Part 4

Personally, I am proud of our cafeterias, but I do not get on in them. I enter hungry. I look sideways to see what other folks are eating. I decide to have corned beef and cabbage and peach short cake and nothing else. Then in the line I have the hurried feeling of people back of me, and that I ought to make quick decisions. Everyone ought to eat salad, so I take a salad. Then some roast beef looks good so I take that, and the girl asks briskly with a big spoon poised, if I’ll take potatoes, and I don’t wish potatoes, but she makes a great nest of them beside the meat and fills the nest with gravy and I pass on. According to Hoover or Maria Parloa or Roosevelt, I ought to have a vegetable, and so I take two. Meanwhile I have taken bread, but the woman ahead takes hot scones and so I do. I choose some thick-creamed cake, very fattening, but just this once, and then, oh, I don’t know. The tray is heavy and no place to put it, and in my journeying I peek at the bill and it’s over 75 cents, and when I finally sit down opposite a stranger I find on my tray two salads, and when I chose the other I don’t remember.

But cafeterias are very fine for those who have cafeteria sense.

The Open Board of Trade

Months ago one of The Journal readers suggested a story to be found down on Market street near the Hobart building. Many times since when passing there I have thought that those street hawkers must have a certain picturesque and even humorous value, and hoping to find it I have stopped to listen. But the moment I stop they win me with their everlasting logic, and then blessed if I can write them up. They have the same effect upon others. I have seen chambers of commerce and stock exchangers and professors from Berkeley passing with a supercilious glance which did very well so long as they kept moving. But once let them step into the magic ring and they too became mesmerized and stood there gaping in spellbound interest. “Logic is logic, that’s all I say.”

Those hawkers are artists, skilled in the arts and wiles of persuasiveness. There is one with a long, horse-hair wig which he occasionally brushes back from his eyes with a dignified flourish. This man has found the supreme elixir and the secret of perpetuity. He is the only man in the world, this modern Ponce de Leon, who knows the secret. Surely we need not blush to listen to its exposition, $2 is a small sum to pay for such a bonanza. Forty thousand people have used it in the last thirty-nine days. Think of it. “Take it right out into the crowd and sniff it for yourself,” he urges and somehow that breaks the spell, and strong men look foolishly at each other and move a-way.

Horoscopes, suspenders, iron watch charms, brown cakes that may pass for maple sugar, ironing wax, laundry soap or penuchia, a book on Prohibition, mending wax and books of magic are all there. They are not things which we particularly want, but that’s the point. Anyone can sell things that people want. But these men are professional persuaders of men against their will whose mission it is to make people want what they don’t want. That’s Art.

The horoscope seller must have taken his degree from some college of venders, his call has such finesse. I cannot reproduce the lilt of it--“Here’s where you get your horoscope, a dime, ten cents.” It is suggestive of the midways of country fairs, shooting galleries on the Board Walk, and circuses in the springtime. “Here’s where you get your horoscope, a dime, ten cents.”

The little, old, blind man sitting there with one hand outstretched and the other holding a book, his white hair and beard neatly combed, reminds me of something Biblical and prophetic like pictures in old churches. Alas! no one seems to buy his story of prohibition. I think he would do lots better in Kansas or Iowa. A particularly fascinating one is the man of mending wax who stands before his table like some professor of chemistry with a tiny flame and saucers of mysterious powders and, I almost said, a blow pipe.

But, pshaw, I can’t write them up. I take them too seriously. “Logic is logic, that’s all I say.”

The San Francisco Police

The San Francisco police are the handsomest and most-willing-to-flirt policemen in the United States, if not in the world. What a surly lot, the New York policemen. They treat one as though he were a blackguard for merely asking some direction.

“What car shall I take for the New Jersey Central Ferry?” we ask.

“Zippity-ip,” he snaps, moving off.

“What did you say?” we ask in timid desperation.

“Zippity-ip,” he yells, shaking his fist at us.

But ask a San Francisco policeman the way and how different. He will take your arm and smile down at you and even go away with you chatting all the time--“Stranger here? Well, you’ll never go back East again.” And somehow after that you never do.

Of course, the San Francisco police are many things beside being handsome and willing to flirt. But these are important qualifications which, up to this time, have never had their place in journalism. Ah, many a Raleigh and Don Quixote in the roster of the S. F. police.

A policeman is all things to all people. What a policeman is depends upon what we are. To those who are fast, either in reputation or driving, he is a limb of the law to be either evaded or cajoled. To the small boy he is a hero to aspire to become when grown. To the public-spirited citizen of the reforming order he is a piece of community linen to be periodically washed in public with a great hue in the papers about graft expose. To almost anybody in the dead of night with burglars prowling about, he is a friend to be called--in case one has a nickel handy.

But to the great army of women who are hopelessly respectable, the policeman is something quite different. And what we women think of the police is important. We pay taxes, we vote and we cross the street. We like our policemen to be handsome and cavalier and, again I say, the S. F. police are both. Any fine day they will make a funeral procession out of the motor traffic to escort a nice woman across Market street.

It goes without saying and is an unwritten law that policemen should be Irish. I enjoy Greeks in classic literature or in restaurants, but not as policemen. There is a saying in the city that when Greek meets Greek they go together to get a job on the Market Street Railways. But when they get upon the police force, I for one, shall move to the country. Policemen should always be Irish.

And handsome. This is a woman’s reason, but listen: O men, are they not, I ask, a part of the civic beauty of the city? Is it not important that these animated equestrian statues should be gallant men upon noble and spirited horses? And who is more imperial in the pictorial life of the city than the officer on the Lotta Fountain pedestal by the raising of whose sceptered hand the life of the city moves or stays. Yes, policemen should be handsome and gallant. It is written.

A Marine View

Russian Hill had always seemed economically remote to me as an abiding place until recently I was invited out where some people were living in a modest apartment with a good view of the bay. And when they suggested that I try to get an apartment over there I decided to do it.

It was a beautiful morning when I started out. There stood Russian Hill and as Gibraltar bristles with armaments so it glittered with windows facing the sea and one of them for me. Perhaps I could get a few rooms from a nice Italian family and fix them up. Ah, the Latin quarter, Greenwich village, the ghosts of artists haunting the place, Bohemians, enthusiasm, the lust for adventure. I bristled with personality.

“Oh, you want a marine view,” said the real estate man. “Not for that price, lady.”

A “marine view.” I didn’t want a marine view; I only wanted one window facing the sea. Surely with all those windows--.

I left the real estate man and began wandering about. I asked a group of Italian women and they exclaimed in a chorus “No marine views left.” I hadn’t said a thing about a “marine view.” I wandered further and it was always the same. Some were smug and some were sorry but they all spoke of a “marine view” in a certain tone of voice, as Boston people say “Boston.”

It was getting hot. I could not remove my coat because my waist was a lace front. Only a hair net restrained me from utter frumpiness. Still I was not altogether beaten and when I came to a nice countrified looking house standing alone in the midst of modern art and a man came out I asked him. The moment I did there came into his eyes a hunted glitter and he told me how he had held out against them and how he had been besieged for years to rent his marine view and wouldn’t.