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This story was written from the Photoplay of
BERNARD McCONVILLE
To live in the heart of the city kills one's identity ; to exist in the city's suburbs buries it. Why, I have known two men, who were thrown together by the quick camaraderie of the sea, on an ocean liner — strangers who had never set eves on each other — and it turned out that their backyards were separated by only an inch-board of fence. They had been neighbors for twenty years. And a man can turn from brown to gray so quietly, in a suburb, that no one will notice it. A bit uncanny, this living death, if one cares to lead it. Better to give him the tira gracia — the mercy-shot — and be done with it.
John Remington, for instance, was a perfect exemplar of suburban immurement. By changing his sex and heightening his privet hedge a bit, he could have passed for a nun. He came home by the trolley, ate his supper, played with his children, kist his wife, and went to bed. Samuel Pepys, on his good behavior, could not have done better. He also paid his taxes, cut his lawn, and cultivated a kitchen garden on moonlit nights. But he and his red-lipped, smiling wife knew no one and apparently cared less. •
This is not a story at all, you say — 'tis as dry as the old entry clerk's long columns of figures ; it's what happens to you and me. Very well, then, I know John Remington ; he told me his story, and in the telling got beneath the skin, so that I saw the raw wound in his heart. And from every heart, no matter how still, nor how commonplace, there leads an artery straight to yours; that's
what makes every beat — every cious thins:
heartife — a pretale worth tell
112
a
ing till the world's end.
Remington's business was real estate — the leasing of water-front factories and warehouses — and this led him, like a mole, thru blind alleys and into the gas-lit haunts of the tangled streets fronting the bay.
The dwellers on the "B'arbary Coast" are a law unto themselves. The saloons, dives and sailors' slop-shops are rotting with age and decrepitude. Some of its