Betsy Was a Junior / Betsy and Joe

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  They went through the big doors, climbed the stairs past their old friend Mercury, so lightly poised that Betsy never quite believed he was made of stone, and paused in the upper hall. Here was the case which held the silver trophy cups for which the school societies, Philomathian and Zetamathian, competed annually—in athletics, in debating, and in essay writing. The Essay Cup made Betsy think of Joe.

  “How will we feel competing against each other this year…when we’re going together,” she wondered.

  He didn’t appear in the Social Room. He seldom came there. Having a job in addition to his school work, he usually reached school with the last gong and hurried away at the end of each session.

  Ralph Maddox appeared, however. The new senior athlete from St. John caused a sensation.

  “He’s beautiful!” cried Winona.

  “He’s ravishing!” cried Hazel Smith.

  “He’s absolutely pulchritudinous!” cried Betsy—all this in hushed voices, of course.

  “Hmm,” said Tib. “I don’t mind getting him for the Zets.”

  Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark washboard curls rising above a classic profile, he looked kin to Mercury out in the hall. He moved a little self-consciously through the buzzing room. Of course, thought Betsy, if you were that handsome you couldn’t help but know it.

  Carney joined the girls just as the gong rang and accompanied them into the Assembly Room.

  “Gosh, I feel superior,” she said, “watching the rest of you start the same old grind!”

  As usual, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib headed for back seats and found three together. Miss Bangeter announced the opening hymn. Boys and girls stood and sang with a will. They sat, with much banging of seats and scraping of feet, and Miss Bangeter read from the Bible.

  She read from the Bible every morning and it was one of the things, Betsy realized, she would remember from high school. She liked the magnificent prose as it rolled from the lips of the principal, who was magnificent herself, in a dark, austere way.

  “I’m sorry for high schools that haven’t Miss Bangeter for principal,” Betsy thought.

  Miss Bangeter read this morning from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.

  “‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.’”

  Betsy was listening dreamily when the familiar words flashed out with sudden meaning.

  “‘When I was a child,’” read Miss Bangeter, “‘I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’”

  Betsy looked across the aisle at Tacy and saw that Tacy was looking at her. She reached for a tablet and a pencil and thought she would write the words down, but she stopped, for she knew she would remember them. They were so apt, so significant, at the beginning of the senior year.

  “I put away childish things.” You didn’t want to, perhaps; but you did. She would have to, and so would Tacy and Tib and all of them.

  Betsy felt a wave of that sadness she had not felt at all last night when she told her diary she felt it. But it was soon dispelled. They went the round of their classes, Carney making derisive remarks.

  Spurred by Julia’s constant references to the need of modern languages out in the Great World, Betsy had registered for German. Her father had been pleased.

  “We have so many Germans in Deep Valley, all over the county, in fact. Lots of them who come into the store can hardly speak English. It’s a language you can really use, Betsy.”

  “That’s right,” Betsy said. “Why, Tib’s father and mother often speak to each other in German. I can talk it with them. And I can talk it with Tib. And I can go to hear sermons at the German churches.”

  “Besides,” said Mrs. Ray, “you can speak it with Julia when she comes home.”

  “And I can teach it to Margaret. Nicht wahr, Margaret?”

  “Say Ja, Button,” Mr. Ray advised.

  “Ja, ja,” said Margaret, full of laughter.

  These fine plans filled Betsy’s mind now as she left Tacy, Tib, and Carney and went alone into the first-year German class. Her classmates were mostly awestruck freshmen. Her teacher was the blond Miss Erickson, who had tried to teach her Latin.

  Tacy and Tib joined her for physics under Mr. Gaston. They knew this subject would be hard and had dodged it in their frivolous junior year.

  They could relax in the civics class, next on the schedule. Miss Clarke, who had taught them Ancient History, Modern History, and United States History, was a girlish, indulgent teacher.

  Last of all came Miss Bangeter’s Shakespeare class.

  Miss Bangeter didn’t teach many subjects. But her senior Shakespeare class was famous. She loved Shakespeare; she had specialized in his works in college. Her class read some of the comedies and tragedies aloud, parts being assigned to the various students.

  Betsy had looked forward to it ever since Julia had taken it two years before, and she welcomed it also for another reason. Joe would be there. Even when they hadn’t been friends, held apart by that curious hostility which, for a time, had stood between them, they had always enjoyed being together in English class.

  He came into the classroom now with that swinging walk which was so much a part of him, and looked around at once for Betsy, who was also looking for him. They smiled at each other.

  As soon as class was dismissed, he came over to her.

  “I have to get down to the Sun,” he said. “But not until I settle something important. When am I going to see you again?”

  Betsy thought quickly. Winona was entertaining the girls Friday night for Carney. Saturday night she was going to the Majestic with Tony.

  “Why don’t you come up Sunday night?” she asked. “Come to lunch. That’s what we call Sunday night supper at our house. I don’t know why, but we do.”

  “Seeing as how it’s lunch and not supper, I’d love to come,” answered Joe. He smiled at Tacy, Tib, and Carney and went out of the room.

  The three girls looked at each other.

  “Well!” said Tacy.

  “About time!” said Tib.

  “Hurray!” cried Carney. “I’m glad it happened before I went to Vassar. Betsy’s going to go with Joe Willard, at last!”

  “Don’t be silly!” Betsy answered, blushing as pink as the pink chambray dress.

  6

  The Senior Class President

  THE PARTY FOR CARNEY 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 b
lack 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?”