DURAND AND COMPANY

Fond du Lac, one of the older manufacturing towns bordering on Lake Michigan, began with New England people and traditions, but it was gradually overrun in tone and appearance by the influence of Irish and German immigration. This element filtered into the Middle West slowly, and was assimilated gradually and comfortably, because the foreign-born came in poverty and served as the village and farm hewers of wood and drawers of water. Friction was perhaps felt at times, but it found the necessary relief in merely “damning the Dutch” in native moments of exasperation. It was only after the poor had become, with their large families, the well-to-do, and the New England stock had pretty well petered out, that the town, as many another American Middle West community, realized that the new element owned and ran things.

Even after this transformation Fond du Lac lived a comfortably sleepy life until the next notable invasion. This came in the form of manufacturers, seeking, with the phenomenal development of Chicago as a distributing centre, convenient points adjacent to the focal city for their factory units. The first great mills to come to Fond du Lac, for the particular advantages it offered for the making of steel, were those of the Durand Steel Corporation, and the families of the owners and their associates brought a new and highly sophisticated element into the social life of the town.

The steel people, as they were soon known in the community phrase, were city people, and waked up the tradesmen with new and extraordinary market demands. The old townspeople--such, at least, of the pioneers as had survived their race-suicide progenitors--lived a life comfortably apart from that of these newcomers. The mill owners and the manufacturers who followed the Durands with various industries, and who invaded the naturally beautiful town almost within a decade, were likewise people with habits and requirements quite foreign to those governing the lives and affairs of the townspeople. The luxuries of the townspeople were the necessities of the later arrivals.

The industrial growth of the town into something of a city came fast after the blast-furnaces and rolling-mills were located near it. Manufactures followed with almost bewildering rapidity. But the bulk of the new population now added consisted largely, as was inevitable, of laboring people; so fast, indeed, did this element pour in, that Bishop Marion--Bishop of Fond du Lac and a client of Janeway’s on at least one occasion--told the latter that more than once the arrival of a shipload of southern-Europe immigrants had put the population of a whole new parish on him overnight.

The heads of the manufacturing interests did not as a rule coalesce socially with one another. Almost all of them made their own social circles, confined chiefly to those families whose business interests drew them together. The automobile makers, the packers, the starch manufacturers, even the brewers, had their own sets. These met sometimes in common at the country clubs, but their social activities were distinct. And even the country clubs saw little of the higher-ups in the manufacturing world; the country clubs were patronized chiefly by the actual working managers of the industries--the families of the superintendents, department heads, and junior partners. In matter of fact, the actual owners clung mostly to Chicago as a social base, and turned to Chicago for many of their pleasures. The winter season found all of them in their lake-shore apartments for the city’s diversions, and their Fond du Lac homes served the women chiefly as rest-cures and summer retreats.

In the steel circle the Harrison family was an exception to what has been said of their associates, in that they had lived for many years in Fond du Lac. The Simmses had come to Fond du Lac from the North Side in Chicago, because it was Simms’s interest to keep close to Durand. And as Durand was charged by his associates with the operation of the Fond du Lac plant, he necessarily spent a good deal of his time in Fond du Lac, or, rather, between Fond du Lac and Chicago; he had varied social and business interests in both places.

Judge Harrison, however, had begun in Fond du Lac. It was only with the growth and importance of his practice that he had gone perforce to Chicago to pursue his legal career. The elder Durand--Robert’s father--meeting Judge Harrison’s sister at the Fond du Lac home, which Judge Harrison and his wife had always maintained, married her and established a relationship between the two families, and these, with their connections, made up the steel set, which was small but exclusive.

Jacob Simms, a Chicago lawyer, nearing forty, had been a college chum of Robert Durand’s, and afterward a club chum. Both men were exemplars of the life pursued by prosperous young American men of convivial tastes--men interested in athletics, sports, and club life and in well-shaped women who were equal and not averse to late suppers. Simms, with more talent in some directions than Durand, was a leader in what centred in the kaleidoscopic Chicago world. Possessed of an excellent physique, good taste in dress, and a tactful disposition, he had had no difficulty in securing from Robert Durand, when the latter took the management of the steel business after his father’s death, the position of general attorney, under Harrison, for the Durand Corporation. It was only after the phenomenal expansion of the business founded by Durand, Senior, and the consequent rise of corporation questions calling for the keenest order of legal ability, and particularly after the failure of Simms in various instances to secure results, that Judge Harrison took things in his own hands, and began to search for another active legal head for the corporation interests. Simms was kept as general attorney, but Harrison offered to Janeway the position of counsel for the various Durand corporations.

Into this little circle of men and women of Middle West business life Louise Durand had come from San Francisco a very youthful bride. She once told Janeway the story of her girlhood and the circumstances leading to her early marriage; it need not be anticipated here. But the very considerable fortune she brought from her father’s estate to Durand had accounted for the material expansion in 1913 of the steel companies of which he was the new head; and this expansion, in turn, supplied the foundation for the extraordinary success that opened for the Durand Companies at the beginning, in 1914, of the World War. An almost reckless building programme gone into by Durand--who was young, energetic, and fond of the limelight--in dangerous excess of normal plant requirements, and undertaken--as was perhaps enviously said by more conservative steel men--because his wife had too much money--was transformed in a twinkling into an unexampled readiness to supply the urgency of Allied munitions demands at unheard-of profits.

From a monetary aspect, therefore, Durand’s marriage could hardly have been more successful. Louise, on the merits of her personality, would have been accorded a favored place among any new relatives at all well-disposed; but her début in the Durand circle was made under the most felicitous circumstances. Less could be said, as far as her own happiness was concerned, regarding this most important step in any woman’s life. The girlish pride in the passing glamour of the preparations and the well-appointed wedding, the new home overlooking Lake Michigan, the novel responsibilities and the new friends had hardly worn off before she realized that she, herself, really meant very little in Durand’s life. It was not alone that she realized she was only one of his interests--and a perceptibly lessening one. He not only had other interests, such as fast friends, but at least one of these other interests centred upon other women, and of late, particularly, on one other woman.

Almost a complete realization of this domestic situation had come to Louise at the time of the dynamiting of the rolling-mills. The excitement and the fears aroused by this shocking event--for besides the material damage, the loss of life had been considerable--had called, as it were, for a truce as to the domestic relations of Louise and her husband; but neither the untoward event nor the frequent threats made against Durand’s life had had more than a temporary effect on his conduct, which he insisted was nothing new, only usual. And by the time the dynamiters had been convicted and this story opens, Durand was again in the swing of his natural bent.

On the night of the Harrison dinner, coming home late, he went to his wife’s rooms. A fire was burning in the grate, and Louise was reading in the evening paper the day’s story of the trial, with its excerpts from Janeway’s closing speech; as victor in the legal battle he had been featured. Durand, lighting a cigarette, sat down, and Louise read paragraphs from the closing.

“I want Janeway here to dinner when I get back from Chicago next week,” said Durand, after discussing the exciting events of the day. Louise asked whom else he wished to have. He gave her the names and ended with those of the Simmses and a friend of theirs--and his--Mrs. Montgomery.

“The Simmses, yes,” assented Louise. “Not Mrs. Montgomery.”

“She’ll do for Janeway. You’ve nobody else.”

“In a small company Mr. Janeway will take very good care of himself.”

He showed his overbearing impatience. “Mrs. Montgomery is a lifelong friend of Janeway’s.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“What are you talking about? Janeway introduced me to her. Anyway,” he said angrily, “I want Mrs. Montgomery included.”

“I’m free to say I don’t care for her.”

“Does that mean you won’t invite her?”

Louise discussed Mrs. Montgomery with her husband pretty freely. Each knew the real reason for her refusal to have Mrs. Montgomery at her table, but neither was in a position to uncover it. Durand, obstinate now, and incensed, persisted that she be included. “I suppose I’ll have to invite her myself,” he grumbled at last.

Louise was cold. “I’ve no doubt she’d come on such an invitation,” was all she said.

“Look here, Louise,” exclaimed Durand, flinging his cigarette into the fireplace, “it’s time for you and me to have an understanding.”

“We have reached a clear one on that point.”

She had blanched a little in her defiance. And she spoke hurriedly, with a nervous tremor, but she looked at him with determined eyes. Durand was much surprised. He could hardly believe his senses; for the first time in their married lives his wife had unhesitatingly traversed a decision he had made, and was not to be bullied into receding. Louise herself was hardly less astonished at her temerity. But there had been ample preparation for her stand; many givings-in, many useless pleas, many tears, and many bitter reflections. There were no tears now, not even an inclination, but there was much accumulated resentment and doggedness of purpose. Durand tried again.

“What have you got against Mrs. Montgomery?” he demanded.

She could not bring herself to accept his brutal challenge. She had no proof, anyway--only suspicions; but suspicions that burn a woman’s heart and sensibilities to ashes, when she realizes she is being unlawfully supplanted.

“I don’t like her,” she replied, controlling herself, and with hard, helpless tones. “I have invited her here before to please you. I won’t have her here again.”

“Nothing that pleases me pleases you,” he snorted, as if expressing a final conclusion. “You don’t like my friends. You don’t care any more about me, for that matter. But don’t imagine that’s going to break my heart.” He spoke in a tone of forbearance, tempered by disgust with an intractable partner. His wife, being young and inexperienced, would not leave the situation to stand where he had fixed it. She thought she ought to defend herself--which was only bringing fuel to his fire.

“You know that isn’t true, Robert,” she protested. “And you know you ought not to insist on including that woman among my guests.” She looked at him so pointedly that her meaning was unmistakable.

He grew more stubborn. “The trouble with you is,” he remarked with finality, “you’re too old-fogy; Maymie Montgomery is right up-to-date--she’s for fun and a good time. She’s a man’s woman--that’s why you don’t like her.”

Louise was desperate. Though knowing she was right in her stand, her collected antagonist was still torturing her, and doing it, despite all she could urge, with an air of injured innocence.

“I don’t like her for more reasons than that,” she retorted. “But I give her credit for one thing: she doesn’t sail under false colors; she doesn’t even counterfeit decency.”

Durand laughed. He had the situation well in hand. “Still harping on the old string--‘decency’!”

“Decency _is_ a trifle older than indecency,” said his wife, trembling with anger, “but only a trifle.”

“Well, I’ve always lived my life without blue laws, and I expect to continue to do so. I’m beginning to think you’re as much of a crank on decency as that boob Socialist brother of yours is on everything else. I’ll serve final notice on you now that I intend to choose my friends, and give you the same privilege. I’m not jealous. But if you expect to run my house you’ll entertain people I like when I say so.”

Louise only buried herself behind her newspaper. The fires of a long endurance had flared up in her, and she was set in her attitude beyond all of his influence. Grievances raked up and grievances invented by Durand in his abuse of her had no effect on her rigidity. He pricked her sensibilities with taunts and reproaches, but she would not even reply. Angry in turn at his inability to tempt her to wrangle, he started to leave the room.

“Robert!” She spoke just as he reached his door. He turned. She had risen. “You say we’ve reached the parting of the ways. We have. You’ve long been wanting to be rid of me. You’ve been asking why I don’t go to France, to Italy, since I am always talking about it. Now I’m going. In just as few months as I can arrange my affairs and secure passage, we will part company for all time. You’ll have a free rein then with your Athletic Club companions--and with Maymie Montgomery. But I warn you now, Robert Durand, if you ever try to drag me into a divorce court, I’ll fight you as long as I have life left to fight with!”

He had driven her to the point to which he had long tried to drive her--the point at which she would get out of his way until he could entirely rid himself of her--and he went to his room in a complacent frame of mind.