"Match you to see whether it's good, old fifteen cent feed at the
Marseillaise or a four bit bust at the Nevada," said Bertram Chester.
"I'll take you," responded Mark Heath, flipping a silver dollar as he
spoke. "Heads the Nevada; tails the croutons and Dago red."
"Tails it is--aw, let's make it the Nevada to show there's nothing in
luck."
"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, 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_.
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 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 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.
"Oh, he had no call to be in politics. He hasn't the sand. Attwood
says so. And he stuck at his desk and let his business chances go by.
Myself, I'm keeping my lamps open. Just because the Judge doesn't
watch his chances, that office is a great place to pick things up.
Look at those tidewater cases of ours over in Richmond. I know, from
the inside, that we're going to lose our case, and lots will go
whooping up. I've written to Bob for a thousand dollars to invest.
I'll double that in a year and have my first thousand ahead. Say, why
don't you try something in business instead of sticking to newspapers?
Let's go in together. Reporting is a rotten kind of business."
"Oh, I don't know, I like it. I think I'll stay with it for a while."
Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the
loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own
deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in
this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the
four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be
mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay
with it for a while, anyway," he added simply.
They had turned out of Kearney Street and were mounting the hill-rise
toward the Hotel Marseillaise. These fringes and environments of
Chinatown had been residences for the newly affluent in the days when
the Poodle Dog flourished and flaunted in the hull of a wreck, in the
days when that Chinatown site was Rialto and Market-place for the
overgrown mining camp. The wall moss which blew in with the trade
winds, and the semi-tropic growth of old ivies and rose-bushes, had
given to these houses the seasoning of two centuries. Unpretentious
hovels beside the structures of stone turrets and mill-work fronts by
which later millionaires shamed California Street and Van Ness Avenue,
they had the simple dignity of a mission, a colonial farm-house, or
any other structure wherein love of craft has supplanted scanty
materials. Innumerable additions of sheds and boxes, the increment of
their fallen social condition, broke their severe lines. A massive
door, a carriage entrance, the remains of a balcony faced to catch
wind and air of the great bay, recalled what they had been; as though
a washerwoman should wear on her tattered waist some jewel of a wealth
long past.
The Hotel Marseillaise occupied one of these houses. Where it stood,
the hill rose steep. One might enter a narrow alley, skirt a board
fence, dodge into a box hall, seasoned with dinners long past, and
mount by a steep staircase to the dining room; or he might enter that
dining room directly from the street, such was the slope of the hill.
A row of benches parked the front door. On the fine, out-of-doors
evenings which came too seldom in the City of Fogs, French waiters out
of work, French deserters from merchantmen in the harbor below, French
cabmen waiting for night and fares, lolled on these benches while they
smoked their black cigarettes and chattered in their heavy, peasant
accent.
Within, Madame Loisel ruled with her cash register at the cigar
counter. She, bursting with sweet inner fatness like a California
nectarine, kept in her middle age the everlasting charm and chic of
the Frenchwoman. This Madame Loisel was a dual personality. She of the
grave mouth, the considering eye, the business manner, who rung up
dinner fees on the cash register and bargained with the Chinamen for
vegetables at the back door, seemed hardly even sister to the Madame
Loisel of Saturday afternoon on "the line" or Sunday morning at the
French Church. By what process man may not imagine, this second Madame
Loisel took six inches from her girth, fifty pounds from her weight,
fifteen years from her age. Her step was like a dancer's; her figure
was no more than comfortably plump; her Sunday complexion brought the
best out of her alluring eyes and her black, ungrizzled hair; her
hands, in their perfect gloves, bore no resemblance to the hands which
had scraped pots for Louis Loisel in the time before he could flaunt
the luxury of a cashier.
In Madame Loisel's background lay the ramblings of a house built for
comfort and large hospitalities. Gone were the folding doors, bare
the niches, empty the window-seats. The old drawing-rooms, music-room,
dining-room, had become one apartment of a sanded floor and many long
tables. Through this background of his wife moved Louis Loisel,
grizzled, fat and gay; never too busy at his serving to exchange
flamboyant banter with a patron.
Hither the peasant French of San Francisco, menials most of them, came
for luncheons and dinners of thick, heavy vegetable soup, coarse fish,
boiled joint, third-class fruit and home-made claret, vinted by Louis
himself in a hand press during those September days when the Latin
quarter ran purple--and all for fifteen cents! Thither, too, came
young apprentices of the professions, working at wages to shame a
laborer, who had learned how much more one got for his money at
Louis's than at the white-tiled American places further down town. It
stood for ten years, this Hotel Marseillaise, the hope of the
impecunious. How many careers did it preserve, how many old failures
from the wreckage of Kearney Street did it console!
Madame Loisel stood at her cash register as the two young men entered.
A fresh waist, a ribbon at her throat, a slimness of her waist and an
artificial freshness in her complexion showed that she had been
parading that afternoon.
"Bonsoir Madame--la la la-la-la!" called Bertram.
Her face blossomed with coquetry, her teeth gleamed, and:
"Bonsoir--diable!" she smiled back at him. Mark Heath had greeted her
more soberly. Her eyes followed Chester's big, square frame as he
moved with lumbering grace to a corner table.
There he sat at the beginning of his career, such as it was, this
Bertram Chester--a completed piece of work, fresh, unused, from the
mills of the gods. His strong frame was beginning to fill out, what
with the abandonment of training for a year. He was a pretty figure of
a man in his clothes; and those clothes were so woven and cut as to be
in contrast with his surroundings. A tailor of San Francisco, building
toward fashionable patronage, had made him suits free during his last
year in college. Varsity man and public character about the campus,
Chester paid him back in advertising of mouth. Guided by that
instinct of vanity and personal display which runs in those who have
to do with the cattle range, he had learned to dress well before he
was really sure-mouthed in English grammar.
His face, still, as when we first saw him, a little over-heavy, had
lightened with the growth of spirit within him. This increase of
spirit and expression manifested itself in his rolling and merry eye,
which travelled over all humanity in his path with an air of
possession, in the mobility of his rather thick-lipped mouth. For the
rest, the face was all solidity and strength. His neck rose big and
straight from his collar, a sign of the power which infused the figure
below; his square chin, in repose, set itself at a most aggressive
angle; his nose was low-bridged and straight and solid. From any
company which he frequented, an attraction deeper than his obviously
regular and animal beauty brought him notice and attention.
The son of Louis, a small, cheerful imitation of his father, slammed a
bowl of cabbage soup down before them. Bertram, sighing his young,
ravenous satisfaction, sank the ladle deep and stopped, his hand
poised, his eyes fixed. Mark followed the direction of his glance.
Louis Loisel, wearing his best air of formal politeness, was bowing a
party of women to a table by the door.
"Slummers!" said Mark under his breath. A habitué of the place, he
had already developed a resentment of outsiders.
Louis pulled out chairs, wiped the table mightily; the French cabmen,
the Barbary Coast flotsam and jetsam, gazed over their soup-spoons in
silent, furtive interest.
"It's her!" said Bertram, lapsing into his native speech. Heath
flashed a glance of recognition at the same moment.
"Miss Gray--sure--Mrs. Tiffany's niece. I thought she was in
Europe--didn't she start a week or two after we left the ranch?"
"Oh, I knew she was coming back. Mrs. Tiffany told me. The Mrs. Boss
isn't so sweet on me as she used to be, but I see her in the office
now and then."
Bertram resumed his ladling. Both watched furtively. It was a balanced
party--three men and three women. Among the men, Mark Heath recognized
him of the pointed beard as Masters, the landscape painter. The
little, brown woman who sat with her back to them must be his wife.
The other girl, a golden, full-blown Californian thing--her, too, they
marked and noted with their eyes.
Recognition of a sort had come meanwhile from the party at the guest
table. Miss Waddington, the full-blown golden girl, had seated herself
and cooed an appreciative word or two about the quaintness and
difference of the Marseillaise, when her eyes clutched at the two
young men in the corner, whose dress made them stand out so queerly
among the lost and soiled. As Bertram looked up with his glance of
recognition, her eyes caught his. She glanced down at her plate.
"Eleanor," she said, "is that a flirtation starting, or do any of us
know the two men in the corner--there under that beer sign."
Eleanor looked. Kate Waddington, her indirect gaze still on that
corner table, saw the dark young man smile and bow effusively. She
slipped a sidling glance at Eleanor Gray. Something curious, an intent
look which seemed drawn to conceal a tumult within, had filmed itself
over Eleanor's grey eyes. But she spoke steadily.
"Why, yes. I have met them both. They used to do summer work on the
ranch when they were in college. I believe that the darker one--Mr.
Chester--is in Uncle Edward's law office now. I haven't seen either of
them since I went abroad."
"I should say that this Mr. Chester fancied you, from his
expression."
"I suppose that he fancies every girl that he sees--from his
expression."
Kate Waddington caught the shade of irritation, uncommon with Eleanor,
and noted it in memory. Mrs. Masters, an eager little woman who
grasped at everything about her like a child, broke in:
"If you know them, and they're really frequenters of the place, it
would be fun to ask them over. Sydney used to dine here a great deal
when he was young and poor, and he has _such_ stories of the people he
used to know then!"
Eleanor hesitated. Kate looked again toward Bertram, who was talking
rapidly across his soup to Mark Heath, and:
"Do!" she murmured.
In that instant, Bertram himself cast the die. This had been the
debate across the soup:
"I'm going over to speak to her," said Bertram.
"I shouldn't butt in," said Mark. "It's a balanced party."
"Oh, I shan't try to stay--coming along?" He did not wait to see
whether or not Mark was following.
Miss Gray greeted him more cordially, altogether more sweetly, than
she had ever done in their meetings on the ranch, and passed him about
the circle for introductions. Noticing, then, that Mark had not
followed, Bertram turned and beckoned with impatience. Mark crossed
the room in some embarrassment.
"Is this your first visit to the Hotel Marseillaise?" asked Mrs.
Masters. Mark hesitated; but Bertram laughed and beamed down on her
from his brown eyes.
"Only about my two hundred and first," he said. "Mr. Heath and I dine
here every night we haven't the price to dine anywhere else."
Masters, with that ready tact which he needed in order to live with
Mrs. Masters, rushed into the breach.
"And I should call it about my four hundred and first," he said. "It's
back to the old scenes for the night. I haven't tasted real cabbage
soup since the last time--it has been a canned imitation. For
goodness' sake join us and tell us the news!"
"Do!" said Miss Waddington with animation, and "Please," said those
two escorts who do not figure in this story. Eleanor said nothing, but
her expression was an invitation.
"Sure!" responded Bertram.
The Hotel Marseillaise had familiar customs of its own. For one thing,
guests bothered the waiters as little as possible. Masters smiled when
the two unconscious youths went back to their table, picked up the big
soup tureen, their knives and forks, their plates, and transported
them to the larger table.
They were dragging the lees of a rather squalid Bohemia, these two
boys; a Bohemia the more real because they were unconscious in it. Its
components were a cheap furnished room, restaurants like this,
adventurous companionship in the underworld which thrust itself to the
surface here and there in that master-port of the Saxon advance. Not
for months had either of them been in the society of such women as
these--women who preferred cleanliness to display, women who were
nice about their nails and hair. A kind of pleasant shyness crept over
Mark Heath; the spirit came into the face of Bertram Chester. Masters,
tactician that he was, put the conversation into their hands.
Presently, they were telling freely about the fare at Coffee John's,
about their familiars and companions in the little Eddy-Street lodging
house, about the drifters of the Latin quarter. They quite eclipsed
the pale youth who was playing escort to Eleanor, and the substantial
person in the insurance business who seemed to be responsible for Kate
Waddington. Heath, speaking with a little diffidence and lack of
assurance, had twice the wit, twice the eye for things, twice the
illumination of Bertram Chester; yet it was the latter who brought
laughter and attention. His personality, which surrounded him like an
aroma, his smile, his trick of the eyes--one listened to Bertram
Chester.
* * * * *
When the son of Louis brought in the little sweet oranges and arranged
the goblets for black coffee, talk shifted from monologue to dialogue.
Eleanor found herself talking to Bertram. A kind of pride had been
rising in her all the evening; a pride born in recoil from her latest
recollection of him. The episode of that night under the bay tree had
gone with her clear across the Atlantic. Even the influence of the
wholly new environment, in which she had grown from a girl recluse to
a woman, had not served for a long time to erase that ugly stain on
her memory. Here and now was the man who served so to perturb her
once--and she could look on him, with her more mature eyes, as an
attractive, unlicked young cub. She surprised herself taking revenge
upon the past by a hidden patronage. At once, then, she fell to
talking of Europe and the splendors she had lived there.
"This reminds me of the places one slips into abroad," she said, "Mr.
and Mrs. Wark--Lars Wark you know--took me to just such an old ruin in
Paris. We dined for thirty centimes, I remember, but it was no better
than this. I've had to go away to know my native city. That is the
thing which strikes you when you come back--San Francisco is so like
the Latin cities of Europe, and yet so unlike!"
Kate leaned across her insurance man.
"The Society for the Narration of European Travel is in session, Mr.
Chester," she said. "I know the joy that Eleanor is having. It was the
passion of my life after I first got back from abroad."
"Oh, I eat it alive," said Bertram. "I'm strong for seeing Paris." He
turned back to Eleanor; and her double embarrassment drove her on.
"Such a good time as I had with the Warks--their studio in Munich,
where I met all the German long-haired artists--a run to Paris in the
season--the dearest little village on the Coast of Brittany last
summer--and three weeks in incomparable London at the end. I haven't
thought of the ranch for a year and a half--Uncle Edward pays me the
compliment of saying that my profits fell off twenty per cent. under
Olsen's management--oh, isn't she a dear!"
For Madame Loisel, wearing a beaming and affable manner, had come
through the door and approached their table. Madame made it a point of
business honor to promote personal relations with her regular guests,
asking Jean how he liked the fish, assuring Jacques that the soup
would be better to-morrow. This visit of hers to the slumming party
came after a storm in the kitchen, whose French thunders had reached
the dining room now and then. Louis, the conservative, hated slummers
and dreaded being "discovered." He ran a restaurant as a social
institution as well as a business venture. Madame Loisel, with her eye
on the cash register, longed ardently for slummers who would give
large tips to Louis the younger, order expensive wines, and put the
Marseillaise on the way to a twenty-five cent table d'hote dinner.
From that kitchen squabble, recurrent whenever slummers visited them,
Madame Loisel swept in haughty determination, leaving Louis to take it
out on the pots. As she approached the table, all the charm of France
illuminated her smile.
She invariably paid slummers the compliment of addressing them in
French.
"_Bonsoir--le souper, plait-il vous_?" she asked.
Eleanor took her up in fluent French, and the talk sparkled back and
forth between them--reminiscences of this or that restaurant on the
boulevards which Madame Loisel had known in her youth and which
Eleanor had visited. Bertram, his mouth open, followed that talk as
though summoning all his Sophomore French to match a word here and
there. Kate Waddington, leaning again across her insurance man, was
the first to break in.
"I myself used to be keen on French when I came back from Europe, but
I'm out of practice. Please excuse me, Madame, if I speak English. How
can you do it at this price?"
"It is kind of you to say so, Mademoiselle--economy and honesty."
Masters patted Mark Heath on the knee.
"We can't let you fellows go away from us now. One doesn't get guides
to the Latin quarter for nothing. Take us somewhere, Mr. Heath--unless
you're working to-night."
"No, virtue has been rewarded," said Mr. Heath. "I'm off to-night as a
testimonial of esteem from the City Editor. What shall it be?"
Bertram Chester, taking up the talk again, laid out Kearney Street
like a bill of fare. Mrs. Masters, casting her vote as chaperone,
chose the Marionette Theatre tucked away under the shadow of the
Broadway Jail.
As Eleanor stepped out into California Street, gathering her coat
about her against a night which had come up windy and raw, Bertram
took her side with a proprietary air. She turned toward her appointed
escort. It happened that he was walking ahead with Heath just then,
holding an argument about the drift of Montgomery Street when it was
the water front. For several blocks, then, Bertram had her alone. It
seemed to her that he began just where he left off two years or more
ago.
"You're even prettier than you used to be," he said caressingly;
"you've bully eyes. I think I told you that before."
This time, she looked him full in the face and smiled easily.
"Have I? Well I hope you don't mind my saying that they're resting on
a bonny sight!"
Somewhat taken aback by the directness of this answer, so different
from the artificial coyness of the girls he knew best in that period
of his life, Bertram turned in his course.
"You're joshing me," he said.
"Truly I'm not. You are good to look at--eyes and all."
Although balked of his opening, Bertram tried again.
"Well your mouth is just as good as your eyes."
The same quick look into his face, and the same smile, as she
answered:
"Yours is a little better if anything. It is not only well formed, but
it becomes delicious when you smile, and it has most attractive
shadows in the corners."
"Suppose we talk sense," grumbled Bertram.
"Suppose we do; I know you can." They both laughed at this, and all
the way up Kearney Street she continued her chatter of Europe. Lars
Wark, who had known her mother, had done everything for her. It had
been very different from the regular tour; she came back ignorant of
all the show places from Cologne Cathedral to the Tower. But it had
been her privilege to see and meet wonderful people. They would not do
for regular companionship, such people. They struck one, in the end,
as goblins and trolls; but it had been an experience of a
lifetime--while it lasted. The Warks had taken her to places which the
tourist never sees--lost villages in the Black Forest, undiscovered
corners of London, even.
After a little of this, she drew him on to speak of himself. She had
heard news of him, she said, from her uncle, who said that he was
doing well and gave promise of a future in the law. How long had he
remained on the ranch that summer? This reference put him back into
his presumptive mood.
"You went away without giving me a chance to say good-bye," he
complained. "I never saw you again after the party on the lawn."
Her tongue ran away with her.
"I saw you, though," she said.
"Where?"
"Oh, at a distance." He caught nothing from her tone, yet a slight
change did come into her manner, as though something had been drawn
between them. Then her escort fell in on the other side of Eleanor,
appropriating her by right and by consent of her attitude.
Now they were in Broadway, skirting the small bake-shops, the dark
alleys, all the picture scenes of the Latin quarter. At that very
moment, Miss Waddington drew a little apart from the group clustering
about Masters and Mark Heath. An Italian baby of three, too late out
of bed, stood by a cellar rail surveying them with the liquid fire
which was his eyes. Kate Waddington stooped to pat his head. As she
raised herself, she was beside Bertram. Nothing more natural than that
she should fall in, step by step, beside him. He caught step with her,
but he still looked toward Eleanor.
"Wonderful girl, isn't she?" asked Kate.
"She sure is."
"Her mother," said Kate, "had more wit than any other woman in San
Francisco--and the men she had!"
"I think Eleanor has inherited _that_ at any rate," she added after a
pause.
They had reached the door of the Marionette Theatre now. Afterward
they drank beer at Norman's; and when they broke up, Bertram Chester
found himself with three invitations to call.
* * * * *
Kate Waddington spent that night with Eleanor Gray in the Tiffany
House on Russian Hill. While they sat before the fireplace, in the
half-hour of loosened hair and confidences, Eleanor broke a minute of
silence with the inquiry:
"What did you think of him?" An instant after she let slip this
impersonal inquiry, she would have given gold to recall it. And if she
had any hope that Kate Waddington had missed the point, it died in her
when Kate answered in an indifferent tone:
"He? Oh, he seems to me to be a little promiscuous."