Part 14

I cannot help wondering if that woman’s hens--the hens that went with the crow--if they laid well when eggs were so high.

On the California-Street Car

She was a little black girl about four years old, riding with her mother on the observation seat of the California street car. She was a little black girl and didn’t know the difference--she might have been as white as milk for all she knew. She was poor but daintily dressed beside being very neat.

The rest of us in the car were grown-up and white--well-dressed people who looked as though we knew a lot. We were all riding along; we and the little black girl with her mother, when suddenly we came out from the surrounding wall of apartment houses into the open, facing a side street--.

And there before us, in all its morning glory, lay the great city of Saint Francis. It was just emerging out of fog. The smoke and steam rising, touched into color by the sun, softened it into a great mystery with forms and hulks coming into relief through the mists. For a moment it wasn’t a city but a magnificent singing of the morning.

In a dull, inert way I suppose all of us, the grownup people, glimpsed some of its beauty. But we were all intent upon the business of the day--we didn’t look out very far--.

But the little black girl who didn’t know any better, the little black girl raised her two arms above her head and exclaimed in a high, joyous child voice--“GEE WHIZ!”

Western Yarns

The men around the corner store at home were forever telling stories about the big yarns that Were told in the West. One of the favorites was that ancient one of the Western town that was so healthy they had to kill a man to start a graveyard.

Having been brought up on this tradition of Western yarns, I have been surprised since living here never to have heard a single story that didn’t sound perfectly reasonable. But it has dawned on me recently that the “Yarns” are true. Therefore, they are no longer yarns, but facts.

Here is an oil boom story I heard first-hand the other day. I believe it, but you couldn’t get those men around the corner store to believe it--.

It was in a dusty town where everyone rushed in to make quick money and never mind about the main street even if they did have to plough through dust to their knees. Then one day a heavy rain came that made the street one slough of soft oozy clay which no one could cross.

Then enters the hero. Even while they stood dismayed, gazing at each other across the clay, he appeared with a mud sled and took them all across for 50 cents a passenger and $1 if you had a bundle.

Now, I believe it. Didn’t I see the man who had been there and paid his four-bits to cross? Imagine, if you can, though, trying to make those Yankees around the corner store believe that there was a town where one had to pay 50 cents to cross a narrow country road in a mud sled.

I believed a man who told me a story down in Kern County last summer. We were riding over the desert and I asked the stage driver the name of a low yellow bush that grows down there. He was an interesting fellow, that stage driver, who had been a buccaroo all his life and apparently knew all about the sage brush country. And when he didn’t know he was not lacking in an answer. I like a man like that. Answer, I say, whether you know or not.

He said with great assurance that the little, low, yellow bush was “Mexican saddle blanket” or “Tinder bush,” this last because it burns like tinder in the fall of the year.

“Why, that bush is so dry,” he said, “that once when I lighted it to cook my bacon for breakfast it traveled so fast that by the time my bacon was cooked I was five miles from camp.”

I laughed--I couldn’t help it when I imagined that six-footer traveling across the desert with a frying pan over that low bush. I laughed because it was so real to me, but he misunderstood, and said so sort of hurt, “Don’t you believe me?”

And I told him I did. And I did. And I do. Five miles isn’t a great distance to travel over the desert after one’s bacon.

Mr. Mazzini and Dante

Mr. Mazzini will never be rich. He takes too much time for philosophy and gossiping with the women, and he loves a joke too well, and his heart is too kind. He is a universal type, as old as the world is old, Theocritus knew him well.

“You pick me out some good cantaloupes,” I said with deadly tact, and Mr. Mazzini answered that it couldn’t be done and that melons were like men, that there was no sure way of picking them out for their kindness of heart. Then he took time over the melons to tell me how his mother in Italy, who was evidently something of a match-maker, had gotten fooled on a young man who was both “laze” and “steenge” in his youth but who made a very good husband.

One day it was figs, and I was strong for the nice appearing ones, but Mr. Mazzini told me a lot about figs and chose me some that were lop-sided from packing. What delicious figs they were, all stored with sunshine and sweetness and flavor just as he had told me. Mr. Mazzini owns his own store, and yet when he throws in a few extra, as he always does, because they are soft or a little specked, he will wink and glance slyly around just as though he were putting one over on the boss.

One morning I saw him sweeping out his store and he wore a woman’s sweeping cap with the strings tied under his grisly old chin. When I saw him I just stood and laughed aloud, and he asked me why not, and said that a sweeping cap was just as good for a man as for a woman, and then he stopped his sweeping and gave me quite a male feminist talk. And he has a horse, Mr. Mazzini has, a fat old plug that peeks around his blinders as humorously as his master. Oh, I could just keep on talking about Mr. Mazzini for pages, but I started to speak of Dante.

I like the Italians and I like the Latin quarter where they live. I like it better than Ashbury Heights for instance. I like the way the Italians use their windows to look out of and to lean out of, and I like the way they have socialized the sidewalk. It’s all a matter of taste, and I wouldn’t criticize the people of Ashbury Heights simply because they use their well-curtained windows only to admit the light, and do not lean out and gossip with their neighbors and yell to their children, “Mahree, Mahree,” nor sit out on their steps in the evening and play Rigoletto on the accordion. It’s all a matter of taste.

Six hundred years ago Dante was an Italian, but he is much more than that today. After six centuries Dante belongs to all those and only those who can read him with appreciation and pleasure. Our scavenger is an Italian, and he reads Dante just as so many of the Anglo Saxon proletair read Shakespeare. So Dante belongs to this garbage man, not because he is Italian, but because he sincerely loves the Divina Commedia. A waiter, in Il Trovatore, a rarely honest man, acknowledged to me that he could not read Dante, and that every time he tried he got mad and threw the book away.

Dante belongs to the literary elect of all nations, Dante belongs to the great internationale of the immortals. Dante belongs to Eternity. And for that matter so does Mr. Mazzini.

On the Nob of Nob Hill