DRAMATICS
There are pleasanter places to be at midnight than the dark room of a
strange water tower, but Betty was not frightened. She tripped over some
tool as she felt for the door and discovered that she had lost her sense
of direction completely.
"I'm all turned around," was the way she expressed it. "I must start and
go around the sides, feeling till I come to the door."
Following this plan, she did come to the door and confidently turned the
knob. The door stuck and she rattled the knob sharply. Then the
explanation dawned on her.
The door was locked!
Could it have a spring lock? she wondered. Then she remembered a day
when, on exploration bent, a group of girls had made the trip to the roof
and the kindly Dave McGuire had taken a key from his pocket and unlocked
the door of the little room for the more adventurous ones who wanted to
climb up and see the inside.
"It was a flat key, like a latch key," Betty reflected. "The girls must
have had the door unlocked for me to-night, but I don't think they would
follow me and lock it. That would be mean!"
However, the door was locked and she was a prisoner. It was inky black
and at every step she seemed to knock over something or stumble against
cold iron. Gradually her eyes became accustomed to the lack of light, and
she made out the outlines of something against the wall.
"Why, there is a window--I remember!" she said aloud. "I wonder if I can
reach it."
Cautiously she felt her way around and stretched up tentative fingers.
She could barely touch the lower frame.
Then, for the first time, Betty felt a little shiver of fear and
apprehension. It was close in the tower room, and the smell of oil and
dead air began to be oppressive. She had no wish to shout, even if she
could be heard, a doubtful probability, for she had no mind to be rescued
before the curious eyes of the entire school.
"I'll get out of it somehow, if I have to stay here all night," she told
herself pluckily. "Oh, my goodness, what was that?"
A tiny sawing noise in one corner of the room sent Betty scurrying to
the other side. She would have indignantly denied any fear of mice or
rats, but the bravest girl might be excused from a too close
acquaintance thrust upon her in the dark. Betty had no wish to put her
fingers on a mouse.
"How can I get out?" she cried aloud, a little wildly. "I can't breathe!"
In the uncanny silence that followed the sound of her voice, the sawing
noise sounded regularly, rhythmically. In desperation Betty seized an
iron crowbar she had backed into on the wall, and hurled it in the
direction of the industrious rodents.
"Now I've done it," she admitted, as with a clatter and a bang that, she
was sure, could be heard a mile away, an evident avalanche of tools
tumbled to the floor. Her crowbar had struck a box of tools.
But the silence shut down again after that. Betty did not realize that
the water tower was so isolated that even unusual noises inside it would
not carry far, and with the door and the window both closed the room was
practically sealed.
The sawing noise was not repeated, there was that much to be grateful
for, Betty reflected. She wondered if she could batter down the door.
"I'll try, anyway," she thought wearily.
And then she could not find the crowbar! Around and around she went,
feeling on the floor for the tools that had clattered down with such a
racket and for the iron bar she had hurled among them. Not one tool could
she put her hands on.
"I must be going crazy," she cried in despair. "I couldn't have dreamed
those tools fell down, and yet where could they have gone? There's no
hole in the floor--"
Now Betty's nerves were sorely tried by the lonely imprisonment, the bad
air, the heat, and the darkness, and it is not to be wondered at that her
usual sound common sense was tricked by her imagination. Her fancy
suggested that the weight of the tools might have torn a hole in the
floor, they might have dropped through to the roof, and Betty herself
might be in momentary danger of stepping into this hole.
Nonsense? Well, wiser minds have conceived wilder possibilities under
similar trying conditions.
"I won't walk another step!" cried poor Betty, as she visioned this
yawning hole. "Not another step. I'll wait till it's light."
But she waited, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, and the darkness if
anything grew blacker. She had no idea how long she had been locked in
the room, and she could not calculate how far off the morning might be.
"I'll put my hands out before me and creep," she said finally. "That
ought to be safe. Perhaps I can find something to stand on to reach that
window. I guess I could drop to the roof from there."
Stiffly and painfully, she began to crawl, holding out her hands before
her and starting back time and again as she fancied she felt an opening
just ahead. But when she brought up against a step ladder she forgot her
fears in the joy of her discovery.
It was a short ladder, but she dragged it over to the window and put it
in place and mounted it, all in the twinkling of an eye. By stretching to
her full height, she was able to raise the creaky window, but to her
dismay the roof offered a very long drop. She had not realized how high
she had climbed.
"Dave was fussing with ropes and buckets the other day," she recalled.
"Now I wonder--wouldn't it be the best luck in the world if I could
find a rope?"
Hope was singing high in her heart now, but she almost despaired of such
good fortune after a diligent search. Then something told her to feel
about again on the floor. Round and round she went, getting her fingers
into spider webs and sticky substances that renewed her inward shudders
because she could not identify them. And when she found the rope, a tarry
coil, she also solved the mystery of the tools. They had fallen down
behind the coil of rope and were effectively fenced off from the circle
of floor explored by the bewildered Betty.
It was the work of a moment to tie one end of the rope to a heavy staple
driven under the window sill, and then, closing her eyes to the pitch
black void beneath her, Betty let herself slide down to the roof. Her
hands were cruelly scratched by the rope fibres and she was too tired to
care about the evidences of her flight.
"If anybody wants to know about that rope and the locked door, let 'em!"
she sighed defiantly.
Bobby woke up as Betty came in the door, and then there were questions
galore to be answered. Betty was covered with dust and her clothing was
torn and rumpled. Bobby declared she looked as if she had been to war.
"I feel it," admitted Betty. "Let me take a hot bath and get into bed.
And, Bobby, promise me on your word of honor that you'll call me in the
morning. Whoever locked me in expects me to stay there till I'm missed,
and I want to walk into breakfast as usual."
She half regretted her instructions when Bobby called her at seven the
next morning, but Betty was nothing if not gritty, and she sleepily
struggled into her clothes. Ada Nansen's look of utter astonishment when
she saw Betty come into the dining room with the rest for breakfast told
those in the secret what they had already suspected.
"Bobby must have heard her listening at our door last night," said
Betty. "What am I going to do? Why nothing, of course! That was part of
the stunt, or at least I'm going to consider it so. My card is there, so
they'll know I fulfilled my part."
Dave McGuire scratched his head when he found the rope and the open
window, but he wisely said nothing. He had two keys, and one he had
loaned at the request of the senior class president to a fellow student.
The other key, for emergency use, hung on a nail in the fourth story
hall. That was the key Dave found in the door lock when he made his early
morning tour of inspection. "But the young folks must be having their
fun," he said indulgently, "and, short of burning down the place, 'tis
not Dave McGuire who will be interfering with 'em."
Mid-term tests were approaching. Bobby, who, with all her love of fun,
was a hard student, felt prepared and went around serenely. Constance
Howard had, most humanly, neglected, so far as the teacher of mathematics
permitted, the study that was hardest for her, her algebra. She now spent
hours in "cramming" on this, meanwhile complaining to those of her
special chums who would listen to her of "the unfairness of being made to
study algebra."
"I can add--with the use of my fingers--and subtract and divide and
multiply--at least I know the tables up through the twelves. Of what use
will a's and b's and x's, y's and z's ever be to me?"
"Constance, you know that's nonsense," Bobby told her. "We're every one
of us here because we want to play a bigger part in life than the
two-plus-two-is-four people, and we've got to dig in and prepare
ourselves. If you'd do your work when you ought to, you wouldn't be in
such an upset state now."
"Yes'm," grinned Constance, and went back to her belated work.
Betty had found that her year away from school had made it hard for her
to concentrate her mind on her studies, and while she had not
deliberately neglected her work, as Constance had in her algebra, she had
not always kept up to the highest pitch. She was working furiously now,
with the tests to face so soon, and with it went the resolve to be more
studious from day to day during the rest of the school year. The
concentration was becoming easier, too, as the term advanced, and, the
teaching at Shadyside being of the best, she felt sure she would feel
that she had accomplished something by the end of the year.
The Dramatic Club of Shadyside woke to ambition as the term progressed.
Soon after the mid-term tests, which all the girls, even Constance,
passed successfully, by dint of threat and bribery, each student was
"tried out" and her ability duly catalogued.
Betty liked to act, and proved to have a natural talent, while Bobby,
professing a great love for things theatrical, was hopeless on the stage.
Her efforts either moved her coaches to helpless laughter or caused them
to retire in indignant tears.
"She is--what you call it?--impossible!" sighed Madame, the French
teacher, shaking her head after witnessing one rehearsal in which Bobby,
as the villain, had convulsed the actors as well as the student audience.
"Well then, I'll be a stage hand," declared Bobby, whose feelings
were impervious to slights. "I'm going to have something to do with
this play!"
Ada Nansen was eager to be assigned a part--the players were chosen on
merit--and she aspired modestly to the leading rôle, mainly because, the
girls hinted, the heroine wore a red velvet dress with a train and a
string of pearls.
But Ada, it developed, was worse than Bobby as an actress. She was
self-conscious, impatient of correction, and so arrogant toward the other
players that even gentle Alice Guerin was roused to retort.
"I haven't been assigned the maid's part yet!" she flashed, when Ada
ordered her to remove several stage properties that were in the way.
"Give it to her, Alice!" encouraged the mischievous Bobby. "That girl
would ruffle an angel."
Alice and Norma were both valuable additions to the Dramatic Club
ranks. Norma especially proved to be a find, and she was given the
hero's part after the first rehearsal while Alice was the heroine's
mother. Betty, much to her surprise, was posted on the bulletin board
as the "leading lady."
Down toward the end of the list of the cast was Ada Nansen's name as
"the maid."
"She'll be furious," whispered Bobby. "Miss Anderson told Miss Sharpe,
when she didn't think I could hear, that Ada wasn't really good enough to
be the maid, but that they hoped she would sing for them between the
acts. Miss Anderson said if they didn't let her have some part she'd be
so sulky she wouldn't sing."
A rehearsal was held in the gymnasium after school that afternoon, and as
she went through her first act Betty was uncomfortably conscious of Ada's
glowering eyes following her. When the cue was given for the maid, Ada
did not move.
"That's your cue, Ada," called Miss Anderson patiently.
"I've resigned, Miss Anderson," said Ada clearly. "It's a little too
much to ask me to play maid to two charity students."
Norma and Alice shrank back, but Betty sprang forward.
"How dare you!" she flared, white with rage. "How dare you say such a
thing! It's untrue, and you know it. Even if it were so, you have no
right to say such an outrageous thing."
Betty was angrier than she had ever been in her life. She possessed a
lively temper and was no meeker than she should be, but during the past
summer she had learned to control herself fairly well. Ada's cruel taunt,
directed with such a sneer at the Guerin sisters that every girl knew
whom she meant, had sent Betty's temper to the boiling point.
"Easy, easy, Betty," counseled Miss Anderson, putting an arm about the
shaking girl. "You're not mending matters, you know."
Then she turned to Ada, who was now rather frightened at what she had
done. She had not meant to go so far.
"Ada," said Miss Anderson sharply, "you will apologize immediately before
these girls for the injustice you have done to two of them. What you have
just said is nothing more nor less than a lie. I will not stoop to put my
meaning in gentler phrases. Apologize to Norma and Alice at once."
Ada set her lips obstinately. The teacher waited a moment.
"I will give you just three minutes," she declared. "If at the end of
that time you still refuse to obey me, I will send for Mrs. Eustice."
Ada shuffled her feet uneasily. She had no fancy to meet Mrs. Eustice,
whose friendship for the Guerins was well known. Mrs. Eustice had a
hot white anger of her own that a pupil who once witnessed it could
never forget.
"Well, Ada?" came Miss Anderson's voice at the end of the three minutes.
Ada hastily stumbled through a shame-faced apology, painful to listen
to, and then, the angry tears running down her face, turned and dashed
from the room.