167CHAPTER XIVMerry Christmas
Margaret in mauve velvet and violets, and Gertrude in a frock of smart black and white were in the act of meeting by appointment at Sherry’s one December afternoon, with a comfortable cup of tea in mind. Gertrude emerged from the recess of the revolving door and Margaret, sitting eagerly by the entrance, almost upset the attendant in her rush to her friend’s side.
“Oh! Gertrude,” she cried, “I’m so glad to see you. My family is trying to cut me up in neat little quarters and send me north, south, east and west, for the Christmas holidays, and I want to stay home and have Eleanor. How did I ever come to be born into a family of giants, tell me that, Gertrude?”
“The choice of parents is thrust upon us at an unfortunately immature period, I’ll admit,” Gertrude laughed. “My parents are dears, but they’ve never forgiven me for being an artist instead of168a dubby bud. Shall we have tea right away or shall we sit down and discuss life?”
“Both,” Margaret said. “I don’t know which is the hungrier—flesh or spirit.”
But as they turned toward the dining-room a familiar figure blocked their progress.
“I thought that was Gertrude’s insatiable hat,” David exclaimed delightedly. “I’ve phoned for you both until your families have given instructions that I’m not to be indulged any more. I’ve got a surprise for you.—Taxi,” he said to the man at the door.
“Not till we’ve had our tea,” Margaret wailed. “You couldn’t be so cruel, David.”
“You shall have your tea, my dear, and one of the happiest surprises of your life into the bargain,” David assured her as he led the way to the waiting cab.
“I wouldn’t leave this place unfed for anybody but you, David, not if it were ever so, and then some, as Jimmie says.”
“What’s the matter with Jimmie, anyhow?” David inquired as the taxi turned down the Avenue and immediately entangled itself in a hopeless mesh of traffic.169
“I don’t know; why?” Gertrude answered, though she had not been the one addressed at the moment. “What’s the matter with this hat?” she rattled on without waiting for an answer. “I thought it was good-looking myself, and Madam Paran robbed me for it.”
“It is good-looking,” David allowed. “It seems to be a kind of retrieving hat, that’s all. Keeps you in a rather constant state of looking after the game.”
“What about my hat, David?” Margaret inquired anxiously. “Do you like that?”
“I do,” David admitted. “I’m crazy about it. It’s a lovely cross between the style affected by the late Emperor Napoleon and my august grandmother, with some frills added.”
The chauffeur turned into a cross street and stopped abruptly before an imposing but apparently unguarded entrance.
“Why, I thought this was a studio building,” Gertrude said. “David, if you’re springing a tea party on us, and we in the wild ungovernable state we are at present, I’ll shoot the way my hat is pointing.”
“Straight through my left eye-glass,” David170finished. “You wait till you see the injustice you have done me.”
But Margaret, who often understood what was happening a few moments before the revelation of it, clutched at his elbow.
“Oh! David, David,” she whispered, “how wonderful!”
“Wait till you see,” David said, and herded them into the elevator.
Their destination was the top floor but one. David hurried them around the bend in the sleekly carpeted corridor and touched the bell on the right of the first door they came to. It opened almost instantly and David’s man, who was French, stood bowing and smiling on the threshold.
“Mr. Styvvisont has arrive’,” he said; “he waits you.”
“Welcome to our city,” Peter cried, appearing in the doorway of the room Alphonse was indicating with that high gesture of delight with which only a Frenchman can lead the way. “Jimmie’s coming up from the office and Beulah’s due any minute. What do you think of the place, girls?”
“Is it really yours, David?”171
“Surest thing you know.” He grinned like a schoolboy. “It’s really ours, that’s what it is. I’ve broken away from the mater at last,” he added a little sheepishly. “I’m going to work seriously. I’ve got an all-day desk job in my uncle’s office and I’m going to dig in and see what I can make of myself. Also, this is going to be our headquarters, and Eleanor’s permanent home if we’re all agreed upon it,—but look around, ladies. Don’t spare my blushes. If you think I can interior decorate, just tell me so frankly. This is the living-room.”
“It’s like that old conundrum—black and white and red all over,” Gertrude said. “I never saw anything so stunning in all my life.”
“Gosh! I admire your nerve,” Peter cried, “papering this place in white, and then getting in all this heavy carved black stuff, and the red in the tapestries and screens and pillows.”
“I wanted it to look studioish a little,” David explained, “I wanted to get away from Louis Quartorze.”
“And drawing-rooms like mother used to make,” Gertrude suggested. “I like your Oriental touches. Do you see, Margaret, everything is Indian or172Chinese? The ubiquitous Japanese print is conspicuous by its absence.”
“I’ve got two portfolios full of ’em,” David said, “and I always have one or two up in the bedrooms. I change ’em around, you know, the way the Japs do themselves, a different scene every few days and the rest decently out of sight till you’re ready for ’em.”
“It’s like a fairy story,” Margaret said.
“I thought you’d appreciate what little Arabian Nights I was able to introduce. I bought that screen,” he indicated a sweep of Chinese line and color, “with my eye on you, and that Aladdin’s lamp is yours, of course. You’re to come in here and rub it whenever you like, and your heart’s desire will instantly be vouchsafed to you.”
“What will Eleanor say?” Peter suggested, as David led the way through the corridor and up the tiny stairs which led to the more intricate part of the establishment. “This is her room, didn’t you say, David?” He paused on the threshold of a bedroom done in ivory white and yellow, with all its hangings of a soft golden silk.
“She once said that she wanted a yellow room,” David said, “a daffy-down-dilly room, and I’ve173tried to get her one. I know last year that Maggie Lou child refused to have yellow curtains in that flatiron shaped sitting-room of theirs, and Eleanor refused to be comforted.”
A wild whoop in the below stairs announced Jimmie; and Beulah arrived simultaneously with the tea tray. Jimmie was ecstatic when the actual function of the place was explained to him.
“Headquarters is the one thing we’ve lacked,” he said; “a place of our own, hully gee! It makes me feel almost human again.”
“You haven’t been feeling altogether human lately, have you, Jimmie?” Margaret asked over her tea cup.
“No, dear, I haven’t.” Jimmie flashed her a grateful smile. “I’m a bad egg,” he explained to her darkly, “and the only thing you can do with me is to scramble me.”
“Scrambled is just about the way I should have described your behavior of late,—but that’s Gertrude’s line,” David said. “Only she doesn’t seem to be taking an active part in the conversation. Aren’t you Jimmie’s keeper any more, Gertrude?”
“Not since she’s come back from abroad,” Jimmie muttered without looking at her.174
“Eleanor’s taken the job over now,” Peter said. “She’s made him swear off red ink and red neckties.”
“Any color so long’s it’s red is the color that suits me best,” Jimmie quoted. “Lord, isn’t this room a pippin?” He swam in among the bright pillows of the divan and so hid his face for a moment. It had been a good many weeks since he had seen Gertrude.
“I want to give a suffrage tea here,” Beulah broke in suddenly. “It’s so central, but I don’t suppose David would hear of it.”
“Angels and Ministers of Grace defend us—” Peter began.
“Mymotherwould hear of it,” David said, “and then there wouldn’t be any little studio any more. She doesn’t believe in votes for women.”
“How any woman in this day and age—” Beulah began, and thought better of it, since she was discussing Mrs. Bolling.
“Makes your blood boil, doesn’t it—Beulahland?” Gertrude suggested helpfully, reaching for the tea cakes. “Never mind, I’ll vote for women. I’ll march in your old peerade.”
“The Lord helps those that help themselves,”175Peter said, “that’s why Gertrude is a suffragist. She believes in helping herself, in every sense, don’t you, ’Trude?”
“Not quite in every sense,” Gertrude said gravely. “Sometimes I feel like that girl that Margaret describes as caught in a horrid way between two generations. I’m neither old-fashioned nor modern.”
“I’d rather be that way than early Victorian,” Margaret sighed.
“Speaking of the latest generation, has anybody any objection to having our child here for the holidays?” David asked. “My idea is to have one grand Christmas dinner. I suppose we’ll all have to eat one meal with our respective families, but can’t we manage to get together here for dinner at night? Don’t you think that we could?”
“We can’t, but we will,” Margaret murmured. “Of course, have Eleanor here. I wanted her with me but the family thought otherwise. They’ve been trying to send me away for my health, David.”
“Well, they shan’t. You’ll stay in New York for your health and come to my party.”
“Margaret’s health is merely a matter of Margaret’s176happiness anyhow. Her soul and her body are all one,” Gertrude said.
“Then cursed be he who brings anything but happiness to Margaret,” Peter said, to which sentiment David added a solemn “Amen.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Margaret said, shivering a little, “I feel as if some one were—were—”
“Trampling the violets on your grave,” Gertrude finished for her.
Christmas that year fell on a Monday, and Eleanor did not leave school till the Friday before the great day. Owing to the exigencies of the holiday season none of her guardians came to see her before the dinner party itself. Even David was busy with his mother—installed now for a few weeks in the hotel suite that would be her home until the opening of the season at Palm Beach—and had only a few hurried words with her. Mademoiselle, whom he had imported for the occasion, met her at the station and helped her to do her modest shopping which consisted chiefly of gifts for her beloved aunts and uncles. She had arranged these things lovingly at their plates, and fled to dress when they began to assemble for177the celebration. The girls were the first arrivals. Then Peter.
“How’s our child, David?” Gertrude asked. “I had a few minutes’ talk with her over the telephone and she seemed to be flourishing.”
“She is,” David answered. “She’s grown several feet since we last saw her. They’ve been giving scenes from Shakespeare at school and she’s been playing Juliet, it appears. She has had a fight with another girl about suffrage—I don’t know which side she was on, Beulah, I am merely giving you the facts as they came to me—and the other girl was so unpleasant about it that she has been visited by just retribution in the form of the mumps, and had to be sent home and quarantined.”
“Sounds a bit priggish,” Peter suggested.
“Not really,” David said, “she’s as sound as a nut. She’s only going through the different stages.”
“To pass deliberately through one’s ages,” Beulah quoted, “is to get the heart out of a liberal education.”
“Bravo, Beulah,” Gertrude cried, “you’re quite in your old form to-night.”178
“Is she just the same little girl, David?” Margaret asked.
“Just the same. She really seems younger than ever. I don’t know why she doesn’t come down. There she is, I guess. No, it’s only Alphonse letting in Jimmie.”
Jimmie, whose spirits seemed to have revived under the holiday influence, was staggering under the weight of his parcels. The Christmas presents had already accumulated to a considerable mound on the couch. Margaret was brooding over them and trying not to look greedy. She was still very much of a child herself in relation to Santa Claus.
“Merry Christmas!” Jimmie cried. “Where’s my child?”
“Coming,” David said.
“Look at the candy kids. My eyes—but you’re a slick trio, girls. Pale lavender, pale blue, and pale pink, and all quite sophisticatedly décolleté. You go with the decorations, too. I don’t know quite why you do, but you do.”
“Give honor where honor is due, dearie. That’s owing to the cleverness of the decorator,” David said.179
“No man calls me dearie and lives to tell the tale,” Jimmie remarked almost dreamily as he squared off. “How’ll you have it, Dave?”
But at that instant there was an unexpected interruption. Alphonse threw open the big entrance door at the farther end of the long room with a flourish.
“Mademoiselle Juliet Capulet,” he proclaimed with the grand air, and then retired behind his hand, smiling broadly.
Framed in the high doorway, complete, cap and curls, softly rounding bodice, and the long, straight lines of the Renaissance, stood Juliet—Juliet, immemorial, immortal, young—austerely innocent and delicately shy, already beautiful, and yet potential of all the beauty and the wisdom of the world.
“I’ve never worn these clothes before anybody but the girls before,” Eleanor said, “but I thought”—she looked about her appealingly—“you might like it—for a surprise.”
“Great jumping Jehoshaphat,” Jimmie exclaimed, “I thought you said she was the same little girl, David.”
“She was half an hour ago,” David answered,180“I never saw such a metamorphosis. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw Juliet before.”
“She is the thing itself,” Gertrude answered, the artist in her sobered by the vision.
But Peter passed a dazed hand over his eyes and stared at the delicate figure advancing to him.
“My God! she’s a woman,” he said, and drew the hard breath of a man just awakened from sleep.
“I thought”—she looked about her appealingly—“you might like it—for a surprise”
“I thought”—she looked about her appealingly—“you might like it—for a surprise”
181CHAPTER XVGrowing Up
“Dear Uncle Jimmie:
“It was a pleasant surprise to get letters from every one of my uncles the first week I got back to school. It was unprecedented. You wrote me two letters last year, Uncle David six, and Uncle Peter sixteen. He is the best correspondent, but perhaps that is because I ask him the most advice. The Christmas party was lovely. I shall never forget the expressions on all the different faces when I came down in my Juliet suit. I thought at first that no one liked me in it, but I guess they did.
“You know how well I liked my presents because you heard my wild exclamations of delight. I never had such a nice Christmas. It was sweet of the We Are Sevens to get me that ivory set, and to know that every different piece was the loving thought of a different aunt or uncle. I love the yellow monogram. It looks entirely unique, and I like to have things that are not182like anybody else’s in the world, don’t you, Uncle Jimmie? I am glad you liked your cuff links. They are ‘neat,’ but not ‘gaudy.’ You play golf so well I thought a golf stick was a nice emblem for you, and would remind you of me and last summer.
“I am glad you think it is easier to keep your pledge now. I made a New Year’s resolution to go without chocolates, and give the money they would cost to some good cause, but it’s hard to pick out a cause, or to decide exactly how much money you are saving. I can eat the chocolates that are sent to me, however!!!!
“Uncle David said that he thought you were not like yourself lately, but you seemed just the same to me Christmas, only more affectionate. I love you very much. I was really only joking about the chocolates. Eleanor.”
“Dear Uncle David:
“I was glad to get your nice letter. You did not have to write in response to my bread and butter letter, but I am glad you did. When I am at school, and getting letters all the time I feel as if I were living two beautiful lives all at once, the183life of a ‘cooperative child’ and the life of Eleanor Hamlin, schoolgirl, both together. Letters make the people you love seem very near to you, don’t you think they do? I sleep with all my letters under my pillow whenever I feel the least little bit homesick, and they almost seem to breathe sometimes.
“School is the same old school. Maggie Lou had a wrist watch, too, for Christmas, but not so pretty as the one you gave me. Miss Hadley says I do remarkable work in English whenever I feel like it. I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or not. I took Kris Kringle for the subject of a theme the other day, and represented him as caught in an iceberg in the grim north, and not being able to reach all the poor little children in the tenements and hovels. The Haddock said it showed imagination.
“There was a lecture at school on Emerson the other day. The speaker was a noted literary lecturer from New York. He had wonderful waving hair, more like Pader—I can’t spell him, but you know who I mean—than Uncle Jimmie’s, but a little like both. He introduced some very noble thoughts in his discourse, putting perfectly184old ideas in a new way that made you think a lot more of them. I think a tall man like that with waving hair can do a great deal of good as a lecturer, because you listen a good deal more respectfully than if they were plain looking. His voice sounded a good deal like what I imagine Romeo’s voice did. I had a nice letter from Madam Bolling. I love you, and I have come to the bottom of the sheet. Eleanor.”
“Dear Uncle Peter:
“I have just written to my other uncles, so I won’t write you a long letter this time. They deserve letters because of being so unusually prompt after the holidays. You always deserve letters, but not specially now, any more than any other time.
“Uncle Peter, I wrote to my grandfather. It seems funny to think of Albertina’s aunt taking care of him now that Grandma is gone. I suppose Albertina is there a lot. She sent me a post card for Christmas. I didn’t send her any.
“Uncle Peter, I miss my grandmother out of the world. I remember how I used to take care of her, and put a soapstone in the small of her back185when she was cold. I wish sometimes that I could hold your hand, Uncle Peter, when I get thinking about it.
“Well, school is the same old school. Bertha Stephens has a felon on her finger, and that lets her out of hard work for a while. I will enclose a poem suggested by a lecture I heard recently on Emerson. It isn’t very good, but it will help to fill up the envelope. I love you, and love you. Eleanor.
“Life
“Life is a great, a noble task,When we fulfill our duty.To work, that should be all we ask,And seek the living beauty.We know not whence we come, or whereOur dim pathway is leading,Whether we tread on lilies fair,Or trample love-lies-bleeding.But we must onward go and up,Nor stop to question whither.E’en if we drink the bitter cup,And fall at last, to wither.
“P. S. I haven’t got the last verse very good186yet, but I think the second one is pretty. You know ‘love-lies-bleeding’ is a flower, but it sounds allegorical the way I have put it in. Don’t you think so? You know what all the crosses stand for.”
Eleanor’s fifteenth year was on the whole the least eventful year of her life, though not by any means the least happy. She throve exceedingly, and gained the freedom and poise of movement and spontaneity that result from properly balanced periods of work and play and healthful exercise. From being rather small of her age she developed into a tall slender creature, inherently graceful and erect, with a small, delicate head set flower-wise on a slim white neck. Gertrude never tired of modeling that lovely contour, but Eleanor herself was quite unconscious of her natural advantages. She preferred the snappy-eyed, stocky, ringleted type of beauty, and spent many unhappy quarters of an hour wishing she were pretty according to the inexorable ideals of Harmon.
She spent her vacation at David’s apartment in charge of Mademoiselle, though the latter part of the summer she went to Colhassett, quite by herself187according to her own desire, and spent a month with her grandfather, now in charge of Albertina’s aunt. She found Albertina grown into a huge girl, sunk in depths of sloth and snobbishness, who plied her with endless questions concerning life in the gilded circles of New York society. Eleanor found her disgusting and yet possessed of that vague fascination that the assumption of prerogative often carries with it.
She found her grandfather very old and shrunken, yet perfectly taken care of and with every material want supplied. She realized as she had never done before how the faithful six had assumed the responsibility of this household from the beginning, and how the old people had been warmed and comforted by their bounty. She laughed to remember her simplicity in believing that an actual salary was a perquisite of her adoption, and understood for the first time how small a part of the expense of their living this faithful stipend had defrayed. She looked back incredulously on that period when she had lived with them in a state of semi-starvation on the corn meal and cereals and very little else that her dollar and a half a week had purchased, and the188“garden sass,” that her grandfather had faithfully hoed and tended in the straggling patch of plowed field that he would hoe and tend no more. She spent a month practically at his feet, listening to his stories, helping him to find his pipe and tobacco and glasses, and reading the newspaper to him, and felt amply rewarded by his final acknowledgment that she was a good girl and he would as soon have her come again whenever she felt like it.
On her way back to school she spent a week with her friend, Margaret Louise, in the Connecticut town where she lived with her comfortable, commonplace family. It was while she was on this visit that the most significant event of the entire year took place, though it was a happening that she put out of her mind as soon as possible and never thought of it again when she could possibly avoid it.
Maggie Lou had a brother of seventeen, and one night in the corner of a moonlit porch, when they happened to be alone for a half hour, he had asked Eleanor to kiss him.
“I don’t want to kiss you,” Eleanor said. Then, not wishing to convey a sense of any personal189dislike to the brother of a friend to whom she was so sincerely devoted, she added, “I don’t know you well enough.”
He was a big boy, with mocking blue eyes and rough tweed clothes that hung on him loosely.
“When you know me better, will you let me kiss you?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” Eleanor said, still endeavoring to preserve the amenities.
He took her hand and played with it softly.
“You’re an awful sweet little girl,” he said.
“I guess I’ll go in now.”
“Sit still. Sister’ll be back in a minute.” He pulled her back to the chair from which she had half arisen. “Don’t you believe in kissing?”
“I don’t believe in kissingyou,” she tried to say, but the words would not come. She could only pray for deliverance through the arrival of some member of the family. The boy’s face was close to hers. It looked sweet in the moonlight she thought. She wished he would talk of something else besides kissing.
“Don’t you like me?” he persisted.
“Yes, I do.” She was very uncomfortable.
“Well, then, there’s no more to be said.” His190lips sought hers and pressed them. His breath came heavily, with little irregular catches in it.
She pushed him away and turned into the house.
“Don’t be angry, Eleanor,” he pleaded, trying to snatch at her hand.
“I’m not angry,” she said, her voice breaking, “I just wish you hadn’t, that’s all.”
There was no reference to this incident in the private diary, but, with an instinct which would have formed an indissoluble bond between herself and her Uncle Jimmie, she avoided dimly lit porches and boys with mischievous eyes and broad tweed covered shoulders.
For her guardians too, this year was comparatively smooth running and colorless. Beulah’s militant spirit sought the assuagement of a fierce expenditure of energy on the work that came to her hand through her new interest in suffrage. Gertrude flung herself into her sculpturing. She had been hurt as only the young can be hurt when their first delicate desires come to naught. She was very warm-blooded and eager under her cool veneer, and she had spent four years of hard work and hungry yearning for the fulness of a life she was too constrained to get any emotional hold on.191Her fancy for Jimmie she believed was quite over and done with.
Margaret, warmed by secret fires and nourished by the stuff that dreams are made of, flourished strangely in her attic chamber, and learned the wisdom of life by some curious method of her own of apprehending its dangers and delights. The only experiences she had that year were two proposals of marriage, one from a timid professor of the romance languages and the other from a young society man, already losing his waist line, whose sensuous spirit had been stirred by the ethereal grace of hers; but these things interested her very little. She was the princess, spinning fine dreams and waiting for the dawning of the golden day when the prince should come for her. Neither she nor Gertrude ever gave a serious thought to the five-year-old vow of celibacy, which was to Beulah as real and as binding as it had seemed on the first day she took it.
Peter and David and Jimmie went their own way after the fashion of men, all of them identified with the quickening romance of New York business life. David in Wall Street was proving to be something of a financier to his mother’s surprise192and amazement; and the pressure relaxed, he showed some slight initiative in social matters. In fact, two mothers, who were on Mrs. Bolling’s list as suitable parents-in-law, took heart of grace and began angling for him adroitly, while their daughters served him tea and made unabashed, modern-débutante eyes at him.
Jimmie, successfully working his way up to the top of his firm, suffered intermittently from his enthusiastic abuse of the privileges of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. His mind and soul were in reality hot on the trail of a wife, and there was no woman among those with whom he habitually foregathered whom his spirit recognized as his own woman. He was further rendered helpless and miserable by the fact that he had not the slightest idea of his trouble. He regarded himself as a congenital Don Juan, from whom his better self shrank at times with a revulsion of loathing.
Peter felt that he had his feet very firmly on a rather uninspired earth. He was getting on in the woolen business, which happened to be the vocation his father had handed down to him. He belonged to an amusing club, and he still felt himself irrevocably widowed by the early death of the193girl in the photograph he so faithfully cherished. Eleanor was a very vital interest in his life. It had seemed to him for a few minutes at the Christmas party that she was no longer the little girl he had known, that a lovelier, more illusive creature—a woman—had come to displace her, but when she had flung her arms around him he had realized that it was still the heart of a child beating so fondly against his own.
The real trouble with arrogating to ourselves the privileges of parenthood is that our native instincts are likely to become deflected by the substitution of the artificial for the natural responsibility. Both Peter and David had the unconscious feeling that their obligation to their race was met by their communal interest in Eleanor. Beulah, of course, sincerely believed that the filling in of an intellectual concept of life was all that was required of her. Only Jimmie groped blindly and bewilderedly for his own. Gertrude and Margaret both understood that they were unnaturally alone in a world where lovers met and mated, but they, too, hugged to their souls the flattering unction that they were parents of a sort.
Thus three sets of perfectly suitable and devoted194young men and women, of marriageable age, with dozens of interests and sympathies in common, and one extraordinarily vital bond, continued to walk side by side in a state of inhuman preoccupation, their gaze fixed inward instead of upon one another; and no Divine Power, happening upon the curious circumstance, believed the matter one for His intervention nor stooped to take the respective puppets by the back of their unconscious necks, and so knock their sluggish heads together.
195CHAPTER XVIMargaret Louisa’s Birthright
“I am sixteen years and eight months old to-day,” Eleanor wrote, “and I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread, and slept in the same room with, and told everything to for four long years, could turn out to be an absolute traitor and villainess. Let me begin at the beginning. For nearly a year now I have noticed that Bertha Stephens avoided me, and presented the appearance of disliking me. I don’t like to have any one dislike me, and I have tried to do little things for her that would win back her affection, but with no success. As I was editing the Lantern I could print her essayettes (as she called them) and do her lots of little favors in a literary way, which she seemed to appreciate, but personally she avoided me like the plague.196
“Of course Stevie has lots of faults, and since Margaret Louise and I always talked everything over we used to talk about Stevie in the same way. I remember that she used to try to draw me out about Stevie’s character. I’ve always thought Stevie was a kind of piker, that is that she would say she was going to do a thing, and then from sheer laziness not do it. My dictionary was a case in point. She gummed it all up with her nasty fudge and then wouldn’t give it back to me or get me another, but the reason she wouldn’t give it back to me was because her feelings were too fine to return a damaged article, and not fine enough to make her hump herself and get me another. That’s only one kind of a piker and not the worst kind, but it waspikerish.
“All this I told quite frankly to Maggie—I mean Margaret Louise, because I had no secrets from her and never thought there was any reason why I shouldn’t. Stevie has a horrid brother, also, who has been up here to dances. All the girls hate him because he is so spoony. He isn’t as spoony as Margaret Louise’s brother, but he’s quite a sloppy little spooner at that. Well, I told Margaret Louise that I didn’t like Stevie’s brother,197and then I made the damaging remark that one reason I didn’t like him was because he looked so much like Stevie. I didn’t bother to explain to Maggie—I will not call her Maggie Lou any more, because that is a dear little name and sounds so affectionate,—Margaret Louise—what I meant by this, because I thought it was perfectly evident. Stevie is a peachy looking girl, a snow white blonde with pinky cheeks and dimples. Well, her brother is a snow white blond too, and he has pinky cheeks and dimples and his name is Carlo! We, of course, at once named him Curlo. It is not a good idea for a man to look too much like his sister, or to have too many dimples in his chin and cheeks. I had only to think of him in the same room with my three uncles to get his number exactly. I don’t mean to use slang in my diary, but I can’t seem to help it. Professor Mathews says that slang has a distinct function in the language—in replenishing it, but Uncle Peter says about slang words, that ‘many are called, and few are chosen,’ and there is no need to try to accommodate them all in one’s vocabulary.
“Well, I told Margaret Louise all these things198about Curlo, and how he tried to hold my hand coming from the station one day, when the girls all went up to meet the boys that came up for the dance,—and I told her everything else in the world that happened to come into my head.
“Then one day I got thinking about leaving Harmon—this is our senior year, of course—and I thought that I should leave all the girls with things just about right between us, excepting good old Stevie, who had this queer sort of grouch against me. So I decided that I’d just go around and have it out with her, and I did. I went into her room one day when her roommate was out, and demanded a show down. Well, I found out that Maggie—Margaret Louise had just repeated to Stevie every living thing that I ever said about her, just as I said it, only without the explanations and foot-notes that make any kind of conversation more understandable.
“Stevie told me all these things one after another, without stopping, and when she was through I wished that the floor would open and swallow me up, but nothing so comfortable happened. I was obliged to gaze into Stevie’s overflowing eyes and own up to the truth as well as I199could, and explain it. It was the most humiliating hour that I ever spent, but I told Stevie exactly what I felt about her ‘nothing extenuate, and naught set down in malice,’ and what I had said about her to our mutual friend, who by the way, is not the mutual friend of either of us any longer. We were both crying by the time I had finished, but we understood each other. There were one or two things that she said she didn’t think she would ever forget that I had said about her, but even those she could forgive. She said that my dislike of her had rankled in her heart so long that it took away all the bitterness to know that I wasn’t really her enemy. She said that my coming to her that way, and not lying had showed that I had lots of character, and she thought in time that we could be quite intimate friends if I wanted to as much as she did.
“After my talk with Stevie I still hoped against hope that Margaret Louise would turn out to have some reason or excuse for what she had done. I knew she had done it, but when a thing like that happens that upsets your whole trust in a person you simply can not believe the evidence of your own senses. When you read of a situation200like that in a book you are all prepared for it by the author, who has taken the trouble to explain the moral weakness or unpleasantness of the character, and given you to understand that you are to expect a betrayal from him or her; but when it happens in real life out of a clear sky you have nothing to go upon that makes you evenbelievewhat you know.
“I won’t even try to describe the scene that occurred between Margaret Louise and me. She cried and she lied, and she accused me of trying to curry favor with Stevie, and Stevie of being a backbiter, and she argued and argued about all kinds of things but the truth, and when I tried to pin her down to it, she ducked and crawled and sidestepped in a way that was dreadful. I’ve seen her do something like it before about different things, and I ought to have known then what she was like inside of her soul, but I guess you have to be the object of such a scene before you realize the full force of it.
“All I said was, ‘Margaret Louise, if that’s all you’ve got to say about the injury you have done me, then everything is over between us from this minute;’ and it was, too.201
“I feel as if I had been writing a beautiful story or poem on what I thought was an enduring tablet of marble, and some one had come and wiped it all off as if it were mere scribblings on a slate. I don’t know whether it would seem like telling tales to tell Uncle Peter or not; I don’t quite know whether I want to tell him. Sometimes I wish I had a mother to tell such things to. It seems to me that a real mother would know what to say that would help you. Disillusion is a very strange thing—like death, only having people die seems more natural somehow. When they die you can remember the happy hours that you spent with them, but when disillusionment comes then you have lost even your beautiful memories.
“We had for the subject of our theme this week, ‘What Life Means to Me,’ which of course was the object of many facetious remarks from the girls, but I’ve been thinking that if I sat down seriously to state in just so many words what life means tome, I hardly know what I would transcribe. It means disillusionment and death for one thing. Since my grandfather died last year I have had nobody left of my own in202the world,—no real blood relation. Of course, I am a good deal fonder of my aunts and uncles than most people are of their own flesh and blood, but own flesh and blood is a thing that it makes you feel shivery to be without. If I had been Margaret Louise’s own flesh and blood, she would never have acted like that to me. Stevie stuck up for Carlo as if he was really something to be proud of. Perhaps my uncles and aunts feel that way about me, I don’t know. I don’t even know if I feel that way about them. I certainly criticize them in my soul at times, and feel tired of being dragged around from pillar to post. I don’t feel that way about Uncle Peter, but there is nobody else that I am certain, positive sure that I love better than life itself. If there is only one in the world that you feel that way about, I might not be Uncle Peter’s one.
“Oh! I wish Margaret Louise had not sold her birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish I had a home that I had a perfect right to go and live in forevermore. I wish my mother was here to comfort me to-night.”
203CHAPTER XVIIA Real Kiss
At seventeen, Eleanor was through at Harmon. She was to have one year of preparatory school and then it was the desire of Beulah’s heart that she should go to Rogers. The others contended that the higher education should be optional and not obligatory. The decision was finally to be left to Eleanor herself, after she had considered it in all its bearings.
“If she doesn’t decide in favor of college,” David said, “and she makes her home with me here, as I hope she will do, of course, I don’t see what society we are going to be able to give her. Unfortunately none of our contemporaries have growing daughters. She ought to meet eligible young men and that sort of thing.”
“Not yet,” Margaret cried. The two were having a cozy cup of tea at his apartment. “You’re so terribly worldly, David, that you frighten me sometimes.”
“You don’t know where I will end, is that the idea?”204
“I don’t know where Eleanor will end, if you’re already thinking of eligible young men for her.”
“Those things have got to be thought of,” David answered gravely.
“I suppose they have,” Margaret sighed. “I don’t want her to be married. I want to take her off by myself and growl over her all alone for a while. Then I want Prince Charming to come along and snatch her up quickly, and set her behind his milk white charger and ride away with her. If we’ve all got to get together and connive at marrying her off there won’t be any comfort in having her.”
“I don’t know,” David said thoughtfully; “I think that might be fun, too. A vicarious love-affair that you can manipulate is one of the most interesting games in the world.”
“That’s not my idea of an interesting game,” Margaret said. “I like things very personal, David,—you ought to know that by this time.”
“I do know that,” David said, “but it sometimes occurs to me that except for a few obvious facts of that nature I really know very little about you, Margaret.”205
“There isn’t much to know—except that I’m a woman.”
“That’s a good deal,” David answered slowly; “to a mere man that seems to be considerable of an adventure.”
“It is about as much of an adventure sometimes as it would be to be a field of clover in an insectless world.—This is wonderful tea, David, but your cream is like butter and floats around in it in wudges. No, don’t get any more, I’ve got to go home. Grandmother still thinks it’s very improper for me to call upon you, in spite of Mademoiselle and your ancient and honorable housekeeper.”
“Don’t go,” David said; “I apologize on my knees for the cream. I’ll send out and have it wet down, or whatever you do to cream in that state. I want to talk to you. What did you mean by your last remark?”
“About the cream, or the proprieties?”
“About women.”
“Everything and nothing, David dear. I’m a little bit tired of being one, that’s all, and I want to go home.”206
“She wants to go home when she’s being so truly delightful and cryptic,” David said. “Have you been seeing visions, Margaret, in my hearth fire? Your eyes look as if you had.”
“I thought I did for a minute.” She rose and stood absently fitting her gloves to her fingers. “I don’t know exactly what it was I saw, but it was something that made me uncomfortable. It gives me the creeps to talk about being a woman. David, do you know sometimes I have a kind of queer hunch about Eleanor? I love her, you know, dearly, dearly. I think that she is a very successful kind of Frankenstein; but there are moments when I have the feeling that she’s going to be a storm center and bring some queer trouble upon us. I wouldn’t say this to anybody but you, David.”
As David tucked her in the car—he had arrived at the dignity of owning one now—and watched her sweet silhouette disappear, he, too, had his moment of clairvoyance. He felt that he was letting something very precious slip out of sight, as if some radiant and delicate gift had been laid lightly within his grasp and as lightly withdrawn again. As if when the door closed on his friend207Margaret some stranger, more silent creature who was dear to him had gone with her. As soon as he was dressed for dinner he called Margaret on the telephone to know if she had arrived home safely, and was informed not only that she had, but that she was very wroth at him for getting her down three flights of stairs in the midst of her own dinner toilet.
“I had a kind of hunch, too,” he told her, “and I felt as if I wanted to hear your voice speaking.”
But she only scoffed at him.
“If that’s the way you feel about your chauffeur,” she said, “you ought to discharge him, but he brought me home beautifully.”
The difference between a man’s moments of prescience and a woman’s, is that the man puts them out of his consciousness as quickly as he can, while a woman clings to them fearfully and goes her way a little more carefully for the momentary flash of foresight. David tried to see Margaret once or twice during that week but failed to find her in when he called or telephoned, and the special impulse to seek her alone again died naturally.
One Saturday a few weeks later Eleanor telegraphed208him that she wished to come to New York for the week-end to do some shopping.
He went to the train to meet her, and when the slender chic figure in the most correct of tailor made suits appeared at the gateway, with an obsequious porter bearing her smart bag and ulster, he gave a sudden gasp of surprise at the picture. He had been aware for some time of the increase in her inches and the charm of the pure cameo-cut profile, but he regarded her still as a child histrionically assuming the airs and graces of womanhood, as small girl children masquerade in the trailing skirts of their elders. He was accustomed to the idea that she was growing up rapidly, but the fact that she was already grown had never actually dawned on him until this moment.
“You look as if you were surprised to see me, Uncle David,—are you?” she said, slipping a slim hand, warm through its immaculate glove, into his. “You knew I was coming, and you came to meet me, and yet you looked as surprised as if you hadn’t expected me at all.”
“Surprised to see you just about expresses it, Eleanor. I am surprised to see you. I was looking209for a little girl in hair ribbons with her skirts to her knees.”
“And a blue tam-o’-shanter?”
“And a blue tam-o’-shanter. I had forgotten you had grown up any to speak of.”
“You see me every vacation,” Eleanor grumbled, as she stepped into the waiting motor. “It isn’t because you lack opportunity that you don’t notice what I look like. It’s just because you’re naturally unobserving.”
“Peter and Jimmie have been making a good deal of fuss about your being a young lady, now I think of it. Peter especially has been rather a nuisance about it, breaking into my most precious moments of triviality with the sweetly solemn thought that our little girl has grown to be a woman now.”
“Oh, doeshethink I’m grown up, does he really?”
“Jimmie is almost as bad. He’s all the time wanting me to get you to New York over the weekend, so that he can see if you are any taller than you were the last time he saw you.”
“Are they coming to see me this evening?”210
“Jimmie is going to look in. Peter is tied up with his sister. You know she’s on here from China with her daughter. Peter wants you to meet the child.”
“She must be as grown up as I am,” Eleanor said. “I used to have her room, you know, when I stayed with Uncle Peter. Does Uncle Peter like her?”
“Not as much as he likes you, Miss Green-eyes. He says she looks like a heathen Chinee but otherwise is passable. I didn’t know that you added jealousy to the list of your estimable vices.”
“I’m not jealous,” Eleanor protested; “or if I am it’s only because she’s blood relation,—and I’m not, you know.”
“It’s a good deal more prosaic to be a blood relation, if anybody should ask you,” David smiled. “A blood relation is a good deal like the famous primrose on the river’s brim.”
“‘A primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose was to him,—and nothing more,’” Eleanor quoted gaily. “Why, what more—” she broke off suddenly and colored slightly.
“What more would anybody want to be than a yellow primrose by the river’s brim?” David finished211for her. “I don’t know, I’m sure. I’m a mere man and such questions are too abstruse for me, as I told your Aunt Margaret the other day. Now I think of it, though, you don’t look unlike a yellow primrose yourself to-day, daughter.”
“That’s because I’ve got a yellow ribbon on my hat.”
“No, the resemblance goes much deeper. It has something to do with youth and fragrance and the flowers that bloom in the spring.”
“The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la,” Eleanor returned saucily, “have nothing to do with the case.”
“She’s learning that she has eyes, good Lord,” David said to himself, but aloud he remarked paternally, “I saw all your aunts yesterday. Gertrude gave a tea party and invited a great many famous tea party types, and ourselves.”
“Was Aunt Beulah there?”
“I said all your aunts. Beulah was there, like the famous Queenie, with her hair in a braid.”
“Not really.”
“Pretty nearly. She’s gone in for dress reform now, you know, a kind of middy blouse made out of a striped portière with a kilted skirt of the same212material and a Scotch cap. She doesn’t look so bad in it. Your Aunt Beulah presents a peculiar phenomenon these days. She’s growing better-looking and behaving worse every day of her life.”
“Behaving worse?”
“She’s theory ridden and fad bitten. She’ll come to a bad end if something doesn’t stop her.”
“Do you mean—stop her working for suffrage? I’m a suffragist, Uncle David.”
“And quite right to remind me of it before I began slamming the cause. No, I don’t mean suffrage. I believe in suffrage myself. I mean the way she’s going after it. There are healthy ways of insisting on your rights and unhealthy ways. Beulah’s getting further and further off key, that’s all. Here we are at home, daughter. Your poor old cooperative father welcomes you to the associated hearthstone.”
“This front entrance looks more like my front entrance than any other place does,” Eleanor said. “Oh! I’m so glad to be here. George, how is the baby?” she asked the black elevator man, who beamed delightedly upon her.
“Gosh! I didn’t know he had one,” David chuckled. “It takes a woman—”213
Jimmie appeared in the evening, laden with violets and a five pound box of the chocolates most in favor in the politest circles at the moment. David whistled when he saw them.
“What’s devouring you, papa?” Jimmie asked him. “Don’t I always place tributes at the feet of the offspring?”
“Mirror candy and street corner violets, yes,” David said. “It’s only the labels that surprised me.”
“She knows the difference, now,” Jimmie answered, “what would you?”
The night before her return to school it was decreed that she should go to bed early. She had spent two busy days of shopping and “seeing the family.” She had her hours discussing her future with Peter, long visits and talks with Margaret and Gertrude, and a cup of tea at suffrage headquarters with Beulah, as well as long sessions in the shops accompanied by Mademoiselle, who made her home now permanently with David. She sat before the fire drowsily constructing pyramids out of the embers and David stood with one arm on the mantel, smoking his after-dinner cigar, and watching her.214
“Is it to be college, Eleanor?” he asked her presently.
“I can’t seem to make up my mind, Uncle David.”
“Don’t you like the idea?”
“Yes, I’d love it,—if—”
“If what, daughter?”
“If I thought I could spare the time.”
“The time? Elucidate.”
“I’m going to earn my own living, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I am. I’ve got to—in order to—to feel right about things.”
“Don’t you like the style of living to which your cooperative parents have accustomed you?”
“I love everything you’ve ever done for me, but I can’t go on letting you do things for me forever.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know why not exactly. It doesn’t seem—right, that’s all.”
“It’s your New England conscience, Eleanor; one of the most specious varieties of consciences in the world. It will always be tempting you to215do good that better may come. Don’t listen to it, daughter.”
“I’m in earnest, Uncle David. I don’t know whether I would be better fitted to earn my living if I went to business college or real college. What do you think?”
“I can’t think,—I’m stupefied.”
“Uncle Peter couldn’t think, either.”
“Have you mentioned this brilliant idea to Peter?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He talked it over with me, but I think he thinks I’ll change my mind.”
“I think you’ll change your mind. Good heavens! Eleanor, we’re all able to afford you—the little we spend on you is nothing divided among six of us. It’s our pleasure and privilege. When did you come to this extraordinary decision?”
“A long time ago. The day that Mrs. Bolling talked to me, I think. There are things she said that I’ve never forgotten. I told Uncle Peter to think about it and then help me to decide which to do, and I want you to think, Uncle David, and tell216me truly what you believe the best preparation for a business life would be. I thought perhaps I might be a stenographer in an editorial office, and my training there would be more use to me than four years at college, but I don’t know.”
“You’re an extraordinary young woman,” David said, staring at her. “I’m glad you broached this subject, if only that I might realize how extraordinary, but I don’t think anything will come of it, my dear. I don’t want you to go to college unless you really want to, but if you do want to, I hope you will take up the pursuit of learning as a pursuit and not as a means to an end. Do you hear me, daughter?”
“Yes, Uncle David.”
“Then let’s have no more of this nonsense of earning your own living.”
“Are you really displeased, Uncle David?”
“I should be if I thought you were serious,—but it’s bedtime. If you’re going to get your beauty sleep, my dear, you ought to begin on it immediately.”
Eleanor rose obediently, her brow clouded a little, and her head held high. David watched the color coming and going in the sweet face and the217tender breast rising and falling with her quickening breath.
“I thought perhaps you would understand,” she said. “Good night.”
She had always kissed him “good night” until this visit, and he had refrained from commenting on the omission before, but now he put out his hand to her.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” he asked. “There is only one way for a daughter to say good night to her parent.”
She put up her face, and as she did so he caught the glint of tears in her eyes.
“Why, Eleanor, dear,” he said, “did you care?” And he kissed her. Then his lips sought hers again.
With his arms still about her shoulder he stood looking down at her. A hot tide of crimson made its way slowly to her brow and then receded, accentuating the clear pallor of her face.
“That was a real kiss, dear,” he said slowly. “We mustn’t get such things confused. I won’t bother you with talking about it to-night, or until you are ready. Until then we’ll pretend that it didn’t happen, but if the thought of it should ever disturb you the least bit, dear, you are to remember218that the time is coming when I shall have something to say about it; will you remember?”
“Yes, Uncle David,” Eleanor said uncertainly, “but I—I—”
David took her unceremoniously by the shoulders.
“Go now,” he said, and she obeyed him without further question.