Starrett School for Girls - Starette Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

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woman-it was a sexless thing, with eyes and facial expressions that were powerful, a mixture of irony and joy, suggestive of untold pleasure and of misery. As Scott gazed at those green, green eyes, the shop and the dust and cobwebs receded and faded into the distance and he saw vague, illusive visions of wonderful creatures and splendor, such as floats hazily in the drugged dreams of the opium smoker. Scott Kenedy passed his hand over his forehead puzzled, confused. Where had he beheld those scenes before? Then the shop closed round him again and the visionsf faded, but Jade God remained. Jade God was hideous yet beautiful, provoking yet alluring. With an effort, Scott aroused himself and laughed nervously, walked to the front of the shop where the Chinese proprietor waited. With an assumed careless air, he inquired the price of jade God. Slowly the old Chinaman shook his head as he said, Money will not buy that god. No, not all the gold in the world. Jade God was my father's and my father's father's, and he may not be bartered nor sold.', Ordinarily Kenedy would have pressed his bargain, but something in the old man's face perhaps, stilled him, and without a word he walked out into the sunshine. He paused and glanced back, feeling that something had passed out of his life, leaving a vague emptiness. Scott was an unusual man. His nervous temperament had never been denied a single thing. His wish was not to be granted. Was he not rich? Was he not influential? The idol interested and fascinated him. He would soon break down the Chinaman's resistance and Jade God would be his! Home to his apartment which he had once called the palace of contentment, he went, but never again would it be so. For from that day on it became a place of vague imaginings, haunted by shapeless shadows and restless dreams. The mere desire to possess Jade God grew into a passion. Scott Kenedy seemed bewitched by the spell. of the idol. Again and again he returned to the shop, bribed, threatened, and plead with the man. He offered him great sums with always the same answer, No, all the gold in the world will not buy Jade God. He was my father's and my father's father's, and he may not be bartered nor sold. He is a heritage. Then Scott would take Jade God into his hands and gaze at those emerald eyes. These were the only minutes when peace was with him while he was sitting with half-closed eyes thinking, dreaming in a veiled world, a world of mystery with Jade God's green eyes. Desperately he tried to cast off the spell, for he knew that therein lay madness, but day by day the desire for possession grew stronger. The doctor called it brain fever. Days of burning pain, nights of wild delirium in which green eyes seared his soul and then yellow lips and weird eyes laughed. Days when friends sighed, and doctors held consultations, for life would not stay where there was no desire for it. Finally, as a last resort, a friend who knew the tale of the idol called at the curio shop. For a long time he argued with the old man, telling him that the souls of his ancestors would place a curse upon his head if he murdered-actually committed murder by depriving one of that which meant so much to him, even life. He said that he was old and had no sons to whom Jade God might be bequeathed, and that Scott would love Jade God with his very soul. At last the Chinaman gave in, and Jade God was carried away. The old man gazed deeply into Jade God's eyes before it left him, and was it merely fantasy that a subtle communication passed between them? At home Scott lay propped up on pillows. He knew of the last attempt to obtain Jade God and some sixth sense told him that it would be successful. He was restless and nervous. Impatiently he waited. That evening Jade God was delivered. Fervidly Scott tore off the wrapping. Never before had Jade God proved so fascinating, never had his eyes been so green! Again he wrapped his subtle spell closer around Scott. Far into the night he dreamed on. The lights in the antique candelabra flickered and died, and peace had come to Scott Kenedy at last. Early next morning, a fellow collector who shared Scott's apartment tiptoed in, and seeing Jade God on the bedside table, examined him curiously. Then! slowly, word F ort y- Three

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up by themselves, their covers were so thick and broad that the thin pages inside couldn't become bent or torn while the books were being arranged. Often my grand- mother would rush into the library and grab up a cherished first edition that was being used for a perambulator and being dragged over the carpet by a bit of string with a much buffered doll perched on top. How I had ever managed to get hold of the precious literature I never can figure out, but there wasn't much of the cases I left unsearched for the books that would make substantial foundations for my houses. These impressions', that I was unconsciously getting of the many books I handled day after day, sometimes, from using the same ones over again, penetrated my growing mind. I was vastly surprised a few years ago when I had entered into the busy world of high school to come upon some old volumes in the library and feel their friend- liness. The dictionaries were sources of delight, for in my studies words often came up that I could find with ease in the old editions. I received a shock when I turned the rusty cover of a very dusty book and found my old friend, George Eliot's Maggie with Tom close behind. I had used this for a door to the living-room of my play house, my grandmother had informed me, and I vaguely remembered it. A fat book of Shakespeare's tragedies with notes and thousands of other accessories combined I remember had been the floor of the kitchen -how Mr. William would feel to know his precious writing had degenerated to the depths of the back regions! Now I hailed the book as a true comrade, it would stand by nobly in the hard days to come when the plays must be read and talked about and read again. The volumes of poems by Byron and Shelley and Keats I discovered close by, and these showed evidence of hard wear. I think they had stood sentinels for the soldier camp when the little boy next door had come over with his toy men and demanded a place for them to stay in! To think they had been kicked and thrown about the floor in our exciting play! I recall that the book of Shakespeare's tragedies had frightened me very much when I had once opened the cover, particularly the picture of Macbeth's wife in the sleep-walk made me shiver. I laugh when I turn to it now, but still I can imagine how it could have made me quake. The impressions of these books still remain with me. The poems by the famous poets had. of course, meant nothing to me then, but they had come in very handy, now they were good friends and I felt instinctively kindly toward them. There are many other hooks about which I feel the same, and there are many others about which I can remember nothing. Only now are their mysteries revealed to me behind the dim and dusty covers of time and eternity which was and always will be with some of the fading pages. Donna Dickey, Col. I. JADE GOD Scott Kenedy was a collector of curios, a critic, and a man highly respected in every circle in which he moved. He was one of the few who seemed to have everything- love, wealth, and position. Scott was one of a group of men who spend their lives delving into the mysteries of the past and wrestling from the ages matchless bits of beauty. With the essentials of happiness in his possession, he could have had peace and con- tentment, but one thing prevented thim, a great unfulfilled desire-a crowning passion of a desire which had found its birth in a dim little Chinese shop on the river front, a mysterious place where the dry dust and the cobwebs veiled the treaures of the Mings and Tongs. Scott Kenedy had been looking for some choice bits of loveliness in the darkest corners of the shop. He had poked aimlessly among broken joss sticks, quaint incense burners and all manner of things, until, in the lap of a battered Buddha, he found Jade God, a little idol only four inches high but carved out of such beautiful jade that it seemed to be moulded instead of carved. The figure was neither man nor Forty- Two

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by word, he translated the inscription around the idol's base: Iam Jade God- contentment. Death to him who succumbs to my spell, for perfection is a god's state to which mortal man may not aspire. A clammy fear gripped the collector and he hastened to the bedside. Scott Kenedy was dead. Mary Brueshaber, Senior SUSAN SPRAY by SHEILA KAYE-SMITH Susan Spray is the first of Sheila Kaye-Smith's novels that I have read, and I. immediately felt that it is worthy of being known as the climaxing novel of her career, as so many of the reviewers have termed it. The book is written with skill, beauty, and a great sense of the dramatic. In reading the book, one gets the impression that the author thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and found in Susan Spray a character whom she could pity, understand, ridicule, and admire. Susan,s career is presented as the portrait of a masterful woman who makes religious enthusiasm her means to power. Still, this cannot be called a story of a religious fanatic. Susan is not a fanatic, she is a half- educated peasant girl, who by some irony of fate was endowed with an imagination, which she discovered in her early childhood when she found that displays of religious hallucinations, if firmly adhered to, could save her a well-earned whipping. From then on she made those her weapons and never hesitated to use them in her climb upward, nor did they ever fail her when her ambitions were threatened. There is no satire in this book. It is intensely human and the background of the coun- try life is beautiful, and only and naturally does one become aware of the powerful character which is presented. Susan Spray lived in the eighteen thirties, although the book, had it been written then, would not have been understood, for I believe that it is even hard to gain the full significance of it in this day. The full comprehension of how the mind constantly combines and confuses its instincts and ideas, how such a strange combination of greatness and pettiness, of commanding imagination and almost petty ignorance is seen as pure humanity, is at times hard to grasp. The episodes of Susan's life, as a starving child, her first preaching to the Colgate brethren as a child, the pilgrimage to Horcham as a leader of an orphan family, her adolescence as a farm-worker, her Hrst marriage with Strudwick, the hop-drier, her first widowhood, her surrender to sheer passion and the flashy Clarbut, her emancipation and her ruthless imposition of herself upon Pell, her third husband, all show that she was perplexed by higher and lower impulses. She always wanted to command and impress, and feel the Beauty of Holiness. However, when the impulse to make love and the desire to have Bne clothes got the better of her, she left her followers disillusioned and deserted. She is neither a hypocrite nor crazy, but only a woman struggling with her desires, with impulses toward egoism and religious exaltation, which in the long -run proves to be the strongest. She is a better preacher, a stronger woman, and a finer spirit at the end of the book, when she is married bigamously to a man she needs but does not love, and is happier because she has a congregation to fear her, than when she was young and merely a religious enthusiast. Jane Gilbert, Col. I. fContinued from Page 30.1 dis time? I've been a fool! Beatin' it out on you an' Rose for easy bucks. Where's your ma, kid? How's she, huh, how's she?,' Daddy, a long time ado when we were hungry she went to sleep. The men took her away. They said I'd see her soon. But I haevn't, Daddy. Let's go to her. An, dad, can we take her somethin, nice to eat like this good cake? She never had none, and we was always so hungry. Oh, I know you'll find her, won't you?,' Red, his face strangely white, pulled her close, and asked in a whipped, quivering voice, Tom, when do we start for your shack?', Lois Atwood Forty-Four