When Isabelle entered the dining room, the head waiter placed her in a sheltered nook behind one of the stucco pillars, not far from the stringed instruments concealed in a little Gothic choir loft over the entrance.
There were flowers on the tables and mult.i.tudinous electric candles in pink silk shades. The open-timbered ceiling had been decorated by an artist of some fame, who had sought in vain to give to this rich feeding place of the herd the grace of an Italian palace. Two long mural paintings adorned the end walls, and six highly colored tapestries were hung at equal s.p.a.ces laterally. In spite of the large proportions of the room, it was insufferably hot and heavy with the odors of wilting flowers and perspiring humanity, somewhat perfumed, and of foods and wines. The early diners were leaving for the theatres and opera, the women trailing their rich gowns over the rugged floor as they stared about them. (They were mostly strangers from inland cities who had been attracted by the fame of this newest hotel.) Their places were quickly taken by others in couples and in parties, and the hum of talk was feebly punctuated by occasional bursts of teasing sound from the stringed instruments. Isabelle felt curiously alone, sitting here in the crowded dining room,--alone as she had not felt on the most solitary hillside of Grosvenor. She closed her eyes and saw the village in its cup among the mountains glittering white in the March sun.
The thin, pure air of the forests filled her nostrils. She was homesick--for the first time in her life! With a little shake she roused herself and turned to Fosd.i.c.k"s article that she had brought with her to the table. It was all about the progress of the socialist parties abroad, their aims and accomplishments, showing first-hand observation and knowledge; also a vivaciously critical spirit,--in short what Gossom would call "a smart article." ... There was another "serious" article on the problem of housing the poor, amply ill.u.s.trated. In the newspapers that she had glanced through on her long journey, there had been likewise much about "movements,"
political and social, speeches and societies organized to promote this interest or that, and endless references to the eternal conflict of capital and labor, in the struggle for their respective shares of the human cake.
It was the same with all the more serious magazines at the news-stand; they were filled with discussion of "movements" for the betterment of humanity, of talk about this means or that to make the world run a little more smoothly. It was proof, according to the editors, of the sound spirit of democracy, fighting for ideals, making progress along right lines. In other days Isabelle would have considered Fosd.i.c.k"s article brilliant, if not profound. She would have felt that here was something very important for serious people to know, and believed she was thinking.... To-night Fosd.i.c.k"s phrases seemed dead, like this hotel life, this hotel reading matter. Even the impa.s.sioned editorial she had seen on child-labor laws, and the article on factory inspection, and the bill to regulate the hours of labor on railroads--all the "uplift" movements--seemed dead, wooden,--part of the futile machinery with which earnest people deluded themselves that they were doing something. Would all of them, even if successful, right the wrong of life in any deep sense? ...
Isabelle laid down the magazine and looked over the room again. Her eyes fell on a party of four at one of the tables in front of her, beneath the mural painting. While the food she had ordered was being slowly put before her, she watched them. There seemed something familiar about the black back of the man at the nearer side of the table, about the way he leaned forward, gesticulating from his wrists, and also about the large woman at his right with her head turned away. After a time this head came around and looked down the room. It was Conny! Conny splendidly blond and large, in half-mourning, with a fresh touch of color on her pale face, her beautiful shoulders quite bare. And that full mouth and competent chin,--no one but Conny! Isabelle hastily looked down at her plate. She had not recognized the others at the table. Conny was seated just beneath the pink and white painting representing spring,--a mixture of Botticelli brought to date and Puvis. And Conny carried on the allegory of Flora into full-blown summer.
She was drinking her wine meditatively, and her firm chin--the Senator had said it was moulded for an empress--was slightly tilted, revealing the thick, muscular neck.
So long ago it was when Isabelle had been thrilled by her luncheon at the Woodyards". She hurried her dinner now to escape the necessity of talking to Conny when her party pa.s.sed out. But as she prepared to rise, she saw that they were coming towards her and sat down again, opening the magazine.
From it she could see them, Conny in the lead sweeping forward in that consciously unconscious manner with which she took her world. The man behind her had some trouble in keeping up with her pace; he limped, and almost tripped on Conny"s train. Isabelle saw him out of her lowered eyelids. It was Tom Cairy. They almost brushed her table as they pa.s.sed, Conny and after her Tom. Conny was drawling in her treble note, "She made a great sensation in Herndon"s piece over in London." ... And Isabelle was conscious that she was sitting alone at the hotel table, staring into vacancy, with a waiter impatiently eying the coin in her hand....
She had looked at him for half an hour, not knowing him! And suddenly she saw how dead it all was: not merely her feeling for Cairy, but her whole past, the petty things clone or felt by that petty other self, ending with the tragic fact of Vickers"s sacrifice. She had pa.s.sed through into another world.... This man who had sat there near her all the evening she had once believed that she loved more than life itself,--his mere voice had made her tremble,--this G.o.d she had created to worship! And she had not recognized him.
High up in her corner of the brick and stone cliff above the twinkling city, Isabelle knelt by the open window, looking out into the foggy night.
Unconscious of the city sounds rising in one roar from the pavement,--the voice of the giant metropolis,--she knelt there thinking of that dead past, that dead self, and of Vickers, a solemn unearthly music like the march of life in her ears. She knelt there, wide-eyed, able to see it all calmly, something like prayer struggling upwards in her heart for expression.
CHAPTER LXIX
All night long in the corridors of the cliff-city the elevator doors had clicked, as they were opened and shut on the ceaseless trips to pack away the people in the eighteen stories. In the morning they became even livelier in their effort to take down the hungry guests for breakfast and the day"s business. The corridors and the lobbies and the foyer were thronged with the same people, freshly dressed for the day, fat or lean, heavy eyed or alert, pale, nervous, with quick tones and jerky movements.
And there was a line of new arrivals before a fresh row of pale clerks. The prominent people of the city, especially the women, had already left town for the Springs or Florida or Paris or the Mediterranean, anywhere but here! Their flitting, however, had made no impression on the hotels or the honey-hives along the avenue. What they abandoned--the city in March with its theatres, opera, restaurants, and shops--the provincials came hungrily to suck. For the cast-off, the spurned, is always Somebody"s desired.
It was the same on the other side of the ferry in the railroad terminal, hurrying throngs pressing through the little wickets that bore the legend of the destination of each train,--"The Florida East Coast Limited," "New Orleans, Texas, and the South," "Washington and Virginia," etc. From this centre the strands of travel ran outwards to many beguiling points. And there were two perpetual motions,--the crowd flowing out to some joy beyond the horizon, and the crowd flowing back irresistibly to the sucking whirlpool. Always movement, change, endless going, going with these people,--the spirit of the race in their restless feet! There was always the Desirable beyond at the other end of the line. All the world that could move was in unstable flux, scurrying hither and thither in hot search for the phantom Better--change, variety--to be had for the price of a ticket.
It was a relief to be on the Pullman, seated for a time in a small fixed s.p.a.ce, free from the revolving whirlpool of restless humanity, though that fixity itself was being whirled across the land. With a sigh Isabelle leaned back and looked at the pa.s.sing country outside. The snow had long disappeared, leaving the brown earth naked and forlorn. It was the same landscape, under similar conditions, that Isabelle had gazed at the spring afternoon when she was hurrying back to meet Cairy, his violets on her breast. It seemed to her then that she was happy, with a wonderful happiness. Now she was content.... As the train rushed through the Alleghanies, the first faint touches of spring appeared in the swelling stems of the underbrush, in the full streams of yellow water, and the few spears of green gra.s.s beside the sheltering fence posts, and the soft misty atmosphere full of brooding changes over the level fields.
Isabelle became eager to get on to her journey"s end, to see her husband.
Once out there with him, whatever accident befell them, she was equal to it, would see its real meaning, would find in it Peace. She had brought with her the copy of the _People"s_ and a number of other magazines and books, and as the day waned she tried to interest herself in some of their "pleasant" stories. But her eyes wandered back to the landscape through which they were speeding, to the many small towns past which they darted,--ugly little places with ugly frame or brick buildings, stores and houses and factories, dirty and drab, unlike the homely whiteness of the Grosvenor village street. But they were strangely attracting to her eye,--these little glimpses of other lives, seen as the train sped by, at the back porches, the windows, the streets; the lives of the many fixed and set by circ.u.mstance, revolving between home and workshop, the lives of the mult.i.tude not yet evolved into ease and aspiration. But they counted, these lives of the mult.i.tude,--that was what she felt this day; they counted quite as much as here or any. She had travelled back and forth over this main artery of the Atlantic and Pacific many times from her childhood up.
But hitherto the scene had meant nothing to her; she had never looked at it before. She had whirled through the panorama of states, thinking only of herself, what was to happen to her at the end of the journey. But to-day it was _her_ country, _her_ people, _her_ civilization that she looked out on.
The millions that were making their lives in all these ugly little houses, these mills and shops, men and women together, loving, marrying, breeding, and above all living! "All of life is good!" Each one of these millions had its own drama, each to itself, as hers had been to her, with that tragic importance of being lived but once from the germ to the ultimate dust. Each one was its own epic, its own experience, and its own fulfilment. As Renault once said, "Any of the possibilities may lie in a human soul." And in that was the hope and the faith for Democracy,--the infinite variety of these possibilities!
So the literature of "movements" and causes, the effort by organization to right the human fabric, seemed futile, for the most part. If man were right with himself, square with his own soul, each one of the millions, there would be no wrongs to right by machinery, by laws, by discussion, by agitation, by theories or beliefs. Each must start with self, and right that.... Yes, the world needed a Religion, not movements nor reforms!
... Sometime during the night Isabelle was roused by the stopping of the train, and pulling aside the curtain of the window she looked out. The train was standing in the yards of a large station with many switch lights feebly winking along the tracks. At first she did not recognize the place; it might be any one of the division headquarters where the through trains stopped to change engines. But as she looked at the maze of tracks, at the dingy red brick building beyond the yards, she finally realized that it was Torso, the spot where her married life had begun. It gave her an odd sensation to lie there and look out on the familiar office building where she used to go for John--so long ago! Torso, she had felt at that time, was cramping, full of commonplace, ordinary people that one did not care to know. She had been very anxious to escape to something larger,--to St.
Louis and then to New York. She wondered what she would think of it now if she should go back,--of Mrs. Fraser and the Griscoms. Then she remembered the Falkners, and how badly it had gone since with Bessie. It was sad to think back over the years and see how it might have been different, and for the moment she forgot that if it had been different in any large sense, the result would have been different. She would not be here now, the person she was. Regret is the most useless of human states of mind.... The railroad operatives were busy with lanterns about the train, tapping wheels, filling the ice-boxes and gas-tanks, and switching cars. She could see the faces of the men as they pa.s.sed her section in the light of their lanterns. With deliberate, unconscious motions they performed their tasks. Like the face of that lad on the engine at White River, these were the faces of ordinary men, privates of the industrial world, and yet each had something about it distinctive, of its own. What kept these privates at their work, each in his place? Hunger, custom, faith? Surely something beyond themselves that made life seem to each one of them reasonable, desirable. Something not very different from the spirit which lay in her own soul, like a calming potion, which she could almost touch when she needed its strength. "For life is good--all of it!" ... and "Peace is the rightful heritage of every soul."
The train rolled on towards its destination, and she fell asleep again, rea.s.sured.
CHAPTER LXX
At the station in St. Louis a young man came forward from the crowd about the gate and raised his hat, explaining to Isabelle that he had been sent by her husband to meet her. Mr. Lane, he said further, was in court and found it impossible to be there. When she was in the cab and her trunk had been secured the young man asked:--
"Where shall I tell him? The Price house?"
A picture of the familiar empty rooms, of waiting there with her ghosts, aggravated the disappointment she had felt at not seeing John on her arrival. She hesitated.
"Could I go to the court?"
"Sure--of course; only Mr. Lane thought--"
"Get in, won"t you, and come with me," Isabelle said, interrupting him, and then as the young man shyly took the vacant seat, she asked:--
"Aren"t you Teddy Bliss? ... I haven"t seen you for--years!" She added with a smile, "Since you played baseball in your father"s back yard. How is your mother?"
It gave her a sense of age to find the son of her old friend in this smiling young man. Life was getting on apace.... The cab made its way slowly into the heart of the city, and they talked of the old times when the Blisses had been neighbors across the alley from the Prices. Isabelle wished to ask the young man about the trial. The New York paper that she had seen on the train had only a short account. But she hesitated to show her ignorance, and Teddy Bliss was too much abashed before the handsome wife of his "boss" to offer any information. Finally Isabelle asked:--
"Is the trial nearly over?"
"Pretty near the end. Cross-examination to-day. When I left, Mr. Lane was on the stand. Then come the arguments and the judge"s charge, and it goes to the jury."
And he added with irresistible impulse:--
"It"s a great case, Mrs. Lane! ... When our lawyers get after that district attorney, he won"t know what"s happened to him.... Why, the road"s secured the best legal talent that ever argued a case in this district, so they tell me. That man Brinkerhoff is a corker!"
"Indeed!" Isabelle replied, smiling at the young man"s enthusiasm for the sc.r.a.p. To him it was all a matter of legal prowess with victory to the heavy battalions.
"Federal court-rooms are in here temporarily,--crowded out of the federal building," her companion explained as the cab stopped before a grimy office building.
Isabelle had expected that the trial would be in some sort of public building, which might have at least the semblance of serving as a temple of justice. But justice, it seemed, like most else in this day, had to accommodate itself to the practical life.... Upstairs there was a small crowd about the door of the court-room, through which the young man gained admission by a whispered word to the tobacco-chewing veteran that kept the gate.
The court-room was badly lighted by two windows at the farther end, in front of which on a low platform behind a plain oak desk sat the judge, and grouped about him informally the jurors, the lawyers, and stenographers, and mixed with these the defendants and witnesses. The body of the room, which was broken by bare iron pillars, was well filled with reporters and curious persons. Isabelle sank into a vacant chair near the door and looked eagerly for her husband. At last by craning her head she caught a partial view of him where he sat behind a pillar, his face bent downwards leaning on his hand, listening with an expression of weariness to the wrangle of counsel. He was sallow, and his att.i.tude was abstracted, the att.i.tude in which he listened at board meetings or gathered the substance of a wordy report from a subordinate. It was not the att.i.tude of a criminal on trial for his honor! ...
"That"s Brinkerhoff, the big gun," young Bliss whispered to Isabelle, indicating a gentle, gray-headed, smooth-shaven man, who seemed to be taking a nap behind his closed eyes.
The judge himself was lolling back listlessly, while several men in front of him talked back and forth colloquially. The argument between counsel proceeded with polite irony and sarcastic iteration of stock phrases, "If your honor pleases," ... "My learned brother, the district attorney," ...
"The learned counsel for the defence," etc. The judge"s eyes rested on the ceiling, as if he too wished to take a nap. There was a low hum of conversation among the men grouped about the desk meanwhile, and occasionally one of the young men who had been scribbling on a pad would grasp his hat hurriedly and leave the room. Thus the proceedings dragged on.
"They are arguing about admitting some evidence," the young man at her side explained....
Isabelle, who had been living in a suppressed state of emotional excitement ever since that night three days before when she had turned from the newspapers to pack her trunk, felt a sudden limp reaction come over her.
Apparently the whole proceeding was without vitality,--a kind of routine through which all parties had to go, knowing all the time that it settled nothing,--did not much count. The judge was a plain, middle-aged man in a wrinkled sack coat,--very much in appearance what Conny would call a "bounder." The defending counsel talked among themselves or wrote letters or took naps, like the celebrated Mr. Brinkerhoff, and the counsel for the government listened or made a remark in the same placid manner. It was all very commonplace,--some respectable gentlemen engaged in a dull technical discussion over the terms of the game, in which seemingly there was no momentous personal interest involved.
"The government"s case will collapse if they can"t get those books of the coal companies in as evidence," young Bliss informed Isabelle. He seemed to understand the rules of the game,--the point at issue.
Surely the methods of modern justice are unpicturesque, unimpressive!
Compare this trial of the cause of the People against the mighty Atlantic and Pacific railroad corporation _et al_. with the trial of the robber baron dragged from his bleak castle perched above the highroad where he had laid in wait to despoil his fellow-men, weaker vessels, into the court of his Bishop,--there to be judged, to free himself if he might by grasping hot iron with his naked hand, by making oath over the bones of some saint, and if found guilty to be condemned to take the cross in the crusade for the Saviour"s sepulchre. Fantastic, that; but human--dramatic! And starkly memorable, like the row of his victim"s heads nailed along the battlements of his castle. More civilized, the modern tyrant takes the cash and lets the victim die a natural death. Or compare this tedious legal game--which does not count--with that pageant of England"s trial of a corrupt administrator at the bar of Parliament! The issues involved are hardly less vital to millions in the case of the People against the Atlantic and Pacific _et al_. than in the case of the races of India against Warren Hastings; but democracy is the essence of horse-sense. "For these gentlemen before me," the judge seemed to say, "are not criminals, no matter how the jury may render its verdict, in any ordinary sense of the term. They may have exceeded the prescribed limits in playing the game that all men play,--the great predatory game of get all you can and keep it! ... But they are not common criminals."
At last the judge leaned forward, his elbows on the desk:--
"The court orders that the papers in question be admitted as evidence pertinent to this case."