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Old Mrs. HarrisVIII
In August Vickie went down to Denver to take her examinations. Mr. Holliday, the Roadmaster, got her a pass, and arranged that she should stay with the family of one of his passenger conductors.
For three days she wrote examination papers along with other contestants, in one of the Denver high schools, proctored by a teacher. Her father had given her five dollars for incidental expenses, and she came home with a box of mineral specimens for the twins, a singing top for Ronald, and a toy burro for Hughie.
Then began days of suspense that stretched into weeks. Vickie went to the post-office every morning, opened her father`s combination box, and looked over the letters, long before he got down town,-- always hoping there might be a letter from Ann Arbor. The night mail came in at six, and after supper she hurried to the post- office and waited about until the shutter at the general-delivery window was drawn back, a signal that the mail had all been "distributed." While the tedious process of distribution was going on, she usually withdrew from the office, full of joking men and cigar smoke, and walked up and down under the big cottonwood trees that overhung the side street. When the crowd of men began to come out, then she knew the mail-bags were empty, and she went in to get whatever letters were in the Templeton box and take them home.
After two weeks went by, she grew downhearted. Her young professor, she knew, was in England for his vacation. There would be no one at the University of Michigan who was interested in her fate. Perhaps the fortunate contestant had already been notified of her success. She never asked herself, as she walked up and down under the cottonwoods on those summer nights, what she would do if she didn`t get the scholarship. There was no alternative. If she didn`t get it, then everything was over.
During the weeks when she lived only to go to the post-office, she managed to cut her finger and get ink into the cut. As a result, she had a badly infected hand and had to carry it in a sling. When she walked her nightly beat under the cottonwoods, it was a kind of comfort to feel that finger throb; it was companionship, made her case more complete.
The strange thing was that one morning a letter came, addressed to Miss Victoria Templeton; in a long envelope such as her father called "legal size," with "University of Michigan" in the upper left-hand corner. When Vickie took it from the box, such a wave of fright and weakness went through her that she could scarcely get out of the post-office. She hid the letter under her striped blazer and went a weak, uncertain trail down the sidewalk under the big trees. Without seeing anything or knowing what road she took, she got to the Headmaster`s green yard and her hammock, where she always felt not on the earth, yet of it.
Three hours later, when Mrs. Rosen was just tasting one of those clear soups upon which the Templetons thought she wasted so much pains and good meat, Vickie walked in at the kitchen door and said in a low but somewhat unnatural voice:
"Mrs. Rosen, I got the scholarship."
Mrs. Rosen looked up at her sharply, then pushed the soup back to a cooler part of the stove.
"What is dis you say, Vickie? You have heard from de University?"
"Yes`m. I got the letter this morning." She produced it from under her blazer.
Mrs. Rosen had been cutting noodles. She took Vickie`s face in two hot, plump hands that were still floury, and looked at her intently. "Is dat true, Vickie? No mistake? I am delighted--and surprised! Yes, surprised. Den you will BE something, you won`t just sit on de front porch." She squeezed the girl`s round, good- natured cheeks, as if she could mould them into something definite then and there. "Now you must stay for lunch and tell us all about it. Go in and announce yourself to Mr. Rosen."
Mr. Rosen had come home for lunch and was sitting, a book in his hand, in a corner of the darkened front parlour where a flood of yellow sun streamed in under the dark green blind. He smiled his friendly smile at Vickie and waved her to a seat, making her understand that he wanted to finish his paragraph. The dark engraving of the pointed cypresses and the Roman tomb was on the wall just behind him.
Mrs. Rosen came into the back parlour, which was the dining-room, and began taking things out of the silver-drawer to lay a place for their visitor. She spoke to her husband rapidly in German.
He put down his book, came over, and took Vickie`s hand.
"Is it true, Vickie? Did you really win the scholarship?"
"Yes, sir."
He stood looking down at her through his kind, remote smile,--a smile in the eyes, that seemed to come up through layers and layers of something--gentle doubts, kindly reservations.
"Why do you want to go to college, Vickie?" he asked playfully.
"To learn," she said with surprise.
"But why do you want to learn? What do you want to do with it?"
"I don`t know. Nothing, I guess."
"Then what do you want it for?"
"I don`t know. I just want it."
For some reason Vickie`s voice broke there. She had been terribly strung up all morning, lying in the hammock with her eyes tight shut. She had not been home at all, she had wanted to take her letter to the Rosens first. And now one of the gentlest men she knew made her choke by something strange and presageful in his voice.
"Then if you want it without any purpose at all, you will not be disappointed." Mr. Rosen wished to distract her and help her to keep back the tears. "Listen: a great man once said: `Le but n`est rien; le chemin, c`est tout.` That means: The end is nothing, the road is all. Let me write it down for you and give you your first French lesson."
He went to the desk with its big silver inkwell, where he and his wife wrote so many letters in several languages, and inscribed the sentence on a sheet of purple paper, in his delicately shaded foreign script, signing under it a name: J. Michelet. He brought it back and shook it before Vickie`s eyes. "There, keep it to remember me by. Slip it into the envelope with your college credentials,--that is a good place for it." From his deliberate smile and the twitch of one eyebrow, Vickie knew he meant her to take it along as an antidote, a corrective for whatever colleges might do to her. But she had always known that Mr. Rosen was wiser than professors.
Mrs. Rosen was frowning, she thought that sentence a bad precept to give any Templeton. Moreover, she always promptly called her husband back to earth when he soared a little; though it was exactly for this transcendental quality of mind that she reverenced him in her heart, and thought him so much finer than any of his successful brothers.
"Luncheon is served," she said in the crisp tone that put people in their places. "And Miss Vickie, you are to eat your tomatoes with an oil dressing, as we do. If you are going off into the world, it is quite time you learn to like things that are everywhere accepted."
Vickie said: "Yes`m," and slipped into the chair Mr. Rosen had placed for her. Today she didn`t care what she ate, though ordinarily she thought a French dressing tasted a good deal like castor oil.
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