Peggy was bending absorbedly over her desk one evening biting her pen
and then writing a bit and now and then crossing out part of what she
had written, all with a kind of seraphic smile that puzzled Katherine
more and more until she finally just had to speak about it.
"What are you doing, room-mate?" she demanded; "that look is so--so
awfully unlike your usual expression."
"Hush," said Peggy, glancing up and waving her pen solemnly toward the
other. "It's a poet's look."
"A----? Peggy Parsons, you're rooming with me under false pretenses. If
you're going to turn into a genius I'm going home. You know I perfectly
hate geniuses and there are so many funny ones around college. I always
thought that at least you----" her tone was scathing and beseeching at
the same time, "at least you were immune."
"Maybe I am," said Peggy speculatively. "What is it?"
"What's what?"
"Immune. Could a person be it without knowing it, do you suppose?"
Katherine had thrown herself across the room and had kissed Peggy
fervently and repentantly at this remark. "Oh, I take it all back,
Peggy," she cried, "you're not a genius. They always understand every
word in the dictionary and you are--you are just a dear little dunce,
after all!"
"Well, I like that!" exclaimed the injured young poet. "Let me read you
this, Katherine," she continued with shining eyes, "and then you'll
see--oh, Katherinekins, Katherinekins, what a bright room-mate you have,
and how proud you'll be of me to-morrow when Miss Tillotson reads this
out in English 13."
Katherine glanced toward the inky manuscript suspiciously.
"Is it very long?" she inquired.
Peggy only shot her a reproachful glance and began to read in a sweet,
thrilly voice, that already showed the effects of strenuous elocution
training and would have made the veriest nonsense in the world seem
beautiful by reason of its triumphant youth and its perfect conviction.
"Dreams that are dear--of night--of day--
All I could think or hope or plan:
Naught is so sweet in that dream world's sway
As this wonderful hour of the Present's span.
There was a silence in the room when she had finished, and Peggy folded
her manuscript up tenderly and laid it away on her desk with an air that
was little short of reverent.
"How did you do it?" breathed Katherine, carried away by the magic of
the voice rather than by any clear idea of what the voice had read. But
she had a great deal of faith in Peggy, and anything she would read like
that must be very fine. So Katherine passed her judgment on it
immediately.
"Do you like it?" Peggy pleaded, "oh, do you? Oh, I'm so glad.
It's--it's just a piece of my soul, Katherine."
Katherine accompanied her room-mate to English 13 next day with a
pleasant sense of exhilaration in her heart, for wasn't this the day
Peggy was to be praised before them all--freshmen, sophomores, juniors
and seniors alike--for her wonderful poem?
There was a little stir and flutter through Recitation room 27 as the
bright-eyed young literary lights of the college trooped in.
English 13 had to be held in the largest recitation room on campus, for
it was the one class that everybody would rather go to than not. It was
purely elective with a number of divisions and you could walk by and
decide whether or not you wanted to go in--and you always decided to go
in.
Grey sweaters over the backs of chairs, a blur of black furs, youthful
heads with hair all done alike, lolling arms along the chair-tops, slim
white hands toying with pencils or sweater buttons--a gigantic, lazy,
comfortable, enjoying-life sort of a class when you came in from the
back of the room, but as you went down toward the front and glanced
back, there was a light of eager anticipation shining in every face, a
universal expression of intelligent interest such as it is the fortune
of few college professors, alas, to behold in this world.
Peggy and Katherine had dropped the wonderful poem in the 13 box outside
the door--it being written on pale-blue paper so that Peggy would
recognize it at once in the bundle that would soon be brought in, in
Miss Tillotson's arms.
They sat as near the front as they could get, and that queer,
unaccountable, crimson uneasiness that affects authors when their work
is about to be read in public--part pleasurable but mostly agony--swept
Peggy in a miserable flood and she sat deaf, dumb and blind to all that
was going on around her until she heard the bell strike that announced
the opening of class.
Miss Tillotson at this minute came in, her arms full of manuscript, as
usual, her glance moving lightly over the rustling audience of girls,
who were beginning to sit up straight with that eager interest flaming.
Miss Tillotson was always sure of a response. From the moment she
fingered the first manuscript and began to read in her wonderful voice
that made the good things seem so much better than they were and the bad
things so much worse, every pause she made, every raised-eye-brow query,
every slight little twist of amused smile was received with a collective
long-drawn breath, a murmur of appreciation or a small, sudden sweeping
storm of laughter that convulsed the entire giant class at once, only to
drop away suddenly to still attention as her voice again picked up the
thread of narrative or resumed the verse.
It is a pity but true that Peggy heard absolutely nothing of her adored
13 to-day until her own blue-folded poem was lifted up. She had gone
through a hundred different emotions in the few minutes that she had
already spent in this classroom. Every time Miss Tillotson's fingers
lingered near her manuscript in selecting what next to read, a shiver of
despair went up and down her spine. Oh, why had she done such a thing?
She, only a freshman, to have had the effrontery to write a poem when
all these upper-classmen--and even the Monthly board members--were in
the class--and had written such wonderful things! Of course there was
the approval of Katherine by which she had set so much store a short few
hours ago. But--she glanced at Katherine now sitting so tranquilly
beside her. Katherine was only a freshman herself! What did her approval
mean? She hated herself for the disloyalty of the thought, but still she
could not help wishing that she had never shown the poem to Katherine
and then she could make out it was some one else's and not have to
suffer the awful humiliation----
Miss Tillotson was reading! Oh, it had actually come--this horrible
calamity! Nothing could happen to save her now. Her poor little blue
poem was being read out to all these wonderful girls of Hampton and she
could not prevent it. Drowning, drowning in a sea of confusion, there
drifted hazily through Peggy's mind a pathetic story she had once read
in a newspaper about a man whose ship was sinking and who had put a note
in a bottle, "All hope gone. Good-bye forever."
When the smooth voice of Miss Tillotson stopped there was a slight
rustle over the class, and then with one accord the girls burst out into
a laugh.
It was the merest ripple of enjoying titter, but in Peggy's crimson ears
it roared and echoed until the mocking sound of it was the one thing in
the world. She lifted her swimming eyes and kept them on Miss
Tillotson's face and even achieved a somewhat ghastly smile on her own
account, believing, poor child, that she could thus keep secret the
awful fact of her identity as the writer of that "thing"--the poem had
already descended to this title in her mind--and that neither Miss
Tillotson nor the girls need ever know.
"If all that the writer could 'think or hope or plan' is expressed in
this particular--flight," smiled Miss Tillotson, with that dear little
quirk to her mouth that Peggy had loved so many times but which hurt
now, oh, beyond words to tell, "I should think that dream world of hers
would resemble a nightmare."
Another gale of laughter swept the class, fluffy heads leaned back
against the chairs in abandon and shirt-waisted shoulders shook.
Peggy felt that if Katherine looked at her or ventured a pat of sympathy
she would die. But Katherine, when Peggy's miserable glance sought her
face, was gazing interestedly around the room from literary light to
literary light as if to determine which could have been guilty of the
blue manuscript. It certainly was a brilliant way to ward off detection
from her room-mate and Peggy was grateful.
Peggy hardly knew how she got home that day. She and Katherine did not
speak until they had gained the safety of their own suite and then they
put a "Busy" sign on the door, and sat down on their couch.
"Katherine," said Peggy at last, "one of two things must happen now.
Either I shall never touch pen to paper again or I'll keep at writing
until I make a success of it and show Miss Tillotson that I can after
all."
"Yes, room-mate," agreed Katherine solemnly, "that's the only
alternative open to you now."
The tragic whiteness of Peggy's face deepened.
"Never again, or--never give it _up_ until I've made good," she
murmured. "It might mean--more times like this, Katherine, if I kept
on," she reminded tentatively.
"Yes, Peggy," Katherine answered slowly, "I think it _would_ mean more
times like this."
"And nothing but my own determination to go on,--no reason to think I
have any particular talent or ability--she has already taken away all
that notion. Just the will to do it whether I can or not--to show her
that I can."
"Yes," agreed Katherine once more, "that's all you'd have to go on. _I_
think you are good at writing, but then I think you can do anything. I
can't write myself, so my opinion really isn't so very valuable. You'd
have to do it without encouragement."
"I want her respect, Katherine; I want to have her think in the end that
I'm the best writer that ever took Thirteen, but--it would mean giving
most of my time and all my energies to my English--and I might not turn
out any good in the end."
"True," Katherine again attacked her room-mate's problem, "and if you
never touch pen to paper again" (the phrase had them both) "you can soon
forget this hurt to-day and you need not put yourself in a similar
position again, and your main work can go to--well, to math or anything
else."
Peggy paced up and down the room and Katherine, never doubting but that
this was the most serious problem that had ever been fought out in
college, followed her room-mate's figure with eyes that brimmed with
sympathy and a heartful of affectionate loyalty that longed to be of
help and could not.
"Say, Peggy," she said suddenly, "I want to take a note over to the
note-room for one of the girls in my Latin class. Don't you want to come
along? This doesn't have to be decided all at once, does it?"
Peggy silently slipped on her sweater again and the girls ran across the
campus to the big recitation hall and thence down the basement steps to
the note-room. Crowds of girls were swarming into and out of this place
where, on little boards--one to each class--the girls left their
communications for each other under the proper initials. In so large a
college it was necessary to have some easy and direct means of reaching
each other without delay or the expense of telephone or postage. Every
girl went to the note-room once every day--and a particularly popular
one ran down after each class to gather in the sheaves of invitations,
business notes, and club meeting announcements that were sure to be
hers.
Peggy and Katherine squeezed through the crowds, greeting many other
freshmen as they were suddenly brought face to face, and at length they
stood before the freshman bulletin and Katherine stuck her note in the
rack at the letter R, while Peggy glanced, from habit, back to her own
initial. There were many little important-looking notes stuck upright
over the letter P, and Peggy fingered them over listlessly. Delia
Porter, Helen Pearson, Margaret Perry and so on, until all at once from
the most inviting looking of all leaped her own name, Peggy Parsons, in
perfectly unfamiliar writing--writing almost too assured to be that of a
freshman at all.
Wonderingly she unfolded the little square, and then, jammed in by the
other girls as she was, she flung her arms around Katherine's neck and
cried out with a sob of joy, "Oh, kiss me, Katherine!--they want my poem
for the _Monthly_!"
From dull gray the world leaped to glowing radiance. For a freshman to
be invited to give a poem to the _Monthly_! Her great problem was solved
automatically, and Peggy would be an author from that time forth until
she should be graduated.
"Let's see your note," urged Katherine, when they were out of the crowd
once more. "I want to look at it myself."
Peggy eagerly unfolded the precious thing again and read, while
Katherine looked over her shoulder:
"_My dear Miss Parsons_--or wouldn't it be more like college to
say Peggy?--I'm writing to ask you if we may not have for the
_Monthly_ that little poem of yours that was read in Thirteen
to-day? There are some changes in four of the lines, and if
you'll come over to my room this afternoon, I want you to make
them yourself so that there will be as little as possible of my
scribbling in it. Hoping to see you,
_Ditto Armandale_, _Monthly Board_,
_Room 11, Macefield House_."
"Why, Peggy, do you remember that Ditto Armandale we met that day last
year while you were standing under the waterfalls? And it was the sight
of her and all those other Hampton girls that first made you want to
come here! Miss Armandale invited me to come and see her that day, when
I should get to Hamp, and she said you were just the sort that ought to
come here--oh, isn't it _fine_, Peggy!"
"Yes, but look here," said Peggy, who was still reading over her note,
"she says 'changes in four of the lines.' There were only four lines
_in_ it, Katherine, you remember."
"That's queer. But I'd go anyway."
"Of course I will,--I don't suppose she'll remember me, but I'm glad
she's the one, she looked so nice and considerate that day."
"What are you going to wear?"
"It's an invitation house. I suppose a person ought to be awfully
dressy," Peggy said doubtfully.
"I don't know," murmured Katherine. "I shouldn't think it would be
necessary to dress much if you were just one of the multitude like me.
But being one of the youngest authors in college, it's different with
you."
With arms around each other's shoulders, the room-mates strolled back
across the campus toward Ambler House. The sunlight shone over the
campus and over the moving army of girls going in every direction across
it, for it was just at the end of recitation hour. None of them wore
hats, so that the light gleamed down on their hair. Most of them wore
white sweaters or sport coats, and under the arm of each was tucked a
notebook or a stack of study volumes.
All of them walked in pairs, as Katherine and Peggy were doing, or in
laughing groups that gathered numbers as they went on.
Peggy and Katherine began to have an intimate sense of belonging to it
all. Hampton was becoming _their_ college in a way it had not been
before. This campus and those red brick buildings, those laughing crowds
of girls, their hair blowing in the wind--these things were to represent
their whole world for four years, and, tightening their hands on each
other's shoulders, they were glad it was to be so.
And Peggy held crushed in her free hand a tiny wad of paper, the
tangible evidence that this first year promised success to her.