Turn About Eleanor Part 21

Peter reviewed this conversation while he shaved the right side of his face, and frowned prodigiously through the lather. He wished that he had an engagement that evening that he could break in order to get to see Beulah at once, and discover for himself the harm that had come to his friend. He was devoted to Beulah. He had always felt that he saw a little more clearly than the others the virtue that was in the girl.

He admired the pluck with which she made her attack on life and the energy with which she accomplished her ends. There was to him something alluring and quaint about her earnestness. The fact that her soundness could be questioned came to him with something like a shock.

As soon as he was dressed he was called to the telephone to talk to David.

"Margaret has just told me that Doctor Penrose has been up to see Beulah and p.r.o.nounces it a case of nervous breakdown. He wants her to try out psycho-a.n.a.lysis, and that sort of thing. He seems to feel that it's serious. Margaret is fearfully upset, poor girl. So'm I, to tell the truth."

"And so am I," Peter acknowledged to himself as he hung up the receiver. He was so absorbed during the evening that one of the ladies--the wife of the fat banker--found him extremely dull and decided against asking him to dinner with his sister. The wife of the thin banker, who was in his charge at the theater, got the benefit of his effort to rouse himself and grace the occasion creditably, and found him delightful. By the time the evening was over he had decided that Beulah should be pulled out of whatever dim world of dismay and delusion she might be wandering in, at whatever cost. It was unthinkable that she should be wasted, or that her youth and splendid vitality should go for naught.

He found her eager to talk to him the next night when he went to see her.

"Peter," she said, "I want you to go to my aunt and my mother, and tell them that I've got to go on with my work,--that I can't be stopped and interrupted by this foolishness of doctors and nurses. I never felt better in my life, except for not being able to sleep, and I think that is due to the way they have worried me. I live in a world they don't know anything about, that's all. Even if they were right, if I am wearing myself out soul and body for the sake of the cause, what business is it of theirs to interfere? I'm working for the souls and bodies of women for ages to come. What difference does it make if my soul and body suffer? Why shouldn't they?" Her eyes narrowed. Peter observed the unnatural light in them, the apparent dryness of her lips, the two bright spots burning below her cheek-bones.

"Because," he answered her slowly, "I don't think it was the original intention of Him who put us here that we should sacrifice everything we are to the business of emphasizing the superiority of a s.e.x."

"That isn't the point at all, Peter. No man understands, no man can understand. It's woman's equality we want emphasized, just literally that and nothing more. You've pauperized and degraded us long enough--"

"Thou canst not say I--" Peter began.

"Yes, you and every other man, every man in the world is a party to it."

"I had to get her going," Peter apologized to himself, "in order to get a point of departure. Not if I vote for women, Beulah, dear," he added aloud.

"If you throw your influence with us instead of against us," she conceded, "you're helping to right the wrong that you have permitted for so long."

"Well, granting your premise, granting all your premises, Beulah--and I admit that most of them have sound reasoning behind them--your battle now is all over but the shouting. There's no reason that you personally should sacrifice your last drop of energy to a campaign that's practically won already."

"If you think the mere franchise is all I have been working for, Peter,--"

"I don't. I know the thousand and one activities you women are concerned with. I know how much better church and state always have been and are bound to be, when the women get behind and push, if they throw their strength right."

Beulah rose enthusiastically to this bait and talked rationally and well for some time. Just as Peter was beginning to feel that David and Jimmie had been guilty of the most unsympathetic exaggeration of her state of mind--unquestionably she was not as fit physically as usual--she startled him with an abrupt change into almost hysterical incoherence.

"I have a right to live my own life," she concluded, "and n.o.body--n.o.body shall stop me."

"We are all living our own lives, aren't we?" Peter asked mildly.

"No woman lives her own life to-day," Beulah cried, still excitedly.

"Every woman is living the life of some man, who has the legal right to treat her as an imbecile."

"Hold on, Beulah. How about the suffrage states, how about the women who are already in the proud possession of their rights and privileges? They are not technical imbeciles any longer according to your theory. The vote's coming. Every woman will be a super-woman in two shakes,--so what's devouring you, as Jimmie says?"

"It's after all the states have suffrage that the big fight will really begin," Beulah answered wearily. "It's the habit of wearing the yoke we'll have to fight then."

"The anti-feminists," Peter said, "I see. Beulah, can't you give yourself any rest, or is the nature of the cause actually suicidal?"

To his surprise her tense face quivered at this and she tried to steady a tremulous lower lip.

"I am tired," she said, a little piteously, "dreadfully tired, but n.o.body cares."

"Is that fair?"

"It's true."

"Your friends care."

"They only want to stop me doing something they have no sympathy with.

What do Gertrude and Margaret know of the real purpose of my life or my failure or success? They take a sentimental interest in my health, that's all. Do you suppose it made any difference to Jeanne d'Arc how many people took a sympathetic interest in her health if they didn't believe in what she believed in?"

"There's something in that."

"I thought Eleanor would grow up to take an interest in the position of women, and to care about the things I cared about, but she's not going to."

"She's very fond of you."

"Not as fond as she is of Margaret."

Peter longed to dispute this, but he could not in honesty.

"She's a suffragist."

"She's so lukewarm she might just as well be an anti. She's naturally reactionary. Women like that aren't much use. They drag us back like so much dead weight."

"I suppose Eleanor has been a disappointment to you," Peter mused, "but she tries pretty hard to be all things to all parents, Beulah.

You'll find she won't fail you if you need her."

"I shan't need her," Beulah said, prophetically. "I hoped she'd stand beside me in the work, but she's not that kind. She'll marry early and have a family, and that will be the end of her."

"I wonder if she will," Peter said, "I hope so. She still seems such a child to me. I believe in marriage, Beulah, don't you?"

Her answer surprised him.

"Under certain conditions, I do. I made a vow once that I would never marry and I've always believed that it would be hampering and limiting to a woman, but now I see that the fight has got to go on. If there are going to be women to carry on the fight they will have to be born of the women who are fighting to-day."

"Thank G.o.d," Peter said devoutly. "It doesn't make any difference why you believe it, if you do believe it."

"It makes all the difference," Beulah said, but her voice softened.

"What I believe is more to me than anything else in the world, Peter."

"That's all right, too. I understand your point of view, Beulah. You carry it a little bit too far, that's all that's wrong with it from my way of thinking."

"Will you help me to go on, Peter?"

"How?"

"Talk to my aunt and my mother. Tell them that they're all wrong in their treatment of me."

"I think I could undertake to do that"--Peter was convinced that a less antagonistic att.i.tude on the part of her relatives would be more successful--"and I will."

Beulah's eyes filled with tears.