CHAPTER V
ACROSS THE DELAWARE
The afternoon run was even more delightful than that of the morning. Yet one does not really get free of New York—its bustle and thickness of traffic—until one gets west of Paterson, which is twentyfive miles west, and not even then. New York is so all embracing. It is supposed to be chiefly represented by Manhattan Island, but the feel of it really extends to the Delaware Water Gap, one hundred miles west, as it does to the eastern end of Long Island, one hundred miles east, and to Philadelphia, one hundred miles south, or Albany, one hundred miles north. It is all New York.
But west of Paterson and Boonton the surge of traffic was beginning to diminish, and we were beginning to taste the real country. Not so many autotrucks and wagons were encountered here, though automobiles proper were even more numerous, if anything. This was a wealthy residence section we were traversing, with large handsome machines as common as wagons elsewhere, and the occupants looked their material prosperity. The roads, too, as far as Dover, our next large town, thirty miles on, were beautiful—smooth, grey and white macadam, lined mostly with kempt lawns, handsome hedges, charming dwellings, and now and then yellow fields of wheat or oats or rye, with intermediate acres of tall, ripe corn. I never saw better fields of grain, and remembered reading in the papers that this was a banner season for crops. The sky, too, was wholly entrancing, a clear blue, with great, fleecy clouds sailing along in the distance like immense hills or ships. We passed various small hotels and summer cottages, nestling among these low hills, where summer boarders were sitting on verandas, reading books or swinging in hammocks or crocheting, American fashion, in rocking chairs. All my dread of the conventional American family arose as I surveyed them, for somehow, as idyllic as all this might appear on the surface, it smacked the least bit of the doldrums. Youths and maidens playing croquet and tennis, mother (and much more rarely father) seated near, reading and watching. The three regular meals, the regular nine o’clock hour for retiring! Well, I was glad we were making forty miles an hour.
As we passed through Dover it was three o’clock. As we passed Hopatcong, after pausing to sketch a bridge over the canal, it was nearing four. There were pauses constantly which interrupted our speed. Now it was a flock of birds flying over a pool, all their fluttering wings reflected in the water, and Franklin had to get out and make a pencil note of it. Now a lovely view over some distant hills, a small town in a valley, a factory stack by some water side.
“Say, do these people here ever expect to get to Indiana?” remarked Speed in an aside to Miss H——.
We had to stop in Dover—a city of thirty thousand—at the principal drug store, for a glass of ice cream soda. We had to stop at Hopatcong and get a time table in order to learn whether Miss H—— could get a train in from the Water Gap later in the evening. We had to stop and admire a garden of goldenglows and old fashioned August flowers.
Beyond Hopatcong we began to realize that we would no more than make the Water Gap this day. The hills and valleys were becoming more marked, the roads more difficult to ascend. As we passed Stanhope, a small town beyond Hopatcong, we got on the wrong road and had to return, a common subsequent experience. Beyond Stanhope we petitioned one family group—a mother and three children—for some water, and were refused. A half mile further on, seeing a small iron pump on a lawn, we stopped again. A lean, dreamy woman came out and we asked her. “Yes, surely,” she replied and re-entered the house, returning with a blue pitcher. Chained to a nearby tree a collie bitch which looked for all the world like a fox jumped and barked for joy.
“Are you going to Hackettstown?” asked our hostess simply.
“We’re going through to Indiana,” confided Franklin in a neighborly fashion.
A look of childlike wonder at the far off came into the woman’s voice and eyes. “To Indiana?” she replied. “That’s a long way, isn’t it?”