“Yes, except that father is a sort of double personality. Privately, you know, dad is a cynical cosmopolitan, and he thinks America is a hick joint except for half a dozen of his own cronies. But you know how he stands in public, wrapping the flag around him, and doing the big bowwow at Japan and Mexico, and standing pat with the pattest element of the Grand Old Party’s patriots. Dad knows who cuts the melons. Dolly and I are sick of that. We want to come in on the ground floor and on the square. We want to have careers that we have made for ourselves, and not be handed something on a silver plate by one of father’s friends. Then we are sort of sick of this ‘cosmopolitan’ stuff—which means only that you hate your own things and can’t even smoke American tobacco unless it’s been imported from England. We’ve got so tired of it that we are going to organize a new party with Flapjacks and Ham and Eggs for our slogan. The fact is, we get a sort of kick out of our feeling for the country—as our own, you know, a poor thing but our own; and we want to try and see if we can’t be honest-to-goodness Americans before we die—if you understand what I mean.”
“Bully for you!” I cried, in spite of my neutral intentions.
“But mother,” he continued, “has been reading the Barsetshire novels all summer, and Trollope always makes her homesick for the ‘old home.’ She is crazy anyway over the English cathedral towns, and hopes to be buried in one when she dies. And just now she’s got a kind of Golden-Age complex. She hopes to save me from the democracy by sending me to one of the old Eastern colleges, where I shall associate with ‘young gentlemen’ from Anglicized prep schools, and live in a Gothic dormitory, and be tutored by Rhodes scholars, who are mostly nuts. Dorothy and I have decided that we want to go to a State University and get acquainted with the Plain People. And so mother carries us off to Santo Espiritu and segregates us with the Holy Father, in the hope that the seeds of grace and exclusiveness will take root in our unsanctified hearts.”
“She is ‘getting results’!” I said to myself; and then aloud: “But don’t you like California?”
“Sure!” he said, with his father’s flickering smile. “Who wouldn’t? It’s just the place to go to Heaven in. But it doesn’t seem like our own old Yankee Land out here. No one hurries. No one but the Japanese farmer does a lick of work—that’s why they hate him so. The white people just sit around and wait for the Mid-Westerners to bring them their savings. Unless you are descended from a Forty-niner, no one cares who your grandfather was, or whether you are a Mormon or a Christian Scientist or a Presbyterian or a Seventh Day Adventist. All the best things in the State are public property and are out of doors where everyone can get at them. There isn’t any ‘Main Street.’ A few of them keep office hours, but they picnic going to and fro; and up in San Francisco the business men take a sea trip every morning and evening. It all feels like a late afternoon in Arcadia.”
I glanced at my watch and remarked that we must be near Santo Espiritu.
“Yes,” said Oliver; “but let me tell you a little more about the Native Sons. They are having an influence on Dolly’s and my religious beliefs. They get so much harmless pleasure out of the world. They sit around eating apricots and looking at the poppy fields most of the time. When they are very energetic, they get up and recite their own verses, or they go into the redwoods and stage a forest play, or, maybe, do some Greek dances in the almost-altogether, interpreting the Song of Solomon or the Eden story. When they weary of improving their minds with art and song, the whole white population goes camping up around Tahoe or hiking in the high Sierras or motoring down to Coronado or sword-fishing over at Catalina. Easterners and Midlanders who come here late in life easily get mixed up, they tell me, in these new religions, the way Cousin Ethelwyn did; but the real Californian doesn’t take interest in the future life. The present is good enough for him. ‘Wasn’t it too bad,’ I heard one of them say, ‘that Saint John didn’t see Santa Barbara before he wrote Revelation’! And Dorothy and I have sort of reasoned it out that the so-called decay of religion in our generation is rather complimentary to Providence, indicating that we haven’t got such a grouch as some of those old boys had against the land that the Lord gave to our fathers.”
“That is a discussible point of view,” I admitted.
“But here,” he said, “is where we turn off from the main road. It’s only a little way now. You’ll see, before you’ve been five minutes in Santo Espiritu, what a colony of aliens we are, practising our austerities in our august retreat on the outskirts of these careless worldlings.”