Chapter XVI: Who Wrote It?

“It’s bad taste, anyway,” said Annabel Harmon.

“To call it by no worse name,” responded Elizabeth Darcy.

“Almost nothing can be worse than bad taste,” rejoined Annabel.

The two girls, at a table in the conversation room, were looking eagerly at the page of a newspaper.

“Why, what’s the trouble?” asked Polly, who had been standing near the window. “Has anybody had the bad taste to commit a murder, or burglary, or some other crime? I see that you have a yellowish journal there.”

The two, absorbed in their paper, did not reply, and Polly drew near them until she could read the headlines: “Is a College Education Worth While for Girls?” “Lowering of the Standard by a University Professor to meet the Demands of Woman.”

“Dear me!” cried Polly, “this does look interesting.”

“Yes,” responded Annabel, “read further and you will find it more so. You can take the paper for a few minutes. I’m glad that I happened to buy one in the Square when I came out from town.”

Polly sat down with the newspaper. Under the large headlines were others in smaller type that showed that the professor to whom reference was made was a Harvard professor, and then she began to read. Surely there was something very familiar in what followed. It purported to be the transcript of a few pages from the history note-book of a student at Radcliffe. It was all very familiar. Why, of course! Clarissa’s notes! No one who had ever gazed upon them could mistake the style. She remembered having read this very lecture last year when preparing for her examinations. Clarissa was always generous in lending her note-books, and Polly had had the use of this for a day or two. But what had seemed only funny within the covers of a note-book seemed very impertinent thus exposed to the gaze of every one who cared to buy a penny paper. Reading further, Polly learned that the article was copied from an obscure magazine to which the Radcliffe notes had been sent with a plaintive inquiry whether such lectures could greatly benefit woman.

“Poor Professor Z!” sighed Polly. “He certainly lectures in this style sometimes. For my own part, I used to enjoy the colloquialisms, and he used to give us so much besides that it isn’t fair to pillory him.”

“What do you think of Clarissa now?” asked Elizabeth Darcy.

“Clarissa?” repeated Polly. “What has she to do with it?”

Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders. “Most of us have seen Clarissa’s note-books; if she didn’t write this, who did?”

“I won’t say that this is not Clarissa’s style, I won’t even say that these are not her notes; but I will say that she didn’t print them.”

“I wish that I had your confidence in Clarissa.” Elizabeth spoke with an accent of pity. “You must admit that she loves to make fun of people.”

“She is not half as bad as I am,” rejoined Polly, stoutly defending her friend. “Why, I have even made fun of her,—that was before I knew her so well. But she bore me no malice. In fact, she never takes revenge, and there is malice in this article.”

“You admit that these are Clarissa’s notes, and yet you don’t think them malicious.”

The last speaker was Annabel, who had joined the group.

“Come, Miss Harmon, be fair; it is one thing to write nonsense intended only for one’s own eyes, and another to put it before the public. Clarissa, I know, did not have the notes published.” Then Polly turned away.

Polly was by no means comfortable as she left Fay House, and the better to disprove the accusation made by Elizabeth, she went to the stationer’s in the Square to buy a copy of the newspaper. It was the last one to be had. “It’s been in the greatest demand,” explained the attendant. “Some kind of a college article, I believe; I haven’t had time to look at it myself.”

Polly folded the paper and walked down Brattle Street. “I believe I’ll ask Clarissa point blank.” Polly had a slightly uncomfortable doubt as she thought of the article, and it happened, as it so often does happen in such cases, that when she met Clarissa she could not ask the question. “If she hasn’t heard, it would only disturb her,” was her excuse. Afterwards she was sorry that she had not at once gone to her.

Within twenty-four hours almost every one at Radcliffe had read the article. Those who did not own papers borrowed them, and the critics and partisans of Clarissa ranged themselves strongly on one side or the other. Some, while blaming Clarissa for letting her notes get into print, said that it was no more than Professor Z deserved, since the tone of his lectures had never been sufficiently academic. Others were glad that he was now absent on his Sabbatical year, for if he were lecturing in Cambridge they were sure that his wrath would have been pretty keenly felt. Ruth, of course, took Annabel Harmon’s view of the affair. Julia, while loath to think that Clarissa had done this in a spirit of malice, thought that she had allowed herself to be carried away by the spirit of fun, without realizing that the whole thing was a deflection from the straight line of honor. She and Pamela discussed the matter at some length, and very quickly agreed that the relation of a professor to a small class was a confidential relation, and that only an instructor who was on very good terms with his class would talk to them after the fashion of Professor Z. Consequently, to quote his direct language was like telling family secrets.

Yet with it all nobody dared speak to Clarissa. They quoted what this professor or that professor’s wife had said; how one had declared that nothing would induce him to lecture at Radcliffe, how another had termed this the natural result of trying to benefit women,—they would merely hold up their benefactors to ridicule,—and still no one dared reprove Clarissa. The Western girl wrapped herself in a forbidding manner, and not even Polly dared speak of the article or its effects.

But one day, turning the matter over in her mind, she came to a decision. “A party will be the very thing,” she said to herself, “and Clarissa shall give it. Ruth and Julia and Lois Forsaith, oh, yes, and Pamela, and two or three others,—as many as she can afford chairs for,—it will be the very thing.”

Clarissa’s room was in a small, neat house in a neat side street. Her landlady had other boarders, but she took a real interest in them all.

Clarissa’s room looked on a little yard filled with pear trees, and the children of the neighborhood played constantly under her windows. This did not disturb her, for her nerves were not near the surface. Sometimes she called the children to her room and gave them a treat of fruit or sweet things. Mrs. Freeman’s other boarders thought Clarissa rather frivolous. One of them was a timid Freshman who studied unremittingly. Two of the others were graduate students, delving into zoölogy, and other “mussy sciences” (Clarissa’s phraseology), and the fifth was an inoffensive Sophomore. The two graduates roomed together. Clarissa had the best room in the house, but the Freshman had a small room under the eaves. The Freshman sometimes complained that she had made a mistake, and that she should have had a room in a lodging-house where she could have boarded herself with the aid of a chafing-dish and gas stove.

“And starve to death, with nobody nigh to hinder,” said Clarissa. “I’m glad that kind of thing is not encouraged at Radcliffe. But I wish that you had the room on my floor, instead of those zoölogists. Often about ten P.M. when I’ve finished studying I’d slip in and talk with you. Sometimes I knock on the zoölogical door, but if they let me in I feel like a criminal, for I can see that they are making a great effort to be polite, while they wish me a thousand miles away. They like to study well into the small hours, but as they pay for their own oil nobody can well object. I’m not half as entertaining to them as those squirmy things they keep in bottles. The only real gaiety in which they ever indulge is an ethical discussion with Pamela; just imagine the combination, ethics and zoölogy!”

The other girl laughed. “You might start a discussion at your party.”

“No, thank you, it’s to be a poster party, nothing more nor less improving than posters will be considered worthy of mention.”

Clarissa had yielded to Polly’s plans for the party, understanding the spirit in which it had been arranged. It had been talked of indefinitely before the affair of the newspaper; and although Polly did not now explain why she was so anxious to have her friend turn entertainer at this particular time, Clarissa understood, and Polly knew that she understood.

Nearly all who had been invited responded to Clarissa’s invitation, and one windy evening they gathered very contentedly around the open fire in her room. Clarissa’s room was as different as possible from Julia’s. To its rather homely furnishings she had added various things that had caught her fancy without regard to any scheme of art. There was a vivid Navajo blanket over her couch, and two Indian baskets from the Southwest on a bracket in a corner. Some Japanese fans were displayed over the mantle-piece, and just above them hung in a black frame a fine photograph of the Arch of Titus. But the other three walls, whether beautiful or ugly in the matter of their everyday decorations, for this evening were hidden by posters—posters large, small, ugly, beautiful, covered every spot.

“I know,” said Clarissa, in explanation, after welcoming her guests, “I know that posters have gone out of fashion. That is partly why I’ve taken them up. I had thought of offering prizes to the girl who could guess the artist of the largest number, but instead of that I’m going to explain them myself. Lo! here is a pointer that I brought over from Fay House this very afternoon.” So armed with the long wooden stick, Clarissa moved about the room, explaining much after the fashion of an auctioneer who has something to dispose of.

“This you will see is undoubtedly French. You could tell it by the anatomy of the cats, if in no other way. Such creatures were never seen on this side of the Atlantic. Jim got it for me. The real name of the work of art is ‘Lait Pur Sterilisé;’” and as she paused for a moment, they all gazed with fitting admiration on the child in a red dress drinking from a bowl under the envious eyes of three cats.

“Well, it’s better,” said Polly, “than some of those greenery yallery things. No wonder Aubrey Beardsley died young.”

“Oh, Polly, you artless creature, didn’t you dote on the Yellow Book?”

“Not I,” replied Polly. “I measured Mrs. Patrick Campbell as once portrayed there, and in proportion to the length of her head as there shown she must be about ten feet tall.”

“Why, Polly, I didn’t realize that you knew so much about Art.”

“Oh, I know more things than I am sometimes credited with,” and there was an undertone of deeper meaning in Polly’s voice.

“Here’s a Grasset,” continued Clarissa, resuming her explanations. “Isn’t it a beauty?”

“No, no, Clarissa,” said Julia, “I like this better;” and rising, she put her hand on a poster with a Puritan maiden carrying mistletoe.

“You show your taste,” said Clarissa, “that’s a Rhead.” Though hung near Dudley Hardy’s “Gaiety Girl” in poster land, the two did not seem inharmonious neighbors. Not far from them was Bemliardt’s Jeanne d’Arc, and for fifteen minutes or more Clarissa kept her friends amused with the poster show. Before her art lecture was quite at an end, Julia as assistant hostess had lit the lamp under the chafing-dish, and then when the others found that fudge-making was the next thing on the programme, each one wished to offer her own receipt, and to the great surprise of the company it was found that each receipt varied a little from the others.

“First you grate a pound of chocolate into the chafing-dish,” began Polly.

“Oh, not a pound—half a pound at first,” interrupted Julia.

“It’s a great deal better to begin by melting your butter, and then put in a pint of milk,” added Ruth.

“I never use any milk,” interposed Clarissa.

“Then you let it simmer half an hour,” resumed Polly.

“Oh, there isn’t any fixed length of time,” cried Ruth again; “just let it cook until it’s done.”

“How do you know when it’s done?”

Then followed a Babel of voices, as each one told what she thought the proper test; and a listener, I fear, who knew nothing of fudge-making, would have had hard work to select a working receipt from the directions given by these merry girls.

By the time the fudge was ready the ball had been set rolling, and it was evident that Clarissa’s party was a success. While Ruth and Lois were superintending a second chafing-dish, in which a rarebit was preparing, Polly picked up a guitar and began to accompany herself, as she sang the opening lines of one of the Radcliffe classics, “The Mermaid.”

“That’s just the thing to cheer us up.”

“As if you needed cheering! But here it is!” And Polly struck the chords with a firm hand, as she sang about the little mermaid who

“Could not even speak Acroparthianic Greek,
And she’d no instruction in Theology.
One day she found, as she swam around,
A Radcliffe catalogue,
Which shone afar like an evening star
From out the mist and fog.
She paused to rest on a billow’s crest,
In a wreath of sparkling foam,
And when she had read what the catalogue said,
She decided to leave her home.
She saw at once that she was a dunce
And ought to go to college.
So dressed in her best with a hat from Céleste,
She set out for the shrine of knowledge.
The cars were so filled she was almost killed,
But she found she could easily swim
Up Garden Street, that road so neat
That has Radcliffe on its brim.”

The last two lines were loudly applauded, for the mud of Garden Street was constantly ridiculed by the college girls to be beyond description. The song proceeded to describe the advent of the mermaid at Fay House:

“She told her race, and her boarding-place,
And her age (less a year, maybe),
But when the question came,
‘What’s your grandma’s middle name?’
She wept and turned to flee.”

“The regular Boston question,” said Clarissa, with an expression of scorn.

“Don’t interrupt,” cried Ruth, as Polly sang the chorus of each verse.

“Oh, the ocean swell is all very well
For frivolous sport and play,
But the cultured mind you’ll seldom find
Beneath the salt sea spray.”

Other songs followed this,—the “Hunting Song” from the “Princess Perfection,” snatches from one or two real operas; and at last as they sat around the open fire drinking lemonade—for the rarebit was now a thing of the past—Clarissa turned down the lights, and proposed that they should tell weird stories. No one of the eight or nine present was excused. Even Ernestine Dunton had to do her part, and she had unbent to an extent that was astonishing to Ruth and Clarissa; for in the preceding year when she had been their Senior adviser, she had seemed the personification of seriousness. She was now back at Radcliffe as a graduate student, and in certain ways she had begun to unbend.

As her friends bade her good-night, Clarissa knew that her party had been a success; for Polly, lingering a little behind the others, put out her hand and whispered, “You know that we don’t believe that you did that foolish thing, don’t you?” and Clarissa, returning the pressure, replied, “Of course you could not believe it.”