SAN FRANCISCO
The train that carried Hiram Hooker to San Francisco was late. Thirty
miles from the bay it began making up for lost time. Through the
falling dusk it roared toward the metropolis. Slowly the landscape
faded. Vineyards and chicken ranches and orchards and rolling hills
studded with live oaks gave place to the electric-lighted tentacles of
the city. The lights blinked by at Hiram. They helped depress him,
for they were a part of the modernity that he feared. Suburbs grew to
a continuous stretch of lighted streets and houses. Always those
lights blinked on every side. There was witchery in all of it--in the
smell of the city close at hand, in the cold salt air from the bay, in
the _chunk-a-lunk_, _chunk-a-lunk_ of the speeding locomotive.
Hiram sat forward on the seat, eager, shrinking, exultant, always
straining while he shrank. He tried to plan, but could not. Night
closed in, and all that he saw now were the blinking lights that raced
astern. Off in the black sky to the southward a rosy light suffused
the night--San Francisco.
"Saus-a-lito! Everybody change! Don't forget yer baggage!"
Hiram was swept out with the crowd, swept through the chute to the
ferryboat, swept aboard. He followed the crowd forward and stood in
the bow. Black as ink the Bay of San Francisco stretched before him.
Like fireflies the lights of vessels scurried through the blackness.
Beyond the black water blinked the countless eyes of San Francisco,
above these the rosy glow which had beckoned since the fall of dusk.
The boat had started before Hiram was aware. Smoothly it slipped along
toward the beacons on the other shore. Hiram breathed the keen salt
breeze in gulps and looked steadily and curiously at the world that
waited for him. Somewhere there, perhaps, the girl of his dreams was
beckoning, and begging him not to be afraid. The boat nosed into her
slip and the crowd swept him ashore, swept him through the Ferry
Building, and, as it went its thousand ways, left him stranded, staring
unbelievingly up Market Street.
Ten minutes he stood there. Thousands pressed by him. The laughter
and grumblings of life buzzed in his uncomprehending ears. No one
noticed him. The continuous _clang-clang-clang_ of the street cars
grew to a rhythmic roar. Strange odors filled his nostrils. What held
him most was the lights--the myriad lights that blinked away in
perspective up Market Street, clusters of them, pillars of them, wheels
of them, stars and squares of them. They all blended into a shower of
diamonds and held him spellbound. Then the clang of the street cars,
the clatter of hoofs on cobbles, the crunch of wheels, the raucous
toots of automobile horns and the purring of the engines, the ceaseless
laughing and murmuring of the crowds, the unfamiliar odors all blended
with the lights, and Hiram Hooker was breathing life, and knew that it
was warm, knew that he loved it, and was unafraid!
At last he sighed and began warily crossing the street from the Ferry
Building to Market Street. He had read of country boys in the city.
He knew enough not to stand in the street and stare. He wisely kept
with a crowd while crossing, and made their experience in braving the
dangers of traffic protect him. He reached the other curb in safety
and started up the long, broad street.
Hiram Hooker will never forget that night. Not once after leaving the
water front did he know his location, and it would have mattered little
if he had. He walked on and on untiringly through an entrancing dream.
He was alone in a great museum--the other human beings were not fellow
spectators, but specimens on exhibition.
The beauty of the women fascinated him. Never in his wildest
imaginings had he fancied such forms and faces. The most beautiful
girl in Bear Valley bore the face of a gargoyle compared with the soft,
creamy faces he saw that night. The flashing, long-lashed eyes, the
red lips, the coils on coils of fluffy hair, the swishing silk,
unfamiliar furs, sparkling jewels, and the slender French heels were
stupefying.
He was growing hungry. He had not eaten a bite since early morning,
and now it was eleven o'clock at night. It appalled him to think of
entering a restaurant and being confronted by one of those
white-skinned, slim-formed divinities he saw flitting from table to
table. He did not know what to order nor how to order it. Even the
smallest places looked imposing with their myriad lights and fixtures
of gilt and white and glittering glass. But he knew he must screw his
courage to it.
There seemed to be a restaurant nearly every other door in the locality
he was now passing through. Not only that, but many electric letters
blazing down the street notified him that he would have no trouble in
finding rooms; rooms by the day or week; rooms and board; rooms 15
cents and up; lodging; rooms with or without board; beds 10 cents and
up. He was on Kearny Street, he knew, but he did not know where Kearny
Street was in relation to the rest of the city.
He strolled along, staring through the windows at the appetizing
displays and searching for a restaurant where none of those
creamy-skinned beings that caused him so much uneasiness were employed.
At last he found one where, it seemed, only smooth-faced men in short
black coats and low-cut vests were serving. His abused stomach goaded
him to slink through the doorway and seek a table.
Just within the door he paused. The place seemed crowded. He was
about to slink out again when a woman's voice said in his ear: "This
side, please--all full here."
He turned quickly, with a gulp, to see a slim, black-clad girl, with
one of those appalling piles of fluffy hair topping her head, whisking
past behind him. Now he noticed that the restaurant was divided in
half by a screen which ran the length of the building, and that one
side--the side he had seen through the window--was for men, and the
other for women. The tables on the men's side were filled. The girl
stood beckoning from a table on the women's side. Other waitresses he
had not seen before were working here. Hiram could not back out now.
His legs trembled as he obeyed the girl's beckoning finger.
He reached the table and stumbled noisily into a seat. The girl, now
holding out a menu card, was looking at him curiously, he felt. The
blood rushed to his face; he dared not look at her. Fumblingly he took
the card and straightway dropped it on the floor.
Together they bent over to regain it. Their bodies touched. Hiram
grew sick. She recovered the card and was standing erect when he
crawfished up from the floor. He was burning up with shame. Again he
took the card, but his glazed eyes could not read a word.
Suddenly he knew that she was speaking.
"I think you'd like a ribber, medium," she was saying, "with French
fries and a dish of peas."
Hiram's head nodded without command. He knew she was leaving the
table, and something forced his eyes to her. She was turning, but her
eyes were looking back into his. In those eyes, big and brown beneath
dark, arched brows and long lashes, there was a look that thrilled him
to his soul. She was more beautiful than any woman he had seen through
all the splendor of the night, and she had flashed to him a spark of
kindness in a maelstrom of misery! Was this the girl who had been
beckoning him on?
She was coming back. She paused beside him and placed a napkin,
silver, bread and butter, and a glass of water before him. He tried to
look up, but could not. He felt her close to him as she arranged the
things before him.
She was speaking again, low, soothingly.
"Awful crowd to-night. We don't usually put single gentlemen on this
side, but I guess you won't mind. Your ribber'll be here in a minute."
She was gone again. He saw her brown hair bobbing toward the kitchen.
He watched the swing doors, eager for her return.
They burst open at last and she came forward and placed a big platter
before him, on which steamed an enormous rib steak, beside this a dish
of French-fried potatoes and a dish of peas.
She glided away once more and did not again come near his table while
he ate. He kept his eyes on her throughout the meal, and continued to
lower them when he thought her about to look toward him. His "ribber"
was good, and he ate the last scrap. Then he paid his bill and hurried
out.
Through the window he looked back for her. She was nowhere in sight.
In a miserable hallway on the second floor of a dingy brick building,
he obeyed the legend over a button in the wall, which read:
"Landlord--push the button." The result was that a squint-eyed man
came from a door marked "office" and yawningly asked him his business.
Hiram wished a twenty-five-cent room, he said. He was taken to one,
which was not a room at all, but a stall--that is, the thin board
partitions did not connect with the ceiling by three feet. The bed was
a single one, and the sheets had brought the proprietor many a
twenty-five-cent piece since coming from the laundry. The additional
furnishings of the "room" were six nails driven in the board wall to
hold one's clothes. From all over the floor came lusty snores and the
mutterings of world-worn men.
With the city smells still in his nostrils, the buzz of city life still
in his ears, and the countless lights twinkling in a frame about the
white face of a brown-haired, red-lipped girl, he fell asleep from
sheer fatigue. But with unaccountable perversity his dreaming mind
dwelt not upon the beautiful vision he had come to love in fifteen
seconds, but on the whispering firs and twinkling streams of Mendocino,
and on a plodding ten-horse jerkline team hauling tanbark over the
mountains to the coast.