40CHAPTER IVPeter Elucidates
It was Peter who got at the heart of the trouble. Margaret tried, but though Eleanor clung to her and relaxed under the balm of her gentle caresses, the child remained entirely inarticulate until Peter gathered her up in his arms, and signed to the others that he wished to be left alone with her.
By the time he rejoined the two in the drawing-room—he had missed his after-dinner coffee in the long half-hour that he had spent shut into the guest room with the child—Jimmie and Gertrude had arrived, and the four sat grouped together to await his pronouncement.
“She thinks she has adenoids. She wants the doll that David left in that carpetbag of hers he forgot to take out of the ‘Handsome cab.’ She wants to be loved, and she wants to grow up and write poetry for the newspapers,” he announced. “Also she will eat a piece of bread and butter and a glass of milk, as soon as it can conveniently be provided for her.”41
“When did you take holy orders, Gram?” Jimmie inquired. “How do you work the confessional? I wish I could make anybody give anything up to me, but I can’t. Did you just go into that darkened chamber and say to the kid, ‘Child of my adoption,—cough,’ and she coughed, or are you the master of some subtler system of choking the truth out of ’em?”
“Anybody would tell anything to Peter if he happened to want to know it,” Margaret said seriously. “Wouldn’t they, Beulah?”
Beulah nodded. “She wants to be loved,” Peter had said. It was so simple for some people to open their hearts and give out love,—easily, lightly. She was not made like that,—loving came hard with her, but when once she had given herself, it was done. Peter didn’t know how hard she had tried to do right with the child that day.
“The doll is called the rabbit doll, though there is no reason why it should be, as it only looks the least tiny bit like a rabbit, and is a girl. Its other name is Gwendolyn, and it always goes to bed with her. Mrs. O’Farrels aunt said that children always stopped playing with dolls when they got to be as big as Eleanor, but she isn’t never42going to stop.—You must get after that double negative, Beulah.—She once wrote a poem beginning: ‘The rabbit doll, it is my own.’ She thinks that she has a frog-like expression of face, and that is why Beulah doesn’t like her better. She is perfectly willing to have her adenoids cut out, if Beulah thinks it would improve her, but she doesn’t want to ‘take anything,’ when she has it done.”
“You are a wonder, Gram,” Gertrude said admiringly.
“Oh! I have made a mess of it, haven’t I?” Beulah said. “Is she homesick?”
“Yes, she’s homesick,” Peter said gravely, “but not for anything she’s left in Colhassett. David told you the story, didn’t he?—She is homesick for her own kind, for people she can really love, and she’s never found any of them. Her grandfather and grandmother are old and decrepit. She feels a terrible responsibility for them, but she doesn’t love them, not really. She’s too hungry to love anybody until she finds the friends she can cling to—without compromise.”
“An emotional aristocrat,” Gertrude murmured. “It’s the curse of taste.”
“Help! Help!” Jimmie cried, grimacing at Gertrude.43“Didn’t she have any kids her own age to play with?”
“She had ’em, but she didn’t have any time to play with them. You forget she was supporting a family all the time, Jimmie.”
“By jove, I’d like to forget it.”
“She had one friend named Albertina Weston that she used to run around with in school. Albertina also wrote poetry. They used to do poetic ‘stunts’ of one poem a day on some subject selected by Albertina. I think Albertina was a snob. She candidly admitted to Eleanor that if her clothes were more stylish, she would go round with her more. Eleanor seemed to think that was perfectly natural.”
“How do you do it, Peter?” Jimmie besought. “If I could get one damsel, no matter how tender her years, to confide in me like that I’d be happy for life. It’s nothing to you with those eyes, and that matinée forehead of yours; but I want ’em to weep down my neck, and I can’t make ’em do it.”
“Wait till you grow up, Jimmie, and then see what happens,” Gertrude soothed him.
“Wait till it’s your turn with our child,” Margaret44said. “In two months more she’s coming to you.”
“Do I ever forget it for a minute?” Jimmie cried.
“The point of the whole business is,” Peter continued, “that we’ve got a human soul on our hands. We imported a kind of scientific plaything to exercise our spiritual muscle on, and we’ve got a real specimen of womanhood in embryo. I don’t know whether the situation appalls you as much as it does me—” He broke off as he heard the bell ring.
“That’s David, he said he was coming.”
Then as David appeared laden with the lost carpetbag and a huge box of chocolates, he waved him to a chair, and took up his speech again. “I don’t know whether the situation appalls you, as much as it does me—if I don’t get this off my chest now, David, I can’t do it at all—but the thought of that poor little waif in there and the struggle she’s had, and the shy valiant spirit of her,—the sand that she’s got, thesandthat put her through and kept her mouth shut through experiences that might easily have killed her, why I feel as if I’d give anything I had in the world to make45it up to her, and yet I’m not altogether sure that I could—that we could—that it’s any of our business to try it.”
“There’s nobody else who will, if we don’t,” David said.
“That’s it,” Peter said, “I’ve never known any one of our bunch to quit anything that they once started in on, but just by way of formality there is one thing we ought to do about this proposition before we slide into it any further, and that is to agree that we want to go on with it, that we know what we’re in for, and that we’re game.”
“We decided all that before we sent for the kid,” Jimmie said, “didn’t we?”
“We decided we’d adopt a child, but we didn’t decide we’d adopt this one. Taking the responsibility of this one is the question before the house just at present.”
“The idea being,” David added, “that she’s a fairly delicate piece of work, and as time advances she’s going to bedelicater.”
“And that it’s an awkward matter to play with souls,” Beulah contributed; whereupon Jimmie murmured, “Browning,” sotto voice.
“She may be all that you say, Gram,” Jimmie46said, after a few minutes of silence, “a thunderingly refined and high-minded young waif, but you will admit that without an interpreter of the same class, she hasn’t been much good to us so far.”
“Good lord, she isn’t refined and high-minded,” Peter said. “That’s not the idea. She’s simply supremely sensitive and full of the most pathetic possibilities. If we’re going to undertake her we ought to realize fully what we’re up against, and acknowledge it,—that’s all I’m trying to say, and I apologize for assuming that it’s more my business than anybody’s to say it.”
“That charming humility stuff, if I could only remember to pull it.”
The sofa pillow that Gertrude aimed at Jimmie hit him full on the mouth and he busied himself pretending to eat it. Beulah scorned the interruption.
“Of course, we’re going to undertake her,” Beulah said. “We are signed up and it’s all down in writing. If anybody has any objections, they can state them now.” She looked about her dramatically. On every young face was reflected the same earnestness that set gravely on her own.
“The ‘ayes’ have it,” Jimmie murmured. “From47now on I become not only a parent, but a soul doctor.” He rose, and tiptoed solemnly toward the door of Eleanor’s room.
“Where are you going, Jimmie?” Beulah called, as he was disappearing around the bend in the corridor.
He turned back to lift an admonitory finger.
“Shush,” he said, “do not interrupt me. I am going to wrap baby up in a blanket and bring her out to her mothers and fathers.”
48CHAPTER VEleanor Enjoys Herself in Her Own Way
“I am in society here,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Albertina, with a pardonable emphasis on that phase of her new existence that would appeal to the haughty ideals of Miss Weston, “I don’t have to do any housework, or anything. I sleep under a pink silk bedquilt, and I have all new clothes. I have a new black pattern leather sailor hat that I sopose you would laugh at. It cost six dollars and draws the sun down to my head but I don’t say anything. I have six aunts and uncles all diferent names and ages but grown up. Uncle Peter is the most elderly, he is twenty-five. I know becase we gave him a birthday party with a cake. I sat at the table. I wore my crape da shine dress. You would think that was pretty, well it is. There is a servant girl to do evry thing even passing your food to you on a tray. I wish you could come to visit me. I stay two months in a place and get broghut up there. Aunt Beulah is peculiar but nice when you know her.49She is stric and at first I thought we was not going to get along. She thought I had adenoids and I thought she dislikt me too much, but it turned out not. I take lessons from her every morning like they give at Rogers College, not like publick school. I have to think what I want to do a good deal and then do it. At first she turned me loose to enjoy myself and I could not do it, but now we have disapline which makes it all right. My speling is weak, but uncle Peter says Stevanson could not spel and did not care. Stevanson was the poat who wrote the birdie with a yellow bill in the reader. I wish you would tel me if Grandma’s eye is worse and what about Grandfather’s rheumatism.
“Your fond friend, Eleanor.
“P. S. We have a silver organ in all the rooms to have heat in. I was afrayd of them at first.”
In the letters to her grandparents, however, the undercurrent of anxiety about the old people, which was a ruling motive in her life, became apparent.
“Dear Grandma and Dear Grandpa,” she wrote,
“I have been here a weak now. I inclose my50salary, fifteen dollars ($15.00) which I hope you will like. I get it for doing evry thing I am told and being adoptid besides. You can tell the silectmen that I am rich now and can support you just as good as Uncle Amos. I want Grandpa to buy some heavy undershurts right of. He will get a couff if he doesn’t do it. Tell him to rub your arm evry night before you go to bed, Grandma, and to have a hot soapstone for you. If you don’t have your bed hot you will get newmonia and I can’t come home to take care of you, becase my salary would stop. I like New York better now that I have lived here some. I miss seeing you around, and Grandpa.
“The cook cooks on a gas stove that is very funny. I asked her how it went and she showed me it. She is going to leve, but lucky thing the hired girl can cook till Aunt Beulah gets a nother cook as antyseptic as this cook. In Rogers College they teach ladies to have their cook’s and hired girl’s antyseptic. It is a good idear becase of sickness. I inclose a recipete for a good cake. You can make it sating down. You don’t have to stir it much, and Grandpa can bring you the things. I will write soon. I hope you are all51right. Let me hear that you are all right. Don’t forget to put the cat out nights. I hope she is all right, but remember the time she stole the butter fish. I miss you, and I miss the cat around. Uncle David pays me my salary out of his own pocket, because he is the richest, but I like Uncle Peter the best. He is very handsome and we like to talk to each other the best. Goodbye, Eleanor.”
But it was on the varicolored pages of a ruled tablet—with a picture on its cover of a pink cheeked young lady beneath a cherry tree, and marked in large straggling letters also varicolored “The Cherry Blossom Tablet”—that Eleanor put down her most sacred thoughts. On the outside, just above the cherry tree, her name was written with a pencil that had been many times wet to get the desired degree of blackness, “Eleanor Hamlin, Colhassett, Massachusetts. Private Dairy,” and on the first page was this warning in the same painstaking, heavily shaded chirography, “This book is sacrid, and not be trespased in or read one word of. By order of owner. E. H.”
It was the private diary and Gwendolyn, the rabbit doll, and a small blue china shepherdess52given her by Albertina, that constituted Eleanor’slares et penates. When David had finally succeeded in tracing the ancient carpetbag in the lost and found department of the cab company, Eleanor was able to set up her household gods, and draw from them that measure of strength and security inseparable from their familiar presence. She always slept with two of the three beloved objects, and after Beulah had learned to understand and appreciate the child’s need for unsupervised privacy, she divined that the little girl was happiest when she could devote at least an hour or two a day to the transcribing of earnest sentences on the pink, blue and yellow pages of the Cherry Blossom Tablet, and the mysterious games that she played with the rabbit doll. That these games consisted largely in making the rabbit doll impersonate Eleanor, while the child herself became in turn each one of the six uncles and aunts, and exhorted the victim accordingly, did not of course occur to Beulah. It did occur to her that the pink, blue and yellow pages would have made interesting reading to Eleanor’s guardians, if they had been privileged to read all that was chronicled there.
53
“My aunt Beulah wears her hair to high of her forrid.
“My aunt Margaret wears her hair to slic on the sides.
“My aunt Gertrude wears her hair just about right.
“My aunt Margaret is the best looking, and has the nicest way.
“My aunt Gertrude is the funniest. I never laugh at what she says, but I have trouble not to. By thinking of Grandpa’s rheumaticks I stop myself just in time. Aunt Beulah means all right, and wants to do right and have everybody else the same.
“Uncle David is not handsome, but good.
“Uncle Jimmie is not handsome, but his hair curls.
“Uncle Peter is the most handsome man that ere the sun shown on. That is poetry. He has beautiful teeth, and I like him.
“Yesterday the Wordsworth Club—that’s what Uncle Jimmie calls us because he says we are seven—went to the Art Museum to edjucate me in art.
“Aunt Beulah wanted to take me to one room and keep me there until I asked to come out.54Uncle Jimmie wanted to show me the statures. Uncle David said I ought to begin with the Ming period and work down to Art Newvoo. Aunts Gertrude and Margaret wanted to take me to the room of the great masters. While they were talking Uncle Peter and I went to see a picture that made me cry. I asked him who she was. He said that wasn’t the important thing, that the important thing was that one man had nailed his dream. He didn’t doubt that lots of other painters had, but this one meant the most to him. When I cried he said, ‘You’re all right, Baby. You know.’ Then he reached down and kissed me.”
As the month progressed, it seemed to Beulah that she was making distinct progress with the child. Since the evening when Peter had won Eleanor’s confidence and explained her mental processes, her task had been illumined for her. She belonged to that class of women in whom maternity arouses late. She had not the facile sympathy which accepts a relationship without the endorsement of the understanding, and she was too young to have much toleration for that which was not perfectly clear to her.55
She had started in with high courage to demonstrate the value of a sociological experiment. She hoped later, though these hopes she had so far kept to herself, to write, or at least to collaborate with some worthy educator, on a book which would serve as an exact guide to other philanthropically inclined groups who might wish to follow the example of cooperative adoption; but the first day of actual contact with her problem had chilled her. She had put nothing down in her note-book. She had made no scientific progress. There seemed to be no intellectual response in the child.
Peter had set all these things right for her. He had shown her the child’s uncompromising integrity of spirit. The keynote of Beulah’s nature was, as Jimmie said, that she “had to be shown.” Peter pointed out the fact to her that Eleanor’s slogan also was, “No compromise.” As Eleanor became more familiar with her surroundings this spirit became more and more evident.
“I could let down the hem of these dresses, Aunt Beulah,” she said one day, looking down at the long stretch of leg protruding from the chic blue frock that made her look like a Boutet de56Monvil. “I can’t hem very good, but my stitches don’t show much.”
“That dress isn’t too short, dear. It’s the way little girls always wear them. Do little girls on Cape Cod wear them longer?”
“Yes, Aunt Beulah.”
“How long do they wear them?”
“Albertina,” they had reached the point of discussion of Albertina now, and Beulah was proud of it, “wore her dresses to her ankles, be—because her—her legs was so fat. She said that mine was—were getting to be fat too, and it wasn’t refined to wear short dresses, when your legs were fat.”
“There are a good many conflicting ideas of refinement in the world, Eleanor,” Beulah said.
“I’ve noticed there are, since I came to New York,” Eleanor answered unexpectedly.
Beulah’s academic spirit recognized and rejoiced in the fact that with all her docility, Eleanor held firmly to her preconceived notions. She continued to wear her dresses short, but when she was not actually on exhibition, she hid her long legs behind every available bit of furniture or drapery.
The one doubt left in her mind, of the child’s initiative and executive ability, was destined to be57dissipated by the rather heroic measures sometimes resorted to by a superior agency taking an ironic hand in the game of which we have been too inhumanly sure.
On the fifth week of Eleanor’s stay Beulah became a real aunt, the cook left, and her own aunt and official chaperon, little Miss Prentis, was laid low with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism. Beulah’s excitement on these various counts, combined with indiscretions in the matter of overshoes and overfatigue, made her an easy victim to a wandering grip germ. She opened her eyes one morning only to shut them with a groan of pain. There was an ache in her head and a thickening in her chest, the significance of which she knew only too well. She found herself unable to rise. She lifted a hoarse voice and called for Mary, the maid, who did not sleep in the house but was due every morning at seven. But the gentle knock on the door was followed by the entrance of Eleanor, not Mary.
“Mary didn’t come, Aunt Beulah. I thought you was—were so tired, I’d let you have your sleep out. I heard Miss Prentis calling, and I made her some gruel, and I got my own breakfast.”58
“Oh! how dreadful,” Beulah gasped in the face of this new calamity; “and I’m really so sick. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Eleanor regarded her gravely. Then she put a professional hand on her pulse and her forehead.
“You’ve got the grip,” she announced.
“I’m afraid I have, Eleanor, and Doctor Martin’s out of town, and won’t be back till to-morrow when he comes to Aunt Ann. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
“I’ll tend to things,” Eleanor said. “You lie still and close your eyes, and don’t put your arms out of bed and get chilled.”
“Well, you’ll have to manage somehow,” Beulah moaned; “how, I don’t know, I’m sure. Give Aunt Annie her medicine and hot water bags, and just let me be. I’m too sick to care what happens.”
After the door had closed on the child a dozen things occurred to Beulah that might have been done for her. She was vaguely faint for her breakfast. Her feet were cold. She thought of the soothing warmth of antiphlogistine when applied to the chest. She thought of the quinine on the shelf in the bathroom. Once more she tried lifting her head, but she could not accomplish a59sitting posture. She shivered as a draft from the open window struck her.
“If I could only be taken in hand this morning,” she thought, “I know it could be broken.”
The door opened softly. Eleanor, in the cook’s serviceable apron of gingham that would have easily contained another child the same size, swung the door open with one hand and held it to accommodate the passage of the big kitchen tray, deeply laden with a heterogeneous collection of objects. She pulled two chairs close to the bedside and deposited her burden upon them. Then she removed from the tray a goblet of some steaming fluid and offered it to Beulah.
“It’s cream of wheat gruel,” she said, and added ingratiatingly: “It tastes nice in a tumbler.”
Beulah drank the hot decoction gratefully and found, to her surprise, that it was deliciously made.
Eleanor took the glass away from her and placed it on the tray, from which she took what looked to Beulah like a cloth covered omelet,—at any rate, it was a crescent shaped article slightly yellow in tone. Eleanor tested it with a finger.
“It’s just about right,” she said. Then she fixed Beulah with a stern eye. “Open your chest,” she60commanded, “and show me the spot where it’s worst. I’ve made a meal poultice.”
Beulah hesitated only a second, then she obeyed meekly. She had never seen a meal poultice before, but the heat on her afflicted chest was grateful to her. Antiphlogistine was only Denver mud anyhow. Meekly, also, she took the six grains of quinine and the weak dose of jamaica ginger and water that she was next offered. She felt encouraged and refreshed enough by this treatment to display some slight curiosity when the little girl produced a card of villainous looking safety-pins.
“I’m going to pin you in with these, Aunt Beulah,” she said, “and then sweat your cold out of you.”
“Indeed, you’re not,” Beulah said; “don’t be absurd, Eleanor. The theory of the grip is—,” but she was addressing merely the vanishing hem of cook’s voluminous apron.
The child returned almost instantly with three objects of assorted sizes that Beulah could not identify. From the outside they looked like red flannel and from the way Eleanor handled them it was evident that they also were hot.
“I het—heated the flatirons,” Eleanor explained,61“the way I do for Grandma, and I’m going to spread ’em around you, after you’re pinned in the blankets, and you got to lie there till you prespire, and prespire good.”
“I won’t do it,” Beulah moaned, “I won’t do any such thing. Go away, child.”
“I cured Grandma and Grandpa and Mrs. O’Farrel’s aunt that I worked for, and I’m going to cure you,” Eleanor said.
“No.”
Eleanor advanced on her threateningly.
“Put your arms under those covers,” she said, “or I’ll dash a glass of cold water in your face,”—and Beulah obeyed her.
Peter nodded wisely when Beulah, cured by these summary though obsolete methods, told the story in full detail. Gertrude had laughed until the invalid had enveloped herself in the last few shreds of her dignity and ordered her out of the room, and the others had been scarcely more sympathetic.
“I know that it’s funny, Peter,” she said, “but you see, I can’t help worrying about it just the same. Of course, as soon as I was up she was just as respectful and obedient to my slightest wish as she ever was, but at the time, when she was62lording it over me so, she—she actually slapped me. You never saw such a—blazingly determined little creature.”
Peter smiled,—gently, as was Peter’s way when any friend of his made an appeal to him.
“That’s all right, Beulah,” he said, “don’t you let it disturb you for an instant. This manifestation had nothing to do with our experiment. Our experiment is working fine—better than I dreamed it would ever work. What happened to Eleanor, you know, was simply this. Some of the conditions of her experience were recreated suddenly, and she reverted.”
63CHAPTER VIJimmie Becomes a Parent
The entrance into the dining-room of the curly headed young man and his pretty little niece, who had a suite on the eighth floor, as the room clerk informed all inquirers, was always a matter of interest to the residents of the Hotel Winchester. They were an extremely picturesque pair to the eye seeking for romance and color. The child had the pure, clear cut features of the cameo type of New England maidenhood. She was always dressed in some striking combination of blue, deep blue like her eyes, with blue hair ribbons. Her good-looking young relative, with hair almost as near the color of the sun as her own, seemed to be entirely devoted to her, which, considering the charm of the child and the radiant and magnetic spirit of the young man himself, was a delightfully natural manifestation.
But one morning near the close of the second week of their stay, the usual radiation of resilient youth was conspicuously absent from the young64man’s demeanor, and the child’s face reflected the gloom that sat so incongruously on the contour of an optimist. The little girl fumbled her menu card, but the waitress—the usual aging pedagogic type of the small residential hotel—stood unnoticed at the young man’s elbow for some minutes before he was sufficiently aroused from his gloomy meditations to address her. When he turned to her at last, however, it was with the grin that she had grown to associate with him,—the grin, the absence of which had kept her waiting behind his chair with a patience that she was, except in a case where her affections were involved, entirely incapable of. Jimmie’s protestations of inability to make headway with the ladies were not entirely sincere.
“Bring me everything on the menu,” he said, with a wave of his hand in the direction of that painstaking pasteboard. “Coffee, tea, fruit, marmalade, breakfast food, ham and eggs. Bring my niece here the same. That’s all.” With another wave of the hand he dismissed her.
“You can’t eat it all, Uncle Jimmie,” Eleanor protested.
“I’ll make a bet with you,” Jimmie declared.65“I’ll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that if she brings it all, I’ll eat it.”
“Oh! Uncle Jimmie, you know she won’t bring it. You never bet so I can get the dollar,—you never do.”
“I never bet so I can get my doughnut, if it comes to that.”
“I don’t know where to buy any doughnuts,” Eleanor said; “besides, Uncle Jimmie, I don’t really consider that I owe them. I never really say that I’m betting, and you tell me I’ve lost before I’ve made up my mind anything about it.”
“Speaking of doughnuts,” Jimmie said, his face still wearing the look of dejection under a grin worn awry, “can you cook, Eleanor? Can you roast a steak, and saute baked beans, and stew sausages, and fry out a breakfast muffin? Does she look like a cook to you?” he suddenly demanded of the waitress, who was serving him, with an apologetic eye on the menu, the invariable toast-coffee-and-three-minute-egg breakfast that he had eaten every morning since his arrival.
The waitress smiled toothily. “She looks like a capable one,” she pronounced.66
“Icancook, Uncle Jimmie,” Eleanor giggled, “but not the way you said. You don’t roast steak, or—or—”
“Don’t you?” Jimmie asked with the expression of pained surprise that never failed to make his ward wriggle with delight. There were links in the educational scheme that Jimmie forged better than any of the cooperative guardians. Not even Jimmie realized the value of the giggle as a developing factor in Eleanor’s existence. He took three swallows of coffee and frowned into his cup. “I can make coffee,” he added. “Good coffee. Well, we may as well look the facts in the face, Eleanor. The jig’s up. We’re moving away from this elegant hostelry to-morrow.”
“Are we?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes, Kiddo. Apologies to Aunt Beulah (mustn’t call you Kiddo) and the reason is, that I’m broke. I haven’t got any money at all, Eleanor, and I don’t know where I am going to get any. You see, it is this way. I lost my job six weeks ago.”
“But you go to work every morning, Uncle Jimmie?”
“I leave the house, that is. I go looking for work, but so far no nice juicy job has come rolling67down into my lap. I haven’t told you this before because,—well—when Aunt Beulah comes down every day to give you your lessons I wanted it to look all O. K. I thought if you didn’t know, you couldn’t forget sometime and tell her.”
“I don’t tattle tale,” Eleanor said.
“I know you don’t, Eleanor. It’s only my doggone pride that makes me want to keep up the bluff, but you’re a game kid,—you—know. I tried to get you switched off to one of the others till I could get on my feet, but—no, they just thought I had stage fright. I couldn’t insist. It would be pretty humiliating to me to admit that I couldn’t support one-sixth of a child that I’d given my solemn oath to be-parent.”
“To—to what?”
“Be-parent, if it isn’t a word, I invent it. It’s awfully tough luck for you, and if you want me to I’ll own up to the crowd that I can’t swing you, but if you are willing to stick, why, we’ll fix up some kind of a way to cut down expenses and bluff it out.”
Eleanor considered the prospect. Jimmie watched her apparent hesitation with some dismay.
“Say the word,” he declared, “and I’ll tell ’em.”68
“Oh! I don’t want you to tell ’em,” Eleanor cried. “I was just thinking. If you could get me a place, you know, I could go out to work. You don’t eat very much for a man, and I might get my meals thrown in—”
“Don’t, Eleanor, don’t,” Jimmie agonized. “I’ve got a scheme for us all right. This—this embarrassment is only temporary. The day will come when I can provide you with Pol Roge and diamonds. My father is rich, you know, but he swore to me that I couldn’t support myself, and I swore to him that I could, and if I don’t do it, I’m damned. I am really, and that isn’t swearing.”
“I know it isn’t, when you mean it the way they say in the Bible.”
“I don’t want the crowd to know. I don’t want Gertrude to know. She hasn’t got much idea of me anyway. I’ll get another job, if I can only hold out.”
“I can go to work in a store,” Eleanor cried. “I can be one of those little girls in black dresses that runs between counters.”
“Do you want to break your poor Uncle James’ heart, Eleanor,—do you?”
“No, Uncle Jimmie.”69
“Then listen to me. I’ve borrowed a studio, a large barnlike studio on Washington Square, suitably equipped with pots and pans and kettles. Also, I am going to borrow the wherewithal to keep us going. It isn’t a bad kind of place if anybody likes it. There’s one dinky little bedroom for you and a cot bed for me, choked in bagdad. If you could kind of engineer the cooking end of it, with me to do the dirty work, of course, I think we could be quite snug and cozy.”
“I know we could, Uncle Jimmie,” Eleanor said. “Will Uncle Peter come to see us just the same?”
It thus befell that on the fourteenth day of the third month of her residence in New York, Eleanor descended into Bohemia. Having no least suspicion of the real state of affairs—for Jimmie, like most apparently expansive people who are given to rattling nonsense, was actually very reticent about his own business—the other members of the sextette did not hesitate to show their chagrin and disapproval at the change in his manner of living.
“The Winchester was an ideal place for Eleanor,” Beulah wailed. “It’s deadly respectable and middle class, but it was just the kind of70atmosphere for her to accustom herself to. She was learning to manage herself so prettily. This morning when I went to the studio—I wanted to get the lessons over early, and take Eleanor to see that exhibition of Bavarian dolls at Kuhner’s—I found her washing up a trail of dishes in that closet behind the screen—you’ve seen it, Gertrude?—like some poor little scullery maid. She said that Jimmie had made an omelet for breakfast. If he’d made fifty omelets there couldn’t have been a greater assortment of dirty dishes and kettles.”
Gertrude smiled.
“Jimmie made an omelet for me once for which he used two dozen eggs. He kept breaking them until he found the yolks of a color to suit him. He said pale yolks made poor omelets, so he threw all the pale ones away.”
“I suppose that you sat by and let him,” Beulah said. “You would let Jimmie do anything. You’re as bad as Margaret is about David.”
“Or as bad as you are about Peter.”
“There we go, just like any silly, brainless girls, whose chief object in life is the—the other sex,”71Beulah cried inconsistently. “Oh! I hate that kind of thing.”
“So do I—in theory—” Gertrude answered, a little dreamily. “Where do Jimmie and Eleanor get the rest of their meals?”
“I can’t seem to find out,” Beulah said. “I asked Eleanor point-blank this morning what they had to eat last night and where they had it, and she said, ‘That’s a secret, Aunt Beulah.’ When I asked her why it was a secret and who it was a secret with, she only looked worried, and said she guessed she wouldn’t talk about it at all because that was the only way to be safe about tattling. You know what I think—I think Jimmie is taking her around to the cafés and all the shady extravagant restaurants. He thinks it’s sport and it keeps him from getting bored with the child.”
“Well, that’s one way of educating the young,” Gertrude said, “but I think you are wrong, Beulah.”
72CHAPTER VIIOne Descent into Bohemia
“Aunt Beulah does not think that Uncle Jimmie is bringing me up right,” Eleanor confided to the pages of her diary. “She comes down here and is very uncomforterble. Well he is bringing me up good, in some ways better than she did. When he swears he always puts out his hand for me to slap him. He had enough to swear of. He can’t get any work or earn wages. The advertisement business is on the bum this year becase times are so hard up. The advertisers have to save their money and advertising agents are failing right and left. So poor Uncle Jimmie can’t get a place to work at.
“The people in the other studios are very neighborly. Uncle Jimmie leaves a sine on the door when he goes out. It says ‘Don’t Knock.’ They don’t they come right in and borrow things. Uncle Jimmie says not to have much to do with them, becase they are so queer, but when I am not at home, the ladies come to call on him, and drink73Moxie or something. I know becase once I caught them. Uncle Jimmie says I shall not have Behemiar thrust upon me by him, and to keep away from these ladies until I grow up and then see if I like them. Aunt Beulah thinks that Uncle Jimmie takes me around to other studios and I won’t tell but he does not take me anywhere except to walk and have ice-cream soda, but I say I don’t want it because of saving the ten cents. We cook on an old gas stove that smells. I can’t do very good housekeeping becase things are not convenient. I haven’t any oven to do a Saturday baking in, and Uncle Jimmie won’t let me do the washing. I should feel more as if I earned my keap if I baked beans and made boiled dinners and layer cake, but in New York they don’t eat much but hearty food and saluds. It isn’t stylish to have cake and pie and pudding all at one meal. Poor Grandpa would starve. He eats pie for his breakfast, but if I told anybody they would laugh. If I wrote Albertina what folks eat in New York she would laugh.
“Uncle Jimmie is teaching me to like salud. He laughs when I cut up lettice and put sugar on it. He teaches me to like olives and dried up74sausages and sour crought. He says it is important to be edjucated in eating, and everytime we go to the Delicate Essenn store to buy something that will edjucate me better. He teaches me to say ‘I beg your pardon,’ and ‘Polly vous Fransay?’ and to courtesy and how to enter a room the way you do in private theatricals. He says it isn’t knowing these things so much as knowing when you do them that counts, and then Aunt Beulah complains that I am not being brought up.
“I have not seen Uncle Peter for a weak. He said he was going away. I miss him. I would not have to tell him how I was being brought up, and whether I was hitting the white lights as Uncle Jimmie says.—He would know.”
Eleanor did not write Albertina during the time when she was living in the studio. Some curious inversion of pride kept her silent on the subject of the change in her life. Albertina would have turned up her nose at the studio, Eleanor knew. Therefore, she would not so much as address an envelope to that young lady from an interior which she would have beheld with scorn. She held long conversations with Gwendolyn, taking the part of75Albertina, on the subject of this snobbishness of attitude.
“Lots of people in New York have to live in little teny, weeny rooms, Albertina,” she would say. “Rents are perfectly awful here. This studio is so big I get tired dusting all the way round it, and even if it isn’t furnished very much, why, think how much furnishing would cost, and carpets and gold frames for the pictures! The pictures that are in here already, without any frames, would sell for hundreds of dollars apiece if the painter could get anybody to buy them. You ought to be very thankful for such a place, Albertina, instead of feeling so stuck up that you pick up your skirts from it.”
But Albertina’s superiority of mind was impregnable. Her spirit sat in judgment on all the conditions of Eleanor’s new environment. She seemed to criticize everything. She hated the nicked, dun colored dishes they ate from, and the black bottomed pots and pans that all the energy of Eleanor’s energetic little elbow could not restore to decency again. She hated the cracked, dun76colored walls, and the mottled floor that no amount of sweeping and dusting seemed to make an impression on. She hated the compromise of housekeeping in an attic,—she who had been bred in an atmosphere of shining nickle-plated ranges and linoleum, where even the kitchen pump gleamed brightly under its annual coat of good green paint. She hated the compromise, that was the burden of her complaint—either in the person of Albertina or Gwendolyn, whether she lay in the crook of Eleanor’s arm in the lumpy bed where she reposed at the end of the day’s labor, or whether she sat bolt upright on the lumpy cot in the studio, the broken bisque arm, which Jimmie insisted on her wearing in a sling whenever he was present, dangling limply at her side in the relaxation Eleanor preferred for it.
The fact of not having adequate opportunity to keep her house in order troubled the child, for her days were zealously planned by her enthusiastic guardians. Beulah came at ten o’clock every morning to give her lessons. As Jimmie’s quest for work grew into a more and more disheartening adventure, she had difficulty in getting him out of bed in time to prepare and clear away the77breakfast for Beulah’s arrival. After lunch, to which Jimmie scrupulously came home, she was supposed to work an hour at her modeling clay. Gertrude, who was doing very promising work at the art league, came to the studio twice a week to give her instruction in handling it. Later in the afternoon one of the aunts or uncles usually appeared with some scheme to divert her. Margaret was telling her the stories of the Shakespeare plays, and David was trying to make a card player of her, but was not succeeding as well as if Albertina had not been brought up a hard shell Baptist, who thought card playing a device of the devil’s. Peter alone did not come, for even when he was in town he was busy in the afternoon.
As soon as her guests were gone, Eleanor hurried through such housewifely tasks as were possible of accomplishment at that hour, but the strain was telling on her. Jimmie began to realize this and it added to his own distress. One night to save her the labor of preparing the meal, he took her to an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood where the food was honest and palatable, and the service at least deft and clean.
Eleanor enjoyed the experience extremely, until78an incident occurred which robbed her evening of its sweetness and plunged her into the purgatory of the child who has inadvertently broken one of its own laws.
Among the belongings in the carpetbag, which was no more—having been supplanted by a smart little suit-case marked with her initials—was a certificate from the Massachusetts Total Abstinence Society, duly signed by herself, and witnessed by the grammar-school teacher and the secretary of the organization. On this certificate (which was decorated by many presentations in dim black and white of mid-Victorian domestic life, and surmounted by a collection of scalloped clouds in which drifted three amateur looking angels amid a crowd of more professional cherubim) Eleanor had pledged herself to abstain from the use as a beverage of all intoxicating drinks, and from the manufacture or traffic in them. She had also subscribed herself as willing to make direct and persevering efforts to extend the principles and blessings of total abstinence.
“Red ink, Andrea,” her Uncle Jimmie had demanded, as the black-eyed waiter bent over him, “and ginger ale for the offspring.” Eleanor giggled.79It was fun to be with Uncle Jimmie in a restaurant again. He always called for something new and unexpected when he spoke of her to the waiter, and he was always what Albertina would consider “very comical” when he talked to him. “But stay,” he added holding up an admonitory finger, “I think we’ll give the little oneeau rougiethis time. Wouldn’t you likeeau rougie, tinted water, Eleanor, the way the French children drink it?”
Unsuspectingly she sipped the mixture of water and ice and sugar, and “red ink” from the big brown glass bottle that the glowing waiter set before them.
As the meal progressed Jimmie told her that the grated cheese was sawdust and almost made her believe it. He showed her how to eat spaghetti without cutting it and pointed out to her various Italian examples of his object lesson; but she soon realized that in spite of his efforts to entertain her, he was really very unhappy.
“I’ve borrowed all the money I can, Angelface,” he confessed finally. “Tomorrow’s the last day of grace. If I don’t land that job at the Perkins agency I’ll have to give in and tell Peter and David, or wire Dad.”80
“You could get some other kind of a job,” Eleanor said; “plumbing or clerking or something.” On Cape Cod the plumber and the grocer’s clerk lost no caste because of their calling. “Couldn’t you?”
“Icouldso demean myself, and I will. I’ll be a chauffeur, I can run a car all right; but the fact remains that by to-morrow something’s got to happen, or I’ve got to own up to the bunch.”
Eleanor’s heart sank. She tried hard to think of something to comfort him but she could not. Jimmie mixed her moreeau rougieand she drank it. He poured a full glass, undiluted, for himself, and held it up to the light.
“Well, here’s to crime, daughter,” he said. “Long may it wave, and us with it.”
“That isn’t really red ink, is it?” she asked. “It’s an awfully pretty color—like grape juice.”
“It is grape juice, my child, if we don’t inquire too closely into the matter. The Italians are like the French in the guide book, ‘fond of dancing and light wines.’ This is one of the light wines they are fond of.—Hello, do you feel sick, child? You’re white as a ghost. It’s the air. As soon as81I can get hold of that sacrificed waiter we’ll get out of here.”
Eleanor’s sickness was of the spirit, but at the moment she was incapable of telling him so, incapable of any sort of speech. A great wave of faintness encompassed her. She had broken her pledge. She had lightly encouraged a departure from the blessings and principles of total abstinence.
That night in her bed she made a long and impassioned apology to her Maker for the sin of intemperance into which she had been so unwittingly betrayed. She promised Him that she would never drink anything that came out of a bottle again. She reviewed sorrowfully her many arguments with Albertina—Albertina in the flesh that is—on the subject of bottled drinks in general, and decided that again that virtuous child was right in her condemnation of any drink, however harmless in appearance or nomenclature, that bore the stigma of a bottled label.
She knew, however, that something more than a prayer for forgiveness was required of her. She was pledged to protest against the evil that she82had seemingly countenanced. She could not seek the sleep of the innocent until that reparation was made. Through the crack of her sagging door she saw the light from Jimmie’s reading lamp and knew that he was still dressed, or clothed at least, with a sufficient regard for the conventionalities to permit her intrusion. She rose and rebraided her hair and tied a daytime ribbon on it. Then she put on her stockings and her blue Japanese kimono—real Japanese, as Aunt Beulah explained, made for a Japanese lady of quality—and made her way into the studio.
Jimmie was not sitting in the one comfortable studio chair with his book under the light and his feet on the bamboo tea table as usual. He was not sitting up at all. He was flung on the couch with his face buried in the cushions, and his shoulders were shaking. Eleanor seeing him thus, forgot her righteous purpose, forgot her pledge to disseminate the principles and blessings of abstinence, forgot everything but the pitiful spectacle of her gallant Uncle Jimmie in grief. She stood looking down at him without quite the courage to kneel at his side to give him comfort.
“Uncle Jimmie,” she said, “Uncle Jimmie.”83
At the sound of her voice he put out his hand to her, gropingly, but he did not uncover his face or shift his position. She found herself smoothing his hair, gingerly at first, but with more and more conviction as he snuggled his boyish head closer.
“I’m awfully discouraged,” he said in a weak muffled voice. “I’m sorry you caught me at it, Baby.”
Eleanor put her face down close to his as he turned it to her.
“Everything will be all right,” she promised him, “everything will be all right. You’ll soon get a job—tomorrow maybe.”
Then she gathered him close in her angular, tense little arms and held him there tightly. “Everything will be all right,” she repeated soothingly; “now you just put your head here, and have your cry out.”