Fidelia/Chapter 2
WITH the arrival of the three men who had seen her at the station, report of her had reached the Delta Alpha fraternity house; and, as she reckoned whenever men first spoke of her, this report was favorable.
"Any of you loafers get a squint at the queen who came in a cab to Fansler's a couple of minutes ago?" Bill Fraser enthusiastically challenged the group lounging before the fire in the living-room.
"No; who was she?" somebody answered for the bunch; and as Bill's tone suggested that it was worth while—or would have been worth while a couple of minutes ago—some of the fellows got up and looked out the window toward Mrs. Fansler's.
"She's just about the greatest looker that I ever saw feeling the need of a college education," Fraser enthused, his vehemence increasing as he warmed himself before the fire.
"Where'd you meet her?"
"Haven't had the luck; just saw her step off train and call a cab. She's up for the new semester, I suppose."
"Where's her home town?"
"Don't know."
"What do you know about her, then? Whence the huge thrill?"
"I've seen her, boy! Wait, just wait a little! Time will take care of you; after a while you'll see her," Fraser taunted in reply.
Landon Blake, who was the short one of the three who had got the thrill at the station, did not go into the living-room with the others. Something more important was on his mind now. "Dave back in town?" he asked.
"'Bout half an hour ago. He's upstairs," somebody informed and Blake ran up to the front room on the third floor and burst in on his roommate who was working under the light at the flat desk beside the window.
"Dave!" hailed Landon, breathlessly. "How about it? Did you get it?"
Dave, who was a tall, spare young man, turned quickly and looked at Landon; but he nodded in reply only after a moment or two and spoke slowly. "Yes; I got it, Lan," he said, entirely without Landon's excitement; indeed, he replied so soberly that it was almost as if he were giving bad news.
"All of it?" Lan asked. "Or all you needed, anyway?"
"All of it," Dave confirmed.
"The whole ten thousand?"
"The whole ten thousand, Lan. I got it in a check from Mr. Fuller and paid it over down town this afternoon. Snelgrove put up his money. It's a deal, Lan; it's closed; it's all over."
"Good!" Lan congratulated, putting out his short, broad hand. "Great! Dave, put it there!"
Dave grasped Lan with his longer, strong hand. "Thanks," he said. "How was business here?" he asked, deliberately switching the subject from his concerns during the two days between semesters in which he had been home. "How'd it go with you, Lan?"
"Business was a complete washout," Lan confessed promptly and emphatically. "Or rather, I was. Dave, how in the devil do you put it over all the time?"
"I don't," Dave denied, seriously.
Lan laughed and dug in his pocket for cards concerned with this business to which Dave had transferred attention. "Oh, no; it's too darned bad about you. You don't know anything about the auto game at all! You'll simply step in to-morrow to see those guys that have been giving me the gate and have them eating out of your hand; or maybe you won't bother to call; just phone 'em. Here's your cards."
Lan tossed them on the desk and Dave turned and picked them up, thoughtfully, and bending slightly he opened a long, narrow box half full of such index cards; he put the returned ones in place and glanced over some others.
"No," said Lan, seeing this and stopping him. "No use to give me a crack at any more prospects, old top; I'm absolutely helpless and screaming for mercy when I try your game. If Myra has to wait for me to learn that before we're married, I've a wonderful chance, haven't I?"
Dave closed his box without argument. "Plenty of money made in your game, Lan," he reminded.
"Maybe," admitted Lan. "Four years from now, if I'm lucky, we'll be married; that'll be about four years after you."
Dave jerked his head quickly in a manner which made Lan reach directly into Dave's affairs from which Dave had turned him. "How'd you find things at home?" he asked.
"Oh, all right; about as usual."
"See your father?"
"Of course."
"Have much more trouble with him, Dave?"
"Yes," said Dave, going rather pale. "Of course. I've sold my soul, you understand that!" he articulated slowly and distinctly and clenching his strong hands. "I've sold my soul to Mr. Fuller for ten thousand dollars. That's the only way father can see it. I was bound to have a fight with him anyway before going into last term here. He's always held onto the idea, no matter what I said, that after college I was going on into Garrett Bib the way he did and be a minister. But he'll never get me into the fix he's in."
Dave stopped suddenly and swallowed with his emotion. "Lan, you know I'm not—undervaluing father. He's the sincerest Christian I know, according to his own convictions. I'm not undervaluing the men who go on into Garrett Biblical to become preachers. They've got more guts than me, maybe; yes, I think they have. Father had more, anyway; but things were different in his day. He was here in the eighties of last century and this college, and the seminary, was in the hands of the Methodists who brought God into this part of the country and who built up this place by faith and prayer. My hat is off to them; they did big things and believed. This part of the country, and Evanston particularly, was just about the center of faith then. Father used to meet Frances Willard on this street when she had the Woman's Christian Temperance Union headquarters here. Father tells me with tears in his eyes how his professors, old Dr. Marcy and Robert Baird and Bonbright, used to lead in the chapel. There were religious enthusiasts running things then and they made fanatics; nearly half of father's class went into the ministry or foreign missions or some kind of religious work. But our class isn't doing it; we're going into business. That's as normal for me as going into the seminary was for father. I never wanted to be a preacher and I never came to college with that idea."
He was rehearsing, in his outburst of feeling, some of his fight with his father; and Lan realized this and kept still.
"Father keeps on saying that Alice is the reason I'm going into business, that I've given up my ideals for the sake of making money to marry her and now I've gone into debt, borrowing money, so I can marry her sooner. But that's not true. I meant to go into business long before I ever dreamed there was a girl like Alice."
After a few moments he admitted: "Of course I do want to get married."
"You've nothing on me there," Lan said and this time spoke without thinking.
"But you're going on through medical school, Lan!" Dave said, red color flushing over his pale face. "Father threw that up to me. You've the nerve and character to do it and Myra's the character to want you to and wait for you. You know what I think of you both for it. But it's different with Alice and me. You're made to be a doctor and you want to be one; you've never wanted anything else. But I never was made for a minister. I was made for business; I've proved that, I think; and I'm going into business with ten thousand dollars put up for me by the closest judge of business propositions that I ever knew. And there's no soul-selling to that. But you'd thought—you'd thought," repeated Dave, drawing a deep breath and holding it a moment before he was able to speak, "when I'd taken it and told father, you'd thought I was Judas Iscariot."
His head jerked up stiffer and Lan saw the sinews of his neck stand out with his strain upon himself; his eyes went wet and he winked to clear them.
"Alice is over at Willard for supper with Myra," Lan said; he had to say something.
Dave relaxed. "Yes; I know," he acknowledged and Lan turned away and started to wash. Dave began taking off the old suit which he was wearing and which he had put on when he came to his room less than an hour ago.
That careful habit of sparing his better suit, though no longer necessary to Dave Herrick, had been bred in him too deeply to cast it off merely because recently, if he wanted, he might buy himself with his own earned money as many suits of clothes as anybody in college. Clothes meant to him what they can mean only to one who has known, too bitterly, what it is to be without a decent suit of one's own. Dave knew; he was the oldest of six children of the Methodist minister of Itanaca, Illinois, and not until he came to Northwestern, when he was eighteen, had he worn a suit which was new and bought for himself.
Of course he had earned money for clothes for himself many times before that year; as long as he could remember he had earned, and sometimes he had been paid; but frequently not, either because his father had forbidden him to take dimes and nickels for services done and errands run "which he ought to be glad to do for friends" or because some neighbors too readily adopted his father's attitude. His father, in the year when Dave first became cognizant of family finances, had a salary of eight hundred dollars. This year David Herrick, besides carrying full class work as a senior in the university, had earned twenty-nine hundred dollars, reckoned from January to January, and was liable for income tax on that amount with deductions legally allowed as head of a family with three children under eighteen.
The family was his father's; but Dave, having added seventeen hundred dollars to his father's twelve, actually furnished their chief support. He earned the money selling motorcars to the customers listed on the cards in that box on his desk. His particular method of operations was his own and, as seemed to be indicated when somebody else like Lan Blake visited the trade, it required Dave, himself, to make it effective.
He had what somebody in a philosophy course called "a feeling of fundamental necessity" In his efforts which supplied him with a force lacking to Lan Blake, who had an allowance from home and wanted to work only for extra money. Now in his twenty-second year Dave Herrick, tall but rather light for his height, was a developed man, very strong and enduring and of the constitution described as hard physically, which had been formed by much hard, muscular work and by the almost complete absence of self-indulgences. He had clear, good features, nearly regular, with slight, tense lines of strain about his mouth; he had the habit of being under strain and it showed sometimes in his eyes, which were grayish blue and direct and, usually, positive. For that positiveness some people, men mostly, did not like his eyes; they did not understand that it came from his being obliged, when a little boy, to assert and stubbornly stand by the practical against the fanatically spiritual, not only for the sake of himself but of his brothers and sisters and of his mother and father themselves. But almost every one liked his eyes when he smiled for his smile banished those lines of strain and took from any overpositiveness; his was a pleasant, relaxing smile showing the even, perfect teeth of a boy brought up on hard, sparse fare.
Two people—and Lan was one of them—knew him in moods which neither were positively practical nor relaxed, they were sudden, unsummoned times of violent self-reproach and penitence. For what, Lan could not guess at first; then he began to realize the cumulative effect of the unceasing drumming into a thoughtful boy, throughout his childhood and adolescence, of the doctrines of the essential sinfulness of all flesh and the need of self-negation and the stifling of natural appetites. Dave once helped Lan to understand by telling how, when he was a baby, he had been so sick that he was given up by the doctor and his parents prayed to God to spare their firstborn, promising God, for his life, that he should serve God as a missionary of his word.
Dave referred to that now, as he and Lan were dressing. "The trouble, down at the bottom, is their pledge for me to God. They say I've got to redeem it."
Lan, having no helpful answer to make, attempted none and left Dave to his struggle with himself for having taken that ten thousand dollars from Mr. Fuller.
He was a merchant, not a church member, who was the rich man of Itanaca; he never had any use for the preacher but much for the preacher's son; and his ten thousand dollars, now taken, was a voluntary loan to start David Herrick as partner in the Chicago agency of the new Hamilton car which would be put on the market in June, after Dave's graduation. Dave already had enough advance orders to insure his success, he believed; his plan, and Alice Sothron's, was to be married late in June.
There was never a chance of Lan saying anything wrong when reminding Dave of Alice so he mentioned her again: "I suppose you're going to see Alice pretty soon."
"Hmhm," said Dave, who was shaving. "I'm driving home with her after supper."
"I can't see Myra this eve; so tell Alice there's a girl that maybe Tau Gamma wants to look over who came to Fansler's to-night. Saw her on the train," Lan explained. "A regular ripper, Dave; red hair and great looks."
"What's her name?" Dave asked, with the mildest of interest.
"Don't know; just saw her and heard her ask for Fansler's."
"All right," said Dave and catalogued the information he was loyally to pass to Tau Gamma. "A great looker, red hair, at Mrs. Fansler's. That all?"
"You'd not say so if you saw her," Lan rejoined. "Till you do, let it go at that."
They descended together when the gong beat the dinner hour. Fourteen members of the chapter lived at the fraternity house and this evening most of them were about the big table where the talk ran as usual when the "frat" was gathering again after the recess between semesters. A few of the fellows, who lived fairly near, had been home and they spoke about that; they talked of the swimming team, indoor "track," who had "flunks" from last term and, of course, they talked about girls.
Some one facetiously elaborated on the manner in which a couple of co-ed juniors had "worked" a certain professor for marks; some one else seriously recommended a brother, who had just learned of a "flunk" in biology, to go to Myra Taine and borrow her notebook: "She's the clever little picker of the salient points, old top. Packs all the essentials of two hours reading in a couple of paragraphs and never strains the mind." Some one else mildy kidded a sophomore about his evident shift of interest from a classmate to a blond girl from down state who was decidedly the stir of the freshman class. The chatter varied extraordinarily but never once suggested disrespect of any girl. These boys and men were so familiar with many girls that they mentioned them easily and freely and loyally, always. Loyalty to the girls was second only to loyalty to one another and not always second. Everybody at the table knew that Dave was engaged to Alice Sothron and Lan to Myra Taine; everybody knew both girls and liked them and nobody now "joshed" either of the brothers about their engagements. Delta Alpha accepted the fact of them as a basis for a sort of alliance with Tau Gamma; for when a fraternity is "rushing" a man for membership, a sorority often may lend invaluable influence; and so, of course, may a fraternity come to the assistance of a sorority. It was understood throughout the college that Tau Gamma and Delta Alpha worked together; and so, when Delta Alpha mentioned the new girl, whom three of the brothers had seen, they argued whether Tau Gamma would be able to "pledge" her; nobody doubted her entire desirability.
"Dave, you tell Alice," enjoined Bill Fraser (everybody knew that, as Alice was having supper at Willard, Dave was taking her home) "to have Tau Gamma get awful busy and be sure to call on us for help whether they need it or not."
"They sure can count on you, Bill!" said the boy who had asked the source of the big thrill.
"Freshman," said Bill, "we have a few girls at this institution of high or lower learning, as your tender eyes may possibly have observed and your keen little ears may, on occasion, have heard; they are beyond any doubt the finest girls in any college in this or any other country; far be it from me to nurture a knock at any one of them. However, I may say, with sufficient assurance, that something of an event occurred to-day. Some one in this college, not to say several, will never be the same after to-morrow."
"Men, you mean?" the freshman led him on. "Or girls?"
"Both, freshmen," assured Bill sententiously. "Both."
So Dave heard a good deal more of the red-haired girl; but, as his duty in regard to her was already in his mind, he paid no especial attention. To the usual query at the table: "How was everybody at home, Dave?" he gave the usual answer: "Fine, thanks." But that fight with his father kept bothering him; and his taking and putting up that ten thousand dollars, irrevocably, kept cutting across other thoughts. He went to his room, as soon as dinner was finished, and checked over his figures on his desk. They were estimates, mostly, calculations and expectations of costs and interest and overhead and of sales and transactions yet to be made and commissions and profits yet to be earned; but they reassured him and he whistled confidently when he put on his overcoat to go out.
He could go, now, to Alice; and this new overcoat of his—one he had bought in December and by far the best coat he had ever owned—brought to him one of his dearest incidents with Alice. It was only a plainly tailored, well-fitted gray ulster but it had been made for him in Evanston and therefore cost more than was necessary for a ready-made coat which might have been as warm; so Dave still had his qualms of selfishness when he picked it up till he remembered how Alice had looked when she first saw him wearing it and how she had cried a little in her shy, gentle way. "Because I'm so glad, Davey!" she explained. "You just must get good things for yourself and not give everything away! My Davey!" she said again and suddenly kissed his hand which clumsily was holding hers. He liked her "Davey"; no one else called him Davey and no one else even knew that she did.
What a right and natural next step for Alice and him to marry! he thought as he buttoned up his collar and went out into the snow. The storm which in the afternoon had started with a few, fine snowflakes in the east wind, had increased to a heavy blow full of flying snow. Dave liked to feel it, he liked the obstacle of the drift under foot and liked the fury of the pelting swirl circling the street lamps and the sting of the wind and flakes on his face. Snow used to help him, supplying him with walks to clean, for which people almost always paid him; he thought about his boyhood's backbreaking labor pleasantly now, it was so surely of his past. He had told Alice about it once; it was another event which had brought them so close together.
He halted before Willard with its windows glowing yellow on the snow. There was Myra Taine's room where Alice must be. Alice's car was parked nearby him at the curb; it was a coupé of beautiful coachwork and leather upholstery and with an expensive chassis; and the fact that he dealt in motorcars did not prevent him from feeling frequently an accentuation of the difference in worldly position between Alice and himself which her possession of this coupé evidenced.
For Alice always had been one of the rich girls in the university; her home was one of the big, luxurious mansions near the north end of Sheridan Road in Chicago and, as worldly social privileges went, Alice had more of them than any other girl Dave Herrick knew; yet when he first came to college, three and a half years ago, and was struggling to support himself and when he possessed only his one decent suit of clothes, Alice had become his friend and, with her fine, dear disregard for what others thought, she had invited him to dances with her and insisted that he accompany her.
The door of Willard opened and Dave turned about, eager and impatient as he saw two girls coming out. Then he was disappointed; for he discerned that neither of them was Alice. He recognized one, Nell Gould, a Tau Gamma, who likely enough had recently seen Alice; so he advanced toward them, confirming his impression that the girl with Nell was a stranger; and as he came closer, he appreciated that she was a decidedly unusual person.
She was a larger girl than Nell, who was about Alice's size; she was taller and more vigorously built and, though she had on a fur coat, he was aware that she had a fine, graceful figure, of rather full proportions; and she was supplied with a vitality which expressed itself in no particular but which, at that instant, he could examine and it caused him to see Nell as colorless and somber beside her. She had personality, this stranger; it spoke in the timbre of her low, pleasing voice which now reached him as she replied to some inaudible remark of Nell's. Then he was near enough to see her face as Nell and she came under a light.
She had red hair, he saw; and her eyes were beautiful; she was beautiful.
"Hello, David," Nell was saying. "Miss Netley, this is Mr. Herrick; Dave, Miss Netley, who's just come here."
Dave pulled off his cap. "Oh, don't do that, please!" Miss Netley protested, offering her hand.
He pulled his cap on again; and jerked off his heavy glove and took her hand. She had on a light, smooth kid glove and he felt a firm, strong, agreeable grasp replying to his. Hers was an individual grasp; no one had ever clasped his hand in quite that way. He thought, as he gazed at her, "I'd know you anywhere again, if I just heard your voice. If we'd met in the dark, I'd know you the next time from your hand."
Aloud, he spoke an ordinary commonplace.
She did not. "I've met Miss Sothron; I've just been with her, Mr. Herrick. She's lovely," Miss Netley said, drawing her hand from his.
"Yes," agreed Dave. "Of course I think so."
"Alice'll be out in a couple of minutes, Dave," said Nell Gould. "She stayed to speak with Myra."
"Thanks," said Dave.
Miss Netley nodded to him and he gazed at her under the good light. "You're at Mrs. Fansler's," he said, making it a statement rather than a question.
"Yes."
She did not ask how he knew; he thought she would; most girls, surprised with information about themselves, wanted to talk about it; instead, she added: "It's two doors beyond the Delta Alpha house; that's how it's known, it appears. I was helpless to find it until I learned that. Good night, Mr. Herrick."
But Dave turned to walk with her; he might as well, since he would be walking up and down anyway; and he wanted to know more about this unusual girl who had so suddenly appeared from nowhere.
"You're entering college, of course, Miss Netley."
"Oh, yes; but I've been to college before; three years, altogether."
"Where was that?"
"Minnesota, first; then Stanford."
Dave was watching her face; for they were approaching another street light and he wanted to see Miss Netley clearly again. She looked beautiful in the half shadow; the glint of the faraway light played on smooth surfaces of her face which gave her features character when Nell's individuality was entirely lost; and as they came close to the street lamp, the pretty details and the coloring of Miss Netley became visible once more.
He was going on beside her when the step at the curb reminded him that he had passed the corner beyond Willard.
"I'm glad you're trying us now," he said, stopping.
She halted also. "Why, what did you mean by that, Mr. Herrick?" she asked him seriously.
"Why," he replied, surprised. "I don't know; I just said it. I'm glad you're here, I mean."
"That's not what you said."
"No," he admitted. "Good night, Miss Netley. I'll see you to-morrow, I hope."
"I hope so, Mr. Herrick." She turned quickly and with Nell went on, leaving him under the light.
As he stood there, watching after her, again he appreciated the extraordinary aliveness and vitality of her which made her seem altogether another sort of person from Nell. He had hurt her, he realized, by that sudden remark about "trying us now." In the reason for her change from Minnesota to Stanford and now to Northwestern, there was something which made her sensitive to his remark; he told himself that he should have guessed that there might be and as he watched her disappear down the street, he wondered what her reason was. "She's certainly unusual," he said aloud to himself. Then he turned to Willard and, thinking of Alice, found himself more stirred and more impatient for her to come out to him.