"There's Steve," Isabelle said to Vickers, "coming across the meadow with
his boys. He is an old dear, so nice and fatherly!"
The heavy man was plodding slowly along the path, the four boys frisking
around him in the tall June grass like puppies.
"He has come to see John about some business. Let us take the boys and have
a swim in the pool!"
Isabelle was gay and happy this morning with one of those rapid changes in
mood over night that had become habitual with her. When they returned from
their romp in the pool, the boys having departed to the stable in search of
further amusement, Lane and Johnston were still talking while they slowly
paced the brick terrace.
"Still at it!" exclaimed Isabelle. "Goodness! what can it be to make John
talk as fast as that! Why, he hasn't said half as many words to me since
he's been back. Just look at 'em, Vick!"
* * * * *
Outside on the terrace Steve Johnston was saying, stuttering in his
endeavor to get hastily all the words he needed to express his feelings:--
"It's no use, Jack! I tell you I am sick of the whole business. I know it's
big pay,--more than I ever expected to earn in my life. But Alice and I
have been poor before, and I guess we can be poor again if it comes to
that."
"A man with your obligations has no right to give up such an opportunity."
"Alice is with me; we have talked the thing all through.... No, I may be a
jackass, but I can't see it any different. I don't like the business of
loading the dice,--that is all. I have stood behind the counter, so to
speak, and seen the dice loaded, fifteen years. But I wasn't responsible
myself. Now in this new place you offer me I should be IT,--the man who
loads.... I have been watching this thing for fifteen years. When I was a
rate clerk on the Canada Southern, I could guess how it was,--the little
fellows paid the rate as published and the big fellows didn't. Then when I
went into the A. and P. I came a step nearer, could watch how it was
done--didn't have to guess. Then I went with the Texas and Northern as
assistant to the traffic manager, and I loaded the dice--under orders.
Now--"
"Now," interrupted Lane, "you'll take your orders from my office."
"I know it,--that's part of the trouble, Jack!" the heavy man blurted out.
"You want a safe man out there, you say. I know what that means! I don't
want to talk good to you, Jack. But you see things differently from me."...
"All this newspaper gossip and scandal has got on your nerves," Lane said
irritably.
"No, it hasn't. And it isn't any fear of being pulled up before the
Commission. That doesn't mean anything to me.... No, I have seen it coming
ever since I was a clerk at sixty a month. And somehow I felt if it ever
got near enough me so that I should have to fix the game--for that's all it
amounts to, Jack, and you know it--why, I should have to get out. At last
it's got up to me, and so I am getting out!"
The stolid man puffed with the exertion of expressing himself so fully,
inadequate as his confused sentences were to describe all that fermenting
mass of observation, impression, revulsion, disgust that his experience in
the rate-making side of his employment had stored up within him the last
fifteen years. Out of it had come a result--a resolve. And it was this that
Lane was combating heatedly. It was not merely that he liked Johnston
personally and did not want him "to make a fool of himself," as he had
expressed it, not altogether because he had made up his mind that the heavy
man's qualities were exactly what he needed for this position he had
offered him; rather, because the unexpected opposition, Johnston's
scruples, irritated him personally. It was a part of the sentimental
newspaper clamor, half ignorance, half envy, that he despised. When he had
used the words, "womanish hysteria," descriptive of the agitation against
the railroads, Steve had protested in the only humorous remark he was ever
known to make:--
"Do I look hysterical, Jack?"
So the two men talked on. What they said would not have been wholly
understood by Isabelle, and would not have interested her. And yet it
contained more elements of pathos, of modern tragedy, than all the novels
she read and the plays she went to see. The homely, heavy man--"He looks
just like a bag of meal with a yellow pumpkin on top," Isabelle had
said--replied to a thrust by Lane:--
"Yes, maybe I shall fail in the lumber business. It's pretty late to swap
horses at forty-three. But Alice and I have talked it over, and we had
rather run that risk than the other--"
"You mean?"
"That I should do what Satters of the L. P. has just testified he's been
doing--under orders--to make traffic."
It was a shrewd blow. Satters was a clear case where the powerful L. P.
road had been caught breaking the rate law by an ingenious device that
aroused admiration in the railroad world. He had been fined a few thousand
dollars, which was a cheap forfeit. This reference to Satters closed the
discussion.
"I hope you will find the lumber business all you want it to suit your
conscience, Steve. Come in and have some lunch!"
The heavy man refused,--he was in no mood for one of Isabelle's luncheons,
and he had but one more day of vacation. Gathering up his brood, he
retraced his way across the meadow, the four small boys following in his
track.
"Well!" exclaimed Isabelle to her husband. "What was your business all
about? Luncheon has been waiting half an hour. It was as good as a play
watching you two out there. Steve looked really awake."
"He was awake all right," Lane replied.
"Tell us all about it--there, Vick, see if he doesn't put me off with 'Just
business, my dear'!"
"It _was_ just business. Steve has declined a good position I made for him,
at nearly twice the salary he has ever earned."
"And all those boys to put through college!"
"What was it?" Vickers asked.
Something made Lane unusually communicative,--his irritation with Steve or
his wife's taunt.
"Did you ever hear of the Interstate Commerce Commission?" he asked his
brother-in-law, in a slightly ironical tone. And he began to state the
situation, and stated it remarkably well from his point of view, explaining
the spirit of interference that had been growing throughout the country
with railroad management, corporation management in general,--its
disastrous effect if persisted in, and also "emotionalism" in the press. He
talked very ably, and held his wife's attention. Isabelle said:--
"But it was rather fine of Steve, if he felt that way!"
"He's kept his mouth shut fifteen years."
"He's slow, is Steve, but when he sees--he acts!"
Vickers said nothing, but a warm sense of comfort spread through his heart,
as he thought, 'Splendid!--she did that for him, Alice.'
"I hope he won't come to grief in the lumber business," Lane concluded.
"Steve is not fitted for general business. And he can't have much capital.
Only their savings."
Then he yawned and went to the library for a cigar, dismissing Steve and
his scruples and the railroad business altogether from his mind, in the
manner of a well-trained man of affairs, who has learned that it is a
useless waste of energy to speculate on what has been done and to wonder
why men should feel and act as they do feel and act.
And Isabelle, with a "It will come hard on Alice!"--went off to cut some
flowers for the vases, still light-hearted, humming a gay little French
song that Tom had taught her.
* * * * *
If it were hard for Alice Johnston, the large woman did not betray it when
Vickers saw her a few days later. With the help of her oldest boy she was
unharnessing the horse from the Concord buggy.
"You see," she explained, as Vickers tried to put the head halter on the
horse, "we are economizing on Joe, who used to do the chores when he did
not forget them, which was every other day!"
When Vickers referred to Steve's new business, she said cheerfully:--
"I think there is a good chance of success. The men Steve is going in with
have bought a large tract of land in the southern part of Missouri. They
have experience in the lumber business, and Steve is to look after the city
end,--he's well known in St. Louis."
"I do so hope it will go right," Vickers remarked, wishing that in some way
he could help in this brave venture.
"Yes!" Alice smiled. "It had to be, this risk,--you know there come times
when there is only one thing to do. If Steve hadn't taken the step, left
the railroad, I think that neither of us would have been happy afterwards.
But these are anxious days for us. We have put all the money in our
stocking into it,--seven thousand dollars; all we have in the world but
this old farm, which the Colonel gave me. I wanted to mortgage the farm,
but Steve wouldn't let me. So all our eggs are in one basket. Not so many
eggs, but we can't spare one!"
She laughed serenely, with a broad sense of humor over the family venture,
yet with a full realization of its risk. Vickers marvelled at her strong
faith in Steve, in the future, in life. As he had said to Isabelle, this
was Woman, one who had learned the deeper lessons of life from her
children, from her birth-pangs.
She took him into the vegetable garden which she and the children had
planted. "We are truck-farmers," she explained. "I have the potatoes,
little Steve the corn, Ezra the peas, and so on to Tot, who looks after the
carrots and beets because they are close to the ground and don't need much
attention. The family is cultivating on shares."
They walked through the rows of green vegetables that were growing lustily
in the June weather, and then turned back to the house. Alice stopped to
fasten up a riotous branch of woodbine that had poked its way through a
screen.
"If the worst comes to the worst, I shall turn farmer in earnest and raise
vegetables for my wealthy neighbors. And there is the orchard! We have been
poor so much of the time that we know what it means.... I have no doubt it
will come out all right,--and we don't worry, Steve and I. We aren't
ambitious enough to worry."
It was a pleasant place, the Price farm, tucked away in a fold of gentle
hills, at the end of a grassy lane. The bees hummed in the apple trees, and
the June breeze swayed through the house, where all the windows and doors
were open. Vickers, looking at the calm, healthy woman sitting beside him
on the porch, did not pity the Johnstons, nor fear for them. Alice, surely,
was the kind that no great misfortune could live with long.
"I am really a farmer,--it's all the blood in my veins," Alice remarked.
"And when I get back here summers, the soil seems to speak to me. I've
known horses and cows and pigs and crops and seasons for centuries. It's
only skin deep, the city coating, and is easily scraped off.... Your
father, Vickers, was a wise man. He gave me the exact thing that was best
for me when he died,--this old farm of my people. Just as he had given me
the best thing in my life,--my education. If he had done more, I should be
less able to get along now."
They had dinner, a noisy meal at which the children served in turns, Alice
sitting like a queen bee at the head of the table, governing the brood.
Vickers liked these midday meals with the chattering, chirping youngsters.
"And how has it been with the music?" Alice asked. "Have you been able to
work? You spent most of the winter up here, didn't you?"
"I have done some things," Vickers said; "not much. I am not at home yet,
and what seems familiar is this, the past. But I shall get broken in, no
doubt. And," he added thoughtfully, "I have come to see that this is the
place for me--for the present."
"I am glad," she said softly.