XIV
They had passed members of the Citizens' Patrol on every block, and theyfound one pacing the plank walk on Russian Hill. He told them that theedict had gone forth that not so much as a candle should be lit in ahouse that night and that all cooking must be done out-of-doors. Thespectacled Jap was boiling soup on one of the oil stoves, which he hadcarried into the garden and half surrounded by a screen. Beside him waswhat looked like an open newly-dug grave, and the girls, startled,demanded what it meant.
Sugihara, apparently, never smiled, but his eyes flickered. "BeforeCusha and Kuranaga went I made them dig a hole for the silver," he said."It is too heavy for the launch. If we are driven away, I will cut yourancestors from their frames and take them with us."
"Well, you are a treasure," said Isabel, with a sigh. "You shall donothing but read when you get to the ranch."
Lady Victoria was pacing slowly up and down the porch, her eyes seldomwandering from the fire. When dinner was ready, she merely shook herhead impatiently, and Isabel and her guest sat down in the littletower-room, which was brilliantly illuminated from below. Sugiharahad made a very good soup of canned corn and tomatoes and had friedbits of meat and potato. There was little conversation. The dynamitingwas now something more than sporadic. The detonations were so terrificthat it was not difficult for the San Franciscans to imaginethemselves--supposing they had a grain of imagination left--in abesieged city. Isabel suggested, and Anne agreed with her, that theymight have been far worse off than they were; nature at her extremest isnever so pitiless as the human brute when the lust to kill is on him.
Isabel prepared the remains of the feast for Mr. Clatt, and askedSugihara if he would object to relieving the watch, that the wharfingermight snatch a few hours' sleep. There was no longer any danger of fireexcept from the conflagration itself, and now that the dynamiting hadbegun in earnest it was possible that the flames would be isolatedbefore midnight.
The Jap went off with the dish in one hand and a book in the other,hoping that he would be allowed to light a candle on the launch. Hereturned in a few moments, and for the first time he was smiling.
"Mr. Clatt will not give up his watch," he said. "He says he might missthe chance to put a hole in some--dago (his language was very bad,Miss). He says there's not a wink of sleep in him."
"No doubt but that he will hold on to it, unless the military step in,"said Anne. "Then, I fancy, he would surrender very meekly. They haveimpressed a good many launches for prisoners and dynamite. But I hopenot, for whether the fire comes up the hills or not, there is going tobe terrible privation. Heaven knows how many days it will be before wehave enough water even to drink, and I heard a little while ago that assoon as food comes in the authorities will establish relief stations,where everybody, from the millionaire to John Chinaman, will have tostand in line and wait for his loaf of bread. Wouldn't it be better foryou to go at once?"
"I fancy I can endure as much as any one, and if I am driven from here Iwill go down to you. I shall go down anyhow when I have seen Mr. Gwynne.I do not propose to lie in a hammock while several hundred thousandpeople are sleeping on the ground. What do you take me for?"
"Somehow I don't see you as a nurse, or amusing children, or doling outbread and raiment. You would be much more in the picture encouraging Mr.Gwynne. However--I am going to impress your linen and a clothes-basketto carry it in. No doubt the philosophical Sugihara will help me carryit to the fort."
"Take what you like." Isabel directed her to the linen-closet, and wentdown to the veranda. She paused abruptly in the doorway. Victoria's facecould be seen only in profile, but its expression, as she gazed downupon that tossing twisting furious flame ocean, needed no analyticalfaculty to interpret. It was voluptuous, ecstatic.
Isabel crossed the porch in a stride.
"What are you thinking of?" she demanded, imperiously.
Victoria did not turn with a start. She did not turn at all. "I amthinking," she replied, automatically, as if in obedience to thestronger will--"I am thinking that at last I understand what it is weare so blindly striving for from the hour when we can think at all; whatit is--that unsatisfied desire that urges us on and on to so many fatalexperiments in the pursuit of happiness. The great goal, the realmeaning of our miserable balked mortal existence is not that dancingwill-o'-the-wisp we call happiness, for want of a better name. It isDeath."
"Well?" Isabel's voice rose, but she kept the anxiety out of it.
"I cannot imagine anything more delicious," went on Victoria, in thesame low rich tones, "than to walk straight down those hills and intothat sea of flame. I have always admired Empedocles, who cast himselfinto Etna. Once I saw a friend cremated, and the brief vision of thatwhite incandescence, before the coffin shot down, seemed to me theapotheosis, the voluptuous poetry of death. I could walk down into thatcolossal furnace without flinching, and I believe that my last moment,as the world disappeared behind me, and those superb flames took me intotheir embrace, would be one of sublimest ecstasy."
Isabel caught her by the shoulders and whirled her about. "Well, youwill do nothing of the sort," she cried, roughly. "In the first place youcouldn't get through the lines, and in the second you are wanted at FortMason. Anne is going down with a basket of linen for the poor women whowill be confined to-night. You are an uncommonly strong woman, and youcan make use of every bit of your strength. Anne and the Leader arefrail creatures, and no one else that I know of is going. They need you,and you will soon have your hands so full that your head will be purgedof this nonsense. It is the fire lust--the same lust that incited a boyto-day to attempt to set fire to a house in this district that he mightwatch the whole city burn. I hope your egoism exploded in that climax.Here comes Anne. You must go."
"Very well," said Victoria, suddenly dazed, and with a will relaxedafter the long tension of the day. "I will go."
"Where are your jewels?"
"Down in the bank."
"Well, gather up any other small things you treasure, and either concealthem about you or give them to me."
"I shall not take anything. My laces are in the chiffonniere. I do notcare to enter the house again."
Isabel fetched her hat and jacket, for in spite of the fire it would becold near the water; and a few moments later she stood on the edge ofGreen and Jones streets, on the other side of the hill, and watchedVictoria and Anne, carrying a large clothes-basket between them,carefully making their way down to the level. They had a walk of somethirteen blocks before them, but the streets were full of people and ofruddy light.
She returned to the house and sat down on the porch, her eyes divertedfrom the fire for a moment by the picture of Sugihara, a pair ofeye-glasses in front of his spectacles, comfortably established on achair in the garden and reading by the lamp of the burning city. It wasapparent that he had forgotten the 18th of April.
Isabel was alone but a moment. Stone burst in upon her. He hadapproached 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 meredetail. I want to drink to the old city."
Isabel, who liked him best in his dramatic moments, found a bottle ofchampagne. He knocked the head off, and filling the glass, went down tothe first landing of the long narrow flight of steps. He held the glasshigh, pointing it first towards the middle of what had been MarketStreet, and was now a river of fire, then slowly shifting it alongtowards Kearney and Montgomery, as he named the restaurants that hadgiven 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 Fashion! The Hotel deFrance! And here's to the Cocktail Route, the Tenderloin, and theBohemian Club! And here's--" By this time his voice was dissolving, andthe glass was describing eccentric curves. "Here's to the old city,whose like will never be seen this side of hell again. Pretty goodimitation of heaven in spots, an
d everything you chose to look for,anyway. And the prettiest women, the best fellows, the greatestall-night life, the finest cooking, the wickedest climate. Here's to SanFrancisco--and damn the bounder that calls her 'Frisco!"
Then he drank what was left of the contents of his glass and hastilyrefilled it. After he had finished the bottle luxuriously, he held outhis 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 thePark already. You are in no danger, what with the neighbors above andthe patrol. Good luck to you," and he vanished.
Isabel was alone at last, a state she had unconsciously wished for allday--it seemed a month since the morning. She sat down and leaned herelbows on the railing. Now that the sun was gone, the heavens, or thesmoke obscuring them, were as red as that sea beneath which seemed todevour a house a minute as it rolled out towards the Mission and workedwith all its might among the great business blocks between Market Streetand Telegraph Hill. Some one had estimated that the columns of firewere seven miles high, and they certainly looked as if they had meltedthe very stars. Here and there was a play of blue flames, doubtless fromsome explosive substance, and when the dynamite shot the entrails from ahouse there was a gorgeous display of fireworks--the golden showers ofsparks symbolizing the treasure that blackened and crumbled in droppingback to earth.
Before sitting down she had swept the distant hills with her field-glassand seen thousands of people lying not ten feet apart, like an exhaustedarmy after battle. In that intense glare she could even study theeccentric positions of the fallen headstones and monuments in the olddeserted cemeteries--Lone Mountain and Calvary. The cross on the loftypoint of the bare hill behind the Catholic cemetery was red against theblackness of the west; and hundreds of weary mortals were huddled aboutits base. She tried to pity all those terrified uncomfortable creaturesout there, but again the part they played in the greatest natural dramaof modern times occurred to her, and she thought that should consolethem.
She wondered at her lack of sentimental regret at the destruction of herbeloved city. But sentiment seemed a mere drop of insult to be cast intothat ocean of calamity. Moreover, she was pricked by a sense that it wasa living sentient thing, that city, and was getting its just dues forthe hearts it had devoured, the lives it had ruined, the mercilessclutch it had kept upon so many that were made for better things. To itsvice she gave little thought; she fancied it was not worse than othercities, if the truth were known; it was the picturesqueness of itsmethods that had held it in the limelight. But that it was one of theworld's juggernauts, and the more cruel for its ever laughing beguilingface--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 automobilescarrying 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 therisk of a laden machine being suddenly surrounded by fire, for manyhouses were ignited by the sparks, and, in that wooden district downthere, burned like tinder. Perhaps, like Victoria, she was too sure ofhis destiny; perhaps the picture of the future with him that she hadconceived refused to alter its lines; or it may be that there was noplace in the impersonal arrangement of her faculties the doublecatastrophe had effected, for fear; or for anything beyond theimpressions of the moment. Her mind worked on mechanically. She wasdetermined to remain as long as there was a possibility of Gwynne'sreturning for food or care. But the soul beneath was possessed by anabsolute calm. She had the sense of having been taken into partnershipwith nature that morning; so sudden and personal had been that assault,from which she yet had issued unscathed. She felt that everything thatwould follow in life, excepting only her love for Gwynne, would be toopetty to regard more seriously than the daily meals. Not that she hadmore than a bare mental appreciation of the phases of love at themoment; but it possessed her and it was infinite.
She sat motionless until nearly two o'clock and then went up to her roomand lay down. It was not possible to sleep for more than a few momentsat a time, for the detonations were almost incessant, but she forcedherself 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 firewas coming up the hills.