"San Francisco?" she stammered, incredulous, gazing at the SF date-line. Across the yellow sheet she looked at Mr. Roberts, seeing in his eyes a dislike that was almost hatred. "I'll go to-night," she said. "I think everything's in order. That Ramsey message was out twice."
When he had gone, she borrowed ten dollars from McCormick, promising to return it at the end of the month. She hardly resented his elaborately kissing the money good-by, and holding her hand when he gave it to her. But she spent twenty-five cents of it to send a message from the station to Paul, though McCormick would have sent it for her as a note, costing nothing.
CHAPTER VIII
Cooped in a narrow space at the end of a long corridor, Helen sat gazing at the life of a great San Francisco hotel. Every moment the color and glitter shifted under the brilliant light of mammoth chandeliers. Tall, gilded elevator-doors opened and closed; women passed, wrapped in satins and velvets, airy feathers in their shining hair; men in evening dress escorted them; bell-boys went by, carrying silver trays and calling unintelligibly, their voices rising above the continuous muffled stir and the faint sounds of music from the Blue Room.
Helen had choked the telegraph-sounder with a pencil, so that she might hear the music. But the tones of the violins came to her blurred by a low hum of voices, by the rustle of silks, by the soft movement of many feet on velvet carpets. Nothing was clear, simple, or distinct in the medley. Her ears were baffled, as her eyes were dazzled and her thoughts confused, by a multiplicity of sensations. San Francisco was a whirlpool, an endless roaring circle, stupendous and dizzying.
This had been her sick impression of it on that first morning, when she struggled through the eddying crowds at the ferry building, lugging her telescope-bag with one hand and with the other trying to hold her hat in place against gusts of wind. Beneath the uproar of street-car gongs, of huge wagons rumbling over the cobbles, of innumerable hurrying feet, whistles, bells, shouts, she had felt a great impersonal current, terrifying in its heedlessness of all but its own mighty swirl, and she had had the sensation of standing at the brink of a maelstrom.
After ten months the impression still remained. But now she seemed to have been drawn into the motionless vertex. The city roared around her, still incomprehensible, still driven by its own breathless speed, but in the heart of it she was alien and untouched. She had found nothing in it but loneliness.
Her first terrors had vanished, leaving her with a frustrated sense of having been ridiculous in having them. She had gathered her whole strength for a great effort, and she had found nothing to do. Far from lying in wait with nameless dangers and pitfalls for the unwary stranger, the city apparently did not know she was there.
At the main telegraph-office Mr. Bryant had received her indifferently. He was a busy man; she was one detail of his routine work. He directed her to the St. Francis, asked her to report there at five o'clock, and, looking at her again, inquired whether she knew any one in San Francisco or had arranged for a place to live. Three minutes later he handed her over to a brisk young woman, who gave her an address and told her what car to take to reach it.
She had found a shabby two-story house on Gough Street, with a discouraged palm in a tub on the front porch. A colorless woman showed her the room. It was a small, neat place under the eaves, furnished with an iron bed, a wash-stand, a chair, and a strip of rag carpet. The bathroom was on the lower floor, and the rent was two dollars and a half a week. Helen set down her bag with a sigh of relief.