Chapter X

San Diego.--The Bathing-House.--Alarming Disappearance.--The Mystery Solved.--Carriage Drive to Mission Cliffs.--Coronado Beach.--The Museum.--The Hotel.--High Fog.

Our ride of four hours from Los Angeles to San Diego was rather warm, and after our arrival we cared to do little more than lounge about the station in the evening. Near by was a most inviting bathing-house, beautifully fitted up with all sorts of appliances for comfort, not the least of these being a superb swimming-pool, whose tempered waters were sending to us insinuating invitations to take a good plunge and enjoy the charms of their dark, silent depths. It was too soon after eating, and we put it all off until next day.

When we men folk returned to our car from the adjacent bath-house, a feeling of gloom and melancholy settled down upon us. The "Lucania" was silent and lonely, save for the servants. Not another soul was visible. The ladies had all disappeared!

Here was an alarming state of affairs. Those who had wives, were as though they had them not, and those who had not wives, were as though they had. We were all alike disturbed and miserable at the unaccountable absence of our better halves. What had become of them? We seemed to be quite on the outskirts of San Diego. The wide streets, stretching away in darkness, looked terrible and forbidding. Who could tell what desperado might not have made away with them? It would be a mere matter of a sudden stoop down from a horse, perhaps, a seizure by a pair of strong arms, a wild ride over the boundless plain, and misery would settle down upon us as another mysterious disappearance had to be recorded, and remain possibly forever unexplained. We called a council of war, so to speak. We determined to investigate, and boldly plunged into the unknown town in search of our lost ones. Every man we met had the possibilities in him, to our excited imaginations, of a double-dyed cut-throat; every saloon was a gate of Hades; but we bravely pushed on. We found ourselves soon in rather an attractive street. Shops were gay with life. The ever-present electric lamps gave us their cold glitter and their fantastic shadows, until at last, joyful sight, we saw all our ladies shopping to their hearts' content in a Chinese curio shop, where a great, bland, round-faced Chinaman, like a six-foot baby, was all smiles and attention to the purchasing crowd. We joined them as if nothing had happened, and remained with them until we saw them safe back. All the preceding is summed up in one of the ladies' diaries briefly thus: "We arrived at San Diego at 6 P.M. After tea the ladies of the party started out to _see the town_, visited two curio shops, and went back to the car before nine, and received a very severe scolding for going off by ourselves." The italics in the above are mine.

I think the ladies served us right, for we should have awaited their pleasure; but who could have dreamed that they wanted to do anything more than rest after their fatiguing ride?

The comical side of the whole thing is this: that our ladies, in their little independent cruise in San Diego, were as safe as if they were in any Eastern village. San Diego is, in fact, a typical American town of the better class, nurtured by Boston capital, so largely invested in stock of the Santa Fe Railroad, whose western terminus is at San Diego, which is also peopled by New Englanders, who have duly brought with them to the Pacific Slope, a full and perennial supply of their steady habits.

In our one full day in San Diego we saw much to interest us. A carriage drive took some of us over Mission Cliffs, others went round in the great, double-decked tram cars, and all took in the vast extent of San Diego, as it lies on a huge, sloping shelf over the Pacific, giving constant prospects of the mountains and the sea. We also visited Coronado, the city so called, the beach, and the hotel. The city, on the great peninsula between San Diego Bay, a beautiful expanse of water, and the great ocean beyond, has, of course, what every Western effort has--a future.

The beach, where the great rollers of the Pacific dash in, was magnificent; but one cannot safely bathe thereon. The water is heroically cold, and the surf too fierce and heavy for ordinary mortals. The sea water, warmed, tamed, and confined in a bath-house, is what is safest to take.

I quite sympathized with one of our ladies who declared to me that she was never more disappointed in her life than with the beach at Coronado. "Why," said she, "I thought I could gather shells and sea-weed, and pick pretty pebbles; but there is nothing." Well, she was right in a sense. Perhaps it was because that particular spot was harried over and over by visitors _a la_ Coney Island, so that it was bare of all those curious things "cast up by the sea;" or perhaps it was that the huge surf constantly tumbling in raises the sand perpetually, and buries all objects, whatever they may be, rapidly out of sight.

One of our party, who wished to improve the occasion and also give me a treat, paid fifty cents a piece for himself and myself to gain admission to a museum on the beach, said to be a wonderful collection of interesting things in natural history.

I noticed rather a startled look upon the lady caretaker's face as the money was paid. I may here say we found the doors open and a sign at the entrance giving price of admission. We might have pushed in without the formality of a cash payment, but the dignity of our cloth forbade. My friend really made an effort to summon the caretaker from some inner recess. She took our money--his money, I should say--with a startled air, and we entered.

Well, the less said the better about that museum. No wonder that our payment to get in was startling. We who had seen Kensington, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, the British Museum, the World's Fair, and about one hundred and twenty years of life between us, were greeted with shabby plaster reproductions of this, that, and the other; with jute-haired, manufactured monsters and other absurdities; the only thing that really commanded our respect being an American coon tolerably well stuffed and set up. We left disgusted. My reflection to my friend was that in such localities the best things were always "free shows," as I pointed out to the boundless Pacific; the hard, firm sand of the beach; and

"The white arms out in the breakers, tirelessly tossing."

But the melancholy of the museum had yet an outside chapter, for there were cages of wild beasts--miserable captives--and some wretched monkeys, whose capacity for the pathetic grief which was stamped upon their poor faces, turned one's thoughts inward to the tragedy of all life.

The hotel was one of the many "largest hotels in the world," and is really a wonderful place. The great interior court, with glass roof covering in a collection of tropical trees and plants, was all a thing of beauty. Into this magic place quite a number of rooms opened. The dining-room, the ballroom, the verandas, the sun-parlors, the public rooms--all were vast, grandiose, and what one might say "perfectly splendid." I pity the taste of any one who could stand all this splendor, with its crowds of people, for any length of time. It seemed rather deserted when we were there; too late for one season, too early for another. This, and a certain shabby want of repair here and there, made the place seem somewhat sad. It is no easy matter to keep up a show place of such huge extent, with the hungry air of the great Pacific ever whetting its teeth upon every atom of its vast and profusely ornamented surface.

While at San Diego, we noticed a weird effect common on the Pacific Coast, resulting from certain curious atmospheric conditions. The heavens at times are hung with a great veil of what is called "high fog." This bank of vapor shuts out all the upper sky. Between it and the earth is a stratum of hot, dry air, down through which the collected moisture above can never descend. It has to float off to the distant mountains. It has to be caught by their rocky arms, and turned into rain or snow, and then descend as rivers to the dry and dusty plains beneath.

When we were starting out on our carriage ride in the morning, as I noticed this lowering mass of vapor above us, I asked the driver if it was going to rain. "Lord," said he, with an amused and bored shrug, "it will not rain here until next November!" It must have a queer effect upon people to be constantly held in the vise of such inevitable and square-cut atmospheric influences as these.