Betsy agreed warmly. They had both exchanged some travelers’ checks for shillings and pounds, and were turning away, when Betsy suddenly caught sight of a moving flower garden—purple, yellow, blue, and pink—atop the head of a short, stout woman in a yellow silk suit. She heard a familiar voice raised in animated argument with an American Express attendant.
“Mrs. Main-Whittaker!” Betsy cried, as happy as though she had found a friend from home.
To her astonishment, Mrs. Main-Whittaker not only turned, but bounced over and embraced her. Betsy almost choked on a deep wave of perfume.
“Why, it’s little Miss…Miss…Ray, from the Columbic! The one who plans to be a writer!”
“How did you know?” Betsy asked in delight.
“That nice Mr. O’Farrell told me. Well! I suppose you’ve been to the Ritz? To the Comédie Francaise? Out to Montmartre where our Bohemian friends are gathering these days? All excellent background for modern fiction.”
“I’ve been concentrating more on background for historical novels,” said Betsy, smiling at Miss Wilson.
A flash of understanding crossed Mrs. Main-Whittaker’s face. “Well, what are you doing today?”
“We really hadn’t made up our minds.”
The author chuckled. “You come with me, and we’ll do the town together. But first, have you had lunch? How about a sidewalk café?”
In the dazzled silence that followed, Betsy almost prayed that Miss Wilson would say yes.
“Do come!” Mrs. Main-Whittaker urged Miss Wilson. “I’ve just been wishing I had some good company. And Miss Ray and I can talk shop.” She almost seemed lonesome, canary-colored suit, perfumed sophistication, and all.
Miss Wilson’s smooth cheeks flushed. “Why, certainly! Betsy and I have never eaten in a sidewalk café.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Main-Whittaker, “you’re afraid of the wolves in sheep’s clothing. I’d say there were more sheep in wolves’ clothing around, at least for an old lady like me!” She laughed exuberantly, and with Betsy on one arm and Miss Wilson on the other, sailed out into the sunny Paris afternoon.
The sidewalk luncheon was the beginning of a perfect day. Mrs. Main-Whittaker, who delighted in spending her money as much as she delighted in talking, ordered the meal, which began with shrimp and ended with baba-au-rhum, while Betsy and Miss Wilson beamed at each other and at the occupants of the other tables under the bright awnings.
“Now,” said Mrs. Main-Whittaker, after their waiter had bowed to the sidewalk over her tip, “we have just time for two sights no novice writer should miss. We’ll go to Longchamps for a look at the models. Then how about dinner at the Ritz?”
Miss Wilson, who had half risen, sat down as though she were suddenly faint. Betsy looked away, and wondered how she could bear it if they didn’t go. Miss Wilson adjusted her spectacles and managed a faint whisper.
“Is Longchamps very far away?”
“We won’t be walking,” Mrs. Main-Whittaker chuckled. “But…pardon me for saying so…and believe me, I do say so only because I’ve just had a check for royalties big enough to float a bond issue…this is all going to be my treat. Please don’t say no.”
Miss Wilson, with a common sense and dignity that made Betsy want to hug her, gave a chuckle not unlike Mrs. Main-Whittaker’s.
“A teacher’s salary,” she said, “is definitely no royalty check. But at least I’ll pay for the cab.”
And the next thing Betsy knew, they were racing through the crowds of fashionable carriages and enormous black automobiles, some of which bore crests, toward the Longchamps promenade in the Bois de Boulogne. There Miss Wilson paid the charge and gave a tip big enough to bring the driver’s head down to his very feet.
They made their way down to the benches where spectators were settling themselves for the fashion show, and found front-row seats, Betsy drinking up the sights and sounds of the crowd for repeating to Tacy, Tib, and the family.
Beautiful models began to saunter past with the fashionable limp look.
“And I thought I had a debutante slouch!” Betsy whispered to Miss Wilson, whose face was alight. This really was the bat she had wished they could have together, Betsy thought joyfully. Miss Wilson didn’t even look shocked, although as the parade progressed the skirts, slit to the knee, revealed long lengths of lavender, yellow, green, and even pink stockings.
“And what heels!” Betsy gasped. They were inches and inches high.
The make-up astonished her, too. She had never seen such make-up, even on the chorus girls of the musical shows that came to Minneapolis. Lips were crimson; eyes were painted with thickly drawn shadows. Hair-dos leaped straight up or spread straight out, and hair was every color of the rainbow.
Capes seemed to be coming in, Betsy noted…if you could judge by these fantastic styles. Hats were smaller and the suits had vests and pleated, knee-length overskirts. Looking at one, Betsy heard Miss Wilson gasp, and she could have gasped herself. Beneath the overskirt were trousers! Trousers! On a woman in broad daylight in a public place!
The sun was setting behind the tall trees of the Bois de Boulogne when the parade ended.
“The fashions are really exciting this year, don’t you think?” Mrs. Main-Whittaker remarked as she led her charges through the animated, well-dressed crowds. “You’d look stunning in one of those suits, my dear,” she added to Betsy.
“With trousers, I suppose!” Betsy thought. She was feeling lightheaded. The ride to the Ritz went like a ride on a roller coaster.
And the dinner opened new vistas of luxury. The attentive waiters she remembered from the Columbic were quite outdone by the waiters here who leaped to obey Mrs. Main-Whittaker’s waving, sparkling hand. For the party of three there were two waiters, and behind these a captain of waiters hovered, and behind the captain, a maitre d’hotel. He was most attentive of all.
Mrs. Main-Whittaker seemed to know everybody. She waved and called greetings in every direction.
“Cornelia, my dear!” “May, how nice!” “Adele, where have you been?”
Vastly important as she seemed to be, Mrs. Main-Whittaker was really interested in Miss Wilson and Betsy, and in their plans. Over the onion soup, thick with bread and grated cheese, the frogs’ legs, the salad which a waiter mixed at their table, they discussed England.
“You must be sure,” the author said to Betsy, “not to miss the Agony Column!”
“The Agony Column?” asked Betsy eagerly.
“It’s on the front page of the London Times. So astonishing that such a paper would give its front page to personals! John asking Mary to write him, Mary warning Eloise to leave John alone, the gentleman who noticed a lady in the bus asking her to let him see her again. There’s a plot in every item.”
Betsy was enormously flattered that Mrs. Main-Whittaker should talk shop with her!
When they had finished their crêpes suzettes and were lingering over their coffee, Mrs. Main-Whittaker opened a jeweled cigarette case. She extracted a cigarette, beckoned to a hovering waiter to light it for her, and was about to put the case away. But perhaps she noticed that Miss Wilson’s gaze had a peculiar intensity.
“Will you join me?” she asked, and passed the case.
Betsy’s pride in Miss Wilson’s new aplomb soared to the heights.
“No, thank you. I…I…I was just admiring your cigarette case.”
Mrs. Main-Whittaker puffed luxuriously. “It is nice, isn’t it?” she said. “But smoking is a terrible habit. Do try not to take it up, my dear,” she added to Betsy.
A few minutes later Betsy found courage to open a topic that had been on her mind all day. She mentioned her first sight of Mrs. Main-Whittaker surrounded by reporters on the Columbic.
“One of those reporters was an old friend of mine, Joe Willard. He was covering the story for the Boston Transcript…”
“Oh-h-h-h!” Mrs. Main-Whittaker interrupted, almost cooing. “The Transcript young man! I remember him very well. Ext
remely handsome!”
“Yes, he is,” said Betsy softly.
“And he wrote an excellent story. I received it in my clippings. I subscribe to a clipping bureau. You must do it, too, when you’re established, my dear. His story was entertaining, and he got the facts right…all my plans and ideas. It was the best story of the lot.”
Henri Quatre had helped her at last! Betsy thought, back in her room at the Grand Hotel Pension. She climbed into bed, but she couldn’t sleep. She was too full of the promenading models and the bowing waiters and especially of what Mrs. Main-Whittaker had said about Joe.
Here was her chance! It was now or never, if she was going to write to Joe.
Lying there in the darkened room, she thought about Joe, as she hadn’t thought about him for months. She thought about the first time she had seen him, a cocky blond boy of fourteen, eating an apple and reading The Three Musketeers in Willard’s Emporium, in Butternut Center, Minnesota. She remembered him running up and down the sidelines at the high school football games he’d covered so well for the Deep Valley Sun, and the evenings they had sat side by side in the library studying for the essay contests.
She remembered the first letter he’d written her, the summer after junior year, and how she had slaved over her replies, copying them onto scented green note paper. She remembered the first time he’d come to see her, in the fall of their senior year, and all the times after that, when they’d made fudge in the kitchen and talked in front of the dining-room fire.
They had had a quarrel in their senior year, but she remembered the beautiful spring when they made up. She remembered when he had first kissed her up on the Big Hill. She remembered the few months they’d had together at the University, and how proud she had been when he went away to Harvard.
She thought about him in quiet adoration. She loved him. She’d loved him for years. He was the finest person she’d ever known—he was bound up with almost her whole past life, and she didn’t want to live the rest of her life without him.
Of course that was why she hadn’t loved Marco! Deep inside herself, she must have known. She should have drawn the truth out sooner. But at least now she knew what she had to do.
Betsy got up, turned on the light, put on her pink kimono, and got out her fountain pen. But the only letter she wrote that night went to Marco. It told him gently that they must stop corresponding with each other.
Next morning after crescent rolls and café au lait, she dressed and went out of doors, taking her fountain pen and box of scented green stationery. She went out to a little square and found a bench, and there at last she wrote to Joe!
It was a carefully casual letter.
“If he’s already married to his roommate’s sister, he can show it to her without a blush,” Betsy thought grimly.
It didn’t offer any apologies or excuses, or any explanation other than the desire to tell him about Mrs. Main-Whittaker’s compliment.
“I have a t.l. for you, Joe. That charming Mrs. Main-Whittaker from the Columbic (I met her in the American Express office today) said that your story was the best one to come out of that interview.”
Betsy described her day with the author in sprightly style—the sidewalk café, Longchamps, dinner at the Ritz.
“She really takes an interest in young writers. She gave me all kinds of advice. I’m going to be sure to take a look at the Agony Column in the London Times…she says it’s full of story material.”
The letter went on to sketch her trip in three or four well-chosen lines.
“And a story I wrote last summer sold to Ainslee’s while I was over here. That was how I financed the trip to Sonneberg and Oberammergau.”
Betsy wasn’t sure whether it was a good letter or not. Maybe it sounded too self-centered, but she didn’t want to seem to be prying or hinting for an answer if she asked Joe too much about himself.
She didn’t read it over for fear she wouldn’t mail it. She put it into an envelope and sealed and stamped and addressed it and found a letter box.
She held the letter between her hands a moment, and prayed…then quickly let it go.
That afternoon, rolling toward the English Channel, Betsy remembered that she had not included the address of her London boarding house. Joe could not answer even if he wanted to. It was too bad! But on the other hand, he would know that she wanted to make up. He could write to her in Minneapolis…and somehow, she believed that he would.
20
The Roll of Drums
“There’s a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street
In the City as the sun sinks low;
And the music’s not immortal; but the world has made it sweet…”
Kneeling beside the window of a small white room in which her trunk, steamer rug, flag, books, photographs, Goethe’s cup, Tacy’s doll, and a print of St. Mark’s Square were tastefully arranged, Betsy looked down four stories into Taviton Street where a barrel organ was caroling indeed.
She continued saying the Noyes poem to herself after she had thrown some pennies and the Italian had bowed over a velvet cap and trundled his organ away from Mrs. Heaton’s boarding house. This overlooked a green square. It was one of a row of attached houses, all tall and thin with neat door plates, bells, and knockers.
“Come down to Kew in lilac-time,
in lilac-time, in lilac-time;
Come down to Kew in lilac-time
(it isn’t far from London)…”
This wasn’t lilac-time. It was July, 1914. But it was London, and Betsy loved it.
She hadn’t expected to love it so much. She had known it would be pleasant to hear English spoken again, and moving to be in the land from which her own country had sprung, a land peopled for her by long-familiar figures of history and fiction. But she hadn’t known it would be so…heart-warming. The Wilsons had gone on, and although Betsy had been sorry to part from them, she didn’t feel lonely. In this vast, ancient city she felt completely at home.
She was happy because she was getting nearer her family. She was happy because she had written to Joe.
She drew satisfaction, too, from the thought that she was living in London, not just sightseeing, as in Switzerland and Paris.
She was writing again; she had already finished “The Episodes of Epsie.” Search for a shop where she might get it typed had taken her on a legitimate errand to Fleet Street, for generations the stamping ground of publishers and booksellers and anxious young authors like herself.
Of course, while there, she had peeked into old St. Paul’s which dominated the region from its little hill. She had browsed down bookish Paternoster Row to Amen Corner and hunted up the Inn of the Cheshire Cheese where Dr. Johnson used to dine while Boswell took worshipful notes. She had only walked up and down in front of that and gazed, for ladies didn’t eat there alone.
She attended church every Sunday at Westminster Abbey. “Why not?” she defended herself at the storied portal. “That’s what it’s meant for.” You soaked in more of the dear gray old place, kneeling in the candlelight, than you did walking around with a guidebook.
She did that too, of course. Dick Reed, a law student who lived at Mrs. Heaton’s, came along sometimes. He wasn’t another Marco, but he was very nice. They wandered about the Poets’ Corner, reading inscriptions to Goldsmith, Gray, Shakespeare, Dickens…
Afterward they often prowled around the Parliament buildings. Betsy loved the great song of Big Ben because it reminded her of the chime clock at home. And they always walked to Number Ten Downing Street where the Prime Minister lived. Mr. Dick, as the other boarders called him, because his older brother Leonard also lived at Mrs. Heaton’s, wanted to be Prime Minister some day.
Number Ten was very dingy. “But it will be fun living there anyway,” Betsy consoled him.
When not accompanied by Mr. Dick or her other new friends, Betsy was guided by bobbies. She adored these obliging London policemen. Directing traffic, they would stand as cool as cucumbers, gloved hand i
n air, to listen to your problems, and advise.
“Take bus Aighty-Aight, Miss.”
Betsy consulted them mostly about buses. A top front seat on a bus was a grandstand seat for London.
Of course, you had to scramble down, now and then, to view Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square, or perhaps to watch a sidewalk artist. These amazing peple made their living by drawing pictures in colored chalk on the sidewalk and passers-by stopped and dropped tuppence. Naturally you came down from any bus at teatime.
The English were even more devoted to their tea than Germans to their coffee. Tea was served at His Majesty’s Theatre where Betsy saw Mrs. Patrick Campbell in Pygmalion and became a Shaw devotee. A tray was brought right to her seat for sixpence. It was the same at the movies, or “the pictures” as her friends from Mrs. Heaton’s called them. Yesterday, seeing Mary Pickford, they had all had trays of tea.
It was amusing, Betsy thought now, how well you knew when four-thirty came. She glanced at her watch, and simultaneously heard a call.
“Hello up there! Yankee Doodle!”
“Hello!” Betsy ran to the door.
“Tea in the garden!” called Mr. Dick.
“Right-o,” answered Betsy, very British. Giving a pat to her hair and brushing a chamois skin over her nose, she skimmed down past the second-floor drawing room to the first-floor dining room and back to the garden.
This was a bit sooty…no white, rose-draped walls as in Venice. But there were vines and a snowy tea table, and behind the pot Mrs. Heaton’s sweet care-worn face. She mothered everybody, and most of her boarders could use mothering. They were almost all young.
Jean Carver was an actress. When Betsy first arrived Jean had been out of work and her eyes were often red. But now she was engaged for the chorus of The Arcadians, and busy with rehearsals.
“Glad to see you home,” said Betsy. “Dolly needs your legs!”
Little Dolly Cohen was an artist. Her room was just below Betsy’s, wildly untidy, with drawings scattered everywhere, and tubes of paint and brushes about, and an easel in front of her window. She was illustrating a new edition of Helen’s Babies and everyone in the house had posed for her. Betsy was modeling the lady who listened to Toddy’s recitation. Mr. Leonard had posed as Toddy spilling soup. This showed how much everyone liked Dolly, for Mr. Leonard, who was studying to be a doctor, was a most dignified young man, slenderly erect, with eyeglasses. He never went out without a cane.
Betsy and the Great World / Betsy's Wedding Page 21