As the months passed she could not evade the issue. By the time she was settled in her old room at the Farm she had grown anaemic, nervous. The coming of the child had sapped rather than created strength as it properly should have done. White and wasted she lay for long hours on the lounge near the window where she could see the gentle green hills. Here her cousin Alice Johnston found her, when she arrived with her children to make Mrs. Price a visit. The large, placid woman knelt by Isabelle's side and gathered her in her arms.
"I'm so glad, dear! When is it to be?"
"Oh, sometime in the fall," Isabelle replied vaguely, bored that her condition already revealed itself. "Did you want the first one?" she asked after a time.
"Well, not at the very first. You see it was just so much more of a risk. And our marriage was a risk without that. … I hated the idea of becoming a burden for Steve. But with you it will be so different, from the start. And then it always makes its own place, you see. When it comes, you will think you always wanted it!"
She smiled in her large human way, as if she had tested the trials of life
and found that all held some sweet. Isabelle looked down at her thin arms.
The Johnstons had four, and they were so poor! As if divining her thought,
Alice said:—
"Every time I wondered how we were going to survive, but somehow we did.
And now it will all be well, with Steve's new position—"
"What is that?"
"Hasn't John told you? It has just been settled; Steve is going into the A. and P.—John's assistant in St. Louis."
"I'm so glad for you," Isabelle responded listlessly. She recalled now something that her husband had said about Johnston being a good man, who hadn't had his chance, and that he hoped to do something for him.
"Tremendous rise in salary—four thousand," Alice continued buoyantly. "We shan't know what to do with all that money! We can give the children the best education."
Isabelle reflected that John's salary had been five thousand at Torso, and as fourth Vice-president would be ten thousand. And she still had her twenty-five hundred dollars of allowance from her father. Alice's elation over Steve's rise gave her a sudden appreciation of her husband's growing power—his ability to offer a struggling man his chance. Perhaps he could do something for the Falkners also. The thought took her out of herself for a little while. Men were free to work out their destiny in life, to go hither and thither, to alter fate. But a woman had to bear children. John was growing all this time, and she was separated from him. She tried to believe that this was the reason for her discontent, this separation from her husband; but she knew that when she had been perfectly free, she had not shared largely in his activity. …
"You must tell me all about the St. Mary's girls," Alice said. "Have you seen Aline?"
"Yes—she has grown very faddy, I should think—arts and crafts and all that. Isn't it queer? I asked her to visit us, but she has another one coming—the third!"
Isabelle made a little grimace.
"And Margaret?"
"She has suddenly gone abroad with her husband—to Munich. He's given up his business. Didn't her marriage surprise you?"
"Yes, I thought she was going to marry that Englishman who was at your wedding."
"Mr. Hollenby? Yes, every one did. Something happened. Suddenly she became engaged to this Pole—a New York man. Very well connected, and has money, I hear. Conny wrote me about him." …
So they gossiped on. When Alice rose to leave her, Isabelle held her large cool hand in hers. The older woman, whose experience had been so unlike hers, so difficult, soothed her, gave her a suggestion of other kinds of living than her own little life.
"I'm glad you are here," she said. "Come in often, won't you?"
And her cousin, leaning over to kiss her as she might a fretful child who had much to learn, murmured, "Of course, dear. It will be all right!"
CHAPTER XII
The Steve Johnstons had had a hard time, as Isabelle would have phrased it.
He had been a faithful, somewhat dull and plodding student at the technical school, where he took the civil engineering degree, and had gone forth to lay track in Montana. He laid it well; but this job finished, there seemed no permanent place for him. He was heavy and rather tongue-tied, and made no impression on his superiors except that of commonplace efficiency. He drifted into Canada, then back to the States, and finally found a place in Detroit.
Here, while working for thirty dollars a week, he met Alice Johnston—she also was earning her living, being unwilling to accept from the Colonel more than the means for her education—and from the first he wished to marry her, attracted by her gentle, calm beauty, her sincerity, and buoyant, healthy enjoyment of life. She was teaching in a girls' school, and was very happy. Other women had always left the heavy man on the road, so to speak, marking him as stupid. But Alice Johnston was keener or kinder than most young women: she perceived beneath the large body a will, an intelligence, a character, merely inhibited in their envelope of large bones and solid flesh, with an entire absence of nervous system. He was silent before the world, but not foolish, and with her he was not long silent. She loved him, and she consented to marry him on forty dollars a week, hopefully planning to add something from her teaching to the budget, until Steve's slow power might gain recognition.
"So we married," she said to Isabelle, recounting her little life history in the drowsy summer afternoon. "And we were so happy on what we had! It was real love. We took a little flat a long way out of the city, and when I came home afternoons from the school, I got the dinner and Steve cooked the breakfasts—he's a splendid cook, learned on the plains. It all went merrily the first months, though Aunt Harmony thought I was such a fool to marry, you remember?" She laughed, and Isabella smiled at the memory of the caustic comments which Mrs. Price had made when Alice Vance, a poor niece, had dared to marry a poor man—"They'll be coming to your father for help before the year is out," she had said. But they hadn't gone to the Colonel yet.
"Then little Steve came, and I had to leave the school and stay at home. That was hard, but I had saved enough to pay for the doctor and the nurse. Then that piece of track elevation was finished and Steve was out of work for a couple of months. He tried so hard, poor boy! But he was never meant to be an engineer. I knew that, of course, all along. … Well, the baby came, and if it hadn't been for my savings—why, I should have gone to the hospital!
"Just then Steve met a man he had known at the Tech, and was given that place on a railroad as clerk in the traffic department. He was doubtful about taking it, but I wasn't. I was sure it would open up, and even twenty-five dollars a week is something. So he left for Cleveland a week after the baby was born, and somehow I packed up and followed with the baby when I could.
"That wasn't the end of hard times by any means. You see Ned came the next year—we're such healthy, normal specimens!" She laughed heartily at this admission of her powers of maternity. "And it wasn't eighteen months before Alice was coming. … Oh, I know that we belong to the thriftless pauper class that's always having children—more than it can properly care for. We ought to be discouraged! But somehow we have fed and clothed 'em all, and we couldn't spare one o' the kiddies. There's James,