9. Hope College
Hope College was built of gray fieldstone covered with climbing woodbine and Virginia creeper, and it dominated the little town. There were five buildings in the campus group, the main building, laboratory, library and gymnasium, boys’ dormitory, and chapel.
Kit never forgot the first morning when the classes met in Assembly Hall, and the Dean addressed them on the work and aims of the coming year. For the life of her, she could not keep her mind on all he was saying or the solemnity of the moment, because just at the very last minute when the chapel chimes stopped ringing, Jeannette Flambeau entered through the heavy doors at the back of the big, crowded hall. It seemed as though everyone’s eyes were watching the platform, but Kit saw the slender, silent figure standing there alone. She was dressed in black, a soft wool suit, and her brown hair, no longer in pigtails, hung loosely to her shoulders. She waited there, it seemed to Kit, expectant on the threshold of opportunity, not knowing which way to go, and without a friendly hand extended to her in welcome or guidance.
Georgia Riggs, who sat next to Kit, glanced back to see what had attracted her attention, and made a funny little sound with her mouth.
“I never thought she’d have the nerve to really do it,” she whispered. “Isn’t she odd?”
A quick impulsive wave of indignation swept over Kit and she rose from her seat, passing straight down the aisle without even being aware of the curious glances which followed her. She took Jeannette by storm.
“You’re in my class, aren’t you?” she whispered quickly. “It’s right over here, and there’s a seat beside me. I don’t know anyone either, and I’m so glad to see you, so I’ll have someone to talk to.”
Jeannette never answered, but smiled with a quick flash of appreciation, the smile which always seemed to illumine her grave face. She followed Kit back to her seat, and Georgia exchanged glances with her right-hand neighbor, Amy Parker. Kit was altogether too new to realize just exactly what she had done. Being the Dean’s grandniece, she considered herself unconsciously a privileged person. As a matter of course, Della had accompanied her that morning and introduced her to four or five girls in the junior prep class, who came from the representative best families of the town. Also, as a matter of course, she had been welcomed as one of them, but Kit, with her inborn democratic ideas, never even realized that she occupied one of the seats of the mighty, in a circle of the favored few, and that she had smashed all tradition by introducing into that circle a Flambeau. In fact, even if she had known, she would probably have been thoroughly indignant at any such spirit among the girls themselves.
The whole morning was taken up with the assigning of students to classes. Kit loved the curious bustle and excitement of it all. It was so different from the small high school back home, and there were many more boys and girls than she had expected to see. Almost, as she passed from room to room, through the different buildings, she wished she were staying there as a year pupil. Amy introduced her to her closest friend, Peggy Barrows, a girl from South Dakota, who took them up to her quarters in one of the dormitories.
“Gee,” Kit said, looking around her, “I wish I were going to live here. Peggy, you’ll have to entertain us often. It’s so kind of solitary and restful, isn’t it, up here?”
“Solitary,” scoffed Peggy. “I’ve been here four days getting settled, and you might just as well call the side show of a circus solitary. There isn’t even the ghost of privacy. I’m mobbed every time I try to sit and collect my thoughts.”
“Who wants to collect their thoughts, anyway?” asked Amy.
“Have you seen Virginia’s room? Wait.” Peggy darted out of her door and across the hall. On the door opposite a card bore the legend in large black letters:
KEEP OUT
STUDY HOUR
“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” she said, tapping just the same. “Nobody’s studying today. Let us in, Ginny.”
A sound of scraping over the floor, and muffled giggles came to waiting ones in the hall, then the door was thrown wide, and Kit caught her first glimpse of Virginia Parks, the most popular girl at Hope. She was about seventeen, but a short, pudgy type, with curly rumpled hair and blue eyes. There were five other girls with her, and papers littered the bed, chairs, and desk.
“We’re terribly busy, kids,” Virginia said, “What do you want?”
“Just to look at your room. Isn’t it pretty, Kit? This is Kit Craig, Ginny.”
“Hope you’ll like it here,” she said. “I’m from the East, too, only not so far as you are, but we think Pennsylvania’s east, out here. How do you like the color scheme?”
Kit liked it and said so emphatically. The room was in aqua and coral. The chairs were slipcovered in a coral print on an aqua background and the walls were grey. Kit was invited to sit down on one of the beds.
“I wish I stayed here all the time,” Kit exclaimed. “You miss the fun, being a day student, don’t you?”
“Never mind,” Virginia told her, “we’ll have some special celebrations all for you. Now clear out, kids, because I’ve got a deadline to make.”
“Ginny’s editor of the Spirit,” Peg said. “Do you have any journalistic ability, Kit?”
“I’ve been told I write pretty well, but I never did anything in the newspaper line.”
“I think she should have stayed out, she doesn’t belong here,” one of the other girls was saying in another part of the room. “None of that family has ever amounted to anything, except in the fishing industry—”
But Kit overheard this and interrupted point-blank. She was sitting up very straight on the bed, with a certain expression around her mouth, and a very steady look in her eyes.
“Just a minute,” she said quickly. “Do you mean Jeannette Flambeau? Because if you do, I don’t think that’s fair.”
Virginia quickly agreed with Kit, but Peg patted her in a conciliatory manner.
“Now, don’t take it to heart so,” she said, “why should it matter to you? Forget it.”
But Kit could not be diverted, and the color rose belligerently in Amy’s cheeks, too.
“I don’t see why you feel you have to take Jeannette Flambeau’s part,” she said. “If you knew all about her the way we girls do, you’d let her alone.”
“I don’t see how she ever came up here anyway,” Georgia remarked. “It’s just exactly as if one of her brothers tried to come in. Do you think the boys would stand for that?”
“Jeepers, why shouldn’t they?” demanded Kit hotly. “And I’d like to know what they’ve got to say about it anyway. I don’t think that’s the college spirit. Anyone who wants an education and is willing to work for it should be admitted.”
“Yes, but if they had any sense at all,” responded Georgia placidly, “they wouldn’t put themselves into a position of being snubbed. You can talk all you want to about the college spirit from the standpoint of Deans and faculties, but when all’s said and done, it’s the student spirit that rules. I’ll bet that she doesn’t stay here a month. She hasn’t anyone to help her at home and can’t afford tutoring, so she’ll just peter out.”
The gong sounded in the hall below for afternoon classes, so the discussion came to an abrupt end. Kit found herself watching Jeannette. There was a peculiar aloofness about the girl which seemed to put almost a wall of defense around her. She was intensely interested in everything, one could see that plainly, except the other students, and it seemed as if she simply overlooked them. When Kit came down the stairs, she glanced into the library and saw Jeannette in there alone, bending down before the long wall book shelves. Across the wide hall there were groups of boys and girls in the two long lounges, laughing and talking together, and every couch and chair in both rooms were filled, but Jeannette was alone.
Jeannette was holding a volume of Treasure Island, illustrated in color. She turned in surprise at the touch of Kit’s hand on her shoulder.
“I thought we could walk down toward the bluff together, because we go the same way,” suggested Kit. “How do you like it here?”
“I like it,” responded Jeannette slowly, with a certain dignified shyness that was characteristic of her. “My mother has told me all about it. She liked the library when she was here. She told me where her room was upstairs, too, but I didn’t want to go up while the girls were there.”
“Let’s go up now, while they’re all downstairs,” Kit said impulsively. “I’ll take you. Which dorm was she in?”
“Her name was Mary Douglas. It’s the Douglas Dormitory. Her father was one of the founders here, Malcolm Douglas.”
Kit listened in utter amazement and with a rising sense of joy. Here was Jeannette Flambeau, flouted and disdained by the little crowd of girls who happened to live in a certain district of Delphi, but claiming her grandfather was a founder of the college. At that very moment Kit planned her surprise on the girls.
As they walked through the hall together, Georgia and the others followed them with their glances and smiled. The two paused before a big bronze tablet with the name of the founders on it. There it was, third from the last, Malcolm Douglas.
“He came from Canada,” said Jeannette, “and settled here. Later on he went into Minnesota, and on into Dakota. The family was very poor after he died, but my mother came here for two years, and even when I was a little girl, seven or eight years old, before she died, she used to tell me how she loved it, and that I must come here, too.”
“Don’t any of your brothers want to come? They’re all older than you, aren’t they.”
Jeannette shook her head and smiled curiously. “They are all Flambeau, every one. They eat, and sleep and fish, that’s all.”
Kit led the way to the upper floor, where the dorms were, and meeting Virginia, she asked the way to the Douglas.
“Why, you were in that one today,” answered Virginia in surprise. “It’s our dorm, didn’t you know?”
“Oh, thanks a lot,” Kit said with suspicious alacrity, as she guided Jeannette down the corridor. Virginia glanced back at them both, speculatively, wondering just what special business could take two new day students into the most exclusive dormitory at Hope.