The Fifth Son of the Shoemaker by Donald Corley

Author:Donald Corley [Corley, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: .ISBNincl, PerditusLiber, Fiction, Fairy Tale
ISBN: OCLC: 2416433
Publisher: R.M. McBride, New York
Published: 1930-04-15T05:00:00+00:00

A child dancing to a random tune,

Feet and hands aflame;

Caught up like a hazinted, vagrant leaf

In a whorl of feckless wind.

Dancing a moment’s snatch of Carnival

Across the grey, grim city-acre.…

Daft from some far Elysian spring.…

Mad … and rapt.…

Tanagrane.

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And that image became ’Cindy, dancing one afternoon four years ago, in a high vaulted Italian room in the East Seventies. The two images crossed, blended; and the little dark street girl became golden. Her black dress became ’Cindy’s blue pinafore, the hurdy-gurdy became some unheard, unwritten music that had been steeping in his brain for weeks, that he wanted to play on his violin, and couldn’t. It became clearer now.

“If Petrouchka dances for you,” he observed craftily.

He had learned craft at the Settlement House, in dealing with the girl who kept the library, in order to wheedle certain rare books out of their locked shelves … books with pictures of temples and ships and things. The girl had liked to be wheedled. He had learned that. He was already a novice, a practising novice in the great art of dealing with womankind, who in their unstable fashion, in their cosmic pathos, would like to be asked, and beguilingly, for the very thing they would like to give, bountifully, if only some one understood that they liked to be asked, in just the right way.

Hence Pyotr and his guile.

“If Petrouchka dances for you, and plays his lute, too, will you dance for him? And I will play my lute for you.”

The little girl bowed her head many times vehemently. She was pleased. “Very well,” said Pyotr. “Close the eyes, please.”

He had learned the phrase from an optician, who said that, while making him read the charts across

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the room. For the Settlement had decided he needed glasses, he read so much.

First you looked at a candle-flame and said whether it was on the right or the left of a line made of silk. And then you read, across the room:

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