Smith College Stories Part 16

'Dorothea,' said she--and why she persists in calling me Dorothea we shall know, perhaps, when the mists have cleared away--'Dorothea, there is hardly a Friday night that you girls are in to supper. I'm sure I can't see why!' I said that it _was_ strange, but it just happened so. Then she insisted on knowing why; so I suggested that perhaps you found the noise in the dining-room trying--"

"Dodo! you didn't!"

"Certainly I did. I should suppose you might. Anybody who sits near _you_ certainly does! And she said that some freshman or other had been decorating the piazza all the afternoon, lying in wait for me to tutor her, and suggested that I ought to manage better. And I told her I'd tutored three hours and a half to-day and I had a written lesson and Phi Kappa Farewell to-morrow night, and I thought that if she didn't object to the freshman I'd leave her there till next week. So I left her standing in the door--"

"_A thing she has never done before!_" sang Nan, softly, and they laughed long and merrily, as people laugh who are not very ancient, and who have just had a good supper and are the best of friends.

It was a little after that that the Glee Club sang on the steps of Music Hall, while crowds of girls streamed out and sat on the gra.s.s and wandered up and down or listened on dormitory steps. They sang sweet songs and funny songs, and the audience sitting on the campus clapped and clapped again. Their repertoire amazed Miss Cunningham, who had been firmly impressed with the idea that _A Spanish Cavalier_ and _Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party_ were necessarily sung by the college girl to the exclusion of all other melodies. She was used to them now, used to pigtails and puffs, s.h.i.+rt-waists and evening dresses, Western rolled r's and Eastern broad a's, handsome matronly young women, and slim, saucy little chits, solitary walkers, devoted pairs, and rollicking bands. The light faded imperceptibly, turning the ugly brick to a soft pink, bringing out the pale mingling of colors that spread over the smooth, green campus, with here and there a girl vivid in crimson or violet. The leader raised her hand and they started a medley, with queer changes and funny little turns.

Three blind mice!

See how they run!

They all ran after the farmer's wife-- For she was the jewel of Asia, Of Asia, Of Asia--

How happy they seemed, how well able to amuse each other!

Then, as the faces on the steps grew indistinct and the little night noises grew plainer, just as the Club turned to go in somebody called, "_Mandalay!_" The crowd took it up and "_Mandalay!_" sounded from all the groups. Three or four girls with guitars turned up from somewhere, and a mandolin was produced from the Hubbard; a tall, slender girl stepped out a little from the rest and turned upon the waiting audience the kind of soft, rich voice that sounds rough and strained indoors, but only a little thrilled and anxious in the open air.

By the old Moulmein PaG.o.da, lookin' eastward to the sea, There's a Burma girl a-settin' an' I know she thinks o' me!

Some of the girls perched on balcony railings; some leaned on each other's shoulders; the strolling pairs and groups stopped, interlocked, and listened as attentively as if they did not already know it by heart; their white dresses glimmered among the shrubbery.

Ursula and Theodora Bent, a strange pair, Marjory thought, had dropped down on a bench, the little graceful figure balanced on the back of the seat with one arm over the broad shoulders of her big, careless friend. Nan's merry face took on the almost wistful look that music always brought there, and Marjory wondered if the silent, waiting group knew how soft their eyes grew and how much alike they all looked suddenly.

An' the dawn comes up like thunder out er China 'crost the Bay!

A moment of silence, a burst of applause, and the crowd was scurrying away as if a bell had struck. The chatter rose again, the faces changed, and to crown the transformation a tall, dark girl with a handsome face--the girl they had seen at Kingsley's--rose languidly from the top step of the Washburn and sang with a startling imitation of the first singer, to a group of girls about her:

Oh, that Road to Mandalay!

Must we hear it night and day?

For the author'd swear like thunder if he heard it sung that way!

Wild applause and a cry of, "Second verse, Neal! second verse!"

followed, and as they walked past the Hatfield by a group of girls audibly disapproving of the parody and its singer, they caught the second verse:

For they sing it ev'ry evening, and they sing it ev'ry morn; They will sing it at my fun'ral--was it sung when I was born?

Just as soon as I reach heaven, and they teach me how to play, Oh, I know the tune I learn on will be Road to Mandalay!

The juniors chuckled, and as Nan commended the abilities of the cynical senior, Marjory remembered her face as it had been a few minutes before, and wondered.

They took her to her boarding-house and left her to get to bed, for she was tired. And in the morning she went, by previous arrangement, to the Lawrence, whence Dody Bent took her down to Boyden's to eggs and toast, and coffee in a s.h.i.+ning silvery pot, and said that in consequence of the apparently unchanged intentions of Dr. Robbins she should necessarily be much engaged from ten until eleven and the few scant minutes preceding those hours, and that Misses Gillatt, Bradford, and Wyckoff expected to be similarly occupied. Caroline Wilde, however, who apparently did little but work in the laboratory and keep out-of-doors, would be charmed to row her about Paradise.

Accordingly, at a few minutes after nine, Marjory stood at the foot of the main staircase, swaying backward and forward in the chapel rush, and picked out Caroline, sauntering down with a cheerful "h.e.l.lo!" for everybody on the stairs and that air of leisure that was the despair and admiration of the perpetually rushed; for she was one of the notoriously busy people in the college--always "at everything,"

distressingly competent in several of the stiffest courses offered, the first aid to the injured in any capacity, and the prop of more committees than she had fingers. She was always perfectly well and always wore a s.h.i.+rt-waist, and she was one of the exceedingly few people who are equally popular with students, Faculty, and ladies-in-charge.

She pulled Marjory about in the most scientific manner over a somewhat restricted body of water boasting a great deal of scenery for its size, conversing at length on basket-ball, in which she had been twice defeated, and not at all on golf and tennis, in which she held the college champions.h.i.+p. In the course of her remarks it became apparent that Ursula and Dodo formed one third of "their crowd," she and Nan another third, and Lucilla and Carol Sawyer one sixth each.

Of Lucilla there seemed to be little to say: she was of extensive ancestry and made the best fudge in the place. She was also a good person to tell things to and was always quiet and polite. Dodo spoke--very literally--for herself. She was one of the best actresses in the college; she had some very bad quarter-hours back of her continual nonsense; she was poor, and there was something the matter all the time at home. Ursula was one of the all 'round girls of the college; she did beautiful work, and wrote very well and knew a lot--and her clothes! She dressed for the crowd. Nan was, of course, the best girl in the world, as might be seen by anybody with an eye in its head.

And Carol? Oh, Carol was all right. You had to come to know her, that 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 const.i.tuted 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 n.o.bility, 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 n.o.ble 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 astonis.h.i.+ngly, cleverly, unspeakably idiotic performance Marjory had ever seen. Revolvers went off, victims shrieked, dons and donas sneered, terrible sh.e.l.l-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.

n.o.body 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 languis.h.i.+ng 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 crepe kimono under it, Dodo in a hideous house-jacket, and Caroline in the inevitable s.h.i.+rt-waist. Then Ursula went to church in a heavenly lavender batiste 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 s.h.i.+rt-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 Funebre_ 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," ent.i.tled 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, "_Voila le pere aimable Il est arrive avec un =box= enorme--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 pere 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 friends.h.i.+ps. But the consumption of the "box _enorme_" was differently organized. If she hadn't brought any evening dress it didn't matter, Nan a.s.sured 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-cla.s.s girls not invited sniffed it from afar, and the three little freshmen who waited on them glowed with pride and antic.i.p.ation. 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 const.i.tutionally opposed to spreads, could not realize that her wreathed 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 a.s.sembled, a baker's dozen of them, the Amiable Parent grinning, as his dutiful daughter expressed it, like a Ches.h.i.+re cat over his capacious s.h.i.+rt-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 impa.s.sive than ever under her heavy turquoise fillet.

The freshmen, shy but delighted, pa.s.sed them "food after food," as Dodo called it: cold roast chicken, lobster salad on crisp, curly lettuce, delicious thin, little bread-and-b.u.t.ter 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 gla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s of her hostesses which always occurs to guests made Marjory regard the pretty waitresses with upper-cla.s.s 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 Fosd.i.c.k was _d.i.c.k_, but Serena Burd.i.c.k was Serena; why Elizabeth Twitch.e.l.l was _Twitchie_, but Elizabeth Mitch.e.l.l 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.

d.i.c.k Fosd.i.c.k, 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, voila!_" 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 succ.u.mbed 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.