The Patient Observer Part 10

HAYES WINS

VICTOR IN DUAL MATCH OVER DORANDO

AMERICAN LEADS ITALIAN TO THE TAPE, AND CARRIES OFF PRIZE

DORANDO CAN DO NOTHING BETTER THAN SECOND

ONE MORE VICTORY ADDED TO GREAT RUNNER'S STRING

TEN THOUSAND CHEERING SPECTATORS SEE THE AMERICAN RUNNER REPEAT HIS VICTORY AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES

"New York, November 26.--The race between Hayes and Dorando this afternoon was won by the former."

XXVIII

USAGE

... _a certain cla.s.s of verbal critics who can never free themselves from the impression that man was made for language and not language for man._--Professor Lounsbury.

From a large number of readers we have received requests for a ruling on disputed cases of English usage. We now proceed to answer these inquiries in accordance with the liberal standard for which Professor Lounsbury pleads. One man writes:

_Question:_ Which is right, "To-morrow is Sunday and we are going out,"

or "To-morrow will be Sunday and we shall go out?" _Answer:_ Both forms are right, but as a matter of fact, if to-morrow is like other Sundays, it will probably rain all day, and your chances of going out are not bright.

_Q._ Must a sentence always have coherence? What is the practice of our great writers on this point? _A._ Coherence is not essential. Thus: "Conquests! Thousands! Don Bolaro Fizzgig--Grandee--only daughter--Donna Christina--Splendid creature--loved me to distraction--jealous father--high-souled daughter--handsome Englishman--Donna Christina in despair--prussic acid--stomach pump in my portmanteau--operation performed--old Bolaro in ecstasies--consent to our union--join hands and floods of tears--romantic story--very." (Charles d.i.c.kens.)

_Q._ Must a sentence always have a predicate? _A._ No. For example: (1) "The Universe smiles to me. The World smiles to me. Everything. Man.

Woman. Children. Presidential Candidates. Trolley Cars. Everything smiles to me." (_The Complete Whitmanite_) (2) "From the frowning tower of Babel on which the insectile impotence of man dared to contend with the awful wrath of the Almighty, through the granite bulk of the beetling Pyramids lifting their audacious crests to the star-meshed skies that bend down to kiss the blue waters of Father Nile and the gracious nymphs laving their blithesome limbs in the pools that stud the sides of Pentelicus, down to our own Was.h.i.+ngton, throned like an empress on the banks of the beautiful Potomac, waiting for the end which we trust may never come." (From the _Congressional Record_.)

_Q._ Is "ivrybody" a permissible variant for "everybody"? _A._ It is.

For instance, "His dinners [our amba.s.sador's at St. Petersburg] were th'

most sumchuse ever known in that ancient capital; th' carredge of state that bore him fr'm his stately palace to th' comparatively squalid quarters of th' Czar was such that _ivrybody_ expicted to hear th'

sthrains iv a calliope burst fr'm it at anny moment." (Mr. Dooley.)

_Q._ Is there good authority for saying, "He was given a hat," "He was shown the door," etc.? _A._ The form is common, and therefore correct.

As, "The Senator _was paid_ twenty thousand dollars for voting against the Governor"; "He _was offered_ a third term, but declined"; "The coloured delegates _were handed_ a lemon." (From the contemporary press.)

_Q._ The use of "who" and "whom" puzzles me. Must "who" always be used in the nominative case and "whom" in the objective? _A._ Not necessarily. Thus, "I told him who I wanted to see and that it wasn't none of his business" (W. S. Devery); "That's the first guy whom he said put him into the cooler." (Battery Dan Finn.)

_Q._ I am told that it is wrong to place a preposition at the end of a sentence. Why can't I say, "Mr. Roosevelt is a man whom I should enjoy talking _with_"? _A._ Your example is unfortunate. You should say, "Mr.

Roosevelt is a man whom I should enjoy talking _after_."

_Q._ Is it wrong to split infinitives? Is a phrase like "to seriously complain" really objectionable? _A._ We hasten to most emphatically say "Yes!"

_Q._ Is there a rigid rule with regard to the use of the preterite tense? When do you say "hung" and when do you say "hanged"? _A._ Two examples from a universally recognised authority will ill.u.s.trate the flexibility of our language in the general use of tenses: (1) "'I know a gen'l'man, sir,' said Mr. Weller, 'as did that, and _begun_ at two yards; but he never tried it on ag'in; for he _blowed_ the bird right clean away at the first fire, and n.o.body ever _seed_ a feather on him arterwards.'" (2) "So I take the privilidge of the day, Mary, my dear--as the gen'lem'n in difficulties did, ven he valked out of a Sunday--to tell you that the first and only time I _see_ you your likeness was _took_ on my hart in much quicker time and brighter colours than ever a likeness was took by the profeel macheens (wich p'r'aps you may have _heerd_ on Mary my dear) altho it does finish a portrait and put the frame and gla.s.s on complete with a hook at the end to hang it up by and all in two minutes and a quarter." (Charles d.i.c.kens.)

_Q._ What is "elegance" in style? I know it does not mean long words and many of them; but just what does it mean? _A._ Elegance is appropriateness. Long and circ.u.mlocutory terms are just as elegant in the mouth of a fas.h.i.+onable preacher as shorter and uglier words in the mouth of some one else. Hamlet's "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" and Chuck Connors's "Wouldn't it bend your Merry Widow?" are equally elegant.

_Q._ What is force in style? _A._ We may ill.u.s.trate with a quotation from Hall Caine's unannounced book: "He drew her to him and kissed her as men and women have kissed through the aeons, since the first star hymned to the first moonrise." Now, as a matter of fact, kissing is only about two thousand years old, and is still unknown to the Chinese, the native Africans, the Hindus, the Australians, the Indians of South America, the Polynesians, and the Eskimos; but the sentence is nevertheless a very forcible one.

XXIX

60 H.P.

For the purpose of getting one's name into the papers, the acquisition of a high-powered automobile may be recommended to the man who has never given a monkey dinner; whose son was never married to a show-girl in a balloon at 2.30 A.M.; whose son-in-law is neither a count, a duke, nor a prince, and does not beat his wife; who has never paid $100,000 for a Velasquez painted in 1897, or for a mediaeval Florentine altar-piece made in Dayton, Ohio. The press, like the public, does not brim over with affection for the motorist. From the newspapers it may be gathered that when a man has been seen in the front seat of an automobile his family prefers not to allude to the subject. Good men occasionally ride, but as a rule only on errands of mercy, and always in a friend's machine. A candidate for mayor will laugh when you accuse him of owning an opium den, taking $10,000 a month from Mr. Morgan, or experimenting freely in polygamy; but he throws up his hands when some one proves that he has been seen in a garage.

To me this seems absurd. If people admit that the automobile is here to stay, they must also admit that it is here to move from place to place occasionally. Automobiles that did nothing but stay would obviously fail in one of their princ.i.p.al aims. Not that the auto has no other important functions. It is evident that motor-cars were intended for little boys who squeeze the signal bulb and stick nails into the tires; for Republican orators to cite as evidence that the American farmer does not want the tariff revised; for foreign observers to prove that we are developing an aristocracy; and for Tammany office-holders to s.n.a.t.c.h a bit of relaxation after the day's long grind.

Motoring is not unmitigated bliss. The common belief that a body may be in only one place at one time can be easily refuted by a woman with a baby-carriage. Experience shows that such a woman, if she be put five feet from a sidewalk, with forty feet of open road behind her for an auto to pa.s.s through, will cover the forty feet backward with incredible speed and propel herself right in front of the car. What would happen if two cars came in opposite directions on opposite sides of a hundred-foot avenue cannot be predicted. Either the woman would be accompanied by another woman with a baby-carriage, or else, having propelled her own carriage in front of the machine going north, she would proceed to give her personal attention to the car going south.

It is difficult to start on a short spin in town, under doctor's orders, without immediately beginning to wonder why house rents and office rents should be going up steadily in face of the fact that the population of New York transacts its business and pursues its pleasures entirely in the middle of the road. German citizens, as a rule, stop to light their pipes on a street crossing. When you give them the horn, they are seized with the belief that you are trying to play the prelude to "Lohengrin,"

and they run up and down in front of the car in extreme agitation. You frustrate their plans for a beautiful death by rasping your tires against the curb, together with your nerves. At Seventy-second Street two women are saying good-bye in the middle of the street. You swerve to one side and they pursue. You snap your spinal column as you shoot the car straight about, but when you get there they are there. "Ladies,"

you say, "I am not leading a cotillion. I am an old man out for a bit of fresh air." Thereupon one calls you a brute and the other discerns from the colour of your nose that you have been drinking. At Forty-second Street you catch sight of your doctor. "Have you killed any one?" he says, after the cheerful manner of doctors. "No," you say, "but if you will kindly step into the car, I will."

Of the American farmer it may be said that, Mr. Roosevelt to the contrary notwithstanding, he is not an unimaginative, overworked being.

It can be demonstrated that the contemplative life is on the increase in the rural districts. Apparently, there is nothing more peaceful, nothing more restful, nothing more soothing, nothing more permeated with the spirit of _dolce far niente_, than the American farmer on his wagon in a narrow road with an auto behind him. The grunt of the horn invariably stirs in him memories of his aged grandmother, dead these twenty years, and he falls a wondering whether he was really as kind to her as he might have been. If the road is just wide enough for one vehicle, he moves along pensively. If it is wide enough for two vehicles, he throws his horses straight across the road and enters upon a prolonged examination of his rear axle. If the road is wide enough for three vehicles, he drives zigzag. The necessity of conserving our natural resources would seem to be a meaningless phrase when we consider the natural resources of an American farmer in front of an automobile.

The law and the courts press hard on the autoist. Since the invention of the automobile fine, the position of justice of the peace has become one of the highest offices in the gift of the nation. The city magistrate is a kindred soul. "Your Honour," says the prosecuting officer, "the question is whether the city's boulevards shall be given over to the owners of these destructive vehicles or whether they shall be held clear for the use of Marathon runners, suffragette meetings, baseball teams, and 'c.r.a.p' games. The streets, your Honour, are for the benefit of the majority; yet only the other day on Fifth Avenue I saw two ash-carts and an ice wagon held up by a continuous stream of automobiles." "Right,"

says the judge, and he turns to the victim: "What were you doing in the middle of the street when defendant ran you down wantonly and without cause?" "I was sleeping, your Honour," says the complainant, "having been overtaken with drowsiness on my way home from a select social affair." "Outrageous," says the magistrate. "Think of running into a sleeping man. One hundred dollars."

Such incidents make it clear that the automobile as an annihilator of s.p.a.ce has established its reputation. In the days before the auto a drive of fifteen or twenty miles const.i.tuted a good Sunday's outing.

To-day a man can leave New Roch.e.l.le at eight o'clock in the morning and pay a fine at Poughkeepsie at one in the afternoon, or he can leave Poughkeepsie at eight in the morning and at one in the afternoon be in the lock-up at New Roch.e.l.le.

What hurts the motorist's feelings most of all, however, is to be regarded by the public as a sort of licensed a.s.sa.s.sin. Yet almost any one can think of people who drive a car and take no pleasure in spilling blood. The common belief that automobile killing is a favourite sport among our best families seems to be based on the fact that in nine cases out of ten the occupants of a man-slaying automobile bear such well-known Knickerbocker names as Mr. William Moriarty, chauffeur; his friend, Mr. James Dugan, who is prominent in coal-heaving circles; and their friends, the Misses Mayme Schultz and Bessie Goldstein. At bottom, it would seem, most of the criticism directed against the automobile is based on its failure to take a hog and turn him into a gentleman. But in this respect automobiles are like many of our colleges. The comforting thing is that the life of the automobile hog is an uncertain one. Sooner or later he runs down a steep place into the sea, like certain of his species mentioned in the Bible, and the question adjusts itself.

Meanwhile, however, the decent motorist must suffer for the other's sins. A friend says: "The only time I dare be seen in my machine is between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. Before that time people point me out as a 'joy-rider' returning from a night's debauch. After that time I am a 'joy-rider' bound for a night of it." The complaint rings true. The exhilaration aroused by a punctured tire in the open country gathers strength from the remarks of the spectators who wonder if you made your money honestly. In town a defective sparkplug brings the close attention of a crowd which exchanges opinions as to whether the lady in the tonneau is your wife. All agree that you must have mortgaged your home to buy the machine.

And yet it is evident that much misunderstanding could be avoided if we had a simple code of rules for people who cross the street just as there are regulations for the autoist. A few such rules suggest themselves: 1.

If one is about to cross the street in front of an auto, one should do so either before the man in the car succ.u.mbs to heart failure or after, but not while the driver is wrestling with death; it is in such cases that one is apt to get hurt. 2. If one is in the middle of the road and sees a car approaching, one should move either (_a_) away from the car, (_b_) towards the car, (_c_) to the right, (_d_) to the left, or (_e_) stand still; under no circ.u.mstances should one attempt to combine (_a_), (_b_), (_c_), (_d_), and (_e_). 3. The safest place from which to ascertain the make of an automobile or to estimate its cost is the sidewalk.

x.x.x

THE SAMPLE LIFE

The hour, the occasion, and the scene were conducive to melancholy. We had walked a good fifteen miles into the open country and back again under chilly clouds, and were now paying for it with an empty sense of weariness and disenchantment. There is nothing so depressing as a bare room lit up by flaring gas-jets against the gloom of a late afternoon of rain; and the lights in Scipione's little cellar restaurant flared away in the most outrageous manner. Harding, across the table from me, wretchedly fluttered the pages of a popular magazine and looked ill-natured and horribly unkempt. The new table-cloths had not yet been laid for dinner. The sawdust on the floor was mostly mire. Angelina, the cook, was screaming at Paolo and Francesca, who were trying to boil the cat. It was very dreary.