about the campus. That Lilian was strolling was not without its
significance. It was a misty evening after a rainy day. All about them
were the tender, yet vivid, colours of early spring--the fields beyond
the edge of the campus, and the distant uplands, were veiled in green
mist. Near Taylor the Judas-tree was in purple bloom, and further away
the Japanese cherries lifted pink sprays against a soft grey sky. Lilian
was moved to an appreciation that did not exclude a quality the picture
received from the dignity of the buildings, or even from the well-kept
condition of turf and walks. She turned to Clara. "No one can ever
know," she said, "how glad I am to come back."
It was the day before commencement. Lilian Coles was in the library,
selecting some books to take away for the summer. She went to a window
that looked toward Rosemont and Villa Nova. She had come to have a sense
of wide distances from this window. For the moment, with a swift,
scarcely-conscious recognition of new ideals, new standards of life, she
felt in herself something of the triumphant onward rush of the Winged
Victory dominating this end of the library. This morning the sky was
deep blue with a few white clouds. The air was fresh, the trees and
grass very green. The slope beyond the tennis-courts was white with
daisies. Some professors, in white flannels, were playing tennis on the
nearest courts. Girls in white duck or fluffy muslins were moving toward
the gymnasium. The college breakfast was to be there at twelve o'clock.
Lilian was going. She had refused all invitations until her examinations
were over. Then she went to several teas, to a picnic luncheon and to
the class supper. She intended to go to the alumnæ banquet Thursday
evening.
Lilian found her place at one of the long tables in the gymnasium beside
Clara West and opposite Hester Grey. The balustrade of the
running-track had been transformed into a frieze of mountain laurel.
Laurel and ferns decorated the tables.
The breakfast was nearly over, and the black waiters were serving the
ices.
"Can you see Lilian Coles?" Blanche bent around an intervening neighbour
to ask Katherine. Katherine, happy in the fact that she would get a
degree on the morrow, looked across the tables just as Lilian touched
glasses with a freshman, her lips moving in the chorus,
"Here's to Bryn Mawr College!"
It was Hester Grey who saw a solemn look on Lilian's face as they rose
to join in "Manus Bryn Mawrensium." But at that moment it seemed to
Lilian herself, that of all the "lætissimæ puellæ" she, in her way, was
the most joyful.
_Elva Lee, '93._
_FREE AMONG THE DEAD_
I
A quick step came down the hall and stopped. There was a rustle of silk;
the step died away in the direction from which it came. Esther raised
her head, carefully laying her little clay tablet on its bed of
jeweller's cotton as she wheeled around an instant to smile:
"They're a bit shy of us to-night, Sydney. Haven't you finished with
Marius?"
Sydney Lodge, who had swung round also and met her eye, answered:
"No wonder they are; I know I'm shy of myself. If only for once we lived
in Denbigh! Then we might at least see the Faculty coming down past the
staircase window and the lights going out in Taylor and know when the
meeting was over." The castors complained as she pushed back her chair,
then the sash went up and the breath of the night that came in and
rattled Esther's papers tasted like deep well water, wonderfully pure
and cool and dark. Esther wrapped her gown about her, for since dinner
she had been working in the library, and crossing the study with the
very light step of a very strong person leaned out the window behind her
friend.
There was no moon, and the enormous star-sown hemisphere whose horizon
fell below their feet, was tonight a faint blur of pearl-grey. Almost as
faint and illusory was the ground, and the other halls were denoted by
pinkish spots and splashes. From many of these, and in especial from the
great windows of the library, ran bands of moonlight-coloured light,
like a search-light seen transversely, but filmier. A step rang along
the board walk, crunched the gravel, dying away muffled and uneven on
grass; voices blew up to them from somewhere and a far-off singing that
sounded sweet. Sydney Lodge shivered a little and was drawn in to the
fire.
"Lie down and scorch your fuzzy head, young Shelley. The ten o'clock
bell hasn't rung and they won't agree for hours yet."
"They never take long over the graduate fellowships,--they put them off,
as last year; still, I admit the senior one is hard to settle,"
acknowledged Sydney, mischievously.
Esther answered with joyful appreciation: "This is quite the most
picturesque situation we were ever in. If you don't get it I shall be
comforted by its being Hilda----"
"--and if Hilda misses it we've all three the satisfaction of knowing
the honour is yours--all three, mark you; for it is an honour, you know.
And one of us must get it," finished Sydney with conviction.
At the door a knock made both girls turn pale, but as it opened appeared
a mermaid-head with knotted and dripping tresses, just from the
swimming-pool, to beg Sydney's company and her violin below on the
second floor. The invitation declined, the two were silent awhile.
II
Sydney, on the grey furry rug, trailed her slim length closer to the
fire like a pale-green enchanted caterpillar.
"Did you hear Hilda on Marius at dinner?" she inquired drowsily. "She
said if he hadn't stopped to bury his dead----"
"She's quite right. He is very beautiful but all wrong, you know. The
supreme end of living----"
"Is fullness of life," cut in Sydney. "That's an axiom, like the being
of a feeling is its being felt, and that other, about the _esse_ of a
thing's being _percipi_. Anyway, he had it, fullness of life. But it
lands you in the Uebermensch, all the same, and _he_ is a fearful
brute."
Mechanically Esther murmured: "Nonsense, the Uebermensch is the
Magnanimous Man, essentially."
"He's not a bit. Anyway, I don't believe you can work equations like
that," replied Sydney, stretching up one hand pink against the fire. "I
don't think the Magnanimous Man is the opposite of Marius and I know he
isn't the same as the Uebermensch, even temperamentally. He risked
greatly for great ends: Marius of course never risked at all but the
Uebermensch is always chancing it for no particular reason. He doesn't
go in for final causes, does he? Please, between them I prefer the
Aristotelian,--but not to know personally. It's bound to end in
hardness."
"In the last analysis, your soul's your own," declared Esther with a
habitual gesture of wrapping her gown about her, but the other broke in
with a little cry:
"Ah, but it isn't! It's every one's else, in the last analysis."
"But it is not really so good in the long run even for the other people,
that _Tristem Neminem Fecit_. Remember Jane Barry, what she gave up for
her people; they hadn't a thing against the man, but they couldn't
spare her. Now they have an invalid, and when I was there at Christmas I
noticed a very real hardness, which wasn't in the least pretty."
Sydney answered with a candour almost noble: "Really, of course, one
should only make great renouncements on one's deathbed."
"Do you suppose that if Marlowe came by to-morrow and said: 'Chuck the
degree, chuck Sydney there on the hearthrug, and come for a walk around
the world,' I shouldn't go?"
"I suppose you would go, 'still climbing after knowledge infinite.' But
then you've no ties," finished Sydney, strong in the recollection of a
father, a mother and several brothers and sisters.
"Don't you call yourself a tie?" laughed Esther.
"I believe you would go," Sydney repeated with a note of regretful
admiration. "Now I pray I should have grace to reply: 'Thank you kindly,
sir, but I'm bespoke.' I mean, if you had broken your back, for
instance, or gone blind."
In an old oval mirror on the opposite wall Esther Lawes regarded for an
instant her own fair strength, and the large grey eyes a little too
clear and bright and round; from year to year they used to give out.
"I believe you would," she echoed, gazing down with her usual pleased
sense of Sydney's beauty. Never did girl better match than Sydney Lodge
her gracious name, radiant, the very sound of it, with sylvan and
romantic suggestions. Her slimness had the graceless grace of
Shakespeare's disguised heroines; her curls, of hair the most golden
red, prompted the quaint Elizabethan epithet of "gold wires"; and her
academic gown sat as straightly on her as the Oread's coat of sycamore
bark.
"God forbid," said Sydney Lodge solemnly. "The Powers have a trick now
and then of taking us at our word, and our answered prayers are fruit
bitter in the eating."
While she spoke they became conscious that the great bell was ringing,
with strokes that sounded now near, now far distant, from every quarter,
rhythmic in their pulse; the first distinct enough yet echoing
familiarly, as though it were the second or third, the last in like
manner seeming a faint intermediate one, whose successors the ear had
lost. And like the wind awhile before, so the bell had a tang of
darkness and the great spaces outside.
III
In the house there were movements, and voices cut short by banging
doors. Sydney had picked up a lamp and disappeared into her bedroom in a
sphere of radiance, like a glow-worm. The dimmed room, which seemed
yellower, took a new look: the whole Italian Renaissance, very
adequately represented by the pictures on the walls, withdrew into
itself and darkness. Esther stared absently from the long steamer chair
at the faintly yellowed walls, at the pink bed of coals, and two Tanagra
figurines above,--the lady who binds up her hair and the other lady
carrying a wide basin in her slender hands, who forever bends over it to
watch her own reflected face.
The girl was disturbed more by this fellowship business than even to her
close friend she could betray. Not wanting the fellowship for herself,
she did crave it for Sydney. Moreover, they could then go abroad
together. She had longed that day to hint as much to a professor that
was, she thought, disposed to overvalue her own rather advanced work
along a very narrow line as against Sydney's all-round brilliancy. And
while she heard the other opening drawers and rustling in her wardrobe,
Esther pursued her misgiving a step further than it had ever before
taken her, although at no time was she a fancier of illusions.
Their alliance, hers and Sydney's, ran back at least a dozen years, away
into childhood, and was rooted in all sorts of mutual dependencies. Both
moreover were fastidious and constant in their personal affections,
making indeed few acquaintances but giving up fewer, and although Sydney
had besides what the other called the goose-brigade, a succession of
waddling and hissing creatures of both sexes that passed for swans, yet
these never got farther than, so to speak, the common outside her
windows. Esther herself, without near relatives and secure of a tiny
income on which one could starve at least comfortably, having come to
college in the interest less of culture than of pedantry, had in the
interest of amusement supplemented her Greek with English, and her
Hebrew, by way of serious study, with Assyrian and kindred tongues. But
Sydney, positively, had gone through as many stages and as well-defined
as a silk-worm. Once her violin was the be-all and the end-all; her
masters had advised a professional training, urged the expediency of
having a career up one's sleeve. Esther felt that it was she who had
unconsciously lopped off that possibility, in her own enthusiasm for the
college which she was then about to enter, to which she whirled off her
friend, plumping her down mentally breathless in a field of Latin and
Greek. For the past year or two years, however, the classical
prepossessions had been yielding to a keener preoccupation with English
and a kindling ambition along the line of what the Sunday papers call
literary work. This was furthered partly by Esther's own growing delight
in the same matters and partly by the influence of other members of
their class, notably Hilda Railton.
It was in the _argot_ of their own vanishing here and now, of course,
that they had been talking, using counters precisely as the poker-player
does, to stand for an immense amount, or at any rate for an indefinite
amount. Sydney was wonderful at catching not merely the turn of a
phrase, but a turn of thought: she was _simpatica_.
"Do you know," said the voice from the inner room, "I can't get that
Japanese thing of Hilda's out of my head. Don't you think I might look
for one at that same Fifth Avenue place when I am at home at Easter, and
try it over my table?"
Hilda's Japanese print! There you were. After all, one did recognize the
type; it wasn't the superficial nor yet the parasite, but there was
about it something of the chameleon nature. It was the ominous unruffled
pool that brought Narcissus to his death. With all her brilliancy, all
her charm, she was in essence simply the magical mirror.
Esther was convinced that neither Sydney herself knew this, nor any of
her neighbours. She was far and away too clever. There was just one
pathetic chance that somebody in the Faculty might be of so
inconceivable a cleverness as to have spied the unscholastic fact.
For the third time that evening steps came to the door, and a knock.
Esther waited for Sydney and the girls moved together to the threshold,
opening on the mistress who held out an envelope. She offered it to
Esther.
IV
Is there any place in the world, Esther Lawes often in graduate days
asked her friends, where the evening light lies so long and so delicate
as at Bryn Mawr? The campus, snow-piled, prolongs a pale dusk at
tea-time; in spring the afternoons grow longer slowly until they are
forgotten in the softness of the lengthening evenings; the great
cherry-tree, black against grey Pembroke but afoam and aflutter with
exquisite whiteness, merges its sharp perfume into the softer odour of
the crowded flushed apple-trees and the pungent flavour of their
neighbours the green-tufted larches. The misty woods back of Merion
become denser aloft and under foot; and beyond the Roberts Road the
meadow fills up across the brook with pale shapely violets striped at
the heart by threads of purple; the long avenue of maples shakes out its
heavy leafage under which all day the girls with their rugs and
cushions make yellow and scarlet splashes. After dinner, on the dense
short turf in front of Denbigh, she would watch the undergraduates
quadrilling--comely figures in faint blues and lavenders, ribbons and
ruffles all afloat. She stopped awhile on one of these bland nights in a
late and sudden spring, to scan the half-familiar types, the sleek heads
and white arms, in the waxing twilight, smiling to herself at her
content with them and with the swirl of voiceless swallows about one of
the high stone chimneys of Taylor Hall. Gathering up her own filmy dress
she moved through the deep-green grass that began to dull and chill her
slippers, to the shadowed postern door in the graduate wing and up to
her own study. She had not dreamed of such content, she remembered, her
first night in the room.
V
All the days on the steamer she had misdoubted the return to college
after two years' absence, and the surprise and foreboding that sprang up
when her closest gaze at the dock failed to show her Sydney Lodge,
increased the mistrust. There was nothing for which to stay over in New
York since Sydney, according to the friends who did show up to greet
her, was still twenty miles off at the seashore, and since Esther had
cabled to engage the graduate suite of rooms for themselves at college
there was a place prepared and probably a letter awaiting her there.
Tired with the bustle of the custom house, she scarcely noticed the
sunburnt country north of Philadelphia, but from the moment of pulling
out from the city westward, found vague forgotten recollections stirring
like indistinguishable odours.
Strong enough at last even to satisfy her was the sense of a glad
home-coming and the sudden contraction of her throat at particular
perceptions: the first glimpses of the bell-tower above the trees, the
stillness of the wind-swept air, the fresh and quiet beauty of the grey
buildings and green turf.
As a simple mood she welcomed the feeling, prompt of course to pass, but
equally prompt to return and supplant in time inevitable regrets for the
other life now finally renounced.
It looked very gay, soft, desirable, that other life, while she surveyed
the ungarnished and spotless emptiness of the bare study. On one table
lay a pile of letters, the topmost directed in Sydney's hand so oddly
like her own: a letter puzzling for the first sheet, then plain enough
in its shamefaced announcement that the writer was engaged to be
married--had been, indeed, for a month past but for some inexplicable
reason had not wished Esther to learn before sailing. "H'm," thought
Esther, "pity I didn't know this!" She looked around at the two
study-tables, two lamps and two armchairs, almost the whole furniture of
the room, and began to laugh. The stupid chair butting its nose against
the table as maids always will leave study chairs, taunted her with the
unnecessary assurance that Sydney would never occupy it.
The man in question, curiously enough, Esther had once known rather
well. Her brother had been in the same class at Harvard, since whose
death some years before she had scarcely seen him. But she had not heard
of his meeting Sydney. He was a politician by trade, a lawyer by
profession. He belonged in the Middle West.
Esther felt rather sick and very angry; Sydney at least needn't have
made a fool of her! Still, she _could_ see the comedy.
"Hello!" rang up a fine, strong voice below, and turning in the
window-seat she saw on the grass brown sturdy Hilda Railton springing
off her bicycle, rather warm and very pleased to see her. "I'm coming
up. My room is down the hall. Let's have some tea!"
When the kettle had boiled Hilda remarked, as she shovelled in the tea:
"So you're going in for the Ph. D. after all? I had dreamed you were
strong-minded enough to resist the prevailing superstition. O Ichabod,
Ichabod!"
Esther, laughing, echoed the _Ichabod_ so sincerely that Hilda was
prompted to change her ground and while she cut cool odorous slices of
lemon to ask:
"So Sydney came back after one winter? I knew she would."
Esther answered rather dryly: "Yes, her family couldn't spare her."
"Sydney's family!" laughed Hilda, recognizing the object of hostility.
"We all know it. 'Twas a pretty good year, wasn't it?"
"Ah, a golden year!"
"I had a notion from your letters last spring you were staying over
there indefinitely. Then wasn't there a plan about Sydney's going back?"
"Yes. I needed more time. Last year my eyes played me a horrid trick and
I couldn't work at all. Not even write letters," said Esther grimly. She
had fancied it was because of her inability to answer that Sydney had
written so seldom. "I had in another way almost as good a year idling
about Berlin and Paris. My dear girl, you've no notion of the
possibilities of idleness! So I quite thought of staying at the British
Museum this winter, even alone, and finishing what I was at."
"Assyrian cylinders still?"
"Always cylinders." This with a sudden sense of coldness. "The Deluge,
and others. But I changed my mind." Never should any one, her former
roommate least of all, know what had changed her mind. Actually this was
a letter from Sydney Lodge, written in July and saying in effect, "I
need you rather badly. How soon are you coming?" She had explained on a
post-card that certain bricks and cylinders ought first to be deciphered
and in the meantime had cabled for the rooms. She knew--it was one of
the discoveries of this extraordinary afternoon--she knew Sydney's ways
even to the point of prediction; that if she should say: "But my dear
child I wrote you I had engaged the suite for us both," the young lady
would answer with a brilliant smile of privilege and a new note--was it
the sentimental?--in her voice: "Did you really? Well, I must have been
thinking of something else when I read the letter." It was impossible
not to laugh, but Esther covered the laughter with a sudden inspiration:
"Oh, I say, don't you want to share my study?"
"But Sydney?" cried poor Hilda, setting down her flowered teacup.
"Sydney's engaged. One Lewis Mason."
"Oh, dear!" Hilda answered flatly. "I'm rather sorry. I always believed
in her, you know. She might have done things."
"Presumably one can do things with a husband. He is supposed to help,"
replied Esther, throwing forward her general convictions in the
grotesque struggle for loyalty.
"Ah, she can't. And," added the girl, conclusively, "he won't."
"How's that?"
Hilda returned violently: "I know the beggar. She stayed a Sunday with
Helen when I was there this summer and--he called in the evening. He's
in politics, but quite respectable. I don't know why I shouldn't come,
if you really want me: I'm taking my Ph. D., too, you know. Think it
over. He's what they called," said Hilda with an explicit vagueness,
"'_le parfait gentleman_.'"
VI
Esther looked around, when she went back to the emptiness, almost with a
little shiver. This was the end then: _après tant de jours: après tant
de fleurs_. She had just for a little while known the unacademic world,
people who had seen something different in her face, something rather
sweet and rather sensitive.
How far all the things seemed and all alike how dim: the socialist
meetings in Berlin, the cheap dinners at a droll _crêmerie_ in Paris
frescoed all around with the history of the Queen of Hearts and the
immemorial tarts; even the soft after-dinner hour when she was staying
with her cousins down in Leicestershire; even a delicious painter-boy
who had just got into the Salon--all alike out of reach. The life before
her looked poor and thin: books to be sure were at hand and one could
hurry up to New York two or three times in a winter for the opera, and
go abroad every summer with a companion chosen, like Hilda, expressly
for her impersonality, one year to Greece, another time for the French
cathedrals and _châteaux_.
Hilda--"she's impersonal as a Velasquez," she had written in the first
week--proved for the aggrieved young woman the Griselda of companions.
Even to herself Esther would only admit a few grounds of grievance.
Sydney did well to marry, though there were elements of pain in the
shock and the strangeness of her elected husband, but she, or somebody
else, might have sounded a note of warning. That faint sigh of amorous
trouble and the consequent precipitate response! Esther found herself in
the position of one running at full speed who stops short, consciously
red-faced and rather blown. The picture made her angry and undigested
anger made her sick and spoiled her work.
There was even a sense of participation in Sydney's guilt, a secret
confession of some dawdling in Paris, some philandering, that provoked
to wholesome laughter. She had moments of saying to her inward
interlocutor that it was rather absurd to chafe at the loss after all of
only a few months, in June she would go back to London, to Paris, to the
great glad world. But these conversations shared more or less the
chimerical character of the thoughts when one lies awake at night and in
the bodily warmth and darkness and the inner blaze of the overheated
brain, one's perceptions, one's values are all monstrous. At last she
saw that she had in truth been only playing with the thought of the
straight, brown-bearded young artist in his little round cap like a
Holbein drawing. Him she had not left behind without annoyance, though
certainly she would not have wished to bring him along; but she could
not even for Sydney have left behind her lexicons and manuscripts, and
comical little bricks done up in pasteboard jewel boxes.
VII
The moon plainly was coming up in a hurry behind Dalton as Esther paused
at the entrance to her room, for though still invisible it filled with
light the air outside all the windows. Against this pale-blue background
Hilda on the sill was making coffee in a tall green porcelain pot. The
air was full of the spicy steam.
"_Dégenérée!_" laughed Esther. "Didn't you have coffee for dinner?"
"Dinner was a long time ago," replied Hilda sententiously. "Besides, I
didn't have enough. Where have you been? Your frock is clammy."