Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (iphone ebook reader .TXT) đ
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- Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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forgive her for that cruelty. And when she thought that her darling was
at Putney Farm ⊠! Her blood ran cold. It positively did! It was too
dreadful. But it couldnât be helped, for a time anyhow, because Aunt
Harriet was really VERY sick. Elizabeth Ann would have to be a dear,
brave child and endure it as best she could. And as soon ⊠oh, as soon
as ever she COULD, Aunt Frances would come and take her away from them.
âDonât cry TOO much, darling ⊠it breaks my heart to think of you there!
TRY to be cheerful, dearest! TRY to bear it for the sake of your
distracted, loving Aunt Frances.â
Elizabeth Ann looked up from this letter and across the table at Aunt
Abigailâs rosy, wrinkled old face, bent over her darning. Uncle Henry
laid the paper down, took a big mouthful of pop-corn, and beat time
silently with his hand. When he could speak he murmured: An hundred dogs
bayed deep and strong, Clattered an hundred steeds along.
Old Shep woke up with a snort and Aunt Abigail fed him a handful of pop-corn. Little Eleanor stirred in her sleep, stretched, yawned, and
nestled down into a ball again on the little girlâs lap. Betsy could
feel in her own body the rhythmic vibration of the kittenâs contented
purr.
Aunt Abigail looked up: âFinished your letter? I hope Harriet is no
worse. What does Frances say?â
Elizabeth Ann blushed a deep red and crushed the letter together in her
hand. She felt ashamed and she did not know why. âAunt Frances
says, ⊠Aunt Frances says, âŠâ she began, hesitating. âShe says Aunt
Harriet is still pretty sick.â She stopped, drew a long breath, and went
on, âAnd she sends her love to you.â
Now Aunt Frances hadnât done anything of the kind, so this was a really
whopping fib. But Elizabeth Ann didnât care if it was. It made her feel
less ashamed, though she did not know why. She took another mouthful of
pop-corn and stroked Eleanorâs back. Uncle Henry got up and stretched.
âItâs time to go to bed, folks,â he said. As he wound the clock Betsy
heard him murmuring:
But when the sun his beacon red. âŠ
ELIZABETH ANN FAILS IN AN EXAMINATION
I wonder if you can guess the name of a little girl who, about a month
after this, was walking along through the melting snow in the woods with
a big black dog running circles around her. Yes, all alone in the woods
with a terrible great dog beside her, and yet not a bit afraid. You
donât suppose it could be Elizabeth Ann? Well, whoever she was, she had
something on her mind, for she walked more and more slowly and had only
a very absent-minded pat for the dogâs head when he thrust it up for a
caress. When the wood road led into a clearing in which there was a
rough little house of slabs, the child stopped altogether, and, looking
down, began nervously to draw lines in the snow with her overshoe.
You see, something perfectly dreadful had happened in school that day.
The Superintendent, the all-important, seldom-seen Superintendent, came
to visit the school and the children were given some examinations so he
could see how they were getting on.
Now, you know what an examination did to Elizabeth Ann. Or havenât I
told you yet?
Well, if I havenât, itâs because words fail me. If there is anything
horrid that an examination DIDnât do to Elizabeth Ann, I have yet to
hear of it. It began years ago, before ever she went to school, when she
heard Aunt Frances talking about how SHE had dreaded examinations when
she was a child, and how they dried up her mouth and made her ears ring
and her head ache and her knees get all weak and her mind a perfect
blank, so that she didnât know what two and two made. Of course
Elizabeth Ann didnât feel ALL those things right off at her first
examination, but by the time she had had several and had rushed to tell
Aunt Frances about how awful they were and the two of them had
sympathized with one another and compared symptoms and then wept about
her resulting low marks, why, she not only had all the symptoms Aunt
Frances had ever had, but a good many more of her own invention.
Well, she had had them all and had them hard this afternoon, when the
Superintendent was there. Her mouth had gone dry and her knees had
shaken and her elbows had felt as though they had no more bones in them
than so much jelly, and her eyes had smarted, and oh, what answers she
had made! That dreadful tight panic had clutched at her throat whenever
the Superintendent had looked at her, and she had disgraced herself ten
times over. She went hot and cold to think of it, and felt quite sick
with hurt vanity. She who did so well every day and was so much looked
up to by her classmates, what MUST they be thinking of her! To tell the
truth, she had been crying as she walked along through the woods,
because she was so sorry for herself. Her eyes were all red still, and
her throat sore from the big lump in it.
And now she would live it all over again as she told the Putney cousins.
For of course they must be told. She had always told Aunt Frances
everything that happened in school. It happened that Aunt Abigail had
been taking a nap when she got home from school, and so she had come out
to the sap-house, where Cousin Ann and Uncle Henry were making syrup, to
have it over with as soon as possible. She went up to the little slab
house now, dragging her feet and hanging her head, and opened the door.
Cousin Ann, in a very short old skirt and a manâs coat and high rubber
boots, was just poking some more wood into the big fire which blazed
furiously under the broad, flat pan where the sap was boiling. The
rough, brown hut was filled with white steam and that sweetest of all
odors, hot maple syrup. Cousin Ann turned her head, her face very red
with the heat of the fire, and nodded at the child.
âHello, Betsy, youâre just in time. Iâve saved out a cupful of hot syrup
for you, all ready to wax.â
Betsy hardly heard this, although she had been wild about waxed sugar on
snow ever since her very first taste of it. âCousin Ann,â she said
unhappily, âthe Superintendent visited our school this afternoon.â
âDid he!â said Cousin Ann, dipping a thermometer into the boiling syrup.
âYes, and we had EXAMINATIONS!â said Betsy.
âDid you?â said Cousin Ann, holding the thermometer up to the light and
looking at it.
âAnd you know how perfectly awful examinations make you feel,â said
Betsy, very near to tears again.
âWhy, no,â said Cousin Ann, sorting over syrup tins. âThey never made me
feel awful. I thought they were sort of fun.â
âFUN!â cried Betsy, indignantly, staring through the beginnings of her
tears.
âWhy, yes. Like taking a dare, donât you know. Somebody stumps you to
jump off the hitching-post, and you do it to show âem. I always used to
think examinations were like that. Somebody stumps you to spell
âpneumonia,â and you do it to show âem. Hereâs your cup of syrup. Youâd
better go right out and wax it while itâs hot.â
Elizabeth Ann automatically took the cup in her hand, but she did not
look at it. âBut supposing you get so scared you canât spell âpneumoniaâ
or anything else!â she said feelingly. âThatâs what happened to me. You
know how your mouth gets all dry and your knees âŠâ She stopped. Cousin
Ann had said she did NOT know all about those things. âWell, anyhow, I
got so scared I could hardly STAND up! And I made the most awful
mistakesâthings I know just as WELL! I spelled âdoubtâ without any b
and âseparateâ with an e, and I said Iowa was bounded on the north by
Wisconsin, and I âŠâ
âOh, well,â said Cousin Ann, âit doesnât matter if you really know the
right answers, does it? Thatâs the important thing.â
This was an idea which had never in all her life entered Betsyâs brain
and she did not take it in at all now. She only shook her head miserably
and went on in a doleful tone. âAnd I said 13 and 8 are 22! and I wrote
March without any capital M, and I âŠâ
âLook here, Betsy, do you WANT to tell me all this?â Cousin Ann spoke in
the quick, ringing voice she had once in a while which made everybody,
from old Shep up, open his eyes and get his wits about him. Betsy
gathered hers and thought hard; and she came to an unexpected
conclusion. No, she didnât really want to tell Cousin Ann all about it.
Why was she doing it? Because she thought that was the thing to do.
âBecause if you donât really want to,â went on Cousin Ann, âI donât see
that itâs doing anybody any good. I guess Hemlock Mountain will stand
right there just the same even if you did forget to put a b in âdoubt.â
And your syrup will be too cool to wax right if you donât take it out
pretty soon.â
She turned back to stoke the fire, and Elizabeth Ann, in a daze, found
herself walking out of the door. It fell shut after her, and there she
was under the clear, pale-blue sky, with the sun just hovering over the
rim of Hemlock Mountain. She looked up at the big mountains, all blue
and silver with shadows and snow, and wondered what in the world Cousin
Ann had meant. Of course Hemlock Mountain would stand there just the
same. But what of it? What did that have to do with her arithmetic, with
anything? She had failed in her examination, hadnât she?
She found a clean white snow-bank under a pine-tree, and, setting her
cup of syrup down in a safe place, began to pat the snow down hard to
make the right bed for the waxing of the syrup. The sun, very hot for
that late March day, brought out strongly the tarry perfume of the big
pine-tree. Near her the sap dripped musically into a bucket, already
half full, hung on a maple-tree. A blue-jay rushed suddenly through the
upper branches of the wood, his screaming and chattering voice sounding
like noisy children at play.
Elizabeth Ann took up her cup and poured some of the thick, hot syrup
out on the hard snow, making loops and curves as she poured. It
stiffened and hardened at once, and she lifted up a great coil of it,
threw her head back, and let it drop into her mouth. Concentrated
sweetness of summer days was in that mouthful, part of it still hot and
aromatic, part of it icy and wet with melting snow. She crunched it all
together with her strong, childâs teeth into a delicious, big lump and
sucked on it dreamily, her eyes on the rim of Hemlock Mountain, high
above her there, the snow on it bright golden in the sunlight. Uncle
Henry had promised to take her up to the top as soon as the snow went
off. She wondered what the top of a mountain would be like. Uncle Henry
had said the main thing was
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