BEULAH'S PROBLEM
Peter was shaving for the evening. His sister was giving a dinner
party for two of her husband's fellow bankers and their wives. After
that they were going to see the latest Belasco production, and from
there to some one of the new dancing "clubs,"--the smart cabarets that
were forced to organize in the guise of private enterprises to evade
the two o'clock closing law. Peter enjoyed dancing, but he did not as
a usual thing enjoy bankers' wives. He was deliberating on the
possibility of excusing himself gracefully after the theater, on the
plea of having some work to do, and finally decided that his sister's
feelings would be hurt if she realized he was trying to escape the
climax of the hospitality she had provided so carefully.
He gazed at himself intently over the drifts of lather and twisted his
shaving mirror to the most propitious angle from time to time. In the
room across the hall--Eleanor's room, he always called it to
himself--his young niece was singing bits of the Mascagni intermezzo
interspersed with bits of the latest musical comedy, in a rather
uncertain contralto.
"My last girl came from Vassar, and I don't know where to class her."
Peter's mind took up the refrain automatically. "My last girl--" and
began at the beginning of the chorus again. "My last girl came from
Vassar," which brought him by natural stages to the consideration of
the higher education and of Beulah, and a conversation concerning her
that he had had with Jimmie and David the night before.
"She's off her nut," Jimmie said succinctly. "It's not exactly that
there's nobody home," he rapped his curly pate significantly, "but
there's too much of a crowd there. She's not the same old girl at all.
She used to be a good fellow, high-brow propaganda and all. Now she's
got nothing else in her head. What's happened to her?"
"It's what hasn't happened to her that's addled her," David explained.
"It's these highly charged, hypersensitive young women that go to
pieces under the modern pressure. They're the ones that need licking
into shape by all the natural processes."
"By which you mean a drunken husband and a howling family?" Jimmie
suggested.
"Yes, or its polite equivalent."
"That is true, isn't it?" Peter said. "Feminism isn't the answer to
Beulah's problem."
"It is the problem," David said; "she's poisoning herself with it. I
know what I'm talking about. I've seen it happen. My cousin Jack
married a girl with a sister a great deal like Beulah, looks,
temperament, and everything else, though she wasn't half so nice. She
got going the militant pace and couldn't stop herself. I never met her
at a dinner party that she wasn't tackling somebody on the subject of
man's inhumanity to woman. She ended in a sanitorium; in fact, they're
thinking now of taking her to the--"
"--bug house," Jimmie finished cheerfully.
"And in the beginning she was a perfectly good girl that needed
nothing in the world but a chance to develop along legitimate lines."
"The frustrate matron, eh?" Peter said.
"The frustrate matron," David agreed gravely. "I wonder you haven't
realized this yourself, Gram. You're keener about such things than I
am. Beulah is more your job than mine."
"Is she?"
"You're the only one she listens to or looks up to. Go up and tackle
her some day and see what you can do. She's sinking fast."
"Give her the once over and throw out the lifeline," Jimmie said.
"I thought all this stuff was a phase, a part of her taking herself
seriously as she always has. I had no idea it was anything to worry
about," Peter persisted. "Are you sure she's in bad shape--that she's
got anything more than a bad attack of Feminism of the Species in its
most virulent form? They come out of _that_, you know."
"She's batty," Jimmie nodded gravely. "Dave's got the right dope."
"Go up and look her over," David persisted; "you'll see what we mean,
then. Beulah's in a bad way."
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 pronounces it a case of nervous breakdown. He wants her to
try out psycho-analysis, 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 sex."
"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
nobody--nobody 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
nobody 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 God," 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 attitude on the part of her relatives would be more
successful--"and I will."
Beulah's eyes filled with tears.
"You're the only one who comes anywhere near knowing," she said, "or
who ever will, I guess. I try so hard, Peter, and now when I don't
seem to be accomplishing as much as I want to, as much as it's
necessary for me to accomplish if I am to go on respecting myself,
every one enters into a conspiracy to stop my doing anything at all.
The only thing that makes me nervous is the way I am thwarted and
opposed at every turn. I haven't got nervous prostration."
"Perhaps not, but you have something remarkably like _ideê fixe_,"
Peter said to himself compassionately.
He found her actual condition less dangerous but much more difficult
than he had anticipated. She was living wrong, that was the sum and
substance of her malady. Her life was spent confronting theories and
discounting conditions. She did not realize that it is only the
interest of our investment in life that we can sanely contribute to
the cause of living. Our capital strength and energy must be used for
the struggle for existence itself if we are to have a world of
balanced individuals. There is an arrogance involved in assuming
ourselves more humane than human that reacts insidiously on our health
and morals. Peter, looking into the twitching hectic face before him
with the telltale glint of mania in the eyes, felt himself becoming
helpless with pity for a mind gone so far askew. He felt curiously
responsible for Beulah's condition.
"She wouldn't have run herself so far aground," he thought, "if I had
been on the job a little more. I could have helped her to steer
straighter. A word here and a lift there and she would have come
through all right. Now something's got to stop her or she can't be
stopped. She'll preach once too often out of the tail of a cart on the
subject of equal guardianship,--and--"
Beulah put her hands to her face suddenly, and, sinking back into the
depths of the big cushioned chair on the edge of which she had been
tensely poised during most of the conversation, burst into tears.
"You're the only one that knows," she sobbed over and over again.
"I'm so tired, Peter, but I've got to go on and on and on. If they
stop me, I'll kill myself."
Peter crossed the room to her side and sat down on her chair-arm.
"Don't cry, dear," he said, with a hand on her head. "You're too tired
to think things out now,--but I'll help you."
She lifted a piteous face, for the moment so startlingly like that of
the dead girl he had loved that his senses were confused by the
resemblance.
"How, Peter?" she asked. "How can you help me?"
"I think I see the way," he said slowly.
He slipped to his knees and gathered her close in his arms.
"I think this will be the way, dear," he said very gently.
"Does this mean that you want me to marry you?" she whispered, when
she was calmer.
"If you will, dear," he said. "Will you?"
"I will,--if I can, if I can make it seem right to after I've thought
it all out.--Oh! Peter, I love you. I love you."
"I had no idea of that," he said gravely, "but it's wonderful that
you do. I'll put everything I've got into trying to make you happy,
Beulah."
"I know you will, Peter." Her arms closed around his neck and
tightened there. "I love you."
He made her comfortable and she relaxed like a tired child, almost
asleep under his soothing hand, and the quiet spell of his
tenderness.
"I didn't know it could be like this," she whispered.
"But it can," he answered her.
In his heart he was saying, "This is best. I am sure this is best. It
is the right and normal way for her--and for me."
In her tri-cornered dormitory room at the new school which she was not
sharing with any one this year Eleanor, enveloped in a big brown and
yellow wadded bathrobe, was writing a letter to Peter. Her hair hung
in two golden brown braids over her shoulders and her pure profile was
bent intently over the paper. At the moment when Beulah made her
confession of love and closed her eyes against the breast of the man
who had just asked her to marry him, two big tears forced their way
between Eleanor's lids and splashed down upon her letter.