THE APOSTASY OF ANITA FISKE

I

Anita Fiske was no longer wholly absorbed in the student life. This was all she herself understood. Any one else would have seen only generosity on the part of the Fates in the pleasant passing for her of busy days; that is, were it not customary to refer to the interposition of the Fates chiefly on occasions of dire calamity or of some especially flagrant instance of human incompetence or indolence—and indolent or incompetent Anita was not.

The right to be described by very different adjectives would have been granted to her by the most captious critic in her college world. There is a lack of finality in the judgment of this world; even members of it could be brought to agree, if you specifically raised the point, to the truism about the test through the larger issues in the world outside. They could indeed justly claim that their estimate of capability was a very decently fair one; also their estimate of capacity for enjoyment; but, unfortunately for the final value of their opinion, sometimes later on the fortunate possessor of these excellent capabilities and capacities may insist on turning to pursuits calling for another set of capabilities which she does not possess; on the other hand, since she is obviously very young, her capacity for enjoyment may remain as great and yet insist on a change of diet and she remain hungry while trying to satisfy herself with once fancied dainties. Such a double falling away as this from the true faith may even occur before the close of her college days. But—there are some perversions merely temporary of the true and correct inclinations.

This fact might comfort the critic in certain cases, perhaps in that of Anita Fiske, should any of the above considerations be held to apply to her. Her world would certainly have dismissed summarily such foolish speculations. For where, it would say, could you find one more obviously and conspicuously fitted to the grave charm and still, harmonious activity of the student life?

Anita was the daughter of a clergyman who, after years of conscientious if not over-successful care for the spiritual welfare of a country town, was accused of ultra-liberal tendencies and to avoid vain discussion had resigned his pulpit and moved to New York. The family migration had occurred but a few months before Anita entered college; she was a New Yorker in name only,—she avowed this somewhat sadly, for a passionate affection for this city of her adoption was one of the anomalies in her character. So at least her friend Isabel Oakley felt, for Isabel was a born New Yorker, a younger member of the most light-hearted of families. The Student and the Gayety Girl their companions nicknamed the two friends, calling them after characters in a play given two years earlier.

One grey February afternoon Isabel roused Anita who sat looking out with wide eyes on the still winter country.

"Come, you lazy object, you dream too long. Is it of the life history of a root?—a Gothic root, I fear—with due respect to your preference for mould over mere modern earth. I insist upon—well, not snow-balling," as she looked from her goodly height down on the slender figure, "but at least on a race when we have left the proprieties of the village behind."

"Very well—but I scorn your insinuation in regard to roots. Look at this."

She drew her friend down beside her and pushed the yellow curtains more wide apart. The pale light of a winter afternoon fell across long stretches of snow and on burdened trees, bending down heavy branches as though to rest their weight on the firm earth; and sometimes a little mass of feathery snow slipped noiselessly from its uncertain bed and roughened where it fell the smoothness of the white ground.

In a few minutes the two were going down the walk and out through the old entrance between low walls, now mere shapeless mounds in their covering of tangled, snow-laden vines. Anita seemed even more slender, though perhaps a trifle taller, than one would have imagined seeing her crouched on the window-seat. She had quick mouselike movements and walked with sudden little starts as if she feared to lag behind, and from her grey eyes all dreaminess was gone. The other girl moved smoothly and easily with the swinging gait of a strong young animal and held her head high to the cold wind that came over the open valley from the hills in the west. Strands of bright hair blew over her forehead and were tossed back as they threatened to blind her quick brown eyes.

On the bridge over the railroad the wind cut sharply. It poured along the black road below, between high banks the whiteness of which was beginning to grow dim in the unequal contest with smoke and cinders. A woolly St. Bernard leaped from a neighbouring garden to greet Isabel as the two hesitated for a moment; when they started again he fell in behind and trudged patiently on, with only an occasional gambol which resulted in much floundering, the snow being deep and his paws at their clumsiest age.

Beyond the last houses of Rosemont village the girls bent to a long, slow hill and, in spite of quickened breath, refreshed themselves after the long silences of the morning and early afternoon, and the ordered speech of the classroom, by wandering remarks, quick question and answer and an admiration for the fretwork of trees against the sky more freely expressed but less interjectional than is perhaps the custom among other more frankly emotional girls.

Their talk instinctively drifted back to the work they cared for, though with avoidance of detail of necessary drudgery or the friction in routine. Truly original work only Anita had; but Isabel's interest in original work was as deep as her own and perhaps more free from the jar of conflicting desires. This interest of hers would have been another cause of perplexity to a self-appointed critic of the two. Isabel was a society girl by birth and tradition, and at college, through the impetus of all her previous associations and also through the adaptability which gained her immediate wide acquaintance, she was confirmed in her destiny—popularity. But, though the instinct for much intercourse with one's kind and the superabundance of animal spirits may close to their possessors the gates within which the still scholar lives, yet even such may truly care for those quiet places and look almost with reverence on the things which there stand first. In this fashion Isabel regarded the work in which Anita was already noteworthy—in their small world—and in which it was possible that she might stand above the rank and file even in the world of research outside, if the promise of these first years should be fulfilled.

The talk turned to an Icelandic saga on which Anita was working.

"Have you tried doing it in verse as that bit was done in an English magazine last winter?" Isabel asked, "or did it ring better in prose—but I am afraid of the excellences of prose. Of course the original I can only respect from afar,—but that German professor's version—what was his name?—had, I know, sacrificed the real spirit to a monumental accuracy. Now please don't tell me you too prefer his version, as you do the Revised, for that same sordid reason."

"Most excellent Churchwoman! you object to change in the Authorized nearly as much as you would to a change in the Prayer Book. But really that piece that came out lately—of the saga, not the Prayer Book,—was quite inaccurate," Anita musingly added. "I am puzzled. I should care immensely about doing the whole thing as you have wanted me to. Bits go well. I confess I have done several when the spirit moved too hard. I could go on now I know." She raised her voice to be heard in a sudden gust. "It was written, or sung rather, to such a tune,—but up in the Seminar room the passion for accuracy falls on me and a sense of pride comes when I detect the accurate Professor Wirthau in an error. I quite despise that piece in English you spoke of. But now, come, I am in the other mood. Let us go into partnership. You have a turn for verse. I supply dry fact and you transform it into poetry. Let a few of your friends work for you and drop from some one committee—or will this have to wait till next year?"

"Next year!" Isabel smiled at her friend. "You are an institution here, Nita, no one would dream of breaking your work off, but mine, such as it is, comes this year to its natural end in an A. B. and next year I shall be disporting myself among—well, not Norse sea kings. My little sister is to come out with me, you know, and as mamma is not strong I believe my superior age and learning are to serve all but the formal needs of a chaperon."

"You a chaperon!" And Anita looked with amusement at her friend.

"I assure you I should make an excellent one. You mistake my character. It is almost portentously tempered with gravity. Will you race me from the church," she looked up at the deserted and lonely Church of the Good Shepherd they were then passing, "to the other, the cathedral?"—to St. Thomas of Villa Nova, she meant.

"Poor Mr. Clumsy-paws," Anita stopped panting, "he is far behind."

After the tired dog had caught up with them, looking reproachfully, they left behind the bleak church which lifts its golden crosses with uncompromising directness to the winter sky.

Through the fantastic snow twilight an hour later, they climbed the winding hill road to the college. Yellow lights shone steadily in ordered array—a few dark figures passed by somewhere—then a bell rang out suddenly and they hurried in. Yet before turning to the serious duty of preparing for dinner Anita let herself again be caught by her more alert friend idling at the window.

"Another problem, is it? in addition or subtraction?"

"Subtraction," she turned from the cool stars and rushing wind to the staid greeting of books and manuscript, "but what I am subtracting is, perhaps, no such loss after all—an unknown quantity, you see."

II

Anita had just received her father's answer to her letter. Letters are notoriously liable to different interpretations according as one confines oneself to the desires and emotions expressed therein or to those not expressed therein,—not to the uninitiated, that is. Parents are not likely to be the initiated: they have dealt too long in obvious literalness with their children. So, when Anita in her letter laid undue stress on her father's need of her and several other needs classed as domestic, he saw only an overdevelopment of the female conscientiousness in matters household—and a spirit of sacrifice which he duly admired. "Quite heroic, for her heart is set upon staying on at college," the old gentleman had remarked half aloud as he smoothed out her letter.

She read his answer as she sat before a cheerful little fire, a quaint figure in a red and blue flowered kimono. It was the interval between dinner and the time to dress for a college reception. Gay little noises came from the corridors as, by bright coloured screens, soft pillows and stiff potted plants, these were changing from mere means of communication into places of refuge for those who preferred to satisfy their social needs with a lesser degree of illumination and crowding than the large dining-hall, now reception-room, afforded.

Anita fingered her letter. She found it conclusive. She also found herself uncertain as to just the sentiments with which to regard it. His need of her was quite ignored. That annoyed her; but obviously in this she misunderstood him as completely as he had misunderstood her. The letter spoke of the vocation of the scholar and the sacrifice to it of the lesser things. To this she agreed, or thought she did, but had any one seen the grey eyes as they looked fixedly into the fire, he would have seen in these eyes a hunger which was not perhaps wholly for scholarship. Anita had, at the time with full conviction of sincerity, suggested a plan for going on with her work in New York. There were libraries there for the books needed—if one travelled a good many miles. Her father, most wisely and clearly, as she recognized somewhat wearily, spoke of the difficulty of concentrating one's mind on serious work among the distractions of a great city. He himself had once dreamed of a scholar's retirement.

She watched a blue flame curl over the edge of an unburned coal and die down again. She well understood this desire and had even felt it herself. A few years before in Oxford, where she had stayed a month during her one trip abroad, she had longed for just such a life. She remembered how, on one of those summer afternoons in the long vacation, she had sat on the coping of a deserted quad and looked across the tall sunlit grass to a flowering white rosebush which clung and climbed over the grey stone tracery, and then had turned back to the worn inscriptions on the wall behind her in memory of those who had worked there many years before. For her the oak stairways up from the cloisters led to anchorites' cells where men worked through endless, still, summer days. She was very young then and only in Oxford during the long vacation. On her return she first saw Bryn Mawr and then she said, with entire conviction, that to be there would be very well. The long low buildings half covered with creepers suggested, as she saw these also deserted and on a summer day, her dream of life at Oxford. Disillusionment, since then, of course there had been. She had objected, more than a healthy girl with steady nerves should object, to the sounds of girlish talk and laughter, to the many mechanical details of college life, and only found the dream again when night had long come down in quietness and she saw the outline of halls and campus trees soft and still in the moonlight, all signs of newness gone and only a few lights here and there to suggest the silent student. Of late she had shrunk less from the rush and gayety of noise, her objection lying now more against a certain crudity in enjoyment which seems unavoidable at some stages—in either sex.

And now as she sat in the bright kimono and watched the little flame curl and die and half heard the sound of gayety outside her door, Oxford was no longer her dream city. The bored dweller in towns who echoes the praise of rural life and poses a martyr to the weariness endured in the city, may smile at her for a foolish maiden, yet true it was that now she longed for nothing more vague and unknown, nothing more romantic and delightful than simply New York. She longed not merely to see it as now occasionally for a few brief days but to live there, to breathe its heavy air, whether that be tainted or pure, to hear the clamour of its streets. To watch it there, would give for her an added charm to the coming spring, to see it as it touches the city square making this fresh and green in a frame of busy walls with patterned beds of daisies and pansies or early blooming crocuses and a springing fountain in the midst. Here every one knew her. She wished the wish most familiar, but for that as urgent, to go day after day down in the streets, one in the changing mass of passers-by, and watch strange faces till the sense of personality was swept away and forgotten. She wished to feel again at night the fascination of a city then most spectacular yet most itself, as one watches it perhaps from a train and, along side streets, one sees in sudden long flashes the streaming white lights. What these lights were, lights of restaurant or theatre or lights of music hall—where she might go or where she might not,—she cared little now, she wanted the picture and the sound. In time she would want more, the dinner, the play,—this, however, was all she now saw in the fire; but of this she wanted her fill.

A voice, she knew it for Isabel's, spoke just outside the door. She would never tell her all these idle wishes, for Isabel had, or at least would soon have, herself the reality of all of them and seemed to hold it lightly. She, Anita, had once spoken with a bit of impatience of some excellent phase of college life and Isabel's eyes had grown troubled as though the light words were almost a sacrilege. How very much mistaken their little world was in its opinion of the two! Anita's lips curled up in a little satirical smile and Isabel entered the room.

"Not ready, Nita? A kimono, however charming, is unfortunately not the recognized costume for social occasions in this benighted land,—except for our fellow-students of Japanese persuasion, so haste you into frills and furbelows."

There was a party like any other,—bright lights, gay dresses, a little music and a Distinguished Person,—only a little more movement, groups of girls drifting about together and watching rather than making a part of it; a party taken, perhaps, not very seriously; one, also, which broke itself up into many little ones, these, in some cases, subdued groups of victims gathered in for the amusement of another person's unfortunate importation,—in other cases, guests discreetly chosen from those not utter strangers to each other; and one heard, here the accents of a southern town, there the soft "thee" of those who, small in number, have yet made their own a city's nickname; a party on the whole not homogeneous, restless and shifting, with a disproportion even greater than usual between the lightness of pale fabrics and the sombreness of men's dress, a disproportion tending, even, it might seem, to social joy—to judge by the greater gayety in purely feminine groups.

On a stiff settee under the broad stairway Anita was established in the midst of a group of Isabel's friends. It was one of the wisely chosen little parties. All included in it belonged, in effect, to one set in the city that counts numberless sets courting recognition and as many more courting the opposite. There was among those around Anita a lady with presence, also a man who had, curiously, refused to be a slave to his bank account and, at forty-five, was causing many misgivings to his friends—and much solid content to himself—through this emancipation. The lady with presence was not his wife, else the emancipation would still have been unaccomplished. There were several strong clear-eyed young men who were still revelling in the untroubled joy of the first years of an independent income; and they took life too seriously to enter quickly into the serfdom which follows after. Now they were preoccupied with buying much pleasant experience in this country and others. A few of them might, in addition to pleasant living, do something worth while, one had already done it, all were rather worth knowing.

Anita's face was a little flushed and she was talking more than usual, though the air of habitual stillness yet clung to her and her hands lay quiet on her lap, half covered by the soft deep ruffles of her blue gown. That she was a student of excellent promise was not known to those about her and Isabel, from long experience, avoided, when within earshot of her, the smallest reference to even the least of her friend's attainments. They did see only a very pretty girl who was talking gayly of all sorts of things in New York with a delight which was charmingly out of place, it seemed to them, among these surroundings; for they could not forget behind the mask of party dress the fact, almost a menacing one to them, of its being a woman's college. As they were New Yorkers by inheritance and much more by education Anita was unconsciously giving them subtle flattery, especially as what she asked about and evidently cared for was not merely the teas and dances uptown but the work and play down among the tall buildings. Isabel sat smiling at Anita's beauty—she gave the word unreservedly that evening—and wondering at her animation among these people who she had feared would bore her friend sadly.

An allusion, a name, suggested a plan for the following winter and they turned to Isabel.

"You are to be with us then?"

"Yes," she answered, "I leave here in a few months." The note of regret was almost evident.

"And Miss Fiske?"

"Ah! she is fortunate," Isabel answered quickly for her. "She has other things to fill her days. No, I refrain from untimely allusions but we all envy her life next year and the year after—for it is all planned, is it not?"

"Yes," Anita replied after a little pause, "I shall only be a few days in New York. I am to be very busy."

The flush died off her face and, as she herself was silent, the talk drifted away from her: when Isabel looked at her next she saw again the quiet face as she knew and liked it best with a gravity which well avoided seriousness,—the eyes a little larger and darker than usual under the bright lights.

Ellen Rose Giles, '96.