BUSINESS AND SENTIMENT
The winter of ’71-’72 was a feverish one for San Francisco. The rising
excitement in Virginia ran like a tidal wave over the mountains to the
city by the sea and there broke in a seething whirl. There was no stock
market in the Nevada camp. Pine Street was the scene of the operations
of capitalist and speculator--the arena where bull and bear met.
In Virginia men fought against the forces of nature. They matched
their strength with the elements of the primeval world. Water and
fire were their enemies. Their task was the tearing out from the
rock-ribbed flanks of the mountains the treasure that nature had buried
with jealous care. They performed prodigies of energy, conquered the
unconquerable, rose to the height of their mighty antagonist, giant
against giant.
In San Francisco men fought with one another. The treasure once in
their hands, the battle lost its dignity and became the ignominious
scramble of the swindler and the swindled. The gold and silver--thrown
among the crowd--ran this way and that, like spilled quicksilver. Most
of it ran the way its manipulators directed, into pockets that were
already full, carrying with it the accumulation of gold from other
pockets less full, whose owners were less cunning.
Through the winter Crown Point and Belcher--the neighboring mine
into which the ore-body extended--continued to rise. Confidence had
been restored; everybody was investing. Clerks and servant girls
drew their savings out of banks and stocking feet and bought shares.
In April the stock had reached its highest point, seven hundred and
twenty-five dollars. In May, one month later, it dropped to one hundred
and seventy-five. It was the greatest and most rapid decline the San
Francisco stock market had ever known.
The city was for the moment stunned by it. The confidence in
Virginia--for three years regarded as “petered”--had returned in full
force. The sudden drop knocked the breath from the lungs of those who
had been vociferating the recrudescence of the Comstock. A quantity
of fortunes, great and small, were swept away in the collapse. The
brokers’ cries for “mud” drew the last nickels from the clerks and the
servant girls, the last dollars from their employers. When the wave
receded the shore was strewn with wrecks. For the second time this wave
had slowly risen to level-brimming flood, broken, swept back and left
such a drift of human wreckage.
Throughout the city there was wailing. Nearly everybody had suffered.
The last remnant of the fortune left to Jerry Barclay by his father
was gone. His mother too had lost, fortunately not heavily. But she
bemoaned her few thousands with as much zeal as her cook did the five
hundred, which constituted the savings of years.
Among the heaviest losers was Beauregard Allen. Had not the Barranca
been behind him he would have been a ruined man. As it was, the second
fortune he saw himself possessed of was swept away in a few disastrous
days. The Barranca, while its yield had not of late been so large or
so rich as during its first year, still gave him what he once would
have considered a princely income. But he lived up to and beyond it.
His expenditures during the last year had been exceedingly heavy. He
had private extravagances of his own, besides the lavish manner of
living in which he encouraged his daughters. He had leased the De Soto
house for three years at a fancy rent. The Colonel’s mortgage on the
Folsom Street house would mature in another year. The interest which
fell due in January he had neglected to pay. He had had the money and
then a jeweler had threatened to bring suit for an unpaid-for diamond
bracelet, and the money had gone there, quickly, to keep the jeweler
quiet.
Three years ago at Foleys had any one told him that he would own a mine
like the Barranca and enjoy an income from it such as still was his,
he would have wondered how he could best expend such wealth. Since
then the beggar on horseback had ridden fast and far. Now, in morose
absorption, he reviewed his expenses and his debts. His petty vanity
forbade him to economize in his manner of living. He had raised his
head before men and he would not lower it again. Some financiering
would be necessary to pay up his brokers, maintain the two fine
establishments in which his daughters ruled, and have the necessary
cash for the diamond bracelets and suppers after the theater that
absorbed so many uncounted hundreds. There was solace in the thought
that Parrish held the mortgage on the Folsom Street house. However
restive other creditors might grow Parrish could be managed.
The Colonel in these troublous days was also glumly studying his
accounts. Crown Point, which was to repair the recent decline in
certain of his investments, had swept away in its fall a portion of
that comfortable fortune in which its owner had felt so secure. He had
had several losses of late. From the day of his relinquishment of the
Parrish Tract bad luck seemed to follow him. Owing to an uncontrollable
influx of water the mine in Shasta had been shut down indefinitely. The
South Park houses were declining in value, the city was growing out
toward the property he had sold on upper Market Street, which a year
ago had been a bare stretch of sand. The Colonel looked grave as he
bent over his books; his riches were something more than a matter of
mere personal comfort and convenience.
On a blank sheet of paper he jotted down what his income would be
after all these loppings off. Then over against the last line of
figures jotted down a second line of his expenditures. For some time
he pondered frowningly over these two columns. They presented a
disconcerting problem.
For the past six or seven years he had spent some five thousand per
annum on himself, the rest on certain charities and what he lumped
together under the convenient head of “Sundries.” It was a word which
covered among other things numerous presents and treats for June and
Rosamund. “Sundries” had consumed a great deal of ready money, nearly
as much as Allen’s diamond bracelets and theater suppers, and the
Colonel sighed as he realized they must suffer curtailment. The private
charities were represented by a few written words with an affixed line
of figures: “Carter’s girl at Convent;” “Joe’s boy,” “G. T.’s widow.”
When the figures were added up they made a formidable sum.
The Colonel looked at it for another period of frowning cogitation.
Then on the edge of the paper he put down the items of his own private
account. There was only one which was large--the rent of the sunny
suite on the Kearney Street corner. Through that item he drew his pen.
The next time he dined with the Allens he told them that he was going
to move. He had found his old rooms too large and he had decided to
take a smaller suite in the Traveler’s Hotel. The girls stared in
blank surprise. Allen looked at him with quick, sidelong curiosity.
He wondered at the move. He knew that Parrish had been hard hit, but
he still must have enough left to live on comfortably in the style he
had maintained since his return from the war. The Traveler’s Hotel was
a come-down--a place on the built-out land below Montgomery Street,
respectable enough, but far different from the luxurious rooms on the
Kearney Street corner.
The girls were amazed, distressed, had endless questions as to why
Uncle Jim should do such a strange thing. He laughed and parried their
queries. Had they forgotten that he was a pioneer, who had slept under
the stars on the American River in forty-nine? In those days the
Traveler’s Hotel would have been regarded as the acme of luxury.
“And why,” he said, “should the old man to-day turn up his nose at what
would have been magnificence to the young man in forty-nine?”
During this winter of storm and stress June stood on the edge of the
excitement looking on. The selfishness of a purely individual sorrow
held her back from that vivid interest and participation that would
once have been hers. She was tender and loving to the Colonel, and she
bore patiently with the moody irritation that often marked her father’s
manner, but for the most part she gave to the matters that once would
have been of paramount interest, only a shadow of her old blithe
attention.
Yet she was not entirely unhappy. She had accepted the situation, and,
knowing the worst, tried to readjust her life to an altered point
of view. Her comfort lay in the thought that Jerry loved her. The
enchantment of the days when she had dreamed a maiden’s dreams of a
life with the one chosen man, was for ever gone. She marveled now at
the rainbow radiance of that wonderful time when mere living had been
so joyous, and happiness so easy and natural.
But Jerry loved her. In the rending of the fabric of her dreams, the
shattering of her ideals, that remained. She hugged it to her heart
and it filled the empty present. Of the future she did not think,
making no attempt to penetrate its veil. Only her youth whispered hope
to her, and her natural buoyancy of temperament repeated the whisper.
Of Jerry’s feelings toward her she knew, without being told, but
one evening, late in the winter, he again spoke of them. It was at
a party at Mrs. Davenport’s. For the first time during the season
they had danced together. As a rule their intercourse was limited to
the few words of casual acquaintanceship, greetings on the stairway,
conventional commonplaces at suppers or over dinner-tables. Under
this veil of indifference each was acutely conscious of the other’s
presence, thrilled to the other’s voice, heard unexpectedly in a lull
of conversation or the passing of couples in a crowded doorway.
At Mrs. Davenport’s party Jerry had drunk freely of the champagne and
the restraint he kept on himself was loosened. Moreover, Lupé was not
present, and he felt reckless and daring. After a few turns among the
circling couples they dropped out of the dance, and he drew June from
the large room into a small conservatory. Here in the quiet coolness,
amid the greenery of leaves and the drip of falling water, he took her
two hands in his, and in the sentimental phrases of which he had such a
mastery, told her of his love.
She listened with down-drooped eyes, pale as the petals of the lilies
round the fountain, the lace on her bosom vibrating with the beating of
her heart.
“Say you love me,” he had urged, pressing the hands he held, “I want to
hear you say it.”
“You know I do,” she whispered, “I don’t need to say it.”
“But I want to hear you say those very words.”
She said them, her voice just audible above the clear trickling of the
falling water.
“And you’ll go on loving me, even though we don’t see each other except
in these crowded places, and I hardly dare to speak to you, or touch
your hand?”
“I always will. Separation, or distance, or time will make no
difference. It’s--it’s--for always with me.”
She raised her eyes and they rested on his in a deep, exalted look. She
was plighting her troth for life. He, too, was pale and moved, and the
hands clasped round hers trembled. He cared for her with all the force
that was in him. He was neither exaggerated nor untruthful in what he
said. When he told a woman he loved her he meant it. There would have
been no reason or pleasure to Jerry in making love unless the feeling
he expressed was genuine. Now his voice was hoarse, his face tense with
emotion, as he said:
“It’s for life with me, too. There’s no woman in the world for me but
you, June. Whatever I’ve done in the past, in the future I’m yours, for
ever, while I’m here to be anybody’s. Will you be true?”
“Till I die,” she whispered.
Their trembling hands remained locked together, and eye held eye in a
trance-like steadiness that seemed to search the soul. To both, the
moment had the sacredness of a betrothal.
“Some day perhaps we can be happy,” he murmured, not knowing what
he meant, but anxious to alleviate the very genuine suffering he
experienced. She framed some low words over which her lips quivered,
and in his pain he insisted:
“But you will wait for me, no matter what time passes? You won’t grow
tired of waiting, or cease to care? You’ll always feel that you’re
mine?”
“I’m yours for ever,” she answered.
These were the only words of love that passed between them, but at
the time they were uttered they were to both as the words of a solemn
pact. For the rest of the winter Jerry avoided her. His passion was at
its height. Between it and his fear of Lupé he was more wretched and
unhappy than he had ever been in his life.
During the spring, with its tumult of excitement and final catastrophe,
and the long summer of dreary recuperation, June walked apart, upheld
by the memory of the vows she had plighted. Money was made and lost,
the little world about her seethed in angry discouragement while she
looked on absently, absorbed in her dream. What delighted or vexed
people was of insignificant moment to her. In the midst of surroundings
to which she had once given a sparkling and intimate attention she
was now a cool, indifferent spectator. Her interest in life was
concentrated in the thought that Jerry had pledged himself to her.