GATHERING CLOUDS.
"Really!" came in surprised exclamation from Vera.
"Hmm! What a congenial pair!" was Helen Trent's placid reception of the
information.
"Like walks with like." Leila's tones vibrated with satirical truth.
"Knaves fall out, but to fall in again."
"I know it," agreed Jerry. "One would naturally suppose that Miss Cairns
would have no use for Row-ena after the net she led her into. Not a bit
of it."
"It must have been a shock, Jeremiah, to look up suddenly and find
yourself in such company." Helen could not repress the ghost of a
chuckle.
"It was. They were lined up for battle. I saw that at a glance. Row-ena
was half laughing; a trick of hers when she is all ready to make a grand
disturbance. Leslie Cairns looked like a Japanese thundercloud. I never
said a word; just sat very straight in my chair. I went on eating my
ice as if I didn't know they were there. Like this."
Jerry gave an imitation of her manner and facial expression on the
occasion she was describing.
"I thought they might give it up as a bad job and go away, but they
stayed. Then Row-ena started in with a regular tirade about Marjorie and
all of us. I can't repeat what she said word for word. Anyway, she
called us all liars. I don't remember what I said, but it must have been
effective. I certainly handed Row-ena my candid opinion of herself. She
saw she was getting the worst of the argument and declared she wouldn't
stay and be so insulted. She started out of the pavilion, calling Miss
Cairns to come along. The fair Leslie wouldn't budge. She told Row-ena
to go on, that she had something to say to me. That was the first remark
she had made. Then she asked me in her slow, drawling way if I would
listen to something she had to say to me. I said I would not. I had
heard too much as it was. I got up and beat it and left her standing
there. I was so sore I forgot to pay for my ice. I had to send Hal back
with the money. As I started away from the pavilion, I saw Row-ena
getting into a dizzy-looking black and white roadster. I think the car
belonged to Miss Cairns. It looked like her. I suppose she and dear
Row-ena had been out for a ride and simply happened to run across me in
the pavilion.
"Now comes the most interesting part of the story." Jerry glanced from
one to another of her attentive little audience. "Three days afterward
the postman left me a letter. The address was typed, so was the letter.
When I opened it, I soon knew the writer. Here it is." Jerry produced a
letter from a white kid bag she was carrying. "The distinguished writer
of this letter is Leslie Cairns. I brought it along to read to you
because what she has to say includes all of us. It's what I would call
an open declaration of war. Listen to this:
"'Miss Macy:
"'Since you refused to listen to me the other day, I must resort to
pen and ink to make you understand that when I have anything to say
to a person I propose to say it. It isn't a case of what you want.
It is a case of what I want. To begin with, I knew all about you
and your pals before ever you came to Hamilton. My friend, Miss
Farnham, heard that you were to enter Hamilton and warned me
against all of you. I had you looked up, as I have powerful ways
and means of doing this.
"'As your friend, Miss Dean, the lying little hypocrite, had made
my friend, Miss Farnham, so much trouble at high school, I decided
to even her score for her. At first I did not intend to allow you
to enter Hamilton at all. When I say "you" I include those dear
chums of yours. My father could easily have arranged to keep you
out of Hamilton. Then I concluded it would be better to let you
come here and make things lively for you.
"'I proposed that call on you ninnies on your first evening at
college. We arranged matters so as to fuss you self-satisfied
freshies a little and keep you from your dinner. We didn't care
anything about meeting you, but we thought we might as well look
you over. Miss Weyman gave it out that she would meet your party
with her car on purpose to keep other students away. We wanted you
to be a little bit lonesome. When you said in your room, that you
saw Miss Weyman's car at the station, we thought perhaps you might
have seen through the joke. But you were so thick. You didn't.
"'Miss Weyman had no intention of wasting good gasoline on you. She
loaded her car with girls on purpose. There was no room to spare.
She stopped it above the station yard and stayed there until after
the train had come in. After a while she drove into the yard and
out again. Not one of us set foot on the platform. It was a clever
bluff and served you precisely right.
"'I haven't either the patience or the will to tell you all the
clever stunts we put over on you simpletons last year. Believe me,
when I say, it isn't a circumstance compared to what we intend to
do this year. You came back at us in March in a way we will not
forget or overlook. You think you are pretty strongly intrenched
because you and your crowd are quite pally with certain upper class
students who pose as wonders of smartness. Well, don't build too
much on your popularity. Popularity sometimes has a habit of
vanishing over night.
"'It seems too bad to be wasting time and paper on you, but I am
square enough to let you have the truth straight from the shoulder.
You girls have made us trouble from the start, and I predict that
it will not be long before Hamilton will be too small to hold your
crowd and mine. Your crowd will be the one to go; not the Sans. I
am not afraid to tell you this, because there is nothing in this
letter that you can get me on.
"'Leslie Cairns.'"
"That is so like Leslie Cairns." Leila's blue eyes flashed their
profound contempt. "She loves to boast of her own ill-doing. She thinks
it gives her a standing among her friends. She poses as being afraid of
nothing and no one.
"That is truly an outrageous letter!" Vera's voice rang with shocked
indignation. "I wonder at her boldness in writing it."
"Ah, but consider! It is a typed letter. Would you mind letting me look
at the signature, Jerry?" Helen requested.
"With pleasure." Jerry willingly surrendered the typed letter to Helen.
The latter studied the signature shrewdly. "I don't think this is Leslie
Cairns signature," she said, shaking her head. "That is about the way I
thought it would be."
"Humph!" Leila had evidently caught Helen's meaning. The others looked a
trifle mystified.
"But Leila just now said the letter sounded like Leslie Cairns!" Jerry
exclaimed. "She wrote it. I am sure of that. Her name is signed to it.
Why then----" Jerry stopped. "Oh, yes," she went on, in sudden
enlightenment. "I begin to understand."
"Of course you do," returned Helen. "In the first place," she explained
to her puzzled listeners, "this letter has neither date nor place of
writing. It is typed and signed 'Leslie Cairns,' but I am almost
positive she did not sign it. She has either disguised her hand or
another person has signed her name to it at her request, you may be
sure. Object--if Jerry decided to make her any trouble at Hamilton over
the letter, she would say she had nothing whatever to do with the
writing of it."
"It would take a whole lot of nerve to do that. After what happened last
year, she could hardly hope to be believed." This was Muriel's view of
the matter.
"Still, if the letter were typed and not signed by her, there would be
no proof that she wrote it unless someone had seen her write it." Helen
argued. "We are positive she wrote it, because the contents of the
letter tally with the Sans' attitude and actions toward Marjorie and you
Sandfordites. Yet, what would hinder her from saying that some friend of
yours, to whom you had told your troubles, or, that even one of you five
girls wrote that letter, simply for spite? I do not say that she would
do so. I only say she might. She is capable of it."
"I agree with you, Helen. Leslie Cairns would stand before President
Matthews and declare up and down that she never dreamed of writing such
a letter, if it pleased her to do it." Leila spoke with conviction. "She
took chances, of course, of being called to account for the statements
she made in the letter. Undoubtedly, she had her whole course of action
planned out before ever she wrote it. While she couldn't be sure you
wouldn't make a fuss about it, because of the way Ronny brought the Sans
to book last March, she could plan the best way to brazen it out if she
got into difficulties over it.
"Just imagine! She had a grudge against the Lookouts before ever she met
them. Leila and I were always suspicious of the way Natalie Weyman
acted about meeting you at the station. We could not fathom the object
of such a performance. We both thought there was more to it than
appeared on the surface." Vera nodded wisely.
"And all on account of the maliciousness of Row-ena Farnham. Why, none
of us had seen her for over two years! We supposed she belonged to our
departed high school days." Muriel's tones betrayed decided umbrage.
"You can make up your minds that I don't intend ever to serve on any
reform committees--object, the betterment of the heathen; the Sans, I
mean." Jerry made this announcement with a shade of belligerence.
Unconsciously she turned her eyes toward Marjorie.
Marjorie laughed. "I know what you are thinking, Jeremiah," she said,
with quiet amazement. "Don't worry. I shall not suggest a reform
movement here for the Sans' moral benefit."
"Glad of it. Imagine me laboring patiently with that benighted heathen,
Leslie Cairns, to help her to see herself as others see her," grumbled
Jerry.
"How much the Sans would enjoy being called the heathen," interposed
Katherine Langly.
"It's appropriate. When people behave like savages, they class
themselves as such. It is a pity that we should be obliged to consider
fellow students as enemies!" Jerry continued with vehemence. "Why
should petty spite be carried to the point where it is a menace to the
whole college? An institution for the higher education of young girls in
particular should be free of such ignobility."
"Fights and fusses are not conducive to the cultivation of a scholarly
mind," Helen Trent agreed with mock solemnity.
"They are not," returned Leila, with a strong Celtic inflection of which
she, in her earnestness, was entirely unconscious.
Naturally it evoked laughter. Leila's occasional slight lapses into a
brogue were invariably amusing to her chums.
"Laugh at my brogue if you wish, I will not break your bones," she said
good-humoredly, making use of an ancient Irish expression. "I am most
Celtic when serious. Ah, well! Perhaps it is petty in us even to be
discussing the Sans, since we can say nothing good of them."
"That is their fault; not ours," Lucy Warner said incisively.
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in their stars, but in themselves,
that they are underlings," Vera aptly applied with a change of pronouns.
"Quite right, my child. They began it. Not one of us, before the
Lookouts came here to Hamilton, raised a voice against the Sans. We know
the Lookouts did not. This letter Leslie Cairns wrote to Jerry means
war to the knife, all this year. Unless, by good fortune, Miss Remson
has won her point and they are not to come back to the Hall. With them
out of Wayland Hall we might hope for peace. Put them in other campus
houses, they would soon lose track of you girls and turn their bad
attentions to or on someone else. Miss Remson has a strong case against
them on account of the way they treated Marjorie." Such was Helen's
opinion.
Marjorie flushed at mention of the Sans' bad treatment of herself. She
glanced at Ronny, who returned the glance with an enigmatical smile.
Leila was staring at Marjorie, her face also a study.
"Girls," Marjorie began, in her clear resonant enunciation, "I shall
have to tell you something that only Ronny and Leila know. I told Leila
only this afternoon. I asked Miss Remson not to mention the Sans'
treatment of me in her complaint to the president. I had a long talk
with her last June before college closed. I asked Ronny if she cared if
I did so, because she had gone to the trouble of getting Miss Archer
here and spared no pains to help me. All of you helped me, too, but
Ronny and Miss Remson did the hardest part. Ronny said I must do
whatever my conscience dictated. I felt that I did not wish to have
anything to do with their leaving the Hall. If Miss Remson wins or has
won her point against them, that's different. Last March, before we held
the meeting in the living room, it seemed as if I could not endure being
under the same roof with them. That feeling passed away. They were so
utterly defeated. Miss Remson says she has enough insubordinate and
really lawless acts on their part against them to warrant their being
transferred to another campus house. She said it had been done
occasionally in past years with beneficial results."
"That means the Sans will be at the Hall again this year." Resentment
burned briefly in Helen's eyes. Slow to anger, she was slower to
forgive.
"We don't know that yet," resumed Ronny. "All this happened last June.
Miss Remson made her complaint then, I believe. She intended to, at any
rate. Naturally, we could not ask her about the result, and she said
nothing more about it before we went home. I think she will mention it
to Marjorie and me. If she does we will ask if we may tell you girls who
were interested in the affair of last March."
"We'll know anyway, if the Sans appear bag and baggage," put in
practical Lucy.
"Yes; but I mean Miss Remson will tell us the details," returned Ronny.
"Wherever the Sans live on the campus, our best way is to go on about
our own affairs regardless of them. I hate to think of Hamilton College
as a battle ground. I will fight for my rights, if I must, but I will
ignore a worthless enemy as long as I can. We must make our plans for a
happier Hamilton, which does not include the Sans. We must create a
spirit of unity here that will discount cliques." Marjorie argued with
deep earnestness. "If we fight, shoulder to shoulder, for the best, in
time we shall attain it. It's our influence that will count. It may not
be felt at once; gradually it will be. We need not expect the Sans will
change their views. We must put them in the background by being true and
kindly and honorable. Then their false standards will count for
nothing."