Rich men's children

by Geraldine Bonner

With her blankly-staring eyes fixed on the white outside world, her mental vision conjured up a picture of them at dinner that night, sitting opposite each other at a table glistening with the richest of glass and silver, while soft-footed menials waited obsequiously upon them. Bill Cannon was not in the picture. Berny’s imagination had excluded him, pushing him out of the romance into some unseen, uninteresting region where people who were not lovers dined dully by themselves. She could not imagine Rose and Dominick otherwise than alone, exchanging tender glances over the newest form of champagne glasses filled with the choicest brand of champagne.

A sound escaped her, a sound of pain, as if forced from her by the grinding of jealous passions within. She dropped the curtain and rose to her feet. If they married it would be always that way with them. They would have everything in the world, everything that to Berny made life worth while. Even Paris, with her three hundred thousand dollars to open all its doors, would be a savorless place to her if Rose and Dominick were to be left to the enjoyment of all the pleasures and luxuries of life back in California.

Unable to rest, fretted by jealousy, tormented by her longing for the offered money, oppressed by uneasiness as to Cannon’s next move, the thought of the long afternoon in the house was unendurable to her. She could not remain unemployed and passive while her mind was in this state of disturbance. Though the day was bad and there was nothing to do down town, she determined to go out. She might find some distraction in watching the passers-by and looking at the shop windows.

By the time she was dressed, it was four o’clock. The fog was thicker than ever, hanging over the city in an even, motionless pall of vapor. Its breath had a keen, penetrating chill, like that exhaled by the mouth of a cavern. Coming down the steps into it she seemed to be entering a white, still sea, off which an air came that was pleasant on the heated dryness of her face. She had no place to go to, no engagement to keep, but instinctively turned her steps in the down-town direction. Walking would pass more time than going on the car, and she started down the street which slanted to a level and then climbed a long, dim reach of hill beyond. Its emptiness—a characteristic feature of San Francisco streets—struck upon her observation with a sense of griping, bleak dreariness. She could look along the two lines of sidewalk till they were lost in the gradual milky thickening of the fog, and at intervals see a figure, faint and dreamlike, either emerging from space in slow approach, or melting into it in phantasmal withdrawal.

It was a melancholy, depressing vista. She had not reached the top of the long hill before she decided that she would walk no farther. Walking was only bearable when there was something to see. But she did not know what else to do or where to go. Indecision was not usually a feature of her character. To-day, however, the unaccustomed strain of temptation and worry seemed to have weakened her resourcefulness and resolution. The one point on which she felt determined was that she would not go home.

The advancing front of a car, looming suddenly through the mist, decided her. She hailed it, climbed on board, and sank into a seat on the inside. There was no one else there. It smelt of dampness, of wet woolens and rubber overshoes, and its closed windows, filmed with fog, showed semicircular streaks across them where passengers had rubbed them clean to look out. The conductor, an unkempt man, with an unshaven chin and dirty collar, slouched in for her fare, extending a grimy paw toward her. As he took the money and punched the tag, he hummed a tune to himself, seeming to convey in that harmless act a slighting opinion of his passenger. Berny looked at him severely, which made him hum still louder, and lounge indifferently out to the back platform where he leaned on the brake and spat scornfully into the street.

Berny felt that sitting there was worse than walking. There was no one to look at, there was nothing to be seen from the windows. The car dipped over the edge of an incline, slid with an even, skimming swiftness down the face of the hill, and then, with a series of small jouncings, crossed the rails of another line. Not knowing or caring where she was, she signaled the conductor to stop, and alighted. She looked round her for an uncertain moment, and then recognized the locality. She was close to the old Union Street plaza on which the Greek Church fronted. Here in the days before her marriage, when she and Hazel had been known as “the pretty Iverson girls,” she had been wont to come on sunny Sunday mornings and sit on the benches with such beaux as brightened the monotony of that unaspiring period.

She felt tired now and thought it would not be a bad idea to cross to the plaza and rest there for a space. She was warmly dressed and her clothes would not be hurt by the damp. Threading her way down the street, she came out on the opening where the little park lies like an unrolled green cloth round which the shabby, gray city crowds.

She sank down on the first empty bench, and looking round she saw other dark shapes, having a vague, huddled appearance, lounging in bunched-up attitudes on the adjacent seats. They seemed preoccupied. It struck her that they, like herself, were plunged in meditation on matters which they had sought this damp seclusion silently to ponder. The only region of activity in the dim, still scene was where some boys were playing under the faintly-defined outline of a large willow tree. They were bending close to the ground in the performance of a game over which periods of quietness fell to be broken by sudden disrupting cries. As Berny took her seat their imp-like shapes, dark and without detail, danced about under the tree in what appeared a fantastic ecstasy, while their cries broke through the woolly thickness of the air with an intimate clearness, strangely at variance with the remote effect of their figures.

The fact that no one noticed her, or could clearly see her, affected her as it seemed to have done the other occupants of the benches. She relaxed from her alert sprightliness of pose, and sank against the back of the seat in the limpness of unobserved indifference. Sitting thus, her eyes on the ground, she heard, at first unheeding, then with a growing sense of attention, footsteps approaching on the gravel walk. They were the short, quick footsteps of a woman. Berny looked up and saw the woman, a little darker than the atmosphere, emerging from the surrounding grayness, as if she were slowly rising to the surface through water.