Hattie had grasped abstractions. Hattie waved her hand. There was a scarlet spot upon her cheek. Before school there had been words between Hattie and Isobel. The politics of the President of the United States had figured in it, and Emily Louise had learned that the President was a Republican. And yet flags! And processions!
Miss Amanda said, "Well, Hattie?"
Hattie arose. "There is a single, only, solitary Republican pupil in this cla.s.s," said she promptly and with emphasis.
Miss Amanda might proceed to consider the proposition grammatically, her mind being on the rule, and not the import, but the cla.s.s interpreted it as Hattie meant they should. In their midst! And unsuspected!
Emily Louise grew hot. Could Hattie, would Hattie, do this thing?
Hattie, accuse her thus? Yet who else could Hattie mean? The heart of Emily Louise swelled--Hattie to do this thing!
And Hattie was wrong. She should know that she was wrong. She should read it in her own autograph alb.u.m, just brought to Emily Louise for her inscribing. Emily Louise remained in at recess. Verse was beyond her.
She recognised her limitations. Some are born to prose and some to higher things. She applied herself to a plain statement in Hattie"s alb.u.m:
Dear Hattie: I am a Mugwump and your true friend.
Emily Louise Maclauren.
Then she put the book on Hattie"s desk as the bell rang.
With the cla.s.s came a visible and audible excitement. Mr. Page followed, his hair wildly erect, and he conversed with Miss Amanda hurriedly.
With visual signalling and l.a.b.i.al dumb show, Emily Louise implored enlightenment.
"Ours is the honour cla.s.s, so we"re to be chosen," enunciated Hattie, in a staccato whisper.
Rosalie was nearer. "There"s to be a presentation--in the Chapel,"
whispered Rosalie; "sh-h--he"s going to choose us--now----"
Mr. Page and Miss Amanda were surveying the cla.s.s. Some two score pairs of eager eyes sought each to stay those glances upon themselves. Perhaps Mr. Page lacked courage.
"The choice I leave to you," said he to Miss Amanda. Then he went.
Miss Amanda was also visibly excited. She settled her chain and puffed the elaborate coiffure of her hair, the while she continued to survey the cla.s.s. She looked hesitant and undecided, glancing from row to row; then, as from some inspiration, her face cleared and she grew arch, shaking a finger playfully. "To the victors belong the spoils," she said with sprightly humour, "and it will, at least, narrow the choice. I will ask those young ladies whose fathers chance to be of a Republican way of thinking to please arise."
A silence followed--a silence of disappointment to the many; then Emily Louise MacLauren arose.
Was retribution following thus fast because of that subterfuge of Mugwump? Alas for that conscientiousness of which she had once been proud! Was it the measure of her degradation she read on Rosalie"s startled face--Rosalie"s face of stricken incredulity and amaze? But no; Rosalie"s transfixed gaze was not on Emily Louise--it pa.s.sed her, to----
To where in the aisle beyond stood another--Isobel.
But the head of Isobel was erect, and her eyes flashed triumph; the throw of Isobel"s shoulders flung defiance back in the moment of being chosen.
Excitement quivered the voice of Miss Amanda"s announcement. "The wife of the President of the United States, young ladies, having signified her intention of to-day visiting our school, the young ladies standing will report to the office at once, to receive instructions as to their part in the programme; though first, perhaps"--did Miss Amanda read s.e.x through self--"a little smoothing of hair--and ribbons----"
Emily Louise on this day carried her news home doubtfully, for Aunt Louise and Aunt Cordelia were of such violent Democracy.
"You were chosen"--Aunt Louise repeated--"Isobel, to make the speech and you to present the flowers?" Aunt Louisa"s face was alight with excitement and inquiry. "And what did you do, Emmy Lou?"
"I gave them to her up on the platform; it was a pyramid in a lace paper--the bouquet."
"And then?" Aunt Louise was breathless with attention.
"She kissed me," said Emily Louise, "on the cheek."
Aunt Louise gave a little laugh of gratification and pride. "The wife of the President--why, Emmy Lou----"
"I"ll write to her Aunt Katie this very afternoon," said Aunt Cordelia.
"Better look to the family tree," said Uncle Charlie. "There"s danger of too rich soil in these public honours."
But, instead, Emily Louise went out and sat on the side-door step; she needed solitude for the readjustment of her ideas.
Aunt Cordelia was pleased, and Aunt Louise was proud.
And Emily Louise, with the kiss of Republicanism upon her cheek, had stepped down from the Chapel platform into ovation and adulation, to find herself the centre of a homeward group jostling for place beside her. Hattie had carried her books, Rosalie her jacket. William had nodded to her at one corner, to be waiting at the next, where he nodded again with an incidental carelessness of manner, and joined the group.
Emily Louise had stolen a glance at William, anxiously. Had William"s opinion of her fallen? It would seem not.
Yet Isobel had gone home alone. Emily Louise had seen her starting, with sidewise glance and lingering saunter should any be meaning to overtake her. But she had gone on alone.
"Because she never told," said Hattie.
"Until she wanted to be chosen," said Rosalie.
"But I never told," said Emily Louise.
Hattie was final. "It"s different," said Hattie.
"Oh, very," said Rosalie.
They travel through labyrinthian paths who seek for understanding.
The sun went down; the dusk grew chill. Emily Louise sat on the door-step, chin in palm.
A BALLAD IN PRINT O" LIFE
Double names are childish things; therefore Emmy Lou entered the high school as Emily MacLauren.
Her disapproval of the arrangements she found there was decided.
High-school pupils have no abiding place, but are nomadic in their habits and enforced wanderers between shrines of learning, changing quarters as well as teachers for every recitation; and the constant readjustment of mood to meet the varied temperaments of successive teachers is wearing on the temper.
Yet there is a law in the high school superior to that of the teacher.
At the dictates of a gong, cla.s.ses arise in the face of a teacher"s incompleted peroration and depart. As for the pupils, there is no rest for the soles of their feet; a freshman in the high school is a mere abecedarian part of an ever-moving line, which toils, weighted with pounds of text-books, up and down the stairways of knowledge, climbing to the mansard heights for rhetoric, to descend, past doors to which it must later return, to the foundation floor for Ancient History.
Looking back at the undulating line winding in dizzy spiral about the stairways, Emily, at times, seemed to herself to be a vertebrate part of some long, forever-uncoiling monster, one of those prehistoric, seen-before-in-dreams affairs. She chose her figures knowingly, for she was studying zoology now.
Cla.s.ses went to the laboratory for this subject, filing into an amphitheatre of benches about Miss Carmichael, who stood in the centre of things and wasted no time; she even clipped her words, perhaps that they might not impede each other in their flow, which lent a disconcerting curtness of enunciation to an amazing rapidity of the same. Indeed, Miss Carmichael talked so fast that Emily got but a blurred impression of her surroundings, carrying away a dazed consciousness that the contents of certain jars to the right and left of the lady were amphibian in their nature, and that certain other objects in skin leering down from dusty shelves were there because of saurian claims. And because man is a vertebrate, having an internal, jointed, bony skeleton, man stood in a gla.s.s case behind the oracular priestess of the place, in awful, articulated, bony whole, from which the newly initiated had constantly to drag their fascinated, shuddering gaze. Not that Emily wanted to look, indeed she had no time to be looking, needing it all to keep up with Miss Carmichael, discoursing in unpunctuated, polysyllablic flow of things batrachian and things reptilian, which, like the syllables falling from the lips of the wicked daughter in the story-book, proved later to be toads and lizards.