“You have ruined the reputation of myself and daughter.”
The state of California has never executed a woman, and, while Mrs. Fair was sentenced to be hanged at her first trial, at her second one she was set free. During the ’seventies, she was living quietly, and I had only vaguely heard her mentioned, when one morning my boss came to the back of the store, saying:
“You must go out in front and wait on Laura Fair.”
I went out to serve this person, who looked more like an elderly aunt than a murderess, and I marveled that any man would be afraid of so mild a creature. She seemed to have no charm whatever.
The bill for her purchases amounted to about eight dollars, and shortly after, just as a joke, I was sent to her house to collect it. The same thin, sallow, worn-looking woman greeted me at the door. She showed, contrary to my expectations, not the slightest touch of impropriety or dissipation, but—wonder of wonders—when this woman spoke, the sound was liquid music, and the words were followed by a smile so dazzling that one could not help imagining a withered bud suddenly opening into a beautiful flower. She called me Mr. Bill Collector and bade me sit down and have a glass of sherry; then she questioned me about my life.
I have been told she lived on, neglected by her daughter, and once attempting suicide, to a drab and commonplace old age; but I prefer to think of her as she was that day, calm and beautiful by some expression within, sitting in the quiet of her drawing-rooms, and showing the most enthusiastic interest in the absurd aspirations of a callow youth. Laura Fair was one of the few superwomen I have ever met.
My clerk’s salary was augmented in small ways, and one of the most pleasant was taking the place of the literary and dramatic critic of the Chronicle while he went away for a two months’ vacation. After the performances I used to sneak up to a saloon near the City Hall where Market Street tailed off into nothing, and write my criticisms of the plays over a glass of beer. I remember my chagrin when some of the members of Mrs. Oates’s Opera Bouffe Company hunted out my lair and burst in upon me almost nightly. It was my good fortune to hold down my job at the time of the opening of the Baldwin Theater, and also my good fortune to have saved that structure from burning on the day before its opening. Strange to say, not in my capacity of critic, but that of clerk in the store, I went back of the stage of the new theater to deliver some packages, when I saw a naked gas jet, which was jammed against the wall, with a flame ten feet long running up against unplaned boards. I yelled for the stage hands and ran for a bucket of water. In ten minutes it would have been a roaring holocaust and certain to have destroyed—not only the theater, but the hotel above.
The opening of this playhouse (named for Lucky Baldwin) was quite a social event, and everyone of importance was there. I was very anxious to show some attention to a certain young lady whom I admired greatly, so I decided to send her some flowers to wear on this night. My eyes lit on lilies of the valley growing in pots which were quite common and inexpensive in the East, and seemed unpretentious enough for the pocketbook of a poor department-store clerk. The florist assured me they would be twenty-five cents apiece; so, with my usual haste, I purchased a dozen pots, picking off the blooms myself in the shop (wondering at the sudden obsequiousness of the man who waited upon me) and ordering them delivered to the young lady’s home. It was a beautiful present and a much-envied one, but a good lesson to me. The lily of the valley is about the only flower that does not grow prolifically in California. Instead of being twenty-five cents a pot, they were twenty-five cents a bloom, and my rashness cost exactly forty-five dollars. Determined to get my money’s worth, I carried the despoiled plants out to my cousin; but even here I was doomed to disappointment, for she informed me that the lily of the valley was a biennial and the plants would not bloom again for two years.
Speaking of theaters, an amusing story is told of the earlier days in San Francisco when there was a semaphore on Telegraph Hill which signaled the approach of the weekly or monthly steamer. It was the habit of the citizens to drop whatever they were doing and run down to the wharf to meet the incoming vessel. One night there was a performance at a theater, and the heroine of the play was required to rush in crying:
“My God! What does this mean?”