Kitabı oku: «Rose of Dutcher's Coolly», sayfa 3
CHAPTER VI
HER FIRST IDEAL
One June day a man came riding swiftly up the lanes, in a buggy with a gilded box. As he passed the school-house he flung a handful of fluttering yellow and red bills into the air.
"A circus! a circus!" was the cry as the boys rushed for the blowing sheets of paper. It was a circus, the annual "monstrous aggregation of Gregorian games and colossal cataracts of gilded chariots," and it was coming to Tyre.
The children read every word of those high sounding posters, standing in knots by the roadside. It was the mightiest event of their lives. Most of them had never been to a circus. Many had never been so far as Tyre. Some had, however, and they straightway became fountains of wisdom, and declaimed upon the splendors of other aggregations.
Rose looked at the lines of knights and ladies winding down the yellow broadside of the sheet, and wondered if she would ever see them.
The courier rode on. He flung a handful of the bills over into the corn-field where Carl was plowing corn with the hired man, and Carl straightway began to plan.
He flung a handful of the alluring yellow leaves into the bed of the wagon which poor old John Rapp was driving, and he sighed and wondered how he would raise the money to take the children down, and also he longed to see it himself. The whole county awoke to the significance of the event and began preparation and plans, though it was nearly three weeks away. An enormous distance it seemed to the boys and girls.
At school and at church it was talked of. The boys selected their girls, and parties of four or six were made up to go to Tyre, ten miles away, in the larger valley below. In some way, without words, Rose agreed to go with Carl. John Nixon and Ella Pierce made up the other couple. They were to go in a "bowery wagon."
The whole population awoke to pathetic, absorbing interest in the quality of the posters and the probable truth of the fore-word. The circus was the mightiest contrast to their slow and lonely lives that could be imagined. It came in trailing clouds of glorified dust and grouped itself under vast tents whose lift and fall had more majesty than summer clouds, and its streamers had more significance than the lightning.
It brought the throb of drum and scream of fife, and roar of wild beast. For one day each humdrum town was filled with romance like the Arabian Nights; with helmeted horsemen, glittering war maidens on weirdly spotted horses; elephants with howdahs and head-plates of armor, with lions dreadful, sorrowful, sedate and savage; with tigers and hyenas in unmanageable ferocity pacing up and down their gilded dens while their impassive keepers dressed in red, sat in awful silence amidst them.
There was something remote and splendid in the ladies who rode haughtily through the streets on prancing horses, covered with red and gold trappings. There was something heroic, something of splendid art in the pose of the athletes in the ring.
From the dust and drudgery of their farms the farm boys dreamed and dreamed of the power and splendor of the pageantry. They talked it each Sunday night as they sat up with their sweethearts. The girls planned their dresses and hats, and the lunch they were to take. Everything was arranged weeks ahead. Carl was to furnish one team, John the other; Ella was to bring cake and jelly and biscuit; Rose to take a chicken and a shortcake.
They were to start early and drive a certain route and arrive at the ground at a certain hour to see the parade. After the parade they were to take dinner at the hotel, and then the circus! No court ball ever thrilled a young girl's heart like this event.
It was trebly important to Rose. It was her first really long dress. It was her first going out into the world with an escort, and it was her first circus. She trembled with excitement whenever she thought of it, and sometimes burst into tears at the uncertainty of it. It might rain, she might be sick, or something might happen!
She worked away with feverish haste, trimming her hat and helping on her dress, which was to be white, trimmed with real lace from the store. Some dim perception of what it all meant to his girl, penetrated John Dutcher's head, and he gave Rose a dollar to buy some extra ribbon with, and told Mrs. Diehl to give the child a good outfit.
On the night before the circus Carl could not work in the corn. He drove furiously about the neighborhood on inconsequential errands. He called twice on Rose, and they looked into each other's face with transports of fear and joy.
"O, if it should rain!"
"It won't. I just know it's going to be fine. Don't you worry. I am the son of a prophet. I know it can't rain."
There was no real sleep for Rose that night. Twice she woke from an uneasy doze, thinking she heard the patter of rain, but listening close she knew it was only the rustle of the cottonwood trees about the house.
Her room was a little rough-plastered garret room, with an eastern window, and at last she saw the yellow light inter-filtrate the dark-blue of the eastern sky, and she rose and pattered about in her bare feet, while she put up her hair like a woman and slipped on her underskirt, stiff with starch, and then her dress, with its open-work sleeves and ruche of lace, threaded with blue ribbon. She moved about on her bare feet, rejoicing in the crisp rustle of her new clothing, and put on her wide hat with its hectic rose-buds and paris-green thick leaves. Her undistorted feet were the most beautiful of all, but she did not know that.
She sat on the bed completely dressed, but hardly daring to move for fear of waking her aunt. She watched the yellow glow deepen to a saffron dome of ever-spreading light. She knew the weather signs herself, and she was sure the day was to be hot but clear. She did not fear the heat.
As she sat so, a feeling of joy, of realization of the abounding goodness and sweetness of living, made her want to thank something – to give praise. She moved her lips in a little prayer of thanks to the sun, as his first glittering rim of light came above the low hills.
"Rosie!" called Mrs. Diehl.
"I'm up," she replied, and hastily drew on her shoes and stockings. She took her hat in her hands and went down the stairs and through the little sitting room out to the door-step. She heard someone whistling. Then a shout of laughter – they were coming!
She had packed her basket the night before, and she stood ready at the gate when Carl and his companions drove up. They had four horses hitched to a large wagon, which was set about with branches of oak and willow. Carl was driving and Rose mounted to the front seat with him. He cracked his whip and they whirled away, leaving the old folks calling warnings after them.
The sun was just rising, the dew was still globed on the wild roses. The wagon rumbled, the bower over their heads shook with the jar of the wheels. The horses were fresh and strong and the day was before them. Rose felt something vague and sweet, something that laved the whole world like sunlight. She was too happy to sing. She only sat and dreamed. She felt her clothes, but she was no longer acutely conscious of them.
Carl was moved too, but his emotion vented itself in shouts and cheery calls to the horses, and to the pistol-like cracking of his whip.
He looked at her with clear-eyed admiration. She abashed him a little by her silence. She seemed so strangely womanly in that pose, and the glow of her firm arms through her sleeve was alien, somehow.
The road led around hill sides, under young oak trees, across dappled sands, and over little streams where the horses stopped to drink. It was like some world-old idyl, this ride in a heavy rumbling wagon; it led to glory and light, this road among the hills.
Rounding a long low line of bluffs they caught the flutter of flags in Tyre, and saw the valley spotted with other teams, crawling like beetles down the sandy river roads. The whole land seemed to be moving in gala dress toward Tyre. Everywhere appeared the same expectancy, the same exultation between lovers.
Carl pulled up with a flourish at the wooden porch of the Farmers' Hotel, and the girls alighted and went into the parlor, while the boys took the horses into a back alley and gave them their oats and hay in the end of the box.
As Rose walked into the parlor, filled with other girls and young men, the proud consciousness of her clothes came back to her, and she carried herself with a lift of the head, which made her dark gipsy-like face look haughty as a young queen's. She knew her dress was as good as any other there, and she had no need to be ashamed, and besides it was her first long dress, and she wore low shoes.
The boys came bustling back and hurried the girls out on the sidewalk. "They're coming!" they cried breathlessly, as a far-off burst of music came in on a warm puff of wind.
On they came, a band leading the way. Just behind, with glitter of lance and shine of helmet, came a dozen knights and fair ladies riding spirited chargers. They all looked strange and haughty and sneeringly indifferent to the cheers of the people. The women seemed small and firm and scornful, and the men rode with lances uplifted looking down at the crowd with a haughty droop in their eyelids.
Rose shuddered with a new emotion as they swept past. She had never looked into eyes like those. They had wearied of all splendor and triumph, those eyes. They cared nothing for flaunt of flag or blast of bugle. They rode straight out of the wonder and mystery of the morning to her. They came from the unknown spaces of song and story beyond the hills.
The chariots rumbled by almost unheeded by Rose. She did not laugh at the clown jiggling by in a pony-cart for there was a face between her and all that followed. The face of a bare-armed knight, with brown hair and a curling mustache, whose proud neck had a curve in it as he bent his head to speak to his rearing horse. He turned his face toward where Rose stood, and her soul fluttered, and her flesh shrank as if from fire, but he rode on. His face was fine, like pictures she had seen. It was a pleasant face, too proud, but not coarse and stern like the others.
The calliope, (a musical monster, hideous as the hippopotamus) and the dens of beasts went past without arousing her interest; then the open cage of lions rolled by with a trainer carelessly seated on a camp stool amid his dun-colored monsters. His gaudy red-and-gold continental coat and his impassive face made a deep impression on her. At last the procession passed, carrying with it swarms of detached boys and girls, whose parents fearfully called after them and unavailingly plead with them to come back as they broke away.
"O, I wish it would all come by again!" sighed Ella.
"So do I," said Carl.
Rose remained silent. Somehow those knights and ladies dwarfed all else. She did not look forward to eating a hotel dinner with the same pleasure now, but was eager to get to the tent, whose pennants streamed above the roofs of the houses.
The hotel swarmed with farmer folks, whose loud voices uttered shouts of satisfaction over the promise of the parade. It was the best ever seen in the town.
"Right this way, ladies and gentlemen," said the landlord, as he ushered Carl's party down to a table at the end of the dining-room.
Rose felt a thrill of delight; she was a grown-up person at last. This landlord recognized her assumption and it made the dinner almost enjoyable. She saw no one better dressed than herself, and she had a feeling that she was good to look at. She was really more beautiful than she knew. A city drummer sitting at another table eyed her all through the meal with breathless admiration. Her health and color, and the firm lines of her nose and chin were especially attractive.
They all ate with unusual formality, using their forks instead of knives for their pie, and otherwise trying to seem citified. Ella laughed at the antics John cut up over his fork, and the sly digs that he gave Carl, who chased the crust of his pie around his plate with a fork and at last gave it up and seized it with his fingers.
No one noticed these pranks, because everyone else was carrying on in much the same way. At length they rose and returned to the parlor, where they sat about on the cheap red plush chairs and waited for 1 o'clock.
"Well, it's about time to go," said Carl, on one of his re-entries from the street. "Gee-Whittaker! but it's hot out there!"
"It'll be cool under the tent."
"Well, come on."
Out on the street they joined the stream of lovers like themselves, moving hand in hand down the walk, assaulted by cries of lemonade, candy and fruit hucksters.
The sun beat upon their heads; a dust arose from the feet of the passing teams and settled upon the white dresses of the girls, and sank through the meshes of their sleeves and gathered in the moist folds of their ruches. They moved on rapidly toward the clanging band, the flutter of the pennants and the brazen outcries of the ticket-takers.
On to the square before the tents, thronged with innumerable people, an avenue of side-shows faced them like a gauntlet to be run. Before each flapping sign of fat woman, or snake charmer, stood a man who cried in strange, clanging, monotonous and rhythmical voice:
"You still have a half an hour, ladies and gentlemen, before the great show opens. Come in and see the wonders of the world."
Before the ticket wagon a straggling, excited crowd wrestled, suspicious, determined, hurried. Leaving their girls in the more open space, the boys drew deep breaths of resolution and plunged into the press with set, determined faces.
They returned soon, hot, disarranged but triumphant. "Come on, girls."
They moved upon the main entrance, where a man stood snatching at the tickets which were handed to him. He was humorous, and talked as he pushed the people in.
"Hurry up, old man; trot close after your mother. Have your tickets ready, everybody. Yes, right this way, uncle. Bless your dear little face – right ahead. H'y'ere, bub, this ticket's no good! – Oh, so it is, I didn't see the right side – get on quick."
As Rose passed him he said, "You go in free, my dear," and resumed his bawling cry, "Have your tickets ready."
Under the tent! Rose looked up at the lifting, tremulous, translucent canvas with such awe as the traveler feels in St. Peter's dome. Her feet stumbled on, while she clung to Carl's hand without knowing it. O, the enormous crowds of people, the glitter and change of it all!
They followed in the stream which flowed around the circle of animal dens, and Rose silently looked at all she saw. The others laughed and exclaimed, but she did not. Everything seemed inexplicable and mysterious, and roused confusing trains of thought.
She saw the great tigers, and caught the yellow-green sheen of their eyes. She saw the lions rise like clouds of dust in their corners, silent as mist and terrible as lightning. She looked at the elephant and wondered how he could live and be so like the toy elephants she had at home. On past shrieking tropical birds and grunting, wallowing beasts, and chattering crowds of people she moved, without a word, till they came around to the circus entrance, and then she lifted her eyes again around the great amphitheater.
"Peanuts, peanuts here, five a bag!"
"Here's your lemonade, cool and fresh."
On all sides brazen-voiced young men were selling, at appalling prices, sticks of candy, glasses of lemonade, palm-leaf fans and popcorn balls. There was something about them that frightened her, and she walked a little closer to Carl.
They heard familiar voices call and saw some young people from their coulé, and so clambered up where they sat. The boards were narrow and the seats low, but nobody minded that, for that was part of the circus.
They were settled at last and ready to enjoy all that came. Two or three volunteered to say: "This is great! the best place to see 'em come in." Then they passed the peanut bag in reckless liberality.
Rose sat in a dream of delight as the band began to play. It was an ambitious band and played operatic selections with modulations, and it seemed to Rose to be the most splendid music in the world. All other bands she had heard played right along tum-tummy tum-tummy tummy, tummy-tum. This band sang and talked and whispered and dreamed. It shook her like a stallion's neigh, and soothed her like the coo of a dove on the barn roof.
She heard nothing that was said about her, and she did not know she sat squeezing Carl's arm.
People streamed by in enormous crowds. Ladies in elegant dresses, and hats such as she had never seen before. Handsome young men went by, and yet she gave them no second look. They were like figures in a dream.
At last the band blared an announcing note, and the uniformed attendants filed into the ring and took positions at set points like sentries. Then the music struck into a splendid galop, and out from the curtained mysteries beyond, the knights and ladies darted, two and two, in glory of crimson and gold, and green and silver. At their head rode the man with the brown mustache.
They came around into position, and then began a series of bewildering changes, directed by her knight, whose shout dominated the noise of the horses and the blare of the band, with hollow wild sound.
They vanished as they came, and then came the clowns, and tricks and feats of strength. The iron-jawed woman lifted incredible weights; the Japanese jugglers tossed cannon-balls, knives and feathers; the baby elephant stood on his head – and then suddenly six men dressed in tights of blue and white and orange ran into the ring, and her hero led them.
He wore blue and silver, and on his breast was a rosette. He looked a god to her. His naked limbs, his proud neck, the lofty carriage of his head, made her shiver with emotion. They all came to her lit by the white radiance; they were not naked, they were beautiful, but he was something more.
She had seen naked boys, and her own companions occasionally showed themselves naked and cowering before her, but these men stood there proud and splendid. They invested their nakedness with something which exalted them. They became objects of luminous beauty to her, though she knew nothing of art.
As she grew clearer-eyed, she saw that one was a little too short, another too lean, but he of the rosette was perfect. The others leaped, with him, doing the same feats, but as distances were increased, and the number of camels and horses grew, the others stood by to see him make his renowned double somersault over a herd of animals. When the applause broke out she joined it, while her temples throbbed with emotion. To see him bow and kiss his fingers to the audience was a revelation of manly grace and courtesy. He moved under the curtain, bowing still to the cheering crowd.
Once more he came back later on, leading a woman by the hand. She too was in tights throughout, and like him she walked with a calm and powerful movement, but she seemed petty beside him.
Something new seized upon Rose's heart, a cold contraction that she had never felt, and her teeth pressed together. She wondered if the woman were his wife.
The woman seized a rope with her right arm and was drawn to the tent roof. He took a strap in his mouth and was drawn to his trapeze also. There, in mid-air, they performed their dangerous evolutions. It was all marvelous and incredible to the country girl.
She heard him clap his hands, then his glorious voice rang above the music, and the lithe figure of his companion launched itself through the air, was caught by the shoulders in his great hands, thence with a twist he tossed her, and hooked her by the hands.
Each time, the blood surged into Rose's throat as if to suffocate her. A horrible fear that was a pleasure, some way, rose and fell in her. She could not turn away her head. She must look.
She was a powerful girl, and the idea of fainting had never come to her, but when at the conclusion, he dropped in a revolving ball into the net far beneath, she turned sick and her eyes seemed to whirl in their sockets. Then as he leaped to the ground, bowing and smiling, the blood rushed back to her face, and the perspiration stood like rain on her face.
Thereafter riders came, and the clowns capered, and the ring-master cracked his whip and she enjoyed it, but it was an after-climax. She saw it, but saw it dimly. Nothing but the lions and their trainers aroused her to applause. Her brain was full. It was a feast of glories and her very hunger made her lay hold upon the first that came, to the neglect of what came after.
At last the brazen, resounding voice of the ring-master announced the last of the show, and the audience arose and moved out in a curious sort of a hush, as if in sorrow to think it was all over, and the humdrum world was rushing back upon them.
Rose moved along in perfect silence, clinging to Carl's hand. Around her was the buzz of low speech, the wailing of tired and hungry babies and the clamor of attendants selling tickets for the minstrel show to follow.
Suddenly she perceived that her dress was wet with perspiration and grimy with dust. She saw all about her women with flushed faces and grimy hands, their hats awry and their brows wrinkled with trouble over fretful children. The men walked along with their coats over their arms, and their hats pushed back. The dust arose under their feet with a strange smell. Out in the animal tent the odor was stifling and Rose hurried Carl out into the open air.
Somehow it seemed strange to see the same blue sky arching the earth; things seemed exactly the same and yet Rose had grown older. She had developed immeasurably in those few hours. It took her some time to fully recover the use of her feet, and it took longer to get back a full realization of where she was.
The grass, crushed and trampled and littered with paper, and orange peel, gave out a fresh farm-like odor, that helped her to recover herself. She would not talk, she could not talk yet. She only urged them to go home. She wanted to get home to think.
As they climbed the slope on the other side of the river, they looked back at the tents with their wilted streamers, at the swarming bug-like teams and the ant-like human beings, and it seemed to Rose as if she should weep, so poignant was her sense of personal loss.
She knew something sweet and splendid and mystical was passing out of her life after a few hours' stay there. Her feeling of loss was none the less real because it was indefinable to her.
The others chattered about each part of the show, and shouted admiration about this and that feat, but Rose was silent. When they stopped at sunset beside a spring to eat their lunch she merely said:
"I don't feel hungry."
The others fell silent after a time, and they rode dreamily forward, with the roll of wheels making them sleepy and the trample of the horses' feet telling them how rapidly they were leaving their great day's pleasure behind them.
When Rose huddled into her little attic bed, her eyes were wide open, and her brain active as at noonday. There was no sleep for her then. Lying there in the darkness she lived it all over again; the flutter of flags, the wild voices, the blare of music, the chariots, the wild beasts, the knights and ladies, the surging crowds; but the crowning glory, the pictures which lingered longest in her mind were the splendid and beautiful men, whose naked majesty appealed to her pure wholesome awakening womanhood, with the power of beauty and strength combined, with sex and art both included.
These glorious, glittering graceful beings with their marvelous strength and bravery filled her with a deep sad hunger, which she could not understand. They came out of the unknown, led by her chosen one, like knights in Ivanhoe.
She fell asleep thinking of the one in blue and silver, and in her sleep she grew braver and went closer to him, and he turned and spoke to her, and his voice was like waters running, and his eyes shone some way into her eyes like a light.
When she rose the next day she was changed. She moved about the house dull and languid. Never before had she failed to sleep when her head touched the pillow. She managed to be alone most of the time, and at last her mind cleared. She began to live for him, her ideal. She set him on high as a being to be worshiped, as a man fit to be her judge.
In the days and weeks which followed she asked herself, "Would he like me to do this?" or she thought, "I must not do that. What would he think of me if he saw me now?" And every night when she went to sleep it was with the radiant figure in blue and silver before her eyes.
When the sunset was very beautiful, she thought of him. When the stars seemed larger in the blue sky, she could see the star upon his grand breast. She knew his name; she had the bill in her little box of trinkets, and she could take it out and read, "William De Lisle, the world-famous leader in ground and lofty tumbling, in his stupendous leap over two elephants, six camels and two horses."
In all the talk of the circus which followed among her companions, she took no part because she feared she might be obliged to mention his name. When others spoke his name she could feel a hot flush surge up all over her body and she trembled for fear some one might discover her adoration of him.
She went about with Carl and Rob as before, only she no longer longed for them; they seemed good, familiar comrades, but nothing more. To them she seemed stranger every day. Her eyes had lost their clear, brave look; they were dreamy black, and her lids drooped.
Vast ambitions began in her. She determined to be a great scholar. She would be something great for his sake. She could not determine what, but she, too, would be great. At first she thought of being a circus woman, and then she determined that was impossible.
She dreamed often of being his companion and coming on hand in hand with him, bowing to the multitude, but when she was drawn to the tent-roof, she awoke in a cold sweat of fear, and so she determined to be a writer. She would write books like Ivanhoe. Those were great days! Her mind expanded like the wings of a young eagle. She read everything; the Ledger, the Weekly, and all the dog-eared novels of impassioned and unreal type in the neighborhood.
In short, she consecrated herself to him as to a king, and seized upon every chance to educate herself to be worthy of him. Every effort was deeply pathetic, no matter how absurd to others. She took no counsel, allowed no confidants. She lived alone among her playmates.
This ideal came in her romantic and perfervid period, and it did her immeasurable good. It lifted her and developed her. It enabled her to escape the clutch of mere brute passion which seizes so many boys and girls at that age, and leads to destructive early marriages. It kept her out of reach of the young men of the neighborhood.
She did not refuse the pleasures of the autumn and the winter, only she did not seem so hearty in her enjoyment of the rides and parties. She rode with the young fellows on moonlit nights, lying side by side with them on the straw-filled bottom of the sleigh, and her heart leaped with the songs they sang, but it all went out towards her ideal; he filled the circle of her mind. The thought of him made the night magical with meaning. As she danced with Carl it was her hero's arm she felt. At night, when Carl left her on the door-step, she looked up at the stars and the sinking moon, and lifted her face in a wild vow, inarticulate – "I will be worthy of him!" That was the passionate resolution, but it did not reach to the definiteness of words.
As she worked about the house she took graceful attitudes, and wished he might see her; he would be pleased with her. The grace and power of her arm acquired new meaning to her. Her body, she recognized, had something the same statuesque pose of his. In the secrecy of her room she walked up and down, feeling the splendid action of her nude limbs muscled almost like his. And all this was fine and pure physical joy. Her idea remained indefinite, wordless.
These were days of formless imaginings and ambitions. "I will do! I will do!" was her ceaseless cry to herself, but what could she do? What should she do?
She could be wise; that she would be. So she read. She got little out of her reading that she could make a showing of, but still it developed her. It made her dream great things, impossible things, but she had moments when she tried to live these things.
Meanwhile her manners changed. She became absent-minded, and seemed sullen and haughty to her companions at times. She never giggled like the rest of the girls. She had fine teeth, and yet her smile was infrequent. She laughed when occasion demanded, and laughed heartily, but she was not easily stirred to laughter.
Just in proportion as she ignored the young beaux, so they thronged about her. One or two of them eyed her with a look which made her angry. She took refuge in Carl's company, and so escaped much persecution, for Carl was growing to be a powerful young man, with fists like mauls, and was respected among the athletes of the neighborhood.
She did not realize that she would need at some time to settle with Carl. She accepted his company as a matter of course. He filled social requirements for the time being.
Her teacher that winter was a plaintive sort of a little middle-aged man, a man of considerable refinement, but with little force. Rose liked him, but did not respect him as she had two or three of the men who had filled the teacher's chair. She could not go to him for advice.
As the winter wore on the figure of "William De Lisle" grew dimmer, but not less beautiful. Her love for him lost its under-current of inarticulate expectancy; it was raised into a sentiment so ethereal it would seem a breath of present passion would scatter it like vapor, and yet it was immovable as granite. Time alone could change it. He still dominated her thought at quiet times, at dark when the stars began to shine, but in the daytime he was faint as a figure in a dream.
