THE GREAT GOD PAN
In the spring in San Francisco the trade winds come and all wise
Californians move inland. In the early seventies the exodus to the
country was not noticeably large. Rural hotels were still small and
primitive. To be able to evade the fog-laden breath of the trades
was the luxury of the well-to-do, and the well-to-do evaded them by
retiring to country houses which dotted the teeming reaches of the
Santa Clara Valley, or sought the shelter of the live-oaks where the
golden floor of the valley slopes up into the undulations of the hills.
The Allens moved down early in April. Their father, after an
afternoon’s excursion in a buggy with a real estate agent, came back
one evening and told them he had rented the De Soto house, back of San
Mateo, for three years, and they must be ready to move into it in a
week.
He was full of business and hurry in these days, and said he could not
help them much. Neither would he be with them a great deal, as he would
spend most of his summer in town with occasional trips to Virginia
City. Crown Point was steadily rising and the rumors of a new bonanza
were on every tongue. Rion Gracey had not returned, and Black Dan had
ridden over the mountains into the Nevada camp on his own horse, a
dislike for modern modes of locomotion being one of his peculiarities.
Allen had bought heavily of the rising stock and seen himself on the
road to even more dazzling fortune. He had rented the De Soto place
for the highest price any real estate agent had yet dared to ask.
People who knew of the rate of his expenditure talked of a beggar on
horseback. But the Barranca was paying well and the twenty-stamp mill
was up and going.
The De Soto estate was part of the princely grant that the Señorita
Esperanza de Soto brought as a marriage portion to her husband, Peter
Kelley, a sailor from a New England clipper which touched at Yerba
Buena in thirty-eight. At the time the Allens rented it, part of the
great tract had been parceled out and sold to householders. The central
portion, where Peter and the Señora Kelley had built a stately home,
was practically as it had been when the Yankee seaman first ranged over
it and realized the riches of his bride. Now both sailor and señora
were dead, and their only son, Tiburtio Kelley, preferred a life in
Paris on the large fortune accumulated by his thrifty father, to the
_dolce far niente_ of empty, golden days in the Santa Clara Valley.
This central strip of the tract, which ran from the valley up into
the first spurs of the hills, was still a virgin wilderness. Huge
live-oaks, silvered with a hoar of lichen, stretched their boughs in
fantastic frenzies. Gray fringes of moss hung from them, and tangled
screens of clematis and wild grape caught the sunlight in their
flickering meshes or lay over mounds of foliage like a torn green
veil. The silence of an undesecrated nature dreamed over all. Woodland
life seldom stirred the dry undergrowth, the rustle of nesting birds
was rare in the secret leafy depths of the oaks. Here and there the
murmurous dome of the stone pine soared aloft, the clouded dusk of its
foliage almost black against the sky.
For nearly two miles the carriage drive wound upward through this
sylvan solitude. As it approached the house a background of emerald
lawns shone through the interlacing of branches, and brilliant bits of
flower beds were set like pieces of mosaic between gray trunks. The
drive took a sweep around a circular parterre planted in geraniums--a
billowing bank of color under a tent of oak boughs--and ended in a
wide, graveled space at the balcony steps.
The house was a spreading, two-story building of wood, each floor
surrounded by a deep balcony upon which lines of French windows
opened. Flowering vines overhung, climbed and clung about the balcony
pillars and balustrades. Roses drooped in heavy-headed cascades from
second-story railings; the wide purple flowers of the clematis climbed
aloft. On one wall a heliotrope broke in lavender foam and the creamy
froth of the bankshur rose dabbled railings and pillars and dripped
over on to the ground. It was a big, cool, friendly looking house with
a front door that in summer was always open, giving the approaching
visitor a hospitable glimpse of an airy, unencumbered hall.
The move completed, June and Rosamund began to taste the charm of
the Californian’s summer life. There were no hotels near them. No
country club had yet risen to bring the atmosphere of the city into
the suave silence of the hills. It was a purely rural existence:
driving and riding in the morning, reading in the hammock under the
trees, receiving callers on the balcony in the warm, scented end of
the afternoon, going out to dinner through the dry, dewless twilight
and coming home under the light of large, pale stars in a night which
looked as transparently dark as the heart of a black diamond.
They were sometimes alone, but, as a rule, the house contained guests.
The Colonel at first came down constantly, always from Saturday to
Monday and now and then for a week-day evening. But in May the sudden
leap of Crown Point to one hundred and eighty upset the tranquillity of
even cooler natures than Jim Parrish’s, and the stock exchange became
the center of men’s lives. The long expected bonanza had been struck.
The San Franciscans, once more restored to confidence in the great
lode, were seized with their old zest of speculation, and all the world
bought Crown Point. Allen saw himself on the road to a second fortune,
and threw his money about in Virginia with an additional gusto, as it
had been the scene of some of his poorest days.
Even the Colonel was attacked by the fever and invested. His financial
condition had given him grounds for uneasiness lately, and here was the
chance to repair it. A mine in Shasta, in which he had been a large
owner, shut down. He owned property in South Park, and the real estate
agents were beginning to shake their heads at the mention of South
Park property. It surprised him to realize that for the first time in
years he was short of ready money. He sold two buildings far out among
the sand dunes on upper Market Street, and with the rest of his kind
bought Virginia mining stock with Crown Point and Belcher at the head.
Under the live-oaks back of San Mateo the girls only faintly heard
the rising rush of the excitement. The current circled away from
their peaceful corner, lapped now and then by a belated ripple. The
country life they both loved filled them with contentment and health.
Rosamund took to gardening again. Her face shaded by a large Mexican
hat, she might be seen of a morning in confab with the Irish gardener,
astonishing him by her practical knowledge. In the evening she
surreptitiously “hosed” the borders, wishing that her visitors would
go back to town and leave her to the peaceful pursuit of the work she
delighted in and understood.
June was not so energetic. She did not garden or do much of anything,
save now and then go for a walk in the wild parts of the grounds.
As might be expected, Mrs. Barclay always moved down to San Mateo
in April. She was not rich enough to own a large country place, but
she did the best that was in her and rented a pretty cottage outside
the village. Here Jerry came from town every Saturday and stayed
till Monday morning, and to her surprise not infrequently appeared
unannounced on week-day afternoons, saying that business was dull, and
there was no necessity waiting about in town. The year before she had
complained greatly that her son’s visits to San Mateo were rare. This
summer she had no such grievance. He kept a horse in her small stable,
and as soon as he arrived had it saddled and went out for a ride.
Sometimes on Sunday he rode over and called on the Allens, but there
were other people to visit in the neighborhood and he did not go to the
Allens’--so he told his mother--as often as he would have liked.
The direction he took on the week-day afternoons was always the same.
No rain falls during the California summer, there are no dark hours
of thunder and cloud; it is a long procession of blue and gold days,
steeped in ardent sunshine, cooled by vagrant airs, drowsy with
aromatic scents--a summer made for lovers’ trysts.
Half-way up the winding drive to the De Soto house Jerry had learned
there was a path through the underbrush which led to an opening, deep
in the sylvan wilderness, under the thick-leaved roof of an oak. It had
been a favorite spot of the late Señora Kelley’s, and all the poison
oak had been uprooted. With the canopy of the tree above--a ceiling
of green mosaic in which the twisted limbs were imbedded--and the
screen of lightly hung, flickering leafage encircling it, it was like a
woodland room, the bower of some belated dryad.
Sometimes Jerry had to wait for her, and lying prone on the ground,
his horse tethered to a tree trunk near by, lay looking up, his senses
on the alert to catch her step. Sometimes she was there first, and as
he brushed through the covert, he saw her dress gleaming between the
leaves in a spattering of white. His heart was beginning to beat hard
at the sound of her advancing footfall. While he waited for her he
thought of nothing, his whole being held in a hush of expectancy. When
she came he found it difficult for the first moment to speak easily.
On an afternoon early in June he sat thus waiting. All the morning the
thought of this meeting had filled his mind, coming between him and
his business. On the train coming down the anticipation of it held him
in a trance-like quietude. He talked little to his mother at lunch. He
kept seeing June as she came into sight between the small, delicately
leaved branches, dots of sun dancing along her dress, her eyes, shy
and full of delight, peeping through the leaves for him. He answered
his mother’s questions at random and ate but little. The picture of
the white-clad girl grew in intensity, striking him into motionless
reverie, so that, his eyes fixed, he seemed scarcely to breathe.
It was very warm. Lying on his back on the dried grass, his hands
clasped under his head, he gazed straight before him at the long
fringes of moss that hung from a gnarled bough. His senses were focused
in an effort to disentangle her footstep from the drowsy noises of the
afternoon. All scruples, apprehensions of danger, were swept away by
the hunger for her presence. His mind had room for no other thought.
Every nerve was taut, every sense quiveringly alert, as he lay, still
as a statue, waiting for her.
Suddenly he rose on his elbow staring sidewise in the concentration
of his attention. The subdued, regular brush of her dress against
the leaves came softly through the murmurous quietness. He sprang to
his feet, strangely grave, his glance on the path she came by. In a
moment her figure speckled the green with white, and she came into
view, hurrying, sending sharp, exploring looks before her. She saw him,
instantly fell to a slower pace, and tried to suppress the gladness of
her expression. But he saw it all, and the quick breath that lifted her
breast. Her hand hardly touched his, and moving a little away from him,
she sank down on the ground, her white skirts billowing round her. She
pressed them into folds with arranging pats, avoiding his eyes, and
repeating some commonplaces of greeting.
Jerry returned to his reclining posture, lying on his side, his elbow
in the grass, his hand supporting his head. He, at first, made no
pretense of moving his eyes from her, and answered her remarks shortly
and absently.
Against the background of variegated greens she presented a harmony of
clear, thin tints like a water color. Her dress of sheer, white muslin
was cut away from the throat in a point, and smoothly covering her arms
and neck, let them be seen beneath its crisp transparency, warmly white
under the cold white of the material. The heat of the afternoon and the
excitement of the meeting had called up a faint pink to her cheeks. In
her belt she had thrust a branch of wistaria and the trail of blossoms
hung down along her skirt. She wore a wide leghorn hat, and in this
she had fastened another bunch, the flowers lying scattered across the
broad rim, and one spray hanging over its edge and mingling with the
curls that touched her neck.
Jerry had never seen her look as she did this afternoon. Love, that she
felt assured was returned, had lent her the fleeting beauty of an hour.
She did not seek to penetrate the future. The happiness of the present
sufficed her. She said little, plucking at a tuft of small wild flowers
that grew beside her, conscious to her inmost fiber of her lover’s eyes.
“Why don’t you take off your hat?” he said. “There’s no sun here.”
She obediently took it off and threw it on the ground. The black
velvet she wore around her head had become disarranged and she raised
her hands to draw it into place and tuck a loosened curl under its
restraint. He watched her fixedly.
“Now,” he said, reaching out to draw the hat to him and taking one of
the wistaria blossoms from it, “put this in.”
“I have no glass,” she demurred, stretching a hand for the flower.
“That doesn’t matter. I’ll be your glass. I’ll tell you if it isn’t all
right.”
She tucked the stem of the blossom into the velvet band, so that its
trail of delicate lavender bells fell downward behind her ear.
“How is that?” she said, facing him, her eyes downcast. Her coquetries
of manner had deserted her. With the flush on her face a glowing pink
and her lashes on her cheeks, she was a picture of uneasy embarrassment.
“Perfect,” he answered. He continued to stare at her for a moment and
then said suddenly in a low voice,
“Good heavens, how you’ve changed! It’s a little over a year now that
I’ve known you and you’re an entirely different person from the girl
with the short hair I met up at Foleys. What have you done to yourself?
What is it that has changed you?”
“I think it’s because I’m happy,” she said, beginning again to pick the
wild flowers.
“Why are you happy?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I--” she paused and began to arrange
her flowers in a careful bunch.
He suddenly dropped his eyes to the ground and there was a silence.
The sleepy murmur of insects rose upon it. The sun, in an effort to
penetrate the inclosure, scattered itself in intermittent flickerings
of brilliant light that shifted in golden spots along the tree trunks
or came diluted through the webbing of twigs and vine tendrils. It was
still very hot and the balsamic odors of bay-tree and pine seemed to
grow more intense with the passing of the hour.
“You were such a quiet little thing up there,” Jerry went on, “working
like a man in that garden of yours and never wanting to go anywhere.
Things down here may have made you happy, but I sometimes wonder if
they haven’t made you frivolous, too.”
When Jerry ceased staring at her and began to talk in this familiar,
half-bantering strain, she felt more at ease, less uncomfortable and
conscious. She seized the opening with eagerness and said, smiling down
at her little bouquet:
“But you know I am frivolous. I love parties and pretty clothes and
lots of money to spend, and all the good times going. I was that way at
Foleys, only I didn’t have any of those things. I can be serious, too,
if it’s necessary. When I haven’t got the things to be frivolous with,
I can do without.”
He stretched out his hand and plucked a long stalk of feather-headed
grass.
“Can you?” he said indolently. “Are you sure you’re not telling a
little story?”
“No, no, quite sure. I have two sides to my character, a frivolous one
and a serious one. You ought to know that by now.”
“Which have you shown to me oftenest?” He was peeling the stalk of its
shielding blade of grass.
“I don’t know. That’s for you to say. Perhaps it’s been an even
division.”
He looked up. She was smiling slightly, her dimple faintly in evidence.
“And I suppose the dimple,” he said, “belongs to the frivolous side.”
“Yes. Even my face has two sides; the frivolous one with the dimple and
the serious one without.”
“Let me see them,” he said. “Let me judge which of the two is the more
attractive.”
He leaned forward and with the tip of the long spear of grass, touched
her lightly on the cheek.
“Turn,” he commanded, “turn, till I get a good profile view.”
She turned, presenting her face in profile, pure as a cameo against the
leafy background.
[Illustration: WITH THE TIP OF THE LONG SPEAR OF GRASS, HE TOUCHED HER
LIGHTLY ON THE CHEEK]
“That’s the serious side,” she said, raising her chin slightly, so
that her curls slipped back, disclosing her ear.
“And now for the frivolous,” he answered. “I don’t seem to know the
serious side so well.”
She turned her head in the other direction, her eyes down-drooped. He
drew himself nearer to her over the ground, the grass spear in his hand.
“And so this is the frivolous. Shouldn’t the dimple be here?”
He touched her cheek again with the tip of the grass, and as he did so
the dimple trembled into being. She looked at him slantwise, laughing,
with something breathless in the laughter.
As she met his glance her laughter died away. His face had changed
to something unfamiliar and hard. He was pale, his eyes fierce and
unloving. For a moment she looked at him, some phrase of inquiry dying
on her lips, then she made an attempt to rise, but he drew close to
her and caught her hands. She turned her head away, suddenly white and
frightened.
“June,” he whispered, “do you know how much I love you?”
It was a whisper unlike anything she had ever heard before. A whisper
within herself responded to it. She sat still, trembling and dizzy, and
felt his arms close about her, and her consciousness grow blurred as
his lips were pressed on hers.
The instant after he had loosed her and they had shrunk from each other
in guilty terror, the girl quivering with a rush of half comprehended
alarm, the man struggling with contending passions. His face seemed to
her full of anger, almost of hatred, as he cried to her,
“Go home. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have touched you. We can’t come here
again this way. I’m not free to love you. Go home.”
He made an imperious gesture for her to go, almost as though driving
her from his presence. White as death and dazed by the terrifying
strangeness of it all, she scrambled to her feet, and turning from him,
set out at a run. She brushed through the bushes, her eyes staring
before her, her breast straining with dry sobs. In one hand she still
held her little bunch of wild flowers, and with the other she made
futile snatches at her skirt, which she had trodden upon and torn.
Gaining the end of the wood, she came into the open garden, glaring
with sun, deserted and brilliant. Back of it stood the house, shuttered
to the afternoon heat and drowsing among its vines. She was about
to continue her course over the grass to the open front door, when
a footstep behind her, rapid as her own, fell on her ear. For an
instant of alert, lightly poised terror, she paused listening, then
shot forward across the grass and on to the drive. But her pursuer was
fleeter than she. Close at her shoulder she heard him, his voice full
of commanding urgency.
“Stop, I must speak to you.”
She obeyed as she must always obey that voice, and wheeled around on
him, pallid and panting.
“June, dearest, forgive me. I forgot myself and I’ve frightened you.
But we mustn’t meet--that way--any more.”
She looked at him without answering. He was as pale as she. The lower
part of his face seemed to tremble. He had difficulty in controlling it
and speaking quietly.
“It’s true what I said,” he went on. “I love you. I’ve done so for
months. I was to blame, horribly to blame. You’re so young--such a
child. I was the one to blame for it all.”
“For what?” she said. “What’s there to blame anybody for? What has
happened all of a sudden?”
He came closer to her and looked her steadily in the eye.
“I am not free,” he said in the lowest audible voice. “I can’t marry
you. I am not free.”
She repeated with trembling lips,
“Not free! Why not?”
“No. If I were--oh, June, if I were!” He turned away as if to go, then
turned back, and said,
“Oh, June, if I were, we would be so happy! If I could undo the past
and take you--!”
His voice broke and he looked down, biting his underlip. She understood
everything now, and for the moment speech was impossible. There was a
slight pause, and then he said,
“I wouldn’t let myself see the way it was going. I lied to myself. I
loved you better every day, and I persuaded myself I didn’t, and that
it was nothing but a friendship to both of us. We mustn’t meet this
way any more. But we will see each other sometimes at people’s houses?
We’re not to be strangers.”
She turned dazedly away from him to go to the house. For a step or two
he let her go. Then he followed her, caught her hand with its bunch of
limp flowers, and said with urgent desperation:
“I’ll see you sometimes. I can’t give you up entirely. Perhaps--
perhaps--later, when time has passed, we can be friends. June, I can’t
give it all up like this.”
She turned on him a face whose expression pierced through his egotism.
“Let me go into the house,” she whispered. “I can’t say anything now.
Let me go into the house.”
He dropped her hand, and turning, walked rapidly toward the driveway.
June ran to the house.
It was wrapped in complete silence. Not a sound or movement came from
it. She had but one idea, to mount the stairs unseen, gain her room and
then lock the door. Noiseless and fleet-footed she sped up the veranda
steps, flew through the open door, and then cowered against the wall.
Rosamund was on the stairs coming down.
“June,” she said sharply, “where did Jerry Barclay come from, and what
was he saying to you out there? I’ve been watching you from the window.”
Then she saw her sister’s face. Her own changed in a flash. Its
severity vanished, and concern, alarm, love, took its place. She ran
downward to the figure at the stair-foot, pressed against the wall.
“What’s happened? June, what’s the matter?”
Her startled whisper broke the sunny stillness with a note of the
deadly realism of life amid the sweet unconcern of nature. She tried to
clasp June, who made an effort to squeeze past her, crushed against the
wall, her head down, like one who fears recognition. When, finding it
impossible to escape, she suddenly collapsed at Rosamund’s feet, curled
up like a person in physical anguish, and cried with smothered violence,
“He’s not free, Rosamund. It’s all over; everything’s over. It’s all
true, and we’ve got to end it all. He’s not free.”
Rosamund realized vaguely what had happened. She was a loving woman,
but she was a practical one, too. There were people in the house who
must not see June just at this crisis. She was much the larger and
stronger of the two girls, and she bent down and attempted to raise the
prostrate figure.
“June, listen. We were going out driving at five. Mary Moore may be
down at any moment. Come quick; she mustn’t see you. She’s the worst
gossip in San Francisco. Come, I’ll help you.”
She dragged the girl up with an arm around her, hurried her to the top
of the stairs, along the hall, and into her room. There she let her
fall into an arm-chair, and, stepping back, locked the door.
In the sweet-scented, airy room, with its thin muslin curtains
softening the hot brilliancy of the landscape, June sat in the
arm-chair, silent and motionless, her face pinched. Rosamund, who
had never seen her sister like this, did not know what to do, and in
despair, resorted to the remedies she had been accustomed to using when
her mother had been ill. She softly rubbed June’s temples with cologne
and fanned her. Finally she knelt down by her side and said tenderly,
“What is it, Junie, dear? Tell it to me.”
“I have told it to you,” said June. “He’s not free; that’s all. You all
said it, but I wouldn’t believe it. Now he’s said it and I’ve got to
believe it.”
She spoke in a high, hard voice, and Rosamund, kneeling on the floor,
put her arms round her, and said with ingenuous consolation,
“But now you know it, the worst’s over.”
“Everything’s over,” said June dully.
Her eyes fell to her lap, and there, in one hand, she saw the wilted
remains of the little bunch of wild flowers. A sudden realization of
what her feelings had been when she picked them, how joyous, how shyly
happy, how full of an elated pleasure of life, and what they were now,
fell upon her with desolating force. She gave a cry, and, turning from
her sister, pressed her face against the back of the chair and burst
into a storm of tears.