The Readjustment Part 4

Judge Tiffany met the direct hint with a direct parry.

"We have five thousand attorneys in San Francisco and only five hundred of them are making a living."

"Yes, I know it is overcrowded," said Bertram Chester, not a particle abashed.

After black coffee on the piazza, the two college boys swung off down the lane, Bertram smoking rapidly at one of the Judge's cigars.

"He can be almost anything," said the Judge, meditatively.

"Even a gentleman?" gently inquired Mrs. Tiffany.

"Perhaps that isn't necessary in our Western way of life. Thank G.o.d, we haven't come yet to the point where the caste of Vere de Vere is necessary to us."

"I wish I had it," he went on, a little wistfully.

"Gentility? why Edward, if anyone--"

"Oh no, my dear. I may say that was half the trouble. So many considerations came up; so many things I didn't want to do, so many it didn't seem right to do. I was forever turning aside to wrestle with my feelings on those things, and forever hesitating. Half the time, after the opportunity was gone by, I discovered that my scruples had been foolish; but I always discovered afterward. I don't believe that success lies that way in a new world."

He had risen; and now his wife rose and stood beside him.

"You are forever talking as though you were a failure. I know you're not. Everyone knows you're not."

"The parable of the ten talents, Mattie. Not how much we've got, but how much interest we've earned on our powers. However, we had that out long ago, my dear. Yes, I know. I promised not to talk and think this way. But if I'd been like this boy! He'll seize the thing before him.

No side considerations in his mind!"

"It is a policy," said Mrs. Tiffany in a tone of injured partisans.h.i.+p, "that will land him in jail."

"No," said the Judge, "success does not lead towards jails. He'll look out for that."

CHAPTER III

In that immortal "middle period" of San-Francisco, when the gay mining camp was building toward a stable adjustment of society, when the wild, the merry, the dissolute and the brave who built the city were settling down to found houses and cultivate respectability in face of a constantly resurgent past--in those days none who pretended to eminence in the city but knew the sisters Sturtevant. Members of that aristocracy which dwelt on Rincon Hill, their names and fames quite eclipsed those of their quiet, self-effacing parents. Although they never called it that, their establishment amounted to a salon. Also, they never called their circle Bohemian, yet it was tinged with an easy view on the conventionalities, a leaning toward art and the things of art, which meant Bohemia in the time when that word was of good repute. Spain, perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the blood, the impulse of men who packed Virgil with their bean-bags on the Overland journey, conspired already to make San Francisco a city of artists. She had developed her two poets, singers whose notes had sounded round the world; the painters had followed. The stir of a new life in art, a life which was never quite to reach fulfilment, blew in the bay air.

Centre for those awakening young painters, those minor poets who carried in weaker hands the torches of the two giant pioneers, was the house of the Sturtevant sisters, the one a wit, the other a beauty.

Heaven was not grudging with gifts to these two. Alice, the wit, had also a hidden kind of beauty which was not to be taken in on first sight, but which, perceived by the painters of that set, made some of them swear that she was the real beauty of the two. Matilda, the beauty, had if not wit a sprightly feminine fancy. Then, too, her gentleness of judgment, her sweetness of intention, and her illogic of loyalty, gave her point of view a humorous quality. Her circle, confident in her good-nature, was forever leading her on, by this device or that, to exhibit what John Stallard, the novelist, called her "comedy of charity." O'Ryan, that great, glowing failure whose name will outlive the fame of the successful in San Francisco, used to play ingenious jokes upon it. O'Ryan was possibly the only man of any time who could draw the sting of a practical joke.

They dwelt, twin-regnant over this world of theirs, in sisterly harmony. Stallard declared always that a final gift of fate and the G.o.ds preserved them to harmony: their tastes in men differed. They had choice enough, G.o.d wot--poets and novelists struggling on the verge of fame; attractive, irresponsible, magnetic journalists, destined never to arrive anywhere, but following a flowery path along which a woman might smile; sons of new-rich millionaires who followed and backed and corrupted the artists of that budding Paris which never blossomed; two painters, among many, who got both fame and wealth before they were done.

In his later years, one asked Tyson the English novelist, connoisseur of women if there ever was one, whom he esteemed the prettiest and whom the wittiest among the women he had known and studied.

"For wit, Lady Vera Loudon," he said, "and after her, a quite remarkable woman I met in San Francisco out on the West Coast of America--of all places." Tradition has enlarged this reply to make Matilda Sturtevant his prettiest as Alice was his wittiest.

Matilda's fresh beauty of the devil, her full yet delicate beauty of the twenties and early thirties, live in the galleries of Europe. The painters all had their try at her; she lived in creation which ran the line between miniatures and heroic canvases. Lars Wark, perhaps the least considered of all her painter friends, is the one that triumphed most of all. Who does not know his Launcelot and Enid? The Enid, of a beauty so intelligent, so wistful and so good--she is Matilda Sturtevant, hardly idealized.

These twin graces married within two years of each other. Of course, they chose strangely. Matilda, whose beauty might have graced the head of the table in any one of three gaudy mansions on n.o.b Hill, chose Edward C. Tiffany, attorney, politician in a small but honorable way, man about town--and much older than she. Alice, following quietly, accepted Billy Gray, journalist--a clever reporter with no possibilities beyond that; a gentleman, it is true, and a man of likeable disposition, but on the whole the least desirable of all her followers.

Billy and Alice Gray lived out the three years which were all they ever had of matrimony, in a Latin quarter garret, transformed into a studio. The intellectual centre of San Francisco s.h.i.+fted to that garret; the gay, the witty and the brilliant still followed wherever Alice Gray might go. Billy, a type of the journalist in the time when journalism meant the careless life, left her a great deal alone after the honeymoon. On his side, there was no conscious neglect in this; on her side, there was no reproach. It was just their way of living. He adored her with a quiet, steady flame of affection which was too fine to degenerate into mere uxoriousness. Already, he was a little too fond of his liquor--a peccadillo which attracted little attention in that age of the careless city. This troubled Alice Gray less than it would have troubled her mother. In the periods when she pulled herself up, she worried to think how little she did care about it. In fact, his remorseful recovery from his debauches had become her occasion for pouring out upon him the mother in her. She reveled guiltily in this singular sacrament of her singular love.

After three years Alice Gray gave birth to a daughter--and died within a fortnight afterward. In all truth, I may say that life, for Billy Gray, ended that day. To lose this tenth muse--I can think of nothing more complete in tragedy except the loss of her father of Marjorie Fleming. And he, like Marjorie Fleming's father, spoke her name no more--until near the end. When after twenty years, his own time came, Stallard, LeBrun the poet and Lars Wark gathered to pay him their last respects. LeBrun came all the way from New Orleans, and Stallard delayed his journey to the South Seas. They had drifted away from him, such had become his ways and habits; they came back in honor of the woman who illuminated their youth. So long and so powerful was the influence of her who never wrote a line except in air and memory.

Billy Gray went on living for the sake of his daughter; but he lived like a man driven of the furies. He became one of those restless, wandering journalists whose virtue to their newspapers is their utter abandonment of courage and enterprise, whose defect is their love of drink.

Eleanor, they called the baby--Alice had chosen that name "in case it is a girl." Mrs. Tiffany, childless herself, played second mother during the first three years of Eleanor's healthy and contented little life. Perceiving the growth of bad habits in that broken brother-in-law, strong and generous enough to face her perceptions, she called him back from a desk in Los Angeles, where, gossip said, he was drinking himself to death, and gave him over his daughter to keep.

From that time on, during a succession of removes which took him from Vancouver on the north to Los Angeles on the south, Billy Gray had establishment after establishment, housekeeper after housekeeper for this daughter. Her face and ways, the dim shadowing of her mother's, were the only hold on reality which he kept.

She grew up a rather grave little thing, hardly pretty at all until she turned fifteen, when she showed signs that the beauty of her aunt, if not the wit of her mother, might live again in her. Of wit, it seemed, she had little; neither did she show any great talents in her irregular schooling. Her longest term at any one school was three years with the Franciscan Sisters in Santa Barbara. They, Spanish gentlewomen mainly, are the arbiters and conservators of old fas.h.i.+oned manners on the West Coast. Of them it is said, as it is said of certain sisterhoods in France, that one may know their graduates by the way they keep their combs and brushes. In two years Eleanor absorbed something of their grave gentility from these Spanish women.

Little else she got from that education, seeing that she was a Protestant and studied neither catechism nor church doctrine. She did, indeed, totter once on the brink of Rome--even dared speak to her father about it. He accepted the situation so carelessly and gave his a.s.sent so easily that she was a little hurt. But the next day, he quizzed her about the church and its doctrines. Like a good lawyer, he slipped in the crucial question of his cross-examination between two blind ones.

"All who die outside of the church go to h.e.l.l, don't they?" he asked.

"Sister Sulpicia says so."

"Then your grandmother" (Mrs. Sturtevant had just died) "is in h.e.l.l?"

He pursued the line no further; he never needed to; and after a time the storm of doctrine died down in her. That phase of life left another effect on her beside her manners--a mark common enough among Protestant women reared in the shadow of the Catholic Church. Outside its pale by belief, she clung to a few of its sacramentals for pet superst.i.tions, and to a few of its observances for her consolation in trouble and her expression in happiness.

She was sixteen, and about to graduate from a Seminary in Oakland, when her call came to her. In one moment, the secret of her father's long absence became plain; and her whole way of life changed.

Billy Gray had drifted back to the city of his beginnings and happiness; was writing hack editorials and paragraphs for the little weeklies which so infested San Francisco. She knew that their fortunes were low, that only her inheritance, left in trust by her grandparents, kept them moving. Also, a dim suspicion which she had held of her father for years was taking shape in her mind--too young that mind, yet, for any very strong belief in human conduct not written in the tables of the law or in the Etiquette Book.

The current which fused these amorphic thoughts was generated in the most commonplace manner. By custom, she went to the seminary on Monday morning, staying there until Friday evening. It happened that the death of a teacher made Friday an unexpected holiday. Returning on Thursday afternoon, she found the house locked. She remembered that this was "make-up day" at the weekly which took most of her father's work; he must be in the office. She hesitated, wondering whether to telephone for the key; decided to walk down town, since it was a beaming, windless afternoon.

She came about a corner of Montgomery Street, turned in toward the office of _The Whale_, and ran into the environs of a gathering city crowd. The men were straining over backs and shoulders to see; the women were pressing their hands convulsively to their faces with pity and disgust.

"What's the answer?" some one called from the fringe.

"A drunk," came a voice from within, "plain drunk." The police arrived just then, and cleared a way; through the rift they made, she saw them lift--Billy Gray, her father.

In the limpness and horror of this, her first crisis, she did nothing, said nothing; only stood there. Presently, she was aware that a workman in soiled overalls had joined the policemen.

"Now that's all right," he was saying, "he's only dead to the world, making no trouble for n.o.body. He works for _The Whale_ up above; what's the good to pinch him?" "_The Whale_?" asked one of the policemen; and hesitated on the word. In quick decision, then, he whirled upon the crowd, pushed it back, cleared a s.p.a.ce. The other policeman and the man in the soiled overalls--he was foreman of _The Whale_--picked up Billy Gray, who was turning and mumbling feebly, and started to carry him upstairs. A sudden impulse of her limbs, an instinct independent of her will, drew her toward them. The policeman, clearing away the crowd, laid hand upon her.

"You'll have to get back little girl!" he said.

She looked him in the eye; the sudden abandonment to her shame seemed to lift and to exalt her; afterward, shuddering over that day, she still remembered a certain perverse pleasure in this moment. And she spoke loud, so loud that all the crowd might hear.

"He is my father!"

The policeman gave way; she hurried up the stairs. The bearers of Billy Gray were resting on the top of the first flight. They had braced him up against the banisters and were trying to rub sense back into him. She addressed herself straight to the foreman.

"Does this happen often?" she asked.

A good natured and communicative person, he was also enough touched by his importance as Good Samaritan to answer the question of a stray little girl.