Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📕

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

don’t 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 dog’s 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 haven’t I

told you yet?

Well, if I haven’t, it’s because words fail me. If there is anything

horrid that an examination DIDn’t 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 didn’t know what two and two made. Of course

Elizabeth Ann didn’t 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 man’s 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.

“Hello, Betsy, you’re just in time. I’ve saved out a cupful of hot syrup

for you, all ready to wax.”

Betsy hardly heard this, although she had been wild about waxed sugar on

snow ever since her very first taste of it. “Cousin Ann,” she said

unhappily, “the Superintendent visited our school this afternoon.”

“Did he!” said Cousin Ann, dipping a thermometer into the boiling syrup.

“Yes, and we had EXAMINATIONS!” said Betsy.

“Did you?” said Cousin Ann, holding the thermometer up to the light and

looking at it.

“And you know how perfectly awful examinations make you feel,” said

Betsy, very near to tears again.

“Why, no,” said Cousin Ann, sorting over syrup tins. “They never made me

feel awful. I thought they were sort of fun.”

“FUN!” cried Betsy, indignantly, staring through the beginnings of her

tears.

“Why, yes. Like taking a dare, don’t you know. Somebody stumps you to

jump off the hitching-post, and you do it to show ‘em. I always used to

think examinations were like that. Somebody stumps you to spell

‘pneumonia,’ and you do it to show ‘em. Here’s your cup of syrup. You’d

better go right out and wax it while it’s hot.”

Elizabeth Ann automatically took the cup in her hand, but she did not

look at it. “But supposing you get so scared you can’t spell ‘pneumonia’

or anything else!” she said feelingly. “That’s what happened to me. You

know how your mouth gets all dry and your knees …” She stopped. Cousin

Ann had said she did NOT know all about those things. “Well, anyhow, I

got so scared I could hardly STAND up! And I made the most awful

mistakes—things I know just as WELL! I spelled ‘doubt’ without any b

and ‘separate’ with an e, and I said Iowa was bounded on the north by

Wisconsin, and I …”

“Oh, well,” said Cousin Ann, “it doesn’t matter if you really know the

right answers, does it? That’s the important thing.”

This was an idea which had never in all her life entered Betsy’s brain

and she did not take it in at all now. She only shook her head miserably

and went on in a doleful tone. “And I said 13 and 8 are 22! and I wrote

March without any capital M, and I …”

“Look here, Betsy, do you WANT to tell me all this?” 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 didn’t really want to tell Cousin Ann all about it.

Why was she doing it? Because she thought that was the thing to do.

“Because if you don’t really want to,” went on Cousin Ann, “I don’t see

that it’s 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 ‘doubt.’

And your syrup will be too cool to wax right if you don’t take it out

pretty soon.”

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, hadn’t 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, child’s 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