ENTER ROBBIE BELLE
Now it happened one evening in the early fall, while Bea and Lila were learning to live together, that the Students’ Association held a meeting to appoint corridor wardens for the year.
In the throng that came pouring out of chapel afterward, Bea, who had an eel-like rapidity in gliding through crowds, found herself at the doors some yards in advance of Lila. Halting to wait in the vestibule, she overheard a junior instructing a new freshman officer in her duties.
“It is very simple. Oh, no, Miss Sanders, no, indeed! There is nothing meddlesome about it. You’re not expected to spy upon the girls in your neighborhood. The aim is merely to preserve a certain degree of quiet. Girls are often thoughtless about being noisy in the corridors. Simply remind them now and then in flagrant cases that they are disturbing those who wish to study. Of course you must be tactful, though it is rarely that a student wilfully disregards the rights of others.”
Bea peered around the edge of her particular door in order to catch a glimpse of this freshman so distinguished. It was the tall, fair-faced child with the splendid long braid, who lived at the end of Berta’s transverse. Now the sweet mouth was drooping disconsolately, and the big eyes looked dewy with anxious tears.
“I—I don’t think I’d like to,” she said.
“Oh, but it is something that must be done, and you have been selected as the one in that vicinity who strikes us as best fitted for the duties of the position. It is really, you know, a case of public service. Every one at some time or other ought to be willing to make sacrifices of personal desires for the good of the community, don’t you think? But forgive me for preaching. I didn’t mean to. By the way, how do you like college, Miss Sanders?”
“It isn’t so much fun as I had expected,” said she. Bea’s head popped around the door again. The junior was smiling with an air of amused superiority.
“Ah, yes, I understand. Probably you used to have a sister or cousin at college, and from her letters you supposed that the life was composed chiefly of dancing, fudges and basket-ball with a little work sandwiched in between. Is it not so? And now——”
“I don’t mind the work,” here Bea’s head popped out a third time to contemplate this interesting classmate, “but——”
“Beatrice,” called Lila at her other ear, “Berta says to hurry or we’ll miss the best of the fun. It’s to be a sheet-and-pillow-case party to-morrow, and a lot of the girls are coming in to learn how to do the draping. Berta has an idea. Come along quick!”
Robbie Belle Sanders stared after them wistfully. “Those girls live near me,” she said, “they have fun all the time.”
The junior’s keen glance spied in the open countenance something that kept her lingering a moment longer. “This is a democratic place,” she said in a more sympathetic tone, “every girl finds her own level sooner or later. The basis is not money or social rank of the families at home. It is not brains or clothes or stuff like that. It is simply that the same kind of girls drift together. They’re congenial. It seems to be a law. A general law, you understand. Of course,” she hesitated for an instant before being spurred on by her sense of scrupulous honesty, “there are exceptions. Once in a while a girl fails to find her special niche. Maybe she rooms off the campus and is not thrown in contact with her own kind. She may be abnormally shy—that hinders her from making friends. Or perhaps she does something that queers herself first thing.”
“Queers herself?” echoed Robbie Belle, “how does a person queer herself?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She paused to reflect. “She does outlandish things. And still it isn’t what she does so much as what she is. Her acts express her character. If her character is queer, she behaves queerly, and the others fight shy of her. After all, I dare say she does find her own level, and there is nobody else there. So she goes along solitary through the four years.”
Robbie Belle looked frightened. “I wish I knew what things are queer,” she said.
“Oh, being different from the other girls, for instance, awfully different, so different that everybody notices it. Not just original, you know, but actually queer. Watch the girls, particularly those who always go around alone, and you’ll learn. Good-night, Miss Sanders. I must congratulate you again on the honor of being appointed freshman warden. Good-night.”
Robbie Belle walked slowly down the corridor to her room. “I wonder if I am queer,” she thought. “I am almost always alone.” She halted before a door that displayed a small square of white paper pinned in the middle of its upper half. Robbie Belle, her hand on the knob, regarded the sign hopelessly. “If you have a roommate who never takes down her Engaged, and she doesn’t like company and she won’t go anywhere with you herself, maybe you can’t help being queer.”
Robbie Belle entered softly. It was a large room and seemed quite bare because of the absence of curtains, rugs, and cushions. The unsociable roommate was sitting beside the centre table, her elbows propped on its shiny surface that was innocent of any cover and ignorant of the duster. A green shade over her eyes connected a blur of nondescript hair with a rather long nose beneath which a pair of pale lips in the glow of the drop-light was rapidly gabbling over some lines in Greek scansion.
Without looking up, she waved one hand forbiddingly; and Robbie Belle obediently shut her mouth over the few words that were ready to be uttered in greeting. She stood waiting in her tracks, so to speak, until the final hexameter had wailed out its drawling length, and Miss Cutter pushed back the green shade.
“Well,” she demanded, “what was the important business before the meeting? I could not spare valuable time for self-government foolishness to-night.”
“They appointed corridor wardens,” answered Robbie Belle.
“Oh, indeed! It is certainly time, I must say. In theory it is all very well to make the rules a matter of honor, but when you happen to live in a nest of girls who behave as if they were six years old, I insist that something more forcible than chapel admonitions is required. Who is the warden for this neighborhood?”
“I am,” said Robbie Belle.
“You are!” Miss Cutter pushed the green shade farther up on her high forehead. “Well, I must say!” She surveyed her roommate with new interest. “How exceedingly extraordinary!”
Robbie shifted her weight to the other foot. “I didn’t want to be,” she said.
“No, of course not, and you nothing but a child yourself. It must be your height and that grave way you have of staring. With that baby-face, couldn’t they see that your dignity is all on the outside?”
Robbie said nothing, but if Miss Cutter had not been quite so near-sighted she might have spied deep in the violet eyes a glint of black remotely resembling anger.
“Think of appealing to a sixteen-year-old infant—really you are literally in-fans, which is to say, one without the power of speech! Fancy me applying to you to compel quiet in the halls! Imagine that boisterous crowd trailing after Miss Abbott and Miss Leigh et al.—Hist!” She lifted her head like a warhorse sniffing battle near. “There they are now.”
Robbie Belle lifted her head too and listened, although indeed the noise would have penetrated to the most inattentive ears. A multitude of feet were marching lock-step past the door to a chorus of giggling, stifled squeals and groans, while at intervals a voice choking with emotion rose in shrill accents: “There was an old woman all skin and bones, o-o-oh!” When it faltered and collapsed on the o-o-oh, the other voices joined in and dragged out the syllable to lugubrious and harrowing length. Then some one giggled hysterically and another squealed. The soloist took up the verse: “She went to the church to pray, o-o-oh!” The chorus wailed and moaned and croaked and whimpered and groaned in concert. Miss Cutter regarded Robbie Belle sternly.
Robbie Belle’s shoulders rose and fell over a deep breath. She stepped across to the door and closed the transom softly just as the next weird line hissed out above the tumult and then sank into its smothering welter and moan of vowels. Robbie spoke more loudly.
“One of them said that they were going to dress up in sheets and pillow-cases to-night. They are practicing for the Hallowe’en party. It’s only fun.”
Berta’s voice—it was Berta who did the solo—here rose in a quavering shriek that halted not for keys in their holes or transoms in their sockets: “The worms crawled in and the worms crawled out, o-o-o-oh!”
Miss Cutter rose to her indignant feet. “Roberta Sanders, as you are the corridor warden for this neighborhood, I appeal to you. I make formal complaint——”
“They’ve gone.” Robbie Belle smiled in relief and sat down rather quickly. The lock-step had receded into the muffled distance and the ear-splitting wail wafted back in tones that grew steadily fainter.
Miss Cutter took off her glasses, rubbed them bright, put them on again, and contemplated Robbie Belle.
“I do believe that you would rather I suffered than that they became offended with you. You are afraid to rebuke them.”
Robbie’s eyes fell and the guilty color rose slowly through the delicate skin of throat and brow. But Miss Cutter did not see it. She had pulled down the green shade and propping her elbows in their former position had returned to her scansion. She had wasted too much time already.
Conscience-smitten Robbie Belle slid silently through the door and stood at loss for a minute in the deserted corridor. It was Friday night. Nobody studied on Friday night except girls who were queer or who roomed with superior special students like Miss Cutter. On her first day at college Miss Cutter had remarked that there might be a vacant seat of congenial minds for Robbie at her table. Somehow the grave young freshman who was hoping for fun failed to find them satisfying. She had not won a real friend yet, and here it was the end of October.
Robbie Belle was not conceited enough to feel sorry for herself, or else she might have perceived a certain pathos in that listless journey of a lonely child from her worse than solitary room to the deadly quiet of the library. One of the hilarious ghosts who were weaving spells under the evergreens happened to glance in through a great softly shining window and recognized the drooping head above a long deserted table between the shelves of books.
“There’s our noble warden,” whispered Bea, “studying on Friday night! Looks like a dig as well as a prig, n’est-ce-pas?”
Berta’s eager dark face grew sober under the swathing folds of her pillow-case. “Maybe it isn’t her fault,” she said.
But Robbie Belle unaware of this precious drop of sympathy plodded through an essay on Intellect, wrote out a laborious analysis, and at the stroke of the nine-thirty gong crept reluctantly back to her room. The next morning she translated her Latin, committed a geometrical demonstration to a faithful memory, consumed a silent luncheon amid a dizzying cross-fire of psychological arguments, walked around the garden, through the pines and over the orchard hill for a scrupulously full hour of exercise, read her physiology notes, and composed one page of her weekly theme before dinner time. After dinner she stood in a corner of Parlor J and watched the dancing. Then she went to chapel with Miss Cutter, returned alone in haste to dress in the concealing sheet and pillow case. It was rather difficult to manage the drapery without aid, especially in the back and at the sides. The strange junior who had chosen Robbie’s name from the class list and undertaken to escort her to the party found awaiting her a rumpled young ghost with raiment that sagged and bagged quite distressingly in unexpected places. But the eyes that shone from between the crooked bands of white were joyous with excitement. In this disguise she was sure that no one would recognize her; and so of course they would not know that she was queer, and perhaps she would have fun at last.
And at first it really seemed as if she would. Imagine a big gymnasium with jack-o’-lanterns on the rafters and a blazing wood-fire in the wide fireplace, and five hundred figures in white circling and mingling among the shadows, and at least a thousand sticks of candy, and three big dish-pans full of peanuts, and gallons and gallons of red lemonade. When her escort proposed that they should go up-stairs to look in upon the seniors and sophomores who were having a country dance, Robbie Belle moistened her lips and said, “If you please, don’t wait for me. I enjoy it so much here.” Then at the junior’s formal, “Oh, certainly, Miss Sanders!” she remembered that often people did not understand her unless she used a bothersome number of words. So she added hastily, “I mean that you must go with your own friends and leave me here, because I am watching some girls I know, and I want to speak to them. Please don’t trouble any more about me, thank you.”
“I do know them,” she assured herself as her escort disappeared, “and I do want to speak to them even if they don’t know me. I think”—she hesitated and turned quite pale at the prospect of such daring, “I think I shall go and play with them. They will suppose I am one of them. Nobody will know.”
At this point the file of impudent ghosts, headed by Berta, who looked unusually tall and still angular under her flowing sheet, paraded past Robbie Belle’s corner, their elbows flapping like wings. With a gasp for courage she took one step forward and found herself prancing along at the end of the line.
It was such fun! Robbie Belle had shot up to an annoying stature so comparatively early in life that her romping days seemed to have broken short off in the middle. She had never had enough of tag and hide-and-seek and coasting. She hated long skirts. Indeed that was one reason why she longed to join the enviable circle of freshmen around Berta: they wore golf skirts all day long, except when hockey called for the gymnasium costume or bicycling demanded its appropriate array. The reason why she liked Miss Abbott best of course was because her name was Roberta, too.
On this Hallowe’en, in joyous faith in her disguise, she forgot her height and breadth and the dignity imposed thereby. And anyhow Berta Abbott was just as tall, if not of such stately proportions. So Robbie Belle with exulting zest in the frolic raced up-stairs and down with the mischievous band of freshmen. They skipped saucily around members of the faculty, chased appreciative juniors, frightened the smallest forms into scuttling flight, and gave their great performance of “There was an old woman all skin and bones,” in the middle of the upper hall, where the seniors were entertaining the sophomores.
It was fun to howl. It was so long since Robbie Belle had grown up that she had almost forgotten the joy of using her lungs to their full capacity. With her spirits dancing in the afterglow of such vocal exercise, she marched after the others down to the hall below. There in the vestibule Berta halted her followers for final instructions.
“Now, girls, fall into line according to height. We are going to astonish——Why!” She fixed two amazed dark eyes upon the tallest, “who are you?”
Robbie Belle heard; she felt her heart shriveling within her; her shoulders seemed to shrink together; her head drooped. Then turning away slowly she moved toward the gymnasium apartment, a loose corner of her robe trailing at her abashed heels. But she did not escape swiftly enough to avoid catching the sound of hisses.
“Ha! an interloper!”
“Hist! ye false intruder!”
“Seize him! To the shambles!”
“To the guillotine! Ho, brothers! pursue!”
That made Robbie Belle flee so fast that she was able to take refuge behind Prexie himself while the vengeful furies withdrew to a respectful distance. That night when she was shaking her pillow back into its case Robbie noticed some damp spots amid its creases. A few minutes later she laid her head down on it and proceeded to create some more. There was only one comfort in the throng of scorching reflections: this was that it had not been Berta’s voice that had called her an intruder. Perhaps Berta did not think she had done something so awfully wicked after all.
This faint hope infused more dreadful bitterness into the incident that happened in mathematics C on Monday. Anybody would have believed that Berta was offended past forgiveness. She sat next to Robbie. She was not very well prepared that morning, possibly in consequence of Saturday’s excitement. The instructor was more than usually curt and crisp with an unsmiling sternness that struck terror to palpitating freshman hearts. In the middle of the hour Berta became aware that a problem was traveling rapidly down the row toward her; and she had not been paying attention. She had not even noticed the statement of it, for it had started at an apparently safe distance from her seat. Turning with a swift motion of the lips she asked Robbie Belle to tell her. And Robbie Belle—how she longed to tell it! It had almost leaped from her lips while conscience reasoned wildly against it as deceit. It would not be honest. And yet—and yet—the girls would think she was queer. They would say she was mean and priggish, for she might have told Berta as easily as not.
There! the third girl from Berta was trying to explain her own ignorance and failing brilliantly. Now the second was stammering through a transparent bluff. Berta had settled back, coolly resigned to fate. How she must suffer, after having stooped to ask for aid! Poor Robbie Belle! Poor, lonely, disappointed Robbie Belle! For strange to say she flunked too and the question journeyed on triumphantly to the mathematical prodigy at the end of the row.
In the corridor outside Berta exerted her nimble self to overtake Miss Sanders, who was sidling away in a strikingly unprincesslike manner, her eyes shifting guiltily.
“So you didn’t know the answer either? Wasn’t that the biggest joke on me! And really, Miss Sanders, I beg your pardon for asking. It popped out before I could gather my wits. I am scared to death in that class, though of course that is no excuse for sponging. I’m glad you didn’t know it enough to tell me after all.”
Robbie Belle lifted the lashes from her flushed cheeks. “I—I did know it,” she said with a gulp.
“Oh!” said Berta, and stared, “how—how peculiar!”
Robbie Belle held back the tears till she had reached her room, seized her hat and snatched her thickest veil. Then she fled to the loneliest walk among the pines. Her veil was a rarity that rendered her an object of curiosity to everybody she passed on the way. But she hurried on, somewhat comforted by the conviction that no one could mark her reddened eyelids. In truth she had good need of comfort, for Berta Abbott herself had said that she was peculiar. And peculiar meant queer!
That evening Robbie sat down to study for the Latin test announced for the next day. Miss Cutter was studying, too, harder than ever. The green shade was pulled so fiercely forward that a fringe of hair stood up in a crown where the elastic had rumpled it. Her grammar, lexicon and text-book occupied most of the table, but Robbie did not complain. She could manage very well by laying her books, one on the open face of another, in her lap. For once she was grateful that an Engaged sign shielded them from interruptions, for Latin was her shakiest subject, especially the rules of indirect discourse. The instructor had warned the class that this weak spot was to be the point of attack. If Robbie Belle should not succeed in drumming the rules into her head before the ideas in it began to spin around and around in their usual dizzy fashion when she waxed sleepy, she might just as well stay away from the recitation room. Or better perhaps, for in absence there was a possibility of both doubt and hope: hope on Robbie Belle’s part that she might have been able to answer the questions if she had been there, on the teacher’s part doubt concerning the exact extent of the pupil’s knowledge.
At the end of the corridor just outside their door a narrow stairway led to the north tower rooms on the floor above. Beatrice Leigh and Lila Allan and a number of their liveliest friends lived up there on the fifth, with Berta Abbott at the foot of the stairs near Robbie’s place of abode.
Just as Robbie’s usually serene brow was puckering its hardest over the sequence of tenses, a door banged open in the tower and the stairs creaked under swift clatter of feet—a dozen at the very least.
Miss Cutter scowled beneath the green shade; Robbie Belle could tell that from the way the fringe of upright hair vibrated.
“Savages!” she muttered, “they’ll tear the building to pieces. No wonder the newspapers report that the college girl’s favorite mode of locomotion is sliding down the banisters.”
“No,” said Robbie Belle, “not that. They take hold of the railing and jump several steps at a time. I’ve seen them. Miss Leigh says she does it for exercise.”
“And this also is exercise!” Miss Cutter clutched her ears as a tornado swept past their threshold.
Robbie bent to listen anxiously. “They’re going to the ice-cooler,” she said, “pretty soon they will go back again.”
“Yes,” said Miss Cutter as she rose and moved toward the door, “they will doubtless go back, and doubtless also they shall go in a different manner.”
Then she went out and remonstrated briefly but to the point. Whereupon the culprits apologized with noble profusion and tiptoed their way to the stairs. This would have been an admirable proof of repentance if their heels had not persisted in coming down on the bare boards in very loud clicks at very short intervals. And every click was greeted by a reproving chorus of “Sh-sh-sh!”
The instant they reached the hall above, pandemonium broke loose. To judge from the sounds, they were playing blindman’s buff with scampering of heavy shoes, scraping of chairs, banging against walls, flopping on mattresses. Even reluctant Robbie Belle looked upward in fear that the ceiling might fall. When a deputation of wild eyed sophomores from an adjacent study arrived to protest against a continuation of the outrage, the shrinking corridor-warden had no loophole for escape from her duty. Outwardly calm, inwardly quivering, she mounted the stairs to expostulate on behalf of the Students’ Association for Self-Government.
When the peace officer reached the foot of the flight, the noise sank abruptly into a silent scurrying—on unadulterated tiptoes this time. When she appeared at the top, she beheld the tower hall deserted, every door shut and a suspiciously profound stillness reigning in the dimly lighted Paradise of fun. Ah! she drew a breath of relief from away down in her boots. Surely now she had performed her duty. Nobody could expect her to find fault after the disturbance had ceased. Now the girls below would be at liberty to study in peace.
Barely had she completed her hurried descent before the strange silence above was shattered suddenly by the simultaneous banging of seven doors. Seven full-lunged voices burst forth into a howling song, while twice as many feet thumped and tapped and pranced and pounded in the mazes of an extemporaneous jig.
Robbie Belle halted instantly, with a quick lift of her head. Her nostrils quivered. Her violet eyes snapped black. Her hands clenched. Turning swiftly she mounted the stairs once more. But this time she was angry. The uproar was an insult to the authority of the Students’ Association. She forgot for the minute all about shy Robbie Belle.
And the mischievous freshmen above—the flippant fun-loving irresponsible six-year-old freshmen—they waited ready to meet the warden with an impudent burst of revelry, and thus to dash her official dignity from its exasperating estate. When they saw Robbie Belle’s face they simply stared. They listened in silence to the few rapid words that stung and burned and smarted. They watched her depart, her head still held at its angle of wrathful justice. Then they looked at one another.
They could not see how, when once safely in the haven of her room, she broke down utterly and lay trembling and sobbing in Miss Cutter’s astonished arms. Now at last she had surely committed an unpardonable offense against the only girls for whom she cared in the whole collegeful—especially Berta. Now Berta would be certain she was queer.
Meanwhile in the tower, Berta drew a long breath and glanced around at her dismayed and sobered companions.
“The more I see of that girl,” she said, “the better I like her. And we have been awfully silly—that’s a fact. The next time I see her I shall tell her so too. Now suppose we go and do a little studying our own selves.”
Somehow or other before Thanksgiving Day, Robbie Belle Sanders had ceased to be disappointed in college. With Berta for a dearest friend and Miss Cutter withdrawn to a more congenial neighborhood, she was finding it even more fun than she had expected.