The calm male observer might marvel at Bessie's elation over the prospect
of sitting in Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's box at the performance of "Faust"
given by the French Opera Company on tour. But no candid woman will. It
could be explained partly by the natural desire to associate with
entertaining, well-dressed folk, who were generally considered to be "the
best," "the leaders" of local society. Sitting there in the stuffy box,
which was a poor place for seeing or hearing, Bessie felt the satisfaction
of being in the right company. She had discovered in one of the serried
rows of the first balcony Kitty Sanders, whom she had known as a girl in
Kansas City, where Bessie had once lived in the peregrinations of the
Bissell family. Kitty had married a prosperous dentist and enjoyed with him
an income nearly twice that of Rob Falkner. Kitty, scanning the boxes
closely, also spied Bessie, and exclaimed to her husband:--
"Why, there's Bessie Bissell in that box! You know she married a young
fellow, an engineer or something." And she added either aloud or to
herself, "They seem to be _in it_,--that's the Leason box." While the
alluring strains of the overture floated across the house, she mused at the
strange mutations of fortune, which had landed Bessie Bissell there and
herself here beside the dentist,--with some envy, in spite of three beloved
children at home and a motorcar....
To the dispassionate male observer this state of mind might be more
comprehensible if Bessie had appeared in Mrs. Corporation's box on a gala
night at the Metropolitan, or in the Duchess of Thatshire's box at Covent
Garden. But the strange fact of democracy is that instead of discouraging
social desires it has multiplied them ten thousand fold. Every city in the
land has its own Mrs. Anstruthers Leason or Mrs. Corporation, to form the
local constellation, towards which the active-minded women of a certain
type will always strive or gravitate, as you choose to put it. This being
so, the American husband, one might suppose, would sigh for an absolute
monarchy, where there is but one fixed social firmament, admission to which
is determined by a despot's edict. Then the great middle class could rest
content, knowing that forever, no matter what their gifts might be, their
wives could not aspire to social heights. With us the field is clear, the
race open to money and brains, and the result? Each one can answer for
himself.
Isabelle, returning to her home that fall, with a slight surplus of
vitality, was eager for life. "I have been dead so long," she said to her
husband. "I want to see people!" Born inside the local constellation, as
she had been, that was not difficult. Yet she realized soon enough that the
Prices, prominent as they were, had never belonged to the heart of the
constellation. It remained for her to penetrate there, under the guidance
of the same Nannie Lawton whom as a girl she had rather despised. For every
constellation has its inner circle, the members of which touch
telepathically all other inner circles. The fact that Nannie Lawton called
her by her first name would help her socially more, than the Colonel's
record as a citizen or her husband's position in the railroad or their
ample means. Before her second winter of married life had elapsed, she had
begun to exhaust this form of excitement, to find herself always tired.
After all, although the smudge of St. Louis on the level alluvial plains of
America was a number of times larger than the smudge of Torso, the human
formula, at least in its ornamental form, remained much the same. She was
patroness where she should be patroness, she was invited where she would
have felt neglected not to be invited, she entertained very much as the
others she knew entertained, and she and her husband had more engagements
than they could keep. She saw this existence stretching down the years with
monotonous iteration, and began to ask herself what else there was to
satisfy the thirst for experience which had never been assuaged.
Bessie, with a keener social sense, kept her eye on the game,--she had to,
and her little triumphs satisfied her. Nan Lawton varied the monotony of
"the ordinary round" by emotional dissipations that Isabelle felt herself
to be above. Other women of their set got variety by running about the
country to New York or Washington, to a hotel in Florida or in the
mountains of Carolina, or as a perpetual resource to Paris and Aix and
Trouville and London....
Isabelle was too intelligent, too much the daughter of her father, to
believe that a part of the world did not exist outside the social
constellation, and an interesting part, too. Some of those outside she
touched as time went on. She was one of the board of governors for the
Society of Country Homes for Girls, and here and on the Orphanage board she
met energetic and well-bred young married women, who apparently genuinely
preferred their charities, their reading clubs, the little country places
where they spent the summers, to the glory of Mrs. Anstruthers Leason's
opera box or dinner dance. As she shot about the city on her errands,
social and philanthropic, Isabelle sometimes mused on the lives of the
"others,"--all those thousands that filled the streets and great buildings
of the city. Of course the poor,--that was simple enough; the struggle for
life settled how one would live with ruthless severity. If it was a daily
question how you could keep yourself housed and fed, why it did not matter
what you did with your life. In the ranks above the poor, the little people
who lived in steam-heated apartments and in small suburban boxes had their
small fixed round of church and friends, still closely circumscribed and to
Isabelle, in her present mood,--simply dreadful. When she expressed this to
Fosdick, whom she was taking one morning to a gallery to see the work of a
local artist that fashionable people were patronizing, he had scoffed at
her:--
"_Madame la princesse_," he said, waving his hand towards the throng of
morning shoppers, "don't you suppose that the same capacity for human
sensation exists in every unit of that crowd bent towards Sneeson's as in
you?"
"No," protested Isabelle, promptly; "they haven't the same experience."
"As thrilling a drama can be unrolled in a twenty-five dollar flat as in a
palace."
"Stuff! There isn't one of those women who wouldn't be keen to try the
palace!"
"As you ought to be to try the flat, in a normally constituted society."
"What do you mean by a normally constituted society?"
"One where the goal of ease is not merely entertainment."
"You are preaching now, aren't you?" demanded Isabelle. "Society has always
been pretty much the same, hasn't it? First necessities, then comforts,
then luxuries, and then--"
"Well, what?"
"Oh, experience, art, culture, I suppose."
"Isabelle," the big man smilingly commented, "you are the same woman you
were six years ago."
"I am not!" she protested, really irritated. "I have done a lot of
thinking, and I have seen a good deal of life. Besides I am a good wife,
and a mother, which I wasn't six years ago, and a member of the Country
Homes Society and the Orphanage, and a lot more." They laughed at her
defence, and Isabelle added as a concession: "I know that there are plenty
of women not in society who lead interesting lives, are intelligent and all
that. But I am a good wife, and a good mother, and I am intelligent, and
what is more, I see amusing people and more of them than the others,--the
just plain women. What would you have me do?"
"Live," Fosdick replied enigmatically.
"We all live."
"Very few do."
"You mean emotional--heart experiences, like Nan's affairs? ... Sometimes I
wonder if that wouldn't be--interesting. But it would give John such a
shock! ... Well, here are the pictures. There's Mrs. Leason's
portrait,--flatters her, don't you think?"
Fosdick, leaning his fat hands on his heavy stick, slowly made the round of
the canvasses, concluding with the portrait of Mrs. Leason.
"Got some talent in him," he pronounced; "a penny worth. If he can only
keep away from this sort of thing," pointing with his stick to the
portrait, "he might paint in twenty years."
"But why shouldn't he do portraits? They all have to, to live."
"It isn't the portrait,--it's the sort of thing it brings with it. You met
him, I suppose?"
"Yes; dined with him at Mrs. Leason's last week."
"I thought so. That's the beginning of his end."
"You silly! Art has always been parasitic,--why shouldn't the young man go
to pleasant people's houses and have a good time and be agreeable and get
them to buy his pictures?"
"Isabelle, you have fallen into the bad habit of echoing phrases. 'Art has
always been parasitic.' That's the second commonplace of the drawing-room
you have got off this morning."
"Come over here and tell me something.... I can't quarrel with you,
Dickie!" Isabelle said, leading the way to a secluded bench.
"If I were not modest, I should say you were flirting with me."
"I never flirt with any man; I am known as the Saint, the Puritan,--I might
try it, but I couldn't--with you.... Tell me about Vick. Have you seen
him?"
"Yes," Fosdick replied gravely. "I ran across him in Venice."
"How was he?"
"He looked well, has grown rather stout.... The first time I saw him was on
the Grand Canal; met him in a smart gondola, with men all togged out, no
end of a get-up!"
"You saw them _both_?"
"Of course,--I looked him up at once. They have an old place on the
Giudecca, you know. I spent a week with them. He's still working on the
opera,--it doesn't get on very fast, I gather. He played me some of the
music,--it's great, parts of it. And he has written other things."
"I know all that," Isabelle interrupted impatiently. "But is he happy?"
"A man like Vickers doesn't tell you that, you know."
"But you can tell--how did they seem?"
"Well," Fosdick replied slowly, "when I saw them in the gondola the first
time, I thought--it was too bad!"
"I was afraid so," Isabelle cried. "Why don't they marry and come to New
York or go to London or some place and make a life?--people can't live like
that."
"I think he wants to marry her," Fosdick replied.
"But she won't?"
"Precisely,--not now."
"Why--what?"
Fosdick avoided the answer, and observed, "Vick seems awfully fond of the
little girl, Delia."
"Poor, poor Vick!" Isabelle sighed. "He ought to leave that creature."
"He won't; Vick was the kind that the world sells cheap,--it's best kind.
He lives the dream and believes his shadows; it was always so. It will be
so until the end. Life will stab him at every corner."
"Dear, dear Vick!" Isabelle said softly; "some days I feel as if I would
have done as he did."
"But fortunately there is John to puncture your dream with solid fact."
"John even might not be able to do it! ... I am going over to see Vick this
summer."
"Wouldn't that make complications--family ones?"
Isabelle threw up her head wilfully.
"Dickie, I think there is something in me deeper than my love for John or
for the child,--and that is the feeling I have about Vick!"
Fosdick looked at her penetratingly.
"You ought not to have married, Isabelle."
"Why? Every one marries--and John and I are very happy.... Come; there are
some people I don't want to meet."
As they descended the steps into the murky light of the noisy city,
Isabelle remarked:--
"Don't forget to-night, promptly at seven,--we are going to the theatre
afterwards. I shall show you some of our smart people and let you see if
they aren't more interesting than the mob."
She nodded gayly and drove off. As she went to a luncheon engagement, she
thought of Vickers, of Fosdick's remarks about living, and a great wave of
dissatisfaction swept over her. "It's this ugly city," she said to herself,
letting down the window. "Or it's nerves again,--I must do something!" That
phrase was often on her lips these days. In her restlessness nothing seemed
just right,--she was ever trying to find something beyond the horizon. As
Fosdick would have said, "The race vitality being exhausted in its
primitive force, nothing has come to take its place." But at luncheon she
was gay and talkative, the excitement of human contact stimulating her. And
afterwards she packed the afternoon with trivial engagements until it was
time to dress for her guests.
The dinner and the theatre might have passed off uneventfully, if it had
not been for Fosdick. That unwieldy social vessel broke early in the
dinner. Isabelle had placed him next Mrs. Leason because the lady liked
celebrities, and Fosdick, having lately been put gently but firmly beyond
the confines of the Tzar's realm for undue intimacy with the rebellious
majority of the Tzar's subjects, might be counted such. For the time being
he had come to a momentary equilibrium in the city of his birth. Fosdick
and Mrs. Leason seemed to find common ground, while the other men, the
usual speechless contingent of tired business men, allowed themselves to be
talked at by the women. Presently Fosdick's voice boomed forth:--
"Let me tell you a story which will illustrate my point, Mrs. Leason. Some
years ago I was riding through the Kentucky mountains, and after a wretched
luncheon in one of the log-and-mud huts I was sitting on the bench in front
of the cabin trying to make peace with my digestion. The ground in that
spot sloped down towards me, and on the side of this little hill there lay
a large hog, a razor-back sow. There were eight little pigs clustered in
voracious attitudes about her, and she could supply but six at a time,--I
mean that she was provided by nature with but six teats."
Mrs. Leason visibly moved away from her neighbor, and for the rest of his
story Fosdick had a silent dinner table.
"The mother was asleep," Fosdick continued, turning his great head closer
to Mrs. Leason, "probably attending to her digestion as I was to mine, and
she left her offspring to fight it out among themselves for the possession
of her teats. There was a lively scrap, a lot of hollerin' and squealin'
from that bunch of porkers, grunts from the ins and yaps from the outs, you
know. Every now and then one of the outs would make a flying start, get a
wedge in and take a nip, forcing some one of his brothers out of the heap
so that he would roll down the hill into the path. Up he'd get and start
over, and maybe he would dislodge some other porker. And the old sow kept
grunting and sleeping peacefully in the sun while her children got their
dinner in the usual free-fight fashion.
"Now," Fosdick raised his heavy, square-pointed finger and shook it at the
horrified Mrs. Leason and also across the table, noticing what seemed to
him serious interest in his allegory, "I observed that there was a
difference among those little porkers,--some were fat and some were peaked,
and the peaked fellers got little show at the mother. Now what I ask myself
is,--were they weak because they couldn't manage to get a square feed, or
were they hustled out more than the others because they were naturally
weak? I leave that to my friends the sociologists to determine--"
"Isabella," Lane interposed from his end of the table, "if Mr. Fosdick has
finished his pig story, perhaps--"
Isabelle, divided between a desire to laugh and a very vivid sense of Mrs.
Leason's feelings, rose, but Fosdick had not finished and she sat down
again.
"But what I meant to say was this, madam,--there's only one difference
between that old sow and her brood and society as it is run at present, and
that is there are a thousand mouths to every teat, and a few big, fat
fellows are getting all the food."
He looked up triumphantly from his exposition. There was a titter at Mrs.
Lawton's end of the table. This lady had been listening to an indecent
story told in French-English when Fosdick had upset things. Now she
remarked in an audible tone:--
"Disgusting, I say!"
"Eh! What's the matter? Don't you believe what I told you?" Fosdick
demanded.
"Oh, yes, Dickie,--anything you say,--only don't repeat it!" Isabelle
exclaimed, rising from the table.
"Does he come from a farm?" one woman murmured indignantly. "Such _gros
mots_!" She too had been listening to the story of adultery at Mrs.
Lawton's end of the table. Isabelle, who had taken in the whole situation
from her husband's shocked face, Nan Lawton's sly giggle over the salacious
tidbit, and Mrs. Leason's offended countenance, felt that she must shriek
to relieve her feelings.
The party finally reached the theatre and saw a "sex" play, which caused a
furious discussion among the women. "No woman would have done that." "The
man was not worth the sacrifice," etc. And Fosdick gloomily remarked in
Isabelle's ears: "Rot like this is all you see on the modern stage. And
it's because women want it,--they must forever be fooling with sex. Why
don't they--"
"Hush, Dickie! you have exploded enough to-night. Don't say that to Mrs.
Leason!"
Her world appeared to her that night a harlequin tangle, and, above all,
meaningless--yes, dispiritedly without sense. John, somehow, seemed
displeased with her, as if she were responsible for Dickie's breaks. She
laughed again as she thought of the sow story, and the way the women took
it. "What a silly world,--talk and flutter and gadding, all about nothing!"