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Title: By motor to the Golden Gate
Author: Emily Post
Release date: June 6, 2024 [eBook #73784]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: D. Appleton, 1916
Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BY MOTOR TO THE GOLDEN GATE ***
BY MOTOR TO THE GOLDEN GATE
[Illustration: THE PACIFIC AT LAST!]
BY MOTOR
_to the_
GOLDEN GATE
BY
EMILY POST
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATED WITH
PHOTOGRAPHS _and_ ROAD MAPS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY P. F. COLLIER & SON, INC.
Printed in the United States of America
TO
MY YOUNGER SON
BRUCE
PREFACE
“Qui s’excuse s’accuse.” Which, I suppose, proves this a defence to start
with! But having been a few times accused, there are a few explanations I
want very much to make.
When this cross-continent story was first suggested, it seemed the
simplest sort of thing to undertake. All that was necessary was to put
down experiences as they actually occurred. No imagination, or plot
or characterization—could anything be easier? But when the serial was
published and letters began coming in, it became unhappily evident
that writing fact must be one of the most unattainably difficult
accomplishments in the world.
In the first place, only those who, having lived long in a particular
locality and knowing it in all its varying seasons, are qualified truly
to present its picture. The observations of a transient tourist are
necessarily superficial, as of one whose experiences are merely a series
of instantaneous impressions; at one time colored perhaps too vividly, at
another fogged; according to the sun or rain at one brief moment of time.
It would be very pleasant to write nothing but eulogies of people and
places, but after all if a personal narrative were written like an
advertisement, praising everything, there would be no point in praising
anything, would there?
Compared with crossing the plains in the fifties, the worst stretch
of our most uninhabited country is today the easiest road imaginable.
There are no longer any dangers, any insurmountable difficulties. To the
rugged sons of the original pioneers, comments upon “poor roads”—that are
perfectly defined and traveled-over highways—or “poor hotels”—where you
can get not only a room to yourself, but steam heat, electric light, and
generally a private bath—must seem an irritatingly squeamish attitude.
“Poor soft weaklings” is probably not far from what they think of people
with such a point of view.
On the other hand if I, who after all _am_ a New Yorker, were to
pronounce the Jackson House perfect, the City of Minesburg beautiful, the
Trailing Highway splendid, everyone would naturally suppose the Jackson
House a Ritz, Minesburg an upper Fifth Avenue, and the Trailing Highway a
duplicate of our own state roads, to say the least!
I am more than sorry if I offend anyone—it is the last thing I mean to
do—at the same time I think it best to let the story stand as it was
written; taking nothing back that seems to me true, but acknowledging
very humbly at the outset, that after all mine is only _one_ out of a
possible fifty million other American opinions.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IT CAN’T BE DONE—BUT THEN, IT IS PERFECTLY SIMPLE 1
II. ALBANY, FIRST STOP 15
III. A BREAKDOWN 18
IV. PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO AND INDIANA 23
V. LUGGAGE AND OTHER LUXURIES 37
VI. DID ANYBODY SAY “CHICKEN”? 41
VII. THE CITY OF AMBITION 46
VIII. A FEW CHICAGOANS 52
IX. TINS 60
X. MUD!! 67
XI. IN ROCHELLE 72
XII. THE WEIGHT OF PUBLIC OPINION 75
XIII. MUDDIER! 79
XIV. ONE OF THE FOGGED IMPRESSIONS 86
XV. A FEW WAYS OF THE WEST 90
XVI. HALFWAY HOUSE 99
XVII. NEXT STOP, NORTH PLATTE! 107
XVIII. THE CITY OF RECKLESSNESS 119
XIX. A GLIMPSE OF THE WEST THAT WAS 135
XX. OUR LITTLE SISTER OF YESTERDAY 150
XXI. IGNORANCE WITH A CAPITAL I 155
XXII. SOME INDIANS AND MR. X 159
XXIII. WITH NOWHERE TO GO BUT OUT 172
XXIV. INTO THE DESERT 175
XXV. THROUGH THE CITY UNPRONOUNCEABLE TO AN EXPOSITION
BEAUTIFUL 187
XXVI. THE LAND OF GLADNESS 198
XXVII. THE METTLE OF A HERO 205
XXVIII. SAN FRANCISCO 211
XXIX. THE FAIR 229
XXX. “UNENDING SAMENESS” WAS WHAT THEY SAID 237
XXXI. TO THOSE WHO THINK OF FOLLOWING IN OUR TIRE
TRACKS—TO THE MAN WHO DRIVES 241
XXXII. ON THE SUBJECT OF CLOTHES—FOOD
EQUIPMENT—EXPENSES—DAILY EXPENSE ACCOUNT 251
XXXIII. HOW FAR CAN YOU GO IN COMFORT?—SOME DAY 278
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Pacific at last! _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
What we finally carried 8
Stowing the luggage 12
Leaving Gramercy Park, New York 16
Still in New York State 20
The crowd in less than a minute. “Out of the window”
in Cleveland 34
One of the exciting things in motoring is wondering what
sort of a hotel you will arrive at for the night 44
Hours and hours, across land as flat and endless as the
ocean 84
A bedroom in the Union Pacific Hotel, North Platte—not
much of a hardship, is it? 108
A straight, wide road; not even a shack in sight—and
a speed limit of twenty miles an hour 112
Wyoming in the ranch country 116
Cripple Creek 120
In the Garden of the Gods 124
Colorado. Pike’s Peak in the distance 128
First cowboys and cattle 132
Halfway across a thrilling ford, wide and deep, on the
Huerfano River 136
A glimpse of the West of yesterday 140
Your route leads through many Mexican and Indian villages 148
The Indian pueblo of Taos 160
To see the sleeping beauty of the Southwest, the path
is by no means a smooth one to the motorist 170
Across the real desert 180
Our chauffeur takes a day off at the Grand Canyon of
the Colorado 184
This is not a gallery in a Spanish palace, but a
gallery in the Mission Inn at Riverside, California 188
In a California garden 192
Under Santa Barbara skies 196
Ostrich Rock, Monterey, California 200
On the seventeen-mile drive at Monterey 208
On a beautiful ocean road of California 216
The portico of a California house 226
Sometimes we struck a bad road 244
In order to cross here, E. M. built a bridge with the
logs at the right 248
On the famous “staked plains” of the Southwest 254
BY MOTOR TO THE GOLDEN GATE
CHAPTER I
IT CAN’T BE DONE—BUT THEN, IT IS PERFECTLY SIMPLE
“Of course you are sending your servants ahead by train with your luggage
and all that sort of thing,” said an Englishman.
A New York banker answered for me: “Not at all! The best thing is to put
them in another machine directly behind, with a good mechanic. Then if
you break down the man in the rear and your own chauffeur can get you to
rights in no time. How about your chauffeur? You are sure he is a good
one?”
“We are not taking one, nor servants, nor mechanic, either.”
“Surely you and your son are not thinking of going alone! Probably he
could drive, but who is going to take care of the car?”
“Why, he is!”
At that everyone interrupted at once. One thought we were insane to
attempt such a trip; another that it was a “corking” thing to do. The
majority looked upon our undertaking with typical New York apathy. “Why
do anything so dreary?” If we wanted to see the expositions, then let us
take the fastest train, with plenty of books so as to read through as
much of the way as possible. Only one, Mr. B., was enthusiastic enough
to wish he was going with us. Evidently, though, he thought it a daring
adventure, for he suggested an equipment for us that sounded like a
relief expedition: a block and tackle, a revolver, a pickaxe and shovel,
tinned food—he forgot nothing but the pemmican! However, someone else
thought of hardtack, after which a chorus of voices proposed that we stay
quietly at home!
“They’ll never get there!” said the banker, with a successful man’s
finality of tone. “Unless I am mistaken, they’ll be on a Pullman inside
of ten days!”
“Oh, you _wouldn’t_ do that, would you?” exclaimed our one enthusiastic
friend, B.
I hoped not, but I was not sure; for, although I had promised an editor
to write the story of our experience, if we had any, we were going solely
for pleasure, which to us meant a certain degree of comfort, and not to
advertise the endurance of a special make of car or tires. Nor had we
any intention of trying to prove that motoring in America was delightful
if we should find it was not. As for breaking speed records—that was the
last thing we wanted to attempt!
“Whatever put it into your head to undertake such a trip?” someone asked
in the first pause.
“The advertisements!” I answered promptly. They were all so optimistic,
that they went to my head. “New York to San Francisco in an X— car for
thirty-eight dollars!” We were not going in an X— car, but the thought of
any machine’s running such a distance at such a price immediately lowered
the expenditure allowance for our own. “Cheapest way to go to the coast!”
agreed another folder. “Travel luxuriously in your own car from your own
front door over the world’s greatest highway to the Pacific Shore.” Could
any motor enthusiasts resist such suggestions? We couldn’t.
We had driven across Europe again and again. In fact I had in 1898 gone
from the Baltic to the Adriatic in one of the few first motor-cars
ever sold to a private individual. We knew European scenery, roads,
stopping-places, by heart. We had been to all the resorts that were
famous, and a few that were infamous, but our own land, except for the
few chapter headings that might be read from the windows of a Pullman
train, was an unopened book—one that we also found difficulty in opening.
The idea of going occurred to us on Tuesday and on Saturday we were
to start, yet we had no information on the most important question of
all—which route was the best to take. And we had no idea how to find out!
The 1914 Blue Book was out of print, and the new one for this year not
issued. I went to various information bureaus—some of those whose
advertisements had sounded so encouraging—but their personal answers
were more optimistic than definite. Then a friend telegraphed for me
to the Lincoln Highway Commission asking if road conditions and hotel
accommodations were such that a lady who did not want in any sense to
“rough it” could motor from New York to California comfortably.
We wasted a whole precious thirty-six hours waiting for this answer. When
it came, a slim typewritten enclosure helpfully informed us that a Mrs.
Somebody of Brooklyn had gone over the route fourteen months previously
and had written them many glowing letters about it. As even the most
optimistic prospectus admitted that in 1914 the road was as yet not a
road, and hotels along the sparsely settled districts had not been built,
it was evident that Mrs. Somebody’s idea of a perfect motor trip was
independent of roads or stopping-places.
Meanwhile I had been told that the best information was to be had at the
touring department of the Automobile Club. So I went there.
A very polite young man was answering questions with a facility
altogether fascinating. He told one man about shipping his car—even the
hours at which the freight trains departed. To a second he gave advice
about a suit for damages; for a third he reduced New York’s traffic
complications to simplicities in less than a minute; then it was my turn:
“I would like to know the best route to San Francisco.”
“Certainly,” he said. “Will you take a seat over here for a moment?”
“This is the simplest thing in the world,” I thought, and opened my
notebook to write down a list of towns and hotels and road directions. He
returned with a stack of folders. But as I eagerly scanned them, I found
they were all familiarly Eastern.
“Unfortunately,” he said suavely, “we have not all our information yet,
and we seem to be out of our Western maps! But I can recommend some very
delightful tours through New England and the Berkshires.”
“That is very interesting, but I am going to San Francisco.”
His attention was fixed upon a map of the “Ideal Tour.” “The New England
roads are very much better,” he said.
“But, you see, San Francisco is where I am going. Do you know which route
is, if you prefer it, the least bad?”
“Oh, I see.” He looked sorry. “Of course if you _must_ cross the
continent, there is the Lincoln Highway!”
“Can you tell me how much work has been done on it—how much of it is
finished? Might it not be better on account of the early season to take a
Southern route? Isn’t there a road called the Santa Fé trail?”
“Why, yes, certainly,” said the nice young man. “The road goes through
Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona. It would be warmer assuredly.”
“How about the Arizona desert? Can we get across that?”
“That _is_ the question!”
“Perhaps we had better just start out and ask the people living along the
road which is the best way farther on?”
The young man brightened at once. “That would have been my suggestion
from the beginning.”
Once outside, however, the feasibility of asking our road as we came to
it did not seem very practical, so I went to Brentano’s to buy some maps.
They showed me a large one of the United States with four routes crossing
it, equally black and straight and inviting. I promptly decided upon the
one through the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh and St. Louis when
two women I knew came in, one of them Mrs. O., a conspicuous hostess in
the New York social world, and a Californian by birth. “The very person
I need,” I thought. “She knows the country thoroughly and her idea of
comfort and mine would be the same.”
“Can you tell me,” I asked her, “which is the best road to California?”
Without hesitating she answered: “The Union Pacific.”
“No, I mean motor road.”
Compared with her expression the worst skeptics I had encountered were
enthusiasts. “Motor road to California!” She looked at me pityingly.
“There isn’t any.”
“Nonsense! There are four beautiful ones and if you read the accounts of
those who have crossed them you will find it impossible to make a choice
of the beauties and comforts of each.”
She looked steadily into my face as though to force calmness to my poor
deluded mind. “You!” she said. “A woman like you to undertake such a
trip! Why, you couldn’t live through it! I have crossed the continent one
hundred and sixty odd times. I know every stick and stone of the way. You
don’t know what you are undertaking.”
“It can’t be difficult; the Lincoln Highway goes straight across.”
“In an imaginary line like the equator!” She pointed at the map that was
opened on the counter. “Once you get beyond the Mississippi the roads are
trails of mud and sand. This district along here by the Platte River is
wild and dangerous; full of the most terrible people, outlaws and ‘bad
men’ who would think nothing of killing you if they were drunk and felt
like it. There isn’t any hotel. Tell me, where do you think you are going
to stop? These are not towns; they are only names on a map, or at best
two shacks and a saloon! This place North Platte why, you _couldn’t_ stay
in a place like that!”
I began to feel uncertain and let down, but I said, “Hundreds of people
have motored across.”
“Hundreds and thousands of people have done things that it would kill you
to do. I have seen immigrants eating hunks of fat pork and raw onions.
Could you? Of course people have gone across, men with all sorts of
tackle to push their machines over the high places and pull them out
of the deep places; men who themselves can sleep on the roadside or on
a barroom floor. You may think ‘roughing it’ has an attractive sound,
because you have never in your life had the slightest experience of what
it can be. I was born and brought up out there and I know.” She quietly
but firmly folded the map and handed it to the clerk. “I am sorry,” she
said, “if you really wanted to go! By and by maybe if they ever build
macadam roads and put up good hotels—but even then it would be deadly
dull.”
For about five minutes I thought I had better give it up, and I called
up my editor. “It looks as though we could not get much farther than the
Mississippi.”
“All right,” he said, cheerfully, “go as far as the Mississippi. After
all, your object is merely to find out how far you _can_ go pleasurably!
When you find it too uncomfortable, come home!”
[Illustration: WHAT WE FINALLY CARRIED]
No sooner had he said that than my path seemed to stretch straight
and unencumbered to the Pacific Coast. If we could get no further
information, we would start for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis,
as we had many friends in these cities, and get new directions from
there, but as a last resort I went to the office of a celebrated touring
authority and found him at his desk.
“I would like to know whether it will be possible for me to go from here
to San Francisco by motor?”
“Sure, it’s possible! Why isn’t it?”
“I have been told the roads are dreadful and the accommodations worse.”
He surveyed me from head to foot with about the same expression that he
might have been expected to use if I had asked whether one could safely
travel to Brooklyn.
“You won’t find Ritz hotels every few miles, and you won’t find Central
Park roads all of the way. If you can put up with less than that, you can
go—easy!” Whereupon he reached up over his head without even looking,
took down a map, spread it on the table before him, and unhesitatingly
raced his blue pencil up the edge of the Hudson River, exactly as the
pencil of Tad draws cartoons at the movies.
“You go here—Albany, Utica, Syracuse.”
“No, please!” I said. “I want to go by way of Pittsburgh and St. Louis.”
“You asked for the best route to San Francisco!” He looked rather annoyed.
“Yes, but I want to go by way of St. Louis.”
“Why do you want to go to St. Louis?”
“Because we have friends there.”
“Well, then, you had better take the train and go and see them!”
Indifferently he took down another map and made a few casual blue marks
on the mountains of Pennsylvania. “They’re rebuilding roads that will be
fine later in the season, but at the moment [April, 1915] all of these
places are detours. You’ll get bad grades and mud over your hubs! Of
course, if you’re set on going that way, if you want to burn any amount
of gasoline, cut your tires to pieces, and strain your engine—go along to
St. Louis. It’s all the same to me; I don’t own the roads! But you said
you wanted to take a motor trip.”
“Then Chicago is much the best way?”
“It is the _only_ way!”
He did not wait for my agreement, but throwing aside the second map and
turning again to the first, his pencil swooped down upon Buffalo and
raced to Cleveland as though it fitted in a groove. He seemed to be in a
mental aeroplane looking actually down upon the roads below.
“There is a detour you will have to take here. You turn left at a white
church. This stretch is dusty in dry weather, but along here,” his pencil
had now reached Iowa and Nebraska, “you will have no trouble at all—if it
doesn’t rain.”
“And if it rains?”
“Well, you can get out your solitaire pack!”
“For how long?” The vision of the sort of road it must be if that man
thought it impassable was hard to imagine.
“Oh, I don’t know; a week or two, even three maybe. But when they are
dry there are no faster roads in the country. What kind of a car are you
going in?”
I told him proudly. Instead of being impressed by its make and power
he remarked: “Humph! You’d better go in a Ford! But suit yourself! At
any rate, you can open her wide along here, as wide as you like if the
weather is right.” At the foot of the Rocky Mountains his pencil swerved
far south.
“Way down there?” I asked. “That is all desert. Can we cross the desert?”
“Why can’t you?” He looked me over from head to foot. I had felt he held
small opinion of me from the start. “I only wondered if the roads were
passable,” I answered meekly.
“The _roads_ are all right.” He accented the word “roads.”
“I was wondering if there were hotels.”
“And what if there aren’t? Splendid open dry country; won’t hurt anyone
to sleep out a night or two. It’d do you good! A doctor’d charge you
money for that advice. I’m giving it to you free!”
On the doorstep at home I met my amateur chauffeur.
“Have you found out about routes?” he asked.
“We go by way of Cleveland and Chicago.”
He looked far from pleased. “Is that so much the best way?”
“It is the _only_ way,” and I imitated unconsciously the voice of the
oracle of the touring bureau.
* * * * *
One would have thought that we were starting for the Congo or the North
Pole! Friends and farewell gifts poured in. It was quite thrilling,
although myself in the rôle of a venturesome explorer was a miscast
somewhere. Every little while Edwards, our butler, brought in a new
package.
One present was a dark blue silk bag about twenty inches square like a
pillow-case. At first sight we wondered what to do with it. It turned
out afterward to be the most useful thing we had except a tin box, the
story of which comes later. The silk bag held two hats without mussing,
no matter how they were thrown in, clean gloves, veils, and any odd
necessities, even a pair of slippers. The next friend of mine going on a
motor trip is going to be sent one exactly like it!
By far the most resplendent of our presents was a marvel of a luncheon
basket. Edwards staggered under its massiveness, and we all gathered
around its silver-laden contents; bottles and jars, boxes and dishes,
flat silver and cutlery, enamelware and glass, food paraphernalia enough
to set before all the kings of Europe.
“I could not bear,” wrote the giver, “to think of your starving in the
desert.”
[Illustration: STOWING THE LUGGAGE]
Mr. B. brought us a block and tackle and two queer-looking canvas squares
that he explained were African water buckets. All we needed further, he
told us, were fur sleeping-bags and we would be quite fixed!
Another thing sent us was an air cushion. Air cushions make me feel
seasick, but the lady who traveled with us loved them. By the way, we
added a passenger at the last moment. On Friday afternoon, a member of
our family announced she was going with us to protect us.
“The only thing is,” we said, “there is no place for you to sit except in
the back underneath the luggage.”
“I adore sitting under luggage; it is my favorite way of traveling,” she
replied. And as we adore her, our party became three.
We had expected to leave New York about nine o’clock in the morning,
but at eleven we were still making selections of what we most needed to
take with us, and finally choosing the wrong things with an accuracy
that amounted to a talent. Besides our regular luggage, the sidewalk was
littered with all the entrancing-looking traveling equipment that had
been sent us, and nowhere to stow it. By giving it all the floor space of
the tonneau, we managed to get the big lunch basket in. Then we helped
in the lady who traveled with us and added a collection of six wraps,
two steamer rugs, and three dressing-cases, a typewriter, a best big
camera and a little better one—with both of which we managed to take the
highest possible percentage of worst pictures that anyone ever brought
home—a medicine chest, and various other paraphernalia neatly packed over
and around her. Of this collection our passenger was allowed one of the
dressing-cases, two wraps and a big bag. As there was not room for three
bags on the back, my son and I divided a small motor trunk between us; I
took the trays and he the bottom. It seemed at the time a simple enough
arrangement.
On our way up Fifth Avenue, two or three times in the traffic stops, we
found the motors of friends next to us. Seeing our quantity of luggage,
each asked: “Where are you going?”
Very importantly we answered: “To San Francisco!”
“No, really, where are you going?”
“SAN-FRAN-CIS-CO!!!” we called back. But not one of them believed us.
CHAPTER II
ALBANY, FIRST STOP[1]
We had intended making Syracuse our first night’s stopping-place. It can
easily be done, but as we were so late starting—it was nearly half-past
one—we decided upon Albany instead. We felt very self-important; it even
seemed that people ought to cheer us a little as we passed. A number
of persons, especially boys, did look with curiosity at our unusually
foreign type of car—solid wheels and exhaust tubes through the side of
the hood always attract attention in America—but no one seemed to divine
or care about the thrilling adventure we were setting out upon!
For about thirty miles outside of New York the road grew worse and worse.
Through Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley the surface looked fairly good, but was
full of brittle places. Our chauffeur says that the word brittle has no
sense, but it is the only one I can think of to convey the sudden sharp
flaked-off places that would snap the springs of a car going at fair
speed.
I was rather perturbed; because if the road was as bad as this near home,
what _would_ it be further along? But the further we went the better it
became, and for the latter seventy or eighty miles it was perfect.
The Hudson River scenery, the lower end of it, always oppressed me; I
can never think of anything but the favorite fiction descriptions of the
“mansions where the wealthy reside.” Such overwhelmingly serious piles
of solid masonry, each set squarely in the middle of a seed catalog
painter’s dream of pictorial lawn! Steep hills, steep houses, steep
expenditure, typify the lower Hudson, but the scenery a hundred miles
above the river’s mouth is enchanting! Wide, beautiful views of rolling
country; great comfortable-looking houses with hundreds of acres about
them; here, though many are worth fortunes, one feels that they were
built solely to answer the individual need of their owners, and as homes.
Out on a knoll, with the river spread like a great silver mirror in the
distance, we christened our tea-basket. It took us five minutes to burrow
down and unpile all the things we had on top of it, and five more to find
in which compartment were huddled a few sandwiches and in which other box
was the cake. For twenty minutes we boiled water in our beautiful little
silver kettle, but as at the end of that time the boiling water was
tepid, we gave it up and ate our sandwiches as recommended by the _Red
Queen_ in “Alice” who offered her dry biscuits for thirst. Then we spent
fifteen minutes in putting everything away again.
[Illustration: LEAVING GRAMERCY PARK, NEW YORK]
“When we get out on the prairies, where _can_ we get supplies enough to
fill it?” I wondered. Our “chauffeur” mumbled something about “strain on
tires” and “not driving a motor truck.”
“It is a most wonderfully magnificent basket,” said the lady who was
traveling with us, rather wistfully, as she braced all the heaviest
pieces of luggage between her and it.
Not counting the time out for tea, which we didn’t have, it took us five
hours and a half from Fifty-ninth Street, New York, to the Ten Eyck at
Albany.
The run should have been one hundred and fifty miles, but we made it one
hundred and sixty because we lost our way at Fishkill. We had no Blue
Book, but had been told we need only follow the river all the way. At
Fishkill the road runs into the woods and the river disappears until it
seems permanently lost! We wandered around and around a mountain in a
wood for about ten miles before we discovered a signpost pointing the way
to Albany!
Fortunately we had telegraphed ahead for rooms at the Ten Eyck, or
they would not have been able to take us in. The hotel was filled to
overflowing with senators and assemblymen, but we had very comfortable
rooms and delicious coffee in the morning before we left for Syracuse.
CHAPTER III
A BREAKDOWN
Only two hundred miles from home and a breakdown! We had left Albany
early in the morning and were running happily along over a road as smooth
as a billiard table. Everything went beautifully until we were about
twenty miles from Utica when our “chauffeur” said he heard a squeak.
Gloom began to shadow his features. Half a mile further, the squeak
became a knock and gloom deepened. He stopped the engine, got out and
looked under the hood, lifted the cranking handle once or twice and threw
his hands up in a gesture of abject despair. His lips framed all sorts of
words but all he said aloud was: “It’s a bearing!” He looked so utterly
dejected that in my sympathy for him (starting out on such a trip with
a mother and a cousin and neither of us of the slightest use to him) I
forgot that we were all equally concerned in whatever this misfortune
about a “bearing” might be.
“Couldn’t we _try_ to get to a garage?” timorously asked the one in the
back.
Our “chauffeur” shook his head. “Not without wrecking the engine. There
is nothing for it but to be towed to a machine shop.”
“And then?” I asked.
“That depends——” was his ambiguous answer, and we said nothing more.
Is there anything more exhilarating than an automobile running smoothly
along? Is there anything more dispiriting than the same automobile unable
to go? The bigger and heavier it is, the worse the situation seems to be.
You might get out and push a little one, but a big car standing stonily
silent portends something of the inexorability of Fate.
And there we sat. Presently an old man came jogging along in a buggy.
“Any trouble?” He grinned as the owner of a horse always does grin under
such circumstances. But after a few further exasperating remarks, he
offered kindly, “Say, son, I’ll drive you to a good garage down the road;
there are others a mile nearer, but Hoffman and Adams’ place at Fort
Plain is first class.”
There had been nothing in our informer’s conversation to give us great
confidence in his recommendation but the garage turned out even better
than he said. There was a first-rate machine shop with an expert mechanic
in charge of it, who peered into our engine dubiously:
“If it was only a Ford or a Cadillac,” said he, “I could fix you up right
away! But a bearing for that car of yours’ll like as not have to be made.
Can you get one in New York, do you think?”
An unusual and “special” car may be very smart-looking and be
particularly easy to trace if stolen, but in a breakdown a make of
popular type would be best—a Ford ideal. You could buy a whole new one at
the first garage you came to, or maybe get a missing part at the first
ten-cent store. We discovered the difficulty, or inconvenience rather, of
repairing ours, within twenty-four hours of leaving home.
The telephone service at Fort Plain was hopeless. For over four hours we
tried to get the agency in New York; even then it was doubtful whether
they would have the part. Meantime the engine had been taken down and
the cause of the burnt-out bearing discovered to be a broken oil pipe.
They mended that and our “chauffeur” was a little more cheerful when he
discovered that they had all necessary tools and things to make a new
bearing by hand, which they started to do. The lady who was traveling
with us and I walked round and round the town. We sent picture postals
by the dozen quite as though we had arrived where we had intended to be.
We discovered a restaurant where we could, if it should be necessary,
return for lunch, and a news stand where we fortified ourselves with
chocolate and magazines. After which reconnoitering we returned to the
garage prepared to stay where we were indefinitely. Mr. Hoffman made us
comfortable in the office, where I found excitement in the workings of a
very gorgeous and complicated cash register. It had all sorts of knobs
and buttons in every variety of color, and was altogether fascinating! I
wonder if anyone ever has opened a store for the mere joy of playing on
the cash register. I wanted to set up a shop at once!
[Illustration: STILL IN NEW YORK STATE]
Finally New York telephoned they had a bearing, so we decided to go on to
Utica by train. Someone told us—I can’t remember who it was—that beyond
Albany the nearest good hotel was the Onondaga at Syracuse; but as we
would surely have to stop at some poor hotels we thought we might as well
get used to a lack of luxury first as last, so we took the train for
Utica, to wait there until our car should be repaired.
Notwithstanding our altruistic intention to accept cheerfully whatever
accommodations offered, our delighted surprise may be imagined when we
entered the beautiful, wide, white marble lobby of the brand-new Hotel
Utica! Our rooms were big and charmingly furnished. One had light blue
damask hangings, and cane furniture; another mahogany and English chintz;
each of them had its own bathroom with best sort of plumbing.
The food is very good and reasonable as to price. One dinner for instance
was a dollar and thirty cents for each of us, including crêpes Suzette,
which were delicious! There was music during dinner, and afterward
dancing. As in most places outside of Broadway, they still call every
sort of dance that is not a waltz the “tango.”
Sitting in the lobby for a little while in the evening, we noticed that
the clerk at the desk, instead of showing the blank indifference typical
of hotels on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, greeted all arriving guests
with a hearty “How do you do?” They also gave us souvenirs. A little
gilt powder pencil, a leather change purse, and a gilt stamped leather
cardcase. We felt as though we had been to a children’s party.
Our “chauffeur,” who went back to Fort Plain at daybreak, returned with
the car in the late afternoon, so that we were able to go on again after
a delay of only a day and a half.
CHAPTER IV
PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO AND INDIANA
Erie is a nice, homelike little city, full of business; and our hotel,
the Lawrence, very good. There was an irate man at the desk this morning.
“Say, what kind of a hotel do you run? That dancing went on until
three o’clock this morning! It’s an outrage!” The clerk was sorry, and
willingly arranged to have the guest put in a quiet room, but he bit
off the end of a cigar viciously and went out still storming about the
disgrace of allowing such a performance in a reputable hotel.
“He ought to take a trip to little old New York if he thinks dancing till
three is late,” said a bystander.
“He’d better go back to the farm and go to roost with the chickens!”
answered another.
From Albany the roads have been wonderful, wide and smooth as a billiard
table all the way. There were stretches of long straight road as in
France—much better than any in France since the first year theirs were
built. One thing that we have already found out; we are seeing our own
country for the first time! It is not alone that a train window gives
one only a piece of whirling view; but the tracks go through the ragged
outskirts of the town, past the back doors and through the poorest land
generally, while the roads become the best avenues of the cities, and go
past the front entrances of farms. And such farms! We had expected the
scenery to be uninteresting! No one with a spark of sentiment for his own
country could remain long indifferent. Well-fenced fields under perfect
cultivation; splendid-looking grazing pastures, splendid-looking cows,
horses, houses, barns. And in every barn, a Ford. And fruits, fruits,
fruits! Miles and miles and miles of grapevines as neatly trimmed and
evenly set in rows as soldiers on parade.
“It looks like Welch’s grape juice!” we said and laughed. It was!
So much for the country. The towns—only the humanizing genius of Julian
Street could ever tell them apart. Small Utica dressed herself in taupe
color, big Syracuse wore red with brown trimmings. The favorite hues
were brown and red, though one or two were fond of gray, but all looked
almost exactly alike. Each had a bustling and brown business center, with
trolley cars swinging around the corners, pedestrians elbowing their way
past big new dry-goods stores’ windows, and automobiles driving up to the
curbs; each had a wide tree-bordered residence avenue, with block-shaped
detached houses, garnished with cupolas and shelf-paper trimmings. The
houses of Utica had deeper gardens than most, and there was a stable at
the rear of nearly every one on the proverbial Genesee Street. Syracuse,
like the cities in Holland, was picturesquely crossed by canals and,
like the thriving commercial center it is, by—this is just our personal
opinion—all the freight trains of the world! It took us almost an hour to
dodge between the continuous parade of box, refrigerator, and flat cars!
Of the salt, for which Syracuse is so celebrated—the marshes were to the
north of our road—we saw not an ounce. Perhaps those millions of freight
cars were all full of it.
For a surprise we came upon Geneva, a perfect little Quaker, sitting on
her own garden lawn at the edge of the road leading west. Facing an old
Puritan church across a square of green, stood a row of little houses
that suggested the setting of a play like “Pomander Walk.” To the moneyed
magnates of the mansions of the lower Hudson, to the retired tradesmen
residing in some of the red and brown residences of the various Genesee
avenues, the demure little square of huddled houses of Geneva might seem
contemptibly mean. Yet the mansions left us cold, while the little houses
indescribably warmed our hearts. It was like the unexpected finding of a
bit of fragile and beautiful old porcelain in a brickyard. We expected to
see the counterpart of one of the heroines of Miss Austen’s novels come
out of one of the quaint little doorways.
We would have liked to find a tea shop on the square, for it was lunch
time and we hated having to turn into Main Street and make our choice
between several unprepossessing hotels. Geneva was certainly a town of
unexpected contrasts. Although the little houses around the corner were
so adorable, the Hotel Seneca from its façade of factory brick, sitting
flat on the street, never for a moment warned us of an interior looking
exactly like the illustrations in _Vogue_! White woodwork, French blue
cut velvet, delicate spindly Adam furniture, a dining-room all white with
little square-paned mirror doors, too attractive! Luncheon was delicious
and well served by waitresses in white dresses, crisp and clean.
Our great surprise has been the excellence of the roads and the hotels,
and our really beautiful and prosperous country. Going through these
miles after miles of perfect vineyards and orchards, these wonderfully
kept farms, it seems impossible to believe that in New York City are
long bread lines, and that in other parts of our great country there is
strife, hunger, poverty and waste.
* * * * *
In Buffalo we stopped at the Statler, a commercial hotel with a much
advertised and really quite faultless service that carries the idea of
personal attention to guests to its highest degree. When you register,
the clerk reads your name and invariably thereafter everyone calls you by
it. In fact they did even more than that. I had wired ahead for rooms and
as soon as I went up to register, the clerk, whose own name was printed
and hung over the desk, said: “Your room is No. 355, Mrs. Post!” I had
no idea where Room 355 was, but I felt as though I must have occupied it
often before—as though in fact it in some personal way belonged to me.
A decidedly pleasant contrast to a certain New York hotel where, after
stopping four months under its roof, the clerks asked a guest her name!
The Buffalo hotel publishes a little pamphlet called the “Statler Service
Codes.” It contains advice to employees, an explanation of what is meant
by good service, a talk about tipping and a talk to patrons. A few of its
sayings, copied at random, are:
“At rare intervals some perverse member of our force disagrees with a
guest. He maintains that _this_ sauce was ordered when the guest says the
other. Or that the boy _did_ go up to the room. Or that it was _a room_
reserved and not dinner for six. Either may be right. But no employee of
this hotel is allowed the privilege of arguing any point with a guest.”
“A door man can _swing_ the door in a manner to assure the guest that
he is in _His Hotel_, or he can _sling_ it in a way that sticks in the
guest’s crop and makes him expect to find at the desk a sputtery pen
sticking in a potato.”
After giving every thought to the guest’s comfort, the end of the little
book also asks fairness on the part of the guests. Such as, not to say
you waited fifteen minutes when you waited barely five; or not to object
if the clerks can’t read your signature if you write in hieroglyphics.
In the morning at the Statler, a newspaper is pushed under your door and
on it is a printed slip saying: “Good morning! This is your paper while
you are in Buffalo.” And when you are ready to leave instead of calling,
“Front! Get 355’s baggage!” the Statler clerk says, “Go up to Mrs. Post’s
room and bring down her things!”
I certainly liked it very much. And I am sure other people must feel the
same.
If the hotel tried to make us pleased with ourselves, we were not allowed
to keep our self-complacence long. When we went to Niagara, we passed a
sort of taxidermist’s museum; its windows at least were full of stuffed
beasts. The proprietor, standing in front of it, tried his best to make
us “step inside and see the mummied mermaid” and his museum of the
greatest educational wonders of the world. When we showed no interest in
his collection he burst out with:
“If you’re going to remain as ignorant about everything you come to, as
you are about this wonderful museum, traveling won’t educate you any!”
Put a little differently, it might have hit a mark. We had ourselves been
saying, only a little while before, that we were undoubtedly missing
lots of interesting things because we did not quite know how or where
to see them. Yet, though we are still ignorant about the “wonders” of
that particular museum, we are not always so indifferent. We have tried
to look out for points of historical value and we have found many things
of great diversion to ourselves. In Utica, for instance, we hung for
hours over the railings of an exhibit of china making by the Syracuse
pottery manufacturers. There is an irresistible fascination in watching
the potter shaping pitchers, and the decorators putting decalcomania on
plates and drawing fine gilt lines. The facility with which experts in
any branch of industry use their hands is a marvel and a delight to me.
I could stand indefinitely and watch a glass-blower, or a potter, or a
blacksmith, or a paper hanger—anyone doing anything superlatively well.
I am not thinking of describing the world’s wonder of wonders, Niagara
Falls, because everyone knows they are less than an hour’s run from
Buffalo, with a splendid wide motor road leading out to them, and because
their stupendous beauty has been described too often.
There were four bridal couples with us in the elevator that took us down
to go under the Falls. One of the brides was apparently concerned about
the unbecomingness of the black rubber mackintosh and hood that everyone
puts on, for her evidently Southern husband said aloud:
“Don’t you fret about it, Nelly, you look real sweet in it, ’deed you
do!” Whereupon each of the other three patted around the edge of the
hood where her hair ought to be, and glanced a little self-consciously
at the arbiter of her own loveliness.
Later, the young Southerner linked his arm in that of his bride lest she
go too close to that terrific torrent of drenching water. The other three
pairs walked gingerly through the soaking rock galleries in three closely
huddled units. And the rest of us looked at them with that smiling
interest that one irresistibly feels for happy young couples on their
honeymoon.
On Sunday evening in Buffalo a man who looked as though he had been
lifted out of a yellow flour barrel had come into the lobby of the hotel.
We could not tell whether he was black or white or even human. A clerk,
seeing us staring, remarked casually: “Oh, he’s just a motorist who has
come from Cleveland. Gives you some idea of the roads, doesn’t it?”
We started the next day therefore in a rather disturbed frame of mind,
and soon saw how on a Sunday, when every motorist is out, he had looked
as he did. Even on Monday the dust was so thick that the wind blew it in
great yellow clouds, sometimes making it impossible to see ahead. But
most of the way it blew to the left of us, leaving us fairly clean and
not enveloping us unless we had to pass another car going our own way.
As we had gone out to the Falls in the morning, we did not leave Buffalo
until about two o’clock, but in spite of bumpy roads and dust so thick
that it made us swerve a little, we reached Erie easily at a little
after six.
We left Erie the next day at two o’clock and arrived in Cleveland at
seven—which was as fast as the Ohio speed limit of twenty miles an hour
would allow. The road was much the same as it had been the day before.
Forty miles of the whole distance was rather rough and very dusty; the
rest was good, a little of it splendid.
At Mentor, about twenty-three miles before Cleveland, we came to a
number of beautiful places that must have been the out-of-town homes of
Cleveland people. The houses, many of them enormous, were long, low and
white; not farmhouses and not Colonial manor houses, but a most happy
adaptation of the qualities of both; dignified, homelike, imposing and
enchanting.[2]
The remark of the man at the museum in Buffalo irresistibly recurs to
me. We certainly won’t be “educated” if our chauffeur can help it! He is
exactly like the time lock on a safe. Only instead of being set for an
hour, he is set for distance. At Erie, for instance, he throws in his
clutch, “Cleveland”? he asks, and snap! nothing can make him look to the
left or the right of the road in front of him.
“Oh, look! That’s the house where President Garfield——”
Zip! we have passed it!
“Wait a minute, let me see that inscription——”
We are half a mile beyond! We arrive in Cleveland, when click goes the
lock and he stops dead, and nothing will make him go further.
The food at the hotel in Cleveland, also a Statler, was so extraordinary
good that I asked where the maître d’hôtel and his chefs had come from. I
thought that possibly on account of the war they had secured the staff of
Henri’s or Voisin’s or Paillard’s in Paris, and was really surprised to
hear the head chef was from Chicago and the maître d’hôtel from New York.
The dining-room service was quite as good as the food. We did not wait
more than a moment before they brought our first course, and as soon as
we had finished that our plates were whisked away and the second put
before us. Never, even in France, have we had better or more perfectly
cooked chicken casserole, and the hollandaise sauce on the asparagus was
of the exact smooth, golden consistency and flavor that it ought to be,
instead of the various yellow acids, pastes, and eggy mixtures that too
often masquerade under the name. Our waiter brought in crisp, fresh salad
and expertly and quickly made his own dressing. He was in fact a paragon
of his kind, serving all of our meals without that everlasting patting
and fussing and fixing that most waiters go through with until what you
have ordered is so shopworn and handled and cold that it is not fit to
eat. Can anything be more unappetizing than to have a waiter, or two of
them, breathing over your food for half an hour?
Personally I hate hotel service. I hate to be helped. In our own houses
even children of six resent it. I often wonder, why do we submit to
having the piece we don’t want, in the amount we don’t want, put on the
part of the plate we don’t want it on, covering it with sauce if we hate
sauce, or giving us the dryest wisps if we like it otherwise, by a waiter
who bends unpleasantly close? Why do we have everything we eat pinched
between the fork and spoon in that one-handed lobster-claw fashion, and
endure it in silence? All of this is no fault of the waiter who, after
all, is trying to do the best he can in the way that has been taught him.
But why is the service in a hotel so radically different from all good
service in a private house?
Cleveland, “the Sixth City”—and she likes to have you know her rating—is
certainly prosperous-looking and in many ways beautiful. She has wide,
roomy streets with splendid lawns and trees and houses. A few of the
older mansions are hideous but enormous, comfortable, and well built.
They look like the homes of people with no end of money who are content
to live in houses of American architecture’s darkest period because they
are used to them and often because their fathers lived in them. There is
no suggestion of the upstart in their ugliness. The whole city impresses
one as having a nice fat bank account and being in no hurry to spend
it. The municipal buildings, however, are superb, and the newer dwelling
houses all that money and taste can make them, but almost best of all, I
liked the shops.
In a big new one on Euclid Avenue, two elderly ladies with
much-befeathered bonnets were ensconced in a double rolling chair like
those of the Atlantic City boardwalk. An attentive young man was pushing
them about among bronzes and porcelains. Stopping before a shelf of
samples he asked: “Are any of these at all like the coffee cups you are
looking for, Mrs. Davis?”
Mrs. Davis was so absorbed in the conversation of her friend that the
clerk had to repeat his question three times before her purple feathers
bobbed toward the coffee cups casually.
“Coffee cups?” she added absently. “I don’t think I care about any today,
thank you. But you might drive us through the linen department and the
lamp shades. The lamp shades are always so pretty!” she added to her
friend, exactly as though, after telling her coachman to drive around the
east side of the park, she had remarked upon the beauty of the wistaria.
“Does that lady drive about town in a rolling chair?” I asked of the man
waiting upon us.
“Oh, those chairs are ours,” he answered. “We have them so that customers
can visit with each other and shop without getting tired. One of the
clerks will be glad to push you about in one. It is a very pleasant
innovation,” he added, and out of courtesy he did not say for whom.
[Illustration: THE CROWD IN LESS THAN A MINUTE. “OUT OF THE WINDOW” IN
CLEVELAND]
Cleveland is also the city of three-cent carfares—in fact three cents in
Cleveland is almost as good as five cents in other cities. Lemonade three
cents, moving pictures three cents, a ball of pop-corn three cents—a
whole counter full of small articles in one of the big stores. Let’s all
move to Cleveland!
One thing, though, struck us most particularly in the hotels of Utica
and Cleveland; the people didn’t match the background. Dining in a white
marble room quite faultlessly appointed, there was not a man in evening
clothes and not a single woman smartly dressed or who even looked as
though she had ever been! Men in unpressed business suits, women in black
skirts and white shirtwaists are appropriate to the imitation wood or
plaster walls of some of the eating places that we have been in, but in
a beautiful hotel like the Statler in Cleveland, and especially in the
evening, they spoil the picture.
From Cleveland to Toledo the roads are very like those of France, they
have wonderful foundations but badly worn surfaces. Much the best hotel
in Toledo is the Secor, and the restaurant, which made no attempt at
imitating French cooking, was good.
There was a most beautiful art museum in Toledo, a small building pure
Greek in style and set like a jewel against pyramidal evergreens. It is
quite the loveliest thing we have seen.
Because of Ohio’s speed restrictions, twenty miles fastest going and
eight for villages, etc., one must either spend days in crawling across
the state or break the law. As is usually the case with unreasonable
laws, few keep them, or else the motoring Ohioans interpret their
speed laws rather liberally. Of the hundreds of motors we met in Ohio,
especially near Cleveland, which is one of the biggest automobile centers
in the country, scarcely one, even within the city limits, was going less
than twenty-five miles an hour.
However, as it is not courteous for the stranger to dash lawlessly
through at faster than the twelve-mile average prescribed by law, the run
from Toledo to South Bend, a distance of one hundred and sixty-two miles,
will take from twelve to fourteen hours. The road is good, most of it,
but sandwiched between occasional poor stretches.
We lunched at Bryan at the Christman Hotel. It was here that I heard a
new retort courteous. I had dropped a veil; a youth picked it up. I said,
“Thank you.” He replied politely, “Yours truly!”
The Oliver, “Indiana’s finest hotel,” at South Bend is good, clean, well
run, with a Louis Quatorze dining-room in black and white. The black and
white craze is raging here quite as much as in New York.
CHAPTER V
LUGGAGE AND OTHER LUXURIES
Never in the world did people have so much luggage with nowhere to put
it and nothing in it when it is put! Each black piece is bursting! Yet
everything we have with us is the wrong thing and just so much to take
care of without any compensating comfort. We have gradually eliminated
everything we could until now we have just enough for three hallboys on
our arrival and three porters on our departure to stagger under. Then
too, although possibly all right for a man and wife, sharing the motor
trunk with a son is an inconvenience unimagined! If the trunk is put
in my room, he finds himself somewhere on another floor or at the end
of an interminable corridor unable to get his pajamas without entirely
redressing. If the trunk is in his room I have to hunt for him, get his
key, and bring the trays to my room. Packing one trunk in two rooms at
once is even more difficult. Consequently, he has in desperation bought
a “suitcase.” It is orange-colored, made of paper, I think, and it also
makes one more lump of baggage to be carried up and down and packed on
top of our traveling companion.
The thermometer was at about thirty when we left home, so I could think
of nothing but serge coats of heavy weight, plaited skirts also nice and
warm, sweaters of various thicknesses, and fur coats. There came almost
a break in a heretofore happy family when I insisted that over the Rocky
Mountains our “chauffeur” would need his heaviest coat. He refused to
take a coonskin—Heaven praise his intuition on that!—but obligingly
brought a huge ulster. We had not gone fifty miles from New York when the
sun came out hot and has ever since then been trying to show how heat
is produced in the tropics. Our car is loaded down with wraps for the
Rockies, and in this sweltering heat not one thin dress have I brought.
In every way my clothes are a trial and disappointment. A taffeta
afternoon dress that was intended to give me a smart appearance whenever
I might want to look otherwise than as a bedraggled tripper comes out
of the trunk looking like crinkled crepon. I thought of pretending that
it _was_ crinkled crepon, but its crinkle was somehow not quite right
in evenness or design. There is also a coat and skirt of a basket weave
material that I had made especially to be serviceable motoring. I don’t
know what sort of dresses would have packed better, but I _am_ sure none
could be worse. In fact, I unhesitatingly challenge these two of mine
against the most perishable clothes that anyone can produce, that mine
will wrinkle more and deeper and sooner than any others in existence.
I have, however, found one small article that I happen to have brought, a
great success, and that is a lace veil with a good deal of pattern—one of
those things that make you look as though something queer was the matter
with your face—unless there is something the matter with your face, in
which case it takes all the blame. In doing the same thing every day
you find you shake down to a rather regular system. As we come into the
outskirts of the city where we are to spend the night, I take off, in
the car, my goggles and the swathing of veils that I wear touring, and
put on the lace one. The transformation from blown-about hair and dusty
face to a tidy disguise of all blemishes is quite miraculous. Dusters
are ugly things, but as every woman who motors knows, there is nothing
so practical. I don’t think personally that silk ones can be compared
for sense and comfort with those of dust-colored linen or cotton. Silk
sheds the dust perhaps a little better, but wrinkles more. At all events,
I find that by putting my lace veil on and taking my duster off, I can
walk up to the desk and register without being taken for a vagrant. The
lady who was traveling with us is one of those aggravating women who stay
tidy. She keeps her gloves on and her hands dustless. But even she saw
the transforming possibilities of a lace veil and soon bought one too.
Hotels, however, are very lenient in the matter of the appearance of
guests, because of all the begrimed-looking tramps, our “chauffeur” after
driving ten hours or so in the sifting dust is the grimiest. The only
reason why he is not taken for a professional driver is because no one
would hire anyone so disreputable-looking.
In one hotel, though, a grimy working mechanic having gone up in the
elevator and a strange, perfectly well turned out person having come
down, the confused clerk asked where the chauffeur went and did the new
gentleman want a room?
CHAPTER VI
DID ANYBODY SAY “CHICKEN”?
Sometimes we take luncheon with us and sometimes we don’t. If we do,
we see nice, clean-looking places on the road, such as the Parmly at
Plainsville between Erie and Cleveland and the Avelon at Norwalk between
Cleveland and Toledo; if we don’t we find nothing but hotels of the
saloon-front and ladies’-entrance-in-the-back variety.
Between South Bend and Chicago we had not intended to stop, but found
ourselves rather hungry and unwilling to wait until about three o’clock
to lunch in Chicago. We looked in the Blue Book and saw the advertisement
of a restaurant a few miles ahead. “Mrs. Seth Brown. Chicken dinners a
specialty.” That is not her real name.
The very words “chicken dinner” made us suddenly conscious that we were
ravenous.
“Do you remember the chicken dinners at the different places near Bar
Harbor?” reminisced the lady-who-was-traveling-with-us. I am not going to
call her that any more! It is too long to say. I will call her “Celia”
instead. It is not her name, but it is an anagram of it, which will do as
well. Also a repetition of our “chauffeur” sounds tiresome, and his own
initials of E. M. would be much simpler.
Anyway, all three of us conjured up visions of the chicken that was in a
little while going to be set before us.
“Country chickens are so much better than town ones!” said Celia. “They
are never the same after they have been packed in ice and shipped, and
I do wonder whether it will be broiled, with crisp fried potatoes, or
whether it will be fried with corn fritters and bacon!”
“—And pop-overs,” suggested E. M.
“Couldn’t we drive a little faster?” I asked. For by now my imagination
had conjured up not only the actual aroma of deliciously broiled chicken,
but I was already putting fresh country butter on crisp hot pop-overs.
But in my greediness for the delectable dinner that was awaiting us, I
lost my place in the Blue Book. Nothing that I could find any longer
tallied with the road we were on, and it took us at least half an hour
to find ourselves again. By the time we finally reached the little town
of delectable dinners we were so hungry we would have thought any kind
of old fowl good. But search as we might we could not discover any place
that looked even remotely like a restaurant. There was a saloon, and
a factory, and some small frame tenements. Nothing else in the place.
Inquiring of some men standing on a corner, one of them answered, “The
ladies’ entrance of the saloon is Mrs. Seth Brown’s place, and the
eating’s all right.” We were very hungry and the lure of chicken being
strong, also feeling that perhaps the interior might prove better than
the entrance promised, we went in. In the rear of a bar was a dingy
room smelling of fried fat and stale beer. There were three groups of
perfectly respectable-looking people sitting at three tables. A barkeeper
with a collarless shirt, ragged apron, and a cigar in his mouth, sat us
at a fourth table with a coffee-stained cloth on it, rusty black-handled
cutlery, and plates that were a little dusty.
“What y’want!”
“Do you serve chicken dinners?” I asked.
“D’ye see it advertised?”
“Yes, in the Blue Book.”
“Y’ c’n have dinner,” he said as though he was obliged against his
inclination to live up to his advertisement.
E. M. was drawing water out of the well to fill the radiator tank.
Celia and I began wiping off the plates and forks on the corners of the
tablecloth.
At the table nearest us were four men and a woman. One of the men kept
hugging the woman, who paid no attention to him. Two of the others went
continually back and forth to the bar, while the fourth was occupied
solely with his food. At another table was a family motoring party, and
at the third, a second family, with a baby that cried without stopping
and a little child who screamed from time to time in chorus.
Our chicken dinner proved to be some greasy fried fish, cold bluish
potatoes, sliced raw onions, pickled gherkins, bread and coffee.
We ate some bread and drank the coffee. If we had been blindfolded it
wouldn’t have been so bad.
There is one consoling feature in such an incident, that although it is
not especially enjoyable at the time, it is just such experiences and
disappointments, of course, that make the high spots of a whole motor
trip in looking back upon it. It is your troubles on the road, your bad
meals in queer places, your unexpected stops at people’s houses; in
short, your misadventures that afterwards become your most treasured
memories. In fact, after years of touring, I have in a vague, ragged sort
of way tried to hold to what might be called a motor philosophy. Anyway,
I have found it a splendid idea when things go very uncomfortably to
remember—if I can—what a very charming diplomat, who was also a great
traveler, once told me: that in motoring, as in life, since trouble gives
character, obstacles and misadventures are really necessary to give the
_trip_ character! The peaceful motorist who has no motor trouble or
weather trouble or road trouble has a pleasant enough time, but after all
he gets the least out of it in the way of recollections. Not that our one
disappointment about our chicken dinner is meant to serve as a backbone
of character for this trip, neither do I hope we shall run into any
serious misadventure, but I really quite honestly hope that everything
will not be so easy as to be entirely colorless.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE EXCITING THINGS IN MOTORING IS WONDERING WHAT
SORT OF A HOTEL YOU WILL ARRIVE AT FOR THE NIGHT]
I was turning these thoughts over in my mind as we sped on to Chicago
and they suggested a most discouraging possibility, which I immediately
confided to Celia:
“Suppose so little happens that there will be nothing to write about? No
one wants descriptions of scenery or too many details of directions as to
roads or hotels, and supposing that is all we know?”
“You could make some up, couldn’t you?” said she sympathetically.
“Do you think that I could tell you a lot of things that never happened
and that you would believe me?” I asked.
She answered positively: “Of course you couldn’t.”
“Then I’m certain nobody else would believe me either.”
“No, I don’t suppose they would,” she agreed, but suddenly she suggested:
“I tell you what we could do. We could stop over in little places and
pass those where we mean to stop—and we can in many ways make ourselves
uncomfortable, if you think it necessary for interesting material.”
But our conversation turned at that point into admiration of our
surroundings; for we had come into a long drive through a park on the
very edge of the Lake that is the beautiful, welcoming entrance to
Chicago.
CHAPTER VII
THE CITY OF AMBITION
We arrived yesterday at “America’s most perfect hotel.” We are still a
little overawed. So far we have only been in hotels that have prided
themselves on being the “best hotel in the state” or the “best hotel
in the Middle West,” but Chicago’s pride throws down the gauntlet to
America, North and South, and coast to coast. I have never heard that
Chicago did anything by halves! “The world will take you at your own
valuation.” Maybe the maxim originated in Chicago.
America’s best hotel looks like a huge tower of chocolate cake
covered with confectioner’s icing. If it were cake, it might easily
be the biggest piece of chocolate in the world, but for “America’s
best”—probably because the word “best” in America has come to mean also
“biggest”—the Blackstone seems rather small. Still, I don’t think it
boasts of being anything except the finest and foremost, most perfect and
complete hotel in the Western Hemisphere.
The lobby as you enter it is very like the thick chocolate center of the
cake and gives a slightly stuffy impression that is felt in no other
part of the really beautiful interior. The cerise and cream-colored
dining-room, in which for afternoon tea they take up the center carpet
and remove some tables, leaving a hollow square of gray marble tiling to
dance on, is the most beautiful room that I have ever seen anywhere, not
excepting Paris. The white marble simplicity of the second dining-room
also appealed to me, and the upstairs halls are like those in a great
private country house.
The restaurant we find for its standard of high prices not very good.
The food at the Statler in Cleveland was the best we have had anywhere,
and the prices were half. Perhaps we ordered, by luck, the Statler’s
specialties and the dishes that the Blackstone prepares least well.
The room service, however, is well done, with a lamp under the coffee
pot and a chafing dish for anything that ought to be kept hot. Yet my
coffee this morning had a flavor not at all associated with memories of
best hotels, but reminiscent of little inns that one stops at in motoring
through France, Germany, or Italy. There should have been a sourish bread
and fresh flower-flavored honey to go with it. It leaves a copperish
taste in the mouth long afterward.
In defense of the management, I ought to add that we take our coffee at
the abnormally early hour of seven, and the coffee for such as we is
probably kept over in a copper boiler from the night before. Still, ought
this to happen in the best hotel, even if only of the Western Hemisphere?
Our rooms high up and overlooking the lake are lovely, perfectly
appointed, and with an entrancing view of moonlight on the water. The
furnishings of the bedrooms are very like those of the Ritz hotels,
and the prices are reasonable considering the high quality of their
accommodations. The three-dollar-and-a-half rooms are small, light,
and completely comfortable; for seven dollars one can have a big room
overlooking the lake, both of course including bathrooms with outside
windows and all the latest Ritz-Carlton type of furnishings, and—I must
not forget—linen sheets and pillow cases, the first real linen we have
seen since we left home! Also the reading lamp by my bed has a shade,
pink on the outside and lined with white and a generous flare, that I can
read by.
At the Statler in Cleveland there was an exceedingly pretty bed table
lamp with a silk shade on it of Alice blue and a little gold lace,
but one might as well have tried to read by the light of a captured
firefly tied up in blue tissue paper. I tried to get the shade off but
it was locked on—to prevent guests from ironing or stealing the shade
or the bulb? At any rate, since nothing could part the cover from the
fixture, and reading in the blue, glimmering gloom was impossible, I
was obliged to get to sleep by watching the members of a club in the
building opposite smoking and lounging, exactly like the drummers
downstairs—downstairs in Cleveland, not here.
The ubiquitous drummer is not in evidence as he was in northern New York,
Indiana, and Ohio. The people down these stairs are more like the people
one sees in the hotels in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. In the other
cities we have come through there were traveling men to the right of us
and traveling men to the left of us, with hats on the backs of their
heads and cigars—segars, looks more like it—tilted in the corners of
their mouths. Traveling men standing and leaning, traveling men leaning
and sitting, but always men in cigar smoke, talking and lounging and
taking their rest in the lobbies.
Like the drummers, I shall soon have all the hotels in the country at my
finger ends; the advantages, disadvantages, and peculiarities of each.
Already I could write a treatise on plumbing apparatus! The Statler in
Cleveland had an “anti-scald” device. I read about it in the “service
booklet” afterward. The curious-looking handles and levers occupying
most of a white-tiled wall at the head of the bathtub so fascinated me
that I had to try and see how they worked. I pulled knobs and pushed
buttons that seemingly were for ornament merely, until suddenly a
harmless-looking handle let loose a roaring spray of water that came
from every part of the amateur Niagara at once. My bath was over before
I had meant it to begin, and I got undressed afterward instead of
before. But I like the bathrooms with running ice-water faucets, and I
love to examine the wares in the automatic machines, also placed in the
bathrooms. They look like a miniature row of nickel telephone booths,
each displaying a bottle or box through the closed glass door, each
with a slot to drop a quarter in and a knob to pull your chosen box or
bottle out with. The tantalizing thing about them is that they hold very
little of use to me. I don’t like the kind of cold cream they carry; the
toothbrushes are usually sold out, and razors and shaving soap don’t
really tempt me.
There are paper bags in the closets to send your laundry away in and
a notice that all washing sent to the desk before nine in the morning
will be returned by five in the afternoon. If only they could run an owl
laundry, taking your things at nine in the evening and returning them
at five in the morning, it would be much more convenient for people who
arrive at night and leave in the early dawn.
I should like to make a collection of hotel signs, such as plates on the
bedroom doors saying, “Stop! Have you forgotten something?” And in the
bathroom the same sentiments and an additional “How about that razor
strop?”
* * * * *
While waiting for my change in one of the big department stores I
overheard the following conversation between two women directly beside
me:
“So you like living in the city, do you?” said one.
“Sure!” answered the other. “You can run into the stores as often as
you feel like it, and if you get lonesome you can go to the movies
or a vaudeville show, or you can walk up Michigan Avenue and see the
styles—there’s always something going on in the city.”
“I dare say you get used to it and feel you couldn’t give it up, but what
I never could get used to is one of them flats. Now out at home, we’ve
got a fifteen-room house, all hardwood floors——”
“What d’you want all that room for? You’ve only got to spend money to
furnish it and elbow grease to care for it. You need two girls or more.
Now, we’ve got a flat all fixed up nice and cozy and one girl takes care
of it easy.”
“Well, I guess it’s all right, but if I had to bring my babies out of the
good country air and put them in a flat, I think they’d die!”
CHAPTER VIII
A FEW CHICAGOANS
The disappointing and unsatisfactory thing about a motor trip is that
unless you have unlimited time, which few people ever seem to have, you
stop too short a while in each place to know anything at all about it.
You arrive at night and leave early in the morning and all you see is one
street driving in, and another going out, and the lobby, dining-room and
a bedroom or two at the hotel.
Happily for us, we have been staying several days in Chicago, and, while
we can scarcely be said to know the city well, we have had at least a few
glimpses of her life and have met quite a few of her people.
Last evening at a dinner given for us, our hostess explained that she had
asked the most typical Chicagoans she could think of, and that one of
the most representative of them was to take me in to dinner. “He is so
enthusiastic, he is what some people would call a booster,” she whispered
just before she introduced him.
In books and articles I had read of persons called “boosters,” and had
thought of them as persons slangy as their sobriquet; blustering, noisy
braggarts, disagreeable in every way. I think the one last night must
have been a very superior quality. He was neither noisy nor disagreeable;
on the contrary, he was most charming and seemed really trying not to be
a booster at all if he could help it.
He began by asking me eagerly how we liked Chicago. Had we thought the
Lake Shore Drive beautiful? Were we struck with Chicago’s smallness
compared to New York? I told him we had, and we were not. He thereupon
generously but reluctantly admitted—the list is his own—that probably
New York had more tall buildings, more wholesale hat and ribbon houses,
a bigger museum of art, a few more theaters, and yes, undoubtedly, more
millionaires’ palaces, but—he suddenly straightened up—“Chicago has
more real homes! And when it comes to beauty, has New York anything to
compare with Chicago’s boulevard systems of parks edged by the lake and
jeweled with lagoons? And yet she is the greatest railroad center in the
whole world. And let me tell you this,” he paused. “New York can never
equal Chicago commercially! How can she? Look on the map and see for
yourself! From New York to San Francisco, north to the lakes and south to
Mexico—that’s where Chicago’s trade reaches! What is there left for New
York after _that_? She can, of course, trade north to Boston and south to
Washington, but she can’t go west, because Chicago reaches all the way to
New York herself, and there is nothing on the east except the Atlantic
Ocean!”
After dinner we were taken to the small dancing club, a one-storied
pavilion containing only a ballroom with a service pantry in the
back, that a few fashionables of Chicago built in a moment of dancing
enthusiasm. Although we met comparatively few people and had little
opportunity to talk to anyone, I noticed everywhere the same attitude as
that of my companion at dinner. The women had it as much as the men. As
soon as they heard we were from New York they began to laud Chicago.
Mrs. X., one of their most prominent hostesses and one of the most
beautiful and faultlessly turned out people I have ever seen, instead
of talking impersonalities as would a New York woman of like position,
plunged immediately into the comparison of New York’s shoreline of
unsightly docks with the view across her own lawn to the Lake. Imagine a
typical hostess of Fifth Avenue greeting a stranger with: “How do you do,
Mrs. Pittsburgh; our city is twice as clean as yours!” However, I felt I
had to say something in defense of mine, so I remarked that the houses on
Riverside Drive faced the Hudson, and across a green terrace, too.
“Oh, but the Palisades opposite are so hideously disfigured with signs,”
she objected, “and besides none of your really fashionable world lives on
your upper West Side.”
Having staked out our fashionable boundaries for us, she switched the
topic to country clubs. Had we been to any of them?
We had been given a dinner at the Saddle and Cycle Club, and we had
to admit it was quite true that New York had nothing in its immediate
vicinity to compare with the terrace on which we had dined, directly on
the Lake, and apparently in the heart of the wilderness, although the
heart of Chicago was only a few minutes’ drive away.
“You must come out to Wheaton and lunch with us tomorrow!” Mrs. X.
said. You could tell from her tone that she was now speaking of her
particularly favorite club. “I think they will be playing polo, but
anyway you must see what a beautiful spot we have made of it, and there
wasn’t even a tree on the place when we started—we have done everything
ourselves.”
Doing things themselves seemed to me chief characteristic of the
Chicagoans. A “do-nothing” must be about the most opprobrious name that
could be given a man. Nearly all of Chicago’s prominent citizens are
self-made—and proud of it. Millionaire after millionaire will tell you of
the day when he wore ragged clothes, ran barefooted, sold papers, cleaned
sidewalks, drove grocers’ wagons, and did any job he could find to get
along. And then came opportunity, not driving up in a golden chariot,
either! But more often a trudging wayfarer to be accompanied long and
wearily. You cannot but admire the straightforwardness—even the pride
with which these successful men recount their meager beginnings, as well
as the ability that always underlies the success.
Another thing that impressed us was that cleverness is rather the rule
than the exception, and the general topics of conversation are more worth
listening to than average topics elsewhere. For instance, their city is
a factor of vital interest to them, and therefore their keenness on the
subject of politics and all municipal matters is equaled possibly in
English society only. They are also interested in inventions, in science,
in all real events and affairs, both at home and abroad. At least this
is what we found there, and what I am told by many people who have spent
much time in Chicago.
To compare Chicago with Boston is much like comparing a dynamo with a
marble monument, yet paradoxically there is a strong similarity between
the two. There is no public place where people congregate. Both are
cities of homes, and hotel life has little part in the society of
either. Boston society is possibly the most distinguished in America—and
Boston front doors will never open to you unless you have cultivation
and birth to the extent of proving satisfactorily who your grandparents
were. Chicago, of course, cares not at all, in a Boston sense, who
your grandfather was so long as he was not a half-wit who transferred
his mental deficiency to you. Boston society is distinguished and
cultivated. Chicago society interesting and stimulating. At least that is
what the people I have met in these two cities seem to me.
But to go back to the evening of our first dinner party in Chicago: the
attitude of everyone rather puzzled and not a little amused me, and after
I had gone to bed I lay awake, and their remarks, especially those of the
man at dinner, recurred to me and I began to laugh—then suddenly stopped.
The mere bragging about the greatness and bigness of his city was not
the point; _the point was his caring_. The Chicagoans love their city,
not as though it were a city at all, but as though it were their actual
flesh and blood. They look at it in the way a mother looks at her child,
thinking it the brightest, most beautiful and wonderful baby in the
whole world. Tell a mother that Mrs. Smith’s baby is the loveliest and
cleverest prodigy you have ever seen, and her feelings will be those
exactly of Chicagoans if you tell them anything that could be construed
into an unfavorable comparison. They can’t bear New York any more than
the mother can bear Mrs. Smith’s baby. At the very sight of a New Yorker
they nettle and their minds flurry around and gather up quickly every
point of possible advantage to their own beloved Chicago. Not for a
second am I ridiculing them any more than I would ridicule the sacredness
of a man’s belief in prayer. Their love of their city is something
wonderful, glorious, sublime. They don’t brag for the sake of bragging,
but they champion her with every last red corpuscle in their heart’s
blood because they so loyally and tremendously care.
I wonder, is it their attitude that has affected us, too? Otherwise why
is the appeal of Chicago so much more personal than that of other cities
we have come through, so that even we are feeling quite low-spirited
because tomorrow we leave for good! To be sure, the Blackstone is a
beautiful and luxurious hotel, and we are not likely to meet its double
again between here and the Pacific Coast, but it is not that, neither
is it that we have any sentiment for the city or those that dwell
therein. We have no really close friends here, we have met only a few
people—in fact, we are ordinary tourists merely passing through a strange
city, running into a few acquaintances as people are sure to run into
occasional acquaintances almost everywhere.
I don’t think I can explain this personal and sudden liking that I feel
for Chicago. Once in a very great while one meets a rare person whom one
likes and trusts at first sight, and about whom one feels that to know
him better would be to love him much.
To me Chicago is like that.
I don’t suppose a New Yorker ever wants to live anywhere else, but if
sentence should be passed on me that I had to spend the rest of my life
in Chicago I doubt if I would find the punishment severe. There is
something big, wholesome, and vitalizing out here. It is just the sort
of place where one would choose to bring up one’s children, the ideal
soil and sun and climate for young Americans to grow in. New York is a
great exotic hothouse in which orchids thrive; but the question is this:
in selecting a young plant for the garden of the world, is an orchid the
best plant to choose?
CHAPTER IX
TINS
If E. M. were put in charge of the commissary department we would be
given hardtack and water—his suggestions as to food never go any further.
I, on the other hand, feel impelled toward chocolate in the way a
drunkard is impelled toward rum, and if the supplies were left to me I
should fill every thermos with chocolate ice-cream soda water and the
sandwich boxes with chocolate cake. But Celia, having little opinion of
hardtack and still less of chocolate, which she declared was making me
as fat as butter, suddenly took the matter of food supplies into her own
hands. Although she acknowledged that she had invited herself upon the
expedition in the first place, and that she had agreed to sit under the
luggage in the back, she protested that a heavy hamper full of silver and
crockery and nothing to eat in it was an inhumanly heavy weight to put
her up against, and she would like to arrange things differently.
Of course we told her that if she felt like rising above her surroundings
it was not for us to hold her down. So without any more ado she shipped
the beautiful lunch basket home by freight and dragged me out with her
to buy a more practical substitute. Her first purchase was a large,
white, tin breadbox—just an ordinary box with a padlock, neither lining
nor fixtures.
“What for?” I asked.
“To put things in,” said she. “It is going to be padlocked and it is
going to stand flat on the floor of the tonneau and stay there, and not
tumble over on me! Also we won’t have to have it lugged up to our room at
night or carted down in the morning.”
“Excellent!” I agreed enthusiastically. “Let’s have paper plates and
five-cents-a-dozen spoons and throw them away and not have to fuss with
anything to be washed.”
At a ten-cent store we bought only three knives, but dozens of plates and
spoons and enough oiled paper to wrap sandwiches for an expedition. Then
we went to a beautiful grocery store near the hotel and laid in a supply
of everything imaginable that comes in china, glass, or tin! Chicken,
ham, tongue, pheasant in tubes like tooth paste, pâté de foie gras in
china, big pieces of chicken in glass, nuts, jam, marmalade, and honey.
One article of food that we had tried to find ever since leaving New York
was still unobtainable. Neither brittle bread nor protopuffs had ever
been heard of west of New York, and our Chicago grocer looked as blank as
the rest. Either New York women are the only ones who worry about keeping
their figures or else the women of other cities stay slim naturally!
Nothing but good, rich fat-producing bread and butter to be had, to say
nothing of chocolate! And our waistbands getting tighter every day! Not
E. M.—he being very young is as lathlike as ever.
Having bought everything else, we repeated our question, was he _sure_ he
had no gluten or Swedish bread, no dry, flourless bread of any kind! No,
he had only hardtack, and then produced—round packages of brittle bread!
Wonderful! We were so delighted we fairly floundered in it. “Bring us
more; we are going to cross the continent; we must have lots of it!” I
said greedily. Then we hurried home and waited for our supplies to arrive.
First came a big basket, bulging. Had we really bought all that? But it
was only the beginning. Bread, bread, and more bread! Bales of it! It was
I who had ordered “lots of it.” Celia looked sorry for me.
“It looks like rain! We could shelter the car under it,” was all I,
idiotically, could think of. And in my absent-mindedness I broke open
one of the bales. It was certainly Swedish bread, the nicest, crispest
imaginable, and then I took a bite. Caraway seeds!
In our family some ancestor must have been done to death on caraway
seeds. The strongest of us becomes a queer green at even so much as a
whiff of one. Celia ran out into the hall as though I had exclaimed
“Snakes!” And I, like the one who had just been bitten, followed
unstably after her.
“Is there a bat in your room?” asked the floor clerk, sympathetically.
“N-o,—car-a-way s-seeds,” said Celia, all in a tremble.
“We none of us can bear them—and they are in the bread,” I explained.
“Caraway seeds?” exclaimed the bewildered floor clerk. “Oh, but I like
caraway seeds very much!”
“Do you?” we gasped. “Well, then if you will send a staff of porters into
Room 2002, you can have enough to last all your life! You can stack a
whole mountain of it around your desk and eat your way out.”
* * * * *
It rained all last night and drizzled off and on all morning. As everyone
has warned us against muddy roads west of Chicago, we sat with our faces
pressed to the windows overlooking the Lake, feeling alternately hopeful
and downcast and asking each other questions in circles. Might we try to
get on? Had we perhaps better unpack and stay? Twice the sun struggled
out and we sent down for the porters to come for our luggage, but both
times when they arrived it had begun to rain and we sent them away
again. By twelve o’clock, having finally decided to stay over a day, E.
M. went to the Saddle and Cycle Club to lunch with some friends. Celia
and I were about to go down to the restaurant for our own luncheon when
the breadbox caught her attention. I saw her lift the cover and look
wistfully at the two neatly tied white paper packages and three brightly
shining thermos jars that were on top. Expecting to start early in the
morning we had the night before ordered a luncheon put up. And now what
were we to do with the food?
“It was so expensive!” she said wistfully. “The pâté sandwiches were
sixty cents apiece and they will be horrid and dry tomorrow!”
“And the lobster salad was a dollar and a half—and that certainly won’t
keep!”
“And we don’t even know whether it is good or not!” she almost wailed,
but quite as quickly she exclaimed happily: “Let’s picnic here!”
“Here?” I said vaguely, looking about at the rose silk hangings and the
velvet carpet.
“Why not? It is ever so much more comfortable here than it would have
been out on a dusty roadside. Besides, we really ought to see how our
commissary department works. We ought to be sure that we haven’t any more
caraway seeds!” she shivered.
A few minutes later we had spread our picnic on the floor and were having
a perfect time. Also while we were about it we thought we had better
sample the various things we had bought the day before.
“There is no use,” said the food expert, “in carting about a lot of stuff
that we don’t like!” So we opened and tasted a tin of this and a jar of
that until we were surrounded with what looked like the discards of a
canning factory. Suppose our New York friends who had exclaimed at our
going without any servants could see us now!
I was jabbing a hole in a can of condensed milk with a silver and
tortoise-shell nail file when someone knocked at the door. Without a
thought of the picture we were presenting to the probable chambermaid, I
called, “Come in!” but was too busy to look up until I heard a sort of
gasp and a man’s voice stammered:
“I only came to see—to see if Mrs. Post—if there was anything I could do
to—serve——”
“Miller!” It was the head waiter of one of the dining-rooms downstairs—a
man who had for several years been a second head waiter in a celebrated
New York hotel and who had once been a butler for a member of our family.
The expression on his face was one of such surprise, bewilderment,
apology, shame and humility that I found myself explaining:
“We were to have picnicked along the road, but it rained. And so we have
picnicked——! It is very simple!”
“Yes, madam,” he agreed, stoically. But it was not until I had assured
him that we never picnicked more than once a day indoors and had given
him permission to order our dinner at what time and wherever he pleased,
and most particularly after I refused to allow him to send a waiter to
put the room in order and be a witness to the family’s eccentricities
that he became his urbane, impassible self once more.
Tonight I suppose we will have to deck ourselves out in our best bibs
and tuckers and sit through a conventionally complete dinner at the most
prominent table in the dining-room so that Miller may suffer no loss to
his proper pride.
CHAPTER X
MUD!!
We have struck it!
It looks pretty much as though our motor trip to San Francisco were going
to end in Rochelle, Illinois.
Thirty-six miles out of Chicago we met the Lincoln Highway and from the
first found it a disappointment. As the most important, advertised and
lauded road in our country, its first appearance was not engaging. If it
were called the cross continent _trail_ you would expect little, and be
philosophical about less, but the very word “highway” suggests macadam at
the least. And with such titles as “Transcontinental” and “Lincoln” put
before it, you dream of a wide straight road like the Route Nationale of
France, or state roads in the East, and you wake rather unhappily to the
actuality of a meandering dirt road that becomes mud half a foot deep
after a day or two of rain!
Still we went over it easily enough until we passed De Kalb.[3] After
that the only “highway” attributes left were the painted red, white
and blue signs decorating the telegraph poles along the way. The
highway itself disappeared into a wallow of mud! The center of the road
was slightly turtle-backed; the sides were of thick, black ooze and
ungaugeably deep, and the car was _possessed_, as though it were alive,
to pivot around and slide backward into it. We had no chains with us, and
had passed no places where we could get any. Apart from the difficulty
of keeping going on chainless tires our only danger, except that of
being bogged, was in getting over the bridges that had no railings to
their approaches. The car chasséd up every one, swung over toward the
embankment, slewed back on the bridge, went across that steadily, and
dove into the mud again! It certainly was dampening to one’s ardor for
motoring. If the Lincoln Highway was like this what would the ordinary
road be after it branched away at Sterling?
A little car on ahead was slithering and sliding around too, although it
had four chains on it, but it did not sink in very far and it was getting
along much better than we were—so much better in fact, that at the end of
a few miles it slowly wobbled beyond our sight.
Finally we turned a bend and there was a little car on ahead. Not the
same one however. This one evidently had no chains and was coming toward
us drunkenly staggering from side to side. Gradually the lower half of
it was hidden by the incline of an intervening bridge, then suddenly it
disappeared altogether. When we arrived at the bridge ourselves we saw
the car in a deep ditch almost over on its side. The occupants of it, a
man and a small boy, were both out and nothing, apparently, was hurt. The
small boy was having a heavenly time paddling around in mud way above his
knees, and the man called up to us cheerfully:
“’Twas m’own fault; I hadn’t ought to ’a’ come without chains on! No use
for you to stop, thank you! You couldn’t help any and we’d only block
th’road between us. A team’ll be along before long!”
Regretfully we left them and slipped and slid and staggered on for some
miles more.
“Oh,” said Celia in the back, “how are we ever going up _that_?” “That”
was an awful embankment ahead which to look at made me feel as if I had
eaten nothing for a week. It was steep, narrow, turtle-backed, with black
slime, and had a terrifying drop at either side of its treacherous and
unguarded edges. The car went snorting up the incline until, nearly at
the top point where the drop was steepest, it balked and slid toward the
edge——!
“This is the end,” I thought, wondering in the same second if any of
us would fall clear. For one of those eternity-laden moments we seemed
to hang poised on the brink. Then E. M. seemed almost to lift the huge
weight of the machine around bodily and compel it in spite of its
helplessness to crawl up, up, up on the bridge.
Glancing back at Celia, after we were safely over, she looked about as
chalky and weak-kneed as I felt. A short distance further, however, we
ran on the brick pavement of a town. The ragged red-brick buildings
of the street we turned into were not very encouraging and we feared
that again the Blue Book’s hotel description might be one of those
“complimentary” ones, consisting of its paid advertisement. E. M. urged
our trying to get chains and going on to Davenport, but Celia and I had
all the motoring in the mud that we cared about. No matter how squalid
the town, or how poor the accommodations, we meant to cross no more
bridges like that last one until the roads dried! Then we made two turns
like a letter Z and found ourselves in the sweetest, cleanest, newest
little town imaginable. Its streets were all wide and smoothly paved with
brick, and its houses, mostly white, were set each in a garden of trim
and clipped green. There was a new post-office of marble magnificence and
a shopping center of big-windowed, fresh-painted, enterprising stores,
but no hotel except a dingy ramshackle tavern that we took for granted
was the one mentioned in the guide book. We wondered if one of the neat,
sweet little houses might perhaps take us to board instead.
In front of a garage was a man with a blue coat and brass buttons, and
“Fire Chief” on them. We asked him if he knew anyone at whose house we
could stay until the road dried. He looked at us and then at the car in
a quizzical sort of way.
“Oh, y-es,” he drawled. “You could put up at Mrs. Blake’s, I guess.”
We asked the way to Mrs. Blake’s and then happened to remark that it was
curious a town as up-to-date as this one had no good hotel. He lost his
drawl immediately: “No good hotel? Well, I just guess there is a good
hotel! The Collier Inn is just across that street and around the corner.
It’s a fine hotel.”
We cheered up instantly. But why hadn’t he told us that sooner? He
thought that “considerin’ we had asked for a boarding-house, mebbe th’
hotel it was too high-priced for us, but it was a fine hotel if we didn’t
mind the cost.”
I don’t know how we had missed it. It was a fair-sized yellow brick
building on a corner, a rather typical small-town commercial hotel. I
went in expecting dingy darkness. The lobby looked like the office in
a Maine summer resort. I asked—not that I for a moment expected to get
it—for rooms with baths. The proprietor said, “Certainly,” and showed me
three new little rooms, each with a little new bathroom attached.
I returned to my companions grinning like a Cheshire cat. It seemed to us
as though we had found a veritable Ritz!
CHAPTER XI
IN ROCHELLE
Twenty-four hours in a town like this and we feel as though we knew it
and the people intimately. In many ways it suggests a toy-land town. Its
streets are so straight and evenly laid, its houses so white and shining,
its gardens so green, its shops so freshly painted, its displays in the
windows so new, and its people so friendly.
“Strangers in town!” they seem to say to themselves as they look at us,
but instead of looking at us in a “wait until we know who you are before
we take any notice of you,” they seem quite ready to smile and begin a
conversation.
Our most particular friend, as well as our oldest acquaintance, is the
fire chief. E. M. has, of course, one or two other particular friends
in the garage. If he can only find a mechanic or two to talk to, he is
perfectly happy. Celia’s and my chief diversion has been going to the
moving picture theaters, which is evidently the fashionable thing to do
here. In the evening we saw three real theater parties. One of them was
a very important affair; they met in the lobby and went down the aisle
two by two; the ladies all had many diamonds, brand-new white-kid gloves
quite tight, picture hats, corsage bouquets and boxes of candy.
Celia and I had neither gloves nor hats on, and when we ran into the
theater parties, we felt almost like urchins that had been caught
wandering into the foyer of the Metropolitan Opera House. Like our hatred
of caraway seeds, our love of hatlessness must be a family failing.
In Chicago two different papers took the trouble to mention E. M.’s
carelessness in the matter of head-covering. “Scorning to wear a hat even
on occasions when it is generally considered to be convenable,” said one.
The other described him as “such a disciple of fresh air that he was seen
driving a big racing machine on Michigan Avenue without a hat!” Yet isn’t
it a popular supposition that the West is freer from conventions than the
East?
The rain has finally stopped and this morning the sun is trying hard to
shine. To do much good it will have to shine steadily for about three
days. We walked to the end of the brick paving down one of the streets a
little while ago and looked at the black wet Lincoln Highway leading to
Sterling.
On our way back we met our friend the fire chief.
“Been to look at the mud?” asked he, cheerfully. “It isn’t a bit bad now.
You ought to see it when it’s muddy! Why, it took me eight hours to go
twenty-one miles! I did have to get a team of horses to pull me out of
one bog, but otherwise I got through all right.”
“Didn’t you strain your engine?” I asked him. “Oh, yes,” he said
cheerfully; “I guess I did, but I couldn’t help that.”
“Well, maybe you couldn’t,” I agreed, then added with confidential
finality, “but I tell you what we’re going to do! We’re going to put ours
on a nice, dry, comfortable freight car tomorrow morning and ship it past
the mud district—which is probably the width of the continent.”
His warmth of manner fell suddenly to zero. I feared we had in some way
offended him because we thought his state muddy. “Of course it is a
lovely country to grow things in,” I added quickly, “but you see we want
particularly to get to San Francisco, and the surest way is by freight.”
But we could not put the broken conversation together again. In fact,
our friend the fire chief doesn’t smile any more. Our other friends, the
garage men, also look at us askance—in fact in some way we seem to have
lost our popularity.
CHAPTER XII
THE WEIGHT OF PUBLIC OPINION
We know now what is the matter! They think we are quitters! They are
so filled with a sense of shame for us that we are beginning to feel
it ourselves. In spite of our original intention to go only so far as
roads were good and accommodations were comfortable, we feel that we are
somehow lacking in mettle, that we are sandless, to say the least!
To explain that we are not crossing the continent as a feat of endurance
is useless; having started to motor to the West, our stopping this side
of the place we set out for is to them incomprehensible.
“Why, _that_ car ought to go through anything!” is all any of them can
think of saying to us.
Our friend the fire chief stood glowering out in front of the garage
all morning. I think he would have gone to great lengths to prevent our
machine’s incarceration in a freight car. The proprietor of the garage
gave us his opinion: “Of course we drive pretty light machines around
here, and yours is heavy and your wheels are uncommon narrow, but that
engine of yours sure ain’t no toy! I’d go through if I was you! I
wouldn’t quit for a little _mud_! No, sir!”
“And only a _little mud_ at that!” scornfully echoed the fire chief.
“And supposing we slide off one of those bridges, or turn turtle in a
ditch?” asked we.
The chief scratched his head, but his determination was undaunted. “She’d
be kind of heavy to fall on you,” he grinned. “All the same, if that car
was mine, I’d go right on plumb across Hell itself, I would!”
To finish what you have begun, to see it through at whatever cost, that
seems to be the spirit here; it is probably the spirit of the West, the
spirit that has doubled and trebled these towns in a few years. The
consideration as to whether it is the wisest and most expedient thing to
do, has no part in their process of reasoning. That is exactly the point.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs but to do and die.
Only they do not seem to die. They thrive gloriously.
All the same, if this country of ours ever gets into the war there will
be the making of a second Balaklava regiment in a town of Illinois
beginning with an R and a certain fire chief should make a gallant
captain.
But magnificent as is their indomitability as a quality of character;
for us, for instance, to wreck a valuable car, which we might never
afford to replace, for the sake of saying that we were not stopped by any
such trifle as mud seems more foolhardy than courageous. Nevertheless,
they have in some way imbued us with their spirit to such a degree that
we have countermanded the freight car, and although the mud is not a bit
better, have put chains on and are going to start.
* * * * *
Enthusiasm was no name for it! The town turned out to see us off;
the fire chief drove out his engine in all its brass and scarlet
resplendency. The ban of our cowardly leanings toward freight cars was
lifted and they saw us off on our muddy way rejoicing!
We are glad to have seen this little town. Maybe the contagion of its
enthusiasm will remain with us permanently.
The mud, by the way, lasted only ten miles. The celebrated Lincoln
Highway parted from us at Sterling and as soon as we left it, the
ordinary, unadvertised River to River road that we had dreaded was
splendid all the rest of the way to this beautiful hotel, the Black Hawk,
in Davenport, Iowa.
I was in a perfect flutter of excitement about crossing the Mississippi
though I have scarcely the courage to tell the unbelievably idiotic
reason why! It was Mrs. Z., who had crossed the continent an uncountable
number of times, who told me in all seriousness that the middle of the
United States was cut unbridgeably in two by the Mississippi! Nothing
spanned this divide except a railroad bridge, and the only way motorists
had ever crossed was on the trestles in the middle of the night, against
the law and at the risk of their lives! The bridges, needless to say, are
many and quite as crossable as Manhattan to Brooklyn. The river itself
is yellow as the Tiber, but its banks, devoid of factories and refuse
collections, were enchantingly lovely, sloping and vividly green; a
little like the upper Hudson, or still more, Queenstown Harbor in Ireland.
Davenport is evidently a gay resort. A friendly elevator boy detained E.
M. and whispered: “Say, mister, there’s a cabberay going on tonight on
the island. They’ll be vaudeville, tangoing and a band!” He must have put
E. M.’s lack of enthusiasm at our door, for he added: “The fun doesn’t
start until late. You could easy take them,” pointing toward us, “to a
movie first. The Princess is high class and _re_fined. You take it from
me and fix it to stay for a while. You’ll find we’re some lively town!”
CHAPTER XIII
MUDDIER!
The morning looked gray but having gone easily enough the day before with
chains on, we no longer worried about a little rain. Nevertheless, we
left our beautiful rooms at the Black Hawk in Davenport, Iowa, the best
accommodations at the most reasonable rates that we have yet had, with a
regret that has since been doubly intensified.
For seventy-five miles beyond Davenport the road was excellent; not
macadam, but a wide dustless surface of natural clay. The country was
very much like that in southern New York and eastern New Jersey—a rolling
picturesque landscape of green fields, beautiful trees and streams. As
there were black clouds gradually coming up behind us, and we had as
usual forgotten to bring any food except our tinned collection, it seemed
wiser when we got to Iowa City to buy some sandwiches rather than stop at
the Hotel Jefferson, and give the black clouds a chance to catch up. At
an eating-place that had a sign on it: “Every Sort of Sandwiches Ready,”
a gum-chewing youth leaning against the shelves behind the counter pushed
a greasy bill of fare toward me. From a list of chicken, ham, tongue,
and cheese sandwiches, I ordered three chicken—we could not do with less
and I doubted if we’d care for more. They hadn’t any chicken! “Ham,
then?” There wasn’t any ham! “Tongue?” The youth thought if we weren’t in
a hurry he might be able to get some canned tongue at the grocer’s down
the street; the only sandwiches he had ready were of cheese laid between
huge hunks of bread and each garnished with a radish skewered on the top
with a toothpick!
Celia meanwhile by chance discovered an apartment called “Woman’s Rest
Room” where she got some delicious homemade coffee-cake and rolls. Those
with our own potted meats or jams were, of course, all anyone could ask.
That is always the difficulty—a stranger in town has no idea where to go
for anything.
From a point about ten miles beyond Iowa City, the story of that dreadful
day ought to be written in indigo of the darkest shade. It was such
an experience as to dampen your enthusiasm as an adventuring motorist
forever; but that leaves you at least a great appreciation of Pullman
trains, or even old-fashioned stage coaches—any means of conveyance that
can keep going, right end first.
Our delay in foraging had given the black clouds time to gain on us.
But after observing them uneasily for a mile or two, we felt confident
that we were keeping ahead of them, until about ten miles further, at
which point we had a puncture—our very first—and the rain caught us. We
debated whether we had better go back to Iowa City or whether we should
try to run one hundred and thirty miles in the rain to Des Moines.
E. M. was not at all enthusiastic about going on. In fact he had not
wanted to leave Davenport. As he is certainly not apt to care about
weather we ought to have paid exceptional attention to his dubiousness.
But he only said something about a strain on his engine, to which I paid
no great attention—as I feel perfectly confident that no matter what
happens, he is not going to let that engine get hurt very much if it is
in his power to prevent it. The engine is to him what Chicago is to the
Chicagoans, the very child of his heart; its every little piece of steel
or aluminum as personally precious to him as a baby’s tooth or curl is
to its doting parent. We can all be tired and hungry, wet or cold, or
broiling and thirsty, it means nothing to him so long as that engine is
comfortably purring under its bonnet. But the slightest complaint on its
part, its faintest squeak or grumble, the smallest thing that he feels
may disagree with it, and he is unspeakably miserable.
However, the rain seemed to be only a drizzle and the roads looked so
hard and splendid, we concluded it would surely take many hours of
downpour to get them in a bad condition—if in fact they were likely to be
much affected at all. So although as a precaution E. M. put on chains,
we went on in tranquil ignorance of the Nemesis that lurked in waiting.
As an illustration of what rain in Iowa can do, twenty-five minutes of
drizzle turned the smooth, hard surface of the road into the consistency
of gruel. Not only that, but as though it were made in layers, and the
top layer slid off the under layers and the under layers slipped out
between, or the reverse. Our wheels, even with chains on, had no more
hold than revolving cakes of soap might have on slanting wet marble.
The car not only zigzagged sideways, backwards, every way but forward,
unless some unexpected obstacle or pitfall loomed or yawned in our
path, in which case it was seized with an impetuous desire to plunge
to destruction. We saw two unfortunate automobiles already landed in
the ditch. One, luckily, was being hauled out by a team, but the second
was on a lonely stretch of road, and embedded far above the hubs. Its
occupants peered out at us sympathetically, as they saw we were utterly
powerless to help. We were just balancing this way and that, and for a
while it looked as though we were going to park ourselves beside them. We
could only call out as we finally slithered by, that we would send back a
team from a town ahead—if we ever got to one.
At the end of an hour of this swerving, crawling misery, we had a second
puncture. There was a barn near by, and the farmer, a German, let us
drive in and change the tire under cover. We asked if there was any
town nearer and less out of our course than Cedar Rapids. Or would he
himself, or perhaps one of his neighbors, take us in? No, he did not
want any boarders in his house; he said it with a quite surly manner;
his neighbors had no liking for strangers, either. Cedar Rapids was our
nearest place.
In contrast to the kindness with which he had motioned us to come
into his barn in the first place, it struck us that he was on closer
acquaintance, surprisingly curt. But it was not until afterwards, in
the light of later experience, that we realized his manner had become
intentionally unfriendly.
The tire changing went very quickly, and in a few minutes we were on the
road again. Celia and I ate our luncheon, but E. M., struggling with the
zigzagging car, had no thought for food and ate only a mouthful or two
that I fed him as he drove. It was by now pouring hard and we seemed to
be making less and less progress. One thing, we now quite understood what
our friend the fire chief meant when he said the road around Rochelle was
only a little muddy. Without hesitating a moment we would be willing to
swear that the mud championship of the world belongs to Iowa. Illinois
mud is slippery and slyly eager to push unstable tourists into the ditch,
but in Iowa it lurks in unfathomable treachery, loath to let anything
ever get out again that once ventures into it. Our progress through it
became hideously like that of a fly crawling through yellow flypaper—as
though it were a question of time how soon we would be brought to an
exhausted end, and sink into it forever!
At the end of two hours more, we had gone ten miles. Cedar Rapids was
still nearly twenty miles away. _Twenty miles!_ Could anyone in a
lifetime go so far as that? Could any machine hold out so endlessly? In
another hour we had gone only four miles further, and by no means sure
of our road, and then came a third puncture! It was one of those last
straws that seem to finish everything. You think you just can’t live
through it and struggle more. Much better give up and _lie_ down in the
fly-paper and stay there. We were at the top of a fairly steep hill, so
that we might perhaps be able to go on again, but to see E. M., already
exhausted, and not a soul to help him, get out again into that drenching
rain—he had no raincoat and the mud was over his shoetops—and we had
started on the trip in the first place because he had been ill—I could
easily have burst into tears. Which exhibition of courage would have
helped the situation such a lot!
[Illustration: HOURS AND HOURS, ACROSS LAND AS FLAT AND ENDLESS AS THE
OCEAN]
Meanwhile he was having a hopeless time trying to jack the car up. There
was no foundation for the jack to stand on, so that it merely burrowed
down into the clay. Some men lounged out of the one house near by. They
were Germans. All the inhabitants seemed to be German. They approached
with seeming friendliness, but on closer inspection of us, their
demeanor noticeably changed. There was something in our appearance they
did not like. I thought possibly they resented our car’s waltzing, or
thought that E. M.’s jack was harmfully puncturing the surface of their
beautiful road. Two of them shrugged their shoulders and all of them
looked at us in impassive silence that was neither friendly nor polite.
Then a younger man appeared who came forward as though to offer to help,
but stopping to look inquisitively at the radiator top, he too, grew
sullen. And then we understood! The emblem of the Royal Automobile Club
of London was put on when we were in England last year; and as it is very
pretty, we happen never to have taken it off, and the men were Germans!
That’s why they wouldn’t help us. We had asked for a piece of plank that
one of them was holding; the man carried it away. Finally, when that
dreadful tire was at last on, they would not even tell us the way until I
asked in German. Then one of them laconically pointed it out.
Hot, tired, and soaked as a drowned rat, E. M. for three and a half hours
longer guided the steaming, floundering and irresponsible machine until
at last by supreme effort he got us to Cedar Rapids.
CHAPTER XIV
ONE OF THE FOGGED IMPRESSIONS
Somewhere we read a sign “Cedar Rapids suits me. It will suit you.”
Of course after those last six hours of mud-wallowing agony C-e-d-a-r
R-a-p-i-d-s simply spelled Heaven. But after we were dry and warm and
fed—such is the ingratitude of human nature and tourists—we would very
gladly have gone away again.
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I can not tell——
explains our feelings rather perfectly. We were tired; at least E. M.
was exhausted, and Celia and I were tired probably in sympathy. Also it
is always disappointing to start out for a place and not be able to get
there, and little things sometimes sum up a feeling of depression quite
out of proportion to their importance.
We went over bad pavement, and came to some more that was torn up, so
that the city had an upheaved effect. It was all drenched in rain, and
the little we saw of it looked ugly and brown, and finally our rooms were
completely sapping to joyfulness of spirit. Perhaps if we had come from
a hotel less attractive than the Black Hawk in Davenport, we should not
have so keenly felt the contrast, but the rooms we were in depressed us
to the verge of melancholia. Dingy bottle-green paper, a stained carpet,
a bathroom in which the plumbing wouldn’t work, a depressing view of a
torn-up street! I wandered around the cow-path surrounding my big bed
in my narrow room, looked out at the weeping sky, and wondered whether
we were going to have this sort of thing all the way—these dust-filled
hideous rooms, cleaned only with a carpet sweeper; these sooty, ugly,
busy, noisy towns. And the meals—those anemic chilled potatoes, beans
full of strings, everything slapped on plates any which way, and
everything tasting as though it had come out of the same dishwater!
Whenever I am far away from home and uncomfortable, I think of the story
Eleanor Hoyt Brainard once told me. After a long chapter of misadventures
on one of those dreadful journeys where she missed the good boat and
rocked about on a little one, failed to get accommodations at the places
that she counted on, and as a last straw took a wrong continental train,
and finally too exhausted to sleep was settling herself for the night in
the corner of a third-class day coach, she began to cry. To her husband’s
amazed and concerned questioning, “Oh, dear!” she sobbed, “it’s just come
over me we have a perfectly good home! And I wonder _why_ we don’t stay
in it more!”
When my article appeared in _Collier’s_, a Cedar Rapids newspaper arose
in wrath and said we must have put up at a third-rate hotel. I agree with
its rating, but was told it was the best in town. I do realize, however,
it is a very distorted judgment that appraises a town by a few rooms in
an hotel. Unless you can stay in a city long enough to know some of its
people, to learn something about its atmosphere and personality, your
opinion of it is as valueless as your opinion of a play would be, after
seeing only the posters on the outside of the theater. Yet if you are a
transient tourist, it is the room you are shown into that necessarily
colors your impression of that city. If your room is fresh and clean
and comfortable, you give the attributes of newness, cleanness and
up-to-dateness to the city itself. An ugly, down-at-heels, uncomfortable
hotel makes you think the same of the city. You can’t help it, can you?
Besides which we had come to see the country and not stop, rained in, for
indefinite periods in towns that differed in no way from dozens of others
in the East. It was the West, the real great, free, open West we had come
to see. Ranches, cowboys, Indians, not little cities like sample New
Yorks.
At the hotel there was a large Bakers’ Convention. A suggestively
domestic affair in more ways than one, since many had brought their
wives. As though in advertisement of the nourishing quality of a wheat
diet, men and women were nearly all pleasingly plump. We noticed
also, that every man without exception had a solitaire diamond ring
on his wedding-ring finger. Sometimes the wife had only a wide gold
wedding-ring, but her husband was in diamonds. I don’t know whether bread
is a specialty of Cedar Rapids, or whether an effort was made to do
particular honor to the bakers, but bread was the one thing on the menu
that proved to be really good.
There were two bakers and their wives, elderly couples, who sat at the
next table to us. One of the wives had a wretched cough and the other was
rather deaf; and to the combination we owe an anecdote that I hope they
did not mind our overhearing, or my repeating.
It seems the husband of the wife who had the cough, sent for a doctor who
had been out night after night on serious cases until the poor man was
completely exhausted. In order to listen to the patient’s breathing he
put his head on her chest and told her to “count four.” The husband came
into the room and heard his wife counting, “One hundred and forty-six—one
hundred and forty-seven——” and the doctor sound asleep!
It was in Cedar Rapids, too, that our waitress told us about an
automobile she had just bought, to drive out in the evenings! As a
newspaper afterwards printed in criticism of my above remark, “Tips in
the West may be larger than the earnings of dyspeptic authoresses in the
East!”
CHAPTER XV
A FEW WAYS OF THE WEST
Just as the good roads turned into mud slides in a few minutes, a few
hours of sun and wind transformed them into good ones again. After only
two days’ delay we went back over the scene of all our misery and the
distance out of our way that had taken us nearly six hours, we skimmed
over in less than one, returning to our Des Moines road with a little
delay and no misadventure. (Our non-interruptible chauffeur paying no
attention to the suggestion of stopping to taste the famous springs at
Colfax.)
When we arrived in Des Moines, as E. M. wanted to take the car to a
garage to have some things fixed, Celia and I went out by ourselves on
foot. The first vehicle we saw had a sign on it “Jitney, 5 cents.” Never
having been in one, and not caring a bit where it took us, we promptly
got in.
“Now, what are we going to see?” asked Celia, not addressing anybody in
particular.
“Strangers?” questioned the driver affably, turning around.
“Yes,” said Celia, “what can we see from your car?”
“Well, there’s the Capitol—I go right by that, and the finest buffaloes
in the States are less’n a block further out. You could go see the
buffaloes and then walk back to the Capitol.”
“Excellent!” we agreed.
The buffaloes were stuffed in a case at the museum, but they must
certainly have been among the finest in the world when they were alive.
We also saw some stuffed prairie dogs. But out here you need not go in
a museum to see them! After the museum we walked through the Capitol, a
fine building splendidly situated on a height overlooking the city and
its dome newly gleaming with gold. When we were descending the many steps
of the Capitol’s terrace, we saw the same jitney driver who had brought
us there, and his car being empty, he drew up expectantly at the curb.
Not wanting, however, to return to the spot we had started from, we
suggested that he take off his sign and drive us about by the hour.
He grinned broadly. Sure he would! Also he augmented his price with
equal alacrity. Then rolling up his “5-cent” sign, and surveying his
unplacarded machine in evident satisfaction, he said jauntily:
“I tell you! The cops’ll think I’m the showfer of a _mill_ionaire! When
you’re nothing but a jitney you stay behind here, and you don’t go there!
But you bet they’ll let me through _now_ all right!”
As a jitney he had been trundling along briskly, but now assuming all the
characteristics of those who are hired by time instead of by distance,
he never let the speedometer go above eight miles an hour; tried his best
to keep it at six and stalled the engine about every hundred yards, until
at the end of a very little while of halting and creeping we found his
tin-kettle tramp machine acute punishment. We told him that if he would
only go quickly, we would willingly pay for a second hour’s drive at the
end of twenty minutes. But nothing we could say had any effect upon him.
He kept on at the same dot-and-go-one creep. Finally, in desperation,
Celia shrieked:
“If you don’t get us home at once, it will be too late! You will have to
take us to the asylum!”
He looked around at Celia like a scared rabbit, and in her frenzied
countenance found evidently no reassurance, for he took us home at a
speed that broke the traffic regulations—even for the “showfers of
millionaires!”
In a few of our impressions, Des Moines had an eccentric topsy-turviness
as though we had stumbled into the pages of “Alice in Wonderland.” At the
Chamberlain, an old-fashioned General Grant style of hotel, the elevator
boys sit on chairs _in the center_ of the elevator and the guests stand.
When I asked to have a cup of coffee and toast sent up to my room the
next morning at half-past seven, the head waitress raised her eyebrows
and explained:
“If you will tell the clerk at the desk, he will have your room called at
whatever hour you say.”
“I don’t want my room called,” I protested, “I want you to send my coffee
up to me at seven-thirty.”
She looked vaguely puzzled. Then in a moment she said, with obvious
intention to be kind: “Don’t you think you better just leave a rising
call? Because maybe you will feel all right in the morning and’ll want to
come down for your breakfast.”
We also found another original idea in hotel service. At the Chamberlain
we were told our rooms would be two dollars and a half apiece, but our
bill was two-fifty for one and five-fifty for the other two. When I asked
why, the clerk said: “Didn’t you have the door open between?”
“Certainly we did.”
“Well, you see,” he explained, “that makes the room _en suite_, so it is
fifty cents extra.”
The interest people take in population is very amazing to us. Ask any
New Yorker the city’s population and two out of five will shrug their
shoulders. Ask anyone out here—man, woman or child—you will get on the
spot the figures of the last census—plus the imagined increase since!
At random I asked two young girls looking in a milliner’s window. In the
midst of their exclamations about the “swellness” of a black and white
hat they answered in unison, “Eighty-six thousand, three hundred and
sixty-eight.”
“A Mrs. Simson had twins this morning—that makes eighty-six thousand,
three hundred and seventy, doesn’t it?”
“Why, yes—that’s so,” beamed one of them.
“But six deaths would make it six less!”
For a moment they looked disconcerted, then the other answered brightly:
“Oh, the deaths’ll come off the next census taking, and there’ll be
_ever_ so many births before that!”
Des Moines newspapers were full of the glory of their city. “Enterprise,
confidence, civic pride are what make the citizenship of our city!” “Des
Moines is ever going forward!” are sentences we read. “Nothing the matter
with Des Moines!” was the title of a leader in one of them. What was the
matter with Des Moines, we wondered. The article did not tell us. It only
said: “With our new thirteen-story building and the new gilded dome of
the Capitol, Des Moines towers above the other cities of the State like a
lone cottonwood on the prairie.”
However, levity aside, when Des Moines has completed the parkway in front
of the Capitol, and built up all of the embankment like the stretch that
is already finished, the city with its civic center will be one of the
most beautiful and perfect in the world. Already a community of beautiful
buildings and houses, some day Des Moines will probably put up a last
word in hotels. Maybe Des Moines, being a city of homes, doesn’t care
about hotels!
Don’t think from this that the Chamberlain is poor! It is a perfectly
comfortable and well-run hotel, but not truly representative of this fine
city.
In a little hotel the other day a waitress rushed out of the dining-room
and shouted to the clerk behind the desk at which I was standing:
“Say, have you seen Charlie?”
“Who wants him?”
“Miss Higgins.”
“Excuse me a minute,” said the clerk, as he went to look for Charlie, the
proprietor, for Miss Higgins, the waitress!
Most of the hotels so far have been comfortable and nearly all clean. One
of the exceptions has a story, and because of the story I cannot bear to
tell its name. “A new house,” the clerk we left in the morning told us,
“doing a big business. Yes, you had better telegraph ahead for rooms.”
Escorted by negro bellboys we entered a terra cotta and green lobby, the
walls and ceilings of which protuberated with green and orange and brown
and iron and gold and plaster, and all smudged with many wipings in of
soot.
The clerk, or proprietor, was a ray of welcoming attentiveness. Yes,
indeed, he had saved rooms with baths for each of us. He was the pink of
personal neatness and we hoped the bellboys’ color had perhaps not been
chosen with a purpose. Our rooms, however, were brown and sooty, and in
my bathroom I wrote the word “dirt” on the washstand with my finger and
it showed like a rut in the road. We went down to dinner not expecting
much. And, had surprisingly good food in a spotlessly clean dining-room!
When I went to bed the electric lights would not turn on, and as no one
answered the bell I gave up ringing and went to bed in the dark. The
thermometer was about ninety-five; everything felt gritty, and in front
of my eyes blinked mockingly an intermittent electric sign which in
letters six feet high flashed all through the night about a snow-white
laundry!
I was awakened by a waiter with my breakfast, which couldn’t have been
better; clean silver, unchipped china, and the best coffee and toast we
had had anywhere! Evidently the man who ran the restaurant was good,
and whoever ran the chambermaid was bad, and whoever decorated the
place in terra cotta, green, bronze and crimson was criminal! The nice
man at the desk was evidently the proprietor; we wondered whether to
tell him about the electric light and the bells that did not work, and
the good-for-nothing chambermaid, but decided that either he knew it
and could not help it or that he did not know it and did not want to!
When I went to the office to pay our bill he was so really attentively
interested in our welfare that I found myself saying politely: “We have
been very comfortable.”
The man’s look of wistfulness changed to one of pitying perplexity: “You
have been comfortable! Here?” He smiled as one would smile at a child
who was trying to say it did not mind the splinter in its finger.
“I had a delicious breakfast,” I found myself saying enthusiastically.
“Really I did. The best toast I have had since I left my home.”
“Did you?” He seemed pleased and interested. “You were lucky.”
His expressionless, dry tone and impersonal smile would have made Hodge
in “The Man From Home” even more famous.
“Don’t you mind my feelings,” he said, “you needn’t try to pretend my
house is first-class or even second! I’ve seen good hotels, and I know!”
He leaned over the desk away from one of the “shoe men.” “It’s about
fourth-class; that’s _just_ about what it is.”
“There is just one thing the matter——” I hesitated.
“_One_, which one?”
“A dirty chambermaid.”
“Oh, they’re Polacks! Housekeeper can’t break them in! They are something
like cats; they don’t take to water! No, ma’am, there is a big difference
between this house and the ones in New York City, I know that; but all
the same,” and the first look of pride crept into his face, “this hotel’s
the best in the city. The others’d tumble to pieces if you stepped in
’em.”
* * * * *
A great deal of Iowa is uncultivated, picturesque, with grazing lands,
many trees,—chiefly beautiful cottonwood,—and streams, and much prettier
than Illinois, although Illinois was to me more interesting because of
the immense flat farms of grain, and the houses in groups, like being
placed at the hub of a wheel, the farms spreading out like the spokes.
The houses were like those in New England, white with green shutters and
well built. All of this great Western country is rich on its face value,
and it is little surprise to be told of the wealth reputed to these
landowners.
Every town through the Middle West seems to have a little grill of
brick-paved streets; a splendid post-office building of stone or brick or
marble; a court-house, but of an older period generally; and one or two
moving picture houses; two or three important-looking dry-goods stores,
and some sort of hotel, and in it a lot of drummers in tilted-back chairs
exhibiting the soles of their shoes to the street.
CHAPTER XVI
HALFWAY HOUSE
Where, Oh, where is the West that Easterners dream of—the West of
Bret Harte’s stories, the West depicted in the moving pictures? Are
the scenes no longer to be found except in the pages of a book, or
on a cinematograph screen? We have gone half the distance across the
continent and all this while we might be anywhere at home. Omaha is a big
up-to-date and perfectly Eastern city, and the Fontanelle is a brand-new
hotel where we are going to stay over a day in order to luxuriate in our
rooms.
One act of cruelty, however, I hereby protest against; they sent to our
rooms a tempting bill of fare—a special and delicious-sounding luncheon
at only sixty cents! When we hurried down to order it, we were told it
was served solely to the traveling men in their café, Celia and I not
admitted. E. M. said it was as good as it sounded—much interest was
that to us! Also that he sat at a table with a traveler for the Ansco
Photographic Company. E. M. had some very poor films we had taken, and
after luncheon his new friend made him some prints. The results were
little short of marvellous. If it was the paper,—why does anyone ever use
any other? If it was the man, Oh, why doesn’t he open a hospital for the
benefit of weak and decrepit amateur films.
On the subject of food, the cumulative effect of a traveling diet is
queer. After many days of it you feel as though you had been interlined
with a sort of paste. Everything you eat is made of flour, flour,
and again flour. A friend of ours took a trip around the world going
by slow stages. After a month or two her letters were nothing except
dissertations on the state of the cleanliness of hotels and the quality
of the food. Alas! We are getting the same attitude of mind. Ordinarily
the advantage of motoring is that if you don’t like the appearance of
the hotel you come to, you can go on. Out here where one stopping-place
is fifty or a hundred miles away from the other, that is not possible,
unless you are willing to drive nights and days without a pause, or sleep
along the roadside and be independent of hotels altogether. We are not
traveling that way—yet.
Omaha, as everyone knows, is divided from Council Bluffs by the
coffee-colored Missouri. How can as much mud as that be carried down
current all the time and leave any land above, or any river below?
It seemed to us that Council Bluffs and Omaha were comparatively not
unlike Brooklyn and Manhattan. Council Bluffs is much the smaller
city and the Bluffs from which it takes its name are not steep river
embankments as we had supposed, but a high residence-crowned hill behind
and above its innumerable railroad stations. Nothing, by the way, seems
more typical of American towns than to have a “residential district” on
the“heights.”
Omaha, as I said before, is an impressively up-to-date city with many
fine new buildings, important dwellings and beautiful avenues on which,
last but not least, motors are made hospitably welcome. In nearly all
Eastern cities automobiles are treated as though they were loitering
tramps; continually ordered by the police to “keep moving along.” In
Omaha the avenues are so splendidly wide that they can afford chalked-off
parking-places in the center of the streets where motors can stand
unmolested and indefinitely. If only New York and Boston had the space to
follow their example!
Much as New Yorkers go to Sherry’s or the Ritz, Omaha society seems to
come to the Fontanelle to dine. On Sunday evenings, we are told, it is
impossible to secure a table unless ordered long in advance. Even on
an ordinary evening, the dining-room of the Fontanelle looked like an
“Importers’ Opening.” A few women looked smart, but a number suggested
the probability of their having arrayed themselves to take part in
tableau vivants, or an amateur fashion parade.
A young girl with pink tulle draped around the lower half of her face
bent the top edge down gingerly while she ate a few mouthfuls, and then
carefully arranged it across the tip of her nose again. It seemed to be
another example beside that of banting for thinness, of _faut avoir faim
pour etre belle_.
A quite plump matron had on a high-necked dress of white satin
hooped round the hips, and trimmed with black velvet; another wore
black charmeuse, the neck and sleeves and picture hat outlined with
three-quarter inch diameter pearl beads, but the prize for eccentricities
of costumes belonged to a man in a black-and-white checked suit,
black-and-white striped socks and tie, and a white stiff shirt with black
mourning border on the collar and cuffs and down the front seam. You
can’t get away from the black-and-white craze anywhere; people will paint
the fronts of their houses in black-and-white stripes if the obsession
goes any further.
Among the appropriately and well-dressed women one was superlatively
smart. This one was really perfect, from the direction in which her hair
was brushed to exactly suit the outline of her hat, to her perfectly
shaped patent-leather shoes. Her costume is not much to describe: a
severely simple gun-metal-colored taffeta one-piece dress with a white
organdie collar and sleeves of self-colored chiffon, a wide-brimmed
black straw hat turned up at one side of the back with a black bird.
The distinctive effect was due more to the way it was worn than to
the costume. You felt that it belonged to her almost in the way that
a collie’s fur belongs to him; it was as much a part of her, as her
perfectly done hair or her polished fingernails. How few women pay
attention to the effect or outline that their heads make! Nine women
out of ten—more, forty-nine out of fifty—seemingly gather their hair
up on a haphazard spot on their heads and fasten it there almost any
way. Sit in any theater audience and look at them! And yet a paradox; a
really chic woman never gives the appearance of having made an effort.
Her hair suggests dexterity, not effort, and though she may have on a
four-hundred-dollar creation of jet or white velvet she looks as though
she happened to put on a black dress or a white one, but never as though
she had put on _the_ black or _the_ white one! This dissertation, by
the way, belongs by no means solely to Omaha, but to every city where
women follow fashions. New York women are quite as prone to be content
with being mannequins for the display of their clothes rather than take
greater pains to select clothes that are a completion of their own
personalities—the last leaf left for the American woman to take out of
the book of her Parisian sister.
* * * * *
Quite by chance on our last evening, we ran across Mrs. K. in the
corridor of the Fontanelle; and the next moment found ourselves in a
little fragment of Omaha Society—with a capital S. Had it not been for
one topic of conversation I should probably not mention the incident, as
we had merely a glimpse of a few well-bred people that offered little
matter for comment. The topic was the famous cyclone of three years
ago. Among the stories they told us, was one of Mrs. R., the one whose
appearance I had so much admired earlier in the evening. Three years ago
she arrived home from Paris with seventeen trunks full of trousseau, and
as soon as her things could be unpacked she spread them around a big
room, in imitation of a bazaar, so that her particular friends might view
them. Instead of her friends, however, arrived the Cyclone! It tore off
the entire bay window; caught up dresses, hats, lingerie, wraps; whisked
them through the open space where the window had been, and festooned the
topmost branches of the trees all down Farnum Avenue with fragments of
French finery.
Scarcely a garment was ever worth rescuing, as each was pierced through
and through by the branches that skewered it fast.
Mrs. K.’s own story of the cyclone, I give as she told it. “It did not
seem very amusing at the time, but one of the funny things to look back
upon was what happened to Father! The storm came from the south. Father
started across the living-room, which has both north and south windows,
just as the cyclone struck. The windows burst out, the furniture flew
around the room and literally out of the north window. Father made a
sort of vortex in the middle and everything swirled like a whirlpool
around him. When we got to him he was tightly bound up in the rugs,
portières, and curtains, which completely prevented his moving; but also
protected him snugly from flying glass. He was prostrate, of course, and
lightly resting on his chest was a large picture of the Doge’s palace.”
Whatever damage the cyclone did has long been obliterated, and Omaha now
presents a beautifully in order exterior and enjoys an evidently gay
social life; two features of which are the new Hotel, and the Country
Club—neither of them likely to grow much moss on their ballroom floors.
But to go from the triviality of the mere social side to the deeper
characteristics of the Omahans. There is something very inspiring, very
wonderful in the attitude of the West. The pride in their city, the
personal caring, that we met first in Chicago, is also the underlying
motive here. One hears much of the ambitious Western towns, but I think
the word not quite right; it is not mere ambition, but aspiration, that
is carrying them forward. One of the editors of a leading paper said
yesterday:
“The making of a great city depends less on the men who are in office
than on those who have no office, and who want none. It is the spirit of
the people that makes a city go forward or leaves it standing still. The
spirit that is essential to progress, in Omaha as everywhere, is one of
unity, harmony and good will. Combined with this there must be energy,
enterprise, confidence in the future, civic pride and devotion. No city,
however well favored otherwise, can make the progress its opportunities
call for, if its people are forever quarreling among themselves, envious
of one another’s good fortune, seeking each to build himself up by
tearing some other down. It is shoulder to shoulder, in mass formation,
that great armies advance. Rancor, hatred, suspicion, pettiness, that
cause division in the ranks, are as deadly as the other extreme where
indifference, greed, lack of respect for the other man’s rights, produce
dry rot.”
Nor are these merely editorial embroideries of speech. They are the
actual sentiments, not only thought, but for the most part lived up to.
CHAPTER XVII
NEXT STOP, NORTH PLATTE!
North Platte might really be called “City of Ishmael.” For no reason that
is discoverable except its mere existence, every man’s tongue seems to
be against it. Time and time again—in fact the repetition is becoming
monotonous—people say to us, “It is all very well, of course, you have
had fine hotels and good roads so far, but wait until you come to North
Platte!”
Why, I wonder, does everyone pick out North Platte as a sort of third
degree place of punishment? Why not one of the other names through which
our road runs? Why always set up that same unfortunate town as a target?
It began with Mrs. O. in New York, who declared it so dreadful a place
that we could never live through it. Her point of view being extremely
fastidious, her opinion does not alarm us as much as it otherwise might,
but in Chicago, too, the mention of our going to North Platte seemed to
be the signal for people to look sorry for us. Now a drummer downstairs
has just added his mite to our growing apprehension.
“Goin’ t’ th’ coast?” he queried. “Hmm—I guess you won’t like th’ hotels
at North Platte overmuch.”
“Do you go there often?” I returned.
“Me?” he said indignantly. “Not on your life! No one ever gets off at
North Platte except the railroad men—they _have_ to!” That is the one
unexplained phase of the subject, no one of all those who have villified
it has personally been there.
Just as I asked if he could perhaps tell me which of the hotels was least
bad, a fellow drummer joined him. The usual expression of commiseration
followed.
“Well,” said the second drummer, “it’s this way. Whichever hotel you put
up at, you’ll wish you had put up at the other.”
“Suppose it turns out to be the very worst we can think of—what _can_
that worst be?” I asked rather shakily of Celia.
“Dirty rooms over a saloon with drunken ‘bad men’ shooting in it,” she
whispered with a shiver.
“Don’t you think—” we suggested to E. M., “it would be a good idea to buy
a pistol, in case——”
“In case——?” he asked with the completely indifferent tranquillity of
youth.
Celia prodded me. “Well, just in case——” I said lamely. I think Celia
might have finished the sentence herself.
Of all the bogey stories, the one about North Platte is the most
unfounded! Instead of a rip-roaring town, rioting in red and yellow
ribaldry, it is a serious railroad thoroughfare, self-respecting and
above reproach and the home of no less a celebrity than Mr. Cody—Buffalo
Bill. Of course if you imagine you are going to find a Blackstone or a
Fontanelle, you will be disappointed, but in comparison to some of the
other hotels along the Lincoln Highway, the Union Pacific in North Platte
is a model of delectability!
[Illustration: A BEDROOM IN THE UNION PACIFIC HOTEL, NORTH PLATTE—NOT
MUCH OF A HARDSHIP, IS IT?]
As a matter of fact, it is an ocher-colored wooden railroad station, a
rather bare dining-room, and lunch counter, and perfectly good, clean
bedrooms upstairs. You cannot get a suite with a private bath, and if
you are more or less spoiled by the supercomforts of luxurious living,
you may not care to stay very long. But if in all of your journeying
around the world, you never have to put up with any greater hardship than
spending a night at the Union Pacific in North Platte, you will certainly
not have to stay at home on that account. There are no drunkards or
toughs or even loafers hanging about; the food is cleanly served and
good; the rooms, although close to the railroad tracks, are as spotless
as brooms and scrubbing-brushes can make them.[4]
There is a place, though, between the Missouri and the Rio Grande—there
is no use in being more exact as to its locality—where, except in case
of accident—ours was a broken spring—you are not likely to stay. There
our own particular horrors were pretty well realized: dirty rooms over a
saloon and lounging toughs on the corner; uneatable hunks of food at a
table in a barroom, our dinner put in front of us on a platter, and no
plates used at all. And the bedrooms! I slept on top of my bed wrapped
in an ulster with my head on the lining of my coat. And even so, I was
seriously bitten by small but voracious prior inhabitants. The next day
all the “bath” I had was a catlick with the corner of a handkerchief held
reluctantly under a greasy spigot.
This experience was pretty unappetizing but also it was our only bad one,
sent no doubt as a punishment for our lack of appreciation of one or two
former stopping-places, which, as E. M. would say, “sounds fair enough.”
Also in order to live consistently up to that motor philosophy I wrote
about, we will in time be glad of the color it will give to our memory
book. But at present its color seems merely a grease spot on the page,
and all the motor philosophy in the world doesn’t seem potent enough to
blot out the taste and smell, to say nothing of the stings.
* * * * *
By the way, I seem to have arrived at North Platte and possibly farther,
on a magic carpet—a little difficult for anyone taking this as a guide to
follow! Therefore to go back, merely on the subject of the roads, almost
as far as Des Moines. Taking the general average of luck in motoring, no
matter how well things have gone for you, the chances are that you have
had _some_ delays. A day or two of rain that held you up, detours that
made you lose your way, a run of tire trouble—something, no matter what
it is, that has delayed you more than you expected. And whatever it is
you find yourself thinking this does not matter very much because when we
get to those Nebraska fast roads we can make up lost time easily.
The very sound “Nebraska” correlates “dragged roads” speed! While you are
still gently running through the picturesque Sir Joshua Reynolds scenery
of the River to River road in Iowa, you find that your mind is developing
an anticipatory speed craze. So thoroughly imbued has your mind become
with the “fast road” idea that the very ground has a speed gift in its
dragged surface. What if your engine is barely capable of forty miles an
hour, that miraculously fast stretch magically carries you at the easiest
fifty. If you have a big powerful engine, you forget that ordinarily
you dislike whizzing across the surface of the earth, and for just this
once—even though you think of it more in terror than in joy—you are
approaching the raceway of America, and you, too, are going to race!
“We must be sure that everything is in perfect running order,” you
exclaim excitedly as you picture your car leaping out of Omaha and
shooting to Denver while scarcely turning over its engine. “Not many
stopping-places,” you are told. What matter is that to you? You are not
thinking of stopping at all. North Platte, perhaps, yes. Three hundred
and thirty miles in a day is just a nice little fast road run.
“A nice little which?” says the head of a garage in Omaha.
“We’ll leave early,” you continue, unheeding, “and make a dash across the
continental speedway——”
“See here, stranger,” says the garage man, “what state of fast circuits
d’y think y’re in? This is Nebraska and the speed limit is twenty miles!”
“Twenty miles a minute?” you gasp, “that certainly is speed!”
The garage man half edges away from you. “Fr’m here t’ Denver is about
thutty-five hours’ straight travelin’. You gutta slow down t’ eight miles
through towns and y’ can’t go over twenty miles an hour nowheres!”
When you manage to get a little breath into your collapsed lungs you say
dazedly, “But we’re going over the ‘fast dragged’ road.”
“Road’s fast enough! But the law’ll have you if you drive over it
faster’n twenty miles an hour.”
If you can find the joke in all of this, you have a more humorous mental
equipment and a sweeter disposition than we had.
[Illustration: A STRAIGHT, WIDE ROAD; NOT EVEN A SHACK IN SIGHT—AND A
SPEED LIMIT OF TWENTY MILES AN HOUR]
Across Nebraska from the last good hotel in Omaha to the first
comfortable one in Denver or Cheyenne is over five hundred miles. At the
prescribed “speed” of about seventeen miles an hour average, it means
literally a pleasant little run of between thirty and forty hours along
a road dead level, wide, straight, and where often as far as the eye can
see, there is not even a shack in the dimmest distance, and the only
settlers to be seen are prairie dogs.
If between Omaha and Cheyenne there were three or four attractive clean
little places to stop, or if the Nebraska speed laws were abolished or
disregarded _and it didn’t rain_, you could motor to the heart of the
Rocky Mountains with the utmost ease and comfort.
In May, 1915, the road by way of Sterling to Denver was impassable; all
automobiles were bogged between Big Spring and Julesburg, so on the
advice of car owners that we met, we went by way of Chappell to Cheyenne.
It is quite possible, of course, that we blindly passed comfortable
stopping-places, but to us that whole vast distance from Omaha to
Cheyenne was one to be crossed with as little stop-over as possible.
Aside from questions of accommodations and speed laws, the interminable
distance was in itself an unforgettably wonderful experience. It gave
us an impression of the lavish immensity of our own country as nothing
else could. Think of driving on and on and on and yet the scene scarcely
changing, the flat road stretching as endlessly in front of you as
behind. The low yellow sand banks and flat sand islands scarcely vary on
the Platte, which might as well be called the Flat, River. The road does
gradually rise several thousand feet but the distance is so immense your
engine does not perceive a grade. Once in a while you pass great herds
of cattle fenced in vast enclosures and every now and then you come to
a group of nesters’ shanties, scattered over the gray-green plain as
though some giant child had dropped its blocks, or as though some Titans,
playing dominoes, had left a few lying on the table.
At greater intervals you come to towns and you drive between two closely
fitted rows of oddly assorted domino-shaped stores and houses, and then
on out upon the great flat table again. For scores and scores of miles
the scene is unvarying. On and on you go over that endless road until at
last far, far on the gray horizon you catch the first faint glint of the
white-peaked Rocky Mountains.
You have long ago turned away from the river’s yellow sand flats, and you
watch that slowly rising snow-topped rim, until—it may be gradually, or
it may be suddenly—your heart is thrilled by the sublimity of the amazing
contrast of mountain upon plain.
Perhaps you may merely find dullness in the endlessly flat, unvarying
monotonous land; perhaps you are unwilling to be enthralled by Titanic
cones of rock or snow. But steep your sight for days in flatness, until
you think the whole width of the world has melted into a never-ending sea
of land, and then see what the drawing close to those most sublime of
mountains does to you!
And afterwards, when you have actually climbed to their knees or
shoulders, and look back upon the endless plains, you forget the wearying
journey and feel keenly the beauty of their very endlessness. The
ever-changing effect of light and shadow over that boundless expanse
weaves an enchanted spell upon your imagination that you can never quite
recover from. Sometimes the prairies are a great sea of mist; sometimes
they are a parched desert; sometimes they are blue like the waves of an
enchanted sapphire sea; sometimes they melt into a plain of vaporous
purple mystery, and then the clouds shift away from the sun and you see
they are a width of the world, of land.
But however or whenever you look out upon them, you feel as though mean
little thoughts, petty worries, or skulking gossip whispers, could never
come into your wind-swept mind again. That if you could only live with
such vastness of outlook before you, perhaps your own puny heart and mind
and soul might grow into something bigger, simpler, worthier than is ever
likely otherwise.
And now I am getting quite over my head, so better climb down the
mountains again and go back to the motor, which may be supposed to have
reached Cheyenne.
If you think Cheyenne is a Buffalo Bill Wild West town, as we did,
you will be much disappointed, though it may be well not to show the
progressive citizens of that up-to-date city that you hoped they were
still galloping along wooden sidewalks howling like coyotes!
I thought that Celia and E. M. looked distinctly grieved at the sight of
smooth laid asphalt, wide-paved sidewalks, imposing capitol and modern
buildings. Even the brand-new Plains Hotel was accepted by both of them
in much the same spirit that a child who thought it was going to the
circus and found itself at a museum of art, would accept the compensation
of a nice hot supper instead of peanuts and red lemonade.
[Illustration: WYOMING IN THE RANCH COUNTRY]
Unfortunately we had no friends in Cheyenne and therefore never got so
far as even the threshold of society, but the following account taken
from the morning paper is irrefutable evidence that Cheyenne, far from
being a wild town of border outlawry, is a center of refined elegance and
fashion:
“Governor and Mrs. K. tendered a beautiful courtesy to the
Cheyenne and visiting cadets and their sponsors Sunday
afternoon when they entertained them at an informal reception
and luncheon at the executive mansion.
“This brilliant social function was scarcely second in the
estimation of the guests to the wall-scaling tournament
Saturday evening, when world records were smashed by the
invincible cadet squad from Casper.
“The Governor’s mansion was exceedingly attractive with its
luxurious furnishings, in artistic setting. One hundred and
twenty voices mingled in chatter, laughter and song to the
accompaniment of violin and piano. College songs and familiar
popular airs in which everyone joined, made the ‘welkin ring’
as the exuberant spirits found vent in melody.
“To the hostess’ understanding of the needs of boys and girls
was due the satisfactory nature and quantities of the salads,
sandwiches, ice cream and candies served so generously in the
dining-room.
“The cadets outnumbered the pretty sponsors eight to one, and
every girl was a queen at whose shrine a circle of admiring
youths was in constant attendance.”
In our ignorance we don’t know what a “sponsor” is further than that
the paper tells us she is a young girl who is a queen of despotic
fascination, but what, or whom, or why or how she sponsors, is a mystery
too deep for our solving. Cadet, of course, makes an instantaneous
picture of a straight, square-shouldered young human being of inflexibly
rigid demeanor but with a quite susceptible young human heart beating
underneath his rigid exterior.
The object in quoting all this is merely to show our fellow Easterners
that the West of yesterday was no longer to be found in Cheyenne!
On one day in the year though, they have a Frontier Days
Celebration—when, like in the midnight hour of the Puppen Fée, the West
that was, comes back to life. There are wonderful exhibits of “broncho
busting” and rope throwing, and all the features of county fair, horse
show, and wild west show in one.
From Cheyenne to Denver, and from Denver to Colorado Springs, the road
was uneventfully excellent all the way.
Denver, where we stopped merely for luncheon, is far too important a city
to mention in a brief paragraph or two, and is for that reason left out
altogether.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CITY OF RECKLESSNESS
“For West is West, and East is East, and never twain shall meet”—except
in Colorado Springs!
Mountains, plains, squatters’ shanties, replicas of foreign palaces,
cowboys, Indians, ranchers, New Yorkers, Londoners. The free open-air
life and altitude of the plains, the sheltered luxurious manners and
customs of the idle rich! Across the warp of Western characteristics is
woven the woof of a cosmopolitan society.
Before coming here I had imagined the place a sort of huge sanatorium. I
had expected long lines of invalid chairs on semi-enclosed verandas, even
beds possibly, as in the outdoor wards of hospitals. I knew, of course,
that there were good hotels and many private houses; and having friends
who had come out here, I thought perhaps we might take luncheon or dinner
with them in a quiet, semi-invalid sort of way—an early simple supper,
and someone to tell us not to stay too long for fear of tiring Jim or
Mary.
As a matter of fact Mary drove her own motor up to the hotel ten minutes
after we arrived, and, telling us of half a dozen engagements that she
had made for us, including a dinner that she was giving that evening,
wanted us to come out to polo then and there.
Hadn’t she better rest? Not a bit of it!
Instead of the invalid regimen that we expected to fall into, we were
kept going at a pace we could scarcely catch up with. We dined in
extravagantly appointed houses, lunched on terraces overlooking gardens,
danced into the first hours of the morning, and led the life typical
of any fashionable pleasure resort. Of invalidism there was, _on the
surface_, not a trace. Mary herself had come out a few years ago very
ill, and Jim and L——, two men who had been sent away from home in an
almost dying condition, seemed quite as unlike invalids as Mary. L—— has
a beautiful house, run exactly as his establishment in Newport used to
be, and he leads much the same life that he used to lead there. Motoring
takes the place of yachting; he plays poker, polo, and golf, and dines
rather much, wines rather more, and has changed not at all.
Jim, not because he is different, but only because he is less rich, lives
in a little bungalow in Broadmoor. Instead of three or four footmen
standing in the hall, as in L.’s house, Jim lives alone with a Jap boy
who is cook, butler, valet, housemaid and nurse combined, but he gave us
a delicious luncheon to which he had asked a few of his neighbors.
[Illustration: CRIPPLE CREEK]
“They all have t.b.,” he whispered, otherwise we should never have known
it.
After lunch he showed me his sleeping-porch. Nothing unusual in that;
everyone has a fad for sleeping out of doors nowadays. He did, however,
happen to mention that his Jap boy was bully whenever he was ill, but
it was only in his almost emotional gladness to see us, his wistful
eagerness for every small detail of news from home that I caught a
suspicion of what might once have been homesickness. Perhaps I only
imagined that faint suspicion. Certainly he seemed cheerful and happy and
spoke of himself as a “busted lunger” as lightly as he might have said he
was six feet two inches tall! As a matter of fact, his “busted lungs” are
pretty well mended—for so long as he stays out here. Later we heard that
there was likely to be a wedding between Jim and the young quite-lately
widow who sat opposite him at table. She happily is not a member of the
t.b. fraternity, but came out some years ago with a dying husband.
“What an old fox you are! Why didn’t you tell me about her?” I said to
him afterward. He grinned until he looked almost idiotically foolish;
then he exclaimed:
“Isn’t she wonderful?” and he squeezed my hand as though I and not he had
made the remark.
Besides the conspicuous and palatial homes that one associates
instinctively with Broadmoor, there are a few little bungalows, each with
its sleeping-porch, a living-room, dining-room and a bedroom or two.
There are also, in Colorado Springs itself, many boarding-houses, and
in both of these the people do live very simply and follow more or less
the prescribed life of a health resort. But in the general impression of
Colorado Springs, one might imagine oneself in a second Newport, Monte
Carlo, or Simla in India. Not that any of these places bear much physical
resemblance to the heart of the Rocky Mountains, especially Simla, yet
this last is suggested most of all. The conditions are much the same
in that the people are there because they have been ordered to be,
rather than because it is a home they have themselves chosen. In India
the people can’t do very much because the climate is too enervating;
in Colorado the people can’t do very much because their health is
too uncertain. In both places there is an underlying recklessness of
attitude, of wanting to get all the fun out of their enforced extradition
that they can; and the “fun” consists in both places in riding, driving,
playing, or watching polo or tennis, flirting and gambling. The latter
two are the favorites, as they afford the most diversion for the least
physical effort. The Anglo-Indians plunge into whatever form of amusement
offers because the place would be deadly otherwise; the Coloradoites
lead as gay a life as health will permit and ingenuity devise, because
the deadliness may at any time be earnest. “Eat, drink and be merry, for
tomorrow——” was never more thoroughly lived up to, even in the time of
the ancients who originated the adage. Anything for excitement, anything
for amusement, anything not to realize that life is not as gay as it
seems!
Death is the one word never mentioned. If by chance they speak of one who
has gone, they say he has “crossed the great divide.” If someone leaves
to go home hopelessly, the women say good-by as casually as they can;
a few men at the club drink to him—once. That is all. They are people
facing the grim specter always, yet never allowing their eyes to see.
Personally I should have had no inkling of the sadder side; I should
have taken everything at its happy face value had it not been for one
awakening incident.
I was sitting in the wide, cheerfully homelike hall of the Antlers
Hotel when the people from an arriving train came in. Among perhaps a
dozen indiscriminate tourists one in particular attracted my attention
and interest. He was little more than a boy—twenty-two perhaps or
twenty-three—good-looking, well-bred, and well off if one might judge
of these things by his manner and appearance, and the pigskin bags,
golf clubs, polo mallets and other paraphernalia that two porters were
carrying in his wake.
“There’s a lucky young person,” I thought, “evidently fond of sport and
with the ability, wealth and leisure to gratify his taste.” I saw him
register and give a stack of extra baggage checks to the clerk, and then
on his way to the elevator he passed close to me. He was moderately tall
with a graceful, well-built frame, but his step lagged and his shoulders
drooped, and in his drawn face I caught a lost, helpless, despairing
expression that I recognized unmistakably. Near where I often go in
the autumn is a boys’ school and I have seen little new boys on the
first evening of their arrival look just so—livid and lost, poor little
chaps—but you know that in a day or two they will be running about as
happy as grigs in the excitement of school events and the exhilaration of
football. But the look in my “fortunate” youth’s face went deeper and an
illuminating word flashed to my mind: life termer! Homesick? He looked as
though he would die of it.
A moment before the big splendidly kept hotel with its broad white
hallways, wide verandas and sunny terrace under the very shoulder of
Pike’s Peak, rising in snow-crowned glory above all the lesser glorious
mountains, had seemed so beautiful. Suddenly, though, I saw it not
merely with the eyes of one broken-hearted, homesick youth, but with
some realization of the thousands of tear-filled eyes that have looked
about its commonplace stations. What must it be like to be weak and ill,
when the strongest clings like a little child to the ones he loves best,
and then to be sent far away to live always, or to die, perhaps, among
strangers?
[Illustration: IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS]
After this I became more observing of the lives about us, and people
told me many things—quite simply, as though it were all in the day’s
work. The greatest number who are sent out here are young, and strapping
athletes are the most usual type. Sometimes they get well soon, and
go back happily to their families; sometimes their families move out
too, and in that way bring “home” with them, but the majority come and
stay alone, and never leave again except for short annual furloughs.
One of these latter lives here at the hotel. A friend of his told me
that “Harry could never go home, poor chap,” but the adverb “poor”
scarcely seemed to qualify that young man from what I saw of him. He is
always laughing, always shoving his shoulders through the atmosphere;
inquisitive as _Ricki-ticki_ and quite as full of life and vim; he seems
ready to seize every opportunity of hazard or engagement that the moment
offers. He plays all games recklessly; the more dangerous as to stakes or
excitement, the better. He drives a powerful motor-car and he is flirting
outrageously with one of the prettiest women imaginable, whose invalid
husband seems to care very little how much attention she accepts from her
frivolous though ardent admirer.
But a little while ago I was in my window and he was on the terrace just
below, close enough for me to see him without his seeing me. His face was
turned toward the glory of the snow-capped mountains but his unseeing
eyes too, had the exact look of the little homesick boys at school. I
saw then why his friend had called him “poor chap” and I also a little
better understood the exaggeration of his recklessness, the over-swagger
of his shoulders, the laugh and flippancy with which, like Jim, he speaks
of “t.b.” I wonder if anywhere in the world the moon looks down upon more
tear-stained pillows than here!
And this is enough of the black side of the picture—the blackest side
there is. For by no means all of the people are homesick, unhappy or in
any way ill. Families who have come out originally for the sake of a sick
member have stayed because they loved the place and made it their home.
And of the others, many who have been lonely and homesick at first have
found the place an Eden because they have also found the “one in all the
world.”
In fact, meeting the “one” is the almost inevitable thing they do.
Supposing the newcomers live in little bungalows in Broadmoor;
opportunity need go no further. He, for instance, sits on his little
porch in the sunshine, and she sits on her little porch across the way.
Hours and hours and days and days, they sit on their little porches in
the sunshine. Then by and by they sit together on the same little porch.
It is quite simple.
Often the story ends as it should. They get well and marry and live happy
ever afterward. Sometimes, of course, it ends sadly. But nearly always
love brings its compensation of joy, and nearly all who have ever lived
out here keep afterward in their hearts an unfading flower of romance.
Colorado Springs is a place unique in the world. Filled with people
unhappy to come, deserted by people unwilling to go. And nearly always
their coming and going is through no wish or will of their own. Sometimes
their going is as sudden and tragic as their coming.
A friend of ours whom we had expected to find out here had only the
week before been obliged to pack up on a few hours’ notice and go to
California. She had just built a new house and had been in it hardly two
months and now she has to begin in a new environment all over again. The
great tragedy in this case is that the husband cannot stay long away from
a high altitude and the wife must probably always live at a low one.
Of the fashionable element in the Springs a certain elderly lady told me
with bated breath:
“It is the fastest society on earth! They just live for excitement, and
they don’t attend church half as regularly as they go to each other’s
houses to dance or gamble. If you see a woman out walking or driving with
a man, it’s more likely another woman’s husband than her own. My dear,
you may call such a state of affairs modern and up to date, but I call it
shocking—that’s what I call it!”
She, dear soul, is from Salem, Massachusetts, and I can well believe that
she thinks as she spoke. There is also a younger woman, the wife of a
prosperous manufacturer whose home is in Omaha. The old lady from Salem
I had known in York Harbor, Maine, but the Omaha lady we “picked up an
acquaintance with” through the offices of E. M. in saving the life of an
attenuated specimen of a dog from the grip of one whose looks were more
flattering to the species.
Apparently the old lady and the younger one sit and exchange opinions all
day, a rather needless effort, as they share the same in the first place.
At almost any hour that you pass them the old lady is saying:
“My dear, that is Mrs. Smith talking to Mr. Baldwin!”
And the younger, aghast, echoes, “Well, who’d have thot it!” (“Thot” is
not a misprint, that is the way she pronounces it.) And then in unison
they wonder where Mr. Smith can be and why Mrs. Baldwin is not out
walking with her husband.
[Illustration: COLORADO. PIKE’S PEAK IN THE DISTANCE]
The point of view of the old lady and the younger one represent not
unfairly the attitude of the majority of wives in the two thousand miles
we had come through since leaving the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and
Fifth Avenue, New York. An opposed attitude jumps from Central Park
East to Colorado Springs. Central Park West is curiously like the gap
between. On Fifth Avenue and South and East and again in Colorado Springs
a wife does not believe the happiness of family life dependent upon her
husband’s never speaking to another woman but herself. More often is
the shoe on the other foot. The husband generally goes from his office
to his club, the wife more than likely goes with an agreeable young man
to a dancing tea. Parlor Snake is the New York vernacular for the ideal
type of a five-o’clock young man! Once west of Fifth Avenue and for
two thousand miles thereafter nothing like this at all! For Mr. X. to
cross the threshold of Mrs. B.’s house unless accompanied by Mrs. X—and
sometimes several little X.’s—would be just cause for storms and tears,
if not for divorce. Even we as strangers could see wives trailing like
veritable shadows behind their husbands. Let Mr. X. stop for a second
to speak to any Mrs. W., Y. or Z. and Mrs. X. sidles up and clings to
husband’s sleeve as though a few sentences uttered apart from a general
conversation were affronts upon the security and dignity of a wife.
In the small circle of Chicago’s smart set this wifely attitude of “speak
to him not; he is mine” is certainly not apparent. A very opposite
attitude, however, is very noticeable in Colorado Springs where a
perfectly adoring wife said to Celia, who is one of the most attractive
women imaginable: “For Heaven’s sake, do take Fred out on the veranda and
talk to him; he has been here two years without seeing a new face, and
scarcely anyone to talk to about home but me!”
Just how the pioneers and cowboys affect the place is hard to define, and
yet they undoubtedly do. Colorado people love the very name “cowboy”
with an almost personal sentiment, just as, in their love for them,
they seem personally to appropriate the “mountains,” and from both, in
spite of the luxury which many have brought from Europe or the Atlantic
coast, and in contrast to their mere recklessness, they have acquired
directness of outlook, fearless, open-air customs of living, and an
unhampered freedom from unimportant trifles. The spirit of going through
with what you undertake and not being stopped by a little mud that we
first met with in Rochelle is here much intensified. In Illinois they
prided themselves on surmounting obstacles; out here they are so imbued
with the attitude of the men who live out on the plains and through the
mountains—the pioneers whose adventures the most frivolous social leader
knows by heart—that they don’t even recognize an obstacle when they see
it.
Notwithstanding the luxury of his own house, L. goes off into the
wilderness generally with one guide but sometimes entirely alone, sleeps
on the ground, eats what he can kill and reverts to the primitive. And
you can sit in a room the interior of which might be in the Palace of
Versailles and hear your hostess in a two-hundred-dollar simplicity of
chiffon and lace repeat to you by the hour stories beginning: “Bill
Simpson, who was punching cattle on the staked plains——” or “The Apaches
were on the warpath and Kit Carson——” Possibly even she may tell you of
a hold-up adventure of her own when as a child she was traveling in the
Denver stage.
One amusing anecdote told us one afternoon at tea was of a celebrated
plainsman who, carrying a large amount of money and realizing that he was
about to be held up, quickly stuffed his roll of money down his trouser
leg, but craftily left two dollars in his waistcoat pocket. The outlaws
finding him so ill supplied with “grub money” made him a present of a
dollar to show him that he had met with real gentlemen.
Perhaps from habit, just as when someone says, “How are you?” you say,
“Very well, thank you,” though you may be feeling wretchedly, whenever
anyone mentions the topic of motoring, I find myself saying:
“Can you tell me anything about the roads between here and ——?” Why I
keep on asking about the roads I really don’t know! Hearing that they
are good or bad is not going to help or hinder. I think I must do it for
the sake of being sociable and making conversation. So, sitting next to
one of the prominent members of the Automobile Club, yesterday, I found
myself quite parrotlike asking for details of the road to Albuquerque.
“With good brakes, and an experienced chauffeur who won’t get flustered
or light-headed, you oughtn’t to have much trouble. You will find teams
nearly always available to pull you through dangerous fords,” he said
casually.
Having ourselves withstood the mud of Iowa without injury and survived
the perils of the Platte River Valley without meeting any, we find
ourselves as commonplace as anyone who had crossed Long Island would be
to New Yorkers. These people out here talk about being hauled through
quicksand streams, or of clinging along shelf roads at the edge of a
thousand-foot drop as though it were pleasant afternoon driving. I don’t
like the sound of the word “shelf”—why not by calling them mountain-view
roads let us keep our tranquillity at least until we get to them? And
beyond the precipices is the desert, where there is no place to stop over
and Heaven alone knows what fate awaiting us should anything happen to
the car.
[Illustration: FIRST COWBOYS AND CATTLE]
My companion at luncheon volunteered further that he had unluckily never
been farther south than Pueblo himself, but he knew a drug clerk who was
the highest authority on road information. Information and ice-cream soda
at the same time was a combination too alluring to be resisted, and an
hour later saw me thirsting at the fountain. The soda clerk called to
another out of sight behind the drug screen:
“Say, Bill, there’s a lady here wants to start for Albuquerque tomorrow.
Do you know anybody that’s gone over the Raton lately?”
A long, lanky, typical “Uncle Sam,” sauntered in eating a stick of
peppermint.
“Why, yes,” he drawled, “Bullard went down. I guess he went with a team
though; it was about a month ago. But Tracey went last week and took his
bride on their wedding-trip. Of course,” he turned to me, “Tracey is
a big man. Used to work on the freight depot. He bought a good manila
towline and he is as strong as an ox. He could haul his machine out of
anything, I guess.”
At this point an outsider entered; he was labeled from head to toe
with prosperity, expensive clothes, diamond rings—one on the third
finger of each hand—a diamond scarfpin, a breezy air of “here-I-am”
self-confidence. He seemed to be a friend of the drug clerk’s and he
ordered a malted milk and sat on the stool next to me. Immediately the
clerk who had been called “Bill” appealed to him.
“This lady is going down to New Mexico. Do you know anything about the
Raton Pass?”
“Do I know anything about Raton? I was born there!” Then he laughed and
turned to me: “You needn’t tell anybody though. Want to know about Raton?
Well, I’ll tell you, they have no streets, and they have no drainage,
and when it rains the mud is so soft you can go out in a boat and sail
from house to house! There’s just a Santa Fé roundhouse and a bunch of
cottages. Oh, it’s the road over the Pass you want to know about?” He
stirred his baby beverage. “Well, they say they have fixed the road up
some since I was down there but I guess the best thing you can do is to
let your chauffeur take the automobile down, and you walk behind it with
the wreath!”
But somehow these alarms no longer terrify! Are we, too, being imbued
with the spirit of the West? Forgetting that our original intention was
to motor only so far as we could travel comfortably, we can now think of
nothing but that we have arrived merely at the gateway of the land of
adventure, where cowboys, prairie schooners, and Indians may possibly
still be found!
The Honorable Geoffrey G., an Englishman whom we met in New York last
year, says he is going with us as far as Santa Fé. He has just imported a
brand-new little foreign car and is as proud as Punch over it. It is even
lower hung than ours, and has a very delicate mechanism. He drives it
apparently well, but from various remarks he has made I don’t believe he
knows the first thing about machinery.
CHAPTER XIX
A GLIMPSE OF THE WEST THAT WAS
We might have been taking an unconscious part in some vast moving picture
production, or, more easily still, if we overlooked the fact of our own
motor car, we could have supposed ourselves crossing the plains in the
days of the caravans and stage coaches, when roads were trails, and
bridges were not!
To Pueblo by way of Canyon City and over the Royal Gorge loop, you go
through great defiles between gigantic mountains, then out on a shelf
road overlooking now vistas of mountains, now endless plains, now hanging
over chasms two or three thousand feet deep, now dipping down, down to
the brink of the river tearing along the base of the canyon walls. All
of the mountain roads of Colorado are splendidly built—even though some
of their railless edges are terrifying to anyone light of head, and by
no means to be recommended to an inexpert driver. One famously beautiful
drive has a turntable built at an otherwise impossibly sharp bend.
After Pueblo—which by the way is not in the least quaint or Indian
as its name promised, but a smoky and smeltering industrious little
Pittsburgh—you come out upon the plains, plains that look as you
imagined them, on which cattle and cowboys ranged and prairie schooners
came slowly over the horizon. A few miles beyond Pueblo, exactly like a
scene in the moving pictures, we passed three of the white-topped wagons,
their hoods rocking and gleaming in the sun and little burros with
saddles on them trotting on either side. A man walked at the head of the
caravan and two others walked behind. One wagon was driven by a woman,
while a man slept, and two children peered out at us from within. A young
man drove the second wagon; by his side was a young woman holding a baby.
All that was needed to make a frontier drama was a band of befeathered
Indians on the warpath.
A little way farther we saw a cowboy galloping over the plains swinging a
lariat. He laughed when we came up to him, as though he had been caught
doing something foolish. In the next few miles we passed another caravan
and through a herd of cattle driven by three cowboys, but not a sign of
our friend, the Englishman, with whom we had planned to lunch. He, having
taken the direct road, which was about sixty miles or so shorter than
ours, had agreed to select an attractive spot and wait for us. We had
about decided that he had either been lost or overlooked, when we saw a
team coming toward us and behind it, being towed, his nice, new, little
car. He had come to a ford through a wide, swift river which he so
mistrusted from the start that he made his valet wade across it first.
But as the water came up only to the man’s knees, and the bottom was
reported to be firm and pebbly, the Honorable Geoffrey plunged in—and,
bang! she blew up! The water flooding his carburetor sucked into the hot
cylinders and was changed so violently into steam that it blew off the
cylinder heads!
[Illustration: HALFWAY ACROSS A THRILLING FORD, WIDE AND DEEP, ON THE
HUERFANO RIVER]
Mixed with our very real sympathy with the Englishman was not a little
doubt as to whether we had better risk a like fate. The driver of the
team, seeing our doubt, explained: “The river’s a mite high just now, but
when you come to the bank, just go in slow and steady, and if the water
comes up too high, stop your engine quick, and fire a revolver! See! I’ll
hear you and send someone to pull you through!”
The thought of luncheon had vanished. We parted with our unfortunate
friend and approached with not a little trepidation the rushing waters
that had wrecked him. The river looked formidable enough; wide, swift,
bubbling, and opaque—like coffee with cream, exactly. We remembered that
it had a gravel bottom and that its greatest depth was very little over
the drenched valet’s knees.
We went in very cautiously, very slowly, the water came up and up, almost
to the floor boards. The rest of the story is perfectly tame and flat;
our car went through it like a duck!
Further on, we came to several fords, all small and shallow, and we
splashed through them gleefully. We passed great herds of cattle and any
number of cowboys. We saw hundreds of gophers, ran our wheels over two
rattlesnakes, and escaped—one skunk.
In Trinidad we ran across our first companion motor tourists. “Kansas
City to Los Angeles” was written in letters six inches high with an
American pennant on one side, and the name of a popular machine on the
other. Another car, a Ford, announcing that it was bound from Lincoln,
Nebraska, to San Francisco, had enough banners to decorate the room of a
schoolboy. The owners of these two talked volubly on touring in general
and the roads ahead in particular. The owner of the Ford, adjusting the
vizor of his yachting cap and pulling on his gauntlets, looked at us
doubtfully.
“Well,” said he, “everyone to his own liking! I myself prefer a shorter,
lighter car!”
“Are you going to try to take that machine down the Bajada?” asked the
other. “I’m glad I haven’t the job of driving her even over the Raton!”
“My, but she’s a peach!” exclaimed an enthusiastic mechanic. “Don’t you
have no fear, mister!” he whispered to E. M. “The stage coaches they used
to go over this road to Santa Fé; if they could get over, I guess _you_
can!”
It had never occurred to us that we couldn’t, but the reminder of the
lumbering caravans was comforting, and we started tranquilly to climb
the Colorado side of the Raton divide. We passed first one, and then
the other of the two cars, whose owners had little opinion of ours. Did
they believe their ugly snub-nosed tin kettles, panting and puffing and
chug-chugging up the grade, like asthmatic King Charles spaniels, better
hill-climbers than our beautiful, big, long engine, that took the ascent
without the slightest loss of breath even in the almost nine thousand
feet of altitude? We had looked at the two machines in much the same way
that passengers in the cab of a locomotive might look at a country cart
trundling along the road, for we had pulled smoothly by them in much the
same way that the locomotive passes the cart.
We have all heard the story of the hare and the tortoise, and the old
adage, “He who laughs last——” It was all very well as long as we remained
in the state of Colorado! But the instant we crossed the Divide, our
beautiful great, long, powerful machine lay down perfectly flat on its
stomach and could not budge until one of these despised snub-nosed
spaniels heaped coals of fire on our heads by kindly pulling us out.
Because of their highness—one of the chief attributes of their
ugliness—the other two cars could under the present conditions travel
along without hindrance, whereas we discovered to our chagrin that we had
far too little clearance, and the first venturing into New Mexico ruts
held us fast.
The road over the Raton Pass, by the way, was originally built by a
famous character known as “Uncle” Dick Wooten. Having defrayed all the
expenses out of his own pocket he established a tollgate so that he might
somewhat reimburse himself. The American traders paid the toll without a
murmur; the Mexicans paid only through the persuasion of a revolver, and
the Indians would not pay at all. After going over the road we agreed
with the Indians.
The rest of our story all the way to Santa Fé is one long wail. But in
justice to the roads of New Mexico, it is necessary to go into some
explanation of the wherefore of our particular difficulties. In the
first place we went out there in the very early spring after the worst
of the thaw, but before any repairs, which might have been made for the
summer season, had been begun. As for equipment, ours could not by any
possibility have been worse.
With a wheel base of one hundred and forty-four inches, our car has a
center clearance of only _eight_ inches! Furthermore, we have a big steel
exhaust pipe that slants from ten inches above the ground under the
engine to eight and one-half inches above the ground where it protrudes
behind the left rear wheel. Therefore, where shorter, higher cars can
go with perfect ease, it requires great skill and no little ingenuity
for a very low and long one to keep clear of trouble. For instance, over
deep-rutted roads we have to stay balanced on the ridges on either side,
like walking a sort of double tight rope; if we slide down into the rut,
we have to be jacked up and a bridge of stones put under to lift us out
again. On many of the sharp corners of the mountain passes we have to
back and fill two and often four times, but our real difficulties are all
because of that troublesome exhaust pipe.
[Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF THE WEST OF YESTERDAY]
Out on the cattle ranches they build a great many queer little ditch
crossings; two planks of wood with edges like troughs, and a wheel-width
apart. They are our particular horror. Again, right wheels went over
perfectly, but the only way we can get the left ones over is to build up
the hollows with pieces of wood—some barrel staves we found by luck and
that we now always carry with us.
Another particular joy to us is sliding down into and clambering out
of arroyos, on the edge of which the car loves to make believe it is a
seesaw. Our only good fortune seems to be in having plenty of power, and
the carburetor high enough not to be flooded—as yet—by any streams we
have gone through. Once, in order to find a bank that we could crawl up
on, we had to wade up the stream, with the possibility of quicksand, for
nearly half a mile.
After three days of this sort of experience, you can’t help wincing at
the very sight of ruts or rocks or river beds, in exactly the same way
that you wince at the close approach of dentist’s instruments.
Between Trinidad and Las Vegas we were overtaken by a blizzard. It
rained, hailed, and finally snowed; and it all passed by us in less
than an hour. But in the midst of it we lost our way and wandered for
miles across the prairie. Finally, at the end of about twenty miles we
saw an open wagon and two men resting under it, but they spoke only
Spanish and we understood their directions so vaguely that when our road
disappeared into hilly, roadless prairie, and we came to a new bridge
without any tracks leading to it, and apparently uncrossable between it
and us, it was snowing again, there were no shadows to tell the points
of the compass by. As E. M. drove on at a snail’s pace, wondering which
direction to turn, two Indians on ponies appeared over the edge of a
nearby hill.
Again we had no language in common. But we repeated, “Las Vegas,” and
they, gravely motioning us to follow, led us through a labyrinthian path
between the hillocks to the mesa from which the bridge started. Although
they helped us with greatest willingness, and accepted a coin with grave
courtesy, their faces were as expressionless as wood-carvings and neither
uttered a sound nor smiled.
Finally, because we were hungry and not by reason of any inviting charm
at that particular point of the earth’s most dreary surface, we stopped
for luncheon. We had just about spread out our food paraphernalia when,
turning at the sound of a galloping hoofed animal, we saw a horseman
tearing across the plains toward us. He rode as a brigand might, and as
only a Westerner can. Standing in his stirrups rather than sitting in his
saddle, and seemingly unaffected by the rocking motion of his mount, his
body was poised level with the horizon.
Was he a highwayman, one of those notorious bad men that the Southwest
is said to be infested with, or was he just a cowboy? His outline
fitted into any sort of a part your fear or delight might imagine. The
wide-brimmed hat, bandanna handkerchief around his neck, leather cuffs
on his shirt and murderous-looking cartridge belt and revolver, suited
equally a make-up for good or bad.
My heart thumped with the excitement of a possible hold up, and yet I was
far too fascinated to feel either fear or inclination to escape. As he
came nearer, he came slower, and when quite close he brought his horse
to a leisurely walk that had no longer any hold-up suggestion in it and
I took a bite out of my hitherto untouched sandwich. When almost beside
us, he leaned a little sideways in his saddle and glanced at our State
license number, and then at us, with a manner as casual and unconcerned
as though we might have been an inanimate hillock of the landscape.
Then, “Howdy, strangers!” he said. The tone of his voice was friendly
enough, in spite of his taciturn and utterly unsmiling expression. It
has struck us all through the West how seldom anyone has smiled.
“How are you!” echoed E. M., matching manner for manner. His tone, too,
had a friendly ring, but he went on opening a tin of potted meat as
though no one else were present.
“Come all the way from back East in that machine?” the Westerner asked,
with a little more interest. “How long you been comin’?”
E. M. glanced up from his tin-opening and the two exchanged a few remarks
on the subject of roads and horses and motors and then, as nearly as I
can remember, the Westerner said:
“It’d be a mighty long ride on a cayuse! Which them machines shorely
disregards distance a whole lot.”
E. M. asked the Westerner, “Won’t you have some lunch with us? Awfully
glad if you will!”
“Thank _you_,” but he moved a little away from us, as though for the
first time embarrassed. “Thank YOU!” he said again. “I et dinner ’bout an
hour ago!”
“We have only cold things,” I explained, not only thrilled at an
encounter with a real live cowboy but attracted by his distinctly
pleasing personality. He had no manner at all and yet in his absence of
self-consciousness there was very real dignity. And in contrast to the
copper-brown of his face his unsmiling eyes were so blue that their color
was startling. I had been wrapped in admiration of E. M.’s color, which
I thought as brown as sun could make a man, but beside this other of the
plains, E. M. looked almost pallid.
“I don’t aim to have you deny yourself nothin’ for me!” he hesitated.
“Oh, we have _lots_ of food!” said Celia. “Cold food, though, you know;
nothing hot.”
For the first time his eyes crinkled into a half smile:
“The grub we get is _hot_, which is most of the virchoos you can claim
for it.”
Meanwhile E. M. had proffered an open box of eggs and sandwiches. The
other dismounted, threw the reins forward over his horse’s neck, and
accepted our hospitality. He turned a paper plate and a thin tin spoon in
his hands as though dubious of such flimsy utility until he discovered it
was to be used for ice cream. Hard frozen ice cream under the midday sun
and fifty miles from where it could be bought, interested him.
“I’ve seen bottles for liquids, but I’ve never seen one like that for
solids. It sure is cold!” he said. And with its coldness, he quite
thawed. He did not look more than thirty, yet talked quite a while about
the old times that he himself remembered, generalities for the most part,
but with a lingering keenness in describing the qualifications that men
on the range used to have.
Also he told us a string of yarns—that may have been true—or they may
have been merely the type of divertissement whereby Westerners love to
entertain themselves at the expense of Eastern credulity. One amusing
story, at any rate, was of the hold-up of a passenger stage by a single
masked man. Afterwards when the sheriff and his men followed his horse’s
tracks, they suddenly disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them.
It had. They found the thief’s buried boots with horseshoes nailed on
them on a path that had too many footprints to single out one to follow.
He added quite regretfully that cow-punching was not what it used to be.
Cattle were getting tame and the ranches were enclosed in wire fences and
life was so soft and easy, that cattle raising was no more exciting than
raising sheep. Finally he volunteered:
“I’ve got folks in Massachusetts; my brother Sam’s in Boston.”
When E. M. told him that he had come from Boston, as he was still a
student at Harvard, the Westerner could neither understand how it was
that E. M. did not know his brother, nor that a man of such an age and
size could still be getting an education.
“Book learning” was a good thing, he thought, but twenty years of age
was too late in his opinion to be still acquiring it. He himself had run
away from home at the age of eleven. Not because of ill-treatment, but
merely that it seemed the manly thing to do. In his opinion a boy was a
no-account specimen who would stay past his twelfth year “hangin’ round
his womenfolks.”
To run away and never send a word home seems to be the commonplace
behavior of Western boys. “I don’t know how your mothers stand the
anxiety,” I said aloud, “not to know whether their sons are even alive.”
“I reckon that’s so. I never showed up nor wrote for six years. One
evening I walks in on the old folks, and they didn’t recognize me; the
old woman went plum’ over backwards when she saveys it was me. That was
some years ago and I haven’t been back since.”
Having finished luncheon E. M. cranked the car, and our guest gathered up
the trailing reins of his patiently standing horse. Once his rider was
in the saddle, however, the broncho, as though to show what he could do,
gave quite a gallery display of bucking, while his rider gave no less
an exhibition of Western horsemanship, rolling a cigarette in tranquil
disregard of his pony’s hump-backed leaps, which, however, soon settled
down into a steady gallop that carried our friend across the plains. On
the top of a nubble he waved to us and we waved back as we continued, on
our side regretfully, our separate ways.
We have passed any number of little Mexican, or Indian, adobe villages.
One house was surrounded by a picket fence painted bright laundry blue.
Several had blue door and window frames. The houses were all one-storied
and the people looked more Mexican than Indian.
When we finally arrived, without further difficulty, at Las Vegas, it
seemed rather questionable whether we would be able to go on next day
or not. The barometer was down, several other motorists doleful and the
outlook very glum.
“What did you start so early in the season for?” we heard one driver ask
another.
“Well,” said the second, “I don’t mind a little speculation as to what
you’re going to run into. If you know the road ahead of you is all fine
and dandy, what’s to keep your interest up?”
* * * * *
Leaving Las Vegas early the next morning, we encountered the same erratic
weather that we ran through the day before. When we happened to be
under an unclouded area, we could see that all about us were separate
storm clouds, black smudges against an otherwise clear sky. As we drove
beneath one of the black areas, we were deluged with rain, or hail, or
snow, and through it came into sunny weather again. It was the most
curious sensation to run into a blinding storm, and being able to gauge
beforehand how long it would take us to pass through it.
As we approached a ford some Mexicans standing beside it motioned us
to make a wide sweep; it landed us in deep soft sand up to our hubs.
Whereupon they attached their horses to us and pulled us through.
[Illustration: YOUR ROUTE LEADS THROUGH MANY MEXICAN AND INDIAN
VILLAGES]
“Do many motors have to be helped?” I asked.
“Every one, all same!” they replied.
We had passed two cars, so I held up my fingers. “Two more are coming!” I
said.
They immediately broke into a broad grin.
I rather wonder do they make all cars drive in that large circle to
_avoid_ the sand pile!
Between Las Vegas and Santa Fé, the going was the worst yet.
Washed-out roads, arroyos, rocky stretches, and nubbly hills. We just
about smashed everything, cracked and broke the exhaust, lost bolts and
screws, and scraped along on the pan all of the way.
And yet the dread Bajada Hill, in which we are to drop nine hundred feet
in one mile and long cars are warned in every guidebook of the sharp and
precipitous turns, is still ahead of us. One thing, if it is worse than
from the top of the Raton we might as well be prepared to leave all that
is left of us scattered in odd pieces along the road.
The next time we motor the trail to Santa Fé we are unanimously agreed
that it is going to be in a very different type of car—or best of all, on
the backs of little sure-footed burros!
CHAPTER XX
OUR LITTLE SISTER OF YESTERDAY
With straight black Indian hair piled high under a lace mantilla, with
necklaces of gold and silver and coral and turquoise as big as hens’
eggs, with her modern American dress barely showing under her Indian
blanket of holiest red, her head pillowed against the mountains of the
North, and her little pueblo feet in the high-heeled Spanish slippers
stretched out upon the plains of the South, Santa Fé sits dreaming in the
golden sunlight.
Sometimes she dreams idly of her girlhood when she ran about the
mountains barefooted, her hair done in two squash-blossom whorls on
either side of her dusky head, so long ago that no white man had ever set
foot on the western continent. Or perhaps, half shutting her unfathomable
eyes, she remembers the heroes who fought and died for her, or the pomp
of her marriage with her Spanish first lord, Don Juan d’Onate—noble in
estates rather than character, though he brought her a wedding-gift of
white wooly animals, afterward called sheep, and furthermore, dressed her
in fine clothes, put her in a palace, and made a lady of her. Her little
bare feet were shod in scarlet slippers, and she had many skirts of silk
and velvet, though never a bodice to one of them, but her breast was
strung with necklaces and her arms with bracelets, and she had shawls of
silk and mantillas of lace to wrap most of her face and all of her bare
brown shoulders in. The palace had walls six feet thick; some say the
thick walls were to hide the true palace already built by her own Indian
forefathers. All the same, nobles in broadcloth embroidered in silver
and gold crowded her audience room when the Island of Manhattan was a
wilderness, and the wood of which the _Mayflower_ was to be built was
still growing in the forest of England.
But then the dream becomes a sad one of injustice and cruelty; of long,
long miserable years under the oppression of a dissipated gambling tyrant
who put her family to the sword or made them slaves. Then came revolt and
savage warfare; massacres that made her palace steps run red, vivid days
of flame, black ones of darkness until——And this is her dream of dreams!
She forgets it all happened in the long ago. The quick blood leaps again
in her veins, her heart beats fast, her pulses quiver at the magic name
of her hero, her conqueror, her lover, Don Diego de Vargas! Again she
sees him, surrounded by his panoplied soldiers, lances flashing, banners
waving, marching victorious across the plaza, and planting his cross at
her palace door in the name of the Virgin, demanding her glad surrender!
“Ah, to love was to live!” says Santa Fé. “Yet in all the world there
was only one De Vargas—and he has passed!” And she wraps herself in her
Indian blanket and falls again to dreaming.
Her alliance with the American Republic is what one might call a marriage
of arrangement. Foreign in race, in sentiment, in understanding, she
has never adopted the customs or manners of her new lord, but lives
tranquilly, uneventfully, dreaming always of the long ago.
And even though Don Diego de Vargas has lain for two centuries in the
grave of his forefathers, though Indians no longer go on the warpath,
though the eight-horse wagon mile-long caravans of the traders and
travelers from the far East beyond the Mississippi no longer come
clattering down over the mountains, to the excited and welcoming
shouts of the populace of, “_Los Americanos! La Caravana!_” crowding
into the Plaza to receive them, if the streets of Santa Fé no longer
riot in tumult and bloodshed, they at least still riot in color
and picturesqueness, kaleidoscopic enough to vie with anything in
Constantinople or Cairo. You might think yourself in the Orient or in a
city of old Spain transported upon a magic carpet, but nothing less like
the United States can be imagined. Along the narrow crooked streets,
dwellings hundreds of years old stand shoulder to shoulder with modern
houses that have wedged themselves between. Down a zigzag lane you may
see an Indian woman hooded in a white cotton shawl, and balancing a jar
of water on her head as in the Biblical pictures of Rebecca.
Besides big modern automobiles are Indians leading little burros so
loaded down with firewood that their meek little faces are all there is
to be seen protruding in front, little switching tails or kicking heels
in the back, and the whole bundle supported by spindly tiny-footed legs.
On a corner is an Indian wrapped in his bright blanket. Two Mexicans in
high-crowned wide-brimmed sombreros lean against a door frame and smoke
cigarettes. Cowboys in flannel shirts have vivid bandannas around their
throats, and there is more color yet in women’s dresses, in flowers, in
fruits, in awnings—color, color rioting everywhere. Over everything the
sun bakes just as it does in Spain or Northern Africa, and the people all
look as silent and dreamy as the town.
Only a few hundred miles away are typical striving American cities
shouting to anyone who will hear, and assailing the ears of those
who won’t, “Watch me grow—just watch me!” The big ones boom it, the
little ones pipe it, but each and every one shouts to the earth at
large, “Yesterday I was a community of nesters’ shanties; today I’m an
up-to-date thriving town. Tomorrow—wait, and you shall see!”
Yet their little Indian and Spanish sister in the center of a vast domain
of buried cities, of unmined treasures, dozes in the sun and cares not
a bit how much the world outside may strive, or teem or grow. Can anyone
fancy her waking from her reverie, dropping her indolent soft Spanish
accent and shouting in strident tones, that she, too, will be a bustling
growing town? Sooner fancy the Sphinx on the African desert urging,
“Votes for women!”
CHAPTER XXI
IGNORANCE WITH A CAPITAL I
Imagine people living all their lives in Cairo never having seen the
Pyramids. Imagine anyone living in Italy never having been to Pompeii.
Yet we, ourselves, to whom the antiquities and wonders of far countries
are perfectly familiar, did not even know that the wonders of our
Southwest existed! We thought that Pueblo had a nice Indian sound, that
Santa Fé must be an important railroad terminal. Arizona we pictured as a
wide desert like the Sahara, with the Grand Canyon at the top of it, and
a place called Phoenix, appropriately named as the only thing that could
survive the heat, and another place called Tombstone, also fittingly
named, in the middle of a vast area of sizzling sand.
Was there ever any place less like a railroad center than Santa Fé? The
main line of the railroad which has taken its name does not even go
there. A little branch runs to the terminal city from a junction called
Lamy, where, by the way, there is a Harvey hotel, which means, of course,
a good one. This is a word of advice to the tourist who finds the one in
Santa Fé poor. Still, in a city that is old and colorful, and quaint,
one hardly expects wonderful accommodations. The hotel in Biskra, Africa,
did not use to be much to boast about, either.
As for our ignorance about the country, we came across a woman today who
was certainly, at least to us, a new type. She was traveling on mule-back
and absolutely alone! At first it seemed the most daring and dangerous
thing I had ever heard of, but a few minutes of her conversation
convinced me that _she_ was quite safe. Never did I believe a human being
could so closely resemble a hornet. She looked us over as though we might
have been figures in the Eden Musée. Then she asserted:
“Humph! You’re the English people! I saw a British emblem on a car
outside, and it’s easy to see you are the ones it belongs to!”
We denied the nationality but claimed the car.
She shrugged her shoulders:
“Well, if you aren’t English, you’re either from New York or Boston—it
amounts to the same thing! Ever been to Europe?”
We had.
“Ever been out here before?”
We hadn’t.
“I knew it! I knew it the very first moment I clapped eyes on you!”
Like a phonograph she recited a long tirade on the topic of the
“Americans who go spend money in Europe and neglect their own country.”
She asserted the superiority of our own land over that of every other in
generalities and in detail, ending with a final thrust: “What can you get
over there, I’d like to know, that you can’t get here?”
She asserted that a two-hundred-thousand-dollar collection of modern
paintings was far more worth seeing than the incomparable masterpieces of
Italy; she declared that Egypt and Pompeii held no treasures comparable
with the New Mexican cliff-dwellings.
Our cliff-dwellings like little bird holes along the face of solid rock
in which cave men lived hundreds—maybe thousands of years ago, are
marvelously interesting, but to the spoiled globe-trotter, looking for
profuse evidences of bygone manners and customs and beauty, such as you
find in Alexandria or Pompeii, there are none.
There is, however, we had been told, an Arizona cave-dwelling that has
a mural decoration that can rival in interest the frescoes in Italy or
the hieroglyphics of Egypt. It is merely the imprint of a cave baby’s
hand pressed thousands of years ago against the wall when the adobe was
soft. You can also see cave-dwellings of a pigmy people that lived in the
Stone Age and wore feather ruching around their necks; enchanted pools
that have no bottoms; a lava river with a surface so sharp, brittle,
like splintered glass, that nothing living can cross it and not be
footless, actually, in the end. You can also find, to this day they say,
a religious sect of Penitents who, in Holy Week, practice every sort
of flesh mortification, carry crosses, lie down on cactus needles, flay
themselves with cat-o’-nine-tails, and they used, a few years ago, to
crucify especially fervent members.
But why try to convince people that traveling in the byways of the
Southwest is not a strenuous thing to do? Our hornet inquisitor told
us, “What do you want better than a cave to sleep in? It’s as good as
your European hotels any day!” We forgot to ask her how she got up the
face of the cliffs to get into the caves—a feat far above any ability of
Celia’s or mine. She also said she liked taking potluck with the Indians.
I wonder does she like, as they do, the taste of prairie dogs, and they
say, occasionally, mice and snakes?
Although she did her best to spoil it all for us, we took away an
unforgettable picture of an enchanted land. Why, though, I wonder, did
she want to speak of it or think of it as different from what it really
is? Vast, rugged, splendidly desolate, big in size, big in thought, big
in ideals, with a few threads of enchanting history like that of Santa
Fé, or vividly colored romances of frontier life and Indian legends that
vie with Kipling’s jungle books.
CHAPTER XXII
SOME INDIANS AND MR. X.
The best commentary on the road between Santa Fé and Albuquerque is that
it took us less than three hours to make the sixty-six miles, whereas
the seventy-three from Las Vegas to Santa Fé took us nearly _six_. The
Bajada Hill, which for days Celia and I dreaded so much that we did not
dare speak of it for fear of making E. M. nervous, was magnificently
built. There is no difficulty in going down it, even in a very long car
that has to back and fill at corners; there are low stone curbs at bad
elbows, and the turns are all well banked so that you feel no tendency
to plunge off. A medium length car with a good wheel cut-under would run
down the dread Bajada as easily as through the driveways of a park! And
the entire distance across Sandoval County, although a tract of desert
desolation or bleak sand and hills and cactus, is an easy drive over a
smooth road. In one place you go through a great cleft cut through an
impeding ridge, but most of the way you can imagine yourself in a land of
the earth’s beginning and where white man never was. Two Indian shepherds
in fact were the only human beings we saw until our road ran into the
surprisingly modern city of Albuquerque.
* * * * *
Stopping at the various Harvey hotels of the Santa Fé system, yet not
being travelers on the railroad, is very like being behind the scenes at
a theater. The hotel people, curio-sellers, and Indians are the actors,
the travelers on the incoming trains are the audience. Other people don’t
count.
[Illustration: THE INDIAN PUEBLO OF TAOS]
For instance, you enter a tranquilly ordered dining-room. The head
waitress attentively seats you, your own waitress quickly fetches your
first course, and starts towards the pantry for the second, when suddenly
a clerk appears and says, “Twenty-six!” With the uniformity of a trained
chorus every face turns towards the clock, and the whole scene becomes
a flurry of white-starched dresses running back and forth. Back with
empty trays and forth with buttered rolls, radishes, cups of soup, like a
ballet of abundance. You wonder if no one is going to bring your second
course, but you might as well try to attract the attention of a hive
of bees when they are swarming. Having nothing else to do you discover
the mystic words twenty-six to be twenty-six places to set. Finally you
descry your own waitress dealing slices of toast to imaginary diners at
a far table. Then you hear the rumble of the train, the door leading
to the platform opens and in come the passengers. And you, having no
prospect of anything further to eat, watch the way the train supper is
managed. Slices of toast and soup in cups are already at their places,
then in files the white-aproned chorus carrying enormous platters of
freshly grilled beefsteak, and such savory broiled chicken that you, who
are so hungry, can scarcely wait a moment patiently for your own waitress
to appear. You notice also the gigantic pots of aromatically steaming
coffee, tea and chocolate being poured into everyone’s cup but your own,
and ravenously you watch the pantry door for that long tarrying one who
went once upon a time to get some of these delectable viands for you.
“Will you have broiled chicken?” asks the faithless She you have been
watching for, bending solicitously over a group of strange tourists at
the next table. At last when the train people are quite supplied, your
speeding Hebe returns to you and apologizes sweetly, “I am sorry but
I had to help get train Number Seven’s supper. They’ve eaten all the
broiled chicken that was cooked, but I’ll order you some more if you
don’t mind waiting twenty minutes.”
By and by the train people leave, your chicken arrives and you finish
your supper in commonplace tranquillity. But let us look on at another
comedy, for which the scene shifts to the railroad station at Albuquerque
where the long stone platform is colorless and deserted. You have always
on picture postcards seen it filled with Indians. There is not one
in sight. Wait though until ten minutes before the California limited
is due. Out of the nowhere appear dozens of vividly costumed Navajos
and Hopis; their blankets and long braids woven with red cloth, their
headbands and beads and silver ornaments fill the platform with color
like a flower display. Old squaws and a few young squat themselves in
two rows, forming an aisle between the train and the station salesroom.
Although you walk up and down between their forming lines watching them
arrange their display of baskets and pottery, they are silent until the
first passenger alights, and then unendingly they chorus two words:
“Tain cent!” “Tain cent!” The words sometimes sound like a question,
sometimes a statement, but generally a monotonous drone. There is a
nice old squaw—although I believe the Hopis don’t call their women
squaws—sitting at the end. I tripped and almost fell into her lap. She
looked up, smiled, and by her inflection, conveyed, “Oh, my _dear_, did
you hurt yourself?” but what she said was, “Tain cent!”
The third Harvey scene is frankly a vaudeville performance of Indian
dancing and singing. The stage the adobe floor of the Indian exhibit
room, the walls of which are hung to the ceiling with blankets, beadwork,
baskets, clay gods, leather costumes—everything conceivable in the way of
Indian crafts. Immediately after supper the tourists take their places on
benches ranged against three sides of the apartment. Generally there is
a big open fire on the fourth side, adding its flickering light as the
last note to a setting worthy of Belasco.
The Indians dance most often in pairs but occasionally there are as many
as eight or nine in a row or a circle, with an additional background of
others beating time. The typical step is a sort of a shuffling hop; a
little like the first step or two of a clog dancer before he gets going,
or else just a bent kneed limp and stamp accompanied either by a droning
chant or merely a series of sounds not unlike grunts. To our Anglo-Saxon
ears and eyes it seemed very monotonous even after a little sample.
Yet we are told they keep it up for eight or ten or twelve hours at a
stretch, when they are dancing seriously and at home. Dancing to them is
a religious ceremony, not merely an informal expression of gayety.
The women we saw wore heavy black American shoes and calico mother
hubbards with a ruffle at the bottom, and generally a shawl or blanket
around their shoulders. Only one wore the blanket costume as it is
supposed to be worn: around her body and fastened on one shoulder leaving
the other arm and shoulder bare and also bare feet.
The men were much more picturesque, in dark-colored velvet shirts,
silver belts, necklaces of bright beads and white cross-bars that looked
like teeth, huge turquoise square-cut earrings and red head-bands. The
“Castle cut” head-dress that has been the rage in New York for the last
year or two is simply that of the Navajo Indians. Their head-band is a
little wider and invariably of red, and the black straight hair ends as
stiffly as a tassel.
In some places as at the Grand Canyon, there are Navajo huts and a Hopi
communal house where the tourist can see something of the way the Indians
live; the way they weave blankets or baskets, beat silver or make and
paint pottery.
But to go back to Albuquerque, where although we saw less of the Indians
than later in other places, we were lucky enough to hear a great deal
about them. After dinner—there was no dancing—we were in the Indian
Exhibit room—probably the most wonderful collection of their crafts that
there is. As we were admiring an exceptionally beautiful blanket of red,
black and white and closely woven as a fine Panama hat, a man—we thought
him the proprietor at first—said:
“It took three years’ bargaining to get that blanket from a Navajo chief.
You can’t get them made of that quality any more. They’d rather get ten
or twelve dollars for a blanket they spend a few weeks on and get paid
often, than work a year on a single blanket that they can sell for a
hundred.”
He picked out various examples of pattern and weaving and explained
relative values. The amount of red, for instance, in the one we had been
looking at added greatly to its price. We found out later that although
not stationed at Albuquerque, he was one of the Harvey staff, and as we
spent the whole evening talking with him, and he might not care to have
his name taken in vain, I’ll call him Mr. X. He has lived for years among
the Indians. We could have listened to his stories about them forever,
but to remember the greater part would be a different matter.
On the subject of business dealings, an Indian, he said, has no idea of
credit. No matter how well he knows and trusts you, he wants to be paid
cash the moment he brings in his wares. To wait even an hour for his
money will not satisfy him. A puzzling thing had happened on the platform
that afternoon. I heard a lady say to an old squaw, “I’ll take these
three baskets.” Whereupon instead of selling the baskets, the Indian
hastily covered all of them with a blanket, got up and went away!
I told this to Mr. X. He considered a minute, then asked:
“Did the lady by chance wear violet?”
“She did!” interposed Celia. “She had on a violet shirtwaist and——”
“That explains it!” Mr. X broke in. “No wonder she ran away. To an Indian
violet is the color of evil. None but a witch would wear it. Red is
holy; they love red above all colors. Also they love yellow, orange and
turquoise.”
As we were talking a young Navajo who was standing near us, suddenly
covering his eyes with his arm, rushed from the room. Naturally we looked
at our clothes for an evidence of violet but Mr. X. laughed.
“It wasn’t a case of color this time! Do you see that old squaw that just
came in? She is his mother-in-law. Navajos won’t look at their wife’s
mother; they think they will be bewitched if they do. He is going back
to the Reservation tomorrow, because the old woman came down today.
He is an intelligent Indian, too, but if he spies a stray cat or dog
around tonight, he will probably think it is his mother-in-law having
taken that shape. Their belief in witchcraft is impossible to break. At
the same time they have an undeniable gift for necromancy, second sight
or whatever it may be called, scarcely less wonderful than that of the
Hindoos of India. The boy in the basket trick and the rope-climbing trick
of Asia are not to be compared with things I have seen with my own eyes
in New Mexico.
“I have seen a Shaman, or priest, sing over a bare adobe floor, and the
floor slowly burst in one little place and a new shoot of corn appear.
I have seen this grow before my eyes until it became a full-sized stalk
with ripened corn. Instead of waving a wand, as European magicians do,
the priest sings continually and as long as he sings the corn grows, when
he stops the cornstalk stops.
“The same Shaman can pour seeds and kernels of corn out of a hollow
stalk until all about him are heaping piles of grain that could not be
crowded into a thousand hollowed cornstalks. Medicine men of all tribes
can cure the sick, heal the injured, get messages out of the air and do
many seemingly impossible things.
“Navajos abhor snakes as much as we do, but Moquis hold them sacred.
Before their famous snake dance, during which they hold living
rattlesnakes in their mouths and bunches of them wriggling in each hand,
they anoint their bodies with the juice of an herb, and drink an herb
tea; both said to be medicine against snakebite. At all events they don’t
seem to suffer more than a trifling indisposition even when they are
bitten in the face. One theory is—and it certainly sounds reasonable—that
from early childhood the snake priests are given infinitesimal doses of
rattlesnake poison until by the time they reach manhood they are immune
to any ill effects.”
We had by this time wandered out of the Indian room and seated ourselves
in the big rocking-chairs on the veranda of the Alvarado, Mr. X. with
us. Every now and then he stopped and said that he thought he had talked
about enough, but we were insatiable and always begged him to tell us
some more. Of the many things he told us, the most interesting of all
were stories of the medicine men and the combination of articles that
constitutes each individual’s own fetich or “medicine.” To this day not
only medicine men, but chiefs, would as soon be parted from their own
scalp-locks, as from this talisman. Each has his own medicine that can
never be changed, though upon occasion it may have a lucky article added
to it. Most commonly the fetich is composed of a little bag made of the
pelt of a small animal and filled with a curious assortment of articles
such as bear’s claws, wolf’s teeth, things that are associated with the
wearer’s early prowess in the world, or more likely a former existence.
At all events, an Indian’s standing and power in his tribe is dependent
upon this fetich, and to lose it is to lose not only power but caste—much
more than life itself.
In the days past of the Redman’s war prowess, this sort of “medicine”
worn by warriors most especially, was supposed to grant them supernatural
powers to kill enemies and preserve their own life. If they were
wounded or killed, it meant that the enemy’s medicine was even more
powerful. But using the word “medicine” in our sense, their “medicine
men”—healers—certainly know of mysteriously potent cures, the secrets of
which no white man understands.
Their most usual way of effecting a cure is, apparently, to dance all
night in a circle around the afflicted person, with curative results
that are too uncannily like magic to be believable. One case that Mr.
X. vouched for personally was that of a child that was dying of blood
poison. Two white surgeons of high repute said that the child had
scarcely a chance of living even by amputating an arm that had mortified
beyond any hope of saving; and that without the operation, its death
was merely a question of hours. The Indian parents refused to have it
done, and insisted upon taking the child to the Reservation. The white
doctors declared the child could not possibly survive such a journey but
as, in their opinion, it could not live long anyway, the parents might
as well take it where they pleased. They started for the Reservation. It
was Sunday. “Four sleeps we come back, all right,” said the father. On
Thursday, the fourth day, exactly, back they came again with the child
well, and its arm absolutely sound. That a mortified arm should get well,
comes close to the unbelievable—even though vouched for, as in this case,
by several reputable witnesses.
As a case of mental telepathy, Mr. X. told us that time and time again
he had known Indians to get news out of the air. An old Navajo one day
cried out suddenly that his squaw was “heap sick.” He was so excited that
he would not wait for Mr. X. to telegraph and find out if there was any
truth in his fear, nor would he wait for a train, but started on a pony
to ride to the Reservation. After he had gone a telegram came saying that
the squaw had been bitten by a rattlesnake and was dying.
After a while the topic turned upon our own trip. We had intended to ship
the car at Albuquerque, but the road from Santa Fé had been so good we
were encouraged to go further and Mr. X.’s enthusiasm settled it.
“Having come down into this part of the country,” he said, “you really
ought not to miss seeing some of the wonders of our Southwest. The
Pueblo of Acoma is a little out of the way, but there is nothing like
it anywhere. ‘The city of the sky’ they call it—I won’t tell you any
more about it—you just go and look at it for yourselves. Isleta, a short
distance south from here, is a pueblo that lots of tourists go to see,
and Laguna is fairly well known, too. They are both on your road if you
go to Gallup. Acoma is off the beaten track but you wait and send me a
postcard if it is not worth considerable exertion, even to behold it
from the desert. The Enchanted Mesa, the higher one that you come to
first, is interesting chiefly because of its story. The truth of it I
can’t vouch for, but it is said to have been inhabited once by people
who reached its dizzy summit by a great ladder rock that leaned against
its sides. One day in a terrific storm while the men were all plowing
in the valley below, the rock ladder was blown down and the women and
children were left in this unscalable height to perish. Laguna is about
halfway between here and the continental divide, or about one-third of
the distance to Gallup. Acoma is perhaps eighteen miles south of Laguna
where you can get a guide and also more definite information. Or you can
just go south across the plain by yourselves, fairly near the petrified
forest later—no, that not until you are on the way to Holbrook. You also
skirt the edge of the lava river—I don’t think you’d know it was anything
to look at unless you were told. At the time of the eruption, the lava
on the surface cooled while that underneath it was still boiling, and
the steam of the boiling mass burst through the hardened surface and
splintered it like broken glass. Glass is in fact the substance it most
resembles. The country is full of stories of men and animals that have
tried to cross it, but neither hoofs nor cowhide boots have ever been
made that can stay intact on its gashing surface.
[Illustration: TO SEE THE SLEEPING BEAUTY OF THE SOUTHWEST, THE PATH IS
BY NO MEANS A SMOOTH ONE TO THE MOTORIST]
“And of course you must get a glimpse of the painted forest. After
that you can take a train when you please”—then with a laugh he
corrected—“when you get where a train goes.”
“Where could we sleep?” asked Celia.
“Well, you can sleep at the hotel in Gallup—it isn’t an Alvarado but
it’ll shelter you. For my own part, if you have a fine night, I’d sleep
out!”
CHAPTER XXIII
WITH NOWHERE TO GO BUT OUT
Personally I felt a sort of half-shiver. Sleep out in this land he had
been telling us about! Sleep out in the wildest, loneliest country in
the world, surrounded by the very Redskins about whom he had earlier in
the evening been reeling pretty grewsome stories! He seemed to divine my
thoughts. “The Indians are as peaceful as house cats now. Navajos never
gave us much trouble except when it came to horse-stealing.”
Then he looked at me in much the way our friend the fire chief had in
Rochelle, Illinois.
“You are not _afraid_, are you?”
“Oh, n-no! I think it’s most enchanting!”
“Are you cold?” asked E. M.
“P-perhaps,” I said weakly. “Besides if we are starting early I’d better
go in and see about ordering provisions and things.” Which last remark, I
think, quite saved my face—at least it was meant to.
I did, of course, want to see Acoma, that exaltedly perched city of
antiquity. I did want to get at least a glimpse of the Painted Desert,
but my bravery of spirit was of a very halting quality. The only thought
that bolstered me up was the possibility that I was really very brave,
because I was not telling anybody but myself that I was scared to death
at the thought of a night of homelessness in the middle of an Indian
reservation. When we started the next morning I thought Celia looked
less sturdy than usual. She said, “We are not going to spend the night
anywhere, are we?”
And I said with my best effort at spontaneous gladness, “No, won’t it be
fun!”
Celia looked exactly as a beginner who is told to jump head foremost
into the water in his first attempt to dive. E. M.’s attention was
as usual entirely upon the car, and the probabilities of twistings
and bumpings that the unknown roads might inflict upon his cherished
engine. The question of nowhere to sleep was of little interest—still
less importance. At all events we have seemingly enough provisions for
ourselves and the machine to carry us to Alaska. Without doubt we can
get motor supplies somewhere, but that is the one risk E. M. refuses to
take and so we are starting off like a young Standard Oil agency, with
forty-five gallons of gasoline, thirty-five in the tank and ten extra
in cans. Also extra cans of oil. We have plenty of water for ourselves
and some, too, for the car although we doubt whether alkali which ties
the human stomach into a hard knot of agony at a taste would give the
radiator a pain.
Our idea is to go, if we can, as far as Winslow. It seems rather funny
that we, who nearly failed to stay intact over the well-worn Santa Fé
trail, are branching into the unbeaten byway of the desert! We have taken
our battered exhaust pipe off, and shipped it to Los Angeles, and our
sensation without it is one of such freedom that we feel we can surmount
all obstacles.
CHAPTER XXIV
INTO THE DESERT
What has this land lived through? What sorrows have so terribly wasted,
what cataclysms rent it, what courage exalted it! Stupendous in its
desolation, sublime in its awfulness, it mystifies and dumbfounds at
every turn. Smooth plains fall into an abyss, or rise in bleak rock
spires. Firm, pebbled river-beds suddenly shift to greedy quicksands;
pools that look cool and limpid are boiling, or poisonous alkali. It
suggests a theme of sculpture conceived by an Olympian Rodin, splendidly
and gigantically hewn and with all the mystery of things not brought to a
finite shaping.
But like the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy-tale, the beauty sleeping in
the Southwest is surrounded by a thorn hedge of hardships and discomfort
that presents its most impenetrable thicket and sharpest spines to
the motorist. To see this wonderland intelligently or well, you ought
really to be equipped with a camping outfit and go through on horseback.
However, if you are willing to turn away from the main travel and strike
west from Albuquerque, you can get a few compensating glimpses.
For miles and miles after leaving Isleta, a quite large settlement where
there are many Indians and also many tourists, you go on and on and on
over an easy gradually ascending road not unlike the long Platte Valley
drive, but much more uninhabited. The once dangerous fording of the
Puerco River is no longer a barrier to motorists, as there is a splendid
new bridge that takes you smoothly over. From time to time you come to a
few adobe huts or a lonely little packing-box railroad station, but your
road stretches uneventfully on, until Laguna.
There is no need of going by motor to get a glimpse of Laguna, for you
have only to sit on the observation platform—or even look out of a window
of any train in the Santa Fé Railroad. The pueblo of Laguna at a glance,
is a collection of baked earth blocks piled steeply one behind the other
against a sun-baked yellow hill at the side of the railroad track.
But to reach the Enchanted Mesa, and the sky-built city of Acoma, you
must drive southward from Laguna across a stubbled prairie into a desert
valley rimmed with distant cliffs like the walls of a vast garden.
As you round a sand dune you come suddenly upon a gigantic round,
flat-topped rock, like a titanic pink tree-stump—scarcely a reward for
all those miles and miles of dreariness and intense heat, even though its
flat-chopped top is a thousand feet clear above the surrounding plain.
But when you visualize the story of that terrible storm that washed the
great rock ladder away and left a village of women and children marooned
upon that dizzy height until they starved or plunged off to a quicker
death, it certainly grips you in its appalling awe.
It is a little wonder that the Indians think it haunted and accursed! For
my part it seems miracle enough that anyone ever got up there at all even
with a leaning rock supplemented with a notched tree ladder. Scaling such
a cliff would be a feat of horror beside which circus thrillers, looping
gaps and dipping deaths would be a comparatively tame performance.
A little way beyond the Enchanted Mesa crowned upon ramparts of fantastic
perpendicular crags arises Acoma, the skyland citadel of enchantment.
You know you can’t be in such prosy place as Here, or within a thousand
years of Now. You are standing before the shadowy citadel of some
ancient Assyrian king, or more likely yet, you have journeyed into the
land of fairy-tales and have come to the castle of the King of the Iron
Mountain. Way, way above you, you see tiny figures of the sky inhabitants
inquisitively peering down. Several Indians come down from their soaring
citadel and look you over. Finally one of them, very solemn and serious,
with his shirt-tail hanging out, motions, “Do you want to go up?”
You do, but how? There are only two paths, one hard and short, the other
long and easy! The easy one is as close to mountain climbing as the
ordinary person would want to undertake, though Indian mules and burros
make it without difficulty. A burro, and a mule, and a mountain goat
must spring from the same species. You clamber, therefore, up the easy
road—a stiff, winding defile like the rock-hewn causeway to Valhalla in
a Metropolitan production of a Wagner opera, the trail narrowing as it
ascends until finally it is nothing but a narrow shelf at a precipice
edge. If you are rather light-headed and none too sure-footed you clutch
tightly to a stronger, steadier hand and turn your face cliffward as you
shakily venture the last of the ascent.
But your reward on top is a prehistoric Aztec citadel of communal houses
and occupied by people living today exactly as their ancestors lived
hundreds of years ago. An Indian communal house is really a honeycomb
of adobe boxes like a flight of gigantic steps; the row on top set back
from the one below so that the roof of the first floor makes the terrace
in front of the second, and the roof of the second a piazza in front of
the third. Against the wall of each story lean the typical ladders by
which the Hopi Indian always enters his home. The ground-floor rooms
are usually entered through a hatchway in the ceiling from a room or a
terrace above.
Acoma is really the sister of Santa Fé, who has never changed her Indian
ways. When the noble Spanish invader tried to make a conquest of the
whole family, Acoma met him at the top of her cliff-hewn staircase with a
battle-ax! I should think after that climb—the so-called “easy” way had
not been built then—one of her brown babies could have pushed him off
with a small fore-finger!
To know anything at all about the lives or natures or customs of these
people, you would have to see more than is possible to an average,
ignorant tourist, who looks helplessly at their inscrutably serious
faces. Even if by fortunate chance one of them invites you to mount a
ladder and look into a dwelling or two, all you see is a small adobe
room with bare walls, a bare floor and possibly a small high window.
There is a fireplace in one corner and maybe a string stretched across
another with some clothes or blankets hung over it, or piled against
a wall on the floor, a water jar or two, and some primitive cooking
utensils. Except a few younger members of the community who have been
to Carlisle, no one speaks a word of English. Although in a few places
such as the Grand Canyon or Albuquerque an Indian will let you take his
picture for twenty-five cents, Mr. X. at Albuquerque had warned us not to
photograph any Indians we might meet elsewhere. In such places as Acoma
it might even be dangerous. Believing, as they do, that a photograph
takes a portion of their life away from them, no wonder they object to a
stranger’s helping himself to a little piece of their existence.
After leaving Acoma, you drive again long and tediously but without
serious hindrance, all the way to Gallup. At Gallup there is a hotel, a
small frame, frontier type of building. But by the time we reached it
we agreed with Mr. X. that it would be more of an experience to spend
the night under the stars. How much the beauty of the stars would have
tempted us had the hotel been more inviting I am not very sure. Beyond
Gallup you run into the Navajo Indian Reservation, your road having
ascended rather steeply through parklike woods of cedars, and the
altitude again affects both lungs and carburetor, but even if it makes
you gasp a little it is an essence of deliciousness as reviving as an
elixir of life. You go past the road that leads to the wonderful Canyon
de Chelly, but it is impossible for a motor—any kind of a motor, even
the littlest and lightest one—to go over it in the early spring, so
you continue on until at last, coming out upon a mesa, you see spread
below you the Painted Desert! It can be none other. You would be willing
to take oath that a great city of palaces in all the colors of the
rainbow lies spread before you. It is inconceivable that rock and sand
and twilight alone create these turrets and ramparts and bastions of
crimson, gold, blue, azure, indigo, purple, and the whole scene immersed
in liquid mauve and gold, as though the atmosphere were made of billions
and billions of particles of opalescent fluid. And as you stand in silent
contemplation an Indian with scarlet head-band rides by on a piebald
pony so that there shall be no color unused.
[Illustration: ACROSS THE REAL DESERT]
At last when the vividness of colors begin to soften into vapory purples,
deepening again to indigo, you gather a little brushwood and for the mere
companionable cheerfulness make a campfire to eat your supper by. You
probably heat a can of soup, roast potatoes, and finally, having nothing
else to cook or heat for the present, hit upon the brilliant thought
of boiling water, while the fire burns, for next morning’s coffee. At
least this is what we did, and poured it into a thermos to keep hot.
Also we climbed back into the car. Personally I have an abject terror
of snakes, though there was very likely none within a hundred miles of
us. For nothing on earth would I make myself a bed on the open ground.
Also the seats of our car—there was at least one satisfactory thing
about it—are only four or five inches from the floor, and sitting in it
is like sitting in an upholstered steamer chair with the footrest up—a
perfectly comfortable position to go to sleep in. So that bundled up
in fur coats with steamer blankets over us we were just as snug as the
proverbial bugs in a rug. For my own part, though, the night was too
beautiful out under that star-hung sky willingly to shut my eyes and blot
it out. My former fears of prowling Indians, strange animals, spooks,
spirits—or perhaps just vast empty blackness—had vanished completely,
and instead there was merely the consciousness of an experience too
beautiful to waste a moment of. I could not bear to go to sleep. The very
air was too delicious in its sparkling purity to want to stop consciously
breathing it. Overhead was the wide inverted bowl of purple blue made
of an immensity of blues overlaid with blues that went through and
through forever, studded with its myriad blinking lamps lit suddenly all
together, and so close I felt that I could almost reach them with my hand.
I really don’t know whether I slept or not, but the thing I became
conscious of was the beginning of the dawn. Overhead the heaven was
still that deep unfathomable blue. In the very deepest of its color the
crescent moon and single star glowed with a light rayless as it was
dazzling. Over near the horizon the blue lightened gradually to pale
azure and deepened where it rested on the brown purple rim of the desert
to a band of reddish orange, very soft, very melting. Gradually the
moon and star grew dim like turned-down lamps against a heaven turning
turquoise. Down in the valley hung a mist of orchid against which the
black branches of a nearby cedar were etched in Japanese silhouette. Far,
far on the north horizon the clouds of day were herded, waiting. Then
a single cloud advanced, dipped itself in rose color and edged itself
with gold; a streak of red, as from a giant’s paint-brush, swept across
the sky. A moment of waiting more and then the great blinding sun peered
above the eastern mountains’ rim and the clouds broke and scattered
like cotton-wool sheep across their pasture skies. The moon turned into
a little curved feather dropped from a bird’s breast and the star a
pinprick; yet in their hour, how glorious they were!
Celia and I tried to find a stream in which to wash our faces, but,
failing in our search, we shared the water in our African bags with
the radiator. The hot water in the thermos bottle poured over George
Washington coffee did not delay us a moment in our breakfast-making, and
it could not have been later than five o’clock when we were well off on
our way.
It was an endlessly long day’s run and difficult in places. I’m sure we
lost our way several times, a perfectly dispiriting thing to do, as it
was much like being lost in a rowboat out in the middle of the ocean.
Except while still in the Reservation where we passed occasional Navajos
we saw no living person or thing the rest of the day. Sometimes we went
over rolling, stubbled prairie, fringed again with cedars and pines;
next through a veritable desert of desolation with nothing but rocks
and sand. Sometimes the road wound tranquilly through timbered glades;
again came a straight, monotonous stretch of sandy trail. Then suddenly
it twisted itself over a path of washed-out rock, or suddenly fell into
an arroyo. Over and over these symptoms were repeated in every variety
of combination. Finally we reached Holbrook, and we drove without any
adventures over a traveled road to Winslow.
For nothing would I have missed the experience. It was wonderful, all of
it, yet no hotel ever seemed so enchanting as the Harvey, nor was any
supper ever so good as the one they so promptly put before us.
Of course, if we had had a breakdown we would have been marooned out in
a wilderness! No living being knew our whereabouts and we might quite
easily have been dust before anyone would have passed our way. If we had
had different equipment we would certainly have gone further. Fortunately
the most interesting (as well as most difficult) part of the desert was
all behind us, and as we also wanted to motor through California, we
had no choice. The car was in a seriously crippled condition; any more
arroyos and there really would be no more motoring for us this trip. So,
all things considered, we hailed our freight car resignedly, put the
motor on it and sent it ahead of us to Los Angeles, while we ourselves
took the train to the Grand Canyon.
[Illustration: OUR CHAUFFEUR TAKES A DAY OFF AT THE GRAND CANYON OF THE
COLORADO]
By the way, a word about the Navajos whose dwellings in no way resemble
the staired adobe pyramids in Acoma, Taos and Laguna. The Navajo
huts—_hogans_ they are called—are made of logs and twigs plastered with
mud, not all over like an icing, but merely in between the logs as a
mortar. They have no openings except a low door that you have to stoop
to enter, and a smoke hole in the center of the domelike roof. Inside,
if the ones at the Grand Canyon are typical, as they are supposed to be,
they are merely one room with a fire burning in the center and blankets
spread around the edge of the floor close under the slanting walls.
Personally I feel rather embarrassed on being told to look in upon a
group of swarthy figures who contemplate the intrusion of their privacy
in solemn silence. In one of them a mother was rolling her plump brown
baby on its swaddling board. When it was securely tied in place, although
the father carried it outside in order to allow me to take its picture, I
nearly got into trouble about it. The shutter of my camera had to be set
first and then released which made two clicks. When I paid the regulation
quarter, he was furious and demanded double pay. I, on my side, thought
I was being imposed upon as he had himself volunteered to hold the baby
for me for twenty-five cents. E. M., who divined the difficulty, quickly
took the film pack out, and holding it open against the light, explained
to the Indian carefully, “Little click no picture.” And the Navajo,
being quite satisfied with the quarter, I then gave him the second one—a
senseless, but commonplace proceeding.
Meanwhile, comfortably lounging on the terrace overlooking this greatest
of all great canyons, an old-timer is talking of “the good old days of
Hance’s camp before this high-falutin’ hotel was built.” And at his mere
suggestion I become vividly aware that, after all, the way I like best
to see anything is comfortably. Perhaps there might be an added awe if
one stood alone at the brink of this yawning abyss, perhaps some of
the gnarled roads and small clefts that seemed wonderful when we were
crawling among them might have seemed dull little places from the terrace
of a luxurious hotel, but being at heart—no matter how much I might
pretend to be above the necessity of comfort—an effete Easterner, I very
gratefully appreciate the genius of the man who built this hotel for such
as I.
CHAPTER XXV
THROUGH THE CITY UNPRONOUNCEABLE TO AN EXPOSITION BEAUTIFUL
Says Los Angeles, “Whatever you do, don’t call me Angy Lees”!
Laboriously E. M. wrote her name as she herself pronounced it, “Loas
Ang-hell-less.” With the piece of paper before me I can say it glibly
enough, but in coming upon it unprepared, my only hope is to follow his
flippant but very helpful suggestion and mentally dive through it. First,
get _hell_ as the objective plunge fixed in mind, then start on _loas_
(like a run-off), _Ang_ (hit the springboard), _hell_ (the dive), _less_
(into the water).
I am not very certain, though, that I want to call her at all. Perhaps
we had the spleen, but the meaning and beauty of the city was quite as
obscured to us as her name is to those having no knowledge of Spanish.
Another thing that is even more obscured is why Los Angeles calls herself
the City of Hotels? New York might as well call herself the City of
Mosques, or Chicago the Citadel of Fortifications, or Colorado Springs
the Seaside Resort! All the way across the continent in the various
illustrated information books that are strewn for the edification of
idle tourists around mezzanine writing-rooms, you read and read and read
of Los Angeles hotels. Not a word does any one of these pamphlets say
about the Southern capital’s gigantically growing industries, fertile
surroundings, automobile interests, millionaire mansions, peerless
parks, or even the height to which the June thermometer can soar. Each
advertising line acclaims it solely as the City of Hotels.
“Which shall be _your hotel_?” reads one eulogy. “You have only to name
your ideal, and choose whatever you like.” “If you care most for food
there is the restaurant of the Van Nuys; if you want a homey place to
stop at, you have a score of smaller hotels to choose from. But of course
if you want to find the most luxurious metropolitan hostelry on the
entire continent there is the Green and Gold lobby at the Alexandria.”
How the lobby in itself is supposed to so much contribute to your
happiness and comfort, you have no idea. But each and every advertisement
either begins or ends with a description and a full-page picture of this
imposing hallway. To test the peerless perfection of this Blackstone
rival is naturally irresistible and into its overwhelming gorgeousness
you go! The gorgeousness is there quite as in the pictures, also it is
in every way a perfectly up-to-date and luxurious hotel. You wonder,
though, is the cost of food inordinately high? Are wages prohibitive? Is
it merely monopoly or forces of circumstance beyond its control that
allows the only strictly up-to-date hotel in the place to charge such
prices? At Trouville, in the season, or Monte Carlo, your bill can be
rather staggering, but at least you get the quintessence of exotic luxury
and the most unlimited offerings in diversions that the purveyors to the
spenders of the world can achieve. When, however, a commonplace city of
extremest dullness asks you Monte Carlo prices, higher than the Ritz in
New York or the Blackstone in Chicago, you find a certain much-advertised
green with gold lobby illuminingly symbolical of the guests who would for
any length of time stay there.
[Illustration: THIS IS NOT A GALLERY IN A SPANISH PALACE, BUT A GALLERY
IN THE MISSION INN AT RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA]
To find anywhere else to stay is more than difficult. You run around to
“This” one and to “That,” and then to the whole advertised list, but
your own “ideal” is not among them. So either you stay on where you are,
and ignore the hole in your bank account or you go quickly on to the
next place; or, better yet, move out to the beautiful suburb, for which
one might say Los Angeles is famous and where half of the Los Angeles
fashionables live. In other words, Pasadena. Pasadena, besides having
many splendid hotels,[5] is a floral park of much beauty, a little too
neat, perhaps, for real allure and possibly a little over-obviously rich.
But its even squares of streets are splendidly bordered with palms or
pepper-trees. Here and there the center of the street is sentineled by
a superb tree that you are glad the street builders had not the heart to
cut down. Back of tropically verdant lawns are rows of homelike bungalows
smothered in vines and there are many important and beautiful places that
entirely compensate for the few crude garish ones that flaunt so much
wealth and so little good taste.
The Country Club is most charming, and in it a big room so appealing in
color and furnishing that you feel irresistibly like settling yourself in
the corner of one of the chintz-covered sofas and staying indefinitely.
Yet the same people whose own houses are so attractive will seriously
take you to admire a horticultural achievement that, in its magentas and
scarlets, purples and heliotrope, orange, Indian red and Paris green,
lacks no element of discord except an out-of-tune German band to play
among its glass globes. I don’t really remember whether I saw any glass
globes or not, but the disturbed visions that come back to me are of
silver globes, iron stags, sea-shell fountains amid a floral debauch.
They say that when people paint their faces they lose their eye and soon
put the whole paint box on. In the same way it may be that the brilliancy
of the sunshine has affected people’s sight and that they can’t perceive
color discords. All through Southern California you see combinations of
color that fairly set your teeth on edge. Scarlet and majenta are put
together everywhere; Prussian blue next to cobalt; vermilion next to old
rose, olive-green next to emerald. Not only in flowers, but in homes and
in clothes.
We dined the other night in a terra-cotta room hung with crimson
curtains; one woman in a turquoise-colored dress wore slippers of French
blue, another carried an emerald-colored fan with a sage-green frock!
The conversation—only some of it—was as queerly assembled as the colors.
A Mr. Brown, to convince me of the high moral tone of Pasadena men, told
me that, in Honolulu, a chief offered a friend of his two beautiful young
wives. He laid special stress on their beauty of “form” and sweetness of
disposition. Also he explained carefully that they were yellow in color,
not black. “But my friend explained to the chief that he was married.
The chief said, ‘What difference does that make? Do you want to insult
my brotherly love for you?’” But the friend “insulted” and refused the
little gold-colored wives. I waited for the rest of the story but there
did not seem to be any rest. So I said, “And then——?”
“Well, that was just to show you,” he answered proudly, “the high type of
men we have out here on the coast.”
I put this down as I heard it, although I myself don’t see much point to
it, even yet!
* * * * *
I am trying not to say so much about hotels any more, but there is one I
_must_ mention—particularly after the failure we had with them in Los
Angeles. Wanting to see the most famous orange grove in the country,
we drove to Riverside and found quite by accident the most ideal hotel
imaginable—the really most lovely place that ever was! So I must tell
you that the Mission Inn at Riverside is worth traveling miles to stop
at; a hotel of pure delight, in which the beauty of a Spanish palace and
the picturesqueness of an old mission is combined with the most perfect
modern comfort and at fair and reasonable rates. I don’t believe anyone
ever entered its hospitable doors without pleasure or left them without
regret.
From Riverside we made a loop back to Los Angeles and drove to San
Diego along the edge of the ocean all the way. The coast was one long
succession of big ocean resort hotels on a boulevard that seemed too
smooth and perfect to be true. We had forgotten that such road smoothness
existed for our poor long-tortured engine to glide over.
The Fair at San Diego was a little Exposition Beautiful! The composite
impression was of a garden of dense, shiny green. Great masses and
profusions of orange-trees and vines against low one-storied buildings
of gray-white. Across a long viaduct under an archway and down a long
avenue, there was no other color except gray-white and green until you
came into the central plaza filled with pigeons as in St. Mark’s in
Venice, and saw over one portico of the quadrangle of white buildings a
single blaze of orange and blue striped awnings—stripes nearly a foot
wide of blue the color of laundry blue, and orange the color of the most
vivid fruit of that name that you can find! Against the unrelieved green
and gray this one barbaric splash of color actually thrilled.
[Illustration: IN A CALIFORNIA GARDEN]
Down the next avenue hanging behind the balustrade of another building
was the same vivid sweep of blue. Over a building around the corner
was a climbing amber rose, and just beyond it some pinkish-purple
bougainvillea, that beautiful but most difficult vine to put anywhere.
There were gardens and gardens of flowers but each so separated and
grouped that there was not a note of discord.
And how things did grow! Some of the buildings were already covered to
their roofs with vines, and benches shaded by shrubs, that we treasure at
home in little pots!
The San Diego Exposition was a pure delight. Its simplicity and faultless
harmony of color brought out all its values startlingly.
A farmer—ought he be called a rancher?—said he thought it a “homey”
exposition. I doubt if the sentiment could be better expressed. It was
first and foremost designed to show by actual demonstration what could
be accomplished in our own land of the West. The citrus groves were full
sized; the fields of grain were big and real; instead of putting reapers
and harvesters in a large machinery hall, they demonstrated them on a
model ranch, so that anyone likely to be interested could see how they
were used.
The Indian exhibits were very complete—especially those of the Hopis.
There was a life-size model of the pueblo of Taos and miniature models of
the other more famous pueblos, and examples of their arts and crafts.
Otherwise the general impressions of the exhibits were much alike;
bottles of fruit in alcohol, sheaves of grain, arches of oranges, and
school children’s efforts in art.
Of all the buildings, we liked Kansas best. We liked it from its three
stiff clay sunflowers raised and painted over its plain little front door
to its unending varieties of grains. And all because the old Kansan—not
that he was so old either—in charge of it so loved his state and was
so unaffectedly proud of it, that we caught the infection from him. We
couldn’t help it.
“Of course,” he said, “I’ve only samples here but there’s nothing that
can grow in the soil that we can’t grow in Kansas! These people out
here talk about beautiful California, the ‘ever-blooming garden of
California,’ and her ‘sublime mountain scenery,’ ‘ocean-kissed shore’ and
what not. Now, for _my_ taste, give me a land that is as flat as the pa’m
of your hand—give me Kansas!”
An old woman came in while we were there. She poked all around, sniffed
at the kaffir corn, at every variety of grain that could be stored in
glass-fronted bins or arched into sheaves.
“Land sakes!” she said. “Y’ain’t got nothin’ in here but chickin feed.
Ain’t yuh got nothin’ t’eat?” And out she switched again.
“I suppose that old woman’d like me to keep a nice crock of doughnuts
ready to give her, and a cup of tea, mebbe. Chickin feed, indeed! Well,
when it comes to hens, I like the feathered kind. You can put them in a
pot and boil ’em! Chickin feed! And it’s mighty fine chickin feed, I tell
you, that a man can grow in the state of Kansas!”
Coronado Beach, the famous winter resort, is across the bay and reached
in a few minutes by ferry from San Diego.
In San Diego itself a new apartment house, the Palomar, offers a
novelty in automatic and economic living that is quite original. Single
apartments, for instance, rent for $65.00 a month and consist of a large
living-room, a small dressing-room, a bathroom, and a kitchenette. No
bedroom! You dress in the dressing-room, and sleep in the living-room
in a disappearing bed, not a folding one, that in the daytime is rolled
into an air chamber large enough to hold it intact. You can rent a room
for your personal maid, or valet, but all of the service is furnished as
in a hotel. Only instead of ordering your food in a restaurant, you do
your own marketing and have it prepared in your own kitchen. Instead of
paying your cook by the month, you hire one at twenty-five cents an hour
whenever you want a meal cooked. No meals at home, no cook!
From the point of view of the stranger glancing about the streets, the
chief diversion in San Diego seems to be moving pictures. The square
which appears to be the central point around which the city is built, is
lined with electric arched doorways displaying every lure of lithograph.
Besides the picture palaces are two drug-stores, and a funeral director’s
window, proffering the latest novelties in caskets. But the most
lingering memory of San Diego, outside of her harbor, is of her school
buildings. They are the last word in construction and equipment, Tudor in
design, and very imposing.
When we left San Diego and all along the ocean the weather was
deliciously cool, but as we went inland toward Pasadena it became hotter
than anything you can imagine. It was a case of 116° in the shade and
there wasn’t any shade!
“How can the orange-trees remain so beautifully green?” I heard Celia
muttering. Twenty miles north of Los Angeles I looked at the unburnt
hills and crisply standing live-oaks in wonder and amazement. I could
actually see blisters forming on E. M.’s nose. Finally we panted up a
big winding hill, a branch of the Coast Range of mountains, I suppose it
was, and as we dipped over on the other side, such a gust of cold sea
wind greeted us that in five minutes, we, who had been gasping like dying
fish, were wrapping our now shivering selves in coats!
[Illustration: UNDER SANTA BARBARA SKIES]
Besides the life-giving coolness of the sea air, never, never was there
a more beautiful drive than the one to Santa Barbara. Not the Cornici of
France—not even the Sorrento to Amalfi of Italy. Mountains on one side,
the ocean on the other, curving in and out of bays each more lovely than
the last, and on a road like linoleum. I thought I should like to live
where I could drive up and down that road forever!
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LAND OF GLADNESS
Light-hearted, happy, basking in the sunshine, her eyes not dreamily
gazing into the past, nor avariciously peering into the future, but
dancing with the joy of today—such is California! It is not only the sun
of heaven shining upon California that makes her the garden-land of the
world, but the sun radiating from the hearts of her people. Golden she
certainly is—land of golden fruit, land of golden plenty, daughter of the
golden sun.
If you have millions and want to learn a million ways to spend them;
if you are a social climber and want to scale the Western Hemisphere’s
most polished pinnacle; if you want to become worldly, cynical, effete,
go to New York. New York is the princess of impersonality, the queen
of indifference. Your riches do not impress her; without any, you do
not exist. You can come or go, sink or swim, be brilliant, beautiful or
charming, she cares not a whit. “What new extravagance do you bring to
amuse me?” she asks, bored even before she has finished asking.
“What are you ambitious to do?” asks Chicago. “What are you trying to be?
Can I help you?”
“Welcome to the land of sunshine!” says smiling California. “If your
heart is young, then stay with me and play!”
There are plenty of reasons why they liken Santa Barbara to Nice, Cannes,
or Monte Carlo. When we arrived in our rooms at the Hotel Potter we could
hardly believe we were not on the Riviera, not merely because of the
white enamel and shadow chintz furnishings of our rooms looking out upon
the palm-bordered esplanade to the ocean just beyond, but because only in
Continental watering places do friends send—or could they possibly find
for you—bouquets of welcome like that. Against the gray wall above the
writing-table a great sheaf bouquet of the big, pale-pink roses that you
associate with France, combined with silver violet thistles, gladiolii
in a chromatic scale of creams and corals, and in such profusion that
they were standing in a tall vase on the floor. The third bouquet was of
apricot-colored roses, heliotrope and white lilies.
As a matter of fact, the Riviera bears the same resemblance to Santa
Barbara that artificial flowers bear to the real. The spirit of one is
essentially artificial, insidiously demoralizing. The spirit of the other
is the essence of naturalness, inevitably rejuvenating.
Instead of spending your every waking moment in electric-lighted
restaurants and gambling rooms, you live in the sunshine, and in the
open. Every house, nearly, has its patio or open court, and no matter
what your occupation may be, you seldom go indoors. Carrying the love
of outdoors even to concerts and theatrical performances, the owner of
a very beautiful garden has built a theater, of which the stage is a
terrace of grass, and the scenery evenly planted trees. In spite of some
of the pretentious villas, the keynote of the Pacific coast is still
naturalness. Affectations have really no place.
One afternoon at a fruit ranch, we found ourselves next to a woman who
for twenty minutes extolled the perfection of her long years of living
in Italy. With her hands affectedly clasped and gazing at the feathery
olive-trees, she exclaimed:
“Ah! that takes me so back to my beloved Sicily, and the mornings when I
used to walk along the olive groves and eat ripe olives before breakfast.”
To offer strangers olives picked from the trees is a pet joke of
Californians no less than the Italians. The uncured fruit is as bitterly
uneatable as quinine.
“Oh, do you like fresh olives?” This gleefully from the host. “Let me
pick you some!” In a few moments he returned with a fruit-laden branch.
With bated breath, everyone watched as she plucked one and—gamely, ate
it!
[Illustration: OSTRICH ROCK, MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA]
To look at the orange, lemon, walnut and olive groves out here you would
think failure in crops an impossibility. Put any kind of a little shoot
in the ground and you can almost stand beside it and wait for it to be
grown. But perhaps the land’s perfection is a proof of skilled industry
after all. At least one of the greatest of the orange-growers in the
State told us: “Come out and run a ranch for fifteen seasons and you will
find fifteen reasons why you can fail.”
Ordinarily, though, in the conversation of people here, the personal
equation is left out. Californians seldom if ever accentuate their own
share in the success of anything.
Everywhere else the enthusiastic inhabitants speak of their state and
of their city as a man speaks of his success in business, or a woman
speaks of her new home—not only with pride in the thing accomplished but
with a satisfaction that comes from their personal effort toward its
accomplishment.
The Chicagoans, I remember, for instance, in their pride in the Wheaton
Country Club, seemed to feel that their planting and building and making
a beauty spot out of a sand heap was the most admirable thing about it.
The only parallel to the attitude of the Californians that I can think of
is that of the Italians. Living in their land is merely a great privilege
that God has given them, and the beauty of it is a thing that has always
been—a thing with which mere man has had little to do.
The picture that the visitor remembers first, last and best in Santa
Barbara is of a succession of low mountain ledges capped with white,
pink, gray or terra-cotta villas, surrounded by tropical gardens and
overlooking a sapphire-colored ocean gleaming in perpetual sunlight.
Nothing in all of Italy, not on the road from Sorrento to Amalfi, not
even at Taormina in Sicily, is there any scene of land and water more
beautiful. Of the villas, most are impressive, a few are admirable,
and one, in particular, is like a fifteenth-century Italian gem of the
first water transplanted by magic, gardens and all, from the heart of
Italy. No other place has quite the atmosphere of this one—that sense of
nobleness that we have been taught to believe is made only by centuries
of mellowing on an already perfect foundation. It is not an imitation.
Everything in it is real and everything is old except the garden, which
looks the oldest of all. Perhaps, though, in a land where green things
crowd an average year’s growth into every week, it is small wonder that
an effect of centuries can be acquired in a decade.
I don’t know whether we missed them, but among all the glorious gardens
of lawns and hedges and trees, we saw scarcely any flower gardens; and
the few we saw screamed in hideous discords of magenta, scarlet and
purple. As in Pasadena, the riot of sun and color seems to make people
blind to color discord. An exception, however—the only one we saw—was
in the gardens of the Mirasol, which reminds me, by the way, that the
Mirasol Hotel is a sort of post-impressionist _ne plus ultra_, in
hotel-keeping.
To begin with, its groups of little white bungalows neatly set within
its white picket-fenced inclosure, is more like a toy village than any
possible suggestion of hotel. Each little bungalow is low and white, with
boxes of flowers under every window and a general smothered-in-vines
appearance. So much for the outside. Inside each holds several bedrooms,
one or two bathrooms, and perhaps a private sitting-room, all of them
super-modern in their furnishings, and each room looking out upon
a vista of garden that matches its own color scheme. A rose-chintz
sitting-room, for instance, looks out on a rose garden; a lavender
bedroom opens on a garden in which there are none but lavender flowers,
and a yellow one looks into a vista of yellow. All of the decoration is
rather over-stenciled and striped, but the bedroom bungalows are really
enchanting. The public rooms, dining-room, public sitting-room and
tearoom, are in a bigger house, the orange and blue interior of which
suggests nothing so much as the setting of a Bakst ballet. The walls,
curtains, table cloths, decorations, chairs, napkins and the waitresses’
aprons are all apricot orange, and the stenciling and stripes and floor
and waitresses’ dresses are blue. There is a tearoom in which gorgeous
cockatoos—live ones!—live in blaze of orange surroundings. The details
are all carefully done, most of them are effective, and certainly
unusual. For our own parts we thought the bedrooms lovely; the highly
polished indigo floor paint an inspiration, and the orange-colored table
linens amusing; but when it came to filigreed silver breast-pins glued
into the drawing-room mantel, it was the one touch too much!
CHAPTER XXVII
THE METTLE OF A HERO
An explosion shook the town, then came the fire engines. Everybody ran
and of course we ran too. We saw a big, Colonial house in a blaze, then
a second explosion! And a thick black mass of smoke blew off the roof.
People ran hither and thither in wild excitement; a fireman dashed into
the flames and carried out a dying girl; her face was bleeding and her
clothes were in burnt shreds. More dying people were miraculously saved,
then suddenly like a huge screen the whole house fell flat. It had no
behind and no inside and the whole scene was only the “movies.” The
injured face of the heroine was only red paint and the house a property
one built for the purpose.
“This is nothing,” said a member of the company to me, “if you want to
see something exciting, go to the chalk cliffs just on the road to Santa
Maria tomorrow morning. We’re going to work on the ‘Diamond From the
Sky.’ That’s our star over there! You don’t want to miss any pictures
when he is in it.”
I saw a young man leaning against a telegraph pole chewing a straw. He
looked almost too lazy to be alive.
“He’s always like that!” said the member of the company. “You wouldn’t
think there was an ounce of go in him! He’s always whittling a stick, or
chewing a straw, and if he was to be killed, he’d never move a muscle!”
“He looks kind of comatose, doesn’t he?” said the manager, who overheard.
“Well, you go out to the chalk cliffs at about eleven tomorrow if you
think he’s comatose, and see him come to.”
Naturally we went. We found the place easily by the number of people
gathered at the spot. A shelf road was cut on the face of the high
chalk cliffs, above a seventy-foot sheer drop into the water. We saw
the comatose one, looking just as indifferent as ever, get into a car
and start for the narrow road up on the edge of the cliff. Then another
followed him. At a word from the director, they raced across the high
narrow shelf, the comatose one swerved to the very edge, toppled and
plunged over the abyss! No stopping the picture at the brink and putting
a dummy in his place. A feeling of such nausea caught me I could not look
to see him land. How he escaped with his life he alone knew. The car
struck the rocks and smashed to pieces, but they say he threw himself
like an eel clear of the wheel and safely into the water. They then
fished him out, he got into another car just as he was, and started
home as though nothing had happened. When we reached a railroad track
where they were going to take another picture, the same actor was this
time to drive so near the track that the locomotive might in the picture
seem to hit the car. The camera man was ready to turn the crank of his
camera, the locomotive was almost at the crossing, when dash! went the
devil-driver toward the track. Stop? Nothing of the sort! He met it as a
ram meets an enemy, head on. The locomotive carried his mangled self and
wrecked machine up the track. The engineer, shaking as with the palsy,
almost fell out of his cab. The company and we, too, rushed up to where
the wrecked machine and injured man lay. Blood was streaming from his
head, his arm distortedly twisted under him, and he was writhing in pain,
but when the camera man reached him all he said was:
“This’ll be great stuff! Make a close-up quick!” They made the pictures
and then he lost consciousness.
Although decorated with many bandages, he is up and about, looking as
comatose as ever.
We went to a film rehearsal at the Flying A. In front of us sat the
heroine, the hero, the villain, and all members of the company. The
director read the words that would be printed between sections of the
finished reel and the pictures were shown in negative only. Every now
and then the actors made a few remarks such as, “That’s a fine action,
Steve”; “Gee, Steve, that’s great!” “I like Flora down by the brook”;
“Nice scene, Flora!” Finally the heroine died.
“Nobody can die with so much sob stuff as Flora,” said our friend in a
whisper.
Flora heard and answered: “Some time I’d like a part that I don’t have to
die in. That’s the seventeenth time I’ve died this season.”
Of the many moving picture plants we saw, the Flying A was the smallest
but most interesting. The difference between the Universal City and
Flying A studio is that between Barnum’s Circus at the Madison Square
Garden and the Little Theater—or better, the Grand Guignol in Paris. The
Universal City is a gigantic organization that can produce anything from
tiger-hunting in the jungle, to plays like “Quo Vadis.”
But why—Oh, why don’t the moving picture people have someone show them
how the houses of the socially prominent really look? Where do they
devise the manners, customs, and nightmare interiors that could not be
found outside of the society atmosphere of Dingy Dunk or Splashville
except in the “movies”?
Leaving Santa Barbara about two o’clock we arrived at Paso Robles long
before dark. The next morning, however, we left early in order to spend
part of the day with some friends who have a cattle and alfalfa ranch
about midway to Monterey. I should think the cattle would all topple over
dead and the alfalfa shrivel to cinders. Cool California? The thermometer
was easily 120, and that cloudless sky a blinding blaze of torture. Our
friends were quite tranquil about it. “It _is_ pretty hot here just now.
You see we are pocketed in between the hill ranges, but it is beautifully
mild all winter.”
To us the mild winter did not seem to compensate, since we could not
understand anyone’s surviving so long as until then.
[Illustration: ON THE SEVENTEEN-MILE DRIVE AT MONTEREY]
That afternoon’s drive was the hottest I hope ever to have to live
through. To put your hand on unshaded metal was to burn it, as though on
a hot flat-iron. The main road, El Camino Real, was good all the way to
Salinas, but the branch road from there to Monterey was bumpy and bad
until within a mile or so of our destination.
Of Monterey and its peerlessly beautiful seventeen-mile ocean and cedar
drive, there is no need to write. Like Niagara and the Grand Canyon, it
has been written about and photographed in every newspaper and periodical
in the world. Also, as was the case further south, hot as it might be
inland, the coast was deliciously cool. The weather changed fortunately
by the time we again drove inland and up the perfect boulevard to San
Francisco. They tell me, however, that so far as the neighborhood of
San Francisco is concerned no one need ever dread heat, a scorching
temperature being unknown. Wind you may have, and sometimes fog, but
extremes of either heat or cold, never! Besides other blessings in this
particular spot of this wonderful land you can also choose your own
temperature. If you like warm weather, walk in the sun. If you like cold
weather, walk in the shade. On the former side of the street, you will
find a muslin dress just right; on the latter you will be comfortable in
a sealskin coat. This is not a joke, as I had always thought it to be,
but quite true.
CHAPTER XXVIII
SAN FRANCISCO
Just as it is often for their little tricks or failings that we love
people best, so it is with San Francisco. You may find her beautiful as
she rises tier on tier on her many hills above the dazzling waters of
the bay, you must admire the resolution and courage with which, out of
her annihilation, she has risen more beautiful than before; but you love
her for a lot of human, foolish, adorable personalities of her own, such
as the guileless way she stuccoes the front of her houses, leaving their
wooden backs perfectly visible from behind or at the side—a pretense
deliciously naïve, as though she said: “I am putting a lovely front of
concrete where you will see it first, because I think it will please
you!” And it does.
Her insistence upon loading your pockets with pounds of silver
cartwheels, instead of few dollar bills, is not quite so enchanting—but
maybe when your muscles and pocket linings become used to the strain, you
learn to like her silver habits too.
And in her methods of building she has no “fashionable section,” but
mixes smart and squalid with a method of strange confusion peculiar to
herself. The value and desirability of the land is entirely proportionate
to the altitude or view, and not to convenience of location or
neighborhood. On the top of each and every hill, on the “view side,”
perches Mr. Millionaire. If the hill slopes down gently, the wealth of
his neighbors decreases gently also, but as the descent is likely to
be almost a cliff, Mr. Poorman’s shanty, often as not, clings to Mr.
Richman’s cellar door.
And then there are her queer-looking cable-cars—with “outside” seats
facing the sidewalk, as in an Irish jaunting car—pulled up and let down
the terrific hills on their wire ropes. The cable-car was, in fact,
originated on the hills of San Francisco.
Many streets are so steep that they have a stairway cut in the sidewalk,
and in the center, the crevices between the cobblestones are green with
grass. The streets are divided into those you can drive up and those you
can’t. In motoring to an address ten blocks away, instead of driving
there directly as in any other city in the world, you have to take a
route not unlike the pattern of a wall of Troy.
Also, as there are scarcely any names posted up on any corners, and the
traffic policemen order you about for no seeming reason but their own
sweet will, it is just as well for a stranger to allow twice as much time
to get anywhere as would ordinarily be necessary. We were trying to go to
the Hotel St. Francis for lunch. “You turn down Post Street,” said one
policeman. We certainly made no mistake in the name of that street. When
we got to it and tried to go down, another shouted at us, “What’s the
matter with you! Don’t you _know_ you can’t go down Post Street!” I don’t
yet know the solution unless there is one section of Post Street you can
go down, and another section that you can’t. But I do know, however, that
at the end of a little while you get so confused turning around three
times for every block that you go forward, that your sense of direction
seems very like that of a waltzing mouse in a glass bowl.
One thing, though, delays are not as annoying as they would seem.
Californians take life too tranquilly to begrudge you a little while
spent in trying to solve the hill and traffic mysteries. In fact, nothing
could harass or annoy anyone long in a land where the spirit of gladness
is the first and only thing that counts.
Where giantism, self-inflation, or personal ambition plays a prominent
part in the characteristics of other states, the Californians are merely
happy—happy about everything, happy all the time. Their optimism is as
unfailingly golden as their metal, their fruits, their grain, their
poppies.
In a corner of the orange country, lava poured over the soil. Were they
down-hearted? Not a bit.
“For all we know,” said they, “we may find we can grow something new in
it that we’ve never tried before.”
In Pasadena the heat was stifling. It required all the breath I could
muster to ask weakly of a land owner:
“Do you think there is any likelihood of _more_ of this weather?”
“Yes. Oh, yes, indeed,” he beamed. “It is generally cool until the first
of May, and then it gets pleasant just like this.”
In San Francisco it rained all through May without ceasing. “Too
wonderful!” they said. “The Eastern tourists will see the country so
beautifully washed.”
But we have heard that their gladness had one vulnerability, they could
not bear to speak of earthquakes. Therefore, curious as I was to hear
something about them, I did not dare to ask. Drinking my coffee one
morning in San Mateo where we were stopping with the B.’s my bed suddenly
shook so that my coffee spilled. In a moment Mrs. B. rushed into my room
in joyful excitement:
“Did you feel the earthquake? Wasn’t it a wonderful one! I was afraid you
would go back to New York and never know what they are like!”
All that day everyone we saw spoke of the earthquake in much the same
way, as though some delightful happening had occurred for our special
benefit. Instead of shying away from the subject they reveled in it;
advised us if ever we felt a severe one to run and stand in the
doorframe. Even if the whole house comes down the doorways, it seems,
are perfectly safe. Then they drove us to a beautiful estate that was
directly over a fault and to prove what a _real_ earthquake could do,
they showed us a stone wall that had been shifted four feet, and an
orchard of trees that had been picked up bodily and planted elsewhere.
They added casually that the house, of course, was new, the other having
been quaked to the ground.
But “How _terrible_,” exclaimed nearly everyone to us, “to live as you do
in a country where they have _thunderstorms_!”
There is, however, one small matter that upsets them curiously. To us, it
was a phenomenon not unlike the elephant’s terror of a mouse. Never call
Californians Westerners. They get really excited and indignant if you do.
They live on the Pacific Coast—not in the West. For my own part they are
children of the golden sun; call them what you please!
* * * * *
I think it is a rather universal habit to dismiss any unusual features
in the lives of others by saying: “Oh, but they are a different sort of
people from us!”
When we first crossed the Rio Grande and heard of two women who had gone
out camping in the Rocky Mountains alone, and when later we saw a group
of unmistakably well-bred people—each riding astride of a little burro
and each leading a second burro laden with camping things, we thought,
“What an extraordinary people Westerners are! We are brothers and yet it
is impossible to believe that we spring from the same stock.” Later on,
however, we learned the difference was geographical and not ethnological.
And the realization came this way:
A Mrs. R. used to be the most nervous and timid woman I ever knew. Six
years ago, living on Long Island with twelve servants in her house, she
used to lock herself in her bedroom immediately after dinner if her
husband was out, because she was too nervous to sit in the front part
of the ground floor alone. I remember distinctly that she once left a
dinner party at about half-past nine because, with her own coachman
driving, she was afraid to go late at night through the woods. About four
years ago her husband and she moved to California. Last year she bought
a ranch ten miles from the nearest station, and seven miles from the
nearest neighbor. And this same woman who used to be scared to death in
a house full of people, with neighbors all around, now sleeps tranquilly
in a ground-floor bungalow with every door unlocked, every window
open, and her servants’ quarters half a mile away. She drives her own
motor everywhere, and thinks nothing of dining with a neighbor fifteen
or twenty miles distant, and coming home at midnight through Mexican
settlements alone!
[Illustration: ON A BEAUTIFUL OCEAN ROAD OF CALIFORNIA]
Another New York girl, Pauline M., who certainly was as spoiled as
pampering could make her, went once long ago to a Maine hotel and never
stopped talking about how awful the rooms were and how starved she was
because of the horrible food. Twenty years ago she married a Californian
and her house in San Francisco is as luxurious as a house can well
be, but when we arrived she had gone into the mountains to camp, and
telegraphed us to join her. We did not do that, but we motored out to
lunch. Having always associated her with Callot dresses and marble
balustrades, I expected the make-believe “roughing it” of the big camps
in the Adirondacks. As we arrived at a small collection of portable
houses dumped in a clearing we saw our fastidious friend in heavy solid
boots, a drill skirt, flannel shirt, kneeling beside a campfire cooking
flapjacks. She used to be beautiful but rather anemic; her sauntering,
languid walk seemed always to be dragging a five-yard train, and her face
was set with a bored expression. The metamorphosis was startling. She
looked younger than she had at twenty and she put more life and energy
in her waving of her frying-pan in greeting than she would have put in a
whole New York season of how-do-you-do’s.
Even the Orientals seem affected by the spirit of this land’s gladness.
The Chinaman of San Francisco is a big, smiling and apparently
gay-hearted individual—none the less complex and mysterious for all that.
Frankly, the people out here who fascinate me most of all are the
Chinese. From the two or three that we have seen in friends’ houses, a
Chinese servant must be about as easy to manage as the wind of heaven;
you might as well try to dig a hole in the surface of the sea as to make
any impression on him. He is going to do exactly what he pleases and in
the way he pleases. Of course, his way may be your way, in which case
you are lucky. Also it must not be forgotten that his faithfulness and
devotion, when he is devoted, is quite as unalterable as his way. Of the
two or three individual ones that we have seen in friends’ houses, one at
least will never be forgotten by any of us. His serene round face was the
personification of docility, and he moved about in his costume of dull
green brocade like some lovely animate figure of purely decorative value.
Why have we nothing in our houses that are such a delight to the eye?
I have forgotten what we had for luncheon—caviare canapé, I think, and
with it finger bowls.
“No, Chang, not finger bowls yet,” I heard Mr. K. say. So Chang removed
them, only to bring them back again with the next course.
“There is no use,” laughed Mr. K. to me, “he will keep bringing them back
no matter how often I tell him to take them away. He always does, and we
just have to have them from the beginning through.”
Mr. K. carved on the table—Chang probably insisted on that too—and asking
me whether I preferred dark or white, put the breast of a broiled
chicken on a plate. The Celestial one in green brocade instead of passing
it to me, deftly picked up a fork, placed the chicken breast back on the
platter, took a second joint instead, and saying severely:
“_Him_ likee leg pliece!” carried the plate to Mr. K.’s mother. Company
or no company, Chang served her always first.
Also the K.’s told me that Mrs. K., senior, was the only member of the
family whose personal wishes he invariably respected. He is also the
slave of the K. baby, but to the rest of the family he behaves exactly
as a chow, or a Persian cat, or any other purely decorative independent
household belonging.
China is the place for old women to live in! They receive all the
attention and consideration that is shown in our own country only to the
most young and beautiful.
Mrs. S., whose husband was for many years chargé d’affaires in the
American legation in Pekin, is the most enthusiastic champion of
everything Chinese. “If a Chinaman is staying under your roof, you need
have no uneasiness on the subject of his good intentions,” she said this
morning. “No Chinaman will stay in your employ if he does not like you.”
As an example, she told us that while she was in Pekin the head boy of
another legation was taken to task about something in front of some
of the under servants—a situation of great indignity. The occurrence
happened in the midst of the serving of a meal. The Chinaman quietly
laid down the dish he was holding and left the room and the house. In
less than ten minutes he presented himself before Mrs. S. and announced
that he had come to live with them. For nothing would he go back to the
other legation, and having elected Mrs. S. as his _tai tai_ (lady) in
her particular service he stayed. One New Year’s he presented her with a
miniature pig, stunted in the way that the Japanese stunt trees or else
just a little freak. It was only a foot long, but full grown, and as
black as though it had been dipped in shoe polish.
One day in San Francisco, I went out shopping in the Chinese quarter
with Mrs. S. The sensation may be imagined of an American lady
suddenly speaking perfectly fluent Manchu Chinese. Such a grinning and
gesticulating and smiling as went on! And the whole neighborhood gathered
suddenly into the discourse.
Understanding not a single syllable, I could only watch the others, but
even more than ever, they fascinated me.
In San Francisco we rushed early each morning to the Exposition and spent
no time anywhere else. Every now and then someone said to Pauline, with
whom we were stopping, the mysterious sentence: “Have you taken them
to Gump’s?” And her answer: “Why no, I haven’t!” was always uttered in
that abashed apologetic tone that acknowledges a culpable forgetfulness.
Finally one day instead of driving out towards the Exposition grounds we
turned towards the heart of the city.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To Gump’s!” triumphantly.
“To Gump’s? Of all the queer sounding things, what is to Gump’s?”
“Our most celebrated shop. You really must not leave San Francisco
without seeing their Japanese and Chinese things.”
Shades of dullness, thought I, as if there were not shops enough in New
York! As for Oriental treasures, I was sure there were more on Fifth
Avenue at home than there are left in Asia. But Pauline being determined,
there was nothing for us to do but, as E.M. said, “to Gump it!”
Feeling very much bored at being kept away from the Exposition, I entered
a store reminiscent of a dozen in New York, walked down an aisle lined
on either side with commonplace chinaware. My first sensation of boredom
was changing to irritability. Then we entered an elevator and in the next
instant I took back everything I had been thinking. It was as though we
had been transported, not only across the Pacific, but across centuries
of time. Through the apartments of an ancient Chinese palace, we walked
into a Japanese temple, and again into a room in a modern Japanese house.
You do not need more than a first glance to appreciate why they lead
visitors to a shop with the unpromising name of Gump. I am not sure that
the name does not heighten the effect. If it were called the Chinese
Palace, or the Temple of Japan, or something like that, it would be
like telling the answer before asking the conundrum. As in calling at a
palace, too, strangers, distinguished ones only, are asked to write their
names in the visitor’s book.
In this museum-shop each room has been assembled as a setting for the
things that are shown in it. Old Chinese porcelains, blue and white, sang
de bœuf, white, apple-green, cucumber-green and peacock-blue, are shown
in a room of the Ming Period in ebony and gold lacquer.
The windows of all the rooms, whether in the walls or ceiling, are of
translucent porcelain in the Chinese, or paper in the Japanese; which
produces an indescribable illusion of having left the streets of San
Francisco thousands of miles, instead of merely a few feet, behind you.
The room devoted to jades and primitives has night-blue walls overlaid
with gold lacquer lattices and brass carvings and in it the most
wonderful treasures of all. They are kept hidden away in silk-lined
boxes, and are brought out and shown to you, Chinese fashion, one at a
time, so that none shall detract from the other. We wanted to steal a
small white marble statuette of a boy on a horse. A thing of beauty and
spirit very Greek, yet pure Chinese that dated back to the oldest Tang
Dynasty! There was also a silver, that was originally green, luster
bronze of the Ham Period, two thousand years old, and a sacrificial
bronze pot belonging to the Chow Dynasty, B.C. 1125. The patina, or green
rust of age, on these two pieces was especially beautiful. I also much
admired a carved rhinoceros horn, but found it was merely Chien Lung, one
hundred and fifty years old, which in _that_ room was much too modern to
be important.
In one of the Japanese rooms there were decorated paper walls held up
by light bamboo frames, amber paper _shoji_ instead of windows, and the
floors covered with _tatami_, the Japanese floor mats, two inches thick.
You sit on the floor as in Japan and drink tea, while silks of every
variety are brought to you.
We saw three rugs of the Ming Dynasty that are probably the oldest rugs
extant. The most lovely one was of yellow ground, with Ho birds in blue.
And there was an _ice-cooler_ of cloisonné, Ming Period. They brought
the ice from the mountains and cooled the imperial palace—years ago. Yet
to hear Europeans talk, you’d almost be led to believe that ice is an
American invention.
We were shown old Chinese velvet wedding-skirts and a tapestry of
blues, with silver storks and clouds of an embroidery so fine that its
stitches could be seen only through a magnifying glass, and poison plates
belonging to the Emperor Ming that were supposed to change color if any
food injurious to His Majesty were served on them.
One of the most beautiful things was a Caramandel screen of the Kang Hai
Period, in a corridor that it shared only with an enormous lacquer image
of the Buddha.
We were told that a rather famous collector went out to see the Fair. On
his first day in San Francisco—he was stopping at the St. Francis Hotel
which is only a stone’s throw across the square—he went idly into this
most alluring of shops and became so interested he stayed all day. The
next day he did the same, and the third morning found him there again.
Finally he said with a sigh: “Having come to see the Exposition, I _must_
go out there this afternoon and look at it, as I have to go back to New
York tomorrow.”
I don’t know that this is an average point of view, but it is a fact that
was vouched for, and also that his check to the detaining shop ran into
very high figures.
* * * * *
Of the suburbs of San Francisco, Burlingame, I suppose, compares most
nearly to Newport, of our Eastern coast, Sewickley of Pittsburgh or
Broadmoore of Colorado Springs. It is a community of big handsome places
occupied by the rich and fashionable. It strikes you, though, how much
simpler people are in habits, in taste, in attitude, than in the East.
Suggest anything on a house-party in Burlingame or San Mateo, or Ross,
and instead of being answered: “What for?” or “Oh, not just now!” the
response is a prompt and enthusiastic, “Fine! Come on!”
Young women and men in San Francisco, though many have more money to
spend than they know what to do with, demand less in the way of provided
entertainment than New York children in their earliest teens. A dozen of
San Francisco’s most gilded youths stood around a piano and sang nearly
all one evening. After a while someone played, and the rest danced. At
Newport they would have danced, more likely than anything else, but the
music, even if thought of at the last moment, would probably have been by
an orchestra. One afternoon they pulled candy, and every day they swim in
someone’s pool. Today at the J.’s, tomorrow at the H.’s. The girls play
polo as well as the men and all of them, of course, drive their own cars.
In the J.’s garden, they have ladders against the cherry trees, and
everyone wanders out there and eats and eats cherries—and such cherries!
In the first place we haven’t any such cherries, and in the second, can
you imagine a group of Newport women climbing up ladders and clinging to
branches rather than let the gardeners gather them?
But it isn’t the standing on cherry-tree ladders, or the doing of any
actual thing, that makes the essential difference between the people of
the Atlantic and the Pacific Coast. It is the land itself, perhaps—the
sunshine, the climate, that pours a rejuvenating radiance upon the spirit
of resident and visitor alike.
Even at the end of a little while you find yourself beginning to
understand something of the oppressive grayness that settles upon the
spirit of every Californian when away from home. Which reminds me of a
young Italian girl whom I found one day crying her heart out on a bench
in the Public Gardens in Boston. To me Beacon Street is one of the most
beautiful streets I have ever seen, especially where the old and most
lovely houses face the green of the Public Gardens, and the figure of
this sobbing girl was doubly woeful. To every question I could think of
she shook her head and sobbed, “No.” She had not lost anyone, no one
had deserted her, and she was not hungry, or cold, or houseless, or
penniless. “But, my dear, what _is_ the matter?” I implored. Finally,
almost strangling with tears, she stammered: “B-boston is so _u-ugly_!”
Mrs. M., a Californian married to a New Yorker, had seemed to us
rather negative, a listless silent figure who trailed through New York
drawing-rooms more like a wraith than a live woman. We happened to be
at her mother’s when this pale, frail, young person returned home for
a visit and came very much to life! She hung cherries on her ears,
covered her hat, and filled her belt with poppies, and came running up
the terraces of their very wonderful gardens, her arms outstretched and
shouting at the top of her voice:
“California, _my_ California! I’m home, home, _home_!”
[Illustration: THE PORTICO OF A CALIFORNIA HOUSE]
Does anyone ever feel like that about New York? I wonder! Does anyone
really love its millionaires’ palaces, its flashing Broadway, its canyon
streets, its teeming thoroughfares, its subway holes-in-the-ground
into which men dive like moles, emerging at the other end in an office
burrow—sometimes without coming up into the outdoors at all? Or are
the sentiments composed more truly of pride that has much egotism in
the consciousness of more square feet of masonry crowded into fewer
square feet of ground; more well-dressed women, more automobiles; bigger
crowds—sprucer-looking crowds; more electric signs; more things going on;
more business; more amusements; more making and spending; more losing and
breaking, than, one might almost say, all the other cities of the world
together?
All of which makes typical New Yorkers contemptuous of and dissatisfied
with every other city. But as to whether they _love_ it, as the people of
Chicago or San Francisco do—do they? Do we?
For anyone to look out upon New York’s immensity and spread out his arms
and say: “My city! My home!” would be almost like looking overhead and
saying, “My sky, my stars!” _Almost_, wouldn’t it?
I wanted to lead up to the story of a California bride’s impression of
New York. Instead of which I seem to have arrived in New York, but left
the bride at home!
The story was told me by Mr. B., himself a New Yorker, but whose wife and
stepson were Californians. Last winter the stepson brought his wife to
New York on their wedding-trip. This is what Mr. B. told me:
“She had everything we could give her, but spent the afternoon at
matinées and galleries and shopping; her evenings at the play or the
opera and a cabaret afterward, and her mornings in bed. Finally I said:
‘Why don’t you want us to have some dinners for you, so that you can meet
some people? You can’t know much about a city if you meet no one.’
“‘Oh,’ she said,’the people look so queer.’
“‘How, queer?’
“‘Why, so—so well-dressed and so horrid—their faces aren’t kind, and they
don’t seem to smile at all.’
“But I insisted on taking her up Fifth Avenue to see the fine houses. No
enthusiasm. Finally I said:
“‘But surely, the V. house is wonderful!’
“‘I suppose so,’ she said,’but like all the rest, it is just stone and
mortar stuck up in a crowded, noisy street, and the newspapers blow up
around the door.’
“Then she stopped, and seeing how disappointed I was, patted me on the
arm: ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was born and grew up in an orange grove,
and you people stifle me. I want to go home.’”
CHAPTER XXIX
THE FAIR
The Fair will be over when this account is published, but it was so
dominant a part of San Francisco at the time we—and all the thousands of
others—were there I haven’t the heart to cut the pages out.
With merely a phrase, you can make a picture of the little fair at San
Diego; cloister-like gray buildings with clumps of dense green, and
a vivid stroke of blue and orange. But to visualize the Pan-American
Exposition in a few sentences is impossible. You could begin its
description from a hundred different points and miss the best one, you
can say one thing about it and the next moment find you were quite wrong.
In the shade or fog, it was a city of baked earth color, oxydized with
any quantity of terra cotta; in the sun it was deep cream glowing with
light. If you thought of half the domes as brown, and others as faded
green, you found, the next time you saw them, that they looked like a bit
of the sky itself, and the brown ones glimmered a dull, yet living, rose.
Seeing it first from a distance, coming down upon it from the hill
streets of San Francisco, you saw a biscuit-colored city with
terra-cotta roofs, green domes and blue. Beyond it the wide waters of a
glorious bay, rimmed with far gray-green mountains. But you were luckiest
if you saw it first when the sun was painting it for you, which was
invariably unless there was a fog, or perhaps you looked down upon it at
night when the scintillating central point, the Tower of Jewels, looked
like a diamond and turquoise wedding-cake and behind it an aurora of
prismatic-colored search-lights—the most thrilling illumination possible
to imagine.
Or entering one of its many gates you wandered like an ant through
bewildering chaos. Not that it lacked plan; its architectural balance
was one of the most noteworthy things about it. But there were so many
courts, so much detail. Gradually, you noticed that there were eight
great exhibition palaces, and a ninth, the Palace of the Fine Arts,
like a half-circle at the end. You perceived that the buildings of the
separate States and foreign nations trailed off like a suburb at one
end, and that the Zone was a straight street also by itself. Among the
thousands of embellishments, you noticed perhaps the lovely statues of
Borglum’s “Pioneer,” Fraser’s “End of the Trail,” Daniel Chester French’s
“Genius of Creation,” the adventurous bowman on the top of the Column of
Progress, nor could you miss the nations of the West and East, and the
figures of the rising and the setting sun.
The murals of Brangwyn no chair boy would let you pass. Each one pushed
you in front, and backing off to give you the proper distance, declared
that they cost five thousand dollars “_each one_.”
We were admiring their vital animation, for they pulsated fairly with
energy and life, as well as color, when suddenly from the sublime to the
ridiculous, E. M. remarked: “That’s curious! The men have just taken
their shirts off.” Then Celia and I wondered too, why every male figure
was brown as a berry as high as a shirt sleeve would roll up, and white
as a person always sheltered from the air over all the rest of his body?
We also wondered about the four women who clung to the corners of
gigantic boxes on top of the beautiful Fine Arts colonnade. Each of
the boxes suggested the coffin of a very fat Mormon and his four wives
weeping for him. There was _something_ hidden up there that the clinging
women were afraid to take their gaze away from, but what it was we had no
idea. All of which levity reminds me that in Paris I watched two tourists
as they hurried eagerly down the long gallery toward the Venus de Milo.
Arrived at its base one of them leaned over the guard rail, stared at the
marble, and exclaimed:
“Why, Gussie, she’s all pock-marked!”
My criticism of a work as notable as the Pan-American Exposition is
probably much like the above. Beautiful as much of it is, I wish they
had left a few unfilled niches, a few plain surfaces, but they are
filling them fuller every day. When we first came, the little kneeling
figure on her peninsular front of the Fine Arts Temple and her reflection
in the lagoon gave an impression of a dream. While we were there, they
filled every archway with imposing sculptures until it looks merely like
a museum.
I found myself driving around and mentally taking things away. The lovely
old eucalyptus trees, the only planting that was on the grounds before
the Fair, seemed almost to have heard me, for they were not to be kept
from taking everything off that they could, and untidily strewing the
ground with their discarded clothing.
One thing, however, was hard to understand or forgive; of all the courts,
especially at night, the one which had the most imaginative appeal,
was the Court of Abundance. At the four corners of a square pool were
standards of erect green cobras holding brasiers filled with leaping
flames of tongues of silk blown upward by concealed fans and red and
yellow lights; in the center of the pool was the Fountain of the Earth, a
work of highly imaginative beauty in which, above four panels of symbolic
figures in high relief, the globe of the earth was set in a rose-colored
glow surrounded by a mystic vapor, made by a gentle escapement of steam,
and _then_ at one side they had planted two huge Maltese cross standards
of blatant electric lights!
On the subject of the exhibits, everyone has read about the Ford cars
that are assembled on a conveyor. Beginning at one end as pieces of metal
and running off at the other under their own power. That was undoubtedly
the most interesting exhibit to the public in general, but to many others
the Sperry Flour display was quite as ingenious and if anything more
interesting. They had a whole row of little booth kitchens to show how
all the nations of the world use flour.
A camper tossed flapjacks over a campfire; a Mexican made anchillades and
tomales; a Swede, a Russian, a Chinaman, a Hindoo and four or five others
made their national wafers and cakes—and gave samples away! In the center
at a bigger oven was baked home-made American bread and cake and pies, of
such deliciousness that everyone who passed by looked as longingly as the
proverbial ragamuffin in front of a baker’s window.
There was always a crowd, too, watching the manufacture of white lead
paint by the Fuller Company, and going through the staterooms of a
section, full-sized, of an Atlantic steamer. Perhaps the greatest
interest of all was shown in a model United States post-office, with
bridges crossing above, so people could look down and see all the details
of sorting and distributing.
One thing you noticed—nearly all San Franciscans were personally,
or through some members of their family, interested in the Fair.
Everyone gave dinners on the Zone, either on the balcony of the
Chinese restaurant—that had nothing Chinese about it except its Chinese
ornamentation on the front of the building—or at the Old Faithful Inn of
the Yellowstone. The illuminations at night were very soft and subdued,
all the lanterns were turned dark side to the Concourse and light side to
the buildings.
In the Zone there were few new attractions, and fewer worth seeing.
The best were the Panama Canal, the Painted Desert, and Captain, the
mind-reading horse. A woman mind reader, who took turns with the horse,
was equally remarkable.
The queen of the Samoan village, clad literally in a short skirt, a Gaby
Deslys head-dress, a string of beads and a dazzling smile, had not only
great audacity but a fascinating personality that was literally bubbling
over with the old Nick. We were crazy about her, a fact she saw perfectly
well, for in the garden afterward, when she had discarded her gorgeous
head-dress and donned a modest piece of sash tied around her chest, she
came straight to us and shook hands as a child might, who, amidst a crowd
of strangers, had singled out a friend. That is all there is to tell, as
we couldn’t speak Samoan, nor she English.
A few months ago, in the midst of a daring flight, the wings of the
famous Beachey’s aeroplane crumpled and plunged into the sea. The aviator
was strapped into his machine in such a way that, if he still lived, he
could not free himself.
Le roi est mort! Vive le roi!
And the new king was Art Smith. At eleven o’clock at night, the siren
blew and thousands crowded about the open field to see him start. Up and
up and up he went until, at several hundred feet up, a torch suddenly
burned at the back of the machine which swept the sky, leaving a trail of
fire like a comet’s tail, looped and double looped and curved and twisted
and wrote “ZONE” across the sky.
But really to see the feats of this aeronaut who far exceeded Beachey’s
daring, you had to go to the Aviation Field on a day when he flew at
five. You saw, if you were early enough to stand near the ropes of the
enormous enclosure, a young boy apparently, very small, but stockily
built, walk casually out of the crowd standing back of the machine, wave
good-bye to a young girl, his wife, and get on a sort of bicycle on the
front of his biplane without any apparent strapping in, except the handle
of the steering-wheel that he pulled close in front of him. Across the
wide grass field he gradually arose, soared higher and higher, until at
half a thousand feet or more, he dipped and swooped, then somersaulted
round and round and round in a whirling ball, then flying upside down,
dropped nearly over your head, then arose again, flying backwards,
sideways, fell, arose, dipped—like a bird gone mad. At last he came
swooping down and alit at the end of the great green field.
Very young and small, Art Smith walked the whole length of the field
between fifty thousand shouting, waving human beings. No hero of the
Roman Stadium, no king coming to his own, has lived a greater moment than
the young birdman lived every day. Boyishly his mouth broke into a wide
smile, he doffed his cap, bowing to the right and to the left, and the
applause followed him in a series of roars. At the hangar his young wife
ran out and kissed him. He had been spared to her once again.
CHAPTER XXX
“UNENDING SAMENESS” WAS WHAT THEY SAID
Of course you can’t see the Fair in a day, or two days, or three. And
if you stay long in San Francisco, you won’t want to leave at all. Up
and down and around the hills, you constantly see houses that you wish
you could immediately go and live in. For in what other city can you sit
on a hillside—only millionaires sit on hilltops—with a view of sea and
mountains below and beyond you? Where else, outside of a Maxfield Parrish
picture, is there a city rising gayly on steep sugar-loaf hills, and
filled with people whose attitude of mind exactly matches their hilltops?
In many other cities people live in long narrow canyons called streets,
under a blanket of soot, signifying industry, and they scurry around like
ants carrying great mental loads, ten times as big as they are, up steep
hills of difficulty, only to tumble down with them again. The people of
countless other cities are valley people, their perception bounded by the
high walls of the skyscrapers they have themselves erected in the name of
progress. The San Franciscans, too, are building in the valley towering
office buildings in which they work as earnestly for their living as any
others elsewhere, but in spirit they are still hill-people, and their
horizon is rimmed not by acquisitive ambition, but by sea and sky.
When we started, I had an idea that, keen though we were to undertake
the journey, we would find it probably difficult, possibly tiring, and
surely monotonous—to travel on and on and on over the same American road,
through towns that must be more or less replicas, and hearing always
the same language and seeing the same types of people doing much the
same things. Everyone who had never taken the trip assured us that our
impression in the end would be of an unending sameness. Sameness! Was
there ever such variety?
Beginning with New York, as that is the point we started from, New York
was built, is building, will ever be building in huge blocks of steel and
stone, and the ambitious of every city and country in the world will keep
pouring into it and crowding its floor space and shoving it up higher
and higher into towering cubes. New York dominates the whole of the
Western Hemisphere and weights securely the Eastern coast of the map, and
because of all this weight and importance, New Yorkers fancy they are the
Americans of America, but New York is not half as typically American as
Chicago; and that is where you come to your first real contrast.
_Omnipotent_ New York, in contrast to _ambitious_ Chicago. Chicago is
American to her backbone—active, alive and inordinately desiring,
ceaselessly aspiring. Between New York and Chicago is strung a chain of
cities that have many qualities, like mixed samples of these two terminal
points. But beyond Chicago, no trace of New York remains. Every city is
spunky and busy, ambitious and sometimes a little self-laudatory. (New
York is not self-laudatory; she is too supremely self-satisfied to think
any remarks on the subject necessary.) Leaving the country of fields and
woods and streams, you traverse that great prairie land of vast spaces,
and finally ascend the heights of the mighty Rocky Mountains.
The next contrast is in Colorado Springs, which is as unlike the rest of
America as though St. Moritz itself had been grafted in the midst of our
continent. All through New Mexico and Arizona you are in a strange land,
far more like Asia than anything in the United States or Europe. A baked
land of blazing sun, dynamic geological miracles, a land of terrible
beauty and awful desolation, and then the sudden sharp ascent to the
height of steep snow and conifer-covered mountains, looking even higher
than the Rockies because of their abrupt needle-pointed heights. And
finally, the greatest contrast climax of all, the sudden dropping down
into the tropically blooming seacoast gardens of the California shore.
It goes without saying that only those who love motoring should ever
undertake such a journey, nor is the crossing of our continent as
smoothly easy as crossing Europe. But given good weather, _and the right
kind of a machine_, there are no difficulties, in any sense, anywhere.
There couldn’t be a worse tenderfoot than I am, there really couldn’t.
I’m very dependent upon comfort, have little strength, less endurance,
and hate “roughing it” in every sense of the word. Yet not for a moment
was I exhausted or in any way distressed, except about the unfitness
of our car and its consequent injuries, a situation which others,
differently equipped, would not experience.
I suppose the metamorphosis has come little by little all across our
wide spirit-awakening country, but I feel as though I had acquired from
the great open West a more direct outlook, a simpler, less encumbered
view of life. You can’t come in contact with people anywhere, without
unconsciously absorbing a few of their habits, a tinge of their point of
view, and in even a short while you find you have sloughed off the skin
of Eastern hidebound dependence upon ease and luxury, and that hitherto
indispensable details dwindle—at least temporarily—to unimportance.
CHAPTER XXXI
TO THOSE WHO THINK OF FOLLOWING IN OUR TIRE TRACKS
For the benefit of those who are planning such a trip and in answer to
the many questions that have been asked us since our return, we have
compiled the following pages:
The subject of car equipment, driving suggestions, garage and road notes,
I have left to E. M., who has written a part of this chapter.
At the end of the book is a small outline map of the United States
and the route we took marked on it with divisions, each indicating a
day’s run. On separate pages are enlarged, detailed diagrams of these
divisions, drawn to uniform scale, giving general road surfaces, points
of historical or topographical interest along the road, and thumbnail
outlines that suggest the types and relative sizes of the hotels they
represent. Each little symbol means a modernly, even a luxuriously
equipped house; good food, good rooms and private baths. The mileage
between all these best hotels is clearly indicated, so that a tourist can
plan the distance he likes to run at a glance.
East of the Mississippi there are plenty of high-class hotels, and
although fine ones are building in every state of our country, in many
sections of the West those dependent upon luxuries will still have to go
occasionally long distances a day to get them.
From New York to San Francisco, by way of the Rocky Mountains and Los
Angeles, is about 4,250 miles; which divides itself into about four
weeks’ straight running, including the side trips to the Grand Canyon,
to San Diego and Monterey, but not including extra days to stop over.
To make it in less would be pretty strenuous, but perfectly feasible.
Allowing no time out for sightseeing, accidents or weather delays, we
arrived in San Francisco in four weeks’ running time, including the
run to San Diego (two days), but we skipped a stretch of Arizona and
Southeastern California, a distance that would have taken about three
days, which would have made our own entire distance time twenty-nine days.
Some days we drove thirteen or fourteen hours, others we drove only
three or four. We never ran on schedule, but went on further or stayed
where we were as we happened to feel like it, excepting, of course, our
one breakdown and the two times we were held over by rain. When roads
were good and the country deserted, we went fast, but the highest the
speedometer ever went for any length of time in the most uninhabited
stretches was fifty miles an hour. At others it fell to six! For long,
long distances, on account of the speed laws or road surfaces, we
traveled at eighteen to twenty. Between thirty-five and forty is the
car’s easiest pace where surface and traffic conditions allow. East of
Omaha we were never many hours a day on the road. Between Omaha and
Cheyenne, and again between Albuquerque and Winslow, finding no stopping
places that tempted, we drove on very long and far.
TO THE MAN WHO DRIVES
BY E. M. POST, JR.
If I were starting again for the West, I should want an American car. A
_new_ car of almost any standard American make would be better for such a
trip than the best foreign one.
In the first place, our own cars have sufficient clearance—ten inches. In
the second place, spare parts are easy to get. Especially is this true of
the moderate priced cars, which are sold in such large numbers that even
the small country garages must carry supplies for them. But the important
advantage is sufficient height. There are many places, particularly in
New Mexico and Arizona, where with a low car you will have to fill in
ruts so that your center can clear the middle of the road; and you will
have to pile earth and stones on the slopes of some of the railroad
crossings, so as not to “hang up” on the tracks.
Beyond the state of Colorado, which has magnificent mountain roads, if
your car is a foreign one, you should have extra-sized wheels put on
it to lift the frame high enough. Of course, you _can_ get through, by
destroying your comfort and temper, in road building, and jacking the
machine over places impossible to pass otherwise, and arriving in a very
battered condition in the end. Another qualification besides height in
favor of an American car, is endurance. American manufacturers have
solved the problem of building machinery that needs little care and can
be jolted without injury, where the more complicated European machinery
under like treatment goes to pieces.
With a foreign car you are furthermore at a disadvantage in using metric
tire sizes. You can always get the standard American sizes, which in the
tubes will fit your metric casings all right, and for that matter you
could probably at a pinch and temporarily use a standard casing. Metric
size can be found in such places as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and
San Francisco, but shoes have a way of exhausting themselves without
regard to your position on the map.
At Los Angeles or San Francisco you can get your metric equipment for
the return trip so that if you start with new tires all around and two
spares, you should have no need of buying tires on the road. Mine are,
according to average American equipment, way under size for the weight of
my car, and my six shoes carried me through easily. In fact there was New
York air in two of them when we arrived in San Francisco.
[Illustration: SOMETIMES WE STRUCK A BAD ROAD]
In the matter of what to carry: New tires, of course. For any but a very
heavy car two spare shoes are plenty. Tubes you can buy anywhere. I only
had five punctures all the way—and no blow-out. More than two extra shoes
would be a hindrance because of their weight. A small shovel is sometimes
convenient but not necessary east of New Mexico, and with a high car not
necessary at all. African water bags are essential west of Albuquerque,
but not before. Fifty or a hundred feet of thin rope may be very useful
if you happen to strike mud or sand stretches, especially if two cars
are making the trip together. In the way of spare parts, I should
suggest a couple of spark plugs, extra valve and valve spring, fan belt,
extra master links for a chain-drive car. Tire chains with extra heavy
cross-pieces for all wheels are indispensable through the Middle West in
case of rain. And see that the tools that have been “borrowed” from your
tool kit have been replaced. Repairs on the road are aggravating enough,
not to be made more so through lack of tools. Now that people carry spare
rims and almost never seem to put in a new tube and pump it up on the
road, they neglect to carry a pump and a spare tube, but if you should
have three flat tires in one day, you will appreciate a spare tube and an
old-fashioned tire pump that works!
I carried thirty-five gallons of gasoline in my tank, which gave me
a radius of three hundred and fifty miles on a tank full, with which
I was never in any danger of running short. I should say that a two
hundred-mile radius would be plenty, except across the desert. You _can_
buy it even there, but at about three or four times the regular rate. You
may go many miles before you come to a hotel, but gasoline you can buy
anywhere. Good shock absorbers all around will probably save you a broken
spring or two. It will pay to look over your springs after each day’s run
and if a leaf is broken, have a new one put in before attempting to go on.
In the Middle West, automobile associations or highway commissioners
do magnificent work. Roads are splendidly sign posted, and in the
dragged roads districts, the rain no sooner stops than the big four- and
six-horse drags are out. Follow a rainstorm in a few hours, and you will
find every road ahead of you as smooth as a new-swept floor. Hence for
the patient motorist, who can spare the time, there is always an eventual
moment when there are good roads.
A few of the bad roads of the Southwest are so rocky that you have
literally to clamber over them, but about seventy per cent of the road
across New Mexico and Arizona, in which I include the road across the
Mohave Desert that I covered later, is a fair, and occasionally fast,
natural road. The streams are generally easy to get through, and at those
that are sandy or too deep, the automobile association keeps teams
standing on purpose to see you through.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS ON DRIVING
Don’t try to drive from New York to San Francisco on high gear. You will
often have used “first” by the time you strike the Rocky Mountains.
Don’t, then, subject your bearings to an unnecessary strain by forcing
your motor to labor as it must, if too steep a hill is taken on too high
a gear. See that your hand brake can lock your wheels. On a five-mile
grade one brake may burn out, and on most cars in this country the hand
brake is next to worthless from lack of use and care. Letting the engine
act as a brake is a good practice on long descents.
On going through sand or mud that looks as if it might stop you, change
into a lower gear and don’t lose your forward momentum. It is easier to
keep a car going than to start it again. Fording through streams instead
of crossing on bridges is common in the Southwest and many of the streams
have bottoms of quicksand character. Before fording a stream make sure
that the water is not going to come above the height of your carburetor.
Then start and stay in first until you are out on the other side. The
idea is to go through at a constant speed with no jerk on the wheels.
In high altitude your carburetor will need more air, as there is less
oxygen in a given volume of atmosphere than at sea-level. This means
also that a gasoline motor has considerably less power in Colorado than
at sea-level. Don’t be discouraged and think your car is failing you when
you find that you have to crawl up a long hill in “second,” upon which
you think you ought to “pick up” on “high.” Not only is your motor less
powerful than at home, but the _hill is steeper than it looks_. When you
get back to sea-level it will run as well as ever.
The hardest thing for a stranger to guess seven or eight thousand feet up
in the air, is height, grade or distance. You see a little hill, a nice
little gentle incline about half a mile long at most; then gradually from
the elevation of your own radiator out in front of you, you get some idea
of the steepness of grade and you find from your speedometer when you get
to the top, that it was a short little stretch of three miles.
One other point: on high altitudes you will have to fill your radiator
often. Water boils more quickly, and this added to the long stiff grades,
will cause a lot of your cooling water to waste in steam—even in a car
that at normal altitude never overheats.
[Illustration: IN ORDER TO CROSS HERE E. M. BUILT A BRIDGE WITH THE LOGS
AT THE RIGHT]
REPAIR WORK ON THE ROAD
You will find a few garages anxious to please, beautifully equipped and
capable of the finest work. The garages of Europe are not to be compared
with our best ones. Garage equipment of the newest is to be found
frequently, and all the way across the continent. The greater majority
of garages are neither good nor bad; and again a few—a very few only—are
incompetent, careless and lazy, the men having the attitude that they are
doing you a favor in robbing you.
If you know enough about your car to do your own repairing, or know
what should be done well enough to superintend others, you will have no
trouble. Furthermore, if you actually oversee everything that is done—you
_know_ that your car is all right and you don’t have to hope that nothing
has been forgotten by a man who knows that he is not going to be the one
to suffer if his work is not what it should be. Also you know your car’s
weaknesses and in driving can save them. I find garage men who take pride
in their garages, glad and willing to serve an owner who takes that much
interest in his machine.
On rare occasions, a first-class man resents your persistent
superintendence, as though it were a slur on his ability or good
intentions. There was a case in the Marksheffel garage in Colorado
Springs—it was one of the best, by the way, that I have ever encountered.
The car had been driven over 30,000 miles without ever being taken
down, and without other care than my own. And before going into such
an uninhabited country as the desert, there were several parts that I
thought it safer to put in new.
Taking the crank case off and fitting new gaskets, two men worked on it
until late into the night. I did not do any work myself this time, but
stood watching the men, so interested in the efficient way they were
doing the job, that I was unconsciously silent. At the end of about two
hours, one of them burst out with:
“I guess you’ve had some pretty tough experience with dishonest
garages—is that it?”
“No,” I told him, “that was not it, but that I always wanted to know the
exact condition of my engine. Otherwise I might get into serious trouble
on the road somewhere.” The situation being thus explained, his former
resentment melted entirely, and a few hours later we parted warm friends.
In the case of this particular garage, as well as those whose names are
listed in the garage expense accounts (pages 260-277), you can certainly
leave the repairs to them, unless your engine is to you what a favorite
horse is to a lover of animals—something whose welfare you do not want
for a moment to be in doubt about.
On the whole, to a man who has had any driving experience at all, and who
chooses a proper car, most particularly if it is a new one, the trip will
not present any difficulties. And the experiences he may have will prove
an incomparable school for his driving and for his ability to tackle new
problems with the means at hand.
CHAPTER XXXII
ON THE SUBJECT OF CLOTHES
We had far too many! They were a perfect nuisance! Yet each traveler
needs a heavy coat, a thin coat or sweater, a duster and a rug or two,
and there is a huge bundle already. Then possibly a dressing-case for
each, and surely a big valise of some sort, either suit-case or motor
trunk. Added to this are innumerable necessities—Blue Books, a camera,
food paraphernalia, an extra hat—most women want an extra hat, and men,
too, for that matter—and though goggles and veils are worn most of the
time, they have to be put somewhere. All of these last items go too
wonderfully in a silk bag such as I described as having been given us.
It was of taffeta, made exactly like an ordinary pillow-case with a
running string at one end; it was about twenty inches wide and thirty
inches long. E. M.’s straw hat, Celia’s extra hat, and mine all went in
it, beside veils and gloves and other odds and ends. It weighed nothing;
it went on top of everything else and, tied through the handle of a
dressing-case by its own strings, was in no danger of blowing out. Why
hats traveled in it without crushing like broken eggshells, I don’t
know, but they _did_.
Offering advice on clothes for a motor trip is much like offering advice
on what to wear walking up the street. But on the chance that in a
perfectly commonplace list there may be an item of use to someone, I have
inventoried below a list of things that I personally should duplicate, if
I were taking the trip over again:
First: A coat and _pleated skirt_ of a material that does not show
creases. Maltreat a piece first, to see. With this one suit, half a dozen
easily washed blouses and a sleeveless overwaist of the material of the
skirt, which, worn over a chiffon underblouse, makes a whole dress,
instead of an odd shirtwaist and skirt. These underblouses are merely
separate chiffon linings with sleeves and collars, and half a dozen can
be put in the space of a pound candy-box—yet give the same service as six
waists to your dress.
On an ordinary motoring trip such as over the various well-worn tours of
Northeastern States or of the Pacific Coast or Europe, where you arrive
in the early afternoon with plenty of time to rest for a while and dress
for dinner, several restaurant or informal evening-dresses may be useful,
but crossing the continent, unless you stop over several days in cities
where you have friends, in which case you can send a trunk ahead, it
is often late when you arrive, and any dressing further than getting
clean and tidy does not strongly appeal to you. Besides one suit and
blouses, a very serviceable dress to take would be a simple house dress
of some sort of uncreasable silk. There is a Chinese crêpe that _nothing_
wrinkles—not to be confused with many varieties of crêpes de chine that
crease like sensitive plants at a mere touch.
If I expected to go through towns where I might be dining out, I would
add an evening dress of black jet or cream lace—two materials that stand
uncreasingly any amount of packing. Otherwise my third and last would be
a silk skirt and jacket—the skirt of black and white up and down stripes
with white chiffon blouses, and the jacket black. The taffeta should be
of the heavy soft variety that does not crack and muss. The skirt should
be unlined and cut with straight seams gathered on a belt; a dress that
folds in a second of time and in a few inches of space. With the coat on,
it is a street dress; coat off (with a high girdle to match the skirt),
it is whatever the top of the blouse you wear makes it.
A duster is, of course, indispensable. A taffeta one is very nice,
especially when you want something better-looking, but on a long journey
taffeta cracks, dirt constantly sifts through it and it can’t be washed
as linen can. In the high altitudes of the Southwest, a day of tropical
heat is followed by a penetratingly cold night. The thermometer may not
be actually low and the air seem soft and delicious, but it sifts through
fabrics in the way a biting wind can, and you are soon thankful if you
have brought a heavy wrap. When you need it, nothing is as comfortable as
fur. I took an old sealskin coat and I don’t know what I should have done
without it. On my personal list, a mackintosh has no place. If it rains,
the top is up, and to keep wind out, I’d rather have fur.
Nor are shoes under ordinary fortunate circumstances important. But on my
list are “velvet slippers.” Scarcely your idea of appropriate motoring
footwear, but if your seat is the front one over the engine, you will
find velvet the coolest material there is—cooler than buckskin, or suède,
or kid or canvas—much! And if you want to walk, your luggage, after all,
is with you.
Every woman knows the kind of hat she likes to wear. But does every
woman realize, which Celia and I did not, that a hat to be worn nine or
eleven hours across a wind-swept prairie must offer no more resistance
than the helmet of a race driver? A helmet, by the way, made to fit your
head and face is ideally comfortable. A hat that the wind catches very
little won’t bother you in a few hours, but at the end of ten, your
head will feel stone-bruised. An untrimmed toque, very small and close,
and tied on with a veil is just about as comfortable as a helmet. It
has the disadvantage of having no brim, but yellow goggles mitigate the
glare, and it is the brim, even though it be of the inverted flower-pot
turn-down, that is a pocket for wind that at the end of a few hours pulls
uncomfortably.
[Illustration: ON THE FAMOUS “STAKED PLAINS” OF THE SOUTHWEST]
A real suggestion to the woman who minds getting sunburnt, is an
orange-colored chiffon veil. It must be a vivid orange that has a good
deal of red in it. Even with the blazing sun of New Mexico and California
shining straight in your face, a single thickness of orange-colored
chiffon will keep you from burning at all. If you can’t see through
chiffon, but mind freckling or burning, to say nothing of blistering, sew
an orange-colored veil across the lower rims of your goggles and wear
orange-colored glasses. Cut a square out of the top so as to leave no sun
space on your temples, and put a few gathers over the nose to allow it
to fit your face. Fasten sides over hat like any veil. The Southwestern
sun will burn your arms through sleeves of heavy crêpe de chine, but the
thinnest material of orange—red is next best—protects your skin in the
same way that the ruby glass of a lantern in a photographer’s developing
room protects a sensitive plate.
[Illustration]
Wear the thinnest and least amount of underwear that you can feel
decently clad in, so as to get as many fresh changes as possible in the
least space, because of the difficulty in stopping often to have things
laundered. What they put in the clothes in Southern California I don’t
know, but in any mixture of linen and silk, the silk has been apparently
dipped in blue dye. A cream-colored silk-and-linen shirt of E. M.’s that
happened to have the buttonholes worked in silk, is now a stippled green
with buttonholes of navy blue. It is rather putting your belongings to
the test of virtue—as those which are pure silk wash perfectly well. If
I were going again I should take everything I could of thin crêpe de
chine. It seems to be very easy to launder, and is everywhere returned in
a clean and comfortably soft condition, whereas linen often comes back
uncertain as to color and feeling like paper.
Although of more service on boats or trains, or in Europe where private
baths are not often to be had, a black or dark silk kimono and a black
lace bed-cap, if you ever wear bed-caps, are invaluable assets to anyone
who dislikes walking through public corridors in obvious undress. My
own especial treasures, acquired after many unsuccessful attempts, are
a wrapper cut the pattern of an evening wrap, of very soft, black silk
brocade. It rolls up as easily as any kimono, and takes scarcely any
space. The cap is a very plain “Dutch” one, of thread lace with a velvet
ribbon around it. A wrapper that isn’t obviously a wrapper, is sometimes
very convenient. You could make believe it was an evening wrap, if you
were very hard pressed.
And above everything, in traveling you want clothes that are
uncomplicated. The ones that you get into most easily are the ones you
put on most often. Underblouses, such as I have described above, are a
perfect traveler’s delight, because there is no basting in, or trying to
clean collars, cuffs, etc. A fresh underblouse with lace trimming, rolled
like a little bolster, measures one and a half inches by seven.
And remember: Plain skirts crease in half-moons across the back, pleated
or very full ones don’t. An orange veil prevents sunburn. Western climate
is very trying to the skin, so that you need cold cream even if you don’t
use it at home. A lace veil of a rather striking pattern is at times of
ugliness a great beautifier.
Clothes for men are a little out of my province. E. M. had some khaki
flannel shirts, breeches and puttees that seemed to be very serviceable.
At least he was able to spend any amount of time rolling on the road
under the machine, and still brush off fairly well. He had a sweater and
an ulster and two regular suits of clothes to change alternately at the
end of the day. His evening clothes, tennis flannels, etc., were sent
through by express.
To send one hundred and fifty pounds from New York to San Francisco costs
fifteen dollars.
FOOD EQUIPMENT
Don’t take a big, heavy, elaborate lunch basket. If you want to know
what perfect comfort is, get a tin breadbox with a padlock, and let it
stay on the floor of the tonneau. In the bottom of it you can keep
tins of potted meats, jars of jam, and a box of crackers, some milk
chocolate, or if you like better, nuts and raisins. And on top you can
put everything you lay your hands on! Books, sweaters, medicine case,
and a pack of oiled paper to wrap luncheons in. We had a solidified
alcohol lamp, a ten-cent kettle, and thermos bottles, a big thermos
food jar, which we filled with ice cream if the day was hot, and one of
the bottles with cocoa if it was cool. Coffee (if you put cream in it)
has always a corked, musty taste, but cocoa is not affected, neither is
soup. Food tastes better if you don’t mix your bottles. Keep the jar for
ice cream, if you like ice cream, a bottle for cocoa or soup, and two
for ice or hot water. On long runs in the Far West, a canvas water bag
is convenient. You can buy one at almost any garage, and it keeps water
quite wonderfully fresh and cool.
On top of our permanent supplies we put the daily luncheons we took from
the hotels: sandwiches, boiled eggs and fruit and the above-mentioned
cocoa or ice cream. Cocoa we bought at the hotels, but our favorite place
to buy ice cream was at a soda-water fountain.
The tins in our bread box we hoarded as a miser hoards gold—as a surplus
that we might need to keep us alive; and, as is the common end of most
misers, when we got to San Francisco and our journey was over, the
greater part was still left—to give away.
EXPENSES
The following pages of actual expenses copied out of our diaries may be
useful as a table of comparison by which other travelers can form an idea
of what their own are likely to be.
For some the trip will cost more, but on the other hand, it can be done
for very much less. In every case we had the kind of rooms that are
assigned to those who, without questioning the price, asks for “good
outside rooms with baths.” Undoubtedly, there were in many cases more
expensive ones to be had, but in all cases there were cheaper ones.
Our restaurant bills, however, were comparatively light. We seldom
ordered more than three dishes each, and the restaurant charges to people
of very substantial appetite, will run more rather than less. On extras,
of course, anyone could add or subtract indefinitely, but the details
noted may serve as a scale of current charges.
The garage bills speak for themselves. Each man knows how far his own car
can go on a gallon, and how often he wants it washed. No one can count
his repairs in advance, but our garage bills, however, were certainly
very much heavier than average. E. M.’s car is at best an expensive one
to run, and on this trip it was at its worst, having been driven without
overhauling for two years.
DAILY EXPENSE ACCOUNT
PREPARATORY EXPENSES
6 Repub. staggered tires, 6 tubes, and put on $347.04
Warner speedometer 51.00
FIRST DAY’S RUN, NEW YORK TO ALBANY
(MAP NO. 1)
PERSONAL MOTOR
_New York._ _New York._ 49th Street Garage.
Lunched at home. 15 gals. gas $2.70
160 miles (should have been 150).
_Albany._ Ten Eyck Hotel. _Albany._ Albany Garage Co.
2 hallboys carrying up 18 gals. gas $2.70
luggage $ .50 Storage 1.00
Dinner, for three 4.60 Washing 1.50
Tip .50 1 gal. oil .80
“Movies” .30
Postcards .10
Stamps .10
Soda water .30
Telephone home .90
Double room and bath (hotel
full, couldn’t get three
singles) 5.00
Single room (no bath) 2.00
Coffee and toast for two
(in room) .80
Tip .20
Breakfast (E. M.) .70
Tip .25
Luggage carried down .50
Tip, chambermaid .75
SECOND DAY’S RUN, ALBANY TO FORT PLAIN
(MAP NO. 2)
_Fort Plain, N. Y._ _Fort Plain._
Lunch, for three $1.50 Broke bearing; towed to
Tip .30 Hoffman & Adams’ garage $3.00
Chocolate, postcards, etc. .40 Hoffman & Adams’ garage at
3 R. R. tickets to Utica 2 .22 _Fort Plain_.
New bearing valves $9.09
Time labor 12.30
9 gals. oil 1.15
Gaskets, telephone, etc. 3.00
(A remarkably good garage;
intelligent, efficient
and good-natured men.)
_Utica._ Hotel Utica. _Utica._ Hotel Utica garage.
3 fares Utica Hotel omnibus $.45 10 gals. gas $1.20
Telephone home 1.20 2 qts. oil .40
Dinner (delicious) for three 3.50 Washing 1.50
Tip .40 Storage 1.00
Tip, 1 hallboy (most of (Wind shield broken in garage.)
luggage left in the car) .25
“Movies” .30
Soda water .30
Double room (very big, and
lovely; did not wire ahead
and could not get three
singles and baths) $6.00
Single and bath (small but
attractive) 2.50
Coffee for two (in room) .90
Tip .20
Breakfast (E. M.) .90
Tip .25
Telephone home 1.20
Lunch (for two) 1.60
Tip .30
Valet, pressing one suit,
E. M. 1.00
Hired motor 3.00
Tip .50
Second night and morning Utica about same as above.
THIRD DAY’S RUN, UTICA TO BUFFALO
(MAPS NOS. 2 AND 3)
Lunched _Geneva_. Hotel Seneca. _Geneva._
Lunch for 3 (very good and 2 gals. oil $1.20
beautifully served) $3.00 (218 miles.)
Tip .35
_Buffalo._ Hotel Statler. _Buffalo._ Hotel Statler garage.
2 hallboys carrying up New glass in windshield $4.00
luggage .50 Storage 1.00
Dinner (for three) $3.95 2 gals. gas 2.60
Tip .40
3 single rooms (very nice
and each with bath) 7.50
Tip, chambermaid .75
Telegram to Erie .26
Sundries .80
FOURTH DAY. BUFFALO TO CLEVELAND. BROKEN BY STOPOVER IN ERIE
(MAP NO. 4)
Lunch at _Niagara Falls_. Drove out to _Niagara Falls_,
(At R. R. lunch counter to back after lunch, and to
save time) $.50 _Erie, Pa._, 93 miles.
Tip .20
_Erie, Pa._ Hotel Lawrence. _Erie._ Star Garage.
Hallboys up and down 1.00 Storage $1.00
Chambermaid .75 10 gals. gas 1.30
Dinner 4.95 2 gals. oil 1.20
Tip .50 (Very nice garage.)
3 single rooms with baths 9.00
Coffee and toast (in room)
for one .65
Breakfast, C. and E. M. 1.60
Tip .25
Telegrams and sundries 1.00
Lunch (for three) 3.15
Tip .35
_Cleveland._ Hotel Statler. _Cleveland_, 102 miles.
Dinner (three) 4.80
Tip $.50 Hotel’s Garage.
Theater (three) 6.00 Storage $1.00
Ice-cream sodas .30 10 gals. gas 1.30
3 rooms with baths (lovely) 13.50 1 qt. oil .20
Coffee in room (2) .80
Tip .20 _Toledo_, 120 miles.
“Club” breakfast, E. M. .75
Tip .25
Valet, press two suits
(E. M.) 2.00
All tips—2 boys up .50
Down .50
Chambermaid .75
FIFTH DAY’S RUN, CLEVELAND TO TOLEDO
(MAP NO. 5)
_Cleveland_
Lunched Statler $3.75
_Very_ reasonable! Most
delicious food.
_Toledo._ Hotel Secor. _Toledo._ United Garage.
Dinner 3.40 Storage $.75
Tip .40 12 gals. gas. (15c.) 1.80
“Movies” .30 Wash and polish 1.50
Ice-cream soda .30 Fill grease cups .75
Telegrams, newspapers, etc. .80 Pair of pliers .50
3 rooms, 2 baths 10.50
Coffee and toast (for two) .70
Tip .20
Usual tips, hallboys 1.00
Chambermaid .75
Telegram to _South Bend_ .26
SIXTH DAY’S RUN, TOLEDO TO SOUTH BEND
(MAP NO. 6)
Lunch _Bryan_
Christman Hotel (3) $2.25
Tip .25
_South Bend._ Hotel Oliver. _South Bend._ Lincoln Garage.
Dinner $4.10 Storage $.75
Tip .40 1 gal. oil .80
3 rooms, 3 baths 9.00 17 gals. gas 2.38
Coffee and toast (2),
breakfast (1) 1.90
Usual tips 1.75
Sundries .80
SEVENTH DAY’S RUN, SOUTH BEND TO CHICAGO
(MAP NO. 7)
Chicken dinners and tip $1.75
_Chicago._ The Blackstone. _Chicago._ “Down Town” Garage.
4 bellboys (or porters) Storage, three days $2.25
luggage up $1.00 Ground valves 6.75
[6]Dinner for two (E. M. 2 spark plugs 2.00
out) and tip 4.00 Wash and polish (3 days) 6.00
Theater (2) 5.00 17 gals. gas (13c.) 2.21
Telegram .52 2 qts. oil .40
Coffee (2) and tip 1.10 20 gals. gas 2.60
Breakfast, E. M .90 1 gal. oil .80
Tip .25
[6]Lunch (2) 2.60
Tip .30
Beautiful big double twin
beds and dressing room 7.00
Lovely small, single room
and bath (E. M.) 3.50
Laundry 4.75
Valet 2.00
Tailor, pressing two dresses 2.00
Average one day’s expenses,
less extras than above.
Extras bought in Chicago:
Supply of potted meats, etc. 9.35
At Woolworth’s:
Kettle .10
4 doz. plates .20
Oiled paper .10
2 doz. spoons .10
Solid alcohol, lamp,
saucepan (complete) 1.25
Bread box 3.45
Padlock .30
EIGHTH DAY’S RUN, CHICAGO TO ROCHELLE
(MAP NO. 8)
Stopped by mud at _Rochelle, Ill._,
77 miles, May 6-7.
_Rochelle, Ill._ Collier Inn. _Rochelle._ Garage next door to
Inn.
(Typical day.) Storage, two days $1.00
(No bellboys.) Wash car 1.50
3 telegrams $1.48 Chains (2) 3.60
3 rooms with bath, one at 8 gals. gas 1.20
$3, two at $2.50,
including board $8.00
Tips to waitress .75
Tip to chambermaid .50
“Movies,” etc. .80
Left _Rochelle_, May 8
EIGHTH DAY’S RUN, CONTINUED. ROCHELLE TO DAVENPORT
(MAP NO. 8)
Lunched _Rochelle_.
_Davenport, Iowa._ Black _Davenport._ Black Hawk
Hawk Hotel. Hotel’s garage.
Dinner (3) $3.40 10 gals. gas $2.20
Tip .40 1 gal. oil .75
Hallboys, luggage up Storage (night charge) .50
and down 1.00 Wash car 1.50
(Went down to river bank and
spent _nothing_.) Started on road of mud to
Enormous twin-bed room and _Des Moines_. We went to
bath, very attractive _Cedar Rapids_, but as it is
furnishing 4.50 out of the course between
Single room and bath 1.50 _Davenport_ and does not
(Best rooms for least price of belong on this route, it is
any hotel we encountered.) omitted. There was an
Breakfast .60 A1 garage there, but our
Tip .25 experience in mud cost:
Coffee and toast (2) .80 Vulcanizing 3 tires $2.25
Tip .20 Take off radiator, repair
gear case 5.60
Car in shop (no storage),
wash 2.00
20 gals. gas 4.40
1 gal. oil .75
NINTH DAY’S RUN, DAVENPORT TO DES MOINES VIA CEDAR RAPIDS
(MAP NO. 9)
_Des Moines._ Chamberlain Hotel. _Des Moines._ Bernhard & Turner
Auto Co.
Tips, bellboys, etc., as Vulcanizing tire $.75
usual $1.75 Storage .50
Drive in the converted 20 gals. gas. (22c.) 4.40
jitney 5.00 2 qts. oil .30
Dinner (3) 3.75
Tip .35
Breakfast, E. M. .75
Tip .25
Sundries .80
Coffee and toast (in room)
(2) 1.10
2 single rooms (bath
between) 5.50
1 single room and bath 2.50
Lunch to take with us 2.25
Ice cream .30
TENTH DAY’S RUN, DES MOINES TO OMAHA
(MAP NO. 10)
_Omaha._ Hotel Fontanelle. _Omaha._ Guy L. Smith Garage.
(Typical day.)
Hallboys, porters, Storage (2 days) $1.50
chambermaid $1.75 20 gals. gas 4.40
Dinner (3) 3.80 1 gal. oil .80
Tip .40
3 single rooms and baths
(at $3.50) (lovely) 10.50
Coffee (1) .30
Tip .15
Breakfast (E. M.) .50
Tip .20
Lunch, ladies’ dining
room (2) 2.70
Lunch (E. M.), club
lunch, men’s café .60
Tip .25
“Movies,” magazines, soda
water, etc. 1.30
Lunch to take with us 1.80
Ice cream .40
ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH DAYS’ RUN, OMAHA TO NORTH PLATTE
(MAPS NOS. 11 AND 12)
Lunch in car. Independent Garage, _Grand Island_.
15 gals. gas $3.30
_North Platte._ Union Pacific _North Platte._ J. S. Davis Auto
Hotel. Co.
3 rooms (no baths), supper Storage .50
and breakfast for three $7.50 17 gals. gas. (22c.) 3.74
Tips, postcards, etc. 1.35 1 gal. oil .60
Lunch to take with us 1.60
THIRTEENTH DAY’S RUN, NORTH PLATTE TO CHEYENNE
(MAP NO. 13)
_Cheyenne, Wyo._ Plains _Cheyenne._ Plains Hotel garage.
Hotel (brand new).
Tips, as usual $1.75 Storage $.50
Dinner and tip 3.85 20 gals. gas 4.40
3 single rooms and bath 9.00 2 gals. oil 1.20
Coffee and toast (in
room, for two) .90
Breakfast (E. M.) 1.00
FOURTEENTH DAY’S RUN, CHEYENNE TO COLORADO SPRINGS
(MAP NO. 14)
Lunch _Denver_. Brown’s
Palace Hotel $3.60
_Colorado Springs._ Antlers _Colorado Springs._ Mark
Hotel. Sheffel Motor Co. (highest
class garage).
Usual tips $1.75 Take off pan, stop leak, crank
An average dinner (3) 4.80 case and gaskets $8.80
Drive over “high drive” Vulc. case 4.50
(motors not allowed) Greasing and tightening bolts.
(for 3) 6.00 7 cups grease 1.40
Tip to driver .50 1 pt. kerosene .05
Enormous double room with 1 pt. cylinder oil .05
dressing room, bath 6.00 3 days’ storage 1.50
Single room and bath 3.50 35 × 4 B. L. Republic red
Coffee and toast (in room) .70 tube 7.35
Tip .25 4½ B. O. patch .90
(Especially attractively served.) 22 gals. gas 3.30
Breakfast (E. M.) (averaged) .95 3 gals. oil 2.40
Tip .25
Valet (pressing all our
clothes) 8.00
Laundry 6.20
FIFTEENTH DAY’S RUN, COLORADO SPRINGS TO TRINIDAD
(MAP NO. 15)
Lunched, _Pueblo_.
Vail Hotel $3.00
_Trinidad._ Hotel Cardenas Trinidad Novelty Works Co.
(our first of the Harvard
chain of hotels).
Am. plan, 3 good rooms with Storage $.50
3 baths and good “American 14 gals. gas. (15c.) 2.10
cooking” meals ($4.50) $13.50 2 qts. oil .40
$1.50 deducted for lunch
we were not to have. _Las Vegas_, 145 miles.
Tips 1.75
Incidentals, movies, etc. 1.30
Lunch to take with us 1.60
_Las Vegas._ The Castaneda. Las Vegas Auto Co.
(Did not telegraph ahead, so
could not get baths).
3 rooms ($3.25) $9.75 Storage $.50
American plan (lunch deducted). 15 gals. gas. 2.50
Lunch to take with us 1.50
Tips 1.75
Telegrams, sundries 2.50
SEVENTEENTH DAY’S RUN, LAS VEGAS TO ALBUQUERQUE
(MAP NO. 17)
Lunched _Santa Fé_.
(Own lunch.)
_Albuquerque._ Hotel Alvarado. Santa Fé Transcontinental Garage.
Usual tips $1.75 2 men, 1½ hours, patching
Telegrams and sundries 2.80 muffler and exhaust and
3 delightful rooms, 3 baths, tightening bolts, etc. $2.25
supper and breakfast
($4.25 each) 12.75
Extra amount of food to take:
Eggs .60
Cake .80
Sandwiches 2.10
Cocoa .20
Ice cream .30
EIGHTEENTH DAY’S RUN, ALBUQUERQUE TO WINSLOW
(MAP NO. 18)
Leave _Albuquerque_. Out in _Albuquerque._ Coleman Blank
desert. Garage (A 1 garage).
2 men, 4 hours each (night labor,
double rate), mending leak in
radiator, taking off exhaust,
filling grease cups, etc. $6.00
1 front spring shackle bolt .80
18 gals. gas in tank 5.40
10 gals. in cans 3.00
4 gals. oil 2.80
(First-class garage.)
_Winslow, Ariz._ Harvey Hotel. _Winslow._
Rooms, including meals $10.50 Car shipped, via A. T. & S. F. R.
Tips (most of luggage R. Freight to _Los Angeles_.
shipped with car) 1.25 Perfect system for motor
3 tickets _Winslow_ to shipment, no crating and no
_Los Angeles_ 65.85 delay. Freight charge $151.20
Extra tickets _Williams_
to _Grand Canyon_ 22.50
BY TRAIN, WINSLOW TO GRAND CANYON
(MAP NO. 19)
Lunch, _Williams_ $3.30 Car on freight.
_Grand Canyon, Ariz._ El Tovar Hotel.
2 rooms, bath between $10.00
1 room and bath 5.00
Including meals.
Mule down _Angel Trail_
(E. M.) 4.00
Moving pictures exhibited
at studios of trip through
Colorado river 3.00
Tips, per day, about $1.25
Sundries, etc. 1.80
BY TRAIN, GRAND CANYON TO LOS ANGELES
Drawing room, Pullman $14.00 Car on freight.
Lower berth, E. M. 4.00
3 breakfasts 2.60
Tip .30
3 lunches 3.15
Tip .35
_Los Angeles._ Alexandria Hotel. _Los Angeles._ Smith Bros.’
Garage (highest class garage).
1 hallboy (most luggage in
car) .25 Result of desert:
Dinner (very simple; for 1 front spring $11.00
three) 7.80 Tire and tube vulcanized 2.50
Theater 6.00 Exhaust pipe brazed 6.10
1 room and bath, _inside_ Exhaust pipe welded and
and _dark_ 7.00 repaired; install new
1 _very_ small outside gaskets and assemble;
room and bath, but dismantle muffler,
perfectly good room 4.50 repair and assemble;
Breakfasts and tips and paint muffler 21.50
luggage down 2.70 2 gaskets .90
Hiring a motor to move to Wash and polish 2.50
_Pasadena_ (while ours 21 gals. gas. (8c.!!) 1.68
being repaired) 10.00 1 gal. oil 1.00
Stopped with friends, but To charge battery .50
beautiful hotels in _Pasadena_.
RESUMED MOTORING. SHORT RUN LATE IN AFTERNOON, PASADENA TO RIVERSIDE
_Riverside._ Mission Inn.
(The _most_ enchanting hotel!)
3 rooms, baths, and food $18.00
Tips and sundries 3.60
TWENTY-THIRD DAY’S RUN, RIVERSIDE TO SAN DIEGO
(MAP NO. 23)
_San Diego._ U. S. Grant Hotel. White Star Motor Co.
Dinner $3.00 Storage, 3 days $1.50
Tip .35 20 gals. gas 3.20
(Average day.) 1 gal. oil .80
Hallboys, luggage up and Wash car 1.50
down 1.75
Chambermaid .75
3 rooms and baths 14.00
3 entrances exposition
(night) 1.50
Electric chair 2.00
Breakfast (3) 2.95
Exposition, 3 entrances
(morning) 1.50
Electric chair (_whole day
and held all 3 of us_) 4.00
Lunch at Exposition
restaurant (3) 1.50
Tip .30
Indian Village .75
Panama Canal (3) .75
Various side-shows, etc. 6.30
TWENTY-FOURTH DAY’S RUN, SAN DIEGO TO SANTA BARBARA
(MAPS NOS. 23 AND 24)
Lunched in car on road.
_Santa Barbara._ Hotel Potter. _Santa Barbara._ El Camino Real
Motor Co.
3 rooms and baths, a day, 25 gals. gas $2.50
including meals (none of Storage, 3 days 1.50
which we took; lunched and Oil (1 gal.) .80
dined out every day) $21.00
Bringing coffee to room
and tip .45
Lunch to take with us the
day we left 1.50
Ice-cream at druggist’s in
thermos jar .30
Sundries and telegrams 3.10
TWENTY-FIFTH DAY’S RUN, PASO ROBLES TO MONTEREY
(MAP NO. 26)
_Paso Robles, Cal._ Paso _Paso Robles._ Pioneer Garage.
Robles Springs Hotel.
Rooms with baths and two meals; 15 gals. gas $3.30
no luncheon charged for $12.75 Storage .50
Lunched at the R’s on our way.
Much farther _out_ of our
way than we thought, and had
supper at _Salinas_; had cocoa,
toast and omelette, plenty of it
and very good for 75c. for three.
TWENTY-SIXTH DAY’S RUN, MONTEREY TO SAN FRANCISCO
_Monterey._ Hotel Del Monte. _Monterey._ Hotel Del Monte Garage.
Rooms (perfectly _vast_) and 14 gals. gas $3.08
baths, American plan $18.00 Storage .50
Tips and breakfast tray 2.50 Oil .90
Lunch to take with us 1.60
Sundries 2.00
CHAPTER XXXIII
HOW FAR CAN YOU GO IN COMFORT?
This was the original query that we started out to answer, and second
“How long did it take you?” is the question that has been asked us more
often than any other.
Interpreting “comfort” as really meaning “luxury,” you can go, so far
as roads are concerned, only to Pueblo. So far as _high-class_ hotels
are concerned, there are two inhospitable distances. The first from
Omaha, Nebraska, to Cheyenne, Wyoming; the second between Albuquerque,
New Mexico, and Winslow, Arizona, over three hundred miles.[7] Between
Ash Fork, Arizona, and Needles, California, the distance is one hundred
and ninety-one miles, which over those roads is a long distance, but
perfectly possible to make in a day. Also it is by no means necessary
to motor across any of these sections, unless you choose to. Putting a
machine on a freight train is a very different matter from putting it
on a boat and shipping it to Europe. In the latter case, you have to
have a crate made as big and clumsy as a small house; then there are
always delays and complications about catching boats, and altogether it
is something of an ordeal. But to send a motor across our own country,
for as short or as long a distance as you please, is very simple. You
have only to drive it to the railroad station, roll it on an automobile
freight car with a door at the end, as in a small garage, take the next
passenger train yourself and skip as many or as few miles as you choose.
In America, automobile freight is wonderfully efficient, and is about as
fast as ordinary express. (At least the Santa Fé service is.)
We spent only two days at the Grand Canyon and the car arrived in Los
Angeles at the same time we did. There is only one deterrent to frequent
freight shipments: the cost. Automobiles weigh a good deal and the
freight charges are by the pound. From Winslow, Arizona, to Los Angeles—a
distance of 613 miles—costs $151.20 for a car weighing 4,000 pounds. A
2,000-pound car would cost, of course, exactly half that amount. If you
don’t want to go into the desert where hotels are great distances apart
and roads are not the smoothest in the world, a 3,000-pound car costs
$133.20 from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Barstow, California, after which
there are plenty of good hotels and beautiful California roads. The above
freight rates will be of interest to very few, as except in case of
accident or some unseen conditions no one who can help it, will want to
see their car, housed like a lonesome and abandoned dog, on a freight. If
it is a very crippled car, that is different; it is more like leaving it
in a nice cot in a hospital, where it can’t get hurt any more.
But on the subject of cross-continent freight, by which many people may
want to ship their cars home, the Transcontinental Freight Company’s
offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, etc., have a special rate
for through shipment of automobiles that is a very good thing to know
about. They ship three automobiles in one freight car, and for cars
weighing 4,500 pounds and _over_, they charge a maximum rate of $225.00,
or $5.50 a hundred pounds, from New York to San Francisco or vice versa.
A car weighing 3,000 pounds would cost $165.00.
The sole objection to this consolidated car load shipment is that they
only send out the cars when they have three auto consignments, and you
may have to wait a few days for the other two car spaces to be filled.
Also their service is only between the most important terminal points. If
you live somewhere in the middle distance between these terminal cities,
it might be cheaper, as well as more convenient, to ship by regular
railroad freight.
SOME DAY
Some day we are going back. Celia, E. M., and I have planned it. We must
have plenty of time, and take our whole families with us, so that she
will not have to hurry home to a husband, and I will not have to rush on
without pause, in order to get home to a younger son. When we go again,
we are going in two cars—one to help the other in case of need, and, if
possible, a third car to carry a camping outfit—and camp! Celia and I
both hate camping, so this proves the change that can come over you as
you go out into the West. I say “out into,” because I don’t in the least
mean being tunneled through on a limited train! The steel-walled Pullman
carefully preserves for you the attitude you started with. Plunging
into an uninhabited land is not unlike plunging into the surf. A first
shock! To which you quickly become accustomed, and find invigoratingly
delicious. Why difficulties seem to disappear; and why that magic land
leaves you afterwards with a persistent longing to go back, I can’t
explain; I only know that it is true.
The taste we had of the desert has something so appealing in the
reminiscence of its harsh immensity by day, its velvet mystery at
night—if only we might have gone further into it! We couldn’t then and
now it is lost to us, three thousand miles away!
FOOTNOTES
[1] See Map No. 1, page 285.
[2] One of the lovely white ones is the Garfield house, where the
President’s widow still lives.
[3] See Map No. 8, page 292.
[4] Since writing the above, the Union Pacific Hotel has unfortunately
burned down—and still more unfortunately for tourists, the railroad is
not building another, and will run a restaurant only.
[5] See Map No. 23, page 308.
[6] Only dinner and lunch we had in hotel.
[7] See Map No. 18. pp 302-303.
LIST OF MAPS
PAGE
Map showing the entire route by days’ runs 284
1. New York to Albany 285
2. Albany—Fort Plain—Utica—Syracuse 286
3. Syracuse to Buffalo 287
4. Buffalo—Lake Erie—Cleveland 288
5. Cleveland to Toledo 289
6. Toledo to South Bend 290
7. South Bend to Chicago 291
8. Chicago—Rochelle—Davenport 292
9. Davenport—Cedar Rapids—Des Moines 293
10. Des Moines to Omaha 294
11. Omaha to Grand Island 295
12. Grand Island to North Platte 296
13. North Platte to Cheyenne 297
14. Cheyenne to Colorado Springs 298
15. Colorado Springs to Trinidad 299
16. Trinidad to Las Vegas 300
17. Las Vegas to Albuquerque 301
18. Albuquerque to Winslow 302-303
19. Winslow to Grand Canyon 304
20. Grand Canyon to Ash Fork 305
21. Ash Fork to The Needles 306
22. The Needles to Barstow 307
23. Barstow—San Diego—Los Angeles 308
24. Los Angeles to Santa Barbara 309
25. Santa Barbara to Paso Robles 310
26. Paso Robles to Monterey 311
27. Monterey to San Francisco 312
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Map No. 1.]
[Illustration: Map No. 2.]
[Illustration: Map No. 3.]
[Illustration: Map No. 4.]
[Illustration: Map No. 5.]
[Illustration: Map No. 6.]
[Illustration: Map No. 7.]
[Illustration: Map No. 8.]
[Illustration: Map No. 9.]
[Illustration: Map No. 10.]
[Illustration: Map No. 11.]
[Illustration: Map No. 12.]
[Illustration: Map No. 13.]
[Illustration: Map No. 14.]
[Illustration: Map No. 15.]
[Illustration: Map No. 16.]
[Illustration: Map No. 17.]
[Illustration: Map No. 18.]
[Illustration: Map No. 19.]
[Illustration: Map No. 20.]
[Illustration: Map No. 21.]
[Illustration: Map No. 22.]
[Illustration: Map No. 23.]
[Illustration: Map No. 24.]
[Illustration: Map No. 25.]
[Illustration: Map No. 26.]
[Illustration: Map No. 27.]
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