Betsy and the Great World / Betsy's Wedding Read online

  As usual at this hour the pianist with whose tireless fingers Betsy was all too familiar…the cornetist…the tenor all began to practise. The soprano struck a preliminary chord.

  “Oh, not Madame Butterfly!” Betsy groaned. “Please! Not tonight!”

  It wasn’t Butterfly. The soprano began to sing a song so startlingly familiar that Betsy sat upright.

  “From the land of the Sky-blue Water

  They brought a captive maid…”

  “Why, that’s astonishing!” Betsy cried. She listened longingly. She could not tell whether the words were in English or German, but the tune was unmistakable. It was home itself put into song.

  When Betsy went down to supper that night, she took along her German-English Dictionary. She slipped into her seat with the usual “Guten Abend,” and waited for a lull in the mingled German, French, Russian, Bulgarian, and Italian. Then she spoke boldly.

  “Who,” she asked in laborious German, “who sings the song about the sky-blue water?” She repeated Wasser so many times that the waitress hurried to bring her a glassful, and everyone else looked bewildered.

  Betsy began to sing it. “From the land of the Sky-blue Water…”

  She caroled as though she were standing beside the piano at home.

  The girl with the crimped hair began to smile. She had a monkeyish, cute little face. She leaned excitedly across the table. “Me,” she said. “I sing dat.”

  Betsy put a careful finger on her breast. “I,” she proclaimed, “I come from there…from the land of the sky-blue water.”

  “Was? Was sagen Sie?”

  She tried to say it in German but the Bulgarians, the Japanese, the Italian, the little German did not understand. Betsy had an inspiration.

  “Minnehaha Falls,” she said loudly. “I come from Minnehaha Falls.”

  She might have been back on the Columbic. “Minne-ha-ha,” everyone repeated, with long “ah-h-hs” of interest, and Fräulein Minnie hurried up.

  “Fräulein Ray. You have seen de Minnehaha Falls?”

  Poetry, Betsy thought, was wonderful! Longfellow was henceforth her favorite poet.

  “I live there,” she proclaimed. If they thought she went over the falls in a barrel every day, who cared?

  She turned back to the small prima donna.

  “Where…?” asked Betsy, speaking in English slowly, “where…did you learn that song?”

  The girl threw up her hands in laughing mystification, and the table broke into a babble of helpfulness. In German, in French, in Italian, and in what Betsy thought was Bulgarian or Russian, everyone said something.

  The soprano called Fräulein Minnie and Betsy repeated her question. Fräulein Minnie turned it into German. The girl smiled and answered in German which Fräulein Minnie turned into English.

  “After supper she vill explain. Vill you come to her room, please?”

  The singer’s room, too, looked out at the picture-book house. A grand piano stood in one corner and operatic scores and sheet music were scattered about. She was waiting with a calling card. “Fräulein Matilda Dienemann,” it said. Betsy put her fingers to her breast again. “Betsy Ray.”

  Fräulein Dienemann went to the piano and took up a sheet of music. Before she put it in Betsy’s hand, Betsy understood. Written across the title page in a black angular hand was the name—Minerva Surprise.

  Fräulein Dienemann plunged into explanation, but Betsy got more from intuition than from the mixture of German and broken English. Miss Surprise had left this song behind, and Hanni had given it to Fräulein Dienemann.

  “It was Miss Surprise who sent me here. She is a friend of my older sister. My sister is a singer, too.” The two girls sat down beside each other on the couch, passing the German dictionary back and forth. A little French helped. In five minutes they were Tilda and Betsy to each other.

  Tilda wasn’t German, after all. She was Swiss. She showed Betsy a picture of a white stone house in St. Gallen, and photographs of her father and mother.

  Holding her new-found friend tightly by the hand, Betsy led her upstairs to her own family photographs. Tilda was enthralled with Julia in her costumes as Cherubino and Elvira.

  Betsy waved to the big desk. “I write stories,” she declared. She could not understand Tilda’s answer, but she understood her warm delight.

  Hanni came in to turn back Betsy’s bed and a smile spread over her broad dark face when she saw the girls together.

  Presently Tilda took Betsy by the hand and they went back to Tilda’s room. She made tea on an alcohol lamp, and brought out rolls and sausage and kuchen.

  Tilda studied singing at the Conservatory, she said. She took dramatic lessons, too. But there would be no school tomorrow; it was Shrove Tuesday. Could they spend the last day of Carnival together?

  They could and did, and like the rest of Munich they were childishly merry. There was a parade with bands and flower-trimmed floats and carriages full of costumed people. Tilda and Betsy bought bags and bags of confetti and pelted passers-by.

  They saw Fräulein Minnie, a happy, dumpy shepherdess, strolling home in the twilight. They saw even Hanni, who so seldom had a holiday. Everyone came out on the last day of Carnival, Tilda said.

  Hanni wasn’t in costume except for the confetti clinging to her hat and coat, but her face was shining with excitement and pleasure. She was with a soldier.

  “He’s her sweetheart,” Tilda told Betsy. “But they can’t afford to get married.”

  11

  Betsy Takes a Bath

  ONE MORNING FRÄULEIN MINNIE came into Betsy’s room on some domestic errand, and Betsy closed the door and leaned against it.

  “Fräulein Minnie,” she said, “here…at the Pension Geiger…is there a bathroom?”

  Fräulein Minnie, looking startled, nodded.

  “A real, echte bathroom with a tub?”

  “Sure, Fräulein! A beautiful toob.”

  “Then when, please,” asked Betsy, “may I have a bath?”

  Fräulein Minnie moved hurriedly toward the door. “Soon, gnädiges Fräulein.”

  “But I’d like one today,” Betsy persisted, not yielding her strategic position.

  “Ach, Himmel!” Fräulein Minnie looked around with a hunted expression. She was perspiring. “Bitte, Fräulein, not today! But it won’t be long, I promise. Some day…”

  “Some day! I can have a bath some day!” Betsy told Tilda that afternoon.

  Their friendship had progressed by leaps and bounds. They spent their evenings in each other’s room, usually in Tilda’s because of the piano. She sang Betsy arias from the operas in which she had roles—Madame Butterfly, La Bohème, Tales of Hoffman—and Betsy taught her American popular songs.

  “Peg off my hear-r-rt, I loff you…” Tilda sang.

  They tried on each other’s hats and looked into each other’s books. Tilda had Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw—but all in German.

  She told Betsy about an artist who was in love with her. Wishing to be rid of him painlessly, she had invented a rich American fiancé. Betsy must tell her about rich Americans so she could convince August.

  “Wonderful!” cried Betsy. “Say he comes from Pittsburgh.”

  “Pitts-burgh? Warum? Why?”

  “Oh, the best millionaires do! Now, shall he be young and dashing or old and fatherly?”

  Old and fatherly, Tilda decided when she understood. August was so jealous. “All gentlemens is jealous,” she informed Betsy sagely.

  And now, in turn, armed with the German-English dictionary and a French-English dictionary, Betsy brought the problem of her bath to Tilda.

  At first Tilda was as horrified as Fräulein Minnie. “Aber es ist unmöglich. Impossible,” she said.

  Betsy leafed grimly through the dictionary. She stood up straight and slapped her chest.

  “Nothing is impossible!” she declared grandilo-quently, and Tilda burst into laughter.

  “Amerikanische!” she cried
.

  She explained, while the books flew back and forth, that there really was a bathroom in the pension. There really was a tub. But it was downstairs in the officers’ quarters. At least it was near their quarters.

  “Is it their tub?” Betsy asked.

  No, Tilda conceded, it was everybody’s tub. But the officers didn’t like anyone else to use it.

  “Why shouldn’t we all use it if it belongs to us all?”

  “Oh, Betsy! Offiziere!” Tilda rolled expressive eyes. Springing up, she gave an imitation of an officer. She twisted mustaches, threw back a cape, put her hand on an imaginary sword.

  “Germany is theirs,” she said. “If Frau Geiger let you use their tub and they found out…!” Tilda drew the sword and ran it across her neck.

  She spoke in German, but Betsy understood. She had noticed how important officers were in Germany. Germans stepped off the sidewalk to let an officer pass. Betsy didn’t; and she heartily snubbed the young lieutenant who always ogled her when they passed in the halls.

  “If it isn’t their tub,” she said stubbornly, “I’m going to have a bath.”

  “Very vell,” said Tilda. “I vill speak to Frau Geiger. I vill tell her du bist Amerikanische und crazy. For you a yug off vater ist not enough.”

  “Nein!” cried Betsy. “Must be a toob for the crazy Amerikanisches Fräulein.”

  Wiping away tears of laughter, they ran down to the office.

  Frau Geiger’s smile vanished when Tilda explained. There was excited rebuttal and surrebuttal. Betsy didn’t understand a word, but Tilda told her at last that Frau Geiger had promised to arrange things. When the officers went out, and she could be sure they would be gone for several hours, she would call Betsy.

  “Then you must take your bath, schnell, schnell!”

  “Like lightning!” Betsy agreed.

  For several days she awaited a summons, but the officers seemed to be of most domestic habits. The days, however, passed quickly; Betsy’s life was transformed because of Tilda.

  To be sure, she was doing just what she had done before. She wrote in the morning and, after the noon dinner, went out to learn Munich. But what a difference, now that she had a friend!

  Almost every day, she and Tilda met for coffee. Betsy learned what the waitress meant when she offered her steaming pitchers.

  Dunkel meant “dark,” and produced a brunette fluid. Hell meant “light,” and resulted in an insipid pallor. Betsy learned to say, “Mitte, bitte.” Then equal amounts of coffee and hot milk poured into her cup.

  Choosing a cake from the rack of kuchen was a mouthwatering task, especially in the confectioners’ shops, which were frequented chiefly by plump women.

  Betsy and Tilda drank their coffee in all sorts of places. Austere resorts where orchestras played classical music. Smoke-filled rooms where chess games competed with racks full of German periodicals…sometimes, the Paris edition of the Herald. Humbler hostelries; one was very cheerful with geraniums and a parrot that cried, “Hoch!” Here they saw coachmen, off duty, playing cards, and fat old women knitting.

  One coffee house was popular with students. These proved to be the youths with colored caps. The colors denoted their clubs, Tilda explained, and their faces were scarred from dueling. That seemed to hold the place in German universities that football did at home!

  The Café Stephanie was a haven of Bohemians.

  “Why,” Betsy asked Tilda, “do women have to cut their hair in order to paint and men have to let theirs grow?” For several women had their hair cut short, and others wore English bobs, like children, while the men affected flowing locks.

  There were authors surrounded with inkpots and papers, writing busily. One man would pause, now and then, and rumple his bushy hair and stare wildly about and strike his brow. Betsy knew he was fishing for a word. She longed to lean over, fraternally, and suggest one.

  “Oh, Tilda!” she cried. “Let’s come here again! And I’ll bring ‘Meet Miss So and So,’ and write.”

  Tilda agreed. But only in the daytime, she warned, and here Betsy must never come alone!

  Betsy laughed. “Don’t worry about me! I could never be a Bohemian.”

  She was too clean, and too systematic, and too orthodox, she wrote in the home diary-letter. “I can see a woman smoking now without batting an eyelash, but I wouldn’t smoke myself. I like to get the atmosphere, though…for my writing.”

  She and Tilda always wandered a bit before starting home. There was no time for real sight-seeing; they planned to do that on Saturdays and Sundays which were Tilda’s free days. But they patronized the flower sellers who stood on almost every corner. (Their baskets made little gardens in the February sun.) And they loitered near the Royal Palace hoping for a glimpse of the King and Queen, or even a princess. There were three princesses, all very plain, Tilda said. Plain or not, Betsy wanted to see one.

  Sometimes there were errands. Tilda took Betsy to a shop where she could have her films developed. It was strange to see those breeze-blown snapshots from the Columbic.

  “Which one is Mr. O’Farrell?” Tilda wanted to know.

  She needed shoes, and the shoe shop fascinated Betsy. The owner’s wife fitted Tilda. A grown daughter was fitting a man in the adjoining chair. A yellow-haired child, intent of face, buttoned and unbuttoned the shoes. The only one at leisure was the husband and father who strolled about impressively.

  “Not much like my father and his shoe store!” Betsy thought.

  Tilda always knew a good way home. Perhaps it would be through the Old City, those narrow streets around the Frauenkirche with tall, thin, high-peaked houses. On the nearby Marienplatz was the fourteenth-century Town Hall.

  They looked in at the Hofbrau Haus, the Royal Brewing House. In this famous hostelry there was always a cheerful clatter. Maids were moving briskly about with racks of pretzels while men, women, and even children sat comfortably drinking beer.

  München, Tilda told Betsy, strolling home along the Isar which reflected the first lights of evening, München was called the City of Art and Beer.

  “It is gemütlich, München,” she said, and Betsy was astonished to find that she agreed. Yes, knowing Tilda made a difference, and nowhere was this more apparent than at the pension table.

  There was still that mixture of strange tongues, only now Betsy was trying to contribute to the conversation, and her efforts caused endless merriment. Again and again the company summoned Fräulein Minnie.

  “Fräulein Minnie, was heisst…?”

  Slowly Betsy was straightening out the people. The Bulgarians were University students. There were several Austrians: a poet, the tenor, the indefatigable pianist. The Japanese girl studied composition at Tilda’s Conservatory. The long-haired artist was the only German. The Italian girl was an artist, too.

  She put a question to Betsy, via the poet who understood Italian and put it to Tilda in German who put it to Betsy in their peculiar patois.

  There was an American boy at her studio, and he said continually, “Oh, how peach!” They had a pretty model, and he said, “She is peach.” And someone sketched an old woman and when he looked at the picture he said, “It is peach.” What, the Italian artist demanded, was “peach”?

  “Here,” said Betsy. “This is peach.” And she took a spoonful of the ever-present compote. She chuckled to herself, remembering Maida who had asked a similar question.

  So uproarious was the conversation these days that even the arrogant girl at the small table listened. Betsy kept intending to ask Tilda who she was. But she had not yet remembered to put the question, when one day at dinner the girl spoke.

  Betsy had been to the Old Pinakothek, looking at Greek vases. She was trying to say that one beauty, covered with fanciful figures, had made her think of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

  “You know. By Keats. It must have been translated into German. ‘Beauty is truth, truth, beauty…’”

  No one understood. And in the bewildered silence, th
e girl spoke.

  “I don’t know whether that has been translated or not,” she said in flawless and beautifully articulated English. She gave the title in German, and there was instant recognition of the poem from Tilda, who nodded curt thanks. Betsy, too, expressed her thanks, and after the meal she paused by the tall girl’s table.

  “I didn’t realize that you spoke English.”

  The girl smiled, and her smile made her look younger and sweeter. “I am only half German,” she said. “My mother is English. Won’t you sit down?”

  Betsy complied gladly. “I’ve been wishing I knew you. Are you studying in Munich?”

  “Yes. The piano, but I am only an amateur. I live with my parents. I’ve just come to stay with them after…a long time away. You know my mother, perhaps. She eats here the days I don’t come.”

  Betsy was too taken aback to reply. That dingy woman and this exquisite girl!

  “We never come together because we cannot leave my father. He is ill.” For no reason that Betsy could see, the girl flushed. “My name is Helena von Wandersee.”

  “I’m Betsy Ray. Would you like to go for a walk?”

  “That would be very pleasant.”

  But in spite of her perfect English, Helena wasn’t easy to get acquainted with. She was excessively formal. She was trying to be friendly, though. When Betsy began to call her Helena, she reciprocated with a timid Betsy.

  Like Betsy, she was just getting to know Munich. That long time away from her parents had covered not months but years. She had been living with cousins in some distant place.

  “I can’t get used to so much freedom,” she confided. “My cousins and I never went out alone. If my aunt could not go, a maid took us…or a governess. It is very strange to go about like this.”

  They looked at the shop windows which were showing the spring styles.