I
That was a unique and vivid day for young Alexina Groome, whose
disposition was to look upon life as drama and asked only that it shift
its scenes often and be consistently entertaining and picturesque.
Never, so James told her, since her Grandmother Ballinger's reign, had
there been such life and movement in the old house. All Mrs. Groome's
intimate friends and many of Alexina's came to it, some to make kindly
inquiries, others to beg them to leave the city, many to gossip and
exchange experiences of that fateful morning; a few from Rincon Hill
and the old ladies' fashionable boarding-house district to claim
shelter until they could make their way to relatives out of town.
Mrs. Groome welcomed her friends not only with the more spontaneous
hospitality of an older time but in that spirit of brotherhood that
every disaster seems to release, however temporarily. Brotherhood is
unquestionably an instinct of the soul, an inheritance from that
sunrise era when mutual interdependence was as imperative as it was
automatic. The complexities of civilization have overlaid it, and
almost but not wholly replaced it by national and individual
selfishness. But the world as yet is only about one-third civilized.
Centuries hence a unified civilization may complete the circle, but
human nature and progress must act and react a thousand times before
the earthly millenium; and it cannot be hastened by dreamers and
fanatics.
All Mrs. Groome's spare rooms were placed at the service of her
friends, and cots were bought in the humble Fillmore Street shops and
put up in the billiard room, the double parlors, the library and the
upper hall. Some forty people would sleep under the old Ballinger roof
that night--dynamite permitting. Mrs. Groome was firm in her
determination not to flee, and as James and Mike were there to watch,
she had graciously given a number of the gloomy refugees from the lower
regions permission to camp in the outhouses and grounds.
II
Alexina spent the greater part of the day with Aileen Lawton, Olive
Bascom, and Sibyl Thorndyke, out of doors, fascinated by the spectacle
of the burning city.
The valley beyond Market Street, and the lower business district, were
a rolling mass of smoke parting about pillars of fire, shot with a
million glittering sparks when a great building was dynamited. All the
windows in those sections of the city as yet beyond the path of the
fire were open, for although closed windows might have shut out the
torrid atmosphere, the explosions would have shattered them.
"Oh, dear," sighed Olive Bascom, "there goes my building. The smoke
lifted for a moment and I saw the flames spouting out of the windows. A
cool million and uninsured. We thought Class A buildings were safe from
any sort of fire."
"Heavens!" exclaimed Alexina naïvely, "I wish I had a million-dollar
building down in that furnace. It must be a great sensation to watch a
million dollars go up in sparks."
"I hope your mother hasn't any buildings down in the business
district," said Aileen anxiously. "I've heard dad talk about her ground
rents. She'll get those again soon enough. I fancy the old tradition
survives in this town and they'll begin to draw the plans for the new
city before the fire is out. It used to burn down regularly in the
fifties, dad says."
"I don't fancy we have much of anything," said Alexina cheerfully. "I
think mother has only a life interest in a part of father's estate, and
I heard her tell Maria once that she intended to leave me all she had
of her own, this place and a few thousand a year in bonds and some
flats that are probably burning up right now. I gathered from the
conversation that father didn't have much left when he died and that it
was understood mother was to look out for me. I believe he gave a lot
to the others when he was wealthy."
"Good Lord!" Aileen sighed heavily. "It won't pay your dressmakers'
bills, what with taxes and all. I won't be much better off. We'll have
to marry Rex Roberts or Bob Cheever or Frank Bascom--unless he's going
up in smoke too, Olive dear. But there are a few others."
Alexina shook her head. Her color could not rise higher for her face
was crimson from the heat; like the others she had a wet handkerchief
on her head. "There is not a grain of romance in one of them," she
announced. "Curious that the sons of the rich nearly always have round
faces, no particular features, and a tendency to bulge. I intend to
have a romance--old style--good old style--before the vogue of the
middle-class realists. There's nothing in life but youth and you only
have it once. I'm going to have a romance that means falling wildly,
unreasonably, uncalculatingly in love."
"You anticipate my adjectives," said Aileen drily. "Although not all.
But let that pass. I'd like to know where you expect to find the
opposite lead, as they say on the stage. Our men are not such a bad
sort, even the richest--with a few exceptions, of course. They may hit
it up at week-ends, generally at the country clubs, but they're better
than the last generation because their fathers have more sense. I'll
bet they're all down there now fighting the fire with the vim of their
grandfathers.... But romantic! Good Lord! I'll marry one of them all
right and glad of the chance--after I've had my fling. I'm in no hurry.
I'd have outgrown my illusions in any case by that time, only Nature
did the trick by not giving me any."
"Don't you believe there isn't a man in all San Francisco able to
inspire romance." If Alexina could not blush her dark gray eyes could
sparkle and melt. "All the men we meet don't belong to that rich group."
"Bunch, darling. Where--will you give us the pointer?--are to be found
the romantic knights of San Francisco? 'Frisco as those tiresome
Eastern people call it. Makes me sick to think that they are even now
pitying 'poor 'Frisco.' Well?--I could beat my brains and not call one
to mind."
"Oh!"
"What does that mean, Alex Groome? When you roll up your eyes like that
you look like a love-sick tomato."
"Mortimer Dwight was most devoted last night," said Sibyl Thorndyke.
"She danced with him at least eight times."
"You must have sat out alone to know what I was doing," Alexina began
hotly, but Aileen sprang at her and gripped her shoulders.
"Don't tell me that you are interested in that cheap skate. Alexina
Groome! You!"
"He's not a cheap skate. I despise your cheap slang."
"He's a rank nobody."
"You mean he isn't rich. Or his family didn't belong. What do you
suppose I care? I'm not a snob."
"He is. A climbing, ingenuous, empty-headed snob."
"You are a snob. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
"I've a right to be a snob if I choose, and he hasn't. My snobbery is
the right sort: the 'I will maintain' kind. He'd give all the hair on
his head to have the right to that sort of snobbery. His is" (she
chanted in a high light maddening voice): "Oh, God, let me climb. Yank
me up into the paradise of San Francisco society. Burlingame, Alta,
Menlo Park, Atherton, Belvidere, San Rafael. Oh, God, it's awful to be
a nobody, not to be in the same class with these rich fellers, not to
belong to the Pacific-Union Club, not to have polo ponies, not to
belong to smart golf clubs, to the Burlingame Club. Not to get clothes
from New York and London--"
"You keep quiet," shrieked Alexina, who with difficulty refrained from
substituting: "You shut up." She flung off Aileen's hands. "What do you
know about him? He doesn't like you."
"Never had a chance to find out."
"What can you know about him, then?"
"Think I'm blind? Think I'm deaf? Don't I know everything that goes on
in this town? Isn't sizing-up my long suit? And he's as dull as--as a
fish without salt. I sat next to him at a dinner, and all he could talk
about was the people he'd met--our sort, of course. And he was dull
even at that. He's all manners and bluff--"
"You couldn't draw him out. He talked to me."
"What about? I'm really interested to know. Everybody says the same
thing. They fall for his dancing and manners, and--well, yes--I 'll
admit it--for his looks. He even looks like a gentleman. But all the
girls say he bores 'em stiff. They have to talk their heads off. What
did he say to you that was so frantically interesting?"
"Well, of course--we danced most of the time."
"That's just it. He's inherited the shell of some able old ancestor and
not a bit of the skull furniture. Nature often plays tricks like that.
But I could forgive him for being dull if he weren't such a damn snob."
"You shan't call him names. If he wants to be one of us, and life was
so unkind as to--to--well, birth him on the outside, I'm sure that's no
crime."
"Snobbery," said Miss Thorndyke, who was intellectual at the moment and
cultivating the phrase, "is merely a rather ingenuous form of
aspiration. I can't see that it varies except in kind from other forms
of ambition. And without ambition there would be no progress."
"Oh, can it," sneered Judge Lawton's daughter. "You're all wrong,
anyhow. Snobbery leads to the rocks much oftener than to high
achievement. I've heard dad say so, and you won't venture to assert
that _he_ doesn't know. It bears about the same relation to progress
that grafting does to legitimate profits. Anyhow, it makes me sick, and
I'm not going to have Alex falling in love with a poor fish--"
"Fish?" Alexina's voice rose above a fresh detonation, "You dare--and
you think I'm going to ask you whom I shall fall in love with? Fish?
What do you call those other shrimps who don't think of anything but
drinking and sport, whether they attend to business or not?--their
fathers make them, anyhow. And you want to marry one of them! They're
fish, if you like."
The two girls were glaring at each other. Gray eyes were blazing, green
eyes snapping. Two sets of white even teeth were bared. They looked
like a couple of belligerent puppies. Another moment and they would
have forgotten the sacred traditions of their class and flown at each
other's hair. But Miss Bascom interposed. Even the loss of her
uninsured million did not ruffle her, for she had another in Government
and railroad bonds, and full confidence in her brother, who was an
admirable business man, and not in the least dissipated.
"Come, come," she said. "It's much too hot to fight. Dwight is not good
enough for Alex--from a worldly point of view, I mean," as Alexina made
a movement in her direction. "We should none of us marry out of our
class. It never works, somehow. But Mr. Dwight is really quite all
right otherwise. I like him very much, Alex darling, and I don't mind
his being an outsider in the least--so long as he doesn't try to marry
one of us. He's _too_ good-looking, and his heels are fairly inspired.
No one questions the fact that he is an honorable and worthy young man,
working like a real man to earn his living. It isn't at all as if he
were an adventurer. He has never struck me as being more of a snob than
most people, and I don't see why I haven't thought to ask him down to
San Mateo for a week-end."
"You'll certainly have a friend for life if you do," said Aileen
satirically. "Fall in love with him yourself if you choose. You can
afford it."
"No fear. I've made up my mind. I'm going to marry a French marquis."
"What?" Even Alexina forgot Mortimer Dwight. "Who is he? Where did you
meet him?"
"I haven't met him yet. But I shall. I'm going to Paris next winter to
visit my aunt, and I'll find one. You get anything in this world you go
for hard enough. To be a French marquise is the most romantic thing in
the world."
"Why not Elton Gwynne? It's an open secret that he's an English
marquis. Or that young Gathbroke Lady Victoria brought last night?"
"He's a younger son, and he never looked at any one but Alex. And
Isabel Otis has preëmpted Mr. Gwynne. And I adore France and don't care
about England."
"Well, that is romantic if you like!" cried Aileen, her green eyes
dancing. "You have my best wishes. Doesn't it make your Geary Street
knight look cheap--he boards somewhere down on Geary Street."
"No, it doesn't! And I'm a good American. French marquis, indeed! Mr.
Dwight comes of the best old American stock from New York. He told
mother so, I'd spit on any old decadent European title."
"I wish your mother could hear you. So--he's been getting round her has
he? Where on earth did he meet her?"
Alexina, with sulky triumph, reported Mr. Dwight's early visit and the
favorable impression he had made.
Aileen groaned. "That's just the one thing she would fall for in a rank
outsider--superlative manners. His being poor is rather in his favor.
I'll put a flea in her ear--"
"You dare!"
Aileen lifted her shoulders. "Well, as a matter of fact I can't.
Tattling just isn't in my line. But if I can queer him with you I will."
"I won't talk about him any more." Alexina drew herself up with immense
dignity. She had the advantage of Aileen not only in inches but in a
natural repose of manner. The eminent Judge Lawton's only child, upon
whom, possibly, he may have lavished too much education, had a thin
nervous little body that was seldom in repose, and her face, with its
keen irregular features and brilliant green eyes, shifted its surface
impressions as rapidly as a cinematograph. Olive Bascom had soft blue
eyes and abundant brown hair, and Sibyl Thorndyke had learned to hold
her long black eyes half closed, and had the black hair and rich
complexion of a Creole great-grandmother. Alexina was admittedly the
"beauty of the bunch." Nevertheless, Miss Lawton had informed her
doting parent before this, her first season, was half over, that she
was _vivid_ enough to hold her own with the best of them. The boys said
she was a live wire and she preferred that high specialization to the
tameness of mere beauty.
IV
Said Alexina: "Sibyl, what are you going to do with your young life?
Shall you marry an English duke or a New York millionaire?"
But Miss Thorndyke smiled mysteriously. She was not as frank as the
other girls, although by no means as opaque as she imagined.
Aileen laughed. "Oh, don't ask her. Doubt if she knows. To-day she's
all for being intellectual and reading those damn dull Russian
novelists. To-morrow she may be setting up as an odalisque. It would
suit her style better."
Miss Thorndyke's face was also crimson from the heat, but she would not
have flushed had it been the day before. She was not subject to sudden
reflexes.
"Your satire is always a bit clumsy, dear," she said sweetly. "The
odalisque is not your rôle at all events."
"I don't go in for rôles."
And the four girls wrangled and dreamed and planned, while a city burnt
beneath them; some three hundred million dollars flamed out, lives were
ruined, exterminated, altered; and Labor sat on the hills and smiled
cynically at the tremendous impetus the earth had handed them on that
morning of April eighteenth, nineteen hundred and six.
They were too young to know or to care. When the imagination is trying
its wings it is undismayed even by a world at war.