In the vast eighteen-story, thousand-room New York hotel where Isabelle Lane stayed for the night on her way west, there was the usual constant bustle of arriving and departing people. The heat, the crowd, the luxury of this cliff-city with its throngs of much-dressed men and women overwhelmed Isabelle with a sense of startling unreality. It was not simply that she had been removed from the noise of city life for a number of months, secluded in the quiet of open spaces, and that the latest novelty in New York hotels contrasted sharply with primitive Grosvenor. But she found herself examining the scene, from the moment she entered the crowded foyer with its stucco-marble columns and bronze railings, its heavy hangings and warm atmosphere, with eyes that seemed to observe what was there before her for the first time. She looked at the thick rugs, the uniformed servants, the line of pale, sleek young men in the office enclosure, the swarming "guests" (according to the euphemistic slang of American hotels!),—all these women in evening gowns, much jewelled, on their way to dinner, with their attendant males; and she asked herself if it were the same world that she had always known.
The little bronze doors in the bank of elevators opened and shut, taking in and disgorging men and women, to shoot upwards to the tiers of partitioned privacy above or to hurry forth on their errands. Waiting for the hotel maid to fetch her key, Isabelle felt like a soul resurrected from a grave, come back to experience what had once been its theatre of activity and joy. She felt the tense hum of life in the activity of the clerks behind the desk, the servants hurrying on their errands, the coming and going of the horde of people, among whom watchful house detectives moved about silently. She knew that across the narrow street was another even larger cliff-city, where the same picture of life was repeating itself, and around the corner there were four or five more, and farther away dozens almost exactly like this one,—all crowded, humming with people, with the same heavy atmosphere of human beings hived together in hot air, men and women dressed like these, feeding like these in great halls, spending lavishly for comfort, pleasure, and repose! …
This mammoth caravansary was a symbol of the broad, riotously rich country,—a spiritual and material symbol, representing its thoughts, its ideals, its art, its beauty, its joy. Into these metropolitan cliff-cities flowed the stream of dominant, successful lives of the nation, seeking to find satisfaction for their efforts, their rightful triumph. Once Isabelle had had the child's pleasure in the hotel pageant. Later it had been an accepted convenience. Now she sat there looking on as from a great distance, and she said over and over wonderingly: "Can this be life? No, this is not life,—'tis not real!"
At the news-stand near by a group of men and women were loitering, the men buying theatre tickets, the women turning over the leaves of magazines, scanning lazily the titles of novels. The magazines were stacked in rows, each with a gaudy cover,—"artistic" or designed merely to capture the eye by a blaze of color. One of the women turned the leaves of several novels, idly, with a kind of fat ennui, as if loath to be tempted even by mental dissipation. Then noting a title that had somehow lodged itself with favorable associations in her brain, she said to the girl behind the counter, "You may send this up to my room."
So the work of imagination, the picture of life, the soul of the poet creator, was slipped from the pile to be sent upwards along with the other purchases of the day,—clothes and jewellery and candy,—what the woman had desired that day. This group moved on and another took its place. The books and the magazines disappeared like the theatre tickets and the cigars and cigarettes at the neighboring stand,—feeding the maw of the multitude, which sought to tickle different groups of brain cells. Gay little books, saucy little books, cheap little books, pleasant little books,—all making their bid to certain cells in the gray matter of these sated human beings! A literature composed chiefly by women for women,—tons of wood pulp, miles of linen covers, rivers of ink,—all to feed the prevailing taste, like the ribbons, the jewels, the candy, the theatre tickets! A great age, as Mr. Gossom, swelling with pride, would have said, and a great people, that has standardized its pleasures and has them marketed in convenient packages for all tastes! An age of women's ideals, a literature by women for women! … Isabelle bought a copy of Mr. Gossom's patriotic magazine for the People, and turned its fresh pages with a curiosity to see what it was like, and who was writing now. The sentimental novel by the popular English novelist that she had looked at when it first appeared came to its conclusion in this number. And it not having met with the expected popular approval, for all its sentiment, Mr. Gossom had abandoned the idyllic in favor of a startling series of articles on "Our National Crimes," plentifully and personally illustrated. Mr. Gossom would have preferred to prolong the sentimental note,—"pleasant reading," as he called it; personally he did not approve of hanging up the nation's wash in the front yard, for he himself was an investor in corporations. But what could he do? It was his business to give the People what the People wanted. And just now they wanted to be shocked and outraged by revelations of business perfidy. Another six months, perhaps, when the public was tired of contemplating rascality, the editor would find something sweet, full of country charm and suburban peace, to feed them…. On the title-page there were the old names and some new ones, but the same grist,—a "homely" story of "real life" among the tenements, a "humorous" story of the new school, an article on a marvellous invention to set the public on the gape, etc…. Fosdick had an article of a serious nature, on Trades Unions and Socialism. 'So Dickie, having ceased to roll about the world,' thought Isabelle, 'has begun to write about it.' She turned down the page at his article and looked into the advertising section. That was where thePeople'sexcelled,—in its thick advertising section. Between the automobiles and the pianolas were inserted some pages of personal puff, photographs of the coming contributors, and an account of their deeds,—the menus prepared for the coming months. Isabelle looked at the faces of the contributors, among whom was Dick's face, very smooth and serious. As a whole the photographs might be those of any Modern Order of Redmen, consciously posed before the camera of Fame. But they gave that personal touch so necessary to please the democratic taste. Thus from Aeschylus to Mr. Gossom's "literature." … It seemed no more real, no more a part of what life is in its essence, than the hotel and the sleek people thronging it.
* * * * *
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 multitudinous 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 spaces 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 Fosdick'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 illustrated. 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 Fosdick'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 Fosdick's phrases seemed dead, like this hotel life, this hotel reading matter. Even the impassioned 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 passed 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 passed, 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 passed 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 God 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.
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 space, 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 passing 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 grass 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 thePeople'sand 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 circumstance, revolving between home and workshop, the lives of the multitude not yet evolved into ease and aspiration. But they counted, these lives of the multitude,—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 washercountry,herpeople,hercivilization 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 passed 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, reassured.
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 scrap. 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 attitude was abstracted, the attitude in which he listened at board meetings or gathered the substance of a wordy report from a subordinate. It was not the attitude 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 corporationet 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 Pacificet 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."
Teddy Bliss looked chagrined. His side had been ruled against.
"They'll be sure to reverse the decision on appeal," he whispered consolatorily to his employer's wife. "An exception has been taken."
That was apparently the opinion of those concerned who were grouped about the judge's desk. There was no consternation, merely a slight movement as if to free muscles cramped by one position, a word or two among counsel. The great Brinkerhoff still wore that placid look of contemplation, as if he were thinking of the new tulip bulbs he had imported from Holland for his house up the Hudson. He was not aroused even when one of his fellow-counsel asked him a question. He merely removed his glasses, wiped them reflectively, and nodded to his colleague benignantly. He knew, as the others knew, that the case would be appealed from the verdict of the jury to a higher court, and very likely would turn up ultimately in the highest court of all at Washington, where after the lapse of several years the question at issue would be argued wholly on technicalities, and finally decided according to the psychological peculiarities of the various personalities then composing the court. The residuum of justice thus meted out to his clients—if they were not successful before in maintaining their contention—would not affect these honorable gentlemen appreciably. The corporation would pay the legal expenses of the protracted litigation, and hand the bill on to the public ultimately, and the people by their taxes would pay their share of this row…. He put on his glasses and resumed his meditation.
"Court is adjourned." At last! Isabelle stood up eagerly, anxious to catch her husband's attention. He was talking with the lawyers. The young clerk went up to him and touched his elbow, and presently Lane came down the room in the stream of reporters and lawyers bent on getting to luncheon. It was neither the place nor the time that Isabelle would have preferred for meeting her husband after their long separation. There was so much in her heart,—this meeting meant so much, must be so much for them both in all the future years. The familiar solid figure, with the reserved, impassive face came nearer; Lane reached out his hand. There were lines about the mouth, and his hair seemed markedly gray.
"John!" was all she could say.
"Glad to see you, Isabelle!" he replied. "Sorry I couldn't meet you at the station. Everything all right?"
It was his usual kindly, rather short-hand manner with her.
"Yes," she said, "everything is all right." She felt as if all the significance of her act had been erased.
"You know your mother hasn't come back from the Springs," he added, "but they are expecting you at the house."
"Can't we go somewhere and have luncheon together? I want so much to see you!" she urged.
"I wish I might, but I have these lawyers on my hands—must take them to the club for luncheon. Sorry I shall be kept here until late in the afternoon. I will put you in a cab." And he led the way to the elevator. As always he was kind and considerate. But in his equable manner was there also some touch of coldness, of aloofness from this wife, who had taken this curious opportunity to come into his affairs?
"Thank you," she faltered, as he looked down the street for a cab. "Couldn't I go somewhere about here for luncheon and come back afterwards to the court-room? I should like to wait for you."
"Why, if you want to," he replied, looking at her with surprise. And as if divining a reason for her agitation, he said: "You mustn't mind what the papers say. It won't amount to anything, either way it goes."
"I think I'll stay," she said hurriedly.
"Very well. I will call Bliss to take you to a hotel."
He beckoned to the waiting young man, and while Mr. Bliss was finding a cab, Lane said to his wife:—
"You are looking very well. The country has done you good?"
"Yes! I am very well,—all well!" She tried to smile buoyantly. "I don't expect ever to be ill again."
He received this as a man accustomed to the vagaries of woman's health, and said, "That's good!"
Then he put her into the cab, gave some instructions to the young man, and raised his hat. His manner was perfect to her, and yet Isabelle went to her luncheon with the bubbling Mr. Bliss sad at heart. She was such an outsider, such a stranger to her husband's inner self! That it was to be expected, her own fault, the result of the misspent years of married life made it none the easier to bear….
Mr. Teddy Bliss exercised his best connoisseurship in selecting the dishes from the printed broadside put before him at the hotel restaurant, consulting Isabelle frequently as to her tastes, where the desire to please was mingled with the pride of appearing self-possessed. Having finally decided on tomato bisque aux crutons, prairie chicken, grilled sweet potatoes, salad and peche Melba, which was all very much to his liking, he dropped the card and looked at Isabelle with a broad smile. The world and its affairs still had an irrepressible zest and mirthful aspect to young Mr. Bliss.
"You're likely to hear some or-a-tory this afternoon, Mrs. Lane," he scoffed. "The district attorney is a Southerner, and he's going to spread himself when he makes his plea, you can believe. It's his chance to get talked about from San Francisco to Washington…. Of course it don't cut any ice what he says, but the papers will play it up large, and that's what they are after, the government. You see"—he waxed confidential—"the government's got to save its face somehow after all the talk and the dust they have raised. If they can secure a conviction,—oh, just a nominal fine (you know there is no prison penalty),—why, it'll be good campaign material this fall. So they fixed on the A. and P. as a shining mark for their shot. And you know there's a good deal of feeling, especially in this state, against railroads."
"I see!" In spite of herself Isabelle was amused at the naive assurance the young man had given her that nothing serious could happen to her husband,—not imprisonment! Mr. Bliss's point of view about the famous case was evidently that of the railroad office, tinged with a blithe sporting interest in a legal scrap. The ill-paid government attorneys trying the case were a lot of "light-weight mits," put up against the best "talent" in the country employed by the powerful corporation to protect itself; in short, a sure thing for the railroad in the final knockout if not in the first round.
"It was bad, their getting in those Pleasant Valley Company books," he remarked less exuberantly. "But it won't make any difference in the end. The papers have made the most of that evidence already."
"Why do you suppose the newspapers are so bitter against the road?"
"They aren't, the best of them; they know too much what's good for them. They just print the record of the trial. As for the sensational ones, you see it's this way,—they don't care, they haven't any convictions. It is just a matter of business for them. Slamming the corporations suits their readers. The people who buy most of the papers like to have the prosperous classes slammed. Most people are envious; they want the other fellow's roll,—isn't that so? They think they are as good as the best, and it makes 'em sick to see the other fellow in his automobile when they are earning fifteen or eighteen per! They don't stop to consider that it's brains that makes the diff."
"So it is merely envy that produces all this agitation?"
"I am not saying that the corporations are philanthropic institutions," Mr. Bliss continued didactically; "of course they aren't. They are out for business, and every man knows what that means. I suppose they do a good many tough things if they get the chance—same as their critics. What of it? Wouldn't the little fellow do the same thing, if he could,—had the chance? … What would this country be to-day without the corporations, the railroads? Without the Atlantic and Pacific, right here in St. Louis? And all the work of those men they are prosecuting and fining and trying to put into jail? Why, if the President had his way, he'd lock up every man that had enough sense and snap in him to do things, and he'd make this country like a Methodist camp meeting after the shouting is over! There's no sense to it."
Isabelle laughed at the young man's vigorous defence of "our" side. It seemed useless to attempt to pick flaws in his logic, and it would hardly become her as the wife of his "boss" to betray that she was not wholly convinced of his accuracy.
"Besides, why can't the government let bygones be bygones? Every one knows that the roads did some queer things in the old days. But why rake up old crimes and make a mess? I say let's have a clean slate and begin over…. But if they keep on legislating and howling against corporations, like some of these trust-busting state legislatures, we'll have a panic sure thing, and that will do the business for the reformers, won't it now?"
This, as Isabelle realized, was, in the popular language of Mr. Teddy Bliss, her husband's point of view, the philosophy of the ruling class, imbibed by their dependents. As the young man turned from expounding the business situation to his succulent bird, Isabelle had time for reflection.
This young man was sucking his views about honesty, business morality, from the Atlantic and Pacific, from her husband. One of Renault's sentences came to her, "We all live in large part on a borrowed capital of suggested ideas, motives, desires." And the corollary: "Each is responsible not only for the capital that he borrows from others,—that it should really be the right idea for him,—but also for the capital he lends,—the suggestions he gives to others—possibly less stable minds. For thus by borrowing and lending ideas is created that compulsive body of thought throughout the universe on which we all act."
Her husband was on trial for that which he had borrowed and thus made his own, as well as for that which he had passed on into life—to Mr. Teddy Bliss, for example.
The government attorney had already begun his argument when Isabelle, escorted by Teddy Bliss, returned to the court-room. The district attorney was a short, thick-set, sallow-faced man, with bushy gray hair growing in the absurd "Pompadour" fashion, and a homely drooping mustache. Another "bounder," thought Isabelle, one of the hungry outsiders, not in fee to the corporations, who hired only the best lawyers. Perhaps he was aware of his position there in the dingy court-room before the trained gladiators of his profession—and also before his country! The lawyers for the defendants lolling in their chairs settled themselves placidly to see what this humble brother would make of the business. Mr. Brinkerhoff's eyelids drooped over his gentle eyes, as if to shut out all distractions of sense from his brain. The thick-set district attorney frequently scraped his throat and repeated the phrase, "if it please your honor." He had a detestable nasal whine, and he maltreated the accents of several familiar words. The culture of letters and vocal delivery had evidently not been large in the small inland college where he had been educated. These annoying peculiarities at first distracted Isabelle's attention, while the lawyer labored through the opening paragraphs of his argument. In the maze of her thoughts, which had jumped across the continent to the little mountain village, there fell on her ears the words, "In a land of men born free and equal before the law." Was it the tone of unexpected passion vibrating through those ancient words, or the idea itself that startled her like an electric shock? That pathetic effort of our ancestors to enact into constitutional dogma the poetic dream of a race! "Born free and equal"!—there was nothing more absurd, more contrary to the daily evidence of life, ever uttered. Isabelle fancied she saw a soft smile play over the benign face of Mr. Brinkerhoff, as if he too had been struck by the irony of the words. But to the district attorney they did not seem to be a mere poetic aspiration, nor a catch phrase with which to adorn his speech; they voiced a real idea, still pulsating with passionate truth. From this moment Isabelle forgot the lawyer's nasal intonation, his uncultivated delivery.
He stood there, so it seemed, as the representative of the mute millions which make the nation to defend before the court their cause against the rapacious acts of the strong. This great railroad corporation, with its capital of three hundred and seventy-five millions of dollars in stocks and bonds (a creature, nevertheless, of the common public, called into existence by its necessities and chartered by its will), had taken upon itself to say who should dig coal and sell it from the lands along its lines. They and their servants and allies had, so the charge ran, seized each individual man or association of men not allied to them, and throttled the life in them—specifically refusing them cars in which to transport their coal, denying them switching privileges, etc…. The government, following its duty to protect the rights of each man and all men against the oppression of the few, had brought this suit to prohibit these secret practices, to compel restitution, to punish the corporation and its servants for wrong done…. "The situation was, if your honor please, as if a company of men should rivet a chain across the doors of certain warehouses of private citizens and should prevent these citizens from taking their goods out of their warehouses or compel them to pay toll for the privilege of transacting their lawful business…. And the government has shown, if it please your honor, that this Pleasant Valley Coal Company is but a creature of the defendant corporation, its officers and owners being the servants of the railroad company, and thereby this Pleasant Valley Coal Company has enjoyed and now enjoys special privileges in the matter of transportation, cars, and switching facilities. The government has further shown that the Atlantic and Pacific, by its servant, John Lane…."
At this point the railroad counsel looked interested; even the serene Mr. Brinkerhoff deigned to unclose his eyes. For the district attorney, having disposed of his oratorical flourish of trumpets, had got down to the facts of the record and what they could be made to prove. In the close argument that followed, Isabella's thoughts went back to that trumpet phrase,—"all men born free and equal." Slowly there dawned in her an altogether new comprehension of what this struggle before her eyes, in which her husband was involved, meant. Nay, what human life itself, with all its noisy discord, meant!
Their forerunners, the fathers of the people, held the theory that here at last, in this broad, rich, new land, men should struggle with one another for the goods of life on an equal basis. Man should neither oppress nor interfere with man. Justice at last to all! The struggle should be ordered by law so that men might be free to struggle and equal in their rights. To all the same freedom to live, to enjoy, to become! So these fathers of the republic had dreamed. So some still dreamed that human life might be ordered, to be a fair, open struggle—for all.
But within a brief century and a quarter the fallacy of this aspiration had become ridiculously apparent. "Born free and equal!" Nothing on this globe was ever so born. The strong who achieved, the weak who succumbed—both knew the nonsense of it. Free and equal,—so far as men could maintain freedom and equality by their own force,—that was all!
(There was that man who begged John to give him cars. Poor thing! he could not maintain his right.)
And every man who complained at the oppression of another either oppressed some one or would so oppress him, if he had the chance and the power. It was, of course, the business of the law to police the fight,—the game had its rules, its limits, which all must obey, when not too "destructive." But essentially this new land of liberty and hope was like all other human societies,—a mortal combat where the strong triumphed and the weak went under in defeat…. That was what the array of brilliant counsel employed by the Atlantic and Pacific really represented. "Gentlemen, you can't block us with silly rules. We must play this game of life as it was ordered by God it should be played when the first protoplasm was evolved…. And really, if it were not for us, would there be any game for you little fellows to play?"
Egotism, the curse of egotism! This was stark male egotism,—the instinct for domination. And defendants and plaintiffs were alike in spirit, struggling for position in the game. The weaker ones—if they had the hold—would pluck at the windpipe of their oppressors….
So while the attorney for the people spoke on about rate-sheets and schedules A and B, and bills of lading from the Pleasant Valley Company (marked "exhibits nine and ten"), the woman in the court-room began to comprehend dimly the mystery behind this veil of words. Every man felt instinctively this spirit of fight,—the lively young clerk at her side as well as the defendant before the bar, her husband; the paid writers for Mr. Gossom's patriotic magazine as well as the President and his advisers,—all had it in their blood. It was the spirit of our dominating race, fostered through the centuries,—the spirit of achievement, of conquest. Mr. Gossom's clever writers, the President, and the "good element" generally, differed from their opponents only in manner and degree. "Gently, gently, gentlemen," they called. "Play according to the rules of the game. Don't bang all the breath out of your adversary's body when you have him by the throat. Remember, gentlemen, to give every one his turn!"
In the light of this understanding of the nature of the game of life, the efforts of the government to preserve order in a row of this magnitude became almost farcical,—so long as the spirit of man was untouched and SUCCESS was admittedly the one glorious prize of life! …
Finally the district attorney ceased to speak, and the judge looked at his watch. There was not time for the defence to make its argument to-day, and so court was adjourned. The lawyers stretched themselves, chatted, and laughed. The raw district attorney had done his worst, and judging from Mr. Brinkerhoff's amiable smile, it was not very bad. The newspaper men scurried out of the room for the elevators,—there was good copy this afternoon!
Lane joined his wife after a few moments, and they left the court-room.
"Are you tired?" he asked solicitously. "It must have been dull for you, all that law talk."
"Oh, no! … I think I was never so much interested in anything in my life," she replied with a long sigh.
He looked as if he were puzzled, but he made no further reference to the trial, either then or on their way to her mother's house. And Isabelle in a tumult of impressions and feelings was afraid to speak yet, afraid lest she might touch the wrong nerve, strike the wrong note,—and so set them farther apart in life than they were now.
They dined in the lofty, sombre room at the rear of the house, overlooking a patch of turf between the house and the stable. Above the massive sideboard hung an oil portrait of the Colonel, a youthful painting but vigorous, where something of the old man's sweetness and gentle wisdom had been caught. This dining room had been done over the year before Isabelle was married; its taste seemed already heavy and bad.
Her mother's old servants served the same rich, substantial meal they had served when she was a child, with some poor sherry, the Colonel's only concession to domestic conviviality. The room and the food subtly typified the spirit of the race,—that spirit which was illuminated in the court-room—before it had finally evolved…. The moral physiology of men is yet to be explored!
Lane leaned back in the Colonel's high-backed chair, gray and weary under the brilliant light. At first he tried to be interested in Grosvenor, asked questions of his wife, but soon he relapsed into a preoccupied silence. This mood Isabelle had never seen in her husband, nor his physical lassitude. After a time she ventured to ask:—
"Is it likely to last much longer, the trial?"
"A couple of days, the lawyers think." And after a while he added morosely: "Nobody can tell how long if it is appealed…. I have had to muddle away the better part of the winter over this business, first and last! It's nothing but popular clamor, suspicion. The government is playing to the gallery. I don't know what the devil will happen to the country with this lunatic of a President. Capital is already freezing up tight. The road will have to issue short-time notes to finance the improvements it has under way, and abandon all new work. Men who have money to invest aren't going to buy stock and bonds with a set of anarchists at Washington running the country!"
It was quite unlike Lane to explode in this manner. It was not merely the result of nervous fatigue, Isabelle felt: it indicated some concealed sore in her husband's mind.
"How do you think it will be decided?" she asked timidly.
"The trial? Nobody can guess. The judge is apparently against us, and that will influence the jurors,—a lot of farmers and sore-heads! … But the verdict will make no difference. We shall carry it up, fight it out till the last court. The government has given us enough errors,—all the opening we need!"
The government had played badly, that is. Isabelle had it on her tongue to demand: "But how doyoufeel about it,—the real matter at issue? What is right—just?" Again she refrained, afraid to array herself apparently on the side of his enemies.
"It is all this infernal agitation, which does nobody any good and will result in crippling business," he repeated, as they went to the library for their coffee.
This room, where the Colonel usually sat evenings with his wife and the neighbors who dropped in, was exactly as it had been in the old days,—even the same row of novels and books of travel in a rack on the polished table. Only the magazines had been changed.
Lane lighted a cigar and sipped his coffee. Revived by his dinner and cigar, he began to talk more freely, in the same mood of disgusted irritation, the mood of his class these days, of the men he met at his club, in business,—the lawyers, the capitalists, the leaders of society. Isabelle, listening to his bitter criticism, wished that she might get him to speak more personally,—tell her all the detail that had led up to the suit, explain his connection with it,—show her his inmost heart as he would show it to himself in a time of exact truth! With this feeling she went over to where he was sitting and put her hand on his shoulder, and as he glanced up in surprise at this unexpected demonstration, she said impulsively:—
"John, please, John! … Tell me everything—I can understand…. Don't you think there might be some little truth in the other side? Was the road fair, was it just in this coal business? I so want to know, John!"
Her voice trembled with suppressed emotion. She wished to draw him to her, in the warmth of her new feeling to melt his stern antagonism, his harsh mood. But as he looked inquiringly at her—weighing as it were the meaning of this sudden interest in his affairs—the wife realized how far apart she was from her husband. The physical separation of all these years, the emotional separation, the intellectual separation had resulted in placing them in two distinct spheres spiritually. The intervening space could not be bridged in a moment of expansive emotion. It would be a slow matter, if it ever could be accomplished, to break the crust that had formed like ice between their souls. Isabelle went back to her seat and drank her coffee.
"I don't know what you mean by fair and just," he replied coldly. "Business has to be done according to its own rules, not as idealists or reformers would have it done. The railroad has done nothing worse than every big business is compelled to do to live,—has made a profit where there was one to make…. This would be a poor sort of country, even for the reformers and agitators, if the men who have the power to make money should be bound hand and foot by visionaries and talkers. You can't get the sort of men capable of doing things on a large scale to go into business for clerk's wages. They must see a profit—and a big one,—and the men who aren't worth anything will always envy them. That's the root of the whole matter."
It would be useless, Isabelle saw, to point out that his defence was general, and an evasion of the point she wished to see clearly,—what the realfactwith him was. His mind was stiffened by the prejudices of his profession, tempered in fierce fires of industrial competition as a result of twenty years of triumphant struggle with men in the life and death grapple of business. He was strong just because he was narrow and blind. If he had been able to doubt, even a little, the basis of his actions, he would never have become the third vice-president of the Atlantic and Pacific, one of the most promising of the younger men in his profession.
Recognizing her defeat, Isabelle asked about the Johnstons.
"I have seen Steve a couple of times," Lane replied. "I meant to write you, but hadn't the time. Steve didn't make good in that lumber business. Those men he went in with, it looks to me, were sharks. They took all his money away,—every cent. You know they mortgaged the house, too. Then the company failed; he was thrown out. Steve was not sharp enough for them, I guess."
"Isn't that too bad!"
"Just what might have been expected," Lane commented, associating Steve Johnston's failure with his previous train of thought; "I told him so when he gave up railroading. He was not an all-round man. He had one talent—a good one—and he knew the business he was trained in. But it wasn't good enough for him. He must get out and try it alone—"
"It wasn't to make more money," Isabelle protested, remembering the day at the Farm when the two men had walked back and forth, delaying luncheon, while they heatedly discussed Steve's determination to change his business.
"He had this reform virus in his system, too! … Well, he is bookkeeper, now, for some little down-town concern at eighteen hundred a year. All he can get these days. The railroads are discharging men all the time. He might be earning six thousand in the position I offered him then. Do you think Alice and the boys will be any better off for his scruples? Or the country?"
"Poor Alice! … Are they still living in the house at Bryn Mawr?"
"Yes, I believe so. But Steve told me he couldn't carry the mortgage after the first of the year,—would have to give up the house."
"I must go out there to-morrow," she said quickly; and after a time she added, "Don't you think we could do something for them, John?"
Lane smiled, as if the suggestion had its touch of irony.
"Why, yes! I mean to look into his affairs when I can find the time….I'll see what I can do."
"Oh, that is good!" Isabelle exclaimed warmly. It was like her husband, prompt generosity to a friend in trouble. And this matter brought husband and wife closer in feeling than they had been since her arrival.
"Ready money is a pretty scarce commodity," Lane remarked; "but I will see what can be done about his mortgage."
It was not easy, he wished his wife to know, even for the strong to be generous these days, thanks to the reformers, and the "crazy man in Washington," with whom he suspected she sympathized.
They sat in silence after this until he had finished his cigar. There were many subjects that must be discussed between them, which thrust up their heads like sunken rocks in a channel; but both felt their danger. At last Isabelle, faint from the excitement of the day, with all its mutations of thought and feeling, went to her room. She did not sleep for hours, not until long after she heard her husband's step go by the door, and the click of the switches as he turned out the electric lights.
There was much to be done before their marriage could be recreated on a living principle. But where the man was strong and generous, and the woman was at last awakened to life, there was no reason to despair.
Isabelle did not go back to the court-room to listen to the remaining arguments, not even to hear Mr. Brinkerhoff's learned and ingenious plea in behalf of the rights of capital, the sacred privileges of property. She felt that John would rather not have her there. But Isabelle read every word of the newspaper report of the trial, which since the district attorney's impassioned and powerful plea had excited even greater public interest than before. Not only locally, but throughout the country, the trial of the People vs. the Atlantic and Pacific et al. was recognized as the first serious effort of the reform administration to enforce the laws against capital, by convicting not merely the irresponsible agents but also some of the men "higher up." It was John Lane's position in the railroad that gave these "coal cases" their significance.
Isabelle read the report of the trial with thoughtful care, but much of it was too technical for her untrained mind to grasp. All these arguments about admitting certain ledgers in evidence, all these exceptions to the rulings of the court, the dodges, fences, pitfalls, the dust created by the skilled counsel for the defence, confused her. What she gathered in a general way was that the road was fighting its case on technicalities, seeking to throw the suit out of court, without letting the one real matter at issue appear,—had they dealt illegally and unjustly with the public? To her emotional temperament this eminently modern method of tactics was irritating and prejudiced her against her husband's side. "But I don't understand," she reflected sadly, "so John would say. And they don't seem to want people to understand!"
With these thoughts on her mind, she took the cars to the little suburb north of the city, where the Johnstons lived. Bryn Mawr was one of the newer landscape-gardened of our city suburbs, with curving roads, grass-plots, an artnouveaurailroad station, shrubs and poplar sticks set out along the cement sidewalks, in an effort to disguise the rawness of the prairie pancake that the contractors had parcelled into lots. Isabelle found some difficulty in tracing her way along the ingeniously twisted avenues to the Johnston house. But finally she reached the two-story-and-attic wooden box, which was set in a little grove of maple trees. Two other houses were going up across the street, and a trench for a new sewer had been opened obstructively. At this period of belated spring Bryn Mawr was not a charming spot. Unfinished edges left by the landscape gardener and the contractor showed pitilessly against the leafless, scrubby trees and the rolling muddy fields beyond. It was all covered with a chill mist. In the days when she lived in St. Louis she had never found time to go so far to see Alice, and she had shared Bessie's horror of the remote and cheerless existence in this suburb, had wondered how an intelligent and well-bred woman like Alice Johnston could endure its dull level of platitudinous existence. But now as she picked her way across the sewer excavation, she felt that the little wooden box ahead of her was home for this family,—they must not lose that! Place and circumstance had lessened in her estimates of life.
Alice opened the door herself, and with a radiant smile of hungry delight enveloped Isabelle in her arms.
"Where did you drop from, Belle?"
"Oh, I thought I'd come on," Isabelle replied vaguely, not liking to mention the trial.
"And you found your way out here, and navigated that ewer safely! The boys find it surpassingly attractive,—as a coal mine, or a canal in Mars, or the Panama ditch. I've tried to induce Mr. Jorgesson, the contractor, to hang out a lantern or two at night. But he evidently thinks well of the caution and sobriety of the Johnston family and prefers to take his chances of a suit for damages. So far the family has escaped."
Alice's face showed two girlish dimples, while she talked glibly,—too glibly, Isabelle thought. They went into the dining room where there was a tiny coal fire before which Alice had been sewing. Isabelle's namesake—number two in the list—having been considered by her aunt, was dismissed on an errand. The older boys were at school, the baby out in the kitchen "with the colored lady who assists," as Alice explained.
When they were alone, the cousins looked at each other, each thinking of the changes, the traces of life in the other. Isabelle held out her hands yearningly, and Alice, understanding that she knew what had befallen them, smiled with trembling lips. Yet it was long before she could speak of their misfortune in her usual calm manner.
… "The worst is that we have had to take Ned out of the technical institute and send him back to the school here with Jack. It isn't a good school. But we may move into the city in the fall…. And Belle had to give up her music. We all have to chip in, you see!"
"She mustn't give up her music. I shall send her," Isabelle said quickly, reflecting whimsically how she had loathed her own music lessons. Alice flushed, and after a moment's pause said deliberately:—
"Do you really mean that, Isabelle?"
"Of course! I only hope she will get more out of it than I did."
"I should be glad to accept your offer for her sake…. I want her to have something, some interest. A poor girl without that,—it is worse for her than for the boys!"
Isabelle could see Alice's struggle with her pride, and understood the importance of this little matter to her, which had made her deliberately clutch at the chance for the little girl.
"Belle shall come to me to-morrow and spend the day. I will send for the teacher…. Now that's settled, and, Alice, you and Steve will be better off soon! He is too able a man—"
Alice shook her head steadily, saying:—
"I am afraid not, Belle! Steve is too good a man, that is the trouble. I don't say this to him. I wouldn't take a particle of hope from him. But I know Steve all through: he isn't the kind to impress people, to get on,—and he is no longer young."
"It is such a pity he left the railroad," Isabelle mused. "John says they are turning men off instead of taking them on, or he might have found a position for him."
"Never!" Alice's eyes flamed. "If it had to be done over, even now, we should do the same thing…. Steve is slow and quiet, never says much, but he does a lot of thinking. And when he makes up his mind, he sticks…. When he saw what it meant to take that position in the traffic department, what he would have to know and do, he couldn't do it. It is useless trying to make a man like Steve live contrary to his nature. You can't bend a big, thick tree any way you want it."
"But, Alice, he might have been wrong!" Isabelle protested, coloring.
"Yes,—he might have been wrong," Alice admitted, her eyes falling. "But Steve couldn't see it any other way. So he had to do as he did…. And the lumber business failed. I was afraid it would! Dear Steve! He wasn't fitted to fight with those men, to see that they didn't cheat him."
It was later that Alice uttered the deep cry of her heart.
… "Don't think, Belle, that I mind the hard times, the work and all; not even the school for Ned, and the poor prospect for the children. After all, they may do as well without the advantages we could have given them. But what breaks my heart is to see Steve, who is bigger and abler and stronger than most men, go down to the bottom of the ladder and have to take his orders from an ignorant little German. It's small of me, I know, and Steve doesn't complain. But it seems to me terribly unjust somehow."
For a moment her feeling overcame her; then she recovered her composure and continued: "But then, it's Steve! And I wouldn't have him a particle different, not for all the success in the world. You see I have my pride, my snobbery. I am a snob about my husband."
The boys came in from school, and the house shook with racketing children.
"They don't know what has happened, really,—they are too young, thank Heaven!" Alice exclaimed. "And I don't mean they ever shall know—ever think they are poor."
The two stood on the porch for a last word, arranging for the little girl's visit to Isabelle on the morrow. The twilight had descended through the mist.
"See!" Alice said, pointing to the white tree trunks across the street, and the vague fields beyond. "Isn't it very much like that Corot the Colonel used to love so much,—the one in the library? We have our Corot, too…. Good-by, dear! I have chattered frightfully about ourselves. Some day you must tell me of your stay with Mrs. Pole and of yourself."
"There isn't much to tell!"
Alice Johnston, watching her cousin's agreeable figure disappear into the mist, felt that if with Isabelle there might be not much to tell, at least a great deal had happened these last months.
And Isabelle, picking her way cautiously along the sewer excavation, was thinking of the home behind. The couple of hours she had spent with Alice had been filled with a comprehension, a curiously immediate grasp of the other person's vision of life,—what it all meant to her,—Alice's disappointment, her pride in her defeated husband. For the first time in all the years she had known them, Steve and Alice and the children seemed quite real persons, and their life as vivid, as interesting to her, as her own.
Sad as their little story was, in its pathetic limitations of plans and hopes, it did not seem to her intolerable, or sordid, or depressing, as it once would have seemed. Just as she possessed somewhere in herself a new strength to endure whatever misfortune might come to her, so she had an instinctive feeling of how others endured what on the surface of events seemed merely distressing and disagreeable. And the Johnston house, plain and homely as it was, with all the noisy children, had an air of peace about it, the spirit of those that dwelt there, which Isabelle felt to be the most precious thing on earth…. Alice had said, "It's Steve—and I wouldn't have him different for all the success in the world!" The words stung Isabelle. Such was marriage,—perfect marriage,—to be able to say that in the face of worldly defeat. Neither she nor John could ever say that about the other.