Part 9

An even worse breach of etiquette on the part of the outlander is to intimate that an earthquake preceded the great fire. That is positively the unforgivable sin! In any quarter of the city you could get many subscriptions for a fund to buy something with silver handles on it for any man who would insist upon talking of earthquakes. To make my meaning clearer, I will state that there are only two objects of general use in the civilized world that have silver handles on them, and one of them is a loving cup; but this article would not be a loving cup. A native will willingly concede that there was a fire, which burned its memories deep into the consciousness of the city that recovered from it with such splendid courage and such inconceivable rapidity; but by common consent there was nothing else. It does not take the stranger long to get this point of view, either.

If I were in charge of the publicity work of the San Francisco Fair I should advertise two attractions that would surely appeal to all the women in this country, and to most of the men. In my press work I would dwell at length upon the fact that in this part of California a woman may wear any weight and any style of clothes--spring clothes, summer clothes, fall clothes or winter clothes--and not only be perfectly comfortable while so doing, but be in the fashion besides; and to be in the fashion is a thing calculated to make a woman comfortable whether she otherwise is or not.

To see a group of four women promenading a San Francisco street on a pleasant morning is to be reminded of that ballet representing the Four Seasons, which we used to see in the second act of every well-regulated extravaganza. The woman nearest the walls has on her furs--it is always cool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latest wrinkles in spring garniture; the third one, let us say, is dressed in the especially becoming frock she bought last October; and the one on the outside, where the sun shines the brightest, is as summery in her white ducks and her white slippers as though she had just stepped off the cover of the August number of a magazine. There is something, too, about the salt-laden breezes of San Francisco that gives women wonderful complexions; that detail, properly press-agented, ought to fetch the entire female population of the United States.

For drawing the men, I would exploit the great cardinal fact that nowhere in the country--not even in Norfolk or Baltimore or New Orleans--can you get better things to eat than in San Francisco. For its size, I believe there are more good clubs and more good restaurants right there than in any other spot on the habitable globe. Particularly in the preparation of the typical dishes of the Coast do the San Francisco cooks excel; their cuisine is based on a sane American foundation, with a delectable suggestion of the Spanish in it, and sometimes with a traceable suggestion of the best there is in the Italian and the Chinese schools of cookery.

To one whose taste in oysters has been developed by eating the full-chested bi-valve of the Eastern seaboard and the deep-lunged, long-bodied product of the Louisiana bayous, the native oyster does not greatly appeal. A lot has been written and printed about the California oyster, but in my opinion he will always have considerable difficulty in living up to his press notices. It takes about a thousand of him to make a quart and about a hundred of him to make a taste. Even then he doesn't taste much like a real oyster, but more like an infinitesimal scrap of sponge where a real oyster camped out overnight once.

There is a dream of a little fish, however, called a sand dab--he is a tiny, flounder-shaped titbit hailing from deep water; and for eating purposes he is probably the best fish that swims--better even than the pompano of the Gulf--and when you say that you are saying about all there is to be said for a fish. And the big crabs of the Pacific side are the hereditary princes of the crab family. They look like spread-eagles; and properly prepared they taste like Heaven. I often wonder what the crabsters buy one-half so precious as the stuff they sell--which is a quotation from Omar, with original interpolations by me. The domestic cheese of the Sierras is not without its attractions also, whether you eat it fresh or whether you keep it until its general aspect and prevalent atmosphere are such as to satisfy even one of those epicurean cheese-eaters who think that no cheese is fit to eat until you can't.

Another thing worthy of mention in connection with this California school of cookery is that you can pay as little as you please for your dinner or as much as you please. There are three standbys of the exchange editor that may be counted upon to appear in the newspapers about once in so often. One is the hoary-headed and toothless tale regarding the artist who was hired to renovate religious paintings in a church in Brussels, and turned in an itemized account including such entries as--"Correcting the Ten Commandments"; "Restoring the Lost Souls"; "Renewing Heaven"; and winding up with "Doing Several Odd Jobs for the Damned."

The second of the set comes out of retirement at frequent intervals--whenever some trusting soul runs across a time-stained number of the Ulster Gazette giving details of the death of George Washington--I wonder how many million copies of that venerable counterfeit were printed--and writes in to his home editor about it.

And the third, the most popular clipping of the three, concerns the prices that used to govern at the mining camps in the days of the early gold rush. The story that is most commonly quoted has to do with the menu of the El Dorado Hotel, at Placerville, where bean soup was a dollar a plate; hash, lowgrade, seventy-five cents; hash, eighteen-carat, a dollar--and so on down the list to seventy-five cents for two Irish potatoes, peeled.

The cost of living may have gone down subsequently in those parts, but it has gone back up again--at certain favored spots. If the Argonauts, those hardy adventurers who flung their gold round so regardlessly and were not satisfied unless they paid outrageously big prices for everything, could come back today they would have no cause to complain at the contemptible paucity of the bill after they had dined at any one of half a dozen ultra-expensive hotels that are to be found dotted along the Coast.

I append herewith a few items selected at random from the price card of a fashionable establishment in one of the larger Coast cities: caviar imperial d'Astracan, two dollars for a double portion; buffet Russe--whatever that is--ninety cents; German asparagus, a single helping, one dollar and forty cents; blue-point oysters, fifty cents; fifty cents for clams; Gorgonzola cheese, fifty cents a portion; and, in a land where peaches and figs grow anywhere and everywhere, seventy-five cents for an order of brandied peaches and fifty cents for an order of spiced figs. Even seasoned New Yorkers have been known to breathe hard on receiving a check for a full meal at certain restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

On the other hand, you can step round any corner in San Francisco and walk into that institution which people in other large cities are forever seeking and never finding--a table-d'hote restaurant where a perfect meal is to be had at a most moderate price. The best Italian restaurant in the world--and I wish to say, after personal experience, that Sunny Italy itself is not barred--is a little place on the fringe of the Barbary Coast.

There is another place not far away where, for a dollar, you get a bottle of good domestic wine and a selection from the following range of dishes: Celery, ripe olives, green olives, radishes, onions, lettuce, sliced tomatoes, combination salad or crab-meat salad; soup--onion or consomme; fish--sole, salmon, bass, sand dabs, mussels or clams; entrees--sweetbreads with mushrooms, curry of lamb, calf's tongue, tripe with peppers, tagliatini a l'Italienne, or boiled kidney with bacon; vegetables--asparagus, string-beans and cauliflower; roast--spring lamb with green peas, broiled chicken or broiled pig's feet; dessert--rhubarb pie, ice cream and cake, apple sauce, stewed fruits, baked pear or baked apple, mixed fruits; cheese of three varieties, and coffee to wind up on.

The proprietor doesn't cut out his portions with a pair of buttonhole scissors, either, or sauce them with a medicine-dropperful of gravy. He gives a big, full, satisfying helping, well cooked and well served. There is some romance in the San Francisco cooking, too, if the oldtimers who bemourn the old days only realized it.

If this seeming officiousness on the part of a passing wayfarer may be excused there is one more suggestion I should like to throw off for the benefit of the promoters of the exposition. Living somewhere in California is a man who should be looked up before the gates are opened, and he should be retained at a salary and staked out in suitable quarters as a special and added attraction. He is the most magnificent fish-liar in the known world! I do not know his name--he was so busy pouring fish stories down a party of us that he didn't take time to stop and tell his name--but no great difficulty should be experienced in finding him. There is only one of him alive--these world's wonders never occur in pairs. That would cheapen them and make them commonplace.

He swam into our ken--if a mixed metaphor may be pardoned--on a train leaving Oakland for the East. We were sitting in the club car--half a dozen or so of us--when he drifted along. At first look no one would have suspected him of being so gifted a creature as he proved himself to be. He was a round, short, tub-shaped man, with a button nose, and a double chin that ran all the way round and lapped over at the back. But, though his appearance was deceiving, anybody could tell with half an eye that he excelled in extemporaneous conversation. Right off he began shadow-boxing and sparring about, waiting for an opening. In a minute he got it.

The tall man with the long face and the stiff white pompadour, who looked like a patent toothbrush, gave him his chance. The tall man happened to look out of the car window and see in an inlet a fleet of beached fishing boats, and he remarked on their picturesqueness. That was the cue.

"Speaking of fishing," said the button-nosed man, "I'll tell you people something that'll maybe interest you. You may not believe it, either, me being a stranger to you; but it's the Gospel truth or I wouldn't be sitting here a-telling it. I reckon I've done more fishing in my day and more different kinds of fishing than any man alive. I come originally from a prime fishing state--Michigan--and I've lived in Colorado and Montana and Oregon and all the other good fishing states out West. But, take it from me, friends, California is the best fishing state there is. Yes, sir; when it comes to fishing, old California lays it over 'em all--she takes the rag right off the bush! I'm the one that oughter know because I've fished her from end to end and crossways--sea fishing, creek fishing, lake fishing and all.

"Down at Catalina they'll tell you, if you ask 'em, that I'm the man that ketched the biggest tuna that ever come out of that ocean. It took me fourteen hours and forty-five minutes to land him, and during that time he towed me and an eighteen-foot boat, and the fellow I had along for boatman, over forty-four miles--I measured it afterward to be sure--and the friction of the reel spinning round wore my line down till it wasn't no thicker in places than a cobweb. But tunas ain't my regular specialty--trouts and basses are my special favorites; and up in the mountains is where I mostly do my fishing.

"I'm just sort of hanging round now waiting for the snow to move out so's I can go up there and start fishing.

"Well, sirs, it's funny, ain't it, the way luck will run fishing? Oncet when I was living up there I fished stiddy, day in and day out, for two seasons and never got a bite that you could rightly call a bite. And then all of a sudden one afternoon the luck switched and in exactly forty-five minutes by the watch--by this here very watch I'm carrying now in my pocket--I ketched seventy-two of them big old black basses out of one hole; and they averaged five pounds apiece!"

We looked at one another silently. A total of seventy-two five-pound bass in three-quarters of an hour seemed a little too much to be taken as a first dose from a strange practitioner. And it was hard to believe they had all been basses; if only for the sake of variety there should have been at least one barytone. We felt that we needed time for reflection--and digestion.

Evidently realizing this, one of our number undertook to throw himself into the breach. As I recollect, this volunteer was the fat coffin drummer from Des Moines who had the round, smooth face and the round, bald head, and wore the fuzzy green hat with the bow at the back. I think he wore the bow there purposely--it simplified matters so when you were trying to decide which side of his head his face grew on. He heaved a pensive sigh out of his system and remarked upon the clearness of the air in these parts.

"You're right there, mister," broke in the button-nosed man, snapping him up instantly. "The air is tolerable clear here today; but you oughter to see the air up in the mountains! Why, it's so clear up there it would make this here hill-country air look like a fog. I remember oncet I was browsing along a cliff up in that country, toting my fishpole, and I happened to look over the bluff--just so--and down below I saw a hole in the creek that was just crawling with them big trouts--steel-head trouts and rainbow trouts. I could see the spots on their sides and their fins waving, and their gills working up and down.

"I figured out that it was fully a hundred feet down to the water and the water would natchelly be tolerable deep; so I let all my line run off the reel, a hundred and sixty feet of it; and I fished and fished and fished--and didn't get a strike, let alone a nibble. Yet I could look over and see all these hungry trouts down below looking up with expectant looks in their eyes--I could see their eyes--and jumping round regardless; and yet not a bite! So I changed bait--changed from live bait to dead bait, and back again to live--and still there wasn't nothing doing. So I says to myself: 'Something's wrong, sure! This thing'll stand looking into.'

"So I snoops round and finds a place where there's a sort of a sloping place in the bluff; and I braces my pole in a rock and leaves it there; and I climbs down--and then I sees what's the matter. It was that there clear air that had fooled me! It was three hundred feet if it was an inch down from the top of that there bluff to the creek, and the hole was fully a hundred feet deep--maybe more; and away down at the plumb bottom all them trouts was congregated in a circlelike, looking up mighty greedy and longing at my bait, which was a live frog, dangling two hundred and forty-odd feet up in the air. But, speaking of clear air, that wasn't nothing at all compared to some other things I could tell you about. Another time----"

At this point I rose and escaped to the diner. When I got back at the end of an hour the other survivors told me that, up to the time he got off at Sacramento, the button-nosed man had been getting better and better all the time. He certainly ought to be rounded up and put on exhibition at the Fair to show those puny and feeble Eastern fish-liars what the incomparable Western climate can produce.

I almost forgot to mention San Francisco's chief product--Native Sons. A Native Son is one who has acquired special merit by being born in the state. You would think credit would be given to the subject's parents, where it belongs; but, no--that is not the California way. It's a great thing out there to be a Native Son. It counts in politics, and in society, and at the clubs.