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?_"
[Illustration: "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.
"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 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.
V
LIONS IN THE PATH
EMMY LOU came home at close of her first day in the Second Reader. "I
sit with Hattie," she said.
"Who is she?" asked Aunt Katie.
"Where does she come from?" added Aunt Louise.
Emmy Lou was perplexed. Who is Hattie? In her pink-sprigged dress with
her plaits tied behind her either ear? Breathing briskness and
conviction? Why, Hattie is _Hattie_. But how convey this to Aunt Katie?