Two Thousand Miles on an Automobile Part 17

The old inn was so fascinating that we determined to come back in a few days and spend at least a night beneath its roof. The shadows were so rapidly lengthening that we had to hurry on.

Crossing the Charles River near Auburndale a sight of such bewitching beauty met our astonished gaze that we stopped to make inquiries. Above and below the bridge the river was covered with gayly decorated canoes which were being paddled about by laughing and singing young people. The brilliant colors of the decorations, the pretty costumes, the background of dark water, the sh.o.r.es lined with people and equipages, the bridge so crowded we could hardly get through, made a never-to-be-forgotten picture. It was just a holiday canoe-meet, and hundreds of the small, frail craft were darting about upon the surface of the water like so many pretty dragon-flies. The automobile seemed such an intrusion, a drone of prose in a burst of poetry, the discord of machinery in a sylvan symphony.

We stopped a few moments at Lasell Seminary in Auburndale, where old a.s.sociations were revived by my Companion over a cup of tea. A girl's school is a mysterious place; there is an atmosphere of suppressed mischief, of things threatened but never quite committed, of latent possibilities, and still more latent impossibilities. In a boy's school mischief is evident and rampant; desks, benches, and walls are whittled and defaced with all the wanton destructiveness of youth; buildings and fences show marks of contact with budding manhood; but boys are so openly and notoriously mischievous that no apprehension is felt, for the worst is ever realized; but those in command of a school of demure and saintly girls must feel like men handling dynamite, uncertain what will happen next; the stolen pie, the hidden sweets, the furtive note are indications of the infinite subtlety of the female mind.

From Auburndale the boulevard leads into Commonwealth Avenue and the run is fine.

It was about seven o'clock when we reached the Hotel Touraine, and a little later when the machine was safely housed in an automobile station,--a part of an old railway depot.

A few days in Boston and on the North Sh.o.r.e afforded a welcome change.

Through Beverly and Manchester the signs "Automobiles not allowed"

at private roadways are numerous; they are the rule rather than the exception. One young man had a machine up there, but found himself so ostracized he s.h.i.+pped it away. No machines are allowed on the grounds of the Ess.e.x Country Club.

No man with the slightest consideration for the comfort and pleasure of others would care to keep and use a machine in places where so many women and children are riding and driving. The charm of the North Sh.o.r.e and the Berks.h.i.+res lies largely in the opportunities afforded for children to be out with their ponies, girls with their carts, and women with horses too spirited to stand unusual sights and sounds. One automobile may terrorize the entire little community; in fact, one machine will spread terror where many would not.

It is quite difficult enough to drive a machine carefully through such resorts, without driving about day after day to the discomfort of every resident.

In a year or two all will be changed; the people owning summer homes will themselves own and use automobiles; the horses will see so many that little notice will be taken, but the pioneers of the sport will have an unenviable time.

A good half-day's work was required on the machine before starting again.

The tire that had been plugged with rubber bands weeks before in Indiana was now leaking, the air creeping through the fabric and oozing out at several places. The leak was not bad, just about enough to require pumping every day.

The extra tire that had been following along was taken out of the express office and put on. It was a tire that had been punctured and repaired at the factory. It looked all right, but as it turned out the repair was poorly made, and it would have been better to leave on the old tire, inflating it each day.

A small needle-valve was worn so that it leaked; that was replaced. A stiffer spring was inserted in the intake-valve so it would not open quite so easily. A number of minor things were done, and every nut and bolt tried and tightened.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN LEXINGTON AND CONCORD "THE WAYSIDE INN"

Sat.u.r.day morning, September 7, at eleven o'clock, we left the Touraine for Auburndale, where we lunched, then to Waltham, and from there due north by what is known as Waltham Street to Lexington, striking Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue just opposite the town hall.

Along this historic highway rode Paul Revere; at his heels followed the regulars of King George. Tablets, stones, and monuments mark every known point of interest from East Lexington to Concord.

In Boston, at the head of Hull Street, Christ Church, the oldest church in the city, still stands, and bears a tablet claiming for its steeple the credit of the signals for Paul Revere; but the Old North Church in North Square, near which Revere lived and where he attended service, and from the belfry of which the lanterns were really hung, disappeared in the conflict it initiated. In the winter of the siege of Boston the old meeting-house was pulled down by the British soldiers and used for firewood. Fit ending of the ancient edifice which had stood for almost exactly one hundred years, and in which the three Mathers, Increase, Cotton, and Samuel,--father, son, and grandson,--had preached the unctuous doctrine of h.e.l.l-fire and d.a.m.nation; teaching so incendiary was bound sooner or later to consume its own habitation.

Revere was not the only messenger of warning. For days the patriots had been anxious concerning the stores of arms and ammunition at Concord, and three days before the night of the 18th Revere himself had warned Hanc.o.c.k and Adams at the Clarke home in Lexington that plans were on foot in the enemies' camp to destroy the stores, whereupon a portion was removed to Sudbury and Groton.

Before Revere started on his ride, other messengers had been despatched to alarm the country, but at ten o'clock on the memorable night of the 18th he was sent for and bidden to get ready. He got his riding-boots and surtout from his house in North Square, was ferried across the river, landing on the Charlestown side about eleven o'clock, where he was told the signal-lights had already been displayed in the belfry. The moon was rising as he put spurs to his horse and started for Lexington.

The troops were ahead of him by an hour.

He rode up what is now Main Street as far as the "Neck," then took the old Cambridge road for Somerville.

To escape two British officers who barred his way, he dashed across lots to the main road again and took what is now Broadway.

On he went over the hill to Medford, where he aroused the Medford minute-men. Then through West Medford and over the Mystic Bridge to Menotomy,--now Arlington,--where he struck the highway,--now Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue,--to Lexington. Galloping up to the old Clarke house where Hanc.o.c.k and Adams were sleeping, the patriot on guard cautioned him not to make so much noise.

"Noise! you'll have enough of it here before long. The Regulars are coming."

Awakened by the voice, Hanc.o.c.k put his head out of the window and said,--

"Come in, Revere; we're not afraid of you."

Soon the old house was alight. Revere entered the "living room" by the side door and delivered his message to the startled occupants.

Soon they were joined by Dawes, another messenger by another road.

After refres.h.i.+ng themselves, Revere and Dawes set off for Concord.

On the road Samuel Prescott joined them. When about half-way, four British officers, mounted and fully armed, stopped them. Prescott jumped over the low stone wall, made his escape and alarmed Concord. Dawes was chased by two of the officers until, with rare shrewdness, he dashed up in front of a deserted farm-house and shouted, "h.e.l.lo, boys! I've got two of them," frightening off his pursuers.

Revere was captured. Without fear or humiliation he told his name and his mission. Frightened by the sound of firing at Lexington, the officers released their prisoner, and he made his way back to Hanc.o.c.k and Adams and accompanied them to what is now the town of Burlington. Hastening back to Lexington for a trunk containing valuable papers, he was present at the battle,--the fulfillment of his warning, the red afterglow of the lights from the belfry of Old North Church.

He lived for forty-odd years to tell the story of his midnight ride, and now he sleeps with Hanc.o.c.k and Adams, the parents of Franklin, Peter Faneuil, and a host of worthy men in the "Granary."

The good people of Ma.s.sachusetts have done what they could to commemorate the events and obliterate the localities of those great days; they have erected monuments and put up tablets in great numbers; but while marking the spots where events occurred, they have changed the old names of roads and places until contemporary accounts require a glossary for interpretation.

Who would recognize cla.s.sic Menotomy in the tinsel ring of Arlington? The good old Indian name, the very speaking of which is a pleasure, has given place to the first-cla.s.s apartments, --steam-heated, electric-lights, hot and cold water, all improvements --in appellations of Arlington and Arlington Heights. A tablet marks the spot where on April 19 "the old men of Menotomy" captured a convoy of British soldiers. Poor old men, once the boast and glory of the place that knew you; but now the pa.s.sing traveller curiously reads the inscription and wonders "Why were they called the old men 'of Menotomy'?" for there is now no such place.

Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue--Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue! there's a name, a great, big, luscious name, a name that savors of brown stone fronts and plush rockers: a name which goes well with the commercial prosperity of Boston. Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue extends from Dorchester in Boston to Lexington Green; it has absorbed the old Cambridge and the old Lexington roads; the old Long Bridge lives in history, but, rechristened Brighton Bridge, the reader fails to identify it.

Concord remains and Lexington remains, simply because no real estate boom has yet reached them but Bunker Hill, there is a feeling that apartments would rent better if the musty a.s.sociations of the spot were obliterated by some such name as "Buckingham Heights," or "Commonwealth Crest;" "The Acropolis" has been prayerfully considered by the freemen of the modern Athens;-- whatever the decision may be, certain it is the name Bunker Hill is a heavy load for choice corners in the vicinity.

There are a few old names still left in Ma.s.sachusetts,-- Jingleberry Hill and Chillyshally** Brook sound as if they once meant something; Spot Pond, named by Governor Winthrop, has not lost its birthright; Powder-Horn Hill records its purchase from the Indians for a hornful of powder--probably damp; Drinkwater River is a good name,--Strong Water Brook by many is considered better. It is well to record these names before they are effaced by the commercialism rampant in the suburbs of Boston.

At the Town Hall in Lexington we turned to the right for East Lexington, and made straight for Follen Church, and the home of Dr. Follen close by, where Emerson preached in 1836 and 1837.

The church was not built until 1839. In January, 1840, the congregation had a.s.sembled in their new edifice for the dedication services. They waited for their pastor, who was expected home from a visit to New York, but the Long Island Sound steamer--Lexington, by strange coincidence it was called--had burned and Dr. Follen was among the lost. His home is now the East Lexington Branch of the Public Library.

We climbed the stairs that led to the small upper room where Emerson filled his last regular charge. Small as was the room, it probably more than sufficed for the few people who were sufficiently advanced for his notions of a preacher's mission. He did not believe in the rites the church clung to as indispensable; he did not believe in the use of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper; he did not believe in prayers from the pulpit unless the preacher felt impelled to pray; he did not believe in ritualism or formalism of any kind,--in short, he did not believe in a church, for a church, however broad and liberal, is, after all, an inst.i.tution, and no one man, however great, can support an inst.i.tution. A very great soul--and Emerson was a great soul--may carry a following through life and long after death, but that following is not a church, not an inst.i.tution, not a living organized body, until forms, conventions, and traditions make it so; its vitalizing element may be the soul of its founder, but the framework of the structure, the skeleton, is made up of the more or less rigid conventions which are the results of natural and logical selection.

The ritual of Rome, the service of England, the dry formalism of Calvinism, the slender structure of Unitarianism were all equally repugnant to Emerson; he could not stretch himself in their fetters; he was not at ease in any priestly garment. Born a prophet, he could not become a priest. By nature a teacher and preacher, he never could submit to those restrictions which go so far to make preaching effective. He taught the lesson of the ages, but he mistook it for his own. He belonged to humanity, but he detached himself. He was a leader, but would acknowledge no discipline. Men cried out to him, but he wandered apart. He was an intellectual anarchist of rare and lovely type; few sweeter souls ever lived, but he defied order.

Not that Emerson would have been any better if he had submitted to the discipline of some church; he did what he felt impelled to do, and left the world a precious legacy of ideas, of brilliant, beautiful thoughts; but thoughts which are brilliant and beautiful as the stars are, scattered jewels against the background of night with no visible connection. Is it not possible that the gracious discipline of an environment more conventional might have reduced these thoughts to some sort of order, brought the stars into constellations, and left suggestions for the ordering of life that would be of greater force and more permanent value?

His wife relates that one day he was reading an old sermon in the little room in the Follen mansion, when he stopped, and said, "The pa.s.sage which I have just read I do not believe, but it was wrongly placed."

The circ.u.mstance ill.u.s.trates the openness and frankness of his mind, but it is also a commentary on the want of system in his intellectual processes. His habit through life was to jot down thoughts as they came to him; he kept note-books and journals all his life; he dreamed in the pine woods by day and walked beneath the stars by night; he sat by the still waters and wandered in the green fields; and the dreams and the visions and the fancies of the moment he faithfully recorded. These disjointed musings and disconnected thoughts formed the raw material of all he ever said and wrote. From the acc.u.mulated stores of years he would draw whatever was necessary to meet the needs of the hour; and it did not matter to him if thought did not dovetail into thought with all the precision of good intellectual carpentry. His edifices were filled with c.h.i.n.ks and unfinished apartments.

He saw things in a big way, but did not always see them as through crystal, clearly; nor did he always take his staff in hand and courageously go about to see all sides of things. He never thought to a finish. His philosophy never acquired form and substance. His thoughts are not linked in chain, but are just so many precious pearls lightly strung on a silken thread.

In 1852 he wrote in his journal, "I waked last night and bemoaned myself because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable question of slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few a.s.sured voices. But then in hours of sanity I recover myself, and say, 'G.o.d must govern his own world, and knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man, far retired in the heaven of invention, and which, important to the republic of man, have no watchman or lover or defender but me,'" thereby naively leaving to G.o.d the lesser task.

But he wrongs himself in his own journal, for he did bestir himself and he did speak, and he did not leave the black men to G.o.d while he looked after the white; he helped G.o.d all he could in his own peculiar, irresolute way. At the same time no pa.s.sage from the journals throws more light on the pure soul of the great dreamer. He was opposed to slavery and he felt for the negroes, but their physical degradation did not appeal to him so much as the intellectual degradation of those about him. To him it was a loftier mission to release the minds of men than free their bodies. With the naive and at the same time superb egoism which is characteristic of great souls, he consoles himself with the thought that G.o.d can probably take care of the slavery question without troubling him; he will stick to his post and look after more important matters.

What a treat it must have been to those a.s.sembled in the Follen house to hear week after week the very n.o.blest considerations and suggestions concerning life poured forth in tones so musical, so penetrating, that to-day they ring in the ears of those who had the great good fortune to hear. There was probably very little said about death. Emerson never pretended to a vision beyond the grave. In his essay on "Immortality" he says, "Sixty years ago, the books read, the services and prayers heard, the habits of thought of religious persons, were all directed on death. All were under the shadow of Calvinism and of the Roman Catholic purgatory, and death was dreadful. The emphasis of all the good books given to young people was on death. We were all taught that we were born to die; and over that, all the terrors that theology could gather from savage nations were added to increase the gloom, A great change has occurred. Death is seen as a natural event, and is met with firmness. A wise man in our time caused to be written on his tomb, 'Think on Living.' That inscription describes a progress in opinion. Cease from this antedating of your experience. Sufficient to to-day are the duties of to-day. Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well a.s.sured that the right performance of the hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it."

Such was the burden of Emerson's message: make the very best of life; let not the present be palsied by fears for the future. A healthy, sane message, a loud clear voice in the wilderness of doubt and fears, the very loudest and clearest voice in matters spiritual and intellectual which America has yet produced.