Betsy and the Great World / Betsy's Wedding

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  “Really?” Betsy forgot her pose. Her smile was a burst of sunshine.

  A small space between her teeth in front gave her a look of candor. She had a friendly merry face with brown hair pushed over her cheeks in the soft disarray affected that season, and hazel eyes that glowed now into Mr. O’Farrell’s.

  Letters from home! Letters from that paradise lost, lying three long days behind her!

  “Oh, how wonderful!” she cried.

  “Telegrams, too,” said Mr. O’Farrell teasingly. “And boxes! I believe there are even some blossoms. Are you traveling alone?”

  “Yes…practically.”

  “Well, I’m going to give you a special place at table so you won’t get lonely. You pick it up after we sail.”

  “But what about my ticket?”

  “The steward will collect it in your cabin,” he said.

  Betsy pushed her way eagerly through crowded corridors to the paneled library, but the mail was not yet sorted.

  “The flowers are though, Mum,” a steward said. All the stewards sounded as English as Mr. O’Farrell did Irish. He looked over a line of green boxes and selected one for her.

  Betsy opened it with joyful fingers. Bob Barhydt’s card lay on top. Inside was a corsage bouquet of pink roses and lilies of the valley.

  “Oh, how sweet of Bob!” she cried.

  She pinned on the flowers at the nearest mirror, lifted her chin, and went out on deck less afraid of the surging indifferent people.

  “That was really sweet of Bob,” she thought again, and felt guilty because he and the University of Minnesota campus seemed suddenly so remote.

  It was a bleak afternoon. The sky was overcast and the air had a damp bite. She found the Wilsons engaged with the deck steward.

  Dr. Wilson was a thin erect little man with white mustaches and a pointed white beard. His complexion was as pretty as Betsy’s. That came, perhaps, from his theories on diet which he had explained to her at breakfast. He scorned coffee and meat. Carrots, lettuce, apples, and whole-grain breads were his delight.

  His sister, like himself, was white-haired, slender, and erect, but she liked a slice of pound cake now and then, she had admitted to Betsy with a twinkle.

  Having greeted them, Betsy went to the rail and looked down on the chaos below.

  Now long lines of Italians were filing into the steerage. Some were wrapped in red blankets. They carried tin dishes and piles of canned goods. Little dark-eyed children danced along in front, or crowded close to their parents, frightened and crying. Betsy wondered why they were going back to Italy.

  A gong clanged commandingly.

  “That means good-by,” said a woman in a large noisy group at Betsy’s left. And suddenly all around her people were kissing and embracing. A line began to push down the gangplank.

  Soon the windows of the building below were of faces…people crying and laughing, waving handkerchieves and blowing kisses. The passengers leaning over the rail were likewise crying and laughing, waving handkerchieves and blowing kisses. The air was full of ejaculations. “Oh, there he is! Oh, there she is!”

  “Don’t forget you’re married!” called the man who had left the group beside her.

  Betsy noticed a sobbing Italian woman, gazing at the steerage passengers who were bound for her native land. At times she would forget to cry. She would catch her breath, like a child distracted by a toy; then she would remember, and start to sob again.

  Somewhere, someone was strumming a guitar. “O sole mio…” A lump swelled in Betsy’s throat.

  “I’d better get out of here,” she thought.

  Suddenly she couldn’t imagine why she had wanted to go traveling. Her thoughts reached back yearningly to her family. How could she have left them!

  Her darling father who worked so hard for them all, and was always so cheerful about it! Her pretty red-haired mother who had shopped so tirelessly buying these new clothes! Margaret, now sixteen, so sweet, and beginning to have beaux. And Julia, such a wonderful big sister, even though married!

  Betsy sniffed.

  She could see them all, and the gray stucco cottage out in Minneapolis with snow clinging to the bare vines and lying on the evergreens around the glassed-in porch. Inside, there would be a fire in the fireplace. They always had Sunday night lunch around that fire. Her father made the sandwiches.

  Tears flooded Betsy’s eyes.

  Someone beside her called to someone else. “Did you know we had an author on board?”

  An author? Betsy dashed away her tears. For a wild moment she thought they meant her, for she planned to be an author. That was one reason she was going abroad.

  “Yes,” came the answer, shrilling above her head. “Some reporters were talking to her down in the library. They’re taking pictures now, over there by the gangplank.”

  Betsy turned eagerly to look.

  She saw a small stout woman with bright auburn hair under a purple veil and hat. Her purple coat was laden with flowers. Flashbulbs popped.

  “Maybe they’ll be doing that for me someday,” thought Betsy.

  Then the photographers shouldered their cameras and ran down the gangplank with reporters following—the last ones to leave the ship.

  Betsy looked over the railing quickly. There was something familiar about one of the reporters. There was a swing to his shoulders…He had taken off his hat, and she saw that his hair was blond. Before she realized what she was doing Betsy leaned still farther and called out frantically, “Joe!”

  But her voice was lost in the hubbub, for now the gangplanks were being pulled up and the engines began to tug and strain. Deep-throated horns were blowing. Screams and shouts of farewell rose in a frenzied babel.

  Betsy’s eyes searched the windows of the building below. And sure enough a blond head appeared. She recognized the pompadour haircut. But this young man had a mustache—a close-cropped blond mustache! Nevertheless he was, he was. Joe Willard!

  He was scanning the rail, frowning. He didn’t see her. At least, she didn’t think he did, and she didn’t call again. She was glad he hadn’t heard. He would never forgive her—probably he was never going to anyway—but he certainly never would if he knew she had come through Boston without letting him know.

  Now he was frowning down at a paper of some kind.

  The passenger list? Betsy had one in her pocket; she had seen her own name. He looked up sharply.

  But the S.S. Columbic was moving. Slowly, inexorably, the horn still blowing, it edged out of the pier. A line of churned white foam appeared, and the space of cold green water widened. The barnlike building faded, and the shoreline came into view.

  Betsy couldn’t see it, for her tears were back again.

  It wasn’t surprising, she thought, as the steamer picked its way past a fringe of ships at anchor, and along a busy channel, it wasn’t at all surprising that Joe was at the ship. She knew he worked part-time on the Boston Transcript.

  “I wish I hadn’t seen him,” she thought. It would be harder to forget him now, and that was another reason she was going abroad…to forget Joe Willard. She wiped her eyes with grim determination.

  “‘Haply I may remember and haply may forget,’” she quoted flippantly.

  The woman standing next to her looked around, startled.

  Then Betsy turned her back on the Hub of the Universe, which was rising along the horizon. She’d write a letter or two to go back with the pilot, she decided abruptly.

  In the library she found a desk and scribbled a note to her family. She tried to sound ecstatic, and didn’t mention Joe, although she longed to share the news of his mustache. She thanked Bob Barhydt for the flowers. Returning to her stateroom, she replaced her hat with a scarf, got out her steamer rug, and went above, hoping that good-bys were over. But the pilot was just leaving, waving, followed by cheers. His boat bobbed off into gathering fog.

  The Columbic now had left all traffic far behind. They were in the open ocean. Betsy leaned against t
he rail and the wind tore at her unkindly. Looking out at the leaden waves, the joyless, circling gulls, she felt unutterably lonely. Seeing Joe had made her hurt inside. She didn’t even want to read her mail.

  The water grew rougher. Her body could feel the new movement, the climb up, the drop down. A poem she had learned one time began to toll in her head:

  “Up and down! Up and down!

  From the base of the wave, to the billow’s crown…”

  But suddenly there was too much up and down. Walking unsteadily, she found her deck chair and the steward tucked her in. He offered her tea, but she didn’t want tea. Burrowing miserably into her rug, she watched the vessel rise and fall.

  People were walking around the deck with incomprehensible zest. Presently she saw Dr. Wilson, walking briskly, smiling. He recognized her and paused.

  “Would you care to walk, Miss Betsy?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Seasickness,” he said, “can be controlled by diet.” But he looked sympathetic. “My sister hasn’t learned how either, and she believes in going to bed. She always goes to her bunk and stays there until she’s accustomed to the motion.”

  “I think that’s what I’ll do,” Betsy replied, struggling to her feet. He helped her to the passageway.

  Miss Wilson was in bed and greeted her faintly. Betsy undressed too, although, above decks, the bugle was blowing merrily for dinner. Pinned to her innermost garments was a chamois bag containing money, some extra American Express checks, and a check signed in blank by her father—for emergencies. Betsy transferred this treasure to the bosom of her flannel nightgown. Then, without even stopping to wind her hair on curlers, she climbed to the upper bunk, pulled up the blankets, and lay flat.

  She could see a patch of sea and sky through the porthole, but down here, too, it appeared and disappeared in menacing rhythm. She closed her eyes.

  After a time the stewardess came in. She was a dainty little Englishwoman with an encouraging manner. She asked Miss Wilson and Betsy whether they wanted dinner. They both declined.

  “I’d like to see my mail though,” Betsy said feebly. Her letters, telegrams, and boxes had been sent to the cabin and made a tantalizing pile, far below on her trunk.

  The stewardess handed them up, and although Betsy didn’t feel able to read them, it was comforting to have them near. She found a fat letter from home. It would be a round robin—the Ray family was always writing round robins—and put it under her cheek.

  An orchestra was playing now. For dinner, probably. It had said in the folder that there was music for dinner. People dressed up for it and it had sounded such fun.

  “It’s a long way to Tipperary,

  It’s a long way to go…”

  Betsy had danced to that tune and she had always liked it, but it sounded dreary now. Tears dripped into the round robin.

  She wasn’t sick, exactly…not like Miss Wilson was. Miss Wilson occasionally jumped out of bed and was very sick indeed. But Betsy felt frightened and lonesome and forlorn.

  She wondered just what she was doing here. Why should she be in the bowels of a ship ploughing through sullen, turbulent waters, going to a foreign continent alone? Why? Why?

  She turned her thoughts backward and tried to pull all the reasons together.

  2

  “Haply I May Remember”

  SHE HADN’T, BETSY CONFIDED to her pillow, done what she wanted to in college.

  She had gotten off to a bad start because her freshman year was interrupted by appendicitis, and afterward she had gone to California for a long convalescence in her grandmother’s home. She had loved California. It seemed unbelievable to find rioting flowers and oranges on shiny green trees and warm fragrant air in the middle of winter. She had loved the peace of her grandmother’s home. An actor uncle who grew grapes near San Diego had given her a typewriter, and she had sold her first story.

  “I found myself out there,” Betsy had declared more than once.

  Yes, but back at the University she had lost herself again. Was life always like that? she wondered. A game of hide and seek in which you only occasionally found the person you wanted to be?

  It had been discouraging, next fall, to be a year behind her old high school class. Everyone else was a sophomore while she was still a freshman. And it had seemed unjust to find Advanced Botany and Higher Algebra still lying in wait. Betsy loved English and French but she had always hated mathematics and science. Feeling herself almost a professional writer now (because she sometimes sold a story for ten or twelve dollars), she resented these unpleasant subjects even more.

  Plunging zealously into activities, she became Woman’s Editor of the college paper. (A tall well-dressed young man named Bob Barhydt was also on the staff.) She wrote stories which were accepted by the college magazine. One was better than the others. It was really good and Betsy didn’t quite know why, for it was just a simple story laid in her Uncle Keith’s vineyard. But the famous professor, Dr. Maria Sanford, had praised it. She had written Betsy a letter about it. This success made science and mathematics all the more arduous, and Betsy’s grades had slipped.

  Joe Willard, on the other hand, to whom she was almost—but not quite—engaged, had done very well at the U, although he was a part-time copy reader on the Minneapolis Tribune. Because of his outstanding work he was offered a scholarship to Harvard and went east at the beginning of his junior year.

  Betsy was happy for him, and very proud, and he planned to come back the following summer, which made parting easier. Yet his going had hurt her, too. After he left she gave up all scholastic strivings. Her friends were juniors; she was only a humble sophomore.

  “I’ll be a success socially, at least,” she decided flippantly and joined a sorority although she had never liked them.

  It wasn’t a good thing to do. She soon grew tired of pretending that her deepest interests were social. She made a few close friends in the group, but not many, and the exclusive Greek letter club separated her from congenial girls on the Daily and the Mag.

  But after she became a sorority girl Bob Barhydt started to rush her. He was very much the fraternity man. (Joe had never joined a fraternity. He had no time or money or inclination for them.) Because of Bob, Betsy’s sophomore year went in a gay whirl of parties.

  She wasn’t happy, though, in spite of her social success, her achievements on the Daily and the Mag, and her name on committees and the membership lists of many organizations. Betsy felt that she had failed herself. She hadn’t meant to be sucked into the social current. She hadn’t meant to flirt with Bob, or to settle down to any one man while Joe was away. She had meant to get an education. And she wasn’t doing it.

  It wasn’t, she knew, the fault of the University. People all around her were getting excellent educations there. It wasn’t even the fault of the sorority. Many of the outstanding girls on the campus belonged to these groups.

  Betsy admitted to the night and the deep Atlantic that the fault had lain strictly with herself.

  As spring came on she became more and more frivolous. The gossip column in the Daily was full of jokes about her and Bob. (A corner of the Oak Tree, the campus ice cream parlor, was called the B and B.) The Year Book showed kodak pictures of them river-banking—the University phrase for strolling along the Mississippi.

  Joe subscribed to the Minnesota Daily and he bought a copy of the Year Book. Suddenly his letters became as cold as ice.

  Betsy was looking forward longingly to his promised visit. Her dissatisfaction with herself, her wasted year, the flirtation with Bob, couldn’t be explained in letters. If she and Joe could talk, she could make him understand. But he didn’t come back. He wrote that he had a good summer job on the Boston Transcript. He mentioned his roommate’s pretty sister. Their letters grew farther and farther apart.

  “I believe I like Bob better anyway,” Betsy told Tacy, who knew that wasn’t true. For something in Betsy had always reached out to Joe
Willard—blond and stalwart with a proud swing in his shoulders, a deep contagious laugh, and a look of clear goodness in his eyes.

  He was an orphan. He had earned his own way since his early teens, gallantly ignoring shabby clothes and lack of money. He had been her ideal since her freshman year in high school. And Betsy was tenacious in her affections.

  Tacy, too, was tenacious in her affections, and when she completed her course in public school music that June, she had married Harry Kerr.

  He was an aggressive young salesman whom she had met at the Rays’ four years before. They had planned a festive wedding with her sister Katie as maid of honor and Betsy and Tib as bridesmaids. But early that spring Tacy’s father died. Everyone agreed Tacy’s marriage should not be postponed, but it was celebrated quietly with only Katie and Harry’s brother present.

  Before starting off for Niagara Falls on their honeymoon, Tacy and her husband had come for a few days to the Ray house. The Rays moved out for them. Mr. Ray took Mrs. Ray on a business trip. Betsy and Margaret moved over to Betsy’s sorority house.

  They couldn’t have helped Tacy more. The Ray house for many years had been a second home to her; and in Minneapolis as in Deep Valley it was always the same—a fire in the grate in winter, flowers in summer, the smell of good cooking in Anna’s cheerful kitchen, and above all an atmosphere of happiness, of harmony, of love.

  That atmosphere and her husband’s tenderness helped to assuage Tacy’s grief. It was a help, too, after she and Harry moved into their Minneapolis apartment, to have Betsy near. And Tacy’s need of her helped Betsy.

  That summer, Betsy made her bedroom into an office. She was still going on dates with Bob. They went dancing on the Radisson Roof, and canoeing on the Minneapolis lakes. They went to band concerts and the movies, and he came to Sunday night supper. But Betsy’s really happy hours were spent at her desk.

  She worked faithfully every morning on short stories and at last settled down to one she liked, trying to make it as good as the one Dr. Sanford had praised. Meanwhile, as she had done since she was in high school, she kept all her old stories on the go. Neatly typed, with return postage enclosed, they went from magazine to magazine.