Roughing it De Luxe

by Irvin S. Cobb

Just as soon as you cross the Arizona line you discover that you have entered the climate belt. As your train whizzes past the monument that marks the boundary an earnest-minded passenger leans over, taps you on the breastbone and informs you that you are now in California, and wishes to know, as man to man, whether you don't regard the climate as about the niftiest article in that line you ever experienced! At the hotel the young lady of the telephone switchboard, who calls you in the morning, plugs in the number of your room; and when you drowsily answer the bell she informs you that it is now eight-thirty and—What do you think of the climate? The boy who sells you a paper and the youth who blackens your shoes both show solicitude to elicit your views upon this paramount subject.

At breakfast the waiter finds out—if he can—how you like the climate before finding out how you like your eggs. When you pay your bill on going away the clerk somehow manages to convey the impression that the charges have been remarkably moderate considering what you have enjoyed in the matter of climate. Punching your round-trip ticket on the train starting East, the conductor has a few well-merited words to speak on behalf of the climate of the Glorious Southland, the same being the favorite pet name of the resident classes for the entire lower end of the state of California.

Everybody is doing it, including press, pulpit and general public. The weather story—beg pardon, the climate story—is the most important thing in the daily paper, especially if a blizzard has opportunely developed back East somewhere and is available for purposes of comparison. At Los Angeles, which is the great throbbing heart of the climate belt, I went as a guest to a stag given at the handsome new clubhouse of a secret order renowned the continent over for its hospitality and its charities. We sat, six or seven hundred of us, in a big assembly hall, smoked cigars and drank light drinks, and witnessed some corking good sparring bouts by non-professional talent. There were two or three ministers present—fine, alert representatives of the modern type of city clergymen. When eleven o'clock came the master of ceremonies announced the toast, To Our Absent Brothers! and called upon one of those clergymen to respond to it.

The minister climbed up on the platform—a tall man, with a thick crop of hair and a profile as clean cut as a cameo and as mobile as an actor's, the face of a born orator. He could talk, too, that preacher! In language that was poetic without being sloppy he paid a tribute to the spirit of fraternity that fairly lifted us out of our chairs. Every man there was touched, I think—and deeply touched; no man who believed in the brotherhood of man, whether he practiced it or not, could have listened unmoved to that speech. He spoke of the absent ones. Some of them he said had answered the last rollcall, and some were stretched upon the bed of affliction, and some were unavoidably detained by business in the East; and he intimated that those in the last category who had been away for as long as three weeks wouldn't know the old place when they got back!—Applause.

This naturally brought him round to the subject of Los Angeles as a city of business and homes. He pointed out its marvelous growth—quoting freely from the latest issue of the city directory and other reliable authorities to prove his figures; he made a few heartrousing predictions touching on its future prospects, as tending to show that in a year or less San Francisco and other ambitious contenders along the Coast would be eating at the second table; he peopled the land clear back to the mountains with new homes and new neighbors; and he wound up, in a burst of vocal glory, with the most magnificent testimonial for the climate I ever heard any climate get. Did he move his audience then? Oh, but didn't he move them, though! Along toward the close of the third minute of uninterrupted cheering I thought the roof was gone.

On the day after my arrival I made one very serious mistake; in fact, it came near to being a fatal one. I met a lady, and naturally right away she asked me the customary opening question. Every conversation between a stranger and a resident begins according to that formula. Still it seemed to me an inopportune hour for bringing up the subject. It was early in March and the day was one of those days which a greenhorn from the East might have been pardoned for regarding as verging upon the chilly—not to say the raw. Also, it seemed to be raining. I say it seemed to be raining, because no true Southern Californian would admit any actual defects in the climatic arrangements. If pressed he might concede that ostensibly an infinitesimal percentage of precipitation was descending, and that apparently the mercury had descended a notch or two in the tube. Further than that, in the absence of the official reports, he would not care to commit himself.

You never saw such touching loyalty anywhere! Those scoffing neighbors of Noah who kept denying on there was going to be any flood right up to the moment when they went down for the third time were rank amateurs alongside a seasoned resident of Los Angeles. I was newly arrived, however, and I hadn't acquired the ethics yet; and, besides, I had contracted a bad cold and had been taking a number of things for it and for the moment was, as you might say, full of conflicting emulsions. So, in reply to this lady's question, I said it occurred to me that the prevalent atmospheric conditions might for the nonce stand a few trifling alterations without any permanent ill effects.

I repeat that this was a mistake; for this particular lady was herself a recent arrival, and of all the incurable Californians, the new ones are the most incurable. She gave me one look—but such a look! From a reasonably solid person I became first a pulp and then a pap; and then, reversing the processes of creation as laid down in Genesis, first chapter, and first to fifth verses, I liquefied and turned to gas, and darkness covered me, and I became void and without form, and passed off in the form of a vapor, leaving my clothes inhabited only by a blushing and embarrassed emptiness. When the outraged lady abated the intensity of her scornful gaze and I painfully reassembled my astral body out of space and projected it back into my earthly tenement again, I found I'd shrunk so in these various processes that nothing I wore fitted me any longer.

I shall never commit that error again. I know better now. If I were a condemned criminal about to die on a gallows at the state penitentiary, I would make the customary announcement touching on my intention of going straight to Heaven—condemned criminals never seem to have any doubt on that point—and then in conclusion I would add that after Southern California, I knew I wouldn't care for the climate Up There. Then I would step serenely off into eternity, secure in the belief that, no matter how heinous my crime might have been, all the local papers would give me nice obituary notices.