"Of course,--I looked him up at once. They have an old place on the Giudecca, you know. I spent a week with them. He"s still working on the opera,--it doesn"t get on very fast, I gather. He played me some of the music,--it"s great, parts of it. And he has written other things."
"I know all that," Isabelle interrupted impatiently. "But is he happy?"
"A man like Vickers doesn"t tell you that, you know."
"But you can tell--how did they seem?"
"Well," Fosd.i.c.k replied slowly, "when I saw them in the gondola the first time, I thought--it was too bad!"
"I was afraid so," Isabelle cried. "Why don"t they marry and come to New York or go to London or some place and make a life?--people can"t live like that."
"I think he wants to marry her," Fosd.i.c.k replied.
"But she won"t?"
"Precisely,--not now."
"Why--what?"
Fosd.i.c.k avoided the answer, and observed, "Vick seems awfully fond of the little girl, Delia."
"Poor, poor Vick!" Isabelle sighed. "He ought to leave that creature."
"He won"t; Vick was the kind that the world sells cheap,--it"s best kind.
He lives the dream and believes his shadows; it was always so. It will be so until the end. Life will stab him at every corner."
"Dear, dear Vick!" Isabelle said softly; "some days I feel as if I would have done as he did."
"But fortunately there is John to puncture your dream with solid fact."
"John even might not be able to do it! ... I am going over to see Vick this summer."
"Wouldn"t that make complications--family ones?"
Isabelle threw up her head wilfully.
"d.i.c.kie, I think there is something in me deeper than my love for John or for the child,--and that is the feeling I have about Vick!"
Fosd.i.c.k looked at her penetratingly.
"You ought not to have married, Isabelle."
"Why? Every one marries--and John and I are very happy.... Come; there are some people I don"t want to meet."
As they descended the steps into the murky light of the noisy city, Isabelle remarked:--
"Don"t forget to-night, promptly at seven,--we are going to the theatre afterwards. I shall show you some of our smart people and let you see if they aren"t more interesting than the mob."
She nodded gayly and drove off. As she went to a luncheon engagement, she thought of Vickers, of Fosd.i.c.k"s remarks about living, and a great wave of dissatisfaction swept over her. "It"s this ugly city," she said to herself, letting down the window. "Or it"s nerves again,--I must do something!" That phrase was often on her lips these days. In her restlessness nothing seemed just right,--she was ever trying to find something beyond the horizon. As Fosd.i.c.k would have said, "The race vitality being exhausted in its primitive force, nothing has come to take its place." But at luncheon she was gay and talkative, the excitement of human contact stimulating her. And afterwards she packed the afternoon with trivial engagements until it was time to dress for her guests.
The dinner and the theatre might have pa.s.sed off uneventfully, if it had not been for Fosd.i.c.k. That unwieldy social vessel broke early in the dinner. Isabelle had placed him next Mrs. Leason because the lady liked celebrities, and Fosd.i.c.k, having lately been put gently but firmly beyond the confines of the Tzar"s realm for undue intimacy with the rebellious majority of the Tzar"s subjects, might be counted such. For the time being he had come to a momentary equilibrium in the city of his birth. Fosd.i.c.k and Mrs. Leason seemed to find common ground, while the other men, the usual speechless contingent of tired business men, allowed themselves to be talked at by the women. Presently Fosd.i.c.k"s voice boomed forth:--
"Let me tell you a story which will ill.u.s.trate my point, Mrs. Leason. Some years ago I was riding through the Kentucky mountains, and after a wretched luncheon in one of the log-and-mud huts I was sitting on the bench in front of the cabin trying to make peace with my digestion. The ground in that spot sloped down towards me, and on the side of this little hill there lay a large hog, a razor-back sow. There were eight little pigs cl.u.s.tered in voracious att.i.tudes about her, and she could supply but six at a time,--I mean that she was provided by nature with but six teats."
Mrs. Leason visibly moved away from her neighbor, and for the rest of his story Fosd.i.c.k had a silent dinner table.
"The mother was asleep," Fosd.i.c.k continued, turning his great head closer to Mrs. Leason, "probably attending to her digestion as I was to mine, and she left her offspring to fight it out among themselves for the possession of her teats. There was a lively sc.r.a.p, a lot of hollerin" and squealin"
from that bunch of porkers, grunts from the ins and yaps from the outs, you know. Every now and then one of the outs would make a flying start, get a wedge in and take a nip, forcing some one of his brothers out of the heap so that he would roll down the hill into the path. Up he"d get and start over, and maybe he would dislodge some other porker. And the old sow kept grunting and sleeping peacefully in the sun while her children got their dinner in the usual free-fight fashion.
"Now," Fosd.i.c.k raised his heavy, square-pointed finger and shook it at the horrified Mrs. Leason and also across the table, noticing what seemed to him serious interest in his allegory, "I observed that there was a difference among those little porkers,--some were fat and some were peaked, and the peaked fellers got little show at the mother. Now what I ask myself is,--were they weak because they couldn"t manage to get a square feed, or were they hustled out more than the others because they were naturally weak? I leave that to my friends the sociologists to determine--"
"Isabella," Lane interposed from his end of the table, "if Mr. Fosd.i.c.k has finished his pig story, perhaps--"
Isabelle, divided between a desire to laugh and a very vivid sense of Mrs.
Leason"s feelings, rose, but Fosd.i.c.k had not finished and she sat down again.
"But what I meant to say was this, madam,--there"s only one difference between that old sow and her brood and society as it is run at present, and that is there are a thousand mouths to every teat, and a few big, fat fellows are getting all the food."
He looked up triumphantly from his exposition. There was a t.i.tter at Mrs.
Lawton"s end of the table. This lady had been listening to an indecent story told in French-English when Fosd.i.c.k had upset things. Now she remarked in an audible tone:--
"Disgusting, I say!"
"Eh! What"s the matter? Don"t you believe what I told you?" Fosd.i.c.k demanded.
"Oh, yes, d.i.c.kie,--anything you say,--only don"t repeat it!" Isabelle exclaimed, rising from the table.
"Does he come from a farm?" one woman murmured indignantly. "Such _gros mots_!" She too had been listening to the story of adultery at Mrs.
Lawton"s end of the table. Isabelle, who had taken in the whole situation from her husband"s shocked face, Nan Lawton"s sly giggle over the salacious tidbit, and Mrs. Leason"s offended countenance, felt that she must shriek to relieve her feelings.
The party finally reached the theatre and saw a "s.e.x" play, which caused a furious discussion among the women. "No woman would have done that." "The man was not worth the sacrifice," etc. And Fosd.i.c.k gloomily remarked in Isabelle"s ears: "Rot like this is all you see on the modern stage. And it"s because women want it,--they must forever be fooling with s.e.x. Why don"t they--"
"Hush, d.i.c.kie! you have exploded enough to-night. Don"t say that to Mrs.
Leason!"
Her world appeared to her that night a harlequin tangle, and, above all, meaningless--yes, dispiritedly without sense. John, somehow, seemed displeased with her, as if she were responsible for d.i.c.kie"s breaks. She laughed again as she thought of the sow story, and the way the women took it. "What a silly world,--talk and flutter and gadding, all about nothing!"
CHAPTER XXIII
Isabelle did not see much of the Falkners as time went on. Little lines of social divergence began to separate them more and more widely. "After all, one sees chiefly the people who do the same things one does," Isabelle explained to herself. Bessie thought Isabelle "uncertain," perhaps sn.o.bbish, and felt hurt; though she remarked to Rob merely, "The Lanes are very successful, of course."
Affairs in the Buena Vista Pleasance house had progressed meantime. There were, naturally, so many meals to be got and eaten, so many little illnesses of the children, and other roughnesses of the road of life. There was also Bessie"s developing social talent, and above all there was the infinitely complex action and reaction of the man and the wife upon each other. Seen as an all-seeing eye might observe, with all the emotional shading, the perspective of each act, the most commonplace household created by man and woman would be a wonderful cosmography. But the novelist, even he who has the courage to write a dull book, can touch but here and there, on the little promontories of daily life, where it seems to him the spiritual lava boils up near the surface and betrays most poignantly the nature of the fire beneath....
It was a little over three years since the Falkners had moved into the Buena Vista Pleasance house. Husband and wife sat in the front room after their silent dinner alone, with the September breeze playing through the windows, which after a hot day had been thrown open. There was the debris of a children"s party in the room and the hall,--dolls and toys, half-nibbled cakes and saucers of ice-cream. Bessie, who was very neat about herself, was quite Southern in her disregard for order. She was also an adorable hostess for children, because she gave them loose rein.