Part 6 (1/2)
For some miles the road out of Erie was soft, dusty, narrow, and poor--by no means fit for the proposed Erie-Buffalo race. About fifteen miles out there is a sharp turn to the left and down a steep incline with a ravine and stream below on the right,--a dangerous turn at twenty miles an hour, to say nothing of forty or fifty.
There is nothing to indicate that the road drops so suddenly after making the turn, and we were bowling along at top speed; a wagon coming around the corner threw us well to the outside, so that the margin of safety was reduced to a minimum, even if the turn were an easy one.
As we swung around the corner well over to the edge of the ravine, we saw the grade we had to make. Nothing but a succession of small rain gullies in the road saved us from going down the bank. By so steering as to drop the skidding wheels on the outside into each gully, the sliding of the machine received a series of violent checks and we missed the brink of the ravine by a few inches.
A layman in the Professor's place would have jumped; but he, good man, looked upon his escape as one of the incidents of automobile travel.
”When I accepted your invitation, my dear fellow, I expected something beyond the ordinary. I have not been disappointed.”
It was a wonder the driving-wheels were not dished by the violent side strains, but they were not even sprung. These wheels were of wire tangential spokes; they do not look so well as the smart, heavy, substantial wooden wheels one sees on nearly all imported machines and on some American.
The sense of proportion between parts is sadly outraged by spindle-wire wheels supporting the ma.s.sive frame-work and body of an automobile; however strong they may be in reality, architecturally they are quite unfit, and no doubt the wooden wheel will come more and more into general use.
A wooden wheel with the best of hickory spokes possesses an elasticity entirely foreign to the rigid wire wheel, but good hickory wheels are rare; paint hides a mult.i.tude of sins when spread over wood; and inferior wooden wheels are not at all to be relied upon.
Soon we begin to catch glimpses of Lake Erie through the trees and between the hills, just a blue expanse of water s.h.i.+ning in the morning sun, a sapphire set in the dull brown gold of woods and fields. Farther on we come out upon the bluffs overlooking the lake and see the smoke and grime of Buffalo far across. What a blot on a view so beautiful!
”Civilization,” said the Professor, ”is the subjection of nature.
In the civilization of Athens nature was subdued to the ends of beauty; in the civilization of America nature is subdued to the ends of usefulness; in every civilization nature is of secondary importance, it is but a means to an end. Nature and the savage, like little children, go hand in hand, the one the complement of the other; but the savage grows and grows, while nature remains ever a child, to sink subservient at last to its early playmate.
Just now we in this country are treating nature with great harshness, making of her a drudge and a slave; her pretty hands are soiled, her clean face covered with soot, her clothing tattered and torn. Some day, we as a nation will tire of playing the taskmaster and will treat the playmate of man's infancy and youth with more consideration; we will adorn and not disfigure her, love and not ignore her, place her on a throne beside us, make her queen to our kings.h.i.+p.”
”Professor, the automobile hardly falls in with your notions.”
”On the contrary, the automobile is the one absolutely fit conveyance for America. It is a noisy, dirty, mechanical contrivance, capable of great speed; it is the only vehicle in which one could approach that distant smudge on the landscape with any sense of the eternal fitness of things. A coach and four would be as far behind the times on this highway as a birch-bark canoe on yonder lake. In America an automobile is beautiful because it is in perfect harmony with the spirit of the age and country; it is twin brother to the trolley; train, trolley, and automobile may travel side by side as members of one family, late offsprings of man's ingenuity.”
”But you would not call them things of beauty?”
”Yes and no; beauty is so largely relative that one cannot p.r.o.nounce hideous anything that is a logical and legitimate development. Considered in the light of things the world p.r.o.nounces beautiful, there are no more hideous monstrosities on the face of the earth than train, trolley, and automobile; but each generation has its own standard of beauty, though it seldom confesses it. We say and actually persuade ourselves that we admire the Parthenon; in reality we admire the mammoth factory and the thirty-story office building. Strive as we may to deceive ourselves by loud protestations, our standards are not the standards of old. We like best the things we have; we may call things ugly, but we think them beautiful, for they are part of us,--and the automobile fits into our surroundings like a pocket in a coat. We may turn up our noses at it or away from it, as the case may be, but none the less it is the perambulator of the twentieth century.”
It was exactly one o'clock when we pulled up near the City Hall.
Total time from Erie five hours and fifty minutes, actual running time five hours, distance by road about ninety-four miles.
CHAPTER SIX BUFFALO THE MIDWAY
Housing the machine in a convenient and well-appointed stable for automobiles, we were reminded of the fact that we had arrived in Buffalo at no ordinary time, by a charge of three dollars per night for storage, with everything else extra. But was it not the Exposition we had come to see? and are not Expositions proverbially expensive--to promoters and stockholders as well as visitors?
Then, too, the hotels of Buffalo had expected so much and were so woefully disappointed. Vast arrays of figures had been compiled showing that within a radius of four hundred miles of Buffalo lived all the people in the United States who were worth knowing.
The statistics were not without their foundation in fact, but therein lay the weakness of the entire scheme so far as hotels were concerned; people lived so near they could leave home in the morning with a boiled egg and a sandwich, see the Exposition and get back at night. Travellers pa.s.sing through would stop over during the day and evening, then go their way on a midnight train,--it was cheaper to ride in a Pullman than stay in Buffalo.
We might have taken rooms at Rochester, running back and forth each day in the machine,--though Rochester was by no means beyond the zone of exorbitant charges. Notions of value become very much congested within a radius of two or three hundred miles of any great Exposition.
The Exposition was well worth seeing in parts by day and as a whole by night. The electrical display at night was a triumph of engineering skill and architectural arrangement. It was the falls of Niagara turned into stars, the mist of the mighty cascade crystallized into jewels, a brilliant crown to man's triumph over the forces of nature.
It was a wonderful and never-to-be-forgotten sight to sit by the waters at night, as the shadows were folding the buildings in their soft embrace, and see the first faint twinklings of the thousands upon thousands of lights as the great current of electricity was turned slowly on; and then to see the lights grow in strength until the entire grounds were bathed in suffused radiance,--that was as wonderful a sight as the world of electricity has yet witnessed, and it was well worth crossing an ocean to see; it was the one conspicuous success, the one memorable feature of the Exposition, and compared with it all exhibits and scenes by day were tame and insipid.
From time immemorial it has been the special province of the preacher to take the children to the circus and the side show; for the children must go, and who so fit to take them as the preacher?
After all, is not the sawdust ring with its strange people, its giants, fairies, hobgoblins, and clowns, a fairy land, not really real, and therefore no more wicked than fairy land? Do they not fly by night? are they not children of s.p.a.ce? the enormous tents spring up like mushrooms, to last a day; for a few short hours there is a medley of strange sounds,--a blare of trumpets, the roar of strange beasts, the ring of strange voices, the crackling of whips; there are prancing steeds and figures in costumes curious,--then, flapping of canvas, creaking of poles, and all is silent. Of course it is not real, and every one may go. The circus has no annals, knows no gossip, presents no problems; it is without morals and therefore not immoral. It is the one joyous amus.e.m.e.nt that is not above, but quite outside the pale of criticism and discussion. Therefore, why should not the preacher go and take the children?