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!
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?