X
San Diego. — The Bathing-House. — Alarming Disappearance. — The Mystery Solved. — Carriage Drive to Mission Cliffs. — Coronado Beach. — The Museum. — The Hotel. — High Fog.
Our ride of four hours from Los Angeles to San Diego was rather warm, and after our arrival we cared to do little more than lounge about the station in the evening. Near by was a most inviting bathing-house, beautifully fitted up with all sorts of appliances for comfort, not the least of these being a superb swimming-pool, whose tempered waters were sending to us insinuating invitations to take a good plunge and enjoy the charms of their dark, silent depths. It was too soon after eating, and we put it all off until next day.
When we men folk returned to our car from the adjacent bath-house, a feeling of gloom and melancholy settled down upon us. The "Lucania" was silent and lonely, save for the servants. Not another soul was visible. The ladies had all disappeared!
Here was an alarming state of affairs. Those who had wives, were as though they had them not, and those who had not wives, were as though they had. We were all alike disturbed and miserable at the unaccountable absence of our better halves. What had become of them? We seemed to be quite on the outskirts of San Diego. The wide streets, stretching away in darkness, looked terrible and forbidding. Who could tell what desperado might not have made away with them? It would be a mere matter of a sudden stoop down from a horse, perhaps, a seizure by a pair of strong arms, a wild ride over the boundless plain, and misery would settle down upon us as another mysterious disappearance had to be recorded, and remain possibly forever unexplained. We called a council of war, so to speak. We determined to investigate, and boldly plunged into the unknown town in search of our lost ones. Every man we met had the possibilities in him, to our excited imaginations, of a double-dyed cut-throat; every saloon was a gate of Hades; but we bravely pushed on. We found ourselves soon in rather an attractive street. Shops were gay with life. The ever-present electric lamps gave us their cold glitter and their fantastic shadows, until at last, joyful sight, we saw all our ladies shopping to their hearts' content in a Chinese curio shop, where a great, bland, round-faced Chinaman, like a six-foot baby, was all smiles and attention to the purchasing crowd. We joined them as if nothing had happened, and remained with them until we saw them safe back. All the preceding is summed up in one of the ladies' diaries briefly thus: "We arrived at San Diego at 6 P.M. After tea the ladies of the party started out to see the town, visited two curio shops, and went back to the car before nine, and received a very severe scolding for going off by ourselves." The italics in the above are mine.
I think the ladies served us right, for we should have awaited their pleasure; but who could have dreamed that they wanted to do anything more than rest after their fatiguing ride?
The comical side of the whole thing is this: that our ladies, in their little independent cruise in San Diego, were as safe as if they were in any Eastern village. San Diego is, in fact, a typical American town of the better class, nurtured by Boston capital, so largely invested in stock of the Santa Fé Railroad, whose western terminus is at San Diego, which is also peopled by New Englanders, who have duly brought with them to the Pacific Slope, a full and perennial supply of their steady habits.
In our one full day in San Diego we saw much to interest us. A carriage drive took some of us over Mission Cliffs, others went round in the great, double-decked tram cars, and all took in the vast extent of San Diego, as it lies on a huge, sloping shelf over the Pacific, giving constant prospects of the mountains and the sea. We also visited Coronado, the city so called, the beach, and the hotel. The city, on the great peninsula between San Diego Bay, a beautiful expanse of water, and the great ocean beyond, has, of course, what every Western effort has—a future.
The beach, where the great rollers of the Pacific dash in, was magnificent; but one cannot safely bathe thereon. The water is heroically cold, and the surf too fierce and heavy for ordinary mortals. The sea water, warmed, tamed, and confined in a bath-house, is what is safest to take.
I quite sympathized with one of our ladies who declared to me that she was never more disappointed in her life than with the beach at Coronado. "Why," said she, "I thought I could gather shells and sea-weed, and pick pretty pebbles; but there is nothing." Well, she was right in a sense. Perhaps it was because that particular spot was harried over and over by visitors à la Coney Island, so that it was bare of all those curious things "cast up by the sea;" or perhaps it was that the huge surf constantly tumbling in raises the sand perpetually, and buries all objects, whatever they may be, rapidly out of sight.