must be some one there.” Then his voice turned in the direction of
Paul again, and he said laughingly, “Possess your soul and appetite in
patience for a moment, Mr. Bunker; you will be only a course behind us.
But we are lucky in having your company--even at your own discomfort.”
Still more bewildered, Paul turned to his invisible partner. “May I ask
where YOU are dining?”
“Certainly; at home in Curzon Street,” returned the pretty voice. “It
was raining so, I did not go out.”
“And--Lord Billington?” faltered Paul.
“Oh, he's in Scotland--at his own place.”
“Then, in fact, nobody is dining here at all,” said Paul desperately.
There was a slight pause, and then the voice responded, with a touch of
startled suggestion in it: “Good heavens, Mr. Bunker! Is it possible you
don't know we're dining by telephone?”
“By what?”
“Telephone. Yes. We're a telephonic dinner-party. We are dining in our
own houses; but, being all friends, we're switched on to each other,
and converse exactly as we would at table. It saves a great trouble and
expense, for any one of us can give the party, and the poorest can equal
the most extravagant. People who are obliged to diet can partake of
their own slops at home, and yet mingle with the gourmets without
awkwardness or the necessity of apology. We are spared the spectacle, at
least, of those who eat and drink too much. We can switch off a bore at
once. We can retire when we are fatigued, without leaving a blank space
before the others. And all this without saying anything of the higher
spiritual and intellectual effect--freed from material grossness of
appetite and show--which the dinner party thus attains. But you are
surely joking! You, an American, and not know it! Why, it comes from
Boston. Haven't you read that book, 'Jumping a Century'? It's by an
American.”
A strange illumination came upon Paul. Where had he heard something like
this before? But at the same moment his thoughts were diverted by the
material entrance of a footman, bearing a silver salver with his dinner.
It was part of his singular experience that the visible entrance of this
real, commonplace mortal--the only one he had seen--in the midst of this
voiceless solitude was distinctly unreal, and had all the effect of an
apparition. He distrusted it and the dishes before him. But his lively
partner's voice was now addressing an unseen occupant of the next chair.
Had she got tired of his ignorance, or was it feminine tact to enable
him to eat something? He accepted the latter hypothesis, and tried to
eat. But he felt himself following the fascinating voice in all the
charm of its youthful and spiritual inflections. Taking advantage of its
momentary silence, he said gently,--
“I confess my ignorance, and am willing to admit all you claim for this
wonderful invention. But do you think it compensates for the loss of the
individual person? Take my own case--if you will not think me personal.
I have never had the pleasure of seeing you; do you believe that I
am content with only that suggestion of your personality which the
satisfaction of hearing your voice affords me?”
There was a pause, and then a very mischievous ring in the voice
that replied: “It certainly is a personal question, and it is another
blessing of this invention that you'll never know whether I am blushing
or not; but I forgive you, for I never before spoke to any one I had
never seen--and I suppose it's confusion. But do you really think you
would know me--the REAL one--any better? It is the real person who
thinks and speaks, not the outward semblance that we see, which
very often unfairly either attracts or repels us? We can always SHOW
ourselves at our best, but we must, at last, reveal our true colors
through our thoughts and speech. Isn't it better to begin with the real
thing first?”
“I hope, at least, to have the privilege of judging by myself,” said
Paul gallantly. “You will not be so cruel as not to let me see you
elsewhere, otherwise I shall feel as if I were in some dream, and will
certainly be opposed to your preference for realities.”
“I am not certain if the dream would not be more interesting to you,”
said the voice laughingly. “But I think your hostess is already saying
'good-by.' You know everybody goes at once at this kind of party; the
ladies don't retire first, and the gentlemen join them afterwards. In
another moment we'll ALL be switched off; but Sir William wants me to
tell you that his coachman will drive you to your uncle's, unless
you prefer to try and make yourself comfortable for the night here.
Good-by!”
The voices around him seemed to grow fainter, and then utterly cease.
The lights suddenly leaped up, went out, and left him in complete
darkness. He attempted to rise, but in doing so overset the dishes
before him, which slid to the floor. A cold air seemed to blow across
his feet. The “good-by” was still ringing in his ears as he straightened
himself to find he was in his railway carriage, whose door had just been
opened for a young lady who was entering the compartment from a wayside
station. “Good-by,” she repeated to the friend who was seeing her off.
The Writer of Stories hurriedly straightened himself, gathered up the
magazines and papers that had fallen from his lap, and glanced at the
station walls. The old illustrations glanced back at him! He looked at
his watch; he had been asleep just ten minutes!
BOHEMIAN DAYS IN SAN FRANCISCO
It is but just to the respectable memory of San Francisco that in these
vagrant recollections I should deprecate at once any suggestion that the
levity of my title described its dominant tone at any period of my early
experiences. On the contrary, it was a singular fact that while the
rest of California was swayed by an easy, careless unconventionalism, or
swept over by waves of emotion and sentiment, San Francisco preserved
an intensely material and practical attitude, and even a certain austere
morality. I do not, of course, allude to the brief days of '49, when it
was a straggling beach of huts and stranded hulks, but to the earlier
stages of its development into the metropolis of California. Its first
tottering steps in that direction were marked by a distinct gravity and
decorum. Even during the period when the revolver settled small private
difficulties, and Vigilance Committees adjudicated larger public ones,
an unmistakable seriousness and respectability was the ruling sign of
its governing class. It was not improbable that under the reign of the
Committee the lawless and vicious class were more appalled by the moral
spectacle of several thousand black-coated, serious-minded business men
in embattled procession than by mere force of arms, and one “suspect”--a
prize-fighter--is known to have committed suicide in his cell after
confrontation with his grave and passionless shopkeeping judges. Even
that peculiar quality of Californian humor which was apt to mitigate
the extravagances of the revolver and the uncertainties of poker had no
place in the decorous and responsible utterance of San Francisco. The
press was sober, materialistic, practical--when it was not severely
admonitory of existing evil; the few smaller papers that indulged in
levity were considered libelous and improper. Fancy was displaced by
heavy articles on the revenues of the State and inducements to the
investment of capital. Local news was under an implied censorship which
suppressed anything that might tend to discourage timid or cautious
capital. Episodes of romantic lawlessness or pathetic incidents of
mining life were carefully edited--with the comment that these things
belonged to the past, and that life and property were now “as safe in
San Francisco as in New York or London.”
Wonder-loving visitors in quest of scenes characteristic of the
civilization were coldly snubbed with this assurance. Fires, floods, and
even seismic convulsions were subjected to a like grimly materialistic
optimism. I have a vivid recollection of a ponderous editorial on one
of the severer earthquakes, in which it was asserted that only the
UNEXPECTEDNESS of the onset prevented San Francisco from meeting it in
a way that would be deterrent of all future attacks. The unconsciousness
of the humor was only equaled by the gravity with which it was
received by the whole business community. Strangely enough, this grave
materialism flourished side by side with--and was even sustained by--a
narrow religious strictness more characteristic of the Pilgrim Fathers
of a past century than the Western pioneers of the present. San
Francisco was early a city of churches and church organizations to which
the leading men and merchants belonged. The lax Sundays of the dying
Spanish race seemed only to provoke a revival of the rigors of the
Puritan Sabbath. With the Spaniard and his Sunday afternoon bullfight
scarcely an hour distant, the San Francisco pulpit thundered against
Sunday picnics. One of the popular preachers, declaiming upon the
practice of Sunday dinner-giving, averred that when he saw a guest in
his best Sunday clothes standing shamelessly upon the doorstep of his
host, he felt like seizing him by the shoulder and dragging him from
that threshold of perdition.
Against the actual heathen the feeling was even stronger, and reached
its climax one Sunday when a Chinaman was stoned to death by a crowd of
children returning from Sunday-school. I am offering these examples
with no ethical purpose, but merely to indicate a singular contradictory
condition which I do not think writers of early Californian history have
fairly recorded. It is not my province to suggest any theory for
these appalling exceptions to the usual good-humored lawlessness and
extravagance of the rest of the State. They may have been essential
agencies to the growth and evolution of the city. They were undoubtedly
sincere. The impressions I propose to give of certain scenes and
incidents of my early experience must, therefore, be taken as purely
personal and Bohemian, and their selection as equally individual and
vagrant. I am writing of what interested me at the time, though not
perhaps of what was more generally characteristic of San Francisco.
I had been there a week--an idle week, spent in listless outlook for
employment; a full week in my eager absorption of the strange life
around me and a photographic sensitiveness to certain scenes and
incidents of those days, which start out of my memory to-day as freshly
as the day they impressed me.
One of these recollections is of “steamer night,” as it was called,--the
night of “steamer day,”--preceding the departure of the mail steamship
with the mails for “home.” Indeed, at that time San Francisco may be
said to have lived from steamer day to steamer day; bills were made due
on that day, interest computed to that period, and accounts settled.
The next day was the turning of a new leaf: another essay to fortune,
another inspiration of energy. So recognized was the fact that even
ordinary changes of condition, social and domestic, were put aside until
AFTER steamer day. “I'll see what I can do after next steamer day” was
the common cautious or hopeful formula. It was the “Saturday night” of
many a wage-earner--and to him a night of festivity. The thoroughfares
were animated and crowded; the saloons and theatres full. I can recall
myself at such times wandering along the City Front, as the business
part of San Francisco was then known. Here the lights were burning all
night, the first streaks of dawn finding the merchants still at their
counting-house desks. I remember the dim lines of warehouses lining the
insecure wharves of rotten piles, half filled in--that had ceased to
be wharves, but had not yet become streets,--their treacherous yawning
depths, with the uncertain gleam of tarlike mud below, at times still
vocal with the lap and gurgle of the tide. I remember the weird stories
of disappearing men found afterward imbedded in the ooze in which they
had fallen and gasped their life away. I remember the two or three
ships, still left standing where they were beached a year or two before,
built in between warehouses, their bows projecting into the roadway.
There was the dignity of the sea and its boundless freedom in their
beautiful curves, which the abutting houses could not destroy, and even
something of the sea's loneliness in the far-spaced ports and cabin
windows lit up by the lamps of the prosaic landsmen who plied their
trades behind them. One of these ships, transformed into a hotel,
retained its name, the Niantic, and part of its characteristic interior
unchanged. I remember these ships' old tenants--the rats--who had
increased and multiplied to such an extent that at night they fearlessly
crossed the wayfarer's path at every turn, and even invaded the gilded
saloons of Montgomery Street. In the Niantic their pit-a-pat was met
on every staircase, and it was said that sometimes in an excess of
sociability they accompanied the traveler to his room. In the early
“cloth-and-papered” houses--so called because the ceilings were not
plastered, but simply covered by stretched and whitewashed cloth--their
scamperings were plainly indicated in zigzag movements of the sagging
cloth, or they became actually visible by finally dropping through the
holes they had worn in it! I remember the house whose foundations were
made of boxes of plug tobacco--part of a jettisoned cargo--used instead
of more expensive lumber; and the adjacent warehouse where the trunks of
the early and forgotten “forty-niners” were stored, and--never claimed
by their dead or missing owners--were finally sold at auction. I
remember the strong breath of the sea over all, and the constant onset
of the trade winds which helped to disinfect the deposit of dirt and
grime, decay and wreckage, which were stirred up in the later evolutions
of the city.
Or I recall, with the same sense of youthful satisfaction and unabated
wonder, my wanderings through the Spanish Quarter, where three centuries
of quaint customs, speech, and dress were still preserved; where the
proverbs of Sancho Panza were still spoken in the language of Cervantes,
and the high-flown illusions of the La Manchian knight still a part
of the Spanish Californian hidalgo's dream. I recall the more modern
“Greaser,” or Mexican--his index finger steeped in cigarette stains;
his velvet jacket and his crimson sash; the many-flounced skirt and lace
manta of his women, and their caressing intonations--the one musical
utterance of the whole hard-voiced city. I suppose I had a boy's
digestion and bluntness of taste in those days, for the combined odor of
tobacco, burned paper, and garlic, which marked that melodious breath,
did not affect me.
Perhaps from my Puritan training I experienced a more fearful joy in the
gambling saloons. They were the largest and most comfortable, even as
they were the most expensively decorated rooms in San Francisco. Here
again the gravity and decorum which I have already alluded to were
present at that earlier period--though perhaps from concentration of
another kind. People staked and lost their last dollar with a calm
solemnity and a resignation that was almost Christian. The oaths,
exclamations, and feverish interruptions which often characterized more
dignified assemblies were absent here. There was no room for the lesser
vices; there was little or no drunkenness; the gaudily dressed and
painted women who presided over the wheels of fortune or performed on
the harp and piano attracted no attention from those ascetic players.
The man who had won ten thousand dollars and the man who had lost
everything rose from the table with equal silence and imperturbability.
I never witnessed any tragic sequel to those losses; I never heard of
any suicide on account of them. Neither can I recall any quarrel or
murder directly attributable to this kind of gambling. It must be
remembered that these public games were chiefly rouge et noir, monte,
faro, or roulette, in which the antagonist was Fate, Chance, Method, or
the impersonal “bank,” which was supposed to represent them all; there
was no individual opposition or rivalry; nobody challenged the decision
of the “croupier,” or dealer.
I remember a conversation at the door of one saloon which was as
characteristic for its brevity as it was a type of the prevailing
stoicism. “Hello!” said a departing miner, as he recognized a brother
miner coming in, “when did you come down?” “This morning,” was the
reply. “Made a strike on the bar?” suggested the first speaker. “You
bet!” said the other, and passed in. I chanced an hour later to be at
the same place as they met again--their relative positions changed.
“Hello! Whar now?” said the incomer. “Back to the bar.” “Cleaned out?”
“You bet!” Not a word more explained a common situation.
My first youthful experience at those tables was an accidental one.
I was watching roulette one evening, intensely absorbed in the mere
movement of the players. Either they were so preoccupied with the game,
or I was really older looking than my actual years, but a bystander laid
his hand familiarly on my shoulder, and said, as to an ordinary habitue,
“Ef you're not chippin' in yourself, pardner, s'pose you give ME a
show.” Now I honestly believe that up to that moment I had no intention,
nor even a desire, to try my own fortune. But in the embarrassment of
the sudden address I put my hand in my pocket, drew out a coin, and laid
it, with an attempt at carelessness, but a vivid consciousness that I
was blushing, upon a vacant number. To my horror I saw that I had
put down a large coin--the bulk of my possessions! I did not flinch,
however; I think any boy who reads this will understand my feeling; it
was not only my coin but my manhood at stake. I gazed with a miserable
show of indifference at the players, at the chandelier--anywhere but at
the dreadful ball spinning round the wheel. There was a pause; the game
was declared, the rake rattled up and down, but still I did not look at
the table. Indeed, in my inexperience of the game and my embarrassment,
I doubt if I should have known if I had won or not. I had made up my
mind that I should lose, but I must do so like a man, and, above all,
without giving the least suspicion that I was a greenhorn. I even
affected to be listening to the music. The wheel spun again; the game
was declared, the rake was busy, but I did not move. At last the man
I had displaced touched me on the arm and whispered, “Better make a
straddle and divide your stake this time.” I did not understand him, but
as I saw he was looking at the board, I was obliged to look, too. I drew
back dazed and bewildered! Where my coin had lain a moment before was a
glittering heap of gold.
My stake had doubled, quadrupled, and doubled again. I did not know how
much then---I do not know now--it may have been not more than three or
four hundred dollars--but it dazzled and frightened me. “Make your
game, gentlemen,” said the croupier monotonously. I thought he looked
at me--indeed, everybody seemed to be looking at me--and my companion
repeated his warning. But here I must again appeal to the boyish reader
in defense of my idiotic obstinacy. To have taken advice would have
shown my youth. I shook my head--I could not trust my voice. I smiled,
but with a sinking heart, and let my stake remain. The ball again sped
round the wheel, and stopped. There was a pause. The croupier indolently
advanced his rake and swept my whole pile with others into the bank!
I had lost it all. Perhaps it may be difficult for me to explain why I
actually felt relieved, and even to some extent triumphant, but I seemed
to have asserted my grown-up independence--possibly at the cost of
reducing the number of my meals for days; but what of that! I was a man!
I wish I could say that it was a lesson to me. I am afraid it was not.
It was true that I did not gamble again, but then I had no especial
desire to--and there was no temptation. I am afraid it was an incident
without a moral. Yet it had one touch characteristic of the period which
I like to remember. The man who had spoken to me, I think, suddenly
realized, at the moment of my disastrous coup, the fact of my extreme
youth. He moved toward the banker, and leaning over him whispered a few
words. The banker looked up, half impatiently, half kindly--his hand
straying tentatively toward the pile of coin. I instinctively knew what
he meant, and, summoning my determination, met his eyes with all the
indifference I could assume, and walked away.
I had at that period a small room at the top of a house owned by a
distant relation--a second or third cousin, I think. He was a man of
independent and original character, had a Ulyssean experience of men and
cities, and an old English name of which he was proud. While in London
he had procured from the Heralds' College his family arms, whose
crest was stamped upon a quantity of plate he had brought with him to
California. The plate, together with an exceptionally good cook, which
he had also brought, and his own epicurean tastes, he utilized in the
usual practical Californian fashion by starting a rather expensive
half-club, half-restaurant in the lower part of the building--which he
ruled somewhat autocratically, as became his crest. The restaurant was
too expensive for me to patronize, but I saw many of its frequenters as
well as those who had rooms at the club. They were men of very
distinct personality; a few celebrated, and nearly all notorious. They
represented a Bohemianism--if such it could be called--less innocent
than my later experiences. I remember, however, one handsome young
fellow whom I used to meet occasionally on the staircase, who captured
my youthful fancy. I met him only at midday, as he did not rise till
late, and this fact, with a certain scrupulous elegance and neatness in
his dress, ought to have made me suspect that he was a gambler. In my
inexperience it only invested him with a certain romantic mystery.
One morning as I was going out to my very early breakfast at a cheap
Italian cafe on Long Wharf, I was surprised to find him also descending
the staircase. He was scrupulously dressed even at that early hour,
but I was struck by the fact that he was all in black, and his slight
figure, buttoned to the throat in a tightly fitting frock coat, gave, I
fancied, a singular melancholy to his pale Southern face. Nevertheless,
he greeted me with more than his usual serene cordiality, and I
remembered that he looked up with a half-puzzled, half-amused expression
at the rosy morning sky as he walked a few steps with me down the
deserted street. I could not help saying that I was astonished to
see him up so early, and he admitted that it was a break in his usual
habits, but added with a smiling significance I afterwards remembered
that it was “an even chance if he did it again.” As we neared the street
corner a man in a buggy drove up impatiently. In spite of the driver's
evident haste, my handsome acquaintance got in leisurely, and, lifting
his glossy hat to me with a pleasant smile, was driven away. I have
a very lasting recollection of his face and figure as the buggy
disappeared down the empty street. I never saw him again. It was not
until a week later that I knew that an hour after he left me that
morning he was lying dead in a little hollow behind the Mission
Dolores--shot through the heart in a duel for which he had risen so
early.