GETTING SETTLED
After the first busy and exciting weeks when everything was new and a
little terrifying, the girls settled down to regular work and, at times
to a rather dull life, so sometimes very small events loomed quite large
to their young eyes. Of course there were letters from home. And there
was no more thrilling moment in the day than that in which Sallie
Dickinson appeared on the school platform, at the close of the two
o’clock session, with the old brown mail bag under her arm.
Sallie’s blouses were old and faded and her skirt had seen better days
but little Jane Pool declared that the post-girl always looked just like
an angel when she stepped in through the doorway with that dingy bag.
And of course the girls wrote letters, large numbers of them, to the
persons on their writing lists. Some of them liked to write letters and
wrote very fat ones. Some of them, like Mabel for instance, hated to
write letters and wrote very thin ones. One rainy afternoon, the
freckled girl, Cora Doyle, regaled her friends with a distressing tale.
“Do you know,” said she, from her perch on Jean’s window sill, “I
believe Dr. Rhodes _reads_ our letters before he sends them. Mine are
always late getting to my folks and I’ve seen heaps of letters stacked
up in his office for days at a time. And one evening I went in to ask
for a piece of courtplaster for Ruth Dennis’s thumb and all those Rhodes
people were around a table doing something to a lot of mail.”
“Perhaps,” said Jean, who knew that Cora was apt to make mountains out
of molehills, “they were just looking to see if they were stamped or
properly addressed. You know they have to bring them back to us
sometimes for reasons like that.”
“I don’t know,” returned Cora. “Things are queer and different this
year. I’d like to, but I can’t tell you why.”
“_Do_ tell us,” begged Henrietta.
“No, I can’t. I promised not to.”
“There’s one thing,” said Jean, “that surprises me. Doctor Rhodes isn’t
a bit like a school teacher. And when he talks to us in the school room
as he sometimes does when he has anything to announce like new rules or
a lecture or a concert in the village, he often uses the wrong word or
mispronounces a word, as if—well, as if he weren’t used to making
speeches in very good English.”
“I think he gets rattled,” said little Jane Pool, sagely.
“Somehow,” said Marjory, “I don’t exactly like Doctor Rhodes. I don’t
exactly _believe_ in him.”
“I don’t quite like him, either,” declared Henrietta, who had washed her
wonderful mop of hair and was drying it with a large bathtowel. “I’m
surprised at my Grandmother for saying such nice things about him. When
there are visitors he seems so oily and so smooth; and it seems to me
that he is extra polite to those Miller girls—all the world uses their
father’s soap, you know—but when he asks Sallie to do errands he doesn’t
even say please. And Mrs. Rhodes is always gliding about like the ghost
of Hamlet’s Father. She looks as if she were listening with all her
features. But she never _says_ a thing to us, even when she catches us
slipping around through the corridors after lights are out.”
“I’m glad she doesn’t,” said Marjory. “She _looks_ all the things she
doesn’t say.”
“After all,” said Jean, sagely, “they might be a lot worse.”
The next day was Sunday and Sundays were quite different from all the
other days. In the morning the girls always marched two by two to church
a long mile away, where they sat in the front pews with their eyes fixed
upon the clergyman. This often proved a trying ordeal for that gentleman
because this particular church had no regular rector. Instead, each
Sunday, a student from the Theological Seminary just north of the
village offered up home made prayers and stammered forth his first
sermon before the long suffering members of that little church. Each
successive student, it seemed, was more bashful than the last; and if
any one of those blushing young preachers had ever learned to deliver a
sermon, he promptly forgot all he knew, when, for the first time, he
faced a congregation. There was one thing, however, that all these
stuttering young men _could_ do and that was to perspire copiously and
continuously. No matter how many impressive gestures the preacher might
have practised at home beforehand, he used only one while he occupied
that pulpit. With handkerchief clutched firmly in his shaking right
hand, he mopped and mopped and mopped his dripping brow.
While the girls couldn’t help being amused, they were always sorry for
the tortured youths.
“You wouldn’t think,” said Cora, after one of these painful ordeals,
“that they’d be afraid to face thirty or forty girls but they always
are. Just as soon as their eyes light on those ten pews full of Highland
Hall girls, their carefully prepared words take flight, and I guess
_they’d_ like to, too.”
“They seem to find it almost as hard to pass the plate,” laughed
Henrietta. “When they get to us their knees begin to wobble.”
“It’s because we stare at those poor creatures so unmercifully,” said
Jean. “Even a real minister would be embarrassed, I should think.”
“I’m sorry for them, too,” said Bettie, “but they _are_ funny. Of course
they have to learn to preach if they’re going to be ministers, but it
seems cruel to make them do it that way.”
“Just like dumping puppies into cold water to teach them to swim,” said
Marjory.
“It isn’t very much like our kind of church,” complained Bettie. “It’s
too entertaining. We’re Episcopalians and _our_ ministers don’t _have_
to learn how to make their own prayers—the folks that make them know
how.”
“Yes,” said Jean, “we’re all getting lonesome for our own kind of
services. That’s one thing we miss.”
“Well, then,” said Sallie Dickinson, “I have some good news for you. In
about four weeks more the new Episcopal Church will be ready for use and
you can go there. Miss Woodruff and Mrs. Henry Rhodes are Episcopalians,
so perhaps we’ll _all_ go. We used to go to the old church before it was
torn down.”
“I think,” said Henrietta, demurely, “we ought to come back to this
church once in a while just to keep those poor Theologs perspiring. Miss
Woodruff says perspiring is necessary to good health.”
The Sunday dinners were apt to be rather good; there was usually
chicken.
“But,” complained Mabel, after one of these chicken dinners, “I don’t
see why I have to get all the lizzers and gizzers.”
“What!” gasped Maude.
“Givers and lizzers; no, gizzers and lizards,” sputtered Mabel. “I
_always_ get them.”
“She means livers and gizzards,” explained Jean.
Sunday afternoons dragged. The girls could walk within bounds but that
was not particularly exciting. On week days they usually gathered nuts
in the grove—if one threw enough sticks it was possible to knock down a
hickory nut or two most any day; or explored an ancient garden in which
there were old apple trees. But in Sunday frocks and Sunday shoes it was
wiser to stick to the sidewalks, so the girls strolled about and
gossiped. It was truly surprising how much they found to talk about.
Sometimes on rainy Sunday afternoons, Henrietta gathered a flock of the
younger girls about her on the wide front staircase, a dim, spooky,
black walnutty place with a vast dark space overhead, and told thrilling
tales. That was one thing that Henrietta could do to perfection.
But Sunday evenings at Highland Hall were almost invariably harrowing.
The girls gathered about the piano in the big, chilly drawing room and
sang familiar hymns and wept.
Sallie Dickinson wept because she hadn’t any home. The rest of them wept
because they had. Still, Sunday after Sunday evening they sang the same
sorrowful hymns because it seemed the proper thing to do, and then
retired sniffling and snuffling to their narrow, single beds.
“They _like_ it,” declared Mrs. Henry Rhodes. “Boarding school girls
always do it, and they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t enjoy it.”
There was one Sunday evening, however, when the gloom was somewhat
lightened; and when giggles supplanted sobs. Stout Miss Woodruff, clad
in her smooth gray serge gown, with its white vest for Sunday use only,
usually sat in a large arm-chair at the end of the room, in order to
lend dignity to the meeting. But on this occasion she was absent and had
asked Abbie to take her place. Poor scatter-brained Abbie had forgotten
all about it so the chair was vacant. But not for long.
The chief ornament of the high mantel shelf was a large stuffed bird—a
penguin. When it became evident to the waiting girls that no one was
coming to occupy that vacant chair, Maude Wilder, always resourceful,
climbed upon a chair, seized the stately penguin and placed him in the
chair. With his dignity, his mildly disapproving eye and his smooth gray
and white plumage, his resemblance to stern Miss Woodruff—vest and
all—was so striking and so amusing that the astonished girls burst forth
with a chorus of giggles instead of words when Mrs. Henry Rhodes, at the
piano, played the opening notes of the first hymn.
Of course Mrs. Henry turned around to see what caused this most unusual
hilarity. When she saw the solemn penguin doing his birdlike best to be
human and succeeding so admirably in filling Miss Woodruff’s place, Mrs.
Henry not only giggled but laughed outright; and all the pupils,
including the lofty Seniors, joined in. For the rest of the evening,
even the saddest hymns failed to bring on a single case of homesickness.
“But,” warned Mrs. Henry, restoring the bird to his lofty perch when the
singing was finished, “we must never do this again. We’ve all been very
bad.”
“I love that lady,” said Maude, on the way upstairs. “If _she_ were my
teacher I’d be good all the time.”
“I hope,” giggled Sallie Dickinson, “I won’t forget and call Miss
Woodruff ‘Miss Penguin.’ I shall never be able to dust that bird again
without thinking of her.”