Читать книгу The Perennial Bachelor - Anne Parrish - Страница 8

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“What is thy duty towards thy neighbor?” asked Miss Hessie Farley, brushing a bluebottle fly away from her nose; and the children chorused:

“My duty toward my Neighbor is To love him as myself an todotoallmenasIwouldtheyshudountome. To lovonoransuccor my father and mother. To honornobey the civil authority. To sumit myselto all my governors teachers spiritchal pastors an masters——”

“Z-zzzzzz-ZZ-zz” the bluebottle droned. Miss Hessie’s jaw set and her eyes watered as she tried to keep from yawning. A field sloped up like a curtain in front of the Sunday school door, its drifts of daisies dazzlingly white in the sunshine.

“What is the inward and spiritual grace?”

And the children, bored and docile, told her:

“A death unto sin an’ a new birth unto righteousness for beinby nature born in sin and the childerna frath——”

The little Campions saw their carriage go lurching and rocking past the Sunday school door down the steep rutty lane that led to the carriage sheds. Caesar always drove Mamma to church a little early, so that she would have time to fill the brass vases that stood on the altar in Grandmother’s memory. Grandfather had built the church, that looked, on its steep hillside, like a big brown hen sitting on its egg of Sunday school room. The reredos was sacred to his memory, the altar cross to Papa’s. The lectern was so that no one should forget Great-Aunt Clementina, and the big chair by the altar, with its inlaid cross of olive-wood beads from the Mount of Olives was to remind everyone of Greatgrandfather.

“Blow your nose, honey,” Maggie whispered to little Victor. “Blow!” She seized his nose gently in her handkerchief, and he obediently blew, his absent eyes fixed on the shimmer of daisies. May and Lily were in Aunt Priscilla’s class, and Victor should have been with the littlest children who were being told so earnestly by Mrs. Trewhitt, the storekeeper’s wife, about the Infant Moses, but he had wept so on his first Sunday that he had been allowed ever since to sit with Maggie.

The three girls had on plaid silk dresses of blue and cream and brown, and little straw hats tilted over their eyes, with blue streamers hanging down behind; they each carried a prayer-book with a sprig of shrub and a clean handkerchief between the leaves; their handkerchiefs for use were in their pockets. Victor’s light blue jacket had white silk braid all around the edges, laid on in loops, as if someone had been practicing writing letter l’s.

When Sunday school was over they trooped up to church, and sat in their pew with Mamma, good, but inexpressibly bored. They rather enjoyed the hymns and singing, “We Praise Thee, O God,” and there was always the hope that a dog might stray in or the boy who pumped the organ bellows might grow dreamy and let the air out; but these distractions weren’t to be counted on, and oh, the weariness, the long exhaustion of the lessons and the sermon.

They couldn’t have stood it, if they hadn’t had their own private diversions. Maggie watched herself doing the most wonderful things on the cross-beams, running along them over the heads of the congregation, hanging from them by her toes, leaping from one to another. May went on with the endless story she was always telling herself. She was the beautiful princess who had just been locked up in a tall tower on an island in the middle of the sea; the prince would rescue her, but he would have his own troubles doing it. Lily looked for the faces made by patches of damp on the dark raspberry-red walls and pale sea-green ceiling. As for Victor, he leaned against the well-filled smoothness of Mamma’s lilac silk senorita-body, looked at his shoes stuck straight out in front of him, looked at the lozenges of colored glass at the top of each pointed casement window—red sky and leaves, green, purple, yellow, and blue as bright and dark as bluing. Then he yawned, and looked at the altar cross that, as he looked, blurred into a dazzle of light, came swimming out to him, then faded into darkness.

When church was over, they couldn’t get into the carriage and drive right home, for Mamma had to talk with people like Miss Hessie Farley and Mr. and Mrs. Almond, and speak pleasantly to people like Mrs. Trewhitt and Miss Perry, the seamstress. They told each other what a lovely day it was, but how hot—quite unseasonable. Mrs. Almond said Mamma’s lilac bonnet, with its white crushed roses under the brim, was sweetly becoming; Miss Hessie said she was having a new postillion-coat made of that very shade, but couldn’t decide on the shape of the buttons—did they think the Egyptian fashion was going to take? Because if so, she would have triangular buttons, like the Pyramids, but one didn’t want to be extreme. Mr. Almond said it was a fine year for cherries, if the robins didn’t get them all. Miss Martin, the organist, hurried out of church with her music under her arm, small and grey and whiskered like a mouse, and squeaked “good-mornings.” And Mrs. Almond, and Mrs. Trewhitt, and Miss Perry, and Miss Martin, and all the other ladies, spoke to little Victor in the small, lilting voices children endure with such patient disdain.

Lunch on Sundays was cold, to save the servants. There was Saturday’s roast-beef, and bread and butter, and then a great tin pan of solidified sour milk, slippy and pale, called “bonny-clabber,” and eaten unenthusiastically with cream and sugar. The little girls didn’t like it, but Mamma said, “Eat it up,” so they ate it up. But Victor wouldn’t, so he had apple jelly. Mamma said he was delicate and his appetite must be tempted.

After lunch Mamma took a nap, and the children went into the garden with their Sunday books. The week-day books were all put away, together with the dolls, the cup and ball, the battledore and shuttlecock. There were no games on Sunday, no excitements except when something happened like the first crocus or the first snowstorm. Funny that God didn’t seem to understand that exciting things mustn’t happen on Sundays.

Maggie had “‘Blind Lillias; or, Fellowship with God. A Tale for the Young.’ By A Lady,” and May had “‘Arthur and Marion’s Sundays,’ by Mrs. Bradley and Miss Neeley.” The two youngest looked at the pictures in their Old Testament story-book, terrifying pictures—brazen serpents, and fathers about to sacrifice their little boys. And Trusty lay panting across their feet, hot and heavy. They were all heavy and depressed, with Sunday surrounding them like an invisible bell shutting out the air. Even the garden looked different. The beech-tree that was their playhouse on week days knew that the dolls and the little thick white china tea-set were put away; the apple tree knew it wasn’t to be climbed; and the pansies and feather-ball poppies seemed to be saying, “Go away, children, we can’t play today.”

But Monday morning! Monday morning! Oh, the cool touch of the dew-wet grass on little bare feet! The box hedges were covered with soaking cobwebs; the heavy dawn-pink peonies pearled with dew held showers for whoever shook them. In the kitchen shed Martha washed the clothes, rainbow-colored suds, foaming up around her dark arms, singing, and sounding as happy as if she would burst—

“‘Nobody knows de trouble Ah’ve seen,

Nobody knows but Jesus.

Nobody knows de trouble Ah’ve seen,

Glory Hallelujah!’”

The children went tearing over the lawn, and Trusty circled yelping around them, mad with delight.

The Circus had passed in the night—there were the elephant’s footprints in the dust of the road! Little Victor, hands on knees, squatted to look at them in solemn rapture.

“Let’s play circus!” cried Maggie. “I choose to be elephant!”

“No, I choose to be elephant,” said Lily, but she knew they wouldn’t let her be.

“I choose to be effalunt!”

“No, Victor, you can’t be, you’re too little.”

Victor wept. He was young, but he had learned how to rule his women.

But, when he was elephant, he didn’t know what to do. He just stood still. So they gave up having a circus, and went to play house under the beech-tree. The beech-tree spread its branches like a cool tent, and under it was dark moss and between its grey toes little ferns came up.

Chloe had let them bake on Saturday, so there was real food to put on the heavy little china plates today, four baked dough mice with currant eyes, grimy grey and hard as rock. They resisted the children’s teeth and put up a brave fight when hammered between two stones. And Maggie had a candle and a match in her pocket, to bake a winter pear over. It was horrid, all smoky and black, but she made them eat it.

Maggie was busy trying to break up one of the currant-eyed mice, and May lay flat on her back and wouldn’t play properly. But Lily and Victor and Chloe’s little black granddaughter Lossie, with whom they might play in the garden but not in the house, talked together politely.

“How do you do, Mrs. Jackson?”

“Howdo, Mis’ Jackson.”

“You mustn’t call me Mrs. Jackson, too, Lossie. You’re Mrs. Jackson.”

“What-all mus’ Ah call you?”

“Well, let’s see. I guess you better call me Mrs. Featherby. Go on, Lossie. Say how do you do, Mrs. Featherby. You say it too, Victor honey.”

“How do do, Mrs. Featherby.”

“Howdo, Mis’ Featherby, Ah done thought Ah’d come to dinnah.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you did. Is this your dear little boy?”

“No-o ma’am, dis yeah’s mah husban’. He’s a right well-off genelmun. How is you-alls chillun?”

“Well, they all have scarlet fever today. This is my little girl.”

“No, I’m not,” said May. “I’m not playing.” She lay on her back pretending the quivering green light falling through the beech leaves was green sea-water, and that she was lying down, down at the bottom of the sea. She was always pretending that she was under the water.

She loved Mamma’s room better than any place else in the world. She loved the pale grey wall paper with its pattern of whiffs of white lace caught up by moss-rosebuds; the broad bed; the ruffled pin-cushion like a great white water-lily; the amber glass slipper; the brown china trunk for matches; and the great rainbow splashes that Mamma’s crystal-stoppered perfume bottles spattered about the room. And Mamma’s clothes had an irresistible attraction for her—velvet jackets with small gold hanging buttons, some in the form of bells, some of pears or flowers; boots topped with bands of fur or pheasant feathers; lavender gloves; and the fashionable new satin ribbons studded with small gold flies. But trying on a velvet sortie de bal, or tipping a frilled sunshade over her shoulder in front of Mamma’s bureau with all its jutting shelves, she would be drawn into the deep, dim mirror, faintly green, and see herself, a little mermaid, through sea water. On the bureau stood a small house made of shells. That was the Sea-King’s palace in Hans Andersen.

“In the deepest spot of all stands the sea-king’s palace; its walls are of coral, and its tall pointed windows of the clearest amber, while the roof is made of mussel shells, that open and shut according to the tide. And beautiful they look; for in each shell lies a pearl, anyone of which would be worthy to be placed in a queen’s crown.”

How May loved the story! She thought of the marble statue of the handsome youth, standing on bright blue sands in the dancing violet shadows cast by a red weeping willow through whose branches the fishes swam. She was the little mermaid swimming deep, deep in the sea—swimming around that beautiful statue, swimming up through the water while the silver bubbles streamed behind her—up to see and to love the young prince who would never love her.

The fairy-tale house that interested greedy little Lily more was the ginger-bread house in “Hansel and Gretel.” Good little cakes, and almonds on the roof!

Maggie considered herself too old for fairy tales. Her favorite book was “The White Chief; a Story of New Mexico,” by Mayne Reid, and she sternly made the others act it out when they were longing to tie grass sashes around the waists of hollyhock dolls, or beat up mud chocolate puddings—or anything rather than be scalped with the trowel from the potting-shed.

As for Victor, he couldn’t read much of anything yet, although he could point out V for Victor and C for Campion in the alphabet book.