"Will you be back Sunday? Shall I have the Lanes then?"
"Yes,--and you will go to the Hillyers to-morrow?"
"I think so,--Tom will take me."
After the door closed Conny went to her desk and wrote the note to Isabelle. Then after meditating a few moments, more notes of invitation.
She had decided on her combination,--Gossom, the Silvers, the Hillyers (to get them off her mind), Senator Thomas, and Cairy. She did not take Percy"s objection to Tom seriously.
She had decided to present a variety of people to the Lanes. Isabelle and she had never been intimate, and Conny had a woman"s desire to show an accomplished superiority to the rich friend, who had been inclined to snub her in boarding school. Conny was eminently skilful in "combinations."
Every one that composed her circle or even entered it might some day be of use in creating what is called "publicity." That, as Cornelia Woodyard felt, was the note of the day. "You must be talked about by the right people, if you want to be heard, if you want your show!" she had said to Cairy. Thanks to Lane"s rapid rise in the railroad corporation, Isabelle had come legitimately within the zone of interest.
After she had settled this matter to her satisfaction, she turned to some house accounts and made various calculations. It was a wonder to every one who knew them how the Woodyards "could do so much on what they had." As a matter of fact, with the rising scale of living, it required all Conny"s practical adroitness to make the household come out nearly even. Thanks to a great-aunt who admired Percy, they had been able to buy this house and alter it over, and with good business judgment it had been done so that the property was now worth nearly a third more than when they took it. But a second man-servant had been added, and Conny felt that she must have a motor; she pushed away the papers and glanced up, thinking, planning.
The Senator and she had talked investments the last time they had met. She had a little money of her own. If the old fox would only take it and roll it up into a big s...o...b..ll! Isabelle, now, with all that wealth! Conny pursed her lips in disgust to think that so much of the ammunition of war had fallen into such incompetent hands. "Yes," she said to herself, "the Senator must show me how to do it." Perhaps it flitted vaguely through her mind that Percy might object to using stock market tips from the Senator.
But Percy must accept her judgment on this matter. They could not go on any longer with only twenty thousand a year.
Turning out the lights, she went to her bedroom. It was very plain and bare, with none of the little toilette elegances or chamber comforts that women usually love. Conny never spent except where it showed saliently. Her evening gowns were sometimes almost splendid, but her dressing gowns were dowdy, and poor little Bessie Falkner spent twice as much on lingerie.
Having discharged the duties of her day, her mind returned to Cairy, to his work for Gossom, to his appealing self, and her lips relaxed in a gentle smile. Hers was a simple nature, the cue once caught. She had come of rather plain people, who knew the worth of a dollar, and had spent their lives saving or investing money. The energy of the proletariat had been handed to her undiminished. The blood was evident in the large bones, the solid figure, and tenacious fingers, as well as in the shrewdness with which she had created this household. It was her instinct to push out into the troubled waters of the material world. She never weakened herself by questioning values. She knew--what she wanted.
Nevertheless, as she reached up her hand to turn out the night light, she was smiling with dreamy eyes, and her thoughts were no longer practical!
CHAPTER XXVII
When Isabelle emerged from the great hotel and turned down the avenue to walk to the office of Dr. Potts, as he required her to do every day, she had a momentary thrill of exultation. Descending the gentle incline, she could see a good part of the city extending into a distant blue horizon before her. The vast buildings rose like islands in the morning mist. It reminded her, this general panorama, of the awe-compelling s.p.a.ces of the Arizona canon into which she had once descended. Here were the same irregular, beetling cliffs, the same isolated crags, with sharply outlined lower and minor levels of building. The delicate blue, the many grays of storm and mist gave it color, also. But in place of the canon"s eternal quiet,--the solitude of the remote G.o.ds,--this city boiled and hummed.
That, too,--the realization of mult.i.tudinous humanity,--made Isabelle"s pulses leap.
In spite of her poor health, she had the satisfaction of at last being here, in the big hive, where she had wished to be so long. She was a part of it, a painfully insignificant mite as yet, but still a part of it.
Hitherto New York had been a sort of varied hotel, an entertainment. Now it was to be her scene, and she had begun already to take possession. It had all come about very naturally, shortly after her father"s death. While she was dreading the return to St. Louis, which must be emptier than ever without the Colonel, and she and her mother were discussing the possibility of Europe, John"s new position had come. A Western road had made him an offer; for he had a splendid record as a "traffic getter." The Atlantic and Pacific could not lose him; they gave him the third vice-presidency with headquarters in New York and general charge of traffic. Thus the Lanes"
horizon shifted, and it was decided that the first year in the city they should spend in a hotel with Mrs. Price. Isabelle"s health was again miserable; there had been the delayed operation; and now she was in the care of the famous Potts, trying to recover from the operation, from the old fatigue and the recent strains, "to be made fit."
The move to New York had not meant much to Lane. He had spent a great deal of his time there these last years, as well as in Washington, Pittsburg,--in this city and that,--as business called him. His was what is usually regarded as a cosmopolitan view of life,--it might better be called a hotel-view. Home still meant to him the city where his wife and child were temporarily housed, but he was equally familiar with half a dozen cities. Isabelle, too, had the same rootless feeling. She had spent but a short time in any one place since she had left her father"s house to go to St. Mary"s. That is the privilege or the curse of the prosperous American.
Life thus becomes a shifting panorama of surfaces. Even in the same city there are a dozen spots where the family ark has rested, which for the sake of a better term may be called "homes." That sense of rooted attachment which comes from long habituation to one set of physical images is practically a lost emotion to Americans....
There were days when New York roared too loudly for Isabelle"s nerves, when the jammed streets, the buzzing shops, the overflowing hotels and theatres, made her long for quiet. Then she thought of the Farm as the most stable memory of a fixed condition, and she had an unformed plan of "doing over"
the old place, which was now her own, and making it the centre of the family"s centrifugal energy. Meantime there was the great Potts, who promised her health, and the flashing charm of the city.
Occasionally she felt lonely in this packed procession, this hotel existence, with its mult.i.tude of strange faces, and longed for something familiar, even Torso! At such times when she saw the face of an old acquaintance, perhaps in a cab at a standstill in the press of the avenue, her heart warmed. Even a fleeting glimpse of something known was a relief.
Clearly she must settle herself into this whirlpool, put out her tentacles, and grasp an anchorage. But where? What?
One morning as she and her mother were making slow progress down the avenue, she caught sight of Margaret Pole on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the stream, a little boy"s hand in hers. Isabelle waved to her frantically, and then leaped from the cab, dodged between the pushing motors, and grasped Margaret.
"You here!" she gasped.
"We came back some months ago," Margaret explained.
She was thin, Isabelle thought, and her face seemed much older than the years warranted. Margaret, raising her voice above the roar, explained that they were living out of town, "in the country, in Westchester," and promised to come to lunch the next time she was in the city. Then with a nod and a smile she slipped into the stream again as if anxious to be lost, and Isabelle rejoined her mother.
"She looks as if she were saving her clothes," Mrs. Price announced with her precise view of what she observed. Isabelle, while she waited for the doctor, mused on the momentary vision of her old friend at the street corner. Margaret turned up in the noise and mist of the city, as everybody might turn up; but Margaret old, worn, and almost shabby! Then the nurse came for her and she went into the doctor"s room, with a depressing sensation compounded of a bad night, the city roar, the vision of Margaret.
"Well, my lady, what"s the story to-day?"
Dr. Potts looked up from his desk, and scrutinized the new patient out of his s.h.a.ggy eyebrows. Isabelle began at once the neurasthenic"s involved and particularized tale of woe, breaking at the end with almost a sob:--
"I am so useless! I am never going to be well,--what is the matter with me?"
"So it"s a bad world this morning, eh?" the doctor quizzed in an indulgent voice. "We"ll try to make it better,--shake up the combination." He broke off suddenly and remarked in an ordinary, conversational voice: "Your friend Mrs. Woodyard was in here this morning,--a clever woman! My, but she is clever!"
"What is the matter with her?"
"Same thing,--Americanitis; but she"ll pull out if she will give herself half a chance."
Then he returned to Isabelle, wrote her a prescription, talked to her for ten minutes, and when she left the office she felt better, was sure it would "all come out right."
The great Dr. Potts! He served as G.o.d to several hundred neurasthenic women. Born in a back street of a small town, he had emerged into the fashionable light after prodigious labor and exercise of will. Physically he stood six feet, with a heavy head covered with thick black hair, and deep-set black eyes. He had been well educated professionally, but his training, his medical attainments, had little to do with his success. He had the power to look through the small souls of his women patients, and he found generally Fear, and sometimes Hypocrisy,--a desire to evade, to get pleasure and escape the bill. These he bullied. Others he found struggling, feeble of purpose, desiring light, willingly confessing their weakness, and begging for strength. These he despised; he gave them drugs and flattered them. There were some, like Conny, who were perfectly poised, with a plain philosophy of selfishness. These he understood, being of fellow clay, and plotted with them how to entrap what they desired.
Power! That was Potts"s keynote,--power, effectiveness, accomplishment, at any and all cost. He was the spirit of the city, nay of the country itself!
"Results--get results at all costs," that was the one lesson of life which he had learned from the back street, where luckier men had shouldered him.... "I must supply backbone," he would say to his patients. "I am your temporary dynamo!"
To Isabelle this ma.s.s of energy, Dr. Alexander Potts, seemed like the incarnate will to live of the great city. After her visit at his office she came out into the sharp air, the shrill discords of the busy streets, attuned--with purpose,--"I am going to be well now! I am going to do this.
Life will arrange itself, and at last I shall be able to live as others live." This borrowed purpose might last the day out, and she would plunge into a dozen matters; or it might wear off in an hour or two. Then back she went the next day to be keyed up once more.
"Do something! Deliver the goods, no matter what goods or how you get them into the premises!" Potts thundered, beating the desk in the energy of his lecture. "Live! That"s what we must all do. Never mind _how_ you live,--don"t waste good tissue worrying over that. _Live!_"
Dr. Potts was an education to Isabelle. His moods of brutality and of sympathy came like the shifting shadows of a gusty day. His perfectly material philosophy frightened her and allured her. He was Mephistopheles,--one hand on the medicine chest of life, the other pointing satirically towards the towered city.
"See, my child," he purred; "I will tinker this little toy of your body for you; then run along down there and play with your brothers and sisters."
In the mood of reaction that the neurasthenic must meet, the trough of the wave, Isabelle doubted. Potts had not yet found the key to her mechanism; the old listless cloud befogged her still. After a sleepless night she would sit by her window, high up in the mountain of stone, and look out over the city, its voice dull at this hour of dawn,--a dozing monster.
Something like terror filled her at these times, fear of herself, of the slumbering monster, so soon to wake and roar. "Act, do!" thundered Potts; "don"t think! Live and get what you want...." Was that all? The peaceful pastures at Grafton, the still September afternoon when the Colonel died, the old man himself,--there was something in them beyond mere energy, quite outside the Potts philosophy.
Once she ventured to suggest this doubt to Cornelia Woodyard, who, being temporarily in need of a bracer, had resorted to "old Pot." She had planned to go to the opera that night and wanted to "be herself."
"I wonder if he"s right about it all," said Isabelle; "if we are just machines, with a need to be oiled now and then,--to take this drug or that?
Is it all as simple as he makes out? All just autointoxication, chemistry, and delusion?"
"You"re ill,--that"s why you doubt," Conny replied with tranquil positiveness. "When you"ve got the poison out of your system, you"ll see, or rather you won"t see crooked,--won"t have ideas."
"It"s all a formula?"
Conny nodded, shutting her large mouth firmly.
"And he has the key. You are merely an organ, and he pulls out this stop or that; gives you one thing to take and then another. You tell him this dotty idea you"ve got in your head and he"ll pull the right stop to shake it out."
"I wonder! Some days I feel that I must go away by myself, get out of all the noise, and live up among the mountains far off--"