Fidelia/Chapter 20
FIDELIA was brushing her hair beside an open window where the sun streamed in. It was an August sun, clear and hot and ten o'clock high in a turquoise sky. The lake under her window reflected the lucent blue and tinged it with a tint like the pale jade of the bracelet upon her arm. She slipped off the circlet of polished stone and held it before the water to compare the colors. She sang quietly as she resumed her brushing of her hair. David had gone to the office more than an hour ago, leaving her alone.
This room of hers high above the water and with wide, pleasant windows to the east and south was a particularly delightful "living-room" with its soft, blue rug and big, blue lounge, with pretty table and a desk and chairs painted that hue of gray which is gay and made more cheerful by little lines and designs in brighter color. There were bookshelves and books, a parchment-shaded lamp and a small, beautiful grand piano which was open. It was always open and with music on the rack. A dozen times a day Fidelia slipped into the piano seat and played; she loved to play but not to practice.
Beyond the blue Japanese screen before the doorway was a white and blue bath where also the sun shone in; and next was a bedroom, for Fidelia and David had a suite at the hotel now.
Fidelia had just finished doing her diary. In her locked trunk, which was in the hotel store-room, were fifteen red volumes, three new ones added to the twelve she had brought with her to Mrs. Fansler's, and the red bound book which lay open before Fidelia, with its pages for this morning filled, carried the record of Fidelia Herrick past the third anniversary of her marriage to David and up to this morning in the second month of their fourth year.
It was a record which might have dismayed Fidelia if she ever totalled the sum of her doings and reckoned the result of her days; but she never thought of anything like that. She often referred back to old volumes but only to reread certain pages or passages which she wished more vividly to recall. Yet the record emphasized her consciousness of certain tendencies such as the greater and greater infrequency of David's and her visits to Itanaca. As a consequence of the cessation of their visits, father Herrick was taking every opportunity to come to Chicago; he had arrived in the city on church business yesterday and looked in upon David at his office. This morning father Herrick was coming to call upon Fidelia.
"He's simply going to make himself feel more terribly about me," Fidelia said. "That's what he always does."
She did not like to be a subject of distress to him but she had just about abandoned the making of efforts to please him. What was the use when he was sure to see wrong in the most innocent things you did?
A pack of cards lay upon her table and, as she picked them up, idly, she thought how he condemned cards whether you played with them for money or not or whether you simply dealt them to tell your fortune.
She shuffled and began dealing her fortune, as she often did and she forgot father Herrick as she dealt a card to the right and a card to the left. The fall of cards upon the right-hand pile was to tell her fortune in respect to the fortune of the pile to the left, which was Alice Sothron's; for it was Alice who was in her mind.
Alice was at home this summer in the big house a mile up the shore. In every previous summer Alice had gone away, either to Europe or to the Atlantic coast or to the Colorado mountains. This was a summer when Alice might have remained at home for a number of reasons entirely unconnected with David and Fidelia Herrick but Fidelia never thought of Alice doing anything without having David in mind. Alice was still unmarried and though Fidelia knew that she often went out with men, yet Fidelia knew also that Alice never was seen frequently with the same man. Now and then, in the three years, Fidelia had happened to meet Alice and Fidelia knew that Alice had never given up David.
Her idea of Alice disturbed Fidelia this August more than before; for Fidelia was feeling that David was not as happy as he had been. She was sure he still loved her; she did not think of him wishing for Alice, or for any one else, in place of her. She loved David; but in spite of their love for each other, he was less happy.
It could not be the result of business troubles, she knew; for business was good; and he denied that the widening break between his father and himself bothered him. Yet David was less happy. So Fidelia was dealing her cards of fortune, one to the right, one to the left, when some one knocked at her door.
This was no timid knock of a chamber-maid or of a boy bringing up letters; it was the positive summons of a man full of his message and although it was nearly an hour earlier than she expected father Herrick, Fidelia knew it was he; his rap was as unmistakable as though she saw him.
For an instant she had a desire to have her hair "up" and arranged and to be in her suit as though she were going out or at least as though she had some occupation in prospect. She started to gather up the cards; then she desisted and left them on the table and merely closed her diary before she called: "Come in."
As the door opened, she arose and father Herrick gazed at her and then glanced past her at the cards. He said: "I have interrupted you, Fidelia."
"No; come in, father Herrick," she invited, but he stepped back from the door as he again observed her.
"I will wait, Fidelia," he said sternly. "When you are ready, you may let me know."
Fidelia flushed but she was glad she had left the cards spread out. Since it shocked him, anyway, to find her as she was, she liked to give him an extra fillip; but he always succeeded in making her sorry. "Good Heavens!" she exclaimed as he shut himself out. "Good Heavens!"
Ephraim Herrick waited in the hall at a window which looked toward the city. He heard doors open behind him; he never turned to see but he imagined women in negligee passing back and forth and he stood straighter and more sternly in his black coat to rebuke them. He looked down upon the calm, languid lake upon which little boats idled out from the green and yellow shore. He looked upon luxurious dwellings, some of them separate mansions with gay, striped awnings spread to the sun, with pergolas and gardens above the water; some of them were aggregations of many dwellings under one roof, apartment buildings which fostered the idle, indulgent habits which Ephraim Herrick deplored. Strong as was his feeling against these rows and rows of flats, yet it was nothing in intensity compared to his abomination of the hotel and of the idle, self-indulgent life lived by those who made the hotel their home.
His feeling of the sloth of these surroundings, just now exacerbated by the sight of his son's wife seated in a painted chair with her hair down and playing with cards at half past ten in the morning, was whipped again by the soft, indolent voices of other women and by his view, from the window, of the luxurious and seductive shore.
Fidelia came into the hall. Her hair was now up and she wore a plain, white skirt and white linen blouse and she had changed from her slippers to white oxfords; but since Ephraim Herrick was not turning about at the sound of opening doors, he did not see her and she did not speak for an instant while she stood struck by the likeness of father Herrick's posture to David's when he was thoughtful.
Here was the same squareness of shoulder, the same lift of the head, the same pressure of vigor. The back of his head was identical with David's; it was long and handsomely modeled and forceful. But father Herrick's hair was not brown like David's but was black; it was cut in country fashion, rounded and not "feathered" at the back of the neck. Although father Herrick was fifty this summer, his hair was still nearly jet black; and his figure was spare and as straight as David's.
"Will you come in now, father Herrick?" Fidelia asked.
When he turned he looked old; he was looking much more than three years older than he had appeared when she first saw him, Fidelia thought. His face had become deeply lined and his mouth more habitually somber; but his eyes were the same, his dark, vigorous eyes. They never seemed satisfied with contours, as most men's were; they seemed to be always burrowing inside one and making one—at least they always made Fidelia—uncomfortable.
Never in the three years she had known him had he once told her that she was beautiful; never had he noticed, approvingly, any prettiness of her attire. He seemed always to make his own a rebuke to lightness and color; for habitually he wore a black suit and a white shirt with never a dot or line or design in the linen; he wore a stiff, wing collar with a white lawn tie and black, high shoes. In her presence, he kept his coat buttoned, no matter how hot the day; and Fidelia had never seen him except when he was clean-shaven, but his beard was so heavy that it darkened his skin.
Knowing that he and his wife and six children had lived together in a small, crowded house, Fidelia never could have understood how he had maintained the separateness from them which all his children felt, unless she had visited Itanaca and seen him at home and, in particular, unless she had learned about his room in the tower under the steeple.
She had seen, at one of her visits, that there was a screen in the bedroom which he shared with his wife and she had learned that his wife dressed behind this screen, when he was in the room. As his wife and he occupied the same bed, Fidelia could not follow the direction of his ideas of modesty at all.
He said to her, gesturing to the door with the hand in which he held his black, felt hat: "Go in."
"How is mother Herrick?" Fidelia inquired, as she obeyed.
"She is as usual, recently," he replied.
"No better?" Fidelia asked and she flushed with feeling for the thin mother with warm, gray eyes and sweet smile who always kissed her and liked to call her "daughter." Mother Herrick was not as strong as usual this summer, Deborah had written to David.
Ephraim Herrick, having already answered Fidelia's question, ignored its repetition. He stepped into the room and felt assailed by a personal offense from the gay luxuriousness of this suite of his son. Such living held no proper place in his scheme of things.
The men who had taught him, and those who had taught them, had been Bible-reading, Hell-fearing men who had moved out of New England and into western Pennsylvania and Ohio and on into Indiana and Illinois in advance of the vanities and despising them. When these men ceased to go westward and when they settled and luxury and easy-living came about them, they did not therefore cast off their stern ideas; on the contrary they founded colleges to train men to their ideals of Christian service and seminaries to teach their creed of high-thinking and self-discipline to combat the new allures to self-indulgence.
They enlisted in a losing fight but, to the end, they fought the fight—most of them; they finished their course so keeping their faith that they inspired a few, at least, to devote their lives to keep up the combat. To Ephraim Herrick, the long, hard example of his own struggle never seemed so despised as now when he stepped into this room of his son which the girl, who a moment ago was idling at cards with her hair over her shoulders, shared with his David.
He was in distress, Fidelia saw; and she saw that he was perspiring and she longed to unbutton his coat. She could not do that so she crossed to the bedroom door and brought ice-water to him. It was in a gayly painted carafe upon a lacquer tray with two iridescent glasses and these elaborate trappings for a swallow of water offended him; but he drank.
He sat down and Fidelia seated herself upon her painted chair and watched him. He had come with a determination in no way to compromise with the duty upon his soul; and soon he started by asking directly: "You are still satisfied here, Fidelia?"
"Why, yes," she said, not thinking.
"This completely satisfies you?"
"What?" she asked now.
"This life you lead."
"Why," she said "why"
"You think," he demanded, "that this can go on indefinitely?"
"Why, yes," Fidelia said but she was not thinking at all of what he said; for he always said much the same thing. She was thinking, after having noticed again his likeness to David: "I mean absolutely nothing to him. If David grew to be like him, I'd mean absolutely nothing to David."
Now she heard father Herrick asking her something more which required an answer. "Do you never consider how all this must pass away?"
"'All what?" she asked.
"These," he said, motioning with his hand to her painted chairs, to her iridescent glasses and her pretty rug; at least she supposed he was pointing to the chair and the glasses and the rug—"these vain things to which you give your life."
"Yes," she responded; and he demanded, "Fidelia, what was in your mind while I was speaking to you?"
"Why," said Fidelia, honestly. "I was wondering how much you ever were like David."
He said: "Very much, as David once was." And Fidelia jumped.
"Fidelia," he said. "Here is the matter upon which I have come this morning. I might have come about it before; probably I should have but now I can put it off no longer. David and you have been married for three years, for more than three years. You have no children, Fidelia. Is it because God has forbidden them?"
"No," answered Fidelia.
"You do, then."
"Yes," said Fidelia.
"So I was sure; I was sure," he repeated.
Fidelia caught breath and leaned toward him and suddenly she was pale. "You mean—David told you?"
"No; David would not discuss it with me. But I know my son; I know he would want a child, at least."
"Yes," said Fidelia. "Yes."
"Why don't you?"
"I don't, father Herrick!" she cried quickly and piteously.
"Why not?" he pursued her. "Because of this?" he gestured. "Because you prefer this, you live for this—this—"
His hand was going again and for a second time it accused objects, her painted chairs and the Japanese tray, her piano and the gay glasses; then it came to a stop at the door of the bedroom.
"No; no; no; no!" Fidelia cried pitifully; and he ceased. He had never seen her pitiful before and it bewildered him and made him less certain. He said: "Fidelia, you want to please my son?"
"Of course, father!"
"Then have your children, Fidelia. Have them, I warn you."
"But I can't!"
"Why not?"
"I can't tell you."
She was piteous, so piteous again, that he could not further goad her. He arose and gazed away from her, wondering. His glance fell upon the red volume on her gay desk. He read the inscription "Diary" stamped in gold on the cover and he picked up the book.
"This is yours?" he asked, turning to her.
"Yes, father Herrick."
"What is in it?"
"Why," she said, "what I do every day."
"What do you do?"
"Why," she said again, "why—"
He spread the book and Fidelia gasped; he merely ran the pages past his thumb but he noticed how the fear that he was examining the book excited her. He held it open but he turned it upside down to himself and handed it to her.
"Read to me," he bid, "your doings for a day."
She took her book but she closed it.
"Why not?" he demanded. "Are you ashamed of what you do?"
"I write what I think," Fidelia said, "besides what I do."
"Are you ashamed of what you think?"
"It's what I think," she replied and she made her book safe by raising herself slightly and thrusting it under her thigh and resting her leg upon it.
So she lost the pity she had roused in him. He felt himself defied and he said: "Everything must be pleasant and easy for a man and his wife in these days. If God did not ordain that the giving of life be wholly convenient and cause no interruption in pleasure, so much the worse for God or at least for the sacred function of giving life. It must be sacrificed, with everything else, for pleasure. Self-gratification, pleasure, it is the end of all!"
He wiped his brow with the palm of his strong thin hand. "I can distinctly remember, Fidelia, when I first read an account of a philosophy which put up the pursuit of pleasure as the proper aim of life and when I learned that considerable groups of people had lived who deliberately fashioned their lives on the satisfaction of their appetites and who considered that the gratification of the senses brought them the greatest good. 'Pleasure is the end of all,' they said.
"When I read that in my university days, little more than a generation ago, Fidelia, this part of the world, at least, was still serious and soberminded and close enough to God so that this philosophy seemed to me only a peculiar relic of a past paganism. But I have lived to see my world give itself over to the pursuit of pleasure as the end of all and to see my son and his wife deny their duties to themselves and to God for the purpose of self-gratification."
"Why, father Herrick, David and I go to church!" Fidelia cried.
He shook his head in despair and turned his back upon her. Not only had he made no effect—so he believed—but she did not even understand what he was saying.
He heard her pass behind him and enter her bedroom. When she returned, she had a parasol. "Shall we go down by the water, father Herrick?" she asked.
He let her lead him out to the esplanade at the water's edge where bathers hailed her and urged her to come in and "bring along your friend." A canoeist offered them cushioned seats in his craft; and when Fidelia thanked him and refused, father Herrick asked her: "You would accept, if I were not here?"
"Oh, probably," Fidelia said.
"We will both accept," he decided and when they were in the canoe, he made conversation of the tranquillity of the lake this morning in contrast to the fury to which it could be whipped in time of storm.
The canoeist, who was an agreeable boy of eighteen, said, "You speak as if you'd been on the lake when it reared up, sir."
"He has," Fidelia replied with pride. "He was at Northwestern when the students manned the coast guard station, day and night."
The boy looked over the black-suited man with more interest: "Have many wrecks, sir?"
Father Herrick said: "I will never forget one night . . ."
While he told how he had helped take off the crew of a ship sinking in a winter's storm, Fidelia watched his eyes shine; she felt he was happy in his recollection. He made no personal mention of himself until he related how, after the life-boat had been driven back again and again by the waves, he prayed as he pulled at his oar until "God gave us strength and we reached the ship."
He told it simply, sincerely and the more thrillingly for that; and though Fidelia had heard the story before, it made her cry and she had to clasp his hand. She thought: "That's how he spent his spare time when he was in college, working on the coast guard crew. He could have made more money at something else. But he liked that. He's fine, really."
Ephraim quietly freed his hand from Fidelia's. She expected this and she took no offense but she thought: "He is fine but hasn't he a queer way to be happy? He has to see other people in trouble or doing wrong so he can help them. When he sees everybody perfectly safe and just enjoying themselves, he thinks it terrible."
She would have enjoyed just floating in the calm sunlight; but she knew he would not so she kept the boy paddling, or she paddled, sending the canoe somewhere until it was time to take father Herrick to her table in the pleasantest corner of the big dining-room of the hotel. For when he had telephoned from the city, she had invited him to lunch and since he had then accepted, she knew he would stay.
Fidelia delighted in the gay, brightly decorated room almost over the water's edge. Nothing unusual was going on when they entered. It simply was the one o'clock hour when wives who had been bathing and drying their hair or canoeing during the morning, or who had been lying late abed, were descending to the wide, cool, beautiful room, open to the lake breezes, shaded from the sun, where white linen and silver and crystal and soft but gay colors offered a bower of ease and pleasantness for the midday meal. Men servants—mulattos—pulled out pretty chairs with the pleasing obsequiousness and the graceful flourish of negroes; they passed noiselessly and undulatingly to and fro bearing trays displaying extravagant, iced melons and elaborately chilled creations sparkling with the glitter of ice and the bright hues of ripe fruits; they bore decorative platters of cold meats and fowl, canapés, salmis and many covered dishes and, anomalous beside the glasses and bowls heaped with crushed ice, were flaming and steaming chafing dishes presented to deliver one viand boiling hot immediately after another icy cold.
All this thrilled Fidelia; she never got used to it. The many extravagant delicacies, brought from far and near, made her think of the feasts which, in the old days, only a Roman emperor or a great pro-consul could order—"flamingo tongues, roast and chilled mushrooms, locusts in honey, fish, meat and fruits." Here, for her choice, was much more than all of those.
At her appearance, the head waiter hurried up and she said in her pleasant way: "Albert, this is my husband's father. Tell us what's especially nice to-day."
As she sat down, many people spoke to her from surrounding tables or waved to her and she replied and waved: almost everybody looked at her and those who did not were told to, by their companions.
She started to order for father Herrick the especially nice dishes which Albert recommended but Ephraim stopped her. He ordered sandwiches and a glass of milk.
He had never felt so beaten by Fidelia as this morning; he believed that he had never said so much to any one with so little effect. He thought, "And now she believes that if I let her waste money on expensive food for me, we'd finish with a good time."
Glancing about, he saw a little boy at one table, a little girl at another; further on, two children sat together. Fidelia knew that these children were not related but that one had been left by his mother in charge of the mother of the other. Father Herrick did not suspect this and his glance rested upon that table with less disapproval than when he looked elsewhere.
The cry of Isaiah was echoing in his head.
"Rise up, ye women that are at ease; hear my voice, ye careless daughters. Many days and years shall ye be troubled.
"Tremble, ye women that are at ease. Upon the land of my people shall come thorns and briars; yea, upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city."
It seemed to Ephraim Herrick, as he slowly ate his sandwiches and drank the milk, that he scarcely could sit silent here at this table in the accustomed place of his son; it seemed that he could not again go away having affected Fidelia not at all.