Adelle seemed wholly absorbed in the bricks and mortar laid upon old Clark's Field. She did not speak. It would be impossible to say what she was thinking of.... At last, as they emerged from another long stretch of narrow street bordered on either side by high tenements that were varied according to a machine pattern by different colored bricks, Archie protested. He growled,—"Well, haven't you seen enough of this sort of thing to last you awhile?"

Adelle gave the order to retrace their journey to the hotel. She looked back into the dreary maze with her wide gray eyes, and now they were not quite empty eyes as they had been in the probate courtroom. She looked and looked as if she were seeing the past as well as the present, as if she were trying to fathom what Judge Orcutt had meant. When the Field faded into the distance behind the rapid car, she sank back into her corner with an unconscious sigh. Archie had taken a cigarette from the little gold case that had been one of Adelle's first presents to him, and as he lighted it skillfully in face of the wind was doubtless thinking that never again would he be misled into going to Clark's Field.

On the way back Adelle ordered the driver to stop in the Square, and despite Archie's protest that it was already long past lunch-time she left him in the car and turned down the side street that led to the old rooming-house. It was gone! In its place was a five-story flat building that occupied not only all their yard, but the livery-stable lot as well. Adelle realized the change with a positive shock. Latterly, since the little lecture by the probate judge, the images of her early life had come back to her mind as they had not for years. The transformation of Clark's Field did not matter so much even: it had not been in the immediate horizon of her youth,—more an idea than a physical possession. But Church Street and the rooming-house and the livery-stable—they had been her very self. She felt strangely as she had seven years before when she was returning to her aunt's house after the funeral of the widow. The last of all her landmarks had been swept away....

She returned to the car with a thoughtful face, and all the way into the city she paid no attention to Archie's chatter, her mind far away, busy with her forlorn little past. Once or twice she wondered what the judge had meant by urging her to take her husband to see Clark's Field. But she was glad that she had gone. She should have visited Alton sometime or other she supposed to see what the old place was like;—she must remember to go to the cemetery before they left B—— and look for her aunt's grave. But this was not all that the judge meant, Adelle suspected.

She was not to discover for some years the full, fine meaning of the judge's intention, perhaps might never recognize all the implications of his message to her on her twenty-first birthday.



XXX

Archie was pacified by a copious luncheon in the Eclair restaurant, which is almost as good as a second-class Paris restaurant, and after an idle afternoon the couple went to a popular musical comedy to end their day. Adelle's business with the trust company was now finished, and they must decide upon their next move. Their first impulse after the rout upon the dock had been to dart back to Europe as expeditiously as possible, with Adelle's recovered lamp, and never darken again their native shores. But this pettish mood had been largely forgotten during the fortnight that ensued, and they remembered their plan of going to California so that Archie might present himself in his new estate and his wife to his own people. A cable from Sadie Paul, stating that she had taken "the B. and T." (which being properly interpreted meant that she had decided to marry her Hungarian count) and was returning to her home to celebrate her wedding, determined them. They forthwith made their arrangements to cross the continent and spend the summer on the Pacific Coast.

It may as well be said that before departing Adelle had one quite serious business talk with President West of the trust company and the excellent Mr. Smith, whose had been the chastening hand at the time of her elopement. Possibly the wisdom of his remarks was becoming more evident to Adelle as marriage wore on, or it might be that she still did usually as she was told, if she were told with sufficient authority. At any rate, she agreed to leave in the hands of the Washington Trust Company the bulk of her estate, not strictly in the form of a trust,—they could not induce her to surrender the privilege of the lamp to that extent,—but under an agreement by which she bound herself not to disturb the principal of her fortune for a term of years. The bankers represented to her tactfully that neither she nor Mr. Davis had yet had extensive experience in the investment of money; that the operations of the Clark's Field Associates were not finally wound up; that they had had such success in their investments on her account that it would be well to allow them to carry out their scheme of investment, etc. In short, she signed the agreement, which was the last thing she did in B——.

Archie, when he learned what she had done, was irritated. Naturally he did not like Mr. Smith and had a grudge against the trust company as a whole. He said that the arrangement reflected upon him and his dignity as a husband, although, as Mr. West had pointed out to Adelle, it was not customary for a husband to be entrusted with the disposal of all his wife's property. Since the vogue of international marriages, American fathers had taken refuge in the trust companies. In spite of argument and sulks, however, Archie could not prevail upon Adelle to undo what she had done, and he had to content himself with the shrewd reflection that it was probably not legally binding and could be broken when opportunity offered.

In this affair Adelle displayed an unexpected caution by her willingness to let the trust company remain guardian of her magic lamp for the present. She had a woman's instinctive confidence in an institution, especially in one which years of use had made familiar to her. Archie, she felt justly, must content himself with their income, which would be more than two hundred thousand a year. That should satisfy their immediate wants after the eighteen months of bread-and-butter probation. And after all it was her own money, as the trust officers had said to her again and again. This, however, she did not repeat to Archie. She soothed his irritated pride in other ways, and in the end a fairly contented and harmonious couple were whirled westward in the track of the setting sun to that more golden shore of our continent, where other fate awaited them.



XXXI

After a brief visit at the Santa Rosa vineyard, where oddly enough Adelle seemed to feel more at home than Archie, they went to Bellevue to attend the famous Paul wedding. Here Irene Paul, now an "Honorable Mrs." George Pointer, entertained them, both Adelle and Irene apparently forgetting their old grudges. Arm about waist they went lovingly up the grand staircase of the old Paul mansion to Adelle's rooms, babbling about school days, Pussy Comstock, and the other girls of her famous "family." Irene even looked with favor upon Archie in his developed condition of a rich woman's husband. Adelle reflected complacently that he was quite as presentable as a man as the young Englishman Irene had married. All you had to do to succeed, in marriage as in other things, was to do what you wanted and make the world accept you and your acts. And she honestly admired the tall blonde Irene, who had bloomed under the influences of matrimony into something suggestively English—high-colored, stately, emphatic. She liked the rambling ugly mansion built in the eighties after Hermann Paul's success with railroads, in the best mansard style of the day, and never touched since. The grounds which had been extensively planted by the railroad man were now covered with a luxuriant growth of exotic trees that completely hid the house and afforded only peeps of the distant bay. California, with its pungent stimulants of odor and color, appealed to her from the very first. She was quite happy, and Archie seemed to expand in his native soil and was less peevish than he had grown to be latterly.

After the wedding, which according to the local newspapers was a very grand affair, but which unfortunately does not come into this story, Archie and Adelle prolonged their visit. They found the easy atmosphere of this pretty California town so agreeable, with its busy air of luxurious leisure, that they took a furnished house for the remainder of the season, and in the autumn they rented a larger place out on the hills behind the town, having a lovely view of the great valley and the distant waters of the Bay, with the blue tips of the inland hills rising through the mists. They still talked confidently of returning to Europe to live.

They did not, however, at least for permanent residence. Archie was too content with life in this land of sunshine, flowers, and informal living, to leave. He said quite flatly now that he did not think he was meant to be a painter and there was no point in being an artist if you did not have to be something. Adelle perceived that according to Archie there was not much point in doing anything unless one had to. She began to suspect dimly the existence of a deep human law. "By the sweat of thy brow," it had been writ in that Puritan Bible she studied at the First Congregational Church in Alton. Then it had a very definite meaning even to her child's mind, but during the easy years since, she had forgotten it altogether. Now something like its stern truth was boring into her consciousness. It seemed that when the larger incentives of living—the big universal ones—had been removed for any cause, human beings were often at a loss what to do with themselves. They sighed for "freedom" when bound to the common wheel, but when released, as Archie and Adelle had been, the average man or woman had but the feeblest notion of what to do with his "freedom."

With women such as Adelle the tragedy is less apparent than with men, because woman's life for uncounted ages has consisted in great part of playing games with herself at the dictates of men, and large wealth assists her in making these games socially interesting and agreeable. Adelle, to be sure, had no social ambition of the conventional sort. She was more content than Archie with merely being married and having plenty of money to spend in any way she chose. In this respect she was nearer the primitive than Archie, who often reminded her of the fact somewhat cruelly. Yet, as we shall see, when the time came she awoke to the full realization of the situation, which Archie never understood at all.

Art having finally been thrown out of the window by both, it remained to determine how best they could dispose of themselves and their riches so as to "get the most out of life." The first of the game substitutes for real living happened to be a "ranch." The suggestion came from Irene's husband, who had been attracted to California by this lure of "ranching."

"Why don't you go in for a big ranch?" he said to Archie one evening, when the four were yawning sleepily over the fire after a day spent motoring in the wind. "There's the Arivista property in Sonoma County. I hear they want to sell—ten thousand acres."

The idea of becoming a large landowner appealed to the Californian in Archie. They talked the matter over, and it resulted in their all motoring down the State to the Arivista property. In the end they bought at considerable expense this ten-thousand-acre tract of mountain, valley, and plain, and began elaborate improvements. It had been once a "cattle proposition," but Archie's idea was to turn it into fruit and nuts, as well as a gentleman's estate of a princely sort, with a large "mission style" cement mansion. He engaged an architect and a superintendent, and began building and planting on an elaborate scale.

Adelle was glad to see her Archie really interested in something and encouraged him in all his ambitious plans. They motored frequently to the ranch to inspect operations. It took them two days to go and return, and there were only rough accommodations at the ranch. But she liked it. The great untamed spaces of hill and plain, with the broad horizon of blue mountains, appealed to her. She was less interested in the big house, the barns, outbuildings, orchards,—all the paraphernalia that goes with an "estate," which Archie wished impatiently to have created at once. It took, naturally, a great deal of money. Before the work at Arivista was finally stopped, it was estimated that close to half a million dollars of Clark's Field had been poured into this California "ranch," from which, of course, less than a quarter was ever recovered, no other rich man being found with similar conceptions of what a "ranch" should be. All told, the Davises lived upon their ranch less than four months during the next spring, and before the blossoms had finally fallen sufficient reasons were found to move them back nearer people and the ordinary diversions of life. Water, it was discovered, could not be got in sufficient quantity. The relaxing climate of the south did not seem to agree with Adelle. And, above all, a child was expected.

The little boy was born in Bellevue. He had come to them by accident, for neither felt that it was yet the right time to have children; but Adelle recognized almost at once that it was likely to be a happy accident for her and welcomed it with all proper fervor. It served, at any rate, to settle them in California for the present. They decided to buy the place they had rented upon the hills and live there for most of the year. And it also served to strengthen the bond between husband and wife, which was wearing dangerously thin in places. With the coming of the child the family was constituted, and another interest was given to Adelle, which compensated for Archie's pettish moods. The child also released Archie from the constant attention which Adelle exacted of him, and permitted him more of that precious "freedom," which he found wealth did not always bring.

Thus they definitely started their California life.



XXXII

Bellevue is one of those country towns in the neighborhood of a large city that have flourished especially since the discovery of the motor-car. It took quite two hours to reach it from San Francisco by train and nearly that by fast driving in a car, owing to the poor roads. Thus it was removed for the present from the contaminating contact of the "commuter" and all the commonness of suburbanism. Bellevue had, of course, its country club, with a charming new clubhouse, where polo was played in season, as well as the humbler forms of sport such as golf and tennis, and where a good deal of lively entertaining went on at all seasons. It was an old settlement; that is, it had been the country home of a few families for almost two generations, the first of the great places having been developed in the seventies when the railroad fortunes were being made. Besides these older estates, which were marked by the luxuriance of their planting and by the ugliness of their houses, there was a growing number of smaller, more modern estates with attractive houses, and also a little settlement "across the tracks" of trades-people and servants. Except for the eternal spring and the wealth of California foliage, Bellevue was much like any number of towns outside of Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, or Boston. And the social life of the place, except for the minor modifications due to climate and environment, was so exactly typical of what everybody knows that it needs no description.

Thanks to Irene's good will as well as to Adelle's fortune the Davises became immediately acquainted with the "colony" of Bellevue, and were easily accepted as members of that supposedly exclusive society. Archie rapidly made a place for himself at the club. Having no regular occupation he could devote himself to polo with the exclusiveness of a single passion. For diversion he motored up to the city frequently, where he became a member of several clubs, and for business there was always the ranch to worry about. In this way he kept up a current of movement in his daily life, which for persons like the Davises takes the place of real activity.

Adelle was indolent about social life as about much else. She did not like to take pains over anything and found entertaining a bore. She was a poor diner-out, and when the coming of her child gave her an excuse she was quite content to leave the social aspect of their life to Archie, who was generally thought to be much more agreeable than his wife. After they finally decided to buy the Bellevue place, Adelle occupied herself with ambitious schemes for the improvement of the property. She decided that the old house was uncomfortable and badly placed, too near the road, and selected a site upon the steep hillside, which commanded a large view of the valley and the great Bay across the verdurous growth of the town. Then she engaged a young architect, who was a member of the Bellevue Country Club and had "done" several houses in the neighborhood, and at once she was involved in a bewildering maze of plans for house and grounds. This kept her busy during her convalescence and gratified the rudimentary creative instinct in her, which had led her before to making jewelry. In planning a large country estate there was also a pleasant sense of rivalry with her old friend Irene, who was forced to content herself for the present with her father's out-of-date mansion. It took much money, of course, and the young architect spared his clients no possible expense, but Adelle felt that the springs of Clark's Field were inexhaustible.

It was, perhaps, the happiest period of Adelle's existence. Her marriage had begun to prove uncomfortable in Europe and threatened badly at Arivista, because there was not enough of anything between her and her husband to support idleness alone. It was much better at Bellevue, for here Archie was taken care of, not always in a safe way, but, as far as Adelle knew, satisfactorily. The rich, sensuous country, with its peculiar profusion of exotic vegetation and the luxury of perpetual good weather, made Adelle, pale offspring of an outworn Puritanism, bloom, especially after the birth of her child. It was as if all the desires of the old Clarks to escape the hardships of their bleak lives found at last their fulfillment in her. She expanded under the influence of warmth and color; for climate is a larger moral factor than is usually recognized. In California the struggle for life is a meaningless figure of speech, and Adelle did not like struggling. She loved to putter about in the overgrown garden and to slumber in the sun beside her little boy, refusing to descend to the delights of the club and Bellevue hospitality even after she had no excuse. When Irene took her to task for her dawdling by herself she gurgled contentedly,—

"What's the good of doing those things? Archie likes it—he sees the crowd at the club—that's enough for him."

"You've got to take your position," Irene remonstrated with a new pose. She herself aspired to lead on the score of her family's antiquity in Bellevue.

"What's that?" Adelle asked blankly.

It was difficult as Irene found to explain just what position Adelle Davis should take in human society, just what it meant to be a "leader." But she talked much about "the world going by one," and "duties of our position," and "keeping in touch," with a note of mature tolerance and responsibility in her voice. To all of which Adelle opposed merely a lazy stare. In her gray eyes she seemed to mirror the fussy little social life of this ideal country town, with its spread of motors about the station on the arrival of the afternoon train from the city, its properly garbed men and women strenuously amusing themselves at the country club, its numerous "places," all very much alike, with their gardens and greenhouses and tennis-courts, and ten masters' and five servants' rooms, and all the rest of it.

If Adelle could find no very cogent reason why she should make herself toilsomely a pillar of this society, shall we blame her? If she found for the present enough of content in the soft sunshine, the fragrant flowers, her baby, and her own home, with the intermittent companionship of the one man she had chosen to spend her life with, shall we consider her highly culpable, deficient in the moral or social sense? All the rest was much ado about nothing to Adelle, and, perhaps, as far as Bellevue went,—and a good deal like it in life elsewhere,—Adelle was not far wrong in her instinct....

"Here's Archie now," she remarked, observing her lord coming up the drive in his car.

"Hello, Archie!" Irene called in greeting. Her tone was quite friendly and intimate. Archie certainly had been "accepted" in this quarter. "Going to the Carharts?"

Archie, of course, was going to the Carharts to dine and play cards.

"Coming, Dell?" he asked his wife casually.

Adelle shook her head.

"I've been telling Dell she ought not to be so lazy," Irene commented. "She never goes off the place if she can help it!"

"Adelle don't like people," Archie observed gloomily.

"Yes I do, well enough," his wife protested.

"It's a queer way you have of showing it, then."

"Why should I like 'em, anyway, if I don't want to?" she retorted with some heat, childishly eager to put herself in the right.

"That's just it," Irene commented. "I tell her some day she will want people, and she will find it isn't easy to have them then.... Besides, it's her duty to take her part—everybody must."

Adelle made a bored gesture and filched a cigarette from Archie's case.

"Go on, you two, and have a good time," she said amiably.

And presently Archie departed with Irene, driving her back to Bellevue in his own car. As Adelle watched them depart from the veranda, very companionably, in close conversation, she smiled, perhaps because she knew that they were still talking about her and her social delinquency, perhaps because it amused her to think how thoroughly Irene had revised her opinion of the "red-headed bounder." In the still twilight her quiet mind speculated upon many things—the friendship between Archie and Irene, the obsession most people seemed to have to get together in one way or another, Irene's creed of "taking your place in the world,"—possibly even the purpose and meaning of life in general, although Adelle would scarcely recognize her meditations under those terms.... In the end she went up softly to her baby's room and spent a long time in examining minutely the child's features. Now that she had discovered all the delights of maternity she wondered at herself for having been so indifferent to this great power latent in her of creating life, and determined to have other children as soon as possible. As a matter of course she thought of Archie as their father, but it was only in that way that she thought of him at all, if she did happen to think of him. A husband was the necessary means of fulfilling her new desire to have her own young.



XXXIII

That summer while the new house was going up they went back to Europe for a few months, as it was too hot on the ranch and they had nothing better to do. They also meant to buy furniture, rugs, pictures, and other material for the new home which they expected would be their permanent abiding-place....

It would be a waste of time to chronicle in minute detail this period of Adelle's marriage. As the reader must suspect by this time, nothing of spiritual significance was to come to Adelle through Archie nor to Archie through Adelle. They did continue for a number of years to be man and wife, although they frequently had bitter quarrels and felt rather than clearly recognized that their union had been a mistake, which neither one seemed able to rectify nor make the best of. It was not so much principle that prolonged their tie, nor design on Archie's part to keep possession of the wealth his wife had brought him, as the fact of the child—and Adelle's hope, which was never realized, of having other children.

One of their more serious quarrels was occasioned by Adelle's discovery at this time of Archie's unfortunate speculations. She had already yielded to his constant demands for money for the ranch and broken her arrangement with the Washington Trust Company, converting part of their excellent investments into cash, which she removed to San Francisco, where it could be got at more easily. Archie had had charge of this uninvested portion of the estate; it gave him something to do and to talk about with men. Until her illness, to be sure, Adelle had kept run of what was being done with her money, and opposed any considerable further changes in the investments of the estate, which were of the sort that a good trust company would make, and which had very greatly appreciated in value during these last years of national prosperity. But during her illness and afterwards when she was absorbed in the child, Archie had taken a freer hand and had changed some of the investments unknown to his wife. He had put the money into local enterprises, of which the men he met told him, but about which he could know very little. There were new water-power companies up in the mountains, and there was especially the Seaboard Railroad and Development Company—a daring scheme for opening up a tract of land along the northern coast of California. Into this last venture Archie had put much more of Adelle's money than he liked to remember. It was a pet project of the men he knew best in the Bellevue Club—the polo-playing set. The Honorable George Pointer was very active in Seaboard, representing an English syndicate that was supposed to be backing the enterprise with ample funds, and for this reason the Pointers had prolonged their California sojourn beyond the usual term. Seaboard, it was said, would prove eventually to be much more important than a short line of new railroad developing a desolate stretch of the Pacific: it was to be used as a club upon one of the older railroads. The best families of the State were heavily interested in it, the younger generation of bloods expecting by means of it to rival the railroading exploits of their fathers, whose fortunes, as everybody knows, were acquired in the golden seventies and eighties in much the same way. (And when the explosion in Seaboard came off, it left deep scars all through California society.)

All this Archie tried to make Adelle understand, when unexpectedly she gained a knowledge of his operations in Seaboard. She happened to open some letters from his brokers that came to Archie during his absence—letters that clamored for more ready money with which to pay for options that Archie had taken upon the common stock of the new company. Adelle was disturbed when she discovered that more than a million of her money had already gone into Seaboard. The couple had some sharp words about the matter, in which Adelle put the thing rather too bluntly to Archie,—

"What do you know about railroads? You aren't a business man—you never earned a dollar in business in your life!"

Adelle was probably remembering how she had given Archie the only order he had ever received for his painting. Archie naturally resented her allusion to his penniless and dependent state. He knew, he asserted, quite as much as other men, whom he instanced, all of whom managed their wives' money affairs without being scolded for what they did.

But why, Adelle urged more softly, did he have to speculate—try to make more money than they already had? And Archie's somewhat incoherent reply was much the same as Irene Pointer's reasons for going into the society of one's fellows. To try to make more money when one already had the use of a great deal was an honorable and sensible ambition—every one would tell her so. All moneyed men who were worth their salt were always alive to opportunities of enlarging their possessions. Did she want her husband to sit around with folded hands and do nothing in the world? Archie waxed righteous and right-minded, which is the easiest way to eloquence.

Adelle was silent, though not convinced by his reasoning any more than she had been by Irene's about "taking her part." Both seemed to make life needlessly dangerous and complicated, under the disguise of duty. But she could not endure sullenness and bad temper in Archie. Having taken the sort of husband she had, she must make the best of life with him, even if he hazarded her fortune in doubtful enterprises. She remembered with comfort that there was a great deal of money, and ultimately would be even more when Clark's Field was finally liquidated. Archie could hardly go so wrong in investments as to make away with all of it. So she agreed to his selling another block of General Electric or Bell Telephone and taking up his options, and having thus made up their difference, they drifted on their way.

They motored across the continent to the remote fastness where the Countess Zornec was housed upon her husband's estate and spent some weeks with the couple. It was easy, even for Adelle's unobservant eyes, to detect signs of trouble in this new marriage. Sadie had a temper. All the girls at the Hall had known that. Indeed, she had the characteristics of her mother, who report said had been an Irish girl in one of the U. P. construction camps when old Paul found her—that was long before his fortune came, when he was a simple contractor for the railroad. Sadie had an unfortunate mouth, with coarse teeth, and when she was crossed, this long mouth wrinkled into a snarl. The Count apparently had already found out how to cross her. Indeed, he did not disguise his contempt for his bride's origins, and sometimes decorum was badly strained at the dinner-table. Sadie was little and lithe and was something of the gamine—her "tricks," as the girls called her daring maneuvers, had always pleased men. But the Count did not like "tricks." He wished more dignity in the wife of a Zornec and did not hesitate to tell Sadie so. Nor did he care to have her gaminerie attract other men. In short, as Sadie confided to Adelle in a burst shortly after her arrival, the Count was a "regular brute." It seemed that Europeans made very good lovers, but dangerous husbands. Adelle was to be congratulated for having married an American, "who at least knew how to treat a woman," as if she were more than his horse or his servant. Adelle might once have been pleased by this admission of envy of her Archie; but now she had her own troubles. However, she did not confess them to any one. She said good-naturedly that it was hard being married to most any man, until you got used to it. Sadie shook her small head and showed her large teeth.

"I'll show him," she said, "that he can't wipe his feet on me! An American woman won't stand what he's used to."

Adelle suspected dire things, physical violence even, and was silent.

Sadie continued,—"Some day he'll go too far, and then—" She closed her lips over the teeth in a hard fashion.

Adelle wondered what she would do with the Count in such an event. She could hardly divorce him, for the Pauls were Catholic as well as the Zornecs, of course. It was very inconvenient being a Catholic, she reflected, if you were to be married. And it seemed less easy to drop a husband in Europe than it was in America. There would be trouble about the children and all that.

Archie did not find the Count so bad, although he growled sometimes at his host's thinly veiled contempt for all Americans. Archie felt superior to the foreign nobleman who had made a rich American marriage. At least he had taken an heiress from his own people, and there was distinction in that. But the Count and Archie hunted and rode together, also drank deeply of the Hungarian wines and excellent French champagne that the castle contained. He was of the opinion that Sadie Paul had got "what she deserved."

"She needed a man to throw her around a bit—she was always too fresh," he told Adelle.

Archie believed in the strong hand with women. Adelle wondered whether Archie would ever attempt to use it upon her and what she would do under such circumstances. She was sure that she would resent it dreadfully. That would seem too much for any woman to bear—to marry a poor man and support him quite handsomely in idleness and then be abused by him. But fortunately it had not got to that point in their marriage—nothing worse than sullenness and silence or angry words had happened thus far.

The Davises terminated their visit sooner than had been expected. The little boy's ill health was made the excuse, but the fact was that the tempestuous atmosphere of the Zornec household was far from pleasant to easy-going people. They engaged the couple for a return visit the next spring in California and motored off to Paris. The Zornecs had been a good object lesson to them, and for the rest of their trip they remained good friends, being almost lover-like in their respect for each other. They seemed to feel the dangers ahead and restrained their moods. Finally, gathering together their plunder they sailed home, and this time did not make any attempt to evade the custom-house ordeal. They paid nobly for the privilege of being American citizens and did not demur. Adelle insisted upon that, remembering their former experience. Archie was in such haste to get back to California where "Seaboard was acting queer" that he would have paid double for the privilege of entering his own country. They sped swiftly across the continent to their new home.



XXXIV

The house was far from finished by the end of September when they arrived. Their idea of what it should be had developed so fast under the stimulus of the young architect that they could not recognize the original conception in the imposing structure that awaited them. It was meant to be an adaptation of a Spanish villa, in two wings, with a long elevation upon the ravine connecting the two. There was also to be a complicated set of terraces and forecourt, formal gardens, pool, and orangery, which required an immense amount of masonry work that had scarce been begun. Nevertheless they attempted to install themselves in spite of the fact that the workmen were cluttered all over the place, and moved into the wing that was most nearly completed, husband and wife occupying a ground floor suite that was meant for bachelor guests, the child and its nurse being housed temporarily upstairs in the main house. Adelle did not like this separation from the child, but there seemed nothing else to do for the present.

That autumn and winter they lived at close quarters with an army of workmen, who, having three masters,—Adelle, Archie, and the architect,—took advantage of the resulting confusion to move as slowly as possible. Adelle was not impatient as Archie had been with the ranch. She liked directing the work, and discovered that she had her own ideas, which necessitated extensive changes. She spent almost all her time on the place, while Archie was often away for days at a time in the city, attending to business or amusing himself. Adelle scarcely noticed his absences. With her little boy and the house she had her hands quite full, and it was easier to do things when Archie was not there to interfere.

Theirs was a rare location, even in this lovely land, as all their neighbors said. Behind the house the land rose rapidly to a steep ridge of hill that divided the valley from the coast valleys, and thus protected them with its crown of tall eucalyptus trees from the raw sea winds. Their hillside had been thickly planted to cedars and eucalyptus, and the house looked out from its niche in the hill upon the fertile valley in which Bellevue lies, dotted with rich country estates and fruit orchards. Farther east shimmered the waters of the Bay, and on clear days the blue tops of the Santa Clara mountains melted into the clouds beyond the Bay. Immediately beneath the house was the canon, through which in the rainy season a stream of water gushed melodiously. The steep sides of this canon were covered with a growth of aromatic plants and shrubs, the pale blues of the wild lilac touching it here and there. Like a bit of real California, "Highcourt," as they had called the place, was a perpetual bower of bloom and fragrance and sunshine, with a broad panorama of valley, sea, and mountain to gaze upon. Adelle loved to wander about her new possession, exploring its every corner, and when she was tired she could come back to the sunny forecourt and supervise the workmen, making petty decisions, summoning the foreman and the architect for consultation. She thus planned so many alterations which entailed delays that Archie grumbled that they would never get to rights and be able to have people to dinner. Adelle did not seem to care. She had not profited by Irene's advice, and made no effort to create a social atmosphere. Irene apparently gave her up as a hopeless case, and rarely came up the long driveway to Highcourt. The Pointers were still anchored in California, thanks to Seaboard and the darkening financial horizon, and Irene was improving her time by "living hard," which was her philosophy. Adelle knew that she and Archie saw much of each other, were very good friends, indeed, but the intimacy did not disturb her. She no longer had that passionate jealousy of Archie's every movement which had rendered the first years of their marriage so irksome to Archie. It is doubtful if she would have resented his intimacy with any woman, but his "affair" with Irene Pointer merely amused her. Archie was no longer her most precious possession....

The winter after their return to California a new specter appeared—the last that Adelle expected to encounter in her life. Archie hinted that it would be well to go slow with their "improvements" at Highcourt. The times were getting bad, he said, and the market looked as if they would get worse rather than better. Every one was talking of a dark future, unsettled conditions industrially in the country, and "tightening money," whatever that might mean. Adelle could not see why it should affect her solid fortune based upon Clark's Field. To be sure, men talked business more than usually, the ill treatment that capital was receiving, the "social unrest," and such matters, which did not interest her. She thought that Archie had caught the trick of complaining about business and cursing social conditions in America from the men at his clubs, most of whom were obliged to earn their living by business. If the worst came, if America became impossible, as Nelson Carhart was always predicting, for "decent people to endure," they could go abroad until things straightened out again.

Then in midwinter came the Seaboard smash. As a matter of fact, that crazy enterprise had been tottering upon the brink of failure from its inception, and Archie was merely one of the stool pigeons on whom the shrewd promoters had unloaded their "underwriting" in approved style. He came back from San Francisco one night very glum and announced peremptorily that they must cut down their expenses and "quit all this fool building." He wanted to sell the ranch, but it could not be sold in these depressed times when rich men were hoarding their pennies like paupers. And there began at Highcourt a regime of retrenchment, bitterly fought by Adelle—the rich man's poverty where there is no actual want, but a series of petty curtailments and borrowings and sometimes a real shortness of cash, almost as squalid as the commoner sort of poverty. Adelle could not understand the reason for this sudden change, and refused absolutely to stop all work upon Highcourt and go abroad again for the sake of economy. Why should she be made uncomfortable, just because Archie had been foolish about investments and felt hard up? So they had some words, and Archie went oftener than ever to San Francisco, frequently staying in the city for days at a time, which was bad for Adelle's fortune, had she but realized it. But, as has been shown, she had come now to the time when she felt relieved if Archie was not at home, glum and sulky, or nagging and fighting her will. With the place and her boy she had enough to fill her mind, and easily forgot all money troubles when Archie was not there to remind her of them. Somehow they raised the money for the workmen, and the building went on, more slowly.



XXXV

The workmen at Highcourt were of the nondescript labor army that America has recruited. For the rougher outside work there were a number of Italians, whom Adelle liked to entertain with her tourist Italian. There were also a few Greeks and Slavs who had got into this kind of work from other occupations. Inside the house the carpenters, painters, and plumbers were Swedes, Finns, Germans, one Englishman—no one who might justly be described as a native American. It was a typical instance of the way in which all the hard, rough labor of the country was being done, from building railroads to getting out the timber from the forests or making shoes and blankets in the factories. Hard physical labor was no longer performed to any extent by native Americans. Contractors everywhere recruited their polyglot companies in the great cities and shipped them out into the country where there was a demand. The men employed at Highcourt were thus obtained in San Francisco by the head contractor and merely boarded in the town of Bellevue. They lived "across the tracks" in the labor settlement, or in lath and tar-paper shacks about the hills, camping in their eternal campaign of day labor wherever the job happened to take them. Few were married, and all were given more or less to drink and riotous living when pay-day came; and of course they were constantly changing jobs. Adelle often heard the architect and the head contractor deplore the conditions of the labor market and the poor quality of work to be got out of the men at ruinous wages. She had also heard her neighbors, Carter Pound and Nelson Carhart, speak feelingly about the "foreign riff-raff" they had to employ on their estates. No workman had a conscience these days, they said. The women, too, talked of the rowdy character of the town "across the tracks," and the unsafety of the roads for women. Adelle did not think much about the matter, accepting it as a necessity, like gnats or drought or flood.

The Italians at least stuck to their jobs and were good-natured. Adelle always said "bon giorno" when she ran across them toiling up the slippery paths with their loads of stone or cement. She liked the way in which they showed their teeth and touched their hats politely to "la signora." They had a feeling for her as the mistress of the house, a latent sense of feudal loyalty to their employer that had quite disappeared among the other workmen. Apart from the Italians, the faces of the men upon the job were not familiar to her and were constantly changing, a strange one appearing almost every day. So Adelle felt less at home with them and rarely spoke to them unless she had an order to give that she could not easily transmit through the foreman.

One morning in early March—it was while the Seaboard trouble was acute—Adelle made her customary rounds of the place to see what was being done. She descended to the canon and stopped for some time where the stone masons were laying up the wall that was to support the terraces. It was a continuation of the massive wall that rose sheer from the bottom of the little canon to the front of the house, nearly a hundred feet in all perpendicularly from the bottom course to the first floor of the house. (It was the decision to thrust the house out over the canon that had necessitated the building of this massive wall and had delayed matters for months.) Adelle had heard Archie grumble about the useless expense caused by this great wall, but she liked it. Its sheer height and strength gave her a pleasant sensation of accomplishment and endurance. She liked to stare up at it as she liked to see great trees or massive mountains or tall buildings. It was a symbol of something humanly important which supplied a secret craving in her soul.

So this morning she stood silently watching the masons at their slow work. One of the men she recognized as having been steadily on the job ever since her arrival at Highcourt. He was a youngish, slender man with sandy hair and blue eyes, and had the unmistakable air of being a native-born American. His sinewy hands were roughened by his work, and his face was almost a brick red, either from constant exposure to the sun or from drinking, probably both. He seemed morose, as if he were consciously ignoring the presence of his "boss," and worked steadily on, once even failing to answer Adelle when she spoke, apparently unconscious of her presence behind him. Adelle liked especially to watch the masons at work. Their clever management of the great stones they had to handle, the precise yet easy way in which they lined and chipped and trigged and mortared, fitting all the detail of their rough mosaic, gave her a pleasant sense of accomplishment such as she had felt in her own efforts with metal and stone. It stirred an instinct for manual labor which was not far down in her character, and actually made her own shapely hands twitch to be at the fascinating work. And the masons' work grew so surely, course upon course, and when done seemed so solid, so eternal!... This morning she lingered longer than usual watching the young mason wield his hammer and trowel. Archie had ruffled her badly with his talk about money losses, and now she felt soothed, freed from stupid perplexities. The mason's large hands, she noted, were supple and dexterous—he made no useless movements. Occasionally he turned his head to spit tobacco or drew off to look at his wall, but these were the only interruptions in his rhythmic motions. He paid no attention whatever to the woman behind him.

Adelle was prettily dressed in a costume of white linen with a cloud of chiffon tied about her small hat and a parasol that she had purchased this summer in Paris, which consisted of an enormous gold lace butterfly. She was fuller in figure than before her child had come and in perfect health, though still pale. Fresh and well cared for, she was if not beautiful very attractive and dainty—all that money could make of her human person. Adelle was not given to prolonged reflection of any sort, but probably she could not help comparing her own dainty, cool, exquisitely clean person with this sweaty, sun-burned, coarse laborer in his black cotton shirt, frayed khaki trousers, and shoes that the lime had burned all color from. She must have felt a complacent sense of physical superiority to the man who was working for her, and perhaps congratulated herself that her lot in the universe had come out such a comfortable one.

The mason rolled up a large stone and prepared to set it home in the bottom course. Adelle observed that he was about to crush one of the Japanese shrubs that she had been at such pains to have planted along the bank of the canon.

"Look out—don't hurt that bush!" she ordered peremptorily, as she was in the habit of speaking to servants.

The mason tranquilly deposited the rock full upon the shrub and proceeded to slap mortar around it and tap it home with his mallet.

"Didn't you hear me?" Adelle demanded, stepping forward and pointing at the offending rock with her heavily jeweled finger. "Take it out! I don't want the shrubs killed."

The mason looked up for the first time. There was a glint in his clear blue eyes as he said distinctly, without any trace of foreign accent,—

"It's got to go there!"

A smile relaxed his red face, a scornful smile at the impertinence of this dainty specimen of woman-kind who thought that the foundation course of his rock wall could be disturbed for such a trivial matter as a bush.

"No, it hasn't," Adelle rejoined in her imperious tone. "Fix it some other way."

But the mason continued to pat his rock, looking around for the next one to lay upon it.

"Do what I say!" Adelle ordered, almost angrily, irritated by the man's obstinacy.

Then the mason rose, and with his trowel tapping the rock said slowly and emphatically,—

"I'm laying this wall—and I don't take no orders from you!"

Whereupon, after another shot from his hard blue eyes, he turned back to the wall.

At first Adelle was speechless; then she asked in a less peremptory tone,—

"Don't you know who I am?"

"Yes," the mason called back over his shoulder. "You're the boss up there." He indicated the unfinished house with a wave of his trowel, and went on with his work. He seemed indifferent to the fact that he was dealing with the mistress of Highcourt, and Adelle helplessly retreated.

"I will have you discharged!" she said as she walked away.

The mason did not reply, and his face exhibited no emotion over this dire threat.

After considerable search Adelle found the contractor and made her complaint against the mason.

"I warned him not to hurt the shrubs and he kept right on. Please discharge him at once."

The contractor, who had not been long away from the trowel and mortar himself, frowned.

"He's a good worker, ma'am," he protested. "It ain't always you can get a man like him out on a country job. Happens there is a building strike in the city, and he needed the work, so he came. And he's been steady, which is more than most masons."

"He's impudent," Adelle asserted with an air of finality.

"Very well, ma'am," the contractor said reluctantly. "I'll fire him to-night."

And Adelle thereupon went back to the house, gratified that she had enforced discipline, not hearing the contractor's profanity about meddlesome women. Later on the same day after the workmen had left,—they knocked off from their eight hours while the sun was still high in the heavens,—Adelle was wandering over the place, idly looking for a suitable location for a tennis-court. The doctor had told her to take some active exercise like tennis to prevent becoming unduly stout. And Archie had picked out a site below the new house on fairly level ground, but Adelle wanted to have the court cut out of the steep hillside above the pool. Having found what she considered to be the right spot, which would necessitate much expensive excavation and building of retaining walls, she followed a little worn path through the eucalyptus grove over the brow of the hill, curious to discover where it led. After a time she emerged on the other side of the hill, and getting through the barbed wire fence that marked the boundary of her own estate, she followed the path along the farther side of the slope through a clearing in the woods to an open field. From this side there was a wild prospect westwards to the low haze which she knew indicated the presence of the Pacific. The country on this slope of the hills seemed wild and uninhabited. Adelle did not remember ever to have been in the place and wondered if it was accessible by motor. At the farther end of the field there was one of the tar-paper shacks that the workmen put up for themselves, and the path evidently led to this hut. Usually these shacks were huddled together in bunches nearer the town, within easy reach of shop and saloon, but this one stood all alone on the edge of the clearing. A man was bending over a tin basin before the door, apparently washing out some clothes. As Adelle approached, he looked up from his washing and Adelle recognized the impertinent stone mason. He looked at her coolly, as if this time she were trespassing on his domain, and as she came leisurely down the path, trying to ignore his presence, he calmly threw out the dirty water from his pan on the path and went into his shack, pulling the door to after him with a bang. Adelle suspected the smile of contempt upon his face as he recognized her. She did not like the movement he had made in throwing the dirty water from his washpan directly in her path, although she was some distance away. Probably by this time he had learned his fate and took this means of testifying his resentment. The color rose in her pale face. She was not a proud woman, had no large amount of that self-importance which is the almost inevitable result of possessing wealth. But one of the penalties of property is that it cultivates whatever egotism and sensitiveness to its prerogative its owner is capable of. That one of the common laborers employed upon her estate should thus openly flout her made Adelle angry.

She thought first to turn back,—her walk was really aimless,—but she felt that the man would interpret such a retreat as due to his impertinence, would think that she was afraid of him. So she kept on past the shack into another open field. This was but the beginning of a wild treeless descent towards the ocean. The little tar-paper shack was the only sign of habitation in sight. There was an immense panorama of tumbled hill and valley bounded westward by the curving coast-line where the Pacific surges broke into faint lines of white spume, and where, she might reflect sadly, the ill-fated Seaboard Railroad should now be running trains to open up all this unoccupied land to civilization. However, wild and unsettled as it was, it offered an attractive view, and Adelle at once coveted it. They must buy up this tract over the hill—they should have looked into it when they had arranged to take Highcourt. Thus musing, she wandered on into the country until the sun dipping into the ocean warned her to return for dinner.

As she came back along the crest of the hill, she thought again of the discharged stone mason and for her did a large amount of reflection. Why was he living like this in a lonely shack far away from everybody? Why had he chosen to isolate himself from his fellow-workmen, who herded together near the town where they could slip down to the saloons after their work? He must be by nature a sullen, unsociable fellow. And what sort of life did he live in there, doing his own washing and probably also his own cooking? A kind of curiosity about the truculent stone mason and his way of life thus occupied Adelle's unspeculative mind. He was a good-looking young fellow, lean and well muscled. If he were dissipated, as she had been told all the laborers were, his excesses had not yet shown in his person. What would he do now that he had lost his job at Highcourt?

There he was sitting on the doorstep of his shack, smoking his pipe, his bare arms akimbo, staring out across the sunset void towards the sea. He seemed also to be meditating with himself upon something of interest. Upon Adelle's approach this time, he did not take himself off, but continued to smoke indifferently, totally ignoring her presence. As she came in front of him, she stopped involuntarily and found herself speaking to the mason.

"Good-evening," was all she said.

The man mumbled some reply, as if against his will. And then again the unexpected happened to Adelle,—at least the unforeseen. She asked him a question. It was a simple question, but it was entirely out of Adelle's character to make even the small advance implied by asking a question, especially to a servant who had been discharged on her orders.

"Do you live up here alone?"

"Have been living here," the man replied grudgingly, "till to-day. Don't expect to much longer," he added meaningly.

Adelle knew that he was referring to what had occurred earlier in the day between them, and throwing the blame for his dislodgment upon her.

"What are you going to do?" she asked after a pause.

He looked at her with mild astonishment for her question in his blue eyes, then said,—

"Donno exactly—get drunk, maybe," and he glanced at her truculently.

Adelle did not know why she went on talking to the man, but her curiosity was thoroughly aroused and the questions popped unexpectedly into her mind.

"Why did you kill that shrub when I asked you not to put the stone upon it?" she demanded next.

The man looked at her for a moment with an expression of mingled surprise, dislike, and amusement.

"Asked me! You ordered me."

"Why did you do it?" Adelle repeated, ignoring this subtle distinction.

"Guess I felt like it," he replied evasively. "I don't take no orders except from my boss," he grumbled. "Don't like no interference."

"But it's my place—you were working for me!" Adelle rejoined convincingly.

"And," the mason demanded bluntly, "who in hell are you, anyway?"

Adelle had not heard such direct language from a man for a good many years, although Archie sometimes hinted the same thing in slightly more polished language. At first she was staggered and thought she had made a mistake in giving this man another opportunity to insult her. But Adelle, thanks to her origin, was not easily insulted. She stayed on—to hear more.

"You've got a big pile of money and that place and lots of servants and motors and all the rest," the mason went on to explain. "But that's no reason you should go bossing around my job 'bout what you don't know nothing. I get my orders from the boss, my boss—see? And I know how to lay a wall as good as any man—and your damned bushes shouldn't been there."

"You needn't be insulting," Adelle gasped with an attempt at dignity.

"Insultin'!" the man blazed. "Who's insultin'? It's you who are insultin' to God's earth—rich folks like you who've got more money that ain't yours by rights than you know what to do with. You think because you pay the bill you own the earth and every man on it. But you don't—not everybody! And the quicker you and your kind learn that the easier it will be for all of us."

This was what Major Pound meant by "anarchy among the working-classes." She had often heard him and Nelson Carhart deplore this,—using interchangeably the two dread terms, "socialism" and "anarchy." Both the gentlemen were of the opinion that "before we see an end to this spirit in the working-classes, we shall have bloodshed." But it was the first time Adelle had met the thing face to face, and it gave her a faint thrill. She tried to think of some of Major Pound's excellent arguments directed against the "anarchy" of the laboring-classes.

"You're paid good wages, very high wages," she said after a time, remembering that that was one of the grievances gentlemen most often complained of—that laborers were paid altogether too much, thanks to the unions, so that no profit was left for the men who supplied capital, and also that they did less work and poorer work than they had once done when they got only half the wages now paid.

"You think five dollars a day is big money, don't you? It wouldn't go far to fit you out!" He nodded at Adelle's rich dress. "It would hardly get you a dinner—wouldn't pay for the booze your husband will drink to-night."

Adelle winced at this shot, because it was only too evident to the servants and the men about the place that Archie drank too much at times. How could she complain of the workingman's drinking and wasting his money, which was the next argument she remembered from her neighbors' repertory, when her own husband drank more than was good for him and many of the men they knew socially did the same?

"It's no thanks to you rich people we get big pay either," the man continued. "You'd like mighty well to cut it down to nothing if you could get your work done."

That was perfectly true. All their crowd at Bellevue were perpetually complaining of the high wages they had to pay. They gave it as an excuse for all sorts of petty meanness. Adelle felt that Major Pound would have the suitable reply to the mason's argument, but she could not remember it.

"Five dollars a day for a day's hard work ain't so much either, when you think how many days in the year there's nothing doing for one reason or another. Last year I only had four months' work all told on account of the strikes."

"Yes," Adelle joined in eagerly, feeling that this ground was familiar and safe, "but the strikes were your own fault, weren't they? You didn't have to strike?"

For reply the mason looked wearily at her, and rising from his seat on the doorstep with a gesture remarked,—

"Well, I can't stay here gassin' all night, lady. I must hike along soon to get the Frisco train.... What do you care about it anyway, whether the strikes are our fault or not? You've got plenty of the stuff, and we little folks ain't got nothin' but what we earn, and that ought to satisfy you. We must work for you sometimes, and you don't have to do a damn thing for anybody no times. You've got the luck, and we ain't! See? And that's about all there is to it."

Adelle felt that so far as her own case went, the man had come remarkably near the truth. The mason turned, with an afterthought.

"And I'm not whinin' 'bout it neither, remember that! I can always earn enough to keep me goin' and get whiskey when I want it."

He said it with a touch of pride, his workman's boast that he was beholden to no one for meat or drink. It was more than Archie could say now or at any time in his life.

"Are you married?" Adelle asked, feeling that if there was a woman in the situation another line of argument might be used.

"Married! Hell, no! What do I want of being married?"

Married men, Adelle had heard, were likely to be steadier workers than the unmarried. Also more what her class called "moral."

"I should think you would want to have your own home and children in it," she ventured.

The mason gave her an ironical look full of meaning.

"That would sure be nice, if I could always give 'em plenty to eat and education, the same as you can. But what can a man do with a wife when he's here to-day and off to the other end of the land to-morrow lookin' for a job? A steady job in one place where it's fit for a woman to live ain't to be found every day.... A workingman who marries, unless he's got money in the bank and a sure payin' job that'll last, is a fool or worse. What good is it to bring children into the world to be like him or maybe worse?"

Adelle had no reply to this blunt logic. Marriage, he seemed to think, was one of the privileges of the rich class, which she was sure ought not to be so.

"The trouble with the workingman, ma'am, is that he has done that too long,—got families that had to live the best they could, any old way, and take any old job they could get. That's what's made it easy goin' for you! But the workingman is learnin' a thing or two. Men like me won't get married, nor have children to slave for the rich."

"What do the girls do?" Adelle asked, thinking of her own fate if she had been left in the Church Street rooming-house.

The mason shrugged his shoulders and came out with another brutality.

"Some of 'em go into the houses for your men to use—there's always that for 'em," he added, with a disagreeable laugh. "No, ma'am, I tell you until things are made more right in this world, it's better for a poor man to get along the best he can without draggin' a woman after him and a lot of helpless children."

"I didn't know it was as bad as that," Adelle remarked helplessly.

"I guess, ma'am, there are a good many things about life you don't know."

"That's so," Adelle admitted honestly.

"But I know!" the mason exclaimed with rising excitement. "I've seen it over and over, everywhere. I've seen it in my own family," he said in a burst of bitter confidence. "There were eight of us and we were only middling poor until father died. The old man was a carpenter, up north in Sacramento County. He had a small place outside of town and we raised some stuff. But he got sick and died, when he weren't forty, and mother had the whole eight of us on her hands. I was just twelve and my oldest brother fifteen,—he was the only one could earn a dollar. We got on somehow, those that lived. Two of my sisters are married to farmers and there's another—well, she's the other thing." He stopped to look belligerently at Adelle as if she had somehow to do with it. "She was married to a workingman, good enough, I guess, but he got out of work and heard of something up north and never came back.... We boys scattered around where we could get work. Two of us is married and got families. Guess they wish often enough they hadn't, too!"

Adelle was absorbed by the mason's personal statement. She had forgotten by this time her first self-consciousness in talking to the discharged workman, and he, too, seemed less truculent, as if he enjoyed letting off steam and stating his point of view to his ex-employer.

"How old are you?" Adelle asked.

"Twenty-eight," the mason replied.

That was only a few years older than Adelle herself, but she recognized that the man's experience of living had been far more than hers, also deeper, so that he was justified in having opinions on the serious things of life. Wealth, she might think, was not the only road to "a full life" so much talked of in her circle.

"Have you always been a stone mason?" she wanted to know.

"Pretty much ever since I could lift a stone. An old feller took me from mother to work for my keep when I was fourteen. He used to do some mason work, and he knew how to lay stone—none better! He learned his trade back East where he come from. He was one of the real forty-niners, and knew my grandfather's folks—they all came to California the same time.... I've been all over this country, up and down the Coast, to Alasky and over in Nevada, at Carson City; drilling for oil, too, south. Oh, I've seen things," he mused complacently, puffing at his pipe and scratching his bare arms that were as smooth and brown as fine bronze. "And I tell you there ain't much in it for the laboring-man, no matter what wages he gets, unless he's got extry luck, which most of 'em ain't. No wonder he goes after booze when he has the chance. What's there in it for him anyhow?"

Adelle, who had not been educated to philanthropy and social service, did not attempt to answer this difficult question.

"Not that I booze often," the mason explained with pride. "I reckon not to make a hog of myself, but when you've been off on a job for months, working all day long six days in the week in the heat and dust, you accumulate a thirst and a devilment in you that needs letting out."

He grinned at Adelle as if he felt that she might be sympathetic with his simple point of view and added,—

"I guess that's what made me sassy to you this morning!"

It was his sole apology. They both laughed, accepting it as such, and Adelle, to shift the topic, remarked,—

"You've got a nice place up here for your house."

The mason wrinkled his lips against the suggestion of sentiment.

"The shack's all right—kind of fur to tote supplies over the hill. But I can't stand those dagoes and their dirty ways. They have too many boarders where they live."

His American ancestry betrayed itself thus in his selection of an exclusive position for his bunk. The conversation seemed to have come to a natural conclusion, but Adelle did not start. At last she said what she had had in mind for some time,—

"You'd better stay here—come back to work Monday."

"I don't know as I want to," the mason replied, with a touch of his former truculency. "I can get all the work I want most anywheres."

"I'll speak to Mr. Ferguson about it," Adelle said. "Good-night!"

She could not do more, she thought, as she hurried along the path, although she was unreasonably anxious not to have the young stone mason leave, more anxious than she had been that morning to have him discharged for his insolence to her. When she was about to enter the wood, she turned and looked back at the shack. She hoped that he was not going to start on a spree. The mason, who had been sitting on the step where she had left him, rose as if he had come to a sudden resolution and marched into the shack. Adelle felt sure that he had made up his mind to go to San Francisco and get his "booze." She divined the craving in him for excitement, some relief from his toilsome hours under the hot sun. Possibly he had fought against this desire all the summer, restrained from breaking loose by a prudence which she had defeated by arbitrarily discharging him from his job and could not so easily restore with her change of whim. She did not feel any personal blame for his action, however, nor did she blame him for yielding to this gross temptation, as her more conservative neighbors might, although they sometimes yielded themselves both to drink and the stock market to stimulate their nerves. She merely hoped that he would think better of his purpose. For the man interested her, and before she dressed for dinner she sent a servant to the village with a note for the contractor, asking him to reengage the discharged stone mason and be sure that he came back to work on the Monday.



XXXVI

Nevertheless, when Adelle looked for him the next Monday morning his was not among the faces of the men at work on the lofty retaining wall. She asked the contractor about him, but the boss merely shrugged his shoulders and said that somebody had seen the man getting on the late Saturday night train for the city.

"It's too bad," he added, to punish Adelle for interfering in his business. "He was a mighty good worker, and you don't get that kind often these days. I'd rather have him than any four of these dagoes."

He waved a disdainful arm at the squad of sons of sunny Italy who were toiling along the wall.

Adelle did not forget the young stone mason, but she could do nothing more for him even had she known just what to do. Then one morning when she made her usual rounds, she was happily surprised to find him back on the job, working as was his wont a little to one side of his foreign mates with his own helper. His face looked as red as ever, and his eyes were also suspiciously red, but this was the only evidence of his spree that she could see. As Adelle advanced to the place where he was working, the mason glanced up and replied gruffly to her greeting,—

"Morning, ma'am!"

She knew that he was not ashamed of himself, merely embarrassed. And she thought that if he had not felt kindly to her, he would not have come back to Highcourt to work after his spree—or was it, perhaps, his pleasant shack on the hill that lured him to his old job? Adelle did not tell him that she was glad to see him back, but passed on without stopping. Presently, however, when his helper had disappeared for a load of mortar she came back to the place and watched him. He worked as steadily and swiftly as ever, his lithe bronze arm lifting the stones accurately to their places, his wrist giving a practiced flip to each trowel full of mortar, which landed it on the right spot. Adelle wanted to talk to him again, to ask him questions, but did not know how to begin. Apparently he meant to let her make all the advances.

"That's fascinating work," she said at length.

He flipped a fresh dab of mortar to place and replied,—

"You might think so lookin' on—but no work is fascinatin' when you've had too much of it. I've laid enough stone to last me a lifetime."

"What else had you rather do?"

"Oh," he said, pausing a moment to wipe the sweat from his face with the back of his shirt-sleeve, "'Most anything at times! I tried mining once, but it's worse and uncertain. And lumbering—no pay. When I was a kid I wanted to be a doctor—that's before I left school. A nice sort of doctor I'd make, wouldn't I?"

He laughed at himself, but Adelle felt that in spite of his mirthless laugh his mind was chafing. He was dissatisfied with himself and the work he was doing and hungered for some larger demand upon his powers than laying so many feet of rock wall per day. She herself had so little of this sort of hunger in her own soul that it made the young mason all the more interesting to her.

"You might save up your money and try—" she began.

"To be a doctor?" he laughed back. "I saved up once—got most five hundred dollars and a feller came along and persuaded me to put it into some land. Well, I got the land still.... No, ma'am, there ain't much chance to change for the workingman when he's once fixed in his creek bed. He must just roll along with the rest the best he can. And I'm better off than most because I've got a paying trade. Lots of boys like me and my brothers don't learn ever to do anything, and just slave on all their lives at any job comes handy until they are all wore out. Lots and lots. Their folks can't keep 'em in school and they never know enough to more'n sign their names. All they are good for is rough work, same as the dago helper here. He thinks two dollars a day big money. I guess it is to him."

He spat disdainfully with all an American's contempt for the inferior.

"I expect where he come from it was a fortune, two dollars a day, eh?" He appealed to Adelle to appreciate the joke. "Think of that now! And he's got a woman and kids, and I bet has saved money, too. But he's only a dago," he explained tolerantly.

"Say," he resumed after a pause. "It costs more 'n two dollars to go to the opery in San Francisco."

"Did you go to the opera?" Adelle asked, recalling that Archie had said something about the current engagement of the New York Opera company. They had a box or something for the season—they always did. "What did they give?"

"Oh, it was some German piece. It took place in the woods with a lot of folks in armor, but the music was fine, and there was one place where they had a castle upon a big hill, like that where my shack is, way off towards the clouds, and a river down in front going by with women in it swimming," and he described with relish the last act of the "Rheingold-dammerung," which Adelle recognized because she had seen it many times in Europe and been horribly bored by it. The story of the opera seemed to interest the young mason especially. He retold it minutely for Adelle's benefit, offering amusing explanations of its mythological mysteries.

"But how did you happen to go to the opera?" Adelle asked.

"Well," he said in vague diffidence, "I was feeling pretty good by that time, and I seen the poster. I had the price—why shouldn't I go?" he demanded brusquely; and with another sardonic laugh the real motive came out,—"I wanted to see what you folks who go to the opery see—how you enjoy yourselves. Well, the opery ain't so bad—it ain't one bit bad," and he attempted to hum the Rheingold music. "I believe I'll go to the opery again when I'm on the loose and don't know any better way to blow my money. I like music," he added inconsequentially. "Mother used to sing sometimes."

This was as far as they got conversationally that day. Something interrupted Adelle in the midst of the musical discussion and she did not have a chance to return to the wall. But she had almost daily opportunity for talk with the young mason in the succeeding weeks, for after his return from his spree, he worked steadily on his job every day. He was one of the very few American-born workmen employed at Highcourt, and after their misunderstanding and subsequent agreement, Adelle felt better acquainted with him than with the others. He taught her to handle the trowel and to lay stone. After a few attempts, she managed quite well and found a curious pleasure in the manual labor of fitting stone to stone and properly bedding the whole in cement. She learned to select the right pieces with a rapid glance and to chip an obtrusive corner or face a rock with a few taps of the heavy hammer. It gave her a pleasure akin to her experiments in jewelry, and it must be said the results were better. She used to show her visitors proudly the bit of wall she had laid up herself under the young mason's direction and assert that, instead of bookbinding or jewelry or other ladylike occupations, she meant to set up stone walls about Highcourt for her recreation. The Bellevue people considered her whim a harmless bit of eccentricity in the young mistress of Highcourt, and she was the object of many a good-humored joke about her new method of "beating the unions." Little did any of these pleasure-loving rich folk suspect where Adelle's instinct for manual labor came from, how natural it was for her to work at coarse tasks with her large, shapely hands.

* * * * *

She needed all the distraction she could get, for these were not happy days for Adelle within her big new house. The inexplicable stringency of money grew worse, and there were constant quarrels between her and Archie over her "extravagance" when he was at home. Adelle could not understand why she should be obliged to curb her prodigal hand in making "improvements" at Highcourt. Did the trust officers not tell her that hers was a "large fortune," not far from five millions, enough surely to permit a woman freedom for every whim? If there was trouble about money, it must be Archie's fault: she wished she had never consented to take her property out of the safe keeping of the careful trust company. Her logic in these discussions, if irrefutable, was bitter, and Archie resented it, all the more because he knew that he had made a fool of himself with his wife's ample fortune, and allowed stronger men to bite him. He had not sufficient character to confess the fact and refrain altogether from further speculation. He tried instead to make good what had been lost in Seaboard and was always nagging Adelle to dispose of certain stocks and bonds that still remained from the investments of the prudent trust company. But Adelle was obstinate: she would not sell anything more. So Archie's large debit at his brokers went on rolling up, and there continued to be "words" at Highcourt whenever he was there, which was less often then he might have been.

Proverbially, money is the cause of the bitterest disputes in families. Abstractly it might seem remarkable that this should be so, but the peculiar nature of property of all sorts is that it becomes the inmost shrine of its possessor's being, and when the shrine is robbed or desecrated, the injured personality resents the outrage with bitterness. Many a man or woman will submit with Christian fortitude to insults upon character or positive unjust burdens, but will flame into rebellion at the least touch upon the purse. In the case of Archie and Adelle it was all the more remarkable because neither had been born to wealth so that property could become a part of the nature: they were both "the spoiled children of fortune" as the story-books say, having had their wealth thrust upon them unexpectedly, and so might take its loss lightly. Not at all! Adelle felt as much wronged as if she had been the last of an ancient line of dukes and duchesses or had accumulated the riches of Clark's Field by a lifetime of toil and self-denial. Was it not hers? Had the law not made it inalienably a part of her? Such is human nature in a capitalistic society.

Bellevue began to gossip about the couple at Highcourt, and divided as always into two camps with shades of opinion within each camp. The women were generally for Archie, even if he had been foolish with his wife's money and was conducting his "affair" with Irene Pointer rather recklessly. If his wife were less stupid and selfish about not going about with him in society, she could have "held him." The men liked Archie well enough, but knew that he was "no good."



XXXVII

It was some time after the young mason's return to his job before Adelle even learned his name. She had no curiosity about his name, indicating how little of the personal or sentimental there was in the interest she felt in him. He was just the "mason," and she always addressed him as "mason" until one day she heard the foreman call him—"Clark"; and then, when the foreman had passed on, she said with mild curiosity,—

"Is your name Clark?"

"Yes," the man replied with a touch of pride in the pure English name,—"Clark without the e. I'm Tom Clark. Father's name was Stanley Clark, same as grandfather's. Everybody about Sacramento used to know old Stan Clark!"

"My name was Clark, too, before I was married," Adelle remarked.

"Did you spell it with an e?" Tom Clark asked.

"No, the same as yours, without the e," she replied.

"We must be related somewheres," the mason laughed, with a sense of irony.

"Where did your family come from?"

"Somewhere East—Missouri, I think. But that was long ago—before the gold times. Grandfather Stan came out in forty-nine and settled on the Sacramento River, and that was where father was raised."

Adelle felt a slight increase in her interest in the mason from their having the same name, and she remarked idly,—

"So your family lived once in Missouri?"

"The Clarks came from Missouri—that's all I know. Mother's folks were Scotch-Irish, and that's where I get my red head, I guess!"

Like most Americans of his class he knew nothing more of his origin than the preceding two generations. The family was lost in the vague limbo of "back East somewheres." Yet he was proud that the Clarks had come from the East and were among the first Americans to enter the golden land of opportunity. And he apologized for the failure of his ancestors to attach to themselves a larger share of prosperity.

"If we could have hung on to grandfather's old ranch, we'd not one of us been working for other folks to-day. He had a hundred and sixty acres of as pretty a bit of land as there is in Sacramento Valley—part of it is now in the city limits, too. But father was sort of slack in some ways,—didn't realize what a big future California had,—so he sold off most of the ranch for almost nothing, and mother had to part with the rest."

He flipped a trowelful of mortar and whistled as if to express thus his sense of fate.

"Too bad," Adelle replied. "They say you ought never to sell any land. It's all likely to be more valuable some day."

"Sure!" the mason rejoined sourly. "That's why most of us work for a few of you!"

"What do you mean?" Adelle asked, puzzled by the economic theory implied in this remark.

But before Clark could explain, Adelle was summoned to the house. As she went up the slippery path she thought about what the mason had said, about his being a Clark, too. She felt herself on much closer terms of knowledge and sympathy with this workman of her own name than with the fashionable women who had come for luncheon to Highcourt.

Hitherto Adelle had met in the journey of life mainly coarse-minded persons—I do not mean by this, nasty or vulgar people, but simply men and women who were content to live on the surfaces and let others do for them what thinking they needed—people upon whom the experience of living could make little fine impression. In the rooming-house, with her aunt and uncle and the transient roomers, naturally there had been no refinement of any sort. Nor, in spite of its luxury and its boast of educating the daughters of "our best families," had the expensive boarding-school to which the trust company in their blindness condemned their ward added much to Adelle's spiritual opportunities. Pussy Comstock, for all her sophistication, was no better, and as for the "two Pols" and Archie Davis, the reader can judge what fineness of mind or soul was to be found in them. Even the officers of the Washington Trust Company, who were of indubitable respectability and prominence in their own community,—everything that bankers should be,—had neither mental nor spiritual elevation, and coarsely pigeonholed their ideas about life as they had done with Adelle. The thinking of the best spirits in Bellevue has been exemplified in the utterance upon labor that Adelle had taken from Major Pound and Nelson Carhart who are doubtless still enunciating the same trite remarks at the dinner-table and in their clubs with a profound conviction of thinking seriously upon important topics. All these diverse human elements, which thus far had been cast up in Adelle's path, were good people enough—some of them earnest and serious about living, but all without exception coarse-minded. All the wealth of Clark's Field had not yet given its owner one simple, clear-thinking human companion.

The young stone mason, Tom Clark, outwardly crude and coarse and with a knowledge of life limited by his personal estate, was nevertheless the first person Adelle had met who tried to do his own thinking about life. It was not very important thinking, perhaps, but it had for Adelle the attraction of freshness and sincerity. The mason stimulated the mistress of Highcourt intellectually and spiritually, which would have made the good ladies at luncheon with her that day laugh or do worse. Adelle felt that he could help her to understand many things that she was beginning to think about, that were stirring in her dumb soul and troubling her. And she knew that she could talk to him about them, as she could not talk to George Pointer nor Major Pound nor even Archie. In her simple way, when she discovered what she wanted, she went directly after it until she was satisfied. She meant to talk more with the young stone mason of the widespread race of Clark.

The next time Adelle made the ascent of the hill behind Highcourt she took her little boy with her, and after wandering about the eucalyptus wood with him in search of flowers sent him back to the house with his nurse and kept on over the hill to the shack where Clark lived. She examined the tar-paper structure more carefully, noticing that the mason had set out some vegetables beside the door and that a little vine was climbing up the paper facade of the temporary home. She knew that the mason was still at his work below, and so she ventured to peek into the shack. Everything within the one small room was clean and orderly. There was a rough bunk in one corner, which was made into a neat bed, and beneath this were arranged in pairs the man's extra shoes, one pair bleached by lime and another newer pair of modern cut for dress use. In one corner was a small camper's stove with a piece of drain-pipe for chimney; a board table, one or two boxes, and some automobile oil cans made up the furniture of the room. There was also a little lime-spotted canvas trunk that probably contained the mason's better clothes and his extra tools. On the table was a lamp and a few soiled magazines, with which Clark probably whiled away free hours when not disposed to descend to the town for active amusement.

For a woman in Adelle's position such a workingman's home has the interest of the unfamiliar. It is always incomprehensible to a woman nurtured to a high standard of comfort to realize a totally different and presumably lower standard of living. This may be seen when travelers peer with exclamations of surprise and pity or disgust into the stuffy homes of European peasants or the dark mud-floor rooms of Asiatics. The prejudices of race as well as of social class seem to come to the surface in this concrete experience of how another kind of human being sleeps, eats, and amuses himself. With Adelle this sensation of strangeness was not very keen, because her own acquaintance with the habits of the rich was less than ten full years old. Clark's one-room tar-paper shack did not seem so squalid to her as it might to Irene Pointer, though Adelle had never before had the curiosity to enter a humble dwelling. She looked about her, indeed, with a certain appreciation of its coziness and adequacy. All that a single man really needed for decency and modest comfort was to be found here, at least under the conditions of the sunny California clime, which Providence seems to have adapted for poverty. All the wealth of Clark's Field could have added little valuable luxury to this tar-paper shack on the ridge of high hills with a prospect of mountain, valley, and ocean before the front door. Of course, with the assistance of Clark's Field, its proprietor would have been sitting in the great room of the Pacific Coast Club, as Archie was at this moment, imbibing foreign wine and deploring the "agitation among the people," which was making a very bad stock market.