Langdon Masters arrived in San Francisco during Madeleine's third
winter. He did not come unheralded, for Travers bragged about him
constantly and asserted that San Francisco could thank him for an
editorial writer second to none in the United States of America. As a
matter of fact it was on Masters' achievement alone that the editor of
the _Alta California_ had invited him to become a member of his staff.
Masters was also a cousin of Alexander Groome, and arrived in San
Francisco as a guest at the house on Ballinger Hill, a lonely outpost
in the wastes of rock and sand in the west.
There was no excitement in the female breast over his arrival for young
men were abundant; but Society was prepared to welcome him not only on
account of his distinguished connections but because his deliberate
choice of San Francisco for his future career was a compliment they
were quick to appreciate.
He came gaily to his fate filled with high hopes of owning his own
newspaper before long and ranking as the leading journalist in the
great little city made famous by gold and Bret Harte. He was one of
many in New York; he knew that with his brilliant gifts and the
immediate prominence his new position would give him the future was his
to mould. No man, then or since, has brought so rare an assortment of
talents to the erratic journalism of San Francisco; not even James King
of William, the murdered editor of the _Evening Bulletin_. Perhaps he
too would have been murdered had he remained long enough to own and
edit the newspaper of his dreams, for he had a merciless irony, a
fearless spirit, and an utter contempt for the prejudices of small men.
But for a time at least it looked as if the history of journalism in
San Francisco was to be one of California's proudest boasts.
Masters was a practical visionary, a dreamer whose dreams never
confused his metallic intellect, a stylist who fascinated even the poor
mind forced to express itself in colloquialisms, a man of immense
erudition for his years (he was only thirty); and he was insatiably
interested in the affairs of the world and in every phase of life. He
was a poet by nature, and a journalist by profession because he
believed the press was destined to become the greatest power in the
country, and he craved not only power but the utmost opportunity for
self-expression.
His character possessed as many antitheses. He was a natural lover of
women and avoided them not only because he feared entanglements and
enervations but because he had little respect for their brains. He was,
by his Virginian inheritance, if for no simpler reason, a bon vivant,
but the preoccupations and ordinary conversational subjects of men
irritated him, and he cultivated their society and that of women only
in so far as they were essential to his deeper understanding of life.
His code was noblesse oblige and he privately damned it as a
superstition foisted upon him by his ancestors. He was sentimental and
ironic, passionate and indifferent, frank and subtle, proud and
democratic, with a warm capacity for friendship and none whatever for
intimacy, a hard worker with a strong taste for loafing--in the open
country, book in hand. He prided himself upon his iron will and turned
uneasily from the weeds growing among the fine flowers of his nature.
Such was Langdon Masters when he came to San Francisco and Madeleine
Talbot.