Part 5

As I turned away I met an Irish delivery man and he said that there were dozens of vacant apartments very reasonable and waved his hand vaguely in the direction where I’d been searching. I like the Irish but his cheerful fibbery was the last straw and I went home.

The next day my friends called up and said that they had a marine view for me. I was to live all summer in the apartment of the So-and-Sos while they were away. So now I am. They are artistic and I drink my coffee from saffron colored cups on a bay green table runner over a black table under a turquoise blue ceiling with a view of the bay from the window.

But I am humble and if some day I meet a hot, tired looking woman who can’t find an apartment on Russian Hill, I shall say: “Shucks, a marine view isn’t so much.”

Hilly-Cum-Go

This is a story for children, because they will know it’s only fooling, while grown-up people will believe it’s true.

The cable car isn’t a car at all, children, but is a hilly-cum-go, a species of rocking horse and a grown-up kiddie-kar. It is a native of and peculiar to San Francisco, and is a loyal member of the N. S. G. W. It has relatives in the South, and the electric dinkie that rolls up and down between Venice and Santa Monica is its first cousin. Some say that it is distantly related to the wheel chairs at Atlantic City. It is not at all common.

The men who run it are its Uncles. The parents live underground caring for the young kiddie-kars. At times, if you peek down in that hole near the Fairmont and are careful not to be run over you may see them bustling about. Before she was married, the mama was a Marjory Daw of the Daw family, famous see-sawers. The children take after their mother.

The Uncles are very kind and pick the hilly-cum-goes up in their arms as tenderly as a woman would. You must have seen them pick the little things up and run with them across the streets out of the way of autos. And at night they tuck them in their little beds and hear them say their prayer which goes:

Oh, dear me, I hope I’m able, All day long to keep my cable.

These hilly-cum-goes are not run by electricity at all, but just pretend. They are run by three things--black magic, white magic and a sense of humor. Black magic takes them up the hills, white magic restrains them down, and the sense of humor is in the Irish conductors. You may hear, if you listen, the magic coming out of the ground, “Kibble-kable, kibble-kable,” only fast as anything. At noon time it goes “Putter, putter, putter,” and at bed-time, “Kuddle-kiddie, kuddle-kiddie.”

This magic is very, very important. Especially going down hill. Did you ever, my dears, descend that precipice at the end of the Fillmore street line? What is it that keeps you from landing flat on your nose on Union street? Nothing but white magic. What is it that keeps you from shooting from the Fairmont, straight down into the St. Francis? White magic.

The sense of humor is also very important. Suppose a stout person gets on, the conductor hops immediately to the opposite side for ballast. That takes a sense of humor. If the hilly-cum-go is full of young people, especially sweethearts, the Uncle jiggles the hilly-cum-go horribly, but if old people are on it goes--“See-saw, Marjory Daw,” just gently.

I trust, dear children, that all these facts will make you appreciate more the hilly-cum-go, and when you sit on it so cosy, so intimate with the street, riding along looking at the scenery, you will be thankful, that poor old horses do not have to tug you up hill, and that you have this sturdy little creature to haul you about. Nice little, old hilly-cum-go.

I’ll Get It Changed, Lady

This expressman was a regular San Franciscan. And there is such a thing, you know, as a regular San Franciscan. He is a native son and more. His speech betrays him. He calls a “car” a “cahh,” and when he’s surprised he says: “Yeah”! He has a permanent laugh in his eyes, and the only thing he gets mad about is prohibition. But the particular thing that I started to say of him is that money is to him a thing to spend. Money is an incident to life, that’s all.

He said it would be a “dollar, six-bits,” and I was sorry, but I only had a ten-dollar bill. When I said that, he just reached out and took it from me, and said he’d get it changed, and disappeared. Now, the significant thing, and the one that made him a regular San Franciscan, was that he never dreamed that I would doubt his honesty in returning with the change. And I didn’t. It was this last that surprised me. If it had been in New York--I gasp--if it had been in New York, no expressman would have dared do such a thing because no one would have trusted him, and if they had been so hick as to trust him, the expressman would have had no respect for himself if he himself were so hick as to return with the change.

I never shall forget the shock of seeing a pile of newspapers in front of a drug store, the day I landed in San Francisco, where men took their morning paper and threw down a nickel, and even made change for a dime. Right out on the pavement--a lot of nickels lying loose and no one paying any attention. Why, in New York--well, it couldn’t be done in New York, that’s all.

It’s not because San Francisco is not metropolitan. For San Francisco is essentially a city just as Los Angeles will always be a terribly big country village. It’s not at all a matter of population. In Connecticut, we always said that Bridgeport was a city, and New Haven which was larger, was not. It’s a bing, and a zip, and a tra-la-la-lah, that makes one city a city and another not. I can explain it no other way.

But with all its cityfiedness, there is a strange lack of suspicion, a free and easy attitude toward mere physical money, that one finds in no other large city except San Francisco. In the stores the clerks will say: “Shall I put it in a sack?” and you answer just as they hoped you would: “Oh, no, I’ll slip it right in my bag.” In New York as soon as one did that she’d be nabbed on the way out for a shoplifter.

Perhaps the constant use of silver money has had something to do with the matter. Paper money can be tucked away. Silver is more spendable, everyone knows that. Break a five-dollar bill into “iron men,” and it’s gone, gone. And yet it can’t be the use of silver money alone that accounts for it. Reno has silver money, and yet there is little of the old, free Western spirit left in Reno.

No, it’s something to do with San Francisco where suspicion doesn’t yet grip the hearts of men and where money is made to spend.

San Francisco, the last stand of the old, free West.

Fillmore Street

I walk along on Fillmore street. I try to walk very fast with eyes straight ahead. One needs a strong will to take a-walking on Fillmore street and keep from spending all his money. In fact it is better to have no money at all for then one is tempted to hold on to it.

Everything in the world is in the windows on Fillmore street--everything. There isn’t a phase of human activity that isn’t represented. Every nation has left its stamp. Spain--tamales and enchiladas. France--a pastry shop. Italy--spaghetti and raviolas. The Islands have for sale all that’s hula-hula. Here is a Hungarian restaurant. And the “O. K. Shoe Shop--While U Wait” is pure American.

There is “Sam’s Tailor Shop.” I feel as though I should know this fellow Sam. Apparently he knows me from his chummy sign. Sam, Sam--I ought to remember Sam.

Do you wish to paint and varnish? Well, here you are. Or to be shaved or have your eye-brows arched? Walk right in. Here is a place to learn to paint china. Here are drugs, corsets, religion, fish, statuary, cigars and choice meats all in a row. Meats, on Fillmore street, are always “choice” or “selected” or “stall-fed.” I doubt if you could get just “meat” if you tried. Next to the meats, out on a table before a second-hand book store is romantic, old “St. Elmo” of mid-Victorian fame. He must have come West by the “Pony Express.”

I always stop, if I have time, to look at shoes to be mended. They are like people who have fallen asleep in public, off their guard and at their very worst. Take a shoe--a real, old shoe without a foot in it and it looks so foolish, betraying so mercilessly its owner’s bumps and peculiar toes. There is pathos there, too. A scrub woman’s run-down shoes, a kiddie’s scuffed-out toes, a man’s clumsy, clay-stained boots and the happy dancing slippers of a young girl.