There’s a plot in every one, Betsy thought, and started taking notes.
Fires, blizzards, grasshopper plagues went into that notebook. Aunt Ruth loved disasters. But she was far from gloomy even though her usual expression was sad. She laughed and laughed when she told of barn raisings and bobsled parties. She laughed until she cried over Betsy’s meat pie.
Always, after the stories, they made tea. Astonishingly Aunt Ruth preferred tea to coffee. They took this snack in the kitchen where sometimes bread was baking.
Copying country-bred Mr. Ray, who always “put down” staple foods for the winter, Joe and Betsy had stored in their basement a barrel of apples, and baskets of potatoes, turnips, and onions. But it was Aunt Ruth’s idea to lay in a big sack of flour.
“In Butternut Center they used to say, ‘Uneeda loaf of Ruth Willard’s bread,’” she told them roguishly.
Betsy watched with interest the kneading down and rising up of the dough. It was cut and shaped into loaves which were greased and put in the oven. While they baked, the kitchen filled with a mouthwatering smell. The golden brown loaves were put on a clean cloth and buttered.
“I remember Tacy’s mother doing that,” Betsy said. “When the bread cooled, she’d give me a piece.”
So did Aunt Ruth, a thick one, with butter and honey.
After Aunt Ruth went to bed, Betsy changed to a house dress and put her hair in curlers. She got out the dust mop and carpet sweeper. And when all was neat, she sat down at her desk. The apple tree was lost in shadows, but she saw the lighted windows of the tall apartment building behind the cottage. She watched the windows darken, one by one. A single one, like her own, stayed bright all night. How friendly!
Betsy’s forefingers pounced on the typewriter keys.
Before Joe came home she powdered and perfumed and did her hair. She made cocoa and sandwiches and set a table for two. Sometimes she put on a coat and went out to the porch to watch for him. The stars were sharp and bright above a sleeping world.
Joe would come in, stamping his feet, his face cold when he kissed her. As he ate he told her what good heads he had written, news of the Great War. And Betsy passed along Aunt Ruth’s tales. Sometimes one of these had provided a plot for the story she was writing. Sometimes one of them flashed into a plot for Joe. They sat and talked while the darkness outside paled. Often the sky was on fire before they went to bed.
After a noon breakfast (luncheon for Aunt Ruth), Joe shoveled snow or he and Betsy put out bread for the birds. Then he did what Betsy had prophesied. He went into his study, shut the door, and wrote. Afterwards he had a few free hours but other men were working, so the Willards did not see much of the Crowd.
Carney and Sam were busy, for Judy had a baby brother. And Tacy was going to have a second child in the summer. She came to tell Betsy the news.
“It will be so nice for Kelly,” she said.
Kelly could talk now. Not just his parents understood him; seventeen words were plain to anyone. He staggered around on plump legs.
“Luscious as he is,” Betsy cried, snatching him, “the next one must be a girl!”
“I have that doll packed away, waiting,” Tacy laughed.
Often Joe, Betsy, and Aunt Ruth strolled over to the Rays’. They read letters from Julia and Paige, dizzy with the brilliance of New York’s musical season. They heard Margaret’s news.
She and Louisa, juniors this year, were going out with two good-looking boys who were also inseparable friends. The four went out interchangeably. One time it would be Bill and Bogie, Bub and Boogie. Next time it would be Bill and Boogie, Bub and Bogie. Betsy found the situation most confusing.
“Don’t any of them mind?” she asked her mother.
“Not that I can see.”
“When I was their age, I got crushes.”
“Margaret doesn’t seem to have any preference. And neither does Louisa, and neither do the boys. It’s beyond me,” Mrs. Ray said.
Soon Joe and Betsy were hanging a holly wreath on their front door. They were tying the small Santa Claus to mistletoe on their chandelier, and trimming a Christmas tree in that corner of the living room where after Christmas—this was Joe’s secret—a phonograph would stand. Aunt Ruth was baking Christmas cookies of every shape and kind.
At the Ray Christmas, Aunt Ruth listened, tender-eyed, to the reading of the Bible story. She joined in the carol singing and attacked her bulging stocking with excited eagerness.
“I’d been dreading Christmas, but I was happy all day long,” she told Betsy when they said good night.
Henry Ford had sent a Peace Ship to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas. But he hadn’t succeeded. And no Allied offensive had been able to break the German line. U-boats were still sinking neutral shipping. Americans grew less neutral all the time. Then some German plotting in the United States was exposed, and there was a rising suspicion of all German-Americans.
This was on Tib’s mind when she came out to the Willards’ late one Sunday afternoon. She had been skating with her brother Fred.
“We had such fun!” she exclaimed, shaking out of her wraps and pinning up her loosened hair. Tib was as expert on the ice as she was on the dance floor. “Fred and I could be exhibition skaters! Maybe we will be!” she boasted gaily. But at supper, with a sobering face, she brought up the German-American talk.
“I don’t mind. You know I’m always philosophical. Nicht wahr, Betsy? But it’s hard on my brothers, especially Hobbie.”
Hobbie, born during the Spanish-American War, had been named for its naval hero, Hobson, but he was seldom called by that dignified moniker, being short and dimpled and full of mischief. He went to high school in Deep Valley where the Mullers lived.
“Hobbie says he’s going up to Canada and enlist.”
“Oh, I hope he won’t do that!” cried Betsy.
“Well, Mamma’s doing plenty of worrying! And so am I.”
Next day Betsy telephoned Tacy.
“I know,” she said, “our idea about Mr. Bagshaw was crazy. But Tib has this German-American business on her mind. And she doesn’t give a snap for any of her beaus. Maybe we ought to try again.”
Tacy chuckled. “Well, Harry and I did our best! Now it’s up to you and Joe.”
Betsy agreed. But she and Joe had little time for scouting. He had only one free evening weekly, and oftenest they gave it to a newspaper group that met at the Jimmy Cliffs’…to talk writing, read aloud, argue, and drink coffee while Jimmy Junior dashed up and down on his kiddy car.
In Minneapolis there was a sedate and ladylike group called the Violet Study Club. One night when the Willards and their friends were gathered at the Cliffs, and the kiddy car collided with hot coffee and an even hotter argument about Sherwood Anderson’s work, the girl columnist “Q” remarked, “We ought to call this the Violent Study Club.”
The name stuck.
If I find a husband for Tib, Betsy thought, it will be at the Violent Study Club.
14
At the Violent Study Club
“FIRST MEMBER TO GET BOTH hands up reads first!” boomed President Jimmy Cliff.
Up and down the firelit living room, books, notebooks, and pencils clattered to the floor as members hastened to obey the unexpected order for two hands. One plump, dimpled pair rose with suspicious ease and the President nodded at the plump, dimpled owner.
“You win, Patty. No doubt because I warned you. However, this club is all for cheating, so you may read. And how nice that you have brought one of my favorite books!”
Tib’s bewildered voice came through the hubbub of protest. “But I never saw a club run like this! Don’t you have any rules of order?”
“Miss Muller,” answered the President, “this club is very anti rules of order.”
“That two-hands stuff, though, was really underhand!” Joe’s pun brought jeers and groans.
“Mr. Willard! Do you deny your President the gratification of a momentary whim? Or to be plainer,
do you want your fair share of the Cliff coffee and doughnuts? Read, Patty!”
But before she could begin, Jimmy Junior roared out on his kiddy car, yelling, “Pop! Bang! Pop!” His tall, slender mother rushed to carry him off to bed. His large, stout father, wedged into an oversized armchair, shook with laughter.
The Violent Study Club, which met whenever the spirit moved its members, was in session.
Tib was laughing now. “Why, I love this club!” she cried. “It’s wonderful! It reminds me of that Okto Delta we had in high school. Doesn’t it you, Betsy?”
Tib, Betsy thought admiringly, fitted into any group. She was never ill at ease, and so good-natured—falling in with other people’s ways, laughing at their jokes, looking out for chances to be useful! She jumped up now to put away the kiddy car, but hurried back to her sofa, not to miss a word of the hilarious proceedings.
A black velvet dress swathed her from neck to ankles. She meant it, probably, to make her look like a vamp—a word brought into the language by the moving picture actress, Theda Bara. Tib’s flowerlike face, flushed with fun, was not at all like Bara’s, but she looked pretty enough to fascinate anyone.
Who was there, tonight, to fascinate? From her chair beside the fire, Betsy appraised the room. MacTavish, the bony Scot, whom everyone looked up to because he sold verse to magazines of quality (although for very little money), did not seem Tib’s type. The pleasant, serious reporter was a bachelor, long confirmed. The magazine editor was very good-looking, but he had come with “Q.”
Betsy had been surprised, when she first met “Q,” to find her young, with shining hair and very pretty legs—although she was always pulling down her skirts. Only vivid blue eyes gave a hint of her wit.
Sigrid, the vivacious, nut-brown girl reporter, waved a left hand on which a diamond shone.
“If Jimmy likes Patty’s book, we all smell Dickens!” she cried above the uproar.
Patty and Jimmy both loved Dickens; and Dickens would have loved them, Betsy thought. Jimmy’s face, above his flowing Windsor tie, was one of the kindest she had ever seen. Patty was making futile dabs at her soft hair. It was forever falling down, and her very clean petticoats were forever peeping below her skirt, and her shoelaces were forever trailing. Patty did not care. She lived for books…and for friends, and collected both in large numbers.
“It’s Martin Chuzzlewit,” she said in her breathless voice. “I’m trying to turn the book into a play and I want to ask you all whether this incident I’ve selected could be worked up for the second act.”
Members of the Violent Study Club not only read aloud from books they liked; they used fellow members to test plot ideas, completed stories, and writing styles. The members took their responsibility as guinea pigs seriously, and the room became quiet at once.
“Please go on talking!” pleaded Patty. “I want to wait for Marbeth.” Modest Marbeth Cliff was the most valued critic in the club.
“While we’re waiting,” said the President, “let’s hear what the rest of you have brought.”
Sigrid shouted, “Stephen Leacock! Funniest man alive!”
“A beautiful book called The Song of the Lark, by Willa Cather,” said “Q.”
“I know you all think Lowell is old-fashioned,” Betsy said. “But I want to read, ‘The snow had begun in the gloaming.’ Because it did begin in the gloaming, and it’s so lovely, and it’s all over the trees and bushes, and goodness only knows how we’re going to get home!”
“That’s my wife!” said Joe. “I’ve brought Leonard Merrick’s short stories. Grand technique!”
The magazine editor smiled meaningfully at the frail MacTavish. “We might hear a poem that one of our colleagues has just sold to my magazine. It’s a war poem. A hum…” But the “dinger” was lost in a burst of unforced joy.
“The Naughty Chair! The Naughty Chair!” everyone cried at once…everyone except Tib who asked wildly, “Was ist los? Who’s been naughty?”
No one answered. All the members were pulling the blushing MacTavish to his feet. They were pushing him toward a chair at one side of the fireplace—a tall, straight chair, carved of dark Indian mahogany with a yellow velvet seat.
Marbeth tried to explain. “We call it the Naughty Chair because Jimmy Junior has to sit there when he’s naughty.”
“But Jimmy Junior has gone to bed!”
“Yes, but when any member makes a sale he has to sit in the Naughty Chair.”
“Lieber Gott! What’s naughty about a sale?” Tib laughed until she almost choked. She swung her small feet off the floor to the sofa. “I’d better watch out. I’ll be trampled to death in this verruckt club!”
MacTavish was pushed jubilantly into the place of honor. The President, beaming as though he had sold a poem himself, rapped noisily for order.
“You will all settle down—and sharpen your wits! I’m pleased that we have someone in the Naughty Chair tonight, for a most important visitor is coming—provided he’s not stopped by Lowell’s snowfall, or, more likely, ten beautiful girls.”
“Jimmy!” Sigrid clapped. “Did you really get him?”
“I certainly did,” President Cliff said proudly. “Rocky in person!”
Sigrid inspected her diamond. “Oh, if it weren’t for this!” she murmured dreamily.
“He certainly is a charmer,” smiled “Q.”
“He’s a genius,” declared the serious man reporter.
“Ja, ja!” said Tib, in the soothing tone of one humoring infants. “Tell us about him, Mr. Cliff, please.”
Jimmy settled back in his big chair.
“Rocky,” he began, “is one of the last of a fast-vanishing breed, the tramp newspaperman. He never stays on any job long. But he’s so good that every city editor welcomes him back. At twenty-seven he’s been a star reporter in San Francisco, St. Louis, Kansas City, New Orleans, Minneapolis—some of you remember when he was here before.”
Betsy looked inquiringly at Joe, but he shook his head. “While I was in the East,” he said.
“He landed in town yesterday,” Jimmy went on. “Brad put him on the payroll as soon as he walked in and the city room has been buzzing ever since. The men all stop work and listen when he talks; the girls all look when he walks by. He never went to college, but he’s read everything. He came in yesterday with Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum under his arm.”
Tib threw up her hands. “Who’s Ouspensky? What’s Organum?”
“Joe’s got a college degree,” Jimmy said. “Ask him!”
“If I had a month free, I might try to answer.” Joe grinned. But before he had time to make any attempt, firm, strong feet stamped themselves free of snow on the Cliff’s front porch.
“Here he is, folks! The Great Rocky!” Jimmy said.
The young man whom Marbeth admitted was hatless. His hair was a tangled shock of rusty-brown curls and he combed them back with both hands, but they sprang up again with an electric vigor. He was only medium tall and would have seemed fat if he had not been so solidly muscled. His forehead was broad, his eyes were keen, and a firm chin was slashed by an enormous dimple. His lips were full, and the smile he turned on the roomful of young women and men was—yes, Betsy decided—sweet.
“Let’s see!” said Jimmy. “You know all the newspaper folks…except Joe Willard.”
Introductions began, and MacTavish rose from the Naughty Chair, but no one explained why he had been sitting there.
Rocky seemed to be casually measuring everyone in the room. He shook hands silently, smiling, and still smiling turned to the sofa, swung Tib’s tiny feet to the floor, and settled himself alongside her, sitting cheerfully on his backbone.
“There aren’t two smaller feet in the world,” he drawled. “But they do take up a mite of room.” And hauling out a worn bulldog pipe, he looked at Marbeth for permission.
Betsy looked at Tib, expecting the disdainful air, but Tib was regarding the newcomer with amused astonishment.
“Why do they call
you just Rocky?” she asked. “Don’t you have any other name?”
“I was Rocky in the cradle. I was Rocky when I took to my pipe at the age of four.”
“Four?” cried Tib, round-eyed.
“The terrible Rocky is what folks usually say.” He smiled at her, and after a moment Tib began to laugh. But the laughter gave way to an almost awed inspection.
Hooray! Betsy exulted inwardly. She and Tacy had failed with Mr. Bagshaw, but this looked very promising.
She turned to Joe, wanting to share her triumph. He, however, was looking at Rocky. And soon he and all the others were listening to Rocky, as well. They were listening willingly and with absorbed attention.
Patty did not read from Martin Chuzzlewit.
“No! No!” she whispered in an agony of shyness when Marbeth remembered to suggest it. Rocky discussed the Dickensian trace in G. K. Chesterton.
MacTavish’s poem was mentioned, but it was not read. Rocky plunged into a discussion of the Spoon River Anthology. Willa Cather, strangely enough, sent him into a yarn about Jack London, whom he had known in San Francisco. He called the great London “Jack.”
Rocky talked on and on, magnetically piloting the Violent Study Club into uncharted seas. Tib looked dazed when she jumped up at last to help Marbeth with coffee and doughnuts.
Talk became general, and someone referred to President Wilson’s Preparedness tour. Colonel Roosevelt had long been urging preparedness, and now the President had fallen into line.
Rocky drew on his pipe. “I don’t know what’s got into the Professor,” he drawled. He called the President, “Professor.” “But I know one thing. We’re going to be in this war if he doesn’t keep his head.”
Tib put down the coffee pot from which she was refilling cups.
“Don’t you mean,” she asked, “that we’re going to be in it if the Kaiser doesn’t stop sinking our ships?”
Rocky looked as surprised as though a canary had pecked him.
“See here!” he said. “What kind of talk is that from a girl named Muller?”
Tib’s eyes darkened. “It’s American talk,” she answered, and Rocky’s sweet smile broke across his face. He put his hand for a moment on her black velvet arm.