THE TEN HUTCHINSONS
"My Aunt Margaret has a great many people living in her family,"
Eleanor wrote to Albertina from her new address on Morningside
Heights. "She has a mother and a father, and two (2) grandparents, one
(1) aunt, one (1) brother, one (1) married lady and the boy of the
lady, I think the married lady is a sister but I do not ask any one,
oh--and another brother, who does not live here only on Saturdays and
Sundays. Aunt Margaret makes ten, and they have a man to wait on the
table. His name is a butler. I guess you have read about them in
stories. I am taken right in to be one of the family, and I have a
good time every day now. Aunt Margaret's father is a college teacher,
and Aunt Margaret's grandfather looks like the father of his country.
You know who I mean George Washington. They have a piano here that
plays itself like a sewing machine. They let me do it. They have
after-dinner coffee and gold spoons to it. I guess you would like to
see a gold spoon. I did. They are about the size of the tin spoons we
had in our playhouse. I have a lot of fun with that boy too. At first
I thought he was very affected, but that is just the way they teach
him to talk. He is nine and plays tricks on other people. He dares me
to do things that I don't do, like go down-stairs and steal sugar. If
Aunt Margaret's mother was my grandma I might steal sugar or plum
cake. I don't know. Remember the time we took your mother's hermits? I
do. I would like to see you. You would think this house was quite a
grand house. It has three (3) flights of stairs and one basement. I
sleep on the top floor in a dressing room out of Aunt Margaret's only
it isn't a dressing room. I dress there but no one else can. Aunt
Margaret is pretty and sings lovely. Uncle David comes here a lot. I
must close. With love and kisses."
* * * * *
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 assiduously, had come out of two
glasses 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 altitude 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 spacious, 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 assembled 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 analyzing 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 passion 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 nobody 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. Nobody 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 nobody'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 régime 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 classic literature and folk lore.
* * * * *
"The We Are Sevens meet every Saturday 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 nobody 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 participated.
* * * * *
"I quarreled with the ten Hutchinsons. I am very sorry. They laughed
at me too much for being a little girl and a Cape Codder, but they
could if they wanted to, but when they laughed at Aunt Margaret for
adopting me and the tears came in her eyes I could not bare it. I did
not let the cat out of the bag, but I made it jump out. The
Grandfather asked me when I was going back to Cape Cod, and I said I
hoped never, and then I said I was going to visit Uncle Peter and Aunt
Gertrude and Uncle David next. They said 'Uncle David--do you mean
David Bolling?' and I did, so I said 'yes.' Then all the Hutchinsons
pitched into Aunt Margaret and kept laughing and saying, 'Who is this
mysterious child anyway, and how is it that her guardians intrust her
to a crowd of scatter brain youngsters for so long?' and then they
said 'Uncle David Bolling--_what_ does his mother say?' Then Aunt
Margaret got very red in the face and the tears started to come, and I
said 'I am not a mysterious child, and my Uncle David is as much my
Uncle David as they all are,' and then I said 'My Aunt Margaret has
got a perfect right to have me intrusted to her at any time, and not
to be laughed at for it,' and I went and stood in front of her and
gave her my handkercheve.
"Well I am glad somebody has been told that I am properly adoptid, but
I am sorry it is the ten Hutchinsons who know."