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Clark's Field, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Chapter 32 |
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_ CHAPTER XXXII 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. _ |
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