The cars were still whirring up and down Stoney Island Avenue when Sommers
left the cottage, but he did not think to stop one. Instead, he walked on
heedlessly, mechanically, toward the city. Frequently he stumbled and with
difficulty saved himself from falling over the dislocated planks of the
wooden walk. The June night was brilliant above with countless points of
light. A gentle wind drew in shore from the lake, stirring the tall rushes
in the adjacent swamps. Occasionally a bicyclist sped by, the light from
his lantern wagging like a crazy firefly. The night was strangely still;
the clamorous railroads were asleep. Far away to the south a solitary
engine snorted at intervals, indicating the effort of some untrained hand
to move the perishing freight. Chicago was a helpless giant to-night. When
he came to the region of saloons, which were crowded with strikers, he
turned away from the noise and the stench of bad beer, and struck into a
grass-grown street in the direction of the lake. There he walked on,
unmindful of time or destination, in the marvellous state of conscious
dream.
The little space of one day separated him from that final meeting with Miss
Hitchcock in the pleasant cottage above the lake. He had gone there, drawn
by her, and he had gone away repelled, at strife with himself, with her.
Nothing had happened since, and yet everything. As he had said to another
woman, Mrs. Preston was a woman you remembered. And he had said that of a
woman very different from the one he had seen and spoken with this night.
That stricken, depressed creature of the night of the operation had faded
away, and in her place was this passionate, large-hearted woman, who had
spoken to him bravely as an equal in the dark room of the forbidding
cottage. She had thrown a spell into his life this night, and his steps
were wandering on, purposeless, unconscious, with an exhilaration akin to
some subtle opiate.
Her life was set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper
room that had burdened her so grievously--what was it, after all, but one
of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat,
falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and
sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp
discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized poor;
the stupid good, the pedantic, the foolish,--all, all that made the waking
world of his experience! It was like the smoke wreath above the lamping
torch of the blast-furnace. It was the screen upon which glowed the rosy
colors of the essential fire. The fire,--that was the one great thing,--the
fire was life itself.
As he walked on in the tumultuous sensations of dream, the discords of
living were swept away: the beautiful flesh that rotted; the noble human
figures that it was well to have covered; the shame of woman's form, of
man's corrupted carcass; the world that has, with its beauty and charm,
side by side with the world that has not, with its grime and its nastiness.
In the dream that he dreamed the difference between the woman who had
adornment and the other sad one back there in the cottage was as nothing.
The irritating paradox of life was reconciled: there was great
reasonableness in things, and he had found it.
Men fought and gambled to-day in the factories, the shops, the railroads,
as they fought in the dark ages, for the same ends--for sensual pleasures,
gross love of power, barbaric show. They would fight on, glorifying their
petty deeds of personal gain; but not always. The mystery of human defeat
in the midst of success would be borne in upon them. The barbarians of
trade would give way, as had the barbarians of feudal war. This heaving,
moaning city, blessedly quiet tonight, would learn its lesson of futility.
His eyes that had been long searching the dark were opened now, and he
could bide his few years of life in peace. He had labored too long in the
charnel house.
He forgave life for its disgusting manifestations, for the triviality of
Lindsay, for the fleshy Porter with his finger in the stock market, for the
ambitious Carson who would better have rested in his father's dugout in
Iowa. They were a part of the travailing world, without which it could not
fulfil its appointed destiny. It was childish to dislike them; with this
God-given peace and understanding one could never be impatient, nor foam at
the mouth. He could enter into himself and remove them from him, from
_her_. Some day they two would quietly leave it all, depart to a place
where as man and woman they could live life simply, sweetly. Yes, they had
already departed, had faded away from the strife, and he was no longer in
doubt about anything. He had ceased to think, and for the first moment in
his life he was content to feel.
All emotion over life must come to be transmuted to this--an elemental
state of conviction transforming the tawdry acts of life. There was but
this one everlasting emotion which equalized everything, in which all
manifestations of life had their proper place and proportion, according to
which man could work in joy. She and he were accidents of the story. They
might go out into darkness to-night; there was eternal time and multitudes
of others to take their place, to feel the ancient, purifying fire--to love
and have peace.