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In the third chapter I mentioned how the village women, with their men-folk and their children, too until the recent Act of Parliament shut the children out would make a Saturday-night call at some public-house before going home from the weekly shopping expedition. But these are the reverse of bad women.
"But why must we wait four days?" asked Frank petulantly. "Because, my love-lorn brother," she replied, "in the first place I don't want to miss the Saturday-night hop, and then we are booked for a buck-board ride to the Flume to-morrow. Another reason is, I mean to pay you for turning your back on us and going off on the 'Gypsy."
I fear I was the one who most often accepted his hospitality, and wonderful visits they were, certainly to me, and I think to Richard as well. The great event was our Saturday-night dinner, when we always went to a little restaurant on Sixth Avenue.
To relieve the tedium of this untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her grandfather's old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night ballads of the country people the while. But on Saturday nights she would frequently sing a psalm, and it was always on a weekday that she read the Bible, that she might be unoppressed with a sense of doing her duty.
Not only was she unimportant to him, but, in spite of his mortification at that scene on the road, his Saturday-night returns to his wife were blowing the fires of his love into such a glory of devotion, that Edith was practically nonexistent! His one thought was to take Eleanor to Mercer. He wanted her all to himself!
Amongst the throng of Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say, even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a day of pleasure rather than praise.
The next day his little child, being left alone for some hours, was drowned in an uncovered well in the cellar of his house. "The father freely, in open congregation, did acknowledge it the righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day." Visitors and travellers from other countries were forced to obey the rigid laws with regard to Saturday-night observance.
He was too busy. He did not drink. He could not dance; he saw no sense in squandering time in such frivolities. But ever since his arrival he had been promising himself to attend one of these wild Saturday-night debauches in the edge of the jungle that he might use a description of it in some later work. So he had coaxed his one personal friend, the boy, to go with him.
Under the roof, on the galérie, the wheel hummed, the loom pounded; inside, the logs crackled and blazed on the hearth; on the board were venison, mallard, teal, rice-birds, sirop de baterie, and quitte; round the fireside were pipes, pecans, old stories, and the Saturday-night contra-dance; and every now and then came sounding on the outer air the long, hoarse bellow of some Mississippi steamer, telling of the great world beyond the tree-tops, a little farther than the clouds and nearer than the stars.
Our lives lie too far apart, and my time is not my own. It is only an occasional Saturday-night that I can play Cinderella." "What do you do on Sundays?" "Go to church in the morning, and sleep in the afternoon. Sounds elderly, doesn't it? But I do enjoy that sleep. The hour after lunch is the most trying of the school day.
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