patches of thin grey hair around his temples. A volume of the Faery Queen lay open beside him, but he had for some time ceased to pore over its pages, being engaged instead in chasing Fancy as she flitted hither and thither through the vast green woodland, dallying with the shadows and gossiping with the wind.
His mind's eye revelled in the picturesque suggestions that seemed to him, as he lay here with half-closed lids, to be fleetingly visible, as if in a dream. He was aware of beautiful damsels in gauzy draperies pantingly hurrying through the dusky avenues with steel-clad knights in hot pursuit; of grey old monks, cowled and sandalled, moving hither and thither in a world of utter peace; and of dryads and fairies, fauns and satyrs, filling the woodland with dreamy poetry, as the wind filled its giant rafters with music, and the brooks purled babblingly through the crevices of its floor.
How delightful it would be to be a denizen of the forest—to be this elm in whose shadow he was lying! he thought.
The huge tent-like shadow of the elm-tree deepened and widened with the dropping sun, and the shadows of other trees in the vicinity—dainty saplings and gnarled old foresters—fell across the nearer margin of the grass-land in fantastic, almost semi-human outlines: at least, so it seemed to the dreamy student, as he lay here watching the breeze ripple across the grass-blades and listened to the murmur of the forest at his back.
"I should like to be a tree," he sighed lazily and half aloud.
"Would you?" asked a voice from somewhere close to him.
It was a low, caressing, insinuating voice, with a strange seductiveness in its silvery intonation. And instead of feeling startled he felt a sudden wave of happiness, as if a beautiful female had breathed upon his cheek.
"Would you?" asked the voice, deliciously flattering him, "would you like to be one of us indeed?"
A tree has a life void of trouble, he ruminated. The birds sing to it, and the wind caresses it, and it feels the sunshine, and greatens where it grows. Yes, I should like to be a tree indeed!
"Shall I grant your wish?" asked the voice whisperingly—how exquisitely sweet and soothing it was!—"shall I grant it here, and now?" it asked.
The student closed his eyes to leisurely consider; and then, half dreamily, answered, "Yes!"
To be a tree is to be in touch with Nature nakedly; to be stripped of the disguises that have gathered about the man, and to be thrown back blankly into the narrowest groove of life. The student felt the wind and the sun on his branches, and the birds sang joyously, nestling among his leaves; his feet were rooted in the fresh and wholesome earth, and the sap moved sluggishly in his rough-barked trunk.
It was a calm and deeply drowsy existence; but the restlessness of humanity was not yet eliminated from him, and he investigated his novel tenement wonderingly, and not without a touch of squeamish disgust.
But when the quiet night descended on him, and the cooling dews slid into his pores, the exquisite soothe of the darkness enveloped him, and to the rustling of his leaves he fell healthily asleep.
He was awakened presently by the gracious dawn, by the sweet and wholesome breath of morning, and the flash of the sunrise and the singing of birds. And had it not been for the dew-crumpled volume that now lay blotched and smirched at his feet, he would have forgotten his manhood and the unquiet life of cities and would have looked for his brothers only among the trees.
But so long as the volume lay there forlornly, so long he remembered, and had something to regret.
But the days passed—he could now keep no count of them—and human speech and human passions dropped away from his memory as quietly and painlessly as his own ripe leaves began presently to drop. And the tree's life narrowed to its narrow round of needs.
It sheltered the birds, and it took the wind's kisses gladly, and it caught the snows in the wrinkles and twists of its boughs; and the squirrel nested in it, and the wood-mouse nibbled at it; and its life sufficed it, answering its desires.
One day there swept a mighty storm across the forest: the thunder crashed and the lightning flashed continuously; and the whole land held its breath, listening to the uproar.
The Lord of the Forest was moving among his children: and some of them he passed without injuring or despoiling them; but others he smote wrathfully, so that he rent them and they died.
And when he came to the tree that had one-time been the student, he remembered, and desired to bestow on it a boon.
And he said to the elm, now gnarled and wrinkled, "You shall be a man again, if you earnestly desire it—a man again until you die."
The tree heard the great wind roaring among its brethren, and it was aware of the wee birds cowering among its boughs; and it remembered, as in a flash, the weary life of humanity, with hopes to befool it and despair for its reward: and it rustled its myriad leaves whispering mournfully, "Let me, O Master, remain as I am!"
And the Lord of the Forest was content, and passed on.