"What strikes me most," he said, "at least with the people that I see about you, Belle, is the sharp line between work and play. I see you women all at play, and I see the men only when they are wearily watching you play or playing with you. One hears so much about business in America. But with you people it is as much suppressed as if your husbands and brothers went off to some other star every day to do their work and came back at night by air ship to see their families."
"Business is dull," Isabelle explained,--"most men"s business. They want to forget it themselves when they leave the office."
"But it is so much a part of life," Vickers protested, thinking of the hours and days Lane spent absorbed in affairs that Isabelle hadn"t the curiosity to inquire about.
"Too much over here."
"And not enough."...
On their way home in the cool of the evening, over a hilly road through the leafing woods, their horses walked close together, and Isabelle, putting an arm affectionately on her brother"s shoulder, mused:--
"One feels so differently different days. Tell me, Vick, what makes the atmosphere,--the color of life in one"s mind? Look over there, along the river. See all the gray mist and up above on the mountain the purple--and to-morrow it will be gone! Changing, always changing! It"s just so inside you; the color is changing all the time.... There is the old village. It doesn"t seem to me any longer the place you and I lived in as boy and girl, the place I was married from."
"It is we who have changed, not Grafton."
"Of course; it"s what we have lived through, felt,--and we can"t get back!
We can"t get back,--that"s the sad thing."
"Perhaps it isn"t best to get back altogether."
Isabelle gave him a curious glance, and then in a hard tone remarked, "Sometimes I think, Vick, that in spite of your experience you are the same soft, sentimental youth you were before it happened."
"Not quite."
"Did you ever regret it, Vick?"
"Yes," he said bravely, "many times; but I am not so sure now that one can really regret anything that is done out of one"s full impulse."
"Well,--that was different," Isabelle remarked vaguely. "Did you ever consider, Vick, that marriage is an awful problem for a woman,--any woman who has individuality, who thinks? ... A man takes it easily. If it doesn"t fit, why he hangs it up in the closet, so to speak, and takes it out just as little as he has to. But a woman,--she must wear it pretty much all of the time--or give it up altogether. It"s unfair to the woman. If she wants to be loved, and there are precious few women who don"t want a man to love them, don"t want that first of all, and her husband hasn"t time to bother with love,--what does she get out of marriage? I know what you are going to say! John loves me, when he thinks about it, and I have my child, and I am happily placed, in very comfortable circ.u.mstances, and--"
"I wasn"t going to say that," Vickers interrupted.
"But," continued Isabelle, with rising intensity, "you know that has nothing to do with happiness.... One might as well be married to a hitching-post as to John. Women simply don"t count in his life. Sometimes I wish they did--that he would make me jealous! Give him the railroad and golf and a man to talk to, and he is perfectly happy.... Where do I come in?"
"Where do you put yourself in?"
"As housekeeper," she laughed, the mood breaking. "The Johnstons are coming next week, all eight--or is it nine?--of them. I must go over and see that the place is opened.... They live like tramps, with one servant, but they seem very happy. He is awfully good, but dull,--John is a social lion compared to Steve Johnston. John says he"s very clever in his line. And as for Alice, she always was big, but she"s become enormous. I don"t suppose she ever thinks of anything so frivolous as a waist-line."
"I thought she had a beautiful face."
"Vick, I don"t believe that you know whether a woman has a figure! You might write a _Symphonie Colossale_ with Alice and her brood as the theme."
"She is Woman," suggested Vickers.
"Woman!" Isabelle scoffed. "Why is child-bearing considered the corner-stone of womanhood? Having young? Cows do that. Women are good for other things,--inspiration, love, perhaps!" She curved her pretty lips at her brother mockingly....
There were two telegrams at the house. Isabelle, opening the first, read aloud, "Reach Grafton three thirty, Tuesday. John," and dropped it on the table. The other she did not read aloud, but telephoned an answer to the telegraph office. Later she remarked casually, "Tom finds he can get back earlier; he"ll be here by the end of the week."
CHAPTER L
"There"s Steve," Isabelle said to Vickers, "coming across the meadow with his boys. He is an old dear, so nice and fatherly!"
The heavy man was plodding slowly along the path, the four boys frisking around him in the tall June gra.s.s like puppies.
"He has come to see John about some business. Let us take the boys and have a swim in the pool!"
Isabelle was gay and happy this morning with one of those rapid changes in mood over night that had become habitual with her. When they returned from their romp in the pool, the boys having departed to the stable in search of further amus.e.m.e.nt, Lane and Johnston were still talking while they slowly paced the brick terrace.
"Still at it!" exclaimed Isabelle. "Goodness! what can it be to make John talk as fast as that! Why, he hasn"t said half as many words to me since he"s been back. Just look at "em, Vick!"
Outside on the terrace Steve Johnston was saying, stuttering in his endeavor to get hastily all the words he needed to express his feelings:--
"It"s no use, Jack! I tell you I am sick of the whole business. I know it"s big pay,--more than I ever expected to earn in my life. But Alice and I have been poor before, and I guess we can be poor again if it comes to that."
"A man with your obligations has no right to give up such an opportunity."
"Alice is with me; we have talked the thing all through.... No, I may be a jacka.s.s, but I can"t see it any different. I don"t like the business of loading the dice,--that is all. I have stood behind the counter, so to speak, and seen the dice loaded, fifteen years. But I wasn"t responsible myself. Now in this new place you offer me I should be IT,--the man who loads.... I have been watching this thing for fifteen years. When I was a rate clerk on the Canada Southern, I could guess how it was,--the little fellows paid the rate as published and the big fellows didn"t. Then when I went into the A. and P. I came a step nearer, could watch how it was done--didn"t have to guess. Then I went with the Texas and Northern as a.s.sistant to the traffic manager, and I loaded the dice--under orders.
Now--"
"Now," interrupted Lane, "you"ll take your orders from my office."
"I know it,--that"s part of the trouble, Jack!" the heavy man blurted out.
"You want a safe man out there, you say. I know what that means! I don"t want to talk good to you, Jack. But you see things differently from me."...
"All this newspaper gossip and scandal has got on your nerves," Lane said irritably.
"No, it hasn"t. And it isn"t any fear of being pulled up before the Commission. That doesn"t mean anything to me.... No, I have seen it coming ever since I was a clerk at sixty a month. And somehow I felt if it ever got near enough me so that I should have to fix the game--for that"s all it amounts to, Jack, and you know it--why, I should have to get out. At last it"s got up to me, and so I am getting out!"
The stolid man puffed with the exertion of expressing himself so fully, inadequate as his confused sentences were to describe all that fermenting ma.s.s of observation, impression, revulsion, disgust that his experience in the rate-making side of his employment had stored up within him the last fifteen years. Out of it had come a result--a resolve. And it was this that Lane was combating heatedly. It was not merely that he liked Johnston personally and did not want him "to make a fool of himself," as he had expressed it, not altogether because he had made up his mind that the heavy man"s qualities were exactly what he needed for this position he had offered him; rather, because the unexpected opposition, Johnston"s scruples, irritated him personally. It was a part of the sentimental newspaper clamor, half ignorance, half envy, that he despised. When he had used the words, "womanish hysteria," descriptive of the agitation against the railroads, Steve had protested in the only humorous remark he was ever known to make:--
"Do I look hysterical, Jack?"
So the two men talked on. What they said would not have been wholly understood by Isabelle, and would not have interested her. And yet it contained more elements of pathos, of modern tragedy, than all the novels she read and the plays she went to see. The homely, heavy man--"He looks just like a bag of meal with a yellow pumpkin on top," Isabelle had said--replied to a thrust by Lane:--
"Yes, maybe I shall fail in the lumber business. It"s pretty late to swap horses at forty-three. But Alice and I have talked it over, and we had rather run that risk than the other--"
"You mean?"
"That I should do what Satters of the L. P. has just testified he"s been doing--under orders--to make traffic."
It was a shrewd blow. Satters was a clear case where the powerful L. P.
road had been caught breaking the rate law by an ingenious device that aroused admiration in the railroad world. He had been fined a few thousand dollars, which was a cheap forfeit. This reference to Satters closed the discussion.