Turn About Eleanor Part 3

"Nice little girls have a bath every day."

"Do they?" Eleanor asked. Her Aunt Beulah seemed to expect her to say something more, but she couldn't think of anything.

"I'll draw your bath for you this morning. After this you will be expected to take it yourself."

Eleanor had seen bathrooms before, but she had never been in a bath-tub. At her grandfather's, she had taken her Sat.u.r.day night baths in an old wooden wash-tub, which had water poured in it from the tea kettle. When Beulah closed the door on her she stepped gingerly into the tub: the water was twice too hot, but she didn't know how to turn the faucet, or whether she was expected to turn it. Mrs. O'Farrel had told her that people had to pay for water in New York. Perhaps Aunt Beulah had drawn all the water she could have. She used the soap sparingly. Soap was expensive, she knew. She wished there was some way of discovering just how much of things she was expected to use. The number of towels distressed her, but she finally took the littlest and dried herself. The heat of the water had nearly parboiled her.

After that, she tried to do blindly what she was told. There was a girl in a black dress and white ap.r.o.n that pa.s.sed her everything she had to eat. Her Aunt Beulah told her to help herself to sugar and to cream for her oatmeal, from off this girl's tray. Her hand trembled a good deal, but she was fortunate enough not to spill any. After breakfast she was sent to wash her hands in the bathroom; she turned the faucet, and used a very little water. Then, when she was called, she went into the sitting-room and sat down, and folded her hands in her lap.

Beulah looked at her with some perplexity. The child was docile and willing, but she seemed unexpectedly stupid for a girl ten years old.

"Have you ever been examined for adenoids, Eleanor?" she asked suddenly.

"No, ma'am."

"Say, 'no, Aunt Beulah.' Don't say, 'no, ma'am' and 'yes, ma'am.'

People don't say 'no, ma'am' and 'yes, ma'am' any more, you know. They say 'no' and 'yes,' and then mention the name of the person to whom they are speaking."

"Yes, ma'am," Eleanor couldn't stop herself saying it. She wanted to correct herself. "No, Aunt Beulah, no, Aunt Beulah," but the words stuck in her throat.

"Well, try to remember," Beulah said. She was thinking of the case in a book of psychology that she had been reading that morning, of a girl who was "pale and sleepy looking, expressionless of face, careless of her personal appearance," who after an operation for adenoids, had become "as animated and bright as before she had been lethargic and dull." She was pleased to see that Eleanor's fine hair had been scrupulously combed, and neatly braided this morning, not being able to realize--as how should she?--that the condition of Eleanor's fine spun locks on her arrival the night before, had been attributable to the fact that the O'Farrel baby had stolen her comb, and Eleanor had been too shy to mention the fact, and had combed her hair mermaid-wise, through her fingers.

"This morning," Beulah began brightly, "I am going to turn you loose in the apartment, and let you do what you like. I want to get an idea of the things you do like, you know. You can sew, or read, or drum on the piano, or talk to me, anything that pleases you most. I want you to be happy, that's all, and to enjoy yourself in your own way."

"Give the child absolute freedom in which to demonstrate the worth and value of its ego,"--that was what she was doing, "keeping it carefully under observation while you determine the individual trend along which to guide its development."

The little girl looked about her helplessly. The room was very large and bright. The walls were white, and so was the woodwork, the mantle, and some of the furniture. Gay figured curtains hung at the windows, and there were little stools, and chairs, and even trays with gla.s.s over them, covered with the same bright colored material. Eleanor had never seen a room anything like it. There was no center-table, no crayon portraits of different members of the family, no easels, or scarves thrown over the corners of the pictures. There were not many pictures, and those that there were didn't seem to Eleanor like pictures at all, they were all so blurry and smudgy,--excepting one of a beautiful lady. She would have liked to have asked the name of that lady,--but her Aunt Beulah's eyes were upon her. She slipped down from her chair and walked across the room to the window.

"Well, dear, what would make this the happiest day you can think of?"

Beulah asked, in the tone she was given to use when she asked Gertrude and Margaret and Jimmie--but not often Peter--what they expected to do with their lives.

Eleanor turned a desperate face from the window, from the row of bland elegant apartment buildings she had been contemplating with unseeing eyes.

"Do I have to?" she asked Beulah piteously.

"Have to what?"

"Have to amuse myself in my own way? I don't know what you want me to do. I don't know what you think that I ought to do."

A strong-minded and spoiled younger daughter of a widowed mother--whose chief anxiety had been to antic.i.p.ate the wants of her children before they were expressed--with an independent income, and a beloved and admiring circle of intimate friends, is not likely to be imaginatively equipped to explore the spiritual fastnesses of a sensitive and alien orphan. Beulah tried earnestly to get some perspective on the child's point of view, but she could not. The fact that she was torturing the child would have been outside of the limits of her comprehension. She searched her mind for some immediate application of the methods of Madame Montessori, and produced a lump of modeling clay.

"You don't really have to do anything, Eleanor," she said kindly. "I don't want you to make an effort to please me, only to be happy yourself. Why don't you try and see what you can do with this modeling clay? Just try making it up into mud pies, or anything."

"Mud pies?"

"Let the child teach himself the significance of contour, and the use of his hands, by fas.h.i.+oning the clay into rudimentary forms of beauty." That was the theory.

"Yes, dear, mud pies, if you wish to."

Whereupon Eleanor, conscientiously and miserably, turned out a neat half-dozen skilful, miniature models of the New England deep dish apple-pie, p.r.i.c.ked and pinched to a nicety.

Beulah, with a vision related to the nebulous stages of a study by Rodin, was somewhat disconcerted with this result, but she brightened as she thought at least she had discovered a natural tendency in the child that she could help her develop.

"Do you like to cook, Eleanor?" she asked.

In the child's mind there rose the picture of her grim apprentices.h.i.+p on Cape Cod. She could see the querulous invalid in the sick chair, her face distorted with pain and impatience; she could feel the sticky dough in her fingers, and the heat from the stove rising round her.

"I hate cooking," she said, with the first hint of pa.s.sion she had shown in her relation to her new friends.

The day dragged on wearily. Beulah took her to walk on the Drive, but as far as she was able to determine the child saw nothing of her surroundings. The crowds of trimly dressed people, the nursemaids and babies, the swift slim outlines of the whizzing motors, even the battles.h.i.+ps lying so suggestively quiescent on the river before them--all the spectacular, vivid panorama of afternoon on Riverside Drive--seemed absolutely without interest or savor to the child.

Beulah's despair and chagrin were increasing almost as rapidly as Eleanor's.

Late in the afternoon Beulah suggested a nap. "I'll sit here and read for a few minutes," she said, as she tucked Eleanor under the covers.

Then, since she was quite desperate for subjects of conversation, and still determined by the hot memory of her night's vigil to leave no stone of geniality unturned, she added:

"This is a book that I am reading to help me to know how to guide and educate you. I haven't had much experience in adopting children, you know, Eleanor, and when there is anything in this world that you don't know, there is usually some good and useful book that will help you to find out all about it."

Even to herself her words sounded hatefully patronizing and pedagogic, but she was past the point of believing that she could handle the situation with grace. When Eleanor's breath seemed to be coming regularly, she put down her book with some thankfulness and escaped to the tea table, where she poured tea for her aunt, and explained the child's idiosyncrasies swiftly and smoothly to that estimable lady.

Left alone, Eleanor lay still for a while, staring at the design of pink roses on the blue wall-paper. On Cape Cod, pink and blue were not considered to be colors that could be combined. There was nothing at all in New York like anything she knew or remembered. She sighed. Then she made her way to the window and picked up the book Beulah had been reading. It was about _her_, Aunt Beulah had said,--directions for educating her and training her. The paragraph that caught her eye where the book was open had been marked with a pencil.

"This girl had such a fat, frog like expression of face," Eleanor read, "that her neighbors thought her an idiot. She was found to be the victim of a severe case of ad-e-noids." As she spelled out the word, she recognized it as the one Beulah had used earlier in the day.

She remembered the sudden sharp look with which the question had been accompanied. The sick lady for whom she had "worked out" had often called her an idiot when her feet had stumbled, or she had failed to understand at once what was required of her.

Eleanor read on. She encountered a text replete with hideous examples of backward and deficient children, victims of adenoids who had been restored to a state of normality by the removal of the affliction. She had no idea what an adenoid was. She had a hazy notion that it was a kind of superfluous bone in the region of the breast, but her anguish was rooted in the fact that this, _this_ was the good and useful book that her Aunt Beulah had found it necessary to resort to for guidance, in the case of her own--Eleanor's--education.

When Beulah, refreshed by a cup of tea and further sustained by the fact that Margaret and Peter had both telephoned they were coming to dinner, returned to her charge, she found the stolid, apathetic child she had left, sprawling face downward on the floor, in a pa.s.sion of convulsive weeping.

CHAPTER IV

PETER ELUCIDATES

It was Peter who got at the heart of the trouble. Margaret tried, but though Eleanor clung to her and relaxed under the balm of her gentle caresses, the child remained entirely inarticulate until Peter gathered her up in his arms, and signed to the others that he wished to be left alone with her.

By the time he rejoined the two in the drawing-room--he had missed his after-dinner coffee in the long half-hour that he had spent shut into the guest room with the child--Jimmie and Gertrude had arrived, and the four sat grouped together to await his p.r.o.nouncement.

"She thinks she has adenoids. She wants the doll that David left in that carpetbag of hers he forgot to take out of the 'Handsome cab.'

She wants to be loved, and she wants to grow up and write poetry for the newspapers," he announced. "Also she will eat a piece of bread and b.u.t.ter and a gla.s.s of milk, as soon as it can conveniently be provided for her."

"When did you take holy orders, Gram?" Jimmie inquired. "How do you work the confessional? I wish I could make anybody give anything up to me, but I can't. Did you just go into that darkened chamber and say to the kid, 'Child of my adoption,--cough,' and she coughed, or are you the master of some subtler system of choking the truth out of 'em?"

"Anybody would tell anything to Peter if he happened to want to know it," Margaret said seriously. "Wouldn't they, Beulah?"

Beulah nodded. "She wants to be loved," Peter had said. It was so simple for some people to open their hearts and give out love,--easily, lightly. She was not made like that,--loving came hard with her, but when once she had given herself, it was done. Peter didn't know how hard she had tried to do right with the child that day.