“To be honest, to be kind.” Loiterers, vagabonds, slow-going Orientals,
poets and blackguards, all day long come and drink at Stevenson’s
fountain. Some of them look up and read it all and some only get as far
as “to earn a little, to spend a little less”--.
Small-footed Chinese women pass, humping along on their stumps and their
babies running along beside have larger feet than the mothers who bore
them, Bench warmers gaze after them with lazy curiosity. A fat Italian
granddaddy washes a kiddie’s hand from the fountain and a man with a
demijohn and a sense of humor goes smilingly down the path and what he
has in the demijohn is none of our business.
“To make on the whole, a family happier for his presence.” It is noon
and a bride has brought lunch for herself and her husband off the job
in his white overalls, and the two eat together on the beautiful grassy
slope. The poplar trees around Stevenson’s fountain whisper poetry all
day long and the little iron boat on top looks sad not to be sailing
away on high adventure to the South Sea islands.
“To renounce when it shall be necessary and not be embittered.” A woman
with a baby carriage comes by. Something tender and sane and everyday
and basic about her and her baby. A Chinese woman passing looks for all
the world like a black and iridescent purple grackle in her shiny black
coat and shiny black pants and shiny black shoes and shiny black hair,
although the grackle has a prouder strut than her dancing little trot.
“To keep a few friends and those without capitulation.” Where, oh where,
do all the men come from who lie stretched out on the grass? I’ve seen
the very same men lying on Boston Common, and when my father was a boy
he said he saw them there. Hats over their eyes or else blinking up at
the blue sky. Then on the curb facing the Hall of Justice, philosophers
up from the water front or fresh from box cars, everyone with a story
that Stevenson would have got from them.
“Above all on the same grim conditions to keep friends with himself.” On
the bench an enormous woman with a hat that looks like a schooner atop
of a great pompadour wave and on the very same bench a mummied old
Chinese as thin as a wafer. An aeroplane hums above and Stevenson’s
little boat looks envious. Where did Captain Montgomery of the sloop
Portsmouth stand when he planted the flag in 1848? The Mission bell, so
many miles to Dolores, so many miles to Rafael. Ring, Mission bell, ring
and show us where the El Camino Real will lead us all by and by. We who
pass all day, show us the way, Mission bell.--“here is a task for all
that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.”