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The End Of All
by
I don’t think we responded with any adequate interest to the occasion. Miss Brisbane did, indeed, stare at her father in her dreamy, abstracted way a moment, and then got up, and, going to the open window, began to arrange the curtains, as if relinquishing whatever problem there was to the superior acumen of the masculine mind.
I think I said that it looked as if there had been a cyclone somewhere, and if there had we should in all probability get the accounts of it soon enough.
“But, young man,” replied the Judge, with his majesterial emphasis, “cyclones do not extend from the fiftieth degree of north latitude to the fortieth degree of south latitude, and vessels are due at San Francisco from Melbourne and Japan.”
“What, then, other than a storm at sea could have caused a detention of all these vessels?” I asked, and I must have unwittingly betrayed in the tone of my voice, or the expression of my face, that considerate superciliousness with which youth regards the serious notions of mature philosophers, for the Judge, putting his gold spectacles upon his nose, and regarding me over the top of them a moment, said rather severely:
“Other than the known and regular phenomena of this planet do not interest young men. If I could answer your question there would be no special interest in the matter.”
I mention these trivial incidents because, insignificant as they may seem, they were the first ripples of that disaster which was soon enough to overwhelm us all, and to show you what were the only premonitions the world had of the events which were to follow.
On June 26, the subject did not occur to me. A hundred other things of far more immediate consequence to me occupied my attention. A young man who is preparing to get married is not apt to take somber views of anything. Nor is he very apt to allow the contumacy of age in his prospective father-in-law to aggravate him. It was a pardonable freak, I thought, in a man who had retired in most respects from the active world, to dogmatize a little about that world now that he judged it through his favorite evening paper. When, therefore, on the night of the 26th, while at the tea-table, the Judge broke out again about the meteorological wave on the Pacific coast, his daughter Kate and I exchanged a rapid but furtive glance which said, in the perfect understanding of lovers, “There comes the old gentleman’s new hobby again, and we can well afford to treat it leniently.”
The Judge had the damp evening paper in his hand, and he disregarded the steaming cup of tea which his daughter had poured for him.
“Well,” he said, with a toss of self-satisfied import. “Now the newspapers are waking up to the significance of the California news.” He then read from the paper, as nearly as I can recollect, something like the following:
SAN FRANCISCO, June 26.–There is an intense and growing anxiety on this coast with respect to the non-appearance of any eastward-bound vessels. The breeze from the east continues, and is unprecedented.
“Now, I should like to know,” said the Judge, as he laid down the paper and took up his tea-cup, “why a breeze from the east in California should be unprecedented.”
“Because,” I ventured to remark, “it usually blows from the sea at this season.”
“Nonsense,” exclaimed the Judge with vigor. “A variation for a few days in wind or weather is a common occurrence everywhere. Fancy a message sent all over the world from the West Indies that the trade winds were six days late, or a telegram from Minnesota that the winter frosts had been interfered with for a week by pleasant sunshine. No, sir. The event of importance to the Californian at this moment is the mysterious something that has happened out at sea, and there is no excuse for his associating a summer breeze from the east with it, except that there is something peculiar about that breeze that associates it in the mind with the predominant mystery.”