Betsy-Tacy, Page 3

  Julia had already taken Betsy to the door, and had said to Miss Dalton, the teacher: “This is my little sister Betsy.”

  Now Katie said, “This is my little sister Tacy.” And she added, “She’s very bashful.”

  “Never mind,” said Miss Dalton, smiling brightly. “I’ll take care of that. I’ll put her right by me.” And she placed a little chair beside her desk and put Tacy into that.

  Tacy didn’t like it. Betsy could tell from the way she scrunched down and hid herself beneath her curls. She liked it less than ever when Betsy was put far away at a regular desk in one of the rows of desks which filled the room. But Miss Dalton was too busy to notice; Julia and Katie went out; the door closed, and school began.

  If it hadn’t been for Tacy’s looking so forlorn, Betsy would have liked school. The windows were hung with chains made from shiny paper. On the blackboard was a calendar for the month of September drawn with colored chalk. And Miss Dalton was pretty; she looked like a canary. But it was hard for Betsy to be happy with Tacy such a picture of woe.

  Instead of looking better, Tacy looked worse and worse. She gazed at Betsy with pleading eyes, and her face was screwed up as though she were going to cry.

  “She’s going to cry,” someone whispered in Betsy’s ear. It was the little boy named Tom.

  “Oh!” cried Betsy. “You’ve got your teeth.” She knew because now he said “s” as well as she did. Besides, she could see them, two brand-new teeth, right in the front of his mouth.

  “Yes, I got them young,” said Tom.

  He sat at the desk behind Betsy’s.

  Betsy was glad when recess time came. They formed in two lines and marched out of the room and through the front door and down the stairs. The girls skipped off to the playground at the left, the boys to the one at the right. Now, thought Betsy, she would find Tacy and tell her not to be bashful. But when she looked about for Tacy, Tacy was nowhere to be seen.

  Betsy ran to the sidewalk and looked down the street. Flying red ringlets and twinkling thin black legs were almost out of sight.

  “Stop, Tacy! Stop!” cried Betsy. She ran in pursuit. But it was no use. Tacy could always run faster than Betsy. She ran faster now. At last, however, she slowed down so that Betsy could catch up.

  They had reached Mrs. Chubbock’s store.

  “Tacy!” cried Betsy. “We’re not supposed to leave the yard.”

  “I’m going home,” said Tacy. She was crying.

  “But you can’t. It’s not allowed.”

  Tacy only cried.

  She cried harder than Betsy had ever seen her cry. She wrinkled up her little freckled face. Tears ran over her cheeks and dropped into her mouth and spotted the navy blue dress.

  Ding, dong, ding, dong, went the schoolhouse bell. It meant that recess time was over.

  “Come on, Tacy. We’ve got to go back.”

  Tacy cried harder than ever.

  The lines of marching children vanished into the schoolhouse. A strange calm settled upon the empty yard. From an open window came the sound of children singing.

  “We’re supposed to be in there,” Betsy said. She felt a queer frightened lump inside.

  “You go back if you want to,” said Tacy between sobs.

  “I won’t go back without you,” said Betsy. She sat down miserably on Mrs. Chubbock’s steps.

  The door of the little store opened and Mrs. Chubbock came out. She was large and stout, with a small soft mustache. She leaned on a cane when she walked.

  “What’s this? What’s this?” she asked. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “We…we…” said Betsy. Her lip trembled.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “Yes, we are. But she…she’s bashful.”

  “Runaways, eh?” said Mrs. Chubbock.

  At the sound of the dread word, Betsy’s eyes filled with tears. That was what they were exactly. Runaways. That was a terrible thing to be. How could she go home from school and tell her mamma? Would they ever be allowed to go to school again? Betsy too began to cry.

  Once started, Betsy cried as hard as Tacy. Harder, perhaps. And when Tacy heard Betsy cry, she took a fresh start. They held each other tight and wailed.

  “Now, now,” said Mrs. Chubbock. She limped back into her store. When she came out, she opened her two hands and each of them held a little chocolate man.

  “Do you eat the head first or the legs first?” Mrs. Chubbock asked.

  Betsy ate the head first and Tacy ate the legs first. They couldn’t very well eat and cry together. So they were eating and not crying when they saw Miss Dalton hurrying across the schoolhouse yard. The sun was shining on her canary-colored hair. She looked pretty but very worried.

  “Oh, there you are!” she cried gladly when she saw them. “You weren’t supposed to go home, my dears. That was only recess.”

  The tears began to trickle again.

  “I know,” said Betsy. “But Tacy doesn’t like school. She’s bashful.”

  “And she won’t go if I won’t,” said Tacy.

  “No, I won’t go if she won’t,” said Betsy. They lifted anxious faces, smeared with chocolate and tears.

  Miss Dalton stooped down and put an arm around each of them. She smiled up at Mrs. Chubbock.

  “Tacy,” she said. “How would you like to sit with Betsy? Right in the same seat?”

  So they went back to school. Tacy sat with Betsy, right in the same seat. They were crowded, but no more so than they were in the piano box. The little boy named Tom sat right behind them.

  And after that Tacy liked school.

  Betsy had liked it all the time.

  6

  The Milkman Story

  EVERY MORNING Betsy called for Tacy, so that they could walk to school together.

  Betsy came to Tacy’s house a little early, usually, to be there when Tacy had her hair combed. There was a painful fascination in this business, for Tacy always cried.

  Her ringlets were tangled after her night’s sleep. When she washed for breakfast, they were merely tied back with a ribbon. Tacy’s mother was busy getting breakfast for thirteen, and Tacy’s curls took time. After breakfast the time for curls arrived. Tacy began to cry at sight of the comb.

  Betsy’s eyes grew round and she swayed back and forth as she watched. “But she cried harder than that, the first day of school, Mrs. Kelly.”

  “Then she must have cried pretty hard that day,” Mrs. Kelly would answer. “Keep still, Tacy. I’m trying not to hurt.”

  Mrs. Kelly was stout and gentle. She was like a large, anxious dove. She was different from Betsy’s mother who was slim and red-headed and gay. Betsy’s mother knew how to scold as well as to laugh and sing. But Tacy’s mother never scolded.

  “If I tried to scold eleven I’d be scolding all the time,” she explained to Betsy one day.

  After the curls were brushed over Tacy’s mother’s finger, Betsy and Tacy started off to school. They walked to school together, and they walked home together. Back and forth together, every day.

  At first it was autumn; there were red and yellow leaves for Betsy and Tacy to scuffle under foot. Then the leaves were brown, then they were blown away; that was in the gray time named November. Then came the exciting first snow, and this was followed by more snow and more. At last the drifts rising beside the sidewalk were higher than their heads.

  Betsy and Tacy lay down in the drifts and spread out their arms to make angels. They rolled the snow into balls and had battles with Julia and Katie. They started a snowman in the vacant lot, and added to him day after day until…before a thaw came…he was as fat as Mrs. Chubbock.

  The snow was fun while there was sun to glitter on it from a sky as bright and blue as Tacy’s eyes. But after a time the weather grew cold; it was too cold for Betsy and Tacy to play in the snow any more. Their hands inside mittens ached, and their feet inside overshoes grew numb. The wind nipped their faces in their snugly tied hoods; their breath f
roze on the bright scarves knotted around their necks.

  On days like that, as they walked home from school, Betsy told Tacy the milkman story.

  It started one day when a milkman passed them on the corner by the chocolate-colored house. His wagon was running on runners; and it wasn’t an ordinary wagon; it looked like a little house. The milkman sat covered with buffalo robes, and from deep in shadows came the glimmer of a fire. It might have come from the milkman’s pipe, but Betsy and Tacy thought that it came from a little stove inside the milkman’s wagon.

  That gave Betsy the idea for a story.

  The story went differently on different days, but one day it went like this:

  Two little girls named Betsy and Tacy were walking home from school. It was very cold.

  “I wish we could catch a ride,” said Tacy.

  And just at that moment a milkman came riding by. He was riding in a wagon which looked like a little house. He had a little stove inside. He said to Betsy and Tacy:

  “Hello, little girls. Wouldn’t you like a ride in this wagon? I’m through delivering milk, so you can have it for yourselves.”

  Betsy and Tacy said, “Thank you very much!” And the milkman jumped out, and they jumped in. And the milkman went away.

  But before he went away he said, “You don’t need to drive that horse. It’s a pretty cold day for keeping hold of reins. Just wind the reins around the whip.”

  So Betsy and Tacy wound the reins around the whip, and they said to the horse, “Take us home, horse.” The milkman’s horse was a magic horse, but nobody knew it except the milkman and Betsy and Tacy.

  The horse started off over the snow. The sleigh-bells jingled on his back, and the wagon ran so smoothly that it hardly joggled Betsy and Tacy. They were sitting beside the little stove in the very inside of the wagon. They were sitting on two little stools beside the stove.

  In just a minute they were as warm as toast. It was cozy sitting there with the wagon sliding along. Only by and by Tacy said, “I’m hungry.”

  And Betsy said, “That’s funny. Look what I see!” And she pointed over to a corner of the wagon, and there were two baskets. One was marked, “Betsy,” and one was marked, “Tacy.” They were covered with little red cloths.

  Betsy and Tacy took off these cloths and spread them on their knees, and they looked into their baskets. Each one found a cup of cocoa there. It was hot. It was steaming. And it hadn’t spilled a drop. That was because the milkman’s wagon was magic like his horse.

  And beside each cup of cocoa were doughnuts. They were hot too. They smelled like Mrs. Ray’s doughnuts smell when she lifts them out of the lard on a fork. They smelled good. There were plenty of doughnuts for Betsy and plenty for Tacy.

  “Isn’t this fun?” Tacy said. “Riding along in the milkman’s wagon and eating doughnuts?”

  Just then the horse turned his head. “Those doughnuts smell good,” he said.

  “Oh, excuse me,” said Betsy and Tacy. “We didn’t know that horses ate doughnuts.”

  “Well, I do,” said the horse. “Of course I’m a magic horse.”

  And Betsy and Tacy put three doughnuts on the whip and they held out the whip and the horse opened his mouth and the doughnuts dropped right in.

  “Thank you,” said the horse. “I’ll take you home every day it’s cold. I’ll meet you where I met you today, on the corner by the chocolate-colored house.”

  In a minute he turned his head and said, “Of course it’s a secret.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Betsy and Tacy. “We understand that.”

  They had come so far now that they had come to Hill Street Hill. They were halfway up. They put their cups back in the baskets and covered the baskets with the red cloths, and they climbed out of the wagon.

  “Thank you, horse,” they said.

  “You’re welcome,” said the horse.

  They were almost up Hill Street Hill, and they weren’t cold at all, hardly, on account of the ride they’d had.

  Julia and Katie were just ahead.

  “Hurry up!” they called. “Hurry up so you don’t get frost bite.”

  “Frost bite!” said Betsy and Tacy, and they looked at each other and laughed.

  “We’re warm as toast,” said Betsy, stamping her feet.

  “We’re hardly cold at all,” said Tacy, swinging her arms.

  Betsy said to Tacy, “Let’s go ask your mamma if you can’t bring your paper dolls and come over to my house to play.”

  “Yes, let’s,” said Tacy. “I hope we meet that milkman again tomorrow. Don’t you, Betsy?”

  “Those were good doughnuts,” said Betsy. “Maybe my mamma will give us some more.”

  7

  Playing Paper Dolls

  QUITE OFTEN, after school, Betsy and Tacy went to Betsy’s house and played paper dolls.

  Betsy and Tacy liked paper dolls better than real dolls. They wanted real dolls too, of course. The most important thing to see on Christmas morning, poking out of a stocking or sitting under a tree, was a big china doll…with yellow curls and a blue silk dress and bonnet, or with black curls and a pink silk dress and bonnet…it didn’t matter which. But after Christmas they put those dolls away and played with their paper dolls.

  They cut the paper dolls from fashion magazines. They could hardly wait for their mothers’ magazines to grow old. Mrs. Benson didn’t have any children, so she saved her fashion magazines for Betsy and Tacy. And when Miss Meade, the sewing woman, came to Betsy’s house, she could be depended upon to leave a magazine or two behind.

  The chief trouble Betsy and Tacy had was in finding pictures of men and boys. There had to be father dolls and brother dolls, of course. The tailor shops had men’s fashion sheets. But those fashion sheets were hard to get. Tacy’s brother George worked next door to a tailor shop. He told Mr. Baumgarten, the tailor, that his little sister Tacy liked those fashion sheets. After that Mr. Baumgarten saved all his fashion sheets for Tacy, and Tacy divided them with Betsy.

  The dolls were not only cut from magazines; they lived in magazines. Betsy and Tacy each had a doll family living in a magazine. The servant dolls were kept in a pile between the first two pages; a few pages on was the pile of father dolls; then came the mother dolls, and then the sixteen-year-olds, the ten-year-olds, the eight-year-olds, the five-year-olds, and the babies.

  Those were the dolls that Betsy and Tacy played with after school.

  Betsy and Tacy stopped in at Tacy’s house to get her magazine and eat a cookie. Then they went on to Betsy’s house, and when Betsy had kissed her mother and both of them had hung their wraps in the little closet off the back parlor, Betsy brought out the magazine in which her doll family lived.

  “Shall we play here beside the stove, Mamma?” she asked.

  “Yes, that would be a good place to play,” said Mrs. Ray; and it was.

  The fire glowed red through the isinglass windows of the big hard coal heater. It shone on the wild horses’ heads which ran in a procession around the shining nickel trim. Up on the warming ledge the tea kettle was singing. Underneath the stove, on the square metal plate which protected the green flowered carpet, Lady Jane Grey, the cat, was singing too.

  She opened one sleepy eye but she kept on purring as Betsy and Tacy opened their magazines.

  “What shall we name the five-year-old today?” Tacy asked Betsy.

  The five-year-olds were the most important members of the large doll families. Everything pleasant happened to them. They had all the adventures.

  The eight-year-olds lived very dull lives; and they were always given very plain names. They were Jane and Martha, usually, or Hannah and Jemima. Sometimes Betsy and Tacy forgot and called them Julia and Katie. But the five-year-olds had beautiful names. They were Lucille and Evelyn, or Madeline and Millicent.

  “We’ll be Madeline and Millicent today,” Betsy decided.

  They played that it was morning. The servant dolls got up first. The servant dolls wore caps with lon
g streamers and dainty ruffled aprons. They didn’t look at all like the hired girls of Hill Street. But like hired girls they got up bright and early.

  The fathers and mothers got up next. Then came the children beginning with the oldest. The five-year-olds came dancing down to breakfast in the fingers of Betsy and Tacy.

  “What are you planning to do today, Madeline?” Betsy’s father doll asked his five-year-old.

  “I’m going to play with Millicent, Papá.” (Madeline and Millicent pronounced papa, papá.)

  “And I’m going to play with Jemima,” said Betsy’s eight-year-old who was named Hannah today.

  “No, Hannah!” said her father. “You must stay at home and wash the dishes. But Madeline may go. Wouldn’t you like to take the carriage, Madeline? You and Millicent could go for a nice ride. Here is a dollar in case you want some candy.”

  “Oh, thank you, Papá,” said Madeline. She gave him an airy kiss.

  Meanwhile Tacy’s dolls were talking in much the same way. Both father dolls were sent quickly down to work; the mothers went shopping; the babies were taken out in their carriages by the pretty servant dolls; and the older children were shut in the magazines. Then Betsy and Tacy each took her five-year-old in hand, and the fun of the game began.

  First they went to the candy store under the patent rocker. Madeline’s dollar bought an enormous quantity of gum drops and candy corn. Next they sat down in their carriage which was made of a shoebox. There were two strings attached, and Betsy and Tacy were the horses. Madeline and Millicent took a beautiful ride.

  They climbed the back parlor sofa; that was a mountain.

  “Let’s have a picnic,” said Madeline. So they did. They picnicked on top of a pillow which had the head of a girl embroidered on it.

  They swished through the dangling bamboo curtains which separated the back parlor from the front parlor. And in the front parlor they left their carriage again. They climbed the piano stool; that was a merry-go-round, and of course they had a ride.