Geraldine Bonner

“ A few minutes later they were seated opposite each other at dinner. The little table glowed and gleamed, all Berny’s bravery of silver and glass mustered for its adornment. The choice and delicate dinner began with a soup that Dominick especially liked, a fact which Berny hoped he would notice and mention. She was one of those women who have an unfailing memory for what people like to eat; a single expression of preference would remain in her mind for years. Dominick and she had not lived together for a month before she knew everything in the way of food he liked or disliked. ”

“ Now that she had turned her back on it she realized how she had hated it all—the flat, the isolation, the unsuccessful struggle, Dominick and his superior ways.
The excitement of change, the desire of the new, the unfamiliar, the untried, which had taken her far afield once before, sang in her blood and whispered its siren song in her ear. She had missed a fortune, but still she had something. She was not plunging penniless into the great outside world, and she pressed her hand against her chest where the thirty-five thousand dollars was sewed into the lining of her bodice. ”

“ He walked slowly without looking up; his eyes on the tip of his cane as it struck the pavement. It was a superb day, calm, still, breathing peace, like that other Sunday when he had gone to the park with the Iversons and seen Rose Cannon. But the splendors of the morning did not divert his mind from its heavy musings. With down-drooped head, watching the striking tip of the cane as though in it there lay some mystic solution of his difficulties, he walked on, a slow-moving figure, a man wrestling with his own particular world-problem, facing his fate and repudiating it. ”

“ He did not consciously think of Rose. But if she were not there he was uneasy till she came again. His secret exhilaration at her approach, the dead blankness of his lack of her when she was absent, told him nothing. These were the feelings he had, and they filled him and left no cool residue of reason wherewith to watch and guard. He was taken unawares, so drearily confident of his allegiance to his particular private tragedy that he did not admit the possibility of a defection. A sense of rest was on him and he set it down—if he ever thought of it at all—to the relief of a temporary respite. ”

“ Her form detached itself gradually from the fog, the effect of deliberation being due to the fact that she was dressed in gray, a long, loose coat and a round hat with a film of veil about it. She would have been a study in monochrome but for the color in the cheek turned to Berny, a glowing, rose-tinted cheek into which the damp had called a pink brighter than any rouge. Berny looked at it with reluctant admiration, and the woman turned and presented her full face, blooming as a flower, to the watcher’s eye. ”

“ She walked up the hall to the sitting-room and there sat down in a low chair before the chimneypiece. The chill of the fog had penetrated the house and a fire had been kindled in the grate. On its quivering fluctuation of flame she fixed her eyes. With her hands pressed between her knees she sat immovable, thinking of what she was going to say, and so nervous that the blood sang in her ears and the palms of her hands, clasped tight together, were damp. She had never in her life shrunk so before an allotted task. ”

“ Berny felt dizzy. As her rancor had seemed slipping from her in the earlier part of the interview, now she felt as if her resolution was suddenly melting. She was confused between the strangling up-rush of greed and the passion that once again rose in her against the old man, who showed such a bold determination to sweep her from his daughter’s path. She was no longer mistress of herself. Inward excitement, the unfamiliar struggle with temptation, had upset and unnerved her. ”

“ Ryan alighting from the carriage, was suddenly a factor of paramount importance in the struggle between the two. So small a matter as a nod of the elder woman’s head would have made the younger woman more pliable, more tractable and easily managed, than almost any other action on her mother-in-law’s part. Berny, bowed to, would have been a more docile, reasonable person than either Mrs. Ryan or Bill Cannon had had yet to deal with; while Berny, cut, flamed up into a blaze of mutinous fury that, had they known it, would have planted dismay in the breasts of those bold conspirators. ”

“ Every window-pane gleamed like a mirror innocent of dust or blemishing spot. The marble steps up which Cannon mounted were as snowily unsullied as though no foot had passed over them since their last ablution.
The door was opened by a Chinaman, who, taking the visitor’s card, left him standing in the hall, and, deaf to his queries as to where he should go, serenely mounted the stairs. Cannon hesitated a moment, then hearing a sound of voices to his right, entered the anteroom that gave on that suite of apartments into which Dominick had walked on the night of the ball. ”

“ When she left him, he lit another cigar, sank lower in his chair and stared at the fire.
It was a deadlock. In his helplessness, the enraged helplessness of the man who had ridden triumphantly over all obstacles that fate had set in his path, his prevailing thought was how much he would like to kill Berny. She had done all this. This viper of a woman, the kind to tread on if she raised her head, had baffled and beaten them all. He could not murder her, but he thought with grim lips of how he could crush and grind her down and let her feel how heavy Bill Cannon’s hand could be. ”

“ The woman felt the restoring processes that Nature, in its tireless generosity, offers to all who will take them. She felt eased of her troubles, soothed and cheered, as though the enwrapping radiance that bathed her held an opiate for jangled nerves. Blinking in the brightness she leaned on the window-sill, immovable, quieted, feeling the warmth suffuse her and dissipate those alarms that half an hour earlier had been so chill and heavy.
As she dressed, the sense of well-being and confidence increased. She looked very well this morning. Since Dominick’s return she had looked haggard and thin. ”

“ He backed toward the chair, pulling it out into the unencumbered space in the middle of the floor, his movements deliberate and full of design, as if he felt comfortably at home. Subsiding into the seat, which had arms and was rather cramped for his large bulk, he laid his hat among the knick-knacks of a near-by table and said smilingly,
“Now, let me make my apologies for coming. In the first place, I’m an old man. We’ve got a few privileges to compensate us for the loss of so much that’s good. Don’t you think that’s fair, Mrs. Ryan?”
Berny liked him. ”

“ Families stood on the sidewalks, grouped round the Sunday symbol of worship, a picnic-basket. Lovers went by in smiling pairs, arm linked in arm. A pagan joy [339] in life was calling from every side, from the country clothed in its robe of saffron poppies, from the sky pledged to twelve hours of undimmed blue, from the air mellowed to a warmth that never burns, from the laughter of light hearts, the smiles of lovers, the eyes of children.
Dominick went up the hill in the clear, golden sunlight, and in his revolt he pushed Berny from his mind, and let Rose come in her place. ”

“ In the gardens not a blossom stirred. Where leaves extended from undefined darknesses of foliage, they stood out, stem and fiber, with a carven distinctness, their shadows painted on the asphalt walks in inky silhouette. There was no lamplight to warm the clear, still pallor of the street’s vista. It stretched between the fronts of houses, a river of light, white and mysterious, like a path in a dream.
It was a night for lovers, for trysts, and for whispered vows. Dominick walked slowly, feeling himself an outsider in its passionate enchantment. ”

“ Those who had stepped outside the pale, who had dared defy the world’s standards, found in them a haven, an elysian retreat. They rose before his mental vision, palm-shaded, lagoon-encircled, played upon by tropic breezes, with glassy waves sliding up a golden beach. There man lived as his heart dictated, a real life, a true life, not a bitter tale of days in protesting obedience to an immutable, heart-breaking law. There he and Rose might live, lost to the places they had once filled, hidden from the world and its hard judgments. ”

“ The fire sputtered and snapped, and once or twice the crisp paper rustled in Dominick’s hands. Rose held her fingers out to the warmth, studying them with her head on one side as if she had never seen them before. Presently she slid noiselessly out of her coat, and dropped it, a heap of silky fur, on a chair beside her. The movement made it convenient to steal a glance at the young man. He was reading the letter, his body close against the window-pane, his face full of frowning, almost fierce concentration. ”

“ Sitting motionless on the bench she saw the familiar aspect of life fallen into new shapes, taking on alien forms.
She realized that Dominick had never been happy with her, and, for the first time, she understood the gulf between them. She saw what the life was that he had wanted to lead, and that he could have led with the other woman. It would have been that very form of existence which Berny had always derided, and thought an outward expression of the inward dullness of people who had children, looked shabby, and did not care for money. ”

“ Two days after this momentous combination of her enemies, Berny was sitting in the parlor of her flat, writing a letter. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and she had just dressed herself for her daily jaunt down town, where she spent an hour or two looking into the shop windows, pricing articles of apparel, taking a glass of soda water, and stopping for chats with acquaintances under awnings and in open doorways. Her life was exceedingly barren of occupation and companionship. When she had married, she had dropped all work save such as seemed to her fitting for the wife of a rich man. ”

“ He rested in a torpor of relief through which a dreamy sense of happiness came dimly, as if in the faintest, most delicate whispers.
His mother’s musings were definite and practical. She could now make that settlement, share and share alike, on both children that she had long desired—Cornelia’s would be a dowry on her wedding day and Dominick’s—well, Dominick had had hard times enough. She would go down to-morrow morning and see her lawyer about it. ”

“ Waves of radiance quivered and ran up the ceiling, here and there touching the glaze on a picture glass or china ornament. The crude ugliness of the place was hidden in this unsteady, transforming combination of shadow and glow. It seemed a rich, romantic spot, flushed with fire that pulsed on an outer edge of mysterious obscurity, a center of familiar, intimate life, round which coldness and the dark pressed.
She thought the room was unoccupied and advanced toward the table, then started before the uprising of Dominick’s tall figure from a [141] chair in a shadowed corner. ”

“ Only a person watching closely would have noticed it, but Berny was watching with the most vigilant closeness. She saw the infusion of a new and keener interest transform the glance, concentrate its lazy, diffused attention into something that had the sharpness and suddenness of a leaping flame. The next moment a flood of color rose clearly pink over the face, and then, most surprising of all, the lady bent her head in a grave, deliberate bow. ”

“ It was certainly not an enthusiastic greeting. A sensitive woman would have been shriveled by it, but Berny was not sensitive. She had realized from the start that she would probably have to combat the lingering surliness left by the quarrel. As Dominick ascended, her air of smiling welcome was marked by a bland cheery unconsciousness of any past unpleasantness. She was not, however, as unconscious as she looked. She noted his heaviness of demeanor, the tired expression of his lifted face. ”

“ The icy stillness of the morning gave place to a wind, uncertain and whispering at first, but, as the day advanced, gathering volume and speed. The office and bar filled with men, some of them—snow powdered as if a huge sugar-sifter had been shaken over them—having tramped in from small camps in the vicinity. Clamor and vociferations, mixed with the smell of strong drinks and damp woolens, rose from the bar. Constant gusts of cold air swept the lower passages, and snow was tramped into the matting round the hall stove. ”

“ She felt more at home in this noisy byway, where children played on the pavements and there were the house-to-house intimacies, the lack of privacy, of the little town, than she did on the big, clean-swept streets where the houses presented a blank exterior to the gaze, and most of the people were transported in cars or carriages. Even the fact that the Tenderloin was in close proximity did not modify her interest with a counteracting disgust; though she was not one of the women who have a lively curiosity as to that dark side of life, it did not, on the other hand, particularly repel her. ”

“ He went on jubilantly in his high, throaty voice.
“I wasn’t dead certain of it myself at the start. You know it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to break off drinking habits that have had you as long as mine had me. But when I went down there and lived right on the land, when I used to get up in the morning and look out of my window across the hills and see the cattle dotted all over them, and the oaks thick and big and bushy, and feel the air just as soft as silk, I said to myself, ‘By gum, Gene Cannon, you’ve got to have this ranch if you die for want of whisky.’”
“Well, you’ve got it!” ”

“ Women stood staring, some dismayed at the introduction of styles which they felt would have a blighting, not to say obliterating effect on their own beauty. Others, of practical inclinations, studied the new gowns with an eye to discoveries whereby their wardrobes might be induced to assume a deceptive air of second youth.
Berny elbowed her way in among them and pressed herself close to the glass, exploring, with a strained glance, the intricacies of back draperies turned from view. ”

“ It was the instinct of an old warrior who loves the fray.
Berny, on her side, knew him at the first glance, and her sensations were those of disturbance and uneasiness. She remembered him to be a friend of the Ryans’, and she had arrived at the stage when any friend of the Ryans’ was an enemy of hers. She was instantly in arms and on the defensive. Rose had not yet taken shape in her mind as a new, menacing force conniving against her. Besides, she had no idea that Rose reciprocated the sentiment that Dominick cherished for her. ”

“ Even Bill Cannon would hardly dare, in the present day in San Francisco, cold-bloodedly to murder a woman. The thought caused a slight, sarcastic smile to touch her lips. Fortunately for her, the lawless days of California were passed.
With the curtain caught between her finger-tips, her figure bent forward and motionless, she looked out into the street as if she saw something there of absorbing interest. But she saw nothing. All her mental activity was bent on the problem of Dominick’s telephone message. She did not believe it. ”

“ She did not know that it was so much better than her kind but it was different. They made her feel like an outsider in a distant world, and the feeling gave her a sensation of deadly depression. The burning heat of resentment that had made her speak to Rose was gone. All the burning heats and angers of the last two months seemed to belong to the past. An icy, nostalgic ache of loneliness had hold of her. The accustomed [435] sense of intimacy and warm, enjoying interest in the world—what we mean when we talk of “living”—had been completely drawn out of her. ”

“ The ten days that followed were among the most important of Dominick Ryan’s life. Looking back at them he wondered that he had been so blind to the transformation of his being which was taking place. Great emotional crises are often not any more recognized, by the individuals, than great transitional epochs are known by the nations experiencing them. Dominick did not realize that the most engrossing, compelling passion he had ever felt was slowly invading him. He did not argue that he was falling in love with a woman he could never own and of whom it was a sin to think. ”