It seemed my salvation to skin out the door into the blowing fog of Washington Street when Stottlemyer wasn’t looking. I took up a post in the mouth of an alley a hundred feet down the street, wondering what to do if Klosters chose the other direction. But he came my way, looming out of the fog, big-hatted and alone.
I let him pass, then stepped out and jammed the muzzle of the revolver into his kidney. “Just step this way,” I heard my shrill voice say.
He stepped into the alley before he had figured out who I was. When he faced me I prodded the muzzle into his stomach. His hands were raised shoulder high. His pockmarked granite face was close to mine, his bloodshot eyes regarded me, his mouth turned down at the corners.
“What do you think you are doing?” he grated.
“You followed my landlord’s girl home from school on Friday.”
The corners of his mouth turned up. “These girls do like me. Can’t think why.”
“Don’t do it again,” I said.
His eyes closed in weariness, as though this was all too much for him. “You are a foolish young fellow,” he said. “You know you are not going to shoot me, and I know you are not going to shoot me.” But he did not lower his hands.
“I will shoot you if you offer that girl any harm,” I said, and suddenly I felt as futile as Major Copley.
When he lowered his right hand it came down like a hatchet on my wrist, knocking the revolver clattering to the pavement. Before I could move he slammed his boot down on it.
Panting a little from his effort, he said, “You are writing something about Senator Jennings that don’t want to be published. If you leave off publishing it I will leave that girl be.”
I rubbed my wrist, trying not to grimace at the pain. In fact I had not written much of the piece on Jennings, and I could rationalize that Bierce didn’t actually want to publish it anyway, he only wanted Jennings to know it was being written. It was entirely probable that he had made sure that Jennings learned of that fact, which had got me the beating I still ached from, despite the cucumber arnica; and this botch as well.
“All right,” I said.
He stooped to pick up the revolver and handed it to me butt first. He smiled bleakly. “Here’s your piece,” he said. “Don’t forget the Concealed Weapon Ordinance.” He opened his coat so I could see that he himself was not armed; then he lumbered off into the fog.
I was not in a good mood when Amelia and I took the ferry to Marin. I had been Futilitarian with a Concealed Weapon. In fact I had not been much of a hero since I had gone into action on the Brittain’s porch, having come out on the short end of all my scrapes since.
Amelia and I stood on the deck with fog blowing past us. I put an arm around her, to which she seemed to respond. “What’s the matter, Tom?”
“Things going wrong,” I said.
“Can I know?”
“Not today,” I said. “I wish the fog would let up, though.”
“It’s just what I chose for today!”
I gave her a squeeze.
The hoots of foghorns resounded down the Bay. Alcatraz loomed up like a ship bearing down on us, and faded away behind. We ascended Mount Tamalpais still in dense fog blowing over us in the open carriage with other sightseers crouched together in the seats before us, and Amelia huddled against me so that I could look down on the plane of her cheek, and the fringe of eyelashes beneath her bonnet. Suddenly we were out of the fog in brilliant sunshine.
Amelia cried out, “Oh!” as we sailed above the ocean of clouds that extended as far as could be seen in every direction, gleaming white, smooth as cream here and tumbled there, with Mount Diablo knifing the far billows to the east across the Bay like a fin.
As we strolled the summit she clung to my arm in the uneven footing, matching her steps to mine. “What a lovely show you have given me!” she said.
“It is only displayed this way for beautiful young ladies,” I said.
She laughed her warm breath against my cheek.
She pressed against me as we strolled like lovers among the other couples and two family groups with pinafored and sailor-bloused children running and calling to each other. We admired the prospects and walked on random paths. It was impossible to retire from the view of the others without descending two hundred feet into the clouds. It seemed to me that Amelia’s discomfort matched my own.
I held my arm around her waist and she pressed against me, looked into my face with a misty expression and laughed. I laughed with her. We were very far away from the dangers of Taylor Street, and her guardian constable, and my defeats.
“This evening is the Overland Monthly salon,” I said.
“I have heard of it,” Amelia said.
“I am invited, if you wish to attend with me.”
“I don’t know why I should be so lucky twice in one day!”
“What do you mean?”
“I would admire very much to meet the famous poets of San Francisco!” she exclaimed, leaning her weight against me.
22
WOMAN, n. – An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
As the editors of San Francisco’s leading magazine, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coolbrith were powerful in the literary world. Bierce had published occasional pieces in the Overland Monthly, which he referred to as the Warmedoverland, and he had invited me to accompany him to last month’s salon, where I had been introduced to Stoddard, a plump, effeminate man somewhat older than Bierce. Miss Coolbrith was tall and gracious, with a frieze of fair spit curls across her forehead. Although I had no literary aspirations I had been invited to return, which I understood to be because the young lady poets outnumbered the young men who were to provide them company.
The windows of Stoddard’s house on the slopes above North Beach were alight. Inside, the entryway was crowded with guests ridding themselves of coats and hats. Just past them Stoddard stood a host’s post, raising his hands palms flippered back at the wrists to greet each new arrival. He wore a white gardenia in his lapel, and his active eyebrows and moues of pleasure kept his face in constant motion.
Ina Coolbrith met us inside the crowded main room. “It is Mr. Redmond, the journalist! And this is?”
“Miss Brittain,” I said. “And this is Miss Coolbrith, Amelia.”
“I am an admirer of your verse, Miss Coolbrith,” Amelia said with an ease I admired. “And we have spent the day at Mount Tamalpais, which is the scene of many of your poems.”
Smiling at her, Ina Coolbrith said, “It was there that Mr. Miller and I gathered laurels for him to take to Lord Byron’s grave in England.”
Joaquin Miller was holding forth to a cluster of female poets across the room, a big blowhard fraud in my estimation, in his blue flannel miner’s shirt and shiny boots, which he moved forward and back so that the lady poets in their flowered frocks kept in motion evading his advances and compensating for his retreats. He was recently returned from England, where he was reported to have had a grand success. The British welcomed Westerners whom Easterners found ridiculous. Amelia gazed at the Poet of the Sierra with interest.
On the wall was an oil painting of Stoddard in a monk’s cowl, contemplating a skull. I thought the painting silly, and it cast a pall of pretension on Bierce’s desk skull.