Adriana Spadoni

“ Charlotte Welles looked up with such gentle understanding of her bitterness and hurt that Anne wanted to strike her. What right had this woman to penetrate one's mood, to be always down there under the surface of one's thoughts? It was as if she had entered a room locked against her.
"Why, Annie!"
Anne ignored Hilda and went on in a rapid, cracking voice.
"How on earth you can believe such rubbish, I don't know. And to call it science! If science is anything, it's the seeking of effect from cause. Something happens, and you burrow far enough down under the surface and find the cause. ”

“ Roger spoke almost sadly, so that Belle and Dr. Stetson looked toward him, puzzled; but Anne, her face flushing, looked down. "It's the great, sane, middle class that's holding back liberty—killing it. The rich, to a certain extent, have it. The poor are struggling for it. It's only in the middle that they're dead, and safe. The middle class. There is no middle class, really. It is the dividing class. It's the blow-neither-hot-nor-cold. It's the lackey-souled. It's the misfortune of any country that has it, this great, sane, safe, middle class." ”

“ But the strangeness of seeing Anne and Rogie in these surroundings, his ignorance of all that had happened to them in the last months, wrapped Roger like a fog, through which he felt Anne receding from him.
But, for the first time, the room was not hideous to Anne. The damp smell of Roger's clothes, the lingering cigarette smoke, filled it with a throbbing vitality it had never had. She felt Roger's masculinity in the very air and it made the few small remarks she managed to catch from the whirling mass of feeling seem thin and artificial. ”

“ Above this conglomerate of excitement Katya rose like a mountain in her belief and patience. Katya never attacked car-conductors nor urged telephone girls to strike, or bothered whether the social revolution had begun with creation, or whether it was the last stage of progress. Katya worked, often far into the night, and rarely spoke to any one but Tom or Roger. Anne she ignored, not with definite rudeness but with an unfathomable disregard of her existence. In her dark corner Katya was like a brown bear that had been taught to work. ”

“ It passed and was gone, blotted in his clear understanding of how perfectly well Anne was able to look out for herself. That frail fairness, that delicate sensitiveness behind which she tripped with such deep assurance of herself, was almost a masque in the completeness with which it hid the real Anne. Life would present no problem that would trouble or perplex her. With the scalpel of her assurance she would delicately remove all emotion, all passion, all hot, human weakness, wrap it neatly in her own conceit, label it and forever after know exactly where she had put it. ”

“ Safe in his own well-appointed home, with all the glory of Bay and hills spread out before him, he was going to condemn these to the gray, thick dust of the Portrero, the bleak and windswept hills, the dull, depressing streets of the Mission outskirts. All her life Anne had lived on such a street and hated it with the whole force of her nature.
He had the power to do this thing and he was going to do it. Under the suave kindliness of his slim, perfectly groomed figure, he was like an animal snapping at every morsel that came his way. ”

“ Katya shuddered so violently that Roger saw the heavy muscles of her shoulders and neck quiver. "It hurts more than any pain in all the world. It burns out everything in the world, in you, but itself. It takes your brain and your body and makes white ashes of them. It takes you, the individual, and melts you into the world. It is the volcano through which the highest force of spirit finds expression. There are not many volcanoes in the world or the earth would melt in flames. There are not many who can love or the race too would melt away. ”

“ I feel it. We haven't really anything at all," she added, as if facing a fact Roger had avoided.
"I tried to keep it," he said bitterly. "I tried desperately for a long time."
"Did you?"
"Yes, I did. But one can't do those things alone." This was not what he had meant to say, but Anne was looking at him with such cool composure, so safe from all touch of blame in her small assurance of having done all in her power.
"No, of course not. One can't do all the understanding—alone."
Roger felt his anger rising, and stood up, as if by so standing he could reach the calm escaping him. ”

“ Anne's thoughts, too vivid to be held within her brain, slipped into the darkness and she saw them, pictures in the thick silence; the terrible black vacuum of life in which moved the old gray men, her father, Hilda, herself, Roger, Tom, the dancing marionettes about him; Hilary Wainwright, his keen-eyed partners in great enterprises; Merle snatching at beauty, the grimed workers; all groups of whirling dervishes, spinning round in useless effort, until they dropped into decay and death. ”

“ Roger put his arm about her, but Anne stood stiffly within his hold, seeing only the terrible, slow progress of her father to the grave. But to Roger, it was not terrible that one old man, criminal in his narrowness and stupidity, was slowly dying in the same dull way he had lived. There was a magnificent poetic justice in it—the little gray mole, creeping blindly through life, now creeping blindly, selfishly toward death. Men in their prime poured their strength into the fiery pits of the steel mills; the slums of great cities battened on the babyhood of thousands ”

“ Before the mills debouching their hundreds at set hours, the miles upon miles of sordid streets, Roger's eyes saddened.
"I don't know—unless it is to make more room."
"Then why not go now—every one, quickly and cleanly—instead of rotting into it?"
"Suicide? No. Not until you're sure anyhow that you can't do anything to make it better. It can't be the purpose of life, this horrible chaos, like the panic at a fire, with the stronger treading down the weak."
Anne shivered. "The strong—as you call them—have been treading on the weak since the beginning of time and will go on to the end. ”

“ This was divorce of which one spoke so carelessly, this great emptiness to be filled with unglimpsed future. No one to consider now but herself. Every experience to be her own, unshared, unadjusted to another. It was like the clearness of a cold north wind that obliterates all softness, sharpens every outline. Clear, cold, stark, the future lay before her.
The next Thursday afternoon, as usual, a little before three, Anne let herself into the flat. At this hour, James was usually awake and Hilda busy warming the broth or malted milk he always took in the afternoon. ”

“ The clicking of her machine stopped suddenly. Over it she gazed at Roger with passionate longing, pain and anger and tenderness in her small brown eyes.
Roger was in trouble. He never sat so, his head bowed, his hands clenched like that. For days Katya had felt something in him that eluded her; something strange had entered their relationship, the old frankness was gone. It had gone from the night she counseled his leaving Anne, but they had not mentioned the subject again, and since then Katya had moved in an uncertainty of his motive that had been like a stone wall about her. ”

“ Roger moved impatiently, but when he spoke it was with weary acceptance:
"You never liked Tom. You never understood him, the real man, or tried to."
"No? I understand what he claims to be, but not what he is."
"What is he?"
"A monomaniac." The word slipped from Anne and frightened her.
"I don't know what you mean, Anne."
"He's gone mad on social injustice, just as mad as any capitalist has on accumulating money. He's lost all sense of individual values. He's a machine, a machine for fighting for his own theory." ”

“ In the next weeks, it seemed to Anne that the world had been recreated while she and Roger loved by the lake. The old world of definite working hours, through which strangers claimed her physical energy and brain, as deeply strangers one day as the next; the old family life of repression, grown unconscious from habit; minute but never ceasing spiritual adjustment, strengthless rebellions against habits set in steel bands before one awakened to their cramping horror, all had dissolved in a community of interest in a larger and much simpler world. ”

“ Nothing in all the world mattered but to help; to slave too, and die trying to even the chances a little. When the ferry docked and the hills of the city rose misty in the salt fog creeping across their tops, Roger felt older and full of a stronger faith than he had ever had.
And he wanted Anne and Rogie. They were so small and helpless and the world was so cruel. He had been impatient lately with Anne, but he did not feel now that he would ever be impatient again. ”

“ Barbara's sallow cheeks flushed and her eyes scorned Anne's insincerity. For five nights Anne had let her go on, in the dark intimacy of the same room, piling up the mass of her small perplexities, the annoying efforts at adjustment between herself and Janet and her mother. And all the time Anne had harbored a romance. Anne was not the small, shy cousin, so different from Belle, so like themselves in spite of her daily contact with the great world of business. Anne knew men. ”

“ Had she felt him slipping over the edge of Hilary Wainwright's insincerity, out from these months of his own uncertainty, into spiritual freedom, and thrown the silken lariat of her dependence over him, drawn him back to the safety of 'a job'?
Without turning, Roger felt Anne standing small, almost prim, by the fireplace, distrusting him, clinging fast to her safety, as James Mitchell clung to his little job. Afraid to dare, clutching comfort at any price. ”

“ Until it was dark, Anne walked up one street and down another. She passed mean houses where families sat at dinner behind partly-drawn blinds, and stately homes, the intimacy of family life decorously concealed behind thick curtains. She did not know when the high fog parted and the stars came out, but when the sky was all a-glitter and a soft little wind ruffled the bay, she found herself sitting on a pile of lumber at the farthest jetty of Fisherman's Wharf. ”

“ Sitting on the porch, after an early supper, watching the day's farewell to the granite peaks, Anne's eyes filled with tears. If only she had Rogie with her she would never leave this peace. The world beyond could fight its futile battles. If only Rogie were with her, nothing would be lacking. Undisturbed by the world's confusion, they would live out their lives, and sink, at last into the stillness of the earth. ”