THE UNKNOWN WOMAN
A few minutes after the Vallejo Hotel had sunk into ruin, a man came
running up the street. Even among those shaken from a normal demeanor by
an abnormal event, he was noticeable; for he was wild, a creature
dominated by a frenzied fear. As he ran he cried out for news of the
hotel, and shouted answers smote against him like blows: "Down--gone
down! Collapsed. Everybody in the lower floors dead!" And he rushed on,
burst his way through groups, shot past others flying to the scene, flung
obstructing figures from his path.
"Mad," someone cried, thrown to the wall by a sweep of his arm, "mad and
running amuck."
They would have held him, a desperate thing, clawing and tearing his way
through the crowd, but that suddenly, with a strangled cry, he came to a
stop. Over the shoulders of a group of men he saw a girl's head, and his
shout of "Pancha!" made them fall back. He gathered her in his arms,
strained her against him, in the emotion of that supreme moment lifting
his face to the sky. It was a face that those who saw it never forgot.
The men dispersed, were absorbed into the heaving tumult, running,
squeezing, jamming here, thinning there, falling back before desperate
searchers calling out names that would never be answered, thronging in
the wake of women shrieking for their children. Police came battling
their way through, forcing the people back. Swept against a fence Garland
could at first only hold her, mutter over her, want to know that she was
unhurt. She gave him broken answers; she had run up instead of down--that
was how she was there. The horror of it came back in a sickening
realization, and she shook, clinging to him, only his arm keeping her
from falling. A man had thrown his coat about her, and Garland pulled it
over her, then, looking down, saw her feet, bare and scratched in
pointed, high-heeled slippers. The sight of them, incongruous reminders
of the intimate aspects of life, brought him down to the moment and her
place in it.
"Come on," he said. "Let's get out of this. You want to get something on.
Can you walk? Not far, only a few blocks."
She could do anything, she said, now that she knew he was safe, and, her
fingers in the bend of his arm, he pulled her after him through the
press. Gaining clearer spaces, they ran, side by side, their faces
curiously alike, stamped by the same exalted expression as they fronted
the rising sun.
She heard him say something about taking her away, having a horse and
cart. She made no answer; with his presence all sensations but
thankfulness seemed to have died in her. And then, upon her temporary
peace, came thronging strange and dreadful impressions, waking her up,
telling her the world had claims beyond the circle of her own
consciousness. She caught them as she ran--a shifting series of sinister
pictures: a house down in a tumbled heap of brick and stone, a sick woman
on a couch on the sidewalk, a family dragging furniture through a blocked
doorway, pillars, window ledges, cornices scattered along the road. Over
all, delicately pervasive, adding a last ominous suggestion, was a
faint, acrid odor of burning wood.
"Fire!" she said. "I can smell it."
"Oh, there'll be fires. That's bound to come."
"Where are we going?" she panted.
"Right round here--the place where I was stayin'. There's a widder woman
keeps it, Mrs. Meeker. She's got a horse and cart that'll get you out of
this. I guess all the car lines is bust, and I guess we'll have to move
out quick. Look!"
He pointed over the roofs to where glassy films of smoke rose against the
morning sky.
"Everyone of 'em's a fire and the wind's fresh. I hope to God this shake
up ain't done any harm to the mains."
They had reached Mrs. Meeker's gate. He swung it open and she followed
him across the garden to where a worn, grassy path, once a carriage
drive, led past the house to the back yard. Here stood Mrs. Meeker, a
hatchet in her hand, trying to pry open the stable door.
"Oh, Lord!" she cried, turning at his step, "I'm glad you've come back.
Every other soul in the place has run off, and I can't get the stable
door open."
Her glance here caught Pancha, her nightgown showing below the
man's overcoat.
"Who's she?" she asked, a gleam of curiosity breaking through the larger
urgencies.
"My daughter. She lives right round here. I run for her as soon as I felt
the first quake. You got to take her along in the cart, and will you give
her some clothes?"
"Sure," said Mrs. Meeker, and the flicker of curiosity extinguished, she
returned to the jammed door that shut her out from the means of flight.
"Upstairs in my room. Anything you want." Then to Garland, who had moved
to her assistance, "I'm goin' to get out of here--go uptown to my
cousin's. But I wouldn't leave Prince, not if the whole city was down in
the dust."
Prince was Mrs. Meeker's horse, which, hearing its name, whinnied
plaintively from the stable. Pancha disappeared into the house, and the
man and woman attacked the door with the hatchet and a poker. As they
worked she panted out disjointed bits of information:
"There's a man just come in here tellin' me there's fires, a lot of 'em,
all started together. And he says there's houses down over on Minna and
Tehama streets and people under them. Did you know the back wall's out of
that new hotel? Fell clear across the court. I saw it go from my
room--just a smash and a cloud of dust."
"Umph," grunted the man. "Anybody hurt?"
"I don't think so, but I don't know. I went out in front first off and
saw the people pourin' out of it into the street--a whole gang in their
nightgowns."
A soldier appeared walking smartly up the carriage drive, sweeping the
yard with a glance of sharp command.
"Say. What are you fooling round that stable for?"
Mrs. Meeker, poker in hand, was on the defensive.
"I'm gettin' a horse out--my horse."
"Well, you want to be quick about it. You got to clear out of here.
Anybody in the house?"
"No. What are you puttin' us out for?"
"Fire. You don't want to lose any time. We've orders to get the people on
the move. I just been in that hotel next door and rooted out the last of
'em--running round packing their duds as if they'd hours to waste. Had
to threaten some of 'em with the bayonet. Get busy now and get out."
He turned and walked off, meeting Pancha as she came from the house. A
skirt and blouse of Mrs. Meeker's hung loose on her lithe thinness, their
amplitude confined about her middle by a black crochet shawl which she
had crossed over her chest and tied in the back.
"A lot of that big building's down," she cried, as she ran up. "I could
see it from the window, all scattered across the open space behind it."
Engrossed in their task neither answered her, and she moved round the
corner of the stable to better see the debris of the fallen wall.
Standing thus, a voice dropped on her from a window in the house that
rose beyond Mrs. Meeker's back fence.
"Do you know if all the people are out of that hotel?"
She looked up; standing in a third story window was a young man in his
shirt sleeves. He appeared to have been occupied in tying his cravat, his
hands still holding the ends of it. His face was keen and fresh, and was
one of the first faces she had seen that morning that had retained its
color and a look of lively intelligence.
"I don't know," she answered. "I've only just got here. Why?"
"Because it looks to me as if there was someone in one of the
rooms--someone on the floor."
The stable door gave with a wrench and swung open. Garland jerked it wide
and stepped back to where he could command the man in the window.
"What's that about someone in the hotel?" he said.
The young man leaned over the sill and completed the tying of his cravat.
"I can see from here right into one of those rooms, and I'm pretty sure
there's a person lying on the floor--dead maybe. The electric light
fixture's down and may have got them."
Garland turned to Mrs. Meeker:
"You get out Prince and put him in the cart." Then to the man in the
window: "I'll go in and see. A soldier's just been here who says they've
cleaned the place out. There's maybe somebody hurt that they ain't seen."
"Hold on a minute and I'll go with you," called the other. "I'm a doctor
and I might come in handy. I'll be there in a jiff."
He vanished from the window, and before Prince was backed into the
shafts, walked up the carriage drive, neatly clad, cool and alert, his
doctor's bag in his hand.
"I was just looking at the place as I dressed. Queer sight--looks like a
doll's house. Bedding flung back over the footboards, the way they'd
thrown it when they jumped. Clothes neatly folded over the chairs. And
then in that third-story room I saw something long and solid-looking on
the floor. Seems to be tangled up in the coverlets. The electric light
thing's sprinkled all over it. That's what makes me pretty sure--hit 'em
as they made a break. Come on."
He and Garland made off as Pancha and Mrs. Meeker set to work on the
harnessing of Prince.
The soldiers had done their work. The hotel was empty--a congeries of
rooms left in wild disorder, opened trunks in the passages, clothes
tossed and trampled on the floors. As the men ran up the stairs, its
walls gave back the sound of their feet like a place long deserted and
abandoned to decay. The recurring shocks that shook its dislocated frame
sent plaster down, and called forth creaking protests from the wrenched
girders. The rear was flooded with light, streaming in where the wall
had been, and through open doors they saw the houses opposite filling in
the background like the drop scene at a theater.
The third floor had suffered more than those below, and they made their
way down a hall where mortar lay heaped over the wreckage of glass,
pictures and chairs. The bedroom that was their goal was tragic in its
signs of intimate habitation strewn and dust-covered, as if years had
passed since they had been set forth by an arranging feminine hand. The
place looked as untenanted as a tomb. Anyone glancing over its blurred
ruin, no voice responding to a summons, might have missed the figure that
lay concealed by the bed and partly enwrapped in its coverings.
The doctor, kneeling beside it, pushed them off and swept away the litter
of glass and metal that had evidently fallen from the ceiling and struck
the woman down. She was lying on her face, one hand still gripping the
clothes, a pink wrapper twisted about her, her blonde hair stained with
the ooze of blood from a wound in her head. He felt of her pulse and
heart and twitching up her eyelids looked into her set and lifeless eyes.
"Is she dead?" Garland asked.
"No," He snapped his bag open with businesslike briskness. "Concussion.
Got a glancing blow from the light fixture. Seems as if she'd been trying
to wrap herself up in the bedclothes and got in the worst place she
could--just under it."
"Can you do anything for her?"
"Not much. Rest and quiet is what she ought to have, and I don't see how
she's going to get it the way things are now."
"We got a cart. We can take her along with us."
"Good work. I'll fix her up as well as I can and turn her over to you."
He had taken scissors from his bag and with deft speed began to cut away
the tangled hair from the torn flesh. "I'll put in a stitch or two and
bind her up. Looks like a person of means." He gave a side glance at her
hand, white and beringed. "You might get off the mattress while I'm doing
this. We can put her on it and carry her down. She's a big woman; must be
five feet nine or ten."
Garland dragged the mattress to the floor, while the doctor rose and made
a dive for the bathroom. He emerged from it a moment later, his brow
corrugated.
"No water!" he said, as he stepped over the strewn floor to his patient.
"That's a cheerful complication."
He bent over her, engrossed in his task, every now and then, as the
building quivered to the earth throes, stopping to mutter in irritated
impatience. Garland went to the window and called down to Pancha and Mrs.
Meeker that they'd found a woman, alive but unconscious, and space must
be left for her in the cart. He stood for a moment watching them as they
pulled out the up-piled household goods with which Mrs. Meeker had been
filling it. Then the doctor, snapping his bag shut and jumping to his
feet, called him back:
"That's done. It's all I can do for her now. Come on--lend a hand. Take
her shoulders; she's a good solid weight."
Her head was covered with bandages close and tight as a nun's coif. They
framed a face hardly less white and set in a stony insensibility.
"Lord, she looks like a dead one," Garland said, as he lowered the
wounded head on the mattress.
"She's not that, but she may be unless she gets somewhere out of this.
Easy now; these quakes keep getting in the way."
They carried her down the stairs and out into the street. Here the
crowd, already moving before the fire, was thick, a dense mass, plowing
forward through an atmosphere heat-dried and cinder-choked. The voices of
police and soldiers rose above the multiple sounds of that tide of egress
urging it on. A way was made for the men with their grim load, eyes
touching it sympathetically, now and then a comment: "Dead is she, poor
thing?" But mostly they were too bewildered or too swamped in their own
tragedy to notice any other.
Prince and the cart were ready. From her discarded belongings Mrs. Meeker
had salvaged three treasures, which she had stowed against the dashboard,
a solio portrait of her late husband, a canary in a gilt cage, and a
plated silver teapot. The body of the cart was clear, and the men placed
the mattress there. The spread that covered the woman becoming
disarranged, Pancha smoothed it into neatness, pausing to look with
closer scrutiny into the marble face. It was so unlike the face she had
seen before, rosy and smiling beneath the shade of modish hats, that no
glimmer of recognition came to her. Chrystie was to her, as she was to
the others, an unknown woman.
Mrs. Meeker, even in this vital moment, knew again a stir of curiosity.
"Who is she?" she said to the men. "Ain't you found anything up there to
tell us where she belongs?"
The doctor's voice crackled like pistol shots:
"Good God, woman, we've not got time to find out who people _are_. Take
her along--get a move on. It's getting d----d hot here."
It was; the heat of the growing conflagration was scorching on their
faces, the cinders falling like rain.
"Get up there, Mrs. Meeker," Garland commanded; "on the front seat. You
drive and Pancha and I'll walk alongside."
The woman climbed up. The doctor, turning to go, gave his last orders:
"Try and get her out of this--uptown--where there's air and room. Keep
her as quiet as you can. You'll run up against doctors who'll help.
Sorry I can't go along with you, but there'll be work for my kind all
over the city today, and I got a girl across toward North Beach that I
want to see after."
He was off down the carriage drive almost colliding with a soldier, who
came up on the run, a bayoneted musket in his hand, his face a blackened
mask, streaming with sweat. At the sight of the cart he broke into an
angry roar:
"What are you standing round for? Do you want to be burnt? Get out. Don't
you know the fire's coming? _Get out."_
They moved out and joined the vast procession of a city in exodus.
For months afterward Pancha dreamed of that day--woke at night to a sense
of toiling, onward effort, a struggling slow progress, accomplished amid
a sea of faces all turned one way. The dream vision was not more
prodigiously improbable than the waking fact--life, comfortable and
secure, suddenly stripped of its garnishings, cut down to a single
obsessing issue, narrowed to the point where the mind held but one
desire--to be safe.
Before the advancing wall of flame the Mission was pouring out,
retreating like an army in defeat. Every avenue was congested with the
moving multitude, small streets emptying into larger ones, houses
ejecting their inmates. At each corner the tide was swollen by new
streams, rolling into the wider current, swaying to adjustment, then
pressing on. Looking forward Pancha could see the ranks dark to the limit
of her vision; looking back, the faces, smoke-blackened, sweat-streaked,
marked with fierce tension, with fear, with dogged endurance, with cool
courage, with blank incomprehension. The hot breath of the fire swept
about them, the sound of its triumphant march was in their ears, a
backward glance showed its first high flame crests. Soldiers drove them
on, shouted at them, thrust stupefied figures in amongst them, pushed
others, dazedly cowering in their homes, out through doors and
ground-floor windows. At intervals the earth stirred and heaved, and then
with a simultaneous cry, rising in one long wail of terror, they jammed
together in the middle of the street, so close-packed a man could have
walked on their heads.
To make way through them Garland was forced to lead the horse. Women
clung to the shafts and trailed at the tailboard; the cart stopped by an
influx of traffic, men stood on the hubs of the wheels staring back at
the swelling smoke clouds. Mutual experiences flashed back and forth,
someone's death dully recounted, a miraculous escape, tales of falling
chimneys and desperate chances boldly taken. Some were bent under heavy
loads, which they cast down despairingly by the way; some carried
nothing. Those who had had time and clearness of head had packed baby
carriages edge full of their dearest treasures; others pulled clothes
baskets after them into which anything their hand had lighted on had been
hurled pell-mell. There were sick dragged on sofas, wounded upheld by
the arms of good Samaritans, old people in barrows, in children's carts,
sometimes carried in a "chair" made by the linked hands of two men.
And everywhere trunks, their monotonous scraping rising above the shuffle
of the myriad feet. Men pulled them by ropes taut about their chests, by
the handles, pushed them from behind. Then as the day progressed and the
smoke wall threw out long wings to the right and left, they began to
leave them. The sidewalk was littered with them, they stood square in the
path, tilted over into the gutter, end up against the fence. Other
possessions were dropped beside them, pictures, sewing machines, furs,
china ornaments, pieces of furniture, clocks, even the packed baby
carriages and the clothes baskets. Only two things the houseless
thousands refused to leave--their children and their pets. It seemed to
Pancha there was not a family that did not lead a dog, or carry a cat, or
a bird in a cage.
By midday the cart had made an uptown plaza, and there come to a halt for
rest. The grass was covered thick with people, stretched beside their
shorn belongings, many asleep as they had dropped. A few of them had
brought food; others, with money, went out to buy what they could at the
nearby shops, already depleted of their stores. All but the children were
very still, looking at the flames that licked along the sky line. They
had heard now the story of the broken mains, and somberly, without lament
or rebellion, recognized the full extent of the calamity.
A young girl, standing on a wall, a line of pails beside her, offered
cupfuls of water to those who drooped or fainted. Thirsty hoards besieged
her, and Pancha, edging in among them, made her demand, not for herself,
but for a sick woman. The girl dipped a small cut-glass pitcher in one of
the pails and handed it to her.
"That's a double supply," she said. "But you look as if you needed some
for yourself. We've a little water running in our house, and I'm going to
stand here and dole it out till the fire comes. They say that'll be in a
few hours, so don't bring back the pitcher. There's only my mother and
myself, and we can't carry anything away."
Pancha squeezed out with her treasure, and going to the cart climbed into
the front, sliding over the seat to a space at the head of the mattress.
She bent over the still figure, looking into the face. Its youth and
comeliness smote her, seemed to knock at her heart and soften something
there that had been hard. An uprush of intense feeling, pity for this
blighted creature, this maimed and helpless thing, rescued by chance from
a horrible death, rose and flooded her. She moistened the temples and dry
lips, lifted the bound head to her lap, striving for some expression of
her desire to heal, to care for, to restore to life the broken sister
that fate had cast into her hands. Mrs. Meeker came and peered over the
side of the cart, shaking her head dubiously.
"Looks like to me she'd never open her eyes again."
Pancha was pierced with an angry resentment.
"Don't say that. She's going to get well. I'm going to make her."
"I hope you can," said the elder woman. "Poor thing, what a time she must
have had! Your pa says it seemed as if there was no one there with her.
I'd like to know who she is."
"She's somebody rich. Look at her hands."
She touched, with a caressing lightness, Chrystie's hand, milk-white,
satin-fine, a diamond and sapphire ring on one finger.
Mrs. Meeker nodded.
"Oh, yes, she's no poor girl. Anyone can see that. You'd get it from the
wrapper, let alone the rings. I've been wondering if maybe she wasn't
straight."
"She is. I know it."
"How could you know that?"
"By her face."
Mrs. Meeker considered it, and murmured:
"I guess you're right. It has got an innocent look. It'll be up to you,
whether she lives or dies, to find out who she is and if she's got any
relations."
"Oh, that'll be all right," said Pancha confidently, "I'm going to take
care of her and cure her, and when she's good and ready she'll tell me."
They moved on for quieter surroundings and to find a doctor. This was a
hopeless quest. Every house that bore a sign was tried, and at each one
the answer was the same: the doctor was out; went right after the quake
to be back no one knew when. Some were at the Mechanics' Pavilion,
where the injured had been gathered, and which had to be vacated later
in the day; others at work in the hospitals being cleared before the
fire's advance.
Late in the afternoon Mrs. Meeker left them to go to her cousin's, who
had a cottage up beyond Van Ness Avenue. Prince and the cart she gave
over to them; they'd need it to get the woman away out of all this noise
and excitement. Tears were in her eyes as she bade farewell to the old
horse, giving Garland an address that would find her later--"unless it
goes with the rest of the town"--she added resignedly. In the first
shadowing of twilight, illumined with the fire's high glow, they watched
her trudge off, the bird cage in one hand, the portrait in the other, the
teapot tucked under her arm.
It was night when they came to a final halt--a night horribly bright, the
sky a blazing splendor defying the darkness. The place was an open space
on the first rise of the Mission Hills. There were houses about, here
and there ascending the slope in an abortive attempt at a street which,
halfway up, abandoned the effort and lapsed into a sprinkling of
one-story cottages. Above them, on the naked hillside, the first wave of
refugees had broken and scattered. Under the fiery radiance they sat,
dumb with fatigue, some sleeping curled up among their bundles, some
clustered about little cores of fire over which they cooked food brought
out to them from the houses. A large tree stretched its limbs over a
plateau in the hill's flank and here the cart was brought to a stop.
Prince, loosed from the shafts, cropped a supper from the grass, and the
unknown woman lay on her mattress under the red-laced shade.
A girl from a cottage down the slope brought them coffee, bread and
fruit, and sitting side by side they ate, looking out over the sea of
roofs to where the ragged flame tongues leaped and dropped, and the
smoke mountains rolled sullenly over the faint, obscured stars. They
spoke little, aware for the first time of a great exhaustion, hearing
strangely the sounds of a life that went on as if unchanged and
uninterrupted--the clinking of china, the fitful cries of children
sinking to sleep, the barking of dogs, a voice crooning a song, and
laughter, low-voiced and sweet.
Presently they drew closer together and began to talk; at first of
immediate interests--food to be procured, the injured woman, how to care
for her, find her shelter, discover who she was. Then of themselves--how
the quake had come to each, that mad, upward rush of Pancha's, Garland's
race along the street. That done, she suddenly dropped down and lying
with her head against his knee, her face turned from the firelight, she
told him how Boye Mayer had come to her in the dawn, and how he lay
buried in the ruins of the Vallejo Hotel.