had been for so many years superior to her surroundings, so long not
only the cleverest but the finest-grained, most aristocratic of all
those she saw about her, that although she had perfectly appreciated
the fact that she would probably no longer be in that relative
position, she had not estimated the difficulty of the necessary
adjustment, and it is only fair to those who gave her her hardest
lessons of calm neglect to state at once that her manner was a trifle
irritating.
To begin with, she had made herself unpleasantly conspicuous at the
time of their first freshman class-meeting by rising after half an
hour of unventilated and tumultuous altercation, and leaving the room.
Now it is not the custom of popular freshmen to leave their first
class-meeting in this manner--not as if one were faint or demanded at
recitation, but as merely intolerably bored and not a little
contemptuous; and the scrambling, squabbling class regarded her
accordingly. Susan Revere Jackson was bored, too--unspeakably bored;
but she sat indefatigably in her chair in the front row, applauded
nominations, discussed the presumably parliamentary features of the
occasion, smiled and agreed, differed at proper intervals, and left
the room vice-president. It is hard to know just how much enthusiasm
Sue really felt: Susan, to whom she soon became the visible expression
of all the triumph and ease and distilled essence of the successful
college girl, used to wonder, later, as older than Susan have
wondered, how much of her college life was ingenuous and how much a
perfectly conscious attitude. For long before she left, Susan realized
that she had greatly misjudged a large proportion of the girls, whom
the event proved more practically wise than she, and that they who
fill the rôle of "fine, all 'round girl" with the greatest success are
often perfectly competent to fill others, widely different.
This she did not understand at first, and as a result of her ignorance
she included them all in her general condemnation: she found them
immature, boisterous, inclined to be silly; or narrow-minded and
dogmatic when they were less flippant. She was somewhat exacting, as
has been said before, and the solemn, ponderous attitude of the
occasional girl who wallows before the abstract Higher Education, and
lectures the Faculty gravely on their failure to conduct her to its
most eminent peaks during the freshman year, appealed as strongly to
her sense of humor as if she had not herself been sadly disappointed
in the somewhat restricted curriculum offered her at that period.
This was through no fault whatever of the college, but because the
girl had absolutely no practical basis of expectation and knew no more
of the thousand implications of college life than she did of normal
girlhood with its loves and disciplines and confidences, its
tremendous little social experiences, its quaint emotions, and
indispensable hypocrisies. Her vague conception of college life was
modelled on _The Princess_: she imagined graceful, gracious women,
enamoured of a musical, poetic, higher knowledge, deliciously rapt at
the wonderful oratory of some priestess of a cult yet unknown to her:
a woman beautiful and passionate, who should understand her vaguest
dreams and sympathize with her strangest sorrows as no one she had yet
known or seen could do. She found a crowd of jostling, chattering
schoolgirls, unformed, unpoised; many of them vulgar, many stupid,
many ill-bred; overflowing a damp, cold hall that smelled of wet,
washed floors; reciting, in a very average fashion, perfectly concrete
and ordinary lessons from text-books only too familiar, to
businesslike, middle-aged women, rather plain than otherwise, with a
practical grasp of the matter in hand and a marked preference for
regular attendance on the part of freshmen.
It was characteristic of her that what cut deepest in all the
disillusionment was not the loss of the hope, but the shamed
perception of the folly of it, the realization of the depth of
practical ignorance it implied, the perfectly conscious pathos of a
life so empty of real experience of the world as to make such naïve
visions possible. She did the required work and kept her thoughts
about it to herself, but the effect of what she secretly felt to have
been a provincial and ridiculous mistake showed itself in her manner;
and the occasional hauteur of her namesake, who had inherited a very
effective stare of her own, was diffidence itself compared with the
reserved disdain that covered her own smarting sensitiveness.
Girls who had tumbled about with their kind from babyhood, who had
found at home, at church, at school a varied if simple social
training, resented her formality and could not see that pure shyness
of them, pure wonder at their rough-and-ready ease of manner, their
amazing power of adjustment, their quick grasp of the situation and
each other, lay at the root of her jealous dignity.
So she called them "Miss," and they thought her affected; she waited
for invitations that she should have taken for granted, and they
thought her haughty; she made no advance in a place where only the
very favored are sought out and most must earn even the humblest
recognition with honest toil and assiduous advertisement, and they
quietly let her alone. She was not on the campus, and as the girls in
the small boarding-house with her were industrious and ordinary to the
last degree and became very early impressed with her realization of
this fact, she saw little of them, and her one opportunity of getting
the campus gossip, which is the college gossip, grew smaller and
smaller. She took solitary walks, thereby confirming the impression
that she preferred to be alone--for who need be alone among a thousand
girls unless she wishes it?
On such a walk, late in the fall, she stood for some time on one of
the hills that rise above the town proper, looking for the hundredth
time at the mountains, outlined that afternoon against the dying light
of a brassy, green sky. The trees were bare and black about her; the
lights in the comfortable houses were flushing up the windows with a
happy evening red; belated children were hurrying home; and now and
then groups of girls, fresh-cheeked from their quick walk, swung by,
in haste for supper and their evening engagements. Over her heart,
hungry and misunderstood, there poured a sudden flood of passionate
longing for one hour of unconscious happy comradeship with homes and
girls like these; one hour of some one else's--anybody else's--life;
one taste of dependence on another than herself. It fell into rhythm
and fascinating phrases while she gave herself up to the mood, and she
made a poem of it that night. In two days she was famous, for High
Authority publicly placed the poem above anything yet done in the
college; it was seized by the _Monthly_, and copied widely in the
various college publications; to the editorial board and the Faculty
who did not have other reason for knowing her, she became "the girl
who wrote _At Autumn Dusk_." It was long before she equalled it,
though almost everything she did was far above a college standard; and
one or two people will always think it her best poem, I have no doubt,
in spite of more recent and perhaps more striking work.
For this poem was only the beginning, it may as well be admitted now,
of Susan's career as a genius. This degree is frequently conferred, no
doubt, when unmerited; but the article is so susceptible of imitation,
the recipe for producing the traditional effect so comparatively
simple, that it is to be wondered at, on the whole, that the aspirants
for the title should be, among so many clever young women, so
relatively few. To a frank and recently awakened interest in Shelley,
Keats, Rossetti, and Co., it is only necessary to add a vacant
abstraction, a forgetfulness of conventional meal hours--supper, for
choice--a somewhat occult system of reply to ordinary remarks, and the
courage of one's convictions in the matter of bursting out with the
irrelevant results of previous and prolonged meditation irrespective
of the conversation of the moment. Any one who will combine with these
infallible signs of the fire from heaven as much carelessness in the
matter of dress as her previous bringing up will allow--though this is
naturally a variable quantity--and a certain unmistakable looseness of
_coiffure_--was there ever a genius with taut hair? heaven avert
it!--may be reasonably certain of recognition. It is understood, of
course, that with the qualifications above mentioned a taste for verse
and an ear for rhythm, in conjunction with the frank appreciation of
the poetical firm also above mentioned, have produced their inevitable
result.
The character of the output naturally has something to do with the
extent of the reputation, and although Susan, the most promising
candidate for the degree then in the field, had alarmingly few of the
most obvious signs of her rank, this was indulgently passed over, and
she was allowed her laurels.
But it was Sue Jackson on whom all the first congratulations were
heaped: roses and violets, that blossom at the slightest excuse in
Northampton, covered the hall table in the Hubbard House, where she
spent her first two years; affectionate and mock-reverential notes
crowded the bulletin board for her; a spread was actually got up and
the guests invited before the mistake was known. To do her justice she
would have promptly despatched the notes and flowers to her defrauded
namesake, but the donors, whom she consulted, would have none of it.
"Why, Sue! Why, the idea! _Didn't_ you write it? Oh, girls, what a
joke! How perfectly funny!--Send 'em to her? Not at all. Why on earth
should Neal and I send that girl flowers? For that matter, she cut us
dead day before yesterday, on Round Hill, didn't she, Pat? And she's
in our Greek, too. We'll have the stuff to eat, anyhow. You're a nice
old thing, Sue, if you can't write 'this extraordinary poem'!"
Susan, who heard next to nothing of college news, heard about this.
She heard how Sue had gayly responded to toasts: "The Poem I did not
write," "My Feelings on failing to compose my Masterpiece"--this was
Neal Burt's, and she was very clever over it--and others. The only
thing she did not hear about was Sue's half-serious response to "My
gifted God-child," suggested by an upper-class friend. She made a
little graceful fun and then added quite earnestly, "And really,
girls, I _do_ think she ought to be here! After all, the Class, you
know--Let's take down the flowers and all the fudge--come on! She
can't do more than squelch us!"
The very girls who had scoffed at the idea before were naturally the
ones to take it up immediately, and they were hastily gathering the
things together, when the bell rang. They could not hope to get there
and back before ten, and most of them were already deep in the
matron's black list for reported lights; so they gave it up, and put
the flowers in the tub, where a sudden frost over night struck them
and they perished miserably.
To Susan it was the bitterest thing of all; it took the sweetness from
her success; it dulled the piquancy of her sudden position. She could
not possibly know how little it meant to Sue; that it was only one of
many spreads, and by no means the triumphal feast she imagined; that
after the first they forgot why they had planned it, almost. To her it
was her chance at life, her long-delayed birthright, and Sue had taken
it, too, along with everything else. "She might have left me
that!"--it was her thought for more than one unhappy night.
Before she went home in June she had written a Chaucer paper that
became vaguely confounded in the matter of literary rank with the
works of its famous subject, in her class-mates' simple minds, so
great was the commendation of Another High Authority in regard to its
matter and style. It came out in the May _Monthly_, in which were some
pretty little verses of Sue's. They were paraphrased from the
French--Sue had taken any amount of French before she came up--and
Susan spent her time at chapel in looking harder than ever at her
namesake as she laughed and chattered and took her part in the
somewhat crudely conceived jokes that seem to amuse girls so
perennially. Less flexible, as she afterwards considered, less
hypocritical, as she irritably felt then, she marvelled at the mental
make-up of a girl capable of appreciating the force and pathos of De
Musset's best work and expressing it so accurately, and able at the
same time to find content in such tiresome, half-grown nonsense.
When the _Monthly_ came out, she was amazed to receive a dozen copies
with a hasty note:
Dear Miss Jackson: Here are the copies you wanted--never mind
the money. There are always a lot left over since we enlarged
the edition. If you want more, after we've sent out the Alumnæ
list, we'll give them to you.
H. STUART.
It was only one of the many notes intended for Sue that had been
coming to her since the beginning. But none of the invitations to
dinner, to Alpha and Phi Kappa, to walk, to ride, to wheel, to eat a
box from home, had the effect of this one. For Sue came after her
_Monthlies_ and in a ten minutes' conversation wrought more ruin than
she would have believed possible.
"Did you get all mine and your own, too?" she asked laughingly. "I
should send away a hundred, more or less, if _I_ did 'absolutely
satisfactory' Chaucer papers! I should be that proud....
"You see, Papa has to have the _Monthly_, if there's anything of mine
in it, _tout de suite_--directly--now. He was wild with rage at me
because he learned about that little fool story I had in, once before,
from Cousin Con, 'long afterwards,' he said--it was only a week! And
then, other people, you know....
"Did you get any of these off, before I came? Because it's all right
if you did--I don't need a dozen. Isn't it funny I don't get any of
your things? You must be somewhat cloyed with my notes and stuff--I
should think you'd be bored to death. It's very wearing on me, Miss
Jackson, explaining all the time, 'No, I'm not the one! I assure you I
didn't write it.' You've no idea....
"My cousin is on the _Harvard Monthly_ board, you know--he telegraphed
congratulations to me. He was that set up over it! It was really very
funny....
"I'm afraid I'm keeping you--were you going out? Shall I tell Helen
Stuart to send yours down? She may think we've both got all we want.
Do you know what Alpha's going to be to-night? Somebody said it was
going to be Dr. Winthrop--he's my uncle, you know, and I thought if it
was I'd go down to the station...."
She had not the slightest idea that her thoughtless and, to tell the
truth, somewhat embarrassed chatter was one succession of little
galling pinpricks to the other. Her father, who expected his
daughter's little triumphs to be his own, as a matter of course; her
cousin at Harvard; her uncle who lectured to the Alpha; her notes and
flowers--she must know that there was the best of reasons for her not
getting her namesake's!--her light implication that everybody went to
Alpha; her very expression: "No, I'm not the one!" seemed to the
girl's angry sensitiveness a studied insult. Not the one! As if there
were any one else! She did not know how unbearably formal and curt she
seemed to the other, nor how strongly she gave the impression of
wanting to be let alone.
Sue went away to mail her _Monthlies_, and Susan locked her door and
considered at length and in detail the humor of her visitor's light
remarks as applied to herself. She fancied _At Autumn Dusk_ and _A
Study of Chaucer_ demanded by an enraged father, and smiled--a very
unpleasant and ungirlish smile. Moreover, it is possible that she did
her father an injustice here. While it is improbable that he would
have persisted in lending them about among his friends, to his wife's
open amusement, as did Mr. Jackson of Boston, and notwithstanding the
fact that he would doubtless have failed to appreciate them fully, he
might have liked to see them. Later, much later, Susan was to find a
number of her poems and stories clipped with care from the magazines
and pasted into an old scrapbook, with the glowing notices of her
first really well-known work; the book hidden under a pile of old
newspapers in her father's closet. She cried over them for days--he
was dead then--and published _Blind Hearts_ shortly afterward. None of
her class-mates, most of whom gave or received that exquisite
sonnet-cycle for Christmas that year, could have known that the roots
of it struck back to her freshman year at college.
After a stupid, hot vacation, in which she lost touch more than ever
with her people, from whom she was to draw slowly apart, it seemed,
forever, she came back with a little, unowned hope for other things: a
vague idea that she could start fresh. She told somebody, afterwards,
that just as she got to understand girls a little she lost all
connection with them; she did not lose connection with them just then,
so it must be that she did not then understand them.
Indeed, what was, perhaps, her greatest mistake was made at this time,
and colored the year for her. It happened in this way. The Alpha had
the first chance at the sophomores that year, and for a wonder, the
sophomores were not only clever but possessed that intangible quality,
"the Alpha spirit," in a gratifying degree. The ticket for the first
drawing included the two Jacksons, Cornelia Burt, Elizabeth Twitchell,
and to fulfil that tradition that inevitably elects one perfectly
unexplainable girl, Kate Ackley, a young person of many and
judiciously selected friends. At the very night of the election it was
suddenly rumored that Sue Jackson had openly declared her intention of
refusing Alpha in favor of the rival society, on the ground that she
liked Phi Kappa better and had more friends there.
Now aside from the fact that this report was utterly baseless, for Sue
would have preferred the Alpha, if only to go in among the first five
of all, it was aside from the point. As some irritated seniors
afterwards explained with much temper and reiteration to the chidden
society, Alpha was sufficiently honorable in the sight of the college
to endure very calmly rejection at the hands of any freshman
whatsoever, whether or not they had any certainty of the truth of the
rumor. But the girls were struck with the solemn necessity of
immediate and drastic action, and with a gratifying thrill of
excitement they struck off Sue's name and put in Margaret Pattison's,
the sixth in order, whereat Phi Kappa greatly rejoiced and promptly
elected Sue the next week.
Now it is very sad that the only person who seriously misunderstood
this whole affair was Susan Jackson of Troy. Sue very quickly learned
the whole matter; what her feelings may have been is not certain. Phi
Kappa made a jubilee over her, and she became, as is well known, a
great light in that society. Miss Pattison, by some mysterious free
masonry--the girls who are "in everything" seem to absorb all such
matters through their pores--soon found out her luck, and was frankly
grateful for it. Alpha retained the courage of her convictions and
assumed a distinctly here-I-stand-I-can-no-otherwise attitude. Phi
Kappa chuckled privately and looked puzzled in public. But Susan had
made a great mistake, and what is worse, never knew it. A little
gossiping freshman in the boarding-house she had moved into, who had
been injudiciously petted by the seniors and imagined herself in
everybody's confidence, told Miss Jackson, with many vows of secrecy,
that there had never been such a time in Alpha in the history of the
college: they had meant to have Sue--oh, of course!--but there had
been a terrible mistake at the balloting and names had been confused,
and though etiquette forbade any expression of their real feeling,
they were nearly wild at their clumsiness.
It is hardly to be wondered at that Susan jumped to her conclusion.
She had got so many things intended for Sue--why not this? She knew
that cleverness and even college fame are not the only calls to a
society, and she had no real friends in either of the two
organizations. She could not believe that the Alpha would purposely
omit Sue: if they had chosen both, it would have been different, but
as it was....
So she received their very earnest congratulations with a constraint
that chilled them. They reasoned that she was perfectly certain of
the election and took no pains to hide it, and though they could not
blame her for this, they thought her more conceited than ever, and
regarded her accordingly. The poor child was suffering from actual
humility, however, not conceit. She could not know that her mark on
both society lists was the highest ever given; that Alpha would
cheerfully have sacrificed any two, or even three, of the others for
her; that much as they regretted Sue, they wasted less sorrow over her
now that they were sure of the leading girl in Ninety-red. For that
was what they called her--the girls that she thought patronized her.
They took her after-successes almost as a matter of course. "Oh, yes!
she was far and away the most brilliant girl in the college!" they
said. But she never heard them.
The house she had moved into with an unacknowledged hope of getting
more in touch with them was the last house she should have chosen. It
was filled from cellar to roof with freshmen, and not only are they
notoriously clannish under such conditions, but there were at least
eight or ten of them from the same prominent preparatory school, and
among them was their class president. It was not possible for Susan to
join herself to this little circle of satellites, and they controlled
the entire house in a very short time. So she took to visiting the
head of the house, a faded, placid soul with a nominal authority and a
gentleness that moved even her worst freshmen--and a bad freshman
combines the brutality of a boy with the finesse of a woman of the
world--to a little shamed consideration during their periodic fits of
social reform. Sitting by her fire in the dusk, with the smell of hot
cooked chocolate drifting in from the hall, and the din of the
assembled tribes in the president's room overhead, Susan passed long,
bored, miserable hours. Half listening to the older woman's talk, half
sunk in her thoughts, she alternately chafed with rage at the idea of
her college life drifting out in solitary walks and tired women's
confidences, or took a sad kind of comfort in one fire where she was
always welcome, one friend that loved to talk to her.
For Mrs. Hudson grew very fond of her, and something in the girl's own
baffled, unsatisfied soul must have helped her to understand the
stress and pathos of the tired little woman's life. Few of the girls
who afterwards read _Barbara: A Study in Discipline_, would have
believed that the high-hearted, wonderful heroine was based on Miss
Jackson's study of their freshman landlady. But most of Susan's
knowledge was gained from such unscheduled courses.
In her junior year she let her work go, to a great extent, and spent
much time in the town libraries, reading omnivorously. As a matter of
fact, her class work deteriorated not a little, as much by reason of
dangerously extended cuts as anything else. But it all failed to
interest her, somehow: the detailed campaigns, the actual value of
money, the soulless translations, the necessarily primary character of
the beginnings of any study of modern language. She felt with growing
irritation that she should have learned genders and verbs earlier in
life, and she surprised her expectant teachers with poorer and poorer
recitations. Mademoiselle had no means of knowing that though Miss
Jackson stammered through the subjunctive she was reading dozens of
novels and plays with a very fair ease; Fräulein could not tell from
her imperfect handling of the modal auxiliaries that she had written a
better paper on _Faust_ than many a six years' student of German, and
already knew most of Heine by heart.