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Robert Louis Stevenson - "Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson"

Robert Louis Stevenson - "The Silverado Squatters"

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




Mrs. Price, it should be said, did not accept Lane's suit as easily as the
Colonel. Her imagination had been expanded by that winter in Washington,
and though she was glad that Isabelle had not accepted any of "those
foreigners," yet Harmony Price had very definite ideas of the position that
the Colonel's daughter might aspire to in America.... But her objections
could not stand before the Colonel's flat consent and Isabelle's decision.

"They'll be a great deal better off than we were," her husband reminded
her.

"That's no reason why Belle should have to start where we did, or anywhere
near it!" his wife retorted. What one generation had been able to gain in
the social fight, it seemed to her only natural that the next should at
least hold.

The Colonel gave the couple their new home in Torso, selecting, with a fine
eye for real estate values, a large "colonial" wooden house with ample
grounds out beyond the smoke of the little city, near the new country club.
Mrs. Price spent an exciting three months running back and forth between
New York, St. Louis, and Torso furnishing the new home. Isabelle's liberal
allowance was to continue indefinitely, and beyond this the Colonel
promised nothing, now or later; nor would Lane have accepted more from his
hand. It was to the Torso house that the Lanes went immediately after their
month in the Adirondacks.

* * * * *

Torso, Indiana, is one of those towns in the Mississippi Valley which makes
more impression the farther from New York one travels. New York has never
heard of it, except as it appears occasionally on a hotel register among
other queer places that Americans confess to as home. At Pittsburg it is a
round black spot on the map, in the main ganglia of the great A. and P. and
the junction point of two other railroads. At Cincinnati it is a commercial
centre of considerable importance, almost a rival. While Torso to Torso is
the coming pivot of the universe.

It is an old settlement--some families with French names still own the
large distilleries--on the clay banks of a sluggish creek in the southern
part of the state, and there are many Kentuckians in its population.
Nourished by railroads, a division headquarters of the great A. and P.,
near the soft-coal beds, with a tin-plate factory, a carpet factory, a
carriage factory, and a dozen other mills and factories, Torso is a black
smudge in a flat green landscape from which many lines of electric railway
radiate forth along the country roads. And along the same roads across the
reaches of prairie, over the swelling hills, stalk towering poles, bearing
many fine wires glistening in the sunlight and singing the importance of
Torso to the world at large.

The Lanes arrived at night, and to Isabelle the prairie heavens seemed dark
and far away, the long broad streets with their bushy maple trees empty,
and the air filled with hoarse plaints, the rumbling speech of the
railroad. She was homesick and fearful, as they mounted the steps to the
new house and pushed open the shining oak door that stuck and smelled of
varnish. The next morning Lane whisked off on a trolley to the A. and P.
offices, while Isabelle walked around the house, which faced the main
northern artery of Torso. From the western veranda she could see the roof
of the new country club through a ragged group of trees. On the other side
were dotted the ample houses of Torso aristocracy, similar to hers, as she
knew, finished in hard wood, electric-lighted, telephoned, with many baths,
large "picture" windows of plate glass, with potted ferns in them, and much
the same furniture,--wholesome, comfortable "homes." Isabelle, turning back
to her house to cope with the three Swedes that her mother had sent on from
St. Louis, had a queer sense of anti-climax. She swept the landscape with a
critical eye, feeling she knew it all, even to what the people were saying
at this moment in those large American-Georgian mansions; what Torso was
doing at this moment in its main street.... No, it could not be for the
Lanes for long,--that was the conviction in her heart. Their destiny would
be larger, fuller than any to be found in Torso. Just what she meant by a
"large, full life," she had never stopped to set down; but she was sure it
was not to be found here in Torso.

Here began, however, the routine of her married life. Each morning she
watched her husband walk down the broad avenue to the electric car,--alert,
strong, waving his newspaper to her as he turned the corner. Each afternoon
she waited for him at the same place, or drove down to the office with the
Kentucky horses that she had bought, to take him for a drive before dinner.
He greeted her each time with the same satisfied smile, apparently not
wilted by the long hours in a hot office. There was a smudged, work-a-day
appearance to his face and linen, the mark of Torso, the same mark that the
mill-hands across the street from the A. and P. offices brought home to
their wives.... Thus the long summer days dragged. For distraction there
was a mutiny in the crew of Swedish servants, but Isabelle, with her
mother's instinct for domestic management, quickly produced order, in spite
of the completely servantless state of Torso. She would telegraph to St.
Louis for what she wanted and somehow always got it. The house ran,--that
was her business. It was pretty and attractive,--that was also her
business. But this woman's work she tossed off quickly. Then what? She
pottered in the garden a little, but when the hot blasts of prairie heat in
mid-August had shrivelled all the vines and flowers and cooked the beds
into slabs of clay, she retired from the garden and sent to St. Louis for
the daily flowers. She read a good deal, almost always novels, in the vague
belief that she was "keeping up" with modern literature, and she played at
translating some German lyrics.

Then people began to call,--the wives of the Torso great, her neighbors in
those ample mansions scattered all about the prairie. These she reported to
John with a mocking sense of their oddity.

"Mrs. Fraser came to-day. What is she? Tin-plate or coal?"

"He's the most important banker here," her husband explained seriously.

"Oh,--well, she asked me to join the 'travel-class.' They are going through
the Holy Land. What do you suppose a 'travel-class' is?"...

Again it was the wife of the chief coal operator, Freke, "who wanted me to
know that she always got her clothes from New York." She added gently, "I
think she wished to find out if we are fit for Torso society. I did my best
to give her the impression we were beneath it."...

These people, all the "society" of Torso, they met also at the country
club, where they went Sundays for a game of golf, which Lane was learning.
The wife of the A. and P. superintendent could not be ignored by Torso, and
so in spite of Isabelle's efforts there was forming around her a social
life. But the objective point of the day remained John,--his going and
coming.

"Busy day?" she would ask when he bent to kiss her.

"They're all busy days!"

"Tell me what you did."

"Oh," he would answer vaguely, "just saw people and dictated letters and
telegrams,--yes, it was a busy day." And he left her to dress for dinner.

She knew that he was weary after all the problems that he had thrust his
busy mind into since the morning. She had no great curiosity to know what
these problems were. She had been accustomed to the sanctity of business
reserve in her father's house: men disappeared in the morning to their work
and emerged to wash and dress and be as amusing as they might for the few
remaining hours of the day. There were rumors of what went on in that
mysterious world of business, but the right kind of men did not disclose
the secrets of the office to women.

It never occurred to Lane to go over with her the minute detail of his full
day: how he had considered an application from a large shipper for
switching privileges, had discussed the action of the Torso and Northern in
cutting the coal rates, had lunched with Freke, the president of a coal
company that did business with the A. and P.; and had received, just as he
left the office, the report of a serious freight wreck at one end of his
division. As he had said, a busy day! And this business of life, like an
endless steel chain, had caught hold of him at once and was carrying him
fast in its revolution. It was his life; he liked it. With cool head and
steady nerves he set himself at each problem, working it out according to
known rules, calling on his trained experience. He did not look into the
future, content with the preoccupation of the present, confident that the
future, whatever and wherever it might be, would be crowded with affairs,
activity, which he would meet competently....

"Well, what have _you_ been doing?" he asked as he sat down, fresh from his
bath, and relaxed comfortably in anticipation of a pleasant dinner.
Isabelle made a great point of dinner, having it served formally by two
maids, with five "Busy day?" she would ask when he bent to kiss her.

"They're all busy days!"

"Tell me what you did."

"Oh," he would answer vaguely, "just saw people and dictated letters and
telegrams,--yes, it was a busy day." And he left her to dress for dinner.

She knew that he was weary after all the problems that he had thrust his
busy mind into since the morning. She had no great curiosity to know what
these problems were. She had been accustomed to the sanctity of business
reserve in her father's house: men disappeared in the morning to their work
and emerged to wash and dress and be as amusing as they might for the few
remaining hours of the day. There were rumors of what went on in that
mysterious world of business, but the right kind of men did not disclose
the secrets of the office to women.

It never occurred to Lane to go over with her the minute detail of his full
day: how he had considered an application from a large shipper for
switching privileges, had discussed the action of the Torso and Northern in
cutting the coal rates, had lunched with Freke, the president of a coal
company that did business with the A. and P.; and had received, just as he
left the office, the report of a serious freight wreck at one end of his
division. As he had said, a busy day! And this business of life, like an
endless steel chain, had caught hold of him at once and was carrying him
fast in its revolution. It was his life; he liked it. With cool head and
steady nerves he set himself at each problem, working it out according to
known rules, calling on his trained experience. He did not look into the
future, content with the preoccupation of the present, confident that the
future, whatever and wherever it might be, would be crowded with affairs,
activity, which he would meet competently....

"Well, what have _you_ been doing?" he asked as he sat down, fresh from his
bath, and relaxed comfortably in anticipation of a pleasant dinner.
Isabelle made a great point of dinner, having it served formally by two
maids, with five courses and at least one wine, "to get used to living
properly," as she explained vaguely.

"Mrs. Adams called." She was the wife of the manager of the baking-powder
works and president of the country club, a young married woman from a
Western city with pretensions to social experience. "John," Isabelle added
after mentioning this name, "do you think we shall have to stay here long?"

Her husband paused in eating his soup to look at her. "Why--why?"

"It's so second-classy," she continued; "at least the women are, mostly.
There's only one I've met so far that seemed like other people one has
known."

"Who is she?" Lane inquired, ignoring the large question.

"Mrs. Falkner."

"Rob Falkner's wife? He's engineer at the Pleasant Valley mines."

"She came from Denver."

"They say he's a clever engineer."

"She is girlish and charming. She told me all about every one in Torso.
She's been here two years, and she seems to know everybody."

"And she thinks Torso is second-class?" Lane inquired.

"She would like to get away, I think. But they are poor, I suppose. Her
clothes look as if she knew what to wear,--pretty. She says there are some
interesting people here when you find them out.... Who is Mr. Darnell? A
lawyer."

"Tom Darnell? He's one of the local counsel for the road,--a Kentuckian,
politician, talkative sort of fellow, very popular with all sorts. What did
Mrs. Falkner have to say about Tom Darnell?"

"She told me all about his marriage,--how he ran away with his wife from a
boarding-school in Kentucky--and was chased by her father and brothers, and
they fired at him. A regular Southern scrimmage! But they got across the
river and were married."

"Sounds like Darnell," Lane remarked contemptuously.

"It sounds exciting!" his wife said.

The story, as related by the vivacious Mrs. Falkner, had stirred Isabelle's
curiosity; she could not dismiss this Kentucky politician as curtly as her
husband had disposed of him....

They were both wilted by the heat, and after dinner they strolled out into
the garden to get more air, walking leisurely arm in arm, while Lane smoked
his first, cigar. Having finished the gossip for the day, they had little
to say to each other,--Isabelle wondered that it should be so little! Two
months of daily companionship after the intimate weeks of their engagement
had exhausted the topics for mere talk which they had in common. To-night,
as Lane wished to learn the latest news from the wreck, they went into the
town, crossing on their way to the office the court-house square. This was
the centre of old Torso, where the distillery aristocracy still lived in
high, broad-eaved houses of the same pattern as the Colonel's city mansion.
In one of these, which needed painting and was generally neglected, the
long front windows on the first story were open, revealing a group of
people sitting around a supper-table.

"There's Mrs. Falkner," Isabelle remarked; "the one at the end of the
table, in white. This must be where they live."

Lane looked at the house with a mental estimate of the rent.

"Large house," he observed.

Isabelle watched the people laughing and talking about the table, which was
still covered with coffee cups and glasses. A sudden desire to be there, to
hear what they were saying, seized her. A dark-haired man was leaning
forward and emphasizing his remarks by tapping a wine glass with along
finger. That might be Tom Darnell, she thought.... The other houses about
the square were dark and gloomy, most of them closed for the summer.

"There's a good deal of money in Torso," Lane commented, glancing at a
brick house with wooden pillars. "It's a growing place,--more business
coming all the time."

He looked at the town with the observant eye of the railroad officer, who
sees in the prosperity of any community but one word writ large,--TRAFFIC.

And that word was blown through the soft night by the puffing locomotives
in the valley below, by the pall of smoke that hung night and day over this
quarter of the city, the dull glow of the coke-ovens on the distant hills.
To the man this was enough--this and his home; business and the woman he
had won,--they were his two poles!




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.

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