Fidelia/Chapter 18
FIDELIA disappeared into the women's room, half an hour before the train was due at Itanaca, and when she emerged she was fresh and radiant without a sign of four hours' hot travel. David arose as she rejoined him and she asked: "Do I look all right now?"
"You're the most beautiful girl in the world!" he whispered to her and he was sure it was so.
The heat and excitement brightened her large eyes and heightened the clear color of her lovely skin. David was excited.
The town, which the train was entering, differed in no important aspect from other towns passed during the afternoon. The drab, dusty station was a replica of others; behind it lay a wide, rutted, sunbaked road. Harder's general store showed a sun-blistered side to arriving passengers; Eldrige's feed store faced it and there was old Jake Cullen shoeing a horse in the door of his blacksmith shop. Half a dozen identical cars, all identically dusty, clustered before the Ford Garage. The dry, dust-powdered elms of July drooped in the parched parkway before "The Itanaca House"; an opposite clump somewhat shaded the west front of the new, white painted picture theater and of Lekkin's billiard hall next it.
In David's mind, as he gazed from the car, there attached to each establishment and each person in sight the pronouncement of his father's judgments. Lekkin's hall was a place of idleness, gambling and vileness; David's father would, if he could, shut the hall and burn its furniture. The picture theater did much more harm than good, though it might be made only an instrument for good. Mr. Harder was a God-fearing Christian and generous, if easy-going; Cullen drank in secret. . . .
David looked past the fronts of the stores and up the road which reached away in a pleasant vista of trees between which showed the roofs of homes; the home of Henry West, whom David always had been told to respect; of Theodore Lorber, whose first wife had divorced him for scriptural sin and who brazenly had married again. On a rise of ground appeared the big, red brick house of Mr. Fuller from whom—in defiance of his father—David had borrowed the ten thousand dollars with which he had bought his partnership in the Hamilton Agency.
He turned his eyes to the left and he sought and immediately found a tall, tapered, solitary steeple. He could not see his home; he could not see even the church building below the steeple but, almost as vividly as though he stared upon it, there formed before him the wide, grassy lot of the church enclosure, surrounded by a picket fence which ran around both the plain, poor, white clapboard church and the plainer, poorer, white clapboard cottage beside it.
Often when he thought of the church and of his home, the soul of them seemed to be his mother, his gentle, loving, patient and dutiful mother who was busy every waking moment at some task about the house or for her children or for her husband or for the church. At this moment, David did not think of his mother; the soul of that steeple, the soul of that home, the very soul of the town itself seemed to be his father. Not only to David but to every one in this town his father's pronouncements were known. Men could defy them, as David himself had defied them; but no one could ignore them. They cast on the defensive the proprietor of the pool hall, Cullen, and Lorber, Mr. Fuller and David himself; for his father fought for a standard of life—a bigoted and narrow and out-of-date standard, men might say; David himself might say it—still it was a standard for decency and right. Suppose that standard altogether fell, David thought. Suppose his father deserted it; suppose his father abandoned the faith, which David himself was denying. Suppose that steeple, with no belief below it, merely pointed to an empty sky.
The idea shook David; he caught at Fidelia's sleeve. "There's father's church," he said huskily and tried to clear his throat and could not. "Our house is right beside it."
The train stopped and, when the parlor-car porter had raised the trap over the steps and placed his little stool for Fidelia's feet, David followed his wife to the ground. Idlers, who always were about the station, saw her and came closer, staring; they saw David, the preacher's son, coming from the parlor car. "Hello, Dave!" they hailed in frank surprise.
David replied to them by name and he drew Fidelia from them. She knew that he had not written to his family to tell the train upon which he and she would arrive; and he had explained to her that, except by appointment, no driver met a train at Itanaca. If anyone wanted a car, he walked across the road to the Ford garage; but no one hired a car to go to the Methodist parsonage; at least, no Herrick ever did. The house was hardly a half mile from the station.
"Of course well walk," Fidelia said and she took from the porter her box of roses and the long, narrow package of the parasol. David picked up their suitcase and her huge basket of chocolates; the flush of his feeling for his father was gone. At any moment he might meet his father; or he might see his mother in Harder's or at the counter of the butcher shop selecting, with her scrupulous care, a good cut of cheap meat. But on the street he saw no one of his family. Many friends spoke to him and every one stared at Fidelia; several stopped him. "This is your wife, Dave?" they asked.
Every one knew he had been married; so his father must have told them; his father would not depute to any one else the task of telling his congregation that his son secretly had married a girl whom the family had not yet met. But Fidelia amazed them. No one was prepared to see David Herrick bring home a girl like her.
"They're nice people here," Fidelia said to him, when she and he walked on alone.
"Anybody ought to be nice to you!" David replied. She was kept flushed by the many meetings and the warmth of the walk. "They all like you!" he declared. "They never saw anybody as beautiful as you before."
He and she were alone when they reached the picket fence. "Here's home," David said.
At this hour of a summer afternoon, the shadow of the steeple fell across the path to the house; and David stood in the shadow after he opened the gate.
The church was closed and quiet; the cottage was as quiet, although the door and windows stood open. No one was in sight.
David said: "Probably only mother and the girls are home. Probably they're busy in back." Ordinarily he would have called out, at coming home; but now he did not. He led Fidelia to the door. "We'll go in," he said.
The house within was quiet; a sweet odor, that of strawberries cooking, came from the kitchen. "Mother's putting up preserves," David whispered to Fidelia. He did not want to announce them just yet; he was watching Fidelia as she glanced about his home.
Plain, cheap curtains, but very clean, hung at the windows; the carpet on the living-room floor was nearly threadbare. The furniture was a plain, oak table, dented but polished, a horse-hair covered sofa and a severe rocking-chair and several plain, "straight" chairs of differing ages and design. The wall paper was clean by dint of repeated rubbings with bread crumbs and at the cost of much of the gray and brown pattern which originally had decorated it. Upon the furniture, upon the curtains, upon the carpet, everywhere one looked closely were proofs of repeated repair and care for cheap, outworn things.
Fidelia's eyes filled. She put down her packages and one of her hands sought David's. As he felt her clasp, he hardened his hand within hers to oppose her pity for his people.
"They don't care whether they have things or not," he whispered almost fiercely in his pride.
He heard his mother's voice and, in the blue gingham dress in which she did her cooking, she came from the kitchen. "David!" she cried; and then she looked on the beautiful, vivid girl who had come with him.
What Fidelia saw was a woman not beautiful at all and who never had been beautiful. She had wonderful eyes, large and gray, of the grayness which is warm and friendly and patient. Her eyes were set rather far apart in her thin, plain face. Her body was very thin, even more so than Fidelia had expected from that dress which she had exhibited to the salespeople at Field's. But thin as she was, she was not flat-bosomed; she was motherly, in spite of her thinness. She had brown, abundant hair, nearly half gray; her hands, besides being very thin, were calloused and wrinkled. But her eyes and her lips showed she was not old. As a matter of fact, she was barely forty-three; for she had married when she was twenty and David had been born within the year.
Fidelia did not feel that she was old; she was younger than Fidelia had expected her to be but she had worn herself so much more! Fidelia thought of her washing and polishing and mending over and over the poor, cheap possessions of this house; Fidelia thought of her accepting from neighbors worn garments and wearing them out, as she had worn that woolen dress which Fidelia had seen; Fidelia felt how she herself and David had hurt her by marrying without even letting her know; and Fidelia felt from her for David and for Fidelia herself, only love. Fidelia sobbed.
"Why, there!" said David's mother and the thin arms were about Fidelia; and how soft the wrinkled, calloused hands were on Fidelia's face. "Why, there, my dear—my dear!"
"You're so sweet!" sobbed Fidelia. "I didn't know you'd be so sweet!"
A plain quiet girl came from the kitchen. "Hello, Deborah," David said. She was in blue gingham like her mother; she had dark hair, unlike both her mother and David; but she was tall like David and nearly his age. A little girl of ten with brown hair and big gray eyes stared at Fidelia. "This is Esther," David said and picked her up and kissed her.
When Fidelia's mother released her, Fidelia sat down and took the little girl in her lap. Fidelia wanted to do something for these people and to do it at once; and Esther offered the chance to begin.
"I've got a basket of chocolates, Esther," she said, kissing the child. "A great big basket. Get it for me, David, please."
He got it and the flowers and the gay green parasol. So they were all about—the extravagant, long-stemmed roses in a white china water pitcher, the satin-lined candy-basket open and the parasol out of its wrappings—when David's father came in.
Fidelia, still holding the little, gray-eyed girl in her lap, looked up at the doorway to see a tall, black-haired man in black. Dark eyes—brown, they were, actually, though under his black brows she could not see the color—gazed at her. A thin, but strong looking hand, dark from the black hair upon the back of it, grasped the side of the door-way in which he stood.
David arose; his sister Deborah arose; David's mother, who had sat on the sofa, also arose; the child in Fidelia's lap, whom Fidelia was feeding chocolates, freed herself from Fidelia's arms; but Fidelia did not get up.
She felt, with a sudden drop from her joy in giving her gifts, that it was no use for her to try to please this man. She thought of the forty dollars she had planned to spend for a gift for him and thought: "Suppose I'd done it!"
His eyes examined the extravagant basket beside her; he noticed the flowers and the gaudy parasol. They did not surprise him; they seemed to be what he expected, after seeing her. He gazed at David.
"Father!" said David. "Father—"
"I was at Mr. White's when I heard you had come home, David," he said. "I returned at once."
"Yes, father," said David.
His father took his hand from the doorway and came a few steps closer to Fidelia. "You must be my son's wife," he said slowly. "You must be—Fidelia."
"I'm Fidelia," she said, frightened. Seldom indeed did she feel frightened; she did not know at exactly what she was frightened now but she was.
"I'm glad you have come to visit us. I want you to take your place in my family."
Fidelia did not know what to reply to this man; she did not know how to treat a man who disapproved of her, upon whom she made no favorable effect at all. She said, nervously: "We haven't come for a visit."
"She means, father," David put in quickly, "we've come down just for the day. I've got to go back to-morrow night."
His father turned to him. "Why must you go back?"
"For business, father."
"Your automobile business, that is."
"That's my business, father."
"Yes," his father said, as though he had had to recollect. "Of course that's your business."
Then David saw that his father was shaking. His father said: "Come to my room after a minute, David."
His father faced Fidelia again. "This is now your home," he announced to her. "You will always be welcome here; always," he repeated.
When his father left the room, David went to his wife and kissed her; then, quivering himself, he sought his father in the church.
His father's room—the chamber his father meant when he said "my room"—was a small, square apartment under the church steeple which a man less given to the plainest in speech and thought would have called his "study." It contained the books which his father had had at the Seminary, the later-bought volumes of sermons, The Life of Christ, four brown backs of Josephus and the dictionary of the Bible in three severe, regular rows upon home carpentered pine shelves; it contained a flat, deal table, with a drawer, which his father used for a desk and two straight, cheap chairs and a swivel chair bought, secondhand, at a sheriff's sale when a local insurance agency had failed. The square of brown carpet was a masterpiece of matched ends and corners which had been trimmed off when a new strip was laid in the aisle of the church below.
There were four tall, narrow windows, one in each wall; and a characteristic of the room was that, late in the afternoon, the sun shone straight through it, in the west window and out the east. David knew no other room where the sun did that. The rising sun similarly shone through to the west, of course; and David, from his window in the house, used to watch the gleaming spot in the shadow of the steeple. That light, shining through, used to seem a mystic symbol of special power endowed upon his father in that room. There his father went to write his sermons; there he went to meditate and pray when perplexities came upon him; there his father, alone, underwent those spiritual experiences when he "felt the presence of God."
To David, this room was more a solemn place of God than the pulpit in the church below. Sometimes, such as on Christmas day and during Sunday school entertainments, there might be merriment in the church but never was there merriment or lightness here. No one ever visited this room except on a serious errand; no child from the cottage ever played here.
A large, black Bible always was upon the desk; it was there now and it was open at some place in the new testament, David saw. His father sat before it and facing the door at the top of the winding steps which David had climbed. The shaft of the sun, passing through the room, was between David and his father.
"I want you to tell me about your marriage," Ephraim Herrick said at once in his direct way which scorned euphonies and preliminaries. He had a letter on his table beside his Bible and David recognized it for the letter which he had written from camp.
"What do you want to know?" David asked.
"Why you married secretly—that is, secretly as far as your family was concerned."
"Because I'd broken my engagement with Alice," David answered abruptly. "I wrote you that."
"Yes," his father said. "You wrote me that; but you did not write that it was for the purpose of marrying some one else. Why didn't you?"
"Because I knew you'd never approve of Fidelia, father; because—because I loved her, father, and I meant to marry her, no matter what you'd say. And I did it."
"Yes," said his father. "You have brought me an accomplished fact. It is very different from a mere wish or purpose. Fidelia has become your wife; you are her husband. God has joined you."
David jerked, involuntarily, as his father's voice gave him a vision of God—the God of his childhood, whose presence often was here under the steeple and who had joined David to Fidelia, however David denied him.
"I wouldn't have brought you an accomplished fact," David said, "if it would have been better in any way to have told you. Before I borrowed that money from Mr. Fuller, I told you what I was going to do; you said about everything you could to me to stop me from going into business and particularly to stop my taking that money; but I went into business. Now I've married."
"I have never denied you the right to marry."
"You did not want me to marry Alice; so it would've been worse if you'd seen Fidelia, I knew."
"How did you know that?"
"Because she's further from your idea of a wife for me than Alice ever was. When I wrote you the note from college to say that I wasn't going to marry Alice, I wrote some more to you," David proceeded steadily. "I didn't send it. I think I remember just what I said. I wrote: 'A girl has come to college who is the type you would find more detrimental to me than Alice. She's the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. I know almost nothing of her character except that she is pleasant and she's strong in physical endurance and keeps cheerful hour after hour under trying conditions. The truth is, I think almost nothing about her character and less about her religious faith. I love her.
"'You wouldn't call it love. You'd say I desire her. Well, I do; and I mean to marry her.' That's what I wrote and it's all true—except that she is cheerfuller and pleasanter day after day than ever I'd thought she could be. I've married her and I'm happy with her. Father, I didn't know what happiness could be till I married her. It's good and right to be happy, father; and I'm happy as I never supposed I could be, happy—"
"Happy!" His father arose with his hand on his table; he leaned forward so that the sun, striking through the room, shone on his face. "'But and if ye suffer for righteousness sake, happy are ye! If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye!' They are the words of Peter, the Apostle, if you forget them, my son; they are the words he wrote when the Roman world was sinking in lust and giving itself to physical pleasures, as our world does to-day. 'But and if ye suffer for righteousness sake, happy are ye!'
"I wanted you for the work of God; I wanted you for that happiness some day, and in your right time, my son. You turned from it first to go into business to make money and now you've married for physical happiness. I said everything I could to stop you from going into business; that's true. Not because business is wrong or sinful but because it is wrong for you. I feel as I do about Fidelia, not because marriage is wrong, but because I know this marriage is dangerous to you. And you know it; that is why you concealed it from me, that was why you knew I would have stopped you, if I could.
"But now you are man and wife. God has joined you. God works in his own way; and perhaps, perhaps his way of going about the redemption of you was to double the difficulty of your redemption and break you first under the burden. Perhaps that is it."
In the evening David telephoned to Mr. Fuller, from whom he had borrowed the ten thousand dollars, and he asked when he could call. "Any time," said Mr. Fuller cordially. "And bring along that wife of yours I'm hearing about." So David and Fidelia went to Mr. Fuller's on the next afternoon.
Fuller was delighted with Fidelia; and when David and she were leaving, Mr. Fuller detained David at the door.
"Boy, you've a wonderful wife, you certainly made a great move for yourself when you married that girl," Fuller praised David. "She'll be a big asset to you in business."