Title Page
The Author
The Arabian Days of Jimmy Jennette
The Bells of Cullam
The Cordon Bleu of the Sierra
The Eyes of the Heart.
The Fear Motif
Her Groove
How Beelzebub Came to the Convent
About the Publisher
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Ethel Watts Mumford (1876/1878 – 1940) was an American author from New York City. The surname Mumford came from her first husband, George D. Mumford, a lawyer (married 1894–1901).
After her first husband grew intolerant of her prolific writing and art career, she fled to San Francisco in 1899 with their only child, a son. She sued for divorce on grounds of desertion. After the divorce was granted in 1901, she returned to New York, vowing never to remarry unless her husband accepted her career. On June 4, 1906 she married Peter Geddes Grant of Grantown, Morayshire, Scotland.
The daughter of a wealthy businessman, she was given a fine education, topped by her study of painting at the Julian Academy of Paris. She traveled extensively in Europe, the Far East, and North America, experience that is well-reflected in her work.
Most of her early published works were written in San Francisco including her first novel, Dupes. She was a heavy producer of plays, vaudeville sketches, novels, short stories, joke collections, songs, poems, and articles. She also painted and illustrated books.
In her teen years, after studying dramatic technique by reading 2,000 manuscripts, she turned to playwriting. Her farces were produced on New York and London stages. After her 1906 marriage she wrote for a time under the name "Ethel Watts Mumford Grant," adding her second husband's name, but eventually reverted to "Ethel Watts Mumford" as a byline.
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THE trained nurse in charge of the hospital, The Lost and Found Child Department, and lady high custodian of the "Infant Incubator Exhibit," raised her well-arched brows.
"You don't mean to tell me, Mr. Jennette, that you turn that boy loose here! Why, it 'll kill the child."
Jimmy, with ecstatic eyes fixed on the distant lemon-yellow shape of the high-wire artist, nibbled his seventh ice-cream cone and sighed happily. Jimmy's father wrinkled his nose and blinked his pale-blue, humorous eyes.
"I must confess, Miss Alehan, we don't interfere with him much. We found, his mother and I, that he fretted himself sick when he was n't allowed the run of the place, and we 've got a notion it's healthier to let him get plain tired out, and bursting full of pop-corn and ice-cream and soda and 'dogs,' and then have the doctor for a week. He gets over it in great shape, and after that he's in training for the rest of the season. When all's said and done, why spoil it all? He's only eight; all the tinsel is real. It's all gold and diamonds and fairy-land,—fairy-land you don't wake up from,—and lasts every day and all day."
Miss Mehan looked scientific disapproval, and, to do her justice, what she had seen of Jimmy's activities and appetite was enough to horrify her accurate sense of healthy equilibrium.
"Mark my words," she said sorrowfully; "something is going to happen to that boy. Monsieur Daniel took him into the lions' den, and I saw him following around after that dreadful dancer in the Midway. Those Orientals are always fighting, and Jimmy's sure to get in it."
"I don't doubt it," said Jimmy's father, resignedly; "but he 'll subdue them all,—he always does,—and, besides, he's just as dangerous when he's home. Last week I caught him setting off fire-crackers under a contractor's dynamite wagon. Honestly, I feel lot safer when he's here, and it takes a crowd of about two hundred thousand to take care of him."
"Of course," Miss Melian admitted, "you 're his father, Mr. Jennette; but I must say, I do not consider an amusement ark the proper place in which to bring up a child." She turned away as the deputy nurse appeared at the side entrance of "Concession B" and indicated in pantomime that the crowd was awaiting the lecture in the incubator-room.
Mr. Chester Jennette, general manager of "The World's Greatest Spectacular Playground," scratched his red head contemplatively and stared at his son. Perhaps Miss Mehan was right, but he and Edna somehow could n't deny the youngster the glamour and glory of these, his Arabian, days. Perhaps Jimmy's manners were an unpolished reflection of the cosmopolitan, heterogeneous throng of the employees of the big show, perhaps his language did need pruning; but what was lost in these branches of education was doubly gained in his ability to take care of himself, to make friends, to adjust himself, chameleon-like, to all the diversified creeds, customs, and codes with which, as the "boss's boy," he came in daily contact.
"Shucks!" said Jennette, "I only wish I could have had his chance. It must be perpetual heaven." He turned away with a whimsical sigh as Hamil, the Greco-Jewish camel-driver from Cairo, approached with waving hands.
"Boss," he wailed, "that Jimmee he wan' ride Menelik, the black camel, all time. He no pay—"
"Oh, well, let him." The blue Irish eyes looked into the excited brown ones. "Let him, for heaven's sake! He 'll be tired of camels by to-morrow. By all means, Hamil, get Menelik out of his system."
"Susteem?" repeated Hamil.
The manager came back to earth.
"Sure, Hamil; let Jimmy have the run of the whole Midway. Let him eat it up. And," he unwisely added, by way of further enforcing the freedom of the city which he accorded his small son, "if he wants La belle Fatima to teach him the 'coochy-cooch,' tell her to go to it."
The camel-driver retired in confusion to tell his tale in the bazaar. It lost nothing in the telling.
Fatima received her orders to impart her art to the infant man-child with wide-eyed horror. Kula, "the Bride of the Desert," and Zabelle, "the Armenian Captive," were equally nonplussed. Yusuf, the magician, Haji, the brass-worker, Ibrahim, virtuoso of the peacock-zither, and Abdul, the owner of the four gorgeously bedecked camels, received the story of Hamil with amazed incredulity. Were they all to be under the heel of this infant? It was most strange. They would await the coming of Ben Ali Hassan, hereditary saint and general manager of all good Mohammedans in this land of sun-struck infidels. Hassan would explain the mystery.
At this juncture Kiera, astrologer, fortune-teller, and general mystic-of-all-work, came slowly forward, swathed in her veils of black and purple. She heard the story with interest dawning in her pale-irised eyes.
"So—a man-child to whom is given command. That is not of every day; that is even as the babe of Hassan, who, by virtue of the blood of the prophet, inherits the green turban, though he have not been to holy Mecca. But what manner of infidel is this to whose suckling is given such power?"
"Perhaps he is born under Amerikine planets," suggested Kula, hitching her spangled hip scarf. "Kiera,"—she raised her heavy eyebrows, which met above her small nose with true Oriental perfection,—"if Allah grants thee knowledge of the heavens, read thou his horoscope, if thou canst." She turned away sneering, and, swaying with self-conscious grace, crossed the tessellated square, surrounded by cardboard houses and papier-mâché mosques, to the performance tent.
Kiera scowled.
"Did ye hear her?" she snarled. "She would mock me, and pretend that I cannot read the stars! Wait, I will read the future of the man-child, though the heavens fall. Alas! that Achmet Ben Ahr is outside with the ballyhoo. He knows her for what she is, and he shall tell her."
"Quarrel thy quarrels, woman, with thine own kind, and seek not to embroil others," said Ibrahim. "Leave Ben Ahr to his ballyhoo. He is no man of thine."
"Nor of hers," raged Kiera.
"Therefore cease thy talk," admonished Ibrahim. "It is enough." He walked away with stately tread, and took his stand behind the foolish gray-suited American who presumed to engage Riza the crafty in a game of chess at twenty-five cents per game.
But Kiera's hot Southern soul was boiling, and she sought her tent, curtly refusing to read the palms of two white-clad, highly perfumed ladies who dug into silver-mesh bags for "a piece of change."
For months now Kula had badgered and insulted "the Greatest Seeress in the Western Hemisphere," and the G. S. of the W. H.'s small stock of patience was exhausted. Here they were starting in a new season with the big park, and Kula was already beginning her belittling insinuations and sneers. Kiera snorted like a blooded war-horse. She would steal Achmet's knife, and then!
She was deflected from her thoughts of gory reprisal by the appearance of a small boy in a white suit, nibbling an ice-cream cone. The boy had an alert, serious face; a pair of pale-blue, imaginative, wide-set eyes; a shingling of freckles on his peeling, sunburned nose; a capacious mouth; and outstanding ears that upheld a white duck "crew" cap. He advanced to Menelik, the black camel, and with a proprietary air tweaked the colored wool tassels and shell ornaments of the big beast's halter. Then he looked about for Hamil, now absorbed in the game of chess proceeding on the big Kurdish carpet by the mosque entrance, changed his mind, peeled a strip of skin from his nose, gazed at it meditatively, then, catching the inquiring, pale-irised eyes gazing at him above the black and purple veils, he advanced, and laid two little monkey hands on the table before Kiera.
"You 're the psy-cho-log-i-cal wonder and mind-reader, are n't you?" he inquired. "Gee! that must be great!"
"Twenty-fi' cents, please," said the psythological wonder.
The boy looked at her wide-eyed.
"Huh, I'm Jimmy—Jimmy Jennette."
Kiera looked at him with new interest.
"Ah, so you are to learn to dance by Fatima?"
"Me!" gasped Jimmy, overcome by the suggestion. "Not on your tin-type! What 'd I want to learn to dance for? Why, the armless wonder is going to show me how to swallow swords! Say, can you tell me if us 'Coney Island Giants' is going to lick 'the Sea Gate Senators' in the next game?"
He talked in riddles, this to-be-obeyed man-child; but Kiera understood clearly that he scorned to learn from Fatima with a great scorn, and longed for swords, as was the birthright of the son of a chief.
"How old are you?" inquired the seeress.
"I'm eight," said Jimmy, with a proud swagger.
"What mont', what day?" Kiera persisted.
"Day before yesterday," admitted Jimmy, reluctantly. He preferred to be "going on nine."
"What hour—you know what hour?" the veiled one inquired.
Jimmy looked puzzled.
"Well," he said at length, "mother says I began yelling at four in the morning, and I 've been wakin' her up regular ever since. Guess I do wake up sort of early," he allowed. "Bed's awful' slow."
The mystic lady was jotting down various symbols and strange characters. Jimmy regarded the pad with disapproval.
"I can write clearer than that," he bragged. "What's that a picture of?" He looked upon the sign of Cancer on the heading of the paper. "I can dror an Indian," he proudly informed her. "The feller in the burned-leather booth showed me how. Why don't you get him to show you how to dror?"
Kiera finished her notes with a flourish.
"I shall see your stars," she said, and smiled down at the boy's eager face. "I think you shall one day be a very big, great man."
Jimmy nodded gravely.
"Sure," he agreed, and the final morsel of ice-cream cone disappeared within his cavernous mouth, shutting off further communication for the time being. His eyes, however, were endeavoring to impart something of importance. The last of the dainty quite visibly descending beneath the white skin of his thin little throat, the line of communication was at last open. "You bet I 'm going to be a great man! Moonsoor Daniel is going to teach me how to be a lion-tamer. Gee!" he stood silent, in awe of his own future prowess. "Gee!"
"You shall conquer more than lions," affirmed the reader of the heavens; "even men and women."
Jimmy looked unconvinced.
"You oughter hear 'em roar," he said, his mind wholly concentrated on his chosen profession. Yusuf sedately crossed to the booth. Jimmy turned upon him his interested gaze. "Gee! that's the magician. I saw him grow a flower in a pot out on the ballyhoo." He considered the master of the genii with a practical eye. "Dad says he pays him twenty-five dollars a week, and the head gardener for the grounds gets fifty dollars. Why don't he garden?" There seemed no answer to this obviously good advice, and Jimmy's mind had already disposed of that angle of the proposition. "I'm gonna stay for the show," he announced as one conferring a favor. "You 're awful' long between shows. When does it start?"
Yusuf received the question as a command.
"But now, O Son of the Boss; to hear is to obey." He waved Jimmy toward the rows of benches fronting the platform, upon which a gaudy tent of turkey red, hung with bright rugs made in Pennsylvania, sought to impress the audience with a true conception of the beauty and luxury of a sultan's harem. A number of people were already seated, expectantly gazing at this alluring interior. Yusuf marched off, corralled the various performers, and shepherded them to the rear entrance of the tent.
"The boss-child is in front," he informed them. "He desires us to begin. It is five minutes before the hour, but I have said we obey."
Obediently the members of the troupe took their places, one behind the other on the back stairs, and entered the rear flap of the stage in solemn order: first the two boy athletes, beating on tom-toms and crooning a nasal singsong; then the zither-player, with his highly colored instrument; Abdul Baa, with a guitar, ushering in the prides of the harem, Fatima, Kula, Zabelle, and Kiera, who took their places on the cushioned divan. A moment later Haji, the brass-worker, disguised as the sultan, entered, attended by Yusuf, and, seating himself upon the dais, waved a grimy hand in sign of his readiness to be entertained.
Jimmy edged on the very tip of his seat as Yusuf, with a black velvet wand tipped with silver, conjured flowers galore from arid pots; produced pigeons from the beard of Yusuf, where, indeed, they might well have hatched; and quite painlessly poured fire from his finger-tips; then he rolled two pigeons together and produced a ruffled and protesting parrot, and—the trouble began. Instead of flying to his cage, the parrot chose to hang upside down from the fringe of the tent. His master cursed under his breath, but forbore to notice the insubordination, and introduced Zabelle, the Armenian captive, who by a few passes was thrown into a hypnotic sleep, which produced the extraordinary result of suspending her in air with no visible means of support. The sultan, chewing gum, appeared quite callous to the liberties taken with his expensive slave until the parrot, having tired of the curtain as a perch, concluded that Zabelle's glittering head-dress offered a better, and alighted thereon, with small consideration for the captive's hair. Zabelle came out of her trance and shrieked for help. The sultan bent a furious glance—he was the captive's father— on the bungling magician; the magician whacked the parrot, which retorted angrily, and flew to the tent-flap, clawed its way up, and teetered on a guy-rope.
Angry and disgruntled, Zabelle was allowed to alight. The episode had descended from "Oriental mysticism" to plain farce, and the audience rocked with laughter, Jimmy's shriek of delight dominating all the rest with the shrill persistence of a siren. The troupe was thoroughly rattled, but resolved to retrieve itself before the all-important boss-child; for, behold! the boss-child was laughing them to scorn. That was not to be endured.
Fatima was hastily thrust forward, the peacock zither and the tom-toms struck up the accompaniment to her far-famed dance. But unfortunately the extraordinary information she had received—that she was to teach the "Garden of Love" pas seul to the son of the chief—threw her into a state bordering on panic. How, in the name of Allah, was one to teach a man-child of eight the dance of the Oured-Nails? With every gyration that set her beads jangling and her bangles ringing she felt more embarrassed and helpless. The Egyptians, commanded to make bricks without straw, had a task of sheer simplicity compared with that to which, for some reason beyond her Oriental guessing, she had been assigned.
"How, in Allah's name! How to do this impossibility?" She clapped her agile fingers on her silver cymbals absently and out of tune; her naturally rhythmic body became as wooden as an automaton, for her mind was questioning, "How, in the name of Allah, shall I teach a man-child of eight to do this!"
"Ha-ha, ah-ah-ah," chanted the musicians.
Desperately Fatima began the last circling preparatory to her final whirl.
"Ah-ah-ah! Camel!" hissed Yusuf under his breath as she passed. "Camel! No, dromedary! Thou wilt have us expelled from the park for thy most execrable dancing."
"Pariah dog and slaughter-house swine!" murmured the sultan's favorite, with tears of fury in her lustrous eyes.
Kula, the trouble-maker, broke into a sneering giggle.
"Does a man-child affright thee, O rose-leaf-footed teacher of dancing?" she jeered.
Kiera leaned forward.
"Thou art a gazelle, Fatima, compared with her at her best."
To the audience this badinage appeared as encouraging demonstrations of delight; but Kula's fingers twitched, and only the threatening brows of Yusuf and Haji made the serpent-tongued combatants withdraw to their own corners of the divan. Fatima made her bow, rushed to her place, and slammed herself full-length on the cushions. The sultan's palace had become the ragged edge of an active volcano.
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