Peggy Parsons a Hampton Freshman Part 2

CHAPTER II-SUITE 22

It was right in the middle of Freshman Rains.

The faces of the new girls appeared white and mournful, pressed against the dormitory windows, or flushed and laughing from between rubber helmets and slickers out on the campus, according to their dispositions.

Up and down the second floor corridor of Ambler House trooped the usual forenoon procession, umbrella tips clicking on the polished boards: those who were going out to cla.s.ses making a flapping sound with their rubber garments, those returning giving out a slos.h.i.+ng noise that advertised the weather outside in an unfavorable manner.

Before several of the doors wet umbrellas were open on the floor to dry, while tiny rivulets trickled steadily from the steel p.r.o.ngs. They looked like big black bats which had flown in to seek shelter from the outer torrents and might be expected to take wing again at any minute.

It was not a hilarious atmosphere at best, but, to add to its dripping depression, two wails of a most long-drawn and lugubrious sort began to be wafted down the length of the hall over the tops of the wet umbrellas, drifting in heart-brokenly through the students' doors, and dying away in receding cadences whenever a disconsolate head lifted itself from a cus.h.i.+on to listen or a helmet strap was shoved back from a surprised and inquisitive ear.

"M-MMm-MO-O-Oh," went the wail, and then "Moo-oo-oo," with a pastoral significance that was particularly mystifying.

No use for any girl to tell herself that this was the wind howling-or the rain dejectedly descending on a tin roof-for no wind ever howled so precisely up and down scales with such sobbingly human and barnyard notes, and no rain was ever known to be so surprisingly vocal, nor so loud and threatening one moment and so tremulously broken and far away the next.

"Go! Gug-gug-go! Gug-gug-GO-go-go!" screamed the dual wail, apparently expressive of the utmost suffering, and yet, through it all, maintaining a baffling rhythmical quality and a monotony of utterance that sent a shuddering wonder in its wake as it coursed down the hall.

But during such a disheartening season as Freshman Rains the spirit of investigation is not keen, and the residents on the second floor preferred to distract their attention by lessons that must be learned or by long and rambling letters home that ended with vague hints that somebody in their house was being killed down the hall.

It was not until the voices broke out into wild and mirthless laughter that their apathetic spirits were aroused to protest.

"Goodness, girls, what's that awful noise?" an indignant brown head poked itself out from one of the umbrella-guarded doors and sent its peevish remonstrance down the corridor. In an instant every door framed a face-or two faces-and a babble of questions was echoed back and forth.

But triumphantly right through the shrill notes of their eager queries rang the weird and displeasing sound that had so disturbed them.

"Ha-HA! Ho-HO! He-HEE! Haw-HAW!"

"It's too much!" averred the girl who had spoken first. "_Where_ is that sound being made? And _what_ is it? Seems to me as if it were from Suite 22-do you think somebody is torturing those freshmen?" It was just what everybody did think, but they dreaded the admission. "Let's go in there," the girl continued, "and-and find out." She ended rather weakly, shrinking before the task of investigating so unearthly a sound as that.

The girls were flocking forth, some still in their damp slickers, the rain glistening on them; others all immaculate just as they were ready to start out to recitations: and still a lazy third contingent, who had not yet had any cla.s.ses or who were wantonly cutting them, as sweet as flowers in j.a.panese silk kimonos and little pattering slippers.

Together they made the charge on Door 22.

Crowding in at the breach as it swung open, they gasped in sudden bewilderment at the sight that met their eyes.

Standing rigidly side by side like two soldiers on parade, but with their hands solemnly placed upon their diaphragms while they emitted simultaneously the weird noises that had alarmed the house, were Peggy Parsons and Katherine Foster, the idols of Ambler House!

Their eyes widened at the wholesale intrusion and their hands fell limply to their sides, and then, as the indignant chorus broke out around them, they looked at each other in crimson confusion and burst out laughing.

"Why-c-could you h-h-hear us, g-girls?" cried Katherine incoherently through her shaking spasms of mirth.

"Hear you?" echoed Hazel Pilcher, who had led the charge upon them.

"Hear? Well, my _dears_, did you think you were exactly whispering? I never listened to so awful a concert in my life. It's a wonder I didn't call the house-matron. Oh, you incorrigible youngsters, what in the world was it?"

Peggy's face a.s.sumed an aggrieved expression immediately.

"It was only our lesson," she responded somewhat sulkily.

"Lesson! My goodness, what are they giving the freshmen now that their lessons turn out to be imitations of a menagerie? Why, when I was a freshman"-(with a very superior air, for Hazel Pilcher was now enjoying all the glory of a soph.o.m.ore's exalted position)-"we had Latin and French and math and history, but I never heard of a course in ghostly noises. I'm sure that in my year they at least spared us that."

"Just the samey that was our lesson," Peggy persisted, "that was our practice work for to-morrow's yell."

"Do you mean--?" Hazel began to understand, for one cannot be a soph.o.m.ore without knowing most of the abbreviations in which college terminology abounds.

"Elocution, if we have to simplify it," said Peggy. "I suppose you girls didn't take that course. Well, Katherine and I are just-taking it for all it's worth. I guess we want to learn to speak correctly and place our voices right from the diaphragm and make full and open tones--"

"Spare muh!" interposed a senior who was known to be already practicing up for dramatics. "I hear nothing but that sort of thing all day long these days. I might have guessed what your vocal gymnastics meant-but they were so particularly horrible--"

"Well, the worse they sound the better they are," murmured Peggy, deprecatingly. "And I thought myself we did it rather well."

Elocution, or, as the girls called it with enthusiasm, yellocution or yell, was an elective course that entailed no studying, but a vast deal of labor along a different line. The victims who were beguiled into taking it, thinking to gain an easy course minus mental effort, that would count nevertheless a perfectly good two hours a week for their degree, were often mere tearful wrecks after the first few days when they were stood up before an enormous, gaping cla.s.s and put through test after test to the running accompaniment of wounding comment on their enunciation, their manner, their throats, their gestures-everything.

They became acquainted for the first time with all the distressful mystery of larynxes and pharynxes-which most of them had always supposed were the names of diseases-they learned about diaphragms, too, and were forced to breathe in different ways and shout and cry "Ha-ha," all the time feeling for the muscular hammer stroke at their waist lines. It was so embarra.s.sing to Peggy at first that she couldn't make any sound at all when they told her to say "Ha-ha," and it was only after three attempts that she managed a faint and disheartened squeak.

"Your voice is little and thin," criticised the teacher sharply. "I shall give you exercises to round it out."

And that's what she had done, and these were what Peggy and her faithful room-mate were practicing at the moment of the inrush of visitors.

She explained to her guests how little and thin her voice was, but they laughed scornfully and said if she had any more of a one, they'd see that she was put off campus, that, as far as they were concerned, they believed she had the biggest and the fattest voice on record, which seemed to restore Peggy's self-respect in a way marvelous to behold.

"A person can be happy," she a.s.sured them conversationally, "just so long as she doesn't know anything about herself-how she talks, how she looks or how she impresses other people. But the minute you get her conscious of all these larynx-pharynx-diaphragm machines inside her she'll never know another happy minute until she conquers them all and can speak just like a n.a.z.imova with 'em. Though n.a.z.imova is rather sobby, I'm told-maybe I'd better train myself up after Blanche Ring instead."

"Peggy," Katherine put in at this point questioningly, "don't you think we might set the water over and give the girls some tea?"

At this delightful prospect many of the girls-especially the little lazy kimonoed ones-sat right down wherever they happened to be, in a chair or on the floor, with such looks of blissful antic.i.p.ation on their faces that they were a pleasant sight. It wasn't often tea was served in the middle of a rainy forenoon and the two Andrews freshmen were already so practiced in little parties before they came to college, that even a cup of tea served by them had a grace and an added interest, that it could not have possessed in the rooms of girls who were just tasting their first bit of life away from home.

Peggy looked in some consternation at the comfortable crowd with its expectant and gleeful expression, and demurred slowly.

"I just _have_ to train my voice," she said, "but I suppose, even with them here, I can go right on?"

A groan greeted this proposal that was anything but complimentary.

Peggy looked hurt. "Oh, you just wait," she said vindictively, but with a laugh struggling for utterance at the same time. "Some day you'll pay to hear me-see if you won't-and I mean to work at it right along all through four years and then-and-then--" her voice grew dreamy and her eyes stared off into a heavenly future, "and then maybe I can be in the mob at senior dramatics!"

The senior of the party laughed at the pretty compliment, for she herself was only in the mob, and her cla.s.smates didn't think she had such a marvelous success either-so it was pleasant to have the adoration of a popular freshman.

"I'm sure you will be," she said graciously, "and with one accord we all accept the future mob member's invitation to tea." And she sat down with the rest and waited patiently.

With a sigh, Peggy lit the little alcohol lamp under the tea kettle and Katherine dived mysteriously under the desk to emerge a moment later with something that sent a general shout of approval through the entire group.

"A box! A box!" they cried, "Katherine has a box from home!"

Nothing else in life possesses quite the wonder and the satisfying delight of a real box from home. If the parents at home only knew of the wide-eyed envy of all the girls as they cl.u.s.ter around one of these brighteners of college existence as it is being opened, there would be a continuous procession of expressmen tramping in at the back door of all the college houses, week in and week out, and every single closet shelf would hold its quota of jam jars, home-made cookies, and fine large grape-fruit so that the same glow of satisfaction and sense of being loved would abide in each girl's heart all the time.

The tea ball was being daintily dipped in and out of the steaming cups, the cold chicken was being eagerly pa.s.sed down the line of girls, when the door of suite 22 opened again and a confused and blus.h.i.+ng stranger, tall, with wonderful reddish hair and baby-blue eyes, stepped inside and asked in a voice that was so full of fright that it would never have pa.s.sed in that elocution cla.s.s of Peggy's, if this was Miss Katherine Foster's room.