My Dear Cornelia/Book 4/Chapter 6
My speech was cut short at that point by Cornelia at the window, calling out rather sharply:—
"Oliver, why do you suppose the children don't come?" Almost in the same breath she sprang to her feet and, pulling aside the curtain, cried:—
"Oh! Oh! Oliver, what's that?" And an instant later, "Oh! Oh! Oh! How dreadful! Thank God! Thank God! Oh, thank God, it's not the children!"
"Of course not!" soothed Oliver, with his arm about her shoulder. "Of course not. What was it? Tell us about it."
We ourselves had heard, not indistinctly,—the apartment is on the second floor,—the prolonged steady screech of an automobile horn, and, in response to Cornelia's cry, had rushed to her side, expecting, I suppose, to see the fire department clearing its right of way up the avenue.
"Oh, there's been a dreadful accident," cried Cornelia. "That poor little boy—Oh, that poor little boy! They were driving like mad—to the hospital, I suppose. I saw two policemen standing on the running-board of an open car coming up the street, and another sitting on the front seat by the driver. Then, for just an instant, as it flashed into the bright light under the windows, I could see that the policeman in front was holding in his arms a little boy—seven or eight years old—with his head, face upward, hanging over the edge of the car—bright red with blood—absolutely one bright red disc of blood—and streaming. Oh, it was horrible! You have no idea how horrible! And then, as it went past, I could see that there was a woman crumpled over in the rear seat, and an old man trying to hold her up."
"It must have been a shock," Willys offered; and I added something equally helpful, as one does on such occasions.
"Well, my dear," said Oliver, as we returned to the fireplace, "accidents, you know, do happen. Are you calmer now?"
"Yes," said Cornelia, "yes, I guess so. I'm trembling still. You've simply no idea how it shook me."
She sank into a chair, then recovered herself sharply, and said with a smile: "I'm sorry. Forgive me for making such a fuss over it. I'm all right now. I suppose it's horrid to be so selfish—but, oh, Oliver, aren't you glad it wasn't the children? Aren't you?"
"Certainly, my dear!" said Oliver, in such a droll matter-of-fact tone that we all laughed quite spontaneously. "And now shall we talk of something else? Or do you wish me to telephone to the Infant that their mother has been anxiously expecting them for at least five minutes?"
"No, don't telephone," Cornelia protested. "It's really only just after one. I'm sure they will be here in plenty of time for the train. And please don't change the subject. I heard what you were saying. You were talking about automobiles and automobile accidents. That is what made me so 'jumpy,' I suppose. I'll not be silly any more. What were you going to say about automobiles when I interrupted?"
"It would be hard," I said, "to avoid 'improving the occasion' a little. Heaven knows I didn't get up the accident to illustrate my argument—and there's no reason to suppose that it does illustrate my argument exactly. These people may all have been perfectly sober. But if this thing, just now, had happened in a story, like that, we should have felt that it was contrived and artificial—I don't recall just where I stopped, but what I was about to say was—the gist of it was, that you can make a live argument based on our automobiling civilization, with almost anybody in the United States, because almost everybody in the United States has some sort of vital interest in a car; and so the argument, as we say, comes home to him."
"That is sound enough," said Oliver.
"Yes," I said, "the things that people have in common are the things that hold them together and enable them to act together. Cars are a much more expensive cultural and social amalgam than, say, abstract fraternity, or a belief in the Apostolic Church, or even than an old family Bible. But the fact remains that cars are at present far more widely diffused and almost infinitely more used among our fellow countrymen than any of the older and less expensive amalgams. I doubt whether there is any other subject whatever upon which our people possess so large a fund of common knowledge and experience. Consider: we have fifteen million cars. That means that perhaps one out of every six or seven men, women, children, and babies in this country actually drives a car. That's what I call practical belief in an article of the popular religion. And you see—if you think—that it's the garage and the filling-station that crowd out the saloon, at every few blocks in the city, in every town and village, at every crossroads from Florida to Montana. It's one—just one, mind you—of the expensive new clubs of the plain people, of the average man."
"Yes," said Oliver, "there's something in that."
"There's a good deal in that," I persisted, "both for economic necessitarians like you and me, and for religious enthusiasts like Willys. For Willys, you remember, the essence of religion is a kind of dangerous and exciting Bacchic escape from humdrum into a few hours of heightened consciousness and mystical fellowship—through the national drink. Well, Willys, when the half gods go, the true gods arrive. The national car does everything that you ask of the Holy Grail: it provides the average American with an emotional discharge; it provides him with danger, excitement, the intoxication of speed, heightened consciousness, and a mystical sense of fellowship with the owner of both the Rolls-Royce and the Ford roadster; and it provides these things not on Saturday night only but every day in the year. As you will concede, there is a 'kick', the possibility of a kick—especially in our national car—for every day in the year. And there's one more thing about the religion and ritual of the car."
"Oh at least that!" said Oliver. "But what is it, Professor?"
"It's a thing," I said, "that knocks into a cocked hat His Excellency's private argument for privately nullifying the Eighteenth Amendment. Of course His Excellency didn't invent the argument—I mean that hoary old bore about personal liberty and private conscience and so forth. All the 'wet' newspapers pull it out of the Pyramid of Cheops seven times a week. All the 'wet' city newspapers count the German and Italian and Slavic noses in their constituencies and then get off that tedious drip about the 'puritan minority' and its attempt to bully these honest European consciences, which, being European, are free from sanctimonious scruples against befuddling their wits with liquor."
"Quo me rapis, tui plenum—where, O Mid-Western Bacchus," cried Oliver, "where dost thou drag me at the tail of thy car? I feel the thong going through my heels and the rope running up to the axle of your Ford. Crank up! Drag on!"
"Why, don't you see, Excellency," I persisted, "that the car hauls the whole argument clean out of the gumbo of 'personal liberty'—clean out of the slough of 'private conscience'? We don't know how this accident out here in the street took place; but in our Mid-Western metropolis we killed some seven hundred people last year with cars, and, according to the papers, there was more than one such accident as this one from drivers who were drunk. With one out of every seven men, women, children, and babies in the United States driving a car at from twenty to forty miles an hour, along crowded streets and thoroughfares from Maine to California, we have simply got to prevent drivers from being drunk. It's in the necessity of the situation. We are all private engineers nowadays. That's what we want. Very well. If we all want to be private engineers, we've got to submit to the same regulations as governed—long since—engineers on the railways. Our job is not less hazardous than theirs, but more so. A railway engineer who drinks is fired by the railroad, and I understand by his own union."
"I'm stiff on that," said His Excellency. "A man who drives his car when he's drunk should be strung up to the nearest telegraph pole."
"Oh no," said Willys, "you're a little hard on him. You can't stop a man drinking because he occasionally drives his car, drunk. Give him a good fine and take away his license. Or, if he is very drunk, put him where he can sober up."
"That wouldn't," I said, "quite straighten things out—would it—for the occupants of the car that went by here?"
"Oh, but Professor, you are so unrealistic," said Willys, as he rose and clapped a hand over his mouth in order to eject a yawn which he could not swallow. "You are hopelessly unrealistic. If a man doesn't drive when he's drunk, now and then, how in the dickens is he going to get home? What time is it?"
"It's half-past one," said Cornelia, who had also risen at the first opportunity. "And there's the telephone. See what it is, Oliver—quickly, quickly! But nothing could have happened to them—my son is such a careful driver."