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Together, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Part Seven - Chapter 78 |
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_ PART SEVEN CHAPTER LXXVIII It would be very simple for Mrs. Price to provide Alice with a comfortable income,--the Colonel would have done so; and when Isabelle suggested it to her mother after the funeral of Steve, the old lady agreed, though she was not of a philanthropic nature and recalled the fact that the marriage had been a foolish one. But Alice flatly refused the arrangement. She had been trained to work; she was not too old to find something to do, and she had already taken steps to secure a place as matron in a hospital. "I am strong," she said to Isabelle. "Steve has left it for me to do,--all of it. And I want to show him that I can do it. I shall be happier!" John had a better comprehension of her feelings and of the situation than either Isabelle or her mother. "Alice is an able woman," he had said; "she will not break down,--she is not that kind. And she'll be happier working." So he took care of her little life insurance money. He also obtained a scholarship in a technical school for the oldest boy, and undertook to fit the second one for college, as he showed studious tendencies. Isabelle would look after Belle's education. In all these practical details of readjusting the broken family, John Lane was more effective than his wife, giving generously of his crowded hours to the Johnston affairs, ever ready to do all that might be done without hurting the widow's pride and vigorous will. And this, as Isabelle knew, came in the days of his greatest personal perplexity. His resignation as third vice-president had been accepted after protest, negotiations, and then had elicited a regretful communication to the press (emanating from the Senator's office) of an eulogistic nature, concluding with the delicately phrased suggestion that "Mr. Lane's untiring devotion to his work necessitates his taking a rest from all business cares for the present. It is understood that he contemplates a long vacation in Europe." John handed the paper to Isabelle with an ironical smile. "You see we are to go abroad,--the usual thing! That's the Senator's crafty hand. He wants everything decently smooth." But the public no longer cared. The coal cases had gone up to a higher court on appeal, and when the final decision was handed down, the "street" would be interested not in the question of John Lane's guilt or innocence, but in the more important question of whether the Supreme Court "would back up the President's campaign against capital." Meanwhile, there was none of the social stigma attached to the verdict against her husband that Isabelle had resolutely expected. As soon as it was known that the Lanes were established in the city for the spring, their friends sought them out and they were invited to dine more than Isabelle cared for. In their class, as she quickly perceived from jesting references to the trial, such legal difficulties as John's were regarded as merely the disagreeable incidents of doing business in a socialistic age. Lane, far from being "down and out," was considered in the industrial and railroad world a strong man rather badly treated by a weak-kneed board of directors, who had sought to save themselves from trouble by sacrificing an able servant to the public storm. No sooner was his resignation published than he received an offer of the presidency of a large transit company in the middle West. While he was considering this offer, he was approached by representatives of another great railroad, which, though largely owned by the same "interests" that controlled the Atlantic and Pacific, was generally supposed to be a rival. Lane was too valuable a man to be lost to the railroad army. The "interests" recognized in him a powerful instrument, trained from boyhood for their purposes,--one "who knew how to get business." The offer flattered Lane, and soothed that sore spot in his inner consciousness. He saw himself reinstated in his old world, with a prospect of crossing swords with his old superiors in a more than secondary position. Isabelle knew all about this offer. She and her husband talked together more freely than they had ever done before. The experiences of the past weeks,--Steve's death, the planning for Alice's future, as well as the emotional result of the trial--had brought them nearer an understanding. Lane had begun to realize a latent aptitude in his wife for grasping the essential matters of business,--investments, risks, corporation management. She understood far more than the distinction between stock and bond, which is supposedly the limit of woman's business intelligence. As the warm May days came on they took long rides into the fresh country, talking over the endless detail of affairs,--her money, her mother's money, the Colonel's trust funds, the Johnstons' future, the railroad situation,--all that John Lane had hitherto carried tightly shut in his own mind. And thus Isabelle began to comprehend the close relation between what is called "business" and the human matters of daily life for every individual in this complex world. There was not simply a broad mark between right and wrong,--dramatic trials; but the very souls of men and women were involved in the vast machine of labor and profit. She was astonished to discover the extent of her husband's interests, his personal fortune, which had grown amazingly during these last ten fat years of the country's prosperity. "Why, you don't have to take any position!" "Yes, we could afford to make that European trip the Board so kindly indicated." "We _might_ go abroad," she said thoughtfully. A few years before she would have grasped the chance to live in Europe indefinitely. Now she found no inclination in her spirit for this solution. "It isn't exactly the time to leave home," her husband objected; "there is sure to be a severe panic before long. All this agitation has unsettled business, and the country must reap the consequences. We could go for a few months, perhaps." "It wouldn't be good for Molly." And though she did not say it, it would not be good for him to leave the struggle for any length of time. Once out of the game of life, for which he had been trained like an athlete, he would degenerate and lose his peculiar power. And yet she shrank unaccountably from his reentering the old life, with the bitter feeling in his heart he now had. It meant their living in New York, for one thing, and a growing repugnance to that huge, squirming, prodigal hive had come over her. Once the pinnacle of her ambitions, now it seemed sordid, hectic, unreal. Yet she was too wise to offer her objections, to argue the matter, any more than to open the personal wound of his trial and conviction. Influence, at least with a man of John Lane's fibre, must be a subtle, slow process, depending on mutual confidence, comprehension. And she must first see clearly what she herself knew to be best. So she listened, waiting for the vision which would surely come. In these business talks her mind grasped more and more the issues of American life. She learned to recognize the distinction between the officials of corporations and the control behind,--the money power. There emerged into view something of a panorama of industry, organized on modern lines,--the millions of workers in the industrial armies; the infinite gradations of leadership in these armies, and finally far off in the distance, among the canons of the skyscrapers in the great cities, the Mind of it all, the Control, the massed Capital. There were the Marshals' quarters! Even the chiefs of great corporations were "little people" compared with their real employers, the men who controlled capital. And into that circle of intoxicating power, within its influence, she felt that her husband was slowly moving--would ultimately arrive, if success came,--at the height of modern fame. Men did not reach the Marshals' quarters with a few hundred thousands of dollars, nor with a few millions, with savings and inheritances and prudent thrift. They must have tens of millions at their command. And these millions came through alliances, manipulations, deals, by all sorts of devices whereby money could be made to spawn miraculously.... Meanwhile the worker earned his wage, and the minor officers their salaries--what had they to complain of?--but the pelf went up to the Marshals' camp, the larger part of it,--in this land where all were born free and equal. No! Isabelle shuddered at the spectacle of the bloody road up to the camp, and prayed that her life might not be lived in an atmosphere of blood and alarms and noisy strife, even for the sake of millions of dollars and limitless Power. One evening in this period of dubitation Lane remarked casually:-- "Your father's friend, Pete Larrimore, came in to-day to see me. Do you remember him, Isabelle? The old fellow with the mutton-chop whiskers, who used to send us bags of coffee from his plantation in Mexico." "Awful coffee,--we couldn't give it away!" "He wanted to talk to me about a scheme he is interested in. It seems that he has a lot of property in the southwest, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, some of it very valuable. Among other things he has become involved in a railroad. It was started by some people who hadn't the capital to carry it through, and now it begins nowhere and ends in the same place. Larrimore and his friends think they can get the capital to carry the road south to the line and up north, and ultimately will sell it perhaps to one of the big systems.... They are looking for a man to build it and push it through." "What did you say?" Isabelle demanded eagerly. "Oh, I just listened. If they can get the money, it might be successful. That country is growing fast.... It would be a chance for some young man to win his spurs,--hard work, though." He talked on, explaining the strategic position of the new road, its relation to rivals, the prospects of that part of the country, the present condition of the money market in respect to new enterprises; for Isabelle seemed interested. But when she interrupted with sudden energy, "Do it, John! Why don't _you_ take it?" he looked puzzled. "It is a young man's job,--pioneer work." "But you are young--we are young! And it would be something worth doing, pioneer work, building up a new country like that." "There's not much money in it," he replied, smiling at her girlish enthusiasm, "and I am afraid not much fame." Not money, not the fame of the gladiator, the fame of the money power; merely the good report of a labor competently performed, the reward of energy and capacity--and the thing done itself. But to Isabelle this pioneer quality of the work appealed strongly. Her imagination expanded under the idea. "I can see you living for the next ten years in a small Texas town!" he jested. "However, I suppose you wouldn't live out there." "But I should!" she protested. "And it is what I should like best of all, I think--the freedom, the open air, the new life!" So from a merely casual suggestion that Lane had not thought worth serious consideration, there began to grow between them a new conception of their future. And the change that these last weeks had brought was marked by the freedom with which husband and wife talked not only about the future, but about the past. Isabelle tried to tell her husband what had been going on within her at the trial, and since then. "I know," she said, "that you will say I can't understand, that my feeling is only a woman's squeamishness or ignorance.... But, John, I can't bear to think of our going back to it, living on in that way, the hard way of success, as it would be in New York." Lane looked at her narrowly. He was trying to account for this new attitude in his wife. That she would be pleased, or at least indifferent, at the prospect of returning to the East, to the New York life that she had always longed for and apparently enjoyed, he had taken for granted. Yet in spite of the fixed lines in which his nature ran and the engrossing preoccupations of his interests, he had felt many changes in Isabelle since her return to St. Louis,--changes that he ascribed generally to the improvement in her health,--better nerves,--but that he could not altogether formulate. Perhaps they were the indirect result of her brother's death. At any rate his wife's new interest in business, in his affairs, pleased him. He liked to talk things over with her.... Thus the days went steadily by towards the decision. Lane had promised his wife to consider the Larrimore offer. One morning the cable brought the startling news that the president of the Atlantic and Pacific had committed suicide in his hotel room in Paris the evening before he was to sail for home. "Bad health and nervous collapse," was the explanation in the despatch. But that a man of sixty-three, with a long record of honorable success, a large fortune, no family troubles, should suddenly take his own life, naturally roused the liveliest amazement throughout the country. Nobody believed that the cable told the whole truth; but the real reasons for the desperate act were locked tight among the directors of the railroad corporation and a few intimate heads of control--who know all. Lane read the news to Isabelle. It shook him perceptibly. He had known Farrington Beals for years, ever since at the Colonel's suggestion he had been picked out of the army of underlings and given his first chance. Isabelle remembered him even longer, and especially at her wedding with the Senator and her father. They were old family friends, the Bealses. "How terrible for Mrs. Beals and Elsie!" she exclaimed. "How could he have done it! The family was so happy. They all adored him! And he was about to retire, Elsie told me when I saw her last, and they were all going around the world in their yacht.... He couldn't have been very ill." "No, I am afraid that wasn't the only reason," John admitted, walking to and fro nervously. He was thinking of all that the old man had done for him, his resentment at his chief's final desertion of him forgotten; of how he had learned his job, been trained to pull his load by the dead man, who had always encouraged him, pushed him forward. "He went over for a little rest, you said. And he always went every year about this time for a vacation and to buy pictures. Don't you remember, John, what funny things he bought, and how the family laughed at him?" "Yes,--I know." He also knew that the president of the Atlantic and Pacific had gone across the ocean "for his yearly vacation" just at the opening of the coal investigation to escape the scandal of the trial, and had not returned at the usual time, although the financial world was unsettled. And he knew other things; for already clubs and inner offices had been buzzing with rumors. "I am afraid that it is worse than it seems," he said to his wife on his return from the city that afternoon. "Beals was terribly involved. I hear that a bank he was interested in has been closed.... He was tied up fast--in all sorts of ways!" "John!" Isabelle cried, and paused. Did this old man's death mean another scandal, ruin for another family, and one she had known well,--disgrace, scandal, possibly poverty? "Beals was always in the market--and this panic hit him hard; he was on the wrong side lately." It was an old story, not in every case with the same details, but horribly common,--a man of the finest possibilities, of sturdy character, rising up to the heights of ambition, then losing his head, playing the game wantonly for mere pride and habit in it,--his judgment giving way, but playing on, stumbling, grasping at this and that to stop his sliding feet, breaking the elementary laws! And finally, in the face of disaster, alone in a hotel room the lonely old man--no doubt mentally broken by the strain--putting the pistol to his head with his shaking hand. And, afterwards, the debris of his wreck would be swept aside to clear the road for others! Farrington Beals was not a single case. In this time of money disturbance, suicide and dishonor were rife in the streets, revealing the rotten timber that could not stand the strain of modern life, lived as it had been lived the past ten years. It was not one blast that uprooted weak members of the forest, but the eating decay of the previous years, working at the heart of many lives. "The frantic egotism of the age!" Yes, and the divided souls, never at peace until death put an end to the strife at last,--too much for little bodies of nerve and tissue to stand,--the racking of divided wills, divided souls. "John!" Isabelle cried that night, after they had again talked over the tragedy; "let us go--go out there--to a new land!" She rose from the lounge and swept across the room with the energy of clear purpose--of Vision. "Let us put ourselves as far as possible out of this sort of thing! .... It will kill us both. Do it for my sake, even if you can't feel as I do!" And then there poured forth all the story of these years, of their life apart, as she had come to see it the last months, in the remote and peaceful hills, in the court-room, in the plain pathos of Steve's death and Alice's heroism, and now in this suicide,--all that had given her insight and made her different from what she had been,--all that revealed the cheapness of her old ideals of freedom, intellectual development, self-satisfaction, that cult of the ego, which she had pursued in sympathy with the age. Now she wished to put it away, to remove herself and her husband, their lives together, outwardly as she had withdrawn herself inwardly. And her husband, moved in spite of himself by her tense desire, the energy of her words, listened and comprehended--in part. "I have never been a real wife to you, John. I don't mean just my love for that other man, when you were nobly generous with me. But before that, in other ways, in almost all ways that make a woman a wife, a real wife.... Now I want to be a real wife. I want to be with you in all things.... You can't see the importance of this step as I do. Men and women are different, always. But there is something within me, underneath, like an inner light that makes me see clearly now,--not conscience, but a kind of flame that guides. In the light of that I see what a petty fool I have been. It all had to be--I don't regret because it all had to be--the terrible waste, the sacrifice," she whispered, thinking of Vickers. "Only now we must live, you and I together,--together live as we have never lived before!" She held out her hands to him as she spoke, her head erect, and as he waited, still tied by years of self-repression, she went to him and put her arms about him, drawing her to him, to her breast, to her eyes. Ten years before he had adored her, desired her passionately, and she had shrunk from him. Then life had come imperceptibly in between them; he had gone his way, she hers. Now she was offering herself to him. And she was more desirable than before, more woman,--at last whole. The appeal that had never been wholly stifled in the man still beat in his pulses for the woman. And the appeal never wholly roused in the woman by him reached out now for him; but an appeal not merely of the senses, higher than anything Cairy could rouse in a woman, an appeal, limitless, of comradeship, purpose, wills. He kissed her, holding her close to him, realizing that she too held him in the inner place of her being. "We will begin again," he said. "Our new life--together!" * * * * * And this is Influence, the work of one will upon another, sometimes apparent, dramatic, tragic; sometimes subtle, unknowable, speaking across dark gulfs. The meaning of that dead man's austere face, the howl of journalists on his uncovered trail, the old man dead in his hotel room disgraced, the deep current of purpose in his new wife,--all these and much more sent messages into the man's unyielding soul to change the atmosphere therein, to alter the values of things seen, to shape--at last--the will. For what makes an act? Filaments of nerve, some shadowy unknown process in brain cells? These are but symbols for mystery! Life pressing multifariously its changing suggestions upon the sentient organism prompts, at last, the act. But there is something deeper than the known in all this wondrous complexity.... John Lane, the man of fact, the ordered efficient will, was dimly conscious of forces other than physical ones, beyond,--not recognizable as motives,--self-created and impelling, nevertheless; forces welling up from the tenebrous spaces in the depths of his being, beneath conscious life. And at last, something higher than Judgment swayed the man. _ |
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