He had brought them from New York when he had decided to live in

California, and hung them in his bachelor quarters. He had soon made up

his mind that he must remain in San Francisco for at least ten years if

he would maintain the business he had rescued from the disaster of 1906

at the level where he had, by the severest application of his life,

placed it by the end of 1908. Meanwhile he had grown to like San

Francisco better than he would have believed possible when he arrived in

the wrecked city, still smoking, and haunted with the subtle odors of

fires that had consumed more than products of the vegetable kingdom.

The vast ruin with its tottering arches and broken columns, its lonely

walls looking as if bitten by prehistoric monsters that must haunt this

ancient coast, the soft pastel colors the great fire had given as sole

compensation for all it had taken, the grotesque twisted masses of steel

and the aged gray hills that had looked down on so many fires, had

appealed powerfully to his imagination, and made him feel, when wandering

alone at night, as if his brain cells were haunted by old memories of

Antioch when Nature had annihilated in an instant what man had lavished

upon her for centuries. Nowhere, not even in what was left of ancient

Rome, had he ever received such an impression of the age of the world and

of the nothingness of man as among the ruins of this ridiculously modern

city of San Francisco. It fascinated him, but he told himself then that

he should leave it without a pang. He was a New Yorker of the seventh

generation of his house, and the rest of the United States of America was

merely incidental.

The business, a branch of the great New York firm founded in 1840 by an

ancestor grown weary of watching the broad acres of Ruyler Manor

automatically transmute themselves into the yearly rent-roll, and

reverting to the energy and merchant instincts of his Dutch ancestors,

had been conducted skillfully for the thirty years preceding the

disaster by Price's uncle, Dryden Ruyler. But the earthquake and fire in

which so many uninsured millions had vanished, had also wrecked men past

the rebounding age, and Dryden Ruyler was one of them. He might have

borne the destruction of the old business building down on Front Street,

or even the temporary stagnation of trade, but when the Pacific Union

Club disappeared in the raging furnace, and, like many of his old

cronies who had no home either in the country or out in the Western

Addition, he was driven over to Oakland for lodgings, this ghastly

climax of horrors--he escaped in a milk wagon after sleeping for two

nights without shelter on the bare hills behind San Francisco, while the

fire roared its defiance to the futile detonations of dynamite, and his

sciatica was as fiery as the atmosphere--had broken the old man's

spirit, and he had announced his determination to return to

Ruyler-on-Hudson and die as a gentleman should.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024