It was right in the middle of Freshman Rains.
The faces of the new girls appeared white and mournful, pressed against
the dormitory windows, or flushed and laughing from between rubber
helmets and slickers out on the campus, according to their dispositions.
Up and down the second floor corridor of Ambler House trooped the usual
forenoon procession, umbrella tips clicking on the polished boards:
those who were going out to classes making a flapping sound with their
rubber garments, those returning giving out a sloshing noise that
advertised the weather outside in an unfavorable manner.
Before several of the doors wet umbrellas were open on the floor to dry,
while tiny rivulets trickled steadily from the steel prongs. They looked
like big black bats which had flown in to seek shelter from the outer
torrents and might be expected to take wing again at any minute.
It was not a hilarious atmosphere at best, but, to add to its dripping
depression, two wails of a most long-drawn and lugubrious sort began to
be wafted down the length of the hall over the tops of the wet
umbrellas, drifting in heart-brokenly through the students' doors, and
dying away in receding cadences whenever a disconsolate head lifted
itself from a cushion to listen or a helmet strap was shoved back from a
surprised and inquisitive ear.
"M--MMm-MO-O-Oh," went the wail, and then "Moo-oo-oo," with a pastoral
significance that was particularly mystifying.
No use for any girl to tell herself that this was the wind howling--or
the rain dejectedly descending on a tin roof--for no wind ever howled so
precisely up and down scales with such sobbingly human and barnyard
notes, and no rain was ever known to be so surprisingly vocal, nor so
loud and threatening one moment and so tremulously broken and far away
the next.
"Go! Gug-gug-go! Gug-gug-GO-go-go!" screamed the dual wail, apparently
expressive of the utmost suffering, and yet, through it all, maintaining
a baffling rhythmical quality and a monotony of utterance that sent a
shuddering wonder in its wake as it coursed down the hall.
But during such a disheartening season as Freshman Rains the spirit of
investigation is not keen, and the residents on the second floor
preferred to distract their attention by lessons that must be learned or
by long and rambling letters home that ended with vague hints that
somebody in their house was being killed down the hall.
It was not until the voices broke out into wild and mirthless laughter
that their apathetic spirits were aroused to protest.
"Goodness, girls, what's that awful noise?" an indignant brown head
poked itself out from one of the umbrella-guarded doors and sent its
peevish remonstrance down the corridor. In an instant every door framed
a face--or two faces--and a babble of questions was echoed back and
forth.
But triumphantly right through the shrill notes of their eager queries
rang the weird and displeasing sound that had so disturbed them.
"Ha-HA! Ho-HO! He-HEE! Haw-HAW!"
"It's too much!" averred the girl who had spoken first. "_Where_ is that
sound being made? And _what_ is it? Seems to me as if it were from Suite
22--do you think somebody is torturing those freshmen?" It was just what
everybody did think, but they dreaded the admission. "Let's go in
there," the girl continued, "and--and find out." She ended rather
weakly, shrinking before the task of investigating so unearthly a sound
as that.
The girls were flocking forth, some still in their damp slickers, the
rain glistening on them; others all immaculate just as they were ready
to start out to recitations: and still a lazy third contingent, who had
not yet had any classes or who were wantonly cutting them, as sweet as
flowers in Japanese silk kimonos and little pattering slippers.
Together they made the charge on Door 22.
Crowding in at the breach as it swung open, they gasped in sudden
bewilderment at the sight that met their eyes.
Standing rigidly side by side like two soldiers on parade, but with
their hands solemnly placed upon their diaphragms while they emitted
simultaneously the weird noises that had alarmed the house, were Peggy
Parsons and Katherine Foster, the idols of Ambler House!
Their eyes widened at the wholesale intrusion and their hands fell
limply to their sides, and then, as the indignant chorus broke out
around them, they looked at each other in crimson confusion and burst
out laughing.
"Why--c-could you h-h-hear us, g-girls?" cried Katherine incoherently
through her shaking spasms of mirth.
"Hear you?" echoed Hazel Pilcher, who had led the charge upon them.
"Hear? Well, my _dears_, did you think you were exactly whispering? I
never listened to so awful a concert in my life. It's a wonder I didn't
call the house-matron. Oh, you incorrigible youngsters, what in the
world was it?"
Peggy's face assumed an aggrieved expression immediately.
"It was only our lesson," she responded somewhat sulkily.
"Lesson! My goodness, what are they giving the freshmen now that their
lessons turn out to be imitations of a menagerie? Why, when I was a
freshman"--(with a very superior air, for Hazel Pilcher was now enjoying
all the glory of a sophomore's exalted position)--"we had Latin and
French and math and history, but I never heard of a course in ghostly
noises. I'm sure that in my year they at least spared us that."
"Just the samey that was our lesson," Peggy persisted, "that was our
practice work for to-morrow's yell."
"Do you mean----?" Hazel began to understand, for one cannot be a
sophomore without knowing most of the abbreviations in which college
terminology abounds.
"Elocution, if we have to simplify it," said Peggy. "I suppose you girls
didn't take that course. Well, Katherine and I are just--taking it for
all it's worth. I guess we want to learn to speak correctly and place
our voices right from the diaphragm and make full and open tones----"
"Spare muh!" interposed a senior who was known to be already practicing
up for dramatics. "I hear nothing but that sort of thing all day long
these days. I might have guessed what your vocal gymnastics meant--but
they were so particularly horrible----"
"Well, the worse they sound the better they are," murmured Peggy,
deprecatingly. "And I thought myself we did it rather well."
Elocution, or, as the girls called it with enthusiasm, yellocution or
yell, was an elective course that entailed no studying, but a vast deal
of labor along a different line. The victims who were beguiled into
taking it, thinking to gain an easy course minus mental effort, that
would count nevertheless a perfectly good two hours a week for their
degree, were often mere tearful wrecks after the first few days when
they were stood up before an enormous, gaping class and put through test
after test to the running accompaniment of wounding comment on their
enunciation, their manner, their throats, their gestures--everything.
They became acquainted for the first time with all the distressful
mystery of larynxes and pharynxes--which most of them had always
supposed were the names of diseases--they learned about diaphragms, too,
and were forced to breathe in different ways and shout and cry "Ha-ha,"
all the time feeling for the muscular hammer stroke at their waist
lines. It was so embarrassing to Peggy at first that she couldn't make
any sound at all when they told her to say "Ha-ha," and it was only
after three attempts that she managed a faint and disheartened squeak.
"Your voice is little and thin," criticised the teacher sharply. "I
shall give you exercises to round it out."
And that's what she had done, and these were what Peggy and her faithful
room-mate were practicing at the moment of the inrush of visitors.
She explained to her guests how little and thin her voice was, but they
laughed scornfully and said if she had any more of a one, they'd see
that she was put off campus, that, as far as they were concerned, they
believed she had the biggest and the fattest voice on record, which
seemed to restore Peggy's self-respect in a way marvelous to behold.
"A person can be happy," she assured them conversationally, "just so
long as she doesn't know anything about herself--how she talks, how she
looks or how she impresses other people. But the minute you get her
conscious of all these larynx-pharynx-diaphragm machines inside her
she'll never know another happy minute until she conquers them all and
can speak just like a Nazimova with 'em. Though Nazimova is rather
sobby, I'm told--maybe I'd better train myself up after Blanche Ring
instead."
"Peggy," Katherine put in at this point questioningly, "don't you think
we might set the water over and give the girls some tea?"
At this delightful prospect many of the girls--especially the little
lazy kimonoed ones--sat right down wherever they happened to be, in a
chair or on the floor, with such looks of blissful anticipation on their
faces that they were a pleasant sight. It wasn't often tea was served in
the middle of a rainy forenoon and the two Andrews freshmen were already
so practiced in little parties before they came to college, that even a
cup of tea served by them had a grace and an added interest, that it
could not have possessed in the rooms of girls who were just tasting
their first bit of life away from home.
Peggy looked in some consternation at the comfortable crowd with its
expectant and gleeful expression, and demurred slowly.
"I just _have_ to train my voice," she said, "but I suppose, even with
them here, I can go right on?"
A groan greeted this proposal that was anything but complimentary.
Peggy looked hurt. "Oh, you just wait," she said vindictively, but with
a laugh struggling for utterance at the same time. "Some day you'll pay
to hear me--see if you won't--and I mean to work at it right along all
through four years and then--and--then----" her voice grew dreamy and
her eyes stared off into a heavenly future, "and then maybe I can be in
the mob at senior dramatics!"
The senior of the party laughed at the pretty compliment, for she
herself was only in the mob, and her classmates didn't think she had
such a marvelous success either--so it was pleasant to have the
adoration of a popular freshman.
"I'm sure you will be," she said graciously, "and with one accord we all
accept the future mob member's invitation to tea." And she sat down with
the rest and waited patiently.
With a sigh, Peggy lit the little alcohol lamp under the tea kettle and
Katherine dived mysteriously under the desk to emerge a moment later
with something that sent a general shout of approval through the entire
group.
"A box! A box!" they cried, "Katherine has a box from home!"
Nothing else in life possesses quite the wonder and the satisfying
delight of a real box from home. If the parents at home only knew of the
wide-eyed envy of all the girls as they cluster around one of these
brighteners of college existence as it is being opened, there would be a
continuous procession of expressmen tramping in at the back door of all
the college houses, week in and week out, and every single closet shelf
would hold its quota of jam jars, home-made cookies, and fine large
grape-fruit so that the same glow of satisfaction and sense of being
loved would abide in each girl's heart all the time.
The tea ball was being daintily dipped in and out of the steaming cups,
the cold chicken was being eagerly passed down the line of girls, when
the door of suite 22 opened again and a confused and blushing stranger,
tall, with wonderful reddish hair and baby-blue eyes, stepped inside and
asked in a voice that was so full of fright that it would never have
passed in that elocution class of Peggy's, if this was Miss Katherine
Foster's room.
"I'm trying to find Miss Foster," the scared voice went on, "because I
was to have roomed with her this year. I'm Gloria----"
With a single bound, the impulsive Peggy had reached the beautiful
stranger and had thrown her arms around her neck. It was all her fault,
she was thinking, all her fault that this nice, nice girl had been
deprived of the finest room-mate on campus, for while Peggy and
Katherine were at Andrews Preparatory School, Peggy had not known that
she herself could go to college until the last minute, and Katherine had
already been assigned another room-mate. When Peggy had been given the
money to come, however, by old Mr. Huntington, her friend, Katherine had
written to Gloria Hazeltine--who stood before them now--and had
explained that she just must room with her own Peggy, and would Gloria
mind and she could easily find somebody else.
Neither of the girls had seen Gloria before, but at this first glimpse
of her, Peggy's heart was warm with a sense of wanting to make up to her
for having taken her place, and hence the smothering arms she wrapped so
quickly around the newcomer's neck.
All the embarrassment of the new guest fled at this surprisingly eager
reception. She drew back from Peggy's arms and smiled happily down into
her face.
"Oh, oh," she cried, "I wish more than ever that you were my room-mate!
Which is Peggy Parsons that has taken you away from me?"
Peggy at once saw the other's mistake and flushed. "I'm the guilty
party," she admitted. "I'm Peggy. But I want you please to like me a
little--anyway. And now----" suddenly changing to a business-like tone
of hospitality, "sit right down and have some tea. Girls, this is
Morning Glory, Katherine's and my best friend. You don't mind my calling
you that?" she inquired anxiously. "That's the way Katherine and I spoke
of you to ourselves and you--your looks bear it out so well," she
faltered.
Gloria, very much taken into the Ambler House set, and already being
plied with tea and wonderful beaten biscuit, didn't mind anything, and
in a few minutes the whole room seemed to glow with a pervading
happiness and content that took no account of the gloomy weather
outside, and for this season at least the bugaboo ghost of the Freshman
Rains was laid.