From year to year, dependent upon the generosity of those whom its accomplishments convinced, the school not only existed but grew, and in order that the springs which fed it might not run dry there were, several times each year, the "begging trips" of the women who "went out."
For that was the phrase they used, just as in all wilderness life it is the phrase with which men speak of journeys from the solitudes.
When Miss Shorte went east or west, she carried to the outer world a living and vivid portraiture of that folk immured behind the ridge and its elder life. Then somehow the undertakings, absurdly impractical from a material viewpoint, realized themselves, and a new school building, a tiny hospital or a needed dormitory rose among the hardwood and the pines of Marlin County.
In the fall of 1913 Miss Shorte brought east with her a younger woman also from the school, to sing for her audiences those quaint "song-ballets" that sound around smoky mountain hearths to the accompaniment of banjo and "dulcimore."
Because no dollar could go out from the school's closely guarded treasury without assurance that it would bring other dollars back, the experiment of increasing the traveling expenses by including this girl in the journey to New York had been discussed back of Cedar Mountain with prayerful earnestness, and the girl herself had greeted the final decision as one of the great moments of her life.
Now that girl stood beside the piano a little tremulous with stage fright as she looked out over an audience more sophisticated than any to which she had ever sung before. It was in one of the women's university clubs in the Forties and to her uninitiated eye the light fell on a confusing display of evening dress and worldly-wise faces full of self-containment.
They would listen with politeness but how could her offering interest these men and women to whom great voices were familiar? Hers was untrained and the songs were crude vehicles for folk-lore compositions, plaintive with uncultivated minors.
That elderly gentleman, sitting far back near the door, had been identified to her in a whisper. He was a music critic whose word carried the force of authority—and she wondered if he sat near the exit with thought of escape from her inflictions. Just now he was writing a series of magazine articles on folk-lore music in America, and the girl felt herself the subject of a cold experiment in mental vivisection.
The lady with the white pompadour was one whose name she had known with awe on the school's list of patronesses and even here in New York it was a great name.
The mountain singer's knees trembled a little as the accompanist struck the keys, and her first note stole out, sweetly clear and naturally fresh.