Little Miss By-The-Day Part 28

Perhaps you happened to see her when she stepped out on that vast stage, looking tinier than she really was, with the lights s.h.i.+ning on her satin-smooth hair and white neck, with the coral comb and the carved bracelets making bright spots of color. Do you remember how her wide green skirts spread about her as she made her deep curtsy? Do you remember her smile? Or were you rustling your program until you heard that deep contralto voice of hers beginning with,

"What I am going to do for you I shall have to explain a little."

There was a bald grouchy human in the front row, he honestly believed she was talking just to him! He leaned forward. "I am going to do some songs for you but I can't exactly sing--" The bald man grunted, he considered that plain foolishness and it was! "But I can play this lute a little--and I can whistle--"

"Louder!" called the voices at the rear.

She lifted her chin defiantly.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Maybe some of them are deaf like the Wheezy's friends, oh dear! How slowly I must speak!" she admonished herself in her thoughts. Her knees were shaking. But her voice lifted itself a bit; she enunciated carefully,

"These are not new songs, they are just songs you know. So you'd better not look at me while I do them. You'd better shut your eyes and pretend--oh, I _do_ hope you're good at pretending--you must pretend that you are seeing the first person you heard sing these songs for you when you were little. The first one I heard, Marthy sang. Marthy was lean and small and ra-ther old. She lived over our stable in the cleanest rooms! With red geraniums in the windows!"

Oh, do you remember the adorable way she took you into her confidence?

Do you remember how strangely familiar she seemed?

"Marthy used to sing 'Cherry Ripe.' Do you know it?" she asked so anxiously that one sympathetic soul murmured "yes" and hid her confusion in a cough as Mademoiselle Folly began,

"It's about a young man who thinks his sweetheart's lips are like big ripe cherries, so he sings,

"'Cherry Ripe, Cherry Ripe, Who will buy my cherries?'"

She hummed the tune tentatively. She swung the narrow green ribbon of the lute over her shoulders and her fingers touched the strings. And then suddenly the soft flute-like trill of her wonderful whistle was wafted out toward them.

Ah, who can describe the miracle, the mystery whereby her simple songs made them all feel young again! She was just a little seamstress, aged twenty-seven, who had lived an unreal life of sentiment and dreams and memories and they were just a sophisticated, tired, jaded audience.

Some of them twisted their lips and scoffed. Some of them weren't especially moved by "Cherry Ripe," but the bald man in the front row pattered his hands together before she was through bowing and noisily told his neighbors,

"Gee, that's the stuff. You can't beat the old stuff! S'lovely stuff--"

A few pioneers about him pattered too. It was enough to encourage Felicia. She smiled.

She was still frightened but her voice was firmer. "If you liked that one, maybe you will like the song about Robin Adair. There was a young woman a long time ago, who loved a man named Robin Adair. You see he went on a journey, I imagine a long journey--" Ah, Felice! he'd gone on a very long journey, that Robin Adair! A journey that a generation of rag-times and turkey-trots and walkin'-dogs had almost obliterated.

Yet from the tone of her voice they suddenly were very sorry that Robin had gone a journey. "So the young lady sang a song asking

'What's this dull town to me?

Robin's not here--'

Like this it goes."

This time she did not use the lute but put it down carefully and folded her hands quietly together. Her own repose made it easy for her listeners to rest until the last questioning trill had died away. The applause was louder this time. Some of them were talking delightedly and the rising murmur of their approval warmed her trembling heart.

"Another! Another!" called her excitable bald friend.

"It's vairee good of you to like them. Do you think you'd enjoy a French one now? That is if it isn't ten minutes. They told me to do this for ten minutes--"

The intimate way she took them into her thoughts made even the most sceptical of them lean back and smile. If they felt like questioning the genuineness of her feeling it could only be explained on the ground of consummate art and either way it was something they didn't want to lose.

"Margot taught me this one. It is about a forest. I heard it first vairee early in the morning, the first morning I evaire did see a forest. Pretend you can see it. It was spring before the leaves had come but the tops of the trees were swaying and the branches had the colors you see when you dream--and the wind was warm and sweet and sighing. And on a maple tree a blackbird whistled--so--and in the s.h.i.+ning melted snow-pools the little green frogs made this kind of noises--and down in the old stone stable two little new lambs were crying--it was a wonderful spring! You must pretend you can see Margot sitting in a gray stone doorway sorting seed in a little broken brown basket. Margot is ra-ther brown herself, but she has gray hair and black eyes and she's fat and she wears a blue dress, vairee old and clean and faded and a big white ap.r.o.n. Her voice isn't pretty I'm afraid, but her song is. Her song is the oldest song I've evaire heard. There was a Frenchman, Maitre Guerdon, who made it a long time ago. He was a fine gentleman with ruffles of lace on his sleeves and he had a lute--perhaps like this--" she picked up hers again "and what he says in his song is that he wants every shepherdess to hasten to pleasure and to be vairee careful about time for Youth alone has time to have fun with. Because, as he tells them, time slips through your fingers like water and then you have nothing left but a sorry old sad feeling. So the best thing that you and the shepherdesses can do is to run around in the spring forests and spend all the time you can--" her voice faltered "--loving--"

The absurdity of the thing never struck them. Most of them couldn't have endured a forest ten minutes. But she had them completely under her spell and it suddenly seemed the most fascinating thing in this world to be young and "--run around in a spring forest--loving--"

Her melody began. It matched the dainty spirit of the words and I think if Maitre Guedron, in that heaven where all music makers, good men or bad, should go, could have heard her, he would have bowed his admiration just to hear the tender graceful spirit that her softly muted whistle gave his quaint old song. It was a spirit never lagging, that tripped ahead of the faint strum of the lute strings.

The plaudits were coming whole-heartedly now. Felicia adored them for liking her--she leaned forward to catch what a man in the side box was saying. Bolder than the rest, he coughed and let his desire overcome his temerity as he cried out,

"Do you know--er--'Ever of thee I am fondly dreaming'?"

Felice came quite close to the footlights and peered at him,

"Is it like this?" she hummed it over softly--

"That's the ticket," he nodded; "do you know the words?"

She shrugged.

"I just know it's about a person--who was thinking about some one he used to see," she translated dreamily, "and he thinks he can hear her voice and that cheers him up vairee much when he's feeling low spirited and so it's like this--" She whistled it.

After that they just shouted at her, as eager as children. She never failed one of them--save once, when a gasping person demanded "After the Ball."

That _did_ puzzle her.

"The ball," she echoed regretfully, "I think I don't know about it-- what sort of a ball, was it, M'sieur--a little tennis ball?"

But the puffy old lady who asked for "White Wings" was rewarded with the gentlest smile--

"It is stupid of me, I think I never heard the words except those two lines 'White wings they never grow weary--I'll think of my dearie--'"

and she finished the "Fly away home," with a charming gesture of her little hands and a triumphant warbling of the tune.

Can you wonder that they loved this amazing person who tugged their hearts this way and that with ail the dear old songs that those they'd loved best had once sung to them? Janet's crooning Scotch songs, Molly's wistful Irish ballads, Margot's naughty French and Marthy's sentimental loves, Grandy's English favorites too, it seemed as though she could never give them enough of them--ten minutes! They'd have kept her an hour if they could! She talked, she hummed, she played her lute--but best of all she whistled for them because they liked her-- little Mademoiselle Folly!

Last of all, she stood very quietly and looked at them while they were still laughing over something she'd picked up from Zeb, a ridiculous sc.r.a.p of New England,

"Pretend I'm Eunice making the gol-_dern_est huckleberry pie and that I'm singing,

"'Once upon a time I had a feller Way down in Maine. AND He took me home under his umbreller--'

"There is just one more I can do for you. I am a vairee little tired, perhaps you are too. This song you have heard before tonight. I heard this music playing it. Perhaps we can make them play it again. It was Piqueur who told me this song. Piqueur is a vairee old gardener, who once was a soldier. He fought in battle. He was hurt vairee much. His head has nevaire been quite right since then. But some one taught him to be a vairee good gardener and that made him forget how frightful war had been. But in the spring, because spring makes all of us remember when we were young, Piqueur would remember--war. He used to tell me about it while we planted the garden. Early in the morning when the sun was rising. And he would sing this song, in French of course. It was Margot who told me what the words meant. You know them--

"Ye sons of France, awake to Glory!

Hark! Hark! what myriads bid you rise!

Your children, wives and grandsires h.o.a.ry--"

The violinist caught up his bow, the orchestra leader was on his feet.

Felicia was not smiling any more; her great eyes burned with excitement; she saw Piqueur singing; she heard Piqueur trying to tell her about war--she did not mute her whistle. She let it ring--

And after that they stood on their feet and whistled and sang and cheered with her while she poured out her whole heart at them, gave them her whole self until her tears blinded her and she turned and ran away. To the blessed shelter of the wings where some one opened comfortable arms and let her weep.

Nor could her rapturous audience get so much as even a little glimpse of her again.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" called the chairman of the committee, "I beg of you to be lenient. Mademoiselle Folly thanks you but she cannot whistle any more tonight--she says--" he cleared his throat, "to thank you--to tell you her lips and her heart are too much puckered up!"