THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS
Eleanor walked over to the steam pipes, and examined them carefully.
The terrible rattling noise had stopped, as had also the choking and
gurgling that had kept her awake because it was so like the noise that
Mrs. O'Farrel's aunt, the sick lady she had helped to take care of,
made constantly for the last two weeks of her life. Whenever there was
a sound that was anything like that, Eleanor could not help shivering.
She had never seen steam pipes before. When Beulah had shown her the
room where she was to sleep--a room all in blue, baby blue, and pink
roses--Eleanor thought that the silver pipes standing upright in the
corner were a part of some musical instrument, like a pipe organ. When
the rattling sound had begun she thought that some one had come into
the room with her, and was tuning it. She had drawn the pink silk puff
closely about her ears, and tried not to be frightened. Trying not to
be frightened was the way she had spent a good deal of her time since
her Uncle Amos died, and she had had to look out for her
grandparents.
Now that it was morning, and the bright sun was streaming into the
windows, she ventured to climb out of bed and approach the uncanny
instrument. She tripped on the trailing folds of that nightgown her
Aunt Beulah--it was funny that all these ladies should call themselves
her aunts, when they were really no relation to her--had insisted on
her wearing. Her own nightdress had been left in the time-worn
carpetbag that Uncle David had forgotten to take out of the "handsome
cab." She stumbled against the silver pipes. They were _hot_; so hot
that the flesh of her arm nearly blistered, but she did not cry out.
Here was another mysterious problem of the kind that New York
presented at every turn, to be silently accepted, and dealt with.
Her mother and father had once lived in New York. Her father had been
born here, in a house with a brownstone front on West Tenth Street,
wherever that was. She herself had lived in New York when she was a
baby, though she had been born in her grandfather's house in
Colhassett. She had lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, too, until she was four
years old, and her father and mother had died there, both in the same
week, of pneumonia. She wished this morning, that she could remember
the house where they lived in New York, and the things that were in
it.
There was a knock on the door. Ought she to go and open the door in
her nightdress? Ought she to call out "Come in?" It might be a
gentleman, and her Aunt Beulah's nightdress was not very thick. She
decided to cough, so that whoever was outside might understand she was
in there, and had heard them.
"May I come in, Eleanor?" Beulah's voice called.
"Yes, ma'am." She started to get into bed, but Miss--Miss--the nearer
she was to her, the harder it was to call her aunt,--Aunt Beulah might
think it was time she was up. She compromised by sitting down in a
chair.
Beulah had passed a practically sleepless night working out the theory
of Eleanor's development. The six had agreed on a certain sketchily
defined method of procedure. That is, they were to read certain books
indicated by Beulah, and to follow the general schedule that she was
to work out and adapt to the individual needs of the child herself,
during the first phase of the experiment. She felt that she had
managed the reception badly, that she had not done or said the right
thing. Peter's attitude had shown that he felt the situation had been
clumsily handled, and it was she who was responsible for it. Peter was
too kind to criticize her, but she had vowed in the muffled depths of
a feverish pillow that there should be no more flagrant flaws in the
conduct of the campaign.
"Did you sleep well, Eleanor?" she asked.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Are you hungry?"
"No, ma'am."
The conversation languished at this.
"Have you had your bath?"
"I didn't know I was to have one."
"Nice little girls have a bath every day."
"Do they?" Eleanor asked. Her Aunt Beulah seemed to expect her to say
something more, but she couldn't think of anything.
"I'll draw your bath for you this morning. After this you will be
expected to take it yourself."
Eleanor had seen bathrooms before, but she had never been in a
bath-tub. At her grandfather's, she had taken her Saturday night baths
in an old wooden wash-tub, which had water poured in it from the tea
kettle. When Beulah closed the door on her she stepped gingerly into
the tub: the water was twice too hot, but she didn't know how to turn
the faucet, or whether she was expected to turn it. Mrs. O'Farrel had
told her that people had to pay for water in New York. Perhaps Aunt
Beulah had drawn all the water she could have. She used the soap
sparingly. Soap was expensive, she knew. She wished there was some way
of discovering just how much of things she was expected to use. The
number of towels distressed her, but she finally took the littlest and
dried herself. The heat of the water had nearly parboiled her.
After that, she tried to do blindly what she was told. There was a
girl in a black dress and white apron that passed her everything she
had to eat. Her Aunt Beulah told her to help herself to sugar and to
cream for her oatmeal, from off this girl's tray. Her hand trembled a
good deal, but she was fortunate enough not to spill any. After
breakfast she was sent to wash her hands in the bathroom; she turned
the faucet, and used a very little water. Then, when she was called,
she went into the sitting-room and sat down, and folded her hands in
her lap.
Beulah looked at her with some perplexity. The child was docile and
willing, but she seemed unexpectedly stupid for a girl ten years old.
"Have you ever been examined for adenoids, Eleanor?" she asked
suddenly.
"No, ma'am."
"Say, 'no, Aunt Beulah.' Don't say, 'no, ma'am' and 'yes, ma'am.'
People don't say 'no, ma'am' and 'yes, ma'am' any more, you know. They
say 'no' and 'yes,' and then mention the name of the person to whom
they are speaking."
"Yes, ma'am," Eleanor couldn't stop herself saying it. She wanted to
correct herself. "No, Aunt Beulah, no, Aunt Beulah," but the words
stuck in her throat.
"Well, try to remember," Beulah said. She was thinking of the case in
a book of psychology that she had been reading that morning, of a girl
who was "pale and sleepy looking, expressionless of face, careless of
her personal appearance," who after an operation for adenoids, had
become "as animated and bright as before she had been lethargic and
dull." She was pleased to see that Eleanor's fine hair had been
scrupulously combed, and neatly braided this morning, not being able
to realize--as how should she?--that the condition of Eleanor's fine
spun locks on her arrival the night before, had been attributable to
the fact that the O'Farrel baby had stolen her comb, and Eleanor had
been too shy to mention the fact, and had combed her hair
mermaid-wise, through her fingers.
"This morning," Beulah began brightly, "I am going to turn you loose
in the apartment, and let you do what you like. I want to get an idea
of the things you do like, you know. You can sew, or read, or drum on
the piano, or talk to me, anything that pleases you most. I want you
to be happy, that's all, and to enjoy yourself in your own way."
"Give the child absolute freedom in which to demonstrate the worth and
value of its ego,"--that was what she was doing, "keeping it carefully
under observation while you determine the individual trend along which
to guide its development."
The little girl looked about her helplessly. The room was very large
and bright. The walls were white, and so was the woodwork, the mantle,
and some of the furniture. Gay figured curtains hung at the windows,
and there were little stools, and chairs, and even trays with glass
over them, covered with the same bright colored material. Eleanor had
never seen a room anything like it. There was no center-table, no
crayon portraits of different members of the family, no easels, or
scarves thrown over the corners of the pictures. There were not many
pictures, and those that there were didn't seem to Eleanor like
pictures at all, they were all so blurry and smudgy,--excepting one of
a beautiful lady. She would have liked to have asked the name of that
lady,--but her Aunt Beulah's eyes were upon her. She slipped down from
her chair and walked across the room to the window.
"Well, dear, what would make this the happiest day you can think of?"
Beulah asked, in the tone she was given to use when she asked Gertrude
and Margaret and Jimmie--but not often Peter--what they expected to do
with their lives.
Eleanor turned a desperate face from the window, from the row of bland
elegant apartment buildings she had been contemplating with unseeing
eyes.
"Do I have to?" she asked Beulah piteously.
"Have to what?"
"Have to amuse myself in my own way? I don't know what you want me to
do. I don't know what you think that I ought to do."
A strong-minded and spoiled younger daughter of a widowed
mother--whose chief anxiety had been to anticipate the wants of her
children before they were expressed--with an independent income, and a
beloved and admiring circle of intimate friends, is not likely to be
imaginatively equipped to explore the spiritual fastnesses of a
sensitive and alien orphan. Beulah tried earnestly to get some
perspective on the child's point of view, but she could not. The fact
that she was torturing the child would have been outside of the limits
of her comprehension. She searched her mind for some immediate
application of the methods of Madame Montessori, and produced a lump
of modeling clay.
"You don't really have to do anything, Eleanor," she said kindly. "I
don't want you to make an effort to please me, only to be happy
yourself. Why don't you try and see what you can do with this modeling
clay? Just try making it up into mud pies, or anything."
"Mud pies?"
"Let the child teach himself the significance of contour, and the use
of his hands, by fashioning the clay into rudimentary forms of
beauty." That was the theory.
"Yes, dear, mud pies, if you wish to."
Whereupon Eleanor, conscientiously and miserably, turned out a neat
half-dozen skilful, miniature models of the New England deep dish
apple-pie, pricked and pinched to a nicety.
Beulah, with a vision related to the nebulous stages of a study by
Rodin, was somewhat disconcerted with this result, but she brightened
as she thought at least she had discovered a natural tendency in the
child that she could help her develop.
"Do you like to cook, Eleanor?" she asked.
In the child's mind there rose the picture of her grim apprenticeship
on Cape Cod. She could see the querulous invalid in the sick chair,
her face distorted with pain and impatience; she could feel the sticky
dough in her fingers, and the heat from the stove rising round her.
"I hate cooking," she said, with the first hint of passion she had
shown in her relation to her new friends.
The day dragged on wearily. Beulah took her to walk on the Drive, but
as far as she was able to determine the child saw nothing of her
surroundings. The crowds of trimly dressed people, the nursemaids and
babies, the swift slim outlines of the whizzing motors, even the
battleships lying so suggestively quiescent on the river before
them--all the spectacular, vivid panorama of afternoon on Riverside
Drive--seemed absolutely without interest or savor to the child.
Beulah's despair and chagrin were increasing almost as rapidly as
Eleanor's.
Late in the afternoon Beulah suggested a nap. "I'll sit here and read
for a few minutes," she said, as she tucked Eleanor under the covers.
Then, since she was quite desperate for subjects of conversation, and
still determined by the hot memory of her night's vigil to leave no
stone of geniality unturned, she added:
"This is a book that I am reading to help me to know how to guide and
educate you. I haven't had much experience in adopting children, you
know, Eleanor, and when there is anything in this world that you don't
know, there is usually some good and useful book that will help you to
find out all about it."
Even to herself her words sounded hatefully patronizing and pedagogic,
but she was past the point of believing that she could handle the
situation with grace. When Eleanor's breath seemed to be coming
regularly, she put down her book with some thankfulness and escaped to
the tea table, where she poured tea for her aunt, and explained the
child's idiosyncrasies swiftly and smoothly to that estimable lady.
Left alone, Eleanor lay still for a while, staring at the design of
pink roses on the blue wall-paper. On Cape Cod, pink and blue were not
considered to be colors that could be combined. There was nothing at
all in New York like anything she knew or remembered. She sighed. Then
she made her way to the window and picked up the book Beulah had been
reading. It was about _her_, Aunt Beulah had said,--directions for
educating her and training her. The paragraph that caught her eye
where the book was open had been marked with a pencil.
"This girl had such a fat, frog like expression of face," Eleanor
read, "that her neighbors thought her an idiot. She was found to be
the victim of a severe case of ad-e-noids." As she spelled out the
word, she recognized it as the one Beulah had used earlier in the day.
She remembered the sudden sharp look with which the question had been
accompanied. The sick lady for whom she had "worked out" had often
called her an idiot when her feet had stumbled, or she had failed to
understand at once what was required of her.
Eleanor read on. She encountered a text replete with hideous examples
of backward and deficient children, victims of adenoids who had been
restored to a state of normality by the removal of the affliction. She
had no idea what an adenoid was. She had a hazy notion that it was a
kind of superfluous bone in the region of the breast, but her anguish
was rooted in the fact that this, _this_ was the good and useful book
that her Aunt Beulah had found it necessary to resort to for guidance,
in the case of her own--Eleanor's--education.
When Beulah, refreshed by a cup of tea and further sustained by the
fact that Margaret and Peter had both telephoned they were coming to
dinner, returned to her charge, she found the stolid, apathetic child
she had left, sprawling face downward on the floor, in a passion of
convulsive weeping.