Ancestors Part 53

"I shall not take anything. My laces are in the chiffonniere. I do not care to enter the house again."

Isabel fetched her hat and jacket, for in spite of the fire it would be cold near the water; and a few moments later she stood on the edge of Green and Jones streets, on the other side of the hill, and watched Victoria and Anne, carrying a large clothes-basket between them, carefully making their way down to the level. They had a walk of some thirteen blocks before them, but the streets were full of people and of ruddy light.

She returned to the house and sat down on the porch, her eyes diverted from the fire for a moment by the picture of Sugihara, a pair of eye-gla.s.ses in front of his spectacles, comfortably established on a chair in the garden and reading by the lamp of the burning city. It was apparent that he had forgotten the 18th of April.

Isabel was alone but a moment. Stone burst in upon her. He had approached from behind, and came running down the hill.

"Isabel," he cried. "Get a bottle of champagne."

"Champagne?"

"Yes. It may be six months before I see another--but that is a mere detail. I want to drink to the old city."

Isabel, who liked him best in his dramatic moments, found a bottle of champagne. He knocked the head off, and filling the gla.s.s, went down to the first landing of the long narrow flight of steps. He held the gla.s.s high, pointing it first towards the middle of what had been Market Street, and was now a river of fire, then slowly s.h.i.+fting it along towards Kearney and Montgomery, as he named the restaurants that had given San Francisco no mean part of her fame.

"Here's to Zinkand's, Tait's, The Palace Grill! The Poodle Dog!

Marchand's! The Pup! Delmonico's! Coppa's! The Fas.h.i.+on! The Hotel de France! And here's to the c.o.c.ktail Route, the Tenderloin, and the Bohemian Club! And here's--" By this time his voice was dissolving, and the gla.s.s was describing eccentric curves. "Here's to the old city, whose like will never be seen this side of h.e.l.l again. Pretty good imitation of heaven in spots, and everything you chose to look for, anyway. And the prettiest women, the best fellows, the greatest all-night life, the finest cooking, the wickedest climate. Here's to San Francisco--and d.a.m.n the bounder that calls her 'Frisco!"

Then he drank what was left of the contents of his gla.s.s and hastily refilled it. After he had finished the bottle luxuriously, he held out his hand to Isabel. "Come along?" he asked. Then, as she shook her head: "I must go back to Paula and the kids. The mattresses are out in the Park already. You are in no danger, what with the neighbors above and the patrol. Good luck to you," and he vanished.

Isabel was alone at last, a state she had unconsciously wished for all day--it seemed a month since the morning. She sat down and leaned her elbows on the railing. Now that the sun was gone, the heavens, or the smoke obscuring them, were as red as that sea beneath which seemed to devour a house a minute as it rolled out towards the Mission and worked with all its might among the great business blocks between Market Street and Telegraph Hill. Some one had estimated that the columns of fire were seven miles high, and they certainly looked as if they had melted the very stars. Here and there was a play of blue flames, doubtless from some explosive substance, and when the dynamite shot the entrails from a house there was a gorgeous display of fireworks--the golden showers of sparks symbolizing the treasure that blackened and crumbled in dropping back to earth.

Before sitting down she had swept the distant hills with her field-gla.s.s and seen thousands of people lying not ten feet apart, like an exhausted army after battle. In that intense glare she could even study the eccentric positions of the fallen headstones and monuments in the old deserted cemeteries--Lone Mountain and Calvary. The cross on the lofty point of the bare hill behind the Catholic cemetery was red against the blackness of the west; and hundreds of weary mortals were huddled about its base. She tried to pity all those terrified uncomfortable creatures out there, but again the part they played in the greatest natural drama of modern times occurred to her, and she thought that should console them.

She wondered at her lack of sentimental regret at the destruction of her beloved city. But sentiment seemed a mere drop of insult to be cast into that ocean of calamity. Moreover, she was p.r.i.c.ked by a sense that it was a living sentient thing, that city, and was getting its just dues for the hearts it had devoured, the lives it had ruined, the merciless clutch it had kept upon so many that were made for better things. To its vice she gave little thought; she fancied it was not worse than other cities, if the truth were known; it was the picturesqueness of its methods that had held it in the limelight. But that it was one of the world's juggernauts, and the more cruel for its ever laughing beguiling face--of that there was no manner of doubt.

She wondered also that she was not in a fever of anxiety about Gwynne.

She had interrogated the sentry and been informed that the automobiles carrying dynamite dashed straight down to the fire line, often within; that a number of the soldiers, whose duty it was to lay the explosive, had been wounded and carried to the hospitals; that there was always the risk of a laden machine being suddenly surrounded by fire, for many houses were ignited by the sparks, and, in that wooden district down there, burned like tinder. Perhaps, like Victoria, she was too sure of his destiny; perhaps the picture of the future with him that she had conceived refused to alter its lines; or it may be that there was no place in the impersonal arrangement of her faculties the double catastrophe had effected, for fear; or for anything beyond the impressions of the moment. Her mind worked on mechanically. She was determined to remain as long as there was a possibility of Gwynne's returning for food or care. But the soul beneath was possessed by an absolute calm. She had the sense of having been taken into partners.h.i.+p with nature that morning; so sudden and personal had been that a.s.sault, from which she yet had issued unscathed. She felt that everything that would follow in life, excepting only her love for Gwynne, would be too petty to regard more seriously than the daily meals. Not that she had more than a bare mental appreciation of the phases of love at the moment; but it possessed her and it was infinite.

She sat motionless until nearly two o'clock and then went up to her room and lay down. It was not possible to sleep for more than a few moments at a time, for the detonations were almost incessant, but she forced herself to rest, not knowing what work the morrow might have in store.

When she finally rose and looked out of her window she saw that the fire was coming up the hills.

XV

She barely touched the breakfast prepared by the methodical Sugihara, who had already buried the silver, and cut the pictures from their frames, rolled, and tied them securely.

"It is only a question of a few hours," he said. "The dynamiting so far has done more harm than good. They take a house at a time instead of a block, and as it falls apart it ignites another on the opposite side of the street. The army doesn't like to interfere, and the mayor has too long been obsequious to capital. Mr. Clatt is still there with the launch behind him. I took him down his breakfast some time ago. He told me to tell you that he'd 'got his job cut out for him now, as the Dagos were beginning to leave Telegraph Hill.'"

Isabel had one or two moments of panic as she watched those waves of flame beat up the hill, and pictured them raging up the eastern slopes as well; but the panic pa.s.sed, for she knew that there were two exits still open. The heavens were black. A disk like a sealing-wax wafer indicated the position of the sun. The heat was terrific. The dynamiting was incessant, but it did not drown the roar and the eager furious crackle of the flames, the reverberating crash of falling walls. And the flames were the redder for the blackness above. Cinders were falling all over the heights, and the smoke burned the eyes.

"I shall feel like Casabianca presently, and rather ridiculous," she reflected, "but I shall stay till the last possible moment." She went within and packed a pillow-case with Lady Victoria's laces and other portable objects of value and adornment, then gathered up similar belongings of her own, tied the case firmly about the neck, stood it where it could be s.n.a.t.c.hed in flight, and returned to the porch.

The boarding-house district, several blocks of large wooden houses, seemed literally to be swept from its foundations by those rus.h.i.+ng pillars of fire. The whole quarter was wiped out in an hour, and then the fire turned its attention to the higher slopes.

It played with them for a while, darting west and returning for a morsel at which it leaped with the agility of a living monster, went west again; then, its appet.i.te whetted and its greed insatiable, it started straight for n.o.b Hill. The soldiers drove the faithful servants out of the houses at the point of the bayonet. Then--in a moment--the familiar curtains were blowing out of the windows--shrivelled to a crisp and pursued by the red rage behind.

Sugihara did not go through the form of cooking luncheon. He knew that his mistress would not eat, and he had as little appet.i.te himself. He folded his arms on the top of the fence and waited for the signal to retreat.

Isabel went into the house repeatedly and dipped her burning face into a basin of water, but returned quickly to her post. The fire was running from the east along California Street hill; she saw the men who had been cutting pictures from their frames in the Inst.i.tute of Art flee to the west, then watched the Gothic structure flare up and burn like an old hay-stack: that monument to a millionaire whose name would be already forgotten had it not been tacked to the gift. The fire reached California Street, on the edge of the plateau, from the south, coming up the west side of Taylor Street. Other great houses of the rich were so many roaring furnaces--several were curiously neglected and isolated by the fire, that seemed to have gone mad with its own l.u.s.t. The eastern slopes were a ma.s.s of smouldering ruins, not black, but the most exquisite tints of violet, rose, chrome, gray, sepia, yellow. They looked, with their arches and columns, towers and broken walls, like the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill on a colossal scale. About and through them floated clouds of fine white ashes, ghostly restless dust of unthinkable treasure.

Suddenly, hardly crediting her eyes, Isabel saw an automobile labor up the steep acclivity, through that swirling furnace, and dart across California Street and in the direction of Russian Hill. She knew that Gwynne was in it, and a moment later Hofer discharged him at the foot of the steps, then ran the car out Jackson Street at the top of its speed.

Gwynne walked up the steps and along the plank walk. Isabel recognized him by his carriage, for he was as black as a coal-heaver and most of his hair was burned off.

"I should like to wash first," he said, as he came up the house flight.

"The water will go with the rest."

"Of course. Do you want anything to eat."

"No, I had some sandwiches a while ago."

He went up to his room and Isabel awaited him in the farthest corner of the living-room, where it may have been a trifle less hot and less noisy than elsewhere.

He came down in a moment. "That was a close shave," he said. "We didn't know what we were in for, and it was either go on and hope for better luck at the top, or dive down into a very good imitation of a live volcano."

He was recognizable, although his khaki clothes were black and burned, and one side of his head made him look as if he had just been discharged from a military hospital.

"I shall rest for a few moments and then go back," he said, throwing himself into a chair opposite Isabel. "I never forgot you, but I made sure Stone had delivered my message and that you were on the ranch. I saw my mother and Miss Montgomery an hour ago. You must get out of this at once."

"Tell me what you have been doing," said Isabel evasively.

"I have been alive," he said, intensely. "Never in all my days have I found life so wonderful. Battle is nothing to it. For the best part of two days I have been dodging the open jaws of death every minute; and the sensation of pitting one's puny human strength and the acc.u.mulated wit of several thousand years of varied civilization against an element in its might has inspired me with the only consummate approval of life that I have ever known--although I might have known it the day before yesterday if you had looked as you do now." He sat steadily regarding her for a few moments without speaking, but he was sensible of no immediate wish to touch her. That, too, belonged to a possibly greater but far different to-morrow. He was keyed very high. He did not feel himself so much a human being as a component part of one force disputing every inch of the progress of a mightier.

"Great G.o.d, what men!" he burst out. "I have been with some member of the Committee of Fifty, on and off, these two days, to say nothing of last night--Mr. Phelan invited me to serve on it yesterday morning. They are superb, not daunted for a moment, talking already of the new city, of the opportunity this conflagration has given them to make it over in every way. Architects were engaged before three o'clock yesterday afternoon. And the young business men that have been cleaned out! They talk only of the enormous possibilities of the future. I remember reading once of much the same spirit exhibited by Londoners after the Great Fire. It is the most wonderful thing in the world that for a few days at least you are permitted to cherish an unleavened respect for human nature. Every mean cowardly and selfish trait that chains man to earth is moribund to-day, in the normal at least; and the rats have run to other holes. The higher qualities, those that have inspired the world since it began, are in full possession. And, by Jove, it is going to be the pioneer life over again! Do you remember that I regretted once I could not be in at the foundation and growth of a great city, also that the drawback to such an opportunity was that one was never conscious of his part? Well, now we are back to the conditions of the Fifties, and we know it. We shall work for tremendous stakes, and in no doubt of the result."

"The enthusiastic moment has come," said Isabel.

"Rather. Here is my part cut out for me. Here I stay and become a chief factor in making this city greater even than before. That is enough for any man. And there will be plenty of fight. Politics will crawl back to new strongholds, as soon as men become egos again, but I shall fight them here, not in the country."

He stood up, and Isabel asked, hastily: "Have you had no sleep?"

"Hofer and I broke into an empty house in the Western Addition towards morning and slept on the floor for three hours. I have known harder beds. I must go. I felt that I must look at you and order you to leave at once."

"I don't want to leave the city."

"You must go. The fire will have taken this house before midnight. You will be ordered out before that. They may save the city west of Van Ness Avenue, for the mayor at last has consented that several blocks shall be blown up at once. I am carrying dynamite. If I saw Russian Hill on fire and was not sure that you were out of harm's way, it would unnerve me, and I need all the nerve I've got."

"I can go down to Fort Mason."

"I want to know that you are out of the city. I think my mother is better off where she is. She is working with a will down there and absolutely refused to leave. I did not insist--no fire could cross those sand-lots, and I fancy she needs occupation. But you must go."

"I should be as safe."

"Perhaps. But I should be beset by fears that you had ventured too far.