CONSEQUENCES
For her junior year Bea was fortunate enough to secure a mail-route, the
proceeds of which helped to make her independent of a home allowance for
spending money. To tell the truth, however, she enjoyed the work even
more than the salary. While distributing the letters she felt a personal
share in every delighted, "Oh, thank you!" in each ever-unsatisfied, "Is
that all?" or the disappointed, "Nothing for me to-day?"
From her own experience and observation during the years already past,
she was particularly interested in the different pairs of roommates who
came within the scope of her daily trips. In a certain double lived two
freshmen, one of whom always greeted her with, "Oh, thank you!" whether
the mail was addressed to her or to her roommate. But when the roommate
answered the knock, she invariably exclaimed, no matter how much was
handed to her, "Is that all?"
More than once in her reports to Lila, Bea declared that it was about
time for a wave of reform in the vicinity of Ethelwynne Bruce. Perhaps
she might even have contemplated the possibility of engineering something
of the kind herself, if she had not been too busy to spare the necessary
thought-energy. In the course of events, fate with its machinery of
circumstances added an extra lesson to Ethelwynne's college course.
It happened one evening during the skating season.
Ethelwynne with her skates jingling over her arm came shivering into the
room. "Oo-oo-ooh!" Her teeth chattered. "Wynnie's freezing. Do shut that
window and turn on the heat, Agnes. It is hard lines to live in a double
with a regular Polar bear direct from the land of Sparta. You ought to
keep it up as high as forty degrees anyhow."
"Sh-h!" The smooth dark head at the desk bent lower over the water-color
before her. "Don't interrupt this minute. There's a dear. I've got to
catch this last streak of daylight----"
"But it isn't daylight," fretted Ethelwynne, "the moon's up already. And
I'm so chilly! I wish you would help me make some hot chocolate."
"Look at the thermometer. Ah, one more stroke of that exquisite saffron
on the stem! Hush, now. Look at the thermometer, look at the
thermometer," she muttered abstractedly while concentrating all her
mental attention in the tips of her skilful fingers.
Ethelwynne stared at her a moment before giving a little chuckle that
ended in a shiver. "Look at the thermometer, look at the thermometer,"
she echoed sarcastically, "I reckon that'll warm me up, won't it? Like
somebody or other who set a lighted candle inside the fireless stove and
then warmed himself at the glowing isinglass. Suppose your old
thermometer does say seventy or eighty or ninety or a hundred? Maybe it
is telling a story. Why should I trust an uneducated instrument that has
never studied ethics? Now listen here!" She lifted her skates and poised
them to throw from high above her head. "Hist! if you don't drop those
hideous toadstools of yours and begin to sympathize with me this instant,
I shall hur-r-rl this clanking steel----"
Agnes still painting busily raised one elbow in an attitude of
half-unconscious defense.
"----upon the floor-r-r!"
At the crashing rattlety-bang Agnes sprang to her feet with a nervous
shriek. Ethelwynne dived for her skates and felt them carefully. "I tried
to pick out the softest spot on the rug," she complained whimsically,
"but there wasn't any other way to wake her up. And I simply had to have
some sympathy. Oo-oo-ooh, Wynnie's freezing!"
Agnes had returned to her brushes and was wiping them dry in heartless
silence.
"Wynnie's freezing, I say."
"Say it again," counseled the other's calm voice. "I am so provoked at
myself for jumping at every little noise! It is shameful to have so
little control over my own nerves even if I am tired. Ah! what was that?"
"Jump again," advised Ethelwynne in a tone that was meant to be serene
but proved rather jerky. "It was nothing but my teeth chattering and
clicking together."
"Generally it's your tongue," retorted Agnes with interest but broke off
in this promising repartee to exclaim with genuine anxiety, "Why, Wynnie,
child, you have a regular chill. Lie down quick and let me cover you up.
Have you been out skating ever since I left you on the lake?"
"Yes, I have," she replied with an air of defiance, "you needn't preach.
I couldn't bear to come in. Everybody out. We had square dances,
shinney-on-the-ice, wood tag. Perfectly glorious! Such a splendid elegant
sunset behind the bare trees! I simply had to stay. Beatrice Leigh and
her crowd were there. A big moon came sailing up. We skated to
music--somebody whistled it. I couldn't bear to stop. I wanted to stay, I
tell you. I wanted to stay."
"Hm-m," said Agnes, "I wanted to stay too. But what with the Latin test
to-morrow and this plate for the book on fungi to be sent off in the
morning, I managed to tear myself away."
"You're different. Oo-oo-ooh!" Ethelwynne shivered violently again. "You
like to deny yourself. You enjoy discipline. It gives you pleasure to do
what you hate. You love duty just because it is disagreeable."
"My--land!" Agnes clutched her own head. "The infant must have slipped up
a dozen times too often. Did the horrid bad ice smite her at the base of
the brain? Poor little darling! Is her intellect all mixedy-muddle-y? We
will fix it right for her. We'll give her a pill."
"I think I have caught cold," moaned her roommate from the depths of the
blankets.
Agnes looked judicial. "Our doctor at home has a theory that people take
cold easily when they have been eating too much sweet stuff. He says that
colds are most frequent after Thanksgiving. Now I wonder--I believe--why,
you surely did go to a meeting of the fudge-club in Martha's room last
night. Ethelwynne, did you eat it? Did you eat it even after all the
doctor said to you about your sick headaches?"
"Of course I ate it. How do you expect me to sit hungry in a roomful of
girls all digging into that plateful of brown delicious soft hot fudge
with their little silver spoons, and I not even tasting it? I hated to
make myself conspicuous before the juniors there. They would think I am a
hypochondriac, and Berta Abbott might have said something to make the
others look at me and laugh. I don't believe the stuff hurts me a
particle. Doctors always want you to give up the things you like best."
"Oh, Ethelwynne!" groaned Agnes, "you never deny yourself anything. It is
the only trait I don't like in you. Now you have caught a dreadful cold
just because you could not refuse the candy. You must break it up with
quinine." She fetched a small box from the bureau in her bedroom. "Here,
open your mouth."
The other girl opened her mouth obediently. "I love pills. We're
homeopaths, you know. Once when I was a baby, I got hold of mother's
medicine chest and ate all the pellets. I thought they were candy.
Sweet--oh, delicious! I used to enjoy being sick. And now this nice big
chocolate-coated pill!" She sprang up suddenly, her face twisted into an
expression of agony. "Oh, oh, oh!"
Agnes white as a sheet flew to her side. "What is it? Quick, quick,
Wynnie! Is it your heart? Your head? A darting pain! Where, oh, where?"
"Crackie!" Ethelwynne ruefully rubbed her mouth. "I've been sucking that
pill."
After a moment's struggle to retain her sympathetic gravity, Agnes gave
way and dropping her head on her hands shook alarmingly for at least half
a minute.
"I told you I was a homeopath," expostulated Ethelwynne, "how was I to
know that allopaths always swallow their pills whole?"
"Wh-wh-why did you suppose it was coated with chocolate?" gasped Agnes.
"So as to improve the taste of course and tempt me to eat it. I am fond
of chocolate. If it is my duty to eat a pill, I want it to be inviting. I
don't want to do anything that I don't want to do, specially when I am
sick. Well, anyhow, I shall never touch another."
However, by bedtime Ethelwynne was feeling so miserable that finally
after long urging she consented to swallow another dose of quinine in the
orthodox way. She allowed Agnes to put a hot water bottle at her feet and
to tuck in the coverlets cozily; and then she tried to go to sleep. But
that was another story. It was a story of fitful jerks and starts, of
burning fever alternating with shivering spells, of terrifying dreams and
wretched haunted hours of wakefulness. At last the longed-for morning
stole in at the windows to find her eyes heavy, her limbs languid, her
brain muddled and dull, her head roaring.
It was the quinine that had done it--she knew it was--unspeakably worse
than the cold unattended. Worried Agnes acknowledged that the dose might
effect some systems violently.
"But it has broken up your cold," she pleaded, "that's certainly gone."
"What?" said Ethelwynne fretfully, "don't mumble so and run your words
together. I can't hear the gong very well either. And the Latin test is
coming the first hour after breakfast. I haven't had a chance to review
an ode. I feel so wretched! Oh, me! oh, me!"
Ethelwynne never forgot that Latin test. The very first line written by
the instructor on the blackboard smote her with despair. She had never
been able to translate from hearing anyhow. This morning when Miss Sawyer
took her seat on the platform and opened her book, Ethelwynne bent
forward anxiously, every nerve alert and strained. What was the first
word? Oh, what was it? She had not caught it. It sounded blurred and mazy
with no ending at all. And the next--and the next! And the third! Now she
had lost it. The first was gone. She had forgotten the second. The voice
went reading on and on. She floundered after, falling farther and farther
behind. There wasn't any sense to it, and she couldn't hear the words
plainly, and everything was all mixed up. The other girls seemed to
understand. They were writing down the translation as fast as they could
scribble--at least some of them were. But she could not make out a
particle of meaning. It was Agnes's fault--it was all her fault. She had
coaxed her to take the quinine, and now she could not hear plainly or
think or remember or anything.
In wrathful discouragement she turned to the rest of the questions. One
or two were short and easy. She managed to do the translations already
familiar. But when she reached the last part and attempted to write down
an ode which she had memorized the week before, she found that many of
the words had slipped away from her. The opening line was vivid enough,
then came a blank ending in a phrase that kept dancing trickily from spot
to spot in her visual imagination of the page. Here she recalled two
words, there three, with a vanishing, vague, intangible verse between.
The meaning had slid away utterly, leaving only these faulty mechanical
impressions of the way the poem had looked in print. Struggle as she
would, the thought frolicked and pranced just beyond the grasp of her
memory.
Ethelwynne bit her lip grimly and put the cap on her fountain-pen. It was
not the slightest use. Miss Sawyer had always told them to learn the odes
understandingly, not in parrot fashion. It was better to submit a blank
than a paper scribbled with detached words and phrases. It was all
Agnes's fault--every bit. She had forced her to swallow that pill--the
pill that had muddled her brain and dulled her hearing--the pill which
was causing her to flunk in Latin. She had known that ode perfectly only
the previous day. It wasn't her fault--it was entirely Agnes's. She would
go instantly and tell her so.
And she went the moment class was over. To be sure, she did not go so
fast as she wished, for her head had a queer way of spinning dizzily at
every sudden movement. Once or twice her knees faltered disconcertingly
in her progress down the corridor. But at last she reached the room and
walked in with a backward slam of the door.
Agnes was putting the final touches to the water-color drawing of
exquisite fungi before her.
"Sh-h," she murmured, "don't interrupt. Just one more stroke--and
another--now this tiny one. There, it is finished. Professor Stratton
sends her manuscript off to-day and she is waiting for this. Think of it!
Thirty dollars for this sheet of paper! Thirty whole big beautiful
dollars to send home for Christmas. They need it pretty badly. I've
worked hours and hours, and now they shall have a real Christmas! I know
what mother wants and couldn't afford----"
Ethelwynne stamped her foot. "It was all your fault. I couldn't hear. I
couldn't think. I couldn't remember. The pill did it. You made me take
it. You always think you know best. You're always preaching and advising.
You wanted to make me flunk. You knew it would make my ears ring and my
head whirl. You did it on purpose. I shall never forgive you, never,
never, never!"
"What!"
At the tone Ethelwynne suddenly shivered, threw herself on the couch, and
fell to crying weakly. "I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it at all. I only
wanted to say something horrid. I wanted you to suffer too. I just wanted
to say it, and so I did say it. Oh, oh, oh, I am so miserable! I want to
go home."
Agnes paid no attention. In her sudden sharp resentment at the
preposterous accusation, she had swung around in her chair, and her elbow
had tipped over the inkwell, spilling the contents over the desk. She sat
staring in horrified silence at her ruined drawing.
Finally Ethelwynne puzzled by the continued stillness peered with one eye
from the sheltering fringes. She sprang up with a jump.
"Agnes, your beautiful fungi!"
A knock sounded at the door.
"Come," called Agnes in mechanical response. There was a pause; then the
knob turned and the visitor entered with diffident step.
Ethelwynne hastily smoothed her hair with one hand and felt of her belt
with the other. "Oh, good evening, Professor Stratton," she stuttered
from surprised embarrassment, "I mean, good morning. How do you do? Won't
you sit down?"
Agnes turned to look, and rose in sober greeting.
"You see it is spoiled," she pointed to the ink-splotched drawing. "It
was an accident. You don't know how exceedingly sorry I am, Professor
Stratton. The work on your book can go on without it, I hope."
The older woman forgot her incorrigible shyness in dismay. "What a shame!
How distressing!" She hurried forward impulsively to examine the sheet.
"Since you brought it to me last night I have been exulting in the
thought of it. You have great talent for such work. The time you have
spent on it! How distressing!" She stopped in thoughtful fear that she
might be adding to the girl's disappointment. "An accident, you say? How
did it happen?"
"Something startled me so that I twirled around in my seat, and my elbow
knocked the ink over. I--I am very sorry." Her lips felt stiff.
Ethelwynne watching with miserable eyes saw her moisten them. They were
drooping at the corners.
"It is my fault," she burst out hurriedly, "it is all my fault. I made her
jump. I startled her on purpose. I said mean things to her because I felt
like saying them. I felt like saying them because I had flunked in Latin.
And I flunked in Latin because I took a p-p-pill--oh, no, no! I mean,
because I caught cold from staying out on the ice too long. And I stayed
out long because I wanted to. And the reason why I caught cold from
staying out too long was because my digestion was upset from eating fudge
when the doctor told me not to. And I ate the fudge because I wanted it.
And it is all my fault. It is all because I do things just because I want
to do them and not because I ought to do them or ought not to do them. I
ought to leave them undone, you know. And Prexie says that most miseries
in life come from that attitude of I-do-it-because-I-want-to-do-it-and-
I-don't-do-it-because-I-don't-want-to-do-it. And now Agnes won't have
thirty dollars to send home for Christmas. And it is all my----"
"Hush!" said Agnes, "hush, now, dear! That'll be all right. It was my
fault anyhow. I should have had better control of my nerves and learned
not to let myself get startled." She smiled reassuringly across the bowed
head into Professor Stratton's concerned eyes.
"I will see what I can do about holding back the manuscript till you
reproduce the drawing," said the older woman, "it is barely possible that
I can manage it."
As the door closed softly behind her, Ethelwynne lifted her tear-wet
face.
"Agnes, do you think it was the pill that did it?"
"Did what? Everything?"
"Oh, no, no! Was it the pill that made me flunk in Latin?"
"I don't know," she answered doubtfully, "perhaps it helped."
"I want to say it was the pill. I want to believe it was the pill. I want
to, but I won't, because it wasn't--not really way down underneath truly,
you know. It was my own selfish self." She reached up both arms to draw
Agnes closer in a repentant hug. "Wynnie's sorry," she said.