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.