FREE AS THE WIND

Stella sat watching the gray lines of rain beat down on the asphalt, the muddy rivulets that streamed along the gutter. A forlorn sighing of wind in the bare boughs of a gaunt elm that stood before her window reminded her achingly of the wind drone among the tall firs.

A ghastly two weeks had intervened since Jack Junior's little life blinked out. There had been wild moments when she wished she could keep him company on that journey into the unknown. But grief seldom kills. Sometimes it hardens. Always it works a change, a greater or less revamping of the spirit. It was so with Stella Fyfe, although she was not keenly aware of any forthright metamorphosis. She was, for the present, too actively involved in material changes.

The storm and stress of that period between her yielding to the lure of Monohan's personality and the burial of her boy had sapped her of all emotional reaction. When they had performed the last melancholy service for him and went back to the bungalow at Cougar Point, she was as physically exhausted, as near the limit of numbed endurance in mind and body as it is possible for a young and healthy woman to become. And when a measure of her natural vitality re-asserted itself, she laid her course. She could no more abide the place where she was than a pardoned convict can abide the prison that has restrained him. It was empty now of everything that made life tolerable, the hushed rooms a constant reminder of her loss. She would catch herself listening for that baby voice, for those pattering footsteps, and realize with a sickening pang that she would never hear them again.

The snapping of that last link served to deepen and widen the gulf between her and Fyfe. He went about his business grave and preoccupied. They seldom talked together. She knew that his boy had meant a lot to him; but he had his work. He did not have to sit with folded hands and think until thought drove him into the bogs of melancholy.

And so the break came. With desperate abruptness Stella told him that she could not stay, that feeling as she did, she despised herself for unwilling acceptance of everything where she could give nothing in return, that the original mistake of their marriage would never be rectified by a perpetuation of that mistake.

"What's the use, Jack?" she finished. "You and I are so made that we can't be neutral. We've got to be thoroughly in accord, or we have to part. There's no chance for us to get back to the old way of living. I don't want to; I can't. I could never be complaisant and agreeable again. We might as well come to a full stop, and each go his own way."

She had braced herself for a clash of wills. There was none. Fyfe listened to her, looked at her long and earnestly, and in the end made a quick, impatient gesture with his hands.

"Your life's your own to make what you please of, now that the kid's no longer a factor," he said quietly. "What do you want to do? Have you made any plans?"

"I have to live, naturally," she replied. "Since I've got my voice back, I feel sure I can turn that to account. I should like to go to Seattle first and look around. It can be supposed I have gone visiting, until one or the other of us takes a decisive legal step."

"That's simple enough," he returned, after a minute's reflection. "Well, if it has to be, for God's sake let's get it over with."

And now it was over with. Fyfe remarked once that with them luckily it was not a question of money. But for Stella it was indeed an economic problem. When she left Roaring Lake, her private account contained over two thousand dollars. Her last act in Vancouver was to re-deposit that to her husband's credit. Only so did she feel that she could go free of all obligation, clean-handed, without stultifying herself in her own eyes. She had treasured as a keepsake the only money she had ever earned in her life, her brother's check for two hundred and seventy dollars, the wages of that sordid period in the cookhouse. She had it now. Two hundred and seventy dollars capital. She hadn't sold herself for that. She had given honest value, double and treble, in the sweat of her brow. She was here now, in a five-dollar-a-week housekeeping room, foot-loose, free as the wind. That was Fyfe's last word to her. He had come with her to Seattle and waited patiently at a hotel until she found a place to live. Then he had gone away without protest.

"Well, Stella," he had said, "I guess this is the end of our experiment. In six months,—under the State law,—you can be legally free by a technicality. So far as I'm concerned, you're free as the wind right now. Good luck to you."

He turned away with a smile on his lips, a smile that his eyes belied, and she watched him walk to the corner through the same sort of driving rain that now pelted in gray lines against her window.

She shook herself impatiently out of that retrospect. It was done. Life, as her brother had prophesied, was no kid-glove affair. The future was her chief concern now, not the past. Yet that immediate past, bits of it, would now and then blaze vividly before her mental vision. The only defense against that lay in action, in something to occupy her mind and hands. If that motive, the desire to shun mental reflexes that brought pain, were not sufficient, there was the equally potent necessity to earn her bread. Never again would she be any man's dependent, a pampered doll, a parasite trading on her sex. They were hard names she called herself.

Meantime she had not been idle; neither had she come to Seattle on a blind impulse. She knew of a singing teacher there whose reputation was more than local, a vocal authority whose word carried weight far beyond Puget Sound. First she meant to see him, get an impartial estimate of the value of her voice, of the training she would need. Through him she hoped to get in touch with some outlet for the only talent she possessed. And she had received more encouragement than she dared hope. He listened to her sing, then tested the range and flexibility of her voice.

"Amazing," he said frankly. "You have a rare natural endowment. If you have the determination and the sense of dramatic values that musical discipline will give you, you should go far. You should find your place in opera."

"That's my ambition," Stella answered. "But that requires time and training. And that means money. I have to earn it."

The upshot of that conversation was an appointment to meet the manager of a photoplay house, who wanted a singer. Stella looked at her watch now, and rose to go. Money, always money, if one wanted to get anywhere, she reflected cynically. No wonder men struggled desperately for that token of power.

She reached the Charteris Theater, and a doorman gave her access to the dim interior. There was a light in the operator's cage high at the rear, another shaded glow at the piano, where a young man with hair brushed sleekly back chewed gum incessantly while he practiced picture accompaniments. The place looked desolate, with its empty seats, its bald stage front with the empty picture screen. Stella sat down to wait for the manager. He came in a few minutes; his manner was very curt, business-like. He wanted her to sing a popular song, a bit from a Verdi opera, Gounod's Ave Maria, so that he could get a line on what she could do. He appeared to be a pessimist in regard to singers.

"Take the stage right there," he instructed. "Just as if the spot was on you. Now then."

It wasn't a heartening process to stand there facing the gum-chewing pianist, and the manager's cigar glowing redly five rows back, and the silent emptinesses beyond,—much like singing into the mouth of a gloomy cave. It was more or less a critical moment for Stella. But she was keenly aware that she had to make good in a small way before she could grasp the greater opportunity, so she did her best, and her best was no mediocre performance. She had never sung in a place designed to show off—or to show up—a singer's quality. She was even a bit astonished herself.

She elected to sing the Ave Maria first. Her voice went pealing to the domed ceiling as sweet as a silver bell, resonant as a trumpet. When the last note died away, there was a momentary silence. Then the accompanist looked up at her, frankly admiring.

"You're some warbler," he said emphatically, "believe me."

Behind him the manager's cigar lost its glow. He remained silent. The pianist struck up "Let's Murder Care," a rollicking trifle from a Broadway hit. Last of all he thumped, more or less successfully, through the accompaniment to an aria that had in it vocal gymnastics as well as melody.

"Come up to the office, Mrs. Fyfe," Howard said, with a singular change from his first manner.

"I can give you an indefinite engagement at thirty a week," he made a blunt offer. "You can sing. You're worth more, but right now I can't pay more. If you pull business,—and I rather think you will,—have to sing twice in the afternoon and twice in the evening."

Stella considered briefly. Thirty dollars a week meant a great deal more than mere living, as she meant to live. And it was a start, a move in the right direction. She accepted; they discussed certain details. She did not care to court publicity under her legal name, so they agreed that she should be billed as Madame Benton,—the Madame being Howard's suggestion,—and she took her leave.

Upon the Monday following Stella stood for the first time in a fierce white glare that dazzled her and so shut off partially her vision of the rows and rows of faces. She went on with a horrible slackness in her knees, a dry feeling in her throat; and she was not sure whether she would sing or fly. When she had finished her first song and bowed herself into the wings, she felt her heart leap and hammer at the hand-clapping that grew and grew till it was like the beat of ocean surf.

Howard came running to meet her.

"You've sure got 'em going," he laughed. "Fine work. Go out and give 'em some more."

In time she grew accustomed to these things, to the applause she never failed to get, to the white beam that beat down from the picture cage, to the eager, upturned faces in the first rows. Her confidence grew; ambition began to glow like a flame within her. She had gone through the primary stages of voice culture, and she was following now a method of practice which produced results. She could see and feel that herself. Sometimes the fear that her voice might go as it had once gone would make her tremble. But that, her teacher assured her, was a remote chance.

So she gained in those weeks something of her old poise. Inevitably, she was very lonely at times. But she fought against that with the most effective weapon she knew,—incessant activity. She was always busy. There was a rented piano now sitting in the opposite corner from the gas stove on which she cooked her meals. Howard kept his word. She "pulled business," and he raised her to forty a week and offered her a contract which she refused, because other avenues, bigger and better than singing in a motion-picture house, were tentatively opening.

December was waning when she came to Seattle. In the following weeks her only contact with the past, beyond the mill of her own thoughts, was an item in the Seattle Times touching upon certain litigation in which Fyfe was involved. Briefly, Monohan, under the firm name of the Abbey-Monohan Timber Company, was suing Fyfe for heavy damages for the loss of certain booms of logs blown up and set adrift at the mouth of the Tyee River. There was appended an account of the clash over the closed channel and the killing of Billy Dale. No one had been brought to book for that yet. Any one of sixty men might have fired the shot.

It made Stella wince, for it took her back to that dreadful day. She could not bear to think that Billy Dale's blood lay on her and Monohan, neither could she stifle an uneasy apprehension that something more grievous yet might happen on Roaring Lake. But at least she had done what she could. If she were the flame, she had removed herself from the powder magazine. Fyfe had pulled his cedar crew off the Tyee before she left. If aggression came, it must come from one direction.

They were both abstractions now, she tried to assure herself. The glamour of Monohan was fading, and she could not say why. She did not know if his presence would stir again all that old tumult of feeling, but she did know that she was cleaving to a measure of peace, of serenity of mind, and she did not want him or any other man to disturb it. She told herself that she had never loved Jack Fyfe. She recognized in him a lot that a woman is held to admire, but there were also qualities in him that had often baffled and sometimes frightened her. She wondered sometimes what he really thought of her and her actions, why, when she had been nerved to a desperate struggle for her freedom, if she could gain it no other way, he had let her go so easily?

After all, she reflected cynically, love comes and goes, but one is driven to pursue material advantages while life lasts. And she wondered, even while the thought took form in her mind, how long she would retain that point of view.