"It is love and interdependence that cause all the misery of the world; they would be the very first things I should relegate among the minor influences, did I wield the sceptre for an hour. To women, at least, all unhappiness comes from the superst.i.tion that love--any sort--is all. Of course there would be marriage, but of deliberate choice, and after a long and purely platonic friendship, in which all the horrid little failings that do most to dissever could be recognized and weighed. Free love and experimental matrimony are mere excuses for the sort of sensuality that is shallow and inconstant."
"Ah! Then you would permit love to your married pair after they had probed each other"s minds and mannerisms for a year or two? That is a concession I hardly expected."
Isabel shrugged her shoulders. "I am neither an idiot nor blind. Heaven knows I have seen enough of reckless pa.s.sion and its consequences. The equipment of the mortal proves him to be the slave of the race, but at least he need not remain the blind and ridiculous slave he is at present. If I had married that man no doubt I should have loved him more frantically than ever for a time. But that would have pa.s.sed, left me resentful of bondage, of the surrender of self. There, above all, is the reason I shall never marry. Impersonally, I believe in marriage, or rather accept it, but I purpose to stand apart as a complete individual, and subtly to teach others to drag strength out of the great body of force in which we move, until they realize that in time mankind may feed those creative fires, becoming, who knows, stronger than the great first cause itself."
"And I have been called an egoist," murmured Gwynne. "I feel a mere--well--Leghorn--beside this sublime determination to sit upon the throne of G.o.d and administer to both kingdoms. All the same, my fair cousin, I believe that it takes a man and a woman to complete the ego. I incline to the picturesque belief that they were originally united, and halved in some--well, say when Earth and its atmosphere became two distinct parts. No doubt it was a judgment for having accomplished too much evil in that formidable combination. Who knows but that may be the secret of the fall of man; the uneven progress of human nature may be towards the resumption of that state, only to be attained when we have conquered the worst in ourselves and become pure spirit."
"That fits my own theory, for I believe that the two parts of what should have been a perfect whole were cut in two for their sins, and that reunion will come only when each has absolutely mastered the human evil in him and freed the spiritual, but this he can only accomplish alone--"
"Don"t quote Tolstoi to me! He waited until he was old and cold to hurl anathema against the human pa.s.sions. Theories upon love by a man long past his prime are as valueless as those of a girl."
"It was a theory I had no intention of advancing. I think for myself and pay no more attention to the excessive virtue bred by the years than to that equally illogical repentance or awakening of a woman"s moral nature when the man has ceased to charm or has disappeared. That is a mere process, and no augury of future behavior. But you are always at your best when you go off at half-c.o.c.k like that! What I meant was that woman has degenerated, not through pa.s.sion but through ages of the exercise of her pettier and meaner qualities. In some, these qualities lead to malignancy, in the majority, no doubt, to frivolity--still worse, to my puritanical inheritance--and they are utterly commonplace of outlook.
Matrimony keeps these qualities in constant exercise, because the ego loses its independent life, its habit of meditation, and is pin-p.r.i.c.ked twenty times a day. It is by these qualities that woman chains man to the earth, not by her human pa.s.sions. I am quite willing to concede that pa.s.sion is magnificent."
Gwynne ground his teeth. He had never encountered anything so incongruous as this beautiful vital superbly fashioned girl talking of pa.s.sion in precisely the same tone as she would have talked of chickens.
He felt the primitive man"s impulse to beat her black and blue and then make her his creature. As Isabel turned her eyes she was astonished at what she saw in his. Gwynne"s eyes were blazing. There was a dark color in his face, and even his mouth, somewhat heavy, and generally set, was half open. She fancied that so he looked when on a platform facing the enemy, and thoroughly awake.
"What are you angry about?" she asked, calmly. "That I devote myself to my s.e.x instead of to yours? They need me more than any leader they have evolved so far. There are millions of women of your sort. I want nothing that your s.e.x has left to offer. I will find a happiness unimaginable to you, in living absolutely within myself and independent of all that life, so far, has to give."
Then Gwynne exploded, and forgot himself. He flung himself forward, and catching her upper arms in the grip of a vise shook her until her teeth clacked together. "d.a.m.n you! d.a.m.n you!" he stammered. "What you want is to be the squaw of one of your own Indians!"
"Let me go!" gasped Isabel, furious, and in sharp physical pain. "Do you want to turn the boat over? Have you gone mad? I"ll _kick_ you!"
"Good!" said Gwynne, releasing her, and sitting back. "That is the only feminine speech you have made since I have known you. I make no apology.
You need never speak to me again. Set me ash.o.r.e over there. I can take the train when it comes along."
"You pinched me! You hurt me!" cried, Isabel in wrath and dismay. "I hate you!"
"And your sentiments are cordially returned. Will you put me on sh.o.r.e?"
"I don"t care what you do. You hurt me! You hurt me!" And Isabel dropped her head into her arms and burst into a wild tempest of tears, like a child that has had its first whipping.
Gwynne laughed aloud. "We are running into a mud bank," he said, "and the tide is going out."
Isabel made a wild clutch at the tiller ropes, and brought the boat back into the channel. But she could scarcely see, and Gwynne with a contrition he had no intention of displaying offered to control the launch. She vouchsafed him no reply, and as she did not steer for the land, he retired to the extreme end of the boat and studied the scenery.
He was determined not to go through even the form of an apology, but he was equally determined upon a reconciliation. In his first attempt to match his wits with a woman"s his face became so stony and intense that Isabel recovered in a bound the serenity she had been struggling for, and laughed with a gayety that would have deceived any man.
"We are a couple of naughty children," she said, sweetly. "Or maybe people are not quite civilized so early in the morning. You may smoke, if you like, and then I shouldn"t mind if you came here and let me teach you to run this launch--it is probably more old-fashioned than any you have undertaken. But as we no doubt shall make many journeys it is only fair that you should do half the work."
XIX
When they docked at the foot of Russian Hill, Isabel suggested that Gwynne should leave his portmanteau with Mr. Clatt, the wharfinger that lived at the edge of the sea-wall and looked after such launches and yachts as came his way.
"I want you to stay with me if Lyster and Paula will come too," she said, hospitably. "They like that sort of thing when they happen to have a nurse. If they cannot come you will have to go to one of the hotels.
In either case you can send here for your suit-case. You had better take the Jones Street car--"
"The track is bust," said Mr. Clatt, who was a laconic person.
"Walk along the docks to Polk Street and then south until you find a car--I think it turns in at Pacific Avenue. The conductor will tell you where to transfer--"
"Are there no cabs?"
"There are hacks and coupes at the livery-stables, if you care to expend ten or fifteen dollars for being less comfortable than in the cars.
Remember our hills are little off the perpendicular."
She did not see fit to inform him that his business would not take him into the hilly district, and watched him wend his way along the noisy, dirty, evil-smelling docks with some satisfaction. Then she climbed the steep hill to her house, over the crest. There were many cottages on this side of Russian Hill and one or two fine residences, but beyond one cable-car line little or nothing had been done to make life easy for the inhabitants. It was a bit of pioneer San Francisco. One day, no doubt, there would be a boulevard at its foot, the rough inhospitable cliff would be terraced, and set with the country-like villas of people that appreciated the beauties of the bay and Tamalpais, but at present a carriage could not mount it, and it made no appeal to the luxurious.
An elderly couple lived in the "Belmont House" and did all that was necessary in the present stage of Isabel"s fortunes. She found the woman house-cleaning and the old man weeding among the abundant crysanthemums and asters in the half acre which still surrounded the old mansion. She gave her orders and started for the home of her sister. A belated trade-wind was screaming through the city driving the dust before it.
Isabel looked down at the towers and the domes, the steeples and walls of the great modern buildings, the low city built in the days when San Franciscans still feared earthquakes, all looming through the torn brown veil like the mirage of a city infinitely distant. But San Francisco was rarely more beautiful than in a dust-storm, which recombined her outlines and the patchwork of her crowded generations into something like harmony. She looked dreaming, proud, detached, an houri veiled to allure, to inspire a new race of poets. Gwynne holding his hat on his head with both hands, in the valley, cursed the climate, but Isabel picking her way down the crazy old staircase, although in anything but a poetical mood, paused a moment with that sudden outrush and uplift that was the only pa.s.sion she had ever known. Such moments were not frequent and brought with them a sense of impersonality, as if she were but the vehicle of aspiring pa.s.sionate souls long gone from their own clay, that rushed back through familiar conduits like volcanic fires, eager for the arch of the visible world.
But ancestral rights had short shrift this morning. Isabel"s spirit was a very caldron. She not only still raged at the fact that for a few seconds she had been as helpless in the grip of mere brute strength as any peasant woman, but she was keenly disappointed that Gwynne had not understood her. That he might have understood her too well, his whole s.e.x precipitating itself upon the new enemy, she would not admit for a moment; women, with a sort of dishonest mental confusion, invariably subst.i.tuting the word misunderstood for failure to accept their own point of view. Above all, was she furious with herself. Instead of annihilating him with the dignity of which she possessed an uncommon share, she had been surprised into behaving as if she were the crudest of mere human creatures.
Moreover, her arms still pained, and she knew that they were black and blue.
At the foot of the bluff she ran into a bas.e.m.e.nt doorway to pin on her veil more securely, and dismissed psychology as incompatible with trade-winds and dust. A block or two farther on she took a cable car which slipped rapidly down the western slope, across the narrow valley, then up another and steeper hill, all blooming with flowers in the narrow gardens. She alighted at a corner half-way to the summit, and walked back to one of those curious San Francisco "Flat Houses" with three doors in a row. It was perched high above the sidewalk, for the street but a few years since was a gully, and the grading had deepened it. It was reached by some sixty winding but solid steps, and the little terrace, off at a right angle, was full of color.
As she had expected, Mrs. Paula was sitting in the bow-window of her bedroom, gazing at the pa.s.sers-by with a sort of idle eagerness. But so were a hundred others in sight, there being no idler creature than the American woman of small means, who neither belongs to clubs nor does her own work. The shallow philosophers harp upon the boredom of the idle rich whose every wish is gratified; but as a matter of fact the rich are seldom idle, and in highly organized societies are models of system and energy; whether misdirected or not, is beyond the question. It is the idle woman in a flat whose imagination riots along the highways of the great world, who keeps an avid eye for change of any sort, and finds a fict.i.tious existence in the sentimental, the immoral, and the society novel.
Paula, who lived in the top flat, ran down the two flights of stairs and opened the door for Isabel.
"Well! you are a stranger!" she exclaimed. "I was wondering if your chickens had tuberculosis. Lots have in California. I read it in a Sunday newspaper."
"My chickens are quite healthy. How are the children?"
"As well as can be expected in this dusty windy city where they have to stay in the house half the day." Mrs. Stone"s children were notoriously healthy, but she was of the stuff of which the modern martyr is made.
Isabel followed her up the stairs and into the large sunny front bedroom. The children being invisible and also inarticulate, were doubtless in the back yard. The room was vaguely untidy without being dirty. A basket of socks and stockings in various stages of repair stood on a table by the window, but pushed aside to accommodate the Sat.u.r.day society papers and a novel from the circulating library. An opera-cloak lay across a chair, flung there, no doubt, the night before, and on the floor close by was a pair of pink worn slippers very narrow at the toes but bulging backward like a toy boat. On the sofa was a freshly laundried pile of shirts with detached collars and cuffs, which Mrs.
Stone immediately began ostentatiously to snip along the frayed edges.
The room itself was full of sunshine, which gave it a cheerful air in spite of the faded Brussels carpet and the old-fashioned walnut furniture, a contribution from the house on Russian Hill. Mrs. Paula wore a vastly becoming wrapper of red nun"s veiling trimmed with a yellowish lace that by no means looked as cheap as it was. She was pretty to excess, one of those little brown women that men admire and often trust. Had she been thin she would have been bird-like with her bright darting brown glance, but her cheeks, like her tightly laced little figure, were very round, and so crimson that they excited less suspicion than the more delicate and favorite pink. And the brilliant color suited her peasant style of prettiness, her full red lips, her bright crisp bronze hair. She had a fashion of absently sweeping the loose sleeves of her wrapper and "artistic" house-gowns up to her shoulder and revealing a plump and charming arm; and the pointed toe of shoe or slipper was always visible. Her arts were lost on Isabel, who understood and despised her, but who regarded her as a sacred legacy from her mother; Mrs. Belmont had been devoted to the pretty child she had adopted just after burying three of her own, and who had waited on her hand and foot to the day of her death. Isabel was always conscious of putting on a curb the moment she entered her sister"s presence, but thought it good discipline, and only spoke her mind when goaded beyond endurance.
"I tried to telephone," she began, but was interrupted by a deep sigh.
"The telephone is cut off--we owe for three months. Hateful things!--they know we always pay some time or other."
"If you are so badly off would it not be more economical to make the children"s clothes--"
"Isabel! Much you know about children! One can buy ready-made things for just half."
Isabel subsided, for she felt herself at a disadvantage before this experienced young matron; although she vaguely recalled that whenever she had presented the children with little frocks and sailor suits she had expended a considerable sum. But doubtless she had gone to the wrong shops. Mrs. Paula was one of those women that haunted the cheap shops and bargain-counters, and was always in debt.
"What a heavenly suit!" she exclaimed, her eyes roving covetously over Isabel"s smart black costume. "Paris, I suppose. Fancy being able to walk into a store and order a new dress whenever you feel like it. I have never done that in all my life--"
"It was for that I settled an income upon you before I left for Europe, but if it is not enough to buy a new frock occasionally--"