Betty Bonnet: February 1915
Betty Bonnet is an ongoing serial story, released on the Sheep Among Wolves blog once a month. It follows the adventures of the Bonnet family, first created by Sheila Young as a paper doll series released in the Ladies’ Home Journal beginning 1915. To go to the first episode, click here.
I.
If I were an impulsive individual, I would most likely begin this chapter by telling you that shopkeepers are categorically hardhearted.
This—like many generalizations—would be a severe judgement on slight grounds, because (as so often happens in these matters) the actual fact is only that one shopkeeper, in an unfortunate predicament, refused to give a kind and generous hearing to someone I happened to care about.
That is a long sentence, and now that it’s written I am not sure what I think about it. It will be better, perhaps, to go on with the story.
The someone was little Betty Bonnet. And the shopkeeper (as you may have guessed) was Mr. Anderson of the toy shop.
When Betty dove through the green-and-gold door, with the tender-hearted impulse of rescuing the dilapidated and suffering doll from the shop window, Billy and I, perforce, dove after her. All three of us came up rather hard against a pair of customers, just in the act of exiting. This was awkward, but had the incidental convenience of securing for us the immediate attention of Mr. Anderson himself.
II.
“We beg your pardon,” I explained, with rather hot ears.
“We want to buy a doll,” explained Betty, without waiting for me to go on.
“Ah!” explained Mr. Anderson, attempting to recover a duly gracious attitude. “One of the clerks will be very glad to—”
“It is the doll in the bed,” proceeded Betty.
Mr. Anderson did not look particularly enlightened.
“The sick doll—the one with the broken arm!”
Mr. Anderson examined the shop window, looking rather alarmed. Then enlightenment dawned.
“My dear little girl,” he said, (as all of us should have said, under similar circumstances,) “I’m afraid you don’t understand. That doll’s not for sale.”
This was not the end of the conversation, but it might as well have been. Mr. Anderson (who had a reputation to keep up, after all) could not dream of allowing such a deplorable specimen of dollhood pass out of his shop under the pretense of a sale. He had had doubts about putting The Dilapidated One in the shop window to begin with. He had only yielded, under the press of business, because his young assistant had been sure it put the finishing touch of realism to the tableau.
I am fairly confident that he regretted it with his whole heart before our conversation was at an end.
However, he remained inexorable.
I escorted a sobbing Betty out of the shop.
III.
All this was very sad. Personally, I could not help feeling that as the doll was quite clearly of no use whatsoever to Mr. Anderson—or to any other customer likely to come into his shop—it really might have been possible to stretch a point a little, and let the child have the worn-out plaything.
However, Mr. Anderson thought otherwise. He was the supreme authority within the confines of the green-and-gold shop. Billy and I resigned ourselves to the understanding that the subject was closed.
Not so Betty.
Now Betty, you must understand, is not a self-willed child. In the general course of things, she is regarded by her friends (myself among them) as a trifle too yielding. We sometimes think that such a tender, loving, sweet-tempered maiden might go through the world a little more safely if she had just the tiniest bit more backbone to her character.
But there hangs, in Betty’s little third-floor bedroom, directly over the bureau, where Betty can lie and look at it while she falls asleep, a picture. It is a picture of the Good Shepherd.
That it was a picture of the Good Shepherd, was all that I did notice about it, for a long time. I had not sat in bed, as Betty did, every night, propped up with pillows while she waited for Nurse to tuck her in, and gazed and gazed into that picture’s face.
Betty had.
The spirit of the Good Shepherd, so bravely, so calmly, so trustfully leaving His ninety-and-nine strong, healthy, good sheep, to seek the one suffering, broken, sinful outcast, had somehow passed into Betty’s soul.
She was not a wilful child, stubbornly set on obtaining a forbidden plaything.
She was a faithful little pilgrim, with a heart big enough to take in the whole world. Even the part of the world that contained a tattered, broken, loveless old doll. Had I realized this properly, I dare say I might not have been so startled by what happened next.
IV.
Our confrontation at Mr. Anderson’s toy shop had taken place in the last week of January. For the next fortnight, Betty was very busy with a big ball of red worsted and a crochet hook. Somebody had taught Betty to crochet, last summer, at the seaside. She indulged in the practice, now and again, sitting curled up in the library window seat, gazing solemnly out at an uninspiring vista of back garden, in between stiches, and pulling her worsted about with an air of innocent importance, until the article under construction was finished, and she could have the supreme delight of presenting and explaining it to her admiring friends.
For the next two weeks, Betty was very busy with her red worsted. Her small, rosy lips were drawn up into an expression of indescribably gravity while she worked. They drew themselves up into that same expression every time we passed Mr. Anderson’s toy shop, on the after-school-parade.
But neither she nor Billy mentioned the dilapidated doll.
You may be very sure I myself did not mention it, either!
V.
A fortnight into February came Valentine’s Day. Because it was Valentine’s Day, and because the something Betty had been knitting was so very red and Valentine-ish, and because Betty had a very beloved teacher to whom she was in the habit of carrying gifts on every possible occasion, I (most naïvely) took little notice of the bulky paper parcel which Betty chose to carry under her arm on the way to school.
I took scarcely more notice, even though I felt a slight touch of surprise, to see Betty still clutching this parcel when I arrived in the afternoon to take her home.
It was a very sloppy day. The New York streets could not make up their mind whether they were sticking faithfully to their character of Frozen, or whether they were having a try at Thaw for a change. I had a difficult article for a rigorous-souled editor weighing on my mind, and Billy had come out of kindergarten with an unusually long list of questions on the workings of the world in general, that had to be answered as we went along.
I offer all of these facts, not in excuse, but as an explanation of how I walked all the way to Mr. Anderson’s toy shop, with Betty’s hand grasped in my right one, and Billy’s in my left—and never really thought about the bundle cuddled under Betty’s other arm.
At the door of the toy shop—just as I was trying to explain to Billy why oranges, which grow where it’s hot, should be cheapest and most plentiful just when Christmas snows are making the world white; and while I was trying, at the same time, to work out my last unsatisfactory simile into some form the editor might be likely to swallow—just at this inauspicious moment, and as the door of Mr. Anderson’s toy shop was directly abreast of us on the right flank, Betty suddenly let go of my hand.
“Betty!” I exclaimed, breaking off my sentence, but still with my brain chiefly divided between editors and oranges. “What’s the matter, darling? Why are you stopping here?”
I got no answer.
Betty and her enormous parcel had already disappeared through Mr. Anderson’s door.
(To be continued.)
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