A week passed; then another. The year was coming to a close. In ten
days Blix would be gone. Letters had been received from Aunt Kihm, and
also an exquisite black leather traveling-case, a present to her niece,
full of cut-glass bottles, ebony-backed brushes, and shell combs. Blix
was to leave on the second day of January. In the meanwhile she had
been reading far into her first-year text-books, underscoring and
annotating, studying for hours upon such subjects as she did not
understand, so that she might get hold of her work the readier when it
came to class-room routine and lectures. Hers was a temperament
admirably suited to the study she had chosen--self-reliant, cool, and
robust.
But it was not easy for her to go. Never before had Blix been away
from her home; never for longer than a week had she been separated from
her father, nor from Howard and Snooky. That huge city upon the
Atlantic seaboard, with its vast, fierce life, where beat the heart of
the nation, and where beyond Aunt Kihm she knew no friend, filled Blix
with a vague sense of terror and of oppression. She was going out into
a new life, a life of work and of study, a harsher life than she had
yet known. Her father, her friends, her home--all these were to be
left behind. It was not surprising that Blix should be daunted at the
prospect of so great a change in her life, now so close at hand. But
if the tears did start at times, no one ever saw them fall, and with a
courage that was all her own Blix watched the last days of the year
trooping past and the approach of the New Year that was to begin the
new life.
But Condy was thoroughly unhappy. Those wonderful three months were at
an end. Blix was going. In less than a week now she would be gone.
He would see the last of her. Then what? He pictured himself--when he
had said good-by to her and the train had lessened to a smoky blur in
the distance--facing about, facing the life that must then begin for
him, returning to the city alone, picking up the routine again. There
would be nothing to look forward to then; he would not see Blix in the
afternoon; would not sit with her in the evening in the little
dining-room of the flat overlooking the city and the bay; would not
wake in the morning with the consciousness that before the sun would
set he would see her again, be with her, and hear the sound of her
voice. The months that were to follow would be one long ache, one
long, harsh, colorless grind without her. How was he to get through
that first evening that he must pass alone? And she did not care for
him. Condy at last knew this to be so. Even the poor solace of
knowing that she, too, was unhappy was denied him. She had never loved
him, and never would. He was a chum to her, nothing more. Condy was
too clear-headed to deceive himself upon this point. The time was come
for her to go away, and she had given him no sign, no cue.
The last days passed; Blix's trunk was packed, her half section
engaged, her ticket bought. They said good-by to the old places they
had come to know so well--Chinatown, the Golden Balcony, the
water-front, the lake of San Andreas, Telegraph Hill, and Luna's--and
had bade farewell to Riccardo and to old Richardson. They had left K.
D. B. and Captain Jack until the last day. Blix was to go on the
second of January. On New Year's Day she and Condy were to take their
last walk, were to go out to the lifeboat station, and then on around
the shore to the little amphitheatre of blackberry bushes--where they
had promised always to write one another on the anniversary of their
first visit--and then for the last time climb the hill, and go across
the breezy downs to the city.
Then came the last day of the old year, the last day but one that they
would be together. They spent it in a long ramble along the
water-front, following the line of the shipping even as far as Meiggs's
Wharf. They had come back to the flat for supper, and afterward, as
soon as the family had left them alone, had settled themselves in the
bay window to watch the New Year in.
The little dining-room was dark, but for the indistinct blur of light
that came in through the window--a light that was a mingling of the
afterglow, the new-risen moon, and the faint haze that the city threw
off into the sky from its street lamps and electrics. From where they
sat they could look down, almost as from a tower, into the city's
streets. Here a corner came into view; further on a great puff of
green foliage--palms and pines side by side--overlooked a wall. Here a
street was visible for almost its entire length, like a stream of
asphalt flowing down the pitch of the hill, dammed on either side by
rows upon rows of houses; while further on the vague confusion of roofs
and facades opened out around a patch of green lawn, the garden of some
larger residence.
As they looked and watched, the afterglow caught window after window,
till all that quarter of the city seemed to stare up at them from a
thousand ruddy eyes. The windows seemed infinite in number, the
streets endless in their complications: yet everything was deserted.
At this hour the streets were empty, and would remain so until
daylight. Not a soul was stirring; no face looked from any of those
myriads of glowing windows; no footfall disturbed the silence of those
asphalt streets. There, almost within call behind those windows, shut
off from those empty streets, a thousand human lives were teeming, each
the centre of its own circle of thoughts and words and actions; and yet
the solitude was profound, the desolation complete, the stillness
unbroken by a single echo.
The night--the last night of the old year--was fine; the white, clear
light from a moon they could not see grew wide and clear over the city,
as the last gleam of the sunset faded. It was just warm enough for the
window to be open, and for nearly three hours Condy and Blix sat
looking down upon the city in these last moments of the passing year,
feeling upon their faces an occasional touch of the breeze, that
carried with it the smell of trees and flowers from the gardens below
them, and the faint fine taint of the ocean from far out beyond the
Heads. But the scene was not in reality silent. At times when they
listened intently, especially when they closed their eyes, there came
to them a subdued, steady bourdon, profound, unceasing, a vast, numb
murmur, like no other sound in all the gamut of nature--the sound of a
city at night, the hum of a great, conglomerate life, wrought out there
from moment to moment under the stars and under the moon, while the
last hours of the old year dropped quietly away.
A star fell.
Sitting in the window, the two noticed it at once, and Condy stirred
for the first time in fifteen minutes.
"That was a very long one," he said, in a low voice. "Blix, you must
write to me--we must write each other often."
"Oh, yes," she answered. "We must not forget each other; we have had
too good a time for that."
"Four years is a long time," he went on. "Lots can happen in four
years. Wonder what I'll be doing at the end of four years? We've had a
pleasant time while it lasted, Blix."
"Haven't we?" she said, her chin on her hand, the moonlight shining in
her little, dark-brown eyes.
Well, he was going to lose her. He had found out that he loved her
only in time to feel the wrench of parting from her all the more
keenly. What was he to do with himself after she was gone? What could
he turn to in order to fill up the great emptiness that her going would
leave in his daily life? And was she never to know how dear she was to
him? Why not speak to her, why not tell her that he loved her? But
Condy knew that Blix did not love him, and the knowledge of that must
keep him silent; he must hug his secret to him, like the Spartan boy
with his stolen fox, no matter how grievously it hurt him to do so. He
and Blix had lived through two months of rarest, most untroubled
happiness, with hardly more self-consciousness than two young and
healthy boys. To bring that troublous, disquieting element of love
between them--unrequited love, of all things--would be a folly. She
would tell him--must in all honesty tell him that she did not love him,
and all their delicious camaraderie would end in a "scene." Condy,
above everything, wished to look back on those two months, after she
had gone, without being able to remember therein one single note that
jarred. If the memory of her was all that he was to have, he resolved
that at least that memory should be perfect.
And the love of her had made a man of him--he could not forget that;
had given to him just the strength that made it possible for him to
keep that resolute, grim silence now. In those two months he had grown
five years; he was more masculine, more virile. The very set of his
mouth was different; between the eye-brows the cleft had deepened; his
voice itself vibrated to a heavier note. No, no; so long as he should
live, he, man grown as he was, could never forget this girl of nineteen
who had come into his life so quietly, so unexpectedly, who had
influenced it so irresistibly and so unmistakably for its betterment,
and who had passed out of it with the passing of the year.
For a few moments Condy had been absent-mindedly snapping the lid of
his cigarette case, while he thought; now he selected a cigarette,
returned the case to his pocket, and fumbled for a match. But the
little gun-metal case he carried was empty. Blix rose and groped for a
moment upon the mantel-shelf, then returned and handed him a match, and
stood over him while he scraped it under the arm of the chair wherein
he sat. Even when his cigarette was lighted she still stood there,
looking at him, the fingers of her hands clasped in front of her, her
hair, one side of her cheek, her chin, and sweet, round neck outlined
by the faint blur of light that came from the open window. Then
quietly she said:
"Well, Condy?"
"Well, Blix?"
"Just 'well'?" she repeated. "Is that all? Is that all you have to say
to me?"
He gave a great start.
"Blix!" he exclaimed.
"Is that all? And you are going to let me go away from you for so long,
and say nothing more than that to me? You think you have been so
careful, think you have kept your secret so close! Condy, don't you
suppose I know? Do you suppose women are so blind? No, you don't need
to tell me; I know--I've known it--oh, for weeks!"
"You know--know--know what?" he exclaimed, breathless.
"That you have been pretending that you did not love me. I know that
you do love me--I know you have been trying to keep it from me for fear
it would spoil our good times, and because we had made up our minds to
be chums, and have 'no more foolishness.' Once--in those days when we
first knew each other--I knew you did not love me when you said you
did; but now, since--oh, since that afternoon in the Chinese
restaurant, remember?--I've known that you did love me, although you
pretended you didn't. It was the pretence I wanted to be rid of; I
wanted to be rid of it when you said you loved me and didn't, and I
want to be rid of it now when YOU pretend not to love me and I KNOW you
do," and Blix leaned back her head as she spoke that "know," looking at
him from under her lids, a smile upon her lips. "It's the pretence
that I won't have," she added. "We must be sincere with each other,
you and I."
"Blix, do YOU love ME?"
Condy had risen to his feet, his breath was coming quick, his cigarette
was flung away, and his hands opened and shut swiftly.
"Oh, Blixy, little girl, do YOU love ME?"
They stood there for a moment in the half dark, facing one another,
their hearts beating, their breath failing them in the tension of the
instant. There in that room, high above the city, a little climax had
come swiftly to a head, a crisis in two lives had suddenly developed.
The moment that had been in preparation for the last few months, the
last few years, the last few centuries, behold! it had arrived.
"Blix, do you love me?"
Suddenly it was the New Year. Somewhere close at hand a chorus of
chiming church bells sang together. Far off in the direction of the
wharves, where the great ocean steamships lay, came the glad, sonorous
shouting of a whistle; from a nearby street a bugle called aloud. And
then from point to point, from street to roof top, and from roof to
spire, the vague murmur of many sounds grew and spread and widened,
slowly, grandly; that profound and steady bourdon, as of an invisible
organ swelling, deepening, and expanding to the full male diapason of
the city aroused and signaling the advent of another year.
And they heard it, they two heard it, standing there face to face,
looking into each other's eyes, that unanswered question yet between
them, the question that had come to them with the turning of the year.
It was the old year yet when Condy had asked that question. In that
moment's pause, while Blix hesitated to answer him, the New Year had
come. And while the huge, vast note of the city swelled and vibrated,
she still kept silent. But only for a moment. Then she came closer to
him, and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
"Happy New Year, dear," she said.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
On New Year's Day, the last day they were to be together, Blix and
Condy took "their walk," as they had come to call it--the walk that
included the lifeboat station, the Golden Gate, the ocean beach beyond
the old fort, the green, bare, flower-starred hills and downs, and the
smooth levels of the golf links. Blix had been busy with the last
details of her packing, and they did not get started until toward two
in the afternoon.
"Strike me!" exclaimed Captain Jack, as Blix informed him that she had
come to say good-by. "Why, ain't this very sudden-like, Miss Bessemer?
Hey, Kitty, come in here. Here's Miss Bessemer come to say good-by;
going to New York to-morrow."
"We'll regularly be lonesome without you, miss," said K. D. B., as she
came into the front room, bringing with her a brisk, pungent odor of
boiled vegetables. "New York--such a town as it must be! It was
called Manhattan at first, you know, and was settled by the Dutch."
Evidently K. D. B. had reached the N's.
With such deftness as she possessed, Blix tried to turn the
conversation upon the first meeting of the retired sea captain and the
one-time costume reader, but all to no purpose. The "Matrimonial
Objects" were perhaps a little ashamed of their "personals" by now, and
neither Blix nor Condy were ever to hear their version of the meeting
in the back dining-room of Luna's Mexican restaurant. Captain Jack
was, in fact, anxious to change the subject.
"Any news of the yarn yet?" he suddenly inquired of Condy "What do
those Eastern publishin' people think of Our Mug and Billy Isham and
the whiskey schooner?"
Condy had received the rejected manuscript of "In Defiance of
Authority" that morning, accompanied by a letter from the Centennial
Company.
"Well," he said in answer, "they're not, as you might say, falling over
themselves trying to see who'll be the first to print it. It's been
returned."
"The devil you say!" responded the Captain. "Well, that's kind of
disappointin' to you, ain't it?"
"But," Blix hastened to add, "we're not at all discouraged. We're
going to send it off again right away."
Then she said good-by to them.
"I dunno as you'll see me here when you come back, miss," said the
Captain, at the gate, his arm around K. D. B. "I've got to schemin'
again. Do you know," he added, in a low, confidential tone, "that all
the mines in California send their clean-ups and gold bricks down to
the Selby smeltin' works once every week? They send 'em to San
Francisco first, and they are taken up to Selby's Wednesday afternoons
on a little stern-wheel steamer called the "Monticello." All them
bricks are in a box--dumped in like so much coal--and that box sets
just under the wheel-house, for'ard. How much money do you suppose
them bricks represent? Well, I'll tell you; last week they represented
seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Well, now, I got a chart of
the bay near Vallejo; the channel's all right, but there are mudflats
that run out from shore three miles. Enough water for a whitehall, but
not enough for--well, for the patrol boat, for instance. Two or three
slick boys, of a foggy night--of course, I'm not in that kind of game,
but strike! it would be a deal now, wouldn't it?"
"Don't you believe him, miss," put in K. D. B. "He's just talking to
show off."
"I think your scheme of holding up a Cunard liner," said Condy, with
great earnestness, "is more feasible. You could lay across her course
and fly a distress signal. She'd have to heave to."
"Yes, I been thinkin' o' that; but look here--what's to prevent the
liner taking right after your schooner after you've got the stuff
aboard--just followin' you right around an' findin' out where you land?"
"She'd be under contract to carry Government mails," contradicted
Condy. "She couldn't do that. You'd leave her mails aboard for just
that reason. You wouldn't rob her of her mails; just so long as she
was carrying government mails she couldn't stop."
The Captain clapped his palm down upon the gate-post.
"Strike me straight! I never thought of that."