After a brief visit at the Santa Rosa vineyard, where oddly enough
Adelle seemed to feel more at home than Archie, they went to Bellevue to
attend the famous Paul wedding. Here Irene Paul, now an "Honorable Mrs."
George Pointer, entertained them, both Adelle and Irene apparently
forgetting their old grudges. Arm about waist they went lovingly up the
grand staircase of the old Paul mansion to Adelle's rooms, babbling
about school days, Pussy Comstock, and the other girls of her famous
"family." Irene even looked with favor upon Archie in his developed
condition of a rich woman's husband. Adelle reflected complacently that
he was quite as presentable as a man as the young Englishman Irene had
married. All you had to do to succeed, in marriage as in other things,
was to do what you wanted and make the world accept you and your acts.
And she honestly admired the tall blonde Irene, who had bloomed under
the influences of matrimony into something suggestively
English--high-colored, stately, emphatic. She liked the rambling ugly
mansion built in the eighties after Hermann Paul's success with
railroads, in the best mansard style of the day, and never touched
since. The grounds which had been extensively planted by the railroad
man were now covered with a luxuriant growth of exotic trees that
completely hid the house and afforded only peeps of the distant bay.
California, with its pungent stimulants of odor and color, appealed to
her from the very first. She was quite happy, and Archie seemed to
expand in his native soil and was less peevish than he had grown to be
latterly.
After the wedding, which according to the local newspapers was a very
grand affair, but which unfortunately does not come into this story,
Archie and Adelle prolonged their visit. They found the easy atmosphere
of this pretty California town so agreeable, with its busy air of
luxurious leisure, that they took a furnished house for the remainder of
the season, and in the autumn they rented a larger place out on the
hills behind the town, having a lovely view of the great valley and the
distant waters of the Bay, with the blue tips of the inland hills rising
through the mists. They still talked confidently of returning to Europe
to live.
They did not, however, at least for permanent residence. Archie was too
content with life in this land of sunshine, flowers, and informal
living, to leave. He said quite flatly now that he did not think he was
meant to be a painter and there was no point in being an artist if you
did not have to be something. Adelle perceived that according to Archie
there was not much point in doing anything unless one had to. She began
to suspect dimly the existence of a deep human law. "By the sweat of thy
brow," it had been writ in that Puritan Bible she studied at the First
Congregational Church in Alton. Then it had a very definite meaning even
to her child's mind, but during the easy years since, she had forgotten
it altogether. Now something like its stern truth was boring into her
consciousness. It seemed that when the larger incentives of living--the
big universal ones--had been removed for any cause, human beings were
often at a loss what to do with themselves. They sighed for "freedom"
when bound to the common wheel, but when released, as Archie and Adelle
had been, the average man or woman had but the feeblest notion of what
to do with his "freedom."
With women such as Adelle the tragedy is less apparent than with men,
because woman's life for uncounted ages has consisted in great part of
playing games with herself at the dictates of men, and large wealth
assists her in making these games socially interesting and agreeable.
Adelle, to be sure, had no social ambition of the conventional sort. She
was more content than Archie with merely being married and having plenty
of money to spend in any way she chose. In this respect she was nearer
the primitive than Archie, who often reminded her of the fact somewhat
cruelly. Yet, as we shall see, when the time came she awoke to the full
realization of the situation, which Archie never understood at all.
Art having finally been thrown out of the window by both, it remained to
determine how best they could dispose of themselves and their riches so
as to "get the most out of life." The first of the game substitutes for
real living happened to be a "ranch." The suggestion came from Irene's
husband, who had been attracted to California by this lure of
"ranching."
"Why don't you go in for a big ranch?" he said to Archie one evening,
when the four were yawning sleepily over the fire after a day spent
motoring in the wind. "There's the Arivista property in Sonoma County. I
hear they want to sell--ten thousand acres."
The idea of becoming a large landowner appealed to the Californian in
Archie. They talked the matter over, and it resulted in their all
motoring down the State to the Arivista property. In the end they bought
at considerable expense this ten-thousand-acre tract of mountain,
valley, and plain, and began elaborate improvements. It had been once a
"cattle proposition," but Archie's idea was to turn it into fruit and
nuts, as well as a gentleman's estate of a princely sort, with a large
"mission style" cement mansion. He engaged an architect and a
superintendent, and began building and planting on an elaborate scale.
Adelle was glad to see her Archie really interested in something and
encouraged him in all his ambitious plans. They motored frequently to
the ranch to inspect operations. It took them two days to go and return,
and there were only rough accommodations at the ranch. But she liked it.
The great untamed spaces of hill and plain, with the broad horizon of
blue mountains, appealed to her. She was less interested in the big
house, the barns, outbuildings, orchards,--all the paraphernalia that
goes with an "estate," which Archie wished impatiently to have created
at once. It took, naturally, a great deal of money. Before the work at
Arivista was finally stopped, it was estimated that close to half a
million dollars of Clark's Field had been poured into this California
"ranch," from which, of course, less than a quarter was ever recovered,
no other rich man being found with similar conceptions of what a "ranch"
should be. All told, the Davises lived upon their ranch less than four
months during the next spring, and before the blossoms had finally
fallen sufficient reasons were found to move them back nearer people and
the ordinary diversions of life. Water, it was discovered, could not be
got in sufficient quantity. The relaxing climate of the south did not
seem to agree with Adelle. And, above all, a child was expected.
The little boy was born in Bellevue. He had come to them by accident,
for neither felt that it was yet the right time to have children; but
Adelle recognized almost at once that it was likely to be a happy
accident for her and welcomed it with all proper fervor. It served, at
any rate, to settle them in California for the present. They decided to
buy the place they had rented upon the hills and live there for most of
the year. And it also served to strengthen the bond between husband and
wife, which was wearing dangerously thin in places. With the coming of
the child the family was constituted, and another interest was given to
Adelle, which compensated for Archie's pettish moods. The child also
released Archie from the constant attention which Adelle exacted of him,
and permitted him more of that precious "freedom," which he found wealth
did not always bring.
Thus they definitely started their California life.