ONE DESCENT INTO BOHEMIA
"Aunt Beulah does not think that Uncle Jimmie is bringing me up
right," Eleanor confided to the pages of her diary. "She comes down
here and is very uncomforterble. Well he is bringing me up good, in
some ways better than she did. When he swears he always puts out his
hand for me to slap him. He had enough to swear of. He can't get any
work or earn wages. The advertisement business is on the bum this year
becase times are so hard up. The advertisers have to save their money
and advertising agents are failing right and left. So poor Uncle
Jimmie can't get a place to work at.
"The people in the other studios are very neighborly. Uncle Jimmie
leaves a sine on the door when he goes out. It says 'Don't Knock.'
They don't they come right in and borrow things. Uncle Jimmie says not
to have much to do with them, becase they are so queer, but when I am
not at home, the ladies come to call on him, and drink Moxie or
something. I know becase once I caught them. Uncle Jimmie says I shall
not have Behemiar thrust upon me by him, and to keep away from these
ladies until I grow up and then see if I like them. Aunt Beulah thinks
that Uncle Jimmie takes me around to other studios and I won't tell
but he does not take me anywhere except to walk and have ice-cream
soda, but I say I don't want it because of saving the ten cents. We
cook on an old gas stove that smells. I can't do very good
housekeeping becase things are not convenient. I haven't any oven to
do a Saturday baking in, and Uncle Jimmie won't let me do the washing.
I should feel more as if I earned my keap if I baked beans and made
boiled dinners and layer cake, but in New York they don't eat much but
hearty food and saluds. It isn't stylish to have cake and pie and
pudding all at one meal. Poor Grandpa would starve. He eats pie for
his breakfast, but if I told anybody they would laugh. If I wrote
Albertina what folks eat in New York she would laugh.
"Uncle Jimmie is teaching me to like salud. He laughs when I cut up
lettice and put sugar on it. He teaches me to like olives and dried
up sausages and sour crought. He says it is important to be edjucated
in eating, and everytime we go to the Delicate Essenn store to buy
something that will edjucate me better. He teaches me to say 'I beg
your pardon,' and 'Polly vous Fransay?' and to courtesy and how to
enter a room the way you do in private theatricals. He says it isn't
knowing these things so much as knowing when you do them that counts,
and then Aunt Beulah complains that I am not being brought up.
"I have not seen Uncle Peter for a weak. He said he was going away. I
miss him. I would not have to tell him how I was being brought up, and
whether I was hitting the white lights as Uncle Jimmie says.--He would
know."
* * * * *
Eleanor did not write Albertina during the time when she was living in
the studio. Some curious inversion of pride kept her silent on the
subject of the change in her life. Albertina would have turned up her
nose at the studio, Eleanor knew. Therefore, she would not so much as
address an envelope to that young lady from an interior which she
would have beheld with scorn. She held long conversations with
Gwendolyn, taking the part of Albertina, on the subject of this
snobbishness of attitude.
* * * * *
"Lots of people in New York have to live in little teny, weeny rooms,
Albertina," she would say. "Rents are perfectly awful here. This
studio is so big I get tired dusting all the way round it, and even if
it isn't furnished very much, why, think how much furnishing would
cost, and carpets and gold frames for the pictures! The pictures that
are in here already, without any frames, would sell for hundreds of
dollars apiece if the painter could get anybody to buy them. You ought
to be very thankful for such a place, Albertina, instead of feeling so
stuck up that you pick up your skirts from it."
* * * * *
But Albertina's superiority of mind was impregnable. Her spirit sat in
judgment on all the conditions of Eleanor's new environment. She
seemed to criticize everything. She hated the nicked, dun colored
dishes they ate from, and the black bottomed pots and pans that all
the energy of Eleanor's energetic little elbow could not restore to
decency again. She hated the cracked, dun colored walls, and the
mottled floor that no amount of sweeping and dusting seemed to make an
impression on. She hated the compromise of housekeeping in an
attic,--she who had been bred in an atmosphere of shining
nickle-plated ranges and linoleum, where even the kitchen pump gleamed
brightly under its annual coat of good green paint. She hated the
compromise, that was the burden of her complaint--either in the person
of Albertina or Gwendolyn, whether she lay in the crook of Eleanor's
arm in the lumpy bed where she reposed at the end of the day's labor,
or whether she sat bolt upright on the lumpy cot in the studio, the
broken bisque arm, which Jimmie insisted on her wearing in a sling
whenever he was present, dangling limply at her side in the relaxation
Eleanor preferred for it.
The fact of not having adequate opportunity to keep her house in order
troubled the child, for her days were zealously planned by her
enthusiastic guardians. Beulah came at ten o'clock every morning to
give her lessons. As Jimmie's quest for work grew into a more and more
disheartening adventure, she had difficulty in getting him out of bed
in time to prepare and clear away the breakfast for Beulah's arrival.
After lunch, to which Jimmie scrupulously came home, she was supposed
to work an hour at her modeling clay. Gertrude, who was doing very
promising work at the art league, came to the studio twice a week to
give her instruction in handling it. Later in the afternoon one of the
aunts or uncles usually appeared with some scheme to divert her.
Margaret was telling her the stories of the Shakespeare plays, and
David was trying to make a card player of her, but was not succeeding
as well as if Albertina had not been brought up a hard shell Baptist,
who thought card playing a device of the devil's. Peter alone did not
come, for even when he was in town he was busy in the afternoon.
As soon as her guests were gone, Eleanor hurried through such
housewifely tasks as were possible of accomplishment at that hour, but
the strain was telling on her. Jimmie began to realize this and it
added to his own distress. One night to save her the labor of
preparing the meal, he took her to an Italian restaurant in the
neighborhood where the food was honest and palatable, and the service
at least deft and clean.
Eleanor enjoyed the experience extremely, until an incident occurred
which robbed her evening of its sweetness and plunged her into the
purgatory of the child who has inadvertently broken one of its own
laws.
Among the belongings in the carpetbag, which was no more--having been
supplanted by a smart little suit-case marked with her initials--was a
certificate from the Massachusetts Total Abstinence Society, duly
signed by herself, and witnessed by the grammar-school teacher and the
secretary of the organization. On this certificate (which was
decorated by many presentations in dim black and white of
mid-Victorian domestic life, and surmounted by a collection of
scalloped clouds in which drifted three amateur looking angels amid a
crowd of more professional cherubim) Eleanor had pledged herself to
abstain from the use as a beverage of all intoxicating drinks, and
from the manufacture or traffic in them. She had also subscribed
herself as willing to make direct and persevering efforts to extend
the principles and blessings of total abstinence.
"Red ink, Andrea," her Uncle Jimmie had demanded, as the black-eyed
waiter bent over him, "and ginger ale for the offspring." Eleanor
giggled. It was fun to be with Uncle Jimmie in a restaurant again. He
always called for something new and unexpected when he spoke of her to
the waiter, and he was always what Albertina would consider "very
comical" when he talked to him. "But stay," he added holding up an
admonitory finger, "I think we'll give the little one _eau rougie_
this time. Wouldn't you like _eau rougie_, tinted water, Eleanor, the
way the French children drink it?"
Unsuspectingly she sipped the mixture of water and ice and sugar, and
"red ink" from the big brown glass bottle that the glowing waiter set
before them.
As the meal progressed Jimmie told her that the grated cheese was
sawdust and almost made her believe it. He showed her how to eat
spaghetti without cutting it and pointed out to her various Italian
examples of his object lesson; but she soon realized that in spite of
his efforts to entertain her, he was really very unhappy.
"I've borrowed all the money I can, Angelface," he confessed finally.
"Tomorrow's the last day of grace. If I don't land that job at the
Perkins agency I'll have to give in and tell Peter and David, or wire
Dad."
"You could get some other kind of a job," Eleanor said; "plumbing or
clerking or something." On Cape Cod the plumber and the grocer's clerk
lost no caste because of their calling. "Couldn't you?"
"I _could_ so demean myself, and I will. I'll be a chauffeur, I can
run a car all right; but the fact remains that by to-morrow
something's got to happen, or I've got to own up to the bunch."
Eleanor's heart sank. She tried hard to think of something to comfort
him but she could not. Jimmie mixed her more _eau rougie_ and she
drank it. He poured a full glass, undiluted, for himself, and held it
up to the light.
"Well, here's to crime, daughter," he said. "Long may it wave, and us
with it."
"That isn't really red ink, is it?" she asked. "It's an awfully pretty
color--like grape juice."
"It is grape juice, my child, if we don't inquire too closely into the
matter. The Italians are like the French in the guide book, 'fond of
dancing and light wines.' This is one of the light wines they are fond
of.--Hello, do you feel sick, child? You're white as a ghost. It's the
air. As soon as I can get hold of that sacrificed waiter we'll get
out of here."
Eleanor's sickness was of the spirit, but at the moment she was
incapable of telling him so, incapable of any sort of speech. A great
wave of faintness encompassed her. She had broken her pledge. She had
lightly encouraged a departure from the blessings and principles of
total abstinence.
That night in her bed she made a long and impassioned apology to her
Maker for the sin of intemperance into which she had been so
unwittingly betrayed. She promised Him that she would never drink
anything that came out of a bottle again. She reviewed sorrowfully her
many arguments with Albertina--Albertina in the flesh that is--on the
subject of bottled drinks in general, and decided that again that
virtuous child was right in her condemnation of any drink, however
harmless in appearance or nomenclature, that bore the stigma of a
bottled label.
She knew, however, that something more than a prayer for forgiveness
was required of her. She was pledged to protest against the evil that
she had seemingly countenanced. She could not seek the sleep of the
innocent until that reparation was made. Through the crack of her
sagging door she saw the light from Jimmie's reading lamp and knew
that he was still dressed, or clothed at least, with a sufficient
regard for the conventionalities to permit her intrusion. She rose and
rebraided her hair and tied a daytime ribbon on it. Then she put on
her stockings and her blue Japanese kimono--real Japanese, as Aunt
Beulah explained, made for a Japanese lady of quality--and made her
way into the studio.
Jimmie was not sitting in the one comfortable studio chair with his
book under the light and his feet on the bamboo tea table as usual. He
was not sitting up at all. He was flung on the couch with his face
buried in the cushions, and his shoulders were shaking. Eleanor seeing
him thus, forgot her righteous purpose, forgot her pledge to
disseminate the principles and blessings of abstinence, forgot
everything but the pitiful spectacle of her gallant Uncle Jimmie in
grief. She stood looking down at him without quite the courage to
kneel at his side to give him comfort.
"Uncle Jimmie," she said, "Uncle Jimmie."
At the sound of her voice he put out his hand to her, gropingly, but
he did not uncover his face or shift his position. She found herself
smoothing his hair, gingerly at first, but with more and more
conviction as he snuggled his boyish head closer.
"I'm awfully discouraged," he said in a weak muffled voice. "I'm sorry
you caught me at it, Baby."
Eleanor put her face down close to his as he turned it to her.
"Everything will be all right," she promised him, "everything will be
all right. You'll soon get a job--tomorrow maybe."
Then she gathered him close in her angular, tense little arms and held
him there tightly. "Everything will be all right," she repeated
soothingly; "now you just put your head here, and have your cry out."