Part 38 (1/2)

”I replied that I must finish my law studies with Judge Leslie first, and have some little practice under his direction; that I intended to go in for politics, but that for some years all the power over men I could acquire would be through the law--and I had remarkable chances for contact in and about Rosewater; where, moreover, if they learned who I was it would not matter much. It might be quite otherwise in the city.

To this they agreed: that is to say, that I should remain in Rosewater for six months or a year longer; but they asked me to promise that if any great emergency arose, in which they believed I could be of use, I would come at their call. And I promised.”

He rose and moved restlessly about the room. ”Upon my word!” he exclaimed; and Isabel, who had not taken her eyes off him, although he had addressed the greater part of his talk to the fire, noted that he was paler than usual--and that his eyes were very bright; ”upon my word, I really do feel more elated than on that night at Arcot. That small devoted band of men!--most of them with millions they might take to the most civilized capitals of the world and spend in splendid enjoyment--I never have met such patriotism! It is magnificent! And to find it out here in this stranded city--that fascinates the very heart out of you, by-the-way--I don't know that I wonder so much--I believe I shall succ.u.mb myself in time--it is like being on another planet. At any rate I hated myself to-night for any sickness of spirit I may have permitted to linger--for a while my very personality seemed to melt into what may prove an even greater cause than all that appears on the surface. The present California may be merely the nucleus of a great future Western civilization, so unlike the Eastern that no doubt it will dissever itself in time and breed still wider divergences; until the old generic term American will no longer apply to both. Moreover, it already feels that it owns the Pacific, and faces the Orient alone.

And to rebuild this city--you have seen the Burnham plans--transform it into the most beautiful city of the modern world--to give it a great, instead of a merely brilliant and erratic civilization--a perfect administration--what dreamers! What imagination! It is an inspiration to come into contact with an idealism that money, and power, and daily contact with the mean and base in human nature--”

”I could love you!” cried Isabel. ”If you say any more, I believe I shall kiss you again.”

”If you do,” said Gwynne, deliberately, ”I shall neither pinch you nor push you away. But you may regret it, nevertheless.”

He threw himself once more into his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. ”It is an astonis.h.i.+ng fact,” he said--”This--I was reading the history of the Kearney riots, only the other day. The commentator was very severe on the Irish and German element that imperilled the city for purely personal reasons; that was responsible for the most remarkable and reprehensible of all the State Const.i.tutions. That was not quite thirty years ago. Whether any of these men, who are mainly of Irish or German descent, are the sons or grandsons of any of those old Sand-lot agitators I have no means of knowing; probably not, their fortunes were no doubt already in the making, and the founders had graduated from the cla.s.s that went to sand-lot meetings and shouted, 'The Chinese must go.'

But it is certainly one of the oddest evolutions in history that it should be the descendants of that foreign element alone that take any real interest in this city; that are ardent to reform it, beautify it; that are willing to devote their time and a good part of their fortunes to that end. So far, although I have met in the clubs many old gentlemen of charming manners and prehistoric descent--that is from '49, or even the more pretentious East and South; and, at all sorts of places, their sons--who are either building up new fortunes or spending old ones--there is not one, so far as my observation serves me, that has lifted a finger to fling off this octopus. Hofer says they have even ceased to grumble. Their incomes are a.s.sured. Some are merely well off, others immensely wealthy--with a sufficiency invested elsewhere. All can command about the same amount of luxury, however their establishments may vary in splendor. And nothing can exceed the luxury of their Clubs.

The older men at least--and they are not so old--have subsided into a slothful content that makes them a cross between a higher sort of carnivorous animal and the tacit supporters of the criminals in power.

These friends of mine, whose fathers may or may not have listened to Kearney in the Sand-lots, are worth the whole lot of your ancient aristocracy--hybrid, anyhow--and if I do 'hang out my s.h.i.+ngle' here in San Francisco, they are the only ones I care anything about knowing.

They are the only real Americans I have met, for that matter--according to your own standards--” He broke off abruptly and leaned forward, smiling at his companion. ”I meant to ask you as soon as we got home to tell me all about your first great party in your beloved city, but I have been led away by my natural egotism. You were, by general acclaim, I fancy, the beauty of the evening. Did you enjoy it all as much as you expected?”

”I fancy I should have enjoyed it more if I had been up-stairs with you.

I found it more of an effort than I had imagined to make conversation with those young men. Of course I enjoyed being openly admired and besought for dances. Who wouldn't? But I never deluded myself for a moment that I was anything approaching those old-time belles. As the conditions have pa.s.sed away, however, my vanity doesn't suffer. At all events I am going to carry out my program and rush about to everything that is given this week, to forget Rosewater, every aspiration, all that ever happened to me. Every girl should have one girl's good time, and although mine is belated, it would be silly to let it pa.s.s. Besides, I am curious to see if I really can--well, delude myself.”

”So am I! I have an idea you won't. You are quite different from all those girls, who are at the same time the brightest and the most frivolous, the most feminine and the most modern, the most daring and the most indifferent, I have ever met. Those that have been as carefully brought up as our ninetieth cousin, Inez Trennahan, are simply moulds for the future to run into. There were several young persons that looked as if they might go pretty far in a conservatory--perhaps that is the reason Mrs. Hofer has none. She appears to have Irish virtue in excess, and I expect the larky would get short shrift from her. But you--you are quite unlike them all.”

”I am a Californian,” said Isabel, defiantly.

”Yes, but of a very exclusive sort--to say nothing of the peculiar circ.u.mstances that were bound to breed seriousness of mind. And you have quite a distinguished collection of real ancestors, and intellect instead of mere cleverness. It is only once in a while that your--let me whisper it--Western frankness and ingenuousness leap out--the impulsiveness, the electric pa.s.sion. When a certain amount of readjustment has gone on inside of you and your more natural elements work their way up and take possession, I really believe I shall fall in love with you, and marry you out of hand--if you remain as beautiful as you are to-night.”

”All right,” said Isabel, pretending to stifle a yawn. ”That would be interesting. All the clocks are booming something. Let us go out and see if the sun is rising.”

She wrapped herself in her cloak once more, and they climbed to the crest of the hill and watched the sun rise behind the Berkeley mountains and bathe San Francisco in trembling fire. It routed what was left of the fog, although for a time the walls and waters of the Golden Gate looked darker than before, and Tamalpais was a mountain of onyx. In a few moments the smoke that wrapped the San Francisco day in a brown perpetual haze began to ascend first from the little chimneys and then from the great stacks. But until then every steeple, every tower, the great piles of stone and brick in the valley, the old gardens full of eucalyptus-trees and weeping willows, the strange a.s.sortment of architectures on n.o.b Hill, even the rows of houses on the tapering half-circle of hills beyond the valley, miles away, stood out as bright and sharp and shadowless as if caught and imprisoned in a crystal ball.

It was the drifting smoke that seemed to bind all together and make the city fit for humanity.

Gwynne pointed to a spot far to the southeast, in the valley between Market Street--the wide diagonal highway that cut the city in two, and ran from the ferries almost to the foot of Twin Peaks--and the high mound known as Rincon Hill. ”There,” he said, ”are the hovels and shops that cover the block belonging to my mother and myself, and that is to make us rich. Half is practically sold, and the proceeds, and the money raised on the other half, will erect a building that is to cost some two hundred thousand dollars. The insurance rates will be enormous, but even so the income should be really a great one. If all goes well, the foundations--of reinforced concrete, although they still laugh at earthquakes--but Mr. Colton is a monster of caution--will be laid in about six weeks, and then I shall watch the steel framework rise with a very considerable interest.”

”That means the beginnings of a millionaire. Do you really care so much to be rich?”

”I know the value of money,” said Gwynne, dryly. ”I have no intention of buying men after the fas.h.i.+on of your friend Tom Colton, but it is a mighty good background for personality. Now you had better go in and get some beauty sleep.”

x.x.xV

Miss Montgomery called as Isabel and Gwynne were sitting down to luncheon at two o'clock. She was not in the best of tempers, for she had renewed her youth briefly the night before, her old admirers had shown her much gallant attention, and if she had gone home with a song in her heart and a flame in her eyes, she had been but the more conscious of the wooden spoon upon awakening. She had risen with no very keen regret for her vanished claims upon men long since married and consoled, for she had never been what is called a marrying girl, but with her mind inclined to gloomy meditation upon lost opportunities far more dear. She had never ceased to believe that, the fates conspiring, she might have become one of the great musicians of the world; for although she was willing to admit the defect of will that had reduced her to the ranks, she had not grasped the historic fact that the born artist accomplishes his fulfilment in spite of all obstacles, imagined or real. Her obstacles had been purely sentimental, for her family were commonplace selfish people not worth considering, and, her endowment being just short of distinguished, a misplaced sense of duty and the stultifying influences of her home were responsible for her profession as caterer at the age of thirty-six. Her people had belonged to the type that held in aristocratic disgust the ”woman who did things,” ”showed herself to the public”; moreover, as Isabel had told Gwynne, they wors.h.i.+pped the flower-like artistic young creature, and would let neither the world nor man have aught of her. She was twenty-eight when her family died, and knowing that as a music-teacher she could not hope to compete with finished instructors, she had looked ever her other talents and found that the only one which promised immediate returns was a certain knack for sauces and sweets. All her friends rushed to her a.s.sistance, and while broiling over a hot stove, stirring jam, wished that dear Anne were not so proud and would accept a check without any fuss. But Miss Montgomery quickly graduated from this amateur stage. She set herself deliberately to work to become a _chef_, and, from offerings to the Womans' Exchange, she was soon supplying choice dishes for luncheons, and finally entire dinners. She had a warm friend in the then Leader of San Francisco Society, and her own cleverness and indomitable perseverance did the rest. She sometimes reflected that if she had found the iron in her nature sooner she might have been fiddling in Vienna; but perhaps her highest gift had really been culinary, perhaps she needed the enthusiastic encouragement which she found on all sides when she embraced that appealing art; at all events she succeeded, was educating a promising orphan relative, and laying by for her old age.

Another friend, no doubt, was the ma.s.sive family silver which had escaped the wreck. Many of the new people, Mrs. Hofer among others, did not care for the responsibility of a luxury so tempting to thieves, and for which they had no innate predilection; they were more than willing to pay a reasonable sum for ancestral decorations upon state occasions, and to dine from artistic plated ware meanwhiles. Not but that there was a sufficiency of solid bullion to be seen on many a San Francisco table, and there were several golden services in the city; but rich people have all sorts of economical kinks, and Miss Montgomery found this one profitable. Another thing, no doubt, that had contributed to her success, was the business-like att.i.tude she had a.s.sumed as soon as she felt herself a professional. She accompanied her refections to the kitchen door, although the front was always open to her, and philosophically pocketed the customary tip.

And she had struggled valiantly against becoming an embittered old maid; in the main, had succeeded. To the world, at least, she rarely turned a scowl, and she had never lost a friend. But there were times when she hated her parents. Since Isabel's return she had had more than one rebellious hour, for Isabel had taken her life in both hands, snapped her fingers at restraints and small conventions, and, so far, at least, had made good. And the younger girl's development, to one that had known her always, was extraordinary. On the other hand, she exulted in the prospect of a member of the old set coming prominently to the front once more. She had spent a week with Isabel at Old Inn, and received a certain measure of confidence. She hoped that Isabel would really make a fortune, and urged her to follow Gwynne's example and put up a modern building on her San Francisco property. Money was easy to raise, for change and improvement possessed San Franciscans like an epidemic, and few but were not anxious to convert ”South of Market Street” into a great business district. Although she was grateful to the new people, particularly Ada Hofer, who, to use the lady's own expression ”made things hum,” in her heart she disliked the breed, and deeply resented the fact that the old set, even those by no means impoverished, to-day formed little more than a background. They were to be seen everywhere, they were still a power in a way, but they were by no means prosilient.

Therefore, as she sat in the old dark dining-room on Russian Hill and listened to Isabel's praise of the interest that Hofer and his set took in the political and artistic regeneration of the city, she was moved to break out tartly:

”Are you giving them credit for altruism? They have their millions invested here, naturally they crave a reasonable prospect of retaining them--also of increasing them by filling Fairmont, and other projected caravansaries for the rich, with winter tourists from the East; possibly Europe. They not only fear the corporation cormorants--whom they can never reach so long as the Board of Supervisors is controlled by the Boss--the Boss himself and all his devouring horde, but the greatest menace of all: that San Francisco will in time, and before very long, be owned body and soul by the labor-unions. Then, even if they managed to save their wealth, the city would be intolerable for the socially ambitious or even the merely refined.”