SAN FRANCISCO
Just as it is often for their little tricks or failings that we love
people best, so it is with San Francisco. You may find her beautiful as
she rises tier on tier on her many hills above the dazzling waters of
the bay, you must admire the resolution and courage with which, out of
her annihilation, she has risen more beautiful than before; but you love
her for a lot of human, foolish, adorable personalities of her own, such
as the guileless way she stuccoes the front of her houses, leaving their
wooden backs perfectly visible from behind or at the side—a pretense
deliciously naïve, as though she said: “I am putting a lovely front of
concrete where you will see it first, because I think it will please
you!” And it does.
Her insistence upon loading your pockets with pounds of silver
cartwheels, instead of few dollar bills, is not quite so enchanting—but
maybe when your muscles and pocket linings become used to the strain, you
learn to like her silver habits too.
And in her methods of building she has no “fashionable section,” but
mixes smart and squalid with a method of strange confusion peculiar to
herself. The value and desirability of the land is entirely proportionate
to the altitude or view, and not to convenience of location or
neighborhood. On the top of each and every hill, on the “view side,”
perches Mr. Millionaire. If the hill slopes down gently, the wealth of
his neighbors decreases gently also, but as the descent is likely to
be almost a cliff, Mr. Poorman’s shanty, often as not, clings to Mr.
Richman’s cellar door.
And then there are her queer-looking cable-cars—with “outside” seats
facing the sidewalk, as in an Irish jaunting car—pulled up and let down
the terrific hills on their wire ropes. The cable-car was, in fact,
originated on the hills of San Francisco.
Many streets are so steep that they have a stairway cut in the sidewalk,
and in the center, the crevices between the cobblestones are green with
grass. The streets are divided into those you can drive up and those you
can’t. In motoring to an address ten blocks away, instead of driving
there directly as in any other city in the world, you have to take a
route not unlike the pattern of a wall of Troy.
Also, as there are scarcely any names posted up on any corners, and the
traffic policemen order you about for no seeming reason but their own
sweet will, it is just as well for a stranger to allow twice as much time
to get anywhere as would ordinarily be necessary. We were trying to go to
the Hotel St. Francis for lunch. “You turn down Post Street,” said one
policeman. We certainly made no mistake in the name of that street. When
we got to it and tried to go down, another shouted at us, “What’s the
matter with you! Don’t you _know_ you can’t go down Post Street!” I don’t
yet know the solution unless there is one section of Post Street you can
go down, and another section that you can’t. But I do know, however, that
at the end of a little while you get so confused turning around three
times for every block that you go forward, that your sense of direction
seems very like that of a waltzing mouse in a glass bowl.
One thing, though, delays are not as annoying as they would seem.
Californians take life too tranquilly to begrudge you a little while
spent in trying to solve the hill and traffic mysteries. In fact, nothing
could harass or annoy anyone long in a land where the spirit of gladness
is the first and only thing that counts.
Where giantism, self-inflation, or personal ambition plays a prominent
part in the characteristics of other states, the Californians are merely
happy—happy about everything, happy all the time. Their optimism is as
unfailingly golden as their metal, their fruits, their grain, their
poppies.
In a corner of the orange country, lava poured over the soil. Were they
down-hearted? Not a bit.
“For all we know,” said they, “we may find we can grow something new in
it that we’ve never tried before.”
In Pasadena the heat was stifling. It required all the breath I could
muster to ask weakly of a land owner:
“Do you think there is any likelihood of _more_ of this weather?”
“Yes. Oh, yes, indeed,” he beamed. “It is generally cool until the first
of May, and then it gets pleasant just like this.”
In San Francisco it rained all through May without ceasing. “Too
wonderful!” they said. “The Eastern tourists will see the country so
beautifully washed.”
But we have heard that their gladness had one vulnerability, they could
not bear to speak of earthquakes. Therefore, curious as I was to hear
something about them, I did not dare to ask. Drinking my coffee one
morning in San Mateo where we were stopping with the B.’s my bed suddenly
shook so that my coffee spilled. In a moment Mrs. B. rushed into my room
in joyful excitement:
“Did you feel the earthquake? Wasn’t it a wonderful one! I was afraid you
would go back to New York and never know what they are like!”
All that day everyone we saw spoke of the earthquake in much the same
way, as though some delightful happening had occurred for our special
benefit. Instead of shying away from the subject they reveled in it;
advised us if ever we felt a severe one to run and stand in the
doorframe. Even if the whole house comes down the doorways, it seems,
are perfectly safe. Then they drove us to a beautiful estate that was
directly over a fault and to prove what a _real_ earthquake could do,
they showed us a stone wall that had been shifted four feet, and an
orchard of trees that had been picked up bodily and planted elsewhere.
They added casually that the house, of course, was new, the other having
been quaked to the ground.
But “How _terrible_,” exclaimed nearly everyone to us, “to live as you do
in a country where they have _thunderstorms_!”
There is, however, one small matter that upsets them curiously. To us, it
was a phenomenon not unlike the elephant’s terror of a mouse. Never call
Californians Westerners. They get really excited and indignant if you do.
They live on the Pacific Coast—not in the West. For my own part they are
children of the golden sun; call them what you please!
* * * * *
I think it is a rather universal habit to dismiss any unusual features
in the lives of others by saying: “Oh, but they are a different sort of
people from us!”
When we first crossed the Rio Grande and heard of two women who had gone
out camping in the Rocky Mountains alone, and when later we saw a group
of unmistakably well-bred people—each riding astride of a little burro
and each leading a second burro laden with camping things, we thought,
“What an extraordinary people Westerners are! We are brothers and yet it
is impossible to believe that we spring from the same stock.” Later on,
however, we learned the difference was geographical and not ethnological.
And the realization came this way:
A Mrs. R. used to be the most nervous and timid woman I ever knew. Six
years ago, living on Long Island with twelve servants in her house, she
used to lock herself in her bedroom immediately after dinner if her
husband was out, because she was too nervous to sit in the front part
of the ground floor alone. I remember distinctly that she once left a
dinner party at about half-past nine because, with her own coachman
driving, she was afraid to go late at night through the woods. About four
years ago her husband and she moved to California. Last year she bought
a ranch ten miles from the nearest station, and seven miles from the
nearest neighbor. And this same woman who used to be scared to death in
a house full of people, with neighbors all around, now sleeps tranquilly
in a ground-floor bungalow with every door unlocked, every window
open, and her servants’ quarters half a mile away. She drives her own
motor everywhere, and thinks nothing of dining with a neighbor fifteen
or twenty miles distant, and coming home at midnight through Mexican
settlements alone!
[Illustration: ON A BEAUTIFUL OCEAN ROAD OF CALIFORNIA]
Another New York girl, Pauline M., who certainly was as spoiled as
pampering could make her, went once long ago to a Maine hotel and never
stopped talking about how awful the rooms were and how starved she was
because of the horrible food. Twenty years ago she married a Californian
and her house in San Francisco is as luxurious as a house can well
be, but when we arrived she had gone into the mountains to camp, and
telegraphed us to join her. We did not do that, but we motored out to
lunch. Having always associated her with Callot dresses and marble
balustrades, I expected the make-believe “roughing it” of the big camps
in the Adirondacks. As we arrived at a small collection of portable
houses dumped in a clearing we saw our fastidious friend in heavy solid
boots, a drill skirt, flannel shirt, kneeling beside a campfire cooking
flapjacks. She used to be beautiful but rather anemic; her sauntering,
languid walk seemed always to be dragging a five-yard train, and her face
was set with a bored expression. The metamorphosis was startling. She
looked younger than she had at twenty and she put more life and energy
in her waving of her frying-pan in greeting than she would have put in a
whole New York season of how-do-you-do’s.
Even the Orientals seem affected by the spirit of this land’s gladness.
The Chinaman of San Francisco is a big, smiling and apparently
gay-hearted individual—none the less complex and mysterious for all that.
Frankly, the people out here who fascinate me most of all are the
Chinese. From the two or three that we have seen in friends’ houses, a
Chinese servant must be about as easy to manage as the wind of heaven;
you might as well try to dig a hole in the surface of the sea as to make
any impression on him. He is going to do exactly what he pleases and in
the way he pleases. Of course, his way may be your way, in which case
you are lucky. Also it must not be forgotten that his faithfulness and
devotion, when he is devoted, is quite as unalterable as his way. Of the
two or three individual ones that we have seen in friends’ houses, one at
least will never be forgotten by any of us. His serene round face was the
personification of docility, and he moved about in his costume of dull
green brocade like some lovely animate figure of purely decorative value.
Why have we nothing in our houses that are such a delight to the eye?
I have forgotten what we had for luncheon—caviare canapé, I think, and
with it finger bowls.
“No, Chang, not finger bowls yet,” I heard Mr. K. say. So Chang removed
them, only to bring them back again with the next course.
“There is no use,” laughed Mr. K. to me, “he will keep bringing them back
no matter how often I tell him to take them away. He always does, and we
just have to have them from the beginning through.”
Mr. K. carved on the table—Chang probably insisted on that too—and asking
me whether I preferred dark or white, put the breast of a broiled
chicken on a plate. The Celestial one in green brocade instead of passing
it to me, deftly picked up a fork, placed the chicken breast back on the
platter, took a second joint instead, and saying severely:
“_Him_ likee leg pliece!” carried the plate to Mr. K.’s mother. Company
or no company, Chang served her always first.
Also the K.’s told me that Mrs. K., senior, was the only member of the
family whose personal wishes he invariably respected. He is also the
slave of the K. baby, but to the rest of the family he behaves exactly
as a chow, or a Persian cat, or any other purely decorative independent
household belonging.
China is the place for old women to live in! They receive all the
attention and consideration that is shown in our own country only to the
most young and beautiful.
Mrs. S., whose husband was for many years chargé d’affaires in the
American legation in Pekin, is the most enthusiastic champion of
everything Chinese. “If a Chinaman is staying under your roof, you need
have no uneasiness on the subject of his good intentions,” she said this
morning. “No Chinaman will stay in your employ if he does not like you.”
As an example, she told us that while she was in Pekin the head boy of
another legation was taken to task about something in front of some
of the under servants—a situation of great indignity. The occurrence
happened in the midst of the serving of a meal. The Chinaman quietly
laid down the dish he was holding and left the room and the house. In
less than ten minutes he presented himself before Mrs. S. and announced
that he had come to live with them. For nothing would he go back to the
other legation, and having elected Mrs. S. as his _tai tai_ (lady) in
her particular service he stayed. One New Year’s he presented her with a
miniature pig, stunted in the way that the Japanese stunt trees or else
just a little freak. It was only a foot long, but full grown, and as
black as though it had been dipped in shoe polish.
One day in San Francisco, I went out shopping in the Chinese quarter
with Mrs. S. The sensation may be imagined of an American lady
suddenly speaking perfectly fluent Manchu Chinese. Such a grinning and
gesticulating and smiling as went on! And the whole neighborhood gathered
suddenly into the discourse.
Understanding not a single syllable, I could only watch the others, but
even more than ever, they fascinated me.
In San Francisco we rushed early each morning to the Exposition and spent
no time anywhere else. Every now and then someone said to Pauline, with
whom we were stopping, the mysterious sentence: “Have you taken them
to Gump’s?” And her answer: “Why no, I haven’t!” was always uttered in
that abashed apologetic tone that acknowledges a culpable forgetfulness.
Finally one day instead of driving out towards the Exposition grounds we
turned towards the heart of the city.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To Gump’s!” triumphantly.
“To Gump’s? Of all the queer sounding things, what is to Gump’s?”
“Our most celebrated shop. You really must not leave San Francisco
without seeing their Japanese and Chinese things.”
Shades of dullness, thought I, as if there were not shops enough in New
York! As for Oriental treasures, I was sure there were more on Fifth
Avenue at home than there are left in Asia. But Pauline being determined,
there was nothing for us to do but, as E.M. said, “to Gump it!”
Feeling very much bored at being kept away from the Exposition, I entered
a store reminiscent of a dozen in New York, walked down an aisle lined
on either side with commonplace chinaware. My first sensation of boredom
was changing to irritability. Then we entered an elevator and in the next
instant I took back everything I had been thinking. It was as though we
had been transported, not only across the Pacific, but across centuries
of time. Through the apartments of an ancient Chinese palace, we walked
into a Japanese temple, and again into a room in a modern Japanese house.
You do not need more than a first glance to appreciate why they lead
visitors to a shop with the unpromising name of Gump. I am not sure that
the name does not heighten the effect. If it were called the Chinese
Palace, or the Temple of Japan, or something like that, it would be
like telling the answer before asking the conundrum. As in calling at a
palace, too, strangers, distinguished ones only, are asked to write their
names in the visitor’s book.
In this museum-shop each room has been assembled as a setting for the
things that are shown in it. Old Chinese porcelains, blue and white, sang
de bœuf, white, apple-green, cucumber-green and peacock-blue, are shown
in a room of the Ming Period in ebony and gold lacquer.
The windows of all the rooms, whether in the walls or ceiling, are of
translucent porcelain in the Chinese, or paper in the Japanese; which
produces an indescribable illusion of having left the streets of San
Francisco thousands of miles, instead of merely a few feet, behind you.
The room devoted to jades and primitives has night-blue walls overlaid
with gold lacquer lattices and brass carvings and in it the most
wonderful treasures of all. They are kept hidden away in silk-lined
boxes, and are brought out and shown to you, Chinese fashion, one at a
time, so that none shall detract from the other. We wanted to steal a
small white marble statuette of a boy on a horse. A thing of beauty and
spirit very Greek, yet pure Chinese that dated back to the oldest Tang
Dynasty! There was also a silver, that was originally green, luster
bronze of the Ham Period, two thousand years old, and a sacrificial
bronze pot belonging to the Chow Dynasty, B.C. 1125. The patina, or green
rust of age, on these two pieces was especially beautiful. I also much
admired a carved rhinoceros horn, but found it was merely Chien Lung, one
hundred and fifty years old, which in _that_ room was much too modern to
be important.
In one of the Japanese rooms there were decorated paper walls held up
by light bamboo frames, amber paper _shoji_ instead of windows, and the
floors covered with _tatami_, the Japanese floor mats, two inches thick.
You sit on the floor as in Japan and drink tea, while silks of every
variety are brought to you.
We saw three rugs of the Ming Dynasty that are probably the oldest rugs
extant. The most lovely one was of yellow ground, with Ho birds in blue.
And there was an _ice-cooler_ of cloisonné, Ming Period. They brought
the ice from the mountains and cooled the imperial palace—years ago. Yet
to hear Europeans talk, you’d almost be led to believe that ice is an
American invention.
We were shown old Chinese velvet wedding-skirts and a tapestry of
blues, with silver storks and clouds of an embroidery so fine that its
stitches could be seen only through a magnifying glass, and poison plates
belonging to the Emperor Ming that were supposed to change color if any
food injurious to His Majesty were served on them.
One of the most beautiful things was a Caramandel screen of the Kang Hai
Period, in a corridor that it shared only with an enormous lacquer image
of the Buddha.
We were told that a rather famous collector went out to see the Fair. On
his first day in San Francisco—he was stopping at the St. Francis Hotel
which is only a stone’s throw across the square—he went idly into this
most alluring of shops and became so interested he stayed all day. The
next day he did the same, and the third morning found him there again.
Finally he said with a sigh: “Having come to see the Exposition, I _must_
go out there this afternoon and look at it, as I have to go back to New
York tomorrow.”
I don’t know that this is an average point of view, but it is a fact that
was vouched for, and also that his check to the detaining shop ran into
very high figures.
* * * * *
Of the suburbs of San Francisco, Burlingame, I suppose, compares most
nearly to Newport, of our Eastern coast, Sewickley of Pittsburgh or
Broadmoore of Colorado Springs. It is a community of big handsome places
occupied by the rich and fashionable. It strikes you, though, how much
simpler people are in habits, in taste, in attitude, than in the East.
Suggest anything on a house-party in Burlingame or San Mateo, or Ross,
and instead of being answered: “What for?” or “Oh, not just now!” the
response is a prompt and enthusiastic, “Fine! Come on!”
Young women and men in San Francisco, though many have more money to
spend than they know what to do with, demand less in the way of provided
entertainment than New York children in their earliest teens. A dozen of
San Francisco’s most gilded youths stood around a piano and sang nearly
all one evening. After a while someone played, and the rest danced. At
Newport they would have danced, more likely than anything else, but the
music, even if thought of at the last moment, would probably have been by
an orchestra. One afternoon they pulled candy, and every day they swim in
someone’s pool. Today at the J.’s, tomorrow at the H.’s. The girls play
polo as well as the men and all of them, of course, drive their own cars.
In the J.’s garden, they have ladders against the cherry trees, and
everyone wanders out there and eats and eats cherries—and such cherries!
In the first place we haven’t any such cherries, and in the second, can
you imagine a group of Newport women climbing up ladders and clinging to
branches rather than let the gardeners gather them?
But it isn’t the standing on cherry-tree ladders, or the doing of any
actual thing, that makes the essential difference between the people of
the Atlantic and the Pacific Coast. It is the land itself, perhaps—the
sunshine, the climate, that pours a rejuvenating radiance upon the spirit
of resident and visitor alike.
Even at the end of a little while you find yourself beginning to
understand something of the oppressive grayness that settles upon the
spirit of every Californian when away from home. Which reminds me of a
young Italian girl whom I found one day crying her heart out on a bench
in the Public Gardens in Boston. To me Beacon Street is one of the most
beautiful streets I have ever seen, especially where the old and most
lovely houses face the green of the Public Gardens, and the figure of
this sobbing girl was doubly woeful. To every question I could think of
she shook her head and sobbed, “No.” She had not lost anyone, no one
had deserted her, and she was not hungry, or cold, or houseless, or
penniless. “But, my dear, what _is_ the matter?” I implored. Finally,
almost strangling with tears, she stammered: “B-boston is so _u-ugly_!”
Mrs. M., a Californian married to a New Yorker, had seemed to us
rather negative, a listless silent figure who trailed through New York
drawing-rooms more like a wraith than a live woman. We happened to be
at her mother’s when this pale, frail, young person returned home for
a visit and came very much to life! She hung cherries on her ears,
covered her hat, and filled her belt with poppies, and came running up
the terraces of their very wonderful gardens, her arms outstretched and
shouting at the top of her voice:
“California, _my_ California! I’m home, home, _home_!”
[Illustration: THE PORTICO OF A CALIFORNIA HOUSE]
Does anyone ever feel like that about New York? I wonder! Does anyone
really love its millionaires’ palaces, its flashing Broadway, its canyon
streets, its teeming thoroughfares, its subway holes-in-the-ground
into which men dive like moles, emerging at the other end in an office
burrow—sometimes without coming up into the outdoors at all? Or are
the sentiments composed more truly of pride that has much egotism in
the consciousness of more square feet of masonry crowded into fewer
square feet of ground; more well-dressed women, more automobiles; bigger
crowds—sprucer-looking crowds; more electric signs; more things going on;
more business; more amusements; more making and spending; more losing and
breaking, than, one might almost say, all the other cities of the world
together?
All of which makes typical New Yorkers contemptuous of and dissatisfied
with every other city. But as to whether they _love_ it, as the people of
Chicago or San Francisco do—do they? Do we?
For anyone to look out upon New York’s immensity and spread out his arms
and say: “My city! My home!” would be almost like looking overhead and
saying, “My sky, my stars!” _Almost_, wouldn’t it?
I wanted to lead up to the story of a California bride’s impression of
New York. Instead of which I seem to have arrived in New York, but left
the bride at home!
The story was told me by Mr. B., himself a New Yorker, but whose wife and
stepson were Californians. Last winter the stepson brought his wife to
New York on their wedding-trip. This is what Mr. B. told me:
“She had everything we could give her, but spent the afternoon at
matinées and galleries and shopping; her evenings at the play or the
opera and a cabaret afterward, and her mornings in bed. Finally I said:
‘Why don’t you want us to have some dinners for you, so that you can meet
some people? You can’t know much about a city if you meet no one.’
“‘Oh,’ she said,’the people look so queer.’
“‘How, queer?’
“‘Why, so—so well-dressed and so horrid—their faces aren’t kind, and they
don’t seem to smile at all.’
“But I insisted on taking her up Fifth Avenue to see the fine houses. No
enthusiasm. Finally I said:
“‘But surely, the V. house is wonderful!’
“‘I suppose so,’ she said,’but like all the rest, it is just stone and
mortar stuck up in a crowded, noisy street, and the newspapers blow up
around the door.’
“Then she stopped, and seeing how disappointed I was, patted me on the
arm: ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was born and grew up in an orange grove,
and you people stifle me. I want to go home.’”