Turn About Eleanor Part 8

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 the table 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 dear sometimes 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 of admitting 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 a.s.siduously, had come out of two gla.s.ses 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 of his 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 alt.i.tude 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.

"She moves around the room with grace, Her hands she puts with quickness.

Although she wears upon her face The 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 Hugh Hutchinson 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 s.p.a.cious, 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 with a 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 a.s.sembled 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."

"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 for _you_, 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.

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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 pa.s.sion 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 tells me 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 n.o.body loves anybody--not to say so anyway. If a man is getting married they say he _likes_ that 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. n.o.body 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 n.o.body'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.'

"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. Of course 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 regime 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 cla.s.sic literature and folk lore.

"The We Are Sevens meet every Sat.u.r.day 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 am found 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 n.o.body else ever, but I should like to have. He thinks she is the best aunt too."

Some weeks later she wrote to chronicle a painful scene in which she had partic.i.p.ated.