Part 52 (2/2)

They had pa.s.sed members of the Citizens' Patrol on every block, and they found one pacing the plank walk on Russian Hill. He told them that the edict had gone forth that not so much as a candle should be lit in a house that night and that all cooking must be done out-of-doors. The spectacled j.a.p was boiling soup on one of the oil stoves, which he had carried into the garden and half surrounded by a screen. Beside him was what looked like an open newly-dug grave, and the girls, startled, demanded what it meant.

Sugihara, apparently, never smiled, but his eyes flickered. ”Before Cusha and Kuranaga went I made them dig a hole for the silver,” he said.

”It is too heavy for the launch. If we are driven away, I will cut your ancestors from their frames and take them with us.”

”Well, you are a treasure,” said Isabel, with a sigh. ”You shall do nothing but read when you get to the ranch.”

Lady Victoria was pacing slowly up and down the porch, her eyes seldom wandering from the fire. When dinner was ready, she merely shook her head impatiently, and Isabel and her guest sat down in the little tower-room, which was brilliantly illuminated from below. Sugihara had made a very good soup of canned corn and tomatoes and had fried bits of meat and potato. There was little conversation. The dynamiting was now something more than sporadic. The detonations were so terrific that it was not difficult for the San Franciscans to imagine themselves--supposing they had a grain of imagination left--in a besieged city. Isabel suggested, and Anne agreed with her, that they might have been far worse off than they were; nature at her extremest is never so pitiless as the human brute when the l.u.s.t to kill is on him.

Isabel prepared the remains of the feast for Mr. Clatt, and asked Sugihara if he would object to relieving the watch, that the wharfinger might s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours' sleep. There was no longer any danger of fire except from the conflagration itself, and now that the dynamiting had begun in earnest it was possible that the flames would be isolated before midnight.

The j.a.p went off with the dish in one hand and a book in the other, hoping that he would be allowed to light a candle on the launch. He returned in a few moments, and for the first time he was smiling.

”Mr. Clatt will not give up his watch,” he said. ”He says he might miss the chance to put a hole in some--dago (his language was very bad, Miss). He says there's not a wink of sleep in him.”

”No doubt but that he will hold on to it, unless the military step in,”

said Anne. ”Then, I fancy, he would surrender very meekly. They have impressed a good many launches for prisoners and dynamite. But I hope not, for whether the fire comes up the hills or not, there is going to be terrible privation. Heaven knows how many days it will be before we have enough water even to drink, and I heard a little while ago that as soon as food comes in the authorities will establish relief stations, where everybody, from the millionaire to John Chinaman, will have to stand in line and wait for his loaf of bread. Wouldn't it be better for you to go at once?”

”I fancy I can endure as much as any one, and if I am driven from here I will go down to you. I shall go down anyhow when I have seen Mr. Gwynne.

I do not propose to lie in a hammock while several hundred thousand people are sleeping on the ground. What do you take me for?”

”Somehow I don't see you as a nurse, or amusing children, or doling out bread and raiment. You would be much more in the picture encouraging Mr.

Gwynne. However--I am going to impress your linen and a clothes-basket to carry it in. No doubt the philosophical Sugihara will help me carry it to the fort.”

”Take what you like.” Isabel directed her to the linen-closet, and went down to the veranda. She paused abruptly in the doorway. Victoria's face could be seen only in profile, but its expression, as she gazed down upon that tossing twisting furious flame ocean, needed no a.n.a.lytical faculty to interpret. It was voluptuous, ecstatic.

Isabel crossed the porch in a stride.

”What are you thinking of?” she demanded, imperiously.

Victoria did not turn with a start. She did not turn at all. ”I am thinking,” she replied, automatically, as if in obedience to the stronger will--”I am thinking that at last I understand what it is we are so blindly striving for from the hour when we can think at all; what it is--that unsatisfied desire that urges us on and on to so many fatal experiments in the pursuit of happiness. The great goal, the real meaning of our miserable balked mortal existence is not that dancing will-o'-the-wisp we call happiness, for want of a better name. It is Death.”

”Well?” Isabel's voice rose, but she kept the anxiety out of it.

”I cannot imagine anything more delicious,” went on Victoria, in the same low rich tones, ”than to walk straight down those hills and into that sea of flame. I have always admired Empedocles, who cast himself into Etna. Once I saw a friend cremated, and the brief vision of that white incandescence, before the coffin shot down, seemed to me the apotheosis, the voluptuous poetry of death. I could walk down into that colossal furnace without flinching, and I believe that my last moment, as the world disappeared behind me, and those superb flames took me into their embrace, would be one of sublimest ecstasy.”

Isabel caught her by the shoulders and whirled her about. ”Well, you will do nothing of the sort,” she cried, roughly. ”In the first place you couldn't get through the lines, and in the second you are wanted at Fort Mason. Anne is going down with a basket of linen for the poor women who will be confined to-night. You are an uncommonly strong woman, and you can make use of every bit of your strength. Anne and the Leader are frail creatures, and no one else that I know of is going. They need you, and you will soon have your hands so full that your head will be purged of this nonsense. It is the fire l.u.s.t--the same l.u.s.t that incited a boy to-day to attempt to set fire to a house in this district that he might watch the whole city burn. I hope your egoism exploded in that climax.

Here comes Anne. You must go.”

”Very well,” said Victoria, suddenly dazed, and with a will relaxed after the long tension of the day. ”I will go.”

”Where are your jewels?”

”Down in the bank.”

”Well, gather up any other small things you treasure, and either conceal them about you or give them to me.”

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