The Web of Life Part 22

A great stagnation had settled over the city this hot July day. Somewhat disappointed in his search for excitement he came back at nightfall to the cool stretches of the South Parks. He turned into the desolate Midway, where the unsightly wheel hung an inert, abortive ma.s.s in the violet dusk.

His way home lay in the other direction, and his horse trotted languidly.

He had determined to turn back, when suddenly a tongue of flame shot up a mile away toward the lake. This first long tongue ran out, followed by another and another, and yet others that raced north and south and up into the night.

"The Fair Buildings!" a man on a bicycle shouted, and sped away.

The broad flames now illuminated the dome of the Administration Building and the facades of the Court of Honor. Sommers spurred his horse, while the loungers suddenly, with one cry, poured from the park along the rough paths of the Midway, streaming out across the prairie toward the fire. He plunged into the cool gulf under the Illinois Central tracks, then out into a glare of full day, before the wild, licking flames. The Court of Honor with its empty lagoon and broken bridges was more beautiful in the savage glow of the ravaging fire than ever on the gala nights of the exposition. The fantastic fury of the scene fascinated man and beast. The streaming lines of people raced on, and the horse snorted and plunged into the ma.s.s. Now the crackling as of paper burning in a brisk wind could be heard. There was a shout from the crowd. The flames had gained the Peristyle--that n.o.ble fantasy plucked from another, distant life and planted here above the barbaric glow of the lake in the l.u.s.trous atmosphere of Chicago. The horseman holding his restive steeds drove in a sea of flame. Through the empty arches the dark waters of the lake caught the reflection and sombrely relighted the scene.

Sommers almost knocked over a woman who was gazing in speechless absorption at the panorama of flame. In the light of the fire he could see that it was Mrs. Preston. She seemed entranced, fascinated like an animal by the savagery of the fierce fire.

"It is grand, beautiful," she murmured to Sommers, who had dismounted. Her large frame trembled with suppressed excitement, and her face glowed.

"Beauty eating beauty," Sommers replied sadly.

"They ought to go, just like this--shoot up into the sky in flame and die, expire in the last beauty."

The excitement of the scene loosened her tongue, gave her whole being expression, and made her words thrill. She took off her hat as if to free her body, even by that little, while she drank in the scene of leaping flames, the crescendo of light, the pathetic, n.o.ble emptiness between the fire-eaten pillars of the Peristyle.

"That is better than the Fair itself. It is fiercer--not mere play."

"Nature has taken a hand," Sommers said grimly, "and knocks about man's toys. Look!"

He pointed to the fairylike brightness of the island in the lagoon. The green leaf.a.ge of the shrubbery was suffused in tender light; the waters reflected calmly all their drapery, but none of the savage desolation of the pyre in the Court of Honor. Beyond where the gracious pile of the Art Building stretched across the horizon the light clouds of smoke floated, a gray wreath in the night. The seething ma.s.s of flame began to abate, to lessen almost imperceptibly, exhausting itself slowly with deep groans like the dying of a master pa.s.sion.

Sommers suggested that they should circle the fire to the south, where they could see to better advantage the Peristyle now burning almost alone. They made the circuit slowly, Sommers leading his frightened animal among the refuse of the grounds. Mrs. Preston walked tranquilly by his side, her face still illuminated by the fading glow. The prairie lay in gloomy vastness, lighted but a little way by the waning fire. Along the avenue forms of men and women--mere mites--were running to and fro. The figures were those of gnomes toiling under a gloomy, uncertain firmament, or of animals furtively peeping out of the gloom of dusk in a mountain valley. Helpless shapes doomed to wander on the sandy strand of the earth!

The two found a place above the little inlet, directly across from the burning Peristyle. The fire had burned itself out now, and was dying with protests of reviving flame spurting here and there from the dark spots of the Court. The colossal figure rising from the lagoon in front of the Peristyle was still illuminated,--the light falling upon the gilded ball borne aloft,--solemnly presiding even in the ruins of the dream. And behind this colossal figure of triumph the n.o.ble horseman still reined in his frightened chargers. The velvet shadows of the night were falling once more over the distant Art Building, creeping over the little island, leaving the lagoons in murky silence. The throngs of curious people that had cl.u.s.tered about the western end of the fire were thinning out rapidly. A light night breeze from the empty s.p.a.ces of prairie wafted the smoke wreaths northward toward the city of men whose plaything had been taken. At their feet a white column of staff plunged into the water, hissed and was silent. The pa.s.sion was well-nigh spent.

Mrs. Preston sighed, like a child waking from a long revery, a journey into another land.

"I never felt that the fierce things, the pa.s.sions of life, could bring their happiness too. It seemed that happiness was something peaceful, like the fields at night or this lake when it is still. But that is but _one_ kind. There are many others."

Her low voice, powerful in its restraint, took up the mood of the place.

"It dies," Sommers replied. "Burnt out!"

"No," she protested eagerly; "it remains in the heart, warming it in dull, cold times, and its great work comes after. It is not well to live without fierceness and pa.s.sion."

The last lights from the fire flickered over her dark hair and sombre face.

She was breathing heavily close by his side, throwing into the soft night a pa.s.sionate warmth of feeling. It set his pulses beating in response.

"You are so insistent upon happiness," the man cried.

"Yes," she nodded. "To die out without this"--her hand pointed to the blackened Court of Honor--"is to have lived unfulfilled. That is what I felt as a child in the rich fields of Wisconsin, as a girl at the chapel of the seminary."

And she began, as if to explain herself, to tell the story of the Wisconsin farm, sleeping heavily in the warm sun among the little lakes; of the crude fervor that went on under the trees of the quiet seminary hill; of the little chapel with its churchyard to the west, commanding the lakes, the woods, the rising bosom of hills. The story was disconnected, lapsing into mere exclamations, rising to animated description as one memory wakened another in the chain of human a.s.sociations. Bovine, heavy, and animal, yet peaceful, was that picture of Wisconsin farm lands, saturated with a few strong impressions,--the scents of field and of cattle, the fertile soil, and the broad-shouldered men, like Holstein cattle.

The excitement of the evening had set free the heart, and a torrent of feelings and memories surged up,--disordered, turbulent, yet strangely unified by the simple nature, the few aims of the being that held them. The waters of the past had been gathering these past weeks, and now she found peace in their release, in the abandonment of herself through speech. The night crept on, cooler now and clouded, the heavens covered with filaments of gray lace; the horse tied near by stamped and whinnied. But the two sitting on the sh.o.r.e of the silent lake felt neither the pa.s.sing of time nor the increasing cold of the night.

At the end of her tale the dominant note sounded once more: "Eight or wrong, happiness! for if we make happiness in the world, we know G.o.d. G.o.d lives upon our happiness."

This belief, which seemed laboriously gathered from the tears of tortured experience, had become an obsession. She was silent, brooding over it; but she herself was there, larger, less puzzling and negative than hitherto,--an awakening force. The man lost his anchor of convention and traditional reasoning. He felt with her an excitement, a thirst for this evanescent treasure of joy.

"If you think that--if your whole story turns out that way--why did you--"

But he paused, unwilling to force her by a brutal proof of illogicality.

"How is _he_?" he asked at last, with effort.

Her head had drooped forward, but with this question she moved quickly, as if suddenly lashed.

"He is better, always better."

"My G.o.d!" the man groaned.

"But his mind is weaker--it wanders. Sometimes it is clear; then it is dreadful."

"You must not endure it!"

She laid her hand lightly upon his arm, warning him of the inutility of his protest.

"I think we must endure it now. If it had been done earlier, before--" she answered tranquilly; and added definitely, "it is too late now for any relief."

It was on his lips to cry out, "Why, why?" but as his eyes looked into her face and met her warm, wistful glance, he acquiesced in the fate she had ordained. He took her hand, the one that had touched him, and for the time he was content that things should be as they were. She was looking out into the ruined buildings, where embers hissed; at last she lowered her eyes, and whispered:

"It is very good even as it is, now."

But he rebelled, manlike, unwilling to be satisfied with mere feeling, desirous of retrieving the irretrievable. "Fool," he muttered, "a weak fool I have been! _I_ have fastened this monstrous chain about you--about _us_."

"Let us not think of it----to-night," she murmured, her eyes burning into his face.

The first gray of the morning was revealing the outlines of the scrub oaks in the field as the two came back to the cottage. Sommers tied his horse to a fence-post at the end of the lane, and went in to warm himself from the chill of the night air. Mrs. Preston prepared some coffee, while he built a fire in the unused stove. Then she drew up her work-table before the fire and poured out the coffee into two thick cups. As there was no cream, she remarked with a little smile, "It is very late for after-dinner coffee!"

She moved and spoke with extreme caution, not to disturb Mrs. Ducharme and Preston, who became excitable when awakened suddenly. They drank their coffee in silence, and Sommers had stood up to leave.

"I shall come very soon," he was saying, and her face responded with a little smile that lit up its sober corners and hard lines. Suddenly it grew rigid and white, and her eyes stared beyond the doctor into the gloom of the room. Sommers turned to follow her gaze. The door moved a little. There was some one outside, peering in. Sommers strode across the floor and threw the door open. In the dim light of the dawn he could see Preston, half dressed. He had slunk back from the door.

"Come in," the doctor ordered sternly.

The man obeyed, shambling into the room with an air of bravado.

"Oh, it's you, is it, doctor?" he remarked quite naturally, with an air of self-possession. "Haven't seen you for a long time; you don't come this way often, at least to see _me_," he added insinuatingly, looking at his wife. "I heard voices, and I thought I would come down to see what my wife was up to. Women always need a little watching, doctor, as you probably know."

He walked toward the table. As he stood there talking in a sneering voice, in full flesh, shaved and clean, he certainly did not look like a man stricken with paresis. Yet the doctor knew that this fitful mood of sanity was deceitful. The feeble brain had given a momentary spurt.

"Coffee?" Preston continued, as the others remained silent. "Haven't you got anything better than coffee? Where have you been, Mrs. Preston and Dr.--?"

Mrs. Preston tremblingly poured out some coffee and handed it to him. The act enraged the doctor. It seemed symbolical. Preston threw the cup to the floor.