Let it be frankly acknowledged: the ordinary adult is usually bored by the undergraduate periodical—even though he may, once upon a time, have edited it himself. The shades of the prison-house make a poor light for the Gothic print of adolescence. But the historian, if we may trust allegory, bears a torch. For him no chronicle, whether compiled by twelfth-century monk or twentieth-century collegian, can be too remote, too dull, to reflect the gleam. And some chronicles, like the Wellesley one, are more rewarding than others.
No one can turn over the pages of these fledgling journals, Courant, Prelude, Magazine, News, without being impressed by the unconscious clarity with which they reflect not merely the events in the college community—although they are unusually faithful and accurate recorders of events—but the college temper of mind, the range of ideas, the reaction to interests beyond the campus, the general trend of the intellectual and spiritual life.
The interest in social questions is to the fore astonishingly early. In Wellesley's first newspaper, the Courant, published in the college year 1888-1889, we find articles on the Working Girls of Boston, on the Single Tax, and notes of a prize essay on Child Labor. And throughout the decade of the '90's, the dominant note in the Prelude, 1889-1892, and its successor, the Wellesley Magazine, 1892-1911, is the social note. Reports of college events give prominent place to lectures on Woman Suffrage, Social Settlements, Christian Socialism. In 1893, William Clarke of the London Chronicle, a member of the Fabian Society, visiting America as a delegate to the Labor Congress in Chicago, gave lectures at Wellesley on "The Development of Socialism in England", "The Government of London", "The London Working Classes." Matthew Arnold's visit came too early to be recorded in the college paper, but he was perhaps the first of a notable list of distinguished Englishmen who have helped to quicken the interest of Wellesley students along social lines. Graham Wallas, Lowes-Dickinson, H. G. Wells, are a few of the names found in the pages of the Magazine and the News. The young editors evidently welcomed papers on social themes, such as "The Transition in the Industrial Status of Women, by Professor Coman"; and the great strikes of the decade, The Homestead Strike, the Pennsylvania Coal Strike, the New Bedford Strike, are written up as a matter of course. It is interesting to note that the paper on the Homestead Strike, with a plea for the unions, was written by an undergraduate, Mary K. Conyngton, who has since won for herself a reputation for research work in the Labor Bureau at Washington.
Political articles are only less prominent than social and industrial material. As early as 1893 we have an article on "The Triple Alliance" and in the Magazine of 1898 and 1899 there are papers on "The Colonial Expansion of the Great European Powers", "The Italian Riots of May, 1898", "The Philippine Question", "The Dreyfus Incident." This preoccupation of young college women of the nineteenth century with modern industrial and political history is significant when we consider the part that woman has elected to play in politics and reform since the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the first years of that new century, the Magazine and the weekly News begin to reflect the general revival of religious interest among young people. The Student Volunteer Movement, the increased activities in the Christian Associations for both men and women, find their response in Wellesley students. Letters from missionaries are given prominence; the conferences at Silver Bay are written up enthusiastically and at great length. Social questions never lapse, at Wellesley, but during the decade 1900 to 1910, the dominant journalistic note is increasingly religious. Later, with the activity of the Social Study Circle, an informal club for the study of social questions, and its offspring the small but earnest club for the study of Socialism, the social interests regained their vitality for the student mind.
Besides the extra mural problems, the periodicals record, of course, the events and the interests of the little college world. Through the "Free Press" columns of these papers, the didactic, critical, and combative impulses, always so strong in the undergraduate temperament, find a safe vent. Mentor and agitator alike are welcomed in the "Free Press", and many college reforms have been inaugurated, and many college grievances—real and imagined—have been aired in these outspoken columns. And not the least readable portions of the weeklies have been the "Waban Ripples" in the Prelude, and the "Parliament of Fools" in the News. For Wellesley has a merry wit and is especially good at laughing at herself,—yes, even at that "Academic" of which she is so loyally proud. Witness these naughty parodies of examination questions, which appeared in a "Parliament of Fools" just before the mid-year examinations of 1915.
Philosophy:"Translate the following into Kant, Spencer, Perry, Leibnitz, Hume, Calkins (not more than one page each allowed).
"'Little drops of water, little grains of sand,Make the mighty ocean, and a pleasant land.'
"The remainder of the time may be employed in translating into Kantian terminology, the title of the book: 'Myself and I.'"
English Literature:"Give dates and significance of the following; and state whether they are persons or books: Stratford-on-Avon, Magna Charta, Louvain, Onamataposa, Synod of Whitby, Bunker Hill, Transcendentalism, Mesopotamia, Albania, Hastings.
"Write an imaginary conversation between John Bunyan and Myrtle Reed on the Social significance of Beowulf.
"Do you consider that Browning and Carlyle were influenced by the Cubist School? Cite passages not discussed in class to support your view.
"Trace the effects of the Norman strain in England in the works of Tolstoi, Cervantes, and Tagore."
English Composition:"Write a novelette containing:(a) Plot; (b) two crises; (c) three climaxes; (d) one character.
"Write a biography of your own life, bringing out distinctly reasons pro and con. Outline form."
Biblical History:"Trace the life of Abraham from Genesis through Malachi.
"Quote the authentic passages of the New Testament. Why or why not?
"Where do the following words recur? Verily, greeting, begat, therefore, Pharisee, holy, notacceptedbythescholars."
Excellent fooling, this; and it should go far to convince a skeptical public that college girls take their educational advantages with sanity.
As literary magazines, these Wellesley periodicals are only sporadically successful. Now and again a true poet flashes through their pages; less often a true story-teller, although the mechanical excellence of most of the stories is unquestionable,—they go through the motions quite as if they were the real thing. But the appeals of the editors for poetry and literary prose; their occasional sardonic comments upon the apathy of the college reading public,—especially during the waning later years of the Magazine, before it was absorbed into the monthly issue of the News,—would seem to indicate that the pure, literary imagination is as rare at Wellesley as it is in the world at large. Yet there are shining pages in these chronicles, pages whose golden promise has been fulfilled.
In 1911, the Alumnae Association discussed the advisability of publishing an alumnae magazine, but it was decided that the time was not yet ripe for the new enterprise, and instead an agreement was entered into with the News, by which a certain number of pages each month were to be at the disposal of the alumnae editor, for articles and essays on college matters which should be of interest to the alumnae. The new department has been marked from the beginning by dignity and interest, and the papers contributed have been unusually valuable, especially from the point of view of college history.
In 1889 Wellesley's Senior Annual, the Legenda, came into being. In general it has followed the conventional lines of all college annuals, but occasionally it has departed from the beaten path, as in 1892, when it was transformed into a Wellesley Songbook; in 1894, when it printed a memorial sketch of Miss Shafer, and a biographical sketch of Mrs. Durant; in 1896, when it became a storybook of college life.
In October, 1912, The Wellesley College Press Board was organized by Mrs. Helene Buhlert Magee, of the class of 1903. The board is the outgrowth of an attempt by the college authorities, in 1911, to regulate the work of its budding journalists. Up to this time the newspapers had been supplied, more or less intermittently and often unsatisfactorily, with items of college news by students engaged by the newspapers and responsible only to them. The college now appoints an official reporter from its own faculty, who sends all Wellesley news to the newspapers and is consulted by the regular reporters when they desire special information. The Press Board, organized by this official reporter, consists of seven students reporting for Boston papers and two for those in New York. At the time of the Wellesley fire, this board proved itself particularly efficient in disseminating accurate information.
But it is not the workaday Wellesley, tranquilly pursuing her serious and semi-serious occupations, that the outsiders know best. To them, she is wont to turn her holiday face. And no college plays with more zest than Wellesley. Perhaps because no college ever had such a perfect playground. Every hill and grove and hollow of the beautiful campus holds its memories of playdays and midsummer nights.
Those were the nights when Rosalind and Orlando wandered out of Arden into a New England moonlight; when flitting Ariel forsook Prospero's isle to make his nest in Wellesley's bowering rhododendrons—in blossom time he is always hovering there, a winged bloom, for eyes that are not holden. Those were the nights when Puck came dancing up from Tupelo with Titania's fairy rout a-twinkle at his heels; when the great Hindu Raj floated from India in his canopied barge across the moonlit waters of Lake Waban; when Tristram and Iseult, on their way to the court of King Mark, all love distraught, cast anchor in the little cove below Stone Hall and played their passion out; when Nicolette kilted her skirts against the dew and argued of love with Aucassin. Those were the nights when the Countess Cathleen—loveliest of Yeats's Irish ladies—found Paradise and the Heavenly Host awaiting her on a Wellesley hilltop when she had sold her soul to feed her starving peasants.
But the glamour of the sun is as potent as the glamour of the moon at Wellesley. High noon is magical on Tree Day, for then the mythic folk of ancient Greece, the hamadryads and Dian's nymphs, Venus and Orpheus and Narcissus, and all the rest, come out and dream a dance of old days on the great green billows of the lawn. To see veiled Cupid, like a living flame, come streaming down among the hillside trees, down, swift as fire, to the waiting Psyche, is never to forget. No wood near Athens was ever so vision-haunted as Wellesley with the dancing spirits of past Tree Days.
On that day in early June the whole college turns itself into a pageant of spring. From the long hillside above which College Hall once towered, the faculty and the alumnae watch their younger sisters march in slow processional triumph around and about the wide green campus. Like a moving flower garden the procession winds upon itself; hundreds and hundreds of seniors and juniors and sophomores and freshmen,—more than fourteen hundred of them in 1914. Then it breaks ranks and plants itself in parterres at the foot of the hill, masses of blue, and rose, and lavender, and golden blossoming girls. Contrary Mistress Mary's garden was nothing to it. And after the procession come the dances. Sometimes a Breton Pardon wanders across the sea. The gods from Olympus are very much at home in these groves of academe. Once King Arthur's knight came riding up the wide avenue at the edge of the green. The spirits of sun and moon, the nymphs of the wind and the rain, have woven their mystical spells on that great greensward. And in the fairy ring around Longfellow fountain, gnomes and fays and freshmen play hide-and-seek with the water nixies.
The first Tree Day was Mr. Durant's idea; no one was more awake than he, in the old days, to Wellesley's poetic possibilities. And the first trees were gifts from Mr. Hunnewell; two beautiful exotics, Japanese golden evergreens—one for 1879 and one for 1880. The two trees were planted on May 16, 1877, the sophomore tree by the library, the freshman tree by the dining room. An early chronicler writes, "Then it was that the venerated spade made its first appearance. We had confidently expected a trowel, had written indeed 'Apostrophe to the Trowel' on our programs, and our apostrophist (do not see the dictionary), a girl of about the same height as the spade, but by no means, as she modestly suggested, of the same mental capacity, was so stricken with astonishment when she had mounted the rostrum and this burly instrument was propped up before her, that she nearly forgot her speech.... And then it was there was introduced the more questionable practice of planting class trees too delicate to bear the college course. Although a foolish little bird built her nest and laid her eggs in the golden-leaved evergreen of '79, and although a much handsomer nest with a very much larger egg appeared immediately in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two, being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks."
The true story of the Wellesley spade and how it came to be handed down from class to class, is recorded in Florence Morse Kingsley's diary, where we learn how the "burly instrument" of 1877 was succeeded by a less unwieldy and more ladylike utensil. Under the date, April 3, 1878, we find:
Our class (the class of '81) had a meeting last night. We held it in one of the laboratories on the fifth floor, quite in secret, for we didn't want the '80 girls to find it out. The class of '80 is thought to be extraordinarily brilliant, and they certainly do look down on us freshmen in haughty disdain as being correspondingly stupid. I don't say very much against them, since I—— is an '80 girl: besides, if I work hard I can graduate with '80, but at present my lot is cast with '81. We have decided to have a tree planting, and it is to be entirely original and the first of a series. Mr. Durant has given a Japanese Golden Evergreen to '79 and one to '80. They are precisely alike and they had been planted for quite a while before he thought of turning them into class trees. We heard a dark rumor yesterday to the effect that Mr. Durant is intending to plant another evergreen under the library window and present it to us. But we voted to forestall his generosity. We mean to have an elm, and we want to plant it out in front of the college, in the center or just on the other side of the driveway. The burning question remained as to who should acquaint Mr. Durant with our valuable ideas. Nobody seemed ravenously eager for the job, and finally I was nominated. "You know him better than we do," they all said, so I finally consented. I haven't a ghost of an idea what to say; for when one comes to think of it, it is rather ungrateful of '81 not to want the evergreen under the library window.
April 10. Alice and I went to Mr. Durant to-day about the tree planting; but Alice was stricken with temporary dumbness and never opened her lips, though she had solemnly promised to do at least half the talking; so I had to wade right into the subject alone. I began in medias res, for I couldn't think of a really graceful and diplomatic introduction on the spur of the moment. Mr. Durant was in the office with a pile of papers before him as usual; he appeared to be very preoccupied and he was looking rather severe. The interview proceeded about as follows:
He glanced up at us sharply and said, "Well, young ladies," which meant, "Kindly get down to business; my time is valuable." I got down to it about as gracefully as a cat coming down a tree, like this: "We have decided to have a regular tree-planting, Mr. Durant." Of course I should have said, "The class of '81 would like to have a tree-planting, if you please."
Mr. Durant appeared somewhat startled: "Eh, what's that?" he said, then he settled back in his chair and looked hard at us. His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled—just a little, as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary fuss and twaddle.
"Alice and I are delegates from the Class of '81," I explained, a trifle more lucidly. "The class has voted to plant an elm for our class tree, and we would like to plant it in front of the college in a prominent spot." We had previously decided gracefully to ignore the evergreen rumor.
Mr. Durant looked thoughtful. "Hum," he said, "I'd planned to give you girls of '81 a choice evergreen, and as for a place for it: what do you say to the plot on the north side, just under the library window?"
I looked beseechingly at Alice. She was apparently very much occupied in a meek survey of the toes of her boots, which she had stubbed into premature old age scrambling up and down from the boat landings.
Meanwhile Mr. Durant was waiting for our look of pleased surprise and joyful acquiescence. Then, without a vestige of diplomacy, I blurted right out, "Yes, Mr. Durant; we heard so; but we don't think, that is, we don't want an evergreen under the library window; we would like a tree that will live a long, long time and grow big like an elm, and we want it where everybody will see it."
Mr. Durant looked exceedingly surprised, and for the space of five seconds I was breathless. Then he smiled in the really fascinating way that he has. "Well," he said, and looked at me again, "what else have you decided to do?"
Then I told him all about the program we had planned, which is to include an address to the spade (which we hope will be preserved forever and ever), a class song, a procession, and a few other inchoate ideas. Mr. Durant entered right into the spirit of it, he said he liked the idea of a spade to be handed down from class to class. He asked us if we had the spade yet, and I told him "no," but Alice and I were going to buy it for the class in the village that afternoon.
"Well, mind you get a good one," he advised. We said we would, very joyfully. Then he told us we might select any young elm we wanted, and tie our class colors on it, and he would order it to be transplanted for us. After that he put on his hat and all three of us went out and fixed the spot right in front of the college by the driveway. Mr. Durant himself stuck a little stick in the exact place where the elm of '81 will wave its branches for at least a hundred years, I hope.
The hundred years are still to run, and old College Hall has vanished, but the '81 elm stands in its "prominent" place, a tree of ancient memories and visions ever young.
It was not until 1889 that the pageant element began to take a definite and conspicuous place in the Tree Day exercises. The class of '89 in its senior year gave a masque in which tall dryads, robed in green, played their dainty roles; and that same year the freshmen, the class of 1892, gave the first Tree Day dance: a very mild dance of pink and white English maidens around a maypole—but the germ of all the Tree Day dances yet unborn. In its senior year, 1892 celebrated the discovery of America by a sort of kermess of Colonial and Indian dances with tableaux, and ever since, from year to year, the wonder has grown; Zeus, and Venus, and King Arthur have all held court and revel on the Wellesley Campus. Every year the long procession across the green grows longer, more beautiful, more elaborate; the dancing is more exquisitely planned, more complex, more carefully rehearsed. In the spring, Wellesley girls are twirling a-tiptoe in every moment not spent in class; and in class their thoughts sometimes dance. Indeed, the students of late years have begun to ask themselves if it may not be possible to obtain quite as beautiful a result with less expense of effort and time and money; for Tree Day, the crowning delight of the year, would defeat its own end, which is pure recreation, if its beauty became a tyrant.
This multiplication of joys—and their attendant worries—is something that Wellesley has to take measures to guard against, and the faculty has worked out a scheme of biennial rotatory festivities which since 1911-1912 has eased the pressure of revelry in May and June, as well as throughout the winter months.
Wellesley's list of societies and social clubs is not short, but the conditions of membership are carefully guarded. As early as the second year of the college, five societies came into existence: of these, the Beethoven Society and the Microscopical—which started with a membership of six and an exhibition under three microscopes at its first meeting—seem to have been open to any who cared to join; the other three—the Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma societies founded in November, 1876, and the Shakespeare in January, 1877—were mutually exclusive. The two Greek letter societies were literary in aim, and their early programs consisted in literary papers and oral debates. The Shakespeare Society, for many years a branch of the London Shakespeare Society, devoted itself to the study and dramatic presentation of Shakespeare. Its first open-air play was "As You Like It", given in 1889; and until 1912, when it conformed to the new plan of biennial rotation, this society gave a Shakespearean play every year at Commencement.
In 1881, Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma were discontinued by the faculty, because of pressure of academic work, but in 1889 they were reorganized, and gradually their programs were extended to include dramatic work, poetic plays, and masques. The Phi Sigma Society gives its masque—sometimes an original one—on alternate years just before the Christmas vacation; and Zeta Alpha alternates with the Classical Society at Commencement. The Zeta Alpha Masque of 1913, a charming dramatization in verse of an old Hindu legend by Elizabeth McClellan of the class of 1913, was one of the notable events of Commencement time, a pageant of poetic beauty and oriental dignity; and in 1915 Florence Wilkinson Evans's adaptation of the lovely old poem "Aucassin and Nicolette", was given for the second time.
In 1889, the Art Society—known since 1894 as Tau Zeta Epsilon—was founded; and, alternating with the Shakespeare play, it gives in the spring a "Studio Reception", at which pictures from the old masters, with living models, are presented. The effects of lighting and color are so carefully studied, and the compositions of the originals are so closely followed that the illusion is sometimes startling; it is as if real Titians, Rembrandts, and Carpaccios hung on the wails of the Wellesley Barn. In 1889, also, the Glee and Banjo clubs were formed.
In 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into existence. The serious intellectual quality of its work does honor to the college, and its open debates, at which it has sometimes represented the House of Commons, sometimes one or the other of the American Chambers of Congress, are marked events in the college calendar.
In 1892, Alpha Kappa Chi, the Classical Society, was organized, and of late years its Greek play, presented during Commencement week, has surpassed both the senior play and the Shakespeare play in dramatic rendering and careful study of the lines. Gilbert Murray's translation of the "Medea", presented in 1914, was a performance of which Wellesley was justly proud. Usually the Wellesley plays are better as pageants than as dramatic productions, but the Classical Society is setting a standard for the careful literary interpretation and rendering of dramatic texts, which should prove stimulating to all the societies and class organizations.
The senior play is one of the chief events of Commencement week, but the students have not always been fully awake to their dramatic opportunity. If college theatricals have any excuse for being, it is not found in attempts to compete with the commercial stage and imitate the professional actor, but rather in dramatic revivals such as the Harvard Delta Upsilon has so spiritedly presented, or in the interpretation of the poetic drama, whether early or late, which modern theaters with their mixed audiences cannot afford to present. The college audience is always a selected audience, and has a right to expect from the college players dramatic caviare. That Wellesley is moving in the right direction may be seen by reading a list of her senior plays, among which are the "Countess Cathleen", by Yeats, Alfred Noyes's "Sherwood", and in 1915 "The Piper" by Josephine Peabody Marks.
But Wellesley's recreation is not all rehearsed and formal. May Day, when the seniors roll their hoops in the morning, and all the college comes out to dance on the green and eat ice-cream cones in the afternoon, is full of spontaneous jollity. Before the burning of College Hall, the custom had arisen of cleaning house on May Day, and six o'clock in the morning saw the seniors out with pails and mops, scrubbing and decorating the many statues which kept watch in the beloved old corridors.
One of these statutes had become in some sort the genius of College Hall. Of heroic size, a noble representation of womanly force and tranquillity, Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau had watched the stream of American girlhood flow through "the Center" and surge around the palms for twenty-eight years. The statue was originally made at the request of Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman, the well-known abolitionist and dear friend of Miss Martineau; but after Mrs. Chapman's death, it was Miss Whitney's to dispose of, and, representing as it did her ideal modern woman, she gave it in 1886 to Wellesley, where modern womanhood was in the making. In later years, irreverent youth took playful liberties with "Harriet", using her much as a beloved spinster aunt is used by fond but familiar young nieces. No freshman was considered properly matriculated until she had been dragged between the rungs of Miss Martineau's great marble chair; May Day always saw "Aunt Harriet" rise like Diana fresh from her bath, to be decked with more or less becoming furbelows; and as the presiding genius in the lighter columns of College News, her humor—an acquired characteristic—was merrily appreciated. Of all the lost treasures of College Hall she is perhaps the most widely mourned.
The pretty little Society houses, dotted about the campus, also give the students opportunity to entertain their guests, both formally and informally, and during the months following the fire, when Wellesley was cramped for space, they exercised a generous hospitality which put all the college in their debt.
As the membership in the Shakespeare and Greek letter societies is limited to between forty and fifty members in each society, the great majority of the students are without these social privileges, but the Barn Swallows, founded in 1897, to which every member of the college may belong if she wishes, gives periodic entertainments in the "Barn" which go far to promote general good feeling and social fellowship. The first president of the Barn Swallows, Mary E. Haskell, '97, says that it arose as an Everybody's Club, to give buried talents a chance. "Suddenly we adjured the Trustees by Joy and Democracy to bless our charter, to be gay once a week, and when they gave the Olympic nod we begged for the Barn to be gay in—and they gave that too.
"It was a grim joy parlor; rough old floor, bristly with splinters, few windows, no plank walk, no stage, no partitions, no lighting. We hung tin reflectored lanterns on a few of the posts,—thicker near the stage end,—and opened the season with an impromptu opera of the Brontes'." To Professor Charlotte F. Roberts, Wellesley '80, the Barn Swallows owe their happy name.
Besides these more formal organizations there are a number of department clubs, the Deutsche Verein, the Alliance Francaise, the Philosophy Club, the Economics Club, and informal groups such as the old Rhymesters' Club, which flourished in the late nineties, the Scribblers' which seems to have taken its place and enlarged its scope, the Social Study Circle, the little Socialist Club, and others through which the students express their intellectual and social interests.
Of Wellesley's many festivities and playtimes it would take too long to tell: of her Forensic Burnings, held when the last junior forensic for the year is due; of her processional serenades, with Chinese lanterns; of her singing on the chapel steps in the evenings of May and June. These well-beloved customs have been establishing themselves year by year more firmly in undergraduate hearts, but it is not always possible to trace them to their "first time." Most of them date back to the later years of the nineteenth century, or the first of the twentieth. Wellesley's musical cheer seems to have waked the campus echoes first in the spring of 1890, as a result of a prize offered in November, 1889, although as far back as 1880 there is mention of a cheer. The musical cheer has so much beauty and dignity, both near at hand and at a distance, that many of the early alumnae and the faculty wish it might some time quite supersede the ugly barking sounds, imitated from the men's colleges, with which the girls are fain to evince their approval and celebrate their triumphs. They invariably end their barking with the musical cheer, however, keeping the best for the last, and relieving the tortured graduate ear.
Formal athletics at Wellesley developed from the gymnasium practice, the rowing on the lake, and the Tree Day dancing. In the early years, the class crews used to row on the lake and sing at sunset, in their heavy, broad-bottomed old tubs; and from these casual summer evenings "Float" has been evolved—Wellesley's water pageant—when Lake Waban is dotted with gay craft, and the crews in their slim, modern, eight-oared shells, display their skill. This is the festival which the public knows best, for unlike Tree Day, to which outsiders have been admitted on only three occasions, "Float" has always been open to friendly guests. Year by year the festival grows more elaborate. Chinese junks, Indian canoes, Venetian gondolas, flower boats from fairyland, glide over the bright sunset waters, and the crews in their old traditional star pattern anchor together and sing their merry songs. There are new songs every spring, for each crew has its own song, but there are two of the old songs which are heard at every Wellesley Float, "Alma Mater", and the song of the lake, that Louise Manning Hodgkins wrote for the class of '87.
Lake of gray at dawning day,In soft shadows lying,—Waters kissed by morning mist,Early breezes sighing,—Fairy vision as thou art,Soon thy fleeting charms depart.Every grace that wins the heart,Like our youth is flying.
Lake of blue, a merry crew,Cheer of thee will borrow.Happy hours to-day are ours,Weighted by no sorrow.Other years may bring us tears,Other days be full of fears,Only hope the craft now steers.Cares are for the morrow.
Lake of white at holy night,In the moonlight gleaming,—Softly o'er the wooded shore,Silver radiance streaming,—On thy wavelets bear awayEvery care we've known to-day,Bring on thy returning wayPeaceful, happy dreaming.
After the singing, the Hunnewell cup is presented for the crew competition; and with the darkness, the fireworks begin to flash up from the opposite shore of the lake.
Besides the rowing clubs, in the first decade, there were tennis clubs, and occasional outdoor "meets" for cross-country runs, but apparently there was no regular organization combining in one association all the separate clubs until 1896-1897, when we hear of the formation of a "New Athletic Association." There is also record of a Field Day on May 29, 1899. In 1902, we find the "new athletics"—evidently a still newer variety than those of 1897—"recognized by the trustees"; and the first Field Day under this newest regime occurred on November 3, 1902. All the later Field Days have been held in the late autumn, at the end of the sports season, which now includes a preliminary season in the spring and a final season in the autumn. An accepted candidate for an organized sport must hold herself ready to practice during both seasons, unless disqualified by the physical examiner, and must confine herself to the one sport which she has chosen. During both seasons the members may be required to practice three times a week.
The Athletic Association, under its present constitution, dates from March, 1908. All members of the college are eligible for membership, all members of the organized sports are ipso facto members of the association, and the Director of Physical Training is a member ex officio. An annual contribution of one dollar is solicited from each member of the association, and special funds are raised by voluntary contribution. In the year 1914-1915, the association included about twelve hundred members, not all of them dues-paying, however.
The president of the Athletic Association is always a senior; the vice president, who is also chairman of the Field Day Committee, and the treasurer are juniors; the secretary and custodian are sophomores. The members of the Organized Sports elect their respective heads, and each sport is governed by its own rules and regulations and by such intersport legislation as is enacted by the Executive Board, not in contravention to regulations by the Department of Physical Training and Hygiene. In this way the association and the department work together for college health.
The organized sports at Wellesley are: rowing, golf, tennis, basket ball, field hockey, running, archery, and baseball. The unorganized sports include walking, riding, swimming, fencing, skating, and snowshoeing. Each sport has its instructor, or instructors, from the Department of Physical Training. The members are grouped in class squads governed by captains, and each class squad furnishes a class team whose members are awarded numerals, before a competitive class event, on the basis of records of health, discipline, and skill. Honors, blue W's worn on the sweaters, are awarded on a similar basis. Interclass competitions for trophies are held on Field Day, and the association hopes, with the development of outdoor baseball, to establish interhouse competitions also. The gala days are, besides Field Day in the autumn, the Indoor Meet in the spring at the end of the indoor practice, "Float" in June, and in winter, when the weather permits, an Ice Carnival on the lake.
Through the Athletic Association, new tennis courts have been laid out, the golf course has been remodeled, and the boathouse repaired. In 1915, it was making plans for a sheltered amphitheater, bleachers, and a baseball diamond; and despite the fact that dues are not obligatory, more and more students are coming to appreciate the work of the Association and to assume responsibility toward it.
Wellesley does not believe in intercollegiate sports for women. In this opinion, the women's colleges seem to be agreed; it is one of the points at which they are content to diverge from the policy of the men's colleges. Wellesley's sports are organized to give recreation and healthful exercise to as many students as are fit and willing to take part in them. Some students even disapprove of interclass competitions, and it is thought that the interhouse teams for baseball will serve as an antidote to rivalry between the classes.
The only intercollegiate event in which Wellesley takes part is the intercollegiate debate. In this contest, Wellesley has been twice beaten by Vassar, but in March, 1914, she won in the debate against Mt. Holyoke, and in March, 1915, in the triangular debate, she defeated both Vassar and Mt. Holyoke.
In September, 1904, the college was granted a charter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the Wellesley Chapter,—installed January 17, 1905, is known as the Eta of Massachusetts.
On the morning of March 17, 1914, College Hall, the oldest and largest building on the Wellesley campus, was destroyed by fire. No one knows how the fire originated; no one knows who first discovered it. Several people, in the upper part of the house, seem to have been awakened at about the same time by the smoke, and all acted with clear-headed promptness. The night was thick with fog, and the little wind "that heralds the dawn" was not strong enough to disperse the heavy vapors, else havoc indeed might have been wrought throughout the campus and the sleeping village.
At about half past four o'clock, two students at the west end of College Hall, on the fourth floor, were awakened and saw a fiery glow reflected in their transom. Getting up to investigate, they found the fire burning in the zoological laboratory across the corridor, and one of them immediately set out to warn Miss Tufts, the registrar, and Miss Davis, the Director of the Halls of Residence, both of whom lived in the building; the other girl hurried off to find the indoor watchman. At the same time, a third girl rang the great Japanese bell in the third floor center. In less than ten minutes after this, every student was out of the building.
The story of that brief ten minutes is packed with self-control and selflessness; trained muscles and minds and souls responded to the emergency with an automatic efficiency well-nigh unbelievable. Miss Tufts sent the alarm to the president, and then went to the rooms of the faculty on the third floor and to the officers of the Domestic Department on the second floor. Miss Davis set a girl to ringing the fast-fire alarm. And down the four long wooden staircases the girls in kimonos and greatcoats came trooping, each one on the staircase she had been drilled to use, after she had left her room with its light burning and its corridor door shut. In the first floor center the fire lieutenants called the roll of the fire squads, and reported to Miss Davis, who, to make assurance doubly sure, had the roll called a second time. No one said the word "fire"—this would have been against the rules of the drill. For a brief space there was no sound but "the ominous one of falling heavy brands." When Miss Davis gave the order to go out, the students walked quietly across the center, with embers and sparks falling about them, and went out on the north side through the two long windows at the sides of the front door.
And all this in ten minutes!
Meanwhile, Professor Calkins, who does not live at the college but had happened to spend the night in the Psychology office on the fifth floor, had been one of the earliest to awake, had wakened other members of the faculty and helped Professor Case and her wheel-chair to the first floor, and also had sent a man with an ax to break in Professor Irvine's door, which was locked. As it happened, Professor Irvine was spending the night in Cambridge, and her room was not occupied. Most of the members of the faculty seem to have come out of the building as soon as the students did, but two or three, in the east end away from the fire, lingered to save a very few of their smaller possessions.
The students, once out, were not allowed to re-enter the building, and they did not attempt to disobey, but formed a long fire line which was soon lengthened by girls from other dormitories and extended from the front of College Hall to the library. Very few things above the first floor were saved, but many books, pictures, and papers went down this long line of students to find temporary shelter in the basement of the library. Associate Professor Shackford, who wrote the account of the fire in the College News, from which these details are taken, tells us how Miss Pendleton, patrolling this busy fire line and questioning the half-clad workers, was met with the immediate response, even from those who were still barefooted, "I'm perfectly comfortable, Miss Pendleton", "I'm perfectly all right, Miss Pendleton." Miss Shackford adds:
"At about five o'clock, a person coming from the hill saw College Hall burning between the dining-room and Center, apparently from the third floor up to the roof, in high, clear flames with very little smoke. Suddenly the whole top seemed to catch fire at once, and the blaze rushed downward and upward, leaping in the dull gray atmosphere of a foggy morning. With a terrific crash the roof fell in, and soon every window in the front of College Hall was filled with roaring flames, surging toward the east, framed in the dark red brick wall which served to accentuate the lurid glow that had seized and held a building almost one eighth of a mile long. The roar of devastating fury, the crackle of brands, the smell of burning wood and melting iron, filled the air, but almost no sound came from the human beings who saw the irrepressible blaze consume everything but the brick walls.
"The old library and the chapel were soon filled with great billows of flame, which, finding more space for action, made a spectacle of majestic but awful splendor. Eddies of fire crept along the black-walnut bookcases, and all that dark framework of our beloved old library. By great strides the blaze advanced, until innumerable curling, writhing flames were rioting all through a spot always hushed 'in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.' The fire raged across the walls, in and around the sides and the beautiful curving tops of the windows that for so many springs and summers had framed spaces of green grass on which fitful shadows had fallen, to be dreamed over by generations of students. In the chapel, tremendous waves swelled and glowed, reaching almost from floor to ceiling, as they erased the texts from the walls, demolished the stained-glass windows, defaced, but did not completely destroy the college motto graven over them, and, in convulsive gusts swept from end to end of the chapel, pouring in and out of the windows in brilliant light and color. Seen from the campus below, the burning east end of the building loomed up magnificent even in the havoc and desolation it was suffering."
At half past eight o'clock, four hours after the first alarm was sounded, there stood on the hill above the lake, bare, roofless walls and sky-filled arches as august as any medieval castle of Europe. Like Thomas the Rhymer, they had spent the night in fairyland, and waked a thousand years old. Romance already whispered through their dismantled, endless aisles. King Arthur's castle of Camelot was not more remote from to-day than College Hall from the twentieth-century March morning. Weeks, months, a little while it stood there, vanishing—like old enchanted Merlin—into the impenetrable prison of the air. There will be other houses on that hilltop, but never one so permanent as the dear house invisible; the double Latin cross, the ten granite columns, the Center ever green with ageless palms, the "steadfast crosses, ever pointing the heavenward way",—to eyes that see, these have never disappeared.
At half past eight o'clock, in the crowded college chapel, President Pendleton was saying to her dazed and stricken flock, "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God,—who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" And when she had given thanks, in prayer, for so many lives all blessedly safe, there came the announcement, so quiet, so startling, that the spring term would begin on April 7, the date already set in the college calendar. This was the voice of one who actually believed that faith would remove mountains. And it did. By the faith of President Pendleton, Wellesley College is alive to-day. She did literally and actually cast the mountain into the sea on that seventeenth of March, 1914. St. Patrick himself never achieved a greater miracle.
She knew that two hundred and sixteen people were houseless; that the departments of Zoology, Geology, Physics, and Psychology, had lost their laboratories, their equipment, their lecture rooms; that twenty-eight recitation rooms, all the administrative offices, the offices of twenty departments, the assembly hall, the study hall, had all been swept away. Yet, in a little less than three weeks, there had sprung up on the campus a temporary building containing twenty-nine lecture and recitation rooms, thirteen department offices, fifteen administrative offices, three dressing rooms, and a reception room. Plumbing, steam heat, electricity, and telephone service had been installed. A week after college opened for the spring term, classes were meeting in the new building. During that first week, offices and classes had been scattered all over the campus,—in the Society houses, in the basements of dormitories, the Art Building, the Chemistry Building, the Gymnasium, the basement of the Library, the Observatory, the Stone Hall Botany Laboratories, Billings Hall; all had opened their doors wide. The two hundred and sixteen residents of old College Hall had all been housed on the campus; it meant doubling up in single rooms, but the doublets persuaded themselves and the rest of the college that it was a lark.
This spirit of helpfulness and cheer began on the day of the fire, and seems to have acquired added momentum with the passing months. Clothes, books, money, were loaned as a matter of course. By half past nine o'clock in the morning, the secretary of the dean had written out from memory the long schedule of the June examinations, to be posted at the beginning of the spring term. Members of the faculty were conducting a systematic search for salvage among the articles that had been dumped temporarily in the "Barn" and the library; homes had been found for the houseless teachers, most of whom had lost everything they possessed; several members of the faculty had no permanent home but the college, and their worldly goods were stored in the attic from which nothing could be saved. It is said that when President Pendleton, in chapel, told the students to go home as soon as they had collected their possessions, "an unmistakable ripple of girlish laughter ran through the dispossessed congregation." This was the Franciscan spirit in which Wellesley women took their personal losses. For the general losses, all mourned together, but with hope and courage. In the Department of Physics, all the beautiful instruments which Professor Whiting had been so wisely and lovingly procuring, since she first began to equip her student-laboratory in 1878, were swept away; Geology and Psychology suffered only less; but the most harrowing losses were those in the Department of Zoology, where, besides the destruction of laboratories and instruments, and the special library presented to the department by Professor Emeritus Mary A. Willcox, "the fruits of years of special research work which had attracted international attention have been destroyed.... Professor Marion Hubbard had devoted her energies for six years to research in variation and heredity in beetles.... In view of the increasing interest in eugenics, scientists awaited the results with keen anticipation, but all the specimens, notes, and apparatus were swept away." Professor Robertson, the head of the department, who is an authority on certain deep-sea forms of life, had just finished her report on the collections from the dredging expedition of the Prince of Monaco, which had been sent her for identification; and the report and the collections all were lost.
Among the few things saved were some of the ivies and the roses which the classes had planted year by year; these the fire had not injured; and a slip from the great wistaria vine on the south side of College Hall has proved to be alive and vigorous. The alumnae gavel and the historic Tree Day spade were also unharmed. But that no life was lost outweighs all the other losses, and this was due to the fire drill which, in one form or another, has been carried on at Wellesley since the earliest years of the college. Doctor Edward Abbott, writing of Wellesley in Harper's Magazine for August, 1876, says:
"Whoever heard of a fire brigade manned by women? There is one at Wellesley, for it is believed that however incombustible the college building may be, the students should be taught to put out fire,... and be trained to presence of mind and familiarity with the thought of what ought to be done in case of fire." From time to time the drill has been strengthened and changed in detail, but in 1902, when Miss Olive Davis, Director of Houses of Residence, was appointed by Miss Hazard to be responsible for an efficient fire drill, the modern system was instituted. An article in College News explains that "the organization of the present fire-drill system is much like the old one. With the adoption of Student Government, it was put into the hands of the students. Each year a fire chief is elected from the student-body, by the students. This girl is a senior. She is counted an officer of the Student Government Association, and is responsible to Miss Davis. Then at meetings held at the beginning of the fall term, each dormitory elects one fire captain, who in turn appoints lieutenants under her,—one for every twenty or twenty-five girls.
"The directions for a fire drill are:
"Upon hearing the alarm (five rings of the house bell),
"1. Close your windows, doors, and transoms.
"2. Turn on the electric lights.
"3. March in single file, and as quickly as possible, downstairs, and answer to your roll call.
"Each lieutenant is responsible for all the girls on her list. After the ringing of the alarm, she must look into every room in her district and see that the directions have been complied with and the inmates have gone downstairs. If the windows and doors have not been shut, she must shut them. Then she goes downstairs and calls her roll (some lieutenants memorize their lists). When the lieutenants have finished, the captain calls the roll of the lieutenants, asking for the number absent in each district, and the number of windows and doors left open or lights not lighted, if any.
"The captains are required to hold two drills a month. At the regular meetings of the organization at which the fire chief presides and Miss Davis is often present, the captains report the dates of their drills, the time of day they were held, the number of absentees and their reasons, the time required to empty the building, and the order observed by the girls.
"Drills may be called by the captain at any time of the day or night. Frequently there were drills at College Hall when it was crowded with nonresident students, there for classes. In that case no roll was called, but merely the time required and the order reported. The penalty for non-attendance at fire drills is a fine of fifty cents, and a serious error credited to the absentee.
"There are devices such as blocking some of the staircases to train the girls for an emergency. It was being planned, just about the time College Hall burned, to have a fire drill there with artificial smoke, to test the girls. The system is still being constantly changed and improved. On Miss Davis's desk, the night of the fire, was the rough draft of a plan by which property could be better saved in case of fire, without more danger to life."
A few weeks after the burning of College Hall, a small fire broke out at the Zeta Alpha House, but was immediately quenched, and Associate Professor Josephine H. Batchelder, of the class of 1896, writing in College News of the self-control of the students, says:
"Perhaps the best example of 'Wellesley discipline since the fire,' occurred during the brief excitement occasioned by the Zeta Alpha House fire. A few days before this, a special plea had been made for good order and concentrated work in an overcrowded laboratory, where forty-six students, two divisions, were obliged to meet at the same time. On this morning, the professor looked up suddenly at sounds of commotion outside. 'Why, there's a fire-engine going back to the village!' she said. 'Oh, yes' responded a girl near the window. 'We saw it come up some time ago, but you were busy at the blackboard, so we didn't disturb you.' The professor looked over her roomful of students quietly at work. 'Well,' she said, 'I've heard a good deal of boasting about various things the girls were doing. Now I'm going to begin!'"
And this self-control does not fail as the months pass. The temporary administration building, which the students have dubbed the Hencoop, tests the good temper of every member of the college. Like Chaucer's wicker House of Rumors it is riddled with vagrant noises, but as it does not whirl about upon its base, it lacks the sanitary ventilating qualities of its dizzy prototype. On the south it is exposed to the composite, unmuted discords of Music Hall; on the north, the busy motors ply; within, nineteen of the twenty-six academic departments of the college conduct their classes, between walls so thin that every classroom may hear, if it will, the recitations to right of it, recitations to left of it, recitations across the corridor, volley and thunder. Though they all conscientiously try to roar as gently as any sucking dove. The effect upon the unconcentrated mind is something like—The cosine of X plus the ewig weibliche makes the difference between the message of Carlyle and that of Matthew Arnold antedate the Bergsonian theory of the elan vital minus the sine of Y since Barbarians, Philistines and Populace make up the eternal flux wo die citronen bluhn—but fortunately the Wellesley mind does concentrate, and uncomplainingly. The students are working in these murmurous classrooms with a new seriousness and a devotion which disregard all petty inconveniences and obstacles.
And the fire has kindled a flame of friendliness between faculty and students; it has burned away the artificial pedagogic barriers and quickened human relations. The flames were not quenched before the students had begun to plan to help in the crippled courses of study. They put themselves at the disposal of the faculty for all sorts of work; they offered their notes, their own books; they drew maps; they mounted specimens on slides for the Department of Zoology. In that crowded, noisy, one-story building there are not merely the teachers and the taught, but a body of tried friends, moving shoulder to shoulder on pilgrimage to truth.