"I had to come in the back way like a tramp and leave my oil-skins in the kitchen," he announced, abruptly, as he entered. "Don"t get up. I have always wanted to see your hair down. So did Jimmy, I remember. Did he?"
"Certainly not. Neither would you if you had not chosen such an extraordinary time to call. I am delighted to see you once more after all these years, but--what on earth possessed you?" His eyes were glittering, although he had dropped his lids, and he did not sit down, but moved restlessly about the room.
"Your mother is much better," said Isabel, tentatively.
"Oh yes, and she is looking forward to her motor trip, and telephoned this morning that her room was a ma.s.s of flowers. I fancy she is a bit touched by so much kindness, for she has not been half decent to any one but the Trennahans."
"Does she say anything about returning to England? She had it in mind--just after the earthquake."
"She has made one or two casual allusions to her return, but she never plans far ahead--does what takes her fancy at the moment. But this life will never suit her. I imagine she will go before long. London is in her blood. Now that she can live properly--will have all she can, or ought to want, when the building is paying, there is no object in her remaining here."
"How goes the building?"
"How can anything go in this infernal weather? The old shanties are down, and the contractor had a sort of tent erected and has done some work on the foundations. I should have come directly to California if I had had any idea of the money to be made by selling off my superfluous land and putting up that building. It might be finished, by this time.
Why didn"t you tell me?"
"I am only remodelling my own brain on business lines by slow degrees, and no echo of this building fever reached me in Europe. You will remember that I did write, while you were wandering about America, that Mr. Colton suggested it for both of us. If I did not dwell on the subject it was because I had a feminine horror of the mortgage--and no idea that you were so keen on making money."
"I am thinking princ.i.p.ally of my mother. When a woman has always had the world I doubt if she can live long out of it. San Francisco is all very well for the young and adventurous, and for those with a strong sense of the picturesque, but I can imagine that to a woman of her age and experience----Do you know--" he burst out. "I don"t know where I am.
What an extraordinary thing heredity is! I doubt if most people, although they would call that a plat.i.tude, realize that heredity is anything more than a telling word. There are times when I am sitting at my stove, surrounded by all those typical American men, who seldom mention a subject but politics and farming--for I tabu chickens--or the intensely local interests, more or less affected by politics,--there are times when I actually feel the nameless ambitious young fellow--not born in a log-cabin, perhaps, but next door to it--and endowed with that keen compact pioneer determination to stride straight to my goal, whether it is the White House or--well--the Presidency of a Trust Company. I forget--good G.o.d!--_Are_ those years behind me in England? I have caught myself wishing that I had kept a sc.r.a.p-book like other idiots. It escapes my memory altogether at times, that I have but to take a steamer out of New York to reach the top of civilization again in less than a week."
"Perhaps it suggests itself when you remember that with the income you can command before long, life in England will be more worth while."
"That was as nasty a one as you ever gave me! No one knows better than yourself what brought me to America, and that those conditions cannot be altered by money. Could I not have had Julia Kaye"s fortune? You need not be nasty again! You forget that not only was I in love with her--or thought I was--but could have given her the equivalent. She would be the last to claim that she was to pay too high a price, even with me thrown in. If you don"t beg my pardon I"ll leave the house."
"I beg your pardon," said Isabel, hastily. She was thrilled with curiosity; she had never seen him so nearly excited, with the exception of one memorable and painful moment. She fancied that she could see one of the barriers between them sway.
"It may be that this sudden prospect of wealth, or rather of a goodish income that would enable me to keep up a decent establishment in town, and a bit of a place somewhere in the hunting country, has upset my equilibrium, but it occurred to me this morning as I was splashing through the mud--I had to go out to the ranch--in fact it came over me with such a rush that I felt like Don Quixote, and every landmark looked like a windmill--what is England to-day but the very apex of civilization? The Mecca, the reward, of every man and woman with the breeding and the intelligence to appreciate it? The best of everything goes there, you have but to turn round to help yourself to an infinite variety--to be found piecemeal everywhere else on earth. And the very best is mine, by inheritance and personal effort. Why in thunder am I out here on this ragged edge of civilization struggling with almost primitive conditions?--elemental badness, sure enough! What is my object? Merely to bring about a set of conditions that exists in England to-day. I have them there. Why am I wading into filth up to my knees, for the sake of an alien race, when they are mine already?"
"But you had too full a measure. That was the reason you emptied the cup and turned your back. You wanted hard work--to use your gifts."
"What does it all amount to? Suppose I insidiously work up a reform movement in this State, and am shot into Congress over the head of the machine? Suppose my gifts are as extraordinary as I have been led to suppose--ordinarily a man feels d.a.m.ned commonplace--and by force of those gifts I hold my own against the formidable organizations I shall encounter there at every turn? Suppose this reform spirit in the United States grows and strengthens, and I come along in time to benefit by it, and am landed in Washington--even in the White House? What of it? I had a thousand times rather be prime-minister in England--in other words the real head of eleven million square miles of the earth"s surface, dictator to a good part of the world, for that matter. Your public men are servants--or ought to be, according to your Const.i.tution. In England we render service by courtesy, and rule the roost. In this country every man in public life is not only at the mercy of his const.i.tuents, but in daily terror of having his head cut off by the man above him. Even the President has to be a politician above all things."
"You used to talk in England--as if you were not wholly swayed by personal ambition."
"It is not so difficult over there to conceive high and mighty ideals--fool yourself, if you like. But I"ll be hanged if I can see myself baring my breast for poisoned arrows, with a seraphic smile on my lips, over here! It is all so crude! I want to be a main instrument in reform as much as ever--Oh yes! But I am not sure that one motive is not to make the life and the game more tolerable. And the everlasting machine! There won"t be a day, inside or out of it, that I won"t run up against every d.a.m.nable meanness that human nature is capable of. I must handle these men, placate them--or get out. History has not yet failed to repeat itself. If I succeed, in favoring conditions, in forming a new party, I may end as a boss myself! Exalted ideal! Inspiring thought!
Better go home and live like a gentleman. I could have some sort of a career, and I have seen enough in this country to drive me towards the conclusion that there are worse things in life than curbing one"s youthful ambitions a bit."
He was still striding up and down the room, his expressive hands as restless as his feet. The color was in his face and his eyes were blazing. There was a curious magnetism about him that Isabel had never been sensible of before, although she had heard much of it in England.
It was as if his spirit were fully awake; at other times he appeared to live with his cool critical brain only, while his inner self, with its intense slow pa.s.sions, slept. She wisely made no comment, and after shoving the books violently about the table he went on:
"You may argue that if public men were elected directly by the people and the President held office for one term of ten or fifteen years only, that a long stride would be made towards the millennium. But it is doubtful if even then, forty or fifty different tribes--for that is what your State and territory lines effect--could be managed without machinery, and machinery develops the lowest attributes in human nature.
I saw enough of that in the few rotten boroughs we have left in England, but my imagination never worked towards the full and original development in this country. We have other faults; the serenest optimist would never deny them; but, faults or no faults, we crown civilization to-day. The richest man in America has not the least idea what it means to live like a gentleman in our sense. And there is no flaw in my appreciation of your country. In many respects it is the most marvellous the world has known--but--I sometimes wonder if the pioneer blood in my veins is red enough to stand it. No matter what the most successful reformers accomplish, there will be no high civilization here in our time--no background. Unconsciously, or otherwise, I shall always have the goal of England in my mind--and if that is the case, why am I here? Isn"t civilization the highest that man is capable of accomplishing, the best that Earth has to offer any of us? What sense is there in going back to the beginnings and plodding or fighting towards a goal you were born to? It"s more than once I"ve felt like Don Quixote.
The whole infernal country is a windmill--and a large percentage of its inhabitants are windbags."
"Of course you have a streak of Don Quixote in you. All men of genius have, I suppose. You felt that you had a mission--to pack a great deal into a convenient phrase. You could do nothing in England but sit down and sup with the elect. You would have choked very quickly. And if you went back you would not stay. You would not only be bored, but you know now how badly this country needs one disinterested man of genius."
"I am not disinterested. I never felt more selfish in my life."
"You have an immense capacity for disinterested statesmanship. Of course all motives, especially with the highly gifted, are complex. You have said yourself they would be fanatics otherwise. And you are far more American than you know, although you have just confessed that you do know it well enough at times. All your American ancestors may be living again in you. It was your own instinct, no influence of mine, that sent you out here, filled with mixed but high ambitions. No full-blooded Englishman would ever do what you have done. Insanity and inebriety skip a generation. Why not Americanism? Heaven knows there is nothing American about your mother. And when the political cleanup comes, as it is bound to--"
"Oh, I am sick of this everlasting optimism: "Everything is bound to come out all right," "G.o.d"s own country," and all the rest of it. I can understand it well enough out here, though. It is a wonder to me that any Californian has energy enough to care. Life is easy at the worst.
The scoundrels batten unnoticed--although they are sending up the price of everything; and the most ungrateful and rapacious labor cla.s.s on earth never get their deserts. The labor cla.s.s hasn"t a leg to stand on, so far as bare justice goes. Pity they can"t have a taste of Eastern factories and wages and climate for a while. If it were not for its bay and the tremendous significance of its position opposite the Orient, California would be what it ought to be, the pleasure gardens of the world. No politics, no labor-unions, merely a succession of estates, big and little, where a man could live a happy animal existence for one-third of the year, after working the other two-thirds--that is a sane division. But if I stay here I work. And for what ultimate object?
England, as sure as fate."
"You cannot possibly tell how you will feel twenty years hence--"
"Twenty years! That is a fair estimate, no doubt! I believe that the real secret of discontent has been the prospect of this cursed period of inaction. Nice subst.i.tute--coruscating as a blooming barrister; and it"s mighty difficult to travel along for four years without showing your hand. It requires a tact that I may or may not have. If I have it, there may be other depths of hideous guile, as yet undiscovered. I have had glimpses of them already. All these farmers that I am nursing? What if my beneficent virus works too quickly--before I can represent them? Some other fellow reaps the benefit; and when my turn comes, likely as not there will be a reaction. I"ve to keep and increase my hold on these men of every nationality under the sun, as well as upon the seasoned old Americans, lest they should break away from me. Nice job I"ve cut out."
He hesitated a moment, but added: "Beastly idea to subject all to the same law. It should be ten years for immigrants, and one for the man-of-the-world anxious to take the oath of allegiance--not that I am frantic to take it."
"I never knew any one so keen for obstacles; and now that you have found more than you bargained for--"
"It"s not the obstacles that daunt me. If I were only sure of accomplishing any result worth while, if I had the materials to work on--if I were sure I cared! The American is an unhatched Englishman, but he won"t be hatched out in my time----I even long for the close compact drama of English life. Everything is spread over such a vast loose surface here. These four years through which I may--must stumble along with my hands tied, are a fair example. And it seems to me that I never go to bed without seeing a face on the dark trying to enunciate: "What for?" "Why?""
He sat down suddenly on a chair in front of her and took his head in his hands. "Do you ever ask yourself those questions?" he demanded, abruptly.
Isabel nodded. He noted absently that she looked like an elf with her face half-hidden by her hair, and that he could see but one little black mole, but a narrow ring of blue about the dilated pupils of her eyes, the tiny dimple at the corner of her mouth. She wore a loose blue wrapper, and the wood fire leaped in high flames behind her. The storm was terrific. He suddenly realized that this was the only homelike room he knew outside of England. He felt as if nothing would ever give him peace again, but he was suddenly and overwhelmingly glad to be there--and comfortably alone with Isabel on this raging night. He stared at her until his own pupils dilated, but she replied more tranquilly than she felt.
"_Cui bono_ is the motto on Earth"s coat of arms. The only thing that saves us is that we don"t see it all the time. There are long intervals in which we eat and sleep and dance and love and play at politics and enjoy the storm--and our best companions."
"We certainly are not here to spend our lives preparing for another world. Otherwise there would be no sense in the complexities of civilizations. A man could do that much in a cave. It is merely the diabolism of instinct that prompts the young to believe that the race is all. Certainly love is not the only source of happiness. I have been ecstatically happy when writing--thinking, in the fever of composition that I was dashing out the finest thing in literature. I have been happy under fire, or excited enough to think so. And I have felt enough exultation with exaltation to make happiness when I have been on a platform and carried a hostile crowd off its head and to my feet. If two people were indescribably mated--I don"t know--"
"Why not deliberately accept the doctrine that there is a purpose, even if you are not permitted to read the riddle of life--"
"All very well, but what have politics to do with it? You may answer that a man should lay up all the credits he can, and that he can possibly get more by cleaning out the political trough than in any other way. If those are my lines I suppose I shall work along them, but my higher faculties whisper that to live this life on the intellectual plane, fighting for your country when necessary, is the rational existence for those that have the luck to be born to the good things of the old civilizations. Here they don"t know any better, or if they do they can"t help themselves. If that plane isn"t meant to live on, why is it there? Has a man the right deliberately to step off the high plane upon which a long succession of circ.u.mstances have planted him--pull up his roots and plant them in a virgin soil?"
"Perhaps it is his duty to go where he is most needed--where his riper instincts and experience--"
"Your arguments are always good, otherwise I should not be here arguing with you. What do you really think of love?"
She jumped with the suddeness of the attack, and then drew backward a little, for he was leaning towards her and she felt his masculine magnetism as she had never done before. It pulled and repelled her, fascinated and filled her with resentment. And she was fully alive to the romantic conditions, the wild night, the isolation, the vibrating atmosphere. But she replied, soberly:
"I don"t think about it. I buried all that--"
"Chuck it on the dust-heap! It served its purpose: women should have some such experience in their first youth as men have others. You are the better for it, because you worked off on the poor devil all the morbid and ultra-romantic tendencies that were spoiling your life. But let it go at that. It was no more love than my first Byronic madness for one of my mother"s friends when I was sixteen--"
"You were thirty when you were in love with Mrs. Kaye. And she was not even your second--nor your tenth, no doubt."
"Quite right. I do not understand and shall waste no time on the effort.
All men run pretty much the same gamut. That attack was the most commonplace sort of pa.s.sion, no madness in it, no idealization, no sense of mating--"
"And how, may I ask, do you expect to know when you really do fall in love--"
"I"ll know, all right. I wish you would put up your hair. You look uncanny, not like a woman at all. You have too many sides. I like you when you are human and normal."
"If you think my hair in its proper place will accomplish that result--my hair-pins are up-stairs on my dressing-table--"
He disappeared instantly. When he returned she was standing and coiling her hair about her head. Her sleeves were loose and the att.i.tude bared her arms. As Gwynne handed her the pins, one by one, he stared, fascinated; but when she had finished and shaken down her sleeves, returning his stare with two polar stars, he turned his back suddenly and resumed his tramp of the room.