“Everything good you claim for America.”
“Come and see it, and you’ll understand. Why don’t you come, Helena? I’ll matchmake you to a nice American boy. Of course, he’ll be in trade,” Betsy teased.
Helena smiled. But suddenly over the empty cups and plates and the white cloth on which blown maple wings were lying, Betsy saw that her eyes were full of tears.
“I am in love with my cousin Karl,” she said.
“Why, Helena!” Betsy reached across and touched her hand. “Is he in love with you, too?”
“Yes.”
“And will you be married?”
“Oh, no!”
“Why not?”
“My aunt wants a good match for him. It is quite right that she should. He is a lieutenant in the army.”
“But you’d be a good match. You’re pretty and clever and talented.”
“I am poor.”
“Well, he has plenty of money.”
Helena shook her head.
“And Europeans were always saying that Americans liked money!” Betsy thought.
“Why don’t you just get married?” she asked. “You could live on his salary.”
But Helena, drying her eyes, did not bother to answer so preposterous a question.
“Helena,” asked Betsy, “is this why you came to Munich?”
“Yes. There is talk at the castle of whom Karl will marry. My aunt thinks I behaved very well. I could go back. But, Betsy, I won’t leave my mother.”
“You could see her often.”
“No, I couldn’t.” Helena’s pale cheeks colored faintly. “I never saw my mother until I came to Munich. Not to remember her. You see…my father’s family didn’t like the marriage. My mother was English…”
And far beneath him, Betsy felt sure, the story unrolling like a scroll.
“They…cast him off. And it wasn’t good for him.”
Betsy knew. She had known since the day she went to their apartment.
“I didn’t understand until I came to Munich, but now…I couldn’t leave my mother. Things are hard for her, very hard. And she’s so good to me…you can’t imagine!” Helena’s face glowed.
Betsy tried to remember that glow, for Helena’s story left her with a heartache. Helena and her mother were so different. Tall and proud, Helena looked like a true aristocrat. She always made you think of something white—snow on a mountain, or moonlight, or lilies.
The next day Frau von Wandersee suggested that Betsy eat dinner at her table, and she was as dingy, frowsy, sly as ever.
“She must have something fine about her, and I ought to be able to dig it out,” thought Betsy, but she couldn’t seem to.
Frau von Wandersee talked on as usual about how much money people had…or didn’t have…or used to have. But during the meal there came one moment of revelation.
She was saying that her daughter would miss Betsy. “She considers you a real friend. And she hasn’t friends enough.” The purring voice seemed to change, to strengthen. “Sometimes I’m afraid she ought to go back to her aunt.”
“She doesn’t want to, Frau von Wandersee.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me. She said she would hate to leave you. She loves you very much.”
Frau von Wandersee looked up. She looked straight at Betsy, which she didn’t often do, and her eyes were luminous, beseeching.
“If I make her go back…it won’t be that I want her to go,” Frau von Wandersee said. After a moment she added in her usual tone, “She will be over tonight to say good-by.”
There was one last party in Munich. Betsy took Hanni out for afternoon coffee. She had to battle Frau Geiger, but the bath episode had given this lady respect for Betsy’s perseverance. When she saw that the crazy American Fräulein was really in earnest, she gave in.
Hanni’s face was one big smile. She wore a monstrous summer hat, several seasons old, and the lace collar and jabot Betsy had given her. She wouldn’t say where she would like to go, so Betsy selected the zoo. Betsy was obliged to decide whether they would have coffee or tea and what kind of cakes. Hanni would only say, “As you will, Fräulein.”
They discussed a favorite subject, Hanni coming to America. In the early days, Betsy had tried to plan how Hanni could marry her soldier. He could earn a little extra money, or leave the army and get another job.
“It is impossible,” Hanni always said sadly. “I will come to America to you.”
She loved to talk about this, telling Betsy over and over how hard she would work, how Betsy would have her clothes mended and her hair brushed and her breakfast in bed. She would live in Paradise, Hanni declared.
“Fräulein, when you are married, send for me, and I will come.”
“And if I don’t marry,” Betsy said now, “when I get to be a famous author, we’ll go around the world together.”
“I’ll have to write Tacy,” she thought with a chuckle, “that I’m firing Celeste.”
She took Hanni’s picture, and the servant girl was transfixed with delight. She stood as straight as her soldier, smiling fixedly beneath the monstrous hat.
“I’ll send you some prints from Venice,” Betsy promised. Secretly she resolved to have one enlarged for Hanni’s sweetheart.
For the last time Betsy heard the din of music practise at the Geiger. She said good-by to the cold bare dining room, to Susuki, and the Italian artist, the Austrians, the Bulgarians.
It was starting to rain and Betsy was afraid that Helena might not come, but she knocked at Betsy’s door and came in smiling, wearing a raincoat glistening with drops. She carried a package.
“I can’t stay. I know you are busy packing, but I wanted to say good-by. Betsy, I wish we could keep in touch.”
“But of course we will! I’d love to correspond, and I write enormous letters.”
Helena offered the package. Her sensitive face quivered with pleasure while Betsy unwrapped it. There emerged a tall china cup, striped in pink and gold and blue.
“It is a cup the poet Goethe drank from.”
“Why, Helena! How…how marvelous!”
“It’s come down in our family. We haven’t very many such things left; we’ve moved so much. But my mother and I thought you would like this because…you’re a writer, too.”
“I’m overwhelmed by it!” cried Betsy. “It will be one of my dearest treasures always.” She threw her arms about Helena, wanting to cry.
For a second Helena’s arms closed around Betsy. “You’ve helped me,” she whispered, then drew back stiffly. She left soon after with “auf Wiedersehen” only, for Betsy assured her that she would be coming back.
While she packed, Betsy kept remembering that “You’ve helped me.”
“I don’t see how I helped her! Why couldn’t I have liked her mother!” Betsy thought in self-reproach.
Packing was a complicated operation. Her trunk was being shipped to Innsbruck; only the bags were going on the fortnight of travel, and every article was shifted from bags to trunk and from trunk to bags, as Betsy decided now that she couldn’t live without it and then that she would have to. Everything breakable had to be wrapped in something unbreakable, but there seemed to be more breakable than unbreakable objects. Goethe’s cup had the steamer rug to itself. At the end the trunk would not shut although Betsy jumped on the lid. Hanni came in and sat on it.
The rain pounded, and in the wavering gaslight the dismantled room looked strange and unfamiliar. Ready at last to slip beneath her featherbed, Betsy opened the windows and looked out at the decorated house.
Helena had said she had helped her, but it seemed to Betsy that she hadn’t helped anyone in Munich. Germans were hard to help. They were all so pessimistic, so sure that reduced circumstances could never be bettered nor difficulties solved.
Betsy remembered what she had told Tilda, that Bavaria made her think of a dark fairy tale. It did. In its wild mountains there were more sorcerers and ghosts and goblins than h
elpful fairies.
She thought of Helena locked in the prison of her title, and of that princess in the dining room who sat by herself, and of Hanni who worked so hard and couldn’t marry her soldier. Although Munich was so gemütlich, it seemed to have a spell upon it.
But in the morning Hanni was smiling down at her above the breakfast tray. To the usual chocolate, hard rolls, and butter, she had added ein bissel marmalade. The rain had stopped and the air that the casement admitted was full of happy promise.
“A good journey, gnädiges Fräulein,” Hanni said.
14
A Very Special Doll
BETSY WAS IN A BUS riding toward Krug’s Hotel in Sonneberg deep in the Thuringian Mountains.
She had visited the festival city of Bayreuth. Opera was not sung at this season, but she had seen Richard Wagner’s great Opera House, and his home, the Villa Wahnfried. In fact, she had trespassed in the garden there and had been ejected by no less a person than Wagner’s son Siegfried.
At Nuremberg she had walked in enchantment around the old gray wall that encircled the medieval city. She had strolled the cobbled streets, looking up at the gable-roofed houses pierced by dormer windows…especially at the fifteenth-century house in which Albrecht Dürer had lived, and at the house of Hans Sachs, right out of Die Meistersinger. The cobbler poet had not always stayed at home, though. He had traveled the open road with a stick and a knapsack.
“Like I’m doing now,” thought Betsy, ignoring the bulging suit cases piled around her feet. She was all alone in the bus and bounced like a piece of popcorn.
She had been surprised, at the Sonneberg station, to see a uniformed driver from Krug’s Hotel. She had expected only a primitive inn in the little Doll Town and looked out curiously as the bus joggled along through a wide mountain valley. But the town was at some distance from the station.
Betsy caught her reflection in the bus mirror. She was beaming like Hanni at the coffee party.
“Pretty pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” she asked. “Well, no wonder! I’m pleased with you myself.”
She was pleased, for one thing, because her mail was being forwarded from Munich. There should be lots! Since leaving Munich she had had her twenty-second birthday. A strange birthday with no cake or presents, just the wine of traveling alone…seeing strange places, meeting new people, struggling with a foreign language! Her present, the family had written, was a check to be spent for new clothes in Paris. But there would certainly be some letters here.
“What a place,” Betsy thought, “to be getting mail from Minnesota!” A town in the Thuringian Forest that had been making dolls since before Columbus!
But Sonneberg was a little like Deep Valley, she discovered as they entered. The mountains seemed no taller than the Big Hill and its companions had seemed to her and Tacy when they were little girls.
“Tacy would love this crazy expedition,” Betsy thought.
Krug’s Hotel was something of a shock. It was an imposing white stone building with gardens and shaded verandas. Betsy’s room had electric lights, and steam heat flooded it with summery warmth, quite different from the limited circle of heat thrown off by porcelain stoves. Most surprising of all, there was a bathroom.
“Glory of glories!” Betsy cried. Her one and only bath in Munich was a long time behind her now. “What? No boots?” She smiled down at the gleaming white tub.
She was in wonderful spirits, in spite of the fact that there had been no mail awaiting her. It would come! And the clerk had spoken English!
“I might be in the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis,” Betsy thought.
The reason for this cosmopolitan atmosphere was, of course, that Sonneberg was the center of the doll trade. It drew buyers from London, Paris, New York. Betsy was made aware of this again, when, having freshened up, she went for a walk before supper.
On cobblestone streets, where oxen were more common than horses, she passed well-dressed, clean-shaven men wearing Derby hats, swinging canes.
“Heavens!” she thought. “I should have curled my hair!” But even with straight hair, she attracted attention enough. In her smartly cut suit and the big slanting hat with the rose—and, of course, the debutante slouch which she did not forget to assume—she seemed as surprising to the buyers as the buyers did to her. The Americans especially looked at her unbelievingly, and some even seemed on the point of speaking. But Betsy was cool and unresponsive.
The air, piney and fresh, was as stimulating as the unwonted admiration. The streets ran up the side of a mountain, but just a little timid way. Above them, where a stretch had been cleared of trees, old women with baskets on their backs were stooped over, gathering fuel. Higher still, the slope was darkly wooded and a bench had been placed to catch the view.
“Like the bench on Hill Street where Tacy and I used to take our suppers when we were little. Dear me, Tacy ought to be here!” Betsy mourned.
The newer streets had modern shops and villas, carriages, and even a few automobiles. But there were old streets, too. Streets so narrow that the gable-roofed houses almost touched overhead. Streets that were nothing but winding paths or steps up the side of the mountain.
Many people wore baskets, such as the old women had worn, fastened to their backs. Some of these were filled with wood; others, with groceries. But most of them were covered with white cloths and Betsy could not see what they contained.
Some of the women carried their babies tied on with shawls. Betsy smiled at them but they looked blank.
“People don’t seem very friendly,” she observed. Tilda had told her that the North Germans were different from the dark, vivacious, warm-hearted Müncheners, and it was certainly true.
Not the children, though! They gathered about her, smiling and nudging one another. Betsy tried out her German, and they bent their heads to conceal delighted chuckles. They were rosy and fat. All the little boys seemed to be outgrowing their jackets. The little girls wore aprons over their dresses, and thick black stockings, and stout shoes.
“But none of them are carrying dolls!” Betsy was puzzled. There certainly ought to be dolls on the streets of the doll metropolis! She couldn’t look into the matter, for now the quick upland twilight fell. It was cozy to return to the warm luxurious hotel, but there still wasn’t any mail.
The dining room was spacious with glittering chandeliers and potted palms, and the traveling men were already eating when Betsy came in. Her entrance caused a flattering commotion, and although she strove for a bored air, she was charmed with the proximity of the American men. Their voices, their slang, took her across the wide Atlantic—to her father, to Joe, to college dances and gaieties at the Ray house.
Eavesdropping as intently as she could while remembering to act blasé, she heard them discussing the States. They even mentioned Duluth, Minnesota. Betsy wanted to lean over and say, “Boo! I come from Minneapolis!” But she resisted.
After sauntering out like a woman of the world, she hurried to her room lest she be tempted into some indiscretion. She knew the rules for safety in traveling alone, and they didn’t include picking up strange men acquaintances—even Americans!
She wrote home jubilantly, pouring out the day’s adventures. And naturally she took a bath. She had had one before dinner, but she took another now and planned a third in the morning.
“Goodness knows when I’ll see a bathroom again!”
She was glad, though, that Krug’s Hotel was not too modern for a featherbed and slipped beneath it gratefully for the night air was sharp. In the morning the snug warmth of steam heat returned. She ate breakfast in her room, and presently in suit and hat with camera, notebook, and pencil, she was down in the cool invigorating morning.
Everyone was either at work or going to work. Sonnebergers, both men and women, hurried along with those large wicker baskets on their backs. All the baskets now seemed to be covered with white cloths. The buyers, freshly pressed and shaven, were heading for the doll factories—Puppen Fabri
ken, the desk clerk had called them.
There weren’t many factories here; that was the reason the air was so pure, he had said. No smoking factory chimneys as in Nuremberg where they made their toys by machinery. In Sonneberg, manual work in the homes was most important.
Betsy, too, headed for a Puppen Fabrik. The large modern buildings were easy to identify on Sonneberg’s picturesque streets.
A crowd of children had already gathered behind her. “I feel like the Pied Piper,” Betsy thought, turning to smile at them. One little girl put her hand shyly into Betsy’s. She was the only thin one in the lot, elfishly thin, with a shock of pale straight hair and vivid eyes. Her name was Gretel.
At the door of the Fabrik a youth of tender years stood moodily with folded arms. Betsy asked in her best German if she might go through the factory. Before replying he astonished her by going through all the motions of brushing up a mustache, although his pink and white face looked as smooth as a girl’s. Studying him closely she did catch a bit of fuzz.
A trip through the Fabrik? Impossible, he said, and brushed up the mustache again.
Betsy explained in a torrent of bad German that she came from the United States, that she was a writer, that she loved dolls and expected to have a large family of children who would also love dolls. Surely he would like to have her able to tell her children that she had seen the famous dolls of Sonneberg—nicht wahr?
He blushed. “Oh, I was calling him du!” Betsy thought in consternation. Tilda had warned her over and over that du was only for family and intimates.
He said something, bowed, and went inside. He would be back, the children told her, jumping up and down and laughing. They all waited.
He returned accompanied by a larger and more substantial young man with a florid face. Betsy repeated her speech, watching out for du’s. At the end he bowed again and now both youths disappeared.
The pair returned with an older man. He had a paunch with a gold watch chain across it and piercing eyes behind thick spectacles.