The Colonel's Meditations

by Geraldine Bonner

THE COLONEL'S MEDITATIONS

IT was nearly five by the office clock. A good hour, thought the Colonel, to call on Mrs. Mack and get that duty off his mind. It was a duty at once attractive and disturbing. The Colonel, as he descended the steps and made his way through the throng of hurrying men, south toward Market street, did not know whether he regarded it with anticipations that were pleasurable or the reverse. He would like to see Mrs. Mack again; he felt sure of that. But whether he would like to see her as the wife of Rollin Mack was a question not to be hastily or lightly answered.

A few months before the Colonel had himself been somewhat preoccupied by thoughts of Mrs. Mack. She was then Mrs, Isabel Conway, relict of the late Drusus Conway, a lady of vivacious charm, with a round, dimpled face, and coquettish ways that had power to subjugate the souls of men.

The Colonel's acquaintance with the pretty widow had never expanded into intimacy. He had admired her from safe distances with the cautious discretion of one who is not going to juggle with destiny. Several times, in the masculine seclusion of his club, he had remarked that if she had not had the incumbrance of two children he might, in the infatuated recklessness of his admiration, have rushed into wedlock. While he was musing on the thoughts of matrimonial extinction, Rollin Mack, the millionaire, a full forty years the lady's senior, had quietly stepped in and married her himself, thereby bringing to a summary end the Colonel's hesitations and doubts.

The Colonel could not but acknowledge that he felt rather blank. While he was deliberating in unflattering indecision, she had made the marriage most pleasing to her ambition. Had he been made a fool of, or had he made a fool of himself? It was a delicate question, and the thought of it engrossed him as he swung up Montgomery street to where the Palace Hotel loomed large from a mist of telegraph wires.

Mrs. Mack was at home and receiving, and, as the visitor was ushered into the parlor of her second-floor suite, rustled in from an adjoining room. She was splendid in a dress of rich heliotrope brocade that emitted soft, silken whisperings, and brought out the wonderful tinting of her fresh, girlish face. She was prettier than ever, the Colonel saw with a jealous pang. Once or twice, as her glance lingered on his, he thought there was something in its expression that suggested a desire to laugh. She had triumphed, and the Colonel felt annoyed with her and with himself that it should be so. Had he been a fool not to marry her? Then the conversation was brought to a temporary stop by the entrance of Rollin Mack, the bridegroom.

The millionaire, bent a little from his great height by the weight of his seventy years, extended a limply friendly hand to the visitor and sank into an armchair. Here, his withered, loose-fitting eyelids low over the steely attention of his eyes, he sat with an air of uninterested indifference, now and then throwing a lazy remark into the conversation. The appearance of the little girl—one of the children whose existence had caused the Colonel to merely admire Mrs. Conway from the safe distances of impersonal acquaintanceship—contributed the finishing touch to this family group. She, however, showed no desire for either the society of her mother or her new papa. Securing a book, she retired to a stool, and there began to turn the pages, every now and then taking surreptitious bites of a cake concealed in her hand. Her step-father, with an apathetic cast of his eye in her direction, looked her slowly up and down, as if he was not quite sure who it was, and took no further notice of her.

They ought to have presented quite an ideal domestic picture, the Colonel thought, as he rose to go. And yet they did not—each one, in some subtle way, suggesting a sharp self-concentration, strongly separate and individual. The millionaire, rising and jerking himself into erectness for the moment of farewell, was imposing enough for the disparity in years between him and his wife to be overlooked. Holding out a jewelled hand, she smiled softly up at the departing guest, and then let her glance slip obliquely away from the open admiration in his eyes, which made her laugh a little with secret amusement and triumph. Behind them the Colonel caught a parting glimpse of the little girl, who had snatched this propitious moment hastily to eat her cake, her eyes fixed in alert apprehension upon the backs of her guardians.

It was after six, and the dark was settling down with the chill accompaniment of fog, when the Colonel found himself in the street. Having business to attend to across town that evening, he resolved to dine in unhurried loneliness at one of the French restaurants, the cuisine of which was known and approved by his cultured palate.

Walking slowly up the street, lit now with the bold gushes of yellow radiance from show windows and the pale suffused lustre from the electric lights, he passed through the crowd of wayfarers, with level-staring, vacant eyes. He noticed no one, for he was thinking. He was still preoccupied when he entered the restaurant, and ran his eyes over the tables, set out in two lines down the length of the narrow room. He did not notice the glances that followed him to his place, nor the pretty girl opposite with the green rosette in her hat. When he finally let his slow-moving eyes dwell for a moment on the charming face, so softly shadowed by the green-rosetted hat, he did not vouchsafe it the compliment of a second glance, but greeted the advent of his dinner with a relieved sigh.

He was thinking of Mrs. Mack. The girl with the green rosettes was only as pretty as a thousand other girls—not like Mrs. Mack. The Colonel could not yet decide whether he was sorry he had not become the rightful owner of this lovely lady. The memory of her sitting in delicate erectness in the silken splendor of her heliotrope dress floated before his vision, blotting out the faces of all other women, plain or pretty.

As the waiter assisted him on with his coat, and the girl with the green rosettes stole one last glance at him, he was still preoccupied. He stretched his hand for his cane, and thought that, after all, he was glad he had not married Mrs. Mack. Something was wanting; he did not quite know what it was, or what made him think so, yet something that ought to have been there, lending the last radiance to the charm of her personality and the success of her union, was absent. But as the obsequious garçon flung open the door, and the breath of fog swept in, and the chill street without looked damp and dirty, he thought of the sumptuous room, and against its glow and richness of color, the enchanting woman that would have been there and been his own, and felt a sudden accession of petulance with himself for not having been fool enough to marry Mrs. Mack when he had the chance.

Out in the night, his coat buttoned high to his throat, his malacca cane with its loaded head grasped in his hand, the Colonel, by a complicated system of short-cuts and street cars, made his way acrosstown to the old residence-quarter beyond South Park and Rincon Hill. Some houses he owned there sheltered tenants who had been clamorously demanding repairs, and the Colonel, a gentleman of many engagements and easy negligence, had resolved to dedicate this unoccupied evening to them and their grievances.

It was in the quiet hours that come when the hard-working half of the community has gone to bed that the Colonel, his work done, turned his face toward that portion of the city where his club and his supper awaited him. The coolness of the fog-saturated night and the idle stillness of the deserted streets, wooed him to a walk acrosstown—walk in which a great deal of thinking might be done.

It was cold, damp, and still. The older city, through which his vigorous strides carried him, lay lulled in the heavy sleep of toil. It was not yet midnight, yet the Colonel passed block after block, where only a light here and there in an upper window broke the darkness of the long lines of shadowy houses. The fog lay in a heavy beaded dew on the wooden pavements, and seemed to condense into a thick and vapory veil, where the lamp-light tried to pierce its enshrouding density. Now and then, in a pause of indecision at an unfamiliar corner, the Colonel could hear it dripping lazily from upper angles, the drops slowly detaching and falling with a distinct “plunk.”

He had hardly realized such loneliness and silence could exist in a city. There was something eerie about it, something mysterious in the dark lines of silent houses, close-shuttered and secretive, their blank faces, where the lamp-light gilded them, wet and shining. The walk too was longer than the Colonel had at first thought. He decided to shorten it by striking through those small alleys, black and still in the dumbness of heavy somnolence, which cut through the middle of many of the older city blocks—small, connecting veins between the town's larger arteries of traffic.

He passed from one of these to another, crossing the light-dotted lengths of wider thoroughfares, to plunge again into the narrow blackness of the next alley. As he advanced they seemed to grow meaner and darker. The houses on either side, the wretched tenements of the poor, rarely showed a crack or crevice of light through their sagging shutters, against which the Colonel's shoulder—so narrow were the sidewalks—brushed as he passed.

A new one, gloomier and blacker than any of its predecessors, opened before him. The Colonel, taking a swift coup d' œil up its shadowy length, shifted his grip from the top to the end of his cane. Some distance ahead of him, looking far away through the fog, a solitary lamp shone, a yellow spot dropped on the darkness. It looked like a street of the dead, a street of evil doings seen once in a dream, with all these squalid houses looming large and toppling through the sinister, shrouding mist. The Colonel, running an exploring glance over the bedimmed wooden walls and humid shutters, wondered what Mrs. Mack would have been like if Fate had willed that she should have lived in such places as these. This one, for example, its wet face dripping moisture, its dim outline suggesting a garret and a ground floor, with a few steps leading up to a dark doorway.

The Colonel's careless glance, resting on the black void of the doorway, was suddenly shot through with a lightning flash of alarm. With a sharp, inarticulate sound, a shape, black as the place it came from, sprang from the doorway and leapt upon him. In the unexpected suddenness of the attack the Colonel reeled back a pace. The creature, gasping out detached broken words that struck on the other's ear as frantic demands for money, hurled itself upon him, grappling at him with bony, strenuous hands, in a blind, beating frenzy of assault.

The Colonel, staggering for an instant back against the wall, felt a thrill of fear dart through him when he saw on the dark side of the house a small square crossed by narrow bars of light—the opening of a shutter—and behind it the outline of a head. There was a gang. It was an ambush. The Colonel saw it was a case for action; tore himself free, and with one mighty swing of his arm brought down the loaded top of his malacca on his assailant's head,

With a gurgling sound in his throat, the creature dropped on the steps like a stone. Almost simultaneously the door of the house was swiftly opened; a square of pale light fell across the steps, over the figure fallen there in a huddled mass, and a woman darted out and knelt beside it. With silent rapidity she seized it and turned the face up to the light. It was pinched, ashen, and dreadfully dead-looking. She uttered a suppressed sound, rose to her feet, seized the body under the arms, and tried to drag it up the steps. In its inert heaviness it was too much for her. She desisted, let it sink back in a limp mass, and whispered hoarsely:

“Get here and help. The cop'll be along in a minute.”

The Colonel lifted it by the legs, and, with the woman holding it under the arms, they dragged it in and laid it on the floor. Relinquishing it gently, the woman turned, and, with the alert breathlessness which had characterized all her movements, closed the shutters and fastened the door. Then, coming back, she crouched on the floor, and with extraordinary rapidity and tenderness of touch, lifted the man's head to her knee, unfastened his collar, and chafed his bloodless hands.

“Get some water,” she commanded in the same strained whisper; “it's in the tin by the window.”

The Colonel brought it and knelt by her side. The chill fear that he had killed this miserable creature—revealed now in the light to be a sickly, shrunken lad, his stubby three-days' beard not hiding the pallid emaciation of his face—had brushed every. other thought and feeling from his mind. With blank anxiety he watched the woman touch the sunken temples and grey, half-opened mouth with the water, and put aside the locks of hair that straggled over the dark, bruised spot where the malacca had fallen.

“Brandy,” she whispered; “you must have brandy.'

The Colonel, with stumbling indignation at his own forgetfulness, produced his flask. They raised the man's head, the jaw fallen, a glimmer of white shining between the half-closed eyelids, and poured some of the brandy down his throat. Holding him against herself, the woman eyed him with a downward look of hungry anxiety. No answering color tinted the waxen skin. It looked horribly dead beside the living tint of her tenuous, scrawny arm. For the first time she raised her eyes to the Colonel, and looking at him with ferocity, said in her hoarse whisper:

“I suppose if you've killed him you're satisfied.”

The Colonel quailed before the fiercely accusing eyes.

“Try the brandy again,” he whispered. “Look—there 's a little color in his lips!”

She looked down with a startled flash of the eyes, and loosened her hold on the man. The next instant she had altered his position, and with his head upon her knee was chafing his forehead and chest with the brandy, and squeezing a piece of her dress saturated with it into his mouth. The flickering color spread from his lips and slowly suffused his face. There was a spasmodic movement in one of his hands; his eyelids quivered and slowly lifted over the dazed languor of his eyes. The Colonel suppressed an ardent exclamation of thanksgiving. The woman bent down and brought her face within the wounded man's line of vision.

“You're all right, Danny,” she said, whisperingly. “It's all O.K. You got a little clip, but you're back home here, and it's all right again.”

He looked back at her with vague indifference, then turned his glance away with a weak sigh.

She made a gesture to the Colonel for the flask. As he bent forward to hand it to her she looked into his eyes and harshly breathed the words,

“Go on and tell on him now. No one'll blame yer. It'll be the end of him and won't do you no harm. G'wan!”

The fierce irony of her speech was not impaired by the whisper that she still employed. The scarcely articulated words breathed bitterness and desperation. Her face was close to the Colonel's, and the biting hostility of her manner was contradicted by the anguish of her eyes. She was young, he saw now that he looked closely at her, not yet out of her teens, though her face was haggard, her body lean and angular. She had never been pretty. Lank locks of unkempt hair, that had been the richly curled bang of her girlhood, hung over her forehead to her eyebrows. A sickly, freckled pallor had banished such meagre good looks as mere youth could have given her. With a jerk of her head toward the window she hissed again:

“G'wan now; here's the cop. G'wan and tell on him.”

From the street without, heavy and regular, came the advancing footsteps of the policeman on his beat down the alley. The three in the house listened with thrilled apprehension. The Colonel felt his heart beat thick as the footfalls approached. He noticed with vague eyes that the woman had turned her head toward the window, and that, in the rigidity of her listening attitude, the cords in her neck stood out in fibrous tightness. On her clenched left hand her wedding ring caught a gleam of light. On the floor the wounded man stirred and breathed audibly. The Colonel's nervous glance shifted from him to the squalid room, the smoky light from a small kerosene lamp playing over the wretchedness of its peeling walls and the tumbled coverings of an unmade bed.

In the oppressive silence, broken at intervals by the wounded man's harsh breathing, the footsteps drew nearer, went slowly and heavily by, and retreated. The Colonel, his chest lifting with a deep inspiration of relief, brought his glance back on the woman and her husband. They were staring at him like hungry dogs.

“Why didn't you call him in?” she demanded.

The man on the floor moved his head so that he could command his would-be slayer.

“I-I—I didn't intend to,” stammered the Colonel apologetically.

“Well,” said the woman, with her ironic savageness, “you can do it when he comes back. There 's a chair; take it and be comfortable. You need n't be afraid. He won't move. He don't look as if he'd run, does he?” with a gesture of fierce derision toward the husband, who, the Colonel's handkerchief tied round his bloody head, lay along the floor in the apathy of abject weakness.

“But,” said the Colonel with an air of embarrassed resistance, feeling himself a man of obnoxious brutality, “I don't want to—I don't want to call the police.”

She looked at him for a moment in curious doubt. Then an expression of sly cunning crossed her ugly, street-Arab face.

“You can spare yourself the trouble of that sort of talk,” she said dryly. “1'Il give yer the facts and yer can have them all good and ready when he comes back. This is Danny Gagan,” indicating her husband. “He's been out o' work for four months. He got sick and lost his job, and then I got sick, and we didn't have nothing to eat here. To-night I told him to go out and hold up someone, same as the men that was in the papers. They get money and things and get off. I didn't see no reason why he couldn't. It ain't no picnic starving. I made him to do it. He didn't want to. He kep' on saying he did n't have no strength, but he would n't get no more settin' here starving. I was looking through the shutters. I seen yer comin', and I says 'Here's your man, Danny. Let out now and baste him; the cop's away; the street's clear.' An' he didn't want to. So I says, 'You do it now or I'll go out and beg off him.' That settled it, and he went.”

She stopped abruptly, her hard eyes on the Colonel. There was a slight tremor in her mouth, but she tightened her long upper lip and controlled it. Her husband with a feeble, stirring movement, said dully:

“It don't matter. I done it, and I'm caught.”

The Colonel, deeply interested, was still kneeling by the supine figure, absently holding the flask and the tin of water.

“You put him up to it?” he said. “That accounts for the whole thing. Could n't you see I was twice his size and was carrying a stick, and might have been armed? It was a crazy thing to do.”

He was interested in the foolhardiness of this singular woman.

“You surely must have known better?” he said, bending down to look into the face of his assailant.

“I don't know,” said the man with weary apathy. “She wanted it, and we was hungry. I guess when your 're hungry y' ain't got much sense.”

The Colonel rose from his kneeling attitude to the athletic magnificence of his stalwart six feet.

“That's so,” he said slowly. “I'd forgotten it for the moment. Of course it makes a difference;” and turning away he walked to where the kerosene lamp stood flaring on a narrow shelf. Standing here, his back toward the two watchers, his head slightly bent, he rapidly went through his various pockets. When he returned toward them he looked rather shamefaced.

“1'd offer to send you up something,” he said, with an affectation of ease to conceal his embarrassment, “but I'm not familiar with this neighborhood, and don't know where the good restaurants are. You'll know all that better than I.”

He bent down and laid his money and watch in the woman's lap.

“The watch is in pawn now,” he said, smiling, and avoiding her searching eyes. “I'll redeem it if you'll bring it to my office to-morrow. The address is in the purse.”

“The cop,” she faltered. “You'll wait for him and give Danny up?”

“Oh, bother, no!” said the Colonel, looking round for his hat. ”I've got too much to do to waste time on that sort of thing. Life 's too short to do anything but enjoy it. Danny's all right. Get him something to eat, and to-morrow take him to a drug store and they'll fix up his head. My hat looks worse than Danny does,” he added, solicitously punching out the dints in it and brushing it with his sleeve.

He took up his cane and moved to the door, The two on the floor had moved a little nearer to each other, and looked dumbly at him. Opening the door a crack, he paused, his head bent, listening for the policeman's returning tread, but the silence of midnight possessed the alley. With the door-knob in his hand, he turned and surveyed the motionless pair, crouched on the floor. The two pallid faces looked with mute meaning into his.

“Well, so-long!” said the Colonel gaily, giving a gallant wave of his hand toward his hat brim. “I'm sorry I hit so hard, but the cane was loaded, and I didn't stop to think. When Danny gets on his feet again, he'd better drop into my office. Something may turn up, you know. Good-bye!” The door opened, shut, and he was gone.

It was even darker and chillier than it had been, the Colonel thought, turning up his collar. He would keep to the broader thoroughfares for the rest of the way home. By the light of the first street lamp he looked at the top of the malacca and observed that it had not sustained a scratch, while Danny had been nearly killed. The Colonel breathed a pious sentiment of thanksgiving at the thought of his assailant's escape, and struck sharp sounds out of the cement pavement with the tip of the sturdy cane.

Certainly it had been a very interesting evening. As he swung forward, down the quiet, lamp-lit street, he mused upon it. They had been a strange pair, especially that fierce woman. What an Amazon! She seemed to love that helpless creature she was married to with an extraordinary, passionate sort of tenderness. It struck the Colonel that no woman had ever loved him just like that. Perhaps the capacity for such feeling was the compensating prerogative Destiny gave to ugly women. She was ugly, and yet the Colonel, an avowed admirer of female beauty, felt his heart stirred by a pensive envy of Danny. That was the way women ought to love. That was the corner-stone on which a marriage should be built. That was what a wife should be and should feel. And as this sentence passed through the Colonel's brain, suddenly, with a startling effect of strangeness and shock, came the memory of Mrs. Mack.

The Colonel slackened his pace and walked loiteringly, staring before him. He felt bewildered, as if he had burst suddenly out of reality into fiction. Mrs. Mack! It seemed a hundred years ago that he had seen her. It was as if she had been the denizen of another planet, and he had known her in a previous existence. Was it only this afternoon that he had talked with her in her parlor at the hotel? She seemed to be withdrawn to an enormous distance—to be a thing impalpable, glittering, fictitious, an actress he had seen years ago in a play, a character he had once read of in a book. How extraordinarily unreal it all seemed!

He knew now he was glad he had not married her. How strange that he ever should have doubted! He felt as if he had waked up from some oppressive dazzling dream. The air about him was fresher and cooler; the sense of uncertainty was gone. Things seemed to have fallen into their proper perspective. Was that exquisite piece of flesh and millinery the woman a man would choose to love and cherish? Would she meet his looks with eyes of quiet truth and faith, and have a soft hand ready to slip into his when the grey days came? No! He knew now! He had seen the real thing.

He felt the grave importance of one who has suddenly increased his fund of experience, his power of comprehension, and walked forward with a firmer step, his head held high. Traversing a dark block and turning a corner, he came suddenly upon the light-pierced, rustling darkness of the plaza. Its tropical trees and plants raised their massy spiked and notched foliage against the great façade of the club, crudely staring at the night with long, lit windows. The sight of the building made the Colonel realize how hungry he was, and he crossed the plaza with hasty strides.

Geraldine Bonner

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