CHAPTER XIIAN ORIGINAL IN MATH
When Gertrude’s brother turned up at college just before the holidays of their senior year, he boldly asked for Bea in the same breath with his sister’s name. When the message was brought to her, that fancy-free young person’s first thought was a quick dread that Berta would tease her about the preference. But no. Miss Abbott, chairman of the Annual’s editorial board, clasped her inky hands in relief.
“Bless the boy! He couldn’t have chosen better if he had looked through the walls and discovered Bea the sole student with time to burn—or to talk, for that matter. Trot along, Beatrice, and tell him that Gertrude is coming the moment she has dug her way out of this avalanche of manuscript. I can’t possibly spare her for half an hour yet. Go and distract his mind from his unnatural sister by means of another story.”
“Tell him about your little original in math, Bea,” called Lila after her, “that’s your best and latest.”
Bea retraced her steps to thrust back an injured countenance at the door. “I guess I am able to converse as well as monologue, can’t I?” she demanded indignantly, “you just listen.”
However, when confronted by a young man with a monosyllabic tongue and an embarrassingly eloquent pair of eyes, she seized a copy of the last Annual from the table in the senior parlor, and plunged into an account of her own editorial trials.
Gertrude is on the board for this year’s Annual, you know, and Berta Abbott is chairman. At this very moment they are struggling over a deluge of manuscripts submitted in their prize poem contest. Of course, I sympathize, because I have been through something of the same ordeal. The Monthly offered a prize for a short story last fall, and we had rather a lively sequel to the decision. Shall I tell you about it from the beginning? At our special meeting, I read the stories aloud, because I happen to be chief editor.Nobody said anything at first. Janet, the business editor, tipped her chair back and stared at the piles of magazines on the shelves opposite. Laura, who does the locals, pressed her forehead closer to the pane to watch the girls hurrying past on their way to the tennis tournament on the campus. Adele and Jo, the literaries, nibbled their fountain-pens.
I spread out the manuscripts, side by side, in a double row on the big sanctum desk, picked up my scribbled pad, leaned back till the swivel screw squeaked protestingly from below, and said, “Well?”
Janet brought her chair down on all four feet with a bump. “Nary one is worth a ten dollar prize,” she declared pugnaciously, “especially now that Robbie Belle has gone to the infirmary for six weeks and she can’t help me in soliciting advertisements.”
Laura turned her head. “Robbie Belle had promised to write up the first hall play for me. She was going to review two books for Jo and compose a Christmas poem for Adele’s department. I think maybe there are perhaps a dozen or so girls who might have been more easily spared.”
I brushed a hand across my weary brow. It did not feel like cobwebs exactly,—more like cork, sort of light and dry and full of holes. I had been up almost all night, studying over those fifteen manuscripts, applying the principles of criticism, weighing, balancing, measuring, arguing with myself, and rebelling against fate. If Robbie Belle had been there she could have recognized the best story by instinct. Ever since I became chief editor I had depended upon her judgment, because she is a born critic and always right, and I’m not. And now just when I needed her most of all and more than anybody else, there she had to go and get quarantined in the infirmary.
“Girls,” I said, “do express an opinion. Say what you think. We simply must decide this matter now, because the prize story has to go to press before the first, and this is our only free afternoon. I know what I think—at least I am almost sure what I think—but I want to hear your views first. Adele, you’re always conscientious.”
Adele was only a junior and rather new to the responsibility of being on the editorialboard. She glanced down at her page of notes.
“Every one of the stories has some good points,” she began cautiously. “Most of them start out well and several finish well. Six have good plots, nine are interesting, five are brightly written. Number seven is, I believe—yes, I think I consider it the best. The trouble is——”
“Altogether too jerky,” interrupted Jo, “a fine plot but no style whatever. This is a cat. See the cat catch the rat. That’s the kind of English in number seven. Now I vote for number fifteen.”
“Oh, but, Jo,” I broke in eagerly, for number seven was my own laborious choice also, and Adele’s corroboration strengthened me wonderfully. “Jo, it is the simplicity of the style that is its greatest recommendation. You know how Professor Whitcomb has drummed into us the beauty of Anglo-Saxon diction. It’s beautiful—it’s charming—it’s perfect. Why, a six-year-old could understand it. Fifteen is far too sensational for good art. Just listen to this——”
Jo was stubborn. “The use of short wordsis a mere fad,” she said, “it is like wearing dimity for every occasion. Now listen to this!”
She snatched up one manuscript and read aloud while I declaimed from the other. Adele listened with a pained frown on her forehead, Janet laughed and teetered recklessly to and fro on her frisky chair, Laura fidgeted at the window and filled every pause with a threat to leave us instanter for the tournament positively had to be written up that day. Finally I put the question to the vote, for Jo is so decided in her manner that she makes me feel wobbly unless I am conscious of being backed up by Robbie Belle. I suppose it is because my own opinions are so shaky from the inside view that I hate to appear variable from the outside. It would have been horrid to yield to Jo’s arguments and change my ideas right there before the whole board. The rest of them except Jo had fallen into a way of deferring to my judgment, for I had seemed to hit it off right almost always in accepting or rejecting contributions. Nobody knew how much I had depended on Robbie Belle.
The board awarded the prize to number seven, my choice, you know. Janet was on my side because the story had a nice lively plot, and that was all she cared about. Laura put in a blank ballot, saying that her head ached so that it was not fair to either side for her to cast any weight upon the scale. Adele of course voted with me. Jo stuck to number fifteen till the end.
“Well, that’s over!” sighed Laura and escaped before any one had put the motion to adjourn. Janet vanished behind her, and Jo picked up the manuscript of which she was champion.
“By the way, girls,” she said, “I will return this to its writer, if you don’t mind. And I shall tell her to offer it to the Annual. The committee will jump at the chance. Find out who she is, please.”
I slipped the elastic band from the packet of fifteen sealed envelopes and selected the one marked with the title of the story. The name inside was that of a sophomore who had already contributed several articles to the Monthly. Then I opened the envelope belonging to number seven.
“Maria Mitchell Kiewit,” I read, “who in the world is she? I’ve never heard of her. She must be a freshman.”
Jo who was half way out of the room stopped at the word and thrust her head back around the door. “Did little Maria Kiewit write that? No wonder it is simple and jerky. She’s a mathematical prodigy, she is. Her mother is an alumna of this college. See! The infant was named after our great professor of astronomy. She wants to specialize herself in mathematical astronomy when she gets to be a junior. Her mother was head editor of the Monthly in her day. Maria rooms somewhere in this corridor, I believe. It will be a big thing for her to win the prize away from all the upper class girls. I didn’t vote for her. By-bye.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Adele, clasping her hands in that intense way of hers, “won’t she be happy when she hears! A little ignorant unknown freshman to win the prize for the best short story among eight hundred students! Her mother will be delighted. Her mother will be proud.”
“Hist!” Jo’s head reappeared. “She’scoming down the corridor now. Red cheeks, bright eyes, ordinary nose, round chin, long braid, white shirtwaist, tan skirt—nothing but an average freshman. She doesn’t look like a mathematical prodigy, but she is one. And an author, too—dear, dear! There must be some mistake. Authors never have curly hair.”
Adele and I poked our faces through the crack. Jo wickedly flung the door wide open. “Walk right out, ladies and gentlemen. See the conquering heroine comes,” she sang in a voice outrageously shrill. During the trill on the hero, she bowed almost double right in the path of the approaching freshman. Maria Mitchell Kiewit stopped short, her eyes as round as the buttons on her waist.
Jo fell on her knees, lifting her outspread hands in ridiculous admiration. “O Maria Mitchell Kiewit,” she declaimed, “hearken! I have the honor—me, myself—I snatch it, seize it—the honor to announce that thou—thee—you—your own self hast won the ten dollar prize for the best short story written for the Monthly by an undergraduate. Vale!” She scrambled upright by means of clutchingmy skirt and put out a cordial hand. “Nice girl! Shake!”
“Josephine!” gasped Adele in horrified rebuke. My breath was beginning to come fast over this insult to our editorial dignity when I caught sight of the freshman’s face. Her cheeks were as red as ever, but she had turned white about the lips, and her eyes were really terrified.
“Oh, I don’t want it!” she cried involuntarily, shrinking away from us, “I don’t want it.”
Jo’s mouth fell open. “Then why in the world——”
The little freshman fairly ran to the alleyway leading to her room.
Jo turned blankly to us. “Then why in the world did she write the story and send it in?”
Adele—I told you she was conscientious, didn’t I? and inclined to be mathematical herself—stared at the spot where Maria had disappeared. “Such an attitude might be explained either by the supposition that she is diffident—sort of stunned by the surprise, you understand—she never expected to win. Ormaybe she is shy and dreads the notoriety of fame. Everybody will be looking at her, pointing her out. Or—or possibly——” Adele hesitated, glanced around uneasily, caught my eye; and we both dropped our lids quickly. It was horrid of us. I think it is the meanest thing to be suspicious and ready to believe evil of anybody. But truly we had just been reading a volume of college stories, and one was about a girl who plagiarized some poems and passed them off as her own. And this Maria Mitchell Kiewit had behaved almost exactly like her.
“Or possibly what?” demanded Jo.
Adele stammered. “Or p-p-possibly—oh, nothing! Maybe she is ashamed of the story or something like that. She lacks self-esteem probably. She didn’t expect it to be published, you know, and—and she is surprised. That’s all. She—I guess she’s surprised.”
“Come along, Adele,” I slipped my arm through hers and dragged her away from Jo’s neighborhood, “you must help me reject these fourteen others. That’s the part I hate worst about this editorial business.”
“Don’t you want to reconsider the decision?”called Jo, “since she doesn’t wish the prize herself, you’d better choose my girl. This is your last chance. The committee for the Annual will surely gobble number fifteen up quick. Berta Abbott knows good literature when she sees it. Going, going——”
“Let her go. Now, Adele,” I said, closing the sanctum door with inquisitive stubborn Jo safely on the outside, “here are the rest of the names. You doubtless know some of their owners by sight, and I hope I know others. This is how we shall manage. Whenever you see one of them securely away from her room—maybe in the library or recitation or out on the campus or down town or anywhere—you tell me or else run yourself and take her manuscript and poke it under her door. I’ll write a nice polite little regretful admiring note to go with each story, and that ought to take the edge off the blow. But be sure she is not at home. It would be simply awful to hand anybody a rejected article right to her real face and see how disappointed she is. I think it is more courteous to give her a chance to recover alone and unobserved.”
“But suppose she has a roommate?” said Adele.
“Oh, dear! Well, in that case we’ll have to watch and loiter around till they are both out of reach. It may take us all the week.”
And it actually did. It took a lot of time but it was exciting too in a way. We felt like detectives or criminals—it doesn’t matter which—to haunt the corridors and grounds till we spied one of those girls headed away from her room (of course we had to find out first where each one lived), and then we scurried up-stairs and down and hung around in the neighborhood and walked past the door, if anybody happened to be near, and finally shoved the manuscript to its goal. Certainly I understand that we were not obliged to take all this trouble but I simply could not bear to send those long envelopes back through the post. Every student who distributes the mail would have recognized such a parcel as a rejected manuscript. And of course that would have hurt the author’s feelings.
Naturally I was rushed that week because Thanksgiving Day came on Thursday, and I had an invitation to go down to the city tohear grand opera that afternoon. It was necessary to take such an early train that I missed the dinner. That evening when I returned I found the whole editorial board and Berta too groaning in Lila’s study while Laura acted as amanuensis for a composite letter to Robbie Belle. You see, they had eaten too much dinner—three hours at the table and everything too good to skip. Each one tried to put a different groan into the letter. They were so much interested in the phraseology and they felt so horrid that nobody offered to get me crackers or cocoa, though I was actually famishing.
After poking around in the family cupboard under the window seat, I routed out a bag of popcorn. I lighted the gas stove and popped about three quarts, and then boiled some sugar and water to crystallize it. When you are starving, have you ever eaten popcorn buttered for a first course and crystallized for a second? It is the most delicious thing! I had just settled myself in a steamer-chair with the heaped up pan of fluffy kernels within reach of my right hand, when there came a knock on the door.
“Enter!” called Janet.
The knob turned diffidently and in marched Maria Mitchell Kiewit.
Lila pushed another pillow behind Jo on the couch, Laura lifted her pen, Janet exerted herself to rise politely. I carelessly threw a newspaper over the corn, and then poked it off. After all, editors are only human, and freshmen might as well learn that first as last.
“I wish to see Miss Leigh,” said the visitor in a high, very young voice that quavered in the middle.
I straightened up into a dignified right angle. “What can I do for you, Miss Kiewit?”
“I wish to withdraw my story,” she announced still at the same strained pitch, “I have changed my mind. Here is the ten-dollar bill.”
“But it went to press three days ago,” I exclaimed.
“And the Annual has gobbled up second choice,” said Jo triumphantly.
“We jumped at it,” corroborated Berta.
“To take out the prize story now would spoil the magazine,” cried Adele.
“Impossible!” declared Janet.
“Nonsense!” said Laura under her breath.
The little freshman stared from one to another. Then suddenly her round face quivered and crumpled. Throwing up one arm over her eyes she turned, snatched at the door knob and stumbled out into the corridor.
I looked at Adele.
“Yes,” she replied to my expression, “you’d better go and find out now. It’s for the honor of the Monthly. It would be awful to print a—a—mistake,” she concluded feebly.
Just as I emerged from the alleyway I caught sight of the small figure fluttering around the corner of a side staircase half way down the dimly lighted hall. I had to hurry in order to overtake her before she could reach her own room. She must have been sobbing to herself, for she did not notice the sound of my steps on the rubber matting till I was near enough to touch her elbow. Then how she jumped!
“Pardon me, Miss Kiewit. May I speak to you for one minute?”
She nodded. I am not observant generally but this time I could see that she said nothing because she dared not trust her voice to speak. She went in first to light the gas. The pillows on the couch were tossed about in disorder, and one of yellow silk had a round dent in it and two or three damp spots as if somebody had been crying with her face against it.
Now I hate to ask direct questions especially in a situation like this where I wished particularly to be tactful, and of course she would be thrust into an awkward position in case she should dislike to reply. So I sat down and looked around and said, “How prettily you have arranged your room!”
The freshman had seated herself on the edge of her straightest chair. At my speech she glanced about nervously. “My mother graduated here,” she explained, “and she knew what I ought to bring. Ever since I can remember, she has been planning about college for me.”
“What a fortunate girl you are!” This was my society manner, you understand, for I was truly embarrassed. I always incline tosmall talk when I have nothing to say. She caught me up instantly.
“Fortunate! Oh, me! Fortunate! When I hate it—I hate the college except for math. My mother teaches in the high school—she works day after day, spending her life and strength and health, so that I may stay here. I—I hate it. She wants me to become a writer. And I can’t, I can’t, I can’t! I want to elect mathematics.”
“Oh!” said I.
“When she was a girl, she longed to write, but circumstances prevented. Then I was born and she thought I would carry out her ambition and grow to be an author myself. She’s been trying years and years. But I can’t write. I’m not like my mother. I have my own life to live. I—I hate it so. And—and——” The child stopped, swallowed hard, then leaned toward me, her eyes begging me.
“And if you keep my story for the prize, she will hear about it, and she won’t let me elect mathematics for my sophomore year.”
“Oh!” I said, and I was surprised to such a degree that the oh sounded like a giggle atthe end. That made me so ashamed that I sat up a little more erect and ejaculated vivaciously, “You—you astonish me.”
It was the funniest thing—she hung her head like a conscience-smitten child. “I—I haven’t told her about it because it would encourage her and then later she would—would be all the more disappointed. I can’t write, I tell you.”
“The vote was almost unanimous,” I remarked stiffly.
She stared at me doubtfully. “Well, maybe that story is good but I know I couldn’t do it again. And anyhow my mother told me the plot.”
“Oh,” I said. It was really the plot that had won the prize, you understand, though indeed I had found the style eminently praiseworthy also according to all the principles of criticism. It almost fulfilled the rhetorical rules about unity, mass and coherence.
“So you will let me withdraw?” she questioned timidly, “here’s the ten dollars.” She held out the crumpled bill which she had been clutching all the evening.
I thought I might as well be going. “It’s allowable to use your own mother’s plot,” I assured her, “don’t bother about that. Good bye.”
Without looking at her I hurried through the alleyway into the corridor, flew past the sanctum, darted into the staircase, then halted, turned around, stopped at the water-cooler for a taste of ice water, then walked slowly back to her room.
I put my head in at the door. “You heard me say, didn’t you, that the story has gone to press?”
She lifted her face from that same yellow silk pillow. “Yes,” she said.
“All right.” I started away briskly as if I thought I was going, but I didn’t. This time I turned around, went clear into the room and sat down on the couch.
“And anyway,” I said, “you haven’t any right to deceive your mother like that. It is robbing her of a joy that she surely deserves. She has earned it. You haven’t any right not to tell her that your story won the prize. Whether we let you withdraw it or not, it would be wrong for you to steal that pleasurefrom your own mother. You are thinking merely of your own selfish wishes.”
“No, no, no! Don’t you see?” She flung herself toward me. “It is like being a surgeon. I must cut out the ambition. I can never fulfill it. Never, never, I tell you. The news of this prize will make it grow and grow like a cancer or something, till it will hurt worse, maim, kill, when I fail at last. If she would only see that I love mathematics and can do something in that maybe some day. But in literature. Suppose I shut myself up for years, struggle, struggle, struggle to wring out something that isn’t in me, while she wears herself out to support me. The publishers will send it back, one after another. I can’t write, I tell you. I know it. It will be all an awful sacrifice—a useless sacrifice, with no issue except waste of her life and my life. Don’t you see?”
“Don’t you think,” said I calmly, “don’t you think that you are just a little foolish and intense?” That is what a professor said to me once and it had a wonderfully reducing effect. So I tried it on this excited little freshman. But the result was different. Insteadof clearing the atmosphere with a breeze of half mortified laughter, it created a stillness like the stillness before a whirlwind. I got up hastily. “I think I had better be going,” I said.
This time I heard the key turn in the lock behind me as I walked rapidly away. Actually I had to hold myself in to keep from scuttling away like a whipped puppy. That is how I felt inside. I didn’t believe that she would ever forgive me. There were two compensations for this episode in my editorial career: one was the realization that the little freshman had plenty of dignity to fall back on, the other was that she would not be very likely to ask again for the return of the prize story.
Considering that this was my sincere attitude, you may imagine how amazed I was to hear my name called by this young person the very next morning. She came running up to me at the instant my fingers were on the knob of the sanctum door. Her hands were filled with those little cardboard rhomboids, polyhedrons, prisms and so forth which the freshmen have to make for their geometry work.
“I’m going to do it,” she began breathlessly, “I’m going to tell my mother. Perhaps it would please her more if—if you should write me a note on paper with the name of the Monthly at the top, you know. She used to be an editor when she was in college. In it say that the board gave me the prize. I think it will please her.”
“I shall be delighted,” I exclaimed. Then something in the way she was gazing down at those geometrical monstrosities (I never could endure mathematics myself) made me want to comfort her.
“Why, child, it won’t be necessary to sacrifice math entirely. You can elect analytics and calculus to balance the lit and rhetoric. Cheer up.”
She raised eyes brimming with tears. “My mother thinks that math has an adverse tendency. She doesn’t want me to take much science either. She says that science deals with facts, literature with the impression of facts.”
“Oh,” I remarked. You notice that I had found occasion to use the foregoing expletive several times since first meeting Miss Maria Mitchell Kiewit.
She nodded gloomily in acknowledgment of my sympathetic comprehension. “Yes, once when I described lights in a fog as ‘losing their chromatic identity’ instead of saying they ‘blurred into the mist,’ she asked me to drop physics in the high school. She said it was ruinous, it was destroying the delicacy of my perceptions.”
“Doesn’t your mother ever——” I hesitated, then decisively, “doesn’t she ever laugh?”
Maria dimpled suddenly. “Oh, yes, yes! She’s my dearest, best friend, and we have fun all the time except when she talks about my becoming a writer. She said that now at college I could show if there was any hope in me. She meant that this is my chance to learn to write. I—I——” She paused and glanced at me dubiously from under her lashes. “I sent in that story just to show her that I couldn’t write. I was going to tell her I had tried and failed.”
“Oh!” Then I chuckled, and the freshman after a moment of half resentful pouting joined in with a small reluctant laugh.
“It is funny,” she said, “I think that maybefrom your side of the affair it is awfully funny. But——”
I turned the knob swiftly. “No but about it. I shall write that note this minute, and you shall mail it home at once. That is the only right thing to do.”
“Yes.” She heaved a deep, long sigh. “I know that. I have worked it all out as an original in geometry. For instance: Given, an unselfish mother with a special ambition for her rebellious selfish daughter. Problem: to decide which one should sacrifice her own wishes. Let the mother’s desire equal this straight line, and the daughter’s inclination equal this straight line at right angles to the other. To prove——”
“See here, little girl,” I interrupted her kindly but firmly, “no wonder your mother dreads the effect of mathematical studies on your tender brain! I said farewell to geometry exactly two years and four months ago. I did the examination in final trig three times. Comprehend? Now run into your own room and get that letter written quick. If you are very agreeable indeed, I may let you enclose the proof sheets, who knows?”
“Thank you,” she exclaimed in impulsive joy, “that will be lovely. Mother will be so pleased.” Then the vision of coming woe in exile from beloved calculations descended upon her, and she hugged the paper figures so convulsively that the sharpest, most beautiful angle of the biggest polyhedron cracked clear across from edge to edge. They were perfectly splendid clean edges, edges that even I could see had been formed by the carefully loving hands of a mathematical prodigy.
After that day came a pause in the drama (Adele declared that it was really a tragedy caused by one life trying to bend another to its will) until the day when the new issue of the Monthly arrived in the noon mail. As Robbie Belle was still in the infirmary of course, the rest of the board took hold of her share of the work. We divided the list of subscribers between us, and started out to distribute the magazines at the different rooms in the various dormitories.
SHE WAVED AN OPEN LETTER IN HER HAND
SHE WAVED AN OPEN LETTER IN HER HAND
Part of my route happened to include the neighborhood of the sanctum. Just as I turned into Maria’s alleyway to leave the three copies always provided for every contributor, she came dashing out of her room in such a headlong rush that I barely saved my equilibrium by a rapid jump to one side. As soon as she could control her own impetus she whirled and bore down upon me once more.
“Mercy, mercy!” I cried, backing into a corner by the hinges and holding my pile of magazines in front as a rampart, “don’t be an automobile any more.”
She waved an open letter in her hand.
“Mother says I may elect all the math I want. She says I can’t write a little bit. She says that this prize story shows I can’t. She says it is awful—all except the plot, and that isn’t mine, you know. She says that the vocabulary, sentence structure, everything proves me mathematical to the centre of my soul. She says she has always been afraid she was making a mistake to force a square peg into a round hole. I’m the peg, you understand. She says I needn’t struggle any more, and she’ll be just as proud of a mathematical genius as of a mechanical author. She says she is grateful for the honor of the prize, but she thinks the board of editors made a mistake.”
I walked feebly into the room, sank on thecouch, and propped myself against that yellow silk pillow.
“It’s horrid to be an editor,” I said, “especially when Robbie Belle has to go and get taken to the infirmary just when I need her most.”
“My mother knows,” chanted the little freshman, “and she says I can’t write a little bit. She says I can elect mathematics. Whoopee!”
CHAPTER XIIIJUST THIS ONCE
Ellen drummed restlessly on the window pane. “I’m ’most sure it would not matter just this once. We’ve had the mildest sort of a fever, and I don’t see yet why they keep us shut up so long away off here. I’m crazy to send a letter home.”
Lila’s thin shoulders gave an irritable little shrug under the silken folds of her dressing-gown, and her finely cut features screwed for an instant into an expression of impatient dislike. It was only for an instant—then the mask of her conventional courtesy dropped again between the two convalescents.
“Why not tell the doctor or the nurse what you wish to write? They will attend to it for you. Infection may be conveyed in a dozen ways, you know. We are beginning to peel, and that is the worst——”
“Oh, are we?” broke in Ellen excitedly, “are we really peeling?” She lifted one hand and examined the wrist. “No, I’m not evenbeginning. Every morning the moment I wake up I rub and rub, but it won’t peel. It simply won’t. And I’ve got to stay here till I do. Are you peeling? Really?”
She darted across to her companion and seized her arm without noticing the quiver of distaste before it lay limp in her eager grasp.
“Oh, oh, it is, it certainly is! You are peeling. You will get through first and be set free and go back to the girls. I shall be left here alone. It isn’t fair. We both came the same day. Think of almost six weeks lost from college! My first spring in this beautiful place! It doesn’t mean so much to you, because you’re a junior. You don’t care.”
Lila had withdrawn her hand under the pretext of picking up a case knife to sharpen her pencil. Now though her lids were lowered as she hacked at the stubby point, she was perfectly aware of the hopeful curiosity in the freshman’s side glance at her. Lila despised the habit of side glances. For the past few days she had felt increasing scorn of a childishness that sought to vary by quarrels the monotony of their imprisonment. Hadn’t the girl learned yet that she—LilaAllan, president of the junior literary society—was not to be provoked into any undignified dispute by puerile taunts?
“You don’t care,” repeated Ellen from her old position at the window. “I guess you’d rather anyhow have all your time to write poetry instead of studying.” She glanced around just in time to see Lila’s lips set in a grimmer line as the lead in the short pencil snapped beneath a more impatient jab of the dull knife. She laughed teasingly.
“What’s the use of writing all that stuff now? You’re wearing out your pencil fast. Aren’t you afraid the paper will carry infection? Or will it be fumigated? I think it is silly to bother about germs. Oh, dear!” She began to drum again on the pane. “I’m so tired of this infirmary. There’s nothing to do. I can’t make up poetry. My eyes ache if I try to read.” Here she paused, and Lila was aware of another side glance in her direction.
“My eyes ache if I try to read,” repeated Ellen slowly, “and there is an awfully interesting story over on the table.” She stopped her drumming for a moment to listen to thesteady scribble behind her. The little face with its round features so unlike Lila’s delicate outlines took on a disconsolate expression. “Do your eyes ache when you try to read,” for an instant she hesitated while a mischievous spark of daring danced into her eyes. Then she added explosively, “Lila?”
She had done it. She had done it at last. Never before through all the weeks of imprisonment together had she ventured to call Miss Allan by her first name. A delightful tingle of apprehension crept up to the back of her neck. She waited. Now surely something would happen.
But nothing happened except the continued scribble of pencil on paper in the silence. Oh, dear! this was worse than she had expected. It was worse than a scolding or a freezing or an awful squelching. It was the queerest thing that they were not even acquainted really after the many weeks. There was a shell around this junior all the time. It made Ellen feel meaner and smaller and more insignificant every minute. The freshman pressed her forehead wearily against the glass.
“Oh, look! There come the girls.They’re your friends away down on the lawn. Miss Abbott, I think, and Miss Leigh, and Miss Sanders. See, see! The rollicking wind and the racing clouds! Their skirts blow. They hold on their tams. They are looking up at us. They are waving something. Maybe it is violets, don’t you think? Once I found violets in March. Can’t you smell the air almost? I’m going to open the window. I am, I am! Who’s afraid of getting chilled?”
“I would advise you not to do anything so utterly foolhardy,” spoke Lila’s frigid voice. A certain inflection in the tone made Ellen shrink away instinctively. For an instant she looked full into the serene, indifferent eyes, and her own seemed to flutter as if struggling against the contempt she saw there. Then with a defiant lift of her head she hurried to the writing table and seized the pencil which Lila had dropped upon rising to approach the window.
A few minutes later when the older girl turned from the greetings and messages in pantomime with her friends below, she saw Ellen’s rough head bending over a paper. It was a needlessly untidy head. During theweeks of close confinement and enforced companionship, she had felt her dislike steadily growing. The girl was on her nerves. She was wholly disagreeable. Everything about her was displeasing, her careless enunciation, queer little face, coarse clothes, impulsive, crude ways, even occasional mistakes in grammar. She told herself that the child had no breeding, no manners, no sense of the fitness of things. There was no reason why she should admit her into the circle of her intimates merely because the two had been thrown together by the exigencies of an attack of scarlet fever. Such a fortuitous relation would be severed in the shortest possible time, completely and irremediably severed. Trust Lila Allan, president of the junior literary society, to manage that. Meanwhile she intended to leave the girl severely alone. Think of the impudence of calling her Lila! Lila, indeed! And that hint about reading aloud! The incredible impertinence of it! And to appropriate her pencil! Atrocious!
But of course she would keep on being polite. She owed that to herself, to her position,to her self-respect. Accordingly Miss Allan busied herself graciously about other matters till Ellen had finished her note, addressed an envelope, and advanced with it to the window.
She hesitated doubtfully, with one hand on the sash.
“It won’t matter just this once,” she said as if arguing, “somebody will pick it up and mail it for me. It concerns something important and private. People are silly about infection. I’m quite sure it won’t matter just this once.” She paused this time with rather an anxious little side glance toward Lila.
That young lady said nothing. She was engaged in contemplating with a studiously inexpressive countenance the stub of her precious and only pencil. It needed sharpening again.
Ellen raised the window half an inch. “The doctor here is so foolish,” she commented with an injured air, “she’s always bothering about infection or contagion or whatever you call it. It isn’t necessary either. I know a doctor at home and he told a woman to wrap up her little girl and bringher down to his office, and the little girl was peeling too. He knew it wouldn’t do any harm even if she did go in the street car. He was sensible.”
Lila smothered a sigh of long suffering as she reached for the case knife again.
“And I am so tired,” insisted Ellen with fretful vehemence. “I am bored to death, and nobody amuses me, and my eyes ache when I try to read, and my wrist won’t peel, and all the other girls are enjoying themselves, and my letter is awfully important and private, and mother will be so glad to receive it, and my little sister will snatch it quick from the postcarrier, and they’ll all be glad, and there isn’t the least bit of danger, and I’m going to do it.” She flung the sash wide and glanced around for an instant with a face in which reckless defiance wrestled with a frightened wish to be dissuaded. “I’m going to do it,” she repeated, “I’m going to do it—Lila!”
Miss Allan raised her head with a politely controlled shiver. “Would you mind closing the window at your earliest convenience, Miss Bright?”
The younger girl gave her one look, then turned and leaning out over the sill sent the envelope fluttering downward till it rested square and white on the concrete walk far below. Lila shrugged her shoulder and finished sharpening her pencil.
In the course of weary time she was set at liberty. Fair and sweet and delicate in her fresh array she walked down the corridor in the centre of an exultant crowd of friends. In listening to the babel of chatter and laughter, she forgot utterly her companion in imprisonment. Just once she happened to look back from the entangling arms of Bea and Berta and Robbie Belle, and caught sight of a forlorn little figure staring after her from the shadows of the infirmary door. In the glow of her new freedom and heart-warming affection, Lila nodded to her with such a radiant smile that Ellen blushed with joy. On her journey to her room she told herself that Miss Allan liked her after all. It was a solitary journey, for Ellen had boarded in town till February. After moving into the dormitory she had barely begun to make acquaintances before the ogre of fever hadswooped down upon her and dragged her away to his den in the isolation ward.
The vision of that smile must have remained with her through the troubled weeks that followed; for one April evening in parlor J she ventured to invite Miss Allan to dance. Beyond distant glimpses in the corridors and chapel, Lila had seen nothing of her fellow convalescent. To tell the truth, she had taken pains to avoid any chance association. Once she had found hardly time to take refuge behind anEngagedsign before the dreaded little freshman came tiptoeing shyly into the alleyway. Another time when she spied the small face waiting with an expectant wistful half smile at the foot of the stairs she turned to retrace her steps as if she had suddenly recalled an errand in another direction.
On this particular evening, Lila had been the guest of honor at a senior birthday table. The senior whose birthday was being celebrated was chief editor of the Monthly. She declared that she invited Lila because of the rhymes that came in so handy to fill up several pages in the last number of the magazine. As Lila, lovely in pale rose and blue and silver, satat the table gay with flowers and shaded candles, she told the story of how she had written the verses in the infirmary. On her witty tongue the stubby pencil, the dull knife, and the teasing midget of an impudent freshman made a delightfully humorous tale. Even the explosive “Lila!” and its accompanying side glance of terrified joy in the daring developed into a picture that sent the seniors into tempests of laughter. Somehow she did not care to mention the letter which Ellen had dropped out of the window.
After dinner Lila pressed on with the others to the dancing in parlor J. The applause and admiration surrounding her made her look her prettiest and talk her wittiest, for Lila’s nature was always one that throve best in an atmosphere of praise. She felt as if whirling through fairyland. In the midst of the gayety of music, lights, and circling figures, she lifted her head in gliding past the great mirror and beheld her own radiant face smiling back at her from the flower-tinted throng. Just at that moment through a rift in the throng she caught a glimpse of two big troubled eyes in a queer small face atop of a drooping ill-cladform. Half a minute later as she leaned breathless and glowing against the mirror’s gilt frame, she became aware of a timid touch on her arm. Turning quickly she saw Ellen beside her. Her smile faded to an expression of formally polite and distant questioning as she drew her skirts a few inches away.
“Will you——” the freshman swallowed once, then pushed out the words with a desperate rush, “will you dance with me?”
“Oh, Miss Bright,” exclaimed Lila in an overwhelmingly effusive manner, “I am so dreadfully sorry, but I regret to say that I am already engaged for every number. Good-bye!” She slid her hand about her partner’s waist and propelled her swiftly into the concealing vortex of waltzers.
The partner in question happened to be a certain lively and independent young person called Bea by her friends. “Lila Allan,” she scolded as soon as she could steer their steps to a sheltered eddy in a corner, “why in the world did you snub that poor child so unmercifully? After six weeks together in the infirmary too! I’m downright ashamed of you. You ought to be above snobbishness.And it isn’t a point of snobbishness either. It is plain cruelty to children. Didn’t you see how you hurt her? And the poor little thing has enough trouble without your adding to the burden.”
“Trouble?” echoed Lila uneasily.
“Yes, trouble. Haven’t you heard? Her little sister is desperately ill with scarlet fever. Infection conveyed in a letter, I understand. A telegram may come for her any hour. And then when she tries to cheer up, you treat her so abominably! Lila, you are growing more and more spoiled every day. People praise you too much. You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. You’ve improved a lot since you first began to room with me, but still——”
Lila had vanished. Winding her swift way between the circling pairs, she hurried into the corridor where girls were strolling idly as they waited for the gong to summon them to chapel. Beyond the broad staircase Ellen’s disconsolate little figure stood in the glare of the gas-jet over the bulletin-board.
Lila hastened toward her. “Miss Bright, oh, Miss Bright, I did not know. I am exceedinglysorry. You will keep me posted? If there is anything that I can do, of course—I feel—I feel—so guilty.”
Ellen raised her face. Her mouth was trembling at the corners. “I sent the letter,” she said, “I’m waiting.” She winked rapidly and her odd features worked convulsively for a moment. “If—if they telegraph——”
“Miss Bright.” It was the voice of a messenger girl who had that instant emerged from an adjacent apartment. “Will you step into the office at once, if you please? There is a message——”
Ellen was gone like a flash. Lila walked across to the staircase and very deliberately seated herself with her head resting against the banisters. It was there that Bea found her a few minutes later when the stream of students was beginning to set toward the chapel doors.
Bea was startled. “Lila, what is it? You look like a ghost. Shall I get some water?”
Lila opened her eyes. “I think that her little sister is dead,” she said.
“Oh!” Bea clasped her hands in pity. “How can we help?”
“I think that I killed her,” said Lila.
“What!” It was almost a shout. Then noticing that several girls turned to stare curiously in passing, Bea put out her hand. “Come, Lila, get up. It’s time to go to chapel. You don’t realize what you’re saying.”
She rose obediently in mechanical response to the gesture.
“It was my fault because I was the older and I knew the danger. She was only a freshman. She wanted me to persuade her not to drop that letter from the window. I could have kept her from feeling lonely. I made her reckless. It wasn’t her fault. But now her little sister is dead.”
“How do you know she is?” asked Bea.
“A message came.”
“Hush!” They slipped into a pew near the rear of the chapel. During the reading of Scripture, Lila sat gazing blankly straight before her over the rows of heads, dark and fair. As if in a dream she rose with the others for the singing of the hymn. Still as though moving in a mist, she sank again into her seat and bowed her forehead upon the pewin front. While the rustling murmur was subsiding into a hush before the prayer, she stirred and lifting her face turned for one fleeting moment toward the wide doors at the back. Ah! She raised her head higher to watch, motionless, breathless. The doors were noiselessly swinging shut behind a girl with a queer small face atop of an ill-clad little figure. But the face instead of being crumpled in grief was alight with joy; and the little figure advanced with a lilt and a swing, as if just freed from a burden.
The message had been a message of good tidings.
Lila watched the child slip exultantly into a convenient corner. Then with a sudden, swift movement the older girl dropped full upon her knees and covered her eyes with her hands.