FAMILY AFFAIRS
Every summer afternoon the trade winds blow through San Francisco,
winging their way across miles of chill, salt sea, and striking the
bulwarked city with a boisterous impact. The long streets seem as
paths, lines of least resistance, and the winds press themselves into
the narrow limits and whoop buoyantly along, carrying before them dust,
rags, scraps of paper--sometimes hats.
Their period of highest recognized activity is from May till September,
but before that, vagrant breezes, skirmishers sent out in advance,
assault the city. They follow on still, sunny mornings, which show not
the slightest warning symptom of the riotous forces which are designing
to seize upon and disrupt the tranquillity of the afternoon. Eleven
sees them up and stirring; by midday they have begun the attack. The
city, in a state of complete unpreparedness, is at their mercy and
they sweep through it in arrogant triumph, veiled in a flying scud of
dust. Unsuspecting wayfarers meet them at corners, and stand, helpless
victims of a playfulness, fierce and disconcerting as that of tigers.
Hats, cleverly running on one rim, career along the sidewalk. Ladies
have difficulties with parasols, heretofore docile and well-behaved.
Articles of dress, accustomed to hang decorously, show sudden ambitions
to rise and ride the elements. And those very people who in winter
speak gratefully of the winds as “the scavengers of San Francisco” may
be heard calling curses down on them.
Such a wind, the first of the season, was abroad on a bright morning in
early April, and Cornelia Ryan was out in it. It was a great morning
for Cornelia. Even the wind could not ruffle her joyousness. She was
engaged. Two evenings before, Jack Duffy, who had been hovering round
the subject for a month, poised above it, as a hawk above delightful
prey, had at last descended and Cornelia’s anxieties were at an end.
She had been so relieved, elated, and flustered that she had not
been able to pretend the proper surprise, but had accepted blushing,
stammering and radiant. She had been blushing, stammering and radiant
when she told her mother that night, and to-day, forty-eight hours
later, she was still blushing, stammering, and radiant.
It was not alone that she was honestly in love with Jack, but Cornelia,
like most maidens in California and elsewhere, was in love with being
admired, deferred to, and desired. And despite her great expectations
and her prominent position, she had had rather less of this kind of
delightful flattery than most girls. Walking down town in the clear,
sun-lit morning, she was, if not handsome, of a fresh and blooming
wholesomeness, which is almost as attractive and generally wears
better. The passers-by might readily have set her down as a charming
woman, for whom men sighed, and in this surmise been far from the
mark. She had had few lovers before Jack Duffy. That matter-of-fact
sturdiness, that absence of softness and mystery so noticeable in
Californian women, was particularly accentuated in her case, and had
robbed her of the poetic charm of which beauty and wealth can never
take the place.
But to-day she was radiant, a sublimated, exultant Cornelia, loved
at last and by a man of whom she could completely and unreservedly
approve. There were times when Cornelia--she was thirty--had feared
that she might have to go abroad and acquire a foreign husband, or,
worse still, move to New York and make her selection from such relics
of decayed Knickerbocker families as were in the market. She was woman
enough to refuse to die unwed. Now these dark possibilities were
dispelled. In her own state, in her own town, she had found her mate,
Jack Duffy, whose father had known her father and been shift boss under
Bill Cannon in the roaring days of Virginia City. It was like royalty
marrying into its own order, the royalty of Far Western millions,
knowing its own ramifications having its own unprinted Almanach de
Gotha--deep calling unto deep!
The wind was not yet out in force; its full, steady sweep would not be
inaugurated till early in the afternoon. It came now in gusts which
fell upon Cornelia from the back and accelerated her forward progress,
throwing out on either side of her a flapping sail of skirt. Cornelia,
who was neat and precise, usually resented this rough handling, but
to-day she only laughed, leaning back, with one hand holding her hat.
In the shops where she stopped to execute various commissions she had
difficulty in suppressing her smiles. She would have liked to delay
over her purchases and chat with the saleswomen, and ask them about
their families, and send those who looked tired off for a month into
the country.
It was after midday when she found herself approaching that particular
block, along the edge of which the flower-venders place their baskets
and display their wares. In brilliantly-colored mounds the flowers
stood stacked along the outer rim of the sidewalk, a line of them,
a man behind each basket vociferating the excellence of the bouquet
he held forward to the passer’s inspection. In the blaze of sun that
overlaid them, the piled-up blossoms showed high-colored and variegated
as a strip of carpeting.
Cornelia never bought flowers at the street corners. The town house
was daily supplied from the greenhouses at the country place at Menlo.
When sick friends, anniversaries, or entertainment called for special
offerings they were ordered from expensive florists and came in made-up
bunches, decorated with sashes of ribbon. But to-day she hesitated
before the line of laden baskets. Some of the faces behind them looked
so dreary, and Cornelia could not brook the sight of a dreary face on
this day of joy. The dark, wistful eyes of an Italian boy holding out
a bunch of faded jack roses, stiffly set in a fringe of fern, made a
sudden appeal to her and she bought the roses. Then the old man who was
selling carnations looked so lean and grizzled that he must be cheered,
and two bunches of the carnations were added to the roses. The boys and
men, seeing that the brilliant lady was in a generous mood, collected
about her, shouting out the excellences of their particular blossoms,
and pressing sample bunches on her attention.
Cornelia, amused and somewhat bewildered, looked at the faces and
bought recklessly. She was stretching out her hand to beckon to the
small boy with the wilted pansies, who was not big enough to press
through the throng, when a man’s voice behind her caught her ear.
“Well, Cornelia, are you trying to corner the curb-stone market?”
She wheeled swiftly and saw her brother, laughing and looking at the
stacked flowers in the crook of her arm.
“Dominick!” she exclaimed, “you’re just the person I want to see. I was
going to write to you. I’ve got lots to tell you.”
“Come along then and take lunch with me. I was on my way up to
Bertrand’s when I saw you. They’ll give us a good lunch there and you
can tell me all your secrets.”
The flower sellers, who had been listening with unabashed eagerness,
realized that their prey was about to be ravished from them, and raised
their voices in a chorus of wailing appeal. As Cornelia moved forward
they moved round her, thrusting bouquets under her eyes in a last hope,
the boy with the wilted pansies, on the brink of tears, hanging on the
outskirts of the crowd. Cornelia might have forgotten him, but her eye,
sweeping back for an absent moment, saw his face, bereft of all hope--a
face of childish despair above his drooping pansies.
“Here, boy with the pansies,” she called, and sent a silver dollar
through the air toward him, “that’s for you. Keep it and the flowers,
too. I’ve too many now and can’t carry any more. Maybe he’ll sell them
to some one else,” she said to Dominick, as they crossed the street.
“He’s such a little boy to be earning his bread!”
They walked up the street toward Bertrand’s, a French restaurant which
for years had enjoyed the esteem of the city’s gourmets. The wind was
now very high. It tore at Cornelia’s clothes and made it necessary for
Dominick to hold his hat on, his hand spread flat on the crown. A trail
of blossoms, torn from the flowers each carried, sprinkled the pavement
behind them. Cornelia, with her head down and her face toward her
brother, shouted remarks at him, every now and then pausing in a stifle
of laughter to struggle with her draperies, which at one moment rose
rebellious, and at the next were wound about her in an umbrella-like
sheath.
They had often met this way in the past, when the elder Mrs. Ryan’s
wrath had been in its first, untameable freshness, and her son had
seen her seldom. In those days of estrangement, Cornelia had been the
tie between Dominick and his home. She loved her brother and was sorry
for him, and had felt the bitterness of the separation, not alone as
a family misfortune, but as a scandal over which mean people talked.
Had it rested with her, she would long ago have overlooked the past
and have opened the door to her sister-in-law. Not that she felt any
regard or interest in Berny Iverson; her feeling for her was now, and
always would be, largely composed of that undying unfriendliness and
repugnance that the naturally virtuous woman feels for her sister with
the _tache_. But Cornelia was of a younger and milder generation
than her mother. She had not fought hard for what she had and, like
Dominick, there was more of the sunny-tempered, soft-hearted Con Ryan
in her than of the strong and valiant woman who had made him and given
him his place in the world.
In the restaurant they found a vacant table in a corner, and Cornelia
had to bottle up her good news while Dominick pondered over the bill
of fare. She was impatient and drummed on the table with her fingers,
while her eyes roamed about the room. Once or twice, she bowed to
people that she knew, then let her glance pass in an uninterested
survey over the bare walls and the long line of windows that gave
on the street. The place had an austerely severe, unadorned air.
Its bleakness of naked wall and uncovered stone floor added to the
foreignness that was contributed by the strong French accent of the
waiters, and the arrangement of a cashier’s desk near the door, where a
pleasant-faced woman sat between a large bouquet of roses and a drowsy
gray cat.
The orders given and the first stages of lunch appearing, Cornelia
could at last claim her brother’s full attention. Planting her elbows
on the table and staring at him, she said,
“I told you how awfully anxious I was to see you, and how I was going
to write to you, didn’t I?”
Dominick nodded. He was buttering a piece of bread and showed no
particular acceleration of curiosity at this query.
“Well, now, what do you suppose I was going to write about?” asked his
sister, already beginning to show a heightened color.
“Can’t imagine. Nothing wrong with mother, I hope?”
Since his marriage Cornelia had been in the habit of communicating
frequently with her brother by letter. It was the best way of keeping
him informed of family affairs. The telephone at the senior Ryan
house was sufficiently secluded to make it a useful medium of private
communication, but the telephone at the junior Ryan house did not share
this peculiarity, and Dominick discouraged his sister’s using it.
“No, mother’s all right,” said Cornelia. “And it’s nothing wrong
about anybody. Quite the other way; it’s something about me, and it’s
something cheerful. Guess!”
Her brother looked up and his eye was caught by her rosily-blushing
cheeks.
“Dear me, Cornie,” he said with a look of slowly-dawning comprehension,
“it really isn’t--it really can’t be----?”
The waiter here interrupted further confidence by setting forth the
lunch with many attentive bowings and murmurings. By the time he had
presented one dish for Cornelia’s approval, removed it with a flourish
and presented another, her impatience broke out in an imploring,
“Yes, Etienne, it’s all _perfectly_ lovely. _Do_ put it on the table
and let’s eat it. That’s what it’s for, not to hand round and be stared
at, as if it were a diamond necklace that I was thinking of buying.”
Etienne, thus appealed to, put the viands on the table, and Dominick,
deeply interested, leaned forward and said,
“What is it? Go ahead. I’m burning up with curiosity.”
“Guess,” said his sister, bending over her plate.
“Is it that you’re going to be married? Oh, Cornie, it can’t be.”
“And why can’t it be?” looking very much hurt. “What’s there so queer
about that?”
“Nothing, only I meant that I hadn’t heard any rumors about it. _Is_ it
_that_?”
“Yes, it is, Dominick Ryan, and I don’t see why you should be so
surprised.”
“Surprised! I’m more than surprised. I’m delighted--haven’t been so
pleased for years. Who is it?”
“Jack Duffy.”
“Oh, Cornie, that’s the best yet! That’s great! It’s splendid. I wish I
could kiss you, but I can’t here in the open restaurant. Why didn’t you
tell me somewhere where we would be alone? I’d just like to give you a
good hug.”
Cornelia, who had been a little hurt at her brother’s incredulity, was
now entirely mollified and once again became bashfully complacent.
“I thought you’d like it,” she said. “I thought you’d think that was
just about right. Any girl would be proud of _him_.”
“He’s one of the best fellows in the state--one of the best anywhere.
He’ll make you a first-rate husband. You’re a lucky girl.”
“I know I am. You needn’t tell me. There are not many men anywhere
like Jack Duffy. I’ve always said I wouldn’t marry the tag, rag and
bobtail other girls are satisfied with. _My_ husband was going to be a
gentleman, and if Jack’s anything, he’s that.”
“You’re right there. He’s one of Nature’s gentlemen--the real kind.”
Cornelia thought this savored of condescension, and said, rallying to
the defense of her future lord,
“Well, that’s all right, but he’s educated too. He’s not one of those
men who have good hearts and noble yearnings but look like anarchists
or sewing-machine agents. Jack graduated high at Harvard. He went there
when he was only eighteen. There’s no one’s had a better education or
done better by it. His father may have been Irish and worked as shift
boss on the Rey del Monte, but Jack’s quite different. He’s just as
much of a gentleman as anybody in this country.”
Cornelia’s attitude on matters of genealogy was modern and
Californian. Ireland was far behind her and Jack, as were also those
great days in Nevada of which her mother and Bill Cannon spoke, as the
returned Ulysses might have spoken of the ten years before Troy. She
and Jack would eventually regard them as a period of unsophistication
and social ferment which it were wisest to touch on lightly, and of
which they would teach their children nothing.
“And then,” Cornelia went on, determined not to slight any detail of
her fiance’s worthiness, “there’s never been anything fast or wild
about Jack. He’s always been straight. There’s been no scandalous
stories about him, as there have about Terence.”
“Never. Terence committed all the scandals for the family.”
“Well, Terence is in New York, thank Heaven!” said Cornelia with pious
fervor, “and we won’t have to have anything to do with him or his wife
either. Even if we go to Europe, we need only stay there a few days.”
The irregular career of Terence had been a thorn in the side of
the respectable Duffys, he, some years earlier, having married his
mistress, a chorus girl in a local theater, and attempted to force her
upon the exclusive circles in which his people moved. It was not the
least galling feature of Terence’s unconventional course that, having
doubled his fortune by successful speculations, he had removed to New
York where, after several spirited assaults and vigorous rebuffs, his
wife had reached social heights toward which other Californians of
spotless record and irreproachable character had clambered in vain.
“Well,” said Dominick, “mother ought to be satisfied with _this_
marriage. It’s a good thing one of her children is going to settle down
the way she likes.”
“Oh, she’s delighted. She’s not been in such good spirits for a long
time, and she’s as interested as I am in arranging everything. We
want to have a large house wedding; the two families and all their
connections, and all our intimate friends, and all the people who’ve
entertained us,--and--and--the whole crowd. Of course, it’ll be a lot
of people. Mommer said she didn’t see how we could cut it down to less
than five or six hundred. But I don’t see why we need to, the house is
big enough.”
“Plenty,” said Dominick. He set down his knife and fork and looked at
his sister. “Our family don’t take up much room. There’s just three of
us.”
“Then you’re coming?” she said quickly, her anxiety flashing out into
an almost pained intensity of eagerness. “You’ll come? You must,
Dominick. You’ve got to give me away.”
He looked away from her in moody discomfort. The eternal discussions
created by his marriage were becoming more and more hateful to him.
Why should his unloved and unloving wife perpetually stand between
him and his own people--his mother and sister--women to whom he owed
allegiance, even as he did to her? The call of his home and the binding
ties of kin were growing stronger as the obligation of his marriage had
weakened and lost its hold.
Cornelia leaned across the table and spoke with low-toned, almost
tremulous earnestness:
“You know that if it were I, I’d ask your wife. You know that all the
hard feelings I may once have had against her have gone. If it were for
me to say, I’d have received her from the start. What I’ve always said
is, ‘What’s the good of keeping up these fights? No one gets anything
by them. They don’t do any one any good.’ But you know mommer. The
first thing she said when we talked about the house wedding, and I said
you’d give me away, was, ‘If he’ll come without his wife.’ Those were
her very words, and you know when she says a thing she means it. And,
Dominick, you _will_ come? You’re the only brother I’ve got. You’re the
only man representative of the family. You can’t turn me down on my
wedding day.”
There were tears in her eyes and Dominick saw them and looked down at
his plate.
“All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll come. When is it to be?”
“Oh, Dominick,” his sister breathed in an ecstasy of relief and
gratitude. “I knew you would. And I’ll do anything for you I can. If
mommer wouldn’t get so dreadfully angry, I’d call on your wife, but you
know I can’t offend her. She’s my mother, and I can’t stand up against
her. But some day I’ll pay you back--I will indeed.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Cornie,” he said, turning to summon the waiter.
“I can’t let my sister get married without me. Tell mother I’ll come.
You haven’t yet told me when it’s to be.”
“June,” said the prospective bride, once more beginning to blush and
beam, “early in June. The roses are so fine then, and we can have
the house so beautifully decorated. We’ve already begun to plan the
trousseau. It’s going to be just stunning, I tell you; the dresses from
New York and all the lingerie and things like that from Paris. Mommer
says she’ll give me fifteen thousand dollars for it. And she’s going to
give me, besides, a string of pearls that hangs down to here”--Cornelia
indicated a point on her person with a proud finger--“or else a house
and lot anywhere in town that I like. Which would you take?”
Dominick was saved from the responsibility of stating a preference on
this important point by Etienne, the waiter, presenting his hat to him
with the low bow of the well-tipped garçon. With a scraping of chair
legs, they rose and, threading their way among the now crowded tables,
passed out into the wind-swept streets. Here they separated, Cornelia,
with her armful of wilting flowers, going home, and Dominick back to
the bank.
He was entering the building when he met Bill Cannon, also returning
to his office from a restaurant lunch at a small Montgomery Street
chop-house, where, every day at one, he drank a glass of milk and ate
a sandwich. The Bonanza King stopped and spoke to the young man, his
greeting marked by a simple friendliness. Their conversation lasted a
few minutes, and then Dominick entered the bank.
Two hours later, while he was still bending over his books, in the
hushed seclusion of the closed building, Bill Cannon was talking to
Berny in the parlor of the Sacramento Street flat. This interview was
neither so long, and (on Berny’s part) did not show the self-restraint
which had marked the first one. The offer of one hundred thousand
dollars which the old man made her was refused with more scorn and less
courtesy than had been displayed in her manner on the former occasion.