the following sunday, at ten o’clock in the morning, dominick noiselessly descended the stairs of the flat and let himself out into the street. he had had a sleepless night, and as he stood in the dazzling sunshine, debating which way he should go, his face showed the hollows and lines left by hours of worried wakefulness.
his day—the holiday of his week of steady work—was without engagement. the friend with whom he usually walked over the suburban hills had moved to the country. his rest from labor would take the form of a day spent away from his home in the open air. as he had eaten his breakfast he had planned his itinerary, carefully considering the best distribution of these twelve treasured hours of liberty. he would spend the morning walking, anywhere—the direction did not matter much—anywhere where there was quiet and a view. he would take his lunch at any little joint—country hotel, city chop-house—he happened to pass, and in the afternoon he would[335] walk again, on for hours, probably over the presidio hills where the poppies were beginning to gild the slopes, or along the beach where there were unfrequented nooks in which a man could lie and look at the water, and think. a whole day away from berny and the flat, in the healing balm of the sunshine and the clean, untroubled air, was the best way to renew the fund of philosophy and patience that of late he had felt was almost exhausted.
the ferment of his wakeful night was still in his blood as he walked across the city, aiming for the eminence of telegraph hill. 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.
there had been times lately when he had felt he could no longer endure the present conditions of his life. as he had lain thinking in the darkness of the previous night, it had come upon him, with the clearness of conviction, that he could[336] not stand it. the future with berny had loomed before him, crushing, unbearable, and he had seen no end to it, and repeated to himself that he must be free of it. it had been awful as a nightmare, and turning on his bed he had wondered how he had endured the situation so long.
now, as he walked through the sweet, gay morning he felt a renewal of courage and reasoned with himself, using the old arguments with which for two years he had been subduing his rebellion and curbing the passion and impatience of his youth. because a man had married an uncongenial woman, was that an excuse for him to leave her, to put her away from him when she had honestly tried to live up to her marriage contract? summing it all up in a sentence—his wife had a bad temper and he had ceased to care for her, was that a reason for him to separate from her?
last night he had used none of these arguments. he had felt too strongly to reason about the righteousness of moral obligation. lying in the dark, listening to the striking of the clocks, he had said to himself that he could not stand berny any longer—he could not live in the house with her. he did not hate her, it was far from that. he wished her well; to hear that she was happy and prosperous somewhere where he did not have to dine with her and sit in the den with her every evening, would have given him the greatest[337] satisfaction. he felt that the sight of her was daily growing more unbearably and unnaturally obnoxious to him. little personal traits of hers had a strange, maddening power of exciting his dislike. in the evening the rustling of the sheets of the newspaper as she turned and folded them filled him with a secret anger. he would sit silent, pretending to read, waiting for that regular insistent rustling, and controlling himself with an effort. as they sat opposite each other at breakfast, the sound she made as she crunched the toast seemed to contain something of her own hard, aggressive personality in it, and he hated to hear it. in the dead depression of the night, he had felt that to listen to that rustling of newspapers every night and that crunching of toast every morning was a torment he could no longer bear.
in the clear light of the morning, patience had come and the old standards of restraint and forbearance reasserted themselves. the familiar pains, to which he had thought himself broken, had lost much of their midnight ghoulishness. the old ideals of honor and obligation, with which he had been schooling himself for two years, came back to his mind with the unerring directness of homing pigeons. he went over the tale of berny’s worthiness and his own responsibility in the misfortunes of her life and disposition. it was a circular process of thought that[338] always returned to the starting place: what right had he to complain of her? had not most of the disappointments that had soured and spoiled her come from his doing, his fault, his people?
he breathed a heavy sigh and looked up. to this question and its humbly acquiescing answer these reflections always brought him. but to-day it was hard to be acquiescent. the rebellion of the night was not all subdued. the splendor of the morning, the pure arch of sky, the softness of the air, called to him to rejoice in his strength, to be glad, and young. he raised his head, breathing in the sweet freshness, and took off his hat, letting the sun pour its benediction on his head. his spirit rose to meet this inspiring, beneficent nature, not in exhilaration, but in revolt. the thought of rose gripped him, and in the strength of his manhood he longed for her.
he ascended the hill by one of the streets on its southern slope, violently steep, the upward leaps of its sidewalk here and there bridged by flights of steps. every little house was disgorging its inmates, garbed in the light sunday attire of the californian on pleasure bent. the magnificent day was calling them, not to prayer and the church, but to festival. 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. his thoughts, always held from her, sprang at her, encircled her, seemed to draw her toward him as once his arms had done. she was a sacred thing, the madonna of his soul’s worship, but to-day she seemed to bend down from her niche with less of the reverenced saint than of the loving woman in the face his fancy conjured up.
standing on the summit of the hill, where the wall of the quarry drops down to the water front and the wharves, he relinquished himself to his dream of her. the bay lay at his feet, a blue floor, level between rusty, rugged hills. there was an island in it, red-brown, incrusted with buildings, that seemed to clutch their rocky perch with long strips and angles of wall. in the reach of water just below there was little shipping, only a schooner beating its way to sea. the wind was stiffer down there than on the sheltered side of the hill. the schooner, with sails white as curds against the blue, was tacking, a long, slantwise flight across the ruffled water. she[340] left a thin, creamy line behind her which drifted sidewise into eddying curves like a wind-lashed ribbon. dominick, his eyes absently on her, wondered if she were bound for the south seas, those waters of enchantment where islands, mirrored in motionless lagoons, lie scattered over plains of blue.
a memory crossed his mind of a description of some of these islands given him by a trader he had once met. they were asylums, lotus-eating lands of oblivion, for law-breakers. 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 thought seized upon his mind like a drug, and he stood in a tranced stillness of fascinated imagination, his eyes on the ship, his inner vision seeing himself and rose standing on the deck. he was so held under the spell of his exquisite, enthralling dream, that he did not see a figure round the corner of the rough path, nor notice its slow approach. but he felt it, when its casual,[341] roaming glance fell on him. as if called, he turned sharply and saw rose standing a few yards away from him, looking at him with an expression of affrighted indecision. as his glance met hers, the dream broke and scattered, and he seemed to emerge out of a darkness that had in it something beautiful and baleful, into the healthy, pure daylight.
the alarm in rose’s face died away, too. for a moment she stood motionless, then moved toward him slowly, with something of reluctance about her approach. she seemed to be coming against her will, as if obeying a summons in his eyes.
“i wasn’t sure it was you,” she said. “and then when i saw it was, i was going to steal away before you saw me. but you turned suddenly as if you heard me.”
“i felt you were there,” he answered.
it was natural that with rose he should need to make no further explanation. she understood as she would always understand everything that was closely associated with him. he would never have to explain things to her, as he never, from their first meeting, felt that he needed to talk small talk or make conversation.
she came to a stop beside him, and they stood for a silent moment, looking down the bare wall of the quarry, a raw wound in the hill’s flank, to the docks below where the masts of ships rose[342] in a forest, and their lean bowsprits were thrust over the wharves.
“you came just in time,” he said. “i walked up here this morning to have a think. i don’t know where the think was going to take me when you came round that corner and stopped it. what brought you here?”
“nothing in particular. it was such a fine morning i thought i’d just ramble about, and i came this way without thinking. my feet brought me without my knowledge.”
“my think brought you,” he said. “that’s the second time it’s happened. it was a revolutionary sort of think, and there was a lot about you in it.”
he looked down at her, standing by his shoulder, and met her eyes. they were singularly pellucid, the clearest, quietest eyes he thought he had ever looked into. his own dropped before them to the bay below, touched and then quickly left the schooner which was beating its way toward them on the return tack.
“if you could only always come this way when i want you, everything would be so different, so much easier,” he said in a low tone. “i was surrounded by devils and they were getting tight hold of me when you came round that corner.”
he glanced at her sidewise with a slight, quizzical smile.
this time she did not answer his look, but with[343] her eyes on the bay, her brows drawn together, asked,
“new devils or old ones?”
“the old ones, but they’ve grown bigger and twice as hard to manage lately. they——” he broke off, his voice suddenly roughened, and said, “i don’t seem to know how to live my life.”
he turned his face away from her. the demons she had exorcised had left him weakened. in the bright sunshine, with the woman he loved beside him, he felt broken and beaten down by the hardships of his fate.
“sit down and talk to me,” she said quietly. “no one can hear you. it’s like being all alone in the world up here on the hilltop. we can sit on this stone.”
there was a broken boulder behind them, close to the narrow foot-way, and she sat on it, motioning him to a flat piece of rock beside her. her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her loose gray coat, the wisps of fair hair that escaped below the rim of her hat fanning up and down in faint breaths of air, like delicate threads of seaweed in ocean currents.
“tell me the whole thing,” she said. “you and i have never talked much about your affairs. and what concerns you concerns me.”
he pricked at the earth with the tip of his cane, ashamed of his moment of weakness, and yet fearing if he told her of his cares it might return.
[344]“it’s just what you know,” he began slowly. “only as every day goes by it seems to get worse. i’ve never told you much about my marriage. i’ve never told anybody. many men make mistakes in choosing a wife and find out, and say to themselves early in the game, that they have made a mistake and must abide by it. i don’t think i’m weaker than they are, but somehow——”
he stopped and looked at the moving tip of his cane. she said nothing, and after taking a deep breath he went on.
“i knew all about her when i married her. i was young, but i wasn’t a green fool. only i didn’t seem to realize, i didn’t guess, i didn’t dream, that she was going to stay the way she was. i seemed to be at the beginning of a sort of experiment that i was sure was going to turn out well. i didn’t love her, but i liked her well enough, and i was going to try my best to have things go smoothly and make her happy. when she was my wife, when i’d try to make everything as comfortable and pleasant as i could, then i expected she’d—she’d—be more like the women men love, and even if they don’t love, manage to get on with. but it didn’t seem to go well even in the beginning, and now it’s got worse and worse. perhaps it’s my fault. i’m not one of those fellows who can read a woman like a book. when a person tells me a thing, i think they mean[345] it; i’m not looking into them to see if they mean just the opposite.”
he stopped again and struck lightly at a lump of earth with his cane. he had pushed his hat back from his forehead and his face bore an expression of affected, boyish nonchalance which was extremely pathetic to rose.
“maybe there are men who could stand it all right. she’s very nice part of the time. she’s a first-class housekeeper. i give her two hundred dollars a month, and on that little bit she runs the flat beautifully. and she’s quiet. she doesn’t want to be out all the time, the way some women do. she’s as domestic as possible, and she’s been very decent and pleasant since i came back. the way she was treated over the ball would have r’iled any woman. i didn’t tell you about that—it’s a mean story—but she got no invitation and was angry and flared up. we had a sort of an uncomfortable interview, and—and—that was the reason i went to antelope. i didn’t think i’d ever go back to her then. i was pretty sore over it. but—” he paused, knocking the lump of clay into dust, “i thought afterward it was the right thing to do. i’d married her, you see.”
rose did not speak, and after a moment he said in a low voice,
“but it’s—it’s—awfully hard to live with a person you don’t get on with. and it’s the sort[346] of thing that goes on and on and on. there isn’t any end; there isn’t any way out.”
once more he stopped, this time clearing his throat. he cleared it twice, and then said,
“i oughtn’t to say this. i oughtn’t to complain. i know i’m a chump and a coward to talk this way to you, but—” he dropped his voice to a note of low, inward communing, and said, “it’s so hopeless. i can’t see what to do.”
he leaned forward and rested his forehead on the head of his cane, hiding his face from her. the silence between them vibrated with the huskiness of his voice, the man’s voice, the voice of power and protection, roughened with the pain he was unused to and did not know how to bear.
rose sat looking at him, her soul wrung with sympathy. her instinct was to take the bowed head in her arms and clasp it to her bosom, not as a woman in love, but as a woman torn by pity for a suffering she could not alleviate. she made no movement, however, but kept both hands deep in her pockets, as she said,
“i don’t see why you shouldn’t talk this way to me. i think i’m the one person in the world that you ought to speak to about it.”
“i can’t talk to anybody else, not to any friend, not to my own mother. it’s my affair. no one else had any responsibility in it. i brought it on myself and i’ve got to stand by it myself. but you—you’re different.”
[347]he drew himself up, and, staring out into the great wash of sun and air before him, went on in a louder voice, as if taking a new start.
“i was thinking last night about it, looking it in the face. the dark’s the best time for that, you seem to see things clearer, more truthfully. and i came to the conclusion it would be better if i ended it. i didn’t see that i had any obligation to go on martyrizing myself for ever. i didn’t see that anybody was benefiting by it. i thought we’d be happier and make something better of our lives if we were apart, in different houses, in different towns.”
“does she want to leave you?”
the question seemed to touch a nerve that startled and then stiffened him. he answered it with his head turned half toward her, the eyebrows lifted, a combative note in his voice:
“i don’t know whether she does or not.” he stopped and then said, with his face flushing, “no, i don’t think she does.”
“how can you leave her then?”
“well, i can—” he turned on her almost angrily and met her clear eyes. “oh, i can’t go into particulars,” he said sharply, looking away again. “it’s not a thing for you and me to discuss. incompatibility is a recognized ground of separation.”
he fell to striking the lump of clay again, and rose said, as if offering the remark with a sort of tentative timidity,
[348]“you said just now you had nothing to complain of against her. it doesn’t seem fair to leave a woman—a wife—just because she’s hard to live with and you no longer like her.”
“would you,” he said with a manner so full of irritated disagreement as to be almost hectoring, “advocate two people living on together in a semblance of friendship, who are entirely uncongenial, rub each other the wrong way so that the sight of one is unpleasant to the other?”
“are you sure that’s the way she feels about you?”
he again looked away from her, and answered in a sullen tone, as though against his will,
“i don’t know.”
they were silent for a space, and he went on.
“doesn’t it strike you as wrong, cowardly, mean, for a man and woman to tear their lives to pieces out of respect for what the world says and thinks? every semblance of love and mutual interest has gone from our companionship. isn’t it all wrong that we should make ourselves miserable to preserve the outward forms of it? we’re just lying to the world because we haven’t got the sand to tell the truth. you ask me if my views on this matter are hers. i don’t know, that’s the truth.” a memory of berny’s futile and pathetic efforts to make friends with him on his return swept over him and forced him to say, “honestly, i don’t think she wants to leave[349] me. i think the situation doesn’t drive her crazy the way it does me. i think she doesn’t mind it. i don’t know why, but she doesn’t seem to. but surely, any woman living would rather be free of a man she no longer cared for, than forced to live on in a false relation with him, one irritating the other, the two of them every day growing more antagonistic.”
“she would not want to be free if she loved him.”
“loved him!” he ejaculated, with angry scorn. “she never loved me or anybody else. love is not in her. oh, you don’t know! i thought last night i’d offer her all i had, the flat, the furniture, my salary, everything i could rake and scrape together, and then i’d tell her i was going to leave her, that i couldn’t stand living that way any longer. i was going to take a room somewhere and give her everything i could. i was going to be as generous to her as i knew how. i’d not say one word against her to anybody. that was what i thought i’d do last night.”
“but this morning you think differently.”
“how do you know that?”
“because those are not your real thoughts—they’re the dark, exaggerated ones that come when a person lies awake at night. it’s as if, because you couldn’t see your surroundings, you were in another sort of world where the proportions are different. you couldn’t do that to your wife. you couldn’t treat her that way. you say in[350] many ways she’s been a good wife. it isn’t she that’s stopped caring, or finds her life with you disagreeable.”
“then, am i to suffer this way for ever—see my life ruined for a fault man after man commits and goes scott free?”
“your life isn’t ruined. things don’t last at such a pressure. something will change it. by and by, you’ll look back on this and it’ll seem hundreds of miles away and you’ll wonder that you were so discouraged and hopeless.”
“yes,” he said bitterly, “maybe when i’m fifty. it’s a long time between then and now, a long time to be patient.”
manlike, he was wounded that the woman of his heart should not side with him in everything, even against his own conscience. had rose been something closer to him, a sister, a wife, this would have been one of the occasions on which he would have found fault with her and accused her of disloyalty.
“i thought you’d understand,” he said, “i thought you’d see how impossible it is. you make me feel that i’m a whining coward who has come yelping round like a kicked dog for sympathy.”
“i care so much that i do more than sympathize,” she said in a low voice.
this time he did not answer, feeling ashamed at his petulance.
“with any one else it would be just sympathy,”[351] she said, “but with you there’s more than that. it’s because i care, that i expect more and demand more. other men can do the small, cowardly, mean things that people do, and find excuses for, but not you. i could make excuses for them too, but i must never have to make excuses for you. you’re better than that, you’re yourself, and you do what’s true to yourself and stand on that. you’ve got to do and be the best. maybe it won’t be what you want or what’s most comfortable, but that mustn’t matter to you. if you’re not to be happy that mustn’t matter either. what pleases you and me mustn’t matter if it’s not the thing for a man like you to do. you can’t shirk your responsibilities. you can’t stick to something you’ve done just while it’s pleasant and then, when it’s hard, throw it up. lots of people do that, thousands of them. just as you said now—hundreds of men do what you have done and go scott free. that’s for them to do if they want to, but not for you. let them drop down if they want, that’s no reason why you should. let them go on living any way that’s agreeable to them, you know what you ought to do and you must do it. it doesn’t matter about them, or the world, or what anybody says. the only thing that matters is that the thing you know in your heart is the thing that’s true for you.”
“you expect too much of weak human nature,” he said.
[352]“no,” she answered, “i don’t. i only expect what you can do.”
he turned and looked at her.
“then i’m to live for the rest of my life with a wife i don’t care for, separated from the woman i love? what is there in that to keep a man’s heart alive?”
“the knowledge that we love each other. that’s a good deal, i think.”
it was the first time she had said in words that she loved him. there was no trace of embarrassment or consciousness on her face; instead she seemed singularly calm and steadfast, much less moved than he. her words shook him to the soul. he turned his eyes from her face and grasping for her hand, clasped it, and pressed it to his heart, and to his lips, then loosed it and rose to his feet, saying, as if to himself,
“yes, that’s a good deal.”
there was silence between them for some minutes, neither moving, both looking out at the hills and water. from the city below, sounds of church bells came up, mellow and tranquil, ringing lazily and without effort. other sounds mingled with them, refined and made delicate by distance. it was like being on an island floating in the air above the town. rose got up and shook the dust from her coat.
“the churches are coming out, it must be nearly one. it will be lunch-time before i get home.”
[353]he did not turn or answer, but stood with his hand on the metal rope that protected the quarry’s ledge, looking down. her eyes followed his, and then brought up on the schooner bearing away on its long tack, strained and careening in the breeze that, down there in the open, blew fresh and strong from the great pacific.
“it’s a schooner,” she said absently. “where do you suppose it’s going?”
“i don’t know. somewhere a long way off, i hope. my devils are sailing away on it.”
they stood side by side, gazing down at it till she moved away with a sudden “good-by.”
“good-by,” he answered, and stretched out his hand.
but she was already some feet in advance and had begun to move quickly.
“good-by, rose,” he cried after her, with something in his voice of the wistful urgency in a child’s when it is left behind.
“good-by,” she called over her shoulder without looking back. “good-by.”
he followed her with his eyes till she disappeared round the bend of the path, then turned back and again dropped his glance to the schooner.
he stood watching it till it passed out of sight beneath the shoulder of the hill, straining and striving like a wild, free creature in its forward rush for the sea.
