Smith College Stories Part 13

By the time she had been three years in the high school she was considered by every one the most brilliant student there, and the princ.i.p.al suggested college to her. This had never occurred to her.

Though they had never lacked for necessities, Mr. Jackson's business was not conducted in a manner to lead to marked financial success, and though he said little about his affairs, it was evident to them all that matters were slowly but surely running down hill. Doris and Veronica were eager to leave school and spend a term at the Business College, some friends of theirs having done this with great success and found positions as typewriters, but their father insisted on their staying at school for two years at least. It would be time enough to leave, he said, when they had to. It was significant of the unconscious att.i.tude of the family that there had never been any question of the oldest daughter's leaving school: Elaine had always been real bright, her mother said, and as long as books was all she took any interest in, she might as well get what she could--she presumed she'd teach.

But this acquiescent spirit changed immediately when she learned that her husband had told Elaine he would send her to college for two years anyway, and as much longer as he could afford. It seemed to Mrs.

Jackson a ridiculous and unwarranted expense, particularly as he had refused to allow the term at the Business College partly on the financial score. She lectured, argued, scolded; but he was firm.

"I told her she should, and she shall," he repeated quietly. "She says she thinks she can help along after a while, and you needn't worry about her paying it back--she will, all right, if she can. I guess she's the best of the lot of us; she's worth the other two put together. You let Lainey alone, Hattie, she's all right!"

This was during her last year at school, and as she had on her own responsibility taken the cla.s.sical course there, finding a fascination in the idea of Greek, she accomplished the preparation very easily.

Her mother, bowing to the inevitable, began to plume herself on her daughter "who was fitting herself to go to Smith's College," and rose many degrees in the social scale because of her. But their ideas of the necessary preparations differed so materially, that after prolonged and jarring hostilities marked by much temper on both sides, the final crash came, and after a battle royal Elaine took what money was forthcoming and conducted her affairs unchallenged from that moment. It was a relief to be freed from the wearisome squabbles, but she cried herself to sleep the night before she left--she did not perfectly know why. Later she told herself that it was because she had so little reason to cry when she left home for the first time.

She went to the train alone, because the girls were at school and her father at his business. She said good-by to her mother on the porch, with the constraint that had grown to characterize her att.i.tude towards them all, but her mother was suddenly seized with a spasm of sentiment, and kissing her wildly, bewailed the necessity that drove her firstborn from her to strangers. Later the girl found it sadly characteristic of her life, that absurd scene on the porch; with her heart hungry and miserable for the love and confidence she had never known, she endured agonies of shame and irritation at the demonstration that came too late. She went away, outwardly cold, with tight-pressed lips; her mother read _Cometh up as a Flower_, and wept hysterically that Fate should have cursed her with such an unfeeling, moody child.

It is hard to determine just what incident convinced Susan--for she dropped the initial on her registration--that life had not changed for her because she was to live it in Northampton, and that she must be alone there, as she had been in Troy. Just before she left college she decided that she had known it immediately: that from the moment when she plunged into the chattering, bustling crowd in the Main Hall, where everybody knew somebody and most people knew all the others, a vague prevision of her four years' loneliness came to her: a pathetic certainty that she could not, even with the effort she was too proud to make, become in any reality a part of that sparkling, absorbed, unconscious current of life that rushed by her.

Sometimes she dated her disillusionment--for she had had her dreams: she knew them only by the pathetic disappointment of the obstinate awakening--from the day that she saw her namesake laughing in the midst of a jolly group of girls to whom she was presenting her father and her aunt. They were handsome, well-dressed people with a distinct air, and they were tolerantly amused at Sue in her new environment and showed it in a kindly, courteous way that was much appreciated. As Susan pa.s.sed the group there was a great laugh, and she heard Sue's voice above the rest.

"Truly, Papa, I thought you'd finished! You know, whenever I interrupted, Papa used to make me sit absolutely still for a quarter of an hour afterward--it's not so long ago he stopped, either!"

Her father laughed, and patted her shoulder, and Susan went on out of hearing. It was only a flash; but she saw the gracious, well-ordered household, the handsome, dignified people, the atmosphere of generations of good breeding and scholarship, as clearly as if she had visited them, and her heart swelled with angry regret and a sickening certainty that all the cleverness in the world could not make up for the youth she had been cheated out of. She thought of the bickering, squabbling family table in Troy and tried to imagine her father teaching Doris and Veronica not to interrupt: her cheeks burned.

In cla.s.s Sue was often near her; she knew that she was recognized chiefly by the fact that _she_ was Susan Jackson, too. On the first day, when the instructor had called "Miss Jackson" and they had both answered, "Miss Susan Jackson," when they still replied together, and finally "Miss Susan Revere Jackson," when the matter was cleared up, Sue had looked at her with interest, and after the cla.s.s made some little joking remark. If the other had answered in the same spirit, n.o.body knows whether this story need have been written. But Susan had heard Cornelia Burt ask: "Is she related at all, Sue?" and heard Sue's answer, "Oh, dear, no! From Troy, I believe."

Now Sue meant absolutely nothing but what she said, but her namesake read into the words a scorn that was not there--either in intention or fact. Her heart was sore with a hot, vague jealousy: this girl, no longer there than she, had stepped so easily into a place prepared, apparently, for her; she knew everybody, went everywhere; admired by her own cla.s.s and made much of by the upper-cla.s.s girls, she was already well known in the college. She was a part of it all--Susan only watched it. And because of this and because she admired her tremendously and envied her with all the force of a pa.s.sionate, repressed nature, the poor child answered her little remark with a curtness that was almost insolent, and the manner of an offended d.u.c.h.ess. Sue flushed a little, lifted her brows, threw a swift glance at Cornelia, and walked away with her. Susan heard them laughing in the hall, and bit her lip.

She could not know that Sue had described her in a letter to her father as "a queer, haughty thing, but terribly clever. n.o.body seems to know her--I imagine she's terribly bored up here. I said some footless thing or other to her the other day, and she turned me down, as Betty says. Did you meet Dr. Twitch.e.l.l? He was stopping with the Winthrops...."

Susan used to wonder afterwards if it would all have been different had she been on the campus. I know that most college people will say that it would, and it is certain that campus life was the best thing in the world for Martha Williams: n.o.body knows with what self-conscious egotism she might have been spoiled if her friends and foes had not conspired to laugh it out of her. But, on the other hand, those who have watched the victims of that reasonless, pitiless boycotting that only women can accomplish so lightly--so unconsciously, do you think?--know the ghastly loneliness of the one who, in the very centre of the most crowded campus house, is more solitary than the veriest island castaway.

There is no doubt that Susan needed a great deal of discipline. She had been for so many years superior to her surroundings, so long not only the cleverest but the finest-grained, most aristocratic of all those she saw about her, that although she had perfectly appreciated the fact that she would probably no longer be in that relative position, she had not estimated the difficulty of the necessary adjustment, and it is only fair to those who gave her her hardest lessons of calm neglect to state at once that her manner was a trifle irritating.

To begin with, she had made herself unpleasantly conspicuous at the time of their first freshman cla.s.s-meeting by rising after half an hour of unventilated and tumultuous altercation, and leaving the room.

Now it is not the custom of popular freshmen to leave their first cla.s.s-meeting in this manner--not as if one were faint or demanded at recitation, but as merely intolerably bored and not a little contemptuous; and the scrambling, squabbling cla.s.s regarded her accordingly. Susan Revere Jackson was bored, too--unspeakably bored; but she sat indefatigably in her chair in the front row, applauded nominations, discussed the presumably parliamentary features of the occasion, smiled and agreed, differed at proper intervals, and left the room vice-president. It is hard to know just how much enthusiasm Sue really felt: Susan, to whom she soon became the visible expression of all the triumph and ease and distilled essence of the successful college girl, used to wonder, later, as older than Susan have wondered, how much of her college life was ingenuous and how much a perfectly conscious att.i.tude. For long before she left, Susan realized that she had greatly misjudged a large proportion of the girls, whom the event proved more practically wise than she, and that they who fill the role of "fine, all 'round girl" with the greatest success are often perfectly competent to fill others, widely different.

This she did not understand at first, and as a result of her ignorance she included them all in her general condemnation: she found them immature, boisterous, inclined to be silly; or narrow-minded and dogmatic when they were less flippant. She was somewhat exacting, as has been said before, and the solemn, ponderous att.i.tude of the occasional girl who wallows before the abstract Higher Education, and lectures the Faculty gravely on their failure to conduct her to its most eminent peaks during the freshman year, appealed as strongly to her sense of humor as if she had not herself been sadly disappointed in the somewhat restricted curriculum offered her at that period.

This was through no fault whatever of the college, but because the girl had absolutely no practical basis of expectation and knew no more of the thousand implications of college life than she did of normal girlhood with its loves and disciplines and confidences, its tremendous little social experiences, its quaint emotions, and indispensable hypocrisies. Her vague conception of college life was modelled on _The Princess_: she imagined graceful, gracious women, enamoured of a musical, poetic, higher knowledge, deliciously rapt at the wonderful oratory of some priestess of a cult yet unknown to her: a woman beautiful and pa.s.sionate, who should understand her vaguest dreams and sympathize with her strangest sorrows as no one she had yet known or seen could do. She found a crowd of jostling, chattering schoolgirls, unformed, unpoised; many of them vulgar, many stupid, many ill-bred; overflowing a damp, cold hall that smelled of wet, washed floors; reciting, in a very average fashion, perfectly concrete and ordinary lessons from text-books only too familiar, to businesslike, middle-aged women, rather plain than otherwise, with a practical grasp of the matter in hand and a marked preference for regular attendance on the part of freshmen.

It was characteristic of her that what cut deepest in all the disillusionment was not the loss of the hope, but the shamed perception of the folly of it, the realization of the depth of practical ignorance it implied, the perfectly conscious pathos of a life so empty of real experience of the world as to make such nave visions possible. She did the required work and kept her thoughts about it to herself, but the effect of what she secretly felt to have been a provincial and ridiculous mistake showed itself in her manner; and the occasional hauteur of her namesake, who had inherited a very effective stare of her own, was diffidence itself compared with the reserved disdain that covered her own smarting sensitiveness.

Girls who had tumbled about with their kind from babyhood, who had found at home, at church, at school a varied if simple social training, resented her formality and could not see that pure shyness of them, pure wonder at their rough-and-ready ease of manner, their amazing power of adjustment, their quick grasp of the situation and each other, lay at the root of her jealous dignity.

So she called them "Miss," and they thought her affected; she waited for invitations that she should have taken for granted, and they thought her haughty; she made no advance in a place where only the very favored are sought out and most must earn even the humblest recognition with honest toil and a.s.siduous advertis.e.m.e.nt, and they quietly let her alone. She was not on the campus, and as the girls in the small boarding-house with her were industrious and ordinary to the last degree and became very early impressed with her realization of this fact, she saw little of them, and her one opportunity of getting the campus gossip, which is the college gossip, grew smaller and smaller. She took solitary walks, thereby confirming the impression that she preferred to be alone--for who need be alone among a thousand girls unless she wishes it?

On such a walk, late in the fall, she stood for some time on one of the hills that rise above the town proper, looking for the hundredth time at the mountains, outlined that afternoon against the dying light of a bra.s.sy, green sky. The trees were bare and black about her; the lights in the comfortable houses were flushing up the windows with a happy evening red; belated children were hurrying home; and now and then groups of girls, fresh-cheeked from their quick walk, swung by, in haste for supper and their evening engagements. Over her heart, hungry and misunderstood, there poured a sudden flood of pa.s.sionate longing for one hour of unconscious happy comradeship with homes and girls like these; one hour of some one else's--anybody else's--life; one taste of dependence on another than herself. It fell into rhythm and fascinating phrases while she gave herself up to the mood, and she made a poem of it that night. In two days she was famous, for High Authority publicly placed the poem above anything yet done in the college; it was seized by the _Monthly_, and copied widely in the various college publications; to the editorial board and the Faculty who did not have other reason for knowing her, she became "the girl who wrote _At Autumn Dusk_." It was long before she equalled it, though almost everything she did was far above a college standard; and one or two people will always think it her best poem, I have no doubt, in spite of more recent and perhaps more striking work.

For this poem was only the beginning, it may as well be admitted now, of Susan's career as a genius. This degree is frequently conferred, no doubt, when unmerited; but the article is so susceptible of imitation, the recipe for producing the traditional effect so comparatively simple, that it is to be wondered at, on the whole, that the aspirants for the t.i.tle should be, among so many clever young women, so relatively few. To a frank and recently awakened interest in Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Rossetti, and Co., it is only necessary to add a vacant abstraction, a forgetfulness of conventional meal hours--supper, for choice--a somewhat occult system of reply to ordinary remarks, and the courage of one's convictions in the matter of bursting out with the irrelevant results of previous and prolonged meditation irrespective of the conversation of the moment. Any one who will combine with these infallible signs of the fire from heaven as much carelessness in the matter of dress as her previous bringing up will allow--though this is naturally a variable quant.i.ty--and a certain unmistakable looseness of _coiffure_--was there ever a genius with taut hair? heaven avert it!--may be reasonably certain of recognition. It is understood, of course, that with the qualifications above mentioned a taste for verse and an ear for rhythm, in conjunction with the frank appreciation of the poetical firm also above mentioned, have produced their inevitable result.

The character of the output naturally has something to do with the extent of the reputation, and although Susan, the most promising candidate for the degree then in the field, had alarmingly few of the most obvious signs of her rank, this was indulgently pa.s.sed over, and she was allowed her laurels.

But it was Sue Jackson on whom all the first congratulations were heaped: roses and violets, that blossom at the slightest excuse in Northampton, covered the hall table in the Hubbard House, where she spent her first two years; affectionate and mock-reverential notes crowded the bulletin board for her; a spread was actually got up and the guests invited before the mistake was known. To do her justice she would have promptly despatched the notes and flowers to her defrauded namesake, but the donors, whom she consulted, would have none of it.

"Why, Sue! Why, the idea! _Didn't_ you write it? Oh, girls, what a joke! How perfectly funny!--Send 'em to her? Not at all. Why on earth should Neal and I send that girl flowers? For that matter, she cut us dead day before yesterday, on Round Hill, didn't she, Pat? And she's in our Greek, too. We'll have the stuff to eat, anyhow. You're a nice old thing, Sue, if you can't write 'this extraordinary poem'!"

Susan, who heard next to nothing of college news, heard about this.

She heard how Sue had gayly responded to toasts: "The Poem I did not write," "My Feelings on failing to compose my Masterpiece"--this was Neal Burt's, and she was very clever over it--and others. The only thing she did not hear about was Sue's half-serious response to "My gifted G.o.d-child," suggested by an upper-cla.s.s friend. She made a little graceful fun and then added quite earnestly, "And really, girls, I _do_ think she ought to be here! After all, the Cla.s.s, you know--Let's take down the flowers and all the fudge--come on! She can't do more than squelch us!"

The very girls who had scoffed at the idea before were naturally the ones to take it up immediately, and they were hastily gathering the things together, when the bell rang. They could not hope to get there and back before ten, and most of them were already deep in the matron's black list for reported lights; so they gave it up, and put the flowers in the tub, where a sudden frost over night struck them and they perished miserably.

To Susan it was the bitterest thing of all; it took the sweetness from her success; it dulled the piquancy of her sudden position. She could not possibly know how little it meant to Sue; that it was only one of many spreads, and by no means the triumphal feast she imagined; that after the first they forgot why they had planned it, almost. To her it was her chance at life, her long-delayed birthright, and Sue had taken it, too, along with everything else. "She might have left me that!"--it was her thought for more than one unhappy night.

Before she went home in June she had written a Chaucer paper that became vaguely confounded in the matter of literary rank with the works of its famous subject, in her cla.s.s-mates' simple minds, so great was the commendation of Another High Authority in regard to its matter and style. It came out in the May _Monthly_, in which were some pretty little verses of Sue's. They were paraphrased from the French--Sue had taken any amount of French before she came up--and Susan spent her time at chapel in looking harder than ever at her namesake as she laughed and chattered and took her part in the somewhat crudely conceived jokes that seem to amuse girls so perennially. Less flexible, as she afterwards considered, less hypocritical, as she irritably felt then, she marvelled at the mental make-up of a girl capable of appreciating the force and pathos of De Musset's best work and expressing it so accurately, and able at the same time to find content in such tiresome, half-grown nonsense.

When the _Monthly_ came out, she was amazed to receive a dozen copies with a hasty note:

Dear Miss Jackson: Here are the copies you wanted--never mind the money. There are always a lot left over since we enlarged the edition. If you want more, after we've sent out the Alumnae list, we'll give them to you.

H. STUART.

It was only one of the many notes intended for Sue that had been coming to her since the beginning. But none of the invitations to dinner, to Alpha and Phi Kappa, to walk, to ride, to wheel, to eat a box from home, had the effect of this one. For Sue came after her _Monthlies_ and in a ten minutes' conversation wrought more ruin than she would have believed possible.

"Did you get all mine and your own, too?" she asked laughingly. "I should send away a hundred, more or less, if _I_ did 'absolutely satisfactory' Chaucer papers! I should be that proud....

"You see, Papa has to have the _Monthly_, if there's anything of mine in it, _tout de suite_--directly--now. He was wild with rage at me because he learned about that little fool story I had in, once before, from Cousin Con, 'long afterwards,' he said--it was only a week! And then, other people, you know....

"Did you get any of these off, before I came? Because it's all right if you did--I don't need a dozen. Isn't it funny I don't get any of your things? You must be somewhat cloyed with my notes and stuff--I should think you'd be bored to death. It's very wearing on me, Miss Jackson, explaining all the time, 'No, I'm not the one! I a.s.sure you I didn't write it.' You've no idea....

"My cousin is on the _Harvard Monthly_ board, you know--he telegraphed congratulations to me. He was that set up over it! It was really very funny....

"I'm afraid I'm keeping you--were you going out? Shall I tell Helen Stuart to send yours down? She may think we've both got all we want.

Do you know what Alpha's going to be to-night? Somebody said it was going to be Dr. Winthrop--he's my uncle, you know, and I thought if it was I'd go down to the station...."

She had not the slightest idea that her thoughtless and, to tell the truth, somewhat embarra.s.sed chatter was one succession of little galling pinp.r.i.c.ks to the other. Her father, who expected his daughter's little triumphs to be his own, as a matter of course; her cousin at Harvard; her uncle who lectured to the Alpha; her notes and flowers--she must know that there was the best of reasons for her not getting her namesake's!--her light implication that everybody went to Alpha; her very expression: "No, I'm not the one!" seemed to the girl's angry sensitiveness a studied insult. Not the one! As if there were any one else! She did not know how unbearably formal and curt she seemed to the other, nor how strongly she gave the impression of wanting to be let alone.

Sue went away to mail her _Monthlies_, and Susan locked her door and considered at length and in detail the humor of her visitor's light remarks as applied to herself. She fancied _At Autumn Dusk_ and _A Study of Chaucer_ demanded by an enraged father, and smiled--a very unpleasant and ungirlish smile. Moreover, it is possible that she did her father an injustice here. While it is improbable that he would have persisted in lending them about among his friends, to his wife's open amus.e.m.e.nt, as did Mr. Jackson of Boston, and notwithstanding the fact that he would doubtless have failed to appreciate them fully, he might have liked to see them. Later, much later, Susan was to find a number of her poems and stories clipped with care from the magazines and pasted into an old sc.r.a.pbook, with the glowing notices of her first really well-known work; the book hidden under a pile of old newspapers in her father's closet. She cried over them for days--he was dead then--and published _Blind Hearts_ shortly afterward. None of her cla.s.s-mates, most of whom gave or received that exquisite sonnet-cycle for Christmas that year, could have known that the roots of it struck back to her freshman year at college.

After a stupid, hot vacation, in which she lost touch more than ever with her people, from whom she was to draw slowly apart, it seemed, forever, she came back with a little, unowned hope for other things: a vague idea that she could start fresh. She told somebody, afterwards, that just as she got to understand girls a little she lost all connection with them; she did not lose connection with them just then, so it must be that she did not then understand them.

Indeed, what was, perhaps, her greatest mistake was made at this time, and colored the year for her. It happened in this way. The Alpha had the first chance at the soph.o.m.ores that year, and for a wonder, the soph.o.m.ores were not only clever but possessed that intangible quality, "the Alpha spirit," in a gratifying degree. The ticket for the first drawing included the two Jacksons, Cornelia Burt, Elizabeth Twitch.e.l.l, and to fulfil that tradition that inevitably elects one perfectly unexplainable girl, Kate Ackley, a young person of many and judiciously selected friends. At the very night of the election it was suddenly rumored that Sue Jackson had openly declared her intention of refusing Alpha in favor of the rival society, on the ground that she liked Phi Kappa better and had more friends there.

Now aside from the fact that this report was utterly baseless, for Sue would have preferred the Alpha, if only to go in among the first five of all, it was aside from the point. As some irritated seniors afterwards explained with much temper and reiteration to the chidden society, Alpha was sufficiently honorable in the sight of the college to endure very calmly rejection at the hands of any freshman whatsoever, whether or not they had any certainty of the truth of the rumor. But the girls were struck with the solemn necessity of immediate and drastic action, and with a gratifying thrill of excitement they struck off Sue's name and put in Margaret Pattison's, the sixth in order, whereat Phi Kappa greatly rejoiced and promptly elected Sue the next week.

Now it is very sad that the only person who seriously misunderstood this whole affair was Susan Jackson of Troy. Sue very quickly learned the whole matter; what her feelings may have been is not certain. Phi Kappa made a jubilee over her, and she became, as is well known, a great light in that society. Miss Pattison, by some mysterious free masonry--the girls who are "in everything" seem to absorb all such matters through their pores--soon found out her luck, and was frankly grateful for it. Alpha retained the courage of her convictions and a.s.sumed a distinctly here-I-stand-I-can-no-otherwise att.i.tude. Phi Kappa chuckled privately and looked puzzled in public. But Susan had made a great mistake, and what is worse, never knew it. A little gossiping freshman in the boarding-house she had moved into, who had been injudiciously petted by the seniors and imagined herself in everybody's confidence, told Miss Jackson, with many vows of secrecy, that there had never been such a time in Alpha in the history of the college: they had meant to have Sue--oh, of course!--but there had been a terrible mistake at the balloting and names had been confused, and though etiquette forbade any expression of their real feeling, they were nearly wild at their clumsiness.

It is hardly to be wondered at that Susan jumped to her conclusion.

She had got so many things intended for Sue--why not this? She knew that cleverness and even college fame are not the only calls to a society, and she had no real friends in either of the two organizations. She could not believe that the Alpha would purposely omit Sue: if they had chosen both, it would have been different, but as it was....

So she received their very earnest congratulations with a constraint that chilled them. They reasoned that she was perfectly certain of the election and took no pains to hide it, and though they could not blame her for this, they thought her more conceited than ever, and regarded her accordingly. The poor child was suffering from actual humility, however, not conceit. She could not know that her mark on both society lists was the highest ever given; that Alpha would cheerfully have sacrificed any two, or even three, of the others for her; that much as they regretted Sue, they wasted less sorrow over her now that they were sure of the leading girl in Ninety-red. For that was what they called her--the girls that she thought patronized her.

They took her after-successes almost as a matter of course. "Oh, yes!