The following Sunday, at ten o’clock in the morning, Dominick noiselessly descended1 the stairs of the flat and let himself out into the street. He had had a sleepless2 night, and as he stood in the dazzling sunshine, debating which way he should go, his face showed the hollows and lines left by hours of worried wakefulness.
His day—the holiday of his week of steady work—was without engagement. The friend with whom he usually walked over the suburban3 hills had moved to the country. His rest from labor4 would take the form of a day spent away from his home in the open air. As he had eaten his breakfast he had planned his itinerary5, carefully considering the best distribution of these twelve treasured hours of liberty. He would spend the morning walking, anywhere—the direction did not matter much—anywhere where there was quiet and a view. He would take his lunch at any little joint—country hotel, city chop-house—he happened to pass, and in the afternoon he would[335] walk again, on for hours, probably over the Presidio Hills where the poppies were beginning to gild6 the slopes, or along the beach where there were unfrequented nooks in which a man could lie and look at the water, and think. A whole day away from Berny and the flat, in the healing balm of the sunshine and the clean, untroubled air, was the best way to renew the fund of philosophy and patience that of late he had felt was almost exhausted7.
The ferment8 of his wakeful night was still in his blood as he walked across the city, aiming for the eminence9 of Telegraph Hill. He walked slowly without looking up; his eyes on the tip of his cane10 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 Cannon11. But the splendors12 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 repudiating14 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[336] not stand it. The future with Berny had loomed15 before him, crushing, unbearable16, 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 renewal17 of courage and reasoned with himself, using the old arguments with which for two years he had been subduing18 his rebellion and curbing19 the passion and impatience20 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 den21 with her every evening, would have given him the greatest[337] satisfaction. He felt that the sight of her was daily growing more unbearably22 and unnaturally23 obnoxious24 to him. Little personal traits of hers had a strange, maddening power of exciting his dislike. In the evening the rustling25 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 insistent26 rustling, and controlling himself with an effort. As they sat opposite each other at breakfast, the sound she made as she crunched27 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 crunching28 of toast every morning was a torment29 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 schooling30 himself for two years, came back to his mind with the unerring directness of homing pigeons. He went over the tale of Berny’s worthiness31 and his own responsibility in the misfortunes of her life and disposition32. It was a circular process of thought that[338] 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 humbly33 acquiescing34 answer these reflections always brought him. But to-day it was hard to be acquiescent35. The rebellion of the night was not all subdued36. The splendor13 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 benediction37 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 ascended38 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 inmates39, garbed40 in the light Sunday attire41 of the Californian on pleasure bent42. 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[339] 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 mellowed44 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 niche46 with less of the reverenced47 saint than of the loving woman in the face his fancy conjured48 up.
Standing49 on the summit of the hill, where the wall of the quarry50 drops down to the water front and the wharves51, he relinquished52 himself to his dream of her. The bay lay at his feet, a blue floor, level between rusty53, rugged54 hills. There was an island in it, red-brown, incrusted with buildings, that seemed to clutch their rocky perch55 with long strips and angles of wall. In the reach of water just below there was little shipping56, only a schooner57 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 curds58 against the blue, was tacking60, a long, slantwise flight across the ruffled61 water. She[340] left a thin, creamy line behind her which drifted sidewise into eddying62 curves like a wind-lashed ribbon. Dominick, his eyes absently on her, wondered if she were bound for the South Seas, those waters of enchantment63 where islands, mirrored in motionless lagoons64, lie scattered65 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 asylums66, 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 haven67, 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 dictated68, a real life, a true life, not a bitter tale of days in protesting obedience69 to an immutable70, heart-breaking law. There he and Rose might live, lost to the places they had once filled, hidden from the world and its hard judgments71.
The thought seized upon his mind like a drug, and he stood in a tranced stillness of fascinated imagination, his eyes on the ship, his inner vision seeing himself and Rose standing on the deck. He was so held under the spell of his exquisite72, enthralling73 dream, that he did not see a figure round the corner of the rough path, nor notice its slow approach. But he felt it, when its casual,[341] roaming glance fell on him. As if called, he turned sharply and saw Rose standing a few yards away from him, looking at him with an expression of affrighted indecision. As his glance met hers, the dream broke and scattered, and he seemed to emerge out of a darkness that had in it something beautiful and baleful, into the healthy, pure daylight.
The alarm in Rose’s face died away, too. For a moment she stood motionless, then moved toward him slowly, with something of reluctance74 about her approach. She seemed to be coming against her will, as if obeying a summons in his eyes.
“I wasn’t sure it was you,” she said. “And then when I saw it was, I was going to steal away before you saw me. But you turned suddenly as if you heard me.”
“I felt you were there,” he answered.
It was natural that with Rose he should need to make no further explanation. She understood as she would always understand everything that was closely associated with him. He would never have to explain things to her, as he never, from their first meeting, felt that he needed to talk small talk or make conversation.
She came to a stop beside him, and they stood for a silent moment, looking down the bare wall of the quarry, a raw wound in the hill’s flank, to the docks below where the masts of ships rose[342] in a forest, and their lean bowsprits were thrust over the wharves.
“You came just in time,” he said. “I walked up here this morning to have a think. I don’t know where the think was going to take me when you came round that corner and stopped it. What brought you here?”
“Nothing in particular. It was such a fine morning I thought I’d just ramble75 about, and I came this way without thinking. My feet brought me without my knowledge.”
“My think brought you,” he said. “That’s the second time it’s happened. It was a revolutionary sort of think, and there was a lot about you in it.”
He looked down at her, standing by his shoulder, and met her eyes. They were singularly pellucid76, the clearest, quietest eyes he thought he had ever looked into. His own dropped before them to the bay below, touched and then quickly left the schooner which was beating its way toward them on the return tack59.
“If you could only always come this way when ............