The Web of Life Part 21

Without a word the two descended, Sommers carefully barring and bolting the door. When they reached her room, her manner changed, and she spoke with a note of elation in her voice:

"I was _so_ afraid that you would not come again after sending me help."

"I shall come as often and as long as you need me," Sommers answered, taking her hand kindly. "He has had another attack," he continued. "Mrs.

Ducharme told me--I sent her out--and I suppose he's sleeping off the opiate."

"Yes, it was dreadful, worse than anything yet." She uttered these words jerkily, walking up and down the room in excitement. "And I've just left the schoolhouse. The a.s.sistant superintendent was there to see me. He was kind enough, but he said it couldn't happen again. There was scandal about it now. And yesterday I heard a child, one of my pupils, say to his companion, 'She's the teacher who's got a drunken husband.'"

Her voice was dreary, not rebellious.

"I don't know what to do. I cannot move. It would be worse in any other neighborhood. I thought," she added in a low voice, "that he would go away, for a time at least, but his mind is so weak, and he has some trouble with walking. But he gets stronger, stronger, O G.o.d, every day! I have to see him grow stronger, and I grow weaker."

"It is simply preposterous," the doctor protested in matter-of-fact tones, "to kill yourself, to put yourself in such a position for a man, who is no longer a man. For a man you cannot love," he added.

"What would be the use of running away from the trouble? He has ruined my life. Alves Preston is a mere thing that eats and sleeps. She will be that kind of thing as long as she lives."

"That is romantic rot," the doctor observed coldly. "No life is ruined in that way. One life has been wrecked; but you, _you_ are bigger than that life. You can recover--bury it away--and love and have children and find that it is a good thing to live. That is the beauty of human weakness--we forget ourselves of yesterday."

In answer to his words her face, which he had once thought too immobile and pa.s.sive for beauty, flamed with color, the dark eyes flas.h.i.+ng beneath the broad white brow.

"Am I just caught in a fog?" she murmured.

"You are living in a way that would make any woman mad. I might twist myself into as many knots as you have. I might say that _I_ had caused this disaster; that March evening my hand was too true. For I knew then the man ought to die."

He blurted out his admission roughly.

"I knew you did," she said softly, "and that has made it easier."

His voice trembled when he spoke again. "But I live with facts, not fancies. And the facts are that that ruined thing should not clog you, ruin _you_. Get rid of him in any way you will,--I advise the county asylum. Get rid of him, and do it quickly before he crazes you."

When he had finished, there was an oppressive stillness in the room, as if some sentence had been declared. Mrs. Preston got up and walked to and fro, evidently battling with herself. She stopped opposite him finally.

"The only thing that would justify _that_ would be to know that you grasped it all--real happiness in that one bold stroke. Such conviction can _never_ come."

"Happiness!" he exclaimed scornfully. "If you mean a good, comfortable time, you won't find any certainty about _that_. But you can get freedom to live out your life--"

"You fail to understand. There _is_ happiness. See,--come here."

She led him to the front window, which was open toward the peaceful little lawn. On the railroad track behind the copse of scrub oak an unskilful train crew was making up a long train of freight cars. Their shouts, punctuated by the rumbling reverberations from the long train as it alternately buckled up and stretched out, was the one discord in the soft night. All else was hushed, even to the giant chimneys in the steel works.

One solitary furnace lamped the growing darkness. It was midsummer now in these marshy spots, and a very living nature breathed and pulsed, even in the puddles between the house and the avenue.

"You can hear it in the night air," she murmured; "the joy that comes rising up from the earth, the joy of living. Ah! that is why we are made--to have happiness and joy, to rejoice the heart of G.o.d, to make G.o.d live, for _He_ must be happiness itself; and when we are happy and feel joy in living, He must grow stronger. And when we are weak and bitter, when the world haunts us as I felt this afternoon on leaving the superintendent, when men strike and starve, and others are hard and grasping--then He must shrink and grow small and suffer. There _is_ happiness," she ended, breathing her belief as a prayer into the solitude and night.

"What will you do to get it?" Sommers asked, shortly.

"Do to get it?" She drew back from the window, her figure tense. "When it comes within my grasp, I will do everything, everything, and nothing shall hinder me."

"Meantime?" the doctor questioned significantly.

"Don't ask me!" She sank into a chair and covered her eyes with her hand.

And neither spoke until the sound of footsteps was heard on the walk.

"There is Mrs. Ducharme coming home from the charmer of devils. It is time for me to go," Sommers said.

The room was so dark that he could not see her face, as he extended his hand; but he could feel the repressed breathing, the pa.s.sionate air about her person.

"Remember," he said slowly, "whenever you need me--want me for anything--send a message, and I shall come at once. We will settle this thing together."

There was a sharp pressure on his hand, her thin fingers drawing him toward her involuntarily. Then his hand dropped, and he groped his way to the door.

CHAPTER XVIII

The cars were still whirring up and down Stoney Island Avenue when Sommers left the cottage, but he did not think to stop one. Instead, he walked on heedlessly, mechanically, toward the city. Frequently he stumbled and with difficulty saved himself from falling over the dislocated planks of the wooden walk. The June night was brilliant above with countless points of light. A gentle wind drew in sh.o.r.e from the lake, stirring the tall rushes in the adjacent swamps. Occasionally a bicyclist sped by, the light from his lantern wagging like a crazy firefly. The night was strangely still; the clamorous railroads were asleep. Far away to the south a solitary engine snorted at intervals, indicating the effort of some untrained hand to move the peris.h.i.+ng freight. Chicago was a helpless giant to-night. When he came to the region of saloons, which were crowded with strikers, he turned away from the noise and the stench of bad beer, and struck into a gra.s.s-grown street in the direction of the lake. There he walked on, unmindful of time or destination, in the marvellous state of conscious dream.

The little s.p.a.ce of one day separated him from that final meeting with Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k in the pleasant cottage above the lake. He had gone there, drawn by her, and he had gone away repelled, at strife with himself, with her.

Nothing had happened since, and yet everything. As he had said to another woman, Mrs. Preston was a woman you remembered. And he had said that of a woman very different from the one he had seen and spoken with this night.

That stricken, depressed creature of the night of the operation had faded away, and in her place was this pa.s.sionate, large-hearted woman, who had spoken to him bravely as an equal in the dark room of the forbidding cottage. She had thrown a spell into his life this night, and his steps were wandering on, purposeless, unconscious, with an exhilaration akin to some subtle opiate.

Her life was set in noisome places. Yet the poor ma.s.s of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously--what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized poor; the stupid good, the pedantic, the foolish,--all, all that made the waking world of his experience! It was like the smoke wreath above the lamping torch of the blast-furnace. It was the screen upon which glowed the rosy colors of the essential fire. The fire,--that was the one great thing,--the fire was life itself.

As he walked on in the tumultuous sensations of dream, the discords of living were swept away: the beautiful flesh that rotted; the n.o.ble human figures that it was well to have covered; the shame of woman's form, of man's corrupted carca.s.s; the world that has, with its beauty and charm, side by side with the world that has not, with its grime and its nastiness.

In the dream that he dreamed the difference between the woman who had adornment and the other sad one back there in the cottage was as nothing.

The irritating paradox of life was reconciled: there was great reasonableness in things, and he had found it.

Men fought and gambled to-day in the factories, the shops, the railroads, as they fought in the dark ages, for the same ends--for sensual pleasures, gross love of power, barbaric show. They would fight on, glorifying their petty deeds of personal gain; but not always. The mystery of human defeat in the midst of success would be borne in upon them. The barbarians of trade would give way, as had the barbarians of feudal war. This heaving, moaning city, blessedly quiet tonight, would learn its lesson of futility.

His eyes that had been long searching the dark were opened now, and he could bide his few years of life in peace. He had labored too long in the charnel house.

He forgave life for its disgusting manifestations, for the triviality of Lindsay, for the fleshy Porter with his finger in the stock market, for the ambitious Carson who would better have rested in his father's dugout in Iowa. They were a part of the travailing world, without which it could not fulfil its appointed destiny. It was childish to dislike them; with this G.o.d-given peace and understanding one could never be impatient, nor foam at the mouth. He could enter into himself and remove them from him, from _her_. Some day they two would quietly leave it all, depart to a place where as man and woman they could live life simply, sweetly. Yes, they had already departed, had faded away from the strife, and he was no longer in doubt about anything. He had ceased to think, and for the first moment in his life he was content to feel.

All emotion over life must come to be trans.m.u.ted to this--an elemental state of conviction transforming the tawdry acts of life. There was but this one everlasting emotion which equalized everything, in which all manifestations of life had their proper place and proportion, according to which man could work in joy. She and he were accidents of the story. They might go out into darkness to-night; there was eternal time and mult.i.tudes of others to take their place, to feel the ancient, purifying fire--to love and have peace.

CHAPTER XIX

The Fourth, of July had never before been kept in the like manner in Chicago. There was a row or two at Grand Crossing between the strikers and the railroad officials, several derailed cars and spiked switches, a row at Blue Island, and a bonfire in the stock yards. People were not travelling on this holiday, and the main streets were strangely silent and dull.

Sommers had found no one at the office in the Athenian Building. Lindsay had not been in since the strike began. Probably he would not appear until the disorderly city had settled down. Sommers had taken the clinic yesterday; to-day there was nothing for him to do except exercise his horse by a long ride in the blazing suns.h.i.+ne. Before he left the office a telegram came from Lake Forest, announcing that a postponed meeting of the board of managers of the summer sanitarium for poor babies would be put off indefinitely. Sommers knew what that meant--no appropriation for carrying on the work. At the last meeting the board of managers, who were women for the most part, had disagreed about the advisability of undertaking the work this season, when every one was feeling poor. Some women had been especially violent against supporting the charity in those districts where the strikers lived.

Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k, who was the secretary, and Sommers had got the heated members of the board to suppress their prejudices for the present, and vote a temporary subsidy. The telegram meant that under the present circ.u.mstances it would be hopeless to try to extract money from the usual sources. The sanitarium and creche would have to close within a week, and Sommers was left to arrange matters. After he had taken the necessary measures, he started on his ride. He had in mind to ride out of the city along the lines of railroad to the southwest to see whether the newspaper reports of the strike were justified or, as he suspected, grossly exaggerated. The newspapers, at first inclined to side with the Pullman men in their demand for arbitration, had suddenly turned about and were denouncing the strikers as anarchists. They were spreading broadcast throughout the country violent reports of incendiarism and riot.

Outside of the stations and the adjacent yards Sommers found little to see.