Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe (27 page)

T
HE PARTY FOR
C
ARNEY
was a noteworthy affair. Of course, her impending departure was noteworthy. She was going so far—half way across the continent—and she was the first Deep Valley girl to go east to college. And she would leave a yawning gap in the Crowd. No more on warm September days would they sprawl on the Sibley lawn. No more on moonlight
nights would they go rattling about the country, singing, in the Sibley auto. The girls brought letters to be read on the train and small gifts for the trip. Winona presented a corsage of carnations which Carney popped into the ice box so that she could wear it on the morrow.

They played five hundred. Five hundred was almost as much the rage as bands around the hair. There were dishes of candy kisses on each table, there were prizes, and superlative refreshments—crab meat salad, home baked rolls, cocoa, an enormous sunshine cake. The boys raided and were invited in, which made the party perfect.

It was well that the Crowd got its innings on Friday night, for at the train next morning they were far outnumbered by Sibleys. Carney's own family was reasonably small, but there were Sibleys all over the county. The station swarmed with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, so that the Crowd got only a glimpse of Carney in the tweed suit and the brown velvet tricorn, with the big bouquet of carnations. Her eyes were shining behind her glasses. The dimple stood out in her round pink cheek.

“Write to us!” the Crowd called when she came out on the observation platform.

“I will, I will.”

The whistle blew, the bell began to ring, and the
great oily black wheels started turning. Carney waved with vigor but her lips were set as though it were an effort to keep calm and matter-of-fact.

“I wonder whether college will change Carney,” Betsy said, when the train was gone.

“Maybe she'll come back with an eastern accent.”

“Carney never ‘put on' in her life.”

“Some people do, though, when they're in the East only a little while.”

“Well, Carney will come back with her same old Deep Valley accent,” Winona said positively, and everyone agreed.

Betsy and Tony discussed her departure that night, eating pineapple sundaes at Heinz's after the picture. Tom had already left for Cox, and Al and Squirrelly would soon be leaving for the U.

“You and I will be going off to college next year, I suppose,” Betsy said.

“Heck! I probably won't even graduate.”

“What do you mean? Of course you'll graduate!” Betsy was indignantly emphatic. “Probably,” she added, “you'll go to the U at Minneapolis.”

“Well, I'm going up to Minneapolis all right…tomorrow,” he said wickedly. “The team is playing at home.”

“How are you going?”

“In my private car.”

“Tony,” said Betsy, “you ought not to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Papa told you. You might lose a leg. Besides, those railroad men are all too old for you.”

“They suit me fine.”

“I wish you wouldn't do it,” Betsy said.

Tony looked at her across the metal table, his laughing black eyes growing suddenly somber.

“Do you really wish I wouldn't?” he asked.

“I certainly do.”

“I might stop it,” he said enigmatically.

“I wish you would,” Betsy replied. “I worry about those trips, Tony. I like it so much better when you just hang around with the Crowd.”

“And with you?” Tony asked. His tone was low. Betsy was hardly sure she had understood what he said. Although Tony was so bold and breezy, he was intensely reticent. He was not given to personal remarks, or at least not with her. And if he had really said what she thought he had said, he wouldn't like having said it when he found out about Joe. She decided to pretend she hadn't heard.

“If you don't go to Minneapolis,” she replied, “we'll expect you for Sunday night lunch.”

He did not appear on Sunday night, but Joe came early, his blue suit neatly pressed this time, his pompadour burnished by much brushing. He and Mrs.
Ray started talking about books. It seemed to Betsy that he had read everything, beginning with
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. But Mr. Ray had never even heard of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. He liked people instead of books. He was wary of intellectuals and Betsy could see that he acted a little guarded with Joe. Joe also seemed a little guarded with him.

Shifting from books, Mrs. Ray told him the news of Julia, whom Joe had known slightly. She showed him Julia's pictures and chatted on about the difficulties with her trunk.

“If I remember Julia,” Joe said gallantly, “she doesn't need to worry if that trunk never comes.”

He got on famously with Mrs. Ray, but Betsy felt a little fearful when he pushed his way deliberately through the swinging door to the kitchen where her father was making sandwiches.

Mr. Ray always made the sandwiches for Sunday night lunch. They were a family institution. He sat down to make them, looking dignified and benevolent, as he went about his invariable rites—buttering bread, arranging slices of cold meat, cheese, or onions, seasoning them expertly while the coffee he had earlier set to boil exuded its inviting fragrance. He liked to have lookers-on but Betsy wondered what under the sun he and Joe would find to talk about.

As she chattered with Cab at the fireplace, she
kept an ear turned to the kitchen. Certainly a hum of conversation was issuing therefrom. At last she found courage to saunter out, and she found Joe watching the sandwich-making intently, but not half so intently as he was listening to Mr. Ray's story about an old Syrian couple who had come into the store to buy shoes.

When Joe was helping Betsy arrange the cups and saucers on the dining room table, he said, “I always thought it was just people who want to write, like me, who enjoyed analyzing people. But your father is a far better student of human nature than I'll ever be. He likes people better.”

Betsy was delighted and even more delighted later when her father remarked, “That Joe's a nice boy, a fine boy, and he certainly does like my stories.”

A letter came from Julia the next day, and to Mrs. Ray's dismay, she was still without her trunk. Moreover, she had needed it badly for an event which she dramatically described.

Fraulein von Blatz had taken her to a reception given by the Kaiser…no less…for an American who was coming to Berlin in a balloon. His name was Wright.

“I asked Fraulein whether it was perfectly all right for me to go as I was. She said, ‘Of course, of course,' in that vague way of hers. She doesn't care a thing
about clothes and wears a suit and a man's old hat wherever she goes. It doesn't matter, for she's a celebrity, but I'm not—yet.

“We drove clear out to the end of the city to a magnificent estate. Our host was a pompous old officer. He couldn't speak any English and you know my German! But I smiled my most elegant smile.

“Over the garden wall was the field where the Emperor was to greet the balloonist. There were hundreds of troops at attention. The garden was swarming with grand ladies, to some of whom Fraulein introduced me before she disappeared. They wore jewels and trailing dresses and plumed hats and white kid gloves. I didn't even have gloves.

“I began to be conscious of my rags and tatters. In fact, I was fussed. For how could I rise above clothes—as I pride myself on being able to do—when my vocabulary was limited to ‘
Ach, ja, sehr schoen
'? Bettina, you learn languages!

“I fumed and cussed until my sense of humor came to the rescue. Then I began to play with a little girl Margaret's age. (They give such cute curtseys when they are introduced.) She and her sisters, about fourteen and eighteen, were with their governess. Their mother, the Countess von Hetternich, was at the Royal Palace in the Empress' party.

“The youngsters laughed at my German and I tried to help their English. We had lots of fun. The balloonist
broke his propeller or something about fifty miles away, so we all had cakes and coffee and went home.”

Mr. Ray was interested in the balloonist, but Mrs. Ray could think of nothing but Julia's predicament.

“She must have been embarrassed or she wouldn't have told us about it. Ordinarily Julia never thinks about clothes.”

“She thought it was a joke,” said Betsy. “And so do I. Imagine her, after all the trouble you took with her clothes, going to the Kaiser's reception without gloves!”

“Tell your mother that Julia's entrée into Berlin society wasn't half so much of a fiasco as Mr. Wright's,” said Joe, when Betsy told him about it at school.

School activities were getting under way. Philomathians and Zetamathians were approaching the day when newcomers would be asked to choose societies. Last year on this occasion, Dave Hunt had put the Zetamathian banner on the cupola, thereby goading the rival society, the following spring, into painting Philomathian on the roof.

Miss Bangeter gave advance warnings that there would be no more such goings-on.

“The boys who went up there last year were suspended; if anyone tries it again, he will be expelled.”

That settled that, and with roof climbing out of the question, excitement centered on the rushing being given Ralph Maddox.

He was sure to be a Philo, gossip said. He had Philomathian cousins.

“Why, they got him to come to Deep Valley,” Winona explained.

“He's practically a Philo now,” said Joe. “Boy, boy, this cinches the athletics cup!”

Betsy and Tacy hurried off to Tib. “You promised to get him for the Zets, remember?”

“I remember, I remember,” said Tib.

Watching her chance in the Social Room, she gazed up at him naively. “I just have to tell you. We're so thrilled about your coming to Deep Valley. You know, our big football star, Al Larson, graduated. We just needed another football star.”

After that wherever you saw the tall, dark, handsome Maddox, you saw Tib, small, blond, and enchanting, smiling up at him.

“Is he practically a Philo now?” asked Betsy.

“Sure,” said Joe. “Blood is thicker than water.”

“I'll bet you a box of candy Tib gets him for the Zets.”

The next day Tib, standing on tiptoe, pinned a blue ribbon into Maddox's lapel, and Joe brought a big box of candy to the Social Room.

Busy as he was, Joe was mingling more with the high school crowd this year. Betsy was glad, for he had always been something of an outsider. Working after school, he had been unable to take part in athletics,
and until last year he had not had the money for social life.

He had always found time for the Essay Contest, of course, and last year, as a reporter for the
Sun
, he had attended football and basketball games. He had headed the program committee for the Junior-Senior Banquet and had helped to paint that fateful Philomathian on the roof.

These things had drawn him into the current of school life, and it was good for him, Betsy thought, to ride that giddy current. His experiences had matured him, just as different, less sober, experiences had matured Tony. Like Tony, Joe needed a crowd, needed fun, needed to go with a girl who thought high school affairs were important.

When class elections came along, he arranged with Mr. Root to be late getting down to the paper.

“I'm really interested,” he confided to Betsy. “I'd really like to know who's going to steer us through this year of glory. It will be Stan, I suppose?”

Stan Moore had been president through the sophomore and junior years.

“He would be a good one,” Betsy answered. “But some kids think that the offices ought to be passed around.”

“You've been secretary for two years, haven't you?”

“Yes. And I wouldn't accept it again. Last year I thought I wanted it awfully, but now I can see that it
wouldn't be fair. And I'm going to be plenty busy.”

They walked together into the Assembly Room and Betsy took her place on the platform with last year's officers. Stan took charge. Hazel started the election ball to rolling by nominating him.

Stan jumped up. “Thanks very much,” he said, “but I've had this office twice and I think it's time someone else had it.”

Dennie rose. “I want to nominate an outstanding boy and a swell athlete, Dave Hunt.” There was a burst of applause. A voice in the rear of the room cried, “I second the nomination.”

Alice stood up. “I think,” she said, “that we might have a girl president for a change. I have a girl in mind who would be just the one. She's a leading senior and the best girl debater in the state. Hazel Smith.” There was another burst of applause even louder than the first, and again a prompt seconding voice.

“We have two nominations,” Stan said. “Dave Hunt and Hazel Smith. Does anyone else have anything to say?”

To the surprise of the class, Tony pulled himself lazily to his feet. He had always taken even less interest than Joe in school affairs. He didn't make a speech now, but he stood, for long seconds, in silent scrutiny of all the class. It came to Betsy that he was challenging them. He was, she realized, about to make a nomination which, in his opinion, would test them, and
his gaze as much as said that he doubted how well they would come off. That bold, scornful gaze circled the room for a last time, then he drawled in his deep voice, “I nominate Joe Willard,” and sank back into his seat.

There was no applause whatever. When Betsy realized that, it was too late to start any. A confused silence had fallen on the room, broken only by Tacy's, “I second that nomination.”

Joe Willard! He wasn't an athlete. He had never held a class office. No one had ever thought of him in such a connection.

Yet, Betsy thought defensively, he had always been a credit to the school. Among grown-ups in Deep Valley, he was, without doubt, the school's outstanding student. Men and women knew Joe Willard; they admired him and said he would make his mark. And in school, when you came to think of it, who had been a bigger help to his fellow students? He had written of school events in the
Sun
as no one ever had written of them before. And although he hadn't had time for athletics, his three-time victory in the Essay Contest had been, she assured herself doggedly, as good as winning touchdowns any day.