A carnival jangle
There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading
sense of jester's noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal
colours. The streets swarm with humanity,--humanity in all
shapes, manners, forms, laughing, pushing, jostling, crowding, a
mass of men and women and children, as varied and assorted in
their several individual peculiarities as ever a crowd that
gathered in one locality since the days of Babel.
It is Carnival in New Orleans; a brilliant Tuesday in February,
when the very air gives forth an ozone intensely exhilarating,
making one long to cut capers. The buildings are a blazing mass
of royal purple and golden yellow, national flags, bunting, and
decorations that laugh in the glint of the Midas sun. The
streets are a crush of jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns,
ballet girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys; of wild and
sudden flashes of music, of glittering pageants and comic ones,
of befeathered and belled horses; a dream of colour and melody
and fantasy gone wild in an effervescent bubble of beauty that
shifts and changes and passes kaleidoscope-like before the
bewildered eye.
A bevy of bright-eyed girls and boys of that uncertain age that
hovers between childhood and maturity, were moving down Canal
Street when there was a sudden jostle with another crowd meeting
them. For a minute there was a deafening clamour of shouts and
laughter, cracking of the whips, which all maskers carry, a
jingle and clatter of carnival bells, and the masked and unmasked
extricated themselves and moved from each other's paths. But in
the confusion a tall Prince of Darkness had whispered to one of
the girls in the unmasked crowd: "You'd better come with us, Flo;
you're wasting time in that tame gang. Slip off, they'll
never miss you; we'll get you a rig, and show you what life is."
And so it happened, when a half-hour passed, and the bright-eyed
bevy missed Flo and couldn't find her, wisely giving up the
search at last, she, the quietest and most bashful of the lot,
was being initiated into the mysteries of "what life is."
Down Bourbon Street and on Toulouse and St. Peter Streets there
are quaint little old-world places where one may be disguised
effectually for a tiny consideration. Thither, guided by the
shapely Mephisto and guarded by the team of jockeys and ballet
girls, tripped Flo. Into one of the lowest-ceiled, dingiest, and
most ancient-looking of these shops they stepped.
"A disguise for the demoiselle," announced Mephisto to the woman
who met them. She was small and wizened and old, with yellow,
flabby jaws, a neck like the throat of an alligator, and
straight, white hair that stood from her head uncannily stiff.
"But the demoiselle wishes to appear a boy, un petit garcon?" she
inquired, gazing eagerly at Flo's long, slender frame. Her voice
was old and thin, like the high quavering of an imperfect
tuning-fork, and her eyes were sharp as talons in their grasping
glance.
"Mademoiselle does not wish such a costume," gruffly responded
Mephisto.
"Ma foi, there is no other," said the ancient, shrugging her
shoulders. "But one is left now; mademoiselle would make a fine
troubadour."
"Flo," said Mephisto, "it's a dare-devil scheme, try it; no one
will ever know it but us, and we'll die before we tell. Besides,
we must; it's late, and you couldn't find your crowd."
And that was why you might have seen a Mephisto and a slender
troubadour of lovely form, with mandolin flung across his
shoulder, followed by a bevy of jockeys and ballet girls,
laughing and singing as they swept down Rampart Street.
When the flash and glare and brilliancy of Canal Street have
palled upon the tired eye, when it is yet too soon to go home to
such a prosaic thing as dinner, and one still wishes for novelty,
then it is wise to go into the lower districts. There is fantasy
and fancy and grotesqueness run wild in the costuming and the
behaviour of the maskers. Such dances and whoops and leaps as
these hideous Indians and devils do indulge in; such wild
curvetings and long walks! In the open squares, where whole
groups do congregate, it is wonderfully amusing. Then, too,
there is a ball in every available hall, a delirious ball, where
one may dance all day for ten cents; dance and grow mad for joy,
and never know who were your companions, and be yourself unknown.
And in the exhilaration of the day, one walks miles and miles,
and dances and skips, and the fatigue is never felt.
In Washington Square, away down where Royal Street empties its
stream of children great and small into the broad channel of
Elysian Fields Avenue, there was a perfect Indian pow-wow. With
a little imagination one might have willed away the vision of the
surrounding houses, and fancied one's self again in the forest,
where the natives were holding a sacred riot. The square was
filled with spectators, masked and un-masked. It was amusing to
watch these mimic Red-men, they seemed so fierce and earnest.
Suddenly one chief touched another on the elbow. "See that
Mephisto and troubadour over there?" he whispered huskily.
"Yes; who are they?"
"I don't know the devil," responded the other, quietly, "but I'd
know that other form anywhere. It's Leon, see? I know those
white hands like a woman's and that restless head. Ha!"
"But there may be a mistake."
"No. I'd know that one anywhere; I feel it is he. I'll pay him
now. Ah, sweetheart, you've waited long, but you shall feast
now!" He was caressing something long and lithe and glittering
beneath his blanket.
In a masked dance it is easy to give a death-blow between the
shoulders. Two crowds meet and laugh and shout and mingle almost
inextricably, and if a shriek of pain should arise, it is not
noticed in the din, and when they part, if one should stagger and
fall bleeding to the ground, can any one tell who has given the
blow? There is nothing but an unknown stiletto on the ground,
the crowd has dispersed, and masks tell no tales anyway. There
is murder, but by whom? for what? Quien sabe?
And that is how it happened on Carnival night, in the last mad
moments of Rex's reign, a broken-hearted mother sat gazing
wide-eyed and mute at a horrible something that lay across the
bed. Outside the long sweet march music of many bands floated in
as if in mockery, and the flash of rockets and Bengal lights
illumined the dead, white face of the girl troubadour.
-THE END-
Alice Dunbar's short story: A carnival jangle
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