The Eleventh Virgin, Dorothy Day [best e book reader for android TXT] 📗

were a melancholy incense. The sweet clover in the fields down by the lake where June walked made the air heavy. The soft waves whispered at the breakwater all the day long.

But with the late autumn, school came again and band concerts ceased and she no longer saw Mr. Armand. The sky was muddy, there was no brightness in it. Music had fled with all the little breezes that aroused the soft emotions in her heart.

Long hours of study, the constant struggle in the family, housework and the baby occupied her time and her imagination. There was no more romance.

III

It was a gloomy Sunday. The Henreddy family had just finished dinner and Sunday dinner was a dark spot in the uniformly grey week. Mr. Henreddy must hate his children, June often thought. As long as she could remember, the only time they ever sat at the table with him was on Sunday at the midday meal. Even when the boys had started to work nights as telegraphers, getting up at ten when he also arose, he would not eat breakfast with them but insisted that Mother Grace serve his meals separately. He wished, twenty meals a week, to eat with Mother Grace alone. If he wanted to read in the parlor, he sent his sons and daughters into the dining-room, although they were no longer prattling children. It didn’t matter if the dining-room fire was out and the room cold and draughty. They had to allow him “to read in peace.”

Sunday noon, however, he insisted on a family meal. No engagement was important enough to keep anyone away. It was a solemn institution in the family life.

None spoke; all ate in gloomy silence. They could hear each other swallow and the strain to eat quietly was so great that by the time the dessert was brought on, appetites had fled.

June used to sit and look at her father eating in this curious, abject way and feel sorry for him. Did he feel as shy and embarrassed and miserable as they did? She was sure of it, and her self-consciousness and resultant anger relaxed and she gulped less. At moments like these she felt a curious sympathy for him. She suddenly realized that she and her father looked very much alike⁠—their eyes and the shape of their mouths. The same blood ran in their veins and probably the same feelings in their hearts.

All father wanted was mother, and here was a group of children sitting around the table, restrained and uncomfortable. Where did they all come from? They were his. Well, he had performed a family duty by dining with them on Sunday⁠ ⁠… His meals for a week hence would be with mother⁠ ⁠… Damn it! He always wanted to be alone with her, and here were five children come between them⁠ ⁠…

These, it seemed to June, must have been his thoughts.

Adele and June found it an unpleasant duty after dinner to wash the dishes. They could not sing while they worked as they usually did, because Mr. Henreddy would send Mother Grace out to silence them.

While Adele cleared the table, June piled the dishes in neat stacks in the kitchen. And sometimes they forgot to maintain their enforced silence and as soon as the doors were closed between the two rooms, they burst into soft song.

One hymn was June’s favorite:

“In that cou-untry⁠—
To which I jour-er-ny
My Redeemer, my Redeemer
Is its King.
There is no sorrow
Nor any si-ighing
Nor any tears there,
Nor any cry-y-ing.
I’m a pilgrim,
I’m a stra-anger,
I can tarry, I can tarry
But an hour.”

“Huh,” Adele said. “Feeling religious?”

“Is that a nice way to talk?”

“Just because you went to church this morning, you get holy!”

“Jesus, Lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly⁠—”

“Hypercrite! Singing songs like that when you’re in love with a married man.” It seemed Adele had been reading her sister’s diary.

“You’re a liar,” June told her trembling.

“ ‘He who calleth his brother or sister a fool or a liar is in danger of hell fire.’ ” It was her turn.

“Now don’t you get holy. Besides you’re quoting wrong.”

“I’m not trying to be holy. You’re the one. You’re always pretending to mother that you’ve got religion. You’re always spouting the Bible to the boys and me. I don’t pretend to be religious the way you do.” All this with a self-righteous air, in spite of which June felt that she was right.

After that fervent summer, fall had come drearily. Lessons were dull and unprofitable, and although for a time the Virgil class was made interesting by a boy in the next row whose Irish eyes were blue-lidded and strangely appealing, that charm faded soon. For he came to school one day with his hair cut too short and the visible scalp offset the appeal of his eyelids.

There were no teachers offering opportunities for distant worship and, at first, no girl in the class sufficiently attractive to write notes to.

Then a new boy appeared in the choir of the little church and offered a sufficient reason for being baptized and confirmed, taking communion and attending church regularly.

It was a fragile and ephemeral attachment, hardly enduring till Monday morning. But part of its charm lay in its contrast to the fervid emotions of the summer, and the boy’s ascetic and rather tubercular face gave to the music a sad charm.

June read the Bible with interest, but exaltation was obtained only through the sermons of Wesley and the little books of Jonathan Edwards and Thomas á Kempis. The Church of England prayer book had a quaintness and beauty about it. Diligent translation of a Greek New Testament, attractively dog-eared and ancient (one hundred and fifty years old) and picked up in a secondhand bookshop for ten cents, served, if not to increase her religious zeal, to gain for her a high mark in Greek for the term.

Then came Henrietta, June’s first intimate friend. Her sincere and wholesomely cheerful piety gave a vigor to religion which it had lacked before, and also provided reasons for scrubbing