"Do you mean to say that you have not been enjoying yourself?"
"Enjoying myself! I have been on the rack."
"You are the rudest--most unsatisfactory--I thought I knew your taste."
"Oh, _please_!"
"What do you mean?"
They confronted each other, Gwynne flushed and angry, Isabel coldly interrogative. Gwynne, who had been on the verge of an explosion, felt suddenly helpless. It was a.s.suming a great deal to tell a woman that he saw through her plot to disenchant him with a rival. He could hear the descending whip of Isabel"s scorn. Besides, it would mean a quarrel, and much as he resented her interference in his destinies, especially this last and most notable success, he had no desire to break up the even surface of their relation. So he merely shrugged his shoulders and said, with what calmness he could muster:
"Be kind enough to take her home. I will return the entire library if you need it."
"Oh, I have finished. I am sorry you have been bored." And she carefully gathered up her papers and went to the rescue of the weary Miss Boutts, while Gwynne ordered the buggy. During the drive towards the paternal roof Miss Boutts remarked casually that she didn"t care about Englishmen, but otherwise had little to say.
So ended the social regeneration of Rosewater.
XVIII
Gwynne awoke one morning with an irresistible desire for The Town in every fibre of his being. Barring London he would have liked three crowded days in New York, but as nothing better was available he felt that he was open to the attractions of San Francisco. He had not visited it since his departure on that brilliant Sunday after his arrival; he had promised to wait for Isabel, and his interest in it was intermittent. This morning he found his indifference culpable, inasmuch as he had had three letters from his mother imploring him to increase her income, and Mr. Colton had not only strongly advised him to tear down the block of old structures south of Market Street, and put up a great office building, but had offered to raise the money--selling half the land and mortgaging the rest. And if Gwynne had not revisited San Francisco he had a very accurate idea of its present conditions. It was uncommonly rich, and its citizens, always sanguine of its future, had been seized with a very fever of faith; they were selling out their interests everywhere else and buying and building, tearing down and rebuilding, until San Francisco threatened to lose its oddly patched and wholly individual appearance and become the Western city of sky-sc.r.a.pers.
As Gwynne dressed he recalled his first impression of the city as he crossed the bay: its singularly desolate appearance, in spite of what at first looked to be a compact ma.s.s of buildings covering some thirty thousand acres on hill and plain, and later as if a comet had rained down pickings from every architectural quarter of the universe. He had walked once to the back of the boat and looked at the line of little towns and cities lying at the base of the eastern hills. They did nothing to dispel the impression of loneliness. Whatever their individual names they were mere annexes of the great-little city opposite. When he returned to the forward deck the dust was blowing its brown volumes through every street that converged to the water-front.
Those dust wracks, broken and narrowed by the buildings, lifted from the outlying sand-dunes, and following a law that had driven them eastward since California had risen from the deeps, had a curiously baffled, stolidly persistent expression, as if the old sand-dunes knew their rights and were determined to a.s.sert themselves so long as man left a yard of them free.
Gwynne, in his solitary moments, when even his law-books were closed, had recalled the stories of San Francisco, past and present, told him by Isabel, and they had given rise to many whimsies. California, he still all but disliked, but he wondered at the haunting memory of the city he had seen so briefly, and the odd almost pathetic appeal it had made to his sympathies. He had concluded that it was the pioneer taint in his English blood, and had blinked in sudden wonder before the fact of his close kinship, not only to that old romantic Spanish element, but to the brilliant adventurous lawless race of men that had made the city great and famous, then pa.s.sed on into the kingdom of darkness leaving their moral rottenness in its foundations, and, pulsing above, all their old brave indomitable and progressive spirit. Although he had found it no rival to his studies and his ranch, still he had given it more thought than he was aware, and not only to its picturesque psychology, but as the seat of a possible business adventure. To raise a large sum of money on the San Francisco real estate--the common property of his mother and himself--and erect a great office building of steel and reinforced concrete, would add enormously to his own and his mother"s incomes, but on the other hand it would stand in the midst of acres of wooden buildings and shanties, and the risk of a great fire--whose momentum would sweep through any fireproof building--was one forgotten neither by the insurance agents nor the chief of the fire department, who was said to keep thousands of tons of dynamite in the city with which to segregate the always expected conflagration. It was possible that no insurance company would take the risk on an expensive building in such a quarter. On the other hand it was as certain as the present wealth of the city, that such a building would have hundreds of companions in the next ten years, and the undesirable, immoral, and generally drunken element, so largely responsible for the continual fires of the district, would be gradually pressed to the outskirts of the city. He felt inclined to take the risk, even a sense of exhilaration in it, as if indeed the dead and gone Otises had invaded his soul and demanded one more bout on earth.
There was another matter that claimed his thoughts when the law was at rest. He was suspicious and resentful of Isabel"s desire to manage him; and that she had succeeded more than once, through her superior feminine subtlety, made him aware that two strong natures were slowly bracing themselves against each other, and that on some future battle-ground there might be a heavy and final encounter. This morning, as he ordered his portmanteau to be packed and placed in the buggy, his impulse was to take the tram, and cavalierly announce, upon their next meeting, that he had "been to town." After he had had his coffee, however, he decided not to be an a.s.s, and unpardonably rude as well. She had talked of this visit every time they had met, although one thing and another had detained her, and he could hardly explain to her an impetuous and solitary flight. He colored as he invoked her a.s.sumption that he feared and was running away from her, a.s.serting his independence like any school-boy. Besides there was the launch. The idea of three hours on the water instead of one and a half on a slow and dirty train so exhilarated him that he forgot his self-communings and ordered the buggy at once. It was but half-past five. They would catch the tide; nor did the train leave until half-past eight. He presented Imura Kisaburo Hinamoto with a box of cigarettes, gave him the run of the library, and drove off whistling.
He found Isabel among the chickens. She had just opened the doors of all the little colony houses, and the hills were white with excited scratching Leghorns. She wore overalls and high boots, and the night braid of her hair was twisted several times round her throat. Gwynne smiled as he recalled the heroines of poesy that had fed so many doves and garden birds. No heroine could look picturesque in bloomers, and feeding chickens, but as Isabel came towards him waving her hand hospitably, her white clear-cut face resting on its black _goita_ of hair might have suggested Stuck"s Sunde, in the Neue Pinakothek of Munich, had there been an evil glint in her light cool blue eyes. The fleeting query crossed his mind as to what she might have been if born in one of the generations before the pioneers of her s.e.x had opened so many gates for the irruption of overburdened femininity. But he merely remarked:
"I am suddenly inspired With a desire to see San Francisco. Are you too busy? Are we too late for the tide?"
"Just in time," said Isabel, promptly; "and I shall be ready as soon as the launch is. Do you know that it is Sat.u.r.day? You could not have chosen a better day."
As they pushed off, all the marsh and its creek was covered with a low white mist that gave it the appearance of a great lake, a ghost lake through which the little steamer just leaving Rosewater two miles above coiled its way like a monstrous white bird feeling uneasily for a foothold. Overhead the sky was covered with the pink fleece of dawn. The ma.s.s of mountains in Marin County looked black and formless, but above them rose the granite crest of Tamalpais, like an angular lifted shoulder.
"That mountain has marched north five feet in the last forty years,"
said Isabel, as she carefully steered through the mist. "Either that, or the earthquake of 1868 moved her off her base."
"For heaven"s sake don"t tell me any more weird tales about this country; it gives me the horrors often enough as it is. This morning the hills and mountain on the other side of the valley looked like antediluvian monsters just ready to turn over."
"Well, they have turned over a few times, and may again. One reason we all love California is because we never know what she will do next, and because she is still primeval under this thin coat of civilization that is too tight for her. I admire England, but I could not live in it. It is too peaceful, too done. It is impossible to imagine any further change, for civilization can go no further. But out here--the whole country may stand on its head any day; and we may yet have cities as great as Babylon and Nineveh."
"Well, we"ll not be here to see. This fog is just high enough to filter into one"s very marrow--even your picturesque pioneer days are over; I will confess they might have made me feel that life on the edge of the world was worth while. I should have liked to lay the foundations of a great isolated city like San Francisco; but I don"t see any sign of another big city. Los Angeles is a little Chicago and may live to be a big one, but nothing would induce me to live in the south. However, no man is ever conscious of the fact that he is in at the birth of a great city; our pioneer forefathers were just a parcel of adventurers crazed with the l.u.s.t of gold, and with no sense of any future beyond the present."
Isabel leaned forward eagerly. "You have been thinking about San Francisco!" she exclaimed, triumphantly. "The old Otis blood is beginning to wake up! Hooray!"
Gwynne laughed outright, and for the first time without resentment; he was tired of having California "rammed down his throat." Isabel"s eyes were dancing with so purely youthful and feminine a triumph that he could not but feel indulgent.
"I am growing reconciled to my lot. Here I am and here I remain."
"Yes, you are much happier," said Isabel, softly. She half closed her eyes and looked a trifle older. "It worried me dreadfully at first to know that you were unhappy, and that it was my fault."
"Unhappy!" exclaimed Gwynne, reddening haughtily. "I have not been mooning about like a homesick a.s.s--"
"Oh, your outside was as tranquil as your pride demanded--and it was splendid! But I couldn"t help knowing--feeling. A thousand little things appeal so directly to a woman"s intuitions."
"Indeed! I am delighted to learn that you possess the common intuitions of a woman."
"Am I unwomanly? Masculine?" asked Isabel, anxiously.
"Not in the ordinary sense; but you are much too strong. No woman should be as strong--as, well--as psychically independent as you are. It is as flagrant a usurpation of prerogative as a pretty complexion on a man."
"I only say one prayer: "Give me strength. Give me strength.""
"For what, in heaven"s name? What use have you for so much strength? You have forsworn matrimony. You disclaim the intention of going forth and entering the great battle of the intellects--having, as you say, no talents. You have isolated yourself from love, so you need no uncommon supply of strength to meet suffering. You will always have money enough, and you appear to have been born with the gift of making it. Even if you elect to be the leader of fashion in San Francisco, your equipment need not be of unadulterated steel. But I cannot fancy why you entertain any such ambition."
"That is the least of my ambition--although I intend to become the most notable woman in San Francisco, not only because I must gratify a healthy natural ambition in some way, and because I want my life to have a sufficiency of incident in it, but because it is a part of my general scheme."
"What is this precious scheme?"
"You would not understand if I should tell you. Men have no time for subjectivities--except poets, psychological fictionists, and the like, who do not seem to me men at all. Now, one reason I have liked you from the first, in spite of many things that made my American blood boil, is that you are a man, a real masculine arrogant dense man, with no feminine morbid tendency to a.n.a.lyze your ego, in spite of your Celtic blood. I met too many of that sort in Europe."
Gwynne, with his elbows on his knees, regarded the bottom of the boat and colored guiltily, while congratulating himself that for all her insight and cleverness she had barely penetrated his outer envelope. She had thought him merely homesick, when his ego had been tottering, his soul racked with doubt and terror; when he had spent long hours in self-a.n.a.lysis; until the law had come to his rescue and reinvigorated his brain. At the same time a wave of sadness swept over him. How little human beings knew one another, no matter how intimate. As he raised his eyes he seemed to see Isabel across a chasm as vast as the Atlantic; and he was reminded that he knew her as little as she him. She had confessed to the throes of what she believed to have been a great pa.s.sion, but when he had rehea.r.s.ed the story away from the influence of her curious cold magnetism and the sinister setting of its recital, he had recognized it for what it was, the first violent embrace of an ardent unshackled imagination with positive experience, in which the ego had played an insignificant part. Her immediate recovery upon beholding the disintegrating clay, without one regret for the vanished soul, or even for the magnetic warmth of the living sh.e.l.l, suggested to his groping masculine intelligence, totally unaccustomed to a.n.a.lysis of woman, that her attack had been little more personal than if the man had infected her with the microbe of influenza. Surely a woman that had loved a man well enough to kiss him must have been stabbed with pity for the ardent vigorous life thrust out into the dark. Then he felt a quick resentment that anything so stainlessly statuesque as this girl--for all her trim tailoring and large black hat--should have been even superficially possessed by any man.
"Did that Johnny ever kiss you?" he asked, abruptly.
"Of course," replied Isabel. "Did I not have to, being engaged to him?
Not that there was much chance, for I never saw him alone between four walls. Perhaps that was one reason that side of love seemed to me much overrated. I was happiest when sitting alone in a sort of trance and thinking about him."
"Humph!" said Gwynne.
The mist was gone. The east was a vast alcove of gold in which the hills were set like hard dark jewels. The creek was narrowing. On either side, and far on all sides, stretched the marsh. The guileless duck disported himself on the ponds, but Gwynne, for once, was insensible to its subversive charms, felt no regret that he had forgotten his gun. He came and sat closer to Isabel, wondering if she felt as young as he did in the wonderful freshness and beauty of the dawn. She certainly looked very young and fresh and girlish, not in the least fateful, as when she turned her profile against a hard background and forgot his presence.
"I think I could quite understand anything you cared to tell me," he said, smiling into her eyes. "Please give me your reasons for cultivating the character of a Toledo blade. Is it your intention to marshal all the clans of all the advanced women and lead them against the more occupied and disunited s.e.x? I am told that it is a standing grievance in Rosewater that you will not join that Literary--Political--Improvement--and all the rest of it Club. I should think with your ambitions and--well--masterful disposition, you would a.s.sume its leadership as a sort of preliminary course."
"I intend to be a whole club in myself."
"Appalling! But what _do_ you mean by that cryptic a.s.sertion? I told you that I could understand anything you chose to explain, but, as they say out here, I am not good at guessing."
"I am working out a theory of my own. It has been demonstrated that labor, capital, all the known forces, are far stronger when concentrated and organized. I believe in concentrating all the faculties about a will strong enough not only to conquer life but all the inherited weaknesses that beset one daily within. That is a minor matter, however. I believe that our higher faculties were given to us for no purpose but to create within ourselves an individual strength that will add to the sum of strength in the world. It is not necessary to proclaim this strength from the house-tops, nor to search for windmills--a positive enemy it would leap at automatically--nor even to seek to improve the world by all the tried and generally futile devices. It is enough to be. I alone may not add greatly to this subjective strength of the world; but think what life would be did each individual succeed in making himself but one degree less strong than G.o.d himself! It may be my destiny to make propaganda without noise; but if not, the achievement of absolute strength in myself will move the world forward to its millennium one-millionth part of a degree at least. For that will be the real millennium--when there shall be no despicable weakness in the world, no moral rottenness, when each individual shall rely upon himself alone, independent of the environment from which the majority to-day draw everything good and bad, their happiness or misery. Nothing will ever purge human nature but the triumph of the higher faculties, a triumph accomplished by an unswervingly cultivated and jealously maintained strength."
"I don"t deny that your millennium has its points, but would that not be rather a hard world? What of love, the interdependence of the s.e.xes, and all the other human relations?"