PART I
CHAPTER ONE
Jean Norris came slowly down the Library steps, passed the Chemistry Building, and took the worn path across the campus to the brush-lined creek. The hot stubble burned through her white canvas shoes and fine, gray dust powdered the mortarboard and black graduating gown she carried over her arm. With one stride she crossed the trickle of water and scrambled up the opposite bank.
"Lord!" She drew a deep breath of the shaded coolness and, taking off the mortarboard, ran the tips of her fingers under the heavy plait of pale brown hair. "Thank God this day is nearly over." She dropped to the carpet of dead leaves under the scrub oak and, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasped about them, looked out through the lattice of green. With definite appraisal her gray eyes went slowly from one building to another, out across the parched campus, past the grateful green of the entrance oaks, to the strip of town beyond and the Bay, glittering in the hot May sun. A tolerant smile flicked the corners of her mouth.
It was over at last. The four long, interminable years had culminated in a series of fitting ceremonies. All day streams of students had flowed through the buildings, swept the campus, overflowed into the town. Well dressed parents from San Francisco and country parents, uncomfortable in their unusual clothes, had rushed helplessly about, harassed by the necessity of remembering many directions, of being in certain spots at certain moments, of not asking foolish questions and so disgracing their children. Flustered and important, the graduating class had appropriated the earth.
Through the throng, instructors and assistant professors had moved with weary, anxious faces as if, in the graduating of each class, they heard another hour strike in the clock of their lives. Committees, distinct with colored badges, exhausted with importance, had misread hours and locations, given directions in college vernacular so explicit that no stranger could understand them, overlapped, performed one another's duties, apologized, pretended it was all going smoothly. Everywhere well-bred, managed confusion had exuded like a fog.
Exactly at twelve, in a silence so intense that even the sun hung waiting in the zenith, the graduating class had wound its last solemn pilgrimage across the campus. First the aged president, bent, as if in scholastic humility, beneath the great weight of his Doctor's scarlet hood. Then the guests of honor, sleek and prosperous men, followed by the professors in order of their rank and departments, and finally five hundred students, two by two, awed by the seriousness of what lay before them.
To Jean it had seemed hours while the aged president piped of Life's ideals, the security of college, the pitfalls of the world. Each May, for twenty years, he had stood so, each year a little more bent, and piped of the world beyond. Parents had furtively wiped their eyes and students made heroic resolves.
Then, with a trembling gesture of his strengthless hands, he had offered the graduating class to Life. One by one they had filed up, received their diplomas and hurried back to their places under scattered puffs of applause from relatives. It had seemed to Jean that it would never end, but forever black gowned figures would be going forward to get slender rolls of white paper.
In the general confusion of congratulations that followed, Jean had caught sight of her mother, slipping unobtrusively away. She had not expected her mother to seek her out, but there was something so small, so self-effacing in the figure hurrying to take up again the endless round of duties which the graduation had momentarily interrupted, that Jean's eyes had filled with tears and she had escaped from the chattering crowds as quickly as possible.
Now it was all over. The deserted campus lay silent in the late afternoon sun, and the empty buildings rested from the ceaseless chatter. So alive was the Future, waiting for the signal to start, that when the clock, hidden in the woodbine of the Library tower, struck four, Jean jumped to her feet, shook her shoulders as if freeing them from the clutch of the years behind, and turned away.
"It may be peaceful—I suppose it is. But so's the grave."
As she came into the cool dimness of the Girls' Rest Hall, Patricia Farnsworth rose from a hammock.
"Well, for the love of Mike, where have you been? I looked everywhere, until I couldn't stand another minute."
"If you looked as violently as you appear to be doing this instant, I don't wonder you didn't find me. Library—off the main line of travel—only safe place to-day."
"Never thought of it. Gee, but I'm all in. I wouldn't graduate twice for a thousand dollars."
Jean threw her cap and gown on a couch and stretched beside them.
"Well, twice wouldn't be so bad, if you did it just for yourself. But when you insist on doing it for the whole class, Pat, of course——"
"Oh, shut up. Somebody's got to do the dirty work. Fond parents loose their moorings and drift worse than sheep."
"'Moored sheep drifting!' Patsy, how on earth did you ever make Hoppy's English?"
Pat giggled down to the depths of her stocky body. "'Moored sheep,' is going some, but honestly they were worse. I told one bewildered old party a dozen times if I told him once, that all exercises were scheduled for out of doors and nothing was taking place in the coal-cellar of North Hall. He had a perfect obsession on the cellar. Wandered into it every time I turned my back."
"Well? How was he to know that everything was being managed—'with an executive precision never before equaled in the handling of so large a class'?"
"Get out. It's all right for you to talk when you wouldn't be on a committee to oblige the President of the United States."
"Iwouldnot. Of all the piffling rubbish! If you all feel as badly as you pretend to do at getting out of the cage, why don't you just go and get your diplomas and sneak away to weep in private? And if you're not sorry to get out, and feel like this—this mess of jubilation, why don't you say so? Conventional sentimentality! It makes my tummy turn over."
"You ought to be all turned over and spanked, Jean. Some day you're going to be found frozen stiff in your own logic."
"Pat Farnsworth, I wouldn't mind beginning instanter. I never was so hot in my life. Me for tea. On a day like this my English grandparent bellows for his tea."
"Bellow on, George III. I'll get it. I've been cooling off for an hour." Pat started for the kitchen with the same vigorous efficiency that ran her many committees, paused, and with an almost shy smile at Jean, crossed to the front door and locked it. "We don't want any one butting in, do we?"
Jean had risen and now she put her arm about Pat's shoulder.
"Oh, Patsy," she whispered, "when you're gone——"
"Don't Jean. Don't. Something will turn up. It must."
Jean's lips trembled. "When you say it like that I feel sure myself for a minute. But——"
"Are Tom and Elsie going to stayallsummer?"
"Yes. This is the supreme chance of mummy's life to make herself uncomfortable, and she won't lose it."
"Don't, Jeany. I hate you when you're bitter like that."
"I can't help whether you do or not. It's true."
Jean's arm dropped from Pat's shoulder and she stood frowning. "I have never been able to make you understand, but nobody who hasn't lived and breathed and petrified in Christian Duty for years could. It's the wickedest, most hellish misconception the brain of man ever conceived to make this rotten scheme of things rottener. It's done more harm in the world than the Seven Deadly Sins put together. It——"
"Don't, Jean."
"You were brought up where religion was a kind of entrée, but with mummy it's the whole meal from soup to fingerbowls. God lives right in the house with us, and interferes in everything we do. Think of it, Patsy. For thirty years, mummy hasn't eaten a meal she didn't cook herself. That translation I'm going to do for Renshaw would give us a couple of weeks somewhere. And are we going? No. Because Tom Morton, who was some distant relative of father's, who's been dead for eighteen years and whom mummy didn't love when he was alive, chooses to appear from nowhere and dump himself and his fool wife and disgusting baby on us, mummy conceives it her duty to stay all summer cooking for them, and waiting on that idiot Elsie because she's going to have another. It makes my soul shiver, it makes me so mad. And I know what will happen. You talk about my logic. It's mummy who has all the logic in our family. Because she's saddled with these she'll say she might just as well have others, and we'll have every slab-chested old maid who comes to summer-school and wants to get the best food in town for nothing. Mummy will roast all July and August and say they were very nice people as long as they don't turn her out of her own house."
"Can't you make her see that——"
"Make her see! What chance have I against God Almighty? You don't understand the basis of the whole business. 'Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.' When He stops loving He stops chastening. So it's up to the believers to get all the chastening there is."
"Don't, Jean. There must be more in it than that." Jean dabbed at her eyes and crossing to the sink filled the kettle for tea.
"Well, maybe there is. But when you live with it you're too near to see it. It's either that, all summer long, waiting for something to turn up out of the blue, or going away to teach. Sometimes I don't know which is worse."
"Now, Jean, we've hashed that over and settled it a million times. It's ridiculous. After all youarerather like mummy, you know. There are millions of things to do when you've got ordinary intelligence, but just because you loathe teaching you've picked it out as the one thing that'll come your way. How about that translation? How do you know it won't lead to something else?"
"Because I want it to so terribly hard, Patsy. I know, Pat, I suppose I do rant, but I guess I've got what Dr. Harper calls 'The Imagination for Pain.' I do want things so hard that I just can't imagine getting them."
"Doesn't say much for your imagination, no matter what Harper calls it. But it isn't that. It's just conceit, not another thing. You're so proud of that analytic brain of yours that you work it on everything. The minute you get a glimpse of some happiness you drag it into that mental laboratory and tear off its flesh, and you never stop until you've busted the poor old skeleton to bits. Why can't you let things go about with their clothes on?"
"I do."
"No, you don't. And when you do get it stripped it isn't any more of a truth than it was with its clothes on."
Pat's color deepened and she looked away in genuine embarrassment, for in the emotional reticence of their friendship they were oddly like two men. At long intervals Pat's love and admiration forced her to try and make Jean see things simply and clearly as she saw them herself.
"And it's such a lonely job, sitting there by yourself prying the barnacles off every old oyster that's been struggling to hold its clothes on ever since the world began."
The mixture of figures was too much for even Jean's very genuine mood.
"Oh, Patsy, you are the joy of my life. But I can't help it if I prefer my oysters without their clothes on."
"Yes, you can. And I hate to think of you not getting every scrap of joy there is in life. Sometimes it seems to me you just won't take things when they're right under your nose. Sometimes, you make me feel like a demented ant running about in a circle, and then again I know I'm right. While you sit round waiting for Life, it's being lived all round you. And yet, when you talk that way you make me feel as if you were sitting away off on a cloud somewhere, playing on a golden flute, while I'm down below leading a circus parade—beating a drum in a cloud of dust."
Jean sputtered into her cup and put it down for safety.
Pat grinned. "Well, the figure may be mixed, but that is precisely the way I feel. And I don't want you to sit up there always."
"But I will do things as soon as I get them to do. I can't pretend a doll's alive when I know it isn't."
"But they'll always be dolls if you go at them like that."
"No, they won't, Patsy. There must be some real live things in the world. And I'm going to get them. Even if I have to fall off my cloud and break my golden flute."
Jean bent and for a moment Pat's arms clasped her. Then they stood apart, smiling.
"All right. Go to it, old girl. Only yell in time so that I can get out from under. I never expect to have more than one drum in my life and I don't want it busted. You're no fairy."
When the dishes were finished they locked up, hung the key on its nail outside among the wistaria, and went. At the corner of the street, Pat turned toward the town, while Jean continued straight on toward the foot of the hills.
From his comfortable rocker on the porch, Tom Morton looked up from the evening paper.
"A great day, wasn't it?" His broad face beamed with unintelligent good humor as he put down the paper preparatory to a chat. "You look terribly important in that rig, Jean. Makes me feel like I don't know how to write my name."
"Well, you won't feel like that much longer. It's the hottest rig ever invented."
"You all did look kind of red round the gills. I say, Jean, who was that girl that got the gold medal? Didn't look to me like she was terrible smart."
"She stood higher than anybody else."
"Wasn't you due for something extra? Seems to me a girl that gets a job helping a professor at his own work must be some bright."
"It's not really much of a job, just a few weeks."
"Graft, them medals, I guess, like everything else. There isn't a field in this country to-day——"
But Jean had disappeared.
In the hall she almost collided with Elsie, trailing wearily from the kitchen with a great bowl of salad. Elsie put down the bowl and caught at her.
"Oh, Jeany! It was too wonderful. I never was so thrilled in my life! I don't believe Ieverrealized what college could mean before. If I only had had the chance! When I heard that darling old man talking about life—oh, Tommykins has just got to go when he grows up, if westarveto put him through."
"Can't be done without food, Elsie." By a supreme effort Jean succeeded in speaking lightly, but when Elsie showed signs of being about to kiss her, Jean escaped to the kitchen.
As she entered, Martha Norris emptied the creamed celery into a blue willow dish, and wiped her damp forehead with her apron. Her mouth drooped with fatigue but she smiled. Jean crossed the room quickly and took her mother in her arms.
"Mummy, you're not going to have a bad headache?" She framed the small face in both hands and looked down into her mother's faded eyes.
"Why, no, dear. It's just the heat and the excitement. It's been a big day for me, Jean. Then I got a little late and that always flurries me."
Jean drew her mother closer. "I'm not going to let you work like this any more. You're going to take things easier now I'm through, whether you want to or not."
"Now, Jeany, you know I'd be perfectly miserable idle."
"There's a lot of difference between idleness and this." Jean's hand swept the hot kitchen and the stove covered with pans. "You slave and what for? They don't even thank you."
Martha Norris laid her work-scarred hand on Jean's arm.
"You forget, dear—'Whatever ye do, do it all to the glory of God.' And it meanseverything, just as it says, even washing pots and pans."
Jean's arms dropped and it seemed to her that the rigid little body within stepped back almost with a sense of release. It was as if her mother had stood so long alone, that any other expression must always be a slight strain.
"Shall I serve the beef, mummy?" Jean picked up an oven cloth and moved to the stove.
"No, dear. It'll spatter and your dress is as clean as when you put it on. If you'll just cube up the cheese—Iamgetting behind and it's almost six now."