If it takes Strong Will, Mature Character, and Determined Purpose to live
effectively, it takes all of that and more--humor and patience--to build a
house in America, unless one can afford to order his habitation as he does
a suit of clothes and spend the season in Europe until the contractor and
the architect have fought it out between them. But Bessie was a young woman
of visions. She had improved all her opportunities to acquire taste,--the
young architect said she had "very intelligent ideas." And he, Bertram
Bowles, fresh from Paris, with haunting memories of chateaux and villas,
and a knowledge of what the leading young architects of the East were
turning out, had visions too, in carrying out this first real commission
that he had received in St. Louis. "Something _chic_, with his stamp on
it," he said....
The hours with the contractors to persuade them that they could do
something they had never seen done before! The debates over wood finish,
and lumber going up while you talked! The intricacies of heating, plumbing,
electric lighting, and house telephones--when all men are discovered to be
liars! Falkner thought it would be easier to lay out the entire terminal
system of the A. and P. than to build one "small house, pretty and just
your own, you know." Occasionally even Bessie and the polite Bertram Bowles
fell out, when Falkner was called in to arbitrate. Before the question of
interior decoration came up the house had already cost fourteen thousand
dollars, which would necessitate a mortgage of six thousand dollars at
once. Here Falkner put his foot down,--no more; they would live in it with
bare walls. Bessie pleaded and sulked,--"only another thousand." And "not
to be perfectly ridiculous," Falkner was forced to concede another
thousand. "Not much when you consider," as the architect said to Bessie....
Time dragged on, and the house was not ready. The apartment hotel into
which they had moved was expensive and bad for the children. In June
Falkner insisted on moving into the unfinished house, with carpenters,
painters, decorators still hanging on through the sultry summer months.
"I met your poor little friend Mrs. Falkner at Sneeson's this morning," Nan
Lawton said to Isabelle. "She was looking over hangings and curtains for
her house.... She is nothing but a bag of bones, she's so worn. That
husband of hers must be a brute to let her wear herself all out. She was
telling me some long yarn about their troubles with the gas men,--very
amusing and bright. She is a charming little thing."
"Yes," Isabelle replied; "I am afraid the house has been too much for them
both."
She had been Bessie's confidant in all her troubles, and sympathized--who
could not sympathize with Bessie?--though she thought her rather foolish to
undertake so much.
"We'll simply have to have rugs, I tell Rob," Bessie said to her. "He is in
such bad humor these days, and says we must go on the bare floors or use
the old Torso carpets. Fancy!"
And Isabelle said, as she was expected to say, "Of course you will have to
have rugs. They are having a sale at Moritz's,--some beauties and cheap."
Yet she had a sneaking sympathy for Falkner. Isabelle did not suspect that
she herself was the chief undoing of the Falkner household, nor did any one
else suspect it. It was Bessie's ideal of Isabelle that rode her hard from
the beginning of her acquaintance with the Lanes. And it was Isabelle who
very naturally introduced them to most of the people they had come to know
in their new world. Isabelle herself had much of her mother's thrift and
her father's sagacity in practical matters. She would never have done what
Bessie was doing in Bessie's circumstances. But in her own circumstances
she did unconsciously a great deal more,--and she disliked to fill her mind
with money matters, considering it vulgar and underbred to dwell long on
them. The rich and the very wise can indulge in these aristocratic
refinements! Isabelle, to be sure, felt flattered by Bessie's admiring
discipleship,--who does not like to lead a friend? She never dreamed of her
evil influence. The power of suggestion, subtle, far-reaching, ever working
on plastic human souls! Society evolves out of these petty reactions....
The rugs came.
"We simply have to have rugs,--the house calls for it," asserted Bessie,
using one of Mr. Bertram Bowles's favorite expressions.
"My purse doesn't," growled Falkner.
Nevertheless Bessie selected some pretty cheap rugs at Moritz's, which
could be had on credit. In the great rug room of the department store she
met Alice Johnston, who was looking at a drugget. The two women exchanged
experiences as the perspiring clerks rolled and rerolled rugs.
"Yes, we shall like Bryn Mawr," Mrs. Johnston said, "now that the foliage
covers up the tin cans and real estate signs. The schools are really very
good, and there is plenty of room for the boys to make rough house in. We
are to have a garden another year.... Oh, yes, it is rural middle
class,--that's why I can get drugget for the halls."
Bessie thought of her pretty house and shuddered.
"We are planning to call and see the house--Isabelle says it's
wonderful--but it will have to be on a Sunday--the distance--"
"Can't you come next Sunday for luncheon? I will ask Isabelle and her
husband," Bessie interrupted hospitably, proud to show off her new toy.
And on Sunday they all had a very good time and the new "toy" was much
admired, although the paint was still sticky,--the painter had been
optimistic when he took the contract and had tried to save himself
later,--the colors wrong, and the furniture, which had done well enough in
Torso, looked decidedly shabby.
"It's the prettiest house I know," Isabelle said warmly, and Bessie felt
repaid.
She was very tired, and to-day looked worn. The new toy was dragging her
out. As the long St. Louis summer drew to an end, she was always tired.
Some obscure woman's trouble, something in the delicate organism that had
never been quite right, was becoming acutely wrong. She lived in fear of
having another child,--the last baby had died. By the new year she was in
care of Isabelle's specialist, who advised an operation. When that was
over, it was nearly spring, and though she was still delicate, she wished
to give some dinners "to return their obligations." Falkner objected for
many reasons, and she thought him very hard.
"It is always sickness and babies for me," she pouted; "and when I want a
little fun, you think we can't afford it or something."
Her hospitable heart was so bent on this project, it seemed so natural that
she should desire to show off her toy, after her struggle for it, so
innocent "to have our friends about us," that he yielded in part. A good
deal might be told about that dinner, from an economic, a social, a
domestic point of view. But we must lose it and hasten on. Imagine merely,
what a charming woman like Bessie Falkner, whose scheme of the universe was
founded on the giving of "pleasant little dinners," would do,--a woman who
was making her life, building her wigwam, filling it with those she wished
to have as friends, and you will see it all. It was, of course, a great
success. Mrs. Anstruthers Leason said of the hostess (reported by Nan
Lawton through Isabelle), "Little Mrs. Falkner has the real social gift,--a
very rare thing among our women!" And when an invitation came from Mrs.
Anstruthers Leason to dinner and her box at the French opera, Bessie was
sure that she had found her sphere.
* * * * *
Falkner seemed to Bessie these days to be growing harder,--he was
"exacting," "unsympathetic," "tyrannical." "He won't go places, and he
won't have people,--isn't nice to them, even in his own house," Bessie said
sadly to Isabelle. "I suppose that marriage usually comes to that: the wife
stands for bills and trouble, and the husband scolds. Most people squabble,
don't they?"
"Of course he loves you, dear," Isabelle consoled her. "American husbands
always take their wives for granted, as Nannie says. A foreigner pays
attentions to his wife after marriage that our husbands don't think are
necessary once they have us. Our husbands take us too much as a matter of
course,--and pay the bills!"
Bessie felt and said that Rob took life too hard, worried too much. After
all, when a man married a woman and had children, he must expect a certain
amount of trouble and anxiety. She wasn't sure but that wives were needed
to keep men spurred to their highest pitch of working efficiency. She had
an obscure idea that the male was by nature lazy and self-indulgent, and
required the steel prod of necessity to do his best work. As she looked
about her among the struggling households, it seemed such was the
rule,--that if it weren't for the fact of wife and children and bills, the
men would deteriorate.... Naturally there were differences,--"squabbles,"
as she called them; but she would have been horrified if any one had
suggested that these petty squabbles, the state of mind they produced or
indicated, were infinitely more degrading, more deteriorating to them both,
than adultery. It never entered her mind that either she or her husband
could be unfaithful, that Falkner could ever care for any other woman than
her. "Why, we married for love!"
* * * * *
Love! That divine unreason of the gods, which lures man as a universal
solvent of his sorrow, the great solution to the great enigma! Where was
it? Bessie asked when Rob passed her door in the morning on his way to his
solitary breakfast without a word of greeting or a kiss, and finally left
the house without remembering to go upstairs again. And Falkner asked
himself much the same thing, when Bessie persisted in doing certain things
"because everybody does," or when he realized that after two years in his
new position, with a five hundred dollars' increase in his salary the
second year, he was nearly a thousand dollars in debt, and losing steadily
each quarter. Something must be done--and by him!--for in marriage, he
perceived with a certain bitterness, Man was the Forager, the Provider. And
in America if he didn't bring in enough from the day's hunt to satisfy the
charming squaw that he had made his consort, why,--he must trudge forth
again and get it! A poor hunter does not deserve the embellishment of a
Bessie and two pretty children.
So he went forth to bring in more game, and he read no poetry these days.