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.