was all. People didn't understand Carol. Her mother died when she was
a baby, and she didn't like her Eastern aunt, who took care of her
part of the time. They were really ridiculously wealthy, and her
father was--well, her father wasn't very attractive. She had lived a
great deal in San Francisco, and in the West girls do very much more
as they please, you know. There wasn't a more generous girl on the
face of the earth. She was a mighty good friend to her friends. People
said she was being tutored through college. It wasn't so. And what if
she was? Look at the men! Her bark was worse than her bite: she said
more than she did. If all the things she had done for people up here
were known--but she would be horribly angry if they were.
It occurred to Marjory during that morning and afterwards, as she was
handed impartially from one to the other of the six juniors who
constituted her entertainment committee, that it was well to have five
friends to take care of your character with the world.
In the evening she went, by favor of Ursula and Dodo, in the character
of a distant relative, to the entertainment proper of the Phi Kappa
Farewell, a play given to the seniors of that honorable body by the
juniors. Nothing but a detailed account of the drama could worthily
treat of it, and that cannot be given. It was a melodrama based on the
Spanish War, adapted from a blood-and-thunder novel into a play of
five acts with three and four scenes to the act. A large cast
presented it, comprising revolutionists, Cubans, spies, U. S. Army and
Navy, native population, planters, New York belles, and English
nobility, and there were slow deaths, ghastly conspiracies, horribly
pathetic separations, magnificent patriotic tableaux, and a final and
startling adjustment that exceeded in scenic display the wildest
expectation of the enraptured audience.
From the first act, in a Fifth Avenue parlor, furnished with a toy
piano perched on a card-table and a Vision of Elegance accompanying,
with much execution and one finger, a rival Vision who rendered _My
bonnie lies over the ocean_ with dramatic fervor and a sob that
recalled Bernhardt, while Dodo, in irreproachable evening dress and a
curly mustache, devotedly turned the half-inch sheet music, one elbow
ostentatiously leaned on the twelve-inch piano; to the ecstatic
_finale_ in the Havana Cathedral, where two marvellous brides in
window-curtain-trained wedding dresses, orange blossoms, and
indefinite yards of white mosquito netting were led to the altar by a
noble naval officer and a haughty peer of the realm, the entire cast
in the character of bridal party performing an elaborate ballet to the
Lohengrin March, the procession preceded by a priest two-stepping
solemnly at the head, it was the most astonishingly, cleverly,
unspeakably idiotic performance Marjory had ever seen. Revolvers went
off, victims shrieked, dons and doñas sneered, terrible
shell-trimmed, tawny-skinned natives leaped and brandished and
gabbled, virtue pleaded, and villainy cried "Ha, ha!" and everybody
called upon Heaven except the peer of the realm, who very properly
called upon England. They rolled their r's and smote their chests and
spoke in a vibrating contralto, while at the proper places the
audience groaned and clapped and hissed and at the end fairly
thundered its applause.
Nobody who had seen the two heroines under a trusty Spanish escort
travelling through a mountain gorge, half of the escort placidly
dragging a ramping, double-breasted rocking-horse cart, and the other
half cavorting gracefully about with a small mounted horse under his
arm, could ever forget the sight; nor the languishing ladies in
glorious Spanish costumes tossing their trains behind and coquetting
with enormous fans as they conspired in dramatic and deep-chested
asides to the audience.
Ursula, Dodo, and another genius had adapted this
never-sufficiently-to-be-praised work, and they appeared flushed and
panting from the wedding scene, to receive the ovation prepared for
them. Ursula said that to have seen Martha Williams in undisguised
hysteria and B. S. Kitts and Susan Jackson collapsed in their chairs
was honor enough for her, and that she would willingly have worked
twice as hard as she did for it. Then they went over, costumes and
all, to the Dewey, to eat ices and go home, for the play had occupied
two hours or more and such a strain was naturally somewhat enervating,
as Biscuits said.
They took breakfast next morning in Ursula's room: strawberries and
rich chocolate and rolls and scrambled eggs. Lucilla cooked it in two
chafing-dishes, and Carol and Caroline came over from the Morris to
share it, Carol in a magnificent fluffy party-cloak with a gorgeous
crêpe kimono under it, Dodo in a hideous house-jacket, and Caroline in
the inevitable shirt-waist. Then Ursula went to church in a heavenly
lavender bâtiste and white-rabbit gloves, as Nan called them; Lucilla
accompanied her in a demure little checked silk, and Carol sulked in
her room, wrapped in the kimono.
Dodo wrote some difficult letters home, and took a walk to get over
them; Caroline tramped out to Florence, where she conducted a funny
little Sunday-school--in a shirt-waist; Marjory and Nan strolled out
to Paradise and talked. They dined in state with the house and its
guests on the traditional Sunday turkey, Nan speculating solemnly on
the exhaustless energy of Providence, except for whose ceaseless
intervention the race of turkeys must long since have become extinct.
Later they retired to the parlor and sat on sofas while the
after-dinner Sunday music was performed--an apparently mechanical
process where the same girls offered the same things to the same
audience with the same expression that they had presented the Sunday
before. The _Marche Funèbre_ received the usual sighs of pleasure, an
optimistic young lady rendered the love song from _Samson et Dalila_,
and at unmistakable evidences of approaching _Mandalay_ the occupants
of the sofa nearest the door murmured something about letters and
melted away.
To vespers, referred to by the devout as "the sweetest of the college
services," entitled by the profane "the Sunday strut," owing to the
toilets of the carefully selected ushers and the general prevalence of
millinery, Marjory did not go, for returning from a walk with Lucilla,
they found Miss Gillatt pinching the ears of a gentleman upon whose
lap she sat, whose not too abundant hair she had arranged in
peculiarly foolish spirals that bobbed over his ears as he responded
to the introduction, "_Voilà le père aimable Il est arrivé avec un
=box= énorme--c'est un enfant bien gentil, n'est-ce pas? Nous en
mangerons =to-morrow night=, mon Dieu, =and for once= nous aurons quelqu'
chose =fit to eat=--hein? A moi, Lucille--il y aura une chaleur
excessive dans la ville ancienne ce soir!_"
_Le père aimable_ greeted Marjory with an unfeigned interest, and when
to his inquiring "Cunningham? Cunningham? I don't remember Cunningham,
do I, Nannie?" Nan replied easily, "Oh, no, she's not a regular
inmate!" Marjory felt suddenly left out and undeserving, somehow, of
all the joy in store.
It was worth being away from home to be one of the four girls who hung
upon the Amiable Parent the next day as he wandered happily through
the campus, distributing Allegretti and admiration as he went. He
beamed upon them all, annexing the pretty ones regardless of expense,
as his irreverent daughter put it. He chartered a tally-ho, and they
tooted off to Chesterfield and broke the horn beyond repair,
convulsing him with laughter all the way. Caroline cut her laboratory
for it and enjoyed it "with a serene and sickly suavity known only to
the truly virtuous," to use her friends' quotation; Dodo was a
continuous performance all the way; and at Chesterfield they ate till
there was little left in the village, as it had not been sufficiently
forewarned of their invasion.
They got back in time to dress, and here Marjory's ideas sustained a
distinct shock. She had always perfectly understood from the fiction
devoted to such descriptions that it was the custom of young ladies at
boarding-schools and colleges, when they wished to be peculiarly
uproarious and sinful, to gather in carefully darkened apartments,
robed in blanket-wrappers and nightgowns, with braided or dishevelled
hair, in order to eat olives and pickles with hat-pins from the
bottles, toasting marshmallows at intervals, and discussing the
suitability of cribs and the essential qualities of really earnest
friendships. But the consumption of the "box _énorme_" was differently
organized. If she hadn't brought any evening dress it didn't matter,
Nan assured her, but they considered the event more than worthy of it,
though it wasn't an occasion for a Prom costume by any means.
All the way down the corridor she smelled it, that night at seven. It
was necessarily far from private--envious upper-class girls not
invited sniffed it from afar, and the three little freshmen who waited
on them glowed with pride and anticipation. It was in Ursula's room,
for Nan's was too small and the guests used it for a cloak-room. Mrs.
Austin greeted her cordially at the door, and Marjory, who had always
supposed that those in authority were constitutionally opposed to
spreads, could not realize that her wreathèd smiles were genuine. She
did not know that the Amiable Parent had dutifully called upon Mrs.
Austin in all good form, openly discussed the spread, and cannily
presented the lady with a fascinating box of Canton ginger-buds--ginger
being the Amiable Parent's professional interest.
When they were assembled, a baker's dozen of them, the Amiable Parent
grinning, as his dutiful daughter expressed it, like a Cheshire cat
over his capacious shirt-front, Marjory made their acquaintance over
again from the evening-dress standpoint. Against the dark furniture
and bookbindings their shoulders shone soft and white; their hair was
piled high; they looked two or three years older. Ursula in pink
taffeta, with coral in her glossy dark coils, was a veritable
_marquise_; Nan in white with lavender ribbons, and a pale amethyst
against her throat, was transformed from a jolly, active girl to a
handsome young woman with charmingly correct shoulders; Caroline was
almost pretty; Lucilla's small prim head was set on the most beautiful
tapering little neck in the world. Only Dodo in an organdie many times
laundered was the same as ever, bony, awkward, and the greatest fun
possible; while Carol's strange half-sullen face looked more impassive
than ever under her heavy turquoise fillet.
The freshmen, shy but delighted, passed them "food after food," as
Dodo called it: cold roast chicken, lobster salad on crisp, curly
lettuce, delicious thin, little bread-and-butter sandwiches with the
crusts off, devilled eggs, stuffed olives, almonds and ginger. There
was a great sheet of fudge-cake, which is a two-storied arrangement of
solid chocolate cake with a thick fudge filling and a half-inch icing,
a compound possible of safe consumption to girls and ostriches only.
There were dozens and dozens of a fascinating kind of thin wafer
filled with nuts, and there were plates of chocolate peppermints. Also
there were many bottles of imported ginger ale, which the freshmen
presented in graceful, curved glasses after the Amiable Parent had
with much chuckling pulled the corks, the freshmen pitching these last
cheerfully down the corridor at their friends who came to scoff but
went away to pray. That immediate amalgamation with the class of her
hostesses which always occurs to guests made Marjory regard the pretty
waitresses with upper-class patronage, till it occurred to her that
they might be older than she, and that after all....
One in especial, whom the Amiable Parent insisted on feeding from his
own plate, was very pretty and apparently very popular. But why the
brown-eyed, red-cheeked adorer of Ursula should be _Theo_ Root, while
Miss Bent was always _Dodo_; why Alida Fosdick was _Dick_, but Serena
Burdick was Serena; why Elizabeth Twitchell was _Twitchie_, but
Elizabeth Mitchell was _Betty_; why Ursula was always Ursula, and Nan
was often _Jack_ and sometimes _Pip_ (it was because _Captain Gadsby_
was one of her famous parts) Marjory could not tell.
When they were through and not another of all those two pounds of
almonds could be eaten, and the freshmen had carried off the remains
to dispose of them in the most obvious and economical manner, they
proceeded to "do stunts," to the boundless joy of the Amiable Parent.
Dick Fosdick, a plain, heavy-eyed senior, arose, draped in a black
cashmere shawl, and delivered a lecture on the suffrage in a manner
to cause one to pinch oneself to make sure it was not a dream and she
was not forty-five and horrible. The Amiable Parent choked to
suffocation, vowed she was the cleverest actress this side the water,
and called for the next. Dodo, with lifted skirts and utterly unmoved
features, jumping up heavily and landing on both feet with turned-in
toes--she followed the good old custom of tan walking-boots with
evening dress--droned in a monotonous nasal chant, to which her
thudding feet kept time, an unholy song of no tune whatever:
Oh, it's _dance_ like a _fairy_ and _sing_ like a _bird_,
And _sing_ like a _bird_,
And _sing_ like a _bird_,
It's _dance_ like a _fairy_ and _sing_ like a _bird_,
_Sing_ like a _bird_ in _June_!
Anybody who has not seen this done by a solemn-looking girl of five
feet seven or so, who divests a naturally humorous mouth of any
expression whatever, and lands on the floor like an inspired
steam-roller, is not in a position to judge of the comic quality of
the performance.
Nan, with much coy reluctance and very Gallic gestures, rendered what
was pessimistically called her "naughty little French song." Its
burden was not discoverably pernicious, however, consisting of the
question, "_O Jean Baptiste, pourquoi?_" occasionally varied by the
rapturous answer, "_O Jean Baptiste, voilà!_" But there was accent
enough to make anything naughty, and she looked so pretty they made
her do it again.
Lucilla resisted many appeals, but succumbed finally to the Amiable
Parent, who could wheedle the gate off its hinges, according to his
daughter, and delivered her "one and only stunt." She had performed it
steadily since freshman year, always with the same wild success, never
with a hint of its palling. Marjory wondered why they laughed so--they
all knew it by heart--and asked if anybody else never did it; their
amazed negative impressed her greatly. She stood before them slim and
straight, this daughter of a hundred Bostonians, a little cold, a
little bored, a little displeased, apparently, and with an utterly
emotionless voice and a quite impersonal manner delivered the most
senseless doggerel in the most delicately precise enunciation:
Baby sat on the window ledge,
Mary pushed her over the edge.
Baby broke into bits so airy--
Mother shook her finger at Mary.
Sarah poisoned mother's tea,
Mother died in agonee.
Father looked quite sad and vexed--
"_Sarah, my child,_" he said, "_what next?_"
Any one to whom this seems a futile and non-humorous piece of verse
needs only to hear Lucilla's delivery of it, and catch the almost
imperceptible shade of displeasure and surprise that touched her
slender eyebrows at the last line, to realize that all similar
exhibitions must seem forever crude beside it.
They begged Marjory to sing and got her a guitar. As it had slowly
dawned on her that most of the girls in the room played something, and
that at least one third of them belonged to one or another of the
musical clubs besides the many other organizations they carried, and
thought nothing whatever of it--or concealed it if they did--her
estimate of a hitherto much prized accomplishment had steadily
decreased. She sang a little serenade for them, however, more
tremulously than she had been wont to sing for a crowd of young
people, and took an unreasoning and disproportionate amount of
pleasure in their hearty applause. She sang again, and when Miss
Cornelia Burt, who turned out to be the dark girl she had watched at
Kingsley's and recognized, thanked her particularly and told her with
a smile that she should "come up" and sing that with the Glee Club,
Marjory remembered that she was a prominent senior, and found her
heart beating a little faster when her friend Miss Twitchell, also
prominent, repeated the suggestion. It could not be, she asked herself
a moment afterwards, that _she_ was proud to have them notice her?
There were more stunts, for the Amiable Parent could not have enough
of what Nan called Dodo's Anglo-Saxon attitudes. Only the bell brought
a stop to the proceedings, which had grown more and more hilarious,
ending with a toast in ginger ale, to the delighted hero of the feast:
Oh, _here's_ to Nannie's _Dad_, drink him _down_!
Oh, _here's_ to Nannie's _Dad_, drink him _down_!
Oh, _here's_ to Nannie's _Dad_,
He's the _best_ she could have _had_,
Drink him _down_, drink him _down_, drink him _down_,
down, _down_!
Nan and he and Marjory went out into the cool, dark campus, and they
marched to "Balm of Gilead" all the way to Marjory's boarding-house.
She watched them from her window, tramping arm-in-arm down to the
hotel, where Nan was to stay the night with him. Nan had explained
that while of course it would be a trial to her to be obliged to
select her own breakfast, still her relative had desired it, and she
had as usual bidden him "her own convenience count as nil."
Marjory undressed slowly, humming the tune they had marched to and
surveying the plain boarding-house bed-room. It seemed lonely after
the Lawrence, and there was no dashing about in the halls, nor
glimpses of fudge-parties and rarebits and laughing, busy people
through half-shut doors.
"Still, that Miss Burt was off the campus," she murmured as she
braided her hair; and as she set the alarm-clock somebody had loaned
her--for she took an early train--and climbed into bed, she explained
to an imaginary aunt that people on the temporary list with no campus
application whatever often "got on" miraculously--Lucilla had done
that, and Caroline!
THE EIGHTH STORY
_THE EVOLUTION of EVANGELINE_
VIII
THE EVOLUTION OF EVANGELINE
To those who knew her afterward it may seem an impossible condition of
affairs, but it is nevertheless quite true that until the night of the
sophomore reception she was utterly unheard of. Indeed, when her name
was read to the chairman of the committee that looks up stray
freshmen, yet uninvited, and compels them to come in, the chairman
refused to believe that she existed.
"I don't believe there's any such person," she growled, "and if there
is, there's nobody to take her. I can't _make_ sophomores! Evangeline
Potts, forsooth! What a perfectly idiotic name! Who's to take her?
Where does she live? Where's the catalogue?"
"She lives on West Street," somebody volunteered, "and Bertha Kitts'
freshman is sick, or her uncle is sick, or something, and Bertha says
that lets _her_ out--she never wanted to go, anyhow--and now she's not
going. Couldn't she take her?"
"Not going!" the chairman complained bitterly. "If that's not like B.
Kitts! Go get her, somebody, and send her after Evangeline, and tell
her to hurry, too! Don't stop to argue with her, there isn't time.
She'll prove that there isn't any reception, if you let her. Just get
her started and then come right back. I promised to send three Bagdads
over, and I can't get but two."
The messenger paused at Miss Kitts' door, sniffed scornfully at the
sign which read: "Asleep! Please do not disturb under any
circumstances whatever!" and entered the room abruptly. Miss Kitts was
curled comfortably on the window-seat, with _Plain Tales from the
Hills_ in one hand, and _The Works of Christopher Marlowe_ in the
other. From these volumes she read alternately, and the pile of cores
and seeds on the sill indicated a due regard for other than mental
nutriment. At intervals she lifted her eyes from her book to watch the
file of girls loaded down with the pillows, screens, and palms whose
transportation forms so considerable a portion of the higher education
of women. Just as the door opened Biscuits was chuckling gently at the
collision of a rubber-plant with a Japanese screen and the consequent
collapse of their respective bearers, who, even in their downfall,
poured forth the apologies and regrets that take the place of their
brothers' less considerate remarks upon similar occasions.
But her mirth was rudely checked by the messenger, who closed the
Marlowe and put the Kipling under a pillow.
"Hurry up," she remarked briefly, "and find Evangeline Potts and tell
her that you can't sleep at night till you take her to the sophomore
reception. Nobody urged her to attend and yours is sick."
"She's not, either," returned B. Kitts, calmly. "She's quite well,
and--"
"Oh, don't possum, Biscuits, but get along. Sue's nearly wild. It's
her uncle, then; we know you weren't going, so we know you can take
her. Can I take this couch cover along? She's on West Street, and I
can't stop to discuss it, but we depend on you. Now _do_ hurry up;
it's three already."
Biscuits freed her mind to the heap of pillows in the middle of the
floor, for there was no one else to hear her. Then, still grumbling,
she put on her golf cape and walked over to West Street. In a
pessimistic frame of mind she selected the most unattractive house,
and on inquiring if Miss Evangeline Potts lived there and ascertaining
that she did, she astonished the slatternly maid by a heartfelt
ejaculation of "Sherlock Holmes!"--adding, with resignation, "Is she
in?" She was in, and her guest climbed two flights of stairs and
knocked at her door.
Although Evangeline Potts was not fully dressed and her room in
consequent disorder, she did not appear at all embarrassed, but
finished buttoning her shirt-waist and attached her collar with calm
deliberation. She was a large, tall girl, with masses of auburn hair
strained back unbecomingly from a very freckled face and heaped in
tight coils on the top of her head. Her eyes were a rich red-brown;
they struck you as lovely at first, till after a while you discovered
that they were like glass or running water, always the same and
absolutely expressionless. She had large hands and feet and a wide,
slow smile, and she was dressed in unmitigatedly bad taste, with
sleeves two years behind the style and a skirt that could have had
nothing to do with it at any date.
"I came to--to see if you had been--if you were going to the sophomore
reception," said Biscuits. "I'm Miss Kitts, Ninety-red, and--and I've
nobody to go with me and--and I shall be glad--"
Biscuits was frankly embarrassed. She was a clever girl, and clever
girls of her age are invariably conscious and more or less sensitive.
She knew how she would have felt if she had been a freshman and a
"left over": she would have resented such an eleventh-hour invitation
and shown it, possibly. But if Evangeline Potts bore any resentment it
was not apparent.
"No," she said quietly, "I haven't been asked and I'd just as lieve go
with you."
"Oh, that's very nice!" returned Biscuits, cheerfully, "then that's
settled. And what color is your gown? I should like to send you some
flowers."
"I'm not sure what I _will_ wear," said Evangeline; "what will you?"
"My dress is pink," and Biscuits carefully kept her surprise out of
the answer. Miss Potts did not look like the kind of girl to possess
more than one evening gown.
"How is it made?" Evangeline pursued. She was not curious, and yet she
was not talking vaguely to cover any embarrassment: she merely desired
information.
"Oh, it's quite plain," and Biscuits rose to go; she was a little
bored and there was nothing in Miss Potts' room to give any clew to
her apparently pointless character. Biscuits prided herself on her
ability to get at people through their belongings, and graded her
friends as possessors of Baby Stuart, the Barye Lion, a Botticelli
Madonna, or the imp of Lincoln Cathedral.
But Evangeline did not rise. "I mean, is it low neck and short
sleeves?" she insisted; and as Biscuits nodded, she added, "Does
everybody wear them?"
"Why, yes," said Biscuits, hastily; and then, "That is, a great many
do. It's not at all necessary, though: you'll see plenty of girls
without. Any light organdie will do perfectly."
"I don't think I'll go, then," remarked Evangeline, calmly; "my dress
wouldn't do."