The soldiers slung their rifles and went on down the street. After a while a man sitting at the campfire got up and went over to look at the body. He stared at the face for some time. Then he came back and sat down at the fire.
“He ain’t from this neighborhood,” he said.
A little farther down on Gough a crowd had collected. The roof of a house had caught on fire from embers drifting from the main conflagration only a few blocks away, south of Golden Gate Avenue. The fire had eaten down through the ceiling and was now showing at the windows. A pair of soldiers were standing in the small crowd watching it. Herma recognized them as the same two soldiers who had shot the looter.
“Nothin’ to do,” said one soldier. “This whole block’s goin’ in a couple of hours anyway.”
They all stood for a while watching the flames licking away.
“Ain’t ole Missus Parsons still in there?” said someone.
“Not if she has any sense. She’d come out.”
“She can’t git up, since she had her stroke. She can’t do nothin’ but lay in bed all day.”
“Her daughter takes care of her, I think,” said a woman. “Her daughter probably took her out.”
“The daughter’s kilt,” said a man. “A wall fell on her down on Howard.”
He hesitated for a moment. Then he moved toward the door which was hanging smoking on its hinges, stuck his head in, and entered.
He came out almost immediately.
“Whole place is on fire in there,” he said.
One of the standing soldiers crossed his legs. The other shifted his quid of chewing tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Canaille!” roared Grasse. He lowered his head and charged into the house like a bull. After a while he came out with an old lady in a nightgown slung over his shoulder like a bag of grain. He laid her down on a mattress in the street, pushing aside a woman who was resting on it.
“Is they anybody else in there, Grandma?” somebody asked her.
“There’s the baby,” she twittered feebly.
Grasse rushed back into the burning house.
Perhaps that night, perhaps the next night, Herma became separated from Grasse. Not conscious of lack of sleep, but feeling oddly floaty and weightless as though her feet were not quite touching the ground, she went more or less aimlessly through the blackened city. A strange thing had happened that she couldn’t quite grasp. By this time the fire had marched across the city like an invading army, burning everything in its path. Somehow she must have passed through this line of fire, and yet she had never noticed when it happened. She was on the blackened side of the city now, no longer on the intact side; in fact there was almost no intact side now that the fire had burned its way through North Beach and all the way to the waterfront. But when had this happened? Perhaps it was when she was asleep, she thought. But she hadn’t slept, as far as she could remember. Perhaps she had dreamed.
Another thought occurred to her as she wandered through the streets in her gown by Worth of Paris and her velvet cloak. All her other clothes were burned, and so were Fred’s clothes. Worse, there were no more mirrors. Without mirrors, she couldn’t … it was not that she wished to become Fred, but that she wanted a mirror so that she could say something important to Fred. She wasn’t quite sure what it was. It was about Death. About Death and Love.
A good deal of time had elapsed. She must have slept at some time or another, but she couldn’t remember it. As far as she could recall, she hadn’t eaten anything either, although this hardly seemed possible. Perhaps the people at the campfire on Gough Street had given her a little of their soup. At any rate, it was the fourth day now and the fires for the most part had burned themselves out. A few columns of smoke could still be seen standing in the sky out beyond Telegraph Hill, but nobody paid very much attention to them. The fire had roared its way in a single angry afternoon through the central business district, leaving the iron skeletons of skyscrapers and a few stone buildings with the glass broken out of their blackened windows.
Herma found herself on Post Street coming out into Union Square. It was a little after dawn on a morning that promised to turn into a beautiful and clear sunny day. The air was crisp, with an acrid but not unpleasant smell of smoke and dampened ashes in the air.
The refugees from south of the Slot, driven away from the Square the day before by the fire, were now beginning to return, bringing their various bundles, now tattered and blackened from being dragged around the city for three days. During the night a ramshackle city of improvised tents and shacks had sprung up on the grass around the Dewey Monument. The Square itself seemed hardly touched by the fire, although the leaves of the trees were singed here and there. A fine gray dust of ashes lay over the grass and everything in the Square, but the people, ignoring this, had spread around their mattresses, their cots, their tents, and their makeshift huts contrived out of boxes and tin signs, with burlap for doors.
There was a carnival quality to the scene, along with a certain air of the lunatic. In the center of the Square an old man was, with great deliberation, trying to decipher the inscription on the Dewey Monument through spectacles from which the lenses had fallen out. Another man, in pink pyjamas and a pink bathrobe, and carrying a pink comforter under his arm, was wandering around barefoot on the gravel path, trying to find a place to put down the comforter so he could go to sleep on it.
The sun had risen enough now to illuminate the blackened hulk of the St. Francis Hotel on Powell Street, but the rest of the Square was still in shadow. The air was chill. A number of people had built open fires and were warming themselves by them. Others had improvised stoves out of rubble, sheet metal, and pieces of stovepipe salvaged from the ruins. Herma stopped to warm herself at one of these rustic kitchens. It belonged to a family of a dozen or more, from babies to an octogenarian great-grandmother, who were somehow managing to live together under a square of canvas stretched on four poles with burlap hanging down for walls.
At one side of the tent Herma caught sight of a basin of warm water and a bar of soap standing on a plank supported on two sawhorses.
“That’s what I need.”
She hadn’t seen a mirror for four days but she could imagine what she looked like. A great lust for soap and water swept over her. People stared as she washed her hands and face in the basin. The water had been used by several persons before and was the color of weak coffee, but it didn’t matter, it was warm, and most of the dirt came off her face. A woman, evidently the wife of the family, silently passed her an old blanket end to use as a towel.
Herma said, “That feels good.”
The whole family had turned to watch her at these ablutions. They all smiled at one another. Herma felt almost as though she were a member of the family. She passed the improvised towel back to the woman.
“What you had to eat lately, Sister?” asked the woman, not in a kindly voice exactly but in a matter-of-fact monotone.
Herma lifted one eyebrow and made a noncommittal motion of her shoulders.
The woman got out a fork and stuck it into the cauldron seething on the improvised stove. She came out with a boiled potato, the jacket still hanging on it in scraps.
Herma took this and sat cross-legged on the grass to eat it. It was hot and burned her fingers at first. She passed it rapidly from one hand to the other. This made everybody smile again. Herma smiled too. Then, her hunger overcoming the pain of the burned fingers, she broke the potato apart and began eating it. It was delicious. She finished it to the last scrap, including the jacket, and then licked her fingers. She found a morsel or two that had fallen into the skirt between her knees, and she ate these too. Once again there was a round of smiles.
Everyone sat around on boxes, on chunks of rubble, and on the grass watching Herma eat the potato. It occurred to her that she ought to offer them some money for it, but she had only the gold pieces in the pocket of her cloak. She should have brought along some of the silver dollars as
well, she thought.
“Would you like another potato, Dearie?” the wife asked her.
Herma shook her head.
“There’s enough potatoes if you want one. We ain’t got much else.” She hesitated. “There’s a little milk we’re savin’ for the children. You could have some of that if you want.”
At this suggestion, Herma only glanced at her and then looked away.
The woman seemed very anxious that Herma should have enough to eat. Perhaps it was because she recognized her as a lady, or perhaps it was merely her sense of hospitality. This was her home, even though it was only a canvas on four poles, and Herma was her guest. Or perhaps it was something about Herma’s youthfulness, her slim and virginal simplicity, her air somehow in spite of her soiled clothing and grime of having passed through the debacle of the city unscathed, that drew the woman toward her.
“My husband, he’s got a little brandy,” she said hopefully. “Warms you up. I don’t hold with it myself. But maybe you’d like a drop.”
Herma shook her head again, still smiling. A child perhaps three, the grimiest and dirtiest child that Herma had ever seen, crawled a little closer on the grass to get a better look at her. She sat there staring straight up at Herma’s face. Herma was glad she had washed the face, at least after a fashion.
“What’s your name?” she asked the child.
The child stared straight back at her, solemnly, without a word.
“Do you like boiled potatoes?”
This time the child nodded faintly, still watching her out of her large white eyes in her dirty face.
The husband, a man about thirty who looked as though he might be a workman or a porter, rummaged around in the box under his feet and pulled out a small battered accordion. It only had a dozen or so keys, and a few buttons on the other end, and the bellows in between was patched with tape. He stuck his hands into the straps on either end and began playing it softly. He played so badly that for a while it was hard to tell what he was playing. Herma seemed to recognize it vaguely.
Finally she identified it as the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffmann. He played it very slowly, groping his way from note to note as though he were doing something very difficult, like shoeing a horse. Herma began humming along softly under her breath.
“Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour,
Souris a nos ivresses …”
The wife stared at her, suddenly transfixed.
“Sing it, Girlie! Go on and sing it out loud!”
A little louder, in mezza voce, Herma continued on to the end.
“Nuit plus douce que le jour,
O belle nuit d’amour!”
“Them ain’t the words I know,” said the husband.
Everybody smiled at this too. Since the husband knew no French, they seemed to agree, it was natural that he shouldn’t recognize the words as the words he knew. In a cracked and off-key voice he sang his version. “Lovely night, oh night of love, oh lovely night of love.”
A youth in elegant but filthy clothes—tight-fitting black trousers, a shirt with lace frills, and black polished pumps that were scuffed and stained with ashes—came up and impatiently snatched the accordion out of the husband’s hands. He laughed aloud. Facing Herma, he began playing, in galloping tempo and not without a certain expertness:
“Ta ra ra boom-de-ay,
Ta ra ra boom-de-ay.”
After a moment everybody was singing it, the various cracked voices and even the piping treble of the little ones, the husband trying to follow along, always a few notes behind, in his scratchy growl.
“Ta ra ra boom-de-ay,
Ta ra ra boom-de-ay.
Ta ta ta boom-de-ay,
Ta ra ra boom-de-ay.”
By this time a crowd had collected, some standing around solemnly watching and others grinning. When everyone seemed to have enough of this simpleminded chant, the youth in tight pants set off into There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, which he played even faster, still with his grin.
“Please, oh, please, oh do-not-let-me-fall,
You’re all mine and I love-you-best-of-all,
And you must be my man, or I’ll have-no-man-at-all,
There’ll be a hot-time, in the old-town, to-ni-i-ite.”
This produced a rattle of laughter and some raucous shouts. A voice called out from somewhere in the background. “Hey. Ain’t that Herma?”
But it was not the Herma of the triumph at the Opera House that they recognized; it was the Herma of the song that was on everyone’s lips.
“Kiss me a-gain!” cried out a voice.
The request was repeated in a clamor of voices, with laughter, and then more clapping. Finally Herma had to get to her feet. The grinning boy gave her a bar or two, and off she went, mounting up from the low G into the clear and sentimental melody in the middle register.
“Sweet summer breeze, whispering trees,
Stars shining softly above;
Roses in bloom, wafted perfume,
Sleepy birds dreaming of love …”
The crowd was utterly silent now, hanging on her every note, some smiling faintly, some expressionless. Almost as though they were in church they listened through the long second verse, and then into the chorus again. The last note swelled to the end with its coda, the last “Kiss me a-gain,” and the accordion note died away.
There was a silence. Then a cheer went up from the tattered and hungry people in the Square, waiting for the sunlight to creep slowly over from the burned St. Francis and touch them a little with its warmth. The skeletons of the burned skyscrapers looked down on them. They could be rebuilt, they would be rebuilt. San Francisco was not an old city. There was nothing old in it, nothing that was irreplaceable. It was not like a European city. It was all new, they could build it all over again. They had built it once, and they could build it again.
Herma left the Square on Post Street, turned left on Dupont, and went on up the hill toward Chinatown. After she passed Bush she entered into a kind of wasteland, a level expanse of black and acrid-smelling cinders still smoking in places. The houses and buildings in this part of the city were for the most part flimsily constructed of wood; they had withstood the earthquake but when the fire passed over them they burned like tinder, collapsing into their network of cellars and underground dens. Nothing was left but the checkerboard of streets ascending the hill with squares of ashes and cinders between them, a stove or a burnt-out iron safe sticking up here and there. Only Old St. Mary’s Church, with its blackened brick walls and bell tower, was still standing at the corner of California.
A little farther along Dupont she turned down the narrow lane that descended the hill and curved gradually to the left. She had difficulty getting her bearings. All the familiar buildings were gone. Finally she identified the gnarled and blackened limbs of the pine tree that had shaded her once as she rang the bell and stood waiting on this spot. Of the porcelain shop, and the house behind it, there was no sign. The level expanse of cinders and broken rubble stretched off down the hill toward Montgomery Street and the burnt-out business district. Then she saw something sticking up a little: it was the stump of the ancient fig tree that had stood in the garden.
She stood looking at this for a while, then she went back up to Dupont and wandered up and down the street, skirting around the heaps of ashes and cinders, stared at by an occasional Chinese youth or a pair of soldiers with slung rifles. Everything made by human hands had been devoured by the flames. Oddly enough it was the trees, here and there, that had survived. In Portsmouth Square, by some miracle, the straggling elm trees were still standing in the spring sunshine, a little scorched at the edges. The shabby old Chinese gentlemen in black clothes were still sitting around on benches in the sun, exactly as though nothing had happened.
Herma went on slowly across the square on a diagonal gravel path. The square was built on the side of the hill, and she climbed down a short flight of stairs and came out onto the lower part of it toward Kearney
Street.
Then she stopped and stood motionless, staring. One of the Chinese gentlemen, seeming as old and shabby as the others and almost indistinguishable from them, was Mr. Ming.
She stood there looking at him for some time. After a while she became aware that he had noticed her too and was looking back at her with a fixed expression, as though he were not at all surprised to see her standing there. It was a look of acceptance—not a smile exactly but a placid look—as though what had happened was in the ordinary manner of events and something that no reasonable man would be surprised at.
He didn’t, however, make any gesture or say anything to her, feeling perhaps with his Oriental delicacy that under the circumstances she would prefer not to recognize him.
“Mr. Ming.”
He smiled a little and still said nothing. The other Chinese gentlemen, having taken note of the Foreign Devil lady standing in their midst, turned away and went on with their droning and singsong conversations.
Herma took Mr. Ming’s elbow and lifted him from the bench. He got reluctantly to his feet.
“Isn’t there some place we can go? Just to have a talk,” she added smoothly in a matter-of-fact tone.
He still wore his fine gray silk tunic and skirt, in place of the black of the others, but under the dust that covered it the difference was hardly noticeable. His face too seemed gray, whether from the ashes or from some other cause.
He shook his head. “No, there is nothing. As you can see.”
With an oddly hieratic gesture, as though it were a ceremony, he pointed around at the level expanse of cinders where Chinatown had been.
With her hand still under his elbow she pulled him gently away. They climbed up the short length of stairs, and at the top of the square they stopped. Here there was a short length of stone wall to sit on, blackened by the fire. Fragments of soot and scraps of burned paper clung in the cracks between the stones.
“Mr. Ming,” said Herma.
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