The Native Son Part 2

I began that last paragraph with the phrase, "A few years ago". But since that time a whole era seems to have pa.s.sed--that heart-breaking era of the Great War. And now the Native Son has entered into and emerged from a new and terrible game. He has needed--and I doubt not displayed--all that he has of strength, natural and developed; of keenness and coolness; of bravery and fort.i.tude; of capacity to endure and yet josh on.

Perhaps after all, though, the best example of the Native Son's fairness was his enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the Native Daughter and the way in which he did it. Sometime, when the stories of all the suffrage fights are told, we shall get the personal experiences of the women who worked in that whirlwind campaign. It will make interesting reading; for it is both dramatic and picturesque. And it will redound forever and ever and ever to the glory of the Native Son.

The Native Son--in the truest sense of the romantic--is a romantic figure. He could scarcely avoid being that, for he comes from the most romantic State in the Union and, if from San Francisco, the most romantic city in our modern world. It is, I believe, mainly his sense of romance that drives him into the organization which he himself has called the Native Sons of the Golden West; an adventurous instinct that has come down to us from mediaeval times, urging men to form into congenial company for offence and defence, and to offer personality the opportunity for picturesque masquerade.

That romantic background not only explains the Native Son but the long line of extraordinary fiction, with California for a background, which California has produced. California though is the despair of fiction writers. It offers so many epochs; such a mixture of nationalities; so many and such violently contrasted atmospheres, that it is difficult to make it credible. The gold rush... the pioneers... the Vigilantes ...

the Sand Lot days... San Francis...o...b..fore the fire... the period of reconstruction. As for the drama lying submerged everywhere in the labor movement... the novelists have not even begun to mine below the surface.

To the fiction-writer, the real, everyday life is so dramatic that the temptation is to subst.i.tute for invention the literal records of some literary moving-picture machine.

In fact, all the time you stay in California you're living in a story.

The San Franciscans will inundate you with stories of that old San Francisco. And what stories they are! The water-front, Chinatown, the Barbary Coast and particularly that picturesque neighborhood, south of Market Street--here were four of the great drama-breeding areas of the world. The San Franciscans of the past generation will tell you that the new San Francisco is tamed and ordered. That may be all true. But to one at least who never saw the old city, romance shows her bewildering face everywhere in the new one. Almost anything can happen there and almost everything does. Life explodes. It's as though there were a romantic dynamite in solution in the air. You make a step in any direction and--bang!--you b.u.mp into adventure. There is something about the sparkle and bustle and gaiety of the streets... There is something about the friendliness and the vivacity of the people... There is something about the intimacy and color and gaiety of the restaurants....

Let me tell some stories to prove my point. Anybody who has lived in San Francisco has heard them by scores. I pick one or two at random.

A group of Native Sons were once dining in one of the little Bohemian restaurants of San Francisco. Two of them made a bet with the others that they could kiss every woman in the room. They went from table to table and in mellifluous accents, plus a strain of hyperbole, explained their predicament to each lady, concluding with a respectful demand for a kiss. Every woman in the room (with the gallant indulgence of her swain) acceded to this amazing request. In fifteen minutes all the kisses were collected and the wager won. I don't know on which this story reflects the greater credit--the Native Daughter or the Native Son. But I do know that it couldn't have happened anywhere but in California.

The first time I visited San Francisco shortly after the fire, I was walking one day in rather a lonely part of the city. There were many burnt areas about: only a few pedestrians. Presently, I saw a man and woman leaning against a fence, absorbed in conversation. Apparently they did not hear my approach; they were too deep in talk. They did not look out of the ordinary and, indeed, I should not have given them a second glance if, as I pa.s.sed, I had not heard the woman say, "And did you kill anyone else?"

A man told me that once early in the morning he was walking through Chinatown. There was n.o.body else on the street except, a little distance ahead, a child carrying a small bundle. Suddenly just as she pa.s.sed, a panel in one of the houses slid open... a hand came out... the child slipped the bundle into the hand... the hand disappeared... the wall panel closed up. The child trotted on as though nothing had happened...

disappeared around the corner. When my friend reached the house, it was impossible to locate the panel.

A reporter I know was leaving his home one morning when there came a ring at his telephone. "There is something wrong in apartment number blank, house number blank, on your street," said Central. "Will you please go over there at once?" He went. Somehow he got into the house.

n.o.body answered his ring at the apartment; he had to break the door open. Inside a very beautiful girl in a gay negligee was lying dead on a couch, a bottle of poison on the floor beside her. He investigated the case. The dead girl had been in the habit of calling a certain number, and she always used a curious identifying code-phrase. The reporter investigated that number. The rest of the story is long and thrilling, but finally he ran down a group of lawbreakers who had been selling the dead girl drugs, were indirectly responsible for her suicide. Do you suppose such a ripe story could have dropped straight from the Tree of Life into the hand of a reporter anywhere except in California?

A woman I know was once waiting on the corner for a car. Near, she happened casually to notice, was a Chinaman of a noticeable, dried antiquity, shuffling along under the weight of a bunch of bananas. She was at that moment considering a curious mental problem and, in her preoccupation, she drew her hand down the length of her face in a gesture that her friends recognize as characteristic. Did she, by accident, stumble on one of the secret signals of a great secret traffic? That is her only explanation of what followed. For suddenly the old Chinaman shuffled to her side, un.o.btrusively turned his back towards her. One of the bananas on top the bunch, easy to the reach of her hand, was opened, displaying itself to be emptied of fruit. But in its place was something--something little, wrapped in tissue paper. Her complete astonishment apparently warned the vendor of drugs of his mistake. He scuttled across the street; in a flash had vanished in a back alley.

One could go on forever. I cannot forbear another. A woman was pa.s.sing through the theatrical district of San Francisco one night, just before the theatres let out. The street was fairly deserted. Suddenly she was accosted by a strange gentleman of suave address. Obviously he had dallied with the demon and was spectacularly the worse for it. He was carrying an enormous, a very beautiful--and a very expensive--bouquet.

In a short speech of an impa.s.sioned eloquence and quite as flowery as his tribute, he presented her with the bouquet. She tried to avoid accepting it. But this was not, without undue publicity, to be done.

Finally to put an end to the scene, she bore off her booty. She has often wondered what actress was deprived of her over-the-foot-lights trophy by the sudden freak of an exhilarated messenger.

I know that the Native Son works and works hard. The proof of that is California itself. San Francisco twice rebuilt, the progressive city of Los Angeles, all the merry enterprising smaller California cities and towns. But, somehow, he plays so hard at his work and works so hard at his play that you are always wondering whether it's all the time he works or all the time he plays. At any rate, out of his work comes gaiety and out of his play seriousness. His activities are so many that when I try to make my imagined program of his average day, I should provide one not of twenty-four hours, but of seventy-two.

I imagine him going down to his office at about nine in the morning, working until noon as though driven by steam and electricity; then lunching with a party of Native Sons, all filled with jocund j.a.peful joshing Native Son humor which brims over in showers of Native Son wit. I imagine him returning to an afternoon of brief but concentrated strenuous labor, then going for a run in the Park, or tennis, or golf, ending with a swim; presenting himself fine and fit at his club at first-c.o.c.ktail time. I imagine him dining at his club or at a restaurant or at a stag-dinner, always in the company of other joyous Native Sons; going to the Orpheum, motoring through the Park afterwards; and finally indulging in another bite before he gets to bed. Sometime during the process, he has a.s.sisted in playing a graceful practical joke on a trusting friend. He has attended a meeting to boost a big, new developing project for California. He has made a speech. He has contributed to some pressing charity. He has swung into at least two political fights. He has attended a pageant or a fiesta or a carnival.

And he has managed to conduct his wooing of that beautiful (and fortunate) Native Daughter who will some day become Mrs. Native Son.

Really my favorite hour is every hour.

Every hour in San Francisco is a charming hour. Perhaps my favorite comes anywhere between six and eight. Then "The City" is brilliant with lights; street lamps, shop windows, roof advertising signs. The hotels are a-dance and a-dazzle with life. Flowers and greens make mats and cushions of gorgeous color at the downtown corners. At one end of Market Street, the Ferry building is outlined in electricity, sometimes in color; at the other end the delicate outlines of Twin Peaks are merging with night. Perhaps swinging towards the horizon there is a crescent moon--that gay strong young bow which should be the emblem of California's perpetual youth and of her augmenting power. Perhaps close to the crescent flickers the evening star--that jewel on the brow of night which should be a symbol of San Francisco's eternal sparkle. And, perhaps floating over the City, a sheer high fog mutes the crescent's gold to a daffodil yellow; winds moist gauzes over the thrilling evening star. At the top of the high hill-streets, the lamps run in straight strings or pendant necklaces. Down their astonishing slopes slide cars like gla.s.s boxes filled with liquid light; motors whose front lamps flood the asphalt with bubbling gold. If it be Christmas--and nowhere is Christmas so Christmasy as in California--the clubs and hotels show facades covered with jewel-designs in red and green lights; mistletoe, holly, stack high the sidewalks on each side of the flower stands. The beautiful Native Daughter, eyes dancing, lips smiling, dressed with much color and more chic, is everywhere. And everywhere too, crowding the streets, thronging the cafes, jamming the theatres, flooding the parks, filling the endless files of motor-car, until before your very eyes, "the city" seems to sp.a.w.n men, is--

Generous, genial, gay; handsome; frank and fine; careless and care-free; vital, virile, vigorous; engaging and debonair; witty and winning and wise; humorous and human; kindly and courteous; high-minded, high-hearted, high-spirited; here's to him! Ladies, this toast must be drunk standing--the Native Son.