CHAPTER XIV
A GREAT DEAL TO LEARN
Molly Granger possessed at least one talent besides the ability to extract fun out of most things. She could draw quite remarkably for a girl who had had so little instruction; and made many really clever cartoons in black and white.
Over her dressing-table was a long study in feline humor; as Beth called it when she first observed the piece, “a yard of cats.”
“Isn’t it cute?” she cried. “You never did it?”
“Yes, I did. From life,” Molly said, smiling at the row of kittens tenderly.
“From life? Nonsense! How could you get cats to pose for you? And they are too, too funnily human!”
“Didn’t get the cats to pose. But my aunts did. I flatter myself I have hit off the characteristics of the dears.”
“Your aunts?” gasped Beth, horrified.
“Yes, my dear. All seven of them.”
“There are seven of the cats,” admitted Beth, weakly. “But you never deliberately caricatured your aunts like that?”
“They’re not caricatures. My aunts are regular tabbies, anyway; they don’t mind. They begin to look upon my talent for drawing cats as a ‘gift.’ You see, Bethesda,” said Molly, laughing again now, “I can draw cats, and I can’t draw folks. If I ever attempt your portrait, you’ll have to appear as a cat. Whatever artistic talent I have, I’ll never be a portrait painter. So I told the aunts I wanted to draw them in black and white, and they all sat for me.”
Beth was as much amazed as she was amused.
“The grave looking cat at the end, with spectacles and a book, is Aunt Celia; the next with the knitting and goloshes on her feet is Aunt Catherine. She always either wears overshoes or carries them. Auntie Cora is the cute little blue kitten with the fan.
“Aunt Carrie stands there in her wedding finery—she still has hopes. She is engaged to a sea captain who comes home for three weeks about once in three years. Doesn’t she look too sweet for anything? Aunt Charlotte is the sly, plump one—you know she’s just lapped up all the cream. Aunt Charlotte manages to get the best of everything.
“Aunt Cassie is the one in furs and mittens; she’s always cold. I believe she’d get chilblains in July. On the end is Aunt Cyril—you can see she is an aristocrat, the dear! I’m quite proud of my aunties—but nobody ever called them a yard of cats before,” and Molly giggled.
Beth Baldwin’s introduction to Rivercliff School was not all fun and frolic. On Monday came lessons—the beginning of the fall and winter semester. Miss Hammersly and her teachers were quite firm in their intention of making the students of Rivercliff work. And few of them—lazy or otherwise—cared to have a monthly report go home, across which was printed “defective.”
Miss Hammersly’s idea was that girls came to her to study—and for no other reason. This was not a boarding school where the pupils could work or not, as they pleased. “Ours is not an institution for the encouragement of girls lacking in gray-matter,” Miss Hammersly was wont to say. “I am very sorry for the defectives; but three such reports send them home.”
Beth found that the working hours of the school were fully occupied, and that the recreation hours were not long enough for any of the students to get very deeply into mischief.
Even jolly Molly had to repress her super-abundant spirits; or rather, after being under the ministrations of the instructors of Rivercliff School all day, by supper time the most spirited girl in the school was subdued.
“Goodness!” confessed Molly to her chum, coming wearily into Number Eighty and dropping an armful of books on Beth’s study table, “I feel like a wornout dishcloth that’s been drawn sixty times through a knothole! Miss Carroll has just about finished me this time, Beth Baldwin. If I don’t get up to-morrow morning, just write my seven aunties that I died in a good cause—in an attempt to acquire all the knowledge in the world within an infinitesimal length of time.”
“Oh, Molly! it’s not so bad as all that,” Beth said, laughing, though rather ruefully, for she found the system followed at Rivercliff entirely different from that at the Hudsonvale high school. Larry had been right. Three years at this establishment—if she could keep up—would put her a long lap ahead in education.
Her own end of the table was piled high with books, for the two chums studied each evening together—and preferably in Number Eighty. Eighty-one was too apt to be the Mecca of girls who desired to scamp their work and barely get through on the monthly reports “by the skin of their teeth.”
“Which is a perfectly proper expression, and not slang, Beth Baldwin, no matter what Miss Carroll may say,” Molly declared. “Who was it said it—Job or the psalmist?”
“That is your question—you answer it,” replied Beth. “But what do you make out of this awful passage Miss Felice has given us to construe? It’s a heart-breaker, isn’t it?”
They set to work. They were not the only studious girls on the corridor; but there was a good deal of noise outside, and Beth closed the door to shut some of it out. Having retired to Number Eighty, Molly hoped her old friends would not annoy her.
“I am determined to delight the aunts this year,” Molly said. “I’ve told them I have a new chum and that she is studious. Maybe it’s catching.”
This evening was within the first fortnight of the term. Naturally, Beth had not made many friends as yet. The girl who attends strictly to her lessons in a boarding school is slower in making friendships than she who is careless of her standing on the reports. So the gay ones were not apt to come and pound on the door of Number Eighty for admittance.
Not that Beth did not take plenty of recreation. Indeed, that was compulsory to a certain extent. There was a physical instructor and a splendid gymnasium—the latter a handsome building, the gift of a wealthy graduate of Miss Hammersly’s establishment.
There was a splendid athletic field, too, with a cinder track, courts for basket-ball and tennis; and at the foot of the bluff, which was reached in the school wagonette, was a boathouse with a number of two, four, and eight-oared shells, as well as canoes and a power launch of some size.
Nothing was neglected that would add to the physical development, as well as the mental well-being, of the girls. Miss Hammersly did not graduate weaklings in any particular.
Save Maude Grimshaw, such girls as had spoken to Beth had been kind. But except Molly and a few of her intimate friends, nobody at Rivercliff had paid very much attention to her. She had been popular in Hudsonvale, and she missed Mary Devine and her other schoolmates who had deferred to her there.
She did not even have an opportunity of talking with Cynthia Fogg, the strange girl who had come up to Rivercliff with her on the steamboat. She saw Cynthia now and then, going about her duties. She waited at a neighboring table to Beth’s in the dining-room. But there could be no communication of any extended character between the “young lady students” and the maids employed at the school. Madam Hammersly’s eye was too sharp.
This night, while Beth and Molly were deeply engaged in their books, both suddenly looked up to see an unexpected figure standing in the doorway of the passage into Molly’s room. It was that of a girl in a kimono with a red bag over her head, masking her completely, for there were only two little holes in the bag to see through. It was a startling apparition, and Molly exclaimed:
“Cracky-me! How you scared us! Go away—do!”
The girl behind the mask of turkey-red giggled. Then she stalked forward and placed two folded red bags, like her own, on the study table.
“Number Sixty-two. Ten-thirty,” she said, in a sepulchral voice, and immediately marched out again by the way she had come.
“Well!” gasped Beth.
But Molly began to giggle now. “It’s just awful—this trying to be a ‘grind.’ My poor, poor Bethesda! your chum’s former reputation is against our ever being the twin Minervas of Rivercliff School.”
“But what does this mean?” demanded Beth, trying on one of the bags.
“Kimono party—sometimes called red-head party. You can see what the bags are for. Unless you are familiar with the kimonos of the whole school, you can’t be sure of who is at the party—save the legal occupant of the room in which the party is held. And sometimes the girls exchange kimonos. So that helps.”
“Helps! How?”
“Why, if we are caught, and can run, the teacher or monitor who catches us can’t see who we are with the bags over our heads. And those who are captured can’t tell on the rest, for everybody’s masked and we can’t be sure. See?”
“Are you going to-night?” Beth asked.
“What number did she say?” rejoined Molly.
“Sixty-two.”
“Let’s! That’s Mamie Dunn’s,” cried Beth.
“Aren’t there two Sixty-twos?”
“Oh, the kimono parties have to be wing affairs. Guests can’t slip over from one wing to the other. They have to be localized.”
“Why?” asked the curious Beth.
“Why, there’s always somebody on watch at the top of the main flight of stairs—and there’s no other way to go from wing to wing than by that cross-corridor.”
“On watch all night, do you mean?”
“Sure. For fire protection; likewise if anybody should be taken sick in the night.”
“I suppose,” said Beth, reflectively, “that these after-hours parties are against the rules of the school?”
“I suppose they are,” admitted Molly, with serious mouth but twinkling eyes; “but I never really asked.”
Beth laughed. “Did you ever get caught at one of these parties?”
“Never mind about that! We’ll go to-night. All work and no play makes Jill just as dull as her brother.”
“We’ll do our tasks first, dear,” said Beth.
She was not a prude; but she felt herself in honor bound to keep up with all her lessons. She had been at Rivercliff long enough to know that she could not earn her diploma in any easy way. To fall back one recitation would mean hard effort to make it up. There were no delays for the slow and inattentive under Miss Hammersly.
Beth, of course, had written home several times. She had told the home folk of all the interesting things she had encountered thus far in her school life, and about her teachers and the students as she had met them with the one exception of Maude Grimshaw. She had not mentioned that haughty and purse-proud girl. Beth hoped she would never be obliged to come in contact with Maude again. She thought that, by letting her unpleasant neighbor strictly alone, Maude would let her alone.
She was yet to learn the fallacy of this belief—as well as much else that Beth could never have learned anywhere but at Rivercliff School.