were Lisa, Yetta, and Mittie, as has been shown. The second group
journeying on an upland, flowery way paralleling the strait and narrow
path in general direction, at least, were Alice, Rosalie, and Amanthus.
Charming names! Enchanting figures!
School opened early in September. Alice, Rosalie, and Amanthus, who were
newcomers, were given desks across the aisle from Emmy Lou. Alice,
seeing her earnestly scrubbing her desk each morning before school and
arranging it for the day, laughed in her eyes. Amanthus, seeing her test
her pen and try her ink for the coming ordeal of copybook, laughed in
her dimple. And Rosalie, asking her what she was hunting on the
outspread page of her geography, laughed aloud when Emmy Lou replied
that it was Timbuctoo, and that she could find it easier if she knew
whether it was a country, or a mountain, or a river. On which they all
came across the aisle and hugged her.
"You said in class that the plural of footnote was feetnotes," said
Rosalie.
"You said, when the teacher held you down about the spelling in your
composition, that a dog didn't have fore-feet but four feet," said
Amanthus.
"It's so funny and so dear," said Alice.
"What?" asked Emmy Lou.
"You," said Amanthus, and they all kissed her.
"Come and see us," said Rosalie; "we're your neighbors now. We've moved
in the white house with the big yard on your square, and Alice, our
cousin, and her mother have come to live with us. We've never been to a
public school before. You live in a white house at the other end of the
square. We saw you in the yard."
"I'll come this afternoon," said Emmy Lou, "and I'll bring Hattie. I'll
get her now so she'll know you."
But Hattie declined to come. She shook her head decidedly. "They've
light dispositions and I've not. My mamma said so about some other
little girls I couldn't get along with. I don't want to come, and
besides I'm not sure I want to know them."
Which would imply that light dispositions were undesirable apart from
Hattie's inability to get along with them! Hattie could be most
disturbing.
Towards noon a sudden shower fell, and the class was told to remain in
its room for recess and eat its luncheons at its desks.
Across the aisle on the other side of Emmy Lou sat Charlotte Wright.
She, too, had shown every disposition to be friendly but Hattie
discouraged this also. She leaned from her desk now. "Will you have a
piece of my homemade hickory-nut candy?" She spoke with pride. "My mamma
let me make it myself on the grate."
On the grate? Why not in the kitchen on the stove? Still that was
Charlotte's own affair. More showy than tidy in her dress, she seemed
one of those detached and anxious little girls hunting for friends. The
kindly impulse was to respond to overtures, Emmy Lou knowing a past
where she had needed friends. And besides there was the candy.
Hickory-nut candy does not have to look tidy to look good. She had a
liberal lunch outspread on the napkin upon her desk, but she had no
candy.
But Hattie leaving her desk and approaching, held her back. "No, she
won't have any candy," she said, and gathering up Emmy Lou's lunch in
the napkin and thus forcing her to follow, walked away.
Whereupon Rosalie and Amanthus, arising and going around to Charlotte,
flung back their curls as they crowded into her desk, one on either side
of her, and _asked_ for a piece of her candy.
"I don't say it wasn't hard to do," said Hattie, flushed and even
apologetic. "But I had to. She's not your kind, and she's not mine."
Yet Rosalie and Amanthus were sharing Charlotte's desk and her candy.
Was she their kind?
Hattie's voice had dropped and was even awe-struck as she explained.
"Charlotte's papa and her mamma don't live together. I heard my mother
and my aunt say so. She and her mother live in a boarding house next to
the confectionery."
In a boarding house? Charlotte through necessity making her candy on a
grate, therefore, and not in the kitchen! And proof indeed that she was
not their kind, even to Emmy Lou, in a day when the home, however small,
was the measure of standing and the rule!
Yet Alice has arisen and is looking across at Charlotte. Emmy Lou loves
Alice. Light disposition or not, she is drawn to her. Her hair is a pale
gold while the curls of her cousins are sunny, and her smile is in her
reflective eyes while theirs is in lip and dimple. Of the three she
loves Alice. Why? She has no idea why. Alice moves forward suddenly and
going around to Charlotte leans to her and kisses her.
"Is Charlotte their kind?" Emmy Lou asks Hattie who also was watching.
"Ask them; they ought to know," tersely. "We can't afford to care, even
if it does make us sorry. My father said people have to stand by their
colors."
Later as school was dismissed and the class was filing out, Rosalie
called to Emmy Lou, "If you will go by for Charlotte, she says she will
come this afternoon, too."
Emmy Lou went home disturbed. Charlotte's father and mother did not live
together, and because of this Charlotte was not their kind.
Marriage then is not a fixed and static fact? As day and night, winter
and summer? Would she yet learn that the other family relations as
brother and sister, parent and child, are subject to repudiation and
readjustment, too?
Emmy Lou was just through serving as bridesmaid for Aunt Katie, in a
filmy dress with a pink sash around what Uncle Charlie said was by
common consent and courtesy her waist, whatever his meaning by this, and
carrying a basket from which she earnestly scattered flowers up the
aisle of St. Simeon's in the path of the bride, and incidentally in the
path of Mr. Reade, the bridegroom, and had supposed she now knew
something about marriage.
The sanction of St. Simeon's was upon the bride, crowned with the veil
and orange blossoms of her solemn dedication, or so the bridesmaid had
understood it.
"Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes,
And blesseth her with his two happy hands!"
Such in substance was the bridesmaid's understanding of it, if not in
just these words.
To be sure the occasion held its disappointment. The concentration of
gifts upon the bride would argue that others shared with Emmy Lou a
sense of the inadequacy of the bridegroom in his inglorious black
clothes.
There was a steel engraving above the mantel in the dining-room called
"The Cavalier's Wedding," at which Emmy Lou glanced again today as she
came in, and in which the bridegroom has a hat in his hand with a
feather which sweeps the ground, and wears a worthy lace-trimmed coat.
At the dinner-table she repeated the news which had so dismayed and
astounded her.
"There's a little girl in my class named Charlotte Wright whose papa and
mamma don't live together."
"Dear, dear!" expostulated Aunt Cordelia, "I don't like you to be
hearing such things."
This would seem to ratify Hattie's position. "Then I mustn't play with
her?"
"Why, Emmy Lou, what a thing for you to say!"
"Then I can play with her?"
"The simple code of yea, yea, and nay, nay," said Uncle Charlie.
"Charlie, be quiet." Then to Emmy Lou, "You mustn't pin me down so; I
will have to know more about it."
"I fancy I know the case and the child," said Uncle Charlie. "The father
worked on my paper for a while, a fine young fellow with a big chance to
have made good." Then to Emmy Lou, "Uncle Charlie wants you to be as
nice to the little girl as you know how, for the sake of the father who
was that fine young fellow."
Emmy Lou was glad to get her bearings. Hattie would be glad to get them
too. The status is fixed by a father and they could play with Charlotte.
One further item troubled. "What are light dispositions?" she inquired.
"Leaven for the over-anxious ones," said Uncle Charlie. "If you meet
any, pin to them."
Emmy Lou turned to Aunt Cordelia. "May I get Charlotte, then, and go to
see Alice Pulteney and Rosalie and Amanthus Maynard? They've just moved
on our square?"
"Agree, Cordelia, agree," urged Uncle Charlie as he arose from the
table. "If we are to infer they have light dispositions, drive her to
see Alice, Rosalie, and Amanthus."
Emmy Lou started forth by and by. The shower of the morning was over and
the September afternoon was fresh and clear. It was heartening to feel
that she was standing by her colors, by Charlotte, and going to see her
new friends.
The boarding house was unattractive and the vestibule where Emmy Lou
stood to ring the bell embarrassed her by its untidiness. As Charlotte
joined Emmy Lou at the door, her mother who had followed her halfway
down the stairs called after her. She was almost as pretty as Aunt
Katie, though she was in a draggled wrapper more showy than tidy, and
she seemed fretful and disposed to blame Charlotte on general
principles.
"Now do remember when it's time to come home. Though why I should
expect anybody to remember in order to save me----"
Rosalie and Alice and Amanthus were waiting at their gate and led them
in, not to the house, but across the clipped lawn gleaming in the
slanting light of the mid-afternoon, to a clump of shrubberies so old
and hoary that beneath their branches was the spaciousness of a room.
Here the ground was heaped with treasure, a lace scarf, some trailing
skirts, a velvet cape, slippers with spangled rosettes, feathers, fans,
what not?
"I am the goose-girl waiting until the prince comes," said Amanthus.
"I am the beggar-maid waiting for the king," said Rosalie.
"I am the forester's foster-daughter lost in the woods until the prince
pursuing the milk-white doe finds her," said Alice.
"Then in the twinkling of an eye our rags will be changed to splendor,"
said Amanthus. "There is a skirt for everyone and a feather and a fan.
Who will you be?" to Emmy Lou and Charlotte.
They were embarrassed. "I never heard of the goose-girl and the others,"
said Emmy Lou. Nor had Charlotte.
Dismay ensued and incredulous astonishment.
A lady came strolling from the house across the lawn. She was tall and
fair, and as she drew near one saw that her smile was in her quiet eyes.
Emmy Lou felt promptly that she loved her.
"Mother," cried Alice.
"Cousin Adeline," cried Rosalie and Amanthus.
"Emmy Lou and Charlotte never have heard of the goose-girl and the
beggar-maid----"
"May we have the green and gold book that was yours when you were
little, to lend them?"
Alice's mother, who was Mrs. Pulteney, smiled at the visitors. "And this
is Emmy Lou? And this is Charlotte? Certainly you may get the book to
lend them."
Emmy Lou felt that one not only did well to love Mrs. Pulteney but might
go further and adore her.
It was agreed that Charlotte should take the book first. She kept it two
days and brought it to Emmy Lou, her small, thin face alight. "I read it
in school and got a bad mark, but I've finished it. It all came right
for everybody."
She left an overlooked bookmark between the leaves at the story of the
outcast little princess who went wandering into the world with her
mother.
Emmy Lou in her turn finished the book. Charlotte got one thing out of
it and she got another. For Charlotte it all came right. Emmy Lou
entered its portals and the glory of understanding came upon her.
Looking back from this land which is that within the sweep of the far
horizon, to the old and baffling world left behind, all was made plain.
Even as Hattie drew a line between those who are right and those who are
wrong, so a line is drawn between those who have entered this land of
the imagination and those who are left behind. One knew now why Alice
flits where others walk, why the hair of Amanthus gleams, why laughter
dwells in the cheek of Rosalie, why the face of Charlotte is
transfigured. And one realizes why she instinctively loves Mrs.
Pulteney. It is because she owned the green and gold book when she was
little!
Emmy Lou also felt that she understood at last why Mr. Reade made so
poor a showing as a bridegroom. It is because while every goose-girl,
beggar-maid, princess or queen may be and indeed is a bride, there is
nothing less than a prince sanctioned for bridegroom, in any instance,
by the green and gold book!
The glory of the green and gold book upon her, Emmy Lou went to Hattie.
But she declined the loan of it, saying she didn't believe in fairy
tales. She had not believed in Alice, Rosalie, and Amanthus at first,
either, though she had accepted them now.
Emmy Lou took this new worry home. "Hattie doesn't believe in fairy
tales."
"She will," from Uncle Charlie confidently.
"When?"
"When she gets younger, with time, like us, or when she overtakes a
light disposition looking for an owner. But I wouldn't be hard on her.
Keep up heart and coax her along."
Hard on Hattie? Her best friend? Coax her along? When were she and
Hattie apart?
At Thanksgiving, Mrs. Maynard, the mother of Amanthus and Rosalie, a
close rival herself to Aunt Katie in prettiness, gave a party for her
two little daughters, a party calling for white dresses and sashes and
slippers.
"Hattie doesn't want to go, but I've coaxed her," Emmy Lou reported at
home.
"Doesn't want to go?" from Aunt Cordelia. "Why not?"
"She says she hasn't got a disposition for white dresses and slippers,
she'd rather go to parties with candy-pulling and games."
Christmas came, with a Christmas Eve pantomime at the theater, which was
given, so Uncle Charlie said, because so many of what he called the
stock company were English.
Mrs. Pulteney gave a party to this pantomime for Alice and her friends,
and though Uncle Charlie had asked Emmy Lou to go with him, in the face
of this later invitation he withdrew his.
"You may give our tickets to Hattie and Sadie if they are not already
going."
Hattie had to be coaxed again. She said she didn't believe in theaters
and felt she had to stand by her colors. Her papa who chanced along at
the moment helped her decide. "There's such a thing as making a nuisance
of your colors," he said, and took the tickets for her from Emmy Lou.
A dreadful thing happened at school the day before the Christmas
holidays. A little girl got mad at Alice. "We've all known something
about you and wouldn't tell it," she said, while the group about the two
stood aghast. "Your papa and your mamma don't live together, and that's
why you live with Rosalie and Amanthus. And it's true because it was all
in the paper."
Emmy Lou hurried home all but weeping and told it.
"Hush, my dear, hush," said Aunt Cordelia. "For the sake of Alice's
brave mother we must forget it. I hoped you would not hear it."
Alice's brave mother? Now the status is fixed by a mother. Life is
perplexing. One must explain to Hattie.
* * * * *
The Christmas pantomime! Emmy Lou had been to the theater before. Aunt
Cordelia had taken her to see "Rip Van Winkle."
"Uncle Charlie wants you to be able to say you have seen certain of the
great actors," she had said, but Emmy Lou did not grasp that she was
seeing the actor until it was explained to her afterward. She had no
idea that a great actor would be a poor, tottering old man, white-haired
and ragged, who brought tears to the onlooker as he lifted his hand to
his peering eyes, standing there bewildered upon the stage.
Aunt Louise took her to another play called "The Two Orphans." She
understood this less. "The name on the program is _Henriette_. Why do
they call it 'Onriette'? Is it a cold in their heads?" She was cross and
spoke fretfully because she was bothered.
But the pantomime! Christmas Eve, the theater brilliant with lights and
garlands, evergreens wreathing the box wherein she sat in her new
crimson dress with Alice, Rosalie, Amanthus, and Charlotte, and Mrs.
Pulteney just behind--fair and lovely Mrs. Pulteney who, like the mother
of Charlotte, did not live with her husband, though Emmy Lou is doing
her best to forget it.
The lights go down, the curtain rises, the pantomime is beginning!
Can it be so? Palace and garden, an open market-place, the public
fountain, the shops and dwellings of a town, and threading the space
thus set about, a crowding, circling throng, jugglers, giants, dwarfs,
fairies, a crutch-supported witch, a white-capped baker! It is the world
of the green and gold book!
The goose-girl is here, about to put her teeth into an apple. The
beggar-maid and her king are recognized. A princess and a prince,
kissing their finger-tips to the boxes, are the center of the stage.
No, _Harlequin_ in his parti-colored clothes with his dagger, whoever
_Harlequin_ may be, is that center, causing the baker at a touch to take
off his head and carry it under his arm, striking the apple from the
lips of the goose-girl, tipping the crown from the head of the prince,
twitching the scepter from the fingers of the princess.
Clownery? Buffoonery? _Grotesquerie?_ Emmy Lou never suspects it if it
be. Rather it is life, which with the same perversity baffles the
single-hearted, bewilders the seeker, and juggles with and decapitates
the ideas even as _Harlequin_ dismembers the well-meaning and
unoffending baker. With this difference, that in the world Emmy Lou is
gazing on all will be made right before the end.
The play moves on. Who are these who now are the center of the scene?
Emmy Lou has not met them before? Sad and lovely _Gabriella_ at her
wheel in her woodland cottage, in reality a princess stolen when in the
cradle, and _Bertram_ her husband, forester of the ignoble deeds, whose
hands have wrung the white doe's neck in wantonness.
And who are these as the play moves on? _Florizel_, once high-hearted
prince, forced to dig in the nether world for gold to replace that
forever slipping through the unmended pocket of _Gonderiga_ his wife,
standing by, princess of the slovenly heart, who is no princess in truth
at all, but a goose-girl changed in the cradle.
The play moves on to its close. The curtain falls, the lights come up,
the pantomime is over.
* * * * *
Hattie and Sadie joined the box party at the door of the theater and all
went home together on the street car. It was Christmas Eve and the
shops and streets were alight and crowded. As the car reached the
quieter sections the lights of the homes shone through the dusk.
Charlotte left the car at her corner which was reached first, to go home
to her mother in the boarding house. Mrs. Pulteney and her group of
three said good-bye at the next corner. At the third, Hattie, Sadie, and
Emmy Lou got off together.
Hattie detained the others ere they could go their separate ways. Her
voice was awed.
"Maybe Charlotte's father was like _Florizel_, once high-hearted
prince----"
Emmy Lou and Sadie gazed at Hattie. They caught the point. No wonder
Hattie was awed.
"--and maybe Mrs. Pulteney is beautiful _Gabriella_----?"
* * * * *
That night after supper Emmy Lou paused before the picture of "The
Cavalier's Wedding." She was far from satisfied with Aunt Katie's
choice.
"Why did Mr. Reade wear those black clothes?" she asked.
"What are you talking about?" from Aunt Cordelia.
But Uncle Charlie seemed to comprehend in part, at least. "Those were
the trappings and the suits of woe."
"Woe?"
"Certainly. He was the bridegroom."
* * * * *
Hattie came around the day after Christmas. Stern daughter of the voice
of God in general, today she was hesitant. "If you haven't returned that
book of fairy tales, I'll take it home and read it."
IX
SO BUILD WE UP THE BEING THAT WE ARE
AUNT CORDELIA stood behind Emmy Lou who was seated at the piano with
"Selections From the Operas, for Beginners," open on the rack. She
paused in her counting. "Now try it again by yourself. You have to keep
time if you want harmony."
Harmony? The mind of the performer dwelt on the word as she started over
again. What is harmony?
Aunt Cordelia relaxing her attention for the moment turned to speak to
Uncle Charlie who was reading his paper by the droplight. "It's no easy
thing to bring up a child, Charlie." As it happened, she was not
referring to the practicing. "Louise thinks Emmy Lou ought to be
confirmed. She says now that she is eleven years old she surely ought to
know where she stands."
It is no easy thing to be the child brought up either, as Emmy Lou on
the piano-stool could have rejoined. Life and Aunt Cordelia might perch
her on the stool but, as events were proving, that did not make her a
musician. Would going up the aisle of St. Simeon's to kneel at the rail,
she had watched the confirmation class for some years now, make her----?
What was it supposed to make her? An Episcopalian? What is an
Episcopalian? Did she want to be one? Or did she want to be what Papa
is?
"Repeat, repeat," said Aunt Cordelia behind her. "Don't you see the dots
at the end of the passage?"
Emmy Lou repeated, came to the end of her selection, and, to the relief
of herself, at least, got down. She was thinking about Papa.
She had gathered from somewhere that when Mamma after marriage left her
church and went with Papa to his church, there was feeling.
Emmy Lou adored Papa. Aunt Cordelia had a brother and two sisters to go
with her to St. Simeon's. Surely there should be someone to go with
Papa? But where? What was he?
Emmy Lou had asked this question outright a good while ago. Papa was
paying her a visit at the time. Unknown to her he had looked over her
head at Aunt Cordelia and laid a finger on his lips. Considering the
extent and the nature of his obligation to Aunt Cordelia, possibly his
idea was there must be no more feeling, though Emmy Lou could not know
this.
Having thus communicated with Aunt Cordelia, he answered the question.
"Had my two grandfathers elected to be born on one side of the Tweed
and not the other, I probably would have been an Episcopalian," he said.
"Tweedledee, in other words, instead of Tweedledum," said Uncle Charlie.
All of which meant that Papa was not an Episcopalian. What was he? Emmy
Lou, eight years old then and eleven now, was still asking the question.
At bedtime Aunt Cordelia spoke again about confirmation. "Think it over
for the rest of the week and then come tell me what you have decided."
Emmy Lou was glad to be alone in bed. At eleven there is need for
constant adjustment and readjustment of the ideas and also for
pondering. The relations of one little girl to Heaven and of Heaven to
one little girl call for pondering. People assort themselves into
Episcopalians, Methodists, and the like. Rebecca Steinau is a Jew, Katie
O'Brien is a Dominican, Aunt M'randy in the kitchen is an
Afro-American, her insurance paper entitling her to one first-class
burial says so. Mr. Dawkins' brother is a Canadian; Maud and Albert
Eddie say their father sometimes is sorry he's not a Canadian, too.
Is each of these assortments a religion? Or all the assortments
religion? Has God a special feeling about having Emmy Lou an
Episcopalian when Papa is something else? Is it not strange that He
never, never speaks? In which case she could ask Him and He would tell
her.
When Emmy Lou arrived at the grammar school the next morning, for she is
thus far on the road of education now, Sadie and Hattie had something to
tell her.
There is a pupil in the class this year named Lorelei Ritter. Emmy Lou
has heard it claimed by some that she can speak French, by others that
she speaks German. The fact is self-evident that she speaks English.
She is given to minding her own affairs and in other ways seems
sufficient to herself. Miss Amanda, the teacher, is pronouncedly cold to
her; they do not seem to get along.
"Where is the Rio de la Plata River, and how does it flow?" Miss Amanda
asked her in the class only yesterday.
Lorelei had hesitated a moment. She was plainly bothered.
"I thought _Rio_ was river----?" she began, and stopped. Miss Amanda's
face was red.
"Go to your seat," she said.
For what? How had Lorelei offended? The class had no idea.
Miss Amanda had shown steady disapproval of Lorelei before this, and
this morning Sadie and Hattie knew why.
"A girl in a class upstairs told us," said Sadie. "Her name is Sally
White and she lives near Lorelei. She says Miss Amanda lives next door
to Lorelei and they play the piano at Lorelei's house all day Sunday
with the windows wide open."
"Tunes," Sadie went on to qualify. "It isn't even as if it were hymns."
"Or voluntaries," said Hattie. Voluntaries were permitted at Hattie's
church before service and Sadie did not approve of them.
Sadie was continuing. "Sally said the neighbors sent word to the Ritters
that it was a thing a Christian neighborhood couldn't and wouldn't put
up with, but the Ritters go right on playing."