II

Saturday came to be the day of the week for Angela, but her sister Virginia preferred Sundays. She loved the atmosphere of golden sanctity which seemed to hover with a sweet glory about the stodgy, shabby little dwelling. Usually she came downstairs first so as to enjoy by herself the blessed “Sunday feeling” which, she used to declare, would have made it possible for her to recognize the day if she had awakened to it even in China. She was only twelve at this time, yet she had already developed a singular aptitude and liking for the care of the home, and this her mother gratefully fostered. Gradually the custom was formed of turning over to her small hands all the duties of Sunday morning; they were to her a ritual. First the kettle must be started boiling, then the pavement swept. Her father’s paper must be carried up and left outside his door. Virginia found a nameless and sweet satisfaction in performing these services.

She prepared the Sunday breakfast which was always the same⁠—bacon and eggs, strong coffee with good cream for Junius, chocolate for the other three and muffins. After the kettle had boiled and the muffins were mixed it took exactly half an hour to complete preparations. Virginia always went about these matters in the same way. She set the muffins in the oven, pursing her lips and frowning a little just as she had seen her mother do; then she went to the foot of the narrow, enclosed staircase and called “hoo-hoo” with a soft rising inflection⁠—“last call to dinner,” her father termed it. And finally, just for those last few minutes before the family descended she went into the box of a parlour and played hymns, old-fashioned and stately tunes⁠—“How Firm a Foundation,” “The Spacious Firmament on High,” “Am I a Soldier of the Cross.” Her father’s inflexible bass, booming down the stairs, her mother’s faint alto in thirds mingled with her own sweet treble; a shaft of sunlight, faint and watery in winter, strong and golden in summer, shimmering through the room in the morning dusk completed for the little girl a sensation of happiness which lay perilously near tears.

After breakfast came the bustle of preparing for church. Junius of course had come down in complete readiness; but the others must change their dresses; Virginia had mislaid her Sunday hair-ribbon again; Angela had discovered a rip in her best gloves and could not be induced to go down until it had been mended. “Wait for me just a minute, Jinny dear, I can’t go out looking like this, can I?” She did not like going to church, at least not to their church, but she did care about her appearance and she liked the luxuriousness of being “dressed up” on two sucessive days. At last the little procession filed out, Mattie hoping that they would not be late, she did hate it so; Angela thinking that this was a stupid way to spend Sunday and wondering at just what period of one’s life existence began to shape itself as you wanted it. Her father’s thoughts were inchoate; expressed they would have revealed a patriarchal aspect almost biblical. He had been a poor boy, homeless, a nobody, yet he had contrived in his mid-forties to attain to the status of a respectable citizen, house-owner, a good provider. He possessed a charming wife and two fine daughters, and as was befitting he was accompanying them to the house of the Lord. As for Virginia, no one to see her in her little red hat and her mother’s cut-over blue coat could have divined how near she was to bursting with happiness. Father, mother and children, well-dressed, well-fed, united, going to church on a beautiful Sunday morning; there was an immense cosmic rightness about all this which she sensed rather than realized. She envied no one the incident of finer clothes or a larger home; this unity was the core of happiness, all other satisfactions must radiate from this one; greater happiness could be only a matter of degree but never of essence. When she grew up she meant to live the same kind of life; she would marry a man exactly like her father and she would conduct her home exactly as did her mother. Only she would pray very hard every day for five children, two boys and two girls and then a last little one⁠—it was hard for her to decide whether this should be a boy or a girl⁠—which should stay small for a long, long time. And on Sundays they would all go to church.

Intent on her dreaming she rarely heard the sermon. It was different with the hymns, for they constituted the main part of the service for her father, and she meant to play them again for him later in the happy, golden afternoon or the grey dusk of early evening. But first there were acquaintances to greet, friends of her parents who called them by their first names and who, in speaking of Virginia and Angela still said: “And these are the babies; my, how they grow! It doesn’t seem as though it could be you, Mattie Ford, grown up and with children!”

On Communion Sundays the service was very late, and Angela would grow restless and twist about in her seat, but the younger girl loved the sudden, mystic hush which seemed to descend on the congregation. Her mother’s sweetly merry face took on a certain childish solemnity, her father’s stern profile softened into beatific expectancy. In the exquisite diction of the sacramental service there were certain words, certain phrases that almost made the child faint; the minister had a faint burr in his voice and somehow this lent a peculiar underlying resonance to his intonation; he half spoke, half chanted and when, picking up the wafer he began “For in the night” and then broke it, Virginia could have cried out with the ecstasy which filled her. She felt that those who partook of the bread and wine were somehow transfigured; her mother and father wore an expression of ineffable content as they returned to their seats and there was one woman, a middle-aged, mischief-making person, who returned from taking the sacrament, walking down the aisle, her hands clasped loosely in front of her and her face so absolutely uplifted that Virginia used to hasten to get within earshot of her after the church was dismissed, sure that her first words must savour of something mystic and holy. But her assumption proved always to be ill-founded.

The afternoon and the evening repeated the morning’s charm but in a different key. Usually a few acquaintances dropped in; the parlour and dining-room were full for an hour or more of pleasant, harmless chatter. Mr. Henson, the policeman, a tall, yellow man with freckles on his nose and red “bad hair” would clap Mr. Murray on the back and exclaim “I tell you what, June,”⁠—which always seemed to Virginia a remarkably daring way in which to address her tall, dignified father. Matthew Henson, a boy of sixteen, would inevitably be hovering about Angela who found him insufferably boresome and made no effort to hide her ennui. Mrs. Murray passed around rather hard cookies and delicious currant wine, talking stitches and patterns meanwhile with two or three friends of her youth with a frequent injection of “Mame, do you remember!”

Presently the house, emptied of all but the family, grew still again, dusk and the lamp light across the street alternately panelling the walls. Mrs. Murray murmured something about fixing a bite to eat, “I’ll leave it in the kitchen if anybody wants it.” Angela reflected aloud that she had still to get her Algebra or History or French as the case may be, but nobody moved. What they were really waiting for was for Virginia to start to play and finally she would cross the narrow absurdity of a room and stretching out her slim, brown hands would begin her version, a glorified one, of the hymns which they had sung in church that morning, and then the old favourites which she had played before breakfast. Even Angela, somewhat remote and difficult at first, fell into this evening mood and asked for a special tune or a repetition: “I like the way you play that, Jinny.” For an hour or more they were as close and united as it is possible for a family to be.

At eight o’clock or thereabouts Junius said exactly as though it had not been in his thoughts all evening: “Play the ‘Dying Christian,’ daughter.” And Virginia, her treble sounding very childish and shrill against her father’s deep, unyielding bass, began Pope’s masterpiece on the death of a true believer. The magnificently solemn words: “Vital spark of heavenly flame,” strangely appropriate minor music filled the little house with an awesome beauty which was almost palpable. It affected Angela so that in sheer self-defence she would go out in the kitchen and eat her share of the cold supper set by her mother. But Mattie, although she never sang this piece, remained while her husband and daughter sang on. Death triumphant and mighty had no fears for her. It was inevitable, she knew, but she would never have to face it alone. When her husband died, she would die too, she was sure of it; and if death came to her first it would be only a little while before Junius would be there stretching out his hand and guiding her through all the rough, strange places just as years ago, when he had been a coachman to the actress for whom she worked, he had stretched out his good, honest hand and had saved her from a dangerous and equivocal position. She wiped away happy and grateful tears.

“The world recedes, it disappears,” sang Virginia. But it made no difference how far it drifted away as long as the four of them were together; and they would always be together, her father and mother and she and Angela. With her visual mind she saw them proceeding endlessly through space; there were her parents, arm in arm, and she and⁠—but tonight and other nights she could not see Angela; it grieved her to lose sight thus of her sister, she knew she must be there, but grope as she might she could not find her. And then quite suddenly Angela was there again, but a different Angela, not quite the same as in the beginning of the picture.

And suddenly she realized that she was doing four things at once and each of them with all the intentness which she could muster; she was singing, she was playing, she was searching for Angela and she was grieving because Angela as she knew her was lost forever.

“Oh Death, oh Death, where is thy sting!” the hymn ended triumphantly⁠—she and the piano as usual came out a little ahead of Junius which was always funny. She said, “Where’s Angela?” and knew what the answer would be. “I’m tired, mummy! I guess I’ll go to bed.”

“You ought to, you got up so early and you’ve been going all day.”

Kissing her parents good night she mounted the stairs languidly, her whole being pervaded with the fervid yet delicate rapture of the day.