Betsy and the Great World / Betsy's Wedding Page 20

  But now there was a weight on Betsy’s heart. She wasn’t so carefree any more. He had told her that if he stayed and fell more in love with her, he would never get over it. Was she doing wrong to keep him with her? She had written her mother all about it, but there wasn’t time for an answer that would help.

  Sometimes he was very unhappy. When he asked her if she loved him and she had to say no, he flared up: “Oh, you Americans! You can’t feel! You’re like ice!”

  But Betsy did feel. She felt like a murderess.

  “I think you ought to go away,” she would say. “I really do.” But then she would begin to cry, and he would take her in his arms and beg her to forgive him.

  The moon came, and poured its golden-silvery light over the pearly buildings and along the canals of Venice, but Betsy didn’t change her mind. And the weeks were slipping by fast. They went to the Accademia and looked at the Titians, the Tintorettos, the Bellinis. They went to the Church of San Zaccaria, because her favorite picture was Bellini’s “Madonna with Saints.”

  “You and Ruskin!” he said. Ruskin, it seemed, had called that one of the two most beautiful pictures in Venice.

  “Me and Ruskin! I must write that to Tilda.”

  One morning the King and Queen came to Venice. Betsy was awakened by cannons which announced the arrival of their train. She dressed hurriedly, and after a bite of breakfast ran over to the Santa Maria della Salute with Marco to see their boat go past.

  Flags and banners were hung out of the windows of the palaces along the Grand Canal. But it was drizzling and the crowd was so thick that Betsy could hardly see Victor Emmanuel and Elena through the dripping forest of umbrellas.

  “Won’t they appear again? I want to get a good look at them.”

  “They’ll come out on the balcony of the Palace tomorrow night,” Marco answered. “I’ll take you, unless it looks as though there is going to be trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “I think the monarchy is tottering,” he answered. “The Socialists are very strong; there may be riots.”

  But there were no rumors of riots the next day, and although by nightfall it was raining harder than ever, Betsy and Marco went to the Palace. The square in front was a sea of bobbing umbrellas and filled with a roar of voices.

  Betsy doubted that royalty would really appear in such a downpour, but suddenly they were there above her, the little king and the tall, bejeweled queen. They seemed extremely nervous, and bowed hastily to the cheering throngs as though they were anxious to retreat into the room behind them.

  The crowd certainly seemed loyal and enthusiastic. A woman beside Betsy almost lost her head with admiration. She kept tugging at Betsy’s arm and shouting, “Ah, signorina! La regina!” But there were ominous lines of soldiers and armed police guarding the square.

  A few days later, when the sun was shining again, they went to Chioggia. By special request Betsy wore the red jacket. Chioggia, which guarded the entrance to Venice, had been a most important place in the great days of the past, Marco said. Now it was a fishing town, remarkable only for its picturesqueness.

  Betsy and Marco took a walk and admired the forests of rigging. They took pictures, surrounded all the time by an interested, amused, sympathetic, and chattering audience of children.

  “Like in Sonneberg,” Betsy said. Marco was always ready to listen to her tales of Germany.

  They ate dinner in a little café with a view of the sea. Their friends the children stood outside in the twilight and Marco and Betsy tossed them sweets. They were handsome little ragamuffins. All Italians were handsome, Betsy thought, glancing at Marco.

  They were happy all day, but on the boat ride home they grew quiet. Up in the stern men were singing strange, fantastic songs. They kept passing quiet groups of fishermen, and by and by the full moon came out.

  “My second moon in Venice!” Betsy said.

  “Oh, Betta!” Marco answered. “Aren’t you going to change your mind? How can I bear it after you go?”

  “And how can I bear to go?” thought Betsy, but she didn’t say it. She only pressed back tears and shook her head.

  It was almost time to leave Venice now. Marco helped her buy her presents—mosaics, laces, leather-work, beads of Venetian glass. They bought a special print of St. Mark’s Square for Betsy.

  They went to Thomas Cook’s and planned her trip. She was joining the Wilsons in Lucerne. They cashed her father’s travel check and shipped her trunk to London. Betsy wondered how she had ever managed to leave Munich without Marco.

  He went with her while she said good-by to Venice. Venezia! She would always remember the varying colors of the sky and water; the time-worn marble palaces with their barred windows and their wave-washed steps and the colored hitching posts in front for gondolas; the little courts and alleys with the swarms of gesticulating people; sunsets in the Giudecca; the Lido with its golden beach and turquoise sea. But, above all, the Square: St. Mark’s and the Doge’s Palace, the bric-a-brac shops under the colonnades, the streams of people, the little outdoor tables, and the fat glossy pigeons circling down.

  On her last afternoon, Betsy got into her kimono, wadded up her hair, and approached her packing. Every other moment Marco knocked and offered to help, but he was refused. He asked her to open the door a crack and handed in some cherries. He threw flowers through the window.

  About six o’clock she freshened up and slipped into the white and green dress for dinner. Afterward she took the red blazer and she and Marco went down to the Giudecca.

  They had planned to go to the Square again, but somehow they didn’t want to. They watched a last sunset over the crazy quilt of water craft, and then he got a gondola. In the darkness on the Grand Canal, people were singing as before, everything from Il Trovatore to “Funiculi Funicula.” But tonight Marco and Betsy didn’t sing. They floated silently, sadly, her hand in his.

  In the morning Betsy got up early and finished packing. Then she walked toward Marco’s room to meet him. It was misty. The canals were pale, but no paler than Marco, although he smiled his eager, vivid smile when he saw her.

  The little aunts gave Betsy a lunch. (They had printed—or Marco had—Arrivederci on the eggs.) After breakfast, which neither Marco nor Betsy ate, she said good-by to the little aunts and a gondola carried them heartlessly through the mist to the station.

  Marco helped her buy her ticket. He took her to her compartment. He was behaving cheerfully, but his eyes, Betsy thought, were liked burned holes in a blanket. Yet she didn’t think he felt any worse than she did. How could she bear to go out into the world and leave this love, this thoughtfulness, this protection? Loneliness flooded over her and she began to cry.

  “Maybe I do love you,” she said.

  “Don’t say it unless you do. I couldn’t bear it if you changed your mind.”

  “Then I won’t say it,” she answered. “But oh, Marco! I’ll never forget you!”

  He kissed her, and she clung to him, while whistles blew and bells rang. The train was moving when he jumped off.

  It crossed the bridge and reached the mainland. It ran through meadows full of poppies like the ones at Fusina. It ran past white plastered houses with flapping washlines, olive orchards, vineyards. Betsy was still crying.

  The bad thing about traveling, she thought, was leaving people you got to like—or love. Maida, Mr. O’Farrell, Tilda, Helena—now Marco.

  She certainly loved Marco, but not—she still believed, in spite of her tears—the way she ought to love him if she were going to marry him.

  Maybe she would have if it weren’t for Joe. She didn’t know.

  19

  Betsy Writes a Letter

  “ONZE RUE SCRIBE,” said Betsy, smiling up at the little old driver who was perched jauntily on the seat of his horse-drawn hack. She was standing in front of the Grand Hotel Pension in the Latin Quarter, where she and the Wilsons had lived for the past two weeks, and the address she now gave in her best French was t
hat of the American Express Company office.

  “Pardon, mademoiselle, je ne comprends pas,” the driver answered politely.

  Oh, no, not again! Her next-to-last day in Paris, and she still couldn’t make herself understood!

  “Onze Rue Scribe,” Betsy repeated in a loud voice.

  “Mademoiselle?” He threw out his hands in apologetic bewilderment.

  Betsy drew a deep breath.

  “Onze Rue…” But she knew from experience that this could go on for hours. She’d better give up. Pulling from her purse the little notebook she always carried to jot down a bit of description or an idea for a story, she printed the address in large letters and handed it up.

  “Ah!” Relief flooded the driver’s face. In a torrent of words he begged the mademoiselle’s pardon a thousand times for having misunderstood. If she would do him the honor of entering his humble conveyance, they would set forth immediately for Onze Rue Scribe, the home of the so-distinguished American Express Company—unless perhaps the mademoiselle would first like a little drive about Paris?

  Betsy climbed to the back seat of the hack and vigorously nodded her assent. Patient Miss Wilson wouldn’t mind waiting a little longer, and Betsy had wanted to drive through the city and take what might be her last look at it—alone.

  But as the sturdy old horse began to move at a gentle clip-clop through the twisted streets of the left bank, she sank into a brown study. The last month had been a disappointment. Ready to leave for London, which would be practically home, she knew she couldn’t count Paris as one of the places she had lived in, or Switzerland either.

  Of course, in Switzerland she had been bitterly unhappy. The nagging homesickness had returned, mixed with loneliness for Marco. There had been letters and telegrams from him at every stopping place. Sometimes, falling asleep in strange hotels, she had thought again that she was mistaken, that she did love him after all. There was every reason in the world why she should, and it would be so easy to write and tell him so! She had imagined his overflowing happiness on receiving her letter. He would probably join her, she had thought; they would see Paris together, she would give up London and they would go home to be married. But there, somehow, her imagination had always rebelled. Something inside you told you when you didn’t love a person, just as…something…told you when you did, even though he was thousands of miles away and you could hardly bear to think about him because you’d probably lost him.

  Betsy and the Wilsons had left Switzerland behind on the twenty-eighth of June. She remembered how, reading in a newspaper about the murder of an Austrian archduke in the Balkan town of Sarajevo, she had amused herself as the train sped through the night by plotting a romantic novel full of titled corpses, spies, and intrigue.

  Then, as she tried to sleep in a jiggling upper berth, she had thought about Marco and Joe—or rather, she had suddenly ceased to think about Marco and had begun to think about Joe, with persistent, painful intensity. Venice was fading away—home was coming closer—and how she wished that Joe were waiting for her there!

  But it was over a year since she and Joe had written to each other. Betsy wished that night that she had written him about Julia’s wedding; she wished that she had written him about her trip to Europe, or from the Columbic to explain not having seen him in Boston. Now she had no excuse at all for writing, and she couldn’t write without one. She was too proud for that.

  The next day, her first in Paris, she had slipped out of the drab little Grand Hotel Pension and had walked out in a soft gray morning to the Pont Neuf, one of the bridges spanning the Seine. She wanted to do something the Wilsons certainly would not understand. Neither of them had read The Beloved Vagabond and knew how Paragot, with his world crashing around him, had gone to ask advice of the statue of Henri Quatre on the Pont Neuf…or how the king had nodded and pointed to the Gare de Lyon.

  Betsy didn’t expect Henri Quatre to do the same for her, but she wanted to take a snapshot of him to send to Tacy. And she thought he might, he just might, give her a little hint about how to get in touch with Joe again. He sat on horseback looking out over the Seine, and didn’t even seem to know she was there. But just the same she’d been glad she’d gone. And from that day to this, the sixteenth of July, she’d put the problem stubbornly out of her mind and tried to enjoy Paris.

  Her hack was approaching the Pont Neuf now, jolting along the cobbled streets, lined with open-air bookstalls presided over by old ladies who sat knitting as implacably as Madame Defarge, or by old men as yellow as their oldest manuscripts. As she crossed over the bridge, she leaned out of the hack impulsively and waved to Henri Quatre. Her only Parisian friend! she thought. No, not quite; she had made others, and equally notable ones.

  One was in the Louvre, which they were passing now; her cabby turned to indicate it with a wave of his whip. She would never forget the moment when, down a long avenue of statues, she had glimpsed against a dark velvet background the white gleam of the Venus de Milo.

  “I never dreamed she would be so beautiful,” she had said to Miss Wilson. “I never expect to like famous things! But I guess they’re famous because they give everybody this wonderful feeling.”

  Victor Hugo was another friend. He had been with her on her first visit to Notre Dame. Gazing up at the great church, she had imagined his little dancing girl among the bells; and inside she had seen the Hunchback lurking in the shadows.

  It had been fitting afterward to go to Hugo’s tomb in the domed Pantheon. It was down in a dark, gloomy vault, in a small stone cell behind a grating. She had wished that she had brought him some flowers; it seemed sad for such a lover of life to be shut up in musty obscurity.

  Napoleon wasn’t a friend, exactly; Betsy had never been an admirer of his. But she had been unexpectedly stirred by the sight of his last resting place. In the silence of the room, awed crowds looked down at the sarcophagus which held the small body of the man who had made all Europe tremble…returned from exile as he had wished to be, and buried among the French people.

  Fully half the onlookers were Americans, but Betsy had wondered if Germans ever came, particularly when she read the inscription on the fresh wreath prominently displayed: “Let no French soldier rest, while there is a German in Alsace.”

  The French and Germans really hated each other, Betsy thought, as the hack bounced on past the Tuileries Gardens. Marie Antoinette was there; another friend. And also the Empress Eugenie, who Betsy’s grandmother had once seen with her own eyes, sitting on one of these benches.

  The hack passed through the Place de la Concorde, spacious and brilliant, with the Obelisk in the center surrounded by fountains, and the eight colossal statues symbolizing the queen cities of France. It swung down the broad, tree-lined Champs Elysées; and the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, came into full view. The tea gardens and Punch and Judy shows were crowded; the nursemaids and charming French children were out in full force among the strolling crowds.

  Betsy felt a lump in her throat. “Paris is so beautiful! A little of it ought to belong to me by now, and it doesn’t, any more than it did when I read the Stoddard Lectures at home!” She needed someone to share it with, someone who would love the same odd, romantic things that she loved.

  Tilda would have understood about Henri Quatre and Victor Hugo. Tib would have wanted to go to the smart restaurants, and shop at Paquin’s or Worth’s, and see the models parade at Longchamps. Tacy would have liked to picnic in the Bois de Boulogne, and Marco would have appreciated the sidewalk cafés.

  She and the Wilsons had never once eaten in a sidewalk café! Dr. Wilson felt sure that none of them would supply his carrots and whole-grain bread, and while Miss Wilson would really have enjoyed going, Betsy felt sure, she had noted Baedeker’s warning that unattended ladies didn’t eat in such spots.

  “French women must think it’s all right,” Betsy had thought, noticing many of them alone or in twos and threes at the gay little outdoor tables.

  It wasn’t th
at she didn’t like the Wilsons; on the contrary, she had grown fonder of them every day. The erect little professor with the pointed beard was amusing and often stimulating, and Miss Wilson was wistfully lovable.

  Miss Wilson would have liked to have some fun in Paris, Betsy thought now. It was just that she had been brought up so strictly that she didn’t know how. Betsy had wished time and again during the past two weeks that she could find a way to give Miss Wilson one good bat. But she had never felt that she should take the initiative in making plans, or urge her chaperones to do anything they hadn’t done before.

  So she had dutifully gone sightseeing. And she had gone with Miss Wilson to sensible, medium-priced stores like the Bon Marche to buy perfumes and gloves for gifts and to spend her birthday money on a dark blue suit with a soft, wide belt of crimson satin. With a black hat and a crimson veil, it made a stunning outfit.

  She was wearing it now, as the hack pulled up in front of the American Express office. She tipped the driver generously, and watched him clip-clop off down the crowded, busy street.

  Stopping at a sidewalk kiosk to buy the Paris edition of the Herald, Betsy entered the office.

  As she saw Miss Wilson standing at the cashier’s window, she felt a sudden wave of affection for the kind, reserved little spinster.

  “Oh, I wish I could do something nice for her!” she thought again.

  Miss Wilson waved. “Here you are, my dear! My, it took you a long time to finish that letter!”

  Betsy felt guilty, and she hugged her companion’s arm. “I finished the letter half an hour ago, Miss Wilson…I let the driver take the long way around. I sort of wanted a last look at the Champs Elysées.”

  “Of course you did! You have so much imagination, Betsy; you really know how to enjoy things. Let’s you and I do something pleasant this afternoon. It’s our last. You’ll soon be at Mrs. Heaton’s boarding house in London, and we’ll be off to the Lake Country.”