I
Nora was unpacking her trunk in her old room in Petersfield. Margaret
Abington, looking in at the door, hesitated shyly at the threshold.
‘I kept hoping all the time,’ sighed Margaret, ‘that something
better—something would turn up in New York.’
‘You don’t want me here, then?’ Nora looked up from the depths of her
trunk.
‘I was trying to eliminate my own choice,’ Margaret said solemnly.
Margaret looked very tired, worn, sucked dry. They had come up to
Petersfield on the same train after two busy days in New York spent in
arranging Margaret’s fall exhibition, a ceremony which generally left
her exhausted but radiant. But as Nora had watched her old friend,
silent and gloomy, superintending the hanging of her pictures, she knew
that Margaret wasn’t well. And yet, standing in the little gallery taken
over by the New Society of Women Artists before Margaret’s last
painting—the doorway of a fisherman’s cottage opening out upon a dull
sea, in the foreground the gay, old-fashioned flowers which grow best
with simple care, their bright colors standing out with a kind of
jubilation against the troubled sky and sea—one sensed the joy of
creation. Margaret, so sombre herself—all the energy driven out of her.
‘Those fleeting precious summer weeks,’ she murmured, as if she were
alone. The brilliance in her eyes burned for an instant, then changed to
dull despair. ‘My summer all gone. So little done.’ She crept out of the
room.
In returning to her profession, Nora was trying to convince herself that
she had no illusions about her future. The vows of poverty, chastity,
and obedience, without the religious exaltation—these were the rules of
the order to which she was attached. But if a woman threw herself
entirely into her work, she seemed in the end to find something which
fed her spirit.
There was Ruth Ewing. Nora had visited her at her scientific station on
the Massachusetts coast not far from Margaret’s studio. After a
laborious day hunting and studying specimens, Ruth leaped into the sea
and followed the path of the moonlight. In the water, beauty, grace, the
swiftness of a fish or a mermaid came to this plain little spinster. Her
emotions swept over the sky, over birds, butterflies, bugs of the less
ethereal kingdoms, flowers, plants, germs, with the same unspoiled joy.
Men like John Harper would say that science dried up a woman, but
nothing would ever dry up the pools of Ruth Ewing’s fresh spirit. Nora
and Margaret had left her in a New York laboratory working beside a man,
both of them trying to isolate the influenza germ. Neither one thought
of his own glorification. They were the servants of sick humanity. Their
sexless coöperation seemed to Nora very fine. Disembodied mind—that was
the goal of mankind. As she watched their generosity, each placing the
results of his former experiments at the disposal of the other, she felt
something of the heights to which science, once so lowly and despised,
has climbed. Hearing Ruth talk made one realize what an intellectual
outlet meant for women.
But Margaret Abington said Ruth was a pathetic creature. Margaret didn’t
appreciate science. Nor did she appreciate Ruth’s strenuous enjoyment of
the natural world, without contemplation or real æsthetic appreciation,
always darting after something outdoors to name and classify it, to add
it to her store of memory. Margaret’s way was so different. She let
beauty take her unaware. But the result for her as for Ruth was the
same; the same absorption, the same fusion of the individual with his
accomplishment.
The problem of women whose entire sex interest has gone into their work
belongs to the present. The old painters sentimentalized the virgin with
her rapturous gaze upon her young child. But physical creation is the
labor of only one class of women. Miss Steele had the uplifted
expression of a Raphael Madonna when she started a new book and Ruth
Ewing when she was pursuing a new germ. This emotional devotion to some
kind of work—this was what Nora must find if Petersfield was to be
endurable.
Saying good-bye to Michael and Ellen Powys on the pier, Ellen with her
first baby, sure that nothing was important but babies, Nora felt
debased—frustrated—wasted in life. Women with intellectual progeny never
flaunted their self-satisfaction that way. Nora didn’t care if she never
saw Ellen again. Michael’s father had died, leaving a generous fortune
to his son with the stipulation that he never step his foot in the
factory, reserved to the management of Michael’s conservative older
brother. Of course they were disappointed. But with the money they were
embarking to London to start a new liberal weekly. At least Michael was.
Ellen, as a mother, left the reform of the world to others. Nora waved
to her old friend and watched her sail out of her life with no regrets.
The women at Petersfield—they meant her future.
A return to the old life. But during the first days Nora felt like a
stranger. The war had changed Petersfield. During the house shortage,
commuters had discovered the quiet village, had built a row of
attractive suburban dwellings on the street leading to the campus, and
persuaded the railroad to put on express trains between New York and
Petersfield, with excellent service. The journey was now simpler than
the subway stretch between Knickerbocker University and Wall Street. For
a member of the faculty, returning from graduate study with an
indefinite stretch of years divided between teaching and mad plunges
into Knickerbocker lectures and seminars, residence within suburban
limits had special advantages.
But there were other changes. The girls had changed. Most of them had
bobbed hair, wore short skirts, and adopted a costume common over the
entire country, one heard, among college women. There were two
variations: a smart sweater over a ruffled blouse and a pleated skirt,
or the pleated skirt with a blouse in coat effect fastened below the
waist with a leather belt. A plain felt hat completed the desired
effect. Even the woollen stockings now in vogue kept close to one model.
Girls between seventeen and twenty-two all looked alike, and the
delicacy and grace which a democracy in fashion did not entirely conceal
was hidden as if the owner were ashamed of distinction.
Possibly the college world has always appropriated a homogeneous style
to characterize its own order. She may have forgotten. There was the
Peter Thompson sailor-suit just waning in Nora’s freshman year. Yet
surely there was more individuality then.
Walking alone at the end of her first day of lectures, Nora approached
the graveyard where the Suffrage League had kept its night vigils. She
laughed aloud at the memory. She wanted to see how the old place looked.
She heard voices.
Seated on the tombstones was a group of girls all having an afternoon
smoke together. When they saw one of the faculty, they rose, greeted her
cordially, and invited her to join them. No traces of embarrassment,
even though cigarettes were forbidden by college rules. Conservative
mothers from the Middle West still terrorized over the academic
authorities.
Everywhere one heard about the new frankness among girls. Frankness was
their code. They acted as they thought, Nora soon observed. A
distinguished English poet came to lecture, and the girls, expecting to
hear him read his verse, crowded the hall. But he happened to be a
critic as well, and, in a voice so low it reached only the first ten or
twelve rows, read a highly involved study of a Victorian poet. The
students in the back rows slid out. Those in the centre began trickling
away. Bolder spirits marched out of the hall. At last only those near
the platform remained.
Professor Steele was enraged by such rudeness to a guest. But the girls
proclaimed their intention of defending themselves against boredom. No
good came of it. Let lecturers speak out good and loud, and they would
stay to listen.
In the exchange of undergraduate ideas speech was full of psychological
tags. Only a friend like Helen enabled Nora to meet this new college
generation. A freshman was greeted her first day with a charge of the
Œdipus complex, against which she must defend herself. Intimacies
between two girls were watched with keen, distrustful eyes. Among one’s
classmates, one looked for the bisexual type, the masculine girl
searching for a feminine counterpart, and one ridiculed their devotions.
‘But are they really so sophisticated as they seem?’ Nora appealed to
Margaret Abington as she finished recounting a student’s avowal of
feminine independence, in which adventures of sex loomed dangerously.
‘They’re as innocent as babes,’ Margaret declared. ‘It’s pathetic. All
that talk is a protective armor. Those who don’t talk—the old-fashioned,
languishing ones—look out for them. It was like that in your day. You’ve
forgotten. When you’re young, you like to express yourself.’
A group of girls having dinner with Nora began to argue about the
difference between a flirt and a coquette.
‘A flirt,’ ventured a precocious freshman, whose older brother was of
the opinion that girls ought to learn to think and had accordingly
presented his sister with a set of Shaw, ‘a flirt is a woman who is
willing to rouse a man’s passion without being willing to satisfy it.’
The two older girls blushed beyond their rouge.
In this post-war era men flocked to Petersfield from all the colleges
for week-end visits. A man with a car speeded over the roads from Boston
to Petersfield as a relief from mental fatigue. The campus was like a
country fair. The visitors needed no special entertainment.
Roller-skating had become a fad among the girls. A youth, therefore,
roller-skated, hand in hand with his lady-love, who, if she were a
stalwart maiden, could hold him up while he was learning to balance
himself. There were bicycle races on the college walks, and Miss Steele
was almost run down. Most of the faculty went into retirement during
this frightful week-end period. Even the country roads were no longer
peacefully secluded. Youth was an athletic generation with tireless
legs. The week-enders explored the countryside. A girl, walking with her
visitor’s arm tossed carelessly over her shoulder as they trudged along,
was a frequent faculty vision of horror. There were picnics in one’s
secret haunts—droves of them. Margaret Abington gave up her walks with
Nora. But Nora could only be thankful all this hadn’t come in her day.
Then, men visited Petersfield for proms or to announce their
engagements. Other times one had peace. For the girls without swains to
exhibit, this new order necessitated advertising one’s failure to
attract men. Nora watched the female squads doing everything together,
pretending to be superior to these ruddy boys in knickerbockers, but
looking over their shoulders at them just the same.
Ruth Ewing insisted from the first that the new ways were better. Her
students told her about the violent arguments they had with their
masculine week-enders about the war, which had touched none of them, so
they could talk; about the present Administration and its shameful
attitude toward the League of Nations. World affairs were vital to the
best of these girls. They were arranging debates with the men’s
colleges. The Oxford debaters were coming to Petersfield to cross swords
with them next year. It was wonderful. In November a conference on
social questions was to be held at the college, with delegates from the
men’s colleges as well as the women’s.
Through all this revolution, however, the faculty was unchanged. The
feeble representation of men had not increased. What men there were
seemed more old-maidish than the women, with minds far inferior. Many
were there, Nora suspected, because they couldn’t compete with men in
the men’s colleges. The curriculum, too, was just the same, even though
the President announced that the colleges since the war were attracting
a new type of girl, formerly confined to the finishing schools. But
courses in household arts, by which this society type might be
benefited, had not been provided. When faculty discussions touched upon
the necessity, Miss Steele fought against such innovations. Petersfield
was a college of arts. Let these frivolous creatures who lowered
academic standards go to an institute for domestic science. The number
of girls entering teaching had also declined. But the old training for a
pedagogical career was still the backbone of the college.
Nora going down to New York twice a week, spending Saturday in the
Knickerbocker library, in the moments snatched for contemplation
pondered over what she could do. On the train travelling back and forth
she went over this huge problem. The old traditions and ideals were
gone. What was to take their place?
Her ambition for the students who crowded her courses was to give them
an understanding of the impartial mind, how one got it, what results it
gained. She tried to show them the confused, wasted world into which
their youth had been born; she put before them their special problems
and responsibilities. She talked about the international point of view,
read them the preface to the new Shaw play which had appeared that
summer; ‘The Wicked Half-Century,’ ‘War Delirium,’ ‘The Long Arm of
War,’ ‘The Sufferings of the Sane,’ ‘How the Fools Shouted the Wise Men
Down.’ But while she read, she was conscious of the daily press in the
fall of 1920, with its headlines trumpeting the hunting down of
dangerous ‘aliens and radicals,’ terms largely synonymous, the
deportation of harmless foreigners, and the madness of Americanization
propaganda. What difference did her poor feeble words make?
But she continued to remind the girls that studies in history, unless
one first tried to be impartial, were a pure waste of time. Go into
something else. The classics or a new language. Mathematics.
The descendants of the Socialist League of Nora’s day were now
concentrated upon the Russian Soviets. They looked to the radical
history instructor, Miss Deming, as a patroness for the cause of real
freedom.
‘But are your Bolshevists really giving Russia freedom?’ she demanded
the day she was asked to address a meeting. ‘Isn’t this a new form of
tyranny?’
Her audience looked at her, their courtesy fighting against hostility.
She was evidently like all the rest of the faculty, blind to the beauty
and tragedy of Russia, struggling against her old shackles. She had
deceived them with her animated talk.
Miss Steele told Nora she was becoming an excellent teacher. ‘I don’t
know what you’re doing with them,’ she said. ‘But they’re
interested—stirred up. I hear them talking. You’re waked up yourself,
Nora. Your trips to New York—the University—it won’t let you get stale.’
So the winter passed.
II
One night Margaret Abington knocked at Nora’s door. She came in, and lay
down on her couch, utterly exhausted.
‘It’s the weather,’ Nora said. ‘The first of spring. I feel tired, too,
these days.’
Margaret said nothing.
‘I wonder,’ she murmured half to herself, ‘if it’s worth while going on.
One always feels sure the next thing will be better.’
She rose slowly, paused at Nora’s door, her fingers playing with the
knob. Her face wore its characteristic twisted, tortured smile.
‘You’re so strong, Nora,’ she said. ‘So—so firm and courageous. If I——’
She stopped, looked back at Nora, and was gone.
Late the next afternoon word got around that Miss Abington was missing.
She had not come down to breakfast, but that was not unusual. At
luncheon she was still gone. Nora went up to her room. It was empty. A
search was begun. Nora was questioned.
‘Did she seem pessimistic?’ they asked her.
‘No more than usual.’
‘You noticed nothing? What she said?’
‘She so often says queer things—when she’s tired.’
Not until the next day did they find her. A farmer three miles beyond
the college saw a hat floating down the swollen stream which ran through
his property. She had been dead some time when they took her out of the
water. Not far away was a basket weighted down with stones holding the
bodies of her two cats. She had not been willing to leave them behind
her.
In all the sad arrangements Nora and her friends had to make during the
next days, they found Margaret Abington’s life singularly solitary. She
had provided for no disposal of her possessions, even her paintings.
Some wealthy distant cousins near Boston to whom Nora wrote felt
outraged that the Abington name had been dragged into the newspapers.
They had no suggestions to make about her pictures. They did not care
for the kind of thing she did. They had been collecting Gainsboroughs
for years and were now started on Romneys. It was clear enough from
their letters that they had never given their gifted cousin a penny to
help her along with her work nor the blessed boon of a little leisure.
Miss Abington’s canvases became the possession of the college, all but
the picture of the flowers growing in the fisherman’s doorway, which
went to Nora. And to the fall exhibition, arranged in the art lecture
room, fashionable and artistic New York crowded. Miss Abington had made
Petersfield famous. The President was very much pleased. He immediately
forgot that he had never cared for Miss Abington. He thought of himself
now as the guardian of a sacred shrine. For the pictures, which the
critics tardily praised, he conceived the idea of a beautiful gallery
where the best of contemporary paintings should be gathered. He came out
in the New York papers, called on art patrons, and wrote impressive
letters to wealthy men. In a few months he announced to the college that
the art building was assured.
That the name of one so shrinking and unassuming should be tossed about
by the daily press and the college generally was unendurable to Nora.
Fame for a talent so delicate must be clean and pure. Nora saw it
besmirched by the stupidity of the rabble. In Margaret’s lifetime a
select company had appreciated her. She had had no mercy for fools. Now
she was defenceless against the enthusiasm of the loquacious dilettante.
Nora could not bear it. She kept away from the art lecture room, avoided
the sight of Margaret’s successor, a hard, confident young person who
talked about pictures as if she were trying to sell them.
Margaret—the dear companion, so tortured by her own fastidious nature,
so affectionate with her friends, so fierce against the rest of the
world—Nora would keep for herself. She no longer mentioned Margaret’s
name.
There was plenty to do. As an ambitious historian of nineteenth-century
England, she was now devoting most of her time to the eighteenth
century, and had begun her book, ‘England on the Eve of the Industrial
Revolution.’ The making of a book after long stretches of teaching, with
the frequent trips to New York on stray half-days to use the University
library, the painful adjustments of the mind from the classroom to
writing and back again, was a tortuous undertaking. Nora thought late at
night as she worked of scholars all over the world who have brought
forth their ideas with an even greater fight against unfavorable odds.
The luxuries of ease and an untroubled mind—they were unknown to the
brotherhood of poor scholars. Brotherhood of poor scholars—the phrase
running through her weary head brought cool draughts of refreshment. All
those who had something within them—like poor Margaret—how they suffered
in the pangs of creation! The chips of Nora’s labor she gave to her
students. She also took them into her confidence about her speculations,
her perplexities, tried to have them see how difficult it was to be
honest, intelligent, fair, and at the same time how beautiful were these
virtues of learning. Some of them caught her meaning.
III
Five years of toil. There is nothing to say about it. You read for five
years, think, write, destroy everything you have done the first, perhaps
the second year; and possibly at the end, if you have kept your head and
your health, you have written a book which is worth the reading. Just
that, Nora estimated, was her history between the ages of twenty-five
and thirty.
But the book was done. Nora had spent her thirtieth birthday typing the
last of it. Miss Steele went around with a challenging air pronouncing
it the best piece of scholarship done by an American woman, or a British
woman, she often added. No one dared to contradict her. But Miss Steele
at last was beginning to show signs of age. Nora discerned a tendency in
her to emotionalize those whom she had once regarded with a chill
justice, and the praise of her old teacher had its sting of pain.
Professor Nicholson, who was urging the necessity of sending so
promising a young scholar to England to get a really big piece of work
started, regarded this first book as merely a respectable beginning. It
was all his management, of course, that the fellowship from
Knickerbocker University came to Nora. She was amused that Petersfield
should consider her a remarkable person, and that her students should
offer their congratulations with humble awe.
IV
After a tiresome afternoon spent conferring with her publishers, Nora
went to Helen Spring’s apartment for a quiet week-end. She and Helen
were lounging in front of the fire after dinner, with no other light in
the room. A knock at the door.
‘Bother,’ said Helen.
She opened the door, standing there a minute in silence, staring at her
visitor. ‘Why, it’s Zoe Ryder!’ she exclaimed. ‘I didn’t recognize you
at first.’
Nora turned on the lights. A pale, very thin woman dropped down,
breathless, on Helen’s couch. ‘It must be five or six years since I’ve
seen you,’ Nora remarked, trying to conceal her shock at the change
which had come over Zoe. A kind of decay had settled over the former
Southern gentility, as if poor Zoe had been dragged through a miry way
in her troubles.
‘You were expecting me?’ Zoe gasped. ‘I followed the marks. I was so
relieved when I saw it was your house, Helen.’
‘The marks?’
Zoe pulled off a little black hat and patted her short brown hair,
heavily streaked with grey. ‘At first I was scared when I saw them on my
doorstep. A big letter _F_ in chalk. It’s that gang following me again,
I thought.’ Zoe’s large blue eyes regarded first Helen seated beside her
on the couch, then Nora before the fire. Nora observed their restless
glitter. ‘Another of their tricks. But something just made me follow
them. You know how it is. Something inside pushing you to do things. The
arrows at the corner—it was easy—and then following the lines—they
brought me right here.’
‘But we don’t know anything about the marks,’ Helen protested.
Zoe paid no attention. She sat, her hands clasping her knees, looking
abstractedly at something in front of her. ‘They’ve done enough. Fed on
me—ruined a good business.’ The gentle voice became shrill, then
subsided, and returned to the old girlish animation Nora remembered.
‘You never came to my tea-room, Helen. It was so cute. Of course I
didn’t have any money. I took down the doors and made them into tables,
stuck candles in the holes where the knobs had been. I called it the
“Devil’s Kitchen”——’
Nora and Helen looked at each other.
‘It was all written up in the newspapers. In two of them. I cooked
everything myself—fried the chicken—made the chocolate cake—the first
night went off wonderfully. I even had drinks—to advertise the tea-room,
you know.’
‘And you’ve made a success of it?’ Helen inquired.
‘The first week I had crowds every night.’ Zoe’s aged face had in
flashes the fire of youth. ‘The real people—writers, the theatre crowd,
artists. And that gang—they all had titles—foreigners. The Baron was
Russian. Pole maybe. I can’t remember. He brought the others. They kept
saying they’d pay and then ate off me every night. Imposing on a woman
that way! And noisy when they were drunk—it scared off the others. I
don’t blame them.’
Zoe’s narrative—broken off with this strange, inconsequential anger
against some one—the gang it was, Nora remembered. It sounded like
madness. And yet Zoe, perched lightly on the edge of Helen’s couch, was
so small and harmless, so much, Nora had always felt, like a fluttering
ground bird, with a silly ambition sometimes for the sky. Helen sat
regarding Zoe with her kind, amused eyes.
‘Why did you feed those men?’ Nora demanded indignantly.
‘They just ordered things. Nobility—all of them. Just helped themselves
to the drinks until they were all gone. And the trouble to get hootch
now——’
Zoe, with her soft voice and helpless air, in league with bootleggers
and a debauched alien crowd—the word ‘hootch’ crashing into her
old-fashioned Virginia speech—was this really Zoe sitting there?
‘My dear,’ drawled Zoe, ‘I never knew there were such people in the
world. After I’d trusted them——’ Her innocent round blue eyes with the
deep circles looked up at Nora. ‘I know now. It was a gang that feeds
off people—off women. They won’t work. Just drinking——’
Zoe wandered in her narrative. But in the end of a long description of
the troubled fortunes of the tea-room, she came at last to its sudden
end, the doors closed, no more possible credit.
‘Even then the Baron came,’ she went on. ‘Walked right in. “I’m hungry,”
he said. “You’ve eaten up all I’ve got,” I told him. “There’s nothing
left.” “I’m going to make myself some tea.” And, my dear, he walked
right out into the kitchen and got tea for himself.’
‘You ought to’ve called the police,’ Helen said.
But Zoe for some reason had no confidence in the protecting arm of the
law. She shrank away from Helen’s suggestion, as if wincing before a
blow. With a few sticks of furniture rescued from the tea-room she had
sought refuge in the attic of a feather factory as a hiding-place from
the gang, of which she lived in daily dread.
‘I didn’t even have a bed,’ Zoe continued plaintively. ‘I told my
friends——’ In all of Zoe’s troubles, when she tried to borrow money, she
spoke largely of those mysterious devoted beings always ready to come to
her aid. ‘They began sending me cots. One after another. I lost count of
them. They were just lined up——’ She laughed as she stretched out her
hands to indicate an infinity of beds. This light, untroubled laughter
as she described that terrible refuge—what—what had come to Zoe to
change her like this? Nora’s imagination leaped to a succession of
vivid, unmentionable horrors.
Zoe went on. Even in this rude shelter above the feather factory,
consisting sometimes of one room, sometimes of four in Zoe’s uncertain
recital, the Baron hunted her down. He declared he would freeze on the
streets if she didn’t take him.
‘I had such a nice fireplace,’ she boasted. ‘And I picked up wood
everywhere. He lay right down on the floor in front of my fire. He had a
terrible cough. Honestly, girls, he was very ill. I couldn’t——’
She had made up a bed for the Baron out of her superfluous store of
cots, covered him with some old clothes, nursed his cold. But as soon as
he was well, he went out and brought back the gang to occupy the rest of
the cots stacked up in the attic.
Helen accepted even this last revelation quietly, with all that one
could imagine from Zoe’s dark hints, the loft of the feather factory
with its disreputable nightly crew presided over by a worn, emaciated
Zoe. Did Zoe know what she was saying? Couldn’t Helen stop this mad
tale? Surely all this flimsy, impossible horror was the work of a sick
mind. But Helen’s calm face seemed to inspire Zoe to go on.
‘Carrying on—stamping up my stairway—there wasn’t even a lock to my
door. I’d lie there scared almost to death——’ Zoe’s skinny little
shoulders shook. ‘It was terrible—just terrible.’ Her voice had the
chirp of an insect trying to announce a tragedy.
Zoe came home one afternoon and found a crowd gathering around the back
door leading to her attic. Two policemen stood over something on the
stairs. Zoe stepped up beside them. She displayed a dainty pride as she
described her important part in the drama.
‘There was the Baron. He’d got some feathers out of one of the factory
bags. He was all rolled up in feathers. Just his head sticking out. Like
an enormous bird.’ Zoe began to laugh at the memory. Helen and Nora, not
knowing what else to do, joined her.
‘Such language. And right before a lady.’ Zoe had a slight lisp in
moments of stress. ‘He was so drunk he—they wanted to carry him off. But
I couldn’t have that. I told them he was a relative. I’d be responsible
for him.’ Again Nora observed Zoe’s unaccountable satisfaction, as if
she had performed some glorious deed.
But after Zoe had got the Baron up to the attic, she had herself taken
flight. Since then she had lived in a room not far from Helen, in daily
dread that the gang would discover her.
‘I’ve found out about them now,’ she said. ‘They collect around the
Square. They pick out their victims and then—I don’t dare go out except
after dark to get something to eat. I never go to the door. My friends
ring three times. Remember, three times. If they found where I was——’
Zoe rambled on a little more, going back over parts of her story,
exclaiming at intervals, ‘My dear, I never knew there were such people
in the world.’
Suddenly she seemed to remember a pressing engagement, jumped up, and
left, saying once more, ‘Ring three times. I’m always home.’
She was gone, and Helen and Nora were looking at each other.
‘It’s all like a hideous nightmare that you can’t shake off,’ Nora said,
her voice husky.
‘Something has happened to her. Drugs maybe,’ Helen speculated. ‘But
that old obsession of hers——’
How much of this tale of terror was true, how much built up with the aid
of Zoe’s sick mind, it was impossible to tell. They compared their
impressions, went over the details once more, but there seemed no
immediate solution.
Finally they went downstairs. Stooping they made out the letter _F_ in
chalk on the outer steps. At the nearest corner, they found a chalk
diagram.
The arrows leading from the letter _F_ pointed toward their house. They
followed the arrows for a few blocks, found them radiating in all
directions, in a perplexing maze.
‘Some new Village game,’ Nora ventured. ‘A party, perhaps—a treasure
hunt. These novelty-seekers would hit on something like this.’
Whatever it was, however, it had brought Zoe to Helen’s.
‘And I didn’t even dare offer to help her,’ Helen remembered, when they
had returned to Helen’s sitting-room. ‘She’s borrowed money from every
one she knew. It’s two years since any one I know has seen her.’
They made inquiries among Zoe’s old circle, but no one had heard of her.
At the address she gave even three rings at the door failed to bring
Zoe.
‘Well,’ Helen remarked, when Nora was starting back to Petersfield
Sunday night, ‘you’ve seen all my menagerie the years you’ve been around
New York. I guess Zoe’s the last of them, Nora. Your work’s about
finished. I’ve done my best for you—Amelia—Vicky—Zoe—I don’t believe I
can give you any more.’
‘You’ve done very well by me, Helen.’
‘Kept you from too dull a diet—the university and the normal academic
mind——Well, you’re the only one of us that’s come to anything. And yet
we’ve sneered at your sanity behind your back, Nora. I can tell you
now.’
V
Nora stood in a long procession of men and women receiving degrees from
Knickerbocker University. She marched up to the high platform, heard a
few words mumbled over her, and was soon back in her seat. The end, so
long delayed by teaching, by her own stumbling in by-paths, by her
intellectual insecurity, was reached at last. In the crowded
amphitheatre, she sensed what a big American university, so formless and
destitute of charm or emotion, had given her. In these striving years,
shut off from much of what men experienced in the rubbing together of
the best minds, she was carrying away intellectual gains which
Petersfield could never have offered her.
After all, it was the universities like Knickerbocker which represented
the best American life could deliver, the safest places to breed the
ideas which would become the popular possession of the next age. The
universities were far from perfect—she was ready to admit, but no
institution of learning can be far above the society which supports it.
Idealists had laid heavy charges against Knickerbocker University: the
creaking machinery, the officers who placed immediate well-being before
the ultimate good, the dull professors, the dead scholarship. Many of
these evils existed in all the universities. But there was the other
side. Where did all the scornful critics who saw no virtue in American
learning get their ideals—their first spark? At a university. Some
professor. Some other student. Perhaps both. Then they grew up, went
away, and belabored the place which prepared them to walk without
leading strings.
Crossing the square in front of the library, escaping from the multitude
of Commencement Day, Nora experienced a prolonging of her elated mood.
She reviewed swiftly the books she knew written by the men of
Knickerbocker. In most of them one found honesty, patient toil, the
absence of charlatanism. And in the best there was brilliance and a safe
start for a new generation of scholars. The great need was more
time—more time to think. ‘Ripeness is all,’ wise Shakespeare had said.
More time, more leisure, peace, no worry about money—but all this is the
heaven of which the tired scholar dreams.
Ruth Ewing was waiting for Nora on the corner. ‘I’m so sorry. I couldn’t
get in to see your little show for the crowd.’ She kissed Nora. ‘What
shall we do now?’
‘I’ve meant to do it for months. I’ve never had the time. I’m going to
have my hair cut off,’ Nora said.
‘My dear!’ protested her friend.
‘Come along.’ Nora put a firm hand on Ruth’s arm. ‘My mind’s all made
up.’
‘Miss Steele will be furious,’ Ruth persisted, but Nora only laughed and
dragged her forward.
Nora gazed at a shorn head in the barber’s mirror. ‘Very nice, Miss,’ a
dark little man was saying.
Ruth Ewing was examining her not entirely with disapprobation. ‘I wish
Margaret could see you, Nora.’
Nora continued to study the reflection in the mirror. The line of her
head in back, the sweep of hair over her forehead, broad and
clean-cut—yes, it all went with her slender, boyish figure.
‘They won’t take you seriously at first over there in England,’ laughed
Ruth. ‘How you’ll fool them, my dear.’
Years had dropped from Nora, and most of her dignity. At this climax in
her academic honors, she had never seemed more lightly touched by time.
This was the way to start marching over the stretch between thirty and
forty. Thirty-one years old. A woman ready to face the world for the
first time. The best of life beginning; of that she felt sure.
Intelligence ripens slowly, gives its best only after long and weary
waiting. But she was ready, at last, to see what she could do.
‘Ruth,’ Nora called out, ‘let’s take the first train to Petersfield and
show Miss Steele. Of course she’ll be furious. I want to hear her rage.’
She slid out of the barber’s chair, her eyes seeking once more the trim,
smiling girl in the mirror.