After the first busy and exciting weeks when everything was new and a little terrifying, the girls settled down to regular work and, at times to a rather dull life, so sometimes very small events loomed quite large to their young eyes. Of course there were letters from home. And there was no more thrilling moment in the day than that in which Sallie Dickinson appeared on the school platform, at the close of the two o’clock session, with the old brown mail bag under her arm.
Sallie’s blouses were old and faded and her skirt had seen better days but little Jane Pool declared that the post-girl always looked just like an angel when she stepped in through the doorway with that dingy bag.
And of course the girls wrote letters, large numbers of them, to the persons on their writing lists. Some of them liked to write letters and wrote very fat ones. Some of them, like Mabel for instance, hated to write letters and wrote very thin ones. One rainy afternoon, the freckled girl, Cora Doyle, regaled her friends with a distressing tale.
“Do you know,” said she, from her perch on Jean’s window sill, “I believe Dr. Rhodes reads our letters before he sends them. Mine are always late getting to my folks and I’ve seen heaps of letters stacked up in his office for days at a time. And one evening I went in to ask for a piece of courtplaster for Ruth Dennis’s thumb and all those Rhodes people were around a table doing something to a lot of mail.”
“Perhaps,” said Jean, who knew that Cora was apt to make mountains out of molehills, “they were just looking to see if they were stamped or properly addressed. You know they have to bring them back to us sometimes for reasons like that.”
“I don’t know,” returned Cora. “Things are queer and different this year. I’d like to, but I can’t tell you why.”
“Do tell us,” begged Henrietta.
“No, I can’t. I promised not to.”
“There’s one thing,” said Jean, “that surprises me. Doctor Rhodes isn’t a bit like a school teacher. And when he talks to us in the school room as he sometimes does when he has anything to announce like new rules or a lecture or a concert in the village, he often uses the wrong word or mispronounces a word, as if—well, as if he weren’t used to making speeches in very good English.”
“I think he gets rattled,” said little Jane Pool, sagely.
“Somehow,” said Marjory, “I don’t exactly like Doctor Rhodes. I don’t exactly believe in him.”
“I don’t quite like him, either,” declared Henrietta, who had washed her wonderful mop of hair and was drying it with a large bathtowel. “I’m surprised at my Grandmother for saying such nice things about him. When there are visitors he seems so oily and so smooth; and it seems to me that he is extra polite to those Miller girls—all the world uses their father’s soap, you know—but when he asks Sallie to do errands he doesn’t even say please. And Mrs. Rhodes is always gliding about like the ghost of Hamlet’s Father. She looks as if she were listening with all her features. But she never says a thing to us, even when she catches us slipping around through the corridors after lights are out.”
“I’m glad she doesn’t,” said Marjory. “She looks all the things she doesn’t say.”
“After all,” said Jean, sagely, “they might be a lot worse.”
The next day was Sunday and Sundays were quite different from all the other days. In the morning the girls always marched two by two to church a long mile away, where they sat in the front pews with their eyes fixed upon the clergyman. This often proved a trying ordeal for that gentleman because this particular church had no regular rector. Instead, each Sunday, a student from the Theological Seminary just north of the village offered up home made prayers and stammered forth his first sermon before the long suffering members of that little church. Each successive student, it seemed, was more bashful than the last; and if any one of those blushing young preachers had ever learned to deliver a sermon, he promptly forgot all he knew, when, for the first time, he faced a congregation. There was one thing, however, that all these stuttering young men could do and that was to perspire copiously and continuously. No matter how many impressive gestures the preacher might have practised at home beforehand, he used only one while he occupied that pulpit. With handkerchief clutched firmly in his shaking right hand, he mopped and mopped and mopped his dripping brow.
While the girls couldn’t help being amused, they were always sorry for the tortured youths.
“You wouldn’t think,” said Cora, after one of these painful ordeals, “that they’d be afraid to face thirty or forty girls but they always are. Just as soon as their eyes light on those ten pews full of Highland Hall girls, their carefully prepared words take flight, and I guess they’d like to, too.”
“They seem to find it almost as hard to pass the plate,” laughed Henrietta. “When they get to us their knees begin to wobble.”
“It’s because we stare at those poor creatures so unmercifully,” said Jean. “Even a real minister would be embarrassed, I should think.”
“I’m sorry for them, too,” said Bettie, “but they are funny. Of course they have to learn to preach if they’re going to be ministers, but it seems cruel to make them do it that way.”
“Just like dumping puppies into cold water to teach them to swim,” said Marjory.
“It isn’t very much like our kind of church,” complained Bettie. “It’s too entertaining. We’re Episcopalians and our ministers don’t have to learn how to make their own prayers—the folks that make them know how.”
“Yes,” said Jean, “we’re all getting lonesome for our own kind of services. That’s one thing we miss.”
“Well, then,” said Sallie Dickinson, “I have some good news for you. In about four weeks more the new Episcopal Church will be ready for use and you can go there. Miss Woodruff and Mrs. Henry Rhodes are Episcopalians, so perhaps we’ll all go. We used to go to the old church before it was torn down.”
“I think,” said Henrietta, demurely, “we ought to come back to this church once in a while just to keep those poor Theologs perspiring. Miss Woodruff says perspiring is necessary to good health.”
The Sunday dinners were apt to be rather good; there was usually chicken.
“But,” complained Mabel, after one of these chicken dinners, “I don’t see why I have to get all the lizzers and gizzers.”
“What!” gasped Maude.
“Givers and lizzers; no, gizzers and lizards,” sputtered Mabel. “I always get them.”
“She means livers and gizzards,” explained Jean.
Sunday afternoons dragged. The girls could walk within bounds but that was not particularly exciting. On week days they usually gathered nuts in the grove—if one threw enough sticks it was possible to knock down a hickory nut or two most any day; or explored an ancient garden in which there were old apple trees. But in Sunday frocks and Sunday shoes it was wiser to stick to the sidewalks, so the girls strolled about and gossiped. It was truly surprising how much they found to talk about.
Sometimes on rainy Sunday afternoons, Henrietta gathered a flock of the younger girls about her on the wide front staircase, a dim, spooky, black walnutty place with a vast dark space overhead, and told thrilling tales. That was one thing that Henrietta could do to perfection.
But Sunday evenings at Highland Hall were almost invariably harrowing. The girls gathered about the piano in the big, chilly drawing room and sang familiar hymns and wept.
Sallie Dickinson wept because she hadn’t any home. The rest of them wept because they had. Still, Sunday after Sunday evening they sang the same sorrowful hymns because it seemed the proper thing to do, and then retired sniffling and snuffling to their narrow, single beds.
“They like it,” declared Mrs. Henry Rhodes. “Boarding school girls always do it, and they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t enjoy it.”
There was one Sunday evening, however, when the gloom was somewhat lightened; and when giggles supplanted sobs. Stout Miss Woodruff, clad in her smooth gray serge gown, with its white vest for Sunday use only, usually sat in a large arm-chair at the end of the room, in order to lend dignity to the meeting. But on this occasion she was absent and had asked Abbie to take her place. Poor scatter-brained Abbie had forgotten all about it so the chair was vacant. But not for long.
The chief ornament of the high mantel shelf was a large stuffed bird—a penguin. When it became evident to the waiting girls that no one was coming to occupy that vacant chair, Maude Wilder, always resourceful, climbed upon a chair, seized the stately penguin and placed him in the chair. With his dignity, his mildly disapproving eye and his smooth gray and white plumage, his resemblance to stern Miss Woodruff—vest and all—was so striking and so amusing that the astonished girls burst forth with a chorus of giggles instead of words when Mrs. Henry Rhodes, at the piano, played the opening notes of the first hymn.
Of course Mrs. Henry turned around to see what caused this most unusual hilarity. When she saw the solemn penguin doing his birdlike best to be human and succeeding so admirably in filling Miss Woodruff’s place, Mrs. Henry not only giggled but laughed outright; and all the pupils, including the lofty Seniors, joined in. For the rest of the evening, even the saddest hymns failed to bring on a single case of homesickness.
“But,” warned Mrs. Henry, restoring the bird to his lofty perch when the singing was finished, “we must never do this again. We’ve all been very bad.”
“I love that lady,” said Maude, on the way upstairs. “If she were my teacher I’d be good all the time.”
“I hope,” giggled Sallie Dickinson, “I won’t forget and call Miss Woodruff ‘Miss Penguin.’ I shall never be able to dust that bird again without thinking of her.”