44CHAPTER III
In that immortal “middle period” of San-Francisco, when the gay mining camp was building toward a stable adjustment of society, when the wild, the merry, the dissolute and the brave who built the city were settling down to found houses and cultivate respectability in face of a constantly resurgent past—in those days none who pretended to eminence in the city but knew the sisters Sturtevant. Members of that aristocracy which dwelt on Rincon Hill, their names and fames quite eclipsed those of their quiet, self-effacing parents. Although they never called it that, their establishment amounted to a salon. Also, they never called their circle Bohemian, yet it was tinged with an easy view on the conventionalities, a leaning toward art and the things of art, which meant Bohemia in the time when that word was of good repute. Spain, perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the blood, the impulse of men who packed45Virgil with their bean-bags on the Overland journey, conspired already to make San Francisco a city of artists. She had developed her two poets, singers whose notes had sounded round the world; the painters had followed. The stir of a new life in art, a life which was never quite to reach fulfilment, blew in the bay air.
Centre for those awakening young painters, those minor poets who carried in weaker hands the torches of the two giant pioneers, was the house of the Sturtevant sisters, the one a wit, the other a beauty. Heaven was not grudging with gifts to these two. Alice, the wit, had also a hidden kind of beauty which was not to be taken in on first sight, but which, perceived by the painters of that set, made some of them swear that she was the real beauty of the two. Matilda, the beauty, had if not wit a sprightly feminine fancy. Then, too, her gentleness of judgment, her sweetness of intention, and her illogic of loyalty, gave her point of view a humorous quality. Her circle, confident in her good-nature, was forever leading her on, by this device or that, to exhibit what John Stallard, the novelist, called her “comedy of charity.” O’Ryan, that great,46glowing failure whose name will outlive the fame of the successful in San Francisco, used to play ingenious jokes upon it. O’Ryan was possibly the only man of any time who could draw the sting of a practical joke.
They dwelt, twin-regnant over this world of theirs, in sisterly harmony. Stallard declared always that a final gift of fate and the gods preserved them to harmony: their tastes in men differed. They had choice enough, God wot—poets and novelists struggling on the verge of fame; attractive, irresponsible, magnetic journalists, destined never to arrive anywhere, but following a flowery path along which a woman might smile; sons of new-rich millionaires who followed and backed and corrupted the artists of that budding Paris which never blossomed; two painters, among many, who got both fame and wealth before they were done.
In his later years, one asked Tyson the English novelist, connoisseur of women if there ever was one, whom he esteemed the prettiest and whom the wittiest among the women he had known and studied.
“For wit, Lady Vera Loudon,” he said, “and after her, a quite remarkable woman I met47in San Francisco out on the West Coast of America—of all places.” Tradition has enlarged this reply to make Matilda Sturtevant his prettiest as Alice was his wittiest.
Matilda’s fresh beauty of the devil, her full yet delicate beauty of the twenties and early thirties, live in the galleries of Europe. The painters all had their try at her; she lived in creation which ran the line between miniatures and heroic canvases. Lars Wark, perhaps the least considered of all her painter friends, is the one that triumphed most of all. Who does not know his Launcelot and Enid? The Enid, of a beauty so intelligent, so wistful and so good—she is Matilda Sturtevant, hardly idealized.
These twin graces married within two years of each other. Of course, they chose strangely. Matilda, whose beauty might have graced the head of the table in any one of three gaudy mansions on Nob Hill, chose Edward C. Tiffany, attorney, politician in a small but honorable way, man about town—and much older than she. Alice, following quietly, accepted Billy Gray, journalist—a clever reporter with no possibilities beyond that; a gentleman, it is true, and a man of likeable disposition, but48on the whole the least desirable of all her followers.
Billy and Alice Gray lived out the three years which were all they ever had of matrimony, in a Latin quarter garret, transformed into a studio. The intellectual centre of San Francisco shifted to that garret; the gay, the witty and the brilliant still followed wherever Alice Gray might go. Billy, a type of the journalist in the time when journalism meant the careless life, left her a great deal alone after the honeymoon. On his side, there was no conscious neglect in this; on her side, there was no reproach. It was just their way of living. He adored her with a quiet, steady flame of affection which was too fine to degenerate into mere uxoriousness. Already, he was a little too fond of his liquor—a peccadillo which attracted little attention in that age of the careless city. This troubled Alice Gray less than it would have troubled her mother. In the periods when she pulled herself up, she worried to think how little she did care about it. In fact, his remorseful recovery from his debauches had become her occasion for pouring out upon him the mother in her. She reveled49guiltily in this singular sacrament of her singular love.
After three years Alice Gray gave birth to a daughter—and died within a fortnight afterward. In all truth, I may say that life, for Billy Gray, ended that day. To lose this tenth muse—I can think of nothing more complete in tragedy except the loss of her father of Marjorie Fleming. And he, like Marjorie Fleming’s father, spoke her name no more—until near the end. When after twenty years, his own time came, Stallard, LeBrun the poet and Lars Wark gathered to pay him their last respects. LeBrun came all the way from New Orleans, and Stallard delayed his journey to the South Seas. They had drifted away from him, such had become his ways and habits; they came back in honor of the woman who illuminated their youth. So long and so powerful was the influence of her who never wrote a line except in air and memory.
Billy Gray went on living for the sake of his daughter; but he lived like a man driven of the furies. He became one of those restless, wandering journalists whose virtue to their newspapers is their utter abandonment50of courage and enterprise, whose defect is their love of drink.
Eleanor, they called the baby—Alice had chosen that name “in case it is a girl.” Mrs. Tiffany, childless herself, played second mother during the first three years of Eleanor’s healthy and contented little life. Perceiving the growth of bad habits in that broken brother-in-law, strong and generous enough to face her perceptions, she called him back from a desk in Los Angeles, where, gossip said, he was drinking himself to death, and gave him over his daughter to keep. From that time on, during a succession of removes which took him from Vancouver on the north to Los Angeles on the south, Billy Gray had establishment after establishment, housekeeper after housekeeper for this daughter. Her face and ways, the dim shadowing of her mother’s, were the only hold on reality which he kept.
She grew up a rather grave little thing, hardly pretty at all until she turned fifteen, when she showed signs that the beauty of her aunt, if not the wit of her mother, might live again in her. Of wit, it seemed, she had little; neither did she show any great talents in her irregular schooling. Her longest term51at any one school was three years with the Franciscan Sisters in Santa Barbara. They, Spanish gentlewomen mainly, are the arbiters and conservators of old fashioned manners on the West Coast. Of them it is said, as it is said of certain sisterhoods in France, that one may know their graduates by the way they keep their combs and brushes. In two years Eleanor absorbed something of their grave gentility from these Spanish women. Little else she got from that education, seeing that she was a Protestant and studied neither catechism nor church doctrine. She did, indeed, totter once on the brink of Rome—even dared speak to her father about it. He accepted the situation so carelessly and gave his assent so easily that she was a little hurt. But the next day, he quizzed her about the church and its doctrines. Like a good lawyer, he slipped in the crucial question of his cross-examination between two blind ones.
“All who die outside of the church go to Hell, don’t they?” he asked.
“Sister Sulpicia says so.”
“Then your grandmother” (Mrs. Sturtevant had just died) “is in Hell?”
He pursued the line no further; he never52needed to; and after a time the storm of doctrine died down in her. That phase of life left another effect on her beside her manners—a mark common enough among Protestant women reared in the shadow of the Catholic Church. Outside its pale by belief, she clung to a few of its sacramentals for pet superstitions, and to a few of its observances for her consolation in trouble and her expression in happiness.
She was sixteen, and about to graduate from a Seminary in Oakland, when her call came to her. In one moment, the secret of her father’s long absence became plain; and her whole way of life changed.
Billy Gray had drifted back to the city of his beginnings and happiness; was writing hack editorials and paragraphs for the little weeklies which so infested San Francisco. She knew that their fortunes were low, that only her inheritance, left in trust by her grandparents, kept them moving. Also, a dim suspicion which she had held of her father for years was taking shape in her mind—too young that mind, yet, for any very strong belief in human conduct not written in the tables of the law or in the Etiquette Book.53
The current which fused these amorphic thoughts was generated in the most commonplace manner. By custom, she went to the seminary on Monday morning, staying there until Friday evening. It happened that the death of a teacher made Friday an unexpected holiday. Returning on Thursday afternoon, she found the house locked. She remembered that this was “make-up day” at the weekly which took most of her father’s work; he must be in the office. She hesitated, wondering whether to telephone for the key; decided to walk down town, since it was a beaming, windless afternoon.
She came about a corner of Montgomery Street, turned in toward the office ofThe Whale, and ran into the environs of a gathering city crowd. The men were straining over backs and shoulders to see; the women were pressing their hands convulsively to their faces with pity and disgust.
“What’s the answer?” some one called from the fringe.
“A drunk,” came a voice from within, “plain drunk.” The police arrived just then, and cleared a way; through the rift they made, she saw them lift—Billy Gray, her father.54
In the limpness and horror of this, her first crisis, she did nothing, said nothing; only stood there. Presently, she was aware that a workman in soiled overalls had joined the policemen.
“Now that’s all right,” he was saying, “he’s only dead to the world, making no trouble for nobody. He works forThe Whaleup above; what’s the good to pinch him?” “The Whale?” asked one of the policemen; and hesitated on the word. In quick decision, then, he whirled upon the crowd, pushed it back, cleared a space. The other policeman and the man in the soiled overalls—he was foreman ofThe Whale—picked up Billy Gray, who was turning and mumbling feebly, and started to carry him upstairs. A sudden impulse of her limbs, an instinct independent of her will, drew her toward them. The policeman, clearing away the crowd, laid hand upon her.
“You’ll have to get back little girl!” he said.
She looked him in the eye; the sudden abandonment to her shame seemed to lift and to exalt her; afterward, shuddering over that day, she still remembered a certain perverse pleasure in this moment. And she spoke loud, so loud that all the crowd might hear.55
“He is my father!”
The policeman gave way; she hurried up the stairs. The bearers of Billy Gray were resting on the top of the first flight. They had braced him up against the banisters and were trying to rub sense back into him. She addressed herself straight to the foreman.
“Does this happen often?” she asked.
A good natured and communicative person, he was also enough touched by his importance as Good Samaritan to answer the question of a stray little girl.
“Lord yes!” he replied. “Every pay day nowadays. Used to be the brightest man in the business, too.”
Then as she stood there, blown by all the strong cross-winds of the world, Marshall the editor, who knew Eleanor, came hurrying down the stairs. He saw that wreckage, grown familiar now to them all, saw the girl standing white of face beside the balustrade; the situation came over him at once. He opened the door, drew in both the intoxicated Billy Gray and his daughter. Half an hour later, when Billy could walk a little—it was a dead, nerveless intoxication with him nowadays—Eleanor and the foreman took him home in a cab.56
In that long day and night, Eleanor strung together a thousand half-forgotten incidents, neglects and irregularities of life, and perceived the truth which her whole world had been in conspiracy to keep from her. Out of the cross-blowing impulses of an immaturity which was still half childhood—self pity, shame, heroic pride in her own tragedy, passionate hatreds of a world which harbors such things—she came to a resolve in whose very completeness she was happy for a time. When, before breakfast, she burst into Mattie Tiffany’s boudoir, she had a saintly radiance in her face. The elder woman, advised by the first words that Eleanor knew, took the little, cold body into bed with her, petted her back to something like calm. Storm followed the calm; Eleanor went all to pieces in a burst of passionate crying.
After she had recovered a little, her purpose came out of her. Considering her years, she said it all quite simply and undramatically. It was her business to be with her father. Her mother would have wished it so. She was going to leave school. That was her work.
Mattie Tiffany, with her passion for picturesque philanthropies, knew right well that57she had neglected somewhat the plain, unpicturesque philanthropy which lay close to her hand. She had neither the heart nor the conscience to deny Eleanor this sacrifice. In that hour, there grew up between the childless aunt and the motherless niece an understanding which those three years of first infancy, when Eleanor had lain on her breast like a daughter, had never brought at all.
In three months more, during which time Billy Gray reformed, lapsed, reformed, lapsed again, the wiser head of Judge Tiffany found the way. The Sturtevant estate, nearly fifty thousand dollars in all, lay in his hands as trustee. Upon Eleanor’s majority, it was to be divided, one third accruing to her, the surviving grandchild, and two-thirds to Mattie Tiffany.
Of late, Judge Tiffany had been turning his mind toward the Santa Clara Valley fruit farms, and especially toward the Santa Lucia tract. He had made the struggle with his own world and lost; that is another story. At sixty-eight, life held little for him except an easy descent into the grave after a career in which he had played only too little. That leisurely style of farming, which would permit him to58keep an eye on his dwindling law practice, attracted him. And nothing, it seemed to him, would better further the intention, now awakened in all of them, to do something for Billy Gray. He bought, therefore, two tracts, already planted and bearing in diversified fruits; one of forty acres, with a little cottage home, for Eleanor; the other of eighty acres, with a large bungalow, for himself.
So far as his intentions toward Billy Gray went, Judge Tiffany made this venture with little hope. Billy Gray had tried the Keeley Cure twice. After each course of treatment, he had “beaten it,” although he must gargle whisky, through a deadly sickness, in order to get back into the habit again. His was that variety of drunkenness which is not only an unnatural thirst, but also a mania to forget. There on the Santa Lucia tract, Billy Gray, sure of a living, might tilt at happiness and success with that independent writing which is the chimera of all newspaper men until the end of their days; and Eleanor might help him make the fight.
The next four years—they were a monotony of variety. For her broken, incompetent father, Eleanor learned the art and practice of59growing apricots and prunes. Lady of her small manor, she made a business of it; got it to pay after the second year. Billy Gray never reformed; no one but Eleanor ever expected that he would. He smuggled whisky in; he stole away to get it; once he led the Judge and Eleanor a chase through his old haunts in San Francisco until they found him, broken all to pieces, in the county hospital.
That incident—it appeared that he had been beaten by a squad of drunken soldiers from the Presidio—was the breaking strain. His constitution gone, his mind and body weakened. For twenty years, no one had ever heard him speak the name of that Saxon Alice whose death was the death of his soul. Now, he began suddenly to babble to his daughter of her mother. In his last delirium, he called her “Alice.”
When he was dead and buried, Eleanor went on for a year through her accustomed routine of the ranch, letting life flow in again. Tired at twenty-two, she overstated the feeling to herself after the manner of youth, and thought that heart and sense and feeling were dead in her.
In all the years of passage from girlhood to60womanhood, she had lived alone with that dipsomaniac, seeing only such society as frequented her aunt’s lawn, and little of that. Books, and such training in life as they give, she had known; but she had never known a flirtation, a follower or a lover. On the day when Bertram Chester went with her to tame the bull, she was as one who steps from the door of a convent.
61CHAPTER IV
As she left the Tiffany gate and emerged into the main road between Santa Clara and Los Gatos, Eleanor raised her serviceable khaki-brown parasol. She was walking directly toward the setting sun, which poured into her eyes; yet she dropped the sunshade behind her head as though to shield herself against an approach from the rear. No one followed; she had walked to the next fence corner before she assured herself of that, dared to shift that feminine buckler against the eye of the sun, to slacken her pace, and to muse on an afternoon whose events, so quiet, so undramatic, and yet so profoundly significant, buzzed still in her head. As she thought on them, other things came into her mind as momentous and worthy of attention before the jump of the great event—that moment alone with Bertram Chester, that panic of unaccountable fear. Slow to anger as much by a native and hidden sweetness as by that surface62control which puzzled her demonstrative Aunt Matilda, she surprised her cheeks burning and her blood beating in her throat.
With this physical agitation came an army of disagreeable and disturbing thoughts. At first they were only recollections of irritations past; the tiny maladjustments of her life; things by which she owed vengeance of slight wrongs. They came together at length, into one great, sore grievance—the forwardness, the utter, mortifying impudence, of Mr. Chester. It was long before she admitted this as a cause of irritation; once admitted, it overshadowed all her other complaints against life.
Timidly, she approached stage by stage that scene on the lawn, that unaccountable moment in the kitchen. Again she saw his great shoulders heave with unnecessary strength at the ridiculous cracker box; again she caught the sense of confinement with a machine of crushing strength and power. It seemed to her that her retina still danced with the impression of him as he turned to face her, as he flashed upon her like a drawn weapon. She found herself looking down at the dusty road; suddenly she grew so sick and faint that the breath deserted her body and she had to lean63against the gate post for support. The touch of it against her body revived her with a start, and brought to her mind the extent and folly of her own imaginings. She pulled herself together and dropped her parasol to shield her face from Maria, who was hurrying over from the kitchen garden.
Life flowed in immediately. A hundred details of a household, of a fruit farm in the picking season, awaited her attention. Her orchard and the Tiffany orchard were conducted together on a kind of a loose co-operative system devised by the Judge to give her the greatest amount of freedom with just as much responsibility as would be good for her. Foreseeing that Alice Sturtevant’s daughter would never live on a farm indefinitely, that marriage or her own kind would claim her in the end, he arranged everything so that her oversight might pass on short notice to Olsen or to himself. In this harvest season, for example, he secured for both farms the cutters and pickers—the hardest problem for the Californian farmer. Also, the fruit went to his own sheds and yards for cutting and drying. He was among the sturdy minority who stood64out against the co-operative driers which had absorbed most of the fruit crop in the Santa Clara Valley. The detail work about her place—such as setting out the fruit boxes, selecting the moment when apricots or pears were ripe for the picking, seeing that the trees, her permanent investment, were not injured by wagon or picker, keeping her own accounts in balance with those of Judge Tiffany—these and a hundred other little things she did herself and did them well. Especially was the up-keep of the orchard her special care; and this she managed with such native mother-sense that one learned in trees might have told just when he crossed the unfenced line from the Gray orchard to the Tiffany orchard.
To-night, Olsen was waiting to know whether she thought that the ten rows of Moor Parks were ready for picking; he had just finished the first crop of the Judge’s Royals and a small gang would be without pressing work on Monday morning. So they walked over the orchard together, pressing a golden ball here and there, and decided that the fruit was ripe and ready. Eleanor summoned Antonio for directions about boxes and ladders. The hen-house had to be inspected, for Eleanor65was fumigating against the pip, brought into the Santa Lucia by an importation of fancy Eastern chickens. To-morrow’s menu of the housekeeper was to be looked after. The things kept her busy until her solitary Sunday evening supper.
Eleanor had dined alone so much that she had quite recovered from any self-pity on that score. Like the daughter of convent manners that she was, she kept up her self-respect by a little ceremony at this meal. She dressed for it usually; at least she put on fresh ribbons and flowers, gave a touch here and there to the table, held Maria to the refinements of service.
However, as she opened her napkin that evening the rush and emotional strain of the day brought a certain flash of introspection. It came first when she lifted her eyes and caught sight of herself in the mirror—dewy eyed, fresh, a pink rose in her hair, a pink ribbon at her throat. What was she, so young, so feminine, doing there, supping alone in state? She remembered the invitation of Lars Wark in Munich; he and his wife, living the life artistic away over there, had sent to ask her that she visit them and share their winter in the studio or their summer on the coast of Brittany.66Why, in the face of that alluring invitation, did she suffer her soul to keep her in such prisons as this? She could afford it; there was no question of money. According to the books she had read, that solitary state belonged to old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age—and she less than twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy and responsibility came together—that moment had stretched itself out to six years. She had lived by it; was living by it now.
In some unaccountable fashion, that picture would intertwine itself with the impression, so new and vivid, which she had received that afternoon. Momentarily, both united to produce one emotion—profound disgust and dislike for the coarseness, the brutality, of male67humanity, which had laid her father out on the pavement for the sport of a mob, which had made this perturbing young man trample on all considerations and delicacies.
“You need not mind about dessert, Maria,” she called out suddenly. She rose, hurried out of doors, tore into the inspection of fruit crates for to-morrow’s picking.
Night, falling with little twilight, as always in those climes, found her still ranging the house and barnyard, the rose incongruously in her hair, the ribbon at her throat. When it was too dark to find employment out of doors, she hurried back to the house, tried to read. But a sense of confinement drove her forth. She started out toward the road, stopped by the hedge gate, sat down finally on a bench under her grape arbor. The leaves and the bunches of swelling fruit hid her from sight of the highway, overshadowed at that point by a great bay tree.
A confusion of voices, masculine and feminine, sounded in the distance. She caught a shrill, rowdy laugh. “The cutting-women and their men,” she thought dimly. That social phenomenon of the picking season, grown accustomed by six years of passing summers68and winters, drew no special attention from her. But the noise continued; it became plain that these reveling laborers were making in her direction. Doubtless, they came from the women’s camp at Judge Tiffany’s. The night was bringing her peace and sleep of the soul after a disturbing day; alone, that raucous noise marred the calm.
She peered idly through the leaves. A half a dozen women, their white dresses making them visible in the dusk, a few men whose forms loomed indistinctly against the edge of the sky, noised past her and were gone down the road. One couple, she perceived, lingered behind. They had reached the shade of the bay tree, were so close that she might have reached out and touched them, before she realized the situation. She was about to call out, to cough, when the man spoke.
“No, I won’t hurt you,” he said, “I’m as gentle a little kisser as you ever saw.” The voice was that of Bert Chester.
“Aw, you’re too fresh,” came the voice of the girl. But as they drew into deeper shadow, she was not pulling away from him.
“Fresh as a daisy!” said the voice of Bertram69Chester. Followed a struggle, a faint “stop, stop!” in the voice of the girl, the sound of gross and heavy kissing. In a moment, the white form of the girl broke down the road, the greater, darker form of the man lumbering after. He caught her, held her for a longer time and a lesser struggle. She came out of this one laughing, and down the road they went, his arm a black shadow about her waist.
Eleanor’s deeper and higher self—the self that lay like a filmy, impalpable wrapper about her conscious mind, so that at times she appeared to herself as two persons—that consciousness stood aloof in expectation of disgust, revulsion, horror. It came as a confused surprise that she felt nothing of the kind. A cloying sweetness, a sensation purely physical, as though a syrup had been poured into all the channels of her nerves, began in her throat, rushed through body and limbs. The sweet tide surged backward, beat in a wave of faintness upon her heart. Shame, like air into a vacuum, followed with a rush. She sank to the ground, clinging to the bench.
When she had so far mastered herself that70she could feel her own senses, she was praying aloud—praying in the rite which held her emotions while it failed with her reason.
“Ave Maria Sanctissima!” she was saying over and over again.
71CHAPTER V
“Match you to see whether it’s good, old fifteen cent feed at the Marseillaise or a four bit bust at the Nevada,” said Bertram Chester.
“I’ll take you,” responded Mark Heath, flipping a silver dollar as he spoke. “Heads the Nevada; tails the croutons and Dago red.”
“Tails it is—aw, let’s make it the Nevada to show there’s nothing in luck.”
“You quitter!”
“All right; but I hate to look cabbage soup in the face,” grumbled Bertram. He resumed, then, his languid occupation which this parley had interrupted, and continued to review, from an angle of Moe’s cigar stand, the passing matinee parade.
The time was late afternoon of a fog-scented October day. Through the wet air, street lamps and electric signs had begun to twinkle. Under the cross-light of retreating day and incandescent globes, the parade of women,72all in bright-colored silks and gauds, moved solid, unbroken. Opera bags marked off those who had really attended the matinees; but only one in five wore this badge of sincerity. The rest had dressed and painted and gone abroad to display themselves just because it was the fashion in their circles so to dress and paint and display. Women of Greek perfection in body and feature, free-stepping Western women who met the gaze of men directly and fearlessly, their costumes ran through all the exaggerations of Parisian mode and tint. Toilettes whose brilliancy would cause heads to turn and necks to crane on the streets of an Eastern city, drew here no tribute of comment. It had gone on all the afternoon. From the Columbia Theatre corner, which formed one boundary of “the line,” to the Sutler Street corner of Kearney, five blocks away, certain of these peacocks had been strutting back and forth since two o’clock. The men who corresponded in the social organization to these paraders of vanity lined the sidewalks or lolled in the open-air cigar stands, as did these two young adventurers in life—Bertram Chester, now a year and a half out of college, and Mark Heath, cub reporter on theHerald.73
When the homefarers from office and factory had begun to tarnish the brilliance of this show, when the women had begun to scatter—this one to dinner with her man, that one back to the hall-room supper by whose economies she saved for her Saturday afternoon vanities—Bertram and Mark drifted with the current up Kearney street toward the Hotel Marseillaise. In their blood, a little whipped already by the two cocktails which they had felt able to afford even while they debated over the price of dinner, ran all the sparkling currents of youth. They drew on past Sutler Street to Adventurer’s Lane, the dingy section of that street wherein walked the treasure-farers of all the seven seas; and as they walked, Bertram began to speak of the things which lay close to his heart.
“I guess I’ll chuck the law,” he said. “Maybe I’ll stay with Judge Tiffany a year or so longer—until I get admitted anyway. A bar admission might count if I wanted to go into politics.”
“Politics is a pretty poor kind of business,” responded Mark Heath. Old enough in journalism to have recovered somewhat from his first enchantment with the rush of life, he was74only just beginning to acquire the cynical pose.
“Hell, it’s all according to how you play it,” said Bertram. “When you get to be Lincoln, nobody calls it poor business. Do they think any the worse of my old man because he played politics to be sheriff of Tulare? If I should go into the game down there, his pull would help me a lot. But it’s me for this.” His sweeping gesture took in the whole city.
He had missed Mark’s point. The latter felt within him a little recoil from that loyalty for his greater, more ready, more popular friend, which had carried him, a blind slave, through college, and which had helped him make him settle in San Francisco instead of Tacoma. Through his four years at the University, Mark had shared his crusts with Bertram Chester, yelled for him from the bleachers, played his fag at class elections. Now Mark was out in the world, practising the profession of lost illusions; and a new vision had been growing within him for many days. He turned a grave face toward his chum, and his lips opened on the impulse of a criticism. But he thought better of it. His mouth closed without sound.
“The real chances for a lawyer, though, are75in business,” Bertram went on. “Judge Tiffany never grabbed half his chances. Attwood in the office, says so.”
“He surely didn’t keep out of politics, that Judge,” said Mark, remembering the turns of fate which had almost—and ever not quite—made the old Judge a congressman, a mayor, and a Justice of the California State Supreme Court.
“Oh, he had no call to be in politics. He hasn’t the sand. Attwood says so. And he stuck at his desk and let his business chances go by. Myself, I’m keeping my lamps open. Just because the Judge doesn’t watch his chances, that office is a great place to pick things up. Look at those tidewater cases of ours over in Richmond. I know, from the inside, that we’re going to lose our case, and lots will go whooping up. I’ve written to Bob for a thousand dollars to invest. I’ll double that in a year and have my first thousand ahead. Say, why don’t you try something in business instead of sticking to newspapers? Let’s go in together. Reporting is a rotten kind of business.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I like it. I think I’ll stay with it for a while.” Again Mark had76put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. “I think I’ll stay with it for a while, anyway,” he added simply.
They had turned out of Kearney Street and were mounting the hill-rise toward the Hotel Marseillaise. These fringes and environments of Chinatown had been residences for the newly affluent in the days when the Poodle Dog flourished and flaunted in the hull of a wreck, in the days when that Chinatown site was Rialto and Market-place for the overgrown mining camp. The wall moss which blew in with the trade winds, and the semi-tropic growth of old ivies and rose-bushes, had given to these houses the seasoning of two centuries. Unpretentious hovels beside the structures of stone turrets and mill-work fronts by which later millionaires shamed California Street and Van Ness Avenue, they had the simple dignity of a mission, a colonial farm-house,77or any other structure wherein love of craft has supplanted scanty materials. Innumerable additions of sheds and boxes, the increment of their fallen social condition, broke their severe lines. A massive door, a carriage entrance, the remains of a balcony faced to catch wind and air of the great bay, recalled what they had been; as though a washerwoman should wear on her tattered waist some jewel of a wealth long past.
The Hotel Marseillaise occupied one of these houses. Where it stood, the hill rose steep. One might enter a narrow alley, skirt a board fence, dodge into a box hall, seasoned with dinners long past, and mount by a steep staircase to the dining room; or he might enter that dining room directly from the street, such was the slope of the hill. A row of benches parked the front door. On the fine, out-of-doors evenings which came too seldom in the City of Fogs, French waiters out of work, French deserters from merchantmen in the harbor below, French cabmen waiting for night and fares, lolled on these benches while they smoked their black cigarettes and chattered in their heavy, peasant accent.
Within, Madame Loisel ruled with her cash78register at the cigar counter. She, bursting with sweet inner fatness like a California nectarine, kept in her middle age the everlasting charm and chic of the Frenchwoman. This Madame Loisel was a dual personality. She of the grave mouth, the considering eye, the business manner, who rung up dinner fees on the cash register and bargained with the Chinamen for vegetables at the back door, seemed hardly even sister to the Madame Loisel of Saturday afternoon on “the line” or Sunday morning at the French Church. By what process man may not imagine, this second Madame Loisel took six inches from her girth, fifty pounds from her weight, fifteen years from her age. Her step was like a dancer’s; her figure was no more than comfortably plump; her Sunday complexion brought the best out of her alluring eyes and her black, ungrizzled hair; her hands, in their perfect gloves, bore no resemblance to the hands which had scraped pots for Louis Loisel in the time before he could flaunt the luxury of a cashier.
In Madame Loisel’s background lay the ramblings of a house built for comfort and large hospitalities. Gone were the folding79doors, bare the niches, empty the window-seats. The old drawing-rooms, music-room, dining-room, had become one apartment of a sanded floor and many long tables. Through this background of his wife moved Louis Loisel, grizzled, fat and gay; never too busy at his serving to exchange flamboyant banter with a patron.
Hither the peasant French of San Francisco, menials most of them, came for luncheons and dinners of thick, heavy vegetable soup, coarse fish, boiled joint, third-class fruit and home-made claret, vinted by Louis himself in a hand press during those September days when the Latin quarter ran purple—and all for fifteen cents! Thither, too, came young apprentices of the professions, working at wages to shame a laborer, who had learned how much more one got for his money at Louis’s than at the white-tiled American places further down town. It stood for ten years, this Hotel Marseillaise, the hope of the impecunious. How many careers did it preserve, how many old failures from the wreckage of Kearney Street did it console!
Madame Loisel stood at her cash register as the two young men entered. A fresh waist,80a ribbon at her throat, a slimness of her waist and an artificial freshness in her complexion showed that she had been parading that afternoon.
“Bonsoir Madame—la la la-la-la!” called Bertram.
Her face blossomed with coquetry, her teeth gleamed, and:
“Bonsoir—diable!” she smiled back at him. Mark Heath had greeted her more soberly. Her eyes followed Chester’s big, square frame as he moved with lumbering grace to a corner table.
There he sat at the beginning of his career, such as it was, this Bertram Chester—a completed piece of work, fresh, unused, from the mills of the gods. His strong frame was beginning to fill out, what with the abandonment of training for a year. He was a pretty figure of a man in his clothes; and those clothes were so woven and cut as to be in contrast with his surroundings. A tailor of San Francisco, building toward fashionable patronage, had made him suits free during his last year in college. Varsity man and public character about the campus, Chester paid him back in advertising of mouth. Guided by81that instinct of vanity and personal display which runs in those who have to do with the cattle range, he had learned to dress well before he was really sure-mouthed in English grammar.
His face, still, as when we first saw him, a little over-heavy, had lightened with the growth of spirit within him. This increase of spirit and expression manifested itself in his rolling and merry eye, which travelled over all humanity in his path with an air of possession, in the mobility of his rather thick-lipped mouth. For the rest, the face was all solidity and strength. His neck rose big and straight from his collar, a sign of the power which infused the figure below; his square chin, in repose, set itself at a most aggressive angle; his nose was low-bridged and straight and solid. From any company which he frequented, an attraction deeper than his obviously regular and animal beauty brought him notice and attention.
The son of Louis, a small, cheerful imitation of his father, slammed a bowl of cabbage soup down before them. Bertram, sighing his young, ravenous satisfaction, sank the ladle deep and stopped, his hand poised, his82eyes fixed. Mark followed the direction of his glance. Louis Loisel, wearing his best air of formal politeness, was bowing a party of women to a table by the door.
“Slummers!” said Mark under his breath. A habitué of the place, he had already developed a resentment of outsiders.
Louis pulled out chairs, wiped the table mightily; the French cabmen, the Barbary Coast flotsam and jetsam, gazed over their soup-spoons in silent, furtive interest.
“It’s her!” said Bertram, lapsing into his native speech. Heath flashed a glance of recognition at the same moment.
“Miss Gray—sure—Mrs. Tiffany’s niece. I thought she was in Europe—didn’t she start a week or two after we left the ranch?”
“Oh, I knew she was coming back. Mrs. Tiffany told me. The Mrs. Boss isn’t so sweet on me as she used to be, but I see her in the office now and then.”
Bertram resumed his ladling. Both watched furtively. It was a balanced party—three men and three women. Among the men, Mark Heath recognized him of the pointed beard as Masters, the landscape painter. The little, brown woman who sat83with her back to them must be his wife. The other girl, a golden, full-blown Californian thing—her, too, they marked and noted with their eyes.
Recognition of a sort had come meanwhile from the party at the guest table. Miss Waddington, the full-blown golden girl, had seated herself and cooed an appreciative word or two about the quaintness and difference of the Marseillaise, when her eyes clutched at the two young men in the corner, whose dress made them stand out so queerly among the lost and soiled. As Bertram looked up with his glance of recognition, her eyes caught his. She glanced down at her plate.
“Eleanor,” she said, “is that a flirtation starting, or do any of us know the two men in the corner—there under that beer sign.”
Eleanor looked. Kate Waddington, her indirect gaze still on that corner table, saw the dark young man smile and bow effusively. She slipped a sidling glance at Eleanor Gray. Something curious, an intent look which seemed drawn to conceal a tumult within, had filmed itself over Eleanor’s grey eyes. But she spoke steadily.
“Why, yes. I have met them both. They84used to do summer work on the ranch when they were in college. I believe that the darker one—Mr. Chester—is in Uncle Edward’s law office now. I haven’t seen either of them since I went abroad.”
“I should say that this Mr. Chester fancied you, from his expression.”
“I suppose that he fancies every girl that he sees—from his expression.”
Kate Waddington caught the shade of irritation, uncommon with Eleanor, and noted it in memory. Mrs. Masters, an eager little woman who grasped at everything about her like a child, broke in:
“If you know them, and they’re really frequenters of the place, it would be fun to ask them over. Sydney used to dine here a great deal when he was young and poor, and he hassuchstories of the people he used to know then!”
Eleanor hesitated. Kate looked again toward Bertram, who was talking rapidly across his soup to Mark Heath, and:
“Do!” she murmured.
In that instant, Bertram himself cast the die. This had been the debate across the soup:85
“I’m going over to speak to her,” said Bertram.
“I shouldn’t butt in,” said Mark. “It’s a balanced party.”
“Oh, I shan’t try to stay—coming along?” He did not wait to see whether or not Mark was following.
Miss Gray greeted him more cordially, altogether more sweetly, than she had ever done in their meetings on the ranch, and passed him about the circle for introductions. Noticing, then, that Mark had not followed, Bertram turned and beckoned with impatience. Mark crossed the room in some embarrassment.
“Is this your first visit to the Hotel Marseillaise?” asked Mrs. Masters. Mark hesitated; but Bertram laughed and beamed down on her from his brown eyes.
“Only about my two hundred and first,” he said. “Mr. Heath and I dine here every night we haven’t the price to dine anywhere else.”
Masters, with that ready tact which he needed in order to live with Mrs. Masters, rushed into the breach.
“And I should call it about my four hundred and first,” he said. “It’s back to the old86scenes for the night. I haven’t tasted real cabbage soup since the last time—it has been a canned imitation. For goodness’ sake join us and tell us the news!”
“Do!” said Miss Waddington with animation, and “Please,” said those two escorts who do not figure in this story. Eleanor said nothing, but her expression was an invitation.
“Sure!” responded Bertram.
The Hotel Marseillaise had familiar customs of its own. For one thing, guests bothered the waiters as little as possible. Masters smiled when the two unconscious youths went back to their table, picked up the big soup tureen, their knives and forks, their plates, and transported them to the larger table.
They were dragging the lees of a rather squalid Bohemia, these two boys; a Bohemia the more real because they were unconscious in it. Its components were a cheap furnished room, restaurants like this, adventurous companionship in the underworld which thrust itself to the surface here and there in that master-port of the Saxon advance. Not for months had either of them been in the society of such women as these—women who preferred87cleanliness to display, women who were nice about their nails and hair. A kind of pleasant shyness crept over Mark Heath; the spirit came into the face of Bertram Chester. Masters, tactician that he was, put the conversation into their hands. Presently, they were telling freely about the fare at Coffee John’s, about their familiars and companions in the little Eddy-Street lodging house, about the drifters of the Latin quarter. They quite eclipsed the pale youth who was playing escort to Eleanor, and the substantial person in the insurance business who seemed to be responsible for Kate Waddington. Heath, speaking with a little diffidence and lack of assurance, had twice the wit, twice the eye for things, twice the illumination of Bertram Chester; yet it was the latter who brought laughter and attention. His personality, which surrounded him like an aroma, his smile, his trick of the eyes—one listened to Bertram Chester.
When the son of Louis brought in the little sweet oranges and arranged the goblets for black coffee, talk shifted from monologue to dialogue. Eleanor found herself talking to88Bertram. A kind of pride had been rising in her all the evening; a pride born in recoil from her latest recollection of him. The episode of that night under the bay tree had gone with her clear across the Atlantic. Even the influence of the wholly new environment, in which she had grown from a girl recluse to a woman, had not served for a long time to erase that ugly stain on her memory. Here and now was the man who served so to perturb her once—and she could look on him, with her more mature eyes, as an attractive, unlicked young cub. She surprised herself taking revenge upon the past by a hidden patronage. At once, then, she fell to talking of Europe and the splendors she had lived there.
“This reminds me of the places one slips into abroad,” she said, “Mr. and Mrs. Wark—Lars Wark you know—took me to just such an old ruin in Paris. We dined for thirty centimes, I remember, but it was no better than this. I’ve had to go away to know my native city. That is the thing which strikes you when you come back—San Francisco is so like the Latin cities of Europe, and yet so unlike!”
Kate leaned across her insurance man.89
“The Society for the Narration of European Travel is in session, Mr. Chester,” she said. “I know the joy that Eleanor is having. It was the passion of my life after I first got back from abroad.”
“Oh, I eat it alive,” said Bertram. “I’m strong for seeing Paris.” He turned back to Eleanor; and her double embarrassment drove her on.
“Such a good time as I had with the Warks—their studio in Munich, where I met all the German long-haired artists—a run to Paris in the season—the dearest little village on the Coast of Brittany last summer—and three weeks in incomparable London at the end. I haven’t thought of the ranch for a year and a half—Uncle Edward pays me the compliment of saying that my profits fell off twenty per cent. under Olsen’s management—oh, isn’t she a dear!”
For Madame Loisel, wearing a beaming and affable manner, had come through the door and approached their table. Madame made it a point of business honor to promote personal relations with her regular guests, asking Jean how he liked the fish, assuring Jacques that the soup would be better to-morrow.90This visit of hers to the slumming party came after a storm in the kitchen, whose French thunders had reached the dining room now and then. Louis, the conservative, hated slummers and dreaded being “discovered.” He ran a restaurant as a social institution as well as a business venture. Madame Loisel, with her eye on the cash register, longed ardently for slummers who would give large tips to Louis the younger, order expensive wines, and put the Marseillaise on the way to a twenty-five cent table d’hote dinner. From that kitchen squabble, recurrent whenever slummers visited them, Madame Loisel swept in haughty determination, leaving Louis to take it out on the pots. As she approached the table, all the charm of France illuminated her smile.
She invariably paid slummers the compliment of addressing them in French.
“Bonsoir—le souper, plait-il vous?” she asked.
Eleanor took her up in fluent French, and the talk sparkled back and forth between them—reminiscences of this or that restaurant on the boulevards which Madame Loisel had known in her youth and which Eleanor had91visited. Bertram, his mouth open, followed that talk as though summoning all his Sophomore French to match a word here and there. Kate Waddington, leaning again across her insurance man, was the first to break in.
“I myself used to be keen on French when I came back from Europe, but I’m out of practice. Please excuse me, Madame, if I speak English. How can you do it at this price?”
“It is kind of you to say so, Mademoiselle—economy and honesty.”
Masters patted Mark Heath on the knee.
“We can’t let you fellows go away from us now. One doesn’t get guides to the Latin quarter for nothing. Take us somewhere, Mr. Heath—unless you’re working to-night.”
“No, virtue has been rewarded,” said Mr. Heath. “I’m off to-night as a testimonial of esteem from the City Editor. What shall it be?”
Bertram Chester, taking up the talk again, laid out Kearney Street like a bill of fare. Mrs. Masters, casting her vote as chaperone, chose the Marionette Theatre tucked away under the shadow of the Broadway Jail.
As Eleanor stepped out into California92Street, gathering her coat about her against a night which had come up windy and raw, Bertram took her side with a proprietary air. She turned toward her appointed escort. It happened that he was walking ahead with Heath just then, holding an argument about the drift of Montgomery Street when it was the water front. For several blocks, then, Bertram had her alone. It seemed to her that he began just where he left off two years or more ago.
“You’re even prettier than you used to be,” he said caressingly; “you’ve bully eyes. I think I told you that before.”
This time, she looked him full in the face and smiled easily.
“Have I? Well I hope you don’t mind my saying that they’re resting on a bonny sight!”
Somewhat taken aback by the directness of this answer, so different from the artificial coyness of the girls he knew best in that period of his life, Bertram turned in his course.
“You’re joshing me,” he said.
“Truly I’m not. You are good to look at—eyes and all.”
Although balked of his opening, Bertram tried again.93
“Well your mouth is just as good as your eyes.”
The same quick look into his face, and the same smile, as she answered:
“Yours is a little better if anything. It is not only well formed, but it becomes delicious when you smile, and it has most attractive shadows in the corners.”
“Suppose we talk sense,” grumbled Bertram.
“Suppose we do; I know you can.” They both laughed at this, and all the way up Kearney Street she continued her chatter of Europe. Lars Wark, who had known her mother, had done everything for her. It had been very different from the regular tour; she came back ignorant of all the show places from Cologne Cathedral to the Tower. But it had been her privilege to see and meet wonderful people. They would not do for regular companionship, such people. They struck one, in the end, as goblins and trolls; but it had been an experience of a lifetime—while it lasted. The Warks had taken her to places which the tourist never sees—lost villages in the Black Forest, undiscovered corners of London, even.94
After a little of this, she drew him on to speak of himself. She had heard news of him, she said, from her uncle, who said that he was doing well and gave promise of a future in the law. How long had he remained on the ranch that summer? This reference put him back into his presumptive mood.
“You went away without giving me a chance to say good-bye,” he complained. “I never saw you again after the party on the lawn.”
Her tongue ran away with her.
“I saw you, though,” she said.
“Where?”
“Oh, at a distance.” He caught nothing from her tone, yet a slight change did come into her manner, as though something had been drawn between them. Then her escort fell in on the other side of Eleanor, appropriating her by right and by consent of her attitude.
Now they were in Broadway, skirting the small bake-shops, the dark alleys, all the picture scenes of the Latin quarter. At that very moment, Miss Waddington drew a little apart from the group clustering about Masters and Mark Heath. An Italian baby of three, too late out of bed, stood by a cellar rail surveying95them with the liquid fire which was his eyes. Kate Waddington stooped to pat his head. As she raised herself, she was beside Bertram. Nothing more natural than that she should fall in, step by step, beside him. He caught step with her, but he still looked toward Eleanor.
“Wonderful girl, isn’t she?” asked Kate.
“She sure is.”
“Her mother,” said Kate, “had more wit than any other woman in San Francisco—and the men she had!”
“I think Eleanor has inheritedthatat any rate,” she added after a pause.
They had reached the door of the Marionette Theatre now. Afterward they drank beer at Norman’s; and when they broke up, Bertram Chester found himself with three invitations to call.
Kate Waddington spent that night with Eleanor Gray in the Tiffany House on Russian Hill. While they sat before the fireplace, in the half-hour of loosened hair and confidences, Eleanor broke a minute of silence with the inquiry:
“What did you think of him?” An instant96after she let slip this impersonal inquiry, she would have given gold to recall it. And if she had any hope that Kate Waddington had missed the point, it died in her when Kate answered in an indifferent tone:
“He? Oh, he seems to me to be a little promiscuous.”