She barely touched the breakfast prepared by the methodical Sugihara, who had already buried the silver, and cut the pictures from their frames, rolled, and tied them securely.
"It is only a question of a few hours," he said. "The dynamiting so far has done more harm than good. They take a house at a time instead of a block, and as it falls apart it ignites another on the opposite side of the street. The army doesn't like to interfere, and the mayor has too long been obsequious to capital. Mr. Clatt is still there with the launch behind him. I took him down his breakfast some time ago. He told me to tell you that he'd 'got his job cut out for him now, as the Dagos were beginning to leave Telegraph Hill.'"
Isabel had one or two moments of panic as she watched those waves of flame beat up the hill, and pictured them raging up the eastern slopes as well; but the panic passed, for she knew that there were two exits still open. The heavens were black. A disk like a sealing-wax wafer indicated the position of the sun. The heat was terrific. The dynamiting was incessant, but it did not drown the roar and the eager furious crackle of the flames, the reverberating crash of falling walls. And the flames were the redder for the blackness above. Cinders were falling all over the heights, and the smoke burned the eyes.
"I shall feel like Casabianca presently, and rather ridiculous," she reflected, "but I shall stay till the last possible moment." She went within and packed a pillow-case with Lady Victoria's laces and other portable objects of value and adornment, then gathered up similar belongings of her own, tied the case firmly about the neck, stood it where it could be snatched in flight, and returned to the porch.
The boarding-house district, several blocks of large wooden houses, seemed literally to be swept from its foundations by those rushing pillars of fire. The whole quarter was wiped out in an hour, and then the fire turned its attention to the higher slopes.
It played with them for a while, darting west and returning for a morsel at which it leaped with the agility of a living monster, went west again; then, its appetite whetted and its greed insatiable, it started straight for Nob Hill. The soldiers drove the faithful servants out of the houses at the point of the bayonet. Then—in a moment—the familiar curtains were blowing out of the windows—shrivelled to a crisp and pursued by the red rage behind.
Sugihara did not go through the form of cooking luncheon. He knew that his mistress would not eat, and he had as little appetite himself. He folded his arms on the top of the fence and waited for the signal to retreat.
Isabel went into the house repeatedly and dipped her burning face into a basin of water, but returned quickly to her post. The fire was running from the east along California Street hill; she saw the men who had been cutting pictures from their frames in the Institute of Art flee to the west, then watched the Gothic structure flare up and burn like an old hay-stack: that monument to a millionaire whose name would be already forgotten had it not been tacked to the gift. The fire reached California Street, on the edge of the plateau, from the south, coming up the west side of Taylor Street. Other great houses of the rich were so many roaring furnaces—several were curiously neglected and isolated by the fire, that seemed to have gone mad with its own lust. The eastern slopes were a mass of smouldering ruins, not black, but the most exquisite tints of violet, rose, chrome, gray, sepia, yellow. They looked, with their arches and columns, towers and broken walls, like the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill on a colossal scale. About and through them floated clouds of fine white ashes, ghostly restless dust of unthinkable treasure.
Suddenly, hardly crediting her eyes, Isabel saw an automobile labor up the steep acclivity, through that swirling furnace, and dart across California Street and in the direction of Russian Hill. She knew that Gwynne was in it, and a moment later Hofer discharged him at the foot of the steps, then ran the car out Jackson Street at the top of its speed.
Gwynne walked up the steps and along the plank walk. Isabel recognized him by his carriage, for he was as black as a coal-heaver and most of his hair was burned off.
"I should like to wash first," he said, as he came up the house flight. "The water will go with the rest."
"Of course. Do you want anything to eat."
"No, I had some sandwiches a while ago."
He went up to his room and Isabel awaited him in the farthest corner of the living-room, where it may have been a trifle less hot and less noisy than elsewhere.
He came down in a moment. "That was a close shave," he said. "We didn't know what we were in for, and it was either go on and hope for better luck at the top, or dive down into a very good imitation of a live volcano."
He was recognizable, although his khaki clothes were black and burned, and one side of his head made him look as if he had just been discharged from a military hospital.
"I shall rest for a few moments and then go back," he said, throwing himself into a chair opposite Isabel. "I never forgot you, but I made sure Stone had delivered my message and that you were on the ranch. I saw my mother and Miss Montgomery an hour ago. You must get out of this at once."
"Tell me what you have been doing," said Isabel evasively.
"I have been alive," he said, intensely. "Never in all my days have I found life so wonderful. Battle is nothing to it. For the best part of two days I have been dodging the open jaws of death every minute; and the sensation of pitting one's puny human strength and the accumulated wit of several thousand years of varied civilization against an element in its might has inspired me with the only consummate approval of life that I have ever known—although I might have known it the day before yesterday if you had looked as you do now." He sat steadily regarding her for a few moments without speaking, but he was sensible of no immediate wish to touch her. That, too, belonged to a possibly greater but far different to-morrow. He was keyed very high. He did not feel himself so much a human being as a component part of one force disputing every inch of the progress of a mightier.
"Great God, what men!" he burst out. "I have been with some member of the Committee of Fifty, on and off, these two days, to say nothing of last night—Mr. Phelan invited me to serve on it yesterday morning. They are superb, not daunted for a moment, talking already of the new city, of the opportunity this conflagration has given them to make it over in every way. Architects were engaged before three o'clock yesterday afternoon. And the young business men that have been cleaned out! They talk only of the enormous possibilities of the future. I remember reading once of much the same spirit exhibited by Londoners after the Great Fire. It is the most wonderful thing in the world that for a few days at least you are permitted to cherish an unleavened respect for human nature. Every mean cowardly and selfish trait that chains man to earth is moribund to-day, in the normal at least; and the rats have run to other holes. The higher qualities, those that have inspired the world since it began, are in full possession. And, by Jove, it is going to be the pioneer life over again! Do you remember that I regretted once I could not be in at the foundation and growth of a great city, also that the drawback to such an opportunity was that one was never conscious of his part? Well, now we are back to the conditions of the Fifties, and we know it. We shall work for tremendous stakes, and in no doubt of the result."
"The enthusiastic moment has come," said Isabel.
"Rather. Here is my part cut out for me. Here I stay and become a chief factor in making this city greater even than before. That is enough for any man. And there will be plenty of fight. Politics will crawl back to new strongholds, as soon as men become egos again, but I shall fight them here, not in the country."
He stood up, and Isabel asked, hastily: "Have you had no sleep?"
"Hofer and I broke into an empty house in the Western Addition towards morning and slept on the floor for three hours. I have known harder beds. I must go. I felt that I must look at you and order you to leave at once."
"I don't want to leave the city."
"You must go. The fire will have taken this house before midnight. You will be ordered out before that. They may save the city west of Van Ness Avenue, for the mayor at last has consented that several blocks shall be blown up at once. I am carrying dynamite. If I saw Russian Hill on fire and was not sure that you were out of harm's way, it would unnerve me, and I need all the nerve I've got."
"I can go down to Fort Mason."
"I want to know that you are out of the city. I think my mother is better off where she is. She is working with a will down there and absolutely refused to leave. I did not insist—no fire could cross those sand-lots, and I fancy she needs occupation. But you must go."
"I should be as safe."
"Perhaps. But I should be beset by fears that you had ventured too far. I can be quite impersonal, keen, steady of hand and brain, if you are out of the city."
"Very well, I will go."
"The day the fire is over I will go for you and we will marry and live in any shanty we can find—begin life together like any Forty-niners. You can help others as much as you choose then. There will be work for all—but now there is not, cannot be until organization begins. And I must be free to take care of you. Will you go at once? The launch is still there."
"Yes, I will go at once."
He left her, and a few moments later she was walking down the other side of the hill, the voluminous pillow-case slung over her shoulder. Beside her trudged Sugihara, the ancestors under one arm, and his library under the other. The street along the water-front was a moving mass of refugees from Telegraph Hill, and Mr. Clatt was standing in the launch, on the alert. He gave a shout of delight as he saw Isabel, and she waved her hand. As she reached the wharf and forced her way through the Italians and Mexicans, who regarded her with no great favor, she noticed a small party of Chinese evidently in distress. The woman, magnificently arrayed, and hardly larger than a child, was huddled against the sea-wall, dumbly protesting that she could go no farther. Her face was twisted and her eyes were staring with pain and fright. A pretty child in three shirts of different colors, all silken and embroidered, was wailing in the common language of his years, and the young husband argued with his wife in vain: she made no response, but her passive resistance was as effective as if her feet had been six. She would not let her maid touch her, and her husband dared not relinquish his hold on his strong-box while surrounded by his formidable neighbors of Telegraph Hill.
Isabel, glad to be able to do something for some one, told him to hand the box to Mr. Clatt, then carry his wife on board the launch. The nurse followed with the child, while Isabel and Sugihara, having cast their own burdens on board, and drawn their pistols, brought up in the rear.
As the launch entered the current that would carry it east of Angel Island, Isabel looked at her guests—the Chinese wife and her child lying on the cushions of the cabin, stolid once more; the big-footed maid and the husband, his strong-box between his knees, seated opposite; the Japanese, sitting cross-legged on the roof, his back to the land—no doubt to emphasize his contempt for the rabble; Mr. Clatt, shaking his fist at a group of vociferating Italians—and smiled grimly as she recalled the romantic boat party that escaped from Pompeii. She did not feel in the least romantic, but she felt something greater and deeper.
She turned her head many times to look at the wonderful spectacle of the burning city, the red curtain in the background, along whose front rushed the pillars of fire driven by the rolling masses of smoke. Where the fires on Nob Hill had burned low the flames looked like red sprouting corn. Fairmont had caught at last. It stood, a great square pile of white stone against the red background, and from its top alone poured a steady square volume of curling white smoke. The windows, and there were many hundreds of them, looked like plates of brass. The last thing she saw, as the launch shot up the bay towards San Pablo, was a wave of fire roll down Telegraph Hill, and hundreds of black pigmies fleeing before it.
It was a beautiful evening of perfect peace when the launch entered Rosewater creek. The marsh was bathed in all the faint colors of the afterglow. The birds were singing. People were sitting under the trees in their parks or gardens. A fisherman was sailing up to Rosewater with his catch. But for the red light in the south and the faint sound as of a besieging army, there was nothing to recall that a civilization had been arrested and a great city was burning down to its bones.