After breakfast she acquainted Mrs. Cassidy with her intention of leaving, giving as her reason the fact that that portion of the city was too full of painful memories for her to remain in it. The widow received the news with loud lamentations, which ended almost in tears. As soon as she had overcome her surprise and commanded her feelings, she besieged Viola with questions as to where she intended going. The girl, who was not skilful at this sort of duel, found it difficult to evade her hostess’s vigilant determination to maintain her surveillance. Viola was soon red and stammering under the widow’s persistent and unescapable queries, and her discomfort was not lessened by the realization that Mrs. Cassidy had guessed her real reason for leaving and had resented it.
It was a clear, soft morning, the air still and golden. In its brief Indian summer the city seemed to stretch itself, and lie warm, apathetic, and relaxed, basking in the mellowness of its autumnal quiet. That part of it toward which Viola directed her course was almost as old as the locality where she had passed her uneventful girlhood. Boarding an electric car, she crossed the low basin of the town, where originally the village of Yerba Buena skirted the cove in straggling huts and tents. Here the business life of a metropolis is compressed into an area covered by a few blocks. Women do their shopping one street away from where men are making the money which renders the shopping possible. The car swept Viola through the gay panorama that Kearney Street presents on a sunny morning, out past Portsmouth Square, with a glimpse of Chinese back balconies, where lines of flowering plants, the dip of swaying lanterns, and here and there the brilliant spot of color made by a woman or a child, bring to the scene a whiff of the Orient.
Beyond, where the broken flank of Telegraph Hill rises gaunt and red amid its clinging tenements, she alighted and continued her way on foot. She made a detour round the forbidding steeps of the hill, past narrow alleys where shawled figures slunk along lengths of sun-touched wall, by old verandahed houses brooding under rusty cypress-trees, by straight-fronted, plastered dwellings, the stucco streaked with dark rain-stains like the traces of tears on a face too dejected to care how it looked. Finally the street rose over a spur of the hill, then dipped, sloping down to the hollow of North Beach.
There was a sudden widening of the horizon on every side. Marine views broke on the eye through the spaces between high, cramped, flat buildings, over the tops of decrepit cottages, in the breaks between peeling, vine-draped walls. Vivid bits of sea were set in mosaic-like clearness between the trunks of dark old trees in gardens that were planted when the region was yet suburban. The end of the street’s vista was filled with its blue expanse, with the distant hills beyond—all clear lights and shadows on this sun-steeped autumn morning.
Here was spaciousness and room. The torn hill, battered and weather-beaten with the stress and turmoil of the elements, stood up from the lower portions of the city in an eternal wash of air fresh from the ocean. Houses clung to it like barnacles. On its sharper steeps they seemed to be hanging precariously, clutching to irregularities in the soil, cowering down in hollows, or gripping rocky projections. But on its seaboard face the slope was more gradual, and here, in the old days, prosperous families had once built charming villas, where, from rose-shaded balconies, the inmates could look on the bay, sometimes a weltering waste, sometimes a vast sapphire level tracked with the trails of sailing-vessels bending to the trades.
Viola knew that North Beach, like her old home, was a quarter upon which fashion had turned its back. Rents were low there, and, judging by the number of signs of “Furnished Rooms,” the inhabitants must be poor. She began her search at the foot of the hill, working up through the streets that struck her as at once clean and respectable-looking. But even her humble requirements were hard to fill.
By noontime, passing back and forth from street to street, she had gained the top of the hill. She had seen nothing at once tolerable to her taste and suitable to her purse. Now, spent with fatigue and disappointment, she climbed a last breathless ascent, and came out upon the slope below the summit. This space of open ground, devoid of streets, and with here and there a hovel squalidly sprawling amid its own debris, slants up the crest of the incline upon which perches the deserted observatory, worn and weather-stained into an appearance of mellow antiquity.
Even at this warm noonday hour the air was pure and balmily clear. Viola sank down, panting, on a broken sod, and several dogs, attracted by the unusual presence of a stranger, rushed upon her from one of the neighboring shanties, barking frenziedly. Some hens joined them, and for a moment they stood in an excited group, evidently meditating a sortie. Presently a tousled woman in a wrapper emerged from the house and threw an old boot at them, at which they scattered—the hens running off in staggering terror, the dogs scuttling away to safer regions, their tails tucked in.
The silence that settled was crystalline. It seemed to place the city at a curiously remote distance. Far below her, Viola could see the wharves and the masts of ships that lay idle by the quays. Men were running about down there with the smooth, sure movements of mechanical toys. Drays passed along the water-front, and little light wagons that sped by in a sudden wake of dust. From there, and from regions unseen, sounds came up to her with clear distinctness. A bell rang, a dog barked, a child cried piercingly—each sound seeming to rise separate and finely accentuated from the muffled roar which broods over the hives of men.