Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  Ida sat down on the piano stool, twisting back and forth, leaning her elbows on the keys.

  “All the folks have gone out to a whist-party, and I’m left all alone in the house with Maggie,” she said. Then she added: “Bessie and Bandy Ellis said they would come down to-night, and I thought we could all go downtown to the Tivoli or somewhere, in the open-air boxes, you know, way up at the top.” Hardly had she spoken the words when Bessie and Ellis arrived.

  Ida went upstairs to get on her hat at once, because it was so late, and Bessie went with her.

  Ellis and Vandover laughed as soon as they saw each other, and Ellis exclaimed mockingly, “Ye-e-ow, thash jush way I feel.” Vandover grinned:

  “That’s so,” he answered. “I do remember now of having made that remark several times. But you — oh, you were fearful. Do you remember the row in the Luxembourg? Look there where you bit me.”

  Ellis was incensed with Geary because he had forsaken their party.

  “Oh, that’s Charlie Geary, all over,” answered Vandover.

  As they were speaking there came a sudden outburst of bells in various parts of the city and simultaneously they heard the hoarse croaking of a whistle down by the waterfront.

  “Fire,” said Vandover indifferently.

  Ellis was already fumbling in his pockets, keeping count of the strokes.

  “That’s one,” he exclaimed, pulling out and studying his list of alarm-boxes, “and one-two-three, that’s three and one-two-three-four, one thirty-four. Let’s see now! That’s Bush and Hyde streets, not very far off,” and he returned his card to the inside pocket of his coat as though he had accomplished a duty.

  He lit a cigar. “I wonder now,” he said, hesitating. “I guess I better not smoke in here. I’ll go outside and get a mouthful of smoke before the girls come down.” He went out and Vandover sat down to the cheap piano and played his three inevitable pieces, the two polkas and the air of the topical song; but he was interrupted by Ellis, who opened the door, crying out:

  “Oh, come out here and see the fire, will you? Devil of a blaze!” Vandover ran out and saw a great fan-shaped haze of red through the fog over the roofs of the houses.

  “Oh, say, girls,” he shouted, jumping back to the foot of the stairs; “Ida, Bessie, there’s a fire. Just look out of your windows. Hark, there go the engines.”

  Bessie came tearing down the stairs and out on the front steps, where the two fellows were standing hatless.

  “Where? Oh, show me where! O-o-oh, sure enough! That’s a big fire. Just hear the engines. Oh, let’s go!”

  “Sure; come on, let’s go!” exclaimed Vandover. “Tell Ida to hurry up.”

  “Oh, Ida,” cried Bessie up the stairs, “there’s an awful big fire right near here, and we’re going.”

  “Oh, wait!” shouted Ida, her mouth full of pins. “I had to change my waist. Oh, do wait for me. Where is it at? Please wait; I’m coming right down in just a minute.”

  “Hurry up, hurry up!” cried Vandover. “It will be all out by the time we get there. I’m coming up to help.”

  “No, no, no!” she screamed. “Don’t; you rattle me. I’m all mixed up. Oh, darn it, I can’t find my czarina!”

  But at last she came running down, breathless, shrugging herself into her bolero jacket. They all hurried into the street and turned in the direction of the blaze. Other people were walking rapidly in the same direction, and there was an opening and shutting of windows and front doors. A steamer thundered past, clanging and smoking, followed by a score of half-exhausted boys. It took them longer to reach the fire than they expected, and by the time they had come within two blocks of it they were quite out of breath. Here the excitement was lively; the sidewalks were full of people going in the same direction; on all sides there were guesses as to where the fire was. On the front steps of many houses stood middle-aged gentlemen, still holding their evening papers and cigars, very amused and interested in watching the crowd go past. One heard them from time to time calling to their little sons, who were dancing on the sidewalks, forbidding them to go; in the open windows above could be seen the other members of the family, their faces faintly tinged with the glow, looking and pointing, or calling across the street to their friends in the opposite houses. Every one was in good humour; it was an event, a fête for the entire neighbourhood.

  Vandover and his party came at last to the first engines violently pumping and coughing, the huge gray horses standing near by, already unhitched and blanketed, indifferently feeding in their nosebags. Some of the crowd preferred to watch the engines rather than the fire, and there were even some who were coming away from it, exclaiming “false alarm” or “all out now.”

  The party had come up quite close; they could smell the burning wood and could see the roofs of the nearer houses beginning to stand out sharp and black against the red glow beyond. It was a barn behind a huge frame house that was afire, the dry hay burning like powder, and by the time they reached it the flames were already dwindling. The hose was lying like a python all about the streets, while upon the neighbouring roofs were groups of firemen with helmets and axes; some were shouting into the street below, and others were holding the spouting nozzles of the hose. “Ah,” exclaimed an old man, standing near to Ida and Vandover, “ah, I was here when it first broke out; you ought to have seen the flames then! Look, there’s a tree catching!”

  The crowd became denser; policemen pushed it back and stretched a rope across the street. There was a world of tumbling yellow smoke that made one’s eyes smart, and a great crackling and snapping of flames. Terribly excited little boys were about everywhere whistling and calling for each other as the crowd separated them.

  They watched the fire for some time, standing on a pile of boards in front of a half-built house, but as it dwindled they wearied of it.

  “Want to go?” asked Vandover at last.

  “Yes,” answered Ida, “we might as well. Oh, where’s Bessie and Ellis?” They were nowhere to be seen. Vandover whistled and Ida even called, but in vain. The little boys in the crowd mimicked Ida, crying back, “Hey! Bessie! Oh, Bes-see, mommer wants you!” The men who stood near laughed at this, but it annoyed Vandover much more than it did Ida.

  “Ah, well, never mind,” she said at length. “Let them go. Now shall we go?”

  It was too late for the theatre, but to return home was out of the question. They started off aimlessly downtown.

  While he talked Vandover was perplexed. Ida was gayly dressed and was one of those girls who cannot open their mouths nor raise a finger in the street without attracting attention. Vandover was not at all certain that he cared to be seen on Kearney Street as Ida Wade’s escort; one never knew who one was going to meet. Ida was not a bad girl, she was not notorious, but, confound it, it would look queer; and at the same time, while Ida was the kind of girl that one did not want to be seen with, she was not the kind of girl that could be told so. In an upper box at the Tivoli it would have been different — one could keep in the background; but to appear on Kearney Street with a girl who wore a hat like that and who would not put on her gloves — ah, no, it was out of the question.

  Ida was talking away endlessly about a kindergarten in which she had substituted the last week.

  She told him about the funny little nigger girl, and about the games and songs and how they played birds and hopped around and cried, “Twit, twit,” and the game of the butterflies visiting the flowers. She even sang part of a song about the waves.

  “Every little wave had its night-cap on;

  Its white-cap, night-cap, white-cap on.”

  “It’s more fun than enough,” she said.

  “Say, Ida,” interrupted Vandover at length, “I’m pretty hungry. Can’t we go somewhere and eat something? I’d like a Welsh rabbit.”

  “All right,” she answered. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Well,” replied Vandover, running over in his mind the places he might reach by unfrequented streets. �
��There’s Marchand’s or Tortoni’s or the Poodle Dog.”

  “Suits me,” she answered, “any one you like. Say, Van,” she added, “weren’t you boys at the Imperial the other night? What kind of a place is that?”

  On the instant Vandover wondered what she could mean. Was it possible that Ida would go to a place like that with him?

  “The Imperial?” he answered. “Oh, I don’t know; the Imperial is a sort of a nice place. It has private rooms, like all of these places. The cooking is simply out of sight. I think there is a bar connected with it.” Then he went on to talk indifferently about the kindergarten, though his pulse was beating fast, and his nerves were strung taut. By and by Ida said:

  “I didn’t know there was a bar at the Imperial. I thought it was just some kind of an oyster joint. Why, I heard of a very nice girl, a swell girl, going in there.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Vandover, “they do. I say, Ida,” he went on, “what’s the matter with going down there?”

  “The Imperial?” exclaimed Ida. “Well, I guess not!”

  “Why, it’s all right, if I’m with you,” retorted Vandover, “but if you don’t like it we can go anywhere else.”

  “Well, I guess we will go anywhere else,” returned Ida, and for the time the subject was dropped.

  They took a Sutter Street car and got off at Grant Avenue, having decided to go to Marchand’s.

  “That’s the Imperial down there, isn’t it?” asked Ida as they reached the sidewalk. Vandover made a last attempt:

  “I say, Ida, come on, let’s go there. It’s all right if I’m with you. Ah, come along; what’s the odds?”

  “No — no — NO,” she answered decisively. “What kind of a girl do you think I am, anyway?”

  “Well, I tell you what,” answered Vandover, “just come down by the place, and if you don’t like the looks of it you needn’t go in. I want to get some cigarettes, anyhow. You can walk down with me till I do that.”

  “I’ll walk down with you,” replied Ida, “but I shan’t go in.”

  They drew near to the Imperial. The street about was deserted, even the usual hacks that had their stand there were gone.

  “You see,” explained Vandover as they passed slowly in front of the doors, “this is all quiet enough. If you pulled down your veil no one would know the difference, and here’s the ladies’ entrance, you see, right at the side.”

  “All right, come along, let’s go in,” exclaimed Ida suddenly, and before he knew it they had swung open the little door of the ladies’ entrance with its frosted pane of glass and had stepped inside.

  It was between nine and ten o’clock, and the Imperial was quiet as yet; a few men were drinking in the barroom outside, and Toby, the red-eyed waiter, was talking in low tones to a girl under one of the electric lights.

  Vandover and Ida went into one of the larger rooms in the rear passage and shut the door. Ida pushed her bolero jacket from her shoulders, saying, “This seems nice and quiet enough.”

  “Well, of course,” answered Vandover, as though dismissing the question for good. “Now, what are we going to have? I say we have champagne and oysters.”

  “Let’s have Cliquot, then,” exclaimed Ida, which was the only champagne she had ever heard of besides the California brands.

  She was very excited. This was the kind of “gay” time she delighted in, tête-à-tête champagne suppers with men late at night. She had never been in such a place as the Imperial before, and the daring and novelty of what she had done, the whiff of the great city’s vice caught in this manner, sent a little tremor of pleasure and excitement over all her nerves.

  They did not hurry over their little supper, but ate and drank slowly, and had more oysters to go with the last half of their bottle. Ida’s face was ablaze, her eyes flashing, her blond hair disordered and falling about her cheeks.

  Vandover put his arm about her neck and drew her toward him, and as she sank down upon him, smiling and complaisant, her hair tumbling upon her shoulders and her head and throat bent back, he leaned his cheek against hers, speaking in a low voice.

  “No — no,” she murmured, smiling; “never — ah, if I hadn’t come — no, Van — please—” And then with a long breath she abandoned herself.

  About midnight he left her at the door of her house on Golden Gate Avenue. On their way home Ida had grown more serious than he had ever known her to be. Now she began to cry softly to herself. “Oh, Van,” she said, putting her head down upon his shoulder, “oh, I am so sorry. You don’t think any less of me, do you? Oh, Van, you must be true to me now!”

  Chapter Six

  Everybody in San Francisco knew of the Ravises and always made it a point to speak of them as one of the best families of the city. They were not new and they were not particularly rich. They had lived in the same house on California Street for nearly twenty years and had always been comfortably well off. As things go in San Francisco, they were old-fashioned. They had family traditions and usages and time-worn customs. Their library had been in process of collection for the past half century and the pictures on the walls were oil paintings of steel engravings and genuine old-fashioned chromos, beyond price to-day.

  Their furniture and ornaments were of the preceding generation, solid, conservative. They were not chosen with reference to any one style, nor all bought at the same time. Each separate piece had an individuality of its own. The Ravises kept their old things, long after the fashion had gone out, preferring them to the smarter “art” objects on account of their associations.

  There were six in the family, Mr. and Mrs. Ravis, Turner, and her older brother, Stanley, Yale ‘88, a very serious young gentleman of twenty-seven, continually professing an interest in economics and finance. Besides these were the two children, Howard, nine years old, and his sister, aged fourteen, who had been christened Virginia.

  They were a home-loving race. Mr. Ravis, senior, belonged to the Bohemian Club, but was seldom seen there. Stanley was absorbed in his law business, and Turner went out but little. They much preferred each other’s society to that of three fourths of their acquaintances, most of their friends being “friends of the family,” who came to dinner three or four times a year.

  It was a custom of theirs to spend the evenings in the big dining-room at the back of the house, after the table had been cleared away, Mr. Ravis and Stanley reading the papers, the one smoking his cigar, the other his pipe; Mrs. Ravis, with the magazines and Turner with the Chautauquan. Howard and Virginia appropriated the table to themselves where they played with their soldiers and backgammon board.

  The family kept two servants, June the “China boy,” who had been with them since the beginning of things, and Delphine the cook, a more recent acquisition. June was, in a way, butler and second boy combined; he did all the downstairs work and the heavy sweeping, but it was another time-worn custom for Mrs. Ravis and Turner to spend part of every morning in putting the bedrooms to rights, dusting and making up the beds. Besides this, Turner exercised a sort of supervision over Howard and Virginia, who were too old for a nurse but too young to take care of themselves. She had them to bed at nine, mended some of their clothes, made them take their baths regularly, reëstablished peace between them in their hourly quarrels, and, most arduous task of all, saw that Howard properly washed himself every morning, and on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons that he was suitably dressed in time for dancing school.

  It was Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Ravis was reading to her husband, who lay on the sofa in the back-parlour smoking a cigar. Stanley had gone out to make a call, while Howard and Virginia had forgathered in the bathroom to sail their boats and cigar boxes in the tub. Toward half-past three, as Turner was in her room writing letters, the door-bell rang. She stopped, with her pen in the air, wondering if it might be Vandover. It was June’s afternoon out. In a few minutes the bell rang again, and Turner ran down to answer it herself, intercepting Delphine, who took June’s place on these occasions, but who was hopelessly stup
id.

  Mrs. Ravis had peered out through the curtains of the parlour window to see who it was, and Turner met her and Mr. Ravis coming upstairs, abandoning the parlour to Turner’s caller.

  “Mamma and I are going upstairs to read,” explained Mr. Ravis. “It’s some one of your young men. You can bring him right in the parlour.”

  “I think it’s Mr. Haight,” said Turner’s mother. “Ask him to stay to tea.”

  “Well,” said Turner doubtfully, as she paused at the foot of the stairs, “I will, but you know we never have anything to speak of for Sunday evening tea. June is out, and you know how clumsy and stupid Delphine is when she waits on the table.”

  It was young Haight. Turner was very glad to see him, for next to Vandover she liked him better than any of the others. She was never bored by being obliged to entertain him, and he always had something to say and some clever way of saying it.

  About half-past five, as they were talking about amateur photography, Mrs. Ravis came in and called them to tea.

  Tea with the Ravises was the old-fashioned tea of twenty years ago. One never saw any of the modern “delicacies” on their Sunday evening table, no enticing cold lunch, no spices, not even catsups or pepper sauces. The turkey or chicken they had had for dinner was served cold in slices; there was canned fruit, preserves, tea, crackers, bread and butter, a large dish of cold pork and beans, and a huge glass pitcher of ice-water.

  In the absence of June, Delphine the cook went through the agony of waiting on the table, very nervous and embarrassed in her clean calico gown and starched apron. Her hands were red and knotty, smelling of soap, and they touched the chinaware with an over-zealous and constraining tenderness as if the plates and dishes had been delicate glass butterflies. She stood off at a distance from the table making sudden and awkward dabs at it. When it came to passing the plates, she passed them on the wrong side and remembered herself at the wrong moment with a stammering apology. In her excess of politeness she kept up a constant murmur as she attended to their wants. Another fork? Yes, sir. She’d get it right away, sir. Did Mrs. Ravis want another cuppa tea? No? No more tea? Well, she’d pass the bread. Some bread, Master Howard? Nice French bread, he always liked that. Some more preserved pears, Miss Ravis? Yes, miss, she’d get them right away; they were just over here on the sideboard. Yes, here they were. No more? Now she’d go and put them back. And at last when she had set the nerves of all of them in a jangle, was dismissed to the kitchen and retired with a gasp of unspeakable relief.