This conversation proved so enlightening that Betsy sounded out Tony.
“Where does Joe Willard live?”
“With Mrs. Blair, a widow, at the north end of town. You know that little gray house, sort of under Agency Hill? My mother knows her, and she says Joe’s all right. He doesn’t want any mothering, though. He eats around at restaurants and he won’t let Mrs. Blair give him a home-cooked meal, unless she’ll let him pay her.”
“I wonder why that is?”
“He’s independent! But Mrs. Blair likes him. He pays his rent and keeps his room neat…except for books. It’s all over apples and books, she says.”
“He was eating an apple and reading a book the first I saw him,” Betsy remarked.
“He loads up with books every night coming home from the Creamery. He just about lives at the library,” Tony replied.
Betsy’s heart warmed. She loved the library, too…the quiet, the smell of books, the fireplace in the Children’s Room with a painting called “The Isle of Delos” over the mantle. And she loved Miss Sparrow, the small winsome librarian, with her curly untidy hair and merry eyes.
When Hallowe’en drew near Mrs. Ray told Betsy she might give a party, a costume party for boys and girls, and that same afternoon, after school, Betsy got out her library card.
“Isn’t it late to be going to the library?” her mother asked.
“Oh, I just remembered something,” Betsy replied off-handedly.
“Well, wear your heavy coat. It’s turning cold.”
“I will,” said Betsy. She put on her red tam and mittens with her gray winter coat.
The warm well-lighted rooms were almost empty, and Miss Sparrow helped Betsy choose some books. She had known for years that Betsy planned to be a writer; they often talked about it. Tonight she suggested books by women writers…Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
“It will give you confidence to read them,” Miss Sparrow said.
“I wish you’d give me a list of novels to read, Miss Sparrow.”
“I’d love to.”
“Novels that would help me learn to write.”
“And you ought to read poetry, too. In fact, the poetry is more important now, in my opinion. You’re at the age when poetry sinks in….”
Joe Willard didn’t come but Betsy didn’t care. The trip had been well worth while. Smiling and full of plans, she swung out into a chilly twilight…and met Joe on the library steps.
Unceremoniously he seized her books and looked at the titles.
“I’m surprised,” he said grinning. “I thought you’d be reading Robert W. Chambers.”
“I read women writers. I think they’re the best,” Betsy said.
“Especially Elizabeth Warrington Ray, I suppose.”
“Oh! Do you know her work? I thought it would be beyond you.”
“I wade through it now and then.” His blue eyes were gay above a blue woolen muffler tucked inside his coat. He handed back her books.
“Have you read these?” Betsy asked.
“Naturally. I’ve read everything.”
“I’ll bet you haven’t read…Hamlet.”
“Shakespeare in one volume. Take it off the parlor table and try it some time.”
They were getting on famously when Betsy said with an abrupt change of tone, “Joe, I want to talk to you.”
“No charge. Can I advise you about Gaston’s peculiar methods?” He was still joking, but his tone had changed, too. He sounded wary.
“It’s about our Crowd. We think you ought to…ought to…I mean, I want you to come to a party.”
His friendly look faded.
“Thanks very much. I’m afraid I can’t.”
“But you don’t even know when it is!” Betsy cried. “How do you know you can’t come when I haven’t even told you when it is?”
“I know. Thanks just the same.”
“It’s a Hallowe’en costume party.”
“Fine, fine! Have a good time.”
“Joe,” said Betsy. “I think you belong with our Crowd. Everyone thinks so. And we do have the best times. We play around at each other’s houses, and go to the Majestic and Heinz’s together….” She stopped, because his expression grew more and more hostile.
“Thanks a lot. Mind if I go now?”
“But why, why, don’t you want to go with our Crowd?”
He looked trapped. After a brief pause he said, “It would just bore me, that’s all.”
Bore him! Betsy could hardly believe her ears. Imagine her beloved Crowd boring anyone!
Betsy didn’t get angry easily; she almost never got angry. But she felt a hot flare of anger now.
“I see. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
Her tone was as cold as the wind which came sweeping down Broad Street across the library steps. It whipped at the blue muffler and pulled it loose. The muffler was so becoming, and Joe wore it with such a jaunty air, that Betsy wondered with irritation if he was going without an overcoat just to call attention to his muffler. Or maybe overcoats bored him, too.
“See you in Gaston’s hangout,” he said, and swaggered into the library, quickly, as though it were a refuge.
Betsy stood on the steps, and tears came into her eyes. Her feelings were mixed up. She felt hurt, humiliated, angry, and yet she was almost sorry for him…or would be, except that you just couldn’t be sorry for Joe. He was so proud, so confident…it would be ridiculous.
“Bore him!” said Betsy, trying to whip up her anger, but it was fading fast.
That night she telephoned the Crowd about the party. She told the girls that Joe Willard wouldn’t come but she didn’t tell anyone what he had said. She didn’t want to make trouble for him…rude as he had been.
To Winona she said airily, “He must be a woman hater. He even hates me.”
She couldn’t settle down to study, and finally she went into Julia’s room. Betsy wasn’t much of a confider, but Julia’s advice was invaluable sometimes.
Julia, who was buffing her nails, listened thoughtfully. After Betsy had finished she said, “I think you went at the thing wrong.”
“But why? I was perfectly honest.”
“Too honest.”
“You can’t be too honest.”
Julia put down her buffer. She spoke slowly.
“Of course not. But it wouldn’t have been dishonest, exactly, to have kept on talking, having fun. He’d have asked to walk home with you…it was getting dark. And maybe…who knows…Mamma would have kept him to supper? We had apple pie. And then we’d have asked him to Sunday night lunch, and he’d have fallen for Papa’s sandwiches. And we’d have told him about the party, and started planning costumes. You could have asked him to plan one for you. The first thing he knew he’d be at your party, and smack in the midst of your Crowd.”
“Julia,” said Betsy. “You’re wonderful. Why don’t I know how to wangle things?”
“You’ll learn.”
“You didn’t learn. You were born knowing how.”
“Yes,” said Julia, glancing up at Geraldine Farrar. “But even if you wouldn’t do a thing like that instinctively as I would, you could figure it out. You’re a writer. You could plan it out and do it.”
Betsy was silent.
“About Joe! Wait a few days and try again, using a little finesse.”
“No,” Betsy interrupted firmly. “We bore him. He said so.”
“Maybe he didn’t mean that. Maybe he just can’t afford to go with a crowd.”
“Oh, fudge! We’re not millionaires. Cab delivers papers; doesn’t he? Tony drives a grocery wagon every summer! All of us have a terrible time managing on our allowances. No, we just bore him, like he said.”
Julia didn’t answer. She knew that tone…and look. There was no use trying to change Betsy when she was feeling stubborn.
Before Hallowe’en a curly-headed Irish boy named Dennis started going around with Cab. Cab brought him to the Ra
y house, and Betsy asked him to her party. And she asked a football hero named Al who had started going with Carney, and a boy nicknamed Squirrelly who had a case on Irma.
The party was a great success, and soon the Crowd had plenty of boys.
But not one, Betsy thought sometimes, feeling hurt inside, was so nice as Joe Willard, who went his solitary way.
8
Rosy Apple Blossoms
BETSY ALWAYS HAD had the gift of getting along with people. She was like her father in that. Bob Ray had friends all up and down Front Street; he had friends all over the county. And everyone in high school liked Betsy…or had last year. Now, however, there was this new coolness between her and Joe Willard. She hated it, but she didn’t know how to end it. Presently something even more antagonistic arose between Betsy and another person. And the person was no one less than Mr. Gaston, the rhetoric teacher.
He had liked her well enough last year. His recommendation had helped to give her the coveted chance to compete on the Essay Contest. But this year, he liked her less and less.
Mr. Gaston, as Julia had said, wished to be a science teacher. He did not enjoy teaching English. The only part of the subject that interested him was punctuation, paragraphing, spelling. He liked neat, factual papers.
Betsy punctuated and paragraphed better than most; her spelling was good, and her papers were neat. But alas, they were almost never factual! Betsy liked to invent, to create. She could not write even about Our System of Taxation without coloring it up a bit.
When at rare intervals…very rare, for Mr. Gaston, the scientist, disliked fiction…an original story was given as a class assignment, Betsy went into a delirium. She wrote and wrote, evolving hair raising plots, conjuring up romantic characters, describing Paris, Vienna, and other cities she had never seen. The class liked Betsy’s stories, but the general approval only deepened Mr. Gaston’s exasperation.
“Betsy, you have this miser hoarding a twenty-five dollar gold piece and there is no such coin.”
“Oh, well…I’ll make it twenty dollars then.”
But Mr. Gaston would not allow her to toss off the mistake. The story was returned with a red F for Fair, when Betsy felt fiercely sure that it was the best submitted. (Except for Joe Willard’s, perhaps. He wrote good stories, too, and his gold pieces were always of a proper denomination.)
Seething, she mentioned the affair at supper.
“Really, Bob,” exploded Mrs. Ray, “you ought to speak to the school board.”
“Now, now, Jule! Remember you have red hair!”
“I am remembering. That’s why I suggest something temperate like speaking to the school board.” Mrs. Ray’s blue eyes were snapping. “The very idea! Bothering Betsy about twenty-five dollar gold pieces….”
“And commas,” put in Margaret, remembering Betsy’s most frequent complaint.
“It won’t do Betsy any harm to learn about commas,” Mr. Ray said. “I’ve noticed myself that she scatters them like grass seed.”
“Who reads Shakespeare for the commas?”
“Maybe…” Mr. Ray’s eyes twinkled. “I duck when I say it. You hold the carving knife, Margaret…. Maybe Betsy isn’t quite in Shakespeare’s class?”
That drew Julia into the fray.
“How do you know she isn’t? Maybe this generation is going to produce another Shakespeare, and maybe it’s Betsy.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” interjected Mrs. Ray.
“What do you think, Margaret?”
Margaret looked grave. “Just who is Shakespeare, exactly?”
“Ja, who is this Shakespeare?” Anna burst through the swinging door. The argument had penetrated to the kitchen only faintly, but Anna knew that Betsy was being attacked.
“Who is he anyway?” she demanded, squaring her plump shoulders. “Does he ever come here? Well, he’d better not.”
“He’s dead,” Julia said.
Anna was dashed, but only for a moment.
“Small loss, probably. If anyone picks on you, Betsy, lovey, you know who to come to. I always said the same to the McCloskey girls.” She returned to the kitchen, breathing heavily.
Everyone laughed, and Julia began to tell about Miss Bangeter’s Shakespeare class.
This was an institution at Deep Valley High School. It was a class of which the whole school spoke with reverence. It was open only to seniors, and was almost of college level, other teachers said. They eavesdropped when they could, on Miss Bangeter’s reading of the plays.
“You’ll adore it, Bettina,” Julia said. “Just now we’re studying As You Like It. How I’d love to play Rosalind!”
She read the play to Betsy that evening, and after that Betsy read all the plays right along with Julia. Julia passed on Miss Bangeter’s explanations, her comments, her enthusiasm, and Betsy took to experiments in blank verse. Tacy thought they were wonderful.
“Better not show them to Gaston though,” she added cautiously.
“I know. He’d think I was conceited. But I’m not. Am I, Tacy?”
“Of course not!”
“I just happen to be able to write, like Julia can sing, and Carney can sew, and Gaston…probably…can cut up frogs.”
“Cutting up frogs is all he’s good for.”
“If there’s anything I’m not, it’s conceited,” Betsy declared. But Mr. Gaston continued to think that she was. He thought it all the more after November Rhetoricals.
Rhetoricals were programs which the two literary societies presented in alternate months. In November it was the Zetamathians’ turn, and early in the month Miss Clarke asked Julia and Betsy to drop into her room after school. Miss Clarke had long leaned on Julia in preparing the Zetamathian Rhetoricals. Julia loved to oblige with a solo, or to play the piano, or to act in a skit. And Betsy last year had sung the “Cat Duet” with Tacy…and had read an original paper.
“My two Rays!” Miss Clarke said happily when Julia and Betsy came in. She was a pretty woman with soft dark hair, soft white skin, and soft eyes behind round glasses which emphasized her gentle guilelessness. Her manner in class was timid and appealing, but out of class she had an innocent girlish gaiety which beamed in her eyes now.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “how sad it is that Julia is going to graduate! Of course, I have Betsy coming along, but this is the last year I’ll have you both. I’ve been wondering what you could do for Rhetoricals together.”
“A duet?” asked Julia hopefully.
Miss Clarke shook her head.
“Betsy’s going to repeat that ‘Cat Duet’ with Tacy on one of the programs this year. No, I have a better idea. A really marvelous one. I want Betsy to write a song which you can sing.”
“Not the music!” cried Betsy, alarmed.
“Oh, no, dear! We’ll take the music of some popular song. I’d thought of that ‘Same Old Story’ everybody’s singing.”
“Just new words? That’s a cinch!”
“Listen to her!” Miss Clarke turned to Julia. “I suppose she could do it overnight?”
“Why, yes,” said Betsy. She was surprised at such a to-do about something so easy. Julia was delighted with the plan, so Betsy went home and wrote new words for “Same Old Story.”
When November Rhetoricals came, Miss Clarke introduced the number with a little speech about the Rays. She told about Betsy’s writing the words and the school began to clap. Mr. Gaston, sitting on the platform, folded his arms and looked sardonic. Then Carney sat down at the piano, Julia came to the platform, and everyone clapped again.
Julia had dressed her hair with a long curl over her shoulder. And since this song definitely wasn’t grand opera, she dropped all her grand opera airs. She sang like a musical comedy soubrette, sauntering along the platform, with a special smile or toss of her head to end each verse.
There were verses about the Freshman Girl, the Sophomore Girl, the Junior Girl and the Senior Girl, and after each verse the same refrain:
“Same old s
tory,
Same old High,
Same old bunch of gigglers
As the years pass by.
She’s a hummer,
A shining light,
For she’s Deep Valley’s High School Girl
And she’s all right.”
At the end of the last chorus there was such a clamor of applause that Carney began to repeat. Julia, with true instinct, opened her arms.
“Everybody sing!” she cried, and everybody sang, even Miss Bangeter. Everybody, that is, except Mr. Gaston. He kept his arms folded and looked unpleasant while the assembly room rang.
“Same old story,
Same old High,
Same old bunch of gigglers
As the years pass by…”
It was sung over and over. After school it was hummed in the cloak rooms, in the halls, and along High Street. Miss Clarke was triumphant, and Julia and Betsy were decidedly pleased with themselves.
But Betsy stopped being pleased next morning in rhetoric class.
When she came into the room, Mr. Gaston looked up with a smile dangerously bland. It followed her while she went to her desk and sat down.
“We feel fortunate to have a poetess in our midst,” Mr. Gaston said, and Betsy blushed. Everyone laughed, but almost no one laughed at his next joke.
“When we come to the study of poetry, perhaps I’d better step down and let Betsy take the chair.”
He stacked the attendance cards and grinned maliciously.
“It was reassuring to hear that the Deep Valley High School girl is such a fine specimen,” he said.
Betsy was furious, but not so furious as Tacy who fixed him with indignant bright blue eyes. Cab and Tony scowled, Dennie, the new boy in the Crowd, pulled at his curly hair and looked uneasy. Joe Willard, Betsy saw, was gazing out of the window.
Betsy did not enliven the supper table with this encounter. She had decided, wisely, to keep her troubles to herself. But she argued mentally with Mr. Gaston all through the evening, and after she had gone to bed.
“I never claimed it was great poetry.” “It was meant to be funny.” “I’d like to hear what kind of verses you’d write!” And so on, into the night.