Fidelia/Chapter 9
FIDELIA attended her classes as usual that morning; Dave did not even return to the campus but went to the Delta Alpha house where he shut himself in his room for an hour. Then he went down town and surprised Mr. Snelgrove by appearing for work before noon.
He didn't do much; he could not concentrate on the important business of selling cars. He kept feeling his sensation of the cold sunrise alone with Fidelia Netley and the surprising delight of his play with her that they were in ice caves of fifty thousand years ago. She and he seemed to have separated themselves from other people by their walk together, as Titans, in their magic valley of ice and snow.
"She had a good time too!" he said to himself. "She had no more idea than I how long we were there."
Intermittently, he went aghast at himself: "What was I thinking of? What was the matter with me? Alice!"
Several times he started to go to her; several times he went into a telephone booth with a plan of calling her; but he waited until the hour, late in the afternoon, when he usually telephoned her. Then he did not ask for her but only gave the maid a message saying that he would be at the house at eight o'clock.
He did not understand himself that day. He was sorry and ashamed more than he had been before but also he experienced, more than before, the strange, defiant pangs of exaltation which had followed his first meeting with Fidelia Netley. He did not will them; they came.
They came with the night cold off the lake and with the sight of the stars above the ice when he approached Alice's home. They went with sight of the lighted windows of the big, stone mansion between the boulevard and the shore.
It still surprised Dave Herrick to realize that this was a house of friends of his, that he not only could enter it but that he was a privileged person within. He had been brought up in suspicion of the rich.
There was no one in Itanaca who really was rich; and there was no house either in Itanaca or in any of the larger towns of the county which could be compared with this mansion in which Alice lived. Obviously her father was a rich man; and that had meant to Dave Herrick that he was, therefore, almost certainly a Godless man. He might be a hypocrite, making a show of prayer and right-doing; but if he was rich, something must be wrong with him.
Dave had been taught Christ's own word to prove that: "Verily I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
"Woe unto you that are rich!" the Lord had cried out; and his apostle warned: "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you."
Dave was eighteen years old, and he had been only a few months away from Itanaca when Alice first took him to her home for dinner; and in coming to dine at this large, luxurious house Dave felt that he was, in some way, condoning unrighteousness.
He did not know what unrighteousness; for his father had never been definite in describing the ways in which the rich offended; and Dave discovered little that night.
Of course he encountered strong contrasts to the manners of Itanaca where few families kept "help" and where those who did always had the help sit at the table and naturally treated them as equals. The Sothrons had several servants and Dave had learned enough not to expect Alice's family to eat with their maids; but he had not known enough not to be surprised, and disturbed, at the way the Sothrons ignored the feelings of their help. Dave would not treat others so and, having the courage of his convictions, he pointedly thanked the maids when they served him at the table, looking up at them when he spoke.
Now he was not ashamed of having done that; but he had ceased it long ago. To-night, when the door was opened for him, he spoke to the maid personally in much the same way that the Sothrons themselves did. He was nervous when he asked for "Miss Alice."
"Mr. Sothron is in the library," the maid said.
Dave entered the library where he found Alice's father alone with a newspaper in his hand. "Good evening, Dave," Mr. Sothron greeted him as usual and without rising.
"Good evening, Mr. Sothron," said Dave, standing.
"Sit down, boy," Alice's father invited, pleasantly. "Alice won't be here right away."
"She's out?"
"Oh, no; she's in her room. You've been having a little difficulty between you, I take it."
"Yes, sir," Dave admitted.
"Sit down," Mr. Sothron repeated; and this time Dave obeyed.
His nervousness increased but he was used to feeling nervous in this house and he had had ways of combating it. At first he had done it by summoning to himself a feeling of scorn for the trappings of wealth which made him uncomfortable. But he could not continue feeling this; for the more familiar he became with these people, the more ridiculous became his previous teachings in regard to the rich. If woe was to come to Mr. Sothron, because he had left his father's farm in New York state, put himself through Cornell, and then invented and manufactured electrical appliances which everybody wanted, Dave would like to know the justice of it. He thought Mr. Sothron about as good and useful a citizen as one could find; and the idea of Mr. Sothron having to howl and weep, was simply absurd. He wouldn't do it. So Dave's defense of his early ideas soon left him. He became merely a poor young man in the embarrassing position of a suitor in a house of wealth. Every one here always had been kind to him; they were well-bred people and besides they made him feel that they honestly liked him, but not as a husband for Alice.
For the first time, Dave felt in Alice's father an absence of that opposition to-night.
"I've no idea what your difficulty is, Dave," Mr. Sothron continued. "I know only that Alice came home early this morning and has shut herself in her room ever since. She seems to think it is serious. But of course," he said, pleasantly and confidently and yet putting a question into his tone, "it's not."
"No, sir," Dave protested. "It's not."
"That's good."
"Yes, sir." Dave stirred, gripping his hands. That's good, Mr. Sothron had said. So opposition to him was really gone. It loosed something in Dave which sent a flood of warmth over him. "Can I see Alice now, sir? Won't you tell her that I'm here?"
Mr. Sothron gazed at him. "Not yet." But for a few moments, Mr. Sothron would not tell why; he sat there, slight-looking in his big chair, with his clear gray eyes studying Dave; and after a moment, Dave ceased to meet them. Dave's eyes lifted to Mr. Sothron's smoothly brushed, grayish hair, then glanced to his knees over which his trousers turned trimly, and Dave noticed, as he often had before, the smallness and slenderness of Mr. Sothron's feet. Alice's were unusually small; and so were her hands, like her father's. And, with this thought, Dave's mind jumped to Fidelia and he wondered who she was like, who gave her her glorious red hair and her strong, beautiful body.
"What was the trouble?" Mr. Sothron questioned directly.
"What?" said Dave. "It was a girl who came to college this term whom—whom Alice imagines I've—I've—" he stopped.
"I see," said Mr. Sothron. "I suppose so."
"Mr. Sothron, there's nothing in it! The other night, Alice and I agreed on the date we want to be married. It's the twenty-second of June. I was going to see you about it this week. I've made my arrangements to go into business; I'm going to have an agency for—"
Mr. Sothron stopped him. "Alice told me of that. Why didn't you see me this week?"
Dave stared and at last said: "I am now, sir."
"Yes," said Mr. Sothron and looked away. "Well, there is no feeling against you here, Dave. It is useless to say there never was. You came to us distinctly as a surprise. We did not expect you; we did not expect any one from Northwestern for—Alice.
"You know we did not expect her to stay there. She was so young, when she was ready for college, we thought we would send her to the university and keep her at home for a year; then we meant to send her to Wellesley; but she would not go. Of course you know you were the chief reason. But perhaps you do not appreciate something else."
"What?" asked Dave, warm and uncomfortable.
"The peculiar advantage you were able to take of her because of the undeveloped state in which you came to college. In a woman's affection—in a girl's love," Mr. Sothron substituted frankly, "there is as much of the maternal as anything else; in some girls' love, at any rate. Alice saw you and liked you and set herself to the business of bringing you out; she began at something which became the greatest thing in the world to her—almost the only thing in her world, after a while; that was the development of you. She is perfectly willing to give the rest of her life to it, as she has given most of the last four years."
He got up and Dave saw that he was quivering. Dave saw, too, that his eyes glistened.
"I did not think that a third person—especially a girl who had just come to college—could come between you two. I'm glad it's not so." He gave Dave his hand. "I'll ask Alice to come down."
Dave was left with no illusion in regard to Mr. Sothron's whole acceptance of him now; it was because Alice's father had seen how Dave could hurt Alice. Never—not once—had he hurt her before Fidelia Netley appeared.
He went into the hall when he heard Alice on the stairs and as he saw her slowly coming down to him, he started up to her. He had never thought of his taking an advantage of her; she was so small and sweet!
He reached her several steps from the bottom and he took her in his arms.
"Your father says it's all right, Alice!"
"What did you tell him about this morning?"
"This morning!"
He held her soft, slight body; this morning he had held Fidelia Netley's when his hands were under her arms as she was rising from the ice.
"David, why did you go down to the lake with her? You must have got up on purpose!"
"I didn't."
"David!" She was holding to him, almost hysterically, with her head down so he could not see her face. Not Davey, she called him; never once did she call him Davey.
"Alice, I happened to be up. You'll believe that when I tell you. I happened to see her go by; I thought something was the matter. I followed her; then she went down to the lake."
"What for?"
"She wanted to see the sun rise."
"It was before sunrise!"
He admitted, "Yes."
Alice pushed back from him and stared at him now. "I saw the sun rise this morning! I was in bed. You were with her then!"
David had nothing to say.
"All the time I was getting up, and having breakfast, and riding to college, you were with her! Where?"
He replied, almost brusquely. "Down there, Alice. Down on the ice."
"But it was zero this morning; zero!"
He thought: Zero! Yes, it was; but he had not cared. Fidelia Netley had not felt it; nor he. Alice could not imagine that. It set Fidelia with him apart from every one else again; there they were together for their hour, in their world which they had discovered, not feeling the cold nor thinking of time.
He said none of this; but Alice, whom he held, became sensitive to it through his touch; for she shrank from him; and he cauht her tighter and cried:
"I didn't mean to do anything. I didn't mean to!" And he thought, as he clasped her, that he made her calm again.
But what stilled her was a return of that sense of her helplessness before Fidelia Netley which had struck her, upon that first morning, when she came into the history class-room and saw Fidelia sitting in the sun.
And Alice, standing quiet with David's arms about her, believed him, that he hadn't meant to do anything. She could believe even that Fidelia, in going to the lake that morning, had not meant or planned anything against her. What Alice was feeling against her, and that which paralysed her to this quiet, was not intentions and plans but impulses, wholly unplanned and ten times as terrible to her, therefore.
She felt that she could not fight them and she had to fight; for if she did not, it meant giving him up—him whom she had taken when he was a queer and awkward boy four years ago and whom she had brought to this.
Strength—her soft, passionate strength—came back to her fingers and she clung to him. "You're mine!" she whispered to him. "Mine! Mine! Mine!"
And he, holding her, told her: "Of course I'm yours, of course."