IN Myra's letter to Alice, and upon a page which Alice did not mention to David, was the question, "What's all this I hear about Dave and Fidelia separating? Is it so? And did it have anything to do with that Bolton man I heard about?"
Alice wrote to Myra the acknowledged facts of the matter, and stated that Fidelia's marriage to David had been annulled. Alice added, after much indecision, "I am seeing David now."
The return mail from Rock Island brought a reply which exclaimed, "Then it's struck! I always knew it would! She's finished for you. Oh, I'm so glad, Allie! . . . Now I can tell you something I wanted to before and which maybe you've suspected from my staying safe at home and not trying to get across somewhere to be nearer Lan. We're going to have a baby. It's the wonderfulest thing. . . ."
It thrilled Alice but it also frightened her to be treated by Myra, the wife, almost as a wife herself and no longer as a girl who could never hope for a child and who therefore must not be shown the joy of another's hope. How could Myra feel so sure that Fidelia "was finished" for Alice?
Fidelia's secret had proved to be as serious as Myra could have suspected; and it was true that Fidelia was gone away to be the wife of another man. But she was not "finished" for Alice; and would she ever be?
Myra seemed to imagine that David and Alice could, if they would, ignore his three and a half years with Fidelia; she seemed to fancy that Fidelia had not changed him and her and that they had power to put themselves back where they were before Fidelia came to college on that snowy, winter night. But how different were the hours, when now he came to the house, from any hours before!
On a morning in March, Alice walked alone on the street to the west where stood the apartment in which David and she, four years ago, had planned to live.
It had only been building then for they were to move in when the place was new; now, newer apartments were beside it and in comparison "their" apartment looked old and long occupied.
She had not seen it since she had visited it with David on a day before Fidelia was known to either of them; and the sight of it revived in Alice the poignancy of his devotion to her then. To him, she had been without lack, until Fidelia came; but now, though Fidelia was gone and although she might remain away forever, Alice could never believe herself wholly sufficient to him.
Sometimes, when she was with him, she said to herself: "We're as we were in sophomore year." Or she said, "It is like our first year." But she knew that she considered the likeness of manners, only.
They shook hands upon meeting and upon parting; they occasionally sat side by side upon the lounge but as a rule they occupied separated chairs while they talked of his mother, of business, of the war, of Lan and Myra and of anything and any one but Fidelia.
Their minds swiftly re-established an intimacy in which Alice could feel no break. When he spoke of his relations with his father and with Mr. Fuller and when he told her of his difficulties with Snelgrove and the agency, it seemed just like long ago. It seemed to her not only that she had not heard these things for four years but also that he had not talked them to any one.
"Did you talk this way with—her?" Alice asked him suddenly, one evening.
He flushed and then went white as he looked at her and answered, "Of course not."
"Why not?"
"We didn't talk this way," he replied.
"How did you? I mean, I mean I don't want to make you talk to me just this way."
"You don't; you only let me, Alice," he said. "And please keep on letting me. It's marvelous to have this again."
"It is for me," she said; but she thought, "It really can't mean so much, for we were doing this when she took him away." Alice thought: "I felt too much interest; I made myself too much like a partner in his work; she didn't do that at all and she took him away. I'll be lighter with him."
But it was no time to be light with him, when he came to her from his mother who was dying; and Alice could not dissemble the intensity of her concern in everything which affected him. She was happiest when he discussed plans with her and when he reported progress of the plans, as he did in May when he told her: "I owe Mr. Fuller just twenty thousand now."
"You've paid off five thousand!"
"I'll make it five more this year, if business holds."
In June, his mother died. He was at home for several days previous and he wrote Alice where he was, but when the end came he did not inform her until he was ready to return to Chicago when he wired her the bare fact and that he was returning.
She well knew the time of the evening train from Itanaca and she met him at the station with her car and drove him to her home.
When they were alone there, he related to her, "I had a long talk with mother, a few days ago, about what I ought to do. They used to think I ought to go into the ministry, you remember."
"Yes, I remember," said Alice.
"Father thinks so still. He's a literal person, but mother wasn't, so much. She was loyal to father, absolutely, but broader. She told me that years ago she'd given up the idea that I'd go into the ministry or missions or even that I ought to. She wanted me to know that, before she went; she wanted me to know that she trusted me to work out my own best usefulness for myself.
"That was a mighty big way of putting it up to me, wasn't it?"
He asked, "Do you remember that talk we had long ago, Alice—that talk which you said, at Rock Island, always marked the end of you and me? It was when I said Eternity made me tired; and you said, I thought you'd do for me in place of Eternity and then you said, I thought you wouldn't but Fidelia would.
"You meant that I turned to you, when I was first trying to shake off father's ideas and when I'd got them shaken off, I turned to Fidelia.
"Well, a few of the ideas I shook off—or thought I'd shaken off—are in me again and I think they'll stay. I'll never go into the ministry but I've got to set myself to more than making money and spending it. It's right for me to make money, as I said that night in the snow; but also it's certainly not enough."
"What are you going to do differently?" Alice asked.
His need to do differently was met, temporarily at least, by his enrollment in the citizens' volunteer training camp which that summer was established at Fort Sheridan, in Illinois. It was the July when the British armies, seeking to relieve the frightful pressure of the German divisions before Verdun, were about the business of ceaseless slaughter in battle which soon earned the name of "the blood bath of the Somme."
The Russian front, too, was active and Italy was yet young in the war. The Serbians, swept from their native soil, were reforming in Macedonia, recruiting and making ready to turn. No one now talked confidently and carelessly, as had Vredick less than a year ago, about how the big bankers would soon call an end to war; most Americans were feeling themselves drawn closer and closer into it and Congress already had drafted the National Guard regiments into the regular army and offered to volunteers the chance for training which David accepted.
He enrolled against the vehemently spoken best judgment of Mr. Snelgrove.
"Do your duty, boy!" Irving urged. "Go to it; but don't pick the exact time when Hamilton is slipping out the sweetest, snappiest, sellingest little summer tourings and all-weather sedans that this street ever seen. Here we wait for four long, lingering years—and I ain't sayin' they ain't been lucrative in their way—yet they're the waitin' years lookin' forward to luck like this model which all we need is you to sell it and set the street on its ear with rage and envy, and you pick this for the prize time to take a month off runnin' at dummy sandbags and stickin' em through with bayonets."
David recognized that his month at the camp was to be costly to him in money but he wanted it to cost him. Besides being expensive for him, the experience returned him to strict discipline and hard, muscle-taxing labor.
It was much less lonely living in barracks than in a room in the city and he was busy nearly all his waking time and he was sure to be tired at night.
He never had let himself get really "soft" and he relearned the satisfaction of spending strength to exhaustion.
One day, when the Fort was open to the public, Alice drove through without intention of inquiring for David, but she was looking for his figure in every group of men she passed. She found him, at last, with a company "digging in" technically under fire. He was all at it, working rapidly, ceaselessly and with more vigor than any other man, but also with more grace. His strong, well-built body was graceful even when laboring with a shovel; and Alice thought of a time in their freshman year, when he supported himself by labor, and she was going to college in a snowstorm and she had come upon him, in flannel shirt and with coat off, clearing a walk of the heavy snow with that same strong, vigorous, graceful swing of his body.
She watched him as long as she dared; then she drove off before he saw her.
At the end of the month, he returned to selling cars with so much energy that Snelgrove allowed that maybe the camp might help business after all. Irving thought that David's better physcial condition accounted for his increased activity; but the actual impetus was his determination to pay off his debt at the earliest possible moment and make himself free.
He returned to his room in the city but he liked it even less than before.
"I mean to move," he announced to Alice one Sunday afternoon in September when she and he were walking west from her home.
"Where to?" she asked. "Back to a hotel where you'll be more with people?"
"No; I'm through with hotels. I'm crazy, I suppose, but since I've been shoveling and working with my back again, I'd like to keep on doing that sort of work. And I certainly have a hankering for a house and to take care of things again. When I get into that room of mine and all I have to do, before I go to bed, is turn out the light, I feel I've forgotten half a dozen things."
Alice thought, "He did that for three and a half years with Fidelia but he doesn't think of it now."
He went on. "I was brought up to take care of a house and to cut grass and shovel snow and tend a furnace; and I haven't looked in the face of a furnace, hot or cold, for years."
Alice made no comment, but when they came to the corner at which they always turned, in these days, to avoid the block in which was "their" flat, she said: "Shall we go on to-day?"
"Past the building, you mean?"
She nodded and he said, "I went by a couple of weeks ago."
She said: "I did once last spring." And they did not turn but this time went straight on and looked at the building and gazed at the windows on the second floor where was the apartment which was to have been theirs.
When they were by the building, Alice said, "I want to stop dodging other things, David."
He said, "I do."
"I'm thinking about Fidelia, you know as well as you knew I was thinking about—our flat."
"Of course I knew."
"Where is she now, David? Do you know?"
"I don't."
"Where do you think she is?"
"In London, I suppose; that's where she was going and Jessop said she got there."
"How do you think of her there?"
"With Bolton," he said shortly, "when I think of her definitely."
"Do you often think of her—definitely?"
"Not more than I can help."
"Because you have to think of her with Bolton, when you do?"
"Yes."
"I know," said Alice, "how it was to have to think definitely of you at the hotel with her. I didn't do it, more than I could help. But all through it I kept on loving you. Of course you know that, so it is useless not to say it. Do you keep on loving her, David?"
"I loved her and I was happy with her—very, very happy for a while," he replied. "Now—she's not my wife, Alice. She was his wife before she was mine; she's his again. I forget her entirely a good deal of the time; then I think a lot about her, when she was my wife. I'd lie to you, if I denied that; I can't help remembering lots of things. I don't ever expect to forget them; I can't honestly say I want to. But I don't want her again; it's over between us—her and me."
"When was it over, David?"
He stopped walking and, when he did, she stopped and he stood looking down at her. They had passed from the squares which were built up with flats, they had passed a square of little houses and had come to some vacant lots fringed with brown, September trees. Few people had met them on the walk and no one at all was near, now.
He replied to her, after he had thought, "I don't know. You see, what she told me about her husband came all on the night I got back from Itanaca just after I heard about mother. The next day she went away, Fidelia did. So it was all mixed up in me with the trouble of mother's. Finding out about mother and about Bolton—that he'd had Fidelia and she wanted to go back to him—fixed it for me so I didn't feel much of anything for a while. What started me feeling again was the sight of you in the hotel. I wanted to go back to the time before I ever saw Fidelia. And there you were; and—here you are."
"But suppose her husband is killed! What'll happen then?"
"With her?"
"With you, David, and to me, if she comes back."
"I don't wonder you ask it," said David and ground his heel in the soil beside the walk. "My dear, my dear, I don't wonder you ask it; but, oh God, I don't see how I could ever hurt you again."
"You wouldn't mean to, I know," Alice said. "For you didn't."
She turned and started back toward her home and in a moment he followed.