When Isabelle emerged from the great hotel and turned down the avenue to
walk to the office of Dr. Potts, as he required her to do every day, she
had a momentary thrill of exultation. Descending the gentle incline, she
could see a good part of the city extending into a distant blue horizon
before her. The vast buildings rose like islands in the morning mist. It
reminded her, this general panorama, of the awe-compelling spaces of the
Arizona canon into which she had once descended. Here were the same
irregular, beetling cliffs, the same isolated crags, with sharply outlined
lower and minor levels of building. The delicate blue, the many grays of
storm and mist gave it color, also. But in place of the canon's eternal
quiet,--the solitude of the remote gods,--this city boiled and hummed.
That, too,--the realization of multitudinous humanity,--made Isabelle's
pulses leap.
In spite of her poor health, she had the satisfaction of at last being
here, in the big hive, where she had wished to be so long. She was a part
of it, a painfully insignificant mite as yet, but still a part of it.
Hitherto New York had been a sort of varied hotel, an entertainment. Now it
was to be her scene, and she had begun already to take possession. It had
all come about very naturally, shortly after her father's death. While she
was dreading the return to St. Louis, which must be emptier than ever
without the Colonel, and she and her mother were discussing the possibility
of Europe, John's new position had come. A Western road had made him an
offer; for he had a splendid record as a "traffic getter." The Atlantic and
Pacific could not lose him; they gave him the third vice-presidency with
headquarters in New York and general charge of traffic. Thus the Lanes'
horizon shifted, and it was decided that the first year in the city they
should spend in a hotel with Mrs. Price. Isabelle's health was again
miserable; there had been the delayed operation; and now she was in the
care of the famous Potts, trying to recover from the operation, from the
old fatigue and the recent strains, "to be made fit."
The move to New York had not meant much to Lane. He had spent a great deal
of his time there these last years, as well as in Washington,
Pittsburg,--in this city and that,--as business called him. His was what is
usually regarded as a cosmopolitan view of life,--it might better be called
a hotel-view. Home still meant to him the city where his wife and child
were temporarily housed, but he was equally familiar with half a dozen
cities. Isabelle, too, had the same rootless feeling. She had spent but a
short time in any one place since she had left her father's house to go to
St. Mary's. That is the privilege or the curse of the prosperous American.
Life thus becomes a shifting panorama of surfaces. Even in the same city
there are a dozen spots where the family ark has rested, which for the sake
of a better term may be called "homes." That sense of rooted attachment
which comes from long habituation to one set of physical images is
practically a lost emotion to Americans....
There were days when New York roared too loudly for Isabelle's nerves, when
the jammed streets, the buzzing shops, the overflowing hotels and theatres,
made her long for quiet. Then she thought of the Farm as the most stable
memory of a fixed condition, and she had an unformed plan of "doing over"
the old place, which was now her own, and making it the centre of the
family's centrifugal energy. Meantime there was the great Potts, who
promised her health, and the flashing charm of the city.
Occasionally she felt lonely in this packed procession, this hotel
existence, with its multitude of strange faces, and longed for something
familiar, even Torso! At such times when she saw the face of an old
acquaintance, perhaps in a cab at a standstill in the press of the avenue,
her heart warmed. Even a fleeting glimpse of something known was a relief.
Clearly she must settle herself into this whirlpool, put out her tentacles,
and grasp an anchorage. But where? What?
One morning as she and her mother were making slow progress down the
avenue, she caught sight of Margaret Pole on the sidewalk, waiting to cross
the stream, a little boy's hand in hers. Isabelle waved to her frantically,
and then leaped from the cab, dodged between the pushing motors, and
grasped Margaret.
"You here!" she gasped.
"We came back some months ago," Margaret explained.
She was thin, Isabelle thought, and her face seemed much older than the
years warranted. Margaret, raising her voice above the roar, explained that
they were living out of town, "in the country, in Westchester," and
promised to come to lunch the next time she was in the city. Then with a
nod and a smile she slipped into the stream again as if anxious to be lost,
and Isabelle rejoined her mother.
"She looks as if she were saving her clothes," Mrs. Price announced with
her precise view of what she observed. Isabelle, while she waited for the
doctor, mused on the momentary vision of her old friend at the street
corner. Margaret turned up in the noise and mist of the city, as everybody
might turn up; but Margaret old, worn, and almost shabby! Then the nurse
came for her and she went into the doctor's room, with a depressing
sensation compounded of a bad night, the city roar, the vision of Margaret.
"Well, my lady, what's the story to-day?"
Dr. Potts looked up from his desk, and scrutinized the new patient out of
his shaggy eyebrows. Isabelle began at once the neurasthenic's involved and
particularized tale of woe, breaking at the end with almost a sob:--
"I am so useless! I am never going to be well,--what is the matter with
me?"
"So it's a bad world this morning, eh?" the doctor quizzed in an indulgent
voice. "We'll try to make it better,--shake up the combination." He broke
off suddenly and remarked in an ordinary, conversational voice: "Your
friend Mrs. Woodyard was in here this morning,--a clever woman! My, but she
is clever!"
"What is the matter with her?"
"Same thing,--Americanitis; but she'll pull out if she will give herself
half a chance."
Then he returned to Isabelle, wrote her a prescription, talked to her for
ten minutes, and when she left the office she felt better, was sure it
would "all come out right."
The great Dr. Potts! He served as God to several hundred neurasthenic
women. Born in a back street of a small town, he had emerged into the
fashionable light after prodigious labor and exercise of will. Physically
he stood six feet, with a heavy head covered with thick black hair, and
deep-set black eyes. He had been well educated professionally, but his
training, his medical attainments, had little to do with his success. He
had the power to look through the small souls of his women patients, and he
found generally Fear, and sometimes Hypocrisy,--a desire to evade, to get
pleasure and escape the bill. These he bullied. Others he found struggling,
feeble of purpose, desiring light, willingly confessing their weakness, and
begging for strength. These he despised; he gave them drugs and flattered
them. There were some, like Conny, who were perfectly poised, with a plain
philosophy of selfishness. These he understood, being of fellow clay, and
plotted with them how to entrap what they desired.
Power! That was Potts's keynote,--power, effectiveness, accomplishment, at
any and all cost. He was the spirit of the city, nay of the country itself!
"Results--get results at all costs," that was the one lesson of life which
he had learned from the back street, where luckier men had shouldered
him.... "I must supply backbone," he would say to his patients. "I am your
temporary dynamo!"
To Isabelle this mass of energy, Dr. Alexander Potts, seemed like the
incarnate will to live of the great city. After her visit at his office she
came out into the sharp air, the shrill discords of the busy streets,
attuned--with purpose,--"I am going to be well now! I am going to do this.
Life will arrange itself, and at last I shall be able to live as others
live." This borrowed purpose might last the day out, and she would plunge
into a dozen matters; or it might wear off in an hour or two. Then back she
went the next day to be keyed up once more.
"Do something! Deliver the goods, no matter what goods or how you get them
into the premises!" Potts thundered, beating the desk in the energy of his
lecture. "Live! That's what we must all do. Never mind _how_ you
live,--don't waste good tissue worrying over that. _Live!_"
Dr. Potts was an education to Isabelle. His moods of brutality and of
sympathy came like the shifting shadows of a gusty day. His perfectly
material philosophy frightened her and allured her. He was
Mephistopheles,--one hand on the medicine chest of life, the other pointing
satirically towards the towered city.
"See, my child," he purred; "I will tinker this little toy of your body for
you; then run along down there and play with your brothers and sisters."
In the mood of reaction that the neurasthenic must meet, the trough of the
wave, Isabelle doubted. Potts had not yet found the key to her mechanism;
the old listless cloud befogged her still. After a sleepless night she
would sit by her window, high up in the mountain of stone, and look out
over the city, its voice dull at this hour of dawn,--a dozing monster.
Something like terror filled her at these times, fear of herself, of the
slumbering monster, so soon to wake and roar. "Act, do!" thundered Potts;
"don't think! Live and get what you want...." Was that all? The peaceful
pastures at Grafton, the still September afternoon when the Colonel died,
the old man himself,--there was something in them beyond mere energy, quite
outside the Potts philosophy.
Once she ventured to suggest this doubt to Cornelia Woodyard, who, being
temporarily in need of a bracer, had resorted to "old Pot." She had planned
to go to the opera that night and wanted to "be herself."
"I wonder if he's right about it all," said Isabelle; "if we are just
machines, with a need to be oiled now and then,--to take this drug or that?
Is it all as simple as he makes out? All just autointoxication, chemistry,
and delusion?"
"You're ill,--that's why you doubt," Conny replied with tranquil
positiveness. "When you've got the poison out of your system, you'll see,
or rather you won't see crooked,--won't have ideas."
"It's all a formula?"
Conny nodded, shutting her large mouth firmly.
"And he has the key. You are merely an organ, and he pulls out this stop or
that; gives you one thing to take and then another. You tell him this dotty
idea you've got in your head and he'll pull the right stop to shake it
out."
"I wonder! Some days I feel that I must go away by myself, get out of all
the noise, and live up among the mountains far off--"
She stopped. For Conny was not one to whom to confide a longing for the
stars and the winds in the pines and the scent of the earth. Such vaporing
would be merely another symptom!
"What would you go mooning off by yourself for? You'd be crazy, for a fact.
Better come down to Palm Beach with me next month."
The great Potts had the unfortunate habit of gossiping about his patients
with one another. He had said to Conny: "Your friend Isabelle interests me.
I should say that she had a case of festering conscience." He crossed his
legs and gazed wisely up at the ceiling. "A rudimentary organ left over
from her hard-working ancestors. She is inhibited, tied, thinks she can't
do this and that. What she needs"--Potts had found the answer to his riddle
and brought his eyes from the ceiling--"is a lover! Can't you find her
one?"
"Women usually prefer to select _that_ for themselves."
"Oh, no,--one is as good as another. What she needs is a counter-irritant.
That husband of hers, what is he like?"
"Just husband, very successful, good-natured, gives her what she wants,--I
should say they pull well together."
"That's it! He's one of the smooth, get-everything-the-dear-woman-wants
kind, eh? And then busies himself about his old railroad? Well, it is the
worst sort for her. She needs a man who will beat her."
"Is that what the lover would do?"
"Bless you, no! He would make her stop thinking she had an ache." When
Conny went, the doctor came to the door with her and as he held her hand
cried breezily: "Remember what I said about your friend. Look up some nice
young man, who will hang around and make her think she's got a soul." He
pressed Conny's hand and smiled.