XVIII
Gwynne awoke one morning with an irresistible desire for The Town inevery fibre of his being. Barring London he would have liked threecrowded days in New York, but as nothing better was available he feltthat he was open to the attractions of San Francisco. He had not visitedit since his departure on that brilliant Sunday after his arrival; hehad promised to wait for Isabel, and his interest in it wasintermittent. This morning he found his indifference culpable, inasmuchas he had had three letters from his mother imploring him to increaseher income, and Mr. Colton had not only strongly advised him to teardown the block of old structures south of Market Street, and put up agreat office building, but had offered to raise the money--selling halfthe land and mortgaging the rest. And if Gwynne had not revisited SanFrancisco he had a very accurate idea of its present conditions. It wasuncommonly rich, and its citizens, always sanguine of its future, hadbeen seized with a very fever of faith; they were selling out theirinterests everywhere else and buying and building, tearing down andrebuilding, until San Francisco threatened to lose its oddly patched andwholly individual appearance and become the Western city ofsky-scrapers.
As Gwynne dressed he recalled his first impression of the city as hecrossed the bay: its singularly desolate appearance, in spite of whatat first looked to be a compact mass of buildings covering some thirtythousand acres on hill and plain, and later as if a comet had raineddown pickings from every architectural quarter of the universe. He hadwalked once to the back of the boat and looked at the line of littletowns and cities lying at the base of the eastern hills. They didnothing to dispel the impression of loneliness. Whatever theirindividual names they were mere annexes of the great-little cityopposite. When he returned to the forward deck the dust was blowing itsbrown volumes through every street that converged to the water-front.Those dust wracks, broken and narrowed by the buildings, lifted from theoutlying sand-dunes, and following a law that had driven them eastwardsince California had risen from the deeps, had a curiously baffled,stolidly persistent expression, as if the old sand-dunes knew theirrights and were determined to assert themselves so long as man left ayard of them free.
Gwynne, in his solitary moments, when even his law-books were closed,had recalled the stories of San Francisco, past and present, told him byIsabel, and they had given rise to many whimsies. California, he stillall but disliked, but he wondered at the haunting memory of the city hehad seen so briefly, and the odd almost pathetic appeal it had made tohis sympathies. He had concluded that it was the pioneer taint in hisEnglish blood, and had blinked in sudden wonder before the fact of hisclose kinship, not only to that old romantic Spanish element, but to thebrilliant adventurous lawless race of men that had made the city greatand famous, then passed on into the kingdom of darkness leaving theirmoral rottenness in its foundations, and, pulsing above, all their oldbrave indomitable and progressive spirit. Although he had found it norival to his studies and his ranch, still he had given it more thoughtthan he was aware, and not only to its picturesque psychology, but asthe seat of a possible business adventure. To raise a large sum of moneyon the San Francisco real estate--the common property of his mother andhimself--and erect a great office building of steel and reinforcedconcrete, would add enormously to his own and his mother's incomes, buton the other hand it would stand in the midst of acres of woodenbuildings and shanties, and the risk of a great fire--whose momentumwould sweep through any fireproof building--was one forgotten neither bythe insurance agents nor the chief of the fire department, who was saidto keep thousands of tons of dynamite in the city with which tosegregate the always expected conflagration. It was possible that noinsurance company would take the risk on an expensive building in such aquarter. On the other hand it was as certain as the present wealth ofthe city, that such a building would have hundreds of companions in thenext ten years, and the undesirable, immoral, and generally drunkenelement, so largely responsible for the continual fires of the district,would be gradually pressed to the outskirts of the city. He feltinclined to take the risk, even a sense of exhilaration in it, as ifindeed the dead and gone Otises had invaded his soul and demanded onemore bout on earth.
There was another matter that claimed his thoughts when the law was atrest. He was suspicious and resentful of Isabel's desire to manage him;and that she had succeeded more than once, through her superior femininesubtlety, made him aware that two strong natures were slowly bracingthemselves against each other, and that on some future battle-groundthere might be a heavy and final encounter. This morning, as he orderedhis portmanteau to be packed and placed in the buggy, his impulse was totake the tram, and cavalierly announce, upon their next meeting, that hehad "been to town." After he had had his coffee, however, he decided notto be an ass, and unpardonably rude as well. She had talked of thisvisit every time they had met, although one thing and another haddetained her, and he could hardly explain to her an impetuous andsolitary flight. He colored as he invoked her assumption that he fearedand was running away from her, asserting his independence like anyschool-boy. Besides there was the launch. The idea of three hours on thewater instead of one and a half on a slow and dirty train so exhilaratedhim that he forgot his self-communings and ordered the buggy at once. Itwas but half-past five. They would catch the tide; nor did the trainleave until half-past eight. He presented Imura Kisaburo Hinamoto with abox of cigarettes, gave him the run of the library, and drove offwhistling.
He found Isabel among the chickens. She had just opened the doors of allthe little colony houses, and the hills were white with excitedscratching Leghorns. She wore overalls and high boots, and the nightbraid of her hair was twisted several times round her throat. Gwynnesmiled as he recalled the heroines of poesy that had fed so many dovesand garden birds. No heroine could look picturesque in bloomers, andfeeding chickens, but as Isabel came towards him waving her handhospitably, her white clear-cut face resting on its black _goita_ ofhair might have suggested Stuck's Suende, in the Neue Pinakothek ofMunich, had there been an evil glint in her light cool blue eyes. Thefleeting query crossed his mind as to what she might have been if bornin one of the generations before the pioneers of her sex had opened somany gates for the irruption of overburdened femininity. But he merelyremarked:
"I am suddenly inspired With a desire to see San Francisco. Are you toobusy? Are we too late for the tide?"
"Just in time," said Isabel, promptly; "and I shall be ready as soon asthe launch is. Do you know that it is Saturday? You could not havechosen a better day."
* * * * *
As they pushed off, all the marsh and its creek was covered with a lowwhite mist that gave it the appearance of a great lake, a ghost lakethrough which the little steamer just leaving Rosewater two miles abovecoiled its way like a monstrous white bird feeling uneasily for afoothold. Overhead the sky was covered with the pink fleece of dawn. Themass of mountains in Marin County looked black and formless, but abovethem rose the granite crest of Tamalpais, like an angular liftedshoulder.
"That mountain has marched north five feet in the last forty years,"said Isabel, as she carefully steered through the mist. "Either that, orthe earthquake of 1868 moved her off her base."
"For heaven's sake don't tell me any more weird tales about thiscountry; it gives me the horrors often enough as it is. This morning thehills and mountain on the other side of the valley looked likeantediluvian monsters just ready to turn over."
"Well, they have turned over a few times, and may again. One reason weall love California is because we never know what she will do next, andbecause she is still primeval under this thin coat of civilization thatis too tight for her. I admire England, but I could not live in it. Itis too peaceful, too done. It is impossible to imagine any furtherchange, for civilization can go no further. But out here--the wholecountry may stand on its head any day; and we may yet have cities asgreat as Babylon and Nineveh."
"Well, we'll not be here to see. This fog is just high enough to filterinto one's very marrow--ev
en your picturesque pioneer days are over; Iwill confess they might have made me feel that life on the edge of theworld was worth while. I should have liked to lay the foundations of agreat isolated city like San Francisco; but I don't see any sign ofanother big city. Los Angeles is a little Chicago and may live to be abig one, but nothing would induce me to live in the south. However, noman is ever conscious of the fact that he is in at the birth of a greatcity; our pioneer forefathers were just a parcel of adventurers crazedwith the lust of gold, and with no sense of any future beyond thepresent."
Isabel leaned forward eagerly. "You have been thinking about SanFrancisco!" she exclaimed, triumphantly. "The old Otis blood isbeginning to wake up! Hooray!"
Gwynne laughed outright, and for the first time without resentment; hewas tired of having California "rammed down his throat." Isabel's eyeswere dancing with so purely youthful and feminine a triumph that hecould not but feel indulgent.
"I am growing reconciled to my lot. Here I am and here I remain."
"Yes, you are much happier," said Isabel, softly. She half closed hereyes and looked a trifle older. "It worried me dreadfully at first toknow that you were unhappy, and that it was my fault."
"Unhappy!" exclaimed Gwynne, reddening haughtily. "I have not beenmooning about like a homesick ass--"
"Oh, your outside was as tranquil as your pride demanded--and it wassplendid! But I couldn't help knowing--feeling. A thousand little thingsappeal so directly to a woman's intuitions."
"Indeed! I am delighted to learn that you possess the common intuitionsof a woman."
"Am I unwomanly? Masculine?" asked Isabel, anxiously.
"Not in the ordinary sense; but you are much too strong. No woman shouldbe as strong--as, well--as psychically independent as you are. It is asflagrant a usurpation of prerogative as a pretty complexion on a man."
"I only say one prayer: 'Give me strength. Give me strength.'"
"For what, in heaven's name? What use have you for so much strength? Youhave forsworn matrimony. You disclaim the intention of going forth andentering the great battle of the intellects--having, as you say, notalents. You have isolated yourself from love, so you need no uncommonsupply of strength to meet suffering. You will always have money enough,and you appear to have been born with the gift of making it. Even if youelect to be the leader of fashion in San Francisco, your equipment neednot be of unadulterated steel. But I cannot fancy why you entertain anysuch ambition."
"That is the least of my ambition--although I intend to become the mostnotable woman in San Francisco, not only because I must gratify ahealthy natural ambition in some way, and because I want my life to havea sufficiency of incident in it, but because it is a part of my generalscheme."
"What is this precious scheme?"
"You would not understand if I should tell you. Men have no time forsubjectivities--except poets, psychological fictionists, and the like,who do not seem to me men at all. Now, one reason I have liked you fromthe first, in spite of many things that made my American blood boil, isthat you are a man, a real masculine arrogant dense man, with nofeminine morbid tendency to analyze your ego, in spite of your Celticblood. I met too many of that sort in Europe."
Gwynne, with his elbows on his knees, regarded the bottom of the boatand colored guiltily, while congratulating himself that for all herinsight and cleverness she had barely penetrated his outer envelope. Shehad thought him merely homesick, when his ego had been tottering, hissoul racked with doubt and terror; when he had spent long hours inself-analysis; until the law had come to his rescue and reinvigoratedhis brain. At the same time a wave of sadness swept over him. How littlehuman beings knew one another, no matter how intimate. As he raised hiseyes he seemed to see Isabel across a chasm as vast as the Atlantic; andhe was reminded that he knew her as little as she him. She had confessedto the throes of what she believed to have been a great passion, butwhen he had rehearsed the story away from the influence of her curiouscold magnetism and the sinister setting of its recital, he hadrecognized it for what it was, the first violent embrace of an ardentunshackled imagination with positive experience, in which the ego hadplayed an insignificant part. Her immediate recovery upon beholding thedisintegrating clay, without one regret for the vanished soul, or evenfor the magnetic warmth of the living shell, suggested to his gropingmasculine intelligence, totally unaccustomed to analysis of woman, thather attack had been little more personal than if the man had infectedher with the microbe of influenza. Surely a woman that had loved a manwell enough to kiss him must have been stabbed with pity for the ardentvigorous life thrust out into the dark. Then he felt a quick resentmentthat anything so stainlessly statuesque as this girl--for all her trimtailoring and large black hat--should have been even superficiallypossessed by any man.
"Did that Johnny ever kiss you?" he asked, abruptly.
"Of course," replied Isabel. "Did I not have to, being engaged to him?Not that there was much chance, for I never saw him alone between fourwalls. Perhaps that was one reason that side of love seemed to me muchoverrated. I was happiest when sitting alone in a sort of trance andthinking about him."
"Humph!" said Gwynne.
The mist was gone. The east was a vast alcove of gold in which the hillswere set like hard dark jewels. The creek was narrowing. On either side,and far on all sides, stretched the marsh. The guileless duck disportedhimself on the ponds, but Gwynne, for once, was insensible to itssubversive charms, felt no regret that he had forgotten his gun. He cameand sat closer to Isabel, wondering if she felt as young as he did inthe wonderful freshness and beauty of the dawn. She certainly lookedvery young and fresh and girlish, not in the least fateful, as when sheturned her profile against a hard background and forgot his presence.
"I think I could quite understand anything you cared to tell me," hesaid, smiling into her eyes. "Please give me your reasons forcultivating the character of a Toledo blade. Is it your intentionto marshal all the clans of all the advanced women and lead themagainst the more occupied and disunited sex? I am told that it isa standing grievance in Rosewater that you will not join thatLiterary--Political--Improvement--and all the rest of it Club. I shouldthink with your ambitions and--well--masterful disposition, you wouldassume its leadership as a sort of preliminary course."
"I intend to be a whole club in myself."
"Appalling! But what _do_ you mean by that cryptic assertion? I told youthat I could understand anything you chose to explain, but, as they sayout here, I am not good at guessing."
"I am working out a theory of my own. It has been demonstrated thatlabor, capital, all the known forces, are far stronger when concentratedand organized. I believe in concentrating all the faculties about a willstrong enough not only to conquer life but all the inherited weaknessesthat beset one daily within. That is a minor matter, however. I believethat our higher faculties were given to us for no purpose but to createwithin ourselves an individual strength that will add to the sum ofstrength in the world. It is not necessary to proclaim this strengthfrom the house-tops, nor to search for windmills--a positive enemy itwould leap at automatically--nor even to seek to improve the world byall the tried and generally futile devices. It is enough to be. I alonemay not add greatly to this subjective strength of the world; but thinkwhat life would be did each individual succeed in making himself but onedegree less strong than God himself! It may be my destiny to makepropaganda without noise; but if not, the achievement of absolutestrength in myself will move the world forward to its millenniumone-millionth part of a degree at least. For that will be the realmillennium--when there shall be no despicable weakness in the world, nomoral rottenness, when each individual shall rely upon himself alone,independent of the environment from which the majority to-day draweverything good and bad, their happiness or misery. Nothing will everpurge human nature but the triumph of the higher faculties, a triumphaccomplished by an unswervingly cultivated and jealously maintainedstrength."
"I don't deny that your millennium has its points, but would th
at not berather a hard world? What of love, the interdependence of the sexes, andall the other human relations?"
"It is love and interdependence that cause all the misery of the world;they would be the very first things I should relegate among the minorinfluences, did I wield the sceptre for an hour. To women, at least, allunhappiness comes from the superstition that love--any sort--is all. Ofcourse there would be marriage, but of deliberate choice, and after along and purely platonic friendship, in which all the horrid littlefailings that do most to dissever could be recognized and weighed. Freelove and experimental matrimony are mere excuses for the sort ofsensuality that is shallow and inconstant."
"Ah! Then you would permit love to your married pair after they hadprobed each other's minds and mannerisms for a year or two? That is aconcession I hardly expected."
Isabel shrugged her shoulders. "I am neither an idiot nor blind. Heavenknows I have seen enough of reckless passion and its consequences. Theequipment of the mortal proves him to be the slave of the race, but atleast he need not remain the blind and ridiculous slave he is atpresent. If I had married that man no doubt I should have loved him morefrantically than ever for a time. But that would have passed, left meresentful of bondage, of the surrender of self. There, above all, is thereason I shall never marry. Impersonally, I believe in marriage, orrather accept it, but I purpose to stand apart as a complete individual,and subtly to teach others to drag strength out of the great body offorce in which we move, until they realize that in time mankind may feedthose creative fires, becoming, who knows, stronger than the great firstcause itself."
"And I have been called an egoist," murmured Gwynne. "I feel amere--well--Leghorn--beside this sublime determination to sit upon thethrone of God and administer to both kingdoms. All the same, my faircousin, I believe that it takes a man and a woman to complete the ego. Iincline to the picturesque belief that they were originally united, andhalved in some--well, say when Earth and its atmosphere became twodistinct parts. No doubt it was a judgment for having accomplished toomuch evil in that formidable combination. Who knows but that may be thesecret of the fall of man; the uneven progress of human nature may betowards the resumption of that state, only to be attained when we haveconquered the worst in ourselves and become pure spirit."
"That fits my own theory, for I believe that the two parts of whatshould have been a perfect whole were cut in two for their sins, andthat reunion will come only when each has absolutely mastered the humanevil in him and freed the spiritual, but this he can only accomplishalone--"
"Don't quote Tolstoi to me! He waited until he was old and cold to hurlanathema against the human passions. Theories upon love by a man longpast his prime are as valueless as those of a girl."
"It was a theory I had no intention of advancing. I think for myself andpay no more attention to the excessive virtue bred by the years than tothat equally illogical repentance or awakening of a woman's moral naturewhen the man has ceased to charm or has disappeared. That is a mereprocess, and no augury of future behavior. But you are always at yourbest when you go off at half-cock like that! What I meant was that womanhas degenerated, not through passion but through ages of the exercise ofher pettier and meaner qualities. In some, these qualities lead tomalignancy, in the majority, no doubt, to frivolity--still worse, to mypuritanical inheritance--and they are utterly commonplace of outlook.Matrimony keeps these qualities in constant exercise, because the egoloses its independent life, its habit of meditation, and is pin-prickedtwenty times a day. It is by these qualities that woman chains man tothe earth, not by her human passions. I am quite willing to concede thatpassion is magnificent."
Gwynne ground his teeth. He had never encountered anything soincongruous as this beautiful vital superbly fashioned girl talking ofpassion in precisely the same tone as she would have talked of chickens.He felt the primitive man's impulse to beat her black and blue and thenmake her his creature. As Isabel turned her eyes she was astonished atwhat she saw in his. Gwynne's eyes were blazing. There was a dark colorin his face, and even his mouth, somewhat heavy, and generally set, washalf open. She fancied that so he looked when on a platform facing theenemy, and thoroughly awake.
"What are you angry about?" she asked, calmly. "That I devote myself tomy sex instead of to yours? They need me more than any leader they haveevolved so far. There are millions of women of your sort. I want nothingthat your sex has left to offer. I will find a happiness unimaginable toyou, in living absolutely within myself and independent of all thatlife, so far, has to give."
Then Gwynne exploded, and forgot himself. He flung himself forward, andcatching her upper arms in the grip of a vise shook her until her teethclacked together. "Damn you! Damn you!" he stammered. "What you want isto be the squaw of one of your own Indians!"
"Let me go!" gasped Isabel, furious, and in sharp physical pain. "Do youwant to turn the boat over? Have you gone mad? I'll _kick_ you!"
"Good!" said Gwynne, releasing her, and sitting back. "That is the onlyfeminine speech you have made since I have known you. I make no apology.You need never speak to me again. Set me ashore over there. I can takethe train when it comes along."
"You pinched me! You hurt me!" cried, Isabel in wrath and dismay. "Ihate you!"
"And your sentiments are cordially returned. Will you put me on shore?"
"I don't care what you do. You hurt me! You hurt me!" And Isabel droppedher head into her arms and burst into a wild tempest of tears, like achild that has had its first whipping.
Gwynne laughed aloud. "We are running into a mud bank," he said, "andthe tide is going out."
Isabel made a wild clutch at the tiller ropes, and brought the boat backinto the channel. But she could scarcely see, and Gwynne with acontrition he had no intention of displaying offered to control thelaunch. She vouchsafed him no reply, and as she did not steer for theland, he retired to the extreme end of the boat and studied the scenery.He was determined not to go through even the form of an apology, but hewas equally determined upon a reconciliation. In his first attempt tomatch his wits with a woman's his face became so stony and intense thatIsabel recovered in a bound the serenity she had been struggling for,and laughed with a gayety that would have deceived any man.
"We are a couple of naughty children," she said, sweetly. "Or maybepeople are not quite civilized so early in the morning. You may smoke,if you like, and then I shouldn't mind if you came here and let me teachyou to run this launch--it is probably more old-fashioned than any youhave undertaken. But as we no doubt shall make many journeys it is onlyfair that you should do half the work."