Years of Grace

by Margaret Ayer Barnes

  CHAPTER IV

  I

  The October sun was shining brightly down on the Bryn Mawr maples when Jane and her father first walked under the arch of Pembroke Hall, where Agnes was awaiting them. Jane thought Bryn Mawr was very beautiful. Much more beautiful than the pictures. The most beautiful place, indeed, that she had ever seen.

  *Let's look it over, Jane,' said Mr. Ward, 'before we go in.' They strolled on, arm in arm, down the gravel walk beyond.

  The campus stretched fresh and green before them. On one hand it terminated in a group of grey stone buildings, hung with EngUsh ivy. On the other it extended past a row of breeze blown maples to an abrupt decHne, where the ground dropped off down a grassy hillside. In that direction you could see the rolling Pennsylvania country for miles and miles. Jane had never hved among hills. She thought the view was very lovely.

  They passed some groups of girls, walking in twos and threes on the gravel path. They were laughing and chattering together and they paid no attention whatever to Jane and her father. Other girls were sitting, here and there, under the maples. Four or five ran out of a building, that Jane knew from the pictures must be Merion, and almost bumped into them. They were dressed in bright red gym suits, with red corduroy skirts, and they carried hockey sticks. They cantered across the campus toward the hillside, making a bright patch of colour against the green as they ran.

  Pembroke Hall, as they returned to it, looked very big and important. Jane drew a little nearer to her father as they en-

  tcred the front door. It seemed quite deserted for a moment. Then a coloured maid, in a neat black dress and apron, came out from a little room under the stairs. She said she would tell the warden. 'The warden' sounded a bit forbidding, Jane thought. Rather like a prison. But when she appeared she proved to be a nice-looking girl with dark brown hair, not much older than Isabel. She shook hands with Jane's father and told them how to find Jane's room. It was on the second story, in the middle of the corridor.

  Jane and Jane's father walked alone up the wooden stairs. In the upper hall they met some more girls, laughing and shouting, hanging about the open doors of bedrooms. Inside the rooms was confusion twice confounded. Open trunks and scattered books and dishes and clothing flung on chairs. An odour of cooking chocolate permeated the air.

  Agnes was waiting for them in the three-room suite. It looked very small to Jane, but otherwise just as it had in the catalogue. There was a little study with an open fireplace and a window-seat that commanded the campus, and two tiny bedrooms, opening off it. Agnes's trunk was already unpacked. Agnes had come yesterday, straight from the steamer. She had already been out, exploring the country. A great vase of Michaelmas daisies was on the study table.

  'Well, girls,' said Jane's father, 'this is great.*

  It was great, thought Jane. It was much nicer than she had ever imagined. She didn't feel shy any longer, now she had seen Agnes.

  Agnes had taken her advanced standing examination in French that morning. It was easy, she said. Much easier than entrance.

  Jane sat down on the window seat and gazed out over the campus. It looked very tranquil and pleasant. Yet exciting, too, with all those different girls, that seemed so much at

  home, walking about as if they owned the place. No one seemed to be watching them, as in school. No one was telling them what to do. As Jane looked six girls came out from under the arch. They were carrying a picnic basket and a steamer rug and several cushions and they wore green gym suits and corduroy skirts, just hke the red ones Jane had seen before. They hung about under a big cherry tree under the window for a minute and they were all singing. Jane could catch the words by leaning out, around the ivy.

  'Once there dwelt captiously a stern papa.

  Likewise with him sojourned, daughter and ma.

  Daughter's minority tritely was spent,

  To a prep boarding school, glumly she went.

  One day the crisis came, outcome of years,

  Father and mother firm, daughter in tears.

  With stern progenitors, hotly she pled,

  Lined up her arguments, this is what she said: "I don't want to go to Vassar, I can't bear to think of Smith." *

  They were strolling off across the campus, now, but Jane could still hear the words of the song.

  • "I've no earthly use for Radcliffe, Wellesley's charms are merest myth, Only spooks go to Ann Arbor, Leland Stanford's much too far." *

  Their fresh young voices rose in a final wail in the middle distance.

  ' **I don't want to go to col — lege, if — I can't — go — to — Bryn —

  Mawr!'"

  'That's a nice song,' said Jane excitedly.

  'They sing all the time,' said Agnes. 'The Seniors sing on the steps of Taylor Hall after dinner.'

  'I'm going to love this,' said Jane.

  Her father looked very much pleased.

  'I hope you do, Kid,' he said heartily. 'And I'm sure you will. Jane's had a pretty poor summer, Agnes.*

  Agnes knew all about Jane's summer. Jane had written her about Andre, just as soon as she could bear to put it down on paper. Agnes had sent her an awfully nice letter. She looked very sympathetic now.

  'You must look out for her, Agnes,' said Jane's father.

  *I don't think she'll need much looking out for,' said Agnes. *This is Jane's kind of place.'

  Jane was sure it was, even at the long Freshman supper table in Pembroke, which was very terrifying. Jane sat between her father and Agnes. On Agnes's other side was the warden and beyond her father sat a Uttle dark-eyed Freshman from Gloversville, New York. Her name was Marion Park. She talked very politely to Jane's father throughout the meal.

  'That's a bright kid,' Jane's father said, as they left the table. *I bet she'll amount to something some day.* Jane felt that she and Agnes would like Marion Park.

  The Seniors were singing on Taylor steps just as Agnes had prophesied. Jane and her father and Agnes strolled up and down in the gathering twilight and listened to them. There were lots of girls about, more than a hundred, Jane thought, all in light summer dresses, walking up and down under the maple trees, occasionally Uning up in a great semi-circle before the steps, joining the Seniors in a song. Some of the songs were awfully funny.

  *If your cranium — is a vacuum — and you'd like to learn How an intellect — you can cultivate — from the smallest germ. On the management — of the universe — if your hopes you stake, Or a treatise — on the ineffable — you propose to make, If you contemplate — making politics — your exclusive aim, And are looking for — some coadjutor — in your little game. And in short if there — should be anything — that you fail to know, To the Sophomore — to the Sophomore — go — go — go!'

  Jane's father thought the songs were awfully funny, too.

  He laughed quite as much over them as Jane and Agnes did.

  'Bright girls,' he said. *Nice bright girls.'

  That was just what they were, thought Jane. And her kind. Like Agnes. Not at all like Flora and Muriel, whom slie loved of course and who had written to her only last week from Farmington, but who she didn't fee! would fit into Bryn Mawr very well. They were just — different.

  Agnes came into her bedroom that night in her cotton crepe kimono, just before she turned out the light. Jane was sitting up in her little wooden bed.

  'Open the window, Agnes,' said Jane. 'I like this place. I'm going to like it a lot.'

  Agnes opened the window in silence. Dear old Agnes — it was fun to be rooming with her! But Jane hadn't forgotten, She hadn't forgotten one bit. She sat there in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown, with her hair braided tightly in two straight pigtails, looking very like the little Jane that used to run up Pine Street to meet Andre under the Water Works Tower. She hadn't forgotten, but she wasn't the same little Jane, in spite of appearances. She was begirming to learn that the world was wdde.

  'Since I can't marry Andre,' she said solemnly, 'I'd rather be here than anywhere els
e.'

  n

  'It's funny,' said Jane to Agnes. 'All the years you're trying to get into college you think it's the work that counts. When you get there you see it's the people.'

  Jane and Agnes were sitting on their window-seat, looking out over the gnarled branches of the cherry tree. It was an afternoon in late Januar)^ The sun was sinking behind the stripped boughs of the maples and the campus was covered with snow. Jane and Agnes had just finished their midyear

  examinations. They had taken Minor Latin that morning. And English two days ago. And Biology the day before that. They were pretty sure that they had passed them all. Now they had five days of vacation before the second semester began.

  'The work counts a lot,' said Agnes.

  Jane wondered if the work counted more for Agnes than it did for her. Agnes was continuing to be terribly bright. She expected to take a job, when she graduated, and she was hoping to write, on the side. Agnes was writing now, all the time. Stories that she sometimes sent to magazines. Jane thought they were awfully good, though the editors always sent them back with rejection slips, Agnes was never discouraged. She just went on writing.

  Jane never did much of anything, except just enough work to keep up in her courses. She loved the General English and she liked Horace and she found the Biology awfully interesting. She didn't think, though, that she was going to enjoy cutting up rabbits, much, next semester. Angleworms were different. They seemed bom to suffer. On fish hooks and in robins' beaks if not in laboratories. Little soft furry rabbits — that was different.

  Jane liked all her work and she hked her professors, much better than any of the teachers that she had ever had at Misi Milgrim's. Still — she never appHed herself Hke Agnes. It was too much fun to take long rambling walks over the wooded countryside with friendly classmates, and make tea in the dormitor)', and get up hall plays, and sit up half the night on somebody's window-seat, talking about — well, almost anything. Beowulf or the Freshman show, or whether there really was an omniscient God that heard your prayers, or the fiinny thing that had happened in the Livy lecture when Sometimes Jane thought, very solemnly, that she

  would never really be serious. Serious as a young woman ought to be who had the advantage of a college education and lived in a world where there was so much to be done.

  President M. Carey Thomas always had a great deal to say to the students about the advantage of a college education and she was always caUing their attention to the opportunities for women's work that were opening up in the world. Jane felt a little guilty when she listened to her.

  President M. Carey Thomas spoke to the students every day in chapel, after the morning hymn and the reading from the Bible and the Quaker prayer. Jane always went to chapel for she simply loved to hear her. She loved to look at her, too. President Thomas was very beautiful. She stood up behind the reading desk in her black silk gown with the blue velvet Ph.D. stripes on its floating sleeves and her Uttle black mortar board on her dark auburn hair. Her face was very tranquil and serene. The auburn hair was curly and rippled smoothly back from her forehead. Her mouth was firm and her chin was proud and her dark brown eyes could look very wise and persuasive. When she laughed, as she often did, there were funny friendly httle Unes about them in the corners.

  *How lovely she looks!' Jane always thought. It was strange that Miss Thomas's beauty always made Jane think, for a passing moment, of Flora's mother. Flora's mother — who was so beautiful too, in such a different way. Beautiful with hair of burnished gold tightly coiffed on her distinguished little head, and gowns of rippling silk and wraps of cHnging velvet, and pink cheeks with dimples, and eyes that danced and smiled, but could look very wistful, too, and romantic and sometimes very sad, Hke windows through which you could see down into her very soul. Miss Thomas's eyes were like windows, too, but the soul inside was very different.

  gS Years of Geiage

  Flora's mother's soul was like a rose-lit room, a little intimate interior where gay and charming and tender things were bound to happen. Miss Thomas's soul was like a vast arena, a battleground, Jane sometimes thought, where strangely impersonal wars were waged with a curiously personal ardour. Moreover, Miss Thomas could shut her windows. Flora's mother's were always wide open. Inviting, unprotected. You could see exactly what went on inside. But Miss Thomas could draw down the blinds, and sometimes did, when things displeased her. Then her face grew very cold and austere, but no less beautiful. A wise, wilful face, that made you understand just how she had accomplished so much, and feel that it was terribly important to do just what she wished you to do and help her make the world the place she thought it ought to be.

  Jane came to know Miss Thomas's face very well and she never tired of looking at it. She came to know her views ver)' well, too, and it always made her feel a little unworthy to hear them. Miss Thomas spoke to the students of women's rights and women's suffrage and women's work for temperance. She spoke to them of education and economic independence and their duty, as educated women, to make their contribution to the world of knowledge. She spoke with eloquence and conviction and a curiously childUke and disarming enthusiasm. Jane always felt very conscience-stricken because she knew, in her heart, that she would never do anything about all of this, that the seed was falling, as far as she was concerned, on barren ground.

  Miss Thomas read from the Bible, too. Always very beautiful passages that she read very beautifully. Sometimes the echo of them Ungered in Jane's mind, long after Miss Thomas had closed the book and the Quaker prayer had been said, and Miss Thomas was talking on quite mundane topics.

  *She speaks with the tongue of men and angels,' Jane often thought, as she listened and looked at the upturned faces of the students all around her. 'Doth it profit her nothing?' The adolescent audience seemed dreadfully unworthy of the eloquence. Jane couldn't beheve that her generation would ever grow up to be great and forceful and wise, like the generation that had preceded them. But Miss Thomas's confidence in the power of youth seemed to remain unshaken. She was never tired of directing it. Agnes said that was why she was a great college president.

  'She works,' said Agnes, *to make what she beheves in come true. You can't do more than that.'

  That was what Agnes did, in her small way, and Marion Park, too, who had turned out to be quite as nice as she looked. But did Jane? Jane often wondered. She couldn't see her life as a crusade — grievous as the wrongs might be in a world that needed them righted. Listening to Agnes and Marion Park, Jane often felt just as fiivolous as Flora and Muriel.

  At home, in the Christmas holidays, however, listening once more to her mother and Isabel, going out to parties where she tried not to be shy, missing Andre so dreadfully ai every turn that nothing else seemed really to count at all, Jane had realized, of course, that she was all on Miss Thomas's side. Life must be more important than this, she thought. There must be things for even a woman to do that would be interesting and significant. She had only to look at Flora and Muriel, comparing their dance programs in a dressing-room door, to feel just a httle smug and condescending. But back at Bryn Mawr, among the people who had definite plans for concrete accompHshment, she felt again very trivial and purposeless. She didn't really worry a bit as to whether or no she ever voted and she didn't want to work for her living and.

  loo Years of Grace

  really, she only cared about pleasing Andni and growing up into the kind of a girl he'd like to be with and talk to and love and marry. It was very confusing. At home she felt like an infant Suscm B, Anthony. She had aired her views on women's rights with unaccustomed vigor, at the breakfast tabic Isabel had derided her.

  'I hope you're satisfied, John,' her mother had said. 'She's a dreadful little blue-stocking already.'

  But her father had only laughed.

  *The blue will come out in the wash,' he had prophesied cheerfully. 'I doubt if it's a fast colour.'

  Jane doubted it, too, as she sat on the window-seat with Agnes. Agnes had the Latin exam
ination paper in her hand.

  'We might go over it with the trot,' she said, 'and see what we got wrong.*

  *Oh, Agnes!'said Jane. 'It's a lovely day. Let's go for a sleigh ride. We'll have time before supper. You go and get Marion and I'll call up the livery stable and order a cutter.'

  m

  'Next year,' said Agnes lazily, stretching her long limbs beneath the budding cherry tree, 'I'm going to begin Greek.'

  Jane thought she would like to begin Greek, too. It made her feel awfully illiterate to have to skip the quotations she bumped into in English and French books. But she knew she would never have the stamina to do it. The alphabet was toe discouraging.

  'Agnes,' she said, 'it makes me tired to listen to you. I'm going to take French and Philosophy and English.'

  'I'm going to take an elective in Narrative Writing,' said Agnes. 'I'm going to learn to write if it kills me.'

  Jane contemplated the white froth of the cherry blossoms against the stainless sky.

  *This place is heaven,' she said.

  The captain of the Freshman basket-ball team sauntered up to them across the green lawn.

  'I wish you two would get out and practise with the team/ she said.

  'Well — we won't,* said Agnes obligingly.

  *We're intellectuals,' explained Jane sweedy. 'Sit down, Mugsy, and look at the cherry blossoms.'

  Mugsy dropped down cross-legged on the grass.

  'You'd be good, if you'd try,' she said persuasively.

  Agnes shook her head.

  'Our arms and legs don't work,' she said cheerfully.

  'Only our brains,' said Jane.

  'Oh — honestly!' said Mugsy.

  'But they work very well,' said Agnes.

  'Agnes's do,' said Jane. 'You know she's got two scholarships. They'U be announced to-morrow.'

  Mugsy looked pleasandy impressed.