THE GIFTIE GIE US
It had been raining for a week. Berta was writing a poem, her elbows on the desk, her hair clutched in one hand, her pen in the other. At the window Robbie Belle was working happily over her curve-tracing, now and then drawing back to gaze with admiration at the sweeping lines of her problem. Once the slanting beat of the drops against the pane caught her eye, and she paused for a moment to consider their angle of incidence. She decided that she liked curves better than angles. She did not wonder why, as Berta would have done, but having recognized the fact of preference turned placidly back to her instruments.
Splash! came a fiercer gust of rain, and Berta stirred uneasily, tossing her head as if striving subconsciously to shake off a vague irritation of hearing. Another heavier sound was mingling with the steady patter. Rub-a-dub-dub, rub-a-dub-dub! Robbie Belle glanced up and listened, her pencil uplifted.
“It’s Bea,” she said, “she’s drumming with her knuckles on the floor in the corridor. She says that it is against her principles to knock on the door when it has an engaged sign on it. Shall I say come?”
Apparently Berta did not hear the question. With her chin grasped firmly in one fist, she was staring very hard at a corner of the ceiling where there was nothing in particular. Robbie looked at her and sighed, but the resignation in the sigh was transfigured by loving awe. She picked up her pencil in patient acquiescence. Berta must not be disturbed.
“Chir-awhirr, chir-awhirr, tweet, tweet, tweet!” It was Bea’s best soprano, with several extra trills strewn between the consonants. “Listen to the mocking-bird. Oh, the mocking-bird is singing on the bough. Bravo, encore! Chir-awhirr! Encore!
Robbie Belle was leaning back in her chair to listen in serene enjoyment. She loved to hear Bea sing. Berta was listening, too, but with an absent expression, as if still in a dream.
The voice outside the door declared itself again. “Ahem, written by Bliss Carmen. Sung by Beatrice Leigh. Ahem!” It was a noticeably emphatic ahem, and certainly deserved a more appreciative reply than continued silence from within. After a minute’s inviting pause, the singer piped up afresh.
| “‘Make me over in the morning From the rag-bag of the world. Scraps of deeds and duds of daring, Home-brought stuff from far-sea faring, Faded colors once so flaring, Shreds of banners long since furled, Hues of ash and hints of glory From the rag-bag of the world.’ Ahem!” |
The concluding cough was so successfully convulsive that Robbie Belle’s mouth opened suddenly.
“It must be something important,” she said.
Berta woke up from her trance. “Come!” she called.
At the first breath of the syllable, the door flew open with a specially prepared bang, and Bea shot in with an instantaneous and voluntary velocity that carried her to the centre of the rug.
“Oh, girls!” she exclaimed in the excited tone of a breathless and delighted messenger bringing great and astonishing news, “it’s raining!”
In the ensuing stillness, she could almost hear the disgusted thud of expectation dashed to earth.
“Villain!” said Berta, and swung around to her interrupted poem.
Robbie’s puzzled stare developed slowly into a smile. “I think that is a joke,” she said.
Then Bea laughed. She collapsed on the sofa and shook from her boots to her curls. It was contagious laughter that made Robbie chuckle in sympathy and Berta grin broadly at a discreet pigeon-hole of her desk. When the visitor resumed sufficient self-possession to enable her to enunciate, she sat up and inquired anxiously,
“Did you hear me sing?”
Berta regarded her solemnly. “We did,” she answered.
“Yes,” said Robbie Belle.
“Well, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to change. I’m going to be made over, Mother April. I’m going to turn into a genius for a while. I’ve always wanted to be a genius. It’s no fun to be systematic and steady and conscientious, and so forth, is it, Robbie Belle? At least it isn’t very much fun, considering what might be done with our opportunities. So I intend to behave as if I had an artistic temperament. I am going to let my work pile up, cut late, skip meals, break engagements, never answer letters, give in to moods, be generally irresponsible, and so forth, just like Berta. I’m going to——”
“What!”
Bea laughed again mischievously at the sound of outraged dignity in Berta’s voice. “Yes, I am. I have the spring fever: I don’t want to do anything, and I don’t want to do nothing either. In fact, this is the single solitary thing I do want to do. That’s the reason why it will be so agreeable to be a genius. At least, it will be agreeable to me, if not to my contemporaries and companions. I shall do exactly as I please at the moment. Another reason will be the thrill of novelty—I’m simply dying for excitement.”
“Thrill of novelty!” groaned Berta. “I infer that you never do as you please. You continually ‘sackerifice’ yourself——”
“Yes, yes, of course, but I was afraid you hadn’t noticed.” Bea raised her fingers to smooth the corners of her mouth straight. “Now, you’ve been growing worse—I mean, more and more of a genius ever since entering college. I myself ought to be called Prexie’s Assistant, somewhat after the order of Miss Edgeworth’s ‘Parent’s Assistant,’ you know, because my career has been such an awful warning to the undergraduate. But you’re an example——”
“I am not a genius,” Berta spoke with biting severity of accent; “Lucine Brett is a genius, and I despise her.”
“You used to despise her,” put in Robbie Belle gently.
Berta caught her lip between her teeth for a fleeting instant of irritation, for she was not naturally meek. Then she glanced at Robbie with a quick smile all the sweeter for the under-throb of repentance over her impatient impulse. “All right, I used to long ago. But to return to our guest. I am not a genius, I hasten to remark again. Furthermore I shall be excessively obliged if Miss Leigh will march out of this apartment and stay where she belongs.”
In the pause which was occupied by Bea in considering a choice of retorts stupendous, Robbie spoke again.
“I think Bea misses Lila while she is in the infirmary,” she said.
Bea swung magnificently on her heel. “I have decided that the proper rejoinder is a crushing silence. I wish you good afternoon.” At the door she halted. “And I shall be a genius for a spell. You just watch me and see. Shelley was lawless, you know, and Burns and Carlyle, I guess, and Goethe and George Eliot——”
“OH, THANK YOU; I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO EAT”
“What!”
This was a shout of such indignation that Bea vanished instanter. A moment later she poked her head around the lintel.
“Well, they were,” she said, “and so are you. It is a marvel to me how you hoodwink Prexie about your work. Pure luck! Vale!”
Berta’s repartee consisted of a sofa pillow aimed accurately at the diminishing crack.
The next day was Saturday. Bea failed to appear at breakfast—a catastrophe which had not occurred before in the memory of the oldest junior. Berta who usually arrived herself half an hour late headed a procession of inquiring friends, three of whom bore glasses of milk and plates of rolls to supply the dire omission. A succession of crescendo taps at her door was at length rewarded by a drowsy-eyed apparition in bath-robe and worsted slippers.
“Oh, thank——” she exclaimed at sight of the sympathetic group, and suddenly remembered that she must be different from her ordinary self. “I don’t want anything to eat. I didn’t feel exactly like getting up early. I seem to prefer to be alone this morning.” And she managed, though with a hand that faltered at the misdeed, to shut the door in their astonished faces.
“Well, I never!” “What has happened?” “Was it a telegram?” “How perfectly atrocious!” “Is she sick?” “Beatrice Leigh to treat us with such unutterable rudeness!”
Berta listened with a queer little smile on her sensitively cut lips. Once she noticed a hasty twist of the knob as if Bea had snatched at it from the other side under the prick of the comments floating over the transom. As she walked slowly away the smile faded before a shadowing recollection. She was wondering if her own manner had truly been so unpardonable on that autumn morning when Robbie had carried her a baked apple with cream on it and plum bread besides. It had certainly been irritating to be interrupted in the middle of that rondel for the sake of which she had skipped Sunday breakfast. She had not forgotten how amazed and disappointed Robbie had looked with the saucer in one hand, the plate in the other, while the door swung impatiently back to its place. But then, the poem was sufficient excuse for that discourtesy, Berta assured herself in anxiety to justify her behavior. If she had waited to be polite, the thought and the rhymes would doubtless have scattered beyond recall. Nobody could condemn her for slamming the door and hurrying again to her desk. She had saved the rondel, and it had been printed in the Monthly. That was worth some sacrifice, even of manners to dear old Robbie. She always understood and forgave such small transgressions of the laws of friendship. Only it certainly looked different when somebody else did it.
An hour or so later while Berta was bending devotedly over her notes in the history alcove of the library, she was vaguely aware of a newcomer sauntering carelessly behind her chair. A heavy book clattered to the floor, and somebody’s elbow in stooping to pick it up nudged her arm. Her pen went scratching in a mad zigzag across the neat page and deposited a big tear of red ink where it suddenly stopped.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” exclaimed Bea repentantly, for she was indeed the culprit; “it’s horrid to be heedless on purpose. I didn’t know it would really do any harm.”
Berta glanced up quickly from her blotter. So Bea considered a reckless disregard for books and persons also a quality of genius. Berta felt a slow blush creeping up to her brow at the candid memory of her tendency to bump into things and brush against people when in a dreamy mood—and to pass on without even a beg pardon.
“You’re evidently new to the business, my cautious and calculating young friend,” she whispered, “you should have ignored the resultant calamity. Ah—why, child!” she stared in surprise, “your collar is pinned crooked and your turnover is flying loose at one end, and your hair is coming down. You look scandalous.”
Bea looked triumphant also. “It’s an artistic disarray,” she explained. “It’s hard work because I’ve slipped into the habit of being prim and precise, and I had to bend a pin intentionally. Four girls already have warned me about my hair falling down. It worries me a lot and yet it doesn’t give the same effect as yours. Does yours feel loose and straggly?”
Berta’s hand flew to her head. “You sinner! Mine is just as usual.”
“Yes, I know it,” assented Bea innocently, “it’s a negligee style. I’m being a geni——”
“Go away!” Berta snatched up her bottle of red ink. “Fly, villain, depart, withdraw, retreat, abscond, decamp,—in short, go away!”
Bea went, holding her neck stiffly on one side to balance the sensation of unsteadiness above her ears. Berta watched her with a wavering expression that veered from wrathful amusement to uneasy reflectiveness. Was it really true that she dressed so untidily as this little scamp made out? Perhaps she did slight details once in a while, but though not scrupulously dainty like Lila, still she tried to be neat enough on the whole. Could it be possible that the other girls criticised her so severely as this?
The suspicion bothered her so effectually that she left the library five minutes early and hurried to her room for a few renovating touches before luncheon. Her hair caused her such extraordinary pains that she was late in reaching the table. She found that Bea had usurped her place at the head, but forgot to object in the confusion of being greeted with: “Heigho, Berta, what’s happened?” “You’re spick and span enough for a party.” “Are you going to town this afternoon?”
“Young ladies!” Berta ignored the warm color that she felt rising slowly under her dark skin, “I am astonished at your manners. Don’t you know that you should never refer to an individual’s personal appearance? I read that in a book on etiquette. You may allude to my money, to my brains, to the beauty of my soul, but you must not remark upon my looks. I don’t understand the principle of the thing, unless it is that compliments on the other three articles fail to injure the character, whereas flattery with regard to my pulchritude——”
Bea’s hand shot into the air and waved frantically.
“Please, teacher, what is that funny word?”
“Go to the Latin lexicon, thou ignoramus.”
“I can’t,” said Bea, “you borrowed mine and never brought it back. It’s being a——”
“But aren’t you going anywhere?” asked Robbie Belle who had been filling Berta’s plate and pouring her milk during the discourse.
Bea sent a bewitching smile straight into Berta’s eyes. “I’m ’most sure she is going to give me a swimming lesson at half past four. Then if it is still raining this evening, we can all swim over to the chapel for the concert. Please, Berta.”
“All right,” acquiesced Berta carelessly. “I will do it because I am so noble and you are a literary person, though how in this world of incomprehensibilities you managed to get elected to that editorial board passes my powers of apperception. Robbie, will you be so kind as to reach me that saltcellar?”
“You ought to say, ‘Salt!’ at the beginning, and then while you are putting in the rest of the words, she can be handing it over,” advised Bea; “ah, what was the thought I was about to think?”
She paused in dispensing the main dish and rolled up her eyes vacantly for a moment before she dropped the spoon without a glance at the cloth to see if it left a stain and rising walked dreamily out of the dining-room.
The other girls stared. Robbie looked alarmed till Gertrude caught the likeness and explained: “It’s ‘sincerest flattery’ for you, Berta. Imitation, you understand. When an idea strikes you, you drop everything and wander away while Robbie or Bea picks up the spoon and goes on ladling out the stuff in the dish at your place. What a monkey!”
“No, a missionary,” corrected Berta, her eyes and mouth contradicting each other as usual. This time her eyes tried to hide a troubled spark in their depths while her mouth twitched over the joke of it all. “She is posing as an awful example.”
“Here I am again!” Bea appeared suddenly in her seat. “I find I’m considerably hungry still,” she vouchsafed in response to a chorus of taunts and jeers. “Ideas aren’t filling, so to speak. At least, mine aren’t—and they most of them belong to other people; hence I infer that other people’s aren’t either. Is that plain, my dear young and giddy friends? Now, somebody, applesauce!” she called, and added politely, “please pass it.”
Berta regarded her sternly. “Beatrice Leigh, you are running this scheme pretty far into the ground. When you reach bed-rock, something is likely to get a bump. Take care! Remember!”
“Thank you, yes, Berta. Half-past four at the swimming-tank in the gymnasium. I’ll be there. Trust me!”
“Trust you!” echoed Berta in withering scorn.
Bea lifted a face bearing a suitably wounded expression.
“I trust you,” she murmured in touchingly plaintive tones. “I shall be in the water at the stroke of the half hour—in the icy water. Promise that you will not fail me.”
“All right!” Berta dismissed the engagement from her mind with a heedless assent. An hour later while she was absorbed in looking over the week’s daily themes which she had found in the box, Robbie walked in rather disconsolately.
“Bea’s writing a poem, too,” she said; “she scowled at me.”
Berta frowned in abstraction. “Yes,” she muttered, “yes, yes.”
Robbie looked at her and then stared out at the steady pall of rain. “I think I shall go swimming with you, if you want me.”
“Do come.” It was a mechanical response while Berta’s eyes narrowed in the intensity of her application. “Now I wonder what that question-mark on the margin can mean. She is the vaguest critic I ever had. Suggestive, I reckon, and nothing else.”
Robbie sighed. “Bea always used to be interested in everything. I wish she wouldn’t write poems. She walked right past four girls and didn’t see them. They were astonished. They asked me if she was sick or anything. Her eyes were sort of rolled up in her head, as if she were being oblivious on purpose.”
“Um-m,” replied Berta brilliantly from the depths of her own obliviousness, “quite likely. Alas! there is another questionable question-mark. I do wish she weren’t so stingy with her red ink.”
Robbie sighed again and looked at the clock. “It will be half past four in two hours,” she volunteered.
Berta pushed back her hair with an impatient gesture. “Robbie Belle, the longer it rains, the more loquacious you become. Do go and write a note to Lila, or darn stockings or something. I have a committee meeting at three, and you bother me dreadfully, with your chatter. Do run along, there’s a dear.”
Robbie rose and wandered away forlornly. Even though she did not feel like studying, she half wished that she had not finished the preparation of Monday’s lessons. College on a rainy Saturday afternoon, when all your friends are writing poems, is not a very cheerful place.
At half-past four Berta was in the midst of a fiery argument about the program for the Junior Party to the seniors. The dispute concerned some fine point of æsthetic taste in the choice of paper and position of monogram. The stroke of the half hour reminded her of the engagement with Bea, but she lightly pushed aside the thought as of no consequence in comparison with the present emergency.
It was ten minutes to five when she seized an umbrella and scurried across the campus to the gymnasium. There in the dusk of fading light from the clouded sky outside she beheld the swimming-tank deserted, its surface still glinting in soft ripples as if from recent plunging.
At sound of a rustle in one of the dressing-rooms, Berta called Bea’s name. It was Robbie’s voice that answered her.
“Bea’s gone out walking.”
“Out walking?” echoed Berta scandalized and incredulous.
“Yes, she was here in the water at half-past four, just as she had said she would be. She waited for you, and tried to swim at the end of a curtain pole. I held it steady for her, but when she was the teacher, she let me duck under. And we weren’t sure about the stroke anyhow. And we kept getting colder and colder.”
“Oh!” the voice sounded as if suddenly enlightened. “At what time did you go in?”
“It was after three, and she waited for you till twenty minutes to five. Then she said she thought it would be interesting to go up to the orchard and gather apple-blossoms with rain-drops fresh on the petals. She said it would be poetic and erratic and a lot of fun. So she went. She said it would be more like a real genius if she went alone, and so I didn’t go with her. Besides that, she took my umbrella, and it isn’t big enough for two.”
“It is queer that she did not wait longer,” commented Berta wonderingly.
“She said it would be more whimsical and unexpected to stroll off in that eccentric way. She explained how she is being made over, Mother April, from the rag-bag of the world; and so she has to be different.”
“I hope that she gets very wet indeed,” said Berta, “and I don’t see why I should worry.”
Robbie’s voice answered, “Bea worried about you that day last fall when you went off alone in that storm to find fringed gentians. The branches were crashing down in the wind, and one girl had seen a tramp out on that lonely road. You said you could take care of yourself, but we worried.”
“Oh, that was different,” exclaimed Berta. “I am perfectly capable of judging for myself. But Bea is such a scatterbrain that I can’t help feeling”—she hesitated, then added as if to herself, “There isn’t any sense in feeling responsible. She is old enough——”
“I can’t hear when you mumble,” called Robbie.
“Bea is an awful idiot,” replied Berta in a louder key. “Did you catch that valuable bit of information, Robbie Belle?”
“It sounds,” spoke Robbie with unexpected astuteness, “as if you are really worrying after all.”
“Does it?” groaned Berta; “well, then I am an idiot too.”
She sternly refused to look anxious even when the dressing-gong found the wanderer still absent in the rain. At six Berta started for the dining-room, leaving Robbie hovering at Bea’s open door with a supply of hot water, rough towels, dry stockings, and spirits of camphor. In the leaden twilight of the lower corridor a draggled figure passed with a sodden drip of heavy skirts and the dull squashing of water in soaked shoes.
“Where are the apple-blossoms?” asked Berta in polite greeting as they met at the elevator.
“I’ve b-b-b-been studying b-b-b-bobolinks,” Bea’s teeth chattered. “It’s original to follow birds in the rain.”
“But”—Berta’s eyes snapped, “I myself when I did it I wore a gym suit and a mackintosh and rubber boots. Of all the idiots!”
“‘O wad some power the giftie gie us,’” chanted Bea’s tongue between clicks,
| “‘To see oursels as ithers see us, It wad fra mony a blunder free us, And foolish notion.’” |
Then as Berta took a threatening step in her direction, she broke into a run. “I think I’ll take some exercise now,” she called back mockingly as she fled up the stairs.
At midnight Berta was roused wide awake by an insistent rapping on the wall between her room and Bea’s. Startled at last wide awake, she asked what was the trouble. Upon receiving no audible reply, she hurried around through the corridor to the door. She heard the key turned as she grasped the knob. An instant later she felt Bea sway against her and stand choking for breath, her hands to her chest.
“It’s croup,” she gasped. “The doctor! Run!”
Berta ran. She ran as she had never run before. Down the endless corridor and up the stairs, two steps at a time. Then a hail of frantic knocks on the doctor’s door brought her rushing to answer. In four minutes they were back beside Bea’s bed, and the doctor’s orders kept Berta flying, till after a limitless space of horror and struggle she heard dimly from the distance: “She’ll do now.” Whereupon Berta sat down quietly in a chair and fainted.
The next day was Sunday. Berta carried Bea her breakfast.
“Good-morning, Beatrice,” she said. “I’ve decided that I am tired of being a genius.”
“So am I,” said Bea.
“No more poems!” cried Robbie Belle and clapped her hands. “Oh, goodie!”