The Heart Line 40

The Heart Line 40

CHAPTER VIII*

 

*ILLUMINATION*

 

 

It is easy to imagine the virtuous pride with which the civil engineer,

Jasper O’Farrell, set about the laying out of the town of San Francisco

in 1846. Here was the ideal site for a city—a peninsula lying like a

great thumb on the hand of the mainland, between the Pacific Ocean and a

deep, land-locked bay, an area romantically configured of hills and

valleys, with picturesque mountain and water views, the setting sun in

the west and Mount Diablo a sentinel in the east; to the northward, the

sea channel of the Golden Gate overhung by the foot-hills of Tamalpais.

 

There was still chance to amend and improve the old town site of Yerba

Buena, the little Spanish settlement by the cove in the harbor, whose

straight, narrow streets had been artlessly ruled by Francisco de Haro,

alcalde of the Mission Dolores. He had marked out upon the ground,

northerly, La Calle de la Fundacion and the adjacent squares necessary

for the little port of entry in 1835. Four years later, when Governor

Alvarado directed a new survey of the place, Jean Vioget extended the

original lines with mathematical precision to the hills surrounding the

valley; and it would have been possible to correct that artistic blunder

of the simple-minded alcalde. But Jasper O’Farrell had seen military

service with General Sutter; his ways were stern and severe, his

esthetic impulses, if he had any, were heroically subdued. Market

Street, indeed, he permitted to run obliquely, though it went straight

as a bullet towards the Twin Peaks. The rest of the city he made one

great checkerboard, in defiance of its natural topography.

 

As one might constrict the wayward fancies of a gipsy maiden to the

cold, tight-laced ethics of a puritanical creed, so O’Farrell bound the

city that was to be for ever to a gridiron of right-angled streets and

blocks of parallelograms. He knew no compromise. His streets took their

straight and narrow way, up hill and down dale, without regard to grade

or expense. Unswerving was their rectitude. Their angles were exactly

ninety degrees of his compass, north and south, east and west. Where

might have been entrancingly beautiful terraces, rising avenue above

avenue to the heights, preserving the master-view of the continent, now

the streets, committed to his plan, are hacked out of the earth and

rock, precipitous, inaccessible, grotesque. So sprawls the fey,

leaden-colored town over its dozen hills, its roads mounting to the sky

or diving to the sea.

 

So the stranger beholds San Francisco, the Improbable. Its pageantry is

unrolled for all to see at first glance. Never was a city so prodigal

of its friendship and its wealth. She salutes one on every crossing,

welcoming the visitor openly and frankly with her western heart. In

every little valley where the slack, rattling cables of her car-lines

slap and splutter over the pulleys, some great area of the town exhibits

a rising colony of blocks stretching up and over a shoulder of the hill

to one side and to the other. Atop every crest one is confronted with

farther districts lying not only beneath but opposite, across lower

levels and hollows, flanking one’s point of vantage with rival summits.

San Francisco is agile in displaying her charms. As you are whirled up

and down on the cable-car, she moves stealthily about you, now lagging

behind in steep declivities, now dodging to right or left in stretches

of plain or uplifted hillsides, now hurrying ahead to surprise you with

a terrifying ascent crowned with palaces. Now she is all water-front

and sailors’ lodging-houses; in a trice she turns Chinatown, then shocks

you with a Spanish, Italian or negro quarter. Past the next rise, you

find her whimsical, fantastic with garish flats and apartment houses.

She lurks in and about thousands of little wooden houses, and beyond,

she drops a little park into your path, discloses a stretch of

shimmering bay or unveils magnificently the green, gently-sloping

expanse of the Presidio.

 

No other city has so many points of view, none allures the stranger so

with coquetry of originality and fantasy. Some cities have single

dominant hills; but she is all hills, they are a vital part of herself.

They march down into the town and one can not escape them, they stride

north and west and must be climbed. The important lines of traffic

accept these conditions and plunge boldly up and down upon their ways.

And so, going or returning from his home, the city is always with the

citizen—from Nob Hill he sees ships in the harbor and the lights of the

Mission; from Kearney Street he keeps his view of Telegraph Hill and

Twin Peaks—the San Franciscan is always in San Francisco, the city of

extremes.

 

Of all this topographical chaos, the most spectacular spot is Telegraph

Hill. To the eastward on the harbor side, it rises a sheer precipice

over a hundred feet high, where a concrete company has quarried stone

for three decades despite protest, appeal, injunction and the force of

arms. To the north and west the hill falls away into a jumble of

streets, cliffed and hollowed like the billows of the sea, crusted with

queer little houses of the Latin quarter.

 

 

Francis Granthope, after the Chinese supper, had found himself swayed by

an obsession. The thought of Clytie Payson was insistent in his mind.

She troubled him. He recognized the symptom with a grim sense of its

ridiculousness. It was, according to his theory, the first sign of

love; but the idea of his being in love was absurd. Certainly he

desired her, and that ardently. She stimulated him, she stirred his

fancy. But he was jealous of his freedom; he would not be snared by a

woman’s eyes. Marriage, indeed, he had contemplated, but, to his mind,

marriage was but a part of the game, a condition which would insure for

him an attractive companion, a desirable standing; in short, a point of

vantage. What had begun to chafe him, now, was a sort of compulsion

that Clytie had put upon him. Somehow he could not be himself with

her—he was self-conscious, timid—he was sensitive to her vibrations, he

was swayed by her fine moods and impulses. Though the strain was

gentle, still she coerced him. He felt an impulse to shake himself

free.

 

In this temper, he decided, while he was at dinner, to see her, and, if

he could, regain possession of the situation, master her by the use of

those arts by which he had so often won before. He would, at least, if

he could not cajole her, assert his independence. No doubt he had been

misled by her claims of intuitive power. He would put that to the test,

as well.

 

It was already after sunset when he started across Union Square.

Kearney Street was alight with electric lamps and humming with life. He

walked north, passing the gayer retail shopping district towards the

cheaper stores, pawnshops and quack doctors’ offices to where the old

Plaza, rising in a green slope to Chinatown, displayed the little

Stevenson fountain with its merry gilded ship. Here the waifs and the

strays of the night were already wandering, and he responded to frequent

appeals for charity.

 

Beyond was the dance-hall district, where women of the town were

promenading, seeking their prey; sailors and soldiers descended into

subterranean halls of light and music. Then came the Italian quarter

with its restaurants and saloons.

 

He paused where Montgomery Avenue diverged, leading to the North Beach,

consulted his watch, and found that it was too early to call. He

decided to kill time by going up Telegraph Hill, and kept on up Kearney

Street.

 

Across Broadway, it mounted suddenly in an incline so steep, that

ladder-like frameworks flat upon the ribbed concrete sidewalks were

necessary for ascent. Two blocks the hill rose thus, encompassed by

disconsolate and wretched little houses, with alleys plunging down from

the street into the purlieus of the quarter; then it ran nearly level to

the foot of the hill. The track there was up steps and across hazardous

platforms, clambering up and up to a steep path gullied by the winter

rains, and at last, by a stiff climb, to the summit of the hill.

 

From here one could see almost the whole peninsula, the town falling

away in waves of hill and valley to the west. The bay lay beneath him,

the docks flat and square, as if drawn on a map, red-funneled steamers

lying alongside. In the fairway, vessels rode at anchor, lighted by the

moon. The top of the hill was commanded by a huge, castellated,

barn-like white structure which had once been used as a pleasure

pavilion, but was now deserted, save by a rascally herd of tramps. At a

near view its ruined, deserted grandeur showed unkempt and dingy. By

its side, a city park, crowning the crest, scantily cultured and

improved, indicated the first rude beginning of formal arrangement.

Moldering, displaced concrete walls and seats showed what had been done

and neglected.

 

He skirted the eastern slope of the hill, went up and down one-sided

streets, streets that dipped and slid longitudinally, streets tilted

transversely, keeping along a path at the top till he came to the cliff.

 

Here was the prime scandal of the town, naked in all its horror. The

quarrymen had, with their blasting, robbed the hill inch by inch, foot

by foot and acre by acre. Already a whole city block had disappeared,

caving gradually away to tumble to the talus of gravel at the foot of

the steep slope. For years, the neighborhood had been terrorized by

this irresistible, ever-approaching fate. The edge of the precipice

drew nearer and nearer the houses, bit off a corner of the garden here,

ate away a piece of fence there, till the danger-line approached the

habitations themselves. Nor did it stop there; it crept below the

floors, it sapped the foundations till the house had to be abandoned.

Then with a crash, some afternoon, the whole structure would fall into

the hollow. House after house had disappeared, family after family had

been ruined. The crime was rank and outrageous, but it had not been

stopped.

 

As Granthope walked, he saw bits of such deserted residences. Here a

flight of stone steps on the verge of the height, there fences running

giddily off into the air or drain-pipes, broken, sticking over the edge.

The hazardous margin was now fenced off—at any moment a huge mass might

slip away and slide thundering below. At the foot of the cliff stood

the lead-colored building housing the stone-crusher, whose insatiate

appetite had caused this sacrifice of property. It was ready to feed

again on the morrow.

 

He walked to the edge and looked down a sharp incline, a few rods away

from the most dangerous part of the cliff. He was outside the fence,

now, with nothing between him and the slope. As he stood there, a dog

barked suddenly behind him. He turned—his foot slipped upon a stone,

twisted under him, and he fell outward. He clutched at the loose dirt,

but could not save himself and rolled over and over down the slope.

Forty feet down his head struck a boulder and he lost consciousness.

 

 

He came to himself with a blinding, splitting pain in his head; his body

was stiff and cold in the night air. He lay half-way down the slope,

his hands and face were scratched and bleeding, his clothes were torn.

He was motionless for some time, endeavoring to collect his senses,

wondering vaguely what to do. Then he stirred feebly, tried his limbs to

see what damage had been done and found he had broken no bones. His

ankle, however, was badly strained, and it ached severely. As he sank

back again, far down the hill towards the crusher building, a voice came up to him: