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Together

R >> Robert Herrick (1868 1938) >> Together




The luncheon was very good. The black cook, "a relic of my mother's
establishment," as Margaret explained, gave them a few savory family
dishes, and there was a light French wine. Margaret ate little and talked
little, seeming to enjoy the vivacity of the other women.

"Tell about your visit to the Gorings," Conny drawled. "Percy's cousin,
Eugene Goring, who married Aline, you know. Boots in the bath-tub, and the
babies running around naked, and Aline lost in the metaphysics of the arts,
making chairs."

And Isabelle recounted what she had seen of Aline's establishment in St.
Louis, with its total disregard of what Conny called the "decencies" of
life. They all laughed at her picture of their "wood-nymph," as they had
named Aline.

"And Eugene talking anarchy, and washing the dishes,--it sounds like a
Weber and Field's farce," gurgled Conny. "He wrote Percy about lecturing in
New York,--wanted to come East. But Percy couldn't do anything for him. It
isn't a combination to make a drawing-room impression."

"But," Margaret protested, "Aline is a person, and that is more than you
can say of most of us married women. She has kept her personality."

"If I were 'Gene," Conny replied contemptuously, "I'd tone her
'personality' down."

"He's probably big enough to respect it."

There followed a discussion of the woman's part in marriage, Margaret
defending independence, "the woman's right to live for herself," and Conny
taking the practical view.

"She can't be anything any way, just by herself. She had better make the
most of the material she's got to work with--or get another helping," she
added, thinking of Larry.

"And Aline isn't happy," Isabelle remarked; "she has a look on her face as
if she were a thousand miles away, and had forgotten her marriage as much
as she could. Her chairs and tables are just ways of forgetting."

"But they have something to think about,--those two. They don't vegetate."

"I should say they had,--but no anarchy in my domestic circle, thank you!"
Conny observed.

"I shouldn't object to anarchy," sighed Margaret, with her whimsical smile.

"Margaret is bored," Isabelle pronounced, "simply awfully bored. She's so
bored that I expect some day she will poison herself and the children,
merely to find out what comes next."

"No wonder--buried in the snowdrifts out here," Conny agreed. "Isn't there
anything you want to do, even something wicked?"

"Yes," Mrs. Pole answered half seriously. "There is _one_ thing I'd like to
do before I die."

"Tell us!"

"I'd like to find Somebody--man or woman--who cared for the things I care
for--sky and clouds and mountains,--and go away with him anywhere for--a
little while, just a little while," she drawled dreamily, resting her
elbows on the table.

"Elope! Fie, fie!" Conny laughed.

"My mother's father had a plantation in one of the Windward Islands,"
Margaret continued. "It must be nice down there--warm and sunny. I'd like
to lie out on the beach and forget children and servants and husbands, and
stop wondering what life is. Yes, I'd like a vacation--in the Windward
Islands, with somebody who understood."

"To wit, a man!" added Conny.

"Yes, a man! But only for the trip."

They laughed a good deal about Margaret's vacation, called her the
"Windward Islands," and asked her to make reservations for them in her
Paradise when they had found desirable partners.

"Only, I should have to bring John, and he wouldn't know what to do with
himself on a beach," Isabelle remarked. "I don't know any one else to
take."

"You mustn't go Windwarding until you have to," Margaret explained....

At the dessert, the children came in,--two boys and a girl. The elder boy
was eight, with his mother's fair hair, blue eyes, and fine features, and
the same suggestion of race in the narrow high brow, the upward poise of
the head. His younger brother was nondescript, with dark hair and full
lips. Margaret observed her children with a curiously detached air,
Isabelle thought. Was she looking for signs of Larry in that second son?
Alas, she might see Larry always, with the cold apprehension of a woman too
wise to deceive herself! The little girl, fresh from her nap, was round and
undefined, and the mother took her into her arms, cuddling her close to her
breast, as if nothing, not even the seed of Larry, could separate her from
this one; as if she felt in her heart all the ills and sorrows, the woman's
pains to be,--the eternal feminine defeat,--in this tiny ball of freshness.
And the ironical smile subtly softened to a glow of affection. Here, at
least, was an illusion!

Isabelle, watching these two, understood--all the lines, the smile, the
light cynicism--the Windward Islands! She put her arms impulsively about
the mother and the child, hugging them closely. Margaret looked up into her
shining eyes and pressed her hand....

"There are some cigarettes in the other room," Margaret suggested; "we'll
build up the fire and continue the argument in favor of the Windward
Islands."

"It is a long way to New York over that road," Conny observed. "I have an
engagement."

Now that she had satisfied her curiosity about "how the Poles lived," she
began to think of her dinner with Cairy, and was fearful lest she might be
delayed.

"Spend the night," suggested Margaret; but Isabelle, who understood Conny,
telephoned at once for the motor.

"You aren't going back to the West, Isabelle?" Margaret asked, while they
waited for the motor. "Won't you miss it?"

"Miss the West? Did you ever know a woman that had escaped from the
Mississippi Valley who would go back there?" Conny drawled. "Why, Belle is
like a girl just out of school, looking at the shop windows!"

Cornelia Woodyard, who had lived a number of years in a corner of that same
vast valley, looked from metropolitan heights on the monotony of the
"middle West." She had the New Yorker's amusing incapacity to comprehend
existence outside the neighborhood of Fifth Avenue and Central Park.

"One lives out there," Margaret protested with sudden fire, "in those great
spaces. Men grow there. They _do_ things. When my boys are educated I shall
take them away from New York, to the Virginia mountains, perhaps, and have
them grow up there, doing things, real things, working with their hands,
becoming men! Perhaps not there," she mused, recollecting that the acres of
timber and coal in the mountains, her sons' inheritance from her vigorous
ancestors, had been lost to them in a vulgar stock dealer's gamble by their
father,--"perhaps out to Oregon, where I have an uncle. His father rode his
horse all the way from Louisiana across the continent, after the War! He
had nothing but his horse--and before he died he built a city in his new
country. That is where men do things!"

Margaret had flashed into life again. As Tom Cairy would have said,
"_Vraiment, ma petite cousine a une grande ame--etouffee_" (For Cairy
always made his acute observations in the French tongue).

"There's something of the Amazon in you, Margaret," Conny remarked, "in
spite of your desire to seclude yourself in the Windward Islands with a
suitable mate."

The motor finally came puffing up the drive, and the women stood on the
veranda, prolonging their farewells. A round, red, important sun peeped
from under the gray cloud bank that had lowered all the afternoon, flooding
the thin branches of the budding trees, falling warm and gold across the
dead fields.

"See!" Margaret cried, raising her thin arms to the sun. "The Promise!"

"I hope it will hold until we reach Jerome Avenue," Conny replied
practically, preparing to enter the car.

"The promise of another life!"

Margaret was standing in the sun, her nostrils dilated, absorbing the
light, the source of joy and life.

"Windward Islands, eh?" Conny coughed, settling herself comfortably in her
corner.

"The real land," Margaret murmured to herself.

The chauffeur had reached for the lever when there appeared on the drive
two men bearing something between them, a human something, carefully.

"What's that!" exclaimed Conny in a frightened voice. "What is it?" she
repeated to the chauffeur,--demanding of a man something in his province to
know.

"Looks though they had a child--hurt," the chauffeur replied.

Margaret, shading her eyes with a thin hand, looked down the avenue. She
made no movement to go towards the men,--merely waited motionless for the
thing to come. And the men came slowly forward, past the car, up the steps.

It was the older boy. The man who held the head and shoulders of the child
said, "An accident--not serious, I believe."

Margaret opened the door and pointed to the lounge before the fire. The man
who had spoken laid the boy down very gently with his head on a cushion,
and smoothed back the rumpled hair.

"I will go for the doctor," the other man said, and presently there was the
sound of the motor leaping down the hill.

Margaret had dropped on her knees beside the unconscious boy, and placed
one hand on his brow. "Bring some water," she said to Isabelle, and began
to unbutton the torn sweater.

Conny, with one look at the white face and closed eyes, went softly out
into the hall and sat down.

"Will you telephone to Dr. W. S. Rogers in New York, and ask him to send
some one if he can't come himself?" Margaret asked the stranger, who was
helping her with the boy's clothes.

"Can I telephone any one else--his father?" the man suggested, as he turned
to the door.

"No--it would be no use--it's too late to reach him."

Then she turned again to the boy, who was still unconscious....

When the man had finished telephoning, he came back through the hall, where
Conny was sitting.

"How did it happen?" she asked.

"He fell over the culvert,--the high one just as you leave the station, you
know. He was riding his bicycle,--I saw the little chap pushing it up the
hill as I got out of the train. Then a big touring car passed me, and met
another one coming down at full speed. I suppose the boy was frightened and
tried to get too far out on the culvert and fell over. The motors didn't
notice him; but when I reached the spot, I saw his bicycle hanging on the
edge and looked over for him,--could just see his head in the bushes and
leaves. Poor little fellow! It was a nasty fall. But the leaves and the
rubbish must have broken it somewhat."

"Rob! Rob Falkner!" Isabelle exclaimed, as the man turned and met her at
the door. "I didn't recognize you--with your beard! How is Bessie?"

"Very well, I believe. She is in Denver, you know."

When he had gone back to the boy, Isabelle said to Conny:--

"We used to know the Falkners very well. There is a story! ... Strange he
should be _here_. But I heard he was in the East somewhere."

Conny did not seem interested in Rob Falkner and his turning up at this
juncture. She sat with a solemn face, wondering how she could get back to
the city. Finally she resolved to telephone Cairy.

* * * * *

Falkner went over to the unconscious boy, and taking his hand, counted the
pulse. "It's all right so far," he said to the mother, who did not hear
him. After a time she looked up, and her low voice dragged hoarsely,--"You
mustn't wait. The doctor will be here soon, and we can do everything now."

"I will wait until the doctor comes," Falkner replied gently, and stepped
to the window to watch for the motor.

After the local doctor had come and said, "A slight concussion,--nothing
serious, I expect," and the boy had revived somewhat, Conny departed alone
in the motor, Isabelle having decided to stay with Margaret over the night.
Falkner helped the doctor carry the patient upstairs, and then started to
leave. Isabelle waited for him at the door.

"Mrs. Pole wishes me to thank you for all your kindness."

"I shall look in to-morrow morning," he replied hurriedly. "I would stay
now until the boy's father came; but I don't suppose there is anything I
can do. I am living at the hotel below, and you can telephone if you want
me."

"You are living here?"

"Yes; I am working on the new dam, a few miles from this place."

"I am so glad to see you again," Isabelle said, the only words she could
think of.

"Thank you."

Then with a curt nod he was off. He had not shown in any way that he was
glad to see her, Isabelle reflected. Falkner was always moody, but she had
thought he liked her,--and after all their friendship! Something had kept
her from asking more about Bessie.




CHAPTER XXXI


Larry did not return for dinner, which Isabelle ate by herself in sombre
silence. When she went upstairs to take the mother's place with the boy,
Margaret did not seem to notice her husband's absence, though she inquired
repeatedly whether the New York doctor had telephoned. Later in the evening
when Isabelle suggested that some effort should be made to find the boy's
father, Margaret exclaimed impatiently:--

"I can't tell where he is! ... It is easier for me that he isn't here." And
in answer to Isabelle's expression, she added: "Don't look so shocked, B!
Larry gets on my nerves frightfully when there is anything extra to bear or
do. Of course I shall telephone his office in the morning, and he will come
out at once. That doctor said there would be no change before morning. Do
you suppose he knows anything, that doctor? He had the look of polite
ignorance!"

The New York doctor arrived towards midnight with a nurse, and stayed the
night to await developments. Margaret still sat by the boy's bed, and
Isabelle left her huddled in a large chair, her eyes staring at the shadow
on the faintly lighted bed. She had listened to what Dr. Rogers had to say
without a word. She was almost stone, Isabelle felt, looking at her with
some awe. What could have made her like this!

She was still in this stony mood the next morning when Larry reached the
house. Dressed in a loose black gown that clung to her slight figure and
brought out the perfect whiteness of her skin, she stood and listened
indifferently to the vague explanation of his absence that her husband
poured out profusely. Then with a remark that the doctor would see him
before he went, she left the room. Isabelle, who was present, watched the
two keenly, trying to divine the secret. To be sure, Larry was not
attractive, she decided,--too effusive, too anxious to make the right
impression, as if he were acting a part before Isabelle, and full of wordy
concern for every one. A little below the medium height, he stood very
erect, consciously making the most of his inches. His sandy hair was thin,
and he wore glasses, behind which one eye kept winking nervously. Neatly,
almost fashionably dressed, he bore no evident marks of dissipation. After
Conny's description, Isabelle had expected to see his shortcomings written
all over him. Though he was over-mannered and talkative, there was nothing
to mark him as of the outcast class. "One doesn't despise one's husband
because he's foolish or unfortunate about money matters," Isabelle said to
herself. And the sympathy that she had felt for Margaret began to
evaporate.

"You say that he fell off that embankment?" Larry remarked to her. "I was
afraid he was too young to ride about here by himself with all the motors
there are in this neighborhood. But Margaret was anxious to have him
fearless.... People who motor are so careless--it has become a curse in the
country.... Mrs. Woodyard came out with you? I am so sorry this frightful
accident spoiled your day."...

He ran on from remark to remark, with no prompting from Isabelle, and had
got to their life in Germany when the doctor entered the room. Larry shook
hands punctiliously with him, inquiring in a special tone: "I hope you have
good news of the little fellow, Doctor? I thought I would not go up until I
had seen you first."...

The doctor cut short the father's prolixity in a burly voice:--

"It's concussion, passing off, I think. But nobody can say what will happen
then,--whether there is anything wrong with the cord. It may clear up in a
few days. It may not. No use speculating.... I shall be back to-morrow or
send some one. Good day."

Larry followed him into the hall, talking, questioning, exclaiming.
Isabella noticed that the doctor gave Pole a quick, impatient glance,
shaking him off with a curt reply, and jumped into the waiting carriage. In
some ways men read men more rapidly than women can. They look for fewer
details, with an eye to the essential stuff of character.

What had the doctor said to Margaret? Had he let her know his evident
fears? When she came into the room for a moment, there was an expression of
fixed will in her white face, as if she had gone down into herself and
found there the courage to meet whatever was coming.... 'The older boy,
too,' thought Isabelle,--'the one so like her, with no outward trace of the
father!'

While Margaret was giving directions for telephoning, making in brief
phrases her arrangements for the day, Falkner came in. He was in his
working clothes, and with his thick beard and scrubby mustache looked quite
rough beside the trim Larry.

"How is the boy?" he demanded directly, going up to the mother.

"Better, I think,--comfortable at least," she answered gently. There was a
warm gleam in her eyes as she spoke to this stranger, as if she had felt
his fibre and liked it.

"I will come in this afternoon. I should like to see him when I can."

"Yes, this afternoon," Margaret replied. "I should be glad to have you
come."

Isabelle had told Pole that Falkner was the man who had found the boy and
brought him home. Larry, with the subtle air of superiority that clothes
seem to give a small man, thanked Falkner in suitable language. Isabelle
had the suspicion that he was debating with himself whether he should give
this workingman a couple of dollars for his trouble, and with an hysterical
desire to laugh interposed:--

"Mr. Pole, this is Mr. Falkner, an old friend of ours!"

"Oh," Larry remarked, "I didn't understand!" and he looked at Falkner
again, still from a distance.

"Rob," Isabelle continued, turning to Falkner, "you didn't tell me
yesterday how Bessie is. I haven't heard from her for a long while,--and
Mildred?"

"They are well, I believe. Bessie doesn't write often."

Pole followed him into the hall, making remarks. Isabelle heard Falkner
reply gruffly: "Yes, it was a nasty fall. But a kid can fall a good way
without hurting himself seriously."

When Pole came back and began to talk to her, Isabelle's sympathy for his
wife revived. The house had settled into the dreary imitation of its
customary routine that the house of suspense takes on. To live in this,
with the mild irritation of Larry's conversational fluency, was quite
intolerable. It was not what he said, but the fact that he was forever
saying it. "A bag of words," Isabelle called him. "Poor Margaret!" And she
concluded that there was nothing more useful for her to do than to take
upon herself the burden of Larry until he should dispose of himself in some
harmless way.




CHAPTER XXXII


No, women such as Margaret Pole do not "despise their husbands because they
are unfortunate in money matters,"--not altogether because they prove
themselves generally incompetent in the man's struggle for life! This
process of the petrification of a woman's heart, slow or rapid as it may
be, is always interesting,--if the woman is endowed in the first place with
the power to feel. How Margaret Lawton may have come to marry Lawrence
Pole, we can defer for the present, as a matter of post-mortem psychology,
unprofitable, melancholy, and inexact, however interesting. How does any
woman come to marry any man? Poets, psychologists, and philosophers have
failed to account for the accidents of this emotional nexus.

What is determinable and more to our purpose is the subsequent process of
dissolution, or petrifaction. All that need be said is that Margaret
married her husband when she was twenty-four, with confidence, belief in
him, and a spiritual aspiration concerning marriage not possible to many
who marry. However foolishly she may have deluded herself,--betrayed a
fatal incapacity to divine,--she believed when she went to the altar with
Lawrence Pole that she was marrying a Man,--one whom she could respect as
well as love, and to whom she should remain loyally bound in mind and heart
and soul.

She was ardent, this delicate Southern girl. Under a manner that had seemed
to comrades at St. Mary's cold because of its reticence, there burned the
fire of a crusading race,--of those Southerners who had pushed from the fat
lowlands about the sea into the mountains and across them to the
wilderness; of that uncle, who after the defeat of his cause had ridden his
cavalry horse across the entire country in search of a new opening, to
build at forty-three a new life for himself and his wife--after defeat!
There was courage, aspiration, the power of deeds in that blood,--note the
high forehead, the moulded chin, the deep eyes of this woman. And there was
also in her religious faith, received from her father the Bishop, piety,
and accepted beliefs in honor, loyalty, love to one's family and friends,
and charity to the world. All this was untested, handed down to her wrapped
in the prayer-book by the Bishop. And she had seen a bit of what we call
the world, there in Washington among her mother's friends,--had been gay,
perhaps reckless, played like a girl with love and life, those hours of
sunshine. She knew vaguely that some men were liars, and some were carnal;
but she came to her marriage virgin in soul as well as body, without a spot
from living, without a vicious nerve in her body, ready to learn.

And folly with money, mere incompetence, did not turn that heart to
stone,--not that alone. The small segment of the world that knew the Poles
might think so, hearing how Larry had gone into Wall Street and fatuously
left there his own small fortune, and later, going back after his lesson,
had lost what he could of his wife's property. To be sure, after that first
"ill luck," Margaret's eyes had opened to the fact that her husband was not
"practical," was easily led by vanity. In the Lawton family it had been the
Man's part to deal effectively with practical life, and women did not
concern themselves with their judgments. But as Margaret had never expected
to be rich,--had no ambition for place in the social race,--she would have
gone back to her blue-capped mountains and lived there contented, "with
something to look at." She had urged this course upon her husband after the
first disaster; but he was too vain to "get out," to "quit the game," to
leave New York. So with the understanding that henceforth he would stick to
prosaic methods of money making, he had started again in his brokerage
business. This was at the time when Margaret was occupied with her babies.
As the indubitable clay of her idol revealed itself, she had thought that
child-bearing, child-having would be a tolerable compensation for her idyl.
Margaret Pole was one who "didn't mind having babies," and did not consider
the fatal nine months a serious deprivation of life. She liked it all, she
told Isabelle, and was completely happy only when the children were coming
and while they were helpless babies. One real interest suffices for all.

Then one day, after the second boy was born, Larry came in, shaking in hand
and heart, and the miserable news was soon out,--"caught in the panic,"
"unexpected turn of the market." But how could he be caught, his wife
demanded, with contracting blue eyes? Had his firm failed? And after a
little,--lie and subterfuge within lie and subterfuge being unwrapped,--it
appeared,--the fact. He had "gone into cotton"--with whose money? His
mother's estate,--those excellent four per cent gold bonds that the thrifty
judge had put aside for his widow!

With the look that Margaret gave her husband, he might have seen that the
process of petrifaction had set in, had gone far, indeed.

Margaret loved her mother-in-law,--the sweet old woman of gentle fancies
who lived in an old house in an old town on the Massachusetts coast, the
town where she and the judge had grown up. An unworldly, gentle woman, who
had somehow told her daughter-in-law without words that she knew what was
missing in her woman's heart. No, the judge's widow should not pay for her
son's folly! So Margaret sold the New York house, which was hers, and also
some of those mountain lands that had a growing value now, realizing
bitterly that by this early sale she was sacrificing her boys'
heritage--the gift of her forefathers--for a miserable tithe of its real
value,--just because their father was too weak to hold what others had
given him; and hadn't kept faith with her like a frank comrade.... What was
left she took into her own possession.

So the Poles went abroad, after this. In doubt and distress, in sickness
and divorce, what else does an American do? Margaret had one lingering hope
for her husband. He had a good voice. At college it was considered
remarkable,--a clear, high tenor. He had done little with his gift except
make social capital out of it. And he had some aptitude for acting. He had
been a four years' star in the college operas. If the judge had not
belonged to the settled classes, Larry might have adorned a "Broadway
show." Instead, through his father's influence, he had attempted
finance--and remained an amateur, a "gentleman." But now, Margaret said to
herself, over there, away from trivial society,--the bungled business
career ended,--Larry might turn to his gift seriously. He was only
thirty-two,--not too old, with hard work and steady persistence, which she
would supply, to achieve something. For she would have been content to have
him in the Broadway show; it mattered not to her now what he should do. And
then she beguiled herself with the hope that some of that intellectual
life, the interests in books, music, art--in ideas--could come to them in
common,--a little of what she had dreamed the husband-and-wife life might
be like. Thus with clear insight into her husband's nature, with few
illusions, but with tolerance and hope, Margaret betook herself to Munich
and settled her family in a little villa on the outskirts, conformable to
their income,--_her_ income, which was all they had. But it mattered not
what she had to live on; her mother had shown her how to make a little
answer....

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