CHAPTER x.x.x
"That snipe!" Conny called Margaret"s husband, Mr. Lawrence Pole. Larry, as he was known in his flourishing days when he loafed in brokers" offices, and idiotically dribbled away his own fortune and most of his wife"s, rarely earned a better word than this epithet. "She ought to leave him--divorce him--get rid of such rubbish somehow," Conny continued with unwonted heat, as the tired motor chugged up the steep Westchester hillside on its way to Dudley Farms where the Poles lived.
"Perhaps Margaret has prejudices," Isabella suggested. "You know she used to be religious, and there"s her father, the Bishop."
"It would take a good many bishops to keep me tied to Larry!"
Conny was enjoying the early spring air, the virginal complexion of the April landscape. She surveyed the scene from Isabelle"s motor with complacent superiority. How much better she had arranged her life than either Margaret or Isabelle! After the talk with Percy the previous evening, she felt a new sense of power and competency, with a touch of grat.i.tude for that husband who had so frankly and unselfishly "accepted her point of view" and allowed her "to have her own life" without a distressing sense of wrecking anything. Conny"s conscience was simple, almost rudimentary; but it had to be satisfied, such as it was. To-day it was completely satisfied, and she took an ample pleasure in realizing how well she had managed a difficult situation,--and also in the prospect of dinner with her lover in the evening.
That morning before the motor had come for her, she had gone over with Percy the complicated situation that had developed at Albany. It was her way in a crisis to let him talk it all out first, and then later, preferably when he came to her room in the morning after his breakfast with the children, to suggest those points which she wished to determine his action. Thus her husband absorbed her views when they would make most impression and in time came to believe that they were all evolved from his inner being.... To-day when he appeared shortly before her coffee, she had glanced at him apprehensively out of her sleepy eyes. But he betrayed no sign of travail of spirit. Though naturally weary after his brief rest, he had the same calm, friendly manner that was habitual with him. So they got at once to the political situation.
She was content with the way in which she had led him, for the time at least, to resolve his doubts and suspicions. They had no reason to suspect the Senator,--he had always encouraged Woodyard"s independent position in politics and pushed him. There was not yet sufficient evidence of fraud in the hearings before the Commission to warrant aggressive action. It would be a pity to fire too soon, or to resign and lose an opportunity later. It would mean not only political oblivion, but also put him in a ridiculous light in the press, and suggest cowardice, etc. So he had gone away to attend to some matters at his office, and take an afternoon train back to Albany, with the conviction that "he must do nothing hurriedly, before the situation had cleared up." Those were his own phrases; Conny always preferred to have Percy use his own words to express his resolves.
There was only one small matter on her mind: she must see the Senator and find out--well, as much as she could discreetly, and be prepared for the next crisis....
"I don"t see why Margaret buries herself like this," Conny remarked, coming back to the present foreground, with a disgusted glance at the little settlement of Dudley Farms, a sorry combination of the suburb and the village, which they were approaching. "She might at least have a flat in the city somewhere, like others."
"Margaret wants the children to be in the country. Probably she gets less of Larry out here,--that may compensate!"
"As for the children," Conny p.r.o.nounced with lazy dogmatism, "I don"t believe in fussing. Children must camp where it"s best for the parents.
They can get fresh air in the Park."
The motor turned in at a neglected driveway, forbidding with black tree-trunks, and whirled up to the piazza of a brick house, an ugly survival of the early country mansion. Mrs. Pole, who was bending over a baby carriage within a sun parlor, came forward, a smile of welcome on her pale face. She seemed very small and fragile as she stood above them on the steps, and her thin, delicate face had the marked lines of a woman of forty. She said in her slow, Southern voice, which had a pleasant human quality:--
"I hope you weren"t mired. The roads are something awful about here. I am so glad to see you both."
When she spoke her face lost some of the years.
"It is a long way out,--one can"t exactly run in on you, Margaret! If it hadn"t been for Isabelle"s magnificent car, you might have died without seeing me!" Conny poured forth.
"It _is_ a journey; but you see people don"t run in on us often."
"You"ve got a landscape," Conny continued, turning to look across the bare treetops towards the Sound. It would have been a pleasant prospect except for the eruption of small houses on every side. "But how can you stand it the whole year round? Are there any civilized people--in those houses?" She indicated vaguely the patch of wooden villas below.
"Very few, I suppose, according to your standard, Cornelia. But we don"t know them. I pulled up the drawbridge when we first came."
Mrs. Pole"s thin lips twitched with mirth, and Conny, who was never content with mere inference, asked bluntly:--
"Then what do you do with yourselves--evenings?" Her tone reflected the emptiness of the landscape, and she added with a treble laugh, "I"ve always wondered what suburban life is like!"
"Oh, you eat and read and sleep. Then there are the children daytimes. I help teach "em. We live the model life,--flowers and shrubs in the summer, I suppose.... The Bishop was with me for a time."
The large bare drawing-room, which was sunnily lighted from the southwest, was singularly without the usual furniture of what Conny called "civilized life." There were no rugs, few chairs, but one table, such as might be made by the village carpenter and stained black, which was littered with books and magazines. There was also a large writing cabinet of mahogany,--a magnificent piece of Southern colonial design,--and before the fire a modern couch. Conny inventoried all this in a glance. She could not "make it out." "They can"t be as poor as that," she reflected, and turned to the books on the table.
"Weiniger"s _s.e.x and Character_," she announced, "Brieux"s _Maternite_, Lavedan, Stendhal, Strobel on Child Life,--well, you do read! And this?"
She held up a yellow volume of French plays. "What do you do with this when the Bishop comes?"
"The Bishop is used to me now. Besides, he doesn"t see very well, poor dear, and has forgotten his French. Have you read that book of Weiniger"s?
It is a good dose for woman"s conceit these days."
There was a touch of playful cynicism in the tone, which went with the fleeting smile. Mrs. Pole understood Cornelia Woodyard perfectly, and was amused by her. But Conny"s coa.r.s.e and determined handling of life did not fascinate her fastidious nature as it had fascinated Isabelle"s.
Conny continued to poke among the books, emitting comments as she happened upon unexpected things. It was the heterogeneous reading of an untrained woman, who was seeking blindly in many directions for guidance, for light, trying to appease an awakened intellect, and to answer certain gnawing questions of her soul....
Isabelle and Margaret talked of their visit at the Virginia Springs. In the mature face, Isabelle was seeking the blond-haired girl, with deep-set blue eyes, and sensitive mouth, that she had admired at St. Mary"s. Now it was not even pretty, although it spoke of race, for the bony features, the high brow, the thin nose, had emerged, as if chiselled from the flesh by pain.
"She has suffered," Isabelle thought, "suffered--and lived."
Conny had recounted to Isabelle on their way out some of the rumors about the Poles. Larry Pole was a weakling, had gone wrong in money matters,--nothing that had flared up in scandal, merely family transactions. Margaret had taken the family abroad--she had inherited something from her mother--and suddenly they had come back to New York, and Larry had found a petty job in the city. Evidently, from the bare house, their hiding themselves out here, most of the wife"s money had gone, too.
Pity! because Margaret was proud. She had her Virginian mother"s pride with a note of difference. The mother had been proud in the conventional way, of her family, her position,--things. Margaret had the pride of accomplishment,--of deeds. She was the kind who would have gone ragged with a poet or lived content in a sod hut with a Man. And she had married this Larry Pole, who according to Conny looked seedy and was often rather "boozy." How could she have made such a mistake,--Margaret of all women?
That Englishman Hollenby, who really was somebody, had been much interested in her. Why hadn"t she married him? n.o.body would know the reason....
The luncheon was very good. The black cook, "a relic of my mother"s establishment," as Margaret explained, gave them a few savory family dishes, and there was a light French wine. Margaret ate little and talked little, seeming to enjoy the vivacity of the other women.
"Tell about your visit to the Gorings," Conny drawled. "Percy"s cousin, Eugene Goring, who married Aline, you know. Boots in the bath-tub, and the babies running around naked, and Aline lost in the metaphysics of the arts, making chairs."
And Isabelle recounted what she had seen of Aline"s establishment in St.
Louis, with its total disregard of what Conny called the "decencies" of life. They all laughed at her picture of their "wood-nymph," as they had named Aline.
"And Eugene talking anarchy, and washing the dishes,--it sounds like a Weber and Field"s farce," gurgled Conny. "He wrote Percy about lecturing in New York,--wanted to come East. But Percy couldn"t do anything for him. It isn"t a combination to make a drawing-room impression."
"But," Margaret protested, "Aline is a person, and that is more than you can say of most of us married women. She has kept her personality."
"If I were "Gene," Conny replied contemptuously, "I"d tone her "personality" down."
"He"s probably big enough to respect it."
There followed a discussion of the woman"s part in marriage, Margaret defending independence, "the woman"s right to live for herself," and Conny taking the practical view.
"She can"t be anything any way, just by herself. She had better make the most of the material she"s got to work with--or get another helping," she added, thinking of Larry.
"And Aline isn"t happy," Isabelle remarked; "she has a look on her face as if she were a thousand miles away, and had forgotten her marriage as much as she could. Her chairs and tables are just ways of forgetting."
"But they have something to think about,--those two. They don"t vegetate."
"I should say they had,--but no anarchy in my domestic circle, thank you!"
Conny observed.
"I shouldn"t object to anarchy," sighed Margaret, with her whimsical smile.
"Margaret is bored," Isabelle p.r.o.nounced, "simply awfully bored. She"s so bored that I expect some day she will poison herself and the children, merely to find out what comes next."
"No wonder--buried in the snowdrifts out here," Conny agreed. "Isn"t there anything you want to do, even something wicked?"
"Yes," Mrs. Pole answered half seriously. "There is _one_ thing I"d like to do before I die."