The Personality of American Cities Part 20

It is not funny. You saw the Boston Club which vies for social supremacy in the old French city with the Pickwick Club, there in Ca.n.a.l street, at least you saw its fine old white house in that broad thoroughfare. It is not funny. Your New Orleans man tells you--courteously but clearly.

"We named our club from that game," he says.

"Boston was a fine game, sir," he adds. "And that without ever a thought of that town up in Ma.s.sachusetts."

From a carnival to a graveyard is a far cry indeed, and yet the cemeteries of New Orleans are as distinctive of her as her Mardi Gras festivities. We have spoken of the river and the great part it has played in the history of the city that rests so close to its treacherous sh.o.r.e. And it is that very treacherous sh.o.r.e that makes it so exceedingly difficult to arrange a cemetery in the soft and marshy soil on which the city is built.

So it is that the New Orleans' cemeteries are veritable cities of the dead. For the bodies that are buried within them are placed above the ground, not under them. Tombs and mausoleums are the rule, not the exception, and where a family is not prosperous enough to own even the simplest of tombs, it will probably join with other families or with some a.s.sociation in the ownership of a house in the city of the dead.

And for those who have not even this opportunity there are the ovens.

The ovens are built in the great walls that encompa.s.s the older cemeteries and make them seem like crumbling fortresses. Four tiers high, each oven large enough to accommodate a coffin--the sealed fronts bear the epitaphs of those who have known the New Orleans of other days.

A motley company they are--poets, pirates, judges, planters, soldiers, priests--around them the scarred regiments of those who lived their lives without the haunting touch of Fame upon the shoulder--no one will even venture a guess as to the number that have been laid away within a single one of these cities.

And when you are done with seeing the graves of Jean Lafitte or Dominique You--why is it that the average mind p.r.i.c.ks up with a more quickened interest at the tomb of a pirate than at a preacher--the Portuguese s.e.xton begins plucking at the loosely laid bricks of one of these abandoned ovens. Abandoned? He lifts out a skull, this twentieth century Yorick and bids you peep through the aperture. Like the _concierge_ of the old hotel, looking is made more easy from a blazing folding copy of the morning _Picayune_. In the place are seemingly countless skulls, with lesser bones.

"He had good teeth, this fellow," coughs the Portuguese.

You do not answer. Finally--

"Do they bury all of them this way?"

Not at first, you find. The strict burial laws of New Orleans demand that the body shall be carefully sealed and kept within the oven for at least a year. After that the s.e.xton may open the place, burn the coffin and thrust the bones into the rear of the place. And New Orleans can see nothing unusual in the custom.

"New Orleans is more like the old San Francisco than any other community I have ever seen," says the Californian. Not in any architectural sense and of course two cities could hardly be further apart in location than the city in the flat marshlands whose trees are below the level of the yellow river at flood-tide, and the new city that rises on mountainous slopes from the clear waters of the Golden Gate. But there is an intangible likeness about New Orleans and his city that was but never again can be, that strikes to the soul of the Californian. Perhaps he has come to know something of the real life of the Creoles--of those strange folk who even today can say that they have lived long lives in New Orleans and never gone south of Ca.n.a.l street. Perhaps he has met some of that little company of old French gentlemen who keep their faded black suits in as trim condition as their own good manners, and who scrimp and save through years and months that they may visit--not Chicago or New York--but Paris, Paris the unutterable and the unforgettable.

"New Orleans is more like the old San Francisco than any other community that I have ever seen," reiterates the Californian. "It is more like the old than the new San Francisco can ever become."

And there is a moral in that which the San Franciscan speaks. In the twinkling of an eye the old San Francisco disappeared--forever. Slowly, but surely, the old New Orleans is beginning to fade away. There are indubitable signs of this already. When it shall have gone, our last stronghold of old French customs and manners shall have gone. One of the most fascinating chapters in the story of our Southland will have been closed.

16

THE CITY OF THE LITTLE SQUARES

In after years, you will like to think of it as the City of the Little Squares. After all the other memories of San Antonio are gone--the narrow streets twisting and turning their tortuous ways through the very heart of the old town, the missions strung out along the Concepcion road like faded and broken bits of bric-a-brac, the brave and militant show of a.r.s.enal and fort--then shall the fragrance of those open plazas long remain. The Military Plaza, with its great bulk of a City Hall facing it, the Main Plaza, where the grave towers of the little cathedral look down upon the palm-trees and the beggars, the newer, open squares--always plazas in San Antonio--and then, best of all, the Alamo Plaza, with that squat namesake structure facing it--_the_ lion of a town of many lions. These open places are the distinctive features of the oldest and the best of the Texas towns. They lend to it the Latin air that renders it different from most other cities in America. They help to make San Antonio seem far more like Europe than America.

[Ill.u.s.tration: One of the little squares--and the big cathedral--San Antonio]

To this old town come the Texans, always in great numbers for it is their great magnet--the focusing point that has drawn them and before them, their fathers, their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers--far reaching generations of Texans who have gone before. For here is the distinct play-ground of the Lone Star State. Its other cities are attractive enough in their several ways, but at the best their fame is distinctly commercial--Fort Worth as a packing-house town, Dallas as a distributing point for great wholesale enterprises, Houston as a banking center, Galveston as the great water-gate of Texas and the second greatest ocean port of the whole land. San Antonio is none of these things. While the last census showed her to be the largest of all Texas cities in point of population, it is said by her jealous rivals and it probably is true, that nearly half of that population is composed of Mexicans; and here is a part of our blessed land where the Mexican, like his dollar, must be accepted at far less than his nominal value.

But if it were not for these Mexicans--that delicate strain of the fine old Spanish blood that still runs in her veins--San Antonio would have lost much of her nave charm many years ago. The touch of the old grandees is everywhere laid upon the city. In the narrow streets, the architecture of the solid stone structures that crowd in upon them in a tremendously neighborly fashion shows the touch of the Spaniard in every corner; it appears again and again--in the iron traceries of some high-sprung fence or second-story balcony rail, or perhaps in the lineaments of some snug little church, half hidden in a quiet place. The Cathedral of San Fernando, standing there in the Main Plaza, looks as if it might have been stolen from the old city of Mexico and moved bodily north without ever having even disturbed its fortress-like walls or the crude frescoes of its sanctuary. The four missions out along the Concepcion road are direct fruit of Spanish days--and remember that each of the little squares of San Antonio is a plaza, so dear to the heart of a Latin when he comes to build a real city.

But the impress of those troublous years when Spain, far-seeing and in her golden age, was dreaming of Texas as a mighty princ.i.p.ality, is not alone in the wood and the stone of San Antonio, not even in the delirious riot of narrow streets and little squares. The impress of a Latin nation still not three hundred miles distant, is in the bronzed faces of the Mexicans who fill her streets. Some of them are the old men who sit emotionless hours in the hot sun in the narrow highways, and vend their unspeakable sweets, or who come to affluence perhaps and maintain the marketing of _tamales_ and _chile con carne_ at one of the many little outdoor stands that line the business streets of San Antonio, and make it possible for a stranger to eat a full-course dinner, if he will, without pa.s.sing indoors. These are the Mexicans of San Antonio who are most in evidence--the men still affecting in careless grandeur their steeple-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, even if the rest of their clothing remain in the docile humility of blue jeans; the women scorning such humility and running to the brilliancy of red and yellow velvets, although of late years the glories of the American-made hat have begun to tell sadly upon the preeminence of the mantilla. These are the Mexicans who dominate the streets of the older part of the town--they are something more than dominant factors in the West end of the city, long ago known as the Chihuahua quarter.

But there is another sort--less often seen upon the streets of San Antonio. This sort is the Mexican of cla.s.s, who has come within recent years in increasing numbers to dwell in a city where una.s.suming soldiery afford more real protection for him and for his than do all of the brilliantly uniformed regiments with which Diaz once illuminated his gay capital. Since our neighbor to the south entered fully upon its troublous season these refugees have multiplied. You could see for yourself any time within the past two years sleeping cars come up from Laredo filled with nervous women and puzzled children. These were the families of prosperous citizens from the south of Mexico, who in their hearts showed no contempt for the comfortable protection of the American flag.

A man plucks you by the sleeve as you are pa.s.sing through the corridors of one of the great modern hotels of San Antonio, hotels which, by the way, have been builded with the profits of the cattle-trade in Texas.

"That _hombre_," he says, "he is the uncle of Madero."

But a mere uncle of the former Mexican President hardly counts in a town which has the reputation of fairly breeding revolutions for the sister land to the south; whose streets seem to whisper of rumors and counter-rumors, the vague details of plot and counterplot. There is a whole street down in the southwestern corner of San Antonio lined with neat white houses, and the town will know it for many years as "Revolutionary Row." For in the first of these houses General Bernardo Reyes lived, and in the second of them this former governor of Nuevo Leon planned his _coup d'etat_ by which he was to march into Mexico City with all the glory of the Latin, bands playing, flags flying, a display of showy regimentals. Reyes had read English history, and he remembered that one Prince Charlie had attempted something of the very sort. In the long run the difference was merely that Prince Charlie succeeded while Reyes landed in a dirty prison in Mexico City.

Here then is the very incubator of Mexican revolution. There is not an hour in San Antonio when the secret agents of the United States and all the governments and near-governments of our southern neighbor are not fairly swarming in the town and alive to their responsibilities. The border is again pa.s.sing through historic days--and it fully realizes that. It is twenty-four hours of steady riding from San Antonio over to El Paso--the queer little city under the shadows of the mountains and perched hard against the "silver Rio Grande," this last often so indistinguishable that a young American lieutenant marched his men right over and into Mexican soil one day without knowing the difference--until he was confronted by the angry citizens of Ciudad Juarez and an _affaire nationale_ almost created. Every mile of that tedious trip trouble is in the air.

And yet El Paso does not often take the situation very seriously. It is almost an old story, and if the revolutionists will only be kind enough to point their guns away from the U.S.A. they can blaze away as long as they like and the ammunition lasts. In fact El Paso feels that as long as the Mexican frontier battles have proper stage management they are first-rate advertising attractions for the town--quite discounting mere Mardi Gras or Portola or flower celebrations, Frontier or Round-up Days, as well as its own simpler joys of horse-racing and bull-fighting. On battle-days El Paso can ascend to its house-tops and get a rare thrill.

But when the atrocious marksmanship of ill-trained Mexicans does its worst, and a few stray bullets go whistling straight across upon American soil, El Paso grows angry. It demands of Washington if it realizes that the U.S.A. is being bombarded--the fun of fighting dies out in a moment.

San Antonio is a safer breeding ground for insurrection than is El Paso.

For one thing it is out of careless rifle-shot, and for another--well at El Paso some Mexican troopers might come right across the silver Rio Grande in a dry season, never wetting their feet or dreaming that they were crossing the majestic river boundary, and pick up a few erring citizens without much effort. There is a risk at El Paso that is not present in San Antonio. Hence the bigger town--in its very atmosphere emitting a friendly comfort toward plottings and plannings--is chosen.

You wish to come closer to the inner heart of the town. Very well then, your guide leads you to the International Club which perches between the narrow and important thoroughfare of Commerce street and one of the interminable windings of the gentle San Antonio river. It was on the roof of the International Club that Secretary Root was once given a famous dinner. It is an inst.i.tution frankly given "to the encouragement of a friendly feeling between Mexico and the United States." It is something more than that, however. It is a refuge and sort of harbor for storm-tossed hearts and weary minds that perforce must do their thinking in a tongue that, to us, is alien. Most of the time the newspaper men of the town sit in the rear room of the club and look down across the tiny river on to the quiet grounds of an oldtime monastery. They play their pool and dominoes--two arts that seem hopelessly wedded throughout all Texas. The International Club nods.

Suddenly a tall bronzed man, with _mustachios_, perhaps a little group of Mexicans will come into the place. The pool and the dominoes stop short. There are whisperings, flashy papers from Mexico city are suddenly produced, maps are studied. One man has "inside information"

from Washington, another lays claim to mysterious knowledge up from the President's palace of the southern capital, perhaps from the const.i.tutionalists along the frontier. There is a great deal of talk, much mystery--after all, not much real information.

But when some real situation does develop, San Antonio has glorious little thrills. To be the incubator of revolution is almost as exciting as to have bull-fights or a suburban battle-field, the treasures for which San Antonio cannot easily forgive her rival, El Paso. Each new plot-hatching of this sort gives the big Texas town fresh thrills.

Gossip is revived in the hotel lobbies and restaurants, the cool and lofty rooms of the International Club are filled with whisperers in an alien tongue, out at Fort Sam Houston the cavalrymen rise in their stirrups at the prospect of some real excitement. San Antonio does not want war--of course not--but if it must have war--well it is already prepared for the shock. And it talks of little else.

"Within ten years the United States will have annexed Mexico and San Antonio will have become a second Chicago," says one citizen in his enthusiasm. "And what a Chicago--railroads, manufactories and the best climate of any great city in the world."

Even in war-times your true San Antonian cannot forget one of the chief a.s.sets of his lovely town.

The others say little. One is a junior officer from out at the post. He can say nothing. But he is hoping. There is not much for an army man in inaction and the best of drills are not like the real thing. For him again--the old slogan--"a fight or a frolic."

Not all of San Antonio is Spanish--although very little of it is negro.

An astonishing proportion of its population is of German descent. These are largely gathered in the east end of the town, that which was formerly called the Alamo quarter, and like all Germans they like their beer. The brewing industry is one of the great businesses of San Antonio--and the most famous of all these breweries is the smallest of them. On our first trip to "San Antone" we heard about that beer; all the way down through Texas--"the most wonderful brew in the entire land."

[Ill.u.s.tration: San Juan Mission--a bid of faded bric-a-brac outside of San Antonio]

The active force of this particular Los Angeles brewery consisted of but one man, the old German who carried his recipe with him in the top of his head, and who had carefully kept it there throughout the years. In the cellar of the little brewery he made the beer, upstairs and in the garden he served it. In the mornings he worked at his cellar kettles, in the late afternoon and the early evening he stood behind his bar awaiting his patrons. If they wished to sit out in the shady garden they must serve themselves. There were no waiters in the place. If a man could not walk straight up to the bar and get his beer he was in no condition for it. The old German was as proud of the respectability of his place as he was of the secret recipe for the beer, which had been handed down in his family from generation to generation.

Only once was that secret given--and then after much tribulation and in great confidence to an agent of the government. But he had his reward.

For the government at Washington in its turn p.r.o.nounced his the purest beer in all the land. Men then came to him with proposals that he place it upon the market. They talked to him in a tempting way about the profits in the business, but he shook his head. His beer was never to be taken from the brewery. It was a rule from which San Antonians and tourists alike had tried to swerve him, to no purpose. Of course, every rule has its exceptions but there was only a single exception to this.

Each Sat.u.r.day night Mr. Degen used to send a small keg over with his compliments to a boyhood friend--he believed that friendship of a certain sort can break all rules and precedents.

All the way down through dry Texas we smacked our lips at the thought of Degen's beer. Before we had been in San Antonio a dozen hours we found our way to the brewery; in a quiet side street down back of the historic Alamo. But we had no beer.