THE MYSTERY OF COINCIDENCE
As we were starting for Wabash from here, a distance of twenty miles or
so, and at ten o’clock in the morning, it began to sprinkle. Now the
night before, as we were entering this place, Franklin had been telling
me that as he had gone through here the year before about this time in
the morning, homebound from a small lake in this vicinity, some defect
in the insulation of the wiring had caused a small fire which threatened
to burn the car. They detected it in time by smelling burning rubber.
Incidentally, it had started to rain, and they had to go back to the
local garage for repairs.
“I bet it rains tomorrow,” Speed had observed as he heard Franklin’s
story.
“Why?” I asked.
“There’s a ring around the moon.”
“That always means rain, does it?” I chaffed.
He did not answer direct, but concluded: “I bet it will be raining by
tomorrow noon.”
Just as we were leaving town, and before we reached a bridge which spans
the Eel River at this place, I detected the odor of burning rubber and
called Franklin’s attention to it. At the same time Speed smelt it too,
and stopped the car. We got out and made a search. Sure enough, a rubber
covering protecting and separating some wires which joined in a box was
on fire, and the smoke was making a fine odor. We put it out, but as we
did so Franklin observed, “That’s funny.”
“What?” I inquired.
“Why, this,” he replied. “At this place last year, in a rain, this very
spot, nearly, we got out because we smelled burning rubber and put out a
fire in this same box.”
“That is odd,” I said, and then I began to think of my own experiences
in this line and the fact that so often things have repeated themselves
in my life, in little and in big, in such a curious way.
Once, as I told Franklin now—the only other time, in fact, that I took
an important trip in this way—a certain Englishman whom I had not seen
in years burst in upon me with a proposition that I go to England and
Europe with him, offering to see that the money for the trip was raised
and without my turning a hand in the matter—and quite in the same way,
only a week before, Franklin himself had burst in upon me with a similar
proposition, which I had accepted. Another time, at the opening of a
critical period of my life, I was compelled to undergo an operation in
the process of which, under ether, certain characters appeared to me,
acting in a particular way and saying various things to me which
impressed me greatly at the time; and later, at another critical period
when, strangely enough, I was, much against my wishes, undergoing
another operation, these same characters appeared to me and said much
the same things in the same way.
One of the commonest of my experiences, as I now told Franklin, had been
a thing like this. I would be walking along thinking of nothing in
particular when some person, male or female, about whom I cared nothing,
would appear, stop me, and chat about nothing in particular. Let us say
he or she carried a book, or a green parasol, or a yellow stick, and
congratulated me upon or complained to me concerning something I had or
had not done. As for my part, at that particular moment I might be
trying to solve some problem in relation to fiction or finance—a crucial
problem. It would be raining or beautifully clear or snowing. A year or
two later, under almost exactly the same circumstances, when I would be
trying to solve a similar problem, in rain or snow or clear weather, as
the case might be, I would meet the same person, dressed almost as
before, carrying a book or a cane or green parasol, and we would talk,
about nothing in particular, and I would say to myself, after he or she
were gone, perhaps: “Why, last year, at just about this place, when I
was thinking of just some such problem as this, I met this same person
looking about like this.”
I am not attempting to theorize concerning this. I am merely stating a
fact.
This system of recurrence applies not only to situations of this kind,
but to many others. The appearance of a certain person in my life has
always been heralded by a number of hunchbacks who came forward,
passed—sometimes touching my elbow—and frequently looking at me in a
solemn manner, as though some subconscious force, of which they were the
tool, were saying to me, “See, here is the sign.”
For a period of over fifteen years in my life, at the approach of every
marked change—usually before I have passed from an old set of
surroundings to a new—I have met a certain smug, kindly little Jew,
always the same Jew, who has greeted me most warmly, held my hand
affectionately for a few moments, and wished me well. I have never known
him any more intimately than that. Our friendship began at a sanatorium,
at a time when I was quite ill. Thereafter my life changed and I was
much better. Since then, as I say, always at the critical moment, he has
never failed. I have met him in New York, Chicago, the South, in trains,
on shipboard. It is always the same. Only the other day, after an
absence of three years, I saw him again. I am not theorizing; I am
stating facts. I have a feeling, at times, as I say, that life is
nothing but a repetition of very old circumstances, and that we are
practically immortal, only not very conscious of it.
Going south from North Manchester, we had another blowout in the right
rear tire and in connection with this there was a discussion which may
relate itself to what I have just been saying or it may not. The reader
may recall that between Stroudsburg and Wilkes-Barré, in Pennsylvania,
we had had two blowouts in this same right rear wheel, or tire, and in
connection with the last of these two blowouts just east of
Wilkes-Barré, Franklin had told me that hitherto—ever since he had had
the car, in fact—all the trouble had been in the same right rear wheel
and that, being a good mystic, he had finally to realize for himself
that there was nothing the matter with the perfect idea of this car as
it existed before it was built or, in other words, its psychic unity,
and hence that there couldn’t be anything wrong with this right rear
wheel. You see? After that, once this had been clearly realized by him,
there had been no more trouble of any kind in connection with this
particular quarter or wheel until this particular trip began.
“Now see here, Speed,” I heard him say on this particular occasion.
“Here’s a psychic fact I want you to get. We’ll have to get that right
hand tire off our minds. This car is an embodiment of a perfect idea, an
idea that existed clear and sound before this car was ever built. There
is nothing wrong with that idea, or that tire. It can’t be injured. It
is in existence outside this car and they are building other cars
according to it right now. This car is as perfect as that idea. It’s a
whole—a unit. It’s intact. Nothing can happen to it. It can’t be
injured. Do you get me? Now you’re going to think that and we’re not
going to have any trouble. We’re going to enjoy this trip.”
Speed looked at Franklin, and I felt as though something had definitely
been “put over,” as we say—just what I am not quite able to explain
myself. Anyhow we had no more tire trouble of any kind until just as we
were nearing Wabash or about half way between the two towns. Then came
the significant whistle and we climbed down.
“There you have it!” exclaimed Franklin enigmatically. “You shouldn’t
have knocked on wood, Speed.”
“What was that?” I inquired, interested.
“Well, you remember where we had the last blowout, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “east of Wilkes-Barré.”
“We haven’t had any trouble since, have we?”
“Not a bit.”
“Last night, after you had gone to bed, Speed and I went to a
restaurant. As we were eating, I said: ‘We’ve had some great tire luck,
haven’t we?’ Perhaps I shouldn’t have thought of it as luck. Anyhow he
said, ‘Yes, but we’re not home yet,’ and he knocked on wood. I said:
‘You shouldn’t knock on wood. That’s a confession of lack of
understanding. It’s a puncture in the perfect idea of the car. We’re
likely to have a blowout in the morning.’ And here it is.”
He looked at me and smiled.
“What is this,” I said, “a real trip or an illusion?”
He smiled again.
“It’s a real trip, but it wants to be as perfect as the idea of it.”
I felt my conception of a solid earth begin to spin a little, but I said
nothing more. Anyhow, the wheel was fixed, as well as the psychic idea
of it. And we didn’t have any more tire trouble this side of Carmel,
where Speed left us.
Going south from North Manchester, we came to Wabash, a place about as
handsome as Warsaw, if not more so, with various charming new buildings.
It was on the Wabash River—the river about which my brother Paul once
composed the song entitled, “On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away” (I
wrote the first verse and chorus!), and here we found a picture postcard
on sale which celebrated this fact. “On the Banks of the Wabash Far
Away,” it said under a highly colored scene of some sycamore trees
hanging over the stream. As my brother Paul was very proud of his
authorship of this song, I was glad.
From here, since it was raining and we were in a hurry to reach Carmel
before dark, we hustled west to Peru, about twenty miles, the cover up
and the storm curtains on, for we were in a driving rain. I could not
help noting how flat Indiana was in this region, how numerous were the
beech and ash groves, how good the roads, and how Hollandesque the whole
distant scene. Unlike Ohio, there was no sense here of a struggle
between manufacture and trade and a more or less simple country life.
The farmers had it all, or nearly so. The rural homes were most of them
substantial, if not markedly interesting to look upon, and the small
towns charming. There were no great factory chimneys cutting the sky in
every direction, as farther east, but instead, windmills, and silos and
red or grey barns, and cows, or horses, or sheep in the fields. At Peru
I asked a little girl who worked in the five-and-ten-cent store if she
liked living in Peru.
“Like it? This old town? I should say not.”
“Why not?” I replied.
“Well, you ought to live here for a while, and you’d soon find out. It’s
all right to go through in a machine, I suppose.”
“Well, where would you rather be, if not here?” I questioned.
“Oh, what’s the use wishing—lots of places,” she replied irritably, and
as if desiring to end the vain discussion. “It never does me any good to
wish.”
She walked off to wait upon another customer, and I departed.
South of Peru were several county seats and towns of small size, which
we might have visited had we chosen to take the time; but aside from
passing through Kokomo, in order to see an enormous automobile works
with which Speed had formerly been connected, and from whence, earlier
in his life, he had attempted to flee at the approach of the end of all
things, we avoided all these towns. It was raining too hard, and there
would have been no pleasure in stopping.
At Kokomo, which appeared presently out of a grey mist and across a
middle distance of wet green grass and small, far scattered trees, we
had a most interesting experience. We met the man who made the first
automobile in America, and saw his factory—the Haynes Automobile
Company, of which he was president and principal stockholder, and which
was employing, at the time we were there, nearly three thousand men and
turning out over two thousand cars a year, nearly a car apiece for every
man and woman in the place. I saw no children employed.
The history of this man, as sketched to me beforehand by Franklin and
Speed, was most interesting. Years before he had been a traveling
salesman, using a light runabout in this very vicinity. Later he had
interested himself in motors of the gas and steam variety and had
entered upon the manufacture of them. Still later, when the problem of
direct transmission was solved in France and the automobile began to
appear abroad, he, in conjunction with a man named Apperson, decided to
attempt to construct a car here which would avoid infringing all the
French patents. Alone, really, without any inventive aid from Apperson,
so to speak, Haynes solved the problem, at least in part. It was claimed
later, and no doubt it was true, that he, along with many other
mechanicians attempting to perfect an American car which would avoid
French lawsuits, had merely rearranged, not improved upon, the French
idea of direct transmission. At any rate, he was sued, along with
others; but the American automobile manufacturers eventually beat the
French patentees and remained in possession of their designs. Of all of
these, Haynes was the first American to put an American automobile in
the field.
We were shown over his factory before meeting him, however, and a
fascinating spectacle it proved. We arrived in a driving rain, with the
clouds so thick and low that you would have thought it dusk. All the
lights in the great concern were glowing as though it were night. A
friendly odor of smoke and hot mould sand and grease and shellac and
ground metal permeated the air for blocks around. Inside were great
rooms, three to four hundred feet long, all of a hundred feet wide, and
glassed over top and sides for light, in which were droves of men, great
companies of them, in jeans and jumpers, their faces and hands and hair
stained brown or black with oil and smoke, their eyes alight with that
keen interest which the intelligent workman always has in his work.
I never saw so many automobiles and parts of automobiles in all my life.
It was interesting to look at whole rooms piled high with auto carriage
frames or auto motors, or auto tops or auto bodies. I never imagined
that there were so many processes through which all parts of a machine
have to be put to perfect them, or that literally thousands of men do
some one little thing to every machine turned out. We stood and gazed at
men who were polishing the lacquered sides of automobile bodies with
their thumbs, dipping them in oil and so rubbing down certain rough
places; or at others hovering over automobile motors attached in rows to
gasoline tanks and being driven at an enormous rate of speed for days at
a time without ever stopping, to test their durability and speed
capacity. It was interesting to see these test men listening carefully
for any untoward sound or flash, however slight, which might indicate an
error. We pay very little, comparatively, for what we buy, considering
the amount of time spent by thousands in supplying our idlest wants.
And there were other chambers where small steel, or brass, or copper
parts were being turned out by the thousand, men hovering over giant
machines so intricate in their motions that I was quite lost and could
only develop a headache thinking about them afterward. Actually, life
loses itself at every turn for the individual in just such a maze. You
gaze, but you never see more than a very little of what is going on
about you. If we could see not only all the processes that are at work
simultaneously everywhere, supplying us with what we use here, but in
addition, only a fraction—that nearest us—of the mechanics and physics
of the universe, what a stricken state would we be in! Actually, unless
we were protected by lack of capacity for comprehension, I should think
one might go mad. The thunder, the speed, the light, the shuttle flashes
of all the process—how they would confuse and perhaps terrify! For try
as we will, without a tremendous enlargement of the reasoning faculty,
we can never comprehend. Vast, amazing processes cover or encircle us at
every turn, and we never know. Like the blind we walk, our hands out
before us, feeling our way. Like moths we turn about the auto-genetic
flame of human mystery and never learn—until we are burned, and not
then—not even a little.
After inspecting the factory we came into the presence of the man who
had built up all this enterprise. He was relatively undersized, quite
stocky, with a round, dumpling-like body, and a big, round head which
looked as though it might contain a very solid mass of useful brains. He
had the air of one who has met thousands, a diplomatic, cordial,
experienced man of wealth. I sensed his body and his mind to be in no
very healthy condition, however, and he looked quite sickly and
preoccupied. He had a habit, I observed, contracted no doubt through
years of meditation and introspection, of folding both arms over his
stout chest, and then lifting one or the other forearm and supporting
his head with it, as though it might fall over too far if he did not. He
had grey-blue eyes, the eyes of the thinker and organizer, and like all
strong men, a certain poise and ease very reassuring, I should think, to
anyone compelled or desiring to converse with him.
The story he told us of how he came to build the first automobile (in
America) was most interesting.
Franklin had seemed to be greatly interested to discover whether as an
Indiana pioneer this man had borrowed the all-important idea of
transmission from either Daimler or Panhard, two Europeans, who in the
early stages of the automobile had solved this problem for themselves in
slightly different ways, or whether he had worked out for himself an
entirely independent scheme of transmission and control. Franklin went
after him on this, but he could get nothing very satisfactory. The man,
affable and courteous, explained in a roundabout way that he had made
use of two clutches, and then toward the end of the interview, when
Franklin remarked, “You know, of course, that the idea of transmission
was worked out some time before 1893” (the year Haynes built his first
car), he replied, “You have to give those fellows credit for a great
deal”—a very indefinite answer, as you see.
But to me the man was fascinating as a man, and I was pleased to hear
him explain anything he would.
“I was already interested in gas and steam engines and motors of this
type,” he said, “and I just couldn’t keep out of it.”
“In other words, you put an old idea into a new form,” I suggested.
“Yes—just that.”
“Tell me—who bought your first car?” I inquired.
“A doctor up in Chicago,” he smiled. “He has it yet.”
“Of course, you thought you could make money out of it?”
“Well, I built my first car with the idea of having one for myself,
really. I have a turn for mechanics. I borrowed enough money to begin
manufacturing at once—took in a partner.”
“And then what?”
“Well, the machine was a success. We just grew. In a few months we were
behind on our orders, and always have been since.”
He appeared too tired and weary to be actively at the head of any
business at this time. Yet he went on telling us a little of his trade
struggles and what he thought of the future of the automobile—in
connection with farming, railroads and the like—then he suddenly changed
to another subject.
“But I’m not nearly so interested in automobiles as I was,” he observed
smilingly, at the same time diving into his pocket and producing what
looked like a silver knife. “My son and I”—he waved an inclusive hand
toward an adjoining room built of red brick, and which seemed to be
flickering romantically as to its walls with the flame reflections of
small furnace fires—"have invented a thing which we call stellak, which
is five hundred times harder than steel and cuts steel just as you would
cut wood with an ordinary knife."
“Well, how did you invent that?” I asked.
“We had need of something of that kind here, and my son and I invented
it.”
“You just decided what to do, did you? But why did you call it stellak?”
I persisted.
“After stella, star, because the metal turned out to be so bright. It
has some steel in it, too.”
He shifted his arms, sank his head into the palm of his left hand, and
gazed at me solemnly.
“All the processes are patented,” he added, with a kind of unconscious
caution which amused me. I felt as though he imagined we were looking
too curiously into the workshop, where the perfecting processes were
still going on, and might desire to steal his ideas.
“There ought to be a real fortune in that,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied, with a kind of lust for money showing in his face,
although he was already comfortably rich and daily growing richer as
well as sicker, “we’re already behind on our orders. Everybody wants to
see it. We can use a lot ourselves if we can just make it fast enough.”
There was a time in my life when I would have envied a man of this type,
or his son, the mere possession of money seemed such an important thing
to me. Later on, it became the sign manual of certain limitations of
thought which at first irritated and then bored me. Now I can scarcely
endure the presence of a mind that sees something in money as money—the
mere possession of it. If the mind does not race on to lovelier or more
important things than money can buy, it has no import to the world, no
more, at least, than is involved in the syphoning of a clam. We must
have grocers and brewers and butchers and bakers—but if we were never to
have more than these or anything different or new!!