"You see," continued Bessie Falkner, drawing up her pretty feet into the
piazza cot, "it was just love at first sight. I was up there at the hotel
in the mountains, trying to make up my mind whether I could marry another
man, who was awfully rich--owned a mine and a ranch; but he was so dull the
horses would go to sleep when we were out driving ... And then just as I
concluded it was the only thing for me to do, to take him and make the best
of him,--then Rob rode up to the hotel in his old tattered suit--he was
building a dam or something up in the mountains--and I knew I couldn't
marry Mr. Mine-and-Ranch. That was all there was to it, my dear. The rest
of the story? Why, of course he made the hotel his headquarters while he
was at work on the dam; I stayed on, too, and it came along--naturally, you
know."
Mrs. Falkner dipped into a box of candy and swung the cot gently to and
fro. The men were still talking inside the house and the two wives had come
outside for long confidences. Isabelle, amused by this sketch of the
Colorado courtship, patted the blond woman's little hand. Mrs. Falkner had
large blue eyes, with waving tendrils of hair, which gave her face the look
of childish unsophistication;--especially at this moment when her
voluptuous lips were closing over a specially desired piece of candy.
"Of course it would come along--with you!"
"I didn't do a thing--just waited," Bessie protested, fishing about the
almost empty box for another delectable bit. "He did it all. He was in such
a hurry he wanted to marry me then and there at the hotel and go live up in
the mountains in a cabin above the dam where he was at work. He's romantic.
Men are all like that then, don't you think? But of course it couldn't be
that way; so we got married properly in the fall in Denver, and then came
straight here. And," with a long sigh, "we've been here ever since. Stuck!"
"I should think you would have preferred the cabin above the dam," Isabelle
suggested, recalling her own romantic notion of Dog Mountain. Mrs. Falkner
made a little grimace.
"That might do for two or three months. But snowed in all the winter, even
with the man you like best in all the world? He'd kill you or escape
through the drifts ... You see we hadn't a thing, not a cent, except his
salary and that ended with the dam. It was only eighty a month anyway. This
is better, a hundred and fifty," she explained with childish frankness.
"But Rob has to work harder and likes the mountains, is always talking of
going back. But I say there are better things than hiding yourself at the
land's end. There's St. Louis, or maybe New York!"
Isabelle wondered how the Falkners were able to support such a hospitable
house--they had two small children and Bessie had confided that another was
coming in the spring--on the engineer's salary.
"And the other one," Mrs. Falkner added in revery, "is more than a
millionnaire now."
Her face was full of speculation over what might have been as the wife of
all that money.
"But we are happy, Rob and I,--except for the bills! Don't you hate bills?"
Isabelle's only answer was a hearty laugh. She found this pretty, frank
little "Westerner" very attractive.
"It was bills that made my mother unhappy--broke her heart. Sometimes we
had money,--most generally not. Such horrid fusses when there wasn't any.
But what is one to do? You've got to go on living somehow. Rob says we
can't afford this house,--Rob is always afraid we won't get through. But we
do somehow. I tell him that the good time is coming,--we must just
anticipate it, draw a little on the future."
At this point the men came through the window to the piazza. Bessie shook
her box of candy coquettishly at Lane, who took the chair beside her.
Evidently he thought her amusing, as most men did. Falkner leaned against
the white pillar and stared up at the heavens. Isabelle, accustomed to men
of more conventional social qualities, had found the young engineer glum
and odd. He had a stern, rather handsome face, a deep furrow dividing his
forehead and meeting the part of his thick brown hair, which curled
slightly at the ends. "If he didn't look so cross, he would be quite
handsome," thought Isabelle, wondering how long it might be before her host
would speak to her. She could see him as he rode up to the hotel piazza
that day, when Bessie Falkner had made up her mind on the moment that she
could not marry "the other man." Finally Falkner broke his glum silence.
"Do you eat candy, Mrs. Lane? Pounds of it, I mean,--so that it is your
staple article of diet."
"Tut, tut," remarked his wife from her cot. "Don't complain."
His next remark was equally abrupt.
"There's only one good thing in this Torso hole," he observed with more
animation than he had shown all the evening, "and that's the coke-ovens at
night--have you noticed them? They are like the fiery pits, smouldering,
ready for the damned!"
It was not what she expected from a civil engineer, in Torso, Indiana, and
she was at a loss for a reply.
"You'd rather have stayed in Colorado?" she asked frankly.
He turned his face to her and said earnestly, "Did you ever sleep out on a
mountain with the stars close above you?--'the vast tellurian galleons'
voyaging through space?"
Isabelle suspected that he was quoting poetry, which also seemed odd in
Torso.
"Yes,--my brother and I used to camp out at our home in Connecticut. But I
don't suppose you would call our Berkshire Hills mountains."
"No," he replied dryly, "I shouldn't."
And their conversation ended. Isabella wished that the Darnells had not
been obliged to go home immediately after supper. The young lawyer knew how
to talk to women, and had made himself very agreeable, telling stories of
his youth spent among the mountains with a primitive people. She had
observed that he drank a good deal of whiskey, and there was something in
his black eyes that made her uncomfortable. But he was a man that women
liked to think about: he touched their imaginations. She did not talk about
him to John on their way home, however, but discussed the Falkners.
"Don't you think she is perfectly charming?" (Charming was the word she had
found for Bessie Falkner.) "So natural and amusing! She's very Western--she
can't have seen much of life--but she isn't a bit ordinary."
"Yes, I like her," Lane replied unenthusiastically, "and he seems original.
I shouldn't wonder if he were clever in his profession; he told me a lot
about Freke's mines."
What he had learned about the Pleasant Valley mines was the chief thing in
the evening to Lane. He did not understand why Isabelle seemed so much more
eager to know these people--these Darnells and Falkners--than the Frasers
and the Adamses. She had made fun of the solemn dinner that the Frasers had
given to introduce them into Torso "society."
"I wonder how they can live on that salary," Isabelle remarked. "One
hundred and fifty a month!"
"He must make something outside."
* * * * *
After the Lanes had gone, Bessie Falkner prepared yawningly for bed,
leaving her husband to shut up the house. Her weekly excitement of
entertaining people over, she always felt let down, like a poet after the
stir of creation. It was useless to go over the affair with Rob, as he was
merely bored. But she spent hours thinking what the women said and how they
looked and deciding whom she could have the next time. On her way to bed
she went into the nursery where her two little girls were asleep in their
cots beside the nurse, and finding a window open woke the nurse to reprove
her for her carelessness. In the hall she met her husband bringing up the
silver.
"Emma is so thoughtless," she complained. "I shall have to let her go if I
can find another servant in this town."
Her husband listened negligently. The Falkners were perpetually changing
their two servants, or were getting on without them.
"Mrs. Lane's maids all wear caps," Mrs. Falkner had observed frequently to
her husband.
Bessie had strict ideas of how a house should be run, ideas derived from
the best houses that she was familiar with. Since the advent of the Lanes
she had extended these ideas and strove all the harder to achieve
magnificent results. Though the livery of service was practically unknown
in Torso, she had resolved to induce her cook (and maid of all work) to
serve the meals with cap and apron, and also endeavored to have the
nursemaid open the door and help serve when company was expected.
"What's the use!" her husband protested. "They'll only get up and go."
He could not understand the amount of earnest attention and real feeling
that his wife put into these things,--her pride to have her small domain
somewhat resemble the more affluent ones that she admired. Though her
family had been decidedly plain, they had given her "advantages" in
education and dress, and her own prettiness, her vivacity and charm, had
won her way into whatever society Kansas City and Denver could offer. She
had also visited here and there in different parts of the country,--once in
New York, and again at a cottage on the New England coast where there were
eight servants, a yacht, and horses. These experiences of luxury, of an
easy and large social life, she had absorbed through every pore. With that
marvellous adaptability of her race she had quickly formed her ideals of
"how people ought to live." It was frequently difficult to carry out these
ideals on a circumscribed income, with a husband who cared nothing for
appearances, and that was a source of constant discontent to Bessie.
"Coming to bed?" she asked her husband, as she looked in vain for the
drinking water that the maid was supposed to bring to her bedside at night.
"No," Falkner answered shortly. "I've got to make out those estimates
somehow before morning. If you will have people all the time--"
Bessie turned in at her door shrugging her shoulders. Rob was in one of his
"cross" moods,--overworked, poor boy! She slowly began to undress before
the mirror, thinking of Isabelle Lane's stylish figure and her perfect
clothes. "She must have lots of money," she reflected, "and so nice and
simple! He's attractive, too. Rob is foolish not to like them. He showed
his worst side to-night. If he wants to get on,--why, they are the sort of
people he ought to know." Her husband's freakish temper gave her much
trouble, his unexpectedly bearish moods when she was doing her very best
for him, "bringing him out" as she put it, making the right kind of
friends,--influential ones, so that he might have some chance in the
scramble for the good things of life. Surely that was a wife's part. Bessie
was satisfied that she had done much for her husband in this way, developed
him socially; for when he rode up to the mountain hotel, he was solitary,
moody, shy. Tonight he hadn't kissed her,--in fact hadn't done so for
several days. He was tired by the prolonged heat, she supposed, and worried
about the bills. He was always worried about expenses.
As the clothes slipped from her still shapely figure, she stood before the
glass, thinking in a haze of those first lover-days that had departed so
soon. Now instead of petting her, Rob spent his hours at home upstairs in
his attic workroom, doing extra work or reading. Could it be that he was
growing tired of her, so soon, in four years? She glanced over her shoulder
at her pretty arms, her plump white neck reflected in the glass, and smiled
unconsciously with assurance. Oh, he would come back to the lover-mood--she
was still desirable! And as the smile curved her lip she thought, "I
married him for love!" She was very proud of that....
The house was now deliciously cool and quiet. Bessie sank into her bed with
a sigh, putting out one hand for a magazine and turning on the electric
light beside the bed. It had been a tiresome day, with the supper to bring
off. There had been six courses, and everything had been very nice. The
black cook she had engaged to prepare the meal was a treasure, could serve
a better dinner than Mrs. Fraser's or Mrs. Adams's. She herself had made
the salad and prepared the iced grape-fruit. Every limb ached--she was
always so tired. She loved this last quiet hour of the day that she had by
herself, now that the nurse took both the children. With her delicate
health the nurse had been a necessity. She usually looked blooming and
rosy, but was always tired, always had been as long as she could remember.
The doctor had told Falkner after the second child came that his wife would
always be a delicate woman, must be carefully protected, or she would
collapse and have the fearful modern disease of nerves. So Falkner had
insisted on having the best nurse obtainable to relieve her from the
wearing nights,--though it meant that somehow eighteen hundred dollars must
grow of itself!
As midnight sounded from the court-house clock, Bessie laid down the
magazine and stretched her tired limbs, luxuriating in the comfort of her
soft bed. The story she had been reading was sentimental,--the love of a
cowboy for the fair daughter of a railroad president. She longed for the
caresses of her cow-boy lover, and wondered dreamily if Lane were a devoted
husband. He seemed so; but all men were probably alike: their first desires
gratified, they thought of other things. So she put out the light and
closed her eyes, in faint discontent with life, which was proving less
romantic than she had anticipated.
She had her own room. At first it had held two beds, her husband sharing
the room with her. But as the house was large he had taken a room on the
third story. Nowadays, as Bessie knew, the better sort of American
household does not use the primitive double bed. For hygiene and comfort
enlightened people have taken to separate beds, then separate quarters. A
book might be written on the doing away of the conjugal bed in American
life! There should be interesting observations on the effect of this
change, social, and hygienic, and moral,--oh, most interesting! ... A
contented smile at last stole over the young wife's face. Was she dreaming
of her babies, of those first days of love, when her husband never wished
her out of his sight, or simply of the well-ordered, perfectly served,
pretty supper that she had given for the Lanes whom she was most anxious to
know well? The supper had quite met her aspirations except in the matter of
caps and aprons, had satisfied her cherished ideal of how "nice people"
lived in this world.
That ideal is constantly expanding these days. In America no one is classed
by birth or profession. All is to make, and the women with their marvellous
powers of absorption do the shaping. In a thousand ways they learn "how to
live as other people do,"--in magazines and on bill boards, in the theatre,
the churches, the trains, the illustrated novel. Suggestions how to live!
Meantime upstairs in the mansard room of the old house Falkner was figuring
over stresses and strains of an unemotional sort. When past midnight he
shoved the papers into the drawer, a familiar thought coursed through his
brain: somehow he must sell himself at a dearer price. Living was not cheap
even in Torso, and the cost of living was ever going higher, so the papers
said and the wives. There were four of them now, a fifth to come in a few
months. There should be a third servant, he knew, if they were to live
"like other people." With a gesture that said, "Oh, Hell!" he jumped from
his chair and took down a volume of verse from the pine shelf above the
mantel and lighted a cigarette. For a few minutes he might lose himself and
forget the fret of life, in the glowing pictures of things not seen.
The book dropped from his hand. He had carried it in his mountain kit, had
read it to Bessie when they were engaged. She had listened, flattered,
looking at him and smoothing his hair. But after marriage she confessed
flatly that she was not "literary." So they had read together a book of
travels, then a novel, then a magazine, and latterly nothing. Taking
another cigarette, the man read on, and before his tired eyes rose the
purple peaks of the Rockies, the shining crests of snow, the azure sky. And
also a cabin in a green meadow beside a still mountain lake, and a woman
fair and tall and straight, with blue eyes and a caressing hand,--a child
on one arm. But Bessie was sleeping downstairs. Putting out his light, the
man went to bed.
The man on horseback riding up the trail to look into the girl's eyes that
summer afternoon!