Anne Austin

“ Carnival routine had already become an old story to Sally; she no longer minded the curious stares of villagers, the crude advances of dressed-up young male “rubes.” The glamor had worn off, but in its place had come a deep contentment and a sympathetic understanding, born on that happy Sunday when the relaxed carnival family had shown her its heart and hopes. She was glad to be one of them, to be earning her living by giving entertainment and happiness—fake though her crystal-gazing was—to thousands of people whose lives were blighted with monotony. ”

“ Sally flushed angrily and struggled to rise, but David held her back. “You’ll have to go with her, darling. Remember how you’ve always wanted a mother? You have one now, and she wants you with her, wants to make up to you for all you’ve missed.”
As only mute rebellion answered him, he wisely changed his tactics: “Do you think you could ever be really happy, darling, knowing that you had hurt your mother, cheated her of the child for whom she has grieved all these years? She’ll never have another child, Sally, and she needs you as much as you need her.” ”

“ Hope you have a good time!”
“Goodby, Sal-lee! Write me a letter, Sal-lee!” “Goodby, goodby!”
Sally, waving her Sunday handkerchief, craned her neck for a last sight of those blue-and-white-ginghamed little girls, the only playmates and friends she had in the world. There were tears in her eyes, and, queerly, for she thought she hated the Home, a stab of homesickness shooting through her heart. How safe they were, there in the playground pen! How simple and sheltered life was in the Home, after all! Suddenly she knew, somehow, that it was the last time she would ever see it, or the children. ”

“ She would never forgive us, Sally, if I took you away and made you live on what I can earn as a farmer, and she would be right not to forgive. I would not forgive myself, and after awhile you’d be unhappy, too, remembering all that you had lost, including a mother who adores you. Goodby, Sally. David.”
She was so quiet, so white at supper that Grant Proctor, who was already in love with her, begged her to let him give her a drink from his pocket flask, but she refused, scarcely knowing what he had said to her. Once she caught her mother’s eyes, and shivered at the anxiety and reproach in them. ”

“ As the miles sped away Carson seemed to feel the need of impressing upon her the fact that her summer was not to be one of unalloyed pleasure. He sketched the life of the farm, her own work upon it, as if to prepare her for the worst. “My wife’s got the reputation of being a hard woman,” he told her confidentially. “But she’s a good woman, good clean through. She works her fingers to the bone, and she can’t abide a lazy, trifling girl around the place. You work hard, Sally, and speak nice and respectful-like, and you two’ll get on, I warrant.” ”

“ The last week, except for the storm, had been an excellent one; money was free, spirits high. Even Mrs. Bybee, hovering like a mother hen over David, was good-natured, inclined to reminisce and give advice. Sally, whose talent for exquisite darning had been discovered by the women and girls, sat on the edge of David’s berth, her lap full of flesh and beige and gun metal silk stockings, her needle flying busily, her lips curved with a smile of pure delight, as she listened to the surge of laughter and song and talk. ”

“ And the breeze rustled through them, bringing to the beauty-drunk little girl a cargo of mingled odors of earth, ripe fruit and greenness thrusting up from the moist embrace of the ground to the kiss of the sun.
“Let’s sit here on the ground and watch the moon come up,” David suggested, his voice hushed with the wonder of the night and of the beauty that lay about them. “The earth is soft, and dry from the sun. It won’t soil your pretty dress.”
Sally obeyed, locking her slender knees with her hands and resting her chin upon them. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ Did he really love her—a pathetic, immature girl from an orphanage, a girl who had been nothing but a responsibility and a source of dire trouble to him since he had first met and championed her on the Carson farm?
Her old feeling of inferiority rose like nausea in her throat. Life in an orphanage is not calculated to give a girl faith in her own beauty and charm. No one, until David’s teasing eyes had rested on her, had thought her beautiful. ”

“ Enid Barr laughed, but a bright flush of pleasure spread over her fair face. “One has to do something with ‘much moneys,’ doesn’t one? Listen, Princess Lalla, if that is really your name: prove to me you are a real crystal-gazer! Tell me something I’d give almost anything to know—” She leaned forward tensely, her violet-blue eyes darkening with excitement and appeal until they were almost the color of Sally’s.
“And what’s that, Enid?” a mocking, amused voice inquired. “Do you want to know whether I really love you? How can you ask! Of course I do!” ”

“ The terrified audience milled like stampeded cattle, choking up both exits of the tent, that leading out into the midway, and the flap at the back of the tent through which performers passed in and out between shows. At each exit the fear-crazed carnival visitors were assaulted by a dazing impact of wind and hail and rain, driven back into the tent.
Sally was fighting her way toward the “alley” exit, her frail, small body hurling itself futilely against men who had lost all thought of chivalry, knew only that death threatened. ”

“ Sally reflected sadly, dusting around nutmeg over the thickly sugared apples, “if I could stay on here, Mrs. Carson would want to adopt me. But of course Pearl and Mr. Carson wouldn’t let her. They hate me because David likes me and won’t marry Pearl. And I like David better than anybody in the world,” she confessed to herself, as the pink in her cheeks deepened. “But I would love to have a mother, even if it was only a ready-made mother. I wonder why some girls have everything, and others nothing? Why should Pearl have a mother who just spoils her past all enduring? ”

“ And Sally squirmed miserably, pitifully afraid that she would never measure up to the standard which her mother and Courtney Barr had set for her, knowing, too, deep in her heart, that she did not want to. For her heart had been given to a golden young god of a man, whose kingdom was the soil, and whose wife needed none of the qualities which Enid Barr was bent upon cultivating in her daughter. ”

“ But really, Sally Ford—” his voice dropped caressingly on the name, as if to remind her that he shared her secret with her—“the way you persist in misunderstanding me is very distressing.
“I’m not mocking you, my dear child! I’m mocking myself—if anyone. It recurs to me continually that this is an amazing adventure that Arthur Van Horne, of New York, Long Island and Newport is so sedulously engaged upon! To paraphrase your own delightful defense, I’m really ‘not that kind of man.’ I assure you I’m not in the habit of making love to show girls, no matter how adorable their mouths may be!” ”

“ At least there were no references to the case in either Wednesday’s or Thursday’s papers, and Sally’s heart was light with gratitude to David and Pop Bybee for having persuaded her to stick with the carnival. It was rather fun to be on exhibition, reading the fortunes of the very policemen who had been given her description and orders to “get” her—much more fun than fleeing along state roads at night and hiding in cornfields by day, hungry, exhausted, afraid of her shadow and of the more menacing shadow of the state reformatory. ”

“ For the third time that day Sally was having David Nash, the only friend she had ever made outside the orphanage, flung into her face as a sweetheart or worse. Winfield Bybee’s casual words to his wife—“Can’t you see she’s clear gone on that Dave chap of hers?”—had made her heart beat fast with a queer, suffocating kind of pleasure, a pleasure she had never before experienced in her life. Those words had somehow initiated her into young ladyhood, fraught with strange, lovely, privileges, among them the right to be “clear gone” on a man—a man like David! ”

“ Children screamed; women shrilled for help, called frantically for their offspring separated from them in that mad rush for the exits.
Sally had almost won to the alley exit when she remembered “Pitty Sing,” the midget, tiny, helpless Miss Tanner, who was paying her to carry her to and from the tent, who must even now be cowering in her baby-chair, unable even to reach the ground without assistance.
It was not quite so hard to push her way back into the center of the tent; crazed men and women offered little resistance to anyone who was so foolish as to tempt death under a collapsed tent. ”

“ Ross Willis thanked “Princess Lalla” awkwardly and dropped from the platform to the grass-stubbled ground, entirely unaware that the marvelous seeress was little Sally Ford.
Confidence and mirth welled up in Sally. She began to believe in herself as “Princess Lalla,” just as she had always more than half-believed that she was the queen or the actress whom she had impersonated in the old days so recently ended forever, when she had “play-acted” for the other orphans. ”

“ Sally saw the tell-tale tremble of Eloise’s babyish mouth, and her heart ached with desire to comfort the child. Outwardly Eloise had become exactly like all the other little girls—shy, bleating when the other little sheep bleated, obediently excited when they were excited, silent when they were silent—but underneath she was still bewildered and unreconciled to the death of her mother, the cheap little stock-company actress who had evidently adored her child and been adored in return. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ She felt that she was talking to Enid as she wrote, pleading for understanding and forgiveness from those dreaming, misty, cornflower-blue eyes:
“Mother, darling: I’m running away, to go to David. Please don’t try to stop me or bring me back, for I’ll have to run away again if you do. I’m going to marry David because I love him with all my heart and because he is the only man I could ever marry without causing you shame. He already knows the truth, and it made no difference in his love for me. You know how it was with Grant Proctor. ”

“ Pop Bybee wants us all in the privilege car,” a carnival employe shouted, running down the sleeping car and pausing only to thrust a hand into each berth, like a Pullman porter awakening its passengers.
But Sally was already dressing, getting her dress on backward and sobbing with futile rage at the time lost in reversing it. When she was scrambling out of her upper berth, a tiny hand reached out of the lower and tugged at her foot.
“Don’t forget me, Sally,” the midget commanded sharply. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t take on so! You’ll make yourself sick, crying like that. ”

“ On Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning before show time the two wandered about the village to which the carnival had journeyed the night before. It was heavenly to be able to walk the streets unafraid. David walked with head high, shoulders squared, unafraid to look any man in the face, and Sally could have cried with joy that he was free again, for Bybee had assured them that there was not the slightest chance of extradition on the charges which still stood against the two in their native state. ”

“ Clara, the nine-year-old orphan, stuck out her tongue as the white skirt swished through the door, then turned upon Sally, her little face sharp and ugly with hatred.
“Mean old thing! Always buttin’ in! Can’t let us have no fun at all! Some other kid’ll find Thelma’s sapphire and keep it offen her—”
“It isn’t a sapphire,” Sally said dully, her brush beginning to describe new semi-circles on the pine floor. “It’s like she said—just a piece of broken old bottle. And she said she’d try to find you a doll, Thelma.” ”

“ When the show was over, she joined him proudly, her little brown-painted hands clinging to his arm, her face uplifted adoringly to his, as she pattered at his side on a tour of the midway. It was then that her dreams came true. At last she was “doing the carnival” with a “boy friend,” like other girls. And David played up magnificently, buying her hot dogs, salt water taffy, red lemonade—the two of them drinking out of twin straws from the same glass. ”

“ I think it has made it harder for me to find that underneath the new surface you are still Sally Ford. But they’ll change the core of you almost as rapidly as they have remade the surface of you into a society beauty. And after you’re changed all through you’ll be glad I went away. I’ll carry my own Sally in my heart always, and the new Sally Barr will fall in love with the splendid young son of some old family, marry him and make her mother very happy. ”