And Magdaléna lived this life for three years. Its monotony was broken by one event only.
* * *
XXVII
During the winter following Mr. Polk's death, Colonel Belmont was driving his coach along the beach beyond the Park one afternoon when Helena, who sat beside him, saw him give a long shudder, then huddle. She grasped the reins of the four swiftly trotting horses and spoke over her shoulder to Alan Rush.
"Pull my father up to the top," she said.
Rush did as he was bid, and the body of Colonel Belmont was laid out between the two rows of young people, whose gaiety had frozen to horror.
"Now take the reins," said Helena.
Rush took the reins. Helena followed her father swiftly and stooped to take his head in her arms. But she dropped her ear to his lips instead, then to his heart. For a moment longer she stared at him, while the others waited for the outburst. But she returned to the front seat, and caught the reins from Rush's hands.
"I must do something," she said; and he knew better than to answer her, or even to look at her.
It was some time before she could turn the horses, and then she was several miles from home. She drove with steady hands; but when they had reached the house and Rush lifted her down, she was trembling violently. She pushed him aside.
"Go and get Magdaléna," she said.
Magdaléna remained with her a week. This was Helena's first real grief, and there was nothing cyclonic about it. "I'll never get over it," she said. "Never! And I'll never be quite the same again. Of course I don't mean that I'll have this awful sense of bereavement and keep on crying all my life: I know better than that; but I could never forget him, nor forget to wish I still had him, if I lived to be a hundred. If I had anything to reproach myself for—anything serious—I believe I'd go off my head; but I was good to him; and I am sure mamma never could have taken better care of him than I did. When he was under doctor's orders I gave him every drop of the medicine myself, and I never would let him eat a thing I thought wouldn't agree with him. He used to say his life was a burden, poor darling, but I know he liked it. And who knows?—if I hadn't watched him so, he might not have lived as long as he did. That is my one consolation.... This terrible grief makes everything else seem so paltry; I could not even think of being engaged to Alan Rush any longer. Poor fellow! I feel sorry for him, but I can't play for a long time to come. As for papa's wishes in the matter, Mr. Geary and Mr. Washington will take care of my money, and I am quite able to take care of myself. If papa is near me now, he will understand how I feel, and agree with me. I wish I had some heroic destiny. Why has the United States ceased to make history? I'd like to play some great part. Papa used to say there was bound to be another upheaval some day, but I'm afraid it won't be in my time."
"It may," replied Magdaléna. "There's a good deal of history-making, quiet and noisy, going on all the time. I've been reading the newspapers this last year. They're horrid sensational things, but I manage to get a few ideas from them. No one can tell what may happen ten years hence. You may have a chance to be the heroine of a revolution yet."
"I'm afraid I'll never be anything but a belle, and I'm tired of that already, although I never could stand being shelved. But if there is a revolution during my life I'll be a factor in it. Just you remember that."
"I really do believe that you were intended for something extraordinary."
"I believe I was. That's the reason I'm so restless and dramatic. I don't feel as if I ever could be so again, though,—not for ages, anyhow."
The old close and affectionate intimacy between the two girls was restored during that week. At its end Helena went East to visit her aunt, Mrs. Forbes. She was the untrammelled mistress of something under a million dollars; and as her private car, filled with flowers, bonbons, and books, pulled away from a sorrowing crowd of friends on the Oakland side of the ferry, it must be confessed she reflected that the future would appear several shades darker if she were arranging her belongings in a half-section, a small quarterly allowance in her pocket. Nevertheless Colonel Belmont had his reward. His daughter's grief was deep and lasting; and perhaps he knew.
* * *
XXVIII
Caro married her Englishman, and on a thriving grape-farm entertained other Englishmen. Rose went East and triumphantly captured a Baltimorean of distinguished lineage and depleted exchequer. Tiny went to Europe again. Magdaléna was practically alone. Her father still lived in his two rooms downstairs and never spoke to anyone but Ah Kee. Once he forgot to close his study door, and Magdaléna, who happened to be passing, paused and looked at him. His face had shrunken and was crossed with a thousand fine and eccentric lines; like the palm of a man singled out for a career of trouble. He had let his hair and beard grow, and he looked uncouth and dirty.
Mrs. Yorba still read novels. She no longer paid calls, for her allowance, now reduced to fifty dollars a year, was quite inadequate to meet the requirements of a dignified member of society. She received her few intimate and faithful friends in her bedroom; the first floor was never dusted nor aired. The house smelt musty and deserted; the lower rooms were as cold and damp as underground caverns; the spiders spun unheeded; when the front door was opened, the festoons in the hall swung like hammocks. Even the gloom of the house seemed to accentuate with the years. Magdaléna wondered if the inside of the old Polk house looked any more haunted than this; and even the Belmont house was acquiring an expression of pathos, peculiar to desertion in old age. Magdaléna fancied that the three houses must be pointed out to visitors as the sarcophagi of the futile ambitions of three Californian millionaires.
In her own rooms she toiled on, absorbed in her work, loving it with the beggared passion of her nature, experiencing two or three moments of creative ecstasy and many hours of dull discouragement. She wrote her stories and rewrote them; then again, and again. Her critical faculty took long strides ahead of her creative power, and she rarely ceased to be uneasy at the disparity between her work and her ideals. But Trennahan had said that it would be ten years before she could attain excellence, and she was willing to serve a harder apprenticeship than this. Had it not been for her work and the books of those who had climbed the heights and slept beneath the stars, she might have become morbid and melancholy in her unnatural surroundings. But although the monotony of her life was never broken by a day in the country, she had always the beauty of bay and hill and sky beyond her window; and there are certain months in the spring and autumn when San Francisco is as lovely and brilliant as the southern shores of California. The trades are hibernating in the caves of the Pacific, and the fogs exist only in the spray of the ponderous waves. On such days and evenings Magdaléna sat for hours on her little balcony, forgetting her work, dreaming idly. It was inevitable, in her purely mental and imaginative life, that she should apprehend in Trennahan the lover again. She wove her own romance as ardently and consecutively as that of any of her heroines. In time he would forget Helena; his love for her had been one of those sudden insane passions of which she had read,—which she tried to depict in her Southland tales,—and in time it would fall from him, and he would hear the tinkle of the chain forged in long hours of perfect sympathy. They would both be older and wiser and more sad: the better, perhaps. Loneliness and the peculiar circumstances of her life inclined her to borderland sympathies; she believed that if he died suddenly she should become immediately aware of the fact.
Her love for Trennahan by no means interfered with her literary ambitions. All others had failed her; she knew now that with the best of opportunities she should never have cut a brilliant figure in society. But she did not care; letters were a far more glorious goal. Helena adored great military heroes, great imperialists like Clive and Hastings, even great tyrants like Napoleon. Herself reverenced the great names in literature, and could think of no destiny so exalted as to be enrolled among them. And if she succeeded, what would have mattered these long years of dull loneliness, of denial of all that is dear
to the heart of a girl? Sometimes she even thought the tarrying of Trennahan mattered little; for there is no tyrant so jealous as Art.
Once she read her stories aloud to her mother; and Mrs. Yorba was pleased to observe that they were much better than she could have expected, but that on the whole she preferred "The Duchess." She had grown quite fond of her daughter, and often sat in her room while she wrote. The intimacy and isolation of the two women had made it easy and natural for Magdaléna to confide in her mother, but she was forced to confess that she had not inherited her critical faculty from her maternal parent. Nevertheless, she was glad of the meagre encouragement and plodded on.
* * *
XXIX
It was early in the fourth year that Henry James swooped down upon San Francisco. He arrived in the train of Helena's triumphant return, under her especial patronage. Not that a few choice spirits in California had not discovered James for themselves long since; but James as a definite entity, known and approved by Society, awaited the second advent of Helena. He immediately became the fad; rather, Society split into two factions and was threatened with disruption. One young woman of the disapproving camp even went so far as to call an ardent advocate a "Henry James fool." All of which was doubtless due to the fact that the traditions of action still lingered in California. Strangely enough, Tiny, who returned almost immediately after Helena, was one of the first to take Mr. James under her small but determined wing. She regarded well-read people as an unnecessary bore, and ambition of any sort as unsuited to the Land of the Poppy, but she had a feminine faith in exceptions, and joined the cult with something like enthusiasm. It was she who introduced him to Magdaléna.
Magdaléna cared nothing for American latter-day authors, and gave no heed to Helena's emphatic approval of Mr. James. In fact, she and Helena had so much else to talk about that they found little leisure for books. Helena had been abroad again, and the belle of a winter in Washington. She was more beautiful than ever, and, although somewhat subdued, was full of plans for the future. Her first ball—she arrived at the end of the winter season—determined that her supremacy, socially and sentimentally, was unshaken. Immediately after, she bought an old Spanish house in the northern redwoods and provided new surprises for her little world. But there is no more room for Helena in this chronicle. Perhaps, if history shapes itself around her, she may one day have a chronicle to herself.
Tiny called on Magdaléna one afternoon with two volumes of Henry James under her arm. She took to her toes as the front door closed, and ran down the long hall and up the stair to Magdaléna's room.
"I feel like a book agent," she said, trying not to pant, and hoping Magdaléna would go down to the door with her when she left. "But you really must read him, 'Léna. He's so fascinating: I think it's because nothing ever happens, and that's so like life. I think I must always have felt Henry Jamesish, and it seems to me that he is singularly like Menlo,—when Helena is not there,—just jogging along in aristocratic seclusion punctuated by the epigrams of Rose and Eugene Fort. I'm sure Mr. James could, write a novel of Menlo Park; he just revels in irradiating nothing with genius. There! I feel so guilty, for I really do love Menlo,—with intervals of Europe,—but I've been visiting Rose, and I'm afraid I'm plagiarising a little; you know I'm not one bit clever. Only I really feel so when I read Mr. James. And he'll be such company in Menlo this summer. Just think, I shall be all alone there, when I'm not visiting Helena or Caro. Is—is—" she glanced about fearfully—"is there no hope of dear Don Roberto relenting?"
"I am afraid not. But it is such a comfort to have you back. I heard you were engaged—to an Englishman, or something?"
Tiny blushed. She was on her way to a tea, and looked exquisitely pretty in a fawn-coloured crêpe de chine embroidered with wild roses, and a bonnet of pink tulle crushed about her face. Magdaléna wondered why some man had not married her out of hand, then reflected that Tiny was likely to dispose of her own future.
"I'm not quite sure," said Miss Montgomery, looking innocently at a lithograph of the Virgin which still decorated the wall. "You see, he has a title, and it's so commonplace to marry a title. But if I decide to, I'll let you know the very first."
Shortly after she went away—and left Magdaléna alone with Henry James.
She took up one of the volumes. As she did so, something stirred in the cellars of her mind—beat its stiff wings against the narrow walls—struggled forward and upward.
She stood on the porch in the late evening: alone in a fog. Her young mind opened to literary desire—preceding it was a swift disturbing presentiment; it had recurred once, and again—but not for several years. What did it mean, here again? And what had Henry James to do with it? She dropped into a chair. Her hands trembled as they opened the book.
* * *
XXX
It was a week before she squarely faced the relation of Henry James to her own ambitions. Then she admitted it in so many words: she could not write, she never could write. The writers who were dust had inspired her to emulation; it took a great contemporary to bring her despair. It is only the living enemies we fear; the dead and their past are beautiful unrealities to the smarting ego.
Magdaléna realised for the first time the exact value she had placed upon the art of expression,—a value that was in inverse ratio to her limitations. Literature to her was, above all else, the art of words. Stories were to be picked up anywhere: had she not found a number ready to her hand? The creative faculty might, in its unique development, be something supremer still, although crippled without the perfected medium of this writer, who seemed above all writers to be the master and not the servant of words. She re-read her own efforts. They represented the hard thought and work of six years; not a great span, perhaps, but long enough to determine the promise of a faculty. The stories were wooden. Her work would always be wooden. There was not a phrase to delight the cultivated reader, not a line that any moderately clever person, given the same material, might not have written. After as many more years of labour she might become a praiseworthy writer of the third rank. She put her manuscripts in the fire.
After that, life turned grey indeed. Her imagination might have gone into the flames with the stories, for her illusions about Trennahan fell to ashes coincidently. She no longer believed that he would return, that he would even write demanding her friendship. She could hardly recall his face; the sound of his voice was gone from her. Indubitably he had forgotten her long since. Why not? She had ascended above the rosy stratum of youth, where delusions were possible.
Then began a long struggle against despair and its terrible consequences. It was a summer of raging trades which seemed to lift the sand dunes from their foundations and hurl them through the choking city. She could take little exercise. The Library was her only resource, but one can read only so many hours a day. If she could but travel, as Helena did, when anything went wrong! Or if her uncle had only left her an income that she could expend in charity! Her sympathy for the poor had never ebbed, and she would have gladly spent her life in their service, although she doubted if they were more miserable than herself. It was true that she had enough to eat, a roof to her head, and clothes to wear,—extremely plain clothes; but that was all. A nun or a prisoner had as much.
There were times when she was threatened with a consuming hatred of life, and then she fled out into the dust and battled with the storms within and without; for her ideals were all that were left her. She knew the ugly potentialities in the depths of her ill-compounded nature: the day she ceased to be true to herself there would be a tragedy in that dark house on the hill. Sometimes she wondered toward what end she was persevering, striving to perfect the better part of her. A quarter of a century or more of meaningless earthly existence? A controvertible hereafter? But she ceased to analyse, knowing that it could lead nowhere until the human mind ceased to be human.
And one day, in the end of the summer, she lost her grip on herself.
For three days the trade-
winds had raged; she had not been able to leave the house. Twice she had set forth, desperate with the nervous monotony of her hours, and been driven back by the blinding dust. It was on the third day that she happened to catch sight of herself in the glass. She saw her face plainer than ever, but her attention passed suddenly to her shoulders and rested there. They were bent. Her carriage was dejected, apathetic. The sluggish tide mounted slowly to her face as she realised that this physical manner must have fallen upon her gradually, and been worn for some time; and its significance. She made an effort to reassume her old erect haughty poise, which had been partly the manifest of inherent pride, partly of half-acknowledged defiance of the beauty-worship of the world. Her shoulders sank before the spine had risen to its perpendicular. What did it matter? Again she experienced that disintegration of will which once had left her at the mercy of that instinct for destruction which is one of the essential particles of the ego.
Her brain was almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not care. But if her brain was sodden, her nerves felt as if on the verge of explosion. She noticed that her hands were not steady, and sat for hours, wondering what was coming upon her. She cared less and less.
Ah Kee tapped at her door. She replied that she did not want any dinner, loathing the unvarying bill-of-fare.
The hours dragged on, and darkness came; but she did not light the gas, whose jet was but a feeble point in these times, hardly worth the waste of a match. She strained her ears, fancied she heard whisperings in the hall below. If San Francisco's skeletons really were down there, she wished they would go in and throttle her father. He was the author of all her misery; and was any woman on earth so miserable as she? Why should he live, exist down there like a beast in his cave, when his death would give her liberty?—a poignant happiness in itself. She wondered did she kill him should she be hanged? They rarely hanged anybody in California, never when there was gold to rattle contemptuously in the face of the law; why should she not deliver her mother and herself? They would both be in an asylum for the mad, or dead before their time, unless he went soon; and their lives were of several times more value than his. They, at least, had ruined the lives of no one, and with his hoarded unsavoury millions they would gladly do good to hundreds.
The Californians Page 24