The Readjustment Part 6

"I guess I'll chuck the law," he said. "Maybe I'll stay with Judge Tiffany a year or so longer--until I get admitted anyway. A bar admission might count if I wanted to go into politics."

"Politics is a pretty poor kind of business," responded Mark Heath.

Old enough in journalism to have recovered somewhat from his first enchantment with the rush of life, he was only just beginning to acquire the cynical pose.

"h.e.l.l, it's all according to how you play it," said Bertram. "When you get to be Lincoln, n.o.body calls it poor business. Do they think any the worse of my old man because he played politics to be sheriff of Tulare? If I should go into the game down there, his pull would help me a lot. But it's me for this." His sweeping gesture took in the whole city.

He had missed Mark's point. The latter felt within him a little recoil from that loyalty for his greater, more ready, more popular friend, which had carried him, a blind slave, through college, and which had helped him make him settle in San Francisco instead of Tacoma. Through his four years at the University, Mark had shared his crusts with Bertram Chester, yelled for him from the bleachers, played his f.a.g at cla.s.s elections. Now Mark was out in the world, practising the profession of lost illusions; and a new vision had been growing within him for many days. He turned a grave face toward his chum, and his lips opened on the impulse of a criticism. But he thought better of it. His mouth closed without sound.

"The real chances for a lawyer, though, are in business," Bertram went on. "Judge Tiffany never grabbed half his chances. Attwood in the office, says so."

"He surely didn't keep out of politics, that Judge," said Mark, remembering the turns of fate which had almost--and ever not quite--made the old Judge a congressman, a mayor, and a Justice of the California State Supreme Court.

"Oh, he had no call to be in politics. He hasn't the sand. Attwood says so. And he stuck at his desk and let his business chances go by.

Myself, I'm keeping my lamps open. Just because the Judge doesn't watch his chances, that office is a great place to pick things up.

Look at those tidewater cases of ours over in Richmond. I know, from the inside, that we're going to lose our case, and lots will go whooping up. I've written to Bob for a thousand dollars to invest.

I'll double that in a year and have my first thousand ahead. Say, why don't you try something in business instead of sticking to newspapers?

Let's go in together. Reporting is a rotten kind of business."

"Oh, I don't know, I like it. I think I'll stay with it for a while."

Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay with it for a while, anyway," he added simply.

They had turned out of Kearney Street and were mounting the hill-rise toward the Hotel Ma.r.s.eillaise. These fringes and environments of Chinatown had been residences for the newly affluent in the days when the Poodle Dog flourished and flaunted in the hull of a wreck, in the days when that Chinatown site was Rialto and Market-place for the overgrown mining camp. The wall moss which blew in with the trade winds, and the semi-tropic growth of old ivies and rose-bushes, had given to these houses the seasoning of two centuries. Unpretentious hovels beside the structures of stone turrets and mill-work fronts by which later millionaires shamed California Street and Van Ness Avenue, they had the simple dignity of a mission, a colonial farm-house, or any other structure wherein love of craft has supplanted scanty materials. Innumerable additions of sheds and boxes, the increment of their fallen social condition, broke their severe lines. A ma.s.sive door, a carriage entrance, the remains of a balcony faced to catch wind and air of the great bay, recalled what they had been; as though a washerwoman should wear on her tattered waist some jewel of a wealth long past.

The Hotel Ma.r.s.eillaise occupied one of these houses. Where it stood, the hill rose steep. One might enter a narrow alley, skirt a board fence, dodge into a box hall, seasoned with dinners long past, and mount by a steep staircase to the dining room; or he might enter that dining room directly from the street, such was the slope of the hill.

A row of benches parked the front door. On the fine, out-of-doors evenings which came too seldom in the City of Fogs, French waiters out of work, French deserters from merchantmen in the harbor below, French cabmen waiting for night and fares, lolled on these benches while they smoked their black cigarettes and chattered in their heavy, peasant accent.

Within, Madame Loisel ruled with her cash register at the cigar counter. She, bursting with sweet inner fatness like a California nectarine, kept in her middle age the everlasting charm and chic of the Frenchwoman. This Madame Loisel was a dual personality. She of the grave mouth, the considering eye, the business manner, who rung up dinner fees on the cash register and bargained with the Chinamen for vegetables at the back door, seemed hardly even sister to the Madame Loisel of Sat.u.r.day afternoon on "the line" or Sunday morning at the French Church. By what process man may not imagine, this second Madame Loisel took six inches from her girth, fifty pounds from her weight, fifteen years from her age. Her step was like a dancer's; her figure was no more than comfortably plump; her Sunday complexion brought the best out of her alluring eyes and her black, ungrizzled hair; her hands, in their perfect gloves, bore no resemblance to the hands which had sc.r.a.ped pots for Louis Loisel in the time before he could flaunt the luxury of a cashier.

In Madame Loisel's background lay the ramblings of a house built for comfort and large hospitalities. Gone were the folding doors, bare the niches, empty the window-seats. The old drawing-rooms, music-room, dining-room, had become one apartment of a sanded floor and many long tables. Through this background of his wife moved Louis Loisel, grizzled, fat and gay; never too busy at his serving to exchange flamboyant banter with a patron.

Hither the peasant French of San Francisco, menials most of them, came for luncheons and dinners of thick, heavy vegetable soup, coa.r.s.e fish, boiled joint, third-cla.s.s fruit and home-made claret, vinted by Louis himself in a hand press during those September days when the Latin quarter ran purple--and all for fifteen cents! Thither, too, came young apprentices of the professions, working at wages to shame a laborer, who had learned how much more one got for his money at Louis's than at the white-tiled American places further down town. It stood for ten years, this Hotel Ma.r.s.eillaise, the hope of the impecunious. How many careers did it preserve, how many old failures from the wreckage of Kearney Street did it console!

Madame Loisel stood at her cash register as the two young men entered.

A fresh waist, a ribbon at her throat, a slimness of her waist and an artificial freshness in her complexion showed that she had been parading that afternoon.

"Bonsoir Madame--la la la-la-la!" called Bertram.

Her face blossomed with coquetry, her teeth gleamed, and:

"Bonsoir--diable!" she smiled back at him. Mark Heath had greeted her more soberly. Her eyes followed Chester's big, square frame as he moved with lumbering grace to a corner table.

There he sat at the beginning of his career, such as it was, this Bertram Chester--a completed piece of work, fresh, unused, from the mills of the G.o.ds. His strong frame was beginning to fill out, what with the abandonment of training for a year. He was a pretty figure of a man in his clothes; and those clothes were so woven and cut as to be in contrast with his surroundings. A tailor of San Francisco, building toward fashionable patronage, had made him suits free during his last year in college. Varsity man and public character about the campus, Chester paid him back in advertising of mouth. Guided by that instinct of vanity and personal display which runs in those who have to do with the cattle range, he had learned to dress well before he was really sure-mouthed in English grammar.

His face, still, as when we first saw him, a little over-heavy, had lightened with the growth of spirit within him. This increase of spirit and expression manifested itself in his rolling and merry eye, which travelled over all humanity in his path with an air of possession, in the mobility of his rather thick-lipped mouth. For the rest, the face was all solidity and strength. His neck rose big and straight from his collar, a sign of the power which infused the figure below; his square chin, in repose, set itself at a most aggressive angle; his nose was low-bridged and straight and solid. From any company which he frequented, an attraction deeper than his obviously regular and animal beauty brought him notice and attention.

The son of Louis, a small, cheerful imitation of his father, slammed a bowl of cabbage soup down before them. Bertram, sighing his young, ravenous satisfaction, sank the ladle deep and stopped, his hand poised, his eyes fixed. Mark followed the direction of his glance.

Louis Loisel, wearing his best air of formal politeness, was bowing a party of women to a table by the door.

"Slummers!" said Mark under his breath. A habitue of the place, he had already developed a resentment of outsiders.

Louis pulled out chairs, wiped the table mightily; the French cabmen, the Barbary Coast flotsam and jetsam, gazed over their soup-spoons in silent, furtive interest.

"It's her!" said Bertram, lapsing into his native speech. Heath flashed a glance of recognition at the same moment.

"Miss Gray--sure--Mrs. Tiffany's niece. I thought she was in Europe--didn't she start a week or two after we left the ranch?"

"Oh, I knew she was coming back. Mrs. Tiffany told me. The Mrs. Boss isn't so sweet on me as she used to be, but I see her in the office now and then."

Bertram resumed his ladling. Both watched furtively. It was a balanced party--three men and three women. Among the men, Mark Heath recognized him of the pointed beard as Masters, the landscape painter. The little, brown woman who sat with her back to them must be his wife.

The other girl, a golden, full-blown Californian thing--her, too, they marked and noted with their eyes.

Recognition of a sort had come meanwhile from the party at the guest table. Miss Waddington, the full-blown golden girl, had seated herself and cooed an appreciative word or two about the quaintness and difference of the Ma.r.s.eillaise, when her eyes clutched at the two young men in the corner, whose dress made them stand out so queerly among the lost and soiled. As Bertram looked up with his glance of recognition, her eyes caught his. She glanced down at her plate.

"Eleanor," she said, "is that a flirtation starting, or do any of us know the two men in the corner--there under that beer sign."

Eleanor looked. Kate Waddington, her indirect gaze still on that corner table, saw the dark young man smile and bow effusively. She slipped a sidling glance at Eleanor Gray. Something curious, an intent look which seemed drawn to conceal a tumult within, had filmed itself over Eleanor's grey eyes. But she spoke steadily.

"Why, yes. I have met them both. They used to do summer work on the ranch when they were in college. I believe that the darker one--Mr.

Chester--is in Uncle Edward's law office now. I haven't seen either of them since I went abroad."

"I should say that this Mr. Chester fancied you, from his expression."

"I suppose that he fancies every girl that he sees--from his expression."

Kate Waddington caught the shade of irritation, uncommon with Eleanor, and noted it in memory. Mrs. Masters, an eager little woman who grasped at everything about her like a child, broke in:

"If you know them, and they're really frequenters of the place, it would be fun to ask them over. Sydney used to dine here a great deal when he was young and poor, and he has _such_ stories of the people he used to know then!"

Eleanor hesitated. Kate looked again toward Bertram, who was talking rapidly across his soup to Mark Heath, and:

"Do!" she murmured.

In that instant, Bertram himself cast the die. This had been the debate across the soup:

"I'm going over to speak to her," said Bertram.

"I shouldn't b.u.t.t in," said Mark. "It's a balanced party."

"Oh, I shan't try to stay--coming along?" He did not wait to see whether or not Mark was following.

Miss Gray greeted him more cordially, altogether more sweetly, than she had ever done in their meetings on the ranch, and pa.s.sed him about the circle for introductions. Noticing, then, that Mark had not followed, Bertram turned and beckoned with impatience. Mark crossed the room in some embarra.s.sment.

"Is this your first visit to the Hotel Ma.r.s.eillaise?" asked Mrs.

Masters. Mark hesitated; but Bertram laughed and beamed down on her from his brown eyes.

"Only about my two hundred and first," he said. "Mr. Heath and I dine here every night we haven't the price to dine anywhere else."

Masters, with that ready tact which he needed in order to live with Mrs. Masters, rushed into the breach.