by Frank Norris
She found a tiny summer house, built in Japanese fashion, around a diminutive pond, and sat there for a while, her hands folded in her lap, amused with watching the goldfish, wishing — she knew not what.
Without any warning, Annixter sat down beside her. She was too frightened to move. She looked at him with wide eyes that began to fill with tears.
“Oh,” she said, at last, “oh — I didn’t know.”
“Well,” exclaimed Annixter, “here you are at last. I’ve been watching that blamed house till I was afraid the policeman would move me on. By the Lord,” he suddenly cried, “you’re pale. You — you, Hilma, do you feel well?”
“Yes — I am well,” she faltered.
“No, you’re not,” he declared. “I know better. You are coming back to Quien Sabe with me. This place don’t agree with you. Hilma, what’s all the matter? Why haven’t you let me see you all this time? Do you know — how things are with me? Your mother told you, didn’t she? Do you know how sorry I am? Do you know that I see now that I made the mistake of my life there, that time, under the Long Trestle? I found it out the night after you went away. I sat all night on a stone out on the ranch somewhere and I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’ve been a different man since then. I see things all different now. Why, I’ve only begun to live since then. I know what love means now, and instead of being ashamed of it, I’m proud of it. If I never was to see you again I would be glad I’d lived through that night, just the same. I just woke up that night. I’d been absolutely and completely selfish up to the moment I realised I really loved you, and now, whether you’ll let me marry you or not, I mean to live — I don’t know, in a different way. I’ve GOT to live different. I — well — oh, I can’t make you understand, but just loving you has changed my life all around. It’s made it easier to do the straight, clean thing. I want to do it, it’s fun doing it. Remember, once I said I was proud of being a hard man, a driver, of being glad that people hated me and were afraid of me? Well, since I’ve loved you I’m ashamed of it all. I don’t want to be hard any more, and nobody is going to hate me if I can help it. I’m happy and I want other people so. I love you,” he suddenly exclaimed; “I love you, and if you will forgive me, and if you will come down to such a beast as I am, I want to be to you the best a man can be to a woman, Hilma. Do you understand, little girl? I want to be your husband.”
Hilma looked at the goldfishes through her tears.
“Have you got anything to say to me, Hilma?” he asked, after a while.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she murmured.
“Yes, you do,” he insisted. “I’ve followed you ‘way up here to hear it. I’ve waited around in these beastly, draughty picnic grounds for over a week to hear it. You know what I want to hear, Hilma.”
“Well — I forgive you,” she hazarded.
“That will do for a starter,” he answered. “But that’s not IT.”
“Then, I don’t know what.”
“Shall I say it for you?”
She hesitated a long minute, then:
“You mightn’t say it right,” she replied.
“Trust me for that. Shall I say it for you, Hilma?”
“I don’t know what you’ll say.”
“I’ll say what you are thinking of. Shall I say it?”
There was a very long pause. A goldfish rose to the surface of the little pond, with a sharp, rippling sound. The fog drifted overhead. There was nobody about.
“No,” said Hilma, at length. “I — I — I can say it for myself. I—” All at once she turned to him and put her arms around his neck. “Oh, DO you love me?” she cried. “Is it really true? Do you mean every word of it? And you are sorry and you WILL be good to me if I will be your wife? You will be my dear, dear husband?”
The tears sprang to Annixter’s eyes. He took her in his arms and held her there for a moment. Never in his life had he felt so unworthy, so undeserving of this clean, pure girl who forgave him and trusted his spoken word and believed him to be the good man he could only wish to be. She was so far above him, so exalted, so noble that he should have bowed his forehead to her feet, and instead, she took him in her arms, believing him to be good, to be her equal. He could think of no words to say. The tears overflowed his eyes and ran down upon his cheeks. She drew away from him and held him a second at arm’s length, looking at him, and he saw that she, too, had been crying.
“I think,” he said, “we are a couple of softies.”
“No, no,” she insisted. “I want to cry and want you to cry, too. Oh, dear, I haven’t a handkerchief.”
“Here, take mine.”
They wiped each other’s eyes like two children and for a long time sat in the deserted little Japanese pleasure house, their arms about each other, talking, talking, talking.
On the following Saturday they were married in an uptown Presbyterian church, and spent the week of their honeymoon at a small, family hotel on Sutter Street. As a matter of course, they saw the sights of the city together. They made the inevitable bridal trip to the Cliff House and spent an afternoon in the grewsome and made-to-order beauties of Sutro’s Gardens; they went through Chinatown, the Palace Hotel, the park museum — where Hilma resolutely refused to believe in the Egyptian mummy — and they drove out in a hired hack to the Presidio and the Golden Gate.
On the sixth day of their excursions, Hilma abruptly declared they had had enough of “playing out,” and must be serious and get to work.
This work was nothing less than the buying of the furniture and appointments for the rejuvenated ranch house at Quien Sabe, where they were to live. Annixter had telegraphed to his overseer to have the building repainted, replastered, and reshingled and to empty the rooms of everything but the telephone and safe. He also sent instructions to have the dimensions of each room noted down and the result forwarded to him. It was the arrival of these memoranda that had roused Hilma to action.
Then ensued a most delicious week. Armed with formidable lists, written by Annixter on hotel envelopes, they two descended upon the department stores of the city, the carpet stores, the furniture stores. Right and left they bought and bargained, sending each consignment as soon as purchased to Quien Sabe. Nearly an entire car load of carpets, curtains, kitchen furniture, pictures, fixtures, lamps, straw matting, chairs, and the like were sent down to the ranch, Annixter making a point that their new home should be entirely equipped by San Francisco dealers.
The furnishings of the bedroom and sitting-room were left to the very last. For the former, Hilma bought a “set” of pure white enamel, three chairs, a washstand and bureau, a marvellous bargain of thirty dollars, discovered by wonderful accident at a “Friday Sale.” The bed was a piece by itself, bought elsewhere, but none the less a wonder. It was of brass, very brave and gay, and actually boasted a canopy! They bought it complete, just as it stood in the window of the department store and Hilma was in an ecstasy over its crisp, clean, muslin curtains, spread, and shams. Never was there such a bed, the luxury of a princess, such a bed as she had dreamed about her whole life.
Next the appointments of the sitting-room occupied her — since Annixter, himself, bewildered by this astonishing display, unable to offer a single suggestion himself, merely approved of all she bought. In the sitting-room was to be a beautiful blue and white paper, cool straw matting, set off with white wool rugs, a stand of flowers in the window, a globe of goldfish, rocking chairs, a sewing machine, and a great, round centre table of yellow oak whereon should stand a lamp covered with a deep shade of crinkly red tissue paper. On the walls were to hang several pictures — lovely affairs, photographs from life, all properly tinted — of choir boys in robes, with beautiful eyes; pensive young girls in pink gowns, with flowing yellow hair, drooping over golden harps; a coloured reproduction of “Rouget de Lisle, Singing the Marseillaise,” and two “pieces” of wood carving, representing a quail and a wild duck, hung by one leg in the midst of game bags and powder horns, — q
uite masterpieces, both.
At last everything had been bought, all arrangements made, Hilma’s trunks packed with her new dresses, and the tickets to Bonneville bought.
“We’ll go by the Overland, by Jingo,” declared Annixter across the table to his wife, at their last meal in the hotel where they had been stopping; “no way trains or locals for us, hey?”
“But we reach Bonneville at SUCH an hour,” protested Hilma. “Five in the morning!”
“Never mind,” he declared, “we’ll go home in PULLMAN’S, Hilma. I’m not going to have any of those slobs in Bonneville say I didn’t know how to do the thing in style, and we’ll have Vacca meet us with the team. No, sir, it is Pullman’s or nothing. When it comes to buying furniture, I don’t shine, perhaps, but I know what’s due my wife.”
He was obdurate, and late one afternoon the couple boarded the Transcontinental (the crack Overland Flyer of the Pacific and Southwestern) at the Oakland mole. Only Hilma’s parents were there to say good-bye. Annixter knew that Magnus and Osterman were in the city, but he had laid his plans to elude them. Magnus, he could trust to be dignified, but that goat Osterman, one could never tell what he would do next. He did not propose to start his journey home in a shower of rice. Annixter marched down the line of cars, his hands encumbered with wicker telescope baskets, satchels, and valises, his tickets in his mouth, his hat on wrong side foremost, Hilma and her parents hurrying on behind him, trying to keep up. Annixter was in a turmoil of nerves lest something should go wrong; catching a train was always for him a little crisis. He rushed ahead so furiously that when he had found his Pullman he had lost his party. He set down his valises to mark the place and charged back along the platform, waving his arms.
“Come on,” he cried, when, at length, he espied the others. “We’ve no more time.”
He shouldered and urged them forward to where he had set his valises, only to find one of them gone. Instantly he raised an outcry. Aha, a fine way to treat passengers! There was P. and S. W. management for you. He would, by the Lord, he would — but the porter appeared in the vestibule of the car to placate him. He had already taken his valises inside.
Annixter would not permit Hilma’s parents to board the car, declaring that the train might pull out any moment. So he and his wife, following the porter down the narrow passage by the stateroom, took their places and, raising the window, leaned out to say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Tree. These latter would not return to Quien Sabe. Old man Tree had found a business chance awaiting him in the matter of supplying his relative’s hotel with dairy products. But Bonneville was not too far from San Francisco; the separation was by no means final.
The porters began taking up the steps that stood by the vestibule of each sleeping-car.
“Well, have a good time, daughter,” observed her father; “and come up to see us whenever you can.”
From beyond the enclosure of the depot’s reverberating roof came the measured clang of a bell.
“I guess we’re off,” cried Annixter. “Good-bye, Mrs. Tree.”
“Remember your promise, Hilma,” her mother hastened to exclaim, “to write every Sunday afternoon.”
There came a prolonged creaking and groan of straining wood and iron work, all along the length of the train. They all began to cry their good-byes at once. The train stirred, moved forward, and gathering slow headway, rolled slowly out into the sunlight. Hilma leaned out of the window and as long as she could keep her mother in sight waved her handkerchief. Then at length she sat back in her seat and looked at her husband.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” echoed Annixter, “happy?” for the tears rose in her eyes.
She nodded energetically, smiling at him bravely.
“You look a little pale,” he declared, frowning uneasily; “feel well?”
“Pretty well.”
Promptly he was seized with uneasiness. “But not ALL well, hey? Is that it?”
It was true that Hilma had felt a faint tremour of seasickness on the ferry-boat coming from the city to the Oakland mole. No doubt a little nausea yet remained with her. But Annixter refused to accept this explanation. He was distressed beyond expression.
“Now you’re going to be sick,” he cried anxiously.
“No, no,” she protested, “not a bit.”
“But you said you didn’t feel very well. Where is it you feel sick?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sick. Oh, dear me, why will you bother?”
“Headache?”
“Not the least.”
“You feel tired, then. That’s it. No wonder, the way rushed you ‘round to-day.”
“Dear, I’m NOT tired, and I’m NOT sick, and I’m all RIGHT.”
“No, no; I can tell. I think we’d best have the berth made up and you lie down.”
“That would be perfectly ridiculous.”
“Well, where is it you feel sick? Show me; put your hand on the place. Want to eat something?”
With elaborate minuteness, he cross-questioned her, refusing to let the subject drop, protesting that she had dark circles under her eyes; that she had grown thinner.
“Wonder if there’s a doctor on board,” he murmured, looking uncertainly about the car. “Let me see your tongue. I know — a little whiskey is what you want, that and some pru — —”
“No, no, NO,” she exclaimed. “I’m as well as I ever was in all my life. Look at me. Now, tell me, do l look likee a sick lady?”
He scrutinised her face distressfully.
“Now, don’t I look the picture of health?” she challenged.
“In a way you do,” he began, “and then again — —”
Hilma beat a tattoo with her heels upon the floor, shutting her fists, the thumbs tucked inside. She closed her eyes, shaking her head energetically.
“I won’t listen, I won’t listen, I won’t listen,” she cried.
“But, just the same — —”
“Gibble — gibble — gibble,” she mocked. “I won’t Listen, I won’t listen.” She put a hand over his mouth. “Look, here’s the dining-car waiter, and the first call for supper, and your wife is hungry.”
They went forward and had supper in the diner, while the long train, now out upon the main line, settled itself to its pace, the prolonged, even gallop that it would hold for the better part of the week, spinning out the miles as a cotton spinner spins thread.
It was already dark when Antioch was left behind. Abruptly the sunset appeared to wheel in the sky and readjusted itself to the right of the track behind Mount Diablo, here visible almost to its base. The train had turned southward. Neroly was passed, then Brentwood, then Byron. In the gathering dusk, mountains began to build themselves up on either hand, far off, blocking the horizon. The train shot forward, roaring. Between the mountains the land lay level, cut up into farms, ranches. These continually grew larger; growing wheat began to appear, billowing in the wind of the train’s passage. The mountains grew higher, the land richer, and by the time the moon rose, the train was well into the northernmost limits of the valley of the San Joaquin.
Annixter had engaged an entire section, and after he and his wife went to bed had the porter close the upper berth. Hilma sat up in bed to say her prayers, both hands over her face, and then kissing Annixter good-night, went to sleep with the directness of a little child, holding his hand in both her own.
Annixter, who never could sleep on the train, dozed and tossed and fretted for hours, consulting his watch and time-table whenever there was a stop; twice he rose to get a drink of ice water, and between whiles was forever sitting up in the narrow berth, stretching himself and yawning, murmuring with uncertain relevance:
“Oh, Lord! Oh-h-h LORD!”
There were some dozen other passengers in the car — a lady with three children, a group of school-teachers, a couple of drummers, a stout gentleman with whiskers, and a well-dressed young man in a plaid travelling cap, whom Annixter had observed before supper time reading D
audet’s “Tartarin” in the French.
But by nine o’clock, all these people were in their berths. Occasionally, above the rhythmic rumble of the wheels, Annixter could hear one of the lady’s children fidgeting and complaining. The stout gentleman snored monotonously in two notes, one a rasping bass, the other a prolonged treble. At intervals, a brakeman or the passenger conductor pushed down the aisle, between the curtains, his red and white lamp over his arm. Looking out into the car Annixter saw in an end section where the berths had not been made up, the porter, in his white duck coat, dozing, his mouth wide open, his head on his shoulder.
The hours passed. Midnight came and went. Annixter, checking off the stations, noted their passage of Modesto, Merced, and Madeira. Then, after another broken nap, he lost count. He wondered where they were. Had they reached Fresno yet? Raising the window curtain, he made a shade with both hands on either side of his face and looked out. The night was thick, dark, clouded over. A fine rain was falling, leaving horizontal streaks on the glass of the outside window. Only the faintest grey blur indicated the sky. Everything else was impenetrable blackness.
“I think sure we must have passed Fresno,” he muttered. He looked at his watch. It was about half-past three. “If we have passed Fresno,” he said to himself, “I’d better wake the little girl pretty soon. She’ll need about an hour to dress. Better find out for sure.”
He drew on his trousers and shoes, got into his coat, and stepped out into the aisle. In the seat that had been occupied by the porter, the Pullman conductor, his cash box and car-schedules before him, was checking up his berths, a blue pencil behind his ear.
“What’s the next stop, Captain?” inquired Annixter, coming up. “Have we reached Fresno yet?”
“Just passed it,” the other responded, looking at Annixter over his spectacles.
“What’s the next stop?”
“Goshen. We will be there in about forty-five minutes.”