You aren't there yet, however. Next you round a sloping shoulder of a hill and slide down into a shore road, with the beating, creaming surf on one side, and on the other a long succession of the sort of architectural triumphs that have made Coney Island famous. You negotiate another small ridge and there, suddenly spread out before you, is the Golden Gate, with the city itself cuddled in between the ocean and the friendly protecting mountains at its back. The Seal Rocks are there, and the Cliff House, and the Presidio, and all. New York has a wonderful harbor entrance; Nature did some of it and man did the rest. San Francisco has an even more wonderful one, and the hand of man did not need to touch it. When Nature got through with it, it was a complete and satisfactory job.
The first convincing impression the newcomer gets of San Francisco is that here is a permanent city—a city that has found itself, has achieved its own personality, and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, because they are growing so fast, certain of the other Coast cities strike the casual observer as having just been put up. I was told that a man who lives on a residential street of San Diego has to mark his house with chalk when he leaves of a morning in order to know it when he gets home at night. A real-estate agent told me so, and I do not think a Southern California real-estate agent would deceive anybody—more particularly a stranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' main business district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middle of Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky—as alive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you are at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.
San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like any city on earth except San Francisco. Once you get away from the larger hotels, which are accurate copies of the metropolitan article of the East, even to the afternoon tea-fighting mêlées of the women, you find yourself in a city that is absolutely individual and distinctive. It impresses its originality upon you; it presents itself with an air of having been right there from the beginning—and this, too, in spite of the fact that the ravages of the great fire are still visible in old cellar excavations and piles of débris. Practically every building in the main part of the town has been rebuilt within eight years and is still new. The scars are fresh, but the spirit is old and abides.
This same essence of individuality tinctures the lives, the manners and the conversations of the people. They do not strike you as being Westerners or as being transplanted Easterners; they are San Franciscans. Even when all other signs fail you may, nevertheless, instantly discern certain unfailing traits—to wit, as follows: 1—A San Franciscan shudders with ill-concealed horror when anybody refers to his beloved city as Frisco—which nobody ever does unless it be a raw alien from the other side of the continent; 2—He does not brag of the climate with that constancy which provides his neighbor of Los Angeles a never-failing topic of congenial conversation; and 3—He assures you with a regretful sighing note in his voice that the old-time romance disappeared with the destruction of the old-time buildings, the old-time resorts and the old-time neighborhoods.
It has been my experience that romance is always in the past tense anyhow. Romance is a commodity that was extremely plentiful last week or last year or last century, but for the moment they are entirely out of it, and can't say with any degree of certainty when a fresh stock will be coming in. This is largely true of all the formerly romantic cities I know anything about, and it appears to be especially true of San Francisco. Romance invariably acquires added value after it has vanished; in this respect it is very much like a history-making epoch. An epoch rarely seems to create any great amount of excitement when it is in process of epoching, or at least the excitement is only temporary and soon abates. Afterward we look back upon it with a feeling of longing, but when it was actually coming to pass we took it—after the first shock of surprise—as a matter of course.
No doubt our children and our children's children will read in the text-books that the first decade of the twentieth century was distinguished as the age when the auto and tango came into use, and people learned to fly, and grown men wore bracelet watches and carried their handkerchiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine because they, too, did not live in those stirring times. But we of the present generation who recently passed through these experiences have already accepted them without undue excitement, just as our forefathers in their day accepted the submarine cable, the galvanic battery and the congress gaiter.
EVEN THE PLACE WHERE THE TURKEY TROT ORIGINATED WAS TROTLESS AND QUIET
Age and antiquity give an added value to everything except an egg. In my own case I know how it was with regard to the Egyptian scarab. For years I felt that I could never rest satisfied until I had gone to Egypt and had personally broken into the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some crumbly old Rameses, and with my own hands had ravished from it a mummified specimen of that fabled beetle which the ancients worshiped and buried with them in their tombs. But not long ago I made the discovery that, in coloring, habits, customs and general walk and conversation, the scarab of the Egyptians was none other than the common tumblebug of the Southern dirt roads. Right there was where I lost interest in the scarab. He was no novelty to me—not after that he wasn't. As a boy I had known him intimately.