by Frank Norris
Another chap suddenly remembered that he owed a departing friend a dollar and fairly lathered himself in his exertion to reach the rail and square himself. Another man, a huge, fat fellow, who knew more people than any man I ever saw, left a little brother behind. The fat man, from the deck of the boat, was trying to talk and joke with everybody at once, but the little brother, with the tears running down his face, never took his eyes from him. The fat man never looked toward his little brother, and his face never uncreased itself from its jovial grin, but I was mighty glad to see that every now and then, on the most trivial pretext, he would come running down the plank, his huge stomach shaking in front of him, and call the little brother to him, and the two would exchange a couple of words and another hand grip. “George,” he would say, “don’t forget about them insurance papers — and — and — well, good-bye again, old man.”
And in another moment, after an interval of shouting and chaffing, would be back again on some equally palpable excuse. The little brother — he was perhaps fifteen — never said a word, but he wasn’t ashamed to let the whole crowd see the tears running down his cheeks.
There was another man, an old man, however, upon whom the tremendous excitement — for it was all of that — acted like heady wine (perhaps he was weak-minded, anyway — probably he was). At any rate, just when the cheering was loudest, this’ old man completely lost control of himself and found occasion to leap into a buggy, swinging his hat violently, and thunder, “Look out for your souls, for the kingdom of Christ is coming. Look out for your souls, I say.”
For anyone accustomed to the deliberate and ponderous movement of a liner getting under way, the actual departure of the Excelsior was abrupt in the extreme, almost flippant. One instant the gangplank was drawn in; the next, ten feet of water gaped between wharf and ship, and the next, the screw was churning up the waters of the bay.
She was off at last; off hardly before we knew it; off to those Arctic treasure fields, with so many hopes and fears and plans and expectations, and there in her stern and on the after decks were the men — plenty of them men whom we knew — going out and up to that bleak, stricken, gray country away up there on the curve of world, on the shoulder of the globe, over so many miles of trembling water and so many leagues of snow and ice, to wrestle with the reluctant, frozen ground, fighting it, as one might say, grappling it with pick and shovel, tearing the heart out of it, the vitals out of it. Some of these men will find a fortune along the Yukon. That is sure; and some of them will be killed there. That is also sure. So that, taking it by and large, there is a splendid uncertainty about the whole affair that invests it with a quality of dignity like a charge of cavalry or a dash for the pole, and as the Excelsior’s whistle roared and the water began to talk under her foreport, and her flags stood out to the wind, and the screw rumbled in a vortex of white water, and the span between ship and wharf widened faster and faster, one ran one’s eye along the groups on the receding decks from face to face, asking one’s self, “Is it you who are to find fortune, you in the plush cap, or you in the brown sweater? Or is it you who are to be killed, you in the blanket roll, or you with the smart cravat?”
And so she went out, this last Argo, loaded with gold seekers from a land of gold, went out with the outgoing tide; and after the excitement was all over and the ship gone from sight, we others, you and I and all the rest of us, set our faces cityward and thought to ourselves, “Well, she’s gone, and we ain’t in her, and if that fool Batty comes back with a wad, I’ll kick myself around the whole dam’ lot for not goin’.”
San Francisco Wave, July 31, 1897.
PASSING OF “LITTLE PETE”
WHEN a man is vulgar he is vulgar according to fixed standards. He conforms to a certain common type of vulgarity; but every woman is vulgar in her own way. There is the brutally vulgar woman, the meanly vulgar, the self-consciously vulgar, the brazenly vulgar, and the modestly vulgar. There is the vulgar woman who knows that she allows herself to be vulgar and is ashamed of it, and there is the woman who is proud of her vulgarity, and calls it liberty and equality and fraternity and democracy and independence and I don’t know what, and who trumpets her vulgarity to the four winds of heaven, and is only ashamed when men fail to take notice.
That is the kind of woman who was most in evidence at the funeral ceremonies of a certain wealthy man, known by the name of L. F. Peters, who was shot to death this month of January, 1897.
Perhaps I have seen a more disgusting spectacle than that which took place at “Little Pete’s” funeral ceremonies, but I cannot recall it now. A reckless, conscienceless mob of about two thousand, mostly women, crowded into the Chinese cemetery. There was but one policeman to control them, and they took advantage of the fact. The women thronged about the raised platform and looted everything they could lay their hands on: China bowls, punk, tissue paper ornaments, even the cooked chickens and bottles of gin. This, mind you, before the procession had as much as arrived.
The procession itself was rather disappointing — from a picturesque point of view. Perhaps one expected too much. There might possibly have been a greater display of colour and a greater number of bands. Nor were there any of the street ceremonies in front of Pete’s Chinatown residence that you had been told to look for. The company of chief mourners, in blue and white cambric, was too suggestive of a campaign club to be very impressive, and the members of the carriage orchestras refused to take themselves very seriously, seeming more interested in the crowd of spectators than in the funeral cortege.
At the cemetery, however, things were different. There was a certain attempt here at rites and observances and customs that would have been picturesque and striking had it not been for the shamelessness, the unspeakable shamelessness of the civilized women of the crowd.
A few mandarins came first, heads, no doubt, of the Sam Yup, one of them in particular, with all the dignity and imposing carriage of a senator. He was really grand, this mandarin, calm, austere, unmoved amidst this red-faced, scrambling mob. A band of women followed, the female relatives of the deceased.
“Here comes his wife!” screamed half a dozen white women in chorus.
Pete’s widow was wrapped from head to foot in what might have been the sackcloth of the Bible stories; certainly it had the look of jute. A vast hood of the stuff covered her whole face, and was tied about the neck. Two other women, similarly dressed, but without the hood, were supporting her. A mat was unrolled, and after the white women had been driven back from the platform by the main strength of two or three men, not yet lost to the sense of decency, the mourners kneeled upon it, forehead to the ground, and began a chant, or rather a series of lamentable cries and plaints. “Ai yah, ai-yah-yah.”
A gong beat. A priest in robes and octagon cap persistently jingled a little bell and droned under his breath. There was a smell of punk and sandalwood in the air. The crouching women, mere bundles of clothes, rocked to and fro and wailed louder and louder.
Suddenly the coffin arrived, brought up by staggering hack drivers and assistants, a magnificent affair, heavy black cloth and heavy silver appointments. The white women of the crowd made the discovery that Little Pete’s powder-marked face could be seen. They surged forward on the instant. The droning priest was hustled sharply; he dropped his little bell, which was promptly stolen. The mourners on the mat, almost under foot, were jostled and pushed from their place or bundled themselves out of the way hurriedly to escape trampling. Just what followed after this I do not know. A mob of red-faced, pushing women thronged about the coffin and interrupted everything that went on. There were confusion and cries in Cantonese and English; a mounted policeman appeared and was railed at. There can be no doubt that more ceremonies were to follow but that those in charge preferred to cut short the revolting scene. The coffin was carried back to the hearse, a passage at length being forced through the crowd, and the Chinese returned to the city. Then the civilized Americans, some thousand of them, descended upon the raised plat
form, where the funeral meats were placed — pigs and sheep roasted whole, and chickens and bowls of gin and rice. Four men seized a roast pig by either leg and made off with it; were pursued by the mounted police and made to return the loot. Then the crowd found amusement in throwing bowlfuls of gin at each other. The roast chickens were hurled back and forth in the air. The women scrambled for the China bowls for souvenirs of the occasion, as though the occasion were something to be remembered.
The single mounted police, red-faced and overworked, rode his horse into the crowd, and, after long effort, at last succeeded in thrusting it back from the plundered altar and in keeping it at a distance. But still it remained upon the spot; this throng, this crowd, this shameless mob, that was mostly of women. There was nothing more to happen, the ceremony was over, but still these people stayed and looked.
This was the last impression one received of Little Pete’s funeral — a crowd of two thousand men and women, standing in a huge circle, stupidly staring at the remains of a roasted pig.
San Francisco Wave, January 30, 1897.
THE SANTA CRUZ VENETIAN CARNIVAL
AN ARTICLE REPRINTED FROM THE WAVE OF JUNE 27, 1896.
You got off the train feeling vaguely intrusive. The ride from the city had, of course, been long and hot and very dusty. Perhaps you had been asleep for the last third of the way, and had awakened too suddenly to the consciousness of an indefinable sensation of grit and fine cinders, and the suspicion that your collar was limp and dirty. Then, before you were prepared for it, you were hustled from the train and out upon the platform of the station.
There was a glare of sunshine, and the air had a different taste that suggested the sea immediately. The platform was crowded, mostly with people from the hotels, come down to meet the train, girls in cool, white skirts and straw sailors, and young men in ducks and flannels, some of them carrying tennis rackets. It was quite a different world at once, and you felt as if things had been happening in it, and certain phases of life lived out, in which you had neither part nor lot. You in your overcoat and gritty business suit and black hat, were out of your element; as yet you were not of that world where so many people knew each other and dressed in white clothes, and you bundled yourself hurriedly into the corner of the hotel ‘bus before you should see anybody you knew.
It was a town of white and yellow. You did not need to be told that these were the carnival colors. They were everywhere. Sometimes they were in huge paper festoons along the main street of the town, sometimes in long strips of cambric wound about the wheels of the hacks and express wagons, sometimes in bows of satin ribbon on the whips of the private drags and breaks. The two invariable color notes sounded, as it were, the same pleasing monotone on every hand. It was Thursday, June 18th. By then the carnival was well under way. Already the Queen had been crowned and the four days’ and nights’ reign of pleasure inaugurated amidst the moving of processions, the clanging of brass bands, and the hissing of rockets. Nothing could have been gayer than the sights and the sounds of the town of Santa Cruz, as that hot afternoon drew toward evening. The main street seen in perspective was as a weaver’s loom, the warp white and yellow, the woof all manner of slow moving colors — a web of them, a maze of them, intricate, changeful, very delicate. Overhead, from side to side, from balcony to balcony, and from housetop to housetop, stretched arches and festoons and garlands all of white and of yellow, one behind another, reaching further and further into the vista like the reflections of many mirrors, bewildering, almost dazzling. Below them, up and down through the streets, came and went and came again a vast throng of people weaving their way in two directions, detaching against the background of the carnival colors a dancing, irregular mass of tints and shades. Here and there was the momentary flash of a white skirt, again the lacquered flanks of a smart trap turned gleaming to the sun like a bit of metal, a feather of bright green shrubbery overhanging a gate stirred for a moment in the breeze very brave and gay, or a brilliant red parasol suddenly flashed into view, a violent, emphatic spot of color, disappearing again amidst the crowd like the quick extinguishing of a live coal.
And from this scene, from all this gaiety of shifting colors, rose a confused sound, a vast murmur of innumerable voices blending overhead into a strange hum, that certain unintelligible chord, prolonged, sustained, which is always thrown off from a concourse of people. It is the voice of an entire city speaking as something individual, having a life by itself, vast, vague, and not to be interpreted; while over this mysterious diapason, this bourdon of an unseen organ, played and rippled an infinite multitude of tiny staccato notes, every one joyous, the gay treble of a whole community amusing itself. Now it was a strain of laughter, hushed as soon as heard, or the rattle of stiffly starched skirts, or bits of conversation, an unfinished sentence, a detached word, a shrilly called name, the momentary jangling of a brass band at a street corner, or the rhythmic snarling of snare drums, as a troop of militia or of marines passed down the street with the creaking of leather belts and the cadenced shuffle of many feet.
And then little by little the heat of the afternoon mingled into the cool of the evening, and the blue shadows grew long and the maze of colors in the street was overcast by the red glow of the sunset, harmonizing them all at last, turning white to pink and blue to purple, and making of the predominant carnival colors a lovely intermingling of rose and ruddy gold. Then far down at the end of the street a single electric light flashed whitely out, intense, very piercing; then another and then another. Then as rapidly as the day darkened the little city set its constellation. Whole groups and clusters and fine nebulae of tiny electric bulbs suddenly bloomed out like the miraculous blossoming of a Lilliputian garden of stars. The city outlined itself, its streets, its squares, its larger buildings in rows and chains and garlands of electricity, throwing off into the dark blue of the night a fine silver haze. Then all at once from the direction of the lagoon the first rocket hissed and rose, a quickly lengthening stem of gold, suddenly bursting into a many-colored flower. A dozen more followed upon the moment; where one was twenty others followed; a rain of colored flames and sparks streamed down, there was no pause; again and again the rockets hissed and leaped and fell. The lagoon glowed like a brazier; the delicate silver electric mist that hung over the town was in that place rudely rent apart by the red haze of flame that hung there, fan-shaped, blood-red, distinct.
* * * * *
Later that same evening, about ten o’clock, Queen Josephine made her entry into the huge pavilion and gave the signal for the opening of the ball. The procession moved up the floor of the pavilion toward the throne (which looked less like a throne than like a photographer’s settee). It advanced slowly, headed by a very little girl in a red dress, resolutely holding a tiny dummy trumpet of pasteboard to her lips. Then in two files came the ushers, Louis Quatorze style. They were all in white — white lace, white silk, white cotton stockings — and they moved deliberately over the white canvas that covered the floor against the background of white hangings with which the hall was decorated. However, their shoes were black — violently so; and nothing could have been more amusing than these scores of inky black objects moving back and forth amidst all this shimmer of white. The shoes seemed enormous, distorted, grotesque; they attracted and fascinated the eye, and suggested the appearance of a migratory tribe of Brobdingnag black beetles crawling methodically over a wilderness of white sand. Close upon the ushers came the Queen, giving her hand to her prime minister, her long ermine-faced train carried by little pages. Pretty she certainly was. Tall she was not, nor imposing, nor majestic, even with her hair dressed high, but very charming and gracious nevertheless, impressing one with a sense of gaiety and gladness — a Queen opera comique, a Queen suited to the occasion. The Prime Minister handed her down the hall. He wore an incongruous costume, a compound of the dress of various centuries — boots of one period, surcoat of another, a sword of the seventeenth century, and a hat of the early nineteenth; while his very fin
de siecle E. & W. white collar showed starched and stiff at the throat of his surcoat. He was a prime minister a travers les Ages.
When Her Majesty was at length seated, the dancers formed a march and, led by Lieutenant-Governor Jeter, defiled before the Queen, making their reverences. Directly in front of the throne each couple bowed, some with exaggerated reverence coming to a halt, facing entirely around, the gentleman placing his hand upon his heart, the lady sinking to a deep courtesy, both very grave, and a little embarrassed; others more occupied in getting a near sight of the Queen merely slacked their pace a bit, bending their bodies forward, but awkwardly keeping their heads in the air; others nodded familiarly as if old acquaintances, smiling into Josephine’s face as though in acknowledgment of their mutual participation in a huge joke; and still others bowed carelessly, abstractedly, interrupting their conversation an instant and going quickly on, after the fashion of a preoccupied priest passing hurriedly in front of the altar of his church. The music was bad; there were enough square dances to give the ball something of a provincial tone, and the waltz time was too slow; yet the carnival spirit — which is, after all, the main thing — prevailed and brought about a sense of gaiety and unrestraint that made one forget all the little inconsistencies.
Friday afternoon brought out the floral pageant on the river. What with the sunshine and the blue water and bright colors of the floats and what with Roncovieri’s band banging out Sousa’s marches, it was all very gay, but nevertheless one felt a little disappointed. Something surely was lacking, it was hard to say exactly what. The tinsel on the boats was tinsel, defiantly, brutally so, and the cambric refused to parade as silk, and the tall lanterns in the Queen’s barge wobbled. The program — that wonderful effort of rhetoric wherein the adjective “grand” occurs twenty-two times in four pages — announced a Battle, a “grand” Battle of Flowers, but no battle was in evidence. True, I saw a little white boy with powdered hair, on the Holy Cross float, gravely throw a handful of withered corn-flowers at an elderly lady in a pink waist, in a rowboat maneuvered by a man in his shirt sleeves, and I saw the elderly lady try to throw them back with her left hand while she held her parasol with her right. The corn-flowers fell short, being too light to throw against the wind; they dropped into the water, and the elderly lady and the little white boy seriously watched them as they floated down stream. Neither of them smiled.