Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  Covertly he looked at her, as she sat near him, her yellow hair rolling and blowing back from her forehead, her hands clasped over her knee, looking out over the ocean, thoughtful, her eyes wide.

  She had told him she did not love him. Condy remembered that perfectly well. She was sincere in the matter; she did not love him. That subject had been once and for all banished from their intercourse. And it was because of that very reason that their companionship of the last three or four months had been so charming. She looked upon him merely as a chum. She had not changed in the least from that time until now, whereas he — why, all his world was new for him that morning! Why, he loved her so, she had become so dear to him, that the very thought of her made his heart swell and leap.

  But he must keep all this to himself. If he spoke to her, told her of how he loved her, it would spoil and end their companionship upon the instant. They had both agreed upon that; they had tried the other, and it had worked out. As lovers they had wearied of each other; as chums they had been perfectly congenial, thoroughly and completely happy.

  Condy set his teeth. It was a hard situation. He must choose between bringing an end to this charming comradeship of theirs, or else fight back all show of love for her, keep it down and under hand, and that at a time when every nerve of him quivered like a smitten harp-string. It was not in him or in his temperament to love her calmly, quietly, or at a distance; he wanted the touch of her hand, the touch of her cool, smooth cheek, the delicious aroma of her breath in his nostrils her lips against his, her hair and all its fragrance in his face.

  “Condy, what’s the matter?” Blix was looking at him with an expression of no little concern. “What are you frowning so about, and clinching your fists? And you’re pale, too. What’s gone wrong?”

  He shot a glance at her, and bestirred himself sharply.

  “Isn’t this a jolly little corner?” he said. “Blix, how long is it before you go?”

  “Six weeks from to-morrow.”

  “And you’re going to be gone four years — four years! Maybe you never will come back. Can’t tell what will happen in four years. Where’s the blooming mouth-organ?”

  But the mouth-organ was full of crumbs. Condy could not play on it. To all his efforts it responded only by gasps, mournfulest death-rattles, and lamentable wails. Condy hurled it into the sea.

  “Well, where’s the blooming book, then?” he demanded. “You’re sitting on it, Blix. Here, read something in it. Open it anywhere.”

  “No; you read to me.”

  “I will not. Haven’t I done enough? Didn’t I buy the book and get the lunch, and make the sandwiches, and pay the car-fare? I think this expedition will cost me pretty near three dollars before we’re through with the day. No; the least you can do is to read to me. Here, we’ll match for it.”

  Condy drew a dime from his pocket, and Blix a quarter from her purse.

  “You’re matching me,” she said.

  Condy tossed the coin and lost, and Blix said, as he picked up the book:

  “For a man that has such unvarying bad luck as you, gambling is just simple madness. You and I have never played a game of poker yet that I’ve not won every cent of money you had.”

  “Yes; and what are you doing with it all?”

  “Spending it,” she returned loftily; “gloves and veils and lace pins — all kinds of things.”

  But Condy knew the way she spoke that this was not true.

  For the next hour or so he read to her from “The Seven Seas,” while the afternoon passed, the wind stirring the chaparral and blackberry bushes in the hollows of the huge, bare hills, the surf rolling and grumbling on the beach below, the sea-birds wheeling overhead. Blix listened intently, but Condy could not have told of what he was reading. Living was better than reading, life was better than literature, and his new-found love for her was poetry enough for him. He read so that he might not talk to her or look at her, for it seemed to him at times as though some second self in him would speak and betray him in spite of his best efforts. Never before in all his life had he been so happy; never before had he been so troubled. He began to jumble the lines and words as he read, over-running periods, even turning two pages at once.

  “What a splendid line!” Blix exclaimed.

  “What line — what — what are you talking about? Blix, let’s always remember to-day. Let’s make a promise, no matter what happens or where we are, let’s always write to each other on the anniversary of to-day. What do you say?”

  “Yes; I’ll promise — and you—”

  “I’ll promise faithfully. Oh, I’ll never forget to-day nor — yes, yes, I’ll promise — why, to-day — Blix — where’s that damn book gone?”

  “Condy!”

  “Well, I can’t find the book. You’re sitting on it again. Confound the book, anyway! Let’s walk some more.”

  “We’ve a long ways to go if we’re to get home in time for supper. Let’s go to Luna’s for supper.”

  “I never saw such a girl as you to think of ways for spending money. What kind of a purse-proud plutocrat do you think I am? I’ve only seventy-five cents left. How much have you got?”

  Blix had fifty-five cents in her purse, and they had a grave council over their finances. They had just enough for car-fare and two “suppers Mexican,” with ten cents left over.

  “That’s for Richard’s tip,” said Blix.

  “That’s for my CIGAR,” he retorted.

  “You made ME give him fifty cents. You said it was the least I could offer him — noblesse oblige.”

  “Well, then, I COULDN’T offer him a dime, don’t you see? I’ll tell him we are broke this time.”

  They started home, not as they had come, but climbing the hill and going across a breezy open down, radiant with blue iris, wild heliotrope, yellow poppies, and even a violet here and there. A little further on they gained one of the roads of the Reservation, red earth smooth as a billiard table; and just at an angle where the road made a sharp elbow and trended cityward, they paused for a moment and looked down and back at the superb view of the ocean, the vast half-moon of land, and the rolling hills in the foreground tumbling down toward the beach and all spangled with wild flowers.

  Some fifteen minutes later they reached the golf-links.

  “We can go across the links,” said Condy, “and strike any number of car lines on the other side.”

  They left the road and struck across the links, Condy smoking his new-lighted pipe. But as they came around the edge of a long line of eucalyptus trees near the teeing ground, a warning voice suddenly called out:

  “Fore!”

  Condy and Blix looked up sharply, and there in a group not twenty feet away, in tweeds and “knickers,” in smart, short golfing skirts and plaid cloaks, they saw young Sargeant and his sister, two other girls whom they knew as members of the fashionable “set,” and Jack Carter in the act of swinging his driving iron.

  Chapter XI

  As the clock in the library of the club struck midnight, Condy laid down his pen, shoved the closely written sheets of paper from him, and leaned back in his chair, his fingers to his tired eyes. He was sitting at a desk in one of the further corners of the room and shut off by a great Japanese screen. He was in his shirt-sleeves, his hair was tumbled, his fingers ink-stained, and his face a little pale.

  Since late in the evening he had been steadily writing. Three chapters of “In Defiance of Authority” were done, and he was now at work on the fourth. The day after the excursion to the Presidio — that wonderful event which seemed to Condy to mark the birthday of some new man within him — the idea had suddenly occurred to him that Captain Jack’s story of the club of the exiles, the boom restaurant, and the filibustering expedition was precisely the novel of adventure of which the Centennial Company had spoken. At once he had set to work upon it, with an enthusiasm that, with shut teeth, he declared would not be lacking in energy. The story would have to be written out of his business hours. That meant
he would have to give up his evenings to it. But he had done this, and for nearly a week had settled himself to his task in the quiet corner of the club at eight o’clock, and held to it resolutely until twelve.

  The first two chapters had run off his pen with delightful ease. The third came harder; the events and incidents of the story became confused and contradictory; the character of Billy Isham obstinately refused to take the prominent place which Condy had designed for him; and with the beginning of the fourth chapter, Condy had finally come to know the enormous difficulties, the exasperating complications, the discouragements that begin anew with every paragraph, the obstacles that refuse to be surmounted, and all the pain, the labor, the downright mental travail and anguish that fall to the lot of the writer of novels.

  To write a short story with the end in plain sight from the beginning was an easy matter compared to the upbuilding, grain by grain, atom by atom, of the fabric of “In Defiance of Authority.” Condy soon found that there was but one way to go about the business. He must shut his eyes to the end of his novel — that far-off, divine event — and take his task chapter by chapter, even paragraph by paragraph; grinding out the tale, as it were, by main strength, driving his pen from line to line, hating the effort, happy only with the termination of each chapter, and working away, hour by hour, minute by minute, with the dogged, sullen, hammer-and-tongs obstinacy of the galley-slave, scourged to his daily toil.

  At times the tale, apparently out of sheer perversity, would come to a full stop. To write another word seemed beyond the power of human ingenuity, and for an hour or more Condy would sit scowling at the half-written page, gnawing his nails, scouring his hair, dipping his pen into the ink-well, and squaring himself to the sheet of paper, all to no purpose.

  There was no pleasure in it for him. A character once fixed in his mind, a scene once pictured in his imagination, and even before he had written a word the character lost the charm of its novelty, the scene the freshness of its original conception. Then, with infinite painstaking and with a patience little short of miraculous, he must slowly build up, brick by brick, the plan his brain had outlined in a single instant. It was all work — hard, disagreeable, laborious work; and no juggling with phrases, no false notions as to the “delight of creation,” could make it appear otherwise. “And for what,” he muttered as he rose, rolled up his sheaf of manuscript, and put on his coat; “what do I do it for, I don’t know.”

  It was beyond question that, had he begun his novel three months before this time, Condy would have long since abandoned the hateful task. But Blix had changed all that. A sudden male force had begun to develop in Condy. A master-emotion had shaken him, and he had commenced to see and to feel the serious, more abiding, and perhaps the sterner side of life. Blix had steadied him, there was no denying that. He was not quite the same boyish, hairbrained fellow who had made “a buffoon of himself” in the Chinese restaurant, three months before.

  The cars had stopped running by the time Condy reached the street. He walked home and flung himself to bed, his mind tired, his nerves unstrung, and all the blood of his body apparently concentrated in his brain. Working at night after writing all day long was telling upon him, and he knew it.

  What with his work and his companionship with Blix, Condy soon began to drop out of his wonted place in his “set.” He was obliged to decline one invitation after another that would take him out in the evening, and instead of lunching at his club with Sargeant or George Hands, as he had been accustomed to do at one time, he fell into another habit of lunching with Blix at the flat on Washington Street, and spending the two hours allowed to him in the middle of the day in her company.

  Condy’s desertion of them was often spoken of by the men of his club with whom he had been at one time so intimate, and the subject happened to be brought up again one noon when Jack Carter was in the club as George Hands’ guest. Hands, Carter, and Eckert were at one of the windows over their after-dinner cigars and liqueurs.

  “I say,” said Eckert suddenly, “who’s that girl across the street there — the one in black, just going by that furrier’s sign? I’ve seen her somewhere before. Know who it is?”

  “That’s Miss Bessemer, isn’t it?” said George Hands, leaning forward. “Rather a stunning-looking girl.”

  “Yes, that’s Travis Bessemer,” assented Jack Carter; adding, a moment later, “it’s too bad about that girl.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Eckert.

  Carter lifted a shoulder. “Isn’t ANYTHING the matter as far as I know, only somehow the best people have dropped her. She USED to be received everywhere.”

  “Come to think, I HAVEN’T seen her out much this season,” said Eckert. “But I heard she had bolted from ‘Society’ with the big S, and was going East — going to study medicine, I believe.”

  “I’ve always noticed,” said Carter, with a smile, “that so soon as a girl is declassee, she develops a purpose in life and gets earnest, and all that sort of thing.

  “Oh, well, come,” growled George Hands, “Travis Bessemer is not declassee.”

  “I didn’t say she was,” answered Carter; “but she has made herself talked about a good deal lately. Going around with Rivers, as she does, isn’t the most discreet thing in the world. Of course, it’s all right, but it all makes talk, and I came across them by a grove of trees out on the links the other day—”

  “Yes,” observed Sargeant, leaning on the back of Carter’s armchair; “yes; and I noticed, too, that she cut you dead. You fellows should have been there,” he went on, in perfect good humor, turning to the others. “You missed a good little scene. Rivers and Miss Bessemer had been taking a tramp over the Reservation — and, by the way, it’s a great place to walk, so my sister tells me; she and Dick Forsythe take a constitutional out there every Saturday morning — well, as I was saying, Rivers and Miss Bessemer came upon our party rather unexpectedly. We were all togged out in our golfing bags, and I presume we looked more like tailor’s models, posing for the gallery, than people who were taking an outing; but Rivers and Miss Bessemer had been regularly exercising; looked as though they had done their fifteen miles since morning. They had their old clothes on, and they were dusty and muddy.

  “You would have thought that a young girl such as Miss Bessemer is — for she’s very young — would have been a little embarrassed at running up against such a spick and span lot as we were. Not a bit of it; didn’t lose her poise for a moment. She bowed to my sister and to me, as though from the top of a drag, by Jove! and as though she were fresh from Redfern and Virot. You know a girl that can manage herself that way is a thoroughbred. She even remembered to cut little Johnnie Carter here, because Johnnie forced himself upon her one night at a dance when he was drunk; didn’t she, Johnnie? Johnnie came up to her there, out on the links, fresh as a daisy, and put out his hand, with, ‘Why, how do you do, Miss Bessemer?’ and ‘wherever did you come from?’ and ‘I haven’t seen you in so long’; and she says, ‘No, not since our last dance, I believe, Mr. Carter,’ and looked at his hand as though it was something funny.

  “Little Johnnie mumbled and flushed and stammered and backed off; and it was well that he did, because Rivers had begun to get red around the wattles. I say the little girl is a thoroughbred, and my sister wants to give her a dinner as soon as she comes out. But Johnnie says she’s declassee, so may be my sister had better think it over.”

  “I didn’t say she was declassee,” exclaimed Carter. “I only said she would do well to be more careful.”

  Sargeant shifted his cigar to the other corner of his mouth, one eye shut to avoid the smoke.

  “One might say as much of lots of people,” he answered.

  “I don’t like your tone!” Carter flared out.

  “Oh, go to the devil, Johnnie! Shall we all have a drink?”

  On the Friday evening of that week, Condy set himself to his work at his accustomed hour. But he had had a hard day on the “Times,” Supplement, and his brain
, like an overdriven horse, refused to work. In half an hour he had not written a paragraph.

  “I thought it would be better, in the end, to loaf for one evening,” he explained to Blix, some twenty minutes later, as they settled themselves in the little dining-room. “I can go at it better to-morrow. See how you like this last chapter.”

  Blix was enthusiastic over “In Defiance of Authority.” Condy had told her the outline of the story, and had read to her each chapter as he finished it.

  “It’s the best thing you have ever done, Condy, and you know it. I suppose it has faults, but I don’t care anything about them. It’s the story itself that’s so interesting. After that first chapter of the boom restaurant and the exiles’ club, nobody would want to lay the book down. You’re doing the best work of your life so far, and you stick to it.”

  “It’s grinding out copy for the Supplement at the same time that takes all the starch out of me. You’ve no idea what it means to write all day, and then sit down and write all evening.”

  “I WISH you could get off the ‘Times,’” said Blix. “You’re just giving the best part of your life to hack work, and NOW it’s interfering with your novel. I know you could do better work on your novel if you didn’t have to work on the ‘Times,’ couldn’t you?”

  “Oh, if you come to that, of course I could,” he answered. “But they won’t give me a vacation. I was sounding the editor on it day before yesterday. No; I’ll have to manage somehow to swing the two together.”

  “Well, let’s not talk shop now. Condy. You need a rest. Do you want to play poker?”

  They played for upward of an hour that evening, and Condy, as usual, lost. His ill-luck was positively astonishing. During the last two months he had played poker with Blix on an average of three or four evenings in the week, and at the close of every game it was Blix who had all the chips.

  Blix had come to know the game quite as well, if not better, than he. She could almost invariably tell when Condy held a good hand, but on her part could assume an air of indifference absolutely inscrutable.