She went to Mabel’s that night, and they talked about Vassar. She heard about Mabel’s roommate who came from Rhode Island. Mabel had visited her at Thanksgiving, and she liked the roommate’s brother, and he liked her.
“He’s a science major at Princeton,” said Mabel demurely. She, too, was planning to major in science.
Emily heard about the marvelous courses, the step sings, the bacon bats. Back in her room she thought with satisfaction how wonderful it was to have the crowd back.
She did wish she were invited to that Sunday night affair—whatever it was! But there were two weeks left!
She took a quick look at the white and blue dress. “I’d like to do the Gaby Glide in you,” she said, and knelt down, smiling, to say her prayers.
She was pleased, emerging from church the next day, to see Don in the crowd. Her grandfather’s cold had kept him at home, so Emily was alone, and she knew that she looked well. The brown velvet hat with the rose underneath was becoming and harmonized with her brown, fur-collared coat. She was wearing white gloves.
He came up to her smiling. “Well, well, little Em’ly!”
“I wouldn’t call myself exactly little.”
“Did you think you were tall and queenly?”
“I know I’m tall.” She was taller than ever this winter, she thought, because she now held herself straight, due to skating—or Browning—or something!
But he was still taller, and his shoulders had that proud masterful squareness. He had taken off his hat, and the sun shone on his smooth dark hair. He looked well groomed, like the city—
He fell into step beside her and walked with her all the way home. She had thought he would drop off at Annette’s, but he didn’t. He went on across the slough.
She had forgotten how much she liked his voice. It was deep and full of melody. You forgot he wasn’t handsome—and he wasn’t—when he smiled and when he spoke.
She told him eagerly that she had come to love Browning, and he looked indulgently amused.
“He’s a little too optimistic for me.”
“But you have to be optimistic in this world, Don.”
“I’m not, and I get along fine.”
She saw that he preferred to talk about himself, so she asked why he hadn’t gone out for debating.
“I got fed up with it in high school,” he answered contemptuously, which made her shrink. He couldn’t suspect how much that would hurt her or he wouldn’t have said it, she thought.
“I tried out for Masquers, the dramatic club, and made it. We’re going to put on Shaw’s Arms and the Man. I know I’m not another John Drew, but the fellows want us all to go out for something—the fellows in the fraternity, I mean.”
He talked on and on in a mellow-toned flood. She knew he felt he was impressing her. But she loved it. She was impressed. There was no one, no one like Don!
At the gate he stopped and pulled out a pipe. “To solace my homeward walk,” he said.
“When did you take to a pipe?” Her eyes were on his long, dark, sensitive fingers as he tamped tobacco into the bowl of the pipe.
“Oh, gosh! Months ago! We’re all pipe smokers at the house…” He took the pipe between his teeth and lighted it.
Emily did not ask him in; it was Deep Valley’s dinner hour. But he did not hurry away. He leaned on the gate post, and his gray-green eyes studied her. He could see, she felt sure, that she had changed.
“Emily, have you read any Shaw?”
“Why, I’m reading Man and Superman right now.”
“Man and…” He threw back his head and laughed. “Well, don’t let it give you any ideas!” To her intense annoyance Emily colored.
“I’d like to see a Shaw play performed,” she said quickly.
“So would I. There’s pretty good theatre up in the Cities. Annette and I take in everything that comes along. We’re planning to see Maude Adams in Peter Pan.”
“I believe that’s coming here, too,” Emily said, and he looked faintly annoyed.
He took off his hat again. “Good-by. I’ll be seeing you around.”
“Oh, of course!” She put out her hand. “We’re all going up to school tomorrow.”
“Not I! Oh Lord, when will the rest of you grow up!”
Emily went slowly into the house and up to her room. When she had taken off her hat, she looked in the mirror. This was a different Emily from the one she had looked at that August afternoon when Don had left with Annette. The upsweep of hair was becoming, it emphasized the broad serenity of her brow. The texture of her skin had always been rough, but it looked rich and peachy this winter. She smiled into her earnest blue eyes.
“I don’t want to take Don away from Annette!” she thought. “And, of course, I couldn’t! I only want him for a friend. But oh, how I want that!”
Nothing, she thought, could give her more needed confidence than to have Don accept her as one of the desirable girls.
The morning at the high school was a carefree revel. It was tradition for the old grads to come for the Christmas tree at which joke presents for faculty and students were dispensed with much hilarity.
Emily looked around for Mr. Wakeman but he wasn’t there.
“Miss Bangeter let him off early so he could get home in time for Christmas. He lives way down south somewhere,” Jerry Sibley explained.
There was a gay crowd out—not only from the class of 1912. Carney Sibley was there, talking with Mabel. Emily saw Cab, who shook his hands over his head jovially in her direction. He was with a large group of 1910-ers.
“Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly are visiting my sister,” Fred Muller said. “Gee, I didn’t know folks acted like that after they got to be twenty! A party every day!”
That was why she had had no invitation from Cab, Emily thought, and her heart sank a little. But only for a moment. She was interested to see Fred’s pretty blond sister who went to school in Milwaukee, and Tacy Kelly who used to sing at rhetoricals, and Betsy Ray—especially Betsy, because she had written short stories which had been published. She was practically an author.
Betsy looked much as Emily remembered her from high school, tall and slim with red cheeks, always laughing. She was wearing a plaid dress with a plaid ribbon tied around her head. Meeting Emily’s eyes, she waved, and so did Alice and Winona who were with her.
Annette touched Emily’s arm. “I’m leaving to meet Don. He wouldn’t come up. He thinks all this is infantile.” As she spoke, a pair of sophomores dashed past, the pursued screaming, the pursuer waving mistletoe.
Emily laughed. “I get his point.”
She was glad to note that she no longer felt any nostalgic longings. But, unlike Don, she enjoyed being back.
“I’ll see you tonight at my party. And by the way, Em—” Annette paused and put her hand on Emily’s arm. “Jim Baxter will stop by for you.”
“Jim Baxter! But he hasn’t asked me.”
“No, he—asked me to ask you. You haven’t a telephone, you know.” But that was ridiculous! Emily thought. He had been right here in the Assembly Room a few moments ago.
Annette seemed embarrassed. “I have to hurry. Bye-bye!” she said, and was gone.
Emily looked after her with a sobering face. Annette had asked Jim to call for her, of course. She had thought no one else would do so! Emily turned away to the cloak room slowly.
She wouldn’t have minded walking over to Annette’s alone. She was used to going to parties alone. But she minded Jim calling for her when he didn’t want to. He hadn’t even gone through the formality of asking her!
Injured pride stung her as she found her wraps and went downstairs. At first she thought she wouldn’t go to the party. But that would hurt Annette, who had meant well, she knew, and Aunt Sophie who was always so kind. Besides—she had counted on this evening. She was besieged with invitations to girls’ afternoon affairs, but this was the only one she had for a man-and-girl party.
“No. I won’t let this spoil things for me. I’ll go and have a g
ood time. Muster you wits! Muster your wits!” she told herself, trying to smile as she tramped across the slough.
At home she laid out her sweaters and warm waists, selecting the most becoming one, a red flannel trimmed with gold buttons. “And I’ll wear a red ribbon—and my new fur hat!”
She was sorry it wasn’t a more glamorous type of party to which she could wear a pretty dress. But clothes didn’t matter, really.
“It’s inside I’ve changed most. Don saw it when we walked home from church, and he will tonight,” she thought.
She waited for Jim that evening with a resolute smile on her face. She had not put on her wraps ahead of time tonight. She would risk his thinking the parlor was queer, she had decided. She looked nice, and he might as well see it before she buried herself in the clumsy sweaters and coats and shawls one wore to a sleighing party.
“Cab had a good time with me. He asked me a second time. Probably the U has improved Jim Baxter and we’ll have something in common,” she encouraged herself. But when the old doorbell chimed, and she let him in, she saw that he had changed very little. He was the same big, hulking, stolid boy. And moreover, he looked mad.
“It isn’t because he has to take me. It’s because he can’t be with Annette,” Emily told herself with desperate insistence. But logic did not help. The moment she saw his sullen face all her self-confidence died like a fire under a thrown pail of water.
Her calmness as they shook hands was the stiff aloofness she had had in high school, not the easy dignity she had felt with Cab’s crowd. She tried to joke about the piles of wraps but he did not respond. He buckled her overshoes grimly.
They went out and she asked him how he liked the U. He said, “Fine!” and relapsed into silence. When she said she understood he was on the second football team, he said, “That’s right!” and let the subject drop.
It was a cold bitter night and the slough seemed endless. Emily felt guilty about every step. What a walk to take with a girl you did not wish to walk with!
As soon as they reached Annette’s house—while she was greeting Aunt Sophie—Jim Baxter disappeared into a group of boys. He did not come near Emily again.
The crowd milled about the Webster parlor in the highest spirits. They all looked ridiculous in their unwieldy garments. It was an atmosphere, Emily thought, in which anyone should be able to have fun. But she felt painfully awkward. She was almost in a panic.
She forced herself to conversational overtures but they sounded hollow. No one seemed to respond.
“I shouldn’t be trying so hard. No one else is trying,” she thought. Scid and Fred were teasing Gladys about the stocking cap she had borrowed from her little brother. Emily laughed with the others but she thought her laughter sounded too loud.
Don was avoiding her. Now there was none of the half-admiring friendliness he had shown on the walk home from church.
“He can see that I don’t fit in, and he doesn’t like being associated with a girl who doesn’t fit in,” she thought wretchedly.
Aunt Sophie was distributing horns and candy.
“Can’t I do that, Aunt Sophie?”
“Why yes! Thank you, dear.”
It helped to have something to do.
Don and Annette were dancing now, clowning in their cumbrous clothes.
“Do the Gaby Glide!” Nell called.
“Go ahead! Do the Gaby Glide like you did Sunday night at Don’s!”
At Don’s! Don had given the party! And he had not invited her even though he had seen her Sunday morning before she had—collapsed like this. She must have been mistaken when she thought he had found her attractive.
Despair swept her. She felt crushed, unable to go on. But fortunately at that moment sleighbells jingled merrily outside.
“It’s the Bluejay!” everyone cried and they rushed out into the icy night blowing horns and shouting. They piled in, not without scuffling. Every man seemed determined to sit beside a particular girl. But Emily wasn’t one of the girls.
She found herself with Don on her right and Scid on her left but it was by chance. Don’s concern had been to be beside Annette. Scid had been striving to sit with Gladys. In the midst of the noisy jubilant crowd Emily sat marooned. But she didn’t care. She was too heartsick to care.
The night was as cold as her despair. It was ten below, somebody said, but there was hay in the bottom of the bobsleigh and there were plenty of buffalo robes. Now and then a rider hopped out and ran to warm his feet, throwing snowballs at the company.
The sweet jingling of the sleighbells was drowned out soon by singing. Emily had always loved it when the crowd sang, but tonight the music seemed to pierce her heart. “Moonlight Bay.” “Shine on Harvest Moon.” “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” She tried to join in but her throat was dry.
There was one song they sang over and over again. It was new, a dreamy waltz, “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” It seemed to typify for Emily all the talk about fraternities and sororities, fussing and dating, in which she had no part, everything to which she didn’t belong, everything she was being left out of.
“The girl of my dreams is the sweetest girl
Of all the girls I know…”
Don sang it to Annette, looking down into her face, his arm around her shoulder. Scid sang it to Gladys.
“As long as I live I can never bear to hear that song!” Emily thought, sitting rigidly between them.
After an hour or so they went back to the Websters’ for oyster stew.
“There’s just one thing to do in a situation like this,” Emily decided. “It’s to go home!”
She found Aunt Sophie in the kitchen. “I’m going to slip out, Aunt Sophie. I want to get home. Grandpa has that bad cold, you know.”
“But can’t you wait for some oyster stew?”
“I’d rather not. I’m worried about him. It’s been a wonderful party.”
Aunt Sophie went to the dining room door. “That boy who brought you, Jim. He’ll take you home. I’ll call him.”
“Please, Aunt Sophie, don’t!” Emily seized her aunt’s arm, then quieted her voice. “I don’t want to break up the party, and I’m so used to walking home alone. Please! Let me just slip out!”
“All right,” Aunt Sophie said reluctantly. “But you’re coming for Christmas dinner.”
“If Grandpa is able…”
Aunt Sophie was not listening now. “Minnie, I tasted the stew. Just a little more salt, I would say, and a big lump of butter…”
Emily ran out the back door.
Suddenly she was glad that her grandfather had a cold. They wouldn’t have to go to Annette’s for Christmas!
“We won’t go,” she thought angrily. “I’m not going to put up with this situation any longer!”
The wind on the slough was cutting. Tears froze on her cheeks. Halfway across she started to run. She found herself longing for the shelter of her little room and even more for its solacing solitude.
14
A Christmas Party
BEFORE SHE WAS QUITE awake next morning, Emily remembered that something dreadful had happened. She pressed her arm across her eyes to hold it back, but it came—the detestable memory of the sleighing party!
She sat up. “Look here!” she thought. “I’ve got to see this thing in the right proportions!”
The room was frigid, and she reached out for her bathrobe and pulled it over her shoulders. As she sat staring into the murky darkness, she was still bitterly resolved not to go to Annette’s for Christmas.
“Not that I’d behave again the way I did last night! I don’t know what came over me! Annette’s asking Jim to call for me started it, I guess. But it would be just the way it was at Thanksgiving. The kids would drop in after dinner…”
Talk would be about their colleges, their new experiences. She had had new experiences, too, she thought with proud resentment, but when she was with the crowd they seemed to become of no importance. It was true even with the girls.
/> “I tag them around, but I’m like a shadow. Well, I won’t do it any more!”
She wasn’t tired of her friends, but she was tired of pursuing them as though her own life were worthless.
“I’ll make another plan for Christmas,” she decided. “A good, definite one! And I’ll make it before I tell Aunt Sophie we’re not coming, so she can’t talk me down.”
She jumped out of bed and dressed quickly, groping for ideas. It wasn’t easy, she discovered, to make a spur-of-the-moment plan for Christmas. So many people were tied up with family affairs.
She searched among her winter’s associates. Miss Cobb went to relatives, she knew. Miss Fowler was going to the Cities. Mrs. Anderson? She had come to like the courageous lame dancer. But her grandfather didn’t know Mrs. Anderson. He would be disappointed at not going to Aunt Sophie’s unless she made a plan he would enjoy.
She went to the window, rubbed away a patch of frost, and stared out thoughtfully. The east was a mass of small fiery-red clouds. Her eyes fell on the Syrian rooftops, and she smiled suddenly.
Kalil and Yusef! Her grandfather loved them; he had asked her a dozen times whether she had remembered to buy the skates. And she had been wanting to see Layla again. Maybe they could come Christmas afternoon for a party!
“We could trim a tree for them!” she thought.
She ran downstairs and shook the coal heater and dumped in a scuttle of coal. Her grandfather came in and she turned around, smiling.
“Grandpa,” she said. “I’ve been thinking. You have such a cold and the weather is so bad—let’s stay home for Christmas!” His face fell and she rushed on. “Let’s ask Kalil and Yusef to come here for a party! And that cute little Layla I told you about.”
His eyes beneath their bushy brows kindled. “Why, I believe I’d like that, Emmy! I’m sorry not to go to Chester’s, but—could you get us a turkey?”
“Of course! We’d have turkey sandwiches for the children. And I’d get a tree. It would be fun to trim a tree again.”
“By Jingo, it would!”
“Maybe you could pop some corn this morning—for stringing.”