The sinewy sentry shifted his gun and tramped off, his blue eyes marvelling at the unaccustomed sights of the great city, all the panoply of the civilization that he was hired to protect.
The city was under martial law, but it did not seem to mind it. The soldiers had had a few scuffles with rowdies at Blue Island and the stock yards. They had chased the toughs in and out among the long lines of freight cars, and fired a few shots. Even the newspapers couldn't magnify the desultory lawlessness into organized rebellion. It was becoming a matter of the courts now. The general managers had imported workmen from the East. The leaders of the strike—especially Debs and Howard—were giving out more and more incendiary, hysterical utterances. All workingmen were to be called out on a general strike; every man that had a trade was to take part in a "death struggle." But Sommers could see the signs of a speedy collapse. In a few days the strong would master the situation; then would follow a wrangle in the courts, and the fatal "black list" would appear. The revenge of the railroads would be long and sure.
Sommers went to his rooms and sought to get some rest before the time set for the funeral. The driving west wind, heated as by a furnace in its mad rush over the parched prairies, fevered rather than cooled him. His mind began to revolve about the dead man, lying with heavy, red-lidded eyes in the cottage. Was it,—was it murder? He put the thought aside laboriously, only to be besieged afresh, to wonder, to argue, to protest. After three hours of this he dressed and took the cable car for the cottage. He might find some pretext to examine the dead man again before the others came.
At the cottage gate, however, he overtook the good dentist, bearing a large florist's box. Miss M'Gann was already within the little front room, and Alves was talking in low tones with a sallow youth in a clerical coat. At the sight of the newcomers the clergyman withdrew to put on his robes. Dr. Leonard, having surrendered the pasteboard box to Miss M'Gann, grasped Mrs. Preston's hand.
"Alves," he began, and stopped. Even he could feel that the commonplaces of the occasion were not in order. "Alves, you know how mighty fond of you I am."
She smiled tranquilly. Her air of calm reserve mystified the watchful young doctor. The clergyman returned, followed by Mrs. Ducharme and Anna Svenson. The Ducharme woman's black dress intensified the pallor of her flabby face. Her hands twitched nervously over the prayer-book that she held. Subject to apoplexy, Sommers judged; but his thoughts passed over her as well as Miss M'Gann, who stood with downcast eyes ostentatiously close to Mrs. Preston, and the grave old dentist standing at the foot of the coffin, and the clergyman whose young voice had not lost its thrill of awe in the presence of death. He had no eyes for aught but the woman, who was bound to him by firmer ties than those whose dissolution the clergyman was recording. She stood serene, with head raised above theirs, revealing a face that sadness had made serious, grave, mature, but not sad. She displayed no affected sorrow, no nervous tremor, no stress of a reproachful mind. Unconscious of the others, even of the minister's solemn phrases, she seemed to be revolving truths of her own, dismissing a problem private to her own heart. To the man who tried to pierce beneath that calm gaze, the woman's complete control was terrible.
The minister's grave voice went on, pronouncing the grave sentences of the service. The ceremonial words sounded all the more fateful said over this poor body. The little of life that he had had,—the eating and drinking in restaurants and hotels, the chaffing and trading with his own kind, the crude appeasements of crude desires,—all these were taken away, and thus stripped it was easy to see how small was his responsibility in the matter of life. He had crushed and injured this other human being, his wife, to whom he had come nearest, just as a dirty hand might soil and crumple a fine fabric. But she no longer reproached him, if she ever had; she understood the sad complexity of a fate that had brought into the hand the fabric to be tarnished. And what she could accept, others must, the world must, to whom the Prestons are but annoyances and removable blemishes.
Sommers felt the deaconlike attitude of the dentist, the conventional solemnity of the schoolteacher and of the immobile Swede, the shaking, quavering terror of Mrs. Ducharme, mumbling to herself the words of the service. Why should the old woman be so upset, he wondered. But his vagrant thoughts always came back to the woman near the coffin, the woman he loved. How could she summon up such peace! Was hers one of those mighty souls that never doubted? That steadfast gaze chilled his heart.
"The resurrection of the dead." Her glance fell, and for one swift moment rested on the dead man. She was debating those noble words, and denying their hope to him, to such as were dead in this life. Then once more her glance rose and fell upon Sommers, and swiftly it effaced his doubts.
She was so beautiful, a woman in the full tide of human experience! And the night before she had been so simple and tender and passionate. He felt her arms about his heart, teaching him how to live. This moment, this careful putting away of the past must be over soon, in a few hours; whereupon he and she would cast it out of their hearts as they would leave this gloomy cottage and waste marshes. He would not think of the body there and its death, of anything but her. How exquisite would be this triumph, over her baulked, defeated past! 'Alves, Alves,' he murmured in his heart, 'only you who have suffered can love.' It seemed that an answering wave of color swept over her pale face.