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rising among the houses in front of them, and veiling the white facade of
a terrace beyond the road that appeared between the backs of the villas.
Mrs. Elphinstone suddenly cried out at a number of tongues of smoky red
flame leaping up above the houses in front of them against the hot, blue
sky. The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling
of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of waggons, and the
staccato of hoofs. The lane came round sharply not fifty yards from the
crossroads.
"Good
heavens!" cried Mrs. Elphinstone. "What is this you are driving us
into?"
My brother stopped.
For the main
road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human beings rushing
northward, one pressing on another. A great bank of dust, white and
luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything within twenty feet of
the ground grey and indistinct and was perpetually renewed by the hurrying
feet of a dense crowd of horses and of men and women on foot, and by the
wheels of vehicles of every description.
way!"It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to
approach the meeting point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a
fire, and the dust was hot and pungent. And, indeed, a little way up the
road a villa was burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across
the road to add to the confusion.
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Accessories
past them. Then a dirty woman, carrying a heavy bundle and weeping. A lost
retriever dog, with hanging tongue, circled dubiously round them, scared
and wretched, and fled at my brother's threat.
So
much as they could see of the road Londonward between the houses to the
right was a tumultuous stream of dirty, hurrying people, pent in between
the villas on either side; the black heads, the crowded forms, grew into
distinctness as they rushed towards the corner, hurried past, and merged
their individuality again in a receding multitude that was swallowed up at
last in a cloud of dust.
"Go on! Go on!" cried the voices.
"Way! Way!"
One man's hands pressed on the back of
another. My brother stood at the pony's head. Irresistibly attracted, he
advanced slowly, pace by pace, down the lane.
"To
think of it! I've seen this beach alive with men, women, and
children on a pleasant Sunday. And there weren't any
bears to eat them up, either. And right up there on the cliff was a big
restaurant where you could get anything you wanted to eat. Four million
people lived in San Francisco then. And now, in the whole city and county
there aren't forty all told. And out there on the sea were ships and ships
always to be seen, going in for the Golden Gate or coming out. And
airships in the air—dirigibles and flying machines. They could travel two
hundred miles an hour. The mail contracts with the New York and San
Francisco Limited demanded that for the minimum. There was a chap, a
Frenchman, I forget his name, who succeeded in making three hundred; but
the thing was risky, too risky for conservative persons. But he was on the
right clew, and he would have managed it if it hadn't been for the Great
Plague. When I was a boy, there were men alive who remembered the coming
of the first aeroplanes, and now I have lived to see the last of them, and
that sixty years ago."
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Gaming
babbled on, unheeded by the boys, who were long accustomed to his
garrulousness, and whose vocabularies, besides, lacked the greater portion
of the words he used. It was noticeable that in these rambling soliloquies
his English seemed to recrudesce into better construction and phraseology.
But when he talked directly with the boys it lapsed, largely, into their
own uncouth and simpler forms.
"But there weren't
many crabs in those days," the old man wandered on. "They were fished out,
and they were great delicacies. The open season was only a month long,
too. And now crabs are accessible the whole year around. Think of
it—catching all the crabs you want, any time you want, in the surf of the
Cliff House beach!"
A sudden commotion among the
goats brought the boys to their feet. The dogs about the fire rushed to
join their snarling fellow who guarded the goats, while the goats
themselves stampeded in the direction of their human protectors. A half
dozen forms, lean and gray, glided about on the sand hillocks and faced
the bristling dogs. Edwin arched an arrow that fell short. But Hare-Lip,
with a sling such as David carried into battle against Goliath, hurled a
stone through the air that whistled from the speed of its flight. It fell
squarely among the wolves and caused them to slink away toward the dark
depths of the eucalyptus forest.