“Jail, heck!” said Tom. “It’s the finest school in the country. And it isn’t mourning your departure either.”
He scowled and took Betsy’s arm.
Phil Brandish looked at her then, but absently. His eyes were yellowish brown. He was big, bigger than Tom, and notably well dressed. His felt hat had a crease down the middle; his overcoat was of rich dark wool, well cut; a checked muffler was folded with care.
“What’s biting you?” he said to Tom. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“Neither did I. So long,” said Tom. He and Betsy moved away, and the red auto whizzed away too like an angry hornet.
“He gets my goat,” confided Tom. “He means all right, I guess, but he didn’t fit in at Cox.”
“He doesn’t here either, exactly,” Betsy said.
“I don’t believe he knows how.” Tom sounded puzzled. “He’s always had too much money. He’s traveled with his folks all around the world, gone to one school after another, had things handed to him on a platter.”
“Cab says all he cares about is that auto.”
“He was nuts about machinery at Cox,” Tom replied.
They walked all the way to Page Park, and when they returned it was growing dark. Young and old gathered cozily around the Slade fire, where apples and cider were set out, and Tom’s grandmother told stories. She was a very old lady, wizened and small, with thin white hair and sunken lips. She could remember Indians going on the warpath in the valley.
Betsy loved to listen to Grandma Slade’s stories, but when the Rays were walking home her thoughts returned to Phil. She was irritated that he had paid so little attention to her. He would have paid attention to Julia.
“I wish I could go away,” thought Betsy, harking back to her talk with Tacy. “It isn’t practical just to wake up in the morning different. But if I could go away I’d come back so fascinating, so mysterious, Phil Brandish would have to look at me.”
She planned all the way home and while she wound her hair on Magic Wavers, and after she went to bed, about going away and coming back different, a sirenlike woman of the world.
10
A Letter From Mrs Muller.
BETSY DREAMED ABOUT going away from Deep Valley, but she didn’t for a moment suspect that around a bend in her Winding Hall of Fate a journey was actually waiting.
The day she reached that noteworthy bend everything began just as usual. She brought Tacy in after school, which was entirely usual. As usual she dropped her books on the music room table while she shouted for her mother…not that she wanted her for anything in particular…and when Mrs. Ray answered from upstairs, Betsy and Tacy went out to the kitchen to see what there was to eat.
“Fresh molasses cookies, lovey,” Anna said. They heard Mrs. Ray’s high heels on the stairs and just as they dipped their hands in the cookie jar Mrs. Ray came into the kitchen.
“Betsy,” she said, “you have a letter from Mrs. Muller. I hope it doesn’t mean that Tib is sick.”
Betsy took the letter quickly, and while she tore it open Mrs. Ray and Tacy waited without speaking. Both of them were very fond of Tib, who for so many years had made the team of Betsy and Tacy a threesome. Betsy unfolded the sheet of creamy white stationery and her face was swept by a smile so amazed and delighted that Mrs. Ray and Tacy were as mystified as they were relieved.
“Mamma!” Betsy cried, “Mrs. Muller wants me to come to Milwaukee for Christmas!”
“Why…why…what an idea!”
“Do you think I can go?”
“You’ll have to ask Papa. What does she say?”
Betsy handed the letter to her mother and threw her arms around Tacy. They danced and squealed.
“Don’t get too excited,” Mrs. Ray advised, “until you know whether you can go. It’s a long trip for you to make all alone. Expensive, too.”
Betsy and Tacy took their cookies into the front parlor, where they studied Mrs. Muller’s letter. It was brief and concise but it produced an hour or more of uninterrupted conversation.
“Imagine,” cried Tacy, “seeing Tib again!”
“And Tacy, I’ll see Aunt Dolly!” Tib’s Aunt Dolly had visited the Mullers in Deep Valley. She was a doll-like blonde, and Betsy and Tacy had always thought her the most beautiful creature in the world.
“I wonder whether she’s as pretty as she used to be.”
“Prettier, probably. She’s engaged, you know.”
“Do you remember her lovely clothes?”
“Do I!”
Julia came in and Betsy and Tacy fell upon her with the magnificent news. Margaret came in and was staggered by it. At last Tacy had to go home, but Betsy promised to telephone her the first thing after supper. She accompanied her out to the porch, and paused there in the twilight, shivering.
“Tacy,” she said, “do you realize what this is? It’s the chance I’ve been waiting for.”
“Piffle!” said Tacy, and shook her.
“I’ll come back completely changed.”
“You won’t be half as nice.”
“Won’t you have some tea, Lady Glexter-Glexton?” Betsy drawled in a languid voice. “Celeste, my smelling salts, please!”
Tacy tried to throw her off the porch into the waiting drifts. Betsy struggled, shrieking. She freed herself and ran into the house. There she embraced her mother.
“Oh, I hope…I hope…I hope I can go!”
“Don’t get your heart too set on it, Betsy,” Mrs. Ray warned. “You know what big expenses Papa has. Three girls, and this big house. You’d need some new clothes, too.”
“I know. If I can’t go, it’s all right,” Betsy said.
She went upstairs and tried to do homework, but her head was whirling. She turned out the gas and went to the window, looked out over the purpling snow. She imagined the lighted train, like a glittering serpent, winding its way to far-off Milwaukee.
“I’d have to eat on the diner!” she thought.
It was a family custom not to broach any new important matter to Mr. Ray until he had had his supper.
“No man, not even an angel like your father, likes to decide things on an empty stomach,” Mrs. Ray often said.
But by the time Anna had brought in warm apple sauce and the fresh molasses cookies, Mr. Ray noticed the excitement in Betsy’s face.
“What have you got up your sleeve, Betsy?” he asked. “I can see there’s something.”
“It’s not up my sleeve,” said Betsy, reaching into the “V” of her dress and drawing out Mrs. Muller’s letter. Smiling broadly she handed it to him.
Mr. Ray read it very slowly. In fact he read it over twice. But that, Betsy felt sure, was only to give him time to turn the matter over in his mind.
“Do you want to go?” he asked then, looking up.
Betsy tried to restrain her smile. She tried to draw it in, to look sober.
“I’d love to go,” she said, “if you think we can afford it. But if we can’t, it’s perfectly all right.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” Mr. Ray answered. “I was thinking about your being away from home on Christmas. We have a pretty good time right here.”
“I know,” said Betsy. But she locked out of her mind the picture of her family on Christmas Eve, trimming the tree, filling the stockings, singing carols and reading from The Night Before Christmas and Dickens’ Christmas Carol and the Gospel according to St. Luke. If she let herself think about this she might not go…she might miss the ecstatic experience of visiting Tib in Milwaukee. “I don’t think I’d be homesick though,” she went on, hastily.
“It would seem pretty funny…” Mr. Ray began, and then he stopped and thought awhile. “It would be quite an experience, Betsy,” he went on, “to have Christmas in a city like Milwaukee. I’ve been in Milwaukee. It’s so German that it’s like a foreign city, and the Germans make a lot of Christmas.” He looked across the table at Mrs. Ray and his brow furrowed slightly. “Really, Jule,” he said, “for a girl who wants
to be a writer, it might be educational to spend Christmas in Milwaukee.”
“But can we afford it, Bob?” Mrs. Ray asked. “I think Betsy is quite old enough and responsible enough to make the trip alone. But she’d need some new clothes, and we all know how many expenses you have.”
“Never mind about that,” said Mr. Ray. “I think she ought to go. Julia went with you to California to visit your mother. It’s Betsy’s turn to have a trip. Next, we’ll send Margaret to Timbucktoo.”
The worried look left his face and he began to act happy.
“I want you to get a lot out of this trip, Betsy,” he said. “I think it would be a good idea to learn a little about Milwaukee before you go. It was built by Germans, mostly…Germans and Austrians and Bohemians and Poles…who didn’t like old country ways. They had the good sense to come to America.
“The Germans brought a lot of Germany with them, but it was mostly the good part. Singing societies, and coffee cake, and Christmas trees.” He got up and went around the table to squeeze Betsy’s shoulders.
“Well, well, just imagine!” he said, “Betsy’s going off to leave us! She’s going to spend Christmas in Milwaukee.”
Anna came into the doorway to say that the McCloskeys often went to Milwaukee. It was a tony city, she said.
Mrs. Ray said she would try to get Miss Mix, the dressmaker; they would start sewing at once.
Betsy ran to telephone Tacy, and the Ray family sat in the parlor and talked excitedly about Milwaukee for a long time.
Betsy was exultantly, rapturously happy, and when Betsy was happy, Mrs. Ray often said, she was happier than anyone else in the world. But after she went upstairs to study she began to feel a little queer inside. She remembered how homesick she had been when she visited the Taggarts.
“Tib’s different from the Taggarts though, and I’m more than a year older.”
Christmas thoughts tried to push their way into her mind. Every year since they were small children she and Tacy had gone Christmas shopping together. They always visited every store in town and each of them always bought just one thing, the same thing every year, a Christmas tree ornament.
“We can go shopping this year, of course. I won’t be here though to see the new ornament on the tree.”
But Betsy forced back these thoughts with that stubbornness she had in her nature.
“I’m going to go! This is my chance. Maybe I can’t change much in two weeks, but I can change a little. Anyway I won’t miss a wonderful thing like this, having Christmas with Tib in Milwaukee.”
She put on her night gown, and wound her hair on Wavers and rubbed into her face a wonderful new cream she had seen advertised in the magazines. It was supposed to make one’s skin as radiant as rose petals.
“I hope it will work by the time I go to Milwaukee,” she thought, looking into the mirror wistfully.
Betsy used more creams, lotions, and curlers than most of her friends. Carney and Tacy never used them at all and were very scornful of them. Betsy joked about her beauty aids, but in private she didn’t think them funny.
She longed with her whole heart to be pretty, and if…as Julia and Tacy insisted…she was pretty already, she longed to be prettier still. The heroines in her stories were always beautiful. Some author’s heroines were plain but attractive; they had tip-tilted noses, or freckles, or other flaws. Betsy’s heroines were perfect, golden-haired and rosy or raven-haired with white magnolia skin. Betsy always made them look just as she wished to look herself.
The rest of December went by on wings. Word of Betsy Ray’s holiday visit to Milwaukee spread through the school, and Betsy found herself flatteringly marked out for attention.
Her father bought the tickets. She would leave at eight o’clock in the morning and arrive in Milwaukee at nine twenty-five that night. She would ride in a parlor car, and have two meals in the diner. She would leave on the twenty-first of December.
“I know,” said Cab, “you’re trying to get away from mistletoe, but you can’t do it, Miss Ray.”
“Not much,” said Tony, looking wicked. “Just when does that train leave?”
“Heaven preserve us!!!” Betsy wrote in her journal. “The boys are coming down to see me off and bring mistletoe to kiss me good-by. Horror of horrors!!!”
The days grew busier and busier. Miss Mix was in the house making a new party dress for Betsy. It was a pink silk with white daisies in it, and with it Betsy would wear a wreath of daisies in her hair. And Miss Mix was making a red and green sailor suit for traveling. Betsy and her mother went downtown and bought a red hat. It was big with a stiff wired bow across the back.
“It will match your red velveteen dress, as well as this one,” Mrs. Ray planned.
Mrs. Ray acted like the general of an army. She shopped, mended, pressed. And Anna, a loyal lieutenant, washed and ironed until all Betsy’s clothes were the pink of perfection.
“If only I could put Julia in my trunk and take her along to do my hair,” Betsy said.
The trunk stood open in Betsy’s room, and slowly it was being filled…not only with clothes. The Crowd brought tissue-wrapped bundles to put in it. And Betsy had to buy or make Christmas presents to take along, as well as to leave behind.
It was strange to see home preparations for Christmas going forward. Anna was making fruit cake, plum pudding and mince meat. Betsy would not be there to eat them. Her mother was dressing a doll for Margaret. It was a yellow-haired doll with a red silk dress trimmed with black lace and insertion. Betsy would not be there to see Margaret’s delight.
Holly wreaths went up in the windows. Washington and Abie received red and green bows. The house was ready for holiday parties. Betsy would not be there to share in the fun.
Closets and drawers were full of packages at which other people were warned not to look. These would be stuffed in the stockings on Christmas Eve. But Betsy’s stocking would be hung in Milwaukee, if it were hung at all.
“I don’t believe the Mullers hang stockings. They just have a Christmas tree,” Betsy remembered.
The choir was busy rehearsing Christmas music. Betsy would not be there on Christmas morning to sing in a joyful, pine-scented church.
But she took part in the school Christmas program. It was given on Friday, the day before she left. She and Julia and Tacy sang a trio, a musical setting of Tennyson’s poem:
“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying clouds, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new…”
Betsy was proud of Tacy that afternoon. Standing between the two Rays she was not frightened, and her voice rang out so sweetly that people spoke of it afterwards.
“You must sing a solo at Rhetoricals, sometime,” Miss Clarke said.
“Oh, no,” Tacy began, but Julia cut in,
“Certainly she will. In the Spring, Miss Clarke. I’ll help her get it ready.”
That afternoon Betsy and Tacy delivered Betsy’s Christmas presents. It was a pleasant day with sunshine sparkling on the snow and afterward they went on their annual Christmas-shopping expedition.
“We’re not going to be cheated out of that,” Tacy had said, and Betsy had laughingly agreed.
But now she didn’t have the proper feeling. Not the decorated windows, nor the tinkling sleighbells, nor Tacy’s arm hooked happily into hers bred the giddy mood in which one could shop gaily for everything from diamonds to bon bons and finally buy only a Christmas tree ornament.
The nearer she came to the moment of departure for Milwaukee the nearer Betsy came to homesickness. She still wanted to go more than she wanted not to go, but she wanted to go less and less.
Tacy sensed that Betsy’s spirits were low and tried to cheer her up by acting nonsensical. She drew her to a stop before a toyshop window. It was such a window as they used to gaze at entranced, with jacks-in-the-box, teddy bears, and doll
s of every description.
“Now let’s choose,” Tacy said, speaking in a childish sing-song. “Which one do you want Santa Claus to bring you? I want that big one in the pink dress.”
Footsteps behind them stopped and Betsy knew that someone had paused. But she followed Tacy’s lead.
“Let me see,” she said in baby talk, pointing. “I think I’d like that one, and a buggy to take her riding in.”
“Oh, no!” cried Tacy. “I want that one.”
“You can’t have it. I saw it first.”
“You did not.”
“I did so.”
As they wrangled Betsy turned her head, and saw a tall boy directly behind them. She looked into the puzzled yellow brown eyes of Phil Brandish.
Aghast, Betsy squeezed Tacy’s hand, but Tacy thought it came only from affection and kept on talking. Betsy extended her foot in its sturdy overshoe and brought it down on Tacy’s foot, hard.
“Ouch! What the dickens…” Tacy exclaimed. She usually caught on quickly but now she had to be nudged in the ribs before she, too, looked around. Phil Brandish, averting his eyes, walked on.
“Tacy!” Betsy wailed. “How perfectly awful!”
“And I got you into it!”
“I’ll never get a ride in that red auto now.”
They were between laughing and crying. So they went to Heinz’s for the consolation of hot chocolate. There laughter triumphed. They laughed so hard thinking what idiots they must have seemed to Phil…Philip the Great, Tacy called him…that Betsy forgot all her lonesome feelings.
Numbers of boys and girls dropped in at the Ray house that night. Almost the whole Crowd came. Someone wanted to sing Christmas carols but Julia tactfully refrained. She knew what sort of thing made people homesick. Instead she played the newest popular songs.
“Baby dear, listen here,
I’m afraid to go home in the dark…”
Tony and Winona clowned through that one. And Carney and Irma, the newly weds, sang in harmony:
“I would, if I could, but I can’t,
Heaven to Betsy / Betsy in Spite of Herself Page 29