by Gwen Bristow
Pocket was cheerful about his own loss. He said he and his assistants had managed to save the mail entrusted to them. Most of his cash and dust were on deposit at Hiram’s bank, and were safe in the vault. The fire had gone as far as Montgomery Street, but though several other buildings on the block had been wrecked, Hiram’s bank had withstood the flames. Chase and Fenway’s, at the edge of the burnt area, had barely escaped.
The store had escaped because of the new wing Messrs. Chase and Fenway were planning to build. They had bought a lot next to the store, and by great good fortune this lot was between the store and the fire. Right now the lot was empty but for the bricks they had bought from Captain Pollock’s brickyard. Sparks that had fallen there last night had fizzled out.
Pocket said he had gone by the store this morning and had spoken to both Mr. Chase and Mr. Fenway. None of the earlier fires had come so close to them, and Mr. Chase said the fright had aged him ten years. Mr. Fenway was complaining that he was worn out from lack of sleep. He was also complaining about the extra work he would have to do because of the extra trade. Folks would be crowding in all day long to replace the stuff they had lost in the fire. When he went home tonight, he said, he was going to take a bolt of cream-colored satin to make a new dress for Rosabel. Poor girl, she had had a bad scare last night and needed a cheering up. Bad times, these.
Pocket finished his bread and beef, and went off to add to Mr. Fenway’s labors by buying clothes to take the place of those he had lost in the fire. Marny walked downstairs with Dwight. Half an hour later she came back into the kitchen, where Kendra was delighting Geraldine with a pan of the liver brought by Dwight and Pocket. Marny sat down at the kitchen table, took out her ever present pack of cards, and began to shuffle.
“Life,” she said to Kendra, “is like a card game. No matter how the game goes, every loss is somebody’s gain.”
Kendra offered Marny a cup of coffee. Marny, laying out her cards, shook her head. Bringing a cup for herself, Kendra came to the table. Marny was smiling at the cards.
“Go on,” said Kendra.
“Dwight Carson,” Marny said without looking up, “is today the happiest man in San Francisco.”
Kendra smiled too. She thought she knew what Marny was about to say. Marny said it.
“He has proved himself. He can put up a building that won’t burn. He has done it.”
She looked up, holding the queen of diamonds in her hand.
“Dwight is no villain,” she continued. “He wouldn’t set a fire to prove his competence. But he can’t help being gleeful now that fate has proved it for him. Pocket’s library, which Dwight did not build, went down in the fire. Hiram’s bank, which he did build, is still there.”
She went on laying out the cards. Kendra hoped they would show a rosy future, because while she had no faith in fortune telling she knew Marny had.
Pocket and Dwight had told them about Hiram’s bank. Carefully designed, carefully constructed of brick and stone and malleable iron, the bank had no trace of the fire except smudges on the outside. Dwight had reason to be proud.
It meant that she and Marny had been fortunate too. The nugget she had found at Shiny Gulch, and her small savings of gold dust, were secure in Hiram’s vault. Also in the vault unharmed (though Marny had probably not called this to Dwight’s attention) were the jeweled pin and nugget necklace Archwood had given her, and various other ornaments Dwight did not want her to wear these days.
Marny finished her layout and studied it.
“Of course,” she said, almost as if appealing to the cards, “even when the Calico Palace is finished, we can’t be sure it’s fireproof. We can’t know unless a fire hits Kearny Street.”
—The last thing she needs right now, Kendra thought, is sympathy. But she does need to be encouraged. I can’t tell her the Calico Palace is fireproof because maybe it’s not. I can’t tell her Dwight is going to stay with the Calico Palace until it has proved itself, because maybe he won’t. But I do want to help her somehow.
“Marny,” she said, “my grandmother used to have a cook who was happy and wise. I suppose she was happy because she was wise. When I would run in, all upset about something that might happen next week, she used to say to me, ‘Little girl, the way to live is, get ready for the maybe. Then forget it.’”
Marny’s face lit with a smile. “Get ready for the maybe,” she repeated. “Then forget it. That makes sense.” She looked down at the cards again. “I don’t see any disasters here. And Dwight does build well.”
“So he does,” said Kendra. “Now if you want to stop worrying, get busy and do something useful.”
“Such as what?”
“Take out Geraldine’s sandbox,” said Kendra, “and put in some fresh sand.”
“All right. Where’s the box?”
“On Geraldine’s balcony.”
Marny gathered up the cards, put the pack into her pocket, and stood up. “I’ll get it.”
A few minutes later she returned, carrying the box, now filled with clean sand.
“Where do I put this? On the balcony again?”
“That’s right.”
Marny looked down at the pan of sand she was holding, and looked up at Kendra. “In times gone by,” she said reflectively, “I used to have my hopes and my ambitions. I used to think about the days to come, and I wondered what the future held for me.” She gave a sigh. “I thought of so many possible destinies,” she went on. “But never, in my wildest thoughts, never did I dream that I would wind up being chambermaid to a cat.”
56
MARNY TRIED TO GET ready for the maybe. Maybe there would be another fire on the plaza. But three floors of the Calico Palace were finished now, the top floor was progressing every day, and if ever a building looked safe and felt safe, this one did. Over and over she reminded herself of the advice from Kendra’s grandmother’s cook. “Get ready. Then forget it.”
The second part of the advice was the hard part. How could she forget, when every week or two the bells resounded with another fire alarm?
In all these alarms, rarely was there any question of accident. A policeman or night watchman would be attracted by a glimmer in the dark. Going nearer, he would find rubbish piled against the wall of a building and set alight; or shavings heaped on a wharf, crackling merrily, and matchsticks lying about. Nearly all the fires were set in the blocks between the plaza and the waterfront, where loot would be richest. The volunteer firemen, prompt and profane, were keeping the fires under control. But every alarm reminded Marny that some day the firemen might not get there in time.
“I’m so damn mad,” she said to Kendra, “that sometimes I feel like I’ve got a fire of my own, right inside my skull.”
She was not the only citizen enraged. Every sort of crime was increasing. People and more people were crowding into San Francisco, some of them with no purpose but to help themselves to anything they could lay hands on. Every night men were knocked down and robbed in the unlighted streets. The papers did not even try to list all the murders. And what was worse, the authorities were not doing much to change things.
There were a thousand rumors about why this was true. At Marny’s bar and Hiram’s bank and Pocket’s library, men talked of bribery and corruption. More and more, they were saying it was time they took justice into their own hands. They all began, with pious monotony, “I don’t believe in lynch law, but…”
The safest streets were those around the plaza, because of the lights that streamed from the pleasure resorts. The safest people were women, because their rarity hedged them with a kind of aura. Even on ill-lighted streets, a man with a woman at his side was not likely to be attacked.
“Everything here is upside down,” said Marny. “The most orderly part of town is the region of gamblers and fancy ladies; and when a man has to pass a dark alley he hires a streetwalker to protect him. Was there ever such a place in the world before?”
Still, if there was much to remind her of the da
ngers, there was also much to turn Marny’s thoughts to happier matters.
Gold was streaming down from the placers. Much of this gold went out by the steamers, but a great deal of it never got any farther than Kearny Street. Marny could not find the days too worrisome when she was getting richer all the time. And if she did feel quaky now and then, she could always divert her mind by stepping out on the balcony to see what was going on in the plaza.
Something was always going on in the plaza. People in San Francisco liked to celebrate. The anniversary of a battle, the birthday of a hero, a stirring piece of news—at any such event they rushed to the plaza with bands and cheering. The day a steamer brought word that California was now a state of the Union, they rang bells and tooted horns and had a parade, and fired so many guns that it sounded like a war.
Admission to the Union was important. They had felt like exiles, remote and unrecognized here in this far outpost of their country. Now they were part of their country. They resented anybody who did not realize how important this was. At Marny’s bar an innocent newcomer remarked to Hiram that the new Union Hotel was as fine a hostelry as the finest in the States. At this, Hiram and three other men at the bar exclaimed together, “Sir, we are in the States!”
The stranger hastily said, “Yes, yes, of course, excuse me.” Before long, new arrivals learned to say “back East” instead of “in the States.” If they did not learn fast enough, affronted Californians taught them.
Dwight finished Pocket’s new building. A handsome structure of brick and iron, it stood on the site of the old building, on Washington Street facing the plaza. The reading rooms were in front, and behind them were living quarters for Pocket and his partner, Mr. Gilmore. When asked, Pocket said business was going along nicely, thank you.
While Pocket was still content to live in a room behind his office, Hiram was not. Hiram had moved into the new Union Hotel. This hotel, the best in San Francisco, stood in the same block as the Calico Palace, next door to the Parker House.
In the Parker House itself the whole second floor had been rented by a theatrical producer from New York, who turned it into a theater called the Jenny Lind. He brought in first-class actors, and the plays were good. San Francisco playgoers were not easy to please. Too many of them had come here from the leading cities of the world, and they were used to good theater. They liked the Dramatic Museum well enough, but the Museum offered mostly farces, and song-and-dance acts. The Jenny Lind actors gave real plays, and they did it well.
Marny and Dwight went there often. Marny told Kendra that not only were the plays good but the manager was a smart fellow. He had done something new: he had given his theater two entrances. One of these led through the barroom; the other opened directly into the theater itself. For the first time in San Francisco, you could get into a place of public entertainment without passing a bar.
Marny herself did not object to passing a bar. However, the ladies of Happy Valley did object. More and more successful men were sending home for their wives. The presence of these ladies in a public place gave it an air of quality. And at the Jenny Lind Theater, not only could they avoid the bar, but they could see to it that their husbands did the same.
The new idea worked. Of the four hundred seats in the theater, seldom were more than twenty or thirty occupied by women, and not all these women were matrons proud of their virtue. But in the expensive boxes, almost any evening you could see leading men of San Francisco with their wives.
While they pretended to ignore women not as chaste as themselves, these ladies did send Marny glances bright with interest. They had heard of her—it was hardly possible to live in San Francisco and not hear about Marny of the Calico Palace—and her green eyes and flamelike hair made her easy to recognize. They whispered. Was it true that she came of a fine family back East? That her father had been a college professor? Or was it a banker? Marny was amused. She conducted herself with propriety that matched their own, and let them whisper all they pleased.
Hiram came to see Kendra and asked if she would go to the plays with him. They sat together in a private gambling room not in use at the time, and Hiram spoke to her candidly across the card table.
“I know the calendar of good form back East,” he said. “A widow isn’t supposed to be seen until she has been a widow at least a year. But this isn’t back East. Anyway, I think you’re too smart to want to bury yourself alive.”
Kendra smiled back at him. “I think it’s silly,” she answered, “to say that a woman who has been bereaved should sit at home wrapped in her grief. It’s like saying that when you’ve been ill it’s bad manners to try to get well. I’d like to go with you, thanks.”
He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. She noticed that Hiram’s hand was not as rough as it had been when he was working a rocker at Shiny Gulch. But it was still a big confident hand, hard and strong. “I always knew you had good sense, Kendra,” he said.
The next evening she went with Hiram to the play, wearing a flowered silk dress she had borrowed from Marny. As usual, the audience was mostly men, and she received a shower of admiring glances as she sat down. Kendra wondered which of these men had sent her letters proposing marriage. She still received these letters, and tore them up half read.
She enjoyed the play. After this she went often to the theater, either with Hiram or with Hiram and Pocket together. Sometimes, when she and Hiram went there without Pocket, they caught sight of him with a girl friend of his own. He escorted various girls, and always they were attractive girls.
“Pocket has better luck with women than any other man in town,” Hiram said to her with a chuckle. “Even in San Francisco, where a girl can be a crosseyed hunchback and still have admirers, Pocket can take his choice of them all.”
Glancing at Pocket’s profile, Kendra was not surprised. He was a handsome man. And a likable man. She wondered if he often thought of that girl back in Kentucky. He had said he did not care about her any more. Kendra was sure he did not. But though a wound might heal, she reflected, it could still leave a scar that would never go away.
Another evening as she entered the theater she saw Mr. Fenway and Rosabel. They were occupying a box with Hiram’s partner, the quiet little banker Mr. Eustis, and a lady Kendra did not recognize. Hiram told her the lady was Mrs. Eustis, who had recently arrived from back East to join her husband. Kendra gave an exclamation. “Oh! I’m glad.”
“Glad of what?” Hiram asked with a spark of mischief.
“I’m glad she’s in a box with Rosabel. You know as well as I do how some women are, about a girl like Rosabel.”
Hiram was laughing. “My pretty blue-eyed friend,” he said, “you’re not that innocent. Rosabel is now a married woman, but that’s not all. She’s married to a leading citizen, and a rich one. All her sins are forgotten.”
“I told you, I’m glad,” Kendra repeated. “This is what she wanted and I’m glad she’s getting it.”
Just then Rosabel turned her head and saw them, and they exchanged smiles of greeting. Rosabel wore a dress of pink-flowered satin, and in her hair pink satin flowers held with a jeweled pin. Her black curls danced on her cheeks, and she looked pretty and pampered and content. Kendra noticed that Mr. Fenway, though he kept his solemn dignity, also looked content.
After the play they all had a chat. Mrs. Eustis proved to be a nice little woman, with a good deal to say about the dreadful hardships she had endured while crossing the Isthmus. Rosabel listened demurely, but Kendra saw her lips twitch. The route across the Isthmus was now guarded by the United States Army. Along the way were American lodging houses where travelers could sleep, if not in luxury, at least without fear of being murdered before morning. Rosabel could remember when things had been otherwise. But she kept quiet and let Mrs. Eustis prattle.
When Mr. and Mrs. Eustis had said good night, Rosabel spoke to Kendra.
“Come to see me,” she invited. “My house is all furnished now and ready for company.”
/> Kendra thanked her. She was wondering if Rosabel was also going to invite Marny to call. —If she doesn’t, thought Kendra, I won’t go.
But even as she thought this, Rosabel was saying, “Drag Marny away from her card table and bring her with you.” She glanced at Mr. Fenway. “You’ll drive them, won’t you, Silas?”
Mr. Fenway said he would be glad to. Let them agree upon an afternoon, and he would call for Marny and Kendra in his carriage and escort them to Happy Valley.
The time now was November, and the afternoon they chose for their call proved to be cold and cloudy, but the carriage was well cushioned and Mr. Fenway tucked a warm robe over their knees. In Happy Valley the houses had a look of cheerful neatness. There were fresh curtains at the windows, potted ferns on the porches, and even children playing games in the yards. Mr. Fenway and Rosabel still lived in the readymade house he had set up before their marriage, but he said he approved of the neighborhood and expected to start a brick house shortly.
They found Rosabel in a parlor lighted and warmed by a large wood fire, welcome in the gray chill of the day. Besides the furniture Kendra had helped her select, the parlor had cushions and footstools, a bookcase full of books, and a really splendid rosewood piano. Near the fire was a table on which stood a silver tea service. Rosabel poured tea and passed little sandwiches, with no more fluttering than might have been expected of any bride not yet quite used to receiving callers in her own home. It was a pleasant home, well kept, and Kendra said so. Mr. Fenway, sipping tea and nibbling an olive sandwich, solemnly quoted Scripture.