Betty Bonnet: March 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.
When Billy and I caught up to Betty, Betty herself had already caught up to the shop keeper. Not Mr. Anderson, as upon previous occasions, but Mr. Anderson’s niece—a girl of about seventeen, who had worked at the place not quite a fortnight, and knew (if possible) even less than Betty about the way toy shops were supposed to be conducted.
“It’s for HER,” Betty was explaining, as Billy and I lunged up to the pair.
It was obvious, even to the inexperienced shop girl, that Betty’s “HER” did not refer to any of the persons immediately present.
“For whom?” murmured the bewildered Miss Anderson, watching with a kind of hypnotized fascination, as Betty unrolled her bundle.
It was a piece of knitting. A voluminous piece of knitting. A piece of knitting rendered in wonderful, indescribable, shapeless vastness, by Betty’s persistent little needles over the last fortnight. A piece of knitting which she now grandly introduced to Miss Anderson with the words:
“It’s a quilt. For HER.”
II.
Billy and I, by this time, understood. We waited, as philosophically as we could, for the moment when Miss Anderson, too, should understand—and after a brief parlay, we could expect to escort a once-again-sobbing Betty out of the toy shop.
Miss Anderson, however, disconcerted our calculations.
Most likely she disconcerted Mr. Anderson’s as well.
In any case, Miss Anderson did what none of us could have looked to see her do. She hesitated. She doubted. She declared Betty was a very kind little girl. She tottered in the balance. At last she said, “Come along.”
Betty came.
Billy and I—not having any good route of escape—came also.
We came to the window of the shop. Up above us, surrounded by Parisian fashion-models, in the latest of silk and ribbon; wax babies, luxuriating beneath velvet and lace; tin tea sets that looked almost like silver and model steamships that looked almost fit to float—we beheld the object of Betty’s affection.
“There,” said Betty, pointing up to the dilapidated patient, almost hidden in the corner bed. “It’s for HER.”
III.
Miss Anderson’s eyes got very round. Then they got a little bit misty. Billy and I decided she was a rather nice girl, after all.
She gave a cautious look up and down the street. No one was paying any particular attention to the shop window just then.
“Here,” she said to Betty—and she pushed a step ladder up against the window. “You can give it to her, yourself.”
Betty mounted the steps, her little face beaming with a reflection that reminded me of the Shepherd, in the picture in Betty’s small room at home. With motherly tenderness she tucked the fabulous red quilt warmly down about the battered doll.
Then she bent forward, and planted a kiss on the tip of the flattened china nose.
The little bell above the shop door tinkled. Miss Anderson whisked Betty off the step ladder, shoved her into the arms of Billy and myself, and rushed off to her post behind the counter.
Billy and I talked about mechanical steam pumps, all the way home.
Betty talked of nothing.
She only looked blissfully inspired.
IV.
All the rest of that month, while February was swinging from frost to thaw, and back to frost again—all through the next month, while March was trying it’s alternated powers of lamb and lion—while Bob practiced his skating, every afternoon that he could find a sheet of ice, and polished his baseball bat and longed for summer on the melancholy days when he could not—all this time faithful little Betty’s knitting needles never stopped clicking.
“I want her to know SOMEBODY loves her,” Betty would explain, earnestly, when we tried to remonstrate.
Certainly, if affection could be communicated by woolen socks, woolen mittens, woolen hat, scarf, jacket, muff, petticoat—then SHE (we had still no name for the sufferer in the doll’s bed) was unquestionably a beloved person.
It ought to have been comical. It WAS comical. There was no denying the fact, when one passed by Mr. Anderson’s toy shop, and caught a glimpse of the wool-swaddled marvel in the back corner.
But there was something oddly touching in it, too.
Perhaps it was the reflection of that singularly loving look from Betty’s picture.
Perhaps it was the certainty that Betty’s faithful little needles would have clicked away as compassionately for US, under similar circumstances.
V.
Anyhow, there could be no doubt that the entire family, from Albert and Isabella (who went by the vague distinction of Mr. and Mrs. Bonnet, to anyone who chose to call them so) right down to little Bonnie (who was smaller even than Billy, and dwelt upstairs in a big, airy pair of rooms, with a nurse all to herself)—everyone, I repeat, in the Bonnet household had begun to take an interest in Betty’s pilgrimages to the toy shop.
“If that cranky old chap would only SELL the thing,” Bob remarked, with gusto one evening, while he was trying out his new tennis racket (somewhat dangerously) in the hall, “I’d buy it myself, for little Bet.”
Did Mr. Anderson know what was going on? We supposed he did. We supposed he could not have been in ignorance of what was becoming the dominant feature of his northern display window. It had seemed impossible to us that anyone could so much as pass down the street without noticing the remarkable display of knitted wonders rising up like a kind of pyramid from the doll’s bed.
By this time, the doll herself had long ceased to be able to hold all her possessions upon her own frail person at once. They were piled on the counterpane, on the footboard, even in the arms of the dainty nurse-doll, who had been the whole reason for “HER” ill-advised presence in the shop window to begin with.
And still—such is naïveté—we supposed Mr. Anderson knew!
VI.
We were coming home from school on the last day of March, when we were undeceived.
I say “undeceived”—but that mild and semi-passive term does not begin to suggest the vigor with which Mr. Anderson operated on our behalf.
Speak of Mount Vesuvius, if you will, “undeceiving” the inhabitants of Pompeii, and you will have some notion of the charisma, the energy, the foreboding, awe-inspiring power with which our way was blocked by a personification of outraged indignation in the form of Mr. Anderson of Anderson’s Toy Shop, on our way home from school, on the 31st of March.
“Miss Bonnet, I believe!” It was the first rumble of the approaching eruption.
“Yes?” said Betty, holding up last evening’s newly-completed, knitted romper (size: DOLL) as a kind of shield between herself and the offended potentate.
Billy, like a good little brother, dropped my hand, and wriggled defiantly to Betty’s side.
I, like a responsible escort, groaned inwardly, and wondered why I hadn’t taken the children in a taxi to the park.
“Miss Bonnet,” repeated Mr. Anderson, in tones solemn with indescribable disapprobation, “I wish to know WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN DOING TO MY SHOP WINDOW!”
(To be continued.)
If you missed last month’s episode, here is Betty Bonnet: February 1915:
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