THE BREAKING POINT
In the middle of the December afternoon the Colonel had come in early
to his rooms to change his coat and brush up a bit. He was going to
call on the wife of a pioneer friend who had just returned from Europe.
The Colonel was punctilious and called in a black coat, which he now
stood brushing beside the window and anxiously surveying, for he had
been a man who was careful of his dress, and the coat looked shiny.
It was a chill gray day and he looped back the lace curtains to see
better. Outside, the fog was beginning to send in long advancing wisps
which projected a cold breath into the warmest corners of the city.
A mental picture rose on his mind of the sand dunes far out with the
fleecy curls and clouds sifting noiselessly over them. The vision was
not cheering and he put it out of his mind, and in order to enliven his
spirits, which were low, he whistled softly as he brushed.
The room--the bare hotel parlor of that kind of suite which has a small
windowless bedroom behind it--looked out on the life of one of the
down-town streets. The Traveler’s Hotel had not yet quite fallen from
grace, though the days of its prosperous prime were past. On the block
opposite it a few old sheds of wood and corrugated iron (relics of the
early fifties) toppled against one another and sheltered a swarming
vagabond life. The hotel itself still preserved its dignity. The shops
on its ground floor were respectable and clean. There was a good deal
of Spanish and Italian spoken in them, which seemed to accord with
their pink and blue door-frames, the Madeira vines growing in their
windows, and the smell of garlic that they exhaled at midday.
The Colonel was giving the coat a last inspection when a knock made him
start. His visitors were few, and his eyes were expectantly fixed on
the door when in answer to his “come in” it slowly opened. A whiff of
perfume and a rustle of silks heralded the entrance of June, who stood
somewhat timidly on the threshold looking in.
“Junie!” cried the Colonel in delighted surprise. “My girl come to see
the old man in his lair!”
And he took her by the hand and drew her in, kissing her as he shut the
door, and rolling up his best arm-chair.
She did not sit down at once and he said, still holding her hand by the
tips of the fingers and looking her over admiringly:
“Well, aren’t you a beautiful sight! And just the best girl in the
world to come down here and see me.”
She smiled faintly and answered:
“Wasn’t I lucky to find you? I’ve been coming for some days
only--only--” she sat down on the arm of the chair, prodding at the
carpet with the end of her umbrella and looking down.
“Only you had so many other things to do,” he suggested.
“No, not that,” still looking down at the tip of the umbrella. “Only I
think I hadn’t quite enough courage.”
She rose from the arm of the chair and walked to the window. As she
moved the rustle of her rich dress and the perfume it exhaled filled
the room. The Colonel looked at her uneasily. It was three weeks since
the Davenport ball. She had kept her room for some days after the ball,
saying she was sick. After that she had appeared, looking miserably
ill, and in manner cold and uncommunicative. She had spoken of Jerry’s
engagement to no one, not even to Rosamund. To the Colonel she had been
gentle, quiet, and for the first time in their acquaintance indifferent
and unresponsive. What her appearance this afternoon portended he could
not guess.
“Not enough courage!” he now repeated. “Was there ever any time since
I’ve known you when you wanted courage to come to me?”
“Never before,” she answered, standing with her back to him looking out
of the window.
Her voice, her attitude, her profile against the pane, were expressive
of the completest dejection. She was expensively and beautifully
dressed in a crisp silken gown of several shades of blue. Every detail
of her appearance was elegant and fastidious. In her years of city life
she had developed all the extravagance, the studious consideration of
her raiment, of a fashionable woman. Now her costly dress, the jeweled
ornaments she wore, her gloves, her hat with its long blue feather that
rested on her bright-colored hair, the tip of the shoe that peeped from
her skirt, combined to make her a figure of notable feminine finish and
distinction. And surrounded by this elaboration of careful daintiness,
her heaviness of spirit seemed thrown up into higher relief.
“Come, sit down,” said the Colonel, rolling the chair toward her. “I
can’t talk comfortably to you when you stand there with your back to me
looking out of the window as if we’d been quarreling.”
She returned to the chair and obediently sank into it. Her hands hung
over its arms, one of them languidly holding the umbrella. He had
thought his suggestion about quarreling would make her laugh, but she
did not seem to have heard it.
“And now,” he said, drawing a chair up beside her, “let’s hear what
it is you hadn’t the courage to tell to your Uncle Jim? Have you been
robbing or murdering, or what?”
“I’ve been staying in the house mostly, looking out of the window.
I--don’t feel much like going out. I--oh, Uncle Jim,” she said,
suddenly turning her head as it rested on the chair-back and letting
her eyes dwell on his, “I’ve been so miserable!”
He leaned forward and took her hand. He had nothing to say. Her words
needed no further commentary than that furnished by her appearance.
With the afternoon light shining on her face, she looked a woman of
thirty, worn and thin. All the freshness of the young girl was gone.
“That’s what I’ve come to talk about,” she said. “I don’t feel
sometimes as if I could live here any longer, as if I could breathe
here. I hate to go out. I hate to meet people. Every corner I turn I’m
afraid that I may meet _them_--and--and--then--” her voice suddenly
became hoarse and she sat up and cleared her throat.
For a moment a heavy silence held the room. The Colonel broke it.
“How would you like to go up to Foleys for a while?” he suggested.
“Your father was telling me the other day that the superintendent of
the Barranca had a nice little house and a very decent sort of wife.
You could stay there. It would be a change.”
“Foleys!” she echoed. “Oh, not Foleys! It’s too full of the past before
anything had happened. No, I want to go away, far away, away from
everything. That’s what I came to talk about. I want to go to Europe.”
“Europe!” he exclaimed blankly. “But--but--you’d be gone for months.”
“Yes, that’s just it. That’s what I want--to be gone for months, for
years even. I want to get away from San Francisco and California and
everything I know here.”
The Colonel was silent. He felt suddenly depressed and chilled. San
Francisco without June! His life without June! The mean little room
with its hideous wall paper and cheap furniture came upon him with its
true dreary strangeness. The city outside grew suddenly a hollow place
of wind and fog. Life, that was always so full for him, grew blank
with a sense of cold, nostalgic emptiness. He had never realized before
how she illumined every corner of it.
“Well, dearie,” he said, trying to speak cheerfully--“that sounds a big
undertaking; sort of thing you don’t settle up all in a minute. You
couldn’t go alone and Rosamund couldn’t go with you.”
“I know all that. I’ve thought it all out. I haven’t slept well lately
and I arranged it when I was awake at night. I could take some one with
me, a sort of companion person. And then when Rosamund got married and
came over there with Lionel, why, then I could stay with them. Perhaps
I could live with them for a while. He has such a big house.”
She paused, evidently waiting to see how the Colonel would take her
suggestions.
“That’s all possible enough,” he said,--“but--well, there’s your
father. How about him?”
“Oh, my father!” the note of scorn in her voice was supplemented by a
side look at him which showed she had no further illusions as to her
father. “My father can get on very well without me.”
Even if she had come to know Allen at his just worth, the hardness of
her tone hurt the Colonel. It showed him how deep had been the change
in her in the last three years.
“It’s hard on him just the same,” he said, “to lose his two daughters
at once.”
“Parents have to lose their children,” she answered in the same tone.
“Suppose I’d married a foreigner like Rosamund?”
The Colonel did not answer. Suddenly she laid the hand near him on his.
“There’s only you and Rosamund,” she said. “And now Rosamund’s going
too.”
“It’s--it’s--pretty hard even to think of,” he answered.
“But, Uncle Jim,” she urged in the egotism of her pain, blind to all
else, “I _can’t_ stay here. It’s too much. You must guess how I feel.”
“I can guess,” he answered, nodding.
“I can’t bear it. I can’t stand it. If I could die it would be all
right, but I can’t even die. I’ve got to go on living, and if I stay
here I’ve got to go on hearing everybody talking about them and saying
how happy they are. Every time I go out I run the risk of meeting them,
of seeing them together, with Jerry looking at her the way he used to
look at me.”
She spoke quietly, staring at the window before her with steady eyes.
“June,” he said almost roughly, “I want to talk sensibly to you. All
the traveling in Europe won’t make you feel better if you don’t make an
effort to shake yourself free of all this. Now listen--Barclay’s shown
you what he is. He’s a blackguard. I told it to you three years ago,
and you know it now by your own experience. Why do you love him? Why do
you go on caring for a dog like that? I--I--upon my word, dearest, if
it was any girl but you I’d be ashamed of her.”
“You don’t love a man because he’s good, or noble, or any of those
things. It’s not a thing you reason about. It’s something that steals
into you and takes possession of you. I know what Jerry is. I suppose
it’s all true what you say. He may be different from what I thought he
was. He may be cruel and unkind to me. But that won’t make me change.”
“But good God, he’s treated you like a dog--thrown you over for a
girl with money, made surreptitious love to you when he was bound to
a woman he’d ruined and whose husband was his friend! Heavens, June,
you can’t love a dirty scrub like that! You’re a good girl--honest and
high-minded--you can’t go on caring for him when you see now what he
is!”
“Oh, Uncle Jim, dear, you can’t change me by talking that way. Women
don’t love men with their reason, they love them with their hearts. The
Jerry that I know is not the Jerry that you know. There are two, and
they’re quite different. The Jerry that I know and used to meet in the
plaza on Turk Street, was always kind and sweet to me, and I used to
be so happy when I was with him! I know now they’re both true. I guess
yours is as true as mine. But even if it is, I care just the same.
There’s no arguing or convincing--only just that fact.”
“After he’s made a public show of you and engaged himself to Mercedes
not two months after Mrs. Newbury’s death? Such a dirty record! Such a
mean, cold-blooded, calculating cur! Oh, June, where’s your pride?”
“Dead,” she said bitterly, “dead long ago.”
She suddenly sat upright, turned on him, and spoke with somber
vehemence:
“There’s no pride, there’s no question of yourself--sometimes I think
there’s no honor, with a girl who feels for a man as I do for him. I
know him now, all about him. I know in my heart that he’s what you say.
I think sometimes, deep down under everything, I have a feeling for him
that is almost contempt. But I’m his while he’s alive and I am. I can’t
any more change that than I can make myself taller or shorter. If I’d
known in the beginning what I do now it would have all been different.
It’s too late now to ask me where my pride is, and why I don’t tear
myself free from such a bondage. It’s spoiled my life. It’s broken my
heart. Sometimes I wish Jerry was dead, because then I know I’d be
myself again.”
He looked at her horrified. Pallid and shrunken in her rich clothes,
eaten into by the passion that now, for the first time, he heard her
confess, it seemed to him that she could not be the girl he had met at
Foleys three and a half years ago. To his strong, self-denying nature,
her weakness was terrible. He did not know that that weakness was one
of the attributes which made her so lovable.
“I dare say there’s something bad about me,” she went on. “I can see
that other people don’t feel this way. I know Rosamund wouldn’t. If
Lionel had not really cared for her and asked her to marry him she
would have gone to work and just uprooted him from her mind like a weed
in a garden. She wouldn’t have let things that weren’t right get such a
hold on her. But I--I never tried to stop it. And now the weed’s choked
out everything else in the garden.”
“Don’t let it choke out everything. Root it up! Tear it out! Don’t be
conquered by a weed, June.”
“Oh, Uncle Jim,” she almost groaned with the eternal cry of the
self-indulgent and weak, “if only I had stopped it in the beginning! I
wouldn’t have grown to love him so if I’d known. It’s been such useless
suffering. Nobody’s gained anything by it. It’s all been such a waste!”
There was a silence. The Colonel sat looking down with his heart
feeling heavy as a stone. When he came against that wall of acquiescent
feminine feebleness, he felt that he could say nothing. She stirred in
her chair and said, her voice suddenly low, her words coming slowly:
“They’re to be married in January. It’s going to be a short engagement.
Black Dan’s going to give them a house down here with everything new
and beautiful. I’ll see them all the time, everywhere. I know just the
way they’ll look, smiling into each other’s eyes.”
She stopped and then sat up with a rustling of crushed silks.
“How do people bear these things? I haven’t hurt anybody or done any
harm to have to suffer this way. When I’m alone I keep thinking of
them--how happy they are together, not caring for anything in the world
but each other. I think of him kissing her. I think that some day
they’ll have a baby--” her voice trailed away hoarsely and she sank
back in the chair, her head on her breast.
The Colonel got up and walked to the window. These same savage pangs
had once torn him. In his powerful heyday it had taken all the force of
his manhood to crush them. How could she wage that blasting fight? He
turned and looked at her as she sat fallen together in the embrace of
the chair.
“I think you’re right, June, about going away,” he said. “It’s the best
thing for you to do. The old man’ll have to get on as well as he can
for a while without you.”
She did not move and answered in a dull voice:
“It’s the only thing for me to do.”
“When were you thinking of going?”
“Soon--as soon as I can. Anyway before January. I must go before then.
And--and--Uncle Jim, this was what I came to ask you and was afraid.
We’ve been a long time getting to it.”
She looked at him with a sort of tentative uneasiness.
“It’s asking a good deal,” she added, “but you’ve always been so good
to me.”
“What is it, dearie?” he said gently. “Don’t you know it’s my pleasure
to do anything for you?”
“I want you to give me the money to go with.”
For a moment the Colonel was so surprised that he looked at her without
answering. As she spoke the color came faintly into her face.
“It--it--won’t be so very much,” she went on hurriedly, “perhaps enough
for a year. I thought five thousand dollars would do.”
“Five thousand dollars,” he said, recovering himself, “five thousand
dollars? Why of course--”
He paused, looking down on the floor and asking himself where he was to
get five thousand dollars.
“I’ll get it for you, only you’ll have to give me a few days.”
She leaned forward with a sudden energy of animation and clasped his
hand.
“I knew you’d do it,” she said. “I knew if I came to you for help I’d
never be disappointed. I asked father for it, and he!--” she completed
the sentence with a shrug.
“He hadn’t it, perhaps,” suggested the Colonel.
“That’s what he said. He said he couldn’t possibly give it to me, that
he was in debt now. And look at the way we live! Look at this dress! He
knows how I feel. He has only to look at me, but he said he couldn’t
give it.”
“Will five thousand be enough, do you think?” said the Colonel, who had
no comments to make on Allen, of whose mode of life and need of money
he knew more than June.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about traveling. I’ve never been
anywhere but in California and Nevada. But it ought to be enough for
a while. Anyway, if I had that I could go, I could get away from all
this. I could get away from San Francisco and California, and the
people and things that torture me.”
She rose from the chair and picked up her umbrella. Her languor of
dejection had returned. She cast a listless eye toward the pane and
said:
“I must go. It’ll soon be dark.” Then she moved toward the window and
for a moment stood looking down on the street.
“It’s quite easy for you to give it to me, isn’t it?” she asked without
turning. “You’re not like father, always talking about your wonderful,
priceless stocks, and with not a cent to give a person who’s just
about got to the end of everything.”
“Don’t talk about that,” he answered quickly. “There can’t be a better
use for my money than to help you when you’re in trouble. I’ll see you
in a few days and arrange then to give it to you.”
She turned from the window.
“Well, good-by, then,” she said. “I must go. Good-by, Uncle Jim, my own
dear, dear Uncle Jim.”
She extended her hand to him, and as he took it, looked with wistful
eyes into his.
“I feel as if you were really my father,” she said. “It’s only to a
father or mother that a person feels they can come and ask things from
as I have from you to-day.”
The Colonel kissed her without speaking. At the doorway she turned and
he waved his hand in farewell, but again said nothing.
June walked home through the soft gray damp of the late afternoon. As
she looked up the lines of the long streets that climbed the hills,
then sloped down toward the water front, she saw the fog blotting them
out, erasing outlines, stealthily creeping downward till the distance
looked like a slate blurred by a wet sponge. She remembered evenings
like this in the first year of her San Francisco life, when she walked
home briskly with the chill air moist on her face and her imagination
stirred by the mystery and strangeness of the dim, many-hilled city,
veiled in whorls and eddies of vaporous white. There was no beauty in
it to-night, only a sense of desolation, cold and creepingly pervasive
as the fog.