Her eyes shone with a certain joy as she frankly stated the woman's problem, while Isabelle looked away, embarrassed. Mrs. Johnston continued in her simple manner:—
"If Nature doesn't want us to have them, why does she give us the power? … I know that is wretched political economy and that Nature really has nothing to do with the modern civilized family. But as I see other women, the families about me, those that are always worrying over having children, trying to keep out of it—why, they don't seem to be any better off. And it is—well, undignified—not nice, you know. … We can't spare 'em, nor any more that may come! … As I said, I believed all along that Steve had it in him, that his mind and character must tell, and though it was discouraging to have men put over him, younger men too, at last the railroad found out what he could do."
Her face beamed with pride.
"You see Steve has a remarkable power of storing things up in that big head of his. Remembers a lot of pesky little detail when he's once fixed his mind on it—the prices of things, figures, and distances, and rates and differentials. Mr. Mason—that was the traffic manager of our road—happened to take Steve to Buffalo with him about some rate-making business. Steve, it turned out, knew the situation better than all the traffic managers. He coached Mr. Mason, and so our road got something it wanted. It was about the lumber rate, in competition with Canadian roads. Mr. Mason made Steve his assistant—did you ever think what an awful lot the rate on lumber might mean to you and yours? It's a funny world. Because Steve happened to be there and knew that with a rate of so much a thousand feet our road could make money—why, we had a house to live in for the first time!
"Of course," she bubbled, "it isn't just that. It's Steve's head—an ability to find his way through those great sheets of figures the railroads are always compiling. He stores the facts up in that big round head and pulls 'em out when they are wanted. Why, he can tell you just what it would cost to ship a car of tea from Seattle to New York!"
Isabella had a vision of Steve Johnston's large, heavy head with its thick, black hair, and she began to feel a respect for the stolid man.
"John said he had great ability," she remarked. "I'm so glad it all came out right in the end."
"I had my first servant when the promotion came, and that spring we took a little house—it was crowded in the flat, and noisy."
"You will find it so much easier now, and you will like St. Louis."
"Oh, yes! But it hasn't been really bad—the struggle, the being poor. You see we were both well and strong, and we loved so much, and we always had the problem of how to live—that draws you together if you have the real thing in you. It isn't sordid trying to see what a quarter can be made to do. It's exciting."
As she recalled the fight, a tender smile illuminated her face and curved her lips upward. To her poverty had not been limiting, grinding, but an exhilarating fight that taxed her resources of mind and body.
"Of course there are a lot of things you can't have. But most people have more than they know how to handle, no matter where they are!"
Isabelle was puzzled by this remark, and explained Alice Johnston's content by her age, her lack of experience, at least such experience as she had had. For life to her presented a tantalizing feast of opportunities, and it was her intention to grasp as many of these as one possibly could. Any other view of living seemed not only foolish but small-minded. Without any snobbishness she considered that her sphere and her husband's could not be compared with the Johnstons'. The Lanes, she felt, were somehow called to large issues.
Nevertheless, Isabelle could understand that Alice's marriage was quite a different thing from what hers was—something to glorify all the petty, sordid details, to vivify the grimy struggle of keeping one's head above the social waters.
"Now," Alice concluded, "we can save! And start the children fairly. But I wonder if we shall ever be any happier than we have been—any closer, Steve and I?"
Alice, by her very presence, her calm acceptance of life as it shaped itself, soothed Isabelle's restlessness, suggested trust and confidence.
"You are a dear," she whispered to her cousin. "I am so glad you are to be near me in St. Louis!"
CHAPTER XIII
Isabelle saw the fat headlines in the Pittsburg paper that the porter brought her—"Congressman Darnell and his wife killed!" The bodies had been found at the bottom of an abandoned quarry. It was supposed that during a thunder-storm the night before, as he was driving from Torso to his farm in company with his wife, the horses had become uncontrollable and had dashed into the pit before Darnell could pull them up. He had just taken his seat in Congress. Isabelle remembered that he called the day before she left Torso, and when she had congratulated him on his election, had said jokingly: "Now I shall get after your husband's bosses, Mrs. Lane. We shan't be on speaking terms when next we meet." He seemed gay and vital. So it had ended thus for the tempestuous Kentuckian. …
John was waiting for her at the station in Torso, where she was to break the journey. His face was eager and solicitous. He made many anxious inquiries about her health and the journey. But she put it all to one side.
"Tell me about the Darnells. Isn't it dreadful!"
"Yes," he said slowly, "it is very bad." Lane's voice was grave, as if he knew more than the published report.
"How could it have happened—he was such a good driver? He must have been drunk."
"Tom Darnell could have driven all right, even if he had been drunk. I am afraid it's worse than that."
"Tell me!"
"There are all sorts of rumors. He came up from Washington unexpectedly, and his wife met him at the station with their team. They went to the hotel first, and then suddenly started for the farm in the midst of the storm. It was a terrible storm. … One story is that he had trouble with a bank; it is even said he had forged paper. I don't know! … Another story was about the Adams woman—you know she followed him to Washington. … Too bad! He was a brilliant fellow, but he tied himself all up, tied himself all up," he observed sententiously, thus explaining the catastrophe of an unbalanced character.
"You mean it was—suicide?" Isabelle questioned.
"Looks that way!"
"How awful! and his wife killed, too!"
"He was always desperate—uncontrolled sort of fellow. You remember how he went off the handle the night of our dinner."
"So he ended it—that way," she murmured.
And she saw the man driving along the road in the black storm, his young wife by his side, with desperate purpose. She remembered his words in the orchard, his wistful desire for another kind of life. "The Adams woman, too," as John expressed it, and "he couldn't hold his horses." This nature had flown in pieces, liked a cracked wheel, in the swift revolution of life. To her husband it was only one of the messes recorded in the newspapers. But her mind was full of wonder and fear. As little as she had known the man, she had felt an interest in him altogether disproportionate to what he said or did. He was a man of possibilities, of streaks, of moods, one that could have been powerful, lived a rich life. And at thirty-three he had come to the end, where his passions and his ideals in perpetual warfare had held him bound. He had cut the knot! And she had chosen to go with him, the poor, timid wife! … Surely there were strange elements in people, Isabelle felt, not commonly seen in her little well-ordered existence, traits of character covered up before the world, fissures running back through the years into old impulses. Life might be terrible—when it got beyond your hand. She could not dismiss poor Tom Darnell as summarily as John did—"a bad lot, I'm afraid!"
"You mustn't