Introducing Betty Bonnet

This week, I am excited to be bringing you the first episode of a continuing story that will (hopefully!) be appearing on the Sheep Among Wolves blog once a month.

In 1915 artist Sheila Young began running a series of paper dolls in the Ladies’ Home Journal, featuring a little girl named Betty Bonnet, and her large family of brothers, sisters, neighbours and friends. Over a hundred years later, I am delighted to introduce the new Betty Bonnet serial story—built around the characters she first introduced to the public as the Betty Bonnet paper dolls.

Introducing Betty Bonnet

“You know,” I remarked, pausing to wiggle the last of the marmalade off my spoon, “I’m not actually sure that Bonnet is a name at all.”

“It’s French,” said my host, from behind his newspaper.

“Then you ought to pronounce it differently than you do,” I returned. “Quite truthfully, I suspect you may have invented it yourselves. The first time I ever saw it was in your signature.”

“Actually, it happens to be the name of a Swiss naturalist, a French doctor and politician, a concert organist, and a Barbadian pirate.”

“Not,” added his wife, “all in the same person.”

“That’s a pity,” I sighed. “For a moment, I fancied I had found the hero for my next story.”

I.

The idea that I would write better in New York belonged to the Bonnets in the first place. Probably, this is the reason it was taken for granted that their back spare room was at my disposal for as long as I chose to stay.

It was a more tolerable arrangement than it sounded. Whether I wrote better remains a disputed point, but the saving in stamps was tremendous. By trotting stealthily down dozing business streets in the early light of dawn, and slyly popping my envelopes through letter slots when the editor wasn’t looking, I managed to dispense with the United States Postal Service almost entirely.

On the other hand, the saving in stamps may have had a counterbalance by the wear-and-tear of shoe leather. For in between my bursts of literary activity, and my early-morning postal expeditions, it was an understood thing that I might as well make myself useful to the Bonnets, if I could. It may have been revenge for my overly-transparent remarks about the family name. Or it may have been that the Bonnets saw some talent in me which I did not see in myself. Whichever it was, one of the ways in which I was useful, from the very beginning, was as an armed escort to convoy Betty and Billy to school.

II.

I may as well remark, right here, that the most natural and reasonable person to see Betty and Billy from the broad stone steps of their house on Sixth Avenue down several streets, across several thoroughfares, and safely up the broad stone steps of their respective schools, would have been Bob.

Bob was eleven and a half. He navigated New York streets better than a taxi driver. And he could be depended on for kindness to his little brother and sister whenever no one else was present to take the responsibility off his hands.

Also, he was a constitutional early-riser.

However, unfortunately, Bob’s school lay six blocks off in the opposite direction. Bob was on the school baseball team, and the school sprinting team, and by next year would be on the school rowing team (provided the school got a rowing team by the time next year rolled around)—but asking him to do twelve city blocks on a full stomach directly before severe mental application would apparently have been stretching the bounds of credulity. Anyhow, his school opened half an hour before the little ones’.

Thus, it came about that the honor of armed escort devolved upon me.

Every morning, at twenty minutes past eight, Betty, Billy and the escort (fully armed with gloves, umbrella, pencil cases, school books, and Billy’s most beloved and inseparable grey flannel elephant) departed from Sixth Avenue for Miss Keats’ Kindergarten. Billy, who was five, went to the kindergarten. Betty, who was three years older, went to a highly-reported girls’ preparatory school, three doors down. We dropped Billy, the elephant, and one pencil case at Miss Keats’, marched three doors down with flags flying, landed Betty, the other pencil case, and all the school books on the threshold of the preparatory school, after which we (who had now become I) heaved a sigh of relief and fled home to our abandoned desk.

III.

So much for the mornings. They were tense with the unavowed possibility of BEING LATE. I don’t remember that we ever were late in the mornings. It was only that the specter of possible lateness hung like a thundercloud over our heads.

In the afternoon, on the other hand, the being late was not a possibility, but a certainty.

I was still on escort duty in the afternoons. Technically, Bob, (whose school got out half an hour earlier than theirs) might very conveniently have gone for the children at this time. However, after sprinting home in nine and a half minutes after school let out, Bob was generally in the depths of geometry by then, with a view to being ready for baseball practice by the time baseball practice was ready for him. Even in January, when baseball practice was limited, he was still emersed in geometry at the requisite hour. So once again, I made myself useful.

You mustn’t imagine that I wasn’t fond of Betty and Billy. I was. Billy was a confiding, caressing little chatterbox, who believe me one of the wisest and most wonderful people in the world. And Betty was a clinging, appealing little girl with a heart so tender that she once apologised for treading on the toe of my kid boot. Apologized not to me, but to the boot, I mean.

No, Betty and Billy, as they trotted down the sidewalk, each holding to one of my hands with tightly-clinging gloved fingers, occupied a very dear place in my heart. I did not blame our perpetual lateness upon Betty and Billy, themselves, but upon Mr. Anderson’s toy shop.

IV.

Mr. Anderson’s toy shop was on a corner. In this lay our doom. Even if, by strenuous efforts, we got safely past the first window, safely past the alluring green-and-gold door with it’s bewitching little bell to wake Mr. Anderson up (I suppose) if he had fallen asleep between customers—even if we got fairly around the corner and into the next street which led straight towards home, there was the second window. And past the second window, without stopping to flatten our noses against the glass and gaze with longing affection on the glories within, we never got.

“Isn’t she sweet?” sighed Betty, squeezing my fingers as one certain of unalloyed sympathy.

Billy was craning his neck in the impossible attempt to decide whether a toy ship, further inside the shop, was the kind that actually floated, or only the kind that looked as if it would, until after you had filled the bath.

“Isn’t she?” repeated Betty with gentle persistence.

“Yes,” I replied, recklessly, “she’s a lovely doll. One of the loveliest. Exactly like a real nurse I saw in the hospital, once.”

Betty raised reproachful brown eyes to my own. “Oh, Miss Burton—I didn’t mean the nurse, of course!”

This was awkward. The gorgeously-appareled nurse doll, in impeccable Red Cross uniform, bending over the exquisitely-finished hospital cot, with a real thermometer in her hand, was not the object of Betty’s rapture, after all. I scanned the window hastily.

V.

“The dolly—the dolly herself,” pleaded Betty. “Don’t you see, Miss Burton? With her poor little arm in a sling?”

After another rapid survey of the window, I did become conscious that the nurse’s cot was not empty. A very battered specimen of dollhood—frizzy, matted hair, faded paint, chipped nose, and an arm manifestly in a sling not because it enhanced the realism of the tableau, but because it could not have been fastened to the body in any other way—was almost extinguished by the ample Red Cross blanket piled in luxurious folds under the nurse’s dainty china hand.

“That doll, Betty?”

Betty’s solemn nod was firm.

“But—Betty, love,” I protested weakly. “You’ve got other dolls, at home.”

Betty’s reproachful eyes were both surprised and disappointed. What sort of a heartless grownup says such a thing as that? “You’ve got other dolls”—well, so she had. And mothers have “other children.” And sanitariums have “other invalids.” This wasn’t about the others. It wasn’t about Betty, herself.

“She needs me,” said the gently reproving voice, while the little fingers unclasped themselves from mine, and struggled with the great brass doorhandle of the shop.

“But Betty, she’s—I mean, she’s not—I mean, she’s only part of the display—put there because of the nurse—she isn’t—” I drew a breath “—Betty, she isn’t for sale!”

I did not know Betty then, as I do now. If I had, I would not have fancied such a trifle could have delayed her for a second. Shyness and timidity had entirely vanished before the call of the half-abandoned doll, in the corner of the shop window.

While I was still speaking, Betty had disappeared inside.

(To be continued.)

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