BUT if I was wrought up by the varying aspects of the city, I was
equally wrought up by the delights of love, which came for the first
time fully with the arrival of Alice. Was I in love with her? No, as I
understand myself now. I doubt that I have ever been in love with any
one, or with anything save life as a whole. Twice or thrice I have
developed stirring passions but always there was a voice or thought
within which seemed to say over and over, like a bell at sea: “What does
it matter? Beauty is eternal.... Beauty will come again!” But this
thing, _life_, this picture of effort, this colorful panorama of hope
and joy and despair—that _did_ matter! Beauty, like a tinkling bell, the
tintings of the dawn, the whispering of gentle winds and waters in
summer days and Arcadian places, was in everything and everywhere.
Indeed the appeal of this local life was its relationship to eternal
perfect beauty. That it should go! That never again, after a few years,
might I see it more! That love should pass! That youth should pass! That
in due time I should stand old and grizzled, contemplating with
age-filmed eyes joys and wonders whose sting and color I could no longer
feel or even remember—out on it for a damned tragedy and a mirthless
joke!
Alice proved to be in love with me. She lived in a two-flat frame house
in what was then the far middle-south section of the city, a region
about Fifty-first and Halsted streets. Her foster-father was a railroad
watchman, and had saved up a few thousand dollars by years of toil. This
little apartment represented his expenditures plus her taste, such as it
was: a simple little place, with red plush curtains shielding a pair of
folding-doors which separated two large rooms front and back. There were
lace curtains and white shades at the windows, a piano (a most soothing
luxury for me to contemplate), and then store furniture: a red velvet
settee, a red plush rocker, several other new badly designed chairs.
Quaint little soul! How cheery and dreamful and pulsating with life she
was when I met her! Her suitor, as I afterwards came to know, was a
phlegmatic man of thirty-five, who had found in her all that he desired
and was eager to marry her, as he eventually did. He was wont to call
regularly on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, taking her occasionally to a
theater or to dinner downtown. When I arrived on the scene I must have
disrupted all this, for after a time, because I manifested some
opposition, leaving her no choice indeed, Wednesdays and Sundays became
my evenings, and any others that I chose. Regardless of my numerous and
no doubt asinine defects, she was in love with me and willing to accept
me on my own terms.
Yes, Alice saw something she wanted and thought she could hold. She
wanted to unite with me for this little span of existence, to go with me
hand in hand into the ultimate nothingness. I think she was a poet in
her way, but voiceless. When I called the first night she sat primly for
a little while on one of her red chairs near the window, while I
occupied a rocker. I had hung up my coat and hat with a flourish and had
stood about for a while examining everything, with the purpose of
estimating it and her. It all seemed cozy and pleasing enough and,
curiously, I felt more at ease on this my first visit than I ever did at
my Scotch maid’s home. There her thrifty, cautious, religious though
genial and well-meaning mother, her irritable blind uncle and her more
attractive young sister disturbed and tended to alienate me. Here, for
weeks and weeks, I never saw Alice’s foster-parents. When finally I was
introduced to them, they grated on me not at all. This first night she
played a little on her piano, then on her banjo, and because she seemed
especially charming to me I went over and stood behind her chair,
deciding to take her face in my hands and kiss her. Perhaps a touch of
remorse and in consequence a bit of indecision now swayed her, for she
got up before I could do it. On the instant my assurance became less and
yet my mood hardened, for I thought she was trifling with me. After the
previous Sunday it seemed to me that she could do no less than permit me
to embrace her. I was deciding that the evening was about to be a
failure, when she came up behind me and said: “Don’t you think it’s
rather nice across there, between those houses?”
Over the way a gap between peaked-roofed houses revealed a long stretch
of prairie, now covered with snow, gas lamps flickering in orderly rows,
an occasional frame house glowing in the distance.
“Yes,” I admitted moodily.
“This is a funny neighborhood,” she ventured. “People are always moving
in and out in that row of houses over there.”
“Are they?” I said, not very much interested now that I felt myself
defeated. There was a silence and then she laid one hand on my arm.
“You’re not mad at me, Dorse?” she asked, using a name which my sister
had given me.
The sound of it on her lips, soft and pleading, moved me.
“Oh, no,” I replied loftily. “Why should I be?”
“I was thinking that maybe I oughtn’t to be doing this. There’s been
some one else up to now, you know.”
“Yes.”
“I guess I don’t care for him any more or I wouldn’t be doing what I
am.”
“I thought you cared for me. Why did you invite me down here?”
“Oh, Dorse, I do,” she said, placing both her hands on my folded arms
and looking up into my face with a kind of tenseness. “I know it isn’t
right but I can’t help it. You have such nice hair and eyes, and you’re
so tall. Do you care for me at all?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling cynically over my victory. “I think you’re
beautiful.” I smoothed her cheek with one hand while I held her about
the waist with the other.
We went over to the red settee and I took her in my arms and held her
and kissed her mouth and eyes and neck. She clung to me and laughed and
told me bits about her work and her pompous floor-walker and her social
companions, and even her fiancé. She danced for me when I asked her,
doing a running overstep clog, sidewise to and fro, her skirts lifted to
her shoetops. She was sweetly feminine, in no wise aggressive or bold. I
stayed until nearly one in the morning. I had nine or ten miles to go by
owl cars, arriving home at nearly three; but at this time I was not
working and so my time was my own.
The thing that troubled me was what my Scotch girl would think if she
found out (which she never would), and how I could extricate myself from
a situation which, now that I had Alice, was not as interesting as it
had been.
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