Isabelle did not go back to the court-room to listen to the remaining
arguments, not even to hear Mr. Brinkerhoff's learned and ingenious plea in
behalf of the rights of capital, the sacred privileges of property. She
felt that John would rather not have her there. But Isabelle read every
word of the newspaper report of the trial, which since the district
attorney's impassioned and powerful plea had excited even greater public
interest than before. Not only locally, but throughout the country, the
trial of the People vs. the Atlantic and Pacific et al. was recognized as
the first serious effort of the reform administration to enforce the laws
against capital, by convicting not merely the irresponsible agents but also
some of the men "higher up." It was John Lane's position in the railroad
that gave these "coal cases" their significance.
Isabelle read the report of the trial with thoughtful care, but much of it
was too technical for her untrained mind to grasp. All these arguments
about admitting certain ledgers in evidence, all these exceptions to the
rulings of the court, the dodges, fences, pitfalls, the dust created by the
skilled counsel for the defence, confused her. What she gathered in a
general way was that the road was fighting its case on technicalities,
seeking to throw the suit out of court, without letting the one real matter
at issue appear,--had they dealt illegally and unjustly with the public? To
her emotional temperament this eminently modern method of tactics was
irritating and prejudiced her against her husband's side. "But I don't
understand," she reflected sadly, "so John would say. And they don't seem
to want people to understand!"
With these thoughts on her mind, she took the cars to the little suburb
north of the city, where the Johnstons lived. Bryn Mawr was one of the
newer landscape-gardened of our city suburbs, with curving roads,
grass-plots, an art _nouveau_ railroad station, shrubs and poplar sticks
set out along the cement sidewalks, in an effort to disguise the rawness of
the prairie pancake that the contractors had parcelled into lots. Isabelle
found some difficulty in tracing her way along the ingeniously twisted
avenues to the Johnston house. But finally she reached the
two-story-and-attic wooden box, which was set in a little grove of maple
trees. Two other houses were going up across the street, and a trench for a
new sewer had been opened obstructively. At this period of belated spring
Bryn Mawr was not a charming spot. Unfinished edges left by the landscape
gardener and the contractor showed pitilessly against the leafless, scrubby
trees and the rolling muddy fields beyond. It was all covered with a chill
mist. In the days when she lived in St. Louis she had never found time to
go so far to see Alice, and she had shared Bessie's horror of the remote
and cheerless existence in this suburb, had wondered how an intelligent and
well-bred woman like Alice Johnston could endure its dull level of
platitudinous existence. But now as she picked her way across the sewer
excavation, she felt that the little wooden box ahead of her was home for
this family,--they must not lose that! Place and circumstance had lessened
in her estimates of life.
Alice opened the door herself, and with a radiant smile of hungry delight
enveloped Isabelle in her arms.
"Where did you drop from, Belle?"
"Oh, I thought I'd come on," Isabelle replied vaguely, not liking to
mention the trial.
"And you found your way out here, and navigated that ewer safely! The boys
find it surpassingly attractive,--as a coal mine, or a canal in Mars, or
the Panama ditch. I've tried to induce Mr. Jorgesson, the contractor, to
hang out a lantern or two at night. But he evidently thinks well of the
caution and sobriety of the Johnston family and prefers to take his chances
of a suit for damages. So far the family has escaped."
Alice's face showed two girlish dimples, while she talked glibly,--too
glibly, Isabelle thought. They went into the dining room where there was a
tiny coal fire before which Alice had been sewing. Isabelle's
namesake--number two in the list--having been considered by her aunt, was
dismissed on an errand. The older boys were at school, the baby out in the
kitchen "with the colored lady who assists," as Alice explained.
When they were alone, the cousins looked at each other, each thinking of
the changes, the traces of life in the other. Isabelle held out her hands
yearningly, and Alice, understanding that she knew what had befallen them,
smiled with trembling lips. Yet it was long before she could speak of their
misfortune in her usual calm manner.
... "The worst is that we have had to take Ned out of the technical
institute and send him back to the school here with Jack. It isn't a good
school. But we may move into the city in the fall.... And Belle had to give
up her music. We all have to chip in, you see!"
"She mustn't give up her music. I shall send her," Isabelle said quickly,
reflecting whimsically how she had loathed her own music lessons. Alice
flushed, and after a moment's pause said deliberately:--
"Do you really mean that, Isabelle?"
"Of course! I only hope she will get more out of it than I did."
"I should be glad to accept your offer for her sake.... I want her to have
something, some interest. A poor girl without that,--it is worse for her
than for the boys!"
Isabelle could see Alice's struggle with her pride, and understood the
importance of this little matter to her, which had made her deliberately
clutch at the chance for the little girl.
"Belle shall come to me to-morrow and spend the day. I will send for the
teacher.... Now that's settled, and, Alice, you and Steve will be better
off soon! He is too able a man--"
Alice shook her head steadily, saying:--
"I am afraid not, Belle! Steve is too good a man, that is the trouble. I
don't say this to him. I wouldn't take a particle of hope from him. But I
know Steve all through: he isn't the kind to impress people, to get
on,--and he is no longer young."
"It is such a pity he left the railroad," Isabelle mused. "John says they
are turning men off instead of taking them on, or he might have found a
position for him."
"Never!" Alice's eyes flamed. "If it had to be done over, even now, we
should do the same thing.... Steve is slow and quiet, never says much, but
he does a lot of thinking. And when he makes up his mind, he sticks....
When he saw what it meant to take that position in the traffic department,
what he would have to know and do, he couldn't do it. It is useless trying
to make a man like Steve live contrary to his nature. You can't bend a big,
thick tree any way you want it."
"But, Alice, he might have been wrong!" Isabelle protested, coloring.
"Yes,--he might have been wrong," Alice admitted, her eyes falling. "But
Steve couldn't see it any other way. So he had to do as he did.... And the
lumber business failed. I was afraid it would! Dear Steve! He wasn't fitted
to fight with those men, to see that they didn't cheat him."
It was later that Alice uttered the deep cry of her heart.
... "Don't think, Belle, that I mind the hard times, the work and all; not
even the school for Ned, and the poor prospect for the children. After all,
they may do as well without the advantages we could have given them. But
what breaks my heart is to see Steve, who is bigger and abler and stronger
than most men, go down to the bottom of the ladder and have to take his
orders from an ignorant little German. It's small of me, I know, and Steve
doesn't complain. But it seems to me terribly unjust somehow."
For a moment her feeling overcame her; then she recovered her composure and
continued: "But then, it's Steve! And I wouldn't have him a particle
different, not for all the success in the world. You see I have my pride,
my snobbery. I am a snob about my husband."
The boys came in from school, and the house shook with racketing children.
"They don't know what has happened, really,--they are too young, thank
Heaven!" Alice exclaimed. "And I don't mean they ever shall know--ever
think they are poor."
The two stood on the porch for a last word, arranging for the little girl's
visit to Isabelle on the morrow. The twilight had descended through the
mist.
"See!" Alice said, pointing to the white tree trunks across the street, and
the vague fields beyond. "Isn't it very much like that Corot the Colonel
used to love so much,--the one in the library? We have our Corot, too....
Good-by, dear! I have chattered frightfully about ourselves. Some day you
must tell me of your stay with Mrs. Pole and of yourself."
"There isn't much to tell!"
Alice Johnston, watching her cousin's agreeable figure disappear into the
mist, felt that if with Isabelle there might be not much to tell, at least
a great deal had happened these last months.
And Isabelle, picking her way cautiously along the sewer excavation, was
thinking of the home behind. The couple of hours she had spent with Alice
had been filled with a comprehension, a curiously immediate grasp of the
other person's vision of life,--what it all meant to her,--Alice's
disappointment, her pride in her defeated husband. For the first time in
all the years she had known them, Steve and Alice and the children seemed
quite real persons, and their life as vivid, as interesting to her, as her
own.
Sad as their little story was, in its pathetic limitations of plans and
hopes, it did not seem to her intolerable, or sordid, or depressing, as it
once would have seemed. Just as she possessed somewhere in herself a new
strength to endure whatever misfortune might come to her, so she had an
instinctive feeling of how others endured what on the surface of events
seemed merely distressing and disagreeable. And the Johnston house, plain
and homely as it was, with all the noisy children, had an air of peace
about it, the spirit of those that dwelt there, which Isabelle felt to be
the most precious thing on earth.... Alice had said, "It's Steve--and I
wouldn't have him different for all the success in the world!" The words
stung Isabelle. Such was marriage,--perfect marriage,--to be able to say
that in the face of worldly defeat. Neither she nor John could ever say
that about the other.