Bellevue is one of those country towns in the neighborhood of a large
city that have flourished especially since the discovery of the
motor-car. It took quite two hours to reach it from San Francisco by
train and nearly that by fast driving in a car, owing to the poor roads.
Thus it was removed for the present from the contaminating contact of
the "commuter" and all the commonness of suburbanism. Bellevue had, of
course, its country club, with a charming new clubhouse, where polo was
played in season, as well as the humbler forms of sport such as golf and
tennis, and where a good deal of lively entertaining went on at all
seasons. It was an old settlement; that is, it had been the country home
of a few families for almost two generations, the first of the great
places having been developed in the seventies when the railroad fortunes
were being made. Besides these older estates, which were marked by the
luxuriance of their planting and by the ugliness of their houses, there
was a growing number of smaller, more modern estates with attractive
houses, and also a little settlement "across the tracks" of
trades-people and servants. Except for the eternal spring and the wealth
of California foliage, Bellevue was much like any number of towns
outside of Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, or Boston. And the social
life of the place, except for the minor modifications due to climate and
environment, was so exactly typical of what everybody knows that it
needs no description.
Thanks to Irene's good will as well as to Adelle's fortune the Davises
became immediately acquainted with the "colony" of Bellevue, and were
easily accepted as members of that supposedly exclusive society. Archie
rapidly made a place for himself at the club. Having no regular
occupation he could devote himself to polo with the exclusiveness of a
single passion. For diversion he motored up to the city frequently,
where he became a member of several clubs, and for business there was
always the ranch to worry about. In this way he kept up a current of
movement in his daily life, which for persons like the Davises takes the
place of real activity.
Adelle was indolent about social life as about much else. She did not
like to take pains over anything and found entertaining a bore. She was
a poor diner-out, and when the coming of her child gave her an excuse
she was quite content to leave the social aspect of their life to
Archie, who was generally thought to be much more agreeable than his
wife. After they finally decided to buy the Bellevue place, Adelle
occupied herself with ambitious schemes for the improvement of the
property. She decided that the old house was uncomfortable and badly
placed, too near the road, and selected a site upon the steep hillside,
which commanded a large view of the valley and the great Bay across the
verdurous growth of the town. Then she engaged a young architect, who
was a member of the Bellevue Country Club and had "done" several houses
in the neighborhood, and at once she was involved in a bewildering maze
of plans for house and grounds. This kept her busy during her
convalescence and gratified the rudimentary creative instinct in her,
which had led her before to making jewelry. In planning a large country
estate there was also a pleasant sense of rivalry with her old friend
Irene, who was forced to content herself for the present with her
father's out-of-date mansion. It took much money, of course, and the
young architect spared his clients no possible expense, but Adelle felt
that the springs of Clark's Field were inexhaustible.
It was, perhaps, the happiest period of Adelle's existence. Her marriage
had begun to prove uncomfortable in Europe and threatened badly at
Arivista, because there was not enough of anything between her and her
husband to support idleness alone. It was much better at Bellevue, for
here Archie was taken care of, not always in a safe way, but, as far as
Adelle knew, satisfactorily. The rich, sensuous country, with its
peculiar profusion of exotic vegetation and the luxury of perpetual good
weather, made Adelle, pale offspring of an outworn Puritanism, bloom,
especially after the birth of her child. It was as if all the desires of
the old Clarks to escape the hardships of their bleak lives found at
last their fulfillment in her. She expanded under the influence of
warmth and color; for climate is a larger moral factor than is usually
recognized. In California the struggle for life is a meaningless figure
of speech, and Adelle did not like struggling. She loved to putter about
in the overgrown garden and to slumber in the sun beside her little boy,
refusing to descend to the delights of the club and Bellevue hospitality
even after she had no excuse. When Irene took her to task for her
dawdling by herself she gurgled contentedly,--
"What's the good of doing those things? Archie likes it--he sees the
crowd at the club--that's enough for him."
"You've got to take your position," Irene remonstrated with a new pose.
She herself aspired to lead on the score of her family's antiquity in
Bellevue.
"What's that?" Adelle asked blankly.
It was difficult as Irene found to explain just what position Adelle
Davis should take in human society, just what it meant to be a "leader."
But she talked much about "the world going by one," and "duties of our
position," and "keeping in touch," with a note of mature tolerance and
responsibility in her voice. To all of which Adelle opposed merely a
lazy stare. In her gray eyes she seemed to mirror the fussy little
social life of this ideal country town, with its spread of motors about
the station on the arrival of the afternoon train from the city, its
properly garbed men and women strenuously amusing themselves at the
country club, its numerous "places," all very much alike, with their
gardens and greenhouses and tennis-courts, and ten masters' and five
servants' rooms, and all the rest of it.
If Adelle could find no very cogent reason why she should make herself
toilsomely a pillar of this society, shall we blame her? If she found
for the present enough of content in the soft sunshine, the fragrant
flowers, her baby, and her own home, with the intermittent companionship
of the one man she had chosen to spend her life with, shall we consider
her highly culpable, deficient in the moral or social sense? All the
rest was much ado about nothing to Adelle, and, perhaps, as far as
Bellevue went,--and a good deal like it in life elsewhere,--Adelle was
not far wrong in her instinct....
"Here's Archie now," she remarked, observing her lord coming up the
drive in his car.
"Hello, Archie!" Irene called in greeting. Her tone was quite friendly
and intimate. Archie certainly had been "accepted" in this quarter.
"Going to the Carharts?"
Archie, of course, was going to the Carharts to dine and play cards.
"Coming, Dell?" he asked his wife casually.
Adelle shook her head.
"I've been telling Dell she ought not to be so lazy," Irene commented.
"She never goes off the place if she can help it!"
"Adelle don't like people," Archie observed gloomily.
"Yes I do, well enough," his wife protested.
"It's a queer way you have of showing it, then."
"Why should I like 'em, anyway, if I don't want to?" she retorted with
some heat, childishly eager to put herself in the right.
"That's just it," Irene commented. "I tell her some day she will want
people, and she will find it isn't easy to have them then.... Besides,
it's her duty to take her part--everybody must."
Adelle made a bored gesture and filched a cigarette from Archie's case.
"Go on, you two, and have a good time," she said amiably.
And presently Archie departed with Irene, driving her back to Bellevue
in his own car. As Adelle watched them depart from the veranda, very
companionably, in close conversation, she smiled, perhaps because she
knew that they were still talking about her and her social delinquency,
perhaps because it amused her to think how thoroughly Irene had revised
her opinion of the "red-headed bounder." In the still twilight her quiet
mind speculated upon many things--the friendship between Archie and
Irene, the obsession most people seemed to have to get together in one
way or another, Irene's creed of "taking your place in the
world,"--possibly even the purpose and meaning of life in general,
although Adelle would scarcely recognize her meditations under those
terms.... In the end she went up softly to her baby's room and spent a
long time in examining minutely the child's features. Now that she had
discovered all the delights of maternity she wondered at herself for
having been so indifferent to this great power latent in her of creating
life, and determined to have other children as soon as possible. As a
matter of course she thought of Archie as their father, but it was only
in that way that she thought of him at all, if she did happen to think
of him. A husband was the necessary means of fulfilling her new desire
to have her own young.