A FEW STRONG INSTINCTS AND A FEW PLAIN RULES
Everyexigency in life save one, for an Emmy Lou at six, seemingly is provided for by rules or admonition, the one which sometimes is overlooked being lack of understanding.
"'Take heed that thou no murder do,'" was the new clause of the Commandments In Verse, she had recited at Sunday school only yesterday.
"'The way of the transgressor is hard,'" said Dr. Angell from his pulpit to her down in the pew between Uncle Charlie and Aunt Cordelia an hour later. Or she took it that he was saying it to her. For while one frequentlyfails to follow the words in this thing of admonition, there is no mistaking the manner. When she came into church with Uncle Charlie and Aunt Cordelia, in her white piqué coat and her leghorn hat, Dr. Angell had met her in the aisle and seemed glad to see her, even to patting her cheek, but once he was in his pulpit he shook an admonishing finger at her and thundered.
Nor did Emmy Lou, a big girl now for all she still was pink-cheeked and chubby, lack for admonitions at home from Aunt Cordelia and Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise above stairs, and Aunt M'randy in the kitchen below—a world of aunts, in this respect, it might have seemed, had Emmy Lou, faithful to those she deemed faithful to her, been one to think such things.
Admonitions vary. Aunt Cordelia and Aunt M'randy drew theirs from the heart, so to put it. "When you mind what I say, youare a good little girl. When you do not mind what I say, you are a bad little girl," said Aunt Cordelia.
"When I tell you to go on upstairs outer my way, I want you to go. When I tell you to take your fingers outen thet dough, I want you to take 'em out," said Aunt M'randy. Admonitions put in this way are entirely comprehensible. There is no getting away from understanding mandates such as these.
Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise drew their admonitions from a small, battered book given to them when they were little for their guidance and known as "Songs for the Little Ones at Home."
"O that it were my chief delightTo do the thing I ought;Then let me try with all my might,To mind what I am taught,"
said Aunt Katie.
"O dear me, Emma, how is this?Your hands are very dirty, Miss;I don't expect such hands to seeWhen you come in to dine with me,"
said Aunt Louise.
Nor did Emmy Lou suspect that it was because their advice did not come from the heart it reduced her to gloom; that Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise delighted in it not because it was advice, but because it did reduce her to gloom; that Aunt Katie, who was twenty-two, and Aunt Louise, who was twenty, did it to tease?
Bob, the house-boy, too, had his line of ethics for her. And while he went to Sunday school, and to what he called Lodge, and had what he termed fun'ral insurance, observances all entitling him to standing, he pointed his warnings with dim survivals from an older, darker lore which someone wiser than Bob or Emmy Lou might have recognized as hoodoo. Not that Bob or Emmy Lou either knewthis. Nor yet did Emmy Lou grasp that he to whom she was told to go for company a dozen times a day when the others wanted to get rid of her used the same to get rid of her himself. On the contrary, her faith in him being what it was, his warnings sank deep, the dire fates of his examples being guaranty for that. Moreover his examples came close home.
The little girl who wouldn't go play when they wanted to get rid of her. The little boy who would stay out visiting so late they had to send the house-boy after him. The little girl who wouldn't go 'long when told to go, but would hang around the kitchen. Treated as a class by Bob, a class, so his gloomy head-shakings would imply, peculiarly fitting to his present company, their fates were largely similar.
"They begun to peak, an' then to pine. An' still they wouldn't mind. Thar ha'r drapped out in the comb. An' still they wouldn't mind.Thar nails come loose. An' still they wouldn't mind. Thar teeth drapped out. But it wuz too late. When they tried to mindthey couldn't mind!"
And while his audience might chafe beneath the almost too personal tone of these remarks, she dared not question them. Examples dire as Bob's were vouched for every day. Only the Noahs were saved in the ark. Lot's wife turned to a pillar of salt. The bear came out of the woods and ate the naughty children. Aunt Cordelia and Sunday school alike said so. The wicked sisters of Cinderella were driven out of the palace. Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise said so. The disobedient little mermaid was turned into foam. The little girl down at the corner, named Maud, who owned the book, said so.
These things all considered, perhaps it came to be a matter of too many and cumulative admonishings with Emmy Lou. Nature willrevolt at too steady a diet perhaps even of admonitions. Or it may be that even an Emmy Lou in time rebels, when elders so persistently refuse to recognize that there is another, an Emmy Lou's side, to most affairs.
For at six the peripatetic instinct has awakened and the urge within is to move on. Where? How does an Emmy Lou know? Anywhere so that the cloying performances of outgrown baby ways are behind her.
Many whom she knew in the receded stages of five years old, and four, have moved on or away before this. Izzy who lived next door. Minnie who lived next to Izzy. Lisa Schmit whose father had the grocery at the corner but now has one at a corner farther away.
And others have moved into Emmy Lou's present ken. Mr. Dawkins has the grocery at the corner now, and his little girl is Maud, guarantor for the mermaid, and his big girl is Sarah, and his little boy is Albert Eddie.The peripatetic instinct impelling, Emmy Lou goes to see them as often as Aunt Cordelia will permit.
There is fascination in going if one could but convey this to Aunt Cordelia in words. Any can live in houses; indeed most people do; or in Emmy Lou's time did; but only the few live over a grocery.
It argues these different. Mr. Schmit was German. Mr. Dawkins is English. At Emmy Lou's, the teakettle, a vague part in family affairs, boils on the stove, but at Maud's, the teakettle, a family affair of moment, boils on the "hob," which is to say, the grate. And more, the father and mother of Maud and Albert Eddie not only have crossed that vague something, home of the little mermaid, the ocean, but their mother has all but seen the Queen.
"You know the Queen?" the two had asked Emmy Lou anxiously.
And she had said yes. And she did know her. Knew her from long association and by heart. She sat in her parlor at the bottom of the page, eating bread and honey, while the maid and the blackbird were at the top of the next page.
"Tell her about it," Maud and Albert Eddie then had urged Sarah, their elder sister, "about when mother all but saw the Queen?"
Sarah complied. "'Now hurry along home with your brother in the perambulator while I stop at the shop,' mother's mother said to her. Mother was twelve years old. But she didn't hurry. She stopped to watch every one else all at once hurrying and running, and so when she reached the corner the Queen, for the Queen it was, had gone by."
"If she had minded her mother——" from Albert Eddie.
"And hurried on home with the perambulator——" from Maud. Proof not only of aworthy attitude on their part towards the admonition of the tale, but of an evident comprehension of what a perambulator was.
But Aunt Cordelia, not always a free agent, was no longer permitting so much visiting.
"You are letting her actually live on the street," said Aunt Katie.
"With any sort of children," supplemented Aunt Louise.
Undoubtedly Aunt Cordelia came the nearest to understanding there is another side to these affairs. "Sometimes I think she's lonesome," she said.
"Those children who are all the day,Allowed to wander out,And only waste their time in play,Or running wild about——"
said Aunt Katie. Aunt Louise finished it:
"Who do not any school attend,But trifle as they will,Are almost certain in the end,To come to something ill."
And while it almost would seem that Aunt Cordelia was being admonished too, and from the little book, in the light of what followed, it appeared that Aunt Katie, Aunt Louise, and the little book were right.
The day in question started wrong. In the act of getting out of bed, life seemed a heavy and a listless thing. If Emmy Lou, less pink-cheeked than usual if any had chanced to notice, but full as chubby, ever had felt this way before, she would have told Aunt Cordelia that her head ached. But if the head never has ached before?
Her attention was distracted here, anyhow, and she, startled, let her tongue pass along the row of her teeth. Milk teeth, those who knew the term would have called them. There is much, however, that an Emmy Lou, one small person in a household of elders, is supposedto know that she does not, knowledge coming not by nature but through understanding.
Then, reassured, her attention came back to the affairs of the moment, the chief of these being that life is a heavy and listless affair and the labyrinthine windings of stockings more than ever fretting in effect upon the temper. And after stockings come garments, ending with the pink calico dress apportioned to the day, and succeeding garments come buttons. Aunt Katie in the next room was cheerful.
"I love to see a little girlRise with the lark so bright,Bathe, comb and dress with cheerful face——"
One was in no mood whatever for the little book, and showed it. Aunt Louise in the next room too, possibly grasped this.
"Why is Sarah standing thereLeaning down upon a chair,With such an angry lip and brow,I wonder what's the matter now?"
Aunt Cordelia was struggling with the buttons. "Let her alone, both of you. Sometimes I think you are half responsible."
The outrages of the day went on at breakfast. Emmy Lou's once prized highchair, a tight fit now, and which, could she have had her own way, would have been repudiated some time ago, was in itself provocative. She climbed into it stonily.
Bob placed a saucer before her. If she ever had suffered the qualms of an uneasy stomach before, she would have known and told Aunt Cordelia.
"I don't want my oatmeal," said Emmy Lou.
"You must eat it before you can have anything else," said Aunt Cordelia.
"I don't want anything else."
"She's fretful," said Aunt Katie.
"She's cross," said Aunt Louise.
"I am coming to think you are right, Louise," said Aunt Cordelia. "What she needs is to be at school with other children. School opens the day after tomorrow, and I'll start her."
"This baby?" from Uncle Charlie incredulously, his gaze seeking Emmy Lou in her highchair.
"Look at that oatmeal still untouched," from Aunt Cordelia. "Charlie,she is getting so she doesn't want to mind!"
The outrages went on during the morning. Emmy Lou did not know what to do with herself, whereas Aunt Cordelia had a great deal to do with herself. "You little hindering thing!" by and by from that person with exasperation. "Go on out and talk with Bob. He's cleaning knives on the kitchen doorstep."
But Bob, occupied with his board and bath-brickand piece of raw potato, had no idea of talking with her. He talked to himself.
"Seems like I done forgot how it went, 'bout thet li'l boy whut would stan' roun' listenin'. Some'n' like 'bout thet li'l girl whut wouldn't go about her business——"
Gathering up his knives and board, he went in to set his table. Turning around by and by he found her behind him in the pantry. He talked to himself some more.
"Reckon is I done forgot how it went? 'Bout thet li'l girl got shet up in the pantry after they tol' her to keep out? She knowed ef she coughed they'd hear an' come an' fin' her thar. An' she hed to cough. An' she wouldn't cough. An' she hed to. An' she wouldn't. An' she hed to. An' she DID. But it wuz too late. The pieces of her wuz ev'ey whar, even to the next spring when they wuz house-cleanin', an' foun' her knuckle-bone on the fur top shelf. Looks lak to me, somebodyelse is gettin' ready for a good lesson. Better watch out."
The final outrage was yet to come. At the close of dinner Emmy Lou came round to Aunt Cordelia's chair. Aunt Cordelia was worn out. She had never known her Emmy Lou to behave as she had in the last day or so.
"Now don't come asking me again," she said, forestalling the issue. "I've gone over the matter with you several times before today. You cannot go play with anybody. No, not with Maud at the corner or anybody else." Then to Uncle Charlie, shaking his head over this unwonted friction as he rose to start back down town: "They tell me there is whooping-cough around everywhere, Charlie." Then to Emmy Lou: "Now try and be a good girl for the rest of the day, Aunt Cordelia will have her hands full. It is Bob's afternoon out. Try and be Aunt Cordelia's precious baby."
But Emmy Lou, her tongue traveling therow of her teeth anew, didn't propose to be anybody's precious baby. She was a big girl, now, almost six years old, and wanted it recognized that she was. And she didn't feel good in the least, but like being quite the reverse for the rest of the day.
This was at two o'clock. At three Aunt Cordelia's own Emmy Lou, the pink calico upon her person and a straw hat upon her head, turned the knob of the front door. Having obeyed thus far in life, she was about to disobey.
The front door, its knob requiring both hands and her tiptoes, whereas the kitchen door would have been open. But Aunt M'randy was in the kitchen.
As it chanced, Bob was leaving by the kitchen door, and coming around by the side pavement as Emmy Lou came down the steps, they met. His idea seemed to be that she was tagging after him, an injury in itself whenshe divined it. He was of the same mind evidently when a moment later she was still beside him outside the gate.
He paused and addressed the air disparagingly before he went. "Looks like to me I'll have to bresh up my ricollection 'bout thet li'l girl whut would come outside her own gate after she was tole not to come. Spoilin' for one good lesson, thet li'l girl wuz, an' 'pears like to me she got it. Better watch out." And Bob was gone, up the street, whereas it was the definite intention of the other person at that gate to go down the street.
Mr. Dawkins' grocery fronted on the main street while his housedoor opened on the side-street. A few moments later a small figure in a familiar pink dress and straw hat reached this side door, and, pausing long enough for her tongue to pass uneasily along the row of her teeth, opened it upon a flight of stairs and went in.
Five o'clock it was and after when Mr. Dawkins' eldest daughter Sarah, followed by Maud and Albert Eddie, came down these steps propelling a visitor in a pink dress and straw hat, a visitor known from the Dawkins' viewpoint as that little girl from up the street in the white house that get their groceries from Schmit.
Perhaps this fact explained Sarah's small patience with this person who in herself would seem to invite it. She not only was pale, and her lips pressed with unnatural while miserable firmness together, but her eyes, uplifted when Sarah most undeniably shook her, were anguished.
"If you'd open your mouth and speak," said Sarah with every indication of shaking her again.
A stout gentleman coming along the side street which led from a car-line crossed over hastily.
"Here, here! And what for?" Uncle Charlie asked with spirit.
Sarah looked up at him. With her long, tidy plaits and her tidy person she conveyed the impression that she was to be depended on. Maud looked up at him. With her small tidy plaits and her tidy person she conveyed the impression that she was to be depended on, too.
Albert Eddie looked up. Mr. Dawkins was to be congratulated on his family. There was dependability in every warm freckle of Albert Eddie's face.
Emmy Lou, Uncle Charlie's own Emmy Lou, had been looking up the while, anguished. She was a reliable person in general herself, or Uncle Charlie always had found her so.
"If she'd open her mouth and speak," said Sarah. "Half an hour ago by the clock it was, she gave a sound, and I turned, and here she was like this."
"Sister was telling us a story——" from Albert Eddie.
"The story of naughty Harryminta——" from Maud.
"No use your trying, sir," from Sarah. "I've been trying for half an hour. We're taking her home."
"Excellent idea." He took Emmy Lou's little hands. "So you won't tell Uncle Charlie either?"
Evidently she would not, though it was with visible increase of anguish that she indicated this by a shake of her head.
"We'll walk along," said Sarah. "I've my part of supper to get, but we'll feel better ourselves to see her home."
They walked along.
"I was talking to them peaceful as might be——" from Sarah again.
"Sister was telling us a story——" from Albert Eddie.
"The story of naughty Harryminta——" from Maud.
Was it a sound here from Uncle Charlie's Emmy Lou, or the twitch of her hand in his, which betrayed some access to her woe?
"And what was the story?" asked Uncle Charlie. It might afford a clue.
Maud volunteered it. "The little girl's mother said to her, 'Don't.' And her name was Harryminta. And when she got back from doing what she was told not to do, her mother was waiting for her at the door. 'Whose little girl is this?' And Harryminta said, 'Why, it's your little girl.' But her mother shook her head. 'Not my little girl at all.My little girl is a good little girl.' And shut the door."
"Talk about your coincidence," said Uncle Charlie afterward. "Talk about your Nemesis and such!"
For as the group came along the street—the Dawkins family, Uncle Charlie, and EmmyLou—and turned in at the gate, Aunt Cordelia flung the front door open. Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise were behind her. They had really just missed Emmy Lou.
"Whose little girl is this?" said Aunt Cordelia, severely. But not going as far as the mother of Araminta she did not shut the door. Instead, Sarah explained.
"Half an hour ago by the clock——" Sarah began.
They led her into the hall, and Aunt Cordelia lifted her up on the marble slab of the pier table. Aunt Cordelia's admonitions and mandates came from the heart. "Open your mouth and speak out and tell me what's the matter?"
Emmy Lou opened her mouth, and in the act, though visibly against her stoutest endeavor even to an alarming accession of pink to her face, ominously and unmistakably—whooped; the same followed on her part bythe full horror of comprehension, and then by a wail.
For with that whoop the worst had happened. As with the little boys and girls in Bob's dire category of naughty little boys and girls, her sin had found her out indeed.
"I'm coming to pieces," wailed their terrified Emmy Lou, "because I didn't mind."
And according to her understanding she was, since after her vain endeavor for half an hour by Sarah's clock to hold it in place with tongue and lips, in her palm lay a tooth, the first she had shed or known she had to shed, knowledge coming not by nature but through understanding.
Aunt Cordelia did not carry out her program the day school opened. There was whooping-cough at her house, and a day or so after there was whooping-cough at Mr. Dawkins'.
"He is very indignant about it," Aunt Cordeliatold Uncle Charlie. "He stopped me as I came by this morning from my marketing. He said it wasn't even as though we were customers."
"Which is the least we can be after this, I'm sure you will agree," said Uncle Charlie.
Just here in the conversation, Emmy Lou, miserable and stuffy in a pink sacque over her habitual garb because Aunt Cordelia most emphatically insisted, whooped.
"Thosegoodlittle girls, Marianne and Maria,Were happy and well asgoodgirls could desire—"
said Aunt Louise.
Aunt Cordelia, approaching with a bottle and spoon as she did after every cough, shook her head. "Little girls who mind are good little girls," she said.
"Emmy Lou is learning to be a good little girl while she is shut up in the house sick," said Aunt Katie. "She knows all of her CommandmentsIn Verse for Sunday school now. Let Aunt Cordelia wipe the cough-syrup off your mouth and say them for Uncle Charlie before he goes."
Emmy Lou learning to be a good little girl said them obediently.
"Thou shalt have no more gods but me;Before no idol bow thy knee.Take not the name of God in vain,Nor dare the Sabbath day profane.Give both thy parents honor due,Take heed that thou no murder do.Abstain from deeds and words unclean,Nor steal though thou art poor and mean;Nor make a willful lie nor love it,What is thy neighbor's, dare not covet."
Aunt Cordelia, Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise looked pleased. Emmy Lou had said the verses without stumbling. Uncle Charlie looked doubtful. "Five words with understanding rather than ten thousand in an unknown tongue? How about it, Cordelia?"
But Bob, bringing Emmy Lou's dinner upstairs to her on a tray, had the last disturbing word. "Been tryin' to riccollect how it went, 'bout thet li' girl kep' her tongue outer the place whar her tooth drapped out, so's a new tooth would grow in."
THE TRIBUNAL OF CONSCIENCE
Uncle Charlietook six blue tickets from his pocket and set them on the dining-room mantel. His ownership of a newspaper was the explanation for this liberality of supply to those who could put the two things together.
"I wonder," said he, "if anybody in this room ever heard of the circus?"
Emmy Lou could not get down from her place at the dinner-table fast enough. She hurried to the kitchen. She had heard of the circus from Bob the house-boy, who had a circus bill!
Bills, as a rule, are small affairs measurable in inches; bits of paper which reduce AuntCordelia to figurings with a lead pencil, short replies, and low spirits.
But a circus bill, pink and pictorial, is measurable in feet. As Bob spread his on the kitchen table yesterday and again this morning, it fell either side well on the way to the floor. Its wonders, inexplicable where he, spelling out the text, forebore to explain, or explicable where he did if one knew no better than he, were measurable only by the limits of the mind to take them in. If Emmy Lou, who started to school last fall three weeks late owing to a popular prejudice against whooping-cough, had caught up as Aunt Cordelia easily assumed she would, or "caught on," in the words of Uncle Charlie, she might have been spelling out some of the wonders of the circus bill for herself.
Bob's finger had paused beneath a lady in myriad billowing skirts poised mid-air between a horse and a hoop such as Emmy Lou spenthours trying to trundle on the sidewalk. "She's jumpin' th'ough the hoop, but thet ain't nothin'. Heah in the other picture she's jumpin' th'ough six."
Emmy Lou, hurrying to the kitchen now and finding Bob about to start in with the soup, borrowed the bill and hurried back with it to the dining-room and Uncle Charlie's side.
"This one's an elephant," she explained, her finger, even as Bob's, beneath the picture. "He picks little children up and puts them in his trunk."
"I see you know, though some do call it his howdah," said Uncle Charlie. "And no doubt about the lions and the tigers, the giraffe and the zebra as well?" regretfully. "Even the lemonade?"
"Lemonade?"
"Pink. And peanuts." Uncle Charlie motioned to Bob to put his soup down and have done with it, as it were. "Also Nella, TheChild Equestrienne in Her Triumphal Entry—here she is. And Zephine, the Wingless Wonder, in Her Flight Through the Air——"
"Am I going to the circus?" from Emmy Lou.
"That's what I hoped," from Uncle Charlie, handing back the bill and turning to his soup. "But of course if there is room for doubt about it——"
The very next day Emmy Lou came hurrying home from Sunday school. She had the Dawkins, Sarah, the conscientious elder sister, Maud, and Albert Eddie, for company as far as the grocery at the corner. Since Aunt Cordelia had learned they were English, apparent explanation for those who understood, they had been persuaded to go to St. Simeon's Sunday school too.
Sunday school was to have a—Emmy Lou in her Sunday dress and her Sunday hat, hurrying on from the corner by herself, tried tostraighten this out before reaching home and reporting it. What was it Sunday school was to have? In Uncle Charlie's study—a small back room, somewhat battered and dingy but, as he claimed in its defense, his own—was a picture of a stout little man propelled in a wheelbarrow by some other men.
Emmy Lou had discovered that Uncle Charlie loved the little man and prized the picture. When she asked who he was and where he was going in the wheelbarrow, Uncle Charlie said it wasMr. Pickwickgoing to apicnic. Or, and here was the trouble, was itMr. Picnicgoing to apickwick?It depended on this what Sunday school was to have.
Uncle Charlie, hat and cane in hand, waiting in the hall for Aunt Cordelia to start to church, straightened out the matter.Mr. Pickwickwas going to apicnic. It then followed that Emmy Lou, in general a brief person, had such a store of information about the picnic shewas moved to share it with Uncle Charlie. This common interest about the circus and their recurring conversations about it were drawing them together, anyhow. Her data about the picnic on the whole was menacing in its character. As, for example:
It was to be in Mr. Denby's grove. He charged too much for it, but St. Simeon's could not do any better. If you went too far away from the swings and the benches the mamma of some little pigs would chase you.
Further. You cannot go to St. Simeon's picnic, or, indeed, to any picnic without a basket! Emmy Lou had endeavored to find out what sort of a basket and Sarah had cut her short with the brief reply, "A picnic basket."
And, finally, "Albert Eddie wishes he'd never started to St. Simeon's. Sarah says he has to go to the picnic and he wants to go to the circus!"
Aunt Cordelia arriving in full church arraycaught this last. "I've been meaning to speak about it myself. I find the circus is here for the one day only and that the day for St. Simeon's picnic."
Emmy Lou received this as applying to the Dawkins only. The information her inquiries had enabled her to get together led her personally to disparage picnics.
"Albert Eddie says Sarah made him wash dishes at the last picnic he went to. And she makes him carry baskets. That if he'd wash dishes for 'em at the circus and carry water, they'd let him in."
"Sarah, Maud, Albert Eddie, you, me, and one ticket to spare; such was my idea," said Uncle Charlie, he and Aunt Cordelia preparing to start. "The only thing we've ever given the Dawkins up to date is the whooping-cough. Picnic or circus, duty or pleasure, we'll have to put it to them which they want it to be."
Aunt Cordelia, even at the risk of being late to church, stopped short. She didn't see the matter in any such fashion at all! "Emmy Lou will prefer to go to her own Sunday school picnic too, I hope," decidedly. "How you distract and bother the child, Charlie!"
"I bother Emmy Lou? She and I are as near good friends as people get to be. We respect each other's honesty and go our own ways. I am going to leave the tickets where I put them yesterday. I planned to take her and the Dawkins to the circus. You and she can fight it out." He proceeded through the open doorway to the stone steps.
"In that case," from Aunt Cordelia as she followed him, "since you seem to put me in the wrong, I leave it to her own conscience. She is seven years old, a big girl going to school and Sunday school, and ought to know right from wrong." And the two were gone.
Conscience! Familiar shibboleth to the seventhage of little girls! Stern front behind which Aunt Cordelia these days hides her kindly features.
Somewhere beyond the neighborhood where Emmy Lou lived with Aunt Cordelia and Uncle Charlie, was the roundhouse and the yards of a railroad. Or so Aunt Cordelia explained. The roundhouse bell, rung every hour by the watchman on his rounds, made far-off melancholy tolling through the night.
The sins at seven, the chubby, endeavoring Emmy Lou's sins, her cloak on the coat-closet floor instead of the closet peg, mucilage on Aunt Katie's rug where a paper outspread before pasting began would have saved it—sins such as these have no prod to reminder more poignant than this melancholy tolling of the roundhouse bell in the night.
"It is an uneasy conscience," Aunt Cordelia invariably claimed when Emmy Lou, waking, came begging for permission to get in her bed."If your conscience was all that it should be, you'd be asleep."
Yet did Aunt Cordelia, as a rule, leave those matters to Emmy Lou's conscience which she thought she did? Did Emmy Lou three out of four Sundays find herself remaining at church rather than on her road home because she herself wanted to stay? Or taking off her new dress on reaching home because she wanted to get into the older one?
Or, rather, did she find her baffled if unsuspecting self, coerced and bewildered, doing these and other things in the name of choice when the doing was not through choice at all?
Aunt Cordelia was going to leave the decision between the circus and the picnic to Emmy Lou, too, because she said she was. Nor did Aunt Cordelia, honest soul, or Emmy Lou, unquestioning and trusting one, dream but that she did.
"I'll see Sarah Dawkins," said Aunt Cordeliato Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise the very next morning, "and arrange with her to look after Emmy Lou at the picnic. We'll use the small hamper for her basket. She can take enough for herself and them. Bob can take her and it around to the church corner where the chartered street cars are to be waiting, and put her in Sarah's charge there. I can't see, Katie, why you oppose a cake with custard filling for the basket."
"It's messy," said Aunt Katie, "both to take and to eat."
"But if she likes it best?" from Aunt Cordelia.
It was the first thing come to Emmy Lou's hearing lending appeal to the picnic; or light on the purpose of the baskets.
Uncle Charlie arriving for dinner outmatched it, however, by another appeal. "I saw a new circus bill on the fence of the vacant lot as I came by. A yellow bill."
Emmy Lou hurried right down there from the dinner-table. Nella, the Child Equestrienne, was kissing her hand right to Emmy Lou from her horse's back. And the elephant, abandoning his customary dark business of putting little children in his trunk, with unexpected geniality was sitting on a stool before a table drinking tea.
And the next day Bob outmatched this. He had been to the grocery to see about chickens for the picnic to which Emmy Lou ought to want to go.
"There's a Flyin' Dutchman on the outside, an' side-shows too. I seen about it on a bill the other side of the grocery. A green bill."
Emmy Lou hurried down there. She didn't see anything that she could identify as a Flying Dutchman, perhaps because she was hazy as to what a Dutchman was. But Zephine, swinging by herteeth, was just leaping into space.
"I think I will let her wear her sprigged muslin," said Aunt Cordelia at supper that night. "A good many grown persons go in the afternoon."
"Their excuse being to take the children——" from Uncle Charlie easily.
"I am not talking of the circus, Charlie, and you know I am not," from Aunt Cordelia sharply.
"She has decided then?"
"She certainly ought to have decided. There never should have been any doubt. I'll put in some little tarts, Katie; all children like tarts."
Had Emmy Lou decided? She heard it assumed that she had. Why, then, with this sense of frustration and bewilderment was she swallowing at tears?
"I certainly feel I may say Emmy Lou has decided," repeated Aunt Cordelia. "I'm sure, Katie, tarts are just the thing."
"I'll never believe it," said Uncle Charlie, emphatically, nor was he referring to the tarts.
Did he refuse to be party to any such idea?
"I would not be surprised," said he to Emmy Lou the next evening, "if we hear the circus rumbling by in the night. Our street is the one they usually take from the railroad yards to the circus-grounds. I put six tickets on the mantelpiece where at the most we will need only five. Suppose I take one and see what I can do with it?"
"Emmy Lou has no idea but of going to her own Sunday school picnic," said Aunt Cordelia. "I wish, Charlie, you would be still about your tickets and the circus."
"They are not my tickets. They are going to stay right here. I merely was to go with Emmy Lou on one of them. They are her tickets to do with as she wants and to take whom she pleases."
Though the circus did go by in the night, according to report next morning, Emmy Lou failed to hear it. Nor did the melancholy of the tolling bell disturb her. Aunt Cordelia said this was because she was going to her Sunday school picnic as she should, and had a quiet conscience.
"I come roun' by the circus as I come to work," Bob said in the pantry where Aunt Cordelia and he packed the basket with Emmy Lou for spectator. "Gittin' them wagons with the lookin'-glass sides ready for the perade. Thet ol' elephant come swinging erlong like he owned the y'earth. Mr. Charlie gimme a ticket las' night to go."
Which reminded Emmy Lou. Even though she was going to the picnic, there was comfort in the thought those tickets yet on the mantelpiece were hers. She went into the dining-room and pushed a chair to the hearth. The sprigged muslin she was to wear had a pocket,and later when this dress was put on the tickets which were her own were in the pocket.
If one never has been to a picnic the only premises to go on are those given you.
"You haven't a thing to do but stay with Maud and Albert Eddie, and mind Sarah," said Aunt Cordelia as she put Emmy Lou's hat on her head and its elastic under her chin, "except, of course, to look after your basket. There is pink icing on the little cakes and a good tablecloth that I don't want anything to happen to under the beaten biscuits at the bottom. There is ham and there's tongue and there's chicken."
"I have to look after the basket," Emmy Lou told Sarah as she and the Dawkins with the rest of St. Simeon's Sunday school were put aboard the excursion cars.
"Of course you do," said Sarah approvingly. "We all do. It's right here. And," with the heartiness of one distributing largesse in privileges,the meanwhile settling her three charges in their places, "when we get off the car Albert Eddie shall carry it."
Emmy Lou had a seat between Albert Eddie and Maud. Beyond Albert Eddie were three little boys in knickerbockers, blouses, and straw hats, as gloomy in face as he.
"Not onlylethim carry water for the elephant but gave hima ticketfor doing it," the nearest one was saying to the other three. "Had it with him when he got back. I saw it myself. He lemme take it in my hand. Ablueticket."
"Right past the circus grounds, tents and all," from the second little boy as their car came in sight of the beflagged tent city. "I'll betcher they're gettin' ready for the parade right now!"
Four glittering, turbaned beings appeared around a tent, each leading a plumed and caparisoned horse to a place before a gildedand high-throned edifice. "Didn't I tell you they were?" bitterly. A band crashed.
The heads of St. Simeon's Sunday school, regardless of danger, craned out as one. The more venturesome left their seats.
St. Simeon's chartered cars rolled inexorably by. Heads came in. The venturesome returned to their places.
"What is there to a picnic anyhow?" from the third little boy. "Nothin' at all but what you eat."
Albert Eddie staggered under the weight of the basket when in time the car stopped on the track along the dusty road outside Mr. Denby's grove. But then one out of every two persons descending from the several cars was similarly staggering under the weight of a basket.
Sarah and Maud, with Emmy Lou led by either hand between them, followed Albert Eddie with their own. After which, St. Simeon's,having brought all baskets to a common center beneath a tree in the neighborhood of the ice-water barrel, went off and left them.
"I'm going with a little girl who asked me," Maud told Sarah. "We won't go too far or the mother of the little pigs will chase us."
"Albert Eddie, I told the ladies that you would get the wood for a fire so we can put the coffee on," said Sarah. "When you come back from that you can take the bucket and bring us the ice-water from the barrel for the lemonade."
Sarah's glance came next to Emmy Lou, no mixer in the world of Sunday school at best, as Sarah before this had observed. Sarah frowned perturbedly. Some are picnickers by intuition, for example Maud and the little girl gone off together; others come to it through endeavor. It was seven-year-old Emmy Lou's first picnic, and she in her sprigged muslin stood looking to Sarah.
Sarah was a manager, but having yet to manage for Emmy Lou her frown was perturbed. Then her face cleared. She fetched a flat if a trifle over-mossy stone and put it down on the outskirts of the baskets grouped beneath the sheltering tree, and near the ice-water barrel. "There, now! You can sit down here and look after the baskets till I get back," she told Emmy Lou and was gone.
There is virtue in coming to a picnic. Aunt Cordelia plainly gave one to understand so.
"Why don't you go play with the others, little girl?" asked a lady who was tying on a gingham apron as she hurried by. "Go over to the swings and see-saws."
But Emmy Lou, no picnicker by intuition, nor as yet by any other mode of arrival, was grateful that she had to stay with the baskets, and, had the lady paused long enough for a reply, could say so.
Was there virtue in coming to the picnicfor Albert Eddie too? Emmy Lou on her stone under the tree guarding baskets saw him come back with his load of firewood. She saw him next carrying the bucket of water from the barrel.
And here some ladies approaching the baskets beside Emmy Lou beneath the tree, and casting appraising eyes over the outlay, began to help themselves to the same! To this basket, and that basket, and carry them away! One even approached and laid hands on Emmy Lou's own! It took courage to speak, but she found it.
"It's mine," from Emmy Lou.
"And just the very nicest looking one I have seen," said the lady heartily after raising the lid and probing into the contents. "Anyone would be glad to say it was hers," and went off with it! St. Simeon's with a commendable sense of fellowship made a common feast from its picnic baskets at long tables for all, butEmmy Lou did not know this. She only saw her cake with the custard filling, her cakes with the pink icing, her tarts, her ham and tongue, her chicken and biscuits and tablecloth borne off from her with a coolness astounding and appalling.
Virtue is hers who dully endures a picnic. Emmy Lou, coming out of her stun and daze and seeing some little boys approaching, the ice-water barrel being a general Mecca, swallowed hard that, did they notice her, they might not see how near she was to crying. Three little boys in knickerbockers, blouses, and straw hats they were, still with their common air of being more than justifiably aggrieved.
They noticed her and at the abrupt halt of one, all stopped.
"We saw her on the car," he said. "What's she got?"