Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy (7 page)

So you see, Daddy, I'm much more intelligent than if I'd stuck to Latin. Will you forgive me this once if I promise never to flunk again?

Yours in sackcloth,

JUDY.

 

 

 

This is an extra letter in the middle of the month because I'm sort of lonely tonight. It's awfully stormy; the snow is beating against my tower. All the lights are out on the campus, but I drank black coffee and I can't go to sleep.

I had a supper party this evening consisting of Sallie and Julia and Leonora Fenton—and sardines and toasted muffins and salad and fudge and coffee. Julia said she'd had a good time, but Sallie stayed to help wash the dishes.

I might, very usefully, put some time on Latin to-night—but, there's no doubt about it, I'm a very languid Latin scholar. We've finished Livy
²⁴
and De Senectute and are now engaged with De Amicitia
²⁵
(pronounced Damn Icitia).

Should you mind, just for a little while, pretending you are my grandmother? Sallie has one and Julia and Leonora each two, and they were all comparing them to-night. I can't think of anything I'd rather have; it's such a respectable relationship. So, if you really don't object—When I went into town yesterday, I saw the sweetest cap of Cluny lace trimmed with lavender ribbons. I am going to make you a present of it on your eighty-third birthday.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

That's the clock in the chapel tower striking twelve. I believe I am sleepy after all.

Good night, Granny.
I love you dearly.

JUDY.

 

 

 

The Ides of March.

I am studying Latin prose composition. I have been studying it. I shall be studying it. I shall be about to have been studying it. My reëxamination comes the 7th hour next Tuesday, and I am going to pass or BUST. So you may expect to hear from me next, whole and happy and free from conditions, or in fragments.

I will write a respectable letter when it's over. To-night I have a pressing engagement with the Ablative Absolute.

Yours—in evident haste,

J. A.

March 26th.

SIR: You never answer any questions; you never show the slightest interest in anything I do. You are probably the horridest one of all those horrid Trustees, and the reason you are educating me is, not because you care a bit about me, but from a sense of Duty.

I don't know a single thing about you. I don't even know your name. It is very uninspiring writing to a Thing. I haven't a doubt but that you throw my letters into the waste-basket without reading them. Hereafter I shall write only about work.

My reëxaminations in Latin and geometry came last week. I passed them both and am now free from conditions.

Yours truly,

JERUSHA ABBOTT.

 

 

April 2d.

I am a BEAST.

Please forget about that dreadful letter I sent you last week—I was feeling terribly lonely and miserable and sore-throaty the night I wrote. I didn't know it, but I was just coming down with tonsilitis and grippe and lots of things mixed. I'm in the infirmary now, and have been here for six days; this is the first time they would let me sit up and have a pen and paper. The head nurse is
very bossy.
But I've been thinking about it all the time and I shan't get well until you forgive me.

Here is a picture of the way I look, with a bandage tied around my head in rabbit's ears.

Doesn't that arouse your sympathy? I am having sublingual gland swelling. And I've been studying physiology all the year without ever hearing of sublingual glands. How futile a thing is education!

I can't write any more; I get sort of shaky when I sit up too long. Please forgive me for being impertinent and ungrateful. I was badly brought up.

Yours with love,

JUDY ABBOTT.

 

 

 

 

THE INFIRMARY.
April 4th.

Yesterday evening just toward dark, when I was sitting up in bed looking out at the rain and feeling awfully bored with life in a great institution, the nurse appeared with a long white box addressed to me, and filled with the
loveliest
pink rosebuds. And much nicer still, it contained a card with a very polite message written in a funny little uphill back hand (but one which shows a great deal of character). Thank you, Daddy, a thousand times. Your flowers make the first real, true present I ever received in my life. If you want to know what a baby I am, I lay down and cried because I was so happy.

Now that I am sure you read my letters, I'll make them much more interesting, so they'll be worth keeping in a safe with red tape around them—only please take out that dreadful one and burn it up. I'd hate to think that you ever read it over.

Thank you for making a very sick, cross, miserable Freshman cheerful. Probably you have lots of loving family and friends, and you don't know what it feels like to be alone. But I do.

Good-by—I'll promise never to be horrid again, because now I know you're a real person; also I'll promise never to bother you with more questions.

Do you still hate girls?

Yours forever,
JUDY.

 

 

 

 

 

8th hour, Monday.

I hope you aren't the Trustee who sat on the toad? It went off—I was told—with quite a pop, so probably he was a fatter Trustee.

Do you remember the little dugout places with gratings over them by the laundry windows in the John Grier Home? Every spring when the hoptoad season opened we used to form a collection of toads and keep them in those window holes; and occasionally they would spill over into the laundry, causing a very pleasurable commotion on wash days. We were severely punished for our activities in this direction, but in spite of all discouragement the toads would collect.

And one day—well, I won't bore you with particulars—but somehow, one of the fattest, biggest,
juiciest
toads got into one of those big leather arm chairs in the Trustees' room and that afternoon at the Trustees' meeting—But I dare say you were there and recall the rest?

Looking back dispassionately after a period of time, I will say that punishment was merited, and—if I remember rightly—adequate.

I don't know why I am in such a reminiscent mood except that spring and the reappearance of toads always awakens the old acquisitive instinct. The only thing that keeps me from starting a collection is the fact that no rule exists against it.

After chapel, Thursday.

What do you think is my favorite book? Just now, I mean; I change every three days. “Wuthering Heights.”
²⁶
Emily Brontë was quite young when she wrote it, and had never been outside of Haworth churchyard. She had never known any men in her life; how
could
she imagine a man like Heathcliffe?
²⁷

I couldn't do it, and I'm quite young and never outside the John Grier Asylum—I've had every chance in the world. Sometimes a dreadful fear comes over me that I'm not a genius. Will you be awfully disappointed, Daddy, if I don't turn out to be a great author? In the spring when everything is so beautiful and green and budding, I feel like turning my back on lessons, and running away to play with the weather. There are such lots of adventures out in the fields! It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.

Ow ! ! ! ! ! !

That was a shriek which brought Sallie and Julia and (for a disgusted moment) the Senior from across the hall. It was caused by a centipede like this:
only worse. Just as I had finished the last sentence and was thinking what to say next—plump!—it fell off the ceiling and landed at my side. I tipped two cups off the tea table in trying to get away. Sallie whacked it with the back of my hair brush—which I shall never be able to use again—and killed the front end, but the rear fifty feet ran under the bureau and escaped.

This dormitory, owing to its age and ivy-covered walls, is full of centipedes. They are dreadful creatures. I'd rather find a tiger under the bed.

Friday, 9.30 P.M.

Such a lot of troubles! I didn't hear the rising bell this morning, then I broke my shoe-string while I was hurrying to dress and dropped my collar button down my neck. I was late for breakfast and also the first-hour recitation. I forgot to take any blotting paper and my fountain pen leaked. In trigonometry the Professor and I had a disagreement touching a little matter of logarithms. On looking it up, I find that she was right. We had mutton stew and pie-plant
²⁸
for lunch—hate 'em both; they taste like the asylum. Nothing but bills in my mail (though I must say that I never do get anything else; my family are not the kind that write). In English class this afternoon we had an unexpected writing lesson. This was it:

That is a poem. I don't know who wrote it or what it means. It was simply printed out on the blackboard when we arrived and we were ordered to comment upon it. When I read the first verse I thought I had an idea—The Mighty Merchant was a divinity who distributes blessings in return for virtuous deeds—but when I got to the second verse and found him twirling a button, it seemed a blasphemous supposition, and I hastily changed my mind. The rest of the class was in the same predicament; and there we sat for three quarters of an hour with blank paper and equally blank minds. Getting an education is an awfully wearing process!

But this didn't end the day. There's worse to come.

It rained so we couldn't play golf, but had to go to gymnasium instead. The girl next to me banged my elbow with an Indian club. I got home to find that the box with my new blue spring dress had come, and the skirt was so tight that I couldn't sit down. Friday is sweeping day, and the maid had mixed all the papers on my desk. We had tombstone for dessert (milk and gelatin flavored with vanilla). We were kept in chapel twenty minutes later than usual to listen to a speech about womanly women. And then—just as I was settling down with a sigh of well-earned relief to “The Portrait of a Lady,”
³⁰
a girl named Ackerly, a dough-faced, deadly, unintermittently stupid girl, who sits next to me in Latin because her name begins with A (I wish Mrs. Lippett had named me Zabriski), came to ask if Monday's lesson commenced at paragraph 69 or 70, and stayed ONE HOUR. She has just gone.