Betty Wales, Freshman Part 31

"I pity you from the bottom of my heart," said Eleanor, "but if you are really going to be here would you tell Lil Day when she comes that I have an awful headache and have gone off--that I'll see her to-morrow. I could go down there, but if she's in, her room will be fuller of June-bugs than mine. Hear them slam against that gla.s.s!" She turned to Betty stiffly. "I congratulate you on your victory," she said.

"Oh thank you!" answered Betty eagerly. "Christy did most of it.

Would--won't you come out with us?"

"No, thank you. I feel like being all alone. I'm going down for a twilight row on Paradise."

"You'll get malaria," said Katherine.

"You'll catch cold, too, in that thin dress," added Helen.

"I don't mind, if only I don't see any June-bugs," answered Eleanor, "or any girls," she added under her breath, when she had gained the lower hall.

The quickest way to Paradise was through the campus, but Eleanor chose an unfrequented back street, too ugly to attract the parties of girls who swarmed over the college grounds, looking like huge white moths as they flitted about under the trees. She walked rapidly, trying to escape thought in activity; but the thoughts ill-naturedly kept pace with her.

As everybody who came in contact with Eleanor Watson was sure to remark, she was a girl brimful of strong possibilities both for good and evil; and to-night these were all awake and warring. Her year of bondage at college was nearly over. Only the day before she had received a letter from Judge Watson, coldly courteous, like all his epistles to his rebellious daughter, inquiring if it was her wish to return to Harding another year, and in the same mail had come an invitation from her aunt, asking her to spend the following winter in New York. Eleanor shrewdly guessed that in spite of her father's disapproval of his sister's careless frivolity, he would allow her to accept this invitation, for the obvious relief it would bring to himself and the second Mrs. Watson.

He was fond of her, that she did not for a moment question, and he honestly wished her best good; but he did not want her in his house in her present mood.

"For which I don't in the least blame him," thought Eleanor.

She had started to answer his letter immediately, as he had wished, and then had hesitated and delayed, so that the decision involved in her reply was still before her. And yet why should she hesitate? She did not like Harding college; she had kept the letter of her agreement to stay there for one year; surely she was free now to do as she pleased--indeed, her father had said as much. But what did she please--that was a point that, unaccountably, she could not settle.

Lately something had changed her att.i.tude toward the life at Harding.

Perhaps it was the afternoon with Miss Ferris, with the perception it had brought of aims and ideals as foreign to the ambitious schemes with which she had begun the year as to the angry indifference in which she was finis.h.i.+ng it. Perhaps, as poor Helen had suggested, it was the melting loveliness of spring term. At any rate, as she heard the girls making their plans for the next year, squabbling amiably over the merits of the various campus houses, choosing roommates, bargaining for furniture, even securing partners for the commencement festivities still three years off, an unexplainable longing to stay on and finish the four years' drama with the rest had seized upon Eleanor. But each time it came she had stifled it, reminding herself sternly that for her the four years held no pleasant possibilities; she had thrown away her chance--had neglected her work, alienated her friends, disappointed every one, and most of all herself. There was nothing left for her now but to go away beaten--not outwardly, for she still flattered herself that she had proved both to students and faculty her ability to make a very brilliant record at Harding had she been so inclined, and even her superiority to the drudgery of the routine work and the childish recreations. But in her heart of hearts Eleanor knew that this very disinclination to make the most of her opportunities, this fancied superiority to requirements that jarred on her undisciplined, haphazard training, was failure far more absolute and inexcusable than if dulness or any other sort of real inability to meet the requirements of the college life had been at the bottom of it. Her father would know it too, if the matter ever came to his notice; and her brother Jim, who was making such a splendid record at Cornell--he would know that, as Betty Wales had said once, quoting her sister's friend, "Every nice girl likes college, though each has a different reason." Well, Jim had thought for two years that she was a failure. Eleanor gulped hard to keep back the tears; she had meant to be everything to Jim, and she was only an annoyance.

It was almost dark by the time she reached the landing. A noisy crowd of girls, who had evidently been out with their supper, were just coming in. They exclaimed in astonishment when her canoe shot out from the boat-house.

"It's awfully hard to see your way," called one officious damsel.

"I can see in the dark like an owl," sang back Eleanor, her good-humor restored the instant her paddle touched water,--for boating was her one pa.s.sion.

Ah, but it was lovely on the river! She glided around the point of an island and was alone at last, with the stars, the soft, grape-scented breezes, and the dark water. She pulled up the stream with long, swift strokes, and then, where the trees hung low over the still water, she dropped the paddle, and slipping into the bottom of the canoe, leaned back against a cus.h.i.+oned seat and drank in the beauty of the darkness and solitude. She had never been out on Paradise River at night. "And I shall never come again except at night," she resolved, breathing deep of the damp, soft air. Malaria--who cared for that? And when she was cold she could paddle a little and be warm again in a moment.

Suddenly she heard voices and saw two shapes moving slowly along the path on the bank.

"Oh, do hurry, Margaret," said one. "I told her I'd be there by eight.

Besides, it's awfully dark and creepy here."

"I tell you I can't hurry, Lil," returned the other. "I turned my ankle terribly back there, and I must sit down and rest, creeps or no creeps."

"Oh, very well," agreed the other voice grudgingly, and the shapes sank down on a knoll close to the water's edge.

Eleanor had recognized them instantly; they were her soph.o.m.ore friend, Lilian Day, and Margaret Payson, a junior whom Eleanor greatly admired.

Her first impulse was to call out and offer to take the girls back in her canoe. Then she remembered that the little craft would hold only two with safety, that the girls would perhaps be startled if she spoke to them, and also that she had come down to Paradise largely to escape Lil's importunate demands that she spend a month of her vacation at the Day camp in the Adirondacks. So, certain that they would never notice her in the darkness and the thick shadows, she lay still in the bottom of her boat and waited for them to go on.

"It's a pity about her, isn't it?" said Miss Payson, after she had rubbed her ankle for a while in silence.

"About whom?" inquired Lilian crossly.

"Why, Eleanor Watson; you just spoke of having an engagement with her.

She seems to have been a general failure here."

Eleanor started at the sound of her own name, then lay tense and rigid, waiting for Lilian's answer. She knew it was not honorable to listen, and she certainly did not care to do so; but if she cried out now, after having kept silent so long, Lilian, who was absurdly nervous in the dark, might be seriously frightened. Perhaps she would disagree and change the subject. But no----

"Yes, a complete failure," repeated Lilian distinctly. "Isn't it queer?

She's really very clever, you know, and awfully amusing, besides being so amazingly beautiful. But there is a little footless streak of contrariness in her--we noticed it at boarding-school,--and it seems to have completely spoiled her."

"It is queer, if she is all that you say. Perhaps next year she'll be----"

"Oh, she isn't coming back next year," broke in Lilian. "She hates it here, you know, and she sees that she's made a mess of it, too, though she wouldn't admit it in a torture chamber. She thinks she has shown that college is beneath her talents, I suppose."

"Little goose! Is she so talented?"

"Yes, indeed. She sings beautifully and plays the guitar rather well--she'd surely have made one of the musical clubs next year--and she can act, and write clever little stories. Oh, she'd have walked into everything going all right, if she hadn't been such a goose--muddled her work and been generally offish and horrid."

"Too bad," said Miss Payson, rising with a groan. "Who do you think are the bright and s.h.i.+ning stars among the freshmen, Lil?"

"Why Marion l.u.s.tig for literary ability, of course, and Emily Davis for stunts and Christy Mason for general all-around fineness, and socially--oh, let me think--the B's, I should say, and--I forget her name--the little girl that Dottie King is so fond of. Here, take my arm, Margaret. You've got to get home some way, you know."

Their voices trailed off into murmurs that grew fainter and fainter until the silence of the river and the wood was again unbroken. Eleanor sat up stiffly and stretched her arms above her head in sheer physical relief after the strain of utter stillness. Then, with a little sobbing cry, she leaned forward, bowing her head in her hands. Paradise--had they named it so because one ate there of the fruit of the tree of knowledge?

"A little footless streak!"

"An utter failure!"

What did it matter? She had known it all before. She had said those very words herself. But she had thought--she had been sure that other people did not understand it that way. Well, perhaps most people did not. No, that was nonsense. Lilian Day had achieved a position of prominence in her cla.s.s purely through a remarkable alertness to public sentiment.

Margaret Payson, a girl of a very different and much finer type, stood for the best of that sentiment. Eleanor had often admired her for her clear-sightedness and good judgment. They had said unhesitatingly that she was a failure; then the college thought so. Well, it was Jean Eastman's fault then, and Caroline's, and Betty Wales's. Nonsense! it was her own. Should she go off in June and leave her name spelling failure behind her? Or should she come back and somehow change the failure to success? Could she?

She had no idea how long she sat there, turning the matter over in her mind, viewing it this way and that, considering what she could do if she came back, veering between a desire to go away and forget it all in the gay bustle of a New York winter, and the fierce revolt of the famous Watson pride, that found any amount of effort preferable to open and acknowledged defeat. But it must have been a long time, for when she pulled herself on to her seat and caught up the paddle, she was s.h.i.+vering with cold and her thin dress was dripping wet with the mist that lay thick over the river. Slowly she felt her way down-stream, pus.h.i.+ng through the bank of fog, often running in sh.o.r.e in spite of her caution, and fearful every moment of striking a hidden rock or snag.

Soft rustlings in the wood, strange plas.h.i.+ngs in the stream startled her. Lower down was the bewildering net-work of islands. Surely there were never so many before. Was the boat-house straight across from the last island, or a little down-stream? Which was straight across? And where was the last island? She had missed it somehow in the mist. She was below it, out in the wide mill-pond. Somewhere on the other side was the boat-house, and further down was a dam. Down-stream must be straight to the left. All at once the roar of the descending water sounded in Eleanor's ears, and to her horror it did not come from the left. But when she tried to tell from which direction it did come, she could not decide; it seemed to reverberate from all sides at once; it was perilously near and it grew louder and more terrible every moment.

Suddenly a fierce, unreasoning fear took possession of Eleanor. She told herself sternly that there was no danger; the current in Paradise River was not so strong but that a good paddler could stem it with ease. In a moment the mist would lift and she could see the outline of one sh.o.r.e or the other. But the mist did not lift; instead it grew denser and more stifling, and although she turned her canoe this way and that and paddled with all her strength, the roar from the dam grew steadily to an ominous thunder. Then she remembered a gruesome legend that hung about the dam and the foaming pool in the shadow of the old mill far below, and dropped her paddle in an agony of fear. She might hurry herself over the dam in striving to escape it!

And still the deafening torrent pounded in her ears. If only she could get away from it--somewhere--anywhere just to be quiet. Would it be quiet in the pool by the mill? Eleanor slipped unsteadily into the bottom of her boat and tried to peer through the darkness at the black water, and to feel about with her hands for the current. As she did so, a bell rang up on the campus. It must be twenty minutes to ten. Eleanor gave a harsh, mirthless laugh. How stupid she had been! She would call, of course. If she could hear their bell, they could hear her voice and come for her. There would be an awkward moment of explanation, but what of that?

"Hallo! Hallo--o-o!" she called. Only the boom of the water answered.

"Hallo! Hallo--o-o!"

Again the boom of the water swallowed her cry and drowned it.

It was no use to call,--only a waste of strength.

Eleanor caught up her paddle and began to back water with all her might.

That was what she should have done from the first, of course. She was cold all at once and very tired, but she would not give up yet.

She had quite forgotten that only a little while before it had not seemed to matter much what became of her. "But if I can't keep at it all night----" she said to the mist and the river.