wall and listening to a woodthrush. Did you ever have enough?" Esther
added, lighting a lamp as she spoke, while the brass teakettle winked in
the soft light and the outside earth vanished. "Hilda, it's a good
world."
"A well-enough world," answered Hilda crossing the yellow patch to get
the delicate cups. As she returned with them Esther studied her black
serge skirt and caught it up.
"Cat-hairs!" she affirmed. "How was Helen?--I've not seen her for a long
time. And how was Pasht? He has a black soul."
"He's uncommonly beautiful. If you go to Chapel to-morrow," said Hilda
irrelevantly, "you will hear the President announce that I am appointed
a Reader in English for next year. Pretty good, isn't it, for a Canadian
who is Scotch?"
"That's all right, Doctor Railton," murmured Esther congratulating her
and adding, "Then I'm sure of you here next year." This was before the
days of Low Buildings, and Readers lived in the Halls where and how they
could.
Esther lay back in her chair, admiring the tarnished frame of a quaint
oval mirror that reflected a really admirable Japanese water-colour of
Hilda's. She was glad the study would be unchanged another year, and
quiet. She thought, too, with a little shudder of the hot bad air of
crowded rooms, the loud noise of voices, the indecorous bustle of a life
made up of many acquaintances.
"I am going to Spain this summer to look at some Arabic manuscripts,"
she said at length. "You'd better come too. If we cross cheaply and
don't travel we can live on nothing. Berenson says the Spanish galleries
are full of wonderful pictures, practically unknown."
"My dear, I've a family," laughed Hilda ruefully.
"Didn't you say last night that they were going to the winds of heaven
this year and that you didn't know what to do? Represent to them,
moreover, that one shouldn't lose so superb a chance of _doing_ me.
Seriously, I shall take a whole stateroom, not having forgotten the
seasick German girl I came home with last time, and you'd much better
occupy the other berth. Indeed, I can't travel alone in Spain, you
know."
Her eyes were fixed on eighteen square inches of pinkish brocade pinned
against the wall--her Christmas present to Hilda and a ruinous
extravagance. A chance word, from a lecture, she had caught up and
fancied once, came back: "Nobody frames the multiplication table and
hangs it on the wall." But surely that was because the multiplication
table was shallow and petty and strikingly untrue: there were tracts of
knowledge infinite and unfathomable where one would never tire.
The things, she realized, which one does not ask too much of--and the
people--are the things which are forever surprising one with unguessed
possibilities.
"Curiosity, after all, is the only insatiable emotion," said Esther out
of her experience, and there were always more little bricks: one might
even in time when one had read all the rest, go and dig some up with
one's own hands.
_Georgiana Goddard King, '96._
_STUDIES IN COLLEGE COLOUR_
The great bell clangs out through the morning air--through the
snowflakes that thicken it, sending its summons over the white-crusted
campus. The slippery walks are crowded with black figures moving towards
Taylor Hall, single, in groups of twos and threes, wrapped close with
shawls and hoods, half of them umbrellaless. Voices fall as they enter
and amid friendly jostling around the bulletin board and in the
cloak-room whispered greetings are exchanged. Then upstairs to the
silent chapel, with its white windows made whiter by the frost; a
stillness seeming to fold it round. The black mortar-boards nod their
tassels in cheery greeting; subdued talk between neighbours fills the
room with a low hum. A sudden hush; the talk stops; the heads are still;
a moment's pause and the service has begun. All are together for once in
the day, with no distinctions of class or grade. All are alike children,
and children of Bryn Mawr. At the close of the prayer another moment's
silence. Then a sudden movement. The bell clangs out again. A general
rush to classes, to the office, to one's room. The day has begun.
* * * * *
The sunlight is streaming in through the broad windows. It dances among
the leaves of the red geraniums on the window-sill and falls upon the
carpet in bright spots and bands. The bookcase and the two shelves of
the little mahogany desk are crowded with a confusion of much worn,
many-coloured volumes. Over the Dresden inkstand and disordered files of
papers and pencils a small brass dragon mounts guard. Dainty cups shine
on the white tea-table, which bears for its motto the words of the March
Hare:
"_It's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the tea things between
whiles._"
On the Turkish scarf which drapes the mantel stands a ginger-jar full of
yellow roses. Across the rocking-chair is thrown a college gown, while
tennis balls and rackets strew the floor. The divan is filled with
flowered cushions innumerable, and half-buried among them is the
mistress of all this colour and confusion. She is reading "The
Republic."
* * * * *
It was a warm afternoon in May. The shadows were lengthening on the
campus, and the air had all the stillness of midsummer. On the grass
near the gravel walk a robin was hopping and pecking. Two black-gowned
figures had just passed slowly by, and now all was still again. A
sparrow who had been hovering for several minutes over head alighted
close by the robin.
"Ah!" said the robin, "could you but fancy what you have lost! Two
seniors conversing together. Did you not perceive them?"
The sparrow would gladly have concealed his ignorance on such classic
ground, yet, constrained by curiosity, with hanging head he asked, "What
may seniors be?"
"Seniors," replied the robin. "Do you not know, then, that seniors are
the sovereigns of this place? Indeed, I assure you, it is true. We have
their own confession for it. Listen while I tell you the words of these
two as they passed by.
"'Well, it is almost over,' said one. 'And next year what do you suppose
will become of the college?'
"'It is too dreadful to think of,' said the other. 'Some of our class
may come back as graduates. That is the only hope.'
"'And even then they cannot help the Undergraduate Association. And they
will be too few to manage Self-Government. Oh, this dear old college!
It is too terrible to think of leaving it to go to rack and ruin. And
just when everything is in the best condition possible! Imagine the
Editorial Board without some member from '93! And the standard of class
work is sure to fall next year.'
"'And the gymnasium, too. To be sure most of us are making up conditions
in the gym, but then----'
"'Oh, there is no help for it! The college is sure to go down now. And
it has been rapidly rising for four years! It is too cruel!'"
The robin paused. Then he hopped confidingly towards the sparrow and,
cocking his head on one side, whispered, "If you will take the trouble
to listen you will hear conversations like that every spring on this
campus. Now you know what seniors are."
_L. S. B. S., '93; G. E. T. S.,'93._
_EPOCH MAKING_
The morning after the freshman play found the gymnasium looking somewhat
forlorn. The portable stage had lost part of the discreet drapery that
masked its front below the footlights, and now recklessly displayed its
crazy supports to the public eye; the footlights themselves were a mass
of blackened tallow in their battered tin sockets; the faded green
canton-flannel curtains which had served as a forest background for the
last act of _Prince Otto_, and been torn from half their rings at its
end when Seraphina and the prince tried to make a simultaneous entry in
response to applause, trailed limply from their remaining supports, and
seemed to beg for the friendly shadows of the property-room to hide
their rents and tatters. In the corners of the stage, the groups of
branches which had simulated the primeval forest drooped their withered
heads in mournful wise against their too evident props, and like the
grey cambric rocks and tin-foil rivulet which occupied the centre of the
scene, were hardly recognizable as parts of last night's fairy
woodland.
Even less recognizable, but scarcely so forlorn, the actors in the
performance soon began to drop in, at first one by one, and then in
little groups of two or three. They came in fresh and smiling and full
of misdirected zeal for the work of clearing up; most of the later
arrivals came from the basket-ball field, and flung down their
gayly-coloured golf-capes just where they would be most in the way; and
all of them, as they went about pulling down the decorations, and piling
borrowed properties into bewildering heaps for return to their owners,
chattered incessantly of last night's great success.
The November sunlight fell in yellow, dusty shafts through the high
windows above the running track, spilling its pale brightness on the
cluttered floor and stage, and spread even into the alcove where the
horizontal bars jostled the horse and the rowing-machines in ignominious
confusion and with a general shamefaced air of being huddled out of the
way. The position of the yellow rays indicated ten o'clock, and the busy
workers, having accumulated rugs, curtains, costumes, bric-a-brac, a
number of potted plants, and the fragments of a pasteboard fireplace, in
heterogeneous piles on every side, were beginning to wonder if they
could ever straighten them out again, when the arrival of three or four
fresh recruits gave them an excuse for resting while they reported
progress.
Their labours, indeed, spoke for themselves. Peggy Dillon, the class
chairman, who headed the reinforcements, opened her round blue eyes
aghast at the dusty chaos which greeted her, and found herself bereft of
speech by the look of modest pride which beamed from all the faces
before her; but one of her companions, a handsome girl with a certain
air of authority about her, was equal to the occasion.
"Dear me, how enterprising you all are!" she exclaimed, coming forward
with a comprehensive smile; "there is really a great deal accomplished
already. (Don't look so utterly overcome, Peggy, if you can help it.)
You must have worked like beavers to get all those curtains down."
The workers, hot, dirty, and dishevelled, beamed with redoubled
brightness upon the speaker, and upon the havoc they had wrought, and
tasted all the sweetness of being appreciated. Pauline Van Sandford was
a tall girl who carried her head rather high, and spoke with a
good-humoured imperiousness. Perhaps these things added weight to her
remarks. With a very creditable show of gratification, she went on,
"And nearly all the properties in piles!" Here a gasp from Peggy, who
had just discovered her pet cast in one of the said piles under a
section of the stage-steps, warned her to hasten her climax; she worked
up her remarks to quite an enthusiastic close, and then, apparently
consumed with anxiety for the workers' fatigue, she fell upon the
helpful band, and fairly swept them from the gymnasium upon a wave of
appreciative solicitude.
"Do go home and lie down, all of you--no, it's really too much to
expect--no, don't think of staying, we can do all the rest--no, you are
too good, and we are awfully grateful, but--there!" She slammed the door
upon the bewildered objects of her gratitude, and then, falling back
against it, exchanged looks of despair with her companions.
"Who would ever have thought they'd get at it so early!" wailed Peggy,
on her knees beside a particularly hopeless-looking heap of articles;
"will some one help me to rescue my poor Clytie? Shirley, lend a hand
with these steps."
Shirley Nairn, a slender girl with a big, soft, dust-brown pompadour,
brown eyes, and a firm little chin which half contradicted their
gentleness, began cautiously to lift away the boards. She had a
fluttering grace in all her movements like that of a bird just lighting.
"Rescue is the word," she said; "there is still hope for most of the
things, but unless we do a lot before lunch, those Vandals will be back
again, and next time there will be nothing left but chips."
In spite of the discouraging outlook, an hour or two of hard work did
wonders. Curtains and costumes went to the property-room, the faded
forest hid its head in a corner, the borrowed chairs and rugs and
rubber-plants found themselves grouped in something like order, and the
rescue party sank at last upon a mattress in the alcove to wipe its
heated brow, and survey results.
"There is less damage done than you would think," observed Katharine
Holland; she was a girl of that ineffectual type that must always appeal
to some one, and she now turned her long brown face and mournful eyes
towards Shirley. "Except for Peggy's Clytie, and a few smashed pots, and
that long tear in Miss Meredith's leopard-skin, most things seem to have
been miraculously spared. There is a special Providence that watches
over idiots."
Still inspecting her very grimy hands, Shirley said, "They aren't really
idiots, but you can't leave them to themselves. We should have had a
committee."
"It's all my fault; I neglected it," began Peggy meekly.
"We are all just as bad," Pauline interrupted in a decided tone; "Louise
is stage manager, and I am business manager, and look at our behaviour:
we have both been wasting valuable time on our essay appointments when
we should have been attending to business."
As self-accusation seemed the order of the day, each of the small party
came forward to blame herself, and did it thoroughly and at some length.
When a soothing pause came at last, Shirley said meditatively,
"I heard Miss Meredith say the other day that women couldn't work
together effectively, because woman isn't a political animal."
Charlotte Meredith's masters degree and undisputed cleverness gave no
small weight to her opinion among the undergraduates, but Pauline, as
her cousin and protégée, stood less in awe of her than most of the
freshmen; she had even dared to christen her, quite openly, "the Cynic."
It was Pauline, therefore, who now voiced the meeting's dissent from
Miss Meredith's dictum. Woman could be a political animal, if she chose,
and was properly directed. All that the class of '9-- needed was to be
taught to think before they acted.
Louise Ferguson, a small bustling girl with red hair, wanted to know how
you were going to teach them to think. They might be able to do it
separately, but when you took them in the mass, they were just like a
flock of sheep, and class meetings merely a game of follow-my-leader. No
matter how clever and sensible the individual girl was, a class of
sixty-three girls was capable of any idiocy on the spur of the moment.
"Look at the number of classes who elect their presidents, and then hate
them ever after. Look at the case of the class who barred out their
temporary chairman, and then spent the rest of their college career
wishing they had elected her. They never know what they want, or if they
do, they don't know enough to get it."
"Thanks awfully," crowed Peggy; "all the bouquets are coming my way.
'9-- made me chairman, therefore they did not want me. Q. E. D. Thanks
ever so much!"
As Louise and Peggy were roommates, their differences could be left for
private settlement. Louise therefore took no notice of this
interruption, beyond a threatening scowl at the speaker, and, sticking
bravely to her point, appealed to Pauline for support. In Pauline's
opinion class politics were usually unintelligent, but she did not agree
that there was no help for it. When the spirited discussion which this
remark brought on had run its rather ineffectual course to no
conclusion, the two disputants fell silent, and four of the little group
found themselves looking shyly at Shirley Nairn.
Three of the girls had come up together from the Airlie School in New
York, and Pauline Van Sandford was their leader; Peggy Dillon was a
Philadelphia girl who had chanced upon a room in the "Airlie corridor"
of Pembroke East, and whose short-lived ascendency in '9--'s affairs had
declined, very early in her chairmanship, into dependence upon Pauline;
but Shirley Nairn lived in Merion, and the four knew very little about
her, except that her schoolmates from the Briony School of New Haven
counted on her to win the class presidency from the Airlie candidate. So
now they eyed her sideways, and waited for her views on class politics
as expressing class intelligence; and the pause was just beginning to be
uncomfortable when she lifted her head.
"We might try to better things in our own case," she said tentatively;
"there ought to be a way to make class politics intelligent, but we can
only prove it by doing it."
"How?" asked Louise, while Pauline rapidly decided that Shirley Nairn
did not have that square chin for nothing. Then, taking the floor
herself, Pauline opined that the whole trouble lay in too hasty action.
"We women," she said, rather grandly, and with her usual air of decided
conviction, "we women make up our minds before we think; we look at a
few arguments, listen to our friends' opinions, leap to a conclusion
(usually all wrong), and score another foolish vote."
Peggy's groan of mock despair, which followed this speech, and was meant
to preface a lively protest, was robbed of effect by the sudden sound of
Taylor bell, ringing for lunch-time; and the parliament of five
forthwith dissolved. But as they dispersed, Pauline pledged them all to
come to her room that evening for further discussion of the subject.
They met there accordingly, with a few other high souls who were ripe
for reform; they discussed; and from their discussion there grew a plan.
When the class of '9-- assembled a few days later in Denbigh Students'
Parlour, they expected to nominate and forthwith elect their permanent
officers; but on the latter point a considerable surprise was in store
for them. After the nomination votes for president were cast and
counted, and the result announced--Shirley and Pauline far in the lead,
and very close together, Peggy a modest third, and a few other names
straggling hopelessly in the rear--the chairman rose to tell them that a
change in the usual order of proceedings was proposed. The nominations
for president were now before them; the election was postponed, by order
of the chair, until that day week, in order that during the interval the
class might weigh well its measures before taking the final--Peggy's
tone almost implied, the fatal--step. In the stupefied silence which
followed this announcement, she went on to give the arguments in favour
of the new course. It would give them time to look into the
qualifications of the candidates and form their decision intelligently;
it would prevent mistakes which they might deplore hereafter;
and--superbly--it would mark the beginning of a new epoch in class
politics. The candidates were bound in honour not to canvass for
themselves, or to allow others to do so, and the final ballot was to be
cast according to each voter's conviction of what would be best for the
class. No haste in deciding, no prejudice, no regard to personal
influence; but careful consideration, and final action on the highest
and most disinterested grounds--that was the idea.
When the other nominations were in, and the meeting adjourned, the class
of '9-- went its various ways homeward sorely bewildered. It does not
do, as a rule, to call upon a freshman class for too much disinterested
consideration when it is just recovering from the effects of a freshman
play; but the undergraduate mind will usually rise to a hook that is
baited with the word "epoch-making." So the members of '9-- eager to
make an epoch, fell very earnestly and ardently to work at the business
of weighing and comparing the two chief candidates before them; Peggy's
name was very little under discussion, for her chances were hardly to be
considered seriously, and, as interest centred in the presidency, the
candidates for other offices got very little attention. But concerning
the merits and demerits of Shirley and Pauline, the course of debate ran
high and warm; during the seven days assigned them, the freshmen talked
of little else, and strove hard to prove, by quite a heated exhibition
of partisan spirit, that they were political animals after all, while
the two principal nominees affected an Olympian indifference to the
result, and used a dignified reserve when greeting each other in the
corridors of Taylor. And amused upper classmen made laughing guesses as
to the outcome of the campaign.
But the new plan did not work exactly as its framers had expected, and
in a day or two there were rumours that things were going wrong. By the
middle of the week these rumours had gathered such strength that
Charlotte Meredith, M. A., and Fellow of Bryn Mawr College, felt called
upon to visit her freshman cousin, and hear the news. Accordingly she
knocked at the door of 39 Pembroke East on the afternoon of the fifth
day following the nominations. Charlotte Meredith, whom Pauline called
the Cynic, was a tall, slight girl, pale and clean-looking, with
quantities of very black hair; she had bright, near-sighted grey eyes
behind her glasses, and walked with a stoop; her usual expression was
one of whimsical boredom. There was probably no one in the world whom
Pauline would have cared less to see at her door that afternoon, but she
welcomed the unexpected guest with almost her usual readiness, and tried
to cover the real hollowness of her greeting by eager hospitality in the
line of tea and jam. Peggy was there, too, spreading crackers with a
worried air; and both girls seemed somewhat harassed by Charlotte's
questions as to the outlook for the election, delivered with her
habitual slight drawl and air of fatigued politeness.
"I take a lively interest in it," she told them, in a tone expressive of
anything rather than liveliness, as she stirred her tea; "and I hope you
won't let the fact that you are both candidates embarrass you. This
impersonal campaign of yours is highly novel, and your effort to elevate
class politics into a thing of moral beauty smacks delightfully of
altruism, but may I ask how the thing is likely--in the vulgar
phrase--to pan out?" She nibbled her cracker appreciatively, and gave
the discomfited pair a questioning smile. Peggy squirmed a little, and
said nothing; but Pauline burst out,
"The whole affair is too miserable and humiliating for words, and has
panned out like--like--Charlotte, it is literally past speech! I am
ashamed of belonging to such a small-minded sex, for the girls have
acted abominably."
Charlotte smiled benignly. "As I understand that your reform is in part
a crusade against a statement of mine that woman is not a political
animal, would you mind telling me whether their abominableness throws
any light on that point?"
"Political animals?" cried Pauline; "I should say they were! If we have
a rag of reputation left by the end of the week, I shall be surprised."
"And by 'we' you mean----"
"Shirley Nairn and myself; Peggy seems to have been spared."
"Yes," Peggy assented with the utmost affability, "they are after bigger
game, thank Heaven!" And then, the flood-gates being opened, Charlotte
was favoured with a full, if not very coherent account of '9--'s
enormities. Events had taken a course which was not to be wondered at.
In the ranks of '9--, deliberation had brought on discussion, discussion
had led to dispute; and in the clash of warring factions, each side had
brought so many charges of unfitness against the opposing candidate that
Pauline declared her own character, as well as Shirley's, blackened for
life.
"That is doing fairly well for a purely impersonal campaign not yet five
days old," was Charlotte's grim comment; "I suppose you do not lack for
friends to keep you posted on the state of public opinion."
"My dear Miss Meredith," responded Peggy genially, "the only reason that
the door is not at this moment besieged with news from the seat of war
is that the rest of the class are at freshman drill, which Pauline and I
are sinfully cutting. Only think, Polly, how their tongues are wagging
even now! And how----"
A resounding knock at the door cut her short.