# Phoebe and Her Other Self

Extracted from The American Magazine, 1909, pp. 45–59. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted. A “Phoebe and Ernest” story.
Phoebe and Her Other Self
BY Inez Haynes Gillmore Author of “The Lost Children,” “Puppy Love,” etc.
With Illustrations by R. F. Schabelitz
MRS. MARTIN always considered the year Phoebe grew up to be the most trying of her whole existence. In some respects it was much harder on her than the parallel process with Ernest. For Ernest, being male, was often an unknown quantity. Even in her earliest and most tentative explorations into masculine psychology, Mrs. Martin had recognized the existence of areas she could never penetrate because of barriers she could never cross. But with Phoebe she had quite a different feeling—a feeling of bafflement. It was akin to the sensation of strolling through a familiar country in a dense fog.
“What in the world is the matter with Phoebe nowadays?” Mr. Martin was constantly asking his wife. “She seems so dissatisfied all the time. I don't know what to make of her.”
“Oh, nothing,” Mrs. Martin reassured him. “It's only that she's developing. Girls always get to a period when they're more interested in themselves than anything else in the world. She'll come out of it all right.”
But though she spoke Mr. Martin so fair, Mrs. Martin had her own irritations with her daughter. She could not put her finger on what, as she expressed it, “ailed” her.
It was not alone that Phoebe was silent and preoccupied in the family circle. It was that she condescended rather too much to the world at large. Socially, Phoebe's presence was characterized by a pale, withdrawn air. Her conversation consisted of epigrams aimed scathingly at the human race and of general statements aimed scathingly at human institutions. Mrs. Martin gathered that, in especial, the male half of creation did not meet with Phoebe's approval. If Phoebe's attitude provoked opposition, her delicate brows merely lifted with the disdain of the misunderstood; she wrapped herself in that lofty silence which is the final defense of mental superiority.
Mrs. Martin's least worry was that Phoebe was losing all her pretty manners. Deeper than that, a fear lurked ever in the background of her mind that her daughter would grow up “strong-minded.”
Phoebe could have explained it all in a single sentence. For Phoebe had made a terrifying discovery about herself—had made it in the most accidental way. But here, as Phoebe might herself have said if she had been writing this passage, it will be necessary to turn back a few pages.
In the beginning Phoebe had not intended to bare her soul to the world. But of those four blank-books which came to be the central decoration of her desk the first two were labelled “Gleanings from My Books”; but the second two, willy-nilly, became “My Other Self.” In other words, what, in Volumes I and II, led a rather furtive existence among the quotations had, in Volumes III and IV, crowded the quotations out, and become a full-fledged diary.
A comparison of sample pages is most illuminating at this juncture.
Page 1 of “Gleanings from My Books” bears, stark and unqualified, the following literary harvest:
“Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.”
“Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.”
“I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov'd I not honor more."
“Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
“The light that never was, on land or sea."
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
On the other hand, Page 1 of “My Other Self” plunges at once into the abysses of introspective psychology. Thus:
“Standing with reluctant feet Where the brook and river meet.”
“It is dreadful to feel that you live quite alone in a world crowded with teeming millions, that in all the vast concourse there is not one—no, not one—who thinks as you do. For, all the time, I am having thoughts and ideas so different from everybody's else that they frighten me. I ought to be perfectly contented and happy. I am contented and happy—after a fashion. For I have the loveliest family that ever a girl was blessed with. My father is a perfect dear and the handsomest man I ever saw in my life. Better than that, he is 'that noblest work of God, an honest man.' But how could I confide to him thoughts like this? Not that I haven't the courage! It's because he'd only laugh at me. He always laughs at me, and the more serious I am, the harder he laughs.
“My mother—well, if there ever was an angel on earth, it's my mother:
'A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command.'
But were I to read this diary to her, were she to learn that I feel like Shelley, bright luminous angel, beating my wings in the circumambient ether in vain, I think it would nearly kill her.
“As for Ern—that's my brother—I would no more think of telling Ern—! I believe that I love my brother as much as any sister should—in fact I know I do. But I cannot blind myself to the fact that he never thinks. The time may come when he will realize how serious life is, but I doubt it. He will always be the kind to drift along on the surface, taking things just as they come. No, it is borne in upon me every day of my life that nobody understands me simply because I am different from everybody else.”
If Mrs. Martin, having once been a girl herself, could have seen page 29 of Volume V (“Storm and Stress"), all would have been clear to her:
“It has always been a mystery to me in the past,” wrote Phoebe, “but now I understand perfectly why women retire from the world and become nuns. They are driven to it by the frightful stupidity of the rest of the human race. When I think of it, I get fairly desperate. Take my case: I go out into general society quite a lot. I meet people. I talk. I even laugh. Nobody, seeing me at these times, would ever guess the truth. I mean they would never guess that, inwardly, I am bored to extinction. I see nobody who is really my kind. I see nobody who speaks my language. I see nobody who is interested in the things that interest me. If I advance an idea, people only smile or change the subject. Or they say, 'You will think differently about these things when you have had a little experience.' I find that it is a crime to be young. If I did not have you, dear diary, into which to pour out the thoughts that are consuming me, I don't know what would become of me. Oh, to find a congenial spirit!”
Without further elucidation, it will be perceived that, with Phoebe, things were about as bad as they could be. Unfortunately, prolonged mental unrest inevitably affects character and habit. Phoebe was not exempt.
The first thing to happen was that her bedroom underwent a complete metamorphosis—the third in its history. Everything that made for decoration was cast out. Out went the fish-net wall drapery with its catch of photographs. Out went the pictures, poster loot of many magazines, passe-partouted by Phoebe's own fingers. Out went the souvenirs in birch-bark, burnt wood, and abalone shell, all geographically inscribed, of many happy vacations. Out went the embroidered litter of the bureau and the last futile frivolity of the church bazaar. Out went the Baryé lion even. A period of conventual plainness ensued. Painfully, Phoebe printed cards with her favorite quotations and hung them where her eye could fall on them morning and night. 'Lessons from the Masters” she called them. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were the favorites.
As this was the first, so it was the least effect of Phoebe's perturbing discovery. In passing, however, it is enough to note that Mr. Martin, in his weekly excursions with her to the theater, had steadily to fight a tendency on her part to substitute the Ibsen of her most recent literary enthusiasm for the vaudeville of his taste. But by January Phoebe felt herself to be a changed girl—“melancholy,” in her own quoted phrase, “had marked her for its own.”
It is, however, one of the most harrowing disillusions of life that, even at seventeen, melancholy will have its mitigations.
One night Phoebe burst into the library, radiant with glad tidings.
“Mother,” she cried, “I've made a new friend.”
Mrs. Martin groaned inwardly.
“Isn't it queer”—Phoebe actually poured herself out with some of her former impetuosity—“how you can sit beside a person for a whole year—how you can know a person all your life—and yet not really understand them at all? And suddenly they say something that shows you're kindred spirits, and then it's different ever afterwards. That is the way this happened.”
To Mrs. Martin, Phoebe's most lovable quality was her inability to recognize the artificial distinctions of caste. Her first social affinities were the washerwoman's children, and it had never blurred their charm for her that they ruled her with a rod of iron. In her kindergarten days, she used regularly to bring home all the colored children she could pick up, fascinated by a preponderance of pigtail and wide, dazzling smile. Later, it was always the maimed, the halt and the blind—the derelict, in short, of the social world—whom Phoebe chose for her bosom friends, lavishing upon them her toys, her pocket-money and, unless Mrs. Martin interfered, her very clothes. As she grew older, this tendency increased rather than diminished. Mrs. Martin could never bring herself to curb it, although she sighed sometimes when when her daughter passed the gilded elect, unnoticing and unnoticed.
Illustration: Everything that made for decoration was cast out
But perhaps it was this breadth of social sympathy that had developed Phoebe's character. For Phoebe had not been in High School a year before it was evident that she would become the guiding spirit of her class. Mrs. Martin had no means of knowing that Tug Warburton had much to do with the public recognition of this leader quality. He had, in fact, strained almost to the breaking point his influence as athletic boss of his class to insure Phoebe's election.
It had also been evident from the beginning of her Senior year that Phoebe would be valedictorian—as evident, it may be noted in passing—to Phoebe as to anybody else. In fact, the fall instalment of her diary, which was then just ceasing to be a store-house for quotations, contained the germs of certain passages in her valedictory—“June has come with its riot of rhythms and roses” and “As the emigrant stands on the proud ship.” These passages marked it—and justly, as parallel passages had marked all the valedictories which preceded it—as the most able valedictory ever read in the M. H. S.
“Who is she?” Mrs. Martin asked.
“Augusta Pugh,” Phoebe answered in the voice of him who proclaims the prophet to his insensate countrymen.
Ernest emitted a snort of derision. “Gussie Pugh! That bag of bones!”
“Mother,” Phoebe asked in an ominous voice, “will you kindly request Ernest Martin not to refer to a girl as a 'bag of bones' in my presence?”
“Ernest,” his mother was already remonstrating in a shocked tone, “do you think that is pretty?”
“But, mother,” Ernest answered argumentatively, “wait until you see her. She's so thin that when the fellows meet a hungry dog` on the street they always say, 'Go along up to Pugh's, you'll find a bone there, all right, all right.' Honest they do!”
“Mother,” Phoebe exclaimed passionately, reaching across the chasm of years that divided them and groping blindly for the support of their common sex, “aren't boys the most loathly creatures that exist? Why, if I were a boy, I'd—” Her rage choked her to inarticulateness.
“Well, if I was a girl like Gussie Pugh—” Ernest in his turn became inarticulate.
“I guess if you knew Gussie as I do,” Phoebe found tongue at last. “She's the greatest student—reads Goethe and Heine like a streak. If you knew what her life was like and how she was misunderstood you'd pity her.”
“I'd hate the sight of her whatever she was,” Ernest persisted doggedly; “she looks like a frankfurter on a hairpin.”
“Ernest,” Mrs. Martin said sternly, “don't ever let me hear you say a thing like that again.” But even as she rebuked, her intuition, reinforced by reiterated experience, warned her what to expect of Gussie.
She had not long to wait. The following Saturday Phoebe came into the upstairs sitting-room, importance oozing from every pore of her.
“Mother,” she announced as one who ushers to royalty, “this is Augusta.”
“Augusta,” Mrs. Martin said pleasantly, “I'm very glad to see you.”
Augusta made fitting response to this welcome. For an instant, her cool light eyes impaled Mrs. Martin with a critical stare. Then they withdrew behind pink lids and a fringe of yellow lash. At intervals, they made furtive but composed survey of the light, pleasant room.
“Mother,” Phoebe went on—and her mother perceived at once that she was in one of her moods when she bustled mentally—“I'm going to take Augusta up into my room and, unless you need me for something very important, I'd rather we wouldn't be interrupted this afternoon. Augusta and I have some very interesting—er—er—work—that we want to discuss.”
“Very well,” Mrs. Martin said. She watched the two girls out of the room, not confessing to herself that she shrank from the intellectual frigidity of Miss Pugh's gaze.
Augusta was obviously a year or two older than Phoebe, and was what, in Mrs. Martin's younger days, people described as “sandy-complected.” Freckles, thin, straight, red hair, tow-colored lash and brow, all the physical concomitants were there. There, too, was the rust-colored dress in which with invariable unbecomingness—it was Mrs. Martin's generalization—Augusta's type inevitably arrayed itself. But all these details sank into the background in the overwhelming effect of Augusta's excessive thinness. Mrs. Martin with a sense of shame crushed back the instinct to smile at the sapience of Ernest's descriptive phrases.
The “something very important” which Phoebe and Augusta had to discuss was nothing more or less than their two diaries. For the remark which had revealed to them that they were kindred spirits was this:
“Well,” Augusta had said emphatically, “all I know is if I were to tell people some of the thoughts that come to me, it would frighten them. And that's why I keep a diary.”
“Oh, Augusta,” Phoebe exclaimed in awe, “do you keep a diary too?”
“You don't mean to tell me that you do?” Augusta answered.
And so beginning, naturally enough, with the confession that they wrote what it would be shamefully impossible to confide to any other living being, they ended with an unblushing agreement to read aloud from these dangerous memoirs.
Alone in Phoebe's room, they veered off, shy of their own self-consciousness, from a consideration of the subject in hand, although Augusta's blank-book of butcher's linen, conspicuously labeled WELSCMERTZ, lay in her lap, and Phoebe's, of a luxurious near-leather, sprawled ostentatiously open on her desk. The conversation was none the less intimate and revelatory.
“If I could write my life exactly as it's happened,” Augusta announced, “it would take the world by the ears. But,” she added with the noble resignation of the spirit bigger than its times, “it would be of no use to do it. Nobody would believe me. And so I only put down my thoughts. A few have tried to tell the truth, but it has always ended the same way—nobody has dared to tell everything. Bashkirtseff for instance. Bashkirtseff made a feeble attempt at self-revelation, but she didn't have the courage to tell the whole truth.” Augusta's lip curled with her scorn of the muzzled Bashkirtseff.
“Did you ever think what you'd like to be when you're a woman, Augusta?” Phoebe asked. “You know I myself never intend to marry.”
“Of course!” A faint, world-weary lifting of Augusta's eyebrows deprecated that possibility. “No girl who thinks would choose to marry.”
“Not when one must marry a man!” Phoebe said, a furious scorn italicizing her utterance.
“Not when one must marry a man!” Augusta echoed to the accompaniment of what Phoebe instantly recognized to be Augusta's idea of a shrug of the shoulders.
“Although,” Phoebe's gray eyes clouded, “I simply adore children.” Translating from Augusta's face the contempt that this weakness merited, she went on hastily. “Still you can always adopt all the children you want. But I don't intend to be a burden to my father—I intend to earn my own living. But there are only three things that I'd like to be—a great writer, or a great painter, or a trained nurse. I did think that once I'd be a reformer and become an expert on economic conditions as they affect women.” Reading in the sudden fixity of Augusta's gaze that she, in her turn, had opened vistas to surprise, she rushed on with a triumphant glibness. “I went into my father's office once to study the proletariat, but——”
She stopped and allowed a tragic memory to make mystery in her expression.
“—but that dream is over. Have you ever thought what you would like to do, Augusta?” Phoebe's tone was ostentatiously cheerful.
“Thought about it!” Augusta smiled patiently. “I have thought of nothing else. And my mind is made up. Just as soon as I graduate I'm going on the stage.”
Illustration: “Mother,” she announced as one who ushers to royalty, “this is Augusta”
“The stage!” Even Phoebe was startled. She liked Augusta enormously and she thought her a very wonderful person. But an actress! Somehow it didn't seem to her that Augusta was just the kind of person to be an actress. Phoebe recalled suddenly that the companies “showing” for one night engagements at the Maywood Opera House always lodged with Mrs. Pugh. “Oh, that would be interesting,” she compelled herself to say, but her voice was a little flat.
“Yes,” Augusta went on tranquilly, “I feel it in me. I've made all my plans. I've even selected my stage-name—Mercedes Mordaunt—don't you think that's sweet?”
“Lovely,” Phoebe said, her enthusiasm reviving.
“And I'm making a careful study of Shakespeare,” Augusta continued fluently. “Or at least of those parts that appeal to me. I doubt if I shall ever make a great comedy-actress—I have too much temperament. Besides I prefer tragedy. І already know the balcony-scene from 'Romeo and Juliet' and the sleep-walking scene from 'Macbeth.'”
Phoebe's eyes went wide and shining. Phoebe was a little vague on the subject of “temperament.” Dimly she connected it with a facility for frequent appearance, because of violent social experiences, in the newspapers. If Augusta had “temperament,” then all was well. “Oh, Augusta, how wonderful you are! How I'd love to have you do one of those scenes! Couldn't you now?”
“Oh, dear, no. Not here. You see I have to have certain props, my wigs and costumes and make-up box. But some time when you come to my house, I'll do my whole repertoire for you.”
There followed a consideration of the diaries. And in the process occurred the most extraordinary series of coincidences that the two girls had ever known.
They endured with comparative calm the minor shock arising from twin recognitions of their deliberate miscomprehension by an uninterested, cold, cruel, and unfeeling world. But that moment was charged tight with electricity which revealed that each had passed through a period of dreadful anguish because it occurred to her—and, oh, with what a sickening sense of certainty—that she was an alien child, adopted in infancy.
“Why, do you know, Augusta,” Phoebe said, “the idea came to me in the middle of the night that I was adopted, and I couldn't sleep, it frightened me so. I didn't dare to ask anybody in the family about it, for I knew they'd deceive me if it were true. But one day, I was talking with Dr. Bush—he's our family physician, you know—and I said in a very careless tone, 'Oh, by the way, Dr. Bush, what kind of a baby was I?' Oh, Augusta, you can't imagine how I studied his face when he answered me. 'Why just the kind of girl you are,' he said. 'When you were born, the first thing your mother said was, “Is she a healthy child, doctor?” and I said, “Healthy? She's so healthy it will take all the strength you've got just to handle her.” Of course I never worried after that.”
A little later came that never-to-be-forgotten instant when they discovered that, crowning all the sorrows of their lives, towered the supreme regret that they had been born woman instead of man.
Augusta read impressively from her diary:
“A man's life is a free one. He can come and go as he chooses. A woman's life is always slavery. She must stay where she is put. Always the open road for the male. Always the restricted fireplace for the female. Always the lance and the charger for him. Always the spinning-wheel and the cradle for her. Why should this always be thus?”
Later, piling Ossa of desire on Pelion of coincidence, came the final audacity of their difference from the human kind. Always, there after, they referred to it in vague phrases. Always, thereafter, they referred to it with averted faces. Of all their confessions, this was the one they would have dreaded most to confide to a carping and apathetic world. And yet, both had acknowledged—and in compromising black and white—that they yearned to undergo every human experience—yes, every one— before they died.
“I am not sure of any previous life,” wrote Augusta. “I cannot be sure of any future one. Let me drink this life to its very dregs.”
“I know I have lived before,” wrote Phoebe. “I know that I shall live again. And yet because I cannot recall the one or anticipate the other, I want to know every experience that this existence has to offer.”
The two girls became inseparable. The gloom which accompanies a resignation to the inevitable reigned over the Martin household, for with prompt unanimity the family took a violent dislike to Augusta.
“She makes me crawl,” Mrs. Martin said more than once to Mr. Martin; or, “І declare I feel witchy when that girl's about”; and, “My stars, Edward, did you ever see one girl boss another as Augusta bosses Phoebe?”
“Yes,” Mr. Martin agreed, “on the whole she's worse than Phoebe. For, as far as I can figure, Phoebe is suffering nothing worse than a secret sorrow gnawing at her heart, whereas Gussie is a misunderstood genius.”
“Now don't you admire her, Ern Martin?” Phoebe short-sightedly crowed over her brother, after one interminable evening during which Phoebe had quoted thrice from Heine and had corrected two errors in judgment on the part of her hosts.
“Sure do I!” Ernest responded with the first conscious sarcasm of his existence. “І simply adore Gussie. I've named my new punching-bag after her.”
Even the happy-go-lucky Tug, Phoebe's adorer and slave, drew a firm line at Augusta. Phoebe tried to browbeat him into letting Augusta accompany them in the automobile.
“Sorry, Phoebe,” he answered with smiling obstinacy, “but I can't stand for Gussie. I'd feel as if I had a toad in the tonneau.”
The family opposition only set Phoebe the closer in her love and pity for her friend. But despite this championship, the forces that make and break human companionship were already prying the intimacy apart. It is written in the Book of Truth that every human emotion can be pooled, with the effect of an immediate inflation, except melancholy. But a sorrow shared is a burden divided. And youth, which clings longest and fondest to its tragedies, admits alleviation but grudgingly. It is an exquisite experience to stand solitary in a misunderstanding universe. But who would elect to be misunderstood in couples? Alas for Phoebe! Alas for Augusta! Never again could either honestly claim the distinction of difference. But for a while neither would admit this: it was neck and neck as to which, in impassioned and blotted lubrications, could prove the bitterer fate. And since, when emulation enters, friendship droops a little, the intimacy began to slacken all along the line.
An event in school precipitated the break.
About the middle of the second term, Mr. Wilbur, the head of the English department, made announcement, that, although the wishes of the class could not be final, the teachers would like from it an expression of opinion to guide them in their choice of a valedictorian. Would each member of the class put the name of his candidate on a slip of paper?
Before school closed that day, Mr. Wilbur made a second announcement. The choice of the class for valedictorian had coincided with that of the teachers. On the side of the teachers, there had been no difference in opinion. On the side of the class, there had been but two dissenting votes. Miss Phoebe Martin (amidst applause) was officially notified of her election.
That afternoon when Phoebe walked home, linked as usual to Augusta, Molly Tate approached.
“Say, Augusta,” Molly began, the offhand quality of her manner contradicted by the indignant lightnings of her straight-gazing blue eyes, “why didn't you vote for Phoebe for valedictorian? She voted for you. I counted the votes, and of course I recognized your handwritings. I should have thought, Augusta, you'd have been the first to vote for Phoebe. You know perfectly well that nobody in the class has ever wanted anybody else.”
Involuntarily, Augusta dropped Phoebe's arm. For the only time in her life, Phoebe saw Augusta embarrassed.
“Well, of course, I knew Phoebe would get it,” Augusta managed at last. “I just voted for Tug because I thought somebody else ought to be represented.”
Molly sniffed and, with a definite appearance of flaunting her tactfulness, changed the subject, dropped from the conversation and the group. Phoebe said nothing. She and Augusta talked—though unlinked—as if the disturbing little incident had not occurred. Of course Augusta had a right to vote for anybody. Phoebe decided loyally that there was even a kind of magnificent courage about her procedure—and yet——
Augusta was not waiting for her when they came out of school the next day; and, thereafter, it was as if the intimacy had never been. Coincidently, Phoebe's diary fell away to a mere daily trickle. Also by this time, Phoebe was closeting herself tri-weekly with Mr. Wilbur for a discussion of the valedictory. Mrs. Martin noted all these symptoms hopefully.
It was Mr. Wilbur's idea that the Maywood High School should produce something original that year—something, say, which combined literary essay and valedictory in one. He had asked Phoebe to choose her own subject. After long nights of study and longer days of thought, she decided in favor of “Byron, Shelley and Keats.”
Of Mr. Wilbur, Phoebe's diary said, “His figure has acquired the scholar's stoop from too much burning of the midnight oil.” Clean-shaven, silver-haired, there dwelt permanently among the wrinkles of his middle-age an expression, disquietingly sardonic. There dwelt intermittently there a smile of surprising winsomeness. Every girl in the Maywood High School adored him frantically, although she trembled like a leaf when his crisp enunciation of her name made her, during two minutes of recitation, the target for his terrible wit.
“What is there about Miss Martin that interests you so much?” asked Miss Selby, his first assistant. “It seems to me that there are ever so many girls in the class who write as well as she. In fact, Augusta Pugh writes much better.”
“True,” Mr. Wilbur agreed, his smile at its most whimsical. “Miss Pugh is beyond a doubt the ablest girl in the class—little beast that she is! But nobody who has any sense of humor could write a good valedictory. Now Miss Pugh has the rudiments to a sense of humor, but Miss Martin hasn't enough to put on the end of a pin. I wouldn't miss the valedictory that Phoebe will write for untold millions.”
Illustration: Phoebe-baiting became a recognized parlor-game
Miss Selby's middle-aged eyes blinked. A something rigorously unmodern in her dress made her look like a daguerreotype. A rumor, handed down from class to class in the M. H. S., explained that her fiancé died in the Civil War and she had been wearing out her trousseau ever since.
“Phoebe's very pretty,” she said, “pretty enough to make up for that sense of humor, even if it never appears.”
“Quite,” agreed Mr. Wilbur with alacrity. “I could find it in my heart to wish that it never would. But,” he shook his head, “women aren't like what they used to be. Phoebe is going to make a fine woman,” he added irrelevantly.
As for Phoebe—if, before, she had assumed the air of one congenitally at odds with the world, now she had definitely acquired the saintly mildness of the cloistered nun. What of her time was not devoted to work on her valedictory was spent in its sepulchral rehearsal. The male portion of the Martin community took her absorption lightly. When, occasionally, she favored them with her presence, Phoebe-baiting became a recognized parlor-game.
“It is extremely interesting in the study of literature,” Ernest would remark apropos of nothing, “to note the great dissimilarity existing between writers of the same age.”
“June has come with its riot of rhythms and roses,” Tug would take it up.
And, “as the emigrant stands upon the proud ship,” Mr. Martin was sometimes base enough to add.
Thereupon, Phoebe would arise with great dignity and retire to her chamber.
“Be sure you don't say, 'Byron, Kelly and Sheets,'” Ernest always called after her.
“Or 'Chyron, Helly and Beets,'” Tug added.
They never knew that, though Phoebe stood their joking with outward composure, the thought that she might say “Byron, Kelly and Sheets” or—worse—“Chyron, Helly and Beets” haunted her very dreams.
But Mrs. Martin, in contradistinction to the male half of her family, was sounding these days the very depths of irritation. “Did you ever see anything like her?” she demanded again and again of Mr. Martin. “If this keeps up,” she threatened stormily more than once, “I'll take her to Dr. Bush and make him give her a tonic. There is really no living with her. Will graduation ever come?”
Phoebe's great day, in point of fact, actually came at last. It was a graduation differing in no wise from every other graduation. The big hall of the Maywood High School was decorated with bunting and June blossoms. The wide, roomy platform was banked so closely with girls and flowers that it looked as if it had grown both. The audience swelled the hall to the bursting-point—fussy, delighted, triumphant mothers, bored, indulgent, deprecatory fathers, superior big sisters, critical big brothers, awed little sisters and squirming little brothers, crowds of attentive grandmothers, cousins and aunts. At the back, a fringe of young men who had not quite left off being boys and groups of boys who were just deciding to become young men, swarms of ridiculing undergraduates and multitudes of irreverent small fry shook the walls with undiscriminating applause every time the opportunity tempted.
Mrs. Martin, Mr. Martin and Ernest came early, and found seats in a front row near the end. To the right, stout Mrs. Warburton, the mother of the class-historian, leaned over to bow beamingly to the mother of the valedictorian. Somewhere back, Dr. Bush's spectacles gleamed from a swirl of femininity.
The program was a replica, with a difference in detail, of every graduation that the country has ever produced. A salutatorian welcomed the audience to the hallowed precincts which she herself was about to leave forever in language that, chaste and periodic as it was, could leave her hearers in no doubt as to the personal pleasure the occasion afforded her. Tug Warburton—he was received with such thunderous and prolonged applause that he had finally to frown his followers to silence—prophesied fame and fortune for every member of his class. At the blackboard, a pair of youthful scientists demonstrated with diagrams of the clearest and utterance of the thickest an utterly ungraspable problem in physics. A puny youth whose voice threatened to shatter the window-panes considered “Napoleon's Last Days at St. Helena,” and a girl who stood six feet lisped in whispers her impassioned answer to the query, “Shall Women Vote?” Then came daily themes written and read by Augusta Pugh. Then, to the visible and audible relief of the audience, came the class song, composed by Molly Tate. Then came the valedictory.
Mrs. Martin had become so accustomed to the Phoebe of the last six months that she started when she recognized the Phoebe of other days—a Phoebe from whose air all the disdain, the cocksureness, the mental superiority had evaporated completely—a Phoebe, moreover, of smoky-gray, shy eyes, a softly curved, wistful mouth and curls that seemed to twine about the yellow rose over her ear in wispy tangles of real gold—a Phoebe who seemed, because of her delicate, sheer white gown, more than ever before slim and girlish, tenderly young and helpless.
Illustration: She drew Phoebe into an empty recitation-room
“It is extremely interesting in the study of literature,” began Phoebe; and Mrs. Martin's heart commenced to pound.
For Phoebe's voice was low and uncertain. Phoebe's breath came in great, gaspy catches. Phoebe's hands shook so violently that her stiff valedictory paper crackled, its yellow ribbons waved.
She approached the passage, “June has come with its riot of rhythms and roses,” but only the more distressingly her breath fluttered and caught. Mrs. Martin turned cold. She did not know that Ernest, sitting on the other side of his father, was shaking in his shoes for fear that his sister would say, “Byron, Kelly and Sheets.” She did not know that Tug, sitting on the platform, was tense with terror for fear that Phoebe would say, “Сhуron, Helly and Beets.” But Phoebe sailed past her Scylla. She rounded her Charybdis. Though she faltered, she continued not to fail.
“As the emigrant stands on the proud ship,” perorated Phoebe and, in her voice, Mrs. Martin felt the relief of one who sees the end of long strain in sight.
And then a strange thing happened.
Phoebe's valedictory was composed entirely of trite and timeworn phrases. But to Mrs. Martin every one of them brought as vivid a truth as their creation must have carried. It came over her with a suffocating sense of sorrow that what her child was saying was symbolically true. It was true that Phoebe was about to face “the real conflict of life.” It was true that she must, thereafter, “put the little things of her youth aside.” It was true that, before her, lay “the beginning of adult responsibility.” Mrs. Martin was stabbed by that conviction, terrible always for women to face, that things would never again be as they had been. The tears flooded to Mrs. Martin's eyes. They began to pour down her cheeks, to soak into the lace of her bodice.
Mr. Martin alone caught the situation. Without looking at his wife, without speaking, he manœuvered his big body so that it interposed between her and the gaze of assembled Maywood—even Ernest did not guess. Mr. Martin's hand stole down to his side and seized his wife's hand.
Flurried to the end, Phoebe managed to finish. There followed the distribution of the diplomas. But Mrs. Martin's emotion seemed to increase rather than diminish. Not even the unparalleled roar of applause that came to Phoebe with her sheepskin seemed to ameliorate it. As the class filed off the platform, Mrs. Martin arose, pushed blindly through the dispersing throng, pushed blindly through the crowds of graduates and their congratulators, caught up with her daughter and gestured her into the hall. She drew Phoebe into an empty recitation-room.
“Why, mother,” Phoebe exclaimed alarm, “what is the matter?”
“My poor little girl,” Mrs. Martin said, “I'm sorry if I've been unfeeling and unsympathetic this last year. It's only because I didn't realize what it all meant to you, giving up these happy years. I didn't understand until I heard you read your valedictory. Do forgive me, Phoebe, child, won't you?”
“Forgive you?” Phoebe repeated with a gasp. “Mother Martin, you darling, if you cry another tear, you'll break my heart! Why—” She stopped abruptly and, with one of those honest self-accusals that made Phoebe Phoebe, she added, smiling, “Why, mother, it's the truth. I've enjoyed being unhappy this year. Didn't you when you were a girl?”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1970, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 53 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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