"So you were quite satisfied, John?" his wife asked as she kissed him good-night.
"Perfectly—it was the right thing—every way—all but Darnell's rot; and that didn't do much harm."
So the two went to their rest perfectly satisfied with themselves and their world. Lane's last conscious thought was a jumble of equipment bonds, and the idea of his wife at the head of a long dinner table in some very grand house—in New York.
The Darnells had a farm a few miles out of Torso, and this spring they had given up their house on the square and moved to the farm permanently. Bessie said it was for Mrs. Darnell's health; men said that the lawyer was in a tight place with the banks; and gossip suggested that Darnell preferred being in Torso without his wife whenever he was there. The farm was on a small hill above a sluggish river, and was surrounded by a growth of old sycamores and maples. There was a long stretch of fertile fields in front of the house, dotted by the huge barns and steel windmills of surrounding farms.
One Sunday in early May the Lanes were riding in the direction of the Darnell place, and Isabelle persuaded her husband to call there. "I promised to ride out here and show him the horses," she explained. The house was a shabby frame affair, large for a farmhouse, with porticoes and pillars in Southern style. They found the Darnells with the Falkners in the living-room. Tom Darnell was reading an Elizabethan play aloud, rolling out the verse in resounding declamation, punctuated by fervid appreciation,—"God! but that's fine!" "Hear this thing sing." "Just listen to this ripper."
"O God! O God! that it were possibleTo undo things done; to call back yesterday!That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass,To untell the days, and to redeem the hours!" …
When the Lanes had found chairs before the fire, he kept on reading, but with less enthusiasm, as if he felt an alien atmosphere. Falkner listened to the lines with closed eyes, his grim jaw relaxed, the deep frown smoothed. Bessie stroked a white cat,—it was plain that her thoughts were far away. Mrs. Darnell, who looked slovenly but pretty, stared vacantly out of the window. The sun lay in broad, streaks on the dusty floor; there was an air of drowsy peace, broken only by the warm tones of the lawyer as his voice rose and fell over the spirited verse. Isabelle enjoyed it all; here was something out of her usual routine. Darnell's face, which reflected the emotion of the lines, was attractive to her. He might not be the "right sort"; but he was unusual…. Finally Darnell flung the book into the corner and jumped up.
"Here I am boring you good people with stuff dead and gone these hundreds of years. Falkner always starts me off. Let's have a drink and take a look at the horses."
The living-room was a mess of furniture and books, wineglasses, bottles, wraps, whips, and riding-boots. Lane looked it over critically, while Darnell found some tumblers and poured out wine. Then they all went to the stable and dawdled about, talking horse. The fields were green with the soft grass, already nearly a foot high. Over the house an old grape-vine was budding in purple balls. There was a languor and sweetness to the air that instigated laziness. Although Lane wished to be off, Isabelle lingered on, and Darnell exclaimed hospitably: "You stay to dinner, of course! It is just plain dinner, Mrs. Lane,"—and he swept away all denial. Turning to his wife, who had said nothing, he remarked, "It's very good of them to come in on us like this, isn't it, Irene?"
Mrs. Darnell started and mumbled:—
"Yes, I am sure!"
His manners to his wife were always perfect, deferential,—why should she shrink before him? Isabelle wondered…. Dinner, plentiful and appetizing, was finally provided by the one negro woman. Darnell tried to talk to Lane, but to Isabelle's surprise her husband was at a disadvantage:—the two men could not find common ground. Then Darnell and Falkner quoted poetry, and Isabelle listened. It was all very different from anything she knew. While the others waited for their coffee, Darnell showed her the old orchard,—"to smell the first blossoms." It was languorously still there under the trees, with the misty fields beyond. Darnell said dreamily:—
"This is where I'd like to be always,—no, not six miles from Torso, but in some far-off country, a thousand miles from men!"
"You, a farmer!" laughed Isabelle. "And what about Congress, and the real anarchists?"
"Oh, you cannot understand! You do not belong to the fields as I do." He pointed ironically to her handsome riding skirt. "You are of the cities, of people. You will flit from this Indiana landscape one day, from provincial Torso, and spread your gay wings among the houses of men. While I—" He made a gesture of despair,—half comic, half serious,—and his dark face became gloomy.
Isabelle was amused at what she called his "heroics," but she felt interested to know what he was; and it flattered her that he should see her "spreading gay wings among the houses of men." These days she liked to think of herself that way.
"You will be in Washington, while we are still in Torso!" she answered.
"Maybe," he mused. "Well, we play the game—play the game—until it is played out!"
'He is not happy with his wife,' Isabelle concluded sagely; 'she doesn't understand him, and that's why she has that half-scared look.'
"I believe you really want to play the game as much as anybody," she ventured with a little thrill of surprise to find herself talking so personally with a man other than her husband.
"You think so?" he demanded, and his face grew wistful. "There is nothing in the game compared with the peace that one might have—"
Lane was calling to her, but she lingered to say:—
"How?"
"Far away—with love and the fields!"
They walked back to where John was holding the horses. She was oddly fluttered. For the first time since she had become engaged a man had somehow given her that special sensation, which women know, of confidence between them. She wished that John had not been so anxious to be off, and she did not repeat to him Darnell's talk, as she usually did every small item. All that she said was, after a time of reflection, "He is not a happy man."
"Who?"
"Mr. Darnell."
"From what I hear he is in a bad way. It is his own fault. He has plenty of ability,—a splendid chance."
She felt that this was an entirely inadequate judgment. What interested the man was the net result; what interested the woman was the human being in whom that result was being worked out. They talked a little longer about the fermenting tragedy of the household that they had just left, as the world talks, from a distance. But Isabelle made the silent reservation,—'she doesn't understand him—with another woman, it would be different.'…
Their road home lay through a district devastated by the mammoth sheds of some collieries. A smudged sign bore the legend:—
Lane pulled up his horse and looked carefully about the place. Then he suggested turning west to examine another coal property.
"I suppose that Freke man is awfully rich," Isabelle remarked, associating the name of the coal company with its president; "but he's so common,—I can't see how you can stand him, John!"
Lane turned in his saddle and looked at the elegant figure that his wife made on horseback.
"He isn't half as interesting as Tom Darnell or Rob," she added.
"I stand him," he explained, smiling, "for the reason men stand each other most often,—we make money together."
"Why, how do you mean? He isn't in the railroad."
"I mean in coal mines," he replied vaguely, and Isabelle realized that she was trespassing on that territory of man's business which she had been brought up to keep away from. Nevertheless, as they rode homeward in the westering golden light, she thought of several things:—John was in other business than the railroad, and that puffy-faced German-American was in some way connected with it; business covered many mysteries; a man did business with people he would not ordinarily associate with. It even crossed her mind that what with sleep and business a very large part of her husband's life lay quite beyond her touch. Perhaps that was what the Kentuckian meant by his ideal,—to live life with some loved one far away in companionship altogether intimate.
But before long she was thinking of the set of her riding-skirt, and that led to the subject of summer gowns which she meant to get when she went East with her mother, and that led on to the question of the summer itself. It had been decided that Isabelle should not spend another summer in the Torso heat, but whether she should go to the Connecticut place or accept Margaret Lawton's invitation to the mountains, she was uncertain. Thus pleasantly her thoughts drifted on into her future.
If Isabelle had been curious about her husband's interest in the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, she might have developed a highly interesting chapter of commercial history, in which Mr. Freke and John Lane were enacting typical parts.
The Atlantic and Pacific railroad corporation is, as may easily be inferred, a vast organism, with a history, a life of its own, lying like a thick ganglia of nerves and blood-vessels a third of the way across our broad continent, sucking its nourishment from thousands of miles of rich and populous territory. To write its history humanly, not statistically, would be to reveal an important chapter in the national drama for the past forty years,—a drama buried in dusty archives, in auditors' reports, vouchers, mortgage deeds, general orders, etc. Some day there will come the great master of irony, the man of insight, who will make this mass of routine paper glow with meaning visible to all!
Meanwhile this Atlantic and Pacific, which to-day is a mighty system, was once only a handful of atoms. There was the period of Birth; there was the period of Conquest; and finally there has come the period of Domination. Now, with its hold on the industry, the life of eight states, complete, like the great Serpent it can grumble, "I lie here possessing!"
Farrington Beals came to be President of the Atlantic and Pacific at the close of the period of Conquest. The condottieri leaders, those splendid railroad brigands of the seventies and eighties, had retired with "the fruits of their industry." To Farrington Beals and his associate was left the care of the orchard. It was their task to solidify a conglomerate mass of interest-bearing burden, to operate the property with the greatest efficiency possible, in order that it might support the burdens laid upon it and yet other burdens to come as the land waxed rich,—all burdens being ultimately passed to the broad back of the Public, where burdens seem naturally to belong. To this end, Beals men, as they were called, gradually replaced throughout the length and breadth of the system the old operatives, whose methods belonged to the coarse days of brigandage! These Beals men were youngsters,—capable, active, full of "jump," with the word "traffic, traffic" singing always in their ears. Beals was a splendid "operator," and he rapidly brought the Atlantic and Pacific into the first rank of the world's railroads. That shrewd and conservative statesman, Senator Alonzo Thomas (who had skilfully marshalled the legal and political forces during the period of Conquest) was now chairman of the Board, and he and the President successfully readjusted the heterogeneous mass of bonds and stocks, notes and prior liens, taking advantage of a period of optimistic feeling in the market to float a tremendous general mortgage. When this "Readjustment" had been successfully put through, the burden was some forty or fifty millions larger than before,—where those millions went is one of the mysteries to reward that future Carlyle!—but the public load was adjusted more trimly. So it was spoken of as a "masterly stroke of finance," and the ex-statesman gained much credit in the highest circles.
The Senator and the President are excellent men, as any financier will tell you. They are charitable and genial, social beings, members of clubs, hard working and intelligent, public spirited, too,—oh, the very best that the Republic breeds! To see Farrington Beals, gray-haired, thoughtful, almost the student, clothed in a sober dark suit, with a simple flower in the buttonhole, and delicate glasses on the bridge of his shapely nose,—to see him modestly enter the general offices of the Atlantic and Pacific, any one would recognize an Industrial Flywheel of society. To accompany him over the system in his car, with a party of distinguished foreign stockholders, was in the nature of a religious ceremony, so much the interests of this giant property in his care seemed allied with the best interests of our great land!
Thus Beals men ran the road,—men like John Hamilton Lane, railroad men to the core, loyal men, devoted to the great A. and P. And traffic increased monthly, tonnage mounted, wheels turned faster, long freight trains wound their snaky coils through the Alleghanies, over the flat prairies, into Eastern ports, or Western terminals—Traffic, Traffic! And money poured into the treasury, more than enough to provide for all those securities that the Senator was so skilled in manufacturing. All worked in this blessed land of freedom to the glory of Farrington Beals and the profit of the great A. and P.
What has Isabelle to do with all this? Actually she was witness to one event,—rather, just the surface of it, the odd-looking, concrete outside! An afternoon early in her married life at Torso, she had gone down to the railroad office to take her husband for a drive in the pleasant autumn weather. As he was long in coming to meet her, she entered the brick building; the elevator boy, recognizing her with a pleasant nod, whisked her up to the floor where Lane had his private office. Entering the outer room, which happened to be empty at this hour, she heard voices through the half-open door that led to the inner office. It was first her husband's voice, so low that she could not hear what he was saying. Presently it was interrupted by a passionate treble. Through the door she could just see John's side face where he was seated at his desk,—the look she liked best, showing the firm cheek and jaw line, and resolute mouth. Over his desk a thin, roughly dressed man with a ragged reddish beard was leaning on both arms, and his shoulders trembled with the passion of his utterance.
"Mr. Lane," he was saying in that passionate treble, "I must have them cars—or I shall lose my contract!"
"As I have told you a dozen times, Mr. Simonds, I have done my best for you. I recognize your trouble, and it is most unfortunate,—but there seems to be a shortage of coalers just now."
"The Pleasant Valley company get all they want!" the man blurted out.
Lane merely drummed on his desk.
"If I can't get cars to ship my coal, I shall be broke, bankrupt," the thin man cried.
"I am very sorry—"
"Sorry be damned! Give me some cars!"
"You will have to see Mr. Brundage at St. Louis," Lane answered coldly. "He has final say on such matters for the Western division. I merely follow orders."
He rose and closed his desk. The thin man with an eloquent gesture turned and rushed out of the office, past Isabelle, who caught a glimpse of a white face working, of teeth chewing a scrubby mustache, of blood-shot eyes. John locked his desk, took down his hat and coat, and came into the outer office. He kissed his wife, and they went to drive behind the Kentucky horses, talking of pleasant matters. After a time, Isabelle asked irrelevantly:—
"John, why couldn't you give that man the cars he wanted?"
"Because I had no orders to do so."
"But aren't there cars to be had when the other company gets them?"
"There don't happen to be any cars for Simonds. The road is friendly to Mr.Freke."
And he closed his explanation by kissing his wife on her pretty neck, as though he would imply that more things than kisses go by favor in this world. Isabelle had exhausted her interest in the troubled man's desire for coal cars, and yet in that little phrase, "The road is friendly to Mr. Freke," she had touched close upon a great secret of the Beals regime. Unbeknownst to her, she had just witnessed one of those little modern tragedies as intense in their way as any Caesarian welter of blood; she had seen a plain little man, one of the negligible millions, being "squeezed," in other words the operation in an ordinary case of the divine law of survival. Freke was to survive; Simonds was not. In what respects Simonds was inferior to Freke, the Divine Mind alone could say. When that convulsive face shot past Isabelle in Lane's office, it was merely the tragic moment when the conscious atom was realizing fully that he was not to be the one to survive! The moment when Suspense is converted into Despair….
Nor could Isabelle trace the well-linked chain of cause and effect that led from Simonds about-to-be-a-bankruptviaFreke and the Pleasant Valley Coal Company through the glory of the A. and P. (incidentally creating in the Senator his fine patriotism and faith in the future of his country) to her husband's check-book and her own brilliant little dinner, "where they could afford to offer champagne." But in the maze of earthly affairs all these unlike matters were related, and the relationship is worth our notice, if not Isabelle's. If it had been expounded to her, if she had seen certain certificates of Pleasant Valley stock lying snugly side by side with Torso Northern bonds and other "good things" in her husband's safe,—and also in the strong boxes of Messrs. Beals, Thomas, Stanton,et al., she would have said, as she had been brought up to say, "that is my husband's affair."…
The Atlantic and Pacific, under the shrewd guidance of the amiable Senator, was a law-abiding citizen, outwardly. When the anti-rebate laws were passed, the road reformed; it was glad to reform, it made money by reforming. But within the law there was ample room for "efficient" men to acquire more money than their salaries, and they naturally grasped their opportunities, as did the general officers. Freke, whom Isabelle disliked, with her trivial woman's prejudice about face and manners, embodied a Device,—in other words he was an instrument whereby some persons could make a profit, a very large profit, at the expense of other persons. The A. and P. 'was friendly to Freke.' The Pleasant Valley Coal Company never wanted cars, and it also enjoyed certain other valuable privileges, covered by the vague term "switching," that enabled it to deliver its coal into the gaping hulls at tidewater at seventy to eighty cents per ton cheaper than any of its competitors in the Torso district. No wonder that the Pleasant Valley company, with all this "friendliness" of the A. and P., prospered, and that Mr. Freke, under one name or another, swallowed presently, at a bargain, the little mine that the man Simonds had struggled to operate, as well as thousands of acres of bituminous coal lands along the Pleasant River, and along the Torso Northern road. (Perhaps the inwardness of that Inspection Party can now be seen, also.) The signs of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company and its aliases squatted here and there all through the Torso coal region. As the Senator would say, it was a very successful business, "thanks to the initiative of Mr. Freke." And that poor Simonds, who had amply demonstrated his inability to survive, his utter lack of adaptation to his environment, by not being able to be friendly with the great A. and P., went—where all the inefficient, non-adaptable human refuse goes—to the bottom.Bien entendu!
Freke was the Pleasant Valley Coal Company,—that is, he was its necessary physiognomy,—but really the coal company was an incorporated private farm of the officers and friends of the A. and P.,—an immensely profitable farm. Lane in his callow youth did not know this fact; but he learned it after he had been in Torso a few weeks. He was quick to learn, a typical Beals man, thoroughly "efficient," one who could keep his eyes where they belonged, his tongue in his mouth, and his ears open. As he told Isabelle that Sunday afternoon, "he had had many business dealings with Freke," alias the Pleasant Valley Company, etc., and they had been uniformly profitable.
For the fatherly Senator and the shrewd Beals believed that the "right sort" should make a "good thing"; they believed in thrift. In a word, to cut short this lengthy explanation, the great Atlantic and Pacific, one of the two or three most efficiently operated railroads in the United States, was honeycombed with that common thing "graft," or private "initiative"! From the President's office all the way down to subordinates in the traffic department, there were "good things" to be enjoyed. In that growing bunch of securities that Lane was accumulating in his safe, there were, as has been said, a number of certificates of stock in coal companies—and not small ones.
And this is why Lane maintained social as well as financial relations with the coarse Mr. Freke. And this is why, also, Lane felt that they could afford "the best," when they undertook to give a dinner to the distinguished gentlemen from New York. Of course he did not explain all this to Isabelle that pleasant Sunday afternoon. Would Isabelle have comprehended it, if he had? Her mind would have wandered off to another dinner, to that cottage at Bedmouth, which she thought of taking for the summer, or to the handsome figure that John made on horseback. At least nine out of ten American husbands would have treated the matter as Lane did,—given some sufficient general answer to their wives' amateurish curiosity about business and paid their figures due compliments, and thought complacently of the comfortable homes to which they were progressing and the cheerful dinners therein,—all, wife, home, dinner, the result of their fortunate adaptation to the environments they found themselves in….
Perhaps may be seen by this time the remote connection between that tragic gesture of Frank Simonds on the Saturday afternoon, calling on heaven and the Divine Mind that pitilessly strains its little creatures through the holes of a mighty colander—between that tragic gesture, I say, and Isabelle's delightful dinner of ten courses,—champagne and terrapin!
* * * * *
But this tiresome chapter on the affairs of the Atlantic and Pacific railroad,—will it never be done! So sordid, so commonplace, so newspapery, so—just what everything in life is—when we might have expected for the dollar and a quarter expended on this pound of wood pulp and ink,—something less dull than a magazine article; something about a motor-car and a girl with a mischievous face whom a Russian baron seeks to carry away by force and is barely thwarted by the brave American college youth dashing in pursuit with a new eighty h. p., etc., etc. Or at least if one must have a railroad in a novel (when every one knows just what a railroad is), give us a private car and the lovely daughter of the President together with a cow-punching hero, as in Bessie's beloved story. But an entire chapter on graft and a common dinner-party with the champagne drunk so long ago—what a bore!
And yet in the infinite hues of this our human life, the methods by which our substantial hero, John Hamilton Lane, amassed his fortune, are worthy of contemplation. There is more, O yawning reader, in the tragic gesture of ragged-bearded Frank Simonds than in some tons of your favorite brand of "real American women"; more in the sublime complacency of Senator Alonzo Thomas, when he praised "that great and good man," and raised to his memory his glass of Pommery brut, triple sec, than in all the adventures of soldiers of fortune or yellow cars or mysterious yachts or hectic Russian baronesses; more—at least for the purpose of this history—in John's answer to Isabelle's random inquiry that Sunday afternoon than in all the "heart-interest" you have absorbed in a twelvemonth. For in the atmosphere of the ACTS here recorded, you and I, my reader, live and have our being, such as it is—and also poor Frank Simonds (who will never appear again to trouble us). And to the seeing eye, mystery and beauty lie in the hidden meaning of things seen but not known….
Patience! We move to something more intimate and domestic, if not more thrilling.
The child was coming!
When Isabelle realized it, she had a shock, as if something quite outside her had suddenly interposed in her affairs. That cottage at Bedmouth for the summer would have to be given up and other plans as well. At first she had refused to heed the warning,—allowed John to go away to New York on business without confiding in him,—at last accepted it regretfully. Since the terrifying fear those first days in the Adirondack forest lest she might have conceived without her passionate consent, the thought of children had gradually slipped out of her mind. They had settled into a comfortable way of living, with their plans and their expectations. "That side of life," as she called it, was still distasteful to her,—she did not see why it had to be. Fortunately it did not play a large part in their life, and the other, the companionable thing, the being admired and petted, quite satisfied her. Children, of course, sometime; but "not just yet."
"It will be the wrong time,—September,—spoil everything!" she complained to Bessie.
"Oh, it's always the wrong time, no matter when it happens. But you'll get used to it. Rob had to keep me from going crazy at first. But in the end you like it."
"It settles Bedmouth this year!"
"It is a bore," Bessie agreed sympathetically, feeling sorry for herself, as she was to have spent six weeks with Isabelle. "It takes a year out of a woman's life, of course, no matter how she is situated. And I'm so fearfully ugly all the time. But you won't be,—your figure is better."
Bessie, like most childlike persons, took short views of immediate matters.She repeated her idea of child-bearing:—
"I hated it each time,—especially the last time. It did seem so unnecessary—for us…. And it spoils your love, being so afraid. But when it comes, why you like it, of course!"
John arrived from his hurried trip to New York, smiling with news. He did not notice his wife's dejected appearance when he kissed her, in his eagerness to tell something.
"There is going to be a shake-up in the road," he announced. "That's why they sent for me."
"Is there?" she asked listlessly.
"Well, I am slated for fourth Vice-president. They were pleased to say handsome things about what I have done at Torso. Guess they heard of that offer from the D. and O."
"What is fourth Vice-president?" Isabelle inquired.
"In charge of traffic west—headquarters at St. Louis!"
He expected that his wife would be elated at this fulfilment of her desires; but instead Isabelle's eyes unaccountably filled with tears. When he understood, he was still more mystified at her dejection. Very tenderly holding her in his arms, he whispered his delight into her ears. His face was radiant; it was far greater news than his promotion to the fourth vice-presidency of the A. and P.
"And you knew all this time!" he exclaimed reproachfully.
"I wasn't sure!"
He seemed to take the event as natural and joyful, which irritated her still more. As Bessie had said, "Whatever ties a woman to the home, makes her a piece of domestic furniture, the men seem to approve of!"
"What a fright I look already!" Isabelle complained, gazing at the dark circles under her eyes in the glass. She thought of Aline, whose complexion like a Jacqueminot rose had been roughened and marred. Something still virginal in her soul rebelled against it all.
"Oh, not so bad," Lane protested. "You are just a little pinched. You'll be fitter than ever when it's over!"
The man doesn't care, she thought mutinously. It seems to him the proper thing,—what woman is made for. Isabelle was conscious that she was made for much more, for her own joy and her own activity, and she hated to part with even a little of it!
He could not understand her attitude. As a man he had retained the primitive joy in the coming of the child, any child,—buthischild and the first one above all! Compared with that nothing was of the least importance. Seeing her pouting into the glass, he said reproachfully:—
"But you like children, Belle!"
And taking her again into his arms and kissing her, he added, "We'll give the little beggar a royal welcome, girl!"
His grave face took on a special look of content with the world and his share in it, while Isabelle continued to stare at herself in the glass and think of the change a child would make in her life. Thus the woman of the new generation, with her eagerness for a "large, full life," feels towards that process of nature for which the institution of marriage was primarily designed.
* * * * *
So for a time longer Isabelle tried to ignore the coming fact, to put it out of her mind, and grasp as much of her own life as she could before the life within her should deprive her of freedom. As Lane's new duties would not begin until the summer, it was arranged that Isabelle should spend the hot weeks at the Grafton farm with her mother, and then return to St. Louis for her confinement in her old home. Later they would settle themselves in the city at their leisure…. It was all so provoking, Isabelle persisted in thinking. They might have had at least a year of freedom in which to settle themselves in the new home. And she had had visions of a few months in Europe with Vickers, who was now in Rome. John might have come over after her. To give up all this for what any woman could do at any time!
As the months passed she could not evade the issue. By the time she was settled in her old room at the Farm she had grown anaemic, nervous. The coming of the child had sapped rather than created strength as it properly should have done. White and wasted she lay for long hours on the lounge near the window where she could see the gentle green hills. Here her cousin Alice Johnston found her, when she arrived with her children to make Mrs. Price a visit. The large, placid woman knelt by Isabelle's side and gathered her in her arms.
"I'm so glad, dear! When is it to be?"
"Oh, sometime in the fall," Isabelle replied vaguely, bored that her condition already revealed itself. "Did you want the first one?" she asked after a time.
"Well, not at the very first. You see it was just so much more of a risk. And our marriage was a risk without that…. I hated the idea of becoming a burden for Steve. But with you it will be so different, from the start. And then it always makes its own place, you see. When it comes, you will think you always wanted it!"
She smiled in her large human way, as if she had tested the trials of lifeand found that all held some sweet. Isabelle looked down at her thin arms.The Johnstons had four, and they were so poor! As if divining her thought,Alice said:—
"Every time I wondered how we were going to survive, but somehow we did.And now it will all be well, with Steve's new position—"
"What is that?"
"Hasn't John told you? It has just been settled; Steve is going into the A. and P.,—John's assistant in St. Louis."
"I'm so glad for you," Isabelle responded listlessly. She recalled now something that her husband had said about Johnston being a good man, who hadn't had his chance, and that he hoped to do something for him.
"Tremendous rise in salary,—four thousand," Alice continued buoyantly. "We shan't know what to do with all that money! We can give the children the best education."
Isabelle reflected that John's salary had been five thousand at Torso, and as fourth Vice-president would be ten thousand. And she still had her twenty-five hundred dollars of allowance from her father. Alice's elation over Steve's rise gave her a sudden appreciation of her husband's growing power,—his ability to offer a struggling man his chance. Perhaps he could do something for the Falkners also. The thought took her out of herself for a little while. Men were free to work out their destiny in life, to go hither and thither, to alter fate. But a woman had to bear children. John was growing all this time, and she was separated from him. She tried to believe that this was the reason for her discontent, this separation from her husband; but she knew that when she had been perfectly free, she had not shared largely in his activity….
"You must tell me all about the St. Mary's girls," Alice said. "Have you seen Aline?"
"Yes,—she has grown very faddy, I should think,—arts and crafts and all that. Isn't it queer? I asked her to visit us, but she has another one coming,—the third!"
Isabelle made a little grimace.
"And Margaret?"
"She has suddenly gone abroad with her husband—to Munich. He's given up his business. Didn't her marriage surprise you?"
"Yes, I thought she was going to marry that Englishman who was at your wedding."
"Mr. Hollenby? Yes, every one did. Something happened. Suddenly she became engaged to this Pole,—a New York man. Very well connected, and has money, I hear. Conny wrote me about him." …
So they gossiped on. When Alice rose to leave her, Isabelle held her large cool hand in hers. The older woman, whose experience had been so unlike hers, so difficult, soothed her, gave her a suggestion of other kinds of living than her own little life.
"I'm glad you are here," she said. "Come in often, won't you?"
And her cousin, leaning over to kiss her as she might a fretful child who had much to learn, murmured, "Of course, dear. It will be all right!"
The Steve Johnstons had had a hard time, as Isabelle would have phrased it.
He had been a faithful, somewhat dull and plodding student at the technical school, where he took the civil engineering degree, and had gone forth to lay track in Montana. He laid it well; but this job finished, there seemed no permanent place for him. He was heavy and rather tongue-tied, and made no impression on his superiors except that of commonplace efficiency. He drifted into Canada, then back to the States, and finally found a place in Detroit.
Here, while working for thirty dollars a week, he met Alice Johnston,—she also was earning her living, being unwilling to accept from the Colonel more than the means for her education,—and from the first he wished to marry her, attracted by her gentle, calm beauty, her sincerity, and buoyant, healthy enjoyment of life. She was teaching in a girls' school, and was very happy. Other women had always left the heavy man on the road, so to speak, marking him as stupid. But Alice Johnston was keener or kinder than most young women: she perceived beneath the large body a will, an intelligence, a character, merely inhibited in their envelope of large bones and solid flesh, with an entire absence of nervous system. He was silent before the world, but not foolish, and with her he was not long silent. She loved him, and she consented to marry him on forty dollars a week, hopefully planning to add something from her teaching to the budget, until Steve's slow power might gain recognition.
"So we married," she said to Isabelle, recounting her little life history in the drowsy summer afternoon. "And we were so happy on what we had! It was real love. We took a little flat a long way out of the city, and when I came home afternoons from the school, I got the dinner and Steve cooked the breakfasts,—he's a splendid cook, learned on the plains. It all went merrily the first months, though Aunt Harmony thought I was such a fool to marry, you remember?" She laughed, and Isabella smiled at the memory of the caustic comments which Mrs. Price had made when Alice Vance, a poor niece, had dared to marry a poor man,—"They'll be coming to your father for help before the year is out," she had said. But they hadn't gone to the Colonel yet.
"Then little Steve came, and I had to leave the school and stay at home. That was hard, but I had saved enough to pay for the doctor and the nurse. Then that piece of track elevation was finished and Steve was out of work for a couple of months. He tried so hard, poor boy! But he was never meant to be an engineer. I knew that, of course, all along…. Well, the baby came, and if it hadn't been for my savings,—why, I should have gone to the hospital!
"Just then Steve met a man he had known at the Tech, and was given that place on a railroad as clerk in the traffic department. He was doubtful about taking it, but I wasn't. I was sure it would open up, and even twenty-five dollars a week is something. So he left for Cleveland a week after the baby was born, and somehow I packed up and followed with the baby when I could.
"That wasn't the end of hard times by any means. You see Ned came the next year,—we're such healthy, normal specimens!" She laughed heartily at this admission of her powers of maternity. "And it wasn't eighteen months before Alice was coming…. Oh, I know that we belong to the thriftless pauper class that's always having children,—more than it can properly care for. We ought to be discouraged! But somehow we have fed and clothed 'em all, and we couldn't spare one o' the kiddies. There's James, too, you know. He came last winter, just after Steve had the grippe and pneumonia; that was a pull. But it doesn't seem right to—to keep them from coming—and when you love each other—"
Her eyes shone with a certain joy as she frankly stated the woman's problem, while Isabelle looked away, embarrassed. Mrs. Johnston continued in her simple manner:—
"If Nature doesn't want us to have them, why does she give us the power? … I know that is wretched political economy and that Nature really has nothing to do with the modern civilized family. But as I see other women, the families about me, those that are always worrying over having children, trying to keep out of it,—why, they don't seem to be any better off. And it is—well, undignified,—not nice, you know…. We can't spare 'em, nor any more that may come! … As I said, I believed all along that Steve had it in him, that his mind and character must tell, and though it was discouraging to have men put over him, younger men too, at last the railroad found out what he could do."
Her face beamed with pride.
"You see Steve has a remarkable power of storing things up in that big head of his. Remembers a lot of pesky little detail when he's once fixed his mind on it,—the prices of things, figures, and distances, and rates and differentials. Mr. Mason—that was the traffic manager of our road—happened to take Steve to Buffalo with him about some rate-making business. Steve, it turned out, knew the situation better than all the traffic managers. He coached Mr. Mason, and so our road got something it wanted. It was about the lumber rate, in competition with Canadian roads. Mr. Mason made Steve his assistant—did you ever think what an awful lot the rate on lumber might mean toyouand yours? It's a funny world. Because Steve happened to be there and knew that with a rate of so much a thousand feet our road could make money,—why, we had a house to live in for the first time!
"Of course," she bubbled, "it isn't just that. It's Steve's head,—an ability to find his way through those great sheets of figures the railroads are always compiling. He stores the facts up in that big round head and pulls 'em out when they are wanted. Why, he can tell you just what it would cost to ship a car of tea from Seattle to New York!"
Isabella had a vision of Steve Johnston's large, heavy head with its thick, black hair, and she began to feel a respect for the stolid man.
"John said he had great ability," she remarked. "I'm so glad it all came out right in the end."
"I had my first servant when the promotion came, and that spring we took a little house,—it was crowded in the flat, and noisy."
"You will find it so much easier now, and you will like St. Louis."
"Oh, yes! But it hasn't been really bad,—the struggle, the being poor. You see we were both well and strong, and we loved so much, and we always had the problem of how to live,—that draws you together if you have the real thing in you. It isn't sordid trying to see what a quarter can be made to do. It's exciting."
As she recalled the fight, a tender smile illuminated her face and curved her lips upward. To her poverty had not been limiting, grinding, but an exhilarating fight that taxed her resources of mind and body.
"Of course there are a lot of things you can't have. But most people have more than they know how to handle, no matter where they are!"
Isabelle was puzzled by this remark, and explained Alice Johnston's content by her age, her lack of experience, at least such experience as she had had. For life to her presented a tantalizing feast of opportunities, and it was her intention to grasp as many of these as one possibly could. Any other view of living seemed not only foolish but small-minded. Without any snobbishness she considered that her sphere and her husband's could not be compared with the Johnstons'. The Lanes, she felt, were somehow called to large issues.
Nevertheless, Isabelle could understand that Alice's marriage was quite a different thing from what hers was,—something to glorify all the petty, sordid details, to vivify the grimy struggle of keeping one's head above the social waters.
"Now," Alice concluded, "we can save! And start the children fairly. But I wonder if we shall ever be any happier than we have been,—any closer, Steve and I?"
Alice, by her very presence, her calm acceptance of life as it shaped itself, soothed Isabelle's restlessness, suggested trust and confidence.
"You are a dear," she whispered to her cousin. "I am so glad you are to be near me in St. Louis!"
Isabelle saw the fat headlines in the Pittsburg paper that the porter brought her,—"Congressman Darnell and his wife killed!" The bodies had been found at the bottom of an abandoned quarry. It was supposed that during a thunder-storm the night before, as he was driving from Torso to his farm in company with his wife, the horses had become uncontrollable and had dashed into the pit before Darnell could pull them up. He had just taken his seat in Congress. Isabelle remembered that he called the day before she left Torso, and when she had congratulated him on his election, had said jokingly: "Now I shall get after your husband's bosses, Mrs. Lane. We shan't be on speaking terms when next we meet." He seemed gay and vital. So it had ended thus for the tempestuous Kentuckian….
John was waiting for her at the station in Torso, where she was to break the journey. His face was eager and solicitous. He made many anxious inquiries about her health and the journey. But she put it all to one side.
"Tell me about the Darnells. Isn't it dreadful!"
"Yes," he said slowly, "it is very bad." Lane's voice was grave, as if he knew more than the published report.
"How could it have happened,—he was such a good driver? He must have been drunk."
"Tom Darnell could have driven all right, even if he had been drunk. I am afraid it's worse than that."
"Tell me!"
"There are all sorts of rumors. He came up from Washington unexpectedly, and his wife met him at the station with their team. They went to the hotel first, and then suddenly started for the farm in the midst of the storm. It was a terrible storm…. One story is that he had trouble with a bank; it is even said he had forged paper. I don't know! … Another story was about the Adams woman,—you know she followed him to Washington…. Too bad! He was a brilliant fellow, but he tied himself all up, tied himself all up," he observed sententiously, thus explaining the catastrophe of an unbalanced character.
"You mean it was—suicide?" Isabelle questioned.
"Looks that way!"
"How awful! and his wife killed, too!"
"He was always desperate—uncontrolled sort of fellow. You remember how he went off the handle the night of our dinner."
"So he ended it—that way," she murmured.
And she saw the man driving along the road in the black storm, his young wife by his side, with desperate purpose. She remembered his words in the orchard, his wistful desire for another kind of life. "The Adams woman, too," as John expressed it, and "he couldn't hold his horses." This nature had flown in pieces, liked a cracked wheel, in the swift revolution of life. To her husband it was only one of the messes recorded in the newspapers. But her mind was full of wonder and fear. As little as she had known the man, she had felt an interest in him altogether disproportionate to what he said or did. He was a man of possibilities, of streaks, of moods, one that could have been powerful, lived a rich life. And at thirty-three he had come to the end, where his passions and his ideals in perpetual warfare had held him bound. He had cut the knot! And she had chosen to go with him, the poor, timid wife! … Surely there were strange elements in people, Isabelle felt, not commonly seen in her little well-ordered existence, traits of character covered up before the world, fissures running back through the years into old impulses. Life might be terrible—when it got beyond your hand. She could not dismiss poor Tom Darnell as summarily as John did,—"a bad lot, I'm afraid!"
"You mustn't think anything more about it," her husband said anxiously, as she sat staring before her, trying to comprehend the tragedy. "I have arranged to take you on to-morrow. The Colonel writes that your brother Ezra is seedy,—touch of malaria, he thinks. The Colonel is looking forward a lot to your coming."
He talked on about the little domestic things, but she held that picture in the background of her mind and something within her said over and over, 'Why should it be like that for any one!'
And all the next day, on their way to St. Louis, she could not dismiss the thought from her mind: 'Why, I saw him only a few weeks ago. How well he read that poetry, as if he enjoyed it! And what he said that night at dinner he really meant,—oh, he believed it! And he was sorry for his wife,—yes, I am sure he was sorry for her. But he loved the other woman,—she understood him. And so he ended it. It's quite dreadful!'
* * * * *
The Colonel met them at the station with his new motor. His face was a bit grave as he said in answer to their inquiry:—
"No, it is not malaria, I am afraid. The doctors think it is typhoid. There has been a great deal of it in the city this summer, and the boy wouldn't take a vacation, was afraid I would stay here if he did. So I went up to Pelee, instead."
It was typhoid, and young Price died within the week. In the hush that followed the death of her brother Isabelle lay waiting for the coming of her child…. Her older brother Ezra! He was like a sturdy young tree in the forest, scarce noticed in the familiar landscape until his loss. Quiet, hard-working "Junior," as the family called him,—what would the Colonel do without him? The old man—now he was obviously old even to Isabelle—would come to her room and sit for long hours silent, as if he, too, was waiting for the coming of the new life into his house.
These two deaths so unlike, the tragic end of Darnell and her brother's sudden removal, sank deep into her, sounding to her in the midst of her own childish preoccupation with her own life, the intricacy, the mystery of all existence. Life was larger than a private garden hedged with personal ambitions. She was the instrument of forces outside her being. And in her weakness she shrank into herself.
They told her that she had given birth to a daughter—another being like herself!
Colonel Price was a great merchant, one of those men who have been the energy, the spirit of the country since the War, now fast disappearing, giving way to another type in this era of "finance" as distinguished from "business." When the final review was ended, and he was free to journey back to the little Connecticut village where three years before he had left with his parents his young wife and their one child, he was a man just over thirty, very poor, and weak from a digestive complaint that troubled him all his life. But the spirit of the man was unbroken. Taking his little family with him, he moved to St. Louis, and falling in there with a couple of young men with like metal to himself, who happened also to possess some capital, he started the wholesale hardware business of Parrott, Price, and Co., which rapidly became the leading house in that branch of trade throughout the new West. The capital belonged to the other men, but the leadership from the start to Colonel Price. It was his genius as a trader, a diviner of needs, as an organizer, that within twenty years created the immense volume of business that rolled through the doors of their old warehouse. During the early years the Colonel was the chief salesman and spent his days "on the road" up and down the Mississippi Valley, sleeping in rough country taverns, dining on soda biscuit and milk, driving many miles over clayey, rutty roads,—dealing with men, making business.
Meanwhile the wife—her maiden name was Harmony Vickers—was doing her part in that little brick house which the Colonel had taken Lane to see. There she worked and saved, treating her husband's money like a sacred fund to be treasured. When the colonel came home from his weekly trips, he helped in the housework, and nursed the boy through the croup at night, saving his wife where he could. It was long after success had begun to look their way before Mrs. Price would consent to move into the wooden cottage on a quiet cross street that the Colonel wanted to buy, or employ more than one servant. But the younger children as they came on, first Vickers, then Isabelle, insensibly changed the family habits,—also the growing wealth and luxury of their friends, and the fast increasing income of the Colonel, no longer to be disguised. Yet when they built that lofty brick house in the older quarter of the city, she would have but two servants and used sparingly the livery carriage that her husband insisted on providing for her. The habit of fearsome spending never could wholly be eradicated. When the Colonel had become one of the leading merchants of the city, she consented grudgingly to the addition of one servant, also a coachman and a single pair of horses, although she preferred the streetcars on the next block as safer and less troublesome; and she began gradually to entertain her neighbors, to satisfy the Colonel's hospitable instincts, in the style in which they entertained her.
Mrs. Price had an enormous pride in the Colonel and in his reputation in St. Louis, a pride that no duke's wife could exceed. It was the Colonel who had started the movement for a Commercial Association and was its first president. As his wife she had entertained under her roof a President of the United States, not to mention a Russian prince and an English peer. It was the Colonel, as she told her children, who had carried through the agitation for a Water Commission; who urged the Park system; who saved the Second National Bank from failure in the panic days of ninety-three. She knew that he might have been governor, senator, possibly vice-president, if it had not been for his modesty and his disinclination to dip into the muddy pool of politics. As she drove into the city on her errands she was proudly conscious that she was the wife of the best-known private citizen, and as such recognized by every important resident and every quick-witted clerk in the stores where she dealt. To be plain Mrs. Ezra Price was ample reward for all the hardship and deprivation of those beginning years!
She was proud, too, of the fact that the money which she spent was honest money. For the hardware merchant belonged to the class that made its fortunes honestly, in the eye of the Law and of Society, also. Although latterly his investments had carried him into real estate, railroads, and banks, nevertheless it was as the seller of hardware that he wished to be known. He was prouder of the Lion brand of tools than of all his stock holdings. And though for many years a director in the Atlantic and Pacific and other great corporations, he had always resolutely refused to be drawn into the New York whirlpool; he was an American merchant and preferred to remain such all his life rather than add a number of millions to his estate "by playing faro in Wall Street."
The American merchant of this sort is fast disappearing, alas! As a class it has never held that position in the East that it had in the West. In the older states the manufacturer and the speculator have had precedence. Fortunes built on slaves and rum and cotton have brought more honor than those made in groceries and dry goods. Odd snobbery of trade! But in that broad, middle ground of the country, its great dorsal column, the merchant found his field, after the War, to develop and civilize. The character of those pioneers in trade, men from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, was such as to make them leaders. They were brave and unselfish, faithful, and trusting of the future. With the plainest personal habits and tastes, taking no tarnish from the luxury that rose about them, seeing things larger than dollars on their horizon, they made the best aristocracy that this country has seen. Their coat of arms bore the legend: Integrity and Enterprise.
For their fortunes were built not speculatively, but on the ancient principles of trade, of barter between men, which is to divine needs and satisfy them, and hence they are the only fortunes in our rich land that do not represent, to some degree, human blood, the sacrifice of the many for the few. They were not fattened on a protective tariff, nor dug in wild speculation out of the earth, nor gambled into being over night on the price of foodstuffs, nor stolen from government lands, nor made of water in Wall Street. These merchants earned them, as the pedler earns the profit of his pack, as the farmer reaps the harvest of his seed. They earned them by labor and sagacity, and having them, they stood with heads erect, looking over their world and knowing that such as it is they helped to build it.
The day of the great merchant has already gone. Already the names of these honorable firms are mere symbols, cloaking corporate management, trading on the old personalities. No one saw the inevitable drift clearer than Colonel Price. In common with his class he cherished the desire of handing on the structure that he had built to the next generation, with the same sign-manual over the door,—to his son and his grandson. So he had resisted the temptation to incorporate the business and "take his profits." There was a son to sit in his seat. The sons of the other partners would not be fit: Starbird's only son, after a dissipated youth, was nursing himself somewhere on the Riviera; his daughter had married an Easterner, and beyond the quarterly check which the daughter and son received from the business, this family no longer had a share in it. As for Parrott there was a younger son serving somewhere in the immense establishment, but he had already proved his amiable incapacity for responsibility. The second generation, as the Colonel was forced to admit, was a disappointment. Somehow these merchants had failed to transmit the iron in their blood to their children. The sons and sons-in-law either lacked ability and grit, or were frankly degenerate,—withered limbs!
With the Colonel it had promised to be different; that first boy he had left behind when he went to the War had grown up under his eye, was saturated with the business idea. Young Ezra had preferred to leave the military academy where he had been at school and enter the store at eighteen. At twenty-six he had been made treasurer of the firm, only a few months before his death…. The Colonel's thin figure bent perceptibly after that autumn of ninety-seven. He erected a pseudo-Greek temple in Fairview Cemetery, with the name Price cut in deep Roman letters above the door, to hold the ashes of his son,—then devoted all his energies to measures for sanitary reform in the city. He was a fighter, even of death….
Vickers had cabled at once when the news reached him that he was sailing for home. He and Isabelle had inherited their mother's nervous constitution and had come later in the family fortunes. They had known only ease and luxury, tempered as it was by their father's democratic simplicity and their mother's plain tastes. Insensibly they had acquired the outlook of the richer generation, the sense of freedom to do with themselves what they pleased. Both had been sent East to school,—to what the Colonel had been told were the best schools,—and Vickers had gone to a great university.
There for a time the boy had tried to compete in athletics, as the one inevitable path of ambition for an American boy at college; but realizing soon that he was too slightly built for this field, he had drifted into desultory reading and sketching for the college comic paper. Then a social talent and a gift for writing music gave him the composition of the score for the annual musical play. This was a hit, and from that time he began to think seriously of studying music. It was agreed in the family that after his graduation he should go abroad "to see what he could do." Ezra had already taken his place in the hardware business, and the younger son could be spared for the ornamental side of life, all the more as he was delicate in health and had not shown the slightest evidence of "practical ability." So the summer that he took his degree, a creditable degree with honors in music, the Prices sailed for Europe to undertake one of those elaborate tasting tours of foreign lands that well-to-do American families still essay. In the autumn it concluded by the Colonel's establishing the family in Munich and returning to his affairs. Vickers had been in Europe most of the time since, living leisurely, studying, writing "little things" that Isabelle played over for the Colonel on the piano.
* * * * *
Now he had come home at the family call,—an odd figure it must be confessed in St. Louis, with his little pointed beard, and thin mustache, his fondness for flowing neckwear and velveteen waistcoats, his little canes and varnished boots. And he stayed on; for the family seemed to need him, in a general way, though it was not clear to him what good he could do to them and there were tempting reasons for returning to Rome. In spite of the sadness of the family situation the young man could not repress his humorous sense of the futility of all hopes built upon himself.
"Just think of me selling nails,"—he always referred to the hardware business as "selling nails,"—he said to his mother when she spoke to him of the Colonel's hope that he would try to take his brother's place. "All I know about business is just enough to draw a check if the bank will keep the account straight. Poor Colonel! That germ ought to have got me instead of Junior!"
"You owe it to your father, Vick. You can't be more useless than Bob Parrott, and your father would like to see you in the office—for a time any way."
Vickers refrained from saying that there was an unmentioned difference between him and Bob Parrott. Young Parrott had never shown the desire to do anything, except play polo; while he might,—at least he had the passion for other things. The family, he thought, took his music very lightly, as a kind of elegant toy that should be put aside at the first call of real duty. Perhaps he had given them reason by his slow preparation, his waiting on the fulness of time and his own development to produce results for the world to see. Isabelle alone voiced a protest against this absorption of the young man into the family business.
"Why, he has his own life! It is too much of a sacrifice," she remonstrated.
"Nothing that can give your father comfort is too much of a sacrifice,"Mrs. Price replied sharply.
"It can't last long," Isabelle said to Vickers. "The Colonel will see,—he is generous."
"He will see that I am no good fast enough!"
"He will understand what you are giving up, and he is too large hearted to want other people to do what they are not fitted to do."
"I don't suppose that the family fortunes need my strong right arm exactly?" the young man inquired.
"Of course not! It's the sentiment, don't you see?"
"Yes, of course, the sentiment for nails!" the young man accepted whimsically. "Poor Junior did the sentiment as well as the business so admirably, and I shall be such a hollow bluff at both, I fear."
Nevertheless, the next morning Vickers was at breakfast on time, and when the Colonel's motor came around at eight-thirty, he followed his father into the hall, put on an unobtrusive black hat, selected a sober pair of gloves, and leaving his little cane behind him took the seat beside his father. Their neighbor in the block was getting into his brougham at the same moment.
"Alexander Harmon," the Colonel explained, "president of the CommercialTrust Company."
They passed more of the Colonel's acquaintances on their way down the avenue, emerging from their comfortable houses for the day's work. It was the order of an industrial society, the young man realized, in a depressed frame of mind. He also realized, sympathetically, that he was occupying his brother's seat in the motor, and he was sorry for the old man at his side. The Colonel looked at him as if he were debating whether he should ask his son to stop at a barber shop and sacrifice his pointed beard,—but he refrained.
Vickers had never seen the towering steel and terra-cotta building in which the hardware business was now housed. It stood in a cloud of mist and smoke close by the river in the warehouse district. As the car drew up before its pillared entrance, the Colonel pointed with pride to the brass plaque beside the door on which was engraved the architect's name.
"Corbin did it,—you know him? They say he's the best man in America. It was his idea to sign it, the same as they do in Paris. Pretty good building, eh?"
The young man threw back his head and cast a critical glance over the twelve-story monster and again at the dwarfed classic entrance through which was pouring just now a stream of young men.
"Yes, Corbin is a good man," he assented vaguely, looking through the smoke drifts down the long crowded thoroughfare, on into a mass of telegraph wires, masts, and smokestacks, and lines of bulky freight cars. Some huge drays were backed against the Price building receiving bundles of iron rods that fell clanging into their place. Wagons rattled past over the uneven pavement, and below along the river locomotives whistled. Above all was the bass overtone of the city, swelling louder each minute with the day's work. A picture of a fair palace in the cavernous depths of a Sienna street came over the young man with a vivid sense of pain. Under his breath he muttered to himself, "Fierce!" Then he glanced with compunction at the gentle old face by his side. How had he kept so perfectly sweet, so fine in the midst of all this welter? The Colonel was like an old Venetian lord, shrewd with the wisdom of men, gentle with more than a woman's mercy; but the current that flowed by his palace was not that of the Grand Canal, the winds not those of the Levant!
But mayhap there was a harmony in this shrill battlefield, if it could be found….
Within those long double doors there was a vast open area of floor space, dotted with iron beams, and divided economically into little plots by screens, in each one of which was a desk with the name of its occupant on an enamel sign.
"The city sales department," the Colonel explained as they crossed to the bank of shooting elevators. The Colonel was obliged to stop and speak and shake hands with many men, mostly in shirt sleeves, with hats on their heads, smoking cigars or pipes. They all smiled when they caught sight of the old man's face, and when he stopped to shake hands with some one, the man's face shone with pride. It was plain enough that the "old man" was popular with his employees. The mere handshake that he gave had something instinctively human and kind in it. He had a little habit of kneading gently the hand he held, of clinging to it a trifle longer than was needed. Every one of the six or seven hundred men in the building knew that the head of the business was at heart a plain man like themselves, who had never forgotten the day he sold his first bill of goods, and respected all his men each in his place as a man. They knew his "record" as a merchant and were proud of it. They thought him a "big man." Were he to drop out, they were convinced the business would run down, as if the main belt had slipped from the great fly-wheel of the machine shop. All the other "upstairs" men, as the firm members and managers of departments were called, were nonentities beside "our Colonel," the "whole thing," "it," as he was affectionately described.
So the progress to the elevators was slow, for the Colonel stopped to introduce his son to every man whose desk they passed or whose eye he caught.
"My boy, Vickers, Mr. Slason—Mr. Slason is our credit man, Vick—you'll know him better soon…. Mr. Jameson, just a moment, please; I want you to meet this young man!"
"If he's got any of your blood in him, Colonel, he's all right," a beefy, red-faced man jerked out, chewing at an unlighted cigar and looking Vickers hard in the face.
Even the porters had to be introduced. It was a democratic advance! But finally they reached the "upstairs" quarters, where in one corner was the Colonel's private den, partitioned off from the other offices by ground glass,—a bare space with a little old black walnut desk, a private safe, and a set of desk telephones. Here Vickers stood looking down at the turmoil of traffic in the street below, while his father glanced over a mass of telegrams and memoranda piled on his desk.
The roar of business that had begun to rumble through the streets at daybreak and was now approaching its meridian stunned the young man's nerves. Deadened by the sound of it all, he could not dissociate from the volume that particular note, which would be his note, and live oblivious to the rest…. So this was business! And what a feeble reed he was with which to prop it! Visions of that other life came thronging to his mind,—the human note of other cities he had learned to love, the placid hours of contemplation, visions of things beautiful in a world of joy! Humorously he thought of the hundreds of thousands of dollars this busy hive earned each year. A minute fraction of its profits would satisfy him, make him richer than all of it. And he suspected that the thrifty Colonel had much more wealth stored away in that old-fashioned iron safe. What was the use of throwing himself into this great machine? It would merely grind the soul out of him and spit him forth.
To keep it going,—that was the reason for sacrificing his youth, his desire. But why keep the thing going? Pride, sentiment? He did not know the Colonel's feeling of fatherhood towards all the men who worked for him, his conviction that in this enterprise which he had created, all these human beings were able to live happier lives because of him, his leadership. There was poetry in the old man, and imagination. But the young man, with his eyes filled with those other—more brilliant—glories, saw only the grime, heard only the dull roar of the wheels that turned out a meaningless flood of gold, like an engine contrived to supply desires and reap its percentage of profits.
"Father!" he cried involuntarily.
Hot words of protest were in his throat. Let some other young man be found to run the machine; or let them make a corporation of it and sell it in the market. Or close the doors, its work having been done. But give him his life, and a few dollars!
"Eh, Vick? Hungry? We'll go over to the club for luncheon in just a minute." And the old Colonel smiled affectionately at his son over his glasses.
"Not now—not just yet," Vickers said to himself, with a quick rush of comprehension.
But the "now" never seemed to come, the right moment for delivering the blow, through all those months that followed, while the young man was settling into his corner of the great establishment. When the mother or Isabelle confessed their doubts to the Colonel, the old man would say:—