The conductor stepped up on the platform where I stood, and caught me by the arm as I reeled.
“The high altitude,” he said, “makes a good many folks get dizzy. You’d better go inside and sit down.”
Then again.
On a ferry-boat crossing the bay from the Oakland pier to San Francisco. I had just returned that morning from a four-months’ tour of Mexico. It was raining dismally, and everything about the shipping on the bay was dripping and dreary. Gray-white sea gulls circled and screamed; darting and dipping, they followed our wake, or dropped down into the foam churned up by the wheels. Winds—wet and salty, and fresh from the sea—tugged at our mackintoshes; and flapped the gowns and wraps of the women where—huddled together away from the rail—we stood under shelter. Sheets of flying fog—dense, dark and forbidding—went by; gray ghosts of the ocean’s uneasy dead. And back of the curtain of falling waters and fog, whistles shrieked shrilly, and the fog horns uttered their hideous sounds. Bellowing—moaning; moaning—bellowing; suddenly still.
The city seemed but an endless succession of terraced, water-washed houses under an endless rain. The storm lashed the waves in the harbor into running ridges of foam, and on the billows the ferry-boat (falling and rising, rising and falling) pushed her way through gray skeleton-ships at anchor, and into her slip at the wharf. The drivers of wagons and trucks on the lower deck, wrapped in oilskins yellow or black and all dripping with wet, drove down the echoing planks. Then the people began to descend the stairways. With my right hand steadying me, I had taken three downward steps when the gripping at my heart told me who was passing at my left (always at the left, it had been; at the left, always) and he of the smoldering eyes that burned into mine like live embers passed me quickly, and went on down the stairway and into the rain-wetted crowd.
And again——
It happened when, with a guide and some Club friends, we went through the Chinatown slums of the city.
It was Saturday night; the night of all others for hovels and evil haunts to disgorge their hives of human bees to swarm through passage and alley, or up and down the dark and wretched stairways.