DAVE was skating about with quick, ecstatic strength. Quickness came naturally to him and so did strength, in any emergency; but this ecstasy was something new. "I'm away," he said to himself. "Away . . . away!" It was a sensation which thrilled through him. "Away!"
"Away with her!" it was; he would be away with Fidelia Netley.
Away from Alice. This sensation of "away" included that; but as he rushed from the shore, he did not feel himself fleeing from Alice, personally; she became only a part of all that which he was escaping—duty and his father's ideas, his own fears and prohibitions.
Strange that, only a few weeks ago, Alice and his betrothal to her represented his revolt from those duties and ideas of which she now had become a part. That had been before Fidelia Netley came, or before he knew her. Now what did it mean that his plan to marry Alice, which had been in defiance to duty, itself had become a duty?
This did not become a conscious question; it was merely an impulse in his sensation as he skated swiftly, feeling the thrust of the wind at his back. He said to himself: "We'll never get in."
By never, he meant never that night. With Fidelia Netley, he would be away from all the rest, away from all the world, together with her and there would be no help for it. He would meet her out here in their realm of sky and stars; no one else would be about; no one would watch them; no clock could call them at the end of an hour.
He was gloriously, recklessly exultant. He felt no fear at all. He was strong and young; she was, too. They had not thought of the cold that morning; they would not now, when it was not nearly so cold though it was night.
There was little danger from the lake; for the floe was firm and thick. It might break up somewhat; probably it would, but great fields, acres in extent, would hold together. There was too much ice upon the water to allow the wind to whip up a sea; and that smooth ice offered such small edge to the wind that it would drift out but slowly.
Dave saw Fidelia vaguely in the dusk. He was skating straight toward her. There she was! He had known she was in this direction before he could see her; throughout the afternoon he had kept himself aware of her presence on this side or on that, though he had never skated with her. So he had been sure, just now, that she was in the dusk toward the north.
She had seen him and was coming to meet him. She was skating rapidly but without panic. "She's not afraid!" he said. She seemed so little alarmed, indeed, that he wondered whether she knew the ice was drifting. He called to her: "Hello!"
"Why!" she exclaimed. "Why!"
He reached her and, with one of those swoops which a skater makes in turning, he put himself beside her and caught her hand.
"Ice's going out!" he told her.
"You came to get me," she said; and still he wondered whether previously she had known. He asked: "Didn't you know it?"
"I wasn't thinking," she replied. "I'm sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry 'bout," he said, breathlessly. She was not breathless; and he felt her hand steady in his. It drew within his, not quiveringly, but with regular pulsation as the rhythm of her effort pulled the muscles of her arm.
"She's all in it!" he realized as he felt this effort of her body. "How she puts all of herself into a thing!"
It was not like skating with any other girl. Others moved, in comparison with Fidelia, by detached efforts. "How different she is!" he thought. Different from Alice and from any one else.
He said to her: "No hurry."
"Why not?"
"No use. We won't get in."
"Then why did you come out?"
"To get you."
"Can't you get in?"
"No. Water's spreading too fast. You'll see."
They arrived at water and stopped.
"You came out here?" she asked.
"About here. I jumped it. Not a chance to jump it now."
"No," she agreed and turned, letting go his hand, and she skated south along the edge of the widening lead of open water.
He followed her, glancing toward the shore. No one else had come; no one else was near. She reached open water leading eastward and she turned and skated back past their original point beside the water until she came to the third edge of the floe on the north.
"It's no use," he said again.
She agreed, "No." And she made no feminine suggestion of impossible proceedings such as to attempt to swim to the other edge of the water, scramble upon the ice and make a dash for shore. "I'm sorry," she said again, simply and sincerely.
"I'm not. A few hours on the ice won't hurt anybody."
"Where's it deciding to take us, do you suppose?" she asked and thrilled him with her word which had been his word upon that morning they saw the sunrise together and watched the floe from the shore. It gave him the feeling that she and he were upon that same floe which they had seen drifting on the horizon and that this evening was a direct continuation of that morning.
"We're headed for Michigan, if the wind holds," he replied gayly. "You have anything against Michigan?"
"Oh, I like Michigan."
"But I suppose," he qualified, "somebody will go to work and pick us up before we're half way there."
"It's a lovely, clear night," Fidelia said, comfortably.
She was comfortable, Dave believed. Now she lifted a foot and, bending quickly, she loosened a skate and kicked it off; that was sensible, not to tire herself by standing on skates. She cleared her other boot of the second skate while he was stooping to help her. He removed his skates and he stood beside her, gazing at the lights on the shore.
There was the double line of lights, which were the street lamps of Sheridan Road; in many places the line was broken, and uneven patterns of yellow windows showed where houses stood between the boulevard and the shore; along other reaches of the road, the irregular patches of lighted windows glowed beyond the street lamps; and before them bright gleams waved back and forth, as motorcars sped by.
"That's what the ice comes in to see," Fidelia said and her feeling caught him; for the moment, the ice, upon which they stood, became the barque of some elemental God steering shoreward for a while to look at the lights of man and then casting adrift to return to his dwelling in the dark of the stars.
Dave drew closer to her; he wanted to share more of the exuberance of her feelings.
On the shore, far away, a red flame wavered up and broadened and then blew flat and long, beaten down by the wind.
"Bonfire," Fidelia said. "Alice has a bonfire for us."
Dave did not want to think of Alice. He did not know that she had fallen into the water in her attempt to follow him; he did not know that she had tried to go with him. From the instant when he leaped the first break in the ice, he had shut his thought to every one behind. "I'm away; away!"
Now he almost resented that fire. It could be of no use; and under no circumstances could it have been of any service. There were thousands of lights marking the shore; and the bonfire could satisfy no purpose of warmth. If Fidelia and he reached the shore, and especially if they had fallen into water and were freezing, they would not stop at the fire but would go into the house. No; the fire, which surely was Alice's, had been built for another reason. Alice had lit it to keep him in mind of her. So he looked away from it.
Before it flamed up, he had had a moment of exuberance and, before that, a sensation of gayety strange to the serious, earnest person who was David Herrick. Fidelia Netley had brought both to him. Always, from their first meeting, she had the pleasant power to take him out of that distraint person who had been himself. She had begun it by setting him to saying surprising, perverse things to her and then startling him into the amazement of following her to the shore at sunrise and putting him to play with her in the caves of the cliffs of ice.
Not one of these things had she intended; she could not have imagined them, in advance, more than could he. And he knew that she had never intended this, more than he; but here he was with her, "away"—away from every one else and all the world once more.
He looked back at Alice's fire—the faint, red flicker on the shore. It had become so futile now that he ceased to resent it. His thought went from Alice by the road of wondering who might be, at this moment, in Fidelia's mind as Alice was in his. Once before—at least once, she had told him—Fidelia had been in danger when she had thought of Water and the Wind as personal forces opposing her. Who had been with her on the side against the Water and the Wind as he was with her now? It struck him as strange that, although he had wondered about that danger frequently, he had always imagined her alone in it until now.
"You were alone that other time?" he asked her, suddenly.
"When?" she said; but he knew that she recognized what time he meant, and without his explaining, she told him, "No."
"Who was with you?"
She didn't reply.
His heart was thumping. "Hers is," he thought. He put his hand on her and clasped her forearm. He felt a pulse pounding but, if it was hers, it was beating simultaneously with the throb in his fingers.
He thought: "Why is she here with me? Everywhere men must have been crazy for her. That's why she's been a changer, of course."
He altered his question aloud, since she had not answered the other. "You both got out?" he said.
"Yes."
"Where's he?"
She waited again and her throbbing quickened with his. He thought she was not to reply but she did: "He's dead."
"Oh!" said Dave. "Oh!" Yet he had to ask more. "But not as a result of that?"
She replied quickly. "No. What killed him was something he did alone. He was that sort, you see, always getting into things."
"I see," said Dave and released her. He was satisfied. The man, who evidently was the one who had meant most to her, was dead; nothing could be more final than that.
"We'll get out of this," he said confidently. "Somebody's carried out almost every winter that there's skating on the lake."
He expected her to ask what happened to the skaters and how long they drifted before being rescued; but she did not, so he told her. "If it's daylight, they're picked up right away, of course. If it's night, half the time the ice drifts back to shore by morning or a tug comes out from Chicago and finds you."
He realized that she was not hearing him; her thought was back in the past where he had sent it.
"I should have come in," she said, after a minute. "That's the way with me. I guess I like to get into things, too," she admitted. "You told me about the ice the other morning. Why I could see it floating out there—out here," she corrected exhilaratingly and stamped a heel on their hard floor. "But I wanted to get far out; I thought I'd dare the wind. 'You can't hurt me!' I said. I thought if the ice goes out, I'll go with it but I bet I'll be all right. I almost wanted to take a chance. I get that way sometimes. But I should have thought about you."
"Me?" said Dave. "Why? What's there to this? We walk around on the ice all night; that's all."
"I shouldn't have done it," Fidelia said and Dave knew she was not regarding dangers of water or of cold. She was gazing again toward the flicker of Alice's useless fire; and she was thinking—Dave was sure—of her own self and of Alice and him. She knew how she drew him; denial of it would be silly; he was here because he wanted to be; and she knew that. She knew, she must know, that he wished to be with her rather than with Alice.
On the shore, beside Alice's fire, appeared an oblong of light. "They've opened a boat house," said Dave. "They're trying to get out to us with a boat."
"That's good," Fidelia replied; and he knew that, whatever were her feelings the minute before, now she wanted the boat to come. But he did not; not yet. Away, he wanted to stay away with Fidelia Netley; and there was impulse in this desire greater than before. It strengthened from what she had told him. "He's dead," she had said; the man, who had meant most to her, was dead.
Dave had known nothing whatever about him; even now Dave did not know so much as his name. It made no difference; he was dead. There was a feeling of freedom for Dave in that knowledge which surprised him. He had not been conscious of a sensation of restraint with Fidelia Netley because of a man for whom she cared; he became aware that he had had it only now when it was lifted from him. He said to himself: "There was some one for her; of course I knew there had been some one for her. But he's dead."
It cleared away barriers between Fidelia and him, on her side.
He caught himself about and saw, before the boathouse lights, gleaming spots which he took for electric torches in the hands of people who must be pulling a boat out over the shore hummocks of ice and snow. "They won't reach us," he said; and his voice surprised himself with its triumph.