Part 9
It is very close to one hundred and forty miles from San Diego to Riverside if you take the route which passes the rambling, red-tiled, adobe ranch-house famous as the home of _Ramona_; dips down into Mission Valley, where from behind its screen of palms and eucalyptus peers the crumbling and dilapidated façade of the first of the Californian missions; swirls through La Jolla with its enchanted ocean caverns; climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the live-oak groves behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment at Oceanside for a farewell look at the lazy turquoise sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the Lake of Elsinore. That is the route that we took and, though it is not the shortest, it is incomparably the most beautiful and the most interesting. We found by experience that one hundred and forty miles is about as long a day’s run as one can make with comfort and still permit of ample time for meals and for leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way. Once, in the French Midi, I motored with a friend who had chartered a car by the month with the agreement that he was to be permitted to run four hundred kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinating or historically interesting was the region we were traversing, we must needs tear through it as though the devil were at our wheels. We couldn’t stop anywhere, my host explained, because if we did he wouldn’t be able to get the full allowance of mileage to which he was entitled. Some day, however, I’m going through that same country again and see the things I missed. Next time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With highways as smooth as the promenade-deck of an ocean liner it is a temptation to burn up the road, of course, particularly if your car has plenty of power and your driver knows how to keep his wits about him. But that sort of thing, especially in a country which has so many sights worth seeing as California, smacks altogether too much of those impossible persons who boast of having “done” the Louvre or the Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring, to my way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and where you please—_and stopping_.
Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs the coast as though it were a long-lost brother. It is wide and smooth and for long stretches led through acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the vivid blue of the sea on one side and the emerald green of the wooded hillsides on the other, made the country we were traversing resemble the flag of some Central American republic. I think that the most beautiful of the little coast towns through which the road winds is Del Mar, perched high on a cypress-covered hill looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world. In the springtime the mesas above the sea are all aflame with yellow dahlias and the hillsides at the back are as gay with wild flowers as a woman’s Easter bonnet. Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation of a down-and-out town. A few years ago it was little more than a straggling, grass-grown street lined with decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A far-sighted corporation discovered the ramshackle little hamlet, bought it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour drives and a golf course, and built a little gem of a hostelry, modelled and named after the inn at Stratford-on-Avon, on the hill above the sea. Now the place is awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot its ten-mile crescent of silver sand; artists pitch their easels beneath the shadow of the friendly live-oaks; on the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the villas and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther up the coast you can lunch beneath the vine-hung pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that the hills behind, grey-green with olive groves, are those of Amalfi and that the lazy, sun-kissed sea below you is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific.
Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale between low hills, stands all that is left of the Mission of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as its name denotes, is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France. Begun when Washington was President of the United States and Alta California was still a province of New Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican authorities after the expulsion of the Spaniards in 1834, the historic mission has once again passed into the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and is now a training-school for priests who wish to carry the cross into foreign lands. The ruins of the mission—which, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the priest in charge, are being restored to a semblance of their original condition as fast as he is able to raise the money—are among the most picturesque in California. We stopped there on a golden afternoon, when the sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling, weather-worn façade and filtered through the arches of those cloistered corridors where the cowled and cassocked brethren of Saint Francis were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling their beads and muttering their prayers.
Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles northeast of San Luis Rey, over a road which is comparatively little travelled and only indifferently smooth, is the _asistencia_ or mission chapel of San Antonio de Pala. Even though it were not on the road to Riverside, it would be well worth going out of one’s way to see because of its picturesque _campanario_, with a cactus sprouting from its top, and the adjacent Indian village with its curious burial-ground. The little town, which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency, and the trader’s, stands on the banks of the San Luis Rey River, with high mountains rising abruptly all around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided by a paternal government and brought bodily from the East and set up in this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the Palatingwa tribe—a living refutation of our boast that we have given a square deal to the Indian. Once each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends of neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain valley resounds to the barbaric clamour of the tom-toms and to the plaintive, pagan chants which were heard in this land before the paleface came. The mission chapel, after standing empty for many years, once more has a priest, and at sunset the bell in the ancient campanile sends its mellow summons booming across the surrounding olive groves and the copper-coloured villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre Serra’s time, come trooping in for evening prayer.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._
_From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._
NOT IN CATALONIA BUT IN CALIFORNIA.
“A great hotel which combines the architectural features of the Californian missions—cloisters, patios, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses—with an Old World atmosphere and charm.”]
But of all the California missions, from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north, the one I like the best is the Mission Miller at Riverside—and any one who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly agree with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the Mission Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere else in the world. At least I, who am tolerably familiar with the hotels of five-score countries, know of none. In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as he loves to be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance to an extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed, to have taken the cent from sentiment. In other words, he has built a great hotel which combines the architectural features of the most interesting of the Californian missions—cloisters, patios, quadrangles, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming macaws screeching in them—with an Old World atmosphere and charm, and in such a setting he dispenses the same genial and personal hospitality which was a characteristic of the Spanish _padres_ in the days when the travellers along El Camino Real depended on the missions for food and shelter.
V
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES
“Dost thou know that sweet land where the orange flowers grow? Where the fruits are like gold and the red roses blow?”
V
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES
It was in the heyday of the Second Empire. The French army was at its autumn manœuvres and the country round about Rheims was aswarm with troopers in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches. Louis Napoleon was directing the operations in person. Riding one day through a vineyard at the head of a brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and turned in his saddle.
“Halt!” he ordered. “Column right into line! Attention! Present ... arms!”
“But who are you saluting, sire?” inquired one of his generals in astonishment, spurring alongside.
“The grapes, _mon général_,” replied the Emperor; “for do they not represent the wealth and prosperity of France?”
* * * * *
It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange belt which brought the incident to mind. For an entire morning we had been motoring among the orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an emerald sea. The endless orchards whose shiny-leaved trees drooped under their burden of pumpkin-coloured fruit; the chalk-white villas and the blossom-smothered bungalows of which we caught fleeting glimpses between the ordered rows; the oiled roads, so smooth and level that no child could look on them without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars standing at almost every doorstep—all these things spelled prosperity in capital letters.
“It seems to me,” I remarked to the gentleman who was acting as our guide (these same orange groves had made him a millionaire in less than a decade), “that it would not be unbefitting if the people of Riverside followed the example of Louis Napoleon when he saluted the grapes”; and I told him the story of the Emperor in the vineyard.
“You are quite right,” said he. “Would you mind stopping the car?” and, standing in the tonneau very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat.
“My Lady Citrona,” he said gravely, “I have the honour to salute you, for it is to you that the prosperity of southern California is chiefly due.”
* * * * *
What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its climate has done for Santa Barbara, its oranges have done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you could not have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest community _per caput_—which is the Latin for inhabitant—between the ice-floes of the Arctic and the Gatun Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet—the gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green volume which tells you whether the people you meet are worth cultivating—says, and he ought to know what he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any “show-places” such as are proudly pointed out to the open-mouthed tourist in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, it is a pleasant place in which to dwell, is this happy, sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It is as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as spick and span as a ward in a hospital; it is as satisfying as a certified cheque—and, incidentally, it is as dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded with suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for alcohol for a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only place I know that has foiled the exaggeratory tendencies of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its poinsettias so flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains so snowily white, its skies so bright a blue that the post-card artists have had to be truthful in spite of themselves.
I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised by two great wrought-iron baskets which flank the entrance to the dining-room of its famous hostelry, the Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the other with flowers. And you are expected to help yourself; not merely to take one as a souvenir, you understand, but to fill your pockets, fill your arms. “That’s what they’re there for,” the Master of the Inn will tell you. That little touch does more than anything else to make you feel that southern California really is a land of fruit and flowers and that they are not hidden behind the garden walls of the rich but can be enjoyed by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the unfavourable impression a stranger receives in a certain ornate hotel in Los Angeles where he is charged forty cents for a sliced orange!
Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored up a zigzag boulevard, with many horseshoe bends and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount Rubidoux, a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette within the city limits. Moses and his footsore Israelites, looking down upon the Promised Land, could have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted us on that winter’s Sunday morning. I doubt if there has been anything more peacefully enchanting than a Sunday morning in southern California in the orange season since a “To Let” sign was nailed to the gates of the Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any way resembling, such a number of things: a stained-glass window in a church, for example; an Easter wedding; Italy in the springtime ... but perhaps you don’t grasp just what I mean.
From Rubidoux’s rocky base the furrowed orange groves, looking exactly like quilted comforters of bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until they meet just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be before the water came, and the desert sweeps up to meet tawny foot-hills, and the foot-hills blend into amethystine mountain ranges and these rise into snowy peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky. And from the orange groves rises that same subtle, intoxicating fragrance (for you know, no doubt, that orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at the same time) that you get when the organist strikes up the march from “Lohengrin” and the bride floats up the aisle. The significant thing about it all, however, is not the surpassing beauty and extraordinary luxuriance of the vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation here at all. No longer ago than when women wore bustles this region was a second cousin to the Sahara, dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a country pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the faith, patience, energy, and courage of a handful of horticulturists, has been transformed into a land which is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a fruit-store window.
* * * * *
Once each year, toward the close of the fasting month of Ramazan, the Arabs of the Sahara make a pilgrimage to a spot in the desert near Biskra, in southern Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come—by horse and by camel and on the backs of asses—for the sake of a prayer in the yellow desert at break of day. This “Great Prayer,” as it is called, is one of the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever witnessed, and I little thought that I should ever see its like again—certainly not in my own land and among my own people. Once each year the people of Riverside and the surrounding country also make a pilgrimage. They set out in the darkness of early Easter morning, afoot, ahorseback, in carriages, and in panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They group themselves, fittingly enough, about the cross which has been erected in memory of Padre Junipero Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought Christianity to the Californias, and who, on his weary journeys between the missions which he founded, not infrequently spread his blankets for the night at the foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross to greet the Easter morn. As sunrise approached, a group of girls from the Indian School, standing on a rocky eminence, sang “He Is Risen,” and then, as a red glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun, the sweet, clear notes of a cornet rang out upon the morning air in the splendid bars of “The Holy City.” Just as the last notes died away a spark of light—brighter than the arc-lamps which still glared in the streets of the city below—appeared above the San Bernardino’s topmost rim and a moment later the full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory, turning the purple mountains into peaks of glowing amethyst and the sombre valleys into emerald islands swimming in a sea of lavender haze. “Lord, Thou hast been my dwelling-place in all generations.... I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” chanted the people in solemn unison. And then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth boulder for a pulpit, read his “God of the Open Air.” With the Amen of the benediction there ended the most significant and impressive service that I have ever heard under the open sky and one which sharply refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.
[Illustration: A MODERN VERSION OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.
The Easter sunrise service on Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, “sharply refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.”]
It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena, provided you go via Redlands, Smiley Heights, and San Bernardino, and it is flowers and fruit-trees all the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange belt asks to be shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner was a hotel proprietor of national fame who amassed a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the discipline of the Methodist Church, among the rules which the guests are required to observe being one which states that “visitors are not expected to arrive or depart on the Sabbath.” Smiley Heights is a remarkable object-lesson in the horticultural miracles which can be performed in California with water and patience. When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone-dry mesa, whose entire six hundred acres did not have sufficient vegetation to support a goat, but which, by the lavish use of water, and fertilisers, and the employment of a small army of landscape architects and gardeners, has been transformed into a beauty-spot which is worth using several gallons of gasoline to see. In Cañon’s Crest, to give the place the name bestowed by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern California, for on every side of this semitropic garden of pines, palms, peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs, acacias, bamboos, deodars, and roses, roses, roses, stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which it was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care and water, it would quickly return. If you will look from the right-hand window of your north-bound train, just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for yourself: a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising abruptly from an arid plain.
I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoyment from the signs along the way as I do. The notices along the Californian roads struck me as being more original and amusing than any that I had ever seen. Most of them were worded with an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse politeness which made acquiescence with their courteous requests a pleasure, though occasionally we were confronted with a warning couched in such threatening terms that it seemed to shake a metaphorical fist in our faces. Who, I ask you, would not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in the face of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads between Riverside and Pasadena: “Speed limit thirty miles an hour—a reasonable compliance with this request will be deeply appreciated”? Another time, however, as we were humming along one of those stretches of oiled delight which make the speedometer needle flutter like a lover’s heart, we were greeted, as we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced us in staring black letters with the threat: “Fifty dollars fine for exceeding the speed limit.” As a result we crept through the town as sedately as though we were following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect the city fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the limits of the municipality our resentment was dispelled by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of the departing motorist. It read: “So long, friend! Come again.”
There is one word that you should never, _never_ mention in the orange belt and that is—frost. That severe frosts are few and far between is perfectly true, as is attested by the fact that the road from Riverside to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure-bearing trees. That there is another and less joyous side to the business of raising breakfast-table fruit was brought sharply home to me, however, by noting that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds, yes, thousands, of little cylindrical oil-stoves—the kind that they use in New England farmhouses to heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on Sunday mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles flashes to the orange-growing centres a warning of an impending frost, the countryside turns out _en masse_ as though to repel an invader, and soon the groves are dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchardists wage their desperate battle with the cold, with stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and bonfires for their weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes which does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as in 1913, that they _are_ infrequent is best proved by the fact that automobile, phonograph, and encyclopedia salesmen find their most profitable markets in the orange belt.