219CHAPTER XVIIIBeulah’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 called220it 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.”221
“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.”222
“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 ofthat, 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 felt223that 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 be224pulled 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’t225think 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.”226
“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 in227the 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 many228people 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.229She 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.”230
“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 likeideê 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 to231the 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 sobbed232over 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, “but233it’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.
234CHAPTER XIXMostly Uncle Peter
“Dear Uncle Peter,” the letter ran, “I am very, very homesick and lonely for you to-day. It seems to me that I would gladly give a whole year of my life just for the privilege of being with you, and talking instead of writing,—but since that can not be, I am going to try and write you about the thing that is troubling me. I can’t bear it alone any longer, and still I don’t know whether it is the kind of thing that it is honorable to tell or not. So you see I am very much troubled and puzzled, and this trouble involves some one else in a way that it is terrible to think of.
“Uncle Peter, dear, I do not want to be married. Not until I have grown up, and seen something of the world. You know it is one of my dearest wishes to be self-supporting, not because I am a Feminist or a new woman, or have ‘the unnatural belief of an antipathy to man’ that you’re always talking about, but just because it will prove to me once and for all that I belong to myself, and that mysoulisn’t, and never has been cooperative.235You know what I mean by this, and you are not hurt by my feeling so. You, I am sure, would not want me to be married, or to have to think of myself as engaged, especially not to anybody that we all knew and loved, and who is very close to me and you in quite another way. Please don’t try to imagine what I mean, Uncle Peter—even if you know, you must tell yourself that you don’t know. Please, please pretend even to yourself that I haven’t written you this letter. I know people do tell things like this, but I don’t know quite how they bring themselves to do it, even if they have somebody like you who understands everything—everything.
“Uncle Peter, dear, I am supposed to be going to be married by and by when the one who wants it feels that it can be spoken of, and until that happens, I’ve got to wait for him to speak, unless I can find some way to tell him that I do not want it ever to be. I don’t know how to tell him. I don’t know how to make him feel that I do not belong to him. It is only myself I belong to, and I belong to you, but I don’t know how to make that plain to any one who does not know it already. I can’t say it unless perhaps you can help me to.236
“I am different from the other girls. I know every girl always thinks there is something different about her, but I think there are ways in which I truly am different. When I want anything I know more clearly what it is, and why I want it than most other girls do, and not only that, but I know now, that I want to keep myself, and everything I think and feel and am,—sacred. There is an inner shrine in a woman’s soul that she must keep inviolate. I know that now.
“A liberty that you haven’t known how, or had the strength to prevent, is a terrible thing. One can’t forget it. Uncle Peter, dear, twice in my life things have happened that drive me almost desperate when I think of them. If these things should happen again when I know that I don’t want them to, I don’t think there would be any way of my bearing it. Perhaps you can tell me something that will make me find a way out of this tangle. I don’t see what it could be, but lots of times you have shown me the way out of endless mazes that were not grown up troubles like this, but seemed very real to me just the same.
“Uncle Peter, dear, dear, dear,—you are all I have. I wish you were here to-night, though you237wouldn’t be let in, even if you beat on the gate ever so hard, for it’s long after bedtime. I am up in my tower room all alone. Oh! answer this letter. Answer it quickly, quickly.”
Eleanor read her letter over and addressed a tear splotched envelope to Peter. Then she slowly tore letter and envelope into little bits.
“He would know,” she said to herself. “I haven’t any real right to tell him. It would be just as bad as any kind of tattling.”
She began another letter to him but found she could not write without saying what was in her heart, and so went to bed uncomforted. There was nothing in her experience to help her in her relation to David. His kiss on her lips had taught her the nature of such kisses: had made her understand suddenly the ease with which the strange, sweet spell of sex is cast. She related it to the episode of the unwelcome caress bestowed upon her by the brother of Maggie Lou, and that half forgotten incident took on an almost terrible significance. She understood now how she should have repelled that unconscionable boy, but that understanding did not help her with the problem238of her Uncle David. Though the thought of it thrilled through her with a strange incredible delight, she did not want another kiss of his upon her lips.
“It’s—it’s—like that,” she said to herself. “I want it to be from somebody—else. Somebodyrealerto me. Somebody that would make it seem right.” But even to herself she mentioned no names.
She had definitely decided against going to college. She felt that she must get upon her own feet quickly and be under no obligation to any man. Vaguely her stern New England rearing was beginning to indicate the way that she should tread. No man or woman who did not understand “the value of a dollar,” was properly equipped to do battle with the realities of life. The value of a dollar, and a clear title to it—these were the principles upon which her integrity must be founded if she were to survive her own self-respect. Her Puritan fathers had bestowed this heritage upon her. She had always felt the irregularity of her economic position; now that the complication of her relation with David had arisen, it was beginning to make her truly uncomfortable.239
David had been very considerate of her, but his consideration frightened her. He had been so afraid that she might be hurt or troubled by his attitude toward her that he had explained again, and almost in so many words that he was only waiting for her to grow accustomed to the idea before he asked her to become his wife. She had looked forward with considerable trepidation to the Easter vacation following the establishment of their one-sided understanding, but David relieved her apprehension by putting up at his club and leaving her in undisturbed possession of his quarters. There, with Mademoiselle still treating her as a little girl, and the other five of her heterogeneous foster family to pet and divert her at intervals, she soon began to feel her life swing back into a more accustomed and normal perspective. David’s attitude to her was as simple as ever, and when she was with the devoted sextet she was almost able to forget the matter that was at issue between them—almost but not quite.
She took quite a new kind of delight in her association with the group. She found herself suddenly on terms of grown up equality with them. Her consciousness of the fact that David was240tacitly waiting for her to become a woman, had made a woman of her already, and she looked on her guardians with the eyes of a woman, even though a very newly fledged and timorous one.
She was a trifle self-conscious with the others, but with Jimmie she was soon on her old familiar footing.
“Uncle Jimmie is still a great deal of fun,” she wrote in her diary. “He does just the same old things he used to do with me, and a good many new ones in addition. He brings me flowers, and gets me taxi-cabs as if I were really a grown up young lady, and he pinches my nose and teases me as if I were still the little girl that kept house in a studio for him. I never realized before what a good-looking man he is. I used to think that Uncle Peter was the only handsome man of the three, but now I realize that they are all exceptionally good-looking. Uncle David has a great deal of distinction, of course, but Uncle Jimmie is merry and radiant and vital, and tall and athletic looking into the bargain. The ladies on the Avenue all turn to look at him when we go walking. He says that the gentlemen all turn to look241at me, and I think perhaps they do when I have my best clothes on, but in my school clothes I am quite certain that nothing like that happens.
“I have been out with Uncle Jimmie Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday,—four days of my vacation. We’ve been to the Hippodrome and Chinatown, and we’ve dined at Sherry’s, and one night we went down to the little Italian restaurant where I had my first introduction toeau rougie, and was so distressed about it. I shall never forget that night, and I don’t think Uncle Jimmie will ever be done teasing me about it. It is nice to be with Uncle Jimmie so much, but I never seem to see Uncle Peter any more. Alphonse is very careful about taking messages, I know, but it does seem to me that Uncle Peter must have telephoned more times than I know of. It does seem as if he would, at least, try to see me long enough to have one of our old time talks again. To see him with all the others about is only a very little better than not seeing him at all. He isn’t like himself, someway. There is a shadow over him that I do not understand.”
“Don’t you think that Uncle Peter has changed?”242she asked Jimmie, when the need of speaking of him became too strong to withstand.
“He is a little pale about the ears,” Jimmie conceded, “but I think that’s the result of hard work and not enough exercise. He spends all his spare time trying to patch up Beulah instead of tramping and getting out on his horse the way he used to. He’s doing a good job on the old dear, but it’s some job, nevertheless and notwithstanding—”
“Is Aunt Beulah feeling better than she was?” Eleanor’s lips were dry, but she did her best to make her voice sound natural. It seemed strange that Jimmie could speak so casually of a condition of affairs that made her very heart stand still. “I didn’t know that Uncle Peter had been taking care of her.”
“Taking care of her isn’t a circumstance to what Peter has been doing for Beulah. You know she hasn’t been right for some time. She got burning wrong, like the flame on our old gas stove in the studio when there was air in it.”
“Uncle David thought so the last time I was here,” Eleanor said, “but I didn’t know that Uncle Peter—”243
“Peter, curiously enough, was the last one to tumble. Dave and I got alarmed about the girl and held a consultation, with the result that Doctor Gramercy was called. If we’d believed he would go into it quite so heavily we might have thought again before we sicked him on. It’s very nice for Mary Ann, but rather tough on Abraham as they said when the lady was deposited on that already overcrowded bosom. Now Beulah’s got suffrage mania, and Peter’s got Beulah mania, and it’s a merry mess all around.”
“Is Uncle Peter with her a lot?”
“Every minute. You haven’t seen much of him since you came, have you?—Well, the reason is that every afternoon as soon as he can get away from the office, he puts on a broad sash marked ‘Votes for Women,’ and trundles Beulah around in her little white and green perambulator, trying to distract her mind from suffrage while he talks to her gently and persuasively upon the subject. Suffrage is the only subject on her mind, he explains, so all he can do is to try to cuckoo gently under it day by day. It’s a very complicated process but he’s making headway.”244
“I’m glad of that,” Eleanor said faintly. “How—how is Aunt Gertrude? I don’t see her very often, either.”
“Gertrude’s all right.” It was Jimmie’s turn to look self-conscious. “She never has time for me any more; I’m not high-brow enough for her. She’s getting on like a streak, you know, exhibiting everywhere.”
“I know she is. She gave me a cast of her faun’s head. I think it is lovely. Aunt Margaret looks well.”
“She is, I guess, but don’t let’s waste all our valuable time talking about the family. Let’s talk about us—you and me. You ask me how I’m feeling and then I’ll tell you. Then I’ll ask you how you’re feeling and you’ll tell me. Then I’ll tell you how I imagine you must be feeling from the way you’re looking,—and that will give me a chance to expatiate on the delectability of your appearance. I’ll work up delicately to the point where you will begin to compare me favorably with all the other nice young men you know,—and then we’ll be off.”
“Shall we?” Eleanor asked, beginning to sparkle a little.245
“We shall indeed,” he assured her solemnly. “You begin. No, on second thoughts, I’ll begin. I’ll begin at the place where I start telling you how excessively well you’re looking. I don’t know, considering its source, whether it would interest you or not, but you have the biggest blue eyes that I’ve, ever seen in all my life,—and I’m rather a judge of them.”
“All the better to eat you with, my dear,” Eleanor chanted.
“Quite correct.” He shot her a queer glance from under his eyebrows. “I don’t feel very safe when I look into them, my child. It would be a funny joke on me if they did prove fatal to me, wouldn’t it?—well,—but away with such nonsense. I mustn’t blither to the very babe whose cradle I am rocking, must I?”
“I’m not a babe, Uncle Jimmie. I feel very old sometimes. Older than any of you.”
“Oh! you are, you are. You’re a regular sphinx sometimes. Peter says that you even disconcert him at times, when you take to remembering things out of your previous experience.”
“‘When he was a King in Babylon and I was a Christian Slave?’” she quoted quickly.246
“Exactly. Only I’d prefer to play the part of the King of Babylon, if it’s all the same to you, niecelet. How does the rest of it go, ‘yet not for a—’ something or other ‘would I wish undone that deed beyond the grave.’ Gosh, my dear, if things were otherwise, I think I could understand how that feller felt. Get on your hat, and let’s get out into the open. My soul is cramped with big potentialities this afternoon. I wish you hadn’t grown up, Eleanor. You are taking my breath away in a peculiar manner. No man likes to have his breath taken away so suddint like. Let’s get out into the rolling prairie of Central Park.”
But the rest of the afternoon was rather a failure. The Park had that peculiar bleakness that foreruns the first promise of spring. The children, that six weeks before were playing in the snow and six weeks later would be searching the turf for dandelions, were in the listless between seasons state of comparative inactivity. There was a deceptive balminess in the air that seemed merely to overlay a penetrating chilliness.
“I’m sorry I’m not more entertaining this afternoon,” Jimmie apologized on the way home. “It isn’t that I am not happy, or that I don’t feel the247occasion to be more than ordinarily propitious; I’m silent upon a peak in Darien,—that’s all.”
“I was thinking of something else, too,” Eleanor said.
“I didn’t say I was thinking of something else.”
“People are always thinking of something else when they aren’t talking to each other, aren’t they?”
“Something else, or each other, Eleanor. I wasn’t thinking of something else, I was thinking—well, I won’t tell you exactly—at present. A penny for your thoughts, little one.”
“They aren’t worth it.”
“A penny is a good deal of money. You can buy joy for a penny.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t—buy joy, even if you gave me your penny, Uncle Jimmie.”
“You might try. My penny might not be like other pennies. On the other hand, your thoughts might be worth a fortune to me.”
“I’m afraid they wouldn’t be worth anything to anybody.”
“You simply don’t know what I am capable of making out of them.”
“I wish I could make something out of them,”248Eleanor said so miserably that Jimmie was filled with compunction for having tired her out, and hailed a passing taxi in which to whiz her home again.
“I have found out that Uncle Peter is spending all his time with Aunt Beulah,” she wrote in her diary that evening. “It is beautiful of him to try to help her through this period of nervous collapse, and just like him, but I don’t understand why it is that he doesn’t come and tell me about it, especially since he is getting so tired. He ought to know that I love him so dearly and deeply that I could help him even in helping her. It isn’t like him not to share his anxieties with me. Aunt Beulah is a grown up woman, and has friends and doctors and nurses, and every one knows her need. It seems to me that he might think that I have no one but him, and that whatever might lie heavy on my heart I could only confide in him. I have always told him everything. Why doesn’t it occur to him that I might have something to tell him now? Why doesn’t he come to me?
“I am afraid he will get sick. He needs a good deal of exercise to keep in form. If he doesn’t249have a certain amount of muscular activity his digestion is not so good. There are two little creases between his eyes that I never remember seeing there before. I asked him the other night when he was here with Aunt Beulah if his head ached, and he said ‘no,’ but Aunt Beulah said her head ached almost all the time. Of course, Aunt Beulah is important, and if Uncle Peter is trying to bring her back to normality again she is important to him, and that makes her important to me for his sake also, but nobody in the world is worth the sacrifice of Uncle Peter. Nobody, nobody.
“I suppose it’s a part of his great beauty that he should think so disparagingly of himself. I might not love him so well if he knew just how dear and sweet and great his personality is. It isn’t so much what he says or does, or even the way he looks that constitutes his charm, it’s the simple power and radiance behind his slightest move. Oh! I can’t express it. He doesn’t think he is especially fine or beautiful. He doesn’t know what a waste it is when he spends his strength upon somebody who isn’t as noble in character as he is,—but I know, and it makes me wild to think250of it. Oh! why doesn’t he come to me? My vacation is almost over, and I don’t see how I could bear going back to school without one comforting hour of him alone.
“I intended to write a detailed account of my vacation, but I can not. Uncle Jimmie has certainly tried to make me happy. He is so funny and dear. I could have so much fun with him if I were not worried about Uncle Peter!
“Uncle David says he wants to spend my last evening with me. We are going to dine here, and then go to the theater together. I am going to try to tell him how I feel about things, but I am afraid he won’t give me the chance. Life is a strange mixture of things you want and can’t have, and things you can have and don’t want. It seems almost disloyal to put that down on paper about Uncle David. I do want him and love him, but oh!—not in that way. Not in that way. There is only one person in a woman’s life that she can feel that way about. Why—why—why doesn’t my Uncle Peter come to me?”
251CHAPTER XXThe Makings of a Triple Wedding
“Just by way of formality,” David said, “and not because I think any one present”—he smiled on the five friends grouped about his dinner table—“still takes our old resolution seriously, I should like to be released from the anti-matrimonial pledge that I signed eight years ago this November. I have no announcement to make as yet, but when I do wish to make an announcement—and I trust to have the permission granted very shortly—I want to be sure of my technical right to do so.”
“Gosh all Hemlocks!” Jimmie exclaimed in a tone of such genuine confusion that it raised a shout of laughter. “I never thought of that.”
“Nor I,” said Peter. “I never signed any pledge to that effect.”
“We left you out of it, Old Horse, regarding you as a congenital celibate anyway,” Jimmie answered.252
“Some day soon you will understand how much you wronged me,” Peter said with a covert glance at Beulah.
“I wish I could say as much,” Jimmie sighed, “since this is the hour of confession I don’t mind adding that I hope I may be able to soon.”
Gertrude clapped her hands softly.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” she cried. “We’ve the makings of a triple wedding in our midst. Look into the blushing faces before us and hear the voice that breathed o’er Eden echoing in our ears. This is the most exciting moment of my life! Girls, get on your feet and drink to the health of these about-to-be Benedicts. Up in your chairs,—one slipper on the table. Now!”—and the moment was saved.
Gertrude had seen Margaret’s sudden pallor and heard the convulsive catching of her breath,—Margaret rising Undine-like out of a filmy, pale green frock, with her eyes set a little more deeply in the shadows than usual. Her quick instinct to the rescue was her own salvation.
David was on his feet.
“On behalf of my coadjutors,” he said, “I thank you. All this is extremely premature for me, and253I imagine from the confusion of the other gentlemen present it is as much, if not more so, for them. Personally I regret exceedingly being unable to take you more fully into my confidence. The only reason for this partial revelation is that I wished to be sure that I was honorably released from my oath of abstinence. Hang it all! You fellows say something,” he concluded, sinking abruptly into his chair.
“Your style always was distinctly mid-Victorian,” Jimmie murmured. “I’ve got nothing to say, except that I wish I had something to say and that if Idohave something to say in the near future I’ll create a real sensation! When Miss Van Astorbilt permits David to link her name with his in the caption under a double column cut in our leading journals, you’ll get nothing like the thrill that I expect to create with my modest announcement. I’ve got a real romance up my sleeve.”
“So’ve I, Jimmie. There is no Van Astorbilt in mine.”
“Some simple bar-maid then? A misalliance in our midst. Now about you, Peter?”
“The lady won’t give me her permission to254speak,” Peter said. “She knows how proud and happy I shall be when I am able to do so.”
Beulah looked up suddenly.
“It is better we should marry,” she said. “I didn’t realize that when I exacted that oath from you. It is from the intellectual type that the brains to carry on the great work of the world must be inherited.”
“I pass,” Jimmie murmured. “Where’s the document we signed?”
“I’ve got it. I’ll destroy it to-night and then we may all consider ourselves free to take any step that we see fit. It was really only as a further protection to Eleanor that we signed it.”
“Eleanor will be surprised, won’t she?” Gertrude suggested. Three self-conscious masculine faces met her innocent interrogation.
“Eleanor,” Margaret breathed, “Eleanor.”
“I rather think she will,” Jimmie chuckled irresistibly, but David said nothing, and Peter stared unseeingly into the glass he was still twirling on its stem.
“Eleanor will be taken care of just the same,” Beulah said decisively. “I don’t think we need even go through the formality of a vote on that.”255
“Eleanor will be taken care of,” David said softly.
The Hutchinsons’ limousine—old Grandmother Hutchinson had a motor nowadays—was calling for Margaret, and she was to take the two other girls home. David and Jimmie—such is the nature of men—were disappointed in not being able to take Margaret and Gertrude respectively under their accustomed protection.
“I wanted to talk to you, Gertrude,” Jimmie said reproachfully as she slipped away from his ingratiating hand on her arm.
“I thought I should take you home to-night, Margaret,” David said; “you never gave me the slip before.”
“The old order changeth,” Gertrude replied lightly to them both, as she preceded Margaret into the luxurious interior.
“It’s Eleanor,” Gertrude announced as the big car swung into Fifth Avenue.
“Which is Eleanor?” Margaret cried hysterically.
“What do you mean?” Beulah asked.
“Jimmie or David—or—or both are going to marry Eleanor. Didn’t you see their faces when Beulah spoke of her?”256
“David wants to marry Eleanor,” Margaret said quietly. “I’ve known it all winter—without realizing what it was I knew.”
“Well, who is Jimmy going to marry then?” Beulah inquired.
“Who is Peter going to marry for that matter?” Gertrude cut in. “Oh! it doesn’t make any difference,—we’re losing them just the same.”
“Not necessarily,” Beulah said. “No matter what combinations come about, we shall still have an indestructible friendship.”
“Indestructible friendship—shucks,” Gertrude cried. “The boys are going to be married—married—married! Marriage is the one thing that indestructible friendships don’t survive—except as ghosts.”
“It should be Peter who is going to marry Eleanor,” Margaret said. “It’s Peter who has always loved her best. It’s Peter she cares for.”
“As a friend,” Beulah said, “as her dearest friend.”
“Not as a friend,” Margaret answered softly, “she loves him. She has always loved him. It comes early sometimes.”
“I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe it.”
“I believe it,” Gertrude said. “I hadn’t thought257of it before. Of course, it must be Peter who is going to marry her.”
“If it isn’t we’ve succeeded in working out a rather tragic experiment,” Margaret said, “haven’t we?”
“Life is a tragic experiment for any woman,” Gertrude said sententiously.
“Peter doesn’t intend to marry Eleanor,” Beulah persisted. “I happen to know.”
“Do you happen to know who he is going to marry?”
“Yes, I do know, but I—I can’t tell you yet.”
“Whoever it is, it’s a mistake,” Margaret said. “It’s our little Eleanor he wants. I suppose he doesn’t realize it himself yet, and when he does it will be too late. He’s probably gone and tied himself up with somebody entirely unsuitable, hasn’t he, Beulah?”
“I don’t know,” Beulah said; “perhaps he has. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“It’s the way to think of it, I know.” Margaret’s eyes filled with sudden tears. “But whatever he’s done it’s past mending now. There’ll be no question of Peter’s backing out of a bargain—bad or good, and our poor little kiddie’s got to suffer.”258
“Beulah took it hard,” Gertrude commented, as they turned up-town again after dropping their friend at her door. The two girls were spending the night together at Margaret’s. “I wonder on what grounds. I think besides being devoted to Eleanor, she feels terrifically responsible for her. She isn’t quite herself again either.”
“She is almost, thanks to Peter.”
“But—oh! I can’t pretend to think of anything else,—who—who—who—are our boys going to marry?”
“I don’t know, Gertrude.”
“But you care?”
“It’s a blow.”
“I always thought that you and David—”
Margaret met her eyes bravely but she did not answer the implicit question.
“I always thought that you and Jimmie—” she said presently. “Oh! Gertrude, you would have been so good for him.”
“Oh! it’s all over now,” Gertrude said, “but I didn’t know that a living soul suspected me.”
“I’ve known for a long time.”
“Are you really hurt, dear?” Gertrude whispered as they clung to each other.259
“Not really. It could have been—that’s all. He could have made me care. I’ve never seen any one else whom I thought that of. I—I was so used to him.”
“That’s the rub,” Gertrude said, “we’re so used to them. They’re so—so preposterously necessary to us.”
Late that night clasped in each other’s arms they admitted the extent of their desolation. Life had been robbed of a magic,—a mystery. The solid friendship of years of mutual trust and understanding was the background of so much lovely folly, so many unrealized possibilities, so many nebulous desires and dreams that the sudden dissolution of their circle was an unthinkable calamity.
“We ought to have put out our hands and taken them if we wanted them,” Gertrude said, out of the darkness. “Other women do. Probably these other women have. Men are helpless creatures. They need to be firmly turned in the right direction instead of being given their heads. We’ve been too good to our boys. We ought to have snitched them.”
“I wouldn’t pay that price for love,” Margaret260said. “I couldn’t. By the time I had made it happen I wouldn’t want it.”
“That’s my trouble too,” Gertrude said. Then she turned over on her pillow and sobbed helplessly. “Jimmie had such ducky little curls,” she explained incoherently. “I do this sometimes when I think of them. Otherwise, I’m not a crying woman.”
Margaret put out a hand to her; but long after Gertrude’s breath began to rise and fall regularly, she lay staring wide-eyed into the darkness.