Rich men's children

by Geraldine Bonner

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 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 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 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 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 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.