by Frank Norris
It was a crisis.
But instead of acting as he expected, she suddenly seemed to concentrate all her thoughts on keeping her balance upon the rail. She did not pay the slightest attention to what he had done, but walked on, swaying and laughing as before. For a moment he was perplexed; then he saw his answer in her very silence. He instantly fell in with her mood, joyfully affecting ignorance of anything unusual. For a moment he debated the question of attempting to kiss her, but soon told himself that he had too much delicacy for that. This one great favour was enough at first.
“Really, we ought to be going home,” she said, at length. “Just suppose and suppose if my aunt should come back from the cruiser, and Mamma should find out I wasn’t with her. I’d more than catch it.”
They turned back and started home, but he kept his arm where it was, both of them still pretending to think of other things. Part of the way she walked on the rail again, and at one moment, losing her balance altogether, swayed toward him, and throwing out her hand instinctively, seized his shoulder furthest from her. On the instant he caught her wrist with his free hand and held her arm in place where it was.
At this she could no longer affect not to notice. She stopped suddenly and tried to pull away from him. Now it was his turn to assume a blissful ignorance: he looked at her surprised.
“Come along,” he exclaimed. “I thought you said it was late; look there, the cruiser’s lights are out.”
“Oh, but suppose somebody should see us,” she gasped.
They did not talk much on the way back.
It was about quarter after twelve when they reached the hotel. The elevator had stopped running, the night clerk had just come on duty, and a porter was piling the office chairs together, making ready to sweep. She drank a glass of water at the ice cooler in the corner of the office and said she was going to bed. He went with her down the hall to her room, talking about a riding party the next day.
“I think I’ll just see if Howard is in bed,” she said, as she stopped before the door of the room that opened from her mother’s and in which her little brother slept.
He followed her a couple of steps inside the room. Howard was there in bed, very warm and red, and sleeping audibly.
As she bent over the bed and smoothed out the pillows for her little brother, the sense of her beauty and her charm came over him again as keenly and vividly as when he had first met her. The hall was deserted, the hotel very quiet. He took a sudden resolution. He partially closed the door with his heel, and as she straightened up he put his arm about her neck and drew her head toward him. She turned to him then very sweetly, yielding with an infinite charm, and he kissed her twice.
Then he went out, softly closing the door behind him.
This was how he proposed to her. Not a word of what was greatest in their minds passed between them. But for all that they were no less sure of each other.
She rather preferred it that way.
San Francisco Wave, April 16, 1926.
MAN PROPOSES — NO. II
HE was a coal heaver, and all that day he had been toiling at the dockyards with his fellows, carrying sacks of coal into a steamer’s hold. The fatigue of work had been fearful; for full eight hours he had laboured, wrestling with the inert, crushing weight of the sacks, fighting with the immense, stolid blocks of coal, smashing them with sledge hammers, sweating at his work, grimed like a Negro with the coal dust.
It was after six now, and he was on his way home. A fine, cold rain was falling, and over his head and shoulders he had thrown an empty coal sack, havelock fashion.
He was an enormous man, strong as a dray horse, bigboned, heavily muscled, slow in his movements. His feet and hands were huge and knotted and twisted, and misshapen by hard usage. Through the grime of the coal dust one could but indistinctly make out his face. The eyes were small, the nose flat, and the lower jaw immense, protruding like the jaws of the carnivora, and thrusting the thick lower lip out beyond the upper. His father had been a coal heaver before him, and had worked at that trade until he had been killed in a strike. His mother had drunk herself into an asylum and had died long ago.
He went on homeward through the fine drizzle. He thrust his hands into his trousers’ pockets, gripping his sides with his elbows, drawing his shoulders together, shrinking into a small compass in order to be warm. His head was empty of all thought; his only idea was to get home and to be warm — to be fed, and then to sleep. At length he reached the house.
He pushed open the door of the kitchen, then paused on the threshold exclaiming, “What you doing here?”
She straightened up from the washtub and pushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of one smoking hand. “Yi sister’s sick again, so I come in to bear a hand with the wash,” she explained. “Yonder’s your supper,” and she jerked a bare elbow at the table with its linoleum cover. He did not answer, but went straight to his food, eating slowly with the delicious pleasure of a glutton, his huge jaws working deliberately, incessantly. She returned to the tubs, her shoulders rising and falling over the scrubbing board with a continuous rhythmical movement. There was no conversation.
He finished his supper and sat back in his chair with a long breath of satisfaction and content, and slowly wiped his lips with the side of his hand. Then he turned his huge body clumsily about and looked at her. Her back was toward him, but he could catch occasional indistinct glimpses of her face in the steam-blurred mirror that hung on the wall just above the tub.
She was not very young, and she was rather fat; her lips were thick and very red, and her eyes were small, her neck was large and thick and very white, and on the nape the hair grew low and curling.
Still watching her, he straightened out a leg, and thrusting his hand deep into his trousers’ pocket drew out his short-stemmed clay pipe.
The tips of her bare elbows were red, and he noted with interest how this little red flush came and went as her arms bent and straightened.
In the other pocket he found his plug of tobacco and his huge horn-handled clasp knife. He settled his pipe comfortably in the corner of his mouth and began to cut off strips of tobacco from the plug with great deliberation.
As her body rose and fell, he watched curiously the wrinkles and folds forming and reforming about her thick corsetless waist.
He shut his knife with a snap and slipped it back into his pocket and began to grind the strips of tobacco between his palms, his eyes still fixed upon her.
Little beads of perspiration stood on her forehead and glistened in the hair on the nape of her neck. She breathed rapidly, and he remarked how her big white throat alternately swelled and contracted.
He took his pipe from his lips and filled it, stoppering it with his thumb, put it back unlighted between his teeth and dusted his leathery palms together slowly. Then he let his huge hands fall upon his knees, palms upward. He sat motionless, watching her fixedly. He was warm now, crammed with food, stupid, content, inert, and the animal within him purred and stretched itself. There was a long silence.
“Say,” he exclaimed at length, with the brutal abruptness of crude, simple natures, “listen here. I like you better’n anyone else. What’s the matter with us two gett’n’ married, huh?”
She straightened up quickly and faced him, putting back her hair from her face with the same gesture of her soapy hand, drawing back from him frightened and bewildered.
“Say, will you?” he repeated. “Say, huh, will you? Come on, let’s.”
“No, no!” she exclaimed instinctively, refusing without knowing why, suddenly seized with the fear of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male.
He could only say: “Ah, come on; ah, come on,” repeating the same thing over and over again.
She, more and more frightened at his enormous hands, his huge square-cut head, and his enormous brute strength, cried out, “No, no!” shaking her head violently, holding out her hands and shrinking from him.
He laid his unlighted pipe on the
table and got up and came near to her, his immense feet dragging and grinding on the bare floor.
“Ah, come on,” he repeated; “what’s the matter with us two gett’n married. Come on — why not?”
She retreated from him and stood on the other side of the tub.
“Why not?” he persisted. “Don’t you like me well enough?”
“Yes.”
“Then why not?”
“Because—”
“Ah, come on,” he repeated. There was a silence, the hundred tiny bubbles in the suds of the washtub were settling and bursting with a prolonged and tiny crackling sound. He came around to where she stood, penning her into the corner of the room. “Huh, why not?” he asked. She was warm from her exertions at the tub, and as he stood over her she seemed to him to exhale a delicious feminine odour that appeared to come alike from her hair, her mouth, the nape of her neck. Suddenly he took her in his enormous arms, crushing down her struggle with his immense brute strength. Then she gave up all at once, glad to yield to him and to his superior force, willing to be conquered. She turned her head to him, and they kissed each other full on the mouth, brutally, grossly.
San Francisco Wave, May 30, 1926.
MAN PROPOSES — NO. III
THEY had been out to the theatre together, and there was no chaperon. They knew each other well enough for that. On the front steps of her house she gave him her latchkey and he opened the front door for her. “You had better come in,” she said, “and we’ll find something to eat.”
Every Monday evening they went to the theatre and afterward had blue ribbon beer and pate sandwiches in the kitchen of her house. It was a time-worn and time-honoured custom of three months’ standing, like his Thursday evening call and his meeting with her at the eleven o’clock service each Sunday.
She turned on the current in the hall and in the parlour, and went into the latter rooms and took off her things. He followed her about from place to place and listened attentively to her chaffing him because he had passed her on the street car the day before and had not seen her. He protested his innocence of any premeditated slight, and they went out into the kitchen both talking at the same time. It was all very gay, and they felt that they sufficed to themselves.
The Chinaman had set out the beer and sandwiches on the top of the ice chest in the laundry. She lighted every gas burner in sight and fetched the tray into the kitchen and got down the plates, while he opened the beer and filled the two glasses.
“There’s pate sandwiches,” she said, punching each little pile with the tip of her finger as she spoke, “and sardine sandwiches and lettuce-an’-mayonnaise sandwiches, and don’t say ‘and the sandwich-is on the floor,’ because you say it every time, and it’s become an old joke that was funny once but isn’t funny any more at all. Here, don’t talk so much, but drink your beer. Here’s success to you.” They drank to each other, she sitting on the deal table, clicking her heels together; he, with his chair tilted back against the sink, grinning at her over the top of his glass.
“Huh!” he exclaimed all of a sudden, as he set down his glass and glanced about him, “four burners going full head in the kitchen at this hour. I won’t let you do that when we’re married, young woman, I can’t afford it.”
“When we’re—” she shouted, adding furiously, “Well, I do like that.”
“Yes, I thought you would,” he replied calmly.
“You thought — you thought,” she gasped, getting to her feet and gazing at him wide-eyed and breathless, “you were — you are — we are—”
“I am, thou art, he is,” he interrupted, beginning to laugh, “which means that ‘I am’ quite determined to marry you, and ‘thou art’ to be my wedded wife, and ‘he is,’ that is to say your father, is to give us his consent and his blessing. I’ve been thinking it all over, and I’ve made up my mind that it will be for next Thursday at twenty minutes after three.”
“Oh, you have, have you!” she cried, breathing hard through her nose. “You might have asked me something about it.”
“Oh, I didn’t need to ask,” he answered; “you see I’m pretty sure already.”
“Pretty sure,” she retorted. “Oh, this is fine. Oh, isn’t this splendid! I just hate and loathe and detest and abhor and abominate you.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” he answered, putting up his hand. “Does Thursday suit?”
“No, it don’t suit,” she flashed back at him. “It will be when I say and choose; I mean — I mean—”
He shouted with laughter, and her face blazed.
“I mean it won’t ever be. Oh, I could — I could bite you.”
“I think it will be Thursday,” he said reflectively. “ I’ll call for you here in a carriage at twenty minutes after three, and in the meantime I’ll see your father and fix things.”
She sank into a chair and let her hands drop into her lap palms upward, and drew a long breath or two, gazing at him helplessly and shaking her head.
“Well, of all the cool—”
“You see that will give us time enough for supper, and then we can take the eight fifty-five—”
“What are you talking about?” she inquired deliberately.
He went on unheeding:
“I got the tickets this afternoon.”
“Tickets,” she faltered.
“Um-hum,” he answered, absently feeling in his inside pocket. “Here they are; see, this is the railroad ticket, and here’s the Pullman ticket. Lower 10.”
“Lower 10! It will be the whole section. I — I mean, of course — I — you — Oh — h, how I hate you!”
“That will give us two days in New York. I wired for a stateroom day before yesterday. It’s the St. Paul. She sails on the twenty-third. Do you like the boat?”
“Oh, go right on, go right on!” she cried, waving her hands at him. “Don’t mind me.”
“Well, that’s as far ahead as I’ve planned now. I don’t think we would want to stay over on the other side more than four months. Then, you know, there’s the expense.”
She was about to answer when they both heard the front door close. “That’s Dave,” she exclaimed. Her brother came out into the kitchen in evening dress. “Hello, hello,” he said. “Beer and skittles, domestic enough; can I belong? Beer’s flat, of course, but I’ll have a skittle, if you don’t mind,” and he began to eat a sandwich, telling them the whiles where he had been and what he had been doing.
He and the brother fell a-talking. She sat silent, very thoughtful, looking at him from time to time.
“Well,” said he, at last, “I must be going,” adding, as he turned to her,”I’ve a deal to do in the next few days.” She made a little gasp and got up and went with him into the front hall, leaving the brother to grumble over the flatness of the beer. She helped him on with his overcoat. There was a silence. He stood with his hand on the knob of the door. “Good-night,” she said, adding, as she always did, “When am I to see you again?”
“Well,” he answered, suddenly grave, very much in earnest, “when are you to see me again? It’s up to you, little girl — what’s your answer? Now, when shall I come?”
She didn’t answer at once. In the stillness they heard the humming of the cable in the street outside. Then there was an opening and closing of doors as the brother came out of the kitchen.
“Quick,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder, “he’ll be here in a minute. When am I to see you again?”
Then she turned to him:
“Oh, I suppose Thursday, at twenty minutes after three.”
San Francisco Wave, June 13, 1896.
MAN PROPOSES — NO. IV
Going away!” she echoed, suddenly facing him and looking at him with wide eyes.
“That’s right,” he admitted.
They were sitting on the green bench, all carved and whittled, that stood at the end of the pier. Behind them, on the shore, the lights of the huge hotel were winking out one by one. It was rather late.
; “Yes,” he went on, looking vaguely about on the floor of the pier. “The governor wired me two or three days ago, but I didn’t want to say anything about it and spoil our fun. You see, the governor is starting a branch agency in Liverpool, and he wants me to go over there and take charge. I suppose I shall have to — well, have to locate there — live there — permanently. The governor knows a lot of people there. Then there’s the business. You see, I’ve been in the firm now for nearly ten years — ever since I graduated — and I know the details pretty well — better than a new man — and the governor’s business methods. That new lamp for the submarine torpedo boats is a pet hobby of his. I improved a selfadjuster to regulate the pressure that tickled him almost to death. He thinks I can get the contract for lighting all the new torpedo boats that the—”
“Oh, what do I care about all that?” she burst out suddenly. “How about me?”
“How about you?” he repeated, pretending not to understand. “How — what do you mean about you?” There was a silence. Then:
“Haven’t you got anything more than that to say to me?” she asked bravely, sitting up very straight and trying to catch his eye.
“Well, what can I say?” he answered, smiling at her. “We’ve had an awfully good time here, little girl, and I shall never forget you. You don’t know how sorry I am to leave you. You must promise to write to me, won’t you? — just ‘care of the office,’ you know.”
“But you — you don’t seem to understand,” she began.
“Send me a letter on board ship,” he went on quickly— “she sails a week from Saturday — just to wish me bon voyage. It’s mighty good, you know, to get a letter when you are leaving for a long voyage like that. Oh, I say, little girl, don’t do that. Look here, for heaven’s sake, don’t take it to heart like that. Look here, look at me. I didn’t know that you — that you really cared.”