ELEANOR ENJOYS HERSELF IN HER OWN WAY
"I am in society here," Eleanor wrote to her friend Albertina, with a
pardonable emphasis on that phase of her new existence that would
appeal to the haughty ideals of Miss Weston, "I don't have to do any
housework, or anything. I sleep under a pink silk bedquilt, and I have
all new clothes. I have a new black pattern leather sailor hat that I
sopose you would laugh at. It cost six dollars and draws the sun down
to my head but I don't say anything. I have six aunts and uncles all
diferent names and ages but grown up. Uncle Peter is the most elderly,
he is twenty-five. I know becase we gave him a birthday party with a
cake. I sat at the table. I wore my crape da shine dress. You would
think that was pretty, well it is. There is a servant girl to do evry
thing even passing your food to you on a tray. I wish you could come
to visit me. I stay two months in a place and get broghut up there.
Aunt Beulah is peculiar but nice when you know her. She is stric and
at first I thought we was not going to get along. She thought I had
adenoids and I thought she dislikt me too much, but it turned out not.
I take lessons from her every morning like they give at Rogers
College, not like publick school. I have to think what I want to do a
good deal and then do it. At first she turned me loose to enjoy myself
and I could not do it, but now we have disapline which makes it all
right. My speling is weak, but uncle Peter says Stevanson could not
spel and did not care. Stevanson was the poat who wrote the birdie
with a yellow bill in the reader. I wish you would tel me if Grandma's
eye is worse and what about Grandfather's rheumatism.
"Your fond friend, Eleanor.
"P. S. We have a silver organ in all the rooms to have heat in. I was
afrayd of them at first."
* * * * *
In the letters to her grandparents, however, the undercurrent of
anxiety about the old people, which was a ruling motive in her life,
became apparent.
* * * * *
"Dear Grandma and Dear Grandpa," she wrote,
"I have been here a weak now. I inclose my salary, fifteen dollars
($15.00) which I hope you will like. I get it for doing evry thing I
am told and being adoptid besides. You can tell the silectmen that I
am rich now and can support you just as good as Uncle Amos. I want
Grandpa to buy some heavy undershurts right of. He will get a couff if
he doesn't do it. Tell him to rub your arm evry night before you go to
bed, Grandma, and to have a hot soapstone for you. If you don't have
your bed hot you will get newmonia and I can't come home to take care
of you, becase my salary would stop. I like New York better now that I
have lived here some. I miss seeing you around, and Grandpa.
"The cook cooks on a gas stove that is very funny. I asked her how it
went and she showed me it. She is going to leve, but lucky thing the
hired girl can cook till Aunt Beulah gets a nother cook as antyseptic
as this cook. In Rogers College they teach ladies to have their cook's
and hired girl's antyseptic. It is a good idear becase of sickness. I
inclose a recipete for a good cake. You can make it sating down. You
don't have to stir it much, and Grandpa can bring you the things. I
will write soon. I hope you are all right. Let me hear that you are
all right. Don't forget to put the cat out nights. I hope she is all
right, but remember the time she stole the butter fish. I miss you,
and I miss the cat around. Uncle David pays me my salary out of his
own pocket, because he is the richest, but I like Uncle Peter the
best. He is very handsome and we like to talk to each other the best.
Goodbye, Eleanor."
* * * * *
But it was on the varicolored pages of a ruled tablet--with a picture
on its cover of a pink cheeked young lady beneath a cherry tree, and
marked in large straggling letters also varicolored "The Cherry
Blossom Tablet"--that Eleanor put down her most sacred thoughts. On
the outside, just above the cherry tree, her name was written with a
pencil that had been many times wet to get the desired degree of
blackness, "Eleanor Hamlin, Colhassett, Massachusetts. Private Dairy,"
and on the first page was this warning in the same painstaking,
heavily shaded chirography, "This book is sacrid, and not be trespased
in or read one word of. By order of owner. E. H."
It was the private diary and Gwendolyn, the rabbit doll, and a small
blue china shepherdess given her by Albertina, that constituted
Eleanor's _lares et penates_. When David had finally succeeded in
tracing the ancient carpetbag in the lost and found department of the
cab company, Eleanor was able to set up her household gods, and draw
from them that measure of strength and security inseparable from their
familiar presence. She always slept with two of the three beloved
objects, and after Beulah had learned to understand and appreciate the
child's need for unsupervised privacy, she divined that the little
girl was happiest when she could devote at least an hour or two a day
to the transcribing of earnest sentences on the pink, blue and yellow
pages of the Cherry Blossom Tablet, and the mysterious games that she
played with the rabbit doll. That these games consisted largely in
making the rabbit doll impersonate Eleanor, while the child herself
became in turn each one of the six uncles and aunts, and exhorted the
victim accordingly, did not of course occur to Beulah. It did occur to
her that the pink, blue and yellow pages would have made interesting
reading to Eleanor's guardians, if they had been privileged to read
all that was chronicled there.
* * * * *
"My aunt Beulah wears her hair to high of her forrid.
"My aunt Margaret wears her hair to slic on the sides.
"My aunt Gertrude wears her hair just about right.
"My aunt Margaret is the best looking, and has the nicest way.
"My aunt Gertrude is the funniest. I never laugh at what she says, but
I have trouble not to. By thinking of Grandpa's rheumaticks I stop
myself just in time. Aunt Beulah means all right, and wants to do
right and have everybody else the same.
"Uncle David is not handsome, but good.
"Uncle Jimmie is not handsome, but his hair curls.
"Uncle Peter is the most handsome man that ere the sun shown on. That
is poetry. He has beautiful teeth, and I like him.
"Yesterday the Wordsworth Club--that's what Uncle Jimmie calls us
because he says we are seven--went to the Art Museum to edjucate me in
art.
"Aunt Beulah wanted to take me to one room and keep me there until I
asked to come out. Uncle Jimmie wanted to show me the statures. Uncle
David said I ought to begin with the Ming period and work down to Art
Newvoo. Aunts Gertrude and Margaret wanted to take me to the room of
the great masters. While they were talking Uncle Peter and I went to
see a picture that made me cry. I asked him who she was. He said that
wasn't the important thing, that the important thing was that one man
had nailed his dream. He didn't doubt that lots of other painters had,
but this one meant the most to him. When I cried he said, 'You're all
right, Baby. You know.' Then he reached down and kissed me."
* * * * *
As the month progressed, it seemed to Beulah that she was making
distinct progress with the child. Since the evening when Peter had won
Eleanor's confidence and explained her mental processes, her task had
been illumined for her. She belonged to that class of women in whom
maternity arouses late. She had not the facile sympathy which accepts
a relationship without the endorsement of the understanding, and she
was too young to have much toleration for that which was not perfectly
clear to her.
She had started in with high courage to demonstrate the value of a
sociological experiment. She hoped later, though these hopes she had
so far kept to herself, to write, or at least to collaborate with some
worthy educator, on a book which would serve as an exact guide to
other philanthropically inclined groups who might wish to follow the
example of cooperative adoption; but the first day of actual contact
with her problem had chilled her. She had put nothing down in her
note-book. She had made no scientific progress. There seemed to be no
intellectual response in the child.
Peter had set all these things right for her. He had shown her the
child's uncompromising integrity of spirit. The keynote of Beulah's
nature was, as Jimmie said, that she "had to be shown." Peter pointed
out the fact to her that Eleanor's slogan also was, "No compromise."
As Eleanor became more familiar with her surroundings this spirit
became more and more evident.
"I could let down the hem of these dresses, Aunt Beulah," she said one
day, looking down at the long stretch of leg protruding from the chic
blue frock that made her look like a Boutet de Monvil. "I can't hem
very good, but my stitches don't show much."
"That dress isn't too short, dear. It's the way little girls always
wear them. Do little girls on Cape Cod wear them longer?"
"Yes, Aunt Beulah."
"How long do they wear them?"
"Albertina," they had reached the point of discussion of Albertina
now, and Beulah was proud of it, "wore her dresses to her ankles,
be--because her--her legs was so fat. She said that mine was--were
getting to be fat too, and it wasn't refined to wear short dresses,
when your legs were fat."
"There are a good many conflicting ideas of refinement in the world,
Eleanor," Beulah said.
"I've noticed there are, since I came to New York," Eleanor answered
unexpectedly.
Beulah's academic spirit recognized and rejoiced in the fact that with
all her docility, Eleanor held firmly to her preconceived notions. She
continued to wear her dresses short, but when she was not actually on
exhibition, she hid her long legs behind every available bit of
furniture or drapery.
The one doubt left in her mind, of the child's initiative and
executive ability, was destined to be dissipated by the rather heroic
measures sometimes resorted to by a superior agency taking an ironic
hand in the game of which we have been too inhumanly sure.
On the fifth week of Eleanor's stay Beulah became a real aunt, the
cook left, and her own aunt and official chaperon, little Miss
Prentis, was laid low with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism.
Beulah's excitement on these various counts, combined with
indiscretions in the matter of overshoes and overfatigue, made her an
easy victim to a wandering grip germ. She opened her eyes one morning
only to shut them with a groan of pain. There was an ache in her head
and a thickening in her chest, the significance of which she knew only
too well. She found herself unable to rise. She lifted a hoarse voice
and called for Mary, the maid, who did not sleep in the house but was
due every morning at seven. But the gentle knock on the door was
followed by the entrance of Eleanor, not Mary.
"Mary didn't come, Aunt Beulah. I thought you was--were so tired, I'd
let you have your sleep out. I heard Miss Prentis calling, and I made
her some gruel, and I got my own breakfast."
"Oh! how dreadful," Beulah gasped in the face of this new calamity;
"and I'm really so sick. I don't know what we'll do."
Eleanor regarded her gravely. Then she put a professional hand on her
pulse and her forehead.
"You've got the grip," she announced.
"I'm afraid I have, Eleanor, and Doctor Martin's out of town, and
won't be back till to-morrow when he comes to Aunt Ann. I don't know
what we'll do."
"I'll tend to things," Eleanor said. "You lie still and close your
eyes, and don't put your arms out of bed and get chilled."
"Well, you'll have to manage somehow," Beulah moaned; "how, I don't
know, I'm sure. Give Aunt Annie her medicine and hot water bags, and
just let me be. I'm too sick to care what happens."
After the door had closed on the child a dozen things occurred to
Beulah that might have been done for her. She was vaguely faint for
her breakfast. Her feet were cold. She thought of the soothing warmth
of antiphlogistine when applied to the chest. She thought of the
quinine on the shelf in the bathroom. Once more she tried lifting her
head, but she could not accomplish a sitting posture. She shivered as
a draft from the open window struck her.
"If I could only be taken in hand this morning," she thought, "I know
it could be broken."
The door opened softly. Eleanor, in the cook's serviceable apron of
gingham that would have easily contained another child the same size,
swung the door open with one hand and held it to accommodate the
passage of the big kitchen tray, deeply laden with a heterogeneous
collection of objects. She pulled two chairs close to the bedside and
deposited her burden upon them. Then she removed from the tray a
goblet of some steaming fluid and offered it to Beulah.
"It's cream of wheat gruel," she said, and added ingratiatingly: "It
tastes nice in a tumbler."
Beulah drank the hot decoction gratefully and found, to her surprise,
that it was deliciously made.
Eleanor took the glass away from her and placed it on the tray, from
which she took what looked to Beulah like a cloth covered omelet,--at
any rate, it was a crescent shaped article slightly yellow in tone.
Eleanor tested it with a finger.
"It's just about right," she said. Then she fixed Beulah with a stern
eye. "Open your chest," she commanded, "and show me the spot where
it's worst. I've made a meal poultice."
Beulah hesitated only a second, then she obeyed meekly. She had never
seen a meal poultice before, but the heat on her afflicted chest was
grateful to her. Antiphlogistine was only Denver mud anyhow. Meekly,
also, she took the six grains of quinine and the weak dose of jamaica
ginger and water that she was next offered. She felt encouraged and
refreshed enough by this treatment to display some slight curiosity
when the little girl produced a card of villainous looking
safety-pins.
"I'm going to pin you in with these, Aunt Beulah," she said, "and then
sweat your cold out of you."
"Indeed, you're not," Beulah said; "don't be absurd, Eleanor. The
theory of the grip is--," but she was addressing merely the vanishing
hem of cook's voluminous apron.
The child returned almost instantly with three objects of assorted
sizes that Beulah could not identify. From the outside they looked
like red flannel and from the way Eleanor handled them it was evident
that they also were hot.
"I het--heated the flatirons," Eleanor explained, "the way I do for
Grandma, and I'm going to spread 'em around you, after you're pinned
in the blankets, and you got to lie there till you prespire, and
prespire good."
"I won't do it," Beulah moaned, "I won't do any such thing. Go away,
child."
"I cured Grandma and Grandpa and Mrs. O'Farrel's aunt that I worked
for, and I'm going to cure you," Eleanor said.
"No."
Eleanor advanced on her threateningly.
"Put your arms under those covers," she said, "or I'll dash a glass of
cold water in your face,"--and Beulah obeyed her.
Peter nodded wisely when Beulah, cured by these summary though
obsolete methods, told the story in full detail. Gertrude had laughed
until the invalid had enveloped herself in the last few shreds of her
dignity and ordered her out of the room, and the others had been
scarcely more sympathetic.
"I know that it's funny, Peter," she said, "but you see, I can't help
worrying about it just the same. Of course, as soon as I was up she
was just as respectful and obedient to my slightest wish as she ever
was, but at the time, when she was lording it over me so, she--she
actually slapped me. You never saw such a--blazingly determined little
creature."
Peter smiled,--gently, as was Peter's way when any friend of his made
an appeal to him.
"That's all right, Beulah," he said, "don't you let it disturb you for
an instant. This manifestation had nothing to do with our experiment.
Our experiment is working fine--better than I dreamed it would ever
work. What happened to Eleanor, you know, was simply this. Some of the
conditions of her experience were recreated suddenly, and she
reverted."