seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. "I will
live for this! I will live for this!" he kept saying over and over to
himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue's
arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish
together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the
darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought
they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.
At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
"I must go to her--I must go to her at her house--now--tonight--and tell
her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me," he thought.
And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
"It cleanses me! this cleanses me!" he said to himself.
He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman's grocery
when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing from
the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how strangely
perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been. "Sex is a
solution, not a menace--it is wonderful," he told himself without knowing
fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his lips.
When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his
apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of
the sleeping houses was striking three.
CHAPTER VI
One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in Jackson
Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake Michigan
steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the distance. They had
been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom's big house on the south side;
and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being carried out into darkness,
vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each more or less afraid of the
other. They sat in silence, looking at the blinking lights and listening
to the low voices of their fellow passengers, also sitting in the chairs
along the deck or strolling leisurely about, and to the wash of the water
along the sides of the boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the
solemnity of the marriage service had built up between them.
A picture floated in Sam's mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and
wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the
newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy
moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this hour
when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from her
the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being able
to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy in his
mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had been half
overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame that had
swept over him that night when she had given her word and he had walked
hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him that from among
the guests standing about should arise a voice crying, "Stop! Do not go
on! Let me tell you of this fellow--this McPherson!" And then he had seen
her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious Colonel Tom and he had
taken her hand to become one with her, two curious, feverish, strangely
different human beings, taking a vow in the name of their God, with the
flowers banked about them and the eyes of people upon them.
When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in Jackson
Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered and roared
and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam remained cool
and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming the door and
shouting, "Upstart! Damned upstart!" and Sam had gone smiling back to his
desk, mildly disappointed. "I told Sue he would say 'Ingrate,'" he
thought, "I am losing my skill at guessing just what he will do and say."
The colonel's rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting of
Sam to chance callers as "the best business man in America," and in the
face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the approaching
marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected him of secretly
calling on the telephone those newspapers whose representatives had not
crossed his trail.
During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making between
Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country or to the
parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious eager passion of
suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew in Sam's brain. To
live for the young things that would presently come to them, to be simple,
direct, and natural, like the trees or the beasts of the field, and then
to have the native honesty of such a life illuminated and ennobled by a
mutual intelligent purpose to make their young something finer and better
than the things in Nature by the intelligent use of their own good minds
and bodies. In the shops and on the streets the hurrying men and women
took on a new significance to him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose
might be in their lives, and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a
marriage with a little jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the
women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with
questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and
determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material,
as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in
the great workshop of the universe. "Marriage is a port, a beginning, a
point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage
of life," he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. "All that
goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage." Or, again, one night
when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about them
in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of excited
girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in against
the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel, with his
head in her lap and whisper, "It is not the love of a woman that grips me,
Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the great mystery. This
--this is why we are here--this justifies us."
Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried
away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love for
her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down upon
his shoulder.
"Not yet, Sam," she whispered, "not with these hundreds of people sleeping
and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost within
touch of our hands."
They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the clean
wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the darkness
in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently, speechless with
happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between them.
At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets, and
camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods passing
the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a sawmill that
stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean sweet smell of
the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of the water tumbling
over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen working among the
floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air, and above the song of
the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting song, the song of love
and of life singing in the hearts of husband and wife.
In a little roughly-built lumberman's hotel they ate breakfast in a room
overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing the
door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold swiftly-
flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages wrapped in
blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little wharf beside the
hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two strange boys,
saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his breast.
On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
current. During the six weeks' waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
essentials of the canoeist's art and, now, as he shot the canoe under the
bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the prow of
the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the shore.
At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill and
on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they made their
first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like feathers in
the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while Sue, at the
foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared their first
cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out her rifle and
gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness making the
lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the young night,
with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold wind blowing
into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under the trees to
where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the stormy waters of a
great sea before their eyes, and lay down together for their first long
tender embrace.
There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one's first knowledge
of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves and to have
that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life, adds point and
flavour to the experience. In his busy striving, nickel-seeking boyhood in
the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in his young manhood of
scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not thought of vacations
and resting places. He had walked on country roads with John Telfer and
Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing their ideas, blind and
deaf to the little life in the grass, in the leafy branches of the trees
and in the air about him. In clubs, and about hotels and barrooms in the
city, he had heard men talk of life in the open, and had said to himself,
"When my time comes I will taste these things."
And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the river,
floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight, listening to the
night call of birds, or watching the flight of frightened wild things as
he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of the great forest about them.
At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the blankets
under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at Sue lying
beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across her face and
her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just the quiet of her
expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he turned reluctantly
to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure, go on looking at her
all night.
For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and lay
looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that when he
awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that she knew
these secret love passages gave to both.
They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers
and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind of
people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away to the
woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open. He
discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest
fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One
with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked
him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay did
not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it did,
nodding his head and laughing.
"But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it," he said, "the
danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real fun
with them."
Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always as
one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and he came
to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making because she
admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of the out-of-
doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out of the
solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they called to
her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show her husband,
and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the inroads of the
lumber men upon their paradise. "The Burnhams were this year on the shores
of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from Pittsburgh would come early in
August, the Detroit man with the crippled son was building a cabin on the
shores of Bone River."
Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for the
wonder of Sue's past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the woman
rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these people; she,
who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of Chicago, to have
been secretly all of these years the companion and fellow spirit of these
campers by the lakes.
For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of every
thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of readjustment
and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to shoot, and to get
the fine taste of that life into his being.
And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim of
their two lives.
If Sam's life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of
many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly
full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart
tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom,
the voter of Sue's big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and
genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince's loyalty had been
rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of the
Rainey Arms Company's wares known to all reading Americans. The muzzles of
Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked threateningly out
at one from the pages of the great popular magazines, brown fur-clad
hunters did brave deeds before one's eyes, kneeling upon snow-topped crags
preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain sheep; huge open-
mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the top of the pages and
seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen who stood undaunted,
swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place, and presidents,
explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the merits of Rainey-
Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam and for Colonel Tom a
time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and contentment.
Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing her
ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two children,
going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in country
hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each other,
raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside when
they were out of breath.
Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
fine vows of their early love-making days.
Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness is
a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little turns
of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate and at
rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost ideal
happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even months of
their first year together that later passed out of Sam's memory entirely,
leaving only a sense of completeness and well being. He could remember,
perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen lake, or a visitor
who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But at the end he had to
come back to this: that something sang in his heart all day long and that
the air tasted better, the stars shone more brightly, and the wind and the
rain and the hail upon the window panes sang more sweetly in his ears. He
and the woman who lived with him had wealth, position, and infinite
delight in the presence and the persons of each other, and a great idea
burned like a lamp in a window at the end of the road they travelled.
Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president was
elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city
council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own city. In
other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting, planning,
working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue's feet, dreaming and
talking to her of the brood that under their care should grow into
wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented sales manager of
the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a Kansas City jobber, he
smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that territory, and went for an
afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely and wholly accepted Sue's
conception of life. "We have wealth for any emergency," he said to
himself, "and we will live our lives for service to mankind through the
children that will presently come into our house."
After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness and
indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own little
circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during the
engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an
evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them for
a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which Sue and
Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought brought to
them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone resplendent. In some
indefinable way he thought they paid court to him and the thought
flattered him immensely. The college professor who had talked brilliantly
through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his conclusions, a writer
of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over a difficulty in the
stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid him the rare compliment
of repeating one of Sam's remarks as his own. It was as though, in spite
of their talk, they thought him the most gifted of them all, and for a
time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack Prince came, sat at one of the
dinner parties, and explained.
"You have got what they want and cannot get--the money," he said.
After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner. It
was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the people
at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends of the table,
lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other's eyes, drank off
the health of him who was to come, the first of the great family, the
family that was to have two lives lived for its success.
At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his white,
pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue's side sat Jack
Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye on the
handsome New York girl at Sam's end of the table or to puncture, with a
flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched by
Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the artist,
who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite him
bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a serious-faced
little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling as the artist
talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both, perhaps at all of
them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and at the other faces
up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her directing and leading
the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her strong neck and the fine
firmness of her straight little body, and his eyes grew moist and a lump
came into his throat at the thought of the secret that lay between them.
And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
eating among strange people at Freedom Smith's table. He saw again the
tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand
in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying to blow
the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of death
through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record of his loves
on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man rubbing his
hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this--this home with its
safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at the head of it
all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should admire and bow his
head before the romance of destiny. He thought his station, his wife, his
country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the very apex of life on the
earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that he was in some way the
master and maker of it all.
CHAPTER VII
Late one evening, some weeks after the McPhersons had given the dinner
party in secret celebration of the future arrival of what was to be the
first of the great family, they came together down the steps of a north
side house to their waiting carriage. They had spent, Sam thought, a
delightful evening. The Grovers were people of whose friendship he was
particularly proud and since his marriage with Sue he had taken her often
for an evening to the house of the venerable surgeon. Doctor Grover was a
scholar, a man of note in the medical world, and a rapid and absorbing
talker and thinker on any subject that aroused his interest. A certain
youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had attracted to him the
devotion of Sue, who, since meeting him through Sam, had counted him a
marked addition to their little group of friends. His wife, a white-
haired, plump little woman, was, though apparently somewhat diffident, in
reality his intellectual equal and companion, and Sue in a quiet way had
taken her as a model in her own effort toward complete wifehood.
During the evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas
between the two men, Sue had sat in silence. Once when he looked at her
Sam thought that he had surprised an annoyed look in her eyes and was
puzzled by it. During the remainder of the evening her eyes refused to
meet his and she looked instead at the floor, a flush mounting her cheeks.
At the door of the carriage Frank, Sue's coachman, stepped on the hem of
her gown and tore it. The tear was slight, the incident Sam thought
entirely unavoidable, and as much due to a momentary clumsiness on the
part of Sue as to the awkwardness of Frank. The man had for years been a
loyal servant and a devoted admirer of Sue's.
Sam laughed and taking Sue by the arm started to help her in at the
carriage door.
"Too much gown for an athlete," he said, pointlessly.
In a flash Sue turned and faced the coachman.
"Awkward brute," she said, through her teeth.
Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt as
he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips of his
mother. The look in Sue's eyes as she turned them on Frank struck him like
a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception of her and
of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam the carriage
door after her and walk home.
They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new and
strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her face
held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in front.
He didn't want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm and
shake her. "I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank's seat
and give her a sound beating," he told himself.
At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and when
Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the stairs
leading to her room and waiting for him.
"I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
evening," she cried. "Your beastly talk there at the Grovers--it was
unbearable--who are these women? Why parade your past life before me?"
Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at her
and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the door of
her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in the grate
and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think the thing
out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the Sue who had
lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed, that in her
place there was this other woman, this woman who had insulted her own
servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of his talk during the
evening.
Sitting by the fire filling and refilling his pipe, Sam went carefully
over every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grovers and
could get hold of no part of it that he thought might in fairness serve as
an excuse for the outburst. In the upper part of the house he could hear
Sue moving restlessly about and he had satisfaction in the thought that
her mind was punishing her for so strange a seizure. He and Grover had
perhaps been somewhat carried away, he told himself; they had talked of
marriage and its meaning and had both declared somewhat hotly against the
idea that the loss of virginity in women was in any sense a bar to
honourable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could have
been twisted into an insult to Sue or to Mrs. Grover. He had thought the
talk rather good and clearly thought out and had come out of the house
exhilarated and secretly preening himself with the thought that he had
talked unusually forcefully and well. In any event what had been said had
been said before in Sue's presence and he thought that he could remember
her having, in the past, expressed similar ideas with enthusiasm.
Hour after hour he sat in the chair before the dying fire. He dozed and
his pipe dropped from his hand and fell upon the stone hearth. A kind of
dumb misery and anger was in him as over and over endlessly his mind kept
reviewing the events of the evening.
"What has made her think she can do that to me?" he kept asking himself.
He remembered certain strange silences and hard looks from her eyes during
the past weeks, silences and looks that in the light of the events of the
evening became pregnant with meaning.
"She has a temper, a beast of a temper. Why shouldn't she have been square
and told me?" he asked himself.
The clock had struck three when the library door opened quietly and Sue,
clad in a dressing gown through which the new roundness of her lithe
little figure was plainly apparent, came into the room. She ran across to
him and putting her head down on his knee wept bitterly.
"Oh, Sam!" she said, "I think I am going insane. I have been hating you as
I have not hated since I was an evil-tempered child. A thing I worked
years to suppress in me has come back. I have been hating myself and the
baby. For days I have been fighting the feeling in me, and now it has come
out and perhaps you have begun hating me. Can you love me again? Will you
ever forget the meanness and the cheapness of it? You and poor innocent
Frank--Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!"
Reaching down, Sam took her into his arms and cuddled her like a child. A
story he had heard of the vagaries of women at such times came back to him
and was as a light illuminating the darkness of his mind.
"I understand now," he said. "It is a part of the burden you carry for us
both."
For some weeks after the outbreak at the carriage door events ran smoothly
in the McPherson house. One day as he stood in the stable door Frank came
round the corner of the house and, looking up sheepishly from under his
cap, said to Sam: "I understand about the missus. It is the baby coming.
We have had four of them at our house," and Sam, nodding his head, turned
and began talking rapidly of his plans to replace the carriages with
automobiles.
But in the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue's
ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the
relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first of
the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of their
lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding and
kindly tolerance with which they had faced smaller things in the past--a
disagreement over the method of shooting a rapid in a river or the
entertainment of an undesirable guest. The inclination to fits of temper
loosens and disarranges all the little wires of life. The tune will not
get itself played. One stands waiting for the discord, strained, missing
the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that he must keep a
check upon his tongue and that things of which they had talked with great
freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated his wife when brought
into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who, during his life with Sue,
had learned the joy of free, open talk upon any subject that came into his
mind and whose native interest in life and in the motives of men and women
had blossomed in the large leisure and independence of the last year, this
was trying. It was, he thought, like trying to hold free and open
communion with the people of an orthodox family, and he fell into a habit
of prolonged silences, a habit that later, he found, once formed,
unbelievably hard to break.
One day in the office a situation arose that seemed to demand Sam's
presence in Boston on a certain date. For months he had been carrying on a
trade war with some of the eastern manufacturers in his line and an
opportunity for the settlement of the trouble in a way advantageous to
himself had, he thought, arisen. He wanted to handle the matter himself
and went home to explain to Sue. It was at the end of a day when nothing
had occurred to irritate her and she agreed with him that he should not be
compelled to trust so important a matter to another.
"I am no child, Sam. I will take care of myself," she said, laughing.
Sam wired his New York man asking him to make the arrangements for the
meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading aloud
to her.
And then, coming home the next evening he found her in tears and when he
tried to laugh away her fears she flew into a black fit of anger and ran
out of the room.
Sam went to the 'phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct
him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans for
the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had been standing
outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the mouthpiece of the
'phone.
"Sam! Sam!" she cried. "Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do
anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying
your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of
what I have said!"
Over the 'phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand
aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making some
detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.
Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the fire
until his train time, talking like lovers.
To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.
"Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it," she had wired.
While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.
"Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and
only half a fool."
Sam was irritated. "It is deliberate pettiness and weakness," he thought,
when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding his immediate
return. "The situation calls for drastic action and perhaps one good
stinging reproof will stop it for all time."
Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention to
the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and
saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and not
upon her impulses.
Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no
shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and he
said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had come
into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said and
when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and
mailed it at a passing station.
Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He
thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things
Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came back
to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire asking her
not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he would hurry
through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.
When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and read
the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the
knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about
his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her
alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her growing
worse daily and became alarmed for her health.
And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time
with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open air.
He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and went to
bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a stormy
passage between them.
There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near insanity.
With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would take up some
minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had quoted from some
book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk of it until his
head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of his hands to keep
control of himself. After such a day he would steal off by himself and,
walking rapidly, would try through pure physical fatigue to force his mind
to give up the remembrance of the persistent, complaining voice. At times
he would give way to fits of anger and strew impotent oaths along the
silent street, or, in another mood, would mumble and talk to himself,
praying for strength and courage to keep his own head during the ordeal
through which he thought they were passing together. And when he returned
from such a walk and from such a struggle with himself it often occurred
that he would find her waiting in the arm chair before the fire in her
room, her mind clear and her little face wet with the tears of her
repentance.
And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged that
Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they drove
there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring pains
gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness had hold
of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new life Sue was
transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes glistened.
"I am going to do it," she cried; "my black fear is gone. I shall give you
a child--a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It will
be beautiful."
When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of physical
sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his
helplessness.
At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his
knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.
"Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you."
At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the
swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of
regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced up
and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge
moments when a man's brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans for
the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life, halt,
and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little clock
on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop also and
wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and vital seemed
now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the silent white-
clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the presence of this
greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up and down peering at
the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting at the stem of his
empty pipe.
And then through the swinging door came Grover.
"We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance
with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide."
Sam sprang past him toward the door.
"You bungler," he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet
corridor. "You do not know what this means. Let me go."
Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men stood
facing each other.
"You stay here," said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; "I
will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now
answer me--do you want to take the chance?"
"No! No!" Sam shouted. "No! I want her--Sue--alive and well, back through
that door."
A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the doctor's
face.
"Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will----"
Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam
staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor
Grover's office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside
him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and
talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.
"Do not worry," he said. "She will be all right. Grover will take care of
her. Nothing can happen to little Sue."
The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue,
wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the tears
ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the woman's
tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.
"My mother is dead," he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. "I wish that
you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me."
When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his
self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the
little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the
long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door of
the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice, thin
and weak, talking to Grover.
"Unfit--Sue McPherson unfit," said the voice, and Sam thought it was
filled with an infinite weariness.
He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned
her eyes to him smiling bravely.
"The next time we'll make it," she said.
The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again
Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without
the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again he shook
his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and reassuring.
After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his
arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the
nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused to
see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in some way
responsible for her physical inability to bear living children, and when
she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and listless but
grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life she so wanted
to feel in her arms.
During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce
ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam's nerves, but having learned
to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far as in him lay
to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she sometimes said; and
the third time, it was agreed between them that if they were again
unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other things.
"If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through
with each other for good," she said one day in one of the fits of cold
anger that were a part of child bearing with her.
That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside
himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and
to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death that
ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a child by a
fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the prisoners at
Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries to a little
pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that he too was
creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death. In a
conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had been
decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand on the
part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case unless
permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be performed.
"Take the chances that need be taken," Sam had said to Grover after the
conference; "she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child."
In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he stood
motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression that they
were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside. When, from a
distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he shook with
fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns clad in white
passed.
"Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section," said one of them; "he is
getting out of date. Hope he doesn't bungle it."
In Sam's ears rang the remembrance of Sue's voice, the Sue who that first
time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the determined
smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white face looking up
from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through the door.
"I am afraid, Dr. Grover--I am afraid I am unfit," he had heard her say as
the door closed.
And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his life.
On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked to the
swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating room
where Grover was at work upon Sue.
The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white
cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw its rays
directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal operating
table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set in shining
glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense, expectant
atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women, faceless,
hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through the white
masks that covered their faces.
Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild, half-seeing
eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time to time little
shining instruments from a swinging table close at his hand. The nurse
standing beside him looked up toward the light and began calmly threading
a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at the side of the room
lay the last of Sue's tremendous efforts toward new life, the last of
their dreams of the great family.
Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall, aroused
him and he struggled to his feet.
Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.
"Damn it, man, get out of here."
Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish
figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes
closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and down
a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had no
doubt of Sue's death.
live for this! I will live for this!" he kept saying over and over to
himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue's
arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish
together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the
darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought
they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.
At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
"I must go to her--I must go to her at her house--now--tonight--and tell
her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me," he thought.
And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
"It cleanses me! this cleanses me!" he said to himself.
He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman's grocery
when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing from
the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how strangely
perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been. "Sex is a
solution, not a menace--it is wonderful," he told himself without knowing
fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his lips.
When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his
apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of
the sleeping houses was striking three.
CHAPTER VI
One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in Jackson
Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake Michigan
steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the distance. They had
been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom's big house on the south side;
and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being carried out into darkness,
vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each more or less afraid of the
other. They sat in silence, looking at the blinking lights and listening
to the low voices of their fellow passengers, also sitting in the chairs
along the deck or strolling leisurely about, and to the wash of the water
along the sides of the boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the
solemnity of the marriage service had built up between them.
A picture floated in Sam's mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and
wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the
newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy
moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this hour
when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from her
the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being able
to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy in his
mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had been half
overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame that had
swept over him that night when she had given her word and he had walked
hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him that from among
the guests standing about should arise a voice crying, "Stop! Do not go
on! Let me tell you of this fellow--this McPherson!" And then he had seen
her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious Colonel Tom and he had
taken her hand to become one with her, two curious, feverish, strangely
different human beings, taking a vow in the name of their God, with the
flowers banked about them and the eyes of people upon them.
When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in Jackson
Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered and roared
and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam remained cool
and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming the door and
shouting, "Upstart! Damned upstart!" and Sam had gone smiling back to his
desk, mildly disappointed. "I told Sue he would say 'Ingrate,'" he
thought, "I am losing my skill at guessing just what he will do and say."
The colonel's rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting of
Sam to chance callers as "the best business man in America," and in the
face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the approaching
marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected him of secretly
calling on the telephone those newspapers whose representatives had not
crossed his trail.
During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making between
Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country or to the
parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious eager passion of
suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew in Sam's brain. To
live for the young things that would presently come to them, to be simple,
direct, and natural, like the trees or the beasts of the field, and then
to have the native honesty of such a life illuminated and ennobled by a
mutual intelligent purpose to make their young something finer and better
than the things in Nature by the intelligent use of their own good minds
and bodies. In the shops and on the streets the hurrying men and women
took on a new significance to him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose
might be in their lives, and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a
marriage with a little jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the
women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with
questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and
determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material,
as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in
the great workshop of the universe. "Marriage is a port, a beginning, a
point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage
of life," he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. "All that
goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage." Or, again, one night
when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about them
in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of excited
girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in against
the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel, with his
head in her lap and whisper, "It is not the love of a woman that grips me,
Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the great mystery. This
--this is why we are here--this justifies us."
Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried
away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love for
her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down upon
his shoulder.
"Not yet, Sam," she whispered, "not with these hundreds of people sleeping
and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost within
touch of our hands."
They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the clean
wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the darkness
in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently, speechless with
happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between them.
At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets, and
camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods passing
the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a sawmill that
stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean sweet smell of
the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of the water tumbling
over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen working among the
floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air, and above the song of
the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting song, the song of love
and of life singing in the hearts of husband and wife.
In a little roughly-built lumberman's hotel they ate breakfast in a room
overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing the
door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold swiftly-
flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages wrapped in
blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little wharf beside the
hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two strange boys,
saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his breast.
On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
current. During the six weeks' waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
essentials of the canoeist's art and, now, as he shot the canoe under the
bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the prow of
the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the shore.
At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill and
on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they made their
first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like feathers in
the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while Sue, at the
foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared their first
cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out her rifle and
gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness making the
lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the young night,
with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold wind blowing
into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under the trees to
where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the stormy waters of a
great sea before their eyes, and lay down together for their first long
tender embrace.
There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one's first knowledge
of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves and to have
that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life, adds point and
flavour to the experience. In his busy striving, nickel-seeking boyhood in
the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in his young manhood of
scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not thought of vacations
and resting places. He had walked on country roads with John Telfer and
Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing their ideas, blind and
deaf to the little life in the grass, in the leafy branches of the trees
and in the air about him. In clubs, and about hotels and barrooms in the
city, he had heard men talk of life in the open, and had said to himself,
"When my time comes I will taste these things."
And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the river,
floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight, listening to the
night call of birds, or watching the flight of frightened wild things as
he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of the great forest about them.
At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the blankets
under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at Sue lying
beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across her face and
her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just the quiet of her
expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he turned reluctantly
to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure, go on looking at her
all night.
For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and lay
looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that when he
awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that she knew
these secret love passages gave to both.
They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers
and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind of
people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away to the
woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open. He
discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest
fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One
with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked
him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay did
not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it did,
nodding his head and laughing.
"But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it," he said, "the
danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real fun
with them."
Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always as
one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and he came
to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making because she
admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of the out-of-
doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out of the
solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they called to
her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show her husband,
and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the inroads of the
lumber men upon their paradise. "The Burnhams were this year on the shores
of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from Pittsburgh would come early in
August, the Detroit man with the crippled son was building a cabin on the
shores of Bone River."
Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for the
wonder of Sue's past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the woman
rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these people; she,
who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of Chicago, to have
been secretly all of these years the companion and fellow spirit of these
campers by the lakes.
For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of every
thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of readjustment
and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to shoot, and to get
the fine taste of that life into his being.
And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim of
their two lives.
If Sam's life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of
many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly
full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart
tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom,
the voter of Sue's big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and
genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince's loyalty had been
rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of the
Rainey Arms Company's wares known to all reading Americans. The muzzles of
Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked threateningly out
at one from the pages of the great popular magazines, brown fur-clad
hunters did brave deeds before one's eyes, kneeling upon snow-topped crags
preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain sheep; huge open-
mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the top of the pages and
seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen who stood undaunted,
swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place, and presidents,
explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the merits of Rainey-
Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam and for Colonel Tom a
time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and contentment.
Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing her
ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two children,
going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in country
hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each other,
raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside when
they were out of breath.
Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
fine vows of their early love-making days.
Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness is
a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little turns
of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate and at
rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost ideal
happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even months of
their first year together that later passed out of Sam's memory entirely,
leaving only a sense of completeness and well being. He could remember,
perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen lake, or a visitor
who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But at the end he had to
come back to this: that something sang in his heart all day long and that
the air tasted better, the stars shone more brightly, and the wind and the
rain and the hail upon the window panes sang more sweetly in his ears. He
and the woman who lived with him had wealth, position, and infinite
delight in the presence and the persons of each other, and a great idea
burned like a lamp in a window at the end of the road they travelled.
Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president was
elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city
council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own city. In
other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting, planning,
working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue's feet, dreaming and
talking to her of the brood that under their care should grow into
wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented sales manager of
the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a Kansas City jobber, he
smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that territory, and went for an
afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely and wholly accepted Sue's
conception of life. "We have wealth for any emergency," he said to
himself, "and we will live our lives for service to mankind through the
children that will presently come into our house."
After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness and
indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own little
circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during the
engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an
evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them for
a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which Sue and
Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought brought to
them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone resplendent. In some
indefinable way he thought they paid court to him and the thought
flattered him immensely. The college professor who had talked brilliantly
through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his conclusions, a writer
of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over a difficulty in the
stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid him the rare compliment
of repeating one of Sam's remarks as his own. It was as though, in spite
of their talk, they thought him the most gifted of them all, and for a
time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack Prince came, sat at one of the
dinner parties, and explained.
"You have got what they want and cannot get--the money," he said.
After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner. It
was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the people
at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends of the table,
lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other's eyes, drank off
the health of him who was to come, the first of the great family, the
family that was to have two lives lived for its success.
At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his white,
pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue's side sat Jack
Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye on the
handsome New York girl at Sam's end of the table or to puncture, with a
flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched by
Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the artist,
who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite him
bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a serious-faced
little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling as the artist
talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both, perhaps at all of
them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and at the other faces
up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her directing and leading
the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her strong neck and the fine
firmness of her straight little body, and his eyes grew moist and a lump
came into his throat at the thought of the secret that lay between them.
And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
eating among strange people at Freedom Smith's table. He saw again the
tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand
in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying to blow
the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of death
through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record of his loves
on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man rubbing his
hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this--this home with its
safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at the head of it
all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should admire and bow his
head before the romance of destiny. He thought his station, his wife, his
country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the very apex of life on the
earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that he was in some way the
master and maker of it all.
CHAPTER VII
Late one evening, some weeks after the McPhersons had given the dinner
party in secret celebration of the future arrival of what was to be the
first of the great family, they came together down the steps of a north
side house to their waiting carriage. They had spent, Sam thought, a
delightful evening. The Grovers were people of whose friendship he was
particularly proud and since his marriage with Sue he had taken her often
for an evening to the house of the venerable surgeon. Doctor Grover was a
scholar, a man of note in the medical world, and a rapid and absorbing
talker and thinker on any subject that aroused his interest. A certain
youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had attracted to him the
devotion of Sue, who, since meeting him through Sam, had counted him a
marked addition to their little group of friends. His wife, a white-
haired, plump little woman, was, though apparently somewhat diffident, in
reality his intellectual equal and companion, and Sue in a quiet way had
taken her as a model in her own effort toward complete wifehood.
During the evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas
between the two men, Sue had sat in silence. Once when he looked at her
Sam thought that he had surprised an annoyed look in her eyes and was
puzzled by it. During the remainder of the evening her eyes refused to
meet his and she looked instead at the floor, a flush mounting her cheeks.
At the door of the carriage Frank, Sue's coachman, stepped on the hem of
her gown and tore it. The tear was slight, the incident Sam thought
entirely unavoidable, and as much due to a momentary clumsiness on the
part of Sue as to the awkwardness of Frank. The man had for years been a
loyal servant and a devoted admirer of Sue's.
Sam laughed and taking Sue by the arm started to help her in at the
carriage door.
"Too much gown for an athlete," he said, pointlessly.
In a flash Sue turned and faced the coachman.
"Awkward brute," she said, through her teeth.
Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt as
he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips of his
mother. The look in Sue's eyes as she turned them on Frank struck him like
a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception of her and
of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam the carriage
door after her and walk home.
They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new and
strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her face
held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in front.
He didn't want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm and
shake her. "I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank's seat
and give her a sound beating," he told himself.
At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and when
Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the stairs
leading to her room and waiting for him.
"I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
evening," she cried. "Your beastly talk there at the Grovers--it was
unbearable--who are these women? Why parade your past life before me?"
Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at her
and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the door of
her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in the grate
and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think the thing
out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the Sue who had
lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed, that in her
place there was this other woman, this woman who had insulted her own
servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of his talk during the
evening.
Sitting by the fire filling and refilling his pipe, Sam went carefully
over every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grovers and
could get hold of no part of it that he thought might in fairness serve as
an excuse for the outburst. In the upper part of the house he could hear
Sue moving restlessly about and he had satisfaction in the thought that
her mind was punishing her for so strange a seizure. He and Grover had
perhaps been somewhat carried away, he told himself; they had talked of
marriage and its meaning and had both declared somewhat hotly against the
idea that the loss of virginity in women was in any sense a bar to
honourable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could have
been twisted into an insult to Sue or to Mrs. Grover. He had thought the
talk rather good and clearly thought out and had come out of the house
exhilarated and secretly preening himself with the thought that he had
talked unusually forcefully and well. In any event what had been said had
been said before in Sue's presence and he thought that he could remember
her having, in the past, expressed similar ideas with enthusiasm.
Hour after hour he sat in the chair before the dying fire. He dozed and
his pipe dropped from his hand and fell upon the stone hearth. A kind of
dumb misery and anger was in him as over and over endlessly his mind kept
reviewing the events of the evening.
"What has made her think she can do that to me?" he kept asking himself.
He remembered certain strange silences and hard looks from her eyes during
the past weeks, silences and looks that in the light of the events of the
evening became pregnant with meaning.
"She has a temper, a beast of a temper. Why shouldn't she have been square
and told me?" he asked himself.
The clock had struck three when the library door opened quietly and Sue,
clad in a dressing gown through which the new roundness of her lithe
little figure was plainly apparent, came into the room. She ran across to
him and putting her head down on his knee wept bitterly.
"Oh, Sam!" she said, "I think I am going insane. I have been hating you as
I have not hated since I was an evil-tempered child. A thing I worked
years to suppress in me has come back. I have been hating myself and the
baby. For days I have been fighting the feeling in me, and now it has come
out and perhaps you have begun hating me. Can you love me again? Will you
ever forget the meanness and the cheapness of it? You and poor innocent
Frank--Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!"
Reaching down, Sam took her into his arms and cuddled her like a child. A
story he had heard of the vagaries of women at such times came back to him
and was as a light illuminating the darkness of his mind.
"I understand now," he said. "It is a part of the burden you carry for us
both."
For some weeks after the outbreak at the carriage door events ran smoothly
in the McPherson house. One day as he stood in the stable door Frank came
round the corner of the house and, looking up sheepishly from under his
cap, said to Sam: "I understand about the missus. It is the baby coming.
We have had four of them at our house," and Sam, nodding his head, turned
and began talking rapidly of his plans to replace the carriages with
automobiles.
But in the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue's
ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the
relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first of
the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of their
lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding and
kindly tolerance with which they had faced smaller things in the past--a
disagreement over the method of shooting a rapid in a river or the
entertainment of an undesirable guest. The inclination to fits of temper
loosens and disarranges all the little wires of life. The tune will not
get itself played. One stands waiting for the discord, strained, missing
the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that he must keep a
check upon his tongue and that things of which they had talked with great
freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated his wife when brought
into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who, during his life with Sue,
had learned the joy of free, open talk upon any subject that came into his
mind and whose native interest in life and in the motives of men and women
had blossomed in the large leisure and independence of the last year, this
was trying. It was, he thought, like trying to hold free and open
communion with the people of an orthodox family, and he fell into a habit
of prolonged silences, a habit that later, he found, once formed,
unbelievably hard to break.
One day in the office a situation arose that seemed to demand Sam's
presence in Boston on a certain date. For months he had been carrying on a
trade war with some of the eastern manufacturers in his line and an
opportunity for the settlement of the trouble in a way advantageous to
himself had, he thought, arisen. He wanted to handle the matter himself
and went home to explain to Sue. It was at the end of a day when nothing
had occurred to irritate her and she agreed with him that he should not be
compelled to trust so important a matter to another.
"I am no child, Sam. I will take care of myself," she said, laughing.
Sam wired his New York man asking him to make the arrangements for the
meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading aloud
to her.
And then, coming home the next evening he found her in tears and when he
tried to laugh away her fears she flew into a black fit of anger and ran
out of the room.
Sam went to the 'phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct
him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans for
the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had been standing
outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the mouthpiece of the
'phone.
"Sam! Sam!" she cried. "Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do
anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying
your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of
what I have said!"
Over the 'phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand
aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making some
detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.
Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the fire
until his train time, talking like lovers.
To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.
"Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it," she had wired.
While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.
"Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and
only half a fool."
Sam was irritated. "It is deliberate pettiness and weakness," he thought,
when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding his immediate
return. "The situation calls for drastic action and perhaps one good
stinging reproof will stop it for all time."
Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention to
the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and
saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and not
upon her impulses.
Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no
shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and he
said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had come
into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said and
when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and
mailed it at a passing station.
Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He
thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things
Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came back
to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire asking her
not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he would hurry
through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.
When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and read
the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the
knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about
his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her
alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her growing
worse daily and became alarmed for her health.
And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time
with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open air.
He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and went to
bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a stormy
passage between them.
There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near insanity.
With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would take up some
minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had quoted from some
book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk of it until his
head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of his hands to keep
control of himself. After such a day he would steal off by himself and,
walking rapidly, would try through pure physical fatigue to force his mind
to give up the remembrance of the persistent, complaining voice. At times
he would give way to fits of anger and strew impotent oaths along the
silent street, or, in another mood, would mumble and talk to himself,
praying for strength and courage to keep his own head during the ordeal
through which he thought they were passing together. And when he returned
from such a walk and from such a struggle with himself it often occurred
that he would find her waiting in the arm chair before the fire in her
room, her mind clear and her little face wet with the tears of her
repentance.
And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged that
Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they drove
there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring pains
gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness had hold
of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new life Sue was
transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes glistened.
"I am going to do it," she cried; "my black fear is gone. I shall give you
a child--a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It will
be beautiful."
When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of physical
sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his
helplessness.
At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his
knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.
"Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you."
At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the
swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of
regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced up
and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge
moments when a man's brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans for
the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life, halt,
and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little clock
on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop also and
wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and vital seemed
now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the silent white-
clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the presence of this
greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up and down peering at
the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting at the stem of his
empty pipe.
And then through the swinging door came Grover.
"We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance
with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide."
Sam sprang past him toward the door.
"You bungler," he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet
corridor. "You do not know what this means. Let me go."
Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men stood
facing each other.
"You stay here," said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; "I
will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now
answer me--do you want to take the chance?"
"No! No!" Sam shouted. "No! I want her--Sue--alive and well, back through
that door."
A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the doctor's
face.
"Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will----"
Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam
staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor
Grover's office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside
him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and
talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.
"Do not worry," he said. "She will be all right. Grover will take care of
her. Nothing can happen to little Sue."
The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue,
wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the tears
ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the woman's
tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.
"My mother is dead," he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. "I wish that
you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me."
When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his
self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the
little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the
long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door of
the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice, thin
and weak, talking to Grover.
"Unfit--Sue McPherson unfit," said the voice, and Sam thought it was
filled with an infinite weariness.
He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned
her eyes to him smiling bravely.
"The next time we'll make it," she said.
The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again
Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without
the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again he shook
his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and reassuring.
After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his
arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the
nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused to
see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in some way
responsible for her physical inability to bear living children, and when
she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and listless but
grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life she so wanted
to feel in her arms.
During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce
ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam's nerves, but having learned
to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far as in him lay
to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she sometimes said; and
the third time, it was agreed between them that if they were again
unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other things.
"If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through
with each other for good," she said one day in one of the fits of cold
anger that were a part of child bearing with her.
That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside
himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and
to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death that
ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a child by a
fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the prisoners at
Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries to a little
pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that he too was
creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death. In a
conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had been
decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand on the
part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case unless
permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be performed.
"Take the chances that need be taken," Sam had said to Grover after the
conference; "she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child."
In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he stood
motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression that they
were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside. When, from a
distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he shook with
fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns clad in white
passed.
"Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section," said one of them; "he is
getting out of date. Hope he doesn't bungle it."
In Sam's ears rang the remembrance of Sue's voice, the Sue who that first
time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the determined
smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white face looking up
from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through the door.
"I am afraid, Dr. Grover--I am afraid I am unfit," he had heard her say as
the door closed.
And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his life.
On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked to the
swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating room
where Grover was at work upon Sue.
The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white
cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw its rays
directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal operating
table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set in shining
glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense, expectant
atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women, faceless,
hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through the white
masks that covered their faces.
Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild, half-seeing
eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time to time little
shining instruments from a swinging table close at his hand. The nurse
standing beside him looked up toward the light and began calmly threading
a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at the side of the room
lay the last of Sue's tremendous efforts toward new life, the last of
their dreams of the great family.
Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall, aroused
him and he struggled to his feet.
Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.
"Damn it, man, get out of here."
Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish
figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes
closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and down
a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had no
doubt of Sue's death.