by Howard Fast
And in that manner, with the salvaging of a wrecked vessel, John Preswick started off to the building of a fortune that was to resound even to the other sea, where other Preswicks had once seen their ships come and go. It seemed much as though fate had led Michael Brian to John Preswick, as though fortune had chosen out the two of them to lavish her hand upon. Their venture with the first ship proved fantastically successful, but the trip they made from Panama to San Francisco was their last. After that time, when they had carried sixty-five men in their burning hold and upon their decks, their schooner sailed under hired hands. John Preswick took long to forget—though he did, in time—the horrible discomfort of that voyage, or realize what it was in men that made them hunger so for gold—to the extent of paying five hundred dollars and more for room to lie upon the deck. Amazingly successful was that first voyage. But it was their last. Michael Brian assured him that their necks were entirely too valuable to be risked on such a cockle-shell as the hull they had raised.
They came to San Francisco while the gold fever was at the height of its first flush. San Francisco had become favored above the old name of Yerba Buena, and its deserted frame building licked at the water where now Market Street goes into First and Battery. But the sudden, fire-like growth of the city had lapsed; its population had abandoned it for the lure of the gold fields; stores closed; labor was unobtainable; real estate touched bottom values. And in that time, at the insistence of John Preswick, who had a passion in his breast for things concrete and material, they invested forty thousand dollars in almost worthless property and in piles of the merchandise that crowded the waterfront, dumped there by shippers who saw in human flesh the only freight worth carrying. Their title was dubious, but Michael Brian, resigning himself to John Preswick’s judgment, made preparations to defend by force what they had acquired. They had remaining to them almost thirty thousand dollars’ clear profit from the first trip.
But the property burnt as a flame in the mind of John Preswick as the reports came back from the gold fields. He said to Michael Brian: “There must be a boom. What does time matter? Sooner or later, the boom will come, and then the world will flock through San Francisco to the fields and back again. You see it in ships. I see it in property. While those fools hunt for then-gold, we’ll hold to the coast. Wait until food begins to be scarce. Wait until they pour over the mountains. Wait until they finish crossing the plains and find themselves starving. Then they’ll come with their gold! Can they eat their gold? Can they hold off the rain with it? Wait until they come!”
And smiling tolerantly, Michael Brian took their remaining capital and invested it in an unseaworthy ketch scarcely worth half of the price when new. But he smiled, painted their name upon the stern, and sent it off down the coast with a crew of three, to whom he was forced to pay ten dollars a day.
And then, after months, the boom began, and slim, graceful clippers, lumbering brigs, fast barques, and grotesque steam side-wheelers, overburdened and retarded by huge spreads of canvas they did not need, came flocking through the Golden Gate and unloaded, with feverish haste, tons of merchandise and thousands of men from every part of the world, until the waterfront and the ragged, shapeless streets swarmed with an aimless, bewildered humanity, who picked their way in and out of the piled baggage in a vain quest for sleeping and eating quarters. They sprawled in the mud-filled avenues; they rolled their blankets on the beaches; they lay unmindful of mud and rain; and for food and shelter they paid fabulous prices. John Preswick and Michael Brian bought another boat, a sloop this time; they bought food and clothing as fast as they could roll it into the sail-, cloth and frame shelters they had built, before which armed men paced. With a speed that was as ridiculous as it was unbelievable, the deserted shell of the city had become a place throbbing with a life it could not contain. And still John Preswick and his partner bought and bought, writing their notes, after their money had given out, for what, a year ago, would have been inconceivable sums.
And where it was all bringing them, John Preswick hardly knew, for of their three ships, one, the ketch, had gone down, and the other two were no longer commanding anything like the former prices. The property which he had purchased, and which he now transformed into hotels, was taking in a stream of gold, with rooms selling for two hundred a month. And Michael Brian sold, at a good profit, a small part of the merchandise, which he was accepting without limit from every ship that touched at the city. In an emergency, he sold one of the buildings, a stable, which he had acquired for a thousand dollars, for the fantastic price of two hundred thousand dollars, a quarter of it in a lump sum of gold. And buyers contended and bid for it. The fifty thousand dollars tided them over and enabled them to purchase a half interest in a clipper ship, Salt of the Spray, the first of what were to be the famous Preswick & Brian ships—sail and then steam. Just what their property was worth, they had not the faintest idea, nor could they estimate it, for prices and values were dancing a whirling waltz.
Then the value of their property rose in a dizzying crescendo. Their hotels were charging, and getting, a thousand dollars a month for the larger rooms; and a discreet brothel which John Preswick had launched had an income of almost fifty thousand dollars a week—not all profit, though, for women were difficult to obtain, and with a knowledge of the prices they commanded. They were white women, and expensive.
And all of it was gold—gold. It seemed that here money had become quite worthless.
With armed guards, they defended the validity of their titles, John Preswick himself going about with a revolver strapped to his waist, with a long knife thrust into his shirt. He and Michael Brian, garbed in slouch hats and overalls, worked like madmen. Their goal was a million by eighteen fifty.
The food, clothing, and timber they had bought, and which was piled in great heaps in the streets and on the waterfront, was shipped inland to Stockton and Sacramento, where it commanded a better price than in San Francisco. The exchange of money and of gold was too rapid for them to keep any sort of books; and because banking facilities were of the poorest, they reinvested their money as soon as they received it. They sent an order east for the building of two small steam vessels; and they organized the Golden Gate Freight and Shipping Company, and the San Francisco Land Holding Company, both of which were later to incorporate into the famous Golden Gate Land and Shipping Company.
In eighteen fifty-one they disposed of all their property except that directly upon the waterfront and reinvested the proceeds in ships, which were now to be had for a fraction of what they had commanded years before, and in real estate in Oakland and in the straggling inland sections of the city proper. Their million had been passed long since. This disposal of their property when prices for land were still at their height, and when titles were still doubtful, enabled them to escape the rather sudden fall in values that came with eighteen fifty-two and eighteen fifty-three, although they lost out theoretically in the reoccurrence of the boom in the latter part of eighteen fifty-three, when values again went sky-rocketing.
In the crash of eighteen fifty-five, they lost hardly a hundred thousand dollars in surplus deposits, a comparatively small sum, and by this time their steam and sail lines were solidly set upon a paying basis. Already they were many times millionaires; but their goal had crept ahead.
The war came, and their open and published sympathy for the South kept their ships free of the privateers who preyed upon the west coast. They prospered. Their wealth grew with the freight their ships carried about the Horn, for as yet Michael Brian’s dream of a canal through Darien had not been realized. They built themselves a home in Oakland, where they lived together until, in the year of eighteen sixty-two, John Preswick took a wife. Then, not so much angered as hurt, Michael Brian left and built for himself a separate and smaller house upon the other side of the street. But a woman could not break the curious love the two men had for each other. Of an evening, they would sit side by side on the porch, and pull thoughtfully on then-pipes, and sp
eak of the Darien, and the long, bright, jungle-walled length of the Chagres, and the lakes, and Panama—to which they had never returned—the city of calculated madness. Now it was a city of dead dreams. And of the already old San Francisco they would speak, which they had known, and which, was no more, of the turbulent, spinning city, swarming with a conglomeration of humanity no city had ever seen before…. They would sit, and they would dream, and the smoke from their pipes would curl lazily upward, and they would stare after it and wonder just what they had, in spite of their fleet of ships that sailed about the Horn, in spite of their tremendous property holdings, and whether all they had was not behind them and lost….
7
THE brownish, mild, retiring woman whom John Preswick had made his wife, bore him a child a year after they were married, and he observed with intense disappointment that it was a girl. But before another year had gone past, she made a second attempt, and this time the result was a boy, a midget, red thing, with brown hair and fawn-colored eyes; and, in a sense of the completest fulfillment, he bestowed upon it the name of John Preswick, feeling even then the stirrings of immortality within him. Michael Brian was the godfather, and young John Preswick broke him, so that the little aging man took him to his heart and spoilt him far more thoroughly than John Preswick himself might have.
And after that, the years passed, as years will, and the two men grew older, while young John Preswick emerged from his swaddling clothes and began to investigate the ways of locomotion and speech.
They grew older, and their wealth increased, and they became what are known as powers in the financial world, and they were able to bribe legislators and to swing projects. And their interests expanded, and their wealth grew, and they were pointed out as kings of finance. And they left their homes for other homes that were marvelously ornate and spacious.
But still they would sit together on what was now a large if architecturally grotesque portico, and they would smoke their pipes and speak of days that were. For though they had become powers, and though they traveled, and though they had servants and luxuries beyond reason, they never came again to the heights of Darien, where the fever walks, but where the jungle is tall and splendid, and where there are birds out of dreams, and strange cries. And there was a beach once, in a bay called Chorrera, near the mouth of the Rio Caimito, where they had dragged from the sand a hulk of a forgotten boat with which they had made their fortune.
And back from the beach there was jungle.
They would smoke their pipes, and the smoke would curl upward and about their heads, attempting, factitiously, for it was obviously futile, to conceal the change that had come over their features. But beneath the smoke, John Preswick was old, his face long and yellow and hollow below the cheeks and under the eyes; his heavy mustache was gray; his hair was gray, too, and so sparse that he had to comb it sidewise to cover his skull. And Michael Brian, a dozen years older than John Preswick, was a wizened dwarf with wrinkle-encased blue eyes, with an almost toothless mouth. They would sit and smoke….
Sometimes John Preswick would remember; and then he would be in a garden where tables were set upon flagstones, where pink blooms nodded in gay profusion, where such a scent went into the air as was a drug upon the nostrils of the sanest. And he would smile as he thought of the business-like New York lawyer, who had been tricked, by the odor of flowers and the humming of insects, into paying more than it could possibly have been worth. As he had done a hundred times before, he would relate the tale to Michael Brian, who would invariably nod, blinking his little eyes in approval.
But lately, as he thought more of the garden, he did not smile quite so easily, for he could almost hear the humming of insects and almost catch the fragrance of pink blooms. Again he would doze, and he would be back—
He would be back there, gazing to the Steer’s Head, black and rather grand against the setting sun. And he would turn his gaze to take in the fire-washed fields, the stone fences, with their long, bizarre shadows, and the little house with its high, narrow white portico.
He thought, John Preswick, that if he had a turn for architecture or description, he would reproduce that same little house; but wistfully he thought of it, for he knew that house was not made to be reproduced.
So as the years fell away, they dozed and dreamed and smoked more and more; and they became old men.
Then one morning a servant came from the house of Michael Brian, came to John Preswick, and said, in a low voice, that during the night his master had died in bed. And that was in the year of eighteen hundred and seventy-nine.
Rousing his weary body, John Preswick put on a suit of dark clothes, took his stick, called snappishly for his carriage, and went to Michael Brian. They had laid the little man out on his bed, and they had dressed him and had shaven his face. When John Preswick entered the room, he waved the others out, closed the door, and went over to the bed. He was fired, and he pulled a chair to the bed, that he might rest himself, thinking that Michael would know of his rheumatism and understand. For Michael was a quick one to take offense.
For a long while he sat there, leaning thoughtfully upon his stick, sometimes glancing sidewise to the dead man, most of the time staring at the floor, a faint and quizzical smile over his lips.
“Michael,” he said, “we were both of us canny men—too canny.”
With his stick he traced upon the floor, thinking as he did so: “Here is Panama City—come north through the gulf. We are at Point Mala, and this spot is Naos Island. In again to the coast, and you are at Point Batelo and then Venando. And from there—follow me, Michael Brian—it is but fourteen miles to the Bay of Chorrera.”
He smiled, and he nodded at Michael Brian. He was not saddened, but he was wistful; he thought that perhaps Michael Brian might have enjoyed sitting in the little garden at one of the tables, and that there the two of them might have dipped into tall bumpers of ale—such ale as they did not have in California.
Into his mind flashed the picture of the beach where the boat had been, and of the naked, pot-bellied Indians straining at the ropes, and of the voyage north, when the men lay as cattle upon the deck—of the room where he had wakened and found Michael Brian.
He was not saddened; he almost envied Michael Brian. But he was wistful.
Going to leave, he paused at the door to the room, looked back, and waved a hand. “A gentle voyage—Michael,” he said in a voice strangely tender.
Very softly, as though he feared to disturb a sleeping man, he closed the door behind him. His yellow face was like a grotesque mask, and the smile that still clung about his lips had divorced itself from the rest of his countenance.
Though he knew there was no reason for it—after that, he lingered in life, for he was a wealthy man, and it was his business to live while he might. And if he were to be taken ill, there was always a staff of meddling and officious doctors buzzing about him, like flies over a carcass. He saw his son become a boy, and the boy become a man. He saw him handed a diploma at college, and he saw him step up to the pulpit to take a wife. And he saw, in due time, that wife bear him a boy child, whom they called, in the way of many generations, John Preswick.
The older John Preswick was seventy-eight years of age when the boy was born, and his son, who was the father of the child, was a man in middle age, prosperous, managing dexterously what his father had given him, dull perhaps, but with the look of a magnate about him. But to the old man the grandson was new life, and he fondled him upon his knee, and crooned over him, and thought of how wonderful it was that three John Pres-wicks should exist together, and what a wonderful arranger was nature, or God, or whatever it might be that brought about these things.
Then in the year nineteen hundred and seven the older John Preswick died.
PART IV
1915–1930
STEER’S HEAD
STEER’S HEAD
1
WHETHER it was a sudden squall of wind, or whether he had dreamed and allowed his body to
press back against the rudder, John Preswick never really knew. He saw the boom pass over his head, and then he was in the water, the keel of his boat striking off a ruddy, slanting sun that hung out at the edge of the bay.
Holding to the side of his boat, he looked about him. Far off a sail bobbed, and beyond that a streamer of smoke slid out from an ocean-going vessel. An incredible, lonesome silence hung over the water; it was as though the bay had purposely cleared itself for the evening. Thinking to himself that it was something of a pity he could swim so well, he climbed onto the keel of the overturned boat and sat there, slapping the water off his wet shirt. If there were no one around by sundown who could give him a tow, he would have to swim in to shore. It was nearly a mile.
“It is a pity,” he reflected to himself, “that I was not drowned or something of that sort. It is a pity I can swim at all.”
And he almost smiled as he thought of what Lucille Croyden, seeing them bring in his dead, water-soaked body, would say. It was not at all difficult for him to picture it. Lucille would be visiting his mother. Perhaps her husband would be with her. In spite of herself, she would miss him; and upon questioning his mother, would discover that he had taken his boat out on the bay. She would be a little anxious, just as his mother always was when he took out the boat. But his own slim strength belied the weakness of his mother; she would never quite trust to it.
Lucille Croyden would remain later than usual—perhaps over night—and always she would look towards the door. Then a car would slide up the driveway, and some men would step out with a basket, or whatever they carried bodies in, and Lucille Croyden would know—almost instinctively. He bathed in the glow of his self-pity.