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.