Smith College Stories / Ten Stories by Josephine Dodge Daskam

by Josephine Daskam Bacon

Mr. Jackson was not a sentimentalist himself, and read nothing but the paper, sitting placidly behind the peanut-brittle and chocolate mice, and relapsing sometimes into absolute idleness for hours together, deep in contemplation, perhaps, possibly dozing—nobody ever knew. At such times he regarded the entrance of customers as an unwelcome intrusion and was accustomed to hurry them, if juvenile, into undue precipitance of choice. From this even quiet he emerged seldom but effectively: when Veronica entertained the unattractive young men she called "the boys," later than eleven o'clock, when Doris went to the theatre more than twice a week, or when they had purchased garments of a nature more than usually unsuitable and pronounced. Then Mr. Jackson spoke, and after domestic whirlwinds and fires the still voice of an otherwise doubtful head of the family became the voice of authority.

Elaine gave him no trouble of this sort. She did not care for young men, and she never went to the theatre. Her clothes, when she had any choice in the matter, were of the plainest, and she had never teased her father for candy since she began to read, which was at a very early age. I Say No, or the Love-letter Answered, was her first consciously studied book, and between ten and fifteen she devoured more novels than most people get into a lifetime. Incidentally she read poetry—she got books of it for prizes at school—and one afternoon she sandwiched the Golden Treasury between two detective stories. She did not care for her mother's friends, gossiping, vulgar women, and she loathed her sisters'. She had a sharp tongue, and as parental discipline was of the slightest, she criticised them all impartially with the result that she was cordially disliked by everybody she knew—a feeling she returned with interest. She found two or three ardent friends at school and was very happy with them for a time, but she was terribly exacting, and demanded an allegiance so intense and unquestioning that one by one they drifted away into other groups and left her.

In her second year at the high school they read the Idylls of the King, and she discovered her name and saw in one shame-filled second the idiotic bad taste of it—Elaine Susan! She imagined the lily maid of Astolat behind her father's counter and became so abased in her own mind that the school found her more haughty and disagreeable than ever. From that moment she signed her name E. Susan Jackson and requested to be called Susan. This met the approval of the teachers, and as the schoolgirls did not hold much conversation with her, the change was not a difficult one.

By the time she had been three years in the high school she was considered by every one the most brilliant student there, and the principal suggested college to her. This had never occurred to her. Though they had never lacked for necessities, Mr. Jackson's business was not conducted in a manner to lead to marked financial success, and though he said little about his affairs, it was evident to them all that matters were slowly but surely running down hill. Doris and Veronica were eager to leave school and spend a term at the Business College, some friends of theirs having done this with great success and found positions as typewriters, but their father insisted on their staying at school for two years at least. It would be time enough to leave, he said, when they had to. It was significant of the unconscious attitude of the family that there had never been any question of the oldest daughter's leaving school: Elaine had always been real bright, her mother said, and as long as books was all she took any interest in, she might as well get what she could—she presumed she'd teach.

But this acquiescent spirit changed immediately when she learned that her husband had told Elaine he would send her to college for two years anyway, and as much longer as he could afford. It seemed to Mrs. Jackson a ridiculous and unwarranted expense, particularly as he had refused to allow the term at the Business College partly on the financial score. She lectured, argued, scolded; but he was firm.

"I told her she should, and she shall," he repeated quietly. "She says she thinks she can help along after a while, and you needn't worry about her paying it back—she will, all right, if she can. I guess she's the best of the lot of us; she's worth the other two put together. You let Lainey alone, Hattie, she's all right!"

This was during her last year at school, and as she had on her own responsibility taken the classical course there, finding a fascination in the idea of Greek, she accomplished the preparation very easily.

Her mother, bowing to the inevitable, began to plume herself on her daughter "who was fitting herself to go to Smith's College," and rose many degrees in the social scale because of her. But their ideas of the necessary preparations differed so materially, that after prolonged and jarring hostilities marked by much temper on both sides, the final crash came, and after a battle royal Elaine took what money was forthcoming and conducted her affairs unchallenged from that moment. It was a relief to be freed from the wearisome squabbles, but she cried herself to sleep the night before she left—she did not perfectly know why. Later she told herself that it was because she had so little reason to cry when she left home for the first time.

She went to the train alone, because the girls were at school and her father at his business. She said good-by to her mother on the porch, with the constraint that had grown to characterize her attitude towards them all, but her mother was suddenly seized with a spasm of sentiment, and kissing her wildly, bewailed the necessity that drove her firstborn from her to strangers. Later the girl found it sadly characteristic of her life, that absurd scene on the porch; with her heart hungry and miserable for the love and confidence she had never known, she endured agonies of shame and irritation at the demonstration that came too late. She went away, outwardly cold, with tight-pressed lips; her mother read Cometh up as a Flower, and wept hysterically that Fate should have cursed her with such an unfeeling, moody child.

It is hard to determine just what incident convinced Susan—for she dropped the initial on her registration—that life had not changed for her because she was to live it in Northampton, and that she must be alone there, as she had been in Troy. Just before she left college she decided that she had known it immediately: that from the moment when she plunged into the chattering, bustling crowd in the Main Hall, where everybody knew somebody and most people knew all the others, a vague prevision of her four years' loneliness came to her: a pathetic certainty that she could not, even with the effort she was too proud to make, become in any reality a part of that sparkling, absorbed, unconscious current of life that rushed by her.