Mr. O’Farrell burst into laughter. “We have an author…pardon me…another author on board. Did you know? A Mrs. Main-Whittaker. Would you like to meet her?”
“Well, I would normally, but in this case…” She didn’t want to, because Mrs. Main-Whittaker knew Joe. It was idiotic. But Betsy’s face turned scarlet.
Mr. O’Farrell changed the subject deftly. He was very tactful, Betsy realized—sensitive, too.
“That’s why I like him,” she thought later, on the upper deck. “It’s not just that he’s so handsome and flings compliments around.”
There were groups and couples on the upper deck looking at the stars. Betsy was with a group but Maida was with Mr. Chandler. “Fussing,” Betsy accused her later down in Maida’s cabin.
Maida’s mother was playing bridge as usual and they had the small room to themselves. They had put on bathrobes and caps, rung for lemon squash and sandwiches. Again Betsy had the feeling that she had turned back the clock.
Maida was a little younger than herself, but it wasn’t that. For Maida didn’t usually seem younger. Mrs. Sims and Mrs. Cheney would never, Betsy realized, call Maida naïve. But she had gone to a private school and she had not, like Betsy, had boys around all her life—in the classroom, in the schoolyard, in and out of her home. She didn’t understand boys as well as Betsy did.
“What’s ‘fussing’?”
“Flirting.”
“I don’t believe he’s flirting, actually.”
“That’s it!” Betsy thought. “I’m only joking about having a crush on Mr. O’Farrell, but I’m afraid Maida is really falling for Mr. Chandler.”
4
Enchanted Island
“SEVEN O’CLOCK and land in sight!”
These words of high romance were accompanied by a rattling of the stateroom door.
“Miss Wilson!” Betsy cried. “Do you hear that?”
“Yes, yes!” Miss Wilson was groping into a dressing gown. Betsy scrambled down the ladder and joined her at the porthole.
There romance was written along the horizon in a wavy line. It looked no more substantial than the airy cloud-built islands they had often seen at sunset. But this was a real island; it was one of the Azores.
“St. Michael’s, probably,” Miss Wilson said. She and her brother had stopped here before.
Excitement beat like wings over the breakfast table.
“Imagine,” Betsy babbled, “finding islands out here in the middle of the ocean! Of course, I’ve always known they were here. But I never realized before how big the Atlantic was, and how brave it was of a little island to push right up in the middle of it.”
“It didn’t push,” said Mr. O’Farrell. “It was flung up by a volcano. Eat your porridge, child.”
“Porridge!” said Betsy scornfully. “I’m too uplifted to eat.” But she poured the thick cream with a generous hand.
There were nine islands in the Azores Archipelago, Mr. O’Farrell said—all volcanic, mountainous, and rising steeply from the sea. They were farther from Europe and nearer to America than any other group of islands. Portugal had discovered them.
“Portugal!” The English lady didn’t seem to believe it.
“Yes, Madame. It was in those adventur-r-rous days when Prince Henry, the Navigator, was pushing out the world’s boundaries. And the islands had no human inhabitants when the Portuguese arrived.”
“When were they discovered?”
“Corvo, the last one, around 1452. After that, men kept on searching. They felt sure there was more land farther on, for some rocks on Corvo”—Mr. O’Farrell’s voice warmed to the drama—“are shaped like a horseman pointing west.”
Betsy felt shivers down her spine. “Did Columbus ever see that?”
“He may have.”
“How simply, absolutely fascinating!”
Out on deck passengers gathered in the sunshine. Now the distant wavy line had resolved itself into mountains. They were the vivid green of grass after rain, divided off like a checkerboard by darker green hedges. And where the mountains swept down to the bay lay Ponta Delgada.
At first the little city was a splash of dazzling white. But nearer, it took on color. Many of the houses, all small and of similar shape, were tinted in pastel hues.
“It looks like a toy village! I want to sit right down on the floor and play with it!” cried Betsy.
“It’s like a stage setting,” said Maida.
Shortly they missed the throb of the engines. The Columbic had stopped and small boats were racing toward it. Betsy ran down to the stateroom for her jacket, cap, and camera.
“And some stout shoes!” Mrs. Sims warned her. “The cobblestones are fiendish.”
“And your purse!” added Mrs. Cheney. “The embroideries are divine…and so cheap!”
Maida, too, sped below and returned with a flat sailor hat perched above her flowing hair.
The crew had let down a stairway from the lower deck, and the passengers descended to rowboats, manned by dark, barefooted boatmen. Their gibble-gabble was Portuguese, Dr. Wilson said. The boat tipped and joggled as though sharing the general excitement, and the little toy city came nearer all the time.
Landing at a rock platform, the visitors climbed stairs to the street and were at once surrounded by smiling, clamorous natives. Men and women alike were barefooted. The women wore bright shawls, and many carried black-eyed babies. Some attempted English. Little boys held out their hands with captivating grins, calling, “Mawney, mawney!” “I ’peak English. Give me mawney!”
Flowers were offered. Betsy bought a bouquet of violets and their wet fragrance intoxicated her. She looked around eagerly at the tiny streets—the little colored houses.
“Oh, this darling place! This dear, sweet, cunning, adorable place!”
Carriage drivers, with gestures, urged everyone to ride. But Betsy wanted to walk. She wanted to be on her own feet, able to stop and look about as often and as long as she chose. Fortunately, Dr. Wilson believed in exercise as much as he believed in raw vegetables. He and his sister would be walking, he said, and Betsy and Maida could go with them. Maida’s mother took a carriage with Mrs. Sims and Mrs. Cheney, and the girls agreed to meet them at Brown’s Hotel for lunch.
The cobblestones were rough, as Mrs. Sims had warned, but Betsy was walking on air. And the steep streets were very narrow—many didn’t even have sidewalks—but that only brought the travelers closer to the enchanting little houses.
These were built of dried lava, Dr. Wilson said; then plastered and tinted to suit the owner’s fancy. They were pale green, blue, pink, lavender, and orange. They were striped, checkered, tiled like a bathroom floor. They looked like little frosted cakes or bricks of Neopolitan ice cream. They had second-story balconies with green wrought-iron railings that hung above the cobblestones.
“I love them! I adore them!” Betsy kept saying. “I’m going to come back and stay at least a month. Celeste and I are going to live in a pale green house with a balcony.”
Maida laughed. “Just wait till you see Madeira!”
“But it can’t, it can’t be as nice as this!”
“Madeira is supposed to be the most beautiful spot on earth. It was probably the Garden of Eden.”
Dark-eyed women smiled from the balconies where they sat working on the embroidery for which the Azores, as well as Madeira, were famous. Children, irresistibly pretty, peeped over the railings and crowded about the visitors in the street.
Betsy was taking snapshots madly. She snapped the children. She snapped a Portuguese soldier, in gray and red, with a jaunty beret. She snapped an old man with a tassel cap, sitting on top of a load of brush that was sitting on top of a donkey.
There were donkeys everywhere, flanked with bulging panniers or patiently pulling two-wheeled carts. There were oxen, too, but very few horses.
Suddenly Maida stopped abruptly. “My word!”
Betsy turned her head. “Golly!” she breathed.
From
among the brightly shawled women one had emerged wearing an unbelievable costume. It was like a nun’s habit, blown out to a grotesque size. The cloak was as large as a tent, and the huge hood, shaped like a sunbonnet, was so contrived that the face could be completely concealed.
“That is the capote e capelo,” Dr. Wilson said, “the traditional costume of the island. We are lucky to see one, for they are going out. The younger women object to them, I hear,” he added regretfully.
“I should think they jolly well would!” Maida cried.
“But it’s a perfect disguise! It might be convenient…” Betsy was already putting one into a dark romance.
“I think,” Miss Wilson said, “the costume was devised on account of the showers.” It was true that showers and little bursts of sunshine alternated every few minutes. “On our other visit I counted eleven showers and nine rainbows in the time we were ashore.”
No one minded the rain. It was like a bright mist through which struck quite plainly the little doll houses with their dainty balconies. After every shower there was a smell of heavenly sweetness.
“It must be freesias…or roses!” Betsy sniffed rapturously. “This place reminds me of California,” she added.
The palm trees were indeed familiar, and she recognized the giant geraniums, red and pink, which had astonished her long ago in her grandmother’s garden. In California, too, she had first seen bougainvillaea, which was pouring cascades of purple, red, and blue over these walls.
More and more houses had gardens now. The owners attempted to conceal them with high walls, but great masses of fragrant flowers surged up and over, to greet the passers-by.
“There seem to be so few people around these bigger houses,” Maida observed.
“The upper-class women,” Dr. Wilson replied, “lead lives of great seclusion. Men servants do their shopping for them. And when they go out…to church or to pay calls…they go in carriages.”
“I don’t blame them for staying in their gardens,” Betsy said, pausing at a white wall where a white cat with yellow eyes sat in a torrent of yellow bloom.
Dr. Wilson wanted them to see some “sights,” so they visited a public garden. Here were grotesque lava formations—caves and grottos and little hills—and more lavish vegetation. Orange trees with shiny green leaves, white blossoms, and golden fruit. Huge camellia trees, covered with red and white flowers. Magnolia trees, banana trees, figs, peaches, apricots. Mountains of cactus, forests of ferns, and oceans of flowers.
“It isn’t hard to make things grow in these islands,” Miss Wilson remarked. “The trouble is to keep them from growing too much. It looks untidy, doesn’t it?”
But Betsy thought it was a garden out of a dream.
They went to the Old Jesuit Church. The portals were guarded by beggars; Betsy had never seen a beggar before. The church was almost three hundred years old, Dr. Wilson said, and she looked around with awe. The altar was astonishing. It was an enormous mass of cedar, carved with a multitude of little fat cherubs. Cherubs were as thick as leaves on a tree.
When they left the church, Betsy and Maida were too hungry, they told Dr. Wilson, to imbibe further education. He had brought his lunch in his pocket—a carrot and a slice of whole-grain bread—and his sister had a sandwich. They were going on to the Matriz Church.
“One of the doors is a very interesting example of the Manueline,” he told them earnestly.
“But what is the Manueline, Dr. Wilson?”
“The Manueline style? It’s like the Plateresque.”
“Heavens! How much I have to learn!” Betsy said to Maida as they climbed to Brown’s Hotel.
This modest white plaster building was situated on a hill with terraces overlooking the city and bay. The showers had stopped and the air was very warm.
“Just think,” Betsy said, “at home it’s winter! The roofs and lawns are covered with snow, and Papa is out shoveling walks.”
They were hot and tired. It was pleasant, when they went inside, to find the hotel deliciously cool. The Browns were English people, but their hostelry seemed very foreign, with high ceilings, bare, white-washed walls, and cement floors.
The room to which the girls were escorted to rest was high, bare, and cool like the others, with long white curtains at the window, an iron bed, a wardrobe, a dresser, a washstand with a china bowl and pitcher.
“Not much like a room at the Radisson,” Betsy said. “But then, the Radisson doesn’t look out on a garden.”
“What is the Radisson?” Maida asked, dropping down on the bed.
“It’s a hotel in Minneapolis. That’s near the Minnehaha Falls, in case you don’t remember.”
Betsy was as tired as Maida, but she couldn’t leave the window. It was thrilling to stand in a strange room and look out into a flaming garden.
“I’m in a foreign land,” she thought. “No wonder people love traveling!”
“Betsy,” Maida said suddenly. “I want to talk something over with you. Why don’t you get off at Madeira with us? You could go on to the continent later.”
Betsy was too astonished to reply.
“You like the Azores so well,” Maida continued. “And Madeira is even more beautiful.”
“But would your mother want me?”
“Oh, yes! I asked her last night. She’d love to have you visit us.”
“Why, why…that’s the nicest thing I ever heard of! It’s wonderful of you and your mother. But I don’t know what to say.”
“It would be ever so jolly to have you,” Maida urged.
Betsy stretched out on the bed beside her, trying to imagine what it would be like to stay in Madeira—if Madeira were as beautiful as this. It would be like living in another world. But would it be sensible? What would her parents think? She’d have to write Miss Surprise.
Maida began to whisper confidences. “Mr. Chandler is really in love with me, Betsy. It isn’t just a shipboard flirtation.”
“Really?” Betsy was sympathetic. She couldn’t help feeling secretly doubtful, though.
“He feels terrible that I have to get off at Madeira. Betsy, do you suppose Mamma would mind if I married a ship’s officer?”
Presently they took turns at the washbowl and went out to the dining room where Mrs. Bartlett and others from the Columbic were waiting. Mrs. Main-Whittaker wasn’t there. She had gone to the Portuguese hotel, someone said.
“Looking for atmosphere,” thought Betsy.
All the guests ate at one table and they were served by two Portuguese women—one old, with a white turban on her head, the other, young and pretty with a pink skirt and a blue and white striped waist.
Conversation was in French and Portuguese as well as in English. Betsy rejoiced when she occasionally understood a merci or a s’il vous plait. She was almost rested after the fatiguing morning, and the cool, dim, lofty room refreshed her.
Moreover, the luncheon was delicious. They had first a thick soup, then a slice of beef with salad, then an omelet, with apricots and fresh pineapple for dessert. The Azores shipped pineapples everywhere, Mrs. Bartlett said.
No wonder! Betsy thought. She had never eaten one so sweet and full of juice.
After lunch she and the Bartletts went out to the terrace and Mrs. Bartlett repeated Maida’s invitation.
“We have a villa rented…and servants arranged for. We’d love to have you.”
“You’re so sweet to ask me!” Betsy cried. “And it would be wonderful. But I don’t know whether I ought to.”
“The Wilsons are your chaperones, aren’t they? They could speak for your parents?”
“Yes,” answered Betsy. “I could do anything the Wilsons approved.”
“The purser could arrange it very easily. This line permits stopovers. Another ship could pick you up and carry you on to Genoa in a month or two…say, in early spring.”
“Then I wouldn’t go to Munich at all.” Betsy’s head was whirling, but the plan tempted her greatly. Back at the quay she tol
d the Wilsons about the invitation.
Dr. Wilson was dazed and dubious. He and his sister were charmed with the Bartletts, he said.
“But Munich is a great metropolis, a famous center for music and art. I really can’t advise you to give it up merely for a picturesque island.”
His sister agreed, and Betsy had an uncomfortable feeling that her parents would, too. And Julia wouldn’t like her missing all that music.
“But it would be something,” she insisted, “to spend six weeks in a perfect earthly paradise.”
“Yes, of course! And if you want to do it, I can assure your parents that it would be quite proper.” His reluctance was obvious, however.
They were all exhausted when they got back to the Columbic, laden with big bunches of flowers, pineapples, postcards, and embroideries. It was like coming home, Betsy thought, to return to the little stateroom. The stewardess scurried about making them comfortable.
While Betsy was taking a hot salt bath, she felt the engine begin to throb again.
She thought of the little island—such a tiny scrap of land—melting from sight as the steamer moved away.
“Maybe it goes back into the ocean and rises up again when another steamer comes along. It’s lovely enough to be enchanted.”
If Madeira was really nicer than St. Michael’s, she ought to accept Maida’s invitation.
“I almost believe I will.” She sprang out of the tub and rubbed herself until she tingled. “I’ll ask Mr. O’Farrell to arrange it.”
At dinner the orchestra was playing Strauss waltzes, and everyone was bursting with the day’s adventures. The English lady, like the Wilsons, was talking of Manueline doors. Mr. Glenn had visited a pineapple farm. Betsy was delirious and knew it.
“It’s the most entrancing little place I ever saw. Celeste and I are going to go back someday and live in a pale green house with a balcony.”
“Celeste is your sister?” the English lady asked politely.
“Oh, she’s my maid! I mean…she’s my imaginary maid. I mean…aren’t those balconies adorable?”
Betsy and the Great World / Betsy's Wedding Page 5