The Story of Wellesley Part 11

V.

But it is not the workaday Wellesley, tranquilly pursuing her serious and semi-serious occupations, that the outsiders know best. To them, she is wont to turn her holiday face. And no college plays with more zest than Wellesley. Perhaps because no college ever had such a perfect playground. Every hill and grove and hollow of the beautiful campus holds its memories of playdays and midsummer nights.

Those were the nights when Rosalind and Orlando wandered out of Arden into a New England moonlight; when flitting Ariel forsook Prospero's isle to make his nest in Wellesley's bowering rhododendrons--in blossom time he is always hovering there, a winged bloom, for eyes that are not holden. Those were the nights when Puck came dancing up from Tupelo with t.i.tania's fairy rout a-twinkle at his heels; when the great Hindu Raj floated from India in his canopied barge across the moonlit waters of Lake Waban; when Tristram and Iseult, on their way to the court of King Mark, all love distraught, cast anchor in the little cove below Stone Hall and played their pa.s.sion out; when Nicolette kilted her skirts against the dew and argued of love with Auca.s.sin. Those were the nights when the Countess Cathleen--loveliest of Yeats's Irish ladies--found Paradise and the Heavenly Host awaiting her on a Wellesley hilltop when she had sold her soul to feed her starving peasants.

But the glamour of the sun is as potent as the glamour of the moon at Wellesley. High noon is magical on Tree Day, for then the mythic folk of ancient Greece, the hamadryads and Dian's nymphs, Venus and Orpheus and Narcissus, and all the rest, come out and dream a dance of old days on the great green billows of the lawn.

To see veiled Cupid, like a living flame, come streaming down among the hillside trees, down, swift as fire, to the waiting Psyche, is never to forget. No wood near Athens was ever so vision-haunted as Wellesley with the dancing spirits of past Tree Days.

On that day in early June the whole college turns itself into a pageant of spring. From the long hillside above which College Hall once towered, the faculty and the alumnae watch their younger sisters march in slow processional triumph around and about the wide green campus. Like a moving flower garden the procession winds upon itself; hundreds and hundreds of seniors and juniors and soph.o.m.ores and freshmen,--more than fourteen hundred of them in 1914. Then it breaks ranks and plants itself in parterres at the foot of the hill, ma.s.ses of blue, and rose, and lavender, and golden blossoming girls. Contrary Mistress Mary's garden was nothing to it. And after the procession come the dances. Sometimes a Breton Pardon wanders across the sea. The G.o.ds from Olympus are very much at home in these groves of academe. Once King Arthur's knight came riding up the wide avenue at the edge of the green.

The spirits of sun and moon, the nymphs of the wind and the rain, have woven their mystical spells on that great greensward. And in the fairy ring around Longfellow fountain, gnomes and fays and freshmen play hide-and-seek with the water nixies.

The first Tree Day was Mr. Durant's idea; no one was more awake than he, in the old days, to Wellesley's poetic possibilities.

And the first trees were gifts from Mr. Hunnewell; two beautiful exotics, j.a.panese golden evergreens--one for 1879 and one for 1880. The two trees were planted on May 16, 1877, the soph.o.m.ore tree by the library, the freshman tree by the dining room. An early chronicler writes, "Then it was that the venerated spade made its first appearance. We had confidently expected a trowel, had written indeed 'Apostrophe to the Trowel' on our programs, and our apostrophist (do not see the dictionary), a girl of about the same height as the spade, but by no means, as she modestly suggested, of the same mental capacity, was so stricken with astonishment when she had mounted the rostrum and this burly instrument was propped up before her, that she nearly forgot her speech.... And then it was there was introduced the more questionable practice of planting cla.s.s trees too delicate to bear the college course. Although a foolish little bird built her nest and laid her eggs in the golden-leaved evergreen of '79, and although a much handsomer nest with a very much larger egg appeared immediately in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two, being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks."

The true story of the Wellesley spade and how it came to be handed down from cla.s.s to cla.s.s, is recorded in Florence Morse Kingsley's diary, where we learn how the "burly instrument" of 1877 was succeeded by a less unwieldy and more ladylike utensil. Under the date, April 3, 1878, we find:

Our cla.s.s (the cla.s.s of '81) had a meeting last night.

We held it in one of the laboratories on the fifth floor, quite in secret, for we didn't want the '80 girls to find it out. The cla.s.s of '80 is thought to be extraordinarily brilliant, and they certainly do look down on us freshmen in haughty disdain as being correspondingly stupid. I don't say very much against them, since I---- is an '80 girl: besides, if I work hard I can graduate with '80, but at present my lot is cast with '81. We have decided to have a tree planting, and it is to be entirely original and the first of a series.

Mr. Durant has given a j.a.panese Golden Evergreen to '79 and one to '80. They are precisely alike and they had been planted for quite a while before he thought of turning them into cla.s.s trees. We heard a dark rumor yesterday to the effect that Mr. Durant is intending to plant another evergreen under the library window and present it to us. But we voted to forestall his generosity. We mean to have an elm, and we want to plant it out in front of the college, in the center or just on the other side of the driveway. The burning question remained as to who should acquaint Mr. Durant with our valuable ideas.

n.o.body seemed ravenously eager for the job, and finally I was nominated. "You know him better than we do," they all said, so I finally consented. I haven't a ghost of an idea what to say; for when one comes to think of it, it is rather ungrateful of '81 not to want the evergreen under the library window.

April 10. Alice and I went to Mr. Durant to-day about the tree planting; but Alice was stricken with temporary dumbness and never opened her lips, though she had solemnly promised to do at least half the talking; so I had to wade right into the subject alone. I began in medias res, for I couldn't think of a really graceful and diplomatic introduction on the spur of the moment. Mr. Durant was in the office with a pile of papers before him as usual; he appeared to be very preoccupied and he was looking rather severe. The interview proceeded about as follows:

He glanced up at us sharply and said, "Well, young ladies,"

which meant, "Kindly get down to business; my time is valuable."

I got down to it about as gracefully as a cat coming down a tree, like this: "We have decided to have a regular tree-planting, Mr. Durant." Of course I should have said, "The cla.s.s of '81 would like to have a tree-planting, if you please."

Mr. Durant appeared somewhat startled: "Eh, what's that?"

he said, then he settled back in his chair and looked hard at us.

His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled--just a little, as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary fuss and twaddle.

"Alice and I are delegates from the Cla.s.s of '81," I explained, a trifle more lucidly. "The cla.s.s has voted to plant an elm for our cla.s.s tree, and we would like to plant it in front of the college in a prominent spot." We had previously decided gracefully to ignore the evergreen rumor.

Mr. Durant looked thoughtful. "Hum," he said, "I'd planned to give you girls of '81 a choice evergreen, and as for a place for it: what do you say to the plot on the north side, just under the library window?"

I looked beseechingly at Alice. She was apparently very much occupied in a meek survey of the toes of her boots, which she had stubbed into premature old age scrambling up and down from the boat landings.

Meanwhile Mr. Durant was waiting for our look of pleased surprise and joyful acquiescence. Then, without a vestige of diplomacy, I blurted right out, "Yes, Mr. Durant; we heard so; but we don't think, that is, we don't want an evergreen under the library window; we would like a tree that will live a long, long time and grow big like an elm, and we want it where everybody will see it."

Mr. Durant looked exceedingly surprised, and for the s.p.a.ce of five seconds I was breathless. Then he smiled in the really fascinating way that he has. "Well," he said, and looked at me again, "what else have you decided to do?"

Then I told him all about the program we had planned, which is to include an address to the spade (which we hope will be preserved forever and ever), a cla.s.s song, a procession, and a few other inchoate ideas. Mr. Durant entered right into the spirit of it, he said he liked the idea of a spade to be handed down from cla.s.s to cla.s.s. He asked us if we had the spade yet, and I told him "no," but Alice and I were going to buy it for the cla.s.s in the village that afternoon.

"Well, mind you get a good one," he advised. We said we would, very joyfully. Then he told us we might select any young elm we wanted, and tie our cla.s.s colors on it, and he would order it to be transplanted for us. After that he put on his hat and all three of us went out and fixed the spot right in front of the college by the driveway. Mr. Durant himself stuck a little stick in the exact place where the elm of '81 will wave its branches for at least a hundred years, I hope.

The hundred years are still to run, and old College Hall has vanished, but the '81 elm stands in its "prominent" place, a tree of ancient memories and visions ever young.

It was not until 1889 that the pageant element began to take a definite and conspicuous place in the Tree Day exercises.

The cla.s.s of '89 in its senior year gave a masque in which tall dryads, robed in green, played their dainty roles; and that same year the freshmen, the cla.s.s of 1892, gave the first Tree Day dance: a very mild dance of pink and white English maidens around a maypole--but the germ of all the Tree Day dances yet unborn.

In its senior year, 1892 celebrated the discovery of America by a sort of kermess of Colonial and Indian dances with tableaux, and ever since, from year to year, the wonder has grown; Zeus, and Venus, and King Arthur have all held court and revel on the Wellesley Campus. Every year the long procession across the green grows longer, more beautiful, more elaborate; the dancing is more exquisitely planned, more complex, more carefully rehea.r.s.ed. In the spring, Wellesley girls are twirling a-tiptoe in every moment not spent in cla.s.s; and in cla.s.s their thoughts sometimes dance.

Indeed, the students of late years have begun to ask themselves if it may not be possible to obtain quite as beautiful a result with less expense of effort and time and money; for Tree Day, the crowning delight of the year, would defeat its own end, which is pure recreation, if its beauty became a tyrant.

This multiplication of joys--and their attendant worries--is something that Wellesley has to take measures to guard against, and the faculty has worked out a scheme of biennial rotatory festivities which since 1911-1912 has eased the pressure of revelry in May and June, as well as throughout the winter months.

Wellesley's list of societies and social clubs is not short, but the conditions of membership are carefully guarded. As early as the second year of the college, five societies came into existence: of these, the Beethoven Society and the Microscopical--which started with a membership of six and an exhibition under three microscopes at its first meeting--seem to have been open to any who cared to join; the other three--the Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma societies founded in November, 1876, and the Shakespeare in January, 1877--were mutually exclusive. The two Greek letter societies were literary in aim, and their early programs consisted in literary papers and oral debates. The Shakespeare Society, for many years a branch of the London Shakespeare Society, devoted itself to the study and dramatic presentation of Shakespeare. Its first open-air play was "As You Like It", given in 1889; and until 1912, when it conformed to the new plan of biennial rotation, this society gave a Shakespearean play every year at Commencement.

In 1881, Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma were discontinued by the faculty, because of pressure of academic work, but in 1889 they were reorganized, and gradually their programs were extended to include dramatic work, poetic plays, and masques. The Phi Sigma Society gives its masque--sometimes an original one--on alternate years just before the Christmas vacation; and Zeta Alpha alternates with the Cla.s.sical Society at Commencement. The Zeta Alpha Masque of 1913, a charming dramatization in verse of an old Hindu legend by Elizabeth McClellan of the cla.s.s of 1913, was one of the notable events of Commencement time, a pageant of poetic beauty and oriental dignity; and in 1915 Florence Wilkinson Evans's adaptation of the lovely old poem "Auca.s.sin and Nicolette", was given for the second time.

In 1889, the Art Society--known since 1894 as Tau Zeta Epsilon--was founded; and, alternating with the Shakespeare play, it gives in the spring a "Studio Reception", at which pictures from the old masters, with living models, are presented. The effects of lighting and color are so carefully studied, and the compositions of the originals are so closely followed that the illusion is sometimes startling; it is as if real t.i.tians, Rembrandts, and Carpaccios hung on the wails of the Wellesley Barn. In 1889, also, the Glee and Banjo clubs were formed.

In 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into existence.

The serious intellectual quality of its work does honor to the college, and its open debates, at which it has sometimes represented the House of Commons, sometimes one or the other of the American Chambers of Congress, are marked events in the college calendar.

In 1892, Alpha Kappa Chi, the Cla.s.sical Society, was organized, and of late years its Greek play, presented during Commencement week, has surpa.s.sed both the senior play and the Shakespeare play in dramatic rendering and careful study of the lines. Gilbert Murray's translation of the "Medea", presented in 1914, was a performance of which Wellesley was justly proud. Usually the Wellesley plays are better as pageants than as dramatic productions, but the Cla.s.sical Society is setting a standard for the careful literary interpretation and rendering of dramatic texts, which should prove stimulating to all the societies and cla.s.s organizations.

The senior play is one of the chief events of Commencement week, but the students have not always been fully awake to their dramatic opportunity. If college theatricals have any excuse for being, it is not found in attempts to compete with the commercial stage and imitate the professional actor, but rather in dramatic revivals such as the Harvard Delta Upsilon has so spiritedly presented, or in the interpretation of the poetic drama, whether early or late, which modern theaters with their mixed audiences cannot afford to present. The college audience is always a selected audience, and has a right to expect from the college players dramatic caviare.

That Wellesley is moving in the right direction may be seen by reading a list of her senior plays, among which are the "Countess Cathleen", by Yeats, Alfred Noyes's "Sherwood", and in 1915 "The Piper" by Josephine Peabody Marks.

But Wellesley's recreation is not all rehea.r.s.ed and formal.

May Day, when the seniors roll their hoops in the morning, and all the college comes out to dance on the green and eat ice-cream cones in the afternoon, is full of spontaneous jollity. Before the burning of College Hall, the custom had arisen of cleaning house on May Day, and six o'clock in the morning saw the seniors out with pails and mops, scrubbing and decorating the many statues which kept watch in the beloved old corridors.

One of these statutes had become in some sort the genius of College Hall. Of heroic size, a n.o.ble representation of womanly force and tranquillity, Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau had watched the stream of American girlhood flow through "the Center"

and surge around the palms for twenty-eight years. The statue was originally made at the request of Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman, the well-known abolitionist and dear friend of Miss Martineau; but after Mrs. Chapman's death, it was Miss Whitney's to dispose of, and, representing as it did her ideal modern woman, she gave it in 1886 to Wellesley, where modern womanhood was in the making.

In later years, irreverent youth took playful liberties with "Harriet", using her much as a beloved spinster aunt is used by fond but familiar young nieces. No freshman was considered properly matriculated until she had been dragged between the rungs of Miss Martineau's great marble chair; May Day always saw "Aunt Harriet"

rise like Diana fresh from her bath, to be decked with more or less becoming furbelows; and as the presiding genius in the lighter columns of College News, her humor--an acquired characteristic--was merrily appreciated. Of all the lost treasures of College Hall she is perhaps the most widely mourned.

The pretty little Society houses, dotted about the campus, also give the students opportunity to entertain their guests, both formally and informally, and during the months following the fire, when Wellesley was cramped for s.p.a.ce, they exercised a generous hospitality which put all the college in their debt.

As the membership in the Shakespeare and Greek letter societies is limited to between forty and fifty members in each society, the great majority of the students are without these social privileges, but the Barn Swallows, founded in 1897, to which every member of the college may belong if she wishes, gives periodic entertainments in the "Barn" which go far to promote general good feeling and social fellowship. The first president of the Barn Swallows, Mary E. Haskell, '97, says that it arose as an Everybody's Club, to give buried talents a chance. "Suddenly we adjured the Trustees by Joy and Democracy to bless our charter, to be gay once a week, and when they gave the Olympic nod we begged for the Barn to be gay in--and they gave that too.

"It was a grim joy parlor; rough old floor, bristly with splinters, few windows, no plank walk, no stage, no part.i.tions, no lighting.

We hung tin reflectored lanterns on a few of the posts,--thicker near the stage end,--and opened the season with an impromptu opera of the Brontes'." To Professor Charlotte F. Roberts, Wellesley '80, the Barn Swallows owe their happy name.

Besides these more formal organizations there are a number of department clubs, the Deutsche Verein, the Alliance Francaise, the Philosophy Club, the Economics Club, and informal groups such as the old Rhymesters' Club, which flourished in the late nineties, the Scribblers' which seems to have taken its place and enlarged its scope, the Social Study Circle, the little Socialist Club, and others through which the students express their intellectual and social interests.

Of Wellesley's many festivities and playtimes it would take too long to tell: of her Forensic Burnings, held when the last junior forensic for the year is due; of her processional serenades, with Chinese lanterns; of her singing on the chapel steps in the evenings of May and June. These well-beloved customs have been establishing themselves year by year more firmly in undergraduate hearts, but it is not always possible to trace them to their "first time."

Most of them date back to the later years of the nineteenth century, or the first of the twentieth. Wellesley's musical cheer seems to have waked the campus echoes first in the spring of 1890, as a result of a prize offered in November, 1889, although as far back as 1880 there is mention of a cheer. The musical cheer has so much beauty and dignity, both near at hand and at a distance, that many of the early alumnae and the faculty wish it might some time quite supersede the ugly barking sounds, imitated from the men's colleges, with which the girls are fain to evince their approval and celebrate their triumphs. They invariably end their barking with the musical cheer, however, keeping the best for the last, and relieving the tortured graduate ear.

Formal athletics at Wellesley developed from the gymnasium practice, the rowing on the lake, and the Tree Day dancing. In the early years, the cla.s.s crews used to row on the lake and sing at sunset, in their heavy, broad-bottomed old tubs; and from these casual summer evenings "Float" has been evolved--Wellesley's water pageant--when Lake Waban is dotted with gay craft, and the crews in their slim, modern, eight-oared sh.e.l.ls, display their skill.

This is the festival which the public knows best, for unlike Tree Day, to which outsiders have been admitted on only three occasions, "Float" has always been open to friendly guests. Year by year the festival grows more elaborate. Chinese junks, Indian canoes, Venetian gondolas, flower boats from fairyland, glide over the bright sunset waters, and the crews in their old traditional star pattern anchor together and sing their merry songs. There are new songs every spring, for each crew has its own song, but there are two of the old songs which are heard at every Wellesley Float, "Alma Mater", and the song of the lake, that Louise Manning Hodgkins wrote for the cla.s.s of '87.

Lake of gray at dawning day, In soft shadows lying,-- Waters kissed by morning mist, Early breezes sighing,-- Fairy vision as thou art, Soon thy fleeting charms depart.

Every grace that wins the heart, Like our youth is flying.

Lake of blue, a merry crew, Cheer of thee will borrow.

Happy hours to-day are ours, Weighted by no sorrow.

Other years may bring us tears, Other days be full of fears, Only hope the craft now steers.

Cares are for the morrow.