Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (6)

From the summit of the pass we dropped down the brush-clothed flanks of the mountains by a zigzag road into a secluded river valley whose peace and pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring grandeur of the Gaviota, as is the five-o’clock whistle to the workman after a busy day. By this same pass the trail of the _padres_ ran when, a century ago, they walked between the missions, so that it was with peculiar appropriateness that there rose before us, as we swung around a shoulder of the mountain, the Mission of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming like ivory in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a splendid note of colour against the lush, green fields, its cross-surmounted campanile pointing heavenward, just as the fingers of its cassocked builders were wont to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mission, which was in a deplorable state of neglect when he came there a dozen years ago, has been reroofed and in a large measure restored, the south corridor, which runs the length of the _convento’s_ front, where the brown-robed monks were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, having been transformed into a sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the old monastic days that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp, who applies at the Mission Santa Ynez for food or shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that brought home to me most vividly the hardships endured by the cowled and sandalled founders of these missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk, bordered with faded blue, which caught my attention in the sacristy.

“What was this umbrella used for, father?” I inquired.

“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used by the _padres_ to shield themselves from the sun on their journeys between the missions, for they were not permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows to go always afoot. Though Father Serra was lame, and every step that he took caused him the extremest anguish, he not once but many times walked the six hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his northernmost mission at Sonoma.”

One would naturally suppose that the people of California would be inordinately proud of these crumbling missions which have played so great a part in the history of their State and would take steps to have them preserved as national monuments, just as the French Government preserves its historic châteaux. But, for some unexplainable reason, just the opposite is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in obtaining funds to effect even the most imperative repairs, depending very largely on the contributions of Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for this unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are still a young people, which, of course, is true. It is equally true, however, that by the time we are old enough to appreciate their historic significance and value, there will be no missions left to preserve.

Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks, you should not fail to stop for luncheon at a hamlet, not far from Santa Ynez, called, from the olive orchards which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn there kept by a Frenchman named Mattei—a Basque he is, if I remember rightly—who will serve you just such a meal as you can get at one of those wayside _fondas_ in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that instead of the roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-coffee luncheon which the motorist learns to expect, we had set before us brook-trout fried in flour and bread-crumbs, ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garlic and oil, roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet _à la Espagnole_, and heaping bowls of wild strawberries, the whole washed down with a wine rarely seen in America—real white Chianti. It is the very unexpectedness of such meals which makes them stand out like white milestones along the gastronomical highway.

More Spanish in character and atmosphere even than Santa Barbara is Monterey, three hundred miles farther up this enchanted coast. Careless of the changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on its sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of palm and live-oak, its feet laved by the tepid waters of the bay. The town is built on the slopes of a natural amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising steeply behind the town is the hill where the Spanish _castillo_ used to stand, which is now surmounted by grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow barracks which house the garrison. At the foot of Presidio Hill is the sheltered cove where Vizcaino landed to take possession of this region in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years later, Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it in the name of a far mightier King. Here, on clear days, you can see on the harbour bottom the bleached and whitened bones of the frigate _Natalia_, on which Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water-front, where the soiled and smelly fishing-boats with their queer lateen sails rub shoulders with the spotless, white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on many strange and thrilling scenes, has this balconied building of whitewashed adobe; it has seen the high-prowed caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their carven sterns; it has seen the swarthy Spanish governors reviewing their steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen the _fiestas_ and other merrymakings which marked the careless Mexican régime; and on that July day in 1846 it saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the blue-jackets in their jaunty hats land from the American frigates, saw them form in hollow square upon the plaza, saw their weapons held rigid in burnished lines of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff, and heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of stripes and stars.

In historic interest and significance this little town of Monterey is to the West what Boston is to the East. Here was planned the conquest of California; here the first American flag was raised upon the shores of the Pacific; here was the first capital and here was held the first constitutional convention of California. Follow Alvardo Street up the hill, between rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and whitewashed walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias, and geraniums, to the group of historic buildings at the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin house, where dwelt the last American consul in California and in which were hatched the plots which led up to the American occupation; the picturesque home of the last Spanish governor of the Californias; Colton Hall, in which the first constitutional convention assembled on the day of California’s admission to the Union; the little one-roomed dwelling that Sherman and Halleck occupied when they were stationed here as young lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beautiful señorita whom Sherman loved long years before he won imperishable fame beneath the eagles at Shiloh; and, by no means least in interest, the wretched dwelling where that immortal genius Robert Louis Stevenson lodged for a year or more, and the little restaurant where he took his meals, and the green pathways which he wandered.

In the edge of the town stands the church of San Carlos, one of the best preserved mission churches of California, whose sacristy contains the most precious religious relics in the State; for here the priest in charge will reverently show you Father Serra’s own chasuble, cope, and dalmatics and the altar service of beaten silver which was brought out for him from Spain. The _padre-presidente_ preferred Carmel over the hill to all his other missions, however, and it was there, where the Carmel River ripples down between the silent willows to its mother, the sea, that he came back to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient mission, his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours transformed from a savage wilderness to a vineyard of the Lord.

From Monterey you may motor or drive or street-car or foot it to Del Monte, which is only a mile away. Whichever method you choose, I should take the longest way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel through the glorious wild-wood by which it is enveloped. And after you have twisted and turned for a mile or more through a wilderness of bloom and foliage, like the children in the story-book in search of the enchanted castle, and after you have concluded that you have lost your way and are ready to abandon the quest, all unexpectedly you catch a glimpse of its red-roofed towers and spires and gables rising above the tree tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years ago, huge and rambling and not unpicturesque, surrounded by acres of lawn and the finest live-oaks I have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance to the Gezireh Palace—now a hostelry for tourists—which the Khedive Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del Monte suggests not one, but many places, however. Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is the result of more than a third of a century of care, in many respects recall the famous country-seats of England, though the vegetation, of course, is very different; the gardens, which offer a continual feast of colour, remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the cypress maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court. The artificial lake, surrounded by subtropical vegetation and approached by a palm-bordered esplanade, has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that I know, while from the golf-links—than which there are none better in the West—looking across the tree tops to where the white houses of Monterey overhang the bay, it is difficult to believe that you are not on the hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon the white buildings of Algiers. Although Del Monte is an enchanted garden at any time of the year, the “high season” is in July and August, when the golfing, polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San Mateo exactly as the corresponding section of society on the other side of the continent flocks to Newport and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo field resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the click of mallet and ball; the golf-links on the rolling downs above the sea are alive with players taking part in the great midsummer tournament which is the most important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in the evenings white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and whirl and glide to fervid music upon a glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the light of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers transform into a fairyland.

The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from south to north, as we did, for that was the way of the _padres_; so it was quite natural that our next stop after leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San Juan Bautista. San Juan Bautista—Saint John the Baptist—is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty little hamlet as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian road. Along its lanes—they are too narrow and straggling to be dignified with the name of streets—stand quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine and passion-vine, hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza up the hill, where the Spanish soldiery, and after them the Mexican, used to parade and where the _fiestas_ used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in obedience to the summons of the mission bells, and, thanks to the renaissance of the rural districts caused by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is nearly always filled with guests. Close by the hotel is the old adobe building which served as the headquarters of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and back of the town rises the hill known as the Hawk’s Nest, where Frémont and his handful of American frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan Bautista is a place where I could have loitered for a week instead of a day, for who, with a spark of romance in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the hotel note-paper: “A relic of the distant past, when men played billiards on horseback and the trees bore human fruit”?

VII

THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT

“He touched my eyes with gladness, with balm of morning dews,
On the topmost rim He set me, ’mong the hills of Santa Cruz,
And I saw the sunlit ocean sweep, I saw the vale below—
The Vale of Santa Clara in a sea of blossomed snow.”

VII

THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT

I first heard about the place from the captain of a little coasting steamer in the Indian Ocean. It was moonlight, I remember, and we were leaning over the rail, watching the phosphorescent waves curl away from the vessel’s bow. We had both seen more than our shares of the world and we were exchanging opinions of what we had seen over the captain’s Trichinopoli cheroots. Perhaps it was the effect of the moonlight on the silent waters, but I am more inclined to think it was the brandy which his silent-footed Swahili steward had just served us, which caused him to grow confidential.

“A few more voyages and I’m going to quit the sea,” he remarked.

“Yes?” said I interrogatively. “And what will you do then? Get a berth as harbour master at Shanghai or port captain at Suez or somewhere?”

“No,” said he, “I’m going to build a house for myself and the missis in a valley that I know; a house painted white with green blinds and with a porch as broad as a ship’s deck, and I’m going to have a fruit orchard and a flower garden with red geraniums in it, and I’m going to raise chickens—white Wyandottes, I think, but I’m not quite certain.”

“Of all things!” I ejaculated. “My imagination isn’t elastic enough for me to picture an old sea-dog like you settled down in a white farmhouse raising fruit and chickens. Where is all this going to be?”

“In the Santa Clara,” said he.

“It sounds like the name of a Pullman car or a tune in the hymn-book,” said I.

“It’s neither,” said he; “it’s a valley in California.”

“Tell me about it,” I suggested.

“I can’t,” said he. “It’s too beautiful—in the spring the whole valley is a sea of blossoms, like cherry season in Japan; and beyond are green hillsides that might be those of Devonshire; and looming up back of the hills are great brown-and-purple mountains that look like those at the back of Cintra, in Portugal (that’s some place, too, believe _me_); and there is always the smell of flowers in the air, such as you get in Bulgaria in the attar-of-rose season; and I’ve never seen a sky as blue anywhere else except in the Ægean; and——”

“That’s enough,” I interrupted. “That’s where I’m going next. Any place that will make a hardened old sea captain become poetical must be worth seeing.”

* * * * *

Months later, in Algiers, I found myself sitting at a small iron table on a sun-bathed terrace overlooking the orange-and-olive-and-palm-fringed shores of the Mediterranean. There are only five views to equal it in all the world. As I sat gazing out across the waters toward France a fellow countryman strolled up and dropped into the seat beside me. I knew that he was an American by the width of his hat brim and because he didn’t wait for an introduction.

“Fine morning,” I remarked pleasantly. “Wonderful view from this terrace, isn’t it? And the sunshine is very warm and cheering.”

“Pretty fair,” he assented gloomily; “pretty fair for this place. But in the part of the world I come from fine mornings and wonderful views and sunshine are so darned common that it never occurs to us to mention them.”

“Where is your home, may I ask?” I inquired, for want of anything better to say.

“In the Santa Clara Valley of California,” he answered proudly. “God’s favourite country, sir! He took more pains with it than any place he ever made, not even barring the original Eden. This is a very pleasing little view, I admit; a very pleasing one, but I wish I could take you up on the slopes of Mount Hamilton just before sunset and let you look across the valley to Los Gatos when the prune orchards are in blossom. As for the climate, why, say, my friend——”

“Yes, yes, I know,” I said soothingly, for when a man gets a lump in his throat while talking about his native land it’s time to change the topic of conversation. “I know; I’ve heard all about it before. Fact is, I’m on my way there now.”

“You _are_?” he exclaimed incredulously, and, leaning back in his chair, he clapped his hands until the Arab waiter came running. “Garsong,” said he, “bring us a bottle of the best wine you’ve got.” When the amber fluid was level with the rims we touched our glasses:

“It’s poor stuff compared with the wine we make in California,” he said, “but it’ll do to drink a toast in.” He stood up, bareheaded and very straight, as British officers do when they drink to the king.

“Friend,” said he, and his voice was husky, “here’s to God’s favourite valley—here’s to the Santa Clara.”

* * * * *

If you go to the Santa Clara when I did, which was in March, when the unfortunates who live beyond the Sierra Nevada are still waking up to find ice in their water-pitchers, you will find that the people of the valley are celebrating the Feast of the Blossoms. It is a very beautiful festival, in which every man, woman, and child in this fifty-mile-long garden of fruit and flowers takes part, but you cannot appreciate its true significance until you have climbed to a point on the slopes of the mountains which form the garden wall, where the whole enchanting panorama lies before you. Did you ever see one hundred and twenty-five square miles of trees in snow-white blossom at one time? No, of course not, for nowhere else in all the world can such a sight be seen. I, who have listened to the voice of spring on five continents and in more than five-score countries, assure you that it is worth the seeing.

Personally, I shall always think of the Santa Clara as a sleeping maiden, fragrant with perfume and intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven bed formed by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtained by fleecy clouds, her coverlet of eiderdown tinted with rose, quilted with green, edged with yellow; her pillow the sun-kissed waters of San Francisco Bay. When you come closer, however, you find that the coverlet which conceals her gracious form is in reality an expanse of fragrant blossoms; that the green tufts are the live-oaks which rise at intervals above the orchards of cherry, peach, and prune; and that the yellow edging is the California poppies which clothe the encircling hills.

Sentimentally and commercially it is fitting that the people of the Santa Clara Valley should celebrate the coming of the blossoms, for they are at once its chief beauty and its chief wealth. In a single season these white and fragrant blossoms have provided the breakfast tables of the world with one hundred and thirty million pounds of prunes, to say nothing of those luscious pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots which beckon temptingly from grocers’ windows and hotel buffets from Salt Lake City around to Shanghai. No other single fruit of any region, not even the fig of Smyrna, the date of Tunis, the olive of Spain, or the currant of Greece, is so widely distributed as the prune of the Santa Clara Valley. The people of the valley will assure you very earnestly that the reason their wives and daughters have such lovely complexions is because they make it a point to eat prunes every morning for breakfast. Whether due to the prunes or not, I can vouch for the complexions.

Barring the coast of Tripolitania, where it is harvest time all the year round, but where the Arabs are offering no inducements to settlers, and the Imperial Valley, whose summer heat makes it undesirable as a place of permanent residence, the Santa Clara Valley has more crops, through more months of the year, than any place I know. Ceres makes her annual appearance in February with artichokes—the ones that are priced at a dollar a portion on the menus of New York’s fashionable hotels; in March the people of the valley are having spring peas with their lamb chops; April brings strawberries, although, as a matter of fact, they are to be had almost every month of the year; in May the cherry pickers are at work; the local churches hold peaches-and-cream sociables in June; by the ides of July the valley roads are alive with teams hauling cases of pears, plums, and apricots to the railway stations; August, being the month of prunes, is marked with red on the Santa Clara calendars; September finds the presses working overtime turning grapes into wine, and the prohibitionists likewise working overtime trying to turn “wet” communities into “dry” ones; in October the men are at work in the orchards picking apples and the women are at work in the kitchens baking apple pies; the huge English walnuts which wind up dinners half the world around are harvested in November; while in December and January the prodigal goddess interrupts her bounty just long enough to let the fortunate worshippers at her shrine observe the midwinter holidays. After such a recital it is almost needless to add that the valley boasts both the largest fruit-drying houses and the largest fruit canneries in the world, for in the Santa Clara they dry what they can and can what they can’t.

The _chef-lieu_ of the valley is San José. It may interest Easterners to know that Don Caspar de Portola and his men, marching up from the south in their search for the lost Bay of Monterey, had looked down from the valley’s mountain rim upon the spot where the city now stands four years before the Boston Tea Party; while that indomitable Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra, had established the great Mission San José, and was hard at work Christianising and teaching the Indians of this region before the ink was fairly dry on the Declaration of Independence and while the three thousand miles of country which lies between the valley of the Santa Clara and the valley of the Connecticut was still an unexplored wilderness. The last time that the gentlemen with the census books knocked at San José’s front doors they reported that the city had forty thousand people, and it keeps agrowing and agrowing. It has about four times as many stores as any place of its size that I can recall, but that is because the local merchants depend on the trade of the rural rather than the urban population, for the hardy frontiersmen who rough it in this portion of the West run in to do their shopping by automobile or trolley-car or else give their orders over the telephone. There are two things about the city which I shall remember. One is the street-cars, which have open decks forward and aft, with seats running along them lengthwise, on which the passengers sit with their feet hanging over the side, as though on an Irish jaunting-car. In pleasant weather the display of ankles on the street-car makes them look, from the sidewalks, like moving hosiery advertisements. The other municipal feature which riveted my attention was a sort of attenuated Eiffel Tower, sliced off about half-way up, which straddles the two main streets of the city at their intersection, and from the top of which a powerful search-light signals to the traveller on the valley highroads, to the shepherd on the mountains, to the fisherman on San Francisco Bay: “Here is San José.”

If there is anywhere a royal road to learning, it is the fifty-mile-long one which meanders up the Santa Clara Valley, for there are more schoolhouses scattered along it than there are milestones, and they’re not the little red schoolhouses of which our grandfathers brag, either. Every time our motor-car swung around the corner of a prune orchard we were pretty certain to find a schoolhouse of concrete, usually in the overworked mission style of architecture, with roses and honeysuckle and wistaria clambering over the door. The youngster who wants to travel the royal road to knowledge can commence his journey in one of the concrete schoolhouses at Gilroy, which is at the southern portal of the valley; the second stage will take him up to the great high school at San José, which is so extensive and handsome and completely equipped that it would make certain famous Eastern colleges feel shamefaced and embarrassed; the final stage along this intellectual highway is only eighteen miles in length and ends at Palo Alto, amid whose live-oaks rise the yellow towers and red-tiled roofs of that great university which Leland Stanford, statesman and railway builder, founded in memory of the son he lost, and which he endowed with the whole of his enormous fortune. He gave the eight thousand acres of his famous stock-farm for the purpose, and to-day white-gowned “co-eds” wander, book in hand, where the paddocks once stood, and spike-shod sprinters dash down the track, where the great mare Sunol used to put close on half a mile a minute behind her spinning sulky wheels. It is one of the great universities of the world, is Leland Stanford, Jr., and, with its cloistered quadrangles, its wonderful mosaic façades, and its semitropical surroundings, certainly one of the most beautiful. It stands, fittingly enough, at the valley’s northern gateway and at the end, both literally and metaphorically, of the royal road to learning; so that the valley-bred youth who passes through its doors with his sheepskin in his pocket finds himself on the threshold of that great outside world for which, without leaving his native valley, he has been admirably prepared.

Speaking of roads, they have built one running the length of the State and, therefore, of the Santa Clara Valley, which would cause Mr. John MacAdam, were he still in the land of the living, to lift his hat in admiration. It is really a restoration of El Camino Real, that historic highway which the Spanish conquistadores built, close on a century and a half ago, for the purpose of linking up the one-and-twenty missions which the indefatigable Padre Serra flung the length of California as outposts of the church, and which did more to open up the Pacific Coast to civilisation and colonisation and commerce than any undertaking save the construction of the Southern Pacific. Were this highway in the East I am perfectly sure that they would cheapen it by calling it the Shore Road or the State Pike, but it speaks well for California’s appreciation of the picturesque and the appropriate that she has decided to cling to the historic name of El Camino Real—the Royal Road—the King’s Highway.

Although the Santa Clara Valley, properly speaking, ends at Palo Alto, the ultrafashionable colonies of Burlingame, San Mateo, and Hillsboro may, for the purposes of this chapter, at least, be considered as within its compass. These are to the Pacific Coast what Lenox and Tuxedo are to the Eastern world of fashion: places where the rich dwell in great country houses set far back in splendid parks, with none but their fellow millionaires for neighbours and with every convenience for sport close at hand. Full of colour and animation are the scenes at their ivy-covered stations when the afternoon trains from San Francisco pull in; for here, at least, the motor-car has not ousted the horse from his old-time popularity, and the gravelled driveways are alive with tandem carts and runabouts and spider phaetons, with smart grooms in whipcord liveries and leather gaiters standing rigidly at the heads of the horses. Probably the finest examples of architecture in California are to be seen in the neighbourhood of Burlingame and San Mateo, the only other communities which can rival them in this respect being Montecito, near Santa Barbara, Oak Knoll, outside of Pasadena, and Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles.

The East and, for that matter, all of the rest of America owe California a debt of gratitude for her development of a native domestic architecture. The first true homes for folk of real culture but moderate incomes were produced on the Pacific Coast. In the type of house that abounds to-day in California comfort, tradition, and art have been skilfully and interestingly combined. Based on the old missions, which in their turn drew inspiration from the ideals of the Spaniard and the Moor, modern Californian architecture has nevertheless made servants, not masters, of those traditions. Though drawing from the romantic background of the conquistadores and the _padres_ the sturdy spirit, the simple lines, and the practical details of the old frontier buildings, the main virtue of these Californian homes is that they possess a definite relation to the soil and climate and the habits of the people. But, though back of each design lurks the motive of the Spanish missions, there is no monotony, no sameness; but, on the contrary, a remarkable variety of design. Each possesses the characteristic features of the Californian home: the low, wide-spreading roof lines, the solid walls, generally of concrete or plaster, the frank use of structural beams, the luxurious spaces of veranda and balcony, the tiled terraces and pottery roofs, the cool, inviting patios, and the quiet loveliness of the interiors. It is true, of course, that many house-builders have been unable to resist the temptation of Colonial, Norman, Dutch, and Tudor, but, as their culture increases, Californians are fast realising that an architecture designed for inhospitable climates is utterly incongruous in California’s semitropical surroundings.

It rained one of the days that I spent in San José, and my genial host was so apologetic about it that I actually felt sorry for him. Though rain is seldom unwelcome in a horticultural country, the residents don’t like to have it come down in bucketfuls when visitors whom they are anxious to impress with the perfection of their climate are around. They are as proud of their climate in the Santa Clara Valley as a boy is of “his first long pants,” and to back up their boasts the residents carry in their pockets the blue slips of the Government Weather Bureau’s monthly reports to show the stranger. I’m not fond of figures, unless they happen to be on cheques drawn in my favour, but I was impressed by the fact, nevertheless, that in 1913 the valley had only fifty-eight cloudy days, sixty-four which were overcast, and two hundred and thirty-four in which there was not a cloud to dim the turquoise of the sky. Carrying my investigations a little further, I found that during the greater part of February, which is the coldest month of the year, the mercury remained above 55, only four times dropping as low as 33, while there were only four days in August when the thermometer needle crept up to 79, and once in the same month it fell as low as 42, thus giving a solar-plexus blow to the idea stubbornly held by most Easterners that in summer California is an anteroom to Hades.

To this unvarying geniality of the climate and to the careless, happy-go-lucky, pleasure-loving strain handed down from the Spanish and Argonaut pioneers are due the invincible gaiety and the passionate love for the out-of-doors which are among the most likeable characteristics of the Californians. One of the first things that strikes an Eastern visitor is the fact that the Californians can always find time for amusement, and they enter into those amusements with the enthusiasm and the whole-souled gaiety of children. On the Pacific Coast recreation is considered quite as important as business—and business does not suffer, either. There is about these Californian merrymakings an abandon, a joyousness, a childlike freedom from restraint which is in striking contrast to the restrained, self-conscious pleasures of the older, colder East. To the colourful _fiestas_ of the Spanish and Mexican eras may be traced the out-of-door festivities which play so large a part in the life of the people on the Pacific Coast, such as the midwinter Tournament of Roses at Pasadena, the Portola Festival with which the San Franciscans celebrate the discovery of San Francisco Bay, the Feast of the Blossoms held each spring in the Santa Clara Valley, the Battle of Flowers which, until very recently, was a feature of life at Santa Barbara, but which, for some unexplainable reason, has been abandoned, the Rose Festival at Portland, the Potlatch at Seattle. Under much the same category are the classic plays given in the wonderful Greek Theatre at the University of California, the sylvan masks produced by the colony of authors and artists at Carmel-by-the-Sea, and the Bohemian Club’s celebrated Grove Play.

No account of Californian festivals is in any way complete without at least a brief description of the last named, which is characterised by a beauty of production and a dignity of treatment that make it in many respects an American Bayreuth. For forty years the Bohemian Club of San Francisco has gone into the California redwoods each summer for a fortnight’s outing. This famous club, founded in 1872 by a coterie of actors, newspaper men, and artists, now has a membership of upward of thirteen hundred, representing all that is best in the art, music, literature, drama, and science of the West. No one may become a member who has not achieved a distinction of sorts in one of these fields, the anticommercial spirit which animates the club being aptly expressed by the quotation at the top of its note-paper: “Weaving spiders come not here.” The Bohemian Grove, which consists of about three hundred acres of forest and contains some of the finest redwood giants in California, stands on the banks of the Russian River, ninety miles to the north of San Francisco. The stately redwoods stand in a gentle ravine whose floor and slopes in the rainless midsummer are bright with the canvas of the club encampment, which resembles a sort of sylvan Durbar; for the camps, many of which are elaborately arranged and furnished, are made of canvas in the gayest colours—scarlet and white, green and white, blue and yellow—with flags and banners and gorgeous Oriental lanterns everywhere. Here, during the first two weeks in every August, congregate close on a thousand men who have done things—authors of “best sellers,” builders of bridges and dams and lighthouses and aqueducts, painters whose pictures hang on the line at the Paris Salon or on the walls of the Luxembourg, composers of famous operas, writers of plays which have made a hit on Broadway, presidents of transcontinental railway systems, celebrated singers, men who have penetrated to the remotest corners of the earth—wearing the dress of the woods, calling each other “Bill” or “Jim” or “Harry” as the case may be, and becoming, for the time being, boys once more. A steep side of the ravine forms the “back-drop” of the forest stage, the spectators—no woman has ever taken part in the play or witnessed an original performance—sitting on redwood logs under the stars. The Grove Play is an evolution from a simpler programme, which was originally known as “High Jinks.” It is now a serious composition, with music, largely symbolical in character, created entirely by members of the club, in which many artists of international fame have taken part, always in the amateur spirit.

But to return to our Valley of the Santa Clara. In the Panhandle of Texas a ranch usually means anywhere from five thousand acres upward of uncultivated land; in the Santa Clara a ranch means anywhere from five acres upward of the most highly cultivated soil in the world. East of the Sierra Nevada, where scientific fertilisation and intensive cultivation are still wearing short dresses, five acres are scarcely worth considering, but five acres in California, properly planted and cared for, ofttimes supports a family in something akin to luxury. I had pointed out to me in the Santa Clara Valley at least a score of small holdings which yield their owners annually in the neighbourhood of five hundred dollars an acre. All of these hardy pioneers have telephones and electric lights and electric power for pumping and daily newspaper and mail deliveries. When they have any business in town, instead of going down to the corral and roping a bronco, they either stroll through the orchard and hail an electric car or they crank up the family automobile.

While I was in the Santa Clara Valley I asked a number of those questions to which every prospective home seeker wants to know the answers. I found that improved land, planted to prune, apricot, or peach trees old enough to bear, can be had all the way from four hundred to seven hundred dollars an acre, according to its location. At a conservative estimate this land, so I was told by a banker whose business it is to lend money on it (and you can trust a banker for never being oversanguine), can be depended upon to yield an income of from one hundred to three hundred dollars an acre, it being by no means an unusual thing for a well-managed ranch to pay for itself in two or three years. I found that a ten-acre orchard—which is quite large enough for one man to handle—could be had for five thousand dollars, the purchaser paying, say, two thousand dollars down and carrying the balance on a mortgage at seven per cent, which is the legal rate of interest in California. The local building and loan associations would lend him two thousand dollars to build with, which he could repay, at the rate of twenty-four dollars a month, in ten years. Two thousand dollars, I might add, will build an extremely attractive and comfortable six-room bungalow, for the two chief sources of expense to the Eastern home builder—cellars and furnaces—are not necessary in California. Such a place, provided its owner has horse sense, is not afraid of work, and knows good advice when he hears it, should yield from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a year, in addition to which the whole family can find ready employment, at excellent wages, in the orchards or packing-houses during the fruit season. For this work a man receives from two dollars to two dollars and a half a day and can count on fairly steady employment through at least eight months of the year, while many women and girls, whose deft fingers make them particularly valuable in the work of wrapping and packing the finer grades of fruit, can earn as high as twenty dollars a week during the busy season. This work, I might add, attracts an altogether exceptional class of people, for university and high-school students and the wives and daughters of small ranchers eagerly avail themselves of this opportunity to add to their incomes, the fruit orchards, during the picking season, looking less like a hive of workers than like a gigantic picnic among the shaded orchard rows, in which the whole countryside is taking part.

The air in the Santa Clara Valley is said to be the clearest in the world, though they tell you exactly the same thing at Colorado Springs, and in the Grand Cañon of Arizona, and at Las Vegas, N. Mex. The Santa Clara air is clear enough, however, for all practical purposes. In fact, its extraordinary clarity sometimes lends itself to extraordinary uses. I have a friend whose residence is set on a hillside high on the valley’s eastern rim. One day, idly scanning the distant landscape through his field-glasses, he noted that the field hands employed on the ranch of a neighbour on the opposite hillside, twenty odd miles away, knowing that they could not be observed by their employer, were loafing in the shade instead of working. My friend called up his neighbour by telephone and told him that his men were soldiering, whereupon that gentleman rode up the hillside and gave his astonished employees such a tongue-lashing that when the six-o’clock whistle blew that night they had blisters on their hands.

Lack of labour is one of the most serious problems with which the fruit-growers of California have had to contend, though it is believed that this will be remedied, in some measure at least, by the flood of European immigration which will pour through the Panama Canal. Twenty years ago the labour problem was solved by the Chinaman, who was the most industrious and dependable labourer California has ever had, but with the agitation which resulted in closing our doors to the Celestial most of the Chinese in California entered domestic service and now command such high wages—fifty dollars a month is the average wage of a Chinese house boy or cook—that only the well-to-do can afford to employ them. Time and again I have heard clear-headed Californians of all classes assert that the admission, under certain restrictions, of a hundred thousand selected Chinese would prove an unqualified blessing for California. The relentless war waged by California—or, rather, by the labour element of California—against the admission of Chinese immigrants was based on the difference in the standard of living. The yellow man could live in something very akin to luxury on about a tenth of the ration required for a white man’s support. In other words, the Chinaman could outstarve the white man; therefore the Chinaman must go. And there has never been any one to take his place.

Outside of the Pacific Coast the impression seems to prevail that the Chinaman’s place has been taken by the Japanese. This is not so. To begin with, Japanese labour is not cheap labour. The Japanese do not work for less pay than white men, unless it be temporarily, so as to obtain the white man’s job. Japanese house cleaners and gardeners demand and receive a minimum wage of thirty-five cents an hour, and in California, where most people of modest means are compelled to do their own housework because of the scarcity of and exorbitant wages demanded by domestic servants, housewives are thankful to get Japanese by the day at any price. Their standard of living is as high as that of other nationalities; much higher, in fact, than that of peoples from southern Europe. There is no pauperism among them and astonishingly little crime. They dress well, eat well, spend money lavishly for entertainment. But the Jap, unlike the Chinaman, “talks back.” He is not in the least impressed by the American’s claim of racial superiority. In fact, he considers himself very much better than the white man and, if the opportunity presents itself, does not hesitate to say so. He is patronising instead of patronised. He has proved that he is the white man’s equal in every line of industry and in some his superior. Three times in succession a Japanese grower has virtually cornered the potato crop of the Pacific Coast. The Japanese has driven the Greek and the Portuguese out of the fishing industry, in which they believed that they were impregnably intrenched. As a result of these things he steps off the sidewalk for no one. He knows that back of him stands a great empire, with a powerful fleet and one of the most efficient armies in existence, and he takes no pains to disguise this knowledge in his relations with the white man.

To tell the truth, the prohibition of land ownership, the segregation of school children are but pretexts put forward by a jealous and resentful white population to teach the yellow man his place. The assertion that Japanese ownership of land is a menace to white domination is the veriest nonsense, and every Californian knows it. There are ninety-nine million acres in California and of this area the Japanese own or lease barely thirty thousand acres, or _twelve hundredths of one per cent_. The fifty-eight thousand Japanese in California form but two and one half per cent of the total population. These figures, which are authoritative, are not very menacing, are they? The bulk of the Japanese reside in Los Angeles County and in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, where they work gigantic potato fields and truck-gardens and asparagus beds. Now, Los Angeles, mind you, has never demanded Japanese exclusion. Protests poured into Sacramento from the white settlers of the delta country against the passage of the anti-alien land laws. Why, then, you ask, does the entire Pacific Coast, including British Columbia, exhibit such intense dislike for the Jap? Because, as I have said, he has shown that he can beat the white man at his own game; because he is not in the least meek and humble as befits an alien and “inferior” race; because he believes in his heart that in an armed conflict Nippon could whip the United States as thoroughly as she whipped China and Russia; because, as a result of this belief, he perpetually swaggers about with his hat cocked on one side and a chip perched invitingly on his shoulder; because, in short, his very manner is a constant irritation to the Californians. And until the status of the Japanese upon the Pacific Coast is definitely and finally established by international treaty this irritation may be expected to continue and to increase.

* * * * *

I wonder if sometimes, at that sunset hour when the lengthening shadows of the hills fall athwart the blossoming orchards, there do not wander through the Santa Clara those whom the eyes of mortals cannot see—Portola, swart of face under his steel cap, come back to feast his eyes once more, from the top of yonder hill, on that fertile valley which he was the first white man to see; Father Serra, mild-mannered and gentle-voiced, trudging the dusty highroad in his sandals and woollen robe, pausing to kneel in prayer as the bells boom out the Angelus from that mission which he founded; Captain Jedediah Smith, the first of the pathfinders, a strange and romantic figure in his garb of fringed buckskin, leaning on his long rifle as he looks down on the homesteads of the thousands who followed by the trail he blazed across the ranges; Stanford, who linked the oceans with twin lines of steel, pacing the campus of that great seat of learning which he conceived and built—guardian spirits, all, of that valley for which they did so much and which they loved so well.

VIII

THE MODERN ARGONAUTS

“For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,
Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;
It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,
And you feel that you could follow it to hell.
You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;
You’d follow it in solitude and pain;
And when you’re stiff and battened down let some one whisper ‘Gold,’
You’re lief to rise and follow it again.”

VIII

THE MODERN ARGONAUTS

I once knew an Englishman and his wife who were possessed with a mania for things Egyptian. Some people were unkind enough to say that they were “dotty” on the subject, but that was an exaggeration. They knew all there was to know about Egyptian customs from the days of Amenhotep to those of Abbas Hilmi; they had delved in the sand-smothered ruins across the river from Luxor; they could converse as fluently in the degraded patois of the native coffee-houses as in the classic Arabic spoken at the University of El Azhar. Their chief regret in life was that they had not been born Egyptians. Their names were—but never mind; it is enough to say that they had coronets on their visiting cards and owned more fertile acres in Devonshire than an absentee landlord has any right to possess. Whenever they came to Cairo, which they did regularly at the beginning of the cold weather, they could never be induced to take the comfortable motor-bus which the management of Shepheard’s Hotel thoughtfully provides for its guests—at ten piastres the trip. Instead, they would wire ahead to have a couple of camels meet them at the station, and, perched atop of these ungainly and uncomfortable beasts, would amble down the Sharia Kamel, which is the Fifth Avenue of Cairo, and dismount with great pomp and ceremony in front of their hotel to the delectation of the tourists assembled upon its terrace. I once asked them why they chose this outlandish mode of conveyance when there were a score or so of perfectly good taxicabs whose vociferously importunate drivers were only awaiting a signal to push down their little red flags and set their taximeters whirring.

“Well, it’s this way,” was the answer. “We’re jolly fond of everything Egyptian, y’ know. Sort of steeped ourselves, as you might say, in the country’s history and politics and customs and language and all that sort of thing. This city is so romantic and picturesque that a motor-car seems to be inappropriate and unfitting—like wearing a top hat in the country, y’ know. So we always have the camels meet us—yes. All bally nonsense, I suppose, but it sort of keeps us in the spirit of the place—makes us feel as though we were living in the good old days before the tourist Johnnies came and spoiled it all. Same idea that Vanderbilt has in driving his coach from London down to Brighton. You can make the trip by train in half the time and for half the money and much more comfortably, but you lose the spirit of the old coaching days—the atmosphere, as the painter fellows call it. Rum sort of an idea to use camels instead of taxis, perhaps, but we like it and that’s the chief thing after all, isn’t it? What?”

That was precisely the frame of mind which caused us to disregard the one hundred and twenty-five miles of oiled highway which reaches, like a strip of hotel linoleum, from San Francisco to the Californian capital, and load ourselves, together with our six-cylindered Pegasus, aboard the stern-wheel river boat which leaves the Pacific Street wharf for Sacramento at half past eight on every week-day morning. That section of our Mexico-to-Alaska journey which lay immediately before us, you must understand, led through a region which is indelibly associated with “the days of old, the days of gold, the days of ’Forty-Nine,” and to storm through it in a prosaic, panting motor-car seemed to us as incompatible with the spirit of romance which enshrouds it as it would to race through the canals of Venice in a gasoline launch. Feeling as we did about it, the consistent thing, I suppose, would have been to have hired a creaking prairie-schooner and plodded overland to the mines in true emigrant fashion, but as the few prairie-schooners still extant in California have fallen into the hands of the moving-picture concerns, who work them overtime, we compromised by journeying up to the gold country by river boat, just as the Argonauts who came round the Horn to San Francisco were wont to do.