Will Irwin

“ Mrs. Markham spoke from the piano stool:
"I feel your influence, Helen. You are stronger every time, dear, because his love grows stronger. Come, dear—come."
A pillar of light glowed against the cabinet curtains. Norcross rose; Blake could catch a suggestion of his face and collar against the dark draperies. There came the same exchange of love words, of pats, of caressing speeches, which he had heard from the closet; even now, better understood as this thing was, the sound of them drew his finger nails up into his palms.
Rosalie's touch brought him back to his sense of observation. ”

“ There is a race feeling against the Chinese among the working people of San Francisco, and no white man, except the very lowest outcasts, lived in the quarter.
On the slopes of Telegraph Hill dwelt the Mexicans and Spanish, in low houses, which they had transformed by balconies into a semblance of Spain. Above, and streaming over the hill, were the Italians. The tenement quarter of San Francisco shone by contrast with those of Chicago and New York, for while these people lived in old and humble houses they had room to breathe and an eminence for light and air. ”

“ Taking advantage of Dynamo’s slight hesitation, he sprang in close, caught him by the horn and the tender, black nose; and back and forth, across the ruins of the prune tree, which went flat at the first rally, they fought and tugged and tossed. Through the agonized half-bellows of Dynamo, Eleanor caught a slighter sound. Her champion was swearing! Raised a little above her fears by the vicarious joy of fight, she took no offence at this; it seemed part of the picture.
No one can account for the emotional processes of a bull. Just as suddenly as it rose, Dynamo’s courage evaporated. ”

“ She stood a perfect phantom of the night, like Annette called back from the dead.
The pillar of dull light was moving now. She had stooped; he heard a faint creak, he imagined that he felt new air. Suddenly, too, a voice which had been droning far away became audible. And now the pillar of light was sinking, sinking through the floor. The feet were gone, the torso; the star of light was level with the floor, was gone. He was looking into darkness.
Mrs. Markham's controlled, vibrant voice rose clearly from below—he caught every word:
"Come, Helen; be strong. He loves you. ”

“ In Madrid, which loves dancing and novelty, she would have been a craze. With a Madrid reputation she might have gone on to the Argentine and to all rich, lavish Latin America. Suites at luxurious hotels, jewels, automobiles, the company of the rich and great in all the Spanish world—this was the prospect open to La Sorda when, years ago, she went to Madrid. If she were of a saving nature, she might have had much money. ”

“ Men were there; dark figures crowding together, whispering. There was a click and clash of steel, and against the pale blur of the sky, he saw, silhouetted, the moving head of a spear. Again some one struck him. He wrenched about terrified, and a score of hands gripped him close, while at his throat sprang the clutch of fingers iron-strong. Then a voice:
"Fool, and son of a fool, and worse than a fool! It is I, Thorbjorn, called The Hook. Speak as he should speak who is nigh to death, true words and few words. What of Grettir?" ”

“ On these afternoons, neither cold nor hot, wet nor wholly dry, the blood is champagne and the heart a dancing-floor.
At the moment when Eleanor stepped out into the home-going crowd, she, an instrument tuned to catch delicate vibrations from earth and sea and air, felt all this exhilaration. Life 199 was right; the future was right; the display of a young female creature before the male—that most of all was right. And Bertram Chester, talking for the moment like his old, natural self, was a main eddy in the currents of joy-in-youth. ”

“ It was all more like Italy than anything in the Italian quarter of New York and Chicago—the very climate and surroundings, the wine country close at hand, the bay for their lateen boats, helped them.
Over by the ocean and surrounded by cemeteries in which there are no more burials, there is an eminence which is topped by two peaks and which the Spanish of the early days named after the breasts of a woman. ”

“ On the extreme left of his range of vision he could see a set of dark portières; directly before him was a foolish little white desk, over which burned a gas jet, turned low. That, apparently, was the only illumination in the room. For the rest, he could only see a wall decorated with the tiny frivolities of a boudoir, two chairs, a sewing table. He watched until—his eyes, grown accustomed to the dim light—he discerned every detail. From far below, he heard the subdued hum of a conversation, and made out at length, in the rise and fall of voices, that a man and a woman were speaking. ”

“ His hands were huge and white, and lay open and palm upward at his side, the fingers inertly lax, like those of a discarded glove, and his face——
When I looked at the face of him I know not what insane desire, born of an unconquerable disgust, came up in me to rush upon him and club him down to the pavement with my stick and batter in that face—that face of a blind idiot—and blot it out from the sight of the sun for good and all. It was impossible to feel pity for the wretch. ”

“ When the curtain rose, seven people sat on two benches behind the footlights. To the left, dressed in Spanish dancing costume of fringed shawl, skirts flaring like a petal, tight bodices, were two young girls who had danced before. Next them, seeming by contrast a rather shabby figure in her old black evening dress and her skimpy white shawl, sat La Sorda. Next were two squat men, in ordinary day clothes and checked, cravatless flannel shirts, holding guitars. Finally came two old women, dumpy of figure and gray of hair. ”

“ In this parade of tall, deep bosomed, gleaming women, one caught the type and longed, sometimes for the sight of a more ethereal beauty—for the suggestion of soul within which belongs to a New England woman on whom a hard soil has bestowed a grudged beauty—for the mobility, the fire, which belongs to the Frenchwoman. The second generation of France was in this crowd, it is true; but climate and exercise had grown above their spiritual charm a cover of brilliant flesh. ”

“ When Bertram left, Mrs. Tiffany did not follow him to the door, as was her old-fashioned custom. He waited a moment, as though expecting something. His eyes were on Eleanor. She did not move. She only bade him a simple and easy good night over her shoulder.
The old couple sat for a long time before the fire. Eleanor was gone—not to bed, could they but have known it, but to sit by her window and breathe bay-fragrance and drink the foggy night air off the Gate. ”

“ A smile lifted the mustache of Norcross.
"You admit that there are frauds in your profession, then?"
"Oh, dear, yes!" she smiled back at him. "It lends itself so easily to fraud that the temptation among the little people must be overwhelming—the more because trickery is often more accurate than real revelation. I will confess to you that this is the rock upon which my powers and my mission seem sometimes most likely to split. But I console myself by thinking that all of us, great as well as small, must be on the verge of it sometimes. ”

“ The wind for an instant tore in twain the veils of fog, and they saw the black cliff towering above them, as well as the ladder that hung from its summit clattering against the rock as the wind dashed it to and fro, and as they turned from the boat to look about them, lo, at their feet, stranded at make of the ebb, a great walrus, crushed between two ice-floes, lay dead, the rime of the frost encrusting its barbels.
So Grettir Asmundson, called The Strong, outlawed throughout Iceland, came with his brother Illugi, and the thrall Noise, to live on the Island of Drangey. ”

“ I SAW Buckskin Joe once more before I left. Unless I meet him somewhere among the outer nebulæ, carrying the purposes of the Creator to new peoples of new-made worlds, I shall never see him again; for two years later he passed from sleep to Mary Stewart. He and Charlie sat on the piazza. His hand was on Charlie's knee, and they were gazing southward toward that range of hills which curtained their sight from Sonoma—decayed Sonoma, dreaming among her vines. ”

“ And somehow this is so like Billy Gray! It was just this way in her mother’s case. When Billy came around—you remember how bonny a boy he was then, Edward—I, her own sister, could never tell how she felt toward him. I’ve always told you that Eleanor has slipped a generation. She’s her grandmother, not her mother, in mind. But she’s just like her mother in one thing. You can’t ever tell what she’s thinking about, and the deeper her thoughts go the harder it is to tell! ”

“ But you always landed, and we've another name for it now."
"That's it!" exclaimed Norcross. "That's exactly it. I dare to say now that the dead do return! People have believed in ghosts as long as they've believed in a Divine Providence—just as many centuries and ages—every race, every nation. We hear in this generation that certain people have proved it—found! the way—set up the wires—and we laugh, and call it all fraud. I don't laugh! Why, we're on the verge of things which make the railroad and the steamboat and the telegraph seem like toys—if we only dared. ”

“ The best days in the voyage from the Cape to Southampton are those that come immediately before and immediately after that upon which you cross the line, when the ship is as steady as a billiard table, and the ocean is as smooth and shiny and coloured as the mosaic floor of a basilica church, when the deck is covered with awning from stem to stern, and the resin bubbles out of the masts, and the thermometer in the companion-way at the entrance to the dining-saloon climbs higher and higher with every turn of the screw. Of course all the men people aboard must sleep on deck these nights. ”

“ Kate, in fact, had rested the tray on a hall table, drawn out the photographs, and run over them, looking at them with all her eyes. The profile was at the bottom of the package. When she reached that, she hesitated a moment; then, with a quivering motion that ran from her fingers over her whole body, she tore it in two. Short as this explosion was, her recovery was quicker. She glanced with apprehension over her shoulder at the door of Eleanor’s room, tucked the photographs back in her bosom, and took up the tray again. ”

“ It was a song of the old days, when all men were friendly to him, when he was known as Grettir Asmundson and not Grettir the Outlaw; and as he sang, his mind went back through the years of all that wild, troubled life of his, and he remembered many things. Back again in the old home at Biarg, free and happy once more he saw himself as he should have been, head of his mother's household, his foot upon his own hearthstone, his head under his own rooftree. And there should be no more foes to fight, and no more hiding and night-riding; no noontime danger to be faced down ”

“ An instant she looked at Blake and an instant he looked at her. What she gained from her scrutiny showed in no change of expression. What he gained showed only in a quick flutter of the eyelids. He had, in fact, taken an impression of mental power as startling as a sudden blow in the face. She had a magnificent physique, preserved splendidly into the very heart of middle age; yet her foot had made no sound in her approach. ”