THE OMNISCIENT FOCUS
One of the traditional prerogatives of an Omnipotent Power is to look
down at the activities of earth at any given moment and ascertain
simultaneously the occupation of any number of people. Thus the Arch
Creator--that Being of the Supreme Artistic Consciousness--is able to
peer into segregated interiors at His own discretion and watch the
plot thicken and the drama develop. Eleanor, who often visualized this
proceeding, always imagined a huge finger projecting into space,
cautiously tilting the roofs of the Houses of Man to allow the sweep
of the Invisible Glance.
Granting the hypothesis of the Divine privilege, and assuming for the
purposes of this narrative the Omniscient focus on the characters most
concerned in it, let us for the time being look over the shoulder of
God and inform ourselves of their various occupations and
preoccupations of a Saturday afternoon in late June during the hour
before dinner.
Eleanor, in her little white chamber on Thirtieth Street, was engaged
in making a pink and green toothbrush case for a going-away gift for
her Uncle Peter. To be sure she was going away with him when he
started for the Long Island beach hotel from which he proposed to
return every day to his office in the city, but she felt that a slight
token of her affection would be fitting and proper on the eve of their
joint departure. She was hurrying to get it done that she might steal
softly into the dining-room and put it on his plate undetected. Her
eyes were very wide, her brow intent and serious, and her delicate
lips lightly parted. At that moment she bore a striking resemblance to
the Botticelli head in Beulah's drawing-room that she had so greatly
admired.
Of all the people concerned in her history, she was the most
tranquilly occupied.
Peter in the room beyond was packing his trunk and his suit-case. At
this precise stage of his proceedings he was trying to make two
decisions, equally difficult, but concerned with widely different
departments of his consciousness. He was gravely considering whether
or not to include among his effects the photograph before him on the
dressing-table--that of the girl to whom he had been engaged from the
time he was a Princeton sophomore until her death four years
later--and also whether or not it would be worth his while to order a
new suit of white flannels so late in the season. The fact that he
finally decided against the photograph and in favor of the white
flannels has nothing to do with the relative importance of the two
matters thus engrossing him. The health of the human mind depends
largely on its ability to assemble its irrelevant and incongruous
problems in dignified yet informal proximity. When he went to his desk
it was with the double intention of addressing a letter to his tailor,
and locking the cherished photograph in a drawer; but, the letter
finished, he still held the picture in his hand and gazed down at it
mutely and when the discreet knock on his door that constituted the
announcing of dinner came, he was still sitting motionless with the
photograph propped up before him.
Up-town, Beulah, whose dinner hour came late, was rather more
actively, though possibly not more significantly, occupied. She was
doing her best to evade the wild onslaught of a young man in glasses
who had been wanting to marry her for a considerable period, and had
now broken all bounds in a cumulative attempt to inform her of the
fact.
Though he was assuredly in no condition to listen to reason, Beulah
was reasoning with him, kindly and philosophically, paying earnest
attention to the style and structure of her remarks as she did so. Her
emotions, as is usual on such occasions, were decidedly mixed. She was
conscious of a very real dismay at her unresponsiveness, a distress
for the acute pain from which the distraught young man seemed to be
suffering, and the thrill, which had she only known it, is the
unfailing accompaniment to the first eligible proposal of marriage. In
the back of her brain there was also, so strangely is the human mind
constituted, a kind of relief at being able to use mature logic once
more, instead of the dilute form of moral dissertation with which she
tried to adapt herself to Eleanor's understanding.
"I never intend to marry any one," she was explaining gently. "I not
only never intend to, but I am pledged in a way that I consider
irrevocably binding never to marry,"--and that was the text from which
all the rest of her discourse developed.
Jimmie, equally bound by the oath of celibacy, but not equally
constrained by it apparently, was at the very moment when Beulah was
so successfully repulsing the familiarity of the high cheek-boned
young man in the black and white striped tie, occupied in encouraging
a familiarity of a like nature. That is, he was holding the hand of a
young woman in the darkened corner of a drawing-room which had been
entirely unfamiliar to him ten days before, and was about to impress a
caress on lips that seemed to be ready to meet his with a certain
degree of accustomed responsiveness. That this was not a peculiarly
significant incident in Jimmie's career might have been difficult to
explain, at least to the feminine portion of the group of friends he
cared most for.
Margaret, dressed for an academic dinner party, in white net with a
girdle of pale pink and lavender ribbons, had flung herself face
downward on her bed in reckless disregard of her finery; and because
it was hot and she was homesick for green fields and the cool
stretches of dim wooded country, had transported herself in fancy and
still in her recumbent attitude to the floor of a canoe that was
drifting down-stream between lush banks of meadow grass studded with
marsh lilies. After some interval--and shift of position--the way was
arched overhead with whispering trees, the stars came out one by one,
showing faintly between waving branches; and she perceived dimly that
a figure that was vaguely compounded of David and Peter and the
handsomest of all the young kings of Spain, had quietly taken its
place in the bow and had busied itself with the paddles,--whereupon
she was summoned to dinner, where the ten Hutchinsons and their guests
were awaiting her.
David, the only member of the group whose summer vacation had actually
begun, was sitting on the broad veranda of an exclusive country club
several hundreds of miles away from New York and looking soberly into
the eyes of a blue ribbon bull dog, whose heavy jowl rested on his
knees. His mother, in one of the most fashionable versions of the
season's foulards, sleekly corseted and coifed, was sitting less than
a hundred yards away from him, fanning herself with three inches of
hand woven fan and contemplating David. In the dressing-room above,
just alighted from a limousine de luxe, was a raven-haired,
crafty-eyed ingénue (whose presence David did not suspect or he would
have recollected a sudden pressing engagement out of her vicinity),
preening herself for conquest. David's mind, unlike the minds of the
"other gifted members of the We Are Seven Club," to quote Jimmie's
most frequent way of referring to them, was to all intents and
purposes a total blank. He answered monosyllabically his mother's
questions, patted the dog's beetling forehead and thought of nothing
at all for practically forty-five minutes. Then he rose, and offering
his arm to his mother led her gravely to the table reserved for him in
the dining-room.
Gertrude, in her studio at the top of the house in Fifty-sixth Street
where she lived with her parents, was putting the finishing touches on
a faun's head; and a little because she had unconsciously used
Jimmie's head for her model, and a little because of her conscious
realization at this moment that the roughly indicated curls over the
brow were like nobody's in the world but Jimmie's, she was thinking of
him seriously. She was thinking also of the dinner on a tray that
would presently be brought up to her, since her mother and father were
out of town, and of her coming two months with Eleanor and her recent
inspiration concerning them.
In Colhassett, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the dinner hour and even the
supper hour were long past. In the commodious kitchen of Eleanor's
former home two old people were sitting in calico valanced rockers,
one by either window. The house was a pleasant old colonial structure,
now badly run down but still marked with that distinction that only
the instincts of aristocracy can bestow upon a decaying habitation.
A fattish child made her way up the walk, toeing out unnecessarily,
and let herself in by the back door without knocking.
"Hello, Mis' Chase and Mr. Amos," she said, seating herself in a
straight backed, yellow chair, and swinging her crossed foot
nonchalantly, "I thought I would come in to inquire about Eleanor. Ma
said that she heard that she was coming home to live again. Is she,
Mr. Amos?"
Albertina was not a peculiar favorite of Eleanor's grandfather. Amos
Chase had ideas of his own about the proper bringing up of children,
and the respect due from them to their elders. Also Albertina's father
had come from "poor stock." There was a strain of bad blood in her.
The women of the Weston families hadn't always "behaved themselves."
He therefore answered this representative of the youngest generation
rather shortly.
"I don't know nothing about it," he said.
"Why, father," the querulous old voice of Grandmother Chase protested,
"you know she's comin' home somewhere 'bout the end of July, she and
one of her new aunties and a hired girl they're bringing along to do
the work. I don't see why you can't answer the child's question."
"I don't know as I'm obligated to answer any questions that anybody
sees fit to put to me."
"Well, I _be_. Albertina, pass me my glasses from off the
mantel-tree-shelf, and that letter sticking out from behind the clock
and I'll read what she says."
Albertina, with a reproachful look at Mr. Amos, who retired coughing
exasperatedly behind a paper that he did not read, allowed herself to
be informed through the medium of a letter from Gertrude and a
postscript from Eleanor of the projected invasion of the Chase
household.
"I should think you'd rather have Eleanor come home by herself than
bringing a strange woman and a hired girl," Albertina contributed a
trifle tartly. The distinction of a hired girl in the family was one
which she had long craved on her own account.
"All nonsense, I call it," the old man ejaculated.
"Well, Eleena, she writes that she can't get away without one of 'em
comin' along with her and I guess we can manage someways. I dunno what
work city help will make in this kitchen. You can't expect much from
city help. They ain't clean like home folks. I shall certainly be
dretful pleased to see Eleena, and so will her grandpa--in spite o'
the way he goes on about it."
A snort came from the region of the newspaper.
"I shouldn't think you'd feel as if you had a grandchild now that six
rich people has adopted her," Albertina suggested helpfully.
"It's a good thing for the child," her grandmother said. "I'm so lame
I couldn't do my duty by her. Old folks is old folks, and they can't
do for others like young ones. I'd d'ruther have had her adopted by
one father and mother instead o' this passel o' young folks passing
her around among themselves, but you can't have what you'd d'ruther
have in this world. You got to take what comes and be thankful."
"Did she write you about having gold coffee spoons at her last place?"
Albertina asked. "I think they was probably gilded over like ice-cream
spoons, and she didn't know the difference. I guess she has got a lot
of new clothes. Well, I'll have to be getting along. I'll come in
again."
At the precise moment that the door closed behind Albertina, the clock
in Peter Stuyvesant's apartment in New York struck seven and Eleanor,
in a fresh white dress and blue ribbons, slipped into her chair at the
dinner table and waited with eyes blazing with excitement for Peter to
make the momentous discovery of the gift at his plate.