He hurried on. "No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me about your ideas. I felt I had to know."
Sam faced her.
"He thinks your ideas absurd. I do not. I like them. I like you. I think you are beautiful. I do not know whether I love you or not, but for weeks I have been thinking of you and clinging to you and saying over and over to myself, "I want to live my life with Sue Rainey." I did not expect to go at it this way. You know me. What you do not know I will tell you."
"Sam McPherson, you are a wonder," she said, "and I do not know but that I will marry you in the end, but I can"t tell now. I want to know a lot of things. I want to know if you are ready to believe what I believe and to live for what I want to live."
The horse, growing restless, began tugging at the bridle and she spoke to him sharply. She plunged into a description of a man she had seen on the lecture platform during her visit to the East and Sam looked at her with puzzled eyes.
"He was beautiful," she said. "He was past sixty but looked like a boy of twenty-five, not in his body, but in an air of youth that hung over him. He stood there before the people talking, quiet, able, efficient.
He was clean. He had lived clean, body and mind. He had been companion and co-worker with William Morris, and once he had been a mine boy in Wales, but he had got hold of a vision and lived for it. I did not hear what he said, but I kept thinking, "I want a man like that."
"Can you accept my beliefs and live for what I want to live?" she persisted.
Sam looked at the ground. It seemed to him that he was going to lose her, that she would not marry him.
"I am not accepting beliefs or ends in life blindly," he said stoutly, "but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I haven"t any myself. When I reach for them they are gone. My mind shifts and changes. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you."
"When can we meet and talk everything over thoroughly?"
"Now," answered Sam bluntly, some look in her face changing his whole viewpoint. Suddenly it seemed as though a door had been opened, letting in a strong light upon the darkness of his mind. His confidence had come back to him. He wanted to strike and keep on striking. The blood rushed through his body and his brain began working rapidly. He felt sure of ultimate success.
Taking her hand, and leading the horse, he began walking with her along the path. Her hand trembled in his and as though answering a thought in his mind she looked up at him and said,
"I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your offer. This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my life. I want you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain things more than I want you or any other man."
There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he wanted something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed through his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger idea than he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man who stood on the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of a purpose in life, the dreams of the last few weeks--all of these were a part of the eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals waiting to be fed. "We must have it all out here and now," he told himself. "I must not let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I must not let her be.
"Do not think," he said, "that I haven"t tenderness for you. I am filled with it. But I want to have our talk. I want to know what you expect me to believe and how you want me to live."
He felt her hand stiffen in his.
"Whether or not we are worth while to each other," she added.
"Yes," he said.
And then she began to talk, telling him in a quiet steady voice that steadied something in him what she wanted to make out of her life. Her idea was one of service to mankind through children. She had seen girl friends of hers, with whom she had gone to school, grow up and marry.
They had wealth and education, fine well-trained bodies, and they had been married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or two who had married poor men had only done so to satisfy a pa.s.sion in themselves, and after marriage had joined the others in the hungry pursuit of pleasure.
"They do nothing at all," she said, "to repay the world for the things given them, the wealth and well-trained bodies and the disciplined minds. They go through life day after day and year after year wasting themselves and come in the end to nothing but indolent, slovenly vanity."
She had thought it all out and had tried to plan for herself a life with other ends, and wanted a husband in accord with her ideas.
"That isn"t so difficult," she said, "I can find a man whom I can control and who will believe as I believe. My money gives me that power.
But I want him to be a real man, a man of ability, a man who does things for himself, one fitted by his life and his achievements to be the father of children who do things. And so I began thinking about you. I got the men who come to the house to talk of you."
She hung her head and laughed like a bashful boy.
"I know much of the story of your early life out in that Iowa town," she said. "I got the story of your life and your achievements out there from some one who knew you well."
The idea seemed wonderfully simple and beautiful to Sam. It seemed to add tremendously to the dignity and n.o.bility of his feeling for her. He stopped in the path and swung her about facing him. They were alone in that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night had settled over them. In the gra.s.s at their feet a cricket sang loudly. He made a movement to take her into his arms.
"It is wonderful," he said.
"Wait," she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. "It isn"t so simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying energy in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to children--our children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving up your dreams of power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after two or three have come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to make a mother of me and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be a new kind of father with something maternal in you. You will have to be patient and studious and kind. You will have to think of these things at night instead of thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live wholly for me because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength and courage and your good sane outlook on things. And then when they come you will have to give all these things to them day after day in a thousand little ways."
Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot tears stood in his eyes.
The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down the path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two happy children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by a park policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking up.
"I"ll tell the colonel in the morning," he said.
"What will he say?" she murmured, musingly.
"d.a.m.ned ingrate," Sam mimicked the colonel"s bl.u.s.tering throat tones.
She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.
"How soon?" he asked.
She put her head down near his.
"We"ll waste no time," she said, blushing.
And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the entrance to the park with the people pa.s.sing up and down, Sam had his first kiss from Sue Rainey"s lips.
After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the pa.s.sing of time, wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping n.o.bility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. "I will live for this! I will live for this!" he kept saying over and over to himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue"s arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.
At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
"I must go to her--I must go to her at her house--now--tonight--and tell her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me," he thought.
And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
"It cleanses me! this cleanses me!" he said to himself.
He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman"s grocery when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing from the terror of l.u.s.t. He began to understand how distorted, how strangely perverted, his whole att.i.tude toward women and s.e.x had been.
"s.e.x is a solution, not a menace--it is wonderful," he told himself without knowing fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his lips.
When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of the sleeping houses was striking three.
CHAPTER VI
One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in Jackson Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake Michigan steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the distance. They had been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom"s big house on the south side; and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being carried out into darkness, vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each more or less afraid of the other. They sat in silence, looking at the blinking lights and listening to the low voices of their fellow pa.s.sengers, also sitting in the chairs along the deck or strolling leisurely about, and to the wash of the water along the sides of the boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the solemnity of the marriage service had built up between them.