INTO PARADISE--AND OUT
It was a glorious summer twilight. The air was sweet with the odor of
lilacs and honeysuckle. One by one the stars shone softly out in the
velvet sky, across which troops of swallows swooped and darted,
twittering softly on the wing. Near the western horizon the golden glow
of sunset still lingered. It was a night for poets to sing of, a night
to revel in and to remember; but it was assuredly not a night for study.
Gaslight heated one's room to the boiling point. Closed windows meant
suffocation; open ones--since there are no screens in the Harding
boarding house--let in troops of fluttering moths and burly June-bugs.
"And the moral of that is, work while it is yet light," proclaimed Mary
Brooks, ringing her bicycle bell suggestively.
There was a sudden commotion on the piazza and then Betty's clear voice
rose above the tumult. "We won it, one up! Isn't that fine? Oh no, not
the singles; we go on with them to-morrow, but I can't possibly win. Oh,
I'm so hot!"
Eleanor Watson smiled grimly as these speeches floated up to her from
below. She had been lounging all the breathless afternoon, trying vainly
to get rid of a headache; and the next day's lessons were still to be
learned.
"Ouch, how I hate June-bugs," she muttered, stopping for the fifth time
in as many minutes to drive out a buzzing intruder. She had just gotten
one out when another flew straight at her unperceived and tangled
himself in her hair. That was the limit of endurance. With one swift
movement Eleanor turned off the gas, with another she pulled down her
hair and released the prisoned beetle. Then she twisted up the soft coil
again in the dark and went out into the sweet spring dusk.
At the next corner she gave an angry little exclamation and turned back
toward the house. The girls had deserted the piazza before she came
down, and now the only light seemed to be in Betty's room. Every window
there was shut, so it was no use to call. Eleanor climbed the stairs and
knocked. Katherine and Betty were just starting for a trolley ride, to
cool off the champion, Katherine explained; but Helen was going to be in
all the evening.
"I pity you from the bottom of my heart," said Eleanor, "but if you are
really going to be here would you tell Lil Day when she comes that I
have an awful headache and have gone off--that I'll see her to-morrow. I
could go down there, but if she's in, her room will be fuller of
June-bugs than mine. Hear them slam against that glass!" She turned to
Betty stiffly. "I congratulate you on your victory," she said.
"Oh thank you!" answered Betty eagerly. "Christy did most of it.
Would--won't you come out with us?"
"No, thank you. I feel like being all alone. I'm going down for a
twilight row on Paradise."
"You'll get malaria," said Katherine.
"You'll catch cold, too, in that thin dress," added Helen.
"I don't mind, if only I don't see any June-bugs," answered Eleanor, "or
any girls," she added under her breath, when she had gained the lower
hall.
The quickest way to Paradise was through the campus, but Eleanor chose
an unfrequented back street, too ugly to attract the parties of girls
who swarmed over the college grounds, looking like huge white moths as
they flitted about under the trees. She walked rapidly, trying to escape
thought in activity; but the thoughts ill-naturedly kept pace with her.
As everybody who came in contact with Eleanor Watson was sure to remark,
she was a girl brimful of strong possibilities both for good and evil;
and to-night these were all awake and warring. Her year of bondage at
college was nearly over. Only the day before she had received a letter
from Judge Watson, coldly courteous, like all his epistles to his
rebellious daughter, inquiring if it was her wish to return to Harding
another year, and in the same mail had come an invitation from her aunt,
asking her to spend the following winter in New York. Eleanor shrewdly
guessed that in spite of her father's disapproval of his sister's
careless frivolity, he would allow her to accept this invitation, for
the obvious relief it would bring to himself and the second Mrs. Watson.
He was fond of her, that she did not for a moment question, and he
honestly wished her best good; but he did not want her in his house in
her present mood.
"For which I don't in the least blame him," thought Eleanor.
She had started to answer his letter immediately, as he had wished, and
then had hesitated and delayed, so that the decision involved in her
reply was still before her. And yet why should she hesitate? She did not
like Harding college; she had kept the letter of her agreement to stay
there for one year; surely she was free now to do as she
pleased--indeed, her father had said as much. But what did she
please--that was a point that, unaccountably, she could not settle.
Lately something had changed her attitude toward the life at Harding.
Perhaps it was the afternoon with Miss Ferris, with the perception it
had brought of aims and ideals as foreign to the ambitious schemes with
which she had begun the year as to the angry indifference in which she
was finishing it. Perhaps, as poor Helen had suggested, it was the
melting loveliness of spring term. At any rate, as she heard the girls
making their plans for the next year, squabbling amiably over the merits
of the various campus houses, choosing roommates, bargaining for
furniture, even securing partners for the commencement festivities still
three years off, an unexplainable longing to stay on and finish the four
years' drama with the rest had seized upon Eleanor. But each time it
came she had stifled it, reminding herself sternly that for her the four
years held no pleasant possibilities; she had thrown away her
chance--had neglected her work, alienated her friends, disappointed
every one, and most of all herself. There was nothing left for her now
but to go away beaten--not outwardly, for she still flattered herself
that she had proved both to students and faculty her ability to make a
very brilliant record at Harding had she been so inclined, and even her
superiority to the drudgery of the routine work and the childish
recreations. But in her heart of hearts Eleanor knew that this very
disinclination to make the most of her opportunities, this fancied
superiority to requirements that jarred on her undisciplined, haphazard
training, was failure far more absolute and inexcusable than if dulness
or any other sort of real inability to meet the requirements of the
college life had been at the bottom of it. Her father would know it too,
if the matter ever came to his notice; and her brother Jim, who was
making such a splendid record at Cornell--he would know that, as Betty
Wales had said once, quoting her sister's friend, "Every nice girl likes
college, though each has a different reason." Well, Jim had thought for
two years that she was a failure. Eleanor gulped hard to keep back the
tears; she had meant to be everything to Jim, and she was only an
annoyance.
It was almost dark by the time she reached the landing. A noisy crowd of
girls, who had evidently been out with their supper, were just coming
in. They exclaimed in astonishment when her canoe shot out from the
boat-house.
"It's awfully hard to see your way," called one officious damsel.
"I can see in the dark like an owl," sang back Eleanor, her good-humor
restored the instant her paddle touched water,--for boating was her one
passion.
Ah, but it was lovely on the river! She glided around the point of an
island and was alone at last, with the stars, the soft, grape-scented
breezes, and the dark water. She pulled up the stream with long, swift
strokes, and then, where the trees hung low over the still water, she
dropped the paddle, and slipping into the bottom of the canoe, leaned
back against a cushioned seat and drank in the beauty of the darkness
and solitude. She had never been out on Paradise River at night. "And I
shall never come again except at night," she resolved, breathing deep of
the damp, soft air. Malaria--who cared for that? And when she was cold
she could paddle a little and be warm again in a moment.
Suddenly she heard voices and saw two shapes moving slowly along the
path on the bank.
"Oh, do hurry, Margaret," said one. "I told her I'd be there by eight.
Besides, it's awfully dark and creepy here."
"I tell you I can't hurry, Lil," returned the other. "I turned my ankle
terribly back there, and I must sit down and rest, creeps or no creeps."
"Oh, very well," agreed the other voice grudgingly, and the shapes sank
down on a knoll close to the water's edge.
Eleanor had recognized them instantly; they were her sophomore friend,
Lilian Day, and Margaret Payson, a junior whom Eleanor greatly admired.
Her first impulse was to call out and offer to take the girls back in
her canoe. Then she remembered that the little craft would hold only two
with safety, that the girls would perhaps be startled if she spoke to
them, and also that she had come down to Paradise largely to escape
Lil's importunate demands that she spend a month of her vacation at the
Day camp in the Adirondacks. So, certain that they would never notice
her in the darkness and the thick shadows, she lay still in the bottom
of her boat and waited for them to go on.
"It's a pity about her, isn't it?" said Miss Payson, after she had
rubbed her ankle for a while in silence.
"About whom?" inquired Lilian crossly.
"Why, Eleanor Watson; you just spoke of having an engagement with her.
She seems to have been a general failure here."
Eleanor started at the sound of her own name, then lay tense and rigid,
waiting for Lilian's answer. She knew it was not honorable to listen,
and she certainly did not care to do so; but if she cried out now, after
having kept silent so long, Lilian, who was absurdly nervous in the
dark, might be seriously frightened. Perhaps she would disagree and
change the subject. But no----
"Yes, a complete failure," repeated Lilian distinctly. "Isn't it queer?
She's really very clever, you know, and awfully amusing, besides being
so amazingly beautiful. But there is a little footless streak of
contrariness in her--we noticed it at boarding-school,--and it seems to
have completely spoiled her."
"It is queer, if she is all that you say. Perhaps next year she'll
be----"
"Oh, she isn't coming back next year," broke in Lilian. "She hates it
here, you know, and she sees that she's made a mess of it, too, though
she wouldn't admit it in a torture chamber. She thinks she has shown
that college is beneath her talents, I suppose."
"Little goose! Is she so talented?"
"Yes, indeed. She sings beautifully and plays the guitar rather
well--she'd surely have made one of the musical clubs next year--and she
can act, and write clever little stories. Oh, she'd have walked into
everything going all right, if she hadn't been such a goose--muddled her
work and been generally offish and horrid."
"Too bad," said Miss Payson, rising with a groan. "Who do you think are
the bright and shining stars among the freshmen, Lil?"
"Why Marion Lustig for literary ability, of course, and Emily Davis for
stunts and Christy Mason for general all-around fineness, and
socially--oh, let me think--the B's, I should say, and--I forget her
name--the little girl that Dottie King is so fond of. Here, take my arm,
Margaret. You've got to get home some way, you know."
Their voices trailed off into murmurs that grew fainter and fainter
until the silence of the river and the wood was again unbroken. Eleanor
sat up stiffly and stretched her arms above her head in sheer physical
relief after the strain of utter stillness. Then, with a little sobbing
cry, she leaned forward, bowing her head in her hands. Paradise--had
they named it so because one ate there of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge?
"A little footless streak!"
"An utter failure!"
What did it matter? She had known it all before. She had said those very
words herself. But she had thought--she had been sure that other people
did not understand it that way. Well, perhaps most people did not. No,
that was nonsense. Lilian Day had achieved a position of prominence in
her class purely through a remarkable alertness to public sentiment.
Margaret Payson, a girl of a very different and much finer type, stood
for the best of that sentiment. Eleanor had often admired her for her
clear-sightedness and good judgment. They had said unhesitatingly that
she was a failure; then the college thought so. Well, it was Jean
Eastman's fault then, and Caroline's, and Betty Wales's. Nonsense! it
was her own. Should she go off in June and leave her name spelling
failure behind her? Or should she come back and somehow change the
failure to success? Could she?
She had no idea how long she sat there, turning the matter over in her
mind, viewing it this way and that, considering what she could do if she
came back, veering between a desire to go away and forget it all in the
gay bustle of a New York winter, and the fierce revolt of the famous
Watson pride, that found any amount of effort preferable to open and
acknowledged defeat. But it must have been a long time, for when she
pulled herself on to her seat and caught up the paddle, she was
shivering with cold and her thin dress was dripping wet with the mist
that lay thick over the river. Slowly she felt her way down-stream,
pushing through the bank of fog, often running in shore in spite of her
caution, and fearful every moment of striking a hidden rock or snag.
Soft rustlings in the wood, strange plashings in the stream startled
her. Lower down was the bewildering net-work of islands. Surely there
were never so many before. Was the boat-house straight across from the
last island, or a little down-stream? Which was straight across? And
where was the last island? She had missed it somehow in the mist. She
was below it, out in the wide mill-pond. Somewhere on the other side was
the boat-house, and further down was a dam. Down-stream must be straight
to the left. All at once the roar of the descending water sounded in
Eleanor's ears, and to her horror it did not come from the left. But
when she tried to tell from which direction it did come, she could not
decide; it seemed to reverberate from all sides at once; it was
perilously near and it grew louder and more terrible every moment.
Suddenly a fierce, unreasoning fear took possession of Eleanor. She told
herself sternly that there was no danger; the current in Paradise River
was not so strong but that a good paddler could stem it with ease. In a
moment the mist would lift and she could see the outline of one shore or
the other. But the mist did not lift; instead it grew denser and more
stifling, and although she turned her canoe this way and that and
paddled with all her strength, the roar from the dam grew steadily to an
ominous thunder. Then she remembered a gruesome legend that hung about
the dam and the foaming pool in the shadow of the old mill far below,
and dropped her paddle in an agony of fear. She might hurry herself over
the dam in striving to escape it!
And still the deafening torrent pounded in her ears. If only she could
get away from it--somewhere--anywhere just to be quiet. Would it be
quiet in the pool by the mill? Eleanor slipped unsteadily into the
bottom of her boat and tried to peer through the darkness at the black
water, and to feel about with her hands for the current. As she did so,
a bell rang up on the campus. It must be twenty minutes to ten. Eleanor
gave a harsh, mirthless laugh. How stupid she had been! She would call,
of course. If she could hear their bell, they could hear her voice and
come for her. There would be an awkward moment of explanation, but what
of that?
"Hallo! Hallo--o-o!" she called. Only the boom of the water answered.
"Hallo! Hallo--o-o!"
Again the boom of the water swallowed her cry and drowned it.
It was no use to call,--only a waste of strength.
Eleanor caught up her paddle and began to back water with all her might.
That was what she should have done from the first, of course. She was
cold all at once and very tired, but she would not give up yet.
She had quite forgotten that only a little while before it had not
seemed to matter much what became of her. "But if I can't keep at it all
night----" she said to the mist and the river.