MY face was set to the West, to be sure, but my thoughts were traveling
back over my shoulder to the East. I wish I could say that a lively
sense of injury enabled me to put out of my mind Levant and everybody in
Levant--box and dice! But I’m not much of a liar.
I do not propose to dwell on the bitterness which stuck in me day after
day, along with softer sentiments. This narrative goes into a gallop at
about this point and there is no time to be wasted on self-communings.
However, if I do not mention my old home and the folks back there it
must not be understood that the problem of my life ceased to go to bed
with me, rise with me, and keep pace with me as I hurried through the
day’s work. I obeyed Jodrey Vose’s counsel about giving bulletins of my
progress west. After I had bought my railroad ticket and had counted up,
I felt that I could not afford to take any chances on those strangers
losing their interest in me. I needed a job almighty sudden after I
landed in San Francisco.
On the last leg of the journey I was able to forecast the hour of my
arrival and I suggested by wire that somebody meet me--knowing that
my diver’s kit in its duck bag would be identification enough. This
telegraph business was shooting arrows into the air and I would have
welcomed a return message; I thought they ought to be able to guess
closely enough to intercept me somewhere along the line. But, although
no answer came, I had the comfortable feeling that they’d be likely to
be on the lookout for me. And at last I got my first peek at Pacific
waters.
Our train was hung up outside the yard over in Oakland while they opened
our track to the ferry, and a chap I had chatted with more or less in
the smoking-room on the trip, and who knew my business, rushed out,
climbed down beside the roadbed, and scooped a tumblerful of water. He
ran back into the car and dumped the water over me for a joke, and I’m
so accustomed to water that the joke did not jar me. I took it as it was
meant.
“I baptize thee in the name of the Pacific,” he said. “Now I hope the
old dame will be good to you in your line.”
Well, whether she was or not depends on how one looks at those things.
I walked slowly through the ferry-house, hoping to be hailed, and
stepped out on to the foot of Market Street into the old San Francisco
of the days before the great calamity. In my right hand I tugged along
the duck bag that was bulging with my diving equipment. In my left hand
I had the rest of my earthly possessions in a grip which was about the
size of a ten-cent loaf of bread. It was early evening, and all the
lights were aglare.
There was a turn-table for the cable cars at the foot of Market Street.
The cars were coming down in constant procession, and the turn-table was
busy. It was a regular merry-go-round kind of an affair. It interested
me, but it didn’t interest me so much that I had no eye for a girl
who stood beside me at the edge of the thing. It seemed to me right
then--fresh from a tedious train ride, where I’d been penned in with a
frumpy set of women passengers--that I had never seen a prettier girl.
She had her finger pointed at some one on the turn-table, and was saying
“Father!” over and over, with a new inflection on the word every time
she spoke it. Her finger traveled as the table revolved, and I was able
to pick out father fight away. I was right-down sorry for that girl when
I laid eyes on father. Father was grinning like a sculpin in deep water,
and he was good and drunk, and he was evidently taking a joy ride on
that turn-table.
It struck me right then, as a stranger, that San Francisco had a good
trait pretty well developed; it was willing to let a man mind his own
business as long as he didn’t make too much of a nuisance of himself.
The street-car men did not push father off the turn-table, and two
policemen took a look at him and went off about their business.
I took a good look at the man, too, when the turntable brought him near
me and stopped to let a car on. He had a face about as square as the
front of a safe, and his nose was the shape of a safety-lock knob,
and was red. His pot-bellied body was set on legs like crooked wharf
pilings. I had father sized up in a second. Double-breasted blue coat,
cap of blue, with the peak pulled rakishly down over one eye, gray beard
which radiated in spills from his chin like tiller spokes--he was a
steamboat man, sure! I don’t know what in the devil possessed me to butt
in and make certain--perhaps I wanted to start something so as to get a
rise out of the girl. I’m not naturally fresh and you may be sure I was
in no mood for a flirtation. I was crusted with Yankee reserve even
when I was young. But that impish air of San Francisco was in my
nostrils--did you ever sniff it? It makes your head buzz and your
thoughts froth, and it takes hold of an Easterner as quickly as a stiff
cocktail grabs a man who isn’t used to a mixed drink. You’ll do almost
anything in San Francisco when the sparkle from that trade-wind gets
into your lungs.
So I tipped father the wink.
“Give her the jingle when she starts again,” I said.
I was right in my guess. He crooked his forefinger, reached down, and
yanked empty air.
“Clang!” he barked. In a few seconds the turntable began to revolve
again. Father gave me as silly a grin as I ever saw on a grown-up man’s
face. “Yingleyingle--yingle!” he yelled in falsetto. And away he went!
I never got a more awful look from a pretty girl than I got from that
one when I turned and caught her eyes. There was nothing shrinking or
bashful about her when she was mad, so I found out then and there.
“You fool! You have started him all over again.”
“He seemed to be well started before I came along, miss.” It was that
confounded air that was making me reckless and saucy.
“Clang!” yelped father, coming around again. “Yingle--yingle--yingle!
Pull in them port fenders and mouse that anchor; we’re going outside
this trip.”
“Just see the fool notion you have gone and put into him when he was
all ready to come along with me!” she blazed. She knocked her little
knuckles together in as fine a state of temper as I ever viewed spouting
in a female. She turned suddenly and drove one of her fists against a
man whom I had not noticed till then. He was tall--as long as the moral
law, as we say East--as thin as a pump-handle, and he had a tangle
of gray whisker and beard on top of him that made him look like a
window-mop. He fell down when she hit him. She kicked him with the
point of a little shoe, and he came up, unfolding in sections like a
carpenter’s two-foot rule.
“Slap this man’s face, Ike, and send him along about his business,” she
commanded.
But he only teetered and grinned and drooled, and winked at me over her
shoulder.
“Oh, you are only another drunken fool!” she raged; and she stretched
on tiptoe, and beat his face with the flat of her hand. “You have stood
here without putting up a finger to help me get him off that turn-table,
where he’s disgracing himself. I wonder whether there are any real
men left in San Francisco!” She was in such a state of mind that I was
mighty ashamed by then, I tell you that!