It was a day made for poets to sing about. A day for the young man to forget the waiting ledger on his desk and gaze out the window at skies so blue and deep as to invite the building of castles; for even his father to see visions of golf-course or fishing-boat flickering in the translucent air; for old Jeff to get out his lawn-mower and lazily add a metallic song to the hum of the universe. And for him or her who must sit at schoolroom desk, it was a day to follow the processes of blackboard or printed page with the eyes but not the mind, while the encaged spirit beat past the bars of dull routine to wing away in the blue.
Missy, sitting near an open window of the “study room” during the “second period,” let dreamy eyes wander from the fatiguing Q. E. D.'s of the afternoon's Geometry lesson; the ugly tan walls, the sober array of national patriots hanging above the encircling blackboard, the sea of heads restlessly swaying over receding rows of desks, all faded hazily away. Her soul flitted out through the window, and suffused itself in the bit of bright, bright blue showing beyond the stand-pipe, in the soft, soft air that stole in to kiss her cheek, in the elusive fragrance of young, green, growing things, in the drowsy, drowsy sound of Mrs. Clifton's chickens across the way...
Precious minutes were speeding by; she would not have her Geometry lesson. But Missy didn't bring herself back to think of that; would not have cared, anyway. She let her soul stretch out, out, out.
Such is the sweet, subtle, compelling madness a day of Spring can bring one.
Missy had often felt the ecstasy of being swept out on the yearning demand for a new experience. Generally because of something suggestive in “reading” or in heavenly colour combinations or in sad music at twilight; but, now, for no definable reason at all, she felt her soul welling up and up in vague but poignant craving. She asked permission to get a drink of water. But instead of quenching her thirst, she wandered to the entry of the room occupied by Mathematics III A—Missy's own class, from which she was now sequestered by the cruel bar termed “failure-to-pass.” Something was afoot in there; Missy put her ear to the keyhole; then she boldly opened the door.
A tempest of paper-wads, badinage and giggles greeted her. The teacher's desk was vacant. Miss Smith was at home sick, and the principal had put Mathematics III A on their honour. For a time Missy joined in their honourable pursuit of giggles and badinage. But Raymond had welcomed her as if the fun must mount to something yet higher when she came; she felt a “secret, deep, interior urge” to show what she could do. The seductive May air stole into her blood, a stealthy, intoxicating elixir, and finally the Inspiration came, with such tumultuous swiftness that she could never have told whence or how. Passed on to her fellows, it was caught up with an ardour equally mad and unreckoning. One minute the unpastored flock of Mathematics III A were leaning out the windows, sniffing in the lilac scents wafted over from Mrs. Clifton's yard; the next they were scurrying, tip-toe, flushed, laughing, jostling, breathless, out through the cloak-room, down the stairs, through the side-door, across the stretch of school-yard, toward a haven beyond Mrs. Clifton's lilac hedge.
Where were they going? They did not know. Why had they started? They did not know. What the next step? They did not know. No thought nor reason in that, onward rush; only one vast, enveloping, incoherent, tumultuous impulse—away! away! Away from dark walls into the open; away from the old into the new; away from the usual into the you-don't-know-what; away from “you must not” into “you may.” The wild, free, bright, heedless urge of Spring!
Behind their fragrant rampart they paused, for a second, to spin about in a kind of mental and spiritual whirlpool. Some began breaking off floral sprays to decorate hat-band or shirt-waist. But Missy, feeling her responsibility as a leader, glanced back, through leafy crevices, at those prison-windows open and ominously near.
“We mustn't stay here!” she admonished. “We'll get caught!”
As if an embodiment of warning, just then Mrs. Clifton emerged out on her front porch; she looked as if she might be going to shout at them. But Raymond waited to break off a lilac cluster for Missy. He was so cool about it; it just showed how much he was like the Black Prince—though of course no one would “understand” if you said such a thing.