Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (6 page)

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
B
ETSY
and Julia hitched up Old Mag and went riding. It was almost unheard-of for Betsy not to be with a crowd of boys and girls on Saturday night. But for once she didn't want to be. Julia was leaving the following Tuesday.

Betsy had seen very little of her sister since returning
from Murmuring Lake. Miss Mix, the dressmaker, was in the house. Julia and Mrs. Ray were shopping all day long for materials and trimmings, as well as for hats, night gowns, underwear, shoes and all the other things Julia must take to the U.

“Anyone would think there wasn't a store in Minneapolis,” Mr. Ray grumbled. “Why don't you just fill a trunk with her duds and let her buy what else she needs in the cities?”

But this was unthinkable. Mrs. Ray loved to shop. Every purchase must be discussed from all angles, colors matched, accessories pondered over. The two had been lost in a maze of clothes.

Betsy was glad tonight to have Julia to herself. It was a fine chance to talk, jogging along behind Old Mag, the reins held loosely, the whip in the right hand, but as a gesture merely. Old Mag always took her own gait.

Riding was a favorite evening diversion in Deep Valley, especially since Front Street and Broad Street had been paved. The Rays usually went as a family, Mr. and Mrs. Ray in the front seat, the three girls behind. They would drive down High Street past the high school and court house to the end, turn and drive up Broad past the library, the Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist and Episcopal churches, and Carney's house. At Lincoln Park they would turn and angle
down Second where there were more homes and more churches, livery stables, the post office, the fire house, the Opera House. Then, turning again, they would drive up Front past the Big Mill and the Melborn Hotel and Mr. Ray's shoe store. Sometimes they stopped for ice cream.

Out riding you continually passed and hailed friends who were likewise out riding, going up one street and down another while sunset died out of the sky. Occasionally an automobile whizzed past and then you had to hang on to the reins. Old Mag still detested automobiles.

Betsy held the reins tonight. Julia looked pensively over the pleasant streets, dimmed by the cool September twilight. She looked as though she were bidding them good-by, as indeed she was.

“I both hate it and love it,” Julia said.

“Deep Valley? How could you possibly hate it?”

“Because it has held me for so long,” Julia said. “And it isn't my native heath. Never was.”

Julia was taking the music course at the U. She began talking about how hard she planned to work, not only at singing lessons but at piano, history and theory of music, languages.

“Of course,” she explained, “the U wasn't my choice. What I would really like to do is go to New York or Berlin to study. But Papa thinks I'm too
young for that, and I'm willing to go to the U first if he wants me to.”

She drew her finely arched brows together.

“It's not so good, though,” she said. “You ought to begin young in music. I'd like to start work with some great teacher. Geraldine Farrar made her debut when she wasn't much older than I am.”

Betsy wanted to tell Julia how much she would miss her, but it didn't come easy to Betsy to say things like that.

“When you're gone, I'm going to go into your room every day and muss it up. I'm going to pull open your bureau drawers and throw your clothes on the floor. You know, make the place look natural.”

“I'm not that bad, Bettina,” Julia said, slipping her arm through her sister's.

“Worse! Gee, we're going to miss you!”

Old Mag's hoofs rang on the asphalt of Broad Street. Betsy and Julia bowed to the Brandishes, waved to the Roots, gazed thoughtfully at the first timid star.

“Yes, Papa and Mamma will miss me,” said Julia at last.

“I'm going to stay around home more,” Betsy said, awkwardly. “Go places with Mamma. Do the best I can.”

“I'm very thankful that they have you, Bettina. I
don't see how ‘only' children ever manage to leave home.”

“Julia, I think I'll start taking piano lessons.”

“What?” Julia received this declaration with such a cry of pleasure that it sent Old Mag into a trot. “Oh, Betsy, I'm so glad! How grand to have another musician in the family!” It was just like Julia to assume that Betsy's success at the instrument was already assured.

“I'll never be a musician,” said Betsy. “But there has to be a piano being played around the Ray house.”

“You'll study with Miss Cobb?”

“Of course.”

Everyone in Deep Valley began piano study with Miss Cobb, a large, mild, blonde woman who was a Deep Valley institution, and one of its most widely admired heroines. Students of the piano who had any large talent ultimately went on to other teachers but their parents would have felt guilty about starting them with anybody but Miss Cobb. The fact that she had a particular gift with very small children was the least part of the explanation.

The town felt that Miss Cobb deserved its support. Years before, on the death of a sister, she had broken her own engagement to marry and had taken the sister's four children to raise. The little girl had followed her mother and the youngest boy had followed his
sister. One of the two remaining boys was delicate. Miss Cobb kept on staunchly, year in and year out, teaching the young of Deep Valley to play.

“I remember,” Julia said dreamily, “sitting down before the key-board and having Miss Cobb show me where middle C was. It's one of those memories that stand out like a photograph. There it is…me, aged six or so, all swelled up with importance, sitting on the piano stool with Miss Cobb's face quite close to me, and her gentle, kind voice saying, ‘Now we always begin with middle C.'”

Julia stared at the star which was brighter now in the lofty leafy lane made by the treetops.

“If I were told today that I was beholding the Garden of Eden it couldn't possibly rate in importance with the way middle C seemed to me that day. It's queer, Bettina, to be thinking of that just as I'm leaving Deep Valley.”

“Julia,” said Betsy, “you talk as though you weren't ever coming back.”

“I'm not,” said Julia. She stared upward again and her violet gaze reached beyond the brightening star to wherever opera singers of the future were singing gloriously to hushed enraptured audiences. “Not to stay,” she added. “Not in the way I'm here now.”

Sunday morning Julia and Betsy went to the little
Episcopal church. They sang in the choir, and today, putting on their black robes and black four-cornered hats, both of them were aware that it might be a long time before Julia did it again.

The choir girls marched down the aisle, two abreast, singing. Julia looked rapt and far away, as always when she sang. But she loved the little brown stone church. Once during the prayers Betsy saw her lift her head and look around tenderly, then drop her face into her hands again.

Sunday night was always a special occasion at the Ray house. Friends of all members of the family dropped in for supper, which was called Sunday night lunch. Mr. Ray took charge, making the sandwiches for which he was renowned. There was talk and music. But tonight the shadow of Julia's departure hung over it all.

Everything was supposed to be just the same as usual, but it wasn't. Anna had baked a towering five-layer banana cake instead of the common uncomplicated kind. Mrs. Ray had provided roast chicken and other sandwich materials. Usually Mr. Ray made his sandwiches of anything which came handy—Bermuda onions, for example.

Most upsetting of all, Mrs. Ray had made a salad, a gelatin salad with fruit molded in.

“Why the salad?” Mr. Ray demanded, indignant.
“What's the matter with my sandwiches? Aren't they good enough?”

“Of course, darling!” Mrs. Ray cried. “Your sandwiches are marvelous. But I thought that just tonight, since Julia was going away…”

“What's that got to do with it? Anyone would think that Julia was going to the North Pole!”

But he felt as upset as anyone.

There was more company than usual, so many came to say good-by to Julia. Tony, unobtrusively helpful as always, passed sandwiches, poured coffee and made jokes with Mr. Ray about it being a wake.

“Bob Ray! You keep still! You stop that!” Mrs. Ray said.

When it was time for singing, Julia skipped the hymns and the old songs like “Annie Laurie” and “Juanita”…the kind which make people homesick. They sang “San Antonio” and “O'Reilly” and “Waiting at the Church” and that new song to which you danced the barn dance—

Everyone was noisier and gayer than usual, yet it wasn't a very successful Sunday night lunch.

The next day started off oddly: Julia was up so early. Her trunk was filled, closed and locked. It went off on the dray.

That night Mr. Ray took the family down to the Moorish Café. This was in the Melborn Hotel, which was run by the husband of Julia's singing teacher. Mr. and Mrs. Poppy, both stout, cosmopolitan and merry, joined the family at the table and it was a gayer occasion than the Sunday night lunch had been.

“New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there's going to be a change,” Betsy decided profoundly.

It was hard for her to imagine what the house would be like without Julia, who had always been the buoyant center of it all.

On Tuesday, although Julia's train didn't leave until four forty-five, Betsy was excused from school at noon. Margaret had been excused, too, and Mr. Ray came home early from the store. These extravagant gestures were a mistake. The family sat around feeling strange, making conversation.

Mr. Ray asked Julia several times to let him know if her allowance wasn't big enough. He acted too cheerful. Mrs. Ray reminded Julia to buy some new jabots, and a pair of long kid gloves. Betsy made jokes that didn't come off and Margaret acted cross, which was always her defense against emotion. Anna
kept coming in from the kitchen.

“Oh, my poor lovey! Going all the way to Minneapolis! Your bedroom will look like a tomb.”

“No, it won't, Anna. I'm going to go in and muss it up, throw her clothes on the floor.”

But the joke failed miserably.

“Her clothes have gone away already,” Anna wailed. “The closet is as empty as though she had never been born. Charlie asked me last night, ‘Did that McCloskey girl go away to the State University?' and I said, ‘Na, Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey kept her right at home where she belonged.'”

At last, although Julia was going to eat supper on the diner, Mr. Ray went to the kitchen and put the coffee pot on. The Ray family always put the coffee pot on in moments of crisis. Anna brought out butternut cookies and everyone cheered up. They even got to laughing.

But just before she left for the train, when Old Mag was standing at the hitching post, Julia went to the piano and began to play. She played an operatic aria she had sung all last winter.

She sang a few bars and then broke off, and Mrs. Ray, waiting for her on the porch, wiped her eyes. And
when Julia came out, very briskly, her eyes were red.

At the station things were exciting. School was over and Betsy's Crowd was there along with all of Julia's friends. Katie, rosy and smiling, had come down from the German Catholic College. Julia was a credit to Miss Mix in a new brown suit with a long fitted jacket cut in points, two in front and two in back. Her hat was enormous and she wore a corsage bouquet of little yellow roses.

Her face looked white and strained but she didn't cry again. Nobody cried. The Rays didn't believe in crying at trains. Margaret stood straight and smiled brightly at everyone who looked at her. When the train arrived the family trouped into the parlor car with Julia. Then they came out, and she appeared on the observation platform.

She smiled as the train pulled away and showed her white teeth set so close together. She leaned over the railing, blew kisses with both hands. She didn't look like Julia as Julia looked at home. She looked like Julia acting in a play.

Somehow that made everything easier. Mr. Ray took the family, Tacy, Tib and Katie up to Heinz's for ice cream. Everybody laughed and joked and felt better than they had felt for a week.

But when they got back to High Street the house seemed funny without Julia.

S
CHOOL RUSHED IN TO
try to fill the vacuum left by Julia's departure. School had a new flavor this year because of Tib. She was so small that when she sat at her desk in the assembly room her feet did not touch the floor. Miss Bangeter, to the general amusement, provided her with a footstool. Yet she made her presence felt. Half the boys in school were smitten with her, especially Lloyd and Dennie.

In September, as usual, the Zetamathians and Philomathians began a drive for members. Betsy was assigned to the membership committee and on Wednesday preceding the Monday on which the freshmen would choose their societies, the committee met in Miss Clarke's room.

Betsy went in with Carney, and was pleased to find Dave Hunt in the group.

“How that Dave Hunt has changed!” Carney whispered, and Betsy agreed. He had been in high school all along but he hadn't seemed important until this year. Over the summer he had been unaccountably transformed.

His extreme height—he was six foot three—was now impressive. Impressive, too, was his stoic calm. Dave Hunt seldom spoke but you knew it was because he did not wish to speak. He seldom smiled. But when a smile flickered over his stern, clean-cut face, it changed him from a deacon into a daredevil.

He was characteristically silent while Miss Clarke proposed brightly that money be appropriated to buy turquoise blue baby ribbon. The girls on the committee, Betsy and Carney, could make bows to pin on the new members. This was routine procedure.

“Maybe,” suggested Betsy, “we might do something flashy this year. How about buying blue cambric and making arm bands for the Zets? Carney can sew.”

“So can you,” said Carney. “You're making me a jabot.”

“Really?” asked Miss Clarke. “How nice! Sewing is such a valuable accomplishment.”

Dave Hunt surprised everyone by speaking.

“Make a pennant, too,” he said.

“A pennant?” “A big one?” Betsy and Carney waited radiantly.

Dave did not answer. His silence made it clear that when he said pennant he meant pennant, and that he couldn't possibly want a small one.

“Would we have any use for a pennant?” Miss Clarke asked, but her question was obviously rhetorical. “I don't suppose we'd be permitted to hang one on the stage unless the Philomathians did, too. Maybe it might work into the decorating, though. Certainly it would! That's a good idea, Dave,” she added kindly.

Dave did not seem to hear her; she might have been a mouse squeaking. But the expression in his deep-set, dark blue eyes told Betsy and Carney that he expected a pennant. Two dollars were entrusted to the girls and they went down to purchase turquoise blue ribbon and cambric.

Thursday after school Carney hemmed arm bands while Betsy read aloud from “The Shuttle.” They had saved a large piece of blue cambric and when the arm
bands were finished they cut this into a triangle and Carney hemmed it.

“I hope it's big enough to suit him,” Carney said. “He scares me. Doesn't he you?”

“He makes me feel about as big as a pin.”

“Al says he's wonderful at football. He's sure to be a track star, too.”

“He ought to be. Those long legs!”

Carney made her sewing very neat and Betsy inspected it with critically pursed lips.

Friday morning in the Social Room they approached Dave with an innocent looking package.

“Thanks,” he said thrusting it into his pocket.

“Is it a secret what you're going to do with it?” Betsy asked, smiling.

But Dave didn't answer except with his calm gaze. That said, “Don't be silly. Of course it's a secret.”

Monday morning Tacy and Tib called for Betsy as usual. Many Philomathians had been wooing Tib, but in vain. She already wore a blue rosette in her hair. Betsy and Tacy, of course, wore blue arm bands. These had been distributed to all Zetamathians secretly over the week-end. High Street was dotted with them, to the annoyance of passing Philos.

Cab, wearing an arm band, joined the girls. He was smiling broadly and several times, for no apparent reason, burst into a loud guffaw.

“Cab! What ails you?”

“You'll see.”

Dennie, with arm band also, met them and the boys started ostentatiously to yawn.

“It's really too bad,” said Tacy, “that you had to get up to go to school.”

“We're going to school, but we didn't get up, did we, Dennie?”

“What do you mean?” asked Tib. “You must have gotten up. You went to bed.”

“Oh, did we? That's what our mothers think.”

“Well, you didn't stay up all night, did you?”

“All I've got to say,” said Dennie, “is that it gets darned chilly along about three
A.M.
”

This mystifying dialogue was interrupted by a cry from Tacy.

“Gee, is the school burning down? Look at that crowd!”

A churning mass of boys and girls extended from the big front doors out into the street. Cab and Dennie began to hurry and the girls kept pace. They saw that everyone was looking up at the cupola which rose high above the main building. They, too, stared up and saw something floating from the top of the peaked cap of roof. It was a turquoise blue pennant, the pennant Carney had hemmed.

Betsy, Tacy and Tib grabbed each other and began
to yell. After a moment Betsy paused to ask, “How did it get up there? That's a very steep roof.”

“Search me,” said Cab. “But it gets cold up in that cupola.”

“Swell view of the sunrise, though,” said Dennie, “and somebody had to stay on guard….”

“Not that any Philo would dare—”

A Philomathian boy fell upon him from behind. As he thumped to the ground, Dennie grabbed the Philo. Boys were wrestling all over the school lawn. Dave Hunt, sober as always, was looking on and Betsy saw Joe Willard, grinning, take a swing at him. They locked in mock battle.

The gong, unusually loud and angry, broke through the uproar. Reluctantly holds were loosed, clothes straightened and boys and girls began to stream indoors. Everyone was talking at once.

“Who put it up?”

“He might have broken his neck.”

“Squirrelly tried to get it down. He climbed as far as the cupola but Miss Bangeter stopped him. She's mad as a wet hen.”

Carney pulled Betsy aside. “I feel like Barbara Fritchie or whoever it was made the flag.”

“It was Betsy Ross, idiot.” She lowered her voice and whispered, “Dave must have done it!”

Carney nodded. Her dimple pierced her cheek.

Miss Bangeter did indeed emit sparks of fury as she rapped the assembly to a semblance of order. She did not mention the pennant, however, and a noisy rendition of “The Men of Harlech” cleared the atmosphere somewhat. There wasn't much studying done that morning. A long ladder blocking the windows on the turret side of the building showed that the janitor was hauling down the pennant. But the query, “Who put it up?” still buzzed through classrooms and along the halls.

In the Social Room, after a tumultuous noon recess, the query was being answered. Nobody knew how the secret had slipped out. But it had.

“Dave Hunt put it up.”

“Cab and Dennie and a bunch of other Zets stayed up in the cupola all night guarding it.”

“Dave Hunt put it up.”

“Dave Hunt.”

“Dave Hunt.”

Everyone was looking in Dave's direction, but his face was imperturbable.

When, at the end of the afternoon, the freshmen chose their societies, turquoise blue bows blossomed everywhere. The pennant, it was clear, had tipped the scales.

“You wait till next year. Just wait!” Philos were muttering. Winona hissed to the other girls after
school, “Wait till next year. We'll get even.”

Carney laughed. “Maybe you're going to get even now. Dave has been asked to stay and see Miss Bangeter.”

“Gee, he's cute,” said Winona forgivingly. “I wonder when he'll start taking out girls.”

“He'll have to learn to talk first.”

“Oh, I don't know. You could look at him.”

No one ever heard what Miss Bangeter said to Dave, but no one had any doubt about what he said to her. Nothing, it was agreed. Nothing at all.

After the boiling excitement of this day the current of school ran smoothly. Junior class elections were held. Betsy was re-elected secretary. The junior girls were enchanted with Domestic Science. They began their study with canning, made grape jelly and peach jam. It was fun, as Tacy had thought it would be, to eat what they cooked.

Next to Domestic Science, Betsy liked Foundations of English Literature under little Miss Fowler. United States History as Miss Clarke taught it was supremely restful. In Cicero they struggled through the First Oration against Cataline under Miss Erickson's hard, marble-blue eyes.

They were supposed to be making herbariums for botany but not Betsy nor Tacy nor Tib had yet begun. The fall flowers were still abundant. It seemed such
an easy thing to do to pick and press just one of each kind, that they forgot to do it.

Yet September was passing. Chauncey Olcott, as much a part of the season as the goldenrod, came to the Opera House.
Ragged Robin
, said the Rays, who went in a body as usual, was the best play he had had in years. It teemed with “good little people,” banshees, will-o'-the-wisps, and tenderly wistful songs.

“Don't You Love the Eyes that Come from Ireland?”—Betsy thought of Tacy when she heard that one. “Sweet Girl of My Dreams” was almost as appealing as “My Wild Irish Rose,” which Chauncey Olcott, wearing a plumed hat, sang as always after the second act.

Tony brought the songs up to the Ray house next day, but there was no one to play them! Betsy, who always found it easier to make plans than to carry them out, had not yet started her piano lessons. Not that she didn't miss Julia's music. It was unbelievably strange to have the piano silent. Mrs. Ray knew how to play but she had stopped practising since Julia had become so proficient. She never touched the instrument now except when Betsy had company and asked for her famous waltz and two-step. Fortunately, Carney could play and so could Winona. So the Crowd still sang sometimes around the Ray piano.

But having Tony bring the Olcott songs reminded
Betsy sharply of her resolution. At supper that night she said, “I believe I'll start taking piano lessons, if you still want me to.”

“We certainly do,” her mother said. And Mr. Ray added, “I could stand a few scales myself.”

Betsy telephoned Miss Cobb and the next Saturday morning she walked down to Miss Cobb's house on a steep hillside street below the high school.

Betsy knew the little house from the days when Julia had studied there. The rooms were small, low-ceilinged, always comfortably warm and smelling of the potted geraniums Miss Cobb kept in the windows. There were a grand piano and an upright piano in the front parlor. In the back parlor was Leonard, the nephew who was ill. A slender fifteen-year-old boy with sandy hair and vivid cheeks, he often lay on a couch listening to the music. Bobby, the younger boy, was like his aunt, large and robust.

Miss Cobb's red-gold hair was dimmer than it had been when Julia studied with her. She wore glasses on a chain and snowy shirt waists belted neatly above black flowing skirts. Miss Cobb gave a feeling of largeness, and not only because of her Junoesque figure. It was the expression in her face, calm and courageous.

She was a gentle teacher. Under her tutelage you didn't have to worry too much about practising scales. Soon you were playing “The Merry Farmer”
and “The Sailor Boy's Dream.” She herself had studied abroad under a very fine master.

“She's a better musician than she is a teacher,” Julia had remarked one time.

“And a finer human being than either,” Mr. Ray had added.

Miss Cobb whirled the piano stool now until it was the proper height and Betsy sat down. Miss Cobb struck a note and said, as she had said to Julia, “This is middle C.” Betsy liked that. It gave her a warm feeling of the continuity of life. Though she knew that she could never learn to play the piano as Julia did, she was glad she had begun.

Betsy missed Julia. Close as she was to Tacy, wonderful as it was to have Tib back, she missed the confidential talks in her sister's once brightly cluttered room. Now the room looked so unnaturally neat that she could not bear to go inside it.

The whole family missed Julia. Anna kept forgetting and would set five places at the table.

“That's a sign Julia wishes she was home, the poor lovey,” Anna said darkly.

Mrs. Ray would never leave the house until the mail came and when there was a letter she telephoned Mr. Ray. They read them over and over and Betsy often read them aloud in the evening, Margaret sitting on her father's knee.

They were good letters. Just as Julia had always shared everything—bon bons, handkerchiefs, her excitement over a new opera or book—she was trying lovingly now to share this new experience. She described the campus, her classrooms and teachers, the dormitory where she lived. Roger had taken her to lunch in Minneapolis. She had found a bewildering number of friends.

She sounded happy. Nevertheless, there was that in her letters which told that Anna's divination might be correct. The pages were so full of longing and remembering. She asked about everything and everyone at home. The family wrote to her often. Betsy weighed the postman down with fat and supposedly funny letters. Yet Julia kept asking for more and more.

One evening toward the end of September Betsy wrote a long letter to Julia. She finished her homework and her telephone conversations, wound her hair on Magic Wavers and went to bed. Margaret was already asleep and Anna had gone up to her lofty room. Mr. Ray wound the clock and Mrs. Ray put Washington and Lincoln in the basement. Nobody locked doors in Deep Valley. Soon the lights were out and the house was still.

Betsy had barely fallen asleep when she was awakened by the sound of music. The air was shattered by
great crashing chords. It was the new song everyone was barn-dancing to.