“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 lust. He began
to understand how distorted, how strangely perverted,
his whole attitude toward women and sex had been.
“Sex 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.
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 passengers, 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.
A picture floated in Sam’s mind. He saw
Sue, all in white, radiant and wonderful, coming toward
him down a broad stairway, toward him, the newsboy
of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the
greedy moneygetter. All during those six weeks
he had been waiting for this hour when he should sit
beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from her
the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life.
Without being able to talk as he had thought of talking,
he yet felt assured and easy in his mind. In
the moment when she had come down the stairway he had
been half overcome by a feeling of intense shame,
a return of the shame that had swept over him that
night when she had given her word and he had walked
hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed
to him that from among the guests standing about should
arise a voice crying, “Stop! Do not go
on! Let me tell you of this fellow—this
McPherson!” And then he had seen her holding
to the arm of swaggering, pretentious Colonel Tom and
he had taken her hand to become one with her, two
curious, feverish, strangely different human beings,
taking a vow in the name of their God, with the flowers
banked about them and the eyes of people upon them.
