by Grant Allen
The next twelve months were a time of wonders. It isn’t often, even on the Pacific slope, that a city has grown up by magic like this one. But here, you see, we had the gas laid on to do the work for us automatically, and all we needed was the hands and brains to guide and direct it. The gas quarried the stone for us, and worked the drills, and hoisted the cranes, and drove the traction engines; and within the year Main Street had a frontage of fine stone-built stores, and the stakes at the side had developed by a sort of Arabian Nights method into broad avenues of handsome residences fit for respectable and cultured families. There was society in the Pike, now, there was positively society. Ladies with children drove in their own buggies down the new-made roads. A railroad connected us with Carson City, and another joined the North California line by Santander Junction. There was every convenience and comfort of life, except civilized fields and farms about us. And I was myself the richest man, by a long chalk, in the whole community. I bossed the Pike; that’s the long and short of it.
One little event happened, however, before I made my journey to San Francisco — the journey that turned my hair white — which I think I ought to tell you about, because it has some bearing, in a way, upon the rest of my story. One day, about six weeks after the discovery of gas, while I was up to my eyes in business, arranging for the laying down of our main supply pipes — for we began from the very first on the large scale with the definite idea that Cooper’s Pike was to be a live city — who should break into my office but Joe Ashley, the bartender, his eyes bloodshot, his cheeks pale, and his whole face looking very much as if he’d made a night of it, the evening before, to very bad purpose. The poor fellow seemed almost as if he would burst out crying before my very face.
“Hallo, Joe,” says I; “why, what on earth’s the matter, man?”
“Drink, Mr. Freke, sir,” says he. “Drink. Drink. Drink. That’s just about the name of it.”
“How so?” I asked, sympathizing, for I was sorry for Joe.
“Well, I met a few friends at the saloon last night,” Joe said, making a clean breast of it, and looking very penitent. “And I got precious lively. But that’s not the worst of it. One of them friends must have been a bad lot, for there’s fifty dollars missing from the till this morning — I don’t know how; and I’ve got the sack; and I’m off to Frisco.”
“Fifty dollars,” I said, pulling out my purse. “Now, Joe, you can’t go and leave the till fifty dollars short, can you? Take this, old fellow, and settle up with the governor,” says I, “and then come back and have dinner with me, and we’ll talk things over.”
For Joe was a Very good fellow at bottom, in spite of his small failing; and I could never forget it was he who’d laid the foundation of my own fortunes, by getting up the subscription to pay the piano freight.
Well, off Joe went, taking his money like a man — it isn’t every one that knows how to accept a favor gracefully, I can tell you — and by and by he came back and talked things over; and I spoke to him like a father about going to San Francisco. You’ve no idea what a lot of moral dignity I developed all at once, on the strength of being president of the Natural Gas Supply Association. You see, people always think there’s something extremely moral in the possession of capital. Joe listened to my preaching as if I’d been twenty years his senior, instead of being a young fellow just out of his teens. “And now, Joe,” I said, “before you go from this, you’ve just got to sign a little paper for me, if you please, will you?”
“What is it?” said Joe, looking at it rather hard. “Note of hand for fifty?”
“No, no,” says I. “Note of hand be blowed! Not that, my friend. Total abstinence pledge for three years certain.”
“Will you sign it yourself?” says Joe, drawing back.
“If you will,” I answered. And I took up a pen, and signed right there. And for three years, gentlemen, just for the sake of example, never a drop of liquor passed my teeth, I can promise you.
“Well, I ain’t going to be licked by a boy like you,” Joe said, examining my signature with a sort of admiring interest. “You’re a plucky one, you are. If you can stand the chaff you’ll get from the boys, why, I ought to be able to stand it, I reckon. Here goes,” said Joe; and he took up the pen; and for three years after that, you may be sure, he never touched another glass of old Bourbon.
“Now, if you go to San Francisco,” I said, putting on a sort of patronizing air, “don’t you know, you’ll want a trifle to start you in life. You’re a good fellow, Joe, and you did me a good turn when I needed one badly. There’s two hundred dollars, United States gold. You keep that safe. And mind, when it’s gone, if you can’t get work, there’s plenty more any day where that lot came from.”
For the natural gas had worked such an instantaneous revolution in my financial position that a couple of hundred dollars was less to me than twenty cents would have been six weeks before, you may be sure. And I rather liked parading my new-made wealth to Joe, I fancy.
Joe looked at it twice, and then he looked at me. “Mr. Freke,” he said, “you’re a brick, you are. I’ll never touch another drop again as long as I live; and I’ll work like a horse till I’ve paid you back this. And if ever there’s anything I can do to help you, you count on me, sir, and I’ll try my best for you.”
And sure enough, Joe was as good as his word. He went down to San Francisco, and there he got employment (partly by the aid of a recommendation from me, for, you see, I was beginning to be a somebody on the Pacific slope already) as a clerk in the Pacific Steam Navigation Company’s service. And before three months were out, he’d sent me back the two hundred and fifty dollars, United States gold, never having had occasion to touch the two hundred I lent him at all, and having saved the fifty out of his weekly wages. I call that most honorable of Joe Ashley, gentlemen.
CHAPTER IV.
TO SAN FRANCISCO.
Whene’er a noble deed is wrought.
Whene’er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts, in glad surprise
To higher levels rise.”
HOW about Edith, do you say, meanwhile? Well, gentlemen, I didn’t like to drag in a lady’s name more than I could help in a billiard-room conversation; but if you ask me point-blank and you will have the truth about it, why, I don’t mind confessing to you that all this time I’d been writing by every Pacific mail, as regular as clockwork, to Edith Deverel, and keeping as straight, for Edith’s sake, as any young fellow can hope to do on a new mining station. The means of grace aren’t largely developed, as a rule, in a Pacific settlement. I saw a good deal of the boys, of course, but, as far as I could, I held myself aloof from drink or play; and after I signed the pledge, to encourage poor Joe, why, I kept up the dignity of President of the Gas Association by never going near the Columbia saloon at all, by day or by night, and by putting on my best London clothes every Sunday morning, which was the nearest approach to divine service we could manage at the Pike, till the first Methodist minister came over from Carson to run a congregation. I don’t want to talk sentiment, that’s not my line; but if you think there was ever a minute of the day when Edith was out of my mind, or when thoughts of what Edith would have wished me to do didn’t influence my conduct, why, all I can say is, you’ve got a less vivid recollection than I have of what sort of a chap I was when I first set up to run the Cooper’s Pike Natural Gas Association.
It was a full year, however, before I thought we’d got things ship-shape enough at the Pike to make it possible for me to ask such a lady as Edith to come over as an elevating and refining influence on Nevadan society. At the end of that time, there were several high-toned families settled in the city whom I wouldn’t be ashamed to introduce to my wife; and the sidewalks were beginning to be fit for the sole of Edith’s foot to tread upon. So I wrote and asked her if she’d redeem her pledge, and make me a long sight happier than I could possibly tell her (without exceeding half an ounce) in a twenty-five cent letter. In order to explain things a
bit at the same time, I also wrote to her respected papa, informing him that I was now the president of the Cooper’s Pike Natural Gas Association, and that if he wanted anything reasonable in the way of settlements, my solicitor would be glad to arrange matters with him on what I trusted would be a mutually satisfactory basis. Edith herself never hesitated for a moment; I knew she wouldn’t; and, what was odder still, her papa accepted my financial proposals in the same liberal spirit in which they were intended. I took it kindly of him that he was willing to entrust me with Edith.
So I arranged that my bride was to come over in the next Pacific Steam Navigation Company’s packet from Yokohama for San Francisco; and I determined to go down to the Golden Gate myself to meet her in port on her first arrival. It was agreed that she should go, immediately she landed, to the house of a lady in San Francisco who knew her father; and from there she was to be married at the earliest possible date, at the First Episcopal Church in Madison Street, and go up country with me straight to her new location.
Two days before the vessel was due in port, I started off by our new railway line via Carson City, en route for the Californian capital.
Now, although we were in daily business communication with the coast, I had never myself been in San Francisco before; and it was a real treat to me, I can tell you, after eighteen months of bustle and hurry in our mushroom Pike, with its cranes and its derricks, to find myself in a civilized town once more, and to feel I was again in touch with old-world culture. So to fill up the time before Edith arrived, I began to hunt about over the sights of the city.
The first thing I did, however, on arriving at the Palace Hotel, where I put up my traps, was to go down to the Pacific Steam Navigation Company’s bureau to have a chat with Joe Ashley, the former bartender.
Such a respectable man as Joe’d developed into, under the joint influence of teetotalism and the San Francisco air, you’ll hardly imagine unless you could have seen him. I tell you, that man wore a black coat, and was courting a young lady in an up-town book-store who’d have done credit at the head of any merchant’s table on the Pacific seaboard. It did my heart good to see how nicely he was prospering.
Joe gave my hand such a wring as would have made a good many Englishmen cry out; but I knew it was well meant, and I thanked him with tears of gratitude in my eyes. Perhaps they weren’t altogether gratitude either; I’m not quite clear about that; but anyhow they were tears, and that’s the main thing, isn’t it? He told me the Sacramento, that Edith was coming by, claimed to be the fastest steamer on the Japan line, and she might be in, perhaps, that very evening. Or perhaps she mightn’t. But she’d be telegraphed up, anyhow, four hours in advance, from the Farallone Islands, where they always signal all approaching vessels. As soon as ever the telegram announcing that she’d passed the lighthouse came safe to hand, Joe promised to send a messenger up to my hotel right away with the news, so that I’d have ample time to put on my store clothes and come down and meet Edith.
That night I went out and had a peep at Chinatown. I went the usual round of the Chinese theatre, and the gambling hells, and the hideous dens where the yellow men poison themselves with fumes of opium. But I won’t describe them all; they’ve nothing particular to do with my story. For it wasn’t that night that turned my-hair gray; not so bad as that; it was the night after. It takes more than Chinatown, a good deal, to turn my hair white, I can promise you that; though Chinatown’s enough to make it stand on end, if you’ve never been here. I may be prejudiced, but I don’t know how it is, I never do take to the Chinese somehow.
However, I never went to bed that night. I was too much on the lookout for Edith’s arrival. Every hour, I expected to receive a note from Joe Ashley announcing that the Sacramento was now in sight; so even after I got home from that horrible sink of filth and iniquity I sat and read, dozing at times in my chair, and strolling out now and again into the well-lighted streets, just to keep myself from dropping off and forgetting about the steamer.
It was a tedious night, and I was tired with travelling.
Morning dawned at last, and no news of the Sacramento. About eight o’clock, after a hasty breakfast, I went down to the bureau and saw Joe once more. He told me there was now no chance of the ship coming alongside before noon at the earliest, so I might go out again and spend the morning, if I liked, in seeing the sights of San Francisco.
Once or twice in the course of the day I called in again at the office, but always with the same stereotyped result: “Sacramento not yet telegraphed from the Farallone Islands. At least four hours before she arrives in harbor.”
To get rid of the day, therefore, I went a regular round of the San Francisco lions. I drove through the Golden Gate Park; I walked in the Plaza; I inspected the University; I tramped along miles of church aisles of every denomination, till I was footsore and weary with my needless exertions. In the afternoon I hired a hack, and went down for an excursion by a fine boulevard to the Cliff House, where I sat on the veranda and watched the sea-lions on Seal Rock basking in the sun or wriggling over the crags with their discordant barks, right in front of the seats in that fashionable restaurant. But all these sights gave me very little satisfaction. By four o’clock I was back in Market Street again, only to receive that one invariable answer: Sacramento not yet cabled; call again for news in three or four hours.”
“What else is there,” I said to Joe, with a despairing yawn, for I was beginning to get tired, “worth a fellow’s going to see in this great, overgrown city?”
“Well, I guess,” said Joe, “there ain’t anything much, now you’ve done Chinatown, and gone through the Parks; but you might put in an hour, perhaps, at our Madame Tussaud’s.”
“What! you don’t mean to say,” I cried, “there’s a Madame Tussaud’s here in San Francisco?”
“Well, that ain’t exactly its official name,” Joe answered: “we only call it that for short, don’t you see? Its regular title is the Central Metropolitan Californian Plastographic Museum, for blending amusement and instruction in the education of the masses.”
“That’s a good word, Plastographic,” I said, “if it’s in the right place, of course; but whereabouts does the Metropolitan Californian Museum hang out?”
“Corner of Washington and Pacific,” says Joe: “eight blocks down. You can’t miss your way, and the poster at the door’s as big as the City Hall, almost.”
“What’s the damage?” said I.
“A quarter,” said Joe; “and extra for the murderers. But there’s a guillotine there that’s real fine for the money.”
Well, I never was what you could call an enthusiastic devotee of waxworks at any time; they don’t come up to my idea of art, like the Romneys in my grandfather’s dining-room in Devonshire; and I was tired enough now not to go out of my way if Mont Blanc, Niagara Falls, the Piazza of St. Mark’s, and the Karnak Temples had all been on view at once round the nearest corner; but somehow, I felt as if I must do something by way of working off my suppressed excitement? so, just to pass the time, I took the next street-car that came along, and dropped myself down corner of Washington and Pacific, as Joe directed.
The San Francisco Madame Tussaud’s was absurdly like the dear old exhibition that used to hang out in Baker Street when I was in London (I’m told it’s been moved since, with the progress of thought in the old country, to the Marylebone Road — ah, dear, what changes!) — of course with a distinct American flavor thrown in as well; George Washington, and Henry Clay, and the Secretary of the Treasury shaking hands with the President, as a set-off to the late Emperor of the French in his coronation robes, and the royal family playing hunt-the-slipper in the drawing-room at Windsor — but on the whole about as much alike in its main features as you expect everything to be nowadays all the world over. There was a Chamber of Horrors, too, as Joe had told me, for which you paid an extra quarter; and there you could see Junius Brutus Booth in the act of assassinating Abraham Lincoln; as well as Guiteau on trial for his life, a
fter shooting a pasty-faced Garfield in wax at the other end of the raised exhibition platform. There was the usual display of intelligent poisoners, and rascally doctors, and ladies who had anticipated their husband’s life-policies, and gentlemen who, being unable to marry a couple of wives abreast, bad tried to manage it single file by getting off with the old love and on with the new by the agency of a gentle dose of arsenic or antimony. Altogether, a rather depressing spectacle for a man who’d been up in Chinatown all the night before, and was just waiting for his bride to arrive by steamer from Yokohama.
The most interesting feature in the entire exhibition, however, was the attendant or demonstrator, who accompanied visitors round the Chamber of Horrors, and explained the various groups, their crimes and punishments, with profound gusto. He was a connoisseur in modes of death, and his graphic descriptions would have made the fortune of any penny dreadful. But what gave him novelty was the fact that he was a Chinaman, a genuine Celestial in a yellow silk robe and a long pigtail; and that he descanted on the nature and deeds of the various criminals with perfect assurance in the most lovely dialect of pigeon English. At first he merely amused and interested me, that man; I took him as a study of Oriental character; I had no idea how soon he was to interweave himself in fixed colors into the most awful incident in my whole career. Well, yes, gentlemen, you’re about right there. I’m coming at last in this long yarn of mine to what it actually was that turned my hair white.
And you aren’t far wrong when you say that that yellow-faced Mongolian had a good deal to do with it.
CHAPTER V.
Ll SING, THE SHOWMAN.
The voyage through life is various found.
