In that immortal “middle period” of San-Francisco, when the gay mining camp was building toward a stable adjustment of society, when the wild, the merry, the dissolute and the brave who built the city were settling down to found houses and cultivate respectability in face of a constantly resurgent past—in those days none who pretended to eminence in the city but knew the sisters Sturtevant. Members of that aristocracy which dwelt on Rincon Hill, their names and fames quite eclipsed those of their quiet, self-effacing parents. Although they never called it that, their establishment amounted to a salon. Also, they never called their circle Bohemian, yet it was tinged with an easy view on the conventionalities, a leaning toward art and the things of art, which meant Bohemia in the time when that word was of good repute. Spain, perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the blood, the impulse of men who packed 45 Virgil with their bean-bags on the Overland journey, conspired already to make San Francisco a city of artists. She had developed her two poets, singers whose notes had sounded round the world; the painters had followed. The stir of a new life in art, a life which was never quite to reach fulfilment, blew in the bay air.
Centre for those awakening young painters, those minor poets who carried in weaker hands the torches of the two giant pioneers, was the house of the Sturtevant sisters, the one a wit, the other a beauty. Heaven was not grudging with gifts to these two. Alice, the wit, had also a hidden kind of beauty which was not to be taken in on first sight, but which, perceived by the painters of that set, made some of them swear that she was the real beauty of the two. Matilda, the beauty, had if not wit a sprightly feminine fancy. Then, too, her gentleness of judgment, her sweetness of intention, and her illogic of loyalty, gave her point of view a humorous quality. Her circle, confident in her good-nature, was forever leading her on, by this device or that, to exhibit what John Stallard, the novelist, called her “comedy of charity.” O’Ryan, that great, 46 glowing failure whose name will outlive the fame of the successful in San Francisco, used to play ingenious jokes upon it. O’Ryan was possibly the only man of any time who could draw the sting of a practical joke.
They dwelt, twin-regnant over this world of theirs, in sisterly harmony. Stallard declared always that a final gift of fate and the gods preserved them to harmony: their tastes in men differed. They had choice enough, God wot—poets and novelists struggling on the verge of fame; attractive, irresponsible, magnetic journalists, destined never to arrive anywhere, but following a flowery path along which a woman might smile; sons of new-rich millionaires who followed and backed and corrupted the artists of that budding Paris which never blossomed; two painters, among many, who got both fame and wealth before they were done.
In his later years, one asked Tyson the English novelist, connoisseur of women if there ever was one, whom he esteemed the prettiest and whom the wittiest among the women he had known and studied.
“For wit, Lady Vera Loudon,” he said, “and after her, a quite remarkable woman I met 47 in San Francisco out on the West Coast of America—of all places.” Tradition has enlarged this reply to make Matilda Sturtevant his prettiest as Alice was his wittiest.
Matilda’s fresh beauty of the devil, her full yet delicate beauty of the twenties and early thirties, live in the galleries of Europe. The painters all had their try at her; she lived in creation which ran the line between miniatures and heroic canvases. Lars Wark, perhaps the least considered of all her painter friends, is the one that triumphed most of all. Who does not know his Launcelot and Enid? The Enid, of a beauty so intelligent, so wistful and so good—she is Matilda Sturtevant, hardly idealized.
These twin graces married within two years of each other. Of course, they chose strangely. Matilda, whose beauty might have graced the head of the table in any one of three gaudy mansions on Nob Hill, chose Edward C. Tiffany, attorney, politician in a small but honorable way, man about town—and much older than she. Alice, following quietly, accepted Billy Gray, journalist—a clever reporter with no possibilities beyond that; a gentleman, it is true, and a man of likeable disposition, but 48 on the whole the least desirable of all her followers.
Billy and Alice Gray lived out the three years which were all they ever had of matrimony, in a Latin quarter garret, transformed into a studio. The intellectual centre of San Francisco shifted to that garret; the gay, the witty and the brilliant still followed wherever Alice Gray might go. Billy, a type of the journalist in the time when journalism meant the careless life, left her a great deal alone after the honeymoon. On his side, there was no conscious neglect in this; on her side, there was no reproach. It was just their way of living. He adored her with a quiet, steady flame of affection which was too fine to degenerate into mere uxoriousness. Already, he was a little too fond of his liquor—a peccadillo which attracted little attention in that age of the careless city. This troubled Alice Gray less than it would have troubled her mother. In the periods when she pulled herself up, she worried to think how little she did care about it. In fact, his remorseful recovery from his debauches had become her occasion for pouring out upon him the mother in her. She reveled 49 guiltily in this singular sacrament of her singular love.
After three years Alice Gray gave birth to a daughter—and died within a fortnight afterward. In all truth, I may say that life, for Billy Gray, ended that day. To lose this tenth muse—I can think of nothing more complete in tragedy except the loss of her father of Marjorie Fleming. And he, like Marjorie Fleming’s father, spoke her name no more—until near the end. When after twenty years, his own time came, Stallard, LeBrun the poet and Lars Wark gathered to pay him their last respects. LeBrun came all the way from New Orleans, and Stallard delayed his journey to the South Seas. They had drifted away from him, such had become his ways and habits; they came back in honor of the woman who illuminated their youth. So long and so powerful was the influence of her who never wrote a line except in air and memory.
Billy Gray went on living for the sake of his daughter; but he lived like a man driven of the furies. He became one of those restless, wandering journalists whose virtue to their newspapers is their utter abandonment 50 of courage and enterprise, whose defect is their love of drink.