CHAPTER XXIXTHE FAIR
The Fair will be over when this account is published, but it was so dominant a part of San Francisco at the time we—and all the thousands of others—were there I haven’t the heart to cut the pages out.
With merely a phrase, you can make a picture of the little fair at San Diego; cloister-like gray buildings with clumps of dense green, and a vivid stroke of blue and orange. But to visualize the Pan-American Exposition in a few sentences is impossible. You could begin its description from a hundred different points and miss the best one, you can say one thing about it and the next moment find you were quite wrong. In the shade or fog, it was a city of baked earth color, oxydized with any quantity of terra cotta; in the sun it was deep cream glowing with light. If you thought of half the domes as brown, and others as faded green, you found, the next time you saw them, that they looked like a bit of the sky itself, and the brown ones glimmered a dull, yet living, rose.
Seeing it first from a distance, coming down upon it from the hill streets of San Francisco, yousaw a biscuit-colored city with terra-cotta roofs, green domes and blue. Beyond it the wide waters of a glorious bay, rimmed with far gray-green mountains. But you were luckiest if you saw it first when the sun was painting it for you, which was invariably unless there was a fog, or perhaps you looked down upon it at night when the scintillating central point, the Tower of Jewels, looked like a diamond and turquoise wedding-cake and behind it an aurora of prismatic-colored search-lights—the most thrilling illumination possible to imagine.
Or entering one of its many gates you wandered like an ant through bewildering chaos. Not that it lacked plan; its architectural balance was one of the most noteworthy things about it. But there were so many courts, so much detail. Gradually, you noticed that there were eight great exhibition palaces, and a ninth, the Palace of the Fine Arts, like a half-circle at the end. You perceived that the buildings of the separate States and foreign nations trailed off like a suburb at one end, and that the Zone was a straight street also by itself. Among the thousands of embellishments, you noticed perhaps the lovely statues of Borglum’s “Pioneer,” Fraser’s “End of the Trail,” Daniel Chester French’s “Genius of Creation,” the adventurous bowman on the top of the Column of Progress, nor could you miss the nations of the West and East, and the figures of the rising and the setting sun.
The murals of Brangwyn no chair boy would let you pass. Each one pushed you in front, and backing off to give you the proper distance, declared that they cost five thousand dollars “each one.”
We were admiring their vital animation, for they pulsated fairly with energy and life, as well as color, when suddenly from the sublime to the ridiculous, E. M. remarked: “That’s curious! The men have just taken their shirts off.” Then Celia and I wondered too, why every male figure was brown as a berry as high as a shirt sleeve would roll up, and white as a person always sheltered from the air over all the rest of his body?
We also wondered about the four women who clung to the corners of gigantic boxes on top of the beautiful Fine Arts colonnade. Each of the boxes suggested the coffin of a very fat Mormon and his four wives weeping for him. There wassomethinghidden up there that the clinging women were afraid to take their gaze away from, but what it was we had no idea. All of which levity reminds me that in Paris I watched two tourists as they hurried eagerly down the long gallery toward the Venus de Milo. Arrived at its base one of them leaned over the guard rail, stared at the marble, and exclaimed:
“Why, Gussie, she’s all pock-marked!”
My criticism of a work as notable as the Pan-American Exposition is probably much like the above. Beautiful as much of it is, I wish they hadleft a few unfilled niches, a few plain surfaces, but they are filling them fuller every day. When we first came, the little kneeling figure on her peninsular front of the Fine Arts Temple and her reflection in the lagoon gave an impression of a dream. While we were there, they filled every archway with imposing sculptures until it looks merely like a museum.
I found myself driving around and mentally taking things away. The lovely old eucalyptus trees, the only planting that was on the grounds before the Fair, seemed almost to have heard me, for they were not to be kept from taking everything off that they could, and untidily strewing the ground with their discarded clothing.
One thing, however, was hard to understand or forgive; of all the courts, especially at night, the one which had the most imaginative appeal, was the Court of Abundance. At the four corners of a square pool were standards of erect green cobras holding brasiers filled with leaping flames of tongues of silk blown upward by concealed fans and red and yellow lights; in the center of the pool was the Fountain of the Earth, a work of highly imaginative beauty in which, above four panels of symbolic figures in high relief, the globe of the earth was set in a rose-colored glow surrounded by a mystic vapor, made by a gentle escapement of steam, andthenat one side they had planted two huge Maltese cross standards of blatant electric lights!
On the subject of the exhibits, everyone has read about the Ford cars that are assembled on a conveyor. Beginning at one end as pieces of metal and running off at the other under their own power. That was undoubtedly the most interesting exhibit to the public in general, but to many others the Sperry Flour display was quite as ingenious and if anything more interesting. They had a whole row of little booth kitchens to show how all the nations of the world use flour.
A camper tossed flapjacks over a campfire; a Mexican made anchillades and tomales; a Swede, a Russian, a Chinaman, a Hindoo and four or five others made their national wafers and cakes—and gave samples away! In the center at a bigger oven was baked home-made American bread and cake and pies, of such deliciousness that everyone who passed by looked as longingly as the proverbial ragamuffin in front of a baker’s window.
There was always a crowd, too, watching the manufacture of white lead paint by the Fuller Company, and going through the staterooms of a section, full-sized, of an Atlantic steamer. Perhaps the greatest interest of all was shown in a model United States post-office, with bridges crossing above, so people could look down and see all the details of sorting and distributing.
One thing you noticed—nearly all San Franciscans were personally, or through some members of their family, interested in the Fair. Everyone gave dinners on the Zone, either on the balconyof the Chinese restaurant—that had nothing Chinese about it except its Chinese ornamentation on the front of the building—or at the Old Faithful Inn of the Yellowstone. The illuminations at night were very soft and subdued, all the lanterns were turned dark side to the Concourse and light side to the buildings.
In the Zone there were few new attractions, and fewer worth seeing. The best were the Panama Canal, the Painted Desert, and Captain, the mind-reading horse. A woman mind reader, who took turns with the horse, was equally remarkable.
The queen of the Samoan village, clad literally in a short skirt, a Gaby Deslys head-dress, a string of beads and a dazzling smile, had not only great audacity but a fascinating personality that was literally bubbling over with the old Nick. We were crazy about her, a fact she saw perfectly well, for in the garden afterward, when she had discarded her gorgeous head-dress and donned a modest piece of sash tied around her chest, she came straight to us and shook hands as a child might, who, amidst a crowd of strangers, had singled out a friend. That is all there is to tell, as we couldn’t speak Samoan, nor she English.
A few months ago, in the midst of a daring flight, the wings of the famous Beachey’s aeroplane crumpled and plunged into the sea. The aviator was strapped into his machine in such a way that, if he still lived, he could not free himself.
Le roi est mort! Vive le roi!
And the new king was Art Smith. At eleven o’clock at night, the siren blew and thousands crowded about the open field to see him start. Up and up and up he went until, at several hundred feet up, a torch suddenly burned at the back of the machine which swept the sky, leaving a trail of fire like a comet’s tail, looped and double looped and curved and twisted and wrote “ZONE” across the sky.
But really to see the feats of this aeronaut who far exceeded Beachey’s daring, you had to go to the Aviation Field on a day when he flew at five. You saw, if you were early enough to stand near the ropes of the enormous enclosure, a young boy apparently, very small, but stockily built, walk casually out of the crowd standing back of the machine, wave good-bye to a young girl, his wife, and get on a sort of bicycle on the front of his biplane without any apparent strapping in, except the handle of the steering-wheel that he pulled close in front of him. Across the wide grass field he gradually arose, soared higher and higher, until at half a thousand feet or more, he dipped and swooped, then somersaulted round and round and round in a whirling ball, then flying upside down, dropped nearly over your head, then arose again, flying backwards, sideways, fell, arose, dipped—like a bird gone mad. At last he came swooping down and alit at the end of the great green field.
Very young and small, Art Smith walked the whole length of the field between fifty thousandshouting, waving human beings. No hero of the Roman Stadium, no king coming to his own, has lived a greater moment than the young birdman lived every day. Boyishly his mouth broke into a wide smile, he doffed his cap, bowing to the right and to the left, and the applause followed him in a series of roars. At the hangar his young wife ran out and kissed him. He had been spared to her once again.