Q. What is force in style? A. We may illustrate with a quotation from Hall Caine's unannounced book: "He drew her to him and kissed her as men and women have kissed through the æons, since the first star hymned to the first moonrise." Now, as a matter of fact, kissing is only about two thousand years old, and is still unknown to the Chinese, the native Africans, the Hindus, the Australians, the Indians of South America, the Polynesians, and the Eskimos; but the sentence is nevertheless a very forcible one.
XXIX
60 H.P.
For the purpose of getting one's name into the papers, the acquisition of a high-powered automobile may be recommended to the man who has never given a monkey dinner; whose son was never married to a show-girl in a balloon at 2.30 a.m.; whose son-in-law is neither a count, a duke, nor a prince, and does not beat his wife; who has never paid $100,000 for a Velasquez painted in 1897, or for a mediæval Florentine altar-piece made in Dayton, Ohio. The press, like the public, does not brim over with affection for the motorist. From the newspapers it may be gathered that when a man has been seen in the front seat of an automobile his family prefers not to allude to the subject. Good men occasionally ride, but as a rule only on errands of mercy, and always in a friend's machine. A candidate for mayor will laugh when you accuse him of owning an opium den, taking $10,000 a month from Mr. Morgan, or experimenting freely in polygamy; but he throws up his hands when some one proves that he has been seen in a garage.
To me this seems absurd. If people admit that the automobile is here to stay, they must also admit that it is here to move from place to place occasionally. Automobiles that did nothing but stay would obviously fail in one of their principal aims. Not that the auto has no other important functions. It is evident that motor-cars were intended for little boys who squeeze the signal bulb and stick nails into the tires; for Republican orators to cite as evidence that the American farmer does not want the tariff revised; for foreign observers to prove that we are developing an aristocracy; and for Tammany office-holders to snatch a bit of relaxation after the day's long grind.
Motoring is not unmitigated bliss. The common belief that a body may be in only one place at one time can be easily refuted by a woman with a baby-carriage. Experience shows that such a woman, if she be put five feet from a sidewalk, with forty feet of open road behind her for an auto to pass through, will cover the forty feet backward with incredible speed and propel herself right in front of the car. What would happen if two cars came in opposite directions on opposite sides of a hundred-foot avenue cannot be predicted. Either the woman would be accompanied by another woman with a baby-carriage, or else, having propelled her own carriage in front of the machine going north, she would proceed to give her personal attention to the car going south.
It is difficult to start on a short spin in town, under doctor's orders, without immediately beginning to wonder why house rents and office rents should be going up steadily in face of the fact that the population of New York transacts its business and pursues its pleasures entirely in the middle of the road. German citizens, as a rule, stop to light their pipes on a street crossing. When you give them the horn, they are seized with the belief that you are trying to play the prelude to "Lohengrin," and they run up and down in front of the car in extreme agitation. You frustrate their plans for a beautiful death by rasping your tires against the curb, together with your nerves. At Seventy-second Street two women are saying good-bye in the middle of the street. You swerve to one side and they pursue. You snap your spinal column as you shoot the car straight about, but when you get there they are there. "Ladies," you say, "I am not leading a cotillion. I am an old man out for a bit of fresh air." Thereupon one calls you a brute and the other discerns from the colour of your nose that you have been drinking. At Forty-second Street you catch sight of your doctor. "Have you killed any one?" he says, after the cheerful manner of doctors. "No," you say, "but if you will kindly step into the car, I will."
Of the American farmer it may be said that, Mr. Roosevelt to the contrary notwithstanding, he is not an unimaginative, overworked being. It can be demonstrated that the contemplative life is on the increase in the rural districts. Apparently, there is nothing more peaceful, nothing more restful, nothing more soothing, nothing more permeated with the spirit of dolce far niente, than the American farmer on his wagon in a narrow road with an auto behind him. The grunt of the horn invariably stirs in him memories of his aged grandmother, dead these twenty years, and he falls a wondering whether he was really as kind to her as he might have been. If the road is just wide enough for one vehicle, he moves along pensively. If it is wide enough for two vehicles, he throws his horses straight across the road and enters upon a prolonged examination of his rear axle. If the road is wide enough for three vehicles, he drives zigzag. The necessity of conserving our natural resources would seem to be a meaningless phrase when we consider the natural resources of an American farmer in front of an automobile.
The law and the courts press hard on the autoist. Since the invention of the automobile fine, the position of justice of the peace has become one of the highest offices in the gift of the nation. The city magistrate is a kindred soul. "Your Honour," says the prosecuting officer, "the question is whether the city's boulevards shall be given over to the owners of these destructive vehicles or whether they shall be held clear for the use of Marathon runners, suffragette meetings, baseball teams, and 'crap' games. The streets, your Honour, are for the benefit of the majority; yet only the other day on Fifth Avenue I saw two ash-carts and an ice wagon held up by a continuous stream of automobiles." "Right," says the judge, and he turns to the victim: "What were you doing in the middle of the street when defendant ran you down wantonly and without cause?" "I was sleeping, your Honour," says the complainant, "having been overtaken with drowsiness on my way home from a select social affair." "Outrageous," says the magistrate. "Think of running into a sleeping man. One hundred dollars."