VIII
STERN DAUGHTER OF THE VOICE OF GOD
Hattie's rule of life was simple, but severe. She set it forth for Emmy Lou. "Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and you have to draw the line between. And when you've chosen which side you're on, you have to stand by your colors."
She went on to diagram her meaning. "I heard my father tell my brothers what it means to stand by your colors. He said they couldn't be too careful in their associates. That now they've joined the League for the Right they must show their faith by their works. You and I can't associate with anyone who chooses the other side either. If Lisa Schmit will go to Sunday picnics, she's wrong, and you and I have to show our colors and tell her so."
Emmy Lou hesitated at such consignment of Lisa to the limbo defined as wrong, but Hattie said she didn't dare hesitate. She even showed a disposition to take Emmy Lou's right of election into her keeping, saying if she felt this way about it she'd speak for her.
"No, we won't come into your game of prisoner's base," she told Lisa and Yetta at recess; "we're going to have a game of our own."
The contumely for the unfriendly act nevertheless fell on Emmy Lou who knew them best. "She's getting to be stuck up," Lisa said bitterly to her own group, with a jerk of her head toward Emmy Lou standing by Hattie. "She won't play with Yetta and me any more because our papa keeps a grocery."
"No such thing!" said Hattie. "She won't play with you because you go to picnics on Sunday."
Was this true? Or was it because Hattie had told her she must not play with them because they went to picnics on Sunday?
Hattie called this bringing of Lisa and Yetta to judgment "drawing the line." It was a painful process to the rejected. Lisa went off with her face suffused and Yetta who followed her was crying.
Next followed the case of Mittie Heinz whose mamma kept a little shop for general notions, a stock that Emmy Lou never had been able to identify, often as she had been there to buy needles or thread or cambric for Aunt Cordelia.
Mittie read her storybook on the steps of the shop on Sunday and Hattie explained to her that this made it impossible to include her in a game of catcher.
"Right's right, and wrong's wrong," she said. "If we are going to draw the line we have to draw it."
"I read my books on Sunday," expostulated Emmy Lou, for Mittie's startled face showed surprise as she turned away, and her eyes looked reproach at Emmy Lou.
"But they are books you get out of your Sunday school library, and don't count anyway because you say you don't like them," from Hattie.
This lamentable and unhappy knowledge of good and evil was forced on Emmy Lou when in the ascending scale of years she simultaneously reached her ninth birthday, the Fourth Reader, and the estate of bridesmaid to Aunt Katie.
Life from this eminence appeared broad-spread and beautiful, and diversified by variant paths within the sweep of a far horizon until now never suspected. But Hattie, youthful Virgil to her youthful Dante, permitted personally conducted excursions only, and these along a somewhat monotonous because strait and narrow path—all other roads, whether devious or parallel, flower-bedecked or somber, ascending or descending, leading but to questionable ends.
The first travelers pointed out by Hattie as trudging these alien roads 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."