Owls Do Cry Read Online Free Page A

dusty and bagged in paper, to lemon or pink pearls. She knew that a drop of iodine on a slice of banana will blacken the fruit, and prove starch; that water is H 2 O; that a man called Shakespeare, in a wood near Athens, contrived a moonlit dream.
    But in all her knowing, she had not learned of the time of living, the unseen always, when people are like the marbles in the fun alley at the show; and a gaudy circumstance will squeeze payment from their cringing and poverty-stricken fate, to give him the privilege of rolling them into the bright or dark box, till they drop into one of the little painted holes, their niche, it is called, and there roll their lives round and round in a frustrating circle.
    And Francie was taken, on the afternoon of the play, like one of the marbles, though still in her silver helmet and breastplate and waiting to be burned; and rolled to a new place beyond Frère Jacques and participles and science and bunsen burners and Shakespeare, there I couch when owls do cry,
    when owls do cry when owls do cry,
    To a new place of bright or dark, of home again, and Mum and Dad and Toby and Chicks; an all-day Mum and Dad, as if she were small again, not quite five, with no school, no school ever, and her world, like her tooth, under her pillow with a promise of sixpence and no school ever any more. No black stockings to buy and get on tick with panama hat and blouse and black shoes, with the salesman spearing the account sheets in a terrible, endless ritual, licking the end of the pencil that is chained by a worn gold chain to the counter, carefully writing the prices, totting the account in larger than ordinary figures so as to see and make quite sure, for the Withers are not going to pay yet. It is all on appro. With the deliberation of power then, the salesman plunges the sheet of paper through the metal spear that stands rooted in a smallsquare of wood; then he moves the wood carefully aside, with the paper speared and torn but spouting no visible blood, and the total unharmed and large, and Francie (or Daphne or Toby or Chicks) staring sideways, afraid, at the committed debt. The Withers are under sentence. It is likely they will be put in prison. And the salesman smooths the sheet of account slips with the power of judgement and fate in the pressure of his hand.
    —Will it be all right, the children ask, till the end of the month?
    —Certainly, till the end of the month.
    But rooted in his mind is the shining awl, the spear to pierce sheaves of accounts and secure them till their day of judgement, to the Last Trump, when the dead spring up like tall boards out of their grave.
    But how shall there be room for the dead? They shall be packed tight and thin like malt biscuits or like the pink ones with icing in between that the Withers could never afford; except for Aunty Nettie passing through on the train.
    So for Francie now, no black stockings to find and darn or uniform to sponge or panama hat to be cleaned with whiting and water and the time saying, Will you walk a little faster? And the marks not coming off, and Francie crying because Miss Legget inspected the hats and pointed to the ones not clean and floppy and said,
    —A disgrace. Now quick march, girls, toes meet the floor first, quick march, but not Francie Withers.
    Francie Withers is dirty. Francie Withers is poor. The Withers haven’t a week-end bach nor do they live on the South Hill nor have they got a vacuum cleaner nor do theylearn dancing or the piano nor have birthday parties nor their photos taken at the Dainty Studio to be put in the window on a Friday.
    Francie Withers has a brother who’s a shingle short. She couldn’t bring the fuji silk for sewing, she had to bring ordinary boiling silk that you shoot peas through, because she’s poor. You never see her mother dressed up. They haven’t any clothes and Francie hasn’t any shoes for changing to at drill time, and her pants are not
real
black Italian cloth.
    She hasn’t a