Marm Lisa

IX

MARM LISA’S QUEST

It was not long after this conversation that the twins awoke one morning with a very frenzy of adventure upon them.  It was accompanied by a violent reaction against all the laws of God and man, and a desire to devour the tree of knowledge, fruit, limbs, and trunk, no matter at what cost.

We have no means of knowing whether there was an excess of electricity in the atmosphere, whether their youthful livers were disordered, or whether the Evil One was personally conducting the day’s exercises; judged by the light of subsequent events, all of these suppositions might easily have been true.  During the morning they so demeaned themselves that all Mistress Mary’s younger neophytes became apostates to the true faith, and went over in a body to the theory of the total depravity of unbaptized infants.

In the afternoon they did not appear, nor did Marm Lisa.  This was something that had never occurred before, save when Pacific had a certain memorable attack of mumps that would have carried off any child who was fitted for a better world, or one who was especially beloved.

‘Do you suppose anything is wrong?’ asked Mary nervously.

‘Of course not,’ said Edith.  ‘I remember seeing Lisa in the playground at one o’clock, but my impression is that she was alone, and stayed only a moment.  At any rate, I was very busy and did not speak to her.  Mrs. Grubb has probably taken the twins to have their hair cut, or something of that sort.’

‘What a ridiculous suggestion!’ exclaimed Rhoda.  ‘You know perfectly well that Mrs. Grubb would never think of cutting their hair, if it swept the earth!  She may possibly have taken them to join a band; they must be getting to a proper age for membership.  At any rate, I will call there and inquire, on my way home, although I can never talk to Mrs. Grubb two minutes without wanting to shake her.’

Rhoda made her promised visit, but the house was closed and the neighbours knew nothing of the whereabouts of the children beyond the fact that Mrs. Grubb was seen talking to them as she went into the yard, a little after twelve o’clock.  Rhoda naturally concluded, therefore, that Edith’s supposition must be correct, and that Mrs. Grubb had for once indulged in a family excursion.

Such was not the case, however.  After luncheon, Marm Lisa had washed the twins’ hands and faces in the back-yard as usual, and left them for an instant to get a towel from the kitchen.  When she returned, she looked blankly about, for there was no sign of the two dripping faces and the uplifted streaming hands.  They had a playful habit of hiding from her, knowing that in no other way could they make her so unhappy; so she stood still for some moments, calling them, at first sharply, then piteously, but with no result.  She ran to the front gate; it was closed; the rope-fastening was out of reach, and plainly too complicated even for their preternatural powers.  She hurried back to the house, and searched every room in a bewildered sort of fashion, finding nothing.  As she came out again, her eye caught sight of a kitchen chair in the corner of the yard.  They had climbed the picket fence, then.  Yes; Atlantic, while availing himself of its unassuming aid, had left a clue in a fragment of his trousers.  She opened the gate, and ran breathlessly along the streets to that Garden of Eden where joy had always hitherto awaited her.  Some instinct of fear or secrecy led her to go quietly through all the rooms and search the playground without telling any one of her trouble.  That accomplished fruitlessly, she fled home again, in the vain hope of finding the children in some accustomed haunt overlooked in her first search.  She began to be thoroughly alarmed now, and thoroughly confused.  With twitching hands and nervous shaking of the head, she hurried through the vacant rooms, growing more and more aimless in her quest.  She climbed on a tall bureau and looked in a tiny medicine cupboard; then under the benches and behind the charts in the parlour; even under the kitchen sink, among the pots and pans, and in the stove, where she poked tremulously among the ashes.  Her newfound wit seemed temporarily to have deserted her, and she was a pitiable thing as she wandered about, her breath coming in long-drawn sighs, with now and then a half-stifled sob.

Suddenly she darted into the street again.  Perhaps they had followed their aunt Cora.  Distance had no place in her terror-stricken heart.  She traversed block after block, street after street, until she reached Pocahontas Hall, a building and locality she knew well.  She crept softly up the main stairs, and from the landing slipped into the gallery above.  Mrs. Grubb sat in the centre of the stage, with a glass of water, a bouquet of roses, and a bundle of papers and tracts on the table by her side.  In the audience were twenty or thirty women and a dozen men, their laps filled, and their pockets bulging, with propaganda.  They stood at intervals to ask superfluous or unanswerable questions, upon which Mrs. Grubb would rise and reply, with cheeks growing pink and pinker, with pleasant smile and gracious manner, and a voice fairly surcharged with conviction.  Most of the ladies took notes, and a girl with a receding chin was seated at a small table in front of the platform, making a stenographic report.

All this Marm Lisa saw, but her eyes rested on nothing she longed to see.  Mrs. Grubb’s lecture voice rose and fell melodiously, floating up to her balcony heights in a kind of echo that held the tone, but not the words.  The voice made her drowsy, for she was already worn out with emotion, but she roused herself with an effort, and stole down the stairs to wander into the street again.  Ah, there was an idea!  The coat-shop!  Why had she not thought of it before?

The coat-shop was a sort of clothing manufactory on a small scale, a tall, narrow building four stories high, where she had often gone with Atlantic and Pacific.  There were sewing-machines on the ground-floor, the cutters and pressers worked in the middle stories, and at the top were the finishers.  It was neither an extensive nor an exciting establishment, and its only fascination lay in the fact that the workwomen screamed with laughter at the twins’ conversation, and after leading them to their utmost length, teasing and goading them into a towering passion, would stuff them with nuts or dates or cheap sweetmeats.  The coat-shop was two or three miles from the hall, and it was closing time and quite dark when Lisa arrived.  She came out of the door after having looked vainly in every room, and sat down dejectedly in the entrance, with her weary head leaning against the wall.  There was but a moment’s respite for her, for the manager came out of his office, and, stumbling over her in the dusk, took her by the shoulders and pushed her into the street with an oath.

‘Go and sit on your own doorstep, can’t you?’ he muttered, ‘and not make me break my legs over you!’

She was too spent to run any further.  She dragged her heavy feet along slowly, almost unconsciously, neither knowing nor caring whither they led her.  Home she could not, dared not go, bearing that heavy burden of remorse!  Mrs. Grubb would ask for Atlantic and Pacific, and then what would become of her?  Mr. Grubb would want to give Pacific her milk.  No, Mr. Grubb was dead.  There! she hadn’t looked in the perambulator.  No, there wasn’t any perambulator.  That was dead, too, and gone away with Mr. Grubb.  There used to be babies, two babies, in the perambulator.  What had become of them?  Were they lost, too?  And the umbrella that she used to hold until her arm ached, and the poor, pale, weeping mother always lying on a bed,—were they all gone together?  Her head buzzed with worrying, unrelated thoughts, so that she put up her hands and held it in place on her shoulders as she shuffled wearily along.  A heavy, dripping mist began to gather and fall, and she shivered in the dampness, huddling herself together and leaning against the houses for a shelter.  She sat down on the curb-stone and tried to think, staring haggardly at the sign on the corner fruit-shop.  In that moment she suddenly forgot the reason of her search.  She had lost—what?  She could not go home to Eden Place, but why?  Oh yes!  It came to her now: there was something about a perambulator, but it all seemed vague to her.  Suddenly a lamplighter put his ladder against a post in front of her, and, climbing up nimbly, lighted the gas-jet inside of the glass frame.  It shone full on a flight of broad steps, a picture so much a part of her life-dream that she would go up to the very gate of heaven with its lines burned into her heart and brain.

She crept up and turned the knob of the outer door.  It was unlocked, and she stole into the inner room, the Paradise, place of joy and sweet content, heart’s rest, soul’s heaven, love’s own abode.  The very atmosphere soothed her.  She heard the janitress clatter through the halls, lock the door, and descend the stairs to her own rooms in the basement.  The light from the street lamps shone in at the two end windows, so that the room was not in utter darkness.  She would lie down here and die with Mr. Grubb and the babies and the umbrella.  Atlantic and Pacific would be sure to come back; nobody who had ever known it could live without this place.  Miss Mary would find them.  She would make everything right.  The mere thought of Mistress Mary brought a strange peace into poor Lisa’s over-wrought, distraught mind.

She opened the closet door.  It was as dainty and neat as Mistress Mary herself, and the mere sight of it bred order in Lisa’s thoughts.  On the top of a pile of envelopes lay the sewing-picture that Atlantic had spoiled that day.  It had been a black morning, and the bit of cardboard was torn and soiled and bent.  Lisa looked at it with a maternal and a prophetic eye.  She could see the firm line of Rhoda’s lip as she bore down upon the destructive urchin.  She could almost hear the bright challenging tone as Rhoda would say: ‘Now, Atlantic, let us see what we can do!  Cut off the chewed edges with these scissors, paste these thin pieces of paper over the torn places, and rub the card with this crust of bread.  A new one?  Certainly not, my young friend!’

Lisa took the poor little object in her hand, and, seeing Mistress Mary’s white apron, pressed her cheek against it in a transport of tenderness and hung it over her arm.  Just then she caught sight of the clay bird’s-nest that Pacific had modelled—such a lovely bird’s-nest that it had been kept for the cabinet.  She carried her treasures over to the old-fashioned lounge where the babies took their occasional nap, put them carefully in a small red chair close beside it, and then, stretching her weary length on the cushions, she kissed the smooth folds of the apron, and clasped it in her arms.

Mistress Mary would come soon.  She would come in her cloud of white, and her steel fillet would gleam and shine when the sunshine fell upon it, and make star-rays and moonbeams and lightning-flashes; and the tiny points would twinkle and wink and laugh and blink whenever she turned her head.  She would smile, and everything would suddenly be clear; she would speak, and the weary buzzing of windmills in the brain would be hushed.  Under her touch the darkness and heaviness would vanish, and there would be no more night there—no more night.

As these healing visions stole upon Marm Lisa, the torture and the anguish, the long hours of bewilderment, faded little by little, little by little, till at length a blessed sleep crept over her eyelids, blotting into a merciful nothingness the terror and the misery of the day.

X

THE TWINS JOIN THE CELESTIALS

Meanwhile, Atlantic and Pacific had been enjoying themselves even unto the verge of delirium.  In the course of their wanderings they had come upon a Chinaman bearing aloft a huge red silken banner crowned by a badger’s tail.  Everything young that had two legs was following him, and they joined the noble army of followers.  As they went on, other Chinamen with other banners came from the side-alleys, and all at once the small procession thus formed turned a corner and came upon the parent body, a sight that fairly stunned them by its Oriental magnificence.  It was the four thousandth anniversary of the birth of Yeong Wo, had the children realised it (and that may have been the reason that they awoke in a fever of excitement)—Yeong Wo, statesman, philanthropist, philosopher, and poet; and the great day had been chosen to dedicate the new temple and install in it a new joss, and to exhibit a monster dragon just arrived from China.  The joss had been sitting in solemn state in his sanctum sanctorum for a week, while the priests appeased him hourly with plenteous libations of rice brandy, sacrifices of snow-white pigeons, and offerings of varnished pork.  Clouds of incense had regaled his expansive mahogany nostrils, while his ears of ivory inlaid with gold and bronze had been stimulated with the ceaseless clashing of gongs and wailings of Chinese fiddles.  Such homage and such worship would have touched a heart of stone, and that of the joss was penetrable sandalwood; so as the days of preparation wore away the smile on the teakwood lips of the idol certainly became more propitious.  This was greatly to the satisfaction of the augurs and the high priest; for a mighty joss is not always in a sunny humour on feast-days, and to parade a sulky god through the streets is a very depressing ceremony, foretelling to the initiated a season of dire misfortune.  So his godship smiled and shook his plume of peacock feathers benignantly on Yeong Wo’s birthday, and therefore the pageant in which Atlantic and Pacific bore a part was more gorgeous than anything that ever took place out of the Flowery Kingdom itself.

Fortune smiled upon the naughty creatures at the very outset, for Pacific picked up a stick of candy in the street, and gave half of it to a pretty Chinese maiden whose name in English would have been Spring Blossom, and who looked, in any language, like a tropical flower, in her gown of blue-and-gold-embroidered satin and the sheaf of tiny fans in her glossy black hair.  Spring Blossom accepted the gift with enthusiasm, since a sweet tooth is not a matter of nationality, and ran immediately to tell her mother, a childish instinct also of universal distribution.  She climbed, as nimbly as her queer little shoes would permit, a flight of narrow steps leading to a balcony; while the twins followed close at her heels, and wedged their way through a forest of Mongolian legs till they reached the front, where they peeped through the spaces of the railings with Spring Blossom, Fairy Foot, Dewy Rose, and other Celestial babies, quite overlooked in the crowd and excitement and jollity.  Such a very riot of confusion there was, it seemed as if Confucius might have originally spelled his name with an s in the middle; for every window was black with pigtailed highbinders, cobblers, pork butchers, and pawnbrokers.  The narrow streets and alleys became one seething mass of Asiatic humanity; while the painted belles came out on their balconies like butterflies, sitting among a wealth of gaudy paper flowers that looked pale in comparison with the daubs of vermilion on their cheeks and the rainbow colours of their silken tunics.

At last the pageant had gathered itself together, and came into full view in all its magnificence.  There were pagodas in teakwood inlaid with gold; and resting on ebony poles, and behind them, on a very tame Rosinante decked with leopard skins and gold bullion fringes, a Chinese maiden dressed to represent a queen of Celestial mythology.  Then came more pagodas, and companies of standard-bearers in lavender tunics, red sashes, green and orange leggings and slippers; more and more splendid banners, painted with dragons sprawling in distressed attitudes; litters containing minor gods and the paraphernalia they were accustomed to need on a journey like this; more litters bearing Chinese orchestras, gongs going at full blast, fiddles squeaking, drums rumbling, trumpets shrieking, cymbals clashing,—just the sort of Babel that the twins adored.

And now came the chariot and throne of the great joss himself, and just behind him a riderless bay horse, intended for his imperial convenience should he tire of being swayed about on the shoulders of his twelve bearers, and elect to change his method of conveyance.  Behind this honoured steed came a mammoth rock-cod in a pagoda of his own, and then, heralded by a fusilade of fire-crackers, the new dragon itself, stretching and wriggling its monster length through one entire block.  A swarm of men cleared the way for it, gesticulating like madmen in their zeal to get swimming-room for the sacred monster.  Never before in her brief existence had Pacific Simonson been afraid of anything, but if she had been in the street, and had so much as caught the wink of the dragon’s eye, or a wave of its consecrated fin, she would have dropped senseless to the earth; as it was, she turned her back to the procession, and, embracing with terror-stricken fervour the legs of the Chinaman standing behind her, made up her mind to be a better girl in the future.  The monster was borne by seventy-four coolies who furnished legs for each of the seventy-four joints of its body, while another concealed in its head tossed it wildly about.  Little pigtailed boys shrieked as they looked at its gaping mouth that would have shamed a man-eating shark, at the huge locomotive headlights that served for its various sets of eyes, at the horns made of barber poles, and the moustache of twisted hogshead hoops.  Behind this baleful creature came other smaller ones, and more flags, and litters with sacrificial offerings, and more musicians, till all disappeared in the distance, and the crowd surged in the direction of the temple.

There was no such good fortune for the twins as an entrance into this holy of holies, for it held comparatively few besides the dignitaries, aristocrats, and wealthy merchants of the colony; but there was still ample material for entertainment, and they paid no heed to the going down of the sun.  Why should they, indeed, when there were fascinating opium dens standing hospitably open, where they could have the excitement of entrance even if it were followed by immediate ejectment?  As it grew darker, the scene grew more weird and fairylike, for the scarlet, orange, and blue lanterns began to gleam one by one in the narrow doorways, and from the shadowy corners of the rooms behind them.  In every shop were tables laden with Chinese delicacies,—fish, flesh, fowl, tea, rice, whisky, lichee nuts, preserved limes, ginger, and other sweetmeats; all of which, when not proffered, could be easily purloined, for there was no spirit of parsimony or hostility afloat in the air.  In cubby-holes back of the counters, behind the stoves, wherever they could find room for a table, groups of moon-eyed men began to congregate for their nightly game of fan-tan, some of the players and onlookers smoking, while others chewed lengths of peeled sugar-cane.

In the midst of festivities like these the twins would have gone on from bliss to bliss without consciousness of time or place, had not hunger suddenly descended upon them and sleep begun to tug at their eyelids, changing in a trice their joy into sorrow and their mirth into mourning.  Not that they were troubled with any doubts, fears, or perplexities.  True, they had wandered away from Eden Place, and had not the slightest idea of their whereabouts.  If they had been a couple of babes in a wood, or any two respectable lost children of romance, memories of lullabies and prayers at mother’s knee would have precipitated them at this juncture into floods of tears; but home to them was simply supper and bed.  The situation did not seem complex to their minds; the only plan was, of course, to howl, and to do it thoroughly,—stand in a corner of the market-place, and howl in such a manner that there could be no mistake as to the significance of the proceeding; when the crowd collected,—for naturally a crowd would collect,—simply demand supper and bed, no matter what supper nor which bed; eat the first, lie down in the second, and there you are!  If the twins had been older and more experienced, they would have known that people occasionally do demand the necessities of life without receiving them; but in that case they would also have known that such a misfortune would never fall upon a couple of lost children who confide their woes to the public.  There was no preconcerted plan between them, no system.  They acted without invention, premonition, or reflection.  It was their habit to scream, while holding the breath as long as possible, whenever the universe was unfriendly, and particularly when Nature asserted herself in any way; it was a curious fact that they resented the intervention of Nature and Providence with just as much energy as they did the discipline of their caretakers.  They screamed now, the moment that the entertainment palled and they could not keep their eyes open without effort; and never had they been more successful in holding their breath and growing black in the face; indeed, Pacific, in the midst of her performance, said to Atlantic, ‘Yours is purple, how is mine?’

A crowd did gather, inevitably, for the twins’ lungs were capable of a body of tone more piercing than that of a Chinese orchestra, and the wonder is that poor Lisa did not hear them as she sat shivering on the curbstone, miles away; for it was her name with which they conjured.

The populace amused itself for a short space of time, watching the fine but misdirected zeal of the performance, and supposing that the parents of the chanting cherubs were within easy reach.  It became unpleasant after a while, however, and a policeman, inquiring into the matter, marched the two dirty, weary little protestants off to a station near by,—a march nearly as difficult and bloody as Sherman’s memorable ‘march to the sea’; for the children associated nothing so pleasant as supper and bed with a blue-coated, brass-buttoned person, and resisted his well-meant advances with might and main, and tooth and nail.

The policeman was at last obliged to confine himself to Atlantic, and called a brother-in-arms to take charge of Pacific.  He was a man who had achieved distinction in putting down railroad riots, so he was well calculated for the task, although he was somewhat embarrassed by the laughter of the bystanders when his comrade called out to him, ‘Take your club, Mike, but don’t use firearms unless your life’s in danger!’

The station reached, the usual examination took place.  Atlantic never could tell the name of the street in which he lived, nor the number of the house.  Pacific could, perhaps, but would not; and it must be said, in apology for her abnormal defiance, that her mental operations were somewhat confused, owing to copious indulgence in strong tea, ginger, sugar-cane, and dried fish.  She had not been wisely approached in the first place, and she was in her sulkiest and most combative humour; in fact, when too urgently pressed for information as to her age, ancestry, and abiding-place, she told the worthy police-officer to go to a locality for which he felt utterly unsuited, after a life spent in the exaltation of virtue and the suppression of vice.  (The vocabulary of the twins was somewhat poverty-stricken in respect to the polite phrases of society, but in profanity it would have been rich for a parrot or a pirate.)  The waifs were presently given to the care of the police matron, and her advice, sought later, was to the effect that the children had better be fed and put to bed, and as little trouble expended upon them as was consistent with a Christian city government.