MYRA wired to Alice, at the end of that week, "He wants a regular wedding so I'm coming to Chicago for clothes"; to which Alice immediately replied, "Come right here." And the next day Myra arrived and Alice and she shut themselves in Alice's room for a long talk about everything.
"Don't your own doings beat the Dutch?" Myra appealed. "Here Lan and I have been passing up month after month since he's been out of medical school and when he might just as well have been married; because he felt he'd be getting into the war before it's over; and now we're getting married because he's about to go."
"You two get married!" Alice urged vehemently.
"Don't worry!" Myra rejoined and longed for ability to take her friend into her happiness.
As soon as she could, Myra inquired cautiously: "How's Dave making it with Fidelia?"
"Very well, I think."
"Do you think it?" Myra demanded.
"Yes," Alice replied but she thought about that telephone call and Myra discerned that she held a reservation.
"Nothing peculiar happened yet?" Myra asked.
"Peculiar?" Alice repeated.
"Something peculiar is due with her; we knew that in college, Allie. Wasn't there a secret that Roy Wheen knew and that our Stanford chapter was covering up? There was a girl visiting in Davenport, just across the river from Rock Island, who was in Stanford when Fidelia was. She was awfully eloquent about a man named Bolton—he wasn't in college but he was playing around ardently with her."
"With your friend, you mean?"
"You know I don't; with Fidelia. He was large and handsome with black hair and dark eyes. He was one of California's proud native sons—a second or third son of somebody who owned about half of a California county. They run to area out there. Well, Sam Bolton was one who went simply wild over Fidelia. He used to arise at midnight on the farm—or the ranch, whatever it was—and ride all night over the mountains to steam into Palo Alto to see her. Or if he was quite a ways off, when he got the feeling that he couldn't live except in her presence, he'd burn up the California highways at sixty or seventy miles an hour when everybody else was asleep. He was especially given to strenuous and spectacular stunts."
Myra halted.
"Well?" said Alice, breathing irregularly.
"Well, what?"
"What did he do? I mean, did she care for him? Was she engaged?"
"Oh, she was engaged to him all right."
"Then?" said Alice.
"That's it; then? Then Fidelia left college; that is, she didn't come back. And neither did he. The next thing we know, it's a year and a half later and she's come to our chapter with something she's covering up."
"But what was it, Myra?"
"That's what was asked me. No one knows. I wonder if Dave does."
Alice s bosom fluttered. Of herself, she never put much store by that secret of Fidelia's but this revival of it excited her.
Myra inquired, bluntly: "Fidelia has no baby yet, has she?"
"No.".
"That seems funny to me. I thought she surely would, she's so naturally animal."
"I thought she would," said Alice.
"You and Dave ever talk over the subject of children?" Myra demanded mercilessly.
"Yes."
"You were going to have them, of course."
"Yes. He thought, Myra, for man and wife to live together except with the idea of having children was sin. He was brought up strictly about that, but he modified the idea, some."
"Evidently he's modified it a good deal more. Men are remarkable creatures, Alice, with their ideas. Thank God Lan takes to normal, scientific, rationalistic notions. Yet he's overtaken with sentiment sometimes. Of course he is about me; I like it. He suddenly insisted on a real father-give-away-the-bride wedding with flower girls and potted palms everywhere. Heavens, I don't care what I'm married in or where. I'd gladly go to Baltimore as I am or to the dock to marry him before he sails, but he wants to come and get me at home from amid bevies of brides-maids and the maid-of-honor—that's you, of course. And he wants a best man and who, do you suppose?"
"Who?" asked Alice.
"Dave! Can you beat it?"
"Who?"
"Of course, only if you agree, Alice."
"I don't understand."
"I don't blame you. You have to remember Lan's going to war; he's got to thinking that after rooming four years with Dave, and getting to care more for him than any other man he ever knew or ever will, you can understand that . . ."
"I can understand that," Alice said.
"Oh, I didn't mean to say that. I meant, Lan got to feeling he'd turned down Dave pretty hard when Dave never did anything to him. So when he comes through here, he wants to bring Dave to Rock Island with him. Dave alone, not Fidelia, of course. He thinks Dave will understand and do it—if you don't care."
"I?" said Alice. "You give me that to decide?"
Her breast, which fluttered before, almost collapsed, then swelled violently with the draw of her breath. Why not? Why not have him come where she was and see what power she had?
As a result of her answer, Dave looked up from his desk in the forenoon two days later and saw Lan standing in the door of his office.
Dave leaped up and Lan advanced with his broad, square hand extended. "Hello, Dave!" he hailed, heartily.
"You old burglar!" Dave cried in his delight. "Where have you been keeping yourself?"
"Baltimore, but I'm on my way to Rock Island."
"That means a wedding, I've heard."
"Have you, Dave?"
"You bet I have and I've heard about Serbia, too; you're going."
"Yes."
"When, Lan?"
"Next week."
"You are!"
They looked each other over and agreed: "You're about the same."
Then Lan said: "Dave, I've been doing a lot of thinking about old times."
"So have I," said Dave.
"I guess this sounds like a last minute idea, Dave; but it isn't. I'm going to Rock Island this afternoon; the wedding's to-morrow night and what I'm here for is to take you along with me, Dave."
"You want me?" cried Dave.
"You've got to stand up with me!"
"What do you mean?"
"Be my best man the way we've always planned. I'd have written you long ago but Myra had to see Alice first."
"Alice!" said David.
"Myra's having her, of course. Myra's just been here, at Alice's. She's taken Alice back with her; they're both at Rock Island now. It's all right with Alice, Dave; Myra wired me."
"What's all right?"
"For me to bring you. So you'll come with me, Old Top! You'll stand up with me. You won't throw me down now."
Dave looked at Lan and forgot everything else for the moment. Lan's "now" meant not only now when he was being married, at last, but now when he was going away to war. Dave thought of Lan at work in Serbia; he pictured Lan working under fire and in pestilence; not with the greatest skill perhaps, but with no idea of sparing his short, stubborn self. Dave promised: "You bet I won't throw you down."
"That's good," Lan accepted immediately. "That's great! That's settled, then. That makes everything all right. I'll wire Myra. You'll stay at her home, of course."
Then Dave remembered Fidelia and that this invitation could not include her; but with the thought was memory of the night when she had brought him word, from Evanston, that Lan was to be married and he had felt badly, and she had, because she thought that Lan, on account of her, meant to ignore him. He wanted to tell her how it really was.
"Fidelia'll understand," asserted Lan. "I'll wire now."
"I'll call her first," David said; and immediately, with Lan there, he did so.
Fidelia insisted that David go; she urged him to go on the afternoon train with Lan. "Of course you'll go, David," she said, "I'm just glad about it. You mustn't think of anything else." And she asked to talk to Lan over the phone.
David kept his promise to go but he did not leave with Lan on the afternoon train, although Fidelia offered to pack his suitcase for him and bring it downtown. David did not deceive himself. His visit to Rock Island was to be not only a return to the companionship of Lan, also it was to be a return to the company of Alice. It must be; there could be no avoiding it. And he knew that Fidelia fully understood this.
As there was a train in the morning which would take him to Rock Island in ample time for the wedding, he saw Lan off in the afternoon and he returned to the hotel at his usual hour.
"Lan's wedding is the only thing which could happen that I've got to be in without you," he said to Fidelia. "Leaving to-morrow morning, I'll get into Rock Island about noon. "I'll be at the Taines' to-morrow night, of course, but back here by noon again. Will you come in for lunch with me?"
"Of course I will," Fidelia said. "You know that I wish you'd gone with Lan, if you'd liked to."
"I didn't want to," David said.
"I wish you'd stay longer in Rock Island, if you find you'd like to," Fidelia urged.
"Why would I stay?" David asked. "Lan and Myra of course will be gone."
Neither he nor she mentioned Alice, except when he said in confirmation of what he had told her over the telephone: "Alice is going to be maid-of-honor, of course," and when he told Fidelia in order that she might have no idea that Alice also would be on the morning train, "Alice is in Rock Island now."
He arose earlier than usual in the morning and he was awakened by unconscious currents of impatience nearly an hour before he arose but he did not stir about, as he wished not to wake Fidelia; however, she also was awake and she was aware that he was.
She dressed for breakfast with him and they breakfasted, not in their room, but in the restaurant, as David suggested it "to save time." As a matter of fact both of them felt under tension this morning when he was leaving her to visit Alice and they found the tension less when they were not alone.
He reminded Fidelia, when he kissed her good-by: "To-morrow at one-thirty. We'll have our lunch at the Blackstone."
She said: "I'll meet your train. But remember you must stay later, if you'd like to."
When he was on the train for Rock Island, and it was started, he felt the tension no more; he was not at ease, yet he felt freshened. The direction of his travel drew his thoughts ahead of the train; Fidelia was not in that direction; ahead of them, where he was traveling, were Lan and Myra and Alice and he was going to join them; it seemed, sometimes, not only a journey to a meeting again of the four of them but almost it seemed a return in time to the world of the four.
Of course, he was Fidelia's husband but the others were the same—Myra and Lan now being married, as they long ago meant to do; and Alice was the same. Or, was she?
To be the same, she must still care more about David Herrick than about any one else in the world; and did she, now? When he had last seen her, she had appeared to be the same as he had known her since he had married; but he had not seen her at all for several months and he went over in his mind what Fidelia had told him after she had talked with Alice at Mrs. Fansler's; he reviewed Lan's declaration that Myra had reported it "all right" with Alice to have David in the same wedding-party with her.
This morning on the train he found himself interpreting this into belief that Alice was changing and was ceasing to care for him. He argued that of course he ought to be glad of that; but he was not. The idea of Alice indifferent to him, disturbed him; it brought back tension to him. He became more impatient to reach Rock Island and learn whether it was so. If it was, very likely she had come to care about some one else and this was more disturbing, although it was exactly what he ought to hope for her.
"I'll know when I see her," he assured himself but he did not know at once.
Lan met him at the station and drove him to the Taines' where the family and bridal party were about to sit down to luncheon. It was a big party and the house was full, so when he found Alice, she was in a group of girls to whom he had to be introduced.
He could not guess how she had debated whether she would meet him thus or alone and how she had rehearsed herself to speak to him without betraying too much of her feeling. In the confusion of the first moment, when he gazed past other girls to meet Alice's clear, blue eyes and to reply to her calm greeting, he thought: "She doesn't care."
She and he were not at once placed together, although they were maid-of-honor and best man, so Alice was able to keep up her pretense during the afternoon; and Myra's manner helped her; for Myra was so happy that she went about beaming at David, as at every one else. Of course he had expected her to be civil to him in her own house and at her wedding, but he thought, if Alice still cared, Myra must show more reserve with him for Alice's sake.
It was in the evening, at the wedding, when Alice's pretense failed. There she had to stand on one side of Myra as David stood side by side with Lan while Myra and Lan were being married. Here were two of them completing their part of the purpose of the four, as they had always meant to do; and when David looked at Alice and met her look toward him, he knew not only that she cared and cared for him alone and forever but that she cared more than before. Then in a moment, Lan and Myra were man and wife, and David and Alice, with her arm in his, were going down a church aisle to the measures of the Mendelssohn wedding march.
At the door of the church, others came about them; thereafter they were constantly with others through the festivities and the solemnities of the long evening.
At last Lan took Myra from her home; hand in hand, leaving laughter and tears behind them, the bride and groom ran out to their motor car and were driven away.
David and Alice were with those who followed them to the gate but after the car drove off, Alice immediately disappeared and David supposed she had gone with the guests who returned to the house where people were dancing again. David did not go in for he was battling with conflicting feelings. He was stirred by his thought of Alice as she went with him down the aisle of the church; he was sobered by the idea that his handshake of good-by to Lan was very likely to be the last time he might grasp that broad, square, earnest hand; he was roused by the disturbing contrast this wedding of Myra and Lan furnished to his marriage to Fidelia in the parlor of Dorothy Hess's home.
He argued that the contrast was due to this being a church wedding, with a large bridal party; he argued that, since Lan was going to war, that fact naturally endowed this marriage with an exalted tone entirely missing from his own wedding; but he could not down his own discomfort. No; there had been something noble in this night—something properly and inherently exalted and beautiful in Lan Blake's marriage to Myra Taine which had been lacking in David Herrick's to Fidelia Netley and which would not have been in the wedding at Streator, even if David then had been going to war.
He glanced up and noticed the stars; and the sight of them brought him to his camp with Fidelia on the sand of the shore; he thought how he had looked up at the stars, as he lay awake with his joy on his wedding night and exulted:
"Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
And then no more of Thee and Me,"
and how the idea had satisfied him that, having Fidelia, he had all he could want and that, after life with her, he would ask nothing more. But he was asking for more now.
He heard some one and, looking down from the stars, he saw Alice in the dim light from those far-away galaxies of the sky. The starlight was the only light over the lawn.
It was a large, wide lawn with many trees, some of them bare of bough on this October night, some of them fir and cedars which stood in great, tapering clumps against the stars.
To-night this western shore of Illinois, washed by the silent, wide waters of the Mississippi was warmer than the shore of the lake. From across the river and up from the southwest plains a mild sirocco was blowing and the season seemed earlier than in Chicago. It was like a mild night in autumn or spring when David and Alice used to wander outdoors from dances at college. She was in white, wearing her maid-of-honor dress, and she had not even a scarf over her white shoulders. Oh, it mightily reminded him of old times with her.
Alice asked, as she approached him: "You've heard their train?"
"No," he said. "But I haven't been listening for it."
"She's happy," said Alice. "Happy as ever she hoped to be. Happier, I guess."
"He is," said David.
"He ought to be."
"Yes; he ought."
She was silent beside him; vaguely he could see her face, her hair, her neck, the round of her bosom, the slenderness of her waist. He used to have his arm about her, when they were alone in the quiet like this; he used to know the feel of her against him, her lips on his, her arm about his neck, holding him down to her for another kiss.
He said: "Alice!"
"What?"
"How about you?" he demanded; and the outrightness of it caught breath from her. She gasped, then after waiting a few seconds she said: "There's nothing new about me, David."
"There's got to be, Alice!"
"What," she said and repeated it, "what ought to be new for me?"
He did not answer and she asked: "You mean I ought to care for somebody else? That's it? You'd be happier if I could?"
He could not say it; what he said was: "I want you to be happy, Alice. I want that more than anything else."
"More than anything else you've not already got, David," she corrected him, quietly. "Maybe that's true. For you've got almost everything you wanted, haven't you? You've made money; you're doing well; and you have Fidelia. I bother you sometimes; that's all. But you shouldn't bother about me; I don't want you to. What can you do for me now, David? Besides, I'm all right."
"You're not."
That stopped her short; it silenced her and seemed to crush her breathing while she thought. At last she said: "Of course I'm not, David. Are you all right?"
"What do you mean by all right?"
"What you do, David."
"I'm all right," David declared.
"Perfectly happy?"
"Of course."
"Then you've changed a lot!"
This caught him up; he expected nothing like it. "How've I changed?"
"You're not living with her very much as you planned to live with me."
He made no reply and she proceeded. "You never talked about a hotel to me; and we—we were going to have children, David, weren't we?"
She made him answer "Yes."
"We talked over the number. We'd have four; not six, like your parents, but four about two years and a half apart. You thought that would be best for me. Wasn't that it?"
His hand brushed hers as he moved it and she drew hers from touch of him with whom she had talked over having children; and she said:
"It's funny how I keep thinking about your business, David. That ten thousand dollars we used to talk about—the last time I asked you about it, you hadn't paid it back yet; but you have now, of course."
"No; I haven't, Alice."
"You haven't. Why? It's queer for me to be asking, David, but that special ten thousand got to be a sort of debt of mine in my mind, once. You see, I thought, when we borrowed it—for we did in a way do that together—I'd pay it back, if something happened so you couldn't. Why haven't you paid it back, David?"
"Because I've borrowed more. I owe Mr. Fuller twenty-five thousand now."
"You mean you aren't doing well?"
"I'm doing fine; I borrowed more to give me capital to take care of more business."
"Your father," she said and he followed the way of her thought. Naturally with mention of Mr. Fuller and his ten thousand dollars, his father came to her mind. "How are you and your father now?"
David replied: "How would you suppose?"
"He's been here—in Chicago, I mean. You told me so, David, that day you phoned me—by mistake."
"Yes; he was seeing me."
"I thought there was—I had to tell from your tone, you said almost nothing to me—maybe there was special trouble."
"There was."
"Much trouble?"
"Much?" said David. "He's stopped taking money from me now."
"He has? Why?"
"He has, Alice; that's all!" David said quickly and he waited in the dark, expecting she must ask more about it; but she said: "Your father used to be against me; you remember David? Yet now I think of you finishing with your father and me at the same time. What was the time, to you, David, which was the end of me with you?"
He said: "I don't know."
"I do," she replied calmly. "Whenever I go back over it, always it's the night Fidelia came and you drove me home in the snow-storm and you stopped your car by the graveyard, remember?"
"Of course I remember."
"And you said you weren't going to live by your father's idea, you said you were tired of Eternity; you wouldn't have it any more. You thought that night—didn't you—that I'd do instead of Eternity. Then you thought I wouldn't but Fidelia would."
He realized in a moment that she was moving away. She did not turn but she stepped from him, saying no word but very evidently she meant to leave him. In another instant, she had turned and she was upon the walk to the house. He watched her while she went from him and her white figure became more visible as she approached the light upon the porch; she went up the steps without even looking back and entered the house.
David stayed out in the dark by himself and, turned from the house, he gazed away toward the wide, midnight sheen of the Mississippi. Lights glinted upon the river from the long bridge and a train slowly moved from the Illinois shore and crossed to Davenport. It could not be Myra's and Lan's train; for they were bound east; but it brought to David thought of them on their train; and he thought of Lan having to-night more than he had had in his camp with Fidelia on the Wisconsin shore; he thought of Lan starting with something he never had gained and this had nothing to do with Lan's going away to war.
The last of the guests were gone when David went up to the house; Alice had disappeared to her room. He went up to his room and to bed almost immediately but he did not sleep. He was not accustomed to be alone with sleeplessness but to-night he lay alone in the silence looking up at the stars above his window and to-night, in his sensation, the stars drew him on and on into their infinite space above, into the reaches of Eternity which he had assumed to say made him tired, of which he would have no more, which could lay no obligations upon him. Eternity! He would not live for it; he would live for pleasure with Fidelia.
He turned from the stars and gazed down at the river flowing on and on ceaselessly, silently, forever. He shut his eyes to it but still he saw the stream, and, more, he seemed to feel the flow of it; he felt himself carried off in the course of that current which became no mere earthly river but the ever-rolling stream of Time bearing all the sons of creation, one after another, away.
"Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away."
He felt himself struggling in the stream of Time washing him on into that endless Eternity which made him tired, which he would not have but instead of which he would have his wife.
A psalm set to beating in his brain:
"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all Generations.
"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting thou art God."
And the Lord God of the little boy learning his first chapters of Genesis, the Lord God who had a voice to be heard and from whose voice Adam hid when God walked in the Garden in the cool of the day; God who spoke to Moses from the burning bush; God who sent the Angel of Death who slew the firstborn in the land of Egypt; God, the I Am the Lord Thy God, Thou Shalt Have no God Before Me; God that night assailed David Herrick.
He wanted to go home. "I'm going home," he decided. "I ought to go home." By home, he meant not the hotel, but Itanaca. He counted with amazement the months which had passed since he had seen his mother. "It can't be," he said; but it was and it was almost a year. He got up, and in his timetable looked up the hour for an early train which would connect with the line for Itanaca. Then he slept.
Alice did not appear for breakfast at the hour David had his; so he left without again seeing her. He intended to telegraph from the station to Fidelia to inform her of his change of plan but he postponed this till he should reach Itanaca, for at breakfast he had found that one of the ushers was driving in the direction of Itanaca and would reach the town before the train; so David went with him.