For reasons of economy Thompson put himself up at a cheap rooming-house
well out Market Street. His window looked out upon that thoroughfare
which is to San Francisco what the aorta is to the arterial system.
Gazing down from a height of four stories he could see a never-ending
stir, hear the roar of vehicular traffic which swelled from a midnight
murmur to a deep-mouthed roar in the daylight hours. And on either side
the traffic lane there swept a stream of people like the current of the
Stikine River.
He was not a stranger to cities, no rustic gazing open-mouthed at
throngs and tall buildings. His native city of Toronto was a fair-sized
place as American and Canadian cities go. But it was not a seaport. It
was insular rather than cosmopolitan; it took its character from its
locale rather than from a population gathered from the four quarters of
the globe. San Francisco--is San Francisco--a melting-pot of peoples,
blown through with airs from far countries, not wholly rid of the aura
of Drake and the conquistadores of Spain even in these latter days of
commercial expansion. And all of San Francisco's greatness and color and
wealth is crowded upon a peninsula, built upon rolling hills. What the
city lacks of spaciousness is compensated by action. Life goes at a
great pace.
It made a profound impression on Thompson, since he had reached the
stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any
source whatever. Those hurrying multitudes, that unending stir, the
kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly
lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel
when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that
environment, so he felt--as he had not at first felt in the North--that
in time, with effort, he would become an integral part of this. Here the
big game was played. It was the antithesis of the North inasmuch as all
this activity had a purely human source and was therefore in some
measure akin to himself. The barriers to be overcome and the problems to
be solved were social and monetary. It was less a case of adapting
himself by painful degrees to a hostile primitive environment than a
forthright competitive struggle to make himself a master in this sort of
environment.
How he should go about it he had no definite idea. He would have to be
an opportunist, he foresaw. He had no illusions about his funds in hand
being a prime lever to success. That four hundred dollars would not last
forever, nor would it be replenished by any effort save his own. It
afforded him a breathing spell, a chance to look about, to discover
where and how he should begin at the task of proving himself upon the
world.