Chapter XXIII: Part III (5)

Isabel handed over her purse mechanically. "Victoria and Elton have plenty, I shall not need it," she said. But the desire to save Mrs. Stone's feelings was superfluous. The purse disappeared with a polite "Thanks, dear," and Paula hastily changed the subject, lest the luxury of a carriage for the return to Russian Hill should appeal to Isabel. "Of course you'll go back to the ranch where you can be comfortable," she remarked.

"I have no plan. The launch is ready for us, but it will depend upon the others. Should you care to go to the ranch? I don't suppose you are in any danger from fire, out here, but things may be very uncomfortable for a time."

"Oh, I'll take the risk," said Paula, easily. "I should be bored to death up there, and here there are so many people to talk to. I have heard about fifty experiences this morning, and all fearfully interesting. I guess we'll make out. It will only be for a day or two anyhow, and everybody that has food in the house is offering to share with the rest. I never have much on hand, but Mrs. Brooks, who lives under me, always keeps her store-room filled, and has invited me to lunch. You had better stop, too."

"I have promised Victoria to return. Just suppose the fire should come out here, what should you do?"

"Oh, take a mattress or two out to the Presidio. It's not far, and would be a regular picnic. But it won't."

"Well, I'll go, then. If you change your mind you can have the launch. Only come to me first. Mr. Clatt is standing over it with a six-shooter."

"Thanks. Sorry you won't come in. Lys won't sit down for about a week, he's _that_ nervous, so you'll probably see him up on the Hill."

Isabel started for home, and when she reached Fillmore Street discovered that she was tired. It was then that she regretted not having reserved a dollar or two; but no doubt Victoria was at home by this time. She found a livery-stable, and asked the proprietor, lounging in the entrance, if he could send her to the foot of her bluff.

"Yes, for fifty dollars," he said, coolly. Fillmore Street was a prosperous slum, another brief level between two steep acclivities. It was not yet aware of the proud destiny that awaited it, that for the next year or more it was to be the teeming centre of the abbreviated city's life, but there never was a time when it was burdened with manners, or the grand point of view. When Isabel stared, the man continued: "Yes, ma'am! Fifty's the ticket. And two hours later it may be five hundred. Some people are getting mighty nervous, and I've let five hacks and buggies already, at my own figure, to them as wants to get out of town quick."

Isabel turned her back on him, and climbed and descended again. Lower Van Ness Avenue was even more torn and lumpy than where she had crossed it at California Street, and hundreds of the South of Market Street refugees were sitting or lying in the middle of the street, worn out but stolid. Just beyond, she caught up with a teamster, who, noticing the fatigue in her eyes, stopped his horses and offered her a "lift," provided she was "going his way."

Isabel gratefully climbed to his high perch, after stating that she had no money, and being royally silenced.

"Oh, shucks!" said the man. "I guess this is the time to do other folks a good turn. You'd do the same for me, I'll bet. What do you think of this business, anyhow?"

Isabel replied hopefully, but he shook his head.

"City's doomed. Far as Van Ness, anyhow. Nothin' ain't goin' to stop that fire but water, and water's just what they haven't got. Lord! to think of that bay on three sides of the city. Talk about the Ancient Mariner. I don't live in the city, but I'll be sorry to see it go. Lord! warn't that a shake? I was flung plumb out of bed and against the wall, and the house next to mine, or the one I war in, went plumb out into the middle of the street. Lord! what a yellin' there was inside! Nobody hurt, but one woman went plumb out'r her mind. They've got her tied to the bed-post now. And what a lootin' of saloons there was until the soldiers marched in! Now, I hear, that there mayor has issued an order, which is to be pasted up all over, that any man caught lootin' anything, saloons or otherwise, is to be shot dead and no questions asked. Good job, that. I guess we're in for high old times, miss. I'm makin' for Oakland, where I live. I brought in a load last evenin' and stopped over. Some of my friends live down by the ferry, and I'll pick them up, if they want to get out. Don't you want to come along? My wife and me'll be glad to put you up if you can't do any better."

Isabel thanked him warmly, and assured him that she would be safe in any case, then discovered a loose half-dollar in the pocket of her jacket. The man accepted it philosophically.

"You were welcome to the ride, but I'm not the one to say nay to a bit of silver so long as you say you're not hard up yourself. Guess it'll come in handy. Well, s'long. Good luck to you. I've enjoyed your society very much."

XII

The teamster had deposited her at Taylor and Jackson streets, and as she passed the Trennahans' door it occurred to her to ask how they fared. The house appeared to be uninjured, but the electric bell was useless, and it was not until she had knocked several times that an old Mexican servant answered the summons. Then she learned that the family had left for Menlo Park in their touring car immediately after the earthquake, as the boys were at the country-house with their tutor. The woman had been maid for many years to Mrs. Polk and had lived with Magdalena since her aunt's death. She was a privileged character, and during Isabel's visit had accepted her relationship to the house of Yorba and waited on her personally.

"So tired you look," she said. "Come in, no?" Then, as the invitation was declined, she leaned her stout shapeless figure against the door-frame and begged Isabel for an account of her experience. Isabel gave it briefly, and the old woman shook her head. "So terreeblay thing!" she sighed. "Seventy years I live in California and this the more bad earthquake I never feel. My mother she feel the great earthquake of 1812 in the south, when the padres plant a long straight branch in the middle of the square of San Gabriel, and it never stop shake for four months. Ay yi, California! I theenk we all go into the bay this morning, and I fall down twice when I run to see how little Senorita Inez she feeling. Ay yi!"

"Why did you not go to the country?"

"And who take care the house? The car come back bime-by for the other servants, but I no go. Si, I can go in the train--then--perhaps. But no in automobilia. Is devil, no less."

"Well, if you should be frightened come up to me," and Isabel went on hurriedly to her own home, suddenly reminded of the uncertainty of her relative's nerves. But Victoria was standing on the porch staring outward with such an intensity of gaze that she took no notice of Isabel's approach. And when Isabel reached her side, she too stood silent for a time. _The Call_ Building was on fire. This square tower of seventeen stories and a dome, with some seventy windows on each side, had caught fire at the top, and as the flames devoured the contents of one floor as quickly as possible that they might dart down another flight and gorge themselves anew, in an incredibly short time the two hundred windows in sight, and no doubt those in the rear, were spouting flames like the mouths of so many cannon: each sharply defined, owing to the indestructible nature of the walls. Volumes of white smoke poured upward to be lost in the black clouds above. At times the fire and smoke, on either side, torn by the wind, seemed to dance and gyrate in a Bacchanalian revel, taking monstrous forms, that exploded in showers of sparks, glittering like the fabled California sands. Above the burning district the smoke clouds changed form constantly. Sometimes they reeled along like colossal water-spouts. The roar of the fire waxed louder as one listened to it: a deep persistent energetic roar, as of a sea climbing over a land its time had come to devour.

Suddenly a curtain of smoke swept down and obliterated the scene, conveying a sense of respite, challenging the memory, although a moment later it was shot with a million sparks.

Victoria announced briefly that they were to have lunch of a sort, but for her part she would prefer a bath.

A bath, however, was out of the question, and, without washing the cinders from their faces and hands, they sat down to beefsteak fried on one of the oil-stoves used for heating the Mansard story, and canned vegetables. That much indulgence they might have permitted themselves, but human nature is prone to extremes, and they were tuned to a severe economy that might embrace more than water for some weeks to come.

Isabel sent a plate of sandwiches and a bottle of beer down to Mr. Clatt, and the servant returned with the information that the faithful wharfinger was sitting on a chair in front of the launch, a pistol on his lap; and that already a small crowd was crouched like buzzards in front of him. Isabel asked Victoria if she cared to retreat, but the older woman shook her head.

"Do you?" she asked.

"Oh no. I shall remain until the last minute, certainly until I know what Elton's plans are. If the launch is seized we can go down to Fort Mason or out to the Presidio. Every one is in the same boat. I should hate being too comfortable. But I don't think you should sleep out-of-doors. It is always damp at night."

"I can stand as much as you can. I am quite fit again. And this is the first time, for heaven knows how many years, that anything has interested me. I shall stay till the last minute; and surely no fire could climb this hill. Did I tell you that Mr. Trennahan came up at once and asked me to go to Menlo Park with them? Ungrateful--but I have not thought of it since."

Isabel announced her intention to take a nap. "No one knows what may happen to-night," she said. "And I feel as if I had not slept for a week."

She fell asleep at once. Lady Victoria awakened her by bursting unceremoniously into her room.

"You must get up and look!" she cried. "The Palace Hotel and the other big newspaper buildings are on fire. The sight is something awful--and wonderful."

Isabel ran to the window. All the valley was a rolling sea of flame, and all space seemed to be filled with enormous surging billows of smoke. From every window of the Palace Hotel, an immense square building of some seven stories, from the great newspaper buildings, and from other brick and stone structures near by, tongues of flame were leaping; the wooden buildings were mere shapeless furnaces. Again a volume of smoke descended, and for the moment nothing was to be seen but a red blur somewhere in the midst of rolling black.

Victoria communicated to Isabel the information she had received from the neighbors, always coming and going. People were pouring out of the city, not only by the Southern Pacific boats to Oakland, and indirectly to Berkeley and Alameda, but by freight-boats and launches to the Marin towns. They were obliged to make a long detour round the base of the northern hills, as the water-front and the streets behind were a roaring furnace, although the fires had not crossed East Street. All houses in the towns across the bay had opened to the refugees, tents had been erected in the public squares, and emergency hospitals had been started before nine o'clock. The militia had been called out to assist the regulars, and also the Cadet Battalion of the State University. A Citizens' Patrol had been formed to protect the still unburned districts, each man provided with arms at the Presidio. People on the lower slopes were now in full flight towards the western parks and hills, as well as the Presidio, many being under the impression that the ferry-boats were not running. It was doubtful if a hotel or a boarding-house would harbor a soul that night; not east of Van Ness Avenue, at least, and many in that region were preparing to sleep in the Park and squares, lest the fire attack them from the south. Refugees, exhausted, were lying on the doorsteps and in the streets of the Western Addition.

Victoria relapsed into silence and Isabel gazed down upon the beautiful terrible scene--the curtain had rolled upward again--at the enormous tongues of flame leaping from every window, the showers of golden sparks, the swooping and soaring clouds, many of them white, with convoluted edges, and faintly tinted like the day smoke of Vesuvius. These curled white masses rolled among the black waves towards the west, and the low deep roar waxed louder as one listened to it.

All the wooden bow-windows of the Palace Hotel had been eaten off, but it would be hours before the stoutly built old hotel ceased to feed the flames. Sometimes sheets of fire seemed to drive from the apertures across the great width of Market Street, to be beaten back by a solid wall of flame. In the intense clear yellow light that bathed the street Isabel could see the twisted car tracks. More than once she fancied she saw a prostrate body, but it may have been an achievement of the shifting flames, and certainly nothing living moved down there. The mounted officers and their men were patrolling the blocks along all the northern front of the fire.

"Are you not in the least worried about Elton?" asked Isabel, abruptly.

"Not a bit. I never worried about him when he was a child. He was always the most agile and ready youngster I ever saw."

"But he is very venturesome. He might be caught in one of those furnaces as well as another, or killed by falling bricks."

"He is a man of destiny," said Victoria indifferently. "He will live to accomplish what he was born for."

Isabel, in truth, found worry as impossible as any other common emotion, nevertheless thought it odd that he did not come to them for a moment or send a message. She could appreciate his wholly masculine mood, his temporary indifference to the charms of her sex, but he had an ingrained sense of responsibility, and was more considerate than the average man.

Lady Victoria returned to her vantage-point on the veranda, and Isabel went down to the garden fence where the three Japs were standing, and asked them if they intended to remain--half the servants had already fled from the city. Two replied that later in the day they should go to Oakland where they had friends. Isabel told them that she should not part with what little money there was in the house, and they answered politely that they expected to wait for their wages. The oldest of the three, a respectable man of thirty, who looked like, and no doubt was, a student, announced his intention to remain.

"I can cook," he added. "Not well, but perhaps well enough for a few days. And perhaps if we are driven out I may go to the country with you. I should be willing to work for anything you could pay me until things were restored to their normal condition--if you would be good enough to give me my evenings for study."

Isabel promised him the protection of her ranch-house, and stood talking to him for some time. His English was unusually correct and his remarks were more intelligent than those of the average man of her acquaintance. He told her something of Japanese earthquakes, and was good enough to add that he had never felt quite so violent or so peculiar a series of earth movements as California had achieved that morning. He was curious to see the result as recorded on the seismograph, and to know at what hour it registered in Japan.

"I think Professor Omori will come over," he said, modestly. "This earthquake will interest him very much. He will wish to study the ground."

"Were you not frightened?" asked Isabel, curiously.

"I appreciated the danger, but frightened--no, miss, I think I have never felt frightened. But I do not like fire. I have seen Tokio burn. I shall walk about constantly and see that it does not steal upon us from the north or west. Some silly person might make a fire, and all the chimneys must be cracked."

"I feel much relieved to know that you will patrol," said Isabel, wondering if she were being gracious to a prince. "Would you mind going up to the top of the hill and asking some one if he knows whether all the injured were taken from the Mechanics' Pavilion? It is blazing like a wood pile."

He went up the hill and returned with the information that all the patients, as well as the doctors and nurses, had been taken out, the last of them while the roof was blazing, and conveyed in automobiles to other emergency hospitals far away; and that the prisoners in the City Hall had been transported, manacled, to the army prisons in the same manner.

"One of the gentlemen said he saw Mr. Gwynne running an automobile full of nurses and patients--one of Mr. Hofer's machines," he added. "And that he returned twice at least. All the young men that own machines are acting very well, they say, transporting the injured, and making themselves generally useful. Many are on the roofs of the greater buildings with the firemen fighting the fire with blankets, and hose attached to the cisterns. A few buildings have been saved in that way, but not many, and more or less of the water has to be turned on the men, who catch fire repeatedly from the sparks."

Isabel went into the house and put on her hat. "I cannot keep still any longer," she said to Victoria, a moment later. "And now I am quite rested. I shall go down and see Mrs. Hofer, and reconnoitre for myself. If Elton should come, ask him to wait for me here--he must need a rest--or walk down Taylor Street."

XIII

She found her lower neighbors still sitting on their doorsteps or standing in groups, but was told that many more had already gone out to the Western Addition with their valuables, fearing that the fire might come up the southern or eastern slopes before night. A large touring car was standing in front of the Hofers' door. The children and their nurses were in it, and Mr. Toole came out and took his place as Isabel reached the house. He greeted her for the first time since she had known him without a smile; and he looked very old and sad. Isabel heard Mrs. Hofer's light high rapid voice within. She was standing in the large drawing-room, giving orders to a group of servants. When she saw Isabel she cried out as if confronted with a ghost.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, but not kissing her as usual; her mind apparently was divided into many parts. "I am relieved to see that _you_ are all right. I didn't know what might have happened up State. Did you _ever_? Well!--Great old country this. Talk about living on the side of Vesuvius. And now everything is going, everything!"

"I keep hoping for a change of wind."

"Perhaps, but I've pretty well given it up. We are in disgrace to-day, sure enough. And anyhow Mr. Hofer has lost millions, millions! However--" She recovered herself with a bound. "He made them, so I guess he can make more. And do you know what he's thinking about already? He burst in here half an hour ago--as black as your hat--with orders that I should take the family down to Burlingame at once, and then began talking about the Burnham plans, and the opportunity to clean up the city politically. There's a raging idealist for you. And do you know what he and Mr. Gwynne are up to now? Carrying dynamite, no less, between Fort Mason and the fire line. The two of them are running an automobile apiece and have put themselves at the disposal of the authorities. Nice thing for me to be thinking of all night. Don't you want to come along?"

Isabel shook her head.

"Well, I'll move on then--before they change their minds and impress my car. So far I have a gracious permit to keep it. The servants have buried the silver and the pictures, but--" She glanced at the beautiful frieze, which, without its electric lights, looked a mere blur of blue and black, then shrugged her shoulders. "I just won't believe my house will go," she said, defiantly; "not till the last minute, anyhow. When the fire's over, or Mr. Hofer lets me, I'll come back and do something for those poor wretches that have been burned out. Gather up what food there is to be had in the country, and start an eating station or something. Mr. Hofer says food will come pouring in from every direction presently, and then they will need organizers. I'm good at that. Can I rely on you? It will be an experience, anyhow; and of course it's my place to do that sort of thing. Besides, I do feel terribly sorry for those poor things, and I won't be able to sit still for a month."

"You can count on me. When this is over I shall find you somehow."

"Oh, don't worry. The newspapers won't miss anything. They're burned out, but I hear that the editors are already over in Oakland scurrying round after a plant. Well, _adios_. If you say the word I'll send the car back for you--although I doubt if it would pass a squad without those children in it. I suppose it would hold several tons of dynamite! Heigh-ho, I suppose it is all in the day's work. What can you expect if you live in an earthquake country?" They had reached the pavement and she put her lips close to Isabel's ear. "I'd like to get out of the damned place and never see it again," she whispered. "I'll keep a stiff upper lip, but those are my sentiments and I guess I have company."

She stepped lightly into the car, nodded with a grim gayety, and in another moment had disappeared round the corner of Taylor and California streets.

Isabel started down the hill, and almost immediately met Anne Montgomery. She had not recognized her as they approached each other, for the glare was in her eyes; but Miss Montgomery ran forward and kissed her.

"What on earth did you come to this God-forsaken place for, when you had the country to stay in?" she demanded. "Oh, Lady Victoria? I did not know she was here. Just come with me and look at a sight."

She put her arm through Isabel's and led her rapidly for several blocks along California Street, then down Hyde towards moving columns of people. The fire was far south of these refugees as yet, but they looked down every cross street and saw it; and more than once during their slow flight they had seen the soldiers at the visible end of each long vista move a block farther north. "I tramped a long way with them," said Miss Montgomery, "carrying things for a woman I never saw before. Then a man took the burden over and I started up the hill to see how some friends were faring."

From this point they could hear the roar and crackle of the fire and the crashing of walls; but even more formidable was that tramping of thousands of feet, the scraping of trunks and furniture on the tracks and stones. Isabel, still feeling like a palimpsest, lingered for an hour looking at these refugees. They were vastly different, in all but their impotence, from those of the early morning. Hundreds were from the "boarding-house district"; others were householders; a large number, no doubt, owned their carriages or automobiles, but those had been impressed long since. It was a well and a carefully dressed crowd, for by this time nearly every one had recovered from the shock of the earthquake; many forgotten it, no doubt, in the new horror. They had not the blank expression of the poor, dazed by the second calamity following so close upon the heels of the first, but their lips were pressed, eyes were straining towards the distant goal, and all would have been pale but for the glare of the fire. Fortunately for most of them, men as well as women, they had either children, pets, or even more cumbersome belongings to claim their immediate attention; no time for either thought or despair. They pushed trunks to which skates had been attached, or pulled them by ropes; they trundled sewing-machines and pieces of small furniture, laden with bundles. Many carried pillow-cases, into which they had stuffed a favorite dress and hat, an extra pair of boots and a change of underclothing, some valuable bibelot or bundle of documents; to say nothing of their jewels and what food they could lay hands on. Several women wore their furs, as an easier way of saving them, and children carried their dolls. Their state of mind was elemental. They lived acutely in the present moment and looked neither behind nor before--save to a goal of safety. Misfortune had descended upon them, and ruin no doubt would follow, but for the present they asked no more than to save what they could carry or propel, and to get far beyond that awful fire. The refinements of sentiment and all complexity were forgotten; they indulged in nothing so futile as complaint, nor even conversation. And the sense of the common calamity sustained them, no doubt, deindividualized them for the hour. Soon after they became their normal selves once more, and accepted the hard conditions of the following weeks with the philosophy that was to be expected of them. But underneath all the recovered gayety and defiant pride of the later time more than one spirit was sprained, haunted with a sense of dislocation, permanently saddened by the loss not of fortune but of personal treasures, of old homes full of life-long associations, never to be replaced nor regained. Many no doubt were better off for losing those old anchors that held them to the past and emphasized their years, besides keeping their sorrows green, but others had one reason less for living. Nevertheless the philosophy born of a lifetime in an earthquake country, of the electric climate, of their isolation, as well as the good Anglo-Saxon strain in so many of them, brought a genuine rebound to all physically capable of it, both old and young. But to-day they were primitive--and entirely human. They helped one another, the stronger carrying the weaker's burdens as a matter of course. The men were bent almost double with increasing properties.

Isabel felt neither pity nor admiration for them; they were a mere unit, these thousands reduced to their primal component, the third fact in the great day of facts.

Suddenly, however, she caught sight of Lyster Stone. He carried a baby on one arm and several rolls of painted canvas under the other. Beside him walked the mother pushing a loaded crib; and behind him the artist friend, to whose aid he had evidently gone, dragged a large canvas trunk bound with an ingenious system of ropes. Stone nodded gayly when he saw Isabel.

"Hallo!" he cried. "I was going for you later on. We'll all sleep out to-night. Better come along." Then as Isabel only shook her head he said, hurriedly: "Awfully sorry I forgot--promised Gwynne I'd go up and tell you he was in for a long day's work--transporting hospital patients and hauling dynamite. He sent peremptory orders that you and his mother were to go to the country with the afternoon tide."

The crowd bore him on and Isabel and Anne walked up the hill again, meeting other streams of refugees, but thinner, as most of them preferred the easier slopes. Isabel looked at Anne curiously. There was an unusual restlessness about her, nothing of the rudimentary expression of the crowd. Isabel was wondering if her apparent and unusual spirits might be due to the fact that her flat was in the Western Addition, and that she had hired a wagon at the first alarm of fire and carried her silver to the Presidio, when Anne suddenly began to explain herself.

"Do you know," she broke out, "I have a wonderful sense of freedom!--of--of--hope. Something has happened at last. All the ruts have been ploughed over. Life will never be the same here, in my time at least. It will be like beginning all over again, with a hundred barely imagined possibilities and an equal chance for every one. It may be a reprehensible thing--to feel as if the destruction of your city had set your individual soul free--but I do, and that's the end of it. And I can tell you I've seen that _expression_ in the eyes of many a man in the last few hours. Not in those of the older men, perhaps, for they wear out early enough in this climate, anyhow, and those that are close upon sixty don't look as if they had much left to live for--although I've seen a few flying about as if they had dropped thirty years; its all a matter of temperament and physique. But for the rest of us! The still energetic men, and the women that have been cankered with the tedium vitae, and have the brains and brawn to work. It will be the Fifties all over again--not only something more than a bare living in prospect, but a constant, exciting, interest in life. I saw a good many men, just after the earthquake, looking as if they had believed the end of the world had come, but they braced up directly the city was threatened by something they could pit themselves against. Every man worth his salt is fighting fire, rescuing the helpless, dragging mattresses out to the hills and Park, and helping the women down here save their belongings. All with automobiles and carriages are helping the authorities and hospitals. Political factions and personal enemies are working side by side, particularly down on the fire line. Even the mayor has won a day's respect from his fellow-citizens, although I'm told he's terribly torn between the Committee of Fifty and the military authorities on the one hand, who want to blow up a wide zone, and the property-holders who won't have their precious possessions sacrificed when the wind may change any minute. Meanwhile the fire has a headway that will give it the best part of the city. I never felt so alive in my life; so vividly in the present. Can you remember the name of a book you have read, that there is any world outside these seven square miles?"

"Yesterday is a mere dream and to-morrow is only a bare possibility! The Fifties! I feel as if we were at the beginning of things on another planet. I shall never trouble my head with problems or psychology again. We are mere dancing midgets on the scalp of stupendous forces that we do not even dimly apprehend. Earth lets us play until her patience is exhausted with our pretentions as mere human beings, at our insane delusion that the intellectual are not only the equal but the superior of the physical forces; and then she merely shakes herself, and the wisest is as helpless as the idiot, the prince even worse off than the pauper because he has a bigger house to run out of. They all dance to her tune like so many wooden marionettes. Hofer is no better off than his blacksmith--whose savings are probably in the fireproof vault of some bank, while I happen to know that more than one millionaire has not insured his Class A buildings, thinking the expense unnecessary. No wonder you have a sense of freedom. So have I. We are dancing to the tune of the unseen forces. They will do the thinking. I wonder, by-the-way, if deep down in the brain of that fleeing ruined tide of elemental beings there is not a prick of gratified vanity that they are in the midst of a great and horrible experience? We have been reading so much lately of the horrors in Russia, we have read, all our lives, of horrors and atrocities somewhere, and this State has grinned at us so unintermittently. Now we, too, are actors in a great life-and-death drama. I don't fancy any one is doing even that much analysis, but I can't help thinking that the vague appreciation of the fact sustains them in a way--possibly gives them a calm sense of superiority to the rest of the world----Look at this."

They had reached Jackson Street on the flat of Nob Hill. It was now evening and the exodus from Chinatown had begun. The Mongolians were streaming up from their threatened quarter, and, like the others, tramping silently out to the Presidio. The merchants had put on their fine clothes, and their families--exposed to the Occidental eye for the first time--wore gorgeous garments of bright silks covered with embroideries. The poor little respectable wives tottered along on their foolish feet, held up by their lords or their "big-footed" serving-women, while their children trudged along uncomplainingly and stared at the fire with big expressionless eyes. Mingling freely with the wealthy autocrats of Chinatown were the coolies, and the disreputable women with which the quarter swarmed. The Chinese rarely import their wives. The coolies wore their blue blouses and soft felt hats, and the women had painted their faces and built up their hair as usual, shining tower-like coiffures stuck with large-lobed pins, cheap or costly, according to their grade. All were as stolid as their own wooden gods. They would have looked like a solemn procession on a festa day had it not been for the bundles and strong-chests they carried.

"Come up to dinner, such as it is," said Isabel, to Anne. "What are you going to do to-night?"

"Camp down in the sand-lots by Fort Mason and see what I can do for those poor refugees. There will be great suffering, I am afraid. Many women should be in hospital with every attention; and with all this excitement who knows what may happen? I fancy either a tent-hospital will be erected, or the worst cases will be taken into the fort. I am a good nurse, and I told the Leader I should be there. There will be many children to look after, too. The parents, the best of them, won't be up to much."

"Perhaps I will go down later. But I shall wait at the house until I have seen Mr. Gwynne--he may need food, or be hurt in any of a dozen ways. If you see him--and no doubt you will, if you are to be at the fort--tell him that I have not gone to the country and have no intention of going."

XIV

They had passed members of the Citizens' Patrol on every block, and they found one pacing the plank walk on Russian Hill. He told them that the edict had gone forth that not so much as a candle should be lit in a house that night and that all cooking must be done out-of-doors. The spectacled Jap was boiling soup on one of the oil stoves, which he had carried into the garden and half surrounded by a screen. Beside him was what looked like an open newly-dug grave, and the girls, startled, demanded what it meant.

Sugihara, apparently, never smiled, but his eyes flickered. "Before Cusha and Kuranaga went I made them dig a hole for the silver," he said. "It is too heavy for the launch. If we are driven away, I will cut your ancestors from their frames and take them with us."

"Well, you are a treasure," said Isabel, with a sigh. "You shall do nothing but read when you get to the ranch."

Lady Victoria was pacing slowly up and down the porch, her eyes seldom wandering from the fire. When dinner was ready, she merely shook her head impatiently, and Isabel and her guest sat down in the little tower-room, which was brilliantly illuminated from below. Sugihara had made a very good soup of canned corn and tomatoes and had fried bits of meat and potato. There was little conversation. The dynamiting was now something more than sporadic. The detonations were so terrific that it was not difficult for the San Franciscans to imagine themselves--supposing they had a grain of imagination left--in a besieged city. Isabel suggested, and Anne agreed with her, that they might have been far worse off than they were; nature at her extremest is never so pitiless as the human brute when the lust to kill is on him.

Isabel prepared the remains of the feast for Mr. Clatt, and asked Sugihara if he would object to relieving the watch, that the wharfinger might snatch a few hours' sleep. There was no longer any danger of fire except from the conflagration itself, and now that the dynamiting had begun in earnest it was possible that the flames would be isolated before midnight.

The Jap went off with the dish in one hand and a book in the other, hoping that he would be allowed to light a candle on the launch. He returned in a few moments, and for the first time he was smiling.

"Mr. Clatt will not give up his watch," he said. "He says he might miss the chance to put a hole in some--dago (his language was very bad, Miss). He says there's not a wink of sleep in him."

"No doubt but that he will hold on to it, unless the military step in," said Anne. "Then, I fancy, he would surrender very meekly. They have impressed a good many launches for prisoners and dynamite. But I hope not, for whether the fire comes up the hills or not, there is going to be terrible privation. Heaven knows how many days it will be before we have enough water even to drink, and I heard a little while ago that as soon as food comes in the authorities will establish relief stations, where everybody, from the millionaire to John Chinaman, will have to stand in line and wait for his loaf of bread. Wouldn't it be better for you to go at once?"

"I fancy I can endure as much as any one, and if I am driven from here I will go down to you. I shall go down anyhow when I have seen Mr. Gwynne. I do not propose to lie in a hammock while several hundred thousand people are sleeping on the ground. What do you take me for?"

"Somehow I don't see you as a nurse, or amusing children, or doling out bread and raiment. You would be much more in the picture encouraging Mr. Gwynne. However--I am going to impress your linen and a clothes-basket to carry it in. No doubt the philosophical Sugihara will help me carry it to the fort."

"Take what you like." Isabel directed her to the linen-closet, and went down to the veranda. She paused abruptly in the doorway. Victoria's face could be seen only in profile, but its expression, as she gazed down upon that tossing twisting furious flame ocean, needed no analytical faculty to interpret. It was voluptuous, ecstatic.

Isabel crossed the porch in a stride.

"What are you thinking of?" she demanded, imperiously.

Victoria did not turn with a start. She did not turn at all. "I am thinking," she replied, automatically, as if in obedience to the stronger will--"I am thinking that at last I understand what it is we are so blindly striving for from the hour when we can think at all; what it is--that unsatisfied desire that urges us on and on to so many fatal experiments in the pursuit of happiness. The great goal, the real meaning of our miserable balked mortal existence is not that dancing will-o'-the-wisp we call happiness, for want of a better name. It is Death."

"Well?" Isabel's voice rose, but she kept the anxiety out of it.

"I cannot imagine anything more delicious," went on Victoria, in the same low rich tones, "than to walk straight down those hills and into that sea of flame. I have always admired Empedocles, who cast himself into Etna. Once I saw a friend cremated, and the brief vision of that white incandescence, before the coffin shot down, seemed to me the apotheosis, the voluptuous poetry of death. I could walk down into that colossal furnace without flinching, and I believe that my last moment, as the world disappeared behind me, and those superb flames took me into their embrace, would be one of sublimest ecstasy."

Isabel caught her by the shoulders and whirled her about. "Well, you will do nothing of the sort," she cried, roughly. "In the first place you couldn't get through the lines, and in the second you are wanted at Fort Mason. Anne is going down with a basket of linen for the poor women who will be confined to-night. You are an uncommonly strong woman, and you can make use of every bit of your strength. Anne and the Leader are frail creatures, and no one else that I know of is going. They need you, and you will soon have your hands so full that your head will be purged of this nonsense. It is the fire lust--the same lust that incited a boy to-day to attempt to set fire to a house in this district that he might watch the whole city burn. I hope your egoism exploded in that climax. Here comes Anne. You must go."

"Very well," said Victoria, suddenly dazed, and with a will relaxed after the long tension of the day. "I will go."

"Where are your jewels?"

"Down in the bank."

"Well, gather up any other small things you treasure, and either conceal them about you or give them to me."

"I shall not take anything. My laces are in the chiffonniere. I do not care to enter the house again."

Isabel fetched her hat and jacket, for in spite of the fire it would be cold near the water; and a few moments later she stood on the edge of Green and Jones streets, on the other side of the hill, and watched Victoria and Anne, carrying a large clothes-basket between them, carefully making their way down to the level. They had a walk of some thirteen blocks before them, but the streets were full of people and of ruddy light.

She returned to the house and sat down on the porch, her eyes diverted from the fire for a moment by the picture of Sugihara, a pair of eye-glasses in front of his spectacles, comfortably established on a chair in the garden and reading by the lamp of the burning city. It was apparent that he had forgotten the 18th of April.

Isabel was alone but a moment. Stone burst in upon her. He had approached from behind, and came running down the hill.

"Isabel," he cried. "Get a bottle of champagne."

"Champagne?"

"Yes. It may be six months before I see another--but that is a mere detail. I want to drink to the old city."

Isabel, who liked him best in his dramatic moments, found a bottle of champagne. He knocked the head off, and filling the glass, went down to the first landing of the long narrow flight of steps. He held the glass high, pointing it first towards the middle of what had been Market Street, and was now a river of fire, then slowly shifting it along towards Kearney and Montgomery, as he named the restaurants that had given San Francisco no mean part of her fame.

"Here's to Zinkand's, Tait's, The Palace Grill! The Poodle Dog! Marchand's! The Pup! Delmonico's! Coppa's! The Fashion! The Hotel de France! And here's to the Cocktail Route, the Tenderloin, and the Bohemian Club! And here's--" By this time his voice was dissolving, and the glass was describing eccentric curves. "Here's to the old city, whose like will never be seen this side of hell again. Pretty good imitation of heaven in spots, and everything you chose to look for, anyway. And the prettiest women, the best fellows, the greatest all-night life, the finest cooking, the wickedest climate. Here's to San Francisco--and damn the bounder that calls her 'Frisco!"

Then he drank what was left of the contents of his glass and hastily refilled it. After he had finished the bottle luxuriously, he held out his hand to Isabel. "Come along?" he asked. Then, as she shook her head: "I must go back to Paula and the kids. The mattresses are out in the Park already. You are in no danger, what with the neighbors above and the patrol. Good luck to you," and he vanished.

Isabel was alone at last, a state she had unconsciously wished for all day--it seemed a month since the morning. She sat down and leaned her elbows on the railing. Now that the sun was gone, the heavens, or the smoke obscuring them, were as red as that sea beneath which seemed to devour a house a minute as it rolled out towards the Mission and worked with all its might among the great business blocks between Market Street and Telegraph Hill. Some one had estimated that the columns of fire were seven miles high, and they certainly looked as if they had melted the very stars. Here and there was a play of blue flames, doubtless from some explosive substance, and when the dynamite shot the entrails from a house there was a gorgeous display of fireworks--the golden showers of sparks symbolizing the treasure that blackened and crumbled in dropping back to earth.

Before sitting down she had swept the distant hills with her field-glass and seen thousands of people lying not ten feet apart, like an exhausted army after battle. In that intense glare she could even study the eccentric positions of the fallen headstones and monuments in the old deserted cemeteries--Lone Mountain and Calvary. The cross on the lofty point of the bare hill behind the Catholic cemetery was red against the blackness of the west; and hundreds of weary mortals were huddled about its base. She tried to pity all those terrified uncomfortable creatures out there, but again the part they played in the greatest natural drama of modern times occurred to her, and she thought that should console them.

She wondered at her lack of sentimental regret at the destruction of her beloved city. But sentiment seemed a mere drop of insult to be cast into that ocean of calamity. Moreover, she was pricked by a sense that it was a living sentient thing, that city, and was getting its just dues for the hearts it had devoured, the lives it had ruined, the merciless clutch it had kept upon so many that were made for better things. To its vice she gave little thought; she fancied it was not worse than other cities, if the truth were known; it was the picturesqueness of its methods that had held it in the limelight. But that it was one of the world's juggernauts, and the more cruel for its ever laughing beguiling face--of that there was no manner of doubt.

She wondered also that she was not in a fever of anxiety about Gwynne. She had interrogated the sentry and been informed that the automobiles carrying dynamite dashed straight down to the fire line, often within; that a number of the soldiers, whose duty it was to lay the explosive, had been wounded and carried to the hospitals; that there was always the risk of a laden machine being suddenly surrounded by fire, for many houses were ignited by the sparks, and, in that wooden district down there, burned like tinder. Perhaps, like Victoria, she was too sure of his destiny; perhaps the picture of the future with him that she had conceived refused to alter its lines; or it may be that there was no place in the impersonal arrangement of her faculties the double catastrophe had effected, for fear; or for anything beyond the impressions of the moment. Her mind worked on mechanically. She was determined to remain as long as there was a possibility of Gwynne's returning for food or care. But the soul beneath was possessed by an absolute calm. She had the sense of having been taken into partnership with nature that morning; so sudden and personal had been that assault, from which she yet had issued unscathed. She felt that everything that would follow in life, excepting only her love for Gwynne, would be too petty to regard more seriously than the daily meals. Not that she had more than a bare mental appreciation of the phases of love at the moment; but it possessed her and it was infinite.

She sat motionless until nearly two o'clock and then went up to her room and lay down. It was not possible to sleep for more than a few moments at a time, for the detonations were almost incessant, but she forced herself to rest, not knowing what work the morrow might have in store. When she finally rose and looked out of her window she saw that the fire was coming up the hills.

XV

She barely touched the breakfast prepared by the methodical Sugihara, who had already buried the silver, and cut the pictures from their frames, rolled, and tied them securely.

"It is only a question of a few hours," he said. "The dynamiting so far has done more harm than good. They take a house at a time instead of a block, and as it falls apart it ignites another on the opposite side of the street. The army doesn't like to interfere, and the mayor has too long been obsequious to capital. Mr. Clatt is still there with the launch behind him. I took him down his breakfast some time ago. He told me to tell you that he'd 'got his job cut out for him now, as the Dagos were beginning to leave Telegraph Hill.'"

Isabel had one or two moments of panic as she watched those waves of flame beat up the hill, and pictured them raging up the eastern slopes as well; but the panic passed, for she knew that there were two exits still open. The heavens were black. A disk like a sealing-wax wafer indicated the position of the sun. The heat was terrific. The dynamiting was incessant, but it did not drown the roar and the eager furious crackle of the flames, the reverberating crash of falling walls. And the flames were the redder for the blackness above. Cinders were falling all over the heights, and the smoke burned the eyes.

"I shall feel like Casabianca presently, and rather ridiculous," she reflected, "but I shall stay till the last possible moment." She went within and packed a pillow-case with Lady Victoria's laces and other portable objects of value and adornment, then gathered up similar belongings of her own, tied the case firmly about the neck, stood it where it could be snatched in flight, and returned to the porch.

The boarding-house district, several blocks of large wooden houses, seemed literally to be swept from its foundations by those rushing pillars of fire. The whole quarter was wiped out in an hour, and then the fire turned its attention to the higher slopes.

It played with them for a while, darting west and returning for a morsel at which it leaped with the agility of a living monster, went west again; then, its appetite whetted and its greed insatiable, it started straight for Nob Hill. The soldiers drove the faithful servants out of the houses at the point of the bayonet. Then--in a moment--the familiar curtains were blowing out of the windows--shrivelled to a crisp and pursued by the red rage behind.

Sugihara did not go through the form of cooking luncheon. He knew that his mistress would not eat, and he had as little appetite himself. He folded his arms on the top of the fence and waited for the signal to retreat.