"That snipe!" Conny called Margaret's husband, Mr. Lawrence Pole. Larry, as
he was known in his flourishing days when he loafed in brokers' offices,
and idiotically dribbled away his own fortune and most of his wife's,
rarely earned a better word than this epithet. "She ought to leave
him--divorce him--get rid of such rubbish somehow," Conny continued with
unwonted heat, as the tired motor chugged up the steep Westchester hillside
on its way to Dudley Farms where the Poles lived.
"Perhaps Margaret has prejudices," Isabella suggested. "You know she used
to be religious, and there's her father, the Bishop."
"It would take a good many bishops to keep me tied to Larry!"
Conny was enjoying the early spring air, the virginal complexion of the
April landscape. She surveyed the scene from Isabelle's motor with
complacent superiority. How much better she had arranged her life than
either Margaret or Isabelle! After the talk with Percy the previous
evening, she felt a new sense of power and competency, with a touch of
gratitude for that husband who had so frankly and unselfishly "accepted her
point of view" and allowed her "to have her own life" without a distressing
sense of wrecking anything. Conny's conscience was simple, almost
rudimentary; but it had to be satisfied, such as it was. To-day it was
completely satisfied, and she took an ample pleasure in realizing how well
she had managed a difficult situation,--and also in the prospect of dinner
with her lover in the evening.
That morning before the motor had come for her, she had gone over with
Percy the complicated situation that had developed at Albany. It was her
way in a crisis to let him talk it all out first, and then later,
preferably when he came to her room in the morning after his breakfast with
the children, to suggest those points which she wished to determine his
action. Thus her husband absorbed her views when they would make most
impression and in time came to believe that they were all evolved from his
inner being.... To-day when he appeared shortly before her coffee, she had
glanced at him apprehensively out of her sleepy eyes. But he betrayed no
sign of travail of spirit. Though naturally weary after his brief rest, he
had the same calm, friendly manner that was habitual with him. So they got
at once to the political situation.
She was content with the way in which she had led him, for the time at
least, to resolve his doubts and suspicions. They had no reason to suspect
the Senator,--he had always encouraged Woodyard's independent position in
politics and pushed him. There was not yet sufficient evidence of fraud in
the hearings before the Commission to warrant aggressive action. It would
be a pity to fire too soon, or to resign and lose an opportunity later. It
would mean not only political oblivion, but also put him in a ridiculous
light in the press, and suggest cowardice, etc. So he had gone away to
attend to some matters at his office, and take an afternoon train back to
Albany, with the conviction that "he must do nothing hurriedly, before the
situation had cleared up." Those were his own phrases; Conny always
preferred to have Percy use his own words to express his resolves.
There was only one small matter on her mind: she must see the Senator and
find out--well, as much as she could discreetly, and be prepared for the
next crisis....
"I don't see why Margaret buries herself like this," Conny remarked, coming
back to the present foreground, with a disgusted glance at the little
settlement of Dudley Farms, a sorry combination of the suburb and the
village, which they were approaching. "She might at least have a flat in
the city somewhere, like others."
"Margaret wants the children to be in the country. Probably she gets less
of Larry out here,--that may compensate!"
"As for the children," Conny pronounced with lazy dogmatism, "I don't
believe in fussing. Children must camp where it's best for the parents.
They can get fresh air in the Park."
The motor turned in at a neglected driveway, forbidding with black
tree-trunks, and whirled up to the piazza of a brick house, an ugly
survival of the early country mansion. Mrs. Pole, who was bending over a
baby carriage within a sun parlor, came forward, a smile of welcome on her
pale face. She seemed very small and fragile as she stood above them on the
steps, and her thin, delicate face had the marked lines of a woman of
forty. She said in her slow, Southern voice, which had a pleasant human
quality:--
"I hope you weren't mired. The roads are something awful about here. I am
so glad to see you both."
When she spoke her face lost some of the years.
"It is a long way out,--one can't exactly run in on you, Margaret! If it
hadn't been for Isabelle's magnificent car, you might have died without
seeing me!" Conny poured forth.
"It _is_ a journey; but you see people don't run in on us often."
"You've got a landscape," Conny continued, turning to look across the bare
treetops towards the Sound. It would have been a pleasant prospect except
for the eruption of small houses on every side. "But how can you stand it
the whole year round? Are there any civilized people--in those houses?" She
indicated vaguely the patch of wooden villas below.
"Very few, I suppose, according to your standard, Cornelia. But we don't
know them. I pulled up the drawbridge when we first came."
Mrs. Pole's thin lips twitched with mirth, and Conny, who was never content
with mere inference, asked bluntly:--
"Then what do you do with yourselves--evenings?" Her tone reflected the
emptiness of the landscape, and she added with a treble laugh, "I've always
wondered what suburban life is like!"
"Oh, you eat and read and sleep. Then there are the children daytimes. I
help teach 'em. We live the model life,--flowers and shrubs in the summer,
I suppose.... The Bishop was with me for a time."
The large bare drawing-room, which was sunnily lighted from the southwest,
was singularly without the usual furniture of what Conny called "civilized
life." There were no rugs, few chairs, but one table, such as might be made
by the village carpenter and stained black, which was littered with books
and magazines. There was also a large writing cabinet of mahogany,--a
magnificent piece of Southern colonial design,--and before the fire a
modern couch. Conny inventoried all this in a glance. She could not "make
it out." 'They can't be as poor as that,' she reflected, and turned to the
books on the table.
"Weiniger's _Sex and Character_," she announced, "Brieux's _Maternite_,
Lavedan, Stendhal, Strobel on Child Life,--well, you do read! And this?"
She held up a yellow volume of French plays. "What do you do with this when
the Bishop comes?"
"The Bishop is used to me now. Besides, he doesn't see very well, poor
dear, and has forgotten his French. Have you read that book of Weiniger's?
It is a good dose for woman's conceit these days."
There was a touch of playful cynicism in the tone, which went with the
fleeting smile. Mrs. Pole understood Cornelia Woodyard perfectly, and was
amused by her. But Conny's coarse and determined handling of life did not
fascinate her fastidious nature as it had fascinated Isabelle's.
Conny continued to poke among the books, emitting comments as she happened
upon unexpected things. It was the heterogeneous reading of an untrained
woman, who was seeking blindly in many directions for guidance, for light,
trying to appease an awakened intellect, and to answer certain gnawing
questions of her soul....
Isabelle and Margaret talked of their visit at the Virginia Springs. In the
mature face, Isabelle was seeking the blond-haired girl, with deep-set blue
eyes, and sensitive mouth, that she had admired at St. Mary's. Now it was
not even pretty, although it spoke of race, for the bony features, the high
brow, the thin nose, had emerged, as if chiselled from the flesh by pain.
'She has suffered,' Isabelle thought, 'suffered--and lived.'
Conny had recounted to Isabelle on their way out some of the rumors about
the Poles. Larry Pole was a weakling, had gone wrong in money
matters,--nothing that had flared up in scandal, merely family
transactions. Margaret had taken the family abroad--she had inherited
something from her mother--and suddenly they had come back to New York, and
Larry had found a petty job in the city. Evidently, from the bare house,
their hiding themselves out here, most of the wife's money had gone, too.
Pity! because Margaret was proud. She had her Virginian mother's pride with
a note of difference. The mother had been proud in the conventional way, of
her family, her position,--things. Margaret had the pride of
accomplishment,--of deeds. She was the kind who would have gone ragged with
a poet or lived content in a sod hut with a Man. And she had married this
Larry Pole, who according to Conny looked seedy and was often rather
"boozy." How could she have made such a mistake,--Margaret of all women?
That Englishman Hollenby, who really was somebody, had been much interested
in her. Why hadn't she married him? Nobody would know the reason....
The luncheon was very good. The black cook, "a relic of my mother's
establishment," as Margaret explained, gave them a few savory family
dishes, and there was a light French wine. Margaret ate little and talked
little, seeming to enjoy the vivacity of the other women.
"Tell about your visit to the Gorings," Conny drawled. "Percy's cousin,
Eugene Goring, who married Aline, you know. Boots in the bath-tub, and the
babies running around naked, and Aline lost in the metaphysics of the arts,
making chairs."
And Isabelle recounted what she had seen of Aline's establishment in St.
Louis, with its total disregard of what Conny called the "decencies" of
life. They all laughed at her picture of their "wood-nymph," as they had
named Aline.
"And Eugene talking anarchy, and washing the dishes,--it sounds like a
Weber and Field's farce," gurgled Conny. "He wrote Percy about lecturing in
New York,--wanted to come East. But Percy couldn't do anything for him. It
isn't a combination to make a drawing-room impression."
"But," Margaret protested, "Aline is a person, and that is more than you
can say of most of us married women. She has kept her personality."
"If I were 'Gene," Conny replied contemptuously, "I'd tone her
'personality' down."
"He's probably big enough to respect it."
There followed a discussion of the woman's part in marriage, Margaret
defending independence, "the woman's right to live for herself," and Conny
taking the practical view.
"She can't be anything any way, just by herself. She had better make the
most of the material she's got to work with--or get another helping," she
added, thinking of Larry.
"And Aline isn't happy," Isabelle remarked; "she has a look on her face as
if she were a thousand miles away, and had forgotten her marriage as much
as she could. Her chairs and tables are just ways of forgetting."
"But they have something to think about,--those two. They don't vegetate."
"I should say they had,--but no anarchy in my domestic circle, thank you!"
Conny observed.
"I shouldn't object to anarchy," sighed Margaret, with her whimsical smile.
"Margaret is bored," Isabelle pronounced, "simply awfully bored. She's so
bored that I expect some day she will poison herself and the children,
merely to find out what comes next."
"No wonder--buried in the snowdrifts out here," Conny agreed. "Isn't there
anything you want to do, even something wicked?"
"Yes," Mrs. Pole answered half seriously. "There is _one_ thing I'd like to
do before I die."
"Tell us!"
"I'd like to find Somebody--man or woman--who cared for the things I care
for--sky and clouds and mountains,--and go away with him anywhere for--a
little while, just a little while," she drawled dreamily, resting her
elbows on the table.
"Elope! Fie, fie!" Conny laughed.
"My mother's father had a plantation in one of the Windward Islands,"
Margaret continued. "It must be nice down there--warm and sunny. I'd like
to lie out on the beach and forget children and servants and husbands, and
stop wondering what life is. Yes, I'd like a vacation--in the Windward
Islands, with somebody who understood."
"To wit, a man!" added Conny.
"Yes, a man! But only for the trip."
They laughed a good deal about Margaret's vacation, called her the
"Windward Islands," and asked her to make reservations for them in her
Paradise when they had found desirable partners.
"Only, I should have to bring John, and he wouldn't know what to do with
himself on a beach," Isabelle remarked. "I don't know any one else to
take."
"You mustn't go Windwarding until you have to," Margaret explained....
At the dessert, the children came in,--two boys and a girl. The elder boy
was eight, with his mother's fair hair, blue eyes, and fine features, and
the same suggestion of race in the narrow high brow, the upward poise of
the head. His younger brother was nondescript, with dark hair and full
lips. Margaret observed her children with a curiously detached air,
Isabelle thought. Was she looking for signs of Larry in that second son?
Alas, she might see Larry always, with the cold apprehension of a woman too
wise to deceive herself! The little girl, fresh from her nap, was round and
undefined, and the mother took her into her arms, cuddling her close to her
breast, as if nothing, not even the seed of Larry, could separate her from
this one; as if she felt in her heart all the ills and sorrows, the woman's
pains to be,--the eternal feminine defeat,--in this tiny ball of freshness.
And the ironical smile subtly softened to a glow of affection. Here, at
least, was an illusion!
Isabelle, watching these two, understood--all the lines, the smile, the
light cynicism--the Windward Islands! She put her arms impulsively about
the mother and the child, hugging them closely. Margaret looked up into her
shining eyes and pressed her hand....
"There are some cigarettes in the other room," Margaret suggested; "we'll
build up the fire and continue the argument in favor of the Windward
Islands."
"It is a long way to New York over that road," Conny observed. "I have an
engagement."
Now that she had satisfied her curiosity about "how the Poles lived," she
began to think of her dinner with Cairy, and was fearful lest she might be
delayed.
"Spend the night," suggested Margaret; but Isabelle, who understood Conny,
telephoned at once for the motor.
"You aren't going back to the West, Isabelle?" Margaret asked, while they
waited for the motor. "Won't you miss it?"
"Miss the West? Did you ever know a woman that had escaped from the
Mississippi Valley who would go back there?" Conny drawled. "Why, Belle is
like a girl just out of school, looking at the shop windows!"
Cornelia Woodyard, who had lived a number of years in a corner of that same
vast valley, looked from metropolitan heights on the monotony of the
"middle West." She had the New Yorker's amusing incapacity to comprehend
existence outside the neighborhood of Fifth Avenue and Central Park.
"One lives out there," Margaret protested with sudden fire, "in those great
spaces. Men grow there. They _do_ things. When my boys are educated I shall
take them away from New York, to the Virginia mountains, perhaps, and have
them grow up there, doing things, real things, working with their hands,
becoming men! Perhaps not there," she mused, recollecting that the acres of
timber and coal in the mountains, her sons' inheritance from her vigorous
ancestors, had been lost to them in a vulgar stock dealer's gamble by their
father,--"perhaps out to Oregon, where I have an uncle. His father rode his
horse all the way from Louisiana across the continent, after the War! He
had nothing but his horse--and before he died he built a city in his new
country. That is where men do things!"
Margaret had flashed into life again. As Tom Cairy would have said,
"_Vraiment, ma petite cousine a une grande ame--etouffee_" (For Cairy
always made his acute observations in the French tongue).
"There's something of the Amazon in you, Margaret," Conny remarked, "in
spite of your desire to seclude yourself in the Windward Islands with a
suitable mate."
The motor finally came puffing up the drive, and the women stood on the
veranda, prolonging their farewells. A round, red, important sun peeped
from under the gray cloud bank that had lowered all the afternoon, flooding
the thin branches of the budding trees, falling warm and gold across the
dead fields.
"See!" Margaret cried, raising her thin arms to the sun. "The Promise!"
"I hope it will hold until we reach Jerome Avenue," Conny replied
practically, preparing to enter the car.
"The promise of another life!"
Margaret was standing in the sun, her nostrils dilated, absorbing the
light, the source of joy and life.
"Windward Islands, eh?" Conny coughed, settling herself comfortably in her
corner.
"The real land," Margaret murmured to herself.
The chauffeur had reached for the lever when there appeared on the drive
two men bearing something between them, a human something, carefully.
"What's that!" exclaimed Conny in a frightened voice. "What is it?" she
repeated to the chauffeur,--demanding of a man something in his province to
know.
"Looks though they had a child--hurt," the chauffeur replied.
Margaret, shading her eyes with a thin hand, looked down the avenue. She
made no movement to go towards the men,--merely waited motionless for the
thing to come. And the men came slowly forward, past the car, up the steps.
It was the older boy. The man who held the head and shoulders of the child
said, "An accident--not serious, I believe."
Margaret opened the door and pointed to the lounge before the fire. The man
who had spoken laid the boy down very gently with his head on a cushion,
and smoothed back the rumpled hair.
"I will go for the doctor," the other man said, and presently there was the
sound of the motor leaping down the hill.
Margaret had dropped on her knees beside the unconscious boy, and placed
one hand on his brow. "Bring some water," she said to Isabelle, and began
to unbutton the torn sweater.
Conny, with one look at the white face and closed eyes, went softly out
into the hall and sat down.
"Will you telephone to Dr. W. S. Rogers in New York, and ask him to send
some one if he can't come himself?" Margaret asked the stranger, who was
helping her with the boy's clothes.
"Can I telephone any one else--his father?" the man suggested, as he turned
to the door.
"No--it would be no use--it's too late to reach him."
Then she turned again to the boy, who was still unconscious....
When the man had finished telephoning, he came back through the hall, where
Conny was sitting.
"How did it happen?" she asked.
"He fell over the culvert,--the high one just as you leave the station, you
know. He was riding his bicycle,--I saw the little chap pushing it up the
hill as I got out of the train. Then a big touring car passed me, and met
another one coming down at full speed. I suppose the boy was frightened and
tried to get too far out on the culvert and fell over. The motors didn't
notice him; but when I reached the spot, I saw his bicycle hanging on the
edge and looked over for him,--could just see his head in the bushes and
leaves. Poor little fellow! It was a nasty fall. But the leaves and the
rubbish must have broken it somewhat."
"Rob! Rob Falkner!" Isabelle exclaimed, as the man turned and met her at
the door. "I didn't recognize you--with your beard! How is Bessie?"
"Very well, I believe. She is in Denver, you know."
When he had gone back to the boy, Isabelle said to Conny:--
"We used to know the Falkners very well. There is a story! ... Strange he
should be _here_. But I heard he was in the East somewhere."
Conny did not seem interested in Rob Falkner and his turning up at this
juncture. She sat with a solemn face, wondering how she could get back to
the city. Finally she resolved to telephone Cairy.
* * * * *
Falkner went over to the unconscious boy, and taking his hand, counted the
pulse. "It's all right so far," he said to the mother, who did not hear
him. After a time she looked up, and her low voice dragged hoarsely,--"You
mustn't wait. The doctor will be here soon, and we can do everything now."
"I will wait until the doctor comes," Falkner replied gently, and stepped
to the window to watch for the motor.
After the local doctor had come and said, "A slight concussion,--nothing
serious, I expect," and the boy had revived somewhat, Conny departed alone
in the motor, Isabelle having decided to stay with Margaret over the night.
Falkner helped the doctor carry the patient upstairs, and then started to
leave. Isabelle waited for him at the door.
"Mrs. Pole wishes me to thank you for all your kindness."
"I shall look in to-morrow morning," he replied hurriedly. "I would stay
now until the boy's father came; but I don't suppose there is anything I
can do. I am living at the hotel below, and you can telephone if you want
me."
"You are living here?"
"Yes; I am working on the new dam, a few miles from this place."
"I am so glad to see you again," Isabelle said, the only words she could
think of.
"Thank you."
Then with a curt nod he was off. He had not shown in any way that he was
glad to see her, Isabelle reflected. Falkner was always moody, but she had
thought he liked her,--and after all their friendship! Something had kept
her from asking more about Bessie.