Part 8

IN THE HAUNT OF THE NATIVE SON

In the Haunt of the Native Son

THERE are various ways of entering San Francisco, and the traveling general passenger agent of any one of half a dozen trunklines stands ready to prove to you--absolutely beyond the peradventure of a doubt--that his particular way is incomparably the best one; but to my mind a very satisfactory way is to go overland from Monterey.

The route we followed led us lengthwise through the wonderful Santa Clara country, straight up a wide box plait of valley tucked in between an ornamental double ruffle of mountains. I suppose if we passed one ranch we passed a thousand--cattle ranches, fruit ranches, hen ranches, chicken ranches, bee ranches--all the known varieties and subvarieties.

In California you mighty soon get out of the habit of speaking of farms; for there are no farms--only ranches. The particular ranch to which you have reference may be a ten-thousand-acre ranch, where they raise enough beef critters to feed a standing army, or it may be a half-acre ranch, where somebody is trying to make things home-like and happy for eight hens and a rooster; but a ranch it always is, and usually it is a model of its kind, too. The birds in California do not build nests. They build ranches.

Most of the way along the Santa Clara Valley our tires glided upon an arrow-straight, unbelievably smooth stretch of magnificent automobile road, which--when it is completed--will extend without a break from the Oregon line to the Mexican line, and will be the finest, costliest, best thoroughfare to be found within the boundaries of any state of the Union, that being the scale upon which they work out their public-utility plans in the West.

Eventually the road changes into a paved and curbed avenue, lined with seemingly unending aisles of the tall gum trees. Soon you begin to skitter past the suburban villas of rich men, set back in ornamental landscape effects of green lawns and among tropical verdure. You emerge from this into a gently rolling plateau, upon which flower gardens of incomparable richness are interspersed with the homely structures that inevitably mark the proximity of any great city. There, rising ahead of you, are the foothills that protect, upon its landward side, San Francisco, the city that has produced more artists, more poets, more writers, more actors, more pugilists, more sudden millionaires--cries of Question! Question! from the Pittsburgh delegation--more good fiction and more Native Sons than any community in the Western Hemisphere.

You aren't there yet, however. Next you round a sloping shoulder of a hill and slide down into a shore road, with the beating, creaming surf on one side, and on the other a long succession of the sort of architectural triumphs that have made Coney Island famous. You negotiate another small ridge and there, suddenly spread out before you, is the Golden Gate, with the city itself cuddled in between the ocean and the friendly protecting mountains at its back. The Seal Rocks are there, and the Cliff House, and the Presidio, and all. New York has a wonderful harbor entrance; Nature did some of it and man did the rest. San Francisco has an even more wonderful one, and the hand of man did not need to touch it. When Nature got through with it, it was a complete and satisfactory job.

The first convincing impression the newcomer gets of San Francisco is that here is a permanent city--a city that has found itself, has achieved its own personality, and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, because they are growing so fast, certain of the other Coast cities strike the casual observer as having just been put up. I was told that a man who lives on a residential street of San Diego has to mark his house with chalk when he leaves of a morning in order to know it when he gets home at night. A real-estate agent told me so, and I do not think a Southern California real-estate agent would deceive anybody--more particularly a stranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' main business district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middle of Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky--as alive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you are at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.

San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like any city on earth except San Francisco. Once you get away from the larger hotels, which are accurate copies of the metropolitan article of the East, even to the afternoon tea-fighting melees of the women, you find yourself in a city that is absolutely individual and distinctive. It impresses its originality upon you; it presents itself with an air of having been right there from the beginning--and this, too, in spite of the fact that the ravages of the great fire are still visible in old cellar excavations and piles of debris. Practically every building in the main part of the town has been rebuilt within eight years and is still new. The scars are fresh, but the spirit is old and abides.

This same essence of individuality tinctures the lives, the manners and the conversations of the people. They do not strike you as being Westerners or as being transplanted Easterners; they are San Franciscans. Even when all other signs fail you may, nevertheless, instantly discern certain unfailing traits--to wit, as follows: 1--A San Franciscan shudders with ill-concealed horror when anybody refers to his beloved city as Frisco--which nobody ever does unless it be a raw alien from the other side of the continent; 2--He does not brag of the climate with that constancy which provides his neighbor of Los Angeles a never-failing topic of congenial conversation; and 3--He assures you with a regretful sighing note in his voice that the old-time romance disappeared with the destruction of the old-time buildings, the old-time resorts and the old-time neighborhoods.

It has been my experience that romance is always in the past tense anyhow. Romance is a commodity that was extremely plentiful last week or last year or last century, but for the moment they are entirely out of it, and can't say with any degree of certainty when a fresh stock will be coming in. This is largely true of all the formerly romantic cities I know anything about, and it appears to be especially true of San Francisco. Romance invariably acquires added value after it has vanished; in this respect it is very much like a history-making epoch. An epoch rarely seems to create any great amount of excitement when it is in process of epoching, or at least the excitement is only temporary and soon abates. Afterward we look back upon it with a feeling of longing, but when it was actually coming to pass we took it--after the first shock of surprise--as a matter of course.

No doubt our children and our children's children will read in the text-books that the first decade of the twentieth century was distinguished as the age when the auto and tango came into use, and people learned to fly, and grown men wore bracelet watches and carried their handkerchiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine because they, too, did not live in those stirring times. But we of the present generation who recently passed through these experiences have already accepted them without undue excitement, just as our forefathers in their day accepted the submarine cable, the galvanic battery and the congress gaiter.

Age and antiquity give an added value to everything except an egg. In my own case I know how it was with regard to the Egyptian scarab. For years I felt that I could never rest satisfied until I had gone to Egypt and had personally broken into the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some crumbly old Rameses, and with my own hands had ravished from it a mummified specimen of that fabled beetle which the ancients worshiped and buried with them in their tombs. But not long ago I made the discovery that, in coloring, habits, customs and general walk and conversation, the scarab of the Egyptians was none other than the common tumblebug of the Southern dirt roads. Right there was where I lost interest in the scarab. He was no novelty to me--not after that he wasn't. As a boy I had known him intimately.

So, when I was repeatedly assured that the old-time romance had vanished from San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere that bred Bohemianism and developed literature and art, and kept alive the spirit of the Forty-niner times, and all that, I made my own allowances. Those who mourned for the fire-blasted past may have been right, in a measure. Certainly the old-time Chinatown isn't there any more--or, at any rate, isn't there in its physical aspects. The rebuilt Chinatown of San Francisco, though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque really or so Chinesey looking as New York's Chinatown.

I did not dare to give utterance to this treasonable statement until I was well away from San Francisco, but it is true all the same. I cruised the shores of the far-famed and much-written-about Barbary Coast; and it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general metropolitan average--that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the avowedly wicked section of any city always is.

However, I was told that I had arrived just one week too late to see the Barbary Coast at its best--meaning by that its worst; for during the week before the police, growing virtuous, had put the crusher on the dance-halls and the hobble on the tango-twisters. Even the place where the turkey trot originated--a place that would naturally be a shrine to a New Yorker--was trotless and quiet--in mourning for its firstborn.

The so-called French restaurants, which for years gave an unwholesome savor to certain phases of San Francisco life, had likewise been sterilized and purified. I wished I might have got there before the housecleaning took place; but, even so, I should probably have been disappointed. What makes the vice of ancient Babylon seem by contrast more seductive to us than the vice of the Bowery is that Babylon is gone and the Bowery isn't.

Likewise the night life of San Francisco, of which in times past I had read so much, was disillusionizing, because it wasn't visible to the naked eye. On this proposition Los Angeles puts it all over San Francisco; for this, though, there is an easy explanation. Los Angeles boasts what is said to be the completest trolley system in the world; undoubtedly it is the noisiest in the world. The tracks seem to run through every street; there is a curve at every corner, I think, and a switch in the middle of every block. Every thirty seconds or so a car comes along, and it always comes at top speed and takes the curve without slackening up; and the motorman is always clanging his gong in a whole-souled manner that would entitle him to membership in the Swiss Bellringers.

Naturally the folks in Los Angeles stay up late--they can't figure on doing much sleeping anyhow; but either San Francisco has fewer trolley cars to the acre or else the motormen are not quite so musically inclined, and people may get to bed at a Christian hour. Most of them do it, too, if I am one to judge. At night in San Francisco I didn't see a single owl lunch wagon or meet a single beggar. Newsboys were remarkably scarce and taxicabs seemed to be few and far between. These things help to make any other city; without them San Francisco still manages to be a city--another proof of her individuality.

The old romance of the Old San Francisco may be dead and buried--the residents unite in saying that it is, and they ought to know; but, even so, New San Francisco may well brag today of a greater romance than any it ever knew--the romance of achievement. Somebody said not long ago that the greatest of all monuments to American pluck was San Francisco rebuilt; but if there was pluck in it there was romance too. And there is romance, plenty of it, in the exposition these people have planned and are now carrying out to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal.

To begin with, citizens of San Francisco and of the state of California are paying the whole bill themselves--they did not ask the Federal Government to contribute a red cent of the millions being spent and that will be spent, and to date the Federal Government has not contributed a red cent either. Climatic conditions are in their favor. Other expositions have had to contend with hot weather--sometimes with beastly hot weather; those other expositions could not open up until well into the spring, and they closed perforce with the coming of cold weather in the fall. But San Francisco is never very hot and never really cold, and California becomes an out-of-door land as soon as the rains end; so this fair will be actively and continuously in operation for nine months instead of being limited to four or five months as the period of its greatest activities.

Then, again, there is another advantage--the exposition grounds are situated well within the city; the site is within easy riding distance of the civic center and not miles away from the middle of town, as has been the case in certain other instances in this country where big expositions were held. It is a place admirably devised by Nature for the purposes to which it is now being put--a six-hundred-acre tract stretching along the water-front, with the Presidio at its farther end, the high hills behind it, and in front of it the exquisite panorama of the Golden Gate, with emerald islands rising beyond; and Berkeley and Oakland just across the way; and on beyond, northward across the narrowing portals of the harbor, the big green mountain of Tamalpais, rising sheer out of the sea.

Moreover, the president of the exposition and his aides promised that the whole thing, down to the minutest detail, would be completed and ready months before the date set for opening the gates--which furnishes another strikingly novel note in expositions, if their words come true; and they declared that, for beauty of conception and harmony of design, their exposition of 1915 would surpass any exposition ever seen in this country or in any other country. Probably they are right. I know that, when I was there, the view from the first rise back of the grounds, looking down upon that long flat where men by thousands were toiling, and building after building was rising, made a picture sufficiently inspiring to warm the enthusiasm and brisken the imagination of any man, be he alien or native.

There isn't any doubt, though, that the people of San Francisco are going to have their hands full when the exposition visitors begin to pile in. By that I do not mean that the housing and feeding accommodations and the transit facilities will be deficient; but it is going to be a most overpoweringly big job to educate the pilgrims up to the point where they will call San Francisco by its full name. All true San Franciscans are very touchy on this point--touchy as hedgehogs, they are; the prejudice extends to all classes, with the possible exception of the Chinese.

I heard a story of a seafaring person, ignorant and newly arrived, who drifted into a waterfront saloon, called for a simple glass of beer and spoke a few casual words of greeting to the barkeeper--and woke up the next morning in the hospital with a very bad headache and a bandage round his throbbing brows. It developed that he had three times in rapid succession referred to the city as Frisco, and on being warned against this practice had inquired:

"Well, wot do you want me to call her--plain Fris?"

That was the last straw. The barkeeper took a bung-starter and felled him as flat as a felled seam--and all present agreed that it served him right.