18. Philip the Great
19. April Weather
20. Julia Sees the Great World
21. Dree-eee-eaming Again
22. Betsye into Betsy
23. Julia’s Graduation
Maud Hart Lovelace and Her World
About Heaven to Betsy
About Betsy in Spite of Herself
Fictional Characters and Their Real-Life Counterparts
1
The Winding Hall of Fate
“JUST A FEW LINES to open the record of my sophomore year. Isn’t it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be. It is almost as though I were ushered into the Winding Hall of Fate, but next day’s destiny was hidden behind a turning.”
Betsy paused, and read what she had written with a dreamy self-satisfied smile.
She was curled up on a pillow beside her Uncle Keith’s trunk which she used as a desk. It stood in her bedroom, a large blue and white room with two windows in which white curtains were blowing. The time was September, 1907, and next day she would be a sophomore in the Deep Valley, Minnesota, High School.
“My ambition,” she continued, “is to be an author some day, and therefore I’ll describe myself and some of my friends. My name is Elizabeth Warrington Ray but most people call me Betsy. My sister Julia always calls me Bettina.
“I am tall, and thin as a willow sapling with a droop which my mother calls a stoop but I hope isn’t too homely. Some benighted people, boys mostly, even think it is pretty. I have dark brown hair, put up in a pompadour over a rat, perfectly beautiful skin but just ordinary hazel eyes, and my teeth are parted in the middle.
“My hair is wavy most of the time, but to manage that I have to put it up on Wavers at night, which I despise, because what am I going to do when I get married? But on the other hand if I don’t put it up on Wavers, I probably never will get married. That’s the way I look at it. Not that I care about getting married. But I certainly want to be asked.
“I don’t see why Edison and these people who go around inventing autos and things can’t concentrate on something important like how to make a girl’s hair stay curled without Wavers. Of course, I adore autos, though.
“And speaking of autos…” Betsy paused, and gave her diary a look. “Speaking of autos, we are just back from two months at the lake and the whole town is agog, simply agog, about a new boy with a bright red auto. He’s the grandson of the rich old Brandish who lives across the slough. His name is Phil…”
“Hoo, hoo, Betsy,” came a masculine voice outside the house. Betsy slammed her journal shut, crammed it into her trunk and ran to the window.
In the street below, a black-haired boy with a bright humorous face sat on a bare-backed brown nag. Cab Edwards was riding the family horse down to the watering trough at the foot of High Street.
“Hello,” called Betsy.
“Hello. Heard you got back last night. Have a good time?”
“Swell. Any fun around here?”
“Dead as a doornail. Seen anyone yet?”
“Just talked on the ’phone to a few of the kids.”
“What are you doing today?”
“Picnic with Tacy.”
“Well, I’ll be in tonight.” He slapped the horse’s rump, then changed his mind and “whoa’ed” her to a stop. “Say: Read Ivanhoe?”
“Sure,” said Betsy. “Why?”
“Don’t you remember? Gaston told us to read it over the summer. We have to pass a test on it, second day of school.”
“I remember. Just like one of Gaston’s ideas! It doesn’t bother me, though. I read Ivanhoe in the cradle practically.”
“Gosh, I wish I had,” said Cab, and slapped his horse again, and rode on down the hill.
Betsy looked after him, and up the hill beyond where trees made a thick green fringe against the sky. High Street itself ran horizontally, halfway up a hill which was criss-crossed by streets and had a German Catholic College on the crest. Off at another angle rose the cluster of hills where she had lived as a child, where Tacy still lived, and where they would picnic today. All were bathed in an early morning freshness.
Betsy went back to her trunk and the journal.
“Where was I? Oh yes, Phil.”
“It’s a good thing there’s a new boy on the scene for last year’s Crowd is shattered, simply shattered. Larry and Herbert Humphreys have gone to California to live. Their going was tragic because they’re boys. Two perfectly good boys snatched by Fate out of Deep Valley High School.
“There’s a new girl named Irma coming into our Crowd, but there always seem to be plenty of girls. I wonder why that is???? She’s nice; she’s very sweet, with a figure like Lillian Russell’s. The boys are crazy about her…none of us can see why exactly. She and Winona are thick as thieves.
“Winona is tall and thin with black eyes that are positively snapping. She’s full of the D…. Carney, (Caroline Sibley), is very pretty, neat as a pin, with eye glasses perched on her nose, and one dimple. The boys like her, girls like her, too. She always says just what she thinks, and she wouldn’t know how to be catty. It’s hard to describe Carney without making her sound sissy. But she isn’t. Not a bit. She’s full of the D…too.
“The other girls in our Crowd are Alice, who lives up near Tacy and is very full of fun, but her parents are strict. And Tacy who is…well, there’s nobody like Tacy. She’s been my chum since we were five years old, and you couldn’t have a better one. Tacy’s bashful but full of the D…She likes to imagine things the same as I do and make adventurous plans about when we grow up. Most of the girls just plan on getting married but Tacy and I want to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight, and go to the Passion Play, and live in Paris with French maids to draw our baths. The funny thing about Tacy is that she’s perfectly indifferent to boys. She’s the only girl I know who doesn’t think that Boys are the Center of the Universe.
“Tib is my chum, too, but she moved to Milwaukee. She’s little and blonde and very pretty. At least she used to be. I wonder whether she’s changed as much as I have in the last two years? I’ve certainly changed.
“As for boys, the most interesting boy in school isn’t in our Crowd. He isn’t in any crowd. His name is Joe Willard, and he’s blond and terribly handsome. He hasn’t any family, but lives in a room somewhere and works at the Creamery afternoons and Saturdays. Last year he won the Freshman points in the Essay Contest. Away from Elizabeth Warrington Ray! The aforementioned Miss Ray is going to have REE—VENGE this year. (There’s an Essay Contest every year.)
“Cab just about lives at our house, and so does Tony. I used to be in love with Tony last year. Doesn’t that seem funny? Tom comes here a lot when he’s in town. He goes away to school though. Cox Military!
“These boys are nice. They’re perfectly dandy. But they’re just neighbors. There’s nothing romantic about them. Where is Romance, anyway, I wonder? Is it in these unwritten pages?”
Betsy flipped them thoughtfully through her fingers.
A gong sounded downstairs, and she put her journal away a second time. Going to the mirror she turned her self-styled willowy figure slowly for inspection. Her blue sailor suit was old, chosen because of the planned picnic, but the belt encircled a waist gratifyingly slim. Betsy’s face, however, was anxious. She usually gave a mirror an anxious face.
The door opened, and her mother’s red head ducked in.
“Dressed? I’m glad. Get Julia up; will you?”
“I’ll try,” said Betsy. She crossed the hall to her older sister’s room.
Getting Julia up was harder than it looked to be when one saw her. Slender, almost fragile, in a thin white nightgown, she was flung lightly across the bed, face down, her dark hair fanning out.
Betsy shook her vigorously. “Julia! The gong! There it goes again!”
“Let it go gallager.”
“But breakfast’s on the table.” Betsy shook her again.
Julia sat upright, her violet eyes flashing.
“But why do I have to get up? Just because Papa was born on a farm and all ten children always came to meals on time…”
The door swung open and Margaret, the nine-year-old sister, came in, her hair ribbon spreading white wings above her shining English bob. Her black-lashed eyes, always large and serious, widened in surprise.
“Why, that’s just what Papa was saying. All ten of them used to be on time, and he sent me up to…”
“I know. I know. Well, I don’t live on a farm. And I’m going to be an opera singer.” But Julia was good natured now. She jumped out of bed, smiling. “Opera singers,” she continued, dressing under her nightgown, “have sense enough to work at night and sleep all morning. They invariably sleep until noon. And that’s what I’m going to do…”
“Come on, Margaret,” said Betsy and they ran downstairs.
Sunshine was pouring into the dining room which was papered with pears and grapes above a plate rail full of Mrs. Ray’s best china. Here, too, the curtains were blowing, full of autumnal zest. Mr. and Mrs. Ray were already seated, and Mr. Ray looked up sternly as Betsy and Margaret slipped quietly into their chairs. Tall, large, dark-haired and hazel-eyed like Betsy, his usual expression was one of calm benevolence, but he lost it when the girls were late to breakfast.
Mrs. Ray had already poured a soothing first cup of coffee, and now Anna, the hired girl, brought in eggs and bacon, raw fried potatoes, buttered toast, and cocoa for the children. Mrs. Ray made conversation briskly. “The girls go back to school tomorrow.”
“If Julia gets up in time.” Mr. Ray turned to look through the music room, up the still empty stairs.
“Cab came by this morning, Papa,” Betsy said talking very fast. “He’s having a fit because he hasn’t read Ivanhoe, and Gaston said we had to read it over the summer vacation. Do you think that’s fair, Papa?”
“Reading Ivanhoe isn’t exactly punishment,” Mr. Ray replied.
“Of course not. But it’s the principle of the thing.”
Julia slid into her chair, shook out her napkin. “It’s the principle of the thing, Papa,” she repeated.
Mr. Ray gave her a look to show she hadn’t fooled him.
“There’s a principle involved in getting down to breakfast, too,” he said. But as his gaze swept the now completed circle, his brow cleared. “Reading Ivanhoe won’t kill any of you,” he decided cheerfully. “How about another cup of coffee, Jule?”
When the coffee was drunk, he walked around the table, kissing his womenfolk. Mrs. Ray jumped up, ran her arm through his and walked with him out to the porch.
“It’s good to be going back to the store,” Mr. Ray said. “The lake’s fine, but it isn’t like 400 High Street.”
“This house is a year old, and I love it as much as I ever did. I’m going to have fun cleaning it,” Mrs. Ray replied.
The morning was busy. Anna started scrubbing while Mrs. Ray at the telephone ordered meat and groceries. Then Mrs. Ray wound her red head in a towel and started scrubbing, too. Julia and Betsy unpacked the trunk, settled drawers and closets. Margaret went out to pick greens for the fireplace and a bouquet of nasturtiums.
After noon dinner Tony, without knocking, poked his head in at the door.
“Hello, folks! Glad you’re back.”
The girls hailed him joyfully, and accompanied him to the kitchen to greet Anna. He persuaded Mrs. Ray to come down from a step ladder, picked up Washington, the cat, and they all sat down to talk.
Tony’s black hair stood up in a curly bush. He had black eyes, bold and laughing, and a lazy teasing air.
“Last year I was in love with him. Now he’s almost like a brother. Life is strange,” thought Betsy.
“What did you do at the lake?” Tony was asking.
“I learned to swim,” said Margaret.
“Julia forgot about Hugh, got a new beau, and then bounced him before we came home. Not a nice thing to do,” Betsy said.
“I didn’t have any piano,” Julia explained plaintively. “And Bettina wrote all summer…a novel, I guess.”
“Speaking of novels,” said Tony, “what about this Ivanhoe Gaston said we had to read?”
“I read it years ago. But I think it was beastly of him to assign it. Have you read it?”
“How could I? I’ve been delivering groceries all summer. And by the way, I’m supposed to be doing it now.” He lounged to his feet. “I’m late, but I’ll be a little later if Julia will pound the ivories just to prove you’re home.”
So Julia went to the piano and started one of last year’s songs. Mrs. Ray and Margaret, Betsy and Tony stood behind her and sang:
“Dreaming, dreaming,
Of you sweetheart I am dreaming,
Dreaming of days when you loved me best,
Dreaming of hours that have gone to rest…”
Then Tony hurried off to his delivery wagon and Mrs. Ray to her step ladder, and Margaret went out to play. Julia stayed at the piano.
“I’m going to have a lesson today. Better warm up,” she said, opening an opera score.
Julia spent all her allowance on opera scores; spent it before she received it, usually, for she had an ill-advised charge account with a music store in St. Paul. She got her money’s worth, though. She sang the operas from cover to cover, all the parts and all the choruses. The newest one was called La Boheme: it was about Bohemians.
Bohemians, like Tib’s grandparents? Betsy had asked. No, Julia had explained, artists and writers. The poet, Rudolph, was writing when a little seamstress came to his door asking a light for her candle. She told him her name, and then came the aria which Julia started now. “Mi chiamano Mimi,” it began, and it meant, Julia said, that people called her Mimi, although her name was Lucia; and it went on to say that the flowers she embroidered in her work made her think of distant flowery fields.
“Mi chiamano Mimi,” Betsy hummed softly and found a shoe box and went to pack a picnic lunch.
A Betsy-Tacy picnic, she thought as she foraged, was just about the nicest thing in the world.
When the box was packed and firmly tied with a string, she put on her hat and set off for Hill Street, up side streets that climbed gently at first, then more and more steeply. Children were playing in the streets, but tomorrow they would be in school.
“Tomorrow,” thought Betsy, “I start down the Winding Hall of Fate.”
And just at that moment, with what seemed prophetic timing, an automobile horn wailed behind her. Turning, she saw a red automobile. It was passing with almost meteorlike swiftness, fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Yet Betsy had a good view of a large boy, wearing a visored tan cap and a brown linen dust coat, behind the steering wheel.
2
Dree-eee-eaming
WHEN SHE ENTERED the familiar block in which she had lived for the first fourteen years of her life, Tacy came running to meet her. Tacy was tall, with red hair bound in Grecian braids, blue eyes that were both shy and merry, tender red lips, a slender freckled face. She and Betsy embraced and kissed.
Tacy carried a copy of Ivanhoe.
“That fiend of a Gaston!” Betsy said.
Tacy groaned. “I only started it yesterday. Gee, it’s long!”
“Take it along on the picnic.”
“Not much! I’m not going to mix up any old crusades with Mamma’s devil’s food cake.”
“Devil’s food cake?” cried Betsy. “Really?”
“This is a celebration,” Tacy said, “because you’re home.”
At the Kellys’ white house, Betsy lingered to talk to Tacy’s large gentle mother, with rosy efficient Katie, the sister Julia’s age, and the other sisters and brothers. It was midafternoon when she and Tacy at last started up the Big Hill. This rose behind the former Ray cottage, across the street from Tacy’s, a slope which Betsy and Tacy had climbed uncounted times.
They climbed contentedly now with the shoe box, a wicker basket spr
ead with a red and white cloth, newspapers with which to start a fire and the tin pail in which they proposed to make cocoa. Sumac was reddening on either side of the rough rutted road.
At the top of the hill they paused to look out over the town. Then they turned right and entered a double line of beech trees which in their childhood they had called the Secret Lane. Leaving that deep shade behind, they came out on another crest of hill where low trees were widely spaced and there was a sweeping valley view. But this valley was empty except for the clustered rooftops of Little Syria. Beyond that settlement stretched the slough, and the wooded river bluffs.
“We can see almost to Page Park,” Betsy said.
“Let’s take a picnic out there sometime,” Tacy suggested. “Maybe the whole Crowd will go.”
“What’s left of it,” Betsy amended. “It isn’t much of a Crowd with the Humphreys gone.”
“Have you heard from Herbert?” asked Tacy as they sank into the grass.
“A letter every week. He loves to write letters, and so do I. So we’re still Confidential Friends.”
It was warm in the grass. The sunshine hit the hill full on, glittering over the goldenrod which rolled in a green-gold flood to the depths of the valley. The sky hung like a painting full of clouds.
“Those clouds make steps,” said Tacy staring upward.
“I wish we could climb them,” Betsy answered dreamily. “Walk up and up, and out into the air.”
“Just keep on going. See where we got to.”
“The clouds were beautiful out at the lake.”
They talked about Murmuring Lake. Tacy and Katie had visited at the cottage which stood with its feet in the water not far from Pleasant Park, Mrs. Ray’s girlhood home.
“I used to go out alone in the boat,” said Betsy. “Row over to the bay where the water lilies are, take along a notebook and pencil, and write.”
“What did you write?”
“Poems. And I worked on that novel you said reminded you of Graustark. I’m not going to neglect my writing the way I did last year. Joe Willard isn’t going to win the Essay Contest again.”
Heaven to Betsy / Betsy in Spite of Herself Page 22