"The Soul?"...
The music had come to an end, and the people were moving about them.
Cornelia came up and drawled:--
"Tom and I are going on,--will you go with us?"
When Isabelle reached her hostess, she had but one idea in her mind, and exclaimed impulsively to that somewhat bored lady:--
"Who is that man just going out? With gray hair? The tall, thin man?"
"Dr. Renault? He"s a surgeon, operates on children,--has done something or other lately."...
She smiled at Isabelle"s impulsiveness, and turned to another.
"A surgeon," Isabelle thought. "What has he to do with the soul?"
In a few moments she had a chance to repeat her question aloud to Dr.
Renault when they left the house together.
"Did you ever hear," he replied directly, "that a house divided against itself will fall?"
"Of course."
"I should say that this national disease, which we have been discussing, is one of the results of trying to live with divided souls,--souls torn, distraught!"
"And we need--?"
"A religion."
The doctor raised his hat and sauntered down the avenue.
"A religion!" Isabelle murmured,--a queer word, here at the close of Mrs.
Bertram"s pleasantly pagan Sunday afternoon, with ladies of undoubted social position getting into their motors, and men lighting cigarettes and cigars to solace them on the way to their clubs. Religion! and the need of it suggested by a surgeon, a man of science....
When the three reached the Woodyards" house, Conny paused with, "When shall I see you again?" which Isabelle understood as a polite dismissal. Cairy to her surprise proposed to walk to the hotel with her. Isabelle felt that this arrangement was not in the plan, but Conny merely waved her hand with a smile,--"By-by, children."
They sauntered up the avenue, at the pace required by Cairy"s disability.
The city, although filled with people loitering in holiday ease, had a strange air of subdued life, of Sunday peace, not disturbed even by the dashing motors. Isabelle, bubbling with the day"s impressions, was eager to talk, and Cairy, as she had found him before at the Virginia Springs, was a sympathetic man to be with. He told her the little semi-scandalous story of her recent hostess.... "And now they have settled down to bring up the children like any good couple, and it threatens to end on the "live happy ever after" note. Sam Bertram is really domestic,--you can see he admires her tremendously. He sits and listens to the music and nods his sleepy old head."
"And the--other one?" Isabelle asked, laughing in spite of the fact that she felt a little shocked.
"Who knows? ... The lady disappears at rare intervals, and there are rumors. But she is a good sort, and you see Sam admires her, needs her."
"But it is rather awful when you stop to think of it!"
"Why more awful than if Sam had stuck a knife into the other"s ribs or punctured him with a bullet? ... I think it is rather more intelligent."
Cairy did not know Renault. "Mrs. Bertram gets everybody," he said.
Isabelle felt no inclination to discuss with Cairy her talk about neurasthenia and religion. So their chatter drifted from the people they had seen to Cairy himself, his last play, "which was a rank fizzle," and the plan of the new one. One got on fast and far with Cairy, if one were a woman and felt his charm. By the time they had reached the hotel, he was counselling Isabelle most wisely how she should settle herself in New York.
"But why don"t you live in the country? in that old village Mrs. Woodyard told me about? The city is nothing but a club, a way-station these days, a sort of Fair, you know, where you come two or three times a year to see your dressmaker and hear the gossip."
"But there"s my husband!" Isabelle suggested. "You see his business is here."
"I forgot the husband,--make him change his business. Besides, men like country life."
Isabelle found her husband comfortably settled near a hot radiator, reading a novel. Lane occasionally read novels on a Sunday when there was absolutely nothing else to do. He read them slowly, with a curious interest in the world they depicted, the same kind of interest that he would take in a strange civilization, like that of the Esquimaux, where phenomena would have only an amusing significance. He dropped his gla.s.ses when his wife appeared and helped himself to a fresh cigar from the box beside him.
"Have a good time?"
It was the formula that he used for almost every occupation pursued by women. Isabelle, throbbing with her new impressions and ideas, found the question depressing. John was not the person to pour out one"s mind to when that mind was in a tumult. He would listen kindly, a.s.sent at the wrong place, and yawn at the end. Undoubtedly his life was exciting, but it had no fine shades. He was growing stout, Isabelle perceived, and a little heavy. New York life was not good for him.
"I thought Conny"s house and the people so--interesting,"--she used the universal term for a new sensation,--"didn"t you?"
"Yes,--very pleasant," he a.s.sented as he would have if it had been the Falkners or the Lawtons or the Frasers.
In the same undiscriminating manner he agreed with her other remarks about the Woodyards. People were people to him, and life was life,--more or less the same thing everywhere; while Isabelle felt the fine shades.
"I think it would be delightful to know people worth while," she observed almost childishly, "people who _do_ something."
"You mean writers and artists and that kind? I guess it isn"t very difficult," Lane replied indulgently.
Isabelle sighed. Such a remark betrayed his remoteness from her idea; she would have it all to do for herself, when she started her life in New York.
"I think I shall make over the place at Grafton," she said after a time.
Her husband looked at her with some surprise. She was standing at the window, gazing down into the cavernous city in the twilight. He could not possibly follow the erratic course of ideas through her brain, the tissue of impression and suggestion, that resulted in such a conclusion.
"Why? what do you want to do with it? I thought you didn"t care for the country."
"One must have a background," she replied vaguely, and continued to stare at the city. This was the sum of her new experience, with all its elements.
The man calmly smoking there did not realize that his life, their life, was to be affected profoundly by such trivial matters as a Sunday luncheon, a remark by Tom Cairy, the savage aspect of the great city seen through April mist, and the low vitality of a nervous organism. But everything plays its part with an impressionable character in which the equilibrium is not found and fixed. As the woman stared down into the twilight, she seemed to see afar off what she had longed for, held out her hands towards,--life.
Pictures, music, the play of interesting personalities, books, plays,--ideas,--that was the note of the higher civilization that Conny had caught. If Conny had absorbed all this so quickly, why could not she?
Cornelia Woodyard--that somewhat ordinary schoolmate of her youth--was becoming for Isabelle a powerful source of suggestion, just as Isabelle had been for Bessie Falkner in the Torso days.
CHAPTER XXIX
When Mrs. Woodyard returned to her house at nine o"clock in the evening and found it dark, no lights in the drawing-room or the library, no fire lighted in either room, she pushed the b.u.t.ton disgustedly and flung her cloak into a chair.
"Why is the house like a tomb?" she demanded sharply of the servant, who appeared tardily.
"Mrs. Woodyard was not expected until later."