PETER
Uncle Peter treated her as if she were grown up; that was the
wonderful thing about her visit to him,--if there could be one thing
about it more wonderful than another. From the moment when he ushered
her into his friendly, low ceiled drawing-room with its tiers upon
tiers of book shelves, he admitted her on terms of equality to the
miraculous order of existence that it was the privilege of her life to
share. The pink silk coverlet and the elegance of the silver coated
steampipes at Beulah's; the implacable British stuffiness at the
Winchester which had had its own stolid charm for the lineal
descendant of the Pilgrim fathers; the impressively casual atmosphere
over which the "hired butler" presided distributing after-dinner gold
spoons, these impressions all dwindled and diminished and took their
insignificant place in the background of the romance she was living
and breathing in Peter's jewel box of an apartment on Thirtieth
Street.
Even to more sophisticated eyes than Eleanor's the place seemed to be
a realized ideal of charm and homeliness. It was one of the older
fashioned duplex apartments designed in a more aristocratic decade for
a more fastidious generation, yet sufficiently adapted to the modern
insistence on technical convenience. Peter owed his home to his
married sister, who had discovered it and leased it and settled it and
suddenly departed for a five years' residence in China with her
husband, who was as she so often described him, "a blooming
Englishman, and an itinerant banker." Peter's domestic affairs were
despatched by a large, motherly Irishwoman, whom Eleanor approved of
on sight and later came to respect and adore without reservation.
Peter's home was a home with a place in it for her--a place that it
was perfectly evident was better with her than without her. She even
slept in the bed that Peter's sister's little girl had occupied, and
there were pictures on the walls that had been selected for her.
She had been very glad to make her escape from the Hutchinson
household. Her "quarrel" with them had made no difference in their
relation to her. To her surprise they treated her with an increase of
deference after her outburst, and every member of the family,
excepting possibly Hugh Hutchinson senior, was much more carefully
polite to her. Margaret explained that the family really didn't mind
having their daughter a party to the experiment of cooperative
parenthood. It appealed to them as a very interesting try-out of
modern educational theory, and their own theories of the independence
of the individual modified their criticism of Margaret's secrecy in
the matter, which was the only criticism they had to make since
Margaret had an income of her own accruing from the estate of the aunt
for whom she had been named.
"It is very silly of me to be sensitive about being laughed at,"
Margaret concluded. "I've lived all my life surrounded by people
suffering from an acute sense of humor, but I never, never, never
shall get used to being held up to ridicule for things that are not
funny to me."
"I shouldn't think you would," Eleanor answered devoutly.
In Peter's house there was no one to laugh at her but Peter, and when
Peter laughed she considered it a triumph. It meant that there was
something she said that he liked. The welcome she had received as a
guest in his house and the wonderful evening that succeeded it were
among the epoch making hours in Eleanor's life. It had happened in
this wise.
The Hutchinson victoria, for Grandmother Hutchinson still clung to the
old-time, stately method of getting about the streets of New York, had
left her at Peter's door at six o'clock of a keen, cool May evening.
Margaret had not been well enough to come with her, having been
prostrated by one of the headaches of which she was a frequent
victim.
The low door of ivory white, beautifully carved and paneled, with its
mammoth brass knocker, the row of window boxes along the cornice a few
feet above it, the very look of the house was an experience and an
adventure to her. When she rang, the door opened almost instantly
revealing Peter on the threshold with his arms open. He had led her up
two short flights of stairs--ivory white with carved banisters, she
noticed, all as immaculately shining with soap and water as a Cape Cod
interior--to his own gracious drawing-room where Mrs. Finnigan was
bowing and smiling a warmhearted Irish welcome to her. It was like a
wonderful story in a book and her eyes were shining with joy as Uncle
Peter pulled out her chair and she sat down to the first meal in her
honor. The grown up box of candy at her plate, the grave air with
which Peter consulted her tastes and her preferences were all a part
of a beautiful magic that had never quite touched her before.
She had been like a little girl in a dream passing dutifully or
delightedly through the required phases of her experience, never quite
believing in its permanence or reality; but her life with Uncle Peter
was going to be real, and her own. That was what she felt the moment
she stepped over his threshold.
After their coffee before the open fire--she herself had had "cambric"
coffee--Peter smoked his cigar, while she curled up in silence in the
twin to his big cushioned chair and sampled her chocolates. The blue
flames skimmed the bed of black coals, and finally settled steadily at
work on them nibbling and sputtering until the whole grate was like a
basket full of molten light, glowing and golden as the hot sun when it
sinks into the sea.
Except to offer her the ring about his slender Panatela, and to ask
her if she were happy, Peter did not speak until he had deliberately
crushed out the last spark from his stub and thrown it into the fire.
The ceremony over, he held out his arms to her and she slipped into
them as if that moment were the one she had been waiting for ever
since the white morning looked into the window of the lavender
dressing-room on Morningside Heights, and found her awake and quite
cold with the excitement of thinking of what the day was to bring
forth.
"Eleanor," Peter said, when he was sure she was comfortably arranged
with her head on his shoulder, "Eleanor, I want you to feel at home
while you are here, really at home, as if you hadn't any other home,
and you and I belonged to each other. I'm almost too young to be your
father, but--"
"Oh! are you?" Eleanor asked fervently, as he paused.
"--But I can come pretty near feeling like a father to you if it's a
father you want. I lost my own father when I was a little older than
you are now, but I had my dear mother and sister left, and so I don't
know what it's like to be all alone in the world, and I can't always
understand exactly how you feel, but you must always remember that I
want to understand and that I will understand if you tell me. Will you
remember that, Eleanor?"
"Yes, Uncle Peter," she said soberly; then perhaps for the first time
since her babyhood she volunteered a caress that was not purely
maternal in its nature. She put up a shy hand to the cheek so close to
her own and patted it earnestly. "Of course I've got my grandfather
and grandmother," she argued, "but they're very old, and not very
affectionate, either. Then I have all these new aunts and uncles
pretending," she was penetrating to the core of the matter, Peter
realized, "that they're just as good as parents. Of course, they're
just as good as they can be and they take so much trouble that it
mortifies me, but it isn't just the same thing, Uncle Peter!"
"I know," Peter said, "I know, dear, but you must remember we mean
well."
"I don't mean you; it isn't you that I think of when I think about my
co--co-woperative parents, and it isn't any of them specially,--it's
just the idea of--of visiting around, and being laughed at, and not
really belonging to anybody."
Peter's arms tightened about her.
"Oh! but you do belong, you do belong. You belong to me, Eleanor."
"That was what I hoped you would say, Uncle Peter," she whispered.
They had a long talk after this, discussing the past and the future;
the past few months of the experiment from Eleanor's point of view,
and the future in relation to its failures and successes. Beulah was
to begin giving her lessons again and she was to take up music with a
visiting teacher on Peter's piano. (Eleanor had not known it was a
piano at first, as she had never seen a baby grand before. Peter did
not know what a triumph it was when she made herself put the question
to him.)
"If my Aunt Beulah could teach me as much as she does and make it as
interesting as Aunt Margaret does, I think I would make her feel very
proud of me," Eleanor said. "I get so nervous saving energy the way
Aunt Beulah says for me to that I forget all the lesson. Aunt Margaret
tells too many stories, I guess, but I like them."
"Your Aunt Margaret is a child of God," Peter said devoutly, "in spite
of her raw-boned, intellectual family."
"Uncle David says she's a daughter of the fairies."
"She's that, too. When Margaret's a year or two older you won't feel
the need of a mother."
"I don't now," said Eleanor; "only a father,--that I want you to be,
the way you promised."
"That's done," Peter said. Then he continued musingly, "You'll find
Gertrude--different. I can't quite imagine her presiding over your
moral welfare but I think she'll be good at it. She's a good deal of a
person, you know."
"Aunt Beulah's a good kind of person, too," Eleanor said; "she tries
hard. The only thing is that she keeps trying to make me express
myself, and I don't know what that means."
"Let me see if I can tell you," said Peter. "Self-expression is a part
of every man's duty. Inside we are all trying to be good and true and
fine--"
"Except the villains," Eleanor interposed. "People like Iago aren't
trying."
"Well, we'll make an exception of the villains; we're talking of
people like us, pretty good people with the right instincts. Well
then, if all the time we're trying to be good and true and fine, we
carry about a blank face that reflects nothing of what we are feeling
and thinking, the world is a little worse off, a little duller and
heavier place for what is going on inside of us."
"Well, how can we make it better off then?" Eleanor inquired
practically.
"By not thinking too much about it for one thing, except to remember
to smile, by trying to be just as much at home in it as possible, by
letting the kind of person we are trying to be show through on the
outside. By gosh! I wish Beulah could hear me."
"By just not being bashful, do you mean?"
"That's the idea."
"Well, when Aunt Beulah makes me do those dancing exercises, standing
up in the middle of the floor and telling me to be a flower and
express myself as a flower, does she just mean not to be bashful?"
"Something like that: she means stop thinking of yourself and go
ahead--"
"But how can I go ahead with her sitting there watching?"
"I suppose I ought to tell you to imagine that you had the soul of a
flower, but I haven't the nerve."
"You've got nerve enough to do anything," Eleanor assured him, but she
meant it admiringly, and seriously.
"I haven't the nerve to go on with a moral conversation in which you
are getting the better of me at every turn," Peter laughed. "I'm sure
it's unintentional, but you make me feel like a good deal of an ass,
Eleanor."
"That means a donkey, doesn't it?"
"It does, and by jove, I believe that you're glad of it."
"I do rather like it," said Eleanor; "of course you don't really feel
like a donkey to me. I mean I don't make you feel like one, but it's
funny just pretending that you mean it."
"Oh! woman, woman," Peter cried. "Beulah tried to convey something of
the fact that you always got the better of every one in your modest
unassuming way, but I never quite believed it before. At any rate it's
bedtime, and here comes Mrs. Finnigan to put you to bed. Kiss me good
night, sweetheart."
Eleanor flung her arms about his neck, in her first moment of
abandonment to actual emotional self-expression if Peter had only
known it.
"I will never really get the better of you in my life, Uncle Peter,"
she promised him passionately.