Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (25 page)

“All out by ten o'clock,” Mrs. Ray called down the stairs.

The Ray family was really back from the lake.

I
RMA CAME BACK
, as bafflingly attractive as ever. Tom, who had been vacationing in the East, returned to get ready for Cox Military. Dave, Stan, and Lloyd, who had gone down the Mississippi in canoes, reappeared, tanned and full of stories. And at the Majestic Motion Picture Theater, at Heinz's Ice Cream Parlor, and the other haunts of the young, Betsy looked
around for Joe. His letters had stopped coming as abruptly as they had started, and the series of stories in the Tribune had ended, too. Probably, she thought, he was out at Butternut Center with his uncle and aunt. She wondered why he didn't call her up.

All the talk was of being seniors.

“It's going to seem queer to be seniors,” the girls agreed, looking ahead to that day, not far off now, when they would pass through the wide, arched doorway of the high school wearing their new dignity.

“Poor me! I'll be a freshie again,” Carney mourned.

She and her mother had returned from Minneapolis, where they had stayed at a hotel and had bought clothes in the city stores. The girls flocked to her house to hear all about it, Betsy accompanied by Margaret, whom she was taking to Miss Cobb's house for her first piano lesson.

“What did you buy?”

“Oh, a tweed suit with a brown velvet collar and a brown velvet tricorn Gage hat.”

“Any new party dresses?”

“I have,” announced Carney grandly, “a store-bought party dress! It's pale pink silk with elbow sleeves and a square neck. It's a dear. Come on! I'll show it to you.”

There was a rush for the stairs.

Ascending, they heard the hum of a sewing machine.

“Miss Mix is making my school dresses and underwear. I wish you could see the underwear! It's made of sheeting!” Carney giggled. “Mother wants it strong so it can stand a college laundry. That's what it is to have a New Englander for a parent.”

“Good thing it isn't your trousseau,” said Tib, who liked lingerie as delicate as cobwebs, lace-trimmed and strung with ribbon.

They piled into Carney's room, where the store-bought party dress was reverently inspected. The suit was displayed, too, and Winona tried on the brown Gage hat, setting it at a ridiculous angle and parading up and down. Margaret struggled to keep her smiles from turning into undignified chuckles when Winona, pretending to be Carney, snatched Larry Humphreys' photograph from the bureau and pressed it madly to her middy blouse.

Betsy jumped up and spoke in a bass voice, obviously representing a Vassar dignitary.

“No, Miss Sibley,” she said. “Do not bring that Howard Chandler Christie profile inside the sacred portals of Vassar.”

“I always turn it to the wall when I'm studying, your honor,” squeaked Winona.

“It makes no difference. Vassar is a girls' college. Leave men behind, all ye who enter here!”

Carney made a dash for Winona and succeeded in
wresting the picture away.

“You're just too silly!” she cried.

“Silly, am I?” said Winona. “Just for that I'll go home and wash my hair.” That broke up the party.

“Margaret and I are going to Miss Cobb's,” said Betsy.

“I'll walk down with you,” Carney volunteered. “I'm going that way, matching ribbons. Heavens, I never thought that going away to college involved so much matching of ribbons!”

Carney, Betsy, and Margaret started down Broad Street under the high trees.

“It's funny to be teased about a boy you haven't even seen for three years,” Carney remarked.

Larry and Herbert Humphreys had moved from Deep Valley three years before. Herbert and Betsy were great friends. But there was no romantic feeling between them such as had always existed between Larry and Carney. Carney had never liked any other boy so well.

“Have you heard from him lately?” asked Betsy.

“We still write every week.” Carney had a dimple in one cheek which flickered mischievously now. “He wishes he was going to West Point.”

“Ah ha!” said Betsy. “Across the river from Vassar.”

“But,” said Carney, “he's going to Stanford, all the
way across the continent and bursting with girls.”

Her smile vanished and she turned to Betsy, frowning.

“I want to see Larry,” she said firmly. “I have to find out whether I still like him. Maybe he's changed. I feel as though I couldn't ever…get married to anyone else until I know.”

“Have you told him that?” asked Betsy.

“No, I haven't. But I should think he'd feel the same way…about seeing me, I mean.”

“I'd like to be a mouse under a chair when you two meet,” said Betsy.

They reached the long flight of wooden steps which led to Miss Cobb's cottage and Carney turned to Margaret, whose eyes were shining with excitement at the prospect of beginning music lessons.

“Good luck!” Carney said. “I'll bet you begin with middle C.”

Carney had studied with Miss Cobb, of course. Most of Deep Valley's boys and girls began their piano study with Miss Cobb, a large stately woman with light hair combed smoothly down on either side of a calm, kindly face. There had been a girl and three boys in the little cottage once, children of Miss Cobb's sister who had died. Miss Cobb had broken her own engagement to marry and had taken the whole brood to raise. The two oldest had passed
away with their mother's complaint. Leonard was ill with it now, out in the Colorado mountains. Only Bobby, the sturdy pink-cheeked youngest of the lot, lived on with his aunt.

Betsy was glad to be back in the little low-ceiled parlor with the upright piano and the grand piano and the scent of geraniums. Miss Cobb told her that Leonard had enjoyed her letters.

“I've enjoyed his letters, too, Miss Cobb,” Betsy replied. She had learned from Leonard's letters—she had learned about courage.

He was not, Betsy suspected, getting any better. But there weren't any complaints about the pain or the discomfort or the boredom. He told instead about the funny things that happened around the sanatorium.

He was interested in music. His letters were full of comments on phonograph records, musicians, and musical compositions. There wasn't a word about not being able to develop his own talent, about how sad it was to be young and full of plans and have a curtain drop across your future like the curtain of a theater…only that, Betsy thought, always came at the end of something and Leonard's life had just begun.

A shadow crossed Miss Cobb's face, but it was like the shadow of a cloud passing over a mountain. Smiling, she turned to Margaret. She whirled the piano stool until it was the proper height and Margaret sat
down, her back very straight. Miss Cobb struck a note and said, as she had said in previous years to Julia and Betsy, “This is middle C.”

Betsy liked that. She always liked things to go on as they had gone before.

She was glad on Sunday to be back in the choir of St. John's Episcopal Church. Tib, Winona, and Irma were all in the choir and there was hushed gossip and laughter in the robing room as they put on their long black robes and the black four-cornered hats. Reverence descended as they formed into a double line, and glory burst, as always, when they marched down the aisle singing.

There was a substitute preacher, for the Rev. Mr. Lewis had not yet returned. He was on his way home. Julia had left the party in London.

“I left London,” she wrote, “with Big Ben chiming in my ears. You know that famous clock; it plays a hymn tune at the striking of the hours:

That's the prayer I'm taking with me to my wonderful experience in Berlin.”

“I know the tune those chimes sing,” said Betsy. “They have it in chime clocks. I never knew the words before, though.”

“They're called Westminster chime clocks. We ought to get one,” Mrs. Ray said.

The next letter came from Berlin.

“The moment I arrived,” Julia wrote, “was the most ecstatically happy moment of my life. Oh, oh, oh, I'm going to work so hard! Fraulein says I'm too nervous and exuberant. I must calm down, get strength, and then do things.”

She added that Fraulein wished her to stay on a few days before going into a pension.

“I'm glad. Her house is so interesting…musicians, critics, and artists coming and going. I have only one worry—my trunk hasn't come! So far, I haven't had to dress up, and it's fortunate, for I'm still wearing the suit I wore when I arrived. I wash out my waist every night.”

“For heaven's sake!” said Mrs. Ray, when she read that. “What's the matter with the Germans that they can't do a simple thing like deliver a trunk?”

“Probably Julia was so excited that she sent it to Kalamazoo,” said Mr. Ray.

“Never mind!” Betsy consoled her mother. “Julia looks pretty in anything.” But Mrs. Ray worried about Julia meeting the Great World in a travel-stained suit.

“All the pretty clothes there are in that trunk!” she mourned.

The next night, when the Rays were at supper, the telephone rang. Anna said that a gentleman wished to speak to Mr. Ray. He returned to the table, smiling.

“It's the Rev. Mr. Lewis,” he said. “He reached town this afternoon and wants to come right up.”

There was an outcry of delight.

The family rushed through peach cobbler—Mrs. Ray left hers untouched upon the plate—and was waiting in the parlor when the Rev. Mr. Lewis arrived.

“You may not have holly around, but it's certainly Christmas for this family,” he announced, putting a large box on the table. He wiped his face. “That daughter of yours! When she wasn't writing letters to you folks, she was buying presents.”

“For you to carry home!” put in Mr. Ray.

“Glad to do it,” said the Rev. Mr. Lewis, grinning. “Glad to do anything for Julia.”

“Before we look at a single present,” Mrs. Ray said, “we want to hear about her. Exactly how was she when you left her?”

“Exhausted but blissful,” he replied. “That puts it in a nutshell. She didn't miss a church or an art museum or an historical monument. She asked so many questions that I was hard put to find answers. She wants to learn, that girl does.”

“Did she drive you crazy,” Mr. Ray asked, “being late for everything?”

“Frankly, yes.” The Rev. Mr. Lewis grinned again. “She caught every boat and train just as it was pulling out. But she was so sweet, so helpful, taking care of people who were seasick, rubbing heads, mending clothes, doing the ladies' hair new ways…. She found me the one thing Mrs. Lewis had asked me to bring back, a little mosaic chest, from Rome. Everybody in the party loved her, including me.”

The whole house was suddenly lonesome for Julia. Mrs. Ray wiped her eyes.

Mr. Ray spoke briskly. “Well, now that we've heard all about her, how about opening the box?”

It was indeed like Christmas when Julia's box was opened. Most of the presents were already familiar, for Julia had described them in her letters. She had bought Betsy's Class Day dress in Lucerne, which was famous, she said, for embroidered dresses. It was pale blue batiste, heavy with embroidery. Betsy got a blue plume, too, from Paris, for the dress hat she would have in the spring, and white gloves from Paris, and exquisite blue and gold Venetian beads.

While Betsy exulted over these, Mr. and Mrs. Ray, Margaret, and Anna were unwrapping and exclaiming. The Rev. Mr. Lewis was almost as happy as they were.

“Am I Santa Claus or am I not?” he wanted to know.

 

The night before school began, when Mr. Ray came home, he called Betsy down to the parlor. He had a pleased look on his face.

“See this picture?” he said, handing her a folded copy of the Minneapolis
Tribune
. “Isn't this the Willard boy who goes to Deep Valley High School? The one you've been getting letters from all summer?”

Betsy took the paper, and Joe's eyes looked out at her under their heavy brows. His lower lip was outthrust as usual, giving his face a look of good-humored defiance.

The story beneath the picture said that this was the Joseph Willard who had written such a fine account of the North Dakota land-swindle trial. It made much of the fact that he was only seventeen.

“I saw Mr. Root on the street tonight,” Mr. Ray said. “You never saw anyone so pleased. He kept saying, ‘That Joe Willard is going to be a top newspaper man, and I taught him all he knows.'”

“Mr. Root is an awfully good friend of Joe's,” Betsy replied. She was bursting with pride.

After supper, when Anna was doing the dishes and Mr. and Mrs. Ray and Margaret were reading in the parlor, Betsy sat down at the piano. She played a few
jubilant scales, then opened her book of Beethoven sonatinas. She was pounding through the first one when the doorbell rang.

“I'll answer it,” she called, jumping up. She opened the front door and there on the porch stood Joe Willard, hot and rumpled but smiling, his hair looking the color of silver above his tanned face.

“Why, Joe! “cried Betsy.

“I came right from the train.”

“I've just been reading about you. Papa brought home the paper.”

“Of course, the picture doesn't do me justice.”

He smiled at Betsy and Betsy smiled at him. A full minute passed before she remembered to ask him in.

“Papa and Mamma will be so glad to meet you,” she said quickly then. “Papa has been reading your stories all summer.”

As she led him into the parlor, Betsy felt very conscious of the fact that this was the first time he had been in her home. The other boys in her class had swung in the hammock and sat on the front steps. They had sung around the piano in the music room and sprawled all over the parlor and sat in front of the dining room fireplace eating her father's sandwiches. They had danced to the two tunes, one a waltz and one a two-step, Mrs. Ray knew how to play on the piano, and had raided Anna's kitchen
time and again. But Joe Willard, the most important boy of all, had never been inside her house before.