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Pedestrians hurried past him, motor vehicles and surface-cars sped by for Fourth Avenue lay in front; but what he saw was Aladdin in chains; Aladdin before the executioner; Aladdin pardoned, yet aghast over the loss of his palace and the beloved Buddir al Buddoor, and ready to take his own life. The afternoon went swiftly. Evening came.
Imagine a country with telegraph and telephone and medieval customs, a country with electric lights, railways, surface-cars, hotel elevators and ancient laws! Something of the customs of the duchy must be told in the passing, though, for my part, I am vigorously against explanatory passages in stories of action.
We burst startlingly into a very remarkable deep glade on the floor of it long and violent surface-cars, a few open shops and bars with commissionaires at the doors, vehicles dipping and rising out of holes in the ground, vistas of forests of iron pillars, on the top of which ran deafening, glittering trains, as on a tight-rope; above all that, a layer of darkness; and above the layer of darkness enormous moving images of things in electricity a mastodon kitten playing with a ball of thread, an umbrella in a shower of rain, siphons of soda-water being emptied and filled, gigantic horses galloping at full speed, and an incredible heraldry of chewing-gum.... Sky-signs!
Progress in the upper part of the Avenue was rapid enough; but from Madison Square slow, halting, and intermittent, horses were falling in all directions, stopping the surface-cars packed with a multitude of toilers, all going city-wards; the gong of the automobile clanged petulantly.
At 164th Street she came to a star of streets where the Third Avenue Elevated collaborated with the surface-cars and the loose traffic to create a delicious pandemonium. She loved those high numbers a hundred and eighty streets! Beautiful! At home Main Street dissolved into pastures at Tenth Street. She wanted to find Main Street in New York and see what First Street looked like.
Just where Broadway crosses Sixth Avenue at Thirty-third Street is to be found a dingy, triangular little park plot in which a few gas-stunted, smoke-stained trees make a brave attempt to keep alive. On two sides of the triangle surface-cars whirl restlessly, while overhead the elevated trains rattle and shriek.
Frothingham's should be so courageous, and meantime we threaded our way through the tangle of trucks and surface-cars on Broadway, and came to the corner of Wall Street. Here Mrs. Frothingham said she would get out and walk; it was quite likely that someone might recognise Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, and she ought not to be seen arriving with the speaker.
The beautiful custom in Catholic countries not only of giving them the right of way, but of the men removing their hats while the procession passes, has resolved itself into a funeral procession going on the run; the driver of the hearse watching his chance and fairly ducking between trucks and surface-cars, jolting the casket over the tracks until I myself have seen the wreaths slip from their places, and sometimes for five or ten minutes the hearse separated from its following carriages by a procession of vehicles which the policeman at the crossing had permitted to interfere.
Nor can I forget also in Boston the spectacle of the citizens of Brookline reputed to be the wealthiest suburb in the world strap-hanging and buffeted and flung about on the way home from church, in surface-cars which really did carry inadequacy and brutality to excess. The horse-cabs of Chicago had apparently been imported second-hand immediately after the great fire from minor towns in Italy.
The New York Subway is a masterpiece of celerity, and in other ways less evil than an Elevated, but in the minimum decencies of travel it appeared to me to be inferior to several similar systems in Europe. The surface-cars in all the large cities that I saw were less smart and less effective than those in sundry European capitals.
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