“Oh, he had no call to be in politics. He hasn’t the sand. Attwood says so. And he stuck at his desk and let his business chances go by. Myself, I’m keeping my lamps open. Just because the Judge doesn’t watch his chances, that office is a great place to pick things up. Look at those tidewater cases of ours over in Richmond. I know, from the inside, that we’re going to lose our case, and lots will go whooping up. I’ve written to Bob for a thousand dollars to invest. I’ll double that in a year and have my first thousand ahead. Say, why don’t you try something in business instead of sticking to newspapers? Let’s go in together. Reporting is a rotten kind of business.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I like it. I think I’ll stay with it for a while.” Again Mark had 76 put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. “I think I’ll stay with it for a while, anyway,” he added simply.
They had turned out of Kearney Street and were mounting the hill-rise toward the Hotel Marseillaise. These fringes and environments of Chinatown had been residences for the newly affluent in the days when the Poodle Dog flourished and flaunted in the hull of a wreck, in the days when that Chinatown site was Rialto and Market-place for the overgrown mining camp. The wall moss which blew in with the trade winds, and the semi-tropic growth of old ivies and rose-bushes, had given to these houses the seasoning of two centuries. Unpretentious hovels beside the structures of stone turrets and mill-work fronts by which later millionaires shamed California Street and Van Ness Avenue, they had the simple dignity of a mission, a colonial farm-house, 77 or any other structure wherein love of craft has supplanted scanty materials. Innumerable additions of sheds and boxes, the increment of their fallen social condition, broke their severe lines. A massive door, a carriage entrance, the remains of a balcony faced to catch wind and air of the great bay, recalled what they had been; as though a washerwoman should wear on her tattered waist some jewel of a wealth long past.
The Hotel Marseillaise occupied one of these houses. Where it stood, the hill rose steep. One might enter a narrow alley, skirt a board fence, dodge into a box hall, seasoned with dinners long past, and mount by a steep staircase to the dining room; or he might enter that dining room directly from the street, such was the slope of the hill. A row of benches parked the front door. On the fine, out-of-doors evenings which came too seldom in the City of Fogs, French waiters out of work, French deserters from merchantmen in the harbor below, French cabmen waiting for night and fares, lolled on these benches while they smoked their black cigarettes and chattered in their heavy, peasant accent.
Within, Madame Loisel ruled with her cash 78 register at the cigar counter. She, bursting with sweet inner fatness like a California nectarine, kept in her middle age the everlasting charm and chic of the Frenchwoman. This Madame Loisel was a dual personality. She of the grave mouth, the considering eye, the business manner, who rung up dinner fees on the cash register and bargained with the Chinamen for vegetables at the back door, seemed hardly even sister to the Madame Loisel of Saturday afternoon on “the line” or Sunday morning at the French Church. By what process man may not imagine, this second Madame Loisel took six inches from her girth, fifty pounds from her weight, fifteen years from her age. Her step was like a dancer’s; her figure was no more than comfortably plump; her Sunday complexion brought the best out of her alluring eyes and her black, ungrizzled hair; her hands, in their perfect gloves, bore no resemblance to the hands which had scraped pots for Louis Loisel in the time before he could flaunt the luxury of a cashier.
In Madame Loisel’s background lay the ramblings of a house built for comfort and large hospitalities. Gone were the folding 79 doors, bare the niches, empty the window-seats. The old drawing-rooms, music-room, dining-room, had become one apartment of a sanded floor and many long tables. Through this background of his wife moved Louis Loisel, grizzled, fat and gay; never too busy at his serving to exchange flamboyant banter with a patron.
Hither the peasant French of San Francisco, menials most of them, came for luncheons and dinners of thick, heavy vegetable soup, coarse fish, boiled joint, third-class fruit and home-made claret, vinted by Louis himself in a hand press during those September days when the Latin quarter ran purple—and all for fifteen cents! Thither, too, came young apprentices of the professions, working at wages to shame a laborer, who had learned how much more one got for his money at Louis’s than at the white-tiled American places further down town. It stood for ten years, this Hotel Marseillaise, the hope of the impecunious. How many careers did it preserve, how many old failures from the wreckage of Kearney Street did it console!
Madame Loisel stood at her cash register as the two young men entered. A fresh waist, 80 a ribbon at her throat, a slimness of her waist and an artificial freshness in her complexion showed that she had been parading that afternoon.
“Bonsoir Madame—la la la-la-la!” called Bertram.
Her face blossomed with coquetry, her teeth gleamed, and: