Freke was the Pleasant Valley Coal Company,--that is, he was its necessary physiognomy,--but really the coal company was an incorporated private farm of the officers and friends of the A. and P.,--an immensely profitable farm. Lane in his callow youth did not know this fact; but he learned it after he had been in Torso a few weeks. He was quick to learn, a typical Beals man, thoroughly "efficient," one who could keep his eyes where they belonged, his tongue in his mouth, and his ears open. As he told Isabelle that Sunday afternoon, "he had had many business dealings with Freke,"
alias the Pleasant Valley Company, etc., and they had been uniformly profitable.
For the fatherly Senator and the shrewd Beals believed that the "right sort" should make a "good thing"; they believed in thrift. In a word, to cut short this lengthy explanation, the great Atlantic and Pacific, one of the two or three most efficiently operated railroads in the United States, was honeycombed with that common thing "graft," or private "initiative"!
From the President"s office all the way down to subordinates in the traffic department, there were "good things" to be enjoyed. In that growing bunch of securities that Lane was acc.u.mulating in his safe, there were, as has been said, a number of certificates of stock in coal companies--and not small ones.
And this is why Lane maintained social as well as financial relations with the coa.r.s.e Mr. Freke. And this is why, also, Lane felt that they could afford "the best," when they undertook to give a dinner to the distinguished gentlemen from New York. Of course he did not explain all this to Isabelle that pleasant Sunday afternoon. Would Isabelle have comprehended it, if he had? Her mind would have wandered off to another dinner, to that cottage at Bedmouth, which she thought of taking for the summer, or to the handsome figure that John made on horseback. At least nine out of ten American husbands would have treated the matter as Lane did,--given some sufficient general answer to their wives" amateurish curiosity about business and paid their figures due compliments, and thought complacently of the comfortable homes to which they were progressing and the cheerful dinners therein,--all, wife, home, dinner, the result of their fortunate adaptation to the environments they found themselves in....
Perhaps may be seen by this time the remote connection between that tragic gesture of Frank Simonds on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon, calling on heaven and the Divine Mind that pitilessly strains its little creatures through the holes of a mighty colander--between that tragic gesture, I say, and Isabelle"s delightful dinner of ten courses,--champagne and terrapin!
But this tiresome chapter on the affairs of the Atlantic and Pacific railroad,--will it never be done! So sordid, so commonplace, so newspapery, so--just what everything in life is--when we might have expected for the dollar and a quarter expended on this pound of wood pulp and ink,--something less dull than a magazine article; something about a motor-car and a girl with a mischievous face whom a Russian baron seeks to carry away by force and is barely thwarted by the brave American college youth dashing in pursuit with a new eighty h. p., etc., etc. Or at least if one must have a railroad in a novel (when every one knows just what a railroad is), give us a private car and the lovely daughter of the President together with a cow-punching hero, as in Bessie"s beloved story.
But an entire chapter on graft and a common dinner-party with the champagne drunk so long ago--what a bore!
And yet in the infinite hues of this our human life, the methods by which our substantial hero, John Hamilton Lane, ama.s.sed his fortune, are worthy of contemplation. There is more, O yawning reader, in the tragic gesture of ragged-bearded Frank Simonds than in some tons of your favorite brand of "real American women"; more in the sublime complacency of Senator Alonzo Thomas, when he praised "that great and good man," and raised to his memory his gla.s.s of Pommery brut, triple sec, than in all the adventures of soldiers of fortune or yellow cars or mysterious yachts or hectic Russian baronesses; more--at least for the purpose of this history--in John"s answer to Isabelle"s random inquiry that Sunday afternoon than in all the "heart-interest" you have absorbed in a twelvemonth. For in the atmosphere of the ACTS here recorded, you and I, my reader, live and have our being, such as it is--and also poor Frank Simonds (who will never appear again to trouble us). And to the seeing eye, mystery and beauty lie in the hidden meaning of things seen but not known....
Patience! We move to something more intimate and domestic, if not more thrilling.
CHAPTER XI
The child was coming!
When Isabelle realized it, she had a shock, as if something quite outside her had suddenly interposed in her affairs. That cottage at Bedmouth for the summer would have to be given up and other plans as well. At first she had refused to heed the warning,--allowed John to go away to New York on business without confiding in him,--at last accepted it regretfully. Since the terrifying fear those first days in the Adirondack forest lest she might have conceived without her pa.s.sionate consent, the thought of children had gradually slipped out of her mind. They had settled into a comfortable way of living, with their plans and their expectations. "That side of life," as she called it, was still distasteful to her,--she did not see why it had to be. Fortunately it did not play a large part in their life, and the other, the companionable thing, the being admired and petted, quite satisfied her. Children, of course, sometime; but "not just yet."
"It will be the wrong time,--September,--spoil everything!" she complained to Bessie.
"Oh, it"s always the wrong time, no matter when it happens. But you"ll get used to it. Rob had to keep me from going crazy at first. But in the end you like it."
"It settles Bedmouth this year!"
"It is a bore," Bessie agreed sympathetically, feeling sorry for herself, as she was to have spent six weeks with Isabelle. "It takes a year out of a woman"s life, of course, no matter how she is situated. And I"m so fearfully ugly all the time. But you won"t be,--your figure is better."
Bessie, like most childlike persons, took short views of immediate matters.
She repeated her idea of child-bearing:--
"I hated it each time,--especially the last time. It did seem so unnecessary--for us.... And it spoils your love, being so afraid. But when it comes, why you like it, of course!"
John arrived from his hurried trip to New York, smiling with news. He did not notice his wife"s dejected appearance when he kissed her, in his eagerness to tell something.
"There is going to be a shake-up in the road," he announced. "That"s why they sent for me."
"Is there?" she asked listlessly.
"Well, I am slated for fourth Vice-president. They were pleased to say handsome things about what I have done at Torso. Guess they heard of that offer from the D. and O."
"What is fourth Vice-president?" Isabelle inquired.
"In charge of traffic west--headquarters at St. Louis!"
He expected that his wife would be elated at this fulfilment of her desires; but instead Isabelle"s eyes unaccountably filled with tears. When he understood, he was still more mystified at her dejection. Very tenderly holding her in his arms, he whispered his delight into her ears. His face was radiant; it was far greater news than his promotion to the fourth vice-presidency of the A. and P.
"And you knew all this time!" he exclaimed reproachfully.
"I wasn"t sure!"
He seemed to take the event as natural and joyful, which irritated her still more. As Bessie had said, "Whatever ties a woman to the home, makes her a piece of domestic furniture, the men seem to approve of!"
"What a fright I look already!" Isabelle complained, gazing at the dark circles under her eyes in the gla.s.s. She thought of Aline, whose complexion like a Jacqueminot rose had been roughened and marred. Something still virginal in her soul rebelled against it all.
"Oh, not so bad," Lane protested. "You are just a little pinched. You"ll be fitter than ever when it"s over!"
The man doesn"t care, she thought mutinously. It seems to him the proper thing,--what woman is made for. Isabelle was conscious that she was made for much more, for her own joy and her own activity, and she hated to part with even a little of it!
He could not understand her att.i.tude. As a man he had retained the primitive joy in the coming of the child, any child,--but _his_ child and the first one above all! Compared with that nothing was of the least importance. Seeing her pouting into the gla.s.s, he said reproachfully:--
"But you like children, Belle!"
And taking her again into his arms and kissing her, he added, "We"ll give the little beggar a royal welcome, girl!"
His grave face took on a special look of content with the world and his share in it, while Isabelle continued to stare at herself in the gla.s.s and think of the change a child would make in her life. Thus the woman of the new generation, with her eagerness for a "large, full life," feels towards that process of nature for which the inst.i.tution of marriage was primarily designed.
So for a time longer Isabelle tried to ignore the coming fact, to put it out of her mind, and grasp as much of her own life as she could before the life within her should deprive her of freedom. As Lane"s new duties would not begin until the summer, it was arranged that Isabelle should spend the hot weeks at the Grafton farm with her mother, and then return to St. Louis for her confinement in her old home. Later they would settle themselves in the city at their leisure.... It was all so provoking, Isabelle persisted in thinking. They might have had at least a year of freedom in which to settle themselves in the new home. And she had had visions of a few months in Europe with Vickers, who was now in Rome. John might have come over after her. To give up all this for what any woman could do at any time!
As the months pa.s.sed she could not evade the issue. By the time she was settled in her old room at the Farm she had grown anaemic, nervous. The coming of the child had sapped rather than created strength as it properly should have done. White and wasted she lay for long hours on the lounge near the window where she could see the gentle green hills. Here her cousin Alice Johnston found her, when she arrived with her children to make Mrs.
Price a visit. The large, placid woman knelt by Isabelle"s side and gathered her in her arms.
"I"m so glad, dear! When is it to be?"
"Oh, sometime in the fall," Isabelle replied vaguely, bored that her condition already revealed itself. "Did you want the first one?" she asked after a time.
"Well, not at the very first. You see it was just so much more of a risk.
And our marriage was a risk without that.... I hated the idea of becoming a burden for Steve. But with you it will be so different, from the start. And then it always makes its own place, you see. When it comes, you will think you always wanted it!"
She smiled in her large human way, as if she had tested the trials of life and found that all held some sweet. Isabelle looked down at her thin arms.
The Johnstons had four, and they were so poor! As if divining her thought, Alice said:--
"Every time I wondered how we were going to survive, but somehow we did.
And now it will all be well, with Steve"s new position--"
"What is that?"
"Hasn"t John told you? It has just been settled; Steve is going into the A.
and P.,--John"s a.s.sistant in St. Louis."