The night was eerie with voices from unseen bodies, or bodies
half-revealed in the flare of gasoline torches, as the business of
loading the carnival proceeded. Soft, rich voices from black men's
throats blended with the velvety softness of the late-June night:
"Oh, if Ah had wings like an angel,
Over these prison walls Ah would fly!
Ah would fly to the ahms of my poah dahlin',
An' theah Ah'd be willin' to die."
A lonesome, heart-breaking plaint. Sally shivered. Except for David and
Pop Bybee and Dan, the barker, she and David might have been behind
prison bars tonight, learning the shame and misery that had created that
song.
A white roustabout said something evil to her out of the corner of his
mouth as she brushed past him on her way to join David. But she scarcely
noticed, for there was David, his shoulders looming immensely broad in
the dark coat he had donned in her honor. Her hands were out to him
before he had reached her, and when he took them both and laid them
softly against his breast, so that her leaping blood caught the rhythm
of his strongly beating heart, she could scarcely restrain herself from
raising her small body on tip-toe and lifting her face for his kiss.
They were shy at first, as they drifted away from the show train across
the vacant lot where the carnival had so recently vended trickery and
truth, freaks and fakes, color and light and noise and music. They
walked softly, slowly, Sally having the absurd feeling that if the grass
stubble were tender, tiny flowers, her joy-light feet would not have
crushed them. Her fingers were intertwined with David's, and the
electric thrill of that contact seemed to be the motor force which
propelled her body. Without a word as to direction, they drifted,
completely in accord, toward a clump of trees which would some day, when
Stanton had become beauty-conscious, form the nucleus of a park.
Sally felt that she was in a spell woven of the beauty and
breathlessness of the night and of her inarticulate joy as, still
without speaking, David took off his coat and spread it upon the ground
that sloped gently from the sturdy trunk of an oak tree. As he was
stooping to spread the coat her hand hovered over his head, aching to
touch the dear, waving crispness of his hair, yet not daring--quite. But
when he straightened more suddenly than she had expected, his head
fitted into the cup of her hovering hand before she could snatch it
away.
He whirled upon her, sweeping her slight body to his breast with such
fierceness and suddenness that her head swam.
"Sally! Sally!" Just that hoarse cry, muted, exultant.
Her hands crept slowly up his breast, so loving every inch of the dear
body whose warmth came through the cloth of his shirt that they
abandoned it reluctantly. When her hands were on his shoulders, clinging
there, she threw her head back upon the curve of his right arm, and
smiled up into his face. Her lips parting slowly to let out a little
gasping sigh of joy.
In the silvery sheen with which the moon joyously and approvingly bathed
them their eyes, wide, dark, luminous, clung for an aeon of time,
reckoned in the history of love. Then David, knowing that his unasked
question had been gloriously answered, bent his head until his lips
touched hers.
He must have felt the slight stiffening of her body, the ardor in her
small hands as they clung more fiercely to his shoulders. For he flung
up his head, then turned it sharply away for a moment, as if ashamed for
her to see the passion in his eyes. She took a drunken, uncertain step
away from him, and his arms fell laxly from her body.
"What is it, David?" she asked in a small, quavering voice, scarcely
more than a whisper.
"I shouldn't have done that!" David reproached himself with boyish
bitterness.
"But David," Sally pleaded, in that small quaver, "don't you--don't you
love me--at all? I thought--I--" Her hands fluttered toward him, then
dropped hopelessly as he still stood sharply turned away from her.
"Yes, I love you. That's the devil of it," David groaned from the
shelter of his arm. "I love you so much I can't think of anything else,
not even of our danger."
She crept closer to him, stroked timidly the clenched fist which hung at
his side. "Then--why, David? I--I love you, too. You--must--have known.
I love you with all my heart." She stooped swiftly and laid her lips
against his knuckles, which shone white as marble in the moonlight.
"Don't!" he cried sharply. He lowered the arm that had sheltered his
shamed, passionate eyes and looked at her humbly, his whole body
drooping. "Don't you see, darling--no, I mustn't call you that!--don't
you see, Sally, that your--caring--only makes it worse? I wish I were
the only one that has to suffer. But you're so young--oh, God!" he cried
in sudden anguish. "You're so pitifully young! Sixteen! I ought to be
horsewhipped!"
She laughed shakily. "I'm getting older every day, David. Is it such a
crime to be young? You're young, too, David--darling!" The word was
dropped shyly, on a tremulous whisper.
"That's it!" David cried wildly, fiercely under his breath. "We're both
young! I'm just half through college, and I haven't a cent to my name
except what I earned those two weeks on Carson's farm. And I won't have
any money except barely enough to live on--I work my way through
college--until I've finished school. And then it will be a long, hard
struggle to get a start, unless my grandfather dies by then and leaves
me his farm. He's a miserly old man, darling. He thinks I'm a fool to
study scientific farming, won't give me a cent. I haven't wanted
it--till now."
"And now, David?" she prompted softly, her fingers closing caressingly
about the clenched hand which she must not kiss.
"I want to marry you, of course!" David flung the confession at her
sternly. "I love you so much it's torture to think of your going on to
New York with the carnival. Oh, it's all so hopeless! We're in such a
nasty jam, Sally, darling!" He groaned, snatched up her hands, kissed
them hungrily, passionately, then dropped them as if the soft, sweet
flesh stung his lips. "Don't let me kiss you, Sally! For God's sake! I
can't stand it! And it's not fair to you to learn what love means,
when--when we can't go through with it."
"But why can't we, David?" she persisted, her love giving her amazing
boldness. "I'll never love anyone else. I'll wait for you, for years and
years. Until I'm eighteen and you're twenty-three. You're almost
twenty-one, aren't you, David?"
"Yes," he acknowledged. "But I'm just a kid. Why, I'm a minor yet!" he
reminded her with youth's bitter shame. "And so are you. We couldn't
even get married legally. And we're both--wanted--by the police. I can't
even figure out how I'm going to get back into A. & M. and finish my
course. I couldn't let you marry a man wanted for attempted murder, even
if I could support you. Oh, I guess I could make a bare living for us,
but I don't want that! Not for you! I want you to have everything lovely
in the world. You've had so little, so little! I want you to have silk
and velvet to make you forget blue-and-white-checked gingham. I want--"
he was going on passionately when Sally interrupted with her soft
delicious little laugh.
"I want David," she said simply.
"All right!" he cried, flinging his arms wide in a gesture of utter
abandonment. "We'll run away tonight. We'll keep going until we get out
of the state. We'll lie about our ages. We'll find someone somewhere to
marry us, and we'll--have each other if we have nothing else in the
world, Sally!"
His exultant young voice and his arms demanded her, but she held back
strangely, while her face went ghastly white and old in the moonlight.
"I--I forgot to tell you my news," she said dully, tonelessly, her hands
flattened against her breast. "Mrs. Bybee found out something
about--about my mother, about me."
Ecstasy was wiped from David's face, leaving it hurt and bewildered. "So
you're going to find her? Go back to her? I--I suppose I'm glad."
"No," she shook her head drearily. "I can't marry you or--anyone, David.
My mother was not Mrs. Nora Ford. I don't know who she was! I don't even
know what my name really is--if I have a name! Whoever my mother was she
was ashamed I'd been born, she paid Mrs. Ford to take me away when I was
an infant, away from New York, so--so I wouldn't disgrace her. I'm the
ugly name Nita called me today. I'm--I'm--"
"You're my Sally," David said gently, his arms gathering her in, holding
her comfortingly against his breast, in a passionless embrace of utter
tenderness. "Do you think I would let that make any difference at all?
If anything could, it would make me love you more. But I love you now
with every bit of me. And we'll be married, Sally. What do I care about
being a scientific farmer?" But there was a note of bravado, of regret
in his voice that did not escape her love attuned ears.
"No, David," she whispered, her hands straying over his face as if
memorizing every dear line of it. "We'll wait. I can wait. I've waited
twelve years to find my mother, and I didn't give up hope until today. I
would wait twice twelve years for you. I'll stick with the carnival if
Pop Bybee will let me, and if the police don't find us. Then when you're
through college--?"
"But I'm damned if I can see how I'm to get back!" David burst out. "We
are both trapped in this second-rate carnival--and a first rate one
would be bad enough!"
"We won't have to stay after we get to New York," Sally interrupted
reasonably. "We can start life again. This trouble will blow over. You
might even learn some other profession in the east--"
"I don't want to learn anything else, live anywhere else but in the
middle west. It's my land. I love it. I want to serve it. But, oh,
Sally, let's not torture ourselves any more. I know I mustn't marry you
under this cloud, but let's be happy for a few minutes before we go back
to the show train. No, don't, darling!" as she lifted her arms. "Just
sit there on my coat and let me look at you. You're the most beautiful
thing in the world. Lovely Sally!"
They sat side by side, hands not touching but hearts reaching toward
each other, and the minutes slipped silently away as David drank in her
moon-silvered young beauty, and she fed her love-hunger upon his
Viking-like handsomeness and strength. They were silently agreeing to go
when a sharp, metallic voice materialized suddenly out of the hush of
the darkness.
"No monkey-business now, Steve! I'm warning you! If you double-cross me
I'll cut your heart out! Fifty-fifty and--"
The rest was lost as the couple passed on, walking swiftly, two shadows
that seemed like one. The voice was Nita's.