those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks from the plank road. the eight big shows combined had arrived in the gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the fair ground being too wet, the performance would "show" in the pump pasture, beyond the mill. there was to be no evening amusement. it was a wait between trains that conferred the circus on friendship at all.
half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed into unknown ground. who in the vicinity of the village had not known the pump pasture of old? haunted of jerseys and guernseys and orioles, it had lain expressionless as the hills,[pg 63] for as long as memory. when in spring, "where you goin'? don't you go far in the hot sun!" from friendship mothers was answered by, "we're just goin' up to the pump pasture for vi'lets" from friendship young, no more was to be said. the pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful newfoundland dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and night-in-a-trundle-bed.
and lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. the great elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing—these gave to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar with more than one had suspected.
"ain't it the divil?" demanded timothy toplady, jr., ecstatically, as the glory of the scene burst upon him.
liva vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up at his brown adam's apple—she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as her sweetheart's face—and rejoined:—
"oh, timmie! ain't it just what you might say great?"
"you'd better believe," said timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."
he looked down in her face with a lifting of [pg 64]eyebrows and an honest fatuity of mouth. liva vesey knew the look—without ever having met it squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her head, displaying to timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver locket chain. at which timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who is unwillingly having second thoughts.
"my!" he said.
they drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. the sunny slope was dotted with other lunchers. the look of it all was very gay, partly because the trees were in june green, and among them windmills were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very perishable.
the others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree, making elaborate detours to avoid it. at which liva flushed, pretending not to notice; and timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she wished that she had not come with him. however, timothy[pg 65] never dared look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and locket. and then he was miserable.
it was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials, could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. three months earlier, liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her locket. up to that time the only personality in which timothy had ever indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and their father's eyes, and of timothy's own, and "our eyes match, mine and yours," he had blurted out, crimson. and yet, even on these terms, he had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. how much more now when he was infinitely nearer to her? for with the long spring evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the vesey farm, matters had so far advanced with timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a green measuring-worm from liva's throat. every time he looked at her throat he thought of that worm with rapture. but also every time he looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. and on circus day, if the oracles[pg 66] seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a banished man.
if only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately over lunch. if only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find courage. but she never did mention it. and the talk ran now:—
"would you ever, ever think this was the pump pasture?" from liva.
"no, you wouldn't, would you? it don't look the same, does it? you'd think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? ain't it differ'nt?"
"did you count the elephants?"
"i bet i did. didn't you? ten, wa'n't it? did you count the cages? neither did i. and they was too many of 'em shut up. i don't know whether it's much of a circus or not—" with gloomy superiority—"they not bein' any calliope, so."
"a good many cute fellows in the band," observed liva. for liva would have teased a bit if timothy would have teased too. but timothy replied in mere misery:—
"you can't tell much about these circus men, liva. they're apt to be the kind that carouse around. i guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell way."
[pg 67]
"oh, i don't know," said liva.
then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of hesitation following a faux pas, save that this silence was longer, and was terminated by liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize how wholly delightful everything was.
"my!" said timothy, finally. "you wouldn't think this was the pump pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."
"that's so," liva said. "you wouldn't."
it was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.
while liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their basket, timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and gloomed at the locket. it was then that miggy and peter passed them and the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of lovers who look on and understand other lovers. then timothy's look went back to liva. liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. moreover, the locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were her locket and as if timothy had no share in it.
"oh," cried liva, "timmie! that was the lion roared. did you hear?"
[pg 68]
timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.
"wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.
timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.
"what you so glum about, timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him fleetingly.
timothy flushed to the line of his hair.
"gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt i can't get over it."
"yes," said liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"
before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent. they went incuriously past the snake show, the eats-'em-alive show, and the eastern vaudeville. but hard by the red wagon where tickets were sold timothy halted spellbound. what he had heard was:—
"types. types. right this way and in this direction for types. no, ladies, and no, gents: not tin-types. but photo-types. photographs put up in tintype style at tintype price. three for a quarter. the fourth of a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. elegant pictures, elegant finish, refined, up-to-date. of yourself, gents, of yourself. or of any one you see around you. and while you wait."
timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:—
[pg 69]
"liva," he begged, "come on. you."
when she understood and when timothy saw the momentary abashment in her eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. but the very next moment she was far more adorable.
"not unless you will, timmie," she said, "and trade."
he followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a throne of empire. and perhaps it was. for presently timothy had in his pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. but that was not all. when she thanked him she had met his eyes. and he thought—oh, no matter what he thought. but it was as if there were established a throne of empire with timothy lord of his world.
then they stepped along the green way of the pump pasture and they entered the animal tent, and strange things closed about them. there underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. and three feet above, foregathered from the antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. the bright[pg 70] wings of unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained in a stately central line along the clover—it was certain, one would have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind. that the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its influence would be breathed on all who entered there. already liva and timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent of the field in another world. or had that world begun at the door of the stuffy little phototype tent?
it was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. timothy stood grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. dare he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket—dare he—dare he——
he turned to look at her. oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his elbow! her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were parted, her eyes that matched timothy's were alight; but there was always in timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that liva's could not match. he longed inexpressibly to say to her what was in his heart concerning the locket—the phototype—themselves. and liva herself was longing to say[pg 71] something about the sheer glory of the hour. so she looked up at his brown adam's apple, and,
"think, timmie," she said, "they're all in the pump pasture where nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"
"i know it—i know it!" breathed timothy fervently. "don't seem like it could be the same place, does it?"
liva barely lifted her eyes.
"it makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and turned to hurry on.
"i was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. but all that timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.
down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues—it was a wonderful progress. but it was as if liva had found something more wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped [pg 72]forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with shining eyes.
"look!" she said. "look, timmie."
she was holding a blue violet.
"in front of the tigers; it was growing!"
"why don't you give it to me?" was timothy's only answer.
she laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.
"it won't ever be the same," she said. "tigers have walked over it. my, ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"
"just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," timothy admitted.
"here we are back to the birds again," liva said, sighing.
timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at the orange and flame in the cage: her phototype and a violet—her phototype and a violet.
but all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:—
"i can't make it seem like the pump pasture to save me."
there is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike" about a circus—the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen flavour of the impending, and above all the sense of the [pg 73]untoward, which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man. liva and timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and believed it to be merely honest mirth. occasionally liva turned and peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof, for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and music and life within. and she was glad of it all, glad to be there with timothy. but all she said was:—
"oh, timmie, i hope it ain't half over yet. do you s'pose it is? when i look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."
and timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast, answered only:—
"no, i guess it'll be quite some time yet. it's a nice show. nice performance for the money, right through. ain't it?"
when at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. he left her leaning against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on the smooth silver locket. and when he drove back, and reached down a hand to draw her up to[pg 74] the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment, as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he perceived instantly that the locket was gone. oh, and at that his heart leaped up! what more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? what more natural than to divine the reality of dreams?
his trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. then he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his heart:—
"i kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. to-morrow when i go to town with the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."
liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.
"i ain't sure," she said.
"what do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.
but liva shook her head.
"i ain't sure," she said evasively, "but i don't think somehow the pump pasture'll ever be the same again."
timothy mulled that for a moment. oh, could she possibly mean because....
yet what he said was, "well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now, all right."
"yes," assented liva, "don't it?"
[pg 75]
timothy had supper at the vesey farm. it was eight o'clock and the elder veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when liva discovered that she had lost her locket.
"lost your locket!" timothy repeated. it was the first time, for all his striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence. he had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his intention. "why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it on when i left you under the cottonwood."
"you sure?" liva demanded.
"sure," timothy said earnestly; "didn't—didn't you have it off while i was gone?" he asked wistfully.
"no," liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.
when they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, timothy spoke tentatively.
"tell you what," he said. "we'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive back to the pump pasture and look."
"could we?" liva hesitated.
it was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the plank road. timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by[pg 76] her side in the warm dusk, and on her ministry. she was silent, and, for almost the first time since he had known her, timothy was silent too—as if he were giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it continually to antics of speech.
from the top of the hill they looked down on the pump pasture. it lay there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of the afternoon. just as timothy's silence was now of the pattern of dreams.
he tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open place where the fence had not yet been replaced. the turf was still soft and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. the pasture was girdled by trees—locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky, nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood made a mysterious figure on the stars. one would have said that underfoot would certainly be violets. a far light pricked out an answer to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.
"i keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said liva once.
"that's funny, so do i," he cried.
under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little banners, timothy flashed his light,[pg 77] first on tufted grass, then on red-tasselled sorrel, then—lying there as simply as if it belonged there—on liva's silver locket. she caught it from him with a little cry.
"oh," she said, "i'm so glad. oh, thank you ever so much, timmie."
he faced her for a moment.
"why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.
"why, it's the first locket i ever had!" she said in surprise. "so of course i'm glad. oh, timmie—thank you!"
"you're welcome, i'm sure," he returned stiffly.
she gave a little skipping step beside him.
"timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where the big tent was. i want to see how it'll seem."
his ill-humour was gone in a moment.
"that's what we will do!" he cried joyously.
he walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness about their feet. so they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon, of the eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. and so at last they stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to dust; and[pg 78] this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the antipodes, and where strange things had closed them round.
the influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. for that tranquil meadow, long haunted of jerseys and guernseys and orioles, expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and colour and life and the beating of wild hearts—and was it not certain that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? the field bore the semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark, it was inarticulate once more. but something was stirring there, something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps, something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in the blood.
timothy cast down his lantern and gathered liva vesey in his arms. her cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her, three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.
[pg 79]
"liva," he said, "all the time—every day—i've meant this. did you mean it, too?"
she struggled a little from him, but when he would have let her go she stood still in his arms. and then he would have her words and "did you?" he begged again. he could not hear what she said without bending close, close, and it was the sweeter for that.
"oh, timmie," she answered, "i don't know. i don't know if i did. but i do—now."
timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.
"an' be my wife?" he asked.
"an' be ..." liva assented, and the words faltered away. but they were not greatly missed.
timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. and lo, it was suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all three saying something together.
when they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden turf. and in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured and soft. it was a gay feather, and timothy took it curiously in his hand.
"see, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.
"no!" liva cried. "it's an oriole feather. one of the pasture orioles, timmie!"
"so it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it was so. he folded it away with[pg 80] the violet liva had gathered that afternoon. after all the strangeness, what he treasured most had belonged to the pasture all the time.
"liva!" he begged. "will you wear the picture—my picture—in that locket?"
"oh," she said, "timmie, i'm so sorry. the locket's one i bought cheap in the city, and it don't open."
she wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. she wondered a little, too, when on the edge of the pasture timothy stood still, looking back.
"liva!" he said, "don't the pump pasture seem differ'nt? don't it seem like another place?"
"yes," liva said, "it don't seem the same."
"liva!" timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt. it's us."
she laughed a little—softly, and very near his coat sleeve.
"i 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.
