Just Patty. Джин Уэбстер
Читать онлайн книгу.
His audience listened with politely intelligent smiles, but with minds serenely occupied elsewhere. The great questions of Capital and Labor, were not half so important to them, as the fact of the lost afternoon, or the essays that must be written for to-morrow's English, or even that this was ice-cream night with dancing class to follow. But Patty, on the front seat, sat with wide, serious eyes fixed on the lecturer's face. She was absorbing his arguments—and storing them for use.
Tea followed according to schedule. The three chosen ones received their guests with the facility of long-tried hostesses. The fact that their bearing was under inspection, with marks to follow, did not appreciably diminish their case. They were learning by the laboratory method, the social graces that would be needed later in the larger world. Harriet and Mae presided at the tea table, while Patty engaged the personage in conversation. He commented later, to Miss Lord, upon the students' rare understanding in economic subjects.
Miss Lord replied with some complaisance that she endeavored to have her girls think for themselves. Sociology was a field in which lessons could not be taught by rote. Each must work out her own conclusions, and act upon them.
Ice-cream and dancing restored the balance of St. Ursula's, after the mental exertions of the afternoon. At half-past nine—the school did not retire until ten on dancing nights—Patty and Priscilla dropped their goodnight courtesy, murmured a polite "Bon soir, Mam'selle," and scampered upstairs, still very wide awake. Instead of preparing for bed with all dispatch, as well-conducted school girls should, they engaged themselves in practising the steps of their new Spanish dance down the length of the South Corridor. They brought up with a pirouette at Rosalie Patton's door.
Rosalie, still in the pale blue fluffiness of her dancing frock, was sitting cross-legged on the couch, her yellow curls bent over the open pages of a Virgil, tears spattering with dreary regularity on the lines she was conning.
The course of Rosalie's progress through senior Latin might be marked by blistered pages. She was a pretty, cuddling, helpless little thing, deplorably babyish for a senior; but irresistibly appealing. Everyone teased her, and protected her, and loved her. She was irrevocably predestined to bowl over the first man who came along, with her ultra feminine irresponsibility. Rosalie very often dreamed—when she ought to have been concentrating upon Latin grammar—of that happy future state in which smiles and kisses would take the place of gerunds and gerundives.
"You silly little muff!" cried Patty. "Why on earth are you bothering with Latin on a Friday night?"
She landed herself with a plump on Rosalie's right, and took away the book.
"I have to," Rosalie sobbed. "I'd never finish if I didn't begin. I don't see any sense to it. I can't do eighty lines in two hours. Miss Lord always calls on me for the end, because she knows I won't know that."
"Why don't you begin at the end and read backwards?" Patty practically suggested.
"But that wouldn't be fair, and I can't do it so fast as the others. I work more than two hours every day, but I simply never get through. I know I shan't pass."
"Eighty lines is a good deal," Patty agreed.
"It's easy for you, because you know all the words, but—"
"I worked more than two hours on mine yesterday," said Priscilla, "and I can't afford it either. I have to save some time for geometry."
"I just simply can't do it," Rosalie wailed. "And she thinks I'm stupid because I don't keep up with Patty."
Conny Wilder drifted in.
"What's the matter?" she asked, viewing Rosalie's tear-streaked face. "Cry on the pillow, child. Don't spoil your dress."
The Latin situation was explained.
"Oh, it's awful the way Lordie works us! She would like to have us spend every moment grubbing over Latin and sociology. She—"
"Doesn't think dancing and French and manners are any good at all," sobbed Rosalie, mentioning the three branches in which she excelled, "and I think they're a lot more sensible than subjunctives. You can put them to practical use, and you can't sociology and Latin."
Patty emerged from a moment of revery.
"There's not much use in Latin," she agreed, "but I should think that something might be done with sociology. Miss Lord told us to apply it to our everyday problems."
Rosalie swept the idea aside with a gesture of disdain.
"Listen!" Patty commanded, springing to her feet and pacing the floor in an ecstasy of enthusiasm. "I've got an idea! It's perfectly true. Eighty lines of Virgil is too much for anybody to learn—particularly Rosalie. And you heard what the man said: it isn't fair to gage the working day by the capacity of the strongest. The weakest has to set the pace, or else he's left behind. That's what Lordy means when she talks about the solidarity of labor. In any trade, the workers have got to stand by each other. The strong must protect the weak. It's the duty of the rest of the class to stand by Rosalie."
"Yes, but how?" inquired Priscilla, breaking into the tirade.
"We'll form a Virgil Union, and strike for sixty lines a day."
"Oh!" gasped Rosalie, horrified at the audacity of the suggestion.
"Let's!" cried Conny, rising to the call.
"Do you think we can?" asked Priscilla, dubiously.
"What will Miss Lord say?" Rosalie quavered.
"She can't say anything. Didn't she tell us to listen to the lecture and apply its teaching?" Patty reminded.
"She'll be delighted to find we have," said Conny.
"But what if she doesn't give in?"
"We'll call out the Cicero and Cæsar classes in a sympathetic strike."
"Hooray!" cried Conny.
"Lordy does believe in Unions," Priscilla conceded. "She ought to see the justice of it."
"Of course she'll see the justice of it," Patty insisted. "We're exactly like the laundry workers—in the position of dependents, and the only way we can match strength with our employer, is by standing together. If Rosalie alone drops back to sixty lines, she'll be flunked; but if the whole class does, Lordie will have to give in."
"Maybe the whole class won't want to join the union," said Priscilla.
"We'll make 'em!" said Patty. In accordance with Miss Lord's desire, she had grasped some basic principles.
"We'll have to hurry," she added, glancing at the clock. "Pris, you run and find Irene and Harriet and Florence Hissop; and Conny, you route out Nancy Lee—she's up in Evalina Smith's room telling ghost stories. Here, Rosalie, stop crying and dump the things off those chairs so somebody can sit down."
Priscilla started obediently, but paused on the threshold.
"And what will you do?" she inquired with meaning.
"I," said Patty, "will be labor leader."
The meeting was convened, and Patty, a self-constituted chairman, outlined the tenets of the Virgil Union. Sixty lines was to constitute a working day. The class was to explain the case to Miss Lord at the regular session on Monday morning, and politely but positively refuse to read the last twenty lines that had been assigned. If Miss Lord proved insistent, the girls were to close their books and go out on strike.
The majority of the class, hypnotized by Patty's eloquence, dazedly accepted the program; but Rosalie, for whose special benefit the union had been formed, had to be coerced into signing the constitution. Finally, after a wealth of argument had been expended, she wrote her name in a very wobbly hand, and sealed it with a tear. By nature, Rosalie was not a fighter; she preferred gaining her rights by more feminine methods.
Irene McCullough had also to be forced. She was a cautious soul who looked forward to consequences. One of the most frequently applied of St. Ursula's punishments was to make the culprit miss desserts. Irene suffered keenly under this form of chastisement; and she carefully refrained from misdemeanors which might bring it upon her. But Conny produced a convincing argument. She threatened to tell that the chambermaid was in the habit