Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (22 page)

T
O
D
ELOS

All's well that ends well
.

—W
M.
S
HAKESPEARE

Epigraph

Betsy and Joe

1.
A Courier with Letters

2.
More Letters

3.
Back from the Lake

4.
The Rays' Telephone Rings

5.
The Last First-Day of School

6.
The Senior Class President

7.
The Rift within the Lute

8.
Two Model Young Men

9.
“Tonight Will Never
Come Again”

10.
The St. John Game

11.
“Cheer Up”

12.
“Don't Worry”

13.
Christmas without Julia

14.
The New Year's Eve Dance

15.
Tacy's Eighteenth Birthday

16.
Mr. Kerr

17.
Up and Down Broadway

18.
“Toil and Trouble”

19.
Beidwinkles'

20.
Butternut Center

21.
No Ivy Green

22.
Surprises

23.
“After Commencement Day
What?”

Maud Hart Lovelace and Her World

About Betsy Was a Junior

About Betsy and Joe

Fictional Characters and Their Real-Life Counterparts

A
T THE TOP OF
Agency Hill, Betsy Ray turned Old Mag off the road into the shade of an elm.

The old mare always climbed the hill at a snail's pace. But once on the summit, out on the high undulating plain that led to Murmuring Lake, she usually, of her own accord, broke into a trot. Today she continued to walk, turning her head—ears enclosed rakishly by the lacy betasseled fly net—to Betsy in the
surrey as though to ask whether speed was really necessary. Betsy guided her into the deep patch of shade.

“I know it's hot, old girl,” she said, using her father's affectionate address. “And that was a long hill. Let's rest.”

Old Mag flapped her tail, shook off flies languidly, and stopped.

Betsy turned in her seat and looked down the road up which she had come—a long dusty road, fringed with butterfly weed and purple vetch. It bisected residential streets which ran in parallel rows all the way down to the river. Beyond this silver streak hills climbed again, giving the town of Deep Valley its name.

Betsy's eye could pick up many landmarks—the red brick turret of the high school she would enter as a senior that fall, and near it, at the corner of High Street and Plum, the roof of her own home, a green, frame, vine-covered house where boys and girls loved to gather after school. Far to the south rose Hill Street, where she had lived as a child with red-haired Tacy Kelly and yellow-haired Tib Muller for playmates. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib had picnicked and explored over every rise of those distant, wooded slopes.

Looking down to Front Street, she found her father's shoe store, and between Front and the river, the
shining rails which, less than a month ago, had carried her older sister Julia away to Boston and the S. S.
Romanic
and a summer of travel in Europe. This was to be followed by a winter of study in Berlin. Julia planned to be an opera singer.

Since Julia's departure, Betsy had been visiting Tacy and Tib. Her mother and her younger sister Margaret were settled at Murmuring Lake Inn, to which Mr. Ray drove out every night from the store. Betsy had stayed in town because Carney Sibley, a member of the Crowd, was entertaining a house guest whose visit had brought on an unexpected summer crop of parties.

Deep Valley was quiet now, almost as quiet as it looked, simmering in the heat between its hills. The Crowd was dispersing to lake cottages, and the farms of relatives, and vacations in the nearby Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Tib was going to Milwaukee.

A group of the boys had left that day on a canoe trip. They were paddling down the river to the Mississippi and a brief way along that celebrated stream. Joe Willard had left early in June to work in the harvest fields.

“There's hardly a soul left in town but Tony,” Betsy thought. Cab, too, of course. His father had died recently and Cab was helping in the family furniture
store. Tony had taken a job at the Creamery.

Betsy was glad she hadn't been forced to spend the hot day at the shoe store waiting for her father.

“You take Old Mag and go along,” Mr. Ray had said with characteristic thoughtfulness. “I'll pick up a ride tonight. You might as well get out in time for a swim.”

Betsy was pleased to be taking the solitary drive. She was a friendly, fun-loving girl with high spirits, touched off like firecrackers under a match by the company of others. Yet as she grew older, she liked increasingly to be alone.

She wanted to be a writer, and she had already discovered that poems and stories came most readily from the deep well of solitude. Moreover, she had discovered that at seventeen one was growing up so fast that one needed time to think, to correlate all the perplexing changes and try to understand them.

Betsy was very conscious of being on the threshold of the adult world; although, unlike her sister Julia, she did not long to enter it. Betsy had clung to every phase of childhood as it passed. She always wanted to keep life from going forward too fast.

Her friend, Tacy, was the same. They both had gallant adventurous plans for their lives out in what Julia called the Great World. But they were well content to linger in high school. Like Julia, Tacy was musical, an
inheritance perhaps from her father, who played a worn, beloved violin whenever time allowed. Tacy sang in a tender soprano voice.

“You grow older in spite of yourself,” Betsy thought resentfully, her gaze returning to the red brick turret. She would be graduating from high school next June, in the Class of 1910. Feeling suddenly that she didn't want to be seventeen, she pulled off her gloves and took off her large flower-laden hat.

“I wish I were a freshman again!” she exclaimed.

Bareheaded, her hair blowing, she looked younger, but she did not look like the Betsy Ray who had entered high school four years before. At thirteen, grown suddenly tall and thin, she had been plainly in the awkward age. Now she enjoyed being tall and slender. She loved high heels that made her even taller, large droopy hats, lacy clothes, perfumes, bracelets, and polished fingernails.

She curled her dark hair every night and wore it parted and pomped on the sides. Her skin was pink and white, very quick to flush. She had warm hazel eyes and a bright ready smile which was one of the things her friends liked most about her. Betsy thought it regrettable, for her teeth were parted in front, giving her an ingenuous expression. She preferred to look enigmatic.

Old Mag lurched forward as a sign that she was
ready to go on, and Betsy turned her back to the road. This was wide enough for two teams to pass and ran through fertile farm land. Corn as high as a man's waist rose beside the road, and fields of rye almost ready for the harvest. Meadows were full of tiger lilies, daisies, Queen Anne's lace—and well-fed cows.

Although distant figures could be seen in the fields, the landscape seemed empty. The houses, small and neat beside their big barns, seemed to be asleep. There wasn't a sound except the cooing of mourning doves and Old Mag's hoofs thudding steadily now.

Suddenly Betsy heard another horse coming behind her almost at a gallop. A great cloud of dust arose and poured into the surrey so that she coughed and choked. The other rig did not pass. It drew to a stop beside her.

“Listen my child and you shall hear, of the midday ride of Paul Revere—the second.” The drawling voice was theatrically deep. Betsy looked, startled, into black laughing eyes.

“Tony Markham!” Betsy halted Old Mag beside his lathered animal. “Whatever are you doing here and why are you racing a horse on such a hot day? My father would certainly give you a lecture.”

“Your father sent me, smarty!”

“My father sent you! Well, I'm sure he didn't
expect you to drive like that.”

“Oh, I've only done it since the top of the hill. We crawled up that so slowly, it's a wonder I ever caught you.”

“But why did you want to catch me? Papa sent you, you said…”

“Yes. Important dispatches!” Tony reached into the pocket of his shirt and produced three letters. Leaning across to the surrey, he handed them to her.

Betsy caught the flash of unfamiliar stamps.

“Letters from Julia!” she cried.

“Yep. Two.” Tony looked very well pleased. He took off his hat and ran lazy fingers through his bushy black hair, which was curlier even than usual in the heat. “Your father thought your mother might as well have them…not have to wait until tonight.”

“Isn't Papa an angel!”

“That's right!” Tony answered. “Praise your father! What about me, galloping up Agency Hill in this heat?”

“Oh, you!” Betsy answered. “How did he happen to find you anyway?”

“I dropped into the shoe store, looking for you. Thought you might go to the Majestic with me. I have two or three hours off in the afternoon, you know. I might as well be with you as with anyone else.”

“Well, thanks!” Betsy answered.

“Maybe even a little better,” Tony said magnanimously. He spoke in a teasing brotherly tone. He was, in fact, almost like a brother to the Ray girls.

Betsy was very fond of him. With his crest of hair, his black eyes which were bold, laughing, and sleepy all at once, his drawling voice, his lazy movements, Tony was nothing if not lovable. But she worried about him, too. She didn't always like the company he kept. He went with an older, wild crowd, and she had resolved some weeks before to get him back into the high school crowd. She thought he would be safer there, not tempted to leave school before he graduated.

Remembering her design, she smiled at him.

“I'm sorry I couldn't have gone,” she said. “Why don't you ever come out to the lake? It's terribly nice out there. Come some Sunday.”

“I go up to Minneapolis if the League team is playing at home. I've gone nuts on baseball.”

“You go to Minneapolis? But how can you afford it…to go that often, I mean?”

“Oh, I don't pay. I hop a freight. I've made friends with a couple of brakemen,” Tony explained grandly. “Poker-playing pals of mine.”

Betsy didn't like the sound of that.

“Well, you don't go
every
Sunday,” she replied.

“The first Sunday you don't go, come out to the lake. Do you hear?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Tony, “I hear and I heed. Well, I must get this nag back to the guy your dad borrowed it from.”

“You walk him every step of the way,” Betsy scolded. “Papa won't like it if he looks the least bit hot.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Tony again. He turned his horse around, picked up the whip as though about to brandish it, then acted alarmed and put it back in the socket with a virtuous look. Betsy laughed.

“Good-by,” she called. “We'll be looking for you.”

Holding the reins loosely as Old Mag started to trot, Betsy studied the letters. They were postmarked from the Azores Islands, of whose existence she had been unaware until Julia's trip was planned. Julia had said in the letter she sent back by the pilot boat that the Azores would be her first stop.

Her father, Betsy noticed, hadn't opened the letters.

“He must have been dying to, but he knew Mamma would like the fun of it,” she thought.

The third letter was addressed to her. She looked at it casually, for the importance of any ordinary letter was dwarfed by the arrival of mail from Julia. This wasn't, however, an ordinary letter. The handwriting on the envelope made her catch her breath.

“It is! It's from Joe! Why is he writing to me, do you suppose?” Betsy asked the empty air.

She clucked to Old Mag to hurry, for she didn't want to open the letter quite yet. She felt churned up by the sight of it. Betsy liked Joe Willard a great deal, and she had for a long time, with very little encouragement.

He was a stalwart, light-haired boy with blue eyes and a strong, tanned face. He was in Betsy's English class, where they had long been rivals. For three consecutive years he had won the Essay Contest for which Betsy herself had competed twice. He was an orphan and earned his own living. Last winter he had worked after school and on weekends for the
Deep Valley Sun
.

He had gone around then with a girl named Phyllis Brandish. He had never asked to come to see Betsy and had danced with her only once. Then, out of a clear sky last June, after leaving for the harvest fields, he had sent her a postcard!

Betsy's most loved possession was an old theatrical trunk which had once belonged to her Uncle Keith, an actor, and now served her for a desk. She had put Joe Willard's postcard in that trunk. When the family moved to the lake, the trunk, of course, could not go. But a few selected manuscripts, notebooks, and pencils, an eraser, and a dictionary had gone in a stout
box marked “My Desk.” The card had been included.

It had come from Texas. The letter, Betsy noticed, studying the postmark, came from North Dakota. She knew that Joe was working his way north with the harvest. But harvest wouldn't have come to North Dakota yet. It hadn't even reached southern Minnesota.

“What the dickens is he doing in North Dakota?” she puzzled.

Old Mag slowed down for a farm house known to Deep Valley folk as the Half Way House because it lay at a point half way to Murmuring Lake. Outside the gate was a watering trough full of fresh water. The farmer who lived there had had so many people stop and ask to water their horses that he had put out the public watering trough to save time. His wife, Betsy had heard, preferred the old, sociable, time-wasting stop in the farm yard.

Betsy climbed out and unfastened Old Mag's checkrein. The trough was set in the shade of a big tree and Old Mag drank long and gratefully. Slowly Betsy ran a finger under the flap of the envelope.

Joe's letter was typewritten, and the printed heading said
The Courier News, Wells County's Finest Weekly, Wells, North Dakota
. He plunged immediately into a surprising piece of news.

Last summer, he said, harvesting near Wells, he had
made friends with the editor of this paper, and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts were swell folks. He had written to them once or twice over the winter. They knew he was working on the
Sun
.

Mr. Roberts had been taken sick and sent to a hospital, and he had written to Joe. The letter had been forwarded by Mr. Root, the editor of the
Sun
, to Oklahoma, where Joe was harvesting. Mr. Roberts had asked Joe to come and help Mrs. Roberts. Under her supervision, Joe wrote with pride, he was practically running the paper.

He was living with the Robertses.

“I have a big square room with a view into a silver maple. The leaves whisper like a bunch of high school girls, but fortunately I'm not here very much. I'm down at the paper all day long. I like this job, Betsy. I even like the smell of the presses. I can learn a lot about newspaper work this summer.

“I've heard from Mr. Root. I can't do half as well as he expects me to, but I'm going to do my darndest. If you answer, as a well-bred young lady is sure to do (and besides I know you go wild at the sight of a pencil), address me here. Sincerely, Joe.”