The cousins were excellent friends. They enjoyed each other when family reunions or Annette’s mother’s assistance to Emily brought them together. But Emily belonged only to the girl part of the crowd. She was seldom included when boys entered in. And even with the girls she was a little apart.
Where Front Street curved to meet the slough, it became briefly residential. There were several blocks of handsome houses standing in large lawns, and Annette lived in one of these, a yellow-painted brick with a bay window, rimmed with colored glass in front.
“Mamma will be furious,” giggled Annette, as they approached.
“Aunt Sophie is never furious at you long,” said Emily. She called Annette’s parents Aunt and Uncle by courtesy. Actually Annette’s father was her own dead father’s cousin.
“But she’s in a state!” answered Annette. “Grandpa and Grandma LaDou are coming for my graduation, and Aunt Lois, and Uncle Edward, and a flock of cousins. And, of course, Miss Mix is there, and presents are just pouring in. And Mamma’s a very nervous type…”
“She’s wonderful to you.”
“I know it. But she has to be handled. Now this crowd coming in won’t be a bit of trouble since the boys are bringing the ice cream. But I’m glad you’ll be with me, Em, when I break the news.”
“Lean on me,” said Emily. “I have broad shoulders.”
It was obvious at once that Aunt Sophie was indeed in a state. She leaned over the stairs, her black hair wispy about an anxious face.
“What’s been keeping you?” she called. “Miss Mix can’t do another thing until she tries these on.”
“Don’t tell her yet,” whispered Annette, as they ran up the wide carpeted stairs.
There was a fern in a brass bowl on the newel post, and an Indian head on the wall. Emily loved these bright modern touches. She looked down with pleasure into the parlor with its mission oak furniture, its smart stenciled over-drapes, and dusky blue Maxfield Parrish picture over the mantel. A rim of polished floor surrounded the rug, for Aunt Sophie had long since abolished carpets.
Aunt Sophie hurried them into the front bedroom where Miss Mix sat at a sewing machine. Miss Mix sewed for all the best families of Deep Valley. She came to their houses, and one of Aunt Sophie’s kind gestures to Emily had been offering to let Miss Mix make her dresses there, while she was making Annette’s. It was inconceivable to think of Miss Mix in the little old-fashioned house across the slough.
Emily liked good clothes, and she dressed well. She spent almost as much money on her clothes as Annette did. In fact, Aunt Sophie was always saying that she wished Annette could spend as freely as Emily spent. Uncle Chester, she said, acted so when the bills came in. Emily’s grandfather never told her to spend much or little.
She liked simple clothes, of good materials, well made. She liked sailor suits, and dark pleated skirts, with plenty of soft white waists. They were a contrast to Annette’s frills, but they suited her.
Her graduation dress was made of fine white lawn trimmed only with tucks. Emily looked in the tier-glass with pleasure while Miss Mix, her mouth full of pins, squinted critically at the hem.
Aunt Sophie approved it absently. “It’s awfully plain, Emily, but you wanted it that way.”
“Yes, I did.”
Miss Mix took the pins out of her mouth. “It’s nice,” she said. This was astonishing, for Miss Mix seldom spoke.
“Yes, it really is,” Aunt Sophie answered. But her eyes were on Annette’s ruffled organdy laid out on the bed. It had tiny white rosebuds along the top of the ruffles and Aunt Sophie was longing to see the effect.
Annette was an only child and Aunt Sophie and Uncle Chester really worshiped her, thought Emily. Uncle Chester might complain about the bills, but he loved to shower his daughter with everything extravagant and lovely. When Annette was in the room they seldom looked at anyone else. They seemed to put everything pertaining to Annette in a special category of supreme importance. The only dress in the room now, so far as Aunt Sophie was concerned, was Annette’s dress. But Emily observed this with interest, rather than resentment. Perhaps, she reflected, all mothers were that way. She knew remarkably little about mothers; her own had died when she was born.
Emily finished her fitting and Annette’s began. The rosebuds were approved.
“That’s fine, Annette. That’s all we’ll want, so now you can…”
But Annette forestalled the instructions, whatever they might be, by plunging boldly with the news that a crowd was bringing ice cream from Heinz’s.
“Annette!” her mother wailed. “When you know how busy we are! Grandpa and Grandma will be coming any minute!”
“We’ll clean up, won’t we?” Annette prodded Emily. “We’ll put all the chairs back.”
“The chairs back. You’re going to dance?”
“Of course. But only on the porch.”
“And afterward we’ll make things as neat as a pin, Aunt Sophie,” Emily put in.
“But there are so many presents to open! There were three boxes this morning and two this afternoon.” Aunt Sophie was relenting, though. She never could stand out against Annette long.
“We’ll open them just as soon as the kids go,” said Annette and pulled Emily into her bedroom. Here sunshine poured through white ruffled curtains held back by pink rosettes. There were more white curtains and pink rosettes on the bird’s-eye maple furniture, a spread of the same pink and white on the big brass bed. The walls showed high school and college pennants, Harrison Fisher girls, and a fishnet full of photographs.
Annette powdered her nose and adjusted the pins in her elaborate coiffure. Emily retied her hair ribbon and washed her hands. There was time for no more for the door bell was ringing. The girls ran downstairs and the crowd burst in with cartons of ice cream, boxes of cookies and bottles of cherry phosphate.
“How did the orations go?”
“Fine! Fine!” said Don. “Cicero has nothing on me!”
“Hunter was wonderful!” cried Ellen. “How do the dresses look?”
“Beautiful. Mine has little white rosebuds on it.”
“If it’s as pretty as your Class Day dress…!”
“Annette!” called her mother, who was dishing out ice cream. “That reminds me! There’s a photographer coming tomorrow to take your pictures.”
“Didn’t you have your pictures taken when the rest of us did?” asked Fred.
“Yes, in shirt waist and skirt. But Papa and Mamma want me in the Class Day dress and the graduation dress. They never seem to have enough pictures of me. They’re silly about me.”
Scid kicked Don who gave an appreciative chuckle. “They’re not the only ones!”
“And, of course,” said Ellen, “next year you’ll be away at college.”
“Of course.”
“All of us will be!”
“All of them but me,” thought Emily, and a quick pain seemed to drop down her body like a skyrocket in reverse.
But Scid was cranking the phonograph and music came to her rescue, pouring from the morning-glory horn. They had carried their ice cream through the rich dark dining room to the sunny side porch. The crowd pushed back the rattan chairs and rolled up the green grass rug. Aunt Sophie, forgetting her early annoyance, looked on eagerly.
The boys found partners and started dancing. Don took Annette, of course. Emily danced with Fred Muller, a tall, slender, light-haired boy, who was an exceptional dancer. He and his sister, Tib, danced together at entertainments sometimes.
Emily stumblingly followed his lead. She wasn’t a good dancer. But it was such fun!—she felt sure that she could be good if she only had a chance to learn.
The phonograph was playing a popular waltz:
“Meet me tonight in dreamland,
Under the silvery moon…”
Everyone but Emily was singing.
Emily didn’t know the words, but she was happy as Fred piloted her gallantly up and down the porch. Not only her eyes but even her
serious mouth was smiling.
If there had to be a last day of high school, she thought, it was wonderful to have it just like this.
2
Emily’s Slough
IT WAS SUNDOWN WHEN Emily started home. The dance had lasted until the grandparents came, Aunt Sophie’s half-French father and mother, from St. Paul. They had driven up from the depot in Mr. Thumbler’s hack and alighted with much commotion…chattering, embracing, effervescing with pride in Annette. The party had broken up, but Emily had lingered, at Annette’s suggestion, to watch her open presents.
She had begun with a box brought by Grandpa and Grandma LaDou, and it had yielded a gold cross on a chain. From other boxes, with trills of delight, she had pulled silk stockings, a locket set with a half moon of pearls, a princesse slip, a party cap. She had flung the wrappings on the floor, and Aunt Sophie had started to pick them up, but Emily had jumped to do it, folding the papers and winding the bright ribbons neatly around her fingers. She had loved being a part of the family celebration.
The massive round dining table had been laid for supper with a linen cloth and napkins, the best silver, cut glass from the buffet and hand-painted china from the platerail. Savory odors floated from the kitchen where Minnie, the hired girl, a large clean apron tied about her waist, stood over the stove.
“Stay to supper, Emily,” Aunt Sophie had urged, but Emily had felt she should go home. To be sure, all her grandfather ate at night was bread and milk. She prepared their main meal at noon. But he was always looking for her at this time of day. So she said good-by and started over the high road across the slough.
The Deep Valley slough, pronounced sloo, was the marshy inlet of a river. When Emily had first read Pilgrim’s Progress, after finding it mentioned in Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women, she had pronounced the Slough of Despond sloo, too. She had called it sloo until Miss Fowler had told her in English class that Bunyan’s Slough rhymed with “how.” Miss Fowler had made the correction in a casual unembarrassing way, putting her emphasis on the fact that Emily alone, out of the class, had read Pilgrim’s Progress.
The difference in pronunciation had seemed suitable to Emily. Slough pronounced like “how” sounded disagreeable, and so did the miry pit in which Christian had wallowed. She loved her own slough, pronounced sloo, beside which she had lived all her life.
Now its hummocks of grass, its rushes and cat-tails were moistly green, but she loved it too in the autumn when its aspect was russet, and under winter’s pall of snow, and most of all in the spring when it was carpeted with marigolds. It was such a social place—always noisy with frogs and birds. One end deepened to form a pond, and the birds loved it—gulls, sandpipers, red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds. It sounded like a barnyard sometimes when a gathering of marsh hens was cackling on the water. And the bitterns made a noise like her own dooryard pump. “Thunder pumps,” her grandfather called them.
Emily’s bedroom looked over the slough, which extended back into the sheltered valley that the town called Little Syria. From her windows she could see the humble rooftops of the Syrians. She could see the sun rise over the marsh and the pond.
She was walking into the west now, toward the sunset, and her grandfather’s little white house. She walked rapidly, smiling, for she still felt happy about the party. She felt excited, too, as she always did after she had been with Don. He had danced with her again today, which was most unusual.
When the debating team was off on its trips, he always sought her out. They talked for hours, on trains and in restaurants, about books—poetry, especially. He had a brilliant interesting mind. And although Emily listened at first with humble admiration, she always took fire and talked, too—more than she did with anyone else. They had wonderful times together.
But in Deep Valley he treated her differently. He never took her to Heinz’s for a soda. In the Social Room and at parties he paid no attention to her. He was always with lively fashionable girls.
Annette liked him. She was impressed with his intellectual attainments and with an air of worldliness he had. Most of the girls liked him, although he was moody, conceited, and not handsome. There was magnetism in his dark, often sullen, face and his flashing white-toothed smile.
Most of the boys considered him a show-off, but they admired him. And in his good moods he was exuberantly friendly whether he really liked people or not. He slapped them on the back, laughed at their jokes.
“He flatters people,” Emily admitted, reluctantly indicting him with a fault that was serious in her eyes. She added at once, “It’s because he’s so anxious to be liked.”
This was true. In spite of his good mind, good family and more money than most, he seemed to have some inner uncertainty, some urgent need of friendship.
Walking home across the slough, she went over everything he had said while they danced. He had jokingly quoted Lord Byron:
“On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined:
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet…”
“Which will you be, Emily, Youth or Pleasure? I’ll give you your choice. Speak up!”
She had not been able to find a witty answer.
He had asked where she was going to go to college. She had answered calmly but with an inner shrinking that she wasn’t going. Gosh, what a shame! he had said. It was a bum world, and he had always known it. To think of her, of all girls, being stuck in Deep Valley!
“I can’t imagine a nicer place to be stuck in!” Emily had exclaimed indignantly. And he had smiled that gleaming smile which so illumined his face.
“Well,” he had said then, “it’s the State University for me. If I’m a good boy and do my homework, I’ll be sent to Yale next year. That’s my father’s college. How’ll you like to know a Yale man?”
The slough was behind her now. Emily followed the faded white picket fence surrounding her grandfather’s acre to the sagging gate which was always ajar. The sloping yard wasn’t well kept. The grass was filled with dandelions; and the lilacs and snowball bushes needed pruning. The snowballs, though, were in bloom.
The little house huddled against a low hill. It was old and weather-beaten. With its gables trimmed with scroll work and topped by absurd little towers, it looked like a dingy, fussy old lady, shrunken by age.
Emily ran up the steps of the small front porch. No lamps had been lighted, but she knew that her grandfather liked to sit in the dark. The door was closed against the sweet spring evening. Opening it, she was greeted by a familiar musty smell.
“Here I am, Grandpa!” she called.
There was no answer and she went through the dim crowded little parlor to the dining room. His easy chair, upholstered in carpet cloth in a pattern of cabbagelike roses, stood in the bow window which overlooked the slough. He wasn’t there. She went on to the kitchen where he ate his evening bread and milk. He wasn’t there either. She looked in his bedroom which adjoined the kitchen, and went out to the twilit back stoop. The sky was flushed now. Frogs were croaking in the pond.
“Grandpa! Grandpa!” she cried.
There was still no answer and she felt a small twinge of alarm. Turning she ran back to the parlor and up the stairs. Her own bedroom was empty.
“Grandpa!” she called again, and this time there was an answer. It came from the low garret at the back of the upstairs hall.
“Here I am, Emmy. Here I am.”
“But what are you doing?”
“Why, I’m looking for my uniform.”
“Your uniform!” For a moment she thought that he had lost his mind, that he had gone back to the days of his youth when he served in the Northern Army during the Civil War.
“Of course,” answered Grandpa Webster, and his skull cap came through the low door of the garret. His round mild face with arching heavy brows was covered now with dirt and perspiration. A blue bundle dragged from his arms. “You haven’t forgotten that day after tomorrow is Decoration Day?”
Decoration Day! It was the m
ost important day in her grandfather’s year, and she hadn’t given a thought to it. Penitently she took the uniform out of his arms.
“I’d have gotten it for you, Grandpa,” she said. “I want to press it anyway.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” he said. He chuckled. “It didn’t get much pressing, though, when we marched thirty-three miles to get to Gettysburg.”
With each passing year her grandfather talked more about Gettysburg. He had served with the First Minnesota there and had reason to be proud.
He followed her to the kitchen where she laid the uniform over a chair while she lit the kerosene lamp and washed her hands.
“You haven’t eaten yet, Grandpa?”
“I was hunting for my uniform. Weren’t you late, Emmy?”
“Yes, I was. We had a sort of party at Annette’s. It was the last day of school.”
He looked up quickly. “Your last day of school?”
“Yes, and not just for this year. I’m graduating. Do you remember, Grandpa?”
“That’s right,” he answered in a pleased tone. “You told me you were. Now you’ll be at home all the time.”
Emily was silent.
“I wouldn’t let you stop until you finished high school,” said the old man, sounding proud. “Would I, Emmy?”
“That’s right, Grandpa.”
He meant to be so generous! In his day there had been no such thing as higher education for women.
He crumbled bread into a bowl and poured milk from a little earthen pitcher. “The snowballs are in bloom.”
“I noticed,” Emily replied. The snowballs should have reminded her, she thought. The old soldiers always wore snowballs, and every year there was anxiety as the great day approached lest they shouldn’t bloom in time. “I’ll go up to the cemetery tomorrow. See that our graves are tidy.”