The Gay Cockade
He laughed to himself, and spent the rest of the way in seeing her at
it. They would drink pink lemonade, and there would be pop-corn
balls--the entrancing smell of sawdust--the beat of the band. He hoped
there would be a tom-tom, and some of the dark people from the Far East.
He reached his destination at seven o'clock. Dunbar met him at the
station. Anne sat with her husband, and Jeanette was in the back seat.
Christopher had, therefore, a side view of Anne as she turned a little
that she might talk to him. The glint of her bright hair under her gray
sports hat, the light of welcome in her eyes--!
"I am going to take you to the circus to-morrow. Ridgeley, you'll go
too?"
Dunbar shook his head. "I've got to get back to town in the morning. And
I'm not sure that the excitement will be good for Anne."
"Why not?" quickly. "Aren't you well, Anne?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Ridgeley seems to think I'm not. But the
circus can't hurt me."
Nothing more was said about it. Christopher decided to ask Ridgeley
later. But the opportunity did not come until Anne had gone up-stairs,
and Dunbar and Christopher were smoking a final cigar on the porch.
"What's the matter with her?" Christopher asked.
Dunbar told him, "She can't get well."
III
Anne, getting ready for bed, on the evening of Christopher's arrival,
felt unaccountably tired. His presence had been, perhaps, a bit
over-stimulating. It was good to have him back. She scarcely dared admit
to herself how good. After dinner she and Ridgeley and Christopher had
walked down to the grove of birches. There had been a new moon, and she
and Ridgeley had sat on the stone bench with Christopher at their feet.
She had leaned her head against her husband's shoulder, and he had put
his arm about her in the dark and had drawn her to him. He was rarely
demonstrative, and his tenderness had to-night for some reason hurt her.
She had learned to do without it.
She had talked very little, but Christopher had talked a great deal. She
had been content to listen. He really told such wonderful things--he
gave her to-night the full story of her silver beads, and how they had
been filched from an ancient temple--and he had bought them from the
thief. "Until I saw you wear them, I always had a feeling that they
ought to go back to the temple--to the god who had perhaps worn them for
a thousand years. If I had known which god, I might have carried them
back. But the thief wouldn't tell me."
"It would have done no good to carry them back," Ridgeley had said, "and
they are nice for Anne." His big hand had patted his wife's shoulder.
"Oh," Christopher had been eager, "I want you to hear those temple bells
some day, Anne. Why won't you take her, Dunbar? Next winter--drop your
work, and we'll all go--"
"I've a fat chance of going."
"Haven't you made money enough?"
"It isn't money. You know that. But my patients would set up a howl--"
"Let 'em howl. You've got a life of your own to live, and so has Anne."
Dunbar had hesitated for a moment--then, "Anne's better off here."
Anne, thinking of these things as she got out of her dinner dress and
into a sheer negligee of lace and faint blue, wondered why Ridgeley
should think she was better off. She wanted to see the things of which
Christopher had told her--to hear the temple bells in the dusk--the beat
of the tom-tom on white nights.
She stood at the window looking out at the moon. She decided that she
could not sleep. She would go down and get a book that she had left on
the table. The men were out-of-doors, on the porch; she heard the murmur
of their voices.
The voices were distinct as she stood in the library, and Christopher's
words came to her, "What's the matter with Anne?"
Then her husband's technical explanation, the scientific name which
meant nothing to her, then the crashing climax, "She can't get well."
She gave a quick cry, and when the men got into the room, she was
crumpled up on the floor.
Her husband reached her first. "My dear," he said, "you heard?"
"Yes. Do you mean that I am--going to die, Ridgeley?"
There was, of course, no way out of it. "It means, my dear, that I've
got to take awfully good care of you. Your heart is bad."
Christopher interposed. "People live for years with a heart like that."
But her eyes sought her husband's. "How long do they live?"
"Many months--perhaps years--without excitement--"
This then had been the reason for his tenderness. He had known that she
was going to die, and was sorry. But for ten years she had wanted what
he might have given her--what he couldn't give her now--life as she had
dreamed of it.
She drew a quivering breath--"It isn't quite fair--is it?"
It didn't seem fair. The two doctors had faced much unfairness of the
kind of which she complained. But it was the first time that, for either
of them, it had come so close.
They had little comfort to give her, although they attempted certain
platitudes, and presently Ridgeley carried her to her room.
IV
She insisted the next morning on going to the circus with Christopher.
She had not slept well, and there were shadows under her eyes. The
physician in Christopher warred with the man. "You ought to rest," he
said at breakfast. Dunbar had gone to New York in accordance with his
usual schedule. There were other lives to think of; and Anne, when he
had looked in upon her that morning, had seemed almost shockingly
callous.
"No, I don't want to stay in bed, Ridgeley. I am going to the circus. I
shall follow your prescription--to eat and drink and be merry--"
"I don't think I have put it quite that way, Anne."
"You have. Quite. 'Death is death and life is life--so make the most of
it.'"
Perhaps she was cruel. But he knew, too, that she was afraid. "My dear,"
he said gently, "if you can get any comfort out of your own ideas, it
might be better."
"But you believe they are just my own ideas--you don't believe they are
true?"
"I should like to think they were true."
"You ought to rest," said Christopher at the breakfast table.
"I ought not. There are to be no more oughts--ever--"
He nodded as if he understood, leaning elbows on the table.
"I am going to pack the days full"--she went on. "Why not? I shall have
only a few months--and then--annihilation--" She flung her question
across the table. "You believe that, don't you?"
He evaded. "We sleep--'perchance to dream.'"
"I don't want to dream. They might be horrid dreams--"
And then Jeanette came down, and poured their coffee, and asked about
the news in the morning paper.
Dressed for her trip to the circus, Anne looked like a girl in her
teens--white skirt and short green coat--stout sports shoes and white
hat. She wore her silver beads, and Christopher said, "I'm not sure that
I would if I were you."
"Why not?"
"In such a crowd."
But she kept them on.
They motored to the circus grounds, and came in out of the white glare
to the cool dimness of the tent as if they had dived from the sun-bright
surface of the sea. But there the resemblance ceased. Here was no
silence, but blatant noise--roar and chatter and shriek, the beat of the
tom-tom, the thin piping of a flute--the crash of a band. But it was the
thin piping which Christopher followed, guiding Anne with his hand on
her arm.
Following the plaintive note, they came at last to the snake-charmer--an
old man in a white turban. The snakes were in a covered basket. He sat
with his feet under him and piped.
Christopher spoke to him in a strange tongue. The piping broke off
abruptly and the man answered with eagerness. There was a quick
interchange of phrases.
"I know his village," Christopher said; "he is going to show you his
snakes."
A crowd gathered, but the snake-charmer saw only the big man who had
spoken to his homesick heart, and the girl with the silver beads. He
knew another girl who had had a string of beads like that--and they had
brought her luck--a dark-skinned girl, his daughter. Her husband had
bestowed the beads on her marriage night, and her first child had been a
son.
He put the thin reed to his lips, and blew upon it. The snakes lifted
their heads. He drew them up and out of the basket, and put them through
their fantastic paces. Then he laid aside his pipe, shut them in their
basket, and spoke to Christopher.
"He says that no evil can teach you while you wear the beads,"
Christopher told Anne.
The old man, with his eyes on her intent face, spoke again. "What you
think is evil--cannot be evil," Christopher interpreted. "The gods know
best."
They moved toward the inner tent.
"Are you tired?" Christopher asked. "We don't have to stay."
"I want to stay," and so they went in, and presently with a blare of
trumpets the great parade began. They looked down on men and women in
Roman chariots, men on horseback, women on horseback, on elephants, on
camels--painted ladies in howdahs, painted ladies in sedan
chairs--Cleopatra, Pompadour--history reduced to pantomime, color
imposed upon color, glitter upon glitter, the beat of the tom-tom, the
crash of the band, the thin piping, as the white-turbaned snake-charmer
showed in the press of the crowd.
Christopher's eyes went to Anne. She was leaning forward, one hand
clasping the silver beads. He would have given much to know what was in
her mind. How little she was and how young. And how he wanted to get her
away from the thing which hung suspended over her like a keen-edged
sword.
But to get her away--how? He could never get her away from her thoughts.
Unless....
Suddenly he heard her laughing. Two clowns were performing with a lot of
little dogs. One of the dogs was a poodle who played the fool. "What a
darling," Anne was saying.
There was more than they could look at--each ring seemed a separate
circus--one had to have more than a single pair of eyes. Christopher was
blind to it all--except when Anne insisted, "Look--look!"
Six acrobats were in the ring--four men and two women. Their tights were
of a clear shimmering blue, with silver trunks. One could not tell the
women from the men, except by their curled heads, and their smaller
stature. They were strong, wholesome, healthy. Christopher knew the
quality of that health--hearts that pumped like machines--obedient
muscles under satin skins. One of the women whirled in a series of
handsprings, like a blue balloon--her body as fluid as quicksilver. If
he could only borrow one-tenth of that endurance for Anne--he might keep
her for years.
Then came Pantaloon, and Harlequin and Columbine. The old man was funny,
but the youth and the girl were exquisite--he, diamond-spangled and lean
as a lizard, she in tulle skirts and wreath of flowers. They did all the
old tricks of masks and slapping sticks, of pursuit and retreat, but
they did them so beautifully that Anne and Christopher sat
spellbound--what they were seeing was not two clever actors on a sawdust
stage, but love in its springtime--girl and boy--dreams, rapture,
radiance.
Then, in a moment, Columbine was dead, and Harlequin wept over
her--frost had killed the flower--love and life were at an end.
Christopher was drawing deep breaths. Anne was tense. But
now--Columbine was on her feet, and Harlequin was blowing kisses to the
audience!
"Let's get out of this," Christopher said, almost roughly, and led Anne
down the steps and into the almost deserted outer tent. They looked for
the snake-charmer, but he was gone. "Eating rice somewhere or saying his
prayers," Christopher surmised.
"How could he know about the gods?" Anne asked, as they drove home.
"They know a great deal--these old men of the East," Christopher told
her, and talked for the rest of the way about the strange people among