It happened when, with a guide and some Club friends, we went through
the Chinatown slums of the city.
It was Saturday night; the night of all others for hovels and evil
haunts to disgorge their hives of human bees to swarm through passage
and alley, or up and down the dark and wretched stairways.
We had begun at the Joss Houses--gaudy with tinsel, and close and
choking from the incense of burning tapers. We had gone to restaurant
and theater. At the one, going in through the back way and on through
their cooking rooms where they were preparing strange and repulsive
looking food; at the other, using the stage entrance and going on
the stage with the players. Into opium joints our guide led the way,
where the smokers in their utter degradation lay like the dead, as the
drug carried the dreamers into a land of untranslatable dreams. We
had looked at the pelf in the pawn-shops, and at the painted faces of
Chinese courtesans looking out through their lattices.
Then underground we had gone down (three stories) and had seen
places and beings hideous in their loathesomeness; loathesome beyond
description. To the “Dog Kennel.” Up to earth’s surface again; to “The
Rag Picker’s Paradise.” Through “Cum Cook Alley”--through “Ross Alley,”
where within a few feet, within a few years, murder after murder had
been committed, and (the murderers escaping through the network of
secret passageways and hidden doors) the deaths had gone unavenged.
Through the haunts of highbinders, and thugs and assassins we moved;
and once I passed a little child--a half-caste--toddling through the
alley that was reeking with filth. “Look out, Baby!” I said, as he
stumbled and fell. “Look out, Man!” he answered in English, and
laughed.
[Illustration: “Again the sirocco passed.”--Page 79]
Then, somewhere between high walls that reached to the open air, I
found myself alone--left behind by the others. I could see the guide’s
light burning--a tiny red spark--far ahead in the darkness, but my own
candle had gone out. Away up in the narrow slit showing the sky, shone
the cold, still stars. Under my feet crunched clinkers and cinders wet
with a little stream from some sewer running over the ground.
Then in the dark wall a door opened, and as the light from within
lit up the inky blackness without I saw him again. Again the sirocco
passed, burning--scorching the life-blood in my veins.
They came back and found me lying in the wet of the noisome alley. For
weeks, in the hotel, I lay ill; then, as soon as I was able to walk
unassisted, I took passage for Japan, intending to extend my trip to
Suez, and through Europe, on home. I said to myself that I would never
again set foot in San Francisco. I feared that horrible something, the
power of which seemed stronger over me there than elsewhere. Six times
we had met and passed. I shrank from the seventh. Each time that we had
come face to face--met--passed--drifted apart, I heard a voice saying
that my life was being daily drawn closer and closer into his, to be a
part of the warp and woof of his own. And the end? It would be----when?
Where? In what way? What would be that final meeting of ours? How far
off was it? What would that fatal seventh meeting mean for us both?
I fled from the city as one does from the touch of a leper. I dared not
stay.
But the third day out on the ocean there suddenly came over me a
knowledge that a greater force than my own will would compel me to
return. Something bade me go back. I fought with it; I battled with
the dread influence the rest of the voyage. It was useless. I was
a passenger on the ship when it returned to San Francisco. There I
found the whole city talking and horrified, over a murder hideous,
foul, revolting. Carmen de la Guerra, a young Spanish woman, had been
brutally murdered--butchered by her lover. I was sick--chilled, when I
heard. A foreboding of the truth came to me as I listened. I feverishly
read the papers; they told of the tragedy in all its frightful details.
I went to the public libraries for the back files. Then I went to the
jail to look at the face of the fiend who had killed her. I knew whom I
should see behind the bars. It was he. And it was the seventh meeting.
His eyes bade me go and get him release.
“Go!” they said, “Call to your aid all the angels of your heaven, and
the help of the demons who are one with me in hell, that you may save
me from the gallows. My Soul is your Soul; if I die, you also must die
with me. Keep the rope from me; for you are fighting for your own life.
Go!”
* * * * *
I went out of the chill jail corridors a madman. I raved against the
hellish destiny. What use? I must save him, or I must die with him.
No one understood. I told no one my secret. Early and late; day and
night I worked unceasingly to get him pardoned. God! how I worked to
save him. I tried every conceivable means to secure him his life. I
exhausted all methods known to the law. I spent money as a mill-wheel
runs water.
“You believe him innocent?--this fiend!” my friends cried
aghast--amazed at my mad eagerness to get him acquittal.
“No! not that!” I answered in my agony, “but he must not die--shall not
hang! Shall not! Do you hear? Innocent or guilty--what do I care? Only
he must live, that I shall not die.”
But no one understood.
* * * * *
It has been in vain. At eleven o’clock he is to be hung. The
death-watch is with him. And the death-watch is here, too, with me. Two
are here; and the name of one is Horror, and the other’s name is Fear.
Down below I hear the rattle of traffic on the streets, and in the
hotel corridors I hear the voices of people talking--just now I heard
one laugh. They do not know. And Lucille---- Ah, my poor Lucille!
The tide of life is running out, and the end is drawing nigh. I have
come to find at last that evil is always stronger than good; and in
that way he draws me after him. I cannot hold the half of his Soul
back. Closer and closer together we come. A Divided Soul--his and mine.
His body has housed the evil half--mine the good. His is all that is
vile, and bestial, and bloodthirsty; mine has always striven after the
best. Yet because of his sin I, too, must die.
At the hour of eleven he will hang for the murder of Carmen de la
Guerra. At eleven I, too, must die. As the sheriff cuts the rope,
and the evil Divided Soul swings out eternity-ward from the body
which has housed it evilly, so will I die at that instant--death by
strangulation. For a Divided Soul may not live when its twin is gone.
Death. And then one body in the rosewood casket, and one in its box of
pine.