Part 13
From the summit of the pass we dropped down the brush-clothed flanks of the mountains by a zigzag road into a secluded river valley whose peace and pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring grandeur of the Gaviota, as is the five-o’clock whistle to the workman after a busy day. By this same pass the trail of the _padres_ ran when, a century ago, they walked between the missions, so that it was with peculiar appropriateness that there rose before us, as we swung around a shoulder of the mountain, the Mission of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming like ivory in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a splendid note of colour against the lush, green fields, its cross-surmounted campanile pointing heavenward, just as the fingers of its cassocked builders were wont to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mission, which was in a deplorable state of neglect when he came there a dozen years ago, has been reroofed and in a large measure restored, the south corridor, which runs the length of the _convento’s_ front, where the brown-robed monks were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, having been transformed into a sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the old monastic days that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp, who applies at the Mission Santa Ynez for food or shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that brought home to me most vividly the hardships endured by the cowled and sandalled founders of these missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk, bordered with faded blue, which caught my attention in the sacristy.
“What was this umbrella used for, father?” I inquired.
“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used by the _padres_ to shield themselves from the sun on their journeys between the missions, for they were not permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows to go always afoot. Though Father Serra was lame, and every step that he took caused him the extremest anguish, he not once but many times walked the six hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his northernmost mission at Sonoma.”
One would naturally suppose that the people of California would be inordinately proud of these crumbling missions which have played so great a part in the history of their State and would take steps to have them preserved as national monuments, just as the French Government preserves its historic châteaux. But, for some unexplainable reason, just the opposite is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in obtaining funds to effect even the most imperative repairs, depending very largely on the contributions of Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for this unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are still a young people, which, of course, is true. It is equally true, however, that by the time we are old enough to appreciate their historic significance and value, there will be no missions left to preserve.
Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks, you should not fail to stop for luncheon at a hamlet, not far from Santa Ynez, called, from the olive orchards which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn there kept by a Frenchman named Mattei—a Basque he is, if I remember rightly—who will serve you just such a meal as you can get at one of those wayside _fondas_ in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that instead of the roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-coffee luncheon which the motorist learns to expect, we had set before us brook-trout fried in flour and bread-crumbs, ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garlic and oil, roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet _à la Espagnole_, and heaping bowls of wild strawberries, the whole washed down with a wine rarely seen in America—real white Chianti. It is the very unexpectedness of such meals which makes them stand out like white milestones along the gastronomical highway.
More Spanish in character and atmosphere even than Santa Barbara is Monterey, three hundred miles farther up this enchanted coast. Careless of the changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on its sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of palm and live-oak, its feet laved by the tepid waters of the bay. The town is built on the slopes of a natural amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising steeply behind the town is the hill where the Spanish _castillo_ used to stand, which is now surmounted by grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow barracks which house the garrison. At the foot of Presidio Hill is the sheltered cove where Vizcaino landed to take possession of this region in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years later, Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it in the name of a far mightier King. Here, on clear days, you can see on the harbour bottom the bleached and whitened bones of the frigate _Natalia_, on which Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water-front, where the soiled and smelly fishing-boats with their queer lateen sails rub shoulders with the spotless, white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on many strange and thrilling scenes, has this balconied building of whitewashed adobe; it has seen the high-prowed caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their carven sterns; it has seen the swarthy Spanish governors reviewing their steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen the _fiestas_ and other merrymakings which marked the careless Mexican régime; and on that July day in 1846 it saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the blue-jackets in their jaunty hats land from the American frigates, saw them form in hollow square upon the plaza, saw their weapons held rigid in burnished lines of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff, and heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of stripes and stars.
In historic interest and significance this little town of Monterey is to the West what Boston is to the East. Here was planned the conquest of California; here the first American flag was raised upon the shores of the Pacific; here was the first capital and here was held the first constitutional convention of California. Follow Alvardo Street up the hill, between rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and whitewashed walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias, and geraniums, to the group of historic buildings at the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin house, where dwelt the last American consul in California and in which were hatched the plots which led up to the American occupation; the picturesque home of the last Spanish governor of the Californias; Colton Hall, in which the first constitutional convention assembled on the day of California’s admission to the Union; the little one-roomed dwelling that Sherman and Halleck occupied when they were stationed here as young lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beautiful señorita whom Sherman loved long years before he won imperishable fame beneath the eagles at Shiloh; and, by no means least in interest, the wretched dwelling where that immortal genius Robert Louis Stevenson lodged for a year or more, and the little restaurant where he took his meals, and the green pathways which he wandered.
In the edge of the town stands the church of San Carlos, one of the best preserved mission churches of California, whose sacristy contains the most precious religious relics in the State; for here the priest in charge will reverently show you Father Serra’s own chasuble, cope, and dalmatics and the altar service of beaten silver which was brought out for him from Spain. The _padre-presidente_ preferred Carmel over the hill to all his other missions, however, and it was there, where the Carmel River ripples down between the silent willows to its mother, the sea, that he came back to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient mission, his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours transformed from a savage wilderness to a vineyard of the Lord.
From Monterey you may motor or drive or street-car or foot it to Del Monte, which is only a mile away. Whichever method you choose, I should take the longest way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel through the glorious wild-wood by which it is enveloped. And after you have twisted and turned for a mile or more through a wilderness of bloom and foliage, like the children in the story-book in search of the enchanted castle, and after you have concluded that you have lost your way and are ready to abandon the quest, all unexpectedly you catch a glimpse of its red-roofed towers and spires and gables rising above the tree tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years ago, huge and rambling and not unpicturesque, surrounded by acres of lawn and the finest live-oaks I have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance to the Gezireh Palace—now a hostelry for tourists—which the Khedive Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del Monte suggests not one, but many places, however. Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is the result of more than a third of a century of care, in many respects recall the famous country-seats of England, though the vegetation, of course, is very different; the gardens, which offer a continual feast of colour, remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the cypress maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court. The artificial lake, surrounded by subtropical vegetation and approached by a palm-bordered esplanade, has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that I know, while from the golf-links—than which there are none better in the West—looking across the tree tops to where the white houses of Monterey overhang the bay, it is difficult to believe that you are not on the hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon the white buildings of Algiers. Although Del Monte is an enchanted garden at any time of the year, the “high season” is in July and August, when the golfing, polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San Mateo exactly as the corresponding section of society on the other side of the continent flocks to Newport and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo field resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the click of mallet and ball; the golf-links on the rolling downs above the sea are alive with players taking part in the great midsummer tournament which is the most important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in the evenings white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and whirl and glide to fervid music upon a glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the light of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers transform into a fairyland.
The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from south to north, as we did, for that was the way of the _padres_; so it was quite natural that our next stop after leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San Juan Bautista. San Juan Bautista—Saint John the Baptist—is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty little hamlet as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian road. Along its lanes—they are too narrow and straggling to be dignified with the name of streets—stand quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine and passion-vine, hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza up the hill, where the Spanish soldiery, and after them the Mexican, used to parade and where the _fiestas_ used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in obedience to the summons of the mission bells, and, thanks to the renaissance of the rural districts caused by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is nearly always filled with guests. Close by the hotel is the old adobe building which served as the headquarters of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and back of the town rises the hill known as the Hawk’s Nest, where Frémont and his handful of American frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan Bautista is a place where I could have loitered for a week instead of a day, for who, with a spark of romance in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the hotel note-paper: “A relic of the distant past, when men played billiards on horseback and the trees bore human fruit”?
VII
THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT
“He touched my eyes with gladness, with balm of morning dews, On the topmost rim He set me, ’mong the hills of Santa Cruz, And I saw the sunlit ocean sweep, I saw the vale below— The Vale of Santa Clara in a sea of blossomed snow.”
VII
THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT
I first heard about the place from the captain of a little coasting steamer in the Indian Ocean. It was moonlight, I remember, and we were leaning over the rail, watching the phosphorescent waves curl away from the vessel’s bow. We had both seen more than our shares of the world and we were exchanging opinions of what we had seen over the captain’s Trichinopoli cheroots. Perhaps it was the effect of the moonlight on the silent waters, but I am more inclined to think it was the brandy which his silent-footed Swahili steward had just served us, which caused him to grow confidential.
“A few more voyages and I’m going to quit the sea,” he remarked.
“Yes?” said I interrogatively. “And what will you do then? Get a berth as harbour master at Shanghai or port captain at Suez or somewhere?”
“No,” said he, “I’m going to build a house for myself and the missis in a valley that I know; a house painted white with green blinds and with a porch as broad as a ship’s deck, and I’m going to have a fruit orchard and a flower garden with red geraniums in it, and I’m going to raise chickens—white Wyandottes, I think, but I’m not quite certain.”
“Of all things!” I ejaculated. “My imagination isn’t elastic enough for me to picture an old sea-dog like you settled down in a white farmhouse raising fruit and chickens. Where is all this going to be?”
“In the Santa Clara,” said he.
“It sounds like the name of a Pullman car or a tune in the hymn-book,” said I.
“It’s neither,” said he; “it’s a valley in California.”
“Tell me about it,” I suggested.
“I can’t,” said he. “It’s too beautiful—in the spring the whole valley is a sea of blossoms, like cherry season in Japan; and beyond are green hillsides that might be those of Devonshire; and looming up back of the hills are great brown-and-purple mountains that look like those at the back of Cintra, in Portugal (that’s some place, too, believe _me_); and there is always the smell of flowers in the air, such as you get in Bulgaria in the attar-of-rose season; and I’ve never seen a sky as blue anywhere else except in the Ægean; and——”
“That’s enough,” I interrupted. “That’s where I’m going next. Any place that will make a hardened old sea captain become poetical must be worth seeing.”
* * * * *
Months later, in Algiers, I found myself sitting at a small iron table on a sun-bathed terrace overlooking the orange-and-olive-and-palm-fringed shores of the Mediterranean. There are only five views to equal it in all the world. As I sat gazing out across the waters toward France a fellow countryman strolled up and dropped into the seat beside me. I knew that he was an American by the width of his hat brim and because he didn’t wait for an introduction.
“Fine morning,” I remarked pleasantly. “Wonderful view from this terrace, isn’t it? And the sunshine is very warm and cheering.”
“Pretty fair,” he assented gloomily; “pretty fair for this place. But in the part of the world I come from fine mornings and wonderful views and sunshine are so darned common that it never occurs to us to mention them.”
“Where is your home, may I ask?” I inquired, for want of anything better to say.
“In the Santa Clara Valley of California,” he answered proudly. “God’s favourite country, sir! He took more pains with it than any place he ever made, not even barring the original Eden. This is a very pleasing little view, I admit; a very pleasing one, but I wish I could take you up on the slopes of Mount Hamilton just before sunset and let you look across the valley to Los Gatos when the prune orchards are in blossom. As for the climate, why, say, my friend——”
“Yes, yes, I know,” I said soothingly, for when a man gets a lump in his throat while talking about his native land it’s time to change the topic of conversation. “I know; I’ve heard all about it before. Fact is, I’m on my way there now.”
“You _are_?” he exclaimed incredulously, and, leaning back in his chair, he clapped his hands until the Arab waiter came running. “Garsong,” said he, “bring us a bottle of the best wine you’ve got.” When the amber fluid was level with the rims we touched our glasses:
“It’s poor stuff compared with the wine we make in California,” he said, “but it’ll do to drink a toast in.” He stood up, bareheaded and very straight, as British officers do when they drink to the king.
“Friend,” said he, and his voice was husky, “here’s to God’s favourite valley—here’s to the Santa Clara.”
* * * * *
If you go to the Santa Clara when I did, which was in March, when the unfortunates who live beyond the Sierra Nevada are still waking up to find ice in their water-pitchers, you will find that the people of the valley are celebrating the Feast of the Blossoms. It is a very beautiful festival, in which every man, woman, and child in this fifty-mile-long garden of fruit and flowers takes part, but you cannot appreciate its true significance until you have climbed to a point on the slopes of the mountains which form the garden wall, where the whole enchanting panorama lies before you. Did you ever see one hundred and twenty-five square miles of trees in snow-white blossom at one time? No, of course not, for nowhere else in all the world can such a sight be seen. I, who have listened to the voice of spring on five continents and in more than five-score countries, assure you that it is worth the seeing.
Personally, I shall always think of the Santa Clara as a sleeping maiden, fragrant with perfume and intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven bed formed by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtained by fleecy clouds, her coverlet of eiderdown tinted with rose, quilted with green, edged with yellow; her pillow the sun-kissed waters of San Francisco Bay. When you come closer, however, you find that the coverlet which conceals her gracious form is in reality an expanse of fragrant blossoms; that the green tufts are the live-oaks which rise at intervals above the orchards of cherry, peach, and prune; and that the yellow edging is the California poppies which clothe the encircling hills.
Sentimentally and commercially it is fitting that the people of the Santa Clara Valley should celebrate the coming of the blossoms, for they are at once its chief beauty and its chief wealth. In a single season these white and fragrant blossoms have provided the breakfast tables of the world with one hundred and thirty million pounds of prunes, to say nothing of those luscious pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots which beckon temptingly from grocers’ windows and hotel buffets from Salt Lake City around to Shanghai. No other single fruit of any region, not even the fig of Smyrna, the date of Tunis, the olive of Spain, or the currant of Greece, is so widely distributed as the prune of the Santa Clara Valley. The people of the valley will assure you very earnestly that the reason their wives and daughters have such lovely complexions is because they make it a point to eat prunes every morning for breakfast. Whether due to the prunes or not, I can vouch for the complexions.
Barring the coast of Tripolitania, where it is harvest time all the year round, but where the Arabs are offering no inducements to settlers, and the Imperial Valley, whose summer heat makes it undesirable as a place of permanent residence, the Santa Clara Valley has more crops, through more months of the year, than any place I know. Ceres makes her annual appearance in February with artichokes—the ones that are priced at a dollar a portion on the menus of New York’s fashionable hotels; in March the people of the valley are having spring peas with their lamb chops; April brings strawberries, although, as a matter of fact, they are to be had almost every month of the year; in May the cherry pickers are at work; the local churches hold peaches-and-cream sociables in June; by the ides of July the valley roads are alive with teams hauling cases of pears, plums, and apricots to the railway stations; August, being the month of prunes, is marked with red on the Santa Clara calendars; September finds the presses working overtime turning grapes into wine, and the prohibitionists likewise working overtime trying to turn “wet” communities into “dry” ones; in October the men are at work in the orchards picking apples and the women are at work in the kitchens baking apple pies; the huge English walnuts which wind up dinners half the world around are harvested in November; while in December and January the prodigal goddess interrupts her bounty just long enough to let the fortunate worshippers at her shrine observe the midwinter holidays. After such a recital it is almost needless to add that the valley boasts both the largest fruit-drying houses and the largest fruit canneries in the world, for in the Santa Clara they dry what they can and can what they can’t.