Part 4
Kit read this last over twice, but could not agree with it at all. She had always liked the pioneer outlook, the longing to break new trails, the starting of little colonies in clearings of one’s own making. If there was an ivy around her castle, she wanted to plant it herself.
“Historic tradition?” repeated Kit. “When all around here are the old Indian trails, and the footprints left by the French explorers. I just wish I could get Billie out here for a little while. He’ll settle down in some old school that thinks it is wonderful because John Smith built a campfire on its site once upon a time, or Pocahontas planted corn in its football field.”
Kit sighed, tucked her mother’s and father’s letters in her suit pocket and started off for her favorite lookout point on the bluff. Here, with Sandy crouching at her feet, she read the three letters from Doris, Jean, and Tommy. Jean’s was full of plans for going to New York again. Beth, their cousin with whom Jean had stayed the previous winter, had promised her three months at the Art Academy.
“I’m so excited to be going back to New York again. I had a letter from Ralph today and he asked me again if I had decided on an art career. I don’t know what to tell him, but I am going to study this winter anyway. Maybe I’ll find out this year whether it is worthwhile for me to go on or not. I do know that I love Ralph, but I still have that ambition to do something really important with my life. With the exception of my one trip to New York last year, I have never done anything on my own. Perhaps what I mean is, I want to be independent.
“I shall be coming home weekends this year so I can help Mother and Dad with the rebuilding plans. Besides, I do like living in the country more than the city and it’s more for the studying I’m going to do there that I want to go back to New York.”
Kit glanced over the rest of the letter hurriedly. Becky had given a neighborhood party and Frank Howard had interested Jean considerably, especially because he told her he was bound for France the first of November. Jean was always so easily impressed just the first few times she met a person. It took Kit a long time to really admit a stranger to her circle of selected ones, although she made friends easily. And she had never quite forgiven Frank Howard for trespassing in the berry patch, even though it had been in the cause of science. Besides, the last year, Jean had seemed to grow aloof from the others. Perhaps it had been her trip away from home or her ambition. Kit could not precisely define the change but it was there, and she felt that Jean troubled herself altogether too much over things unseen.
Doris’s letter was all about the opening of school, and Tommy asked questions about Delphi.
“When you write, do tell us about the things that happen there, and just what you think about it. I don’t like descriptions in books, I like the talk part. You know what I mean. Jack and I have been helping the carpenters at Woodhow every day after school. The house is coming along fine and the men say we help a lot. Has Uncle Bart got any pets at all?”
Kit laughed over this. If he could only have seen Uncle Bart’s pets. His mummy and horned toads, the chimpanzee skull beaming at one from a dark corner, and the Cambodian war mask from another. It seemed as if every time she looked around the house she found something new, and with each curio there went a story. Oddly enough, the Dean thawed more under Kit’s persuasion when she begged for the stories than at any other time. After each meal, it was his custom to take a few moments’ relaxation in his study. Kit found at these times that he was in his best mood. Relaxed and thoughtful, he would lean back in the deep leather chair between the flat-topped desk and the fireplace, and smoke leisurely. Even his pipe had come from Persia, its amber stem very slender and beautifully curved, its bowl a marvel of carving.
Kit sat pondering over her father’s and mother’s letters. School would begin in another week, and she was to enter the third year in high school. And yet, after what her father had written, she felt that she was not giving the Dean a square deal.
The odor of tobacco came through the study window, and acting on the spur of the moment, she stepped around the corner of the porch and perched herself on the window sill.
“Are you busy, Uncle Bart?” Anybody who was well-acquainted with Kit would have suspected the gentleness of her tone, but the Dean looked over at her with a little pleased smile. Her coming was almost an answer to his reverie.
“Not at all, my dear, not at all. In fact, I was just thinking of you. I am inclined to think after all that we will begin with the geological periods. I wish you to get your data on prehistoric peoples assembled in your mind before we take up any definite groups.”
“That’s all right,” Kit answered, “I don’t mind one bit. I’ll do anything you tell me to, Uncle Bart, because,” this very earnestly, “I do feel as if I hadn’t played quite fair. I mean in coming out here, and landing on you suddenly, without warning you I was a girl, and I want to make up to you for it in every possible way. I’ll study bones and ruins and rocks, and anything you tell me to, but I want to make sure first that you really like me. Just as I am, I mean, before you know for certain whether all this is going to take.”
The Dean glanced up in a startled manner and looked at the face framed by the window quite as if he had never really given it an interested scrutiny before. Not being inclined to sentiment by nature, he had regarded Kit so far solely from the experimental standpoint. Since she had turned out to be a girl, he had decided to make the best of it, and at least try the effect of the course of instruction upon her. The personal equation had never entered into his calculation, and yet here was Kit forcing it upon him, quite as plainly as though she had said, “Do you like me or don’t you? If you don’t, I think I had better go back home.”
“Well, bless my heart,” he said, rubbing his head. “I thought that we had settled all that. Of course, my dear, the reason I preferred a boy was because, well--” the Dean floundered, “because scientists hold a consensus of opinion that through--hem--through centuries of cultivation, I may say, collegiate development--the male brain offers a better soil, as it were, for the--er--er--”
“The flower of genius?” suggested Kit. “I don’t think that’s so at all, Uncle Bart, and I’ll tell you why. You take the farm at home. Dad says that our land in Elmhurst is no good because it’s been worked over and over, and it’s all worn out, but if you plow deep and strike a brand new subsoil you get wonderful crops. Just think what a lovely time you’ll have planting crops in my unplowed brain cells.”
The first laugh she had ever heard came from the Dean’s lips, although it was more of a chuckle. His next question was apparently irrelevant.
“How do you think you’re going to like Hope College?”
“All right,” Kit responded cheerfully. “I only hope it likes me. I’ve met a few of the boys and girls through Rex and Aunt Della, and I like them awfully well. At home they’re nice to you if they know who you are, and all about your family. But here it seems as if they either like you or not. Just when they first meet you, you’re taken right into the fold on the strength of what you are yourself.”
The door opened with a little, light, deprecating tap first from Della’s fingertips. She glanced around the side of it cautiously to be sure she was not disturbing the Dean, and smiled when she saw the two. The Dean’s pipe had gone out, and he was leaning over the desk listening as eagerly as though he had been a boy himself, while Kit, with her hands clasped behind her head and leaning against the window frame, chatted. Usually people conversed with the Dean, they never chatted, and Della realized that Kit had already passed the outposts of the Dean’s defenses.
9. Hope College
Hope College was built of gray fieldstone covered with climbing woodbine and Virginia creeper, and it dominated the little town. There were five buildings in the campus group, the main building, laboratory, library and gymnasium, boys’ dormitory, and chapel.
Kit never forgot the first morning when the classes met in Assembly Hall, and the Dean addressed them on the work and aims of the coming year. For the life of her, she could not keep her mind on all he was saying or the solemnity of the moment, because just at the very last minute when the chapel chimes stopped ringing, Jeannette Flambeau entered through the heavy doors at the back of the big, crowded hall. It seemed as though everyone’s eyes were watching the platform, but Kit saw the slender, silent figure standing there alone. She was dressed in black, a soft wool suit, and her brown hair, no longer in pigtails, hung loosely to her shoulders. She waited there, it seemed to Kit, expectant on the threshold of opportunity, not knowing which way to go, and without a friendly hand extended to her in welcome or guidance.
Georgia Riggs, who sat next to Kit, glanced back to see what had attracted her attention, and made a funny little sound with her mouth.
“I never thought she’d have the nerve to really do it,” she whispered. “Isn’t she odd?”
A quick impulsive wave of indignation swept over Kit and she rose from her seat, passing straight down the aisle without even being aware of the curious glances which followed her. She took Jeannette by storm.
“You’re in my class, aren’t you?” she whispered quickly. “It’s right over here, and there’s a seat beside me. I don’t know anyone either, and I’m so glad to see you, so I’ll have someone to talk to.”
Jeannette never answered, but smiled with a quick flash of appreciation, the smile which always seemed to illumine her grave face. She followed Kit back to her seat, and Georgia exchanged glances with her right-hand neighbor, Amy Parker. Kit was altogether too new to realize just exactly what she had done. Being the Dean’s grandniece, she considered herself unconsciously a privileged person. As a matter of course, Della had accompanied her that morning and introduced her to four or five girls in the junior prep class, who came from the representative best families of the town. Also, as a matter of course, she had been welcomed as one of them, but Kit, with her inborn democratic ideas, never even realized that she occupied one of the seats of the mighty, in a circle of the favored few, and that she had smashed all tradition by introducing into that circle a Flambeau. In fact, even if she had known, she would probably have been thoroughly indignant at any such spirit among the girls themselves.
The whole morning was taken up with the assigning of students to classes. Kit loved the curious bustle and excitement of it all. It was so different from the small high school back home, and there were many more boys and girls than she had expected to see. Almost, as she passed from room to room, through the different buildings, she wished she were staying there as a year pupil. Amy introduced her to her closest friend, Peggy Barrows, a girl from South Dakota, who took them up to her quarters in one of the dormitories.
“Gee,” Kit said, looking around her, “I wish I were going to live here. Peggy, you’ll have to entertain us often. It’s so kind of solitary and restful, isn’t it, up here?”
“Solitary,” scoffed Peggy. “I’ve been here four days getting settled, and you might just as well call the side show of a circus solitary. There isn’t even the ghost of privacy. I’m mobbed every time I try to sit and collect my thoughts.”
“Who wants to collect their thoughts, anyway?” asked Amy.
“Have you seen Virginia’s room? Wait.” Peggy darted out of her door and across the hall. On the door opposite a card bore the legend in large black letters:
KEEP OUT STUDY HOUR
“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” she said, tapping just the same. “Nobody’s studying today. Let us in, Ginny.”
A sound of scraping over the floor, and muffled giggles came to waiting ones in the hall, then the door was thrown wide, and Kit caught her first glimpse of Virginia Parks, the most popular girl at Hope. She was about seventeen, but a short, pudgy type, with curly rumpled hair and blue eyes. There were five other girls with her, and papers littered the bed, chairs, and desk.
“We’re terribly busy, kids,” Virginia said, “What do you want?”
“Just to look at your room. Isn’t it pretty, Kit? This is Kit Craig, Ginny.”
“Hope you’ll like it here,” she said. “I’m from the East, too, only not so far as you are, but we think Pennsylvania’s east, out here. How do you like the color scheme?”
Kit liked it and said so emphatically. The room was in aqua and coral. The chairs were slipcovered in a coral print on an aqua background and the walls were grey. Kit was invited to sit down on one of the beds.
“I wish I stayed here all the time,” Kit exclaimed. “You miss the fun, being a day student, don’t you?”
“Never mind,” Virginia told her, “we’ll have some special celebrations all for you. Now clear out, kids, because I’ve got a deadline to make.”
“Ginny’s editor of the _Spirit_,” Peg said. “Do you have any journalistic ability, Kit?”
“I’ve been told I write pretty well, but I never did anything in the newspaper line.”
“I think she should have stayed out, she doesn’t belong here,” one of the other girls was saying in another part of the room. “None of that family has ever amounted to anything, except in the fishing industry--”
But Kit overheard this and interrupted point-blank. She was sitting up very straight on the bed, with a certain expression around her mouth, and a very steady look in her eyes.
“Just a minute,” she said quickly. “Do you mean Jeannette Flambeau? Because if you do, I don’t think that’s fair.”
Virginia quickly agreed with Kit, but Peg patted her in a conciliatory manner.
“Now, don’t take it to heart so,” she said, “why should it matter to you? Forget it.”
But Kit could not be diverted, and the color rose belligerently in Amy’s cheeks, too.
“I don’t see why you feel you have to take Jeannette Flambeau’s part,” she said. “If you knew all about her the way we girls do, you’d let her alone.”
“I don’t see how she ever came up here anyway,” Georgia remarked. “It’s just exactly as if one of her brothers tried to come in. Do you think the boys would stand for that?”
“Jeepers, why shouldn’t they?” demanded Kit hotly. “And I’d like to know what they’ve got to say about it anyway. I don’t think that’s the college spirit. Anyone who wants an education and is willing to work for it should be admitted.”
“Yes, but if they had any sense at all,” responded Georgia placidly, “they wouldn’t put themselves into a position of being snubbed. You can talk all you want to about the college spirit from the standpoint of Deans and faculties, but when all’s said and done, it’s the student spirit that rules. I’ll bet that she doesn’t stay here a month. She hasn’t anyone to help her at home and can’t afford tutoring, so she’ll just peter out.”
The gong sounded in the hall below for afternoon classes, so the discussion came to an abrupt end. Kit found herself watching Jeannette. There was a peculiar aloofness about the girl which seemed to put almost a wall of defense around her. She was intensely interested in everything, one could see that plainly, except the other students, and it seemed as if she simply overlooked them. When Kit came down the stairs, she glanced into the library and saw Jeannette in there alone, bending down before the long wall book shelves. Across the wide hall there were groups of boys and girls in the two long lounges, laughing and talking together, and every couch and chair in both rooms were filled, but Jeannette was alone.
Jeannette was holding a volume of _Treasure Island_, illustrated in color. She turned in surprise at the touch of Kit’s hand on her shoulder.
“I thought we could walk down toward the bluff together, because we go the same way,” suggested Kit. “How do you like it here?”
“I like it,” responded Jeannette slowly, with a certain dignified shyness that was characteristic of her. “My mother has told me all about it. She liked the library when she was here. She told me where her room was upstairs, too, but I didn’t want to go up while the girls were there.”
“Let’s go up now, while they’re all downstairs,” Kit said impulsively. “I’ll take you. Which dorm was she in?”
“Her name was Mary Douglas. It’s the Douglas Dormitory. Her father was one of the founders here, Malcolm Douglas.”
Kit listened in utter amazement and with a rising sense of joy. Here was Jeannette Flambeau, flouted and disdained by the little crowd of girls who happened to live in a certain district of Delphi, but claiming her grandfather was a founder of the college. At that very moment Kit planned her surprise on the girls.
As they walked through the hall together, Georgia and the others followed them with their glances and smiled. The two paused before a big bronze tablet with the name of the founders on it. There it was, third from the last, Malcolm Douglas.
“He came from Canada,” said Jeannette, “and settled here. Later on he went into Minnesota, and on into Dakota. The family was very poor after he died, but my mother came here for two years, and even when I was a little girl, seven or eight years old, before she died, she used to tell me how she loved it, and that I must come here, too.”
“Don’t any of your brothers want to come? They’re all older than you, aren’t they.”
Jeannette shook her head and smiled curiously. “They are all Flambeau, every one. They eat, and sleep and fish, that’s all.”
Kit led the way to the upper floor, where the dorms were, and meeting Virginia, she asked the way to the Douglas.
“Why, you were in that one today,” answered Virginia in surprise. “It’s our dorm, didn’t you know?”
“Oh, thanks a lot,” Kit said with suspicious alacrity, as she guided Jeannette down the corridor. Virginia glanced back at them both, speculatively, wondering just what special business could take two new day students into the most exclusive dormitory at Hope.
10. The Surprise
Kit deliberately planned her campaign for the following week, and the only girl she took into her confidence was Anne Bellamy. It had been the greatest relief when Anne returned to Delphi for the fall term. There was something good-natured and comfortably serene about Anne that made her companionship a relief from that of the other girls. Jean often said back home that Kit was such a bunch of fireworks herself, she always needed the background of a calm silent night or a placid temperament to set her off properly.
“Golly, Anne,” Kit exclaimed, sinking with a luxurious sigh of content down among the cushions on the broad couch in the Bellamy’s living room, “I’d give anything, sometimes, if I’d been an only child. Of course, you’ve got a brother, but you’re the only girl. You don’t know what it is to be one of four. I share my room with Doris, back home, and all honors with Jean. Then, of course, there’s Tommy, and while we are all crazy about each other, still you do have to elbow your way through a large family, if you want to keep on being yourself. Did you ever read anything of old Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras?”
Anne shook her head.
“No, I don’t suppose you have,” Kit went on happily, “that’s one reason why you and I are going to be terribly good friends, ’cause you don’t know everything in creation. It seems to me I can’t speak of anything at all at home now that Jean doesn’t know more about it than I do, or Doris thinks she does, which is worse. Don’t mind me this morning. I just got a family letter, full of don’ts.”
“Yes, and you’re just as likely as not going to be homesick tomorrow,” laughed Anne.
“That isn’t what I really came over for. You know Jeannette Flambeau. The kids don’t like her going to Hope.”
“Don’t they?” Anne asked mildly. “Well, what are they going to do about it? I thought that’s what colleges were for. Who’s against her?”
“I don’t think it’s exactly anything definite or violent, but you know how awfully uncomfortable they can make her. There’s Amy Roberts and Georgia Riggs and Peg Barrows and the Tony Conyers crowd.”
“She won’t miss anything special, even if they do try to snub her,” answered Anne laughingly. “This is my second year at Hope, and I want to tell you right now that Ginny rules in the Douglas dorm. If you can get her on Jeannette’s side, the other girls will follow right along like sheep.”
“Do you suppose,” Kit leaned forward impressively, as she sprang her plan, “do you suppose Ginny would lend her room for a Founders’ Tea?”
“A Founders’ Tea,” repeated Anne. “What’s that?”
Kit spoke slowly and with great expression, “A tea in honor of Malcolm Douglas, pioneer founder of Hope College, and grandfather of Jeannette Flambeau.”
Anne’s blue eyes widened in amazement, and she gasped, “How did you find out? Does Jeannette know?”
“Of course she knows. She told me all about it herself, but I don’t think she realizes what a nice handy little club of defense it gives her against the girls. I want to spring it on them at the tea, and you’ve got to help me get it up. We’ll coax Ginny into lending us her room first, and I’ll look up all about Malcolm Douglas, and write something clever about the historic founding of Hope. Then we’ll send out mysterious little invitations, and just say on them, ‘To meet a Founder’s granddaughter.’”
“When?” asked Anne reflectively. “You ought to do it soon, so if it works they’ll take her into the different clubs right away. I think you ought to try to see Virginia today after classes and get her advice. Another thing, Kit, do you suppose Jeannette would have any things of her grandfather’s we could kind of spring on them unexpectedly?”
Kit’s eyes kindled with appreciation. “That’s a worthy thought. Sort of corroborative evidence, as it were. Anne, you’re a genius.” She jumped up from the couch and started to leave. “I think it’s up to me to go and prepare Virginia. You make out a list of things that we’ll want for the tea. You’d better be the refreshment chairman, and we’ll try and make it a week from next Saturday.”
“Too far off,” Anne warned. “Better do it while it’s fresh in your mind, before you start lectures.”
“I guess I’ll go over now. It’s only a little after five, and that’ll keep me from answering the family letters until I’ve calmed down. If you see anyone looking for me, tell them I’ll be right back. I’ll stop in the library and look up Malcolm’s historic record, on my way, so you may truthfully announce I’m doing research.”
Kit went up the hill road buoyantly. She liked to set a goal for herself this way. Delphi had appeared rather barren as a field for her real endeavor, but now with the opening of school, she could see her way ahead to starting something, which she sincerely hoped she could finish. Coming along the sidewalk that bounded the campus on the south, she met Ginny on her way back from the post office.
“This is ever so-much better than going upstairs,” Kit said. “Let’s walk around the campus twice, while I unburden my soul.”
At the second lap, the whole plan had been matured by Virginia’s quick sympathy and understanding.
“And it will do them good, too,” she said as they parted. “That’s not the college spirit by a long shot, and you’re perfectly right, Kit, but just the same it’s easier to get it across to the girls in this way with a nice friendly accompaniment of sandwiches, and iced tea. And whatever you do, don’t breathe a single word to anybody. I wouldn’t even tell Jeannette herself that she is to be the guest of honor. She’d run like a deer, if she even suspected it.”
The date of the Founders’ Tea was set for the following Saturday. Kit composed the invitations herself and wrote them on small cards.