Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

a red-headed Welshman.

"You talk as if I was ditched by a hog every fool-day o' the week. I ain't friends with all the cussed half-fed shotes in the State o' New York. No, indeed! Yes, this is him-an' look what he's done!"

It was not a bad night's work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the rails and run diagonally for a few hundred feet from right to left, taking with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that game, they had ploughed up and removed, and twisted a good deal of the left-hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn field, and there he stood-fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crank-pins; his pilot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he recovered his senses) and his broken headlight half full of half-burned moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a disreputable buffalo, who had tried to wallow in a general store. For there were, scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, typewriters, sewing-machines; bicycles in crates; a consignment of silver-plated imported harness; French dresses and gloves; a dozen finely moulded hardwood mantels; a fifteen foot naphtha-launch, with a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows; a case of telescopes and microscopes; two coffins; a case of very best candies; some gilt edged dairy-produce, butter and eggs in an omelette; a broken box of expensive toys; and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from nowhere and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen, armed with coupler-pins, walked up and down on one side, and the freight-conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands in their hip-pockets. A long-bearded man came out of a house beyond the cornfield and told Evans that if A the accident had happened a little later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, with Evans at his heels shrieking: ""Twas his hog done it-his hog done it! Let me kill him! Let me

kill him!" Then the wrecking crew laughed; and the farmer put his head out of a window and said Evans was no gentleman.

But .007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before and it frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same time; and .007 forgot his horror in amazement at the way they handled the Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front of his wheels, and jack-screws under him. They embraced him with the derrick-chain and tickled him with crowbars, while .007 was hitched on to wrecked cars and backed away till either the knot broke, or the cars rolled clear of the track. By dawn, thirty or forty men were at work, replacing and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By daylight, all the cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco; the track was freed for traffic; and .007 had hauled the old Mogul over a small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once more, and he settled down with a clank. But his spirit was broken, and his nerve was gone.

""Tweren't even a hog," he repeated, dolefully. ""Twere a shote, and you—you of all of 'em--had to help me on."

'But, how in the whole long road did it happen?" asked .007, sizzling with curiosity.

"Happen! It didn't happen! It just come! I sailed right on top of him around that last curve-thought he was a skunk. Yes, he was all as little as that. He hadn't more'n squealed once 'fore I felt my bogies lift (he'd rolled right under the pilot) and I couldn't catch the track again to save me. Swivelled clean off I was. Then I felt him sling himself along, all greasy, under my left leadin' driver and, Oh, Boilers! that mounted the rail. I heard my flanges zippin' along the ties an' the next I knew I was playin' 'Sally, Sally Waters' in the corn, my tender shuckin' coal through my cab, an' old man Evans lyin' still an' bleedin'in front o' me. Shook? There ain't a stay or a bolt, or a rivet in me that ain't sprung to glory somewhere."

"Umm!" said .007, "what d'you reckon you weigh?"

"Without these lumps o' dirt I'm all of a hundred thousand pound."

[merged small][ocr errors]

Eighty. Call him a hundred at the outside. He's worth about four'n a half dollars. Ain't it awful. Ain't it enough to give you nervous prostration? Ain't it paralyzin'. Why, I come just around that curve-"and the Mogul told the tale again, for he was very badly shaken.

66

Well, it's all in the day's run, I guess,' said .007, soothingly. "An'-an' a cornfield's pretty soft fallin'."

"If it had bin a sixty-foot bridge, an' I could ha' slid off into deep water an' blown up an' killed both men, same as others have done, I wouldn't ha' cared, but to be ditched by a shote-an' you to help me out in a cornfield-an' an old hayseed in his nightgown cussin' me like as if I was a sick truck-horse.

Oh, it's awful! Don't call me Mogul! I'm a sewin' machine. They'll guy my sand-box off in the yard.

And .007, his hot box cooled and his experience enlarged, hauled the Mogul freight slowly to the round-house.

"Hello, old man! Bin out all night, hain't ye?" said the irrepressible Poney, who had just come off duty. "Well, I must say you look it. Costly-perishable -fragile-immediate-that's you! Go to the shops, take them vine-leaves out o' your hair an' git 'em to play the hose on you."

"Leave him alone, Poney," said .007 severely, as he was swung on the turntable," or I'll

“'Didn't know the old granger was any special friend o' yours, kid. He wasn't over civil to you last time I saw him."

"I know it; but I've seen a wreck since then, and it has about scared the paint off

me.

I'm not going to guy anyone as long as I steam—not when they're new to the business an' anxious to learn. And I'm not goin' to guy the old Mogul either, though I did find him wreathed around with roastin' ears. 'Twas a little bit of a shotenot a hog-just a shote, Poney-no bigger'n a lump of anthracite-I saw it-that made all the mess. Anybody can be ditched, I guess."

"Found that out already, have you? Well, that's a good beginnin'." It was the Purple Emperor, with his high, tight, plate

glass cab and green velvet cushion, waiting to be cleaned for his next day's fly.

"Let me make you two gen'lemen acquainted," said Poney. "This, is our Purple Emperor, Kid, whom you were admirin' and, I may say, envyin', last night. This is a new brother, worshipful sir, with most of his mileage ahead of him but, so far as a serving-brother can, I'll answer for him."

[ocr errors]

'Happy to meet you," said the Purple Emperor, with a glance round the crowded round-house. "I guess there are enough of us here to form a full meetin'. Ahem! By virtue of the authority vested in me as head of the Road, I hereby declare and pronounce Number .007, a full and accepted brother of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives, and as such entitled to all shop, switch, track, tank and round-house privileges throughout my jurisdiction, in the degree of Superior Flier; it bein' well-known and credibly reported to me, that our Brother has covered fortyone miles in thirty-nine minutes and a half on an errand of mercy to the afflicted. At a convenient time, I myself, will communicate to you the song and signal of this Degree whereby you may be recognized in the darkest night. Take your stall, newly entered Brother, among Locomotives !

Now in the darkest night, even as the Purple Emperor said, if you will stand on the bridge across the freight-yard, looking down upon the four-track way, at 2.30 A.M., neither before nor after, when the "White Moth," that takes the overflow from the "Purple Emperor," tears south, with her seven vestibuled cream-white cars, you will hear, as the yard-clock makes the half-hour, a far away sound like the bass of a violincello and then, a hundred feet to each word :

With a michnai — ghignai — schtingal!
Yah! Yah!

Yah!

Ein-zwei-drei-mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climb upon der shteeple
Und she frighten all the people
ghignai
Singin' michnai

Yah!

shtingal! Yah!

That is .007 covering his one hundred and eighty-six miles in two hundred and one minutes.

THE UNQUIET SEX

FIRST PAPER-THE WOMAN COLLEGIAN

I

By Helen Watterson Moody

HE woman collegian, both as a graduate and an undergraduate, is a very serious young person. So is her brother, but he is serious about different things. As an undergraduate he takes his fraternities and his societies and his clubs and his Alma Mater's record in athletics with great gravity; he takes his particular college very hard indeed; he is a Yale or a Cornell or a Harvard man, and that is about all there is of him for the first year after graduation. Then he gets over it. But his sister thinks more of her education than she does of her college, and her choice of electives is of more importance to her than her choice of societies. When she gets out of school, even after several years when her brother has digested all his importance as a collegian and thinks only of his college training as a good thing to have had in order that he might know how little it was worth, after all, except to set him on an easy level with other fellows, and give him an occasional interest in athletics and put him into a university club-the woman collegian does not succeed in sloughing off her scholastic habits of thought. She goes in for serious reforms and postgraduate knowledge. She has convictions beyond her unschooled sister, and is, even yet, caught writing papers on the careers of college women, and listening while others discourse upon what college women owe the world. All this makes her a trifle posée, overassertive, too conscious of herself and her type. Thus she has attracted to herself a certain interest, which is not all admiration, as one may get the attention of a drawing-room by an awkward and self-conscious entrance. Her learning is distinctly an acquirement and not a part of herself, and not infrequently fits her badly, like a suit of ready-made

clothes. It is still customary, even in polite circles, to make distinct mention of " of "collegiate advantages" whenever a young woman is present who has been fortunate enough to enjoy them, in order that the unwary, stranger may have his cue. While everything in Tom's life after Harvard is calculated to take the nonsense out of him, and to put the man collegian on a level with the rest of us, everything in Harriet's life in college, and out of it, marks her as one set apart. And all this after thirty years of college training for women, and with thousands of women graduates, whose lives and achievements bear witness to the fact that a woman may undertake the utmost severities of what is still politely known as the "higher " education, without giving the least indication then or thereafter of remarkable ability of any kind.

"And a very good thing it is, too," as Mr. Punch says in answer to the sentiment, "There's no place like home." It would be sad, indeed, if a young woman who asks no more than the indifferent equipment for life that a college training gives should be made to pay the penalty of extraordinariness therefor, when to be ordinary is so much more wholesome for the individual and so much more desirable for the world in general.

There are several reasons why this unfortunate solemnity attaches itself to Harriet's education, some of which will be easily dissipated, no doubt, as the results of education inhere in the physical and mental constitution of women. When one's grandmother is known to have been a bachelor of the liberal arts, a master's degree for the fourth descendant is a matter of simple assumption. But some of these reasons will not disappear until certain defects in the college training for women shall have been remedied. I suppose we all agree that the ideal education for women does not result from segregating them, since the segregation of either

sex is sure to result in intensifying its peculiarities. As a sex, women are disposed to take things too seriously, and to dissipate vital force in that nervous debauch known as worrying. Ten women shut in together will worry one hundred times as much as ten men shut in together, and especially is this true when the women have the unstable equilibrium of the emotions that goes with youth. So, also, a hundred women shut in together will exhaust themselves, presently, merely by being together, the sensitive temperaments eating into each other like corrosive acids. The housing of hundreds of girls in large dormitories, with a common sitting-room for three or four girls, is wholly inadequate to the needs of human nature, and some day some wise woman with money to spend for the better education of women (which is not necessarily the higher education) will build the ideal home for women students, in which there shall be no more than a dozen girls, each of whom shall have a suite of rooms altogether her own, into which she may shut herself as she wills, for the solitude which is so necessary alike to the health of the soul and the body, and which, more than anything else, relieves the nervous tension brought about by the action and reaction of one personality upon another. Meantime I wish it were possible for some college president to try the experiment of requiring each woman student to spend one or two hours of each day absolutely alone and relaxed, that the whirling mind and quivering nerves might hush themselves with the blessedness of silence and seclusion. Such quiet insistence upon the individual life would do much toward a correction of the common and not unnatural tendency among these segregated and unstable young women to lavish themselves in extravagant friendships with each other, and very often, also, in excessive and emotional admiration for some teacher, whose personal magnetism is thus made to bring tribute to her egotism and vanity. The wisest and most helpful teacher is not the one whom the girls themselves "rave over' and find most "magnetic." It is she who carefully avoids the appeal to the emotions, and who, without repelling the

affections, knows how to check hysterical excess and keep the young nature cool and steady by a delicate reserve and a gentle decision at the first indication of need. It is a curious fact in psychology -or is it physiology?-that while hero worship is a good thing for a boy it is seldom a good thing for a girl.

It is declared, by those who have had the opportunity of judging, that one of the advantages of coeducation is a distinct lessening of the emotional and nervous strain among the women students. Just why the presence of men as teachers and fellow-pupils should have both a quieting and a tonic effect upon women, I leave it for others wiser than myself to explain, but there is certainly less nervous tension, morbidity, and self-consciousness among college women associated with men than among those in the women's colleges, even though there is also to be found an occasional instance of that exclusive love between a man and a woman, which will spring up sometimes even in the arid soil of the higher education. To many persons this last is a most undesirable state of affairs, and is considered by them one of the unanswerable arguments against coeducation. It is a fact that boys and girls in college do sometimes fall in love, and sometimes they marry, though oftener they both get well out of it before their first year of separation is past. Of course falling in love "takes their minds off their books," in the phrase of the anxious parent, but love is a distraction whenever it occurs, and it is hard to believe that there can be granted a more fortunate opportunity for indulging in so engrossing an experience than the seclusion and serenity of college life. I should call those two young persons exceptionally blest by fortune who get their falling in love satisfactorily accomplished before graduation, in the "little, bubbling back-water of the quadrangle." Nor is the value of a tender experience of this kind in early youth to be despised in casting up the sum of the educative forces in college life. Aside from the general humanizing effect it is sure to have on the young male animal, this experience usually results in opening up to him a whole new world of intellectual perceptions. The objective world, which was his so long, suddenly grows dim. He

learns, probably for the first time, the value of introspection, the uses of poetry, the joys of melancholy, the possibilitynay, the potency-of quite another point of view than his own. When a man, or a woman, has been years out of college he not infrequently looks back to find that the influences most potent and helpful and sweetest to remember were not the triumphs in the class-room, the struggles in the debating society, the slow acquirement of random and unprofitable fact, but the touch of arm in arm on the college campus, the "simmerings of thought and heart at the hearthstone of a friend," and perhaps also the sophomore love that was so awakening, so delicate, so deep, and so evanescent !

II

JUST what should be the ideal education for women is, and must be, an unsettled question for some time to come; for it is still undetermined how largely the area of woman's needs and activities should be bounded by sex limitations, and how largely it may be identified with the needs and activities of men. This conclusion, when it comes, will be deduced not from tradition nor ambition, nor from personal prejudice, but from science, through the things biology and physiology and sociology have yet to find out about this serious matter of sex. We have lately been told by a man and a microscope that a division of labor upon the lines of sex is distinctly marked as far down in the animal world as the sponges. If this be true, it would seem that no system of education for human beings can be comprehensive and satisfactory that leaves out of account this first dividing principle. For thirty years, now, we have been exploiting a higher education for women, based on what has been called the rational principle that there is no sex in mind, and yet, as a matter of fact, the idea of sex has not been lost sight of for an hour. The education of women has still proceeded along the lines of sex-the other sex. A strenuous insistence in the women's colleges that the curricula should be as nearly as possible identical with those of men, the constant and jealous watch kept on the

comparative standings of young men and women in examinations, the inbreeding and intensifying of sex peculiarities in the women's colleges-through desire to remain womanly, though educated surely all these are the certain indices of the sex idea in education.

But even more significant of the persistency and power of this underlying thought has been the result of the higher education as expressed in the immediate desire of the young woman, upon graduation, to stake out for herself a career in the world, to do something that shall be noticeable if not notable, with an idea of proving to the world that she can do a man's work as well as a man, displaying no prepossession in favor of doing a woman's work as well as a woman can do it. The higher education of women without reference to sex seems, thus far, to have resulted greatly in the glorification of men and men's work, and in dissatisfaction with women and women's work; which is the most logical thing in the world, and quite to be expected, so long as we insist upon ignoring certain simple, radical, dignified distinctions between the sexes. I hasten to say, with the introduction of this threadbare and somewhat bedraggled phrase, that such sex distinctions as I have in mind have nothing to do with any childish and uneasy comparison of the relative endowment of the sexes-that can surely be trusted to take care of itself and to expound itself fully with time and a little judicious negligence. But as things are at present, with half the capable women of the world doing the work of men, and the other half wishing they could do it, while the whole economic situation is upset by thousands of unfortunate incapables who are only trying to earn a temporary and unlucky living until they can marry into a better one, there seems to be a desperate need of some serviceable division of labor along the lines of sex. Since it is to be devoutly hoped and expected that the greater part of our college girls will not be educated or coeducated out of the good old fashion of marrying and taking up thereafter the noble profession of housewifery, it would appear to be as practicable and sensible to educate a girl with some reference to the special and particular knowledge she will need in her life's work

« AnkstesnisTęsti »