Freke was the Pleasant Valley Coal Company,—that is, he was its necessary physiognomy,—but really the coal company was an incorporated private farm of the officers and friends of the A. and P.,—an immensely profitable farm. Lane in his callow youth did not know this fact; but he learned it after he had been in Torso a few weeks. He was quick to learn, a typical Beals man, thoroughly "efficient," one who could keep his eyes where they belonged, his tongue in his mouth, and his ears open. As he told Isabelle that Sunday afternoon, "he had had many business dealings with Freke," alias the Pleasant Valley Company, etc., and they had been uniformly profitable.
For the fatherly Senator and the shrewd Beals believed that the "right sort" should make a "good thing"; they believed in thrift. In a word, to cut short this lengthy explanation, the great Atlantic and Pacific, one of the two or three most efficiently operated railroads in the United States, was honeycombed with that common thing "graft," or private "initiative"! From the President's office all the way down to subordinates in the traffic department, there were "good things" to be enjoyed. In that growing bunch of securities that Lane was accumulating in his safe, there were, as has been said, a number of certificates of stock in coal companies—and not small ones.
And this is why Lane maintained social as well as financial relations with the coarse Mr. Freke. And this is why, also, Lane felt that they could afford "the best," when they undertook to give a dinner to the distinguished gentlemen from New York. Of course he did not explain all this to Isabelle that pleasant Sunday afternoon. Would Isabelle have comprehended it, if he had? Her mind would have wandered off to another dinner, to that cottage at Bedmouth, which she thought of taking for the summer, or to the handsome figure that John made on horseback. At least nine out of ten American husbands would have treated the matter as Lane did,—given some sufficient general answer to their wives' amateurish curiosity about business and paid their figures due compliments, and thought complacently of the comfortable homes to which they were progressing and the cheerful dinners therein,—all, wife, home, dinner, the result of their fortunate adaptation to the environments they found themselves in….
Perhaps may be seen by this time the remote connection between that tragic gesture of Frank Simonds on the Saturday afternoon, calling on heaven and the Divine Mind that pitilessly strains its little creatures through the holes of a mighty colander—between that tragic gesture, I say, and Isabelle's delightful dinner of ten courses,—champagne and terrapin!
* * * * *
But this tiresome chapter on the affairs of the Atlantic and Pacific railroad,—will it never be done! So sordid, so commonplace, so newspapery, so—just what everything in life is—when we might have expected for the dollar and a quarter expended on this pound of wood pulp and ink,—something less dull than a magazine article; something about a motor-car and a girl with a mischievous face whom a Russian baron seeks to carry away by force and is barely thwarted by the brave American college youth dashing in pursuit with a new eighty h. p., etc., etc. Or at least if one must have a railroad in a novel (when every one knows just what a railroad is), give us a private car and the lovely daughter of the President together with a cow-punching hero, as in Bessie's beloved story. But an entire chapter on graft and a common dinner-party with the champagne drunk so long ago—what a bore!
And yet in the infinite hues of this our human life, the methods by which our substantial hero, John Hamilton Lane, amassed his fortune, are worthy of contemplation. There is more, O yawning reader, in the tragic gesture of ragged-bearded Frank Simonds than in some tons of your favorite brand of "real American women"; more in the sublime complacency of Senator Alonzo Thomas, when he praised "that great and good man," and raised to his memory his glass of Pommery brut, triple sec, than in all the adventures of soldiers of fortune or yellow cars or mysterious yachts or hectic Russian baronesses; more—at least for the purpose of this history—in John's answer to Isabelle's random inquiry that Sunday afternoon than in all the "heart-interest" you have absorbed in a twelvemonth. For in the atmosphere of the ACTS here recorded, you and I, my reader, live and have our being, such as it is—and also poor Frank Simonds (who will never appear again to trouble us). And to the seeing eye, mystery and beauty lie in the hidden meaning of things seen but not known….
Patience! We move to something more intimate and domestic, if not more thrilling.
CHAPTER XI
The child was coming!