The Steve Johnstons had had a hard time, as Isabelle would have phrased it.
He had been a faithful, somewhat dull and plodding student at the technical
school, where he took the civil engineering degree, and had gone forth to
lay track in Montana. He laid it well; but this job finished, there seemed
no permanent place for him. He was heavy and rather tongue-tied, and made
no impression on his superiors except that of commonplace efficiency. He
drifted into Canada, then back to the States, and finally found a place in
Detroit.
Here, while working for thirty dollars a week, he met Alice Johnston,--she
also was earning her living, being unwilling to accept from the Colonel
more than the means for her education,--and from the first he wished to
marry her, attracted by her gentle, calm beauty, her sincerity, and
buoyant, healthy enjoyment of life. She was teaching in a girls' school,
and was very happy. Other women had always left the heavy man on the road,
so to speak, marking him as stupid. But Alice Johnston was keener or kinder
than most young women: she perceived beneath the large body a will, an
intelligence, a character, merely inhibited in their envelope of large
bones and solid flesh, with an entire absence of nervous system. He was
silent before the world, but not foolish, and with her he was not long
silent. She loved him, and she consented to marry him on forty dollars a
week, hopefully planning to add something from her teaching to the budget,
until Steve's slow power might gain recognition.
"So we married," she said to Isabelle, recounting her little life history
in the drowsy summer afternoon. "And we were so happy on what we had! It
was real love. We took a little flat a long way out of the city, and when I
came home afternoons from the school, I got the dinner and Steve cooked the
breakfasts,--he's a splendid cook, learned on the plains. It all went
merrily the first months, though Aunt Harmony thought I was such a fool to
marry, you remember?" She laughed, and Isabella smiled at the memory of the
caustic comments which Mrs. Price had made when Alice Vance, a poor niece,
had dared to marry a poor man,--"They'll be coming to your father for help
before the year is out," she had said. But they hadn't gone to the Colonel
yet.
"Then little Steve came, and I had to leave the school and stay at home.
That was hard, but I had saved enough to pay for the doctor and the nurse.
Then that piece of track elevation was finished and Steve was out of work
for a couple of months. He tried so hard, poor boy! But he was never meant
to be an engineer. I knew that, of course, all along.... Well, the baby
came, and if it hadn't been for my savings,--why, I should have gone to the
hospital!
"Just then Steve met a man he had known at the Tech, and was given that
place on a railroad as clerk in the traffic department. He was doubtful
about taking it, but I wasn't. I was sure it would open up, and even
twenty-five dollars a week is something. So he left for Cleveland a week
after the baby was born, and somehow I packed up and followed with the baby
when I could.
"That wasn't the end of hard times by any means. You see Ned came the next
year,--we're such healthy, normal specimens!" She laughed heartily at this
admission of her powers of maternity. "And it wasn't eighteen months before
Alice was coming.... Oh, I know that we belong to the thriftless pauper
class that's always having children,--more than it can properly care for.
We ought to be discouraged! But somehow we have fed and clothed 'em all,
and we couldn't spare one o' the kiddies. There's James, too, you know. He
came last winter, just after Steve had the grippe and pneumonia; that was a
pull. But it doesn't seem right to--to keep them from coming--and when you
love each other--"
Her eyes shone with a certain joy as she frankly stated the woman's
problem, while Isabelle looked away, embarrassed. Mrs. Johnston continued
in her simple manner:--
"If Nature doesn't want us to have them, why does she give us the power?
... I know that is wretched political economy and that Nature really has
nothing to do with the modern civilized family. But as I see other women,
the families about me, those that are always worrying over having children,
trying to keep out of it,--why, they don't seem to be any better off. And
it is--well, undignified,--not nice, you know.... We can't spare 'em, nor
any more that may come! ... As I said, I believed all along that Steve had
it in him, that his mind and character must tell, and though it was
discouraging to have men put over him, younger men too, at last the
railroad found out what he could do."
Her face beamed with pride.
"You see Steve has a remarkable power of storing things up in that big head
of his. Remembers a lot of pesky little detail when he's once fixed his
mind on it,--the prices of things, figures, and distances, and rates and
differentials. Mr. Mason--that was the traffic manager of our
road--happened to take Steve to Buffalo with him about some rate-making
business. Steve, it turned out, knew the situation better than all the
traffic managers. He coached Mr. Mason, and so our road got something it
wanted. It was about the lumber rate, in competition with Canadian roads.
Mr. Mason made Steve his assistant--did you ever think what an awful lot
the rate on lumber might mean to _you_ and yours? It's a funny world.
Because Steve happened to be there and knew that with a rate of so much a
thousand feet our road could make money,--why, we had a house to live in
for the first time!
"Of course," she bubbled, "it isn't just that. It's Steve's head,--an
ability to find his way through those great sheets of figures the railroads
are always compiling. He stores the facts up in that big round head and
pulls 'em out when they are wanted. Why, he can tell you just what it would
cost to ship a car of tea from Seattle to New York!"
Isabella had a vision of Steve Johnston's large, heavy head with its thick,
black hair, and she began to feel a respect for the stolid man.
"John said he had great ability," she remarked. "I'm so glad it all came
out right in the end."
"I had my first servant when the promotion came, and that spring we took a
little house,--it was crowded in the flat, and noisy."
"You will find it so much easier now, and you will like St. Louis."
"Oh, yes! But it hasn't been really bad,--the struggle, the being poor. You
see we were both well and strong, and we loved so much, and we always had
the problem of how to live,--that draws you together if you have the real
thing in you. It isn't sordid trying to see what a quarter can be made to
do. It's exciting."
As she recalled the fight, a tender smile illuminated her face and curved
her lips upward. To her poverty had not been limiting, grinding, but an
exhilarating fight that taxed her resources of mind and body.
"Of course there are a lot of things you can't have. But most people have
more than they know how to handle, no matter where they are!"
Isabelle was puzzled by this remark, and explained Alice Johnston's content
by her age, her lack of experience, at least such experience as she had
had. For life to her presented a tantalizing feast of opportunities, and it
was her intention to grasp as many of these as one possibly could. Any
other view of living seemed not only foolish but small-minded. Without any
snobbishness she considered that her sphere and her husband's could not be
compared with the Johnstons'. The Lanes, she felt, were somehow called to
large issues.
Nevertheless, Isabelle could understand that Alice's marriage was quite a
different thing from what hers was,--something to glorify all the petty,
sordid details, to vivify the grimy struggle of keeping one's head above
the social waters.
"Now," Alice concluded, "we can save! And start the children fairly. But I
wonder if we shall ever be any happier than we have been,--any closer,
Steve and I?"
Alice, by her very presence, her calm acceptance of life as it shaped
itself, soothed Isabelle's restlessness, suggested trust and confidence.
"You are a dear," she whispered to her cousin. "I am so glad you are to be
near me in St. Louis!"