Chapter 2
Imagine a city built not on seven but a hundred hills. I am sure there are no less than a hundred and probably there are more. Certainly I climbed a hundred. On three sides the sea laps the very hem of this city and on one side the forest reaches down to its very toes. That is, when all is said, the most marvelous thing about San Francisco--that the sea and forest come straight to its borders. And as, because of its peninsula situation they form the only roads out, sea and forest are integral parts of the city life. It accounts for the fact that you see no city pallor in the faces on the streets and perhaps for the fact that you see so little unhappiness on them. On Sundays and holidays, crowds pour across the bay all day long and then, loaded with flowers and greens, pour back all the evening long. As for flowers and greens, the hotels, shops, cafes, the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants are full of them. They are so cheap on the streets that everybody wears them. Everybody seems to play as much as possible out of doors. Everybody seems to sleep out of doors. Everybody has just come from a hike or is just going off on one. Imagine a climate rainless three-quarters of the year, which permits the workingman to tramp all through his vacation with the impedimenta only of a blanket, moneyless if he will, but with the certainty always that the orchards and gardens will provide-him with food.
Through the city runs one central hill-spine. From this crest, by day, you look on one side across the bay with its three beautiful islands, bare Yerba Buena, jeweled Alcatraz and softly-fluted Angel Island, all seemingly adrift in the blue waters, to Marin county. The waters of the bay are as smooth as satin, as blue as the sky, and they are slashed in every direction with the silver wakes left by numberless ferryboats. Those ferryboats, by the way, are extremely graceful; they look like white peacocks dragging enormous white-feather tails. By night the bay view from the central hill-spine shows the cities of Berkeley and Oakland like enormous planes of crystal tilted against the distance, the ferryboats illuminated but still peacock-shaped, floating on the black waters like monster toys of Venetian glass. In the background, rising from low hills, peaks the blue triangle of Mt. Diablo. In the foreground reposes Tamalpais--a mountain shaped in the figure of a woman-lying prone. The wooded slopes of Tamalpais form the nearest big playground for San Franciscans--and Tamalpais is to the San Franciscan what Fujiyama is to the Japanese. Would that I had space to tell here of the time when their mountain caught fire and thousands--men, women and children--turned out to save it! Everybody helped who could. Even the bakers of San Francisco worked all night and without pay to make bread for the fire-fighters.
By day, on the city side of the crest, you catch glimpses of other hills, covered for the most part with buildings, like lustrous pearl cubes; for San Francisco is a pearl-gray city. At night you can look straight down the side streets to Market street on a series of illuminated restaurant signs which project over the sidewalk at right angles to the buildings. It is as though a colossal golden stairway tempted your foot.
Perhaps after all the most breath taking quality about San Francisco is these unexpected glimpses that you are always getting of beautiful hill-heights and beautiful valley-depths. Sunset skies like aerial banners flare gold and crimson on the tops of those hills. City lights, like nests of diamonds, glitter and glisten in the depths of those valleys. Then the fogs! I have stood at my window at night and watched the ragged armies of the air drift in from the bay and take possession of the whole city. Such fogs. Not distilled from pea soup like the London fogs; moist air-gauzes rather, pearl-touched and glimmering; so thick sometimes that it is as though the world had veiled herself in mourning, so thin often that the stars shine through with a delicate muffled lustre. By day, even in the full golden sunshine of California, the view from the hills shows a scene touched here and there with fog.
As for the hills themselves, steep as they are, street cars go up and down them. What is more extraordinary, so do automobiles. The hill streets are cobbled commonly; but often, for the better convenience of vehicles, there is a central path of asphalt, smoothly finished. I have seen those asphalt planes by day when a flood, first of rain and then of sun, turned them to rivers of molten silver; I have seen them by night when an automobile, standing at the hilltop and pouring its light over them, turned them to rivers of molten gold.
Within walking distance of the ferry is the heart of the city. Here are the newspaper buildings, many big and little hotels, numberless restaurants, the theatres and the shopping district. The region about Union Square, Geary street, Grant Avenue, Post and Sutter streets, is a busy and attractive area. You could live in San Francisco for a month and ask no greater entertainment than walking through it. Beyond are various foreign quarters and districts inevitably growing colder and more residential in aspect as they get farther away from the city heart. Beyond the heights where one catches glimpses of the ocean, the city slopes to abrupt cliffs along the outer harbor, and here are mansions whose windy gardens overhang the surf. Beyond Market street is the area described in the phrase, "south of the slot". Superficially drab and gray in aspect, it has been celebrated again and again in song and story. From this region have come the majority of San Francisco's champion athletes. Near here beats the red heart of the labor world. And not far off still stands that exquisite gem of Spanish catholicism--Mission Dolores.
Here and there--and it is a little like meeting a ghost in a crowded street--through all the beauty and freshness of the new city project the bones of the old: the lofty ruins, ivy-hung, of a huge Nob Hill Palace here; the mere foundation, bush-encircled, of a big old family mansion there; elaborate rusty fences of Mid-Victorian iron which enclose nothing; wide low steps of Mid-Victorian marble which lead nowhere. The San Franciscan speaks always with a tender, regretful affection of that dead city, but, as is natural, he speaks of it less and less. For myself, I am glad now that I never saw the city that was; for I can love the city that is with no arriere pensee.
They serve, however--those bones of a dead past--to remind the stranger of a marvelous rebuilding feat, to accent the virility and vitality, the courage and enterprise of a people who, before a half decade had passed, had eliminated almost every trace of the greatest disaster of modern time.
Perhaps, after the beauty of its situation, the stranger is most struck with the picturesqueness given to the city by its cosmopolitan atmosphere. For San Francisco, serving as one of the two main great gateways to an enormous country, a front entrance to America from the Orient, a back entrance from Europe and a side entrance from South America, standing halfway between tropics and polar regions, a great port of the greatest ocean in the world, becomes naturally one of the world's main caravanseries, a meeting place of nations.
Chinatown is not far off from the heart of the city. And Chinatown pervades San Francisco. It is as though it distilled some faint oriental perfume with which constantly it suffuses the air. You meet the Chinese everywhere. The men differ in no wise from the men with whom the smaller Chinatowns of the East have acquainted us. The women make the streets exotic. Little, slim-limbed creatures, amber-skinned, jewel-eyed, dressed in silk of black or pastel colors, loosely coated and comfortably trousered, their jet-black shining hair filled with ornaments, they go about in groups which include old women and young matrons, half-grown girls slender as forsythia branches, babies arrayed like princes. You are likely to meet groups of Hindus, picturesquely turbaned, coffee-brown in color, slight-figured, straight-featured, black-bearded. You see Japanese and Filipinos. And as for Latins--French, Italians and Spanish flood the city. There are eight thousand Montenegrins alone in California. I never suspected there were eight thousand in Montenegro. And our own continent contributes Canadians, Mexicans, citizens from every State in the Union. In addition, you run everywhere into soldiers and sailors. The bits of talk you overhear in the street are so exciting that you become a professional eavesdropper, strong-languaged, picturesquely slangy, pungent narrative. Sometimes the speaker has come up from Arizona, or New Mexico or Texas, sometimes down from Alaska, Washington or Oregon, sometimes across from Nevada or Montana or Wyoming. And with many of them--at least with those that live west of the rocky mountains--San Francisco is always (and I never failed to respond to the thrill of it) "the city". Not a city or any city, but the city--as though there were no other city on the face of the earth.
All this alien picturesqueness adds enormously of course to the San Franciscan's native picturesqueness. Not that the Californian needs adventitious aid in this matter. Indeed this cosmopolitanism of atmosphere serves best as a background, these alien types as a foil, for the native-born. For the Californians are a comely people. No traveler has failed--at least no man has failed--to pay tribute in passing to the Californian women. And they are beautiful. In that climate which produces bigness in everything, they grow to heroic size. And as a result of a life, inevitably open-air in an atmosphere always fog-touched, they have eyes of a notable limpidity and complexions of a striking vividness. To walk through that limited area which is the city's heart--especially when the theatres are letting out--is to come on beauty not in one pretty girl at a time, nor in pairs and trios, nor by scores and dozens; it is to see it in battalias and acres, and all of them meeting your eyes with the frank open gaze of the West. San Francisco is, I fancy, the only city on the globe where any musical comedy audience is always more beautiful than any musical comedy chorus. They are not only beautiful--they are magnificent.
Watch in the Admission Day parade for the Native Daughters of the Golden West--stalwart, stunning young giantesses marching with a splendid carriage and a superb poise--they seem like a new race of women.
And the climate being of such kind that, for three-quarters of the year you can count on unvarying sunny weather, the women dress on the streets with nothing short of gorgeousness. All the colors that the rainbow knows and a few that it has never seen, appear here. And worn with such chic, such verve! Not even in Paris, where may appear a more conventional smartness, is sartorial picturesqueness carried off with such an air of authority. Polaire, who was advertised as the ugliest woman in the world, should have made a fortune in California. For the Californian does not really know what female ugliness is. I have a theory that the California men cannot quite appreciate the beauty of their women. They take beauty for granted; they have never seen anything else. Nevertheless, that beauty and that dash constitute a menace. A city ordinance compels traffic policemen to wear smoked glasses, and car conductors and chauffeurs, blinders. Go West, young man!
But everybody celebrates the beauty of the Californian woman. Probably that is because heretofore "everybody" has been masculine. He has been so busy looking at the California woman that he hasn't realized yet that there's a male of the species. The California man, I sing.
It is curious what a difference of opinion there is in regard to him. I have heard Californiacs say in their one moment of humility, "Why is it, when we turn out such magnificent women, that our men are so undersized?" Now I know nothing about average male heights and weights. I have never seen any comparative statistics. I can say only that the average Californian seems bigger than the average man. And often in walking through the San Francisco streets the eye, ranging along the crowd of pedestrians of average California stature, will strike on a man who bulks a whale, a leviathan, a dread-naught, beside the others, and rises a column, a monolith, a tower above them.
He is certainly upstanding, this average California male--running to bulk and a little to flesh. Often the line of feature is so regular that it suggests the Greek. He has eyes like mountain lakes and a smile like a break of sun. He generally flashes a dimple or two or three or more (Californians are speckled with dimples). He manufactures his own slang. And he joshes and jollies all day long. In fact, he's--
Oh, well, go West, young woman!
Beyond its high average of male beauty California has, in its labor-man, produced a new physical type. It is different from the standardized American type, of which Abraham Lincoln of a past and the Wright brothers of a present generation are perfect specimens--the ugly-beautiful face, long and lean, with its harshly contoured strength of feature and its subtly softening melancholy of expression. The look of labor in California is not so much of strength as of force, an indomitable, unconquerable force. Melancholy is not there, but spirit; that fire and light which means hope. It is as though they were molded of iron--those faces--but illuminated from within. And with that strength goes the California comeliness.
Pulchritude begins in childhood with the Californian, grows and strengthens through youth to middle age. Even the old--but there are no old people in California. Nobody ever gets a chance to grow old there. The climate won't let you. The scenery won't let you. The life won't let you.
All this picturesqueness, beauty and charm form the raw materials of the most entertaining city life in the country. For whatever San Francisco is or is not, it is never dull. Life there is in a perpetual ferment. It is as though the city kettle had been set on the stove to boil half a century ago and had never been taken off. The steam is pouring out of the nose. The cover is dancing up and down. The very kettle is rocking and jumping. But by some miracle the destructive explosion never happens. The Californian is easy-going in a sense and yet he works hard and plays hard. Athletics are feverish there, suffrage rampant, politics frenzied, labor militant. Would that I had space here to dilate on the athletic game as it is played in California--played with the charm and spirit and humor with which Californians play every game. Would that I had space to narrate, as Maud Younger tells it--the moving story of how the women won the vote in California. Would that I had space to describe the whirlwind political campaigns when there are at least four candidates in the field for every office, and when you are besought by postal, by letter, by dodgers, by advertisements in the papers and on the billboards to vote for all of them. Would that I had space--but here I must take the space--to tell how the Californian plays.
Remember always that California has virtually no weather to contend with. For three months of the year rain appears; for the remaining nine months it is eliminated entirely. And so, with a country of rare picture-esqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for actors, everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct and everybody more or less writing poetry--California has a pageant for breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are always electing queens. In fact any girl in California, who hasn't been a queen of something before she's twenty-one, is a poor prune.
In the country, especially in the wine districts where the merrymaking sometimes lasts for days, these festivals are beautiful. In the city it depends largely, of course, on how much the commercial spirit enters into it; but whether they are beautiful or the reverse, they are always entertaining. Single streets, for instance, in San Francisco, are always having carnivals. The street elects a king and queen, plasters itself with bunting, arches itself with electric lights, lines its curbs with temporary booths, fills its corners with shows, sells confetti until the pedestrian swims in it--and then whoops it up for a week. All around, north, south, east, west, every other street is jet-black, sleeping decorously, ignoring utterly that blare of color, that blaze of light, that boom of noise around the corner. They should worry--they're going to have a carnival themselves next week. Apropos, a San Francisco paper opened its story of one of these affairs with the following sentence: "Last night (shall we call him Hans Schmidt?) was crowned with great pomp and ceremony king of the--Street Carnival, and fifteen minutes later, with no pomp and ceremony whatever, he was arrested for petty larceny." Billy Jordan was made King of the Fillmore Street Carnival. Now Billy Jordan, who was over eighty years of age, had served as announcer for every big boxing contest in San Francisco since--well, let's say, since San Francisco was born. He always ends his ring announcement with the words, "Let her go!" The reporters say that in the crown and sceptre, the velvet and ermine of a king, he opened the Fillmore Street Carnival with "Let her go!". And for myself, I choose to believe that story. The queen of this carnival--her first name was Manila, by the way--a pretty girl of course, was a picturesque detail in the city life for a week. In velvet, ermine and brilliant crown, she was always flashing from place to place in an automobile, surrounded by a group, equally pretty, of ladies in waiting. When the deep, cylindrical cistern-like reservoir on Twin Peaks was finished, they opened it with a dance; when the Stockton street tunnel was finished, they opened it with a dance; when the morgue was completed they opened that with a reception.
The San Francisco papers reflect all this activity, and they certainly make entertaining reading. For one thing, the annual crop of pretty girls being ten times as large there as anywhere else, and photography being universally a fine art, the papers are filled with pictures of beautiful women. They are the only papers I have ever seen in which the faces that appear on the theatrical page pale beside those that accompany the news stories. The last three months of my stay in San Francisco I cut out all the pictures of pretty girls from three newspapers. They included all kinds of women--society, club, athletic, college, highbrow, low-brow; highway-women, burglaresses, forgeresses and murderesses. I have just counted those pictures three hundred and fifty-four--and all beautiful. When I received my paper in the morning--until the war made that function, even in California, a melancholy one--I used to look first at the pictures of the women. Then always I turned to the sporting page to see what record had been broken since yesterday and, if it were Saturday morning (I confess it without shame), to read the joyous account of Friday night's boxing contest. And, always before I settled to the important news of the day, I read the last "stunt".
Picturesque "stunts" are always being pulled off in San Francisco. Was it the late lamented Beachey flying with a pretty girl around the half-completed Tower of Jewels, was it a pretty actress selling roses at the Lotta Fountain for the benefit of the Belgians, it was something amusing, stirring and characteristic. Always the "stunt" involved a lot of pretty girls and often it demanded the services of the mayor. I shall regret to the end of my days that I did not keep a scrapbook devoted to Mayor Rolph's activities. For being mayor of San Francisco is no sinecure. But as most of his public duties seemed to involve floods of pretty girls--well, if I were a man it would be my ambition to be mayor of San Francisco for the rest of my life.
The year I spent in California they were building the Exposition. They made of that task, as they make of every task, a game and a play and a lark--a joy and a delight--even though they were building under the most discouraging conditions that an exposition ever encountered. But nothing daunts the Californian, and so wood and iron, mortar and paint, grew steadily into the dream city that later fronted the bay.
As I think it over, I am very glad that I did not tell the Californiacs how beautiful Massachusetts is. Because it would only have bewildered them. I am glad that I did not mention to them that I shall always cherish a kind of feeling for Massachusetts that I can develop for no other spot. Because it would only have hurt them. You must not tell a Californiac that you love any place but California or that you have found beauty elsewhere. It's like breaking an engagement of marriage with a girl. It's like telling a child that there's no such person as Santa Claus. There's no tactful way of wording it. It simply can't be done. And I am very glad that I told the Californiacs all the time how much I love California, how much I love San Francisco. For beauty, California is like the fresh, glowing, golden crescent moon; it is waxing steadily to a noble fullness of development; and San Francisco is like the glittering evening-star; it fills the Pacific night with the happy radiance of its light and life. I think of California always--with its unabated fighting strength--as a champion among States. It takes the stranger--that champion State--under its mighty protection and gives him of its strength and happiness. It is more fun to be sick in California than to be well anywhere else. And I think of San Francisco always--the spirit of Tamalpais in the air--as an Amazon among cities. Its people love "the city" because, within the memory of man it was built, and within the memory of child, rebuilt. They themselves helped to build and rebuild it. They have worked and fought for it through every inch and instant of its history. It takes the stranger--that Amazon city--into its great, warm, beating mother-heart. If you are sick it makes you well. If you are sad it makes you glad. It infuses you with its working spirit. It inspires you with its fighting spirit. It asks you to work and fight with it. Massachusetts never permitted me to work or fight for it. Woman is as yet, in no real sense, a citizen there. And the result is that I love California as I love no other State, and San Francisco as I love no other city. I have no real criticism to bring against the Californiac. In fact, reader--ah, I see you've guessed it. I'm a Californiac myself.