BETSY HOLDS THE REINS
You can imagine, perhaps, the dreadful terror of Elizabeth Ann as the
train carried her along toward Vermont and the horrible Putney Farm! It
had happened so quickly—her satchel packed, the telegram sent, the
train caught—that she had not had time to get her wits together, assert
herself, and say that she would NOT go there! Besides, she had a sinking
notion that perhaps they wouldn’t pay any attention to her if she did.
The world had come to an end now that Aunt Frances wasn’t there to take
care of her! Even in the most familiar air she could only half breathe
without Aunt Frances! And now she was not even being taken to the Putney
Farm! She was being sent!
She shrank together in her seat, more and more frightened as the end of
her journey came nearer, and looked out dismally at the winter
landscape, thinking it hideous with its brown bare fields, its brown
bare trees, and the quick-running little streams hurrying along, swollen
with the January thaw which had taken all the snow from the hills. She
had heard her elders say about her so many times that she could not
stand the cold, that she shivered at the very thought of cold weather,
and certainly nothing could look colder than that bleak country into
which the train was now slowly making its way.
The engine puffed and puffed with great laboring breaths that shook
Elizabeth Ann’s diaphragm up and down, but the train moved more and more
slowly. Elizabeth Ann could feel under her feet how the floor of the car
was tipped up as it crept along the steep incline. “Pretty stiff grade
here?” said a passenger to the conductor.
“You bet!” he assented. “But Hillsboro is the next station and that’s at
the top of the hill. We go down after that to Rutland.” He turned to
Elizabeth Ann—“Say, little girl, didn’t your uncle say you were to get
off at Hillsboro? You’d better be getting your things together.”
Poor Elizabeth Ann’s knees knocked against each other with fear of the
strange faces she was to encounter, and when the conductor came to help
her get off, he had to carry the white, trembling child as well as her
satchel. But there was only one strange face there,—not another soul in
sight at the little wooden station. A grim-faced old man in a fur cap
and heavy coat stood by a lumber wagon.
“This is her, Mr. Putney,” said the conductor, touching his cap, and
went back to the train, which went away shrieking for a nearby crossing
and setting the echoes ringing from one mountain to another.
There was Elizabeth Ann alone with her much-feared Great-uncle Henry. He
nodded to her, and drew out from the bottom of the wagon a warm, large
cape, which he slipped over her shoulders. “The women folks were afraid
you’d git cold drivin’,” he explained. He then lifted her high to the
seat, tossed her satchel into the wagon, climbed up himself, and clucked
to his horses. Elizabeth Ann had always before thought it an essential
part of railway journeys to be much kissed at the end and asked a great
many times how you had “stood the trip.”
She sat very still on the high lumber seat, feeling very forlorn and
neglected. Her feet dangled high above the floor of the wagon. She felt
herself to be in the most dangerous place she had ever dreamed of in her
worst dreams. Oh, why wasn’t Aunt Frances there to take care of her! It
was just like one of her bad dreams—yes, it was horrible! She would
fall, she would roll under the wheels and be crushed to ... She looked up
at Uncle Henry with the wild, strained eyes of nervous terror which
always brought Aunt Frances to her in a rush to “hear all about it,” to
sympathize, to reassure.
Uncle Henry looked down at her soberly, his hard, weather-beaten old
face quite unmoved. “Here, you drive, will you, for a piece?” he said
briefly, putting the reins into her hands, hooking his spectacles over
his ears, and drawing out a stubby pencil and a bit of paper. “I’ve got
some figgering to do. You pull on the left-hand rein to make ’em go to
the left and t’other way for t’other way, though ’tain’t likely we’ll
meet any teams.”
Elizabeth Ann had been so near one of her wild screams of terror that
now, in spite of her instant absorbed interest in the reins, she gave a
queer little yelp. She was all ready with the explanation, her
conversations with Aunt Frances having made her very fluent in
explanations of her own emotions. She would tell Uncle Henry about how
scared she had been, and how she had just been about to scream and
couldn’t keep back that one little ... But Uncle Henry seemed not to have
heard her little howl, or, if he had, didn’t think it worth
conversation, for he ... oh, the horses were CERTAINLY going to one side!
She hastily decided which was her right hand (she had never been forced
to know it so quickly before) and pulled furiously on that rein. The
horses turned their hanging heads a little, and, miraculously, there
they were in the middle of the road again.
Elizabeth Ann drew a long breath of relief and pride, and looked to
Uncle Henry for praise. But he was busily setting down figures as though
he were getting his ’rithmetic lesson for the next day and had not
noticed ... Oh, there they were going to the left again! This time, in her
flurry, she made a mistake about which hand was which and pulled wildly
on the left line! The horses docilely walked off the road into a shallow
ditch, the wagon tilted ... help! Why didn’t Uncle Henry help! Uncle Henry
continued intently figuring on the back of his envelope.
Elizabeth Ann, the perspiration starting out on her forehead, pulled on
the other line. The horses turned back up the little slope, the wheel
grated sickeningly against the wagonbox—she was SURE they would tip
over! But there! somehow there they were in the road, safe and sound,
with Uncle Henry adding up a column of figures. If he only knew, thought
the little girl, if he only KNEW the danger he had been in, and how he
had been saved...! But she must think of some way to remember, for sure,
which her right hand was, and avoid that hideous mistake again.
And then suddenly something inside Elizabeth Ann’s head stirred and
moved. It came to her, like a clap, that she needn’t know which was
right or left at all. If she just pulled the way she wanted them to
go—the horses would never know whether it was the right or the left
rein!
It is possible that what stirred inside her head at that moment was her
brain, waking up. She was nine years old, and she was in the third A
grade at school, but that was the first time she had ever had a whole
thought of her very own. At home, Aunt Frances had always known exactly
what she was doing, and had helped her over the hard places before she
even knew they were there; and at school her teachers had been carefully
trained to think faster than the scholars. Somebody had always been
explaining things to Elizabeth Ann so industriously that she had never
found out a single thing for herself before. This was a very small
discovery, but an original one. Elizabeth Ann was as excited about it as
a mother-bird over the first egg that hatches.
She forgot how afraid she was of Uncle Henry, and poured out to him her
discovery. “It’s not right or left that matters!” she ended
triumphantly; “it’s which way you want to go!” Uncle Henry looked at her
attentively as she talked, eyeing her sidewise over the top of one
spectacle-glass. When she finished—“Well, now, that’s so,” he admitted,
and returned to his arithmetic.
It was a short remark, shorter than any Elizabeth Ann had ever heard
before. Aunt Frances and her teachers always explained matters at
length. But it had a weighty, satisfying ring to it. The little girl
felt the importance of having her statement recognized. She turned back
to her driving.
The slow, heavy plow horses had stopped during her talk with Uncle
Henry. They stood as still now as though their feet had grown to the
road. Elizabeth Ann looked up at the old man for instructions. But he
was deep in his figures. She had been taught never to interrupt people,
so she sat still and waited for him to tell her what to do.
But, although they were driving in the midst of a winter thaw, it was a
pretty cold day, with an icy wind blowing down the back of her neck. The
early winter twilight was beginning to fall, and she felt rather empty.
She grew very tired of waiting, and remembered how the grocer’s boy at
home had started his horse. Then, summoning all her courage, with an
apprehensive glance at Uncle Henry’s arithmetical silence, she slapped
the reins up and down on the horses’ backs and made the best imitation
she could of the grocer’s boy’s cluck. The horses lifted their heads,
they leaned forward, they put one foot before the other ... they were off!
The color rose hot on Elizabeth Ann’s happy face. If she had started a
big red automobile she would not have been prouder. For it was the first
thing she had ever done all herself ... every bit ... every smitch! She had
thought of it and she had done it. And it had worked!
Now for what seemed to her a long, long time she drove, drove so hard
she could think of nothing else. She guided the horses around stones,
she cheered them through freezing mud-puddles of melted snow, she kept
them in the anxiously exact middle of the road. She was quite astonished
when Uncle Henry put his pencil and paper away, took the reins from her
hands, and drove into a yard, on one side of which was a little low
white house and on the other a big red barn. He did not say a word, but
she guessed that this was Putney Farm.
Two women in gingham dresses and white aprons came out of the house. One
was old and one might be called young, just like Aunt Harriet and Aunt
Frances. But they looked very different from those aunts. The
dark-haired one was very tall and strong-looking, and the white-haired
one was very rosy and fat. They both looked up at the little, thin,
white-faced girl on the high seat, and smiled. “Well, Father, you got
her, I see,” said the brown-haired one. She stepped up to the wagon and
held up her arms to the child. “Come on, Betsy, and get some supper,”
she said, as though Elizabeth Ann had lived there all her life and had
just driven into town and back.
And that was the arrival of Elizabeth Ann at Putney Farm.
The brown-haired one took a long, strong step or two and swung her up on
the porch. “You take her in, Mother,” she said. “I’ll help Father
unhitch.”
The fat, rosy, white-haired one took Elizabeth Ann’s skinny, cold little
hand in her soft warm fat one, and led her along to the open kitchen
door. “I’m your Aunt Abigail,” she said. “Your mother’s aunt, you know.
And that’s your Cousin Ann that lifted you down, and it was your Uncle
Henry that brought you out from town.” She shut the door and went on, “I
don’t know if your Aunt Harriet ever happened to tell you about us, and
so ...”
Elizabeth Ann interrupted her hastily, the recollection of all Aunt
Harriet’s remarks vividly before her. “Oh yes, oh yes!” she said. “She
always talked about you. She talked about you a lot, she ...” The little
girl stopped short and bit her lip.
If Aunt Abigail guessed from the expression on Elizabeth Ann’s face what
kind of talking Aunt Harriet’s had been, she showed it only by a
deepening of the wrinkles all around her eyes. She said, gravely: “Well,
that’s a good thing. You know all about us then.” She turned to the
stove and took out of the oven a pan of hot baked beans, very brown and
crispy on top (Elizabeth Ann detested beans), and said, over her
shoulder, “Take your things off, Betsy, and hang ’em on that lowest hook
back of the door. That’s YOUR hook.”
The little girl fumbled forlornly with the fastenings of her cape and
the buttons of her coat. At home, Aunt Frances or Grace had always taken
off her wraps and put them away for her. When, very sorry for herself,
she turned away from the hook, Aunt Abigail said: “Now you must be cold.
Pull a chair right up here by the stove.” She was stepping around
quickly as she put supper on the table. The floor shook under her. She
was one of the fattest people Elizabeth Ann had ever seen. After living
with Aunt Frances and Aunt Harriet and Grace the little girl could
scarcely believe her eyes. She stared and stared.
Aunt Abigail seemed not to notice this. Indeed, she seemed for the
moment to have forgotten all about the newcomer. Elizabeth Ann sat on
the wooden chair, her feet hanging (she had been taught that it was not
manners to put her feet on the rungs), looking about her with miserable,
homesick eyes. What an ugly, low-ceilinged room, with only a couple of
horrid kerosene lamps for light; and they didn’t keep any girl,
evidently; and they were going to eat right in the kitchen like poor
people; and nobody spoke to her or looked at her or asked her how she
had “stood the trip”; and here she was, millions of miles away from Aunt
Frances, without anybody to take care of her. She began to feel the
tight place in her throat which, by thinking about hard, she could
always turn into tears, and presently her eyes began to water.
Aunt Abigail was not looking at her at all, but she now stopped short in
one of her rushes to the table, set down the butter-plate she was
carrying, and said “There!” as though she had forgotten something. She
stooped—it was perfectly amazing how spry she was—and pulled out from
under the stove a half-grown kitten, very sleepy, yawning and
stretching, and blinking its eyes. “There, Betsy!” said Aunt Abigail,
putting the little yellow and white ball into the child’s lap. “There is
one of old Whitey’s kittens that didn’t get given away last summer, and
she pesters the life out of me. I’ve got so much to do. When I heard you
were coming, I thought maybe you would take care of her for me. If you
want to, enough to bother to feed her and all, you can have her for your
own.”
Elizabeth Ann bent her thin face over the warm, furry, friendly little
animal. She could not speak. She had always wanted a kitten, but Aunt
Frances and Aunt Harriet and Grace had always been sure that cats
brought diphtheria and tonsilitis and all sorts of dreadful diseases to
delicate little girls. She was afraid to move for fear the little thing
would jump down and run away, but as she bent cautiously toward it the
necktie of her middy blouse fell forward and the kitten in the middle of
a yawn struck swiftly at it with a soft paw. Then, still too sleepy to
play, it turned its head and began to lick Elizabeth Ann’s hand with a
rough little tongue. Perhaps you can imagine how thrilled the little
girl was at this!
She held her hand perfectly still until the kitten stopped and began
suddenly washing its own face, and then she put her hands under it and
very awkwardly lifted it up, burying her face in the soft fur. The
kitten yawned again, and from the pink-lined mouth came a fresh, milky
breath. “Oh!” said Elizabeth Ann under her breath. “Oh, you DARLING!”
The kitten looked at her with bored, speculative eyes.
Elizabeth Ann looked up now at Aunt Abigail and said, “What is its name,
please?” But the old woman was busy turning over a griddle full of
pancakes and did not hear. On the train Elizabeth Ann had resolved not
to call these hateful relatives by the same name she had for dear Aunt
Frances, but she now forgot that resolution and said, again, “Oh, Aunt
Abigail, what is its name?”
Aunt Abigail faced her blankly. “Name?” she asked. “Whose ... oh, the
kitten’s? Goodness, child, I stopped racking my brain for kitten names
sixty years ago. Name it yourself. It’s yours.”
Elizabeth Ann had already named it in her own mind, the name she had
always thought she WOULD call a kitten by, if she ever had one. It was
Eleanor, the prettiest name she knew.
Aunt Abigail pushed a pitcher toward her. “There’s the cat’s saucer
under the sink. Don’t you want to give it some milk?”
Elizabeth Ann got down from her chair, poured some milk into the saucer,
and called: “Here, Eleanor! Here, Eleanor!”
Aunt Abigail looked at her sharply out of the corner of her eye and her
lips twitched, but a moment later her face was immovably grave as she
carried the last plate of pancakes to the table.
Elizabeth Ann sat on her heels for a long time, watching the kitten lap
the milk, and she was surprised, when she stood up, to see that Cousin
Ann and Uncle Henry had come in, very red-cheeked from the cold air.
“Well, folks,” said Aunt Abigail, “don’t you think we’ve done some
lively stepping around, Betsy and I, to get supper all on the table for
you?”
Elizabeth Ann stared. What did Aunt Abigail mean? She hadn’t done a
thing about getting supper! But nobody made any comment, and they all
took their seats and began to eat. Elizabeth Ann was astonishingly
hungry, and she thought she could never get enough of the creamed
potatoes, cold ham, hot cocoa, and pancakes. She was very much relieved
that her refusal of beans caused no comment. Aunt Frances had always
tried very hard to make her eat beans because they have so much protein
in them, and growing children need protein. Elizabeth Ann had heard this
said so many times she could have repeated it backward, but it had never
made her hate beans any the less. However, nobody here seemed to know
this, and Elizabeth Ann kept her knowledge to herself. They had also
evidently never heard how delicate her digestion was, for she never saw
anything like the number of pancakes they let her eat. ALL SHE WANTED!
She had never heard of such a thing!
They still did not ask her how she had “stood the trip.” They did not
indeed ask her much of anything or pay very much attention to her beyond
filling her plate as fast as she emptied it. In the middle of the meal
Eleanor came, jumped into her lap, and curled down, purring. After this
Elizabeth Ann kept one hand on the little soft ball, handling her fork
with the other.
After supper—well, Elizabeth Ann never knew what did happen after
supper until she felt somebody lifting her and carrying her upstairs. It
was Cousin Ann, who carried her as lightly as though she were a baby,
and who said, as she sat down on the floor in a slant-ceilinged bedroom,
“You went right to sleep with your head on the table. I guess you’re
pretty tired.”
Aunt Abigail was sitting on the edge of a great wide bed with four
posts, and a curtain around the top. She was partly undressed, and was
undoing her hair and brushing it out. It was very curly and all fluffed
out in a shining white fuzz around her fat, pink face, full of soft
wrinkles; but in a moment she was braiding it up again and putting on a
tight white nightcap, which she tied under her chin.
“We got the word about your coming so late,” said Cousin Ann, “that we
didn’t have time to fix you up a bedroom that can be warmed. So you’re
going to sleep in here for a while. The bed’s big enough for two, I
guess, even if they are as big as you and Mother.”
Elizabeth Ann stared again. What queer things they said here. She wasn’t
NEARLY as big as Aunt Abigail!
“Mother, did you put Shep out?” asked Cousin Ann; and when Aunt Abigail
said, “No! There! I forgot to!” Cousin Ann went away; and that was the
last of HER. They certainly believed in being saving of their words at
Putney Farm.
Elizabeth Ann began to undress. She was only half-awake; and that made
her feel only about half her age, which wasn’t very great, the whole of
it, and she felt like just crooking her arm over her eyes and giving up!
She was too forlorn! She had never slept with anybody before, and she
had heard ever so many times how bad it was for children to sleep with
grown-ups. An icy wind rattled the windows and puffed in around the
loose old casings. On the window-sill lay a little wreath of snow.
Elizabeth Ann shivered and shook on her thin legs, undressed in a hurry,
and slipped into her night-dress. She felt just as cold inside as out,
and never was more utterly miserable than in that strange, ugly little
room, with that strange, queer, fat old woman. She was even too
miserable to cry, and that is saying a great deal for Elizabeth Ann!
She got into bed first, because Aunt Abigail said she was going to keep
the candle lighted for a while and read. “And anyhow,” she said, “I’d
better sleep on the outside to keep you from rolling out.”
Elizabeth Ann and Aunt Abigail lay very still for a long time, Aunt
Abigail reading out of a small, worn old book. Elizabeth Ann could see
its title, “Essays of Emerson.” A book with that name had always laid
on the center table in Aunt Harriet’s house, but that copy was all new
and shiny, and Elizabeth Ann had never seen anybody look inside it. It
was a very dull-looking book, with no pictures and no conversation. The
little girl lay on her back, looking up at the cracks in the plaster
ceiling and watching the shadows sway and dance as the candle flickered
in the gusts of cold air. She herself began to feel a soft, pervasive
warmth. Aunt Abigail’s great body was like a stove.
It was very, very quiet, quieter than any place Elizabeth Ann had ever
known, except church, because a trolley-line ran past Aunt Harriet’s
house and even at night there were always more or less bangings and
rattlings. Here there was not a single sound except the soft, whispery
noise when Aunt Abigail turned over a page as she read steadily and
silently forward in her book. Elizabeth Ann turned her head so that she
could see the round, rosy old face, full of soft wrinkles, and the calm,
steady old eyes which were fixed on the page. And as she lay there in
the warm bed, watching that quiet face, something very queer began to
happen to Elizabeth Ann. She felt as though a tight knot inside her were
slowly being untied. She felt—what was it she felt? There are no words
for it. From deep within her something rose up softly ... she drew one or
two long, half-sobbing breaths....
[Illustration: “Do you know,” said Aunt Abigail, “I think it’s going to
be real nice, having a little girl in the house again.”]
Aunt Abigail laid down her book and looked over at the child. “Do you
know,” she said, in a conversational tone, “do you know, I think it’s
going to be real nice, having a little girl in the house again.”
Oh, then the tight knot in the little unwanted girl’s heart was loosened
indeed! It all gave way at once, and Elizabeth Ann burst suddenly into
hot tears—yes, I know I said I would not tell you any more about her
crying; but these tears were very different from any she had ever shed
before. And they were the last, too, for a long, long time.
Aunt Abigail said, “Well, well!” and moving over in bed took the little
weeping girl into her arms. She did not say another word then, but she
put her soft, withered old cheek close against Elizabeth Ann’s, till the
sobs began to grow less, and then she said: “I hear your kitty crying
outside the door. Shall I let her in? I expect she’d like to sleep with
you. I guess there’s room for three of us.”
She got out of bed as she spoke and walked across the room to the door.
The floor shook under her great bulk, and the peak of her nightcap made
a long, grotesque shadow. But as she came back with the kitten in her
arms Elizabeth Ann saw nothing funny in her looks. She gave Eleanor to
the little girl and got into bed again. “There, now, I guess we’re ready
for the night,” she said. “You put the kitty on the other side of you so
she won’t fall out of bed.”
She blew the light out and moved over a little closer to Elizabeth Ann,
who immediately was enveloped in that delicious warmth. The kitten
curled up under the little girl’s chin. Between her and the terrors of
the dark room loomed the rampart of Aunt Abigail’s great body.
Elizabeth Ann drew a long, long breath ... and when she opened her eyes
the sun was shining in at the window.