AN EXPOSITION AND A "BOOSTER"
The Panama Pacific Exposition will unquestionably be the most beautiful
exposition ever held in the world. Its setting is both accessible and
lovely, for it has the city upon one side and the bay and the Golden
Gate upon the other.
Instead of being smooth and white like those of previous World's Fairs,
the buildings have the streaked texture of travertine stone, with a
general coloring somewhat warmer than that of travertine. Domes,
doorways and other architectural details are rich in soft greens and
blues, and the whole group of buildings, viewed from the hills behind,
resembles more than anything else a great architectural drawing by Jules
Guerin, made into a reality. And that, in effect, is what it is, for
Guerin has ruled over everything that has to do with color, from the
roads which will have a warm reddish tone, to the mural decorations and
the lighting.
The exposition will hold certain records from the start. It will be the
first great exposition ever held in a seaport. It will be, if I mistake
not, the first to be ready on time. It will be the first held to
celebrate a contemporaneous event, and its contemporaneousness will be
reflected in its exhibitions, for, with the exception of a loan
collection of art, nothing will be shown which has not been produced
since the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. Also, I am informed, it is the
first American exposition to have an appropriation for mural paintings.
True, there were mural paintings at the Chicago World's Fair, but they
were not provided for by appropriation, having been paid for by the late
Frank Millet, with money saved from other things.
Of the painters who will have mural decorations at the Exposition, but
one, Frank Brangwyn, is not an American. Also, but one is a Californian,
that one being Arthur F. Mathews.
The only mural decorations in the Fine Arts Building will be eight
enormous panels by Robert Reid, in the interior of the dome, eighty feet
above the floor. Four of the panels symbolize Art; the others the "four
golds of California": poppies, citrus fruits, metallic gold and golden
wheat. Among the various excursions to the Exposition, I hope there will
be one for old-school mural decorators--men who paint stiff central
figures in brick-red robes, enthroned, and surrounded by cog-wheels,
propellers, and bales of cotton, with the invariable male figures
petrified at a forge upon one side, and the invariable inert mothers and
children upon the other--I hope there will be an excursion to take such
painters out and show them the brave swirl and sweep of line, the light,
and the nacreous color which this artist has thrown into his decorations
at the Fair.
Aside from the work of Mr. Reid, Edward Simmons has done two large
frieze panels of great beauty, Frank Vincent Du Mond, two others, Childe
Hassam, a lunette in most exquisite tones, and William de Leftwich
Dodge, Milton H. Bancroft and Charles Holloway, other canvases, so that,
the finished exposition will be fairly jeweled with mural paintings.
It is hard to write about expositions and mural paintings, without
seeming to infringe upon the prerogatives of Baedeker, and it is
particularly difficult to do so if one has happened to be shown about by
a professional shower-about of the singularly voluble type we
encountered at the Exposition.
To the reader who has followed my companion and me in our
peregrinations, now drawing to a close, it will be unnecessary to say
that by the time we reached the Pacific Coast, we believed we had
encountered every kind of "booster" that creeps, crawls, walks, crows,
cries, bellows, barks or brays.
But we had not. It remained for the San Francisco Exposition to show us
a new specimen, the most amazing, the most appalling, the most
unbelievable of all: the booster who talks like a book.
It was on the day before we left for home that we were delivered up to
him. We had been keeping late hours, and were tired in a happy, drowsy
sort of way, so that the prospect of being wafted through the morning
sunshine to the exposition grounds, in an open automobile, and cruising
about, among the buildings, without alighting, and without care or
worry, was particularly pleasing to us.
The automobile came at the appointed hour, and with it the being who was
to be our pilot. Full of confidence and trust, we got into the car, but
we had not proceeded more than a few blocks, and heard our cicerone
speak more than a few hundred thousand words, before our bosoms became
filled with that "vague unrest" which, though you may never have
experienced it yourself, you have certainly read about before.
I had not planned to have any vague unrest in this book, but it stole in
upon me, unexpectedly, out there by the Golden Gate, just at the end of
my journey, when I was off my guard, believing that the perils of the
trip were past.
We had driven in that automobile but a few minutes, and had heard our
guide speak not more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred
thousand words, when my first vague feeling turned into a certainty that
all was not for the best; and when I caught the eye of my companion and
saw that its former drowsy look had given place to one of wild alarm, I
knew that he shared my apprehension.
By the time we reached the fair grounds I had become so perturbed that I
hardly knew where we were.
"Stop here," I heard our captor say to the chauffeur.
The car drew up between two glorious terracotta palaces. Directly ahead
was the blue bay, and beyond it rose Mount Tamalpais in a gray-green
haze. Our custodian arose from his seat, stepped to the front of the
tonneau, and turning, fixed first one of us and then the other with a
gaze that seemed to eat its way into our vitals. Through an awful moment
of portentous silence we stared back at him like fascinated idiots. He
raised one arm and swept it around the horizon. Then, of a sudden, he
was off:
"Born a drowsy Spanish hamlet, fed on the intoxicants of man's lust for
gold, developed by an adventurous and a baronial agriculture, isolated
throughout its turbulent history from the home lands of its diverse
peoples, and compelled to the outworking of its own ethical and social
standards, the sovereign City of San Francisco has developed within her
confines an individuality and a versatility, equaled by but few other
cities, and surpassed by none."
At that point he took a breath, and a fresh start:
"It mellowed the sternness of the Puritan and disciplined the dashing
Cavalier. It appropriated the unrivaled song and pristine art of the
Latin. Every good thing the Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Gaul, Iberian, Teuton or
almond-eyed son of Confucius had to offer, it seized upon and made part
of its life."
Another breath, and it began again:
"Here is no thralldom of the past, but a trying of all things on their
merits, and a searching of every proposal or established institution by
the one test: Will it make life happier?"
As he went on I was becoming conscious of an over-mastering desire to
do something to stop him. I felt that I must interrupt to save my
reason, so I pointed in the direction of Mount Tamalpais, and cried:
"What is that, over there?"
His eyes barely flickered towards the mountain, as he answered:
"That is Mount Tamalpais which may be reached by a journey of nineteen
miles by ferry, electric train and steam railroad. This lofty height
rears itself a clean half-mile above the sparkling waters of our
unrivaled bay. The mountain itself is a domain of delight. From its
summit the visitor may see what might be termed the ground plan of the
greatest landlocked harbor on the Pacific Ocean, and of the region
surrounding it--a region destined to play so large a part in the affairs
of men."
"Good God!" I heard my companion ejaculate in an agonized whisper.
But if our tormentor overheard he paid not the least attention.
"We know," he continued in his sing-song tone, "that you will find here
what you never found, and never can find, elsewhere. We shall try to
augment your pleasure by indicating something of its origin in the
city's romantic past. We shall give you your bearings in time and place.
We shall endeavor to make smooth your path. We shall tell you what to
seek and how to find it, and mayhap, what it means. We shall endeavor to
endow you with the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and the heart to
understand. In short, it is to help the visitor to comprehend,
appreciate and enjoy 'the City Loved Around the World,' with its
surpassingly beautiful environs, that this little handbook is issued."
"That _what_?" shrieked my companion.
The human guidebook calmly corrected himself.
"That I am here with you to-day," he said.
Through two interminable hours the thing went on and on like that.
Several times, in the first hour, we tried to stop him by this means or
that, but after awhile we learned that interruptions only opened other
floodgates, and that it was best, upon the whole, to try to cultivate a
state of inner numbness, and let his voice roll on.
Sometimes I fancied that I was becoming passive and resigned. Then
suddenly a wave of hate would come boiling up inside me, and my fingers
would itch to be at the man's throat: to strangle him, not rapidly, but
slowly, so that he would suffer. I wanted to see his tongue hang out,
his eyes bulge, and his face turn blue; to see him swell up, as he kept
generating words, inside, until at last, being unable to emit them, he
should burst, like an overcharged balloon.
Once or twice I was on the verge of leaping at him, but then I would
think to myself: "No; I must not consider my own pleasure. If I kill him
it will get into the New York papers, and my family and friends will not
understand it, because they have not heard him talk."
[Illustration: We believed we had encountered every kind of "booster"
that creeps, crawls, walks, crows, cries, bellows, barks or brays, but
it remained for the Exposition to show us a new specimen]
Somehow or other my companion and I managed to survive until lunch time,
but then we insisted upon being taken back to the St. Francis. He did
not want to take us. He did not like to let us escape, even for an hour,
for it was only too evident that several five-foot-shelves of books were
still inside him, eager to get out.
At the door of the hotel he said: "I could stop and lunch with you. In
that way we would lose no time. Ah, there is so much to be told! What
city in the world can vie with San Francisco either in the beauty or the
natural advantages of her situation? Indeed there are but two places in
Europe--Constantinople and Gibraltar--that combine an equally perfect
landscape with what may be called an equally imperial position. Yes, I
think we had better remain together during this brief midday period at
which, from time immemorial, it has been the custom of the human race to
minister to the wants of the inner man, as the great bard puts it."
"Thank you," said my companion, firmly. "We appreciate the offer, but we
have an engagement to lunch, to-day, with several friends who are
troubled with bubonic plague and Asiatic cholera."
"So be it," said our warden. "I shall return for you within the hour. It
shall be my pleasure, as well as my duty, to show you all points of
interest, to give you a brief historical sketch of this coveted Mecca of
men's dreams, to tell you of its awakening, of the bringing of order out
of chaos, of...."
It was still going on as we entered the hotel, and from a window, we saw
that he was sitting alone in the tonneau, talking to himself, as the
motor drove away.
"How long will it take you to pack?" my companion asked me.
"About an hour," I said.
"There's a train for New York at two," said he.
We moved over to the porter's desk, and were arranging for tickets and
reservations when the Exposition Official, who had assigned our guide to
us, passed through the lobby.
"Did you enjoy your morning?" he inquired.
We gazed at him for a moment, in silence. Then, in a hoarse voice, I
managed to say: "We shall not go out with him this afternoon."
"But he is counting on it," protested the Official.
"_We shall not go out with him this afternoon!_" said my companion, in a
voice that caused heads to turn.
"Why not?" inquired the other.
I was afraid that my companion might say something rude, so I replied.
"We are going away from here," I declared.
"Oh," said the Official, "if you have to leave town, it can't be helped.
But if you should stay in San Francisco and refuse to go out with him
again, it might hurt his feelings."
"Good!" returned my companion. "We won't go until to-morrow."