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.