ACROSS THE MEADOWS TO THE PASSAIC
I assume that automobiling, even to the extent of a two-thousand-mile
trip such as this proved to be, is an old story to most people. Anybody
can do it, apparently. The difference is to the man who is making the
trip, and for me this one had the added fillip of including that
pilgrimage which I was certain of making some time.
There was an unavoidable delay owing to the sudden illness of Speed, and
then the next morning, when I was uncertain as to whether the trip had
been abandoned or no, the car appeared at my door in Tenth Street, and
off we sped. There were some amusing preliminaries. I was introduced to
Miss H——, a lady who was to accompany us on the first day of our
journey. A photograph was taken, the bags had to be arranged and
strapped on the outside, and Speed had to examine his engine most
carefully. Finally we were off—up Eighth Avenue and across Fortysecond
Street to the West Fortysecond Street Ferry, while we talked of non-skid
chains and Silvertown tires and the durability of the machines in
general—this one in particular. It proved to be a handsome
sixty-horsepower Pathfinder, only recently purchased, very presentable
and shiny.
As we crossed the West Fortysecond Street Ferry I stood out on the front
deck till we landed, looking at the refreshing scene the river
presented. The day was fine, nearly mid-August, with a sky as blue as
weak indigo. Flocks of gulls that frequent the North River were dipping
and wheeling. A cool, fresh wind was blowing.
As we stood out in front Miss H—— deigned to tell me something of her
life. She is one of those self-conscious, carefully dressed, seemingly
prosperous maidens of some beauty who frequent the stage and the
studios. At present she was Franklin’s chief model. Recently she had
been in some pantomime, dancing. A little wearied perhaps (for all her
looks), she told me her stage and art experiences. She had to do
something. She could sing, dance, act a little, and draw, she said.
Artists seemed to crave her as a model—so-—-
She lifted a thin silk veil and dabbed her nose with a mere rumor of a
handkerchief. Looking at her so fresh and spick in the morning sunlight,
I could not help feeling that Franklin was to be congratulated in the
selection of his models.
But in a few minutes we were off again, Speed obviously holding in the
machine out of respect for officers who appeared at intervals, even in
Weehawken, to wave us on or back. I could not help feeling as I looked
at them how rapidly the passion for regulating street traffic had grown
in the last few years. Everywhere we seemed to be encountering them—the
regulation New York police cap (borrowed from the German army) shading
their eyes, their air of majesty beggaring the memories of Rome—and
scarcely a wagon to regulate. At Passaic, at Paterson—but I anticipate.
As we hunted for a road across the meadows we got lost in a maze of
shabby streets where dirty children were playing in the dust, and, as we
gingerly picked our way over rough cobbles, I began to fear that much of
this would make a disagreeable trip. But we would soon be out of it, in
all likelihood—miles and miles away from the hot, dusty city.
I can think of nothing more suited to my temperament than
automobiling. It supplies just that mixture of change in fixity which
satisfies me—leaves me mentally poised in inquiry, which is always
delightful. Now, for instance, we were coming out on a wide, smooth
macadam road, which led, without a break, as someone informed us, into
Passaic and then into Paterson. It was the first opportunity that
Speed had had to show what the machine could do, and instantly, though
various signs read, “Speed limit: 25 miles an hour,” I saw the
speedometer climb to thirtyfive and then forty and then fortyfive. It
was a smooth-running machine which, at its best (or worst), gave vent
to a tr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r which became after a while somewhat like a
croon.
Though it was a blazing hot day (as any momentary pause proved, the
leather cushions becoming like an oven), on this smooth road, and at
this speed, it was almost too cool. I had decked myself out in a brown
linen outing shirt and low visored cap. Now I felt as though I might
require my overcoat. There was no dust to speak of, and under the low
branches of trees and passing delightful dooryards all the homey flowers
of August were blooming in abundance. Now we were following the
Hackensack and the Passaic in spots, seeing long, low brick sheds in the
former set down in wind rhythmed marsh grass, and on the latter towering
stacks and also simple clubs where canoes were to be seen—white, red and
green—and a kind of August summer life prevailing for those who could
not go further. I was becoming enamored of our American country life
once more.
Paterson, to most New Yorkers, and for that matter to most Americans,
may be an old story. To me it is one of the most interesting pools of
life I know. There is nothing in Paterson, most people will tell you,
save silk mills and five-and-ten-cent stores. It is true. Yet to me it
is a beautiful city in the creative sense—a place in which to stage a
great novel. These mills—have you ever seen them? They line the Passaic
river and various smooth canals that branch out from it. It was no doubt
the well-known waterfall and rapids of this river that originally drew
manufacturers to Paterson, supplied the first mills with water, and gave
the city its start. Then along came steam and all the wonders of modern
electricity-driven looms. The day we were there they were just
completing a power plant or city water supply system. The ground around
the falls had been parked, and standing on a new bridge one could look
down into a great round, grey-black pit or cup, into which tumbled the
water of the sturdy little river above. By the drop of eighty or a
hundred feet it was churned into a white spray which bounded back almost
to the bridge where we stood. In this gay sunlight a rainbow was ever
present—a fine five-striped thing, which paled and then strengthened as
the spray thinned or thickened.
Below, over a great flume of rocks, that stretched outward toward the
city, the expended current was bubbling away, spinning past the mills
and the bridges. From the mills themselves, as one drew near, came the
crash of shuttles and the thrum of spindles, where thousands of workers
were immured, weaving the silk which probably they might never wear. I
could not help thinking, as I stood looking at them, of the great strike
that had occurred two years before, in which all sorts of nameless
brutalities had occurred, brutalities practised by judges, manufacturers
and the police no less than by the eager workers themselves.
In spite of all the evidence I have that human nature is much the same
at the bottom as at the top, and that the restless striker of today may
be the oppressive manufacturer or boss of tomorrow, I cannot help
sympathizing with the working rank and file. Why should the man at the
top, I ask myself, want more than a reasonable authority? Why endless
houses, and lands, and stocks, and bonds to flaunt a prosperity that he
does not need and cannot feel? I am convinced that man _in toto_—the
race itself—is nothing more nor less as yet than an embryo in the womb
of something which we cannot see. We are to be protected (as a race) and
born into something (some state) which we cannot as yet understand or
even feel. We, as individual atoms, may never know, any more than the
atoms or individual plasm cells which constructed us ever knew. But we
race atoms are being driven to do something, construct something—(a race
man or woman, let us say)—and like the atoms in the embryo, we are
struggling and fetching and carrying. I did not always believe in some
one “divine faroff event” for the race. I do not accept the adjective
divine even now. But I do believe that these atoms are not toiling for
exactly nothing—or at least, that the nothingness is not quite as
undeniable as it was. There is something back of man. An avatar, a
devil, anything you will, is trying to do something, and man is His
medium, His brush, His paint, His idea. Against the illimitable space of
things He is attempting to set forth his vision. Is the vision good? Who
knows! It may be as bad as that of the lowest vaudeville performer
clowning it before a hoodlum audience. But good or bad, here it is,
struggling to make itself manifest, and we are of it!
What if it _is_ all a mad, aimless farce, my masters? Shan’t we clown it
all together and make the best of it?
Ha ha! Ho ho! We are all crazy and He is crazy! Ha ha! Ho ho!
Or do I hear someone crying?