Abroad At Home Part 44

"There ain't," he said, succinctly.

Telling him to wait, we entered the door and came upon an elevator and a solitary waiter, whom we informed of our desire to see the place.

Obligingly he took us to an upper floor and opening the door of an apartment, showed us in.

"Of course," he said, "all of them are not so fine as this."

Alas for my imaginings, here was no rose-pink boudoir, no scene for a romantic meeting, but a room like one of those frightful parlor "sets"

one sometimes sees in the cheapest moving pictures. However, in the movies one is spared the color of such a room; one may see that the wallpaper is of hideous design, but one cannot see its ghastly scrambled browns and greens and purples. As I glanced at the various furnis.h.i.+ngs it seemed to me that each was uglier than the last, and when finally my eye fell upon an automatic piano in a sort of combination of dark oak and art nouveau, with a stained gla.s.s front and a nickel in the slot attachment, my dream of a setting for sumptuous and esthetic sin was dead. It was a room in which adventure would taste like stale beer.

My companion placed a nickel in the slot that fed the terrible piano.

There was a whirring sound, succeeded, not by low seductive strains, but by a sudden din of ragtime which crashed upon our ears as the decorations had upon our eyes.

Hastily I moved towards the door. My companion followed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The switchboard of the Chinatown telephone exchange is set in a shrine and the operators are dressed in Chinese silks]

"If the gentlemans would wish to see some other apartments--?" suggested the obliging waiter, as we closed the door.

"Oh, no thanks," I said. "This gives us a good idea of it."

As we moved towards the elevator the waiter asked politely: "The gentlemans have never been in here before?"

"No," I said, "we don't live in San Francisco. We had heard about this place and wanted to see it before we went away."

"It is a famous place," he said. Then, with a shake of the head, he added, "But before the Fire----Ah, the gentlemans should have seen it then!"

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

AN EXPOSITION AND A "BOOSTER"

The Panama Pacific Exposition will unquestionably be the most beautiful exposition ever held in the world. Its setting is both accessible and lovely, for it has the city upon one side and the bay and the Golden Gate upon the other.

Instead of being smooth and white like those of previous World's Fairs, the buildings have the streaked texture of travertine stone, with a general coloring somewhat warmer than that of travertine. Domes, doorways and other architectural details are rich in soft greens and blues, and the whole group of buildings, viewed from the hills behind, resembles more than anything else a great architectural drawing by Jules Guerin, made into a reality. And that, in effect, is what it is, for Guerin has ruled over everything that has to do with color, from the roads which will have a warm reddish tone, to the mural decorations and the lighting.

The exposition will hold certain records from the start. It will be the first great exposition ever held in a seaport. It will be, if I mistake not, the first to be ready on time. It will be the first held to celebrate a contemporaneous event, and its contemporaneousness will be reflected in its exhibitions, for, with the exception of a loan collection of art, nothing will be shown which has not been produced since the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. Also, I am informed, it is the first American exposition to have an appropriation for mural paintings.

True, there were mural paintings at the Chicago World's Fair, but they were not provided for by appropriation, having been paid for by the late Frank Millet, with money saved from other things.

Of the painters who will have mural decorations at the Exposition, but one, Frank Brangwyn, is not an American. Also, but one is a Californian, that one being Arthur F. Mathews.

The only mural decorations in the Fine Arts Building will be eight enormous panels by Robert Reid, in the interior of the dome, eighty feet above the floor. Four of the panels symbolize Art; the others the "four golds of California": poppies, citrus fruits, metallic gold and golden wheat. Among the various excursions to the Exposition, I hope there will be one for old-school mural decorators--men who paint stiff central figures in brick-red robes, enthroned, and surrounded by cog-wheels, propellers, and bales of cotton, with the invariable male figures petrified at a forge upon one side, and the invariable inert mothers and children upon the other--I hope there will be an excursion to take such painters out and show them the brave swirl and sweep of line, the light, and the nacreous color which this artist has thrown into his decorations at the Fair.

Aside from the work of Mr. Reid, Edward Simmons has done two large frieze panels of great beauty, Frank Vincent Du Mond, two others, Childe Ha.s.sam, a lunette in most exquisite tones, and William de Leftwich Dodge, Milton H. Bancroft and Charles Holloway, other canvases, so that, the finished exposition will be fairly jeweled with mural paintings.

It is hard to write about expositions and mural paintings, without seeming to infringe upon the prerogatives of Baedeker, and it is particularly difficult to do so if one has happened to be shown about by a professional shower-about of the singularly voluble type we encountered at the Exposition.

To the reader who has followed my companion and me in our peregrinations, now drawing to a close, it will be unnecessary to say that by the time we reached the Pacific Coast, we believed we had encountered every kind of "booster" that creeps, crawls, walks, crows, cries, bellows, barks or brays.

But we had not. It remained for the San Francisco Exposition to show us a new specimen, the most amazing, the most appalling, the most unbelievable of all: the booster who talks like a book.

It was on the day before we left for home that we were delivered up to him. We had been keeping late hours, and were tired in a happy, drowsy sort of way, so that the prospect of being wafted through the morning suns.h.i.+ne to the exposition grounds, in an open automobile, and cruising about, among the buildings, without alighting, and without care or worry, was particularly pleasing to us.

The automobile came at the appointed hour, and with it the being who was to be our pilot. Full of confidence and trust, we got into the car, but we had not proceeded more than a few blocks, and heard our cicerone speak more than a few hundred thousand words, before our bosoms became filled with that "vague unrest" which, though you may never have experienced it yourself, you have certainly read about before.

I had not planned to have any vague unrest in this book, but it stole in upon me, unexpectedly, out there by the Golden Gate, just at the end of my journey, when I was off my guard, believing that the perils of the trip were past.

We had driven in that automobile but a few minutes, and had heard our guide speak not more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred thousand words, when my first vague feeling turned into a certainty that all was not for the best; and when I caught the eye of my companion and saw that its former drowsy look had given place to one of wild alarm, I knew that he shared my apprehension.

By the time we reached the fair grounds I had become so perturbed that I hardly knew where we were.

"Stop here," I heard our captor say to the chauffeur.

The car drew up between two glorious terracotta palaces. Directly ahead was the blue bay, and beyond it rose Mount Tamalpais in a gray-green haze. Our custodian arose from his seat, stepped to the front of the tonneau, and turning, fixed first one of us and then the other with a gaze that seemed to eat its way into our vitals. Through an awful moment of portentous silence we stared back at him like fascinated idiots. He raised one arm and swept it around the horizon. Then, of a sudden, he was off:

"Born a drowsy Spanish hamlet, fed on the intoxicants of man's l.u.s.t for gold, developed by an adventurous and a baronial agriculture, isolated throughout its turbulent history from the home lands of its diverse peoples, and compelled to the outworking of its own ethical and social standards, the sovereign City of San Francisco has developed within her confines an individuality and a versatility, equaled by but few other cities, and surpa.s.sed by none."

At that point he took a breath, and a fresh start:

"It mellowed the sternness of the Puritan and disciplined the das.h.i.+ng Cavalier. It appropriated the unrivaled song and pristine art of the Latin. Every good thing the Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Gaul, Iberian, Teuton or almond-eyed son of Confucius had to offer, it seized upon and made part of its life."

Another breath, and it began again:

"Here is no thralldom of the past, but a trying of all things on their merits, and a searching of every proposal or established inst.i.tution by the one test: Will it make life happier?"

As he went on I was becoming conscious of an over-mastering desire to do something to stop him. I felt that I must interrupt to save my reason, so I pointed in the direction of Mount Tamalpais, and cried:

"What is that, over there?"

His eyes barely flickered towards the mountain, as he answered:

"That is Mount Tamalpais which may be reached by a journey of nineteen miles by ferry, electric train and steam railroad. This lofty height rears itself a clean half-mile above the sparkling waters of our unrivaled bay. The mountain itself is a domain of delight. From its summit the visitor may see what might be termed the ground plan of the greatest landlocked harbor on the Pacific Ocean, and of the region surrounding it--a region destined to play so large a part in the affairs of men."

"Good G.o.d!" I heard my companion e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e in an agonized whisper.

But if our tormentor overheard he paid not the least attention.

"We know," he continued in his sing-song tone, "that you will find here what you never found, and never can find, elsewhere. We shall try to augment your pleasure by indicating something of its origin in the city's romantic past. We shall give you your bearings in time and place.

We shall endeavor to make smooth your path. We shall tell you what to seek and how to find it, and mayhap, what it means. We shall endeavor to endow you with the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and the heart to understand. In short, it is to help the visitor to comprehend, appreciate and enjoy 'the City Loved Around the World,' with its surpa.s.singly beautiful environs, that this little handbook is issued."

"That _what_?" shrieked my companion.

The human guidebook calmly corrected himself.

"That I am here with you to-day," he said.