Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/376

364 who now call themselves Arguellans have ever been to the ridge of the Sur and looked abroad; nor have they ever even heard that this experience, so near at hand that one can reach and touch it in a day, is one of those great rarities capable of lifting the soul. All the things nowhere else available, but here in this smiling land offered abundantly, they know nothing of; but bring with them the mode of existence they learned elsewhere, and have not the imagination to transcend. And the age-old ramparts of the Sur look down curiously; and their gods wonder whether this strange new people running after little stupid pleasures, building about them their smothery accustomed environment in apparent fear of touching the new, feeding, gambling, posing, dressing, performing not one useful function in then: idleness, and looking up from their absorption only in self-gratulation, whether these also are of a provisional race that must in its turn give way.

For answer in the year of 1910, of which we are speaking, you would have to go below the surface appearance. To the winter visitor, to the shopkeepers along Main Street, and indeed to rumour in the world outside, these fashionable, pleasant, comfortable, unimaginative futile people meant modern Arguello. They and their activites [sic] filled the eye; and as they were thoroughly satisfied with themselves, and thoroughly oblivious to all but themselves, that was natural. But to the life of the nation the significant Arguellans were those who dwelt in the neat little flower-covered bungalows scattered through what was apparently one endless orchard. Miles and miles it stretched, without distinguishable boundaries. Hardsurfaced roads traversed it, on which were to be seen small busy motor cars, or convoys of a hundred Orientals on bicycles shifting their field of work. For this immense orchard, belonging to the many inhabitants of the bungalows, was nevertheless handled as a unit, as far as such things as pruning, irrigation, cultivation and picking were concerned. In the slack seasons the employees worked at the borders of the roadways, so that in time they were edged with gardens; and the inhabitants of the "cottages" on the hills and the rubber-neck tourists loved to drive there. Down where the railroad tracks left town was a new packing