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Together

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




Thus the days went steadily by towards the decision. Lane had promised his
wife to consider the Larrimore offer. One morning the cable brought the
startling news that the president of the Atlantic and Pacific had committed
suicide in his hotel room in Paris the evening before he was to sail for
home. "Bad health and nervous collapse," was the explanation in the
despatch. But that a man of sixty-three, with a long record of honorable
success, a large fortune, no family troubles, should suddenly take his own
life, naturally roused the liveliest amazement throughout the country.
Nobody believed that the cable told the whole truth; but the real reasons
for the desperate act were locked tight among the directors of the railroad
corporation and a few intimate heads of control--who know all.

Lane read the news to Isabelle. It shook him perceptibly. He had known
Farrington Beals for years, ever since at the Colonel's suggestion he had
been picked out of the army of underlings and given his first chance.
Isabelle remembered him even longer, and especially at her wedding with the
Senator and her father. They were old family friends, the Bealses.

"How terrible for Mrs. Beals and Elsie!" she exclaimed. "How could he have
done it! The family was so happy. They all adored him! And he was about to
retire, Elsie told me when I saw her last, and they were all going around
the world in their yacht.... He couldn't have been very ill."

"No, I am afraid that wasn't the only reason," John admitted, walking to
and fro nervously.

He was thinking of all that the old man had done for him, his resentment at
his chief's final desertion of him forgotten; of how he had learned his
job, been trained to pull his load by the dead man, who had always
encouraged him, pushed him forward.

"He went over for a little rest, you said. And he always went every year
about this time for a vacation and to buy pictures. Don't you remember,
John, what funny things he bought, and how the family laughed at him?"

"Yes,--I know." He also knew that the president of the Atlantic and Pacific
had gone across the ocean "for his yearly vacation" just at the opening of
the coal investigation to escape the scandal of the trial, and had not
returned at the usual time, although the financial world was unsettled. And
he knew other things; for already clubs and inner offices had been buzzing
with rumors.

"I am afraid that it is worse than it seems," he said to his wife on his
return from the city that afternoon. "Beals was terribly involved. I hear
that a bank he was interested in has been closed.... He was tied up
fast--in all sorts of ways!"

"John!" Isabelle cried, and paused. Did this old man's death mean another
scandal, ruin for another family, and one she had known well,--disgrace,
scandal, possibly poverty?

"Beals was always in the market--and this panic hit him hard; he was on the
wrong side lately."

It was an old story, not in every case with the same details, but horribly
common,--a man of the finest possibilities, of sturdy character, rising up
to the heights of ambition, then losing his head, playing the game wantonly
for mere pride and habit in it,--his judgment giving way, but playing on,
stumbling, grasping at this and that to stop his sliding feet, breaking the
elementary laws! And finally, in the face of disaster, alone in a hotel
room the lonely old man--no doubt mentally broken by the strain--putting
the pistol to his head with his shaking hand. And, afterwards, the debris
of his wreck would be swept aside to clear the road for others!

Farrington Beals was not a single case. In this time of money disturbance,
suicide and dishonor were rife in the streets, revealing the rotten timber
that could not stand the strain of modern life, lived as it had been lived
the past ten years. It was not one blast that uprooted weak members of the
forest, but the eating decay of the previous years, working at the heart of
many lives. "The frantic egotism of the age!" Yes, and the divided souls,
never at peace until death put an end to the strife at last,--too much for
little bodies of nerve and tissue to stand,--the racking of divided wills,
divided souls.

"John!" Isabelle cried that night, after they had again talked over the
tragedy; "let us go--go out there--to a new land!" She rose from the lounge
and swept across the room with the energy of clear purpose--of Vision. "Let
us put ourselves as far as possible out of this sort of thing! .... It will
kill us both. Do it for my sake, even if you can't feel as I do!"

And then there poured forth all the story of these years, of their life
apart, as she had come to see it the last months, in the remote and
peaceful hills, in the court-room, in the plain pathos of Steve's death and
Alice's heroism, and now in this suicide,--all that had given her insight
and made her different from what she had been,--all that revealed the
cheapness of her old ideals of freedom, intellectual development,
self-satisfaction, that cult of the ego, which she had pursued in sympathy
with the age. Now she wished to put it away, to remove herself and her
husband, their lives together, outwardly as she had withdrawn herself
inwardly. And her husband, moved in spite of himself by her tense desire,
the energy of her words, listened and comprehended--in part.

"I have never been a real wife to you, John. I don't mean just my love for
that other man, when you were nobly generous with me. But before that, in
other ways, in almost all ways that make a woman a wife, a real wife....
Now I want to be a real wife. I want to be with you in all things.... You
can't see the importance of this step as I do. Men and women are different,
always. But there is something within me, underneath, like an inner light
that makes me see clearly now,--not conscience, but a kind of flame that
guides. In the light of that I see what a petty fool I have been. It all
had to be--I don't regret because it all had to be--the terrible waste, the
sacrifice," she whispered, thinking of Vickers. "Only now we must live, you
and I together,--together live as we have never lived before!"

She held out her hands to him as she spoke, her head erect, and as he
waited, still tied by years of self-repression, she went to him and put her
arms about him, drawing her to him, to her breast, to her eyes. Ten years
before he had adored her, desired her passionately, and she had shrunk from
him. Then life had come imperceptibly in between them; he had gone his way,
she hers. Now she was offering herself to him. And she was more desirable
than before, more woman,--at last whole. The appeal that had never been
wholly stifled in the man still beat in his pulses for the woman. And the
appeal never wholly roused in the woman by him reached out now for him; but
an appeal not merely of the senses, higher than anything Cairy could rouse
in a woman, an appeal, limitless, of comradeship, purpose, wills. He kissed
her, holding her close to him, realizing that she too held him in the inner
place of her being.

"We will begin again," he said.

"Our new life--together!"

* * * * *

And this is Influence, the work of one will upon another, sometimes
apparent, dramatic, tragic; sometimes subtle, unknowable, speaking across
dark gulfs. The meaning of that dead man's austere face, the howl of
journalists on his uncovered trail, the old man dead in his hotel room
disgraced, the deep current of purpose in his new wife,--all these and much
more sent messages into the man's unyielding soul to change the atmosphere
therein, to alter the values of things seen, to shape--at last--the will.
For what makes an act? Filaments of nerve, some shadowy unknown process in
brain cells? These are but symbols for mystery! Life pressing
multifariously its changing suggestions upon the sentient organism prompts,
at last, the act. But there is something deeper than the known in all this
wondrous complexity....

John Lane, the man of fact, the ordered efficient will, was dimly conscious
of forces other than physical ones, beyond,--not recognizable as
motives,--self-created and impelling, nevertheless; forces welling up from
the tenebrous spaces in the depths of his being, beneath conscious life.
And at last, something higher than Judgment swayed the man.




CHAPTER LXXIX


The private car Olympus had been switched for the day to a siding at the
little town of Orano on the edge of the Texas upland. The party within--the
Lanes, Margaret and her children, and several men interested in the new
railroad--had been making a leisurely tour of inspection, passing through
the fertile prairies and woodlands of Oklahoma, stopping often at the
little towns that were springing up along the road, aiming south until they
had reached the Panhandle. These September days the harvests were rich and
heavy, covered with a golden haze of heat,--the sweat of earth's
accomplishment. The new soil was laden with its fruit. The men had been
amazed by the fertility, the force of the country. "Traffic, traffic," Lane
had murmured enthusiastically, divining with his trained eye the enormous
possibilities of the land, the future for the iron highroad he was pushing
through it. Traffic,--in other words, growth, business, human effort and
human life,--that is the cosmic song that sings itself along the iron road.

Margaret had said mockingly:--

"Wouldn't it do our New York friends a world of good to get out here once a
year and realize that life goes on, and very real life, outside the narrow
shores of Manhattan!"

That was the illuminating thought which had come to them all in different
ways during this slow progress from St. Louis south and west. This broad
land of states had a vital existence, a life of its own, everywhere, not
merely in the great centres, the glutted metropolitan points. Men lived and
worked, happily, constructively, in thousands and thousands of small
places, where the seaboard had sunk far beneath the eastern horizon. Life
was real, to be lived vitally, as much here in prairie and plain as
anywhere on the earth's surface. The feeling which had come to Isabelle on
her westward journey in March--the conviction that each one counted, had
his own terrestrial struggle, his own celestial drama, differing very
little in importance from his neighbor's; each one--man, woman, or
child--in all the wonderful completeness of life throughout the
millions--swept over her again here where the race was sowing new land. And
lying awake in the stillness of the autumn morning on the lofty plateau, as
she listened to the colored servants chaffing at their work, there came to
her the true meaning of that perplexing phrase, which had sounded with the
mockery of empty poetry on the lips of the district attorney,--"All men
born free and equal." Yes! in the realm of their spirits, in their
souls,--the inner, moving part of them, "free and equal"! ...

"It's the roof of the world!" Margaret said, as she jumped from the car
platform and looked over the upland,--whimsically recalling the name of a
popular play then running in New York.

An unawakened country, dry and untilled, awaiting the hand of the master,
it lifted westward in colored billows of undulating land. Under the clear
morning sun it was still and fresh, yet untouched, untamed.

"It _is_ the roof of the world," she repeated, "high and dry and
extraordinarily vast,--leading your eyes onward and upward to the heavens,
with all the rest of the earth below you in the fog. How I should like to
live here always! If I were you, Isabelle, I should get your husband to
give you a freight-car like those the gangs of track-layers use, with a
little stovepipe sticking out of one corner, and just camp down in it
here,--on the roof of the world."

She lifted her thin, delicate face to the sun, reaching out her arms to it
hungrily.

"We must sleep out to-night under the stars, and talk--oh, much talk, out
here under the stars!"

During the past year at Grosvenor her frail body had strengthened, revived;
she was now firm and vigorous. Only the deep eyes and the lines above them
and about the mouth, the curve of the nostril and chin, showed as on a
finely chased coin the subtle chiselling of life. And here in the uplands,
in the great spaces of earth and sky, the elemental desire of her soul
seemed at last wholly appeased, the longing for space and height and light,
the longing for deeds and beauty and Peace. At last, after the false roads,
the fret and rebellion, she had emerged into the upper air....

"How well the little man rides!" Isabelle remarked as the children went by
them on some ponies they had found.

Margaret's face glowed with pride.

"Yes, Ned has improved very fast. He will go to school with the others
now.... The doctor has really saved his life--and mine, too," she murmured.

So the two slept out under the stars, as Margaret wished, with dotted
heavens close above and vague space all about; and they talked into the
morning of past years, of matters that meant too much to them both for
daylight speech. Isabelle spoke of Vickers, of the apparent waste of his
life. "I can see now," she said, "that in going away with that woman as he
did he expressed the real soul of him, as he did in dying for me. He was
born to love and to give, and the world broke him. But he escaped!" And she
could not say even to Margaret what she felt,--that he had laid it on her
to express his defeated life.

They spoke even of Conny. "You received the cards for her wedding?"
Margaret asked. "The man is a stockbroker. She is turning her talents to a
new field,--money. I hear the wedding was very smart, and they are to live
on Long Island, with a yacht and half a dozen motors."

"I thought she would marry--differently," Isabelle observed vaguely,
recalling the last time she had seen Conny.

"No! Conny knows her world perfectly,--that's her strength. And she knows
exactly what to take from it to suit her. She is a bronze Cleopatra with
modern variations. I think they ought to put her figure on the gold eagles
as the American Woman Triumphant, ruling her world."

"And on the other side the figure of a Vampire, stacking at the souls of
men." ...

And then they talked of the future, the New Life, as it would shape itself
for Isabelle and her husband, talked as if the earth were fresh and life
but in the opening.

"He may do something else than this," Isabelle said. "He has immense power.
But I hope it will always be something outside the main wheels of industry,
as Mr. Gossom would say,--something with another kind of reward than the
Wall Street crown."

"I wish he might find work here for Rob," Margaret said; "something out
here where he belongs that will not pay him in fame or money. For he has
that other thing in him, the love of beauty, of the ideal." She spoke with
ease and naturally of her lover. "And there has been so little that is
ideal in his life,--so little to feed his spirit."

And she added in a low voice, "I saw her in New York--his wife."

"Bessie!"

"Yes,--she was there with the girl,--Mildred.... I went to see her--I had
to.... I went several times. She seemed to like me. Do you know, there is
something very lovable in that woman; I can see why Rob married her. She
has wrecked herself,--her own life. She would never submit to what the
doctor calls the discipline of life. She liked herself just as she was; she
wanted to be always a child of nature, to win the world with her charm, to
have everything nice and pleasant and gay about her, and be petted into the
bargain. Now she is gray and homely and in bad health--and bitter. It is
pitiful to wake up at forty after you have been a child all your life, and
realize that life was never what you thought it was.... I was very sorry
for her."

"Will they ever come together again?"

"Perhaps! Who knows? The girl must bring them together; she will not be
wholly satisfied with her mother, and Rob needs his daughter.... I hope
so--for his sake. But it will be hard for them both,--hard for him to live
with a spent woman, and hard for her to know that she has missed what she
wanted and never quite to understand why.... But it may be better than we
can see,--there is always so much of the unknown in every one. That is the
great uplifting thought! We live in space and above unseen depths. And
voices rise sometimes from the depths."

And lying there under the stars Margaret thought what she could not
speak,--of the voice that had risen within her and made her refuse the
utmost of personal joy. She had kissed her lover and held him in her arms
and sent him away from her. Without him she could not have lived; nor could
she live keeping him....

At last they came to Renault, the one who had opened their eyes to life and
to themselves.

"Still working," Margaret said, "burning up there in the hills like a
steady flame! Some day he will go out,--not die, just wholly consume from
within, like one of those old lamps that burn until there is nothing, no
oil left, not even the dust of the wick."

As the faint morning breeze began to draw across the upland they fell
asleep, clasping hands.




CHAPTER LXXX


The rising sun had barely shot its first beams over the eastern swell when
Lane came to the tent to call them for the early breakfast before the day's
expedition to a wonderful canon. Isabelle, making a sign to John not to
disturb Margaret, who was still fast asleep, drew the blanket over her
shoulders and joined her husband. The level light flooded the rolling
upland with a sudden glory of gold, except along the outer rim of the
horizon where the twilight color of deep violet still held. Husband and
wife strolled away from the tents in the path of the sun.

"Big, isn't it?" he exclaimed.

"Yes!" she murmured. "It is a big, big world!" And linking her arm in his
they walked on towards the sun together.

In the morning light the earth was fresh and large and joyous. And life, as
Renault had said over the body of the dead child, seemed good, all of it!
That which was past, lived vainly and in stress, and that which was to come
as well. So Alice had affirmed in the presence of her bereavement.... Life
is good, all of it,--all its devious paths and issues!

"It is so good to be here with you!" Isabelle whispered to her husband.

"Yes,--it is a good beginning," he replied. And in his face she read that
he also understood that a larger life was beginning for them both.

As they turned back to the tents, they saw Margaret huddled in her blanket
like a squaw, gazing steadily at the sun.

"And the morrow is added to the morrow to make eternity," she was murmuring
to herself. "But always a new world, a new light, a new life!"

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