Together Part 10

"You think so?" he demanded, and his face grew wistful. "There is nothing in the game compared with the peace that one might have--"

Lane was calling to her, but she lingered to say:--

"How?"

"Far away--with love and the fields!"

They walked back to where John was holding the horses. She was oddly fluttered. For the first time since she had become engaged a man had somehow given her that special sensation, which women know, of confidence between them. She wished that John had not been so anxious to be off, and she did not repeat to him Darnell's talk, as she usually did every small item. All that she said was, after a time of reflection, "He is not a happy man."

"Who?"

"Mr. Darnell."

"From what I hear he is in a bad way. It is his own fault. He has plenty of ability,--a splendid chance."

She felt that this was an entirely inadequate judgment. What interested the man was the net result; what interested the woman was the human being in whom that result was being worked out. They talked a little longer about the fermenting tragedy of the household that they had just left, as the world talks, from a distance. But Isabelle made the silent reservation,--'she doesn't understand him--with another woman, it would be different.'...

Their road home lay through a district devastated by the mammoth sheds of some collieries. A smudged sign bore the legend:--

PLEASANT VALLEY COAL COMPANY

Lane pulled up his horse and looked carefully about the place. Then he suggested turning west to examine another coal property.

"I suppose that Freke man is awfully rich," Isabelle remarked, a.s.sociating the name of the coal company with its president; "but he's so common,--I can't see how you can stand him, John!"

Lane turned in his saddle and looked at the elegant figure that his wife made on horseback.

"He isn't half as interesting as Tom Darnell or Rob," she added.

"I stand him," he explained, smiling, "for the reason men stand each other most often,--we make money together."

"Why, how do you mean? He isn't in the railroad."

"I mean in coal mines," he replied vaguely, and Isabelle realized that she was trespa.s.sing on that territory of man's business which she had been brought up to keep away from. Nevertheless, as they rode homeward in the westering golden light, she thought of several things:--John was in other business than the railroad, and that puffy-faced German-American was in some way connected with it; business covered many mysteries; a man did business with people he would not ordinarily a.s.sociate with. It even crossed her mind that what with sleep and business a very large part of her husband's life lay quite beyond her touch. Perhaps that was what the Kentuckian meant by his ideal,--to live life with some loved one far away in companionship altogether intimate.

But before long she was thinking of the set of her riding-skirt, and that led to the subject of summer gowns which she meant to get when she went East with her mother, and that led on to the question of the summer itself.

It had been decided that Isabelle should not spend another summer in the Torso heat, but whether she should go to the Connecticut place or accept Margaret Lawton's invitation to the mountains, she was uncertain. Thus pleasantly her thoughts drifted on into her future.

CHAPTER X

If Isabelle had been curious about her husband's interest in the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, she might have developed a highly interesting chapter of commercial history, in which Mr. Freke and John Lane were enacting typical parts.

The Atlantic and Pacific railroad corporation is, as may easily be inferred, a vast organism, with a history, a life of its own, lying like a thick ganglia of nerves and blood-vessels a third of the way across our broad continent, sucking its nourishment from thousands of miles of rich and populous territory. To write its history humanly, not statistically, would be to reveal an important chapter in the national drama for the past forty years,--a drama buried in dusty archives, in auditors' reports, vouchers, mortgage deeds, general orders, etc. Some day there will come the great master of irony, the man of insight, who will make this ma.s.s of routine paper glow with meaning visible to all!

Meanwhile this Atlantic and Pacific, which to-day is a mighty system, was once only a handful of atoms. There was the period of Birth; there was the period of Conquest; and finally there has come the period of Domination.

Now, with its hold on the industry, the life of eight states, complete, like the great Serpent it can grumble, "I lie here possessing!"

Farrington Beals came to be President of the Atlantic and Pacific at the close of the period of Conquest. The condottieri leaders, those splendid railroad brigands of the seventies and eighties, had retired with "the fruits of their industry." To Farrington Beals and his a.s.sociate was left the care of the orchard. It was their task to solidify a conglomerate ma.s.s of interest-bearing burden, to operate the property with the greatest efficiency possible, in order that it might support the burdens laid upon it and yet other burdens to come as the land waxed rich,--all burdens being ultimately pa.s.sed to the broad back of the Public, where burdens seem naturally to belong. To this end, Beals men, as they were called, gradually replaced throughout the length and breadth of the system the old operatives, whose methods belonged to the coa.r.s.e days of brigandage! These Beals men were youngsters,--capable, active, full of "jump," with the word "traffic, traffic" singing always in their ears. Beals was a splendid "operator," and he rapidly brought the Atlantic and Pacific into the first rank of the world's railroads. That shrewd and conservative statesman, Senator Alonzo Thomas (who had skilfully marshalled the legal and political forces during the period of Conquest) was now chairman of the Board, and he and the President successfully readjusted the heterogeneous ma.s.s of bonds and stocks, notes and prior liens, taking advantage of a period of optimistic feeling in the market to float a tremendous general mortgage.

When this "Readjustment" had been successfully put through, the burden was some forty or fifty millions larger than before,--where those millions went is one of the mysteries to reward that future Carlyle!--but the public load was adjusted more trimly. So it was spoken of as a "masterly stroke of finance," and the ex-statesman gained much credit in the highest circles.

The Senator and the President are excellent men, as any financier will tell you. They are charitable and genial, social beings, members of clubs, hard working and intelligent, public spirited, too,--oh, the very best that the Republic breeds! To see Farrington Beals, gray-haired, thoughtful, almost the student, clothed in a sober dark suit, with a simple flower in the b.u.t.tonhole, and delicate gla.s.ses on the bridge of his shapely nose,--to see him modestly enter the general offices of the Atlantic and Pacific, any one would recognize an Industrial Flywheel of society. To accompany him over the system in his car, with a party of distinguished foreign stockholders, was in the nature of a religious ceremony, so much the interests of this giant property in his care seemed allied with the best interests of our great land!

Thus Beals men ran the road,--men like John Hamilton Lane, railroad men to the core, loyal men, devoted to the great A. and P. And traffic increased monthly, tonnage mounted, wheels turned faster, long freight trains wound their snaky coils through the Alleghanies, over the flat prairies, into Eastern ports, or Western terminals--Traffic, Traffic! And money poured into the treasury, more than enough to provide for all those securities that the Senator was so skilled in manufacturing. All worked in this blessed land of freedom to the glory of Farrington Beals and the profit of the great A. and P.

What has Isabelle to do with all this? Actually she was witness to one event,--rather, just the surface of it, the odd-looking, concrete outside!

An afternoon early in her married life at Torso, she had gone down to the railroad office to take her husband for a drive in the pleasant autumn weather. As he was long in coming to meet her, she entered the brick building; the elevator boy, recognizing her with a pleasant nod, whisked her up to the floor where Lane had his private office. Entering the outer room, which happened to be empty at this hour, she heard voices through the half-open door that led to the inner office. It was first her husband's voice, so low that she could not hear what he was saying. Presently it was interrupted by a pa.s.sionate treble. Through the door she could just see John's side face where he was seated at his desk,--the look she liked best, showing the firm cheek and jaw line, and resolute mouth. Over his desk a thin, roughly dressed man with a ragged reddish beard was leaning on both arms, and his shoulders trembled with the pa.s.sion of his utterance.

"Mr. Lane," he was saying in that pa.s.sionate treble, "I must have them cars--or I shall lose my contract!"

"As I have told you a dozen times, Mr. Simonds, I have done my best for you. I recognize your trouble, and it is most unfortunate,--but there seems to be a shortage of coalers just now."

"The Pleasant Valley company get all they want!" the man blurted out.

Lane merely drummed on his desk.

"If I can't get cars to ship my coal, I shall be broke, bankrupt," the thin man cried.

"I am very sorry--"

"Sorry be d.a.m.ned! Give me some cars!"

"You will have to see Mr. Brundage at St. Louis," Lane answered coldly. "He has final say on such matters for the Western division. I merely follow orders."

He rose and closed his desk. The thin man with an eloquent gesture turned and rushed out of the office, past Isabelle, who caught a glimpse of a white face working, of teeth chewing a scrubby mustache, of blood-shot eyes. John locked his desk, took down his hat and coat, and came into the outer office. He kissed his wife, and they went to drive behind the Kentucky horses, talking of pleasant matters. After a time, Isabelle asked irrelevantly:--

"John, why couldn't you give that man the cars he wanted?"

"Because I had no orders to do so."

"But aren't there cars to be had when the other company gets them?"

"There don't happen to be any cars for Simonds. The road is friendly to Mr.

Freke."

And he closed his explanation by kissing his wife on her pretty neck, as though he would imply that more things than kisses go by favor in this world. Isabelle had exhausted her interest in the troubled man's desire for coal cars, and yet in that little phrase, "The road is friendly to Mr.

Freke," she had touched close upon a great secret of the Beals regime.

Unbeknownst to her, she had just witnessed one of those little modern tragedies as intense in their way as any Caesarian welter of blood; she had seen a plain little man, one of the negligible millions, being "squeezed,"

in other words the operation in an ordinary case of the divine law of survival. Freke was to survive; Simonds was not. In what respects Simonds was inferior to Freke, the Divine Mind alone could say. When that convulsive face shot past Isabelle in Lane's office, it was merely the tragic moment when the conscious atom was realizing fully that he was not to be the one to survive! The moment when Suspense is converted into Despair....

Nor could Isabelle trace the well-linked chain of cause and effect that led from Simonds about-to-be-a-bankrupt _via_ Freke and the Pleasant Valley Coal Company through the glory of the A. and P. (incidentally creating in the Senator his fine patriotism and faith in the future of his country) to her husband's check-book and her own brilliant little dinner, "where they could afford to offer champagne." But in the maze of earthly affairs all these unlike matters were related, and the relationship is worth our notice, if not Isabelle's. If it had been expounded to her, if she had seen certain certificates of Pleasant Valley stock lying snugly side by side with Torso Northern bonds and other "good things" in her husband's safe,--and also in the strong boxes of Messrs. Beals, Thomas, Stanton, _et al_., she would have said, as she had been brought up to say, "that is my husband's affair."...

The Atlantic and Pacific, under the shrewd guidance of the amiable Senator, was a law-abiding citizen, outwardly. When the anti-rebate laws were pa.s.sed, the road reformed; it was glad to reform, it made money by reforming. But within the law there was ample room for "efficient" men to acquire more money than their salaries, and they naturally grasped their opportunities, as did the general officers. Freke, whom Isabelle disliked, with her trivial woman's prejudice about face and manners, embodied a Device,--in other words he was an instrument whereby some persons could make a profit, a very large profit, at the expense of other persons. The A.

and P. 'was friendly to Freke.' The Pleasant Valley Coal Company never wanted cars, and it also enjoyed certain other valuable privileges, covered by the vague term "switching," that enabled it to deliver its coal into the gaping hulls at tidewater at seventy to eighty cents per ton cheaper than any of its compet.i.tors in the Torso district. No wonder that the Pleasant Valley company, with all this "friendliness" of the A. and P., prospered, and that Mr. Freke, under one name or another, swallowed presently, at a bargain, the little mine that the man Simonds had struggled to operate, as well as thousands of acres of bituminous coal lands along the Pleasant River, and along the Torso Northern road. (Perhaps the inwardness of that Inspection Party can now be seen, also.) The signs of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company and its aliases squatted here and there all through the Torso coal region. As the Senator would say, it was a very successful business, "thanks to the initiative of Mr. Freke." And that poor Simonds, who had amply demonstrated his inability to survive, his utter lack of adaptation to his environment, by not being able to be friendly with the great A. and P., went--where all the inefficient, non-adaptable human refuse goes--to the bottom. _Bien entendu!_