Part 16

"What do you think of that? I get it very plain now. Grace says she's watching over Clytie and will help her all she can."

"Can't she tell me anything more?"

The medium became normal. "No, I guess that's about all I can do for you to-day. I think you got some good tests, specially when you consider it was the first time. When you come again I expect we can do better, and I'm sure we can find that little boy you was interested in."

Mr. Payson rose and stood before her, sedate, dignified, and said, in his impressive platform-manner:

"I don't mind saying that I consider this very remarkable, Madam Spoll, very remarkable. I shall certainly call again sometime next week. I am much interested. Now, what is the charge, please?"

"Oh, we'll only call this three dollars. My price is generally five, but I'm sort of interested in your case and I want you to be perfectly satisfied. You can just ring me up any time and make an appointment with me."

She bowed him out with a calm, pleasant smile.

Down-stairs, Professor Vixley was awaiting her. With him was a shrewd-eyed, bald-headed, old man, with iron spectacles, his forehead wrinkled in horizontal lines, as if it had been scratched with a sharp comb. He had a three days' growth of red beard on his chin and cheeks, and his teeth, showing in a rift between narrow, bloodless lips, were almost black. He wore a greasy, plaid waistcoat, a celluloid collar much in need of the laundry and a ready-made butterfly bow.

"Why, how d'you do, Doctor Masterson?" said Madam Spoll. "I was hoping you would get around to-day, so's we could talk business. I suppose you put him wise about Payson, Vixley?"

"Certainly," said the Professor. "We're goin' to share and share alike, and work him together as long as it lasts. How did you get on with him to-day?"

"Oh, elegant," was the answer, as she took a seat on the couch and put up her feet. "I don't believe we're going to be able to use Flora, though."

Professor Vixley's black eyes glistened and he grinned sensuously. "Why, couldn't you get a rise out of him?"

Madam Spoll shook her huge head decidedly. "No, that sort of game won't work on him. He ain't that kind. I went as far as I dared and give him a good chance, but he wouldn't stand for it."

"That's all right, Gert," said Vixley, "I ain't sayin' but what you're a fine figure of a woman, but he's sixty and he might prefer somebody younger. You know how they go. Now, Flora, she's a peach. She'd catch any man, sure! She knows the ropes, too, and she can deliver the goods all right. Look at the way she worked Bennett. Why, he was dead stuck on her the first time he seen her. She put it all over Fancy at the first rattle out of the box."

Again Madam Spoll's crisp, iron-gray curls shook a denial. "See here, Vixley!" she exclaimed, "I ain't been in this business for eighteen years without getting to know something about men. Bennett was a very different breed of dog. I can see a hole in a ladder, and I know what I'm talking about. Payson ain't up to any sort of fly game. He's straight, and he's after something different, you take my word for that. If there was anything in playing him that way, I'd be the first one to steer him on to Flora Flint, but he'd smell a mice if she got gay with him and he'd be so leary that we couldn't do nothing more with him."

"Well, what _did_ you get, then?" Vixley asked.

"Did you wire it up for me?" Doctor Masterson added.

"Oh, I fixed you all right, Doc. He'll show up at your place, sure enough. That accident tip worked all right and I got him going pretty good about his leg. He's got your card and I give you a recommendation, I don't think! You want to look out about what you say about me. We ain't on speaking terms, you understand, and you're a fakir, for fair. You can get back at me all you want, only don't draw it hard enough to scare him away."

Doctor Masterson grinned, showing his line of black fangs, and stuck his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets placidly. "Oh, I'm used to being knocked, don't mind me. I'll charge him for it. If I'm going to be the villain of this here drama, I'll do it up brown."

"Let's see now. I s'pose you can probably hold him about two months, can't you?" said Vixley, stroking his pointed black beard and spitting into the fireplace.

"Oh, not so long as that," said Madam Spoll. "We want to get to work on that book proposition. A month's plenty long enough. They ain't much money in it."

"I don't know." Doctor Masterson shook his head. "I've strung 'em for six months many's the time."

"Women, perhaps, but not men," said the Madam.

"Well, maybe. Men are liable to be in more of a hurry, of course."

"And women ain't so much, with you, are they?"

The two men laughed cynically.

"Oh, they's more ways to work women than men, that's all," the doctor replied. "They're more interested in their symptoms, and they like to talk about 'em. Then, again, they's a more variety of complaints to choose from. I don't say I ain't had some pretty cases in my day."

"Say!" Madam Spoll interposed. "Who's having a circle to-night--Mayhew?"

"Let's see--it's Friday, ain't it? Yes, Mayhew and Sadie Crum," Vixley replied.

"Well, I s'pose we got to put 'em wise about Payson," said the Madam. "He's got the bug now and he's pretty sure to make the rounds."

"Can't we keep him dark?" said Vixley. "He's our game and they might possibly ring him in."

"No, that won't do," she answered emphatically. "We got to play fair. They've always been square with us, and they won't catch him, I'll see to that. Mayhew's straight enough and if Sadie tries to get gay with us, we can fix her and she knows it. And the more easy tests he gets, the better for us. It'll keep him going, and so long as they don't go too far, it'll help us. The sooner he gets so he don't want to impose test conditions, the better, and they can help convert him for us. I'll ring up Mayhew now. I've got a good hunch that Payson will show up there to-night."

She raised her bulk from the couch and went to the telephone by the window, calling for Mayhew's number. When she had got it, she said:

"Is this number thirty-one? ... Yes, I'm number fifteen.... Sure! Oh, pretty good! ... I got a tip for you. I'm playing a six-year-old for the handicap, named Oliver. Carries sixty pounds, colors blue and gray, ten hands, jockey is Payson. He's a ten-to-one shot. My wife Grace lived in Stockton. Do what you can for me, but keep your hands off, do you understand? Numbers forty and thirteen are with me in this deal and we'll fix it for you if you stand in ... yes, all right! If he shows up let me know to-morrow morning, sure."

She turned to the two men. "I guess that's all right now."

"What's all that about Stockton?" Vixley asked.

"He lived there once and there's something more about his wife or something. Mayhew may fish it out of him, and if he does I'll put you on."

"I ain't seen him yet," said the doctor, "but I guess I'll recognize him. Sixty years old, Oliver Payson, one hundred and sixty pounds, blue eyes and gray hair, six feet tall. Are you sure he's a ten-to-one, though? That cuts more ice than anything."

"Oh, sure!" said Madam Spoll. "Why, he swallowed the whole dose. He ain't doing no skeptic business. He thinks he's an investigator. Wait till you hear him talk and you'll understand. Not religious, you know, but a good old sort. He's caught all right, and if we jolly him along, we can polish him off good."

"They ought to be some good materializin' graft in that wife proposition. Grace, was it? We might turn him over to Flora for that." This from Vixley.

"I've been thinking of that," said Madam Spoll, "but I don't know whether he'll stand for it or not. It won't be anywheres near the snap it was with Bennett, in full daylight, and we'll have to have special players. I believe I can put my hands on one or two that can help us out, though. Miss French for one; she's got four good voices. Then there's a young girl I got my eye on that'll do anything I say. She's slim and she can work an eight-inch panel as slick as soap; and she's got a memory for names and faces that beats the directory. Besides, I believe she's really psychic. I've seen her do some wonderful things at mind-reading."

"No, can she really!" said Vixley.

"Oh, I used to be clairaudient myself when I begun," said Madam Spoll a little sadly. "I could catch a name right out of the air, half the time. I've gave some wonderful tests in my day, but you can't never depend upon it, and when you work all the week, sick or well, drunk or sober, you have to put water in the milk and then it's bound to go from you. You have to string 'em sooner or later. This girl's a dandy at it, though, but that'll all wait. There's enough to do before we get to that part of the game. I expect I had better go out and see Sadie Crum myself. I don't trust her telephone. She's got a ten-party line, what do you think of that?"

"A ten-party line don't do for business," said Vixley, "but it's pretty good for rubberin'. I've got some pretty good dope off my sister's wire. She spends pretty near all her time on it and it does come in handy."

"Oh, pshaw!" Madam Spoll looked disgusted. "I ain't got time to spend that way. What's the use anyway? They ain't but one rule necessary to know in this business, and that is: All men is conceited, and all women is vain."

"That's right!" Vixley assented. "Only I got another that works just as good; all women want to think they are misunderstood, and all men want to think they understand. Ain't that right, Doc?"

Masterson grinned. "I guess likely you ought to know, if anybody does. But I got a little one of my own framed up, too. How's this? All men want to be heroes and all women want to be martyrs."

The three laughed cynically together. They had learned their practical psychology in a thorough school. Madam Spoll chuckled for some time pleasantly.

"You're the one had ought to write a book, Masterson. I'll bet it would beat out Payson's!"

"Lord!" said Vixley. "If I was to write down the things that have happened to me, just as they occurred--"

"It wouldn't be fit to print," Madam Spoll added. Vixley looked flattered.

"How about that pickle-girl?" he asked next.

"What's that?" said Doctor Masterson.

"Oh, a new graft of Gertie's. Did she come, Gert?"

"I should say she did," Madam Spoll replied. "And I got her on the string staking out dopes, too. Why, she's mixed up with a fellow at the Risdon Iron Works, and she don't dare to say her soul's her own since she told me."

"Nothin' like a good scandal to hold on to people by," Masterson remarked. "Where'd you get her?"

"Oh, she floated in. I give her a reading and found out she worked in a pickle factory down on Sixth Street where there are fifty or more girls. Soon as I found out the handle to work her by, I made her a proposition to tip off what's doing in her shop. She makes her little report, steers the girls up here, and then she comes round and tells me who they are and all about 'em."

"That's what I call a good wholesale business," said Vixley enviously. "I wish I could work it as slick as that. She uses the peek-hole in the screen, I suppose?"

"Sometimes, and sometimes she sits behind the window curtain up-stairs."

"You have to give yourself away, that's the only trouble," said Doctor Masterson.

"Oh, no," Madam Spoll remarked easily, "I just tell her that I can't always get everybody's magnetism, though of course I can always get hers. That gives her an idea she's important, don't you see? Then I can always lay anything suspicious to the Diakkas. Evil spirits are a great comfort."

"And anyways, if she should want to tell anything," Vixley suggested, "you can everlastingly blacklist her at the factory with what you know."

"Yes," Madam Spoll assented; "she's got a record herself, only she hasn't got sense enough to realize on it the way I do on mine. Is they any bigger fool than a girl that's in love?"

"Only a man that is," Vixley offered sagely.

"Oh, _men_!" she exclaimed contemptuously. "I believe they ain't more'n but three real ones alive to-day!"

The Professor's eyes snapped. "Well, they's women enough, thank the Lord!"

"Well," said Doctor Masterson, "I got to go to work; I'm keeping office hours in the evening now and I have to hump. So long, Gertie, I'll be all ready for Payson, but you and Vixley have got to keep jollying him along. You want me to hold him about a month? I'll see what I can do, and if I get a lead, I'll let you know." He shook hands and left them.

"I ain't so sure of the Doc as I'd like to be," said Madam Spoll after he had gone.

"Nor me neither," Vixley replied. "We've got to watch him, I expect, but he'll do for a starter and we can fix him if he gets funny. There ain't nothin' like cooeperation, Gertie."

As Madam Spoll sat down again to open a bottle of beer she had taken from beneath the wash-stand, Professor Vixley began to twirl his fingers in his lap and snicker to himself.

"What are you laughing at, Vixley?" she asked, pouring out two frothing glasses.

"I was just a-thinkin' about Pierpont Thayer. Don't you remember that dope who went nuts on spiritualism and committed suicide?"

"No, I don't just recall it; what about it?"

"Why, he got all wound up in the circles here--Sadie Crum, she had him on the string for a year, till he didn't know where he was at. He took it so hard that one day he up and shot hisself and left a note pinned on to his bed that said: 'I go to test the problem.' Lord! I'd 'a' sold every one of my tricks and all hers to him for a five-dollar bill! Why didn't he come to _me_ to test his problem? He'd 'a' found out quick enough."

"Yes, and after you'd told him all about how it was done, I'll guarantee that I could have converted him again in twenty minutes."

"I guess that's right," said Vixley. "Them that want to believe are goin' to, and you can't prevent 'em, no matter what you do. They're like hop fiends--they've got to have their dope whether or no, and just so long as they can dream it out they're happy."

*CHAPTER VIII*

*ILLUMINATION*

It is easy to imagine the virtuous pride with which the civil engineer, Jasper O'Farrell, set about the laying out of the town of San Francisco in 1846. Here was the ideal site for a city--a peninsula lying like a great thumb on the hand of the mainland, between the Pacific Ocean and a deep, land-locked bay, an area romantically configured of hills and valleys, with picturesque mountain and water views, the setting sun in the west and Mount Diablo a sentinel in the east; to the northward, the sea channel of the Golden Gate overhung by the foot-hills of Tamalpais.

There was still chance to amend and improve the old town site of Yerba Buena, the little Spanish settlement by the cove in the harbor, whose straight, narrow streets had been artlessly ruled by Francisco de Haro, alcalde of the Mission Dolores. He had marked out upon the ground, northerly, La Calle de la Fundacion and the adjacent squares necessary for the little port of entry in 1835. Four years later, when Governor Alvarado directed a new survey of the place, Jean Vioget extended the original lines with mathematical precision to the hills surrounding the valley; and it would have been possible to correct that artistic blunder of the simple-minded alcalde. But Jasper O'Farrell had seen military service with General Sutter; his ways were stern and severe, his esthetic impulses, if he had any, were heroically subdued. Market Street, indeed, he permitted to run obliquely, though it went straight as a bullet towards the Twin Peaks. The rest of the city he made one great checkerboard, in defiance of its natural topography.

As one might constrict the wayward fancies of a gipsy maiden to the cold, tight-laced ethics of a puritanical creed, so O'Farrell bound the city that was to be for ever to a gridiron of right-angled streets and blocks of parallelograms. He knew no compromise. His streets took their straight and narrow way, up hill and down dale, without regard to grade or expense. Unswerving was their rectitude. Their angles were exactly ninety degrees of his compass, north and south, east and west. Where might have been entrancingly beautiful terraces, rising avenue above avenue to the heights, preserving the master-view of the continent, now the streets, committed to his plan, are hacked out of the earth and rock, precipitous, inaccessible, grotesque. So sprawls the fey, leaden-colored town over its dozen hills, its roads mounting to the sky or diving to the sea.

So the stranger beholds San Francisco, the Improbable. Its pageantry is unrolled for all to see at first glance. Never was a city so prodigal of its friendship and its wealth. She salutes one on every crossing, welcoming the visitor openly and frankly with her western heart. In every little valley where the slack, rattling cables of her car-lines slap and splutter over the pulleys, some great area of the town exhibits a rising colony of blocks stretching up and over a shoulder of the hill to one side and to the other. Atop every crest one is confronted with farther districts lying not only beneath but opposite, across lower levels and hollows, flanking one's point of vantage with rival summits. San Francisco is agile in displaying her charms. As you are whirled up and down on the cable-car, she moves stealthily about you, now lagging behind in steep declivities, now dodging to right or left in stretches of plain or uplifted hillsides, now hurrying ahead to surprise you with a terrifying ascent crowned with palaces. Now she is all water-front and sailors' lodging-houses; in a trice she turns Chinatown, then shocks you with a Spanish, Italian or negro quarter. Past the next rise, you find her whimsical, fantastic with garish flats and apartment houses. She lurks in and about thousands of little wooden houses, and beyond, she drops a little park into your path, discloses a stretch of shimmering bay or unveils magnificently the green, gently-sloping expanse of the Presidio.

No other city has so many points of view, none allures the stranger so with coquetry of originality and fantasy. Some cities have single dominant hills; but she is all hills, they are a vital part of herself. They march down into the town and one can not escape them, they stride north and west and must be climbed. The important lines of traffic accept these conditions and plunge boldly up and down upon their ways. And so, going or returning from his home, the city is always with the citizen--from Nob Hill he sees ships in the harbor and the lights of the Mission; from Kearney Street he keeps his view of Telegraph Hill and Twin Peaks--the San Franciscan is always in San Francisco, the city of extremes.

Of all this topographical chaos, the most spectacular spot is Telegraph Hill. To the eastward on the harbor side, it rises a sheer precipice over a hundred feet high, where a concrete company has quarried stone for three decades despite protest, appeal, injunction and the force of arms. To the north and west the hill falls away into a jumble of streets, cliffed and hollowed like the billows of the sea, crusted with queer little houses of the Latin quarter.

Francis Granthope, after the Chinese supper, had found himself swayed by an obsession. The thought of Clytie Payson was insistent in his mind. She troubled him. He recognized the symptom with a grim sense of its ridiculousness. It was, according to his theory, the first sign of love; but the idea of his being in love was absurd. Certainly he desired her, and that ardently. She stimulated him, she stirred his fancy. But he was jealous of his freedom; he would not be snared by a woman's eyes. Marriage, indeed, he had contemplated, but, to his mind, marriage was but a part of the game, a condition which would insure for him an attractive companion, a desirable standing; in short, a point of vantage. What had begun to chafe him, now, was a sort of compulsion that Clytie had put upon him. Somehow he could not be himself with her--he was self-conscious, timid--he was sensitive to her vibrations, he was swayed by her fine moods and impulses. Though the strain was gentle, still she coerced him. He felt an impulse to shake himself free.

In this temper, he decided, while he was at dinner, to see her, and, if he could, regain possession of the situation, master her by the use of those arts by which he had so often won before. He would, at least, if he could not cajole her, assert his independence. No doubt he had been misled by her claims of intuitive power. He would put that to the test, as well.

It was already after sunset when he started across Union Square. Kearney Street was alight with electric lamps and humming with life. He walked north, passing the gayer retail shopping district towards the cheaper stores, pawnshops and quack doctors' offices to where the old Plaza, rising in a green slope to Chinatown, displayed the little Stevenson fountain with its merry gilded ship. Here the waifs and the strays of the night were already wandering, and he responded to frequent appeals for charity.

Beyond was the dance-hall district, where women of the town were promenading, seeking their prey; sailors and soldiers descended into subterranean halls of light and music. Then came the Italian quarter with its restaurants and saloons.

He paused where Montgomery Avenue diverged, leading to the North Beach, consulted his watch, and found that it was too early to call. He decided to kill time by going up Telegraph Hill, and kept on up Kearney Street.

Across Broadway, it mounted suddenly in an incline so steep, that ladder-like frameworks flat upon the ribbed concrete sidewalks were necessary for ascent. Two blocks the hill rose thus, encompassed by disconsolate and wretched little houses, with alleys plunging down from the street into the purlieus of the quarter; then it ran nearly level to the foot of the hill. The track there was up steps and across hazardous platforms, clambering up and up to a steep path gullied by the winter rains, and at last, by a stiff climb, to the summit of the hill.

From here one could see almost the whole peninsula, the town falling away in waves of hill and valley to the west. The bay lay beneath him, the docks flat and square, as if drawn on a map, red-funneled steamers lying alongside. In the fairway, vessels rode at anchor, lighted by the moon. The top of the hill was commanded by a huge, castellated, barn-like white structure which had once been used as a pleasure pavilion, but was now deserted, save by a rascally herd of tramps. At a near view its ruined, deserted grandeur showed unkempt and dingy. By its side, a city park, crowning the crest, scantily cultured and improved, indicated the first rude beginning of formal arrangement. Moldering, displaced concrete walls and seats showed what had been done and neglected.

He skirted the eastern slope of the hill, went up and down one-sided streets, streets that dipped and slid longitudinally, streets tilted transversely, keeping along a path at the top till he came to the cliff.