Chapter 3

A beautiful woman steps forward and meets a handsome man and they go to dinner together, and somehow I don’t think he is her husband and wonder if she is a widow and decide that it is none of my business. If she has a husband he is probably an “ornery” fellow who never takes her anywhere.

Everyone who passes by me looks alert, and sure, and happy and prosperous, but I comfort myself that probably each one of them has as much to worry about as I myself do.

The Garbage Man’s Little Girl

This vignette is written because it can’t help itself and carries with it a hope that someone who reads it may know a little girl whose father is a garbage man. Suppose that you can’t think of anyone just now who is a daughter to a garbage man, it is best to read this just the same for you never know when you may meet her.

When you do, tell her not to care too much when the children at school tease her about her father and cry--“Phew--phew, here comes the gar-bidge-Garrr-bidge-Garrr-bidge.” Tell her at that time to try and sustain her personal integrity with philosophy. It won’t do her a particle of good but tell her just the same.

Tell her that her father is a terribly useful man. That if he should fail to function, then the disposal of garbage would become an individual problem and that the mamas of kids whose fathers are not garbage men would be obliged to say to their husbands--“Ed, dear, don’t forget to take the garbage bucket to the public incinerator on your way to the office.”

Tell her that just because her father collects dirt, it is no disgrace. Tell her to look at the people in good standing who peddle dirt. Tell her to look at the papers. Tell her to tell the world that it’s better any day to collect than to peddle dirt.

Tell her that when her father, up on his great smelly throne, drives around the corner of Powell and Geary that dressed-up folk needn’t disdain him so much. He’s a sermon. They won’t like him as a sermon so much as a garbage man but he’s a sermon just the same. The text is that back of most things that are dainty and beautiful is the drudgery worker. Tell her that there isn’t an immaculate kitchen in San Francisco that doesn’t depend upon her father.

Nor a feast at the Palace or the St. Francis. Tomato skins and the nests that cauliflowers come in, and gnawed “T” bones. What would become of them if she had no father. And coffee grounds and the nameless things that have been forgotten and burned by the absent-minded. Tell the little girl about Omar Khayyam and how he might have said--.

Oh, many a charred secret into the garbage can goes That from the kitchen range in blackened cloud once rose. Tell her that there is a professor at Yale whose father was a junk man. All this and more tell the garbage man’s little girl.

The Palace

Someone was telling me of an old couple who lost everything they owned at the time of the fire, and that they were very brave about it and never broke down, and even helped others, but that when someone came running up and said: “The Palace is on fire,” they both sat down on the curb and gave way completely to grief.

And they say that after the fire the first piece of publicity which was given to the world as a proof that San Francisco would come back, was that the Palace would be rebuilt immediately. And a man from Virginia City, a descendant of the Comstock days, told me that in Nevada they speak of “The Palace” as Russians speak of the Kremlin as a pivot of destiny. What I am trying to say, of course, is that the Palace is a tradition just as the Waldorf-Astoria is a tradition, only not at all in the same way.

The Palace is a great place for women who are alone and a place where a man may bring “the missus” with impunity. The Palace is stylish, perhaps, but principally it is select. It suggests to me women who wear suits of clothes, mostly dark gray, all wool and a yard wide, women who wear two petticoats and Hanan shoes and Knox hats and who carry suit cases covered with foreign express tags, and whom porters run to meet because they know that these women may not be so stylish as they are generous tippers. And the Palace suggests to me afternoon teas, and that peculiar composite chatter of women’s voices which is more like the sound of birds in a flock, and which Powys speaks of as a strange inarticulate chitter chatter which isn’t really speech at all.

The other day a well groomed young official from the hotel took me out to see the famous old Palace bar and the beautiful Maxfield Parrish painting above it. They have taken the rail away, and around the edge of the bar they have built a nicely finished woodwork wall which looks exactly like a great coffin, the coffin of John Barleycorn. After the manner of my species I wanted to see over the edge and the young man, thinking that I might be suspecting a blind pig, boosted me up to peck over. I asked him why they didn’t remove the bar entirely and he said with unsmiling naivete that they were waiting “to see” and that they had saved the rail, “in case.”

If I were a reformer I should agitate and have that remarkably joyous and beautiful Parrish painting placed where it could be seen. I’d take it out to some San Francisco school so that the dear Pied Piper and all the little round kiddies running after should be a delight to school children.

And now I have come to the end and all that I have said is that the Palace Hotel is the San Francisco tradition and everyone in the United States knew that long ago.

Zoe’s Garden

Zoe says emphatically that it is not her garden, but everybody’s garden. But it is her garden because she tends it, and every morning goes around among her flowers lovingly, giving a little dig of dirt here, and tying some frail sisters up there and then, with her scissors, clipping, snipping and nipping away. Yes, it is Zoe’s garden.

Anything that has spunk to grow is welcome in this essentially San Franciscan garden. And no one is allowed to bully the others. Big burly geraniums and proud dahlias must keep in their places and give the dainty lobelia, cinnamon pinks, oxalis and candy tuft their chance. The oxalis! How we tended it in pots in New England, and out here in California, bless its heart, it runs around like a native daughter. And as for the fuchsia, how far it has grown from the blue laws.

There is no formality in Zoe’s garden. Marigolds go wandering about in the most trampish manner, and poppies, because they are privileged characters, spring up as they please. Then, as though the two of them were not sufficient California gold, there is the faithful gaillardia with its prim little sunflower-faces smiling up at their Mother Sun.

It is a democratic garden, too. Golden rod and asters grow right in among the aristocrats. Fancy the snubbing they would get if they once ventured into a New England garden--Hm. There is freedom there, but not license, and every opportunity for individuality. The gladiolas, canterbury bells, gillie flowers and fox gloves grow as prim as in a conservative English garden. Pansies smile in their little bed, and although the nasturtium, the wild-growing, happy-go-lucky nasturtium, goes visiting around among all his neighbors, he is never allowed to interfere with those who wish to keep by themselves. The sweet peas stay very close to their tradition of wire netting, but they are not snobs at all, and give of their bounty to all who call. The sensuous jasmine is there, and the cold puritanical ceneraria and old maids’ pin cushions, with fragrance of sandalwood. The red-hot-poker grows stiff and straight, but the ragged sailor goes uncombed and untidy still.

Cosmos is coming soon, dressed in her very feminine clothes, and the coreopsis has come on ahead. All old-timers are represented there, honeysuckle, wormwood, petunias, rosemary, gilias, mignonette, heliotrope and foxgloves. If they can not all be there together, all are there at some time in the summer. Montbretia, Japanese sunflower, larkspur, columbine and gourds all have their time and place and opportunity in this San Francisco garden. And the hollyhocks, the bossy things, I’ve a mind to leave them out. Besides I know some gossip about them. When Zoe was away to Yosemite one morning they were all leaning over from too much moonshine or too much sunshine and--well, I won’t repeat what the marigolds told me about them.

Besides it is time to come away from Zoe’s garden, which is everybody’s garden.

Children on the Sidewalk

When you were a little girl, when you were a little boy, where did you play? Was it in a barn? Was it a city park? Did you hunt gophers on the plains of Iowa? Perhaps it was in a California poppy field. Perhaps a graveyard. I played in one, and remember very vividly the grave of Josephine Sarah Huthinson who died at the age of 11 months, and had a little lamb on the top of her stone and an inscription: “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Many delightful games we played around the grave of little Josephine.

Wherever childhood found us we played, and out of our environment and often in spite of it, lived in a delightful world of our own into which no grownup ever really entered. Now, you and I, grownup, walk along the sidewalks of San Francisco and all we see under our calloused old feet is a sidewalk. But to children even a sidewalk blossoms with possibilities. Who but a child invented: “Step on a crack, you break your mother’s back.” Only the other day I saw a kiddie avoiding every crack and muttering some incantation as he walked along.

And out of the sidewalk grew all the different types of kiddie kars and coasters that are so prevalent. I saw a whole load of children zipping down a steep San Francisco hill the other day much as we children coasted down winter hills on wicked “double rippers.” A hill and gravity and a lot of kids, what possibilities. And out of the sidewalk have evolved those nameless explosives that have been so popular over the recent Fourth. A row of kids sitting on a curb, one of them darts out to the car track, a car comes, great expectancy from the kids, terrific noise, annoyed looks on the faces of sour adults, unbounded joy from a row of kids sitting on the curb.

Recently I saw a tomboy who had organized the children in her block, and had confiscated an alley between two straight gray houses, and I don’t know what the game was but it entailed trips on a car down the alley and a very bossy motorman, and “turns,” over which everyone quarreled.

Some dainty little Chinese girls were playing a sidewalk game with a white stone which was a version of an old, old child game. The child would hop to the stone and kick it away and hop to it again until she missed, the object being to beat her opponent in the distance traveled. And I saw some exquisite little Japanese girls playing jump rope and chanting one of the numerous litanies that go with that beautiful game.

The sidewalks of San Francisco. They are full of adventure. Robert Louis Stevenson would have seen it all. But to our dull eyes are only gray cement block. Just a sidewalk to us and to kiddies there are mountains in which Roy Gardner hides, and woods, and Tom Mix on a horse dashes right past us and we never see him at all.

Feet That Pass on Market St.

There is something about walking along Market street with the procession of people that passes all day, ah, how shall I express it? It is thrilling and it is amusing; it is cosmic and it is puny. It is often ridiculous and always sublime. Sometimes when we are in most of a hurry the consciousness of the procession will come to us. It is as though we were one of a moving crowd that never began and will never end. At such times we listen to the sound of their feet, the steady, unceasing step by step, an endless tramp as though it were beating out the rhythm--“Eternity, eternity, eternity.”

As we pass voices call to us from the wayside, a cripple so far down below us on the very ground offering his silent pencils; the allurement of flowers; a hoarse newsboy with his old, old face screwed into a thousand anxious wrinkles; a blind man, silent supplicant, twirling his thumbs; and from the windows the call of strawberries at 15 cents a basket. Overhead an aeroplane hums its way and receives from us the tribute of an upward glance. We gaze upward and think how many years before our day aeroplanes were flying overhead in the dreams of men who passed and passed in the long procession.

Idly we glimpse faces that pass us in the procession that meets ours. We pass them and are never the wiser for the struggle and tragedy that may be going on behind their show of brave masks. A man clutching his last dime and wondering whether to spend it for rolls and coffee or coffee and rolls. A business man absorbed and a lady pondering deeply some detail of her dress. A young girl with soft un-massaged chin hurrying to keep a tryst with her “friend,” and country folks, their feet sore on the unaccustomed pavements, glad to be going home soon.

It is such an orderly procession and although they all seem to be walking along forever, there is an order in their going and each is on his way. Each one is free to go to his own place and yet no one is free. No one is free to leave the procession once he gets into it. Once a man is born he’s done for.

Let him veer one iota from that procession and soon there will come rumbling up to the curb a big black Maria and off he’s whisked away from his fellows. Let him but get into the wrong house or take the wrong overcoat or chuck the wrong person under the chin--Pff! Let him forget where the long procession leads and wander about a free spirit and his wanderings will lead him to the madhouse.

I love to be one of the procession that marches forever up and down Market street, such a brave procession.

Where the Centuries Meet

She was a tourist and she had just finished Sing Fat’s. As she passed out of the door she said smugly to her companion--“I don’t see anything so wonderful here.”

I was standing right there and said I: “Madame, if you have been through Sing Fat’s and have failed, to see anything wonderful then you should go home and give yourself the Benet test which is used to test the intelligence of children.” Oh, of course, I didn’t say this so that the lady could hear. The bravest speeches we humans make are never aloud. Then I continued: “Madame, you may travel far in mileage but you will never take anything back to Dingville, Kansas, richer than a souvenir ash tray.”

Why, just to take a trip from Sing Fat’s to the White House is a tremendous journey if one has the perceiving faculty. In Sing Fat’s a bit of old Cloissonne, tiny pieces of enamel on silver, done with infinite pains by hand labor, perhaps centuries ago, grown beautiful with age. In the White House georgette flowers, exquisite things made for the passing minute, a whiff and a whim and off they go. Just in these two there is a meeting of the centuries, Handcraft Days and the Machine Age--B. C. and A. D.--the oldest civilization in the world and the newest.

The most interesting thing in Chinatown are the Chinese. To some they all look alike, but to me they seem very human and individual and folksy. I find myself paraphrasing: “But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford,” and when I meet a crafty looking old Chinaman this whimsy comes to me, “If Deacon Bushnell who passed the plate in the Centerville Methodist Church had been a Chinaman this is the way he would have looked.” They are such small town folks. Even with the steady cycle of tourists they gaze at each newcomer as though he were the latest comer to Podunk. One day with a friend I called on a Chinese girl, and all the large family and their friends gathered around and discussed us and laughed among themselves and pointed at us. It was embarrassing but I was never once conscious of rudeness, simply a childlike curiosity and honesty.

In Chinatown the other day a peddler was selling spectacles and somehow the old men trying them on and squinting for “near” and for “far,” seemed so quaint and countrified and like a lot of old Yankees around a country store trying to get a “new pair of eyes, by Heck.” In Chinatown the tong men do not seem at all real and the hair raising movie serial with its Chinatown terrors, Buddhist idols that open and swallow the movie actors and floors that drop into dungeons, seem very remote.

Bags or Sacks

“Do you like cafeterias?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he answered, “I’ve never played them.”

“What religion do you follow?” another man asked me.

In a mining camp they told me to take such and such a “trail.”

The point is, that we did not talk that way where I came from. Of course, I hasten to say, we doubtless talked some other way just as peculiar. And if I could detect our colloquialisms I would write a lot about them but alas I can’t. I was in the West two years before I noticed that a “trolley” is a “street car.”

A woman in a mining camp said to the stage driver, “I want out at the bank because I don’t want to pack this sack of silver.” In the first place we wouldn’t have had a sack of silver and if we had, it would have been in a “bag” not a “sack,” and we never “pack” things and we never “want out.”

In the East we never refer to our locality as “this country,” as in the West and South. We do not take the name of our state either as “Californian” or “Kentuckian.” One never hears of a “Connecticutian” or a “Massachusettisian.” I do not profess to give any reasons for these peculiarities.

In the West, speech is more brief. “Autos go slow” is the warning while on the Fenway in Boston the signs read--“Motor Vehicles, Proceed Slowly.” I wouldn’t swear to the comma but the words are identical.

There is a small to near Provincetown where a sign reads--“Friends, we wish to think well of you and we wish you to think well of us. Kindly observe the ten mile motor limit.” After that the roads are so bad that one couldn’t possibly exceed ten miles if he tried. Probably the longest sign in California is that one which reads--“Drive your fool heads off.”

“Booze-fighters” are Western. Oh, they’re Eastern too, but under a different name. It’s a misleading term, that. As though one were fighting against booze like an anti-salooner. I actually know of a woman who came West and thought for or a long time that a “booze-fighter” was a “Dry.” In the East he is a “rummy” and when he’s drunk he’s “tight.”

“It’s a fright,” is Western. “Ornery,” is middle-Western. That’s a wonderful word. Sometimes, I wish I could live my life over with “ornery” in my vocabulary. It describes so many people I never knew just how to classify.

There are no “T” bones in the East. And scrambled brains are not common. Oh, of course, we have them but not as something to eat. Personally, I was brought up to reverence brains and when I see them lying pale and messy on a plate in a Greek restaurant, I confess it gives me a start.

Hot tamales have never crossed the plains East. And baked beans have never come West--not real ones. The difference between the Eastern baked bean and the Western is all the difference between a tin can and a religious rite and it is the same with succotash. A cruller is only a fried doughnut when it gets out West. Tea is more subtle in the East, but out here the waitress will ask “Black or green” in a black or white tone and stands over you until you decide. Maybe you don’t want black tea, maybe you don’t want green, but just “tea,” but there she stands in her unequivocation--“Black or green?”

Silver money has never traveled East. A man told me recently that he didn’t like silver money when he first came out here and that it was always wearing his pockets out but since he’d gotten into Western ways it never wore a hole in his pockets any more. In the East a change purse is scorned by anything masculine, but here all the men carry one, I don’t know why not in the East, nor why in the West. Blessed old “two-bits” and a “dollar six-bits” are the only woolly things left over from the old wild West.

What else--oh, I could keep on for pages. “Stay with it” is Western and has lots more feeling I think than “stick to it.” A Westerner when his wife and babies were going back East to visit her relatives, telegraphed to her brother--“Elizabeth and outfit arrive Tuesday.” And until she arrived the brother spent his time in conjecturing as to just what an “outfit” would mean. Rhubarb plant is “rhubarb” in the East and also “pie plant,” and one day I was in a fruit store and when the man--he was a Greek--yelled “Wha else?” I could only think of “pie plant” and so I didn’t get any.

It’s all the way you are “brought up,” Eastern, and all the way you are “raised,” Western.

Portsmouth Square

“To be honest, to be kind.” Loiterers, vagabonds, slow-going Orientals, poets and blackguards, all day long come and drink at Stevenson’s fountain. Some of them look up and read it all and some only get as far as “to earn a little, to spend a little less”--.

Small-footed Chinese women pass, humping along on their stumps and their babies running along beside have larger feet than the mothers who bore them, Bench warmers gaze after them with lazy curiosity. A fat Italian granddaddy washes a kiddie’s hand from the fountain and a man with a demijohn and a sense of humor goes smilingly down the path and what he has in the demijohn is none of our business.

“To make on the whole, a family happier for his presence.” It is noon and a bride has brought lunch for herself and her husband off the job in his white overalls, and the two eat together on the beautiful grassy slope. The poplar trees around Stevenson’s fountain whisper poetry all day long and the little iron boat on top looks sad not to be sailing away on high adventure to the South Sea islands.

“To renounce when it shall be necessary and not be embittered.” A woman with a baby carriage comes by. Something tender and sane and everyday and basic about her and her baby. A Chinese woman passing looks for all the world like a black and iridescent purple grackle in her shiny black coat and shiny black pants and shiny black shoes and shiny black hair, although the grackle has a prouder strut than her dancing little trot.

“To keep a few friends and those without capitulation.” Where, oh where, do all the men come from who lie stretched out on the grass? I’ve seen the very same men lying on Boston Common, and when my father was a boy he said he saw them there. Hats over their eyes or else blinking up at the blue sky. Then on the curb facing the Hall of Justice, philosophers up from the water front or fresh from box cars, everyone with a story that Stevenson would have got from them.

“Above all on the same grim conditions to keep friends with himself.” On the bench an enormous woman with a hat that looks like a schooner atop of a great pompadour wave and on the very same bench a mummied old Chinese as thin as a wafer. An aeroplane hums above and Stevenson’s little boat looks envious. Where did Captain Montgomery of the sloop Portsmouth stand when he planted the flag in 1848? The Mission bell, so many miles to Dolores, so many miles to Rafael. Ring, Mission bell, ring and show us where the El Camino Real will lead us all by and by. We who pass all day, show us the way, Mission bell.--“here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.”

Miracles

“Why, who makes much of a miracle? As for me, I know of nothing else but miracles. Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, Or stand under trees in the woods, Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car.”

--Walt Whitman.