CHAPTER VIIBUSINESS AND SENTIMENT
The winter of ’71-’72 was a feverish one for San Francisco. The rising excitement in Virginia ran like a tidal wave over the mountains to the city by the sea and there broke in a seething whirl. There was no stock market in the Nevada camp. Pine Street was the scene of the operations of capitalist and speculator—the arena where bull and bear met.
In Virginia men fought against the forces of nature. They matched their strength with the elements of the primeval world. Water and fire were their enemies. Their task was the tearing out from the rock-ribbed flanks of the mountains the treasure that nature had buried with jealous care. They performed prodigies of energy, conquered the unconquerable, rose to the height of their mighty antagonist, giant against giant.
In San Francisco men fought with one another. The treasure once in their hands, the battle lost its dignity and became the ignominious scramble of the swindler and the swindled. The gold and silver—thrown among the crowd—ran this way and that, like spilled quicksilver. Most of it ran the way its manipulators directed, into pockets that were already full,carrying with it the accumulation of gold from other pockets less full, whose owners were less cunning.
Through the winter Crown Point and Belcher—the neighboring mine into which the ore-body extended—continued to rise. Confidence had been restored; everybody was investing. Clerks and servant girls drew their savings out of banks and stocking feet and bought shares. In April the stock had reached its highest point, seven hundred and twenty-five dollars. In May, one month later, it dropped to one hundred and seventy-five. It was the greatest and most rapid decline the San Francisco stock market had ever known.
The city was for the moment stunned by it. The confidence in Virginia—for three years regarded as “petered”—had returned in full force. The sudden drop knocked the breath from the lungs of those who had been vociferating the recrudescence of the Comstock. A quantity of fortunes, great and small, were swept away in the collapse. The brokers’ cries for “mud” drew the last nickels from the clerks and the servant girls, the last dollars from their employers. When the wave receded the shore was strewn with wrecks. For the second time this wave had slowly risen to level-brimming flood, broken, swept back and left such a drift of human wreckage.
Throughout the city there was wailing. Nearly everybody had suffered. The last remnant of the fortune left to Jerry Barclay by his father was gone. His mother too had lost, fortunately not heavily. But she bemoaned her few thousands with as much zealas her cook did the five hundred, which constituted the savings of years.
Among the heaviest losers was Beauregard Allen. Had not the Barranca been behind him he would have been a ruined man. As it was, the second fortune he saw himself possessed of was swept away in a few disastrous days. The Barranca, while its yield had not of late been so large or so rich as during its first year, still gave him what he once would have considered a princely income. But he lived up to and beyond it. His expenditures during the last year had been exceedingly heavy. He had private extravagances of his own, besides the lavish manner of living in which he encouraged his daughters. He had leased the De Soto house for three years at a fancy rent. The Colonel’s mortgage on the Folsom Street house would mature in another year. The interest which fell due in January he had neglected to pay. He had had the money and then a jeweler had threatened to bring suit for an unpaid-for diamond bracelet, and the money had gone there, quickly, to keep the jeweler quiet.
Three years ago at Foleys had any one told him that he would own a mine like the Barranca and enjoy an income from it such as still was his, he would have wondered how he could best expend such wealth. Since then the beggar on horseback had ridden fast and far. Now, in morose absorption, he reviewed his expenses and his debts. His petty vanity forbade him to economize in his manner of living. He had raised his head before men and he would not lower it again. Some financiering would be necessaryto pay up his brokers, maintain the two fine establishments in which his daughters ruled, and have the necessary cash for the diamond bracelets and suppers after the theater that absorbed so many uncounted hundreds. There was solace in the thought that Parrish held the mortgage on the Folsom Street house. However restive other creditors might grow Parrish could be managed.
The Colonel in these troublous days was also glumly studying his accounts. Crown Point, which was to repair the recent decline in certain of his investments, had swept away in its fall a portion of that comfortable fortune in which its owner had felt so secure. He had had several losses of late. From the day of his relinquishment of the Parrish Tract bad luck seemed to follow him. Owing to an uncontrollable influx of water the mine in Shasta had been shut down indefinitely. The South Park houses were declining in value, the city was growing out toward the property he had sold on upper Market Street, which a year ago had been a bare stretch of sand. The Colonel looked grave as he bent over his books; his riches were something more than a matter of mere personal comfort and convenience.
On a blank sheet of paper he jotted down what his income would be after all these loppings off. Then over against the last line of figures jotted down a second line of his expenditures. For some time he pondered frowningly over these two columns. They presented a disconcerting problem.
For the past six or seven years he had spent somefive thousand per annum on himself, the rest on certain charities and what he lumped together under the convenient head of “Sundries.” It was a word which covered among other things numerous presents and treats for June and Rosamund. “Sundries” had consumed a great deal of ready money, nearly as much as Allen’s diamond bracelets and theater suppers, and the Colonel sighed as he realized they must suffer curtailment. The private charities were represented by a few written words with an affixed line of figures: “Carter’s girl at Convent;” “Joe’s boy,” “G. T.’s widow.” When the figures were added up they made a formidable sum.
The Colonel looked at it for another period of frowning cogitation. Then on the edge of the paper he put down the items of his own private account. There was only one which was large—the rent of the sunny suite on the Kearney Street corner. Through that item he drew his pen.
The next time he dined with the Allens he told them that he was going to move. He had found his old rooms too large and he had decided to take a smaller suite in the Traveler’s Hotel. The girls stared in blank surprise. Allen looked at him with quick, sidelong curiosity. He wondered at the move. He knew that Parrish had been hard hit, but he still must have enough left to live on comfortably in the style he had maintained since his return from the war. The Traveler’s Hotel was a come-down—a place on the built-out land below Montgomery Street, respectable enough, but far different from the luxurious rooms on the Kearney Street corner.
The girls were amazed, distressed, had endless questions as to why Uncle Jim should do such a strange thing. He laughed and parried their queries. Had they forgotten that he was a pioneer, who had slept under the stars on the American River in forty-nine? In those days the Traveler’s Hotel would have been regarded as the acme of luxury.
“And why,” he said, “should the old man to-day turn up his nose at what would have been magnificence to the young man in forty-nine?”
During this winter of storm and stress June stood on the edge of the excitement looking on. The selfishness of a purely individual sorrow held her back from that vivid interest and participation that would once have been hers. She was tender and loving to the Colonel, and she bore patiently with the moody irritation that often marked her father’s manner, but for the most part she gave to the matters that once would have been of paramount interest, only a shadow of her old blithe attention.
Yet she was not entirely unhappy. She had accepted the situation, and, knowing the worst, tried to readjust her life to an altered point of view. Her comfort lay in the thought that Jerry loved her. The enchantment of the days when she had dreamed a maiden’s dreams of a life with the one chosen man, was for ever gone. She marveled now at the rainbow radiance of that wonderful time when mere living had been so joyous, and happiness so easy and natural.
But Jerry loved her. In the rending of the fabric of her dreams, the shattering of her ideals, that remained.She hugged it to her heart and it filled the empty present. Of the future she did not think, making no attempt to penetrate its veil. Only her youth whispered hope to her, and her natural buoyancy of temperament repeated the whisper.
Of Jerry’s feelings toward her she knew, without being told, but one evening, late in the winter, he again spoke of them. It was at a party at Mrs. Davenport’s. For the first time during the season they had danced together. As a rule their intercourse was limited to the few words of casual acquaintanceship, greetings on the stairway, conventional commonplaces at suppers or over dinner-tables. Under this veil of indifference each was acutely conscious of the other’s presence, thrilled to the other’s voice, heard unexpectedly in a lull of conversation or the passing of couples in a crowded doorway.
At Mrs. Davenport’s party Jerry had drunk freely of the champagne and the restraint he kept on himself was loosened. Moreover, Lupé was not present, and he felt reckless and daring. After a few turns among the circling couples they dropped out of the dance, and he drew June from the large room into a small conservatory. Here in the quiet coolness, amid the greenery of leaves and the drip of falling water, he took her two hands in his, and in the sentimental phrases of which he had such a mastery, told her of his love.
She listened with down-drooped eyes, pale as the petals of the lilies round the fountain, the lace on her bosom vibrating with the beating of her heart.
“Say you love me,” he had urged, pressing the hands he held, “I want to hear you say it.”
“You know I do,” she whispered, “I don’t need to say it.”
“But I want to hear you say those very words.”
She said them, her voice just audible above the clear trickling of the falling water.
“And you’ll go on loving me, even though we don’t see each other except in these crowded places, and I hardly dare to speak to you, or touch your hand?”
“I always will. Separation, or distance, or time will make no difference. It’s—it’s—for always with me.”
She raised her eyes and they rested on his in a deep, exalted look. She was plighting her troth for life. He, too, was pale and moved, and the hands clasped round hers trembled. He cared for her with all the force that was in him. He was neither exaggerated nor untruthful in what he said. When he told a woman he loved her he meant it. There would have been no reason or pleasure to Jerry in making love unless the feeling he expressed was genuine. Now his voice was hoarse, his face tense with emotion, as he said:
“It’s for life with me, too. There’s no woman in the world for me but you, June. Whatever I’ve done in the past, in the future I’m yours, for ever, while I’m here to be anybody’s. Will you be true?”
“Till I die,” she whispered.
Their trembling hands remained locked together, and eye held eye in a trance-like steadiness thatseemed to search the soul. To both, the moment had the sacredness of a betrothal.
“Some day perhaps we can be happy,” he murmured, not knowing what he meant, but anxious to alleviate the very genuine suffering he experienced. She framed some low words over which her lips quivered, and in his pain he insisted:
“But you will wait for me, no matter what time passes? You won’t grow tired of waiting, or cease to care? You’ll always feel that you’re mine?”
“I’m yours for ever,” she answered.
These were the only words of love that passed between them, but at the time they were uttered they were to both as the words of a solemn pact. For the rest of the winter Jerry avoided her. His passion was at its height. Between it and his fear of Lupé he was more wretched and unhappy than he had ever been in his life.
During the spring, with its tumult of excitement and final catastrophe, and the long summer of dreary recuperation, June walked apart, upheld by the memory of the vows she had plighted. Money was made and lost, the little world about her seethed in angry discouragement while she looked on absently, absorbed in her dream. What delighted or vexed people was of insignificant moment to her. In the midst of surroundings to which she had once given a sparkling and intimate attention she was now a cool, indifferent spectator. Her interest in life was concentrated in the thought that Jerry had pledged himself to her.