# Fidelia/Chapter 8

DAVE decided, two days later, to see no more of Fidelia Netley. Of course it was impossible for him literally to carry out this decision; for as long as he stayed in college, and she did, he was certain to meet her, not only daily, but; probably several times a day.
What he meant was that he would not seek her but I would avoid her as much as possible; and he would put her out of his mind.
He succeeded in this to the extent that he refrained from meeting her on the walks, when she was bound in the same direction as himself, but he spoke to her in the college halls and every morning he spent the hour from eleven to twelve in her splendid presence.
She did not always sit in the shaft of the sun; and frequently the sun did not shine, but she always gave him a sensation of splendor of color and of strength.
He forbade himself to glance often at her but it did no good to forbid himself to think about her; he could not help it. Although he kept up his habit of taking notes on the lecture, he did it only mechanically and seldom knew what he was writing. He could not keep his mind on Danton, Robespierre or even Marie Antoinette with Fidelia Netley nearly at his side.
He tried the alternative of thinking about Alice, who was nearer than Fidelia, but this was only more dis​quieting. He thought: "Alice feels what I'm doing. She knows it's not the same. And it's not!"
It cast him into shame for himself and he realized that it ought to make him miserable. He wondered how it did not for, instead of being wretched, he felt an amazing recklessness which gave him pangs of exaltation surprising and strange to him. Also they frightened him; he warned himself, "If I give in to this, I don't know what I may do." He had never before understood impulses of utter irresponsibility.
The nearest he had come to them had been that night with Alice and he tried to believe, as she did, that everything was as before with them. Neither of them spoke of Fidelia Netley; and there was, in this, a certain confession of their fear of her; for everybody in the college was talking about her and it was queer not to mention her at all.
Then occurred his astonishing conduct of Friday morning.
He awoke early that morning, about five o'clock, he guessed; for the stars were clear and sharp above his window and the air which came in was dry, keen night air. It was very cold. The thermometer had shown zero when he went to bed; and now it seemed even colder.
Down in the basement, the freshman who took care of the furnace was shoveling coal. Dave could hear the scrape of the steel scoop plainly; probably he had been awakened by the shaking of the grate, but he might have stirred anyway from long habit of rising early in winter. He had tended furnaces to support himself when he first came to Northwestern; so these ​sounds set him to thinking of his freshman days here when he was becoming the friend of Alice.
He turned over, uncomfortably, and tried to go back to sleep but failed. He got to thinking about Fidelia Netley, then drove his mind to figuring on business and considering Mr. Snelgrove. It came back to Fidelia Netley and Alice; to Fidelia again.
Dave got up and taking his clothes into the bathroom, so as not to waken Lan, he dressed, shaved and went down stairs. It was barely six, then, and still dark. No one else was about, not even the cook. The freshman, who had started up the furnace fire, had gone back to bed.
Dave went down and poked at the furnace; he took a bottle of milk from the ice-box, poured a glass and seized some crackers and went into the living-room to study. When dawn brightened, he raised the window shades and gazed out at the empty street.
He was still idle and restless when he heard the cook enter by the kitchen door and heard upstairs the slamming down of windows and talk and whistling.
It was seven o'clock and some one passed the house. Dave did not see her until she was by. He jumped up from the chair in which he had been lounging. The girl was Fidelia Netley.
He did not see her face; but her figure and her brown fur coat and her hair and her toque and, most especially, her vigor, were unmistakable. She seemed to him to be hurrying and he thought: "Something's happened!"
He pressed to the window and watched her till she was out of sight beyond the next houses. When he ​stepped back, he stood staring down, quivering and arguing with himself; then he took his cap and heavy overcoat from the closet. The coat called Alice to his feeling and he hesitated but opened the front door quietly.
Upon the porch, he stood and gazed down the street. Fidelia Netley had turned from the street; no one was in sight. He wondered whether anybody upstairs had happened to see her pass and now would see him follow her. He noticed that a light fluff of snow had fallen during the night and so late that it had not been tracked by people returning home in the evening; it lay like a heavy frost on the cleared sidewalk between the high, white ridges of the old snow.
He easily traced Fidelia's footprints and saw that she had turned the corner to the east and then made south on the avenue which ran along the edge of the campus which she followed on its turn east again. Evidently she was going to the lake. He hurried and soon came in sight of her.
She and he were the only people out on the lake shore at this clear, cold moment before sunrise. To the left lay the white campus of the university with nobody astir on its paths; to the right was a white stretch of park with stark, black trees; behind were the avenues of houses where people were only beginning to get up; directly before him, lay the white, winter hills and hummocks of the lake.
For the first cold weather of this winter had come with wind; gales had beaten waves upon the piers and over the sands of the shore, blowing up spray which froze and rolled with other drops and needles ​of ice and which laid the foundation of hummocks and hills which the later winds and waves built up and built up, little by little, storm by storm, until now they had made miniature mountains of spray and snow and ice all along the shore and out over the water in white, gleaming peninsulas and capes of frozen headlands and ice-cliffs.
Beyond, lay smooth, floating ice—the witness of cold weather with calm; still further out was water, the witness of wind again, when the further ice-field broke off and blew out.
There the floe was in sight with a white edge of cast-up, congealed spray. Beyond it was water once more; then ice; ice to the edge of the horizon, to the edge of the world, to the edge of creation, nothing but ice and sky. But in a moment there would be, also, the sun.
Fidelia was leaving the shore and was among the white, gleaming, miniature mountains. She was following the irregular way of their valleys. Sometimes a hill completely hid her; for a few moments, while she followed the path of some deeper canon, she kept out of his sight; but when she was a hundred yards off shore, she began climbing the ice slopes, appearing high above the distant, flat horizon, descending and climbing again.
Dave entered the dwarf valley in which her footprint, and his, became Titanic. If he did not look back but gazed only ahead at her and at the sky, he could lose all scale; they were the Titans, she and he, among the mountains with the sky and the sun.
She stood at the edge on the last high cliff where ​the waves had beaten and built before lulling down in their calm. The water was quiet now; for sound, there was the merest, softest surge under the ice. This miniature world was still below its silent sky; and to the man in the glittering, crystal valley, the girl on the edge of the tiny height before him became a glorious Goddess of the sun.
Perhaps simply by chance, perhaps by his own design, but without his being aware that he did it, he put himself in such position that she divided the sun as it rose. It made her, and the shining height on which she stood, gigantic; it shot the spray crystals at her feet with pink and purple and crimson and haloed her head with red gold of her own. While she stood there with the red sky before her and yet while the yellow rim of the sun pushed up, it kept her a Goddess. Then day was come; the spell of dawn and sunrise was broken.
Fidelia Netley turned about and saw that some one had followed her; she saw who he was and she spoke to him.
"Why, you've come here too! Isn't it wonderful?"
He knew then that she had not suspected he had followed; for her thought, even after she turned, did not wholly go to him.
"It is wonderful," he said, and she exclaimed: "I wanted to see the sun come out of the lake on a morning like this. I couldn't get anybody at the house to get up with me. I'm glad you did."
"I'm glad I did," Dave agreed and then realized that this hardly explained him. "I saw you pass our ​house," he started. He felt the need of adding, "I thought something was the matter," but he felt how silly it would sound now to suggest that, when she turned toward the lake, he had had an idea that she might be intending a plunge into these waters; besides, he had never actually supposed it. So he said aloud, and rather weakly, "I wondered where you were going. I happened to be up. I'm often up early."
"So am I but not so often out, though I love it."
"So do I," said Dave. "Or at least I think I'm going to."
"Why don't you know now?"
"Oh, outdoors has meant mostly work for me; but now it's going to mean—well, just outdoors to me, too."
She nodded, her eyes softening. "I've heard about how you've worked," she said. "Outdoors and indoors, everywhere was a place for terribly hard work for you, wasn't it?"
She started walking and he went close beside her. She did not seem to choose any direction but naturally to follow the winding of the little valley of ice and snow which, though it wavered to right and left, held generally to the north.
She was on his right, between him and the sun.
"You seem to stand up to hard work!" she considered, not sympathizing now but admiring.
"You certainly stand up to the cold!"
She laughed as her foot almost at that instant slid on the icy side of a hummock; she caught herself as she went down on one knee with her hand to the ice and she recovered so quickly that, though he thrust ​his hands under her arms to pull her up, he gave hardly any assistance. He merely felt the rhythm of her body and the swell of her breast as she caught breath and stood up.
"Sometimes I seem to slip," she said; and thanked him. "When will this freeze for skating?" she asked, glancing away toward the open water.
"It's doing it now," Dave assured. "See it steaming!"
The water was beginning to give off mist. The water was warmer, of course, much warmer than the air; and now with the rising of the sun, one of those capricious currents came which made mist through the sweep of colder over warmer.
Fidelia watched it but Dave did not; he watched her. Glowing color was in her cheeks and in her clear, steady eyes; her lips were red and her breath blew in white little clouds from between them as she spoke.
"When will it freeze over, do you suppose?"
"By to-morrow, if it stays calm. But don't you go far out on it, if it does!"
"Why not?"
He pointed to the distant floe. "That was shore ice a week or so ago. The wind or a current got it and it's been visiting Michigan since, I suppose. Maybe it'll be back here to-night; maybe it'll decide it wants to see Mackinac."
"Decide!" she repeated his word, turning to him, pleased. "I like to think of ice and wind and the water deciding things, too. It's so much more exciting when—"
"When what?" asked Dave.
​"When they're doing things to you and you have to beat them to live."
"You speak as though you often had to do that."
She was looking away again; and he persisted, "Have you?"
"Well, once anyway," she admitted.
"Where?" Dave persisted.
She stared off as though she hadn't heard. "What birds are those? Gulls?"
"Yes," said Dave and again demanded: "Where was that?"
"Oh—out west."
"At Stanford?"
"No. Please don't ask me!" she begged, frankly.
Dave started with shame. "I don't know what's got into me," he apologized. "I never was so rude as that in all my life."
She said nothing but she did something better to make him feel forgiven. They had come to an ice grotto where the waves of the early winter had half completed one of the miniature mountains; they had built up half a hollow hill and then subsided, and merely had floored the half they had created. It left a wide, domed cavern with the solid side to the shore, the opening to the sun; and there was a flat ice shelf like a bench within it.
Fidelia went in and sat down and with her gloved hand, patted the seat beside her. "Isn't this wonderful!" she said. "We might be on the north coast of Iceland or in this cave fifty thousand years ago!"
"Yes," said Dave. "There's no change in ice and water and the sun!"
​They proceeded after a few moments and soon explored another grotto and were finding others when the beat of a bell sounded over the shore; and the clock in the tower of old University counted the hour to eight.
"Eight!" said Dave and realized what it meant.
Alice had come to class; she had looked for him on the walk and, later, in the halls. Now she was in the class-room and, not seeing him, was wondering why. Never, except for a most urgent reason, did he miss or was he late at a class. Eight o'clock! It couldn't be! He pulled out his watch. It was so!
Fidelia's and his north coast of Iceland, and their caves of fifty thousand years ago, were just off shore along the campus in full view of a hundred windows and of the walk along the edge of the bluff over the beach.
"Why," said Fidelia as she realized the time. "We've got to run."
She started and, as they ran over the ice, he caught her hand to help her and thus they came to the beach below the campus.
Her eight o'clock was in a different building from his; so he went on alone to old University and to Alice. He wanted to "cut" the class entirely; he wanted to meet nobody, least of all, Alice. How could he face her?
He opened the door of the class-room and, not glancing toward Alice more than to know that she was in her usual place, he avoided his usual seat beside Lan and dropped into the nearest chair. Having no note-book, he could not even pretend to take notes ​so he sat gazing at the lecturer while he thought what to say to Alice! What to say!
He must tell her immediately after class or some one else would. For some one must have seen him leave the house to follow Fidelia Netley; some one must have seen him with her on the ice. But what had David Herrick to tell? What was it which had happened this morning? Exactly what, in its entire truth, was that which he had done?
When the lecture was over, he was the first out of the room and he waited near the door to speak to Alice when she came out. But she looked up at him and then down and away from him and, seeing her, he dared not speak to her. He shrank back, dumb. She went out, staring straight ahead and not speaking to any one. Myra was with her but Alice did not speak even to her.
They left the building and Dave followed and saw Alice and Myra go from the campus to the street where Alice had parked her car.
He hurried to catch up; but Alice got into her car and he saw her push Myra away when she wished to enter. Alice shut the door and drove off.
"Alice!" Dave called. "Alice!"
She must have heard him but she only drove more rapidly away.
Myra heard him, of course; and she turned back and met him.
"Dave!" she assailed him. "Have you the slightest idea what you've done?"