Ancestors: A Novel

  XIII

  She found her lower neighbors still sitting on their doorsteps orstanding in groups, but was told that many more had already gone out tothe Western Addition with their valuables, fearing that the fire mightcome up the southern or eastern slopes before night. A large touring carwas standing in front of the Hofers' door. The children and their nurseswere in it, and Mr. Toole came out and took his place as Isabel reachedthe house. He greeted her for the first time since she had known himwithout a smile; and he looked very old and sad. Isabel heard Mrs.Hofer's light high rapid voice within. She was standing in the largedrawing-room, giving orders to a group of servants. When she saw Isabelshe cried out as if confronted with a ghost.

  "Oh!" she exclaimed, but not kissing her as usual; her mind apparentlywas divided into many parts. "I am relieved to see that _you_ are allright. I didn't know what might have happened up State. Did you _ever_?Well!--Great old country this. Talk about living on the side ofVesuvius. 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 Iguess he can make more. And do you know what he's thinking aboutalready? He burst in here half an hour ago--as black as your hat--withorders that I should take the family down to Burlingame at once, andthen began talking about the Burnham plans, and the opportunity to cleanup the city politically. There's a raging idealist for you. And do youknow 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 anautomobile apiece and have put themselves at the disposal of theauthorities. Nice thing for me to be thinking of all night. Don't youwant to come along?"

  Isabel shook her head.

  "Well, I'll move on then--before they change their minds and impress mycar. So far I have a gracious permit to keep it. The servants haveburied the silver and the pictures, but--" She glanced at the beautifulfrieze, which, without its electric lights, looked a mere blur of blueand black, then shrugged her shoulders. "I just won't believe my housewill go," she said, defiantly; "not till the last minute, anyhow. Whenthe fire's over, or Mr. Hofer lets me, I'll come back and do somethingfor those poor wretches that have been burned out. Gather up what foodthere is to be had in the country, and start an eating station orsomething. Mr. Hofer says food will come pouring in from every directionpresently, and then they will need organizers. I'm good at that. Can Irely on you? It will be an experience, anyhow; and of course it's myplace to do that sort of thing. Besides, I do feel terribly sorry forthose 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 burnedout, but I hear that the editors are already over in Oakland scurryinground after a plant. Well, _adios_. If you say the word I'll send thecar back for you--although I doubt if it would pass a squad withoutthose 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 ifyou live in an earthquake country?" They had reached the pavement andshe put her lips close to Isabel's ear. "I'd like to get out of thedamned place and never see it again," she whispered. "I'll keep a stiffupper lip, but those are my sentiments and I guess I have company."

  She stepped lightly into the car, nodded with a grim gayety, and inanother moment had disappeared round the corner of Taylor and Californiastreets.

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

  "What on earth did you come to this God-forsaken place for, when you hadthe country to stay in?" she demanded. "Oh, Lady Victoria? I did notknow 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 blocksalong California Street, then down Hyde towards moving columns ofpeople. The fire was far south of these refugees as yet, but they lookeddown every cross street and saw it; and more than once during their slowflight they had seen the soldiers at the visible end of each long vistamove a block farther north. "I tramped a long way with them," said MissMontgomery, "carrying things for a woman I never saw before. Then a mantook the burden over and I started up the hill to see how some friendswere faring."

  From this point they could hear the roar and crackle of the fire and thecrashing of walls; but even more formidable was that tramping ofthousands of feet, the scraping of trunks and furniture on the tracksand stones. Isabel, still feeling like a palimpsest, lingered for anhour looking at these refugees. They were vastly different, in all buttheir impotence, from those of the early morning. Hundreds were from the"boarding-house district"; others were householders; a large number, nodoubt, owned their carriages or automobiles, but those had beenimpressed long since. It was a well and a carefully dressed crowd, forby this time nearly every one had recovered from the shock of theearthquake; many forgotten it, no doubt, in the new horror. They had notthe blank expression of the poor, dazed by the second calamity followingso close upon the heels of the first, but their lips were pressed, eyeswere straining towards the distant goal, and all would have been palebut for the glare of the fire. Fortunately for most of them, men as wellas women, they had either children, pets, or even more cumbersomebelongings to claim their immediate attention; no time for eitherthought or despair. They pushed trunks to which skates had beenattached, or pulled them by ropes; they trundled sewing-machines andpieces of small furniture, laden with bundles. Many carriedpillow-cases, into which they had stuffed a favorite dress and hat, anextra pair of boots and a change of underclothing, some valuablebibelot or bundle of documents; to say nothing of their jewels and whatfood they could lay hands on. Several women wore their furs, as aneasier way of saving them, and children carried their dolls. Their stateof mind was elemental. They lived acutely in the present moment andlooked neither behind nor before--save to a goal of safety. Misfortunehad descended upon them, and ruin no doubt would follow, but for thepresent 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 andall complexity were forgotten; they indulged in nothing so futile ascomplaint, nor even conversation. And the sense of the common calamitysustained them, no doubt, deindividualized them for the hour. Soon afterthey became their normal selves once more, and accepted the hardconditions of the following weeks with the philosophy that was to beexpected of them. But underneath all the recovered gayety and defiantpride of the later time more than one spirit was sprained, haunted witha sense of dislocation, permanently saddened by the loss not of fortunebut of personal treasures, of old homes full of life-long associations,never to be replaced nor regained. Many no doubt were better off forlosing those old anchors that held them to the past and emphasized theiryears, besides keeping their sorrows green, but others had one reasonless for living. Nevertheless the philosophy born of a lifetime in anearthquake country, of the electric climate, of their isolation, as wellas the good Anglo-Saxon strain in so many of them, brought a genuinerebound to all physically capable of it, both old and young. But to-daythey were primitive--and entirely human. They helped one another, thestronger carrying the weaker's burdens as a matter of course. The menwere 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 thegreat day of facts.

  Suddenly, however, she caught sight of Lyster Stone. He carried a babyon one arm and several rolls of painted canvas under the other. Besidehim walked the mother pushing a loaded crib; and behind him the artistfriend, to whose aid he had evidently gone, dragged a large canvas trunkbound with an ingenious system of ropes. Stone nodded gayly when he sawIs
abel.

  "Hallo!" he cried. "I was going for you later on. We'll all sleep outto-night. Better come along." Then as Isabel only shook her head hesaid, hurriedly: "Awfully sorry I forgot--promised Gwynne I'd go up andtell you he was in for a long day's work--transporting hospital patientsand hauling dynamite. He sent peremptory orders that you and his motherwere 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 thempreferred the easier slopes. Isabel looked at Anne curiously. There wasan unusual restlessness about her, nothing of the rudimentary expressionof the crowd. Isabel was wondering if her apparent and unusual spiritsmight be due to the fact that her flat was in the Western Addition, andthat she had hired a wagon at the first alarm of fire and carried hersilver to the Presidio, when Anne suddenly began to explain herself.

  "Do you know," she broke out, "I have a wonderful sense offreedom!--of--of--hope. Something has happened at last. All the rutshave been ploughed over. Life will never be the same here, in my time atleast. It will be like beginning all over again, with a hundred barelyimagined possibilities and an equal chance for every one. It may be areprehensible thing--to feel as if the destruction of your city had setyour individual soul free--but I do, and that's the end of it. And I cantell you I've seen that _expression_ in the eyes of many a man in thelast few hours. Not in those of the older men, perhaps, for they wearout early enough in this climate, anyhow, and those that are close uponsixty don't look as if they had much left to live for--although I'veseen a few flying about as if they had dropped thirty years; its all amatter of temperament and physique. But for the rest of us! The stillenergetic men, and the women that have been cankered with the tediumvitae, and have the brains and brawn to work. It will be the Fifties allover again--not only something more than a bare living in prospect, buta constant, exciting, interest in life. I saw a good many men, justafter the earthquake, looking as if they had believed the end of theworld had come, but they braced up directly the city was threatened bysomething they could pit themselves against. Every man worth his salt isfighting fire, rescuing the helpless, dragging mattresses out to thehills and Park, and helping the women down here save their belongings.All with automobiles and carriages are helping the authorities andhospitals. Political factions and personal enemies are working side byside, particularly down on the fire line. Even the mayor has won a day'srespect from his fellow-citizens, although I'm told he's terribly tornbetween the Committee of Fifty and the military authorities on the onehand, who want to blow up a wide zone, and the property-holders whowon't have their precious possessions sacrificed when the wind maychange any minute. Meanwhile the fire has a headway that will give itthe best part of the city. I never felt so alive in my life; so vividlyin the present. Can you remember the name of a book you have read, thatthere is any world outside these seven square miles?"

  "Yesterday is a mere dream and to-morrow is only a bare possibility! TheFifties! I feel as if we were at the beginning of things on anotherplanet. I shall never trouble my head with problems or psychology again.We are mere dancing midgets on the scalp of stupendous forces that we donot even dimly apprehend. Earth lets us play until her patience isexhausted with our pretentions as mere human beings, at our insanedelusion that the intellectual are not only the equal but the superiorof the physical forces; and then she merely shakes herself, and thewisest is as helpless as the idiot, the prince even worse off than thepauper because he has a bigger house to run out of. They all dance toher tune like so many wooden marionettes. Hofer is no better off thanhis blacksmith--whose savings are probably in the fireproof vault ofsome bank, while I happen to know that more than one millionaire has notinsured his Class A buildings, thinking the expense unnecessary. Nowonder you have a sense of freedom. So have I. We are dancing to thetune 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 ofelemental beings there is not a prick of gratified vanity that they arein the midst of a great and horrible experience? We have been reading somuch lately of the horrors in Russia, we have read, all our lives, ofhorrors and atrocities somewhere, and this State has grinned at us sounintermittently. Now we, too, are actors in a great life-and-deathdrama. I don't fancy any one is doing even that much analysis, but Ican't help thinking that the vague appreciation of the fact sustainsthem in a way--possibly gives them a calm sense of superiority to therest of the world----Look at this."

  They had reached Jackson Street on the flat of Nob Hill. It was nowevening and the exodus from Chinatown had begun. The Mongolians werestreaming up from their threatened quarter, and, like the others,tramping silently out to the Presidio. The merchants had put on theirfine clothes, and their families--exposed to the Occidental eye for thefirst time--wore gorgeous garments of bright silks covered withembroideries. The poor little respectable wives tottered along on theirfoolish feet, held up by their lords or their "big-footed"serving-women, while their children trudged along uncomplainingly andstared at the fire with big expressionless eyes. Mingling freely withthe wealthy autocrats of Chinatown were the coolies, and thedisreputable women with which the quarter swarmed. The Chinese rarelyimport their wives. The coolies wore their blue blouses and soft felthats, and the women had painted their faces and built up their hair asusual, shining tower-like coiffures stuck with large-lobed pins, cheapor costly, according to their grade. All were as stolid as their ownwooden gods. They would have looked like a solemn procession on a festaday 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 yougoing to do to-night?"

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

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