84CHAPTER VIIIThe Ten Hutchinsons
“My Aunt Margaret has a great many people living in her family,” Eleanor wrote to Albertina from her new address on Morningside Heights. “She has a mother and a father, and two (2) grandparents, one (1) aunt, one (1) brother, one (1) married lady and the boy of the lady, I think the married lady is a sister but I do not ask any one, oh—and another brother, who does not live here only on Saturdays and Sundays. Aunt Margaret makes ten, and they have a man to wait on the table. His name is a butler. I guess you have read about them in stories. I am taken right in to be one of the family, and I have a good time every day now. Aunt Margaret’s father is a college teacher, and Aunt Margaret’s grandfather looks like the father of his country. You know who I mean George Washington. They have a piano here that plays itself like a sewing machine. They let me do it. They have after-dinner coffee and gold spoons to it. I guess you would like to see a gold spoon. I did. They are about the size of85the tin spoons we had in our playhouse. I have a lot of fun with that boy too. At first I thought he was very affected, but that is just the way they teach him to talk. He is nine and plays tricks on other people. He dares me to do things that I don’t do, like go down-stairs and steal sugar. If Aunt Margaret’s mother was my grandma I might steal sugar or plum cake. I don’t know. Remember the time we took your mother’s hermits? I do. I would like to see you. You would think this house was quite a grand house. It has three (3) flights of stairs and one basement. I sleep on the top floor in a dressing room out of Aunt Margaret’s only it isn’t a dressing room. I dress there but no one else can. Aunt Margaret is pretty and sings lovely. Uncle David comes here a lot. I must close. With love and kisses.”
In her diary she recorded some of the more intimate facts of her new existence, such facts as she instinctively guarded from Albertina’s calculating sense.
“Everybody makes fun of me here. I don’t care if they do, but I can’t eat so much at the86table when every one is laughing at me. They get me to talking and then they laugh. If I could see anything to laugh at, I would laugh too. They laugh in a refined way but they laugh. They call me Margaret’s protegay. They are good to me too. They say to my face that I am like a merry wilkins story and too good to be true, and New England projuces lots of real art, and I am art, I can’t remember all the things, but I guess they mean well. Aunt Margaret’s grandfather sits at the head of the table, and talks about things I never heard of before. He knows the govoner and does not like the way he parts his hair. I thought all govoners did what they wanted to with their hairs or anything and people had to like it because (I used to spell because wrong but I spell better now) they was the govoners, but it seems not at all.
“Aunt Margaret is lovely to me. We have good times. I meant to like Aunt Beulah the best because she has done the most for me but I am afrayd I don’t. I would not cross my heart and say so. Aunt Margaret gives me the lessons now. I guess I learn most as much as I learned I mean was taught of Aunt Beulah. Oh dear87sometimes I get descouraged on account of its being such a funny world and so many diferent people in it. And so many diferent feelings. I was afrayd of the hired butler, but I am not now.”
Eleanor had not made a direct change from the Washington Square studio to the ample house of the Hutchinsons, and it was as well for her that a change in Jimmie’s fortunes had taken her back to the Winchester and enabled her to accustom herself again to the amenities of gentler living. Like all sensitive and impressionable children she took on the color of a new environment very quickly. The strain of her studio experience had left her a little cowed and unsure of herself, but she had brightened up like a flower set in the cheerful surroundings of the Winchester and under the influence of Jimmie’s restored spirits.
The change had come about on Jimmie’s “last day of grace.” He had secured the coveted position at the Perkins agency at a slight advance over the salary he had received at the old place. He had left Eleanor in the morning determined to face becomingly the disappointment that was in store for him, and to accept the bitter necessity of88admitting his failure to his friends. He had come back in the late afternoon with his fortunes restored, the long weeks of humiliation wiped out, and his life back again on its old confident and inspired footing.
He had burst into the studio with his news before he understood that Eleanor was not alone, and inadvertently shared the secret with Gertrude, who had been waiting for him with the kettle alight and some wonderful cakes from “Henri’s” spread out on the tea table. The three had celebrated by dining together at a festive down-town hotel and going back to his studio for coffee. At parting they had solemnly and severally kissed one another. Eleanor lay awake in the dark for a long time that night softly rubbing the cheek that had been so caressed, and rejoicing that the drink Uncle Jimmie had called a high-ball and had pledged their health with so assiduously, had come out of two glasses instead of a bottle.
Her life at the Hutchinsons’ was almost like a life on another planet. Margaret was the younger, somewhat delicate daughter of a family of rather strident academics. Professor Hutchinson was not dependent on his salary to defray the expenses of89his elegant establishment, but on his father, who had inherited from his father in turn the substantial fortune on which the family was founded.
Margaret was really a child of the fairies, but she was considerably more fortunate in her choice of a foster family than is usually the fate of the foundling. The rigorous altitude of intellect in which she was reared served as a corrective to the oversensitive quality of her imagination.
Eleanor, who in the more leisurely moments of her life was given to visitations from the poetic muse, was inspired to inscribe some lines to her on one of the pink pages of the private diary. They ran as follows, and even Professor Hutchinson, who occupied the chair of English in that urban community of learning that so curiously bisects the neighborhood of Harlem, could not have designated Eleanor’s description of his daughter as one that did not describe.
“Aunt Margaret is fair and kind,And very good and tender.She has a very active mind.Her figure is quite slender.90“She moves around the room with grace,Her hands she puts with quickness.Although she wears upon her faceThe shadow of a sickness.”
It was this “shadow of a sickness,” that served to segregate Margaret to the extent that was really necessary for her well being. To have shared perpetually in the almost superhuman activities of the family might have forever dulled that delicate spirit to which Eleanor came to owe so much in the various stages of her development.
Margaret put her arm about the child after the ordeal of the first dinner at the big table.
“Father does not bite,” she said, “but Grandfather does. The others are quite harmless. If Grandfather shows his teeth, run for your life.”
“I don’t know where to run to,” Eleanor answered seriously, whereupon Margaret hugged her. Her Aunt Margaret would have been puzzling to Eleanor beyond any hope of extrication, but for the quick imagination that unwound her riddles almost as she presented them. For one terrible minute Eleanor had believed that Hugh91Hutchinson senior did bite, he looked so much like some of the worst of the pictures in Little Red Riding Hood.
“While you are here I’m going to pretend you’re my very own child,” Margaret told Eleanor that first evening, “and we’ll never, never tell anybody all the foolish games we play and the things we say to each other. I can just barely manage to be grown up in the bosom of my family, and when I am in the company of your esteemed Aunt Beulah, but up here in my room, Eleanor, I am never grown up. I play with dolls.”
“Oh! do you really?”
“I really do,” Margaret said. She opened a funny old chest in the corner of the spacious, high studded chamber. “And here are some of the dolls that I play with.” She produced a manikin dressed primly after the manner of eighteen-thirty, prim parted hair over a small head festooned with ringlets, a fichu, and mits painted on her fingers. “Beulah,” she said with a mischievous flash of a grimace at Eleanor. “Gertrude,”—a dashing young brunette in riding clothes. “Jimmie,”—a curly haired dandy. “David,”—a serious creature with92a monocle. “I couldn’t find Peter,” she said, “but we’ll make him some day out of cotton and water colors.”
“Oh! can you make dolls?” Eleanor cried in delight, “real dolls with hair and different colored eyes?”
“I can make pretty good ones,” Margaret smiled; “manikins like these,—a Frenchwoman taught me.”
“Oh; did she? And do you play that the dolls talk to each other as if they was—were the persons?”
“Do I?” Margaret assembled the four manikins into a smart little group. The doll Beulah rose,—on her forefinger. “I can’t help feeling,” mimicked Margaret in a perfect reproduction of Beulah’s earnest contralto, “that we’re wasting our lives,—criminally dissipating our forces.”
The doll Gertrude put up both hands. “I want to laugh,” she cried, “won’t everybody please stop talking till I’ve had my laugh out. Thank you, thank you.”
“Why, that’s just like Aunt Gertrude,” Eleanor said. “Her voice has that kind of a sound like a bell, only more ripply.”93
“Don’t be high-brow,” Jimmie’s lazy baritone besought with the slight burring of the “r’s” that Eleanor found so irresistible. “I’m only a poor hard-working, business man.”
The doll David took the floor deliberately. “We intend to devote the rest of our lives,” he said, “to the care of our beloved cooperative orphan.” On that he made a rather over mannered exit, Margaret planting each foot down deliberately until she flung him back in his box. “That’s the kind of a silly your Aunt Margaret is,” she continued, “but you mustn’t ever tell anybody, Eleanor.” She clasped the child again in one of her warm, sudden embraces, and Eleanor squeezing her shyly in return was altogether enraptured with her new existence.
“But there isn’t any doll foryou, Aunt Margaret,” she cried.
“Oh! yes, there is, but I wasn’t going to show her to you unless you asked, because she’s so nice. I saved the prettiest one of all to be myself, not because I believe I’m so beautiful, but—but only because I’d like to be, Eleanor.”
“I always pretend I’m a princess,” Eleanor admitted.94
The Aunt Margaret doll was truly a beautiful creation, a little more like Marie Antoinette than her namesake, but bearing a not inconsiderable resemblance to both, as Margaret pointed out, judicially analyzing her features.
Eleanor played with the rabbit doll only at night after this. In the daytime she looked rather battered and ugly to eyes accustomed to the delicate finish of creatures like the French manikins, but after she was tucked away in her cot in the passion flower dressing-room—all of Margaret’s belongings and decorations were a faint, pinky lavender,—her dear daughter Gwendolyn, who impersonated Albertina at increasingly rare intervals as time advanced, lay in the hollow of her arm and received her sacred confidences and ministrations as usual.
“When my two (2) months are up here I think I should be quite sorry,” she wrote in the diary, “except that I’m going to Uncle Peter next, and him I would lay me down and dee for, only I never get time enough to see him, and know if he wants me to, when I live with him I shall know. Well life is very exciting all the time now. Aunt Margaret brings me up this way. She tells95me that she loves me and that I’ve got beautiful eyes and hair and am sweet. She tells me that all the time. She says she wants to love me up enough to last because I never had love enough before. I like to be loved. Albertina never loves any one, but on Cape Cod nobody loves anybody—not to say so anyway. If a man is getting married they say helikesthat girl he is going to marry. In New York they act as different as they eat. The Hutchinsons act different from anybody. They do not know Aunt Margaret has adoptid me. Nobody knows I am adoptid but me and my aunts and uncles. Miss Prentis and Aunt Beulah’s mother when she came home and all the bohemiar ladies and all the ten Hutchinsons think I am a little visiting girl from the country. It is nobody’s business because I am supported out of allowances and salaries, but it makes me feel queer sometimes. I feel like
“‘Where did you come from, baby dear,Out of the nowhere unto the here?’
Also I made this up out of home sweet home.
“‘Pleasures and palaces where e’er I may roam,Be it ever so humble I wish I had a home.’
96
“I like having six homes, but I wish everybody knew it. I am nothing to be ashamed of. Speaking of homes I asked Aunt Margaret why my aunts and uncles did not marry each other and make it easier for every one. She said they were not going to get married. That was why they adoptid me. ‘Am I the same thing as getting married?’ I ast. She said no, I wasn’t except that I was a responsibility to keep them unselfish and real. Aunt Beulah doesn’t believe in marriage. She thinks its beneth her. Aunt Margaret doesn’t think she has the health. Aunt Gertrude has to have a career of sculpture, Uncle David has got to marry some one his mother says to or not at all, and does not like to marry anyway. Uncle Jimmie never saw a happy mariage yet and thinks you have a beter time in single blesedness. Uncle Peter did not sign in the book where they said they would adopt me and not marry. They did not want to ask him because he had some trouble once. I wonder what kind! Well I am going to be married sometime. I want a house to do the housework in and a husband and a backyard full of babies. Perhaps I would rather have a hired butler and gold spoons. I don’t know yet. Of97course I would like to have time to write poetry. I can sculpture too, but I don’t want a career of it because it’s so dirty.”
Physically Eleanor throve exceedingly during this phase of her existence. The nourishing food and regular living, the sympathy established between herself and Margaret, the régime of physical exercise prescribed by Beulah which she had been obliged guiltily to disregard during the strenuous days of her existence in Washington Square, all contributed to the accentuation of her material well-being. She played with Margaret’s nephew, and ran up and down stairs on errands for her mother. She listened to the tales related for her benefit by the old people, and gravely accepted the attentions of the two formidable young men of the family, who entertained her with the pianola and excerpts from classic literature and folk lore.
“The We Are Sevens meet every Saturday afternoon,” she wrote—on a yellow page this time—“usually at Aunt Beulah’s house. We have tea and lots of fun. I am examined on what I have learned but I don’t mind it much. Physically I am98found to be very good by measure and waite. My mind is developing alright. I am very bright on the subject of poetry. They do not know whether David Copperfield had been a wise choice for me, but when I told them the story and talked about it they said I had took it right. I don’t tell them about the love part of Aunt Margaret’s bringing up. Aunt Beulah says it would make me self conscioush to know that I had such pretty eyes and hair. Aunt Gertrude said ‘why not mention my teeth to me, then,’ but no one seemed to think so. Aunt Beulah says not to develope my poetry because the theory is to strengthen the weak part of the bridge, and make me do arithmetic. ‘Drill on the deficiency,’ she says. Well I should think the love part was a deficiency, but Aunt Beulah thinks love is weak and beneath her and any one. Uncle David told me privately that he thought I was having the best that could happen to me right now being with Aunt Margaret. I didn’t tell him that the David doll always gets put away in the box with the Aunt Margaret doll and nobody else ever, but I should like to have. He thinks she is the best aunt too.”
99
Some weeks later she wrote to chronicle a painful scene in which she had participated.
“I quarreled with the ten Hutchinsons. I am very sorry. They laughed at me too much for being a little girl and a Cape Codder, but they could if they wanted to, but when they laughed at Aunt Margaret for adopting me and the tears came in her eyes I could not bare it. I did not let the cat out of the bag, but I made it jump out. The Grandfather asked me when I was going back to Cape Cod, and I said I hoped never, and then I said I was going to visit Uncle Peter and Aunt Gertrude and Uncle David next. They said ‘Uncle David—do you mean David Bolling?’ and I did, so I said ‘yes.’ Then all the Hutchinsons pitched into Aunt Margaret and kept laughing and saying, ‘Who is this mysterious child anyway, and how is it that her guardians intrust her to a crowd of scatter brain youngsters for so long?’ and then they said ‘Uncle David Bolling—whatdoes his mother say?’ Then Aunt Margaret got very red in the face and the tears started to come, and I said ‘I am not a mysterious child, and my Uncle David is as much my Uncle David as they all are,’100and then I said ‘My Aunt Margaret has got a perfect right to have me intrusted to her at any time, and not to be laughed at for it,’ and I went and stood in front of her and gave her my handkercheve.
“Well I am glad somebody has been told that I am properly adoptid, but I am sorry it is the ten Hutchinsons who know.”
101CHAPTER IXPeter
Uncle Peter treated her as if she were grown up; that was the wonderful thing about her visit to him,—if there could be one thing about it more wonderful than another. From the moment when he ushered her into his friendly, low ceiled drawing-room with its tiers upon tiers of book shelves, he admitted her on terms of equality to the miraculous order of existence that it was the privilege of her life to share. The pink silk coverlet and the elegance of the silver coated steampipes at Beulah’s; the implacable British stuffiness at the Winchester which had had its own stolid charm for the lineal descendant of the Pilgrim fathers; the impressively casual atmosphere over which the “hired butler” presided distributing after-dinner gold spoons, these impressions all dwindled and diminished and took their insignificant place in the background of the romance she was living and breathing in Peter’s jewel box of an apartment on Thirtieth Street.102
Even to more sophisticated eyes than Eleanor’s the place seemed to be a realized ideal of charm and homeliness. It was one of the older fashioned duplex apartments designed in a more aristocratic decade for a more fastidious generation, yet sufficiently adapted to the modern insistence on technical convenience. Peter owed his home to his married sister, who had discovered it and leased it and settled it and suddenly departed for a five years’ residence in China with her husband, who was as she so often described him, “a blooming Englishman, and an itinerant banker.” Peter’s domestic affairs were despatched by a large, motherly Irishwoman, whom Eleanor approved of on sight and later came to respect and adore without reservation.
Peter’s home was a home with a place in it for her—a place that it was perfectly evident was better with her than without her. She even slept in the bed that Peter’s sister’s little girl had occupied, and there were pictures on the walls that had been selected for her.
She had been very glad to make her escape from the Hutchinson household. Her “quarrel” with them had made no difference in their relation to103her. To her surprise they treated her with an increase of deference after her outburst, and every member of the family, excepting possibly Hugh Hutchinson senior, was much more carefully polite to her. Margaret explained that the family really didn’t mind having their daughter a party to the experiment of cooperative parenthood. It appealed to them as a very interesting try-out of modern educational theory, and their own theories of the independence of the individual modified their criticism of Margaret’s secrecy in the matter, which was the only criticism they had to make since Margaret had an income of her own accruing from the estate of the aunt for whom she had been named.
“It is very silly of me to be sensitive about being laughed at,” Margaret concluded. “I’ve lived all my life surrounded by people suffering from an acute sense of humor, but I never, never, never shall get used to being held up to ridicule for things that are not funny to me.”
“I shouldn’t think you would,” Eleanor answered devoutly.
In Peter’s house there was no one to laugh at her but Peter, and when Peter laughed she considered104it a triumph. It meant that there was something she said that he liked. The welcome she had received as a guest in his house and the wonderful evening that succeeded it were among the epoch making hours in Eleanor’s life. It had happened in this wise.
The Hutchinson victoria, for Grandmother Hutchinson still clung to the old-time, stately method of getting about the streets of New York, had left her at Peter’s door at six o’clock of a keen, cool May evening. Margaret had not been well enough to come with her, having been prostrated by one of the headaches of which she was a frequent victim.
The low door of ivory white, beautifully carved and paneled, with its mammoth brass knocker, the row of window boxes along the cornice a few feet above it, the very look of the house was an experience and an adventure to her. When she rang, the door opened almost instantly revealing Peter on the threshold with his arms open. He had led her up two short flights of stairs—ivory white with carved banisters, she noticed, all as immaculately shining with soap and water as a Cape Cod interior—to his own gracious drawing-room where105Mrs. Finnigan was bowing and smiling a warmhearted Irish welcome to her. It was like a wonderful story in a book and her eyes were shining with joy as Uncle Peter pulled out her chair and she sat down to the first meal in her honor. The grown up box of candy at her plate, the grave air with which Peter consulted her tastes and her preferences were all a part of a beautiful magic that had never quite touched her before.
She had been like a little girl in a dream passing dutifully or delightedly through the required phases of her experience, never quite believing in its permanence or reality; but her life with Uncle Peter was going to be real, and her own. That was what she felt the moment she stepped over his threshold.
After their coffee before the open fire—she herself had had “cambric” coffee—Peter smoked his cigar, while she curled up in silence in the twin to his big cushioned chair and sampled her chocolates. The blue flames skimmed the bed of black coals, and finally settled steadily at work on them nibbling and sputtering until the whole grate was like a basket full of molten light, glowing and golden as the hot sun when it sinks into the sea.106
Except to offer her the ring about his slender Panatela, and to ask her if she were happy, Peter did not speak until he had deliberately crushed out the last spark from his stub and thrown it into the fire. The ceremony over, he held out his arms to her and she slipped into them as if that moment were the one she had been waiting for ever since the white morning looked into the window of the lavender dressing-room on Morningside Heights, and found her awake and quite cold with the excitement of thinking of what the day was to bring forth.
“Eleanor,” Peter said, when he was sure she was comfortably arranged with her head on his shoulder, “Eleanor, I want you to feel at home while you are here, really at home, as if you hadn’t any other home, and you and I belonged to each other. I’m almost too young to be your father, but—”
“Oh! are you?” Eleanor asked fervently, as he paused.
“—But I can come pretty near feeling like a father to you if it’s a father you want. I lost my own father when I was a little older than you are now, but I had my dear mother and sister107left, and so I don’t know what it’s like to be all alone in the world, and I can’t always understand exactly how you feel, but you must always remember that I want to understand and that I will understand if you tell me. Will you remember that, Eleanor?”
“Yes, Uncle Peter,” she said soberly; then perhaps for the first time since her babyhood she volunteered a caress that was not purely maternal in its nature. She put up a shy hand to the cheek so close to her own and patted it earnestly. “Of course I’ve got my grandfather and grandmother,” she argued, “but they’re very old, and not very affectionate, either. Then I have all these new aunts and uncles pretending,” she was penetrating to the core of the matter, Peter realized, “that they’re just as good as parents. Of course, they’re just as good as they can be and they take so much trouble that it mortifies me, but it isn’t just the same thing, Uncle Peter!”
“I know,” Peter said, “I know, dear, but you must remember we mean well.”
“I don’t mean you; it isn’t you that I think of when I think about my co—co-woperative parents, and it isn’t any of them specially,—it’s just the108idea of—of visiting around, and being laughed at, and not really belonging to anybody.”
Peter’s arms tightened about her.
“Oh! but you do belong, you do belong. You belong to me, Eleanor.”
“That was what I hoped you would say, Uncle Peter,” she whispered.
They had a long talk after this, discussing the past and the future; the past few months of the experiment from Eleanor’s point of view, and the future in relation to its failures and successes. Beulah was to begin giving her lessons again and she was to take up music with a visiting teacher on Peter’s piano. (Eleanor had not known it was a piano at first, as she had never seen a baby grand before. Peter did not know what a triumph it was when she made herself put the question to him.)
“If my Aunt Beulah could teach me as much as she does and make it as interesting as Aunt Margaret does, I think I would make her feel very proud of me,” Eleanor said. “I get so nervous saving energy the way Aunt Beulah says for me to that I forget all the lesson. Aunt Margaret tells too many stories, I guess, but I like them.”109
“Your Aunt Margaret is a child of God,” Peter said devoutly, “in spite of her raw-boned, intellectual family.”
“Uncle David says she’s a daughter of the fairies.”
“She’s that, too. When Margaret’s a year or two older you won’t feel the need of a mother.”
“I don’t now,” said Eleanor; “only a father,—that I want you to be, the way you promised.”
“That’s done,” Peter said. Then he continued musingly, “You’ll find Gertrude—different. I can’t quite imagine her presiding over your moral welfare but I think she’ll be good at it. She’s a good deal of a person, you know.”
“Aunt Beulah’s a good kind of person, too,” Eleanor said; “she tries hard. The only thing is that she keeps trying to make me express myself, and I don’t know what that means.”
“Let me see if I can tell you,” said Peter. “Self-expression is a part of every man’s duty. Inside we are all trying to be good and true and fine—”
“Except the villains,” Eleanor interposed. “People like Iago aren’t trying.”
“Well, we’ll make an exception of the villains; we’re talking of people like us, pretty good people110with the right instincts. Well then, if all the time we’re trying to be good and true and fine, we carry about a blank face that reflects nothing of what we are feeling and thinking, the world is a little worse off, a little duller and heavier place for what is going on inside of us.”
“Well, how can we make it better off then?” Eleanor inquired practically.
“By not thinking too much about it for one thing, except to remember to smile, by trying to be just as much at home in it as possible, by letting the kind of person we are trying to be show through on the outside. By gosh! I wish Beulah could hear me.”
“By just not being bashful, do you mean?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Well, when Aunt Beulah makes me do those dancing exercises, standing up in the middle of the floor and telling me to be a flower and express myself as a flower, does she just mean not to be bashful?”
“Something like that: she means stop thinking of yourself and go ahead—”
“But how can I go ahead with her sitting there watching?”111
“I suppose I ought to tell you to imagine that you had the soul of a flower, but I haven’t the nerve.”
“You’ve got nerve enough to do anything,” Eleanor assured him, but she meant it admiringly, and seriously.
“I haven’t the nerve to go on with a moral conversation in which you are getting the better of me at every turn,” Peter laughed. “I’m sure it’s unintentional, but you make me feel like a good deal of an ass, Eleanor.”
“That means a donkey, doesn’t it?”
“It does, and by jove, I believe that you’re glad of it.”
“I do rather like it,” said Eleanor; “of course you don’t really feel like a donkey to me. I mean I don’t make you feel like one, but it’s funny just pretending that you mean it.”
“Oh! woman, woman,” Peter cried. “Beulah tried to convey something of the fact that you always got the better of every one in your modest unassuming way, but I never quite believed it before. At any rate it’s bedtime, and here comes Mrs. Finnigan to put you to bed. Kiss me good night, sweetheart.”112
Eleanor flung her arms about his neck, in her first moment of abandonment to actual emotional self-expression if Peter had only known it.
“I will never really get the better of you in my life, Uncle Peter,” she promised him passionately.
113CHAPTER XThe Omniscient Focus
One of the traditional prerogatives of an Omnipotent Power is to look down at the activities of earth at any given moment and ascertain simultaneously the occupation of any number of people. Thus the Arch Creator—that Being of the Supreme Artistic Consciousness—is able to peer into segregated interiors at His own discretion and watch the plot thicken and the drama develop. Eleanor, who often visualized this proceeding, always imagined a huge finger projecting into space, cautiously tilting the roofs of the Houses of Man to allow the sweep of the Invisible Glance.
Granting the hypothesis of the Divine privilege, and assuming for the purposes of this narrative the Omniscient focus on the characters most concerned in it, let us for the time being look over the shoulder of God and inform ourselves of their various occupations and preoccupations of a Saturday afternoon in late June during the hour before dinner.114
Eleanor, in her little white chamber on Thirtieth Street, was engaged in making a pink and green toothbrush case for a going-away gift for her Uncle Peter. To be sure she was going away with him when he started for the Long Island beach hotel from which he proposed to return every day to his office in the city, but she felt that a slight token of her affection would be fitting and proper on the eve of their joint departure. She was hurrying to get it done that she might steal softly into the dining-room and put it on his plate undetected. Her eyes were very wide, her brow intent and serious, and her delicate lips lightly parted. At that moment she bore a striking resemblance to the Botticelli head in Beulah’s drawing-room that she had so greatly admired.
Of all the people concerned in her history, she was the most tranquilly occupied.
Peter in the room beyond was packing his trunk and his suit-case. At this precise stage of his proceedings he was trying to make two decisions, equally difficult, but concerned with widely different departments of his consciousness. He was gravely considering whether or not to include among his effects the photograph before him on115the dressing-table—that of the girl to whom he had been engaged from the time he was a Princeton sophomore until her death four years later—and also whether or not it would be worth his while to order a new suit of white flannels so late in the season. The fact that he finally decided against the photograph and in favor of the white flannels has nothing to do with the relative importance of the two matters thus engrossing him. The health of the human mind depends largely on its ability to assemble its irrelevant and incongruous problems in dignified yet informal proximity. When he went to his desk it was with the double intention of addressing a letter to his tailor, and locking the cherished photograph in a drawer; but, the letter finished, he still held the picture in his hand and gazed down at it mutely and when the discreet knock on his door that constituted the announcing of dinner came, he was still sitting motionless with the photograph propped up before him.
Up-town, Beulah, whose dinner hour came late, was rather more actively, though possibly not more significantly, occupied. She was doing her best to evade the wild onslaught of a young man in glasses who had been wanting to marry her for a116considerable period, and had now broken all bounds in a cumulative attempt to inform her of the fact.
Though he was assuredly in no condition to listen to reason, Beulah was reasoning with him, kindly and philosophically, paying earnest attention to the style and structure of her remarks as she did so. Her emotions, as is usual on such occasions, were decidedly mixed. She was conscious of a very real dismay at her unresponsiveness, a distress for the acute pain from which the distraught young man seemed to be suffering, and the thrill, which had she only known it, is the unfailing accompaniment to the first eligible proposal of marriage. In the back of her brain there was also, so strangely is the human mind constituted, a kind of relief at being able to use mature logic once more, instead of the dilute form of moral dissertation with which she tried to adapt herself to Eleanor’s understanding.
“I never intend to marry any one,” she was explaining gently. “I not only never intend to, but I am pledged in a way that I consider irrevocably binding never to marry,”—and that was the text from which all the rest of her discourse developed.
Jimmie, equally bound by the oath of celibacy,117but not equally constrained by it apparently, was at the very moment when Beulah was so successfully repulsing the familiarity of the high cheek-boned young man in the black and white striped tie, occupied in encouraging a familiarity of a like nature. That is, he was holding the hand of a young woman in the darkened corner of a drawing-room which had been entirely unfamiliar to him ten days before, and was about to impress a caress on lips that seemed to be ready to meet his with a certain degree of accustomed responsiveness. That this was not a peculiarly significant incident in Jimmie’s career might have been difficult to explain, at least to the feminine portion of the group of friends he cared most for.
Margaret, dressed for an academic dinner party, in white net with a girdle of pale pink and lavender ribbons, had flung herself face downward on her bed in reckless disregard of her finery; and because it was hot and she was homesick for green fields and the cool stretches of dim wooded country, had transported herself in fancy and still in her recumbent attitude to the floor of a canoe that was drifting down-stream between lush banks of meadow grass studded with marsh lilies. After118some interval—and shift of position—the way was arched overhead with whispering trees, the stars came out one by one, showing faintly between waving branches; and she perceived dimly that a figure that was vaguely compounded of David and Peter and the handsomest of all the young kings of Spain, had quietly taken its place in the bow and had busied itself with the paddles,—whereupon she was summoned to dinner, where the ten Hutchinsons and their guests were awaiting her.
David, the only member of the group whose summer vacation had actually begun, was sitting on the broad veranda of an exclusive country club several hundreds of miles away from New York and looking soberly into the eyes of a blue ribbon bull dog, whose heavy jowl rested on his knees. His mother, in one of the most fashionable versions of the season’s foulards, sleekly corseted and coifed, was sitting less than a hundred yards away from him, fanning herself with three inches of hand woven fan and contemplating David. In the dressing-room above, just alighted from a limousine de luxe, was a raven-haired, crafty-eyed ingénue (whose presence David did not suspect or he would have recollected a sudden pressing119engagement out of her vicinity), preening herself for conquest. David’s mind, unlike the minds of the “other gifted members of the We Are Seven Club,” to quote Jimmie’s most frequent way of referring to them, was to all intents and purposes a total blank. He answered monosyllabically his mother’s questions, patted the dog’s beetling forehead and thought of nothing at all for practically forty-five minutes. Then he rose, and offering his arm to his mother led her gravely to the table reserved for him in the dining-room.
Gertrude, in her studio at the top of the house in Fifty-sixth Street where she lived with her parents, was putting the finishing touches on a faun’s head; and a little because she had unconsciously used Jimmie’s head for her model, and a little because of her conscious realization at this moment that the roughly indicated curls over the brow were like nobody’s in the world but Jimmie’s, she was thinking of him seriously. She was thinking also of the dinner on a tray that would presently be brought up to her, since her mother and father were out of town, and of her coming two months with Eleanor and her recent inspiration concerning them.120
In Colhassett, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the dinner hour and even the supper hour were long past. In the commodious kitchen of Eleanor’s former home two old people were sitting in calico valanced rockers, one by either window. The house was a pleasant old colonial structure, now badly run down but still marked with that distinction that only the instincts of aristocracy can bestow upon a decaying habitation.
A fattish child made her way up the walk, toeing out unnecessarily, and let herself in by the back door without knocking.
“Hello, Mis’ Chase and Mr. Amos,” she said, seating herself in a straight backed, yellow chair, and swinging her crossed foot nonchalantly, “I thought I would come in to inquire about Eleanor. Ma said that she heard that she was coming home to live again. Is she, Mr. Amos?”
Albertina was not a peculiar favorite of Eleanor’s grandfather. Amos Chase had ideas of his own about the proper bringing up of children, and the respect due from them to their elders. Also Albertina’s father had come from “poor stock.” There was a strain of bad blood in her. The women of the Weston families hadn’t always121“behaved themselves.” He therefore answered this representative of the youngest generation rather shortly.
“I don’t know nothing about it,” he said.
“Why, father,” the querulous old voice of Grandmother Chase protested, “you know she’s comin’ home somewhere ’bout the end of July, she and one of her new aunties and a hired girl they’re bringing along to do the work. I don’t see why you can’t answer the child’s question.”
“I don’t know as I’m obligated to answer any questions that anybody sees fit to put to me.”
“Well, Ibe. Albertina, pass me my glasses from off the mantel-tree-shelf, and that letter sticking out from behind the clock and I’ll read what she says.”
Albertina, with a reproachful look at Mr. Amos, who retired coughing exasperatedly behind a paper that he did not read, allowed herself to be informed through the medium of a letter from Gertrude and a postscript from Eleanor of the projected invasion of the Chase household.
“I should think you’d rather have Eleanor come home by herself than bringing a strange woman and a hired girl,” Albertina contributed a trifle122tartly. The distinction of a hired girl in the family was one which she had long craved on her own account.
“All nonsense, I call it,” the old man ejaculated.
“Well, Eleena, she writes that she can’t get away without one of ’em comin’ along with her and I guess we can manage someways. I dunno what work city help will make in this kitchen. You can’t expect much from city help. They ain’t clean like home folks. I shall certainly be dretful pleased to see Eleena, and so will her grandpa—in spite o’ the way he goes on about it.”
A snort came from the region of the newspaper.
“I shouldn’t think you’d feel as if you had a grandchild now that six rich people has adopted her,” Albertina suggested helpfully.
“It’s a good thing for the child,” her grandmother said. “I’m so lame I couldn’t do my duty by her. Old folks is old folks, and they can’t do for others like young ones. I’d d’ruther have had her adopted by one father and mother instead o’ this passel o’ young folks passing her around among themselves, but you can’t have what you’d d’ruther have in this world. You got to take what comes and be thankful.”123
“Did she write you about having gold coffee spoons at her last place?” Albertina asked. “I think they was probably gilded over like ice-cream spoons, and she didn’t know the difference. I guess she has got a lot of new clothes. Well, I’ll have to be getting along. I’ll come in again.”
At the precise moment that the door closed behind Albertina, the clock in Peter Stuyvesant’s apartment in New York struck seven and Eleanor, in a fresh white dress and blue ribbons, slipped into her chair at the dinner table and waited with eyes blazing with excitement for Peter to make the momentous discovery of the gift at his plate.