Beatrice Leigh at College Part 17

For her junior year Bea was fortunate enough to secure a mail-route, the proceeds of which helped to make her independent of a home allowance for spending money. To tell the truth, however, she enjoyed the work even more than the salary. While distributing the letters she felt a personal share in every delighted, "Oh, thank you!" in each ever-unsatisfied, "Is that all?" or the disappointed, "Nothing for me to-day?"

From her own experience and observation during the years already past, she was particularly interested in the different pairs of roommates who came within the scope of her daily trips. In a certain double lived two freshmen, one of whom always greeted her with, "Oh, thank you!" whether the mail was addressed to her or to her roommate. But when the roommate answered the knock, she invariably exclaimed, no matter how much was handed to her, "Is that all?"

More than once in her reports to Lila, Bea declared that it was about time for a wave of reform in the vicinity of Ethelwynne Bruce. Perhaps she might even have contemplated the possibility of engineering something of the kind herself, if she had not been too busy to spare the necessary thought-energy. In the course of events, fate with its machinery of circ.u.mstances added an extra lesson to Ethelwynne's college course.

It happened one evening during the skating season.

Ethelwynne with her skates jingling over her arm came s.h.i.+vering into the room. "Oo-oo-ooh!" Her teeth chattered. "Wynnie's freezing. Do shut that window and turn on the heat, Agnes. It is hard lines to live in a double with a regular Polar bear direct from the land of Sparta. You ought to keep it up as high as forty degrees anyhow."

"Sh-h!" The smooth dark head at the desk bent lower over the water-color before her. "Don't interrupt this minute. There's a dear. I've got to catch this last streak of daylight----"

"But it isn't daylight," fretted Ethelwynne, "the moon's up already. And I'm so chilly! I wish you would help me make some hot chocolate."

"Look at the thermometer. Ah, one more stroke of that exquisite saffron on the stem! Hush, now. Look at the thermometer, look at the thermometer," she muttered abstractedly while concentrating all her mental attention in the tips of her skilful fingers.

Ethelwynne stared at her a moment before giving a little chuckle that ended in a s.h.i.+ver. "Look at the thermometer, look at the thermometer,"

she echoed sarcastically, "I reckon that'll warm me up, won't it? Like somebody or other who set a lighted candle inside the fireless stove and then warmed himself at the glowing isingla.s.s. Suppose your old thermometer does say seventy or eighty or ninety or a hundred? Maybe it is telling a story. Why should I trust an uneducated instrument that has never studied ethics? Now listen here!" She lifted her skates and poised them to throw from high above her head. "Hist! if you don't drop those hideous toadstools of yours and begin to sympathize with me this instant, I shall hur-r-rl this clanking steel----"

Agnes still painting busily raised one elbow in an att.i.tude of half-unconscious defense.

"----upon the floor-r-r!"

At the cras.h.i.+ng rattlety-bang Agnes sprang to her feet with a nervous shriek. Ethelwynne dived for her skates and felt them carefully. "I tried to pick out the softest spot on the rug," she complained whimsically, "but there wasn't any other way to wake her up. And I simply had to have some sympathy. Oo-oo-ooh, Wynnie's freezing!"

Agnes had returned to her brushes and was wiping them dry in heartless silence.

"Wynnie's freezing, I say."

"Say it again," counseled the other's calm voice. "I am so provoked at myself for jumping at every little noise! It is shameful to have so little control over my own nerves even if I am tired. Ah! what was that?"

"Jump again," advised Ethelwynne in a tone that was meant to be serene but proved rather jerky. "It was nothing but my teeth chattering and clicking together."

"Generally it's your tongue," retorted Agnes with interest but broke off in this promising repartee to exclaim with genuine anxiety, "Why, Wynnie, child, you have a regular chill. Lie down quick and let me cover you up.

Have you been out skating ever since I left you on the lake?"

"Yes, I have," she replied with an air of defiance, "you needn't preach.

I couldn't bear to come in. Everybody out. We had square dances, s.h.i.+nney-on-the-ice, wood tag. Perfectly glorious! Such a splendid elegant sunset behind the bare trees! I simply had to stay. Beatrice Leigh and her crowd were there. A big moon came sailing up. We skated to music--somebody whistled it. I couldn't bear to stop. I wanted to stay, I tell you. I wanted to stay."

"Hm-m," said Agnes, "I wanted to stay too. But what with the Latin test to-morrow and this plate for the book on fungi to be sent off in the morning, I managed to tear myself away."

"You're different. Oo-oo-ooh!" Ethelwynne s.h.i.+vered violently again. "You like to deny yourself. You enjoy discipline. It gives you pleasure to do what you hate. You love duty just because it is disagreeable."

"My--land!" Agnes clutched her own head. "The infant must have slipped up a dozen times too often. Did the horrid bad ice smite her at the base of the brain? Poor little darling! Is her intellect all mixedy-muddle-y? We will fix it right for her. We'll give her a pill."

"I think I have caught cold," moaned her roommate from the depths of the blankets.

Agnes looked judicial. "Our doctor at home has a theory that people take cold easily when they have been eating too much sweet stuff. He says that colds are most frequent after Thanksgiving. Now I wonder--I believe--why, you surely did go to a meeting of the fudge-club in Martha's room last night. Ethelwynne, did you eat it? Did you eat it even after all the doctor said to you about your sick headaches?"

"Of course I ate it. How do you expect me to sit hungry in a roomful of girls all digging into that plateful of brown delicious soft hot fudge with their little silver spoons, and I not even tasting it? I hated to make myself conspicuous before the juniors there. They would think I am a hypochondriac, and Berta Abbott might have said something to make the others look at me and laugh. I don't believe the stuff hurts me a particle. Doctors always want you to give up the things you like best."

"Oh, Ethelwynne!" groaned Agnes, "you never deny yourself anything. It is the only trait I don't like in you. Now you have caught a dreadful cold just because you could not refuse the candy. You must break it up with quinine." She fetched a small box from the bureau in her bedroom. "Here, open your mouth."

The other girl opened her mouth obediently. "I love pills. We're homeopaths, you know. Once when I was a baby, I got hold of mother's medicine chest and ate all the pellets. I thought they were candy.

Sweet--oh, delicious! I used to enjoy being sick. And now this nice big chocolate-coated pill!" She sprang up suddenly, her face twisted into an expression of agony. "Oh, oh, oh!"

Agnes white as a sheet flew to her side. "What is it? Quick, quick, Wynnie! Is it your heart? Your head? A darting pain! Where, oh, where?"

"Crackie!" Ethelwynne ruefully rubbed her mouth. "I've been sucking that pill."

After a moment's struggle to retain her sympathetic gravity, Agnes gave way and dropping her head on her hands shook alarmingly for at least half a minute.

"I told you I was a homeopath," expostulated Ethelwynne, "how was I to know that allopaths always swallow their pills whole?"

"Wh-wh-why did you suppose it was coated with chocolate?" gasped Agnes.

"So as to improve the taste of course and tempt me to eat it. I am fond of chocolate. If it is my duty to eat a pill, I want it to be inviting. I don't want to do anything that I don't want to do, specially when I am sick. Well, anyhow, I shall never touch another."

However, by bedtime Ethelwynne was feeling so miserable that finally after long urging she consented to swallow another dose of quinine in the orthodox way. She allowed Agnes to put a hot water bottle at her feet and to tuck in the coverlets cozily; and then she tried to go to sleep. But that was another story. It was a story of fitful jerks and starts, of burning fever alternating with s.h.i.+vering spells, of terrifying dreams and wretched haunted hours of wakefulness. At last the longed-for morning stole in at the windows to find her eyes heavy, her limbs languid, her brain muddled and dull, her head roaring.

It was the quinine that had done it--she knew it was--unspeakably worse than the cold unattended. Worried Agnes acknowledged that the dose might effect some systems violently.

"But it has broken up your cold," she pleaded, "that's certainly gone."

"What?" said Ethelwynne fretfully, "don't mumble so and run your words together. I can't hear the gong very well either. And the Latin test is coming the first hour after breakfast. I haven't had a chance to review an ode. I feel so wretched! Oh, me! oh, me!"

Ethelwynne never forgot that Latin test. The very first line written by the instructor on the blackboard smote her with despair. She had never been able to translate from hearing anyhow. This morning when Miss Sawyer took her seat on the platform and opened her book, Ethelwynne bent forward anxiously, every nerve alert and strained. What was the first word? Oh, what was it? She had not caught it. It sounded blurred and mazy with no ending at all. And the next--and the next! And the third! Now she had lost it. The first was gone. She had forgotten the second. The voice went reading on and on. She floundered after, falling farther and farther behind. There wasn't any sense to it, and she couldn't hear the words plainly, and everything was all mixed up. The other girls seemed to understand. They were writing down the translation as fast as they could scribble--at least some of them were. But she could not make out a particle of meaning. It was Agnes's fault--it was all her fault. She had coaxed her to take the quinine, and now she could not hear plainly or think or remember or anything.

In wrathful discouragement she turned to the rest of the questions. One or two were short and easy. She managed to do the translations already familiar. But when she reached the last part and attempted to write down an ode which she had memorized the week before, she found that many of the words had slipped away from her. The opening line was vivid enough, then came a blank ending in a phrase that kept dancing trickily from spot to spot in her visual imagination of the page. Here she recalled two words, there three, with a vanis.h.i.+ng, vague, intangible verse between.

The meaning had slid away utterly, leaving only these faulty mechanical impressions of the way the poem had looked in print. Struggle as she would, the thought frolicked and pranced just beyond the grasp of her memory.

Ethelwynne bit her lip grimly and put the cap on her fountain-pen. It was not the slightest use. Miss Sawyer had always told them to learn the odes understandingly, not in parrot fas.h.i.+on. It was better to submit a blank than a paper scribbled with detached words and phrases. It was all Agnes's fault--every bit. She had forced her to swallow that pill--the pill that had muddled her brain and dulled her hearing--the pill which was causing her to flunk in Latin. She had known that ode perfectly only the previous day. It wasn't her fault--it was entirely Agnes's. She would go instantly and tell her so.

And she went the moment cla.s.s was over. To be sure, she did not go so fast as she wished, for her head had a queer way of spinning dizzily at every sudden movement. Once or twice her knees faltered disconcertingly in her progress down the corridor. But at last she reached the room and walked in with a backward slam of the door.

Agnes was putting the final touches to the water-color drawing of exquisite fungi before her.

"Sh-h," she murmured, "don't interrupt. Just one more stroke--and another--now this tiny one. There, it is finished. Professor Stratton sends her ma.n.u.script off to-day and she is waiting for this. Think of it!

Thirty dollars for this sheet of paper! Thirty whole big beautiful dollars to send home for Christmas. They need it pretty badly. I've worked hours and hours, and now they shall have a real Christmas! I know what mother wants and couldn't afford----"

Ethelwynne stamped her foot. "It was all your fault. I couldn't hear. I couldn't think. I couldn't remember. The pill did it. You made me take it. You always think you know best. You're always preaching and advising.

You wanted to make me flunk. You knew it would make my ears ring and my head whirl. You did it on purpose. I shall never forgive you, never, never, never!"

"What!"

At the tone Ethelwynne suddenly s.h.i.+vered, threw herself on the couch, and fell to crying weakly. "I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it at all. I only wanted to say something horrid. I wanted you to suffer too. I just wanted to say it, and so I did say it. Oh, oh, oh, I am so miserable! I want to go home."

Agnes paid no attention. In her sudden sharp resentment at the preposterous accusation, she had swung around in her chair, and her elbow had tipped over the inkwell, spilling the contents over the desk. She sat staring in horrified silence at her ruined drawing.

Finally Ethelwynne puzzled by the continued stillness peered with one eye from the sheltering fringes. She sprang up with a jump.