Stanford Stories Tales of a Young University

Excerpt

A Midwinter Madness.

Genius has been defined as a capacity for taking pains.

When a college man's good fairy makes her first call at his cradle, she may bestow upon him the football instinct, with muscles to match; no fairy could do more. But if she bumps up against Heredity, and is powerless to give him the supreme gift, she may compensate for it in a degree by leaving the kind of larynx and tympanum used in the Glee Club. Failing this, she may render next best service by throwing a mandolin in his way and bewitching his parents into paying for lessons. Some twenty years later, behind the enchanted scenes of a specially hired theater, or on the polished floor of society's inner temple, he may think of the fairy kindly.

Doubtless, all theatrical life means drudgery, but the Christmas tour of the Glee and Mandolin clubs is drudgery amidst bowers of roses. The hard-working professional would call it play; yet, even in this gilded stage-life, there is the common affliction of being forced to appear at every concert, and in places you don't care about—unless, of course, you happen to be seriously ill.

The Clubs had just done an abbreviated stunt for the Los Angeles High School the afternoon before Christmas. The occasion was a big ad., but they ripped matters through in a hurry, because the social event of the trip came that afternoon—Lillian Arnold's reception at her home on Figuerroa Street.

At Hacienda Arnold there is running water along the garden copings, and the grounds are large. It was bud-time, and the heavy fragrance of the orange blossoms mingled with the bitter-almond smell of oleanders. Miss Arnold served her refreshments on the lawn, and the girls looked peachy in plume-laden hats and filmy organdies. The day was rather warm for December. To this out-door reception came the prettiest girl in Los Angeles, Dolores Payson; her full name, she confided to Cecil Van Dyke that evening with a slight but captivating roll of her Andalusian eyes and r's, was Dolores Ynez Teresa Payson. Van Dyke was the only man on the trip who had thought to bring his summer togs, and he looked very swell. Van played first mandolin and was notoriously susceptible. It is down in the Club annals that she caught his game at first sight.

Had she been given to genealogical investigation, the name Van Dyke might have recalled to this descendant of many hidalgos that foggy battle-field in the Netherlands on which her ancestor and his took pot-shots at each other with the primitive cross-bow. Motley records that on that day far-gone Holland laid low the Spaniard. The present historian is forced to chronicle the final triumph of Spain. The only bow used in this last encounter was in the hands of a mythological person whose existence is doubted only by scoffers.

They tried a dance or two in the crowded rooms, they strolled out into the gardens, they ate ices under the roses in a secluded arbor. The place, the time, the air had their influence on Van Dyke. He was from Montana, where the magnolias do not shed their waxen petals at Christmas, and the gold-of-Ophir roses sternly refuse to leaf until the Fourth of July.

Perhaps he might have withstood all the seductive charms of the hour if he had not escorted Dolores home and essayed to bid her good-bye. There was a great clump of flaming poinsettia at the Payson gate. Dolores was dark, with a rich southern complexion; her dress was white. So she stood against the poinsettia. That is why there is more to this story.

Van Dyke meditated as he went into town. She was the finest girl he had ever met. It was a hard graft, this playing one day in a live town where one could meet charming people, and being forced to take the train next morning for some uninteresting country place where they would have to lounge around a cheap hotel until concert time. Why couldn't the manager get up a schedule that would give them a day or so longer in a place like Los Angeles? This making a college trip with the sole idea of money-getting was degrading....