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Together, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Part Five - Chapter 49 |
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_ PART FIVE CHAPTER XLIX When Lane went West early in May for his annual inspection trip, Isabelle moved to the Farm for the season. She was wan and listless. She had talked of going abroad with Vickers, but had suddenly given up the plan. A box of books arrived with her, and she announced to Vickers that she meant to read Italian with him; she must do something to kill the time. But the first evening when she opened a volume of French plays, she dropped it; books could not hold her attention any more. All the little details about her house annoyed her,--nothing went smoothly. The governess must be changed. Her French was horrible. Marian followed her mother about with great eyes, fearful of annoying her, yet fascinated. Isabelle exclaimed in sudden irritation: "Haven't you anything to do, Molly!" And to Vickers she complained: "Children nowadays seem perfectly helpless. Unless they are provided with amusement every minute, they dawdle about, waiting for you to do something for them. Miss Betterton should make Molly more independent." And the next day in a fit of compunction she arranged to have a children's party, sending the motor for some ten-mile-away neighbors. In her mood she found even Vickers unsatisfactory: "Now you have me here, cooped up, you don't say a word to me. You are as bad as John. That portentous silence is a husband's privilege, Vick.... You and I used to _jaser_ all the time. Other men don't find me dull, anyway. They tell me things!" She pouted like a child. Vickers recalled that when she had said something like this one day at breakfast with John and Cairy present, Lane had lifted his head from his plate and remarked with a quiet man's irony: "The other men are specials,--they go on for an occasion. The husband's is a steady job." Cairy had laughed immoderately. Isabelle had laughed with him,--"Yes, I suppose you are all alike; you would slump every morning at breakfast." This spring Isabelle had grown tired, even of people. "Conny wants to come next month, and I suppose I must have her. I wanted Margaret, but she has got to take the little boy up to some place in the country and can't come.... There's a woman, now," she mused to Vickers, her mind departing on a train of association with Margaret Pole. "I wonder how she possibly stands life with that husband of hers. He's getting worse all the time. Drinks now! Margaret asked me if John could give him something in the railroad, and John sent him out to a place in the country where he would be out of harm.... There's marriage for you! Margaret is the most intelligent woman I know, and full of life if she had only half a chance to express herself. But everything is ruined by that mistake she made years ago. If I were she--" Isabelle waved a rebellious hand expressively. "I thought at one time that she was in love with Rob Falkner,--she saw a lot of him. But he has gone off to Panama. Margaret won't say a word about him; perhaps she is in love with him still,--who knows!" One day she looked up from a book at Vickers, who was at the piano, and observed casually:-- "Tom is coming up to spend June when he gets back from the South." She waited for an expected remark, and then added, "If you dislike him as much as you used to, you had better take that time for Fosdick." "Do you want me to go?" "No,--only I thought it might be more comfortable for you--" "Cairy doesn't make me uncomfortable." "Oh--well, you needn't worry about me, brother dear!" She blushed and came across the room to kiss him. "I am well harnessed; I shan't break the traces--yet."... It was a summerish day, and at luncheon Isabelle seemed less moody than she had been since her arrival. "Let's take one of our old long rides,--just ride anywhere, as we used to," she suggested. They talked of many things that afternoon, slipping back into the past and rising again to the present. Vickers, happy in her quieter, gentler mood, talked of himself, the impressions he had received these months in his own land. "What strikes me most," he said, "at least with the people that I see about you, Belle, is the sharp line between work and play. I see you women all at play, and I see the men only when they are wearily watching you play or playing with you. One hears so much about business in America. But with you people it is as much suppressed as if your husbands and brothers went off to some other star every day to do their work and came back at night by air ship to see their families." "Business is dull," Isabelle explained,--"most men's business. They want to forget it themselves when they leave the office." "But it is so much a part of life," Vickers protested, thinking of the hours and days Lane spent absorbed in affairs that Isabelle hadn't the curiosity to inquire about. "Too much over here." "And not enough."... On their way home in the cool of the evening, over a hilly road through the leafing woods, their horses walked close together, and Isabelle, putting an arm affectionately on her brother's shoulder, mused:-- "One feels so differently different days. Tell me, Vick, what makes the atmosphere,--the color of life in one's mind? Look over there, along the river. See all the gray mist and up above on the mountain the purple--and to-morrow it will be gone! Changing, always changing! It's just so inside you; the color is changing all the time.... There is the old village. It doesn't seem to me any longer the place you and I lived in as boy and girl, the place I was married from." "It is we who have changed, not Grafton." "Of course; it's what we have lived through, felt,--and we can't get back! We can't get back,--that's the sad thing." "Perhaps it isn't best to get back altogether." Isabelle gave him a curious glance, and then in a hard tone remarked, "Sometimes I think, Vick, that in spite of your experience you are the same soft, sentimental youth you were before it happened." "Not quite." "Did you ever regret it, Vick?" "Yes," he said bravely, "many times; but I am not so sure now that one can really regret anything that is done out of one's full impulse." "Well,--that was different," Isabelle remarked vaguely. "Did you ever consider, Vick, that marriage is an awful problem for a woman,--any woman who has individuality, who thinks? ... A man takes it easily. If it doesn't fit, why he hangs it up in the closet, so to speak, and takes it out just as little as he has to. But a woman,--she must wear it pretty much all of the time--or give it up altogether. It's unfair to the woman. If she wants to be loved, and there are precious few women who don't want a man to love them, don't want that first of all, and her husband hasn't time to bother with love,--what does she get out of marriage? I know what you are going to say! John loves me, when he thinks about it, and I have my child, and I am happily placed, in very comfortable circumstances, and--" "I wasn't going to say that," Vickers interrupted. "But," continued Isabelle, with rising intensity, "you know that has nothing to do with happiness.... One might as well be married to a hitching-post as to John. Women simply don't count in his life. Sometimes I wish they did--that he would make me jealous! Give him the railroad and golf and a man to talk to, and he is perfectly happy.... Where do I come in?" "Where do you put yourself in?" "As housekeeper," she laughed, the mood breaking. "The Johnstons are coming next week, all eight--or is it nine?--of them. I must go over and see that the place is opened.... They live like tramps, with one servant, but they seem very happy. He is awfully good, but dull,--John is a social lion compared to Steve Johnston. John says he's very clever in his line. And as for Alice, she always was big, but she's become enormous. I don't suppose she ever thinks of anything so frivolous as a waist-line." "I thought she had a beautiful face." "Vick, I don't believe that you know whether a woman has a figure! You might write a _Symphonie Colossale_ with Alice and her brood as the theme." "She is Woman," suggested Vickers. "Woman!" Isabelle scoffed. "Why is child-bearing considered the corner-stone of womanhood? Having young? Cows do that. Women are good for other things,--inspiration, love, perhaps!" She curved her pretty lips at her brother mockingly.... There were two telegrams at the house. Isabelle, opening the first, read aloud, "Reach Grafton three thirty, Tuesday. John," and dropped it on the table. The other she did not read aloud, but telephoned an answer to the telegraph office. Later she remarked casually, "Tom finds he can get back earlier; he'll be here by the end of the week." _ |
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