The Web of Life Part 37

"She has fallen--fainted," Dresser stammered.

Alves seemed to acquiesce for a moment, and her head sank back; then she opened her eyes and looked at Sommers pitifully.

"No, Howard. Help me."

Sommers raised her, his face much troubled. While he held her, she spoke brokenly, trying to hide her face.

"You must know. He kissed me. I don't know why. Make him go away. O Howard, what am I?"

Sommers dropped his arm from Alves and started toward Dresser, who was edging away.

"What is this?"

His dictatorial tone made Dresser pause.

"She told you. I was a fool. I tried to kiss her."

Sommers took him by the arm without a word.

"Yes, I am going. Don't make a row about it. You needn't get into a state about it. She isn't Mrs. Sommers, you know!"

"Oh!" Alves groaned, closing her eyes again. "How can he say that!"

Sommers dropped his arm.

"Who told you that Alves was not my wife?" he asked drearily.

"Every one knows it. Lindsay has the whole story. You--"

"Don't say anything more," Sommers interrupted sternly. "You are too nasty to kill."

His tone was quiet. He seemed to be questioning himself what he should do.

Finally, opening the door, he grasped Dresser by the neck and flung him into the sand outside. Then he closed the door and turned to Alves. She was crouching before the fire, sobbing to herself. He stroked her hair soothingly.

"We must conform," he said at last.

She shook her head. "It is too late to stop that talk. I was wrong to care about not having the ceremony, and it was foolish to tell Jane. But--to have him think, his touch--how can you ever kiss me again! You let him go,"

she added, her pa.s.sion flaming up; "I would have killed him. Why didn't you let me kill him?"

"That is savage," he replied sadly. "What good is it to answer brutality by crime? You cannot save your skirts from the dirt," he concluded softly to himself. "I knew the fellow was bad; I knew it eight years ago, when he took a Swiss girl to Augsburg and left her there. But I said to myself then that, like many men, he had his moods of the beast which he could not control, and thought no more about it. Now his mood of the beast touches me. Society keeps such men in check; he will marry Laura Lindsay and make an excellent, cringing husband, waiting for Lindsay's savings. You see," he ended, turning to his work-table, "I suppose he felt released from the bonds of society by the way we live, by--it all."

Alves rose and walked to and fro.

"Do you think," she asked at last, "that anything I could have done--he could have felt that I--encouraged him?"

"I don't think anything more about it," Sommers answered, closing his lips firmly. "It is part of the mire; we must avert our eyes, Alves."

But in spite of his mild, even gentle way of dealing with the affair, he could not fall into his routine of work. He got up from the table and, finding the room too warm, threw open a window to let the clear, cold winter air rush over his face. He stood there a long time, plunged in thought, while Alves waited for him to come back to her. At last she could bear it no longer. She crept over to his side and placed her head close to his.

"I wish you would even hate me, would be angry, would _feel_ it," she whispered. "Will you ever care to kiss me again?"

"Foolish woman!" Sommers answered, taking her face in his hands. "Why should _that_ make any difference to me, any more than if a drunken brute had struck you?"

"But it does," she a.s.serted sadly. "Everything does, Howard--all the past: that I let my husband touch me; that I had to live with him; that you had to know it, him--it all makes, oh, such a difference!"

"No," he responded, in a high voice. "By G.o.d, it makes no difference--only one thing." He paused. Then with a wrench he went on, "Alves, did you--did you--" But he could not make himself utter the words, and before he had mastered his hesitation she had broken in impetuously:

"No, I am right; the great happiness that I wanted to give you must come from the spirit and body of a woman untouched by the evil of living in the world. The soiled people like me should not--"

He closed her lips with a kiss.

"Don't blaspheme our life," he answered tenderly. "One cannot live unspotted except in the heart."

He kissed her again, tenderly, lovingly. But the kiss did not a.s.suage her burning shame; it savored of pity, of magnificent charity.

CHAPTER VIII

One still, frozen winter day succeeded another in changeless iteration. The lake was a solid floor of gray ice as far as one could see. Along the sh.o.r.e between the breakwaters the ice lay piled in high waves, with circles of clear, shining gla.s.s beyond. A persistent drift from the north and east, day after day, lifted the sheets of surface ice and slid them over the inner ledges. At night the lake cracked and boomed like a battery of powerful guns, one report starting another until the sh.o.r.e resounded with the noise. The perpetual groaning of the laboring ice, the rending and riving of the great fields, could be heard as far insh.o.r.e as the temple all through the still night.

Early every morning Sommers with Alves would start for the lake. At this hour only an occasional fisherman could be seen, cutting fresh holes in the ice and setting his lines. Sommers preferred to skate in the mornings, for later in the day the smooth patches of insh.o.r.e ice were frequented by people from the city. He loved solitude, it seemed to Alves, more and more.

In the Keystone days he had been indifferent to the people of the house; now he avoided people except as they needed him professionally. She attributed it, wrongly, to a feeling of pride. In reality, the habit of self-dependence was gaining, and the man was thrusting the world into the background. For hours Sommers never spoke. Always sparing of words, counting them little, despising voluble people, he was beginning to lose the power of ready speech. Thus, living in one of the most jostling of the world's taverns, they lived as in the heart of the Arizona desert.

They skated in these long silences, enjoying the exhilaration of the exercise, the bitter air, the views of the huge, silent city. Now and then they paused instinctively to watch the scene, without speaking, like great lovers that are mute. Starting from the sheltered pool, where the yachts lay in summer, they skirted the dark piles of the long pier, around which the black water gurgled treacherously. Beyond the pier there was a snakelike, oozing crack, which divided the insh.o.r.e ice from the more open fields outside. This they followed until they found a chance to cross, and then they sped away toward the little island made by the "intake" of the water works.

These windless mornings the bank of city smoke northward was like gray powder, out of which the skysc.r.a.pers stretched their lofty heads. The buildings along the sh.o.r.e, etched in the transparent air, breathing silently white mists of steam, lay like a mirage wonderfully touched with purplish shadows. The great steel works rose to the south, visibly near, mysteriously remote. The ribbons of fiery smoke from their furnaces were the first signs of the city's awakening from its lethargic industrial sleep. The beast was beginning to move along its score of miles of length.

But out here in the vacancies of the lake it seemed still torpid.

Eastward, beyond the dot which the "intake" made, the lake was a still arctic field, furrowed by ice-floes, snowy here, with an open pool of water there, ribbed all over with dark creva.s.ses of oozing water. In the far east lay the horizon line of shimmering, gauzy light, as if from beyond the earth's rim was flooding in the brilliance of a perpetual morning. North and south, east and west, along the creva.s.ses the lake smoked in the morning sun, as the vapor from the water beneath rose into the icy air.

Savage, tranquil, immense, the vast field of ice was like the indifferent face of nature, like unto death.

One morning, as they waited breathlessly listening to the silence of the ice sea, the lake groaned close beside them, and suddenly the floe on which they stood parted from the field nearer sh.o.r.e. In a few minutes the lane of open water was six feet in width. Sommers pointed to it, and without a word they struck out to the north, weaving their way in and out of the floes, now clambering over heaved-up barriers of ice, now flying along an unscarred field, again making their way cautiously across sheets of shivered surface ice that lay like broken gla.s.s beside a creva.s.se. Finally, they reached the inner field. Sommers looked at his watch, and said:

"We might as well go ash.o.r.e here. That was rather a narrow chance. I must look in at the Keystone to see how Webber is. I shouldn't wonder if he had typhoid."

"I wish we could go on," Alves replied regretfully. "I was hoping the lane ran on and on for miles."

She put her hands under his coat and leaned against him, looking wistfully into the arctic sea.

"Let me go back!" she pleaded. "I should like to skate on, on, for days!"

"You can't go back without me. Some day, if this weather keeps up, we'll try for the Michigan sh.o.r.e."

"I should like to end things in this way," she continued musingly; "just us two, to plunge on and on and on into that quiet ice-field, until, at last, some pool shot up ahead--and then! To go out like that, quenched right in the heat of our lives; not chilled, piece by piece."