by Frank Norris
Suddenly there came a prolonged trilling of the electric bell, and Howard flashed a grin at Travis. Snooky jumped up and pushed back, crying out: “I’ll go! I’ll go!”
Mr. Bessemer glanced nervously at Travis. “That’s Mr. Rivers, isn’t it, daughter?” Travis smiled. “Well, I think I’ll — I think I’d better—” he began.
“No,” said Travis, “I don’t want you to, Papum; you sit right where you are. How absurd!”
The old man dropped obediently back into his seat.
“That’s all right, Maggie,” said Travis as the cook reappeared from the pantry. “Snooky went.”
“Huh!” exclaimed Howard, his grin widening. “Huh!”
“And remember one thing, Howard,” remarked Travis calmly, “don’t you ever again ask Mr. Rivers for a nickel to put in your bank.”
Mr. Bessemer roused up. “Did that boy do that?” he inquired sharply of Travis.
“Well, well, he won’t do it again,” said Travis soothingly. The old man glared for an instant at Howard, who shifted uneasily in his seat. But meanwhile Snooky had clambered down to the outside door, and before anything further could be said young Rivers came into the dining-room.
Chapter II
For some reason, never made sufficiently clear, Rivers’ parents had handicapped him from the baptismal font with the prenomen of Conde, which, however, upon Anglo-Saxon tongues, had been promptly modified to Condy, or even, among his familiar and intimate friends, to Conny. Asked as to his birthplace — for no Californian assumes that his neighbor is born in the State — Condy was wont to reply that he was “bawn ‘n’ rais’” in Chicago; “but,” he always added, “I couldn’t help that, you know.” His people had come West in the early eighties, just in time to bury the father in alien soil. Condy was an only child. He was educated at the State University, had a finishing year at Yale, and a few months after his return home was taken on the staff of the San Francisco “Daily Times” as an associate editor of its Sunday supplement. For Condy had developed a taste and talent in the matter of writing. Short stories were his mania. He had begun by an inoculation of the Kipling virus, had suffered an almost fatal attack of Harding Davis, and had even been affected by Maupassant. He “went in” for accuracy of detail; held that if one wrote a story involving firemen one should have, or seem to have, every detail of the department at his fingers’ ends, and should “bring in” to the tale all manner of technical names and cant phrases.
Much of his work on the Sunday supplement of “The Times” was of the hack order — special articles, write-ups, and interviews. About once a month, however, he wrote a short story, and of late, now that he was convalescing from Maupassant and had begun to be somewhat himself, these stories had improved in quality, and one or two had even been copied in the Eastern journals. He earned $100 a month.
When Snooky had let him in, Rivers dashed up the stairs of the Bessemers’ flat, two at a time, tossed his stick into a porcelain cane-rack in the hall, wrenched off his overcoat with a single movement, and precipitated himself, panting, into the dining-room, tugging at his gloves.
He was twenty-eight years old — nearly ten years older than Travis; tall and somewhat lean; his face smooth-shaven and pink all over, as if he had just given it a violent rubbing with a crash towel. Unlike most writing folk, he dressed himself according to prevailing custom. But Condy overdid the matter. His scarfs and cravats were too bright, his colored shirt-bosoms were too broadly barred, his waistcoats too extreme. Even Travis, as she rose to his abrupt entrance? told herself that of a Sunday evening a pink shirt and scarlet tie were a combination hardly to be forgiven.
Condy shook her hand in both of his, then rushed over to Mr. Bessemer, exclaiming between breaths: “Don’t get up, sir — don’t THINK of it! Heavens! I’m disgustingly late. You’re all through. My watch — this beastly watch of mine — I can’t imagine how I came to be so late. You did quite right not to wait.”
Then as his morbidly keen observation caught a certain look of blankness on Travis’ face, and his rapid glance noted no vacant chair at table, he gave a quick gasp of dismay.
“Heavens and earth! didn’t you EXPECT me?” he cried. “I thought you said — I thought — I must have forgotten — I must have got it mixed up somehow. What a hideous mistake, what a blunder! What a fool I am!”
He dropped into a chair against the wall and mopped his forehead with a blue-bordered handkerchief.
“Well, what difference does it make, Condy?” said Travis quietly. “I’ll put another place for you.”
“No, no!” he vociferated, jumping up. “I won’t hear of it, I won’t permit it! You’ll think I did it on purpose!”
Travis ignored his interference, and made a place for him opposite the children, and had Maggie make some more chocolate.
Condy meanwhile covered himself with opprobrium.
“And all this trouble — I always make trouble everywhere I go. Always a round man in a square hole, or a square man in a round hole.”
He got up and sat down again, crossed and recrossed his legs, picked up little ornaments from the mantelpiece, and replaced them without consciousness of what they were, and finally broke the crystal of his watch as he was resetting it by the cuckoo clock.
“Hello!” he exclaimed suddenly, “where did you get that clock? Where did you get that clock? That’s new to me. Where did that come from?”
“That cuckoo clock?” inquired Travis, with a stare. “Condy Rivers, you’ve been here and in this room at least twice a week for the last year and a half, and that clock, and no other, has always hung there.”
But already Condy had forgotten or lost interest in the clock.
“Is that so? is that so?” he murmured absent-mindedly, seating himself at the table.
Mr. Bessemer was murmuring: “That clock’s a little fast. I can not make that clock keep time. Victorine has lost the key. I have to wind it with a monkey-wrench. Now I’ll try some more beans. Maggie has put in too much pepper. I’ll have to have a new key made to-morrow.”
“Hey? Yes — yes. Is that so?” answered Condy Rivers, bewildered, wishing to be polite, yet unable to follow the old man’s mutterings.
“He’s not talking to you,” remarked Travis, without lowering her voice. “You know how Papum goes on. He won’t hear a word you say. Well, I read your story in this morning’s ‘Times.’”
A few moments later, while Travers and Condy were still discussing this story, Mr. Bessemer rose. “Well, Mr. Rivers,” he announced, “I guess I’ll say good-night. Come, Snooky.”
“Yes, take her with you, Papum,” said Travis. “She’ll go to sleep on the lounge here if you don’t. Howard, have you got your lessons for to-morrow?”
It appeared that he had not. Snooky whined to stay up a little longer, but at last consented to go with her father. They all bade Condy good-night and took themselves away, Howard lingering a moment in the door in the hope of the nickel he dared not ask for. Maggie reappeared to clear away the table.
“Let’s go in the parlor,” suggested Travis, rising. “Don’t you want to?”
The parlor was the front room overlooking the street, and was reached by the long hall that ran the whole length of the flat, passing by the door of each one of its eight rooms in turn.
Travis preceded Condy, and turned up one of the burners in colored globe of the little brass chandelier.
The parlor was a small affair, peopled by a family of chairs and sofas robed in white drugget. A gold-and-white effect had been striven for throughout the room. The walls had been tinted instead of papered, and bunches of hand-painted pink flowers tied up with blue ribbons straggled from one corner of the ceiling. Across one angle of the room straddled a brass easel upholding a crayon portrait of Travis at the age of nine, “enlarged from a photograph.” A yellow drape ornamented one corner of the frame, while another drape of blue depended from one end of the mantelpiece.
The piano, upon which nobody ever played, bala
nced the easel in an opposite corner. Over the mantelpiece hung in a gilded frame a steel engraving of Priscilla and John Alden; and on the mantel itself two bisque figures of an Italian fisher boy and girl kept company with the clock, a huge timepiece, set in a red plush palette, that never was known to go. But at the right of the fireplace, and balancing the tuft of pampa-grass to the left, was an inverted section of a sewer-pipe painted blue and decorated with daisies. Into it was thrust a sheaf of cat-tails, gilded, and tied with a pink ribbon.
Travis dropped upon the shrouded sofa, and Condy set himself carefully down on one of the frail chairs with its spindling golden legs, and they began to talk.
Condy had taken her to the theatre the Monday night of that week, as had been his custom ever since he had known her well, and there was something left for them to say on that subject. But in ten minutes they had exhausted it. An engagement of a girl known to both of them had just been announced. Condy brought that up, and kept conversation going for another twenty minutes, and then filled in what threatened to be a gap by telling her stories of the society reporters, and how they got inside news by listening to telephone party wires for days at a time. Travis’ condemnation of this occupied another five or ten minutes; and so what with this and with that they reached nine o’clock. Then decidedly the evening began to drag. It was too early to go. Condy could find no good excuse for taking himself away, and, though Travis was good-natured enough, and met him more than half-way, their talk lapsed, and lapsed, and lapsed. The breaks became more numerous and lasted longer. Condy began to wonder if he was boring her. No sooner had the suspicion entered his head than it hardened into a certainty, and at once what little fluency and freshness he yet retained forsook him on the spot. What made matters worse was his recollection of other evenings that of late he had failed in precisely the same manner. Even while he struggled to save the situation Condy was wondering if they two were talked out — if they had lost charm for each other. Did he not know Travis through and through by now — her opinions, her ideas, her convictions? Was there any more freshness in her for him? Was their little flirtation of the last eighteen months, charming as it had been, about to end? Had they played out the play, had they come to the end of each other’s resources? He had never considered the possibility of this before, but all at once as he looked at Travis — looked fairly into her little brown-black eyes — it was borne in upon him that she was thinking precisely the same thing.
Condy Rivers had met Travis at a dance a year and a half before this, and, because she was so very pretty, so unaffected, and so good-natured, had found means to see her three or four times a week ever since. They two “went out” not a little in San Francisco society, and had been in a measure identified with what was known as the Younger Set; though Travis was too young to come out, and Rivers too old to feel very much at home with girls of twenty and boys of eighteen.
They had known each other in the conventional way (as conventionality goes in San Francisco); during the season Rivers took her to the theatres Monday nights, and called regularly Wednesdays and Sundays. Then they met at dances, and managed to be invited to the same houses for teas and dinners. They had flirted rather desperately, and at times Condy even told himself that he loved this girl so much younger than he — this girl with the smiling eyes and robust figure and yellow hair, who was so frank, so straightforward, and so wonderfully pretty.
But evidently they had come to the last move in the game, and as Condy reflected that after all he had never known the real Travis, that the girl whom he told himself he knew through and through was only the Travis of dinner parties and afternoon functions, he was suddenly surprised to experience a sudden qualm of deep and genuine regret. He had never been NEAR to her, after all. They were as far apart as when they had first met. And yet he knew enough of her to know that she was “worth while.” He had had experience — all the experience he wanted — with other older women and girls of society. They were sophisticated, they were all a little tired, they had run the gamut of amusements — in a word, they were jaded. But Travis, this girl of nineteen, who was not yet even a debutante, had been fresh and unspoiled, had been new and strong and young.
“Of course, you may call it what you like. He was nothing more nor less than intoxicated — yes, drunk.”
“Hah! who — what — wh — what are you talking about?” gasped Condy sitting bolt upright.
“Jack Carter,” answered Travis. “No,” she added, shaking her head at him helplessly, “he hasn’t been listening to a word. I’m talking about Jack Carter and the ‘Saturday Evening’ last night.”
“No, no, I haven’t heard. Forgive me; I was thinking — thinking of something else. Who was drunk?”
Travis paused a moment, settling her side-combs in her hair; then:
“If you will try to listen, I’ll tell it all over again, because it’s serious with me, and I’m going to take a very decided stand about it. You know,” she went on— “you know what the ‘Saturday Evening’ is. Plenty of the girls who are not ‘out’ belong, and a good many of last year’s debutantes come, as well as the older girls of three or four seasons’ standing. You could call it representative couldn’t you? Well, they always serve punch; and you know yourself that you have seen men there who have taken more than they should.”
“Yes, yes,” admitted Condy. “I know Carter and the two Catlin boys always do.”
“It gets pretty bad sometimes, doesn’t it?” she said.
“It does, it does — and it’s shameful. But most of the girls — MOST of them don’t seem to mind.”
Miss Bessemer stiffened a bit. “There are one or two girls that do,” she said quietly. “Frank Catlin had the decency to go home last night,” she continued; “and his brother wasn’t any worse than usual. But Jack Carter must have been drinking before he came. He was very bad indeed — as bad,” she said between her teeth, “as he could be and yet walk straight. As you say, most of the girls don’t mind. They say, ‘It’s only Johnnie Carter; what do you expect?’ But one of the girls — you know her, Laurie Flagg — cut a dance with him last night and told him exactly why. Of course, Carter was furious. He was sober enough to think he had been insulted; and what do you suppose he did?”
“What? what?” exclaimed Condy, breathless, leaning toward her.
“Went about the halls and dressing-rooms circulating some dirty little lie about Laurie. Actually trying to — to” — Travis hesitated— “to make a scandal about her.”
Condy bounded in his seat. “Beast, cad, swine!” he exclaimed.
“I didn’t think,” said Travis, “that Carter would so much as dare to ask me to dance with him—”
“Did he? did — did—”
“Wait,” she interrupted. “So I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened. During the german, before I knew it, there he was in front of me. It was a break, and he wanted it. I hadn’t time to think. The only idea I had was that if I refused him he might tell some dirty little lie about me. I was all confused — mixed up. I felt just as though it were a snake that I had to humor to get rid of. I gave him the break.”
Condy sat speechless. Suddenly he arose.
“Well, now, let’s see,” he began, speaking rapidly, his hands twisting and untwisting till the knuckles cracked. “Now, let’s see. You leave it to me. I know Carter. He’s going to be at a stag dinner where I am invited to-morrow night, and I — I—”
“No, you won’t, Condy,” said Travis placidly. “You’ll pay no attention to it, and I’ll tell you why. Suppose you should make a scene with Mr. Carter — I don’t know how men settle these things. Well, it would be told in all the clubs and in all the newspaper offices that two men had quarreled over a girl; and my name is mentioned, discussed, and handed around from one crowd of men to another, from one club to another; and then, of course, the papers take it up. By that time Mr. Carter will have told his side of the story and invented another dirty little lie, and I’m the one who suffers the most i
n the end. And remember, Condy, that I haven’t any mother in such an affair, not even an older sister. No, we’ll just let the matter drop. It would be more dignified, anyhow. Only I have made up my mind what I am going to do.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not coming out. If that’s the sort of thing one has to put up with in society” — Travis drew a little line on the sofa at her side with her finger-tip— “I am going to — stop — right — there. It’s not” — Miss Bessemer stiffened again— “that I’m afraid of Jack Carter and his dirty stories; I simply don’t want to know the kind of people who have made Jack Carter possible. The other girls don’t mind it, nor many men besides you, Condy; and I’m not going to be associated with people who take it as a joke for a man to come to a function drunk. And as for having a good time, I’ll find my amusements somewhere else. I’ll ride a wheel, take long walks, study something. But as for leading the life of a society girl — no! And whether I have a good time or not, I’ll keep my own self-respect. At least I’ll never have to dance with a drunken man. I won’t have to humiliate myself like that a second time.”
“But I presume you will still continue to go out somewhere,” protested Condy Rivers.
She shook her head.
“I have thought it all over, and I’ve talked about it with Papum. There’s no half way about it. The only way to stop is to stop short. Just this afternoon I’ve regretted three functions for next week, and I shall resign from the ‘Saturday Evening.’ Oh, it’s not the Jack Carter affair alone!” she exclaimed; “the whole thing tires me. Mind, Condy,” she exclaimed, “I’m not going to break with it because I have any ‘purpose in life,’ or that sort of thing. I want to have a good time, and I’m going to see if I can’t have it in my own way. If the kind of thing that makes Jack Carter possible is conventionality, then I’m done with conventionality for good. I am going to try, from this time on, to be just as true to myself as I can be. I am going to be sincere, and not pretend to like people and things that I don’t like; and I’m going to do the things that I like to do — just so long as they are the things a good girl can do. See, Condy?”