Part 5

It is a wonderful life for small boys. My sons are the loveliest shades of brown with cheeks of red, and in faded khaki and bare legs are as good an example of protective coloring on the hillside as any zebra in a jungle. Quite naturally they view September and the long stockings of the city with dislike.

There is a place on the beach by the coast road between Pasadena and San Diego where we always have lunch on our journeys to and from town. Just after you leave the picturesque ruins of the Capistrano Mission in its sheltered valley, you come out suddenly on the ocean, and the road runs by the sand for miles. With a salt breeze blowing in your face you can't resist the lunch box long. With a stuffed egg in one hand and a sandwich in the other, Joedy, aged eight, observed on our last trip south, "This is the bright side of living." I agree with him.

One late afternoon a friend of ours was driving alone and offered a lift to two young men who were swinging along on foot. "Your price?" they asked. "A smile and a song," was the reply. So in they got, and those last fifty miles were gay. That is the sort of thing which fits so perfectly into the atmosphere of this land. Perhaps it is the orange blossoms, perhaps it is that we have extra-sized moons, perhaps it is the old Spanish charm still lingering. All I know is that it is a land of glamour and romance. J---- said he was going to import a pair of nightingales. I said that if he did he'd have a lot to answer for.

Places are as different as people. The East, and by that I mean the country east of the Alleghanies and not Iowa and Kansas, which are sometimes so described out here, has reached years of discretion and is set in its way. California has temperament, and it is still very young and enthusiastic and is having a lot of fun "growing up." I love the stone walls, huckleberry pies, and johnny cakes of Rhode Island, and I love the associations of my childhood and my family tree, but there is something in the air of this part of the world that enchants me. It is a certain "Why not?" that leads me into all sorts of delightful experiences. Conventionality does not hold us as tightly as it does in the East, and a certain tempting feeling of unlimited possibilities in life makes waking up in the morning a small adventure in itself. It isn't necessary to point out the dangers of an unlimited "Why not?" cult--they are too obvious. "Why not?" is a question that one's imagination asks, and imagination is one of the best spurs to action. I will give an example of what I mean: When war was declared J---- suggested putting contribution boxes with red crosses on the collars of "Rags" and "Tags," the boys' twin Yorkshire terriers, and coaxing them to sit up on the back of the motor. I never had begged on a street corner, but I thought at once, "Why not?" The result was much money for the Red Cross, an increased knowledge of human nature for me, as well as some delightful new friends. I should never have had the courage to try it in New York--let us say; I should have been afraid I'd be arrested.

At first to an Easterner the summer landscape seems dry and dusty, but after living here one grows to love the peculiar soft tones of tan and bisque, with bright shades of ice plant for color, and by the sea the wonderful blues and greens of the water. No one can do justice to the glory of that. Sky-blue, sea-blue, the shimmer of peacocks' tails and the calm of that blue Italian painters use for the robes of their madonnas, ever blend and ever change. Trees there are few, the graceful silhouette of a eucalyptus against a golden sky, occasional clumps of live oaks, and on the coast road to San Diego the Torry pines, relics of a bygone age, growing but one other place in the world, and more picturesque than any tree I ever saw. One swaying over a canyon is the photographer's joy. It has been posing for hundreds of years and will still for centuries more, I have no doubt.

Were I trying to write a sort of sugar-coated guide-book, I could make the reader's mouth water, just as the menu of a Parisian restaurant does. The canyons through which we have wandered, the hills we have circled, Grossmont--that island in the air--Point Loma, the southern tip of the United States, now, alas, closed on account of the war (Fort Rosecrans is near its point), and further north the mountains and orange groves--snow-capped Sierras looming above orchards of blooming peach-trees!

Even the names add to the fascination, the Cuyamaca Mountains meaning the hills of the brave one; Sierra Madre, the mother mountains; even Tia Juana is euphonious, if you don't stop to translate it into the plebeian "Aunt Jane," and no names could be as lovely as the places themselves. So much beauty rather goes to one's head. For years in the East we had lived in rented houses, ugly rented houses, always near the station, so that J---- could catch the 7.59 or the 8.17, on foot. To find ourselves on a smiling hill-top--our own hill-top, with "magic casements opening on the foam"--seemed like a dream. After three years it still seems too good to be true.

They say that if you spend a year in Southern California you will never be able to leave it. I don't know. We haven't tried. The only possible reason for going back would be that you aren't in the stirring heart of things here as you are in New York, and the Times is five days old when you get it. Your friends--they all come to you if you just wait a little. What amazes them always is to find that Southern California has the most perfect summer climate in the world, if you keep near the sea. No rain--many are the umbrellas I have gently extracted from the reluctant hands of doubting visitors; no heat such as we know it in the East. We have an out-of-door dining-room, and it is only two or three times in summer that it is warm enough to have our meals there. In the cities or the "back country" it is different. I have felt heat in Pasadena that made me feel in the same class with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but never by the sea.

One result of all this fresh air is that we won't even go indoors to be amused. Hence the outdoor theatre. Why go to a play when it's so lovely outside? But to go to a play out-of-doors in an enchanting Greek theatre with a real moon rising above it--that's another matter. I shall never forget "Midsummer Night's Dream" as given by the Theosophical Society at Point Loma. Strolling through the grounds with the mauve and amber domes of their temples dimly lighted I found myself murmuring: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree." In a canyon by the sea we found a theatre. The setting was perfect and the performance was worthy of it. Never have I seen that play so beautifully given, so artistically set and delightfully acted, though the parts were taken by students in the Theosophical School. After the last adorable little fairy had toddled off--I hope to bed--we heard a youth behind us observe, "These nuts sure can give a play." We echoed his sentiments.

I should make one exception to my statement that people won't go indoors to be amused. They go to the "movies"--I think they would risk their lives to see a new film almost as recklessly as the actors who make them. The most interesting part of the moving-picture business is out-of-doors, however. You are walking down the street and notice an excitement ahead. Douglas Fairbanks is doing a little tightrope walking on the telegraph wires. A little farther on a large crowd indicates further thrills. Presently there is a splash and Charley Chaplin has disappeared into a fountain with two policemen in pursuit. Once while we were motoring we came to a disused railway spur, and were surprised to find a large and fussy engine getting up steam while a crowd blocked the road for some distance. A lady in pink satin was chained to the rails--placed there by the villain, who was smoking cigarettes in the offing, waiting for his next cue. The lady in pink satin had made a little dugout for herself under the track, and as the locomotive thundered up she was to slip underneath--a job that the mines of Golconda would not have tempted me to try. Moving-picture actors have a very high order of courage. We could not stay for the denouement, as we had a nervous old lady with us, who firmly declined to witness any such hair-raising spectacle. I looked in the paper next morning for railway accidents to pink ladies, but could find nothing, so she probably pulled it off successfully.

Every year new theatres are built. We have seen Ruth St. Denis at the Organ Pavilion of the San Diego Exposition, and Julius Caesar with an all-star cast in the hills back of Hollywood, where the space was unlimited, and Caesar's triumph included elephants and other beasts, loaned by the "movies," and Brutus' camp spread over the hillside as it might actually have done long ago. There is a place in the back country near Escondido, where at the time of the harvest moon an Indian play with music is given every year. At Easter thousands of people go up Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, for the sunrise service. Some celebrated singer usually takes part and it is very lovely--quite unlike anything else.

So we have come to belong to what the French would call the school of "pleine air." I once knew an adorable little boy who expressed it better than I can:

"Sun callin' me, sky callin' me, Comin' sun--comin' sky."

AN ADVENTURE IN SOLITUDE

My windows were all wide open one lovely April day, the loveliest time of all the year in Southern California, filling the house with the sweetness of wistaria and orange blossoms, but also, truth compels me to add, with so many noises of such excruciating kinds that I followed Ulysses' well-known plan and then tried to find quiet for my siesta in the back spare-room. The worst of this house is that it really has no back--it has various fronts, like the war. The spinster next door but one has a parrot--a cynical, tired parrot, but still fond of the sound of his own voice. The lady across the street is raising Pekinese puppies, who apparently bitterly regret being born outside of Pekin. She puts them in baskets on the roof in the sun and lets them cry it out, in that hard-hearted modern method applied to babies.

A sight-seeing car had paused while the gentleman with the megaphone explained to a few late tourists the Arroyo Seco, that great river-bed with only a trickle of water at the bottom, on whose brink our house perches. At home two plumbers were playfully tossing bricks about our courtyard in a half-hearted endeavor to find out why our cellar was flooded. Hence the back bedroom. No amount of cotton wool in one's ears, however, could camouflage a telephone bell.

"The Red Cross Executive Committee will meet at ten on Wednesday."

A short interval followed. "Will Mr. S---- make a 'four-minute' speech on Friday at the Strand Theatre for the Liberty Bond Campaign?"

Another interval during which I began to feel drowsy. "Will Mr. S---- say a few words of appreciation and present a wrist watch to the Chapter Secretary just starting for France?" etc. Just here I made a resolve. Escape I would, for one week, to my lovely hill-top by the sea, and leave J----, the two boys, the two dogs, the two white mice, the Red Cross, the Red Star, Food Conservation and Liberty Bonds to manage beautifully without me. I even had the reckless idea of trying to forget that there was a war going on! I was furnished with a perfectly good excuse; we had rented "The Smiling Hill-Top" for two months, and it must be put in order. Hence my "Adventure in Solitude."

Everything is called an adventure nowadays, and to me it was a most exciting one, as I had not gone forth independently for many years. One chauffeur, one smiling Helen to clean house for the tenants and cook for me, my worst clothes and my best picnic lunch went into the motor, and I followed. I think my family expected me back next day, when I bade them a loving farewell. Not I! My spirit was craving silence. I wanted not to curl my hair or be neat or polite or a good mother, or any of the things I usually try to be, for just one week. Longer, and I would be lonely and homesick.

It was a lovely day. The coast road to San Diego runs through orange groves for miles, and the perfume of the blossoms hung about us till we came to the sea, where a salt breeze blew away the heavy sweetness. I lunched on the sand and watched the waves for an hour. There, at least, are endless re-enforcements! As fast as the front ranks break more come always to fill their places.

I felt no hurry, as the Smiling Hill-Top is some fifteen miles nearer Pasadena than San Diego--an easy day's run--and I had no engagements, but at last my impatience to see how much our garden had grown started me once more on my way, and we arrived at our wicket gate in the late afternoon. There were twenty-seven keys on the ring the real-estate agent gave me--twenty more than caused so much trouble at Baldpate--but none fitted, so I had the chauffeur lift the gate bodily from its hinges and I was at home!

In California things grow riotously. Grandparents who haven't seen their grandsons for years, and find that they have shot up from toddling babies to tall youths, must feel as I did when I saw the vines and shrubs, especially the banana trees planted only six months before! The lawn over which I had positively wept lay innocent and green--almost English in its freshness. The patio was entrancing with blooming vines. The streptasolen, which has no "little name," as the French say, was like a cascade of flame over one end of the wall. The place was ablaze with it. The three goldfish in the fountain seemed as calm as ever, and apparently have solved the present problem of the high cost of living, for they don't have to be fed at all. The three had picked up what they needed without human aid. I really felt like patting them on the head, but that being out of the question, I was moved to rhyme:

"I wish I were a goldfish, All in a little bowl; I wouldn't worry whether I really had a soul. I'd glide about through sun and shade And snatch up little gnats, My heaven would be summer My hell--well, call it cats!"

All this time the chauffeur had been wrestling with the key ring, and finally had our bare necessities in the way of doors open. I had telegraphed our agent that I was coming only long enough before for the house to have what is vulgarly known as "a lick and a promise," but it looked just as comfortable and pleasant as I knew that it would, and the terrace--no need to bother about that. The south wind does the housework there.

That night I went to sleep between sheets fragrant with lavender from my own garden, while the ocean boomed gently on the beach below the hill. In the week that followed I abolished a number of things. First of all, meal hours. I had my meals when I felt like it; in fact, I didn't wind the clock till I was leaving. I only did it then on account of the tenants, as some people find the ticking of a clock and the chirping of a cricket pleasant and cosy sounds. I don't. Then I cut out the usual items from my bill of fare, and lived on young peas, asparagus, eggs, milk, and fruit, with just a little bread and butter--not enough to agitate Mr. Hoover. I never had had as much asparagus as I really wanted before. I wore an old smock and a disreputable hat, and I pruned and dug in my garden till I was tired, and then I lay on the terrace and watched the waves endlessly gather and glide and spread. Counting sheep jumping over a wall is nothing to compare with waves for soothing rasped nerves.

My first solitary day was so clear that the Pasadena Mountains, as we call that part of the Sierra Madre, rose soft over the water on the far horizon, so that I couldn't feel lonely with home in sight. Long unused muscles expostulated with me, but smoothed-out nerves more than balanced their twinges. Of course I couldn't forget the war. Who could, especially with flocks of aeroplanes flying over me as I lay on a chaise longue on the terrace, listening to the big guns of Camp Kearny roaring behind the hills; but it no longer gave me the sensation of sand-paper in my feelings. I thought about it all more calmly and realized a little of what it is doing to us Americans--to our souls!--that is worth the price; and in addition, how much it is teaching us of economy, conservation, and efficiency, as well as more spiritual things.

It has also brought home to me the beauty of throwing away. In a fever of enthusiasm to make every outgrown union suit and superfluous berry spoon tell, I have ransacked my house from garret to cellar, and I bless the Belgians, Servians, and Armenians, the Poles and the French orphans for ridding me of a suffocating mass of things that I didn't use, and yet felt obliged to keep.