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Some of our families in which there was an unfortunate excess of girls permitted them to have callers on Sunday afternoon, but such affairs were conducted in a prim and prissy manner. Holiness was the motif. The boy, if he had been a good lad all week and had done nothing to affront God or the Preacher, was dressed in his Sunday suit, and the young lady wore the frock that was kept in reserve for weddings, funerals and baptizings, and those cannibalistic exercises called the Lord’s Supper. And it was definitely understood that if a boy called on a girl on a Sunday, he was courting her, and intended to propose marriage. They could not talk; they must converse, and their conversation must be on subjects both inspiring and uplifting. These bons mots that are now known as wise cracks were frowned upon, and a repetition of them resulted in the young gentleman being shown the door.
The piano and the phonograph, in those houses which possessed such wonders, were under lock and key and covered over with draperies to hide them, for it was God’s day and God wanted no foolishness. The girl’s father sat in various strategic places about the house, moving from one to another as his suspicions of the boy’s intentions arose and subsided, and her mother moved solemnly to and fro in her best crinkly silk dress. There was nothing of joy in the hearts of a boy and girl who underwent the torture of the Sunday-afternoon call; to paraphrase the immortal song of Casey, God had struck them out.
The first, and almost the last, young lady upon whom I called on a Sunday afternoon lived near the waterworks, and her father and mother, rocking solemnly upon the front porch and doubtless reflecting gloomily upon the wickedness of the race, presented such a forbidding spectacle that I walked four times around the block before venturing in. But at length I did, and the then idol of my heart greeted me at the front door. Ordinarily she would have seen me coming, and she would have poked her head out of the window and yelled: “Hey! I’ll be out in a minute.” Then we would have piled side by side into the lawn swing and begun swapping trade-lasts, and the air would have been thick with appreciative squeals and “he saids” and “she saids.” But this was Sunday, a day given over to the glory that is religion, and so she met me at the door with a prim and pretty curtsy. Her father gave me a gentle but suspicious greeting, because to the religious parent every boy thinks of a girl only in terms of seduction, and her mother stopped her rocking chair long enough to inquire:
“Did you go to Sunday school to-day, Herbie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What was the Golden Text?” she demanded, suspiciously.
I told her and she asked:
“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.