“Well, what are you doing here?”
the younger of the two sages asked, with a resolute
air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the asphalt
path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other
in the Park. His senior lifted his head and looked
him carefully over to make sure of his identity, and
then he said:
“I suppose, to answer your fatuous
question, I am waiting here to get my breath before
I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the
feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes.”
“How long do you think it will
take you to get your breath in the atmosphere of these
motors?” the younger sage pursued. “And
you don’t imagine that these women are of the
first fashion, do you?”
“No, but I imagine their shoes
are. I have been calculating that their average
heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high,
and touches the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent
piece. As you seem to be fond of asking questions,
perhaps you will like to answer one. Why do you
think they do it?”
“Wear shoes like that?”
the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as he
added, “Because the rest do.”
“Mmm!” the elder grumbled,
not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing the answer.
He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was
somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said:
“It’s very strange, very sad. Just
now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and
fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency,
as the daughter of a thousand years of bound-feet
Chinese women. While she tilted on, the nice
young fellow with her swept forward with one stride
to her three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last
boots, and kept himself from out-walking her by a
devotion that made him grit his teeth. Probably
she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but
she didn’t look it; and I, who voted to give
her the vote the other day, had my misgivings.
I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five years
by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators,
and getting killed by automobiles in helping her off
the cars, where I’ve given her my seat.”
“But you must allow that if
her shoes are too tight, her skirts are not so tight
as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the
good old hobble-skirts, now they’re gone?”
“The hobble-skirts were prettier
than I thought they were when they were with us, but
the ‘tempestuous petticoat’ has its charm,
which I find I’d been missing.”
“Well, at least it’s a
change,” the younger sage allowed, “and
I haven’t found the other changes in our dear
old New York which I look for when I come back in
the fall.”
The sages were enjoying together the
soft weather which lingered with us a whole month
from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon
of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening
to the dim sunset over the westward trees.
“Yes,” the elder assented.
“I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to welcome
me back up and down the Avenue. But there are
more automobiles than ever, and the game of saving
your life from them when you cross the street is madder
and merrier than I have known it before.”
“The war seems to have stopped
building because people can’t afford it,”
the other suggested, “but it has only increased
automobiling.”
“Well, people can’t afford
that, either. Nine-tenths of them are traveling
the road to ruin, I’m told, and apparently they
can’t get over the ground too fast. Just
look!” and the sages joined in the amused and
mournful contemplation of the different types of motors
innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them,
while they choked in the fumes of the gasolene.
The motors were not the costliest
types, except in a few instances, and in most instances
they were the cheaper types, such as those who could
not afford them could at least afford best. The
sages had found a bench beside the walk where the
statue of Daniel Webster looks down on the confluence
of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going
and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.
“The mystery is,” the
elder continued, “why they should want to do
it in the way they do it. Are they merely going
somewhere and must get there in the shortest time
possible, or are they arriving on a wager? If
they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea
of pleasure they must have! Maybe they are trying
to escape Black Care, but they must know he sits beside
the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the horseman,
and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket,
and can foreclose it any time on the house they have
hypothecated to buy their car. Ah!” The
old man started forward with the involuntary impulse
of rescue. But it was not one of the people who
singly, or in terrorized groups, had been waiting
at the roadside to find their way across; it was only
a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their
way safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind
old cabs and carriages, and it lay instantly crushed
under the tire of a motor. “He’s done
for, poor little wretch! They can’t get
used to the change. Some day a policeman will
pick me up from under a second-hand motor.
I wonder what the great Daniel from his pedestal up
there would say if he came to judgment.”
“He wouldn’t believe in
the change any more than that squirrel. He would
decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting
and forgotten.”
“Forgotten,” the elder
sage assented. “I remember when his fame
filled the United States, which was then the whole
world to me. And now I don’t imagine that
our hyphenated citizens have the remotest consciousness
of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his
liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable
speeches, they wouldn’t know what he was talking
about.” The sage laughed and champed his
toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort
to compose their countenances after an emotional outbreak.
“Well, for one thing,”
the younger observed, “they wouldn’t understand
what he said. You will notice, if you listen to
them going by, that they seldom speak English.
That’s getting to be a dead language in New
York, though it’s still used in the newspapers.”
He thought to hearten the other with his whimsicality,
for it seemed to him that the elder sage was getting
sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he
would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither
side of eighty can offer a man on the thither.
“Perhaps the Russian Jews would appreciate Daniel
if he were put into Yiddish for them. They’re
the brightest intelligences among our hyphenates.
And they have the old-fashioned ideals of liberty
and humanity, perhaps because they’ve known
so little of either.”
His gaiety did not seem to enliven
his senior much. “Ah, the old ideals!”
he sighed. “The old ideal of an afternoon
airing was a gentle course in an open carriage on
a soft drive. Now it’s a vertiginous whirl
on an asphalted road, round and round and round the
Park till the victims stagger with their brains spinning
after they get out of their cars.”
The younger sage laughed. “You’ve
been listening to the pessimism of the dear old fellows
who drive the few lingering victorias. If
you’d believe them, all these people in the
motors are chauffeurs giving their lady-friends joy-rides.”
“Few?” the elder retorted.
“There are lots of them. I’ve counted
twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud
to be in one of them, though my horse left something
to be desired in the way of youth and beauty.
But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful
myself.”
As the sages sat looking out over
the dizzying whirl of the motors they smoothed the
tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and
were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed
to drowse off from the time and place, but he was
recalled by the younger saying, “It is certainly
astonishing weather for this season of the year.”
The elder woke up and retorted, as
if in offense: “Not at all. I’ve
seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October.”
“They didn’t set their fruit, I suppose.”
“Well no.”
“Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly
up here in the sheep-pasture the other day. I
could have put out my hand and caught it. It’s
the soft weather that brings your victorias out
like the belated butterflies. Wait till the first
cold snap, and there won’t be a single victoria
or butterfly left.”
“Yes,” the elder assented,
“we butterflies and victorias belong to
the youth of the year and the world. And the
sad thing is that we won’t have our palingenesis.”
“Why not?” the younger
sage demanded. “What is to prevent your
coming back in two or three thousand years?”
“Well, if we came back in a
year even, we shouldn’t find room, for one reason.
Haven’t you noticed how full to bursting the
place seems? Every street is as packed as lower
Fifth Avenue used to be when the operatives came out
of the big shops for their nooning. The city’s
shell hasn’t been enlarged or added to, but the
life in it has multiplied past its utmost capacity.
All the hotels and houses and flats are packed.
The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough, swarm
with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets
the motors stand in rows, and at the same time the
avenues are so dense with them that you are killed
at every crossing. There has been no building
to speak of during the summer, but unless New York
is overbuilt next year we must appeal to Chicago to
come and help hold it. But I’ve an idea
that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some
sort of mechanical horse could be substituted for
the poor old animals that remind me of my mortality,
I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get
an impression of permanence in the things of the Park.
As long as the peanut-men and the swan-boats are with
us I sha’n’t quite despair. And the
other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight
of a four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue
drive. There it was, like some vehicular phantom,
but how, whence, when? It came, as if out of
the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms,
with their arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it’s
the rumble), but of all the young people who ought
to have flowered over the top none was left but the
lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I’ve
tried every evening since for that four-in-hand, but
I haven’t seen it, and I’ve decided it
wasn’t a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream
of the past.”
“Four-horse dream,” the
younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.
The elder did not seem quite pleased.
“A joke?” he challenged.
“Not necessarily. I suppose
I was the helpless prey of the rhyme.”
“I didn’t know you were a poet.”
“I’m not, always.
But didn’t it occur to you that danger for danger
your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile
to the passing human creature?”
“It might have been if it had
been multiplied by ten thousand. But there was
only one of it, and it wasn’t going twenty miles
an hour.”
“That’s true,” the
younger sage assented. “But there was always
a fearful hazard in horses when we had them.
We supposed they were tamed, but, after all, they
were only trained animals, like Hagenback’s.”
“And what is a chauffeur?”
“Ah, you have me there!”
the younger said, and he laughed generously.
“Or you would have if I hadn’t noticed
something like amelioration in the chauffeurs.
At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were,
and I suppose something will be done about the street
traffic some time. They’re talking now
about subway crossings. But I should prefer overhead
foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another
diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches,
and would serve the purpose of any future Dewey victory
if we should happen to have another hero to win one.”
“Well, we must hope for the
best. I rather like the notion of the diagonal
foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second
stories as they have them in Chester? I should
be pretty sure of always getting home alive if we
had them. Now if I’m not telephoned for
at a hospital before I’m restored to consciousness,
I think myself pretty lucky. And yet it seems
but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays,
since I had a pride in counting the automobiles as
I walked up the Avenue. Once I got as high as
twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth Street. Now
I couldn’t count as many horse vehicles.”
The elder sage mocked himself in a
feeble laugh, but the younger tried to be serious.
“We don’t realize the absolute change.
Our streets are not streets any more; they are railroad
tracks with locomotives let loose on them, and no
signs up to warn people at the crossings. It’s
pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves,
especially the poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking
this way and that in their fright, and then tottering
over as fast as they can totter.”
“Well, I should have said it
was outrageous, humiliating, insulting, once, but
I don’t any more; it would be no use.”
“No; and so much depends upon
the point of view. When I’m on foot I feel
all my rights invaded, but when I’m in a taxi
it amuses me to see the women escaping; and I boil
with rage in being halted at every other corner by
the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it’s
“Go” and “Stop” in red and
blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the time and
getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should
keep within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians
of every age and sex ought to be killed.”
“Yes, there’s something
always in the point of view; and there’s some
comfort when you’re stopped in your taxi to feel
that they often do get killed.”
The sages laughed together, and the
younger said: “I suppose when we get aeroplanes
in common use, there’ll be annoying traffic
regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals
in the central blue to enforce them. After all
What he was going to add in amplification
cannot be known, for a girlish voice, trying to sharpen
itself from its native sweetness to a conscientious
severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced
upon the elder sage: “Now, see here, grandfather!
This won’t do at all. You promised not
to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and here
you are away down by the Falconer, and we’ve
been looking everywhere for you. It’s too
bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at all after
this. Why, it’s horrid of you, grandfather!
You might have got killed crossing the drive.”
The grandfather looked up and verified
the situation, which seemed to include a young man,
tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor so
many heads high as the young men in the advertisements
of ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the
young girl as if he had arrived with her, and were
finding an amusement in her severity which he might
not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and
her skirt flared in the fashion of the last moment,
as she stooped threateningly yet fondly over her grandfather.
The younger sage silently and somewhat
guiltily escaped from the tumult of emotion which
ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the path.
The other finally gave an “Oh!” of recognition,
and then said, for all explanation and excuse, “I
didn’t know what had become of you,” and
then they all laughed.