“Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because I don’t know. Good-bye. See you at eleven.”
She hung up, leaving the little French girl in a state of bewilderment, her mind all awhirl with questions. Who was this movie person? Was she truly a queen of the cinema? Why must she meet her?
There was some question in the end regarding Jeanne’s ability to keep this engagement. This, fortunately, was outside her knowledge. So, having eaten a very good dinner at the hotel, and having bestowed a knowing look upon the check boy, custodian of her mysterious laundry bag, she made her way to the fairgrounds and for a time purposely lost herself in the vast throng that, eddying now this way and now that, poured like a river down the broad walks running for miles along the lake front.
“I wonder,” she mused as, jostled here and pushed aside there, she moved forward, “how a rain drop feels when it falls into the center of the great Mississippi. Snuggles right down and makes itself feel right at home. Surely this is so. And I, wandering here with this throng from all over this broad land, feel as if I had been too long away from it all, as if in some other world I had marched on and on, on and on with a vast throng that, like the Milky Way, moves forward forever.”
The ebb and flow of that great human tide at last carried her to the Golden Temple. And here, more by instinct than desire, she sought once more the cool silence of a place where worship seemed the mood of the hour.
Sinking into a chair, she sat in a dreamy mood listening to the low, melodious voice of the mandarin. “This,” he was saying, “is the laughing Buddha, god of happiness. Wart on temple stands for nobility. Long ears, long life.”
Glancing up, Jeanne saw the long ears of this grotesque idol, and laughed. “Long ears, long life,” she whispered. “There is one Chinaman who needs to avoid Florence if his life is to be long. She’d throw him into the lagoon.”
The mandarin was continuing his chant. “The three-bladed knife is not for to kill. Oh, no, he is for drive demons away. Always ring little bell, swing three-bladed knife through the air. Demon go away.
“Demon very bad. Make people sick. Make people die. Make land dry. Rice not come up. Millet not get ripe. All people starve. Oh, yes, demon very bad!”