It seemed afterward to Bertram Chester, reviewing the early events of
a life in which he was well pleased, that his real attack on things,
his virtual beginning, came with that house-party of the Masters's.
The victory of his smile on the staircase he followed up that evening
to a general conquest. For Masters, when dinner was over, brewed a hot
punch. They drank it about the driftwood fire, and even the severe
Marion Slater relaxed and made merry. The essence of the gods strips
self-control and delicacy first, so that the finer wit goes by without
tribute of a laugh and the wit of poked fingers--especially if it be
sauced by personality--rules at the board. After the punch had worked
sunshine in them, the poked finger of this young barbarian was more
compelling than the sallies of Masters or the mimicry of Harry Banks.
When the party dispersed at the Sausalito Ferry and scattered for a
workaday Monday, he found himself accepting invitations left and
right. Dr. French asked him to motor out to the Cliff House that very
night; Mrs. Masters wanted him to dinner; Harry Banks must have him
over to his ranch under Tamalpais. Kate Waddington, mounting the steps
to Banks's automobile, slipped him a farewell word.
"You were a success," she said. "That's the reward of naughty little
boys when they reform!"
"Well, I'd have liked to smash his face just the same--then."
"You've done better than that--you've quite conquered him. I'll see
you Wednesday at the Masters? Good bye!"
Bertram Chester sold forthwith the Richmond lots, his first venture in
business, to get ready money for the wisest or the most foolish
investment which a young man of affairs can make in the beginning of
his career--general society. With all his youth, his energy and his
eager attack on things, he plunged into the life of San Francisco.
Only in that city of easy companionships and careless social
scrutinies would such a sudden rise have been possible. His furnished
room, where he used to read and study of evenings in his years of
beginnings, knew him no more before midnight. He dropped away from
those comrades of the lower sort with whom he had found his
recreation; abandoned and forgotten were his old lights of love. The
milliner's apprentice, a coarsely pretty little thing, used to wait
for him sometimes on the doorstep. Mark Heath, coming home one night
earlier than usual, found her there, took her for a walk about the
block, and conveyed to her the unpleasant news that Bertram was now
flying higher than her covey. After that, she came no more; and the
first phase of his life in San Francisco drifted definitely back of
Bertram Chester.
We shall stop with him only three or four times in the course of that
winter wherein he made his beginnings. Before it was over, he had
entered, by the special privilege accorded such characters, the club
about which man-society in San Francisco revolved; he had broken into
a half a dozen circles of women society; he had become
hail-fellow-well-met with the younger sons of the cocktail route, the
loud characters of flashy Latin quarter studios, the returned Arctic
millionaires of the hour and day who kept the Palace Hotel prosperous,
the patrons and heroes of the prize-fight games, the small theatrical
sets of that small metropolis. Sometimes he flashed in a night through
four or five such circles.
He hung of late afternoons over bars, exchanging that brainless but
well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat
beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world--and not
the worst brain--revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. He
frolicked with trifling painters, bookless poets, apprentice
journalists, and the girls who accrued to all these, through wild
studio parties in Latin quarter attics. He sat before the lace,
mahogany, crimson lights and cut glass of formal dinners, whereat,
after the wine had gone round, his seat became head of the table.
From these meetings and revels, whereby he made his way along the path
of dalliance in the easiest, most childish, most accepting city of the
Western world, two or three kaleidoscopic flashes remained in his
maturer memory. The night of the football game, for example, he
strayed into the annual pitched battle of noise and reproach at the
Yellowstone between the California partisans and the Stanford
fanatics. A California graduate, his companion along the cocktail
route, recognized him; immediately, he was riding shoulder high. His
bearers broke for the sidewalk, and down Market Street he went, a
blue-and-gold serpentine dancing behind him. There was his first Jinks
at the Bohemian club--an impromptu affair, thrown in between the
revelling Christmas Jinks in the clubhouse and the formally artistic
Midsummer High Jinks in the Russian River Grove. The Sire, noting his
smile and figure, impressed him into service for a small part. This
brought a fortnight of rehearsal which was all play and expression of
young animal spirits, a night of revel refined by art, an after-jinks
dinner of the cast, whereat Bertram, as usual, spoke only to conquer.
Memory held also one perfectly-blended winter house-party at the Banks
ranch, with the rain swaying the eucalyptus trees outside and a dozen
people chosen from San Francisco for their power to entertain, making
two nights and a day cheerful within.
Later in life, he, the unreflective, thought that times had changed
in his city; that men were not so brilliant nor circles so convivial
as when he was very young. It was not in him to know that neither
times nor men had changed; that he thought so only because he looked
on them no longer through the rose glasses of youth.
He himself would have called it a season of great change, and he would
have missed, at that, the greatest change of all--the transformation
in himself. The face on which we saw so little written when he had
that meeting in the Hotel Marseillaise, the new sheet straight from
the mills of the gods, had now a faint scratching upon it. The mouth
was looser in repose, firmer in action; the roving and merry eye was
more certain, more accurate as it were, in its glances. His youthful
assurance had changed in him to something like mature self-certainty.
In those external city manners which he had set about from the
beginning to acquire, he showed more ease. Although he had lost the
fragrance of an untouched youth, he had become altogether a prettier
figure of a man.
He needed all the prodigal youth and the cowboy strength in him to
keep up his social pace and still do his work, but he managed it.
Indeed, he became of distinct value to the office through the business
which he brought in from his wandering and his revelling. It seemed
that he might refurbish that old law practice and find his way to the
partnership which Judge Tiffany foresaw at the end of one path.
Through this consideration and through the partisan friendship of Mrs.
Tiffany, he became gradually a pet and familiar of the Tiffany
household, taking pot-luck dinners with them, joining them once or
twice on their out-of-doors excursions. His big, bounding presence,
his good-natured gambols of the Newfoundland pup order, transformed
that somewhat serious and faded ménage, gave it light and interest,
as from a baby in the house. Although Mrs. Tiffany mothered him, gave
him her errands to do, she made no mistake about the centre of
attraction for him. He was "after" Eleanor. That young woman took him
soberly and naturally, laughing at his gambols, accepting his
attentions, but giving no sign to Mrs. Tiffany's attentive eyes that
her interest was more than indifferent friendship.
His wooing, in fact, went on in a desultory fashion, as though he were
following the policy which he had expounded to Kate Waddington--"hang
around and watch." He paid no more compliments to grey eyes; he paid
no compliments at all. When they were alone, he entertained her with
those new tales of his associations in the city, which pleased her
less, had he only known it, than his tales of the ranch and gridiron.
If he showed the state of his feeling, it was no more than by an
occasional long and hungry look.
In one way or another, he saw nearly as much of Kate Waddington, that
winter, as he did of Eleanor. Kate, too, was a ray of light. She--"the
little sister of the clever" her enemies called her--made the Tiffany
house a bourne between her stops at her home in the Mission and her
rangings about Russian Hill. Bertram noticed with sentimental pleasure
that the two girls were a great deal together. He found them
exchanging the coin of feminine friendship in Eleanor's living-room,
he met them on shopping excursions in Post street. When the three met
so, Kate always sparkled with her best wit, her most cheerful manner;
but she showed, too, a kind of deference toward Eleanor, an attitude
which said, "He is yours; I am intruding only by accident." The
meaning in this attitude bore itself in, at length, even upon Bertram
Chester; and he did not fail to glow with gratitude. He expressed that
gratitude once or twice when he was alone with Kate. Somehow, it was
easy for him to talk to her about such things.