PART ONE

TOTHE LADIES OF RUE GIROTBOIS GUILLAUME

TRANSPLANTED

MRS. HAYNE’S boarding-house stood on the corner of Market Street and one of those cross streets which seem to leap down from the heights of San Francisco and empty themselves into the great central thoroughfare that roars from the sandy desert at the base of Twin Peaks to the teeming wharves on the edge of the bay. On the right of Market Street, both on the hills and in the erratic branchings of the central plain, as far as the eye can reach, climbs and swarms modern prosperous San Francisco; of what lies beyond, the less said the better. On the left, at the far southeast, the halo of ancient glory still hovers about Rincon Hill,[A]growing dimmer with the years: few of the many who made the social laws of the Fifties cling to the old houses in the battered gardens; and their children marry and build on the gay hills across the plain. In the plain itself is a thick-set, low-browed, dust-coloured city; “South of Market Street” is ageneric term for hundreds of streets in which dwell thousands of insignificant beings, some of whom promenade the democratic boundary line by gaslight, but rarely venture up the aristocratic slopes. By day or by night Market Street rarely has a moment of rest, of peace; it is a blaze of colour, a medley of sound, shrill, raucous, hollow, furious, a net-work of busy people and vehicles until midnight is over. Every phase of the city’s manifold life is suggested there, every aspect of its cosmopolitanism.

To a little girl of eleven, who dwelt on the third floor of Mrs. Hayne’s boarding-house, Market Street was a panorama of serious study and unvarying interest. She knew every shop window, in all the mutable details of the seasons, she had mingled with the throng unnumbered times, studying that strange patch-work of faces, and wondering if they had any life apart from the scene in which they seemed eternally moving. In those days Market Street typified the world to her; although her school was some eight blocks up the hill it scarcely counted. All the world, she felt convinced, came sooner or later to Market Street, and sauntered or hurried with restless eyes, up and down, up and down. The sun rose at one end and set at the other; it climbed straight across the sky and went to bed behind the Twin Peaks. And the trade winds roared through Market Street as through a mighty cañon, and the sand hills beyond the city seemed to rise bodily and whirl down the great way, making men curse and women jerk their knuckles to their eyes. On summernights the fog came and banked there, and the lights shone through it like fallen stars, and the people looked like wraiths, lost souls condemned to wander unceasingly.

When Mrs. Tarleton was too ill to be left alone, Lee amused herself watching from above the crush and tangle of street cars, hacks, trucks, and drays for which the wide road should have been as wide again, holding her breath as the impatient or timid foot-passengers darted into the transient rifts with bird-like leaps of vision and wild deflections. Occasionally she assumed the part of chorus for her mother, who regarded the prospect beneath her windows with horror.

“Now! She’s started—at last! Oh!whata silly! Any one could have seen that truck with half an eye. She turned back—of course! Now! Now! she’s got to the middle and there’s a funeral just turned the corner! She can’t get back! She’s got to go on. Oh, she’s got behind a man. I wonder if she’ll catch hold of his coat-tails? There—she’s safe! I wonder if she’s afraid of people like she is of Market Street?”

“If I ever thought you crossed that street at the busy time of the day, honey, I should certainly faint or have hysterics,” Mrs. Tarleton was in the habit of remarking at the finish of these thrilling interpretations.

To which Lee invariably replied: “I could go right across without stopping, or getting a crick in my neck either; but I don’t, because I wouldn’t make you nervous for the world. I go way up whenI want to cross and then turn back. It’s nothing like as bad.”

“It is shocking to think that you go out at all unattended; but what cannot be cannot, and you must have air and exercise, poor child!”

Lee, who retained a blurred, albeit rosy impression of her former grandeur, was well pleased with her liberty; and Mrs. Tarleton was not only satisfied that any one who could take such good care of her mother was quite able to take care of herself, but, so dependent was she on the capable child, that she was frequently oblivious to the generation they rounded. Mrs. Tarleton was an invalid, and, although patient, she met her acuter sufferings unresistingly. Lee was so accustomed to be roused in the middle of the night that she had learned to make a poultice or heat a kettle of water while the receding dreams were still lapping at her brain. She dressed her mother in the morning and undressed her at night. She frequently chafed her hands and feet by the hour; and cooked many a dainty Southern dish on the stove in the corner. Miss Hayne, who had a sharp red nose and the anxious air of protracted maidenhood, but whose heart was normal, made it her duty to fetch books for the invalid from the Mercantile Library, and to look in upon her while Lee was at school.

Lee brushed and mended her own clothes, “blacked” her boots with a vigorous arm, and studied her lessons when other little girls were in bed. Fortunately she raked them in with extreme rapidity, or Mrs. Tarleton would have made an effort andremonstrated; but Lee declared that she must have her afternoons out-of-doors when her mother was well and companioned by a novel; and Mrs. Tarleton scrupulously refrained from thwarting the girl whose narrow childhood was so unlike what her own had been, so unlike what the fairies had promised when Hayward Tarleton had been the proudest and most indulgent of fathers.

FOOTNOTE:

[A]This was written before the earthquake and fire of 1906.

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