Part 9

One day last week a man--a regular man, neither a decided proletarian nor a typical bourgeois--but just a man was walking along. He was dressed in average clothes, he was shaved and carried a suit case and didn’t look out of work and was evidently going somewhere.

He was walking along with this suit case--it was on Larkin near McAllister about two o’clock on one of those superb days of last week--and he came to a place where there was a stretch of grass near the sidewalk. I think he was hot and the suit case was getting heavy....

At any rate when he saw that grass, tall, dark green and fragrant, he immediately lay down on it, pulled his hat over his eyes and, I expect, went to sleep. It sounds so free and easy written down. Which makes it no less significant.

First, it was significantly Western. An Easterner or a Middle Westerner would have thought it over first. Then the fact that the man was so average made it significant. If he had looked like a vagabond it would have been not even an incident. It is we who are respectable who are fettered by Grundy. It was a logical thing to do and natural and terribly human, but most of us can’t do the logical thing and natural even if inside we do feel terribly human. Especially these spring days. Today at noon I would like to have gone up on the grass in Union Square and taken my shoes off. Why didn’t I? Not because of the police--but Grundy.

Now a Piute Indian woman could have done it. Her stockings too. A Piute Indian woman when she’s tired she sits down right in the street, right where she’s tired. But you and I, when we are weary we may sigh--“Wish I could sit down.” But we can’t, not until we’ve gone down the street and up in the elevator to some particular place where Grundy says we may sit.

The most significant thing about that man on the grass was that he was in the heart of a great city. Cities are like homes. Some you’re comfortable in--some you’re not. Now, San Francisco, it is a real city, with all the metropolitan lares and penates, dignified and vividly active. And yet there is no city in the country whose children may be as “at home” as here. It is the only city I know of that has forgotten to provide itself with nasty little “Keep Off The Grass” signs. It will probably never be an altogether prohibition town.

Stopping at the Fairmont

It is best to say at the very beginning that if one is tremendously wealthy he will not enjoy this dissertation on staying at high class hotels. If one has more than two bathrooms in his home and can afford chicken when it is not Sunday and turkey when it is not Christmas and could stay at the Fairmont all winter if he preferred, then these words will mean nothing to him.

She has gone, this friend of mine. All winter she has been staying at the Fairmont. Much of the time I, too, have been staying at the Fairmont as her guest. So it is with a sense of double bereavement that I write.

Talk to me no more of the comfort of cozy little homes. Give me a hotel where I am treated as though I were a Somebody. Where I have but to press a button and a liveried servant comes running as though I were Mary, Queen of England, or Clara Kimball Young. And plenty of hot water for baths and lots of enormous towels and, as soon as one’s butter is gone, another piece, and fresh butter at that. Pitchers of ice water and a strapping big man standing so solicitously and watching one’s every mouthful. It makes me feel as though I were the Shah of Persia. At home I don’t feel at all like the Shah of Persia.

I came across something the other day that Boswell quotes Dr. Johnson as saying on this same subject: “There is no private house in which people may enjoy themselves as at a capital tavern. At a tavern you are sure you are welcome, and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are.”

This friend of mine can go to the room telephone and say, so incidentally, “Room service, please,” and order a meal in her room with almost negligence. That, I say, is elegance. Taxis, too, are another test. I never order a taxi without a feeling of sea-sickness. Even when someone else is paying the bill I can’t sit back in comfort. Always they are ticking off the minutes as though they were my last on this earth.

They are simple tests that divide the plebeian from the patrician. Was it Kipling who wrote:

“If you can order breakfast in your room and not feel reckless, If you can ride in taxis with aplomb, If you can read the menu and not the prices, Then, you’re a qualified patrician, son.”

After my friend had gone I went back to the hotel and someone else was in her room and no one treated me as though I were the Queen of Sheba and I went out into a cold, indifferent world where no one cares when my glass is empty, where no chair is pushed under me at table and where, alas, I must sugar my own tea or go without.

San Francisco Sings

Some Cities roar and others hum, but San Francisco sings. Especially on Saturday at noon and downtown. Saturday noon in San Francisco is like nothing else anywhere but Saturday noon in San Francisco. And Saturday noon is like the noon of no other day but Saturday. On Sunday they’re off. On Saturday noon everybody’s on the street.

There are more flowers on Saturday noon. On the street stands great plumes of gold acacia, riots of daffodils, banks of violets, white, waxy camellias and branches of Japanese peach blossoms. It’s still winter by the calendar but it’s spring in San Francisco. Everywhere you turn a man or boy from the country with baskets of the spring flowers. All you want to carry for two bits and a nice bunch for a dime. Big, fat men and oldish men with young twinkles in their eyes sell them, unromantic, but very nice to deal with.

There are the flowers and there are the women. No women in the country so beautiful. No women in the world wear color as they do. Their colors are never primitive, never gaudy, but gorgeous and vivid and alive, seldom do you see a woman dressed in black, and black hats almost never. Sit in the gallery of any church on Sunday morning when the sun comes pouring in and it is as though you were looking down on flowers.

Never two alike in the Saturday noon crowd and yet the same type. Free women, happy women, regular women. Women who can recall a judge or so and still be graceful and dainty. It is very significant that a San Francisco woman stands at the very pinnacle of the city, graceful and alert on that tall slender column in Union Square.

And the Saturday noon men--men?--men? In describing color what can one say of men? Well, it’s not their fault that they can’t wear pretty clothes. They make a nice grey background for the women and a very desirable audience and that’s the best I can do for them.

The street musicians, they contribute a lot to the Saturday noon atmosphere. And when we drop a penny into their cups, perhaps it is not so much pity as pay for the joy their piping gives us. And the people who call papers, of whom the blind are the dearest of all. There’s a blind man on Powell street who sounds exactly as though he were saying Mass.

Dearie me, I can’t describe it. All its lilt and rhythm and color and humanness as well. And ladies walking along with huge white balloons from the White House as though they had been blowing bubbles from some great clay pipes. And a plump, rosy Chinese woman so dainty in her breeches with her shiny, black hair bound in a head dress of jade and opal and turquoise.

We need more poets.

Van Ness Avenue

Van Ness avenue is sole. Nowhere in the wide world does the proud and culminating automobile own and dominate such a wide and sweeping display boulevard.

The automobile, what a magnificent animal it is, long, low, luxurious, purring softly, full of a great reserve, ready to dart forward, not to the cruel touch of a spur or bit, but to the magic touch of a button. It is the culminating achievement of this period of the machine age. The airplane, clumsy and awkward as yet, belongs for its consummation to the men of tomorrow. The automobile is the zenith of today’s accomplishment, and that is why men speak of it as “super” this and “super” that.

The machine age has its own cruelties and its own, ugliness, but it also has its own art and its own beauty, of which the automobile and the houses which men have built to accommodate it, are the consummate art. Not all will agree with me here. The critics will damn me with disdain, and the King of Van Ness, who ought to agree, but is too busy talking cars, will only remark, if he listens at all: “Pretty good dope at that.” But argumentatively I proceed.