He stared at me again,gave me his hand awkwardly,and went into the house.It was not until I had walked the length of the block that Ibegan to realize what a shock my presence there must have been to him,with his head full of the contrast between this visit and my former attitude.Could it be that it was only the night before I had made a speech against him and his associates?It is interesting that my mind rejected all sense of anomaly and inconsistency.Krebs possessed me;Imust have been in reality extremely agitated,but this sense of being possessed seemed a quiet one.An amazing thing had happened--and yet Iwas not amazed.The Krebs I had seen was the man I had known for many years,the man I had ridiculed,despised and oppressed,but it seemed to me then that he had been my friend and intimate all my life:more than that,I had an odd feeling he had always been a part of me,and that now had begun to take place a merging of personality.Nor could I feel that he was a dying man.He would live on....
I could not as yet sort and appraise,reduce to order the possessions he had wished to turn over to me.
It was noon,and people were walking past me in the watery,diluted sunlight,men in black coats and top hats and women in bizarre,complicated costumes bright with colour.I had reached the more respectable portion of the city,where the churches were emptying.These very people,whom not long ago I would have acknowledged as my own kind,now seemed mildly animated automatons,wax figures.The day was like hundreds of Sundays I had known,the city familiar,yet passing strange.
I walked like a ghost through it....
XXVI.
Accompanied by young Dr.Strafford,I went to California.My physical illness had been brief.Dr.Brooke had taken matters in his own hands and ordered an absolute rest,after dwelling at some length on the vicious pace set by modern business and the lack of consideration and knowledge shown by men of affairs for their bodies.There was a limit to the wrack and strain which the human organism could stand.He must of course have suspected the presence of disturbing and disintegrating factors,but he confined himself to telling me that only an exceptional constitution had saved me from a serious illness;he must in a way have comprehended why I did not wish to go abroad,and have my family join me on the Riviera,as Tom Peters proposed.California had been my choice,and Dr.Brooke recommended the climate of Santa Barbara.
High up on the Montecito hills I found a villa beside the gateway of one of the deep canons that furrow the mountain side,and day after day I lay in a chair on the sunny terrace,with a continually recurring amazement at the brilliancy of my surroundings.In the early morning I looked down on a feathery mist hiding the world,a mist presently to be shot with silver and sapphire-blue,dissolved by slow enchantment until there lay revealed the plain and the shimmering ocean with its distant islands trembling in the haze.At sunset my eyes sought the mountains,mountains unreal,like glorified scenery of grand opera,with violet shadows in the wooded canon clefts,and crags of pink tourmaline and ruby against the skies.All day long in the tempered heat flowers blazed around me,insects hummed,lizards darted in and out of the terrace wall,birds flashed among the checkered shadows of the live oaks.That grove of gnarled oaks summoned up before me visions of some classic villa poised above Grecian seas,shining amidst dark foliage,the refuge of forgotten kings.Below me,on the slope,the spaced orange trees were heavy with golden fruit.
After a while,as I grew stronger,I was driven down and allowed to walk on the wide beach that stretched in front of the gay houses facing the sea.Cormorants dived under the long rollers that came crashing in from the Pacific;gulls wheeled and screamed in the soft wind;alert little birds darted here and there with incredible swiftness,leaving tiny footprints across the ribs and furrows of the wet sand.Far to the southward a dark barrier of mountains rose out of the sea.Sometimes Isat with my back against the dunes watching the drag of the outgoing water rolling the pebbles after it,****** a gleaming floor for the light to dance.
At first I could not bear to recall the events that had preceded and followed my visit to Krebs that Sunday morning.My illness had begun that night;on the Monday Tom Peters had come to the Club and insisted upon my being taken to his house....When I had recovered sufficiently there had been rather a pathetic renewal of our friendship.Perry came to see me.Their attitude was one of apprehension not unmixed with wonder;and though they,knew of the existence of a mental crisis,suspected,in all probability,some of the causes of it,they refrained carefully from all comments,contenting themselves with telling me when Iwas well enough that Krebs had died quite suddenly that Sunday afternoon;that his death--occurring at such a crucial moment--had been sufficient to turn the tide of the election and make Edgar Greenhalge mayor.
Thousands who had failed to understand Hermann Krebs,but whom he had nevertheless stirred and troubled,suddenly awoke to the fact that he had had elements of greatness....
My feelings in those first days at Santa Barbara may be likened,indeed,to those of a man who has passed through a terrible accident that has deprived him of sight or hearing,and which he wishes to forget.What Iwas most conscious of then was an aching sense of loss--an ache that by degrees became a throbbing pain as life flowed back into me,re-inflaming once more my being with protest and passion,arousing me to revolt against the fate that had overtaken me.I even began at moments to feel a fierce desire to go back and take up again the fight from which I had been so strangely removed--removed by the agency of things still obscure.
