Fidelia/Chapter 19
FIDELIA surprised David, when they were on the train for Chicago, by proposing a plan for their immediate domestic arrangements. He had intended to return to the Blackstone for another day or so while they could look around for permanent quarters.
"I know just the place," Fidelia announced.
It was a new, residence hotel built close to the lake on the shore about a mile south of Alice's home; it was an unusually well-planned and pleasant hotel, with all the modern, popular features for making its guests comfortable and furnishing them entertainment. Its nearness to the Sothrons bothered David but he felt that he should not object for that reason; so Fidelia and he went to the hotel from the train and had their trunks brought from down town the next day.
In the evening, while Fidelia was finishing her settling into their new room, David took a walk alone up the shore drive to within sight of Alice's home. The house was dark and, going closer, he saw that shutters were on the lower windows. He tried the iron gate and found it locked.
When he reported this to Fidelia, upon his return to the hotel, she said: "Why, Mr. and Mrs. Sothron and Alice are all away in Europe. It was in the society column the other day. They'll be gone all summer or at least Alice and her mother will."
David thought of the plan which Alice and he had made. According to it, they would have been settled now in a flat upon one of the streets a half mile west of the lake in a neighborhood of moderate rents, where many young married people of the Sothrons' acquaintance were living. If he and she had carried through their plan, Alice would not have gone away this summer. He wondered how often their plan came to her mind and whether she found herself reckoning what she and he might be doing, if they had gone on as they had intended.
He found himself thinking of the people whom he had met through Alice and who naturally would have become his friends, if Alice and he had married. Occasionally he saw them on the street or in a car and, though they always spoke to him, no one suggested any improvement of acquaintance with him. The men were just the sort he would have liked to know; and he would have liked Fidelia to make friends with their wives. instead, she had to make her own friends at the hotel; and it was amazing to David how many friends she made, both women and men, and how the life of the hotel occupied her.
His day and hers began early; for he had his habit of early rising and Fidelia always got up with him. They slipped into bathing suits and, with moccasins on bare feet and robes about them, they went down to the water. He usually dove first and when he came up, she dived. He caught her as she came to the top and they laughed and splashed at each other and climbed up and dived again. Then they swam out, side by side, into the deep water.
"You go back now," David would warn her.
Upon such an occasion, and upon such alone, she disobeyed him. "I'm going out if you are."
So, after a moment more, he would turn back; she turned, swimming strongly beside him, her bare arms just under the surface of the water.
Her glorious hair was hidden under a rubber helmet cap but her face was never less feminine for that. He whispered to her, when they were alone, "You're the loveliest that ever lived." When others were about, he watched them gaze at her and he exulted that she was his.
When they dressed in their room, Fidelia shook down her hair, for in spite of her cap, always some edge got wet, and the glorious red gold of her hair lay upon the clear, pink pearl of her fair shoulders. David had breakfast brought to their room. He dressed for breakfast and sometimes she did; but usually she got into a dressing-gown and left her hair down over her shoulders and she sat at the side of the table in the sun.
At eight, promptly, he left for his office and he seldom returned before six, for the Hamilton car was attracting real attention on motorcar "row." Old, established agencies for other cars began taking notice of Snelgrove-Herrick and they paid the new model the compliment of knocking it. David encountered unexpected difficulties in selling the new shipments from the factory; but he was used to difficulties and he honestly liked hard work. For him, the idleness of honeymoon days was definitely ended; but the return to the city brought no serious occupation to fill Fidelia's days.
David bothered about it, at first, when he observed that, after he left her, she seemed to spend about half of each morning in their room; for if he telephoned to her before eleven o'clock, she usually answered from the room. After eleven, the switchboard girl either offered to "page" Mrs. Herrick or reported definitely, "Mrs. Herrick is out." So when David found he would have noontime free, he learned to phone before eleven, if he wanted his wife to lunch in town with him. When he asked her, she always came, though she seemed always to have a luncheon engagement for any day he did not ask her.
She was "out" so regularly in the afternoon that he gave up phoning then. At night, she liked to tell him where she had been and what she had done. "It was auction, David, at half-cent points. Gertrude and I—" Gertrude was a Mrs. Vredick, of about Fidelia's age, who was one of her first friends at the hotel—"we won six dollars." Oh perhaps "it" had been a matinee or a motion picture with tea or a soda afterwards. Or Gertrude and she had been shopping; or they had had their fortunes told. Sometimes she had spent almost the entire afternoon with Gertrude, or some other friend, in a hair-dresser's going through the leisurely and agreeable "getting" of a manicure, or a shampoo and a "wave." But she always was in their room, or at least in the hotel, when he returned; always she was ready to go out with him anywhere to dinner or to the theater, to dance at the hotel or to do with him whatever else he wanted. And day after day she went on thus cheerfully and with every evidence of content.
David did not understand how she could; but he did not speak to her about it. He wondered over it by himself as he lived with her and watched her.
It would have been easy to understand if he could consider it a merely temporary period with her while she was waiting for a child; but she was not awaiting a child. The greatest part of David's wonder about her was that she did not want a child soon.
He had never discussed children with her before their marriage, as he had done with Alice when he and she were engaged and when Alice and he had agreed that they wanted four children and they would want the first child in their first year. He had simply assumed that, if any girl would want a child, Fidelia surely would; but she did not. "Not now, David!" she appealed to him, when he spoke of it to her. "Oh, I want a baby but—not yet, David."
The time, he thought, surely should be the woman's affair; yet she surprised him. He was certain that it was no physical fear which constrained her; he could not think of her physically afraid and what a perfect body she had for motherhood!
He felt, very vaguely at first and then not more definitely but more strongly, the existence of a reason which she would not confide to him; but it did not disturb his happiness with her when they locked their door upon themselves alone and left the world far, far away. It was as when he followed her into the magic valley of the Titans which made him, with her, a god responsible to no one.
When the sun, striking in through their window, awakened them, often they lay and, merely by looking beyond the window and not seeing the frame, they gazed upon the sun rising from the water and felt themselves alone on the edge of Creation and they said that they alone lived fifty thousand years ago or a million ages away in time to come. Of course they could have it whatever they wished for one can argue any age, or any youth, to sky and water and sun.
October came with no change in the manner of life at the hotel except that the morning swim in the lake was omitted since the water was cold. The month brought a lull at the office. The closed-car models were in and being delivered; they were proving very satisfactory and David did not have to work so hard as in the summer.
He had plenty of energy and he had a feeling of laxness at not doing more and at spending evening after evening at dancing, at cards with the Vredicks, at a theater alone with Fidelia or in some party she got up. He enjoyed the evenings and he was doing so well that the expense of the frequent entertainments did not worry him but afterwards he felt guilty about them. He explained it as the result of his habit of doing double work in the fall when he used to be in college and working to support himself and for money to send home.
He missed something else which he could not feel more exactly than as an unexpected lack of full satisfaction in what he was doing. When he had been in the University and also dealing in secondhand cars, it seemed to him that nothing could be better than to be able to give all his time to this agency which he had now procured; and he did enjoy his success, but he missed college. He missed not only the companionship of Lan and Bill Fraser and the other fellows who had lived in the Delta A house with him for four years; he missed classes, too, and the agreeable sense of advancement one had when in college and each day progressing nearer to the desirable and honorable goal of graduation. He did not suspect, until now, how much of his satisfaction in being in business, when he was in college, had come from his working for money, not for its own sake, but to earn him his education and to help out at home.
He was still helping out at home and that gave him satisfaction. He was not working for money simply to spend upon pleasant living for his wife and himself.
He remembered how Alice said he never could work just for money for pleasure. He remembered how she said it when in his arms that night he defied Eternity and she and he set the date upon which they would be married.
She came home in the last week in October. Fidelia read to David, from the society column, the announcement that the Sothron home on Sheridan Road was re-opened and that Mrs. Walter Sothron and her daughter had returned from Europe.
David met her about a week later. He had driven north in the afternoon to take home a customer, a woman, who had bought a car from him and who found herself too timid to drive it, alone. She happened to live only a couple of miles north of his hotel, so after leaving his customer and her car at home, he decided to walk, as the day was clear and pleasant.
When driving, he had passed the Sothron house and he had seen that it was open and as he neared it on foot, he watched the door and the walk; but no one went in or out. He was a block past the house and the stir which it had roused was subsiding within him when he recognized Alice approaching from the south.
In his confusion of feelings, he became keenly self-conscious of his new clothes. He had on a new, well-tailored suit, a new, light overcoat and new hat, evidences of much money spent upon himself, evidences also of great difference in him from the David who used to debate with her whether he "ought" to pay to have an overcoat made for himself.
He proceeded until he was within a few paces of her and then he halted; she came nearly to him and he thought, for a moment, that she meant merely to speak to him and pass. She spoke but she did not pass and he took off his hat and held it at his side.
"How do you do, David?" she asked, in her quiet way and her blue eyes looked up steadily at him.
He said: "I saw in the paper that you were home."
It sounded as though his presence near her home was a result of his having seen the item in the paper. He asked, quickly: "You had a good trip?"
"Yes."
He looked down, not at her eyes, he looked at the walk, at the tips of her small, pretty shoes. He glanced at her hands. How often he had clasped them! She asked: "Where are you living?"
The way she said "you" included Fidelia with him. He told her: "Right down here at the hotel."
She turned enough to glance toward the hotel. "You're near," she said.
"Yes."
"You must be doing well, David," she continued, still gazing toward the hotel; then she looked at him and noticed his clothes.
"I am, Alice. The car's turned out a good one."
"I heard so."
He wanted to ask her how she had heard; but the fact that she, who had planned his business so intimately with him, now had to hear through a third person how it was going, shook them both.
"I suppose," she started and stopped and, after swallowing, she said, "I suppose you're able to start already paying back Mr. Fuller, though you didn't have to till January."
How his arrangements hung in her mind! It was not strange for they had been her arrangements too.
"We could pay off something now—I mean Snelgrove and I," he particularized his "we." He had meant Snelgrove and himself, not Fidel:a and himself; he never thought of Fidelia with him in the business although he realized that always, with Alice, he had said "we," for her and him, when making the plan. "But Mr. Fuller doesn't want us to lower our balance yet. He's well satisfied."
Alice asked: "How's your father, David?"
"The same," David answered, shortly.
At last Alice asked: "How is Fidelia?" And when she did it, another part of their plan—Alice's plan and his—was in his mind. It was the part of their plan which hoped that she would bear a child in their first year.
"She's—the same," said David and Alice gazed into his eyes and she left him.
Upon this afternoon, Fidelia was not in when he reached the hotel for he was considerably earlier than usual. She returned at her customary time and, opening the door of their room, she came upon David sitting in the dark by the window.
"Why, what's happened?" she cried and she switched on the light.
"Nothing," denied David. "I had a 'drive home' up this way a while ago and there was no use going back to the office." He kissed his wife and she asked no more but waited.
She began taking off her suit to dress for dinner and while he was changing his shirt, he said: "I was up beyond the Sothrons' and I walked back. I ran across Alice."
Fidelia made no comment immediately and he did not look at her. In a moment she said: "You surely stopped to speak to her, David."
"Yes. She had a good trip. I told her we were living here. She asked about business and for father and you."
Fidelia went on undressing and when she next spoke it was to tell him lightly where she had been that afternoon and David had no idea of how she dwelt on the incident.
She recorded it carefully in her diary as soon as he left her alone the next morning.
An inevitable effect of such recording, which Fidelia did not appreciate, was to give more weight to some circumstances than they perhaps merited. It was her nature to exaggerate her feelings and she wrote, in part: "I came in on David to-night in the dark; and it gave me a start! I knew right away he had had some experience. He had; he'd seen Alice for the first time since we've been married. Of course he'd feel badly and be sorry for her. I am. But he wasn't just sorry for her; he was thinking about her; he wanted to think about her there by himself; that's why he was sitting alone in the dark.
"There's things between them that stay with him and I don't make him forget. I feel it a lot of times. She's got a hold on him that he can't help and maybe I can't. . . . His father's got another hold on him. Sometimes I'm much more afraid of that, though David and I are man and wife now and that means forever with father Herrick. But if he ever found out about Lakoon, and it turns out I'm wrong, I guess he'd not stop at anything with me."
In several entries in her diary of following days, she made similar reference to the possibility of her being "wrong" about an event which she described no more definitely than "Lakoon." It was in her mind, troubling her again and again. One morning she wrote: "I am sure about it; I've every reason to feel sure. Any one would say so: but I don't absolutely know. Something might be known now that I haven't heard; of course that something might be either way. Flora would have heard, if any one did. I'll write Flora."
Several days later she again inscribed: "I ought to write Flora." But she did not; she put it off and off, lulling her fears by various visits to fortune tellers. From the past, there was nothing of great account to trouble her, they said.