The Other Side of the Door — Key Ideas to Explore

There was a secret shut away from me behind every closed house front; the eucalyptus trees seemed to whisper "mystery" above my head; and at night, when the fog came heaping in, thicker than feather-beds, across the Mission, and streaming down the long hills on the heels of the wind, it brought an army of ghosts to inhabit the dark places beyond the safety of the lighted window-pane. Though I had lived among the seven hills almost all my life; and though in ways it had grown familiar, and even dear to me, yet I never seemed to grow quite used to the city. It had strange tricks of deception that were enough to unsettle the finest faith. For when I looked at it from the windows of my room under the roof it was as flat as a plate, visible in its entirety from end to end, and it was as easy to find Telegraph Hill or the Plaza upon it as it was to pick up a block from the carpet. But, when I went abroad in it, it hid away from me. It would never show me more than one street at a time, and never by any chance would it reveal to me, through the tall houses, in what part of it I was walking.

But by the time I was old enough to play in the garden by myself, and make friends through the hedge with Hallie Ferguson, who lived a block below us, I had come to accept this trick of the city as somewhat less extraordinary. It was developing other characteristics not so fearful to my mind and of far greater fascination; and I spent hours, when I could not be out of doors, watching it from the windows of my room. Father had built what was at the time one of the finest houses in San Francisco. It had a glass conservatory at the side, and a garden with a lawn and palm in the corner; and on rainy nights when the wind was high, and the house was shaking, I could hear the long palm-fingers tap-tapping on my window glass. The house stood half-way up Washington Street Hill, on what was then the western skirts of the city, and from my window under the roof I could look down over the whole city to the east water front, with Rincon Hill misty on the south, and Telegraph bold on the north of it. By leaning far out of the window, as Hallie and I sometimes did when a ship was coming in, we could see northward as far as North Beach, and Alcatraz Island; and from Abby's room across the hall we could continue the panorama around to Russian Hill, whose high crown cut off the Golden Gate. It was a favorite game of ours, hanging out the window, with our heads in the palm leaves, to pretend stories of what we saw going on in the city beneath.

All sorts of strange and interesting things went on in the city. We could see the signals run up on Telegraph Hill when a ship was sighted. And then the "express" would go dashing furiously down some street below us, the pony at gallop; and the line would form in front of the post-office and stretch like a black snake up Washington Street. Or we watched the yellow omnibuses laboring down Washington Street like clumsy beetles. It seemed to me that a city was the most delightful and absorbing plaything a child could have, and it was a hard arbitrary blow of fate that took me from it to the convent school at Santa Clara.

But if to leave the city was hard, it was terrible indeed to leave the house, the familiar rooms, the familiar footsteps and voices that I loved, and listened for. I had never been away from father and Abby in my life, and though Hallie Ferguson and Estrella Mendez went also, I was very homesick.

There was nothing at all interesting at the convent,--nothing but pepper trees, and nun's black hoods, and books. Even when we walked out there were only the dreary Santa Clara flats with the mountains so distant on the horizon that their far-awayness made me want to cry. The only nice thing about the convent was the vacation that took us away from it, back, out of the burning summer valley to the bay, the rows of gray-faced houses, the shipping and the wind. Each time I came back it was with the rapture one must feel returning to some long left, beloved place and finding it unchanged.