Read Ebook: Emmy Lou's Road to Grace: Being a Little Pilgrim's Progress by Martin George Madden Harker G A Illustrator

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Ebook has 188 lines and 9591 words, and 4 pages

who comes to see her once a month keeps the piano open on Sunday, and plays what Sadie and Hattie differentiate as "tunes" as opposed to hymns and voluntaries, often as not dashing into what he explains to Uncle Charlie is this or that from this or that new opera.

He plays at any and all times on Sunday, dropping his paper or magazine to stroll to the piano to pick and try, strum and hum, or jerking the stool into place, to fall into sustained, and to Emmy Lou who herself is still counting aloud, breathless and incredible performance.

She is aware that Aunt Cordelia does not willingly consent to this use of the piano on Sunday, and she also is aware of a definite stand taken by Uncle Charlie in the matter, to which Aunt Cordelia reluctantly yields.

In the past Papa has been Papa, personality with no detail, accepted and adored, just as Aunt Cordelia has been and is Aunt Cordelia, supreme and undisputed. But now Papa's personality is beginning to have its details. He still is Papa, but he is more. He is tall and slight and has quick, clever hands, and impatient motions of the head, together with oddly regardful, considering, debating eyes, fixed on their object through rimmed eye-glasses.

Papa is "brilliant," vague term appropriated from Uncle Charlie who says so. If he were not a brilliant editor he would have been a brilliant musician. Uncle Charlie says this also.

And today at school Emmy Lou hears from Sadie that piano playing on Sunday is a thing a Christian neighborhood can't and won't put up with!

"Aren't the Ritters Christians?" she asked anxiously.

This again was information more painful to Emmy Lou than Sadie could know. Papa on his visits, while dressing in the mornings, or later when wandering about the house or running through the contents of some book picked up from the table, breaks into song, palpably familiar and favored song even if absently and disjointedly rendered. Emmy Lou has heard it often as not on Sunday. Uncle Charlie in speaking of it once said it was "in vogue"--another term appropriated by Emmy Lou--when Papa was a young man studying in Paris.

"If the Ritters are not Christians, what are they?" she asked.

Sadie had information about this. "Sally says the neighbors say they are Bohemians."

Unfortunately Emmy Lou has heard this term before, though she had not grasped that it was a religion. Aunt Cordelia frequently worries over Papa.

"He's a regular Bohemian," she frets to Uncle Charlie.

Before school was dismissed on this same Friday, there were other worries for Emmy Lou. When in time she arrived home, full of chagrin, Papa was there for his usual visit and wanted to hear about the chagrin and its cause.

Words are given out in class at grammar school, as Papa knows, to be defined and illustrated by a sentence. One may be faithful to the meaning as construed from the dictionary, and lose out in class too.

"A girl in the class named Lorelei Ritter laughed at my sentence, and then the rest laughed too."

"What was the word?" inquired Papa.

"Concomitant."

"And what did you say?"

"'A thing that accompanies.' He played the concomitant to her song."

Uncle Charlie shouted, but Papa's laugh was a little rueful. "Poor little mole working i' the dark. Will the light never break for her, Charlie, do you suppose?"

What did he mean, and why is he rueful? Is the trouble with her who would give all she is or hopes to be in adoring offering to Papa? Can he, even in the light of what she has heard today, be open to criticism? Certainly not. Papa may be a Bohemian, and a Bohemian may not be a Christian, but what he is that shall Emmy Lou be also.

To decide is to act. Papa went down town after dinner with Uncle Charlie, and Emmy Lou took her place at the piano. Ordinarily she is loath to practice, going through the ordeal because Aunt Cordelia requires it. But today she goes about it as a practical matter with a definite purpose.

Papa brought her the "Selections From the Operas" some while back, with the remark that a little change from exercises to melody might introduce cheer into a melancholy business all around. But so far this had not been the result, "Selection No. 1--Sextette from Lucia," reducing her to tears, and "Selection No. 2--I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls," doing almost as much for Aunt Cordelia.

But now that Emmy Lou had a purpose, the matter was different. There was a table of contents to the "Selections From the Operas," and a certain title therein had caught her eye in the past. Seated on the piano-stool, leaning over the book on her lap, she passed her finger down the list.

She desisted by and by long enough to go and ask a question of Aunt Cordelia.

"If I were to be confirmed at St. Simeon's could I practice my selections on Sunday?"

"Practice them on Sunday?" Aunt Cordelia had enough trouble getting her to practice on week-days to be outdone with the question. "Why do you ask such a thing? You know you could not."

That night Emmy Lou asked Papa a question a little falteringly: "Are you a Bohemian?"

"Instead, the veriest drudge you ever knew," he said. "There's too much on me, making a living for us both, to be so glorious a thing."

Then what was Papa?

She went around to ask a question of Sadie the next morning. She had been to Sadie's church often enough to know that she liked to go. The prayers were long but the singing was frequent and hearty. No one need mark the time at Sadie's church, the singing marking its own time warmly and strongly until it seemed to swing and sway, and Sadie sang and Emmy Lou sang and everybody sang, and Emmy Lou for one wasn't sure she did not swing and sway too, and her heart was buoyant and warm. She loved the songs at Sadie's church; what matter if she did not know what they meant?

"Oh, there's honey in the Rock, my brother, There's honey in the Rock for you, Leave your sins for the blood to cover, There is honey in the Rock for you, for you."

She could wish that Papa might be a Methodist. It hardly was likely, all things considered, but one could make sure.

"Would 'Selections From the Operas' be allowed by your church on Sunday?" she asked Sadie.

Sadie not only was horrified but, like Aunt Cordelia, was outdone. "Why, Emily Louise McLaurin, you know they would not be!" she said indignantly.

Emmy Lou had no such desire for Papa to be a Presbyterian. She had been with Hattie often enough to know that the emphasis is all on the sermon there. Hattie knew her feeling and when inviting her to go put the emphasis on the voluntary of which she was proud.

This very Saturday afternoon she came around full of information and enthusiasm. "Our soprano has done so well with her new teacher, he is going to play our organ tomorrow by request and she is going to sing a solo during the collection. I want you to come from Sunday school and go."

She had other news. "I asked Lorelei Ritter yesterday after school if she was a Bohemian and she got mad. She said no, she wasn't, she was a Bavarian."

Aunt Louise spoke to Aunt Cordelia that night. "Emmy Lou must decide in the next day or two if she is going to enter the confirmation class this year; I have to report for her."

The chimes at Sadie's church two squares away, were playing,

"How beauteous are their feet Who stand on Zion's hill, Who bring salvation on their tongues And words of peace reveal!"

What was he? As he and Emmy Lou went down the stairs together to breakfast, she caught his hand to her cheek in a sudden passion of adoring. What Papa was, she would be!

She hurried from Sunday school around to Hattie's church on Swayne Street. Hattie defended the absence of a bell by saying they didn't need a bell to tell them when to go to church; they knew and went.

It was a brick church, long built, and a trifle mossy as to its foundations, discreet in its architecture, and well-kept.

Hattie was waiting for Emmy Lou at the door. Her very hair-ribbons, a serviceable brown, exact and orderly, seemed to stand for steadiness and reliability in conviction.

What did Emmy Lou's blue hair-ribbons stand for? Blue is true, and she would be true to whatever the conviction of Papa.

"The strange organist is going to play the voluntary too," Hattie explained. "It's almost time for him to begin. Hurry."

As they went in, she told another thing: "Lorelei and her mother are here, sitting in a back pew."

There were two points of cheer in the service at Hattie's church as Emmy Lou saw it, the voluntary and the collection. She had referred to this last as the offertory on a visit long ago, but never would make the mistake again, so sharply had Hattie corrected her.

Hardly were they settled in their places in the pew with Hattie's father and mother, when a large man with black hair and shaggy brows made his way to the organ in the loft behind the minister, and the voluntary began.

Hattie's face was shining! And the faces of her mother, of her father, and of the congregation around, radiated approval and satisfaction!

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