Fidelia/Chapter 13
"SATURN!" said Dave to Fidelia; they were pointing out stars.
"Which one?"
He showed her.
"How does that go?" said Fidelia.
"About in the same path as the moon, if the moon was up."
"I remember," Fidelia continued. She had not been thinking about the movement of the planet.
"'Up from Earth's center, through the Seventh Gate,'"
she repeated,
"'I rose and on the throne of Saturn sate.'"
She asked: "Do you mind saying it 'sate' to rhyme with 'gate'?"
"No," said Dave. "Go on."
"'And many a knot unravel'd by the Road,
But not the master-knot of human Fate.
"'There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the veil through which I could not see.
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was—and then no more of Thee and Me.'"
She asked: "That's beautiful, isn't it?" She loved the run of the words; she liked the fatalistic thought. It excited her pleasantly.
"You know some more?" Dave asked. He liked it, too—with her. It was pagan philosophy and the verse of a voluptuary; Dave had heard his father call anathema upon the poem which extolled pleasure as the greatest good in life.
"A lot of it," Fidelia said. "I love it. I've the book with the Vedder drawings. He has a wonderful page opposite those verses—some one seated on Saturn with the rings below him and all the worlds whirling about.
"'And that inverted Bowl they call the sky,'"
she quoted,
"'Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not your hands to It—for It
As impotently rolls as you and I.'"
Dave asked her: "Do you think that?"
"Why, I don't feel cooped at all. Do you?"
"No," said Dave and smiled in the starlight. She never bothered about the big idea of her verses, or of any other matter, he noticed. She liked them for the sensation they supplied. And he liked that in her.
He was light-minded and happy. He thought that his shore self would hardly know this Dave Herrick who walked the floe with Fidelia Netley. The boy, who had played with her in the ice caves, would know him; this David Herrick was that boy who now knew Fidelia much better. They had talked together a thousand things; and with each, Fidelia had more delighted him.
She said nothing profound; that was it! She never even tried to; the idea of being profound could not occur to her. She thought and said wholly natural, agreeable things, not like any one else. "She's just natural," he said to himself and soon he felt the corollary to it: "No one else I ever knew was natural."
Not even Alice; no. He thought how he had tried to throw off the constraint of his father's ideas when he had seized Alice that night he halted her car by the graveyard and how she, though she submitted to him, had been more afraid than he for himself and how she had doubted him.
He thought: "Suppose I'd had her in my arms!" This "her" was the girl now beside him. The idea, tremendously stirred him. He tried to forbid it, therefore, but it returned and returned. He thought: "Fidelia, she would have made me sure!"
He was amazingly untired though now, as the height of the sword of Orion showed, it was midnight. In the north, the Dipper tipped in its turn about the Pole star. All the heavens were sparkling clear and still with the silences of space. Calm had come upon the lake when the west wind had dropped to a varying breeze made mild from its journey over open water.
Hours ago Fidelia and Dave had lost the land sounds and now they drifted so far that separate lights upon the shore no longer could be identified. There was the aura of Chicago to the south; there was the streak of Sheridan Road. Somewhere on that strip of beach were the Sothrons' windows but they had become so distant that they bothered Dave no longer. Alice's useless bonfire had burnt out.
Gone also, was the light of the searching row-boat. It always was so far away that, when at last it gave up and went in, Fidelia and Dave felt more relief than anything else. They were glad that they no longer were causing others danger and discomfort.
Dave himself felt little discomfort, being warmly dressed in a heavy suit with a sweater under his coat. He was sure that Fidelia was less warm.
"With this on?" she exclaimed when he argued with her.
"This" was a shaggy sport skirt and jacket with woolen vest. She had knitted gloves, almost as heavy as his; and she wore a white tarn. She explained that she wore these at Minneapolis "when it got really cold, not just barely freezing like to-night."
She added "Imagine me cold!"
Dave couldn't imagine it; her splendid body must always be warm.
It was for Fidelia a night when she felt like going to the point of exhaustion, when she gloried in giving herself to the sensation of spending her strength and feeling how much more she had to spend. She enjoyed this sensation particularly in company; and in David Herrick she found endurance equal to her own.
Her impulse of self-reproach at bringing him here, had passed; he was with her because he wanted to be, instead of being with Alice Sothron in that warm house now lost amid the lights of the distant shore. Fidelia did not feel herself to blame more than she had been to blame for his following her to the shore for the sunrise.
Since people blamed her for that, likely they would blame her for this; but now she forgot them. There was no use of thinking about them until morning; here she was adrift under the stars with the man she most liked of all she had met since—since—
Her mind went back to that man who had been with her in that other event, something like this—to that friend who, so she had told David Herrick, was dead; and her feeling did not except him. She did not yet know David Herrick nearly so well; but what she knew, she liked better. And she had thought she had loved that other man.
"'He's certainly a contrast to S,'" she quoted to herself. They were her own words she was quoting, those which she wrote in her diary the night she met David Herrick. "'He has will and character. He's innocent and strong.'"
"Character," she reflected with herself. It seemed to her that she had come to Northwestern with a determination to make her expedition with character this time. The innocence of this strong man beside her appealed to her, also. For plainly he was innocent, not only of personal impurity, but even of the smaller self-indulgences; she felt that, on the other morning beside their caves of ice, she had set him really to play for the first time in his life. Undoubtedly he had taken part in games many times; but that morning for the first time she had freed his feeling to the spirit of play.
She felt: "That's what he wants more than anything else in the world; and he didn't know it. Alice Sothron didn't know it; or, if she did, she couldn't give it to him. I can."
That, to Fidelia, was merely a fact. "I can." She could; and Alice could not. Another fact was: "He wants me." The corollary of that fact was that he had ceased to want Alice.
Fidelia felt these facts. What she was to do about them—or if she was to do anything about them—was a matter for the future which had a way, so Fidelia had learned, of taking care of itself. One did things, in the future, which one could not possibly imagine today. She thought of what she herself had done.
In a way, she had come here to clear herself of that. "Character," she said to herself. "That's what I want this time."
Dave Herrick walked beside her. He did not clasp her; he did not touch her, unnecessarily; nor did he contrive the excuses for close contact with her which another man—which any other man in Fidelia's experience—would have arranged. He did not know that his constraint upon himself—his being there and yet keeping himself from her—stirred her far more than could any common clasp.
She sang:
"Oh what so rare, dear,
As a day of sunshine;
The sky is dear at last
The rain and storm are past."
The English verse of the warm "Sole Mio." He sang: he had learned that night not merely the verse but how to sing—sing! He had learned it from her there on the floe in the dark and cold.
Like the warm sun, her "Sole Mio," Fidelia kept aglow by the slow expending of her strength; she was happy. All other considerations she had put off until morning—all but one.
This was the star which David had pointed out to her in the east—Saturn, the star of her beautiful verse, yet the baleful star, the wandering planet of misfortune.
"That's Saturn?" she asked him, when their song was done.
"Yes."
"You're sure?"
"I know it. Why?"
She did not tell him. It might mean nothing; of course it was nothing; sensible people laughed at such ideas; yet she wished that Saturn was not the star ascendant to-night.
Dave left her side and walked alone. Sometimes, when he did this, he became drowsy while he walked and half dreamed. It seemed to him that Alice was crying and he was trying to comfort her. She seemed to be in his arms and she was shaken with sobs because some one had hurt her. He tried to comfort her; then he would realize that he could not because he was the one who hurt her.
When this roused him, he thought of his father and of Paul, the Apostle, and of the lust after the flesh of which he was accused for his desire for Alice. Now he desired, not Alice, but Fidelia and this must be lust after the flesh, if any passion was.
For in comparison with his desire for Fidelia, his love for Alice had been sober and responsible; its inception was serious and timid and it had grown, not so much in intensity, as by spread of their interests together till now it held idea of children and of a home as well as of work in which their hearts would be together.
With Fidelia he felt nothing of this. He wanted to take her away; he wanted her all to himself where no one could come. He pictured a warm, pleasant, indolent place where she and he would live in love.
Love? Love? Not in the love of which his father always talked; not in the love of God. He wanted to live with this wonderful girl in the love of the flesh—in what his father would call low, sensual sin. He wanted to marry her, of course; but marriage only made more mockery of such sin as he desired. It could not change the essence; David, son of Ephraim Herrick, knew that.
But that night there in the dark under the stars he planned how he might take Fidelia to his place of love.