Читать книгу Miss Bishop - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 6

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All that fall life in the young college was a never-ending journey of adventure for Ella Bishop. Full of vigor, her keen mind grasping for every advantage of her new surroundings, each morning with eager anticipation she donned either the blue-trimmed-with-plaid or the plaid-trimmed-with-blue and ventured forth upon the search for her own particular Holy Grail. But school life to this girl from the country was not only an avenue of approach to knowledge, but to that larger experience,—contacts with her fellow humans. She never lost interest in the most insignificant of her classmates,—held open house for them all in the chambers of her heart. “There isn’t one of them but has some likable qualities,” she told her mother.

“You’re like your father, Ella,” Mrs. Bishop would say with moist eyes. “I declare—he seemed ... his friends ... he knew every one ... and then, to think ...”

“Friends!” Ella always disregarded her mother’s depressed attitude. “Do you know, Mother, I’d rather have friends than any amount of money.”

Her mother managed a wan smile. “I guess ... your wish, Ella ... you’ll get it ... with Father gone ... leastways, there’ll never ... there’s no money now ...”

So with an exuberance of spirits Ella went happily to school each morning through the lovely Indian summer of the midwest’s October, with a few wild flowers still colorful in the prairie grass,—through the chilling rains of November when the mud-puddles on the way held white rims of ice,—and through the heavy December snows which sent the young Danish janitor out with a horse to break a path that the girls with their flowing skirts might get through the field.

At Christmas time Chester Peters came home, and Ella admitted with something akin to regret the superiority of the younger brother’s charm. There were several social events of the community to which she was invited,—a masquerade party in the town hall, a more select one on New Year’s Eve at Irene Van Ness’s big home on Main Street, and a bob-sled ride to the town of Maynard, including an oyster supper while there. Chester Peters was Irene Van Ness’s escort, although Ella told herself with reluctance that Chester did not appear to be a very ardent lover inasmuch as he paid far more attention to a holiday guest from away than to Irene. It was true that Irene was not pretty,—she was sallow and scrawny, and attempted to cover these discrepancies with a continual change of fine clothes. Poor Irene, with all her nice things she never appeared very attractive. No wonder she was merely “half-engaged” to Chester.

Ella went to the party at Irene’s with Samuel Peters. And while he did not attract her in the least, in all honesty bored her, with her usual effervescent spirits she managed to have a grand time in spite of his rather depressing presence.

The big snows of winter melted, huge chunks slipping off the college roof so that every dash up the wide new wooden steps was a gamble with the back of one’s neck the object in peril. Spring came on, a gorgeous creature, with the prairie campus turning to lush green as though a lovely new dress had been made for her, with wild roses trimming the green of the gown, with wild hawthorn buds for her hair, wild crab-apple blossoms to perfume her, and prairie larks to sing for her. Chris Jensen set out young elms and maples in two curving lines toward the door of the building, a huge half-ellipse of little switches a few yards apart, around each of which he placed a small barrel for protection. George Schroeder and Albert Fonda worked with him after school hours in order to help pay their tuition. When the three had finished, the tiny trees looked almost ludicrous, mere twigs hidden by a half-hundred pickle-kegs on the broad expanse of the prairie campus.

Spring turned to summer with the meadowlark’s voice stilled in the torrid heat and the prairie grass curing for the hay barn. All vacation Chris Jensen hauled water to the tiny trees, so that President Corcoran said to him: “Chris, when future generations sit under the great branches of towering elms and maples, they ought to think of you.”

“Vell, py golly,” Chris beamed with the praise, “I’ll be den as old as Met’uselah, an’ ve’ll all be pickin’ dill pickles off de trees.”

The summer ended and school began.

While life for Ella the first year had been largely one of adjustment to the new conditions and getting acquainted, the second year proved to be one of greater growth with several constructive plans taking shape. For no sooner had a young men’s debating society been formed, than Ella was champing at the bit. In her belief, no masculine student could tread paths over which his feminine colleagues might not go, and so largely through Ella’s efforts in which she found her Man Friday in one Mary Crombie, the Minerva Society came into being.

They met once a week in the small room on the third floor into which President Corcoran allowed them to move,—and it was not noticeably surprising to any one that Ella was made the first president.

With Ella, six others composed the personnel of the charter membership—Irene Van Ness and Janet McLaughlin, the Scotch girl, homely and lovable, and Mary Crombie, frank and efficient—one Mina Gordon, little and lithe and gypsy-like, Emily Teasdale, the college beauty, and Evelyn Hobbs, soft-spoken and shyly humorous.

For several months the seven charter members composed the society in its entirety, but with the growth of self-assurance in speaking, in perpetrating their essays and original poems upon each other, came a desire for new worlds to conquer, and the exclusive bars were let down to admit six more Daughters of Wisdom.

Lusty debates were indulged in, which settled so far as they were able, the burning questions of Equal Suffrage, national party accomplishments, and the brighter effulgence of Rome or Athens.

On Friday afternoons when the secret business meetings were over and the doors opened to the proletariat, the small room on third which was the rendezvous for Minerva’s handmaidens became the mecca for those outside the pale. Other girls arrived to listen to the pearls that dropped from the lips of the chosen few. Sometimes a group of the young men came also and caused much confusion as to the bringing in of extra chairs, and the fluttering of feminine pulses,—feminine pulses being as they were of a far more fluttery type in the late seventies than those of recent years.

Ella Bishop was in her element at these meetings. Whether she had the management of the entire program or the mere duty of slipping one-half of the black calico curtain across the rather shaky rod to meet its other half, she performed her task with deep fervor. Whether in the chair as president, handling with dictatorial power the noisy wooden potato-masher she had brought from home to serve as a gavel, or sitting humbly in the cold outside the door as sentinel, like some little Rhoda at the gate, she put all her energy into the duty. Her rival in managerial capacity was Mary Crombie whose high-powered energies took the form of a deep belligerency toward anything masculine. That woman would one day vote,—that woman would sometime hold office,—would compete with man,—this was her battle cry. The girls agreed with her in most instances, but the Friday afternoon on which she declared with widely sweeping arm gestures that some day a woman would sit in the cabinet at Washington, they all burst out into high girlish laughter at the absurdity.

A library was formed that year, and while it consisted in its entirety of Pilgrim’s Progress, the plays of one William Shakespeare, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Swiss Family Robinson, Plutarch’s Lives, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and the highly romantic and therefore thoroughly dog-eared Barriers Burned Away—it was indeed the nucleus of what eventually became a library of many thousand volumes.

The students were for the most part serious, studious, almost over-zealous. President Corcoran threw himself heart and soul into the building of a great college. If at times he became discouraged, if the worn-out apparatus of the laboratories, the half-furnished classrooms, or the small number of students worried him, he did not show it, but placed the whole of his energies with those few students and the people who had so enthusiastically founded the school.

In that second year there descended upon the authorities the terrible knowledge that young men and young women of the college were paying romantic attention to each other. When the worthy board found out this crime of the ages, they straightway made a ruling which was printed and passed out to all forty-six students. The ruling set forth: “While it is expected that the ladies and gentlemen of this institution shall treat each other with the polite and courteous civilities, there is a condition which transcends the proprieties of refined society. Anything like selection is strictly forbidden. Private walks and rides at any time are not allowed. Students of the two sexes by special permission of the president can meet privately, for the transaction of business and for that purpose only.”

Be it said to President Corcoran’s credit, that he labored faithfully with the board for several hours, attempting to explain that world-old human philosophy, that the apple which is strictly forbidden, becomes straightway the one fruit every Adam and Eve desires. But the committee on rules and regulations was adamant, and for two years the ruling stood on the college books, until that most potent of all weapons, ridicule, caused it to become obsolete.

At the end of the second year Sam Peters was dropped from the list of instructors. In spite of his marvelous dexterity with a pen, Sam and his exotic-looking fish and the elaborately constructed hand with its protruding index finger which he could draw so skillfully were not considered of enough importance as aids in mounting the ladder of success to warrant their continuance.

Judge Peters and President Corcoran thereafter avoided each other assiduously, due, it was rumored, to Judge Peters having turned the full weight of his extensive vocabulary upon the president, using in addition to the words found in his dictionary, a choice selection of those that were not.

Poor Sam’s life under the withering criticism of his father was far less comfortable than before. He went to work soon in a grocery store where he kept the books with his fine Spencerian penmanship, somewhat embellished with intricate figures of hands whose long protruding index fingers pointed to the various commodities, but as he had to wait on trade in addition to the bookkeeping, and as trade in the seventies and eighties bought much salted mackerel and kippered herring, he rather lost his desire to do the fish.

At the first increase in his bookkeeping wages, he dressed in his best, crossed the street, and with almost as much formality as his father might have employed, asked Ella to do him the honor to marry him.

“Oh, no, Sam, I couldn’t. I couldn’t think of it.”

“There’s somebody else you like?” Sam’s pale blue eyes blinked at the hurt.

“Yes,” said Ella, and added hastily: “Oh, no,—I don’t mean that, Sam. I wasn’t even thinking of what I was saying when I said ‘Yes.’ I meant, I hope there will be some one some day that I can care for. I have an ideal in my mind. I can almost see him.” She grew so enthusiastic that even Sam, as obtuse as he was, realized there was no hope for him. “I can see how tall he is ... and broad-shouldered ... and even though I can never see his face—in my fancy, you know—some way I just feel that I’ll know him right away when I first see him.”

“Then ... he doesn’t ...” Sam swallowed with difficulty. “He doesn’t look like me?”

“Oh, no.” And at the sight of the flush on his thin drawn face she held out her hand to him. “I’m so sorry. You know ... how it is. If you can’t,—you just can’t.”

“I suppose not.”

“But I’ll be your friend, Sam ... for all my life.”

“I’m afraid friendship ... doesn’t mean very much, Ella.”

“Oh, yes, it does, Sam—truly it does. Friendship is a wonderful thing—a perfectly wonderful thing. Let’s make a promise. No matter what girl you marry,—and no matter what man I marry,—let’s promise to be friends all our lives. Will you?”

Sam lifted his thin hurt face. “If you say so, Ella.”

“I do say so.” She spoke happily as though the whole question were settled with satisfaction to them both. “It’s a promise. We’ll always be friends. When I’m an old lady and you’re an old man—isn’t that funny to think about, Sam?—we’ll be friends.” It sounded as though she were bestowing an honor upon him,—that a young priestess was anointing him.

It was a persuasive way she had with people, even at eighteen—the art of getting them to see a thing from her viewpoint, to believe it was their own decision.

So Sam went away, stepping almost jauntily—taking Ella’s promise of undying friendship. Poor Sam Peters, carrying away a friendship—who had come for love.