Part 8

Mr. Payson grew more nervous at this questioning, but he replied, "They called her Madam Grant, I believe. How did you happen to bring up the subject after all these years, Cly?"

It was her turn to be embarrassed. "Well--I've recalled that scene occasionally, and wondered about it--it has always been a mystery I couldn't explain, and I never dared talk about it. Of course, it's only one of those vivid early pictures of childhood, but it has always seemed very romantic."

"It was a strange situation," Mr. Payson replied. "She was a very unfortunate woman and I was sorry for her. I never would have permitted you to go, if I had known, of course, but perhaps your mother knew best." He dropped his chin upon his hand. "Yes, I'm glad you went, now. What impression did she make on you?"

"I only remember thinking how beautiful she must have been."

"Yes," Mr. Payson's voice was almost inaudible. He pushed his chair back, rose and went into the library. Clytie followed him.

"Are you going out to-night, father?"

"Yes, I've got some business to attend to."

"In the evening?" she raised her brows.

"Oh, I'm only looking up something--for my book." He turned away to avoid her gaze.

"Oh!" She sat down and took up a book without questioning him further. Soon after, the front doorbell rang and Mr. Cayley was shown in by the Chinese servant.

Blanchard Cayley was well known about town, for he had a place in many different coteries. By his birth he inherited a position in a select Southern set that had long monopolized social standing and looked scornfully down upon the upstart railroad aristocracy and that _nouveau riche_ element which was prominent chiefly through the notoriety conferred by the newspapers. Blanchard Cayley's parts gained him the entree, besides, to less conventional circles, where his wit and affability made him a favorite. He belonged to two of the best clubs, but his inclinations led him to dine usually at French or Italian restaurants, where good-fellowship and ability distinguished the company. He wrote a little and knew the best newspaper men and all the minor poets in town. He drew a little, and was familiar with all the artists. He accounted himself a musical critic and cultivated composers. He knew San Francisco like a rat, knew it as he knew the intricacies of French forms of verse, as well as he knew the architecture of music and the history of painting. He had long ceased his nocturnal meanderings "down the line" from the Hoffman Bar to Dunn's saloon, but he occasionally took a post-graduate course, of sorts, to see whether, for the nonce, the city was wide open or shut. He had discovered the Latin Quarter, now well established as a show-place for jaded pleasure-seekers, and had played _bocce_ with the Italians in the cellars of saloons, before the game was heard of by Americans. He had found the marionette theater in its first week, traced every one of Stevenson's haunts before the Tusitala had died in Samoa, knew the writings of "Phoenix" almost by heart, and had devoured half the Mercantile Library. Tar Flat and the Barbary Coast he knew as well as the Mission and North Beach, and as for Chinatown, he had ransacked it for queer jars, jade and hand-made jewelry, exhausting its possibilities long before San Franciscans had realized the presence, in that quarter, of anything but an ill-smelling purlieu of tourists' bazaars.

He had "discovered" women as well--women, for the most part, whose attractions few other persons seemed to appreciate. His last find was Clytie Payson--a much more valuable tribute to his taste than any heretofore. He had devoted himself assiduously to her, and it was his boast that he could remember the hat she wore when he first saw her, ten years before. His pursuit of her had been eccentric. Cayley was mathematical and his methods were built upon a system. During the first years of their acquaintance he alternated months of neglect with picturesque arrivals on nights so tempestuous and foul that his presence would be sure to be counted as a flattering tribute, and would outweigh, with his obvious devotion, the previous languor of his pursuit. This was a fair sample of the subtlety of his psychological amours, for Blanchard Cayley was not of the temperament to run across the room and kiss a girl with verve and ardor. He led, however, an intense mental life; there he was a creature of enthusiasms and contempts, capable of no intermediate emotion.

What else was true of his character it would be necessary to determine from the several ladies of his choice whom he kept carefully apart, recipients of his subdivided confidence. Blanchard Cayley did not introduce female contemporaries.

He wore a carefully trimmed, reddish, Vandyke beard, with a drooping mustache; his hair curled a bit effeminately. Large blue eyes, the well-developed nose of the hobbyist, hands of a sixteenth-century gentleman, aristocratic, well-kept, soft. To-night he was in half-dress--dinner jacket and gold studs, an inch wide stripe upon his trousers--this under a yellow mackintosh and cricket cap, in strict accordance with his own ideas of form.

Mr. Payson was in the library still busy with his manuscript when he entered. The two shook hands. Blanchard's manner had in it something of a survival of the old school. He was never awkward, yet never bombastic. Suave, rather, with a semi-humorous touch that relieved his courtesy of anything solemn. He smiled, showing his teeth, saying, with an appearance of great interest,

"Well, Mr. Payson, I see you're still at it. How's _The Open Door in the Orient_?"

"Oh, getting on," said Mr. Payson. "I want to read you my last chapter when I get a chance. I think you'll like it."

Cayley had been successful in appearing to listen, and at the same time pay his respects to Clytie, whose hand he did not let go without a personal pressure in addition to the visible greeting. He kept it an unpleasant half-second longer than had Granthope. She freed herself with a slight gesture of discomfort. "Perhaps I'd better go up-stairs and leave you men alone to talk it over," she suggested.

"Certainly not," said her father. "I'll wait until some other time, only I thought Blanchard would be interested."

"Indeed, I am," Cayley protested. "I'm very anxious to hear your opinion about gold, too. I have something to suggest, myself. Oh!" He delved into his breast pocket. "Here are some notes on the history of the trade dollar, Mr. Payson. You know I was speaking of it. I've been looking up the subject at the mint and at the library for you; I think it might give you some ideas."

Mr. Payson took the paper eagerly and pushed up his spectacles to examine it. "Thank you; thank you very much. I'll be glad to look it over. It's a pleasure to find any one nowadays who's so interested in what is going to be a very vital question. You'll find my cigars here, somewhere. Cly, you go and find the box, won't you?"

As Clytie disappeared in the direction of the dining-room, he added, "You must humor her, Blanchard, she's a bit skittish. Don't force her hand and I think you'll bring her around."

"Thanks for the tip, but I have my idea," was the reply. "It's only a question of time when I shall be able to produce the psychological condition I want."

Mr. Payson shook his head dubiously. "I don't know. That isn't the way we went about it when I was young. We didn't bother much with psychology then. We had emotions to attend to."

"Oh, love-making is just as much a science as anything else, and there is no reason why it shouldn't progress. There are modern methods, you know; it's only a form of hypnotism." He smiled blandly.

When he and Clytie were alone--a situation she seemed to delay as much as possible--Cayley sat down opposite her with an ingratiating, disarming smile. He was neither eager nor impressive. He was sure of himself. It did not, as he had said, seem to matter a great deal about her emotions; he scarcely considered her otherwise than as a mind whose defenses he was to overthrow in an intellectual contest. He began with elaborate circumlocution.

"Well, I've discovered something."

Her delicate eyebrows rose.

"It is a curious botanical fact that there are four thousand lamp-posts in the city of San Francisco."

"Why botanical?"

"That is just what I expected you to ask."

"Then I'll not ask it." She was already on the defense.

"But you did!"

"Well?" She appeared to resent his tone.

"Now, see here!" He laid his right forefinger to his left palm. "Suppose a Martian were visiting the earth. He wouldn't at first be able to distinguish the properties of things. So, seeing these four thousand lamp-posts, he might consider them as a part of the Terrene flora--queer trees."

It was like a game of chess, and it was evident that she could not foresee his next move. The detour was too complicated. She seemed, by her attitude, to be on her guard, but allowed him, with a nod of assent, to proceed.

"Now, suppose you have the Martian, or let us call it the uncorrelative point of view. Suppose you use brain-cells that have hitherto been quiescent or undeveloped."

"I don't exactly follow." Her attention wandered.

He probed it. "Suppose I should get up and kiss you."

She awoke suddenly.

"You see what I mean now?" he continued. "You exploded a new cell then. You gained a new point of view with regard to me. Don't be afraid. I'm not going to kiss you."

"Indeed, you're not!" Her alarm subsided; her resentment, rising to an equal level, was drawn off in a smile at the absurdity of the discussion.

He went on: "But you must acknowledge that I have, at least, produced a psychological condition. I'm going to use that new cell again." He waited for her answer.

"Dear me!" she exclaimed at last. "We're getting very far away from the lamp-posts. I'm quite in the dark."

He proceeded: "My character is lighted by four thousand lamp-posts also."

"Ah, I see! You want me to regard them as botanical facts. I, as a supposititious Martian, with this wonderful new cell, am to perceive in you something that is not true?"

"No, for in Mars, the lamp-posts, we will suppose, _are_ vegetables--not mechanical objects."

"A little more light from the lamp-posts, please."

"They are emotions, alive and growing. They have heat as well as light, in spite of their subtleties. I want you to perceive the fact that my methodical nature shows that I have a determined, potent stimulus--that I have energy--that I am in earnest."

She seemed to sniff the danger now and stood at gaze. He went on:

"I shall keep at the attempt until you do look at me in this way--till I've educated these dormant cells."

"If you are leading up to another proposal," Clytie said, "I must say I admire your devotion to method, but it is time thrown away."

He took this calmly enough. He took everything calmly; but he did not abate his persistence. "I'm not leading up to a proposal so much as I am to an acceptance."

Clytie shrugged her shoulders. "You'll be telling me you're in love with me next."

"Do you doubt it?"

"A half-dozen proposals have not convinced me."

"Seven," he corrected. "This is the eighth."

"How long do you intend to keep it up?"

"Until I produce in your mind a psychological condition which will convince you that I'm in earnest, that I am sincere, that I am the man for you. Then I shall produce an emotional reflex--it's sure to follow. It may come to-night and it may come next year. Sooner or later circumstances will bring about this crystallization. Some shock may help; it may be a simple growth. I am sure to win you in the long run. I'm bound to have you, and I will, if I have to make a hundred attempts. You can't dismiss me, for I'm an old friend and you need me. I have educated you, I have broadened your horizon. You see, I am playing with my cards on the table."

"But without trumps." Clytie stifled a yawn.

"Meaning, I suppose, that I have no heart? Clubs may do. I rely upon your atavism."

"I suppose you have as much heart as can be made out of brain."

"What if I say that I'm jealous? Will that prove that I have a heart?"

"Oh, you're too conceited ever to be jealous."

"But I am! I'll prove it. I happen to know that that palmist person, Granthope, was here this afternoon and you spent half an hour with him. How's that?"

"How do you know?" She awoke to a greater interest.

"You don't seem to realize that I make it my business to know all about you. This came by accident, though. I was on the Hyde Street car and I saw him get off and come in here. I waited at the end of the road till he went back. Now, what if I should tell your father that you have been entertaining a faking palmist here, on the sly?" He leaned back and folded his hands.

Clytie rose swiftly and walked to the door without a look at him.

"Father," she called, "Mr. Cayley has something to say to you."

"Never mind," Cayley protested. "That was merely an experiment."

Mr. Payson, in overcoat and silk hat, thrust a mildly expectant head in the room.

"It was only about the trade dollar business," said Cayley. "I'll tell you some other time."

Mr. Payson withdrew, scenting no mischief, and Clytie sat down without a word.

"Thought you'd call my bluff, did you?" said Cayley, unruffled. "I like spirit!"

"If you don't look out you'll succeed in boring me." Clytie's manner had shown an amused scorn rather than resentment. She was evidently not afraid of him.

"You're fighting too hard to be bored," he remarked coolly. He added, "Then you are interested in him, are you?"

"I am." Clytie looked him frankly in the face.

"Why?" he asked.

"I've heard a lot about him and he appeals to my imagination. I scarcely think I need to apologize for it. Have you any objection to my knowing him?"

"I'd rather you wouldn't get mixed up with him; since he's been taken up the women are simply crazy about him, as they always are about any charlatan. They're all running after him and calling on him and ringing him up at all hours. Why, Cly, they actually lie in wait for him at his place; trying to get a chance to talk to him alone. I don't exactly see you in that class, that's all. You can scarcely blame me."

"Oh, I haven't rung him up yet," said Clytie, "but there's no knowing what I may do, of course, with all my unexploded brain-cells."

"How did he happen to come here, then?"

"He came to see me, I suppose."

Cayley accepted the rebuff gracefully. "Well, in another month, when some one else comes along, people will drop him with a thud. He's a nine days' wonder now, but he's too spectacular to last. This is a great old town! We need another new fakir now that the old gentleman in the Miller house has stopped his Occult Brotherhood in the drawing-room and his antique furniture repository in the cellar. I haven't heard of anything so picturesque since that Orpheum chap caught the turnips on a fork in his teeth, that were tossed from the roof of the Palace Hotel. I suppose I'll have a good scandal about Granthope, pretty soon, to add to my collection."

Clytie accepted the diversion, evidently only too glad to change the subject. "What collection?" she asked.

"My San Francisco Improbabilities. I've got a note-book full of them--things no sane Easterner would believe possible, and no novelist dare to use in fiction."

"Oh, yes, I remember your telling me. What are they? One was that house made entirely of doors, wasn't it?"

"Yes, the 'house of one hundred and eighty doors' at the foot of Ninth Street. Then, there is the hulk of the _Orizaba_ over by the Union Iron Works, where 'Frank the Frenchman' lives like a hermit, eats swill and bathes in the sewage of the harbor. Then there's 'Munson's Mystery' on the North beach--nobody has ever found out who Munson is. And Dailey, the star eater of the Palace Hotel--he used to have four canvas-back ducks cooked, selected one and used only the juice from the others; he ordered soup at a dollar a plate; and he had a happy way of buying a case of champagne with each meal, drinking only the top glass from each bottle."

Clytie laughed now, for Cayley was in one of his most amusing and enthusiastic moods. "Do you remember that tramp who lived all summer in the Hensler vault in Calvary Cemetery?"

"Yes, but that isn't so impossible as Kruger's castle out in the sand-hills by Tenth Avenue. It's a perfect jumble of job-lot buildings from the Mid-winter Fair, like a nightmare palace. I went out there once and saw old Mother Kruger, so tortured with rheumatism that she had to crawl round on her hands and knees. She had only one tooth left. The old man is one of the last of the wood-engravers and calls himself the Emperor of the Nations. He has resurrected Hannibal and an army of two hundred thousand men; also he revived Pompeii for three days. He wanted to bring Mayor Sutro back to life for me, but I wouldn't stand for it."

Cayley swept on with his anecdotes. "Who would believe the story of 'Big Bertha,' who buncoed all the swellest Hebrews in town, and ended by playing Mazeppa in tights at the Bella Union Theater? Who has written the true story of Dennis Kearney, the hack-driver, who had his speeches written for him by reporters, and went East with a big head, unconsciously to plagiarize Wendell Phillips in Fanueil Hall? Or of 'Mammy' Pleasant, the old negress who had such mysterious influence over so many millionaires--who couldn't be bribed--who died at last, with all her secrets untold? There's Romance in purple letters!

"What do you think of a first folio Shakespeare, the rent-roll of Stratford parish, and a collection of Incunabula worth thirty thousand dollars, kept in the deserted library on Montgomery Street in a case, by Jove, without a lock! What's the matter with Little Pete, the Chinaman, jobbing all the race-tracks in California? Who'd believe that there are streets here, within a mile of Lotta's fountain, so steep that they pasture cows on the grass?"

"Then there's Emperor Norton, and the Vigilance Committee, and all the secrets of the Chinatown slave trade," Clytie contributed, with aroused interest.

"Oh, I'm not speaking of that sort of thing. That's been done, and the East and England think that Romance departed from here with the red-shirted miner. Everybody knows about the Bret Harte type of adventure. It's the things that are going on now or have happened within a few years--like finding that Chinese woman's skeleton upside down, built into the wall of the house on the corner of Powell and Sutter; like Bill Dockery, the food inspector, who terrorized the San Bruno road, like a new Claude Duval, holding up the milkmen with a revolver and a lactometer, and went here, there and everywhere, into restaurants and hotels all over the peninsula, dumping watered milk into the streets till San Francisco ran white with it."

"Then there's Carminetti's," Clytie recalled, now. "That's modern enough, and typical of San Francisco, isn't it? I mean not so much what's done there, as the way they do it. I've always wanted to go down there some Saturday night and see just what it's like."

"I wouldn't want you to be seen there, Cly, it wouldn't do." Cayley shook his head decidedly.

"Why wouldn't it do?"

"It's a little too lively a crowd. You'd be disgusted, if they happened to hit things up a bit, as they often do."

"I don't see why I shouldn't be privileged to see what is going on. It's a part of my education, isn't it? It's all innocent enough, from what you say; it's at worst nothing but vulgar. I think I am proof against that."

"People would get an altogether wrong opinion of you. They'd think you were fast."

"I fast?" Clytie smiled. "I think I can risk that. I shouldn't probably want to go more than once, it's true. You don't know me, that's all. You don't believe that I can go from one world of convention to another and accept the new rules of life when it's necessary. It's just for that reason that I _do_ wish to go--as, when I went to London, I wanted to see if I could accept all their slow, poky methods of business and transportation and everything and find out the reason of it all for myself, before I thought of criticizing it. I want to understand Carminetti's, if I can, and if you won't take me, I'll find some one who will."

"Granthope, perhaps?" Cayley suggested with irony.

"I have no doubt he'd understand my motives better than you do!"

"Well, it might be an interesting experiment. Miss Payson at Carminetti's--there's a San Francisco contrast for you!"

"You may add it to your list of Improbabilities. Study me, if you like, and put me in your list. You may find that I have a surprise or two left for you." She smiled to herself and threw back her head proudly.

"You do tempt me to try it," he said, coolly watching her. "You'd look as inconsistent there as those old French family portraits in that saloon out on the Beach--Lords of Les Baux, they were, I believe, administrators of the high justice, the middle and the low!

"And, oh!" he added, "that reminds me of another thing I found to-day while I was looking over a file of the _Chronicle_, digging up this trade dollar business. It was way back in 1877; a queer story, but I suppose it's true."

"What was it?" Clytie asked. The rays of the lamp shot her hair with gold sparks as she sat in a low chair, listening.

"Why, there was an old woman who was half crazy; she lived down south of Market Street somewhere in the most fearful squalor."

Clytie suddenly moved back into the shadow.

"Yes, yes,--what else?" She followed his words with absorbed attention.

"There was no furniture except a lot of boxes and a bookcase. And here's the remarkable thing: there was about two inches of rubbish and dirt matted down all over the floor, where she used to hide money and food and any old thing, wrapped in little packages. When she died, her stuff was auctioned off, and they found a trunk with a whole new wedding outfit in it. How's that?"

"What was her name?" Clytie asked breathlessly.

"I don't remember it. She was a sort of clairvoyant, I believe. There was a little boy lived with her, too. It seems he disappeared after she died. Ran away."

Clytie leaned forward again, her eyes wide open and staring. Her hands were tightly clasped together.

"A little boy?" she repeated.

"Why, that's what it said in the paper. Great story, isn't it?"

Clytie's breath came and went rapidly, as if she were trying to breathe in a storm, amidst the dashing of waves. The color went from her cheeks, her thin nostrils dilated. Then, retreating into the shade again, she managed to say:

"It certainly is romantic."

"No one would believe a thing like that could be true," he followed.

"No, I can scarcely believe it's possible, myself," she replied, controlling her agitation.

Blanchard Cayley ran on and on with his talk. Clytie gave him scant attention, answering in monosyllables.

*CHAPTER V*

*THE RISE AND FALL OF GAY P. SUMMER*