Ancestors Part 52

"I keep hoping for a change of wind."

"Perhaps, but I've pretty well given it up. We are in disgrace to-day, sure enough. And anyhow Mr. Hofer has lost millions, millions!

However--" She recovered herself with a bound. "He made them, so I guess he can make more. And do you know what he's thinking about already? He burst in here half an hour ago--as black as your hat--with orders that I should take the family down to Burlingame at once, and then began talking about the Burnham plans, and the opportunity to clean up the city politically. There's a raging idealist for you. And do you know what he and Mr. Gwynne are up to now? Carrying dynamite, no less, between Fort Mason and the fire line. The two of them are running an automobile apiece and have put themselves at the disposal of the authorities. Nice thing for me to be thinking of all night. Don't you want to come along?"

Isabel shook her head.

"Well, I'll move on then--before they change their minds and impress my car. So far I have a gracious permit to keep it. The servants have buried the silver and the pictures, but--" She glanced at the beautiful frieze, which, without its electric lights, looked a mere blur of blue and black, then shrugged her shoulders. "I just won't believe my house will go," she said, defiantly; "not till the last minute, anyhow. When the fire's over, or Mr. Hofer lets me, I'll come back and do something for those poor wretches that have been burned out. Gather up what food there is to be had in the country, and start an eating station or something. Mr. Hofer says food will come pouring in from every direction presently, and then they will need organizers. I'm good at that. Can I rely on you? It will be an experience, anyhow; and of course it's my place to do that sort of thing. Besides, I do feel terribly sorry for those poor things, and I won't be able to sit still for a month."

"You can count on me. When this is over I shall find you somehow."

"Oh, don't worry. The newspapers won't miss anything. They're burned out, but I hear that the editors are already over in Oakland scurrying round after a plant. Well, _adios_. If you say the word I'll send the car back for you--although I doubt if it would pa.s.s a squad without those children in it. I suppose it would hold several tons of dynamite!

Heigh-ho, I suppose it is all in the day's work. What can you expect if you live in an earthquake country?" They had reached the pavement and she put her lips close to Isabel's ear. "I'd like to get out of the d.a.m.ned place and never see it again," she whispered. "I'll keep a stiff upper lip, but those are my sentiments and I guess I have company."

She stepped lightly into the car, nodded with a grim gayety, and in another moment had disappeared round the corner of Taylor and California streets.

Isabel started down the hill, and almost immediately met Anne Montgomery. She had not recognized her as they approached each other, for the glare was in her eyes; but Miss Montgomery ran forward and kissed her.

"What on earth did you come to this G.o.d-forsaken place for, when you had the country to stay in?" she demanded. "Oh, Lady Victoria? I did not know she was here. Just come with me and look at a sight."

She put her arm through Isabel's and led her rapidly for several blocks along California Street, then down Hyde towards moving columns of people. The fire was far south of these refugees as yet, but they looked down every cross street and saw it; and more than once during their slow flight they had seen the soldiers at the visible end of each long vista move a block farther north. "I tramped a long way with them," said Miss Montgomery, "carrying things for a woman I never saw before. Then a man took the burden over and I started up the hill to see how some friends were faring."

From this point they could hear the roar and crackle of the fire and the crashing of walls; but even more formidable was that tramping of thousands of feet, the sc.r.a.ping of trunks and furniture on the tracks and stones. Isabel, still feeling like a palimpsest, lingered for an hour looking at these refugees. They were vastly different, in all but their impotence, from those of the early morning. Hundreds were from the "boarding-house district"; others were householders; a large number, no doubt, owned their carriages or automobiles, but those had been impressed long since. It was a well and a carefully dressed crowd, for by this time nearly every one had recovered from the shock of the earthquake; many forgotten it, no doubt, in the new horror. They had not the blank expression of the poor, dazed by the second calamity following so close upon the heels of the first, but their lips were pressed, eyes were straining towards the distant goal, and all would have been pale but for the glare of the fire. Fortunately for most of them, men as well as women, they had either children, pets, or even more c.u.mbersome belongings to claim their immediate attention; no time for either thought or despair. They pushed trunks to which skates had been attached, or pulled them by ropes; they trundled sewing-machines and pieces of small furniture, laden with bundles. Many carried pillow-cases, into which they had stuffed a favorite dress and hat, an extra pair of boots and a change of underclothing, some valuable bibelot or bundle of doc.u.ments; to say nothing of their jewels and what food they could lay hands on. Several women wore their furs, as an easier way of saving them, and children carried their dolls. Their state of mind was elemental. They lived acutely in the present moment and looked neither behind nor before--save to a goal of safety. Misfortune had descended upon them, and ruin no doubt would follow, but for the present they asked no more than to save what they could carry or propel, and to get far beyond that awful fire. The refinements of sentiment and all complexity were forgotten; they indulged in nothing so futile as complaint, nor even conversation. And the sense of the common calamity sustained them, no doubt, deindividualized them for the hour. Soon after they became their normal selves once more, and accepted the hard conditions of the following weeks with the philosophy that was to be expected of them. But underneath all the recovered gayety and defiant pride of the later time more than one spirit was sprained, haunted with a sense of dislocation, permanently saddened by the loss not of fortune but of personal treasures, of old homes full of life-long a.s.sociations, never to be replaced nor regained. Many no doubt were better off for losing those old anchors that held them to the past and emphasized their years, besides keeping their sorrows green, but others had one reason less for living. Nevertheless the philosophy born of a lifetime in an earthquake country, of the electric climate, of their isolation, as well as the good Anglo-Saxon strain in so many of them, brought a genuine rebound to all physically capable of it, both old and young. But to-day they were primitive--and entirely human. They helped one another, the stronger carrying the weaker's burdens as a matter of course. The men were bent almost double with increasing properties.

Isabel felt neither pity nor admiration for them; they were a mere unit, these thousands reduced to their primal component, the third fact in the great day of facts.

Suddenly, however, she caught sight of Lyster Stone. He carried a baby on one arm and several rolls of painted canvas under the other. Beside him walked the mother pushing a loaded crib; and behind him the artist friend, to whose aid he had evidently gone, dragged a large canvas trunk bound with an ingenious system of ropes. Stone nodded gayly when he saw Isabel.

"Hallo!" he cried. "I was going for you later on. We'll all sleep out to-night. Better come along." Then as Isabel only shook her head he said, hurriedly: "Awfully sorry I forgot--promised Gwynne I'd go up and tell you he was in for a long day's work--transporting hospital patients and hauling dynamite. He sent peremptory orders that you and his mother were to go to the country with the afternoon tide."

The crowd bore him on and Isabel and Anne walked up the hill again, meeting other streams of refugees, but thinner, as most of them preferred the easier slopes. Isabel looked at Anne curiously. There was an unusual restlessness about her, nothing of the rudimentary expression of the crowd. Isabel was wondering if her apparent and unusual spirits might be due to the fact that her flat was in the Western Addition, and that she had hired a wagon at the first alarm of fire and carried her silver to the Presidio, when Anne suddenly began to explain herself.

"Do you know," she broke out, "I have a wonderful sense of freedom!--of--of--hope. Something has happened at last. All the ruts have been ploughed over. Life will never be the same here, in my time at least. It will be like beginning all over again, with a hundred barely imagined possibilities and an equal chance for every one. It may be a reprehensible thing--to feel as if the destruction of your city had set your individual soul free--but I do, and that's the end of it. And I can tell you I've seen that _expression_ in the eyes of many a man in the last few hours. Not in those of the older men, perhaps, for they wear out early enough in this climate, anyhow, and those that are close upon sixty don't look as if they had much left to live for--although I've seen a few flying about as if they had dropped thirty years; its all a matter of temperament and physique. But for the rest of us! The still energetic men, and the women that have been cankered with the tedium vitae, and have the brains and brawn to work. It will be the Fifties all over again--not only something more than a bare living in prospect, but a constant, exciting, interest in life. I saw a good many men, just after the earthquake, looking as if they had believed the end of the world had come, but they braced up directly the city was threatened by something they could pit themselves against. Every man worth his salt is fighting fire, rescuing the helpless, dragging mattresses out to the hills and Park, and helping the women down here save their belongings.

All with automobiles and carriages are helping the authorities and hospitals. Political factions and personal enemies are working side by side, particularly down on the fire line. Even the mayor has won a day's respect from his fellow-citizens, although I'm told he's terribly torn between the Committee of Fifty and the military authorities on the one hand, who want to blow up a wide zone, and the property-holders who won't have their precious possessions sacrificed when the wind may change any minute. Meanwhile the fire has a headway that will give it the best part of the city. I never felt so alive in my life; so vividly in the present. Can you remember the name of a book you have read, that there is any world outside these seven square miles?"

"Yesterday is a mere dream and to-morrow is only a bare possibility! The Fifties! I feel as if we were at the beginning of things on another planet. I shall never trouble my head with problems or psychology again.

We are mere dancing midgets on the scalp of stupendous forces that we do not even dimly apprehend. Earth lets us play until her patience is exhausted with our pretentions as mere human beings, at our insane delusion that the intellectual are not only the equal but the superior of the physical forces; and then she merely shakes herself, and the wisest is as helpless as the idiot, the prince even worse off than the pauper because he has a bigger house to run out of. They all dance to her tune like so many wooden marionettes. Hofer is no better off than his blacksmith--whose savings are probably in the fireproof vault of some bank, while I happen to know that more than one millionaire has not insured his Cla.s.s A buildings, thinking the expense unnecessary. No wonder you have a sense of freedom. So have I. We are dancing to the tune of the unseen forces. They will do the thinking. I wonder, by-the-way, if deep down in the brain of that fleeing ruined tide of elemental beings there is not a p.r.i.c.k of gratified vanity that they are in the midst of a great and horrible experience? We have been reading so much lately of the horrors in Russia, we have read, all our lives, of horrors and atrocities somewhere, and this State has grinned at us so unintermittently. Now we, too, are actors in a great life-and-death drama. I don't fancy any one is doing even that much a.n.a.lysis, but I can't help thinking that the vague appreciation of the fact sustains them in a way--possibly gives them a calm sense of superiority to the rest of the world----Look at this."

They had reached Jackson Street on the flat of n.o.b Hill. It was now evening and the exodus from Chinatown had begun. The Mongolians were streaming up from their threatened quarter, and, like the others, tramping silently out to the Presidio. The merchants had put on their fine clothes, and their families--exposed to the Occidental eye for the first time--wore gorgeous garments of bright silks covered with embroideries. The poor little respectable wives tottered along on their foolish feet, held up by their lords or their "big-footed"

serving-women, while their children trudged along uncomplainingly and stared at the fire with big expressionless eyes. Mingling freely with the wealthy autocrats of Chinatown were the coolies, and the disreputable women with which the quarter swarmed. The Chinese rarely import their wives. The coolies wore their blue blouses and soft felt hats, and the women had painted their faces and built up their hair as usual, shining tower-like coiffures stuck with large-lobed pins, cheap or costly, according to their grade. All were as stolid as their own wooden G.o.ds. They would have looked like a solemn procession on a festa day had it not been for the bundles and strong-chests they carried.

"Come up to dinner, such as it is," said Isabel, to Anne. "What are you going to do to-night?"

"Camp down in the sand-lots by Fort Mason and see what I can do for those poor refugees. There will be great suffering, I am afraid. Many women should be in hospital with every attention; and with all this excitement who knows what may happen? I fancy either a tent-hospital will be erected, or the worst cases will be taken into the fort. I am a good nurse, and I told the Leader I should be there. There will be many children to look after, too. The parents, the best of them, won't be up to much."

"Perhaps I will go down later. But I shall wait at the house until I have seen Mr. Gwynne--he may need food, or be hurt in any of a dozen ways. If you see him--and no doubt you will, if you are to be at the fort--tell him that I have not gone to the country and have no intention of going."

XIV

They had pa.s.sed members of the Citizens' Patrol on every block, and they found one pacing the plank walk on Russian Hill. He told them that the edict had gone forth that not so much as a candle should be lit in a house that night and that all cooking must be done out-of-doors. The spectacled j.a.p was boiling soup on one of the oil stoves, which he had carried into the garden and half surrounded by a screen. Beside him was what looked like an open newly-dug grave, and the girls, startled, demanded what it meant.

Sugihara, apparently, never smiled, but his eyes flickered. "Before Cusha and Kuranaga went I made them dig a hole for the silver," he said.

"It is too heavy for the launch. If we are driven away, I will cut your ancestors from their frames and take them with us."

"Well, you are a treasure," said Isabel, with a sigh. "You shall do nothing but read when you get to the ranch."

Lady Victoria was pacing slowly up and down the porch, her eyes seldom wandering from the fire. When dinner was ready, she merely shook her head impatiently, and Isabel and her guest sat down in the little tower-room, which was brilliantly illuminated from below. Sugihara had made a very good soup of canned corn and tomatoes and had fried bits of meat and potato. There was little conversation. The dynamiting was now something more than sporadic. The detonations were so terrific that it was not difficult for the San Franciscans to imagine themselves--supposing they had a grain of imagination left--in a besieged city. Isabel suggested, and Anne agreed with her, that they might have been far worse off than they were; nature at her extremest is never so pitiless as the human brute when the l.u.s.t to kill is on him.

Isabel prepared the remains of the feast for Mr. Clatt, and asked Sugihara if he would object to relieving the watch, that the wharfinger might s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours' sleep. There was no longer any danger of fire except from the conflagration itself, and now that the dynamiting had begun in earnest it was possible that the flames would be isolated before midnight.

The j.a.p went off with the dish in one hand and a book in the other, hoping that he would be allowed to light a candle on the launch. He returned in a few moments, and for the first time he was smiling.

"Mr. Clatt will not give up his watch," he said. "He says he might miss the chance to put a hole in some--dago (his language was very bad, Miss). He says there's not a wink of sleep in him."

"No doubt but that he will hold on to it, unless the military step in,"

said Anne. "Then, I fancy, he would surrender very meekly. They have impressed a good many launches for prisoners and dynamite. But I hope not, for whether the fire comes up the hills or not, there is going to be terrible privation. Heaven knows how many days it will be before we have enough water even to drink, and I heard a little while ago that as soon as food comes in the authorities will establish relief stations, where everybody, from the millionaire to John Chinaman, will have to stand in line and wait for his loaf of bread. Wouldn't it be better for you to go at once?"

"I fancy I can endure as much as any one, and if I am driven from here I will go down to you. I shall go down anyhow when I have seen Mr. Gwynne.

I do not propose to lie in a hammock while several hundred thousand people are sleeping on the ground. What do you take me for?"

"Somehow I don't see you as a nurse, or amusing children, or doling out bread and raiment. You would be much more in the picture encouraging Mr.

Gwynne. However--I am going to impress your linen and a clothes-basket to carry it in. No doubt the philosophical Sugihara will help me carry it to the fort."

"Take what you like." Isabel directed her to the linen-closet, and went down to the veranda. She paused abruptly in the doorway. Victoria's face could be seen only in profile, but its expression, as she gazed down upon that tossing twisting furious flame ocean, needed no a.n.a.lytical faculty to interpret. It was voluptuous, ecstatic.

Isabel crossed the porch in a stride.

"What are you thinking of?" she demanded, imperiously.

Victoria did not turn with a start. She did not turn at all. "I am thinking," she replied, automatically, as if in obedience to the stronger will--"I am thinking that at last I understand what it is we are so blindly striving for from the hour when we can think at all; what it is--that unsatisfied desire that urges us on and on to so many fatal experiments in the pursuit of happiness. The great goal, the real meaning of our miserable balked mortal existence is not that dancing will-o'-the-wisp we call happiness, for want of a better name. It is Death."

"Well?" Isabel's voice rose, but she kept the anxiety out of it.

"I cannot imagine anything more delicious," went on Victoria, in the same low rich tones, "than to walk straight down those hills and into that sea of flame. I have always admired Empedocles, who cast himself into Etna. Once I saw a friend cremated, and the brief vision of that white incandescence, before the coffin shot down, seemed to me the apotheosis, the voluptuous poetry of death. I could walk down into that colossal furnace without flinching, and I believe that my last moment, as the world disappeared behind me, and those superb flames took me into their embrace, would be one of sublimest ecstasy."

Isabel caught her by the shoulders and whirled her about. "Well, you will do nothing of the sort," she cried, roughly. "In the first place you couldn't get through the lines, and in the second you are wanted at Fort Mason. Anne is going down with a basket of linen for the poor women who will be confined to-night. You are an uncommonly strong woman, and you can make use of every bit of your strength. Anne and the Leader are frail creatures, and no one else that I know of is going. They need you, and you will soon have your hands so full that your head will be purged of this nonsense. It is the fire l.u.s.t--the same l.u.s.t that incited a boy to-day to attempt to set fire to a house in this district that he might watch the whole city burn. I hope your egoism exploded in that climax.

Here comes Anne. You must go."

"Very well," said Victoria, suddenly dazed, and with a will relaxed after the long tension of the day. "I will go."

"Where are your jewels?"

"Down in the bank."

"Well, gather up any other small things you treasure, and either conceal them about you or give them to me."