“Well, there’s an argument for me!” Emily said. Gathering up the dishes, she felt the same mental stimulation she used to feel when preparing for a debate. She must muster all the reasons why Syrian and American children ought to be friends. “And the best one I know,” she thought with a smile, “is that the Syrians are so nice.”
“Who are you going to tackle first?” her grandfather called out.
“The ten-year-olds I know best are Bobbys Sibley and Cobb.”
“They’d be good ones. Sibley is a very public-spirited man. And, of course, Jessie Cobb is the salt of the earth.”
“And four children—five, counting Layla—are enough for this size house. So I guess I won’t have any trouble after all,” Emily replied.
But even when the club was formed, she wouldn’t be through with this matter, she resolved. It was time Deep Valley took some interest in the Syrians.
She decided to call on the Sibleys and Miss Cobb that afternoon. Dressing, she caught a glimpse of the white and blue party gown hanging in her closet, and it gave her a pang, but she said to herself briskly, “None of that!” and closed the door.
She walked over the slough with her head high, and when she was passing the Webster house the door flew open and Annette beckoned. “Come on in!”
“I can’t,” Emily called. “I’m on an errand.”
“Oh, dear! I want you to see my Christmas presents. And Nell asked me to let you know that she’s having the girls tomorrow.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” Emily replied. “But I’m going to Alice Morrison’s.”
“You are? That ought to be fun! Well, stop by for me Saturday for Ellen’s luncheon then.”
“I will,” Emily answered and waved her muff in glad relief. She was thankful not to have to see the girls for two days. They weren’t to blame for her difficulties. Even Don wasn’t to blame. People didn’t need to have other people at their parties unless they wanted to, she told herself, wincing. But she had to break away somehow from her old out-grown self.
Miss Cobb seemed surprised by the idea of the Club, but she offered no objections.
“Bobby isn’t at home. I think he’d like to join, though. Especially if Bobby Sibley does.”
“I’m going to invite him next,” Emily replied. She told Miss Cobb about Layla and the plan to teach her music, and Miss Cobb’s face lighted with interest.
“I think it’s awfully nice of you to do that, Emily. Do you have a beginner’s book? Here, let me loan you one! And bring her to see me some day. Won’t you?”
Emily proceeded to the Sibleys’ house on Broad Street. Bobby himself answered the door, grinning, and took her to the library where his father and Carney were sitting by the fire. Tall, handsome Mr. Sibley rose to greet her, smiling. Emily knew him well; she had been in his Sunday School class. Carney passed popcorn and candy. She was a pretty fresh-faced girl who wore an enormous diamond on her engagement finger—the biggest diamond, Emily thought, that she had ever seen.
Since Bobby was present Emily stated her errand briefly. She did not go into her reasons for forming the club. But Mr. Sibley must have sensed them. He looked at her thoughtfully.
“It’s a very sensible beginning, Emily,” he said. He turned to Bobby. “I think you would like to join; wouldn’t you, son?”
“Sure,” said Bobby amiably. “Will there be refreshments?”
“Yes. At every meeting. And I make good cookies.” Emily smiled at him. “Bobby, do you know any Syrian boys?”
“Naw! They’re…” he stopped, and looked cautiously at his father.
“What were you going to say, son?”
“You told me not to say it.”
“Then I’m glad you didn’t.”
“They’re not dagos; are they, Dad?” asked Bobby, and grinned broadly to have outwitted his parent.
“Kalil and Yusef,” said Emily, “sold me frogs’ legs last summer.”
“Did they?” asked Bobby, looking interested.
“Yes. They’re fine frog catchers.”
“I catch pollywogs,” said Bobby, “and they turn into frogs. It’s easier.”
Carney accompanied Emily to the door. “I’m interested in what you’re doing,” she said. “I’m taking sociology in college. And I’ve often thought about this foreign group in Deep Valley, how little was being done for them—nothing, actually, except what America offers to anyone.”
“I’ve just begun to think about them,” Emily replied.
Carney smiled, showing a lone dimple. “I have an idea you haven’t stopped,” she said. “I’ll be seeing you at Alice’s tomorrow. Maybe we can talk about it there.”
But for a rollicking hour Alice’s party, the next afternoon, offered no chance for serious talk. Like Fred, Emily was amazed at the youthful high spirits of the ancients of 1910. Winona, she knew, was as exuberant as Gladys, but she had not expected to see Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly, visitors from the Cities, acting so wildly absurd.
Betsy was wearing the same plaid dress, but not the ribbon. Her hair was high atop her head in long sausagelike rolls with curls tucked here and there.
“Don’t I look distinguished?” she demanded, parading. “Don’t I look like a lady authoress? Tib did it! To think that I have to go through the U with my hair in a bun while Tib is wasted in Milwaukee.”
“Not exactly wasted,” said Tib, preening like a little yellow bird.
“Ye Gods!” cried Winona. “Can I believe my eyes?”
The girls were bringing out tatting, crocheting and embroidery work and Betsy also had whipped out something white. Emily gathered from the uproar that Betsy never sewed.
“It’s a dish towel,” she said complacently.
“A dish towel?” cried Irma Biscay.
“Isn’t it lovely? I’m hemming it for Tacy, the future Mrs. Harry Kerr. Everyone is making her luncheon sets and dresser scarves. I can’t let her go to the altar without some of my handiwork; can I?”
“Be Gorrah!” cried Tacy. “I’m not going to wear a dish towel to the altar!”
“You’re going to wear a Paris creation; aren’t you, Tacy?”
“White satin with a fine long train!”
“Betsy will step on it!” warned Tib. “I’d never trust Betsy to be my bridesmaid. She’d start composing a poem or something at just the wrong moment.”
“Tib Muller!” Betsy lunged at her. “If I’m not your bridesmaid, the marriage won’t be legal!”
Tacy wiped her eyes. “Let’s stop acting like imbeciles!” she said. “I’m ashamed of us, Emily.”
“It’s because we’re so glad to be back,” Betsy explained, releasing Tib. “And I am so going to be your bridesmaid!”
“Of course you are, liebchen. But I’m not going to get married for a long, long time. I’m going to see the world,” said Tib.
Emily, like the rest, was laughing, but suddenly she yearned for her own crowd. A crowd was pretty nice, she thought. You went through school with them; you were one another’s bridesmaids, maybe; even your children got to be friends sometimes.
But then the girls started talking about the New Year’s Eve ball, and that brought back her bitterness. With this group, when Winona asked, “Going, Emily?” and she had to shake her head, Alice put in, “Oh, you probably will! Not all their royal highnesses have made up their minds on whom to bestow their unutterable boons.”
Over sandwiches and coffee, and a highly acclaimed bisque of macaroons, the talk grew more serious. Carney asked Emily about the Boys’ Club, and there was a lively interest in it. Alice lived near Little Syria and knew a good deal about the settlement. Betsy, Tacy and Tib had played with a little Syrian girl when they were children.
“She was a princess.”
“Betsy! Don’t fib!”
“But she was, really! A Syrian emeera! I’ve never forgotten her.” Betsy’s eyes grew dark.
Betsy wasn’t exactly pretty, Emily thought, in spite of her warm hazel eyes and fair skin. She had irr
egular features, widely spaced teeth. But you liked to look at her, somehow. Emily was pleased, when the party broke up, to find Betsy sociably hooking her arm.
“Cab Edwards has been talking to me about you.”
“He has?” asked Emily.
“He seems to feel badly because you couldn’t go to college—although usually Cab says college isn’t important.”
“He knows I felt badly about it,” Emily replied. “But I find…I mind it less all the time. There’s lots to do right here in Deep Valley.” She heard herself telling eagerly about her music and dancing and the Browning Club.
“It’s been a—surprising year,” she ended.
“I think I know.” Betsy frowned to find the right words. “I’m a year behind my class in college, Emily. I had to stop in the middle of my freshman year and go out to California. I wasn’t well, and my grandmother needed company—
“I didn’t want to go. I hated to get behind in school. I hated to leave my friends, and Joe—Joe Willard, the boy I was going with. But Emily, I had a wonderful year! I had expected it to be a lost year. That was what I kept calling it sadly to myself, ‘a lost year!’ Lost!”
In spite of her earnestness Betsy began to laugh.
“It was just about the most wonderful year of my life! While I was living so quietly with Grandma I had time to write, which is what I like to do best in the world. And I met an uncle who knew about professional writing, and he gave me a lot of good advice, and I started selling stories. But that wasn’t the most important thing…”
They were nearing the Mullers’ house where Carney, Tacy and Tib were waiting. Betsy slowed her pace.
“That ‘lost year’ gave me a chance to do some thinking. I got acquainted with myself, I found myself, out there in California. It’s hard to explain. I was going with Joe before, and I still go with Joe. At least, I like him best; but he’s gone off to Harvard. I wanted to write before, and I still want to write. But I changed. I—I began to see the pattern. It did me good to get away from my friends. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes, I do,” said Emily slowly.
While she was taking off her coat at home her grandfather said, “That Cab Edwards was here.”
“Cab? What did he want?”
“He hung around a while. We talked about the Civil War. We had a real nice time.”
“Did he—did he leave a message?”
“Yes,” said Grandpa Webster. “He left a note.” He dipped into his vest pocket, but his fingers came out empty. He tried his coat pockets, his trouser pockets. “What did I do with the dinged thing! Oh, I remember!” He trotted to the clock shelf. “Here it is! I knew I put it somewhere.”
Emily opened it.
“Anything important?” her grandfather asked.
“Pretty important.” She looked up, smiling tremulously. “It’s an invitation to a dance. To the big New Year’s Eve ball at the Melborn.”
She flew upstairs to her closet and took the white and blue gown into a tearful embrace.
When she called for Annette next day, Annette took her joyously up to her room. She, too, went to her closet and brought out a new evening gown—a pink marquisette trimmed with multiple tiny pink bows.
“And a slit skirt, Em! To the knee!”
“It’s darling!”
“I’m going to wear it to the Melborn—the New Year’s Eve ball, you know.”
“I know,” said Emily, smiling. “I’m going.”
“You’re going?” Annette’s astonishment was so great that they both laughed. “Who with?”
“Cab Edwards.”
“Has he been taking you out?”
“Just to a couple of dances!”
Annette kissed her rapturously. “He’s very nice! And so terribly old! Mamma! Mamma! Guess what!”
Aunt Sophie came hurrying in, and she was as pleased as Annette.
“But do you know what they say about the Edwards boy, Emily? He changes girls a lot. He doesn’t want to get serious because he’s head of the family.”
“Well, that suits me!” said Emily, laughing. “We’re just friends, Aunt Sophie!”
Aunt Sophie looked dubious.
“Wait till the girls hear! Let me tell them,” Annette urged, and during the salad course she dropped her bomb. The surprise was unflattering but the unfeigned rejoicing warmed Emily’s heart.
“She’s been going around with an older crowd,” Annette explained importantly.
“See that you don’t get to like them as well as you do us!” cried Nell, hugging her.
Emily could feel her stature rising—like Jack’s beanstalk! It was astonishing, but not so astonishing as the way her own feelings had changed. “And all because of a dance!” she marveled.
The corn flowers in her hair, and on the white and blue gown, were as becoming as the clerk had said they would be. And she wore the pearl earrings—although earrings weren’t in style.
“But they suit you!” Alice said turning her around when they met at the Sibleys’ where Cab took her first, to join his crowd. Emily met Sam Hutchinson who had put the big diamond on Carney’s finger, and the man who had come down from the Cities to take Betsy to the dance. Bob Barhydt was his name.
Tib Muller looked angelic in a white dress trimmed with swansdown. “I made it myself,” she said when Emily admired it. “I have so many talents. I can sew and cook and draw and do Betsy’s hair.”
“And dance,” said Emily. “I hope you and Fred are going to dance together tonight.”
Tib gave her light laugh. “Oh, naturally! He’s engaged me for the Gaby Glide.”
Automobiles left the party at the brightly lighted Melborn. They swept across the lobby and up the grand staircase, and music rushed down to greet them, for Lamm’s Orchestra was already playing.
“Oh-h-h-h-h every evening hear him sing,
It’s the cutest little thing,
Got the cutest little swing…”
“Hitchy coo, hitchy coo, hitchy coo,” everyone sang, and Cab jigged at the entrance to the ballroom which was glowing with poinsettias and holly. He handed Emily her slipper bag.
“Don’t take too long to powder your nose.”
“I won’t.”
There was a frantic belated scribbling of names. Bob Barhydt asked her for a dance, and so did Sam Hutchinson, and Lloyd, of course, and Dennie, and Tom Slade in his West Point uniform who had come with Irma Biscay. Some boys from her own class slid across the room. Were they, too, impressed, she wondered, by her going around with an older crowd? Hunter came, and Fred, and Scid—but he was Cab’s brother; he didn’t count.
Jim Baxter didn’t come. “Why should he?” Emily thought blithely. “Jim Baxter and I will never in this world have anything in common.” Why, she wondered, had it seemed so tragic to be unable to charm him at the sleighing party?
Don was the length of the room away. She recognized him at once by his proud square shoulders. She saw him dancing with Annette—and with Gladys, Nell, Ellen. He looked moody and contemptuous.
She kept hoping he would ask her for a dance. But he didn’t. He didn’t even look her way. And yet she was sure not only that he had seen her but that he knew she was having a wonderful time.
“He doesn’t like it,” she thought. “He likes me always to feel inferior.”
She recognized his faults more plainly than she used to. But the feeling that swept her when she saw him was deeper than it used to be; it was frighteningly deep.
“I’m growing up. I’m capable of feeling more. And I’m in love with him!” she acknowledged in her heart.
She felt depressed. The orchestra was playing “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”
But that gave way to “Everybody’s Doing It,” and Fred Muller made her try the Turkey Trot. Everyone praised her dancing. “I must tell Mrs. Anderson,” Emily thought. “She’ll be so pleased!”
She met Annette in the dressing room. “Having a good time?” Emily asked.
“I’m tryi
ng to,” said Annette. “But Don is in the vilest mood! Sometimes I think I’ll ditch him for Jim. Jim is sure to be a football star.”
Out on the streets an eloquent whistle blew. Inside a cheer went up and horns and rattles made a joyful din. The orchestra started “Auld Lang Syne,” and everyone joined hands and danced in a great revolving circle.
Nineteen thirteen was coming in! She had dreaded it so! But it found her, Emily Webster, dancing at the Melborn.
“Maybe my ‘lost year’ is going to be like Betsy’s, wonderful!” she thought.
Cab shouted over the racket, “Making a New Year’s resolution?”
“Yes, I am,” Emily called back.
“What is it?”
“I’m going to put in a telephone!”
“Hooray!” he cried, as the circle broke, and whirled her into a waltz.
16
The Wrestling Champs
THE DAY AFTER NEW YEAR’S was memorable on two counts. First, Emily ordered a telephone. She told her grandfather hesitantly at breakfast that she wished to put one in.
“Why not? Why not?” he answered. “We have plenty of money in the bank.”
“You don’t think it would bother you?” she asked.
“Not a bit. I kind of like the things.”
The second event was, of course, the formation of the Boys’ Club.
The three Syrians arrived first, coming in the front gate as before, stamping their feet carefully on the porch, and showing brightly expectant faces at the door. As before, too, they were scrubbed and shining and carried gifts.
“You mustn’t do this!” Emily protested, unwrapping a package which proved to contain a baklawa cake, criss-crossed like a checkerboard. “You don’t bring presents to a club.”
“But it’s the New Year’s, ma’am! Happy New Year!” cried Kalil.
“Happy New Year!” “Happy New Year!” echoed Layla and Yusef.
They ran to shake hands with Grandpa Webster, and Kalil started to tell him about their adventures with the skates, gliding in long strokes around the dining room and falling with an exaggerated bump. He sat laughing with his curly hair tousled while Grandpa Webster shook with mirth, Layla squealed and an appreciative grin spread across Yusef’s broad face.