Fidelia/Chapter 1
FIDELIA
FIDELIA NETLEY, at the age of twenty-three, was going again to college as another girl, who was lonely and who had been badly treated, would go home; for as long as Fidelia could remember, a school of one sort or another had been her home.
Up to the year she was fifteen, there had been a house in White Falls, Iowa, which had been her place of residence, in a legal sense; at least, its street number always was recorded as her address on the register of the schools in which she had lived since she was seven. But Fidelia feared that house more than any other spot on earth; for it was the home of aunt Minna.
She was the sister of Fidelia's father and a widow with children of her own, older than Fidelia, and she frankly hated Fidelia for at least two outspoken reasons; one was because her brother had left his money, every penny of it, to his daughter in trust at the Drovers' Bank; the other was Fidelia's mother.
In a vague, emotional way, Fidelia retained some recollections of her father. Of course she had a picture of him and so she maintained an image of his appearance; but she also had memory of having been clasped in strong arms which held her in a particularly firm and gentle and agreeable way. She had no recollection at all of her mother, who had run off when Fidelia was an infant; and Fidelia never was told more of her mother than that fact; nor was she ever shown a picture of her mother.
"I destroyed them all long ago," aunt Minna announced, as of a good act well performed; but she added, "You are exactly like your mother. Your nose is precisely hers and your skin; and your hair is the identical color."
When she was a child, Fidelia used to look at herself in a glass from every angle in endeavor to learn what was so especially wrong with her nose; but after a time, she came to understand that her trouble was that she was pretty and her nose was particularly tantalizing to some women; and her clear, soft, white and pink skin annoyed them and, more and more as she grew older, they seemed to resent the color and luxuriance of her hair which was red of deep, rich auburn hue.
Since Mr. Jessop, of the Drovers' Bank, allowed no attractive profit for boarding Fidelia, aunt Minna sent her away to school at the earliest age at which Miss Sumpter, in Des Moines, would take a girl. Fidelia found that school a pleasant, friendly place where she got into very little trouble; and she came to love the school so that she intentionally failed in her work, in her last year, for fear of having to return "home." But aunt Minna had no idea of keeping her about merely from affection; so Fidelia went next to Mrs. Drummond's school in St. Paul and was there when aunt Minna started the law suit to obtain control of Fidelia's money. Aunt Minna lost the suit and with it her guardianship of Fidelia's person; consequently, Mr. Jessop was her guardian from that time and Fidelia began giving his house number as her home address. But Mrs. Jessop was one of those women whom Fidelia's nose and skin and hair offended and she saw to it that, when Fidelia was not in school, she was safely away in a girls' summer camp.
After she became eighteen and had completed the course at Mrs. Drummond's, Mrs. Jessop entered her at the University of Minnesota. She was a glorious flame of a girl brought for the first time into frequent and close association with men; she liked the University immensely and stayed there two years, at the end of which she asked to be transferred to Leland Stanford University.
As that was in California and further away, Mrs. Jessop agreed and supposed she had Fidelia settled there for two years; but at the end of one Fidelia had become of age and no longer needed to ask permission to go where she pleased and to draw her own money; and so without explanation—at least without explanation which reached White Falls—she gave up college until this day of the second of February, in her twenty-third year, when she was passenger on a suburban train from Chicago bound for Evanston, Illinois, to enter Northwestern University. As credentials, she carried certificates for her two years' work at Minnesota and for one at Stanford; and she liked her feeling that she was again to continue the gaining of "credits." There was something particularly satisfying in "marks," anyway; they furnished one with such definite evidence of one's success or failure.
Fidelia had lived by marks almost all her life and, by her conduct at school, she had been given or denied privileges. As she sat alone in her seat on the train, with her face toward the partly frosted window, she realized that she was returning to discipline; but it was of her own will and she was honestly impatient to return. She was seeking not discipline alone, of course, but also the ready, friendly familiarities and tolerances of college, the pleasant customs and routines; she was eager to join again the rivalries and enthusiasms, to thrill to the ambitions and to share the companionships of the sort which had been hers.
Once she had visited Chicago before this journey but she had never been to Evanston, though when she was at Minnesota she had heard a good deal of the college and town. She knew that the University was at the north end with the campus running along the shore of the lake; the students, men and women, lived in dormitories and fraternity and boarding houses about the campus, south, west and north. The suburban express from Chicago made several stops in Evanston and the third, Davis Street, was the station for the university.
The conductor had told her this, upon her inquiry when he took up her ticket; and when the train neared Davis Street, he returned to her and reminded her that this was her stop, and he gallantly carried her suitcase to the platform. This was quite unnecessary for she was rather a large girl, not heavy, but obviously strong and vital and excellently developed; but men almost invariably chose her, out of any group, as the object of their attention. She was so accustomed to this that she really thought nothing of it, although she never forgot to express thanks, pleasantly. That perhaps was part of habit, to be pleasant.
"Thank you so much!" she said now, when she took her suitcase on the station platform. No red-cap or porter for hand-baggage met the train at Evanston; and none of the men leaving the cars were of the disposition to press their services upon a strange girl so evidently competent to carry a small suitcase. She thought they were mostly business men, commuters from their offices in Chicago; but she recognized, in a few of the younger ones, the familiar casualness and clannishness of university students. They were of her own age and, seeing her, they eyed her as young men usually did and with the added interest of speculation on the probability of soon meeting her.
"Co-ed?" said one to another.
Fidelia did not hear him but she saw his lips move and she guessed, from her experience in coeducational universities, the term he would use. The boy who was questioned seemed doubtful about her; they all seemed doubtful but decidedly interested and they hung back in a group at the top of the stairs to let her precede them down to the street.
She descended slowly, employing her free hand at gathering closer her coat, which was of soft mink furs; she had on brown gloves and a brown fur toque, which matched her coat and was of a hue most effective with her hair. She was conscious that she was being rated and that the moment was of great importance to her; and she made no error.
Coming out upon the street where fine flakes of snow were blowing in the wind from the east, she glanced about at the opposite shop and restaurant windows already alight in the early dusk of this gray February afternoon and almost at once she nodded toward the first in a row of cars-for-hire waiting beside the station. When the negro driver brought his car up, she said in a clear, agreeable voice: "Take me, please, to Mrs. Fansler's. Do you know where it is?"
"No'm; but git right in, ma'm. I find out quick. Up by de un'versity, you mean, or down in de town?"
"Up by the university, I think," Fidelia said but did not enter the cab, pending the driver's gaining information which he sought by yelling at the colored boy on the next car: "Zeb, you know whereall Mis' Fansler's?"
"Pete you know the Delta A house," a curt Caucasian voice put in from behind. "Mrs. Fansler's is on the same side of the street two doors beyond."
"Oh, thank you," said Fidelia turning to the student, who had cleared up her difficulty as Pete made it plain that he was quite familiar with the location of Delta A. "Thank you so much!"
She found herself speaking to the shortest of the three young men who were in a row on the walk, evidently having waited to see her away before they proceeded. He was rather a homely boy with a square, honest look and with a self-confidence of bearing which made Fidelia know that he was a leader of this particular three. "What he starts thinking about me, they'll start thinking and they'll start the other men," Fidelia reckoned; and knowing the amazing values of first impressions, she considered whether she would ask him for more information about the university neighborhood or whether she would do better with complete formality. She decided on the latter and got into the cab.
It took her quickly through a narrow fringe of the one and two story shops and business buildings which flank the railroad on the university side, crossed a street car line and hurried her by a couple of blocks of residences and vacant lots toward a large, tall brick structure with many lighted windows which loomed far back from the streets in the center of a wide, level lawn. Fidelia recognized immediately the familiar marks of a dormitory and of that particularly famous, old-fashioned, high-windowed, austere "hall" which was one of the first in the country to invite women to college with men.
"Hello, old Willard!" she hailed it to herself, and turned to the newer, less obtrusive building opposite. "I suppose that's Pearson Hall and Chapin is over there." She knew the names of the main dormitories for girls.
Her car passed them and hastened north and now, off to the right and beyond the intervening block of houses, lay the campus, she guessed; she did not think much about it. Here she was penetrating the most immediately significant section of the university; some of the houses on both sides of this street were, possibly, the homes of families without intimate connection with the college; but most were surely the dwellings of professors and instructors or were fraternity houses and rooming houses for students. There were many large residences alight below and, more characteristically, aglow from the lights in ten or a dozen windows on the second and third floors of each. Here was the place where the students lived, Fidelia recognized—ten or twenty girls together in one house and as many men rooming in the next.
They would prove to have come from everywhere and they would be no ordinary people; for each lighted window here must represent a separate and definite will and ambition of some one—at least of a parent or a brother or sister or friend for each some one up there on the other side of every window blind; each glow suggested a self-denial, a sacrifice and a determination of the various sorts with which Fidelia had become familiar. They would be selected and privileged people sent—or having come of their own will and by their own effort—from farms and little towns and cities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska and Michigan; from Ohio, Texas and Nevada; from Washington and from New York state and New England; from South America a few, undoubtedly, and from Europe and even from China and Japan.
Her glimpse of their many second and third-floor windows alight stirred Fidelia to a warm and excited impatience; it was more like coming home than she had supposed it could be. Here she was once more on familiar ground, though she had never seen this street before; here she was re-entering the company of lively, above-average men and girls who would hold certain difficult expectations of her, but of whom she could expect more than of others. She knew the name of not one girl or man here but she felt that she knew them; certainly she knew how they would act in regard to her, if she acted as she had before. She did not mean to do that.
She passed a house with a transom above the front door displaying the triangle and capital A of the Delta Alpha fraternity; and the cab slowed. The second door beyond, which by information was Mrs. Fansler's, was a large frame house painted some dull color which made the lower part appear somber in the failing daylight; but the upper windows, like so many upper windows on this street, were glowing bright.
Fidelia stepped out and paid her driver; she picked up her suitcase and went up the snowy steps to a dark porch where she felt for the bell. While she pressed it, she whispered a chant:
"Fend a friend and kiss a foe,
The first can strike the fouler blow;
Never look the road you go;
Travel on it; you will know."
She was giving no thought to the meaning of the words; she never really thought about them except as composing a sort of charm for good luck which she had picked up from a fortune teller years ago when she was a child in school at Des Moines. She had been told to repeat it whenever making a change and especially when starting out with new people in a strange place and, having formed the habit, she kept it up.
When she heard the door opening, she drew herself more erect and gave a tug to her coat collar. She got a glimpse of a long, brown, rather bare hall and she was aware of the odors of meat and vegetables cooking; then she saw a middle-aged, slender, spectacled woman in a plain blue dress.
"This is Mrs. Fansler's?" Fidelia asked in her pleasant way.
"I am Mrs. Fansler," the woman said, in much more neutral tone but giving the impression that she meant to be more neutral than she succeeded in being.
"How do you do? I'm Fidelia Netley from White Falls. Do you remember I wrote you for a room and asked you to telegraph if you could give me one and you were so nice as to do it?"
"Come in, child," invited Mrs. Fansler.
It was the quickest melting of Mrs. Fansler on record, as was unanimously agreed by all four girls in the upper hall who were looking and listening to learn who had arrived in that cab. "Child" was Mrs. Fansler's admission of approval of a girl; and the college record for thawing her to that point was three days, ten hours and some exactly estimated minutes. "Which record was absolutely smashed to practically nothing at all," the witnesses deposed. "And from a flat, standing start!"
Some girls abode under Mrs. Fansler's roof throughout their college course and never achieved "child" at all.
Of course Fidelia did not know this but simply discerned that of the two sorts of women in the world—those whom her nose and skin and hair at once and unforgivably antagonized, and those who, upon sight, arrayed themselves as her defenders and friends—Mrs. Fansler was of the second. Mrs. Fansler talked to her for a few minutes in the parlor and then showed her to a room on the second floor.
Two of the girls in the upper hall had the delicacy to retreat when the stranger ascended; but the other pair took a full, frank scrutiny of Fidelia Netley from White Falls. Fidelia looked at them, and with the same open, pleasant gaze, but she made not the same effect upon both; and she knew it. One was to be a girl for her to fend and the other a girl to kiss, if Fidelia put into practice the advice of her charm; for one girl, like Mrs. Fansler, showed without cause a sudden warm impulse to be her friend, while the other, at the same instant and from the same sight of her, betrayed as plain a sensation of hostility.
So it was all to start again, the hot, violent liking and hating of her, the reckless and unreasonable deeds to be done for her, without her wish, and the amazing, reasonless abuse of her. Why, at sight of her and when she did nothing at all but exist, did some persons want to hate when others liked her?
She stood in the center of her room, slowly turning while Mrs. Fansler bustled about unnecessarily displaying wholly obvious closets, the dresser and the chest of drawers.
"It's a lovely room," Fidelia said. "And that window is east, isn't it? Really, isn't it east?"
It was not a lovely room but was merely a plainly papered, almost square bed chamber with ordinary oak bed-room set of substantial design; and it was at the rear of the house. Every other girl who had taken it had commented upon this inescapable fact; no one had ever so enthusiastically approved it because its window was east.
"Yes, child," said Mrs. Fansler. "It's east. What beautiful hair you have!"
Fidelia was taking off her toque without thinking either of what Mrs. Fansler or of what she, herself, was saying; for almost automatically she could notice such items as the east outlook of a room and comment upon such an advantage, repressing remark upon disadvantages. What she was thinking about was the method of her first move in this new set of men and girls who were bound to take opposite sides over her—who, in fact, already had begun to divide in regard to her.
She laid down her toque and slipped off her fur coat and stood in her brown tailored suit which disclosed the rounded and well-proportioned fullness of her youthful figure. This presented a test of friendship which some women, who approved her nose and skin and hair, failed to pass; but Mrs. Fansler passed it and Fidelia felt on her blouse for a little jeweled clasp pin which was fastened there and she started to remove it.
"Oh, you're a Tau Gamma!" Mrs. Fansler exclaimed, recognizing the pin as the emblem of a college sorority.
"Yes," admitted Fidelia. "I was; at Minnesota."
"Oh, you've come from the University of Minnesota."
Fidelia hesitated a minute and then said: "No. I've come from Leland Stanford." Again she corrected, frankly, "I mean I went to Leland Stanford last. I've not been at college at all for a year and a half. I'm just starting again."
"Oh!" Mrs. Fansler considered. "You began at Minnesota and then went to Stanford." She did not add, aloud, "and now you're coming here." But she might as well have said it. Yet neither her thought nor her quick glance over Fidelia was unfriendly. For Mrs. Fansler instinctively liked this girl; and, having been in charge of a student boarding house for girls throughout more than a generation, Mrs. Fansler rather prided herself upon the veracity of her instinct. She thought: "This girl hasn't gotten along." Then she thought, more definitely: "She's got into trouble."
Mrs. Fansler said aloud: "Surely you know Tau Gamma has a chapter here."
"Oh, yes; that's why I'm taking this off before I see any one in college. I don't think it right for a girl, who was initiated by one chapter to force herself on the girls of another college, who mightn't want to take her in. Do you?"
"Why, they'll want you!" Mrs. Fansler exclaimed while she realized that she spoke the truth only in a limited way. For she knew that Tau Gamma—or any other group of girls in college—would want to own this girl in the sense that each sorority would prefer to possess her rather than give her to another. But Mrs. Fansler could not imagine Tau Gamma, or any other group, unanimously welcoming this vivid, unusual girl. "You'll like your chapter here," Mrs. Fansler went on. "They're the finest girls in college, Alice Sothron and Myra Taine. . . . Myra lived with me her first year; and I know nearly all of them. I'll send word to Myra right away."
"Please don't!" Fidelia begged. She dropped her little sparkling sorority pin into the drawer of the dresser and she clasped Mrs. Fansler's thin wrist in her warm, caressing grasp.
Mrs. Fansler liked it and a flush of color spread under her pale skin. "Why not, child?" she protested. "When you went from Minnesota to Stanford, you went to the Tau Gamma girls there, didn't you?"
"Yes," Fidelia admitted.
"Then why don't you want to go to your girls here now?"
Fidelia did not immediately answer but Mrs. Fansler felt the grasp on her wrist tighten suddenly before Fidelia became conscious of it and took her hand away; and Mrs. Fansler's instinct much more definitely said: "She's got into some trouble at Minnesota but nothing serious. What really happened was after she shifted to Stanford, or later." Mrs. Fansler hungered to know; she yearned for the confidence of this vital, beautiful person for the maternal delight of counseling and protecting her.
"This is different," Fidelia replied, vaguely.
"How different, child?" Mrs. Fansler urged and she reviewed in her mind the note which had arrived for her the other day and which was the first herald of the coming of this girl to her house. She had thought of it, at the time, as a sudden, impulsive note, but put no significance to it. The postmark had been Portland, Oregon, but the reply was to be sent to White Falls, Iowa.
"I've been out of college for a while," Fidelia said; and not immediately, but after a few moments, explained. "I thought I'd travel a little so I went up to—Idaho and Oregon and Washington, our northwest. Then I thought I'd finish college and get my degree."
"I see," Mrs. Fansler nodded; for she had become satisfied in her mind for the present. At least, she realized that she had learned a good deal and, if she was to learn more later, she must not press matters now. She thought: "She considered whether to say Idaho and then did it. She tells a part of anything freely. Her trouble was after she left Stanford."
Mrs. Fansler took one of Fidelia's hands and pressed it. "You couldn't have chosen a better place than here; and you couldn't have come to a finer chapter. Of course I'll tell your girls that you're here." She dropped Fidelia's hand almost shyly and started out. "Supper at six thirty," she said, practically.
Fidelia removed the coat of her suit and she lay on her bed with her hands clasped behind her head and with her legs bent over the side of the bed. She was not tired; on the contrary, she was exhilarated, jerking her legs up straight in a series of short kicks and dropping and jerking them straight again in the stimulation of the contest over her which was sure to continue.
"Two out of three!" she reckoned her friends against the one already antagonistic to her. Of course she was counting only Mrs. Fansler and the two girls whom she had seen and who had seen her here. The men, or at least a safe majority of them, would begin in favor of her; she could depend upon them; and as she considered the three who had watched her at the station, she thought of them reaching their fraternity houses and telling other men about her. There was no especial conceit in her thinking this, but only a recognition of fact; she knew that men kept her in mind and talked about her. Now she lay, not thinking but listening, for some one was speaking in the hall and she heard the words positively enunciated: "Take her your fraternity pictures; that's what she'll care to see!" A door closed hastily and there was silence during which Fidelia became aware of a low, persistent sound much more steady and unvarying than the blowing of the wind. She arose curiously and went to the window, which she opened and she heard the sound much louder.
"The ocean," she said to herself and immediately recollected where she was. "It's the lake, of course," and she stood with the cold east wind blowing upon her, listening to the roar of the surf.
The violence of it and the cold and storminess of the night appealed to her in her present mood of exhilaration. Already it was too dark for her to get a glimpse of the water, even if the intervening houses and trees and the configuration of the land back of Mrs. Fansler's permitted a clear view eastward; but she could see that the lake was near for the vague illumination from houses and streets, which extended indefinitely north and south of her window, ceased abruptly to the east and there was a great void in which she imagined the tossing, roaring water; she had an impulse to go out and feel the full sweep of the wind and to stride along with all other sounds drowned in the roaring fury of the waves. When she felt like this, she exulted in the sensation of physical struggle and the trying of her strength; she liked the ecstasy of physical exhaustion. But she knew that this was no time for her to go out; for when she closed her window and again heard the house sounds, she discerned Mrs. Fansler's voice evidently speaking into the telephone: "Yes, Myra; one of your chapter from Minnesota . . a remarkably fine appearing girl . . . No, she did not come direct from Minnesota; she's been to Stanford and recently has been out of college for a while . . . "
Fidelia listened more tensely; and what she strained to hear was whether Mrs. Fansler repeated that Fidelia Netley had gone to Idaho. Mrs. Fansler did not and Fidelia felt a certain relief. She wondered if she had made a mistake in saying so much to Mrs. Fansler; but she had to say something about that year and a half. She unpacked her suitcase slowly and looked about while she considered.
Upon a bookshelf near the bed were a few volumes and pamphlets of the sort which accumulate in college rooms and which pass from occupant to occupant—an odd, battered copy of Cymbeline, the second volume of Bryce's American Commonwealth, a Clark's Rhetoric without covers, an old college catalogue and a small, new paper-bound directory of Northwestern University.
Fidelia picked this up and observing that it printed both the Evanston and the home addresses of students in course, she scanned the pages, stopping with a sharp jerk when her eyes fell on the word Idaho.
Boise was the word before it and Boise, she knew, was far in the south of the state. She expelled the breath which she had been holding and she turned the next pages. Here was Idaho again; Jane Howe from Pocatello; well, that was far away in the south, too. Now Idaho once more and—Mondora! "Roy T. Wheen, Junior, college of Liberal Arts; Evanston address, Hatfield House. Home, Mondora, Idaho."
Fidelia dropped the book; there it was on the last page, when the census of students had run down into the Ws. A boy was here from Mondora. "Well," she thought, "what if he is?"
Not every one from Mondora would know her. If he were from Lakoon, that would be a more risky matter; but Mondora, after all, had been really out of it. There was only a chance, and really rather a small one, that Roy T. Wheen had seen her; she had no knowledge at all of him. Again she looked through the directory to make certain that she had missed no Idaho names; and when she was satisfied that there was no one in college from any place nearer Lakoon than Mondora, she decided to take the chance with Roy T. Wheen.
Indeed, when she thought over the matter, his presence supplied an extra spice to this new adventure which she could not help liking. At any rate, now that she had entered for it, she had no idea of running away; already men and girls were talking about her; already her presence here had roused people to contest over her; and she meant to see this contest out. Behind one of these windows down this street or at some other lighted window which she had not yet seen, was some man yet unknown to her whose fate was bound to become entwined with hers in some new and unforeseeable way; she could count upon that, if she stayed here; and she decided to stay. So she closed the directory and tossed it away and lay on her bed, kicking her legs and wondering what there was to come to her from behind those lighted windows and what sort was he who would ride with her about the next turn of the wheel of her destiny.