Concerning Belinda Part 1

Concerning Belinda.

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd.

AN APOLOGY

To all princ.i.p.als of New York boarding-schools, the author of these sketches offers humble apologies for having approached those excellent inst.i.tutions chiefly from their humorous side.

That the city boarding-school has its earnest and serious phases, its charming and sensible pupils, no rational mortal could deny; but each finis.h.i.+ng school has, also, its Amelias, and their youthful absurdities offer tempting material to the writer of tales.

CHAPTER I

BELINDA AND THE TWELVE

FOR years New York had been beckoning to Belinda. All during her time at the western co-educational college, where she collected an a.s.sortment of somewhat blurred impressions concerning Greek roots, Latin depravity, and modern literature, and a.s.sisted liberally in the education of her masculine fellow-students, New York, with its opportunities for work and experience, had lured her on. Fortune she would not need. Daddy had attended to that in his will, but success, and a knowledge of the world outside of Indiana, she must have.

This fixed purpose rendered her immune from the sentimental and matrimonial epidemics that devastate the Junior and Senior ranks in co-educational inst.i.tutions. She graduated with honours--and with scalps. Many Seniors went away sorrowful because of her, the French professor lapsed into hopeless Gallic gloom, and even the professor of ancient history was forced into painful recognition of the importance of the moderns.

When the fortune which had seemed a premise in life's logic shrunk to proportions barely adequate to support the mother and the younger children, and became for Belinda herself a vague hypothesis, New York still hung mystic and alluring upon the horizon; but a public-school position in the home town offered solid ground upon which to stand, while yearning toward the apparently unattainable star. The public-school career was a success. The English cla.s.ses attained unheard-of popularity; and, if the number of fights between the big boys swelled amazingly, at least the frays did not, as a rule, occur upon the school grounds, and the casualties were no more dire than those contingent upon football glory. Belinda shone for all. She allowed great and small to adore her. To her pupils she was just but merciful, and stoically impartial. The school superintendent, who had weathered the first throes of widowerhood, and reached the stage where he loved sitting upon a veranda in the twilight and hearing nocturnes played by some feminine personality in the parlour, suffered much emotional stress and strain in the endeavour to decide whether he would rather have nocturnes and a parlour-chained Belinda or a Belinda beside him in the twilight and no nocturnes.

Chopin eventually went to the wall; but, just as the superintendent was developing a taste for major harmonies once more, the unexpected happened.

Miss Lucilla Ryder came to town.

Miss Ryder was one of the Misses Ryder. Apart from the other Miss Ryder was incomplete, but she more nearly approximated completion than did Miss Emmeline Ryder under the same conditions.

Together, the elderly maiden sisters made up a composite ent.i.ty of considerable force; and for something like thirty years this ent.i.ty had been the mainspring of a flouris.h.i.+ng Select School for Young Ladies, located upon a fas.h.i.+onable side street in the most aristocratic district of New York. To the school of the Misses Ryder youthful daughters of New York's first families might be entrusted, with no fear that their expensive and heaven-allotted bloom would be rubbed off by contact with the offspring of second-rate families. As Miss Lucilla Ryder explained, in an effort to soothe the natural fears of a society leader whose great-grandfather had been a most reputable farmer, the young ladies of the school were divided into groups, and the flowers of New York's aristocracy would find in their especial cla.s.ses only those young ladies with whom they might reasonably expect to be intimate after their school life ended and their social career began.

Miss Ryder did not mention this interesting fact to the fond parents from Idaho and Texas who contemplated placing their daughters in the school, in order that they might acquire a New York lacquer, and make acquaintances among the social elect. In fact, Miss Ryder always dangled before the eyes of these ambitious parents a group of names suggesting a list of guests for the most exclusive of Newport functions, and dwelt eloquently upon the privilege of breathing the air which furnished oxygen to members of these exalted families. Nine times out of ten, mere repet.i.tion of the sacred names hypnotised the prospective patrons, and they gladly offered up their daughters upon the altar of social advancement.

An explanation of the cla.s.s-system would have marred the optimistic hopes of these fond parents, and the Misses Ryder were too altruistic to disturb the happiness of fellow mortals. Moreover, it was a comparatively simple thing to separate day-scholars from boarders without appearing to make a point of it.

In the handling of such delicate matters, the Misses Ryder displayed a tact and a _finesse_ which would have made them ornaments to any diplomatic corps; and, fortunately, the number of the young ladies who were, of necessity, to be kept in cotton wool was small. The great bulk of the school's attendance was more or less genially democratic.

School keeping in an aristocratic section of New York is an expensive matter. It must be done upon a large and daring scale. The Misses Ryder occupied two brownstone houses. The rents were enormous. The houses were handsomely furnished. Teachers of ability were a necessity, and such teachers were expensive. A capable housekeeper and efficient servants were required to make domestic affairs run smoothly. In consideration of all this, it was imperative that the Misses Ryder should gather in, each year, enough boarders to exhaust the room capacity of the two big houses, and that these boarders should be able and willing to pay high prices. In order to insure this condition of things, one of the two princ.i.p.als always made summer pilgrimages to remote places, where wealthy families possessed of daughters hungering for New York advantages might reasonably be supposed to exist; and it was in the course of one of these promoting tours that Miss Lucilla Ryder came to Lanleyville--drawn there by knowledge of certain large milling interests in the place.

It was--with apologies to Tennyson--"the miller's daughter" who was "dear, so dear," to Miss Lucilla, but an unkind fate had decreed that the miller's daughter should show a pernicious desire for college education, and that the miller himself should be as wax in his daughter's hands. Miss Lucilla did not find pupils in Lanleyville, but she found Belinda. That alone should have repaid her for the trip.

The meeting was accidental, being brought about through the aforesaid miller's daughter, who had been, for a High-School period, one of Belinda's adoring slaves.

The Misses Ryder needed a teacher of English; Belinda dreamed of New York. To make a long story short, Belinda was engaged to teach to the Ryder pupils such sections and fragments of the English branches as might be introduced into their heads without resort to surgery. The salary offered was meagre, but the work would be in New York; so the contract was made, and Belinda was inclined to look upon Miss Lucilla as angel of light. Miss Lucilla's opinion of the arrangement was summed up briefly in her next letter to Miss Emmeline.

"I have secured a teacher of English," she wrote. "The young person is much too pretty and girlish, but she is willing to accept a very small salary and is unmistakably a gentlewoman. Her attractions will give her an influence which we may be able to utilize for the benefit of the school."

Two months later Belinda sat upon her trunk in a New York hall bedroom and considered.

The room was the smallest in the Misses Ryder's Select School for Young Ladies, and before the introduction of the trunk it had been necessary to evict the one chair which had been a part of the room's furnis.h.i.+ng.

The bed was turned up against the wall, where it masqueraded, behind denim curtains, as a bookcase. When the bed came down there was no standing room outside of it, and, as Belinda discovered later, getting into that bed without casualties was a feat calling for fine strategy. A chiffonier retired as coyly as possible into the embrace of a recessed doorway; a washstand of Lilliputian dimensions occupied an infinitesimal fraction of a corner.

The newly arrived instructor of youth studied her domain ruefully from her vantage point on the trunk; and it might have been observed, had there been any one on hand to observe it, that the study was interrupted by occasional attacks of violent winking, also that much winking seemed to impart a certain odd moisture to the singularly long lashes which s.h.i.+elded a pair of rather remarkable gray eyes.

As she winked, the young woman of the gray eyes kicked her heels against the side of the trunk in a fas.h.i.+on that was distinctly undignified, but appeared to be comforting. There was a note of defiance in the heel tattoo, an echo of defiance in the heroic attempt at stubbornness to be noted in a deliciously rounded chin, and a mouth which a beneficent Providence never mapped out upon stubborn lines, but the eyelashes gleamed moistly.

If, as has been claimed by worthy persons who have made physiognomy their study, the eyes reflect one's native spirit, and the mouth proclaims one's acquired character, Belinda's spiritual and emotional heritage was in tears, but her mental habit challenged fate to hurl hall bedrooms _ad libitum_ at her curly head. She had wanted to come to New York. Well, she was in New York. The immortal Touchstone loomed up before her with his disgruntled protest: "Now am I in Arden. When I was at home I was in a better place." Belinda quoted the comment softly.

Then suddenly she stopped winking and smiled. The chin and mouth incontinently abandoned their stubborn role, and showed what they could do in the line of curves and witchery. Dimples dashed boldly into the open.

Belinda looked up at the large steel engraving of the Pyramids, which filled most of the room's available wall s.p.a.ce, and the smile expanded into a laugh. When Belinda laughs, even a city hall bedroom is a cheerful place.

"_J'y suis; j'y reste_," the young woman announced cheerfully to the largest Pyramid. It looked stolidly benignant. The sentiment was one it could readily understand.

There came a tap upon the closed door.

"Come in," called Belinda. The door opened, and a tall young woman dispa.s.sionately surveyed the scene.

"It's a mathematical impossibility," she said gravely, "and that's expert testimony, for I'm Miss Barnes, the teacher of Mathematics.

Don't apologize. I had this room myself the first year, and I got so used to it that when I moved to one that is six inches larger each way, I positively rattled around in it. Miss Ryder sent me to ask you to go to her sitting-room. I'll come and call as soon as you've unpacked and settled."

She went away, and Belinda, after dabbing a powderpuff recklessly over her eyelids and nose, hurried to the private sitting-room, which was the Princ.i.p.al's sanctum.

Miss Lucilla, slim, erect, well gowned, superior, sat at a handsome desk between the front windows. Miss Emmeline, a delightful wash drawing of her strongly etched sister, was talking with two twittering girls at the opposite end of the room. Miss Emmeline was always detailed to the sympathetic task. Her slightly vague gentleness was less disconcerting to sentimental or homesick pupils than Miss Lucilla's somewhat glacial dignity.

Belinda hesitated upon the threshold. Miss Emmeline bestowed upon her a detached and impersonal smile. Miss Lucilla summoned her with an autocratic move of a slender hand, a gesture so imperious that it was with difficulty the new teacher refrained from an abject salaam.

"Miss Carewe," said the smooth, cool voice, "some of the young ladies want to go to the theatre to-night. School does not begin until to-morrow; there are no duties to occupy their time and attention, and we are, of course, liable to an epidemic of homesickness and hysteria.

Under the circ.u.mstances the theatre idea is a good one. It will distract their minds. I have selected a suitable play, and you will chaperon. The teachers who have been here before will be needed to a.s.sist me with certain preliminary arrangements to-night. Moreover, you seem to be cheerful, and at present the young ladies need to be inoculated with cheerfulness. Be very careful, however, to be dignified first and cheerful afterward. Remember, however young you may look or feel, you are a teacher with responsibility upon your shoulders. You must make the pupils understand that you cannot be overrun, even though you are young.

Unless you take a very wise stand from the first your position will be difficult and you will be of no value to us. Be reasonable but uncompromising."

Belinda had been listening attentively. Already she began to hear the whirring of wheels within wheels in this work of hers, began to understand that in city private-school life "face" must be preserved as religiously as in Chinese ceremonial circles; but she recognised in Miss Lucilla a woman who understood her problem, and she found this middle-aged spinster, with the keen eyes, the Roman nose, the firm lips, and the grande-dame manner, interesting.

"How many girls will go?" she asked meekly.

"Twelve."

Belinda gasped. Twelve strange, homesick girls! She wondered if they would all be as big as the two with Miss Emmeline.

"The theatre is the Garrick. You will start at five minutes of eight."

Miss Lucilla turned to her desk. The interview was finished. No one ever lingered after Miss Lucilla had said her say.

Belinda went back to her room. On the way she met Miss Barnes.

"Where is the Garrick Theatre?" she inquired.