The Girls of Central High: or, Rivals for All Honors
TextCHAPTER XXIII – THE UNVEILING OF HESTER
“There was a girl in Central High
And she was wondrous wise,
When she wasn’t rigging thunderstorms
She was making strawberry pies!
“Gee, Laura! those tarts smell delicious! Do give a feller one?”
Black Jinny, the Belding’s cook, chuckled inordinately – as she always did whenever Bobby Hargrew showed her face at the Belding’s kitchen window, and shuffled two of the still warm dainties onto a plate and passed them with a fork to the visitor.
“Now, Jinny, you’ll spoil the count. And Bobby’s getting in in advance of the other girls. These are for my party to-morrow afternoon,” complained Laura, but with a smile for the smaller girl.
“Party! Yum, yum!” said Bobby, with her mouth full. “I just love parties, Laura. ’Specially your kind. You always have something good to eat.”
“But you’ll eat your share of the tarts now.”
“I am no South American or Cuban. There is no ‘manana.’ To-morrow never comes. ‘Make hay while the sun shines.’ ‘Never put off until to-morrow,’ and so forth. Oh, I’m full of old saws.”
“I’m glad,” said Laura. “Then there will not be so much of you to fill up with goodies.”
“But it’s my mind that’s full of saws – not my ‘tummy.’”
“Same thing, I believe, in your case,” declared Laura, laughing. “Jinny says the way to the boys’ hearts is through their stomachs; and I think your mind has a very close connection with your digestive apparatus.”
“I believe it. They tell me that eating fish is good for the brain, so all brains must be in close juxtaposition to people’s stomachs.”
“Wha’s dat ‘juxypotation,’ chile?” demanded Jinny, rolling her eyes. “I never heerd the like of sech big wo’ds as you young ladies talks. Is dere seech a wo’d as ‘juxypotation?’”
“There is not, Jinny,” chuckled Laura. “She’s fooling you.”
“I knowed she was,” said the cook, showing all her white teeth in the broadest kind of a smile. “I be’lieb de men wot makes dictionaries oughtn’t to put in ’em no wo’ds longer dan two syllabubs.”
“Great!” crowed Bobby, and then choked over a mouthful of Laura’s flaky pie crust.
“Come out on the side porch,” said Laura, her face quite flushed. “I’ve baked my complexion as well as the pies.”
“Your cheeks are as red as Lily Pendleton’s were last Tuesday at school. Did you hear what Gee Gee did to her?” asked Bobby.
“No.”
“Real mean of Gee Gee,” chuckled Bobby, as the girls took comfortable seats. “But Lily deserved it.”
“Tell me – Gossip!” said Laura.
Bobby merely made a grimace at her and finished the last crumb of pie.
“It was chemistry class. We had done simple tricks and Gee Gee had explained the ‘wheres and whereofs’ in her most lucid manner. Lily had laid it on pretty thick that day.”
“Laid what on?” demanded Laura.
“What she puts on her cheeks sometimes. You know, it isn’t a rush of blood to her head that gives her that delicate cerise flush once in a while. I think she tries to emulate Hester Grimes’s cabbage-rose cheeks. However, Gee Gee came close enough to her to behold the ‘painted Lily’s’ cheeks. Wow! Gee was mad!” exclaimed the irrepressible. “You know she’s as near-sighted as she can be – glasses and all. But this time she spotted Lily.
“She comes up carefully behind her, with a clean damp sponge in her hand.
“‘Young ladies,’ says she, ‘we will have one other experiment before excusing you to your next class. Notice that!’ and she gave one dab of the sponge to Lily’s right cheek. You never saw a girl change color so suddenly!” giggled Bobby. “And only on one side!”
“Don’t you come into my class, Miss, without washing your face, another time!” exclaims Gee Gee. And you can bet she meant it. And Lily carefully removed all the ‘penny blush’ before she went back to recitation again.
“Foolish girl,” said Laura, softly.
“Nothing but a miracle will ever give that girl a natural blush,” declared Bobby, reflectively. “You might work it on her, Laura.”
“How do you mean?”
“Aren’t you a miracle worker?” laughed Bobby.
“I guess not.”
“I hear you are. Colonel Swayne’s telling all over town what a head you have got! You certainly have got him going, Laura – ”
“Sh! You talk worse slang than Chet. Don’t let mother hear you.”
“I learned part of it from Chet,” declared Bobby, unblushingly. “But that was certainly a great scheme about the stage thunderstorm. Some folks laughed and said it was all nonsense. But Nellie’s father says it was all right. And the Colonel has worked it himself once since, and Mrs. Kerrick has got the habit of sleeping at night now, instead of trying to do so in the afternoon, as she used.”
“Well, she’s not complaining about us girls making a noise in the field – that’s one good thing,” said Laura, with a sigh of genuine satisfaction.
“Lucky she is not. Think of the racket there will be there next Friday afternoon. But, oh! I can only be there as a spectator,” groaned Bobby.
“Bobby, dear,” said Laura. “I wish I really was a magician – or something like that. A prophetess would do, I guess – a seeress. Then I could explain the mystery of the fire in Mr. Sharp’s office and your troubles – for the time being, at least – would be over.”
“There’s the hateful cat that made me all the trouble!” exclaimed Bobby, suddenly, shaking her clenched fist.
Laura peered around the vines which screened the porch and saw Hester Grimes climbing into an automobile, which was standing before the gate of the butcher’s premises.
“She did testify against you,” sighed Laura. “But there really was a fire.”
“Just the same, if Hester hadn’t said she saw me throw something into the basket, Gee Gee would never have put it up to the principal so strong.”
Hester was evidently waiting for her mother to appear from the house. They were probably going shopping. Before Laura spoke again she and Bobby heard – as did everybody else who might be listening on the block – Mrs. Grimes shouting to Hester from an upper window:
“Hes! have you seen my veil?”
“No, Ma,” replied Miss Grimes.
“My ecru veil – you know, the big one – the automobile veil?”
“I haven’t got it, Ma,” shouted back Hester.
Laura leaped to her feet.
“What’s the matter, Laura?” demanded Bobby.
“Wait a minute, Bobby,” whispered the older girl.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve got an errand to do,” said Laura, evasively, and darted into the house.
She ran up to her room, seized something from a bureau drawer, stuffed it behind the bib of her big apron, and ran down the front stairway and out of the house by that door.
The Grimes’s car was still waiting. Mrs. Grimes – a much overdressed woman with the same natural bloom on her coarse face that Hester possessed – was just coming out of the house.
Laura darted down the walk out at the gate. She flew up the street and reached the automobile before Mrs. Grimes had stepped in. That lady was saying to her daughter:
“Hester! I ’most know you took that veil and lost it. You took it the night you went car-riding alone. You remember? When you said you had been as far as Robinson’s picnic grounds – ”
“Oh, Mrs. Grimes!” gasped Laura, “is this your veil?”
She flashed before the eyes of Hester and her mother the veil that had been used to gag her when she was overcome by the “ghost” in the haunted house in Robinson’s Woods.
“No! That isn’t her veil,” declared Hester, quickly, but growing redder in the face than Nature, even, had intended her to be. “She never saw that veil before.”
“Why, hold on, child!” exclaimed Mrs. Grimes. “That looks like mine.”
“No, it isn’t!” snapped her daughter.
“Yes it is, Hes,” said Mrs. Grimes, and she took the proffered veil from Laura’s hand.
“’Taint, either, Ma!” cried Hester.
“I hope I know my own veil, Hessie Grimes. This is it. Where did you find it, Laura?” asked the butcher’s wife.
“I found it where Hester left it,” said Laura, quietly, and looking straight into the other girl’s face. “It was the night the M. O. R.’s went to Robinson’s Woods.”
“There! what did I tell you, Hes?” exclaimed the unsuspecting lady. “I knew you lost it that night. I’m a thousand times obliged, Laura. I don’t suppose you would have known it was mine if you hadn’t heard me hollering about it?” and she laughed, comfortably. “I do shout, that’s a fact. But Laws! it got me back my veil this time, didn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Laura, unsmilingly. “And Hester! Monday morning Miss Carrington will want to speak to you before school.”
She turned back without any further explanation to the culprit. She knew that she could make this unveiling of Hester’s meanness do Bobby Hargrew a good turn. Hester must admit to Miss Carrington that she had told a falsehood when she said she saw Bobby throw something in the principal’s wastebasket. If Hester would not make this reparation Laura was determined to make public what Hester had done to her in the haunted house.
CHAPTER XXIV – THE FIRST FIELD DAY
The girls of Central High had looked forward to this open-air exhibition of dancing and field athletics with great expectations. The pretty folk dances were enjoyed by the girl pupils of Central High in assembly. All of the girls who were physically able were expected to take part in such exercises, and Mrs. Case had trained her classes, separately and together, in several of the Morris dances, in the Maypole dance of England, and in the Italian Tarantella.
Besides these general dances there was a special class that danced the Hungarian Czardas and the Swedish Rheinlander as exhibition dances. The gymnasium dresses of the girls of Central High were a dark blue with white braid. In the special dances the class going through the exercises changed costumes in the bath houses and appeared in Hungarian and Swedish peasant costumes.
With these general exercises at this first field day of the school were also relay races – a simple relay, shuttle relay and potato relay. Following which the champion basket-ball team of the school would play a scrub team, although the field was not a really first class place for a basket-ball court.
For a finale the girls were to repeat the Maypole dance and then break up into running and skipping groups over the greensward of the field, the groups as a whole forming a picture pleasing and inspiring to the eyes of the spectators, who could view the proceedings from the grandstand that had been built along one side of the field.
Sprightly little Bobby Hargrew was a beautiful dancer, and enjoyed the exercise more than she did anything else in athletics. She had been one of Mrs. Case’s prize dancers before the unfortunate occurrence that had cut her out of the after-hour fun.
Of course, she took the exercises the physical instructor put into the regular work of the classes; but, forbidden by Mr. Sharp, she could not hope to take part in any of the events on the field. She would be obliged to sit in the stand and look on.
And this deprivation hurt the girl’s pride. She hated, too, to have it said that of all the girls of Central High, she was the one singled out for such punishment. It seemed hard, too, when she knew she was not guilty of the offense of which she stood accused.
However, she needed nobody to point out to her that her own thoughtlessness and love of joking had brought the thing about. Had she not deliberately set out to annoy Miss Carrington, her teacher, by appearing to smoke a cigarette, the Chinese punk would never have been in Mr. Sharp’s office. Then they could not have accused her of setting the fire.
It seemed to the fun-loving girl, however, that the punishment did not “fit the crime.” The punishment was so hard to bear! She began this last week before the Field Day in a very despondent mood, for her – for Clara Hargrew was not wont to despond over anything.
To her surprise, on Tuesday morning, however, she was called to Miss Carrington’s office. The teacher looked very seriously through her thick spectacles at the girl, and her face was a little flushed, Bobby thought.
“Miss Hargrew,” said Gee Gee, “you have proved to my satisfaction during the last few weeks that you can behave yourself almost as well as any other pupil in our school – if you so wish. Ahem!”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Bobby, demurely.
“And if you can behave so well for these weeks, why not all the time?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” admitted Bobby.
“Can’t you?”
“Sometimes I fear I shall burst, Miss Carrington,” said the girl, bluntly.
“Well! you have improved,” admitted the teacher. “But you are not willing to say anything further about the fire?”
“I didn’t set it,” said Bobby, doggedly.
“And you did not go near that waste basket?”
“I did not.”
“Well! it is perfectly ridiculous. The fire could have been set in no other way. There was not a soul in the room but yourself. And the punk was afire when we all left you. That is so; is it not?”
“Yes, ma’am,” admitted the girl, with a flash in her eye. “But I want to repeat to you that Hester Grimes never saw me throw that match into the basket – ”
“Wait!” observed Miss Carrington, holding up her hand reprovingly. “Do not say anything you would be sorry for about Hester.”
“I guess anything I’d say about her I’d not be sorry for,” declared Bobby, bluntly.
“But you would. Hester has done a very brave thing. And she has helped you in – er – Mr. Sharp’s estimation and – and in my own.”
“What’s that?” demanded the amazed Bobby.
“She has come to me and confessed that – out of pique – she made a mis-statement,” said Miss Carrington, gravely. “She admits that she did not see you put anything in the basket. She said it because she was angry with you – ”
“Well! I declare!” burst forth Bobby. “Who ever knew Hessie to do a thing like that before?”
“Why, Miss Hargrew, you seem to be ungrateful!” cried the teacher. “And you do not appreciate what a sacrifice your school friend has made for you. Her conscience would not let her remain silent longer. She had to tell me. She came to me yesterday morning – ”
“All her lonesome – by herself, I mean?” demanded Bobby.
“Certainly.”
“And nobody made her tell the truth?”
“Her conscience only.”
Bobby had been thinking hard, however. She was amazed at this outcome of the matter, but she was not so glad that she could not see some reason for the change of heart on the part of Hester Grimes. “I bet a cent,” thought Bobby, to herself, “that Laura had something to do with it. She ran out and spoke to Hessie and her mother Saturday. She had something on Hessie, and made her do this.”
But the girl saw it would not be wise to indicate her suspicions to Gee Gee. Besides, Laura evidently wished to keep the matter a secret.
“Of course, Clara,” said the teacher, stiffly, “this does not reinstate you in the school. It merely gives you a further chance. We have nothing but circumstantial evidence against you. The fire must be explained, however, before Mr. Sharp can pass upon your name as a member of the junior class for next year.”
“Oh, dear, Miss Carrington!” cried Bobby. “He won’t suspend me?”
“He will have no choice,” said the teacher, rather hardly. “It will be expulsion. You may take your place in the field exercises on Friday and, later, you will have your part in the graduation exercises of your class. He will make that concession. But unless the matter of that fire is cleared up, you cannot return to Central High next fall.”
The decision gave poor Bobby little comfort. To be denied the privilege of the high school – which Mr. Sharp would have a perfect right to do considering the seriousness of the offense supposed to have been committed by the grocer’s daughter – was an awful thing, to Bobby’s mind. Perhaps her father would have to send her away to private school. All the fun of Central High would be denied her. Worse still, she must go to a strange school with the stigma of having been expelled from her local school. Bobby did something that she seldom did – she cried herself to sleep that night.
She could not help taking Laura into her confidence, and telling her all about it. Laura saw that Hester Grimes had taken the opportunity of putting her fault in the best light possible before Miss Carrington. Indeed, Hester’s conduct really seemed to redound to her own credit in that teacher’s opinion.
But Laura was not one to go back on her word. She had assured Hester that if she told the truth about Bobby’s affair, she, Laura, would remain forever silent about the mystery of the haunted house. And Laura would keep faith.
She saw, however, that Mr. Sharp had conceded all he possibly could to the girl under suspicion. Bobby might take part in the Field Day exercises; but when the term was ended she would cease to be a member of the school and therefore could not take part in any of the further athletics of the girls of Central High.
“It’s a hard case, Bobby,” was all she could say to the troubled girl. “Let us hope something may turn up to explain the mystery of that fire.”
“You try and turn it up, then, Laura,” begged Bobby. “I know you can find out about it, if you put your mind to it. Do, do, DO!”
And Laura promised. But she had no idea what she could do, nor how she should go about hunting down the clue which might lead to the explanation of that most mysterious blaze.
The eventful Friday came, however, and Laura had made no progress in poor Bobby’s trouble. It was a beautiful day, and the Central High girls marched to the athletic field right after the noon recess. They carried a banner, and were cheered along the short march by their neighbors and friends.
So many people wished to get into the field to see the games that the school authorities had to be careful about the distribution of the tickets. But Laura noted that Colonel Swayne had a prominent seat in the grandstand. She smiled as she saw the old gentleman, and she hoped with all her heart that what the wealthy man saw of the athletics of the Girls’ Branch that day would open the “way to his pocket-book,” as Jess Morse had expressed it.
CHAPTER XXV – “MOTHER-WIT”
Whether Colonel Richard Swayne was an enthusiastic and interested spectator of the sports Laura fielding did not know at the time. She was too busy on the field herself.
She and her closest friends were in the relay races; and of course she played in the basket-ball game. This time Hester Grimes managed to behave herself. She was playing under the eyes of the instructors, her own parents, and the parents of her schoolmates, and she restrained her temper.
Besides, since Laura had caught her in the matter of the veil, and she had been obliged to acknowledge that she had told a falsehood about Bobby Hargrew, Miss Grimes was much subdued.
“Really, she acts like a tame cat. What do you suppose has happened to Hester?” demanded Laura’s chum, Jess Morse, in the dressing room.
But Laura kept her own counsel.
The basket-ball game went off splendidly. So did most of the exercises. The dancing, that was interspersed between the games, pleased the parents immensely. And the final number – the dance around the Maypole erected in the middle of the green – was as pretty an outdoor picture as one could imagine, despite the fact that the girls wore dark gymnasium suits.
At the end, the running and skipping on the grass delighted the parents. To see these girls, so merry and untrammeled, with the natural grace of healthy bodies displayed in their movements, was charming. At the end of the afternoon Laura saw Colonel Swayne in close consultation with Mr. Sharp and members of the Board of Education. But the girl heard no particulars of that conference until she went to school the following Monday morning.
Just before noon she chanced to have an errand in the principal’s office. Mr. Sharp looked up at the young girl as she entered, nodded to her, and said, with a smile:
“And how does Central High’s fairy-godmother do to-day?”
Laura looked astonished, but she smiled. “Do you mean me, Mr. Sharp?”
“Who else would I mean?” he asked, chuckling. “Haven’t you heard the news?”
“Not that I was a fairy-godmother,” she returned, puzzled.
“Don’t you know that in the estimation of a certain gentleman you are the very smartest and wittiest girl who goes to this school? Because you made a thunderstorm for him, and saved a man from falling from a church steeple, he believes that it is athletics for you girls that puts the wit into your heads! But I tell him, in your case, it is ‘Mother wit.’”
“You mean Colonel Swayne?” whispered Laura, with sparkling eyes.
“I do, indeed.”
“And he has agreed to do something for us?”
“He says he will do a great deal for us,” said Mr. Sharp. “He agrees to make Central High a gift of twenty-five thousand dollars for a proper athletic field for you girls, if the Board of Education will find a like amount. And it will be found, I believe. Before many months the girls of Central High will have one of the finest athletic fields in the State.”
“Isn’t he a dear, good man?” cried Laura, with tears in her eyes. “But it wasn’t I who did it. It was because he saw us the other day, and saw how happy we were. And – perhaps – because he wants us girls to grow up and be different women from his own daughter.”
“Ah! perhaps that last is true, too,” said the principal, softly.
The sun shining in at the long window behind the principal almost dazzled Laura, yet as she looked toward him through her tears she saw something that made her dart forward.
“What’s the matter?” asked Mr. Sharp.
“Oh! the poor fish!” cried the girl. “That sun is pouring right in upon them.”
The four new goldfish in the principal’s bowl were swimming around and around madly. Mr. Sharp saw the reason for these activities at once.
“I declare!” he said, with contrition. “I usually remember to pull down the shade.”
“Oh! the water is almost hot!” cried Laura, putting her hand in the bowl.
“Let me move that stand,” said the principal.
But Laura suddenly held up her hand with such a bright, yet amazed expression on her face, that the principal was startled.
“Please! Please, Mr. Sharp, send for John! Tell him to bring a pail of fresh water and the scoop net. Let him take the fish out of the water here. I have a – a tremendous idea.”
“What’s this? what’s this?” demanded the principal, with a puzzled smile. “One of your great ideas, Miss Belding.”
“Don’t make fun of me, sir,” cried the girl, earnestly. “It is the very greatest idea I ever had. And if it is a true idea, then it is bound to make a certain person the happiest girl in Centerport to-day!”
Mr. Sharp picked up the desk telephone and called the janitor. In five minutes the old man appeared and the struggling fish were scooped out of the water.
“Now, young lady?” demanded the principal.
“Let the bowl of water stand just as it does. See! Look at the ‘spot-light’ on the floor. Why, the oil in the floor fairly smokes! See! A great burning-glass!”
She swished the wastepaper basket, again almost full of scrap paper, so that the rays of the sun, passing through window pane and water-filled bowl, struck upon the loose papers. In a few minutes a light smoke began to rise from the basket. A bit of the paper turned brown slowly, and then curled up and broke into flame.
“Great Heavens!” gasped the principal. “John, put that out! The girl is a regular little firebug! Is that what you have learned from your dipping into physics and chemistry?”
He ran and pulled down the shade to shut out the sun. Then he turned with both his hands held out to the trembling girl.
“I see! I see!” he cried. “I should have seen it before. ‘Mother wit,’ indeed! Colonel Swayne is right. You are an extraordinarily smart girl. That is how the fire started before – and the fish were dead when you emptied the bowl of water upon the burning basket.
“Your young friend is freed of suspicion, Miss Belding. I congratulate her on having such a friend. I congratulate you – Why, why! my dear child! You are crying?”
“Because I am such a dunce!” gasped Laura, through her tears, and with both hands over her face.
“Such a dunce?” demanded the amazed principal.
“Ye – yes, sir! I should have known what started the fire all the time. I should have seen it at once!”
“Why, pray?”
“Because it was a burning glass that started another fire in Bobby’s father’s store that very day – and I put it out by shutting out the sun. I should have seen this right then and there, and saved poor Bobby all this trouble. Don’t call me smart! I – I’m a regular dunce.”
But other people did not think just as Laura did about it. Indeed, the principal’s statement that she possessed “Mother wit,” went the rounds of the school and the neighborhood, and those who loved Laura Belding – and they were many – began to call her from that time, in gentle sportiveness, by that nickname – “Mother Wit.” And if you wish to read more about Laura Belding, and her friends, and the athletic trials and triumphs of the girls of Central High, they will be found narrated in the second volume of this series, entitled, “The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna; Or, The Crew That Won.”
Bobby Hargrew’s delight when she was called up publicly before the whole school at Morning Assembly, and Principal Sharp told her that she was freed from any taint of blame in connection with the fire in his office, can scarcely be described. But she knew who to thank particularly for her escape from expulsion, and if one would wish to find a more loyal supporter of Laura Belding than Clara Hargrew, one must search “the hill district” of Centerport well.
And the other girls were glad that Bobby was freed from suspicion, too. Now the crew of the eight-oared shell hoped to make a better showing in the forthcoming water sports. Bobby was active in other athletics. The girls of Central High were out to win all honors, and in the future it was hoped that the standing of the school in the Girls’ Branch League would be high indeed.
And with that hope we will leave them.