A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Men, Women, and Boats

S >> Stephen Crane >> Men, Women, and Boats




It was not the feat, but it was the word which had at this time the
power to conjure memories of skating parties on moonlit lakes, with
laughter ringing over the ice, and a great red bonfire on the shore
among the hemlocks.


CHAPTER IV

A Terrible thing in nature is the fall of a horse in his harness. It is
a tragedy. Despite their skill in skating there was that about the
pavement on the rainy evening which filled me with expectations of
horses going headlong. Finally it happened just in front. There was a
shout and a tangle in the darkness, and presently a prostrate cab horse
came within my cylinder. The accident having been a complete success and
altogether concluded, a voice from the side walk said, "_Look_ out,
now! _Be_ more careful, can't you?"

I remember a constituent of a Congressman at Washington who had tried in
vain to bore this Congressman with a wild project of some kind. The
Congressman eluded him with skill, and his rage and despair ultimately
culminated in the supreme grievance that he could not even get near
enough to the Congressman to tell him to go to Hades.

This cabman should have felt the same desire to strangle this man who
spoke from the sidewalk. He was plainly impotent; he was deprived of the
power of looking out. There was nothing now for which to look out. The
man on the sidewalk had dragged a corpse from a pond and said to it,

"_Be_ more careful, can't you, or you'll drown?" My cabman pulled
up and addressed a few words of reproach to the other. Three or four
figures loomed into my cylinder, and as they appeared spoke to the
author or the victim of the calamity in varied terms of displeasure.
Each of these reproaches was couched in terms that defined the situation
as impending. No blind man could have conceived that the precipitate
phrase of the incident was absolutely closed.

"_Look_ out now, cawn't you?" And there was nothing in his mind
which approached these sentiments near enough to tell them to go to
Hades.

However, it needed only an ear to know presently that these expressions
were formulae. It was merely the obligatory dance which the Indians had
to perform before they went to war. These men had come to help, but as a
regular and traditional preliminary they had first to display to this
cabman their idea of his ignominy.

The different thing in the affair was the silence of the victim. He
retorted never a word. This, too, to me seemed to be an obedience to a
recognized form. He was the visible criminal, if there was a criminal,
and there was born of it a privilege for them.

They unfastened the proper straps and hauled back the cab. They fetched
a mat from some obscure place of succor, and pushed it carefully under
the prostrate thing. From this panting, quivering mass they suddenly and
emphatically reconstructed a horse. As each man turned to go his way he
delivered some superior caution to the cabman while the latter buckled
his harness.


CHAPTER V

There was to be noticed in this band of rescuers a young man in evening
clothes and top-hat. Now, in America a young man in evening clothes and
a top-hat may be a terrible object. He is not likely to do violence, but
he is likely to do impassivity and indifference to the point where they
become worse than violence. There are certain of the more idle phases of
civilization to which America has not yet awakened--and it is a matter
of no moment if she remains unaware. This matter of hats is one of them.
I recall a legend recited to me by an esteemed friend, ex-Sheriff of Tin
Can, Nevada. Jim Cortright, one of the best gun-fighters in town, went
on a journey to Chicago, and while there he procured a top-hat. He was
quite sure how Tin Can would accept this innovation, but he relied on
the celerity with which he could get a six-shooter in action. One Sunday
Jim examined his guns with his usual care, placed the top-hat on the
back of his head, and sauntered coolly out into the streets of Tin Can.

Now, while Jim was in Chicago some progressive citizen had decided that
Tin Can needed a bowling alley. The carpenters went to work the next
morning, and an order for the balls and pins was telegraphed to Denver.
In three days the whole population was concentrated at the new alley
betting their outfits and their lives.

It has since been accounted very unfortunate that Jim Cortright had not
learned of bowling alleys at his mother's knee or even later in the
mines. This portion of his mind was singularly belated. He might have
been an Apache for all he knew of bowling alleys.

In his careless stroll through the town, his hands not far from his belt
and his eyes going sideways in order to see who would shoot first at the
hat, he came upon this long, low shanty where Tin Can was betting itself
hoarse over a game between a team from the ranks of Excelsior Hose
Company No. 1 and a team composed from the _habitues_ of the "Red
Light" saloon.

Jim, in blank ignorance of bowling phenomena, wandered casually through
a little door into what must always be termed the wrong end of a bowling
alley. Of course, he saw that the supreme moment had come. They were not
only shooting at the hat and at him, but the low-down cusses were using
the most extraordinary and hellish ammunition. Still, perfectly
undaunted, however, Jim retorted with his two Colts, and killed three of
the best bowlers in Tin Can.

The ex-Sheriff vouched for this story. He himself had gone headlong
through the door at the firing of the first shot with that simple
courtesy which leads Western men to donate the fighters plenty of room.
He said that afterwards the hat was the cause of a number of other
fights, and that finally a delegation of prominent citizens was obliged
to wait upon Cortright and ask him if he wouldn't take that thing away
somewhere and bury it. Jim pointed out to them that it was his hat, and
that he would regard it as a cowardly concession if he submitted to
their dictation in the matter of his headgear. He added that he purposed
to continue to wear his top-hat on every occasion when he happened to
feel that the wearing of a top-hat was a joy and a solace to him.

The delegation sadly retired, and announced to the town that Jim
Cortright had openly defied them, and had declared his purpose of
forcing his top-hat on the pained attention of Tin Can whenever he
chose. Jim Cortright's plug hat became a phrase with considerable
meaning to it.

However, the whole affair ended in a great passionate outburst of
popular revolution. Spike Foster was a friend of Cortright, and one day,
when the latter was indisposed, Spike came to him and borrowed the hat.
He had been drinking heavily at the "Red Light," and was in a supremely
reckless mood. With the terrible gear hanging jauntily over his eye and
his two guns drawn, he walked straight out into the middle of the square
in front of the Palace Hotel, and drew the attention of all Tin Can by a
blood-curdling imitation of the yowl of a mountain lion.

This was when the long suffering populace arose as one man. The top-hat
had been flaunted once too often. When Spike Foster's friends came to
carry him away they found nearly a hundred and fifty men shooting busily
at a mark--and the mark was the hat.

My informant told me that he believed he owed his popularity in Tin Can,
and subsequently his election to the distinguished office of Sheriff, to
the active and prominent part he had taken in the proceedings.

The enmity to the top-hat expressed by the convincing anecdote exists in
the American West at present, I think, in the perfection of its
strength; but disapproval is not now displayed by volleys from the
citizens, save in the most aggravating cases. It is at present usually a
matter of mere jibe and general contempt. The East, however, despite a
great deal of kicking and gouging, is having the top-hat stuffed slowly
and carefully down its throat, and there now exist many young men who
consider that they could not successfully conduct their lives without
this furniture.

To speak generally, I should say that the headgear then supplies them
with a kind of ferocity of indifference. There is fire, sword, and
pestilence in the way they heed only themselves. Philosophy should
always know that indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the
walls of cities, and murders the women and children amid flames and the
purloining of altar vessels. When it goes away it leaves smoking ruins,
where lie citizens bayoneted through the throat. It is not a children's
pastime like mere highway robbery.

Consequently in America we may be much afraid of these young men. We
dive down alleys so that we may not kowtow. It is a fearsome thing.

Taught thus a deep fear of the top-hat in its effect upon youth, I was
not prepared for the move of this particular young man when the cab-
horse fell. In fact, I grovelled in my corner that I might not see the
cruel stateliness of his passing. But in the meantime he had crossed the
street, and contributed the strength of his back and some advice, as
well as the formal address, to the cabman on the importance of looking
out immediately.

I felt that I was making a notable collection. I had a new kind of
porter, a cylinder of vision, horses that could skate, and now I added a
young man in a top-hat who would tacitly admit that the beings around
him were alive. He was not walking a churchyard filled with inferior
headstones. He was walking the world, where there were people, many
people.

But later I took him out of the collection. I thought he had rebelled
against the manner of a class, but I soon discovered that the top-hat
was not the property of a class. It was the property of rogues, clerks,
theatrical agents, damned seducers, poor men, nobles, and others. In
fact, it was the universal rigging. It was the only hat; all other forms
might as well be named ham, or chops, or oysters. I retracted my
admiration of the young man because he may have been merely a rogue.


CHAPTER VI

There was a window whereat an enterprising man by dodging two placards
and a calendar was entitled to view a young woman. She was dejectedly
writing in a large book. She was ultimately induced to open the window a
trifle. "What nyme, please?" she said wearily. I was surprised to hear
this language from her. I had expected to be addressed on a submarine
topic. I have seen shell fishes sadly writing in large books at the
bottom of a gloomy acquarium who could not ask me what was my "nyme."

At the end of the hall there was a grim portal marked "lift." I pressed
an electric button and heard an answering tinkle in the heavens. There
was an upholstered settle near at hand, and I discovered the reason. A
deer-stalking peace drooped upon everything, and in it a man could
invoke the passing of a lazy pageant of twenty years of his life. The
dignity of a coffin being lowered into a grave surrounded the ultimate
appearance of the lift. The expert we in America call the elevator-boy
stepped from the car, took three paces forward, faced to attention and
saluted. This elevator boy could not have been less than sixty years of
age; a great white beard streamed towards his belt. I saw that the lift
had been longer on its voyage than I had suspected.

Later in our upward progress a natural event would have been an
establishment of social relations. Two enemies imprisoned together
during the still hours of a balloon journey would, I believe, suffer a
mental amalgamation. The overhang of a common fate, a great principal
fact, can make an equality and a truce between any pair. Yet, when I
disembarked, a final survey of the grey beard made me recall that I had
failed even to ask the boy whether he had not taken probably three trips
on this lift.

My windows overlooked simply a great sea of night, in which were
swimming little gas fishes.


CHAPTER VII

I have of late been led to reflect wistfully that many of the
illustrators are very clever. In an impatience, which was donated by a
certain economy of apparel, I went to a window to look upon day-lit
London. There were the 'buses parading the streets with the miens of
elephants There were the police looking precisely as I had been informed
by the prints. There were the sandwich-men. There was almost everything.

But the artists had not told me the sound of London. Now, in New York
the artists are able to portray sound because in New York a dray is not
a dray at all; it is a great potent noise hauled by two or more horses.
When a magazine containing an illustration of a New York street is sent
to me, I always know it beforehand. I can hear it coming through the
mails. As I have said previously, this which I must call sound of London
was to me only a silence.

Later, in front of the hotel a cabman that I hailed said to me--"Are you
gowing far, sir? I've got a byby here, and want to giv'er a bit of a
blough." This impressed me as being probably a quotation from an early
Egyptian poet, but I learned soon enough that the word "byby" was the
name of some kind or condition of horse. The cabman's next remark was
addressed to a boy who took a perilous dive between the byby's nose and
a cab in front. "That's roight. Put your head in there and get it
jammed--a whackin good place for it, I should think." Although the tone
was low and circumspect, I have never heard a better off-handed
declamation. Every word was cut clear of disreputable alliances with its
neighbors. The whole thing was clean as a row of pewter mugs. The
influence of indignation upon the voice caused me to reflect that we
might devise a mechanical means of inflaming some in that constellation
of mummers which is the heritage of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Then I saw the drilling of vehicles by two policemen. There were four
torrents converging at a point, and when four torrents converge at one
point engineering experts buy tickets for another place.

But here, again, it was drill, plain, simple drill. I must not falter in
saying that I think the management of the traffic--as the phrase goes--
to be distinctly illuminating and wonderful. The police were not ruffled
and exasperated. They were as peaceful as two cows in a pasture.

I can remember once remarking that mankind, with all its boasted modern
progress, had not yet been able to invent a turnstile that will commute
in fractions. I have now learned that 756 rights-of-way cannot operate
simultaneously at one point. Right-of-way, like fighting women, requires
space. Even two rights-of-way can make a scene which is only suited to
the tastes of an ancient public.

This truth was very evidently recognized. There was only one right-of-
way at a time. The police did not look behind them to see if their
orders were to be obeyed; they knew they were to be obeyed. These four
torrents were drilling like four battalions. The two blue-cloth men
maneuvered them in solemn, abiding peace, the silence of London.

I thought at first that it was the intellect of the individual, but I
looked at one constable closely and his face was as afire with
intelligence as a flannel pin-cushion. It was not the police, and it was
not the crowd. It was the police and the crowd. Again, it was drill.


CHAPTER VIII

I have never been in the habit of reading signs. I don't like to read
signs. I have never met a man that liked to read signs. I once invented
a creature who could play the piano with a hammer, and I mentioned him
to a professor in Harvard University whose peculiarity was Sanscrit. He
had the same interest in my invention that I have in a certain kind of
mustard. And yet this mustard has become a part of me. Or, I have become
a part of this mustard. Further, I know more of an ink, a brand of hams,
a kind of cigarette, and a novelist than any man living. I went by train
to see a friend in the country, and after passing through a patent
mucilage, some more hams, a South African Investment Company, a Parisian
millinery firm, and a comic journal, I alighted at a new and original
kind of corset. On my return journey the road almost continuously ran
through soap.

I have accumulated superior information concerning these things, because
I am at their mercy. If I want to know where I am I must find the
definitive sign. This accounts for my glib use of the word mucilage, as
well as the titles of other staples.

I suppose even the Briton in mixing his life must sometimes consult the
labels on 'buses and streets and stations, even as the chemist consults
the labels on his bottles and boxes. A brave man would possibly affirm
that this was suggested by the existence of the labels.

The reason that I did not learn more about hams and mucilage in New York
seems to me to be partly due to the fact that the British advertiser is
allowed to exercise an unbridled strategy in his attack with his new
corset or whatever upon the defensive public. He knows that the
vulnerable point is the informatory sign which the citizen must, of
course, use for his guidance, and then, with horse, foot, guns, corsets,
hams, mucilage, investment companies, and all, he hurls himself at the
point.

Meanwhile I have discovered a way to make the Sanscrit scholar heed my
creature who plays the piano with a hammer.




THE SCOTCH EXPRESS


The entrance to Euston Station is of itself sufficiently imposing. It
is a high portico of brown stone, old and grim, in form a casual
imitation, no doubt, of the front of the temple of Nike Apteros, with a
recollection of the Egyptians proclaimed at the flanks. The frieze,
where of old would prance an exuberant processional of gods, is, in this
case, bare of decoration, but upon the epistyle is written in simple,
stern letters the word "EUSTON." The legend reared high by the gloomy
Pelagic columns stares down a wide avenue, In short, this entrance to a
railway station does not in any way resemble the entrance to a railway
station. It is more the front of some venerable bank. But it has another
dignity, which is not born of form. To a great degree, it is to the
English and to those who are in England the gate to Scotland.

The little hansoms are continually speeding through the gate, dashing
between the legs of the solemn temple; the four-wheelers, their tops
crowded with luggage, roll in and out constantly, and the footways beat
under the trampling of the people. Of course, there are the suburbs and
a hundred towns along the line, and Liverpool, the beginning of an
important sea-path to America, and the great manufacturing cities of the
North; but if one stands at this gate in August particularly, one must
note the number of men with gun-cases, the number of women who surely
have Tam-o'-Shanters and plaids concealed within their luggage, ready
for the moors. There is, during the latter part of that month, a
wholesale flight from London to Scotland which recalls the July throngs
leaving New York for the shore or the mountains.

The hansoms, after passing through this impressive portal of the
station, bowl smoothly across a courtyard which is in the center of the
terminal hotel, an institution dear to most railways in Europe. The
traveler lands amid a swarm of porters, and then proceeds cheerfully to
take the customary trouble for his luggage. America provides a
contrivance in a thousand situations where Europe provides a man or
perhaps a number of men, and the work of our brass check is here done by
porters, directed by the traveler himself. The men lack the memory of
the check; the check never forgets its identity. Moreover, the European
railways generously furnish the porters at the expense of the traveler.
Nevertheless, if these men have not the invincible business precision of
the check, and if they have to be tipped, it can be asserted for those
who care that in Europe one-half of the populace waits on the other half
most diligently and well.

Against the masonry of a platform, under the vaulted arch of the train-
house, lay a long string of coaches. They were painted white on the
bulging part, which led halfway down from the top, and the bodies were a
deep bottle-green. There was a group of porters placing luggage in the
van, and a great many others were busy with the affairs of passengers,
tossing smaller bits of luggage into the racks over the seats, and
bustling here and there on short quests. The guard of the train, a tall
man who resembled one of the first Napoleon's veterans, was caring for
the distribution of passengers into the various bins. There were no
second-class compartments; they were all third and first-class.

The train was at this time engineless, but presently a railway "flier,"
painted a glowing vermilion, slid modestly down and took its place at
the head. The guard walked along the platform, and decisively closed
each door. He wore a dark blue uniform thoroughly decorated with silver
braid in the guise of leaves. The way of him gave to this business the
importance of a ceremony. Meanwhile the fireman had climbed down from
the cab and raised his hand, ready to transfer a signal to the driver,
who stood looking at his watch. In the interval there had something
progressed in the large signal box that stands guard at Euston. This
high house contains many levers, standing in thick, shining ranks. It
perfectly resembles an organ in some great church, if it were not that
these rows of numbered and indexed handles typify something more acutely
human than does a keyboard. It requires four men to play this organ-like
thing, and the strains never cease. Night and day, day and night, these
four men are walking to and fro, from this lever to that lever, and
under their hands the great machine raises its endless hymn of a world
at work, the fall and rise of signals and the clicking swing of
switches.

And so as the vermilion engine stood waiting and looking from the shadow
of the curve-roofed station, a man in the signal house had played the
notes that informed the engine of its freedom. The driver saw the fall
of those proper semaphores which gave him liberty to speak to his steel
friend. A certain combination in the economy of the London and
Northwestern Railway, a combination which had spread from the men who
sweep out the carriages through innumerable minds to the general manager
himself, had resulted in the law that the vermilion engine, with its
long string of white and bottle-green coaches, was to start forthwith
toward Scotland.

Presently the fireman, standing with his face toward the rear, let fall
his hand. "All right," he said. The driver turned a wheel, and as the
fireman slipped back, the train moved along the platform at the pace of
a mouse. To those in the tranquil carriages this starting was probably
as easy as the sliding of one's hand over a greased surface, but in the
engine there was more to it. The monster roared suddenly and loudly, and
sprang forward impetuously. A wrong-headed or maddened draft-horse will
plunge in its collar sometimes when going up a hill. But this load of
burdened carriages followed imperturbably at the gait of turtles. They
were not to be stirred from their way of dignified exit by the impatient
engine. The crowd of porters and transient people stood respectful. They
looked with the indefinite wonder of the railway-station sight-seer upon
the faces at the windows of the passing coaches. This train was off for
Scotland. It had started from the home of one accent to the home of
another accent. It was going from manner to manner, from habit to habit,
and in the minds of these London spectators there surely floated dim
images of the traditional kilts, the burring speech, the grouse, the
canniness, the oat-meal, all the elements of a romantic Scotland.

The train swung impressively around the signal-house, and headed up a
brick-walled cut. In starting this heavy string of coaches, the engine
breathed explosively. It gasped, and heaved, and bellowed; once, for a
moment, the wheels spun on the rails, and a convulsive tremor shook the
great steel frame.

The train itself, however, moved through this deep cut in the body of
London with coolness and precision, and the employees of the railway,
knowing the train's mission, tacitly presented arms at its passing. To
the travelers in the carriages, the suburbs of London must have been one
long monotony of carefully made walls of stone or brick. But after the
hill was climbed, the train fled through pictures of red habitations of
men on a green earth.

But the noise in the cab did not greatly change its measure. Even though
the speed was now high, the tremendous thumping to be heard in the cab
was as alive with strained effort and as slow in beat as the breathing
of a half-drowned man. At the side of the track, for instance, the sound
doubtless would strike the ear in the familiar succession of incredibly
rapid puffs; but in the cab itself, this land-racer breathes very like
its friend, the marine engine. Everybody who has spent time on shipboard
has forever in his head a reminiscence of the steady and methodical
pounding of the engines, and perhaps it is curious that this relative
which can whirl over the land at such a pace, breathes in the leisurely
tones that a man heeds when he lies awake at night in his berth.

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