An Idyll of All Fools' Day — Background and Themes

"You are not at all like your uncle, are you?" she began, after a moment of this pregnant silence. Then after another moment she added absently, "he has such pleasant, easy manners!"

Antony settled his fleckless straw hat firmly upon his head and tightened his grip on his stick.

"My uncle," he began with great control, "is an estimable man. His intentions are of the best--that is to say, I have always believed them to be--but like too many others he does not always carry out his intentions. Take, for instance, this present situation. It was evidently his intention to give you (and me) a pleasurable day. It is quite obvious to me, at least, that he has failed in his intention--to a certain extent," he added politely, for he had by now talked himself into his usual superior calm. His eyes were fixed upon the tip of the young lady's parasol, some distance below him, as she sat on the brick steps of the old porch before which he stood, her slender figure leaning against a white pillar.

"Now, I have a suggestion to make," he continued, quite pleasantly by this time. "I can plainly see that my uncle's somewhat Philistine scheme for my showing you about the place is likely to bore you extremely. Let us, then, omit that part of the programme altogether. We must try to think of something that will attract you, however," Antony had by this time a fairly paternal interest in the young lady, "and if you will help me out, no doubt we can. Perhaps," he concluded tentatively, "you would really prefer to remain by yourself, and not be entertained at all?"

He paused, and as no reply appeared to be forthcoming, slowly lowered his eyes along the fluffy parasol till they reached the level of those deep-set violet ones. He could not have recognised them by their colour, however, for they were closed; the gentle rise and fall of the young lady's breast, the placid and uncharacteristic kindness of her half-smile made the reason for this closing only too obvious. She was sleeping.

Antony swallowed hard. Sheer rage choked him and his collar became intolerably tight. His fingers itched along the supple stick he carried and a longing to employ it in an absolutely unheard of manner nearly flooded him off his feet. "Where it would do the most good"--the obnoxious phrase flashed luminously across his mind.

The sudden silence had its natural effect upon the young person on the brick steps. Slowly, inquiringly, her eyelids lifted, and the peculiar, rain-washed effect of those dark blue eyes, so startling above her olive cheeks, was not lost upon Antony.

"Not entertained at all?" she repeated vaguely, diving under the ruffles of the parasol to cover the positively unconcealable paroxysm of the third yawn, "oh, on the contrary! Really. I am delightfully entertained, Mr.--Mr. Tony!"

"So it appears," he returned acidly. A soft dark colour suffused her gipsy cheeks, but she brazened it out. She seemed to possess no sense of shame whatever.

"This sun makes one almost sleepy," she said calmly, "and I sat up quite late last night, too--playing picquet with your uncle. He is a poor sleeper."

"Indeed. I am not acquainted with his habits," Antony responded. "We will look at the buildings now, I think, if you are sufficiently rested." A fell purpose had suddenly found itself in his humiliated breast. This insolent young puss should have cause indeed for drowsiness.

She sprang instantly to her feet with a quick and pleasing muscular co-ordination, which, again, was not lost upon Antony. She wore a white flannel costume dotted with a dull blue--the blue of Canton china. Of this colour, too, was the silk stocking that flashed down the steps above her low-cut shoes. A ludicrous and daring colour for a brunette--until you encountered her eyes.

"I am quite ready," she said demurely, and Antony started briskly down the street.

"On the right," he began didactically, "you will see Wadsworth Hall, the building of applied sciences. It was presented by the two sons of Mr. Ezra Bement Wadsworth in memory of their father, a prominent graduate. It cost three hundred thousand dollars and is one of the most completely equipped buildings of its kind in the country, I believe."

"How interesting!" she murmured.

"Yes," Antony agreed, "it _is_ interesting."

"To what are the sciences applied?" she inquired placidly.

"To--er, to--really, I have never gone into it so far as that," Antony returned, biting his lip, "I am not interested in science myself. But that is what it is generally called: it is on a bronze tablet on the corner. It is probably only an expression."

"Ah, yes, probably," she assented.

"Beyond it and a shade to the left you will see," he continued, with a wave of his stick, "Mansfield Hall. It is a dormitory, occupied by sophomores."

"And who presented that?" his companion inquired, gazing respectfully at the end of his stick.

"I do not know," he informed her briefly.

"Oh, you do not know," she repeated in her low voice. Something in the falling inflection caused her guide to wriggle uneasily.

"Nobody knows," he added, rashly. "I should think nobody would want to, it is so hideous."

"To be sure," she said. "And sophomores live there. Are you perhaps a sophomore, Mr. Tony?"

"I?" Antony exclaimed; then in level tones, "I am a senior."

"Really!" she murmured. "I suppose that means that you are one of the older pupils, then? In the first class?"

"It does," he assented grimly, adding as a cutting afterthought, "a sophomore, I suppose, would be beneath your notice?"

She smiled sweetly. "Oh, dear me, no!" she assurred him, "not in the least--it is all the same to me, you see, Mr. Tony!"

Antony should have realised by this time the folly of any further tilting, but he did not.

"Your interest naturally turns, then, to men of my uncle's age?" he inquired caustically.

She considered this with a pretty seriousness.

"N-no, hardly that," she said at length. "It is only that I do not-- that I am not--somehow, young men (_and such very young men!_ her eyes added) do not exactly . . ."

"You need not trouble to explain yourself any further," Antony broke in coldly. "It is somewhat unfortunate," he continued, enunciating carefully, with averted eyes, "that I, of all people, should have been selected for your escort this morning."

He had never said anything so nearly rude to a woman; but then he had never to his recollection been so thoroughly annoyed by one, since the dimly distant days when a series of deprecating aunts and spying nurses had darkened his youthful horizon.

"Indeed. And why is that?" she asked pleasantly. She had, when she chose, an exceedingly pleasant manner.

"Because," he returned, astonished at himself, but firm nevertheless, "I am not sufficiently accustomed to the society of young ladies to be certain of my ability to entertain even the ordinary variety--much less those who prefer the society of eccentric old gentlemen." _Come_, he reflected, _that's not half bad. Perhaps that will teach her a thing or two!_

It seemed to him that there was a flash of respect in her eyes, but he could not be sure, it was so fleeting.

"I suppose your studies take up so much of your time that you have no leisure for society," she said kindly, "but you must not let yourself grow shy: ladies are not very difficult to entertain, really!"

To this remark Antony made no reply, perhaps because he could not think of one which combined the expression of his feelings with anything remotely resembling propriety. They walked on, therefore, in utter silence.

The village through which they took their way was but a tiny one, a green and sheltered cradle for the warm brick walls and lichened chapel of the old college; and soon the grass-grown flagged walk gave way to one of trodden earth, the houses grew sparser and smaller, the trees thicker and less carefully tended. They were in the country. The season was well forward: though the calendar marked April, the warm blue sky, the odorous earth, the fresh, full grass, all smelled of May. The early flowers were out long before their wonted times; the birds, misled by the generous sun, were already nesting musically; shock-headed urchins, those most delicate barometers of the real seasons, had bravely cast off their shoes and stockings and renewed the year in the splashing puddles of some recent rain. All the scene spoke peace and promise of better to come--all, I say, but those two fractious young souls who walked diverse among the lovely unity of the pleasant world about them. Antony strode on, his eyes fixed on the winding road, though it is to be doubted if he saw it. Who would have thought to find him, Antony, in such a baited, hot-necked frame? The day had gone hideously awry from the beginning, and it was all the fault of this blue-eyed, brown-cheeked chit.

She, for her part, moved easily and it must be admitted, gracefully, beside him. Her step shot out from the hip, elastic as a boy's; only the faintest shade of red under her skin confessed to the pace he drove her; she drew regular breaths, through her small nostrils. Though she could not match his stride, she yet fell into a sort of rythmical accompaniment to it; evidently she was an accomplished and enduring dancer.

They swung around a sharp corner under a great sprawling oak and fairly mowed down an unattractive red-headed boy, insufficiently attired and freckled beyond belief, who was hurrying frantically in a direction only too obviously opposed to their own. Conscious of a distinct relief at the necessity for constructive action, Antony stooped and raised the howling and resentful creature, who dug his grimy knuckles into his eyes and yelled the louder at each polite query as to his injuries. After a few minutes of this fruitless performance, Antony, irritated at his failure to bring even this sordid incident to a triumphant conclusion, was about to produce a coin and leave his victim to the sovereign solace of Time, that great healer, when his companion, who had stood, hitherto, discreetly aside from the business, now stepped forward and laid a small brown hand on the heaving shoulder of the injured infant.

"Where were you going, Bubby?" she asked abruptly.

He looked up from his bent and screening arm, stared a moment, and replied in a matter-of-fact tone, without a trace of the sobs that still echoed about them:

"To see the big snake!"

"The snake?" She shuddered involuntarily. Had the child mentioned Leviathan, the monster would not have seemed more exotic to this rural and domestic spot. By judicious questioning they elicited from the suddenly secretive imp the successive facts of the spectacular and recent arrival of an enormous foreign reptile; its display under a tent on the outskirts of the village, very near their present station; the establishment of a tariff of fifteen cents for one view, or two separate opportunities for excitement at the comparatively small sum of a quarter of a dollar; and lastly, the cruel certainty that the delay occasioned by this unexpected and sudden meeting had undoubtedly cost their informant his only possible view of the monster, since the price of his admission, though offered voluntarily by his maternal uncle, was contingent upon his arrival at the tent ahead of his cousin, who, in case of a previous appearance, was to receive the prize.

Overcome afresh by the bitterness of his lot, the red-headed boy would have renewed his unpleasant and gulping demonstrations, had not Antony hastily produced a coin of sufficient size to insure two periods of ecstasy and offered it in reparation for what he handsomely described as his clumsiness. Staggered by this princely generosity, the urchin balanced the silver piece doubtfully, then with a shy and unlooked-for courtesy suggested that they should use it together.

"And what should I do, then?" asked the young lady with a smile--I have mentioned that she had, when she saw fit to employ it, an exceedingly pleasant manner.

"Girls don't like snakes," he finally mumbled; "you could wait outside!"

"Where is that tent?" she demanded indignantly, and they hurried on, one on each side of their unconscious guide. No kindly premonition laid a thrilling chill along Antony's stiff spine; no wholesome doubts as to the successful issue of that doomed expedition slowed the springing step of his companion. They hurried on, I say, each with a hand upon the earth-stained, ragged shoulder of that freckled imp whom Fate had selected as the instrument of their destiny, and in ironic rivalry they literally urged him on, and shot him, panting, through the roped enclosure that protected the elect possessors of the admission price from contact with the envious herd.

With the curt direction to their guide to invite, if he pleased, a friend to enter with him, Antony slapped down a coin on the improvised counter, received two greasy green cardboard slips and strode towards the canvas flap of the small tent. The mingled odour of tobacco smoke, crushed grass, and tethered horses, the cheerful, chattering crowd, the honk and blare of a great claret-coloured motor-car, hurtling inquiringly up the slope, all imparted a festival air, a holiday spirit; and it was with a mild excitement that Antony pushed into the close tent, clearing the way punctiliously for his companion.

In the middle, under the opening, was a standard painted a dull, forbidding red, and on this, in a cage of twisted iron, lay a monstrous, coiled thing, hideously and brilliantly mottled, his blunt, flattened head lazily resting on his topmost ring, his malignant, weary eyes fixed in a listless stare, that drooped over the human mushrooms around him, over the seas he had travelled, back to the old gods and the beginnings of things. The inked diamonds along his great length gleamed in a dreadful, supple pattern; the eye, entranced in a seductive terror, followed the massive rounds of those murderous coils, longing, yet dreading, to trace them to their horrid head: it seemed that a faint, uncanny odour, a hint of dead spices, like the secret wrapping cloths of old mummies, hung in the air. Now Antony knew, or supposed he knew, that cobras exhale no such odour, and in a disgusted curiosity he peered about for the source of it, but found nothing in the stained and faded tent, nor any nook or cranny in the obvious bareness where the source of it could lurk.

The scene was a strange one; no officious showman called attention, in a raucous voice, to the ugly thing in the middle. There appeared to be no director, no advertisement of any kind, no appeal to a credulous or morbid crowd. The tent could contain but a score of visitors simultaneously, and they pushed in, fairly quiet as soon as they had entered, slowly encircled the scornful, wicked-eyed heap on the standard, discussed it in low tones and went out through another flap to make room for the next group. Indeed, the accustomed ease with which they performed these evolutions awoke in Antony the wonder whether they had not rehearsed them many times, and he involuntarily mentioned this idea to the girl, who gazed, at once fascinated and repelled, as Eve at the Seducer.

"I suppose," she returned musingly, "they keep coming to see if it will by any chance bite some one."

At this precise moment there pushed through the entrance-flap one who by his distinctive dress showed himself the mechanician of the claret-coloured motorcar. He was as obviously a foreigner, and among the simple rural types that filled the tent his mustachioed personality stood out as startlingly as the great cobra's. Elbowing his way through the little crowd he made himself a place directly beside Antony and the freckled boy, who had attached himself definitely to his patron, and smiled at the young man in easy cosmopolitan contempt of the rustics, conveying at the same time, In a graphic Continental hint of respectful salutation, his duty to the young lady. Antony accepted the smile with a lordly nod, expressive of his familiarity with mechanicians as a class and his appreciation of their place in the general scheme of things, and the two men surveyed the reptile in silence.

"I know heem well," volunteered the big fellow in the leather suit, at last.

"_C'est Monsieur le Cobra_, zat one. We have take ze car all s'rough 'is country. Wait--I will amuse Mademoiselle. Watch heem!"

Lowering his head till the great goggles on his cap fronted the slitted eyes in the cage he emitted a long, piercing hiss, a nerve racking, whistling call. Everyone in the tent jumped backward spasmodically; Antony threw out his arm and pushed the girl behind him before he realised that there was no danger.

Upon the great snake the effect of the sudden noise was even more appalling. His ugly flat head appeared suddenly high above his writhing folds; no one saw the movement, for it was too lightning-quick for sight, but it was undoubtedly the fact that his head was no longer pillowed. The symmetrical turban on his forehead puffed and quivered, his cold eye caught every eye in the tent with a swift, horrible glance; and every eye shrank, terrified, from his.

"A very unpleasant old party, that snake," Anthony remarked, "I trust our friend won't think it advisable to repeat----"

In the middle of his sentence the Frenchman hissed again. The cobra, irritated beyond further endurance, threw its massive weight against the side of the cylindrical cage, which swayed slightly and then dropped forward into the panic-stricken crowd.

Antony felt a soft, sighing breath on his neck and caught his companion as she fell; he heard the ribs of her fluffy parasol crack under somebody's stamping feet and braced himself to meet the crushing, struggling rush of the frightened crowd. Through the oaths and shrieks of the nightmare moment piped shrill the voice of the red-headed boy.

"Mister, the cover's on! The cover's on tight."

Between the grovelling legs of two infuriated men, fighting like demons for leeway from the horrid cage, Antony caught a glimpse of it and realised that it was, indeed, completely fastened. Though it rolled and bounded under the lashings of its excited occupant, it was securely padlocked, and another moment of frenzied struggle for the door-flaps emptied the tent sufficiently to give passage to two angry men who threw a heavy canvas over the cage and righted it, breathing hard.

One of these as he rose to his feet met Antony's eyes, shifted his gaze to the fainting girl on his arm, and thrust his hand into the capacious pocket of his flapping linen coat.

"Try her with this," he said shortly, "I've got the crowd to settle. Then we'll kill the Frenchy, and then we'll leave!"

Antony forced the offered flask into the girl's mouth and dragged her backward through the open flap. As the air reached her she gasped and choked, gulping down the strong spirit nervously, then stiffening herself in his arm and adjusting her hat.

"Your town is not dull, at any rate, Mr. Tony!" she observed, and the observation, though a little breathless, was almost perfectly under her control.

Antony felt his admiration rise into his eyes, nor did he seek to conceal it.

"You are a brave, sensible--for heaven's sake, what's the matter now?" he cried anxiously, staring at a point behind her. Involuntarily she turned and looked in the same direction.

The greater part of the crowd had scattered and fled far down the long hill; only a few groups of the most hardy and venturesome among the villagers remained at varying distances from the deserted tent. The most important of these groups now fell apart slightly, disclosing as its centre a large and writhing human figure, prone on the grass. The light box coat, the great goggles, proclaimed this figure the ill-fated mechanician. Even as he sprawled and twisted, the men who surrounded him turned and looked at Antony and his companion, and there was an unpleasant fixity, an unmistakable threatening, in their regard that chilled the young gentleman slightly, though he was utterly at a loss as to its import. Presently one of the men caught his eye and beckoned commandingly.

"They seem to want me over there," he said to the girl, with an attempt at unconcern, "perhaps I'd better step over a moment--I'll return immediately. You don't object?"