MARGARET LOUISA'S BIRTHRIGHT
"I am sixteen years and eight months old to-day," Eleanor wrote, "and
I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never
wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and
pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread,
and slept in the same room with, and told everything to for four long
years, could turn out to be an absolute traitor and villainess. Let me
begin at the beginning. For nearly a year now I have noticed that
Bertha Stephens avoided me, and presented the appearance of disliking
me. I don't like to have any one dislike me, and I have tried to do
little things for her that would win back her affection, but with no
success. As I was editing the Lantern I could print her essayettes (as
she called them) and do her lots of little favors in a literary way,
which she seemed to appreciate, but personally she avoided me like the
plague.
"Of course Stevie has lots of faults, and since Margaret Louise and I
always talked everything over we used to talk about Stevie in the same
way. I remember that she used to try to draw me out about Stevie's
character. I've always thought Stevie was a kind of piker, that is
that she would say she was going to do a thing, and then from sheer
laziness not do it. My dictionary was a case in point. She gummed it
all up with her nasty fudge and then wouldn't give it back to me or
get me another, but the reason she wouldn't give it back to me was
because her feelings were too fine to return a damaged article, and
not fine enough to make her hump herself and get me another. That's
only one kind of a piker and not the worst kind, but it was
_pikerish_.
"All this I told quite frankly to Maggie--I mean Margaret Louise,
because I had no secrets from her and never thought there was any
reason why I shouldn't. Stevie has a horrid brother, also, who has
been up here to dances. All the girls hate him because he is so
spoony. He isn't as spoony as Margaret Louise's brother, but he's
quite a sloppy little spooner at that. Well, I told Margaret Louise
that I didn't like Stevie's brother, and then I made the damaging
remark that one reason I didn't like him was because he looked so much
like Stevie. I didn't bother to explain to Maggie--I will not call her
Maggie Lou any more, because that is a dear little name and sounds so
affectionate,--Margaret Louise--what I meant by this, because I
thought it was perfectly evident. Stevie is a peachy looking girl, a
snow white blonde with pinky cheeks and dimples. Well, her brother is
a snow white blond too, and he has pinky cheeks and dimples and his
name is Carlo! We, of course, at once named him Curlo. It is not a
good idea for a man to look too much like his sister, or to have too
many dimples in his chin and cheeks. I had only to think of him in the
same room with my three uncles to get his number exactly. I don't mean
to use slang in my diary, but I can't seem to help it. Professor
Mathews says that slang has a distinct function in the language--in
replenishing it, but Uncle Peter says about slang words, that 'many
are called, and few are chosen,' and there is no need to try to
accommodate them all in one's vocabulary.
"Well, I told Margaret Louise all these things about Curlo, and how
he tried to hold my hand coming from the station one day, when the
girls all went up to meet the boys that came up for the dance,--and I
told her everything else in the world that happened to come into my
head.
"Then one day I got thinking about leaving Harmon--this is our senior
year, of course--and I thought that I should leave all the girls with
things just about right between us, excepting good old Stevie, who had
this queer sort of grouch against me. So I decided that I'd just go
around and have it out with her, and I did. I went into her room one
day when her roommate was out, and demanded a show down. Well, I found
out that Maggie--Margaret Louise had just repeated to Stevie every
living thing that I ever said about her, just as I said it, only
without the explanations and foot-notes that make any kind of
conversation more understandable.
"Stevie told me all these things one after another, without stopping,
and when she was through I wished that the floor would open and
swallow me up, but nothing so comfortable happened. I was obliged to
gaze into Stevie's overflowing eyes and own up to the truth as well as
I could, and explain it. It was the most humiliating hour that I ever
spent, but I told Stevie exactly what I felt about her 'nothing
extenuate, and naught set down in malice,' and what I had said about
her to our mutual friend, who by the way, is not the mutual friend of
either of us any longer. We were both crying by the time I had
finished, but we understood each other. There were one or two things
that she said she didn't think she would ever forget that I had said
about her, but even those she could forgive. She said that my dislike
of her had rankled in her heart so long that it took away all the
bitterness to know that I wasn't really her enemy. She said that my
coming to her that way, and not lying had showed that I had lots of
character, and she thought in time that we could be quite intimate
friends if I wanted to as much as she did.
"After my talk with Stevie I still hoped against hope that Margaret
Louise would turn out to have some reason or excuse for what she had
done. I knew she had done it, but when a thing like that happens that
upsets your whole trust in a person you simply can not believe the
evidence of your own senses. When you read of a situation like that
in a book you are all prepared for it by the author, who has taken the
trouble to explain the moral weakness or unpleasantness of the
character, and given you to understand that you are to expect a
betrayal from him or her; but when it happens in real life out of a
clear sky you have nothing to go upon that makes you even _believe_
what you know.
"I won't even try to describe the scene that occurred between Margaret
Louise and me. She cried and she lied, and she accused me of trying to
curry favor with Stevie, and Stevie of being a backbiter, and she
argued and argued about all kinds of things but the truth, and when I
tried to pin her down to it, she ducked and crawled and sidestepped in
a way that was dreadful. I've seen her do something like it before
about different things, and I ought to have known then what she was
like inside of her soul, but I guess you have to be the object of such
a scene before you realize the full force of it.
"All I said was, 'Margaret Louise, if that's all you've got to say
about the injury you have done me, then everything is over between us
from this minute;' and it was, too.
"I feel as if I had been writing a beautiful story or poem on what I
thought was an enduring tablet of marble, and some one had come and
wiped it all off as if it were mere scribblings on a slate. I don't
know whether it would seem like telling tales to tell Uncle Peter or
not; I don't quite know whether I want to tell him. Sometimes I wish I
had a mother to tell such things to. It seems to me that a real mother
would know what to say that would help you. Disillusion is a very
strange thing--like death, only having people die seems more natural
somehow. When they die you can remember the happy hours that you spent
with them, but when disillusionment comes then you have lost even your
beautiful memories.
"We had for the subject of our theme this week, 'What Life Means to
Me,' which of course was the object of many facetious remarks from the
girls, but I've been thinking that if I sat down seriously to state in
just so many words what life means to _me_, I hardly know what I would
transcribe. It means disillusionment and death for one thing. Since my
grandfather died last year I have had nobody left of my own in the
world,--no real blood relation. Of course, I am a good deal fonder of
my aunts and uncles than most people are of their own flesh and blood,
but own flesh and blood is a thing that it makes you feel shivery to
be without. If I had been Margaret Louise's own flesh and blood, she
would never have acted like that to me. Stevie stuck up for Carlo as
if he was really something to be proud of. Perhaps my uncles and aunts
feel that way about me, I don't know. I don't even know if I feel that
way about them. I certainly criticize them in my soul at times, and
feel tired of being dragged around from pillar to post. I don't feel
that way about Uncle Peter, but there is nobody else that I am
certain, positive sure that I love better than life itself. If there
is only one in the world that you feel that way about, I might not be
Uncle Peter's one.
"Oh! I wish Margaret Louise had not sold her birthright for a mess of
pottage. I wish I had a home that I had a perfect right to go and live
in forevermore. I wish my mother was here to comfort me to-night."