It disconcerted Barbara to see through the half-open door that Janet Bland's room was full of girls. For once, girls in the aggregate repelled her. She turned away, and tried to slip unnoticed down the corridor. But Janet Bland had seen her.
"Bab! Were you looking for me? It isn't a party; no, truly. Just a few of the girls who have fallen in love with my grandmother, as usual. You haven't met my grandmother, have you? Wasn't it a pity she didn't get here for May Day? Why, you funny child, of course you're coming in!"
There was nothing to do except to follow Janet Bland into the room and be led up to a little silver-haired lady with an alert, eager face, and a smile that attracted Barbara even in her misery. Some one made a place for the freshman on the floor in front of the crowded window seat; a girl tossed her a pillow; a voice murmured in her ear, "She was here during the Civil War, you know. We've been getting her to tell about it." Then Barbara was left to her own gloomy thoughts. After a while a sentence pierced her preoccupation, then another, and another.
"You don't forget what you live through," the little grandmother was saying. "Feelings ran high, even here, as it did everywhere in those days, North and South. Yes, we held an election, as Jan tells me you do now every presidential year. Mr. Lincoln was overwhelmingly elected. There was only one Southern girl here in the fall of 1860, when I entered. I knew of a few others through my older sister. Her last roommate had been a Georgian, Clara Fitch. They loved each other tenderly - too well to talk politics, I fancy. Becky used to tell me that the Southern girls here before the war marshaled words as well as later their brothers marshaled guns on a battlefield.
"But in the fall of 1860 nobody expected war. Perhaps - Heaven forgive us! - we hoped for it in a young, unrealizing way, just as the thought of war stirred young men's blood, North and South. We didn't know war then. To us it meant gold lace, and shoulder straps, and swords flashing to stirring music, and possibly a battle or two, but no one hurt - no one whom we knew, at any rate. Then our brothers and cousins would all be heroes, and the world, with a fresh glamour added, would wag on in the old happy way.
"Mary Ames's brother hadn't died then at the head of his men on the field of Gettysburg. Annie Clark's sweetheart wasn't a prisoner. Clara Fitch hadn't married her general and starved on rice and dried apples. Lydia Drew hadn't followed the 21st Massachusetts to the front, and her father and Harry Potter were as safe as men could be who consorted with that 'infernal machine set to music,' as the Southerners called Wendell Phillips.
"We were happy. We worked and we played, and our hearts swelled to the tunes of martial music and to the echoes of big themes.
"Then came secession and Sumter. We told each other what we would do if we were men. We read each other our brothers' and our cousins' and our fathers' letters. Boys with whom we had slid downhill the winter before were enlisting. Our friends in college and out were drilling. I shall never forget Mary Ames's glowing face when she told me that her brother Jack had been chosen first lieutenant of his company, or the fire in Lydia Drew's eyes when she said that her father and Harry Potter had answered Lincoln's first call for volunteers. And yet she pretended to take no special interest in Harry Potter! She said I was a sentimental little girl to think that there was anything more than friendship between them.
"But the war was to be short, we said, very short. The boys would be back in time to graduate.
"Jack Ames's name went up on the college rolls, but not as a candidate for his degree. Just last year I read it cast in letters of bronze. And Harry Potter's and Lydia Drew's are cut in the same marble on a village green."
A hush held the room. After a moment the little grandmother broke the silence herself: "When I think of the excitement of those years, of the strain of anxiety for friends and kindred, I sometimes wonder that we came out the healthy creatures that we did."
"Oh, what did you do?" asked some one.
"Scraped lint, knit stockings, made slippers, comfort bags, and shirts, saved all the money we could to send to our soldier boys at the front. Those are a few of the things we did, besides study - yes, and play our pranks. We were young, you know. Now and then one of us went home with stricken face and swollen eyelids. Some dropped out because, with the bread winners away at the front, there was no money to keep them in college. Some of those who went home came back. Some didn't. The rest of us worked on at our books and our comfort bags, sewing our hearts into them, and often slipping a note in as well."
"Did you ever hear from the notes?"
"Sometimes." The soft cheeks flushed a little.
Janet Bland, seated on the arm of the little lady's chair, smiled down at her. "He was very brave," she said, "and he got in the way of a great many bullets. The little pocket testament that he had found in his comfort bag stopped one of them, and saved his life, and he made up his mind that, after the war was over, he would search out the girl who had made the bag, and tell her what her gift had done for him."
"And did he?"
"I'd like to hear about Lydia Drew," some one said. "Hundreds of college men went to the front in both armies. But you never hear that the girls did anything but stay behind and sew."
"Yes, tell us about Lydia Drew!" the girls cried, eagerly.
The little grandmother sat silent, with a tender expression on her face. Her eyes, gazing beyond the room, saw old, forgotten things, and her mouth trembled a little.
"Lydia Drew was a senior my first year here," she said, at last. "Perhaps she wasn't the most wonderful girl that ever lived, but I thought so then. And I - I think so still.
"I wish I could make you see her as I do: tall and slender, and graceful in her motions; dark hair parted and drawn down over her ears in the demure fashion of the times; a broad forehead, a beautifully modeled nose, a sweet, grave mouth, and wide-set eyes that laughed straight into yours. But I have seen them when they did not laugh, when there seemed to be lighted lamps behind them, shining through. So I know how the poor fellows felt who, as they looked into her face, beheld the vision of that city whose walls are of jasper and its very gate of pearl.
"Lydia Drew was highly accomplished, and we were all very proud of her. After graduation she was to go to Europe for travel and study. It was a rare thing then to go abroad. But the war came, and Lydia never saw Europe. Instead, she saw blood and wounds and cruel sickness and death. She went to the front as a nurse, accompanying her father, who was as army surgeon. She didn't stay to graduate. Contrary to popular opinion, Doctor Drew expected a long war, and wanted her to finish her course, but she persuaded him to let her go. Whom couldn't Lydia persuade?
"I helped her pack her trunk. Then I said good-by outside the 'hall.' I couldn't say good-by before the girls. 'O Lydia,' I said, 'Lydia, I can't bear to have you go! If you go, I want to go too. She comforted me very gently, I remember. 'When the war is over, you shall come to visit me,' she said. 'Shall I give your regards to Sergeant Potter?' 'He would rather have your love, Lydia.' She put her finger on my lips at that. 'Nonsense, little goose!' she said. 'Dear little goose!' She kissed me where her finger had been, and her eyes shone like stars. And then she went away, and I never saw her again."
Once more it was very still in the room.
"In midsummer I had a note from her, written at an Annapolis hospital," the gentle voice continued. "It was to carry her love, she said, and to tell me that she was well and very busy. She dared not steal more than a minute from the letters she was writing for her sick soldiers. I must give her love to all the girls. She often thought of us. She had seen Mary Ames's brother. He was as fine-looking as a young man could be who had broken his nose sliding downhill at twelve. And she told me to remember that when she didn't write she loved me just the same.
"I never heard from her again. But I followed her movements as well as I could by report, and long afterward I was still learning details of her service. There were months of hospital work at Annapolis, more months on the transports that carried Burnside's army to Roanoke Island, and on Roanoke Island itself in the wake of the fighting. Since the war I have now and then met men whom she nursed; and I have seen her through their eyes - patient, tireless, with her girlish charm and her woman's spirit.
"She must have been one of the first woman nurses of the war, and the hospital equipment was not then what it later became. Almost out of the air she had to conjure delicacies for her sick. Far into the night she wrote their home-bound messages. In health, officers and men honored and admired her; ill, they adored her. Dim eyes brightened when she appeared; delirious lips ceased babbling at her touch. No wound was too ugly for her to tend. 'The angel of the 21st,' they called her.
"Once it was a little bugler whose leg she saved from amputation. Once it was a wounded officer who was brought aboard the transport; his life would have run out if she had not cared for him. Once it was a private of the 21st, and her home company, who had lost hope and courage, and who was fast sinking. 'Don't you want to go home to Mary, Billy?' Lydia said to him. 'Then do your part. Help me to make you well.' Once it was the gray-clad brother of a former roommate, who thought that his sister was nursing him. Blue and gray looked alike to Lydia when the man inside the uniform was hurt. She was a slip of a girl to stand between strong men and death.
"She would not rest while anyone needed her; and when did they not need her? But she could not save them all. Clara Fitch's cousin died, holding her hand. Harry Potter died, too. She had nursed him devotedly, but no nursing could bring him back to health. I have often wondered how much that death meant to her. A life of high hope snuffed out, a true friend lost; but was it more? He died the day his comrades took the first fort, and they buried him on Roanoke Island. Did she want to lie beside him? Was that why she asked her father to bury her on Roanoke?"
"She didn't die!" cried two or three voices.
"At her post six weeks later, sickened from overwork." A tear slid down the little grandmother's cheek. "The Northerner was at Newbern then. Lying on the very bed on which Harry Potter had died, Lydia slipped out of the world. By General Burnside's special orders her last wish was fulfilled. Her father could not be spared to go with the body, for every day was bringing more wounded; but the general detailed an officer of the hospital department. They wrapped her in her soldier blanket, and The Highland Lights carried her over the waters to Roanoke, where she had done her last work. And there, beside Harry Potter, under the pines, they buried her with military honors, for Lydia Drew had proved herself as brave a soldier as the best."
No one spoke when the story ceased. A junior drew a long, quivering breath. The sophomore beside Barbara slid a wet little ball up her sleeve. Then a senior rose, and the rest, getting to their feet very softly, followed. One or two bent and kissed the little grandmother's forehead as they went out.
"Thank you for making me come in," Barbara said to Janet Bland. She slipped away quietly. She had forgotten what she had come for. She no longer felt the need of talking to Janet Bland, or to anyone.
"You can't help turning out right when you have such girls as that behind you," she thought, as she turned the corner by the chapel.
Out of the dusk ahead loomed a tall figure.
"Tiny, is that you?"
"Oh, hello, Bab!"
"I was just going to your room."
"Come along, then."
They turned toward the grove.
"Tiny," said Barbara, "I've quit."
"Quit?" said Tiny.
"What would you think of me if I asked you to let me off from that promise we made to room together?"
"I'd try not to corrupt you if we roomed together, Bab."
"I'd be as likely to corrupt you. Listen. You and I are birds of a feather, so much of a feather that I - yes, I don't dare trust myself till I've had a little more practice in sticking to business. If I roomed with you I'm afraid I might not stick."
"I get the point."
"Not only that, but being birds of a feather, we are bound to see a good deal of each other, anyway. It's not the same with Dorry. If I don't room with her I may lose her. Oh, I know myself a little by now. And I want to keep her. I'm sure of you. I'm not sure of her yet, unless I room with her."
"She's worth keeping," said Tiny-for-Short. "I didn't always see that. College is a great place for learning to size up your kind."
"It is; your kind and yourself; the latter isn't always pleasant."
Tiny slid an arm across Barbara's shoulders.
"You'd better room with her. There's more time coming to us. Have you asked her yet?"
"What do you take me for?" said Barbara.
I beg your pardon. No offense meant, Bobolink."
"She may not have me, of course. What will you do, Tiny?"
"Go in with somebody - Nina, perhaps. Fuzz and Migs are to be together."
"You're a trump."
"Not exactly. But I've quit, too. I can see that we might have made it hard for each other until we had shaken down into the habit."
When Barbara entered 64 Mead she was disappointed to find that Doris was not at home. Barbara had had no dinner, and she was beginning to feel hungry She sat down on the floor in front of the bookcase, and pulled forth cracker boxes and jelly jars, and thought about the girl who had died at her post off the Carolina shore. "It's great to have girls like that behind you," she said again.
She had cleaned out a couple of boxes, and had begun on a third, when Doris came.
"Have a cracker," said Barbara.
"Thanks," said Doris. She knelt beside Barbara, and munched and wondered what made her roommate's eyes so uncommonly bright to-night.
"Why aren't you rooming with Frances Harrison?" Barbara asked.
"Who told you I had the chance?"
"Wally."
"How did she know?"
"Can't say. Why didn't you? Because you had made up your mind to room alone?"
"Not then."
"Will you room with me, Dorry?"
"I thought you were going in with Tiny."
"We've changed our minds. Decided we can be just as good friends if we're not at home under the same ceiling. What do you say to my proposal?"
Doris gazed earnestly at Barbara. "I wish I knew why you're doing this."
"Why? Why?" Barbara wrinkled her brow in perplexity. "Why shouldn't I ask to room with you? Maybe I wouldn't be here now if it weren't for you."
"Thank you very much, but I am going to room with myself."
"It will be lots nicer with two selves."
"You're very kind to ask me."
"Not in the least. Is that final?"
"It's final."
Barbara surveyed the crumbs of her feast disconsolately.
"I don't wonder you won't undertake me another year. But I'd honestly try to be good. I tell you, Dorry, I've quit."
"I'm very glad, Bab. But I wish you'd stop acting grateful."
"Well, I won't, and you can't make me! Don't you suppose AUnt Annabel thought we'd room together more than one year?"
Doris was silent.
Slowly Barbara rose to her feet and shook her skirts over a waste basket.
"Oh, I know I don't deserve to have you care to room with me, but won't you like me a little bit, Dorry?"
"Like you!" said Doris. "I like you very much, Bab."
Barbara came close to her. "Dorry, I wish I knew what's going on inside your head."
"Nothing," Doris said.
"There's always a lot going on. Why won't you room with me? I'm not teasing, but I do want you such a lot!"
"Want me?"
"Why in the world do you think I asked you!" Barbara exclaimed. "Because I didn't want you!"
"I thought you were grateful."
"You - you thought -" Barbara stared at her.
Then she opened her arms and hugged Doris. "You can stop thinking it," she said, "if that's what's the matter. Now whom are you going to room with?"
"Myself -"
"And -" Barbara prompted.
"And you," said Doris, with a happy smile.