Years afterward, while I was stopping for a few days in a town in the
western part of the State, a carnival set up its tents in a dance-hall
park between the river and the tracks. I saw a van or two come down
the main street, the horses’ fetlocks stirring up dust in clouds which
settled on their sweaty backs and on the faces of the man with his
cheeks full of tobacco and the hatchet-faced woman who sat on the
packing cases and rolls of canvas. That night two of the vagrants
appeared at the boarding-house table where I took my meals. The
shuttered dining room smelled like a potato cellar where the sprouts
have nosed their way upward and the scabby tubers have rotted for
months, and when the landlady trotted out of the kitchen and set down
platters of meat in slabs as large as her hand, the regular boarders
looked with sick faces at their plates and at one another.
But the theatrical ladies ate with the silent heartiness of women
paid to eat in a shop window as an advertisement of whatever they
ate. Chemises of shadow lace showed through georgette shirtwaists,
making their bodies look embossed with garlands and butterflies. Under
mats of blondined hair fastened with rhinestone pins, their faces
had an identical appearance of porcelain, the hard eyes surrounded
by pencilled lashes and eyebrows, spots of orange rouge exactly
between the nose and the ear. Their nails cut in triangles shone
like celluloid. Grasping the knives and forks vigorously, their eyes
unfocussed, their red mouths in motion, they ate the fat meat to the
last drop of gravy, the soggy pie to the last crumb.
The next afternoon I crossed the iron footbridge with an aimless
curiosity, into the Grove. The river was only a trickle from puddle
to puddle and gave off an odor similar to that of cucumbers, and the
reflections of narrow, green and yellow leaves upon its surface were
like the footprints of innumerable birds on a flat of mud.
Five great wagons and a mud-caked Ford were drawn up along the river.
The horses grazed in an adjoining meadow, the sweat dried in flakes on
their backs, switching at the flies and never lifting their heads to
look at the noisy camp, unfolded from the loads which they had drawn.
In the center, like a fat woman pirouetting, the merry-go-round
revolved laboriously. The mincing legs of its horses kicked out behind,
their foamless lips were parted, and a pair of crimson tigers drew
a chariot for those too timid or too large to go astride. The power
which set the minute stallions and sky-blue bears gradually rocking
and circling came from a steam engine like a short-necked bottle,
whose whistle preceded the slapping and squeaking of the leather belts
and the outburst of shrill tunes from the calliope, when all the
passengers, mostly children, had been hoisted and set upright in the
saddles.
A crowd of untidy women and shouting boys filled the alley between the
tents. The refreshment booth, a great umbrella of canvas enclosed by
planks laid from barrel to barrel, did a brisk business in ice-cream
cones, in tepid drinks, in hot dogs and patties of ground meat stewing
on a black griddle. A young man whose hair hung down in shoestrings
and a plump woman with brown pouches beneath her eyes ran from side to
side shouting, “What’s yours?” and “Don’t push plee-ase,” storing the
nickels and dimes in a cash-register drawer which opened and shut with
a grating noise.
Next to it stood a “hit-the-nigger-baby” establishment--a hierarchy
of dolls, and a pile of baseballs with which to knock them down, and
a display of bad cigars and felt pillow-covers for prizes. Though it
was Saturday afternoon few men were there to patronize it, for those
who had worked all morning in the heat naturally preferred to lie on
couches indoors, with newspapers over their faces.
The showmen’s cheeks drooped with disillusionment and fatigue. Business
was not good; business was never good, or never good enough. It was a
hard life: shouting, luring, browbeating, laughing, and singing--eating
the poorest food, counting the smallest coins, packing the tents,
frayed finery, nigger-dolls, fangless rattlesnakes, and petrified
Belgian babies; the boss and his wife going ahead in the Ford to rent
the next park, the rest following slowly after the strong-smelling
horses. They must have learned, the youngest Carnival Queen and the
newest freak, that romance is for those who see, never for those who
do, and underpaid as a profession.
I stopped to look at a picture of the dope-fiend, a moon-colored young
man with scaly, presumably allegorical beasts nestling against his
ribs. Hanging beside it were posters of Jocko, the Baboon-Man, who
spoke the monkey language and ate raw meat, a snake charmer among her
serpents which stood up in spirals as thick as trees, and the Fat
Woman, a belted, brooched, and corsetted feather-bed, with oval fingers
scarcely meeting across her tremendous chest. A nervous little man, who
looked as if he might at any moment burst into tears, was lecturing a
dozen people. I was not tempted by his promises, for I could hear the
tremolo of the young man who would say, “Cigarette smoking has made me
what I am today,” and the charmer crooning perfunctorily to her sick
snakes; I could smell his ether and her toilet-water. I had seen a Wild
Man from Java or Borneo or somewhere else who tore off the heads of
live, squawking hens with his teeth and sucked their blood, and felt
sure that this poor tent had nothing so sensational to offer.
The leaves of the maples, pockmarked and bleached by a common blight,
loosened and glided through the windless air, the calliope played, the
barkers grew hoarse, several babies cried. I went on to the next tent,
labelled in great letters GAY PAREE, joining the crowd which gathered
to see a free show before the performance.
Three women and a negro stood on a platform like a large bench. The
women wore diaphanous slips, all beads and fringe, which did not cover
a row of pink and green legs, two of which were crooked and four very
fat. I recognized the ladies of the boarding house. They stared at the
crowd with the solemnity of caged animals, apparently trying to look
voluptuous on the couchless, cushionless boards. One of them pulled her
blouse away from her body and stared avidly inside it. The negro who
stood sleepily beside them crouched now and began to pipe, drearily and
loud, on a sort of flute. The women stiffened, their lips parted, the
pupils of their eyes grew large and cold. Three arms were lifted, and
all their bodies throbbed, paused, and throbbed again. Then each one
curved her waist extremely, first to the right side, then to the left,
and each seemed to spring upward and relax like a bow from which an
arrow has been shot. Three shrill cries and a tapping of the negro’s
foot marked the beat.
During the dance a woman came out of the tent behind the performers and
sat down in the ticket-box. It was Amelia.
I was shocked and amazed. Seven years had passed. And the pair had
vanished like a rock, not thrown, but laid in a pond. No one had
suspected their intention, and after they went, their neighbors
wondered why rather than where they had gone. The police could have
traced them, but why should they have been traced? The farm, which was
heavily mortgaged, went to a real estate agent who came out from time
to time to stare at the ruin and to stamp over the miserable fields,
not knowing what to do with them. Seven years ago.... Doubtless some
one found out what had become of them, but I had been away from home
for years and had never heard.
Amelia had changed more than I, and at first I was afraid she would
give me a wild welcome--to what? The tent was all she had. But in a few
moments I began to doubt if she would have recognized her own father.
She sat there above me like a figure in a jack-in-the-box, took out a
roll of tickets like a pulley-wheel, and counted the change in a box.
Her small eyes drifted heedlessly from dull face to dull face: so many
strangers, so many fools, so many tickets to be sold! She had forgotten
me, forgotten above all what I remembered.
She was grotesquely fat. Her narrow lips had been pressed together
by rectangular cheeks, there were deep crevices at her wrists, and
the sharp chin was lost in a succession of double chins gathered into
a tight necklace of amber beads as large as cherries. Her hair was
drawn up in a pompadour over a visible brown rat, her purple velvet
dress had worn leathery at the elbows. But it was evident, by the way
she sat in that booth like a pulpit, that all this meant progress and
prosperity. Every distortion of her face, every aggrandizement of her
body proclaimed her contentment. Soothed by movement and noise, gorged
by excitement, the girl who had resembled years ago a wistful rat, was
satisfied.
I looked about for Nick, and his appearance between the flaps,
coat-tails first, as he argued with some one inside the tent, silenced
the music and arrested the dancing. He came forward and began to
harangue the onlookers and to shake his large fists, straining the
frock-coat which was buttoned too tightly over his chest. He had not
changed, unless exaggeration be a change: his glance was still hurt
and ominous, and there was the suggestion of a curse in the tone of
his voice. It was plain that the carnival had not been his salvation.
Amelia did not look at him but nevertheless she seemed, in her
fulfillment, to mock his angry hands, the furtive hope of his eyes, his
mastiff-jaw that would never dare to snap.
“You have here, ladies and gentlemen,” he continued, smiling wanly,
“the flower of Oriental art. It is no singing and dancing for children.
There are things about it they would not appreciate. All these famous
performers have appeared in Paris. The French do not relish tame
entertainments. They like it hot, they like it strong. You have seen
their free preliminary dance. It is only a sample of what they can do.
The admission is ten cents. I advise you strongly to come in. The show
starts in five minutes.”
The women and the negro sauntered down the steps behind the flap. Nick
disappeared. Amelia began to tear off tickets and make change, and
presently she followed, never glancing at the stragglers or at me.
I did not see them again. I did not need to hear their story. For in
the dusty grove were tents, the brass throats of the calliope opened
again, and the whole town throbbed with music. Those silences in which
she had heard “slime dripping in the well” were vanquished.