“Busy, busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy. And busy ...”

“There goes Ellen Ember, crazy again,” we said, when we heard that cry of hers, not unmelodious nor loud, echoing along Friendship streets.

Then we usually ran to the windows and peered at her. Sometimes her long hair would be unbound on her shoulders, sometimes her little figure would be leaping lightly up as she caught at the lowest boughs of the curb elms, and sometimes her hand would be moving swiftly back and forth above her heart.

“If your heart is broken,” she had explained to many, “you can lace it together with ‘Busy, busy, busy ...’ Sing it and see! Or mebbe your heart is all of a piece?”

Once, when I had gone to Miss Liddy’s house, I had found Ellen in a skirt fashioned of an old plaid shawl of her father’s, her bare shoulders wound in the rosy “nubia” that had been her mother’s, and she was dancing in the dining-room, with surprising grace, as Pierrette might have danced in Carnival, and singing, in a sweet, piping voice, an incongruous little song:

O Day of wind and laughter,
A goddess born are you,
Whose eyes are in the morning
Blue blue!

“I made that up,” she had explained, “or I guess mebbe I remembered it from deep in my skull. I like the feel of it in my mouth when I speak the words.”

I used to think that Miss Liddy was really a less useful citizen than Ellen. For though Miss Liddy worked painstakingly at her dressmaking, and even dreamed over it little partial dreams, Ellen, mad or sane, made a garden, and threw little nosegays over our fences, and exercised a certain presence, latent in the rest of us, which made us momentarily gentle and in awe of our own sanity.

When, one spring morning, a week before the Friendship Carnival, she passed down Daphne Street with her plaintive, musical “Busy, busy, busy ...” Doctor June and the young Reverend Arthur Bliss sat on Doctor June’s screened-in porch discussing a deficit in the Good Shepherd’s Orphans’ Home fund for the fiscal year. Ever since the wreck of the Through, Friendship had contributed to the support of the Home, having first understood then that the Home was its patient pensioner, and now it was almost like a compliment that we had been appealed to for help.

Doctor June listened with serene patience to what his visitor would say.

“Tension,” said the Reverend Arthur Bliss, squaring his splendid young shoulders, “tension. Warfare. We, as a church, are enormously equipped. We have shall we say? the helmets of our intelligence and the swords of our wills. Why, the joy of the fight ought to be to us like that of a strong man ready to do battle, oughtn’t it oughtn’t it?”

Doctor June, his straight white hair outlining his plump pink face, nodded; but one would have said that it was rather less at the Reverend Arthur than at his Van Houtii spiraea, which nodded back at him.

“My young friend,” said Doctor June, “will you forgive me for saying that it is fairly amazing to me how the church of God continues to use the terms of barbarism? We talk of the peace that passeth understanding, and yet we keep on employing metaphors of blood-red war. What does the modern church want of a helmet and a sword, if I may ask? Even rhetorically?”

“The Christian life is an eternal warfare against the forces of sin, is it not?” asked the Reverend Arthur Bliss in surprise.

“Let me suggest,” said Doctor June, “that all good life is an eternal surrender to the forces of good. There’s a difference.”

The visitor from the city smiled very reverently.

“I see, sir,” he said, “that you are one of those wonderful non-combatants. You are by nature sanctified and that I can well believe.”

“I am by nature a miserable old sinner,” rejoined the doctor, warmly. “Often often I would enjoy a fine round Elizabethan oath note how that single adjective condones my poor taste. But I hold that good is inflowing and that it possesses whom it may possess. If a man is too busy fighting, it may pass him by.”

“But surely, sir,” said the young clergyman, “you agree with me that a man wins his way into the kingdom of light by both a staff and a sword?”

“You will perhaps forgive me for agreeing with nothing of the sort,” said the doctor, mildly; “I hold that a man takes his way to the light by grasping whatever the Lord puts in his hand a hammer, a rope, a pen and grasping it hard.”

“But the ungifted what of the ungifted?” cried the Reverend Arthur Bliss.

“In this sense, there are none,” said Doctor June, briefly.

“Busy, busy, busy all the day. Busy, busy, busy ...” sounded suddenly from the street in Ellen’s thin soprano. Doctor June looked down at her, his expression scarcely changing, because it was always serenely soft. But the young clergyman saw with amazement the strange little figure with her unbound hair and her arms high and swaying, and as she took some steps of her dance before the gate, he questioned his host with uplifted brows.

“A little mad,” the doctor said, nodding, “like us all. She sings in the streets of a glad morning, and dances now and then. We take ours out in tangential opinions. It is nearly the same thing.”

The young clergyman’s face lighted responsively at this, and then he deferentially clinched his argument.

“There is a case in point,” said he. “That poor creature there what has the Lord put in her hand?”

Doctor June looked thoughtful.

“Nothing,” he declared, “for any fight. But I’m not sure that she isn’t made to be a leaven. The kingdom of God works like a leaven, you know, my dear young friend. Not like a dum-dum bullet.”

“But that poor creature. A leaven?” doubted the Reverend Arthur Bliss.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Doctor June, “I shouldn’t wonder. I’m not so sure as I used to be that I can recognize leaven at first sight.”

“Ah, that’s it!” cried his guest. “But a soldier, now, is a soldier!”

Then they smiled their lack of acquiescence, and went back to the figures for the fiscal year.

An hour later Doctor June stood alone on his garden walk, aimlessly poking about among his slips. He had done what he always did, following close on the heels of his well-established resolution never to do it again. He had pledged himself to try to raise one hundred dollars in Friendship for a pet philanthropy.

“It’s a kind of dissipation with me,” he said, helplessly, and wandered down to his gate. “If I read an article about the Congo Free State or Women in India, it acts on me like brandy. I go off my head and give away my substance, and involve innocent people. But then, of course, this is different. It is always different.”

Then he heard Ellen’s little song again. “Busy, busy, busy ...” she sang, and came round the corner from the town, catching at the lowest branches of the curb elms and laughing a little. At Doctor June’s gate she halted and shook some lilacs at him.

“Here,” she said, “put some on your coat for a patch on your heart so’s the break won’t show. Ain’t the Lord made the sun shine down this morning? Did you know there’s a Carnival comin’ to town?”

“Like enough, Ellen,” said Doctor June. “Like enough.”

“Is one,” she persisted. “They said about it in the Post-Office I heard ’em. Dancin’, an’ parrots, an’ jumpin’ dogs.”

He stood looking at her thoughtfully as she arranged her flowers, singing under breath.

“Ellen,” he said, “will you tell Miss Liddy a few of us are going to meet here in my yard to-morrow afternoon, to talk over some money-raising? And ask her to come?”

“I will,” Ellen sang it, “I will an’ I will. Did you mean me to come, too?” she broke off wistfully.

“My stars, yes!” said Doctor June. “You’re going to come early and help me, aren’t you? I took that for granted.”

“Here’s your lilacs,” said Ellen, tossing him a nosegay. “I’ll tell Liddy while she’s eatin’. Liddy don’t like me to talk much when she’s workin’. But when she eats I can talk, an’ I’ll tell her then.”

She went on, singing, and Doctor June shook his head.

“I don’t know but Mr. Bliss is right,” he said, “though I hope I can keep my doubts to myself and not brag about ’em, just to be the style. But it does look as if poor Ellen Ember came into the world empty-handed. As if the Lord didn’t give her much of anything to work with.”

Summons to a meeting to talk over money-raising is, in Friendship, like the call to festivity in a different life. The cause never greatly matters. Interests appear eclectically to range from ice to coral. For let the news get about that there is to be a bazaar for China, a home bakery sale for the missionary station at Trebizond, or a Japanese tea for the Friendship cemetery fund, and we all sew or bake or lend dishes or sell tickets with the same infinity of zeal. The enterprise in hand absorbs our sense of the ultimate object; as when, after three days of hand-to-hand battle to wrest money for the freedmen from the patrons of a Kirmess at the old roller-skating rink, dear Mis’ Amanda, secretary and door-tender, handed over our $64.85 with the wondering question:

“What do they mean by Freegman, anyway? What country is it they live in?”

It was no marvel that Doctor June’s garden was filled, that yellow afternoon, with many eager for action. Some of us knew that there was an Orphans’ Home fund deficit; but more of us knew only that we were to “talk over some money-raising.” I remember how, from the garden seat against the spiraea, the doctor faced us, all scattered about the antlered walk and its triangle of green, erect on golden oak and bright velvet chairs from within doors. And when he had told us of the shortage to which we were party, instantly the talk emptied into channels of possible pop-corn social, chicken-pie supper, rummage sale, art and loan exhibit, Old Settlers’ Entertainment, and so on. After which Doctor June rose, and stood touching thoughtfully at the leaves which grew nearest, while he essayed to turn our minds from chicken-pot-pie-part-veal, and bib-aprons, to the eternal verities.

“My friends,” he said, “isn’t there a better way? Let us, this time, give of our hearts’ love to the little children of God, instead of buying pies and freezing ice cream in His name.”

There was, of course, an instant’s hush in the garden. We were not used to paradoxes, and we felt as concave images must feel when they first look upon the world. It was as amazing as if we had been told that God grieves with us instead of afflicting us, as we held.

“None of us has much money to give,” Doctor June went on; “let us take the way that lies nearest our hand, and make a little money. God never permitted any normal human creature to come into His world unprovided with some means of making it better. Only, let us get outside our bazaar and chicken-pie faculties. Now what can we each do?”

We sat still for a little, tentatively murmuring; and then Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss stood up by the sweet-alyssum urn.

“Speakin’ of what we can do,” she said, “doin’ ain’t easy. Not when you’re well along in years. Your ways seem to stiffen up some. When I was a girl, I could ‘a’ been quite an elocutionist if I could ‘a’ had lessons. I had a reg’lar born sense o’ givin’ gestures. But I never took. An’ now I declare I don’t know of anything I could do. It’s the same way, I guess, with quite a number of us.”

Mis’ Postmaster Sykes was in the arm-chair, and she sat still, queenly.

“I could do some o’ my embroidery,” she observed, “but it’s quite expensive stuff, an’ I don’t know whether it would sell rill well here in Friendship. I’d be ‘most afraid to risk. An’ I don’t do enough cookin’, myself, to what-you-might-say know how, any more.”

“Same with my sewing,” observed Mis’ Doctor Helman; “I put it all out now. I don’t know as I could sew up a seam. That’s the trouble, hiring everything done so.”

Those who did not hire everything done preserved a respectful silence. And Doctor June looked up in the elm trees.

“The Lord,” he said, “spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. The Lord said unto Moses, ‘What is that in thine hand?’ Moses had, you remember, nothing but a rod in his hand. But it was enough to let the people know that God had been with him that the Lord had appeared unto him. Suppose the glory of the Lord, here in the garden, should ask us now, as it does ask, ‘What is that in thine hand?’ What have we got?”

There was silence again, and we looked at one another doubtfully.

“Land, Doctor!” said Libbie Liberty then, “I been tryin’ for two years to earn a new parlour carpet, an’ I ain’t had nothin’ in my hand to earn with. So I keep on sayin’ I like an old Brussels carpet they’re so easy to sweep.”

“My!” said Abigail Arnold, “I declare, I’d be real put to it to try to make extry money. ’Bout the only thing the Lord seems to ‘a’ put in my hand is time. I’ve got oodles o’ that, layin’ ’round loose.”

Mis’ Photographer Sturgis was in the big garden chair, wrapped in a shawl, her feet on an inverted flower-pot.

“I’m tryin’ to think,” she said, looking sidewise at the ground. “I donno’s I know how I could earn a cent, convenient. It ain’t real easy for women to earn. I think mebbe the Lord meant the men to be the Moseses.”

Mis’ Amanda Toplady’s voice rolled out, deep and comfortable, like a complaisant giant’s.

“Well said!” she remarked. “I’m drove to death all day. If anybody’s to ask me what I got in my hand, I declare I guess I’d say, rill reverent: Dear Lord, I’ve got my hands full, an’ that’s about all I have got.”

So we went on, saying much or little as was our nature, but we were all agreed that we were virtually helpless for Calliope was out of town that week, and not present to shame us.

“What’s in my hands?” said grim Miss Liddy Ember, finally, in her thin falsetto. “Well, I ain’t got any rill, what-you-might-call hands. I just got kind o’ cat’s paws for my three meals a day an’ my rent.”

Then, by her sister’s side, Ellen Ember stood up. We had hardly noticed her, sitting there quietly playing with some of the doctor’s flowers. But now we saw that she had hurriedly twisted her splendid hair about her head, and by this we understood that she was herself again. We had seen her come to herself like this on the street, and then she would go hurrying home, the tears running down her face in shame for her unbound hair and her singing and dancing. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were shining as she rose now, and she looked appealingly pretty, one hand, palm outward, half hiding her trembling mouth. By her soft eyes, too, we knew that she was herself again.

“You all know,” she began, and dare not trust herself. “You all know ...” she said once more, and we understood what she would say. “What can I do?” she cried to us. “What is there I can do? I ain’t got anything but my craziness! Oh, it seems like I ain’t much, an’ so I’d ought to do all the more.”

To soothe her, we took our woman’s way of all talking at once. And then Doctor June called out cheerily that he felt the way Ellen did, that he wasn’t a real Moses, for what had he Doctor June in his hand, and didn’t we all know there was no money in pills? And then he told us how the Reverend Arthur Bliss was to be in town again on Wednesday of the next week, and would we not all think the matter over quietly, and meet with them on that evening, for cakes and tea?

“As many of you as can,” he said, “come with a plan to earn a dollar, and tell how you mean to do it. Ellen, you and I’ll preside at the meeting, and hear what the rest say, and keep real still ourselves, like proper officers.”

But Ellen Ember would not be comforted. She stood with that one hand, palm outward, pressed against her lips, looking at us with big, brimming eyes.

“I ain’t got nothin’ but my craziness, you know,” she said over. And then, as she was going through the gateway, she turned to Doctor June.

“Why, Wednesday’s the first night o’ the Carnival!” she cried. “You set the dollar meetin’ on the first night o’ the Carnival!”

“My stars!” cried Doctor June, gravely. “And I might have been selling pills on the grounds!”

All Friendship Village loves a Carnival. Once the word meant to me a Florentine fiesta day, with a feast of colour, and of many little fine things, “real, like laughter.” Now when I say “carnival” I mean the painted eruption by night from the market square of some town like Friendship, when lines broaden and waver grotesquely, when the mirth is in great silhouettes and Colour goes unmasked.

I always make my way to such a place, for it holds for me the wonder of the untoward; as will a strolling Italian plodding past my house at night with his big, silent bear; or the spectacle of the huge, faded red ice-wagon, with powerful horses and rattling chains and tongs, and giants in blue denim atop the crystal; or the strange, copper world that dissolves in the fluid of certain sunsets. And that Wednesday night, a week later, on my way to the “dollar meeting” at Doctor June’s, I turned toward the Friendship Carnival with some vestige of my youth clinging to the hem of things.

I gave my attention to them all: The pop-corn wagon, an aristocratic affair that looked like a hearse; the little painted canaries and love-birds, so out of place and patient that I thought they must have souls to form as well as we; the sad little live monkey, incessantly dodging white balls thrown at him by certain immortals (who, when they hit him, got pipes); and the giant who flung “Look! Look! Look! Look!” through a megaphone, while a good little dog toiled up a ladder and then stood at the ladder’s top in a silence that was all nice reticence and dignity. Also, the huge Saxon fellow who, at the portal of the Arabian Court of Art and Regular Cafe Restaurant, sang a love-song through a megaphone “Tenderly, dearest, I breathe thy sweet name,” he hallooed, with his free hand beckoning the crowd to the Court of Art.

And then I saw the Lyric Dance Arcade and Indian Palace of Asiatic Mystery. And I found myself close to the platform, listening to the cry of a man in gilt knickerbockers.

“Ladies! Gentlemen! All!” he summoned. “Never in the history of the show business has there been anything resemblin’ this. Come here here here here! See Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, who is about to begin one of her most sublimely sensational dances. See her, see her, you may never again see her! Graceful, glittering, genteel. Graceful, glittering, gen-te-e-e-l. I am telling you about Zorah, queen of the West and princess of the East, in her ancient Asiatic dance, the most up-to-date little act in the entire show business to-day. Here she is, waiting for you you you. Everybody that’s got the dime!”

Until he ceased, I had hardly noticed Zorah herself, standing in the canvas portico. The woman had, I then observed, a kind of appealing prettiness and a genuineness of pose. She was looking out on the crowd with the usual manner of simulated shyness, but to the shyness was given conviction by an uplifted hand, palm outward, hiding her mouth. I noted her small, stained face, her splendid unbound hair and then a certain resemblance caught at my heart. And I saw that she was wearing a skirt made of a man’s plaid shawl, and about her shoulders was a rosy, old-fashioned nubia. Her face and throat were stained, and so were her thin little arms but I knew her.

The performance, as the man had said, was about to begin, and already he was giving Zorah her signal to go within. Somehow I bought a ticket and hurried into the tent. The seats were sparingly occupied, and I saw, as I would have guessed, no one whom I knew in the eager, stamping little audience. In their midst I lost the slim figure that had preceded me, until she mounted the platform and swept before the footlights a stately courtesy.

And there, in the smoky little tent, Ellen Ember began to dance, with her quite surprising grace as Pierrette might have danced in Carnival. It was the charming, faery measure which she had danced for me in Miss Liddy’s dining-room; and as she had sung to me then, so now, in a sweet piping voice, she sang her incongruous little song:

O Day of wind and laughter,
A goddess born are you,
Whose eyes are in the morning
Blue blue!
The slumbrous noon your body is,
Your feet are the shadow’s flight,
But the immortal soul of you
Is Night.

It seemed to me that I sat for hours in that hot little place, cut off from the world, watching. Again and again, to the brass blare of some hoiden tune, she set the words of the lyric that “she liked the feel of,” and she danced on and on. And when at last the music shattered off, and she ceased, and ran behind a screening canvas, somehow I made my way forward through the crowd that was clapping hands and calling her back, and I gained the place where she stood.

When I asked her to come with me, she nodded and smiled, with unseeing eyes, and assented quite simply, and then suddenly sat down before the lifted tent flap.

“But I must wait for my money,” she said. “That’s what I came for my money. They thought I’d never earn my dollar, but I have.”

At this I understood. And now I marvel how I talked at all to the man in gilt knickerbockers who arrived and haggled over the whole matter.

Zorah, he explained, the sure-enough Zorah, had took down sick in the last place they made, an’ they’d had to leave her behind. An’ when he told about it down town that morning, this little piece here had up an’ offered. Somethin’ had to be done he left it to me if they didn’t. He felt his duty to the amusement park public, him. So he had closed with her for a dollar for three fifteen-minute turns he give two shillings a turn, on the usual, but she’d hung out stout for the even money. An’ she’d danced her three, odd but satisfactory. You could hand ’em queer things in the show business, if you only dressed the part. Yes, sure, here was the dollar. Be on hand to-morrow night? No? Sufferin’ snakes, but was we goin’ to leave him shipwrecked?

Finally I got her away, and skirted the market-place with her dancing at my side, shaking her silver dollar in her shut palms and singing:

“Busy, busy, busy all the day. An’ then I earned my dollar, my dollar they never thought I’d earn my dollar ...”

I remember, as we struck into the unlighted block where Miss Liddy’s house stood, that I was struggling hard for my own serenity, so that for a moment I did not observe that Ellen stopped beside me. But I knew that she fell silent, and when I turned I saw her there on the dark walk hurriedly twisting her splendid hair about her head. And by that and by her silence I understood that she was suddenly herself, and of her own mind, as we say.

On this, “Ellen!” said I quickly, “how fine of you to have earned your Orphans’ Home dollar so soon. But you have beaten us all!”

She had contrived to fasten her hair, and I saw her touching tentatively the folds of her strange dress. And so I made her know what she had done, as gently as I might, and with all praise I stilled her dismay and shame. And last I led her, as I was determined that I would do, past Miss Liddy’s dark little house and on to the home of Doctor June.

I think that I would not have dared take Ellen, just as she was, in her plaid skirt and her rosy nubia, into that black and brown henrietta-cloth assembly, if I had remembered that there was to be a stranger present. But this, in the events of the hour, I had quite forgotten. I remembered as I entered the room and came face to face with the Reverend Arthur Bliss, talking of the figures for the fiscal year.

“ and the deficit,” he was saying, “ought to be made up by us who are so well equipped to do it. With Paul, let us fight the good fight of every day. This is to-day’s fight. Now let us talk over our various weapons.”

Doctor June looked thoughtfully at his young guest, and in the older face was a brooding tenderness, like the tenderness of the father who longs to hold the child in quiet, in his arms.

“Yes,” said Doctor June, “‘fighting’ is one name for it. I am tempted to say that ‘drudgery’ is another name. Errantry, ministry, service, or whatever. It all comes to the same thing: ‘What is that in thine hand?’ Well, now, who of us is first?”

“I think,” said I then, “that Ellen Ember is first.”

She would have shrunk back from the doorway to the passage, but I put my arm about her, and then I told them. And when I had done, I remember how she threw up that pathetic hand of hers, palm outward, and this time it was over her eyes.

“I’m a disgrace to all of you!” she said, sobbing, “an’ to the whole Good Shepherd’s Home. But I guess anyhow it’s all the way I had. Seems like I ain’t got nothin’ in the world but my craziness!”

There was silence for a moment, that rich silence which flowers in the heart. And then great Mis’ Amanda Toplady spoke out, in her deep voice which now she some way contrived to keep firm.

“Well said!” she cried. “I come here to say I’d give a dollar outright to get red o’ the whole thing, rather’n to fuss. But now I ain’t goin’ to stop at a dollar. Seems like a dollar for me wouldn’t be moral. I’m goin’ to sell some strawberry plants why, we got hundreds of ’em to spare. I can do it by turnin’ my hand over. An’ I expec’ the Lord meant you should turn your hand over to find out what’s in it, anyway.”

I think that then we tried our woman’s way of all talking at once, but I remember how the shrill voice of Abigail Arnold, of the home bakery, rose above the others:

“Cream puffs!” she cried. “I got a rush demand for my cream puffs every Sat’day, an’ I ain’t been makin’ ’em sole-because I hate to run after the milk an’ set it. An’ I was goin’ to get out o’ this by givin’ fifty cents out o’ the bakery till. An’ me with my hands full o’ cream puffs....”

“Hens hens is what mine is,” Libbie Liberty was saying. “My grief, I got both hands full o’ hens. I wouldn’t sell ’em because I can’t bear to hev any of ’em killed they’re tame as a bag o’ feathers, all of ’em. I guess I ben settin’ the hens o’ my hand over against the heathen an’ the orphans. An’ now I’m goin’ to sell spring chickens....”

Mis’ Sturgis in the rocking-chair was waving a corner of her shawl.

“C-canaries!” she cried. “I can rise canary-birds an’ sell ’em a dollar apiece in the city. I m-meant to slide out account o’ my health, but it was just because I hate to muss ‘round b-boilin’ eggs for the little ones. I’ll raise a couple or two mebbe more.”

“My good land!” came Miss Liddy Ember’s piping falsetto; “to think o’ my sittin’ up, hesitatin’, when new dresses just falls off the ends o’ my fingers. An’ me in my right mind, too.”

Dear Doctor June stood up among us, his face shining.

“Bless us,” he said. “Didn’t I have some spiraea in my hand right while I stood talking to you the other afternoon in my garden? And haven’t I got some tricolored Barbary varieties of chrysanthemums, and some hardy roses and one thing and another to make men marvel? And can’t I sell ’em in the city at a pretty profit? What I’ve got in my hand is seeds and slips I see that plain enough. And my stars, out they go!”

Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Mis’ Mayor Uppers, even Mis’ Postmaster Sykes ah, they all knew what to do, knew it as if somebody had been saying it over and over, and as if they now first listened.

But Ellen Ember sat crying, her face buried in her hands. And I think that she cannot have understood, even when Doctor June touched her hair and said something of the little leaven which leaveneth the whole lump.

Last, the Reverend Arthur Bliss arose, and there was a sudden hush among us, for it was as if a new spirit shone in his strong young face.

“Dear friends,” he said, “dear friends ...” And then, “Lord God,” he prayed abruptly, “show me what is that in my hand thy tool where I had looked for my sword!”