Early every morning Sommers with Alves would start for the lake. At this hour only an occasional fisherman could be seen, cutting fresh holes in the ice and setting his lines. Sommers preferred to skate in the mornings, for later in the day the smooth patches of inshore ice were frequented by people from the city. He loved solitude, it seemed to Alves, more and more. In the Keystone days he had been indifferent to the people of the house; now he avoided people except as they needed him professionally. She attributed it, wrongly, to a feeling of pride. In reality, the habit of self-dependence was gaining, and the man was thrusting the world into the background. For hours Sommers never spoke. Always sparing of words, counting them little, despising voluble people, he was beginning to lose the power of ready speech. Thus, living in one of the most jostling of the world's taverns, they lived as in the heart of the Arizona desert.
They skated in these long silences, enjoying the exhilaration of the exercise, the bitter air, the views of the huge, silent city. Now and then they paused instinctively to watch the scene, without speaking, like great lovers that are mute. Starting from the sheltered pool, where the yachts lay in summer, they skirted the dark piles of the long pier, around which the black water gurgled treacherously. Beyond the pier there was a snakelike, oozing crack, which divided the inshore ice from the more open fields outside. This they followed until they found a chance to cross, and then they sped away toward the little island made by the "intake" of the water works.
These windless mornings the bank of city smoke northward was like gray powder, out of which the skyscrapers stretched their lofty heads. The buildings along the shore, etched in the transparent air, breathing silently white mists of steam, lay like a mirage wonderfully touched with purplish shadows. The great steel works rose to the south, visibly near, mysteriously remote. The ribbons of fiery smoke from their furnaces were the first signs of the city's awakening from its lethargic industrial sleep. The beast was beginning to move along its score of miles of length. But out here in the vacancies of the lake it seemed still torpid.
Eastward, beyond the dot which the "intake" made, the lake was a still arctic field, furrowed by ice-floes, snowy here, with an open pool of water there, ribbed all over with dark crevasses of oozing water. In the far east lay the horizon line of shimmering, gauzy light, as if from beyond the earth's rim was flooding in the brilliance of a perpetual morning. North and south, east and west, along the crevasses the lake smoked in the morning sun, as the vapor from the water beneath rose into the icy air. Savage, tranquil, immense, the vast field of ice was like the indifferent face of nature, like unto death.
One morning, as they waited breathlessly listening to the silence of the ice sea, the lake groaned close beside them, and suddenly the floe on which they stood parted from the field nearer shore. In a few minutes the lane of open water was six feet in width. Sommers pointed to it, and without a word they struck out to the north, weaving their way in and out of the floes, now clambering over heaved-up barriers of ice, now flying along an unscarred field, again making their way cautiously across sheets of shivered surface ice that lay like broken glass beside a crevasse. Finally, they reached the inner field. Sommers looked at his watch, and said:
"We might as well go ashore here. That was rather a narrow chance. I must look in at the Keystone to see how Webber is. I shouldn't wonder if he had typhoid."
"I wish we could go on," Alves replied regretfully. "I was hoping the lane ran on and on for miles."
She put her hands under his coat and leaned against him, looking wistfully into the arctic sea.
"Let me go back!" she pleaded. "I should like to skate on, on, for days!"
"You can't go back without me. Some day, if this weather keeps up, we'll try for the Michigan shore."