Part 10
Miss Hungerford wrote her a most cordial reply, and the two girls, for several years slightly estranged, became again the friends they had been during the first three years of their college life.
The blow had fallen very suddenly, and Miss Hungerford had found it hard to forgive what she called, in her heart, her friend’s tacit deceit and culpable silence. But, as she wrote in her reply to Mrs. Phillips’s letter, her opinions had undergone a decided change, and she felt that perhaps she had been a little hard on her friend and had not understood her feelings and the pressure brought to bear upon her, and she acknowledged that circumstances might materially alter one’s views and actions. And Miss Featherstone, who had been the most talked about girl in college during the last semestre of her junior year, and who had suffered acutely under Miss Hungerford’s indifferently concealed displeasure and surprise at her conduct, replied that now she could be truly happy in her husband and her home, and insisted that Mr. and Mrs. Stanhope should visit her in the Berkshire Hills that summer.
This they did, and though, of course, each thought her husband much the handsomer and more distinguished-looking, still they were very affectionate toward each other, and planned to be at Cowes together the next summer for the yachting.
As has been said, their estrangement happened very suddenly and came about by an unfortunate occurrence one morning in the office of the college.
Anyone who has never had the privilege of being in that office on a Monday morning, just after chapel, can have but a faint idea of pandemonium. The whole seven hundred students seem to be revolving about. There are the young women standing around, waiting to take the next train into Boston, not having been able to go on the early express because they had foolishly forgotten to get a leave of absence on the Saturday previous, and who are furtively trying not to see their friends who are not going on at all, so as to keep from having to attend to their commissions; and there is the girl who is telephoning for roses to wear at the concert that night, and those who are booking boats and tennis courts, and others reading bulletins; and when there is an extra commotion and the crowd is forced back a little to let the cords be pulled up around the desk so as to clear a space; and when the carrier comes in and tumbles the big mail-bags into the middle of it with one hand and unlocks them at apparently the same instant with the other; and when about ten young women fall upon the bags and rend their contents from them, and begin to assort and number and tie up the letters, all the time besieged by their excluded friends to give them their mail on the spot as they are going away, the noise and excitement reach a climax.
But it is all very pleasant and enlivening except the telephone bell, which rings constantly and is wearing on the nerves. It rings not only for all telephone messages but for all telegrams, for the college, being a mile or so from the telegraph station, everything is simply telephoned up to save delays, and that a long and continuous procession of small messenger boys may not be forever circulating between the college and the station.
It was this unfortunate custom of telephoning telegrams, unknown of course to the majority of outsiders, that precipitated the affair. On that particular Monday morning, when the confusion in the office was at its worst, the telephone bell suddenly rang unusually loudly and long, and the nervous Freshman on duty jumped toward it with a warning motion to the rest to keep quiet.
“Hush! it’s a telegram,” she said in a moment, and instantly there was silence, for a telegram is always dreaded where there are so many to whom it could bear ill news. She reached for a pad of paper and a pencil to take it down. From the other end came “Important. Repeat slowly as I deliver it.” The nervous Freshman said “All right,” and braced herself against the support to write.
“To Miss Violet Featherstone.” The docile Freshman repeated it and then said “Wait!” and looked around.
“If Miss Featherstone is here,” she remarked, “she can come to the telephone;” but someone volunteered the information that Miss Featherstone had left by the early train for Boston, and the telephoning proceeded.
“My darling--” the Freshman gasped a little and then repeated slowly “My darling.” There was some suppressed commotion for an instant among the crowd around the doors, and the two at the telephone went at it again.
“I have not heard from you for three days.”
“I have not heard from you for three days,” mumbled the Freshman.
“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”
“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”
* * * * *
When Miss Featherstone reached the college that afternoon she thought she detected a suppressed excitement about the whole place, though she felt rather too tired to think much about it, but when she got to her room she found a telephone message for her which made her sink weakly into a chair.
An appalling vision of the consequences rose before her. She tried to think connectedly, but the effort was too much. Her only thought was of the effect it would have on her friend Eva Hungerford. She would go to her immediately and find out how much she knew.
As she went along the corridors more than one acquaintance smiled knowingly at her, but she only hurried on. When she reached Miss Hungerford’s rooms, she found that young lady looking dejectedly out of the windows. Her melancholy turned to stony haughtiness, however, when Miss Featherstone approached her tremblingly.
“Yes, the whole college knew of it,” she assured her. “The message had been telephoned up when the office was crowded, and by this time everyone was aware of what her best friend had not known.”
Miss Featherstone rebelled a little under Miss Hungerford’s chilling glance and attempted to explain, but her friend was very sad and firm, and said she did not see how any explanation could do away with the fact that Violet Featherstone had broken the solemn vow they had made together never to marry, but to devote themselves to serious study as a life-work. But when Miss Featherstone quite broke down under her friend’s disapprobation, Miss Hungerford relented a little and asked her if she were really so fond of Renford Phillips, and if she thought life with him in Morristown would compensate her for the loss of Oxford and the Bodleian. Miss Featherstone cried a little at that, and said she thought it would, and that she had started a hundred times to tell her dearest friend about her engagement, but she knew how she thought about such things, and how she would lose her respect for allowing anything to interfere with their plans for mental advancement. And Miss Hungerford only sighed and wrote that night to her mother that another of her illusions had been dispelled, but that she was firmer than ever in her determination to make something of herself.
Miss Featherstone did not return for her degree, but had a pretty church wedding that summer at Stockbridge, and Miss Hungerford sent her a very handsome wedding gift, but refused to be present at the marriage. They did not write to each other much the next year, and Miss Hungerford worked so hard that the Faculty had to interfere, and when she left college with a B. S. degree, smiling sadly and saying that she would be a bachelor as well as an old maid, everybody remarked what a superior girl she was to her friend Violet Featherstone.
“MISS ROSE”
She was always called that, and there were very few of the seven hundred students who really knew or cared whether it was her little name or her family name. The uncertainty about it seemed particularly appropriate someway--her whole personality was vague. That is at the beginning; later----
For the first month she passed comparatively unnoticed. In the wild confusion of setting up household gods and arranging schedules, hopeless as Chinese puzzles, of finding out where the Greek instructors can see you professionally, and when the art school is open, and why you cannot take books from the library, and when the elevator runs, anyone less remarkable-looking than an American Indian or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands is apt to be overlooked. But after the preliminary scuffle is over and there is a lull in the storm, and one begins to remember vaguely having seen _that_ dress or face before somewhere, and when one no longer turns up at the history or art rooms instead of the chemical laboratories, and when one ceases to take the assistant professor of physics for the girl who sat next to you in the trigonometry recitation--then the individual comes in for her share of attention.
“Miss Rose” possibly got more than her share. Curious young women soon began to nudge each other, and ask in whispers who she was. And just at first there were covert smiles and a little cruelly good-natured joking, and the inevitable feeble punning on her name and withered looks. There were some who said she could not be more than forty-five, but they were in the minority, and even the more generously inclined could not deny that her face was very old and wrinkled and tired-looking, and that her hair was fast getting gray around the temples, though her eyes still retained a brilliancy quite feverish, and an eager, unsatisfied sort of look that struck some of the more imaginative as pathetic. As a freshman she seemed indeed to be hopelessly out of place--though not so much so, perhaps, as the little Chicago beauty who was so much more interested in her gowns and looks than in her work, that at the beginning of her second semestre she went home with an attack of pneumonia, brought on by having been left out in the cold after an examination in conic sections.
That type, however, is not uncommon, while “Miss Rose” was especially puzzling. They could not quite understand her, and there were even some among the august body of ridiculous freshmen who somewhat resented her entrance into their ranks, and wondered rather discontentedly why she did not join the great body of “T-specs” to which she so evidently belonged.
But it was characteristic of this woman that she preferred to begin at the beginning and work her way up--to take the regular systematic grind and discipline of the freshman’s lot--to matriculating in an elective course where she could get through easily enough if she were so inclined. She saw no incongruity in her position; she rarely seemed to notice the difference between herself and the younger, quicker intellects around her, and she worked with an enthusiasm and persistence that put most of the young women to shame. That she had taught was evident--in what little out-of-the-way Western town, or sleepy Southern one, no one knew; but sometimes there were amusing little scenes between herself and the professor, when the old habit of school-room tyranny which she had once exercised herself was strong upon her, and she lapsed unconsciously into the didactic manner of her former life. And sometimes she became discouraged when the long lack of strict mental discipline irked her, and when she saw in a glimpse how far she was behind the girl of nineteen beside her, and how hopeless was the struggle she was making against youth and training. There were moments when she realized that she had begun too late, that the time she had lost was lost irretrievably. But the reaction would quickly come and she would work away with renewed energy, and they were very patient with her and would lend her a helping hand where a younger student would have been let most severely alone, to sink or swim after the approved method.
But if her mathematics and chemistry and Tacitus left much to be desired, there was one field in which she shone resplendently. “No one could touch her”--as one young woman slangly but enthusiastically remarked--“when it came to the Bible.” There she was in her glory, and her vast knowledge of the wars of Jeroboam and Rehoboam, and her appalling familiarity with Shamgar and the prophets, and the meaning of the Urim and Thummim, and other such things, was the envy and despair of the younger and less biblically inclined. And if at times she was a trifle too prolix and had to be stopped in her flow of information, there was very genuine regret on the part of the less well informed.
And in time she came to make a great many friends. Her peculiar ways no longer struck them as comical, and if anyone had dared make reference to the plainness of her gowns or the strict economies she practised to get through, that person would have very soon discovered her mistake; and they pretended not to know that she would not join any of the societies because of the dues, and that she did her own laundry on Monday afternoons. Indeed, she was so kindly disposed and so cheerful and helpful, and seemed so interested in all the class projects and even in the sports, at which of course she could only look on, that little by little she came to be a great favorite, and the one to whom the rest naturally turned when there was any hitch or especial need for advice. And then, of course, as she was not to be thought of in the light of a possible candidate for president or vice-president or captain of the crew, or any of the other desirable high-places, those misguided young women who did have such literary, social, or athletic aspirations would go to her and confide their hopes and fears, and in some strange way they would all feel very much more comfortable and happy in their minds after such confessions. And so she got to be a sort of class institution in a very short while, and the captains of different stylish but rather un-nautical freshman crews vied with each other in invitations to “come over the lake” with them, and the president of the Tennis Association sent her a special and entirely superfluous invitation to the spring tournament on the club’s finest paper, and the senior editor of the college magazine, whose sister was a freshman, was made to ask her for a short article on the “Study of the Bible,” and at the concerts and receptions many young women, kindly and socially disposed, would introduce her to their brothers and other male relations who had been enticed out, before taking them on to see the lake, or a certain famous walk, or the Art Building, or the Gymnasium.
* * * * *
It was about the middle of the winter semestre that it happened, and of course it was Clara Arnold who knew about it first. Miss Arnold had liked “Miss Rose” from the beginning. She had taken a fancy to the hard-working woman, who had returned it with wondering admiration for the handsome, clever girl. And so Miss Arnold got into the habit of stopping for her occasionally to walk or drive, and it was when she went for her to go on one of those expeditions, that she discovered the trouble. She found “Miss Rose” sitting before her desk with a crumpled newspaper in her hand, and a dazed, hopeless expression on her face which cut the girl to the heart. Her things were scattered about the room, on the bed and chairs, an open trunk half-filled stood in one corner. Miss Arnold stared around in amazement.
“The bank’s broken,” said “Miss Rose” simply, in answer to her questioning glance, and pointed dully to the paper. “I might have known that little bank couldn’t hold out when so many big ones have gone under this year,” she went on, half speaking to herself.
Miss Arnold picked up the paper and read an article on the first page marked around with a blue pencil. She did not understand the technicalities, but she made out that the “City Bank” of a small town in Idaho had been forced to close, and that depositors would not get more than five or ten cents on the dollar.
“Every cent I’ve saved up was in that bank!” The woman turned herself slowly in her chair and laid her face down on the desk with her arms above her head. She spoke in muffled tones into which a strange bitterness had crept.
“I’ve worked all my life--ever since I was twenty--to get enough money to come to college on. I had barely enough to stay here at all--and now--” she stopped suddenly, breathing hard. “I haven’t been here a year yet,” she broke out at last.
“Well, I’ll have to go back to teaching. Great heavens! I thought I’d finished with _that_!”
Miss Arnold seated herself on a clear corner of the bed.
“Look here, ‘Miss Rose,’” she said, excitedly, “of course you aren’t going to stop college now, when you’re doing so well and--and we all like you so much and--and you’re just beginning your course.” She stumbled on--“Has everything gone?--can’t you do something?”
“Miss Rose” looked up slowly--“Everything,” she said grimly, and then, with the pathetically resigned air of one who has been used to misfortunes and has learned to accept them quietly, “I’ve worked all my life, I suppose I can go at it again.” She looked around her. “I’ll be gone this time to-morrow, and then I won’t feel so badly;”--she put her head down on the desk again.
Miss Arnold looked thoughtfully at her for a few minutes and then, with a sudden movement, she got up and went out, closing the door softly behind her.
It was about nine o’clock that evening and “Miss Rose” had almost finished packing. She was feeling particularly disheartened and was taking the books from the cases one by one in a very mournful way, when she heard footsteps and a subdued but very excited whispering outside her door. She got up languidly and threaded her way among the books and cushions and odd articles of clothing heaped up on the floor. As she opened the door, the light from her student-lamp fell upon the very red face of a freshman propelled apparently into the room by the two or three others behind her, who seemed to have a wild desire to efface themselves entirely.
“Miss Rose,” gasped the blushing freshman in the van, “here--here is a letter for you. We’ve just had a class meeting--” she looked nervously at the others who were edging away.
There was an indistinct chorus from them which sounded like “hope you’ll accept,” and then they retreated with as much dignity as possible, but in great haste.
“Miss Rose” opened the letter and gave a little cry as a check for a good round sum drawn on the class treasurer fell to the floor. And then she sat weakly down on the bed and cried a little from pure happiness as she read it all over.
“The class of ’9--have just heard of ‘Miss Rose’s’ financial embarrassment occasioned by the failure of the ---- City Bank, and being most unwilling to lose so valuable and appreciated a member, beg that she will accept the enclosed and continue with the class until the end of the year.”
A SHORT STUDY IN EVOLUTION
A college for women is generally looked upon by the outside world and the visiting preachers as a haven of rest, a sort of oasis in the desert of life, a Paradise with a large and flourishing Tree of Knowledge of which one is commanded to eat, and where one is happily ignorant of the “struggle for life,” and the woes and evils of the world.
Such views have been so often expressed and inculcated that it appears a little ungracious and stubborn to insist that the bishop who comes out and delivers a sermon once a year, or the brilliant young graduate from a neighboring seminary--who is sent because the dean has been suddenly called away and who is quaking with fear at the ordeal--cannot possibly know all about a girl’s college life and its temptations and its trials and its vanities.
When the heterogeneous mass of humanity which makes up a big college is got together and in close relation for ten months at a time, there is bound to be action and reaction. When New York society girls and missionaries’ daughters from India, and Boston Latin-school girls and native Japanese, and Westerners and Georgians and Australians and “Teacher Specials,” and very young preparatory-school girls, are all mixed up together, it inevitably happens that there is some friction and many unexpected and interesting results. One of these is that it not infrequently happens that a young woman leaves college an entirely different person from the girl who took her entrance examinations, and sometimes the change is for the better and sometimes for the worse, or it may be unimportant and relate only to the way she has got to wearing her hair, or the amount of extra money she considers necessary. At any rate, a noticeable change of some sort always operates in a girl during her four or five years’ stay at a college, and when she goes home “for good” her friends will criticise her from their different points of view, and will be sure to tell her whether she is improved or not.
When Miss Eva Hungerford returned for her senior year at college, having been greatly disappointed in one of her friends, she determined to make no new ones, but to work very hard and keep a great deal to herself. She succeeded so well in her efforts that, after she had been there three months, she became aware that she knew absolutely none of the new students. They were an indistinguishable mass to her, with the exception of two or three noticeably pretty, and about the same number of extremely homely young women whose physique rendered them conspicuous. To her uninterested gaze the large majority seemed to be distressingly like all previous freshman classes, and endowed with the same modest amount of good looks and intellectual foreheads.
But in college life it is a strange fact that while upper classes find it rather difficult to become acquainted among the lower ones, owing, of course, to the unwritten code which prevents a senior from appearing interested in any but those of her own class, yet the incoming students are allowed and take every opportunity of ingratiating themselves with upper-class girls, without injury to their dignity. But Miss Hungerford, who had surrounded herself with quite an impenetrable air of seniority, and who was so extremely handsome and distant-looking, by her appearance and bearing had exercised a rather chilling influence on young aspirants for an introduction, and was secretly very much looked up to and feared.
She was not entirely unconscious of the effect she produced, and was therefore decidedly surprised one day to receive a call from a freshman who lived only a few doors from her, but of whose existence she had not been aware. She thought the child--she was very young, not more than sixteen--uninteresting, and that it was an evidence of extremely bad taste, and unconventionality on her part to call in that unprovoked way. But she was very polite to her uninvited guest, and asked her the usual questions, and the girl, who was very naïve, replied with a loquacity quite trying to her hostess.
Miss Hungerford was rather indignant after her visitor had gone, and wondered why she had had to be interrupted in an analytical study of “Prometheus Unbound,” to listen to a child tell her that she had never been out of Iowa before, and that her mother had not wanted her to come to college, but that her father had always said she should have “a higher education,” and so, after presumably much domestic wrangling, she was there. Miss Hungerford could not remember much else of what the young girl had told her, having listened rather absently to her replies, but she had a distinct impression that her visitor was not at all good-looking, with only a fine pair of eyes to redeem her pale face, and that her clothes were atrocious, and that she was