Fidelia/Chapter 32
ALICE was very happy. The days of their wedding journey became for her a period of almost unbelievable content. She had David and she was away with him where Fidelia had never been and could never come! And he was happy. He told her so and she knew it. He said to her, when they had only a room in a mountain hotel, "It's home to be with you. It's like having been away, Alice, and come home."
Not only were they happy of themselves but while they were in North Carolina, they received only good news. The crisis following the break in relations with Germany, seemed to be less tense; there appeared to by a chance for peace; and Alice had a letter from Myra which reported that Lan was safe. He had had typhus but was recuperating splendidly.
Alice longed to stay and to keep David in the security of the mountains but she would not alter his arrangement which required him to return to the office at the end of the week. So, after seven days, they again were in Chicago where Fidelia had been and where, at any moment, again she might be. They went for one night to the Sothrons'; upon the next day they found and immediately moved into a bungalow which was to rent, furnished. It had a wide, rough stone chimney, with a cozy hearth and stood in a little lot of its own, all of which delighted Alice.
"Happy now?" David asked her, when they were in and every one else was shut out.
"I never dreamed I could be so happy, David. Are you?"
He touched her cheek and then turned her face up to his. "I know what's in your dear little head when you look at me like that, Alice: am I as happy as I was with Fidelia?"
"David, I don't mean to ask it."
"You can't help it. And I can't help it. Dear, this is very different;and this is better, sweet little heart. Now kiss me."
She did and he said, "This feels like home, Alice; and I never had that feeling before. We'll buy this house, as soon as we can, won't we?"
"I'd love to. It'll do us for years or at least until we have more than two children."
"Yes," he said and slipped his hand over hers as he realized that she was taking up her plan with him just where they had left it off five years ago.
It was indeed very different from being married to Fidelia; it was, indeed, very like having been away and having come home. And it was good but it was so different that a comparison was really impossible. So he could say "better" as honestly as he could say anything else.
To him it sometimes seemed that a different person—or at least a different part of him—had married and lived with Fidelia, had climbed with her upon the Throne of Saturn and played with her at being Titans on the far-away dawn of creation's day. That part—that reckless, pagan impulse which had possessed him—gave him no trouble now. Purposes possessed him and made him happy.
He continued at his business of selling cars with which he combined efforts to sell his partnership; but Snelgrove had no idea of buying him out and remaining in business by himself and many a partnership was for sale in these days.
"I'll be lucky to get ten thousand for my interest now," he reported to Alice, after he had been busy for several weeks and just after the President had called for April second the special congress which already was named the war congress. David added, "And I'll get less later; so I'll take what I can get to-morrow."
"Yes," said Alice. "I would." She drew close to him and then, in order to discuss their future calmly, she drew away.
"When you go, I'll move back to father's, unless you'd rather I stayed here."
"No; that wouldn't be sensible at all," he said.
"But I'll keep the house ours. I just can't give it up, David. It's our place where I've been with you."
"You'll have from me," said David, "probably the pay of an army lieutenant, at most. And we've only a lease till May."
Then she told him, "The owners aren't coming back, on account of the war. They want to sell or lease; so let's lease even if I have to sublet to keep this house ours."
David procured a bona fide offer of ten thousand dollars for his partnership, including stock and his interest in orders and accounts collectable. He wrote to Mr. Fuller about it and received a reply advising him to accept, as the amount would exactly cancel the balance owing.
As the balance was fifteen thousand, this answer was puzzling, until David received, through Fuller's bank in Itanaca, one of his notes for five thousand dollars stamped "paid and cancelled."
Knowing Mr. Fuller, David had no illusion that the cancelling of this note was a bit of philanthropy and it was equally impossible that it was a mistake. At once David suspected the truth; Alice had paid the note. She had done as he had believed she would do when he had been thinking about her that night he sailed by her windows on the I'll Show You! she was sending him to war. And sending him, she would keep as long as she lived—if he did not return—the home where she had been with him.
He sold out his business and paid his debt to Mr. Fuller and, owing only to Alice, he went to Fort Sheridan when war was declared.
It was a stern and very serious course of training which he underwent for a brief, intensive period. The citizens' camp of the year before seemed almost like play in comparison; this, plainly was a prelude to war. It absorbed him, excited him, exhausted him for he went into it with all his energy. He could not go at anything half way and he liked to work not only with his muscles but with his mind, too.
He liked mathematics and the instructors were eager for men with strong bodies and clear, vigorous minds capable of grappling with the intricacies of ballistics, trajectories and the rest of the problems of modern ordnance, after the other work was done.
It was something like being at school again; and to Alice he seemed to be at school; and though she could not come to class with him, yet she could visit the camp at prescribed hours of certain days; and even this prelude to war had its intermissions which permitted David to go to Chicago.
He telephoned to her, and she met him at the train and in the city they would have supper together before going to a theater or somewhere to dance. Then they went to the bungalow; for Alice was staying there while he was at the Fort.
They were under the constant excitement of war; and they were sure that he would be sent overseas, as soon as he was commissioned; but when he was made first lieutenant, he was moved, not to France, but to Camp Grant, near Rockford, in Illinois, where the drafted men were coming to be trained. So Alice sublet the bungalow and followed to Rockford where she took a furnished room in a boarding-house with other officers' wives.
She was happy and impatient for a child. Wives of her own age and with children lived in the house with her; other wives who arrived as brides had secrets to whisper as the summer wore on; they appeared with nainsooks and soft, fine flannels in work-baskets which had been filled with wool yarn for soldiers' socks; and they boasted, proudly, of morning indispositions. But Alice remained as usual.
It bewildered her because of her previous confidence that she was certain to bear. Of course, she realized that the first half year was no test yet it might be all of her time; at any moment the order might be given for the division, to which David was attached, to entrain for a port. Indeed, repeatedly rumor ran in Rockford that the division was immediately to go overseas to complete its instruction in France or England.
There Fidelia was; and amid Alice's fears of the war, grew again fear of Fidelia, which for a time had abated. She imagined, not Fidelia's return, but David's meeting her on a London street. "What then?" Alice challenged herself. "Nothing," herself replied. No act, surely, and no word disloyal to her; for acts and words would be within his control. But feeling would not be!
She put down such thoughts. David showed nothing but love for her, even when he was caught off guard.
She was standing with David and a few other girls and men on a Rockford street when a man came up and hailed, "Hello, Herrick! How's that wonderful wife of yours?"
"Hello," David replied and he caught Alice's arm with a firmness of pressure which she did not understand until she met the stranger's stare after David said, "This is my wife."
"Oh!" said the fellow. "Oh! Glad to meet you," he muttered and turned away without interest.
David led her away from the others and she looked up at him and asked, "He knew you and Fidelia?"
"The idiot!" David said and swore at the fellow and clung to her and made her happy.
No; she had no right to fear Fidelia in England.
As it proved, David never went across. He was very well liked and he worked hard and gained a recommendation which won him a captaincy and assignment, with other officers of unusual energy and ability, to take special instruction at the School of Fire, at Fort Sill, which was in the southwestern part of Oklahoma.
This fort was near the town of Lawton; so Alice went there and found furnished quarters in an Oklahoma boarding-house where, through winter rain and summer drought and dust and heat, while David drilled for the great artillery attack which was to be made in the spring of 1919, Alice watched the war out.
Other wives at the boarding-house went home, at their appointed times in that year, and telegrams arrived telling of the birth of a boy or a girl; some of the mothers returned with their babies; and a few had their babies born at Lawton; but Alice was without child and she returned alone with David to the bungalow with the wide, rough stone chimney and the room, beside their own bedroom, which she had said would be their baby's.
She cried by herself in the little house; she cried not solely from her disappointment. With the war over, with its duties for her and its excitements ended, and she without a child, what was she to do?
She felt that David and she were approaching the condition which surprised them at the end of their term in college. Again he had been doing double work at school and had given to his hard task his entire interest and energy; he had finished the long grind of duty and he required contrast to it; he wanted to play. And Alice thought of Fidelia and she tried to be "light."
She went to the theater with him and got up supper parties. She had him take her out to dine and dance. She tried to be very gay but it felt false to herself. She did not really want to be light with him; she preferred being serious and discussing and forming plans and talking over his work with him.
"And he doesn't need that now. He does it only to please me," she realized. "But it would be all right, if I had a baby."
There was no baby; there were only he and she and they were very much as they had been when Fidelia had come.
David did not need serious discussions; he wanted play; but he blamed himself, not Alice, for the dissatisfaction he felt. He wanted a child and he held himself guilty for his childlessness.
He recognized that there was no rational basis for blaming himself; but his father accused him. His father pronounced that God very likely was punishing him for his manner of life with Fidelia; since Fidelia and he had forbidden the children which God would have given, God was denying the child which David desired now.
The idea angered David for its outrageous injustice to Alice; yet he could not help wondering if it might be so. It made him even more gentle when Alice cried.
"You're so good to me, David," she whispered.
"I'm not good to you. You're the good one. You stuck to me throughout all that deadly training and never a complaint from you for boarding-school food or heat or the dust or the dullness of it all. A smile for me every time and such dearness, Alice!"
Alice and he went to her father's home for dinner on a Sunday. It was February and the lake was frozen as it had been seven years before; and up and down the shore rose white hummocks and hillocks of ice making miniature mountains and valleys like those which Fidelia had visited on the morning she rose to see the sunrise and he had followed her and they had become Titans together on the brink of Creation and they had played in the caves of the coast of Iceland fifty thousand years ago.
Beyond lay the floe and it drifted slowly as it had on that night when Fidelia and he left the world together, through the Seventh Gate, and on the Throne of Saturn sate.
He saw the hotel and he thought of the gay suite where breakfast was brought to Fidelia and him and she sat in the sun with her hair over her shoulders.
When they arrived at the house, they went up to her old room. In the next room, which now was called his, he found a letter which had been forwarded from the hotel where Fidelia and he had lived and at which he had registered Mr. Sothron's address for mail which might arrive when he was in service.
The postmark was White Falls, Iowa, and on the flap was engraved The Drovers' Bank. He tore it open and read:
My Dear Mr. Herrick:
A communication from Mrs. Fidelia Bolton, to-day received from England, bears information which may be of concern to you. Samuel Bolton, her husband, was wounded in an action near the Dendre in October and since has died in a hospital in London.
Looking up, David saw that Alice was in her own room, and he moved from sight of her.
So Bolton was dead; that tall, vaunting man who had first been Fidelia's husband and then, five years later, had drawn her to him again, was dead; he who had cooked that first camp supper with her, the best ever though it was burnt black, he was dead; he who boasted exultantly of his tremendous eleven days with her which "were days," he was dead; and it was impossible for David Herrick to slow his pulse of triumph over that. If he had won no more than mere survival itself, yet he was alive, Bolton was dead.
But Fidelia—Fidelia Bolton, Mrs. Fidelia Bolton? "A communication . . . which may be of concern to you." What did Edward Jessop mean by that; what had Fidelia written? "Of concern to you . . . Samuel Bolton, her husband . . . has died."
"No concern of mine," David whispered to himself. "No concern of mine. She went to him; she wanted to go."
Alice was moving about in her room and he heard her; he saw her slight figure pass the doorway and he thrust his hand with the letter into his pocket. "It's going to bother her," he thought. "It's going to play the devil with her. She can't help it."
Through several moments, he considered whether he could hide it from her altogether; but the letter had come to her home with the White Falls postmark; there might easily be mention of it; besides he knew he should tell her.
He took his hand from his pocket and entered her room.
"Fidelia's husband is dead," he said. "He was wounded near the Dendre and died in a hospital in London. Fidelia seems to have written Jessop, who used to be her guardian; he wrote me. Here's the letter, Alice."
She took it, staring at him, and with it she sat down. "Fidelia's free, you mean. I knew all along it must be. She wants to come back to you."