A shadow crossed Miss Cobb’s face, but it was like the shadow of a cloud passing over a mountain. Smiling, she turned to Margaret. She whirled the piano stool until it was the proper height and Margaret sat down, her back very straight. Miss Cobb struck a note and said, as she had said in previous years to Julia and Betsy, “This is middle C.”
Betsy liked that. She always liked things to go on as they had gone before.
She was glad on Sunday to be back in the choir of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Tib, Winona, and Irma were all in the choir and there was hushed gossip and laughter in the robing room as they put on their long black robes and the black four-cornered hats. Reverence descended as they formed into a double line, and glory burst, as always, when they marched down the aisle singing.
There was a substitute preacher, for the Rev. Mr. Lewis had not yet returned. He was on his way home. Julia had left the party in London.
“I left London,” she wrote, “with Big Ben chiming in my ears. You know that famous clock; it plays a hymn tune at the striking of the hours:
“Oh, Lord our God,
Be thou our guide,
That by thy help,
No foot may slide.”
That’s the prayer I’m taking with me to my wonderful experience in Berlin.”
“I know the tune those chimes sing,” said Betsy. “They have it in chime clocks. I never knew the words before, though.”
“They’re called Westminster chime clocks. We ought to get one,” Mrs. Ray said.
The next letter came from Berlin.
“The moment I arrived,” Julia wrote, “was the most ecstatically happy moment of my life. Oh, oh, oh, I’m going to work so hard! Fraulein says I’m too nervous and exuberant. I must calm down, get strength, and then do things.”
She added that Fraulein wished her to stay on a few days before going into a pension.
“I’m glad. Her house is so interesting…musicians, critics, and artists coming and going. I have only one worry—my trunk hasn’t come! So far, I haven’t had to dress up, and it’s fortunate, for I’m still wearing the suit I wore when I arrived. I wash out my waist every night.”
“For heaven’s sake!” said Mrs. Ray, when she read that. “What’s the matter with the Germans that they can’t do a simple thing like deliver a trunk?”
“Probably Julia was so excited that she sent it to Kalamazoo,” said Mr. Ray.
“Never mind!” Betsy consoled her mother. “Julia looks pretty in anything.” But Mrs. Ray worried about Julia meeting the Great World in a travel-stained suit.
“All the pretty clothes there are in that trunk!” she mourned.
The next night, when the Rays were at supper, the telephone rang. Anna said that a gentleman wished to speak to Mr. Ray. He returned to the table, smiling.
“It’s the Rev. Mr. Lewis,” he said. “He reached town this afternoon and wants to come right up.”
There was an outcry of delight.
The family rushed through peach cobbler—Mrs. Ray left hers untouched upon the plate—and was waiting in the parlor when the Rev. Mr. Lewis arrived.
“You may not have holly around, but it’s certainly Christmas for this family,” he announced, putting a large box on the table. He wiped his face. “That daughter of yours! When she wasn’t writing letters to you folks, she was buying presents.”
“For you to carry home!” put in Mr. Ray.
“Glad to do it,” said the Rev. Mr. Lewis, grinning. “Glad to do anything for Julia.”
“Before we look at a single present,” Mrs. Ray said, “we want to hear about her. Exactly how was she when you left her?”
“Exhausted but blissful,” he replied. “That puts it in a nutshell. She didn’t miss a church or an art museum or an historical monument. She asked so many questions that I was hard put to find answers. She wants to learn, that girl does.”
“Did she drive you crazy,” Mr. Ray asked, “being late for everything?”
“Frankly, yes.” The Rev. Mr. Lewis grinned again. “She caught every boat and train just as it was pulling out. But she was so sweet, so helpful, taking care of people who were seasick, rubbing heads, mending clothes, doing the ladies’ hair new ways…. She found me the one thing Mrs. Lewis had asked me to bring back, a little mosaic chest, from Rome. Everybody in the party loved her, including me.”
The whole house was suddenly lonesome for Julia. Mrs. Ray wiped her eyes.
Mr. Ray spoke briskly. “Well, now that we’ve heard all about her, how about opening the box?”
It was indeed like Christmas when Julia’s box was opened. Most of the presents were already familiar, for Julia had described them in her letters. She had bought Betsy’s Class Day dress in Lucerne, which was famous, she said, for embroidered dresses. It was pale blue batiste, heavy with embroidery. Betsy got a blue plume, too, from Paris, for the dress hat she would have in the spring, and white gloves from Paris, and exquisite blue and gold Venetian beads.
While Betsy exulted over these, Mr. and Mrs. Ray, Margaret, and Anna were unwrapping and exclaiming. The Rev. Mr. Lewis was almost as happy as they were.
“Am I Santa Claus or am I not?” he wanted to know.
The night before school began, when Mr. Ray came home, he called Betsy down to the parlor. He had a pleased look on his face.
“See this picture?” he said, handing her a folded copy of the Minneapolis Tribune. “Isn’t this the Willard boy who goes to Deep Valley High School? The one you’ve been getting letters from all summer?”
Betsy took the paper, and Joe’s eyes looked out at her under their heavy brows. His lower lip was outthrust as usual, giving his face a look of good-humored defiance.
The story beneath the picture said that this was the Joseph Willard who had written such a fine account of the North Dakota land-swindle trial. It made much of the fact that he was only seventeen.
“I saw Mr. Root on the street tonight,” Mr. Ray said. “You never saw anyone so pleased. He kept saying, ‘That Joe Willard is going to be a top newspaper man, and I taught him all he knows.’”
“Mr. Root is an awfully good friend of Joe’s,” Betsy replied. She was bursting with pride.
After supper, when Anna was doing the dishes and Mr. and Mrs. Ray and Margaret were reading in the parlor, Betsy sat down at the piano. She played a few jubilant scales, then opened her book of Beethoven sonatinas. She was pounding through the first one when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll answer it,” she called, jumping up. She opened the front door and there on the porch stood Joe Willard, hot and rumpled but smiling, his hair looking the color of silver above his tanned face.
“Why, Joe! “cried Betsy.
“I came right from the train.”
“I’ve just been reading about you. Papa brought home the paper.”
“Of course, the picture doesn’t do me justice.”
He smiled at Betsy and Betsy smiled at him. A full minute passed before she remembered to ask him in.
“Papa and Mamma will be so glad to meet you,” she said quickly then. “Papa has been reading your stories all summer.”
As she led him into the parlor, Betsy felt very conscious of the fact that this was the first time he had been in her home. The other boys in her class had swung in the hammock and sat on the front steps. They had sung around the piano in the music room and sprawled all over the parlor and sat in front of the dining room fireplace eating her father’s sandwiches. They had danced to the two tunes, one a waltz and one a two-step, Mrs. Ray knew how to play on the piano, and had raided Anna’s kitchen time and again. But Joe Willard, the most important boy of all, had never been inside her house before.
He was following her now with the swing in his walk more pronounced than usual, as though he were stirring up courage. When she stopped at the archway, he drew himself erect and his smile was a little fixed. Betsy was amazed, and flattered, too, that the great Joe Willard should be nervous at meeting her parents. She smiled reassuringly.
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“Mamma,” she said, “Papa, it seems ridiculous that you don’t know Joe Willard, but I don’t believe you do.”
Mrs. Ray stood up. She gave him the gay smile all the young people loved.
“I don’t know whether I’ll let him come in or not,” she said. “He’s the boy who always wins the Essay Contest away from my Betsy.”
“Oh, let him come in, Jule,” Mr. Ray returned. “He’s quite a fellow, his picture in the paper and all.”
And then Mr. and Mrs. Ray were shaking his hand and Margaret was greeting him, too. She looked grave and appraising, as she always did with her older sisters’ visitors. None of them ever quite measured up to Tony, in Margaret’s opinion.
Old Mag was hitched out in front, for Mr. Ray had planned to take the family riding that night. Mr. and Mrs. Ray and Margaret left without Betsy, and Betsy and Joe sat down on the porch steps. Betsy hoped that casual visitors like Cab, Dennie, or Tony would have sense enough not to come in when they saw them sitting there.
The twilight was crisp, filled with the smell of burning leaves. The sky above the German Catholic College on the hill was tinted by the afterglow.
Betsy asked Joe about the Tribune story, and he explained that the city editor had asked him for a photograph, and when Joe sent it he had found out that Joe was only seventeen. Then he had written another letter which Joe now pulled out of his pocket and showed to Betsy.
“You did a fine job. Privately, you never would have had the chance if I had known how young you were. But you wrote like a veteran. There’s a place for you on the Minneapolis Tribune when you finish high school and come up to the U.”
“Joe, that’s wonderful!” cried Betsy. “You’re going to the U?”
“I’m going to start there,” answered Joe. “Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let’s fight.”
Betsy accepted the change of subject. Joe would be slow to let her or anyone else look through the door of the room where he kept the problems he had met in the past, his plans for the future. Joe Willard wasn’t easy to get acquainted with. But Betsy felt a sweet, strong certainty that she would succeed in time.
They sat on the porch and talked while stars appeared above the college and a pearly glow announced that the moon would join them soon. No one else came, or if they came they went away. Betsy and Joe watched the moon rise.
“How do you like being a senior?”
“I like it.”
“I have an idea that this year is going to be perfectly wonderful.”
“I have the same idea,” Joe Willard said, looking at the moon.
5
The Last First-Day of School
AS BETSY WOUND HER hair on Magic Wavers, preparing for her last first-day of high school, the importance of that event was dwarfed in her mind by Joe’s call. In a way it was dwarfed, in another way it was glorified. The fact that Joe had sought her out, that they were obviously going to go together, put a crowning touch to her joy in being a senior.
She wound her clock briskly and set the alarm for six. She wanted to get into the bathroom early next morning, to have time to prink. She and Tib had planned exactly what they would wear for the great day. Betsy had decided on her pink chambray dress with a wide pink band around her hair.
She slipped a kimono over her nightgown and threw a pillow to the floor beside Uncle Keith’s trunk.
“I guess I’ll read over my old diaries, and start the new one tonight,” she said aloud.
She got out the three fat notebooks which held the story of her first three years in high school, and the fourth one with its tantalizing empty pages. As she read, the quality and mood of each year returned like a tune.
Her freshman year, and her joy in finding a crowd, her discovery about her writing, and her yearning for Tony.
“I’ve never been so much in love with anyone as I was with Tony when I was fourteen.”
Her sophomore year, and her trip to Milwaukee to visit Tib, the attempt to be Dramatic and Mysterious in order to captivate Phil Brandish, Phyllis’ twin.
“After I got him, I didn’t want him.”
And last year, her junior year, when she had been all wound up in sororities, and going with Dave Hunt.
“That was funny. We were really just friends. Not a bit of a crush.”
Through all three years, Joe Willard had stood in the background, a figure of mystery and challenge, and now in her senior year they were going to go together. How completely and utterly satisfactory!
Betsy dipped her pen in ink.
“Three years ago this fall,” she wrote, “I began my first diary and my four years of high school loomed ahead so bigly that the start of my senior-year diary seemed but a vague possibility. Yet here I am starting it!
“How different I feel! One begins one’s freshman year wild with anticipation, eager for the days to pass, radiantly happy! But one begins one’s senior year with a sense of looking back, a longing to enjoy each minute to the full, a little touch of sadness.”
She didn’t feel at all sad but she thought that sounded good.
“I would like to stop the clock right here and take a little breathing spell. As Mary Ware said, ‘It’s so nice to be as old as seventeen, and yet as young as seventeen.’ But time goes on, on, on….”
She meant to develop that but she couldn’t think just how. Besides, she was getting hungry. She always got hungry when she stayed up late. She opened the door of her room into a dark sleeping house, and crept softly down the stairs.
Out in the kitchen, she lit the gas light and foraged. Finding milk, cold sausages, and part of a chocolate cake, she tiptoed with them back up to her room.
How handsome Joe had looked! How thrilling that he had come to see her on his first night home! When her lunch was eaten, she turned out the gas, opened her window wide, and crept into bed.
The next thing she knew the alarm clock was shrilling and she jumped to her feet, remembering drowsily that if she wanted a leisurely time in the bathroom, it behooved her to get there. After her father started shaving, she wouldn’t have a chance. And if she got in just ahead of him, he was sure to rap on the door, saying, “Hurry, Betsy! Remember, I must shave.”
She was amply early, and when the breakfast gong sounded she emerged from her room looking as she had planned to look, in the pink chambray dress which was made in princesse style, long and close-fitting, trimmed with white rickrack braid. The wide pink band was tied around her Magically Waved hair; her fingernails were buffed to a pink shine.
Margaret joined her in the hall. It was hard to know whether Margaret, too, had been up early prinking, for she was always so fastidiously neat. She wore a new white middy blouse with a red tie, and the red bows which tied her braids behind each ear were gigantic. She carried a pile of last year’s books under her arm.
The tempting smell of muffins filled the air. Anna always made muffins for the first day of school. A plateful of the fragrant, tender pyramids was already on the table, and she brought another shortly, for Tacy and Tib dropped in to call for Betsy. The two girls were full of excitement about Joe Willard’s picture in the paper.
“He’s back. He dropped in last night,” Betsy said, offhandedly.
“He dropped in?” cried Tib. “Betsy Ray! Tell us about it.”
“What is there to tell?”
“Do you like him as well as you thought you would?”
“I like him as well as I always did. I’ve known him for three years.”
“She’s just being irritating,” Tacy said. “You tell us what happened, Mrs. Ray.”
“I don’t know,” answered Mrs. Ray. “We tactfully retreated, didn’t we, Margaret?”
Margaret nodded, beaming.
“There’s a poem I learned in school,” said Mr. Ray. He threw back his head and began a sing-song chant:
“New hope may bloom,
And days may come,
Of
milder, calmer beam,
But there’s nothing half so sweet in life,
As love’s young dream,
Oh, there’s nothing half so sweet in life,
As love’s young dream.”
“Papa!” protested Betsy, blushing. But she wasn’t annoyed. “We just had a nice sensible time.”
“On the porch in the moonlight,” put in Mr. Ray.
“He’s so handsome,” said Mrs. Ray, “I could have a crush on him myself if I didn’t have such a crush on my husband.”
“He’s not so nice as Tony,” said Margaret, in a distant tone.
“Oh, but Tony’s different, Margaret,” Tacy replied. “There’s no fun teasing Betsy about Tony. He hasn’t a crush on her.”
“And she hasn’t a crush on him,” Tib added. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“Perhaps,” said Betsy, “we’d better go to school.”
They called out to Anna that the muffins were marvelous and descended the porch, arm in arm, into High Street. The vine over the porch was turning red; and in spite of the summerlike green of the trees, the petunias, zinnias, and nasturtiums still blooming in the borders, Betsy felt the impact of the coming season, the melancholy of September.
For the first time, she missed Cab.
“It’ll seem funny not to have Cab walking to school with us,” she said, and tried to imagine what it would be like to be giving up school in your senior year. She wondered how Cab was feeling about it, down at the furniture store.
“We’ll miss Carney, too,” said Tacy.
“She’s coming to visit today,” Tib announced. “She’s going to classes with us.”
The school-bound parade surged along High Street: freshmen looked frightened and eager; sophomores, proud; juniors, complacent. Betsy wondered whether she and Tacy and Tib betrayed their consciousness of being seniors as they chatted loftily, well aware of admiring eyes.