CHAPTER XVI
BACK TO WORK
The end of the Nassau visit had come at last, much too soon to suit Betty Wales and the rest of “The Merry Hearts.”
“Everything lovely always ends so soon,” Betty lamented, as she stood by the deck-railing between Madeline and Mary Brooks and looked back across the shimmering bay to catch a last glimpse of the sunny little city, half hidden in its circle of tall palms.
“Well, so do horrid things end,” announced Madeline philosophically. “Everything ends, and how dull life would be if it didn’t. Besides, we’re going back to spring term.”
“Yes,” agreed Betty. “That’s my one comfort. I couldn’t stand it to jump away back into winter again.”
“And some time we’re all coming back to Nassau,” added Mary Brooks.
“How do you know?” asked Betty absently.
“Why, because we drank out of Blackbeard’s Well. If you do that you are perfectly sure to come back.”
“Was that the reason you made me drink that horrid water this morning?” laughed Betty. “I went up-stairs to get something that mother had forgotten, and when I came back you were all down in a corner of the garden drinking that warm, sickish water; but I hadn’t the least idea why you were doing it. Who was Blackbeard, and why does drinking out of his well make you sure to come back?”
“I don’t know why,” said Mary. “It’s some sort of a spell, I suppose. Your father heard about it and told us. Blackbeard was a pirate who buried his treasure here and watered his ships at that spring. He must have been Bluebeard’s cousin, because Dr. Eaton said he had fourteen wives.”
“Poor things!” sighed Betty. “Well, I only hope that the spell will work. And now I must go down-stairs this minute to see if I can do anything for Ethel or Roberta. I suppose they’re getting ready to be seasick.”
“Eleanor Watson has gone,” said Mary. “How that girl has changed, Betty. She never used to be happy unless she was at the centre of the stage, and now she’s as retiring as Helen Chase Adams.”
“That reminds me!” announced Madeline oracularly, and went off in pursuit of the B’s, who were seldom far apart.
But to her disappointment the B’s frowned upon her plan to hold a “Merry Heart” meeting on shipboard and elect Eleanor Watson to membership.
“I’m ready to be nice to her,” declared Bob, “but I think that’s enough, for now, any way. She’s been a brick on this trip and I’m glad she came, on her own account as well as on Betty’s. But I hate cheats.”
“When a person has done a thing like that you can’t ever really trust her,” added Babe.
“And so,” concluded Babbie, who, being very tender-hearted, would have yielded but for the support of the other two members of the triumvirate, “you don’t want to be known as her very particular friend, and ‘The Merry Hearts’ are all very particular friends, Madeline.”
“All right,” said Madeline pleasantly. “I only wanted to find out how you felt. It would be a risk, I know, to take her in. I suppose I’m a risky person. Just consider that the matter hasn’t been mentioned.”
“We will,” promised Babe, and Madeline strolled back to Betty.
“Mary has gone to begin the novel,” Betty told her. “She wants to get as much done as possible before Ethel comes on deck.”
“I suppose,” remarked Madeline, irrelevantly, “that if it wasn’t a lot more trouble to find things than to lose them people would be even more careless than they are now. But it seems a little hard sometimes to have to hunt so many months for a thing you lost in a minute.”
Betty stared at her uncomprehendingly. “What kind of things do you mean, Madeline?” she asked.
“Oh, all sorts,” said Madeline. “Handkerchiefs and fountain pens and gold beads and reputations.”
The novel was the chief excitement during the stormy voyage home. It was to be a sort of log-book of the journey, with the merry match-making for its main theme. Mary Brooks, because of her habit of utilizing local happenings to advantage in her themes, had been “elected” to write it, the camera fiends were to furnish the illustrations, and the rest were to give suggestions and act as advisory committee.
Fortunately Mary belonged to the small minority of the ship’s passengers who were not seasick, and she amused herself and everybody else in the party but Ethel with the chapters of the novel, or novelette as she modestly called it. She found her audience interested, but extremely critical.
“I shall never be an authoress,” she declared firmly on the last afternoon of the voyage, when most of the invalids had come on deck and sat about warmly wrapped in rugs and golf capes. “I had thought of devoting myself to literature next year, but I’ve changed my mind. The general public is too hard to suit, if you are fair samples. Roberta thinks I have too much description of Nassau, and now Betty thinks I haven’t enough. Bob says the conversation sounds stilted, and yesterday Helen Adams told me that it wasn’t high-flown enough for college faculty.”
“Then you’ll have to be guided by the dictates of your own inborn genius,” said Babbie, grandiloquently. “An ‘Argus’ editor ought to know how to write a story without asking advice from all her ‘young friends,’ Mary.”
“Thank you in the name of the ‘Argus’ editors,” murmured Mary, recalling a scathing comment to the same effect that Dr. Hinsdale had put on her last psychology report.
“Somehow,” said Helen Adams, tumbling into the conversation in her funny abrupt fashion, “somehow—Mary’s story is interesting—but it does sound awfully made up. You would never guess it had really happened, would you?”
“That’s because I am a romanticist,” said Mary, calmly. “I don’t suppose you little juniors know anything about romanticists, so I will explain that they are the kind of novelists who use their imaginations. In this case I really had to depend on my imagination because naturally I wasn’t there when the most exciting things happened. But when I have been there under somewhat similar circumstances,” added Mary, with a meaning smile, “this was about the way things went.”
“The chapter about Betty’s drowning is the worst of all,” declared Bob, “and it ought to be the best. It seemed exciting enough at the time, but when you think it over there’s nothing to it. Betty ought to have been out in water over her head, and Dr. Eaton ought to have sunk once or twice trying to bring her in, and really risked his life to save her. Then it would sound like something, and there would be some reason in the silly way you made the heroine act afterward.”
“I know it,” said Mary, doubtfully. “It would be a great deal more artistic that way. Shall I change it?”
“Oh, no,” objected Roberta. “That would spoil the whole idea of the novel’s being true and the merry match-making being ours.”
“Oh, well, perhaps it will seem all right when the pictures are put in,” suggested Mary, hopefully. “Lots of novels wouldn’t amount to anything without the illustrations.”
“Did Bob tell you what she thought of?” asked Babbie. “She suggested that the novel would make the best kind of wedding present for Miss Hale.”
“Goodness no!” exclaimed Mary. “I’m not going to be a laughing-stock for the faculty!”
“But think of all the tender memories it would evoke,” said Bob, grinning broadly at her own sentimentality.
“And how well it will prove that things are not what they seem to the fine imagination of a budding young authoress,” added Madeline Ayres, who had been conspicuously silent during the discussion.
“What do you mean, Madeline?” asked Mary, suspiciously.
“I mean,” said Madeline, “that your novel is a fairy-tale—every word of the match-making part, except a few unimportant facts that you saw but misinterpreted.”
“I told you so!” cried Betty, in triumph. “Oh, Madeline, how did you find out?”
But Madeline only shrugged her shoulders. “No matter how,” she said. “I thought I’d better warn them, so that they wouldn’t be too much disappointed later on.”
“Do you mean that Dr. Eaton and Miss Hale haven’t fallen in love?” demanded Mary.
“Oh, I shouldn’t go as far as that.”
“I don’t believe you know any more about it than Betty does. You’re both guessing,” declared Mary indignantly.
Madeline smiled her slow, provoking smile. “Wait and see,” she said, and even to Betty she confided little more. “I’ve talked to Dr. Eaton,“ she admitted. “That is, I happened to ask him one question, and you’re right, Betty. Mary’s scheming was as much use as most match-making is.
”But the book will be a good wedding present all the same,” she assured Mary. “It’s a very ingenious fairy-tale, and I’m sure they’ll enjoy seeing themselves as others saw them.”
“How do you suppose they will act when they get back to Harding?” Roberta wondered.
“They’ll certainly make some bad breaks if they try to deceive the girls,” declared Bob.
“Well,” Mary warned them all, “we mustn’t make any breaks. We must remember that it’s the business of the merry match-makers not to breathe a word of what we’ve noticed, but to be very discreet and dignified.” Mary drew herself up proudly in her steamer chair.
Everybody got down to the last dinner on shipboard, even to Ethel, who came in leaning on Mr. Wales’s arm, and looking very pale through her Nassau tan. To the surprise of the match-makers she merely nodded to Dr. Eaton, and his nod in return was just as casual as hers. And the next morning when he bade the girls good-bye on the wharf,—for he was taking an early train to Harding,—he shook hands with Ethel in the same hearty, offhand way in which he had just shaken hands with Eleanor, and did not so much as try for a last word with the heroine. It was astonishing and disappointing enough!
Mr. Wales took the party in charge for the afternoon, and they did New York with a vengeance, but neither luncheon at the Waldorf nor the marvels of the circus at the Hippodrome sufficed to cheer Mary Brooks, whose lively spirits were completely dampened by the failure of her pet scheme.
“To think,” she sighed to Roberta, “that it’s all gone for nothing—that mad dash that Madeline and I made home from Grant’s Town, when it’s a wonder we didn’t die of sun-stroke, and Betty’s drowning, and the novel, and all the films that Eleanor and Roberta wasted getting snap-shots of the hero and heroine, not to mention the able assistance of Mr. Wales. Betty, mayn’t I ask your father what he thinks now?”
But Mr. Wales was as much in the dark as the girls. “I thought for a while that we had it all fixed,” he said with a twinkle, “but I’m afraid Ethel was playing summer girl down there in the tropics. I should like to tell her what a fine fellow Eaton is, and give her some good advice about marrying and settling down before she’s worn herself out teaching troublesome young things like you, but Mrs. Wales says I’d better not.”
On the way up to Harding nobody had much time to devote to the subject of match-making. The train was full of Harding girls. Nita got on at the junction and Katherine and Rachel were at the station to greet the southern tourists. There were regular volleys of questions to answer, and it was great fun telling all about the queer things they had seen and done.
“You didn’t find out everything from the guide-books, Katherine,” Betty told her, “and you were wrong about the sidewalks. They weren’t narrow, because generally there weren’t any at all.”
A day or two later the college discovered where Dr. Eaton had spent his vacation, and there were more questions: Had they seen much of him? What was he like out of class? How did he and Miss Hale get on together?
The last question the girls parried as well as they could. “And I guess,” said Mary, “that our different versions are about as much alike as black and white.”
Meanwhile the novel and the illustrations for it lay unheeded in the depths of Mary’s desk drawer, for the author declared that she should not copy it into the beautiful gilt edge, morocco-covered blank-book which the club had provided until she knew exactly how things were going to end. This there seemed to be no immediate prospect of finding out. “The Merry Hearts” watched Ethel and Dr. Eaton as closely as they could without appearing intrusive, but they discovered absolutely nothing.
“She asked Betty to go walking with her just as she always did,” announced Babbie.
“And he goes off horseback riding with Professor Hinsdale,” contributed Roberta.
“I was right behind her when she and Dr. Eaton met on the stairs yesterday morning,” added Helen, “and they bowed and said good-morning, just as they’d have said it to any one else.”
“She does look awfully happy though,” said Bob, who for a tom-boy had become extremely interested in Ethel’s romance. “When we were having a written lesson the other day she sat there with her eyes just shining.”
“I guess she always was happy enough,” objected matter-of-fact Helen. “Why shouldn’t she be?”
Betty and Madeline exchanged glances. They had never referred to the night when they saw Ethel crying. But in any case her good spirits were very easily explained; the Nassau trip had rested and cheered her up, and that was all she needed.
And so, after two weeks of unrewarded observation, “The Merry Hearts” forgot to speculate about the interesting faculty romance—if romance it was—and plunged whole-heartedly into the gaieties of spring term. First and foremost among them was of course the junior “prom.” For weeks before vacation it had been a topic of absorbing interest, and now most of the juniors thought and talked of little else. Helen Adams begrudged the way the “prom.” monopolized attention, supplanting all the impromptu festivities and throwing the man-less dances in which she delighted quite into the shade. One reason why Helen loved college so was because there were no men to bother about; but now for two weeks man was the sole topic of conversation, and to have a man, safe and sure, for the “prom.” the desideratum of every junior. But Helen Adams was a “freak.” Every other girl in 19— reveled in the situation, though some, like Katherine Kittredge, scoffed unfeelingly at their friends’ predicaments, and others, like Roberta Lewis, who had gathered courage to invite her cousin from Boston, were filled with secret misgivings and devoutly wished that their men would sprain their ankles (not seriously), like Alice Waite’s tenth one, or be asked to go to Europe with a rich uncle, like Rachel Morrison’s brother. For a “prom.” is a great responsibility as well as a great joy.
“I can tell you it’s no laughing matter,” declared little Alice Waite, “when you’ve got your dress and made out your program and are just dying to go, to have the last man you know east of Denver sprain his ankle—it’s heart-breaking.”
“Almost as bad as when you had two men on your hands for the concert and Georgia Ames couldn’t help you out,” jeered Katherine Kittredge. “Isn’t it a pity that Georgia had to miss the prom.? She’d have been in her element when her men disappeared into thin air.”
Nobody took Alice’s troubles very seriously, because Alice was always in trouble and out again. But the whole class of 19— looked sober when it was rumored that Rachel Morrison was actually thinking of staying at home and letting the vice-president take her place. For 19— was very proud of Rachel, and besides a junior “prom.” without the junior president would be Hamlet with Hamlet left out. But Rachel couldn’t be made to feel her own importance.
“I couldn’t get on with a strange man,” she declared, when various of her friends generously offered their guests for the president’s use. “Christy will lead the march a lot better than I, and you must let her do it.”
And so 19— was duly grateful to Eleanor Watson when she overruled all Rachel’s objections, after Betty and Nita had both tried to and failed, and insisted that she should take Jim to the “prom.”
“What an honor for Jim!” she put it. “He’ll be so set up. He’s looking forward to a calm, brotherly evening with me, and now he’ll find himself up in the receiving line, jollying the patronesses and the class officers. And I—oh, it doesn’t matter. I know plenty of other men. But I do want Jim to have a good time.”
In the end Eleanor watched the prom. from the gallery, except during three dances that Rachel insisted upon her having with Jim. She had looked forward to taking Jim to her prom. too eagerly to care to put up with any second-best escort, and besides the men she had cultivated in her first two years at Harding—Paul West and his set—were utterly distasteful to her now.
Jean Eastman had her characteristic comment to make on Eleanor’s sacrifice. “Bidding for popularity with the class, I suppose,” she said. “A very pretty play to the gallery it is, and just before she comes up at Dramatic Club, too. I wonder if it will work.”
So it was somewhat of a surprise to her when she discovered at the next Dramatic Club meeting that Eleanor had asked to have her name definitely withdrawn.
“I can’t feel that it would be right for me to go in,” she explained to Miss Ferris and to Betty Wales, the two who had seen her through that trying sophomore spring term. “A Dramatic Club election is an official honor, and it ought never to go to any one who doesn’t thoroughly deserve it. I got it under false pretenses and I should never feel as if it really belonged to me.”