The whole town planned to turn out. There was to be no evening
performance, and I schemed to have us all take our lunch--a whole crowd
of us--and go over to the Pump pasture right from the parade, and
spread it under the big maple, and see the sights while we et. I
broached it to Mis' Toplady and Timothy and Eppleby and Marne Holcomb
and Postmaster and Mis' Sykes, and some more--Mis' Arnet and Mis'
Sturgis and Mis' Hubbelthwait; and they, all of them, and Lucy and me,
fell to planning on who'd take what, and running over to each other's
houses about sweet pickles and things we hadn't thought of, and we had a
real nice old-fashioned time.
I'll never forget the day. It was one of the regular circus days, bright
and blue and hot. Lucy Hackett and I went down to see the parade
together; and we watched it, as a matter of course, from the window
where I'd watched circus parades when I was a little girl. The horses,
the elephants, the cages closed and the cages opened, the riders, the
bands, the clowns, the calliope--that I was named for, because a circus
with one come to town the day I was born--had all passed when, to crown
and close the whole, we saw coming a wagon of the size and like we had
not often beheld before.
It was red, it had flags, pennons, streamers, festoons, balloons.
Continually up from it went daylight firecrackers. From the sides of it
fell colored confetti. And it was filled, not with circus folks, dressed
gorgeous, but with boys. And we knew them! Laughing, jigging, frantic
with joy--we saw upward of a hundred Friendship Village boys. As the
wagon passed us and we stared after it, suddenly the clamor of shouting
inside it took a kind of form. We begun, Lucy and I, to recognize
something. And what was borne back to us perfectly clamorous was:
S----s----s!
Yow! Yow! Yow!
Who's----all----right?
Mr. N----o----rdm----a----n!
"What in time are they yelling?" says a woman at the next window.
"Some stuff," says somebody else.
Lucy and I just looked at each other. Lucy was looking wild. "Calliope,"
says she, "how'd they come to yell that--that that they said?"
"Oh, I dunno," I says serene; "I could yell that too--on general
principles. Couldn't you?" I says to her.
And Lucy blushed burning, rosy, fire red--on general principles, I
suppose.
We were all to meet at the courthouse with our lunches and go right out
to the Pump pasture. The tents were up already, flags were flying every
which way, and folks were running all over, busy.
"Like somebody was giving a party," I says.
Lucy never said a word. She'd gone along, kind of breathless, all the
way down. All us that know each other best were there. And we were dying
to get into each other's lunches and see what each other had brought.
So Jimmy Sturgis went to building fire for the coffee, and Eppleby went
off for water, and Silas Sykes, that don't like to do much work, he
says:
"Timothy, supposing we go along down and buy all our tickets and avoid
the rush?"
We let them go, and occupied ourselves spreading down the cloth, and
cutting up cake and veal loaf, and opening up pickles and jell. The
maple shade came down nice on the cloth, and appetizing little picnic
smells of potato salad and other things begun getting out around, and
the whole time was cozy and close up to. We were just disposing the
deviled eggs in a mound in the middle, when Silas Sykes and Timothy come
fair running up the slope.
"My dum!" says Silas. "They won't leave us buy no tickets. They say the
show is free."
"_Free!_" says most everybody but me in chorus.
"They say they ain't no ticket wagon, and they ain't going to be," says
Silas. "What you going to make out that?"
"Blisterin' Benson!" says Timothy Toplady. "What I think is this,
they're kidding us."
Lucy stood opening up a little bag she had.
"Here's one of the slips they threw round this morning," she says; "I
dunno--"
She had it out and we studied it. We'd all seen them blowing round the
streets, but nobody had paid any attention. She held it out and they
all stared at it:
FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
IS INVITED TO COME TO THE CIRCUS
THIS AFTERNOON
FREE
NO TICKETS ON SALE
FREE ADMISSION
FOR
FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
"My gracious," says Mis' Sykes, "I never heard of such a thing since the
world began."
"Land, land!" says Mis' Toplady. "But what does it _mean_?"
"What _does_ it mean?" says Silas Sykes. "What are we all being a party
to?"
"I guess it's _who_ are we being a party to, Silas," I says, mild.
They all looked at me. And then they looked where I was looking, and I
was looking at something hard. Coming out of the main tent was a mass of
struggling, wriggling, dancing humanity--little humanity--in short, the
boys that had rode in the big wagon. And walking in the midst of them
was a man.
At first not even I recognized him. He had his coat off, and his collar
was turned in, his hat was on the back of his head, and he was smiling
throughout his whole face, which was red.
"Look-at!" says I. "I guess that's who we're the party to--all of us."
"What do you _mean_?" Silas says again.
"I mean," says I, "that Nick Nordman's had this whole circus come here
to the village and give it to us free. And I say, let's us rush down
there and drag him up here to eat with us!"
It came to them so sudden that they all moved off like one man, and, as
we started together, not caring who stole the whole lunch that we left
laying idle under the tree, I turned and took a look at Lucy.
Land, she looked as I haven't seen her look in twenty years! Her head
was back, her eyes were bright, her face was bright, and she didn't know
one of us was there. She just went down the slope, running.
We came on him as he was distributing nickels destined for the peanut
man that had just got his wagon going, savory. Nick didn't see us till
we were right there, and then the nicest shamefaced look come over him,
and he threw the rest of the nickels among the boys and left them
scrambling, and met us.
"Nick Nordman! _Is_ this your doings?" Silas plumped it at him,
accusing.
"Gosh, no!" says Nick, grinning like a schoolboy. "It's the kids'
doin's."
And when a millionaire can say "Gosh" like he said it, you can't feel
remote from him. Nobody could. Oh, how we talked at him, all round, a
good many at a time. And I think everything there was to say, we said
it. Anyway, I can't think of any exclamation to speak of that we left
unexclaimed.
We all streamed up the slope, Silas near walking backward most of the
way to take in the full magnitude of it. We sat down round the potato
salad and the deviled eggs and the veal loaf, beaming. And it made a
real nice minute.
Oh, and it was no time till we got to living over the old days. And it
was no time till Timothy and Eppleby were rolling over, recalling this
and bringing back that. It was no time at all till every one of us was
back twenty-five to thirty years, and telling about it. And Lucy, that
I'd maneuvered should sit by Nick, I caught her looking across at me
kind of superior, and as if she could have told me, all the while, that
something or other was so!
"Let's us drink him a toast," says Timothy Toplady when we got through.
"Look-at here: To Nicholas Nordman, the big man of Friendship Village."
"Yes, sir!" says Silas Sykes. "And to Nicholas Nordman, that's give us
ten thousand dollars _and_ a circus!"
"No, sir!" says Eppleby Holcomb, sudden. "None of them things. Let's us
drink just to Nick Nordman, that's come back home!" He up with his hand,
and it came down on Nick Nordman's shoulder with a sound you could have
heard all acrost the grounds.
And as he did that, just for a fraction of nothing, Nick Nordman met my
eyes. And we both knew what we both knew.
Just then the band struck up, and the people were already pouring in the
pasture, so we scrabbled things up and all started for the tent. Nick
was walking with Lucy.
"Lucy," I heard him say, "you look near enough like you used to, for you
to be you!"
She looked like a girl as she answered him. "You _are_ you, Nick," she
says, simple and neat and direct.
And me--I walked along, feeling grand. I kind of felt what all of us was
feeling, and what everybody was going to feel down there in the big
tent, when they knew. But far, far more, I sensed the thing that Nick
Nordman, walking there with us, with about a hundred and fifty boys all
waiting to sit down side of him at his circus--the thing that Nick
Nordman had found out.
"God bless you, Calliope," says he, when he got a chance.
"Oh!" I says. "He has. He has! He's made folks so awful nice--when they
just let it show through!"