"What makes a happy marriage?" Rob Falkner queried in his brutal and
ironical mood, which made his wife shiver for the proprieties of pleasant
society. It was at one of Bessie's famous Torso suppers, when the Lanes and
Darnells were present.
"A good cook and a good provider," Lane suggested pleasantly, to keep the
topic off conversational reefs.
"A husband who thinks everything you do just right!" sighed Bessie.
"Plenty of money and a few children--for appearances," some one threw in.
Isabelle remarked sagely, "A husband who knows what is best for you in the
big things, and a wife who does what is best in the small ones."
"Unity of Purpose--Unity of Souls," Tom Darnell announced in his oratorical
voice, with an earnestness that made the party self-conscious. His wife
said nothing, and Falkner summed up cynically:--
"You've won, Lane! The American husband must be a good provider, but it
doesn't follow that the wife must be a good cook. Say a good entertainer,
and there you have a complete formula of matrimony: PROVIDER (Hustler,
Money-getter, Liberal) and ENTERTAINER (A woman pretty, charming, social)."
"Here's to the Falkner household,--the perfect example!"
Thus the talk drifted off with a laugh into a discussion of masculine
deficiencies and feminine endurances. Isabelle, looking back with the
experience of after years, remembered this "puppy-dog" conversation. How
young they all were and how they played with ideas! Bessie, also,
remembered the occasion, with an injured feeling. On the way home that
night Lane had remarked to his wife:--
"Falkner is a queer chap,--he was too personal to-night."
"I suppose it is hard on him; Bessie is rather wilful and extravagant. He
looked badly to-night. And he told me he had to take an early train to
examine some new work."
Lane shrugged his shoulders, as does the man of imperturbable will, perfect
digestion, and constant equilibrium, for the troubles of a weaker vessel.
"If he doesn't like what his wife does, he should have character enough to
control her. Besides he should have known all that before he married!"
Isabelle smiled at this piece of masculine complacency,--as if a man could
know any essential fact about a woman from the way she did her hair to the
way she spent money before he had lived with her!
"I do hope he will get a better place," Isabelle remarked good-naturedly.
"It would do them both so much good."
As we have seen, Falkner's chance came at last through Lane, who
recommended him to the A. and P. engineer in charge of the great terminal
works that the road had undertaken in St. Louis. The salary of the new
position was four thousand dollars a year,--a very considerable advance
over the Torso position, and the work gave Falkner an opportunity such as
he had never had before. The railroad system had other large projects in
contemplation also.
"Bessie has written me such a letter,--the child!" Isabelle told her
husband. "You would think they had inherited a million. And yet she seems
sad to leave Torso, after all the ragging she gave the place. She has a
good word to say even for Mrs. Fraser!"
Bessie Falkner was one of those who put down many small roots wherever
chance places them. She had settled into Torso more solidly than she knew
until she came to pull up her roots and put them down in a large, strange
city. "We won't know any one there," she said dolefully to her Torso
friends. "The Lanes, of course; but they are such grand folk now--and
Isabella has all her old friends about her." Nevertheless, it scarcely
entered her mind to remain "in this prairie village all our days." Bessie
had to the full the American ambition to move on and up as far as
possible....
Fortune, having turned its attention to the Falkners, seemed determined to
smile on them this year. An uncle of Bessie's died on his lonely ranch in
Wyoming, and when the infrequent local authorities got around to settling
his affairs, they found that he had left his little estate to Elizabeth
Bissell, who was now Mrs. Robert Falkner of Torso. The lonely old rancher,
it seemed, had remembered the pretty, vivacious blond girl of eighteen, who
had taken the trouble to show him the sights of Denver the one time he had
visited his sister ten years before. Bessie, amused at his eccentric
appearance, had tried to give "Uncle Billy" a good time. "Uncle Billy," she
would say, "you must do this,--you will remember it all your life. Uncle
Billy, won't you lunch with me down town to-day? You must go to the
theatre, while you are here. Uncle, I am going to make you a necktie!" So
she had chirped from morning until night, flattering, coaxing, and also
making sport of the old man. "Bess has a good heart," her mother said to
Uncle Bill, and it must be added Bessie also had a woman's instinct to
please a possible benefactor. Uncle Billy when he returned to the lonely
ranch wrote a letter to his pretty niece, which Bessie neglected to answer.
Nevertheless, when Uncle Billy made ready to die, he bestowed all that he
had to give upon the girl who had smiled on him once.
Thus Bessie's purring good nature bore fruit, Before the property could be
sold, the most imaginative ideas about her inheritance filled Bessie's
dreams. Day and night she planned what they would do with this
fortune,--everything from a year in Europe to new dresses for the children!
When it came finally in the form of a draft for thirteen thousand and some
odd dollars, her visions were dampened for a time,--so many of her castles
could not be acquired for thirteen thousand and some odd dollars.
Falkner was for investing the legacy in Freke's mines, which, he had good
reason to believe, were better than gold mines. But when Bessie learned
that the annual dividends would only be about twelve hundred dollars, she
demurred. That was too slow. Secretly she thought that "if Rob were only
clever about money," he might in a few years make a real fortune out of
this capital. There were men she had known in Denver, as she told her
husband, "who hadn't half of that and who had bought mines that had brought
them hundreds of thousands of dollars." To which remark, Rob had replied
curtly that he was not in that sort of business and that there were many
more suckers than millionnaires in Denver--and elsewhere.
So, finally, after paying some Torso debts, it came down to buying a house
in St. Louis; for the flat that they had first rented was crowded and
Bessie found great difficulty in keeping a servant longer than a week. Rob
thought that it would be more prudent to rent a house for six to nine
hundred than to buy outright or build, until they saw how his work for the
A. and P. developed. But Bessie wanted a home,--a house of her own. So they
began the wearisome search for a house. Bessie already had her views about
the desirable section to live in,--outside the smoke in one of "those
private estate parks,"--where the Lanes were thinking of settling. (A few
months had been sufficient for Bessie to orientate herself socially in her
new surroundings.) "That's where all the nice young people are going," she
announced. In vain Rob pointed out that there were no houses to be bought
for less than eighteen thousand in this fashionable neighborhood. "You
never dare!" she retorted reproachfully. "You have to take risks if you
want anything in this world! How many houses in St. Louis that aren't
mortgaged do you suppose there are?"
"But there is only about eleven thousand of Uncle Billy's money left, and
those houses in Buena Vista Park cost from eighteen to twenty-four thousand
dollars."
"And they have only one bath-room," sighed Bessie.
The summer went by in "looking," and the more houses they looked at the
less satisfied was Bessie. She had in the foreground of her mind an image
of the Lanes' Torso house, only "more artistic"; but Falkner convinced her
that such a house in St. Louis would cost thirty thousand dollars at the
present cost of building materials.
"It is so difficult," she explained to Mrs. Price, "to find anything small
and your own, don't you know?" She arched her brows prettily over her
dilemma. Mrs. Price, who, in spite of the fascination that Bessie exerted,
had prim ideas "of what young persons in moderate circumstances" should do,
suggested that the Johnstons were buying a very good house in the new
suburb of Bryn Mawr on the installment plan.
"As if we could bury ourselves in that swamp,--we might as well stay in
Torso!" Bessie said to her husband disgustedly.
Falkner reflected that the train service to Bryn Mawr made it easier of
access to his work than the newer residential quarter inside the city which
Bessie was considering. But that was the kind of remark he had learned not
to make....
In the end it came to their building. For Bessie found nothing "small and
pretty, and just her own," with three bath-rooms, two maids' rooms, etc.,
in any "possible" neighborhood. She had met at a dinner-party an attractive
young architect, who had recently come from the East to settle in St.
Louis. Mr. Bowles prepared some water-color sketches which were so pretty
that she decided to engage him. With misgivings Rob gave his consent. A
narrow strip of frontage was found next a large house in the desired
section. They had to pay three thousand dollars for the strip of land. Mr.
Bowles thought the house could be built for eight or ten thousand dollars,
depending on the price of materials, which seemed to be going up with
astonishing rapidity.
Then Bessie plunged into plans. It was a gusty March day when the Falkners
went out with the architect to consider the lot, and spent an afternoon
trying to decide how to secure the most sun. Falkner, weary of the whole
matter, listened to the glib young architect. Another windy day in April
they returned to the lot to look at the excavation. The contracts were not
yet signed. Lumber had gone soaring, and there was a strike in the brick
business, the kind of brick they had chosen being unobtainable, while
hardware seemed unaccountably precious. Already it was impossible to build
the house for less than twelve thousand, even after sacrificing Bessie's
private bath. Falkner had consented to the mortgage,--"only four thousand,"
Bessie said; "we'll save our rent and pay it off in a year or two!"
Bessie's periods of economy were always just dawning!
Falkner, looking at the contractor's tool shed, had a sense of depressing
fatality. From the moment that the first spadeful of ground had been dug,
it seemed to him that the foundation of his domestic peace had begun to
crumble. But this depression was only an attack of the grippe, he said to
himself, and he tried to take an interest in the architect's description of
how they should terrace the front of the lot....
Of course, as the novelists tell us, the man of Strong Will, of Mature
Character, of Determined Purpose, would not have allowed his wife to
entangle him in this house business (or in matrimony, perhaps, in the first
instance)! But if society were composed of men of S. W., M. C., and D. P.,
there would be no real novels,--merely epics of Slaughter and Success, of
Passionate Love and Heroic Accomplishment.... At this period Falkner still
loved his wife,--wanted to give her every gratification within his power,
and some just beyond,--though that love had been strained by five hard
years, when her efforts as an economic partner had not been intelligent.
(Bessie would have scorned such an unromantic term as "economic partner.")
They still had their times of amiable understanding, of pleasant
comradeship, even of passionate endearment. But by the time the young
architect's creation at number 26 Buena Vista Pleasance had become their
residence, that love was in a moribund condition.... Yet after all, as
Bessie sometimes reminded him, it was her money that was building the
house, at least the larger part of it; and further it was all her life that
was to be spent in it, presumably. The woman's home was her world.
Thus, in the division that had come between them, the man began to consider
his wife's rights, what he owed to her as a woman that he had taken under
his protection,--a very dangerous state of mind in matrimony. If he had
discovered that her conception of the desirable end of life was not his, he
must respect her individuality, and so far as possible provide for her that
which she seemed to need. The faithful husband, or dray-horse
interpretation of marriage, this.