Part One - Chapter 6

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_ PART ONE CHAPTER VI

"You see," continued Bessie Falkner, drawing up her pretty feet into the piazza cot, "it was just love at first sight. I was up there at the hotel in the mountains, trying to make up my mind whether I could marry another man, who was awfully rich--owned a mine and a ranch; but he was so dull the horses would go to sleep when we were out driving ... And then just as I concluded it was the only thing for me to do, to take him and make the best of him,--then Rob rode up to the hotel in his old tattered suit--he was building a dam or something up in the mountains--and I knew I couldn't marry Mr. Mine-and-Ranch. That was all there was to it, my dear. The rest of the story? Why, of course he made the hotel his headquarters while he was at work on the dam; I stayed on, too, and it came along--naturally, you know."

Mrs. Falkner dipped into a box of candy and swung the cot gently to and fro. The men were still talking inside the house and the two wives had come outside for long confidences. Isabelle, amused by this sketch of the Colorado courtship, patted the blond woman's little hand. Mrs. Falkner had large blue eyes, with waving tendrils of hair, which gave her face the look of childish unsophistication;--especially at this moment when her voluptuous lips were closing over a specially desired piece of candy.

"Of course it would come along--with you!"

"I didn't do a thing--just waited," Bessie protested, fishing about the almost empty box for another delectable bit. "He did it all. He was in such a hurry he wanted to marry me then and there at the hotel and go live up in the mountains in a cabin above the dam where he was at work. He's romantic. Men are all like that then, don't you think? But of course it couldn't be that way; so we got married properly in the fall in Denver, and then came straight here. And," with a long sigh, "we've been here ever since. Stuck!"

"I should think you would have preferred the cabin above the dam," Isabelle suggested, recalling her own romantic notion of Dog Mountain. Mrs. Falkner made a little grimace.

"That might do for two or three months. But snowed in all the winter, even with the man you like best in all the world? He'd kill you or escape through the drifts ... You see we hadn't a thing, not a cent, except his salary and that ended with the dam. It was only eighty a month anyway. This is better, a hundred and fifty," she explained with childish frankness. "But Rob has to work harder and likes the mountains, is always talking of going back. But I say there are better things than hiding yourself at the land's end. There's St. Louis, or maybe New York!"

Isabelle wondered how the Falkners were able to support such a hospitable house--they had two small children and Bessie had confided that another was coming in the spring--on the engineer's salary.

"And the other one," Mrs. Falkner added in revery, "is more than a millionnaire now."

Her face was full of speculation over what might have been as the wife of all that money.

"But we are happy, Rob and I,--except for the bills! Don't you hate bills?"

Isabelle's only answer was a hearty laugh. She found this pretty, frank little "Westerner" very attractive.

"It was bills that made my mother unhappy--broke her heart. Sometimes we had money,--most generally not. Such horrid fusses when there wasn't any. But what is one to do? You've got to go on living somehow. Rob says we can't afford this house,--Rob is always afraid we won't get through. But we do somehow. I tell him that the good time is coming,--we must just anticipate it, draw a little on the future."

At this point the men came through the window to the piazza. Bessie shook her box of candy coquettishly at Lane, who took the chair beside her. Evidently he thought her amusing, as most men did. Falkner leaned against the white pillar and stared up at the heavens. Isabelle, accustomed to men of more conventional social qualities, had found the young engineer glum and odd. He had a stern, rather handsome face, a deep furrow dividing his forehead and meeting the part of his thick brown hair, which curled slightly at the ends. "If he didn't look so cross, he would be quite handsome," thought Isabelle, wondering how long it might be before her host would speak to her. She could see him as he rode up to the hotel piazza that day, when Bessie Falkner had made up her mind on the moment that she could not marry "the other man." Finally Falkner broke his glum silence.

"Do you eat candy, Mrs. Lane? Pounds of it, I mean,--so that it is your staple article of diet."

"Tut, tut," remarked his wife from her cot. "Don't complain."

His next remark was equally abrupt.

"There's only one good thing in this Torso hole," he observed with more animation than he had shown all the evening, "and that's the coke-ovens at night--have you noticed them? They are like the fiery pits, smouldering, ready for the damned!"

It was not what she expected from a civil engineer, in Torso, Indiana, and she was at a loss for a reply.

"You'd rather have stayed in Colorado?" she asked frankly.

He turned his face to her and said earnestly, "Did you ever sleep out on a mountain with the stars close above you?--'the vast tellurian galleons' voyaging through space?"

Isabelle suspected that he was quoting poetry, which also seemed odd in Torso.

"Yes,--my brother and I used to camp out at our home in Connecticut. But I don't suppose you would call our Berkshire Hills mountains."

"No," he replied dryly, "I shouldn't."

And their conversation ended. Isabella wished that the Darnells had not been obliged to go home immediately after supper. The young lawyer knew how to talk to women, and had made himself very agreeable, telling stories of his youth spent among the mountains with a primitive people. She had observed that he drank a good deal of whiskey, and there was something in his black eyes that made her uncomfortable. But he was a man that women liked to think about: he touched their imaginations. She did not talk about him to John on their way home, however, but discussed the Falkners.

"Don't you think she is perfectly charming?" (Charming was the word she had found for Bessie Falkner.) "So natural and amusing! She's very Western--she can't have seen much of life--but she isn't a bit ordinary."

"Yes, I like her," Lane replied unenthusiastically, "and he seems original. I shouldn't wonder if he were clever in his profession; he told me a lot about Freke's mines."

What he had learned about the Pleasant Valley mines was the chief thing in the evening to Lane. He did not understand why Isabelle seemed so much more eager to know these people--these Darnells and Falkners--than the Frasers and the Adamses. She had made fun of the solemn dinner that the Frasers had given to introduce them into Torso "society."

"I wonder how they can live on that salary," Isabelle remarked. "One hundred and fifty a month!"

"He must make something outside."

* * * * *

After the Lanes had gone, Bessie Falkner prepared yawningly for bed, leaving her husband to shut up the house. Her weekly excitement of entertaining people over, she always felt let down, like a poet after the stir of creation. It was useless to go over the affair with Rob, as he was merely bored. But she spent hours thinking what the women said and how they looked and deciding whom she could have the next time. On her way to bed she went into the nursery where her two little girls were asleep in their cots beside the nurse, and finding a window open woke the nurse to reprove her for her carelessness. In the hall she met her husband bringing up the silver.

"Emma is so thoughtless," she complained. "I shall have to let her go if I can find another servant in this town."

Her husband listened negligently. The Falkners were perpetually changing their two servants, or were getting on without them.

"Mrs. Lane's maids all wear caps," Mrs. Falkner had observed frequently to her husband.

Bessie had strict ideas of how a house should be run, ideas derived from the best houses that she was familiar with. Since the advent of the Lanes she had extended these ideas and strove all the harder to achieve magnificent results. Though the livery of service was practically unknown in Torso, she had resolved to induce her cook (and maid of all work) to serve the meals with cap and apron, and also endeavored to have the nursemaid open the door and help serve when company was expected.

"What's the use!" her husband protested. "They'll only get up and go."

He could not understand the amount of earnest attention and real feeling that his wife put into these things,--her pride to have her small domain somewhat resemble the more affluent ones that she admired. Though her family had been decidedly plain, they had given her "advantages" in education and dress, and her own prettiness, her vivacity and charm, had won her way into whatever society Kansas City and Denver could offer. She had also visited here and there in different parts of the country,--once in New York, and again at a cottage on the New England coast where there were eight servants, a yacht, and horses. These experiences of luxury, of an easy and large social life, she had absorbed through every pore. With that marvellous adaptability of her race she had quickly formed her ideals of "how people ought to live." It was frequently difficult to carry out these ideals on a circumscribed income, with a husband who cared nothing for appearances, and that was a source of constant discontent to Bessie.

"Coming to bed?" she asked her husband, as she looked in vain for the drinking water that the maid was supposed to bring to her bedside at night.

"No," Falkner answered shortly. "I've got to make out those estimates somehow before morning. If you will have people all the time--"

Bessie turned in at her door shrugging her shoulders. Rob was in one of his "cross" moods,--overworked, poor boy! She slowly began to undress before the mirror, thinking of Isabelle Lane's stylish figure and her perfect clothes. "She must have lots of money," she reflected, "and so nice and simple! He's attractive, too. Rob is foolish not to like them. He showed his worst side to-night. If he wants to get on,--why, they are the sort of people he ought to know." Her husband's freakish temper gave her much trouble, his unexpectedly bearish moods when she was doing her very best for him, "bringing him out" as she put it, making the right kind of friends,--influential ones, so that he might have some chance in the scramble for the good things of life. Surely that was a wife's part. Bessie was satisfied that she had done much for her husband in this way, developed him socially; for when he rode up to the mountain hotel, he was solitary, moody, shy. Tonight he hadn't kissed her,--in fact hadn't done so for several days. He was tired by the prolonged heat, she supposed, and worried about the bills. He was always worried about expenses.

As the clothes slipped from her still shapely figure, she stood before the glass, thinking in a haze of those first lover-days that had departed so soon. Now instead of petting her, Rob spent his hours at home upstairs in his attic workroom, doing extra work or reading. Could it be that he was growing tired of her, so soon, in four years? She glanced over her shoulder at her pretty arms, her plump white neck reflected in the glass, and smiled unconsciously with assurance. Oh, he would come back to the lover-mood--she was still desirable! And as the smile curved her lip she thought, "I married him for love!" She was very proud of that....

The house was now deliciously cool and quiet. Bessie sank into her bed with a sigh, putting out one hand for a magazine and turning on the electric light beside the bed. It had been a tiresome day, with the supper to bring off. There had been six courses, and everything had been very nice. The black cook she had engaged to prepare the meal was a treasure, could serve a better dinner than Mrs. Fraser's or Mrs. Adams's. She herself had made the salad and prepared the iced grape-fruit. Every limb ached--she was always so tired. She loved this last quiet hour of the day that she had by herself, now that the nurse took both the children. With her delicate health the nurse had been a necessity. She usually looked blooming and rosy, but was always tired, always had been as long as she could remember. The doctor had told Falkner after the second child came that his wife would always be a delicate woman, must be carefully protected, or she would collapse and have the fearful modern disease of nerves. So Falkner had insisted on having the best nurse obtainable to relieve her from the wearing nights,--though it meant that somehow eighteen hundred dollars must grow of itself!

As midnight sounded from the court-house clock, Bessie laid down the magazine and stretched her tired limbs, luxuriating in the comfort of her soft bed. The story she had been reading was sentimental,--the love of a cowboy for the fair daughter of a railroad president. She longed for the caresses of her cow-boy lover, and wondered dreamily if Lane were a devoted husband. He seemed so; but all men were probably alike: their first desires gratified, they thought of other things. So she put out the light and closed her eyes, in faint discontent with life, which was proving less romantic than she had anticipated.

She had her own room. At first it had held two beds, her husband sharing the room with her. But as the house was large he had taken a room on the third story. Nowadays, as Bessie knew, the better sort of American household does not use the primitive double bed. For hygiene and comfort enlightened people have taken to separate beds, then separate quarters. A book might be written on the doing away of the conjugal bed in American life! There should be interesting observations on the effect of this change, social, and hygienic, and moral,--oh, most interesting! ... A contented smile at last stole over the young wife's face. Was she dreaming of her babies, of those first days of love, when her husband never wished her out of his sight, or simply of the well-ordered, perfectly served, pretty supper that she had given for the Lanes whom she was most anxious to know well? The supper had quite met her aspirations except in the matter of caps and aprons, had satisfied her cherished ideal of how "nice people" lived in this world.

That ideal is constantly expanding these days. In America no one is classed by birth or profession. All is to make, and the women with their marvellous powers of absorption do the shaping. In a thousand ways they learn "how to live as other people do,"--in magazines and on bill boards, in the theatre, the churches, the trains, the illustrated novel. Suggestions how to live!

Meantime upstairs in the mansard room of the old house Falkner was figuring over stresses and strains of an unemotional sort. When past midnight he shoved the papers into the drawer, a familiar thought coursed through his brain: somehow he must sell himself at a dearer price. Living was not cheap even in Torso, and the cost of living was ever going higher, so the papers said and the wives. There were four of them now, a fifth to come in a few months. There should be a third servant, he knew, if they were to live "like other people." With a gesture that said, "Oh, Hell!" he jumped from his chair and took down a volume of verse from the pine shelf above the mantel and lighted a cigarette. For a few minutes he might lose himself and forget the fret of life, in the glowing pictures of things not seen.

The book dropped from his hand. He had carried it in his mountain kit, had read it to Bessie when they were engaged. She had listened, flattered, looking at him and smoothing his hair. But after marriage she confessed flatly that she was not "literary." So they had read together a book of travels, then a novel, then a magazine, and latterly nothing. Taking another cigarette, the man read on, and before his tired eyes rose the purple peaks of the Rockies, the shining crests of snow, the azure sky. And also a cabin in a green meadow beside a still mountain lake, and a woman fair and tall and straight, with blue eyes and a caressing hand,--a child on one arm. But Bessie was sleeping downstairs. Putting out his light, the man went to bed.

The man on horseback riding up the trail to look into the girl's eyes that summer afternoon! _

Read next: Part One: Chapter 7

Read previous: Part One: Chapter 5

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