Come and Find Me

A crisis in the financial world of California kept the men who were employed in the Palmas Valley Bank of Valdivia hard at work for several hours after statutory closing time. Nathaniel Mar never came home in these days without bringing a black leather bag full of papers, to work over in the dining-room. He had his big desk in there because Mrs. Mar thought it out of place in the parlor, though the parlor was the quietest room in the house and the least used, whereas the dining-room was the most frequented quarter of the modest establishment, and the very place where both the big desk, and the big man who sat before it, were most in the way. For here the family not only ate their meals, but here, in Mrs. Mar's rocking-chair, the screams of the infant daughter were drowned in milk or overcome by sleep; here the two small boys were taught letters and manners; here, on their mother's work-table, was reared the ever-renewed mountain of "mending," and these the walls that oftener than any others looked down upon the mistress's struggles with the "single-handed help"a succession of Irish or Scandinavian girls who came, saw, conquered some of the china, and departed. This concentration of family life in the dining-room was not peculiar to the Mars. Valdiviaall California, indeed all the towns of all the northern and western states, were full of houses where the shut-up parlors bore dumb witness to a social habit that was become mere tradition. The forebears of these people, especially those German, French, or Spanish, had need of a room where they might receive their friends and talk to them at their ease. But in their descendants this much chastened need had taken on the air of an indulgence, and was shrinking out of sight. It is true that even the less well-to-do, summoning all their strength, sometimes gave "parties," but few houses encouraged the cheerful custom of having friends "drop in." And so, no more useless room in any dwelling than the parlor. Yet so great was the power of this tradition of a lost hospitality, that people who had almost nothing else over and above the grimmest necessities, still had their parlor. Discomfort and cramping of every kind was stoically borne that the sacred precincts might be preserved inviolate. For what? Nobody ever asked. So then, in the dining-room, sat Nathaniel Mar even on this fine Sunday afternoon, when, as a rule, the desk was shut and the owner gone to potter in the garden. But the exigency was great, and for once even the Seventh Day had brought no rest. As he sat there, bent over the desk, the light fell with such harshness on the man's foreshortened features, under the unkempt mop of prematurely graying hair, that you would not easily have believed him to be under forty odd. He was not yet thirty-five. The deep line that dropped from the side of each nostril, to lose itself in the heavy, dark mustache, gave to his face a stricken and weariful air. And he sat crooked, with one high shoulder more hunched than the other. You saw the reason of that when he got up to shut out the sounds of pan-banging, and fire-irons rattling, that came in through the inch of open door opposite the one leading into the hall. Before rising, Mar had felt for his walking-stick, and any one who noticed how heavily he bore upon it in limping over the worn carpet, knew why it was that one of his great shoulders was pushed awry.

Dettagli