Bang! Bang!
"My-y goo-oodness, is it time to get up?" Katherine sat up sleepily the
morning after the freshmen officers' reception, and tried to get some
response from the little log-like Peggy in the bed across the room. But
Peggy's face was toward the wall and she presented a perfect picture of
deep sleep.
The banging continued and Katherine felt it incumbent upon her to locate
it. Gertie Van Gorder, who had kindly taken upon herself the task of
waking up the entire second floor at whatever hours its individual
inhabitants specified, never thumped like that. She always came quietly
in and laid icy cold wet wash cloths over their faces, and informed them
calmly, "Your tub is ready, girls; I've left my violet ammonia in there
for you."
So it wasn't Gertie.
"Peggy," yawned Katherine fretfully, "can't you wake up and help me
think what that is?"
But Peggy, accustomed to so much more efficient means of awakening,
never stirred.
"Come in," invited Katherine unwillingly and experimentally to the
banging, and Hazel Pilcher entered, with Myra Whitewell in her wake.
"Lazy!" cried Hazel. "You've missed breakfast!"
Katherine moaned and hunched her shoulders in her pink-ribboned
nightgown. "What's become of Gertie?" she demanded. "We can't wake up by
ourselves, can we?"
"Gertie's in Boston; didn't you know? Went for the week-end," and Hazel
sat down on the foot of the sleeping Peggy's couch and laughed until she
was hoarse. "Now that just shows that what Myra and I are getting up is
a real necessity," she giggled. "If there wasn't a crack o' doom of some
kind, I suppose the whole second floor of Ambler House would snooze
right through the three days until Gertie gets back. It's--it's
ludicrous," she finished, after fishing around for a good word.
"You're sitting on Peggy," pointed out Katherine lackadaisically when
the laughter of her guests had died down.
"Wake up, Peggy," cried Hazel, shaking the rounded shoulder. "Wake up
and quit being sat on."
"You spoke of a plan," drawled Katherine, when all had seen that the
only effect on Peggy was a tossing of her golden curls on the pillow.
"Was it something to take Gertie's place? If it were, I don't think
anything could; Gertie will get up at any hour to call us, and says she
likes it, too. I'm too loyal to Gertie----"
"Nonsense," snapped Myra Whitewell, who had not forgotten that one of
the room-mates had been largely instrumental in electing her opponent at
elections the day before. "This is a fault party that we're going to
have to-night, in Hazel's room. Just freshmen, except Hazel. You two
must be sure to come."
"A fault party?"
"Yes, every house ought to have one. Hazel says this house did last
year. Each person tells the others their faults, you know, and then we
can improve. Everybody is very frank and it really is good for you to
know."
Myra glanced somewhat bitterly at the inattentive form of Peggy, and
Katherine hastily turned a little surprised laugh into a sneeze.
"Oh, so she wants to tell Peggy her faults," mused Katherine. "Peggy of
all people! Why, she hasn't any."
"I don't want to come," a muffled voice came from the erstwhile sleeper.
"It hurts people's feelings."
"It shouldn't," interposed Myra sharply. "If it does, _that's_ a fault,
and somebody can bring up that. Everybody ought to be glad to know
what's the matter with them. Why, the idea!" she burst out, "there isn't
one of us who hasn't seen something to correct in the others, and
instead of just keeping it to ourselves and being hypocrites, isn't it a
thousand times better to tell the person right out?"
"I don't think the person would like that," the muffled voice protested.
"Well, all the freshmen must come," Myra persisted. "Come at nine-thirty
to-night, in case we don't have another chance to tell you."
"That's a funny thing," said Peggy, rubbing her eyes when the two had
gone. "Do you know any faults of any of the girls, Katherine? I don't.
Let's see, there are eight freshmen in this house altogether,--and Hazel
taking part makes nine. Why, Katherine, I think we have wonderful people
here."
"That part won't matter so much," hinted the wise Katherine. "They want
to do the telling, I think."
"I'll watch the girls all day whenever I'm not at class, and if I see
anything the matter with any of them, I'll have something to report on."
"I know some for Myra myself."
"Some way I hadn't thought of that," answered Peggy. "I believe I do,
too. But here's a good idea, Katherine,--you and I live together, and
did all last year, and we ought to know _slews_ of faults about each
other. So when we are called on we can just show each other up at a
great rate--drag each other out to be ridiculed"--Peggy rocked in bed
with the merriment of the thought. "We can make up the most wild faults
of all, and please everybody," she laughed.
"You wouldn't be gloating over foolish things like that if you knew we'd
missed breakfast," interrupted Katherine. "And, my goodness, woman,
there's the chapel bell!"
The room was a confusion of flying clothes, waving hair-brushes and
dodging figures, for some ten minutes thereafter. Then the pink and
white cretonne bed covers were smoothed quickly over two couches that
had each been made up in a single swooping motion, including sheet,
blankets, comforter and all. The fat pillows were stuffed into their
cretonne covers and thrown at the head of the beds, and then two
well-dressed, well-groomed appearing girls, with their notebooks under
their arms, emerged and tore down the broad stairway, flying across the
campus lawn, just in time to be shut out of chapel, while the first
welling notes of the organ came out to them, as they stood panting at
the door.
"You know that girl down the hall who keeps saying 'all things work
together for good,'" said Katherine. "Well----"
"What do you mean?" asked Peggy, but she had already cast one fleeting
glance towards the Copper Kettle just outside the campus.
"It's just a question of whether we can get breakfast in twenty minutes
and be in time for our first class," went on Katherine. "And I'm
starved, and I--don't mind having missed chapel, after all. That's what
I mean."
Laughing, Peggy caught her arm and the two took a short cut out of
campus and across the road to the little tea room.
"Nothing is served till nine o'clock," they were informed, for provision
was made against just such a feeling as Katherine had expressed. The two
ran around the corner to the nearest drug store, and regaled themselves
with two egg chocolates each.
"Goodness," murmured Peggy on their way back to recitation, "I certainly
wish Gertie were back, bless her heart. If anybody at the meeting
to-night finds any fault with _her_, while she's away, they'll have me
to deal with."
But when the freshmen were assembled that evening, no word was said
against Gertie, nor was her name so much as mentioned, for there is
little satisfaction in scoring an absent friend, when you have just
received license to make a present one squirm.
Two candles were lit in Hazel's rose-and-old-blue room. There was no
other light. On the couch and here and there about on the floor sat the
Ambler freshmen, in silk kimonos of Japanese or French design. Florence
Thomas was wearing a pale blue with big gold dragons, Peggy noticed as
soon as she came in, for the candle light flickered over it, and the
dull gold threads gleamed.
Myra's kimono was of midnight blue crepe de chine without any relieving
color tone whatever. Her face shone above it more pale and proud than
usual.
"The reason we are here," began Myra, rising and standing gracefully
before them, with her dark eyes taking in every one of the group, "is to
see if we can't be of some help to each other in weeding out the most
glaring faults of the Ambler House freshmen. Hazel is here as a sort of
referee, and each girl is to tell--quite without reservation--any
criticisms she may have for the rest of us. Now begin, somebody."
She sat down again with a little silken rustle, and Florence Thomas
leaned forward, her pleasant face serious with the weight of her
self-imposed task.
"There's one thing I've noticed," she said slowly. "Doris Winterbean and
May Jenson don't seem to mingle with the rest of the house as they
might. Now I don't want you two girls to get mad," turning to her
victims, "but you have an awfully ungracious air when any one comes to
your door, and you always lay a book face down as if you could hardly
wait to take it up again. You aren't exactly snobs,--maybe it's only
that you're too studious. You never have any eats in your room, and yet
you are always going to call on other people when you hear they have.
And that's about the only way any of us can entice you into our
rooms----"
Doris and May wilted perceptibly under this attack, and their mouths
opened in astonishment to see the way they had been impressing these
girls whom they had supposed were their generous friends. But instead of
making them more gentle when it came their turn to uncover faults, they
threw discretion to the winds, and heaped up accusations, forgetting
that another morning was coming and they must go on living among these
girls throughout the year.
The atmosphere of friendship which prevailed when the girls arrived in
Hazel's room, was changed now to one of animosity.
One after another, the girls criticized each other's gowns, table
manners and personality. Each new victim of attack blanched, drew a
sharp breath of horror and surprise to see in what esteem she had been
held, and then bided her time to "get back."
Faith in friendship died in that college room. Listening to the deeply
serious voice of her critic, each girl had some fleeting memory of that
same critic--bursting laughingly into her room for an exchange of
confidences, or protesting admiration and liking in a sunny, hearty
fashion.
A girl named Lilian Moore came in for the worst of the drubbing. Hardly
a girl present but had discovered some glaring defect in her.
"You'll pardon me, but your clothes have absolutely no style, and Ambler
House can't help wishing you were a little more modern. It hurts a house
to have to claim a girl that will not dress properly--it destroys the
tone of the whole house."
"Your hair--this is awful--but it really ought to be washed more. It
ought to be fluffy and done with some care, and not--just wadded up as
you do it."
"We like you--Doris and I were saying the other day what a nice girl you
were--but we both said we'd like you so much better if you didn't say
'indeed' all the time."
"You have absolutely no faculty for making friends."
"Your room is so unattractive--there's nothing in it, really, and you
can't expect girls to want to go to see you."
"You don't walk right--you stoop."
Those were some of the things that these dainty freshmen had been
thinking about her since the first day she had appeared among them,
shining-eyed and shy, anxious for their approval, fearful lest she, with
such limited advantages, should fail to measure up to their wonderful
standard! And then, oh, glory of life, and happiness undeserved, they
had seemed to care after all! They had seemed to want to talk to her,
had passed her their candy, had often come to her to be helped with
difficult algebra problems!
No one even asked her if she had any fault to find in return. What could
she have found to criticize about _them_? So she was passed over at
last, and allowed to sink back in silence, miserably conscious of her
cotton crepe kimono that she and her mother had made with such pride and
such appreciation of its becomingness. Her cheeks burned a tortured red,
but there was nobody to notice her.
The hilarity with which Peggy and Katherine had meant to accuse each
other of colossal faults had died. They sat quietly in the candle dusk,
holding each other's hands while indignation showed in their faces.
"And Peggy Parsons----"
It was the cold, diamond-hard voice of Myra Whitewell speaking. "Peggy
Parsons, I've felt it my duty for quite a while to tell you how
thoroughly conceited you are----"
Katherine, who had shifted uneasily when the speech began, gasped now
and would have laughed in her relief, for it seemed to her that if there
was one thing in the world everybody must know that Peggy was _not_, it
was conceited. Myra was wide of the mark, Katherine felt, and she did
not even press her room-mate's hand that still lay passively in hers.
"You feel as if you have to dip into everything," went on Myra, with a
voice in which spite was veiled in a grave tone of carrying out a
disagreeable duty. "You felt you must run the elections----"
"Ah," thought Katherine, "I knew that was the reason."
"As if the freshman class couldn't get along without you! You made
yourself very forward and, it seemed to some of us, bold, by going up
and advising Alta Perry how to do things. And Alta the junior president!
It wasn't respectful, and it was taking a good deal on yourself!"
Here Florence Thomas, astonished that any one should dare arraign Peggy,
got up, the golden dragons flaming in the dim light, and moved
deliberately toward the door.
She found the door locked, and the key gone. She turned angrily.
"Until we're through, nobody ought to go," explained the high-handed
Myra Whitewell. "As I was saying, Peggy, your egotism----"
"Back it up, back it up," protested Doris Winterbean.
"Well," Myra accepted the challenge, "that poem of yours in the
_Monthly_----"
"How did you know?" cried Peggy and Katherine, simultaneously.
"Why, I read the foolish thing in the _Monthly_," snapped Myra,
surprised.
Peggy, her eyes alight, and Katherine, dawning credulity in her face,
turned and met each other's gaze in slow triumph.
"It's _in_?" asked Peggy breathlessly.
"Of course--how else----?" murmured Myra.
"Girls!" cried Peggy, radiantly, "my poem is in the _Monthly_! I didn't
suppose they'd really use it--oh, I would have told you all, if I'd been
sure. Are the new _Monthlies_ down on the table now, Myra?"
"Yes, they're downstairs."
"I'm going to sneak down just as I am and get mine," breathed Peggy,
"and then shall I read it to you, girls?"
Faults, depression, lost faith--all forgotten in the frank joy that was
Peggy's.
She pattered across the floor, begged prettily for the key, took it from
Hazel Pilcher's reluctant hand, and fitted it in the lock.
A moment later they heard her trailing down the hall.
There was complete silence while she was gone.
The outraged feelings were subsiding, and the girls, who a few moments
before were almost hating each other, now waited in pleasant
anticipation the reading of the poem.
There was no warning of her return. They were simply watching the door,
which she had left open, and all of a sudden she stood framed in it, the
soft candle glow lighting her lovely face and blue-clad figure, and the
tan cover of the _Monthly_ which she held clasped to her heart.
"I--can't come back in," she whispered. "I met our house-mother on the
stairs, and she made me promise to go right to my own room if she'd let
me creep down and get the _Monthly_ from the table. It's after ten, and
all the lights are out down the hall. Good-night, girls; I've had a
lovely time," and she really believed she had.
Katherine followed her, with a backward wave of the hand, and what more
fault finding went on after their departure they never knew.
"I s'pose it isn't much to any one else," said Peggy deprecatingly, "but
I just feel as if this was the nicest number of the _Monthly_ ever
gotten out!"
And Katherine answered loyally, "I do too."
The cretonne couch covers they had smoothed up in such haste that
morning were carefully folded back, and Katherine climbed into her bed,
and with a little tired sigh was fast asleep; but Peggy, after carefully
fixing the screen around her room-mate's couch so that the light
shouldn't trouble her, propped herself up with pillows in her own bed,
the College _Monthly_ on her knees.
She found her name in the index, "Margaret Parsons," and was thrilled by
the formality of that. Then she fluttered the leaves over--just as any
one might, she told herself, until she came, to her intense surprise, of
course, to her poem.
This she proceeded to read. And when she had finished, she tried to read
one of the stories or a poem by some one else, but somehow nothing
seemed interesting after that--nothing had for her quite the vividness
or charm, so she shamefacedly yielded to the temptation to read hers all
over again.
But before she had finished, a curious sound disturbed her.
From somewhere down the hall came the unmistakable sobs of a person
crying out her heart in heedless abandon. It was not very loud, but was
penetrating and alarming.
Peggy listened, hardly able to believe her ears. When she and Katherine
were so happy in college, was it possible any girl would have cause to
cry like that?--right here in Ambler House?--the nicest dorm on Campus?
Sighing, she slid her feet into her slippers, dipped her arms into her
kimono again, laid the precious _Monthly_ on the dressing-table, turned
out the light and was soon in the fearsome hall, with those sounds
echoing down it, and no light but the tiny globule of red at the other
end, which indicated the fire-escape.
She went on toward the unwinking light, until she was sure she stood
before the door through which the crying emanated.
It was Lilian Moore's room. She had a small single room and was
apparently drowning herself in tears there.
The recklessness of the crying, the absolute indifference as to who
heard or knew, made Peggy hesitate for just a minute before she turned
the knob of the door and went in. She was not exactly afraid, and yet
she felt very much alone with something too painful for her to cope
with, as she felt her way into the darkness.
She felt her foot sink into a soft pile of clothing, then immediately
after, she stumbled against some large and solid object that she never
remembered having seen in the middle of Lilian's room, and for which she
failed utterly to account.
Lilian was throwing herself about on the bed now, and Peggy did not know
whether she realized there was any one in the room or not. She felt for
the light, and, after much fumbling, found it, and snapped it on.
The freshman's room was in a state of complete confusion. An open trunk
half packed was what she had run against in the darkness. Piles of
clothing and books were strewn round about it on the floor, ready to go
in. Lilian, herself, fully dressed, started up from the bed with a cry,
as the glare of light flooded everything, and dropped back moaning when
she saw that it was Peggy who had come.
"Now," said Peggy quietly, sitting down on the bed beside the tossing
figure, "let's be real still or the matron will hear us."
This obvious common sense thrown like cold water over her misery had an
immediate effect on the other girl, who had expected sympathy.
The sobs shuddered down to long-drawn painful breaths, and Lilian
covered her swollen eyes with two weak hands.
"I'm sure it isn't just the way you think," said Peggy, after a few
minutes. "It couldn't be as bad as all that."
"What couldn't?"
"Why, whatever is the matter."
There was a pause and then came a smothered, "Yes, it could. It is. Oh,
and I wanted to come to college so--I wanted to come!"
"Well--and you came, and here you are with all of us," Peggy reminded.
"That's just it," the confidences came now pouring over each other for
utterance. Lilian clasped Peggy's cool fingers with a fevered hand. "I
wish to goodness that I hadn't ever come. I don't belong. The girls
showed me that to-night. Oh, when I think of how my mother kissed me
good-bye--and--and gave me up for all this year--just for--this----"
"For what?" helped out Peggy.
"To have the girls make fun of my room, my clothes--and me. Listen, Miss
Parsons. We lived in a small town where nobody was very well-to-do. And
mother--wanted something better for me than she had ever known. When she
was a girl she used to dream of going to college----"
Sobs choked the narrator and she struggled for a moment before she could
go on.
"And--when I began to grow up, she decided that I should go--oh, Miss
Parsons, when I came away she said to remember that I was going for both
of us!"
Peggy's fingers tightened around the feverish hand, and she could see
very clearly in her mind the face of this girl's mother with its wistful
yet self-sacrificing expression, and the tears came suddenly to her
eyes.
"She saved, my mother did, for years so that there would be enough--for
me--to come on Campus like the other girls," a trace of bitterness crept
in here. "But I didn't know how they dressed at a place like this and
how they all fixed up their rooms. I didn't realize there would be
anything besides the tuition and board--and--I--didn't--know--they
couldn't--love me----"
Peggy tore her hand from the other's grasp and went and stood by the
desk with her back to the bed. Her eyes fell on a blotted and
tear-stained letter which began, "Dear Mother."
"Listen, Lilian," she said, going back to the couch, "I haven't any
mother at all. That will seem strange to you, who have seen me laughing
around here, happy and singing most of the time. But I haven't,--and I
know that nothing ever will quite make up. That letter you have
begun--just try to realize that no matter what happens to me,--whatever
hard thing I may have to go through, I can't write such a letter as
that."
Lilian stared at Peggy in surprise. Why, she had supposed the little
Miss Parsons had _everything_.
"You are the one to be envied after all," said Peggy. "No matter how
many of the girls like you, or how much they care, it isn't anything to
the way a person's own mother cares. And if you want them to, the girls
will care, too. We'll begin now to _make_ them."
"It's too late--I'm going home."
"Going home after your mother saved to send you?--going home without the
least little bit of a try to bring things your way?--going home and
taking away your mother's chance to enjoy college through you?--oh, no,
you're not going home!"
"Well," hesitancy showed in Lilian's manner, "I've been packing my
trunk. I made up my mind that the girls would never have to see my
homely clothes any more."
"Stay a week and--try, will you?" pleaded Peggy. "Katherine and I would
miss you awfully if you went home now."
"You and Katherine? Would you really?"
"Yes, really and truly. Why, when we first knew you here, we said you
were the kind of girl we wanted for a friend, and that we were sure we
were going to like you," fibbed kind little Peggy, striving to find in
her memory a record that they had noticed her at all.
"Then it isn't everybody in the house that feels as some of those girls
do?"
"Nobody really," stoutly maintained Peggy. "Even the ones who talked too
much didn't feel that way. They had all just been rubbed the wrong way
by some one else--and you were an unresisting object to fire away at in
their turn. And don't you suppose some of the rest had just as horrid
things said to them as you did? And they aren't crying about it either.
They are protected by being more egotistical and sure of themselves and
they're just thinking 'how ignorant that critic of mine was,' that's
all."
"If you want me to," said Lilian suddenly, "I'll stay--for you."
"Stay for the mother," corrected Peggy, "and for your own satisfaction,
too."
"Very well, I will," came the determined voice at last.
"Then good-night," said Peggy, "and don't you think about it again
to-night--will you?"
"No," said Lilian sturdily, "I'll think only about to-morrow when maybe,
if I come to see you, you'll read me your poem in the _Monthly_."
"Why, you _dear_," said Peggy, and, since she was a very human little
girl, she made her way back to her room in a state of pleasant warmth
and contentment.