Hard-Pan: A Story of Bonanza Fortunes

by Geraldine Bonner

She leaned back against the broken ground behind her and looked sleepily about. The parched sward was lined by little paths that seemed to cross and recross each other in purposeless wanderings. Some led to the edge of a quarry that had torn away a huge chunk of the hill as though a giant lion had struck down and ripped off a piece of its flank. Below her were the roofs and chimneys of houses on the face of the slope. Smoke came from the chimneys and went up straight, and here and there the ragged foliage of eucalyptus-trees that had grown sere and scant in the turmoil of wintry gales hung motionless, resting on this day of grace. It must be near midday, Viola thought, and, even as the thought formed in her mind, all the whistles of the city below seemed to suddenly open their throats and blow together—a long, mellifluous, fluent sound. Then there was a pause, and odd ones, late but determined, took up the cry and poured out their hollow, reverberant roar. From the water-front louder ones came, hoarse, harsh, dominant, riding the tumult like strident talkers, and others, shrill-toned, broke in, high and protesting, and the note of distant whistles, away in the Mission and the Potrero, answered again, faint, thin, and far. It was twelve o’clock.

Viola gathered herself up from her relaxed attitude. She had been hunting now for two hours, and felt tired and discouraged. She wished she could live here, since one must live somewhere—just here, she thought, as she rose stiffly to her feet and dusted her dress. No one would ever find her, and there was something at once inspiring and soothing in all this vast panorama of sea and mountain and this wash of living air. She looked back at the house the woman with the shoe had come from, and wondered if even there they would take her in. The woman had come to a doorway now, and stood there, eying her, it seemed to Viola, with suspicious disfavor; and even as she looked, the dogs, grown brave again, made a spirited rally round the corner, and came yapping about her heels. She turned and, selecting the first path that she saw, walked down over the forward face of the hill.

The fall of the land was so abrupt here that the few householders had had to build steps from the street below to their gates. Some had even gone to the extravagance of a handrail. Viola, making a chary descent, was attracted to glance about her by a sweet, pungent fragrance, and looking to locate its source, found herself at the gate of a house, low, long, and narrow, with a garden on the outward side, terraced to keep the soil from sliding bodily down into the back yard of the house below. From this garden rose the scent that had attracted her. It was the soft, illusive perfume of mignonette, of which the little inclosure, sheltered from the winds by a lattice-work fence, held a goodly store.

The love of flowers was strong in Viola, and pressing her breast against the top of the fence, she stood peering in at the garden with its roughly bordered terraces and pebbled paths. The mignonette was growing in a border that skirted the side of the house. In the parterres below it were many varieties of blossoming annuals and rose-bushes still densely in flower. The cypress-trees from the yard below showed their dark, funereal tops over the outer fence, and a gaunt eucalyptus made a pattern on the pale noonday sky with its drooping foliage. From the garden Viola’s gaze turned to the house. It presented its side to the view, its narrow front to the street. Its seaward face was flanked by a balcony, and windows, commanding the enormous sweep of water and distant hills, were set closely along the wall. In one of these windows Viola saw the sign her eyes had grown so accustomed to that morning—“Furnished Rooms.”

Half an hour later she made her exit from the house, having completed her arrangement to become a tenant that same day. Its sole occupant at the time was the landlady, Miss Defoe, a spinster of advanced years, who dwelt there with her brother. She was glad of the chance of a lodger, especially one who seemed so gently tractable. The almost inaccessible position of the house made it difficult to rent the rooms, even at the lowest prices. Viola found that the terms offered her were more desirable than those made by Mrs. Cassidy.

In the afternoon, having made her escape from the widow’s with guilty stealth, she took up her residence on the high hilltop, in a room from one window of which she could look out through the Golden Gate on the broad bosom of the Pacific, while from the other she could see the dappled sweep of the Alameda hills, with Berkeley and Oakland clustering about their bases.

A life uneventful and monotonous now began for the solitary girl. The days in the house on the hill passed with the even, colorless rapidity of days full of uninteresting duties and bereft of the stimulus of hope. Viola plodded on doggedly, with her head down and her eyes on the furrow before her. Work had cropped up quickly, and she turned to it with dull resolution. In the back of the house some former tenant had built a small greenhouse, which, during the Defoes’ occupancy, had been left in dusty desuetude. Being granted the use of it, she cleaned and repaired it, and here once more plied her old graceful trade of raising plants.

Her friend the Kearney Street florist, to whom the colonel in his grand days had given many profitable orders, was glad to help the daughter of his old patron. Once again Viola found herself supplying his shops with the delicate ferns which grew so luxuriantly under her intelligent care. Besides this, he now and then engaged her to assist in making up floral pieces used in decoration and at weddings and funerals. In this branch of the work she displayed so much taste and skill that her services were employed more and more constantly.

She earned enough to supply her small wants, and the remains of the thousand dollars lay untouched in the bottom of her trunk.

As the winter began, with its early darkening of the days, its long gray spells of lowering weather, and its first warm, hesitating rains, Viola spent hours in the small room behind the store in Kearney Street, surrounded by flowers mounted on wire stalks, which she stuck into the mossy mold that filled in the skeleton frames. When the work was heavy she was assisted by the girl who waited in the shop—a self-confident, talkative young woman, whom every one called “Miss Gladys,” and who had the most improbably golden hair and the most astonishingly high collars Viola had ever seen. Nevertheless, the confidential chatter of Miss Gladys, which ranged over a variety of topics, not the least of which was Miss Gladys’s own conquering charm and its fatal power, had a salutary effect in diverting Viola from her brooding melancholy.