Miss Bishop, page 21
She read on down: “. . . Among other changes for this year, the student body will say good-by to Old Central. Those who return next fall will find it listed among the missing. Razing of the old building will begin the morning after the Alumni banquet which will be held this year for sentiment’s sake in the old auditorium.”
It moved her unaccountably. She and Old Central—both would be listed among the missing. And old Chris—she must not forget him. He, too, had been associated with Old Central since its beginning.
And if Ella Bishop sat idly for a long time with the paper in her lap, let no one enter into the hushed inner chamber of her thoughts.
After a time she arose and took a light wrap from the hall closet, calling to Stena that she was going out for a walk by herself. Once outside, she turned up the street toward the Jensen’s little house across from the campus. When she tapped at the door, there was a muffled tread in the hall and old Chris himself came, shading his weak eyes with his hand.
“Good evening, Chris.”
“Vell . . . Miss Bis’op.” He took a sooty old pipe out of his mouth and gave an apologetic glance at his blue and white socks quite free from inhibiting shoes. That was the way Miss Bishop had affected him for several decades.
“Chris, they tell me Old Central is to come down at last.” To her surprise, she had to make an effort to keep her voice steady. She had not realized that it was meaning so much to her.
“Yes, dey do say so.” At the risk of a conflagration old Chris was pocketing his pipe. “Come on in, Miss Bis’op.”
“No, no thanks. You still have a key I suppose, Chris?”
Old Chris nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he added.
“I wonder if you will let me take it. It’s so nice to-night, I’d just like to go over the old building for the last time in a sort of ‘We who are about to die, salute you’ attitude.”
Old Chris had never heard of the Morituri Salutamus but he recognized fully the emotion in Miss Bishop’s voice.
“You will laugh at me for being so sentimental,” she said apologetically.
“No, I von’t,” old Chris shook his heavy gray head. “I von’t laugh at you. It’s got me a-feelin’ blue, too. I know every crack in de plaster ’n every knot in de woodwork.”
He shuffled back into the dark interior of the cottage and brought back the key,—a huge affair, like a key to some ancient castle.
“Good night, Chris, and thank you. If you see some one prowling around Old Central, don’t shoot or send for the campus policeman.”
Ella Bishop walked up through the campus under the elms. The moon was full and there was the heavy scent of syringas in the air, snatches of music came from Fraternity Row, and laughter from the steps of Alice Wayland Hall. It had the smell and feel of all the long-gone Commencements.
In front of Old Central she paused and looked at it with appraising eye. In the moonlight all discrepancies in the old building were hidden. One could not see the cracks in the brick under the ivy nor the settling window-frames nor the slight sagging of the steps. It looked sturdy, unyielding. It seemed holding up its head proudly. Like Miss Bishop.
She turned the huge key and pushed the iron latch which had clicked to three generations. Softly she stepped into the shadows of the hall. It was stuffy and chalk-scented,—but friendly, as though it welcomed her home. She had a swift feeling that the old building wanted her to know it held no grudge about her leaving, and smiled at the foolishness of the thought.
She crossed the hall and mounted the stairs, her hand slipping along the bannister which was as smooth as old ivory from the polishing of countless human palms.
Straight to her old classroom she passed, a large room with its rows of recitation seats, half in the moonlight, half in the shadow. She was not just sure what it was used for now, but had a faint impression of manual training projects on a bench by the window.
Toward the front of the room where the instructor’s desk stood, Ella Bishop walked softly as people do in the presence of the dead. A composite picture of all the classes she had ever taught seemed before her. Personalities looked at her from every recitation seat but she did not realize that in point of time they were sometimes fifty years apart.
There was Frank Farnsworth, indolent, mischievous, even stupid in English courses because he did not care for them, wanting only instruction in business administration. Why did she remember him? There was Anna Freybruger. She was a missionary, some one had told her. Over there sat Clarence Davis, a congressman now. Here laughing Esther Reese, a happy wife and mother. She summoned them back out of the shadows, not mature nor successful, but young freshmen, needing her guidance.
Slowly she circled the room, recalling a dozen events of the olden days. Queer how easily they came back to-night.
Then she turned toward the tower room, opened the door and stepped in. Once it had been her Gethsemane. On a day she had come in here full of happiness and the joy of living. When she went out, some of her had died. The part that had lived she had dedicated to young people, warming her cold heart at the fire of their youth, putting into her work all the love and interest she would have given to a husband, home, and children. Here she had said good-by to John Stevens, her love and admiration for him unbesmirched.
She crossed the little room, opened one of the windows and sat down by it. The May breeze, sweet with the smell of Commencements, came in and touched the soft tendrils of her white hair.
Memory went back on the road of the years. She tried to sum up the results of the journey. Nothing,—but age and near poverty. Foolishly, she had thought the teaching itself would compensate her for all of her devotion to the task. A deep bitterness assailed her. It was not right nor just, to give all and receive nothing. She had been a fool to think that if you gave your heart the service rendered would be its own reward.
Across the boulevard the sorority houses were lighted to the last window. Cars were at the curbing. Young people came and went. How unnecessary she was now to this newer college life. Once she had seemed indispensable. Slow tears came, the more painful because hitherto she had met life gallantly with high hopes, deep courage, boundless faith.
Ella Bishop raised her face to the May sky as though to hold intimate conversation with some one. How foolish she had been to think that by binding herself to youth she could retain her own light spirits. That early dedication of hers to the lives of her students was all Quixotic. That old idea of carrying a torch ahead to show them the way to unrevealed truths had been all wasted effort. Every waking thought she had given to them, watched her every act and decision that she might be a worthy example.
There were instructors who heard recitations and then left their responsibilities hanging like raincoats in their lockers. She had not been able to do that. She had given the best that was in her, not only that her students’ minds would further unfold, but whenever they needed assistance for those other sides of their lives, the physical and the moral. A suggestion of eye-strain in a student and she had not rested until the matter was rectified. A knowledge of recurring headaches and she had not known peace until the source was traced. And then that other thing which she had noticed among the newcomers, that elusive thing which was neither all physical nor all mental nor all moral, that subtle thing which crept into the lives of youth. How she had pondered over it, questioned and advised. Many a mother, less motherly than herself, had not known the danger, or having known, had lifted no hand to guide. All this she had done for her students,—and what was her reward? Old age and poverty. And perhaps later,—loneliness. For youth not only must be served, but after that it forgets. Tears came again. And some were for lost youth and some were for advancing age, but some were for a faith that was shattered.
There was nothing now to look forward to—but death. Death! How little thought she had ever given to it! So full of living,—her hands so filled with duties,—she had existed only from day to day, doing the hour’s tasks as well as she could.
She pictured herself lying dead—out in Forest Hill by her mother—under the leaves—
Suddenly a pigeon flew against the bell overhead and it tapped, so that in a great whirl of beating wings all the pigeons flew from the bell tower, their bodies almost brushing the windows. Startled, she jumped up and looked furtively behind her. She had that queer suffocating feeling that one has when he is conscious of a frightened sensation. Usually placid, she realized her heart was pounding wildly. All at once the familiar old building was cold and forbidding. It was as though there were soft foot-falls, phantom whisperings. The ghosts of all her yesterdays seemed haunting the place. Was her brain addled? Had she played too long with her memories? Was she slipping mentally like her mother? All her poise was gone. She wanted to fly as from a tomb.
It seemed almost a physical impossibility for her to return through that shadow-laden classroom.
She gathered herself together and crossed the office to the classroom door. Eerie rustlings, low murmurs, faint mocking laughter played tricks with her imagination. The bell tapped faintly. The pigeons swirled past the window again.
In a perspiration of nervousness, she crossed the moonlighted floor of her old classroom, passed through the upper hall, down the long stairway with its bannister polished by a thousand hands, and hurried out into the clear air of the night.
She crossed the campus and went home, tired in every portion of her body, every bone aching, every nerve tingling with fatigue. At home she went straight to her room with an intense longing to get quickly into the cool depths of her bed. She took off each garment wearily, stopping once or twice to cast longing eyes toward the haven of her couch with a half-formed decision to drop onto it as she was. With extra effort at control she finished the task and slipped into the welcome comfort of that familiar port of rest.
Getting under the quilts was like crawling under leaves, she thought vaguely. Either one meant rest. Rest for a tired teacher. What difference did it make—quilts or leaves? There was peace under either. To let your tired mind and body sink into the blessed comfort of them,—quilts or leaves,—to let them cling softly and gently to you, easing the ache and the long, long weariness.
What difference did it make? Leaves . . . or quilts . . . ? Quilts . . . or leaves . . . ?
CHAPTER XLI
“You know, Gretchen, I think I’m not going to the Alumni banquet this year.” Ella Bishop was sitting in front of her dressing-table and speaking over her shoulder to the girl in the hall. She had tried to make her voice casual, matter-of-fact, but she had a feeling that it quivered and cracked “like the old woman I suppose I might as well admit I am,” she thought.
“Not going? Why?” Gretchen, attractive as always in a white sport outfit, came to the door.
“Oh, I just thought I wouldn’t this year—leaving as I am. . . .” She said it so lightly that she was highly pleased with herself. “And as long as Old Central is to come down—you know it just wouldn’t be good taste to consume food in your own mausoleum.”
“Oh, Aunt Ella, what a terrible thought.”
“And anyway I’ve been to a thousand. My word, Gretchen, some time I’m going to sit down and figure the hours I’ve spent at them, and the words I’ve heard going to waste in the ponderous speeches that have been made. Now, for instance . . . let’s see . . . I began going in 1880 . . . this year would make fifty-three times . . . no, fifty-two . . . I escaped one, anyway, the year I was east. Fifty-two Commencements . . . say three hours each allowed for sitting at the tables,—one hundred and fifty-six hours . . . that’s . . . wait a minute . . . over nineteen working days of eight hours each.” She was enjoying her bit of irony.
“The hours I’ve spent at them, dear heart,
Are but so many words to me,
I count them over, every one apart,
Their ora-tor-ee! Their ora-tor-ee!”
She laughed at her own light humor,—had complete control of herself now. “For nineteen full working days have I listened to flowery rhapsodies or ponderous advice. As for the energy expended, it has been immeasurable.”
“Oh, but you must go.” Gretchen was earnest in her vehemence. “The very fact that you are leaving, Aunt Ella, is the biggest reason for being there.”
“I suppose you’re right. Who am I to shirk?” she answered in the same light vein she had been employing. “Twenty full days would end the whole thing with a flourish, make it an even number, and one can always go into a sort of coma and think of other things if the oratory proves too powerful an anesthetic. And, anyway, I’ll have perfect peace and freedom for they haven’t asked me to talk this year.”
It was rather an important Commencement, what with its being Ella’s last while a faculty member, and Gretchen graduating. Hope and Dick came in time for the festivities, Dick never quite rugged since the war and so never quite the success he might have been, Hope heavy and sweet-faced, and both wrapped up in pride for their lovely daughter. And Ronald Smith came, driving through with his grandmother, old Mrs. Irene Van Ness Hunt, wrinkled and sallow, and looking so much older than Ella that one could not imagine they had been girls together. But she had a whole rumble seat full of bags containing gay lace dresses and high-heeled pumps, and every time she shook her sprightly old head, a different pair of long earrings jangled against her magenta-colored cheeks.
Ella housed them all but Ronald who stayed at the Phi Psi chapter house.
The night of the banquet they were all going together over to Old Central, which, lighted from top to bottom, was making merry on the eve of its own private Waterloo.
Every one was ready quite on time but Gretchen who seemed slower than usual with her dressing. Ella was groomed and ready long before the young girl, a full half-hour before Ronald came to join the group. Always punctual, she could not tolerate the careless way in which the young people seemed to regard time.
“At least, let’s be there when the fruit cocktail is eaten,” she called up the stairs, and added more for her own pleasure than the waiting group: “I can visualize the whole thing from that well-known cocktail to lights out. I could even stay at home and hear in my head every word that will be spoken.”
Old Miss Bishop looked nice. She had on her white lace dress and black velvet evening wrap. Her snow white hair was beautifully groomed and even the inevitable black velvet band at her throat which she wore this last year served not only its pitiful little duty of covering those tell-tale shrunken neck tissues but of accentuating the loveliness of her hair and the pose of her head.
There were so many cars parked around the campus when they arrived that Ella said: “An unusually large attendance, it looks . . . that will be on account of sentiment for Old Central. We really shouldn’t have been late.”
She hastened the pace of the group a little, but Ronald and Gretchen, strolling exasperatingly up the curving walk and around the Administration Building toward Old Central, called to them not to be in such a hurry. Ella was thinking sentimentally that the lights of the old building looked familiar and friendly sending out their message for all to come to the festivities with no thought that to-morrow night and other nights they would not beckon.
One of the big busses that had replaced the old jangling street car disgorged a few people who slipped in ahead of the little group of six. Otherwise, the campus was deserted.
“We’re the very last,” Ella complained. As though Ronald and Gretchen had not used skillful maneuvering to see that this was so.
Old Chris stood in the lobby, almost unrecognizable in his best suit and large shining shoes. His massive gray head was held a bit stiffly above his low loose collar, and his wide bony shoulders drooped heavily under the weight of their years.
As these last comers entered he pulled on the rope dangling through his big gnarled hand. High above them in the old belfry the bell rang, and with a great whirl of wings the pigeons flew out.
“Pretty nigh de last time,” he said to Ella as she passed. “Don’t it sort o’ get you?”
She nodded wordlessly.
Just inside the door of the old auditorium they paused. Something was unusual, Ella was thinking. Not for years had there been such an enormous turn-out. She caught a fleeting vision of rows upon rows of tables, a multitude of people seated at them, flowers, class banners, white-coated waiters, overflow tables in adjoining rooms.
The bell might have been a signal, for the orchestra broke into “Pomp and Circumstance.” Something was happening. The diners were rising as one man. All faces were turned toward the group at the door. President Crowder and the chairman of the board were coming toward them. They were offering Ella their arms, one on her left, one on her right. Ronald was slipping off her velvet wrap. Gretchen was whispering: “All for you, sweet pumpkin.”
Applause broke, wild and unrestrained. In a daze Ella took the arms of the two men and together they walked the full length of the huge room.
Together the president and the board member opened a double gateway of ferns and escorted her to a chair at the head of the long sweep of tables. The chair was rose covered, and when they pulled it out and seated her in the sweet-smelling bower, Miss Bishop looked like a white rose herself. The president and the board chairman seated themselves at each side and the great audience sat down. There was an orchid corsage at Ella’s plate,—and quite trivially it came to her that she had never worn an orchid in her life.
It was all very hard to comprehend. Her mind felt numb, callous, incapable of concentrated thought. A drowning person must feel so. “It isn’t true,” she kept thinking. “I’m moving about only in dreams. This thing hasn’t happened for me. I’m an old woman, worn out, poverty stricken, shelved, with nothing to show for my life.”
