Chapter 4
If man or woman be at all sensitive to life, he must react to the commonplace much as Whitman did. Such a person may be hurrying along about his business with perhaps no time for reflection and yet in a flash, the miracle of life will come to him through the slightest happening.
A little girl on the ferry sitting with her mother takes from her small prim bag a set of doll clothes, and fondles them and smoothes them much like a pullet with her first chickens. The sight of those square, little, gingham dresses, trimmed with scraps of lace and silk and with awkward sleeves standing straight out, brought to me, on that Oakland ferry, all my childhood again, and I was cuddled close between the surface roots of a great elm and from the nearby lane came the sight and scent of Bouncing Bet, Joe Pye Weed, Tansy, Yarrow, Golden Rod, Boneset, and over in the meadow the sight of cows and the smell of peppermint and water cress, beside a little stream.
The moment I write it down in physical words it becomes somehow less miraculous. The mind is so infinite and the human being so essentially mental, that the spoken or written word may never express them.
The sight of electric lights flashing at night, the view of the city from a cable car, the wonder of great trucks bearing down upon us like fiery-eyed dragons, a bunch of poppies growing close to the roots of a billboard in the heart of the city, and the silhouette of a young girl, wind-blown, so that her straight slender figure shows more beautiful than the statue that tops Union Square. Up Kearny street the glimpse of eucalyptus trees on the top of Telegraph Hill standing out against the pink sunset sky, the postman with his pack of human messages on his back, the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson in Portsmouth Square, and a row of old, old men sitting in the sun on Union Square discussing the Universe.
Did you ever stand listening to the seals just at nightfall, and did their weird, low call stir you to a feeling of kinship with all the creatures of the great deep, and did you lose yourself there out under the cold, dark water in that mysterious untamed world of the sea that is older than the land?
I don’t know what it’s all about. I only know we need more poets. Still every man who reacts to life and feels it to be a miracle, he is himself a poet. Even Whitman could only articulate in terms of wonder.
Impulses and Prohibitions
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.
Not that I can name them. I am only sure, really sure, of a Ford. But I admire them with a great pride in my human kind. They sit so majestically in their palaces on Van Ness, great limousines, powerful roadsters, luxurious touring cars, waiting there on display and containing in themselves all the skill, energy, artifice, and beauty of line, color and trim that the machine age can produce.
And the buildings on Van Ness strike a new and independent note in architecture. All that the ages have contributed of arches, columns, coloring and lighting are utilized and made into palaces of great dignity and beauty. There is something about the arched and windowed walls and the spacious, open look of the buildings that is entirely distinctive and Van Ness. It is not Mission, Grecian or Colonial, but it is all of them. It is as new and distinctive as the service stations that have sprung out of the automobile needs. If we dared we would call it entirely American.
And the printing that high lights each building is an achievement in modern art. Who but Americans would dream of using printing instead of gargoyles or classic medallions as ornamentation. Some of it is very beautiful and almost none is ugly. The use of the word “Paige,” the printing of “Buick,” the “H” of Hupmobile, the Mercury “A” of Arnold are to me very beautiful.
Van Ness avenue. It is exactly like its name. A long wide sweep for the regal motor car, the most wonderful and proudest automobile row in the world. The ghosts of the old, aristocratic and residential before-the-fire Van Ness have seen to it that even commercialized it shall still be--Van Ness.
The Blind Men and the Elephant
You live in San Francisco and I live in San Francisco, and so does the man who owns the peanut wagon on the corner, and none of us live in the same San Francisco--funny. We’re like the blind men who each gave a different version of the elephant.
To some, San Francisco is always eight o’clock in the morning or six o’clock at night, swinging on the straps homeward, swallow their dinners and to a show in the evening. Such people never have wandered through Golden Gate Park of an afternoon or sunned themselves on the benches of Union Square. They have never seen San Francisco by week-day sunlight.
Then there are home women and leisure women to whom San Francisco is always afternoon, down-town in the shopping district with ladies in pretty clothes passing each other on the street or in and out of the sweet-scented stores.
To some, San Francisco is always night. A taxi-driver who used to be a newsboy down on the old Barbary Coast. He has never seen anything but the night life of the city. Not bad, but night provincial--a sort of male version of Trilby.
The neighborhood of Merchants Exchange on California Street is San Francisco to hundreds of men. They ride out to the golf links and into the country on Sunday. Occasionally they go to New York, but when they return San Francisco is limited to the neighborhood where men inquire anxiously--“Is she picking up any in the East?”
No matter how wealthy, no matter how poor, to each of us San Francisco is very much limited in the confines of what each of us is interested in. It’s funny when you stop to think about it. How the Master of Marionettes must laugh at us when he sees us together. Perhaps some night after the show, the traffic cop raises his imperial hand and there, waiting to pass, the taxi driver of the night and a dear little home woman with her husband, and Mr. Chamber-of-Commerce and close to him a man who has never seen San Francisco by week day sunlight. There they all wait looking out of their eyes on San Francisco and each seeing it so differently.
San Francisco is one thing to you and another thing to me and something entirely different to the man on the peanut stand.
You’re Getting Queer
Everyone ought to have--well, what is it that everyone ought to have? No, not a machine, not necessarily a garden and not even a camera. Everyone ought to have children. If not children of their own, then borrowed ones or nieces or nephews or the neighbor’s kids. Everyone ought to have children.
People who have no children anywhere in their environment to whom they can talk intimately soon become queer and lop-sided. They may not always realize it but others will find them awkward and stilted and covered with cobwebs and dust. Such people will be found hard to get on with and full of snippiness. It is half what ails folks, that so many of them have no children in their lives and it affects them like malnutrition. Let a baby enter a street car filled with moldy, musty grown-ups and watch the starved looks and the foolish and pathetic boohs and pokes they will dart in the direction of the child.
It is often my privilege to tell stories to a group of babies, and one day when they were crowded close around me one of them exclaimed--“Hey, you spit right in my eye.” Then it came to me what a lot of eyes I had probably spit into all down the years, and how no one had ever told me of it so frankly before. Children are so honest until we teach them to say that they’re sorry when they’re not, and to listen to stories that bore them and to pretend not to like Jazz when all the time they do.
Contact with children takes us back to the genesis of our being and revives in us something primitive and honest and natural. I saw a man recently being led out of a grown-up meeting by the hand of a child and he looked so cross about it and was so obviously trying to maintain his dignity while the child hurried him up the aisle. I thought how silly. When a child has to leave a meeting he has to, that’s all, and there’s no use in arguing or getting cross about it. And really how good it was for that pompous individual to get taken down a peg by the terribly human appeal of a little child.
All of us ought to find some children to tell stories to for our own sakes. And then when we have gotten Jack up the beanstalk and into the ogre’s kitchen, and the ogre says in an awful voice--“I smell a human being,” perhaps there will come to us some of the old thrill that we had forgotten.
If you don’t know any children intimately, children who call you “George” or “Auntie Flo,” children who run to meet you, children who hurt your pockets with anticipation, children to whom you read the funnies or whom you take to the movies, children for whom you may revive your childhood tricks of making a blade of grass squawk, or wiggling your scalp, or cutting out a row of dancing paper dolls, then hurry and get acquainted even if you are driven to pick them up. If you don’t, then as sure as you’re alive, you’ll find yourself growing queer.
The Ferry and Real Boats
As a matter of fact the ferry isn’t a boat at all. It is more like a house or a street car or a park full of pretty benches. It doesn’t sail, it only plies, plies between two given points at stated intervals, and could anything be more dull. Nothing is more prosaic than a ferry unless it be an ironing board.
Even a barge is superior, and a barge doesn’t pretend to be a boat. A barge goes somewhere and it gets mussed up by the real salt sea, and so do flat, old scows, honest and rough and sea-going. Any boat in the bay is superior to the effeminate ferry. Even the boat to Sacramento has a bit more atmosphere. As for tug boats, they are little, but O-my as they pull the great, impotent barges after them. Pilot boats have quite an air making the big, dignified steamers look foolish being yanked here and there. The tidy fisherman’s motor boats look rather unimaginative, all tied in rows at Fisherman’s Wharf, but they go somewhere, sometimes away down the coast and from their sides the long nets reach away down into the sea itself.
How the real boats in the bay must despise the ferry. Think of being called a boat and never once sailing out of the Golden Gate. How maddening it must be. If the ferry had any spirit at all, some day it would just switch about and go chunking out to sea. Imagine then the concern of the staid commuters from Oakland and Alameda to say nothing of the citizens of Berkeley and Marin County, to find themselves being borne away from their vegetable gardens and fresh eggs out to sea in a wooden boat.
I suppose there are many people living right here in San Francisco who have never sailed away out of the Golden Gate, people who have been bound economically or by love or duty, and have had to ply like the ferry daily between two given points. But can there be a man who has seen tall-masted schooners and long-bodied ocean-going steamers pass in and out of the alluring Golden Gate, and has never longed to sail away to the enchanted South Seas, or to Alaska. Such a man is not a man any more than the ferry is a boat.
If I could choose the boat I’d sail away upon, it would not be a coast-wise steamer, nor the prim Alaska packers nor even the steamers to the Orient. I’d choose me a four-masted schooner, carrying freight and going somewhere, anywhere, no one knows where. And then some day the wind would die or some night the wind would howl and there would come to me a great longing for or a ferry that should take me home at night in a safe and prosaic manner.
A Whiff of Acacia
In Connecticut now, and in Illinois and in Utah too, it is lilac time. Lilac time--I’ll stop, if you please, to say the words over lovingly. In San Francisco now the lilacs are in bloom but it is not lilac time. In Golden Gate Park the rhododendrons are blossomed into gorgeous mounds of color but they are not an event in San Francisco, only an incident. In “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” set in the mountains of Virginia, they are the dominant background.
Poppies and lupine and many others are the flower tradition of California but they are not what I mean here. It is an impression of mine that San Francisco more than any other city has taken the traditional plants and flowers of other sections and made them into a composite that makes up the plant atmosphere of this city.
Take roses and geraniums and callas, none of which are epochal because they are always at hand. But with old Mrs. Deacon Rogers in Connecticut who nursed her calla through the long winter that she might take it to church on Easter Sunday, the calla was history.
Even the camellia San Franciscans take very philosophically. It has not, for instance, the supremacy that Dumas gives it in “Camille.” In Sacramento they feature it more and an Easterner who saw them picking it in branches instead of single flowers, exclaimed: “Why, they think they’re oleanders.”
The plant and flower atmosphere of a community is very important. Some child is now growing up in the city, who some day will be far away when there will come to him a whiff, perhaps of acacia, and in an instant there will come surging over him all the feel and urge and thrill and wistfulness and dreams of his childhood, and he will be once more in the atmosphere of San Francisco. It will not include winter and summer but an all-round-the-year-ness, it will not mean a flower, but flowers, cherry blossoms from Japan, acacia from Australia, and the best from everywhere which all together will mean to him--San Francisco.
The smell of the acacia, which he knew as the wattle, inspired Kipling to write those words
“Smells are surer than sounds or sights To make your heart strings crack.”
Perhaps many others see with me this difference between San Francisco and the rest of the country, as though nature here expresses herself in bounty more than in resurrection. Oh, well, whether it be “lilac time” or “all the time” to each locality there is its own beauty and, as for me, I have yet to find, in all my travels, the “place that God forgot.”
It Takes All Sorts
“Hey, hey,” called the tall, nervous man with the fat, little wife, waving his arms at the conductor for fear he would be carried past his corner.
“It takes all sorts of people to make a world,” remarked the sensible-looking woman beside me.
It is not the first time that I have been impressed with the philosophy of those words. Who said them first, I wonder. “It takes all sorts of people to make a world.” That is, if we only had one sort or even a number of sorts we would have no world. To make a world there must be all sorts, including the funniest folks we ever knew.
I looked from the sensible woman with her well-chosen clothes to the woman across the way. This second woman was a sort of dressed-up-and-no-place-to-go type, with a squirt of Cashmere Bouquet in the center of her handkerchief. And nothing on that went with anything else she had on. And a hat which one knew was a hat, because it was on her head, otherwise it might have passed for almost anything.