The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, July 7, 1895, Page 13

THE SAN FRANCISCO CALL, SUNDAY, JULY 7, 1895. When T arrived at the Tenms Court rather late on Wednesday afternoon I looked about me and saw the people who do not matter. There were little rows of them, neatly piled one above the other, like little loaves of bread on the shelves of a pakeshop, it occurred to me that they were all pale and he and a trifle underdone. They were T lly girls, i hdefinite girls, in blu white duck skirts and white sailor They sat and breathed and stared. They stared a good deal the little boys who were playing tennis, whom they knew, and they stared even more at the little people who were not playing tennis, whom they did not know. n there was a sharp rally they applauded flabbily. When the wrong man made the right play they hissed rudely. When they disc stranger or so in their midst they com- mented audibly. I observed that their hands troubled them, that their feet were a responsibility, that their frocks were another, and that red a | g | regarded as proper form an all-day uniform at a sv place. Butin the East o | swift launches, bright with awnings and | the flying colors of the club, dainty skiffs and wherries and craft of every sort. Up end down the trim drive whirlsa stream of smart traps, fine horsesand irre- proachable liveries, Back and forth surges a brilliant crowd, perfectly clothed and, it is safe to say, thoroughly acquainted. On the veranda it is hard to find a rocker yawning for an occupant, well nigh im- California for | possible to find a tete-a-tete table not al- ger watering- | ready appropriated to conversation and nly the maids and | cool drinks. Through the swinging doors governesses appear in shirt waists after |and opened windows come the click of twelve by the midday clc blouse has been so entht and the silk | balls, the tinkling of silver, the ring of cally worn by | glass and porcelain, the murmur of voices, the cluss below, thata smart woman would | greetings, laughter—life. The band plays scarcely consider it to-day in any clime. Large differences in sm press me much more forcibly now, per- haps, because, for the first time in Califor- nia, the smart set of San Francisco has come between me and the sun, and I find myself with time and inclination to com- ment on its di; larity to persons of ap- proximate position New York. While at San Rafael this week I half fancied my- self somewhere in Saratoga County—say Ballston Spa—that is as good a place as i e does not have to stay long, for any there is no such hotel there as the Rafael, with its comforts, conveniences and cour- teous servi But to Ballston Spa any of nice, quiet, not-too-swagger e go for the month of July, and one numt peo; from rosy morn till dewy eve and on again things im- | till daylight. People arriye, depart, move, speak, smile, look amused, hopeful, content. Whether they really are all of this or not is no affair of mine. Perhaps they keep a skeleton cupboard in town, but they lock it de- cently when they go pleasuring, av all events, and the bones do not rattle at ‘Westchester. One would say there that no man had troubles of his own—nay! nor woman. But it is an affair of pleasure, a tennis tournament! Over on the courts, where the sun beats hot and hard—and what is there in tennis if it is not played under a sun fierce enough to fry ?—the game goes on with an m—-‘—(—;’r’-—-—\ A", wi% o 5, their men avoided them. They were not enjoying themselyes at all. They looked tired, bored, dull, melancholy, cross. There was no gayety among them, no sparkle, no abandonment to the pleasures | of their class, no confidence, no unconcern, none of the easy security which belongs to wealth and position. Of course, one affects every now and then to despise weaith ina large, noble, abstract way, but the soul acknowledges it to be a glittering joy. Atall events those who have it not are willing to break body and soul to get it, 2nd ‘those to whom it has been given are not putting on the garments of Gotama and choosing poverty for their portion instead. As for position—who feels an honest con- tempt for it? It is, the two worlds over, the natural result of being born with blood brains and sometimes with both, and ither is despicable. So, when a lot of people thus favored of fortune assemble on their happy hunting- ground for avowed purposes of pleasure, I donot see why they should take them- selves so solemnly or wear such tiresome and flat frocks. Perhaps the cleanly cotton shirt or the highly decent but by no means smart silk blouse worn with contrasting skirts is or often acrowd of neat, slightly embar- rassed, unstylish girls, looking languidly on while a brace of college boys drive balls over the net in silent and determined practice. This is not, however, the atmosphere of Newportj Narragansett, Bar Harbor, or, to go in an other direction, Tuxedo, Baratoga, Lake George and through the scale of lesser summer resorts where the people who make the pace for their var- ions followings go for their season of idiesse. And especially is it unlike the at- mosphere of the Westchester Country Club where the crack Tennis Tournament of the year is held and all the smart world and his fashionable wife and his well-gowned daughters and his well-groomed sons g0 to look on by day and to dance by night. There the wide verandas of the Colonial Clubhouse swarm with life, color and a high-bred sort of loveliness which is not the voluptuous beauty which blooms in Western climes or beneath the Southern sky, but is distinctive and delightful and easily understood after it is studied a bit of a while. Tmakeit out to be merely the careful development of natural points and no end of taste in dress. - The blue flashes of the Sound dazzle between the huge white pillars of the porch, and are shot over by energy that could not be more impassioned if life, as well as honor, lay in the bowl of the Westchester cup. Dripping brows, alert and anxious eyes, scorched mnoses and wild disheveled heads, disdain the power of 'the sun. Be- flanneled legs course wildly in pursuit of vicious balls and frenzied rackets beat the air, guided by bare and sun-browned arms. A cheer or a groan comes swift on the heels of every play. The svectators are for or against each ball with passion and with pride. ‘Wagers are winging about from group to group; wine is up, and dinners at Del- monico’s, suppers at the Waldorf, gloves by the dozen, flowers by the box, chocolates from Huyler’s, hats from Dunlaps’ and cigars from anywhere. But it is an affair to get interested over, the tennis tournament! And yet it is said of the effete East that it knows not enthusiasms, and of the woolly West that it is prodigal of gush. Oh, maie, aie! There was good play in the San Rafael court this vear. One or two lithe-limbed, brown, athletic youths, with the youth of them emphatically in evidence, sent some of the most difficult balls I have ever seen clear 3 uet—and sent them continuously— but hard driving killed many a ball on ‘Wednesday afternoon, and scientific plac- ing does not shine, as far as I could deter- mine, amid the tennis talent of the West. I did not, it is true, see the more impor- tant matches. Requisite energy to reach the courts on the last day did not stir in me, and it is im- possible to judge any man’s ability by the farce of Thursday, when the court was a lake in miniature and it wasim- possible to calculate distances or play in any sort of form. The president was terribly stirred up over this discomforting incident of rain, as if he rather feared being blamed for it. I do not think that was thought of for an instant. [understand that he exclaimed “Wats!” once with great violence, but 1 do not think loud enough to have caused rain. Ishould beinclined to favor theidea that it was due to other explosions of a more | American nature, incident to the date. Apropos of the Fourth, one forgot it in San Rafael. No one had the indelicacy to allude to it, and the painful thought of our Independence was buried beneath a stony British impassibility which fits our men as well as papa’s pants fitted Willie, A | little boy nearly caused heart failure by running down the porch waving the stars and stripes; but a man of great tact and | presénce of mind began whistling “Rule, | Britannia,”” and the crisis was passed safely, although every one was nervous for hours afterward. Itis not true, however, that San Rafael is more English than London. I no- tice a number of little points about it which, consciously or unconsciously, are not English at all. Accents are unmistak-, able. Some of the men cannot understand one another, and they are forced to go out on the porch and explain themselves as opportunity offers in the ‘United States tongue. But all such minor difficulties may be smoothed out by the times Wales comies over, and in the interim the place, as heaven will bear witness, is quite Eng- lish enough. Of course all the watches and clocks are run on London time, and until one masters thislittle detail life seems filled with complications. For example, I was covered with scarlet shame to find myself eating terrapin and drinking Mumm at half after seven in the evening by my own timepiece, set in San Francisco, California, America, only two hours before, whereas people all about me in San Rafael were ordering grilled bones for breakfast and talking Court gossip over their tea. Possibly this difference of time ac- counted for the early close of the ball. It was closed, in fact it w4 slammed down, with the utmost abruptness as soon as the dancers left the ballroom to go out to supper. It seemed to me a very small and early affair, but I presume it was day- light in London. I rather looked for a full dress affair on this occasion, one of the initiated having explained to me that the Hotel Rafael ball was the swagger out-of-town function in California. I saw no gowns which made me blink, and most of the women were garbed in dinner frocks, and by no means extreme dinner frocks at that. A rage for “simple little white muslins,” than which there is nothing more trying after the days of infancy, seemed to have afflicted halt the girls at the hotel. Needless to explain that they were, with one exception, hope- lessly unbecoming, and their lifelessness further enhanced by an exhibition of raw red elbows, which the short puffed sleeves revealed in all the brutality of nakedness. The exception might have been a debu- tante or a jeune marife. Connais pas! She was extremely lovely, with a skin of cream, and dark hair closely coiled to a small, fine head. She was fair and young enough to be a girl, but had something of the dignified repose which the married state is supposed to confer, and she did not dance. She looked like a cameo in her white muslin, but her’s is the peauty that illumines, and she would have glorified a gunny sack. Passing the dancers over in that swift, uncertain mental review, which is so apt to drop one or two and never miss them, I believe there were, after this stately one, but three beauties at the ball. One, the married daugh- ter of a Southern house, who still has the apple blossom tint of early girl- hood, a velvet fascination of the eye and not an atom of an idea how to dress. The other, the tall, distinguished grand- daughter of a dead Bishop, and the third a Greek nymph of a girl who wore the dointiest frock in the room, a matter of blue shimmery stuff and Dresden ribbon blurred with soft roses who took herself and her delicious gown off and away at an early hour, and who is easily the hand- somest girl in California. The beauty of the Californian woman has long been open to fierce disputes. Men and women, too, have fought, bled and died for the native femals loveliness, through columns of newspapers which are pleased to arouse controversy and anxious to create sensations. Therecent sickening Woman Shows have encouraged girls to vie for public approval with the poor slaves sold in the market-place for the beauty of their bodies, and they have proved to the world that feminine vanity, like the yel- low squash, attains prodigious size beneath this genial sky. But they have not yet un- earthed any rare specimens of the sex who could go forth fearlessly to do battle against the beauty of the world. They have not rnn to cover that mysteriously lovely type, thatexquisitely colored, dewy- eyed, rich - toned, generous, abundant beauty, which is said to be indigenous to the soil. Naturally, one does not look in the smart set for beauty of this order. It belongs to the people. But so did some of the smart set just a little while ago, before vapa made money and went out of the saloon business into something respectable, and mamma ceased to wash her neighbors’ linen at home and her own in public. Not so many generations removed but that some few characteristics of the people might be yet discoverable to the naked eye, but this rich, warm, red-blooded beauty is not among the few. The girls I saw were, as a whole, exceedingly indefinite of tint and chillingly cold of tone and utterly de- void of individuality. Exceptions, natur- ally enough, go without the saying, but in a lump, these women, youngand old, mar- ried and single, tall end short, dark and fair, are all singularly alike. They do not carry themselves or their clothes with the dégagée air of women sure of themselves, and they do not walk. They golumph. I watched ten women successively as they left the dining - room of the Hotel Rafael on the night of the ball. They all made exactly the same order of exit. ‘With chin uplifted and head thrust well before, with arms driven stiffly back and shoulders hunched to the ears, they stood prepared to lunge with the whole upper torso at a cruel angle with the hips. Then they lunged. Across the floor, through the 18 | none may deny, but of its fitness there | might be question. Isay Brownie because I suppose I am right. All these sinooth, small, dapper little mincing men—they are Brownies? And where, then, are the real men? I met some real boys. As awfully jolly, genuine, well-bred, well-looking, well-mannered boys as one would wish to see. Iam fond of this kind of boys, and of all men of all ages they are the most direct and sincere—whether they are will- ing to admit it or not. And they will give one a straight, square, clear-sighted view of life as they see it—and heaven knows | they have a trick of peering—and they look through little hollow spaces where one would least expect them to, and they have no earthly use for shams, and as yet no need to learn their usefulness, I read somewhere, not so long ago, that this kind of an American boy was dying out. Heaven help the race! But ah, bah! I do not believe it. I meet them everywhere. They are the other | side of all boys—even of the Brownies. The Brownie is not nearly so well-dressed as he pretends to be. He wears such odd ) OrR HERE m\m\g_l l_\/c coNTROLS g e A —DEFEAT iy cOUPED door, on and away down the corridor, and had a straight road led to San Francisco and that city been their destina- tion, they would have reached it without once losing that singular poise. In order to preserve it a restricted bounding upward from the heel, together with rigidity of the knee, is absolutely requisite. It is the most singular of gymnastic exer- cises, and, indeed, it must require devoted practice. I experimented before my Psyche and came not within a mile of it. It would be supremely funny were it not exquisitely painful. Itisalsounnecessary, quite as much so as the midair handshake, which I perceive Californians still indulge in, possibly in ignorance of the fact that it has not been in polite usage abroad for something like three years. Perhaps, however, it is a matter of inde- pendent taste, like the hoary fad of dancing the deuxtemps with rigid legs and heels glued to the floor. That was the briefest of summer dreams in other towns, born of a reckless fancy for a stage specialty, and refined for use in private life by a woman of two worlds, who has made fashions and broken them almost ever since she was born. She never made an uglier than this sameinflexible deuxtemps, which everybody seems to like here, and dances to every musical measure, even that of Auld Lang Syne. The fastion of dancing independently of one's partner is, however, new tome. I saw girls backing solemnly down the ball- room steering wild youths who clung to them about the belt and executed little pas seuls whenever space permitted. Occasion- ally the man would collide with an en- croaching couple and then both would cannon into somebody’s arms, recover and start again, the girl still solemnly backing and steering, the Brownie’s grip still hard upon her belte The originality of this shoes and such quaint, peculiar ties. He has his shirts polished up to a celluloid pitch and he wears any sort of a hat about the hotel, with his compromise coat. He is an earnest, sincere person though in his | particular line—which is obviously to hang on girls much larger and richer than him- self and to snub people he does not regard as useful or those he feels perfectly sure of, as the case may be. I met a Brownie at the Tennis Court on ‘Wednesday. He was talking with one of my friends and his, a woman who had enter- tained him on many occasions. Indeed, he visits her on what may be termed a society soupticket basis. He presents his card at the door at a pro- pitious hour and 1is straightway asked in to dine. She is a woman of culture, of family and of no wealth. She is fifty-five and a trifle old-fashioned in the way of frocks. She is not in his set, and he is not and never could be in hers. A stranger in San Rafael, she ingenuously called upon him for a little of his time, and he yielded it grudgingly and withdrew it ungraciously. When some of his particular little gilded gods wheeled into sight, he began to melt away from her by perceptible degrees, and later in that same day he passed her on the hotel porch without lifting his hat. But when he runs out of dinner engage- ments—as even a professional diner-out sometimes will—he will be at her front door with his soup ticket, and nine chances out of ten she will let him ixn. I discussed Western society in the ab- stract with one of its acknowledged leaders. 1 did this for two reasons—first, with the laudable intention of obtaining some in- formation from the sources of social wis- dom, and, again, because he is the clev- erest man I have met in many a moon, apd Ienjoyed telking with him, He said it is not the new aspirant for place in the set who threatens the purity of the atmos- phere in which the local high world lives, moves and has its being. No! Itis her mother. He tells me that the aspirations of un- known and insignificant mothers are prac- tically unbounded. They will not be re- strained, guided, directed or adjusted. They have to be put down by force. They have to be stamped on and obliterated, annihilated and made to disappear into nothingness before he can consent to pilot | the prettiest daughters through the troubled seas of social distinction. He says that new fathers are not so bad, new brothers are often even desirable, new cousins, aunts, uncles and relatives-in-law are easily subdued and made to feel soothed by the crumbs from the social feast, such for in- stance, as the privilege of reading about the new bud in the papers and being per- mitted to claim the relationship in a modesi way. But mothers! Oh, that is a different affair. When you come to consider the matter seriously, the relation is rather a close one and it must require great tact and delicacy of feeling—especially on the part of the daughter—to sever it com- pletely and finally. Is this the end of our century? I bethink me that it is the dawn of the new. Until quite recently it used to be an absorbing question with mothers, how best and most successfully to introduce their daughters. Now, forsooth, it is the daughter who is confronted by the problem of how not to introduce her mother. NEW TO-DAY. LADELPHIA SHOE CO STAMPED ON A SHOE P MEANS STANDARD OF MERIT. DOWN 'SALE! SALE NOW GOING ON! The erection of a new building at Third and Market streets by Claus Spreckels will necessitate our moving, as the store occupied by wus will be torn down. Notices have been served on the tenants to vacate by July 15, and the shortness of the time compels us to begin at once our Monster Clearance Sale. The inauguration of our tearing-down sale has filled our store with customers, | and since Monday we have been crowded to the doors. We have reduced the price of every shoe in the store, and our cus- tomers are taking advantage of our low rices. We have to reduce our stock, that 1s compulsory, so that now is the time to take advantage of our low prices. The following are a few of our reductions: Infents’ Dongola Kid Button, with patent leather tips, sizes 110 5... 050 Child’s Dongola Kid Button, paten tips, spring heels, sizes 8 to 104, Child’s' Patent Leather Button, cfo tops, spring heels, sizes 8 t0 1034 0 Misses’ Patent Leather Button, cloth or kid 085 | tops, spring heels, sizes 11 to 2. 140 Misses’ Dongola Kid Button, plail sizes 11 t0 2. 075 Misses’ Dongola heets, sizes 11 to 2. 12 Misses’ Dongola Kid Button, patent leather |~ tips, spring heels, sizes 11 to 2 100 Ladies’ Cloth or Kid Top Oxford square toe: Ladies’ Ra Ladies’ Dongola Kid Button, pointed " toes and patent leather tips....... 175 Ladies’ Dovgola Kid Button, cloth or kid tops, pointed or square toes. % Ladies’ Dongola Kid Button, c pointed or square toes ., . 235 Ladies' Dongola Kid Blucher Lace, pointed e e TR O R I SR Laird, Schober and Mitcheil’s Fire Shoss, all sifles, handsewed turns or welts. S oes, 50 W. L. Douglas Boys' all styles, reduced from........ -$2 t0 190 W. L. Douglas Men’s Shoes, ail styles, re- ducea from eeveo...$3 10 285 W. L. Douglas Men's Shoes, ail styles, hand- welted, reduced from. .$4 to 360 sewed, reduced ‘Houghton's Men’s gress, all styles 140 Cutter, Lyons & Field Men’s Heavy Top Soled = ! Shoes, Congress or lace 190 Reynolds’ Mer’s Light C: gress or lace, all styles. AF-Country orders solicited. Bo~Send for New lllustrated Catalogue. ddress B. KATCHINSKI, 10 Third Street, San Francisco. PHILADELPHIA SHOE CO. Al