LVI
As a boy, thirty years ago, I used to observe, with a boy’s interest, the little bob-tailed street cars that went teetering and tinkling, at intervals of half an hour, out a long street that ran within a block of my home. I watched the cars intently, and so intently that the impressions of their various colors, sounds and smells have remained with me to this day, speaking, in a way, of the conditions of a small American city of that time, and affording a means by which to measure that progress in material efficiency which is so often mistaken for progress in speculative thought.
It may have been that my interest was intensified by the fact that down in Urbana Street cars were unknown, though they were not unimagined, since we used to see them when we went to Cincinnati, and I could then, and I can still, recall, though time has softened the poignancy of that hour, the pain of parting with a certain noble horse which my father sold to a man of dark and hateful aspect, and of the morsel of comfort I derived from the stipulation, invalid enough to be sure, my father made with the dealer, that the horse was not to be put to street-car service. That, by my father, andso by me myself, was held to be the most cruel, degrading and ignoble fate that could befall a horse. But another reason for my interest was the possession of a curiosity to which the passing show has always been novel, generally amusing, sometimes pleasing and often saddening, too—a curiosity in life which I hope will endure fresh and wholesome until life’s largest curiosity shall be satisfied at the end of life.
The progress of the little street car under notice was leisurely and deliberate, sometimes it would wait obligingly for a woman, half a block away, who hurried puffing, and fluttering, and waving, to reach the street corner, and when she had clambered aboard, the driver would slowly unwind his brake, cluck to his horse, the rope traces would strain and the car would bowl along. Ten blocks away from the business section, or a few blocks further on, the little car with its five windows and small hooded platform would enter upon a bare, though expectant scene of vacant lots, and about a mile out, where there was some lonely dwelling staring blankly and reproachfully as though it had been misled, and then abandoned, and further on a few small, expectant cottages, the long, low street-car barn was reached, the car was driven on to a little turntable, slowly turned about and started back. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I had a chance to witness the change of horses, and to experience a nebulous pity for the nag that ambled contentedly into the stable, and did not seem to be very tired after all.
On Summit Street there were grander cars, eachdrawn by two horses, and there were other lines in town, each with its cars painted a distinguishing color. There was one line that went out Collingwood Avenue, far to the very country itself; its cars bowled under noble trees and even past a stately mansion or two, or what in those days seemed stately mansions, and it was pleasant, it was even musical, to hear the tinkle of the bell on the horse’s collar. Then there was still another line that ran down the broad Maumee River, almost to Maumee Bay and the “marsh” where the Frenchhabitantslived, and spoke delightfully like the people in Dr. Drummond’s poems. On Saturday mornings my father was likely to send me on an errand to a superannuated clergyman who lived down there, and this involved a long, irritating journey. The journey occupied the whole morning, and spoiled a holiday. And then it was always cold, for, in the not too clear retrospect, I seem to have been sent on this particular errand only in winter, and the car was the coldest place in the world, especially when it got down where the winds from the icy lake could strike it. Its floor was strewn recklessly with yellow straw, in some ironical pretense of keeping the car warm, and I would sit there with feet slowly freezing in the rustling straw, and after I had inspected the two or three passengers, there was nothing to do but to read the notice over the fare-box in the front end of the car, until I had it quite by heart:
“The driver will furnish change to the amount of Two Dollars, returning the full amount, thus enablingthe passenger to put the exact fare in the box.”
Then I could peer up toward the fare-box and look at the one nickel stranded half-way down its zig-zag chute, and look at the driver, standing on the front platform, slowly rocking from one foot to the other, bundled up in old overcoats, with his cap pulled down and his throat and chin muffled in a repulsive woolen scarf, hoary with the frost of his breath, and nothing of him visible except the shining red point of his frosted nose. His hands, one holding the reins, the other the brake-handle, were lost in the various strata of mittens that marked epochs co-extensive with those of the several overcoats. I had read once in a newspaper of a street-car driver in Indianapolis who, at the end of his run, never moved, but kept right on standing there, and when the barn-boss swore at him, it was found that he was dead, frozen at his post. And I sometimes wondered, as I dwelt on that fascinating horror, if it were possible that sometime, when the car reached the bay, this driver would not be found frozen. Sometimes I expected to be found frozen myself, but nothing exciting ever happened on that journey, and so, somehow, the trips out other streets and other avenues in other cars, remain more pleasantly in the memory, associated with the sunshine and the leafy arch of green overhead, with something of the romance and mystery of untraveled roads in the long vista ahead, while the winter trip down to the superannuated clergyman’s is cold and bleak and desolate, perhaps because it had no more interestingresult than the few minutes I begrudged in that stiff little “parlor,” where the preacher received me with the not unkindly regard of eyes that had the dazed expression of the very old. I can expiate the perfectly patent and impolite reluctance with which I visited the aged man, and the thoughtless contempt youth has for age itself, only by the hope that those dim eyes have since brightened at the realization of those glories they had so long foreseen, which formed perhaps the only consolation of a life that must have had little to gladden it on that forbidding spot.
All these lines, and others like them in the sprawling young town, belonged each to different men, and once I happened to hear that the man who owned the line first mentioned say that every new family that moved into that thoroughfare or built a house there, meant $73.00 a year to him. A good many families moved out into that street, enough indeed to make a settlement that was a town in itself, growing and spreading at the end of the line. Gradually the gaunt vacancies between were built up, though not, it appears, until the man had grown discouraged and sold out, and so suffered the universal fate of the pioneer. One by one the other lines in town were sold, and finally a day came when all the lines were owned by a certain few men, who under our purely individualistic legal system, formed a company and thus could jointly rejoice in all the individual rights and privileges of a person, without any of his embarrassing moral duties and responsibilities.
I ceased to hear of the individual owner any more; I never saw him in his shirt-sleeves in his little office at the end of the line counting up the nickels of those new families which each meant $73.00 per annum to him, and it must have been about the same time that I began to hear of the traction company. There had been probably intervening experiments with tough mules, whom no one pitied, as everyone had pitied the horses they replaced, and there were, in other cities, astounding miracles of cable cars and elevated railways. And then electricity came as a motive power, and the streets were made hideous by the gaunt poles and makeshifts of wires, and the trolley cars came, and increased in size and numbers, and families swarmed, until out on those streets and avenues the great yellow cars went rushing and clanging by, with multitudes of people clinging to the straps and, toward evening, swarming like flies on the broad rear platforms, and the conductors in their blue uniforms shouting “Step lively!” with a voice as authoritative as that which the company spoke in the city councils. And the families continued to arrive, and to build houses, and to toil and to contribute each its $73.00 a year, though they did it with human reluctance and complaint, and grew dimly conscious that somewhere in the whole complicated transaction an injustice lurked. And finally this hidden injustice became the chief public concern of the people of the town, and an issue in local politics for more than a decade.