Читать книгу Concerning Belinda - C.J. Brainerd - Страница 3

A SUBTLE thrill was disturbing the atmosphere of high-bred serenity which the Misses Ryder, with a strenuousness far afield from serenity, fostered in their Select School for Young Ladies. As a matter of fact, this aristocratic calm existed only in the intent and the imaginations of the lady principals, and in the convictions of parents credulous concerning school prospectuses. With fifty girls of assorted sizes and temperaments collected under one roof agitation of one sort or another is fairly well assured.

Miss Ryder's teachers were by no means blind to the excitement pervading the school, but its cause was wrapped in mystery. Amelia Bowers seemed to be occupying the centre of the stage and claiming the calcium light as her due, while Amelia's own particular clique gathered in knots in all the corners, and went about brimming over with some portentous secret which they imparted to the other girls with a generosity approaching lavishness.

It was after running into a crowd of arch conspirators in the music-room alcove and producing a solemn hush that Miss Barnes sought the Youngest Teacher and labored with her.

"Belinda," she began in her usual brusque fashion, "what's the matter with the girls?"

"Youth," replied the Youngest Teacher laconically.

She was trimming a hat, and when Belinda trims a hat it is hard to divert her serious attention to less vital issues.

"Have you noticed that something is going on, and that Amelia Bowers is at the bottom of it?"

Belinda looked up from her millinery for one fleeting instant of scorn. "Have I noticed it? Am I stone blind?"

Miss Barnes ignored the sarcasm.

"But what are they doing? The light-headed set is crazy over something, and I suppose there's a man in it. They wouldn't be so excited unless there were. Now, who is he? What is he? Where is he?"

"Search me," replied the Youngest Teacher with a flippancy lamentable in an instructor of youth.

"I suppose Amelia is making a fool of herself in some way. Sentimentality oozes out of that girl's pores."

"And yet I'm fond of Amelia," protested Belinda.

Amelia was one of the twelve who had witnessed the Youngest Teacher's first disastrous experiment in chaperoning and had remained loyally mute.

Miss Barnes shook her head.

"My dear, I can stand sharp angles, but I detest a human feather pillow. Push Amelia in at one spot and she bulges out at another. It's impossible to make a clean-cut and permanent impression upon that girl."

The teacher of mathematics always stated her opinions with a frankness not conducive to popularity.

Belinda laughed.

"It ought to be easy for you to find out what the girls are giggling and whispering about," continued Miss Barnes. "They are so foolish over you."

"I hate a sneak."

"But, Belinda – "

"Yes, I know – the good of the school and all that. I've every intention of earning my salary and being loyal to Miss Ryder. I'll keep my eyes open and try to find out why the girls are whispering and hugging each other; but if you think I'm going to get one of the silly things into my room, and because she's fond of me hypnotise her into a confidence, and then use it to bring punishment down on her and her chums – I'm not!"

"But what do you suppose is the trouble?" asked the Elder Teacher.

"I don't believe there is any trouble. Probably Amelia's engaged again. If she is it's the sixth time."

"That wouldn't stir up the other girls."

"Wouldn't it? My dear, you may know cube roots, but you don't know schoolgirls. An absolutely fresh engagement is enough to make a flock of girls twitter for weeks. If there are smuggled love letters it's convulsing, and if there's parental disapproval and 'persecution' the thing assumes dramatic quality. Probably all the third-floor girls gather in Amelia's room after lights are out, and she tells them what he said, and what she said, and what papa would probably say, and they plan elopements and schemes for foiling stern teachers and parents. Amelia won't elope, though. She won't have time before her next engagement."

A bell rang sharply below stairs. Miss Barnes sprang to her feet.

"There's the evening study bell. I must go. I'm in charge to-night. But they do elope sometimes. This school business isn't all farce. Do watch Amelia, Belinda."

Belinda had finished the hat and was trying it on before the glass with evident and natural satisfaction.

"My respect for Amelia would soar if she should attempt an elopement, but even the sea-serpent couldn't elope with a jellyfish. Amelia's young man may be a charmer, but he couldn't budge Amelia beyond hysterics."

In the history of the school there had been an experiment with silent study in the individual rooms; but an impartial distribution of fudge over the bedroom carpets, gas fixtures and furniture, an epidemic of indigestion, and a falling off in class standing had effected a return to less confiding and more effectual methods of insuring quiet study.

As Miss Barnes entered the study-room, after her talk with Belinda, a group of agitated backs surrounding Amelia Bowers dispersed guiltily, and the girls took their seats with the italicized demureness of cats who have been at the cream. Amelia herself radiated modest self-esteem. She was IT; she was up to her eyebrows in romance! What better thing had life to offer her?

The teacher in charge looked at her sharply.

"Miss Bowers, if you will transfer your attention from the wall paper to your French verbs you will stand a better chance of giving a respectable recitation to-morrow."

Amelia's dreamy blue eyes wandered from the intricate design on the wall to the pages of her book, but they were still melting with sentiment, and her pink and white face still held its pensive, rapt expression.

"J'aime, tu aimes, il aime," she read. "Il aime!" – she was off in another trance.

Miss Barnes would have builded better had she recommended algebraic equations instead of French verbs.

Following the study hour came an hour of recreation before the retiring bell rang. Usually the girls inclined to music and dancing in the parlours, but now the tide set heavily upstairs toward Amelia's room, which was at the back, and was the most coveted room in the house because the most discreetly removed from teachers' surveillance.

When Miss Barnes passed the door later she heard the twang of a guitar and Amelia's reedy voice raised in song. The teacher smiled. Harmless enough, certainly. Probably she had been over-earnest and suspicious.

Meanwhile, behind the closed door the girls of Amelia's set were showing a strange and abnormal interest in her music – an interest hardly justified by the quality of the performance. The lights in the room were turned down as low as possible. Amelia and her roommate, Laura May Lee, were crouched on the floor close by the open window, beyond which the lights of the houses around the square twinkled in the clear dark of the October night.

Huddled close to the two owners of the room on the floor were six other girls, all big-eyed, expectant, athrill with interest and excitement.

Amelia touched her guitar with a white, if somewhat pudgy, hand, and sang a few lines of a popular love song. Then suddenly she stopped and leaned forward, her elbows on the windowsill, her lips apart, her plump figure actually intense. The other girls edged closer to the window and listened with bated breath. A moment's hush – then, out of the night, came an echo of Amelia's guitar, and a tenor voice took up the song where she had left it.

A sigh of satisfaction went up from the group by the window, and Amelia laid one fat hand upon what she fondly believed to be the location of her heart. The stage business was appropriate, but the star's knowledge of anatomy was limited, and the gesture indicated acute indigestion.

The other girls, however, were properly impressed.

"It's him," murmured the fair one rapturously, as reckless of grammar as of anatomical precision. "Oh, girls, isn't it just too sweet; what a lot of feeling he puts into it!"

"The way he sings 'My Love, My Own,' is simply elegant," gasped Laura May. "I shouldn't wonder a bit if he's a foreigner. They're so much more romantic over there. An Italian's just as likely as not to fall in love this way and go perfectly crazy over it."

"Maybe he's a prince," Kittie Dayton suggested. "The folks on this block go round with princes and counts and earls and things all the time. Like as not he's visiting somebody, and – "

"If he were an Italian prince he wouldn't sing such good English," put in Serena Adams. Serena hailed from Massachusetts and hadn't the fervid exotic imagination characteristic of the daughters of the South.

"Well, earls are English."

"Earls don't sing."

"Why don't they?"

Serena tried in vain to imagine the English earl of her fiction reading warbling love songs out of a back window to an unknown charmer, but gave it up.

"I think he's a poet," Amelia whispered, "or maybe a musician – one of the high-strung, quivering kind, don't you know." They all knew.

"They're so sensitive – and responsive."

Amelia spoke as though a host of lute-souled artists had worshipped at her shrine and had broken into melody at her touch.

"Like as not he's only a nice American fellow. My cousin Sam at Yale sings like an angel. All he has to do is sing love songs to a girl and she's positively mushy."

Amelia looked reflectively at the last speaker.

"Well, I wouldn't mind so much," she said. "If he lives on this block his folks must be rich."

yearned the tenor voice.

"My, won't it be exciting when he does," gurgled Kittie.

"Does he do this every night?" Serena asked. This was her first entrance into the romantic circle.

"Five nights now," Laura May explained. "Amelia was just sitting in the window Wednesday night playing and singing, and somebody answered her. Then they played and sang back and forth. We were awfully afraid the servants in the kitchen would hear it and report, but they didn't. It's been going on every night since. We're most afraid to go outside the house for fear he'll walk right up and speak."

"He wouldn't know you."

Amelia turned from the window to look scornfully at the sordid-souled Serena.

"Not know me! Why, he'd feel that I was The One, the moment he saw me. It's like that when you love this way."

She pillowed her chin on her arms again and stared sentimentally into the back yard.

The song ended upon a high, quavering note just as the retiring bell clanged in the hall.

The visiting girls waited a few moments, then reluctantly scrambled to their feet and started for their rooms. But Amelia still knelt by the window.

"I'm positive he has raven black hair and an olive complexion," she said to Laura May as finally she drew the shade and began to get ready for bed.

The next morning the Youngest Teacher took the girls for their after-breakfast walk. Trailing up and down the streets at the tail of the "crocodile" was one of the features of the boarding-school work which she particularly disliked; but, as a rule, the proceeding was commonplace enough.

For a few mornings past Belinda had noticed something unusual about the morning expedition. She was used to chattering and giggling. She had learned that the passing of a good-looking young man touched off both the giggles and the chatter. She had even forced herself to watch the young man and see that no note found its way from his hand to that of one of the girls; but this new spirit was something she couldn't figure out.

In the first place the girls developed a mad passion for walking around the block. Formerly they had begged her to ramble to Fifth Avenue and to the Park. One saw more pedestrians on the avenue than elsewhere at that hour of the morning; and, if one walked to the Park, one might perchance be late for chapel and have to stay out in the hall until it was over. But now Fifth Avenue held no charms; the Park did not beckon. Round and round the home block the crocodile dragged its length, with Amelia and Laura May at its head and Belinda bringing up the rear. Men were leaving their homes on their way to business, and every time a young man made his appearance upon the steps of one of the houses on the circuit something like an electric shock ran along the school line and the crocodile quivered from head to tail.

The problem was too much for the Youngest Teacher. She led her charges home in time for chapel, and meditated deeply during the morning session.

Late on that same afternoon Belinda was conferring with Miss Lucilla Ryder when the maid brought a card to the principal.

"'Mr. Satterly' – I don't know the gentleman. What did he look like, Katy?"

"Turribly prosperous, ma'am."

"Ah! possibly some one with a daughter. Miss Carewe, will you go down with me? I am greatly pressed for time. Perhaps this is something you could attend to."

Belinda followed the stately figure in softly flowing black. Miss Ryder always looked the part. No parent could fail to see her superiority and be impressed.

The little old gentleman who rose to greet them in the reception-room was not, however, awed by Miss Lucilla's gracious elegance.

He was a corpulent, red-faced little man with a bristling moustache and a nervous manner; his voice when he spoke was incisive and crisp.

"Miss Ryder, I presume."

Miss Ryder bowed.

"This is Miss Carewe, one of our teachers," she said, waving both Belinda and the visitor toward seats.

Mr. Satterly declined the seat.

"I've come to ask you if you know how your pupils are scandalizing the neighborhood," he said abruptly.

Belinda jumped perceptibly. Miss Ryder's lips straightened slightly, very slightly, but she showed no other sign of emotion.

"I am not aware of any misconduct on the part of the young ladies." Her manner was the perfection of courteous dignity. Belinda mentally applauded.

"It's scandalous, madam, scandalous," sputtered the old gentleman, growing more excited with every second.

"So you observed before, I believe. Will you kindly tell me the nature of the offence?"

"Clandestine love-making with the Astorbilt's coachman – for five nights, flirting out of windows, singing mawkish songs back and forth to each other till it's enough to make a man sick. My daughters hanging out of our back window to hear! Nice example for them! Nice performance for a school where girls are supposed to be taken care of!"

A faint flush had crept into Miss Ryder's cheeks. A great awakening light had dawned in Belinda's brain.

"Amelia," she murmured.

Miss Ryder nodded comprehension.

"She's so romantic, and she supposed it was Prince Charming."

Again the principal nodded. She was not slow of comprehension.

"One of our young ladies is excessively romantic," she explained to the irate Mr. Satterly. "I think I understand the situation, and I shall deal with it at once. I am grieved that the neighbors have been annoyed."

The old gentleman relented slightly. "Well, of course, I thought you ought to know," he said.

"You were quite right. I am deeply indebted to you, and shall be still more so if you will not mention the unfortunate incident to outsiders. Good-morning."

The door closed behind him.

Principal and teacher faced each other. Miss Ryder's superb calm had vanished. Her eyes were blazing.

"Dis-gust-ing!" she said.

Belinda wrestled heroically to suppress a fit of untimely mirth. She knew Amelia and her set so well. She could picture each detail of the musical flirtation, each ridiculous touch of sentimentality.

"I shall expel her."

Miss Ryder's tone was firm.

Belinda laid a soft hand impulsively upon the arm of the August One. "She isn't bad – just foolish – "

"She's made the school ridiculous."

"The school can stand it. She's made herself more ridiculous, and it will be hard for her to stand that."

"How would you punish her?"

"Tell the story to the whole school to-morrow. Rub in the fact that the serenader is a coarse, common, illiterate groom. Mention that the stablemen and other servants all around the block are chuckling over the thing. Rob the episode of every atom of romance. Make it utterly vulgar, and sordid, and ugly, and absurd."

Miss Ryder looked at the Youngest Teacher with something akin to admiration.

"I believe you are right, Miss Carewe. It will be punishment enough. I'll mention no names."

"Oh, no. Everyone will know."

There was a short but dramatic special session the next morning. The principal slew and spared not; and all the guilty squirmed uncomfortably, while the arch offender hid her face in her hands and sobbed miserably over shattered romance and open humiliation.

Even her boon companions tittered and grinned derisively at her as she fled to her room when the conference ended.

But the Youngest Teacher followed, and her eyes were very kind.