THE GODS IN THE MACHINE
On the second Sunday after their return from Antelope, Bill Cannon
resolved to dedicate the afternoon to paying calls. This, at least, was
what he told his daughter at luncheon as he, she, and Gene sat over
the end of the meal. To pay calls was not one of the Bonanza King’s
customs, and in answer to Rose’s query as to whom he was going to honor
thus, he responded that he thought he’d “start in with Delia Ryan.”
Rose made no comment on this intelligence. The sharp glance he cast
at her discovered no suggestion of consciousness in the peach-like
placidity of her face. It gratified him to see her thus unsuspecting,
and in the mellowing warmth of his satisfaction he turned and addressed
a polite query to Gene as to how he intended spending the afternoon.
Gene and Rose, it appeared, were going to the park to hear the band.
Gene loved a good band, and the one that played in the park Sunday
afternoons was especially good. The Sunday before, Gene had heard it
play _Poet and Peasant_ and the _Overture of William Tell_, and it
was great! That was one of the worst things about living on a ranch,
Gene complained, you didn’t have any music except at the men’s house at
night when one of the Mexicans played on an accordion.
The old man, with his elbow on the table, and a short, blunt-fingered
hand stroking his beard, looked at his son with narrowed eyes full of
veiled amusement. When he did not find Gene disagreeably aggravating as
his only failure, he could, as it were, stand away from him and realize
how humorous he was if you took him in a certain way.
“What’s the Mexican play?” he growled without removing his hand.
“_La Paloma_,” answered Gene, pleased to be questioned thus amicably
by his autocratic sire, “generally _La Paloma_, but he _can_ play _The
Heart Bowed Down_ and the Toreador song from _Carmen_. I want him to
learn the _Miserere_ from _Trovatore_. It’s nice to sit on the porch
after dinner and listen while you smoke.”
“Sort of Court Minstrel,” said his father, thumping down his napkin
with his hand spread flat on it. “Don Eugenio Cannon, with his minstrel
playing to him in the gloaming! It’s very picturesque. Did you ever
think of having a Court Fool too, or perhaps you don’t feel as if you
needed one?”
He arose from his chair before Gene, who never quite understood the
somewhat ferocious humor of his parent, had time to reply.
“Well, so long,” said the old man; “be good children and don’t get
into mischief, and Rose, see that your brother doesn’t get lost or so
carried away by the _Poet and the Peasant_ that he forgets the dinner
hour. _Adios_, girlie.”
A half-hour later he walked down the flight of marble steps that
led in dignified sweep from the front door to the street. It was a
wonderful day and for a moment he paused, looking with observing eyes
at the prospect of hill and bay which seemed to glitter in the extreme
clearness of the atmosphere. Like all Californians he had a strong,
natural appreciation of scenic and climatic beauty. Preoccupied with
thoughts and schemes which were anything but uplifting, he yet was
sensitively responsive to the splendors of the view before him, to
the unclouded, pure blue of the vault above, to the balmy softness of
the air against his face. Some one had once asked him why he did not
live in Paris as the ideal home of the man of great wealth and small
scruples. His answer had been that he preferred San Francisco because
there were more fine days in the year there than anywhere else he knew
of.
Now he paused, sniffing the air with distended nostril and inhaling
it in deep, grateful inspirations. His eye moved slowly over the
noble prospect, noted the deep sapphire tint of the bay, the horizon,
violet dark against a pale sky, and the gem-like blues and amethysts
of the distant hills. He turned his glance in the other direction and
looked down the gray expanse of the street, the wide, clear, stately
street, with its air of clean spaciousness, sun-bathed, silent, almost
empty, in the calm quietude of the Sabbath afternoon. The bustling
thoroughfares of greater cities, with their dark, sordid crowds, their
unlovely, vulgar hurry, their distracting noise, were offensive to him.
The wonder crossed his mind, as it had done before, how men who could
escape from such surroundings chose to remain in them.
He walked forward slowly, a thick-set, powerful figure, his frock-coat
buttoned tight about the barrel-like roundness of his torso, a soft,
black felt hat pulled well down on his head. His feet were broad and
blunt like his hands, and in their square-toed shoes he planted them
firmly on the pavement with a tread of solid, deliberate authority.
His forward progress had something in it of an invincible, resistless
march. He was thinking deeply as he walked, arranging and planning, and
there was nothing in his figure, or movements, or the expression of his
face, which suggested the sauntering aimlessness of an afternoon stroll.
When he turned into Van Ness Avenue the Ryan house was one block
beyond him, a conglomerate white mass, like a crumbling wedding cake
slowly settling on a green lawn. He surveyed it as he approached,
noting its ugliness with a musing satisfaction. Its size and the
bright summery perfection of surrounding grass and flower beds lent it
impressiveness and redeemed it from the position of a colossal blight
on the prospect to which architect and builder had done their best to
relegate it. Prosperity, a complacent, overwhelming prosperity, was
suggested not only by its bulk but by the state of studied finish and
neatness that marked mansion and grounds. There did not seem to be
a wilting flower bed or withered leaf left on a single stalk in the
garden borders. Every window-pane gleamed like a mirror innocent of
dust or blemishing spot. The marble steps up which Cannon mounted were
as snowily unsullied as though no foot had passed over them since their
last ablution.
The door was opened by a Chinaman, who, taking the visitor’s card,
left him standing in the hall, and, deaf to his queries as to where
he should go, serenely mounted the stairs. Cannon hesitated a moment,
then hearing a sound of voices to his right, entered the anteroom that
gave on that suite of apartments into which Dominick had walked on the
night of the ball. They were softly lit by the afternoon sun filtering
through thin draperies, and extended in pale, gilt-touched vista to
the shining emptiness of the ball-room. The old man was advancing
toward the voices when he suddenly saw whence they proceeded, and
stopped. In the room just beyond him Cornelia Ryan and a young man
were sitting on a small, empire sofa, their figures thrown out in high
relief against the background of silk-covered wall. Cornelia’s red head
was in close proximity to that of her companion, which the intruder
saw to be clothed with a thatch of sleek black hair, and which he
recognized as appertaining to a young man whose father had once been
shift boss on the Rey del Monte, and who bore the patronymic of Duffy.
Cornelia and Jack Duffy had the appearance of being completely
engrossed in each other’s society. In his moment of unobserved survey,
Cannon had time to note the young woman’s air of bashful, pleased
embarrassment and the gentleman’s expression of that tense, unsmiling
earnestness which attends the delivery of sentimental passages.
Cornelia was looking down, and her flaming hair and the rosy tones
of her face, shading from the faintest of pearly pinks to deepening
degrees of coral, were luminously vivid against the flat surface of
cream-colored wall behind her, and beside the black poll and thin,
dark cheek of her companion. That something very tender was afoot was
quickly seen by the visitor, who softly withdrew, stepping gingerly
over the fur rugs, and gaining the entrance to the hall with a
sensation of flurried alarm.
An open door just opposite offered a refuge, and, passing through it
with a forward questing glance alert for other occupants who might
resent intrusion, the old man entered a small reception-room lit by
the glow of a hard coal fire. The room was different in furnishings
and style from those he had left. It had the austere bleakness of
aspect resultant from a combination of bare white walls and large
pieces of furniture of a black wood upon which gold lines were traced
in ornamental squares. An old-fashioned carpet was on the floor, and
several tufted arm-chairs, begirt with dangling fringes, were drawn
up sociably before the fire. This burned cheerily, a red focus of
heat barred by the stripes of a grate, and surmounted by a chastely
severe white marble mantelpiece. He had been in the room often before
and knew it for Mrs. Ryan’s own particular sanctum. When a celebrated
decorator had been sent out from New York to furnish the lower floor of
the house, she had insisted on retaining in this apartment the pieces
of furniture and the works of art which she approved, and which the
decorator wished to banish to the garret. Mrs. Ryan had her way as
she always did, and the first fine “soote” of furniture which she and
Con had bought in the days of their early affluence, and various oil
paintings also collected in the same era of their evolution, went to
the decking of the room she used for her own and oftenest sat in.
Cannon approached the fire, and stood there looking up at the life-size
portrait in oils of the late Cornelius Ryan, which hung over the
chimneypiece. The artist had portrayed him as a thickly-whiskered
man with the complexion of a healthy infant and eyes of baby blue. A
watch chain, given him by his colleagues in the old days at Shasta,
and formed of squares of quartz set in native gold, was painted with
a finished carefulness which had pleased Mrs. Ryan even more than the
likeness had done. In showing the picture, she was wont to say proudly,
“Just look at the watch chain! Seems as if you could almost hear the
ticking of the watch.”
Cannon was speculating as to the merits of the likeness when he heard
the silken rustling of skirts, and turned to greet his old friend.
She came in smiling, with extended hand, richly clad, the gleam of
a fastening jewel at her neck. Her hair was dressed with a shining,
smooth elaboration, drawn up tightly at the sides and arranged over her
forehead in careful curls. As she and her visitor exchanged the first
sentences of greeting he noticed that she looked much older and more
worn than she had done the last time he had seen her, but her face was
as full of pugnacious force as ever. While Delia Ryan’s body lived her
spirit would hold its dominion. She had ruled all her life and would do
so to the end.
They sat down on either side of the fire and the old man said,
“I don’t know whether I ought to be in here. The Chinaman left me to my
fate, and I had to nose about myself and find out where I belonged.”
“Oh, that’s Lee,” she answered with a short laugh. “He waits on the
door every other Sunday. We’ve had him ten years and no one’s ever
been able to make him show people into the parlor. He thinks it better
to leave them standing in the hall till one of us sees the card. Then
he’ll go down and tell them as sociably as you please ‘to go right in
and sit down.’ I asked him why he didn’t do it at first, and he said
‘they might steal something.’”
Cannon looked into the fire with an amused eye.
“I guess he thought I was after the spoons. It’s a dangerous habit, for
I took the first turning to the right and butted into Cornelia and a
young man who gave me to understand I’d come the wrong way around.”
“What did they say?” said the mother, her face stiffening with sudden
disapproving surprise.
“They didn’t say anything. That was just it. They didn’t even see me.
But they certainly led me to believe that I’d got somewhere where I
wasn’t wanted. I may not be smart, but a hint doesn’t have to be much
harder than the kick of a mule for me to see it.”
Mrs. Ryan looked at him consideringly.
“Yes,” she said, nodding, “it’s a case, I guess.”
“It ought to be satisfactory,” he answered. “Pat Duffy, the father of
those boys, was one of the finest fellers I ever knew. He was shift
boss on the Rey del Monte in seventy-one when I was the superintendent.
He got out of Virginia with his pile, didn’t lose it like the others.
He had an easy three million when he came down here and bought the
Bristed house on Pine Street. And Jack’s the best of his children.
Maggie, who married the English baronet, was a nice sort of girl, but
she’s never come back, and Terry’s smart enough, but not the kind you
can bank on. Jack’s a good, straight boy. Cornelia couldn’t do better.”
“That’s what I think,” said the mother, who, however, looked grave and
worried. “Cornelia’s thirty. It’s time for her to settle, and she’ll
make a good wife. They’ll live here, too. There’ll be no kicking up of
their heels and going off to Europe or New York and thinking themselves
too good to come back to California, like Maggie Duffy and her baronet.
I want them here. I want to see some grandchildren round this house
before I die. I want to know where Con’s money is going to.”
She sighed, and it was obvious that her heart was heavy.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s a good marriage and I’m pleased at it. Jack’s a
Roman Catholic but you can’t have everything down here in this world.”
The Ryans were Protestants, almost the only prominent Irish-American
family in San Francisco which belonged to that church. Cornelius Ryan
had been a North-country man, and went out with the Orange men when
they paraded. He had been firm in his faith and so had his wife, and
with the Hibernian’s violent devotion to creed they had made public
their antipathy to the Church of Rome and their hopes that their
children would not make alliances with its members.
“Oh well,” said Cannon with a shrug of vague tolerance, “a man’s
beliefs don’t matter. With a woman it’s a different thing. She brings
up the children and takes her religion hard. Jack won’t interfere with
Cornelia that way.”
“Perhaps not,” said the mother. There was a slight pause and then she
said with a sigh,
“Well, thank God, one of my children’s going to marry as I want.”
She was gazing into the fire and did not notice the quick look, sly
and piercing, that her companion shot at her. The conversation had
suddenly, without any effort of his, fallen upon the subject to which
he had intended directing it.
“Yes,” he said, looking away from her, “you’ve had one disappointment.
That’s enough.”
“Disappointment!” she echoed in a loud voice. “Disappointment? I’ve
lost my son; lost him as if he was dead--worse than if he was dead, for
then I’d know he was happy and safe somewhere.”
It was a cry of pain, Rachel mourning for her child. The note of
feeling in it checked the remark on Cannon’s lips. He understood what
her suffering was and respected it.
“Why, Bill Cannon,” she went on, turning the perturbed fierceness of
her face on him, “how often do you think I see my boy? What ties do you
think he has with his home? He came up here after he’d got back from
Antelope, but before that I’d only seen him once in six weeks.”
“That’s pretty hard,” he commented, his elbow on the arm of the chair,
his chin sunk in the cup of his up-curled hand. “That’s pretty tough. I
didn’t know it was as bad as that.”
“Nobody knows anything about him. He won’t let them. He won’t let me.
He’s proud, and trying to hide it all. That’s the reason he comes up
here so seldom. He knows I can see into him, see through him, clear
through him, and he don’t want me to see how miserable he is.”
“Oh!” said the old man, moving slightly and raising his eyes to look
at her. The interjection was full of significance, pregnant with
understanding, appreciation and enlightenment. He was surprised
himself. He had thought, and had understood from Dominick, that no
one, especially no one of his own people, knew of the young man’s
domestic infelicities. Neither of them was shrewd enough to realize
that the mother would guess, would know by instinct.
“And what do you suppose he came up for that once?” pursued Mrs. Ryan.
“You could guess a lot of times but you’d never strike it. He came up
here the night of my ball to ask me to give him an invitation for his
wife!”
She stared at her visitor with her face set in a stony hardness, a
hardness reminiscent of that which had marked it when Dominick had
asked for the invitation. Cannon saw it and checked the remark that
rose to his lips. He was going to say “Why didn’t you give it to
him?” and he saw that it was too light a comment for what had been a
tragic occasion. All he did was to utter a grunt that might have meant
anything and was consequently safe.
“That’s what his marriage has done for him, and that’s the state that
woman has ground him down to. She’d worked on him till she’d got him to
come up here and ask for it a few minutes before the people began to
arrive! That’s what she made him do.”
“And you wouldn’t give it?” he inquired mildly, inwardly surprised, as
he had been often before, at the rancor displayed by women in their
quarrels.
“Give it?” she exclaimed, “well, I guess not. It would have been my
surrender. I’d have thrown up the fight for ever when I did that.”
And then as if she had read his thoughts: “It’s not natural meanness
either. There’s only one hope for me--for me and for Dominick, too.
Divorce.”
He did not move his chin from its resting-place in his up-curled hand,
but made a slight assenting motion with his head, and said,
“I suppose that’s the only thing.”
“That’s been my hope since the day when I first saw her. I didn’t know
then she’d been anything to Dominick before the marriage, but I knew
the first look I had at her what she was. That long, mean nose and
those sly eyes, and seven years older than the boy if she was a day.
You didn’t have to tell me any more. I saw then just like a flash in
the dark what my son had let himself in for. And then, not a month
after, I heard the rest about her, and I knew that Dominick had started
in to ruin his life about the best way he knew how.”
Cannon gave another grunt, and this time it contained a recognizable
note of sympathy. She went on, absorbed in her recital, anxious to pour
out her griefs, now that she had begun.
“Right there from the start I thought of divorce. I knew it was the
only way out and was bound to come in time. The woman had married
Dominick for money and position. I knew that, saw it in her face along
with other things. There was no love in that face, just calculation,
hard and sharp as a meat ax. I shut down on the money right there and
then. Dominick had three thousand a year, so I knew he couldn’t starve,
but three thousand a year wasn’t what she’d married him for.”
“She’s got along on it for over two years.”
“That’s it. She’s beaten me so far. I’m the keeper of Con Ryan’s
fortune and I just closed my hand on it and said to her in so many
words, ‘Not a cent of this for you.’ I thought she’d tire of struggling
along in a flat with one Chinaman and not a soul to come near her.
But she’s stood it and she’s going to go on standing it. Where she’s
concerned, I did something the smartest men and women sometimes
do--underrated the brains of my enemy.”
“She’s pretty smart, I guess,” said Cannon, raising a gravely-commenting
eye to his companion’s face.
“That’s what she is,--smart and long-headed. She’s more far-sighted
than women of her kind usually are and she’s got her eye on the future.
She’s not going to give us a chance for divorce. She’s not going to
make any breaks or mistakes. There’s not a more respectable woman in
San Francisco. She doesn’t go with any one but her husband and her
own sisters, two decent women that you can’t believe have the same
blood in them. She’s the quietest, most domestic kind of a wife. It
don’t matter, and nobody knows, that she’s making her husband the most
miserable man in the country. That doesn’t cut any ice. What does is
that there’s no ground for divorce against her. If she had the kind of
husband that wouldn’t put up with anything from a woman, all he could
do would be to leave her and she’d go round then getting everybody’s
sympathies as a virtuous, deserted wife.”
The old man gave his head an appreciative jerk, and murmured,
“A pretty smart woman, all right.”
“She’s all that--that and more. It’s the future that she’s banking
on. I’m nearly seventy years of age, Bill Cannon, and this has broken
me up more than anything that’s gone before. I’m not the woman I was
before my boy married. And what’s going to happen when I die? I’ve only
got two living children. Outside them there’s nobody but some distant
relations that Con made settlements on before he died. If I left all
I’ve got to Cornelia, or divided it up between Cornelia and charity,
cutting off my son because he’d made a marriage I didn’t like, would
such a will as that stand? Why had I left nothing to my only son?
Because he’d married a woman I didn’t think good enough? And what was
there against her? She’d been a typewriter and her husband’s mistress
for six months before he married her. The mistress part of it had
been condoned by marriage and good conduct--and after all, how many
families in San Francisco and other places were founded on just those
beginnings? As for her being a typewriter, Delia Ryan herself had been
a washerwoman, washed for the miners with these hands;”--she held out
her blunt, beringed hands with one of those dramatic gestures natural
to the Irish--“when Con was working underground with his pick I was
at the wash-tub, and I made money that way for him to run the mine.
Where’s the California jury that would hesitate to award Dominick, and
through him, his wife her part of the fortune that Con and I made?”
“Well, that’s all possible,” Cannon said slowly, “but it’s so far off.
It’s all surmise. You may live twenty years yet. I fancy she’d find a
twenty-years’ wait under the present conditions rather wearying.”
The old woman shook her head, looking very sad.
“I’m not the woman I was,” she repeated, “this last thing’s broken me
more than anything that went before. I lost three children by death,
and it wasn’t as hard as losing my youngest boy the way I have.”
“Have you any idea whether Dominick has ever thought of divorce?” he
asked.
“I’ve the clearest kind of an idea that he hasn’t. You don’t know
Dominick. He’s the best boy in the world. He’ll blame himself for
everything that’s gone wrong, not that woman. She’s smart enough to
let him, too. And suppose he was a different kind and did think of
it? That’s all the good it would do him. Men don’t sue women for
divorce except under the greatest provocation, and Dominick’s got
no provocation at all. My hopes were that the woman herself would
sue--that we’d freeze her out with small means and cold shoulders--and
you see that’s just what she’s determined not to do!”
Cannon dropped his supporting hand on the chair-arm and began to caress
gently a large tassel that hung there.
“She could be approached in another way,” he said with a suggestion of
pondering deliberation.
“What way?”
“You say she married Dominick for money. Have you never thought of
buying her off?”
He looked at Mrs. Ryan and met her eyes staring anxiously and, in a
sort of way, shyly into his.
“Yes,” she said in a low voice, “I have.”
“Have you tried it?”
“No,--I--I--I don’t think I dared,” she said almost desperately. “It
was my last trump.”
He realized, and, though he was unmoved by it, felt the pathos of this
admission from the proud and combative woman who had so long and so
successfully domineered over her world.
“I suppose it _is_ a sort of death-bed remedy,” he said, “but it seems
to me it’s about time to try it. Your idea that she’s going to wait
till you die and then claim part of the estate as Dominick’s wife is
all very well, but she’s not the kind of woman to be willing to wait
patiently through the rolling years on three thousand dollars per
annum. She’s a good bit older than he is and it isn’t making her any
happier to see her best days passing with nothing doing. I should think
you stood a pretty good chance of getting her to listen to reason.”
“Offering her a sum down to leave him?” she said, looking at the fire,
her brows knit.
“Exactly. Offer her a good sum on the stipulation that she leaves him
and goes away to New York or Europe. Then in the course of time she
can write him asking him to grant her a divorce on some such technical
grounds as desertion, or incompatibility, or anything else that’s
respectable. He’ll have to give it to her. He can’t do anything else.
And there you are!”
“What if she refuses?” she said in a low voice, and he saw she was
afraid of this refusal which would shatter her last hope.
“Raise your offer,” he answered briskly. “She probably will refuse the
first time.”
She pondered, eying the fire with heavy immobility.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “It sounds reasonable. It’s about the only
thing left.”
“If I can be of any assistance to you,” he said, “you just call on me.
I’m willing to help in this thing all I can. It goes against me to see
Dominick caught in a trap this way just at the beginning of his life.”
“A boy,” said his mother, “that would have made some good girl so
happy.”
Cannon rose from his chair.
“That’s just it!” he said, “and there are not so many of ’em round that
we can afford to lose one of the best. I’ve always liked Dominick and
getting to know him so well up at Antelope I grew downright fond of
him. He’s a fine boy.”
He smiled at her with his most genial air, beaming with disinterested
affection for Dominick and the desire to be helpful in a grievous
strait. Mrs. Ryan looked brighter and more hopeful than she had done at
the beginning of the interview.
“It’s very good of you,” she said, “to come and listen to an old
woman’s complaints. But as we get on, we seem to take them harder. And
you know what my boy was to me?”
“About the same thing that my girl is to me,” Cannon answered as he
turned away to look on the table for his hat.
There was a little more talk, and then the set phrases of farewell
brought the interview to a close. Though momentous, it had not lasted
long. As he left the room, Cannon heard the single note of half-past
three chime from the clock on the mantelpiece.
Outside he stood for a moment on the top of the marble steps, looking
downward with absent eyes. He was completely engrossed with the
just-ended conversation, parts of which repeated themselves in his mind
as he stared unseeingly down the wide, unencumbered vista of the street.
Carriages flashed past through strips of sunshine; automobiles whirred
by, leaving dust and gasoline in their wake. On the sidewalks there
were many foot passengers: lazily sauntering couples, lovers, family
parties, and little groups bound for the cars which would whisk them
over the dunes to the park. As he slowly began to descend, one of
these groups, formed of three women, a man, and a child, approached
the bottom of the steps. They were walking down the avenue in a close,
talkative bunch. The descending magnate was apprised of their proximity
by the high, cackling sound of the women’s voices and an aura of
perfume which extended from them into the surrounding ether. He paid no
attention to them, his eye, with its look of inward brooding, passing
indifferently over the faces turned eagerly toward him.
They were not so unmoved. Their glances were trained full on him, their
eyes wide in the unblinking intensity of their scrutiny. Even the
child, who was skipping along beside the eldest of the women, inspected
him with solemn care. Brushing by in their gay Sunday raiment they
drew together to discuss him, their heads in a cluster, their voices
lowered. He was so used to being the object of such interest that he
did not bother to look at them, and was therefore unaware that one of
the women, quite pretty, with reddish hair and dark eyes, had turned as
she moved away and surveyed him over her shoulder.