THE SECRET DOOR
The routine of Jerry's new life shaped into pleasant ways. She felt more like Jerry Travis and less like a dream-creature living in a golden world she had brought around her by wishing on a wishing-rock. She could not have found a moment in which to be homesick; twice a week she wrote back to Sweetheart and Little-Dad long scrawly letters that would have disgraced her in the eyes of Miss Gray of the English department, but expressed such utter happiness and contentment that Mrs. Travis, with a little regret, dismissed the fear that Jerry would be lonely away from her and Sunnyside.
After the first week of school the girls and boys settled down to what Graham called "digging." Geometry looked less formidable to Jerry, Cicero was like a beautiful old friend, Gyp was with her in English and history, Ginny Cox was in one of her classes, too, and Jerry liked her better each day. Patricia Everett was teaching her to play tennis until basketball practice began.
There were the pleasant walks to and from school through the city streets, whose teeming life never failed to fascinate Jerry; the jolly recess, breaking the school session, when the girls gathered around the long tables and ate their lunch; and then the afternoon's play on the athletic field at Highacres.
Had old Peter Westley ever pictured, as he sat alone in his great empty house, how Highacres would look after scores of young feet had trampled over its velvety stretches? Perhaps he had liked that picture; perhaps, to him, his halls were echoing even then to the hum of young voices; perhaps he had felt that these young lives that would pass over the threshold of the house he had built out into the world of men and women would belong, in some way, to him who had never had a boy or girl.
One afternoon Gyp and Jerry lingered in the school building to prepare a history lesson from references they had to find in the library. Gyp hated to study; the drowsy stillness of the room was broken by the pleasant shouting from the playground outside. She threw down her pencil and stretched her long arms.
"Oh, goodness, Jerry—let's stop. We can ask mother all these things."
Jerry was quite willing to be tempted. She, too, had found it hard to hold her attention to the Thirty-one Dynasties.
Gyp leaned toward her. "I'll tell you—let's go exploring. There are all the rooms in the back we've never seen."
During the past six months workmen had been rebuilding the rear wing of Highacres into laboratories. The changes had not been completed. Gyp and Jerry climbed over materials and tools and little piles of rubbish, poking inquisitive noses into every corner. Now and then Gyp stopped to ask a workman a few questions. They stumbled around in the basement where in a few weeks there would be a very complete machine-shop and carpentry room. Then they found a stairway that led to the upper floors and scampered up it.
"Oh, Jerry Travis, I wish you could see yourself," laughed Gyp as they paused on the third floor.
"Your face is dirty, too," Jerry retorted.
"Isn't this fun? It doesn't seem a bit like school, does it? I wonder if they're ever going to use these rooms. Let's play hide-and-seek. I'll blind and count twenty and you hide and we mustn't make a sound!" which, you know, is a very hard thing to do when one is playing hide-and-seek.
Gyp's charm—and there was much charm in this lanky girl—lay in her irrepressible spirits. Gyp was certain—and every boy and girl of her acquaintance knew it—to find an opportunity for "fun" in the most unpromising circumstances. No one but Gyp could have known what fun it would be to play hide-and-seek in the halls and rooms of the third floor of Highacres—especially when one had to step very softly and bite one's lips to keep back any sound!
It was Jerry's turn to blind. She leaned her arm against the narrow frame of a panel painting of George Washington that was set in the wall at a turn in the corridor. As she rested her face against her arm she felt the picture move ever so slightly under her pressure. Startled, she stepped back. Slowly, as though pushed by an invisible hand, the panel swung out into the corridor.
"Gyp——" cried Jerry so sharply that Gyp appeared from her hiding-place in a twinkling. "Look—what I did!" Jerry felt as though the entire building might slowly and sedately collapse around her.
"For goodness' sake," cried Gyp, staring. She swung the panel out. "It's a door! Jerry Travis, it's a secret door!" She put her head through the narrow opening. "Jerry——" she reached back an eager hand. "Look—it's a stairway—a secret stairway!"
Jerry put her head in. Enough light filtered through a crack above so that the girls could make out the narrow winding steps. They were very steep and only broad enough for one person to squeeze through.
"Come on, Jerry, let's——"
"Gyp, you don't know where it'll take you——" Jerry suddenly remembered their poor princess in her dungeon.
"Silly—nothing could hurt us! Come on. Close the panel—there, like that. I'll go first." She led the way, Jerry tiptoeing gingerly behind her.
The door at the top gave under Gyp's push and to their amazement the girls found themselves in the tower room.
It was a square room with a sloping ceiling and narrow windows; there was nothing in the least unusual about it. Gyp and Jerry looked about them, vaguely disappointed. It might have been, with its litter of old furniture, chests of books, piles of magazines and papers, an attic room in any house. The October sunshine filtered in thin bars through the dust-stained windows, cobwebs festooned themselves fantastically overhead. The opening that led to the secret stairway appeared, on the inside of the room, to be a built-in bookcase on the shelves of which were now piled an assortment of hideous bric-a-brac which Mrs. Robert Westley had refused to take into her own home.
"Well, it's fun, anyway, just having the secret stairway," decided Gyp, scowling at what she mentally called the "junk" about her. "Why do you suppose Uncle Peter had it built in?"
Jerry could offer no explanation.
"Hadn't we ought to tell someone?"
Gyp scorned the thought—part with their precious secret—let everybody know that that imposing portrait of George Washington hid a secret door? Why, even mother and Uncle Johnny couldn't know it—it was their very own secret!
"I should say not. At least——" she added, "not for awhile. I guess I'm a Westley and I have a right to come up here." Which argument sounded very convincing to Jerry.
"Oh, I have the grandest idea," Gyp dragged Jerry to the faded window-seat and plumped down upon it so hard that it sent a little cloud of dust about them. "Let's get up a secret society—like the horrid old Sphinxes."
Fraternities and sororities were not allowed in Lincoln School, but from time to time there had sprung up secret bands of boys and girls, that held together by irrevealable ties for a little while, then passed into school history. One of these was the Sphinxes. They were annoyingly mysterious and dark rumors were current that their antics, if known, would not meet, in the least, the approval of the Lincoln faculty. Isobel was a Sphinx, most faithful to her vows, so that all the teasing and bribing that Graham's and Gyp's fertile brains could contrive, failed to drag one tiny truth from her.
Of course Jerry had been at Lincoln long enough to know all about the Sphinxes. And she knew, too, that Gyp meant to suggest a society that would be like the Sphinxes only in that it was secret. She could not be one of that Third Form study-room without sharing the general scorn of the Sophomores for the Senior Sphinxes.
"We can meet up here, you see—once a week. And let's have it a secret society that'll stand ready to serve Lincoln with their very lives—like those secret bands of men in the South—after the Civil War."
Jerry declared, of course, that Gyp's suggestion was "wonderful."
"We'll have a real initiation when we'll all swear our allegiance to Lincoln School forever and ever and we'll have spreads and it'll be such fun making every one wonder where we meet. And we'll have terribly funny signs."
"What'll we call it?" asked Jerry, ashamed that she could offer nothing to the plan.
"Let's call it the Ravens and Serpents—that sounds so awful and we won't be at all. And a crawly snake is such a dreadful symbol and it's easy to draw." Gyp's brain worked at lightning pace in its initiative.
"What girls shall we ask?"
Gyp rattled off a number of names. They were all girls who were in the Third Form study-room.
"Can't we ask Ginny Cox?"
Gyp considered. "No," she answered decidedly. "She'd be fun but she's too chummy with Mary Starr and Mary Starr's a Sphinx. We can't ask her."
Gyp was right, of course, Jerry thought, but she wished Ginny Cox might be invited to join.
"Let's go down now. Oh, won't it be fun? Swear, Jerauld Travis, that burning irons won't drag our secret from you!"
"Nothing will make me tell," promised Jerry. They stole down the stairway, moved George Washington carefully back into place, tiptoed to the main floor and out into the sunshine.
Thus did the secret order of the "Ravens and Serpents" have its birth. Gyp assembled various symbols, impressive in their terribleness, that, during the study hours of the next day, conveyed, with the help of whispered explanations and a violent exchange of notes, invitations to six other girls to join the new order. And after the close of school eight pupils elected to remain indoors, ostensibly to study; eight heads bent diligently over the long oak table in the library until a safe passage into the deserted halls above was assured. Then Gyp and Jerry led the new Ravens to the secret door where, in a sepulchral whisper, Gyp extracted a solemn promise from each that she would not divulge the secret of the hidden stairway. One by one, quite breathless with excitement, they climbed to the tower room where Gyp with ridiculous solemnity called "to order" the first assembly of the Ravens and Serpents of Lincoln School.
