Part 9

A cross-street was lowered a little, and it leaped the chasm in an agony of wood and iron, the most unlovely object in a city that is made up of all unloveliness. The gutting of this Hill cost the city the fortunes of several contractors, and it ruined the Hill forever. There is nothing left to be done now but to cast it into the midst of the sea. I had sported on the green with the goats of goatland ere ever the stately mansion had been dreamed of; and it was my fate to set up my tabernacle one day in the ruins of a house that even then stood upon the order of its going,--it did go impulsively down into that "most unkindest cut," the Second Street chasm. Even the place that once knew it has followed after.

The ruin I lived in had been a banker's Gothic home. When Rincon Hill was spoiled by bloodless speculators, he abandoned it and took up his abode in another city. A tenant was left to mourn there. Every summer the wild winds shook that forlorn ruin to its foundations. Every winter the rains beat upon it and drove through and through it, and undermined it, and made a mush of the rock and soil about it; and later portions of that real estate deposited themselves, pudding-fashion, in the yawning abyss below.

I sat within, patiently awaiting the day of doom; for well I knew that my hour must come. I could not remain suspended in midair for any length of time: the fall of the house at the northwest corner of Harrison and Second Streets must mark my fall. While I was biding my time, there came to me a lean, lithe stranger. I knew him for a poet by his unshorn locks and his luminous eyes, the pallor of his face and his exquisitely sensitive hands. As he looked about my eyrie with aesthetic glance, almost his first words were: "What a background for a novel!" He seemed to relish it all--the impending crag that might topple any day or hour; the modest side door that had become my front door because the rest of the building was gone; the ivy-roofed, geranium-walled conservatory wherein I slept like a Babe in the Wood, but in densest solitude and with never a robin to cover me.

He liked the crumbling estate, and even as much of it as had gone down into the depths forever. He liked the sagging and sighing cypresses, with their roots in the air, that hung upon and clung upon the rugged edge of the remainder. He liked the shaky stairway that led to it (when it was not out of gear), and all that was irrelative and irrelevant; what might have been irritating to another was to him singularly appealing and engaging; for he was a poet and a romancer, and his name was Robert Louis Stevenson. He used to come to that eyrie on Rincon Hill to chat and to dream; he called it "the most San Francisco-ey part of San Francisco," and so it was. It was the beginning and the end of the first period of social development on the Pacific coast. There is a picture of it, or of the South Park part of it, in Gertrude Atherton's story, "The Californians." The little glimpse that Louis Stevenson had of it in its decay gave him a few realistic pages for The Wrecker.

I have referred to the surprising interiors of the city in the Fifties. What I meant was this: there was not an alley so miserable and so muddy but somewhere in it there was pretty sure to be a cottage as demure in outward appearance as modesty itself. Nothing could be more unassuming: it had not even the air of genteel poverty. I think such an air was not to be thought of in those days: gentility kept very much to itself. As for poverty, it was a game that any one might play at any moment, and most had played at it.

This cottage stood there--I think I will say sat there, it looked so perfectly resigned,--and no doubt commanded a rent quite out of proportion to its size. It had its shaky veranda and its French windows, and was lined with canvas; for there was not a trowel full of plaster in it. The ceiling bellied and flapped like an awning when the wind soughed through the clapboards; and the walls sometimes visibly heaved a sigh; but they were covered with panelled paper quite palatial in texture and design, and that is one thing that made those interiors surprising.

At the windows the voluminous lace draperies were almost overpowering. Satin lambrequins were festooned with colossal cord and tassels of bullion. A plate-glass mirror as wide as the mantel reflected the Florentine gilt carving of its own elaborate frame. There were bronzes on the mantel, and tall vases of Sévres, and statuettes of bisque brilliantly tinted. At the two sides of the mantel stood pedestals of Italian marble surmounted by urns of the most graceful and elegant proportions, and profusely ornamented with sculptured fruits and flowers. There was the old-fashioned square piano in its carven case, and cabinets from China or East India; also a lacquered Japanese screen, marble-topped tables of filigreed teek, brackets of inlaid ebony. Curios there were galore. Some paintings there were, and these rocked softly upon the gently-heaving walls. As for the velvet carpet, it was a bed of gigantic roses that might easily put to the blush the prime of summer in a queen's garden.

I well remember another home in San Francisco, one that possessed for me the strongest attraction. It was bosomed in the sandhills south of Market Street,--I know not between what streets, for they had all been blurred or quite obliterated by drifts of sifting sand. It was a small house fenced about; but the fence was for the most part buried under sand, and looked as if it were a rampart erected for the defense of this isolated cot. Some few hardy flowers had been planted there, but they were knee-deep in sand, and their petals were full of grit. One usually blew into that house with a pinch of sand, but how good it was to be there!

Within those walls there was the unmistakable evidence of the feminine touch, the aesthetic influence that refines and beautifies everything. It was not difficult to idealize in that atmosphere. It was the home of a lady who chose to conceal her identity, though her pen-name was a household word from one end of the coast to the other. She was a star contributor to the weekly columns of the Golden Era, a periodical we all subscribed for and were immensely proud of. It was unique in its way. Of late years I have found no literary journal to compare with it at its best. It introduced Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Prentice Mulford, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and many others, to their first circle of admirers. In the large mail-box at its threshold--a threshold I dared not cross for awe of it--I dropped my earliest efforts in verse, and then ran for fear of being caught in the act.

Imagine the joy of a lad whose ambition was to write something worth printing, and whose wildest dream was to be named some day with those who had won their laurels in the field of letters,--imagine his joy at being petted in the sanctum of one who was in his worshipful eyes the greatest lady in the land! About her were the trophies of her triumph, though she was personally known to few. Each post brought her tribute from the grateful hearts of her readers afar off in the mountain mining camps, and perhaps from beyond the Rockies; or, it may have been, from the unsuspecting admirer who lived just beyond the first sandhill. This was another surprising interior. There was plain living and high thinking in the midst of a wilderness that was, to say the least, uninviting; the windows rattled and the sand peppered them. Without was the abomination of desolation; but within the desert blossomed as the rose.

There were other homes as homely as the one I preferred--for there was sand enough to go round. It went round and round, as God probably intended it should, until a city sat upon it and kept it quiet. Some of these homes were perched upon solitary hilltops, and were lost to sight when the fog came in from the sea; and some were crowded into the thick of the town, with all sorts of queer people for neighbors. You could, had you chosen to, look out of a back window into a hollow square full of cats and rats and tin cans; and upon the three sides of the quadrangle which you were facing, you might have seen, unblushingly revealed, all the mysteries and miseries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceanica; for they were all of them represented by delegates.

Of course there were handsome residences (not so very many of them as yet), where there was fine art--some of the finest. But often this art was to be found in the saloons, and the subjects chosen would hardly find entertainment elsewhere. The furnishing of the houses was within the bounds of good taste. Monumental marbles were not erected by the hearth-side; the window drapery was diaphanous rather than dense and dowdy. The markets of San Francisco were much to blame for the flashiness of the domestic interior: they were stocked with the gaudiest fixtures and textures, and in the inspection of them the eye was bewildered and the taste demoralized.

Harmony survived the inharmonious, and it prevailed in the homes of the better classes, as it was bound to do; for refinement had set its seal there, and you can not counterfeit the seal of refinement. But I am inclined to think that in the Fifties there was a natural tendency to overdress, to over-decorate, to overdo almost everything. Indeed the day was demonstrative; if the now celebrated climate had not yet been elaborately advertised, no doubt there was something hi it singularly bracing. The elixir of it got into the blood and the brain, and perhaps the bones as well. The old felt younger than they did when they left "the States,"--the territory from the Rockies to the Atlantic Ocean was commonly known as "the States." The middle-aged renewed their youth, and youth was wild with an exuberance of health and hope and happiness that seemed to give promise of immortality.

No wonder that it was thought an honor to be known as the first white child born in San Francisco--I'd think it such myself,--and I'm proud to state that all three claimants are my personal friends.

HAPPY VALLEY

How well I remember it--the Happy Valley of the days of old! It lay between California Street and Rincon Point; was bounded on the east by the Harbor of San Francisco, and on the west by the mission peaks. I never knew just why it was called happy; I never saw any wildly-happy inhabitants singing or dancing for joy on its sometimes rather indefinite street corners. If there is happiness in sand, then, happily, it was sandy. You might have climbed knee-deep up some parts of it and slid down on the other side; you could have played at "hide-and-seek" among its shifting undulations. From what is now known as Nob Hill you could have looked across it to the heights of Rincon Point--and, perchance, have looked in vain for happiness. Yet who or what is happiness? A flying nymph whose airy steps even the sand can not stay for long.

Down through this Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city from making a checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right angles, as if life were a treadmill and there were no hope of change until the great change comes?

Happy Valley! I remember one cool twilight when a "prairie schooner," that was time-worn and weather-beaten, drifted down Montgomery Street from Market Street, and rounded the corner of Sutter Street, where it hove to. You know the "prairie schooner" was the old-time emigrant wagon that was forever crossing the plains in Forty-nine and the early Fifties. It was scow-built, hooded from end to end, freighted with goods and chattels; and therein the whole family lived and moved and had its being during the long voyage to the Pacific Coast.

On this twilight evening the captain of the schooner, assisted by a portion of his crew, deliberately took down part of the fence which enclosed a sand-lot bounded by Montgomery, Sutter and Post Streets; driving into the centre of the lot; the horses--four jaded beasts--were turned loose, and soon a camp-fire was lighted and the entire emigrant family gathered about it to partake of the evening meal. On this lot now stands the Lick House and the Masonic Hall--undreamed of in those days. No one seemed in the least surprised to find in the very heart of the city a scene such as one might naturally look for in the heart of the Rocky Mountains and the wilds of the great desert, or the heights of the Humboldt. No doubt they thought it a Happy Valley; and well they might, for they had reached their journey's end.

A stone's throw from that twilight camp, on the south side of Market Street, stood old St. Patrick's Church. It was a most unpretending structure, and was quite overshadowed by the R.C. Orphan Asylum close at hand. Both were backed by sandhills; and both, together with the sand, have been spirited away. The Palace and Grand Hotels now stand on the spot. The original St. Patrick's still exists; and, after one or two transportations, has come to a final halt near the Catholic cemetery under the shadow of Lone Mountain. It must be ever dear to me, for within its modest rectory I met the first Catholic clergyman I ever became acquainted with; and within it I grew familiar with the offices of the Church; though I was instructed by the Rev. Father Accolti, S.J., at old St. Ignatius', on Market Street; and by him baptized at the St. Mary's Cathedral, on the corner of California and Dupont Streets, now the church of the Paulist Fathers. I have referred to dear old St. Patrick's--which was dedicated on the first Sunday in September, 1851--in the story of my conversion, a little bit of autobiography entitled "A Troubled Heart, and How It was Comforted at Last." The late Peter H. Burnett, first Governor of California, was my godfather.

In 1855 St. Mary's Cathedral was the handsomest house of worship in the city. For the most part, the churches of all denominations were of the plainest, not to say cheapest, order of architecture. As a youth, I sat in the family pew in the First Presbyterian Church, situated on Stockton Street, near Broadway. Well I remember my father, with others of the congregation--all members of the Vigilance Committee,--at the sound of the alarm-bell, rising in the midst of the sermon and striding out of the house to take arms in defence of law and order.

Perhaps the saddest sights in those early days were the neglected cemeteries. There was one at North Beach, where before 1850 there were eight hundred and forty interments. It was on the slope of Telegraph Hill. The place was neglected; a street had been cut through it, and on the banks of this street we could, at intervals, see the ends of coffins protruding. Some were broken and falling apart; some were still sound. It was a gruesome sight.

There were a few Russian graves on Russian Hill, a forlorn spot in those days; but perhaps the forlornest of all was Yerba Buena cemetery, where previous to 1854 four thousand and five hundred bodies had been buried. It was half-way between Happy Valley and the Mission Dolores. The sand there was tossed in hillocks like the waves of a sandy sea. There the chaparral grew thickest; and there the scrub-oaks shrugged their shoulders and turned their backs to the wind, and grew all lopsided, with leafage as dense as moss.

No fence enclosed this weird spot. The sand sifted into it and through it and out on the other, side; it made graves and uncovered them; it had ever a new surprise for us. We boys haunted it in ghoulish pairs, and whispered to each other as we found one more coffin coming to the surface, or searched in vain for the one we had seen the week before; it had been mercifully reburied by the winds. There were rude headboards, painted in fading colors; and beneath them lay the dead of all nations, soon to be nameless. By and by they were all carried hence; and those that were far away, watching and waiting for the loved and absent adventurers, watched and waited in vain. A change come o'er the spirit of the place. The site is now marked by the New City Hall--in all probability the most costly architectural monstrosity on this continent.

"From grave to gay" is but a step; "from lively to severe," another,--I know not which of the two is longer. It was literally from grave to gay when the old San Franciscans used to wade through the sandy margin of Yerba Buena cemetery in search of pleasure at Russ' Garden on the mission road. It flourished in the early Fifties--this very German garden, the pride and property of Mr. Christian Russ. It was a little bit of the Fatherland, transported as if by magic and set down among the hillocks toward the Mission Dolores. Well I remember being taken there at intervals, to find little tables in artificial bowers, where sat whole families as sedate, or merry, and as much at ease as if they were in their own homes. They would spend Sunday there, after Mass. There was always something to be seen, to be listened to, to be done. Meals were served at all hours, and beer at all minutes; and the program contained a long list of attractions,--enough to keep one interested till ten or eleven o'clock at night.

I can remember how scanty the foliage was--it resembled a little the toy-villages that are made in the Tyrol, having each of them a handful of impossible trees that breathe not balsam, but paint. I remember the high wind that blew in bravely from the sea; the pavilion that was a wonder-world of never-failing attractiveness; and how on a certain occasion I watched with breathless anxiety and dumb amazement a man, who seemed to have discarded every garment common to the race, wheel a wheelbarrow with a grooved wheel up a tight rope stretched from the ground to the outer peak of the pavilion; and all the time there was a man in the wheelbarrow who seemed paralyzed with fright,--as no doubt he was. The man who wheeled the barrow was the world-famous Blondin.

Another sylvan retreat was known as "The Willows." There were some willows there, but I fear they were numbered; and there was an al fresco theatre such as one sees in the Champs-Elysées; indeed, the place had quite a Frenchy atmosphere, and was not at all German, as was Russ' Garden. French singers sang French songs upon the stage--it was not much larger than a sounding-board.

An air of gaiety prevailed; for I imagine the majority of the habitués were from the French Quarter of the city. Of course there were birds and beasts, and cages populous with monkeys; and there was an emeu--the weird bird that can not fly, the Australian cassowary. This bird inspired Bret Harte to song, and in his early days he wrote "The Ballad of the Emeu";