Ancestors Part 48

"It's begun, all right. Jiminy, but you'll have a tough time. They're onto you now. You haven't the ghost of a chance to make a move they won't see before your hand is off the board."

Gwynne replied with even more than his usual fluency.

"Yes," replied Colton, with a sigh. "I guess that's where we'll all bring up. But meanwhile? Are you going to throw me over?"

"It will depend upon yourself. I have no objection to confide to you such plans as I have been able to formulate. Judge Leslie advised me to play about in society, in Washington, but I was in no humor for anything of the sort. I had uncommon opportunities to study men and conditions, and I took full advantage of them. I doubt if I shall vote until the next Presidential election. Then, if an independent party of consequence has not been formed, and I see no prospect of working up one in this State, I shall vote the Democratic ticket. As things stand at present, it is the less of two evils, and would at least accomplish a reduction of the tariff, and something towards a redistribution of wealth. I haven't the least doubt that the Democrats, if they get in--unless they have a really good man up their sleeve--will abuse their power quite as much as the Republicans have done; but that will take some time; and meanwhile a new party is sure to grow up, for the best men in the country are thoroughly roused. There's no doubt on that point--and it is a point you would do well to remember. There have been chapters before in the world's history when right has paid."

"For a while," said Colton, dubiously. "The point is now that you are likely to join the Democrats."

"To vote with them. Theirs are the soundest principles. I stick to that point."

"I don't question it. I only wish elections weren't two years off; I'd like to get to work." He took a bag of peanuts from his pocket and began to munch thoughtfully. "But you are turning me off. What do you mean exactly?"

"I shall have nothing to do with the machine. I shall speak and make propaganda, that is all. My object is not so much to get the Democrats in as the Republicans out. I shall do nothing to split the Democratic party--and play a losing game--unless a really great movement should rise, gather strength, and sweep the country. It is on the cards that there will be such a movement, and I throw myself into it the moment I am persuaded the split will not work to the advantage of the Republicans."

"How much enthusiasm have you pumped up?"

"Enthusiasm!" Gwynne's eyes roved over his "fair domain." Isabel, at least, was not far from its borders! "I cannot say that I am at boiling-point, but I don't fancy that matters much. I have my work cut out and I shall do it. Perhaps I shall work more disinterestedly without enthusiasm. Certainly I shall be more clear-sighted. If ever there was a time in the history of a country to sink individual ambition, it is now."

"Gwynne!" said Colton, abruptly. "What in thunder does it all amount to, anyhow? What difference does it make--will it make a thousand years hence--that you and I are sitting here on the very edge of creation, solemnly discussing the rottenest subject of our little time--American politics? What's the use of the socialists frothing, and nations trying to overturn one another? I had rather die on the spot than that the United States should be conquered for five minutes by j.a.pan or any other Asiatic power, although I could endure the victory of a people that I recognized as our equals. Why are instincts planted so strongly? There may be a reason for a few years; but that's just it, a few mean little years and it is all over. What difference does anything really make, so long as we are comfortable? Everything else, every other instinct, is artificial. My wife is a religious little body and believes in reward and punishment hereafter, that we must spend at least a certain part of our time in this life preparing for the next. I'd like to believe the same, not only to please her, but because I could look forward to meeting my child again; but, somehow, I can't. The present has always been about as much as I could tackle. And I fancy that when I'm through with it, I won't want any more. But although the present whirls so fast that I don't have time for the sort of thinking intellectual people like you and Isabel do, still it does sometimes dash across my mind--that question: 'What is it all for? And why do we sweat through life for what amounts to exactly nothing in the end?'"

"You cannot be sure it amounts to nothing. Sometimes I have the fancy that the entire round globe has just one inhabitant, of which we merely appear to be individual manifestations: that we are, in fact, a part of the earth herself, and she absorbs and casts us forth again, as she rushes along to her own destiny as sentient as ourselves. All the planets are alive in the same way, and they are all racing to see which will make the greatest showing on what we call down here the Judgment Day--that is to say, which shall have produced the most balanced and perfected being; which shall have whirled away the most original sin and sifted out a man, great and good without self-righteousness--to my mind the worst of mortal failings because its correlative, injustice, is the source of most of the unhappiness. That will be the millennium, and having no windmills and evils left to fight, we minute visibilities will welcome deindividualization. Then, no doubt, there will be a grand final battle between the great body of good thus formed, and the evil cast out, but roaming s.p.a.ce and joining forces. If we do our best here we shall win, and be happy ever after. There is no question, that if you follow your higher instincts you are happier in the long run than if you fall a slave to your base and mean; and that, to my mind, is the proof that the highest instincts are meant to be followed to some greater end."

"Hm. I have heard a good many theories, first and last, and that sounds as plausible as any."

"All this is very casually related to American politics, except that we had better clean up when the opportunity is vouchsafed us; for nothing degrades human nature nor r.e.t.a.r.ds civilization so much as politics gone altogether wrong. As far as you are concerned, although it was understood that the compact was to end with my citizenship, I have no thought of ending it unless the conditions I hope for shall crystallize meanwhile. If it seems best to keep the Democratic party unsplit I shall do your canva.s.sing and speaking, for it will make me known, and give me the opportunity to inculcate the principles I purpose to advocate. If you ignore them when you are in office, so much the worse for you, and better for me; for, as I have told you more than once, the moment I am in power I shall devote my energies to pulling you and your like down and out. But I should advise you to join the third party if it arises."

"No doubt I might, if it were strong enough," said Colton, frankly. "I don't propose to play any losing game, and if the Democratic party goes by the board, T. R. Colton doesn't follow. And if a third party came in to stay it would have to have a boss--"

"Not your sort."

"Oh, well, time enough." Colton's ill-humor was now somnolent under some two pounds of peanuts. He rose and shook hands with Gwynne. "Glad to see you looking so well--you're some heavier than when you came to California, by-the-way, and it suits you first rate. Be sure you call on my wife the first time you come to town."

He declined Gwynne's invitation to dinner, and drove off, looking slothful and amiable once more. But what went on behind that mask, within that long ill-built cranium, Gwynne had never pretended to guess.

Nor, to-day, did he care.

At three o'clock he gave his horse to Abe, was told that the lady of the manor was out walking, and went into the house. He had a fancy to meet her again in the room that harbored the sweetest of his California memories. It was dark and cool. Only one window, looking upon the garden, was open. Beside it was a comfortable chair which he took possession of and looked out into the wild old garden so different from the excessively cultivated plots of Rosewater and his own meagre strips.

There was no veranda on this side of the house, and the great acacia-tree, with its weight of fragrant gold, was but a few feet from the window. The entire garden was enclosed by a hedge of the Castilian roses of which he had heard so much, rare as they now were in California. The dull green leaves and tight little buds could hardly be seen for the ma.s.s of wide fluted roses of a deep old-fashioned pink. And there were large irregular borders covered with the luxuriant green and the blue stars of the periwinkle, beds of marguerites and violets, bushes of lilac and honeysuckles, roses and jasmine. The blended perfumes were overpowering, however delicious; Gwynne had sat up half the night before talking to his mother after a long hot journey; he fell asleep.

Perhaps it was his late conversation, perhaps something more subtle, but he felt himself transported to a void. In a moment he realized that the void was not s.p.a.ce as he knew it, but rigid invisible substance. He slipped along through rocky strata, hearing strange echoes and inhaling the disagreeable odors of healing waters. Suddenly he found himself in a vast hollowed s.p.a.ce, empty but for many pillars. His vision grew keener.

In the very centre of the hall he saw two pillars of a colossal size, and standing between them a being almost as large. This unthinkable giant had an arm about each pillar and strained as Samson had strained at the pillars of the temple. Then a new and powerful force drew him upward once more, and he awoke.

He turned his head towards the dim interior of the room and for a dazed moment thought that he beheld Spring herself. She wore white and had dropped a ma.s.s of wild flowers at her feet; she looked as if rising out of them. Her hat was covered with poppies and wild azalea, and she had a sheaf of b.u.t.tercups and "blue eyes" in her belt.

"I haven't changed my ideas one bit," she said, with a shrug, as Gwynne rose and came towards her. "But I can't help it!"

IX

Isabel rose as usual at five, but, instead of dressing at once, stood at her window idly and looked out over the marsh. Thirteen hours before she had made a decision on the instant, or so it seemed to her, and in that instant changed her life so completely that she was still a little dizzy, and the future as yet had taken on no coherent form. She had even told Gwynne she was positive she could _stand_ him for ever, and this, with her varied if incomplete knowledge of his s.e.x, she took to be even more significant and hopeful than the uncompromising sense of loving him. No doubt there would be many interesting battles before two such developed personalities became more or less one, but at least he had none of the petty and selfish and altogether detestable qualities of her father, her uncle, and Lyster Stone; and he was entirely human. And he was young and she was young. It all seemed very wonderful; wonderful to be so happy, and yet to feel that she had relinquished nothing, or at least not the tenth of what she would have lost if she had married Prestage--or any other man. If she had not met Gwynne she knew that she never should have married at all, and, not having had the best within her ken, been happy enough.

And yet she was a little sad, and it was by no means the gentle melancholy of reaction. She had reason, and felt a disposition to box her own ears. She knew that Gwynne, triumphant and happy as he was, had ridden away vaguely dissatisfied. He had turned and given her a keen questioning glance as he mounted, and had not turned again. She had laughed, and waved her hand, and felt a new desire to tantalize him.

She had abandoned herself to sheer happiness the day before, to the mere pagan delight in an ardent lover come in her own ardent youth, to the sense of an unbroken circle of companionship, and to so wild a triumph in having brought Gwynne to her feet, made him quite mad about her, that she had fairly danced about the room, and tormented him as far as she dared.

This was Wednesday. They were to be married on Sat.u.r.day, that Lady Victoria, who was leaving for England in the evening, might nod them a blessing. Then, no doubt, Gwynne would have his way in most things, and she already felt the stirrings of mere female ductility. But meanwhile she should exercise and enjoy her own power to the full. And she had good reason to believe that no woman had ever been more charming, distracting, provocative. If Gwynne had been in love when he came, he had kissed her very feet when he left, and had been as bewitched as anyone so clear-brained could be. Moreover, she had promised him everything he wished, agreed without demur to the hasty marriage, and even, when he asked her whether she would prefer to live in her house or his, had sweetly left it to him to decide. They were to spend the honeymoon in the house on Russian Hill. She was incapable of looking beyond that. There had been at least twenty bewildering hints that when his time came one rein, at least, should be his--in all matters of great moment, two--and although no doubt she would break away very often, what more delightful than to recapture and subdue? What more could a man want than the most fascinating woman in the world, whom only his own pa.s.sion could shock from mere existence into the fulness of life? But Gwynne, in the depths of his swimming brain, had wanted something more, and Isabel knew that if he had slept as ill as herself, the doubt had more than once a.s.sailed him if she were anything more than a charming beautiful and clever creature, save perverse and egotistical; who would keep him distractedly in love with her, but leave the best part of him unsatisfied.

Her perversity had gone with him, and during a more or less wakeful night she had repented, and even wept at the thought that something might occur to exterminate him before ten o'clock on the following morning--when they were to meet again--and he would depart unconsoled by the knowledge that it was the greater needs in his own nature that had called to hers. At least she hoped this was so, and, in an excess of humility, wondered if she really had enough to give--the power to insure their complete happiness. She had lived in a sort of fool's paradise, and no doubt imagined herself a far more rounded being than she was.

Well, she could grow, and finally she had curled down into her pillow and fallen asleep.

This morning she was rather tired, and although still repentant, suspicious that when he returned her femininity would fly up with her spirits, and she would be more than content to fascinate and bewilder him. Like all women in love and fumbling blindly through the outer mysteries, she was eagerly psychological, discovering once for all her s.e.x and herself.

Her eyes had been fixed dreamily upon Tamalpais, but suddenly they were drawn irresistibly upward by the p.r.i.c.king consciousness of something strange. It was a moment before she realized that she had never seen a sky just like that before. Her back was to the east, and although the sun was rising it was still low; at this stage of the dawn the sky was generally gray. This morning it was a ghastly electric blue. And then, while her eyes were still staring, and something in her brain moving towards expression, she heard a noise that sounded like the roar of artillery charging across the world. She fancied it rushing through the Golden Gate and up the bays and marsh, before it hurled itself with a vicious and personal violence against the wall beneath her window. She braced herself against the sash as the house shook in the strongest earthquake she had ever felt. It appeared to be brief, however, and she was turning away to dress herself, when it commenced again with a fury and violence of which she had never dreamed the modern earth to be capable. She threw herself on her knees the better to grip the window-ledge, but her only sensations were surprise and an intense expectation. Electric flames, as blue and ghastly as the reeling sky, were playing all over the marsh, she saw the long bare line of Tamalpais charge down and up like a colossal seesaw; and in that terrific plunging and dancing, that abrupt leaping from one point of the compa.s.s to the opposite, or towards all at once, that hysterical shaking and struggling as if two planets had rushed from their orbits and were fighting for life in mids.p.a.ce, Isabel expected the entire globe to stand on end, and was convinced that the finish of California, at least, had come. She had read of earthquakes that lasted for hours, and even days, and no doubt this one was merely getting up steam, for it increased in violence and momentum every second. The house rattled like a big dice-box. She expected it to leap down the slope into the shivering marsh. Pieces of rock fell down the face of the cliff opposite, but so great was the roar of the earthquake, so close the sound of creaking and straining timbers, of falling chimneys, and china, and even plaster, that she could not hear the impact as they struck the ground and bounded high in air.

Then, there was a bulge of the earth upward, a twist that seemed to wrench the house from its foundations, and the earthquake ceased as suddenly as it had come. Isabel waited a few moments for it to return, incredulous that the mighty forces beneath could compose themselves so abruptly; then rose and began to dress herself.

Human blades of a fine temper meet a sudden and terrific onslaught of Nature in one of two spirits: utter cowardice, or an att.i.tude of impersonal curiosity. It is not a matter of heroism but of nerves. The bravest may become abject, if their will has been weakened by some drain on the nervous system; others, that would run from a mouse or prove unequal to the long-heralded danger, rise, in the intense concentrated excitement and surprise of the moment, to a state of absolute and even cynical indifference. One of the unwritten laws that has descended from father to son in California is that an earthquake, no matter how severe, is a mere joke, and should incite prompt and facetious comment. Isabel being both heroic and hardy, paid the California tradition the tribute of a smile and a shrug, and regretted that she had not been in San Francisco; she "liked being in the midst of things." Sentiment, psychology, egoism, had literally been bounced out of her. She knew that Gwynne might easily have been killed, but although she intended to find out in the least possible time, to feel merely human in the face of such a stupendous exhibition of what nature could do when she chose, was a descent of which she, at least, felt herself incapable.

She hurried on her riding-clothes, dropped her braid under her jacket, and ran down the stairs. Chuma, trim and spotless, was sweeping the hall, white with fallen plaster. He gave her his usual good-morning grin and went on with his work. She paused and regarded him curiously.

"What do you think of our earthquakes?" she demanded.

"Oh, very big shake," he said, cheerfully. "Very big shake."

Vaguely nettled she took her hat from the rack and went out by the back way. Mac had knocked on her door immediately after the earthquake, and was now with Abe in the colony on the hills. He came running down when he saw her, and it was patent that his rheumatism, for once, was forgotten. His old red face with its prominent bones set in thick sandy gray hair was more animated than Isabel had ever seen it.

"Glory be!" he exclaimed, as he reached her. "That was about the worst!

I was just tellin' Abe that I felt the great earthquake of '68 in this very house, in that very room, by gum, although I was up and dressed, for it was eight o'clock, and I'd gone back for my pipe. So, I know what I'm talkin' about, Miss Isabel, when I say that this was about four times as bad--"

"Please saddle my horse."

"Yes, marm. Wisht I could have got out of bed. I'd like to have seen if the earth rose and fell in a long wave like the shake of '68. Land's sakes, but those chickens did squawk." And although he saddled Kaiser rapidly, he never paused in his reminiscence of the last Northern California earthquake to pa.s.s into history. "But this one! By Jiminy!

Well, I guess we take the cake in everything out here, earthquakes included."

Isabel patted the still shaking horse. "Get the launch ready," she said, as she mounted; and Mac nodded. It was characteristic that neither thought of the danger of sudden shoals, of the always possible tidal wave, or of some new and diabolical trick of nature. The nerves were still keyed too high for anything so shabby as prudence.

Kaiser, no doubt glad to put himself into motion, bounded forward as his mistress lifted the bridle, and although Isabel did give an occasional glance ahead, to make sure the earth was not yawning, she never drew rein, and the horse galloped with all his might towards Rosewater. As the marsh narrowed she saw that the town was still there, and that there were no fires. As she approached the great iron bridge that connected Rosewater with the continuation of the county road, a horseman entered at its other end and galloped across, regardless of the law or a graver danger still. The next moment Isabel and Gwynne had shaken hands casually, and were riding towards Old Inn.

His eyes were shining and almost black. "I saw the mountains rock!" he exclaimed. "Rock? Dance. Then I thought they would plunge down into the earth and disappear. And St. Peter is flat. All the business district, including the four hotels, are down, and everybody in them buried in the ruins. A man dashed up as I was mounting, and I told all the men on the place to go to the rescue. The news came just in time to prevent the murder of Imura by Carlos, for not admitting that we had had the greatest earthquake in the history of the world. It was the first symptom of patriotic fire I ever saw in Imura, but he stoutly maintained that in the matter of earthquakes j.a.pan could do as well as California."

"That is all very well, but I have read a lot about j.a.panese earthquakes, and never of such an _extraordinary_ one as this. Has anything terrible happened in Rosewater?"

"I saw a few chimneys down, but no buildings except the old brick school-house. Mrs. Haight was sitting on the curb-stone in her night-gown, wailing like a banshee, but although all the rest of the town appeared to be in the streets, and similarly attired, they were quiet enough. As I pa.s.sed the cemetery I gave it a hasty side glance, half-afraid of what I might see. All the monuments are down and pointing in every direction. What gyrations! Do you suppose they've had it in San Francisco?"