The Smiling Hill-Top Part 2

I haven't catalogued mine, I have just put them down "higgledy-piggledy,"

as we used to say when we were children. J----'s having to work in town, too far to come home except for an occasional week-end, the neighbors'

dogs, servants, Bermuda gra.s.s, tenants, ants, the eccentricities of an adobe road during the rains, and the lapses of the delivery system of the village. Of course they are of varying degrees of unpleasantness.

J----'s absence is horrid but the common lot, so I have accepted it and am learning "to possess, in loneliness, the joy of all the earth."

Truth compels me to add that it isn't always loneliness, either, as, for example, one week-end that was much cheered by a visit from our architect friend, who rode down from Santa Barbara in his motor, and made himself very popular with every member of the household. He brought home the laundry, bearded the ice man in his lair, making ice-cream possible for Sunday dinner, mended the garden lattice, and drew entrancing pictures of galleons sailing in from fairy sh.o.r.es with all their canvas spread, for the boys. As we waved our handkerchiefs to him from the Good-by Gate on Monday, Joedy turned to me:

"I wish he didn't have to go!" A little pause.

"Muvs, if you weren't married to Father, how would you like--" but here I interrupted by calling his attention to a rabbit in the canyon.

One thing I do not consider a part of the joy of all the earth--the neighbors' dogs. On the next hill-top is an Airedale with a voice like a fog-horn. He is an ungainly creature and thoroughly disillusioned, because his family keep him locked up in a wire-screened tennis-court, where he barks all day and nearly all night. He can watch the motors on the coast road from one corner of his cage, and that seems to drive him almost wild. He ought to realize how much better off he is than the Lady of Shalott, who only dared to watch the highway to Camelot in a mirror!

Sometimes he has a bad attack of lamentation in the night--he is quite Jeremiah's peer at that--and then we all call his house on the telephone. You can see the lights flash on in the various cottages and hear the tinkle of the bell, as we each in turn voice our indignation.

Once I even saw a white-robed figure in the road across the canyon, and heard a voice borne on the night wind, "For heaven's sake, shut that dog up." We all bore it with Christian resignation when his family decided to take a motor camping trip, Prince to be included in the party. He is probably even now waking the echoes on Lake Tahoe, or barking himself hoa.r.s.e at the Bridal Veil Falls in the Yosemite, but thank goodness we can't hear him quite as far away as that.

I dare say that he might be a perfectly nice, desirable dog if he had had any early training. Our own "pufflers," as the boys call "Rags" and "Tags," their twin silver-haired Yorks.h.i.+re terriers, could tell him what a restraining influence the force of early training has on them, even on moonlight nights.

Prince is the worst affliction we have had, but not the only one. The people on the mountain-slope above us acquired a yellowish collie-like dog to scare away coyotes. He ought to have been a success at it, though I don't know just what it takes to scare a coyote. At any rate, he used to bark long and grievously about dawn in the road across the canyon.

One morning I was almost frantic with the irregularity of his outbursts.

It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Suddenly a rifle shot rang out; a spurt of yellow dust, a streak of yellow dog, and silence!

I rushed to J----'s room, to find him with the weapon, still smoking, in his hands. I begged him not to start a neighborhood feud, even if we never slept after dawn. I even wept. He laughed at me. "I didn't shoot at him," he said. "I shot a foot behind him, and I've given him a rare fright!" He had, indeed. The terror of the coyotes never came near us again.

As to servants, the subject is so rich that I can only choose.

Unfortunately, the glory of the view does not make up to them for the lack of town bustle and nightly "movies," so it isn't always easy to make comfortable summer arrangements. As you start so you go on, for changing horses in mid-stream has ever been a parlous business. A temperamental high-school boy who came to drive the motor and water the garden, though he appeared barefooted to drive me to town, and took French leave for a day's fis.h.i.+ng, pinning a note to the kitchen door, saying, "Expect me when you see me and don't wait dinner," afflicted me one entire summer. I tried to rouse his ambition by pointing out the capitalists who began by digging ditches--California is full of them--and a.s.suring him that there were no heights to which he might not rise by patient application, etc. It was no use. He watered the garden when I watched him; otherwise not. I came to the final conclusion that he was in love. Love is responsible for so much.

Another summer I decided to try darkies and carefully selected two of contrasting shades of brown. The cook was a slim little quadroon, with flas.h.i.+ng white teeth and hair arranged in curious small doughnuts all over her head. She was a gra.s.s widow with quite an a.s.sortment of children, though she looked little more than a child herself. "Grandma"

was taking care of them while the worthless husband was supposed to be running an elevator in New Orleans. Essie had quite lost interest in him, I gathered, for I brought her letters and candy from another swain, who used such thin paper that I couldn't avoid seeing the salutation, "Oh, you chicken!"

Mandy was quite different. She was a rich seal brown, large and determined, and had left a husband on his honor, in town. We had hardly washed off the dust of our long motor-ride before trouble began. A telegram for Mandy conveyed the disquieting news that George had been arrested on a charge of a.s.sault at the request of "grandma." It appeared that after seeing wifey off for the seash.o.r.e he felt the joy of bachelor freedom so strongly that he dropped in to see Essie's mother, who gave him a gla.s.s of sub rosa port, which so warmed his heart that he tried to embrace her. Grandma was only thirty-four and would have been pretty except for gaps in the front ranks of her teeth. She had spirit as well as spirits, and had him clapped into jail. Telegrams came in--do you say droves, covies, or flocks? Night letters especially, and long-distance telephone calls--all collect. The neighbors, the Masons, the lawyer, and various relatives all went into minute detail. Grandma, being the injured party, prudently confined herself to the mail. As we have only one servant's room and that directly under my sleeping-porch, it made it very pleasant! The choicest telegram J---- took down late one night. It was from one of Mandy's neighbors, and ended with the illuminating statement: "George never had a gun or a knife on him; he was soused at the time!" Mandy emerged from bed, clad in a red kimono and a pink boudoir cap, to receive this comforting message. She wept; Essie, who had followed in order to miss nothing, scowled, while J---- and I wound our bath-robes tightly about us and gritted our teeth, in an effort to preserve a proper solemnity. Of course we had to let her go back to the trial, which she did with the dignity of one engaged in affairs of state. She and the judge had a kind of mother's meeting about George, and decided that a touch of the law might be just the steadying influence he needed.

The sentence was for three months, which suited me exactly, as I calculated that his release and our return to town would happily synchronize. Mandy really stood the gaff pretty well and returned to her job, and an armed neutrality ensued, varied by mild outbreaks. Essie was afraid of Mandy. She said that she would never stay in the house with her alone; Mandy wouldn't stay in the house alone after dark, so it became rather complicated. We apparently had to take them or else find them weeping on the hillside, when we came back from a picnic. In justice to the darky heart I must say that when Billie was taken very ill they buried the hatchet for the time, and helped us all to pull him through.

The summer was almost over when I began to suffer from a strange hallucination. I kept seeing a colored gentleman slipping around corners when I approached. As Mandy was usually near said corner, I certainly thought of George, but calmed myself with the reflection that he was safe in jail. Not so. George had experienced a change of heart and had behaved in so exemplary a manner that his sentence had been shortened two weeks, and what more natural than that he should join his wife? It wasn't that I was afraid of George; I was afraid for George. I did not want him to meet Essie, for if Grandma's smile had cost him so dearly, I hated to think of the effect of Essie's black eyes and unbroken set of white teeth. I needn't have worried, for George was apparently "sick of lies and women," and never let go his hold on the ap.r.o.n-string to which he was in duty bound.

This summer I am unusually fortunate, owing to a moment of clear vision that I had forty-eight hours before leaving town. I had a Christian Science cook, a real artist if given unlimited materials, and she didn't mind loneliness, as she said that G.o.d is everywhere; to which I heartily agreed. I know that He is on this hill-top. So far so good, but her idea of obeying Mr. Hoover's precepts was not to mention that any staple was out until the last moment. At about six o'clock she usually came p.u.s.s.y-footing to my door in the tennis shoes she always wore, to tell me that there wasn't a potato in the house, or any b.u.t.ter. Not so bad in Pasadena, with a man to send to the store, but very trying on a smiling hill-top, one mile from town, with me the only thing dimly suggestive of a chauffeur on the place. At 3 A.M. I resolved to bounce her, heavenly disposition and all. I did, and engaged a cateress for what I should call a comfortable salary, rather than wages. She can get up a very appetizing meal from sawdust and candle-ends, when necessary, and that is certainly what is needed nowadays. Also, she has launched a wonderful counter-offensive against the ants. There was a time when we ate our meals surrounded by a magic circle like Brunhilde, but ours was not of flames, but of ant powder. Not that they mind it much. I'm told that they rather dislike camphor, but do you know the present price of that old friend?

There are singularly few pests or blights in the garden itself. Bermuda or devil gra.s.s is one of our Western specialties, though it may have invaded the East, too, since we left. It is an unusually husky plant, rooting itself afresh at every joint with new vigor, and quite choking out the aristocratic blue gra.s.s with which we started our lawn. At first you don't notice it as it sneaks along the ground, some time above and some time below, as it feels disposed, and then suddenly you see it's cobwebby outlines as plainly as the concealed animals in a newspaper puzzle. If you begin to pull it out you can't stop. It reminds me of the German system of espionage, and that adds zest to my weeding. The other day I laboriously uprooted an intricate network of tentacles, all leading to one big root, which I am sure must have been Wilhelmstra.s.se itself. Being able to do so little to help win the war, this is a valuable imaginative outlet to me!

Everything about the place, as well as the lawn, seems to get out of order when we have tenants. No one likes tenants any more than we like "Central." There is a prejudice against them. They do the things they ought not to do and leave undone the things they ought to do, and there is no health in them. I have more often been one than had one, and I hate to think of the language that was probably used about us, though we meant well.

I am not going to tell all I know about tenants after all. I have changed my mind. I am also going to draw a veil over the adobe road during the rains, because we really do like to rent the place to help pay for the children's and the motor's shoes, and it wouldn't be good business.

The village delivery system enrages and entertains me by turns. I was frankly told by the leading grocery store that they did not expect to deliver to people who had their own motors, and when I occasionally insist on a few necessities being sent up to my house, they arrive after dark conveyed by an ancient horse, as the grocery manager is conservative. A horse doesn't get a puncture or break a vital part often (if he does, you bury him and get another) and it is about a toss-up between hay and gasoline.

Every now and then I am marooned on my hill, if the motor is "hors de combat," and then I get my neighbour to let me join her in her morning marketing trip, sometimes with disastrous results. One day the boys and I sat down to dinner with fine sea-air appet.i.tes, to be confronted by a small, crushed-looking fish. I sent out to ask the cook for more. She said there was no more, and as no miracle was wrought in our behalf, we filled up the void with mashed potatoes as best we could. Just as the plates were being removed the telephone rang, and my neighbor's agitated voice asked if I had her cat's dinner! Light flooded in on my understanding. We had just eaten her cat's dinner. She went on to say that the fish-man had picked out a little barracuda (our household fish in California) from his sc.r.a.ps and made her a present of it. I faintly asked if she thought it was a very old one, visions of ptomaine poisoning rising vividly. Oh, no, she said, "it wasn't old at all, he had merely stepped on it." My own perfectly good dinner was at her house. I told her to take off a portion for her cat, and I would send the boys for the rest. I heaved a sigh of relief--a fresh young fish, even if crushed, would not have fatal results.

I will pa.s.s rapidly on to my last thorn, which isn't on the list because I'm not quite sure that it is one. It is a small, second-hand, rather vicious little motor, which I have learned to drive as a war measure.

After the first time I ever tried to turn it around, and it flew at our lovely rose-garlanded lattice fence at one hundred miles an hour, I christened it "the little fury." I missed the fence by revolving the steering wheel as though I were playing roulette. I almost went round twice, but J---- rescued me by kicking my foot off the throttle. Since then I have sufficiently mastered it to drive to town for the laundry and the newspaper. I am like a child learning to walk by having an orange rolled in front of it. I must know how far the Allies have driven the Germans, so I set my teeth and start for town in the "little fury."

Every one told me that I'd have to break something before I really got the upper hand. I have. I bravely drove out to a j.a.panese truck garden for vegetables and came to grief. One of the boys tersely expressed it in his diary, "Muvs ran into a j.a.panese barn and rooked the b.u.mper!" Now that that is over, I begin to feel a certain sense of independence that is not unpleasant. It is some time since I have stalled the engine or tried to climb a hill with the emergency brake set. The boys and the "pufflers" are game and keep me company; we live or die together.

After all, the loveliest rose in my garden, the Sunburst, lifts its fragrant flower of creamy orange on a stalk bristling with wicked-looking mahogany spikes. If I'm very careful about cutting it, I don't p.r.i.c.k my fingers and the thorns really add to the effect.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

THE GYPSY TRAIL

A friend of mine once wrote an article on motoring in Southern California for one of the smart Eastern magazines. In it she said that often a motor would be followed by a trailer loaded with a camp outfit.

What was her surprise and amus.e.m.e.nt to read her own article later, dressed for company, so to speak. "A trailer goes ahead with the servants and outfit, so that when the motoring party arrives on the scene all is in readiness for their comfort." Great care must be taken that the sensibilities of the elect should not be offended by the horrid thought that ladies and gentlemen actually do make their own camp at times! So the trailer has to go ahead, and that is just where the lure and magic of Southern California slips through the fingers.

Most of us have a few drops, at least, of gypsy blood in us, and in this land of suns.h.i.+ne and the open road we all become vagabonds as far as our conventional upbringing will let us. When you know that it won't rain from May to October, and the country is full of the most lovely and picturesque spots, how can you help at least picnicking whenever you can?

Trains are becoming as obsolete in our family as the horse. We wish to take a trip: out purrs the motor; in goes the family lunch-box, a thermos bottle, and a motor-case of indispensables, and we are off. No fuss about missing the train, no baggage, no tickets, no cinders--just the open road.

I had heard that every one deteriorated in Southern California, and after the first year I began earnestly searching my soul for signs of slackening. Perhaps my soul is naturally easy-going, for somehow I can't feel that the things we let slip matter so greatly.

This much I will admit. There is no deadlier drug habit than fresh air!

The first summer on our Smiling Hill-Top kind ladies used to ask me to tea-parties and card-parties, but I could never come indoors long enough to be anything but a trial to my partners at bridge, so now I don't even make believe I'm a polite member of society. Of course, there are people who carry it further than I do, and can't be quite happy except in their bathing-suits. I'm not as bad as that. I can still enjoy the sea breezes and the colors and the sound of the waves with my clothes on. I don't even wear my bathing-suit to market, which is one of the customs of the place. It is a picturesque little village; half the houses are mere shacks, a kind of compromise between dwelling and bath-houses, everyone being much too thrifty to pay money to the Casino when they can drip freely on their own sitting-room floor, without the least damage to the furnis.h.i.+ngs. Life for many consists largely of a prolonged bath and bask on the beach, with dinner at a cafeteria and a cold bite for supper at home or on the rocks. It is surely an easy life and yet a great deal of earnest effort and strenuous thinking goes on, too, women's clubs, even an "open forum," and there are many delightful people who live there all the year for the sake of the perfect climate. Also, there are a few charming houses perched on the cliffs, most suggestive of Sorrento and Amalfi. An incident J---- is fond of telling gives the combined interests of the place. He was on his way to the post-office when he met two women in very scanty jersey bathing-suits with legs bare, wearing, to be sure, law-fulfilling mackintoshes, but which, being unb.u.t.toned, flapped so in the breeze that they were only a technical covering. The ladies were in earnest conversation as he pa.s.sed. J---- heard one say, "I grant all you say about the charm of his style, but I consider his writing very superficial!"

It is a wonderful life for small boys. My sons are the loveliest shades of brown with cheeks of red, and in faded khaki and bare legs are as good an example of protective coloring on the hillside as any zebra in a jungle. Quite naturally they view September and the long stockings of the city with dislike.

There is a place on the beach by the coast road between Pasadena and San Diego where we always have lunch on our journeys to and from town. Just after you leave the picturesque ruins of the Capistrano Mission in its sheltered valley, you come out suddenly on the ocean, and the road runs by the sand for miles. With a salt breeze blowing in your face you can't resist the lunch box long. With a stuffed egg in one hand and a sandwich in the other, Joedy, aged eight, observed on our last trip south, "This is the bright side of living." I agree with him.

One late afternoon a friend of ours was driving alone and offered a lift to two young men who were swinging along on foot. "Your price?" they asked. "A smile and a song," was the reply. So in they got, and those last fifty miles were gay. That is the sort of thing which fits so perfectly into the atmosphere of this land. Perhaps it is the orange blossoms, perhaps it is that we have extra-sized moons, perhaps it is the old Spanish charm still lingering. All I know is that it is a land of glamour and romance. J---- said he was going to import a pair of nightingales. I said that if he did he'd have a lot to answer for.

Places are as different as people. The East, and by that I mean the country east of the Alleghanies and not Iowa and Kansas, which are sometimes so described out here, has reached years of discretion and is set in its way. California has temperament, and it is still very young and enthusiastic and is having a lot of fun "growing up." I love the stone walls, huckleberry pies, and johnny cakes of Rhode Island, and I love the a.s.sociations of my childhood and my family tree, but there is something in the air of this part of the world that enchants me. It is a certain "Why not?" that leads me into all sorts of delightful experiences. Conventionality does not hold us as tightly as it does in the East, and a certain tempting feeling of unlimited possibilities in life makes waking up in the morning a small adventure in itself. It isn't necessary to point out the dangers of an unlimited "Why not?"

cult--they are too obvious. "Why not?" is a question that one's imagination asks, and imagination is one of the best spurs to action. I will give an example of what I mean: When war was declared J---- suggested putting contribution boxes with red crosses on the collars of "Rags" and "Tags," the boys' twin Yorks.h.i.+re terriers, and coaxing them to sit up on the back of the motor. I never had begged on a street corner, but I thought at once, "Why not?" The result was much money for the Red Cross, an increased knowledge of human nature for me, as well as some delightful new friends. I should never have had the courage to try it in New York--let us say; I should have been afraid I'd be arrested.

At first to an Easterner the summer landscape seems dry and dusty, but after living here one grows to love the peculiar soft tones of tan and bisque, with bright shades of ice plant for color, and by the sea the wonderful blues and greens of the water. No one can do justice to the glory of that. Sky-blue, sea-blue, the s.h.i.+mmer of peac.o.c.ks' tails and the calm of that blue Italian painters use for the robes of their madonnas, ever blend and ever change. Trees there are few, the graceful silhouette of a eucalyptus against a golden sky, occasional clumps of live oaks, and on the coast road to San Diego the Torry pines, relics of a bygone age, growing but one other place in the world, and more picturesque than any tree I ever saw. One swaying over a canyon is the photographer's joy. It has been posing for hundreds of years and will still for centuries more, I have no doubt.

Were I trying to write a sort of sugar-coated guide-book, I could make the reader's mouth water, just as the menu of a Parisian restaurant does. The canyons through which we have wandered, the hills we have circled, Grossmont--that island in the air--Point Loma, the southern tip of the United States, now, alas, closed on account of the war (Fort Rosecrans is near its point), and further north the mountains and orange groves--snow-capped Sierras looming above orchards of blooming peach-trees!

Even the names add to the fascination, the Cuyamaca Mountains meaning the hills of the brave one; Sierra Madre, the mother mountains; even Tia Juana is euphonious, if you don't stop to translate it into the plebeian "Aunt Jane," and no names could be as lovely as the places themselves.

So much beauty rather goes to one's head. For years in the East we had lived in rented houses, ugly rented houses, always near the station, so that J---- could catch the 7.59 or the 8.17, on foot. To find ourselves on a smiling hill-top--our own hill-top, with "magic cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam"--seemed like a dream. After three years it still seems too good to be true.

They say that if you spend a year in Southern California you will never be able to leave it. I don't know. We haven't tried. The only possible reason for going back would be that you aren't in the stirring heart of things here as you are in New York, and the _Times_ is five days old when you get it. Your friends--they all come to you if you just wait a little. What amazes them always is to find that Southern California has the most perfect summer climate in the world, if you keep near the sea. No rain--many are the umbrellas I have gently extracted from the reluctant hands of doubting visitors; no heat such as we know it in the East. We have an out-of-door dining-room, and it is only two or three times in summer that it is warm enough to have our meals there. In the cities or the "back country" it is different. I have felt heat in Pasadena that made me feel in the same cla.s.s with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but never by the sea.

One result of all this fresh air is that we won't even go indoors to be amused. Hence the outdoor theatre. Why go to a play when it's so lovely outside? But to go to a play out-of-doors in an enchanting Greek theatre with a real moon rising above it--that's another matter. I shall never forget "Midsummer Night's Dream" as given by the Theosophical Society at Point Loma. Strolling through the grounds with the mauve and amber domes of their temples dimly lighted I found myself murmuring: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree." In a canyon by the sea we found a theatre. The setting was perfect and the performance was worthy of it. Never have I seen that play so beautifully given, so artistically set and delightfully acted, though the parts were taken by students in the Theosophical School. After the last adorable little fairy had toddled off--I hope to bed--we heard a youth behind us observe, "These nuts sure can give a play." We echoed his sentiments.

I should make one exception to my statement that people won't go indoors to be amused. They go to the "movies"--I think they would risk their lives to see a new film almost as recklessly as the actors who make them. The most interesting part of the moving-picture business is out-of-doors, however. You are walking down the street and notice an excitement ahead. Douglas Fairbanks is doing a little tightrope walking on the telegraph wires. A little farther on a large crowd indicates further thrills. Presently there is a splash and Charley Chaplin has disappeared into a fountain with two policemen in pursuit. Once while we were motoring we came to a disused railway spur, and were surprised to find a large and fussy engine getting up steam while a crowd blocked the road for some distance. A lady in pink satin was chained to the rails--placed there by the villain, who was smoking cigarettes in the offing, waiting for his next cue. The lady in pink satin had made a little dugout for herself under the track, and as the locomotive thundered up she was to slip underneath--a job that the mines of Golconda would not have tempted me to try. Moving-picture actors have a very high order of courage. We could not stay for the denouement, as we had a nervous old lady with us, who firmly declined to witness any such hair-raising spectacle. I looked in the paper next morning for railway accidents to pink ladies, but could find nothing, so she probably pulled it off successfully.

Every year new theatres are built. We have seen Ruth St. Denis at the Organ Pavilion of the San Diego Exposition, and Julius Caesar with an all-star cast in the hills back of Hollywood, where the s.p.a.ce was unlimited, and Caesar's triumph included elephants and other beasts, loaned by the "movies," and Brutus' camp spread over the hillside as it might actually have done long ago. There is a place in the back country near Escondido, where at the time of the harvest moon an Indian play with music is given every year. At Easter thousands of people go up Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, for the sunrise service. Some celebrated singer usually takes part and it is very lovely--quite unlike anything else.

So we have come to belong to what the French would call the school of "pleine air." I once knew an adorable little boy who expressed it better than I can:

"Sun callin' me, sky callin' me, Comin' sun--comin' sky."