present place, Selina, so I'm not on altogether new ground, though no
certificate was required there. It's not quite such a crime against
your fellow-man to be blind, so I've discovered, as to be an orphan.
Anything, even Emma McRanney with no certificate, was good enough
for orphans, whereas I have to be guaranteed in this case. You're
unfortunate if you're blind, but the state does look after you, but to
be an orphan, leaves you convicted of your own guilt, and not a leg
to stand on. If you're ever compelled to choose between these things,
Selina, don't be foolish enough to be an orphan. They pay teachers so
little to instruct them, even I had to leave. I ought to tell you these
examinations I want to take come late in March. That'll give us six
weeks. I'm promised the place if I can get the certificate, and I've
got some former questions from the examining board thinking we could
find out from these where I stand and what there is to do."
Selina roused herself. She didn't want to teach Miss McRanney! "I've
had so little experience, Miss Emma, I ought to tell you I'm not at
all sure I'm competent."
"Neither was I," said Miss Emma good-humoredly if unexpectedly. "I
graduated through our high school, myself, the second class put through
after it was established. And looking back in the light of what I've
found out since, I'll say there don't seem to be anything in the way of
real, actual, everyday sense that a body ought to have, that I didn't
succeed in failing to have--I and most of my class."
"Why, Emma," from Auntie, "and you had the leading honor, what is it
that it's called, the valedictory?"
"That's the surest and most damning evidence against me, Miss Ann
Eliza; it takes years to live it down," continued Miss Emma. "I thought
about you in church Sunday, Selina, wondering if you'd do, and then
went and asked Mrs. Williams about you, knowing you'd taught there. She
said you did fairly well with your little class, and toward the end
of the year seemed to be doing better, but as you told her you were
going South to coach in Latin and Algebra, she judged these were your
specialties. Well, they're mine, too, where I'm likeliest to fall down,
and that decided me."
Do our assumptions, then, like our sins, live on to confront us? "But
there was no coaching to do when I got there," hurriedly explained
Selina. "I never had a pupil!"
"Well, that don't prevent its being your specialty even so. I'm
the one to risk it. And I'll have to say what convinced me there's
something to you, is that you stood Mrs. Williams and her condescension
all those months you were in her house and didn't murder her. I have
to swallow a good deal of such patronage anyhow, because I'm poor, or
because I work, or both, and I'm guiltless of violence only because I
can't hope to commit assault and battery on people's persons and not
pay the penalty. But it never would do to tempt me too far with that
woman. But to get back to the point, are you going to undertake me?"
Try as Selina would, she didn't seem to know how to get out of it.
She endeavored to throw some cordiality into her manner. "We'll begin
whenever you say, Miss Emma. Have you those questions with you, you
spoke about? We might go over them and see what there is to do."
Auntie got up to leave them. "Thank you for remembering your missionary
dues, Emma. You're an amazing person to me. If I was forty instead of
forty-eight," longingly, "I'd certainly follow your example."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
About half-past eight Culpepper Buxton arrived at the Wistar house. He
was good-humored and unruffled. Selina had turned him down the evening
before for the first time in history. The pretty and lovable little
minx! She was waking then! Juliette, who was clever with her dark eyes
and her flashing smiles, or Amanthus herself, could not have done it
any better.
As he came up, Selina was at the door saying good night to a stout,
rather pleasant-voiced person.
He waited until this guest had gone, then went in with Selina.
"Who's your friend?" inquired Culpepper.
Selina diagramed the lady and her business briefly, so briefly that
Culpepper might have taken it as cue to drop a dangerous subject. "She
has to take an examination and wants me to coach her for it."
But Culpepper, in his unruffled good humor, failed to know his cue.
"That's good. Just the sort of thing you've been wanting. No?"
For Selina, having started to push chairs and footstools back into
place, here ceased abruptly and swung about on him furiously. "It's not
good. I loathe everything she stands for. I hate shabbiness. I hate
poverty, I don't like to be near either of them, they always seem to
be reaching out fingers to drag me down to them. You're altogether and
entirely wrong. I don't want to teach Miss McRanney."
Hoity-toity! As Culpepper's stepmother used to say to his early and
childish bursts of temper. She _was_ a little minx all at once! He
didn't know that he'd put up with it.
"You'd better not teach her then, you won't do it halfway right," from
Culpepper coolly.
"You're very priggish," from Selina, in return, and hot as he was cool.
"You speak, I suppose, from the heights of masculine superiority?"
"I'll run on up to ole Miss' door, if I may," from Culpepper. "I've a
message for her in my home letter to-day from my mother, and I want to
get back to the rooms. We've a crowd on for to-night by nine."
She heard him run up the stairs, tap at her aunt's door, and at the
answer, enter. Whereupon she herself sped up the steps, too, and past
that door and in at her own, which she closed softly, if passionately.
When he came down again, to call a cool good-bye as he went out, he
should not find her waiting there!
[Illustration: "Selina ... fell on her knees."]
Within her room this child, Selina, young and crude, her tragedies
pitiful in their tininess but tragedies to her none the less who did
not know them for tiny, fell on her knees beside her big and tolerated
poster-bed, and sobbed into her marseilles spread, and passionately
arraigned that which she called God. First, because Culpepper had hurt
her feelings and next, though she would not have admitted either,
because she did not want to teach Miss Emma McRanney. For while Selina
said her formulas in prayer, night and morning, dutifully and on her
knees, it was only in moments of hurt and passionate outcry against the
hurt that she really approached her God. Though she, dear child, did
not know this.
Self-examined, even here now upon her knees, she would have decided
and honestly so far as she was concerned in the opinion, that she was
a religious person. She had been brought up so to be. On her little
book-rack on her table, stood her Bible, her Thomas à Kempis, "The
Lives of the Saints" (in miniature, a rather daring acquisition which
pleased her, savoring of Rome as it did), "The History of the Church
and Its Liturgy," and a few other volumes. She even felt that she was
rather better informed in religious matters than her friends, and in
some ways, more catholic in her interests. She talked predestination
and free-will with Maud; St. Francis of Assisi, St. Paul and conversion
with Juliette, who longed for a light from Heaven; conscience and
duty with Adele, and even life after death; and she and Maud found
themselves in conversation on virgin birth with a converted Armenian
lady missionary staying at Maud's house, though with a startled
consciousness, in the light of the lady's contribution to the subject,
that they evidently did not know either what they or she were talking
about.
Selina, honest child, looked on matters such as these as being
religious. It did not dawn on her that it was only when the world went
amiss for her that she prayed. Only at times, such as now, after the
door was pushed to and the bolt passionately shot, and she fell on
her knees to that Something brooding somehow and somewhere above its
created creatures, only when she held out her arms to it and cried to
it through sobs, and even though that cry be but appeal against her
own discomfiture, that she prayed, that she ever had prayed, ever had
sought a God through need.
"I want admiration for what I am, I want applause for what I do, I want
my part to be favored and enviable according to my choosing of what is
favored and enviable," may be said to be the unformulated gist of this
unwitting child's poor little human prayer.
As indeed, for the pitiful part of that, it is the prayer of millions
of us, every day. But prayer for all its paucity, prayer for all that.
* * * * *
And meanwhile in Auntie's room, a room of ponderous mahogany akin to
Selina's, with a great deal of red and an equally cheerful predominance
of green in carpet, curtains and lambrequin, she and Culpepper were
having a real heart-to-heart confidence.
"I didn't suppose she'd tiff with me. What's got in her all at once,
ole Miss?"
Ole Miss patted the hand that was holding hers. They were mighty fond
of each other, these two, to use their own vernacular about it. But she
didn't reply. Yet there was that in her manner which implied she could
have done so if she would.
"What's the use us two beating about the bush with each other, ole
sport?" from Culpepper, who meant she should. "You know just as well
as my mother, or Cousin Robert, and I've made a clean breast to 'em
both, what's the state I'm in as to Selina. The trouble's the other
way round. When she was about ten or eleven, up there at home in the
summers, I used to catch and kiss her to tease her. I don't believe
she'd read a bit more in it if I caught her and did it now."
Ole Miss spoke. "There never can be but one first for a girl,
Culpepper. There never was but the one, first and last, for me. I'd
like you to know that it was your father. The truth with Selina is,
she's waking. She's cross because she's coming to be conscious. It's a
trying time and we're human, and we've all got tempers. I think it will
break my old worthless heart if it's Emmeline's Tuttle Jones, and not
John Buxton's Culpepper who's responsible for it."
A pause. Then a breath long and deep and gloriously big and gloriously
confident from Culpepper.
"And that's it! You've put heart in me altogether, ole sport! You've
pointed me the road and shown me the gait. Gimme one before I go, like
a real lady!"
Ole Miss roused to her own defence. "Stop right now, Culpepper. No,
I don't want to be mauled and teased, stop smacking that kiss into
my ear--well, put it on my cheek if that's what you meant to do. No,
I won't discuss the subject further either now or any other time. I
haven't another word to say concerning it, and if that's what you're
waiting for, you may as well go long."
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Miss McRanney proved worth while enough, and rather good fun if Selina
would have allowed this. She arrived on the appointed evening with a
satchel of schoolbooks and an avowed poor opinion of examinations as
tests of teachers. She followed Selina to the dining-room where they
were to work, and where Auntie was lingering to say howdy, and as she
emptied the satchel of the textbooks, emptied her mind of this opinion.
"Drat such a test, it's all wrong. What life asks teachers to put into
their pupils, or get out of them, as you prefer it, is character.
To take a wild flight into the fanciful, and I'm not strong there,
one might call it the universal language recognized everywhere and
anywhere, whether in a Choctaw or a Charlemagne. Right now I couldn't
pass the examination that gave me that valedictory at eighteen, no,
Miss Ann Eliza, and don't look so distressed about it, not if Mazeppa's
ride in duplicate for me was the consequence of failing. Whereas any
character I've got of my own to help a child to his, I've found since
then."
"Any character _you've_ got, Emma?" from Auntie indignantly. "And
starting out again at forty?" The wild daring of this act, as she saw
it, seemed to fascinate Auntie.
"Well," said Miss Emma, "he must needs go whom the devil doth drive, my
devil having been necessity. I've never had a man to rest back on, or
I probably would have done so. However we're keeping Selina waiting.
The digressions of middle age are mighty tiresome, aren't they, Selina?
Well, don't forget they are when you get there. Since I've got to pass
this examination I suppose we'd better get to work, especially in your
specialties, algebra and Latin, that are my pitfalls."
The next lesson came on a Monday evening and Miss Emma had been at
church the day before. "There's many a thing to amuse a body, Selina,"
she said good-humoredly as she took off her wraps. "I earn my way and
occupy my small place in the army of producers. The rest of the women
in that congregation of ours live sweetly and unconcernedly upon the
general store that other people produce. And yet, if their unfailing
and admirably ordered patronage of me could overwhelm, I'd long ago
have been washed away in the flood."
Auntie's voice expostulating, came in from the next room where she was
reading the paper laid down by Papa. "Why Emma----"
"Here, keep out of this, Miss Aunt Eliza. I'm talking to the next
generation. I want to point out a few things to it that may make the
way easier for its journeying. Selina, if you're going to teach, come
on along with me and take this examination and get your certificate.
You've got something to show then, something to go on so long as the
public demands certificates."
Selina had been thinking about this herself, and wishing she'd done it
sooner. If the suggestion had come from anyone but Miss Emma she'd have
taken it. As it was----
"What pitiful fools we are!" from Miss Emma at the next lesson. "Far
from respecting my job when I first started out teaching, and getting
everything out of it there was in it for me and everybody else, I lost
my first years at it being ashamed of it. Nowadays I set type well, the
job seeks me, and I don't mind saying so. I'll have to feel this same
capacity in myself for the new job if I get it. It's a good thing to
feel, capacity in yourself for your work, and respect for yourself in
it."
The doorbell rang. Of course! The wonder to Selina had been that
it hadn't rung before on these lesson evenings. The fear that it
would ring had been one among many reasons she was so averse to the
undertaking. Papa, however, had his instructions in this event to close
the folding doors and leave them to their work in the dining-room
undisturbed. But Papa now forgot the folding doors. He opened the front
door and after a moment's delay in the hall for the removal of hat and
coat, ushered the caller in.
It was Mr. Tuttle Jones. Again, of course! Who could Selina less have
wanted it to be?
And here at the dining-table, all too visible to the front room, sat
Miss Emma McRanney, plain, shabby and busy. Her textbooks, open over
the table, were shabby as herself, and unlovely. Her hands showed
manual work. Selina was ashamed of Miss McRanney, ashamed of teaching
Miss McRanney, ashamed of being found thus teaching her by Tuttle
Jones. Alas for you, Mamma, once again! You with your strained anxiety,
your every effort bent toward that front in life which must be kept up!
Your one ewe lamb would have been the happier for the truer values held
by Auntie!
Mr. Jones came smilingly back through the parlor to the dining-room,
his hand outstretched to--not Selina at all, but Miss McRanney! Indeed,
and indeed, you never can tell!
"Well, Tuttle, and how's your mother?" from this lady. "Tuttle's
mother and I are old friends from grade and high school days, Selina.
Admirable and democratic meeting-ground for the classes with the
masses," dryly. "How'd you say your mother is, Tuttle?"
"Quite well. Miss Emma, and grumbling only yesterday that you'd not
been around for a month to put her in a better humor with the world.
What's wrong with my telling her you'll come for dinner Sunday?" He
was shaking hands with Selina now. "But I'm in the way here?"
Selina was overswept with a passion of loathing for herself, and a need
for abasement and self-punishment.
"Miss Emma came to me to get some coaching and's finding I'm a very
poor teacher. Oh, but she is, and she's too considerate and kind to say
so. For fifteen minutes now she's been showing me how to do a page in
algebra I, the teacher, couldn't show _her_."
"Sit down, Tuttle," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "and see what's wrong.
I'll be jiggered if I've got it either. Figures used to be your strong
suit when you were a boy."
Selina meant for herself to go the whole way now. Being ashamed, she
was very much ashamed. "I've been following every clue and chance for
teaching I could hear of since I came home in November," she told
Tuttle, "and nobody wanted me. I never quite understood until Miss Emma
pointed out that I wasn't qualified as a teacher. I'm going to try for
a certificate along with her in March."
Miss Emma nodded approval. "Now she's talking, Tuttle. Get busy and
applaud her. This child's been going through that circle of purgatory
Dante forgot to set down, finding herself a woman that's got to make
her way, and taking her cue from the rest of the woman world, ashamed
of the fact."
Selina dropped her head right down on the page of the open textbook
before her on the table. The sob was coming and she could not stop it.
Bye and bye when the pretty head with its masses of flaxen hair lifted,
they all laughed together. For Miss Emma McRanney was chafing one of
Selina's hands and Tuttle Jones the other one.
* * * * *
Culpepper's visits these days were to Auntie. He got in the way of
running in and up to her room for a brief while in the evenings, and
out again.
"She won't have a thing to do with me, ole Miss, and there's nothing
for it but for me to take my medicine! 'Oh, yes, she's quite well,
thank you!' when I do stop and speak to her 'and very busy.' She's not
only getting Miss McRanney ready as far as she knows how, but trying to
get herself ready for these examinations in March. That's about what
she says to me, coolly and loftily, and goes on about her own affairs."
"I don't like it at all," from Auntie, stoutly, "And here's Emmeline's
Tuttle around every lesson night looking like a model out of a store
window, helping them with their algebra, both Emma and Selina." Auntie
was innocent of guile. "It's his specialty, too, it seems," she added
lamentingly.
"Why don't he stay where he's put?" grumbled Culpepper. "He's a dude, a
dandy dude, you can tell it by his fashion, can't you, ole Miss? What's
he got to do with our nice, humble, worthy ways, and with our Selina
and her problems? I ask you that!"
* * * * *
There came a morning late in March when Miss Emma McRanney at
nine-thirty, in her 'plain but perfectly genteel' best wool dress,
stood waiting at the drugstore over which she lived, instead of being
at the Institute mounted on a stool, and wearing a blue calico apron
with sleeves, setting type.
Nor had she waited above two minutes when a rather breathless young
person came hurrying in. A moderately tall, slim, pretty girl, with a
good deal of flaxen hair, in obviously her soberest wool dress, and
quietest head-gear.
"On time, am I, Miss Emma? After lying awake half the night saying over
lists of dates and rules and the rest of it, I overslept this morning
and Mamma wouldn't wake me."
"Plenty of time, Selina. At least _you_ don't have to worry about your
particular specialties, algebra and Latin----"
"Now, Miss Emma, you said you wouldn't----"
"Whereas between you and me, Selina, I'm weakest if anything in the one
that's Tuttle's specialty too----"
They boarded the street car, the stout, plain lady in her best wool
dress, and the slim, pretty girl in her plainest dress. When they
alighted before a tall, broad, ugly brick building that bore above
its central doorway the words, "Board of Education," a clock in a
neighboring steeple said five minutes of ten.
"And the examinations are at ten. We're just in good time, Selina,"
said Miss Emma McRanney.
[Illustration: "They boarded the street car."]
One week from that day Selina Wistar arriving at her own gate at dusk
from one direction, she had walked home from the office of the Board of
Education in truth, to avoid getting there any sooner than she had to,
met Miss Emma McRanney arriving from the other direction.
If one did not fear conveying the impression that Selina was fast
lapsing into an eighteenth century heroine so far as weeping goes, it
could be mentioned there was that about her face, despite the dusk,
which showed she had been crying. Just a preparatory cry, perhaps, of a
scalding tear or two, that could be permitted as she hurried along in
the dusk, and would not be noticed--an abeyant tear as it were, pending
the unrestrained flow that would come when seclusion and her own room
were reached.
"Well, Selina," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "it's all over for me. I've
just been by the school office to get my report. I'm a type-setter who
knows her job and is doomed to stick at it. What--_what_? Don't tell me
you've gone and failed, too?"
"Oh, Miss Emma----"
"Now, Selina, don't tell me a further thing, don't tell me you fell
down in your own specialties----"
"Miss Emma----"
"Well, well, now that's exactly what I was afraid I'd do and that I
did, but I'd said from the start they were _my_ weaknesses."
Selina was crying bitterly.
"My child," from Miss Emma, "it isn't worth it. You've gained enough
in other things to make up for the lost certificate. And as for me,
I've something that will comfort you, that I've known for two days. It
made my middle-aged blood so hot I didn't know if I'd take the place
if I could get it. It's almost as despicable a thing to be a woman,
as I discovered it was to be an orphan, Selina, and very seldom more
remunerative to the individual. At the last meeting of the board out at
the Institute, they agreed, to a man, in giving this place to a woman,
that it wasn't worth as much, and reduced the salary to exactly what
I'm getting now. They did the same thing when they gave me my present
job as type-setter. No, I won't come in, thank you. I've got to get on
home. One thing I'm as adamant about. I can't feel those blind babies
would have missed that Latin and algebra in me, and I've been hungry
to teach 'em ever since I've been there. Good night! I'm coming around
some evening soon, with Tuttle. We've a date, so it's not good-bye."
Whereupon Selina fled into the house and up to her room, and although,
this time, it was an absolutely _fresh_ marseilles spread, put on clean
_that_ morning, flung herself upon it and cried and cried and cried
bitterly.
Mamma came in, worried and indignant. "Why did Emma McRanney expect you
to know more than she did and instruct _her_? It was a good deal for
her to ask anyway. And I'm sure you've just said you failed, too. Why
should all your worry be for her?"
Auntie came in. "I'm sure Emma knows you did your best, Selina. And
think what you've gained? A real friend in a real woman like Emma?"
That night alone in her room, Selina took her pen and her paper. The
note she wrote was to Culpepper whom she had ignored for six long
weeks, and it said:
DEAR CULPEPPER:
I want to tell you that I've been hateful and I am sorry. I did try,
however, with my pupil after the first, and try my best. Evidently
my best is an inadequate thing, and unflattering to me, for she has
failed. And, deciding to try for a certificate, myself, I have failed,
too.
SELINA.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The next day, about noon, Culpepper Buxton rang the Wistar doorbell.
Aunt Viney opened the door, still adjusting the apron she had tied on
as she came.
"No, not Miss Ann Eliza this time, Aunt Viney. Is Miss Selina here?"
Viney, cautious soul, true to her race in this, never was known to
commit herself or her white household.
"I'll go up an' see, Mr. Culpepper."
"Tell her it's only for a moment, I've run 'round between classes."
Plump brown Viney, not without panting, mounted the stairs and went
on back to Selina's room. "Yes'm, I knew you's here, an' I knew you's
goin' to see him. But 'tain't my way, an' you know 'tain't, to keep my
white folks too ready on tap. Get up f'om that sew-in'-machine, an'
turn roun' an' lemme untie thet ap'on you got on. Think you's sewin'
foh yo'se'f, don't you? Think it's a petticoat you's goin' to learn to
make, don' you? An' firs' time you lay it down an' go off an' leave it,
yo' aunt or yo' ma'll take it up foh you an' finish it."
"Aunt Viney, you do understand, don't you? And you're the only one here
that does! Tell 'em I _want_ to do it, I want to make mistakes, and I
want to rip 'em out and do it over again. Tell 'em so for me, won't
you, Aunt Viney?"
"Go on down to thet thar youn' man. He ca'ies his haid high, but
'tain't no proof we don't ca'y our'n higher. He'n Miss Maria, his ma,
ain't got it all; we're folks our own se'f."
But for all this by way of support while she smoothed her hair, Selina
went downstairs slowly and constrainedly, conscious in the sense she
had been conscious when coming home through the snowstorm with Tuttle
Jones.