My brother noticed a pale grey smoke or haze 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!" my brother heard voices crying. "Make 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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Two men came 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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The old man 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.