Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  When the bobsled turned over, her head was broken off. She was still alive and beautiful, but she didn’t have a head.

  Her father and mother didn’t like the way she looked.

  “You are no child of ours,” they said, and cruelly shut the door in her face.

  Bad boys and girls threw snowballs at her. They laughed at her and chased her.

  Holding her head by its long black ringlets, she ran along the frozen river.

  “Could she see with it?” Tib interrupted.

  “Oh, yes. She could see. She held it up like a lantern.”

  “Could she hear?”

  “Yes. She could hear too. She couldn’t eat though. It wouldn’t have been practical for her to eat.”

  “I should think she’d have starved to death,” said Tib.

  Betsy did not answer.

  Flossie followed the river as far as St. Paul. It met the Mississippi there. She followed it to St. Louis, to Memphis, to New Orleans. Forlorn and outcast she wandered everywhere.

  She shunned towns and cities, for the people in them laughed at her; or worse still, they ran from her in terror. But after dark she liked to look in at the windows of houses where happy families lived.

  Sometimes she saw good things to eat on the tables. Baked beans and brown bread. Or stewed chicken with dumplings. Or pancakes with maple syrup. She looked at them longingly, for she was very hungry.

  She saw children romping beside the hard-coal heaters and husbands kissing their wives.

  Flossie’s heart almost broke when she saw scenes like that. She couldn’t ever get married without a head. She couldn’t have children. In fact, there was nothing Flossie could do. She couldn’t teach school. She couldn’t clerk in a store. She couldn’t do anything but wander.

  So she kept on wandering.

  “Did she wear her fur coat all the time?” Tib wanted to know.

  “Yes,” answered Betsy. “She wore it year in and year out.”

  “It must have been pretty hot in the summer time.”

  “Sweltering. There was one good thing about that coat though. It never got dirty. Wherever she went or whatever she did, it stayed as white as snow.”

  Flossie wandered and wandered, as the story ran on and on. Her adventures were many and excruciatingly sad. At last she hid in a ship and crossed the ocean. When she got off, she was in Greece.

  She was walking along a road there (carrying her head, of course), when she met a handsome youth. He had blond hair and blue eyes and tanned rosy cheeks.

  “He reminds me of Herbert Humphreys,” said Tib.

  “His name,” said Betsy, “was Chauncey.”

  Chauncey did not laugh and jeer at Flossie as other people did. He stopped and asked her kindly what her trouble was.

  “You look like the Winged Victory,” he said.

  She did, too, although she did not have wings.

  Flossie told him her story.

  “Come with me,” said Chauncey.

  Taking her by the hand, he led her to the top of a mountain. They looked down on olive groves and the blue Mediterranean Sea.

  He built a fire of cedar boughs and when smoke began to rise he said a prayer to the gods and goddesses. He was sort of a god himself. He took Flossie’s head by its ringlets and swung it back and forth in the smoke from his fire. Then he clapped it on her swanlike neck, and it fastened there at once. She was just as beautiful as she had been before the bobsled accident. They got married and went to live on the Island of Delos, and they had ten children, five boys and five girls.

  “That’s the end of the story,” said Betsy, closing the tablet.

  “Betsy! It’s wonderful!” cried Tacy.

  “It’s the best story you ever wrote,” said Tib.

  “It’s the best story I ever heard in my life.”

  “That poor Flossie!”

  Tacy jumped to her feet.

  “Betsy,” she said, excitedly, yet earnestly, “your stories ought to be published. I’ve been thinking that for a long time although I never mentioned it before.”

  Betsy looked at Tacy deeply. It was strange, she thought, that Tacy should say that for she had been thinking the very thing herself.

  “They’re just as good as the stories in the Ladies’ Home Journal,” said Tacy. “Don’t you think so, Tib?”

  “Better,” Tib said.

  “How do people get stories published, do you suppose?”

  “I think,” said Betsy, “they just send them to the magazines.”

  “Why don’t you send this one then?”

  “Maybe I will,” said Betsy. Her heart leaped up like a little fish in a bowl. “I haven’t any good paper though.”

  “My sister Mary has some,” said Tacy. “A box of lovely pink stationery. Got it for her birthday. She’d give me some, I think. And since she isn’t at home, I’ll just take it.”

  “You mean … right now?”

  “Right now. We’ll copy that story and get it off.”

  “I’ll print it for you,” cried Tib. Tib was famous for her printing.

  Tacy seized her coat and overshoes and ran out of the house. Tib opened the bookcase desk and spread Betsy’s tablet on it. She took Betsy’s pencil out to the kitchen and sharpened it to an exquisite point. Betsy waited, feeling queer inside.

  Tacy came back breathless with the pink stationery.

  “I didn’t dare take more than one sheet. Do you think you can get the story on, Tib?”

  “I think so,” said Tib. “I’ll print small.”

  She set to work with painstaking care. While she labored, Betsy and Tacy made plans.

  “Betsy,” said Tacy solemnly, “you’re going to be famous after that story is published.”

  “How much do you suppose I’ll be paid for it?” Betsy asked.

  “Oh, probably a hundred dollars.”

  “What shall we spend it for?”

  “Let’s see! What!”

  They decided to buy silk dresses with hats to match. A blue one for Tacy (because she had red hair). A pink one for Betsy and a yellow one for Tib.

  “We’ll wear them to Mrs. Poppy’s party,” said Betsy.

  “We’ll wear them to the next matinee Winona takes us to. They’ll look fine in a box,” Tacy said.

  “See here,” said Tib, sounding worried. “It’s going to be hard to squeeze this story on.”

  “Oh, you can squeeze it on,” said Betsy.

  “I’ll have to print awfully small.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Tacy. “They’ll be so anxious to know how that story’s coming out that they’ll use a microscope on it, if they have to.”

  So Tib persisted, and by printing very, very, very small she got all the story on the sheet of pink stationery, down to the last word.

  “I saw the Lord’s Prayer printed on a dime one time,” said Betsy. “It looked a good deal like that.”

  They put the pink stationery into an envelope and addressed it to the Ladies’ Home Journal, Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa. Betsy found a stamp and stuck it on.

  “I’ll put it in the mailbox on my way home,” said Tib, sighing with content.

  They all sat on the sofa then, while the sky, behind brown tree trunks, took on the tint of mother-of-pearl, matching the tint of the snow. They planned about the silk dresses and hats.

  Betsy and Tacy and Tib were twelve years old now, and when they made plans like that they didn’t quite believe them. But they liked to make them anyhow.

  10

  Christmas Shopping

  OW LONG does it take a letter to go to Philadelphia?” Betsy asked her father that night at supper.

  “Two or three days,” he replied.

  “Whom do you know in Philadelphia?” asked Julia, stressing the “whom.”

  “Never mind,” said Betsy. “Someone important.”

  “The King of Spain maybe,” said her father. He was teasing. For when Betsy and Tacy and Tib were only ten years old and didn’t
know any better, they had written a letter to the King of Spain. They had received an answer, too.

  Betsy laughed at her father’s joke, but underneath the table she was counting on her fingers.

  Three days for the story to go, a day for the editor to read it, three days for his letter and the hundred dollar bill to return.

  The transaction could be completed in a week, she told Tacy and Tib next day. But a week passed, and another, without any word about Flossie.

  Betsy was back in school, of course. At the end of the second week, school closed for the Christmas vacation. That meant that Betsy, Tacy, and Tib had an important engagement. For years on the first day of Christmas vacation they had gone shopping together.

  “Let’s take Winona this year,” Tib suggested.

  Winona had come to be quite a friend of theirs. They often stopped after school to slide down her terrace, a particularly steep and hazardous one, or to play show in her dining room. Winona loved to play show; she was always the villainess.

  “I’d like to take her,” said Tacy. “She’d be pretty surprised, I guess, at the way we shop.”

  “She certainly would be,” said Betsy, and all of them laughed.

  “You see,” Betsy explained to Winona when they invited her, “we usually make our Christmas presents, or else our mothers buy them for us … the ones we give away, I mean.”

  “Then why do you go shopping?” Winona asked.

  “We go shopping to shop,” said Tacy.

  The three of them smiled. Winona looked mystified.

  “We’ve done it the same way ever since we were children,” said Betsy. “We always take ten cents apiece, and we always buy just the same things.”

  “What do you buy?”

  “You’ll see,” said Betsy, “if you want to come along.”

  They liked to tease Winona because she was such a tease herself.

  Winona’s black eyes snapped. “I’ll come,” she said.

  They made plans to meet the next day at a quarter after two. Betsy didn’t want to leave home until the mail came. (She and Tacy and Tib were watching every mail for her hundred dollars.)

  Every day they changed their minds about how they would spend it. First they had decided on the silk dresses and hats. Then they changed to a Shetland pony, and now it was a trip to Niagara Falls.

  They were planning the trip to the Falls with great enthusiasm when Mr. Goode, the postman, came into sight.

  They swooped down upon him, three abreast. (They had been waiting on Betsy’s hitching block.)

  “I haven’t a blessed thing for any of you,” he said. “What are you looking for, anyway? Another letter from a king?”

  He was like Betsy’s father; he couldn’t forget that letter from the King of Spain.

  “This is a business letter, Mr. Goode,” Betsy said.

  “Money in it, too,” said Tib. “A hundred dollars, we expect.”

  “I’ll be careful with it when it comes,” said Mr. Goode.

  They hurried down to call for Winona, running and sliding in the icy street.

  Winona was waiting in front of her house wearing a crimson coat and hat. She looked like a rakish cardinal against the snow.

  “Does it matter,” she asked, swinging her pocket book, “if I take more than ten cents?”

  “Of course it matters. It isn’t allowed.” Betsy, Tacy, and Tib were noisily indignant.

  “That’s all I’ve got anyway,” Winona grinned. “Just asked for fun.”

  “You go way back and sit down,” Tacy said.

  They started off downtown.

  The fluffy white drifts had packed into hard ramparts guarding the sidewalks. The four had to keep to the sidewalks after they passed Lincoln Park. The streets were crowded with sleighs and cutters. Chiming bells added to the Christmassy feeling in the air.

  Front Street was very Christmassy. Evergreen boughs and holly wreaths, red bells and mistletoe sprays surrounded displays of tempting merchandise in all the store windows. In one window a life-sized Santa Claus with a brimming pack on his back was halfway into a papier-mâché chimney.

  “Look here!” said Winona, stopping to admire. “This will tickle the little kids.”

  “The little kids?”

  “The ones that believe in Santa Claus.”

  “Gee whiz!” said Betsy. “I didn’t think we were little kids any more. I thought we were twelve years old; didn’t you, Tacy?”

  “I was under that impression,” said Tacy.

  “Why, we are! What do you mean?” asked Tib.

  Winona knew what they meant.

  “Are you trying to tell me,” she asked, “that you believe in Santa Claus?”

  “Certainly, we do!”

  “Well, of all …” began Winona. She stopped, words failing her, and looked at them with a scorn which changed to suspicion as she viewed their broadly smiling faces.

  “I expect to believe in Santa Claus when I’m in high school,” said Tacy.

  “I expect to believe in him when I’m grown up and married,” said Betsy. “I hear him on the roof every year; don’t you, Tacy?”

  “Sure I do. And I’ve seen the reindeer go past the bedroom window, lots of times.”

  “You see,” explained Tib, “we’ve made an agreement about him. We’ve crossed our hearts and even signed a paper.”

  “You three take the cake!” said Winona. “All right. I believe in him too.”

  They came to Cook’s Book Store.

  “We start here,” said Betsy.

  “Is that where we spend our dimes?” asked Winona.

  “Mercy, no! We don’t spend them for hours yet. We just shop. Choose a present.”

  “I know what I’m going to choose,” said Betsy. “Little Men. I got Little Women last year.”

  They went in and said hello to Mr. Cook. His bright eyes looked out sharply under his silky toupee.

  “You never pass me up, do you?” he said. He said it good naturedly though.

  “This year we brought Winona Root. She’s another customer for you, Mr. Cook,” said Tib.

  “Customer!” said Mr. Cook. “Customer! Oh well, look around.”

  They looked around. They looked around thoroughly. They read snatches in the Christmas books. They studied the directions on all the games. Tacy chose a pencil set, and Tib chose colored crayons.

  “Choose! Go ahead and choose! Choose whatever you like,” they urged Winona hospitably.

  Winona chose a book about Indians.

  They went next door to the harness and saddle maker’s shop. There wasn’t much to choose here, just whips and buggy robes. Getting into the spirit of the game, Winona cracked a dozen whips before she chose one. Betsy and Tacy chose robes, with landscapes printed on them.

  There was a tall wooden horse standing in the window. It was almost seven feet tall, dapple gray, with flashing glass eyes and springy mane and tail. Every year the harness and saddle maker let Tib sit on the horse.

  He looked at her sadly now as she put her foot in a stirrup and swung nimbly upward.

  “If the horseless carriages keep coming to town, I’ll have to take that fellow down,” he said. That gave Tib an idea.

  “I know what I’ll choose then,” she cried. “I’ll choose this horse. I’ll put him up in our back yard and all of us can ride him.”

  “Tib! What fun!”

  “I wish I’d thought to choose him.”

  “It’s a spiffy idea, Tib!” Betsy cried.

  Winona had an idea even spiffier.

  “Let’s go choose horseless carriages,” she suggested nonchalantly. “The hardware-store man sells them.”

  For a moment Betsy, Tacy, and Tib were dazzled by this brilliant plan. Then Tib scrambled down from the horse. Saying good-by to the melancholy harness and saddle maker, they raced to the hardware store.

  Sure enough, there was a horseless carriage on display there. They inspected it from every angle, and the curly-haired hardware-store man let t
hem sit in it for awhile. He was very obliging. All four of them chose it, and while they were in the store they looked at skates and bicycles.

  “I could use a new sled,” said Winona.

  So they looked at sleds too.

  At the Lion Department store they shopped even more extensively. There were many departments, and they visited them all. The busy clerks paid little attention to them. They wandered happily about.

  They chose rhinestone side combs, jeweled hat pins, gay pompadour pouffs. They chose fluffy collars and belts and pocket books. They chose black lace stockings and taffeta petticoats and embroidered corset covers.

  It was hard to tear themselves away but they did so at last. They went to the drug store where they sniffed assiduously. They sniffed every kind of perfume in the store before they chose, finally, rose and lilac and violet, and new-mown hay.

  “I want new-mown hay because it’s the kind Mrs. Poppy uses,” Betsy said.

  “Mrs. Poppy!” exclaimed Tacy. “That reminds me of her party. We’d better go to the jewelry store and choose some jewels.”

  “Goodness, yes!” said Betsy. “I need a diamond ring to wear to that party.”

  They hurried to the jewelry store. The clerks there weren’t very helpful, however. They wouldn’t let them try on diamond rings, or necklaces, or bracelets. They wouldn’t even let them handle the fat gold watches, with doves engraved on the sides, which looked so fashionable pinned to a shirtwaist.

  “They act this way every year,” said Betsy to Winona. “Let’s go to the toy shop. That’s the nicest, anyhow.”

  The toy shop was what they had all been waiting for. They had been holding it off in order to have it still ahead of them. But the time for it had come at last.

  At the toy shop it was difficult to choose. In blissful indecision they circled the table of dolls. Yellow-haired dolls with blue dresses, black-haired dolls with pink dresses, baby dolls, boy dolls, black dolls.

  Betsy, Tacy, Tib, and Winona had stopped playing with dolls, except on days when they were sick, perhaps, or when stormy weather kept them indoors. Yet choosing dolls was the most fun of all. They liked the dolls’ appurtenances too.