“Did you stay to church?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Brother Jenkins preached such a beautiful sermon.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
And then she smiled a gentle smile, sighed a dolefully religious sigh
and told her daughter that she could take me into the parlor, that holy
of holies which was darkened and unused during the week, but opened on
Sundays for callers and on other special occasions such as funerals and
weddings. The room was extraordinarily gloomy, because the curtains
were never raised enough to let in a great deal of light, and it
smelled musty from being closed all week. And invariably the gloom was
added to by a crayon portrait of the head of the house, a goggle-eyed
enlargement of a very ordinary photograph by Trappe, which stood on an
easel in a corner.
I had considered this call an occasion, and with the aid of my elder
sister who was visiting us from Memphis, I had made an elaborate toilet
and had been permitted to wear my Sunday suit. But I did not have a
good time; I had known this girl a long time and admired her intensely,
but she seemed suddenly to have changed. She sat stiffly on one side
of the room near a window, hands folded demurely in her lap, and I sat
as stiffly on the other. We inquired coldly concerning each other’s
health, and I had prepared in my mind a suitable and, indeed, quite
holy comment on certain aspects of our school life and was about to
deliver it when her mother called gently from the porch:
“Don’t play the piano, dear: it’s Sunday.”
My observation went unuttered, and we sat for some little time in an
embarrassed silence broken only by the crunch of her mother’s rocking
chair and the crooning melody of a hymn, each wishing to Heaven
that the other was elsewhere. I yearned to hear the piano, but this
instrument, with its delightful tinkle and its capacity for producing
ragtime, was generally regarded as a hellish contraption; in fact, any
sort of fast music was considered more or less sinful. If there had
been an organ in the house, the young lady would have been permitted
to play it, and we could have sung from the family hymn book, provided
we did so in proper humility. But there was only a piano, and it was
taboo. Presently the mother spoke again:
“Don’t play the phonograph, dear; it’s Sunday.”
This admonition was modified later by permission to play an organ
record of the hymn, “Face to Face,” and we played it over five times
before the mother got tired of hearing it. She said, “You’d better stop
now, dear; it’s Sunday.” Then she suggested that we turn to other
means of entertainment.
“Perhaps Herbie would like to look at the album, dear. Would you,
Herbie?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
So we looked at the album, stiffly and in silence, the sacred book held
on our knees, but we were very careful that our knees did not touch.
We dared not giggle at the sight of the bushy-whiskered members of the
young lady’s family, and made no comment on their raiment, which we
rightly considered outlandish. We turned the pages and stared, and the
girl explained.
“That’s Uncle Martin.”
“Taken when he went to Niagara Falls on his honeymoon, dear,” said her
mother. “Uncle Martin was a great traveler.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, feeling that comment was expected.
“Wouldn’t you like to travel, Herbie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, be a good boy and read your Bible and maybe some day God will
make you a great traveler.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But don’t travel on Sunday, Herbie.”
“No, ma’am.”
And crunch went the rocker and we turned another page, to find Aunt
Ella smiling gently at us through a mass of glorious flounces and
trains and switches. We learned from the mother that Aunt Ella had been
converted, at an extraordinarily early age, during a revival near Hazel
Run, and had lived a singularly devout and godly life. Then we looked
through the stereopticon at various places of interest, murmuring our
awe when the mother swished gently into the room and pointed out, in a
view of Niagara Falls, the exact spot where Uncle Martin had stood. It
was, she explained, one of God’s rocks.
To my knowledge this family had some very comical stereopticon views,
scenes depicting the life of an unfortunate tramp who was kicked
heartily and effectively at every place he applied for nourishment,
but we did not see them on Sunday afternoon. They were Saturday-night
stuff. Saturday night was nigger night in Farmington, and the whole
town let down the bars somewhat. That was the night when those who
drank got tight, and when those who bathed got wet, and when those who
had amorous intentions did their best to carry them out. Had I called
on Saturday night I should have been permitted to enjoy the adventures
of the unfortunate tramp, but not on Sunday. They had been put away,
under lock and key in the writing desk, and would not be brought out
until Monday. They were not calculated to promulgate a proper respect
for the Lord’s Day; they were considered downright wicked one day a
week and funny the other six.
Even in my infatuated condition an hour or so of this was quite enough.
Ordinarily this girl and I had much in common; at that time I ranked
her high among the beautiful flowers of God, and had I stopped at her
house on a week day we would have had gleeful and uproarious converse,
although even then we would have been liable to religious instruction
and catechism from every snooping Brother and Sister who saw us. But
the taboos that this Christian family had raised on its holy day stood
between us and could not be broken down; we were horribly uncomfortable
in each other’s presence, and we never got over it. She was never
afterward the same girl. And when I took myself and my Sunday suit into
the sunlight of the porch her mother stopped rocking and crooning hymns
long enough to demand.
“Are you going to church to-night, Herbie?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. “I got to.”
And so I went out of the gate and away from there.
This sort of thing in the homes of Farmington drove all of the boys
to more or less open revolt as rapidly as they reached an age at
which they felt able to defy parental and churchly authority. By the
time I left the town the Sunday-afternoon callers, except those who
made unavoidable duty calls, were to be found only in the homes of
the ungodly, where there was music and pleasure and gayety, where
the parlor was wide open seven days a week and the phonograph blared
and the piano tinkled whenever anyone wanted to hear them. To these
houses also went the girls from the devout families for clandestine
meetings with their sweethearts; they could not entertain anyone in the
dismal mausoleums into which their fathers and mothers had transformed
their homes. Many a small-town romance has been blighted by the
Sunday-afternoon call.