He had crossed the ranges twice and returned, but the City of the Angels had lost its old witchery.
The rose-tinted dawns, and the amethystine dusks were beautiful as ever, but to banish the memories he had once dreamed over there, he galloped alone to the harbor called "The Hell of California," and lay all one day on the beach, and stared moodily at the waves whipping the yellow sands of San Pedro.
To the south there, far beyond the prosaic stretch of grazing-lands bordered by the sea, beyond all the tame levels where the water was green or yellow in the shallows, beyond all the jutting points, veiled in the miles of mists, he could follow in his mind each curve, until the one valley of beauty would gleam like a green jewel seen from the cliffs of San Juan.
And at the foot of those cliffs there were no flat stretches of color such as make weary the eye; the water there held all the shimmering, bewitching, iridescence of a peacock's feathers,—the gold and purple, the greens and the blues ever changing,—the strange touch of pink making it all glorious in certain glints of the sunlight; and at the edge of it all, the fringe of foam—a string of pearls shattered on the brown cliffs or sandy beach, and gathered up to be dashed again and again and again—the endless garniture of old Ocean's robe.
Never on any other shore had mere waves, running to the sand, the same witchery. Alvara had said that all men came back some day to San Juan. What witchery was it by which its mesa and its valley and its wonderful shore were forever set apart from other shores of California? Some mystery of life brooded there from sea to mountain, suggesting so much which was left for poor humanity to solve; it was only a whispered suggestion, dim and delightful, as the music of the waves heard from the Mission plaza, or as dreamy as the high film of fog, drifting high up and tempering the sun's rays until they fell softly as a benediction on the valley between blue sea and blue summit.
“Never on Any Other Shore”
His own life stretched before him like the brown levels and yellow flatness of San Pedro; and there to the south, miles across the ranges, was the heart of the dreamland he must not enter: another man had that claim under fence. He gave voice to some self-condemnation of a sort reserved for men who go loco over a woman who forgets, and after hours of brooding there alone by the shore, arrived at only one decision—the California of the south ranges was no longer his own. All the width of it was now narrowed to one little valley, where the poppies flamed over forgotten graves and adobe walls, and the doves circled above a ruined chancel.
He rode into town, where some kind friends mentioned that Don Rafael Arteaga and his bride were being fêted by the leading Spanish families of Los Angeles, and he was invited to a dinner in their honor a week hence.