by Frank Norris
“Trusting this will find you in health, I am
“Respectfully yours,
“K. D. B.”
“Miss K. D. B.
“DEAR MISS: — From the modest and retiring description of your qualities and character, I am led to believe that I will find in you an agreeable life companion. Will you not accord me the great favor of a personal interview? I shall esteem it a high honor. I will be at Luna’s Mexican restaurant at seven of the clock P.M. on Monday evening next. May I express the fervent hope that you also will be there? I name the locality because it is quiet and respectable. I shall wear a white marguerite in my buttonhole. Will you also carry a bunch of the same flower?
“Yours to command,
“CAPTAIN JACK.”
So great was her interest in the affair that Blix even went out with Condy while he mailed the letters in the nearest box, for he was quite capable of forgetting the whole matter as soon as he was out of the house.
“Now let it work!” she exclaimed as the iron flap clanked down upon the disappearing envelopes. But Condy was suddenly smitten with nameless misgiving. “Now we’ve done it! now we’ve done it!” he cried aghast. “I wish we hadn’t. We’re in a fine fix now.”
Still uneasy, he saw Blix back to the flat, and bade her good-by at the door.
But before she went to bed that night, Blix sought out her father, who was still sitting up tinkering with the cuckoo clock, which he had taken all to pieces under the pretext that it was out of order and went too fast.
“Papum,” said Blix, sitting down on the rug before him, “did you ever — when you were a pioneer, when you first came out here in the fifties — did you ever play poker?”
“I — oh, well! it was the only amusement the miners had for a long time.”
“I want you to teach me.”
The old man let the clock fall into his lap and stared. But Blix explained her reasons.
Chapter VI
The next day was Saturday, and Blix had planned a walk out to the Presidio. But at breakfast, while she was debating whether she should take with her Howard and Snooky, or “Many Inventions,” she received a note from Condy, sent by special messenger:
“‘All our fun is spoiled,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve got ptomaine poisoning from eating the creamed oysters last night, and am in for a solid fortnight spent in bed. Have passed a horrible night. Can’t you look in at the hotel this afternoon? My mother will be here at the time.’”
“Ptomaine poisoning!” The name had an ugly sound, and Condy’s use of the term inferred the doctor’s visit. Blix decided that she would put off her walk until the afternoon, and call on Mrs. Rivers at once, and ask how Condy did.
She got away from the flat about ten o’clock, but on the steps outside met Condy dressed as if for bicycling, and smoking a cigarette.
“I’ve got eleven dollars!” he announced cheerily.
“But I thought it was ptomaine poisoning!” she cried with sudden vexation.
“Pshaw! that’s what the doctor says. He’s a flapdoodle; nothing but a kind of a sort of a pain. It’s all gone now. I’m as fit as a fiddle — and I’ve got eleven dollars. Let’s go somewhere and do something.”
“But your work?”
“They don’t expect me. When I thought I was going to be sick, I telephoned the office, and they said all right, that they didn’t need me. Now I’ve got eleven dollars, and there are three holidays of perfect weather before us: to-day, to-morrow, and Monday. What will we do? What must we do to be saved? Our matrimonial objects don’t materialize till Monday night. In the meanwhile, what? Shall we go down to Chinatown — to the restaurant, or to the water-front again? Maybe the mate on the whaleback would invite us to lunch. Or,” added Condy, his eye caught by a fresh-fish peddler who had just turned into the street, “we can go fishing.”
“For oysters, perhaps.”
But the idea had caught Condy’s fancy.
“Blix!” he exclaimed, “let’s go fishing.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Where DO people fish around here? Where there’s water, I presume.”
“No, is it possible?” she asked with deep concern. “I thought they fished in their back yards, or in their front parlors perhaps.”
“Oh, you be quiet! you’re all the time guying me,” he answered. “Let me think — let me think,” he went on, frowning heavily, scouring at his hair. Suddenly he slapped a thigh.
“Come on,” he cried, “I’ve an idea!” He was already half-way down the steps, when Blix called him back.
“Leave it all to me,” he assured her; “trust me IMPLICITLY. Don’t you want to go?” he demanded with abrupt disappointment.
“Want to!” she exclaimed. “Why, it would be the very best kind of fun, but—”
“Well, then, come along.”
They took a downtown car.
“I’ve got a couple of split bamboo rods,” he explained as the car slid down the terrific grade of the Washington-Street hill. “I haven’t used ’em in years — not since we lived East; but they’re hand-made, and are tip-top. I haven’t any other kind of tackle; but it’s just as well, because the tackle will all depend upon where we are going to fish.”
“Where’s that?”
“Don’t know yet; am going down now to find out.”
He took her down to the principal dealer in sporting goods on Market Street. It was a delicious world, whose atmosphere and charm were not to be resisted. There were shot-guns in rows, their gray barrels looking like so many organ-pipes; sheaves of fishing-rods, from the four-ounce whisp of the brook-trout up to the rigid eighteen-ounce lance of the king-salmon and sea-bass; showcases of wicked revolvers, swelling by calibres into the thirty-eight and forty-four man-killers of the plainsmen and Arizona cavalry; hunting knives and dirks, and the slender steel whips of the fencers; files of Winchesters, sleeping quietly in their racks, waiting patiently for the signal to speak the one grim word they knew; swarms of artificial flies of every conceivable shade, brown, gray, black, gray-brown, gray-black, with here and there a brisk vermilion note; coils of line, from the thickness of a pencil, spun to hold the sullen plunges of a jew-fish off the Catalina Islands, down to the sea-green gossamers that a vigorous fingerling might snap; hooks, snells, guts, leaders, gaffs, cartridges, shells, and all the entrancing munitions of the sportsman, that savored of lonely canons, deer-licks, mountain streams, quail uplands, and the still reaches of inlet and marsh grounds, gray and cool in the early autumn dawn.
Condy and Blix got the attention of a clerk, and Condy explained.
“I want to go fishing — we want to go fishing. We want some place where we can go and come in the same day, and we want to catch fair-sized fish — no minnows.”
The following half-hour was charming. Never was there a clerk more delightful. It would appear that his one object in life was that Condy and Blix should catch fish. The affairs of the nation stood still while he pondered, suggested, advised, and deliberated. He told them where to go, how to get there, what train to take coming back, and who to ask for when they arrived. They would have to wait till Monday before going, but could return long before the fated hour of 7 P.M.
“Ask for Richardson,” said the clerk; “and here, give him my card. He’ll put you on to the good spots; some places are A-1 to-day, and to-morrow in the same place you can’t kill a single fish.”
Condy nudged Blix as the Mentor turned away to get his card.
“Notice that,” he whispered: “KILL a fish. You don’t say ‘catch,’ you say ‘kill’ — technical detail.”
Then they bought their tackle: a couple of cheap reels, lines, leaders, sinkers, a book of assorted flies that the delightful clerk suggested, and a beautiful little tin box painted green, and stenciled with a gorgeous gold trout upon the lid, in which they were to keep the pint of salted shrimps to be used as bait in addition to the flies. Blix would get these shrimps at a little market near her home.
“But,�
�� said the clerk, “you got to get a permit to fish in that lake. Have you got a pull with the Water Company? Are you a stockholder?”
Condy’s face fell, and Blix gave a little gasp of dismay. They looked at each other. Here was a check, indeed.
“Well,” said the sublime being in shirt sleeves from behind the counter, “see what you can do; and if you can’t make it, come back here an’ lemmeno, and we’ll fix you up in some other place. But Lake San Andreas has been bang-up this last week — been some great kills there; hope to the deuce you can make it.”
Everything now hinged upon this permit. It was not until their expedition had been in doubt that Condy and Blix realized how alluring had been its prospects.
“Oh, I guess you can get a permit,” said the clerk soothingly. “An’ if you make any good kills, lemmeno and I’ll put it in the paper. I’m the editor of the ‘Sport-with-Gun-and-Rod’ column in ‘The Press,’” he added with a flush of pride.
Toward the middle of the afternoon Blix, who was waiting at home, in great suspense, for that very purpose, received another telegram from Condy:
“Tension of situation relieved. Unconditional permission obtained. Don’t forget the shrimps.”
It had been understood that Condy was to come to the flat on Sunday afternoon to talk over final arrangements with Blix. But as it was, Saturday evening saw him again at the Bessemers.
He had been down at his club in the library, writing the last paragraphs of his diver’s story, when, just as he finished, Sargeant discovered him.
“Why, Conny, old man, all alone here? Let’s go downstairs and have a cigar. Hendricks and George Hands are coming around in half an hour. They told me not to let you get away.”
Condy stirred nervously in his chair. He knew what that meant. He had enough money in his pockets to play that night, and in an instant the enemy was all awake. The rowel was in his flank again, and the scourge at his back. Sargeant stood there, the well-groomed clubman of thirty; a little cynical perhaps, but a really good fellow for all that, and undeniably fond of Condy. But somewhere with the eyes of some second self Condy saw the girl of nineteen, part child and part woman; saw her goodness, her fine, sweet feminine strength as it were a dim radiance; “What’s a good man worth, Condy,” she had said, “if he’s not a strong man?”
“I suppose we’ll have a game going before midnight,” admitted Sargeant resignedly, smiling good-humoredly nevertheless.
Condy set his teeth. “I’ll join you later. Wait a few moments,” he said. He hurried to the office of the club, and sent a despatch to Blix — the third since morning:
“Can I come up right away? It’s urgent. Send answer by this messenger.”
He got his answer within three-quarters of an hour, and left the club as Hendricks and George Hands arrived by the elevator entrance.
Sitting in the bay window of the dining-room, he told Blix why he had come.
“Oh, you were right!” she told him. “Always, ALWAYS come, when — when you feel you must.”
“It gets so bad sometimes, Blix,” he confessed with abject self-contempt, “that when I can’t get some one to play against I’ll sit down and deal dummy hands, and bet on them. Just the touch of the cards — just the FEEL of the chips. Faugh! it’s shameful.”
The day following, Sunday, Condy came to tea as usual; and after the meal, as soon as the family and Victorine had left the pair alone in the dining-room, they set about preparing for their morrow’s excursion. Blix put up their lunch — sandwiches of what Condy called “devilish” ham, hard-boiled eggs, stuffed olives, and a bottle of claret.
Condy took off his coat and made a great show of stringing the tackle: winding the lines from the spools on to the reels, and attaching the sinkers and flies to the leaders, smoking the while, and scowling fiercely. He got the lines fearfully and wonderfully snarled, he caught the hooks in the table-cloth, he lost the almost invisible gut leaders on the floor and looped the sinkers on the lines when they should have gone on the leaders. In the end Blix had to help him out, disentangling the lines foot by foot with a patience that seemed to Condy little short of superhuman.
At nine o’clock she said decisively:
“Do you know what time we must get up in the morning if we are to have breakfast and get the seven-forty train? Quarter of six by the latest, and YOU must get up earlier than that, because you’re at the hotel and have further to go. Come here for breakfast, and — listen — be here by half-past six — are you LISTENING, Condy? — and we’ll go down to the depot from here. Don’t forget to bring the rods.”
“I’ll wear my bicycle suit,” he said, “and one of those golf scarfs that wrap around your neck.”
“No,” she declared, “I won’t have it. Wear the oldest clothes you’ve got, but look fairly respectable, because we’re to go to Luna’s when we get back, remember. And now go home; you need all the sleep you can get if you are to get up at six o’clock.”
Instead of being late, as Blix had feared, Condy was absurdly ahead of time the next morning. For a wonder, he had not forgotten the rods; but he was one tremor of nervousness. He would eat no breakfast.
“We’re going to miss that train,” he would announce from time to time; “I just know it. Blix, look what time it is. We ought to be on the way to the depot now. Come on; you don’t want any more coffee. Have you got everything? Did you put the reels in the lunch-basket? — and the fly-book? Lord, if we should forget the fly-book!”
He managed to get her to the depot over half an hour ahead of time. The train had not even backed in, nor the ticket office opened.
“I told you, Condy, I told you,” complained Blix, sinking helplessly upon a bench in the waiting-room.
“No — no — no,” he answered vaguely, looking nervously about, his head in the air. “We’re none too soon — have more time to rest now. I wonder what track the train leaves from. I wonder if it stops at San Bruno. I wonder how far it is from San Bruno to Lake San Andreas. I’m afraid it’s going to rain. Heavens and earth, Blix, we forgot the shrimps!”
“No, NO! Sit down, I’ve got the shrimps. Condy, you make me so nervous I shall scream in a minute.”
Some three-quarters of an hour later the train had set them down at San Bruno — nothing more than a road-house, the headquarters for duck-shooters and fishermen from the city. However, Blix and Condy were the only visitors. Everybody seemed to be especially nice to them on that wonderful morning. Even the supercilious ticket-seller at the San Francisco depot had unbent, and wished them good luck. The conductor of the train had shown himself affable. The very brakeman had gone out of his way to apprise them, quite five minutes ahead of time, that “the next stop was their place.” And at San Bruno the proprietor of the road-house himself hitched up to drive them over to the lake, announcing that he would call for them at “Richardson’s” in time for the evening train.
“And he only asked me four bits for both trips,” whispered Condy to Blix as they jogged along.
The country was beautiful. It was hardly eight o’clock, and the morning still retained much of the brisk effervescence of the early dawn. Great bare, rolling hills of gray-green, thinly scattered with live-oak, bore back from the road on either hand. The sky was pale blue. There was a smell of cows in the air, and twice they heard an unseen lark singing. It was very still. The old buggy and complacent horse were embalmed in a pungent aroma of old leather and of stables that was entrancing; and a sweet smell of grass and sap came to them in occasional long whiffs. There was exhilaration in the very thought of being alive on that odorous, still morning. The young blood went spanking in the veins. Blix’s cheeks were ruddy, her little dark-brown eyes fairly coruscating with pleasure.
“Condy, isn’t it all splendid?” she suddenly burst out.
“I feel regularly bigger,” he declared solemnly. “I could do anything a morning like this.”
Then they came to the lake, and to Richardson’s, where the farmer lived who was also the cus
todian of the lake. The complacent horse jogged back, and Condy and Blix set about the serious business of the day. Condy had no need to show Richardson the delightful sporting clerk’s card. The old Yankee — his twang and dry humor singularly incongruous on that royal morning — was solicitude itself. He picked out the best boat on the beach for them, loaned them his own anchor of railroad iron, indicated minutely the point on the opposite shore off which the last big trout had been “killed,” and wetted himself to his ankles as he pushed off the boat.
Condy took the oars. Blix sat in the stern, jointing the rods and running the lines through the guides. She even baited the hooks with the salt shrimp herself, and by nine o’clock they were at anchor some forty feet off shore, and fishing, according to Richardson’s advice, “a leetle mite off the edge o’ the weeds.”
“If we don’t get a bite the whole blessed day,” said Condy, as he paid out his line to the ratchet music of the reel, “we’ll have fun just the same. Look around — isn’t this great?”
They were absolutely alone. The day was young yet. The lake, smooth and still as gray silk, widened to the west and south without so much as a wrinkle to roughen the surface. Only to the east, where the sun looked over a shoulder of a higher hill, it flamed up into a blinding diamond iridescence. The surrounding land lay between sky and water, hushed to a Sunday stillness. Far off across the lake by Richardson’s they heard a dog bark, and the sound came fine and small and delicate. At long intervals the boat stirred with a gentle clap-clapping of the water along its sides. From the nearby shore in the growth of manzanita bushes quail called and clucked comfortably to each other; a bewildered yellow butterfly danced by over their heads, and slim blue dragon-flies came and poised on their lines and fishing-rods, bowing their backs.