“You quitter!”
“All right; but I hate to look cabbage soup in the face,” grumbled Bertram. He resumed, then, his languid occupation which this parley had interrupted, and continued to review, from an angle of Moe’s cigar stand, the passing matinee parade.
The time was late afternoon of a fog-scented October day. Through the wet air, street lamps and electric signs had begun to twinkle. Under the cross-light of retreating day and incandescent globes, the parade of women, 72 all in bright-colored silks and gauds, moved solid, unbroken. Opera bags marked off those who had really attended the matinees; but only one in five wore this badge of sincerity. The rest had dressed and painted and gone abroad to display themselves just because it was the fashion in their circles so to dress and paint and display. Women of Greek perfection in body and feature, free-stepping Western women who met the gaze of men directly and fearlessly, their costumes ran through all the exaggerations of Parisian mode and tint. Toilettes whose brilliancy would cause heads to turn and necks to crane on the streets of an Eastern city, drew here no tribute of comment. It had gone on all the afternoon. From the Columbia Theatre corner, which formed one boundary of “the line,” to the Sutler Street corner of Kearney, five blocks away, certain of these peacocks had been strutting back and forth since two o’clock. The men who corresponded in the social organization to these paraders of vanity lined the sidewalks or lolled in the open-air cigar stands, as did these two young adventurers in life—Bertram Chester, now a year and a half out of college, and Mark Heath, cub reporter on the Herald. 73
When the homefarers from office and factory had begun to tarnish the brilliance of this show, when the women had begun to scatter—this one to dinner with her man, that one back to the hall-room supper by whose economies she saved for her Saturday afternoon vanities—Bertram and Mark drifted with the current up Kearney street toward the Hotel Marseillaise. In their blood, a little whipped already by the two cocktails which they had felt able to afford even while they debated over the price of dinner, ran all the sparkling currents of youth. They drew on past Sutler Street to Adventurer’s Lane, the dingy section of that street wherein walked the treasure-farers of all the seven seas; and as they walked, Bertram began to speak of the things which lay close to his heart.
“I guess I’ll chuck the law,” he said. “Maybe I’ll stay with Judge Tiffany a year or so longer—until I get admitted anyway. A bar admission might count if I wanted to go into politics.”
“Politics is a pretty poor kind of business,” responded Mark Heath. Old enough in journalism to have recovered somewhat from his first enchantment with the rush of life, he was 74 only just beginning to acquire the cynical pose.
“Hell, it’s all according to how you play it,” said Bertram. “When you get to be Lincoln, nobody calls it poor business. Do they think any the worse of my old man because he played politics to be sheriff of Tulare? If I should go into the game down there, his pull would help me a lot. But it’s me for this.” His sweeping gesture took in the whole city.
He had missed Mark’s point. The latter felt within him a little recoil from that loyalty for his greater, more ready, more popular friend, which had carried him, a blind slave, through college, and which had helped him make him settle in San Francisco instead of Tacoma. Through his four years at the University, Mark had shared his crusts with Bertram Chester, yelled for him from the bleachers, played his fag at class elections. Now Mark was out in the world, practising the profession of lost illusions; and a new vision had been growing within him for many days. He turned a grave face toward his chum, and his lips opened on the impulse of a criticism. But he thought better of it. His mouth closed without sound.
“The real chances for a lawyer, though, are 75 in business,” Bertram went on. “Judge Tiffany never grabbed half his chances. Attwood in the office, says so.”
“He surely didn’t keep out of politics, that Judge,” said Mark, remembering the turns of fate which had almost—and ever not quite—made the old Judge a congressman, a mayor, and a Justice of the California State Supreme Court.