CHAPTER XXXV
THE UNKNOWN WOMAN
A few minutes after the Vallejo Hotel had sunk into ruin, a man came running up the street. Even among those shaken from a normal demeanor by an abnormal event, he was noticeable; for he was wild, a creature dominated by a frenzied fear. As he ran he cried out for news of the hotel, and shouted answers smote against him like blows: "Down—gone down! Collapsed. Everybody in the lower floors dead!" And he rushed on, burst his way through groups, shot past others flying to the scene, flung obstructing figures from his path.
"Mad," someone cried, thrown to the wall by a sweep of his arm, "mad and running amuck."
They would have held him, a desperate thing, clawing and tearing his way through the crowd, but that suddenly, with a strangled cry, he came to a stop. Over the shoulders of a group of men he saw a girl's head, and his shout of "Pancha!" made them fall back. He gathered her in his arms, strained her against him, in the emotion of that supreme moment lifting his face to the sky. It was a face that those who saw it never forgot.
The men dispersed, were absorbed into the heaving tumult, running, squeezing, jamming here, thinning there, falling back before desperate searchers calling out names that would never be answered, thronging in the wake of women shrieking for their children. Police came battling their way through, forcing the people back. Swept against a fence Garland could at first only hold her, mutter over her, want to know that she was unhurt. She gave him broken answers; she had run up instead of down—that was how she was there. The horror of it came back in a sickening realization, and she shook, clinging to him, only his arm keeping her from falling. A man had thrown his coat about her, and Garland pulled it over her, then, looking down, saw her feet, bare and scratched in pointed, high-heeled slippers. The sight of them, incongruous reminders of the intimate aspects of life, brought him down to the moment and her place in it.
"Come on," he said. "Let's get out of this. You want to get something on.
Can you walk? Not far, only a few blocks."
She could do anything, she said, now that she knew he was safe, and, her fingers in the bend of his arm, he pulled her after him through the press. Gaining clearer spaces, they ran, side by side, their faces curiously alike, stamped by the same exalted expression as they fronted the rising sun.
She heard him say something about taking her away, having a horse and cart. She made no answer; with his presence all sensations but thankfulness seemed to have died in her. And then, upon her temporary peace, came thronging strange and dreadful impressions, waking her up, telling her the world had claims beyond the circle of her own consciousness. She caught them as she ran—a shifting series of sinister pictures: a house down in a tumbled heap of brick and stone, a sick woman on a couch on the sidewalk, a family dragging furniture through a blocked doorway, pillars, window ledges, cornices scattered along the road. Over all, delicately pervasive, adding a last ominous suggestion, was a faint, acrid odor of burning wood.
"Fire!" she said. "I can smell it."
"Oh, there'll be fires. That's bound to come."
"Where are we going?" she panted.
"Right round here—the place where I was stayin'. There's a widder woman keeps it, Mrs. Meeker. She's got a horse and cart that'll get you out of this. I guess all the car lines is bust, and I guess we'll have to move out quick. Look!"
He pointed over the roofs to where glassy films of smoke rose against the morning sky.
"Everyone of 'em's a fire and the wind's fresh. I hope to God this shake up ain't done any harm to the mains."
They had reached Mrs. Meeker's gate. He swung it open and she followed him across the garden to where a worn, grassy path, once a carriage drive, led past the house to the back yard. Here stood Mrs. Meeker, a hatchet in her hand, trying to pry open the stable door.
"Oh, Lord!" she cried, turning at his step, "I'm glad you've come back. Every other soul in the place has run off, and I can't get the stable door open."
Her glance here caught Pancha, her nightgown showing below the man's overcoat.
"Who's she?" she asked, a gleam of curiosity breaking through the larger urgencies.
"My daughter. She lives right round here. I run for her as soon as I felt the first quake. You got to take her along in the cart, and will you give her some clothes?"
"Sure," said Mrs. Meeker, and the flicker of curiosity extinguished, she returned to the jammed door that shut her out from the means of flight. "Upstairs in my room. Anything you want." Then to Garland, who had moved to her assistance, "I'm goin' to get out of here—go uptown to my cousin's. But I wouldn't leave Prince, not if the whole city was down in the dust."
Prince was Mrs. Meeker's horse, which, hearing its name, whinnied plaintively from the stable. Pancha disappeared into the house, and the man and woman attacked the door with the hatchet and a poker. As they worked she panted out disjointed bits of information:
"There's a man just come in here tellin' me there's fires, a lot of 'em, all started together. And he says there's houses down over on Minna and Tehama streets and people under them. Did you know the back wall's out of that new hotel? Fell clear across the court. I saw it go from my room—just a smash and a cloud of dust."
"Umph," grunted the man. "Anybody hurt?"
"I don't think so, but I don't know. I went out in front first off and saw the people pourin' out of it into the street—a whole gang in their nightgowns."
A soldier appeared walking smartly up the carriage drive, sweeping the yard with a glance of sharp command.
"Say. What are you fooling round that stable for?"
Mrs. Meeker, poker in hand, was on the defensive.
"I'm gettin' a horse out—my horse."
"Well, you want to be quick about it. You got to clear out of here.
Anybody in the house?"
"No. What are you puttin' us out for?"
"Fire. You don't want to lose any time. We've orders to get the people on the move. I just been in that hotel next door and rooted out the last of 'em—running round packing their duds as if they'd hours to waste. Had to threaten some of 'em with the bayonet. Get busy now and get out."
He turned and walked off, meeting Pancha as she came from the house. A skirt and blouse of Mrs. Meeker's hung loose on her lithe thinness, their amplitude confined about her middle by a black crochet shawl which she had crossed over her chest and tied in the back.
"A lot of that big building's down," she cried, as she ran up. "I could see it from the window, all scattered across the open space behind it."
Engrossed in their task neither answered her, and she moved round the corner of the stable to better see the debris of the fallen wall. Standing thus, a voice dropped on her from a window in the house that rose beyond Mrs. Meeker's back fence.
"Do you know if all the people are out of that hotel?"
She looked up; standing in a third story window was a young man in his shirt sleeves. He appeared to have been occupied in tying his cravat, his hands still holding the ends of it. His face was keen and fresh, and was one of the first faces she had seen that morning that had retained its color and a look of lively intelligence.
"I don't know," she answered. "I've only just got here. Why?"
"Because it looks to me as if there was someone in one of the rooms—someone on the floor."
The stable door gave with a wrench and swung open. Garland jerked it wide and stepped back to where he could command the man in the window.
"What's that about someone in the hotel?" he said.
The young man leaned over the sill and completed the tying of his cravat.
"I can see from here right into one of those rooms, and I'm pretty sure there's a person lying on the floor—dead maybe. The electric light fixture's down and may have got them."
Garland turned to Mrs. Meeker:
"You get out Prince and put him in the cart." Then to the man in the window: "I'll go in and see. A soldier's just been here who says they've cleaned the place out. There's maybe somebody hurt that they ain't seen."
"Hold on a minute and I'll go with you," called the other. "I'm a doctor and I might come in handy. I'll be there in a jiff."
He vanished from the window, and before Prince was backed into the shafts, walked up the carriage drive, neatly clad, cool and alert, his doctor's bag in his hand.
"I was just looking at the place as I dressed. Queer sight—looks like a doll's house. Bedding flung back over the footboards, the way they'd thrown it when they jumped. Clothes neatly folded over the chairs. And then in that third-story room I saw something long and solid-looking on the floor. Seems to be tangled up in the coverlets. The electric light thing's sprinkled all over it. That's what makes me pretty sure—hit 'em as they made a break. Come on."
He and Garland made off as Pancha and Mrs. Meeker set to work on the harnessing of Prince.
The soldiers had done their work. The hotel was empty—a congeries of rooms left in wild disorder, opened trunks in the passages, clothes tossed and trampled on the floors. As the men ran up the stairs, its walls gave back the sound of their feet like a place long deserted and abandoned to decay. The recurring shocks that shook its dislocated frame sent plaster down, and called forth creaking protests from the wrenched girders. The rear was flooded with light, streaming in where the wall had been, and through open doors they saw the houses opposite filling in the background like the drop scene at a theater.
The third floor had suffered more than those below, and they made their way down a hall where mortar lay heaped over the wreckage of glass, pictures and chairs. The bedroom that was their goal was tragic in its signs of intimate habitation strewn and dust-covered, as if years had passed since they had been set forth by an arranging feminine hand. The place looked as untenanted as a tomb. Anyone glancing over its blurred ruin, no voice responding to a summons, might have missed the figure that lay concealed by the bed and partly enwrapped in its coverings.
The doctor, kneeling beside it, pushed them off and swept away the litter of glass and metal that had evidently fallen from the ceiling and struck the woman down. She was lying on her face, one hand still gripping the clothes, a pink wrapper twisted about her, her blonde hair stained with the ooze of blood from a wound in her head. He felt of her pulse and heart and twitching up her eyelids looked into her set and lifeless eyes.
"Is she dead?" Garland asked.
"No," He snapped his bag open with businesslike briskness. "Concussion. Got a glancing blow from the light fixture. Seems as if she'd been trying to wrap herself up in the bedclothes and got in the worst place she could—just under it."
"Can you do anything for her?"
"Not much. Rest and quiet is what she ought to have, and I don't see how she's going to get it the way things are now."
"We got a cart. We can take her along with us."
"Good work. I'll fix her up as well as I can and turn her over to you." He had taken scissors from his bag and with deft speed began to cut away the tangled hair from the torn flesh. "I'll put in a stitch or two and bind her up. Looks like a person of means." He gave a side glance at her hand, white and beringed. "You might get off the mattress while I'm doing this. We can put her on it and carry her down. She's a big woman; must be five feet nine or ten."
Garland dragged the mattress to the floor, while the doctor rose and made a dive for the bathroom. He emerged from it a moment later, his brow corrugated.
"No water!" he said, as he stepped over the strewn floor to his patient.
"That's a cheerful complication."
He bent over her, engrossed in his task, every now and then, as the building quivered to the earth throes, stopping to mutter in irritated impatience. Garland went to the window and called down to Pancha and Mrs. Meeker that they'd found a woman, alive but unconscious, and space must be left for her in the cart. He stood for a moment watching them as they pulled out the up-piled household goods with which Mrs. Meeker had been filling it. Then the doctor, snapping his bag shut and jumping to his feet, called him back:
"That's done. It's all I can do for her now. Come on—lend a hand. Take her shoulders; she's a good solid weight."
Her head was covered with bandages close and tight as a nun's coif. They framed a face hardly less white and set in a stony insensibility.
"Lord, she looks like a dead one," Garland said, as he lowered the wounded head on the mattress.
"She's not that, but she may be unless she gets somewhere out of this.
Easy now; these quakes keep getting in the way."
They carried her down the stairs and out into the street. Here the crowd, already moving before the fire, was thick, a dense mass, plowing forward through an atmosphere heat-dried and cinder-choked. The voices of police and soldiers rose above the multiple sounds of that tide of egress urging it on. A way was made for the men with their grim load, eyes touching it sympathetically, now and then a comment: "Dead is she, poor thing?" But mostly they were too bewildered or too swamped in their own tragedy to notice any other.
Prince and the cart were ready. From her discarded belongings Mrs. Meeker had salvaged three treasures, which she had stowed against the dashboard, a solio portrait of her late husband, a canary in a gilt cage, and a plated silver teapot. The body of the cart was clear, and the men placed the mattress there. The spread that covered the woman becoming disarranged, Pancha smoothed it into neatness, pausing to look with closer scrutiny into the marble face. It was so unlike the face she had seen before, rosy and smiling beneath the shade of modish hats, that no glimmer of recognition came to her. Chrystie was to her, as she was to the others, an unknown woman.
Mrs. Meeker, even in this vital moment, knew again a stir of curiosity.
"Who is she?" she said to the men. "Ain't you found anything up there to tell us where she belongs?"
The doctor's voice crackled like pistol shots:
"Good God, woman, we've not got time to find out who people are. Take her along—get a move on. It's getting d——d hot here."
It was; the heat of the growing conflagration was scorching on their faces, the cinders falling like rain.
"Get up there, Mrs. Meeker," Garland commanded; "on the front seat. You drive and Pancha and I'll walk alongside."
The woman climbed up. The doctor, turning to go, gave his last orders:
"Try and get her out of this—uptown—where there's air and room. Keep her as quiet as you can. You'll run up against doctors who'll help. Sorry I can't go along with you, but there'll be work for my kind all over the city today, and I got a girl across toward North Beach that I want to see after."
He was off down the carriage drive almost colliding with a soldier, who came up on the run, a bayoneted musket in his hand, his face a blackened mask, streaming with sweat. At the sight of the cart he broke into an angry roar:
"What are you standing round for? Do you want to be burnt? Get out. Don't you know the fire's coming? Get out."
They moved out and joined the vast procession of a city in exodus.
For months afterward Pancha dreamed of that day—woke at night to a sense of toiling, onward effort, a struggling slow progress, accomplished amid a sea of faces all turned one way. The dream vision was not more prodigiously improbable than the waking fact—life, comfortable and secure, suddenly stripped of its garnishings, cut down to a single obsessing issue, narrowed to the point where the mind held but one desire—to be safe.
Before the advancing wall of flame the Mission was pouring out, retreating like an army in defeat. Every avenue was congested with the moving multitude, small streets emptying into larger ones, houses ejecting their inmates. At each corner the tide was swollen by new streams, rolling into the wider current, swaying to adjustment, then pressing on. Looking forward Pancha could see the ranks dark to the limit of her vision; looking back, the faces, smoke-blackened, sweat-streaked, marked with fierce tension, with fear, with dogged endurance, with cool courage, with blank incomprehension. The hot breath of the fire swept about them, the sound of its triumphant march was in their ears, a backward glance showed its first high flame crests. Soldiers drove them on, shouted at them, thrust stupefied figures in amongst them, pushed others, dazedly cowering in their homes, out through doors and ground-floor windows. At intervals the earth stirred and heaved, and then with a simultaneous cry, rising in one long wail of terror, they jammed together in the middle of the street, so close-packed a man could have walked on their heads.
To make way through them Garland was forced to lead the horse. Women clung to the shafts and trailed at the tailboard; the cart stopped by an influx of traffic, men stood on the hubs of the wheels staring back at the swelling smoke clouds. Mutual experiences flashed back and forth, someone's death dully recounted, a miraculous escape, tales of falling chimneys and desperate chances boldly taken. Some were bent under heavy loads, which they cast down despairingly by the way; some carried nothing. Those who had had time and clearness of head had packed baby carriages edge full of their dearest treasures; others pulled clothes baskets after them into which anything their hand had lighted on had been hurled pell-mell. There were sick dragged on sofas, wounded upheld by the arms of good Samaritans, old people in barrows, in children's carts, sometimes carried in a "chair" made by the linked hands of two men.
And everywhere trunks, their monotonous scraping rising above the shuffle of the myriad feet. Men pulled them by ropes taut about their chests, by the handles, pushed them from behind. Then as the day progressed and the smoke wall threw out long wings to the right and left, they began to leave them. The sidewalk was littered with them, they stood square in the path, tilted over into the gutter, end up against the fence. Other possessions were dropped beside them, pictures, sewing machines, furs, china ornaments, pieces of furniture, clocks, even the packed baby carriages and the clothes baskets. Only two things the houseless thousands refused to leave—their children and their pets. It seemed to Pancha there was not a family that did not lead a dog, or carry a cat, or a bird in a cage.
By midday the cart had made an uptown plaza, and there come to a halt for rest. The grass was covered thick with people, stretched beside their shorn belongings, many asleep as they had dropped. A few of them had brought food; others, with money, went out to buy what they could at the nearby shops, already depleted of their stores. All but the children were very still, looking at the flames that licked along the sky line. They had heard now the story of the broken mains, and somberly, without lament or rebellion, recognized the full extent of the calamity.
A young girl, standing on a wall, a line of pails beside her, offered cupfuls of water to those who drooped or fainted. Thirsty hoards besieged her, and Pancha, edging in among them, made her demand, not for herself, but for a sick woman. The girl dipped a small cut-glass pitcher in one of the pails and handed it to her.
"That's a double supply," she said. "But you look as if you needed some for yourself. We've a little water running in our house, and I'm going to stand here and dole it out till the fire comes. They say that'll be in a few hours, so don't bring back the pitcher. There's only my mother and myself, and we can't carry anything away."
Pancha squeezed out with her treasure, and going to the cart climbed into the front, sliding over the seat to a space at the head of the mattress. She bent over the still figure, looking into the face. Its youth and comeliness smote her, seemed to knock at her heart and soften something there that had been hard. An uprush of intense feeling, pity for this blighted creature, this maimed and helpless thing, rescued by chance from a horrible death, rose and flooded her. She moistened the temples and dry lips, lifted the bound head to her lap, striving for some expression of her desire to heal, to care for, to restore to life the broken sister that fate had cast into her hands. Mrs. Meeker came and peered over the side of the cart, shaking her head dubiously.
"Looks like to me she'd never open her eyes again."
Pancha was pierced with an angry resentment.
"Don't say that. She's going to get well. I'm going to make her."
"I hope you can," said the elder woman. "Poor thing, what a time she must have had! Your pa says it seemed as if there was no one there with her. I'd like to know who she is."
"She's somebody rich. Look at her hands."
She touched, with a caressing lightness, Chrystie's hand, milk-white, satin-fine, a diamond and sapphire ring on one finger.
Mrs. Meeker nodded.
"Oh, yes, she's no poor girl. Anyone can see that. You'd get it from the wrapper, let alone the rings. I've been wondering if maybe she wasn't straight."
"She is. I know it."
"How could you know that?"
"By her face."
Mrs. Meeker considered it, and murmured:
"I guess you're right. It has got an innocent look. It'll be up to you, whether she lives or dies, to find out who she is and if she's got any relations."
"Oh, that'll be all right," said Pancha confidently, "I'm going to take care of her and cure her, and when she's good and ready she'll tell me."
They moved on for quieter surroundings and to find a doctor. This was a hopeless quest. Every house that bore a sign was tried, and at each one the answer was the same: the doctor was out; went right after the quake to be back no one knew when. Some were at the Mechanics' Pavilion, where the injured had been gathered, and which had to be vacated later in the day; others at work in the hospitals being cleared before the fire's advance.
Late in the afternoon Mrs. Meeker left them to go to her cousin's, who had a cottage up beyond Van Ness Avenue. Prince and the cart she gave over to them; they'd need it to get the woman away out of all this noise and excitement. Tears were in her eyes as she bade farewell to the old horse, giving Garland an address that would find her later—"unless it goes with the rest of the town"—she added resignedly. In the first shadowing of twilight, illumined with the fire's high glow, they watched her trudge off, the bird cage in one hand, the portrait in the other, the teapot tucked under her arm.
It was night when they came to a final halt—a night horribly bright, the sky a blazing splendor defying the darkness. The place was an open space on the first rise of the Mission Hills. There were houses about, here and there ascending the slope in an abortive attempt at a street which, halfway up, abandoned the effort and lapsed into a sprinkling of one-story cottages. Above them, on the naked hillside, the first wave of refugees had broken and scattered. Under the fiery radiance they sat, dumb with fatigue, some sleeping curled up among their bundles, some clustered about little cores of fire over which they cooked food brought out to them from the houses. A large tree stretched its limbs over a plateau in the hill's flank and here the cart was brought to a stop. Prince, loosed from the shafts, cropped a supper from the grass, and the unknown woman lay on her mattress under the red-laced shade.
A girl from a cottage down the slope brought them coffee, bread and fruit, and sitting side by side they ate, looking out over the sea of roofs to where the ragged flame tongues leaped and dropped, and the smoke mountains rolled sullenly over the faint, obscured stars. They spoke little, aware for the first time of a great exhaustion, hearing strangely the sounds of a life that went on as if unchanged and uninterrupted—the clinking of china, the fitful cries of children sinking to sleep, the barking of dogs, a voice crooning a song, and laughter, low-voiced and sweet.
Presently they drew closer together and began to talk; at first of immediate interests—food to be procured, the injured woman, how to care for her, find her shelter, discover who she was. Then of themselves—how the quake had come to each, that mad, upward rush of Pancha's, Garland's race along the street. That done, she suddenly dropped down and lying with her head against his knee, her face turned from the firelight, she told him how Boyé Mayer had come to her in the dawn, and how he lay buried in the ruins of the Vallejo Hotel.