Transplanted: A Novel

MRS. HAYNE’S boarding-house stood on the corner of Market Street and one of those cross streets which seem to leap down from the heights of San Francisco and empty themselves into the great central thoroughfare that roars from the sandy desert at the base of Twin Peaks to the teeming wharves on the edge of the bay. On the right of Market Street, both on the hills and in the erratic branchings of the central plain, as far as the eye can reach, climbs and swarms modern prosperous San Francisco; of what lies beyond, the less said the better. On the left, at the far southeast, the halo of ancient glory still hovers about Rincon Hill, growing dimmer with the years: few of the many who made the social laws of the Fifties cling to the old houses in the battered gardens; and their children marry and build on the gay hills across the plain. In the plain itself is a thick-set, low-browed, dust-coloured city; “South of Market Street” is a generic term for hundreds of streets in which dwell thousands of insignificant beings, some of whom promenade the democratic boundary line by gaslight, but rarely venture up the aristocratic slopes. By day or by night Market Street rarely has a moment of rest, of peace; it is a blaze of colour, a medley of sound, shrill, raucous, hollow, furious, a net-work of busy people and vehicles until midnight is over. Every phase of the city’s manifold life is suggested there, every aspect of its cosmopolitanism.

To a little girl of eleven, who dwelt on the third floor of Mrs. Hayne’s boarding-house, Market Street was a panorama of serious study and unvarying interest. She knew every shop window, in all the mutable details of the seasons, she had mingled with the throng unnumbered times, studying that strange patch-work of faces, and wondering if they had any life apart from the scene in which they seemed eternally moving. In those days Market Street typified the world to her; although her school was some eight blocks up the hill it scarcely counted. All the world, she felt convinced, came sooner or later to Market Street, and sauntered or hurried with restless eyes, up and down, up and down. The sun rose at one end and set at the other; it climbed straight across the sky and went to bed behind the Twin Peaks. And the trade winds roared through Market Street as through a mighty cañon, and the sand hills beyond the city seemed to rise bodily and whirl down the great way, making men curse and women jerk their knuckles to their eyes. On summer nights the fog came and banked there, and the lights shone through it like fallen stars, and the people looked like wraiths, lost souls condemned to wander unceasingly.

When Mrs. Tarleton was too ill to be left alone, Lee amused herself watching from above the crush and tangle of street cars, hacks, trucks, and drays for which the wide road should have been as wide again, holding her breath as the impatient or timid foot-passengers darted into the transient rifts with bird-like leaps of vision and wild deflections. Occasionally she assumed the part of chorus for her mother, who regarded the prospect beneath her windows with horror.

“Now! She’s started—at last! Oh! what a silly! Any one could have seen that truck with half an eye. She turned back—of course! Now! Now! she’s got to the middle and there’s a funeral just turned the corner! She can’t get back! She’s got to go on. Oh, she’s got behind a man. I wonder if she’ll catch hold of his coat-tails? There—she’s safe! I wonder if she’s afraid of people like she is of Market Street?”