Scholarly Pursuits

by M. Louisa Locke

  It was Friday, and once again Laura wasn’t planning on coming back on campus to attend the Neolaean Society meeting. Instead, she was going to have dinner with Annie tonight, and she couldn’t wait to update her on everything that she and Caro had learned this week. Because she wasn’t coming back on campus, she and Caro had agreed to meet at the restaurant attached to the Golden Sheaf Bakery after her ten o’clock math class. This would give them about an hour or so to talk before she had to get on the train to start the long trip back to the city.

  The more she thought about her conversation with Caro yesterday afternoon, the more certain she was that they were on the right track. She hoped that Caro had been able to confirm their speculations about Grace and the Oestrus with Julia Beck this morning. In retrospect, she realized that her talk with Ned had revealed important clues, that with a little more time last January, they might have figured out exactly what had been going on with Grace. Hard not to wonder if that would have made a difference. Could that have given Grace the will to live?

  Her mother would always say, “A problem shared is a problem halved,” and the more experience Laura had with life, the more she saw the truth in that old adage.

  If only Seth agreed with me. I wish he trusted me enough to tell me what is bothering him, because something’s come between us, and I hate feeling we are growing apart.

  Laura had arrived at the restaurant before Caro, so she had the waitress seat her and ordered a large pot of tea. She also ordered a plate of the bakery’s fresh pastries, since she knew Caro had a healthy appetite and apparently none of the vanity that would require her to pretend otherwise. Unless her new wardrobe requires she be more circumspect…although the way she relished those doughnuts yesterday suggests otherwise.

  Since she was sitting by the bakery restaurant’s front window, she was able to see her friend as soon as she turned the corner onto Shattuck Avenue and then picked her way across the street, trying to miss the puddles. Watching as Caro came closer, Laura was struck by the dramatic differences between Caro, short, stout, and bespectacled, and her cousin Grace, tall, willowy, and fair of face. No wonder no one else had made the connection between the two cousins when Caro arrived on campus in January.

  Yet, the more Laura got to know Caro, the more intrigued she became by the similarities between the two cousins, the slight wave of the hair around the temples, the smooth, unblemished skin, the intense blue eyes, the small neat hands. Grace had a dimple that had appeared whenever she smiled which, in Laura’s memory, was quite often. With Caro, that same dimple and smile appeared only infrequently but was all the more arresting for its rareness.

  As Caro sat down across from Laura, she said, “Good morning. I’m sorry I’m late. The post was just arriving at the boardinghouse…and I wanted to see if I had a letter from my aunt, see how they are all doing.”

  “That’s quite all right. I ordered us some tea and pastries, which should be coming soon. Did you get a letter?”

  “Yes, and I guess they are doing as well as can be expected. However, I know your time is limited, so let’s get started…I have a good deal to report.”

  “You were able to speak to Miss Beck?”

  “Not yet. I decided I wanted to obtain a little more information before I got into a conversation with her. The more I know, the more detailed questions I can ask, and I might only get one chance to persuade her to be honest with me. Now that people know of Grace’s death, and my relationship to her, I suspect they will be even more hesitant to talk.”

  Laura nodded. This was one of those times she appreciated Caro’s more restrained personality. She would have tracked down Miss Beck in the heat of the moment, not thinking things through.

  Caro continued, “I want to thank you for all the work you put in this week. It’s really helped. I’m not sure I would have seen the full importance of Grace’s essay for the joint Durant and Neolaean meeting, without the background you gave me on the campus tradition of producing bogus copies of the speeches for Junior Exhibition Day.”

  “You found something!” Laura paused while the waitress came to the table with their tea and the plate of fruit-filled tarts.

  “I did, indeed. Back in January, I never took the time to do a systematic search of Grace’s books and papers, hoping that my stay would be short. For practical reasons alone, I need to sort through her things now, in order to determine what to give away, what to keep, and what to send home to her parents. I also hoped that I might discover something of importance that I had overlooked. To that end, yesterday I started taking Grace’s old texts off her shelves. As I removed the books, I rifled through them to make sure there wasn’t anything personal in them. Then this fell out, stuffed in an old Latin primer, of all places.”

  Caro handed her four pages of print, with Grace’s name and the title of her Neolaean Society essay at the top.

  Laura knew that there was a printing press in the basement of North Hall that permitted the faculty to print up exams and students to produce posters and programs for campus events, as well as print up the papers they were going to read at the various club meetings. The student newspaper, the Berkeleyan, used this printer to put out their weekly editions, as well. She had noticed, however, that the Blue and Gold yearbooks she and Caro looked at yesterday were printed by larger firms in San Francisco. Probably because the university’s small Gordon Jobber press wasn’t big enough to handle a larger run, and as far as she knew, the university didn’t have a machine for book binding.

  Typesetting and running the university press were one of the many part-time jobs that the university offered, but the wages were abysmally low. Laura supposed they would be attractive to those interested in getting experience in the trade but didn’t have the time to become full-time apprentices. The lack of experience on the part of the students who worked in the printing shop on campus showed, however, and last term, she and Seth amused themselves by pointing out how many typos they could find in a single program or exam sheet.

  Looking more closely at the pages Caro had given her, she instantly recognized the introductory paragraphs Grace had read at the meeting before faltering. As Laura started reading the second page, she saw the reason why Grace stopped reading. The sentences on this next page didn’t make sense. They looked like real sentences, with nouns, pronouns, subjects, objects, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. But the nouns didn’t go with verbs, and the adjectives and adverbs were absurd when combined with the nouns and verbs they were describing. For example, in this part of the essay, desks shrieked at tall, intelligent wastebaskets, and damsels plodded along dusty, fast-moving, rosebushes. And these nonsense sentences went on for paragraph after paragraph, filling the next three pages.

  “Oh Caro…what a terrible trick to play on someone. No wonder Grace looked so bewildered.”

  Laura examined the four pages in front of her again, thinking about how a woman she knew had used her typesetting skills to exonerate herself when she was wrongly accused of a crime. “What a lot of work someone went through to play this so-called ‘little joke’ on your cousin. The person would have had to compose the new paragraphs and make them match the original in length so Grace wouldn’t notice the substitution at first glance. Next they would have had to get the new pages printed out on the university press. Then they would have to get their hands on her final copy to swap these pages out for the real ones.”

  “And you think that these pages of gibberish were printed up on campus?”

  “Oh yes, the plate on the university press is old, and the ink in the upper right corner of any page is just a little paler than the rest of the page. Seth Timmons pointed this out to me last term, and you can see this paler ink appears on all four pages.”

  Caro looked where she pointed, and Laura continued, “The original first page is fairly well done in terms of the typesetting…so it was probably produced by one of the students employed to work for the printing office. These last three pages have been typeset by someone else en
tirely. Letters are transposed; not all the typefaces are from the same font. This second person knew the fundamentals of typesetting but hasn’t had much practice.”

  Caro let out a deep sigh. “What a relief. I was afraid that maybe Grace had somehow written all of the pages. I don’t know, in some sort of fever-induced dream.”

  “Don’t worry, I would swear that the last three pages were done at a different time by a different typesetter. But Grace must have thought she’d gone mad when she turned to the second page.”

  “My poor cousin. If even I wondered for an instant whether or not she had…somehow gone mad…then…”

  “Grace would hesitate to show the paper to anyone else, afraid they would think the same thing. Who could get close enough to her to get a copy of the original? It would need to be someone who would also be able to make the substitution, and that would have to have been done right before the meeting. Otherwise, Grace would have discovered the switch before she started reading the paper.”

  “Willie?”

  “That would make sense…but wait a minute. Ned said their engagement ended right after Junior Exhibition Day, which was before the literary society meeting. Wouldn’t that preclude him from making the final substitution? Let me look at my calendar.”

  Laura pulled a small notebook out of her satchel and rapidly flipped pages until she found what she wanted. She said, “Junior Exhibition Day was October 30, a week and a half before the joint Durant and Neolaean society meeting. Do you have any idea when Grace completed the essay?”

  “Yes, I do. I went back and looked at her letters during the fall term, and in a letter dated October 24, she wrote to her mother how relieved she was to have completed the essay. She also mentioned that she had already had it printed up, so she wouldn’t be tempted to keep changing it. That means the essay was done before their engagement ended.”

  “Would be pretty easy for Willie to pretend he was interested in reading the finished paper at that point.” Laura put away her calendar.

  “Consequently, he’d know how to make the bogus pages look like the original. But how would he get close enough to make the substitution once they were no longer engaged?”

  Laura thought back to that night and said, “Since the meeting was to celebrate the opening of the clubhouse, many of the faculty and a good proportion of the student body attended, I suppose that included a number of the fraternity men. The cottage was crowded, with lots of people milling around, greeting each other as they took their seats.”

  She flashed on a memory of Grace shaking hands with her. She hadn’t been holding any papers at that point. This meant she might have put the essay down on her chair before circulating to greet people. Anyone could have made the substitution—even Willy.

  She was about to share this conclusion with Caro when her friend said, “Before we get into how someone could have pulled off substituting the fake essay for the real one, let me tell you what I’ve learned about what really happened to Grace during Junior Exhibition Day.”

  Laura listened as Caro recounted how she decided to look at back issues of Berkeleyan from this fall, searching to see if there were articles of relevance to their investigation. “There was a piece the week after Junior Exhibition Day about how the sophomores this year had tried to disrupt the day but that they were unsuccessful because of the vigilance of the Juniors on the Decorations Committee. The article was very cryptic about the ceremony itself, something about the sophomores becoming too shy to toot their own horns.”

  “I remember reading that article. Didn’t make sense to me at the time.”

  “I brought up the subject at dinner last night, asking if anyone had attended the exercises this fall, because I’d heard the sophomore class was up to some mischief.”

  “Did anyone say anything?”

  “The two agricultural students just shrugged…too focused on eating, as usual. Miss Roberts, the hat shop owner, said one of her clients told her how lovely the speeches were but that for some reason the group of young men sitting near her never got a chance to play their horns.”

  “What?”

  “That’s when the shy sophomore, Chad, chimed in and said that a group of his fellow classmates brought as many brass instruments with them as they could, planning to blow these horns when the juniors got up to make their speeches. But in his opening remarks, LeConte, the university president, glared at them so pointedly, talking about the need to be gentlemen, that they lost their nerve.”

  Laura laughed, then said, “I’m sorry, Caro, I didn’t mean to make light of what happened; but this seems such a silly plan, compared to the notorious behavior of the class of ’81.”

  “I thought the same thing. However, it turns out that this wasn’t the only attempt to disrupt the festivities.”

  Caro went on to tell her that Chad had knocked on her door after dinner and asked if he could speak privately. When they retired to the parlor, the sophomore said he had something to tell her about Junior Exhibition Day and her cousin Grace.

  “Personally, from the way he talked, I think he had a bit of a crush on my cousin. Grace described him in her letters as a sweet, studious boy, with artistic aspirations. In any event, turns out he volunteered to help her set things up in the Harmon Gymnasium the day before the ceremony. He told me all about the work Grace and the other members of the committee did. Some of the junior girls painted famous quotations on banners, which they then strung from the rafters. Others worked to hang up artwork students had loaned for the occasion. He helped hide the gymnasium apparatus with banks of fresh-cut evergreen boughs some of the junior boys had brought down from the hills. Grace’s job was to work with a Miss Kate Sessions, a senior, to create a visual backdrop for the speakers by placing flower arrangements on a number of pedestals of different heights. Chad said the flowers were primarily from the university greenhouses but that she and Miss Sessions gathered good number of wildflowers that had sprung up after the first of the autumn rains.”

  “My, that all does sound lovely.”

  “Making it all the more shameful that someone tried to destroy all the work they had done. Chad came with Grace the next morning to help refill all the vases, so he was there in person to see the destruction that someone had caused overnight. Banners were pulled down, streamers torn, the banks of greens disarranged, but worst of all, almost all the vases had been taken off the pedestals and the flowers strewn about.”

  “Goodness, I’m surprised I didn’t hear about this from my friend Kitty who attended the event.”

  “According to Chad, the students on the committee, mostly junior women, worked like the devil to repair the damage before people began to arrive. They had an hour, long enough for them to hammer the banners and streamers in place.”

  “But what about the flowers?” Laura knew how difficult it was to keep flowers grown in a hot-house fresh once they’d been cut.

  “He said they did have to throw some away. But the heat had been turned off in the building that night; as a result, the air was quite cold, helping preserve the blooms. He told me that once they got the vases back in place, refilled with water, and the flowers back soaking, most of them revived.”

  “That was fortunate.”

  “However, he also said it was what happened next that he wanted to tell me about. He had just brought in a pitcher of water from the pump outside when he heard Grace give a little cry. She was kneeling and staring at a pile of flowers. He hurried to her, thinking she might have cut herself on one of the broken vases, and saw she was looking at some scraps of paper that lay under the flowers. Looked to him like newsprint.”

  “Newsprint?”

  “Yes. He said Grace hurriedly gathered up the scraps and placed them in her pocket. When he asked what was wrong, she said it was nothing, but he could see she was trembling. As he helped her gather the rest of the fallen flowers, he was on the lookout for other bits of paper, making sure to pick them up whenever he saw them. Said it was so no one else coul
d find them, since they seemed to upset her so much.”

  “Did he tell you what newspapers they were from?”

  “He did even better. He kept them, and last night he handed them over to me.”

  “I wonder why he did that?”

  “Well, I suspect as some sort of memento of her.”

  Caro spread out the scraps of what Laura could see was newsprint, saying, “As you can see, a couple of them have the Oestrus masthead attached. From what I can tell, they appear to be letters to the editor about the need for a temperance movement on campus, pleas for greater civility in public discourse, and warning of the dangers of secret societies. And, look here, several of them are signed from the Greek goddess, Astraea.”

  Laura looked at Caro in shock. “Grace must have sent the anonymous letters she mentioned to you to the Oestrus. More importantly, it looks a lot like someone who knew that fact was involved in the destruction of the decorations.”

  Caro nodded, shuffling the bits of paper together. “In addition, whoever scattered these around wanted her to know that her secret was out.”

  “How cowardly! Using the sophomores’ mischief to target Grace. Do you think there is any way of finding out who was involved in breaking in that night?”

  Caro shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. But Chad told me he thought that Grace believed Willie was behind what was done…or at least knew about it.”

  “How did he come to that conclusion?”

  “He confided to me that he was so worried about Grace that he kept a close eye on her when the doors to the gymnasium opened and people began to arrive for the event. He saw her go up to Willie and show him one of the pieces of paper. He said Willie simply turned his back on her and went and sat with his fraternity brothers. I must say, Chad doesn’t think very highly of Mr. Caulfield.”

  “I must agree with him. The one person who probably knew for sure she’d written those letters was Willie, her fiancé. He would also be the one person who should have understood why she was so upset. No wonder Grace decided not to accompany him to the dance that afternoon.”