ONLY A FRESHER.
It was rather hard work to persuade the old Master of St. Benedict's
that Lucy ought to go to Newnham. He belonged to the old school--he was
almost the last left of that school--that did not believe very much in
women. He believed in a girl learning to sew, and to spell, and play a
little air on the piano--he was very fond of 'Annie Laurie,' he could
listen to it by the hour; he went so far, indeed, as the three R's in a
woman's education--and he stopped there.
He had no sympathy whatever in the movement for the higher education
of Women--spelt with a big W. He had voted consistently all his
life against women being admitted to any of the privileges of the
University, against their being allowed to take degrees; he had even
voted against their being 'placed.' He regarded every concession made
to the weaker sex as a step towards that dreadful time when a female
Vice-Chancellor will confer degrees in the Senate House, and a lady
D.D. will occupy the University pulpit.
With these views, and with his prejudices growing stronger rather
than weaker with the years, it was no wonder that Mary Rae had great
difficulty in reconciling the Master to the idea of Lucy becoming a
student of Newnham.
He had to look at the question all round, from every point of view,
and he had to talk it over a great many times. Sometimes he talked it
over with himself after dinner, when he woke up from his nap, or didn't
quite wake up; and sometimes he talked it over with his nieces.
'I don't think your father would approve of it, my dear,' he said one
day when he was talking 'it' over with Lucy. 'He was a plain man, he
hadn't the advantages of education that I had; but he had what served
him just as well, he had common-sense. He knew what was wanted in a
woman. A woman, he used to say, ought to be able to milk, and make
butter, and bring up a family. Dick's wife could do all these, and her
poultry was noted in all the country round.'
Lucy sighed. She had no ambition to make butter and bring up a family,
and she had a distinct aversion to poultry. She hated cocks and hens
and broods of yellow downy chickens. She remembered how they used
always to be getting into the Vicarage garden and digging up her
flower-seeds.
'I am afraid I couldn't get my living by making butter, uncle,' she
said meekly, 'or milking cows.'
She never could remember to say 'Master,' like everybody else.
'No, my dear, no; I suppose not. Some girls have the knack of it, and
some women, I've heard my mother say, may churn for hours and the
butter will refuse to come. Dick's wife, your mother, my dear----'
'Great-grandmother,' murmured Lucy almost inaudibly. The Master hated
to be contradicted, and he was always telling her that these far-off
ancestors were her father and mother, this humble ploughman and his
homely wife. There had been two generations of culture between, and
Lucy had quite forgotten, until her uncle reminded her, that her
great-grandmother used to carry her eggs and her butter to market. The
worst of it was he used to tell everybody it was her mother.
'Yes, yes,' the Master repeated testily; 'my memory is not what it was.
But it does not much matter which. She was a good woman; she did her
duty here; she brought up a long family--nine children--and she has
gone to her reward. She did not know a word of Greek or Latin, and she
only knew enough mathematics to reckon up the price of eggs; but if she
had gone to Girton or Newnham she could not have done more. She did
her duty here; after all, that is the great thing, my dear. There is
nothing else that will bring comfort at the last.'
It was a delightful reflection. It comforted the old scholar who had
done his duty in this place for over sixty years, who had done it
so well that by common consent men called him Master; but it didn't
comfort Lucy at all. She was quite prepared to do her duty, only she
wanted to do it in her own way.
There were other difficulties in the way of Lucy going to Newnham
beside the Master's prejudices. There was a dreadful ordeal to be gone
through before those sacred portals would be opened to admit her.
There was the entrance examination. The Senior Tutor was as good as
his word; he brought Lucy over the very next day, not only the papers
set at the last 'Previous' examination, but a copy of the last Newnham
entrance papers. The next examination was to take place in March, and
it was now the middle of February, and there were only a few weeks to
prepare for it.
Lucy looked hurriedly through the papers while the Tutor stood by, and
he saw her face fall and the pretty April colour, which was Lucy's
especial charm, go out of her cheeks.
'They are stiffer than you thought,' he said.
He couldn't help putting a little feeling into his voice; he couldn't
help being sorry for the girl. He could see she was dreadfully
disappointed.
'I did not think they would be so hard,' she said, with something like
a sob, and striving to keep back the tears; 'I had no idea that so much
was required.'
Her voice was scarcely steady, and she finished up with a little
wail--she couldn't keep it out of her voice--and she laid the papers
down.
'You don't think you can do them?'
'No, I am sure I can't.'
'Not if you work hard--very hard?--you have three weeks before you--not
if I help you?'
'You! Oh, Mr. Colville!'
The colour leaped back into her face, and her eyes brightened. She was
quite trembling with eagerness.
'If you think with three weeks' hard work you can get through, I will
help you,' he said.
It was something new to the Senior Tutor to have a pupil so eager and
willing. The eyes of the undergraduates of St. Benedict's were not
accustomed to brighten or their cheeks to flush when he proposed to
give them a few hours' extra coaching.
'I am sure I can!' she said eagerly; 'and--and you are sure, Mr.
Colville, you will not mind the trouble? I am a very slow learner, but
I will do my best, my very best.'
'I am sure you will,' he said; and then he noticed that little helpless
quivering about her lips that touched him with quite a new sensation.
He had never seen Mary's lips quiver. 'It will be no trouble,' the
Tutor said softly in quite a different voice; he even noticed the
difference himself, with a strange sense of wonder. 'I shall be very
glad to be of use to you.'
He had often been of use to Mary. She always consulted him about the
college business; she made use of him every day; but his voice had
never faltered nor his cheek grown warm when he had offered to help
her with the Master's correspondence.
Lucy began her work the next day. She turned out from the little
shabby box she had brought with her to the lodge some well-thumbed
old school-books. Small as the box was, it contained all her personal
belongings, and the books were at the bottom of the box.
Like Jacob, she had come into a strange land with very little personal
impedimenta. It could all, everything, be stuffed into one small box,
and the books were at the bottom. The books were shabby, like the box.
They had belonged to her father, and she had read them with him.
There were his old Virgil and Xenophon, and a dilapidated Euclid with
all the riders missing, and an old-fashioned Algebra. There had been
newer editions since Richard Rae had used these in his college days
more than twenty years ago. There had been delightful editions full
of notes, and directing-posts along the royal road to a classical
education; but Lucy had been plodding along the old, rough, dusty way.
The Senior Tutor smiled as he turned over these old books. They brought
back to him the old days twenty years ago, the hopes and dreams
of those early days, and the familiar faces. The dreams had been
realized--at least, some of them--but the familiar faces had faded with
the years, and the hopes--what could a man hope for beyond being Master
of his college? Nevertheless, the Senior Tutor sighed. The sight of
these old books had carried him a long way back.
'I think we can find some newer editions than these,' he said, smiling.
He not only found some newer, but he found the very newest. He found
delightful books that smoothed away all the difficulties and made stony
places plain. There will be a royal road to learning by-and-by. The
road is getting smoother every day, and the way is getting shorter--a
short, straight, macadamized road that one can travel over without any
jolting or sudden pulls-up.
Old scholars who remember the dear old rough road, and the stony ways,
and the hills of difficulty they had to climb, sigh when they look
back. There is no time now, in these hurrying days, to toil over stones
and climb unnecessary heights. The new ways are so much better than the
old; but the old men, if they were to begin again, would go the old
way, the dear old way, with all its difficulties. They will still tell
you the old ways are best.
Lucy Rae was not a scholar yet, though the desire of her heart was to
be one--a perfect Hypatia--and the new royal road was exactly what she
wanted.
She made such rapid progress by means of these short-cuts and easy
paths the Senior Tutor led her through that she was quite ready for
that dreaded entrance examination when it came. She did as well in it
as the girls who had been working for it for years.
There was nothing now to prevent her becoming a student of Newnham.
Cousin Mary had talked the old Master over and smoothed away all the
difficulties. She had wrung from him an unwilling consent. The Senior
Tutor had done his part, too, in overcoming the Master's prejudices.
He had backed Mary up in the most loyal manner; no girl could have had
better advocates. When the Doctor had urged that there had been no
precedent in his family of girls construing Latin and Greek when they
ought to be making butter and carrying their eggs to market, the Tutor
had reminded him that neither had there been a precedent in all the
generations of the Raes of one of their number being the Master of a
college.
He, on his part, had set up a precedent, and Dick's little daughter was
going to set up another--perhaps a more astonishing precedent.
Lucy Rae went up to Newnham the next term. She ought to have waited
until October, when the academical year commences, but she was much too
anxious to begin at once. She couldn't wait till October.
She had taken a little draught of the divine nectar, and she was
thirsting to drink deeply, ever so deeply--deeper than any woman had
ever drunk yet. She was going to do very big things, and she couldn't
afford to lose a minute. She would gain a whole term's work if she went
up now, she would get in ten terms' work instead of nine, like the men,
for her Tripos. She would get a whole term's start of them.
With this thirst upon her, and this emulation stirring in her heart,
Lucy packed her little box and carried it up to Newnham. She did not
exactly carry it in her arms like a housemaid going to a new place.
It was not far to carry it, and for the weight of it she might have
carried it easily, but girls do not generally go to Newnham carrying
a bandbox, or a bundle tied up in a coloured pocket-handkerchief, and
with two out-at-elbow little brothers lagging behind carrying a shabby
box between them. Lucy, alas! had not two out-at-elbow little brothers,
and she had respect for the feelings of Newnham, so she drove up to the
door of Newe Hall in a hansom, with her modest little box on the roof.
She thought it was the happiest, the proudest day of her life, this
first day at Newnham. She had been looking forward to it for weeks. She
had lain awake all the night before picturing what it would be like,
and it was not the least like anything she had pictured.
She had pictured sunshine and a blue sky, and the lilacs in the hedge
budding, and the daffodils blowing beneath the windows. It was the
middle of April, and she had a right to expect these things; it was
very little to expect.
It had been raining cheerfully all the morning, and it was raining
still when the hansom drew up at the gate of St. Benedict's; it
couldn't draw up at the door of the lodge, because college lodges are
cut off from the outside world by cloistered courts, and even royalty,
when it visits the master of a college, has to leave its carriage at
the gate and perform the rest of the journey on foot.
Lucy met Mr. Colville in the cloisters as she was hurrying through, and
he put her into the hansom, and he told the man where to drive, and
quite a crowd of undergraduates, who had come up early in the term,
stood round the gate watching her drive away.
It was quite a new thing, a girl going from St. Benedict's to
Newnham. It was the newest thing under the sun. No daughter, niece or
granddaughter of any Master of St. Benedict's had ever driven from
those gates before to Newnham.
Perhaps when there is a mixed University, and a female president at the
lodge, they will not have to go so far; they may find rooms beneath the
same roof.
Who shall say?
Lucy couldn't have driven away with more depressing surroundings. The
sky couldn't have been grayer, and the trees were shivering overhead,
and the hedges were dripping, and there was a nasty mist settling down
over everything. She forgot all about the lilacs and the daffodils she
had been picturing as she stood, a forlorn little black figure, in the
big, cheerless vestibule of Newe Hall, paying the driver of the hansom.
There was no one at Newnham to receive her, no one to show her to her
room, only a housemaid, who went away directly she reached the door.
She didn't even open the door of the room; she only pointed to it and
went away in another direction.
It was a little bare room, it couldn't have been barer. There was
a couch that served for a bed, a bureau with some drawers beneath,
a table, a couple of chairs, and a thinly disguised washstand with
imperfect crockery; and that was all. Unless, indeed, a chintz curtain
drawn across a corner of the room for hanging gowns behind could be
called a wardrobe.
There was no fire, and the barred windows were steaming and blurred
with the mist outside, and the raw spring afternoon was closing in.
Lucy shivered and looked round the desolate room. She didn't know what
she was expected to do next, or how she was to begin this new life. She
was a member of the University now, she told herself with bated breath;
she was really a female undergraduate, and she had got to begin as
undergraduates began.
Should she begin with lighting the fire? While she was debating this
point, and drawing off her gloves, a girl came in. She had left the
door open so that anyone passing could look in and see her standing
there, and the girl passing by looked in and saw her, and something in
her attitude touched her, and she came in. Perhaps it was her black
frock and her white face.
'Can I do anything for you?' she said. She didn't throw any sympathy
into her voice; they never do at Newnham. 'I've got a kettle boiling if
you'd like some water, or'--looking round the bare room and seeing that
Lucy's things were not unpacked--'perhaps you'd rather have some tea.'
'Ye--es,' Lucy said quite thankfully; 'I would rather have some tea,
please.'
'Then come into my room.'
Lucy followed the girl, a solid-looking girl with no profile to speak
of, and a turned-up nose and violent red hair. She had not to follow
her far, only across the passage.
There was a card slipped into a frame in the door of the room, and the
name of the occupant was written on it--'Stubbs.'
'That's my name,' said the girl, pointing to it; 'Maria
Stubbs--Capability Stubbs they call me. I suppose you are a fresher?'
'Yes,' said Lucy, 'I'm a fresher; I've only just come up. My name is
Rae--Lucy Rae.'
'Not a bad name; but you won't have any use for it here. They'll call
you Lucifer most likely; they don't call anybody by their right name
here.'
Maria Stubbs' room was unlike most Newnham rooms. It was distinctly
utilitarian. There was nothing æsthetic about it. The most prominent
thing in it was a bookshelf full of books, and there was a cabinet in
one corner with a lot of narrow drawers, which Lucy found out after
were crammed with specimens. A bright fire was burning in the little
tiled grate, and a cloth was spread, and some tea-things were laid on
the flap of the bureau, which was let down for the purpose, and there
were some cakes in one of the pigeon-holes.
'Take off your hat and sit down,' said Maria, drawing a low chair to
the fire; 'there's nothing to hurry for, they won't bring in your
things for a long time; they never hurry themselves at Newnham.'
'I don't think I ought to take off my things until I've seen someone,'
said Lucy. 'There's Miss Wrayburne I certainly ought to see. Perhaps
she doesn't know I'm here.'
The girl laughed--or cackled, rather; there wasn't the least fun in her
laugh.
'Perhaps not,' she said, as she busied herself about making the tea;
'and I don't think it would make any difference if she did. You don't
think the Dons are running about the college all day long shaking hands
with the girls? You'll see Miss Wrayburne at the "High" at dinner, and
she'll say "How d'ye do?" and smile--she always smiles--and that's all.'
'I didn't know,' Lucy said humbly. 'I'm only a fresher, you see; I
shall know better soon. But it struck me as a very chilling reception.'
Miss Stubbs cackled in her unfeeling way.
'Chilling! that's lovely! You've come to the wrong place if you expect
any warmth at Newnham, or sympathy either. It would be nothing better
than a big girls' school if we were always "How-d'ye-doing" and shaking
hands with each other--we should get to _kissing_ soon! Thank goodness
there is no spooning here! We are barely civil to each other; and we
make a point of ignoring everybody if we meet 'em out-of-doors. I hope
you won't, on the strength of this tea, nod to me if you happen to run
against me in the street, because I shan't notice you.'
'No,' said Lucy, 'I certainly won't nod to you.' She didn't say it at
all humbly, but she drank Miss Stubbs' tea. It was very good tea for
Newnham.