Betsy and the Great World / Betsy's Wedding Page 6

  Mr. O’Farrell rescued her adroitly. “They’re very important. The boy courts the girl there…from the street. He doesn’t come into the house until they are engaged, and he doesn’t see her alone until they are married.”

  “What kind of marriage would that be!” Betsy would have been glad to expand the subject of marriage. She had often wondered why anyone so charming as Mr. O’Farrell had stayed so long a bachelor. But he kept the talk on island customs.

  “Just wait,” he said to Betsy, as everyone had, “until you see Madeira!”

  Dinner was breaking up. They were standing by their chairs.

  “I’m not only going to see Madeira,” Betsy replied saucily. “I’m going to get off and stay there.”

  “I beg your pardon?” He was genuinely startled.

  “With the Bartletts. They have invited me.”

  “Isn’t this rather unexpected?” he asked slowly.

  “I like to do things unexpectedly. Like Paragot going to Budapest, you know.”

  But although he admired Paragot so much, Mr. O’Farrell didn’t seem pleased.

  “Sit down,” he said abruptly, pulling out her chair again, “and tell me all about it.”

  While she explained he sat looking at her, frowning. His eyes left her face and she felt them on her hands, clasped on the table under their lace frills.

  “Have you made up your mind?” he asked without looking up.

  “Not entirely. But it seems like a wonderful plan.”

  “I could arrange it, of course.” Then his blue eyes lifted. They looked hurt, almost tragic. (And he was so very handsome with his shining black hair, touched with gray.)

  Surprisingly he said, “Faith, and it’s sad for me it will be if you leave at Madeira!”

  He didn’t seem to be joking…but he must be! Betsy felt her face flush.

  Sometimes after dinner Mr. O’Farrell took her out to her chair although he never stayed there. But tonight she went out alone. She looked around for Maida, but Maida was with Mr. Chandler, leaning over the rail. Betsy, too, went to the rail. The moon was coming out, spreading a tremulous silver light over the water.

  Madeira would be beautiful, of course, thought Betsy. But beauty wasn’t everything. She pursed her lips judicially.

  “I believe,” she decided, “that it would be a mistake to miss a great metropolis like Munich for the sake of a picturesque island.”

  5

  The Deluge

  MADEIRA WAS BEAUTIFUL, as reported. It was bewitching. It was idyllic. Yet Betsy didn’t regret her decision to go on with the Columbic.

  She regretted parting from Maida. Shipboard life had wrought its usual miracle, and the friendship of hardly more than a week seemed like the friendship of a lifetime. But Maida and her mother had affectionately extended their invitation to some time in Toronto.

  “Why, of course! Toronto and Minneapolis aren’t far apart. We’ll see lots of each other,” Betsy planned enthusiastically. She had seen very little of Maida, however, during the run to Madeira.

  Maida had spent every available moment with Mr. Chandler. She and Betsy had not even had a stateroom spread on the last night, although Betsy waited up to a very late hour. The farewells must have been harrowing, Betsy thought. Mr. Chandler seemed to be in earnest after all.

  Her own parting from Maida had been unsatisfactory. The Columbic was anchored off Funchal, and the passengers stood waiting for a tender to take them ashore, enjoying an exquisite view. The mountains were higher here than at St. Michael’s. Against the verdant lower slopes the city shone radiantly white.

  Betsy kept looking about for Maida but when she arrived on deck it was with her mother, and a boy carrying bags. Embracing Betsy, she whispered, “The parting was terrible! He’s so in love! And I think I am, too. Don’t answer! I haven’t dared breathe a word to Mamma.”

  What a difference in mothers! Betsy thought. Her mother would have wanted to hear every word.

  Mrs. Bartlett kissed Betsy. “Remember, you’re coming to visit us sometime!”

  “I’ll remember. I’d love to, and thank you again. I’ll be writing,” Betsy added to Maida. “And Celeste asked me to say good-by to Gabrielle.”

  Maida’s laugh rippled. “Gabrielle is desolated!” she replied, and she was gone, her long light hair floating behind her.

  Watching her depart, Betsy mused on how the course of her own life might have been changed by staying on in Madeira. “I might have married an Englishman.”

  Madeira, she had been told, had a large colony of British and other foreigners, some attracted by the climate, others owning vineyards or sugar cane plantations. This was by far the largest and most populous of the Madeira Islands.

  The Madeira Islands! Suddenly, without wishing to, Betsy remembered a visit she had made to Beidwinkles’ farm back in Minnesota. She and Joe Willard had looked through a stereopticon set at “Views of Europe with Side Trips to Egypt, Algiers, and the Madeira Islands.”

  The memory brought a vision of Joe visiting a foreign place like this. She could see him walking about with his quick step. He would be asking all sorts of questions. Joe didn’t just enjoy things in a dreamy way as she did, he always wanted to find out everything about them.

  It took an angry effort to exorcise this vision. But she did it. She reminded herself—it was a dulcet thought—that Mr. O’Farrell had not wanted her to stop at Madeira.

  She had told him casually, “I decided it would be foolish to give up a metropolis like Munich for a little island like Madeira.”

  “You were very wise, Miss Ray.” There wasn’t a hint in his suave reply of the feeling he had shown before.

  She and the Wilsons had a wonderful day in Funchal. First, they rode in an ox-drawn sledge. Even Dr. Wilson was willing to forego the benefits of walking to test this curious vehicle. Wicker seats, set on runners, faced each other under a square red canopy from which white curtains fluttered down.

  The Wilsons and Betsy wanted the curtains open so they could enjoy the quaint streets. The Portuguese driver, for a reason he could not communicate, wanted them shut. He would carefully tie those on the right, but as soon as he crossed to tie those on the left, Dr. Wilson would untie the ones on the right.

  The driver jabbered and gesticulated. He was a small dark man with a worried face, wearing a short jacket over a yellow shirt. Dr. Wilson jabbered and gesticulated back until his white beard quivered. The tying and untying continued until Betsy, putting her head on Miss Wilson’s shoulder, collapsed in laughter. Miss Wilson began to laugh, too, and the driver joined in, showing his white teeth. He rolled his eyes at the little professor, shrugged, and slapped the nearest ox.

  “You have to be firm with these guides,” Dr. Wilson said in a satisfied tone.

  Certainly it was desirable to have the curtains open. In Madeira, too, the houses were tinted in rainbow hues. There was a sprinkling of English people on the street, and other Europeans in conventional dress, but as in the Azores there were comely natives, distressing beggars, and crowds of ragged adorable children.

  Betsy took picture after picture of the children while she waited for a tram to carry them up the mountain. Each child had a rose or a camellia or a handful of violets, and wanted a penny in trade. One little olive-skinned fellow with a smile like Madeiran sunshine kept climbing up a post to throw roses at Betsy. He would cry with an ingratiating inflection, “Only one penny!” When her pennies were gone and she showed her empty hands, he kept on throwing.

  The tram started its climb. Tinted houses draped with flowering vines stood one above the other. Wedged in, here and there, were native shacks. Fields of sugar cane began, and vineyards, and orchards. Mounting steadily, the tram reached the home of pines, and tangles of wild luxuriant growth broken only by streams and waterfalls.

  “Oh, what a beautiful ride!” Betsy exclaimed for the dozenth time as they lunched in the lofty Monte Palace Hotel. The dining room commanded a view of mountainside, city, and sea.

>   “But wait for the ride down!” Miss Wilson’s face shone with pleasure at Betsy’s delight.

  “I know. Maida told me. We go on a toboggan.”

  It wasn’t, she discovered, a toboggan in the Minnesota sense. It was like a broad settee on runners, cushioned, and extremely comfortable. Barefooted natives stood on either side, holding the contraption by ropes, and at a signal they began to run.

  They ran like the wind down the steep precipitous slope. There was no track; they used the narrow cobble-paved street, and Betsy couldn’t see how they missed the dogs, and children, and women with jars of water on their heads.

  Plastered, flower-covered walls sloped down on either side. Above them the rainbow-hued houses flashed past, and arbors, and gardens. Leaning over the walls and out the windows were lovely laughing girls who pelted the tourists with flowers as they rocketed downward.

  Back in Deep Valley, Betsy thought breathlessly, boys and girls were coasting down the Big Hill. They were rushing down an icy road between towering drifts of snow. And here she was sliding down a blooming mountainside under an avalanche of flowers!

  “I never did anything so strange, so unusual, so fantastic in my life!” she chattered, climbing out at the foot of the mountain.

  “I knew you’d like it,” Miss Wilson answered, beaming.

  “Very novel, very novel!” Dr. Wilson agreed.

  They went shopping, of course. Shopping, Betsy had already discovered, was one of the amusements of traveling. You were supposed to bargain with the merchants, and their prices slid down like the toboggans. With treasures of embroidery and wickerwork for gifts and a string of pink beads for herself, she went triumphantly back to the Columbic.

  Mr. O’Farrell was nowhere to be seen. He was always busy in port, she had discovered.

  “Celeste and I are coming back here, too,” Betsy promised herself, and went below to leave her packages.

  When she returned to the deck the weather had changed. It was beginning to rain, and the sea was misty and rough. Mr. Chandler joined her. He must be feeling terrible, Betsy thought sympathetically, but he showed no sign of anguish.

  He took her arm gaily. “How about a spot of tea, Miss Ray?” And entering the cheerful lounge, where the orchestra was playing and stewards were moving about with appetizing little trays, he murmured, “If only that fellow Glenn will leave us alone!”

  Betsy glanced at him sharply. “Of course he won’t leave us alone. Why should he?” she asked. She was disgusted with Mr. Chandler. Here Maida was barely out of sight and he was already mooning around her! As soon as she finished tea, Betsy went below to be rid of him.

  She couldn’t forget Maida as Mr. Chandler apparently had. But even without her, she felt completely happy. Luxuriating again in a hot salt bath, her hair in curlers in preparation for dinner, Betsy reflected on it in perplexity.

  She was always happy these days. She seemed to have shed all her bewilderments and perplexities. She wasn’t homesick anymore, although she poured out her heart to her family each night in voluminous letters. Bob Barhydt had faded and even the stalwart figure of Joe was growing dim.

  She liked shipboard life. She liked everything about it. But best of all—she couldn’t deny it—she liked the dinner table!

  She was increasingly aware that she looked forward eagerly to dinner. Not because it was the social climax of the day. Not because of the music or because everyone looked festive. It was because of the talk—and Mr. O’Farrell.

  Sometimes, she admitted, she felt beyond her depth. The other people were so much older than she, so much more cultured, so much better educated.

  Led lightly by Mr. O’Farrell, they talked of music, perhaps. Fortunately Betsy knew a good bit about opera because of Julia. And Julia had made her listen to modern music—Debussy and Ravel and Stravinsky.

  But modern art! Betsy hadn’t known anyone took that seriously. Talk of an International Art Exhibition in New York had reached Minneapolis, certainly. But Betsy remembered only one echo. “The Nude Descending the Staircase,” at which everyone laughed.

  And although she seldom missed a change at the local stock company and always saw stars, like Maude Adams and Otis Skinner, when they came to Minneapolis, she couldn’t keep up with these people who went to the theatre in New York and London and Paris.

  She got on better with history. That had always been a favorite subject in school, and she had read Dumas, Hugo, and Scott. It was fun to sit and argue about Napoleon, or the Crusades, or Mary, Queen of Scots. She did well enough, too, when they discussed Irish home rule, international peace, President Wilson’s policy in Mexico. Her father talked a lot about such things.

  Betsy would get excited and flushed and turn her bracelets around and around as she defended her opinions. When Mr. O’Farrell talked, it was like a flame leaping.

  “I never knew anyone who could talk like Mr. O’Farrell,” Betsy thought. His wit was so nimble; his choice of words, so exact and colorful.

  Their conversations weren’t always profound. Sometimes, after the table emptied, Betsy told him about the Rays—her father’s sandwiches, her red-haired mother’s love of fun, Julia’s singing, and Margaret’s surprising turn of interest from cats and dogs to boys and girls. Mr. O’Farrell liked to hear about them.

  He never talked about his own home.

  “I wish I knew his story,” Betsy thought. “He must have had some sad love affair. Maybe the girl died.”

  She took more and more pains dressing for dinner.

  “How could I ever have thought I was in love with Joe?” she wondered, arranging her hair in three little heart-breaker curls on her neck. “I really prefer a man of the world.”

  That night the dinner conversation turned to women’s suffrage. In the United States the campaign for votes for women had progressed without much violence. In Great Britain, too, at first, the women had merely paraded and made speeches. But then they had started picketing the House of Commons and breaking windows. They actually tried to be sent to jail in order to call attention to their cause by hunger strikes.

  “Women,” Mr. O’Farrell remarked, “are certainly ingenious at making themselves annoying. One window smasher up for trial kept her back to the judge and sang the ‘Marseillaise’ all the time he was talking to her.”

  “Good!” Betsy cried.

  The English lady was startled, but not so much so as Mr. O’Farrell.

  “You’re not a suffragette!” he exclaimed.

  “I certainly am.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Why, of course I am!” She was astonished that anyone could doubt it. “We’re having a suffrage parade in Minneapolis this spring. I’d be marching if I were there.”

  “But you’re not a militant?”

  Betsy wasn’t sure she was a militant, but she wouldn’t back down. “I would be if I had to be.”

  Mr. O’Farrell’s gaze turned mocking. “You, a militant!” he said. “You’d get your brick all poised to throw and then ask the nearest man, ‘Oh, should I, or shouldn’t I?’”

  Betsy flushed crimson. “I would not!”

  “You don’t need to be ashamed of being feminine.”

  “I don’t think I’m especially feminine. I can barely thread a needle.”

  “You’re feminine! You’re pure Victorian! You don’t belong to the twentieth century at all, at all.”

  “Well, I can do the modern dances!” Betsy said indignantly, which made everyone laugh.

  “Will you put me down for a Hesitation at the Captain’s Ball?” Mr. Glenn asked. Mr. Chandler, who had stopped by her chair, spoke for a tango.

  “Alas, all I can do is waltz!” said Mr. O’Farrell. He didn’t ask her to save a waltz and Betsy didn’t offer one. But she recalled with gratification that she was supposed to waltz exceptionally well.

  She was exhilarated by the discussion and went out on deck smiling. A rain-filled wind was blowing now, but she had brought a cape. Wrapping it about her,
she stood by the rail and went over in her mind everything Mr. O’Farrell had said to her and she had said to him.

  “I wonder why he thinks I’m Victorian. But he said it as though he liked me.”

  She was annoyed when Mr. Chandler came out, taking her arm in that possessive way he had.

  “We’re in for a bit of a blow.”

  “So it seems.”

  “You’re a ripping good sailor, though.” He showed his big white teeth in an admiring smile.

  “Not like Maida,” Betsy answered pointedly.

  He brushed that aside.

  “How about a walk?”

  “No, thank you. I have some post cards I must address.”

  Disengaging herself, she went into the lounge. But Mr. Glenn and Mr. Burton came up; she didn’t write post cards after all. They played three-handed bridge with diverting lack of skill, and Mr. Burton ordered ginger ale, and the two stayed beside her all evening. It served Mr. Chandler right, she thought.

  Her spirits were still high when she went below at eleven.

  “I’ll write my family a wonderful description of that suffrage fracas,” she planned.

  Miss Wilson, in a dressing gown, was standing at the porthole against which water was swishing heavily.

  “This doesn’t seem to be fastened properly,” she said. “I’m fixing it, though.”

  “It’s a cold night,” responded Betsy, hanging up her dress. It would be cozy writing in her little upper bunk. “I’m going to go back to my warm nightie,” she added, and pulled the ballooning blue and white flannel over her head.

  She washed, brushed her teeth, wound her hair on curlers, and climbed to her lofty perch. Ready to begin her letter, she realized that she had forgotten her cap. Miss Wilson was still at the porthole; she would hand it up, Betsy thought, and leaned out to make the request.

  The ship was really pitching now. A suit case had toppled over; the towels on the washstand were swaying; and the boudoir cap, which usually hung on a hook with her bathrobe, had fallen to the floor.

  “Miss Wilson,” Betsy began, but stopped with a gasp. The porthole had swung open, and a roaring gray torrent rushed in, drenching Miss Wilson and flooding the stateroom with water to a depth of a foot or more.