Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (23 page)

Betsy didn't hurry Old Mag away from the watering trough. She read Joe's letter twice and then put it with Julia's beside her on the seat. She looked at the windmill turning lazily above the Half Way House
with shining eyes which didn't see it at all.

Joe Willard had written to her. He wanted to correspond. And what wonderful news he had to tell!

She was glad she had put sachet bags into her stationery and that she had received for her birthday a sealing wax set, colored sticks of wax and a seal with her initial on it. Scents and sealing wax were la de da, of course, but Julia had told her long ago that even with a boy of your own sort, which Joe certainly was, a little la de da didn't hurt.

“I'll write to him tonight,” thought Betsy. She slapped the reins and Old Mag, refreshed by her drink and the rest, went forward briskly toward Murmuring Lake.

J
ULIA'S LETTERS WERE READ
until they were worn thin. Mrs. Ray read them first to herself and then asked Betsy to read them aloud to her and Margaret. She read them to herself again at intervals throughout the day, and after supper Betsy read them aloud to her father. After half an hour he wished to hear them again, so Betsy read them again, and over and
over on succeeding evenings.

Mr. Ray usually took Margaret on his knee to listen. He was a tall, stout, very erect man with satiny black hair, hazel eyes, and a big nose. He listened with a proud fond smile. Mrs. Ray, red-haired, slim, and alert, listened in a rocker close by. The lamp threw their shadows on the unplastered wall, and frustrated moths banged unheeded on the screened door of the cottage. It was one of half a dozen cottages, each with two small rooms and a narrow porch, that surrounded the rambling, white-painted old Inn.

Both letters had been written on board the
Romanic
, en route to Naples. They were long letters. Julia remarked that people said she spent most of her time writing; but she wanted her family to take the trip right along with her. And if ever one person took four others through Europe by means of pen and paper, it was Julia that summer.

The Rays lived a double life. They rested and ate, fished and bathed at Murmuring Lake in Minnesota. But they also took the Rev. Mr. Lewis' “personally conducted tour.”

Although landbound, they felt the lazy charm of shipboard life, sitting in deck chairs watching the ever-changing water. The steward prepared salt baths for them. They had breakfast at nine, broth at eleven,
luncheon at half past one, tea on deck at four, and dinner at seven.

They went to church in the salon and heard the Church of England clergyman pray for King Edward and Queen Alexandra. They heard Julia, in her little black silk dress, sing at the Ship's Concert. They ate at the Captain's dinner and danced at the Grand Ball.

At the Azores they felt the intoxication of a first encounter with a tropical island—purple bougainvillea climbing over everything; narrow streets with tiny plaster houses painted white, blue, yellow, and pink; whining beggars, clamoring vendors, women wrapped in shawls.

They went on through Italy, Switzerland, up the River Rhine, into Holland, Belgium, France, and England.

Julia enjoyed everything five times as much as the average traveler, she said. “I think of each one of you and look at everything just five times as hard.”

Bettina (Julia's name for Betsy) must learn languages at once. “Every cultured person should know at least French.”

She was buying presents for them madly. The Rev. Mr. Lewis had promised to bring a box home in the fall when Julia went on to Berlin and her study with Fraulein von Blatz.

“Oh, I'm so happy! I can't believe it is I, Julia Ray,
who is traveling in Europe, having all her cherished dreams fulfilled.”

Letters, more than anything else, characterized this summer vacation for Betsy. The Ray cottage was set out on a point with a view across the lake to Pleasant Park, where Mrs. Ray had lived as a girl. Sitting on the porch of the cottage or down on the sandy isolated Point, Betsy wrote to Julia. She wrote to Tacy and to Tib; to Leonard, the sick nephew of Miss Cobb, her music teacher. She wrote to Joe Willard.

Betsy had answered Joe's first letter with praise and encouragement. His reply came, brimming with elation. A land-swindle trial had been going on in Wells County when he arrived in June. It had started out quietly; a crook, Joe said, had been indicted. But the case had developed national ramifications when the crook was discovered to have been aided by a senator. Court was continued in session.

Joe had seen the importance of the case and had started filing the story every day for the Minneapolis
Tribune
. The stories were published, and he was paid space rates. On the day he wrote Betsy, the
Tribune
editor had telephoned, long distance.

“Ordinarily,” this august personage had said, “with a story which has ballooned like this one, we would send a correspondent to Wells. But we like your stories. You may handle the case for us.”

Joe had accepted with some misgivings. He had not concealed his age, but neither had he mentioned it.

“I'd just as soon they didn't find out how young I am,” he wrote. “So I wish you'd keep the assignment a secret. I haven't told anyone what I am doing except you and Mr. Root.”

When Betsy received that letter, she went down to the boathouse, took out a boat, and rowed to Babcock's Bay. She liked this quiet backwater, where trees grew close to the shore, making golden-green aisles when the sun shone. She read Joe's letter a second time and a third, then held it between her hands and looked off across the quiet, gleaming water.

“I haven't told anyone except you and Mr. Root.” He had picked her for a confidante!

She took out her paper and a pencil and wrote an answer, reading through what she had written, correcting and interlining as she did with her stories. When she returned to the cottage, she copied it all on scented paper and sealed it with green sealing wax.

Joe's typewritten letters and Betsy's scented, green-sealed replies went back and forth regularly after that.

Betsy took to reading the Minneapolis
Tribune
. She looked for Joe's stories and one day she noticed with excitement that the story was signed at the top, “Joseph Willard.”

“Isn't it a terrific honor,” she wrote to Joe, “having
your name signed to a story in a newspaper?”

A few nights later, her father looked up from his reading.

“I wonder whether this Joseph Willard who writes for the
Tribune
is any relation to the Willard boy who works on the
Deep Valley Sun
?”

“Yes, he is,” Betsy replied.

“Uncle, or something?”

“Something,” Betsy murmured noncommittally. She felt guilty but she stood by her promise. “Joe has mentioned that case to me. We correspond, you know.”

“You certainly do,” Mrs. Ray remarked. “You're keeping the mails busy. I don't remember his ever coming to the house, though.”

“He never has,” Betsy replied. “But he will!” she thought, and smiled to herself.

She clipped all the Joseph Willard articles and kept them in the box with her own stories.

Betsy found time for stories in spite of the time she gave to letter writing. And that summer she started in earnest trying to sell to the magazines. When she finished a story she copied it neatly and sent it away with return postage enclosed to
The Ladies' Home Journal
or
The Delineator, The Youth's Companion
or
St. Nicholas
. As regularly as she sent them out, they were returned.

But Betsy was stubborn. If a story came back in the morning from one magazine, it went out in the afternoon to another. She kept a record in a little notebook of how much postage each manuscript required, when it went out, and when it came back. She was not at all sensitive about her campaign and the family took a lively interest in it.

“Uncle Sam ought to manufacture round-trip postage stamps,” Mr. Ray chuckled. “They would certainly be a convenience to Betsy.”

“My stories will start selling some day. You'll see.”

“Of course they will,” Mrs. Ray put in, with her usual monumental confidence in her daughters. “The magazines are full of stories not half so good as Betsy's.”

“I like them just as well as the stories in my fairy books,” said Margaret.

Margaret, eleven years old now, was up to Betsy's shoulder, and as straight as her father. She was immaculately neat, very quiet and self-contained. She wore her braids crossed in back with big taffeta bows behind her ears. Her serious freckled face was illumined by star-like eyes.

She and Betsy liked to take books down on the Point. The steep bank hid the Inn from their view. Little white-edged waves lapped at their feet, small stilt-legged birds ran along the sand, and reeds at the
water's edge made a forest for a Thumbelina.

Margaret read from her fairy books and Betsy read
Les Miserables
. She had begun Victor Hugo's tome in a zest for self-improvement, having heard it called the greatest novel in the world, but she soon became deeply engrossed.

She was following Jean Valjean's adventures one Sunday afternoon, with Margaret deep in the
Blue Fairy Book
beside her, when she heard a rustling on the bank and looked up to see Tony descending.

He had come several times since the day he gave Betsy the letters and she was pleased to be succeeding in her enterprise. It was fun, too, to have a cavalier. There weren't many young people at the Inn this season. She jumped up to greet him and Margaret followed, her face wreathed in smiles.

“Something for you, Margaret,” he said carelessly, thrusting a box of candy into her hands. He always gave Margaret the candy he brought. Tony's visits seemed to be to the entire family, although he was Betsy's classmate.

They went up to the cottage to dress for a swim. Betsy and Margaret put on blue serge bathing suits, trimmed with white braid around collars, sleeves, and skirts, long black stockings, laced bathing shoes, bandanas on their heads.

“Very skippy,” Tony said.

In the water he romped with Margaret, who was paddling about on water wings. Betsy swam with a joyfully vigorous breast stroke. Then she found a sun hole and floated, staring up at faraway swirls of cloud.

Tony was playing croquet with the family when Betsy emerged from the cottage, dressed for supper. She had put on a filmy pink dress and wore flowers in her hair. Tony leaned on his mallet, his dark eyes teasing.

“Look at Betsy! I swear she's gunning for me. It's no use, girl. I'm hooked. Margaret's got me.”

He stayed for supper, of course, and although the Inn had provided a gigantic Sunday dinner, supper was also an abundant affair, with cold ham and chicken, potato salad, green corn on the cob, baking powder biscuits, and plum cake heaped with whipped cream.

Mr. Ray and Tony talked baseball. Mr. Ray enjoyed Tony's accounts of the Minneapolis League baseball games.

“But I don't like your transportation, Tony,” he said. “You might lose a leg some day, hopping a freight.”

“Oh, they slow down for me!”

“What do you do with your time up there in the cities after the game is over?”

“I hang around with Jake and Harry. They're my brakemen pals.”

“Aren't they a lot older than you are?”

“Sure. Ten years or so, but I like to hear them talk. They're full of the darndest yarns.”

Betsy was listening intently. She could tell her father was troubled. Tony turned and tweaked her nose.

“What makes you listen so good?” he asked in affectionate derision. “You don't understand about baseball or railroading, either.”

After supper, Tony asked Betsy to go rowing. They went down to the boathouse and Old Pete gave them a boat. Tony took off his coat and folded it over the seat, fitted the oars into the oarlocks, and rowed to the middle of the lake.

The water was as smooth as glass. Now and then an insect skimmed along the surface, making a crack in the mirror. Tony rowed lazily, while the sun sank out of sight and diaphanous clouds all over the sky turned pink.

He crossed the oars, looked up and around him.

“Nice. Isn't it?” he said.

Tony never talked much. He teased, joked, and clowned, but he seldom talked about anything important to him. Betsy thought sometimes how little she knew of Tony's life. Other boys talked about school
and sports, their larks and scrapes, their girls, books they were reading. A few of them talked about ideas that stirred them. Tony was either fooling or he was silent.

He could listen, though. Betsy talked more about herself with Tony than with any boy she knew. He understood what her writing meant to her. He had shown the same sensitive insight into Julia's music.

Tony loved to sing himself and had a fine deep voice. Basso profundo, Julia called it. Julia had been quite excited for a time by Tony's gift as a singer. But he had no ambition to sing professionally or to do anything else except enjoy life as it passed.

Betsy told him now about the story she was working on. It concerned a New York debutante.

“Sort of a Robert W. Chambers story,” she explained.

“But you don't know anything about New York debutantes, Betsy.”

“That doesn't matter. I make it up.”

He started rowing again and they found themselves near Pleasant Park. The old house was surrounded by tall trees that almost hid it from view. The lawn was enclosed on three sides by a white picket fence. On the fourth side, the land sloped to the water, and there were a boathouse and docks.

“Just think!” Betsy said. “That's where Mamma
grew up. A farmer lives there now.”

“Your grandfather is in California, isn't he?”

“Yes. He's Mamma's stepfather. Hers and Uncle Keith's. She was married in that house.”

“Well,” Tony said. “It was some marriage! I don't know another family that gets along as yours does, Betsy. Honest to gosh, I've always been sort of glad I got acquainted with you Rays!”

And then, having been betrayed into what he considered sentimentality, he changed the subject.

“Let's sing,” he said.

They sang while the stars came out and the color of the sky deepened to a rich dark blue. The first sprinkle of stars was followed by armies of them.

They sang everything they knew, beginning with old songs like “Annie Laurie” and “Swanee River”; going on to “What's the Use of Dreaming,” Mr. Ray's favorite, and “My Wild Irish Rose,” which the beloved Chauncey Olcott had brought to Deep Valley every autumn since Betsy could remember. They sang the songs associated with each high school year.