ORAL DESCRIPTION CANNOT TOUCH that spring—and not because it is gone—or that there will be others just like. Washlines left out on its evenings had a mystery, and even to the well-sighted, an arbor in a garden sank back in the twilight like an Italian arch. Projects were touched by it, or people were moved to them. Even the plans for a Ford agency were affected, the way a plain street, with plain maples and horse-chestnuts, is one morning littered with the wildest yellows and greens. And when the householder has swept these away, then down come the whites. It was a time of clearness and short, lovable mysteries, when a man may well be afflicted with a keenness of sight for things he has always known aren’t there.
The mate had found his town. At least—after days and days of his circuit-riding under those wind-glassy skies, toward horizons which were one moment riotous and the next second as neat and sharp as a pruned hedge—when he burst in on the dinner-chops with a statement to that effect, it was clear that the time had come; he had had to find it, just as much as if a giant traffic-hand had come down in the road before him, holding up a sign that said STOP THEN GO. As he said to Jim, if they weren’t to let themselves be chosen, they must choose. In this town that had found him, there was a house to which was already attached the means for just such a business, agency and garage, as they wanted, also a half-acre of frontage for expansion, also—unimportantly of course—an owner named Skinner. Skinner didn’t particularly want to sell; in fact, said the mate, the idea had not yet occurred to the man, but they were going to get that setup from him—in an honest way of course—if they had to hire three wolves to blow him out of there.
“Three pigs, it was,” said Jim. “That story is the other way round. I mean—one wolf. Not even two.” But he had to laugh. The two of them looked at each other, grinning. They weren’t looking in any reflecting mirror. Jim couldn’t help knowing he was handsome, a tall, rolling-gaited man with a fresh complexion, whose pink cheeks annoyed him with their youth. The mate was shorter, though not as short as he looked, with a chiropractor’s neck and arms, or a pick-axer’s, and not bad-featured in a pugnacious way, but swart enough to keep him always at the razor, and not above a sneak of talcum on the jowls. Like many from the mines, he had a fine voice, the speaking one too—and he couldn’t help knowing from the women, beginning with his own mother, that he had a smile. And where Jim’s head was close-shaven enough for a phrenologist, so that in some lights his blond hair seemed white, the mate’s black crop shot forward in a forelock which made him look as if he was being pulled along by it—even to himself. Looking back at them both, they were a nice pair, part of the grinning being that they knew it. Slice either of them, and you’d get only honesty, tempered with need but not yet burnt by it.
“Pigs is pigs,” said the mate, adding that Skinner’s house, and certain others in the neighborhood, had been built by Swedes, a Swede carpenter, and scrubbed by his faithful fry ever since—or almost.
“What’s its name,” said Jim. “This great town.”
“Names, names,” said the mate, but he was smiling. “It’s on the main road, of course, but it’s just a section. I don’t think it’s on the map, really.” Then he leaned back and laughed so hard he had to slap himself. He jabbed a fork at Jim. “Going northwest, ask for directions, they say ‘It’s just after you get to the Palewater Reservoir, mister.’ How’s that for you? But if you ask going southwest to it, they tell you ‘It’s just about after you leave the Champion Woods Pulp Company.’ How’s that?”
“No name,” said Jim. “Where in the love of God is this place? What’s it near?”
They got out the map, which spread itself out in a resigned way. The mate’s finger trembled, skipping over the Adirondacks, going due west as if it were a dowser’s, then due south. When it found the spot, it could barely hover over, jouncing with excitement. Jim looked at him, inquiring, then down at the map.
There for sure was Palewater, in one direction. And there was Champion Woods, in another. Between them, on the main road, there was a minim of space which when it stretched to human scale must be quite comfortable, though Jim’s spirits sank a bit at the idea of its being on the road well enough but without a town to it—of course they had to have the road. But he’d been thinking of some deep green well of a town, up to which the lively motors would come to drink, man-made and hearty, but then somehow fade, fade away again, leaving the place natural.
“Look harder,” said the mate. He moved his finger away. There are four directions to a map, after all, and Jim had looked in only two of them. He looked crossways in a third direction, then, following it down, in a fourth.
“By God!” said Jim. “By God, Jim!”
A few miles in the fourth direction, there was Oriskany—where he’d been born.
They spent the balance of the night talking equities and amortizations and other money talk which a session with the local banker had taught them quite well, but that night there wasn’t anything professional about it except their solemn, joined manner; it was as if they had entered upon an agreed magic dialogue which would keep old man Skinner from selling before morning. Most selling and buying, once it gets past sensible need and projects into the future, is nothing but this kind of personification and magic, with maybe some group madness thrown in. And most bankers even, and businessmen—but that’s another story and no time for it, except to point out that Skinner—who promptly became Skinflint in the partners’ talk, and must have aged twenty years overnight in the bargain—was actually himself only one grade less innocent than a chickenfarming type, and only about forty-three. Since the next day was Sunday, they drove over to see him. Cars were already well in of course, though still called autos, and had been in for years, and taxis and buses too; don’t think the dates are wrong here; we are simply still in the period when they hadn’t taken over yet. The mate and Jim had no Stutz Bearcat; they had a Ford. It got them there just before supper, a quarter of five o’clock.
Skinner must have thought they had dropped from heaven, even though they had telephoned ahead. He was the mouse-haired, hysterical type who should have married a big woman to boss him, and maybe with psychology to help him along with his woes he would have, but these were the olden days, and instead he’d married his wife. She was just bright enough to drop children like rabbits, and pink-eyed ones too, just like herself, but she was also the legatee of this house we two were after.
We. But there—it’s been understood all along, hasn’t it, who that pair was?
Well, to go on, there was the house—and the barn (for it was a farmhouse, and the barn was the greater part of it)—the barn of stone-and-mortar, ledged for posterity and for a sunlight it hadn’t quite been able to get that far north, and a seventeen-ninety over the door. The house itself was later, but good too, clapboard, center entrance, double chimneys and a fanlight; that Swedish carpenter had passed through Vermont. There were no Adam mantels but what use would the partners make even of five fireplaces with such a good draw?—and the house was good seasoned wood all through, made to stand, and no plumbing or heating yet, which would keep the price down, and of course, there in front, already let into what had once been the second parlor, was the grocery store and store window—which was how the Skinners skinned along. This would be the partner’s office. As for the barn, it already housed a Model T Ford lost in it like an omen, to show how many more of its kind that barn could take on. Outside, there was already one gas pump, and over the acreage behind all, a hill for the sun to rise out of, and across the post road built by the first settlers, a woods for it to go down into. Oh, it was a fine setup that had caught the mate’s eye, or would be, once the Skinner litter had been cleaned off of everywhere, the pair said to themselves; there’s no litter worse than a bad farmer’s, and Skinner, among other things, had been ploughing up the acreage for something. Even the store was halfhearted, with signs the family had been at their own groceries, and tawdry ones too. The barn took Jim’s eye at once; it was beautiful.
The trouble was, the place had no need or real reason to be at all, any more; none of it did, not barn nor house nor the land. But how were Jim, who didn’t know about land yet, or the mate, who’d never yet had any, to know this—that such a property, in such a place, can pass from hand to hand and still, like an amulet, keep its first stubborn luck attached to it? Even the Skinner litter would be a deception, prompting an industrious buyer to think he was the man to make the change. The trouble with these houses that last is that they were built for nothing but once—and for the post road. They last and last, but they won’t ever pervert to anything else, not to summer places, because of the road, not to business ones, because of no town. But people are always trying, in their stalls and stores and eateries, and of course anyplace having such a sunup and sundown has a good deal to do with it. So it has come about that these houses on roads without towns are the badlands of America in a small way, just as those great glory holes at the center of the continent—the canyons and deserts—are its badlands in a grand way, land where nothing more than carnival or show, or a surprise of the spirit, can ever be arranged. But these other smaller places—being so random but still everywhere in the lymph and life of the countryside and the cityside too—there’s nothing to be done but to spit and to stamp on them, and to start all over again in these new developments, as is being done now. As for the partners, one look at Skinner with that fine hill and all its works behind him, and they were convinced they had come just in time.
A price was quickly agreed upon by all tycoons present, said sum first being tempered the partners’ way—by reason of their willingness to take over all mortgage arrears as soon as they had the money to do it, and then tempered Skinner’s way—by reason of his willingness to wait. Imagination was therefore left free on both sides, to rejoice in its bargain. The partners, for instance, were welcome to visit their property-to-be at any time, and in the next months tirelessly did so. Skinner, in taking them the rounds of their estate, often pointed out to them improvements they would make, when he was in a large mood, or repairs he hadn’t been up to, if he was in a restrained one—to both of which they agreed, like the indulgent landlords they were. Indeed, imagination was rampant on all sides that spring; even the children gathered at the fenceline when the partners left, to stare sullenly at the new owners, and behind them, sometimes the wife too. Skinner enjoyed it most of any, stepping with the lordly pace of a man whose property is wanted, and as came out later, making no more mortgage payments. The property itself needed to do nothing, being everybody’s dream.
The new owners themselves worried a little, as they felt the advancing lures of property, heavy and light. As they would leave it, at a sundown, the mate often shook his head over it, looking back. “That woman’s no housekeeper,” he might say, as he had said that first evening, or something like. Jim, blinking equally in the golden outpour which hid somewhere behind it his watery birthplace, always summed it up his way, never varying. “Well,” he always said, as he too had that first evening. “Well, that lets out Sand Spring.”
During those months also, the trips to Oriskany—as they had taken to calling these, though they never went near the namesake town itself—seemed to take the place of other close relationships, or rather, to free them for still another kind. The mate, though still traveling regularly on his job, no longer found new land-and-home treasures, or was dulled or sated to them, now that he was owned. He found himself thinking of women again, or at least of kindly waitresses along the way, many of whom were extra kind in this magnolia weather, and it was no trouble at all to persuade Jim to ankle along with him in that sort of teamwork. The two of them found that the States were no different from Europe in these matters, only, in a queer way, more cynical. And don’t be surprised that these matters are mentioned here. For, just because we seem to be constructing an idyll here—and maybe we are—doesn’t mean that a man doesn’t remember the more humdrum pleasures of such a time, as well. What is an idyll, but that part of a man’s life which he will remember with clarity for all of it, so that all his years his tongue can go on touching it, as on a live nerve?
As for the Pardees, these other matters, that is, other women, even helped Jim remember them, whereas along the line of the sisters’ usual destiny they might have been forgotten—though how so-called low women often help out the high ladies might not be appreciated by either side. But so it was—and so it sometimes occurred that he went to the Pardees for a pretended fourth time—the whole route there: two miles to the town, one and a half through it, and four round by the lake: all of it—but only in his mind. Meanwhile, in Sand Spring itself, people now and then tried to josh him about the sisters as the two veterans had; a love affair in such a place is often half audience. But as summer came on, it happened as might be expected; people forgot. Jim, on the other hand, though he didn’t get out there, found himself mentioning them now and again; clearly he thought of the sisters as staying the way they always were, suspended, if not actually waiting. And if this had no direct value to the sisters themselves, nevertheless, somewhere along the stations of life they had gone up a bit. In one way or another, for somebody, they had not passed out of mind.
And now—the mate. We haven’t talked much of him or seen his side, though we will. Perhaps we had better do it now; that way we will at least know more about him than he did himself. As the intenser emotions go, the mate certainly wasn’t a late starter, but he wasn’t hard about them either; he was sudden. To judge him correctly, as he went at a woman with his bull forelock, this ought to be said. Jim was a more practical man; he let himself dream of love. But the mate was romantic, he wanted a wife. That is, now that a house and lot had come his way, or almost, he wanted children to staff it, and that’s one way to do it. He was always on the hunt for reality. Of course, he thought of all this as practical. But if you’re going to be hunting reality instead of submitting to it, it’s best to be sure you’re hunting all of it. What the mate actually wanted was to find himself at the prime of life a self-made man, and everything tidy. In Lancashire, as a blackish boy called “our Jim,” he’d seen this kind of life or thought he had, as far above him as the bit of blue sky to be climbed toward from the bottom of the mine. In France he thought he’d glimpsed it too, pointing it out to Jim in farm after farm of the kilometered farmland, every last tended inch of it cantilevering slowly toward heaven—until laid waste. In America, he said, once a boy had arrived here, it was no longer necessary to look upward, only to wait to be of an age to work and to root as prescribed. For this country, now that it had untangled itself from its own notions of Hiawatha, was already up in that fine blue, with almost everybody here. He’d pointed them out to Jim also—the tidy possibles all around them—a whole hemisphere of the self-made. Jim, floating his own watery pastures, had nodded, unable to communicate more than a tinge of his transportational feelings, of all the crowds of barges and liveries going down, derry-down, one after the other, ever since the first ape got down off the first limb of time.
“Down?” said the mate, his eyes staring ahead even of his hair. “Not in our time. What else can you expect of course, if you get mixed up with horses? Or sail.” He knew barges didn’t sail in that sense of course, though it was a question whether he knew that earlier in their history he would have had a point about the horses which had pulled them; he was speaking generally, or so he supposed. “Not in our time,” he repeated. “Not the way the wheel is going now.”
They were just finishing off half a lemon meringue pie bought at the local Sand Spring bakery, and it was awful stuff; back there so early in the century it wasn’t all good homestyle cooking, though at that period only a bachelor might know it. With his fork, he scraped absently at the hard pie-shell left on his plate, a sign of how bad it was, that even this lightning-careless eater had balked.
“Ought to be another bakery here,” he muttered; this was early in their housekeeping together; after that, for dessert they ate fruit. “Down?” he said again, at the same time digging the flat of his fork so hard into the crust that the tines clanked on the plate and the gray, floured bits flew. He was always a violent-moving man, everywhere except in his work which was so delicate; well, you know him, you know. Then, as if he knew this, catching himself about to slap Jim on the shoulder, he carefully rested his hand there instead. “Not this kind of wheel, not in a hundred years, Jim. Why—” He smiled slowly enough, his eyes blind on that horned hair of his forever probing forward. “And the first hundred years is the hardest. “Why—” And then he had to slap Jim after all, his hand coming down even harder than first intended, so that even brawny Jim had to cry, “Whoa.”
But the mate’s cry outshouted him. “Wheels?” he cried. “Why, son-of-a-gun; they’ll be our ladder!”
So this was the mate, who was at the time, as you know, a surveyor. Already he had measured half of New York State with the aid of his old Gunter chain, and day after day was increasing his score; how should he know that this land-knowledge of his, pendulum-tied to the ground though it was, was still not necessarily of the earth earthy? So, this was the man who, when the most important kiss of his life, the wedding-kiss, still tasted deeper of fritter than mouth, didn’t think one thing more about it. And this was the man who, standing in a parlor not the minister’s and with sponsors not really kin to the bride, but with enough of the proper feather-hats tremoring and already so willingly remembering, and the bride like a rose in her rose satin since it wasn’t a formal wedding, the pointed bodice of her as small at the waist as anything in Sears—this was the man who immediately after that lass could shout out (with what the hats and even some of the watch chains could only take for heartiness since otherwise what else would they make of it?)—this man could shout out, “I can see my GRANDCHILDREN now!”
But let’s wait a bit on a wedding which—and you might guess why, if you didn’t already know it—concerned more than the mate. Let us get back to that time, past spring, on into the hottest summer, and after countless trips, sailing trips one could just as soon call them, to Oriskany—when the mate looked up from his stewed peaches to say, “What’s about this Lottie, you once said.”
He saw that Jim began to tremble. “Why, Jim,” he said. Around the house they always named each other quite naturally, not having any trouble knowing who was who. When out of the mate’s presence, Jim always called him “my mate”—not having to identify either the mate or himself to others being one of the virtues of Sand Spring. Whereas out of Jim’s company, the mate, as if to emphasize that Jim belonged in the town more than Jim himself dared imagine, or as if referring to his friend’s two years of higher education, or perhaps merely to qualities of character or reflection which gave him precedence, always called him by name—Jim. On the rarest occasions, as in the case of bankers but not waitresses, the mate would mumble out his own last name, then Jim’s very much more clearly. There too, as in all their later walks of life, though he might tease Jim for his style of reflection (the while his own style of impulse never gave him time to ask for advice much less take it) the mate always gave Jim a tender, courtly distinction—the way one might treat a man wiser than oneself, even stronger, whose head, though ready and hard enough for any fight which came at him, was, nevertheless, compared to the speaker’s, short on horn.
“Why, Jim—” said the mate slowly, “I wouldn’t want to cross you up in any—” Nor would he. On their nights out together he didn’t ever. He didn’t have enough vanity for it—though more vanity would have changed his life, if not saved it; nobody gets saved. It wasn’t that he didn’t see people; he saw all his targets well enough, from old Skinflint, to the land he wanted the way a woman wants velvet, to the women too. As he once told Jim, he saw them all sky-blue upward, that was the trouble, as if he was still down there looking up to where they were all crowded waiting for him up there in the clear, hard azure of that hole. What he never saw, not at the time, was the sight of himself going at them. He does now though; he’s been seen to start out, then stop himself, many a time. And it helps him of course to know, as Jim knew way earlier, that though some nip and tuck is worse than others, nobody gets saved.
For right then, what shook Jim was another one of those glances at the future, which is all that philosophy ever is, isn’t it? “What’s about this Lottie,” the mate had said. Jim coughed, to clear his voice. “I said ‘Lottie and Emily,’ didn’t I?” he asked. “Surely I said ‘Emily’ too?”
The mate regarded him. Jim was never a target to him; maybe that’s why the mate sometimes looked at him as if safety was there.
Jim saw that too—as the mate could always be sure of—but just now Jim himself was wondering. Had there been anything special in the way he’d said it, months ago? Or had it been in the way the mate had heard it—in which case, had it been with a hearkening toward something in Jim’s manner or something strictly private to the mate? “Surely I said ‘Emily’ too,” Jim said. “Didn’t you hear it?”
Still the mate didn’t quite answer. After a pause, he said, “Are we ever going out there, sometime?”
Whether they would or not, wasn’t what had given Jim the shivers. It was—that if they did, things had already been settled, or else were being, now. It was—that right now, if the choice hadn’t been settled on already, in secret archives somewhere—the choice was being made.
“Sometime,” he managed to say, even nodding.
The mate nodded slowly back at him. “It was Lottie I heard,” he said.
And this is the way things were in that part of the state when the last summer came for its interurban, overhead-track trolley cars. Here several explanations are in order, all of them swimming in the full, sad pleasure which is to be had in the description of any event single enough for its influence to be seen, yet faithful to an old cycle—and gone. We can let the cycle be for the nonce, having already said enough of barges and stables. But there still has to be explained how the main street of a town the size of Sand Spring, a street scarcely big enough for its own traffic light, came to be the terminus of a passenger carrier line which—though it never reached its plotted end a hundred miles away in the town of Batavia—did go along, neat as a parlor car on a leash, for twenty-nine of them, only to end up against a hillside in a gentle meadow as wide as a small lake, in among the rushes brimming the sides of an even smaller stream called the Little Otselica. To explain this will be an easy pleasure, follies of this sort being so familiar to everyone, and so acceptable when committed by the worldly—as this one was. Lastly, we have to speak in detail—some of it loving, but still so that you can see it and maybe even smell it—about the mechanism of that fine old sparkler and grinder, an electric traction trolley car. This won’t be any harder, however, than you will someday find it to talk about your old Thundereagle, or Hawkspit, or whatever it is you call those ruby-throated sports cars.
A Folly, says my dictionary, is a costly structure considered to have shown the builder to have been foolish. Add to this, that to my mind a folly is never really very national in outlook; men have been known to build castles-on-the-Rhine up the Hudson, and along the Colorado a Petit Trianon. Follies like these don’t say much about the spirit of a country. Or much that’s profound. But to my mind, a real, home-grown folly can be very local; I would know one of the upstate New York variety anywhere. On land, that is; what to say about the ones on wheels is still in question. But in any case—whether it’s a castle standing dark against the vegetable green of an impossible mountain, or the friendliest tramline trying to sputter between mile after mile of people’s herbaceous borders—what such a Folly shows is the spirit of the owner, just before that breaks through into humanity, or dies back into it. And humanity meanwhile being what it is, the kind of folly which delights it most is the hopeless expenditure of a man very well known not to have gotten his money the soft way, the whole history of his happenstance meanwhile being common knowledge round about home. On all scores, Adelbert Riefel’s folly was of such a kind.
The Riefel house, running to pillars in the front, strange Amsterdam-style peaks in the servants’ quarters behind, and two lions couchant before—and as such merely one of countless minor monuments to the last quarter of the last century—is still to be seen, and still appears to belong to a town larger than Sand Spring. Built on a fine central plot at the beginning of its owner’s prime, always in heyday use in its carriage days, and later cut up into first-class apartments which never went unrented, it took care of him at the end of his prime, or what in some men would be past it, so that, except for what it harbored in its basement, the house itself was never a folly at all. Adelbert himself was the son of a scholarly Swedenborgian farmer—which belief we were taught in those days was part religion, part a sort of science—though that might be contested now. Adelbert, as far as anyone could see in the beginning, took over only the science part; like many another son of scholarly religionists, he went after money. First off, he went after a wife with it; he was a thinskinned redhead with a profile which must have taken on quite a nimbus at the courting hour, and indeed stood him well otherwise, all his life. Her money, it was said, was his stake. And the business he went for was fresh and decent enough: garden seed and related products, arboretums to hog-chows to fertilizers, but the rumor was that he was not benevolent. He was said to have taken advantage of all the financial panics of the eighteen-seventies except the last one, foreclosures sprouting an empire in his pockets. Mrs. Riefel sweetened the scent of their money by acquiring—at first not in the home house but in a conservatory in a rented one on New York’s Fifth Avenue—one of the largest collections in the east of cattleyas, which she told the home garden club later was a fancy word for orchids. Then, at about the time of the last panic, though the Riefels were still unquestionably solid rich if no longer fancy, they came home to stay. People always wondered why, in Sand Spring this kind of change not being considered reason enough. Maybe the people Riefel’d grown used to taking advantage of out there had become his enemies—or his friends. He was still a young man, not even forty, younger than his wife. Maybe Swedenborg had bit him in the brain after all. Anyway, he came home.
Although Sand Spring social life wasn’t of any level for them to lord over, give the Riefels credit, they now and then visited the cousins they had in town, and now and then had them formally back. According to them, he was as polite as all get out with them and with everybody, with the staff that served the house (a cook and a man from the “east,” by which the cousins meant eastern New York of course) and with the rest of the neighborhood—he was even polite with his wife. According to these cousins, to whose social advantage if was of course to keep up the legend, anyone could see that formality was ingrained in Adelbert now. He had a library, so-called but also with books in it, in which he spent some time. His shirt collars sat out above his jackets in a way that none of those townsmen could match, even those who bought the best Rochester had to offer, and his cuffs were long. He was used to sitting in on committees and, it was suspected, champagne suppers, and though he didn’t take much of anything himself, kept a small cellar for occasional visitors from the East and sometimes farther, though compared to western New York’s groaning board his company dinners to anybody were very plain—the kind it took this sort of formality to be able to give.
Oh there were all sorts of details which would have been overlooked by anybody not as intelligently interested as the cousins—or the town. If he had the habit of light women, these were certainly not in the neighborhood, nor of course would they be; he would have mistresses, it was argued, whom he met in a hot, plush love-nest somewhere, though certain returned émigrés from the city (after all Sand Spring was less than four hundred miles away from it) said no, not that way, that it might very well be a much more rarefied business; in fact it might be what in smart circles was called not a love affair, but just “an affair.” Certainly he went regularly to New York, though the manner of his goings and comings anywhere, if by nature distant with the town, was never furtive; now and then anybody could see him and often did, though even if the observer was only a foot of railway platform apart from him, and courteously spoken to as well, it still seemed to be from afar. He was at that time of his return a partially bald but still good-looking gentleman, who, if it was possible to compare him with his coevals about town (which it wasn’t), already looked older than they did and yet younger; this latter characteristic was to emerge more and more. What we were looking at, I think, was a natural-born aristocracy, which the money had only added to—by keeping him in a certain state of organizational and philosophical health.
You’ve seen the type, we all have, and I’ve no doubt that the story of Adelbert Riefel, especially in those little details if not the big ones, has its place and specialty in the social rises of America at large, but we haven’t got time for more of it than is strictly necessary, which some of it is. For remember the Riefel basement. In it there was already growing that engrossing folly whose later development, though it still didn’t take up all of his time was to suck up almost all of his money, and would be of some concern to you also. For truly, in the furtive wheel-chain of life-events, those that can be picked out for sure as single and separate are very valuable. And it is a surety that without the folly that grew from Adelbert Riefel’s basement, to become, as follies may for a time, a kind of practical enchantment—you grandchildren here and your daddies before you—all those unto the second and third generation that stem from Jim Eck and Jim Morgan, heretofore known as Jim and his mate, and in general to be known so hereafter—might not have been born. I’d go further, I’d say the odds are, in spite of occasional spurts of possibility (like that just now recounted mention of the Pardees) that you all would not have been born. And I ought to know.
Now—to the Folly itself. Your generation, I don’t suppose it cares anything much yet for models or modelcraft that are not in the way of science or business—I mean model trains, boats, planes, collectors’ soldiers, even model toy warfare. You’re all for the hot-rod, or the stock-car race, or even the Saturday afternoon parachute jump at the county fair—for the moment, you’re in it, as you like to say for real. Chances are you don’t know anything more about that other world than the Lionel trains I once got for all of you, all of them now in attics, or maybe one or two balsa-and-rubberband airplane kits you and some crony bought at a dime-store and put together when you were thirteen. And I don’t suppose your sisters know any more about it than their old doll houses and tea-sets, or care—though there are always some women who go on to those other little pretties almost at once, to tiny furniture replicas of Williamsburg kept in a cabinet, or toy gardens with Dutch bulbs in them the size of nailheads—or even in their own lifesize houses, in not such an easy-to-see, boiled-down way, though in the end maybe nastier. Many childless couples have this fondness for the wee also—wee dogs, wee talk—and the Riefels were childless, but what fastened on Adelbert was not for coyness or charm, and came over him alone. It is a passion which can come over a grown man—maybe one who’s never had much of anything, or maybe a millionaire in his maturity—when either of them cries or sighs to himself “What lack I now?” This is the way it begins, often—but often there’s more to it, much more. You can’t see it yet. Wait.
I understood it better, him and it, when, a middle-aged man myself and down to New York on a business trip, I happened to go shopping for toy trains for all of you children—grandchildren by marriage, and grandchildren by right. It was after-war time again, nineteen-forty-six, just after V-J Day—Victory-Japan, in case you never heard of it—and countless wheels we could all see had been turning like mad for years, as well as the silent ones also, which we could hear quite as well. But the little toy ones for the moment had stopped. That big toy store on the Plaza said that if the metal allowances were permitted they could still have what I wanted by Christmas—this was only August—but I wouldn’t be there then, and they had nothing to show, to order on. After they understood that the castles and drawbridges, anything with soldiers foot or mounted, didn’t attract me these days no matter how medieval—“We understand perfectly,” said the salesman, “we can scarcely wait for the domestic stuff, I mean the peacetime, ourselves”—they gave me a list of hobbyist shops where I might find secondhand plenty of what I had in mind. I chose a shop on Duane Street called the Train Center—trains, a simple standard set of childhood ones, being all I had in mind. This shop was out of business, I found, but I found another on Park Row, and another on Church. I had an afternoon to kill, and I killed it, and meantime old Riefel, whom I’d seen that summer of nineteen-twenty, and whom I had things to thank for, once more came alive.
You space-eater, you of the hot-rod—ever stand in one of those concentrated essence places called a hobby mart? Ever stand in a motoring headquarters for planes, boats, cars, railroads, and miles of track and roads for all of it, and miles of air too—which isn’t more than fifteen foot square? Only to find out that people don’t only buy them, they make them, with dinky models and construction kits and a host of suppliers and factors to this world—or they have them made for them, nowadays everything from TT trains to HO trains and roadways, to Frogkits and Minic Ships? From there I wandered into a shop that stocked ship-model supplies, blueprints and fittings, woods and veneers, then on to a shop that made only “experimental” models, by God, then to one which only did repairs. I saw them all—and, out of sentiment let’s say, I’ve even now and then kept up with them, though not to buy. You of the Thunderbird, ever hear of model-car racing? Slot-racing? With equipment radio-controlled? But it was already all there in essence back then, the world still hasn’t digressed that much, and it was then I understood what you’ve got no cause to yet, and what Jim and his mate didn’t have any cause to understand either, the afternoon that Adelbert Riefel let them see his basement plan.
It’s that after a certain age, and only after, there’s a certain pleasure in seeing the world once again in miniature. Call these things hobbies if you wish, or if they get larger, follies, but they’re not of childhood, nor of those akin to senility, and are never the devotions of youth. As for seeing the world in small but perfect, perfectly tidy, or having an urge to make it so, that’s as it may be; this is the passion the partners thought they were witnessing that day. But I’m inclined to think otherwise. I think of it as a passion to see a world in small all right, but an enchanting and difficult one, a world with all its power lights always blinking on and off again, always in need of experimentation or repair. A world in small, all right—but for real. And I think of it as a reflective passion. Some of us, as you have good cause to know, take it out in talk. That’s the commonest way. But Riefel had done it this other more solitary way, and perhaps even here had done it uniquely, for in shop after shop I saw nothing like he had, and maybe there never was. The urge to be unique in these affairs persists; maybe you remember what I came home with that year, the French-gauge electric train that no transformer could ever make really run? But Riefel’s fault, and no doubt his reflections too of course, ran deeper. And—so did his folly. For in the end, he tried to see his world both in the small and in the large.
He must have had his small system custom-made, perhaps even in Europe, the cars and the whole thing, though that afternoon he didn’t tell us this—the partners that is—saying only that he’d drawn the entire design and blueprints himself, taking the whole of one year to do it—the year he and his wife came back to Sand Spring. The execution of the plans had taken two years more. Maybe this explained the trips to New York, or maybe not—for when the mate made his acquaintance forty-odd years later (on a train connection out of Albany), he was still going there. Mrs. Riefel had long since died; her orchids had withered, replaced by housekeeper’s fern; the house had been cut into flats. In one way of looking at it, he was only an old man of eighty-odd living on the funds of a once-grand house and on only one floor of it: did I say he retained just the basement floor? But in another aspect he was marvelous, sharp as ever but quietly so, none of that eighty-year chirp in him; in a ghostly way he was still even redheaded—and going to New York. But perhaps, yes—though we couldn’t know for sure of course at our age—perhaps he wasn’t quite so distant any more. Although it was the mate he’d first met up with, he appeared to know about Jim; here was the town again, at its function.
“I understand you two are mechanical in bent,” he said, shooting one of those cuffs. The cufflink in it, as the mate described and Jim saw later, was as modern as anything you might wear, but in those days was still very advanced—an abstract design. “Perhaps you’d like to take a look one of these days at my little system,” he added. He always referred to it that way, to differentiate it from the big one. “Of course I can’t quite keep it up in the style to which it was accustomed, can’t get the parts for it. But it’s still worth a look.”
Worth a look! We knew (the town again) that this was precisely what very few people did get; the cousins, in addition to knowing all the other nuances of his history, had continued to keep the town well informed. It all began, they said, back in his financial days, the peak of them, when he floated some debentures for such systems, or whatever it is that men like him floated. While men like Harriman and Frick had been doing it with the railroads, our Swedenborgian had sectioned out this little specialty of his own. Perhaps he’d even been the czar of it. Whether or not this had been true, the toy system we saw that afternoon was in commemoration of—or reflection on—a czar.
Though this was what impressed me most, and you may record still does—once inside, we had to stare first (though he certainly didn’t make us) at the living-half of the basement. For though the entry door had been very natty in a way entirely new to us, we hadn’t been prepared, even by gossip, for all the tricks of books and low shelves and high-hung pictures, and colors, and white spaces and black nudes, and—culture, I suppose it was—we now saw. I don’t have to prepare any one of you; get married even here, you’ll have it. It was merely certain parts of Paris and New York at the time, that we were staring at. Or nineteen-sixty-six, in Sand Spring. Only, this time we didn’t feel any flicker of the future to make us tremble. Before it might have had a chance to, he opened the door to the other half of his establishment, and there we were, in his system or staring down at it, at his vast little world.
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 housekeeper 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.
When he let them in they saw that he had his smoking-jacket on, as always when he had been working on the system, plus the foulard neckerchief which he wore when taking “infusions” for his “catarrh.” If things went as usual, he would apologize politely for the latter, the only apology he was ever heard to make. Shortly he did so, and as per custom, took them into the other room where, stripping his cuffs, he prepared to entertain them with a brief display of one or other of the elaborately worked-out schedules in the system’s repertoire. This was the moment, ordinarily, when either of the pair would bring out whatever they invariably had for him. “Look here, this lightbulb I found, think it’s small enough?” Jim might say, hauling out a pocketflash bulb that might just screw into a streetlight, or the mate would bring out a battery, the size of four sugar loaves, that he had made himself. Today they brought nothing, and he didn’t wait for it.
Next, usually had come a moment when he offered them a choice of the schedule to be run off; you understand that in a run of a hundred miles, or even twenty-nine of them, and in thirty years, there could be a good many variations, mock breakdowns, accidents, full and partial runs, which could be evolved, a favorite run of the two partners being: Let’s see you run as far as Pell’s bridge in sixteen minutes (one minute of ours being five of the system’s), run into trouble (the least being to have some foreign object strike the vertical gate of the lifeguard, the worst being to have a “passenger” struck by the axle-boxes of the rear bogie truck, when leaving the car), then change cars and return. Riefel didn’t wait for a choice here either, but without preamble gave them the full hour program which they had seen only once before—that first time—in which all the powers of system, landscape and the hand at the helm of all of it were to the fullest vaudeville displayed. It ought to have brought down the house, as it had then, but this time they all sat silent. Then Riefel did something he’d never done before—made a criticism. “One thing I’ve never been able to add to it,” he said.
“What’s that, Bert?” the mate said quickly—no mister or pulled forelock for him, for which Riefel, who always winced with pleasure at this style of address, may well have picked him up in the beginning.
And: “Maybe we—” said Jim.
But Riefel shook his head, tapping his fingertips to a rhythm, making and unmaking a finger cage. “Oh—I suppose I could burn some oil, make some sort of blower. But it’s really not tenable. Nor should it be.”
“What’s that, Mr. Riefel,” asked Jim. “What is it?”
He was turning his beautiful cuffs down again, and linking them. “Just the true trolley-smell,” he said. “Just—the smell.” He quirked at them, to show he shared their amusement, which however hadn’t yet appeared. “Just as well,” he added, linking the second cuff. “A line has to be drawn somewhere. Just as well.” What with the unintentional rhyme, it sounded, curiously enough, like an elegy. Then he stood up.
“Boys,” he said, though often he called them “gentlemen”—“You might as well hand over what you have for me.” He even held out his hand toward the mate’s pocket. It was the town again, though they never knew via which part of it. He had known about the letter all the time.
He read it in their presence, no excuses and no comment, only in his narrowed lips and raised nostril a glimpse of how once, when he had wanted to be, he could have been rude. It may even have been that he wanted them to see this, to see him too, in full vaudeville. But they hadn’t the experience for it, to enlarge on any further suggestions or displays he might have given them—what did that pair know of tickertapes and board rooms? So, in the end he had to tell them his answer, straight out. “No, boys,” he said. “No. But I’ll give you an answer to take back with you.”
He went to a typewriter which must always have been there but they had never before noted, under one of the nudes they so often had. To the town-committee’s letter to him—handwritten in the best Spencerian for courtesy, he rattled off a reply at sixty words a minute—for modernity? Who knew, after all, what was this man’s cultivation? He slipped the sheet into an envelope which he left unsealed, and handed it over, back to the mate. “Read it if you like,” he said indifferently. Then he smiled, with that nimbus which might still have caught him a million, if not a woman, even then. “But not here.”
They understood then that they were dismissed; though the pair acted so often in unison, each was still as sensitive a young man as any to be found acting on his own anywhere.
Jim spoke up this time, the mate after all having had the letter to present. “Then, Mr. Riefel—” he said—it was curious how this “Mr. Riefel” sounded more intimate than the mate’s “Bert”—“Then you’re not—”
“Going?” said Riefel. He glanced down at the letter he had just answered. “A last trolley ride?” he said. “And a medal?” He looked down again, as if to check what hadn’t been important enough to remember precisely, or else didn’t cater to his brand of recall. “For a past pioneer?” At a jerk of his head, quickly gentled though he didn’t smile again, the ascot fell back from his throat. He didn’t look ruined any more than he looked eighty. The ruin, if anywhere, was in the minds that looked at him; it can be wondered if for lots of follyists it isn’t the same.
“Oh no, gentlemen,” he said. “That isn’t for me.”
He was telling us what the world is, for a man of risks—not that we heard him.
“No,” he said, gentler with us than we had ever heard him. “No, you two go. It’s for you.” He gave us a searching look; it could even be said he bowed, to what he found. “Yes, you two go,” he repeated. “It’s for you.”
Then the pair went out of there, never to see him again or thank him, or curse him, for what it took two weeks—and forty years after that—to understand.
Outside, the two walked along with Riefel’s reply. Should they read it, they asked each other; did he mean them to? From street lamp to street lamp they pondered, in separate silence, and aloud. In their ears that alternating voice echoed, offering them advice they couldn’t see, calling them gentlemen, then boys.
“What did he mean!” The mate’s voice was angry. “About the trolley doings. That it was for us.”
Jim was silent. “I dreamed,” he said then. He turned excitedly. “I just remembered. That he shot himself. Tomorrow morning.”
They both saw him according to their joint experience, his chin at that certain ghastly angle, blood all over the olive-green foulard—which was a color quite suitable to combat—alone on a foreign field all his own.
“No,” said the mate judiciously. “That’s your dream.”
They walked on. The mate reared up his forelock. “It’s a cinch he doesn’t see us the way the town does. Or only. Reason I always liked going there.” There was an implication that they wouldn’t go, again.
Jim thought it over a few paces. “He sees us,” said Jim.
Finally, one of them—it doesn’t matter which—opened the note and read it to the other. It contained absolutely nothing the librarian couldn’t have read out in the children’s reading-room—nothing beyond a formal thanks and a formal refusal, saying that he would always have an interest in transportation, but expected not to be in town for the ceremonies.
“He just wanted to get us out of there,” said the mate disgustedly. But a few steps onward, he stopped again. “‘No, gentlemen,’” he said, in a falsetto that certainly wasn’t Riefel’s. “‘No, that isn’t for me. It’s for you.’” He turned to his companion. “You suppose he meant we shouldn’t go for the town; we should get out of here?” He paused. “Or—Oriskany.” They had spoken to Riefel of it. The mate considered. Then he shrugged, drawing himself up with a pomp that was a little growing on him; after all, there has to be some answer to the terrors of the world. “I suppose he only meant—we were young.”
“And simple,” said Jim. He looked down at the note. “We did the wrong thing. That the town asked us to do it isn’t any excuse.”
“They only wanted to honor him.”
“For what? For being—passé?”
That was a word much in the newspapers, those days.
“For being self-made, that’s what.”
Jim already knew the mate’s aspirations, of course; his own were harder to explain, though he had tried. He wasn’t sure he was a man for risks, though he might be one for responsibilities. What worried him uniquely was the thought of so many men returned from the war with twenty-twenty vision, but still, if they weren’t careful, going to live it out in the dark, not knowing which of the two choices was happening to them. What he wanted—almost as good as a religion it would be, mate—was just to understand what happened to him, as he went along. Was that so enormous?
He tramped on awhile. “Maybe they don’t know why either,” he said. “Why they asked him.”
“Who?”
“The town.”
The mate trudged along, hands in pockets. “Passé, eh? Then why should those hijinks be for us?” He gave an angry laugh; how mystery always angered him! “What’s he preaching?”
The pair mulled the rest of the way home without talking, like two apprentices leaving the house of a master who had never quite seen fit to declare openly the nature of the subject under study.
At their door, the mate gave a snort, then a swagger. “Sunday week, that junket is—You for going?”
“Why not?” said Jim. “Nobody’s going to shoot himself over it in the morning.”
Going up the stairs, the mate yawned and stretched. “Transportation interests, huh. Maybe we ought to sell him a car.”
But a few days later, they learned what these interests had been. Riefel had sold the house, as the good income property it was, for a crackerjack sum (the town’s phrase) only to reinvest it promptly in some crackpot scheme (its phrase also) for motor coaches to go down the very highway which was to supersede the Batavia-Sand Spring. The housekeeper was retiring on her annuity, only waiting for the new owners to take formal possession—and for the Smithsonian. As for the basement, except for the art work and the books, which Mr. Riefel had taken with him where he was going, the rest of the stuff there was left to her also. Apparently he had already everything else necessary where he was going—in New York.
“Sonufa gun,” said Jim. “So that’s what he was saying!”
“What—buses?” said the mate. “That was his interest, huh?” He wasn’t stupid, only not reflective—or unable to wait to be. And Jim, to give him credit, always understood this, just as the mate gave Jim credit for being such a thinking chap, if slow.
“O.K., buses, New York City, what does it matter. Can’t you see what he was saying to us?” Jim had to walk twice around the table, he was so excited.
“What?” said the mate, much used to these dialogues, which he thoroughly enjoyed. “What’s the revelation?”
“I’ll tell you what he was saying.” Jim whipped a napkin from the table, folded it around his own neck, ascot-style, and raised his chin, Riefel-style. “See my dust,” he said. “That’s what he was saying.” Then he pulled the napkin off again, and sat down to his meal.
The mate made no reply for a bit, as often when he was stumped, or slowed. See my dust. It was a transportational interest all right; it could be the supreme one.
The two of them could see it underwriting—or overriding—all others, a little searing tail-light disappearing round the bend.
“Going away permanently,” said the mate after a while. Such had been the message to the housekeeper. “At eighty.” He shook his head, the prime of life not being connected in his mind, with age. “Old men—” he said.
That’s a chorus for you. For you, hot-rods.
Old men, old men, old men. And young.
And so there we have it all now—the war, the town, the Pardees, Oriskany, and Riefel—and the two Jims. And all entirely natural.
We need only a ride on the Batavia line, to make it all clear.