Eleanor Enjoys Herself in Her Own Way
“I am in society here,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Albertina, with a pardonable emphasis on that phase of her new existence that would appeal to the haughty ideals of Miss Weston, “I don’t have to do any housework, or anything. I sleep under a pink silk bedquilt, and I have all new clothes. I have a new black pattern leather sailor hat that I sopose you would laugh at. It cost six dollars and draws the sun down to my head but I don’t say anything. I have six aunts and uncles all diferent names and ages but grown up. Uncle Peter is the most elderly, he is twenty-five. I know becase we gave him a birthday party with a cake. I sat at the table. I wore my crape da shine dress. You would think that was pretty, well it is. There is a servant girl to do evry thing even passing your food to you on a tray. I wish you could come to visit me. I stay two months in a place and get broghut up there. Aunt Beulah is peculiar but nice when you know her. 49 She is stric and at first I thought we was not going to get along. She thought I had adenoids and I thought she dislikt me too much, but it turned out not. I take lessons from her every morning like they give at Rogers College, not like publick school. I have to think what I want to do a good deal and then do it. At first she turned me loose to enjoy myself and I could not do it, but now we have disapline which makes it all right. My speling is weak, but uncle Peter says Stevanson could not spel and did not care. Stevanson was the poat who wrote the birdie with a yellow bill in the reader. I wish you would tel me if Grandma’s eye is worse and what about Grandfather’s rheumatism.
“Your fond friend, Eleanor.
“P. S. We have a silver organ in all the rooms to have heat in. I was afrayd of them at first.”
In the letters to her grandparents, however, the undercurrent of anxiety about the old people, which was a ruling motive in her life, became apparent.
“Dear Grandma and Dear Grandpa,” she wrote,
“I have been here a weak now. I inclose my 50 salary, fifteen dollars ($15.00) which I hope you will like. I get it for doing evry thing I am told and being adoptid besides. You can tell the silectmen that I am rich now and can support you just as good as Uncle Amos. I want Grandpa to buy some heavy undershurts right of. He will get a couff if he doesn’t do it. Tell him to rub your arm evry night before you go to bed, Grandma, and to have a hot soapstone for you. If you don’t have your bed hot you will get newmonia and I can’t come home to take care of you, becase my salary would stop. I like New York better now that I have lived here some. I miss seeing you around, and Grandpa.
“The cook cooks on a gas stove that is very funny. I asked her how it went and she showed me it. She is going to leve, but lucky thing the hired girl can cook till Aunt Beulah gets a nother cook as antyseptic as this cook. In Rogers College they teach ladies to have their cook’s and hired girl’s antyseptic. It is a good idear becase of sickness. I inclose a recipete for a good cake. You can make it sating down. You don’t have to stir it much, and Grandpa can bring you the things. I will write soon. I hope you are all 51 right. Let me hear that you are all right. Don’t forget to put the cat out nights. I hope she is all right, but remember the time she stole the butter fish. I miss you, and I miss the cat around. Uncle David pays me my salary out of his own pocket, because he is the richest, but I like Uncle Peter the best. He is very handsome and we like to talk to each other the best. Goodbye, Eleanor.”
But it was on the varicolored pages of a ruled tablet—with a picture on its cover of a pink cheeked young lady beneath a cherry tree, and marked in large straggling letters also varicolored “The Cherry Blossom Tablet”—that Eleanor put down her most sacred thoughts. On the outside, just above the cherry tree, her name was written with a pencil that had been many times wet to get the desired degree of blackness, “Eleanor Hamlin, Colhassett, Massachusetts. Private Dairy,” and on the first page was this warning in the same painstaking, heavily shaded chirography, “This book is sacrid, and not be trespased in or read one word of. By order of owner. E. H.”
It was the private diary and Gwendolyn, the rabbit doll, and a small blue china shepherdess 52 given her by Albertina, that constituted Eleanor’s lares et penates. When David had finally succeeded in tracing the ancient carpetbag in the lost and found department of the cab company, Eleanor was able to set up her household gods, and draw from them that measure of strength and security inseparable from their familiar presence. She always slept with two of the three beloved objects, and after Beulah had learned to understand and appreciate the child’s need for unsupervised privacy, she divined that the little girl was happiest when she could devote at least an hour or two a day to the transcribing of earnest sentences on the pink, blue and yellow pages of the Cherry Blossom Tablet, and the mysterious games that she played with the rabbit doll. That these games consisted largely in making the rabbit doll impersonate Eleanor, while the child herself became in turn each one of the six uncles and aunts, and exhorted the victim accordingly, did not of course occur to Beulah. It did occur to her that the pink, blue and yellow pages would have made interesting reading to Eleanor’s guardians, if they had been privileged to read all that was chronicled there.
“My aunt Beulah wears her hair to high of her forrid.
“My aunt Margaret wears her hair to slic on the sides.
“My aunt Gertrude wears her hair just about right.
“My aunt Margaret is the best looking, and has the nicest way.
“My aunt Gertrude is the funniest. I never laugh at what she says, but I have trouble not to. By thinking of Grandpa’s rheumaticks I stop myself just in time. Aunt Beulah means all right, and wants to do right and have everybody else the same.
“Uncle David is not handsome, but good.
“Uncle Jimmie is not handsome, but his hair curls.
“Uncle Peter is the most handsome man that ere the sun shown on. That is poetry. He has beautiful teeth, and I like him.
“Yesterday the Wordsworth Club—that’s what Uncle Jimmie calls us because he says we are seven—went to the Art Museum to edjucate me in art.
“Aunt Beulah wanted to take me to one room and keep me there until I asked to come out. 54 Uncle Jimmie wanted to show me the statures. Uncle David said I ought to begin with the Ming period and work down to Art Newvoo. Aunts Gertrude and Margaret wanted to take me to the room of the great masters. While they were talking Uncle Peter and I went to see a picture that made me cry. I asked him who she was. He said that wasn’t the important thing, that the important thing was that one man had nailed his dream. He didn’t doubt that lots of other painters had, but this one meant the most to him. When I cried he said, ‘You’re all right, Baby. You know.’ Then he reached down and kissed me.”
As the month progressed, it seemed to Beulah that she was making distinct progress with the child. Since the evening when Peter had won Eleanor’s confidence and explained her mental processes, her task had been illumined for her. She belonged to that class of women in whom maternity arouses late. She had not the facile sympathy which accepts a relationship without the endorsement of the understanding, and she was too young to have much toleration for that which was not perfectly clear to her. 55
She had started in with high courage to demonstrate the value of a sociological experiment. She hoped later, though these hopes she had so far kept to herself, to write, or at least to collaborate with some worthy educator, on a book which would serve as an exact guide to other philanthropically inclined groups who might wish to follow the example of cooperative adoption; but the first day of actual contact with her problem had chilled her. She had put nothing down in her note-book. She had made no scientific progress. There seemed to be no intellectual response in the child.
Peter had set all these things right for her. He had shown her the child’s uncompromising integrity of spirit. The keynote of Beulah’s nature was, as Jimmie said, that she “had to be shown.” Peter pointed out the fact to her that Eleanor’s slogan also was, “No compromise.” As Eleanor became more familiar with her surroundings this spirit became more and more evident.
“I could let down the hem of these dresses, Aunt Beulah,” she said one day, looking down at the long stretch of leg protruding from the chic blue frock that made her look like a Boutet de 56 Monvil. “I can’t hem very good, but my stitches don’t show much.”
“That dress isn’t too short, dear. It’s the way little girls always wear them. Do little girls on Cape Cod wear them longer?”
“Yes, Aunt Beulah.”
“How long do they wear them?”
“Albertina,” they had reached the point of discussion of Albertina now, and Beulah was proud of it, “wore her dresses to her ankles, be—because her—her legs was so fat. She said that mine was—were getting to be fat too, and it wasn’t refined to wear short dresses, when your legs were fat.”
“There are a good many conflicting ideas of refinement in the world, Eleanor,” Beulah said.
“I’ve noticed there are, since I came to New York,” Eleanor answered unexpectedly.
Beulah’s academic spirit recognized and rejoiced in the fact that with all her docility, Eleanor held firmly to her preconceived notions. She continued to wear her dresses short, but when she was not actually on exhibition, she hid her long legs behind every available bit of furniture or drapery.
The one doubt left in her mind, of the child’s initiative and executive ability, was destined to be 57 dissipated by the rather heroic measures sometimes resorted to by a superior agency taking an ironic hand in the game of which we have been too inhumanly sure.
On the fifth week of Eleanor’s stay Beulah became a real aunt, the cook left, and her own aunt and official chaperon, little Miss Prentis, was laid low with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism. Beulah’s excitement on these various counts, combined with indiscretions in the matter of overshoes and overfatigue, made her an easy victim to a wandering grip germ. She opened her eyes one morning only to shut them with a groan of pain. There was an ache in her head and a thickening in her chest, the significance of which she knew only too well. She found herself unable to rise. She lifted a hoarse voice and called for Mary, the maid, who did not sleep in the house but was due every morning at seven. But the gentle knock on the door was followed by the entrance of Eleanor, not Mary.
“Mary didn’t come, Aunt Beulah. I thought you was—were so tired, I’d let you have your sleep out. I heard Miss Prentis calling, and I made her some gruel, and I got my own breakfast.” 58
“Oh! how dreadful,” Beulah gasped in the face of this new calamity; “and I’m really so sick. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Eleanor regarded her gravely. Then she put a professional hand on her pulse and her forehead.
“You’ve got the grip,” she announced.
“I’m afraid I have, Eleanor, and Doctor Martin’s out of town, and won’t be back till to-morrow when he comes to Aunt Ann. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
“I’ll tend to things,” Eleanor said. “You lie still and close your eyes, and don’t put your arms out of bed and get chilled.”
“Well, you’ll have to manage somehow,” Beulah moaned; “how, I don’t know, I’m sure. Give Aunt Annie her medicine and hot water bags, and just let me be. I’m too sick to care what happens.”
After the door had closed on the child a dozen things occurred to Beulah that might have been done for her. She was vaguely faint for her breakfast. Her feet were cold. She thought of the soothing warmth of antiphlogistine when applied to the chest. She thought of the quinine on the shelf in the bathroom. Once more she tried lifting her head, but she could not accomplish a 59 sitting posture. She shivered as a draft from the open window struck her.
“If I could only be taken in hand this morning,” she thought, “I know it could be broken.”
The door opened softly. Eleanor, in the cook’s serviceable apron of gingham that would have easily contained another child the same size, swung the door open with one hand and held it to accommodate the passage of the big kitchen tray, deeply laden with a heterogeneous collection of objects. She pulled two chairs close to the bedside and deposited her burden upon them. Then she removed from the tray a goblet of some steaming fluid and offered it to Beulah.
“It’s cream of wheat gruel,” she said, and added ingratiatingly: “It tastes nice in a tumbler.”
Beulah drank the hot decoction gratefully and found, to her surprise, that it was deliciously made.
Eleanor took the glass away from her and placed it on the tray, from which she took what looked to Beulah like a cloth covered omelet,—at any rate, it was a crescent shaped article slightly yellow in tone. Eleanor tested it with a finger.
“It’s just about right,” she said. Then she fixed Beulah with a stern eye. “Open your chest,” she 60 commanded, “and show me the spot where it’s worst. I’ve made a meal poultice.”
Beulah hesitated only a second, then she obeyed meekly. She had never seen a meal poultice before, but the heat on her afflicted chest was grateful to her. Antiphlogistine was only Denver mud anyhow. Meekly, also, she took the six grains of quinine and the weak dose of jamaica ginger and water that she was next offered. She felt encouraged and refreshed enough by this treatment to display some slight curiosity when the little girl produced a card of villainous looking safety-pins.
“I’m going to pin you in with these, Aunt Beulah,” she said, “and then sweat your cold out of you.”
“Indeed, you’re not,” Beulah said; “don’t be absurd, Eleanor. The theory of the grip is—,” but she was addressing merely the vanishing hem of cook’s voluminous apron.
The child returned almost instantly with three objects of assorted sizes that Beulah could not identify. From the outside they looked like red flannel and from the way Eleanor handled them it was evident that they also were hot.
“I het—heated the flatirons,” Eleanor explained, 61 “the way I do for Grandma, and I’m going to spread ’em around you, after you’re pinned in the blankets, and you got to lie there till you prespire, and prespire good.”
“I won’t do it,” Beulah moaned, “I won’t do any such thing. Go away, child.”
“I cured Grandma and Grandpa and Mrs. O’Farrel’s aunt that I worked for, and I’m going to cure you,” Eleanor said.
“No.”
Eleanor advanced on her threateningly.
“Put your arms under those covers,” she said, “or I’ll dash a glass of cold water in your face,”—and Beulah obeyed her.
Peter nodded wisely when Beulah, cured by these summary though obsolete methods, told the story in full detail. Gertrude had laughed until the invalid had enveloped herself in the last few shreds of her dignity and ordered her out of the room, and the others had been scarcely more sympathetic.
“I know that it’s funny, Peter,” she said, “but you see, I can’t help worrying about it just the same. Of course, as soon as I was up she was just as respectful and obedient to my slightest wish as she ever was, but at the time, when she was 62 lording it over me so, she—she actually slapped me. You never saw such a—blazingly determined little creature.”
Peter smiled,—gently, as was Peter’s way when any friend of his made an appeal to him.
“That’s all right, Beulah,” he said, “don’t you let it disturb you for an instant. This manifestation had nothing to do with our experiment. Our experiment is working fine—better than I dreamed it would ever work. What happened to Eleanor, you know, was simply this. Some of the conditions of her experience were recreated suddenly, and she reverted.”