Did I say it was a trolley system? It was, of course, though it wasn’t the one in this room which had ruined him. Though his story was all in trolleys (or as the bond issues said, tramways), the one we were looking at wasn’t the one which had solidified him down from really gossamer rich, years before. That other system which had bankrupted him or nearly, over the period of fifteen years during which it had been built, brought up dead against a hill, but nevertheless run, and during a subsequent period of five in which he had paid back local investors who wouldn’t have paid him in similar circumstances but whom he chose to call his creditors—religion again!—well, the two young men standing there didn’t need to have that trolley system described to them, by cousins or anyone else. They had ridden it many a time, sometimes when it carried them near one of the few places it was near, or now and then, on a warm spell like this one, for the fun of it, with a girl. For Riefel, after his miniature was completed, had done what a fool always does, or a hero (he was Jim’s and the mate’s for a while): he had exaggerated. Intending to glorify man and country, but forgetting what small potatoes both were in that neighborhood, he had imposed his vision not just on a basement room, but on a region. The state hadn’t helped, nor the public much either, but he had done it, whether for Mrs. Riefel to smile at him over dinner for, after a hard day in the conservatory, or for him to show off to someone else (the prospectuses and finally the pictures maybe) on hot Sundays—did I say he always went there Sundays, summers and winters too?—in New York. Anyway, with his own money, he had gone and completed to the third stage an idea which had graduated from the stock exchange to a hobby, and should have stayed there. He had gone on to build his transport system not only for real, but to human scale.
The two young men gloated down on this other one; they shook their heads and shuffled, open-mouthed. The way they hungered (until it was seen that their interest was mechanical not reflectional) it might have been thought that they were old. Riefel smiled, watching not his system, but them. Unlike most owners of machinery, he seemed not to want particularly to be asked questions on it itself, but Jim and the mate were at liberty to examine it, which they did for a long time. When Riefel finally sat down, his cufflinks glittered and shook; this might have been all that was said between the three except that it was clear to the pair from the first that they had touched him in some way; they could only think it because they were a pair, for afterwards he sometimes called one of them Damon, the other Pythias, though never especially caring which name went with which. And it was plain that he wanted to give them something—not the system itself of course, which the whole town knew was willed to the Smithsonian—but something he must have known wouldn’t be apparent to them for a long time. Well, he gave it, eventually—as most of us elders do. Meanwhile, that evening and others, the pair looked.
And now, if I describe a trolley transport system through their eyes, so that you can see it and maybe even smell it, it won’t make any difference, will it, that we are describing that one, complete in that room, instead of the huge, lumbering one that used to be on the road going from town, outside? The two systems were meant to be exactly alike, and except for the fact that natural wear-and-tear was a lot easier to repair on the large one than on the smaller—ha, wouldn’t think that at first, would you?—and except for one other difference, they were. But when all transport of this particular brand is gone into eternity, which should be any day now, what difference will it make to the sound and shape and smell of what I tell you, that the smaller one of Riefel’s systems ran the full projected hundred miles (scale so many inches to the mile) all the way to Batavia, while the other ran only twenty-nine miles, scale a mile to a mile of course, to the Little Otselica, then jammed up against a hill? Won’t you still have all the information you need for that last trolley ride we’re coming to?
What the two young men saw first was the artificial landscape of course, the stations and car barns, tunnels and bridges and aqueducts that any child’s railroad set, any rich child’s might have. But, where even then these would have been crude plaster-of-Paris glaring with smeared oil-color, and the roadside trees made of that fuzzed green permanence which is the exact opposite of chlorophyll, Riefel’s landscape which he had painted himself was most vague and delicate for such a construction, running to pale hillside curves and winks of mirror-water; the green, when bent to be looked at, wasn’t one color but dotted, and the trees themselves, which from a distance appeared to flourish, almost to wave, were not trees. In this way, it was the cars and their tracks which were made to stand out, those long cars, some with a maroon stripe from stem to stern beneath their windows, some with an Indian earth-brown one, but all the cars of the original gamboge paint worn now to the true trolley-yellow, and above all of them, the electric cables in one long pattern extended, like a black stitch learned by a master crocheter, and beneath the cars, in ess-shapes or flashing stretches, the tiny curves of pure steel. That way, the whole machinery of cars, tracks and cables, whether resting in silence, or in full, rocking motion with switches sparking and the incessant clang of the trolley-bell, appeared to be situated in or moving through the misty-moisty of early morning or dusk or even dreamland—but the cars themselves and their immediate paraphernalia stood out with the utter and clear concreteness of the real world. Only in one important matter Riefel hadn’t done what was attempted by his other effort, the Batavia-Sand Spring Interurban, as the larger system was known. Here in the miniature one, there had been no attempt at passengers of any land.
Here, the only passengers were the giant eye and arm of the owner (who needed to be organist, machinist, conductor, trafficman and Jupiter himself, all in one) and the equally giant, transported eyes of the audience. When the two young men had got through looking on, down and in, and even riding, which was the effect intended, Mr. Riefel allowed them to insert their great forefingers into the cars, to flip back and forth the caned seats, which reversed for the return journey just as in any system, and to touch and even take apart the dummy airbrake, handbrake and controller-box, which in each car were proper replicas down to their minutest inner parts—and even workable, had there only been provided hands of a size to guide. And here he stopped to give them a long lecture on the history of the “tram” or street-railway, British, American and Continental, from Liverpool, Edinburgh, the Potteries and Brixton, Vienna, Paris, Budapest, Nice, to New York and Washington, steam, cable and electric, step-rail and grooved rail, open conduit and overhead conductor—until he had brought them, a-clang and along from the old horse cars with the straight stairway, into the very presence of the single-deck, eight-wheeled, two-motored, center vestibule or transverse-seated, steel-tired, trolley car which any American of those years, in his rightful riding mind though surely not knowing as much as this about it (but even if he woke up to find himself seated in one in his pajamas), would certainly recognize.
The lecture, delivered by an expert lover, was the best the young men had ever heard on this subject, indeed the only one. Unfortunately, the times being always in every generation what they are, there is little need for us to quote here, other than to touch upon, for purposes of that later ride, some loving hints, tips and confidences on the subject of trolley riding, which we might never get anywhere else.
He talked for instance of the tiny rheostats inside the controller-box, of the shift from “series” to “shunt” which helped give the characteristic hitch to the grinding-along movement of these cars.
“The old cast-iron chilled wheels,” he said. “You should have heard those.”
He made them notice that, this being a country system, the roadbed wasn’t paved, as required in cities, but laid only with a sett edging along each rail, the remainder of the surface being completed with tarred macadam, as could be done in country districts.
“This was also one of the economies we could put in on the Sand Spring-Batavia,” he said, with a nod which, though neat, was the first old man’s gesture they had noted in him.
Already they had noted for themselves that over and above the wheel-sounds, there was a constant play and obligato composed of the intermittent gush of the airbrake, the ting of the bell, the hard pull-up of the handbrake which at various points was required by rule to be tested, and wherever, by means of a movable switch, a car was deflected from one road to another—a zazzle of sparks. With a fine tongs, they themselves could turn clockwise the motorman’s controller, though not grasp its wooden handle.
Finally Riefel, after advising them on the relative costs of conduit and overhead construction (the last being cheaper) ended with a little homily on design, pointing out that in the miniature system, as in the Sand Spring Interurban, the two overhead conductors were supported by ears from bracket arms carried on poles on one side of the road only, rather than by span wires strung across the roadway from poles on each side.
Now, all this time, both young men had been wanting to say something more than Oh and Ah, something to show their special comprehension, the way one wants to do when a man shows you the mechanical love of his heart. Accordingly, the mate seized this moment. He nodded. “That way the cables are much less of an eyesore.”
From Riefel’s eye on him—not cataracted wide, noble and frozen, the way an old duffer’s eye should be, but still moving young and shifty—the pair knew at once that such words as eyesore were not remotely applicable to the system ever, not if poles had been strewn like matchsticks—or maple trees and telegraph poles—along the roadway here, or outside. But aristocracy has better reproofs, or folly has, both leaning heavily on superior information.
“Put it this way, gentlemen,” said Riefel. “Dispensing with poles altogether is possible, and can improve the appearance of a street. If—all you have is a street.” He touched a finger to the controls, lightly, but did not set them going.
“Where permission can be obtained,” said Riefel, “span wires are sometimes strung from rosettes attached to the walls of houses on either side—of a street.”
He paused, while footsteps were heard at the ashcans outside the rear wall of his estate, and a few seconds later, through the high small grilles that windowed the basement, the housekeeper’s shoes went by. Already the visitors could see how uncalled for the mate’s comment had been, even silly. Houses on the path of the system here, as on the Sand Spring-Batavia, were only occasional. They could see that this was not a village street but countryside, at times even open country, wild and imperial.
“But this is an Interurban system, gentlemen,” their host continued. “Village-board ratifications, individual permissions? The object is to avoid all that, in favor of cheap, unoccupied land. The object, gentlemen, is distance.”
He said all this in a twenty-by-forty basement room, but it didn’t sound crazy, no more than it would once have done in a paneled room bank-high somewhere—or no more than other systems have, at other times. “That method,” he continued. “The method of the rosettes?” He pursed his mouth as if they had mentioned these, not he, and as if, behind those words he was meanwhile ticking over whole manuals of methods he wouldn’t bother their patience with. “This method has been largely adopted in Germany.”
Given the times, the emphasis was perfect. They saw what a salesman he was, final proof being that, watching his manicured fingertip, they hungered for him to set the system all to going again, all the dream-miles of it, bells and switches, sparks and clang—but he didn’t. Hungry they remained.
When they got out of there, they spoke of this, of what a salesman he was, and of what lessons he could teach them for use in their own business, though lessons of just what remained back too far in their minds to be fastened on precisely, or just on the tips, of their tongues. But curiously enough, the fact that they saw the folly too—could even ride out on it to Otselica, sitting in real seats—made no damn difference. As prospectors themselves, the sight of a folly like this could even make them tender, over another man’s noble mistakes.
“Felt like a stockholder myself,” said the mate. “A possible one.” From his tone, it was an interesting feeling. “Open my mouth, I thought, and one of those debentures will float right in. Kolee, Jim. To own that sort of thing, not only land, but a whole—system.”
“And did you notice, Jim” said Jim slyly, “he always referred to it as the Sand Spring-Batavia? Never, not once as people do, as the Batavia-Sand Spring.”
After that, the two managed to go back fairly often, more often than not with some tribute token from their nimble fingers, maybe wire replacements, or hard-to-get parts for the motor-generator or static transformers; once Jim made a tiny battery with his own hands, and once the mate dealt with one of the bogies—that’s a swiveling truck, you hot-rods—from the main body of one of the cars itself. They got used to the housekeeper coming in there, down to the basement, with a pitcher of grapejuice or lemonade, the pitcher being one of those huge, zinc-lined, silver Reed and Barton coolers which good houses in that part of the state and westward used to be sown with, and they got used to the sight of that dandified cufflink pouring it, neither of them missing the good whisky he must have known they never drank anyway. Beer, on the other hand, wouldn’t have been proper to the relationship; from him, who never drank it, to them, it would have been almost an insult; these social distinctions, or menial ones, run very fine. Or used to. Meanwhile, if Adelbert Riefel had any champagne memories, these didn’t appear to bother him, or else were spared for other environs; as for his two visitors, whatever the effect upon them of civilization—as I believe it is called—they were unaware of it. When the three of them bent over a section of track which was out of alignment, or examined an insulator, or touched up a chipped platform-finish with a bit of japanning, none of the party of three ever spoke of anything but what was immediate; nothing hots up the present better, does it, than a bit of mechanism to repair?
So, as that spring wore into summer and was finally lost there, and the basement system flourished—looking sprucer and running better, its owner said, than in the last thirty years of his tinkering—it came as almost a surprise to the two partners when, as August came forward, town chatter recalled to them that the terminal moment was drawing close, ever closer, for the Batavia-Sand Spring. For the Interurban, however one might choose to put the rest of its name, was dying, not at the usual rate, which had seemed to keep pace with general mortality, but speeded up now, as a transportational disease sometimes does, so that everyone can see its end coming. In this case, state bonds issued to underwrite the cost of a highway along that very roadbed had found no want of subscribers; at midnight on the thirty-first of August, the Interurban cars must stop forever, officially dead.
There are always some, however, who will make a celebration of anything, and indeed they may be wise. Not every turn of the wheel can be as clear as this one, at least to a certain section of the populace, at a certain time. Not every system dies, clean and elderly, in a field. Who celebrated the last phaeton, chariot, growler—yes, we’ll come to that; who, for that matter, in that neighborhood and eastwards, the last ridden-for-need, non-racing horse? In this case, a full centennial not being in order, the event would take the simplest form and a very chaste one compared to some which have been heard of—in the shape of a last trolley ride—to the end, ride a cockhorse and back again—of the system itself. Whatever junketings and picnics always cluster around such affairs began at once to do so, but the men of the committee in charge, seeking for more dignity, suddenly found it. And in America, this kind of dignity means history, no matter of what kind. Mr. Riefel, follyist but founder too, must be invited, if not to preside over the fete, then to be present and honored in the character which thirty years had given him, as a “past pioneer.” It was a question whether he knew of his own transformation, unconnected with the company as he had been since it had lost him his fortune; but in any case, such an invitation, to a man of his distances, was difficult to broach. The cousins, dead as his wife’s orchids, could no longer advise. The h
ousekeeper wasn’t up to it. His tenants couldn’t say they knew him well enough to ask him—who in the town did know him, more than a nod and a greet? But, as usual, Sand Spring had been watching. So, it was entirely natural, just as it was for the two Pardees to go on being forgotten in so many connections, for the two Jims to be remembered in this one. “Unless,” said one of the committeemen, with a backward chug of memory which was for this town in no way remarkable, “unless—and of course it’s no use to us—wasn’t there once somebody in New York?”
If so, the two young men, as they walked toward the Riefel house one evening, bearing the town’s invitation, handwritten by one of the librarians—knew nothing about it. Still, they were troubled to be carrying such an elegy with them, for so they considered it, on a night when they felt themselves so essentially alive.
The mate, whose hands were always cleaner than Jim’s factory job allowed his to be, had the letter in a fist, but put it in a pocket as they approached the portico of the house. In the black-green dark, the big place with its several apartments all lighted looked solid enough, if not festival, and the porte-cochere still possible to carriages. Were they taking advantage of their friend, to bring such a request out of the blue, not an up blue, but fairly a down one, the mate wondered? Or, Jim wondered, was it an act of friendship to do it at all? And as was so often their custom, they wondered these things aloud. The Riefel lions, gloomy as usual, gave no hint. The basement door, ivory black and with a thin gold knocker, snooted them, but this was usual. There remained for Riefel himself to help them with what advice could be given—and it was Riefel who gave it. Their problem was merely to think over what it was he gave them—for forty years after, if necessary.
The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Page 11