British -- California -- Fiction; British -- China -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
Edward followed. If he should let himself run nothing could save him from
falling like a stone into Chinatown and bouncing thence into the bay. He
concentrated sternly on the alpine formation of the sidewalk, and when he
reached Emily she was alone.
“Wez Bope gone?” asked Edward.
“His tram came first,” replied Emily. “I’m waiting for a Ferry tram.”
“Tram,” triumphed Edward, who had been long exiled among mere
street-cars. “That’s the stuff to give ’em.... Tram.... Do ’em good by
Gosh....”
There was no Ferry car in sight.
“Would-nibby fun,” remarked Edward, “if we had supper at Jove Pinelli’s.
Night yet young....”
Emily paused a minute. “Yes, would-nib,” she agreed.
Emily, though born in Kensington, had no ladylike instincts. And of
course her mother had never actually warned her not to go to unrefined
Italian dives late at night with young men fortified by cocktails to the
seventh degree.
When Edward, carefully following Emily, reached a table in Jove Pinelli’s
sanded room he sat down, put his elbows on the table and buried his face
in his hands.
“I’m too tired,” he said, concentrating no longer. “You order supper.” He
was so tired that every channel in his brain felt sore. He thought, “I
am going to die soon. If I were in a book and my present feelings were
described, readers would say, Our Hero is going to die quite soon.... It
would be luck to die in love.” He suffocated with some regret his intense
sympathy for himself. He looked slackly about the room and thought,
“At least it is fun being so wicked. Our Hero drunk and in love on the
Barbary Coast.”
The room was meant for people who felt like this. Most of its occupants
were simple excellent “steady beaux” from respectable homes showing their
girls “Life.” One young man, who no doubt had a good mother in Oakland
and hid no thought from her, was singing to some friends a song which he
and they believed to be very daring. “Picked it up in Paris,” he said,
and so indeed he had—from the Victrola in the Y. M. C. A. there. There
were a few moody artists giving supper to ladies, who, though painted,
looked disappointingly safe. The walls of the room, however, were
decorated with scarlet devils and there were several screened grottos
representing, apparently, private cubicles in Hell.
Presently Edward found that he had roused himself to say, “You know,
Emily, I love you....”
“I know it,” said Emily sadly. “I know it.”
One of them would no doubt have said more, but at that moment a matchbox
hit Emily on the back of her Napoleonic hat.
“Oh, hang it all,” said Emily, putting down her fork and spoon. “Don’t
let’s disappoint anyone. Let’s save the Barbary Coast’s reputation.”
She picked up the matchbox. It was from a hotel and bore the legend—A
Room and a Bath for a Dollar and a Half. “Did you see who threw it?” she
asked.
“The little cad with horn glasses who hasn’t shaved.”
“Shall I show you what one does next?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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