May Iverson tackles life

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

Foreword vii

I. Woman Suffrage at St. Catharine’s i

Foreword

In answer to many letters received during the serial publication of this book, I wish to say that the convent of St. Catharine’s has no existence in fact. Its great walled garden, and the wide main hall, ‘‘with countless little music rooms opening olF it,” are features of the convent from which I graduated many years ago. The river, however, to which reference is so often made, flows through the grounds of a convent in another State, where I have spent my happiest hours; and the mound and the shrines are in the grounds of a third great convent in which my sister was a pupil.

Of the girls, Mabel Blossom and May Iverson herself are the only ones drawn from life — as clearly as one can draw who must look at her models through the mists of more than twenty years. To-day Mabel Blossom’s children, their mother writes me, “know May Iverson by heart.”

In describing the nuns no effort, of course, was made to portray individuals, except in one in-

FOREWORD stance. In writing of Sister Irmingarde, I have tried, how vainly I sadly realize, to convey an impression of the personality and influence of the most inspiring teacher and the most wonderful woman I have ever known — the late Sister Mary Rita, of the Order of the Holy Cross. To her imperishable memory I dedicate this book — the last I shall write on convent life.

Elizabeth Jordan.

I

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AT ST. CATHARINe’s

MAY as well admit at once that Maudie Joyce was the first girl at St. Catharine’s to feel any real interest in Woman Suffrage. Usually I am the one in our school set who thinks of new things, and does them; so the other girls have got in the habit of waiting for me, and not trying to think themselves, in their crude, immature way. But Maudie thought of suffrage all alone, though perhaps Kittie James helped to put the idea into her head.

You see, Kittie started an anti-suffrage club, almost as soon as we got back to school in September, and she made herself the president of it at the very first meeting. Before the meeting I was over, Maudie Joyce asked Kittie what the club was for, and Kittie didn’t know; and Maudie asked what the members were going to do, and Kittie didn’t know that, either. Kittie said she just wanted to have a club because they had one in Chicago, and her sister, Mrs. George Morgan, belonged to it. She said the nicest feature of the Chicago club was that nobody in it did anything, and they joined because they didn’t have to do anything. It was a beautiful club, Kittie said, and so restful.

Maudie walked off to a corner after these words fell from the lips of our young friend, and I followed her. I suppose we looked aloof and lonely and disapproving. Anyway, when the rest of the girls had watched us a while, most of them came over to the corner, too, and the end of it all was that Kittie only got three members for her new club. Mabel Muriel Murphy joined because Sister Edna, the nun she likes best, approves of gentle, womanly girls. Kittie told Mabel the gentlest and most womanly thing a girl could possibly do was to join her anti-suffrage club. Kittie said the real aim of her club was to keep women in their homes, where they belonged, when they weren’t at her club; and she said Mabel Muriel Murphy wouldn’t have to have a single new idea all the time she belonged.

Mabel said afterward it was true, too; she didn’t have any.

But the whole thing seemed silly to Maudie and me. We are very intelligent girls, if we are only sixteen, and we have lots of mature ideas and emotions. If we join a club at all, we want to do something in it, even if it is only to eat. There weren’t going to be any ‘‘spreads” in Kittie’s club, she said at first, because she has a delicate stomach, and the convent infirmarians, who look after her, think she mustn’t eat between meals. They don’t let her eat much at meals, either, so Kittie is against girls overeating. It is an awful thing to behold, when you are held down yourself.

However, Kittie went right on with her club, though, of course, she felt dreadfully disappointed when Maudie and I didn’t join. Well, indeed, did she know what that meant, and how impossible real success was without us. So she “strengthened her party,” as papa says great statesmen do, by giving offices to her friends. She made Mabel Muriel Murphy treasurer, because Mabel Muriel’s father is rich and loves to pay bills; and she made Adeline Thurston secretary, because Adeline likes to write poems, and Kittie said writing reports of her club would be even more interesting than poetry. When 3

Maudie asked how there could be any reports if there wasn’t anything done, Kittie said the club would write up the things that were not done. Then she looked past the sides of our faces and changed the subject by making Hattie Gregory vice-president.

We left the meeting after that, and went to my room and ate pickles and talked about how sharper than a serpent’s tooth an ungrateful child is. Kittie was ’most like our own child, for she is more than a year younger than we are, and not intellectual; and Mabel Blossom and Maudie Joyce and I have really directed her education since she came to St. Catharine’s, three years ago.

While we were talking, Maudie said she wondered what Mabel Blossom would think of all this. Mabel hadn’t come back to school yet, but she was coming in a few days. Before I could answer, Maudie spoke again, in the quick way she has when she thinks of something. It’s just as if some one had touched a button in her brain, and often Maudie jumps when it happens. She jumped this time, and so did I, for I wasn’t expecting her to, and the doctor says I am a nervous girl, singularly high-strung. Besides, of course, I have the artistic temperament, and you know what that does to folks. So I jumped, and then 4 got cross over it, the way any literary artist would, who likes to be ‘‘well poised and dignified,” as Sister Edna says. Maudie Joyce didn’t even apologize. She just sat staring in front of her for a minute, as if she saw something that wasn’t there. Then she said, very slowly:

“May Iverson, let’s be suflFragettes!”

I jumped again, because the idea surprised me so much, and I said:

“But we aren’t suffragettes, so how can we be.?”

Maudie looked at me with a patient expression, like the one Sister Irmingarde wears sometimes in the class-room. I analyzed it once, for literary practice, to help me to observe life and put down all I see: it had astonishment in it, and pained regret, and resignation, and a kind of holy calm, struggling up through hopelessness. After I analyzed it, I wrote it all out and showed the paper to Sister Irmingarde, and asked her if I was right. She looked very much surprised at first, but finally she said she thought I had every ingredient right but one, and she would let me guess at that. Then she smiled her lovely smile, and changed the subject by asking me why my marks weren’t higher in algebra. Of course all this hasn’t anything to do with suffrage, or anti-suffrage, either. I just put it in to show how acute I am, so the 5 gentle reader won’t be surprised when I read people’s hearts the way I’ll have to before I get through with this chapter.

We will now return to Maudie. For a long time she was silent, and thought gathered deeply on her beautiful, high-bred face. At last she said, very solemnly:

“We are, too, suffragettes. We’ve been suffragettes right along. May Iverson. Only we haven’t known it.”

I gasped then, and began to say I couldn’t be anything like that without knowing it, for my first lesson in life had been to know myself, and I learned it when I was twelve. But Maudie went right on, rudely interrupting me. She said she hadn’t known her own heart till she went to Kittie’s meeting and heard Kittie talk. She said all the time she was there she kept feeling more and more uncomfortable and stirred up inside, but she did’nt know why. She even thought it might be indigestion. She said it was only this minute that it burst upon her gloriously that from the very beginning of Kittie’s meeting she had been a suffragette, unconsciously working for the cause, and trying to get independence of thought for women. She added that when she heard Kittie James express her silly little ideas, they made her so annoyed that she ’most wanted 6 to slap Kittie. Then she woke up and knew she was a real suffragette, because that’s the way they feel in England. She read all about it in the newspapers, and a friend of her mother had seen Mrs. Pankhurst in Chicago.

By this time Maudie was very much excited, so when I didn’t answer right off she said she was ready to die for the cause, and if I didn’t feel that way, too, and join the suffrage club she was going to get up, she’d never speak to me again as long as she lived.

Of course that’s no way to talk to the daughter of a general in the army, who is a literary artist besides, and I pointed this out to Maudie in tones that were cold and firm. I said she couldn’t force me to anything by threats, but that she must appeal to my reason and convince me that suffrage was a good thing for women. And I added, frankly, that I didn’t think she could do it now, anyway, because she had annoyed me very much by the way she began. I was ’most sure already I wasn’t a suffragette and didn’t ever want to be one.

Maudie changed her methods then, right off. She has associated with Mabel and me so long that she has a good deal of sense. She begged my pardon very politely, and she fixed me in a big, comfy chair, and gave me a glass of ginger 7 ale and a cookie, and started in to appeal to my reason.

She said, with her first words, that she was glad to have my reason to appeal to, and not the other girls’, and she asked me to imagine how I’d feel if I ever had to appeal to Kittie James’s reason. When I clapped at that, like a real audience — for any one who knew Kittie could see what a powerful point it was — Maudie asked me if I was willing to follow the banner of Kittie James ‘^in a struggle which was of vital import to the human race.” (She got that out of a newspaper. We have to read one every day, for our Current Events class.)

I stood right up, and said I didn’t want to follow Kittie’s banner, or anybody’s but my own. I said I just wanted to spend my life elevating the masses, by writing pure literature for them, and I didn’t see why men couldn’t go on voting, and doing heavy work like that, while we women uplifted them. I felt just full of thoughts, but Maudie made me sit down before I could say any more. She said I had promised to let her appeal to my reason, and she wished I would do it and not interrupt. That was a rebuke, and it annoyed me very much. I sat down right away; but it was quite a long time before I could get my intellect calm enough 8 for Maudie to appeal to it. I kept thinking, instead, of crushing things I might have said before I sat down, and it was dreadfully hard not to get up again and say them then. They would have been a help to Maudie, too.

But Maudie was going right along with her speech all the time, and getting more excited every minute. I don’t believe she really cared much about suffrage when she began, but by the time she finished she was ready to give up her work at St. Catharine’s, and her dream of being a great actress, and go right out and be a suffragette, and get arrested and sent to prison. She had read about the English women in prison, and how they were fed through tubes, and she called them martyrs in a deathless cause, and said she was going to have Adeline Thurston write a poem about them. I spoke up again, then, and reminded her that Adeline was an antisuffragist now, and would only write poems against suffrage. Maudie groaned and said: “This issue will split the convent. It will be like West Point at the outbreak of the Civil War, when the cadets had to take sides for the North or the South.” And she looked at me with her eyes blazing, and said, “May Iverson, at such a crisis will you be on the fence, thinking about life and trying to write stories, or will you be out 9 on the great battle-field, fighting shoulder to shoulder with your dear ones!’’

. I tell you that made me sit up. When there’s any fighting to do, no Iverson turns his back upon the foe. I saw at once that it was time to take sides, and that it was going to be terribly exciting. Kittie James was already in the enemy’s camp, with three of our friends, and here was Maudie getting up an opposition party. I had to decide quickly, and I did it. The audience was convinced on the spot, and it got up and kissed Maudie and told her so. My, but she was glad! She just hugged me, though usually she’s a very undemonstrative girl. Then she said: ‘‘Now we’ve got to get Mabel Blossom on our side. The three of us can sweep the girls off their feet; but if Mabel goes over to Kittie, you and I will have a battle to hold our own.” And she added, gloomily; ‘‘We can never tell how Mabel Blossom will act about anything.”

I knew that was so, and I promised Maudie I would appeal to Mabel’s reason, and try to make her join us the very minute she got back, before the other girls saw her. I said I’d meet Mabel at the station, and ask her which she preferred to associate with on an intellectual level — Kittie James or us. I thought that might i fetch Mabel; she is so proud of her intellect.

lO

Maudie said it was worth trying, but she shook her head and said it would be just like Mabel to join the other side, so she could develop their intellects. Then her face brightened and she jumped; so I saw that she had another idea. She did, too. She said I might tell Mabel she could get a feeding-tube, and use it on Maudie if she wanted to. Maudie said she had wondered how a person felt when she was fed through a tube, and now she was going to get one right off and find out. She said she knew Mabel would be simply delighted to try such an experiment. Mabel was going to be a doctor, so she’d have to know about it sometime, and it might as well be now.

I wasn’t very enthusiastic at first. It seemed to me like what Sister Irmingarde calls ‘‘an irrelevant detail.” But I knew Mabel Blossom would join any society in the world for the sake of trying a medical experiment on some one, so I told Maudie the tube was surely the quickest way of getting to Mabel. Wasn’t that bright? Maudie laughed hard; she doesn’t always. We put Mabel’s name on our list without waiting. So now we had three members — a president (Maudie, of course); a vice-president (Mabel); and a secretary (me). Just then Janet Trelawney knocked at the door and came in, and as

II soon as we mentioned our club she joined it without waiting for any details, because she liked us better than she liked Kittie. We were glad she didn’t insist on having an olEce, because there weren’t any left; but we gave her a glass of ginger ale and a cookie to celebrate on. There was really something to celebrate, for, you see, we had four members, the same as Kittie had, and her club was a whole hour older than ours.

You’d better believe the next twenty -four hours were fevered ones. Whenever we saw a girl alone anywhere we appealed to her reason and got her to join St. Catharine’s suffragettes. Janet Trelawney caught one girl in a bathtub, and wouldn’t leave her till she promised to join; and Maudie Joyce gave her best coral chain to a new girl, to convince her reason. It did, too, though she had half promised Kittie to join the antis. All I did was to appeal to the girl’s reasons and read my stories to them; and they were so proud of being seen seated beneath the trees with a real author that they joined, ‘‘not single spies, but in battalions,” as Shakespeare says. I got nine one Saturday, so you can see how a love for good literature is fostered in our convent school. Betweentimes we made banners with “Votes for Women”

on them. Mabel Blossom was with us by this time. She joined just as soon as we mentioned feeding Maudie through the tube. Before that her mind seemed to be ‘‘clouded with a doubt,” like King Arthur’s.

Perhaps you think Kittie James was idle all this time. She was not. The very moment Kittie heard about our club she began to work like mad to make hers bigger. She was unreasonable about it, too, and instead of seeing that we had a right to our own sacred convictions, Kittie thought we got up our club to kill hers. She hardly spoke to us on the campus at first, but pretty soon she saw how silly this was, especially as it made her miss lots of fun that had nothing to do with suffrage clubs. So she began to drop into my room again in the evening, the way she always had, but she wore such an impatient and busy look that it got on Maudie’s nerves.

I am very broad-minded and just, so I can’t help admitting that Kittie’s club was really a success, after all. Her sister, Mrs. George Morgan, sent her lots of advice about it, and told Kittie everything the Chicago club did; and her brother-in-law, George Morgan, was tremendously interested and made heaps of suggestions. Kittie took them, too, and made her club socially exclusive, and had parties, and things to eat, even if she couldn’t eat them herself. Mabel Muriel pointed out to Kittie, very politely, that this was no reason why other girls shouldn’t eat, and Kittie saw it that way at last, though Mabel Muriel said to see Kittie stand around and look at the food as it disappeared was enough to ruin one’s appetite. Of course our clubs were making life very gay; for when we had a tea, the antis gave a reception, and when they had a musicale, we had an authors’ reading and I read a story. It all took up so much time that Sister Irmingarde got nervous and began to make pointed remarks about study; but Maudie told her we were merely girding on our armor for the vital struggle on life’s grim battle-field. After that Sister Irmingarde didn’t seem to be able to say anything for a few minutes, though we could see she was impressed.

Then, all of a sudden, the way dramatic things happen in books, the crisis came. Kittie James challenged Maudie to a suffrage debate! She said we could have it in the study-hall, and both clubs could come, and some of the other students and Sisters. She said we could have a jury to decide which side won, and give a silver cup to the winner. She said the jury was George Morgan’s idea, and the cup was hers — but I knew that before she told us. Imagine Kittie James thinking of a jury! She told me afterward, with her own lips, that she thought we should have to borrow one from a court-room in Chicago, and she asked George to manage it, because he is a lawyer. George didn’t. He said some of the Sisters would do. So we asked Sister Edna and Sister Irmingarde and Sister Estelle, and they all accepted. Then we ordered programmes, and flowers, and lemons and sandwiches, and other important things, and for days and days we were so busy we didn’t stop to decide who was going to debate. When we asked Kittie she said very coolly that she was going to do it for her side, but if Maudie didn’t feel up to doing it herself, she could ask some one else to represent our club. Kittie said she thought the president ought to do it, so she was going to do her duty; but she didn’t want her decision to influence Maudie in any way.

I wish you could have seen Maudie’s face, and Mabel’s, when Kittie said that. I suppose mine looked funny, too, but of course I couldn’t see mine. When Maudie could speak, she said she would represent her club, and that, as Kittie was very young and inexperienced, and ought to have every advantage, she could begin or finish — Maudie didn’t care which. Kittie said she would end the debate, and she bowed to us all ‘ IS and went away, leaving the loudest silence behind her that I ever heard.

The gentle reader cannot understand how strange it was, because the gentle reader doesn’t know Kittie James. But we girls did, and to think of Kittie making a speech, and trying to express thoughts! I just simply haven’t got far enough in my literary art to describe our emotions. I don’t believe even Shakespeare could do it, or Henry James. Why, the first days Kittie was at St. Catharine’s, she came to my room one night and woke me up to ask me why it was that she always felt so much sleepier in the morning than when she went to bed at night. She said sometimes she couldn’t sleep at night, but she could always sleep after the bell rang at six in the morning. She said she had been wondering about it, and couldn’t understand. Another time she interrupted Maudie, when she was writing an essay one night, to ask her why folks felt homesick when they were away from home. She stayed and talked about it a long time. She said her stomach felt as if she were dropping from the top floor of a high building in a dreadfully fast elevator, and she wanted to know why that was. Finally, Maudie and I told Kittie not to waste her time trying to think, but to come right to us when anything

i6 puzzled her. And she always did, until now. Now she was being a leader of thought and patronizing Maudie Joyce!

Maudie had been working on some new banners with ‘WoTES FOR Women” on them, for we were planning to have an open-air demonstration on the campus the next day. But Maudie put the banners down the very minute Kittie left, and went ofF to write her debate. I knew by the look in her eye that her proud spirit was stirred to its depths, and I felt sorry for Kittie. Kittie wasn’t a bit sorry for herself, though. Mabel Blossom was so much interested in the challenge that she followed Maudie to her room, and told her she needn’t eat through the tube until the day after the debate, though we had already fixed the tube day, before we knew about the debate. You’d better believe Maudie was glad to postpone it. The tube was going to be heroic, but not intellectual, of course.

Every day from then to the day we had the debate, Kittie James went around the halls looking important and murmuring to herself. She’d get off on the banks of the river that runs through the convent grounds, and put pebbles in her mouth and practise oratory, like a man I read about somewhere. Finally she swallowed a pebble by accident and had to stop, so we had some peace. It was time, too, for I was getting dreadfully tired of hearing, ‘‘I say to you, students of St. Catharine’s Academy,” coming from all the nicest nooks on the grounds. I think Maudie would have had to go to the infirmary in a day or two more, she was getting so overwrought.

We were all pretty edgy by this time. If you have delicate nerves in your fingers, you know how perfectly awful you feel when you try to pare a peach. That’s about the way every suffragette at St. Catharine’s felt when an “anti” came round where she was. As for our lessons. Sister Irmingarde told me with her own lips that if I didn’t do better during the coming month she would be reluctantly forced to change her mind about my ability as a student. You’d better believe that stirred me up! I dropped everything at St. Catharine’s except study and suffrage. When the other girls had “spreads” in their rooms, Mabel Muriel Murphy and I were studying in our rooms with wet towels on our heads; for Sister Edna had reproached Mabel Muriel, too. But when there was suffrage or anti-suffrage going on, we were both at our posts, like the boy on the burning deck. For by this time it was a vital, burning issue, as the newspaper said, and was disrupting the girls, just as Maudie had thought it would.

i8

The evening of the debate came at last. We had it in the assembly-hall right after supper, and Sister Irmingarde and Sister Edna and Sister Estelle were the jury, as they had promised to be. The anti girls were all on the left side, and we suffragettes sat on the right; and on the platform there was a speakers’ rostrum, with a glass of water on it. When I saw those three nuns lined Up in their chairs, and some other Sisters in the audience, I felt sorry for Kittie and Maudie. Sisters, especially the Sisters who teach us, make a very critical audience, and we girls had often indeed observed that they had a strange, cramping effect on our style — the kind one’s family has. Both Maudie and Kittie looked nervous, I thought, and dreadfully serious. Kittie wore her newest dress — one her sister had sent her the week before — and Maudie had on a new embroidered blouse. They were pale but firm.

Maudie began, and, dear me! wasn’t I proud of her 1 Maudie has one fault, and I have pointed it out to her freely, like a true literary artist to whom art comes before all. She uses too many big words, and is what Mabel Blossom calls ‘‘highfalutin” in her style. (Mabel has pointed this fault out, too.) But she began to debate in the simplest, most natural way, so that the Minims could have understood her if they had been there. She said afterward that she did this because she wanted the antis to grasp her meaning.

Maudie said that the time came to every girl when she had to look into the depths of her own heart, and make up her mind what her life was going to be. Then, when she decided, all she had to do was to go ahead and make it that. You see how simple that was. The antis began to look bored right ofF, but I gave Maudie a smile of loving encouragement. She said there were only two things a girl could do — she could be an ivy and cling to things, or else she could be a strong support and let things cling to her. Then Maudie drew a long breath and said the very best thing any girl could have clinging to her was Principles. She waited for that to sink in, and we suffragettes applauded. Maudie went on to talk about Duty and Responsibility and the Community Spirit of Helpfulness.

Then she started in, in earnest. She said it was natural for the slothful and indolent to shirk work. She said we saw it done every day by some of those around us at St. Catharine’s. It was easier to let the world go by, Maudie said, than to help to make it move; but, if everybody shirked, what would become of progress, and who would pass on the torch from hand to hand.f* 20

She said butterflies were very pretty to look at, but there was no place for them in a beehive. They did not help the soul to climb. Kittie James stood right up when Maudie said that, and tried to speak, but Adeline Thurston pulled her down. Maudie said the way to live one’s life was not in slothful pleasures, eating ‘^spreads,” and neglecting one’s studies, but to join hands in a ring of helpfulness that would reach round the world. She said it made her feel ’most sick sometimes to see opportunities for universal brotherhood and the community spirit lost by girls who had the priceless advantages of living at St. Catharine’s and seeing the example of others who took life seriously; and she said love should be our guiding principle, and that every girl should devote half an hour to the reading of the best books every day. Then she told about the man who rapped on the door of his beloved, and was asked, “Who is there?” and he said, “It is I.” But the door didn’t open; and he rapped again, and was asked who he was, and he said, “It is I,” and still the door didn’t open. The third time he said, “It is Thou,” and the door opened right oflF. Maudie said that was what we must all do — rap at the door and he what’s behind it. Then, all of a sudden, she sat down, and we girls clapped like mad. The 21 antis looked at one another and smiled in a tired way.