The pioneer

by Geraldine Bonner

The Colonel looked at it for another period of frowning cogitation. Then on the edge of the paper he put down the items of his own private account. There was only one which was large—the rent of the sunny suite on the Kearney Street corner. Through that item he drew his pen.

The next time he dined with the Allens he told them that he was going to move. He had found his old rooms too large and he had decided to take a smaller suite in the Traveler’s Hotel. The girls stared in blank surprise. Allen looked at him with quick, sidelong curiosity. He wondered at the move. He knew that Parrish had been hard hit, but he still must have enough left to live on comfortably in the style he had maintained since his return from the war. The Traveler’s Hotel was a come-down—a place on the built-out land below Montgomery Street, respectable enough, but far different from the luxurious rooms on the Kearney Street corner.

The girls were amazed, distressed, had endless questions as to why Uncle Jim should do such a strange thing. He laughed and parried their queries. Had they forgotten that he was a pioneer, who had slept under the stars on the American River in forty-nine? In those days the Traveler’s Hotel would have been regarded as the acme of luxury.

“And why,” he said, “should the old man to-day turn up his nose at what would have been magnificence to the young man in forty-nine?”

During this winter of storm and stress June stood on the edge of the excitement looking on. The selfishness of a purely individual sorrow held her back from that vivid interest and participation that would once have been hers. She was tender and loving to the Colonel, and she bore patiently with the moody irritation that often marked her father’s manner, but for the most part she gave to the matters that once would have been of paramount interest, only a shadow of her old blithe attention.

Yet she was not entirely unhappy. She had accepted the situation, and, knowing the worst, tried to readjust her life to an altered point of view. Her comfort lay in the thought that Jerry loved her. The enchantment of the days when she had dreamed a maiden’s dreams of a life with the one chosen man, was for ever gone. She marveled now at the rainbow radiance of that wonderful time when mere living had been so joyous, and happiness so easy and natural.

But Jerry loved her. In the rending of the fabric of her dreams, the shattering of her ideals, that remained. She hugged it to her heart and it filled the empty present. Of the future she did not think, making no attempt to penetrate its veil. Only her youth whispered hope to her, and her natural buoyancy of temperament repeated the whisper.

Of Jerry’s feelings toward her she knew, without being told, but one evening, late in the winter, he again spoke of them. It was at a party at Mrs. Davenport’s. For the first time during the season they had danced together. As a rule their intercourse was limited to the few words of casual acquaintanceship, greetings on the stairway, conventional commonplaces at suppers or over dinner-tables. Under this veil of indifference each was acutely conscious of the other’s presence, thrilled to the other’s voice, heard unexpectedly in a lull of conversation or the passing of couples in a crowded doorway.

At Mrs. Davenport’s party Jerry had drunk freely of the champagne and the restraint he kept on himself was loosened. Moreover, Lupé was not present, and he felt reckless and daring. After a few turns among the circling couples they dropped out of the dance, and he drew June from the large room into a small conservatory. Here in the quiet coolness, amid the greenery of leaves and the drip of falling water, he took her two hands in his, and in the sentimental phrases of which he had such a mastery, told her of his love.

She listened with down-drooped eyes, pale as the petals of the lilies round the fountain, the lace on her bosom vibrating with the beating of her heart.