The Sisters In Law Part 13

"How is it you know so much about it, all, if you are not, as you say--pardon me--a part of it?"

"I wonder!" She gave a short hard little laugh. "I don't know that I could explain, except that it all has seemed to me from birth a part of my blood and bones and gristle. An accident, a lucky strike on my father's part when he first came out here, and they would know me as well to-day as I know them. And then ... of course ... it is a small community. We live on the doorsteps of the rich and important, as it were. It would be hard for us not to know. It just comes to us. We are magnets. I suppose all this seems to you--born on the inside--quite ignominious."

"Well, my mother would have remained on the outside--that is to say a quiet little provincial--if her father hadn't happened to make a fortune with his iron works. I can understand well enough, but, if you don't mind my saying so, I think it rather a pity."

"Pity?"

"I mean thinking so much about it, don't you know? I fancy it's the result of living in a small city where there are only a few hundred people between you and the top instead of a few hundred thousand. I express, myself so badly, but what I mean is--as I make it out--it is, with you, a case of so near and yet so far. In a great city like London now (great in generations--centuries--as well as in numbers) you'd just accept the bare fact and go about your business. Not a ghost of a show, don't you see? Here you've just missed it, and, the middle cla.s.s always flowing into the upper cla.s.s, you feel that you should get your chance any minute. Ought to have had it long ago.... I can't imagine, for instance, that if my mother had married the son of my grandfather's partner that I should have wasted much time wondering why I wasn't asked to the Elizabethan Hail on the hill. Of course I don't mean there isn't envy enough in the old countries, but it's more pa.s.sive ...

without hope...."

He felt awkward and officious but he was sorry for her and would have liked to discharge his debt by helping her toward a new point of view, if possible.

She replied: "That's easy to say, and besides you are a man. My brother, who is only a clerk in a wholesale house, has been taken up and goes everywhere. They don't know that I even exist."

"Well, that's their loss," he said gallantly. "Can't you make 'em sit tip, some way? Women make fortunes sometimes, these days, And they're in about everything except the Army and Navy. Business? Or haven't you a talent of some sort? You have--pardon me again, but we have been uncommonly personal to-night--a strong and individual face ... and personality; no doubt of that."

Gora would far rather he had told her she was pretty and irresistible, but she thrilled to his praise, nevertheless. It was the first compliment she had ever received from any man but the commonplace and unimportant friends her brother had brought home occasionally before he had been introduced to society; he took good care to bring home none of his new friends.

Her heart leapt toward this exalted young Englishman, who might have stepped direct from one of the novels of his land and cla.s.s ... even the stern and anxious moderns who had made England's middle-cla.s.s the fashion, occasionally drew a well-bred and attractive man from life....

She turned to him with a smile that banished the somber ironic expression of her face, illuminating it as if the drooping spirit within had suddenly lit a torch and held it behind those strange pale eyes.

"I'll tell you what I've never told any one--but my teacher; I've taken lessons with him for a year. He is an instructor in the technique of the short story, and has turned out quite a few successful magazine writers. He believes that I have talent. I have been studying over at the University to the same end--English, biology, psychology, sociology. I'm determined not to start as a raw amateur. Oh! Perhaps I have made a mistake in telling you. You may be one of those men that are repelled by intellectual women!"

"Not a bit of it. Don't belong to that cla.s.s of duffers anyway. I don't like masculine women, or hard women--run from a lot of our girls that are so hard a diamond wouldn't cut 'em. But I've got an elder sister--she's thirty now--who's the cleverest woman I ever met, although she doesn't pretend to do anything. She won't bother with any but clever and exceptional people--has something of a salon. My parents hate it--she lives alone in a flat in London--but they can't help it.

My grandfather Doubleton liked her a lot and left her two thousand a year. I wish you knew her. She is charming and feminine, as much so as any of those I met at the ball; and so are many of the women that go to her flat--"

"Don't you think I am feminine?" asked Gora irrisistibly. He had a way of making her feel, quite abruptly, as if she had run a needle under her fingernail.

Once more he turned to her his detached but keen young eyes.

"Well ... not exactly in the sense I mean. You look too much the fighter ... but that may be purely the result of circ.u.mstances," he added hastily: the strange eyes under their heavy down-drawn browns were lowering at him. "You are not masculine, no, not a bit."

Once more Miss Dwight curled her upper lip. "I wonder if you would have said the first part of that if you had met me at the Hofer ball and I had worn a gown of flame-colored chiffon and satin, and my hair marcelled like every other woman present--except those embalmed relics of the seventies, who, I have heard, rise from the grave whenever a great ball is given, and appear in a built-up red-brown wig.... And a string of pearls round my throat? My neck and arms are quite good; although I've never possessed an evening gown, I know I'd look quite well in one ... my best."

He laughed. "It does make a difference. I wish you had been there. I am sure you are as good a dancer as you are a pal. But still ... I think I should have recognized the fighter, even if you had been born in the California equivalent for the purple. I fancy you would have found some cause or other to get your teeth into once in a while. Tell me, don't you rather like the idea of taking Life by the throat and forcing it to deliver?"

"I wonder? ... perhaps ... but that does not mitigate my resentment that I am on the outside of everything when I belong on the in. I should never have been forced to strive after what is mine by natural right."

"Well, don't let it make a socialist of you. That is such a cheap revenge on society.... Confession of failure; and nothing in it."

IV

He looked at his watch: "Eight o'clock. I'll be getting on to the Presidio. Why don't you come with me?"

Gora's feminine instincts arose from a less perverted source than her social. She shook her head with a smile.

"I don't want to go any farther from my house. I shall slip down my first chance; and I have plenty to eat. Perhaps you will come to see me before you go if my house is spared."

"Rather. What is the number? And if the house goes I'll find you somehow."

He took her hand in both his and shook it warmly. "You are the best pal in the world--"

"Now don't make me a nice little speech. I'm only too glad. Go out to the Presidio and get a hot breakfast and attend--to--to your affairs. I am sure everything will be all right, although you may not be able to get away as soon as you hope."

"I don't like leaving you alone here--"

"Alone?" She waved her hand at the hundreds of rec.u.mbent forms in the cemeteries and on the lower slopes of Calvary. "I probably shall never be so well protected again. Please go."

He shook her hand once more, ran down the hill, turned and waved his cap, and trudged off in the direction of the Presidio.

V

She slept in her own house that night, for dynamiting by miners summoned from Gra.s.s Valley by General Funston, and a change of wind, had saved the western portion of the city. For the first time in her life Gora experienced a sense of profound grat.i.tude, almost of happiness. She felt that only a little more would make her quite happy.

Her lodgers, even her absorbed brother, noticed that her manner, her expression, had perceptibly softened. She herself noticed it most of all.

CHAPTER XI

I

Gathbroke met Alexina Groome again a week later.

On Sat.u.r.day, when the fire was over, and she could retreat decently and in good order, Mrs. Groome, to her young daughter's secret anguish, had consented to rest her nerves for a fortnight at Rincona, Mrs. Abbott's home in Alta.

As Gora had predicted, Gathbroke found that it would have been hardly more difficult to move his sister's body, now at an undertaker's in Fillmore Street, out of the state in war-time than in the wake of a city's disaster, which was scattering its population to every point of the railroad compa.s.s. He had refused the s.p.a.ce in the baggage car offered to him by the company; it should: be a private car or nothing; and for that, in spite of all the influence Gwynne and his powerful friends could bring to bear, he must wait.

Meanwhile Gwynne had asked him to stay with himself and his mother, Lady Victoria Gwynne, at the house of his fiancee, Isabel Otis, on Russian Hill; a ma.s.sive cliff rising above one of the highest of the city's northern hills, whose old houses, clinging to its steep sides had escaped the fire that roared about its base. To-day it was a green and lofty oasis in the midst of miles of smoking ruins.

Gathbroke was as nervous as only a young Englishman within his immemorial armor can be. Gwynne, who had gone through the same nerve-racking crisis, although from different causes, understood what he suffered and pressed him into service in the distribution of government rations, and garments to the different refugee camps. But Gathbroke had the active imagination of intelligent youth, and he never forgot to blame himself for lingering in New York with some interesting chaps he had met on the _Majestic_, and afterward in Southern California, seduced by its soft climate and violent color.

Unquestionably, if he had stayed on his job, as these expressive Americans put it, his sister would have been in New York, possibly on the Atlantic Ocean when San Francisco shook herself to ruin.

"But not necessarily alive," said Lady Victoria callously, removing her cigar, her heavy eyes that looked like empty volcanos, staring down over the smoldering waste. "People with heart disease don't invariably wait for an earthquake to jolt them out of life. a.s.sume that her time had come and think of something else or you'll become a silly a.s.s of a neurotic."

Gwynne, more sympathetic, continued to find him what distraction he could, and one day drove him down the Peninsula with a message from the Committee of Fifty to Tom Abbott; who had caught a heavy cold during those three days when he had driven a car filled with dynamite and had had scarcely an hour for rest. He was now at home in bed.