CHAPTER XXIV
At the gate of the cemetery he fled from the little company. Dr. Leonard wanted to return to the city with him, but he shook off the talkative dentist. He must escape all sense of participation in the affair. So he made the long journey in the cable train, thinking disconnectedly in unison with the banging, jolting, grinding of the car. The panorama of his one short year in Chicago rose bit by bit into his mind: the hospital, the rich, bizarre town, the society of thirsty, struggling souls, always rushing madly hither and thither, his love for the woman he had just left, and this final distracting event.
What if she had doubled the dose of the anodyne? Probably the fellow was abusive. It might have been some shameful extremity that had forced upon her this act in self-defence. But such a situation would have called for violence, some swift blow. The man had died in insidious calm. He had counselled it, believed in it. But not that she—the woman he loved—should be brave with that desperate courage. Yet it was over now, beyond sight and thought, and he loved her—yes, loved her more than if it had not been so.
Once in town, he felt intolerably lonely, as a busy man who has had his round of little duties in a busy world soon comes to feel when any jar has put him out of his usual course. As he sauntered among the strange faces of the city streets, looking out for a familiar being, he began to realize how completely he had cut himself off from the ordinary routine of life. He was as much a stranger as if he had been dropped into the bustling crowd for the first time. He had sat in judgment, and the world would give a fig for his judgments. A week ago he might have taken refuge in a dozen houses. To-night he stood upon street corners and wistfully eyed the passing stream.
He walked to the river aimlessly, and then walked back, examining the blank faces of the people. He spied through the lowered window of a carriage Brome Porter and Carson, going in the direction of the Northwestern station. The carriage skirted the curb near him, but the occupants were looking the other way. He recalled that Carson had been induced to leave the famous portrait on exhibition at the Art Institute. Whenever in the future he might care to refresh his mind with the vision of this epitome of success, he had but to drop into the dusky building on the lake front and have it all—with the comment of the great artist.
As he moved on his restless course, he thought of Porter and Carson, of Polot, and then of many others, whose faces came out of the memories of the past year. How many of them were "good fellows," human and kind and strong! They fought the world's fight, and fought it fairly. Could more be expected of man? Could he be made to curb his passion for gain, to efface himself, to refuse to take what his strong right hand had the power to grasp? Perhaps the world was arranged merely to get the best out of strong animals.
He turned into a restaurant, where usually he could find a dozen people of his acquaintance in the prosperous world. The place was crowded, but he spied no one he had ever seen. Evidently the people who knew how to make themselves comfortable had contrived to get out of this besieged city. They were at the various country clubs, at Wheaton, Lake Forest, Lake Geneva, Oconomowoc, keeping cool, while the general managers, the strikers, and the troops fought out their differences. The menu was curtailed this evening.
"'Twon't be long, sir," the waiter explained, "'fore we'll have to kill them cab horses as they done in Paris. Game and fruit and milk can't be had."
But for the present the food was not of the famine order, and the noisy crowd eat joyously, as if sure of enough, somehow, as long as they needed it and had the money to pay. As Sommers was idling over his coffee, Swift, a young fellow whom he had seen at the University Club, a college man connected with one of the papers, sat down at his table, and chatted busily.
"They telephoned from the stock yards that there was a big mob down there," he told Sommers. "I thought I'd go over and see if I couldn't get an extra story out of it. Want to come along? It's about the last round of the fight. The managers have got five thousand new men here already or on the way. That will be the knock-out," he chatted briskly.
Sommers drifted along to the scene of the riot with the reporter, happier in finding himself with some one, no matter who he might be. Swift talked about the prospects of ending the strike. He regarded it as a reportorial feast, and had natural regrets that such good material for lurid paragraphs was to be cut off. As they passed through the Levee, he nodded to the proprietors of the "places," with ostentatious familiarity. From the Levee they took an electric car, which was crowded with officers and deputies bound for the stock yards. The long thoroughfare lined with rotting wooden houses and squalid brick saloons was alive with people that swarmed over the roadbed like insects. A sweltering, fetid air veiled the distances. Like a filthy kettle, the place stewed in its heat and dirt. Here lived the men who had engaged in the foolish fight!
At a cross street the officers dropped off the car, and Swift and Sommers followed them.
"Where's the fun?" the reporter asked the sergeant.
The officer pointed languidly toward a tangle of railroad tracks at one end of the vast enclosure of the stock yards. They trudged on among the lines of deserted cars in the fading glare of the July heat. The broad sides of the packing houses, the lofty chimneys surrounded by thin grayish clouds, the great warehouses of this slaughter yard of the world, drew nearer. All at once a roar burst on their ears, and they came out from behind a line of cars upon a stretch of track where a handful of soldiers were engaged in pressing back a rabble of boys, women, and men. The rabble were teasing the soldiers, as a mob of boys might tease a cat. Suddenly, as the officers and deputies appeared, some one hurled a stone. In a moment the air was thick with missiles, revolver shots followed, and then the handful of soldiers formed in line with fixed bayonets.
Sommers heard in the midst of all the roar the piteous bellowing of cattle, penned up in the cars. He saw a dark form stealing around the end of a car; in a moment a light spurted out as if a match had been touched to kerosene; there was a gleam of light, and the stock-car with its load of cattle was wrapped in flames. The dark figure disappeared among the cars; Sommers followed it. The chase was long and hot. From time to time the fleeing man dodged behind a car, applied his torch, and hurried on. At last Sommers overtook him, kneeling down beside a box car, and pouring oil upon a bunch of rags. Sommers kicked the can out of reach and seized the man by the collar. They struggled in the dark for a few moments. Then the man put his hand to his pocket, saying,—
"I suppose you're a damned, sneaking deputy."
"Hold on, you drunken fool!" Sommers exclaimed. "It's lucky for you I am not a deputy."
He could hear the mob as it came down the yards in the direction of the burning cars.
"If you don't want to be locked up, come on with me."
The fellow obeyed, and they walked down through the lane of cars until they reached a fence. Sommers forced his companion through a gap, and followed him. Then the man began to run, and at the corner ran into a file of soldiers, who were coming into the yards. Sommers turned up the street and walked rapidly in the direction of the city. The first drops of a thunder-shower that had been lowering over the city for hours were falling, and they brought a pleasant coolness into the sultry atmosphere. That was the end! The "riot" would be drowned out in half an hour.
The sense of overwhelming loneliness came back, and instinctively he turned south in the direction of the cottage. From the loneliness of life, the sultry squalor of the city, the abortive folly of the mob, he fled to the one place that was still sweet in all this wilderness of men.
* * * * *
The cottage windows were dark when he arrived an hour later, but Alves met him at the door.
"I have been waiting for you," she said calmly. "I knew you would come as soon as you could."
"Didn't Miss M'Gann stay?" he asked remorsefully.
"I sent her away with Dr. Leonard. And our old Ducharme has gone out to one of her doctor's services. She is getting queerer and queerer, but such a good soul! What should I have done without her! You sent her to me," she added tenderly.
They sat down by the open window within sound of the gentle, healing rain. Sommers noticed that Alves had changed her dress from the black gown she had worn in the afternoon to a colored summer dress. The room had been rearranged, and all signs of the afternoon scene removed. It was as if she willed to obliterate the past at once. How fast she lived!
Her manner was peaceful. She sat resting her head against a high-backed chair, and her arms, bare from the elbow, fell limply by her side. She seemed tired, merely, and content to rest in the sense of sweet relief.
"Alves," he cried, taking one of her hands and pressing the soft flesh in his grip, "I could not stay away. I meant to—I did not mean to meet you again here—but it was too lonely, too desolate everywhere."
"Why not here and at once?" she asked, with a shade of wonder in her voice. "Haven't we had all the sorrow here? And why should we put off our joy? It is so great to be happy to the full for once."
The very words seemed to have a savor for her.
"Are you happy?" he asked curiously.
"Why not! It's as if all that I could ever dream while I walked the hot streets had come to me. It has come so fast that I cannot quite feel it all. Some joy is standing outside, waiting its turn."
Smilingly she turned her face to his for response.
"What shall you do?" he asked.
"Do? I can't think now. There is so much time to think of that."
"But you can't stay here!" he exclaimed, with undue agitation.
"Not if you dislike it. But I feel differently. I found this refuge, and it served me well. I have no need to leave it."
Sommers let her hand fall from his clasp, and rose to his feet.
"You must! You cannot stay here after—"
"As you wish. We will go away."
"But until we are married?"
"Married?" she repeated questioningly. "I hadn't thought of that."
After a moment she said hesitatingly:
"Do we have to be married? I mean have the ceremony, the oath, the rest of it? I have been married. Now I want—love."
"Why, it is only natural—" the man protested.
"No, no, it is not natural. It may kill all this precious love. You may come to hate me as I hated him, and then, then? No," she continued passionately. "Let us not make a ceremony of this. It would be like the other, and I should feel it so always. We will have love, just love, and live so that it makes no difference. You cannot understand!"
Sommers knelt beside her chair.
"Love, love," he repeated. "You shall have it, Alves, as you will—the delirium of love!"
"That is right," she whispered, trembling at his touch. "Talk to me like that. Only more, more. Make my ears ring with it. Your words are so weak!"
"There are no words."
"No, there is not one perfect one in all the thousands!" she uttered, with a low cry. "And they are all alike—all used and common. But this,"—she kissed him, drawing him closer to her beating heart. "This is you and all!"
Thus she taught him the fire of love—so quickly, so surely! From the vague boyish beatitude had sprung this passion, like the opulent blossom out of the infolding bosom of the plant. Her kiss had dissipated his horrid suspicions. Her lips were bond and oath and sacrament.
That night they escaped the world with its fierce cross-purposes, its checker-board scheme. The brutality of human success, the anguish of strife,—what is it when man is shut within the chamber of his joy! Outside the peaceful rain fell ceaselessly, quenching the flame and the smoke and the passion of the city.
PART II
CHAPTER I
"Next week Monday is the tenth," Alves announced, glancing at the calendar that hung beside the writing-table.
"Well?" Sommers answered. He was preparing to make the daily trip to the post-office on the other side of Perota Lake.
"The Chicago schools open this year on the tenth," Alves continued slowly.
"What difference does that make?"
For reply Alves took from the drawer of the table the old leather purse that was their bank. The mute action made Sommers smile, but he opened the purse and counted the bills. Then he shoved them back into the purse, and replaced it in the drawer.
"I don't know why I haven't heard about my horse," he mused.
"That would only put the day off another month or two," Alves answered. "We have had our day of play—eight long good weeks. The golden-rod has been out for nearly a month, and the geese have started south. We saw a flock yesterday, you remember."
"But you aren't going back to the school!" Sommers protested. "Not to the
Everglade School."
"I got the notices last week. They haven't discharged me! Why not?" she added sanely. "You know that it will be hard to build up a practice. And Miss M'Gann wrote me that we could get a good room at the Keystone. That won't be too far from the school."
"I had thought of returning to Marion, where my father practised," Sommers suggested. "If we could only stay here, in this shanty three miles from a biscuit!"
Alves smiled, and did not argue the point. They went to the shore where their little flat-bottomed boat was drawn up. Perota Lake, on which the tiny frame cottage stood, was a shallow, reedy pond, connecting by sluggish brooks with a number of other lakes. The shore on this side of the lake was a tangled thicket; the opposite shore rose in a gentle slope to fields of sun-dried grain. The landscape was rich, peaceful, uneventful, with wide spaces of sun and cloud and large broad Wisconsin fields. The fierce west wind came cool and damp from the water. Sommers pulled out of the reedy shore and headed for a neighboring lake. After rowing in silence for some time, he rested on his oars.
"Why couldn't we stay here? That is what I want to do—to keep out of the city with its horrible clatter of ambitions, to return to the soil, and live like the primitive peasant without ambition."
The Wisconsin woman smiled sympathetically. She had grown strong and firm-fleshed these summer weeks, sucking vitality from the warm soil.
"The land is all owned around here!" she laughed. "And they use herb doctors or homeopaths. No, we should starve in the midst of harvests. There is only one thing to do, to go back where we can earn a bit of bread."
Sommers started to row, but put down the oars again.
"Do you want to go back?"
"I never think about it. It is so arranged," she answered simply. "Perhaps it will not be always so."
"Which means that we may be more fortunate than our neighbors?"
"I don't know—why think? We have until Monday," and she leaned forward to touch his hand.
Why think! That is what she had taught him. They had sloughed off Chicago at the first, and from the day they arrived at Perota they had sunk into a gentle, solitary routine. Sommers had been content to smoke his pipe, to ruminate on nothings, to be idle with no strenuous summoning of his will. There had been no perplexity, no revolt, no decision. Even the storm of their love subdued itself to a settled warmth, like that of the insistent summer sun. They had little enough to do with, but they were not aware of their poverty. Alves had had a long training in economy, and with the innate capability of the Wisconsin farmer's daughter, adjusted their little so neatly to their lives that they scarcely thought of unfulfilled wants.
Now why, the man mused, must they break this? Why must they be forced back into a world that they disliked, and that had no place for them? If he were as capable as she, there would be no need. But society has discovered a clever way of binding each man to his bench! While he brooded, Alves watched the gentle hills, straw-colored with grain, and her eyes grew moist at the pleasant sight. She glanced at him and smiled—the comprehending smile of the mothers of men.
"You would not want it always."
They landed at the end of the lake; from there it was a short walk over the dusty country road to the village. The cross-roads hamlet with its saloons and post-office was still sleeping in midday lethargy. Alves pointed to the unpainted, stuffy-looking houses.
"You would not like this."
At the post-office they met a young fellow wearing a cassock, a strangely incongruous figure in the Wisconsin village. "Are you coming to vespers?" the young priest asked. His brown, heavy face did not accord with the clerical habit or with the thin clerical voice.
"I think so—for the last time," Alves answered.
"Guy Jones will be there. You remember Guy, Alves? He used to be quite sweet on you in the old days when your brother was at the seminary."
"Yes, I remember Guy," Alves answered hurriedly. She seemed conscious of Sommers's bored gaze. The young priest accompanied them along the dusty road.
"Guy'll be glad to see you again. He's become quite a man out in Painted
Post, Nebraska—owns pretty much the whole place—"
"We shall be at vespers," Alves repeated, interrupting the talkative young man.
When his cassock had disappeared up the dusty road between the fields of corn, she added,
"And that, too, you would not like, nor Guy Jones."
After beaching the boat in front of the cottage they walked to the seminary chapel by a little path through the meadows along the lake, then across a wooded hill where the birds were singing multitudinously. The buildings of the Perota Episcopal Seminary occupied the level plateau of a hill that lay between two lakes. A broad avenue of elms and maples led to the rude stone cloisters, one end of which was closed by the chapel. To Sommers the cheap factory finish of the chapel and the ostentatious display of ritualism were alike distasteful. The crude fervors of the boy priests were strangely out of harmony with the environment. But Alves, to whom the place was full of associations, liked the services. As they entered the cloisters, a tiny bell was jangling, and the students were hurrying into the chapel, their long cassocks lending a foreign air to the Wisconsin fields. Only one other person was seated on the benches beneath the choir, a broad-faced young American, whose keen black eyes rested upon Alves. She was absorbed in the service, which was loudly intoned by the young priest. The candles, the incense, the intoned familiar words, animated her. Sommers had often wondered at the powerful influence this service exerted over her. To the training received here as a child was due, perhaps, that blind wilfulness of self-sacrifice which had first brought her to his notice.
"The remission and absolution of sins—" Alves was breathing heavily, her lips murmuring the mighty words after the priest. Was there a sore hidden in her soul? Did she crave some supernatural pardon for a desperate deed? The memory of miserable suspicions flashed over him, and gravely, sadly, he watched the quivering face by his side. If she sought relief now in the exercise of her old faith, what would come as the years passed and heaped up the burden of remorse!
* * * * *
The service ended, and the three lay participants sauntered into the graveyard outside the west door. The setting sun flooded the aisle of the little chapel, even to the cross on the altar. The tones of the organ rolled out into the warm afternoon. The young man approached Alves with extended hand.
"The boys told me I could find you here. It's real good to see you again. Yes, I'm back to have a look at the old place. Wouldn't return to stay for worlds. It's a great place out there, where a man counts for what he is. Won't you make me acquainted with your husband?"
Sommers felt instinctively the hesitation in Alves's manner. She turned to him, however.
"Howard, this is my brother's old friend, Mr. Jones,—Dr. Sommers."
The young man shook hands with great warmth, and joined them in their walk home, talking rapidly all the way. When he left the cottage, he extended a cordial invitation to Sommers to establish himself in Painted Post. "We want a good, live, hustling doctor, one that is up in all the modern school theories," he explained.
After he had gone, they sat in silence, watching the deepening twilight in the cool woods. The day, the season, the fair passion of life, seemed to wane. Like the intimations of autumn that come in unknown ways, even in August, surely in September, this accidental visitor brought the atmosphere of change.
"The struggle begins, then, next Monday," Sommers remarked at last.
She kissed him for reply.
To love, to forget unpleasant thoughts, to love again, to refrain from an ignoble strife—alas! that it could not be thus for a lifetime.