When my class entered college the sophomores told us that all freshmen, sooner or later, were required to go 'through the Turtle.' The sophomores brought no pressure to bear. They simply told us where the Turtle was.
On a platform in the old museum of Williston Hall stood a large heavy model of a fossilized creature resembling a tortoise. Its upper crust, under crust, and side armor were all cast in one piece. The head and other members were missing, and the shell made a tunnel large enough so that a limber freshman could on a pinch wriggle through it, but not with ease.
Probably the trip through the Turtle was just about as difficult as the trip the Wellesley girls used to take through the rungs of the sculptured chair on which sat the statue of Harriet Martineau in College Hall. Wellesley's trip was more public. Ours was perhaps more picturesque.
A group of forehanded freshmen who liked to finish required work early went one Saturday afternoon into Williston Museum to do our Turtle assignment.
The smallest and most agile among us climbed in first, and the rest of us circled around the platform to cheer the traveler on. The good gray shell of a mammoth turtle looks strangely expressive when topped off by the fluffy pompadoured head of an early twentieth-century freshman. As we watched our pioneer emerging from the forward end, her expression resolute and absorbed, I had a disquieting mental picture of my own face completing the Turtle. A turtle with a coronet braid was going to be altogether too good. I hit on a device.
Might we, I suggested, try the experiment of going through in a continuous procession making record time? This would be something new that would embellish our report to the sophomores. With rare executive ability I lined up the crowd and took the lead. The girl who had already made the trip came back to aid the awkward. We timed ourselves. Not for a moment must there be any cessation of traffic in the tunnel.
I was well on my way, my head bent down to avoid collision with the carapace above me, when it dawned on me how much the sophomores were missing. Smiling with gratification I wriggled the last part of the distance, thrust my head out at the Turtle's neck, and found myself face to face with one of our favorite professors who was entering the museum.
Luckily, although she looked like Athena to me, she had been through the Turtle in her freshman days herself. But when I first spied her I did not know that. What does conventionality do, I asked myself, when an admired professor finds one acting as the Head of a prehistoric turtle? Does one bow? Or speak? Or pull in!
College, it seemed to me in my embarrassment, was not what I had expected. So many things about it depend on one's point of view.
Old Williston Hall no longer stands, and the Turtle is no more. But the point of view about college still makes all the difference in the world.
Probably to know a college completely, one would have to be the President and both the Deans; the students from all parts of the country and from abroad; their parents, the Trustees, the Executive Secretary of the Board of Admission, and one or two visiting clergymen; all the graduates from the ends of the earth returning for reunion; the organist; the librarians; half a dozen Prom men; any number of non-Prom men; all of the graduate students from other colleges; assorted professors, the Registrar, the Comptroller, the College Physicians, the Press Bureau, the Steward, and the townspeople; one visiting musician coming to give a concert; one visiting lecturer, such as Robert Frost who knows not only his poetry but his audiences; one architect coming to plan a new building; and at Mount Holyoke, the Shoemaker in Extraordinary to the College, Mr. Felice.
Even with all these points of view one would not feel qualified to make many sweeping statements, because through the eyes of each of these observers one would have looked at a different college.
Not only the eye of the observer but the time of observation makes a difference. A survey of the transportation facilities of a century could be made from a dissolving view of students traveling to South Hadley on the opening day of each of our hundred years. Long ago, South Hadley was the intersection for stage-coach lines, even as it is a point of intersection for motor roads today. You arrived, in 1837, by stage; or if you came from the west and would let Miss Lyon know in advance, she would have you met with 'a private carriage' in Springfield. If you hailed from a town not too far away, your father could bring you jogging along behind the family horse.
Now, after a century, the fatherly driver is in evidence again on Registration Day, but with a fleeter kind of steed. In the middle years of the century the fathers dropped out of the picture. If anybody came along on the train, it was usually the mother of the freshman; but new students ordinarily came with upper-classmen. Great use was made of Smith's Ferry, a remarkable contraption that swung you across the Connecticut on the power of the current, the process managed by stout wires from which the ferry swerved. It was a marionette ferry dependent on the man who worked its strings. The ferryman, like a nineteenth-century Charon navigating a more lively Styx, manipulated his barge with full cargo of girls and baggage, playing both ends of the river against the middle in a fabulous way. To and fro he went all day. It is really a perfect miracle that in all his voyagings he never lost a soul.
Now the arriving freshmen come by nearly every means of transportation except the ferry. There are combinations of trains and street-cars bewildering to contemplate, and taxi service for the enterprising; and if one is canny, one can sometimes unearth, between certain points, a bus. Once when she had to get back to College in a hurry, Miss Woolley flew.
On Registration Day in autumn now, an airplane view of South Hadley would show it as the haven for fleets of family cars. From half the States of the Union the arriving motors warp themselves in along College Street under the elms. Wherever you go, you come upon industrious fathers plying up the stairs of the residence halls with traveling-bags, snowshoes, extra furniture, winter coats, and skis. They say, 'I just came along as baggage-rustler,' or 'They brought me along to drive the car.' In the old days if we wanted an extra chair from the College Exchange, we had to chivvy it home across campus by hand-power ourselves. Now your father, or if he is not here then somebody else's father, will convey it to you in all elegance with his car. Fathers on campus are a boon.
Meanwhile the freshman daughter is having a busy time filling out blanks that were never provided for us.She fills out this blank, she fills out that one; she has a picture of her posture taken as she naturally stands, and another picture of her posture as she thinks she ought to stand (usually the most uncomfortable attitude she can invent); she gets her class cards, she listens to talks, she interviews advisers, and she goes to teas. There is scarcely a chance to be homesick, though nearly everybody has a precarious moment when the only car in all the world backs out of the traffic and heads for home.
A certain father had the right technique. He timed his departure precisely at the lunch hour. He did not leave his daughter standing by the roadside like little David Copperfield saving to the Micawbers. He left her with the crowd that was going in to lunch. He told somebody afterward that he had a very satisfactory feeling as he drove away, because he had had that parting glimpse of his daughter as the center of a congenial group going into the dining-room of Pearsons Hall. Said he, 'Not one of those girls had known the others before, yet there they all were going in to lunch together, talking as if they had been friends for years.'
So quickly one forgets that these girls came from the four quarters of the globe. So completely they fit themselves into the college scene. The moment the upper-classmen arrive and the College program has started, nobody can be sure who is a freshman and who is a youthful new assistant on a laboratory staff.
But for a long-distance scrutiny of individuals, come up in imagination with me to the topmost turret of the Cornelia Clapp Laboratory Building and look at the campus as I saw it on a certain autumn morning in 1936, when one class hour was closing and the students were milling around the campus on the way to their next appointments.As we emerge from the dim spiral of the staircase into the blaze of sunlight on the turret, take one sweeping look all around the horizon at the tapestried circle of the hills - mountains to the west, mountains to the north, Prospect Hill and the College lakes and gardens to the east, the region to the south where Phillips Brooks used to say 'the little hills skip,' and beyond those the distant spires of cities in the haze. Then, with your eyes accustomed to the autumn glory, stand at a western battlement and look down. There is no danger that the students will look up and see you gazing. At this height your thoughtful head as you crane it over the battlements is the merest trifle against the sky. You are as near as possible to being a disembodied Spirit peering down, clairvoyant, over a kaleidoscopic world.
The students, under the maples and New England elms, are twinkling over the campus in every direction on their way to classrooms and studios and laboratories and athletic fields. But because the college girl's perennial need to look at her post-box, a grand procession of them is headed for 'Mary Lyon' - the locus not only of the post-boxes but of Junior Lunch. If you should wave your left hand in an outward flourish, you would be saluting the Mary Lyon Administration Building, with its Longmeadow brownstone clock-tower, its pinnacled roofs, its chapel, its offices, its classrooms, and its post-office corridor all in one.
The post-office door is narrow and many there be who wish to go in thereat. Concentrated near the entrance the girls look like anything but a society of bookworms. Seen from a distance, with their gay colors, they look more like a swirl of wedding confetti blown about at the foot of scholastic towers.
If you had the presence of mind to bring field-glasses with you, focus them now and take a sharper view. Seen through a telescopic eye those autumn costumes with their many colors together look like an international congress of knitting materials. At the thought of the multitudinous clicking of needles that went into all the pretty suits and pull-overs one can only, as B. K. Hart used to say, 'knit one's brow - slip one, purl two.'
But watch the pageant now and see the individualities emerge.
There, for instance, dancing at the very edge of the crowd and talking as rapidly as she dances, is the tiny figure of a girl who could take part in a Shakespeare play as the Queen of Elves, Titania. She is an airy flash, a decorative and imperious bit of perpetual motion. Changing her direction suddenly, she darts back into the crowd, speaks to a friend, and then whirls through the post-office door ahead of all those who were ahead of her before. Everyone makes way for her and tries to serve her. She should have a band of attendant sprites to do her bidding. She misses Cobweb and Peaseblossom.
Nearly always there is a Titania in college. The campus could not spare her. She punctuates its deliberations with dainty question marks. A sense of proportion in the place is made vivid by the sight of her. College does not spoil her either. Any Titania worth her mustard seed has been competently spoiled by her father, her uncles, and her fellowmen before she ever dreamed of a Higher Education. College often is the making of her. If Titania once puts her mind on an intellectual pusuit, she works with a magic wand. It is a poor college for women that has not at least one Titania on its faculty.
But as long as she is an undergraduate, she is a problem for those in authority over academic work. Just how much 'concentration' of subject-matter should be advised anybody as capricious and gifted and attached to her own point of view as Titania? She can concentrate, but it is hard for her to promise on what or when. It was for impulsive girls like her that a very old gardener at Mount Holyoke, many a year ago, painted a signboard and set it up by the rosebushes. The sign was lettered with the wistful words, 'TRY not to pick the flowers.'
Titania is not the only student for whom Cottrell and Leonard will have to make a miniature cap and gown. Another small active figure is emerging from inside the post-office, adroitly threading a passage into the open, now hidden by groups of taller girls, now visible in the chinks of the procession. She is like Jane Eyre at seventeen. She may not have lived through the hardships of Miss Bronte's Jane, but something in heredity or experience has made her wise. If Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House could see her, he would call her 'Dame Durden' and tell her his family troubles. People like to confide in her and ask her questions. In class she is called on for discussion more than is her share because whatever she says is sagacious and to the point, and all the more memorable because she is so brisk and small. She goes busily through the daily program with the capable manner and the compact energy of a little wren.
In lively contrast, racing along the path from the Library, comes a long-geared eighteen-year-old to join the trek to the post-boxes. Her hair is shingled and the contents of her notebook are half inside the covers and half out - detached leaves of partly written papers flapping as she runs. This is Louisa Alcott's Jo, on the rampage because she has just snapped out of a writing spell to remember that she had promised to spend the next hour and part of the last one unpacking some new equipment for the Athletic Association in the 'Gym.'
At sight of her, three other girls as tall as Jo but more graceful step aside and block her path, evidently to ask her a question. Jo rummages through her notebook. In her haste she drops two letters, a quiz-book, a pair of shell-rimmed glasses, and a fountain pen. The others pick up her wares as they fall and hold them for her while Jo fourishes a piece of paper and reads it to her friends. All of this group, including Jo, hold positions that in a college for men would entitle them to the classification of 'B. S. O. T. C." [sic] (Big Shot on the Campus). They remind one of the days when the great slogan was 'Education for Leadership,' and all the candidates for college entrance would be described by their preparatory schools as 'natural leaders.' At one meeting of the Mount Holyoke Committee on Admissions, so many of the recommendations used this term that the committee was quite astonished to come upon one application blank in which the candidate was described as 'a gifted student, though perhaps not a natural leader.'
'Oh!' exclaimed Professor Gertude Cushing jubilantly. 'Let's take her! We need somebody for all the leaders to lead.'
But these four girls are natural leaders on any day in the week. The one dressed for horseback riding might be Shakespeare's Rosalind. The one planting a quick foot on one of Jo's stray papers is Katherine the Shrew. And the third might easily be Portia if that name had not already been represented in South Hadley by President Woolley's famous cook.
Miss Woolley's Portia once invented a middle name for herself that Shakespeare never thought of. During the wheat shortage in the World War, food-conservation authorities chose Portia to give demonstrations in Boston on various uses of corn meal. Later Miss Woolley asked Portia if she knew how to make a certain kind of corn-meal bread.
'Yes, I know about that,' said Portia. 'Yes, 'm', Miss Mary. All there is to be known about corn meal I know. My middle name is Corn Meal!'
Therefore, since the name of Portia is taken, we shall call our star senior by her own name, which is - but look up the honor list at Commencement time. Her name will be there. Mary Lyon Scholar, Sarah Williston Scholar, Poetry Prize Winner, House President, member of Blackstick and Phi Beta Kappa - it is possible for one student, pride of Bellario, to be all of these.
By this time the post-office parade is thinning out. The bell for the next hour will ring in two minutes. Alice in Wonderland on her way to Archaeology is asking some questions of an upper-classman as she runs. The upper-classman, like Bill the Lizard with a big pencil, is drawing explanatory diagrams in the air. Meanwhile Beatrix Esmond on her way to History is walking swiftly across the grass.
Beatrix Esmond is a perennial, a striking personage in all generations. Beatrix may vary through the ages, but only as a rose may vary - heraldic rose, tea rose, Jacqueminot, Killarney, Talisman. One may know Beatrix by the five basic petals of her character: beauty, pride, the magnet quality, independence, and wit. Modern costume makes a difference in her since Henry Esmond's days, and so does the lack of rose-colored 'ribands' and a candle. But she walks like the Queen's Maid of Honor nevertheless. A few years ago, an enterprising news-gatherer for the College paper asked a reigning Beatrix why she had not chosen a co-education college.
'Because,' said she, 'in a coed college the dates would be around all the time.' Beatrix is an artist. She likes dates, but not always under foot.
From the far end of the campus, flitting across lots, comes Barrie's Wendy hurrying to get in before the bell. She has a glass jar of specimens for laboratory in her hands. Her light-footed way of running might have been learned from Peter Pan. Wendy is a member of Outing Club. She combines a love of the open air with a cozy sort of domesticity. She will always love the trees, but best of all she will love the House in the Trees. It was a girl like Wendy, years ago, who gave a breakfast party in three boats on Lower Lake with strawberries and jugs of cream and a jar of honey and a percolator of hot coffee rushed to the spot in a muffler, without spilling a drop of anything in the Lake.
Balancing her glass jar, Wendy flies in out of sight. There goes the bell. She made it beyond a doubt.
But here comes one who is late, yet not in the slightest hurry. With a few modifications she is David Copperfield's Dora. Whenever Dora finds herself about to be tardy, she makes herself still later by stopping to decide whether it would not be better to cut the lecture hour entirely. She is struggling with that decision now, and as she struggles, she is finishing a large piece of fudge cake that she paused to buy in the post-office corridor at Junior Lunch. As the last crumb vanishes, Dora quickens her pace. The thought has occurred to her that she can ill afford to cut.
On the other hand, she can ill afford to be tardy. She turns to look at the clock. Shall she or shall she not attend that lecture? If her little dog Jippie were here, with bells on his pagoda, he could help her to decide. As it is, still hesitating, she comes along. She will enter the lecture hall with a glance of helpless apology charming to behold, particularly if the lecturer happens to belong to what Doctor Adler of Vienna told the College never to call 'the opposite' sex. Even in one's own mind Doctor Adler said one should always say 'the other sex' - no trace of opposition, even verbally, should be implied.
Dora puts it more simply. She says it is pleasanter to be late for an appointment if the appointee is a man.
One might perhaps inquire how Dora happens to be in college at all. A genuine Dickens Dora would not be here. The entrance requirements are built to shield her from going to college. But occasionally by dint of prodigious tutoring a modified version of Dora sifts in.
How much can a college do for a girl like Dora? On this question you can work up quite a faculty meeting at any time.If you spend your efforts adapting things for Dora, what becomes of your 'standards' and of the meaning of the college degree? On the other hand, it is perfectly possible for a girl to be Dora in one subject and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in another. Even within the same classroom, a student can look at certain topics with the bewildering blink of a cave woman, and at other topics with the scrutiny of a connoisseur.
This sounds exaggerated. Perhaps I speak with an extra shade of emphasis because I remember how it felt, in one of my required subjects, to be a cave woman myself. Or rather I was far worse off than that, because at least a cave woman always has a cave. I was a primitive Arab, fugitive on the face of the desert, lost, without tent or caravan. The only thing I felt qualified to do in that subject was to bow myself to the ground with my forehead on a cactus toward Allah. Nowadays I should not have to 'take' that subject at all; and if I did stray into it by mistake, search parties would be out after me, with camels. Allah be praised!
The Dora problem of the women's college is not clear-cut.
Neitheris the problem of what to do with Fleur Forsyte. Fleur has a vacant hour just now, and she is clicking her slim heels along the path to the Dean's office to see if she can get her schedule changed. Restless, tense, critical, she spurns the earth. She is displeased with the world, yet worldly.
When critics fume about the 'Modern Girl,' they usually have sombody like Fleur in mind. One Fleur is more conspicuous than fifty Agnes Wickfields.
Of course it is fanciful to call modern college girls by bookish names. But it is not half as far-fetched as it is to lump them all together and call them 'The Modern College Girl.' Some of them are as futuristic as the latest news from Paris.A few are as antediluvian as Mrs. Noah. Most of them are complicated mixtures of conflicting or harmonious traits, made sensitive by generations of thoughtful men and women in their ancestry, and not to be limited to the patterns of any particular 'types.'
The College has something for them all. As you go down from the Tower and out along the quiet path you see two more girls strolling up from South Campus, one with a tennis racquet, one with a violin. Somebody in Mary Lyon Chapel is practicing a fugue on the organ. A gust of wind along College Street blows a yellow leaf or two from the elms. A dozen freshmen across the road are seeing somebody's visitors off in a car.
A many-sided experience, this matter of 'going through college.' Probably it is just as well that the old Turtle we used to go through has departed the scene. There was something a bit to prankish about him to suit the modern vogue. Besides, the shell was dusty inside. But as a metaphor our Turtle was not so bad. Not every student had to go through it. There was no coercion if one refrained. It was not like the inititation ceremonies at a certain university in Scotland where each new student has to be 'passed over' by the convocation of his elders. There the new student arriving on the scene is greeted with the cry, 'Up! Up!' and is snatched bodily into the air and literally 'passed over' through a forest of upraised arms above the heads of the congregation, his belongings flying.
No, our Turtle was optional. But to the sensitive newcoming there is always some sort of spiritual Turtle to go through, if it is only the experience of being 'passed over' by the glances of a thousand eyes. Even when one returns to college after an absence of years, one has afresh the original sensation.
What did we see when we emerged from our pilgrimage through the original Turtle? No two would answer alike, any more than two would see alike what they encountered on their way through college. Each one must speak for himself alone. I happened to see the human element first and then the educational collection in the museum. Another observer in my shell might have seen the model of the Pterodactyl first. Or was it the Megatherium? I ought not to try to answer for him.
Therefore, without too many apologies, I am going to bring in the reports of as many observers as possible in addition to my own personal impressions, whenever I tell about what meets the eye at college - whether seen in the grand manner from the Tower, or, more intimately, from under the prehistoric auspices of the Turtle.