Fidelia/Chapter 4
TO the tinkling of her alarm clock which she had set to ring twenty minutes earlier than the other girls in the house were to be roused, Fidelia awoke and almost instantly arose and went to bathe. Upon hearing her in the hall, Mrs. Fansler looked out and gazed with admiration at the clear freshness of Fidelia's face in the haggard glow of electric light at daybreak.
"You're early, child," said Mrs. Fansler, pleased. She had supposed that Fidelia would be one to dally in bed and to rush down to breakfast at the last moment. Mrs. Fansler had been prepared to indulge her somewhat.
Fidelia would have liked often to lie abed in the morning but boarding-school had trained her, when she was little, to the advisability of always rising promptly and making as little trouble as possibe; so now she was bathed and again in her room and was dressing when the other alarm clocks began sounding.
Each ring stirred a slight, agreeable excitement; she liked the feeling of "I'm back to it again" which the sounds quickened; she liked the familiar smell of second-grade coffee boiling and of eggs and bacon being fried in quantities for the boarding-house breakfast. She listened for the sleepy and the crisp hellos and good mornings in the hall; for the generous offer, "You go ahead; I'm in no hurry" and the grateful acceptance, "Oh, you dear, honestly, aren't you? I've got to make an eight o'clock" and the rest of the chatter of the girls going to and from the bath.
One tapped gently at her door. "Breakfast in ten minutes," she called with friendly warning.
"Oh, thank you!" Fidelia replied. "I'm nearly ready."
She was dressing slowly and carefully, giving particular attention to her hair. She liked to dress for a definite purpose and as she gazed into the glass she thought of how David Herrick had viewed her under the light of the glaring street lamp last night. "He liked me," she thought. As she brushed her glorious hair, she thought of him seeing its color by daylight and she thought of Alice Sothron arranging her soft, dark hair to please the same man.
When the gong sounded, Fidelia descended to breakfast, neither the first nor the last of the fifteen girls in the dining-room. She had met them all at dinner last evening and she was aware that they had talked her over since that occasion; each girl knew whether or not she liked Fidelia Netley and probably most of them had verbally declared themselves. Fidelia felt conscious of friends here, foes there, as she replied to the girls' good mornings. There were two tables in the dining-room and Fidelia's place was at the larger, which was set for eight. Her neighbor on her left was the same as at dinner last night; but a girl named Edith Lacey, who had been next her on the right at dinner, now was two places away and a thin, intense, nervous girl, who wore glasses and whose name was Dorothy Hess, had moved into Miss Lacey's chair.
"I asked Edith to change with me," Dorothy whispered. "You and I will be in the same classes, you see." And Dorothy took from the bowl of fruit the finest orange and laid it upon Fidelia's plate.
Fidelia warmed and she thanked Dorothy and cut the orange; she wanted to give it back but she realized she must accept it. Dorothy was the girl who had rapped at her door and Fidelia guessed that last night, in the discussion at this house over Fidelia Netley, this thin, intense, unattractive girl had come forward as her especial protector; and, probably, Edith Lacey had sided against her. Fidelia never knew why a girl like Dorothy Hess would suddenly, and without any reason, become fanatically her friend; but she knew that a girl like Dorothy always would. At every school which Fidelia had attended, this had been so.
Dorothy was trembling a little with excitement and Fidelia wanted to clasp her thin, quivering hand; but instead she said:
"Are you a senior? Why, you must be the youngest senior in college!"
She brought a flush of pleasure to Dorothy's pale cheek.
"No, there's a boy in our class who's only eighteen," Dorothy told modestly. "I'm nineteen this spring."
"She's going through in three years; and she's just about at the top of every course she takes," a girl opposite put in.
"Why!" said Fidelia.
"She's got Phi Beta Kappa so cinched that it's practically lying in her lap," the other girl continued with a sharpness of emphasis just on the edge of a taunt.
Fidelia did not feel this meant for her; and, indeed, the girl opposite glanced at Edith Lacey as she spoke. Fidelia discreetly kept silent; the others at the table were still for the moment for they were conscious of a delicate situation; and Fidelia could guess what it was.
Miss Lacey, who evidently did not like Fidelia Netley, was a sorority girl; Dorothy Hess and the girl opposite were not. In this house of fourteen girls, besides Fidelia, there were eight who wore on their blouses the pin of one or another of the college sororities; six girls wore no emblem at all. The fourteen had been coming to these same tables three times a day, they had been rooming side by side and exchanging a dozen times a day the little courtesies which Fidelia had overheard that morning; yet if ever a house was set against itself, in secret bitterness and hidden soreness of soul, this house of fifteen girls was so divided. For here were eight marked by the gold and jeweled symbols of approval by their collegemates; here were eight who bore on their blouses the proof that others had welcomed them at the university, had found them delightful and desirable and so had initiated them into the elect band who called each other "sister." And here were six who, willingly or without their will, but by the mere fact of their presence in college, had offered themselves for this same approval and election, but who, having been seen by the select and having been met and talked with, had been passed by as not wanted.
Naturally it was easy for a delicate situation to arise between these groups; naturally the girls, who had been ignored, became sensitive before the girls who had been preferred. Some of the more sensitive left college, Fidelia knew; some simply endured; but others, and often the frailest and most sensitive, "fought back." And Fidelia understood that this was what Dorothy Hess was doing when she was overworking herself to stand at the top of every class. Disregarded by the sorority girls, she determined to prove herself as good or better than they; and, if she could not make them give her a sorority pin, she would win from them the prize of scholarship—the key of Phi Beta Kappa—with which the faculty decorated the honor students of the class.
Fidelia appreciated that Miss Lacey coveted Phi Beta Kappa but probably would not get it, while Dorothy Hess was sure to; reference to that fact gave the opposite girl a certain satisfaction; yet it seemed to give Dorothy none.
Fidelia felt impulsively for Dorothy and she clasped one of Dorothy's thin, tense hands under the table.
"What's your major?" Fidelia asked, taking up the vernacular for discussing classwork which she had dropped the year and a half ago.
"History; I love it."
"So do I," said Fidelia. "Music and history are what I'm here for."
A sorority girl at the other end of the table smiled at nothing at all unless it was at this protestation of Fidelia's serious purpose at college; Miss Lacey also seemed to find something amusing; and Fidelia felt Dorothy's fingers clasping her own more tightly. She began to realize that the girls, who most obviously did not like her, were all wearers of society pins and that her friends were among the other girls.
She knew that they all had learned now that she was a Tau Gamma from Minnesota and also that last night the local Tau Gamma girls, who lived at Willard Hall, had had her "over." She wondered how much more Edith Lacey, for instance, might know which Fidelia herself did not. Miss Lacey, though a member of a different sorority, appeared to be an intimate friend of several Tau Gammas.
"I hear you met Myra Taine last night," Miss Lacey commented. "She and I roomed together freshman year. I dropped into her room half an hour after you'd gone."
Fidelia took this remark as almost threatening. Of course she had seen that Myra Taine disliked her and she wondered if, after she had left Myra's room, Tau Gamma had decided to turn thumbs down upon her and Myra Taine had hinted at this.
Fidelia knew that the local Tau Gamma girls could refrain from inviting her to join them; but it was not at all probable; for it would put too great a stigma upon a girl. It would amount to saying, publicly, "Tau Gamma has met you and written about you to the other chapters which you joined; we've found something the matter and so refuse to take you in."
No, Fidelia thought; they would not do that; but they could. They could put her in a position more humiliating than Dorothy Hess's; they could make her one who was not merely ignored, but who was outcast.
She gazed out the window and saw several men on the snowy walks going to classes, undoubtedly; she forgot her apprehensions and finished breakfast cheerfully.
Many men were on the walks when she left Mrs. Fansler's door in company with Dorothy; and others were appearing from houses up and down the block, hailing one another and calling to girls through the fine, flickering snow which was in the air this morning.
The wind of yesterday and of the night had ceased and the day was calm and mild under light gray clouds which sifted down this pleasant snow and which now and then let sudden, gleaming shafts of the sun slip through.
Fidelia came out in her brown mink coat and toque with Dorothy beside her in a plain, blue cloth coat; and everybody who glanced their way, looked again.
"They're asking who you are," Dorothy whispered in her excitement at appearing as companion to this beautiful person and she flushed as they came down to the walk. Fidelia did not flush at all; she was used to being stared at and could gaze back easily and impersonally.
She did so now, into the eyes of boys, mostly. Some of these on the way to classes really were men, she saw; but no one here was like David Herrick.
She had an extravagant idea, after meeting him so quickly upon coming to this place, that perhaps it abounded in such men of unusual attractiveness; but here were boys and men of only the ordinary sorts.
On the sidewalk, where the snow had been plowed away in a path hardly wide enough for two to walk together and for another person to pass, Dorothy lost her flush of importance; for the men, who were overtaking Fidelia and herself, began pushing by in single file, each peering at Fidelia. No one gave so much as a look at Dorothy Hess and no one spoke to her.
Then the door of the Delta Alpha house opened and Fidelia, glancing up, saw on the porch the short man who had directed her at the station and who, as she now knew, was Myra Taine's friend, Landon Blake. Two boys, probably freshmen, were with him and behind was the tall figure of David Herrick.
Fidelia looked away immediately but not before she observed that David Herrick had seen her and had started forward impulsively and then stopped.
Going on, with eyes ahead, she said to herself: "He wants to catch up with me but thinks he shouldn't; but he wants to."
Fidelia's pulses pricked with her instinct for flight; she wanted to hurry on to make him pursue, if he was to speak with her, but Dorothy detained her. Dorothy, who was ignored by so many men, knew the prominent man of the college and she was determined to show it; so she held Fidelia by her fur sleeve.
"There's a friend of mine I want you to know," and she faced Fidelia about to David Herrick.
He approached, feeling self-conscious at immediately finding Fidelia Netley this morning; for he had been thinking about her more than he liked. Of course he had been thinking much about Alice; he had been impatient, as never before, to have the hour for classes come because it would bring him Alice. But also he had been looking forward to seeing Fidelia Netley.
He called this mere curiosity because she interested everybody so unusually. He said naturally he wanted to know why and he wanted to know more about her "as a person." That was the way he phrased it to himself; he did not say, "as a girl" but "as a person."
The Delta Alphas had talked about her again at breakfast that morning. "That red-haired queen from Fansler's sure stirred up a flurry at the Hall." Dave had kept out of the conversation; he did not even mention that he had met her. The talk was wholly unobjectionable yet he did not like it.
After he finished breakfast, he delayed in the front of the house and several times glanced out the window toward Mrs. Fansler's; yet he denied to himself that he started from the house when he did because he had seen Fidelia Netley come out. Naturally he would be starting then; everybody was going to classes. But he could not deny the sensation which seized him when she looked up at him.
She did not nod; some girls make it a rule never to speak to men on a fraternity house porch. Probably that was her reason, he thought. He liked that in Fidelia Netley, though Alice always spoke to him wherever she saw him. He did not mean to overtake Miss Netley but Dorothy Hess forced it. Dorothy let Lan pass, though he spoke to her, and she let the two freshmen pass; then she hailed David by name and he took off his cap and advanced and shook hands with Dorothy in awkward formality. He was feeling that he was making something of a show of himself when Fidelia Netley spoke to him and explained to Dorothy how she had met him last night. "But it was hardly for a moment," she added.
Her way of saying this, which put far more importance on this meeting which Dorothy had arranged, pleased the plain, nervous girl who sidled to the outside of the path, leaving Dave to walk next to Fidelia; and it banished Dave's feeling that he had made a show of himself. He caught step with Fidelia Netley.
"We're giving you better weather this morning," he started, tritely.
She nodded. "Just right. I'm going to love this place. You do, particularly, of course."
"Why particularly?" Dave asked.
"You've done so wonderfully well here; and your father was here before you. You must feel it especially your college."
She said it with such warmth that Dave glowed with the feeling which she was so sure was in him. "Yes," he admitted.
"You probably never thought of leaving here after you started; but I—well, I seem to have been looking around, don't I?"
"What have you been looking for?" Dave asked quickly; and it was like last night when he said abruptly, without thinking, "You're trying us now." He did not intentionally put such a personal question as that but, when he was with this girl, an impulse for the personal seemed to surprise him. He realized it; and told himself he must watch out for it.
"What does any one look for, Mr. Herrick?" she returned.
"Why, what she hasn't got," Dave replied practically. "What didn't you have, Miss Netley?"
There he had done it again with her; and more baldly.
"What you evidently found here," Fidelia answered, "since you've stayed. But that answer doesn't tell anything to you; for you've found so much—fame and riches and Miss Sothron."
Dave colored slightly, not because of her mention of Alice but because till that mention he had completely forgotten Alice. He looked away from Fidelia Netley to the corner ahead where frequently he met Alice and where he expected to find her this morning; he did not see her and he gazed at Fidelia, catching her eyes for a brief, friendly glance.
"I never heard so little called fame and fortune before, Miss Netley," he objected, smiling; and she smiled and they agreed, in that glance, to let the argument go.
"Miss Netley," he called her; but to himself he thought: "Fidelia Netley."
He had not liked her name when Alice told it to him, but it had interested him; now he liked it. It seemed a particularly exuberant sort of name fitting to this most unusual girl. When she spoke, or when he did, she always looked at him but when she gazed ahead or spoke to Dorothy, he took his chance to observe the warm hue of her hair and the clear, agreeable glow of her smooth skin. He liked to watch the line of her profile with her pretty nose, not quite straight but with a slight, impulsive, attractive tilt; it was a nose which shortened, fascinatingly, when she laughed. He kept watching it and her lips which were full and soft and warm-looking and ever changing in expression. "She must have any amount of feeling," Dave said to himself and liked her for it; and he let himself appreciate the vigor of her body and her beauty of form.
He could not help contrasting her, physically, with Dorothy Hess; every one else on the street was contrasting them when they stared at Fidelia Netley and never glanced at Dorothy twice. He was different from being beside Miss Netley; he felt keener from a stimulation which was so definitely from her that he could not deny it.
Also, he was feeling actively free this morning. Of course Fidelia Netley had nothing to do with that. He had brought it to himself by his final break with his father when he took his loan of ten thousand dollars from Mr. Fuller.
Alice had a great deal to do with that. Again he looked for her as he approached the corner of University Place; for she would probably come to college on the electric car this morning, when the streets were so heavy with snow. He saw that a car must have just let out some passengers for several people were hurrying from the direction of the car line toward the University. One girl walked alone more slowly and was purposely delaying.
"That's Alice!" Dave recognized her; then he denied, "No; that can't be Alice." But he saw that she was, and at this sight of her, with this disconcerting return of his sensation that she was somehow less, he remembered that it had seized him last night after he had been with Fidelia Netley.
He did not like it; he would not have it. In a moment, he did not have it for as he came close to the corner where she was standing and frankly waiting for him, his feeling for her flowed over.
"Hello," he hailed her.
She nodded to him; she did not speak to him because, at that instant, she could not; she was caught too tightly in the grip of her fear, that baseless fear of losing him sometime, which had become so much more definite since his meeting with Fidelia Netley. Here he was with Fidelia Netley again this morning. "It's perfectly natural," Alice argued with herself. "She came from two doors beyond Delta Alpha; they just happened to meet and so of course came on. There's Dorothy Hess with them, too."
Fidelia spoke to her and she replied; then she spoke to Dorothy and last to David. "Good morning, David," she said, looking up directly into his eyes where she found nothing but his feeling for her which had filled him again. It made her strong and confident.
The plowed path on the walk was no wider there than up the street so if four were to walk together, somebody must drop back. Dave was about to do this when Dorothy eliminated herself by suddenly calling after a girl in another group and hurrying ahead. "She's some history notes I positively have to see," Dorothy explained.
Fidelia and Alice both started to the inside of the walk, each leaving to the other the place next to Dave. Alice went so far that she stepped into the deep snow and Fidelia helped her brush her skirt when she stepped back. They went on with Alice where Dorothy had been and Fidelia next to Dave.
Many men and girls called to them as they came to the campus; for almost everybody in college knew either Alice or Dave. Everybody, without exception, looked at Fidelia Netley; and, when they looked, they contrasted her with Alice beside her.
Dave felt that they were doing somewhat as they did when Dorothy was with Miss Netley; it was not that, but enough like it to make him angry. Speaking to Fidelia Netley, he looked from her to Alice. She was paler, less strong surely, less—alive. No; he would not say that. Alice was not less alive. Less something but not that!
So, feeling dissatisfied and irritated over it, he went with the girls to class.