The third scene, as I have already intimated, was rewritten for the second year and much improved, though the staging remained practically unchanged. In the first draft the heroine falls a victim to the bullets of American soldiers, who fire upon the helpless Indians coming to bury their dead priest in the ruined cloisters of San Juan Capistrano. She had spurned the love advances of the captain, who rushes into the ruin only to find her breathing her last. All of which seemed incongruous and left a painful recollection with the audience; but on our second visit to San Gabriel playhouse we were delighted by a happy change in the ending of the play.
The new version shows the ivy-covered ruins of Capistrano seventy years later than the time of the second act. Confiscation by the Mexican Government has ruined the property of the missions and American occupation still further hastened their dissolution and decay. An old Indian shepherd is telling his story to a youth and declares that he was the first Indian child baptized by the sainted Serra. He is interrupted by the entrance of Senora Yorba, a lovely, devout Spanish lady who grieves over the destruction of the old regime and comes at times to muse and pray at the deserted altar, and in a graceful monologue she laments the downfall of the mission and the cessation of its beneficent work. While she is at her devotions a small company of wretched Indians enter the ruin, bearing the dead body of the padre, who ministered to them in their retreats in the hills; they would bury him in the consecrated ground of the old mission. Senora Yorba mourns with the Indians and joins them in laying the body to rest. In the folds of the dead priest's robe she discovers the golden chalice, richly bejeweled, which he had rescued from the ruined church and which the loyal natives—though they knew its value—would have interred with him. In the closing scene of the play the Senora, with a look of rapt devotion, raises the golden cup aloft and solemnly promises that she will lay it on the altar of Santa Barbara, the nearest mission still unforsaken.
The curtain falls on the melancholy scene; we pass out into the May-day sunlight and gaze reverently on the gray old mission across the way. The play has given to it new meaning, just as Oberammergau on another May day gave us a new conception of the old story that has never lost its interest to humanity. I am very sure that there are few people who witness either the famous and very ancient play of the Bavarian peasants or the very recent and less pretentious production of the artists of San Gabriel, who are not spiritually elevated and benefited thereby.
Within easy reach of the city, either by trolley or motor, is San Fernando, the next link in the mission chain to the north of San Gabriel. We made our first journey thither on a showery April day, following a steady downpour for nearly twenty-four hours. The country was at its best, as it always is in California after a spring rain. We edged our way out of the city, along the wide sweep of Sunset Boulevard to Los Feliz Avenue, which soon brought us into the San Fernando road at Glendale. From here a straight-away dash of twenty miles to the northwest takes one to the mission—one of the easiest and most delightful runs in the vicinity of Los Angeles.
CORRIDOR, SAN FERNANDO MISSION
From Photograph by Pillsbury
It was a brilliant day, despite a dark cloud-curtain whose fringes hovered over the peaks of the rugged mountains in the north toward which we were rapidly coursing. We swept along the narrow valley—then a desert, cactus-studded plain—reaching on our left to low, green hills which stood in sharp outline against the deep azure of the sky. On the right, closer at hand, were low foothills, dominated by the distant mountains—their summits white with snow and touched in places by clouds of dazzling brilliance. Directly in front of us we saw the glistening phalanx of a summer shower, which rapidly advanced to meet us, giving us barely time to raise our cape top before it was upon us. Such a rain in our home state would have meant liquid roads and constant danger, but on this perfect highway it only heightened our enjoyment as our steadily purring engine carried us along the smooth wet surface. The green hills to the left and the cloudless sky above them seemed doubly glorious through the crystal curtain of the falling raindrops.
By the time we reached the village of San Fernando, the rain had ceased and we paused to inquire the whereabouts of the mission. We saw about us at the time a straggling, unsubstantial-looking hamlet which bore little resemblance to the smart, well-improved town that greeted us a year later—but so it often is in California. Then a new double boulevard with a parked center stretched away to the southeast—the work of an enterprising land company—with the inviting sign, "Speed limit one hundred miles per hour," but we were content with a fraction of this generous figure. The mission is about a mile out of the town and is best approached by the new boulevard, since this gives the advantage of a little distance for the front view, which the public road, directly passing, does not allow. Before you see the building itself you will note the two giant palms, over a century old, and perhaps a hundred feet high—all that remain of the many planted by the monks.
The structure is long, low, solid-looking—utterly devoid of artistic touches save the graceful, rounded arches of the long "portello" and the simple grille-work of wrought iron that still covers a few of the windows—work of the rude artisans of a hundred years ago. The old tile roof is the glory of San Fernando; the huge, semicircular tiles are time-stained to a color combination to delight the eye of an artist. Moss greens, silver grays, dull reds, and soft browns predominate, blending together in a most pleasing manner. Back from the mission extends a row of old-time living apartments, now little more than shapeless heaps of adobe, while the huge church, a little farther to the rear, seems approaching the final stages of dissolution. It was once a massive structure, built as well as loving care and endless industry could do—walls five or six feet in thickness, bound together at the top by heavy beams perhaps fifteen inches square. Traces of the ancient decorations appear, though they are nearly effaced by the weather, to which they have been long exposed. Apparently the earthquake began the work of ruin and long neglect has done the rest.