Читать книгу Betty Wales, Junior - Edith K. Dunton - Страница 7

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It was a breathless Indian summer day. Every window in number ten Main Building was open, but there was never a breeze to stir the heavy air or break the spell of delicious languor that hung over the class in “English Essayists of the Nineteenth Century.” The new associate professor in English had the course. His name was John Elliot Eaton, after which he could write several mystic combinations of letters, indicating his high rank in the world of scholarship. He was lecturing this hot morning in his rapid, jerky fashion that made note-taking almost an impossibility. He did not seem to mind the weather in the least; if anything he talked faster and more eloquently than usual. Presently he came to a sudden halt, and glancing ominously at the clock made a dreaded announcement.

“You will write, please, for the remaining ten minutes, on the topic previously assigned. I will finish what I had to say at the next recitation.“

The class in English Essayists drew a deep sigh and set to work.

Dr. John Elliot Eaton was as brilliant as reports had foretold when the term opened. He was also young and handsome, and he had charming manners, though he seldom let his classes know it. Generally he sat before them as cold, relentless, and impersonal as an icicle; and the minute the gong sounded the close of the hour he became, if possible, colder and more impenetrable than before. Even Babbie Hildreth, who was supposed to be going through college “on her smile,” found it impossible to “jolly” Dr. Eaton. Why he chose to be so unbending, no one knew. One party declared that he was afraid of girls, and trying to hide it; another said that he was a woman-hater, and didn’t intend to be bored by the attentions of susceptible damsels. Why, in the latter case, he was teaching at Harding, was not evident. His riding horse, his clothes, and his air of athletic, care-free well-being indicated that he was not dependent on an associate professor’s salary. Altogether he furnished an interesting subject for research. But there was one drawback; it was impossible to know him at all outside of his classes, and there he was devoted to ten-minute tests. His pupils hoped that he would speedily outgrow this taste,—it was quite evident that he was doing his first teaching. Meanwhile they endured stoically, and loftily informed their jeering friends, who had not elected English Essayists, that the really interesting courses were never “snaps”; and besides there was one fine thing about Dr. Eaton. He almost never called the roll, and he was a perfect gentleman about cuts.

Madeline Ayres lounged comfortably on the back row and watched her companions struggling to express their opinions on “the topic previously assigned.” It happened to be the characteristics of Matthew Arnold. Madeline had exhausted the subject in five illegible lines, written in half as many minutes. She folded and signed her paper, and leaned forward to see how the girls on the row in front of her were progressing. Babe was chewing her pencil busily. Helen Adams was on her second page and—yes, she had actually divided her work into paragraphs! Madeline shrugged her shoulders, in token of her scorn for such foolishness, and looked at the clock. Then she glanced at the platform where Dr. Eaton sat, wearing his cold, slightly bored expression, and not showing the slightest interest in the spectacle before him.

Madeline Ayres differed from the majority in finding Dr. Eaton dull. His blasé air irritated, instead of interesting her, and she longed to startle him out of it, in spite of himself. Now she would try to do it. Lazily she reached out a long arm for the sheet of paper which Helen Adams had been hoarding against a possible emergency, and meeting Helen’s glance of protest with a pathetically beseeching gesture, she went to work again, as if her life depended upon filling that sheet before the gong struck.

“I have forgotten the exact wording of the topic,” wrote Madeline slowly, in a painstaking backhand that she resorted to in times of stress, “but ‘Matthew Arnold and the Ten-Minute Test’ occurs to me as an interesting point of departure. How would Matthew Arnold view a ten-minute exposition of his characteristic qualities by a class of young ladies (most of them deep-dyed Philistines)? I fancy he would say——”

Madeline had made her point and turned several neat sentences before the “remaining ten minutes” was exhausted. She folded her second sheet as she had her first, paused an instant before writing “Georgia Ames” on the outside, and giving both the papers to Babe to hand in, went out by the back door. Half an hour later she had forgotten all about Dr. Eaton in a heated pursuit of grasshoppers on the back campus. Biology was Madeline’s newest hobby.

She was late for English Essayists the next morning. The class had been called to order and Professor Eaton was beginning to read something to them. Madeline dropped into a seat near the door, found the place in her note-book, and shook her fountain-pen into working-order, before she realized that he was reading Georgia Ames’s remarks upon “Matthew Arnold and the Ten-Minute Test,” with evident liking for Georgia’s ideas. Some of the class got the point of the theme, and more did not. Madeline smiled inanely for the benefit of her neighbors, and wondered if the professor would try to pick out Georgia Ames. Apparently he had not even noticed the signature; for when he came to the end of the theme, he looked at it curiously, consulted his roll, and added the new name at the end of the list. Then, with a scathing comment upon the deadly commonplaceness of the other themes, he opened his portfolio and continued his unfinished lecture.

Madeline took notes in a leisurely fashion and wondered if it was her duty to go up at the end of the hour and claim Georgia Ames’s contribution. She had already accomplished her object, by striking a spark of enthusiasm out of the blasé Dr. Eaton; but she decided that it would be just as well to wait a little before giving her explanation. Georgia Ames might prove a valuable ally in some other time of need. Madeline lost the thread of the lecture as she considered the vast possibilities of a second self.

She brought the subject up at luncheon, without mentioning Georgia.

“She could do the things you never have time to,” she explained, “and the things you hate, or can’t do well.”

“I shouldn’t care to be your second self,” said Mary Brooks. “You’d make a perfect drudge of her,—keep her mending stockings and doing errands all her days. You might as well hire a maid.”

“That’s a good point,” admitted Madeline; “but I should take care not to abuse her. She would be a very fascinating person, I assure you. You see, not really being anybody she could do just as she pleased, without caring what people thought of her.”

“How lovely!” exclaimed Roberta. “Then she could say all the things you want to but don’t dare, and believe all the things that you want to, only you are afraid people will think you’re crazy.”

“I’m afraid that if Madeline’s second self would be a drudge, yours would be a freak, Roberta,” said Mary.

“Oh, no,” answered Roberta, “she would just be delightfully clever and original.”

“Well,” said Betty, who, not being at all imaginative, had listened to the discussion in wondering silence, “for my part I’m sure one self is as much as I want to manage. Think of planning a Saturday afternoon for two people, or making out two schedules of studies!”

“I’ve thought of all that,” said Madeline, passing her plate for more dessert, “but I should have my second self vanish when she wasn’t needed, or when things were getting too complicated.”

“Evidently second selves are going to be Madeline’s next fad,” said Mary with a sigh of tolerance. “Prepare to see her catching grasshoppers with a ghostly double beside her.” She turned to Madeline. “You do get the funniest notions. What put this idea into your head?”

“Oh, it just blew in,” said Madeline lazily. “Then it sprouted, and now I’m very curious to see how tall it will grow.” With which lucid explanation she sauntered off to the library.

She was really getting very much interested in Georgia Ames, but, as she was also very much interested in a number of other things, and as Georgia obviously would keep until she was wanted, Madeline was in no haste to push her forward.

That day’s recitation in English Essayists had been the last of the week, and it was the third recitation of the following week before the class had any more written work. Madeline finished hers with her usual promptness, and then, having nothing else to do, wrote a paper for Georgia Ames, not because she had anything particular to say, but on the principle that Georgia, being on the professor’s roll, would better be doing her work.

That night the Belden House gave its annual dance in the gym. It was still Indian summer weather and the moon was full. Madeline, who did not share the enthusiasm of most Harding girls for man-less dances, arranged her program with a view to frequent intervals of moonlight and solitude on the back campus. She danced the first number with one of her guests, and then strolled out to enjoy numbers two, three and four, which were blanks. She found a belated hammock, sole relic of the joys of springtime, swinging under the yellowing apple-trees, and lay back in it, listening to the music that floated out, soft and sweet, from the gaily lighted gym., and enjoying that delicious sense of evaded responsibility which only the true Bohemian, without even the vestige of a New England conscience, can experience.

The orchestra had finished number two, which was a martial two-step, and begun upon three, a rippling, swinging waltz, when Madeline’s attention was attracted by the grotesque antics of a girl who was sitting, or crouching, on the edge of a circle of light cast by the electric lamp in front of the Hilton House. Madeline watched her strange gestures for a moment, until something in the huddled shape suggested Bob Parker, and assured that all Bob’s performances were interesting, Madeline left her hammock and went over to investigate. The shape proved to be Bob, but a nearer view gave no more clue to her strange behavior.

“Bob,” demanded Madeline, “what in the world are you doing?”

Bob, who appeared to be absolutely engrossed in her odd pursuit, looked up as Madeline spoke and surveyed her calmly. “It’s quite evident what you’re doing,” she said severely. “You’re catching your death of cold in that low dress, and you’re cutting your own house dance. Did you hear Nita Reese inquiring for me?”

“No,” said Madeline, sweetly, “but she told me that she was pleased to death to have one less guest to bother with.”

“I know she never said that,” retorted Bob, quite unmoved. “Nita’s always so polite. I hope she thought it though, but anyhow I couldn’t go. I went riding this afternoon and the horse ran away.”

“Did he spill you off on this spot, and have you been here ever since?” asked Madeline.

“Have I been here ever since?” repeated Bob indignantly. “He spilled me four miles from here, my friend, and I walked home and sent an exploring expedition after the horse, and dressed, and had dinner down-town and came here afterward. How’s that for strenuousness?”

“Well”—Madeline reverted to her original inquiry—“what are you doing now?”

“Oh, yes,” said Bob, cheerfully, “you did ask that. I—wait a minute, Madeline. There he is again.” Bob was off to the opposite end of the lighted space. “Why, I’m making more ‘Merry Hearts,’” she explained, returning and sitting down again at Madeline’s feet. “You know the Hilton House has a family of tame toads that live under the front steps. Well, I’m teaching them not to hop across the sidewalks, so they won’t be accidentally stepped on and come to untimely ends. They’re learning fast, too.”

“Lovely thought,” laughed Madeline. “Couldn’t you find any sad hearts around here but toads?”

“Grasshoppers,” said Bob, promptly, “but they’re about gone now, poor things. Next spring I’m going to have a grasshopper class in high jumping. It’s a shame the way they let you zoölogy fiends catch them for easy victims.”

“Bob,” said Madeline, admiringly, “you are certainly a genius. I was thinking to-day that ‘The Merry Hearts’ needed a boom. We haven’t done anything so far except organize.” Madeline swirled suddenly into the darkness. “At the next meeting I believe I shall propose a new member—just to liven things up a bit.”

Bob shrugged her shoulders, frowning. “If it’s Eleanor Watson, I don’t want her,” she said. “I know Betty does and Betty’s a dear, and what she says goes with the B’s. We’re going to be nice to the freaks, but we don’t want Eleanor Watson.”

“Don’t worry,” laughed Madeline. “It’s not Eleanor. It’s quite a different person, Bob,—quite one of your sort.”

The music from the gym stopped suddenly, and Madeline consulted her card. “Let me see—two, three, four. Yes, the next is five, and I have it with an adoring freshman. Good-bye, Bob,—and please don’t black-ball my new member.”