BLIX
by Frank Norris
1899
Chapter I
IT had just struck nine from the cuckoo clock that hung over the
mantelpiece in the dining-room, when Victorine brought in the
halved watermelon and set it in front of Mr. Bessemer's plate.
Then she went down to the front door for the damp, twisted roll of
the Sunday morning's paper, and came back and rang the breakfastbell for the second time.
As the family still hesitated to appear, she went to the bay
window at the end of the room, and stood there for a moment
looking out. The view was wonderful. The Bessemers lived upon
the Washington Street hill, almost at its very summit, in a flat
in the third story of the building. The contractor had been
clever enough to reverse the position of kitchen and dining-room,
so that the latter room was at the rear of the house. From its
window one could command a sweep of San Francisco Bay and the
Contra Costa shore, from Mount Diablo, along past Oakland,
Berkeley, Sausalito, and Mount Tamalpais, out to the Golden Gate,
the Presidio, the ocean, and even--on very clear days--to the
Farrallone islands.
For some time Victorine stood looking down at the great expanse of
land and sea, then faced about with an impatient exclamation.
On Sundays all the week-day regime of the family was deranged, and
breakfast was a movable feast, to be had any time after seven or
before half-past nine. As Victorine was pouring the ice-water,
Mr. Bessemer himself came in, and addressed himself at once to his
meal, without so much as a thought of waiting for the others.
He was a little round man. He wore a skull-cap to keep his bald
spot warm, and read his paper through a reading-glass. The
expression of his face, wrinkled and bearded, the eyes shadowed by
enormous gray eyebrows, was that of an amiable gorilla.
Bessemer was one of those men who seem entirely disassociated from
their families. Only on rare and intense occasions did his
paternal spirit or instincts assert themselves. At table he
talked but little. Though devotedly fond of his eldest daughter,
she was a puzzle and a stranger to him. His interests and hers
were absolutely dissimilar. The children he seldom spoke to but
to reprove; while Howard, the son, the ten-year-old and terrible
infant of the household, he always referred to as "that boy."
He was an abstracted, self-centred old man, with but two hobbies-homoeopathy and the mechanism of clocks. But he had a strange way
of talking to himself in a low voice, keeping up a running, halfwhispered comment upon his own doings and actions; as, for
instance, upon this occasion: "Nine o'clock--the clock's a little
fast. I think wind my watch. No, I've forgotten my watch.
Watermelon this morning, eh? Where's a knife? have a little
salt. Victorine's forgot the spoons--ha, here's a spoon! No, a knife I want."
After he had finished his watermelon, and while Victorine was
pouring his coffee, the two children came in, scrambling to their
places, and drumming on the table with their knife-handles.
The son and heir, Howard, was very much a boy. He played baseball
too well to be a very good boy, and for the sake of his own selfrespect maintained an attitude of perpetual revolt against his
older sister, who, as much as possible, took the place of the
mother, long since dead. Under her supervision, Howard blacked
his own shoes every morning before breakfast, changed his
underclothes twice a week, and was dissuaded from playing with the
dentist's son who lived three doors below and who had St. Vitus'
dance.
His little sister was much more tractable. She had been
christened Alberta, and was called Snooky. She promised to be
pretty when she grew up, but was at this time in that distressing
transitional stage between twelve and fifteen; was long-legged,
and endowed with all the awkwardness of a colt. Her shoes were
still innocent of heels; but on those occasions when she was
allowed to wear her tiny first pair of corsets she was exalted to
an almost celestial pitch of silent ecstasy. The clasp of the
miniature stays around her small body was like the embrace of a
little lover, and awoke in her ideas that were as vague, as
immature and unformed as the straight little figure itself.
When Snooky and Howard had seated themselves, but one chair--at
the end of the breakfast-table, opposite Mr. Bessemer--remained
vacant.
"Is your sister--is Miss Travis going to have her breakfast now?
Is she got up yet?" inquired Victorine of Howard and Snooky, as
she pushed the cream pitcher out of Howard's reach. It was
significant of Mr. Bessemer's relations with his family that
Victorine did not address her question to him.
"Yes, yes, she's coming," said both the children, speaking
together; and Howard added: "Here she comes now."
Travis Bessemer came in. Even in San Francisco, where all women
are more or less beautiful, Travis passed for a beautiful girl.
She was young, but tall as most men, and solidly, almost heavily
built. Her shoulders were broad, her chest was deep, her neck
round and firm. She radiated health; there were exuberance and
vitality in the very touch of her foot upon the carpet, and there
was that cleanliness about her, that freshness, that suggested a
recent plunge in the surf and a "constitutional" along the beach.
One felt that here was stamina, good physical force, and fine
animal vigor. Her arms were large, her wrists were large, and her
fingers did not taper. Her hair was of a brown so light as to be
almost yellow. In fact, it would be safer to call it yellow from
the start--not golden nor flaxen, but plain, honest yellow. The
skin of her face was clean and white, except where it flushed to a
most charming pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks. Her lips were
full and red, her chin very round and a little salient. Curiously
enough, her eyes were small--small, but of the deepest, deepest
brown, and always twinkling and alight, as though she were just
ready to smile or had just done smiling, one could not say which.
And nothing could have been more delightful than these sloe-brown,
glinting little eyes of hers set off by her white skin and yellow
hair.
She impressed one as being a very normal girl: nothing morbid
about her, nothing nervous or false or overwrought. You did not
expect to find her introspective. You felt sure that her mental
life was not at all the result of thoughts and reflections
germinating from within, but rather of impressions and sensations
that came to her from without. There was nothing extraordinary
about Travis. She never had her vagaries, was not moody-depressed one day and exalted the next. She was just a good,
sweet, natural, healthy-minded, healthy-bodied girl, honest,
strong, self-reliant, and good-tempered.
Though she was not yet dressed for church, there was style in her
to the pointed tips of her patent-leather slippers. She wore a
heavy black overskirt that rustled in delicious fashion over the
colored silk skirt beneath, and a white shirt-waist, striped
black, and starched to a rattling stiffness. Her neck was swathed
tight and high with a broad ribbon of white satin, while around
her waist, in place of a belt, she wore the huge dog-collar of a
St. Bernard--a chic little idea which was all her own, and of
which she was very proud.
She was as trig and trim and crisp as a crack yacht: not a pin was
loose, not a seam that did not fall in its precise right line; and
with every movement there emanated from her a barely perceptible
delicious feminine odor--an odor that was in part perfume, but
mostly a subtle, vague smell, charming beyond words, that came
from her hair, her neck, her arms--her whole sweet personality.
She was nineteen years old.
She sat down to breakfast and ate heartily, though with her
attention divided between Howard--who was atrociously bad, as
usual of a Sunday morning--and her father's plate. Mr. Bessemer
was as like as not to leave the table without any breakfast at all
unless his fruit, chops, and coffee were actually thrust under his
nose.
"Papum," she called, speaking clear and distinct, as though to the
deaf, "there's your coffee there at your elbow; be careful, you'll
tip it over. Victorine, push his cup further on the table. Is it
strong enough for you, Papum'"
"Eh? Ah, yes--yes--yes," murmured the old man, looking vaguely
about him; "coffee, to be sure"--and he emptied the cup at a
single draught, hardly knowing whether it was coffee or tea. "Now
take a roll," he ...
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