The Heart Line. Gelett Burgess
I suppose, that I have no heart? Clubs may do. I rely upon your atavism."
"I suppose you have as much heart as can be made out of brain."
"What if I say that I'm jealous? Will that prove that I have a heart?"
"Oh, you're too conceited ever to be jealous."
"But I am! I'll prove it. I happen to know that that palmist person, Granthope, was here this afternoon and you spent half an hour with him. How's that?"
"How do you know?" She awoke to a greater interest.
"You don't seem to realize that I make it my business to know all about you. This came by accident, though. I was on the Hyde Street car and I saw him get off and come in here. I waited at the end of the road till he went back. Now, what if I should tell your father that you have been entertaining a faking palmist here, on the sly?" He leaned back and folded his hands.
Clytie rose swiftly and walked to the door without a look at him.
"Father," she called, "Mr. Cayley has something to say to you."
"Never mind," Cayley protested. "That was merely an experiment."
Mr. Payson, in overcoat and silk hat, thrust a mildly expectant head in the room.
"It was only about the trade dollar business," said Cayley. "I'll tell you some other time."
Mr. Payson withdrew, scenting no mischief, and Clytie sat down without a word.
"Thought you'd call my bluff, did you?" said Cayley, unruffled. "I like spirit!"
"If you don't look out you'll succeed in boring me." Clytie's manner had shown an amused scorn rather than resentment. She was evidently not afraid of him.
"You're fighting too hard to be bored," he remarked coolly. He added, "Then you are interested in him, are you?"
"I am." Clytie looked him frankly in the face.
"Why?" he asked.
"I've heard a lot about him and he appeals to my imagination. I scarcely think I need to apologize for it. Have you any objection to my knowing him?"
"I'd rather you wouldn't get mixed up with him; since he's been taken up the women are simply crazy about him, as they always are about any charlatan. They're all running after him and calling on him and ringing him up at all hours. Why, Cly, they actually lie in wait for him at his place; trying to get a chance to talk to him alone. I don't exactly see you in that class, that's all. You can scarcely blame me."
"Oh, I haven't rung him up yet," said Clytie, "but there's no knowing what I may do, of course, with all my unexploded brain-cells."
"How did he happen to come here, then?"
"He came to see me, I suppose."
Cayley accepted the rebuff gracefully. "Well, in another month, when some one else comes along, people will drop him with a thud. He's a nine days' wonder now, but he's too spectacular to last. This is a great old town! We need another new fakir now that the old gentleman in the Miller house has stopped his Occult Brotherhood in the drawing-room and his antique furniture repository in the cellar. I haven't heard of anything so picturesque since that Orpheum chap caught the turnips on a fork in his teeth, that were tossed from the roof of the Palace Hotel. I suppose I'll have a good scandal about Granthope, pretty soon, to add to my collection."
Clytie accepted the diversion, evidently only too glad to change the subject. "What collection?" she asked.
"My San Francisco Improbabilities. I've got a note-book full of them—things no sane Easterner would believe possible, and no novelist dare to use in fiction."
"Oh, yes, I remember your telling me. What are they? One was that house made entirely of doors, wasn't it?"
"Yes, the 'house of one hundred and eighty doors' at the foot of Ninth Street. Then, there is the hulk of the Orizaba over by the Union Iron Works, where 'Frank the Frenchman' lives like a hermit, eats swill and bathes in the sewage of the harbor. Then there's 'Munson's Mystery' on the North beach—nobody has ever found out who Munson is. And Dailey, the star eater of the Palace Hotel—he used to have four canvas-back ducks cooked, selected one and used only the juice from the others; he ordered soup at a dollar a plate; and he had a happy way of buying a case of champagne with each meal, drinking only the top glass from each bottle."
Clytie laughed now, for Cayley was in one of his most amusing and enthusiastic moods. "Do you remember that tramp who lived all summer in the Hensler vault in Calvary Cemetery?"
"Yes, but that isn't so impossible as Kruger's castle out in the sand-hills by Tenth Avenue. It's a perfect jumble of job-lot buildings from the Mid-winter Fair, like a nightmare palace. I went out there once and saw old Mother Kruger, so tortured with rheumatism that she had to crawl round on her hands and knees. She had only one tooth left. The old man is one of the last of the wood-engravers and calls himself the Emperor of the Nations. He has resurrected Hannibal and an army of two hundred thousand men; also he revived Pompeii for three days. He wanted to bring Mayor Sutro back to life for me, but I wouldn't stand for it."
Cayley swept on with his anecdotes. "Who would believe the story of 'Big Bertha,' who buncoed all the swellest Hebrews in town, and ended by playing Mazeppa in tights at the Bella Union Theater? Who has written the true story of Dennis Kearney, the hack-driver, who had his speeches written for him by reporters, and went East with a big head, unconsciously to plagiarize Wendell Phillips in Fanueil Hall? Or of 'Mammy' Pleasant, the old negress who had such mysterious influence over so many millionaires—who couldn't be bribed—who died at last, with all her secrets untold? There's Romance in purple letters!
"What do you think of a first folio Shakespeare, the rent-roll of Stratford parish, and a collection of Incunabula worth thirty thousand dollars, kept in the deserted library on Montgomery Street in a case, by Jove, without a lock! What's the matter with Little Pete, the Chinaman, jobbing all the race-tracks in California? Who'd believe that there are streets here, within a mile of Lotta's fountain, so steep that they pasture cows on the grass?"
"Then there's Emperor Norton, and the Vigilance Committee, and all the secrets of the Chinatown slave trade," Clytie contributed, with aroused interest.
"Oh, I'm not speaking of that sort of thing. That's been done, and the East and England think that Romance departed from here with the red-shirted miner. Everybody knows about the Bret Harte type of adventure. It's the things that are going on now or have happened within a few years—like finding that Chinese woman's skeleton upside down, built into the wall of the house on the corner of Powell and Sutter; like Bill Dockery, the food inspector, who terrorized the San Bruno road, like a new Claude Duval, holding up the milkmen with a revolver and a lactometer, and went here, there and everywhere, into restaurants and hotels all over the peninsula, dumping watered milk into the streets till San Francisco ran white with it."
"Then there's Carminetti's," Clytie recalled, now. "That's modern enough, and typical of San Francisco, isn't it? I mean not so much what's done there, as the way they do it. I've always wanted to go down there some Saturday night and see just what it's like."
"I wouldn't want you to be seen there, Cly, it wouldn't do." Cayley shook his head decidedly.
"Why wouldn't it do?"
"It's a little too lively a crowd. You'd be disgusted, if they happened to hit things up a bit, as they often do."
"I don't see why I shouldn't be privileged to see what is going on. It's a part of my education, isn't it? It's all innocent enough, from what you say; it's at worst nothing but vulgar. I think I am proof against that."
"People would get an altogether wrong opinion of you. They'd think you were fast."
"I fast?" Clytie smiled. "I think I can risk that. I shouldn't probably want to go more than once, it's true. You don't know me, that's all. You don't believe that I can go from one world of convention to another and accept the new rules of life when it's necessary. It's just for that reason that I do wish to